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63: I Hold My Children To A Higher Standard

ATP T-shirts (hurry!), average gamer age and game genres falling out of favor, Facebook App Links, and Apple’s 30% commission vs. Amazon and customers.

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

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What the hell’s on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey live stream right now that everyone’s freaking out about?

⏹️ ▶️ John Warm it up, Chris! I’m about to… We’re not live yet, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We do have some follow-up. Something happened a few hours ago, thank goodness, because otherwise this would have been a short show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, we do have some follow-up. So John, would you like to tell us about how people do or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not play games?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week I mentioned the average age of gamers and none of us knew what it was,

⏹️ ▶️ John if someone wrote it in the chat room I didn’t notice so I apologize for that but I

⏹️ ▶️ John looked it up you know it’s not hard to find this information so here are the stats this was in regards to both of you

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that you had grown out of playing games and me saying that’s ridiculous because most people who play games are even

⏹️ ▶️ John older than you or adults wait hold on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither of us said we grew out of games that that’s going to get us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some feedback which it already has uh which is not accurate

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember the exact quote but it was something Like you just felt like you were out of it. But anyway, everyone responding thinks that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what you said. So obviously there was a miscommunication. And you can feel free to clarify because they keep saying, I agree with Casey and Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ John I also grew out of games like we’re seeing those responses again. That doesn’t mean that’s what you said. But I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s what we both said was was that we didn’t see games correctly from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, that we didn’t see games as like a juvenile thing that you would grow out of, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather we played games for a long time. And then we, you know, in recent years or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after we left college or whatever, we just didn’t choose to spend our time playing games or didn’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to play games anymore. So it’s not necessarily a growing out of it, because that implies that it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a juvenile thing. It’s more that we just chose not to spend our time doing that anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MR. HOFFMAN Yeah, I would agree with that. Our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities shifted. MR. HOFFMAN Right. It’s like the same result, but with a different reason and with less judgment in the reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John MR. LASCARIS Initially, one of you said, I don’t know, I guess I just grew out of it, and maybe that was a joke. later you

⏹️ ▶️ John did say that, at least Marco said that he didn’t think they were juvenile or anything, but everyone latched on to

⏹️ ▶️ John the growing out of it angle. But anyway, here is the information I was trying to get across. It’s the average age of gamers, and

⏹️ ▶️ John none of us knew what it was. The average age of game players according to the Entertainment Software

⏹️ ▶️ John Association, which is a trade association that tracks these type of things for video games, is 31 years old.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the United States stats only, I think it’s only US. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John the average age of the US population is 37.2 so yes the average age

⏹️ ▶️ John of the people in the United States is slightly older but I think that makes sense considering video games were introduced

⏹️ ▶️ John partially into the lives of many people who are alive today so you don’t have a sample you know everyone alive wasn’t born when

⏹️ ▶️ John video games were introduced uh the uh the ratios are 52% male 48% female

⏹️ ▶️ John and out of the most frequent game purchasers the ratios are exactly even 50 50 male female

⏹️ ▶️ John They say 59% of Americans play video games. And here are some stats and breakdowns.

⏹️ ▶️ John Women over 18 are 36%. Boys 18 or younger are 17%. So twice as

⏹️ ▶️ John many women, twice as many adult women play games as juvenile boys do. And they

⏹️ ▶️ John say 51% of US homes have a game console. And there’s an average of two game consoles in each house

⏹️ ▶️ John that has any. So like I said, most game players are more or less our age.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m older than 31. guys are also both older than 31, right? I am 31. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. So you are exactly the average age of a gamer. And I think it makes sense because our

⏹️ ▶️ John people your age, Marco and my age are basically like video games were invented more or less when we were young. By

⏹️ ▶️ John the time we were old enough to play them, they were popular. We played them, we grew up,

⏹️ ▶️ John we continue to play them. Whereas people who are, you know, 30 years old before

⏹️ ▶️ John the Atari 2600 was introduced are much less likely, I think, to have gotten into it. So we are sort of the first generation of people

⏹️ ▶️ John to have grown up with games and it makes sense that we continue to play them, whereas the people who are sort of ahead of

⏹️ ▶️ John us may have never gotten into it at all. And I think I made all these points on the last show, people talking about growing

⏹️ ▶️ John out of games and stuff, and tweeting about it and so on and saying, well, I don’t do it as much

⏹️ ▶️ John now as I used to. You may grow out of the games that you played when you were a child in the same way

⏹️ ▶️ John you grow out of the books that you read. You don’t read little golden books anymore. You don’t watch Hanna-Barbera cartoons

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Like there are many things you did as a child that you grew out of, but video games are a medium

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re fairly diverse. And so even though you, of course you don’t have the time to play games that you

⏹️ ▶️ John used to, but you don’t have time to do anything. You don’t have time to just pick any sort of leisure time activity. You do, of course

⏹️ ▶️ John you have more time for that when you’re a kid. But as you get older, you will like different games, just like you like

⏹️ ▶️ John different movies and different television shows and different books. And that I think is natural. And I think a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the people who say, well, I grew out of games. all I do now is and then they

⏹️ ▶️ John insert like the three games that they play but I barely have time for that well yes of course you barely have time but if you’re still playing games

⏹️ ▶️ John like that then you didn’t really grow out of games just grew out of the games that you played as a child it’s true that some people

⏹️ ▶️ John never go out of the games they played as a child maybe they played Super Mario Bros as a child they love Super Mario Bros to this day and they

⏹️ ▶️ John keep playing it that’s fine too same thing with books I mean how many adults out there read young adult books

⏹️ ▶️ John as like you know and love them like the Harry Potter series is a good example or a lot of these things even like the

⏹️ ▶️ John Hungary games and stuff like that. A lot of these books are technically young adult books, but many adults enjoy them. Did they not grow

⏹️ ▶️ John out of that? Should they have grown out of books? Should they have grown out of those specific books? I don’t think it’s an important distinction,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the idea that games are something that most people played when they

⏹️ ▶️ John were a kid and don’t play anymore, I think, is not borne out by the statistics, at least in the United States.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do people count as gamers if they just have like Angry Birds and throw it on their phones versus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a console game or a PC game like is there a distinction and should there be a distinction?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe the maybe the answer is no but but should there be a distinction between like people who have a couple of casual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on their phone versus people who who like you know own dedicated gaming hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have bought like a 40 or 50 dollar game before.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re making those kind of distinctions I think they consider all games games and so would I like I don’t if

⏹️ ▶️ John you say like well I don’t play games all I do is and then you insert some iOS game that you obsessively play in every moment of spare time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, you play games. They do add information on consoles,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you would consider that’s not casual, right? I don’t know if that’s still true. But this thing is saying 51% of homes have a game console in them. Someone

⏹️ ▶️ John in those homes is playing those games, right? And so it’s not like, well, 51% of

⏹️ ▶️ John homes have game consoles. But the only people who play game consoles are the 17% of gamers who are male and

⏹️ ▶️ John younger than 18. That seems unlikely. But anyway, I count them all as games. There’s iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are plenty of legitimate games on iOS. I mean, maybe they’re not counting like Solitaire and Minesweeper, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe these days those have sort of fallen by the wayside. But yeah, I don’t I don’t think there’s a useful

⏹️ ▶️ John distinction between. That’s not a real game. That’s like that’s not a real book. That’s just a I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John a mystery novel, a romance novel. Do these not count as real books or something? It has to be, you know, Tolstoy.

⏹️ ▶️ John A game is a game is a game. Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I do have a question for you. Does Tina get involved in any of the video gaming around your house?

⏹️ ▶️ John She plays games on her phone a lot And I think that’s where she plays the majority of her games But at various

⏹️ ▶️ John times she has been very into as an adult very very into both console games and computer games

⏹️ ▶️ John But these days anytime she I don’t want to reveal her dirty gaming secrets,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Many certain iOS games that have the ability to get their

⏹️ ▶️ John hooks into people have gotten their hooks into her And so she is very susceptible to that. I don’t approve of

⏹️ ▶️ John most of the games that she plays, but she definitely does play

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about your kids because I know your son last I heard is really into Minecraft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that still the case?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes Minecraft has destroyed his life and ours Yeah, he had a very

⏹️ ▶️ John diverse gaming education up until the age of you know, I guess nine

⏹️ ▶️ John Sometime in his ninth year of life, Minecraft came in and destroyed everything else

⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with his life. He is obsessed with Minecraft. Has he played any game other than Minecraft

⏹️ ▶️ John recently? I don’t think so. He’s totally obsessed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And neither your son nor daughter got into the Wii U very much?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, that’s the other… when his friends come over, he plays the Wii U with his friends because I guess,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Minecraft is not as much of a social game. So he does still play that and I assume then

⏹️ ▶️ John the next Recently, I’ve been playing games that he can’t play with me but I’m assuming the next game that we can all play

⏹️ ▶️ John together comes out he’ll play with me like the next Zelda game or What do you call it

⏹️ ▶️ John God, I can’t even remember the name anymore cuz now the last Guardian if that ever comes out He’ll play that with me

⏹️ ▶️ John But he’s not clamoring to play those games We have all these game consoles hooked up and I’ve been playing games on them more than he has

⏹️ ▶️ John So but yeah Like it’s it’s like it’s natural for kids his age to get obsessed with things

⏹️ ▶️ John like this I mean just ask Marco with his total annihilation units and everything you get really at a

⏹️ ▶️ John certain point You get really into one game like yeah You like lots of games within a certain certain game comes and it just absorbs

⏹️ ▶️ John you And this has happened with Minecraft my daughter. I keep trying to get her to play games Many

⏹️ ▶️ John many times on many different consoles and on the computer She’ll play a little bit of kind of casual

⏹️ ▶️ John games on iOS, but she’s just not into it I don’t want to really push it but I keep putting them in front of her.

⏹️ ▶️ John I actually had her play Monument Valley and that, I think, was about her speed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still haven’t played that yet. She just turned seven.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did buy that game and have not even opened it. Like now, ever since iOS 6, I believe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco added that new badge on apps so that you could tell if you have an app that you’ve never launched before,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve really been shamed by those badges on my phone because it’s all games.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s I probably right now my phone probably have like seven or eight games that I bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last six months that I haven’t even launched yet like I want to be a gamer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in theory but I never decide to spend the time doing

⏹️ ▶️ John that Monument Valley is actually a great example of an application that takes advantage

⏹️ ▶️ John of retina if the cloud doesn’t matter for games who cares half of those are low res 3d things

⏹️ ▶️ John scaled up to but this monument Valley has graphics that really benefit from

⏹️ ▶️ John from the retina resolution because they’re just such beautiful little finely detailed

⏹️ ▶️ John things it’s not it’s not like a typical 3d game with stuff flying all over the place it’s just you know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John very precise and it looks great in retina I think the game itself I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more of a casual game I think it is very beautiful and interesting but it’s way

⏹️ ▶️ John too easy for anyone who’s actual you know experienced gamer and plays games a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a little bit short. I don’t really care about length. That’s not like I’m buying it for the length. If it was short and fulfilling, I feel like it just

⏹️ ▶️ John there. There should have been a little bit more there in terms of the overall experience. Maybe if it was harder

⏹️ ▶️ John and I had more of a challenge, but I recommend it for lots of people who, you know, who find the games that I

⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy too challenging. So I think that’s why I had my daughter play because like, well, you’ll be able to play this.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be able to do well and it will challenge you a little bit. I think you’d be bored by tomorrow, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you still just launch Just look at the graphics because like I said it is it’s the rare game that

⏹️ ▶️ John I Can’t even imagine on a non redness green Being half as nice-looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you said that it’s probably way too easy for an experienced gamer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m now a little concerned that I won’t be able to handle it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to try it. I haven’t bought it yet. I keep forgetting about it Anytime I’m sitting in front of my phone or iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just goofing off and I need to get it

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I may I don’t know like maybe my things are skewed because I have seen tweets from people talking about like

⏹️ ▶️ John not so Much getting stuck but having difficulty and I can’t tell if they’re joking So maybe my idea of what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult and what’s not is totally skewed So one of you should just play it like just play through two levels I’ll take you five minutes and just tell me

⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t that like there’s almost no choice. Like it leads you it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John It is very linear. There’s not many places that you can go wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the same could be said of Journey, but like, it’s different. Anyway, try it. Homework for you, too.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I try the first two levels and it takes me 35 minutes, should I not admit

⏹️ ▶️ John that? It will not. The first level will take you 30 seconds, the second level should take you about two minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more quick theory about gaming and losing interest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in gaming over time, and maybe this is just me, I don’t know, and John, I’m sure you’re going to have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good explanation for this. I’ve found that one of the biggest factors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that got me out of gaming, and maybe it’s just coincidence because it overlapped my age progression and my work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco progression, but one of the things I think got me out of gaming is so many of the types

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of games that I enjoyed fell out of favor and we would get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost none of them made anymore. So for example, I love 2D platformer games.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonic, Mario, any of the good 2D platformers, I love those. almost nobody makes 2D platformers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore and like incorrect well hold on hold on and I did play that awesome one on Xbox live the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shadow complex I think it’s called I did play that one and loved it and so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know for a while and maybe maybe now the indie scene is getting this back fortunately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for a while like once the 3d systems came out the PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the n64 the Saturn It became like 2D

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platformers basically went extinct for a while. And same thing happened with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RTS games where I loved RTS games as you mentioned my Total Annihilation phase earlier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Loved RTS games through my through almost my entire teenage hood

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s a word. And then RTS has kind of stopped being made very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well after maybe 2003 2004-ish. Like Supreme Commander

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a big one that was awesome, but nobody bought it. And then they kind of went by the wayside as fantasy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and MMOs kind of took over. And so that kind of bothered me too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now iOS, and I also love turn-based strategy games, but those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very few and far between, and are almost never commercial hits.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now with iOS, some of the best casual games,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they used to be great on iOS. get them for like five bucks and they were awesome. And now they’ve all been ruined with freemium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and free to play and all that crap. And so I wonder, like, you know, is this just me? Am I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I just kind of missing the new stuff because I stopped looking around like I do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with PHP? Or is this like, is this a legitimate reason why I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of kicked out of gaming for a while? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there’s two there’s two things here. One, there are genres that become

⏹️ ▶️ John more and less popular over time. Think of it in terms of movies like murder mystery movies where the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John plot of the movie is someone is murdered and you have to figure out who it is. You don’t see a lot of them anymore. You do see some of

⏹️ ▶️ John them but like that, that genre has become less popular over time. So that does happen and it comes in cycles.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know what’s popular now, it may not be what’s popular 50 years from now and goes around circles.

⏹️ ▶️ John On that front, by the way, the reason I said incorrect for the 2d games is right now there’s a massive renaissance in 2d platformers,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t particularly like because I’m not into 2D platformers, but they’re all over the place. And not just indie games. Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ John has been putting out brand new 2D Mario games that I enjoy way less

⏹️ ▶️ John than the 3D versions, and there’s just a constant stream of them. And those are not indie things. Those are like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re Nintendo flagship titles and tons of indie ones. So if you’re into 2D platforming,

⏹️ ▶️ John like you cannot throw a rock without hitting a 2D platformer. But one of the genres

⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned, real-time strategy, the type of real-time strategy game you’re talking about, like isometric,

⏹️ ▶️ John sprite-based, you know, 2D map kind of thing, like even before the age

⏹️ ▶️ John of 3D. Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, hang on a second. Total Annihilation was none of those, by the way. Go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, I don’t know what vintage your real-time strategy games are, but yes, they eventually went 3D, and you can, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, they became less popular. A lot of the reason they became less popular

⏹️ ▶️ John is because computers became more able to do the genres that became more popular. So once first-person shooters

⏹️ ▶️ John started to take over the entire universe, You could do any genre in first-person perspective. So there was first-person

⏹️ ▶️ John everything Real-time strategy games became less popular. They’re still out there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s still Starcraft there There’s the things that they’ve kind of you know that same

⏹️ ▶️ John type of perspective You’ll see not that you know Diablo is not a real-time strategy game But it’s a similar perspective and that you’re looking down on like

⏹️ ▶️ John what looks like a little board and clicking on people and doing things Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John If you get really into a particular game and a particular genre and a particular implementation

⏹️ ▶️ John of that genre because people like oh I like real-time strategy games, but I don’t like the ones that do X Y & Z I like the ones that like

⏹️ ▶️ John when I was I think I talked about myth on a past show The about how much I liked it was so different than other RTS

⏹️ ▶️ John games If you’re into those specifics, you may have to wait for another one of those things to come around But what I would

⏹️ ▶️ John say is that the things you like about that type of game Exist in other games and

⏹️ ▶️ John you shouldn’t really be married to the genre like if you just like watching murder mysteries It’s like, what is

⏹️ ▶️ John it that I like about murder mysteries? Do I like the fact that someone gets killed and I could get the same thing out of a horror

⏹️ ▶️ John movie? Do I like the fact that there’s suspense and I could get it out of a different kind of thriller or am

⏹️ ▶️ John I just looking for a puzzle that I have to solve and instead I should be watching the M. Night Shyamalan movies with a stupid twist? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John like what you were getting out of those games, the things you enjoy, systemizing things, micromanaging

⏹️ ▶️ John things, you know, do you enjoy like working the tech trees? There’s a lot of games you can play now, perhaps like a

⏹️ ▶️ John role playing game with a big crafting tree and like character development, like you may be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John get the same experiences out of different types of games. Or it may be that you just really like real-time strategy games and you just wait

⏹️ ▶️ John until something like that becomes popular again. That’s conceivable too. And like I said, it’s the same thing at

⏹️ ▶️ John every other medium, you know, what kind of books are popular now, what kind of movies, what kind of TV shows. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, look at TV for crying out loud. If you are totally into formulaic half an hour sitcoms, it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ John So hard to find now, but it’s like everyone has to to have some sort of twist or angle and the one hour drama is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John hugely popular now. The one hour drama was like an aberration, you know, 2030 years

⏹️ ▶️ John ago and now it’s like everything has to be this gritty one hour drama like they make a show about sleepy hollow and it’s like this big gritty

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, you know, and whereas like the old sitcoms are they used to be everywhere and now

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re very rare and each one of them has some weird twist about them. So I think that’s part of it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, gaming is not as broad as books, movies or TVs, not yet anyway, but it’s getting close.

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably something out there that you would get the same type of enjoyment out of. And who knows, like, maybe if you’re like, oh, they don’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John murder mystery movies anymore. All of a sudden you start going to see like, you know, goofy comedies,

⏹️ ▶️ John you may find out, hey, I never watched goofy comedies before, but I really enjoy them. So there’s there’s a lot out there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the funny thing for me is to take this aside just a smidge, is that I find

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I get really into certain games, but only for a very small window

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time. And most recently it’s been iOS games. But I think I mentioned last episode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I might have that I played Metal Gear Solid the whole way through. I used to love the Zelda games.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I played Ocarina of Time and I don’t think I ever had whatever it was for the Wii. But I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey find these games that I just am obsessed with. So I’m looking at my iPhone and I only have a handful of games on there. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right when the iPhone came out, I played the crap out flight control forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When The Incident came out, I loved that. Letterpress loved that. Tiny Wings.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ramp Champ by The Icon Factory, which is a much better game than a lot of people gave it credit for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Threes, when that came out recently. So all these games, I’m just madly in love with them, and I’ll play

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to death. And I don’t like what I do when I find a song I like, and then I just never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look back. So I haven’t played Threes in like a month, and I was playing it nonstop for for two or three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks. And maybe that’s just my personality. But I don’t know. It’s just the way I’ve approached gaming lately.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re in the middle of a letterpress game against me, Casey. So anytime you want to move like

⏹️ ▶️ John six months,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to say I haven’t opened that that app in forever. It’s not that it’s bad. Like I still do enjoy it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I open it, but I just never think about it anymore. And I think I heard Marco say that you’re the same way. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get these obsessions, but then just as quickly as I get the obsession, then it’s done.

⏹️ ▶️ John why like with my limited time as an adult and a parent and all this other stuff, the type of game that I

⏹️ ▶️ John gravitate to are in two kinds. One is the kind that I can just spend for a couple of minutes of fun, like whatever. Let’s say these

⏹️ ▶️ John asynchronous turn based games like letterpress or words with friends and threes, even though it’s single player, you know, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, whatever, just some quick fun. And the other type of game I like is the kind kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John the like true detective or the new popular thing of one hour dramas that have a season long arc that

⏹️ ▶️ John that that ends and then the cast changes. There’s a couple of shows doing that now, and that

⏹️ ▶️ John I think is a good model because people like I don’t want to invest in the show that could go on some X number of seasons that might not have

⏹️ ▶️ John a satisfying ending or whatever, like where I met your mother or how I met you.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even watch that show. But it’s like, well, if people don’t have a lot of time, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John make a one hour thing are a one season arc that you will can consume

⏹️ ▶️ John as a thing and be satisfied with. And so the video games that I, the non-casual video

⏹️ ▶️ John games that I play are ones that are going to give me an experience for a defined amount of time and it’s not going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John open-ended and I’m going to play through it. I mean, not necessarily that they’re story-based games, because Journey is not really a story-based game,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s two hours of gameplay. In and out, like that is the perfect, you know, it’s cheap, I can get it as a

⏹️ ▶️ John digital download, amazingly enjoyable for me, loved it, two hours, done. And even something like The Last

⏹️ ▶️ John of Us, I think I only, I don’t remember how many hours I put into that, maybe 16 or 11 or 20, I don’t remember what the stat was, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a little bit longer, but it’s a single player. There’s a multiplayer aspect that I don’t care about single player

⏹️ ▶️ John game with a story. I play it as a beginning, middle and end and I’m done. It’s not like I feel guilty like,

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I never go back to it. Yeah, I finished it. I played the game like there is a it is a unit of entertainment.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just happens to be a longer unit than a movie, but actually a similar length to watching True Detective, for example.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by our friends at fracture. fracture prints your photo in

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco or desk into the box. Their prices start at just $12 for a 5x5 inch print. I’ve actually used these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let me deviate from the script for a second. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fractures all over the place basically. I’m looking at two right now above my desk that are like roughly, I don’t know, 17x12, something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. And then I have these app icon fractures up on the wall in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco office for all the major apps that I’ve worked on or built. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a little 5x5 size for that, 12 bucks for that, it’s amazing. And it’s nice, it’s like you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a frame, in fact I don’t think you even could frame them, well you could try, but you don’t need a frame,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like the picture itself is printed on glass and it is a complete product already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you look into like buying a frame or getting framed, this is really a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive improvement and massive cost savings. It looks nice, it looks modern, and the print quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fantastic. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, let me actually, let me interrupt you. I was at your house recently and got to see fractures for the very first time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep meaning to order one or order several actually of my Instagram, some of my Instagram pictures,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t freaking pick which ones I want, which is a personal problem. But anyway, I saw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ones at your house and I expected them to look good and they, or even great and they looked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than great. They really, really, really genuinely look awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m very happy with them. That’s why I keep, like even though, some of these I’ve ordered you know outside of coupon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco code times and it just I still order them because I like them anyway all right so fracture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every fracture is handmade and check for quality by their small team in Gainesville Florida see there isn’t a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole lot of great stuff that comes out of Florida but but this is definitely one of those things and Merlin of course this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the thinnest it’s the thinnest lightest and most elegant way to display your favorite photo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you can get 20 off by using coupon code ATP which also lets them know that you came

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the show So please do that. Once again, this is Fracture. Go to fractureme.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use coupon code ATP to get 20% off. Really fantastic stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Love their prints. Once again, fractureme.com. ATP coupon code. Thank you very much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should take note that we have finally, the three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, figured out a design that we felt was worthy of printing a t-shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mostly because we wanted to get it out for WWDC like all the the cool kids do and we are running out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time. So we have t-shirts available for sale. We are recording

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on the last day of April of 2014 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are going to be available for purchase until May 11. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something like that. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. They have a little over week. So we’ll talk about this one more time and only one more time on the next episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are $19. They have basically a stylized version of our show art on the front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a little surprise on the back. I don’t know if you want to talk about that or you want to leave it as a small surprise. That’s up to you, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you should check it out. I think you should go to the final URL of the thing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco teespring.com slash accidental. However, we made a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcut in case you don’t know how to spell teespring. If you go to ATP dot FM slash shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will redirect you to the shirt. So atp.fm slash shirt. You must buy this shirt within the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly 10 days or so. And actually, by the time this episode comes out, it’s gonna be more like eight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. So hurry up and buy the shirt. We’ve already sold a lot through past the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal. So this is awesome. Thank you very much. And so these will definitely be printed and made.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They will make it in time for the US for WWDC probably. Internationally,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends on where you live. We’ve heard reports of some of them coming right before some of them coming right after so we can’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guarantee internationally but in the US they should be there in time for WDC and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yeah so check it out teespring.com accidental or ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco FM shirt

⏹️ ▶️ John and keep in mind that since we are so it’s so difficult for us to pick a

⏹️ ▶️ John design that we like if we have shirts next year it’s very likely that it will be a different design.

⏹️ ▶️ John So even if you are some living internationally or can’t or aren’t going to

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC at all anyway, don’t worry so much about whether you’re gonna get it in time for this year’s WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you order it now you’ll have it for next year’s WWDC and next year’s shirt if there is one will very likely

⏹️ ▶️ John be different. So this may be the only time to buy this shirt. You can decide whether that’s a good or bad thing when you go

⏹️ ▶️ John look at the shirt but please do keep that in mind because I tons of people keep asking me, they want

⏹️ ▶️ John to order hypercritical shirts. And I did hypercritical shirts already, and I’m not sure I’m doing them again

⏹️ ▶️ John anytime soon, if ever. And those people should have ordered when they were available for sale. So don’t let this happen to you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Order them when they’re available for sale.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I also wonder, for those who are international, I have not tried this myself, obviously, but I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you could, you know, arrange with your hotel, hey, would you accept a package for me or so on and so forth. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might even be able to get it delivered to your hotel.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that is a possibility. The hotels usually will charge for that, but I know it is possible,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I did that one year, to get a shirt delivered to a hotel at the conference. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look into it anyway. And also, because, so Teespring is kind of like Kickstarter, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the buying period for a limited time, and then they do the whole run at once, they print them all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. You can’t order them after that. So it is very unlikely, I think, that we will get our act together

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make a new design that we like in the next year. So definitely,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want a shirt anytime between now and next May, you should probably buy this one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so we were actually, I was a little nervous about not having a lot to talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about on the show. And then just today, Facebook decided to try

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own hand at xCallback URL, which was surprising for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me anyway. So they came out with Facebook app links. And I should probably point out, I guess it’s the Pulse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is it? It’s not a subsidiary of Facebook. I’m not familiar with what Pulse is, but I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came from there. Do you guys know what that is? OK, good talk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, so apparently it’s some subsection, for lack of a better way of phrasing it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Facebook. And they came up with AppLinks. And so one of you guys put this in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, and it’s probably for the best if I read this very quickly. Quote, and this is from their website. links,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Facebook wants to standardize deep linking to native apps by using special metadata attached,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, added via HTML. The basic premise of app links is that if a user taps on a link

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a mobile device, and that link belongs to a website that in turn offers the same content

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a native app with better features than a web view, the link could automatically redirect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the user to the app if installed on the app store with support for deep linking to content

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the app. The goal according to Facebook, actually I guess it isn’t from this site, anyway, the goal according to Facebook is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to provide the best experience to a user who clicks a link on a mobile device with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey features to control what happens when a link is clicked on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. Is that from Federico’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey write-up actually?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it is. Okay. So this, I pasted in this paragraph, like first of all, I saw this Facebook app

⏹️ ▶️ John link thing like 15 minutes before the show started, so I know very little about it, but I pasted in this thing because it sounds

⏹️ ▶️ John like something I would never ever want. The idea that I’m on a website

⏹️ ▶️ John and I tap on a link and it shoves me, it takes me out of the web browser, puts me into an app and shoves me into some deep

⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the app. I think the example in the video was like, say you’re on a website and you see a movie that you like and you want to know if it’s playing

⏹️ ▶️ John towards you and you tap on it and it launches a movie app and takes me into there. And about like, I know that their example is like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s annoying to have to go back to the home screen, launch your ticket buying app, do the same search you just did on the

⏹️ ▶️ John web. But like, if I’m in a website and I found the thing, I would like to buy it there on the web.

⏹️ ▶️ John I hate being, I hate that little banner that comes down and says, hey, I know you’re looking at our website, but did you know we have

⏹️ ▶️ John an app? You should try that. The whole idea that like the app could provide better features than the web

⏹️ ▶️ John view. Look, if I’m on a web browser, I’m doing stuff. I want to just do it on the web. Like I’m not saying that native

⏹️ ▶️ John apps don’t have a place, but if I’m navigating around the web, the last thing I want is to be chucked into an application,

⏹️ ▶️ John deep linked or otherwise. So I do not like the idea of this thing. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming people commenting on this about like the interapp communication thing that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS will do something about iOS eight. We’ll do something about it or whatever. We’ll we’ll talk about that in our WWC prediction

⏹️ ▶️ John show in the future, I’m sure. Uh, but that’s about native apps talking to each other and cooperating,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, multiple native apps coordinating to get a single job done. And I guess the web browser is one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John other native apps, but if I’m on a webpage, like, I don’t like, I don’t like those two things being,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like switching between those two things. I don’t care how coordinated they can be about where I jump back

⏹️ ▶️ John and forth. I question whether jumping out at all is ever the right thing to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and see, generally speaking, I would agree with you that if I’m in the browser,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s probably a deliberate action. And I’ve and I want to remain in the browser and the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app banners, whatever they’re called at the top, they just get in the way and are very annoying, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the case that the app is already installed. Well, maybe less so if you’re trying to like advertise that you have an app.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, the one time where I think this makes a lot of sense is if, for example, for some reason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve browsed something in Safari and I end up on some really heavy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey media app. Let’s take Spotify, for example. I’m probably going to want to listen to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever this song or playlist or what have you is in Spotify’s app rather

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than in mobile Safari. So for things like that, it makes sense. But other than that, I tend to agree with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s not the capability that’s bad so much, it’s just that I see the potential for abuse. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John if there was a big badge that was like, open this up and insert name of native app here, and it was clear

⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s what it was gonna do, it’s fine. But these websites, these companies are so desperate

⏹️ ▶️ John to get you to install and use their app. I don’t know why they just, you know, you look at better engagement with our,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna do Marko’s voice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s just annoying. It’s like, I would rather you just make your website good and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John use your app if I want to. But like, now, if we give them the ability to make every single link potential minefield that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to take you out into some native app. I’m not enthusiastic about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it definitely Yeah, I totally agree that it this has nothing to do with x callback URL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in our communication. Really, that that’s a different problem. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s a couple problems with this. I agree with everything john said so far, which is that, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there are probably some some conditions where this is what you what you’d want as a user but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also probably just as many if not more where it’s not what you’d want as a user and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah you could then prompt the user to ask what they want and that’s more clunkiness more complexity it’s one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things where I have a feeling this solves a problem that Facebook thinks they have and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they assume everyone else has the same problem but it doesn’t really there’s probably not a good problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be solved in a good way here Furthermore, I don’t know how they could possibly get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to work very well because, or very effectively in the real world, because the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco common mobile browsers are mobile Safari and Chrome, at least the ones that are actually, you know, used for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web browsing instead of sitting in a drawer playing videos. And I don’t see,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple, there’s almost no chance in hell they would ever implement this in mobile Safari, so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Any chance of, like, you know, a plugin architecture, mobile Safari that would enable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugins for this is probably also out. Google including this in Chrome,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe but Google hates Facebook. So I don’t know if that’s going to happen either. You know, what’s in it for them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably nothing. Does this require

⏹️ ▶️ John browser support? I didn’t even read enough to know whether it requires browser support.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in the documentation, I read through all the documentation and it did. I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I thought their examples were the examples are always contrived. These are crummy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy examples. But the way I understood it is if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap a link in or if you end up on a page

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a web browser, including like a UI web view in say, tweetbot, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then if you see all these meta tags, meta tags, whatever they’re called at the top of your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this HTML document, you can say, oh, I can build a URL

⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on the information in these meta tags and make a check with iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, hey, is this a URL that you know about? And if so, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quietly, well, I guess not so quietly, actually redirect into the app. So say I’m in TweetBot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using a browser in TweetBot. I land on a Spotify page. Then tweetbot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can say, oh, I see that there’s this app link or whatever it’s called. And I see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Spotify is installed on Casey’s phone. So let me just punch you over to Spotify. Marco, did you read into this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I actually spent about five minutes before the show looking at this because I didn’t see it before then. But so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could be totally wrong on this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, that’s the way I interpreted it. Hopefully, we’ll either get a lot of emails saying I’m right or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple emails. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. Well, the key diagram on the site is the one that’s like, hey, it works across

⏹️ ▶️ John Windows Phone and Android and iOS. And right away, well, Apple has no

⏹️ ▶️ John interest in this. And the thing is, if Apple has no interest in it, and I think as Renee tweeted, that’s why the link

⏹️ ▶️ John to Renee in our show notes, is like doing this right before WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a reasonable chance, I’m not gonna say a good bet, but there’s a reasonable chance that Apple might have some similar

⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing having to do with maybe a better version of X callback URL or something. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decides to do remotely in this area, that’s what Apple’s going to do. That’s what they’re going to support. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what everybody on the iOS platform is going to support. Making a cross-platform standard is so hard when one

⏹️ ▶️ John of the vendors, Apple, is just going to ignore you forever. Like, and might potentially do

⏹️ ▶️ John its own thing. Because if Apple does its own thing, people will do whatever the hell iOS supports. Because it is

⏹️ ▶️ John still by far the most popular platform for games where people will actually give you money. Or for applications,

⏹️ ▶️ John not just games, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco half games.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, yeah, so I totally expect Apple to ignore this. And if Apple ignores

⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s a non-starter for the Apple platform anyway. And that means it’s never gonna be cross cross-platform. I know it’s an open

⏹️ ▶️ John standard and blah, blah, blah, but good luck getting Apple to sign on with that. Like your best bet would be to get it to be supported

⏹️ ▶️ John as like a W3C standard, because Apple does support those. But something coming from Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to solve their cross-platform development difficulties, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is just not interested in that at all. And that’s not to say that anything, because Apple’s the one who added that stupid, annoying dialog

⏹️ ▶️ John box. And I complained about that dialog box. It says, hey, download your app. But before they

⏹️ ▶️ John did that, it was every individual website doing something even worse in client-side JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ John to do the same feature. So really, I’m mad at everybody who keeps trying to make me get their app.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple adding the feature to standardize it at least standardizes the annoyance and makes it like it doesn’t slow down the browser

⏹️ ▶️ John as much because it’s no longer terrible client-side JavaScript running, but. It’s no longer a modal dialog

⏹️ ▶️ John box. Or something that would animate, but they wouldn’t use the GPU’s accelerated

⏹️ ▶️ John animation. So it would be like JavaScript redrawing. It was bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so reading more on Vitechi’s article, quoting again, apps that implement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app links will be able to scan a link that’s been tapped by the user and in a matter of seconds understand whether it can be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opened inside a native app through deep linking, fall back to a web view, or offer a way to download

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app from the App Store. So this corroborates what I was thinking earlier, that you’re in TweetBot, you land on some page,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks at the page’s HTML and says, hey, is there something I can do with this or not? And then can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle it and dump you into the app in question. I mean, I guess that’s nice, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to both your points, without Safari supporting this, I don’t see how this is going to be that fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, this also requires a page fetch. It requires for, let’s say you open a link in TweetBot,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it requires TweetBot to first fetch the HTML of the page, parse it for these, look for these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tags, and then possibly offer you the option to redirect into an app. So that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason I put that quote in there, that the one that Casey just read, was not because of the information in it, but because I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to shame the copywriter who wrote it, who’s like, so the little bit was like,

⏹️ ▶️ John app links will be able to scan a link that’s been tapped by the user and, in a matter of seconds, understand

⏹️ ▶️ John whether it can be opened, in a matter of seconds, I sure as hell hope not. I know it’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John expression, but the copywriter is like, that’s the wrong order of magnitude for how long it should really take

⏹️ ▶️ John to scan for links in HTML. Because if it really does take seconds, there’s a serious problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and even the wording there, scan a link, that’s not really true. It’s fetch the contents of a link

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then look at the contents to see if maybe you can open it. That’s a different proposition. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this being widely adopted. John, as you said, if there’s no chance that Apple’s going to implement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, which I’m pretty sure that’s the case. Then how much of a standard is it? You know, Facebook has a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this like platform-itis going on, and they always have. This is nothing new. Where Facebook always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out, you know, Facebook and Apple both have their, and Google and Amazon, everyone, they all have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own breed of arrogance. And Apple’s arrogance is well known and well documented.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s arrogance is, we’re just going to make our own thing and you can make it a standard if you want to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook’s arrogance is, we’re going to launch all these platforms standards that are going to be useful and implemented by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, even when that’s almost never actually the outcome to what they make. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it almost always just serves them at best, and even they often abandon the things they make. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s, I think this is a nice sounding story, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see it being implemented by almost anybody important, and certainly not widely enough to matter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Facebook is not a trusted actor in this relationship. Right. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to make an open standard, but it’s so clear that it is designed to solve a problem that Facebook has, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is how do we deploy our application on all the different platforms. Apple does not have that particular problem,

⏹️ ▶️ John or at the very least has it in a very small version and that they still make iTunes for Windows. But beyond that, they

⏹️ ▶️ John do not want to deploy their software on every mobile platform. So this isn’t a problem they have. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John why would we get on board with this thing that, yes, it’s open and trying to be standardized,

⏹️ ▶️ John but clearly exists to serve Facebook and will probably evolve to continue to serve Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John if we’re not sure that like, I mean, that’s what the W3C is the only thing. And even that is just like these big companies are all,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, on the whatever in these working groups for W3C at each other’s throats, trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John fight for the little details of, you know, what image elements are gonna be used for a multi-resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John images on the web and whether we should support Canvas and all this other stuff. And so that is a forum in which they feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a more level playing field where all the big companies are at each other’s throats trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with web standards. And whatever gets through, more or less, Apple implements. But Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John also does the thing where it proposes a standard, then implements it and ships it to millions and millions

⏹️ ▶️ John of people and says, well, we already kind of implemented this and shipped it to everybody. Does that help you guys think maybe you should have adopted

⏹️ ▶️ John it as a standard W3C? Like, it’s not a,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. That’s how standards work in the real world. the sort of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John kumbaya, sit around the campfire, I think we’re all gonna get along type of thing. Like, oh, Facebook released it in open standard,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone should use it now. That’s never what it’s like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is benefiting Facebook by having a standard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way with which to deep link into an app? Because that’s the ostensible premise behind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, is not only that you can launch an app, which everyone knows how to do reasonably easily, but here’s a standard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which we define what data you’re passing to that app, or that needs to be passed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to that app in order to get to the exact content you want. So what’s the play for Facebook here?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s pretty obvious, it’s for Facebook’s app. It’s so that, you know, if you, let’s say, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook obviously encourages sharing all their crap as much as possible. Let’s say you hit a sharing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco link in something that goes to a Facebook property. They want to be able to launch one of their apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly into that so that they control the whole experience and it isn’t just showing their webpage, or it goes right to their app they get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more information or they, it’s faster for the user so they don’t have to go through the web first. They clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this for themselves. I mean, that’s why they did it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t Facebook just have, I was seeing tweets about it, didn’t they have like their little developer

⏹️ ▶️ John PR thing or some kind of…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s called fate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, I didn’t even think of it that way. Oh.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, like I did not watch this speech thing, but from what I’ve seen from Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John in past months I’m going to pretend that I did and pretend this is what they said. And I imagine that

⏹️ ▶️ John this is all part of the strategy that they have to stop being a single thing

⏹️ ▶️ John called Facebook, which is a website that you go to, or more abstractly, an application that you use through the web browser

⏹️ ▶️ John and other things, and start being a series of more special

⏹️ ▶️ John purpose applications circling around this giant hub of information that they have about everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think things like paper, paper didn’t replace the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John app. It just kind of augments it. I think what they want to make is a fleet of mobile applications, the fleet

⏹️ ▶️ John of native mobile applications that all cooperate and interoperate with each other and with the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John website to make one single unified Facebook experience. And that’s why they want a deep link

⏹️ ▶️ John from paper into the official Facebook app, from the Facebook website into whatever other app they come

⏹️ ▶️ John out with, like the idea that they’re transitioning into, well, they already were a platform, but do they want to be a different

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of platform where all these different pieces on all these different platforms can all

⏹️ ▶️ John talk to each other and, you know, sort of cooperate. So in some ways it is kind of like interapp communication, but all their data

⏹️ ▶️ John is on the web and in the cloud. And so they have to their version of interapp communication

⏹️ ▶️ John is a way to basically deep link from one application to another into the web, out of the web. So it

⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense for from what they want to do to why do they think they want to do it as an open standard?

⏹️ ▶️ John That tends to be the way they do things. And I think they would be happy if it became commonly supported because

⏹️ ▶️ John then they would have some assurance that the OS or the web browsers or whatever wouldn’t change in a way that prevents their

⏹️ ▶️ John nice standard from working, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. At first I was like, oh, this sounds, actually, no, this doesn’t sound that impressive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like a cool idea until you think about it a little bit or try to implement it and start thinking about the realities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it and how Apple will never support mobile Safari and everything. It just, it kind of falls apart under scrutiny,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, it’s a very good way of phrasing it. What else is cool these days?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our friends at Backblaze, We are also sponsored this week, once again, by Backblaze, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still pronounce sometimes in my head as Back-blaze, because I think it sounds fancier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, they’re awesome. So Backblaze is online backup for $5 a month. It’s a Mac-native

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, and at $5 a month, it gets you unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated backup.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve talked a lot about the value of online backup here before, and to quote one of John

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gruber’s sponsor reads, if you don’t use this, you’re nuts. backup is amazing. There’s an entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco class of problems, hazards, events, where if you just have a local

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clone or time machine backup, like sitting in your office next to your computer plugged in, things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power surges, lightning strikes, floods, fires, theft, there’s all sorts of bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that can happen that would affect both the main computer and the backup if all you have is the one in your house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so online backup takes care of that and a whole bunch of other problems. It’s a fantastic solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using it myself. My wife uses it. We’ve been using Backblaze for a couple of years at least now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very happy with it. So they also have easily, you can easily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore all of your files, of course, but you can also easily restore just one file right through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web interface. You also have an iOS app that you can use to access any of your backed up files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even share them if you want to. There’s also, they just added email alerts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can say, for instance, like every every I think week or two weeks, the email you saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, this is the status of your backups. Here’s what we have, we have this computer, we have this many gigs, this is the last time it checked in,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco etc. So you can you can always, you know, be confident at what it’s doing. And you can, of course, also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to restore anything on the web whenever you want to, to confirm that. It’s also founded by x Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineers, it is a native application. It’s, you know, it’s not some weird cross platform runtime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s a native application. It sits in your system preferences, those little menu bar It’s pretty nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It runs natively on Mac and on Mavericks and there’s also a PC application as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a 15-day trial with no credit card required. You just enter an email and password and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once again, once you go to pay for it, it’s just $5 per month for a computer. And there’s no gimmicks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no add-ons, no additional charges. $5 a month for unlimited, unthrottled backup. It even gets cheaper,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, if you pay for a whole year up front. So it is by far the simplest online backup to use. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco install it and it does the rest. to backblaze.com slash ATP to get going.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, it’s backblaze.com slash ATP and I use it and also recommend it. Thank you very much to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backblaze for sponsoring the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So God help me, but I’m about to bring up comics.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Skip, skip, skip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t really have that much to say about the comiXology Amazon thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought I should at least ask you to if you had anything to say. To me, it seems like everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is acting selfishly as expected and there’s nothing here of note. But I don’t know, what do you guys think?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Merlin covered it very well on Back to Work this week, so just listen to that. He

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a really good job of covering the nuance of this problem. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a quick blog post about it, and I’m not going to rehash it here. Basically, my opinion is that Amazon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the new owners of Comixology, Amazon is doing what they always do, the kind of thing they always do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not really a surprise to anybody and it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that Amazon is acting the way they always do. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of sucks, but they have their reasons and that’s it. Whenever

⏹️ ▶️ John we talk about tech topics where there’s something that upsets, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John basically, you know, people who are into following the tech industry and they get angry about it on

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter and their blog posts and stuff like that. There’s a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ John different reactions that I see that are, you know, sort of reaction types.

⏹️ ▶️ John One is the easy one where people like people are partisans for a particular company. If they like that one company,

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t like another company. Whatever happens, they’re going to find out why this proves that Google is evil, why this proves that Apple is evil,

⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever, like they have their favorite company, they have the companies they don’t like. Whatever happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John those people will come out of the woodwork and do that. So you have people who are really big Amazon fans defending Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ John and people who hate Apple saying it’s Apple’s fault to come up, know, that is straight up.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other way are as people trying to figure out what’s really going on and saying, well, it’s really nobody’s fault. And they just kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of trying to do the middle of the road type thing where

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to assign blame, but they’re sad about it. And it’s just like, well, it’s just the way it is, because everyone just has to be selfish. It’s kind of what Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John said before. And my reaction to it is always a little bit. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know if it’s it’s less common or people who have my reaction just don’t tweet about it as I come at it from like a parenting

⏹️ ▶️ John angle where whatever company I like the best, like in this case it’ll be Apple, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Something bad will happen and I will decide that I’m very disappointed in the company that I like.

⏹️ ▶️ John And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so-

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you give him a thumbs down? Instead of taking it out on the companies, instead of taking out the companies that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m like, oh, well, you are the company I don’t like and this is your fault. Instead, I will say, what

⏹️ ▶️ John is it that my company did that caused this to happen? You know, I’m disappointed in my child.

⏹️ ▶️ John that I hold my children to a higher standard, right? I don’t care what other kids are doing, why

⏹️ ▶️ John were you involved? And so, I mean, maybe that’s not the real origin of this thing, but that’s just, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the way I always think of it is like, my first reaction is always to blame Apple. Is it because I dislike Apple? No,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because I expect more of them, you know what I mean? Like, I have a high standard, I’m disappointed in them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and we should point out, by the way, what we’re talking about, in case anyone was living under a rock this week and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t realize what happened. Comicsology, the popular comic buying app for iOS, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, was bought by Amazon. And then, like, within a month, they…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon did basically exactly what the Kindle app does, which is they removed the ability for Comicsology to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have in-app purchase for new comic issues. And is that even the right term? Comic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues? I’m sorry. I’m not a comics person. So anyway… I’m not sorry. Anyway, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco removed in-app purchase. And so now you have to, to like go out to the Amazon website separately, buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the comicsology website owned by Amazon, buy the comics there and then go into the app and download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them download things you’ve bought. Just it’s the exact same way the Kindle app works and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost entirely just to avoid paying Apple their 30% on in-app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases and Apple has a couple of rules that you know that you have to you know give them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their 30% on in-app purchases and also that if you You have a way on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco site for people to pay you without going through Apple for something that is digital.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t advertise that in the app and you can’t link to it from the app. So you can’t, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t just have an app or a link in the app that kicks you out to Safari for a second. You enter your credit card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on your site, avoid Apple’s charge, and then it kicks you back into the app. That’s no longer…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was only allowed for two weeks and then they killed that. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the issue is, obviously, you know, comiXology under Amazon, Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not want to keep paying Apple 30%, and many people are blaming Apple for this, including John,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess. Many people are blaming Apple, saying, well, they shouldn’t be taking 30%, or they shouldn’t have that rule that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco link to your store. And that’s certainly, you know, something worth discussing. A lot of people are mad at comiXology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re ruining the experience here, making it much more clunky to buy things, and probably eliminating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of impulse buys, because what would happen, I guess, from what I’ve heard, is that you’d get to the end of a comic and it would ask you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy the next issue. And you could buy it right there and start reading it. And you can’t do that as easily anymore. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to impact sales.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let me explain why I blame Apple for this and have blamed Apple for it ever since they did the same thing with the Kindle app way back

⏹️ ▶️ John when. And it’s not about the particulars. It’s about the big picture. And the big picture is

⏹️ ▶️ John the technology exists to provide an experience that customers like.

⏹️ ▶️ John And not only just the customers like but that actually is beneficial to the people selling the goods as

⏹️ ▶️ John well. Like you said, the ability to just right in the app impulse purchase comics. Every comic I’ve ever purchased in my

⏹️ ▶️ John life with the exception of I think one flimsy paperback anime comic back when I was 15 years

⏹️ ▶️ John old has been through the Comixology app. And why? Because it is so ridiculously easy. I’m not even into

⏹️ ▶️ John comics. I don’t even like comics, but I’ve got the Comixology app. And if you read one issue, and if it puts that button says,

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want to read the next one? And it puts a little price like, yeah, whatever you tap the button Like that’s the whole killer, that is the killer

⏹️ ▶️ John app of the App Store. The fact that you could with your thumb go, yeah, all right, I’ll do that. And the game goes, you know, it goes, all right. You

⏹️ ▶️ John know, I mean, it’s what the 99 cents, you know, the barrier to entry is so low. So technology exists for sure

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. And the experience is really awesome for customers. They love it. And it’s usually

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good for the people selling the stuff, too, because they sell more stuff because the barrier to buying it is less.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anything that prevents that from happening, anything that says, yeah, we could do this and yeah, it would be good in all these sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of ways. but I don’t care what the but is the but like, well, they have to get 30% because it’s fair. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then when I have a flat, I don’t I don’t want to hear about the reasons. All I know is that this is technologically possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is not financially infeasible. But it doesn’t happen. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John you say, well, Apple sets the rule, Amazon is choosing not to follow them. It’s Amazon’s fault for doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not just one occurrence. I mean, I guess Kindle is also Amazon as well. But like, a lot of businesses

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have 30% to shave off to give to Apple. And you say, well, they used to pay way more

⏹️ ▶️ John than that brick and mortar retail stores. That’s true as well. We’re supposed to be getting better over time. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the value you’re getting out of being in the app store, is that worth 30%?

⏹️ ▶️ John The relationship you had with retail establishments, even though they took more off, was much more complicated in terms of being able to ship

⏹️ ▶️ John for books, in the case of books, being able to ship things back, and dealing with inventory, and having a remainders

⏹️ ▶️ John market. And I would think that we would be having more efficiencies in the system. I’m not saying they should

⏹️ ▶️ John charge less than 30% not saying they shouldn’t charge 30% at all I’m saying that it is an Apple’s interest

⏹️ ▶️ John as the platform owner to figure out what they have to do to make it So there’s a good experience that

⏹️ ▶️ John is is definitely a win-win I don’t know if it’s a win-win-win to use the you know, the business speak I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s gonna be happy But at least two of the three parties here are gonna be happy with this They need to figure out a way to make

⏹️ ▶️ John it happen And the second thing that annoys me about it is the strategy tax thing and that oh by the way Did you know that Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John a bookstore and they pay themselves 30% Don’t worry It’s it you know that

⏹️ ▶️ John that seems like is that the reason they’re not doing it because they want to promote iBooks Well, I don’t think iBooks even sells comics So probably not in this case,

⏹️ ▶️ John but in the Kindle store really burns me that you know Kindle can’t you know if Kindle wants to sell

⏹️ ▶️ John their books inside the app which everyone who uses the Kindle app would love They’ve got to give Apple 30%

⏹️ ▶️ John and really there was just I don’t think this 30% Hanging around to shave off of these things right and so they they could

⏹️ ▶️ John just crank up their prices by 30% But then they have to match the store on the web store like all these rules that Apple set

⏹️ ▶️ John up are are made to introduce inefficiencies in the system, to sort of force people

⏹️ ▶️ John to either use their system and therefore not be able to offer people a discount for going to the website or whatever, or don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use it. And people are choosing not to use it. And you can say, well, they’re playing hard ball and that’s Amazon’s fault. But

⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, I think it’s clear that Apple’s strategy of just holding the line on 30% and saying, nope, we’re never gonna,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be this way for everybody and that’s it. It’s not working. It’s not making people, it’s having the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ John effect. People aren’t saying, well, what choice do we have? I guess we just gotta do it because we want to give our customers a good experience and

⏹️ ▶️ John we get more sales, the opposite is happening. They’re just opting out. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if they think they’re calling Apple’s bluff or whatever, I think Apple’s bluff is called. Apple needs to do something about

⏹️ ▶️ John it because we want to have, you know, I mean, there are so many other things that aren’t as good in Android,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Android at least gives you the option of not paying Google whatever percent if you use your own

⏹️ ▶️ John payment processor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, so on Android, you can, if you use Google, they charge 30%, just like the others,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s no rule against using your own, so you can build in your own, and many of the big apps have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I want to point out also, Amazon, when they sell something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also tend to usually charge at least 30%, especially on digital goods,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially for smaller publishers, for self-published people, they actually often charge more than 30%.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this isn’t like Amazon wants to give more to the authors. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like Amazon just wants that 30% for themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the authors will get more. But we’re ignoring how Amazon splits up its money. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John that is a whole separate issue of, yes, you can definitely complain about Amazon. They are not great about it. They want all the money

⏹️ ▶️ John for everything. They want to sell your stuff below cost and give you nothing for it. They want to give your thing away for free. Like, Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ John deals with that. I’m just talking about the relationship between Apple and everyone else. Because that’s where the dysfunction is.

⏹️ ▶️ John If we could address this, and we could buy things inside the thing, then the secondary dysfunction be like, okay, well, how much of this

⏹️ ▶️ John purchase price after Apple gets it, it’s cut, goes to the creator or whatever. So like, I think that’s a little bit of a sideshow.

⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of people like, well, this is better, because some of that 30% will go to the content creators. And that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ John true. But that’s not why, like, don’t hang your hat on that is the reason we shouldn’t be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to buy things inside an iOS app. It is an artificial situation brought on by a platform

⏹️ ▶️ John owner and someone who wants to be in the platform, butting heads and the and we are the loser, the customers

⏹️ ▶️ John are the loser in this situation. And in the beginning, was like, well, let’s just see how this shakes out. But now, after all these years,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple needs to do something different. I don’t know what that different thing is. Is it different thing you buy Amazon?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, brave not. Is it a different thing you lower your percentage? You come up with a different kind of deal? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John consumers are suffering for it. And that, I think, is the primary response. Apple’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John we just care about making great products. It is not a great product when I can’t buy a Kindle book inside the Kindle app. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John not. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, I disagree on this point, on the idea that Apple has to do something, that Apple is somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing here or they have to. I mean, there’s one side of this that’s an entitlement argument that I don’t think is entirely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair. One side of this is, well, we should be able to do whatever we want on this computing platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we’re able to do whatever we want on Macs and PCs. But the reality is, iOS is, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly a computing platform, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no third-party software that doesn’t go through the App Store unless you jailbreak, but that doesn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John count.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this isn’t a technical issue. This isn’t a safety issue. This isn’t a technical issue. This isn’t an ease of use.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is like it’s a capability thing that we know is possible. It’s an artificial business constraint.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, sure. But OK, so this is only a contentious issue because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is the dominant tablet platform for people who buy things and read them on tablets that they also use for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else in the world. So what if the dominant portable computing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform was, know what if it ended up differently what if the dominant tablet or the dominant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco portable computing platform was the Sony PSP or what if it was the E Ink Kindle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know then you look at like the E Ink Kindles no one ever had apps on that I mean they had a quick little KDK

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that died thank God it was half-baked at best you know you couldn’t make apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the E Ink Kindle. Apple could not make iBooks for the E Ink Kindle. Apple probably also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t make iBooks for the PSP. As the game console game consoles work very differently similar how the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works, although probably on worse terms, I would imagine. And so, you know, there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at other types of computing devices that aren’t just PCs and Macs, other types of computing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices that are, you know, owned by one company, that are kind of vertically integrated, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t, they work usually the same way that Apple does with the same kind of rules or more restrictive, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take bigger cuts. So, and including one of Amazon’s own platforms

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very, very popular, which is the E Ink Kindle platform. So, I don’t really think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that Apple has to do anything here, or that they’re necessarily unjustified, or that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re being excessively greedy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I really…

⏹️ ▶️ John So your argument is that because other people do bad things, Apple is also entitled to do bad things? No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my argument is that you, as as company X or as individual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X, you are not entitled to access Apple’s customer base on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own terms that you dictate.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not it’s not there it’s not the Amazon that has the entitlement. I’m having the entitlement as the customer. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be the one that Apple is serving like they’re they’re reducing the value of their products to me through this

⏹️ ▶️ John fight that they’re having with Amazon over this like Amazon is certainly yes certainly not entitled to access to Apple’s because that’s the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John but the whole fight is over like those two companies are fighting but we are the losers we are caught in the middle and

⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point us being the losers affects Apple more than it affects Amazon because Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ John can go anywhere can sell and whoever the Amazon cares much less about who the winner is in whatever space

⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple does. Because Amazon is promiscuous. We’ll try to get you to buy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, they have their own platform, too. But it’s not like they’re shunning iOS and Android. They will still

⏹️ ▶️ John sell what they want to sell. It’s us that it’s losing. And I was willing to give it a

⏹️ ▶️ John couple of years to see how it would shake out. But if, for example, Apple had become ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ John dominant, like they had 90% market share and everything, maybe Amazon would have lost this one. Maybe they would have gone back

⏹️ ▶️ John to selling in the app. but it didn’t work out that way. And so now I think it’s time to readjust.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see, I just don’t see the pressure being that strong on Apple here.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple is not fulfilling its responsibility as a platform owner to make its

⏹️ ▶️ John products the best they can be for its customers in the long term. Not just the short term, like I said, I was willing to give

⏹️ ▶️ John them a year or two to play hardball and see how it went, but it is going badly for them. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I blame Apple because they’re my child.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will disagree that it’s going badly. But also, one more thing. I think Apple could probably look at this from another

⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle and say, you know, if you’re proposing a change to App Store policy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t just look at it as what would good implementations do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that? What would good people do with that? You know, how would that be used well? You have to also look at it as how would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that be used terribly? How would that be used by scammy people? By crappy companies like King?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would that be used by terrible people and terrible companies? And if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowing other in-app purchase systems that Apple does not run would also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduce a huge risk of an erosion of trust in the payment system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by bad actors like, you know, big game companies with in-app purchase

⏹️ ▶️ Marco schemes, stuff like that. Like bad actors having their own credit card input things in their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that then behave badly. But who is

⏹️ ▶️ John suggesting that though? No one is suggesting that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so well, so that’s, you know, one of the options. There’s a couple options to solve this. One of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options is to reduce Apple’s cut. Let’s say they cut it in half to 15%. Do you think that would change Amazon’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind? I’m guessing not. Let’s say all the rules stay the same, but the cut goes down

⏹️ ▶️ John the most feasible option for them. If you’re looking like what’s the practical solution? What do you actually want them to do?

⏹️ ▶️ John Two things. One on the technical side, they should make it possible for someone with a catalog volume the size of ComiXology,

⏹️ ▶️ John let alone Amazon itself. If there’s any limit, Amazon is going to hit it with an Amazon.com

⏹️ ▶️ John app, for example. It sells everything that Amazon sells, because their catalog is massive. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John make sure that’s all set. Make sure you have a system in place. And then what I would change about it is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous that they have this hard-line thing where it’s got to be 70-30 with everyone. Cut a

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with Amazon. I think it’s not insane. Like, oh, it’s unfair. Why does Amazon get

⏹️ ▶️ John it? get a special deal because they’re Amazon.com. You are not Amazon.com. You get a different deal. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s unreasonable. And Apple seems so tied to like, it’s 7030. It never changes. Everyone is treated equally.

⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that nice and fair for everybody? It stops being a tenable strategy.

⏹️ ▶️ John When your consumers are made to have worse experiences because of I don’t know what crazy principle that you

⏹️ ▶️ John want, like, you know, in each individual Apple developer to feel fair. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to

⏹️ ▶️ John cut a deal with Amazon figure out what you have to do. The terms of that deal don’t even need to be public. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John care what Amazon and Apple have to do to or with each other behind closed doors to get

⏹️ ▶️ John this deal to happen. Just do what you have to do. If someone complains, hey, Amazon’s getting a special

⏹️ ▶️ John deal, when you get to be the size of Amazon, then you’ll get a special deal too. Like, is that crazy?

⏹️ ▶️ John Am I breaking secret rules of the App Store by suggesting this insane idea?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it would be breaking with a lot of precedent. Historically, Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally, very consistently, enforced the same rules for everybody, big and small,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much of the big companies should grin in a lot of cases, but they generally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not negotiate major exceptions to rules like that, even with companies as big as Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Facebook or the New York Times or anything like that. They really have not done that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I agree they haven’t. I think it’s silly that they haven’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I I don’t know. I mean, there is, you know, a lot of the App Store, and a lot of its problems, honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are because of this kind of like almost sort of mostly democratic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that it has often been or it is in a lot of respects. Like the top list

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, famously minimally filtered. And so you see like crappy scam apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up there all the time because they’re not really monitoring it that closely. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth arguing whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but for the most part, the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is run on a pretty level playing field where big companies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not allowed to break rules that small companies can’t also break.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not breaking a rule if you have a deal. Like I said, there’s anger in the chat room about this. Here’s, let me address a couple of the

⏹️ ▶️ John things. Denton Meets says, do you really think that if Amazon is given a better deal, they will automatically pass the money to the content creators?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, of course not. I didn’t say that. I don’t think anyone said that. We’re not talking about how Amazon divides up the money. That’s a whole separate

⏹️ ▶️ John issue. That’s totally not what I’m talking about. I don’t know what Amazon would do with it. Probably not, because that’s not how they

⏹️ ▶️ John work. And then people say, like, comparing it to, like, bribes and corruption.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is, it’s a business relationship. When you are, when Apple is buying parts from someone

⏹️ ▶️ John who makes, like, screens or widgets or whatever, they negotiate a deal to buy those screens. They get a better

⏹️ ▶️ John price than you do if you want to buy 10 of them. That’s business. That’s not bribes and corruption. That’s just how business works. You

⏹️ ▶️ John get volume discounts if you’re to drive a certain amount of business, you get a better deal. I don’t think that’s corruption

⏹️ ▶️ John or bribe. That’s just how business works. It’s a contract, and no one else is entitled to see,

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, how much is Samsung paying you for screens? Apple’s not entitled to see that. That’s individual contracts

⏹️ ▶️ John with businesses. If someone’s bringing up antitrust, Apple doesn’t have the market share in any market

⏹️ ▶️ John to be even remotely considered for antitrust, except for the crazy people who are going to say

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has a monopoly on Apple computers. And I love that one that everyone gets old.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I I understand why you’d want to have uniform rules. And that’s a good idea

⏹️ ▶️ John right up to the point where it seems like there’s some sort of problem here. There is definitely a problem. And

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they can never come to a deal. Like if they can’t come to a deal, they can’t come to a deal. But as far as any of us are

⏹️ ▶️ John aware, they’ve never even considered this as an option. I mean, another example is they held the

⏹️ ▶️ John line on. I imagine a lot of the rumors about Microsoft and Office and why is an

⏹️ ▶️ John office available? Microsoft doesn’t want to give Apple 30% of its software sales, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ John that went on for a really long time until eventually Microsoft blinked and produced Office, but they found a way to do it without

⏹️ ▶️ John giving Apple a cut because you have to sign up for Office 365 and all this other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is that true? I thought they were giving Apple the cut if you bought it in the app. For the subscription,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you mean? I thought it was a little of both. I thought that the way that Microsoft hopes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go is you already have an Office 365 subscription you got on your own accord, But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, Marco, you’re also right that there is an in-app purchase of some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey capacity that Apple does get a cut of.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like the thing I was talking about early on was Apple. Microsoft Office will be available for the iPad. It’ll be ninety nine dollars and

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will get 30 percent of that. And that’s not what Microsoft did. That’s not what happened. You know, like they have.

⏹️ ▶️ John The subscription model, the apps are free, right? It’s a free download. Yep. Yeah. I mean, so that

⏹️ ▶️ John that is, you know, it’s a different monetization strategy as opposed to simply selling

⏹️ ▶️ John Office at a premium price and giving Apple 30% of write-off there. And in that case, there would be no

⏹️ ▶️ John way to get Office without paying Apple 30%. And now there is a way. You download a free app, go to Microsoft’s website

⏹️ ▶️ John where they offer you the same prices, an app purchase. And even that took a long time to figure out. I think customers didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really lose out in that one. And I think Apple kind of won that battle. But the battle over

⏹️ ▶️ John an application through which you naturally want to buy things and consume them right in them, Apple is not winning

⏹️ ▶️ John that battle for whatever reasons. And I think something should be done about it. And I mean, thus far, because

⏹️ ▶️ John Google is so incompetent in this area and has not been able to penetrate the market, people aren’t like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John screw Apple. I’m just going to get an Android device. Because you’re not. I think the iPad is still better. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple still, maybe that’s what they think too. We’re still in the driver’s seat. Eventually, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John win this. But there’s a lot of years of suffering that’s gone on already with the Kindle app. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John comiXology is a drop in the bucket. And we just see a lot of it because we know people who read

⏹️ ▶️ John comics and are angry about it. But I think it is a of a type that will continue

⏹️ ▶️ John coming up until someone figures something out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what about this as a proposed alternative? So the the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey times in which we all get bitter about the 30% seem to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far as I can tell, reselling. So Amazon or Comixology is reselling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the comics in their app. What if Apple announced that, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you come to us and can prove to us that you’re a reseller, then we’ll drop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fee to 15% or something like that. And so for things like games where you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really reselling anything, then you still have to pay the 30%. And you can’t just make a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shell company and say, yes, I promise that this shell company isn’t me. You have to actually go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to someone in Apple and prove to them by whatever means they want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are simply reselling and you are not providing your own original content. And thus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not is it it’s not reasonable to give Apple 30 percent. You will give them the lower

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier cost.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t need to think that hard about this. You can do things if you’re so stuck on doing uniform rules for everybody. You just give

⏹️ ▶️ John like volume discounts. If you sell X amount of dollars, we get X percent. And if you sell 10 billion dollars, I mean, like there are plenty.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like which Microsoft does that? Yeah, these are not like new technologies in the world of business. Like this is how

⏹️ ▶️ John businesses worked forever. It’s just that the apps, the app store is the aberration. Can we apply this uniformly to everybody and

⏹️ ▶️ John not have any variability for volume so that if you sell three in-app purchases for virtual coins versus 30

⏹️ ▶️ John billion in-app purchases, when you get exactly the same percentage, it’s nice and convenient. Everyone, you know, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s only a problem until like, it’s making your platform worse to deploy applications on

⏹️ ▶️ John the Kindle app is worse on iOS in this respect than it is on other platforms that allow purchase and comiXology

⏹️ ▶️ John just got worse because the previous company that owned it was willing to bite the bullet and give the

⏹️ ▶️ John 30% surely shaving its margins and potentially also shaving how much money go to content creators. But who cares? They were willing

⏹️ ▶️ John to do this because that was how they got traction. They got enough traction. They got bought out by Amazon. Amazon doesn’t need traction.

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon is amazon.com. So yeah, they take away 30% because that’s what Amazon does.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like I’m saying Amazon is the scorpion here. It’s like, well, it’s in its nature. It’s going to do that. Like I think Amazon does plenty of

⏹️ ▶️ John evil things to all I’m thinking about is why is the platform that I use on my tablet getting worse for me to do things

⏹️ ▶️ John I like to do on it? And I just want it to be worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, before you jump in, I’d just like to point out I understand the Scorpion reference.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because I talked about it on Hypercritical and you listened.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, John, you’re assuming that Apple needs to address this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your position, you’re arguing that it is an assumption. You’re arguing that Apple needs to fix this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just don’t see the urgent need. I think the Kindle app being this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way for so long, I mean it’s been what four or five years or probably three or four years that the Kindle app has been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way, that’s been there long enough and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to really be affecting Apple sales or customer satisfaction. You know, overall it doesn’t seem to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know Apple’s really like being held to the fire here that they really have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change this. I don’t see the big push. I don’t see why they would have to do any of these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And by the way, I think lowering their cut to anything would not please

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon. I think Amazon wants to own that whole experience and the whole processing of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is potentially right, but at that point I could stop blaming Apple and say, well, Apple offered them

⏹️ ▶️ John like 0.001% and they just so rejected it. It’s like, well, then it’s not Apple’s fault anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, and honestly, I really do think Amazon wants to own the entire customer process,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just that commission. They want everything to be going through them only. And so they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have full control and full access. I really don’t think that a rate cut would do it for them

⏹️ ▶️ John Well the idea that like they don’t need to do it because it’s like well They’ve been doing it for years with Kindle and it hasn’t hurt them, right? It’s difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John to sell what it hasn’t hurt them But like the one thing I would point to that like a metric you’re like Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they would have sold more iPads if you could have bought thing like that’s hard to prove like whatever But the one thing you could

⏹️ ▶️ John point to is good old Tim Cook’s favorite customer sat Customer sat among people who read comics

⏹️ ▶️ John has suddenly gone down I can tell you that and I think customer I mean Kindle app didn’t have it but like

⏹️ ▶️ John customer sat among people who use the Kindle app would go way higher for their iPads if they could

⏹️ ▶️ John buy things through it. Because think about that, like some people they consider their iPad, like it’s my comic

⏹️ ▶️ John reading device. And like, that’s what they use it for. And I bet there are people out there who consider it their Kindle reader. And if suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ John those people could buy the things, like they got to the end of series one of a book series and there was a little page at the end of the Kindle

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that said, do you wanna start reading the next one? Tap this button. You tap the button, a little spinner appeared for two seconds and you were

⏹️ ▶️ John reading the next book. their customer sat with their iPad would go up. Like that is a metric that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can track that they talk about a lot that they should be watching. Is it causing people to not buy iPads?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like maybe customer satisfaction is disconnected from their bottom line

⏹️ ▶️ John in vague ways, but they do care about it because that’s their whole thing. It’s like, we’re trying to make great products to make people happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s the case where they’re intentionally choosing not to do something that they know will make people happy because of a fight they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John having with a competitor about pricing. And like I said, it’s okay to do that for a while, but the way it’s shaking

⏹️ ▶️ John out, it doesn’t seem like Amazon’s gonna budge. And, you know, customer satisfaction with these experiences

⏹️ ▶️ John is either still not going up to the level they know it could be or going down in the cases where applications

⏹️ ▶️ John have to backslide, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Assuming that there’s no rate change that could get Amazon to actually accept that and do everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly through Apple. Assuming that the only thing that would allow them to offer in-app purchases on Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms in a way that Amazon would approve would be to do what Google allows, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to just have their own payment processing in the app that, you know, and Apple would just remove the rule that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Do you think the net gain from that in overall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple ecosystem customer satisfaction, assuming that anybody else could do that same thing, assuming that anyone, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said earlier, like assuming that, you know, King could put their own payment system in Candy Crush to make 30% more,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that any random app could put their own credit card system in.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you keep going back to your own payment system. No one is suggesting that. I would never suggest that people be able to do

⏹️ ▶️ John their own payment systems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re basically putting forth the idea that Apple should negotiate a lower rate with Amazon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then Amazon would probably accept a lower rate.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just Amazon. Say Amazon plays hardball and we will not give you a red cent. You’ll never get anything

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t. For example, Amazon’s policy was, if you don’t let us implement our own payment, then screw

⏹️ ▶️ John you. And then I would say it’s Apple’s interest not to ever do that, because we’d say, well, you implementing your own payment system would make

⏹️ ▶️ John it worse for our customers. So it’s not actually, we’re not benefiting our customers so long as you do this. So forget

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But then that would mean like Marvel Unlimited and all these other like the comiXology had white label versions of their apps to other

⏹️ ▶️ John people. So I don’t know how that’s going to work out now that Amazon owns them. But there’s a potential for other people in the market to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll do a deal for the people who own these comics and we will sell comics electronically and we will let them. But you buy them

⏹️ ▶️ John from within our app and you would see the people who are into comics, they will screw comiXology. I’m not using them anymore. You can’t even buy inside

⏹️ ▶️ John the app. I’m going to this other thing or I’m going to the subscription plan like those ones where you pay a monthly fee and you can read X number

⏹️ ▶️ John of comics like the competition, hopefully, at least in the realm of comics, maybe not in the realm of books

⏹️ ▶️ John or anything else, would make it so that other people would spring up and say, well, you’re not willing to pay Apple 2%, but I think 2%

⏹️ ▶️ John is a reasonable transaction fee and we’re gonna pay it and now everyone’s gonna come to our app and no one’s gonna buy through your thing because they don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John go to your website to buy stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking at just what effect these kind of decisions would have on the entire iOS ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on all developers and all users of it. I don’t see a scenario here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Apple could make a change that would dramatically improve the situation with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon stuff and would be a net benefit and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have too high a cost in user satisfaction, even ignoring the money Apple would lose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that reduced or lost commission. I don’t see this as being a net win. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see bad people taking advantage of it and an erosion of trust in buying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS apps and paying for things on iOS which should reduce customer satisfaction.

⏹️ ▶️ John What would the bad people do with a reduced rate based on volume or otherwise?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the reduced rate, that’s something that I think would probably only negatively affect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, but I also don’t, again, I don’t see Amazon taking that deal. And you’re right, maybe someone else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, and maybe that’ll be the situation, but see, I just, again, I don’t see the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for this. I mean, people are mad this week, they’ll be over it next week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even now, most of the anger is going to Comixology and Amazon. Apple’s not even getting hit by most of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the customer satisfaction with their iPads goes down. They’re less satisfied with their product. I mean, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like it doesn’t reflect on Apple. Maybe they blame comiXology. But what if the next time they need to buy a tablet,

⏹️ ▶️ John by then they have long since heard that this isn’t a problem on Android, and they read comics there and

⏹️ ▶️ John can buy them right in the app. Maybe that will change their decision. It’s small, but

⏹️ ▶️ John these little things add up. Books, I think, is bigger. The Kindle app is bigger, and the Kindle app has the advantage that I’m pretty sure you can never buy them

⏹️ ▶️ John inside the Kindle app. So it’s not like anything was ever taken away. But if people find out that, oh, if you get a Kindle Fire,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy within the app, that may attract them more a Kindle Fire, especially if they start using their tablet mainly as

⏹️ ▶️ John a Kindle device.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like in you might have even said this earlier because the I mean, it was Marco because the iPad is so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better than everything else on the market. I don’t think that customers sat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be influenced negatively enough to level the playing field.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re probably right. And that’s what Apple is counting on, too. But these little things add up. And I was going to say that Sam the Geek

⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room says that the white label versions of of comiXology are keeping their in-app purchase. But like I said, now that

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon owns them, I wonder how long those white label versions of comiXology app are going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be in the world at all. But clearly the people who are currently using them, I think the companies that

⏹️ ▶️ John put out the comics themselves actually white label them. Those people are highly motivated to get away for

⏹️ ▶️ John people with iOS devices to be able to easily buy their comics. And apparently there, they have

⏹️ ▶️ John been willing to pay the 30%. I assume they will continue to be willing to do the 30%. And that could be a way that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote wins this one by basically saying well, no one will use common college anymore, we’ll still get 30%

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll get 30% from these other people instead. That’s that’s potentially true

⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Like, I’m just tired of the game of chicken. I feel like it’s gone on for too many years.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want to see I don’t want to see apps coming onto the platform and just we’ll just assume Well, of course, you can’t buy

⏹️ ▶️ John within the application. Of course, you have to do this dance to go through a website and like a little some kid, little kids gonna ask

⏹️ ▶️ John me me grandpa why why can’t I buy things inside applications and I say well

⏹️ ▶️ John ten decades ago three decades ago wherever I can’t do math anymore because I’m old Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John decided that they wanted to charge everybody 30% and everyone else decided they weren’t going to pay it and Apple still makes

⏹️ ▶️ John the best tablets but we have to do this because of a fight between these giant corporations

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh okay but i’ve heard that in other businesses it always just like that kind of like two companies and the customer kind of thing

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are we done on the comics thing that we don’t have anything to say about?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t listen to the back to work episode yet. I’m still behind, so I don’t know what Merlin had to say about it. But sorry

⏹️ ▶️ John if I repeated any of the stuff that he said.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He mostly took the middle, moderate ground of, like, this is all more complicated than we understand, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we shouldn’t be making assumptions like we understand everything going on with these big companies.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, well, I guess we didn’t overlap. Although, we did talk about, like, you know, I tried to add disclaimers as far as we know, because

⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what overtures any one company is making to Apple? Who knows what response Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ John making to them? We just know what these people announce publicly and what they end up doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this issue is going to be resolved anytime soon between Apple with their 30% rules

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their no external payment processing rules versus Amazon and their desires

⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus customers and their experience. I just, you know, the Kindle app has been this way for years, and it’s and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not budged. And neither side has budged at all. So I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see that changing for a very similar app with the same parties involved that has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much smaller audience. I just don’t see it changing.

⏹️ ▶️ John The volume discount thing has the advantage that it lets everybody pretend that that they didn’t budge. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can say, well, we still apply the same rules to everybody. And other people say, well, we weren’t going to do it, but we got Apple to change

⏹️ ▶️ John the rules. And now, you know, because what that encourages is

⏹️ ▶️ John you are encouraged to drive more business through iOS. Sell tons of crap, because the more stuff you sell, the lower

⏹️ ▶️ John our percentage goes. And so that would let everybody save face. And like you said,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it wouldn’t bring Amazon back to the table. But even if you ignore Amazon, if they’re going to be butts about it, then fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Tons of other people would be like, oh, now I much more highly motivated to figure out a way to sell goods through

⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store because I like if I just sell a little bit of them fine but if I sell tons of them the percentage that gets taken

⏹️ ▶️ John goes down unfortunately the people selling the most stuff for the App Store are you know the companies you mentioned who are

⏹️ ▶️ John using the existing in-app purchase system to sell digital coins to people for bazillions

⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right well and there too like there is pretty much like besides Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What other what other major examples are there that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have enough of an impact that are that are inconveniencing customers enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are bad enough and inconvenient enough for customers that Apple would be more pressure to act

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond just let’s just keep our 30% because it’s working great for us.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re looking for potential things like if Apple wants to people to buy things through iPads,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they should because I think that’s a great way to buy a lot of content that can be digital. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it should use a single unified system that Apple controls for in-app purchases so everyone isn’t like all the things about

⏹️ ▶️ John it that we like. If there was more of that, it would be better. So anybody who’s got anything to sell

⏹️ ▶️ John that could potentially find its way through the invisible airwaves to your iPad should be encouraged to do

⏹️ ▶️ John so. Someone in the chat room brought up like, look where the revenue is coming from. If it’s all coming from the big

⏹️ ▶️ John guy, big guys, then they wouldn’t want to change the rate because then they basically Apple would be losing money. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John why would Apple ever do it? Give a volume discount of all their income or a huge amount of their income is coming from the big

⏹️ ▶️ John guys. Yeah. Apple would make less money. Like this is the problem with this whole thing is that people used to be like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple runs the iTunes start break even and it’s not really a profit center. And oh no, the app store is like, yeah, they

⏹️ ▶️ John take a cup. It’s really just enough to keep the lights on. But that has always been like Apple’s. I don’t know if it’s their secret

⏹️ ▶️ John strategy or whatever, but it’s been pretty clear. Like you could see Apple five years ago

⏹️ ▶️ John rubbing their hands to you saying, yes, ignore our break-even businesses. They’re totally not there to make money. It’s just to make our devices

⏹️ ▶️ John more valuable. They know that it is, you know, this is what you want. The type of system where

⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have to do anything more and we magically get money. Like people can drive more and more money through our systems.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like we like that. The margin is better than having to make another metallic widget to sell to somebody.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much easier to just simply let someone tap another button and send a, get another 30% cut of a transaction

⏹️ ▶️ John is going through our system and lo and behold years down the line Suddenly Apple’s businesses like iTunes and stuff that were oh

⏹️ ▶️ John just run it break Even I started to make some significant money and the App Store same thing like oh it starts out It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John enough for us to cover our costs or whatever But I have a feeling that Apple would like it if these businesses

⏹️ ▶️ John Stopped being break-even and started making some serious money and while people aren’t paying attention. That’s where they’re going So any

⏹️ ▶️ John potential plan that says oh, we’re gonna give you less revenue because of your volume discount It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple might be thinking, I know we’ve always kind of pretended this is like a break-even business,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if we’re gonna do this, it might actually be a break-even business. And we’re not Amazon, we actually want profits. So

⏹️ ▶️ John there are forces against any idea like this, but it’s almost like

⏹️ ▶️ John I wish it would hurt them more because you’re right that it’s not hurting them enough that it’s clear that they have to do

⏹️ ▶️ John this, they’re gonna be out of business or they’re doomed. That’s totally not the case. It’s just like a little

⏹️ ▶️ John thorn in your side where you know it could be better. And someday you’re going to have to explain to your mom

⏹️ ▶️ John who got a Kindle Fire, when she gets her iPad, oh get the iPad it’s better, but on my Kindle Fire I can buy the books

⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing. And you will have to explain that to her and good luck making it sound reasonable. It’s impossible, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable. Apple’s product is worse than this one small way and it galls me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or she’ll just get an iPad and just buy things in iBooks. That’s a fate worse than

⏹️ ▶️ John death.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Fracture, Backblaze, and New Relic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, tech podcasts so long.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want to talk about this weird test flight thing that we’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting off forever? It’s really old news now. I’ve forgotten what it is, Matt. So, Bursley was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco acquired. Do we even know? Is there any actual confirmation that Apple was the acquirer?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The internet said so. I think even that is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco definite, like not confirmed. confirmed, but test flight basically just like very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quietly shut down like it stopped accepting new new applicants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or new customers to beta test the apps with it and it’s just like quietly shutting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and they never made an announcement about this they never explained it it’s just like a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quiet shutdown and so the theory is that Apple bought them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re probably going to integrate you know maybe first party maybe apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might actually integrate test flight like functionality into the provisioning portal for ios app so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we could stop doing the stupid udid dance with with things like hockey and test flight and other beta testing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco type things but uh but i don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i would love that to be the case i would love for the story with test flight to be that apple’s building something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this in and that’s why it’s shutting down but bursley was also a big mobile ad company,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Wasn’t that or analytics one of those things? So Apple might have wanted it for that. And test flight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was this little side project they had that wasn’t making any money. It’s Apple just, you know, made them quietly shut it down. Like it could be any of these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John would put money that they’re going to do the thing that test flight did inside Apple just because it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John so much sense that I mean, anytime you see a bunch of third party sites popping up that developers

⏹️ ▶️ John are using, like lots of developers using hockey app, lots of developers are using test flight. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John hates that. If there’s something that third party developers

⏹️ ▶️ John need to be done, there should not be a thriving ecosystem of companies that

⏹️ ▶️ John serve these developers’ needs to do these things if the thing they’re doing is something

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s common. So Apple wants to eventually have a solution to do that. If they bought

⏹️ ▶️ John this company and this company did that, I would say it’s almost guaranteed that what they’re trying to do is get something in-house

⏹️ ▶️ John that does similar to what the thing that they did.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t know. I’m probably this is probably

⏹️ ▶️ John just like you’re saying nothing can ever get better in the app store, but it can sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s it’s some kind of psychological like barrier that I have where especially in areas like this, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the provisioning of devices, the UDID limits, the beta testing being such

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pain. I can’t fathom Apple actually making a major improvement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this. And I again, I would love to be proven wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll probably still give you a fixed list of IDs that only rotates at a certain level. There still be plenty

⏹️ ▶️ John of things to annoy you I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ John like just the general experience of provisioning and the ability for people to easily

⏹️ ▶️ John download betas and distribute them like I’m assuming they will fix some of the annoyances but I guarantee there’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be more of the remainder just don’t worry code signing will still be terrible so you’ll have that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I don’t know I mean like I’ve heard rumblings here and there from the rumor sites and everybody that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know this might finally be the year where where Apple like really makes things better for developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app App Store. So like, you know, the tool side, like the X code is fantastic. It’s been improved a lot. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the language has been improved a lot. You know, all the tools are really great. But then you, you cross over into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the provisioning and the iTunes connect and the App Store rules and the pricing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, mechanism and, you know, upgrades and trials and all that stuff. The developers have been wanting forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like no faith that Apple will ever improve that stuff because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, they, they just haven’t like the App Store has been running now for, what, six years, five years?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this stuff has almost not changed at all. There have been very minor changes.

⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t you think they’ve been kind of in the middle of a multi-year arc where they’ve been adding lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff so fast that they haven’t had enough time to essentially make it work? Yeah. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s the iOS thing, and there’s like, they’ve been doing a lot of stuff to code signing, provisioning profiles,

⏹️ ▶️ John and betas, and sandboxing, and the sandbox bookmarks on the Mac opening up like

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re adding all sorts of things you can do and revving their compiler toolchain like they’ve kind of been out

⏹️ ▶️ John running themselves leaving a trail of crappy half-implemented things behind them hopefully at some point they

⏹️ ▶️ John will get to a point where they can circle back and say that’s what i hope they’re doing by buying test flies like okay we had a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to do this before the way sucked for years now we finally have a chance to take a breath and say

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s go back and instead of adding a new capability let’s merely make it less incredibly unpleasant

⏹️ ▶️ John to do with something that you could previously do. You know what I mean? I’m hoping that they’re at that point. I mean, iOS 8

⏹️ ▶️ John may be a move in that direction as well. Now that we’re over the 7 hump, you know, so we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Yeah, maybe. I hope you’re right. I don’t have high hopes or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a lot of faith, but I hope you’re right. It might not be this year. It could be next year. Yeah, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else going on? Nope. I quietly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey relaunched my website that’s not on Tumblr anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is the URL?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey www.caseylist.com. Really inventive. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s my second crack, or third crack, if you will. I don’t really have a name for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is the directory called for the project? It has to have something.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does. It’s Camel, C-A-M-E-L, which is kind of a,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, port menu? I don’t know how to pronounce the word, but you see it on Wikipedia all the time. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mash of my first and middle names. But anyway, so yeah, so that’s all written in Node, and everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably breaking it now, and that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what’s it going to take to get you off of the using your last name as a pun thing? Is that an

⏹️ ▶️ John impossible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey task? task. It’s never going to happen. No, I mean, I couldn’t think of a good name. And I was so that site,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in many ways, is kind of a mashup of underscores and your two sites, both in terms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of inspiration for CSS inspiration for layout, things of that nature. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I, I looked at underscore site after I decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call this thoughtless, and he just calls his David Smith. And obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s hypercritical. There’s Marco dot org. I didn’t like Casey list dot com.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a fancy pants name like hypercritical that I’ve been using for forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know. This was the first thing that I came up with that didn’t make me gag,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m not in love with it either.

⏹️ ▶️ John So didn’t you read that whole post that you wrote about not doubting yourself? You should not have a title of

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that says that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughtless. I knew that was coming. That’s why I’m not in love with what we’ve what I’ve got here. but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen you use the list last name pun in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that wasn’t self-deprecating.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, and that’s kind of my shtick.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because it sounds like less and there’s not a lot of good words for less.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Weightless? I don’t know. Ah, whatever. But anyway, this is Node and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been piddling with it a little bit lately. Let me do a clock on it. 405 lines of code. Basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it works is there’s a series of markdown files in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey directories that match the directories you see in the URLs. And then there’s a header and footer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey markdown file. And so if you go to any of these URLs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and during Fireball style, if you put.md at the end, it’ll show you the source. And so I have a little bit of metadata

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top. And then other than that, it just processes the markdown files,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey throws on a header, throws on a footer, and calls it a day. And so it’s 405

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines of node using several packages because I haven’t yet been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey horribly burned by third-party software. And I know I’m pretty proud of it. I like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not flawless, but I like it. I should call it flawless. That’s what I should call it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go. Finally, you figured one out that is not self-deprecating.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, because that has flaw in it. It’s like the flawless, is it the list with the flaw? It’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t, it’s like, you can’t use the last name as a pen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Know I gotta think of a better name.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. Even even your brag had had a self-deprecating root in it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John If this software

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t use markdown, I might replace mine with it, but it does so I won’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s wrong with markdown

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it. You’re a purist right? Don’t you write everything in actual HTML straight?

⏹️ ▶️ John I yeah, I find that for me. I find it better in all ways than writing in a markdown I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to go through another translation. I I’ve got to publish HTML. I know how to write HTML.

⏹️ ▶️ John I write it. I publish it. There’s no, I don’t have to say, how is this going to transform? I don’t need to do like a transformation.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, I don’t know. That’s how I work. I don’t say that everyone else has to do that, but that’s the way I do it. But anyway, most people seem

⏹️ ▶️ John to like Markdown. And so they make all these apps that work with Markdown. And if you don’t want to use Markdown, it’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for what it’s worth, Markdown, I’m going to phrase this wrong, but Markdown is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HTML. No, that’s the other way around.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. You can just write HTML and Markdown too. But it’s like, once I’m doing that, then what the hell’s the point?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so what I’m saying is, with the, so if you look at any one of these URLs and put the dot MD at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end. So I’m looking at the ATP shirts one as an example. You would have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have the at at, and then the couple of metadata entries, but everything below those,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything below that, can all be straight HTML. This looks,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like, this looks like my thing. Like I have the same format, I only don’t have at ats, I just have metadata on the

⏹️ ▶️ John top. I just use the mail format where the first blank line ends the header section. And then I have

⏹️ ▶️ John the HTML.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do something similar, which is I have header format on top.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Yeah, keep talking. I’ll show you one of mine. Mine’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it makes sense to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s what this is about. It made sense to me. I wanted to try something that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hadn’t done before, which is Node. And I like the code. I don’t love the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey code. part of me wants to throw it on GitHub and embarrass myself. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to fix a few things up before I do it. Like, for example, it’s a good thing I only have two posts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on there. Because if we go if I go past, I don’t know, 10, it’s gonna look ridiculous,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t do pagination at the moment.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll figure that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Yeah, I mean, I actually already have a plan. I just haven’t implemented it yet. I’m going to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the world’s worst pagination, which is kind of a loose pagination. Once I get it worked out, maybe we’ll talk about it in another

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after show. But yeah, so I’m pretty proud of it. It’s white, not because,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, it’s Casey, he always says white. It’s white because I couldn’t figure out a background color that I wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s white, of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey course. But I don’t know, I felt like I needed to spend all this time working out better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CSS, because I suck at CSS. And for a brief moment, I thought about copying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Marco, one color at the top and then everything else below. And then I looked at it the way it was. And I was like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s good enough. Why fuss it? Why fuss over it. So I’m pretty proud of it as simple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it is. And maybe I’ll open source it. Maybe I won’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re even thinking about showing this code to anybody, it is a lot better than the code that’s running my check, because I would never

⏹️ ▶️ John show it to anybody. I don’t even like looking at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it myself. It’s bad, but it’s not awful. There’s definitely a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of places where it could be cleaned up and spruced up and made a lot cleaner. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey repeating myself in several places. But by and large, I don’t think it’s terrible. I mean, to be honest, how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad can you really screw up 405 lines of JavaScript, leaving aside the fact that it’s JavaScript?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen a lot of bad JavaScript. It’s definitely possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing is this, this, and I’m looking at the source that you pasted in the chat,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco. This is not a link blog, I have no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no support for like a link post versus a regular post but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it’s just a block but i don’t know i dig it so far

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i don’t have any support for link things either not that i ever post them but i i mean if i did i would

⏹️ ▶️ John guess i would go and add support whatever the real here’s the real problem with adding links everyone has

⏹️ ▶️ John already used up all the obvious characters for indicating links

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep i completely agree i 100 agree there’s 100 the

⏹️ ▶️ John problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well you could steal my arrow afterwards is it error after or before

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not your arrow Everybody uses the arrow and then Daring Fireball uses a star for none

⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of other people use Everyone uses the infinity for permalinks and it’s just like there’s no more glyphs left. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the game over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what’s wrong with just using the standard glyphs that everyone else uses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you want to be different Marco You want to be your own special snowflake exactly you want to be a brand? Well, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t be your own special snowflake because that’s dr. Drang

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the real problem with with link blogs I think is that you know, whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will there’s two problems problems. Number one is what the feed items link to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No matter which option you pick, people will be upset and confused. It’s just different people. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. So that’s one problem. There’s no good solution to that. The other problem is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you choose a title and a length of the post, it’s confusing as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whether you wrote this, whether that’s your title of your post or and then like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people will get to get to your link post permalink page and not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize that that big title at the top is a link to something else

⏹️ ▶️ John well i mean you can avoid that by not making the the title be a link to anything on the page when

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re viewing it you know what i mean when you’re viewing when you’re viewing just the page

⏹️ ▶️ John that just shows that story the title is not a link every place else the title is a link and then you have to choose

⏹️ ▶️ John where you want it to go but I would say you would make it go to the you know I don’t know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like where does the link go in a link post on a on its promo page

⏹️ ▶️ John I would mostly say it goes to the story like I like the idea of of linking from the text

⏹️ ▶️ John that you write to the thing you’re talking about and not relying on the title to fill that role

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s kind of redundant but then I don’t know like it the big problem with link blogging is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these questions like there’s no clear good solution. Like whatever you pick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna have issues.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you just have to pick one and people just have to get used to it. Yeah. The RSS one is worse, but

⏹️ ▶️ John most people don’t seem to use RSS anymore these days, so that kind of takes care of itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just use both. I have an alternate feed in my footer that has the other link style.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just noticed that earlier today, which I’d never seen before, obviously. The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this was how I’m hosting it, which is to say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I put it on Heroku because for a one web dino, as they call it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is absolutely free. And from what I can tell, this didn’t get absolutely crushed under

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the load of live listeners. But what was unique

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me was that when I went to deploy to Heroku, having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never used Heroku before, I looked at how to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. And what it amounted to was, I needed to add a proc file to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey source, which specifies that it is a website, not like a worker or anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, and its node, and which node file to run.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed to clean up my package JSON, which defines what my dependencies

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. But that was it. And then I pushed to a Git repository that they set

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. And suddenly, I had a website.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Now I’m not using your system anymore, because I thought it was generating static files. but I forgot that you’re actually using.

⏹️ ▶️ John It code runs when you, yeah, no, I got to have static.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so basically everything is generated on the fly lazily.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But once it’s generated, it’s held in memory for some amount of time, I don’t recall. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right, it isn’t static. But nevertheless, I would assume that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should hold up to some pretty heavy load.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can do the cruddy thing, which I considered doing before I decided even this was too much work with

⏹️ ▶️ John make a system that dynamically generates web pages and then just crawl it yourself to create your

⏹️ ▶️ John static pages and then just upload the static ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s my own ignorance coming through, but if I have everything in memory, how is it going to be that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard to answer a gazillion requests? Like, it’s all there. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rendered HTML in memory. I just got to look it up from a hash and dump it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the request or to the response object. So what else is there to worry about?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, I mean, with all these static blogging systems, static blogging is really great,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I use it on my site, but you can get almost all of the benefit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from just caching. I mean, because static blogging, you have to change a few things if you do static.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the main things is you have to serve the same markup to everybody, and the same, like you have to serve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same content for every hit. You can’t do server side browser

⏹️ ▶️ Marco detection or device detection and altering what you send, you know, mobile layout separately, like you have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve everyone the same markup. But with responsive design, and with the removal of comments,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even outsourcing comments to other services like Disqus, where you just embed a static JavaScript link and the thing works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if you relegate all dynamic functionality to JavaScript embeds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to CSS with responsive design, then it works. Now, you can do that exact same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either through a static system, or just put a caching proxy in front of your server,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put Varnish or Nginx in caching mode. Put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those in front of your server, just have it cache every hit for one second. That’s it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cache every page it serves with a TTL of one second, and you’ll be able to tolerate almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every possible flood of traffic you will ever get, even if the thing is being generated from a database

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on every hit that actually gets through. It’s static plugging,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does offer high performance, but it also just offers a pretty strong degree of simplicity for deployment.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I get, I’m not doing it for performance reasons, I’m doing it because I’m cheap, and because then you can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco deploy

⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere, super, I don’t need anything to run any code, and that’s like, it’s not just cheap, but you have

⏹️ ▶️ John the most options, it will literally work everywhere. There is no, you don’t need to run anything, you don’t need to have

⏹️ ▶️ John any software, there is no software like that’s I mean static blogging is not done for performance reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just mostly for just you have all the options in the world. It’s going to work everywhere on

⏹️ ▶️ John every single hosting system you could possibly imagine. And yes, it will also happen to be performant and all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not really why you’re doing it. Like it just keeps but hold on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, there is software, they just move it. I mean, that’s the thing. Like you said, there’s no software, but unless you’re actually writing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML pages, which most people are not doing, there, there absolutely is software involved. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be maintained. And it has to run somewhere. It’s just running on your computer, like the thing that generates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, no, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, but you control that. Your deployment options are unlimited.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can move from one hosting provider to another. You don’t have to worry if they don’t support Node.js

⏹️ ▶️ John or have a different version or make some sort of complicated thing. You’re going to need a different deployment. It’s like you just are syncing

⏹️ ▶️ John files somewhere. And if you have a site that actually gets traffic, then you don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about this. Then fine, write some code, deploy it. But like, my site doesn’t get any traffic. I want the cheapest possible thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I can possibly get. And that ends up being static hosting. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you get what you pay for. But that’s why I did it static. And not because I was looking for performance. Although like occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ John I do get traffic bursts and it’s nice that I don’t have to worry about them because again, it’s static. I don’t even use like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is super static. It’s not, some people are like, well, it’s static, but I use like, you know, some

⏹️ ▶️ John server-side include system or something to put in headers. Nope, a hundred percent static.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And that’s the thing is that admittedly this is dynamic the first run. But like I said, as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon as I’ve parsed the markdown for any of these pages, it’s held in memory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for at least half an hour, if not more than that, until I either deliberately toss

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cache or it times out or whatever. So this isn’t a challenge or anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, but I feel like I should, in principle, be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle a crud load of traffic without crumbling.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you should. But yours is static in the respect it really matters for performance in that you’re not talking to a database.

⏹️ ▶️ John For example, the files that you’re reading are static. They just happen to be filled

⏹️ ▶️ John with markdown, and you do a little bit of post-processing and memory. And it’s not like, Node is a single process,

⏹️ ▶️ John like event-driven, right? Yep. It’s a single process. So you don’t even have to worry about your cache getting divided

⏹️ ▶️ John through Apache children or some other concern that you might have with. Yeah, so you’re fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John And really, just like me, no one’s going to read your blog, so we’re both fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey except really, really no one’s going to read my blog. Whereas, eh, nobody reads yours.

⏹️ ▶️ John We can compete. You’d be surprised how few people read my blog. Well, you never post, which. That’s true. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you never post anything, nobody reads it. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know how that works. And admittedly, I’m not good at that either. And I’m hoping this will make me better, but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to do. I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very impressed with how unbelievably simple Heroku was to deploy to. Because truly, I had heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, but never really done anything with it. And it must have been well under half

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour, maybe even under 15 minutes between the time I said, you know what, let me just see if I can throw this on Heroku and if it’ll work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the time that I had it not only up there, but I’d updated my DNS to point to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was unbelievably quick and easy. And that really is awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but is it $5 a month? It’s $0 a month.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right, you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, he’s beating you, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess that’s true, but then he’s stuck deploying someplace It supports Node.js.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they also support PHP.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, great. What are the limits? When do you have to start paying? I honestly don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, basically, if I add more web front ends, then that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey costs money. But in terms of bandwidth, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if after 30 gigs used or something like that. Well, you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to hit the bandwidth limit. It might be CPU time or something. What we need to do is get one of your stories to go up on

⏹️ ▶️ John Hacker News and a bunch of other sites Simultaneously saying the daring fireball link and Marco will link

⏹️ ▶️ John it and everyone will tweet it and we’ll see If you get into the pay zone because okay like the pro even

⏹️ ▶️ John though I don’t have anything on my blog No posting every once in a while some random story will land on some social media

⏹️ ▶️ John site and all of a sudden I’ll have a spike It’s not a big spike But it’s big enough that I would worry that I would go out of the free zone and start getting

⏹️ ▶️ John charged some crazy amount Of money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love how that’s that’s how the world control Casey by making him popular

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we need a way to test the system here, right?