37: A 3,000-Word Digression
01 Nov 2013Red Mac Pro, iOS 7.0.3, and more on John Siracusa’s Mavericks review.
Episode Description:
- Some light Mac Pro waffling and the red one.
- iOS 7.0.3's new crossfade animations in "Reduce Motion" mode.
- Little tidbits and windows into the life of John Siracusa buried in his OS X Mavericks review.
- Noodling John with random questions.
- Dragon Drop and Cocoapods don't suck.
- The big potential section of the Mavericks review that John omitted.
- Choosing high-level and low-level details to include in the review.
- Tags and the filesystem.
- Publishing the review ebooks, and relative sales between iBooks and Kindle.
- Marco's postmortem on his past Kindle efforts. (Museum of Mediocre Reading Devices, CueCat)
- Mavericks' theme and the Mac's constant battle between power users and ease of use.
- Will John keep doing OS X reviews?
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys are failing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see something about transporter in the FU. Do we want to talk about that or do we not care?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a worthy follow-up. Okay. Because it’s quick. I forget if we were talking about transporter
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it was during an ad on a past show mentioning the lights. And I think it was Marco was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that lights, blue LED lights are annoying on devices. This is a big blue light. Well, you can apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John turn the lights off on a transporter. So if you are one of those people who doesn’t like lights on your electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get a transporter Apparently you can dim and turn off the lights. I don’t think the lights are that bad
⏹️ ▶️ John But then again mine is also in the basement. So there you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speaking of retina man John that thing in your review we’re supposed to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your review how you how you found that the Default wallpaper is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2x the current 27 inch cinema displays resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah quite a coincidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incidents. Oh that’s that’s painful man that’s so painful because like now you look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the pieces are in place I was treating like this like all the pieces are in place to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a retina desktop display except having the display like the computers now support it Thunderbolt 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fast enough the GPUs are insanely fast and all these new models and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s clearly a differentiation here whereas you know assuming it would need to be Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2, the new MacBook Air still can’t do it. They don’t have Thunderbolt 2, right? That’s right, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only computers Apple has announced with Thunderbolt 2 are the new Retina MacBook Pro and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro. So it would be interesting and it would start like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve decided now, you know, looking at what’s being released, unless the benchmarks show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of massive gains in an application I actually use on the new Mac Pros, I think going to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not buy a new Mac Pro until there is a Retina desktop display. Because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not going to see enough of a gain from just the CPU side alone, just the storage side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alone. I already have a good CPU, a good SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what I really want is that display. And until it exists, I think I’m just going to hold off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s going to be great claim chowder. I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how well his resolve holds,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I get mine and talk about how awesome it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well the thing is like what like what’s it really gonna get me, and you know if I get it before then
⏹️ ▶️ John no It makes sense. We’re just questioning your ability to act rationally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I might not I mean that’s that’s certainly a valid question and you might be right And I you know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be you know being played back at some point later and laughing at me, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just I Think if you already have a 2010 Mac Pro there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a major reason to upgrade for just the CPU performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll have to see you know how how quickly applications take advantage of those GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could really make a big difference. I don’t expect that most of the apps that I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will really do much with that but we’ll see I could be wrong about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your Mac Pro might probably actually be better for games than the new expensive one that I’m going to buy because I could take
⏹️ ▶️ John out the video card that you have in and buy an aftermarket card. And you know, so it’s got fine CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast SSD, and then I would put in the fastest gaming card available. And that might have better gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John performance than this obscenely expensive Mac Pro, but it wouldn’t be black and cylinder shaped and have one fan, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And do you see that red one that’s in the charity auction for Product Red?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of neat, but I’m like, I don’t know if I like that color too much. I’d rather have a black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. See, I like it a lot. My reason for hesitating on bidding on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that auction is that I don’t know what the specs of the Mac Pro are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait, wait. The thing starts at, what, $40,000? And the reason you’re not bidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because you’re not clear what the insides are?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that it says estimated range, $40,000 to $60,000. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mean that the first bid has to be $40,000? Or does that mean that’s just what they expected to go for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never been that serious about an auction of this capacity to even know the answer to that question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know either, but if I can put in a bid for like $3,000, yeah, maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. It’s not entirely crazy because items like this, one-of-a-kind blah blah blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John would probably retain their resale value. So even if you spend an obscene amount of money on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could, in theory, get that money back, even after the computer is obsolete, simply selling it as a
⏹️ ▶️ John one-of-a-kind Mac Pro blah blah blah, officially sanctioned. It’s not like an aftermarket mod or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it should retain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some value. The other thing like you know right after the Mac Pro comes out is like color where one of these companies are gonna start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Anodizing service that just lets anybody do this for like a thousand bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the big problem. This is they don’t tell you the specs of the Mac Pro and so Like if I’m if I would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco win this thing for a reasonable price I would at least want to know you know what what CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it have because that’s something you can’t change right? GPUs I care less about but like does it have the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model CPU if so that’s kind of crappy for that price But if it has the 12 core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s actually worse for single threaded tasks than the 8 core. So I wouldn’t really want that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. So I don’t know. This is all probably a ridiculously moot discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t think I can get it for $3,000. Goodness. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want to talk about this review? We don’t have any other FU, do we? Oh, what about a 703 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s motion sickness?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this, we should talk about this last week, but no room. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I installed the 703 update. I knew what it was going to bring. And for people who don’t know, the 703 update
⏹️ ▶️ John changes it so that if you go into the accessibility preferences and turn on reduce motion,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t just remove the parallax effect on the home screen and the parallax effect on pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog boxes. It also removes the zooming animation when you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and when you go back to springboard. And it replaces that animation with a crossfade.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I always had a reduced motion on from the second I installed iOS 7 because I can’t stand the parallax
⏹️ ▶️ John thing The worst thing about the parallax thing is my chosen Lockscreen image a picture of my
⏹️ ▶️ John dog My ex dog still a dog anyway died several years ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah That’s my lock screen image because it’s like a tiebreaker between like, you know, my two kids and my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife and everything So just go with the dog When you have parallax on it has to zoom the image
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom in, you know Like so we can do the parallax thing, but there’s not enough background. It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John tight close-up of my dog’s face It’s not enough background Around it and when turn parallax on
⏹️ ▶️ John it zooms the image too much and like chops off his little doggy nose and on the side Of the screen, so that’s no good. So I can’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So I definitely don’t and I don’t like the parallax at all I don’t like the effect. I don’t like the little dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John jiggling around when I move my thing And so I got this thing. I’m like, all right, whatever. I just you know, 703
⏹️ ▶️ John update. I’ll get it And I knew it was gonna reduce eliminate the zooming
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with the crosshair I’m like, oh, maybe it’ll make my thing feel faster, right? Now the first thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even sure that the duration of the animation is any shorter
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t actually timed it but feeling wise like there’s still an animation is still a crossfade
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it is it less time than the zoom animation? Maybe it’s the same amount of time I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know people keep asking me about that. I think I see them asking you about it, too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t tested it. I really don’t want to test it You know just somebody like somebody with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two iPhone 5s is point one at the other one take a take a slow-mo video and test It both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways I’m curious to know the answer, but not so curious that I would actually do that
⏹️ ▶️ John yes But the point is is does it doesn’t it does doesn’t feel instantaneous all right? But the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John I found that I missed the zooming Because the zooming for all of its you know slight
⏹️ ▶️ John motion sickness inducing feeling that and by the way I had that you know very early on until I just learned you learned
⏹️ ▶️ John where to look it was only because it was unexpected right and now I knew how it’s gonna work that zooming animation
⏹️ ▶️ John was like the the thing that made iOS 7 feel like iOS 7 to me
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was fun and it was interesting and it made me feel like hey I’m using iOS 7 this is like that’s why I said that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John associated with the experience that and the weird icons I I guess, whatever, and the new dialogues and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it was gone, I missed it. And in its place, I didn’t get, okay, well, I missed the animation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s so much faster. I got kind of boring, maybe slightly faster, but I can’t even tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the crossfade. And so now I wish there was a way to turn the zooming back on, but
⏹️ ▶️ John keep the parallax off. And this is like, you know, this way lies madness, where it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we had an option to reduce motion, but now some people want this part of the motion is okay, but this part of the motion,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of an unappley kind of thing to do where you release something like this is our statement This is our product but
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have to put in some option to turn some stuff off because there are some legitimate issues with it and then you Start tweaking
⏹️ ▶️ John that option and it’s just like it would be better if you could come up with one interface that everybody liked and nobody Has a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with kind of like the original iOS where there weren’t these motion sickness problems There weren’t options to like turn off zooming
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the effects were when you go back and forth the springboard They nailed it better with that, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7 seems to have more rough edges and they’re like Trying to figure out the balance of okay Well, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have a switch to turn it off and we’ll have this thing to adjust that and I’m not in favor of them adding 8,000 options
⏹️ ▶️ John to like pick which parts of the motion you like I like the parallax But I don’t like it on dialogue box I just like it on the lock screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or I want to disable it on the lock screen or I want that you can’t do That right they have to just go with one thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John In the end the messing it with my wallpaper and the stupid jiggly parallax annoys me more than I
⏹️ ▶️ John miss the zooming But I really really do miss the zooming effect If I if I could pick myself
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say keep the zooming and like make it twice to three times as fast and And that would make me happy well,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I say twice the drivers I just mean reduce the duration it doesn’t mean like I need a higher performance phone to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it really make you happy
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know happier So that surprised me about 703. How did you guys feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about it? Did you upgrade to 703? And do you have reduced motion on, either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m not an animal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did have it on in 702 and earlier. I had it on just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just didn’t care about the parallax. And there was a weird bug with the parallax where if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you launched an app in a certain orientation and then you tilted the phone back a bit, closed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app, goes back to springboard, For a split second, it would show the old position of the parallax and then update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the new one. So you’d see like one wrong frame and then it’d do jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next one. That was, that’s just a stupid implementation bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d seen that as well. And I like, I don’t like seeing graphics move that I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John should be moving. Like the dialogue boxes and stuff like, it’s not a convincing, the 3D effect is not convincing
⏹️ ▶️ John because the background and foreground, like there’s no actual parallax. It’s trying to fake it with, you know, shifting the background
⏹️ ▶️ John around. But to me, it just looks like they’re shifting the background because that is what they’re doing. like it looks flat to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the videos that they show, they’re like, hey, it looks kind of like the icons are floating above the screen, but the illusion is not
⏹️ ▶️ John maintained for me. So all it is is basically making graphics, like untethering them
⏹️ ▶️ John from the pixel grid where I think they should be pinned down for no great effect versus the zooming animation, which I think really does
⏹️ ▶️ John provide kind of like a sense of space of where you are and sort of, you know, going with the different
⏹️ ▶️ John layers and stuff, more so than any of the other layering things. I think the zooming in and out from applications totally works
⏹️ ▶️ John to provide you with a three dimensional sense of space of where things are on the phone. And I miss it when it’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have intentionally not upgraded my iPad because of that. It’s my last bastion of zooming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I did see somebody, I don’t remember who it was, with 703
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the crossfade enabled. And the very first time I saw that person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey return to the home screen from an app, I thought, oh god, that’s terrible. And I completely agree with you that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zoom does give you sense of place and I think it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important to the whole layered approach to iOS 7 and I should say we had some real-time follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a very reliable source that says the speed the the animation speed duration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you were saying is no different for the crossfader no different in 703 and the
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom was the zoom was fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did hear from a few people that that it is different on the iPhone 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 4s that because the slower devices some a lot of people who had those devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco told me on Twitter when I asked if it was faster that it’s faster on those but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really that sounds like maybe a coincidence or maybe maybe placebo and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know I mean I’m with John I I had reduced motion turn on just to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoid the parallax which I think will go down as iOS 7’s pinstripes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as soon as the crossfade became a thing I turned Parallax back on because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I can’t stand the crossfades they’re so bad like you know it’s these are two very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extreme positions it’s as if on Mac OS 10 as if you minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the window like every time you minimized or hit an application it would do the big slow genie effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like it’s like that like if that was the only option either that or no animations at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know it’s the reality is the best thing is something in the middle here and it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just it’s She’s going to take Apple maybe a release or two before they kind of tone down the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool thing that they learned how to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, John, that even though I do quite like – well, I shouldn’t say I quite like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parallax, but I don’t mind the parallax except that my lock screen image because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have children is Erin, who’s my wife. I took that photo – it was actually the very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first photo I took with my 3GS and thus it is way too small to be Parallaxified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever you want to call it and I always constantly see like a black bar at the top of the screen Which drives
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, you can’t can’t have that you gotta get rid of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s terrible it is terrible and I haven’t had a chance to Find a picture that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works better as a lock screen image, but that does drive me bonkers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, she lives with you
⏹️ ▶️ John I know another picture I’m so close to doing like you know content-aware Phil to extend the background
⏹️ ▶️ John of this picture of my dog So I don’t have that problem Like I have Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John I can make it happen here right because I tried recropping it several different ways and realize just you know You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not gonna work. You can’t stretch it out. There’s not enough background And I and of course I use a
⏹️ ▶️ John black background on springboard So there’s no parallax for me on springboard But the dialogue boxes all have it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate seeing those dialogue boxes shift a couple of pixels if I move my hand. Stay still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was the dog photo taken at any location that you can get back to?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no. It was at a rental house in Southampton from many years ago, taking a picture of
⏹️ ▶️ John us putting his little head down on the gray wood deck. So content-aware
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil could have a shot on stretching it out. I might try that. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else on 703?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was there anything else about 703? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Just the crossfades.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just want to make sure. They’re pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of Farhamptons, that’s Long Island. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. Just want to make sure. There’s a point to that question. What is the significance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Levittown to you, particularly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s where my parents grew up, both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, because I don’t have the link handy, or I don’t have the page number handy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’m looking through my notes. But I noticed in the map screenshot, you had Levittown,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you had something else. I don’t recall what the other thing was. And I was wondering, because I feel like all these screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had little tidbits and windows into the life of John Syracuse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so was that address the address where either mom or dad grew up, or both of them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was the address of my mother’s parents. They don’t live there anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John none of the information in the review is useful to you. In fact, when my grandparents
⏹️ ▶️ John moved out of that house, a developer bought it and within weeks, just totally
⏹️ ▶️ John ripped it to shreds and made a new house out of it. Because that house, it was an original Levitt house. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John look up the history of Levittown. You want to maybe read David Halberstam’s The Fifties, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John nice book for learning about this stuff. Very light, not like the power broker.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it was an original Levitt house that my grandfather extended, but for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my grandparents lived there their whole lives and hadn’t changed, like it looked
⏹️ ▶️ John like a grandmother’s house and a grandfather’s house, like they had changed it, but they changed it when they had kids, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I guess it’s just, you know, unsaleable, so when they moved out and the house was sold, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell somebody, I guess, a grandmother’s house or a grandfather’s house, and they just ripped it to shreds. And so I’m glad my brother
⏹️ ▶️ John and I took a bazillion pictures of the inside and outside of it before that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, if you were to go to that address in my review, what you would see is a house that looks absolutely nothing like the house
⏹️ ▶️ John my mother grew up in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. And then what’s MacArthur Lane and Smith something?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the house that I grew up in for the most part. I mean, there was a couple. I lived in three houses. I was born in
⏹️ ▶️ John one, then spent many years in another house, and then moved to that one. That’s where I was in high school and everything. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we sold that house, you know, or my parents sold the house a while ago. I haven’t lived there for many years. The people who bought
⏹️ ▶️ John the house cut down all of the trees in the yard, which is terrible. I think actually against the law,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently they were not prosecuted, and so now the house looks gross and all the trees are cut down,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have no idea what they did to the inside, but I’m sure that’s gross too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, is there enough information in this review to steal your identity or get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a credit card under your name or maybe get an Apple ID password reset?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so, because like I said, these two houses and this map thing, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one related to me has lived in for many, many, many years, and they don’t look anything like they did when I lived there, so it’s useless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. There were a couple other tidbits throughout the review, like an IM that you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably sent to yourself or had Tina send to you, which I wanted to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the contents of that IM, which I have written down here somewhere. I’m assuming it’s some book or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popular media reference I didn’t get. Where was that? Oh, something about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Iceman. No, no, no, that was something else. Oh, raccoon, something about a raccoon being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released safely or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what happens when people don’t read their entire Twitter timelines. That’s from my actual life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? I read every one of your tweets, John. I have no recollection of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you don’t remember when I tweeted when I found the raccoon sleeping in the bottom of my garbage can?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I heard someone else tell that exact same story just today, actually, at work, which is kind of funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, you know, in the bottom of one of our garbage cans, it looked like a young raccoon had gone
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and I guess couldn’t get out and of course they’re nocturnal so he went to sleep so I’m going to put the garbage in the garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John can and then you know you put in the bag and you see a little raccoon sleeping down there so I had to take the raccoon
⏹️ ▶️ John in the garbage can to the woods to wake him up and release him into the woods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s very kind of you
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah well what else am I gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know have him get dumped into the garbage truck if you’re a terrible human being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s terrible I might have done that. I really don’t like raccoons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to love them when I was a kid now I realize they’re just disease-filled disgusting animals but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t email me. The other thing, so the last thing that I spied, that I spied on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshots was Iceman wants to use your passwords which is what I was stumbling over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment ago. Is that supposed to be some other reference that I didn’t catch or is that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you trying to be fun?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey Marco save save Casey here and redeem yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Iceman I’m looking at hold on what I’m on page 5 the iCloud keychain page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximately halfway down the page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh man you’re there’s no way I’m gonna get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well and I mean I my first thought which I’m great I’m grabbing from the chat my first thought was top gun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I that’s not right right it’s nice men not ice man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was only one ice man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey failing that’s a See, that’s why I didn’t think that was the case. So what is it? And will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I even understand what it is this is a reference to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. So make me feel stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best one I have is in the AirPlay menu option
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy. You can see that that’s the name of the volume, because you can see the hard drive in the upper right corner of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. What’s the name of the OS, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mavericks. Oh. So I get it. It’s a plural of Iceman.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. That actually is kind of funny and I’m kind of annoyed now. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John man, that’s I mean, if you make a top gun top gun joke in the review, it’s too obvious. And I also
⏹️ ▶️ John made a talk, an explicit top gun joke two releases ago, you know, so I can’t can’t go
⏹️ ▶️ John there again. But yeah, it’s Mavericks and the character in the movie is Maverick. And there’s more than one of them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had Iceman, you know, more than one of them, like you don’t want to be on the nose. You want to have a little something
⏹️ ▶️ John for people’s brains to be tickled or just confuse you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. Apparently I fall in the confused category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like six feet behind the nose and around the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people got it, let me tell you guys, not to make you feel bad or anything, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like the most obvious thing people write in, you know, hey, like the whatever about your review. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one that was most recognized by people reading the review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dsheehee says in the chat, this is a fun game. Marco and Casey tortuously try to decipher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s references. That’s the last I had everyone, so I’ll stop putting us through this awkward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well this week is sponsored in part by a wonderful return sponsor who would actually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these inside jokes, which I didn’t get, Casey you barely got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know if John gets them. It’s Igloo Software. Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP so that igloo knows that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent you. And of course, that will mean they will keep buying sponsorships, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always good for us. Now, most people don’t really like their intranets because most intranets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are terrible. I know you guys, do you both have experience with SharePoint? I know Casey does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone has to use SharePoint and is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does any, I’ve never heard a single good thing about SharePoint. Have you? Is there a single good thing to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it other than like Microsoft something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is, but I don’t want to go there. I mean, it can be used well, it just never ever ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. And in fact, the last project I did with SharePoint was an instance of it being used well, but that’s the only one I’ve ever ever ever seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s yeah, that’s saying a lot. I mean, because it’s it’s pretty widely used. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost always hated by everyone who uses it. So with Igloo, you can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an intranet that your company and your employees and you will actually like using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can share content quickly with built-in apps. They have blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter-like micro blogs, wikis, and more. Everything on Igloo is social.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can comment on any type of content, you can at mention your co-workers, you can follow any content for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates, and you can use tags to group things around the way you work. You can add on also subrooms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like mini Igloos for each of your teams to work in. It’s very easy to use the whole thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drag-and-drop it features responsive design and uses beautiful fonts from typekit you know most intranets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can go off script here for a second most intranets are designed 15 years earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a programmer and it shows and you know there’s nothing modern about them they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might even require like ie5 to work properly or God knows what igloo is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern beautiful well-designed and tech-friendly it’s free to use up to 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. And when you grow, it’s only $12 a person per month. And this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will pass almost any enterprise checklist. It has enterprise grade security, everything is private,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure and made for businesses. And you can start using it right away. If nothing else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just go to the website, see their genuinely funny videos about the service. And it’s really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go to igloo software.com slash ATP to start building your igloo free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use up to 10 people that’s pretty great. igloosoftware.com slash ATP thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now Marco do you have did you do your homework let’s start there you did read the review if I’m not mistaken. I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very proud of you this might be the first time that you’ve ever done your homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have do would you like to start with any questions I have I have a handful of questions that are kind of all spastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all over the place but if you had any you would like to ask what can we start there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t and and And here’s why, and I mean this as a compliment. The review,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I got done with it, it was like I had just finished a big meal. And it’s like, alright, I’m satisfied.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you just ate a big meal at a restaurant and it was pretty good, and the chef comes over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards and is like, do you have any questions about what you just ate? Actually no, no I don’t, I’m quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy, thank you. So that’s how I feel about this review. It was really good, I liked reading it, and I’m satisfied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually feel mostly the same way and I feverishly re-read the review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this evening right before we recorded in part so I could generate some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey questions and maybe in one or two instances fabricate some questions because the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read it, I felt the same way. I was like, I’m good. Everything was excellent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as I expected and I will be sure to tip the waiter. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it ended up really well. So John, any observations before I start noodling you with random questions?
⏹️ ▶️ John You should start noodling me and then I will riff as needed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of what I think. Is that supposed to be needling? Whatever. Noodling sounds funnier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we were talking about food, so now you’ve got food on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mental image of noodling is definitely funnier. It’s like something like limp, floppy noodles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is going nowhere good, gentlemen. Alright, let me start with a really simple question, actually, which is less about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the review and more about Mavericks. Do either of you guys find yourself using Finder tabs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you’ve installed Mavericks? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, I’m running at work too.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s fine. I mean, the only reason I don’t do it at home is because the stupid VPN that I’m forced
⏹️ ▶️ John to use that is not yet compatible with Mavericks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to actually install today, but I wanted to wait till after this show was recorded just just in case something went
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazingly smooth install, because normally I have to futz with all my installed stuff. I didn’t have to touch anything in
⏹️ ▶️ John user local as far as I can tell it all work. The only bump I had was that my subversion repositories,
⏹️ ▶️ John they bumped subversion up to 1.7 and so I had to upgrade those. That’s one command that it tells you when
⏹️ ▶️ John it finds out that it upgraded it and so far that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have it on my laptop and I was doing some work on my laptop earlier today for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was perfectly fine. I had Homebrew and CocoaPods doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and PHP on the command line doing stuff and yeah, it all works just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, we might have talked about this but you’ve embraced CocoaPods now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, yeah. When I open sourced FC Model, whenever that was, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month and a half, two months ago, whenever that was, a bunch of people requested it in pod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form. And so I decided to install and start learning how to use CocoaPods. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, turns out it’s good. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knew? Now, when I wrote an iPad app early this year at work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we had another guy come in and to help us out and he had told me, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to use CocoaPods, it’s the best thing ever. And I was kind of like, hmm. And as it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, it really is that good. So I digress. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is, programmers always, like every week there’s a new tool that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers are telling other programmers, oh, you got to use this, this is so great. And they usually fizzle out and die because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they aren’t that useful or necessary or mature. And CocoaPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t necessarily call it mature, well and it serves a very good purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nothing else really serves this well if at all so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works fine for me it is pretty poorly documented and for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XC workspaces it would generate were not that great and had different warnings and stuff but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you update to the newest CocoaPods which there is no update command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to like just run the gem install thing again, then that fixes those things. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy with it now. There was definitely a learning curve to getting it installed and set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up properly, but their site is OK at telling you how to do that. And once you get it set up, it’s pretty awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good deal. So we got sidetracked. So Marco, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used Mavericks. Whatever. You’ve barely used Mavericks. John, are you using Finder tabs?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, I don’t use the browser mode Finder. very rarely use it occasionally use it when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like I’m when I’m literally browsing like I’m trying to find something in some San Bashar
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. And I just make one new browser window, use it and discard it. All
⏹️ ▶️ John my other windows don’t have the sidebar. I mean, occasionally when I do browsing type activities,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it will come up. But like for the most part, I don’t do browsing type activities. I have like the five windows that have my stuff in them
⏹️ ▶️ John open, usually in list view. And with little the little folders turned down that I access frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s it. I don’t spend a lot of time browsing the file system with a browser. And most of it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I do anything with the browser, I am potentially screwing up what
⏹️ ▶️ John little spatial state that the Finder deigns to actually remember for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want to take that risk. And it doesn’t matter. Even me avoiding it, mixing that stuff together
⏹️ ▶️ John and screwing up all my state information, it still just forgets every two or three days.
⏹️ ▶️ John my applications window, which I never opened because they were quicksilver, but occasionally I open it up to like look around in there or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, maybe to drag something in or to zip up something before I saw a new version, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know. And I have it, you know, it’s, that’s one of the few windows that I have viewed by icon with pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, cause they’re nice looking and I have it all arranged by name. And at least once a month,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will forget entirely about that. And we’ll use a different view, we’ll change the sort order, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have a sidebar when it shouldn’t, it’ll be in the wrong position on the screen, will be the wrong size. Now we’ll have to hit Command J.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I will see the little checkbox that says, oh, we show an icon mode is checked, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it has totally changed all my view options. And I’ll set it back to the right thing. I mean, maybe it’s a bad installer overwriting the DS store
⏹️ ▶️ John file or whatever. It’s just it has no respect for the work I put into it. So I try to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John the finder. I try to avoid the finder as much as possible, because what’s the point? Like, this is a section of the
⏹️ ▶️ John review that I didn’t write, that I started writing. And I said, you know what? Stop. Stop writing this. It’s not your,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. Because I could just write about this forever. I was going to write in the finer section, go
⏹️ ▶️ John on a big digression about this whole topic, trying to give an analogy to the people who, because
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t understand this whole thing, and they think it’s stupid, but it’s not. And I put in that one little sentence to that effect
⏹️ ▶️ John in the review, and that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John of what could have been a 3,000 word digression that everyone would have been pissed about.
⏹️ ▶️ John How would you feel if once a month you picked up your phone and all the icons and springboard were all place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, would you go and go back and rearrange them to the way you wanted them again? After that happens three times,
⏹️ ▶️ John two times, or maybe even just once, wouldn’t you just give up and go, Oh, well, forget it. I guess I’ll just do search for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I’ll just try to have them sort alphabetically and hope that they stay that way. Like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you just accept that. And if someone said no, no, the little springboard icons, they should remember where they are. So you could arrange by
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s going to arrange all their icons. This is stupid. There’s too many applications. Anyway, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one is is going to arrange all their stuff like that. Just accept that you use search or they’re alphabetical, right? And that’s the state
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Finder, that it doesn’t respect any work you do to get things arranged the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you want them, to have this window off to the left in this view and this size and this scroll position and this selection state,
⏹️ ▶️ John and to have that window over there and to do this. No one’s going to do that because you know any of the work that you put in. It
⏹️ ▶️ John may help you for this session right here, but tomorrow or next week or whatever, it’ll be changed. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you open that window, and it’ll be in the wrong spot. And it’ll have a sidebar, and it won’t respect your view that
⏹️ ▶️ John you picked or the sold order that you picked or whatever. And so people give up. And they’re just like, oh, I guess I can’t do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you hear all the same arguments like, well, there’s too many files. That works when you have five files, but it doesn’t work when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have 1,000. That’s like saying, well, I have too many applications. Even people with a bazillion applications with screen-full
⏹️ ▶️ John folders, and we’ve all seen those people, right? The people who used to hit the 11-page limit on Springboard. Even those
⏹️ ▶️ John people, screen one at the very least. Or even like, they’ll arrange screen
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And then after that, it’s just folder land and it’s just a big mess, right? But even they will arrange screen one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you don’t arrange screen one, I’ll go ahead and no, it’s all just a sea of folders, I always use search. Even those people I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like would carefully pick the four items that are in their little dock at the, you know, the fix thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s always something in your life that benefits from you putting it the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it and knowing where everything is, using, you know, spatial recognition of what size is
⏹️ ▶️ John it, what color is it, what position is it on the screen. When I put it there, it stays there. I know where it is. I can orient
⏹️ ▶️ John myself to it. And those are the few common things you do. No matter how many files we get, no matter how many applications
⏹️ ▶️ John we get, no matter how big hard drives get, there’s always going to be some working set of things that you would benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could arrange them just so and have them where you want them. And that I continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John rail against, and I wish people at Apple understood that. Clearly someone does, because Springboard is just relentlessly spatial in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of arranging things. And if you’ve ever had this happen, and I have with an iOS bug where Springboard does go nuts and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything gets all scrambled, it is crazy-making. Everybody hates that. That’s how I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Finder half the time when using the Finder in OS X. So yeah, not really into tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was all that for, no, not really. I don’t use Finder tabs. John, this is why
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not because I don’t like tabs. I love tabs. I use them in my browser like crazy. It’s because I know if I mess with any of that browser
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, I’m going to be screwing my own tiny little toehold that I have on the spatial
⏹️ ▶️ John state in the Finder. It’s not because I hate the browser stuff. If I could just have separate browser windows and non-browser
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, I would use the browser way more. And I would love that there are tabs there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think it’s a little bit less of a priority of making that stuff that reliable on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than iOS? Because on iOS, Springboard is the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to launch apps and is by far the most common way for power users and the programmers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on iOS to launch their apps. Spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists, but on iOS it’s certainly a little bit clumsy to use over just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swiping two over to find the page and tapping an icon. Whereas on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect that most programmers who work on OS X and most power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users who would be most irritated by this kind of stuff probably don’t open Finder windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very frequently to navigate to their applications or to the files they want. They probably are using things like LaunchBar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Quicksilver or at least Spotlight to do keyboard based launching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finding of things what much more often so you think maybe it’s just like not as much of a pain point
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I mean, it’s it’s not that it’s not much of a pain point. It’s just that like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John Design of the OS 10 finder precludes them doing this. It’s not like it’s like oh if they just fix the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be fine It’s just designed not to work that way because there’s it’s not clear when you’re rearranging
⏹️ ▶️ John something if what you’re rearing what what effect what you’re rearranging has because because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a browser window and you browse through stuff and you make changes as you go, what are you making changes
⏹️ ▶️ John to? It’s the difference between window as a device that you peer through to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the contents of your file system and window as the spatial manifestation of
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular directory on disk. You can’t combine those. Once you can change a window from one to the other, what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens when you transform? Does suddenly the spatial state of the window suddenly apply itself to the folder
⏹️ ▶️ John when you transform it to get rid of the sidebar and reverse? There’s no sensible way to do it. So there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do short of actually separating those two views. And the non-user
⏹️ ▶️ John friendliness of the Finder is tied to the non-user friendliness of the file system. So this also
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t solve that problem. Like the fact that this is a bazillion files and they’re all over the place and people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what to do with them. Like this is the reason iOS is so successful because it gets rid of that. It’s like, you know, people
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t handle the file system. They can’t even handle open save dialog boxes. They just simply cannot handle it. So we need to get
⏹️ ▶️ John that away from them. Springboard is a great solution to that problem, especially in the context of handheld
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. Maybe it doesn’t apply entirely to the Mac, although they did add Launchpad and everything like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the problems of the file system are not going to go away if you suddenly make the Finder
⏹️ ▶️ John spatial. Now, because the Finder was spatial for years and people still couldn’t handle it, for the average person, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for the few people who could, it really did let you manage your stuff in a nicer manner. got
⏹️ ▶️ John many more interesting advanced technologies you know like you said spotlight Quicksilver all that good stuff plus tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of really good in application management of stuff like the sidebars and the very you know the source lists and the various applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that give you a view of your stuff without giving without showing you a view of your disk
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all good stuff it’s all thumbs up but the finder is is not what it could be and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s because of that it’s not a priority it’s just well I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it is kind of it’s not a priority because they’re like well it doesn’t to work that well and we don’t have a real strong philosophy for it and we’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to satisfy everybody and end up satisfying nobody. But really in the grand scheme of things, the Finder is way less important than it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be and that is true. So let’s just add tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why not? Well, the funny thing is, the reason I brought this up two hours ago was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just wondering after having reread your review, why it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was I was still opening like two or three finder windows in order to drag things between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folders, directories, whatever, when I completely forgotten that tabs were even a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing in Mavericks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you want to you want to see the source and the destination at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s a very fair point. But to be honest, I would probably do just as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well by getting one tab with the source the other tab with the destination and that would be sufficient. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why I actually really like this is a completely unsponsored plug. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the app Dragon Drop, which is like the animal dragon drop, but it’s a pun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for drag and drop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. Did you know there’s a really funny joke in his review about Iceman? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John everybody knew but you. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the point is this little app, you jiggle your mouse and a little like a tooltip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of, it’s not a tooltip, it’s like a little, I I don’t know what you call it, but it’s a little thing, a little window that pops up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can drop something that you had in your, that you were dragging onto this little window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is on top of all other windows, and then you can go about your business, do whatever you need to do, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drag away from the drag and drop window onto whatever you want to put it on. So the use case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being, you have one Finder window, you find the file you want, you pick it up, you jiggle your mouse, you drop it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the drag and drop window, go to that same original Finder window and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to wherever you want this file to be and then bring the file from the drag and drop window back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into that original Finder window which is now pointing to the new destination. That was a terrible way of describing it, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point I’m driving at is there are other options other than just tabs that I use constantly, but yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just today I found myself somehow deciding to open two or three Finder windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this when I really should have just embraced Finder tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that drag-and-drop thing is the shelf from next step. So everything old is new again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having that intermediary place to keep things. And it’s a reasonable idea, but at
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain point, you can’t have every. They ditched it because they were trying to simplify the interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next dock was more complicated than the original Apple dock,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the shelf goes away. But there’s lots of replacement type things to say, you know, to let
⏹️ ▶️ John you split up an operation into two pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Here’s the things that I
⏹️ ▶️ John found and then, you know, hang it over here and, you know, yeah, it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know a lot of people who would always have the way they use the OS 10 finder is they would
⏹️ ▶️ John have all they were to have or have is to browser windows, one on top of one on bottom, one on the
⏹️ ▶️ John left, one right, and they would just sort of arrange them. And I bet they got pissed every time those windows rearrange themselves or resize themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. And They use it kind of like transmit, like Panic FTP app. The left side would be
⏹️ ▶️ John source, and the right side would be destination. And that’s how they move files. They would navigate with the browser thing in one place, navigate with the
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing, and then move the files crosswise like that. And that’s one way to operate, albeit inefficient,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the Finder was not helping. Because what they really wanted was basically transmit with a big arrow in between. And so they could navigate,
⏹️ ▶️ John navigate arrow one direction or the other. You know, select and then do arrows. Right, right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so anything else on Finder tabs? I feel like we’ve already been on this for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, let’s see. What else did I? Oh, I wanted to make an observation, perhaps, more than have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a question, which is there were a couple of spots where you threw in these just extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passionate one-liners. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you made mention of one earlier, which was, I guess, it was about Finder, where you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some people don’t care about this distinction between browser and whatever the other kind of Finder window
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s academic and not important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right. And well, they think it’s academic and not important. Next sentence, they are wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was another instance. What was it about? I wrote down eternal vigilance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was notification center about how whether you want your people around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to be able to see who’s IMing you or who’s tweeting at you or whatever the case may be. And so you could choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, in the case of email or IM, you could have kind of the details hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on notification center, but that may not that is less useful if you’re the only one looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the computer. And so he made this like one off about how you have to the other penalty for this is you have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eternally vigilant as to who is within eyeshot of your machine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t again, I don’t think there’s much of a question here. But I just loved those little one liners where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was completely clear exactly what you felt. And if any of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree, well, we are just completely wrong. And that’s the end of the damn thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The academic thing is like that’s part of a broader point where people fall into the trap
⏹️ ▶️ John where if they don’t understand or can’t see the benefit of something, therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no benefit. And in anything where you’re, you know, someone is a creator and someone is
⏹️ ▶️ John consuming it, the assumption is that the creator has more knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John about the domain. Like you’re not, you don’t have to understand what makes a good song to
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciate a good song, right? But you also, you know, can’t say if someone describes
⏹️ ▶️ John like some musical concept, you’d be like, I don’t understand that’s not important to a good song. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what makes a good song. It’s not your job. You don’t have to know what makes a good song. All you have to know is how to enjoy a song. Do I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the song? Do I not like it? And you leave it to the people creating it to figure out what is it that makes a good song all that music
⏹️ ▶️ John theory stuff. Like you may not understand music theory at all. You may not understand how anything about music
⏹️ ▶️ John works, but someone has to and like it’s their job to understand this stuff. So all this academic stuff, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to understand it. You don’t have to even buy that it works. Tons of things that people love
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple products have a foundation in complicated things that users don’t understand. But the user
⏹️ ▶️ John sure as heck feel the result of it. And so that’s what I hate, the argument about this space. You try
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain the concepts behind things that make for usable, pleasing,
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient user interfaces, and people’s eyes glaze over. And they say, well, that is obviously not
⏹️ ▶️ John an important part of user experience. Just because you don’t understand doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not part of it. And the thing is, they shouldn’t have to understand it. So my goal, I’m kind of talking to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John always with these things. Like, I guess I want to tell people about, you know, the philosophies underlying these things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think would be a good idea or whatever, but it shouldn’t be their job to understand it. And it’s not, I don’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, nothing hinges on convincing them. So that’s at this point, I’m not like, I’m done trying to convince the end users
⏹️ ▶️ John that this would make a good interface. And the best bet I have is to try to convince someone who has the power to make an
⏹️ ▶️ John interface. And the thing is, a lot of software developers have read what I’ve talked about on this topic and tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporate some of those things into their designs with very little success, I might add. And I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple itself is one of the few companies that has incorporated. Again, Springboard and the whole iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John user interface is like the comfort and the stability and
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of approachableness that people feel with that little grid of icons that you can move around and swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John from one screen to the other. That is like the ultimate victory of all of these concepts that everyone thought were
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid and their eyes glared over. But that got a one-off because, like I said, that is the big honking section of the
⏹️ ▶️ John review that every time I write a review, I stop myself from writing more or less because I feel like I’ve covered it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still totally there, and I wasn’t interested in engaging on it. And the other one, the eternal vigilance
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, that’s, again, even more true of iOS. Because you know what it’s like in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who are nerds listening to this podcast, how often do we go into preferences and go
⏹️ ▶️ John on patrol in the notifications thing and the location settings. You know what I mean? Like you’re allowed notification,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you’re, you’re allowed to have banners, you’re allowed to make sounds, you’re not allowed. You
⏹️ ▶️ John install an application and you go in there and adjust this thing. You’re not allowed to push notifications. Like all these things
⏹️ ▶️ John are great, but if you want to have a nice experience and not just be like overwhelmed by beeping things and things popping in
⏹️ ▶️ John your face, the price is you have to spend some time in like in the notification minds,
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing the toggle switches left and right and just deciding what you want. And OS 10 has exactly the same thing notification
⏹️ ▶️ John center, which I love. It also means that if I don’t pay attention, and I install five new applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need, you know, they’ll be throwing stuff up, and they’ll be filling my notification center sidebar, and they’ll be doing all this stuff. And I got
⏹️ ▶️ John to go in there and say, Oh, yeah, nope, not you. No banners, no sounds, no this, you know, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t do that, you will eventually be overwhelmed. And you’ll be like, iOS sucks. Everything’s always beeping in my face. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they give all the application developers these things and they give the users control in a way that Apple usually
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t. Like Apple usually isn’t in the business of giving you a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John wall of toggle switches, but in the case of notifications, they do. And I think it’s probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way you can do it because only the user can decide what’s important enough to them to beep
⏹️ ▶️ John in their face and how annoying is a dialogue box versus a sound versus a banner versus something appearing in a sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was the point of that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I really do love them. And I think part of the reason I enjoy them so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much is because I tend to waffle, I don’t know if, or in hedge, I don’t know if anyone happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have noticed this. And I love when you just come out and it’s just, that’s the way it is, like it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just really enjoy it. Marco, do you want to tell us about something else that’s awesome?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to. It is yet another repeat sponsor because we have the best sponsors. It is in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oxygen by Ram Objects. And it’s spelled Oxygen with an E on the end. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oxygen but they insisted it’s pronounced oxygen. If you write applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for different platforms, including the Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, or even Windows phone, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually use Windows phone, then you should really take a look at the oxygen language from RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco object software. Now we know what you’re thinking, but let us assure you that oxygen is not
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen a lot of those. Oxygen lets you create fully native apps on each platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it gives you full unrestricted access to the APIs native to each platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whether it’s the Cocoa APIs on Mac and iOS, the.NET framework on Windows, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the Java and Android libraries, with Oxygen you can still write apps specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for each platform. But you can do so using the same modern language and IDE, removing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for you or your developers to learn different languages and switch between different environments all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time for the different platforms. Oxygen is based on object Pascal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you guys know Pascal? I never learned it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent like a week or two learning it at some point. Actually, it might have been in computer camp and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can do a whole deep dive into the psychosis behind that, but I believe it was in computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camp that I learned very briefly learned Pascal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to band camp and I thought that was the nerdiest thing ever, but I think you just beat me.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I never used Pascal. Actually, I think I may have written a couple of pages of Pascal
⏹️ ▶️ John back when you programmed the Mac in Pascal. That’s a long time ago, but didn’t do anything useful with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe chess camp is worse. Anyway, Oxygen is based on Object Pascal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is revamped and revitalized for the 21st century. It’s a fully object-oriented language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s easy to learn and produces easy-to-maintain code. And it has many sophisticated language enhancements,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from features that make it easier to write asynchronous and parallelized code to things like class contracts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make your code more robust and easier to test. Oxygen comes with the Visual Studio IDE,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the toolchains for all platforms come together. For example, you can build, deploy, and debug
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s actually a somewhat prescient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segue into what I was going to ask next, which is A lot of the review, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say is relatively high level and approachable for just about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone, even non-developers. And then the next thing I know, I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at hex dumps, file, extended file attributes or whatever they’re called. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my question to you is, at what point do you decide you’re going too deep into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerdery and pull yourself back out? Is there any sort of decision making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process or decision tree or is it just you do enough to get your point across and that’s that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so there’s so many things in any release that I could write about. This is the eternal struggle with any of these reviews and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John why I continue to resist the description of comprehensive because, you know, if you’ve gone to
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, like there are so many topics that I could go into, topics that I’m interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, in DevTools alone, I could spend a million years just on Xcode and Clang and LLVM
⏹️ ▶️ John and like all the things they do to the language every year and some years I have done that I did that when they Did GCD
⏹️ ▶️ John and and you know like but then I didn’t do it when they were you know doing properties and dot syntax, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just too much to cover right and I have to decide You know
⏹️ ▶️ John which one of these things it really makes a difference and sometimes I sneak stuff into OS reviews It really has nothing to do with the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS But I think is important for the platform like it’s this is more of a state of the platform type review and using
⏹️ ▶️ John the release of an OS as a point to talk about it. But even within the OS, I just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to leave stuff out. And I try to pick some features that I think are either important
⏹️ ▶️ John or could be important to users or highlight something about Apple’s design philosophy. And so a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of things get dropped in the cutting room floor. But tags fits all the criteria. It’s a feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple touted all the time. It’s a feature that builds on technologies that they added
⏹️ ▶️ John over many, many years and that I’ve been following closely. So this is like a breadcrumb trail
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, how do we get where we are today? And you go all the way back to the metadata stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John file name extensions, and then finally getting extended attributes, and then Spotlight leveraging that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then now finally, we’re at a point where we can do tag. And there’s been so many third party applications that leverage this exact
⏹️ ▶️ John same infrastructure to do similar things with the tags. And now it’s a built-in feature of the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. And the reason I went deep on it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about the implementation, and I don’t have to re-explain the implementation first principles because if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been following along, and I could link back to, remember when we talked about extended attributes, remember we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John spotlight, like it builds on, it’s like any school course. You build
⏹️ ▶️ John on the information that you learned in the previous semester to learn the new things. You don’t have to go back over it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John In particular, when it comes to tags, it’s scary to see hex dumps and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I explained it to a level that I thought anybody reading could understand. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to explain exactly like, OK, well, this number in hex is this, and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John that number, and blah, blah, blah. And understanding the history of tags and the particular imputation
⏹️ ▶️ John explains why it works the way it does. Why are there only seven colors? Why can I have repeat colors
⏹️ ▶️ John but with different names? And all these weird behaviors that if you were to just test them, like it works in a strange way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes this file had this name and this machine, when I brought the tag over here, the color was different, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John tag name was the same. And when I did a search, you know, all these things that would be inexplicable. Once you understand the
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation, it’s not that complicated. Once you understand the implementation, you’re like, oh, now I know why they only have seven
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. And now I know why the names changed like that. And now I know why it’s sort of backward
⏹️ ▶️ John compatible with labels, because I know how labels work. So now I understand why, you know, they can’t have all the labels, because labels
⏹️ ▶️ John only have this one bit field. And so it has to pick, and they chose to pick like the last tag that you applied, but you can still have the other
⏹️ ▶️ John tags they’re over here and why are they in a big XML blob because they do property lists which is a big thing in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X and they put it in one big blob so spotlight can index it is a symbol you know like it all comes
⏹️ ▶️ John together like that the details of that implementation help you understand why the features work the way it does and
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to get into like the trade-offs of like what if they had done this way that would be more pure then they would have this
⏹️ ▶️ John drawback well it was they did it this way what happens if you change the name of a tag and you’ve got 10,000 files and you’re just like
⏹️ ▶️ John that well you’re gonna see a progress dialog box it’s kind of gross and you could have different tags with different names and different machines,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if that disk isn’t online, when you change the name, when you bring it back online, things aren’t going to match. In
⏹️ ▶️ John some sense, it’s revealing the ugliness of the implementation, but I think it explains how the feature works better than
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to truth table it out and saying, when you click here and do this and do that, this happens. When you click here and this and
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, like, you know, because I think tags do have enough weird edge cases that if people just started clicking around,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t understand why they work the way they do. And this is the type of section that I’m going to be linking people back to for years to come
⏹️ ▶️ John and already is getting, you know, people like tags did this strange thing. I don’t understand why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, just linked to the section. Like once you read through it, you say, okay, well now I know what happened when I did that. And now I completely
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why it behaved in this particular way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you feel like going all the way down to hex is, is a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of depth for a normal human being to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Cause I feel like I walk through a step at a time, like here’s the contents of the thing and here’s what it looks like. And
⏹️ ▶️ John linking back, if you don’t know what a property list is, I link you to the documentation that says that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John property lists are what we use in Mac OS X to store this type of data. And I think anyone can understand property
⏹️ ▶️ John lists. You don’t have to know the intimate details of it, but you read the documentation like, oh, this is a nice way to store
⏹️ ▶️ John semi-structured simple data with strings and numbers and stuff. And Apple uses it a lot, and there are different
⏹️ ▶️ John structures. So it makes sense that they would use that to store it. Then you come back to the review and continue reading. And extended attributes, go read
⏹️ ▶️ John about what the heck those are and come back here. Oh, they just made a new extended attribute, they gave it a name and here it is. It
⏹️ ▶️ John may take somebody who doesn’t know anything about it a while to go back through the other stuff, but anybody who has been following along
⏹️ ▶️ John should breeze through it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, actually part of the reason why it took me longer this year to read it than last year is because I followed some of those links
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got lost on things like the Wikipedia page about Unix demons and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well that’s mostly there. I like to just, I’ll just use the word demon with the A before the E and just
⏹️ ▶️ John assume everybody knows what it means. explain what that is. But if you don’t, the Wikipedia page explains what they are, and you could
⏹️ ▶️ John come back fairly quickly unless, you know, you’re like, oh, this is interesting. But, I mean, you already knew what they were, I’m assuming,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just went there out of academic curiosity and then got lost. But I’m trying to just bring everybody along.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if I already know what a demon is, I will follow that link just to see, you know, I bet there’s something about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this that I don’t know. And sure enough, there was lots there I didn’t know. So it was definitely worth
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, sometimes you don’t need to know everything about it. Like in that particular I’m just trying to make sure everyone is following along
⏹️ ▶️ John and so don’t have to explain what a demon is because that’s that’s cumbersome Like I want to assume that there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John Common shared knowledge here, but I but if I can help someone out by going Oh, I didn’t know that was the word
⏹️ ▶️ John for that and why it’s spelled funny like that But now when I read this Wikipedia page it explains You know what these things are
⏹️ ▶️ John and why they have a funny name and now I can come back and continue But in other
⏹️ ▶️ John cases like I’m trying to add add Add additional color through what I link
⏹️ ▶️ John or I’ll link to it, and it’s not the obvious link It’s a link that makes a statement about the word or phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John that adds Usually it’s just adding a little bit of extra opinion about how I feel about something or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t have to follow that link if you already know what the thing is But you will get more information even if you just mouse over
⏹️ ▶️ John the links because you’re like oh I think I know where that leads you mouse over you Yeah But links there because you kind of know
⏹️ ▶️ John what my opinion on is it gonna be but maybe you don’t know and you click through it so yeah it is I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the linking thing some people find it tiring to do that and just want to read I say you could read straight through if you understand every term you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to but the links do add stuff maybe maybe it’s like a replay value in a game you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John repeat reading value out of going back to sections and following the links
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back a sec to the to the tags implementation details one reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually really enjoyed that section is because when I see a feature like tags,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I rely a lot on the file system for organization. And I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that might seem like an obvious statement, but like I rely more than most people do, in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tend to not use things like everything bucket apps, or apps that maintain their own organizational database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Aperture, and then the file system is kind of haphazard or hidden from I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoid that kind of thing and I really just use the file system as a major organizational point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Much like our friend Dr. Drang, I really believe in doing things that way. And one of the reasons is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very resilient to both data problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and software problems. Like for example, failed disks. Like you can you can pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a directory tree off a backup and it doesn’t matter if the backup like was from some service or medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or software that didn’t support certain Mac extended attribute implementations or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it also ages very well in that if I change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software I use, like if I change my text editor, I don’t have to change the directory structure with which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store text files. Like everything is more independent from each other and so on. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that the more I can do just file system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management of things, the generally happier and easier more resilient my setup is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when I see a new feature added like tags, I have to, you know, before I think about using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I have to ask myself, okay, how is this going to fit into long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organization like on the disk? Like, because if there was just some central system database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file that maintained all the tag relationships, or if it was in, if it was baked into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, some kind of allocation table in the file system, you know, something like that where it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the file or next to the file that would be a lot less resilient because then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you backup you know if you copy a directory to a backup drive or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your backup software doesn’t know where that thing is to find that data then if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore from that or if you copy it onto a new machine or you’re moving it to your laptop to work on it for a trip or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff doesn’t come with it and that sucks and so it was really good to know with your file system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that it is implemented in such a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be fairly resilient and it will be fairly portable and fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aging friendly at least not aging proof but aging friendly as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tools in question support extended attributes
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah we’ve had like six years or seven how long has it been since 10.4 to for
⏹️ ▶️ John all the tools to get up to speed on hey you know, extended attributes are a thing. And, and Apple implements
⏹️ ▶️ John so many things through extended attributes, like all of time machine relies on them just to work at all, right? They’re used for
⏹️ ▶️ John access control lists, which is a pretty, you know, deeply woven part of the, you know, provision system, the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they may, and like I said, in the review, like for years and years, they’ve taken things that aren’t even in extended attributes
⏹️ ▶️ John and exposed them through extended attributes. So applications have kind of a unified interface to data that’s not really the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John So any, any application does does anything, especially a backup application. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have to be like, oh, I gotta be able to get it for tags. Oh, I gotta be able to, it’s like, no, you’ve had seven years just to get on the page of like
⏹️ ▶️ John extended attributes are a thing, copy them when you copy stuff. And anything Apple implements on top of extended attributes,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why, you know, I was always in favor of, you know, arbitrarily extensible, arbitrarily extensible metadata, because there
⏹️ ▶️ John are so many things you can do with it. All your tools need to do is understand that those things exist and just copy them all,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s all you need to do. And still there are tools that don’t do it that way, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can rest assured that any tool that works with extended attributes in any form will also work with tags because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all they are. And the implementation is like, and not only that, everything’s in there about them. The stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John number for the color from, you know, 1988 with the labels and the string with the name. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even a central registry for that. Like if you copy the file and you copy the extended attributes with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like any good, even the command line CP does that at this point on OS 10, you will have your tags.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so yeah, that is, that it’s re, as reassuring as any other thing that’s implemented on top of extended
⏹️ ▶️ John attributes in OS X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, I have to say that that if I were to pick a favorite section of the review,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one might have been it, not because I’m particularly enamored with tags, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved that you could trace today’s situation all the way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost 30 years to 1988 and see that decisions made then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a demonstrable effect on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the decisions that were made today. Maybe that’s the nerdy side of me coming out, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just thought it was so cool to be able to trace what happens in 2013 all the way back to 1988.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think you handled it well. I’m grilling you not because I disagreed, but because I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a very interesting point to talk about. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else did I have here? Actually I think one of the things we do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to talk about, and I’m just going to go ahead and kick back while you talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, is how was publishing all the different eBooks?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s pretty smooth this year compared to last year. I was really nervous about doing iBooks because this is the first time I’ve ever published
⏹️ ▶️ John anything on iBooks. Last year and the year before that, I had generated an EPUB
⏹️ ▶️ John version, and that EPUB was, I always try to say an iBooks compatible ePub because people don’t know what ePub is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, I’m making a file that you can load in the iBooks application. And I’ve done that for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like the creation of the file was a problem any more than it always is trying to deal with these
⏹️ ▶️ John eBook readers that don’t render things nicely. So I had the file. It was just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of going through the submission process. And I had heard that the submission process could be like days or weeks, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the iBook store. And that’s not going to work for me when I don’t even know the release date. I need a quick turnaround. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I have friends who hooked me up with people at the iBooks store who
⏹️ ▶️ John said they could expedite, you know, my submission, kind of like the expedited review. You can get a one time type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s a one time type thing, but I only publish one thing every year anyway. So it was fine. And they were
⏹️ ▶️ John all lined up like, Oh yeah, you know, we’ll get it up in, you know, 12 to 24 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was all set to go. And dealing with the tools we talked about in the last show, it’s not wasn’t the greatest
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. The tools are kind of creaky. a lot of hand holding in terms of if this is the first time you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it, are you sure everything’s all set? Are you sure when you click this button it’s going to do what you think? Are you sure after you
⏹️ ▶️ John click this button you will have the ability to modify X, Y, and Z without screwing stuff up? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just learn those through experience. I’ve updated all the ebooks so many times at this point. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re listening to this and you bought either the Kindle book or the iBooks book, both of them have
⏹️ ▶️ John been updated. I don’t know how the hell to get updates from the Amazon store. I think they They have to send you an email
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell you it’s been updated. You have to do some crazy thing. I have no idea. But rest assured that the book has been updated. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can figure out how to get the updated version from Amazon onto your Kindle device, good on you. You’ll get a nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John version with typos, fix, and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure you have to actually just delete the current one off your device, lose any highlights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and notes you’ve made in it, and just redownload it. And I think that will get you the newest version.
⏹️ ▶️ John In past years, that wouldn’t even work. In past years, when you deleted it and redownloaded it, they would give you whatever version
⏹️ ▶️ John you purchased. The only way to do it was to wait for an email with some magic link or something. It may have gotten better. But iBooks,
⏹️ ▶️ John like any other store thing, within iBooks, there’s a little updates tab. Like, hey, this book has been updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You tap the update button and you get the new version. And I think it preserves everything for you. I didn’t try it if it
⏹️ ▶️ John preserves your notes and highlights. But –
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do iBooks updates have release notes?
⏹️ ▶️ John They do. I discovered that 17 updates in when I saw, hey, this guy – these have updates and they got to write
⏹️ ▶️ John something. And then I found the little tiny – the places they let you type these things
⏹️ ▶️ John into the iBooks the iTunes producer thing. It’s like a box that’s literally the size of two postage stamps, like two
⏹️ ▶️ John actual postage stamps. And that proportion, more like a square than a rectangle. And it’s like, paste
⏹️ ▶️ John your tiny text in here. Like seriously, in this gigantic window, I get two postage stamps in a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little font. It’s too small, it shouldn’t even be anti-ALS. It’s like eight point text or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, without spelling correction, I think, because that doesn’t do the little red squiggles. It’s crazy, maybe it does do
⏹️ ▶️ John the red squiggles, and I just didn’t catch it. But I put spelling errors in those boxes many times. Luckily I had typed everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in bbedit and caught it before I pasted it in. But anyway, getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John book up there, it was so fast. So the first submission, I was talking to my
⏹️ ▶️ John contact at Apple and they’re like, OK, I’ve submitted it and he wanted me to give him some information about it. I gave him some information and then I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John the book on the store. I’m like, all right, this is awesome. It’s up. Boom. It’s there. It was there so quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then he sent an email back and said, actually, I wanted this other piece of information, not the one that you sent me. So he
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even expedite it. It just went up that fast just because, like, because I don’t know, it’s a lull and not a lot of people were submitting iBooks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So maybe I just got lucky. And same thing with the updates. I would update the book and it would get
⏹️ ▶️ John updated within hours. And I’m like, is this normal? Is this automated? Or is a person doing this? And they’re like, it usually
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a few hours. So I’m very happy with how responsive, you know, even
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently without the special treatment that I was trying to get, that putting stuff up in the iBook store was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s faster than the Amazon store. And there were humans involved. whatever we did go slow I had a human being I could talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John and say hey it’s going slow can I get it faster but after the first after getting the first book up
⏹️ ▶️ John it was you know it wasn’t a problem I didn’t care if it took a day for like the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know typo correction versions to go up or whatever the iBooks reader
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Kindle reader but the iBooks reader more so continue to frustrate me because they have to paginate stuff right and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine if it’s just text but when you have big images the iBooks reader tries to obviously not
⏹️ ▶️ John have images spanning pages where you see like the top of an image and then you flip to the next page you see the bottom of the image that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John but the only possible way to do that is to move images around because depending on what your screen size
⏹️ ▶️ John is and what your text size is which can be adjusted by the user so you can even control that you know where
⏹️ ▶️ John the images land changes so the iBooks application kind of sort of has to
⏹️ ▶️ John move stuff around and when it moves stuff around like it makes things that are ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John it moves images away from the text that refers to them it you know floating images of the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst because it has to decide is there enough room to even float this sometimes it thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John I have enough room to float this image to the right and it’s got like three characters worth of space on
⏹️ ▶️ John the left side so a three-letter word fits there followed by two-letter word and then there’s a huge vertical swath
⏹️ ▶️ John of space and then the five-letter word is underneath the image and that is terribly ugly and it’s like why don’t you fix
⏹️ ▶️ John the formatting in your book like it totally doesn’t look like that in any other version and it would be nice if iBooks decided
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not enough room for me to float this image. I should just center it and not allow any text on either side
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And so I’m constantly like, you know, doing that little dance that you do, you know, Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar with the dance where you have, I have a stack of Kindles and iOS devices on my desk, maybe not as big
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco stack, but a big enough to be annoying. And you load the book and every million one of these things and
⏹️ ▶️ John you page through it. And believe me, it takes forever to page through this thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John on even an iOS device, let alone an E Ink Kindle. It just takes forever to page through and you just page through to making sure
⏹️ ▶️ John does it look sane? Does it look readable? Can people read the text? Because at a certain point you have to give up on like well
⏹️ ▶️ John on this device and this font size it does this weird formatting thing but you know what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the most part everything went smoothly the iPad bug and Amazon didn’t happen as soon as soon as it went up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Amazon store people were able to put it on their iPad. Did I mention this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past show? The surprising thing to me has been almost all the sales have shifted over to iBooks like the total
⏹️ ▶️ John number of sales is similar to what it was last year roundabout for the ebooks, but
⏹️ ▶️ John last year it was you know there was no iBooks version and of course everything was on Amazon. This year like almost
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody bought the iBooks version and a tiny pool of people bought the Kindle version so I guess that kind of makes sense because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you know built into the OS and Apple nerds are gonna be the people reading this and they might like
⏹️ ▶️ John iBooks or whatever but you know I I always buy all and and I you know the iBooks version
⏹️ ▶️ John is nicer than the Kindle version because I was able to use uncompressed pings there but I couldn’t in the Amazon version because there’s stupid delivery
⏹️ ▶️ John fee thing. So, as I explained in my post, but how many of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John bought the e-book read my blog post about it? I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was surprised at how massively dominant iBooks was in terms of the sales. Thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m perfectly happy with that if people were happy with what they got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s actually really interesting. Because it’d be one thing if you were never that popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Kindles. We could try to explain that away. But to have a big difference between last year and this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s something interesting, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I can kind of understand it, but didn’t you get the impression? I know I buy most of my ebooks on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Kindle store. When I buy a book, the default is I will buy the Kindle book from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I read anything that’s not maybe like a technical book that has lots of charts or something. I
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t do that. Or like a comic book, I might buy a paper version or read in Comixology or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I always thought, oh, well, Kindle’s the dominant thing, and then Apple’s over there with the iBook store but for I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re writing a review of the Apple operating system people are ready to buy that in iBooks form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I mean and maybe part of it is because Kindle like the the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindles are the the grayscale E Ink ones and you know the the tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindles are kind of crappy and that’s an understatement I think and and so like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like this where it’s full of like nice color images and links and things that like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to want to have this on a full featured reading device. The E-ink Kindles are not going to be good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the color images. They’re not going to be good for following those links, because even though they have browsers, they’re terrible and slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, the best device to read this on is a computer or a tablet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it makes sense that most of the people who are interested in reading this kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they have to pick a color tablet device to read this on, are way more likely to pick an iPad than,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, a Kindle Fire, which is a total piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and like I said, I still like the web version better, but for the ebook versions, despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Kindle version has compressed JPEGs, massively compressed JPEGs, as opposed to uncompressed pings that are in the iBooks
⏹️ ▶️ John one, the Kindle reader app has a built-in browser, and the iBooks app doesn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s nicer if you’re visiting a lot of links to do the Kindle one, because then at least you don’t have to keep leaving
⏹️ ▶️ John the app and coming back, because when you tap a link, it’ll open in the in-app browser, you know, like Instapaper or or any other app within an app browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is better. So I mean, there were enough options for everybody. Everyone could get what they
⏹️ ▶️ John want. And the option that I’m surprised more people don’t pick, I guess they’re afraid of subscriptions, is the R’s Premiere subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ John which costs exactly the same amount as buying the book, but you get all the versions of the book. You get the web version
⏹️ ▶️ John with no ads on a single page if you wanted. You get the multi-page web version if that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the ebook and the Kindle version and also a PDF version, which is not nice and I don’t make, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, Some people like PDFs for their libraries or whatever. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all because people don’t want to have to remember to unsubscribe or to cancel their subscription immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it is you have to do. It’s just a simpler transaction for them to just hit buy inside iBooks.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we provide the options, people pick what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I am an Arts Premier subscriber because I subscribed like three years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your review then, and I have just forgotten to unsubscribe every year.
⏹️ ▶️ John You also get to read the R’s site all year with no ads on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually I’m not logged in because I forget that I even have it. And then when it renews, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John oh, I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cancel that sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I like R’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it remembers your login really well, unlike many other sites. I can’t remember the last time I logged into R’s. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think there’s any kind of timeout. So in all my browsers and all my machines, R’s has no ads on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more point to make on this before we leave the e-reader topic. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have over the years with both Instapaper and with the magazine, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent a lot of time and effort trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things work really well on Kindles. Trying to make things look as well as they can, trying to get the layouts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fonts exactly right and the markup exactly right and everything, the navigation with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the periodical navigation, all that stuff. Trying to get all that stuff exactly right for E Ink Kindles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think almost none of it was worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever reason, I don’t really have a great theory on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a lot of people who use Kindles, but any kind of difference in quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Kindle experience just never seemed appreciated by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost anybody, let alone enough people make it worth the pretty incredible amount of effort that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years. And, you know, maybe that’s just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things about reading on a Kindle, content-wise, are mediocre. Like, so many e-books
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are half-assed and have, like, one weird font set for the whole thing. It’s like, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your E Ink Kindle will be set with the regular Cecilia font. one book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be totally set in the sans-serif font in a weird size and justified somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s no way for you to change that or books will have like OCR errors from when they were scanned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from paper and nobody ever fixes them because nobody’s looking at nobody cares so like because there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t even get me started on periodicals on the Kindle which are which are just really really half-assed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so so many content experiences on on these devices are like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, 60% quality or so, that maybe people who use Kindles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t expect any better and maybe don’t even notice when it is better because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience as a whole is so mediocre, you know, full of things like bad formatting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, weird little shortcomings and errors. And that might also have something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with, like, the whole thing about market share and browser share being so different between iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Android where Android devices a lot of those are these like purpose-made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets that are sold as video playing devices or reading devices something that’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intended to be general-purpose computing device and so maybe people who own those you know don’t go looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like this to read on them or don’t go looking for like you know web magazines or web safe for later services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there you know they’re getting these things to just read books and they don’t even consider doing stuff like this with them so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those is probably the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they do notice a little bit. Like I said, what I’m trying to do when I look at on the yin and kindles is make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s okay. Like I’m not, I know it’s never gonna be great. I just want to make sure it’s okay. And last year I think
⏹️ ▶️ John was the year where when it’s not okay I did find out because that was the year everyone was buying on a Kindle because
⏹️ ▶️ John there was no iBooks version and it didn’t look right on the what was then new, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Kindle Touch, the one with the stupid well where your finger goes down to it intersect the IR beams or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the hell that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing was. And I don’t have one of those, and no one should have one of those. But anyway, some people have one of those. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, hey, when I bring your book up on it, the text is crazy small, and it’s all messed up, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unreadable. And no matter what I do to adjust the size, even if I adjust the size to max, it looks too small. And I had screwed something up
⏹️ ▶️ John with the fonts. But when I opened it in the simulator and said, set device
⏹️ ▶️ John to Kindle Touch, it looked fine. But in the actual hardware device, it didn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you screw it up bad enough, you hear from it. And I remember in that case, I had to make my best guess as to what
⏹️ ▶️ John I had screwed up with the fonts. Because again, if you look at the markup of this book, it’s disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ John All sorts of hacks in there that some of them probably aren’t even necessary anymore. I think I have like P
⏹️ ▶️ John style equals text indent none, an inline style in every single paragraph.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you still need that for the Kindle 3 and maybe even the Kindle 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so crap like that, if anyone looked at it, like, what are you, crazy? You don’t know how to make markup. I’m like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not putting that there for my health. That was because like three years ago, I had to do that to get it look right on like the Kindle 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just leave all that crap in there. So now it’s just a pile of hacks on top of pile of hacks. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the particular arrangement of pile of hacks screwed up the font on that Kindle Touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to like guess what the solution was, bundle up a book,
⏹️ ▶️ John email it to Scott McNulty, who has every Kindle in the universe, and say, can you load this on your Kindle and take a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of it to show me what it looks like? various font sizes so I can say okay like there I approve that I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good and then ship it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually you know what before we before I forget I now that I no longer have in paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the magazine and my next app is a podcast app I’ve actually been looking to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my collection of all the Kindles do you want it I’ll just give it to you for I’ll just send it to you for free because you can actually use it
⏹️ ▶️ John wife will not like you sending more electronics to the house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make a Kindle Museum a museum of mediocre reading devices yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sending it to you that’s it you can refuse it if you want but I’m mailing it to
⏹️ ▶️ John well you know I was thinking like we did buy we didn’t give our son one of our old Kindles because you know
⏹️ ▶️ John having Kindles for kids is actually kind of good because I you know I like buying ebooks I think it’s more convenient the paper books and they have so many
⏹️ ▶️ John paper books so like buying my son books and giving him his own Kindle to like to read on it’s pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John so you know if you want to send me some of your old ones like I’ll just give them to my kids and let them read on them I mean you should save some
⏹️ ▶️ John well you know by the time Adam is old enough we’ll have hollow Kindles and you won’t want these crappy things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only one I want to save is the paperwhite because that’s the only one that we actually
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual good one, yeah. But yeah, if you have crappy Kindles, you want to get rid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the old ones, everything before the paperwhite. I have one of each model and you’re gonna have them
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, don’t send me the Kindle one because nobody wants that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so funny how bad the Kindle one is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, it is. It’s kind of like that, I’ll put like that next to my QCAT up in the attic. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John You actually have and kept a QCAT? It came free with Wired Magazine And I’m like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is so, it’s shaped like a freaking cat. Of course I’m going to keep it. That is, of course I can’t find it. I’m sure it’s up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there somewhere. Oh, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I have it. Oh my God. All right. All right, so before we move
⏹️ ▶️ John on from this topic and end the show, I want to get in, ask
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys some, two questions. Well, actually one, I’ll talk about appearance. Maybe I’ll do that next week, but
⏹️ ▶️ John since we’re short on time, I mentioned last week where I didn’t really talk about the review,
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was like some Overriding theme that I was trying to weave throughout the review and that whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not you got the pop culture References that I was using to build that the theme should have worked on its own
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I succeed did you see a theme running through this and if so, what do you think it was? power
⏹️ ▶️ John saving Well, I mean that’s true in terms of the features, but like I’m thinking more like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like again touchy-feely like well, you know What kind of OS is this? What where
⏹️ ▶️ John does it fall in the hierarchy of OS releases? You know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I think so I mean you explicitly state that you know you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of give an idea of the theme that that you want me to say that you weaved I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it depends a lot on your opinion of Mavericks like as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user like when you like once you’re using it depends on like what you think of the things they changed whether it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big difference for you know for your hardware and for your usage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and what you think of the direction they’re going. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that your theme is spot on of like, this shows some interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for the directions, the direction they’re going with some of this stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t necessarily the obvious direction they were going a year ago or two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that you did very well. I’m not sure I picked up on the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of places where you think they are going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Besides some big things like shifting towards, one thing that I think is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious for me with this is Mavericks is really a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop OS that happens to run on desktops if you want it to. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, it is getting more iOS-like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But not in the interface. Stuff like Launchpad I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-assed and kind of stupid. But the interface is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting mostly back to being Mac-like again. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s until they try a radical redesign, who knows. But a lot of the…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Lion started this too, but a lot of the power-saving stuff, stuff, a lot of the app nap, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandboxing, and just putting more restrictions on apps in order to achieve better stuff for the user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s security, whether it’s power related, or managing unsaved data,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more stuff aimed at laptops specifically. But just a lot more restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that won’t necessarily hinder power users, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but will keep making life harder for developers temporarily to get long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better situations going on this platform that they didn’t have the luxury of starting from scratch like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did with iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John You basically got it. I spell it out in the conclusion. Like I said, it’s the intro and the conclusion is where I’m going.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the last paragraph, more or less, and the very last line, like I said in the last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, This is a weird time in the life of the Mac, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the direction it was going in has been sort of like a big stop sign that’s put up there. Stop with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do that anymore. And they scraped out a lot of that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but left a lot of the other things kind of in limbo. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an OS that is not, it’s unsure of itself. Right? It is not bold,
⏹️ ▶️ John confident, even to the degree that Lion was. Lion was more bold and confident, like, yeah, We’re going to have everything
⏹️ ▶️ John wooden and felt, and it’s going to look like iOS. And I don’t care what you’re doing with the address book. It’s a book now. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got a bookmark. Deal with it. I mean, you could say it was misguided or going in the wrong direction, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was certainly more confident and bold about what it was doing. And Mavericks is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Maybe I’m not so sure about what we’re doing here. I guess, you know. I mean, the power
⏹️ ▶️ John saving stuff is like, yeah, definitely they’re going to emphasize power saving and do that stuff, and that’s fine. But when I think of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what is the Mac platform becoming? Like, what is the direction for the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John And aside from the obvious stuff of, like, get more efficient, get faster, you know, better battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does it mean to be a Mac? What is the future of this platform? And Mavericks is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a bold statement in any particular direction, other than that direction we
⏹️ ▶️ John were going in before. We’re not doing that anymore. But we don’t have time to undo all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff either. So some of it’s still going to be there. But I mean, you know, we put this stuff out. We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to do that. we just didn’t have time to clean up, but don’t look over there. It’s kind of a gross, I mean, game center’s still frigging felt. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s still, the stuff is still there, right? I mean, I guess on iOS, there’s a little tiny bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John that of like iBook Steel being the wooden shelves. For the most part, iOS was like iOS 7, you know. Boom, here it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s iOS 7, this is where we’re going. Everyone clear, everyone get in line, you know, all aboard the iOS 7 train.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Mavericks is not like that at all. And the energy saving stuff, I think I should have emphasized this more. I think I did,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I spelled it out. I think I might’ve used italics, maybe not. Like, Apple said this themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s really important. I think it bears out in the usage of it. You said it’s like a laptop OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is true in the sense that they’re focusing on power saving, which only really matters when you have a battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not just energy saving. It’s increased
⏹️ ▶️ John energy efficiency and increased responsiveness. And they go hand in hand. And responsiveness means stop
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac from doing crap that is not responding to you, the user, right now, which usually means stop
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac from doing all sorts of stuff that it was doing before. And if you spend any time running D-Trace or
⏹️ ▶️ John the old SC usage, I think it’s still in there, or D-Truss or FS
⏹️ ▶️ John usage, or all these tools on the Mac that you can use to see what the hell your system is doing, it’s doing tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff all the time. The Mac is doing so many things. This is why it’s so amazing that iOS even works, because
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS is not doing these things. It would destroy your battery. And so they’re trying to bring it into, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop, Macs, I know you have all this. They just have too much memory, too much computing power, too much hard disk space,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were doing tons of stuff in the background just trying to reign it in. And even if you don’t have a laptop, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use laptops, right? It’s you know, it’s maybe the psychological, this happens after every
⏹️ ▶️ John OS update, but I feel like I more or less should have should have this gauged after going through so many OS updates.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, people say, oh, it feels snappier because you just did a fresh install and like all your caches are clean, or maybe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John things are defragmented or things haven’t started to slow down or whatever, you know, all these all these, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John psychological effects of like making you think the new OS is faster, but you know, even
⏹️ ▶️ John accounting for that effect, I truly believe that my desktop Mac Pro at work
⏹️ ▶️ John feels snappier after an upgrade to Mavericks, more so than it always feels snappier
⏹️ ▶️ John after you do an OS upgrade. Like in a lasting way, that yeah you eventually get used to it and you don’t notice it anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s because the thing, my machine is doing less crap, and even if it just comes down
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, my machine is not being destroyed by spotlight and time machine to such a degree, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like totally, this is the way to kill a Mac, like just swamp it with IO because I mean, again, only
⏹️ ▶️ John only one friggin process can have a lock on the catalog file at a time because of stupid HFS plus so those 12 cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing you any good, you know, contention for IO can make your Mac feel slow, almost more so
⏹️ ▶️ John than anything else, although low memory eventually becomes swamp with IO because of swapping and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory compression combined with the lower priority of everything else combined with just less crap going on in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John and more things that’ll be like, oh, I was going to run, but let me hold off. Let me wait until an idle period.
⏹️ ▶️ John That goes a long way, even on a desktop Mac. And so I would encourage people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are like, well, I don’t have laptops. I don’t care about Mavericks. You should care, not because of energy saving, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the responsiveness angle that goes hand in hand. And I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not like it’s magically
⏹️ ▶️ John all super duper responsive now. But they’re finally going in that direction to say, to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a better experience, we have to do like what iOS did and say, we really need to respond to the user. We’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all this power, too much power, and we’ve gotten lazy and just said, oh, well, we’ve got so much power. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they just added things one after the other. Like, first spotlight was like, oh, now this thing is going to run. And then we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have time machine. And that’s another thing that’s going to run in the background. And then we’re going to have all these other things. And if you just look at the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John usage of some stupid thing pulling in your menu bar, so many things are so wasteful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just torturing your machine. And even, this is something I missed in my review
⏹️ ▶️ John that I added an updated version. Even the stupid time machine, like the little turny clock icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t turn anymore. Because it’s not worth giving CPU cycles, waking up the CPU 30
⏹️ ▶️ John times a second to spin that stupid thing when it’s spinning. Because time machine backups can take
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. Just this relentless desire to say, stop
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer from doing crap that does not help the user. And so that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good new direction. And I think this is like the first toe dip in that direction. But overall,
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS is definitely in a transitional period. And the last line of the review,
⏹️ ▶️ John you met me at a very strange time in my life. I think this is a strange time in the life of the Mac. Because think of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. I mean, it has been strange for the past few years. But this is even more strange. It seemed like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the Mac is irrelevant. iOS is awesome. And then it was like, oh, no, the Mac’s relevant. Back to the Mac. And then the Mac’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to become relevant by looking just like iOS. And we’re going to do the same thing there. And then we were like, no, that’s not great or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s kind of like, yeah, you’re right. Like, that’s not great. And now it’s just kind of like, all right, here I
⏹️ ▶️ John am. I stripped off a lot of that wood stuff. We’re going to do some efficiency stuff, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite sure what’s going on there. And again, compared to iOS 7, we’re just so bold and
⏹️ ▶️ John fresh and confident in what it was doing. So that’s the theme I was trying to weave throughout the review.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think people feel that. Like, even if they just feel it as kind of a vague disinterest the Mac platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because Mavericks doesn’t come out of the gate with some, you know, I mean, a lot of it comes down to aesthetics.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t come out the gate with some bold new look and some new ideas about how you interact with the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, what if the dock is gone and all windows are full screen, or we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiling window manager, all sorts of crazy things you can imagine. No more menu bar, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not I’m saying any of these things are good ideas, but if any, if it did any of those things, people would sit up and take notice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not. Like, this is not Mac OS 11. It’s Mac OS 10. And it’s like Mac OS 10, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John tepid edition in terms of what it’s willing to throw in the user’s face. But underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John it all are some good ideas about efficiency and responsiveness that
⏹️ ▶️ John hint at what a new direction for the Mac could be. But we’re not there yet. And again, probably because of
⏹️ ▶️ John time constraints. So we’ll circle back here next year, around a similar time, I assume,
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if the next release is that bold new direction that builds on what
⏹️ ▶️ John Mavericks is kind of hinting at, only hinting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. One other thing too is that I really think that some of this transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notion is because Apple has always had, and this is true of both Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS and iOS, but especially on Mac OS, they’ve always had this weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dichotomy of trying to appeal to power users because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are power users and they respect us and they have a lot of power user fans you know trying to appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to power users and be like the pro OS, the pro platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while also having all these opinions and being being so strongly controlling about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ease of user experience and simplicity and hiding implementation details from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen Apple go a little too far in in the ease direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes and they pull it back and you look at some of the big headlining features of mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know some of the finer enhancements of like that they really are for power users on the multi monitor stuff like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all do you think anyone would have predicted they would have been improving multi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor stuff as much as they did uh… just last year or you or the year before like with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line when line brought in full screen and and everyone’s like oh well now we have women were just up with women
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our second screen forever no one would have predicted at that time that the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company just two years later would dramatically improve multi monitor and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it so much better and you know i i think and was it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mountain lion introduced mission control or whatever that new thing was anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh… you know apples always had this weird dichotomy between power users and hiding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for ease of use and part of the transition that i think you’re getting at is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them fighting that battle that they’ve been fighting for a long time. And they’re just they just keep moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward and making it more locked down for ease of use, but also better for power users. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they it’s like they’re like one upping themselves in that battle as time goes on. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that they can ever win that battle. It’s it’s just a hard problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like this is kind of like a do over because like they’re still they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John head off, I think, in the same direction. But Lion and Mountain Lion are sort of an embodiment of misunderstanding
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s good about iOS. They kind of understood at a broad level, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is good and popular because it’s simple, and it gets crap out of your way that you don’t want to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I talked a lot about this in the Mountain Lion Review, especially in the Lion Review.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things that we all take for granted, that if you think about it’s like, well, why should I even have to bother with that at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John And iOS is the perfect example of, look how easy it is to buy and install an app. Why isn’t it that easy on the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because of x, y, and z, and blah, blah. But does it have to be? well, I’ve been a computer user so long, I need it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like power users do want power, and they’ll get addicted to Stockholm syndrome. They get addicted
⏹️ ▶️ John to things that are terrible. Like if you had asked a Mac user way back before any of your time, you used to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John choose how much RAM an application would allocate to itself. You’d get info on it, find it. It was a little box, and it said
⏹️ ▶️ John two little boxes where you could put in a recommended and a maximum size or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What a support nightmare that must have been for programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Support used to be like, oh, you have to give it more memory if you’re going to open files this big or whatever. You would decide how
⏹️ ▶️ John much RAM it could use. And obviously, from a modern perspective, you’re like, why would I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that? It’s like having to go out and crank your car to start it or something, right? But if you would
⏹️ ▶️ John ask the power users, like, oh, I need to have that control, because I need to tell exactly how much this application needs to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they love the knobs, and they get addicted to that stuff. And it takes a while to get away from that. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes a clean blinker like iOS and say, all that crap that you thought was essential, actually it’s not. And
⏹️ ▶️ John see how much more pleasant it is to use this thing? But what Lion and Mountain Lion were like, Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, like people like that. That’s good, that’s simple. What we need to do is make the Mac like iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they made it like iOS in the wrong ways, right? What they should have been doing is what more
⏹️ ▶️ John of what Mavericks is doing, like, you know, all that sandboxing stuff and all of the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all the simplifications of getting rid of like, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if you knew
⏹️ ▶️ John where all the files were and the system could manage them. And you know, that, you know, the sandbox containers for things and
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t have all these applications just doing random crap to your system and patching things and running in the background and eating CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cycles, and that it wasn’t the Wild West anymore. That’s one aspect of it. The other one was,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, interface simplification. Adder’s book should be like a book, and it’s familiar, and it’s just one simple screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the wrong direction. The simplifications are not in the visual and interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John The simplifications are in, think of the parts of the system that are busy
⏹️ ▶️ John work, that you don’t need to be doing, or that are inefficient, or that cause chaos, like the Wild West nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the internals of like all these things running rampant all over your system and making like a fragile system
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of that but still give the features that make the Mac the Mac and so I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is a reset of like they went off in they went off in pursuit of the aesthetic look and
⏹️ ▶️ John feel and simplification in terms of the visual and they’re resetting now and saying actually true
⏹️ ▶️ John you know true luxury simplicity whatever from terrible advertisements they had that you know the true
⏹️ ▶️ John true simplicity is getting rid of ugly details, but not getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of features as you know, as much as they still do a little bit of that with, you know, witness the I work applications and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but try to try to provide the same functionality, but make it so there are fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John moving parts and fewer crap that you don’t care about that you have to deal with. And they’re far from that goal now, like it’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John rewind and reset. And I hope that when they move in a new direction towards simplicity, it will not be towards,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just, you know, playing iOS dress up like it you know I said in the review a few times and
⏹️ ▶️ John more towards appreciating what it is you know that iOS has fewer hassles
⏹️ ▶️ John so get rid of the hassles in Mac OS don’t just try to make it like iOS because iOS and Mac OS have you
⏹️ ▶️ John know different sets of hassles there are hassles and on the Mac get rid of those hassles add new features
⏹️ ▶️ John without their own set of hassles behind them and go forward in that direction so I hope that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re going I mean like I said the last show I almost has day to call this transitional because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John well I know what it’s transitioning from but we don’t quite know what it’s transitioning to so it’s more it’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a pause reset regroup kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right let’s wrap it up this week because we are running long on time and we want to preserve everyone’s ability to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this episode over cellular so thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week igloo software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and oxygen by rem objects and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find the show notes at atp.fm,
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental. They didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what is the name of that rule that whatever you search for, it will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degenerate into porn?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the rule. You’re trying to think of Rule 34. And the Rule 34, I believe, is if it exists, there’s porn for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work. Okay, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than what you said. That’s what I’m thinking of. Well, I feel like there’s a rule for anything that you participate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, particularly podcasts, which is if you talk long enough, it will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up with you bitching about HFS+.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you just got to fix the things that annoy me. And then I move on to the next thing that annoys me. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t complain about cooperative multitasking your protected memory anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They got those. Yeah. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s always something else. Did you guys find any Easter eggs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. They were Easter
⏹️ ▶️ John eggs. Margo said he was clicking all links.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not all of them. I didn’t, I was not very diligent about clicking links.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always have Easter eggs in there. I mean, it’s hard to find a webpage, you know, but, but, uh, uh, I was surprised by the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I keep making them less obvious and sometimes I think like no one will find these, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put the review up and then 50 people email you and say that these drakes they found.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are we talking, like hyperlink periods and stuff like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, that’s the level of thing. You’re along the right track. You know, crap like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, just references. Like a lot of them are right in your face. Like you know, the image stuff. Iceman
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of them. It’s one of the most obvious, like I said, one of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the most obvious. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John in your face. Seriously, like I use it like nine times. It was the name of my volume. Like, you know, I got to think of what to call these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you could just glance over that and like, oh, I guess he calls his hard drives Iceman or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you think about it for a second, if you’ve seen Top Gun, you’re like, oh, I get it, whatever. That’s the most obvious one. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John has something like that. A lot of people, like in the context screenshot, a lot of people are sending me stuff about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re the same contacts from last year, and I think from the year before. And the reason is because iCloud, in my test account,
⏹️ ▶️ John every year I don’t have to make new fake contacts because I made them one year, and they’re in iCloud now. So every time I install a new OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and load up one of my test accounts, they’re all my So it’s the same joke over and over again, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient. It’s new to some people. They’re like, oh, you know that context thing, how many people caught that reference? And nobody,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, go look at the context screenshot. You have no idea what that crap is, right? But for the seven people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know what it is, it’s entertaining. And six of those people are seeing it for the first time because they didn’t read Maryview last
⏹️ ▶️ John year and the year before that. And they get a little like, oh, that’s cute. Although I screwed up the joke this year. They did it better last year. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I got the joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s a reference to a
⏹️ ▶️ John movie you haven’t seen. So, you know, whatever. But like, you don’t need to know, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to get out of that screenshot. The caption, none of you guys know what the caption is either, do you? I think, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you call it? Merlin posted the caption to his blog, so I think he understood the reference. See the caption
⏹️ ▶️ John under the contacts thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John with cottage cheese? Nothing on that one? Nope. Yeah, you’ve seen that show, maybe you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember that episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t reveal them all to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dudex in the chat room wants to know what’s better than HFS plus and I’ll see you guys later.
⏹️ ▶️ John CFS, BTRFS, NTFS, basically any file system created in the last 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years. FAT16. Not created in the last 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay yi yi. Alright, anything else going
⏹️ ▶️ John on? Oh, one more thing about the eBooks production. I wimped out and I have some copyrighted material and I think it’s fair
⏹️ ▶️ John use, but I have some copyrighted material linked in this review and I wimped out of putting that into
⏹️ ▶️ John either of the e-books because I just dreaded like getting rejected from the iBook store because you know, it contains copyrighted material.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to have a nuanced conversation about fair use when you know, I would need to get my book up. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John did not include that in e-book versions, only in the web version because I was afraid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have nothing constructive to add about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither do I. that I agree that basically if you ever reach a point where you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to argue fair use with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John somebody, you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John lost. Right. So it’s just like so much easier to just remove it. And it’s on the web. If anyone says like it’s because of the delay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t get complaints on the web because no one cares. But if I did get a plan on the web, two seconds later, I can remove it. Boom, fixed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John with the books, it’s like, no. I kind of disappointed because I would want, you know, like, oh, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy the ebook, you get the full experience. But this is like another one of those things that no one’s going to find this anyway. I think everyone, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously everyone who found it was finding it on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I do have one question I should have asked during the show. It’s very simple. Are you going to do this again next year?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I didn’t think I was going to do it this year, but I ended up doing it. Every year you’ve got something terrible about it. This one was like the
⏹️ ▶️ John long drawn out. You think, oh, great, fall. I was so happy at WNBC. I had all this time to write, but then at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, all right, all right. It’s always something like announce the date. I was so long
⏹️ ▶️ John done and then I was just updating it. There’s nothing more joyless than having to revisit a review
⏹️ ▶️ John that you, you know, I finished writing on September 1st, repeatedly revisit it to revise, change, revise,
⏹️ ▶️ John change. That is so terrible. Writing, if at the first time, can be kind of fun, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John work, you know, hard work, but kind of fun. But revising is just not fun at all. So I don’t know. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that, the thing that makes me keep doing these things is I think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if I don’t do it, they’re going to have someone else do it. And I don’t want someone else to go like, no, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing it right. If I did, I would have done this. I don’t want to be sitting there like armchair quarterbacking
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever does reviews of saying, well, if I did a review, and especially if they’re going to do some crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John ass iOS 7 style thing, how can I resist? So in some ways, the 10th
⏹️ ▶️ John major release is a nice round stopping point, kind of like episode 100 of Hypercritical,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it was only on 98 of them because the numbers. So the 10th major release is a nice thing. But on the other hand, 1010 is
⏹️ ▶️ John also a round thing. And if they ever did 11, I don’t know. I’m gonna have to stop at some point but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe maybe they’ll they’ll just get worse and worse until no one reads them anymore that’s that’s that a good is that a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean because imagine like who the hell would want this job of trying to fill these
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter they put it I mean like it’s you don’t have to fill the shoes like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the whole thing about people think that this reviews get so widely read because they’re so good but at this point they get
⏹️ ▶️ John so widely read because they’re on Ars Technica and so if you know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that’s true I don’t either
⏹️ ▶️ John the publication has a reputation at this point people don’t even look at the byline and they have no idea who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I bet that’s not even close to true I bet that you bring a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Ars Technica for this review that are coming to it because it’s your review
⏹️ ▶️ John I brought a lot of people to Ars Technica you know a lot of the people who work for Ars Technica now said oh I first came
⏹️ ▶️ John reading some OS 10 review Years ago, but but I think at this point the artist technique of the publication
⏹️ ▶️ John has you know a good enough reputation on its own That people trust it and will
⏹️ ▶️ John read it I mean That’s the reason they get these three get so much traffic is Because the site’s
⏹️ ▶️ John traffic has grown so much like back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right you are so you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What last year when I did my my parody review of your review? I told you that was by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the number one page view article on my site for all of last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. And I had a lot of big hits last year, and that beat them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know the actual traffic numbers for ours, which I’m not going to say on the air, but I know the actual traffic numbers, so I can compare
⏹️ ▶️ John apples to apples. And ours, as a site, its traffic has grown tremendously over the
⏹️ ▶️ John past several years, and it’s to the credit of all the people who write for the publication. And I’ve just been kind of along for the ride.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like, all I have to say is I make a very long review, too. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I said like in the line review is that it was the most popular article on ours for the year. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it was also the longest. So it’s, you know, hard to tell this year, less traffic than last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I don’t I don’t know if it’s just because the month that came out in or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe maybe that’s what will happen. Maybe it’ll just fade away and people won’t care enough about the Mac platform to
⏹️ ▶️ John be reading these reviews. Or maybe there won’t be that interesting stuff. I mean, this review was shorter than last year. And I think it’s because there’s less stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about. So I’m thinking of endgame, kind of like Cable’s talk at
⏹️ ▶️ John XOXO, which I finally watched. How does this end? What does the end look like?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, the things like fade away, sell out. I have nothing to sell, so I can’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Or just stop. That’s my other thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll stop eventually. The worst time to ask me is after I’ve just finished one, because after I finish, I totally feel like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John never doing that again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I tell you the conversation I had with my really good friend Brian the day that your review came out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I told Marco. I told one of you. But for the live listeners, so my very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend Brian who is a pretty big nerd although he doesn’t do this sort of thing professionally, he sends me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an IM the day the review comes out and he says, wait, wait, wait. Is one of the dudes on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast John Syracuse? I was like, yeah. Oh, well, he is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all over the internet today. I never realized he was the review guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, that’s what I said. People don’t know that, you know, they don’t look at the buy lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s just the Ars Technica. Well, okay, well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on. But they may not look at the buy line, but when a new Mavericks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when a new OS X comes out, they know to go to Ars Technica and find
⏹️ ▶️ John People used to be really into when new iPods came out too, but you see how that ends up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, yes. Everything eventually does die, John. But I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being way too humble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you saying that you are like the iPod classic?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, what happens is that the thing that I have to offer that’s actually of distinct value
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes of less and less interest. Because as time goes on, there are plenty of people, like at this point, when I was first writing them,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody even knew what the hell OS X was. So I was the winner because I was the only one writing about it. So I was the best
⏹️ ▶️ John writer about it. But now, you know, Apple and the Mac gets so much covered by so many
⏹️ ▶️ John actual professional people that, you know, I can’t offer what they
⏹️ ▶️ John offer in terms of, uh, you know, a general purpose review of the operations. All I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John left of value is, you know, I’m the, I’m the guy who’s been there all along. I started with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac in 1984. I know all these details. I have all the historical context. I’ve been deep into every single release.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the first time I were reviewing an operating system. I can give you historical context with
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe knowing which areas to go into technical depth because there’s plenty of people who go into the same depth that I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John people who can find more features than I do and have opinions about them or whatever, all I’ve got to offer is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, old people. Old people eventually don’t have, you know, looks or strength or, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, vigor, they just have wisdom. And, you know, eventually people are like, yeah, wisdom is great and all, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to, you know, go look at this, these young people frolicking on the beach because it’s much more interesting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as time goes on, I will have my wisdom, I will continue to offer it, and that will,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, may not be enough to sustain interest in these types of things. So maybe, like I do with hypercritical, try
⏹️ ▶️ John to bail before things go downhill, before I jump the shark, or just continue to do it