catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

34: Made The Dot Smaller

Siri expectations, the future of Apple web services, payment-processing and money-transfer services, Mavericks GM, and a Readability-like payment model for podcasts.

Episode Description:
  • Siri expectations and unreliability in popular culture.
  • Can Apple ever dramatically improve their web services, and how much pressure do they feel to do so?
  • The sorry state of online payment processing before Stripe, and improving the current sorry state of money transfers (especially in the U.S.) with services such as Dwolla and Square Cash.
  • The Mavericks GM.
  • Drawbacks of a Readability-like model for paying podcast producers in Overcast, and Instacast's 2012 rejection for Flattr integration.
  • Different priorities for podcast playback and management.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took the bold step the very first time I think I’ve ever done it and marked that review as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not helpful. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ John up? Oh no, I totally mark them as not helpful if they’re not helpful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to talk about TV for a minute and not Breaking Bad. And this is going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a point. I was watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. earlier tonight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Aaron. I’m sorry. Well, it’s okay. It’s got promise,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not very good at the moment. Well, the reason I bring this up is because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a portion of the episode, and this is not particularly important if you haven’t seen it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet, but somebody was going behind enemy lines, if you will. They had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an invisible, almost invisible secret agent earpiece thing, and this person was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to schmooze people they didn’t know at a party. What they did was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had the other agents like up in the magical plane thing telling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person in the field, oh, well, this is so and so and he has twin kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ask him about this and that and the other thing. So this person could schmooze and not look like an outsider. Well they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey walked away from this conversation where they had to schmooze with people they didn’t know and they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said something to the effect of, wow, it’s really awesome having you guys here. I could really get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to this. said, and I’m quoting, it’s like Siri if it worked.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this is a national TV show. And granted, America is not the be-all end-all,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I mean, this is Apple taking potshots on national television, which I thought was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit surprising.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, to be fair, Siri has never been that reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean, it’s not unreasonable. I just thought it was surprising that it’s become part

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the – I don’t know if vernacular is the right word, but it’s become something that everyone recognizes as an issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the AI trap. Anything you do that to a layperson seems like it should

⏹️ ▶️ John be like another person talking to you until we get actual real, you know, whatever the term

⏹️ ▶️ John is, strong AI, is not going to be like that and there’s going to be an expectation gap. I

⏹️ ▶️ John talk to a thing, I want it to respond to me like a person, it’s not going to, we all know it’s not going to, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter because once I start talking to it like a person it damn well better work like a person. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John combined with just reliability of like sometimes it just says, sorry, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t reach the servers, or it’s not available now,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But even when it responds to you, you know, it’s fun to play with. And then you quickly realize it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John talking to a person and you’re disappointed. And that’s never going to go away. Like Google Now, Siri, these things

⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna get better and better. And you know, just be leaps and bounds over where they are today. And people

⏹️ ▶️ John will still be like, you know, there’ll still be jokes about them on late night TV because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t they so stupid. You know, my dog is smarter than Siri. It doesn’t understand me, doesn’t understand. And it won’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t understand. It won’t understand for years, decades, our lifetime. Who knows

⏹️ ▶️ John how long it will take to get actual intelligence on the level of a human being at the other end of a computer thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And up until that point, it’s going to be the butt of jokes. It’s hard to tell on the

⏹️ ▶️ John Agent of Shield episode if they were making fun of the reliability or the intelligence or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey both. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because the reliability that Apple could slam it on now, Well, we can make

⏹️ ▶️ John this stupid thing reliable at the very least. And then you’re just complaining about, oh, the responses aren’t very smart. But

⏹️ ▶️ John when it says, oh, sorry, it’s not available right now, series now, whatever the heck it says when the servers don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John send a response, that is something that Apple should be ashamed of now. But everything else, if you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you talk to that talks back, you’re just going to have to take your lumps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as far as popular culture is concerned, and as far as regular people are concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hell, even as far as geeks are concerned, It doesn’t really matter whether the server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure happens or whether it does the wrong thing or thinks the wrong thing about what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said. Either way, it’s a failure. And all it takes is a few failures

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, after that, you just forget about using it. You just stop using it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and so it seems weird to me. Well, I don’t know if weird is the right word, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t help but wonder, this got me to thinking that I can’t help but wonder, at what point is Apple gonna say, Enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is enough, and let’s properly fix this. And I know that that we’ve talked about this a lot with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud and Core Data, for example. And we’ve talked a lot about this with Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. But at some point, you have to think that they’re going to get together and say, guys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and girls, we really, really, really have to fix this. Is that time ever coming? Am I waiting for a train

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just not going to show up?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it was kind of a victory for Apple to be mentioned, because the worst thing for Apple would be for them to make that same joke about

⏹️ ▶️ John Google Now something like Siri has the mind share as that thing on your phone that you talk to and there is

⏹️ ▶️ John value in having that mind share even if it comes along with you know all that other baggage and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John just because like you know you not that you’re gonna become the Kleenex or whatever of

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing or whatever it is genericized branding but you know that that’s that’s what they went to for the joke because they

⏹️ ▶️ John figure most people know of that they’ll know what we’re talking about they’ll get the joke

⏹️ ▶️ John whereas you know Google Now or any of those other things that you talk to are more reliable yes but again I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think the joke was about reliability. I think it’s like if it worked, as in if you could actually ask Siri

⏹️ ▶️ John things and she would give you answers versus just saying, I’m sorry, I don’t know what that

⏹️ ▶️ John is. You’re doing a Google search for it, which is what Siri does when you try to talk to it like a person.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. But like, I think it’s good that the word is in the public consciousness. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple continues to work on the reliability and, you know, fail for the same reason they fail to

⏹️ ▶️ John make all their online services reliable. But it’s also working on the intelligence part of it. And at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s just the cost of doing business. You want to be in the phone market. You’ve got to have some sort of thing that you talk to that does real-time

⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence searches from multiple sources. And so it’s never going to go away. They’re going to keep trying to make it better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And think about online services. Like, when are they going to fix this whole online thing, like.Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John and iTunes and MobileMe? Was iCloud the one where they fixed everything? Not

⏹️ ▶️ John really. They just keep trying, I guess, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, and you have to start wondering, what is it about Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes them, quote, not good at web services? We all say that. We all write

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. We all think that, oh, Apple is not good at web services. But what’s different?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s going to be different a year from now compared to now in that area?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What steps are they taking or what steps could they even take to meaningfully change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? What is it about the company that makes them not good at web services?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really see from the outside any evidence that meaningful change is happening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. It seems like, as we’ve discussed before, it’s probably a problem of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering resources and priorities. Up until this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, Apple has clearly put some priority on web services,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are still a very small company with their engineering resources.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t really ever seem like that’s going to take a massive turn for the better,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where suddenly their web services are going to have tons more staff on them, tons more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources and be a much higher priority in the company. I don’t see that happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know either. Not everything is web objects, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know the iTunes stories, but we have no reason to believe everything else is WebObjects, do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we? I really don’t think WebObjects, the technology, has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything substantial to do with why Apple is not good at web services.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can pick on any language or platform and say, ìOh, well, that doesn’t scale, or that’s old, or whatever.î

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact is, that’s not the problem. With proper administration and proper coding, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make anything scale. You can make anything work. The platform is rarely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem. And by the way, there’s nothing saying Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be using WebObjects. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re using it for part of the stuff. Maybe they’re using it for just a front end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere and using big Oracle stuff behind it. Who knows? But I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not put blame on the fact that they occasionally have WebObject URLs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re looking at from the front. I don’t think that has a lot to do with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but the hard thing about WebObjects is that how do you hire for someone that can do WebObjects?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, obviously you can teach any competent programmer just about anything. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want a WebObjects guru, there are like, what, four of them in the world? And they’re all probably on Apple’s payroll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey already. So yeah, in and of itself, WebObjects may not be the problem in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sense of it functions. And with, like you said, good coding, it’ll continue to function. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s hard to hire into that role if you wanted to throw people at the problem, which may or may

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even be the solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but really, looking at a major code base for a major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web service under heavy traffic that’s very high profile, I mean, really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it matter what language it’s written in? Any new hire is going to have to go through a lot of training

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of time just becoming familiar with this code base and becoming useful in working with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I don’t think, even if it was written in Java, which everyone either knows or can be taught

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quickly. I don’t think that would really make a difference. I mean, really, I think if web objects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really was the big problem that they’re having, either that’s a giant failure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of leadership. Or, well, actually, no, that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a giant failure of leadership. That’s it. That’s like, that’s the reason if, if they’re being held

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, because they’re using web objects, that’s a really stupid reason to be held back. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no reason to continue it. These services are all pretty new. They could, if that was really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem, they could rewrite them. It wouldn’t, it would be a big undertaking, but it wouldn’t be insurmountable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact is, I don’t think that’s really the problem. And if it is really the problem, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still correct that it’s a problem with something about high level leadership and priorities,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than this technology can’t do this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Web objects is actually, not now, but back in the day, was actually a tiny

⏹️ ▶️ John example of Apple sort of doing the right thing. I’ve done this rant several

⏹️ ▶️ John times on many other shows. You two should be able to recite it by now.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re going to do web services or anything online, at the scale Apple does

⏹️ ▶️ John it, you go into a different realm. What Marco said about you can make any web service scale on any platform

⏹️ ▶️ John is true, but Once you start getting into Apple scale or Google scale, things like that

⏹️ ▶️ John do matter a little bit more than they do. There’s a threshold through which you pass, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, OK, now any old platform won’t do. And really, the platform actually does matter, because

⏹️ ▶️ John any tiny inefficiency is multiplied by the jillions of servers that we have. Or maybe a particular architecture

⏹️ ▶️ John dictated by a particular platform doesn’t allow us to be in 8 million different data centers around the world in

⏹️ ▶️ John a synchronized manner. And all these other things that come into play for seven people in the world, for like

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, anybody who’s got a worldwide online presence,

⏹️ ▶️ John who has huge servers with just millions and millions of customers. And the good thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that WebObjects had going for it is that, well, they didn’t make it themselves, but it was in-house. I mean, it came

⏹️ ▶️ John with Next, obviously, like half of the technology they’re using now, it all came from Next, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you have to do with this scale. You have to take ownership of your online platform. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t just use sort of off-the-shelf stuff by experts and have them hook them all up to each other.

⏹️ ▶️ John Once you pass a certain threshold of scale, you got to do stuff yourself. Amazon does, Microsoft does,

⏹️ ▶️ John Google does practically everything themselves. Right down to, you know, speccing out their own hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. And Apple seems to do so much less of it. And Apple is at that scale now. They

⏹️ ▶️ John have hundreds of millions of people using iOS devices, connecting to iCloud. Like they’re there, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John at that scale. They can’t be the only person doing stuff off the shelf. They need to take ownership of their online platform

⏹️ ▶️ John technology. And I don’t understand the leadership gap here too, because it’s clear that the leadership

⏹️ ▶️ John gap doesn’t exist for the client side stuff because the the

⏹️ ▶️ John organization that does a Mac OS 10 iOS and all this other stuff so

⏹️ ▶️ John clearly, whether this comes from the top or not, but so clearly understands that it needs to

⏹️ ▶️ John take complete ownership of its platform, we have to be responsible for making sure we have good tools,

⏹️ ▶️ John good compiler, good language, and we’re going to not just do them once and just say, okay, we’re done, Cocoa’s awesome,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, project builder, we’re all set, we’ve got our own tools, we’re great. They’re gonna be, they’re gonna say, no, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not satisfied with that. We need a better compiler. We need to ditch project builder. We need to make a thing called Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ John We need to keep making Xcode better and better. We need to switch out our debugger for LDB. We need to

⏹️ ▶️ John rev the Objective-C runtime. And you know, they just take such incredible ownership of their platform and they

⏹️ ▶️ John know they can’t just let it And they’re not relying on some other vendor or some other platform

⏹️ ▶️ John to solve their problems and just throw it at a bunch of people and go, all right, here you go, here’s some pieces. They

⏹️ ▶️ John totally take control of their clients. And they need to, the service side is just as important. They need to be doing all those

⏹️ ▶️ John same things. Where is the team that has been working on, this is the technology that we’re going to use inside Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ John deploy online services, starting 10 years ago and continually revising it.

⏹️ ▶️ John 10 years ago, they had WebObjects, which even then was kind of weird and dated. And they just didn’t like keep it

⏹️ ▶️ John up to date and modernize it and like, you know, like history passed it by. They didn’t let that happen on

⏹️ ▶️ John the client side. They’ve been, you know, racing ahead as fast as they can, again with the exception of the file system. But in most

⏹️ ▶️ John other aspects, they’re taking ownership of their platform there. And on the server side, they’re not. They’re going to third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John vendors. And that’s an untenable strategy. They need to be more like Google and Microsoft and Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ John And have their own platforms with their own in-house technology and dedicate those kind of resources to

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I don’t understand why one half of the company can do that and the other half can’t, because it seems like it’s the same leadership,

⏹️ ▶️ John right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, but why do you say that WebObjects isn’t getting better? I mean, from the outside, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no indication it’s getting better. But who’s to say that it isn’t getting better on the inside, and they’re just not letting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone see it?

⏹️ ▶️ John The model of the way it works. I mean, the model of the way WebObject works is the whole idea of having

⏹️ ▶️ John object transparency and just kind of like working like Cocoa on the web and all these conveniences that you have. Like, that’s not what massive

⏹️ ▶️ John online service is about these days anymore. They’re about infrastructure pieces to manage storage and data

⏹️ ▶️ John in ways that are totally unlike the WebObject stack in terms of where the state is and

⏹️ ▶️ John how it all fits together. Just look at how, like, look at Google’s Spanner thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that they use for their database stuff and then all of its predecessors like GFS and what was the,

⏹️ ▶️ John someone in the chat room tell me what was the thing that predated, Bigtable. Bigtable. And all these infrastructure

⏹️ ▶️ John projects that have come and gone, and MapReduce and all those things that Google is constantly revising, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t gone through that revolution. I mean, Google started out. Its first things of just GFS and MapReduce

⏹️ ▶️ John were already ahead of where Apple was with WebObjects in terms of doing things at scale.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Google is constantly throwing away its old ones and replacing with new ones over and over and over again for its service.

⏹️ ▶️ John And same thing with Amazon and all the stuff that it’s using to run its services. Apple started

⏹️ ▶️ John with WebObjects, which was already like sort of the old model. And, you know, look, it’s much more convenient for developers

⏹️ ▶️ John to do, you know, like Google has proven that, uh, you can make things annoying

⏹️ ▶️ John for developers. It’s certainly using big table was super annoying, which is one of the reasons Spanner exists for developers,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it was like, you know, scaling is king. And even though it’s going to be annoying for you to do this stuff with the application level, we

⏹️ ▶️ John scaling is more important and we’ll work out the other things later. Whereas Apple was like, uh, Oh, we want this to be all nice.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of like working with objects. And it’s real convenient. And everything is magically objects and persistent. Sounds kind of like Core Data,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. But online. And isn’t that nice? And that is nice and everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ John your hands are tied behind your back in terms of how do you scale this to 17 data centers with redundant hardware and all these

⏹️ ▶️ John other things. And we’ll know the day has come when Apple has finally sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John joined the modern age when they don’t have to bring the store down before they introduce new products. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a way to do it. The reason they do that is not so much like, oh, we have to take the store down to add new

⏹️ ▶️ John products. They don’t have to take the store down to add new products. They have to take the store down, this is my theory. They have to take the store

⏹️ ▶️ John down to add new products that appear to customers in a deterministic manner, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because they can add new products without taking the store down, but they have no idea when or where they’ll appear for people

⏹️ ▶️ John because their architecture doesn’t allow them to sort of have a way to say, okay, now this is available for the

⏹️ ▶️ John entire world. It’s just like they can add it and then it sort of trickles out through their whatever system they have going with

⏹️ ▶️ John combined with their CDNs and other stuff, and they don’t want it to spoil the surprise. So instead, they bring the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ John down, rev the whole thing, put all the new stuff in, and then just wait for the moment when they say, okay, and go bring it back

⏹️ ▶️ John up. And then you’re sure that nobody sees it ahead of time accidentally, right? And you’re sure that when you do turn it

⏹️ ▶️ John on, everybody sees the new thing because presumably you’ve had time for it to propagate during, you know. That’s my theory of why

⏹️ ▶️ John they take the store down, but that’s not how the web works. You can’t take your store down

⏹️ ▶️ John when you don’t want to spoil a surprise, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you really think taking the store down is still necessary, or do you think they’re doing it only for the theatrical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco element?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have control over when people saw things. They want it to be visible

⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody all at once as much as possible, but only starting at a given point.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this, again, is just speculation. If they just put it up in the store now, it would either slowly trickle

⏹️ ▶️ John out to people, which would be kind of annoying because you want everybody to see it when you announce, or if you start it early, some people

⏹️ ▶️ John might see it early. So I think it’s about making it so that

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone sees the thing simultaneously. It could be purely for theatrics, as in they don’t have to do it

⏹️ ▶️ John at all, but I think they would have stopped that by now. So many things that they’ve done for theatrics have sort of come and gone,

⏹️ ▶️ John but my guess is that it has to do with content propagation and being in control of

⏹️ ▶️ John when it appears to the first person and getting it to appear to the most people as soon as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s no technical reason why it has to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take that long. They don’t have to take the store down for an hour and a half to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco update something.

⏹️ ▶️ John How long does it take for the new content to propagate through their worldwide network of CDNs?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends how they do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I’m saying maybe it actually takes them two hours to be sure that all the new content is propagated

⏹️ ▶️ John to all the CDNs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s a choice they make in implementation. They can do it within a few seconds if they wanted to.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, who knows? This is just my guess of why they would do it. And you’re right. It’s down for a long

⏹️ ▶️ John time. It’s not like it’s down for five seconds, then comes back up. It’s down for an hour during the whole keynote,

⏹️ ▶️ John practically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, usually it goes down before the keynote. And so it’s down for like three hours

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John total.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the only other thing I think of is maybe they’re trying to prevent people from accidentally buying the old products while they’re announcing

⏹️ ▶️ John the new ones. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can still go into an Apple store and buy them. You can still buy them that morning. You can still, you know, it doesn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t be the reason either.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if Apple Store employees wave you off. Like if you go in and like the keynote is going on, surely

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone in Apple Store knows the keynote is going on. If you go in like on the October 22nd iPad event and you

⏹️ ▶️ John go in while someone is on stage introducing new iPads and you try to buy an old one, you would think the Apple Store

⏹️ ▶️ John guy is going to go, you know they’re announcing new ones now. Like you can still buy this. Here you go. Like it’s fine. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John have it now. But just in case, like you might want to know, maybe you don’t know they’re announcing new ones right now. I wonder if

⏹️ ▶️ John they tell you that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you might be overestimating the geekiness and attentiveness of both the staff and the customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an Apple store.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be depressed if they don’t even know that it’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do you think, you know, thinking about some more of this Apple server stuff before we go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to a different topic, do you think Apple’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling pain from this? their stuff being the status quo of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working most of the time, but not being up to the standards service-wise, quality-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uptime-wise, reliability-wise of Google services, Amazon services,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook services, you know, the other big giants. Do you think Apple’s really feeling the pain from that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, do you think this is really hurting them? Because with Google, they had to scale ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well because A, not a lot of other people in their business were doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco B, they were scaling way past what everyone else was doing. And C, that’s their entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. That’s where everything comes from. If Google doesn’t serve an ad, they lose money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas Apple is selling all this hardware regardless of whether iMessage is down this morning. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it doesn’t really hurt them directly and severely where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s one or two instances of downtime here and there. How much pain do you think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling? Because it kind of seems like they’re not feeling enough to do anything drastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, maybe, but let me answer your question by asking you a question. Do you think Apple is proud?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it’s pretty clear to me that they’re a very proud company. I can’t imagine, to come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of full circle, I can’t imagine that they like hearing these pot shots taken at them during

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Does that make sense?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the question, though. The question is, it’s like a Balmer type question. Are they in denial?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you were to ask them, off the record, I’m not going to report this and make a story out of it, just so you bump into Tim Cook in an

⏹️ ▶️ John elevator or whatever. And it’s like, do you think Apple does online stuff as

⏹️ ▶️ John well as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft? And this could explain the leadership gap,

⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re like, maybe they’re in denial. And they think, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John has troubles every once in a while. We’re kind of in the mix. We’re kind of pretty much almost as good as Google and

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon. Maybe some days worse, some days better. Everyone has their ups and downs. Or do they really realize

⏹️ ▶️ John what the gap is? And the gap is not, if you were to put it on a little

⏹️ ▶️ John graph or something, it’s only a couple of percentage, but it’s like that last couple of percentage, it’s like uptime.

⏹️ ▶️ John Going from three nines to seven nines is just astronomically hard, so much

⏹️ ▶️ John harder than going from 90% uptime to 99. You know what I mean? The last little bits of the part that matter.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder, that could explain why they haven’t gotten religion on this and

⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated themselves to doing the server side, taking ownership of the server side tech the same

⏹️ ▶️ John way they do on the client side, is that they think they’re not that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they really actually think, yeah, we have room for improvement. We’re not satisfied with where we are. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that. We’re close, right? And I would say, no, you’re not. It seems like you’re close, but really, those

⏹️ ▶️ John last few inches on the graph make all the difference. You are not close. There is nobody. There’s not a single person who

⏹️ ▶️ John has any technical clue who would say, do you think at any day of any month of any year that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does online stuff better than Google? Like it’s never happened. No one has ever had that opinion. It’s just a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ John percent, okay, Google is better. How much are they better? Are they a little bit better? But nobody believes Apple better than nobody.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and I have a feeling that if you ask someone on like the iTunes music store, they’re like, well, of course we’re better. Look how many billions of songs

⏹️ ▶️ John we sold. Look how many apps we give people. Google doesn’t do stuff like that. Their store sucks. We do so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like, because they excel in a few areas of read mostly distribution

⏹️ ▶️ John of static data to people that they think, we’re an online services company and we’re awesome. And it’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ John the same as an interactive thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think anyone’s ever returned an iPhone because iMessage was down for 20 minutes a month?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, you’re right about them not feeling it. Like, it would be better if they felt they have more of a cushion than Google. They just do, because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so many other interesting things you can do with the device that don’t matter if the, and you can use Google

⏹️ ▶️ John services, for example. You can use Google’s Maps, another area where they have a little trouble. you can use Google now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not their whole business. It’s just part of their business. And so, yeah, no one’s going to return the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing because Siri is wonky every once in a while. Like, it doesn’t hurt them as much. And it’s almost kind of a shame

⏹️ ▶️ John because if it hurt them more, maybe, you know, like, Jobs, I think, knew they weren’t, you know, that Google does

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff better. Which is why I kept yelling at, like, the mobile meet team and having all those meetings and trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John do iCloud. Like, at least he, I think he understood, we’re not good at this.

⏹️ ▶️ John We should get better. He didn’t know how to make that happen, apparently. But he sure tried. So we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John see if there ever comes a time where, I mean, I guess Tim Cook maybe did that about maps,

⏹️ ▶️ John like apologizing for maps and we need to do better and some understanding of maps. But maybe he just sees that as a data problem

⏹️ ▶️ John and not a server problem. I don’t know. Like, I mean, the thing about maps is if I was Tim Cook, I’d be like, OK, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, we just need a better map data. It’s like, OK, Tim, so you haven’t forgotten about the fleet of cars

⏹️ ▶️ John that are going to drive over every single road in the entire world and take pictures. Did you forget about that part? Because you don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John that for free if you just get better map data, right? Google did that. That’s a crazy project. It’s huge.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s ongoing. Right, and they don’t stop doing it. And if you don’t have an answer for that, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not going to have Street View. You’re not going to have, like, let me fly 3D through the middle of Fog Creek’s offices. Like, you’re so far

⏹️ ▶️ John from that. So how are you ever going to compete? And it could be that he’s like, OK, well, we’re never going to do that. We just need

⏹️ ▶️ John maps to say we have maps. And they can just continue to use Google Maps for things. And Google Maps are always

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be better. But that’s not an Apple kind of attitude, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not, like when I say this is like a substantial problem in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company that probably won’t ever change, like imagine, to take another example in the industry,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine if, you know, some Microsoft CEO comes in,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I guess is plausible, some new Microsoft CEO comes in and they say, you know what,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our devices aren’t cool. Everything we make, our hardware is not cool,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our Our software is not cool. Nobody thinks our stuff is cool. Let’s hire somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in charge of keeping things cool or let’s just, let’s increase the funding to our cool

⏹️ ▶️ Marco department by 50% this year. Like, do you think that’s really going to change it? Like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that easy. And so I feel like looking at Apple and saying, how can they address

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server or the services issue that their services aren’t that good traditionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and continue to be that way? I don’t think there is an answer. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s the kind of thing that can change in a large company. I think either it’s a priority

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the start or it’s not. And the elements that Google has that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabled them to produce these kinds of services that scale very well and that prioritize all these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, Apple just doesn’t have those elements. And in the same way that Google is never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make something client-side that has the the kind of quality and taste

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an Apple client-side platform and software. I don’t think Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will ever have what it takes to make Google quality services.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the good thing in Apple’s favor is that the thing that Apple has that Microsoft and Google seem not to

⏹️ ▶️ John have is it’s kind of like it’s one of those things you label as intangible in scare quotes, because it’s not intangible.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s more mysterious, whereas the things that Google has are tangible.

⏹️ ▶️ John And a great example of it is Google was a company that made web search and they indexed the entire web, which was an amazing technical

⏹️ ▶️ John feat, right? But they decided they wanted to have a client-side OS. And they

⏹️ ▶️ John did that by making a client-side platform that they completely took ownership of. They have their own, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t call it Java, Dalvik VM, their own API, their own IDE, their

⏹️ ▶️ John own store. They understood if we want to have a client-side mobile platform, we

⏹️ ▶️ John need to own it. We need to own the technology from top to bottom. We’re going to define the VM, we’re going to define the

⏹️ ▶️ John language sort of, you know, it’s Java, whatever, with native client and all of those stuff. And we’re going to have the ID, they understood

⏹️ ▶️ John that, hey, we were a server side company, but we want to get into client side. And we have we can’t do it by like,

⏹️ ▶️ John licensing a bunch of software from someone else, we have to take ownership of it. So that is a tangible thing. And I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John proof that Apple could if it wanted to say, we need to get into server side, at which they have,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also say they forgot to say is, and we need to take ownership of it the same way we take ownership of

⏹️ ▶️ John the client side. The thing that’s harder to transfer is like, you know, taste and culture and coolness.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is much harder to do because like there is no coolness department at Microsoft. You can’t increase funding and 50% to

⏹️ ▶️ John something that doesn’t exist, right? That, you know, and maybe it’s just like, oh well designers are tangible, we could just steal them

⏹️ ▶️ John all from Apple, but like that’s hard to do because they don’t want to leave Apple and go to, you know, Microsoft has good designers

⏹️ ▶️ John too and they measure stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and that wouldn’t work because the structure around them is different there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I like I think the tangible things of like a server-side company prove that it can get into client side and take ownership

⏹️ ▶️ John of it. I think there’s no reason that a client side company can’t prove that it can get into server side and take ownership of the tech stack.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just didn’t do it. Whereas the intangibles about coolness and taste and design,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is much harder to do. Like more rarely do you see a company, a company like Google or Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, we’re not cool and stylish, we’re gonna put some effort in. And Google has tried to increase the style and so has Microsoft, but

⏹️ ▶️ John none of them, they’re still not reaching the heights that Apple gets in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John taste and design, right? They’ve both made efforts in that area, but it seems harder to do. Whereas I would say technology-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John Google has as much control over, you know, pending whatever the lawsuit is with Oracle, but

⏹️ ▶️ John as much control over and determining its own destiny for all of its core tech,

⏹️ ▶️ John all of its server-side tech, all of its client-side tech. Hell, they even took WebKit back and they have Blink now.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have taken ownership of their tech stack. And so has Microsoft. Microsoft has always had ownership because they don’t like to use anything

⏹️ ▶️ John from anybody else. And same thing with Amazon. You know, even they took Android and they took ownership of it. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not going to even call it Android. It’s going to be whatever the hell the Kindle OS is, right? OS? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it is totally within the realm of possibility.

⏹️ ▶️ John You do have to change how the company works, like the structure of it and stuff like that, but not in any more radical

⏹️ ▶️ John way than Google had to change when it made Android, you know?

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⏹️ ▶️ John Ads are making me depressed because I’ve been wandering websites recently that look like they were designed in 1993 by some person.

⏹️ ▶️ John They probably paid tons of money. I’m looking at home improvement type,

⏹️ ▶️ John construction companies and stuff like that. Their websites, they look like they probably spent $15,000 to give to some teenager

⏹️ ▶️ John in 1994 to make their website. To Merlin’s old company. Yeah, or like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and simple things where you could like, make appointments or buy things. And it’s like, look, if you just spent like, like $8 a

⏹️ ▶️ John month on Squarespace and put up a stripe for, like that experience in all ways, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper for you, it’s nicer for your customers, you’ll make more money. It’s so cheap. It’s especially

⏹️ ▶️ John good when you look at their prices for the work they’re gonna do. Like you guys have the money. You have all the money in the world. You know the prices you charge.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so cheap, just get a Squarespace. And I bet they’re so proud of their sites. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they invested so much money early

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on,

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. It was like a $15,000 site in 1994. I know! Tear it down, pay $8 a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco month. God.

⏹️ ▶️ John And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was one of those people building those sites for people. And everything I built was terrible compared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what any modern web CMS offers you out of the box. Everything I did back then was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible. And I charged people so much money because it was all one-offs. But now you can just go to these big platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wonder, all these restaurants and these flash-only sites… Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get me started. they have to be losing more than $8 a month in sales to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep having their stupid flash

⏹️ ▶️ John site. Yeah, some sites do get a clue, but they still, like, you can tell they paid someone in the last

⏹️ ▶️ John 10 years to do it, but it’s still gross. It’s still like, you know, just please, just use Stripe. Every time I

⏹️ ▶️ John can now recognize, like, the Stripe form, like, the fact that it’s all client-side, and everything, it’s so beautiful. It’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel kind of bad because, you know, I made e-commerce sites too, and it used to be such a pain to make e-commerce sites.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, if we had Stripe back then, it would have been done in an afternoon. Oh, yeah. It has all the features that I’d spend

⏹️ ▶️ John like months implementing, like manually, you know, because there weren’t, you know, there was no companies that you could like

⏹️ ▶️ John outsource this stuff to. No one knew what they were doing. We’re all just like, I guess we’ll take money from people over the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John It seemed like a crime. We’re getting away with something. But yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Stripe really isn’t that old. Like, when it came out, was it maybe three years ago? I mean, it’s not that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old. And like, I just remember even then, even like three years ago, So taking money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco online was still a hassle. You basically had the PayPal API, which is a disaster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every possible way. Having run Instapaper subscriptions off the PayPal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, I cannot tell anybody enough how much they should not use PayPal for anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you ignore all of the crazy stories about how PayPal locks your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco account and takes all your money, that’s bad enough. even when everything’s working as intended

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s terrible it’s absolutely the worst thing in the universe like and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for managing recurring subscriptions there’s no way to get a list of subscribers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still there is still no way to get a list you just have to take in all those messages saying hey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new person and keep track of them yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like newsstand only you can’t even do that in this thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true I think yeah although newsstand has the weird thing where you can like go into iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect and download everybody’s zip code. I don’t know. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like PayPal is the worst. Like when Stripe came out a few years ago, whenever that was, the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it made such a splash was like they’re on their page. It was like, here’s like a curl command

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and here’s a block of JSON that’s equivalent that like here’s how you charge somebody’s card. And it’s like these,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, four lines of JSON or there’s one curl command. You’re like, oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so much better than everything else I’ve ever seen to this point. I don’t have to form

⏹️ ▶️ John a soap message. Send it over. Nice. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that was the Amazon payment story in the news this week, too, right? Like, speaking of the death of PayPal,

⏹️ ▶️ John PayPal is the express exchange

⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann for so many other businesses.

⏹️ ▶️ John Stack Overflow is the express exchange as insert the blank is to PayPal, and

⏹️ ▶️ John insert the blank is Amazon Payments, Stripe, and all the other companies that finally recognized that despite PayPal

⏹️ ▶️ John being the 800-pound gorilla, everybody hates it. It’s terrible. It needs to die and all it takes is

⏹️ ▶️ John some new services that can nip away at it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dolla’s weird. Have you seen Dolla?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard of it. Is that like the interest-free lending thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kiva.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about. Oh, that’s the one where you pay a quarter and you can pay a quarter and send money to anybody?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. It’s basically… I’m not sure how it works. I think it might be based on ACH

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. But somehow, it doesn’t use the credit card network to move money around. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they charge only 25 cents, but then there’s like no fraud protection. It works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot like cash, something like that. I don’t know all the details, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow they’re able to only charge 25 cents for pretty much any size money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It sounds

⏹️ ▶️ John like a complicated money laundering scheme that you are an unwitting participant in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was weird is like, so I signed up for that a few months ago because that’s how we doing some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our ad payments and and like it feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong like because it’s so like it feels suspicious to me to only pay 25

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents to move a giant chunk of money somewhere like I I don’t know it made me uneasy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ John you know it shouldn’t it shouldn’t though because like it’s all the fact that it costs money to transfer money

⏹️ ▶️ John is an artificial construct mostly artificial construct based on the old world by and now that we have all our computers

⏹️ ▶️ John are connected together. But the problem is there’s no sort of secure standard for,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no common secure standard for transferring money other than, I guess, Bitcoin or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John really secure. And everything is kind of this strange game of like trust and

⏹️ ▶️ John parties are sufficiently trustworthy and you assume that they’re not. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then they communicate over this terrible protocol that it’s like a check, where you just need like the account

⏹️ ▶️ John number and routing number And somehow you can send money into people’s accounts. The entire banking system has not

⏹️ ▶️ John kept up with current technology. And it’s all kind of a house of cards that we’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of saying, all right, everybody, let’s just not blow this. So things like Dwalla come in,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it does seem crazy. But you’re like, you know what? We shouldn’t be able to transfer money seamlessly

⏹️ ▶️ John from account to account. Why would we need a middleman for that? And it’s because, well, we don’t have any real

⏹️ ▶️ John secure protocols. And if we did, the NSA would be eavesdropping on them anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know what kind of along the same lines is a square cash, which I think was Andre Arco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent, sent. It might have been him, maybe not. Somebody sent me a few dollars of square cash just so I could try it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And basically what’s the way square cash works is you send an email to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoever, whomever, whatever is supposed to receive the money. You see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their email address, the square cash email address, and you put the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollar amount in the subject line. and then Square will send an email to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person receiving the cash saying, we think somebody’s about to pay you, hold on. They send

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an email to the person that sent it, so they send it to you, saying, hey man, or girl, are you really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure you want to send this money? And then what happens is, the person receiving the money just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inputs their debit card account number, and all the money’s transferred,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it’s 50 cents a transfer, And I’m sure there’s a limit in terms of how much you can send, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what it is. So it must be pretty high. And it works flawlessly.

⏹️ ▶️ John You did that with us. I think you sent me like $1 or something to try it out. Yeah, that was pretty neat. And people in the chat room are saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that they have a system in Europe that works with this. It does not surprise me. Europe has all the nice. Europe is the new Japan.

⏹️ ▶️ John Remember, it used to be that in Japan, they had like flying cars and hoverboards. And we had

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. All we had in the 80s was like Donkey Kong and Casio keyboards. But they had the cool stuff. And then their economy

⏹️ ▶️ John tank. But now it’s like in Europe they have socialized medicine and

⏹️ ▶️ John unemployment. And Switzerland was passing a law for the minimum monthly

⏹️ ▶️ John income to be the equivalent of $2,800 for all citizens. Yeah. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get so much email from this from people who are like, I can’t believe how terrible your system in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the US is. Don’t you know how much better this is in Europe? And the answer is, yes, we know. We are very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aware of how terrible our system is. Please, you don’t have to tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us. Although I think like, I mean, they’re saying, you know, they just need two numbers and they can transfer money to each other. Like, they still

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have, like, Bitcoin is actually at the forefront of this technology, as sad as it is with their, you know, crazy

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they have going on there. At least they have sort of an attempt to make a secure, you know, mathematical

⏹️ ▶️ John foundation for distributed middleman-less transfers that everyone could be assured

⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, happening correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what else Europe does right? And I bring this up only briefly, because I just watched a video from Mythbusters about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is roundabouts. So the Mythbusters, which are clearly the bastion of all things good about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey science, and they never, ever flub anything ever, they did a test with a four-way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop versus a roundabout. And the roundabout crushed the four-way stop in terms of throughput. I just thought that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I don’t even think that’s up for debate. I think almost every study has always proven that, that roundabouts really are way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for throughput.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, we have a ton of them around. I don’t know if you have them down where you guys are. But yeah, Massachusetts is the land of the roundabouts.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We have plenty

⏹️ ▶️ John of them. Yeah, no, they’re all over the place here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they’re becoming popular here. And it’s funny watching everyone try to navigate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, because nobody knows what they’re doing. John, while I’m thinking of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is the review going? Do you feel like you have a release date based on the, what is it, October 22nd

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad event that everyone’s kind of assuming will be Mavericks as well?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we got the GM like two hours after the last show. Oh, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right.

⏹️ ▶️ John it turned out that Apple Insider story that I was pooh-poohing, like they had it right, it was just that they were talking about the people who get like the

⏹️ ▶️ John early seeds. Because as soon as I saw that story, I went to the, you know, Apple developer website and saw nothing there. I’m like, oh, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just bogus. But it was just, you know, it was a stage rollout of the super duper, you know, Apple seed program.

⏹️ ▶️ John People got it and then a couple of hours later, we got it. So the update on the review is, yay, I’ve got a

⏹️ ▶️ John GM. Boo, I had to redo a whole bunch of screenshots. God, the things they changed

⏹️ ▶️ John are just insane. Like, they changed functionality too, So I had to like rewrite an entire section

⏹️ ▶️ John because everything I had written about and all the screenshots that I’d taken were no longer there and the worst thing about the section I had to rewrite

⏹️ ▶️ John is I Don’t understand one of the things that they changed like they changed

⏹️ ▶️ John The the pop-up menus where they are and like what the choices are and understand all the choices except for

⏹️ ▶️ John one And so like right now in my review I have written that I could not figure out what this meant like

⏹️ ▶️ John I tried I tried so many maybe it means this let Me try it. Nope. Maybe means this let me try it I could

⏹️ ▶️ John not figure it. And of course, I asked Apple. Like, I have so many questions into Apple, but they ignore me. So maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll hear from them. Maybe I won’t. But having a GM build is good. So I did a lot of work revising things.

⏹️ ▶️ John By the end, I was getting pissed because it’s like, I mean, we’ve all seen the screenshots. You know

⏹️ ▶️ John the labels or the tag things or whatever in the Finder? You see in the screenshots, they

⏹️ ▶️ John put like a colored dot next to the file name if you give it like a red label. They change the size of those dots by like a pixel.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, come on. Come

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on, guys.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They did that just to troll you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Every single screenshot that had a freaking dot. Yeah, I was like, and I like the old size better. Like they made them like slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John smaller. I’m like, oh, come on. And so now it’s just like, yeah, if I had to redo a screenshot because

⏹️ ▶️ John they totally changed the way something works fine, but I had to redo it because you made the dot smaller. That’s just cruel.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then like the one I tweeted was that one pop-up menu was like two pixels farther away from the label.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to have like some very high ranking design manager you’re on OS 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be a listener of this show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just about to say that. And if that is the truth, like, can you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco imagine? Or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s just whoever’s in charge of that particular screen, just thinking to themselves, you know what, I’m going to troll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Syracuse.

⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I moved the one with the pop up menu like that one, I kind of give them a pass for it because it was misaligned

⏹️ ▶️ John in the in the pre release builds like, you know, what a dialogue about this looks like has a bunch of pop up menus supposed to be all like kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of left, you know, their left edges all line up. And one of them wasn’t the top one was like sticking out

⏹️ ▶️ John more than it should have. So they were simply correcting, like this is how you can tell it’s a GM, like someone did a once over on every single screen and

⏹️ ▶️ John get in when someone, an interface builder like didn’t drag the little thingy to be like, you know what I mean? And

⏹️ ▶️ John so they realigned it and it’s like, you know, I gotta retake the screenshot. Like it’s just at that point

⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, really? Is every screen changed in some small way? People are asking

⏹️ ▶️ John me on Twitter, is there anything that I’ll let slide? Like if it’s not off, like that pop-up

⏹️ ▶️ John menu is off by a pixel, right? Once you see that it’s off by a pixel, you can’t unsee it. I’m not going to leave the pre-release

⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot. Not just because it’s pre-release, but because it’s like, hey, the top pop-up menu is in a line. Someone screwed up an interface

⏹️ ▶️ John builder. So I’m going to fix that one. In every review, there’s at least two or three

⏹️ ▶️ John shots that are not from GM and differ in ways that only

⏹️ ▶️ John I would notice. And I’ve never been called on it. So I shouldn’t even say this, because now someone’s going to go sit there and graphically

⏹️ ▶️ John diff every single thing and find the one that. But rest assured, there will be shots in there that

⏹️ ▶️ John were taken not on the GM, that differ in immaterial ways of a pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John here, a pixel there, that no one will ever notice. And I’m OK with that, because seriously, I’m not going

⏹️ ▶️ John to redo every single one of these screenshots.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only person on Earth who would notice is you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or the person who, the graphic designer, who’s like, I changed that. That’s a different color now. That just, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Nope, not even them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe. We’ll see. Yeah, because it gets cumbersome redoing it, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John when, like, if it was just changing screenshots, fine. But when I had to redo a whole section because they totally changed the functionality, it’s like you wait

⏹️ ▶️ John till the GM bill to massively change its functionality. It’s, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And do you think it’s ready to be called a GM?

⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when they started doing this, they’d be like, here’s the GM seed. And we’re like, what does that mean? What

⏹️ ▶️ John is a GM seed? Does this mean you are seeding us the GM? Or does this mean it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John will we ever see a release where it says GM seed two? Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the big fear. It’s like what GMC to that shows that you are misinterpreting the previous title. The previous title did not

⏹️ ▶️ John mean it was a seat of the GM. It meant this is it’s like it’s like release candidate. They

⏹️ ▶️ John use that terminology of like, maybe this is GM. Here you go. You know? And so I really

⏹️ ▶️ John hope they will not be another one that says GMC two. And I don’t think there will. Uh, I think they could ship

⏹️ ▶️ John this and it would be fine. I need a price and a date. I need a price and a date. I have right now the text

⏹️ ▶️ John in my review says, I don’t know what the price is. Because now I can press the button

⏹️ ▶️ John and publish it, and I can submit it to an e-book store, and it would be valid, assuming

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t change the GM. But I also have two more different versions based on

⏹️ ▶️ John two different guesses of what the price might be. So I need a price, I need a date. I’m waiting patiently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What else is going on? How’s Overcast going?

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, from what I understand, you actually have a book recommendation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is not a new book recommendation, because anyone who’s listened to my past podcast knows

⏹️ ▶️ John that I talk about the same three books over and over again. This is one of them, but it’s in a different context this time. It’s in the context of

⏹️ ▶️ John an audio book. This book is, I don’t read a lot of biographies, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite biography that I’ve ever read. It also won a Pulitzer Prize, so it has some pedigree to it. And it is also,

⏹️ ▶️ John interestingly, a book that most people will never, ever read on their own in paper form,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like over 1,000 pages. And truth be told, it’s like, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not into the subject matter, That’s a lot of pages to read about one person, no matter how interesting they were. Now, I am super into

⏹️ ▶️ John this one person because the biography is of Robert Moses. I knew this was going to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I grew up on Long Island, and I went to all the beaches and parks that they talk about in here. And it’s just an amazing experience

⏹️ ▶️ John for me. I’m such a crazy big fan of Long Island to read about

⏹️ ▶️ John how all these things that I enjoyed in my youth came to be in their sort of tortured history, and the interesting man that was

⏹️ ▶️ John behind them. And it really is an amazing book. But I recognize when I recommend it to people, they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m going to read this phone book or whatever. So get the audiobook. And this, unlike I think in the past episode

⏹️ ▶️ John where Mark said he liked to bridge things, this is an unabridged audiobook of 1,000-page Pulitzer Prize winning

⏹️ ▶️ John biography. Do they have an abridged version out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of

⏹️ ▶️ John curiosity? No, you don’t want the abridged version. You want it to be like it’s like, admit to yourself that you’re never going to read it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And instead, just use it as an audiobook. 66 hours. It’s like more than 2 and 1 1 days of

⏹️ ▶️ John audio. You say you’re going on a cross-country drive

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, this is what you want. Think about the value you’re getting for your money for this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Use this as an unbelievable value, enriching your life in a way that you would never do on

⏹️ ▶️ John your own because you have to admit to yourself that you’re never going to read this book, but you will just stick it in your iPod and

⏹️ ▶️ John listen to it on your drive to and from your colleges across the country or whatever. Highly recommended,

⏹️ ▶️ John The Power Broker, Pulitzer Prize winning by Robert A. Caro, a man with with an amazing accent if you

⏹️ ▶️ John Google him and find some YouTube videos all about Long Island and Robert Moses, two things near and dear

⏹️ ▶️ John to my heart. That is awesome. Although not not Robert Moses himself because he was a terrible person.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, read the book.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot. That is so like the typical John Siracusa

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann pic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring ATP. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take advantage of our free 30 day trial. a lot audible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, was that your hint that you don’t want to know or don’t want to share what’s going on with Overcast?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not a whole lot to share. I mean, another week went by. I’m working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. I’ve been working on it. I’m doing a little more with the sync engine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today I was writing playlist sync and a couple of other, you know, preference

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync type of things. I mean, nothing really exciting. Just optimizations, fixes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just moving forward with the feature set. Adding podcasts, removing podcasts, that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still in the works. There’s still a whole lot missing. But yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. Nutty Gamer in the chat wants me to talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about pricing for the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pricing is interesting, but honestly, I have not really made a decision yet. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not just saying that to be coy. I really haven’t haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. There’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. I really don’t think I’m going to do the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid up front thing. There’s a lot of value to that. And I could, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new iOS 7 receipt validation API, I could launch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as paid up front, see how it goes and then move to free with an app purchase

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and simply migrate those users over who bought But you can migrate them over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you basically know if they bought the paid version or not when you make the same app free.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you could move from paid to free with an app purchase easily for the first time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. Whereas before iOS 7 you could not do that. There was no good way to do it and you’d just anger everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could do that and I’ve certainly thought about doing that. I’m leaning towards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, but the reality is also I’m probably still at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco least three to four months away from release, at least. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said I’m going to try to get it out this year. In reality, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco January or February is more realistic and more likely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All these pricing dynamics could be different then. I might change my mind on the business model in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last month. I really don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s about it, I guess. BD Fortin in the chat asked a good question, which I addressed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on another show. I don’t think I addressed it here. What about an iTunes Match-style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription to remove ads and give the money to the podcasters? Basically the readability model.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Collecting money from people and then distributing it to what you listen to. There’s a number of practical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems to that, most of which is what Readability faced, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you default to collecting money for everyone without them claiming it, it’s kind of weird. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of issues with that. I could do something like integrate with Flatter. Flatter is a decent service.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not really my style, but it’s a good service and they have good intentions and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. I think the biggest problem with the podcast app or platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco collecting money for everybody and distributing it out is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you could get any number of podcasts to really agree

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how they want to do that, how they want to message that, how they want to receive that money. A lot of podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already collect money directly through themselves and wouldn’t want the competition. A lot of them, it would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause confusion as to who the people should be paying.

⏹️ ▶️ John The advertisers, I mean, it’s not good for advertisers either because that hybrid thing makes nobody happy. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John either have a broadcast that’s listener supported, or you can have a podcast that’s ad supported. But when you try to do both, it’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John the advertisers are pissed that they’re not getting those people who are paying to skip their ads. And so you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John advertising to fewer people, and then some people are pissed because they feel like they have to pay for it or should pay for it so they can skip

⏹️ ▶️ John the ads, because we know that some people are skipping the ads and they’re not. So it’s much cleaner to say, look, it’s free, it’s supported by

⏹️ ▶️ John ads, or you pay for it and they give it to you like the magazine type model, where there’s no ads, you

⏹️ ▶️ John just pay money. They’re so clean and understandable, and you don’t have this confusion.

⏹️ ▶️ John Especially hybrid solutions that you impose on people that they haven’t chosen to do, just

⏹️ ▶️ John sadness all around, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And John, wasn’t it one of the last Hypercritical episodes where you talked about how advertisers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost always outbid the listeners or audience directly? That’s very true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost always, a podcast can make more through ads than through direct payments. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s the platform or app’s responsibility to monetize podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think every show is going to have a different audience with different needs and different priorities.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I should just leave it up to the shows and their producers how they want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to monetize and where they want to do that. Also from a practical point of view,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t Instacast have flatter integration for a while and it caused tons of problems with app review?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time you collect money in an app, either not through Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you’re collecting money to distribute in some other weird way, you know, when telling people to add in the app,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re running a very big risk of being rejected for any update you try to make or being kicked out of the store when you’re already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. And because that’s right tiptoeing along the line of what Apple will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow within that purchase rules. And it is just, oh, here’s the link. Thank you, underscore David Smith.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is just not worth even risking that. And to build a major feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around depending on that is not wise. So not only do I think it wouldn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get past Apple very reliably, but I also don’t think it’s a very good idea for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one particular podcast app or even any group of them to try to create

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enforce a new universal podcast monetization model where every show is going to want to do something different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even the language around collecting the money. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked forever ago on Build and Analyze about Flatter and TipJoy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, and a couple of other things like that, where I was saying, I don’t like the idea of having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tip jar on my site.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just socially, that’s kind of a weird thing to me. I would want to very carefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco control any language or implication or pressure around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking people to give me money for something. And everyone’s going to have different opinions on what that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for them, and what they want to present to people, what they want to ask people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give or to do, and in what context and with what language. So there isn’t one solution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to please everybody who cares about this stuff as much as I do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, another thing that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on, and I don’t know if there’s really anything you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do have to say about this, but a lot of people seem to have taken offense at you saying that the now playing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen is the only thing that matters. Do you have anything that you’d

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to clear the air about? And maybe not, I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t, I don’t, I can see both sides of this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey story, so I don’t know, I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it, but I don’t know if you had anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to take too long on this because I don’t want to make it too boring. But yeah, last episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I threw off the comment that I was focusing a lot of my design effort on the now playing screen and that the rest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app could just be like a bunch of table views. And it wouldn’t really matter that much because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you spend the most time navigating the now playing screen. And whatever, whatever exactly I said there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got a lot of email about it from people saying, that’s wrong. As soon as I start playing a show, I turn the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen off, put the phone in my pocket, and that’s it. So I’m interacting more with the the rest of the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I was getting at, whether I said it or not, who knows if I messed up, oh well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the reality of talking for two hours every week, unrehearsed and with no preparation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I mean is the now playing screen has very frequent interaction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether you’re skipping a section or using the scrubber or playing and pausing because you know you got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to something somewhere else, very frequent interaction. Some of that you can do with the remote with a clicker

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some cases some of it you can’t some of it you’re doing directly so that screen to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me like I’m everything else about the app it matters a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less how it’s designed because no matter how you design it you’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling through some kind of list or collection of shows that each within it has a list of episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe you have playlists that have a list of episodes within them whatever the case is those are pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco straightforward designs like yeah you can you can tweak it here and there you can add little flourish here and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there the you know there’s there’s a lot of little decisions you can make differently but structurally navigationally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the app is not that hard to design it just isn’t it’s you know if you want to go that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco route with with your podcast app feel free but the fact is it doesn’t really matter how I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco present a list of episodes in the grand scheme of things I’ll try to do it as nice as I can but it’s not I’m not losing sleep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over that the now playing screen there’s more variability, although you wouldn’t know it based on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at the apps out there right now, but there’s more variability in how that can be designed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it matters more because maybe you’re interacting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it for a split second and putting it back in your pocket, but what if you’re jogging? Or what if you’re in a car and you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really look at it safely? There are situations like this where it matters how it’s designed,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it matters how it’s laid out, it matters what’s on there and what’s not, to a level that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is more nuanced and more important and hard to design for than a list of episodes. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I meant.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think I understood what you meant. And what I would have said to my interpretation of what

⏹️ ▶️ John of it was that that’s where you’re concentrating your development effort for the 1.0 because

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to pick something. But the the one kernel of truth that I think was in all the

⏹️ ▶️ John feedback, at least from my perspective is when I think of podcast apps, which again, I don’t use,

⏹️ ▶️ John I listen on the iPod shuffle that the problem that I would like solved by them

⏹️ ▶️ John that is not solved adequately by most of the ones that I use is how

⏹️ ▶️ John the particular way that I deal with deciding what I’m going to listen to like when I do it manually

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s this terrible process of using iTunes and iTunes 11 has gotten even worse about this and me hunting around for the stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John things dragging them onto my iPod shuffle

⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann you know

⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m lucky I can hunt around for all of them and then drag them all at once but if I’m unlucky I have to do it in two or three trips Then I go over the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPod shuffle and all those things are down at the bottom and then I manually drag them up into the Order that I want and rearrange

⏹️ ▶️ John them and then I wait for it to sync again, right? Because I have an idea what I want to do. I’m like, okay well today

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna listen to this and then I want to listen to that when it comes out and then I’m gonna go on a binge And catch up with this podcast and

⏹️ ▶️ John and when I go on this car trip, I want to do these things, right? so that whole idea of like Managing what I’m going to listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to next is the thing that I just think is not solved by the current crop certainly not by my stupid iPod

⏹️ ▶️ John shuffle and by the current crop of I iOS podcast applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so even though I would be spending most of my time on the now playing screen, the features that are important

⏹️ ▶️ John to me are the ones that let me sort of set up my queue of like, you know, I don’t know if you want to call it like a Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John queue or whatever, like, here’s what I’m going to listen to next. And that queue is just random, arbitrary. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John one podcast has higher priority than the other or like there’s no automated way to do it. It’s like I manually pick

⏹️ ▶️ John what I want to listen to in what order. And that’s what I,

⏹️ ▶️ John If I had to pick another part of the UI for you to concentrate on that would be the second one because yeah most of The time will be on

⏹️ ▶️ John either now playing screen or the controls on the sleep screen or whatever but To

⏹️ ▶️ John get to that screen at all. I have to sort of have my cue set up. You know what I mean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ John And and like the other thing about this I think is that I don’t I’m assuming you’re not telling us every single feature

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re gonna have in the application because why would You you know what I mean like so that’s something for people to keep in mind is they don’t realize

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re not going to to reveal every single feature that Zapp will have or that you’re planning

⏹️ ▶️ John in the future because that’s just not what you do when you’re making an application because why would you give your competitors the head start

⏹️ ▶️ John and never mind the features that are going to be in version 1.1 and 2.0 and so on and so forth. I

⏹️ ▶️ John would keep that in mind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean that’s the other thing too. Everything I’m talking about is 1.0.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As soon as I release it, there’s hopefully going to be a lot of users and those lot of users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to give me feedback and are going to use it in ways I didn’t expect and going and I’m going to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it works with full scale and how the server stuff works and how the structure of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app works, how navigation works. People are going to report problems or suggest improvements

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I haven’t thought of. And so all this planning and all this thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the design and making these decisions, that’s all just for 1.0 and it could all change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month after I release it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Think about Instapaper 1.0 and how it compared to the final version.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god, I don’t even want to think about it in spirit 1.0.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, long way to go. So it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people have nostalgia and positive memories and they look back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fondly on the stuff they made in the past. I am not one of those people. I look back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on stuff I made like three years ago and it’s like, oh, I’m embarrassed. Like I, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even want to think about it. I don’t want to look at it. I’m just deeply embarrassed by it, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably unhealthy. I don’t know. He’s moving forward at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann we good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week Squarespace and audible and we will see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you next week after our singleton trip indeed

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin because

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental Oh, it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn’t do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. It was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-C, USA Syracuse. It’s accidental. It’s accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcasts so

⏹️ ▶️ John long. This is like the least we’ve ever gotten through our little notes document

⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco doesn’t look at.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know.

⏹️ ▶️ John One item, there’s zero follow up. And Casey put in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. item,

⏹️ ▶️ John like right before the show. And that’s the only one we did.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the first time I’ve actually gone the whole show without even looking at the document. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Well, it doesn’t matter. Two out of three cases, as long as we stay strong, we have to not

⏹️ ▶️ John compromise with. Don’t negotiate with terrorists here just because he doesn’t want to use the document.

⏹️ ▶️ John We have the majority. Two out of three people use the document. The document is official.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been whether Marco looks at it or not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so did you see that Bimmer post put out a thing? This is accidental neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the Beamer, whatever. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about religious arguments. Don’t even get into that. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is

⏹️ ▶️ John that is that a real? Is there actually a controversy about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there?

⏹️ ▶️ John There is. Well, we do. We both we all three of us agree that it’s Beamer. Apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s because it’s spelled B.I.M.M.E.R.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know, I understand. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like the nickname for the car is Beamer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Yeah. Well, and that’s well, that’s the religious debate is that the motorcycles are one are Bimmer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Beamer and the car is Bimmer or Beamer. And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey car is actually supposed to be Bimmer. If you talk to a zealot and yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t see. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why I just avoid saying either of them. I don’t I don’t want to have to deal with that

⏹️ ▶️ John Porsche Jaguar. Yeah, well, it’s just yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a Subaru.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann No,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John no one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says that. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Now I can’t even remember what the hell it was I was trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to

⏹️ ▶️ John talk about. Beamer post! Controversy! Beamer post.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh.