38: Auto-Update My Parents
08 Nov 2013Why Everpix failed, photo storage woes, and final Mavericks scraps.
Episode Description:
- Thanks to Jim Pierce for extending John's dog. (Also mentioned: AntiCrop, Glide)
- Everpix's failure and impending shutdown:
- Everpix's critical strategic error, and how tech business and funding strategies should resemble Puerto Rico game strategies).
- Revisiting the challenges of online photo storage and why Apple isn't offering something like Everpix with iCloud.
- Answers to the last listener questions about John's Mavericks review.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if only you had a picture management solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Wouldn’t that be awesome? We should talk about that for another hour. Let’s do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last week, we talked about the problem of disabling the, turning on the reduced motion thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you turn it off, then you get the parallax effect. And it zooms in your background
⏹️ ▶️ John image. And it was cutting off my background image that I wanted to use with my dog. And so I was talking about if I could
⏹️ ▶️ John extend the background of the image of my dog to make the image bigger. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of looked like I could get the same crop as I had with reduced motion on and off
⏹️ ▶️ John by using two different pictures. And I mentioned using content aware fill to try it in Photoshop. And I did that content
⏹️ ▶️ John aware fill is not magic. It worked okay. I tried touching it up and I made a version that was
⏹️ ▶️ John extended a little bit, but it wasn’t great. And then a lot of people recommended to me an iOS app called
⏹️ ▶️ John anti crop on. I’m like, Well, that’s probably gonna work about the same as content aware fill. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that was not the case. It worked way better than content aware fill. Obviously, Photoshop in the hands of someone who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re doing might be better than anti crop. But for me, who just wanted to spend two minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, in anti anti crop, I just pressed the button extended it. I’m like, Oh, yeah, that’s what I did in Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John over the last five minutes. Only this is a better job. So I was impressed by that. But, of course, And D crop
⏹️ ▶️ John has same limitations as content aware film Photoshop and then it has a no idea what a dog
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like and my dog is going off the top. It’s going off the top and right edges of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So neither one of these programs is going to draw the rest of the dog. It’ll draw the rest of the deck, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty regular straight lines and you know, a single color and stuff like that, but it cannot draw the rest of the dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photoshop CS 10. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not holding my breath. So someone named Jim Pierce on Twitter said, Hey, I’m a visual effects artist.
⏹️ ▶️ John He said, do you want me to extend the picture of your dog? I said, have at it. So I sent him the picture. He sent it back
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, and he did an amazing job. He extended not only the deck edges, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John the dog, because he knows what a dog looks like. So once again, humans triumph over computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John His website, I believe, is hatandsuitcase.com. You can look at his portfolio and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John up there. But I’m not sure if I’ll use the picture, because I just couldn’t stand the parallax
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Even with even with the picture crop looking right The
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog box is still move and the icons in the home screen still move like my background is black But the icons still
⏹️ ▶️ John move on the black background that I can see it and it drives me nuts So I’m still in reduced motion land
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that I don’t like the crossfades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you say that so my friend Chris Harris who I believe both you guys have met He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works for the other media and has been making a few waves lately for or being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the head of the company or product called Glide, which Downrimple’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for his rebooted Loop magazine. Well, anyways, he saw me or heard me complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the same issue and did some sort of Photoshop magic on my picture of Aaron that I took in 2008
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and extended—it was taken in our kitchen, so he extended all the bits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are easy to extend. And that was the first time I’d seen an instance of content-aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fill in my world. I’d seen the original video from whenever a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago when this concept was kind of invented. And my goodness, it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flawlessly and looks really good. It’s kind of creepy how good it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just invent something out of nothing. So I was very impressed. So thanks, Chris, for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I guess something happened with links in Mavericks. Is this you, John, that added this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we talked about a couple of shows Maybe way back at the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember even which podcast it was on I mentioned that I have a little folder or a little tag set
⏹️ ▶️ John in yo Jimbo where I keep my the starting point of my notes for each new version of OS 10 and
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to make those notes before I know what the name of the OS would be and I always guess and put the name Down there and then
⏹️ ▶️ John for 10.9. I made a links folder ly nx
⏹️ ▶️ John And not necessarily because I thought that would be the name of the next big cat thing because I’ve always thought like where can You go from
⏹️ ▶️ John a lion and you know mountain lion seem kind of lame, but it’s like all right well They’re done. You know it can’t possibly be a
⏹️ ▶️ John cat But if it was a cat it should be links and so I wrote links And then you know as cross is called maverick
⏹️ ▶️ John has only do with big cats, but this past week. I did get a tip that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was at the very least investigating the word links if they were to go with
⏹️ ▶️ John cat names which of course they didn’t in the end, so I feel slightly vindicated in my instincts for Lynx. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I got Mountain Lion, I, you know, if you had forced me to guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have said well it’s got to be some sort of thing on Mountain Lion or something like that, you know. I feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a good sense of what the cats could be. I think we talked about this on the recent episode of Talk Show, more about the cat stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I feel good knowing that Lynx was in play and that it could have been
⏹️ ▶️ John a 10.9 name, and I would have been perfectly happy with it. But we’re on to the places in California, so that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny because looking in the show notes, the only entry is OS10 10.9 lynx.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I assumed this was going to be you lamenting the lack of the web browser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something changing about the web browser in Mavericks.
⏹️ ▶️ John the executable is lowercase. And I always install it, install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you test your websites in it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No. With JavaScript off?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I occasionally find myself firing it up. Even if it’s just to run links dash dash dump
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, I use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fun. You would. You would. I haven’t used it in forever. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the other big news that just happened this week, and then I think we have a tremendous amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mavericks Review related follow-up, is EverPix folded, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, really, disappointed by. After listening to, I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what episode it was of the prompt and I don’t think Hackett is in the chat to correct me, Bradley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chambers came on the prompt to talk about photo management, which is something I’ve classically been very bad at,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, oh you should really try Everpix, it’s it’s really good, blah blah blah. And so I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and decided it is really good and actually paid for a year’s subscription and it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that they have just decided to close their business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m very sad about that. And I don’t know what you guys have to add. Certainly there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things we can talk about here in the show notes, but John, it seems like you’ve taken a keen interest in this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I signed up for EverPix just because I’m like a lot of people looking for some
⏹️ ▶️ John way to deal with all my pictures to give me a little bit more security. And I’m all paranoid and I have all these multiple backs of my pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing about EverPix was like, we’ll store all your pictures for you. We’ll suck them out from all
⏹️ ▶️ John the places where they are. So it didn’t want to own the pictures. It was like, we’ll pull them out of iPhone. We’ll pull them off your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll pull them from wherever. And we’ll store them forever. And there’s no limit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the price was like $50 a year or something. So I was like, all right, I’ll pay $50 for one year
⏹️ ▶️ John just to try this thing out to see if it’ll give me a fourth or a fifth backup of my stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fringe benefits of it were that I had access to all of my pictures from
⏹️ ▶️ John any device that could run a web browser. And they had a nice iOS app as well. So if there’s some picture
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to see from like seven years ago or something, I’m not gonna have it on my phone because I can’t have all my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone. And if I didn’t pick that one, it’s not gonna be there. And I can wait till I get home and go through my iPhoto library or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But EverPix gave me access from anywhere to all of my pictures. And you could easily
⏹️ ▶️ John give full resolution download links to relatives if they wanted. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna do new prints for my wall, this picture of whatever. It was just convenient. It’s the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever I’m saying about ever fix now they’re gone is like this is the way insert company
⏹️ ▶️ John should should do photo management, whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Apple or anybody and actually go
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of comes close to this with that with their photo stuff, but they don’t have as many hooks into Apple’s applications and stuff. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t have to worry about your photos. They’re all in the cloud will save them all for you forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Storage is unlimited. The pricing is reasonable. You have access to them anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was great. And mostly I didn’t think too much about it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, I’m going to try this for a year, and if it seems like it works out, I’ll sign up for another year.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I didn’t just sign up for a month. I was like, well, 50 bucks, I’ll try the whole year. And had it gone through the whole year, I probably would have signed up for
⏹️ ▶️ John it again, if only for just like, I would pay $50. It’s like, even if they didn’t store them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow gave me magical access to them from everywhere, but like, you know, tunneling through to my home computer or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just great to have access to them. And there was a feature that Lex talks about a lot, Lex Friedman, of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Unprofessional Podcast and other things, that he liked the flashback emails that it would
⏹️ ▶️ John send you. It would send you an email like, this is what happened a year ago today, two years ago today, three years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John today. And if you don’t have kids, you may think, well, nothing happened three years ago today. But when you have kids, you take pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when they’re young, you take pictures like every single day. And so it’s kind of nice to see on this day in history, when
⏹️ ▶️ John your kids were three years younger, these were the pictures you took. I thought that was a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit silly, and I didn’t sign up for the emails because I don’t need to get any more emails, but occasionally when I’m flipping around on my phone, I would go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the EverPix app and look at the flashback, and it was cute and enjoyable. But alas, the company
⏹️ ▶️ John is gone, and they’re supposedly refunding the prorated amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who subscribed, and their subscriptions weren’t up yet. I think it’s sad for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John involved, because I think when we first talked about EverPix, we said, Apple should buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John company. It’s filled with a bunch of ex-Apple people. They’re doing things better than Apple does. I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple can’t do what they’re doing or couldn’t do what they’re doing but they’re not. So why don’t you just buy this company and do it?”
⏹️ ▶️ John That didn’t work out. Nobody wanted to buy them. They could. They tried to sell themselves. They had a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of close calls but no takers and they just ran out of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell It’s funny that you mentioned the Daily Flashback email because when I started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trial with EverPix, which would give you I I think a year of photos and then you can pull a Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hurley and sell your soul in order to get more free – more time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free. Well, even the one year of flashbacks, even for a person who doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have children, I thought was really cool and man, as soon as I signed up for the full year like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did and started getting the flashback emails from as much as like 10 or 12 or whatever years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, it was the neatest thing to be able to see and I found myself – I realized that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was sending pictures to like Aaron and my friends of, oh, look what we were doing six years ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was probably getting to the point that I was becoming a spam bot. And it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the best in my personal relationships that EverPix is going away. But the point I’m driving at is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the flashback emails were incredible, even as someone who doesn’t have kids. And you had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being able to get to your pictures from basically anywhere. And not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike Mike, I was one of those people who had a camera roll of three gazillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures. And the reason I did that, even though I had gotten them off my phone and onto my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I always wanted to be able to show a friend or someone I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey met or family member a picture if I felt the need. So for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m talking about when Marco and Tiff and Aaron and I went to Germany, I wanna be able to have those pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always. Or the top gear parties that we throw or whatever the case may be. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be able to show someone those pictures. And with EverPix, I could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I didn’t have to have a camera roll that was 3,000 pictures, which is literally what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had. And now, I don’t really have a solution for that at the moment. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps in a minute, we’ll talk about some of the alternatives. But it seems like, from what I’ve gathered, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear winner. And the other thing that I thought was interesting about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it would have worked because it’s too fiddly. But I was surmising on Twitter earlier, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, what would have happened if you could provide your own storage, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever picks provided the software. So I’m thinking kind of along the line,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a cross maybe between file transporter, our past sponsor of the show, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fever RSS reader where where it’s it, you need a web, a web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server that you install their software on, or at least that’s the way it was originally may not be anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or even like Arc, the backup app for Mac, which uses S3 as a storage engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you provide your own S3 credentials. So you’re paying for all the costs and they just sell you the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so I was thinking, I wonder if S3 bills weren’t an issue for EverPix,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could they have survived? And both Bradley and Stephen Hackett, who I was talking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I was exchanging tweets with, of course called me out and rightfully so, saying, well, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody would have bought it because it’s way too fiddly. that’s true. But on the other side of the coin, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help but wonder what could have been and it’s very easy to be a armchair quarterback in this capacity. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really I’m really, really bummed about about what’s going on what’s happened with ever picks and I and I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple had bought them up. Although john, you had exchanged a few tweets with I guess one of the employees,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the founders. I don’t know if you want to talk about that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so a couple of people were responding to you know, the news and responding to my retweet
⏹️ ▶️ John of whoever whatever announcement it was. And one of the people, Rorio on Twitter, said the classy thing to do for these
⏹️ ▶️ John failed companies is to open source their technology. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that they wrote doesn’t just go away. OK, well, the company failed. Why not make all your code open source? And
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the engineers of the company said, we wish we could have, but we had to sell the technology to pay for an orderly wind
⏹️ ▶️ John down and refund. So they already sold the underlying technology, I guess. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John did that so they would have enough money to keep the lights on long enough to wind down the service and to give everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John back their refunds. You know, I have to pay their bills and you know, all the outstanding stuff. So they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John shut the company down in a good way, like giving you a refund for the time that you paid for that you don’t get because the service is going away
⏹️ ▶️ John and doing all that stuff. And to do that, apparently they had to sell the tech. And so of course I asked,
⏹️ ▶️ John who bought it? And he said, that’s currently private. So we don’t know who bought it. So for all we know, Apple bought the tech, Yahoo
⏹️ ▶️ John bought the tech, Microsoft, Google, who knows who bought it? So that was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they couldn’t sell the company, but apparently they could sell the tech or whatever at fire sale prices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then some other back and forth about, you know, well, why didn’t the company make it? There’s like, you know, big long blog posts
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and speculation, but this is from the guy at the company who said, variable costs were covered by customer
⏹️ ▶️ John income. So they had enough subscribers to cover their variable costs, but they hadn’t yet reached the economy scale to cover
⏹️ ▶️ John their fixed costs. Like basically they didn’t have enough customers to make the fixed costs of like running the service
⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure and everything to cover all that stuff. And that was really the problem. They needed to scale
⏹️ ▶️ John up to get bigger and bigger. I think this is another one of the guys at the company said, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John had three times their current subscriber base, they would have been profitable. So they just needed more people. And so that’s another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to put another nail in the coffin of Casey’s idea to have your own server and your own storage. They had to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it more accessible. They needed to market it to more people. And there’s been a lot of articles written about how
⏹️ ▶️ John having an awesome product is not enough in the startup world. Because everyone who used EverPix loved it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John their conversion rate from free to paid was excellent. It’s just that they didn’t get enough customers fast
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, and they couldn’t get more funding with the tiny subscriber base they have, which was measured in
⏹️ ▶️ John the thousands. And their growth curve of how many new subscribers they were getting was just too small. So they were so close. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we only had three times more customers. Well, that’s not that big of a deal when you’ve got a couple thousand customers or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John was. I forget what it was. It was like 55,000 free customers and like 6,000 or 7,000 paid.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just needed to grow a little bit faster. They just ran out of money too fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that the product was great. So that’s kind of a shame. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John I look at companies like this, I think, and everyone thinks it, why is this company with this great
⏹️ ▶️ John product that everybody loved, with this team of six people, able to do something with a giant company that has billions
⏹️ ▶️ John and billions of profit burning a hole in its pocket? It’s got so much cash, it’s trying to give it back to the shareholders
⏹️ ▶️ John to the tune of billions of dollars a year. And it still can’t get rid of the cash fast enough. This cash pile is still growing. I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple here, of course. How come their thing people don’t like and it’s confusing and it’s crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John and costs, you know, doesn’t cost more money than EverPix. But it’s like, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John huge, profitable businesses that could easily subsidize the cost
⏹️ ▶️ John of an EverPix-like service. And it’s just an opportunity for these
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies to see, to learn from the small companies. As everyone says, whoever uses EverPix,
⏹️ ▶️ John the big thing is, why doesn’t PhotoStream, which Apple seems to now be rebranding as just iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s application, why doesn’t it work in reverse? Why is it your device has the last 1000 photos?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the stuff why isn’t it reversed, like where the photo stream gives all your photos, and only the most
⏹️ ▶️ John recent 1000 are on your device, instead of being a well, you know, your pictures, once you hit 1000 photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and photo stream, the pictures don’t, you know, aren’t in the cloud anymore, only the most recent 1000 are
⏹️ ▶️ John in the cloud. And of course, the rest of them will be an iPhoto or on your phone or whatever, like people, the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of any kind of cloud type service for pictures and photos, The whole point is you don’t want people to worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has to be, you don’t have, you don’t want to have to like do math in your head of like, well, where are the photos? Would have a sink this recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I run out of room, my phone, that’s fine until I hit the thousand picture limit, and then they start going off the end and I got to make sure I
⏹️ ▶️ John sink the iPhone on my computer, but then I got to back up my computer. It’s like, people shouldn’t have to worry about it. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to charge money to cover the cost, fine. Charge money to cover the cost. Or can you work it into the margins of your other
⏹️ ▶️ John products? And you know, I feel like a company like Apple could, the big win only happens when someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says, Oh, you should get an Apple, whatever phone, iPad computer, because then you won’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about if your photos are safe. Nobody ever says that now. And ever picks you could have when
⏹️ ▶️ John the company is still around, say, get ever picks, then you won’t have to worry about if your photos are safe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of that, the second issue that a lot of people are responding about is like, oh, you know, we heard you talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John ever picks. But now look what happened. Now we’ve learned our lesson. Never trust anybody. I think we emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ John this in the past show about backups. The whole point is you never put all your eggs in any one basket.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if a company like EverPix goes down, you shouldn’t lose your photos because that should not have been the only copy of your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You should have your photos in multiple places. And if all those places can be like
⏹️ ▶️ John fire and forget all my photos are saved forever, like you have them all on your computer and your computer is backed up with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, crash banner, black blaze or something like that, or it’s backed up to a transporter in your house and that transporter syncs
⏹️ ▶️ John with the transporter, your office, like many, many layers of backup. and all those you want to be as brain
⏹️ ▶️ John dead simple, don’t have to think about it, everything gets backed up automatically as you want. And if any
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them goes down, if your hard drive dies and your Mac dies, you should be able to get your stuff back from like your time machine backup. If
⏹️ ▶️ John your house burns down, you should be able to get your stuff back from your cloud backup. If your house burns down and your hard drive dies, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to at least get your family photos back from EverPix or whatever other online service you’re using to just store your photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to have multiple layers. And if any one of those layers goes out of business, burns down, breaks,
⏹️ ▶️ John you replace it. Replace EverPix with another service does the same thing. Replace your online backup with another
⏹️ ▶️ John backup thing. Replace your house with a new house. Replace your Mac with a new Mac that works. Replace your broken hard drive. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of backups. It’s not that all these things are gonna be around forever. It’s acknowledging that every one of these things that you’re backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up for will eventually not be around. Either the company will go out of business or the hardware will die and you should
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to replace it because that shouldn’t be the only place you have your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you guys are being a little bit easy on EverPix. I think everything you said about backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is correct. I agree with everything you just said. I have nothing to add to that. So I’m going back a step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead. You know, you look at, you know, they say their variable costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were already covered by customer income. Well, is S3 a variable cost? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know if they were using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S3. They were. And so there’s this article on the Verge that we’ll link to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is like, kind of like a first person account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like of what, anyway, we’ll link to it. And they mentioned they had a $35,000 S3 bill that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was about to come in that was going to be a problem. And so anyway, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s obvious that they were not about to be profitable. Because if they were about to be profitable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it wouldn’t be an issue to refund everyone’s annual pre-purchases. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their annual pre-purchases wouldn’t all be spent already.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they needed three times the current subscriber base to be profitable. But like I said, three times 6,000
⏹️ ▶️ John is not insurmountable with another funding round. I feel like they could have got to three times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their biggest cost was personnel. They spent the vast majority of the money invested on people. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s their fixed cost. We have six people. We pay them salaries. And that’s where all their money went. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you can get three times a subscriber base, you don’t need three times the number of employees. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have been in the black. I’m not saying they were just this close. They weren’t. That’s why they’re gone. They didn’t make it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t make it probably because they spent too much time trying to make their product better and not enough time trying to get more customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but lesson learned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think they committed a massive strategic error in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their product creation and in their business plan, which is, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re making a new service like this or a new product like this, you gotta choose one extreme or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other. As we learned when underscore David Smith and I taught Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to play Puerto Rico a few weeks ago, in the game of Puerto Rico,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking, You have to pick one extreme strategy and stick with it. If you try to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a middle strategy that combines elements of, like, oh, I’m going to ship a whole lot of goods, but also I’m going to build a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of buildings, you’re not going to do either of them well enough to win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Web services and new services like this are kind of similar in the growth factor versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financing and versus paying your own bills, which is you have to either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go for something that is very cheap to scale but will attract
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of users very quickly. In which case you can pay for it by lots of VC money coming in because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have tons of growth. Or pick something that’s hard and expensive to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hosting a ton of photos on S3, but don’t go into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a free growth-based model up front. Go into that with a more bootstrapping, more self-financed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model, which is you shouldn’t be losing money on every new customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should also enter that kind of market with very low expenses to begin with. Not a big staff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an office. Enter that market with low expectations of profit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while and adjust your cost accordingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead EverPix tried to ride the middle. They chose to do something that’s very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scale. They chose something that it was not likely, and maybe this was their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error, I don’t think it was ever likely to have booming explosive growth. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market for it is not everyone who ever takes pictures needs this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is driven to do this. It’s really only people who care about their photo storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who know enough about photo storage to know why they would need something like this. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a big market, you know, relative to something like Instagram. And this, I mean, to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you some idea, like, Tumblr, like, three or four years into it, had something like 20 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of photos. By my math, EverPix had 400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes or so, if their S3 bill was correct. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, they were scaling at a storage level that’s insane. This was one of my main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, and John, to go back a sec, what you were saying about how we all wish PhotoStream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked this way, and it doesn’t. It’s because people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos can vary so much in size. The idea of EverPix of, upload all your photos to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us and we’ll store all of them forever, you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially hundreds of gigs for people or even terabytes for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. That’s not that uncommon of a case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could absorb that easily. Like if this company would be profitable with their income stream with three times
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of subscribers, and remember, they’re doing freemium. If they take the freemium out of the equation, it’s even more close
⏹️ ▶️ John to being profitable. $50 a year. Apple just adds $50 a year spread across
⏹️ ▶️ John all its profitable product lines. You wouldn’t even notice that. And who knows how much money they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John spending to do photo stream. It seems like I feel like a company like Apple, with their
⏹️ ▶️ John margins and their profit and what they’re already doing, could easily absorb this business. The six-person
⏹️ ▶️ John startup with a freemium model where they have 55,000 customers but only 7,000 are paying can’t absorb it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They came close. If they got one more funding round, which they might have gotten –
⏹️ ▶️ John if they might have gotten another funding round if they had started this company ten years ago or earlier, it’s just harder to get funding now because
⏹️ ▶️ John people want to see Instagram or something. If they don’t, they’re like, meh, don’t bother funding them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aaron Powell No. I mean the problem is that they were never going to have the rate of growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed to get tons of VC money to pay these ridiculous costs. They are paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons and tons and tons of money as people upload massive photo collections. And that’s another thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. If the whole point of your service is upload everything you’ve ever shot when you first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start using it, then your storage needs don’t grow slowly over time as people accumulate new photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your storage needs spike up at the beginning. The whole thing was a very, very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business to run, not even considering the staff which staffing is insane I mean like the staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost or something like this because what do they have like five or six people something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you took away 90% of their storage costs they would be fine it’s the freemium guys that killed
⏹️ ▶️ John them because they said hey sign up for free upload a year of photos and you know 40 or 50 thousand people did that
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who were paying that that was a sustainable business it was if it was pay $50 will store all your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know people have variable size of photos but apparently they had figured out a model where they could store
⏹️ ▶️ John all your photos And be profitable as a six-person company with like 7,000 subscribers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the other problem $50 for a year of Amazon storage buys you about 20 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe you know by the time they’re getting into their bulk pricing. Maybe you’re talking 25 or 30 gigs So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for every everybody I mean maybe that’s the average that sounds a little low to me though for anybody who would use a service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like This that sounds low like I shoot 20 gigs in a year
⏹️ ▶️ John They were doing I’m pretty sure they were doing lossy compression though, so I think they were saying they get 5x compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did they support RAWs? Because that matters a lot. That makes it like five times bigger. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not. That was the other thing. Talk about going in the middle road. Like they had a thing where they thought this could
⏹️ ▶️ John be for everybody, but they weren’t storing RAWs. And they were doing, you know, 5X
⏹️ ▶️ John lossy compression. All things that professional photographers would never accept. And the pricing, I think, was priced like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, it’s $50 a year. This is not a thing for professional photographers. It’s a thing for everybody who just wants
⏹️ ▶️ John access to all their pictures from everywhere and wants to know they’re safe. And if you’re the type person as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not saving my raw so my pictures aren’t really safe This is not this is not the the service for you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they were they had they had a misbalance of
⏹️ ▶️ John Their business model and their funding but and and they made mistakes But it’s not entirely crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think this same company like I said at the same company had gone ten years ago in that VC environment or I don’t know if ten
⏹️ ▶️ John years it was no bubble crash But like at this point, I think it’s getting harder to find VC
⏹️ ▶️ John funding for a company in the state that this thing was. Whereas when you’re in the midst of a run-up or a
⏹️ ▶️ John bubble, people are like, oh my god, you have actual paying customers? And you have a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that people like, here, take our money. But now they’re like, no, you have actual paying customers. That means you’re never going
⏹️ ▶️ John to grow that fast. And yeah, people like your product, but who cares? No thanks, we’ll pass. It’s the curse
⏹️ ▶️ John of a business model. If you didn’t take money from anybody, then you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be on the Instagram thing. We have no revenue. We don’t take money from anybody. Well, not that it’s grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah But but if that was the case then their user number would be impressive and it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I know then you have the potential for explosive growth so they were in this
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an unfortunate situation and the thing about it is I get the feeling that the vulture is surrounding them both the VCS
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Other companies were like why would we ever buy your company? Why don’t we just wait for you to run out of money and then screw up the technology?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which just seems to have been what happened because it’s like you don’t need the company And you don’t need to invest in the company if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s going to be the next Instagram. If you think the technology is interesting, just wait, sit back and wait. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John after it all goes down, I bet you can get the technology involved really cheaply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. Well, firstly, real-time follow-up. Someone in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chat who I’ve already lost your name, it was Savvy, posted a tweet from one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the gentlemen that worked at EverPix saying, we use perceptually lossless 5x compression.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you were right about that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. So JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perceptually lossless means lossy. It’s like virtually spotless, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know, the thing that I really take issue with is something that Marco said a few minutes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is, you know, this isn’t for everyone. And I actually strongly disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think ever picks in principle was maybe not literally for everyone, but was for any normal human
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being that shoots pictures with any device that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to lose, which is to say. Almost everyone. I mean we don’t have kids but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were to lose some of the pictures we’ve taken of vacations, of family gatherings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us goofing off at BMW in South Carolina, if we lost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those pictures, I would be devastated and EverPix was such an easy and reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cheap way of getting yourself a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I completely agree with what you said a while back that this is just one leg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a chair that holds up all of your pictures and make sure they’re safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s a very easy way to do that. If you think about it, I don’t think most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know use a crash plan or a back blaze or anything like that. So getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of your pictures into the cloud is such an improvement over having no backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or just having Time Machine, which by the way, most people I know don’t use either. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you guys that this probably was doomed. And Marco, your Puerto Rico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey analogy, while ridiculous, is actually fairly accurate. But on the other side of the coin, I strongly disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this wasn’t for everyone. It may not have appealed to everyone, but I think it should have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not for everyone in the sense that Marco meant it is not that everyone can’t benefit from this because
⏹️ ▶️ John they can. It’s that it’s not of interest to everyone, which I think is totally true. They’re not going to rush to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. for everyone doesn’t mean like, if I were if everyone’s to have this, they
⏹️ ▶️ John would get benefit from because everyone would get benefit from this. The question is, is this a type of product that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you describe to anyone, they immediately says, Oh, yeah, I totally would like that. And yeah, here’s $50. And the answer to that was
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely no, because it’s the type of thing that people don’t really know that they need. And it’s also the type of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been conditioned to buy sort of modern computing platforms to assume is a platform level concern,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, doesn’t Apple take care of that for me? Or doesn’t Google take care of that for me? And it really
⏹️ ▶️ John properly should be a platform level concern which is why everyone kept saying someone should buy ever picks because
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you know is the type of third-party thing where you’re like Whoever my platform
⏹️ ▶️ John vendor is should be providing some way for me to do this whether it’s paying for iCloud storage Or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of my really expensive phone or as part of my Google account So they get all my personal information or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever like it should be a platform level concern And so people aren’t going to say I’ll pay an
⏹️ ▶️ John extra 50 bucks to this other company to do this thing that yeah I make a value of it, but it’s not something that’s eating
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s only people who are really bothered by it or crazy people like us who think about backups and stuff. And that’s the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about EverPix is most people don’t think they need this at all, even though they do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you gave it to them for free, they would probably enjoy it, but they’re not going to go out and buy it. And if you have something people
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t going to go out and buy, you basically have a business that’s quote unquote not for everyone, because everyone does not
⏹️ ▶️ John come to you to buy it. And it’s a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one when you’re sitting there waiting for the customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I want to address two quick follow-ups here. One, the idea that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should just do this for everyone, to put it bluntly, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that easy because Apple is so big and the number of iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used and having photoshopped onto them is so large that S3 isn’t big enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. That’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about. They’re too big for S3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like this on Apple scale is such a completely different ballgame than doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the scale of a new web service with 10,000, 50,000 whatever users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not even close to the same game. Number two, the idea that a startup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth a lot less once they’ve made any money at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mostly not true in practice. In practice, growth matters above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. Even if you aren’t making a whole lot of money right now, if you are getting user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth, traffic growth, attention growth, but especially user growth, that papers over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. That’s what the entire VC world is based on, just like the stock market, is the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for future money. If you’ve made some money now, but it’s been disappointing, but your user growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is totally through the roof, that doesn’t mean you’re worthless. It means you didn’t try the right business plan yet or the right revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. If you have user growth, VCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will give you money, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the easiest way to get that explosive growth and to make people believe that there’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John explosive growth is to not charge anybody money for anything. Because then people will truly believe, oh, this can
⏹️ ▶️ John scale to all the people who have computers. As soon as you charge any money for anybody for anything, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, that automatically puts a cap on your potential growth rate because you’re asking for money, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Totally agreed. But I’m saying if your actual growth rate is really good, regardless of whether you’re charging for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, If your actual growth rate is consistently good, you’ll keep getting VC money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why VC-funded companies always give everything away for free, because you’re correct that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the whole game is based on growth for as long as possible, the last thing you want to do is inhibit growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by charging money for any part of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And their growth rate was not great, and they kept touting their conversion rate, which was very good. But your conversion rate doesn’t matter if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John converting on peanuts worth of people who are not growing fast enough.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so do we want to Oh, I should note actually, before we move into the review,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow up that a lot of people have been wondering what are the alternatives ever picks I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only speak for myself. I don’t know about you guys. But I haven’t looked into any yet. I haven’t had the chance. But the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re aware of are Loom, Picture Life, and Adobe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it Revel, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right? Yeah, Revel, yeah. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and those are the three that we’re aware of. I don’t know, John or Marco, if you have anything to add about those three, but those are the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are the obvious ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Revel is interesting. I have a brief conflict of interest in that they sponsored my site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they launched Revel for something like eight weeks in a row. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an interesting product, I think. It seems as though Adobe is not paying a lot of attention to it recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe I don’t know Adobe it seems like the Lightroom team is rocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with with the success of Lightroom and I Wish these things were just part of Lightroom, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like there’s no good reason or rather I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revel was just like a Lightroom cloud, and it’s not it’s a separate thing And Lightroom can publish to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but it doesn’t it doesn’t store raws and stuff like that and and and it kind of tries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bridge the gap between consumer and pro and doesn’t really satisfy either of them amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it’s kind of an odd product, and it seems like it’s kind of getting lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Adobe’s complexity, but I’m What I would love really is Lightroom cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I would pay a good price for that to basically have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the revel Ability to store everything online just have you know thumbnails and stuff on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices and be able to download anything by tapping it to have that but integrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully with Lightroom and and Supporting raw that would be amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I haven’t tried any of these services yet either although I did look at all of their pages and the one thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John all have in common is much higher prices than ever picks So take that for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you will. Are there chances of surviving better than EverPix? Are they worse? I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if any of them even have a freemium model. I think they all just charge up front. Is that the case? I don’t know. I haven’t investigated it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’ll look into them all and try it. But one of the things that I found attractive about EverPix was that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was so inexpensive. It’s kind of like the backblaze. When they first came out
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years ago, they’re like, oh, well, this company will be out of business because they’re charging like $5 a month for unlimited backup. how
⏹️ ▶️ John can that be sustainable? And here we are many, many years later, and they’re still around, and they have competitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John and apparently they’ve been able to make that work. And actually, I want to get back to what Marco was saying before about how
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple scale will be much larger. I think that’s true, but EverPix
⏹️ ▶️ John said they would be profitable with 3x their subscriber rate. That’s $50 a year per person, right? So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will have 300,000 times their subscriber rate. So presumably, if it’s profitable three times
⏹️ ▶️ John ever picks a subscriber right it would be profitable 300,000 and I think Apple is especially positioned
⏹️ ▶️ John to be even more you know cost-effective for this thing because ever picks had to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John s3 which means Amazon gets to skim some profit off the top because they’re reselling the storage service
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple presumably would implement its own storage solution or have its own already something
⏹️ ▶️ John something its own storage stuff that it doesn’t have to give Amazon or some other company a piece of its profit
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s it before you get into you know what I was talking about, like, okay, we’ll take some of your massive profit from your
⏹️ ▶️ John other product lines and plowed into that, which presumably is what they’re doing with the iCloud storage, which must
⏹️ ▶️ John be subsidized by their other products and stuff. And iCloud storage, I don’t know if how it compares to $50
⏹️ ▶️ John a year, it’s obviously not $50 a year for unlimited. But again, I feel like if ever picks with their technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were using, was able to be profitable at $50 a year, if Apple charged $50 a year, and they would
⏹️ ▶️ John stall store all your photos in iCloud for you, and then just put the most recent 1000 on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone or something, they would have, I think, a service that
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least breaks even, if not makes profit on its own. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the issue I don’t think would be profitability, it would just be just dealing with that scale. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be a ton of engineering time and resources just to deal with the scale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily the raw costs of, okay, we’re paying for this many servers and this much bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that, it’s like the massive engineering effort required to operate something at that scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where where something like S3 is really not suitable. And by the way, NS3 is not cheap. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of Amazon’s web services are cheap. And there’s this culture in tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco startups these days that the default of you’re starting anything, the default answer is let’s host it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Amazon Web Services. And that is not cost effective at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost anything. You do it on Amazon Web Services because the scaling is effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free up to a limit that’s so high Even Tumblr probably hasn’t reached it yet. Although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, I think, would with that data set. But, you know, you’re talking…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon scales very, very easily with some of their services. EC2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. S3, definitely. And you pay a big premium for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your entire business, like Backblaze… If Backblaze was based on S3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would not be able to offer that kind of pricing. Backblaze very famously made their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage servers. Like they designed their own storage servers with massive numbers of hard drives crammed into this case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They even open sourced the design and something like that. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually designed custom hardware to get tons of storage as cheaply as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why they can offer that. If your entire business is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storing a very large amount of data for as little money as possible, S3 is not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good fit for you. That’s not going to scale very well. But it’s the easy, quick fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front at least while you figure out whether your business has legs. And that’s the problem is that EverPix didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it lets you get in without a big, putting a bunch of money down. Because with
⏹️ ▶️ John S3, it’s like, hey, $0, and you put your first byte of storage in, and you pay for that first byte of storage, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John keep going. And eventually, it becomes ridiculous and unsustainable because now you’re giving all your slim profit
⏹️ ▶️ John margins to Amazon. But it lets you get off the ground. And for companies like Apple, though,
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, this is going to become the price of entry if you are a platform vendor. Like Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already there where they’re like, you know, certain things people just start to expect. A
⏹️ ▶️ John long time ago, Apple didn’t give you an email address. And nowadays, if you are the platform vendor,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if a lot of people don’t use it, and even if your thing doesn’t become the most popular email thing, Apple has to offer people
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to have like a Mac.com or an iCloud.com email address. Is it a core part of their business? No. Are they ever going
⏹️ ▶️ John to threaten Gmail or Hotmail? No. But it’s the price of entry. You just have to do that, because you’re going to have an email
⏹️ ▶️ John application. And so at a certain point, I hope, eventually, a price of entry will
⏹️ ▶️ John be, of course, whoever my platform vendor is will store all my pictures for me in the cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some yearly fee, part of my cell phone plan, some way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get enough money to cover the cost for that. It’ll become the price of entry, because Google is almost
⏹️ ▶️ John already doing it. And if people get used to that, it terrible for Apple to be like, well, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me show you this diagram showing you where your pictures are and how much money you have to pay, and if which device burns down,
⏹️ ▶️ John which photos you’ll lose it at what time. You just want to not have to think about it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s difficult to do, and they can’t do it for Amazon, because why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John give Amazon all that money? Apple’s supposed to do it themselves. Apple has to figure out a way to do it. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the time is coming where they’re just going to have to face that music and just do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, again, I’ll make the same argument I made last time we talked about that, which which is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is that people’s photos and God, especially videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so large file size-wise that you’re into pretty severe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstream bandwidth problems and data cap problems if you try to do a lot of this. I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another one of the problems that EverPix had is that for EverPix to be useful to you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to upload a lot of photos to it. And a lot of people just don’t have a fast enough connection to do that in a reasonable amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backup has a similar problem for a lot of people and And I think that limitation of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bandwidth Not catching up very quickly and when it does catch up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start getting data caps and stuff like that. You know, that’s That’s always gonna be a problem and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as bandwidth increases So will photo size and so will the amount of videos people
⏹️ ▶️ John Bandwidth is already out running photos. I think video you’re still true because video it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John big problem. It’s going to take a long time for bandwidth to catch up to video. And I don’t think 4k videos around
⏹️ ▶️ John the corner, but 1080p video is already way too big for anyone to do. But I think photos, I think we’re already there for photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think anybody with a photo collection, and any what you would call broadband thing, it’s going to take
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, but all your photos will eventually go up, which is not true of video. So I think, I think we’ve it’s kind of like the when
⏹️ ▶️ John we passed the point where you could download music on Napster, but you couldn’t download feature length movies, we’re at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point, You can do photos, all right? Because most people don’t have RAWs, and they just have cruddy JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, the pictures are getting bigger, but I think bandwidth is getting bigger faster. I mean, just look at Casey with his
⏹️ ▶️ John LTE Nirvana, where he’s amazed at the speed he gets on his little phone. Like, the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John that he gets on his phone is sufficient for any photo collection of anybody who’s been alive less than 100 years and
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a dozen pictures a day. I think we’ve passed the photo realm. The fact that videos are mixed
⏹️ ▶️ John in is a problem, but I would say for Apple, they can just say, oh, we don’t back up your videos. Because what can they do with videos?
⏹️ ▶️ John This 1080p is just too much data already from, you know, maybe when they do
⏹️ ▶️ John H265, whatever the next standard is, I think that’s, I got the number right, that’s supposed to give you like another
⏹️ ▶️ John 2x or 3x compression thing with no loss. Maybe we start, and then like LTE becomes common and
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s broadband has to at least match LTE. Then maybe we start to enter the realm of video. But like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we ever go to 4k, it just starts that all over again. But pictures, I think, are going to probably top out
⏹️ ▶️ John at like 30, 40, or 50 megapixels. Like regular people are never going to want more pixels than that
⏹️ ▶️ John in their images. Because what are you going to do, put it on the side of a building? Like it’s big enough to get a 24 by 24 inch print, and you’re fine, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that will top out. And I think we’ve passed that. But if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t start trying to do it now, it’s not like they’re going to wait until bandwidth can carry it
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, OK, now that we feel like we can so comfortably do it and everyone can upload their total photo collection in an hour, now
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s do it. They’ve got to start now. I mean, arguably, they have started somewhere with PhotoStream. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of a shame to do a half solution. They should just try to do the whole thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John bite the bullet now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about EverPix. And I think that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I speak for myself and probably both of you that I’m really bummed that it left. Any other thoughts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, real quick before we move along?
⏹️ ▶️ John Rob Mathers in the chat room thinks that upload bandwidth is still a problem. Point to Casey’s phone. You had good
⏹️ ▶️ John upload speeds too, right? It wasn’t just download that you were impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey with. No, no, no, no. What
⏹️ ▶️ John was your upload speed on that LTE?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget off the top of my head, but it was something to, I’m trying to look, but it was something to the order of like 1515, which- 15 megabits up, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty. And that’s on a phone, like, and everyone will have a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wireless upload speeds are fine. Home broadband upload speeds are terrible. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but like, if that happens, home broadband will be eclipsed by the people who are selling LTE,
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, everyone already knows they need a cell phone, And everyone is eventually going to have an LTE cell phone. And that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for cable companies if they can’t get their acts together to get their upload bandwidth better. And people realize they have faster upload
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth from their iPad or their iPhone. And that’s not even a problem from Apple’s perspective since
⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone’s taking their pictures with their iPhone and it’s already on LTE, there you go. There’s your upload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then you have data cap limits. I mean, there’s no clear path for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately. Maybe in five years, typical carrier data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caps will be two or three times as high. Who knows? Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be exactly the same as they are today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or lower. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, data caps are artificial, though. So that is the type of thing that can change without people running new copper, or
⏹️ ▶️ John putting up new cell towers, or doing any infrastructure things. Someone just changes a number in a spreadsheet, and all of a sudden,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re allowed to upload. I feel like that’s the type of thing that will solve it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s- There’s also issues with with like radio spectrum space and crowding of the towers though I mean they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of this scales particularly gracefully and all of its controlled by companies that historically have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown Much of a willingness to lower prices over time or to give you more over time
⏹️ ▶️ John You never know like what’s gonna lead though because sometimes it’s competition amongst
⏹️ ▶️ John the people providing the service where they compete with each other Oh files is coming now We need to you know as soon as files enters
⏹️ ▶️ John town you see all the cable people crank up their their bandwidth and everything Because that’s one level of competition. And the other level
⏹️ ▶️ John of competition is if there’s something on the net that draws customers, customers will be
⏹️ ▶️ John drawn to it. Like say, oh, I’ve got to have Netflix. And Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work on Time Warner cable just to pick something out of a hat because I don’t have enough bandwidth and it’s terrible. I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John find a new ISP, assuming there’s any competition at all, which is another big problem. But I’m going to find another ISP,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s wireless or WiMAX or whatever the hell it’s going to be, because I need to watch Netflix. And then in that case, Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John is the draw. So you have forces on both sides. And I think the forces
⏹️ ▶️ John on the side of competition among server survivors is so terrible that we should be relying on the force
⏹️ ▶️ John of make this thing on the net that people want and who will get pissy if they can’t get it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if part of the thing is, oh, all my photos are backed up and safe because I have a decent ISP, or my caps are
⏹️ ▶️ John higher, or whatever, and yours isn’t, you should switch to T-Mobile, Sprint, or whoever the hungry competitor is who gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John some insane no limit, you know, let’s see T-Mobile doing like the 200 megabytes free bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Despite the incredible dysfunction in our thing, I think if you make a product or
⏹️ ▶️ John service out there that everybody wants, they will be pissed if they can’t get it, and they will be pissed at their carrier, and they will look for any
⏹️ ▶️ John alternative. That’s a market opportunity for the people who are currently losing in the market to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so real-time follow-up from myself. I just ran a speed test on my phone on LTE,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I got 25 megabits down and 15 up. And I know I’ve told this story at least once or twice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, but I’ll tell it again. When Aaron and I bought our house in 2008, I was arguably more excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about getting Fios than I was about owning our first home. And at that point in time, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable Mac Daddy service was 1515. And that was just 2008,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is just five years ago. And on my cellular telephone, I just got 2515. At this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, we’re past the point which photo uploads are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doable over even LTE with the exception of the data caps like we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you should see how much of your data do you use per month? Like not counting, you know, you’re not uploading photos, but just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d say between one and two gigs in a general month. And I don’t even know how to be honest with you because I’m on Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always, but somehow or another I find a way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re running the overcast beta, it doesn’t do cell filtering yet for the downloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not. Wait, there isn’t. Is there a beta?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna say I just saw my users today it was like 400 megs for the month so far my whoops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our second sponsor this week is f sim space shuttle this is this is interesting this this is a
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s designed to simulate specifically the landing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the US Space Shuttle in its final descent into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kennedy or Edwards Air Force Base. When I first saw this I was like, they have a whole app for that? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I tried the app. It’s incredibly detailed. I mean, you’ve got to read the reviews. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews back this up. You know, it’s not just them, you know, paying us to say this. Like, there’s this great review on the Mac Observer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not really a flight sim person in general, but you can look at people who are are flight sim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and you can see what they say about this and they just love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing. It simulates very realistically these space shuttle landings and you can configure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. You can challenge yourself, you can be like alright well let me let me turn on you know a major turbulence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll do it at night with really cloudy visibility and I’ll simulate the failure of one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instruments or you know my flaps won’t work or something like that and I’ll have to still try to land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it well under these challenging conditions or you can just do it straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do it under perfectly clear conditions and just try to get it exactly right without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slamming down too hard and putting too much force on the landing gear or being unsafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or missing the glide path, things like that. It’s just really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t realize there was this whole world around this stuff until we were sent this app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for review for the spot. And I have to admit, I’m terrible at it. I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried it I’ve tried a bunch of landings myself and the best I can get is what they call a crash landing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which yep which is like you don’t crash but you’ve landed hard enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know wrong enough that you’ve put too much force on certain parts and it’s not proper and it could be unsafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s the crash which I haven’t gotten there’s the proper landing which I haven’t gotten and then in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s the crash landing Which is what I keep getting? But it’s it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an exercise in precision and just like you know practice and self-control. It’s really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The graphics are amazing by the way like this is you know flight sims are always and again I don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about flight sims, but I’ve always noticed that They’ve always been amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the visuals With with the graphics and everything and this is no exception like you play this on a retina iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works on iPhone too, I did it on both, but man, it looks fantastic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially on the Retina iPad. So check out Fsim Space Shuttle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s F-S-I-M, you can search for that in the App Store, or you can go to F-S-I-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with or without the dash, doesn’t matter, F-S-I-M.com. It’s only $4 US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably some similar amount elsewhere. Available for iPhone, iPad, iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch, and Android. out the screenshots check out they have videos it’s not like an arcade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game or anything but if you like flight sims you will like this
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the amazing thing that they did about it is that when you get think about flight sims like that you’re like oh this is gonna be too technical
⏹️ ▶️ John for me I’m not gonna be able to do it there’s gonna be too many buttons it’s gonna be too fidgety the amazing thing about this game is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can start it and just start playing no don’t read a single thing don’t don’t don’t read the
⏹️ ▶️ John help don’t look at the controls, don’t do anything, just start the game and play it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can successfully do what you think is a landing until it tells you that it is technically as a crash landing,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you just jammed the space shuttle into the ground way too fast, and you’ll get a low score and you’ll feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. But the point is, you don’t have no idea what to do. You can immediately pick it up and use it. And the one thing I really liked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this game is that I hate games with tilt controls, but this game, when you do the tilt controls, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen any other games do this, but I think they all should now that I’ve seen it. When you tilt the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture stays level. So like the horizon stays level with your eyes even as you tilt
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad. And tilting the iPad is how you control, you know, like rolling the thing from left to right. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John image on the screen doesn’t tilt. There’s nothing worse than playing like a game, like those driving games where you try to turn to steer the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the whole world tilts when you tilt the screen. I hate all those games. This works in that mode if there’s like an option
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn on that mode if that’s what you prefer. But I vastly prefer the mode where as I turn the iPad, the horizon
⏹️ ▶️ John does not tilt tilt with me unless until the thing is like rolling so it’s that made
⏹️ ▶️ John it immediately accessible i only played like i played just long enough to beat all you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John scores because you guys are terrible but my best is like 7 000 which is terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my best is like 40 000 but then all
⏹️ ▶️ John my all my scores for the 40 000 still were crash landings it is really really hard and
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m playing like with you know i’m not turning on the inclement weather or i did i did random a few times or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a game that if you’re into it, you can pick it up immediately and do it and then
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are obsessive or into flight sims, you could, I don’t know how long it would take you to do this perfectly. Forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John failures, forget about like, you know, this thing doesn’t work and the wind picks up. Just,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you actually do a perfect landing and perfect weather, perfect visibility and no things? I think that would
⏹️ ▶️ John take you a long time. So this is an extremely deep game that nevertheless you can pick up and just immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John play and do something And it’s short. Like, if you do a final approach, it’s like, you know, two minutes worth
⏹️ ▶️ John of gameplay. It’s not something you’re going to be there for seven hours flying across the country and Microsoft flights in later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I was going to say to really quickly kind of wrap up the spot that it’s a really good in-line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game or online, depending on who you ask, in that it’s only a couple minutes long. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike, say, Flight Control, which is a very good game but could last forever if you do well, no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to land that shuttle. So it’s a matter of just a couple of minutes. It really works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well when you just have a couple of minutes to kill, which is when I typically play these kinds of short games.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the brutal thing about the shuttle. No engines. You’re going to land the shuttle because gravity is going to like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, okay, I’m going to go for another, I’m going to come in for another approach. Let me just hit the engines and circle back. Nope. It’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John down like a rock if you don’t do it right. It’s definitely an extra twist on flight simulator
⏹️ ▶️ John landing because I’m accustomed to, okay, I’m coming a little low and a little, let me just boost my engines a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John here to give Nope, there’s none of that. You’re going down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, it’s a glider. Yeah, anyway, so thanks a lot to Fsim Space Shuttle. You can find it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS or Android app stores, fsim.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, when you install Mavericks, do you do a fresh install or do you update? And I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that this is from listener Mike. There’s going to be a series of questions which I will attribute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to him. So do you do a fresh install?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve answered this before. I always do an update install on OS X. I did manually integrate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do it in the classic days. I would do a fresh install and then I would manually bring over all the little files that
⏹️ ▶️ John were part of the system folder because you know, I like to like manually merge it together. But when an
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 came, I realized, Hey, there are way too many files for me to do that manual anymore and I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John them like they knew the back, like the back of my hand, like I knew the classic ones and B once I started doing the update installs
⏹️ ▶️ John and saw that it didn’t lose my settings cause that was the old slam against classic micros was if you tried to do an
⏹️ ▶️ John update install, you could lose some of your settings or would overwrite your preferences with ones and it wasn’t that friendly but
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 has always been pretty good about that. So I always do an update install so much so that I probably have
⏹️ ▶️ John plist files from companies that have long since gone out of business just lurking inside my library folder and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine works fine year after year always do an update install.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have auto app updates on or off?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming they’re asking on the Mac on the Mac. No, I don’t I haven’t. I haven’t really decided
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna do in the Mac. I think probably I won’t just because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to be bothered by the like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John little dialogue that says, Oh, we have an update ready. Like all you need to do is restart, you know, and it will start
⏹️ ▶️ John your install. I would rather be bothered by a little badge on the app store or something like that, then
⏹️ ▶️ John be bothered by the Oh, we’ve already like I know it’s the same amount of bother. It’s just the files on your desk, or it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same kind of nagging, but it makes me feel worse when It says, we’ve already downloaded it. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you need to do is restart, and we’ll start the installer. Somehow that still bothers me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have it set to manual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now for family members’ computers, will you have them on auto?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think I would put a family member that I wasn’t going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if I go visit my parents in Colorado, I think I would put them on auto update after I update them. Because I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be there to, every once in a while, run updates for them. But for a computer in my house,
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t set my wife’s computer to auto update. Like, if I’m not going to be there, I’d rather set an auto update to at least have
⏹️ ▶️ John some confidence that updates are being applied in some fashion at some point. But if I have access to
⏹️ ▶️ John the machine in any way, I’d rather handle that myself just so I can, you know. Like, I wouldn’t put my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife on auto update because what if some update ran and she didn’t like it? Like, I want to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John clear this with her. Whereas, it’s just when I’m far away, I’d rather just have the updates run. So I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a distance thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, what are your thoughts on the yearly release cycle From your review, I got the impression that you have some concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that large, important features will have a hard time fitting in.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was mostly, I talked about in the review and it’s mostly about the idea that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t feel like it has to do yearly updates just because iOS does yearly updates, just
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, as if, if we didn’t have yearly updates, people would say, oh, they’re ignoring the Mac. And the reason I worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about it is because if you’re always in that yearly update cycle, it’s more difficult, not impossible, but more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do features that can’t be done in a year. Because then you’ve got to sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John half do them, all the while you’re tracking the two versions of OS X that
⏹️ ▶️ John slide by underneath you and see which one you can land in. And that is a little bit more uncomfortable. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if we had 18 months, or even two years, we could do a really impressive update.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the middle of that 18-month-to-two-year cycle, we don’t really have anything releasable that’s worthwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s overhead for each release. There’s overhead for the QA process, and putting
⏹️ ▶️ John out the marketing message, and figuring out what it is you’re going to highlight. Especially now that the thing is free,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you’re foregoing any income that you could have gotten in there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d be perfectly fine with them sort of slackening off a little bit, but I think Apple thinks that they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do every year you get a new iOS, and every year you get a new Mac OS, and they’re both free.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I understand why they’re doing it. I just think it’s actually going to delay some interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John new features more so than they would be if the OS X releases were allowed to come out sort of as they naturally wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That makes sense. Now, can you estimate how much time you took on your review?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you guys know and listeners of the podcast know because you just track based on when the whining began about working
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like, last year for Mountain Lion, I had a huge amount written before
⏹️ ▶️ John I ever went to WREDC. This year, didn’t have anything written for it. I had lots of notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, of things to look into. But did we know anything before WWDC? I don’t think we knew anything
⏹️ ▶️ John of substance. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t even have builds. We didn’t have a name. We didn’t have, oh, here’s what’s going to be in the OS. And insider hints were thin on the ground.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there wasn’t in all the stories about, here’s what might be in 10.9. There wasn’t even the whole 10.9 is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be about energy saving. Even that vague rumor was not in
⏹️ ▶️ John the air before WWDC. So I didn’t have much. So I guess you could probably track
⏹️ ▶️ John it from, as soon as the old release is done, or not as soon as the old release is done, I haven’t created my new
⏹️ ▶️ John document for 10.10 yet, but I guess when I do, I’ll mention it on the air. Once I have anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to put in a document, I’ll make it and I’ll start adding stuff to it. But I didn’t start doing real work
⏹️ ▶️ John until WWDC. And then it just worked on basically straight through from what, when was WWDC, June, July,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, until October. And so when did I work on it? after the kids were in bed
⏹️ ▶️ John and Towards the run up to the end I got a stole a couple of weekend days when my Wife would
⏹️ ▶️ John take the kids out somewhere during the day and I get some work done during the day as well So I don’t I don’t know how you’d add up the hours
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as long as it seems because again, this is not my full-time job as many people don’t know It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I do on nights and weekends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you just hibernate for the entire rest of the year
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, maybe I’ll actually post something to my blog again could happen
⏹️ ▶️ John If my life is, wake up, get the kids out of the house, feed them breakfast, get them off to school,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to work, pick the kids up, make them dinner, get them to bed, go to work
⏹️ ▶️ John on a review, go to sleep, I can’t sustain that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need downtime. I desperately need some kind of downtime where I just sit like a vegetable and don’t do something with
⏹️ ▶️ John my brain. Sometimes at the end of a long day of work, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use my brain anymore. not at work. I’m not just like totally my thumbs. I’m using my brain and programming
⏹️ ▶️ John like that can that can burn you out. And plus, and sometimes like you want to have that downtime. I’m sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Marco and Casey both do this, like where you spend the day programming, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John come home and that break where you’re not doing anything, where you’re just making dinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re just, you know, watching some dumb TV show or whatever. That’s when your brain
⏹️ ▶️ John is working on the programming problems that you encounter that day. So when you come in the next morning, now you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John much better approach to that problem. And it maybe occurred to you during dinner or in the shower in the morning or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And if you didn’t have that downtime, if you just sat there plugging away at the problem, you never would have come up
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. It’s almost like sometimes like, you know what, I should have stopped working sooner. Because as soon as I stopped working, and just let
⏹️ ▶️ John my brain chew on that, it became obvious to me, oh, what are you doing? That’s stupid, do it this way. And then you go in the next morning,
⏹️ ▶️ John all ready for that stuff to just dump out of your fingers. You’re like, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, done, done, done. I worked on this for three hours before
⏹️ ▶️ John I went home yesterday and got nowhere. And all I needed to do was stop working, let my brain stew for a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple hours, go to sleep, wake up, and 15 minutes of work. And it’s like, yep, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I should have done last night. So that’s the way I feel. And if I try to take that
⏹️ ▶️ John time when my brain would be working on work programming problems and say, OK, nope, switch gears. Now you’ve got to work on this whole other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Work, work, work. You burn out. So I really try
⏹️ ▶️ John to save the crunch time for just a couple of weeks or maybe a month of crunch time
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like no every waking moment I have to do and even then I try to give myself downtime even if I’m sacrificing
⏹️ ▶️ John sleep like okay, I gotta stop writing for the night. It’s 11 o’clock. Let me watch an hour and a half of TV and then go to bed
⏹️ ▶️ John because I need that hour and a half to like decompress.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. There’s also a little bit of feedback from Michael James Boyle. I guess this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the ebook. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, asking about like how the ebook stores handle updates and how Amazon is very
⏹️ ▶️ John bad at it and the question really is if you do stuff to your ebook and you make notes and you make highlights
⏹️ ▶️ John and you do stuff like that and then you update the ebook how well does each ebook store handle that updating
⏹️ ▶️ John process do you lose all your notes all your bookmarks and all your highlights and everything or does it
⏹️ ▶️ John try to incorporate them and so he gave the answer for how iBooks works and he said
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not lose everything you have it tries its best to preserve it and doesn’t do a very good job
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s better than deleting everything so even highlights of passages of text that have not changed
⏹️ ▶️ John the highlights will be off because they’ll be shifted by other texts or other things but the highlights
⏹️ ▶️ John will be there and the notes will be there and so you could like in theory if this book hasn’t changed that much manually
⏹️ ▶️ John fix them which is vastly preferable to wiping out everything but it’s not as great as like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh we figured out they added a paragraph here so I’m just gonna shift all my other highlights down because I can find where they begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it’s not like running diff intelligently and trying to figure out, oh, this was inserted here and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifted everything over. Yeah, it sounds like it’s literally just like storing a text offset and length
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight. Yeah, and which is better than nothing. I mean, like, for example, one of the updates to my iBooks thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I did was I changed all the, you know, the primes and double primes into curly quotes and, you know, smart
⏹️ ▶️ John apostrophes and everything. And that will totally, if it was trying to say, to track the text, if the text has any
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of contraction in it or quotation mark, the text is different. Like that would totally throw
⏹️ ▶️ John off any kind of, oh, I’ll fake diff algorithm, unless the diff algorithm was also smart enough to know, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this character is more or less equivalent to that one. So it’s very difficult to do this correctly, but I think Apple’s solution of
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it badly, but attempting it is way better than what used to be the Kindle solution. I’m not sure if it still is
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you lose everything. No trace, tough luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, all right, let’s wrap it up for the week. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and F Sim Space Shuttle, and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, is accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann N-T Marco Armin, Before the show started, Aaron was
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann in the office with me, and so I played the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to hear what awful drivel you were putting all of our beloved listeners through. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she said to me something to the effect of, how come you never get to pick the music?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because your music’s terrible. Speaking of your terrible music, there’s somebody in the chat room named
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Pills who is asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what my opinion of Dave Matthews Band is. And I think I’ve talked about it before, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to cut this out of the actual show, but my opinion of Dave Matthews Band is that they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a jam band. I know that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey contentious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position to take among DMB fans, but people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not really fans of jam bands rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey idea of what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. Are you really going hipster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on us right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people who are not jam band fans think that what makes a jam band a jam band is that they play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really long songs. And that’s not really it. happens to be a side effect they usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do play long songs although you know we’re not talking like half-hour songs usually that that might happen like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once every three years that a band might play a three or you know a 35 minute song you know most fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs are like eight minutes long you know and so by pop standards yeah that’s long but you know we’re not talking like half hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every night but a a jam band is really a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about improvisation and and style It really is a genre,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily a type, if that makes sense. And so there aren’t that many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them that anyone’s ever heard of. There’s a very, very small number. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Dave Matthews Band is really a rock slash, not really pop, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rock band that happens to play their songs a little bit longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live sometimes. But for the most part, you’re still hearing like, for the most part, you’re hearing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album version of the song every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, it doesn’t vary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey much as a real jam.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh angry right now. Oh, we got it. We got it I’m so angry. I’m about to get in my car and drive
⏹️ ▶️ John by Marcos definition I think Paul and storm are a jam band, but neither one of you know Paul and storm are so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann songs
⏹️ ▶️ John Improvisation changes every night Paul and storm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so angry right now. All right now that I’m all punchy. Let’s start the show Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so angry. You’re so wrong. Oh, you’re so wrong. Anyway, okay, so we have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of follow up this show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthews is always just kind of like asleep. Like he always I don’t know if he if he’s drunk, like like the Eddie Vedder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style of singing or what? But it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying so hard to be the better man and I’m about to lose my self control.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is Eddie Vedder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Like jam bands are, you know, a lot of it is from fish, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, overall the jam band culture is very like very like happy upbeat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time um whereas dave matthews band is like hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey virginia he’s so just down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and drunk and he never seems like he’s having any fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my god i am so angry right now uh all right i’m not engaging in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you anymore. I’m so f***ing fired up.