65: The Year Of Casey
18 May 2014Casey’s big news, Monument Valley, Apple and Beats, and the crazy world of Javascript.
Episode Description:
- Casey's big news! (Much better than The Year of Luigi.)
- Casey and John discuss Monument Valley, the Escher-inspired puzzle game. (Marco didn't do his homework.)
- Apple and Google agree to... something
- Apple might be buying Beats: why, and what they'd probably do with it.
- WebKit optimizes Javascript with LLVM
- "Full-stack developers" keeping up with the crazy world of Javascript frameworks.
- Using third-party code.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you keep saying you’ll be at what
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how to spell what you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PROM high school prom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re one of those people leaves off of the probably mark with us too, because he’s from Ohio. Yeah, there was never a the
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s never the yeah, where I’m from. There’s a the in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re going to the prom. Yep. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the rest of the country is dumb. New York is right as always. You
⏹️ ▶️ John worst. We also don’t put mustard on our hamburgers and that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Say that again, you don’t put mustard on the hamburgers?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, McDonald’s does not put mustard on its hamburgers in the New York metro area.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought, I didn’t know they did it in the rest of the country until I went to Boston and asked for a hamburger from McDonald’s that had mustard on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, what the hell’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what’s going on this week?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let’s start with Overcast. Something happened over the last few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I shipped the Overcast beta and it’s been really awesome actually. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely impressed and happy and just overwhelmed and humbled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the amount of feedback I’ve gotten from the beta. The beta went out to about, you know, 30 or so people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me interrupt you right there. You are not currently seeking any more testers. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right. Well, I’m running low on UDIDs because the problem is like, you know, you have these 30 people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s plus my own device. That’s about 40 devices. You only get 100 per year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have to realize also like in the fall, half these people are gonna get new phones. So if I want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them keep testing, I’m gonna have to overlap for a little while like and you know, your,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your device limit resets, like on on some calendar anniversary of your developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account or something. And so and I don’t I don’t even know when I think it’s that’s like in July for me or something. So it’s sometimes not ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPhone release cycle. So so basically, I have to like keep my number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of actual devices I care about under 50. Plus, if I ever make an iPad version, I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account for people’s iPads, and that’s a whole other thing. So it’s really a pain in the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, the beta is going fantastically. I’m getting tons of feedback. I’m extremely happy about it. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, you have way better news than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, indeed. So the great news is my blogging engine works and can sustain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traffic from your site, which is significant. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on. No, just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is because I announced a couple of days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Aaron is pregnant finally, which is extremely exciting. Congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. We have been working on this for quite literally three and a half years and I won’t go into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey details here on the show because we aren’t an explicit show. Well, here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we did. We went to the bedroom. So anyway, I wrote a blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post about this, which I entitled Finally, which I thought was hysterical and only a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people I think really picked up on the joke there. But anyway, I wrote a blog post about this, which Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you linked to and tweeted about and John you tweeted about and that was very kind of you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I went into kind of the nitty-gritty of the journey from saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2010, hey, we should probably start trying to have kids to being here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all the way in 2014 saying, oh my God, we’re finally pregnant. It was a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and difficult road, but we are here and that’s all that matters. And so far, everything sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and is healthy and we’ll meet our little sprout, as we’re calling it, in the first week of November.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re seriously, seriously excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad to see that you got to go public before Overcast did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, although if I’m honest, it’s still wearing on me that I haven’t gotten my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 7 update for for FastText out because I cannot get auto layout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working right and I’m too stubborn to revert to springs and struts and I’ve got something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the compose message view is just not working properly and I think it’s the, what is it, the content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inset or something like that. So basically I have a, I wasn’t planning on going into this but since I have…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, is it under the nav bar? Yep. That’s a very common thing, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet and I’ve been trying to go back and look at the old, the auto layout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talks from old WWDCs, but I haven’t really had time because, well, we’ve had something else going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lately. That’s a pretty good reason. Yeah, so I like to think of it as a good reason, but I was real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will, I will be upset if I don’t get the iOS 7 update in before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast ships. I won’t be necessarily upset if I don’t get it in before iOS 8 is in beta, but I will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset if I don’t get it in before Overcast ships. So I got to find some time to do that. You have some time, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To bring this back around, Camel, my blogging engine, which I believe I mentioned I had open sourced a week and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, something like that, that did survive. So I’m pretty excited about that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like it didn’t crumble Heroku, although I will say that, and I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t, but I will say that I noticed in my Google Analytics referrers, some domain, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely don’t remember what it was, but it was like dailysomething.heroku.com, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried to load and it challenged me for authentication, which makes me wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I had actually hit some sort of threshold wherein the Heroku
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people were like, hmm, what’s going on over there? But to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this moment, I’m running on a single dyno, which is Heroku speak for one process,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m using Node and things haven’t crumbled. So a lot of big things going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is really, this is like the year of Casey. This is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s weird to be in the spotlight, which probably sounds really weird, given that I’m on this podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s weird to be in the spotlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds like you. But that’s true. But no, we’re super, super excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh, I’m such a jerk. I forgot to mention that after I put up this post, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people came out of the woodwork to send emails and tweets and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably, unbelievably kind things. And if you were one of those people, thank you so very, very much. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still going through all the email and trying to reply to every single one of them, and I will at some point. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the support has been amazing, and not to completely get us derailed, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been interesting seeing how many people come out of the woodwork and say, we too had fertility problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or alternatively, or alternatively, we know someone who has had fertility problems, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh man, this really rings true. And that’s been really kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, well, it’s sad in that I would never wish this upon anyone, but also really awesome to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s not just us and that and that people appreciate talking about something that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly taboo and not something you hear talked about a lot. So I I’m I’m happy. I’m happy as can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. Aaron is overjoyed. It is a tragedy that Aaron isn’t already a mom because I think she’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a great mom. So I’m I’m really, really excited. Awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s hope the year of Casey goes better than the year of Luigi. I wish I understood that joke. That’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a Nintendo joke about their what? What? Yeah, you’re going to explain that one. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it was the beginning of 2013. Nintendo said this is going to be the year of Luigi, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to release games featuring Luigi more prominently. And 2013
⏹️ ▶️ John was not a good year financially for the company. You should never have me explain these references to you on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just let them go by. You can you can acknowledge that you don’t get them. But rest assured I was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John that the chat room didn’t already make this joke. So I’m just kind of disappointed in them. But you too expect it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever liked Luigi, like that’s the whole point of this. The whole point is the year of Luigi. Oh, who cares about Luigi?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is the year of the I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. That’s terrible. Like who who who was ever in the million years? Who’s ever said like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nintendo needs more Luigi. You know, I would like to play more games with Luigi, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the games that support multiple players. I want to spend more time playing as Luigi.
⏹️ ▶️ John They launched the GameCube with Luigi, with Luigi’s Mansion, because they didn’t have a Mario game. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look how well that went.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the GameCube did much better than the Wii U, I’ll tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, everything is done better than Wii U, and we will probably get to that later. I think the 3DO did better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Wow. We have another piece of follow up. And speaking of things that are expected, Marco, did you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. I did my homework, John. Do I do I get a gold star?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought maybe you tweeting a screenshot would have shamed Marco or reminded him that this homework
⏹️ ▶️ John existed Let’s start with that reminded him that it existed because we know he’s not looking at the notes file. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well to be fair Last night I told Tiff about the game and she installed it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she played it next to me in bed So I heard some of it Wow, and she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did she finish it? It doesn’t take long right Casey you found assuming you finished it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, well, and that’s the funny thing is Okay, so let me back up. So we’re talking about Monument Valley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which came out, what would you say, a couple months ago maybe? A month ago?
⏹️ ▶️ John Something like that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember. Okay. So it came out fairly recently. And as we’ve talked about in the past, it seems that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes premier iOS games. Letterpress is a great example. Threes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a great example. Flight Control, way back when, was a great example. And so Monument Valley was one of the premier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games recently. And so I downloaded it last night and started playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and Erin was watching over my shoulder and was like, hmm, that looks kind of interesting. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we share an iTunes store account, and so she had it already. And so there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were sitting on our iPads next to each other playing Monument Valley, and I definitely have some thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but the funny yet frustrating thing about it was I had started playing somewhere between five and 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes before Erin. I wasn’t paying close attention. And sure enough, by the time we finished, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was only about an hour to an hour and a half later, she finished easily just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple minutes after I did. And we had started quite a bit more than a couple minutes apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was a little annoyed by that, but I guess she’s the smart one in the family. Nevertheless, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good. It was very, very good. I quite liked it. Did you want us to play it for any particular
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Last show, when we talked about the game, I was mentioning that
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people said they had gotten stuck on it or that it was hard but that I couldn’t tell if they were joking because I thought it was just relentlessly
⏹️ ▶️ John linear and extremely easy and that I thought since you two hadn’t been playing a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind of games you used to play but more playing more casual games that this was the casual game that you might enjoy and it had
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it had some interesting aspects to it like the artwork I thought was great and
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea was very clever and it took advantage of touch in an interesting way like it’s a type of game
⏹️ ▶️ John that wouldn’t have been as interesting if you did it on a console or on a PC. And so I figure you
⏹️ ▶️ John should give it a try. But so the two things I want to know is basically, did you find it easy? And
⏹️ ▶️ John and what did you what did you think of it overall?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At the beginning, I most certainly did not find it easy. And when you download Monument Valley, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should do it, it was absolutely a great game. And it’s when it’s worth the what was it, four dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we’ll get to that later. When when you download it, they kind of just dump you in a level. And I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought something was wrong because they don’t explain anything. And I’ve seen this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, but it seemed surprising how little explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was. And, and it took me a minute to realize what the crap I had to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Monument Valley, if I were to summarize it is kind of a game playing off the drawings of, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it MC Escher? Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So the stairs guy, yeah, the stairs guy. So it’s it’s geometry that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t really be real, but you know, it’s I don’t know how to explain this I won’t try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but suffice to say
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to explain to my kids and this is what I came up with It looks like it touches it touches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a good way of looking at it and two things that look like they shouldn’t be able to touch with one in both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same intermediary piece Depending on how things are set up may actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch if you like spin that intermittent intermediary piece around So anyways, so they dump you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into this game and it didn’t have a lot of explanation and at first I was like, what the crap is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on? And I was, I almost started to get frustrated at the very beginning. And then right when I was going from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is weird to, oh my God, what the hell. That’s when I figured it out and then I was okay. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so for the first half to two thirds of the game, I did not find it easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found it to be the correct balance of hard, but not annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also would not say it was terribly linear in at least the way I experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because I had to think about things Then there were a couple levels I should have taken a note on which ones they were but there were a couple levels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I was like, okay This is seriously linear and it’s beautiful and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds great And I didn’t realize that I should have been wearing headphones to play it But I heard after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that it’s it I guess it uses, you know stereo to its advantage or whatever, but it sounds great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s beautiful But there were some levels. I think there was one going into like a dungeon It actually I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is what leads up to the picture I tweeted that it was extremely linear and as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re tapping about moving this little girl around the stage that you’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things are happening. So it’s not like Boring, but nevertheless it was very linear then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that there were other levels like the one with the box that I Just took forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out and I did and I wouldn’t have said it was linear at all What did you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s what I mean by linear. What I mean by linear in the sense of this game is that
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you solve some problem, you’re presented with a new problem, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one way to do it, more or less. Like, you know, if you hit this switch, it opens up the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next step is that you’re going to go through that door, and then you’re not going to be able to go any place except for one place. And to get that place, you do
⏹️ ▶️ John something, and it takes you there. Like, it basically says, solve this problem. Here’s your new problem. Solve this problem. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your new problem. You know, like, not linear in that it’s like a long series of corridors or whatever, but gameplay
⏹️ ▶️ John wise and flowchart wise, it doesn’t make you, it doesn’t make you do 10 things at once, it doesn’t make you like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s set this up over here, let me set that up over there, let me go through and do this and do this and then go over there and do that and then come back here
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I come back here, you know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t ask that of you, which many, you know, games for more experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John gamers do. So this is definitely in the category of casual game. And it’s more of like a game-like
⏹️ ▶️ John experience in that you feel like you’re participating in the narrative, but you’re, it’s very clearly you’re just pushing the
⏹️ ▶️ John character along, sort certain little arc. My main complaint is with not so much with the casualness because again I
⏹️ ▶️ John said in the past show a lot of people can make the same complaint about Journey. It’s very linear, it’s relentlessly
⏹️ ▶️ John linear. It’s just that there’s there’s more freedom within the linearity and there’s more of an overarching
⏹️ ▶️ John story to get you wrapped up. And this one had kind of like a hint of a story but it didn’t you know I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to ruin Journey for people but I think comparing Monument Valley to Journey would be very instructive
⏹️ ▶️ John for like a game design perspective because they are so similar in so many ways and the experience of playing them is
⏹️ ▶️ John so very, very different. And people like Monument Valley is getting good reviews, but I don’t think any game critic would
⏹️ ▶️ John hold it anywhere near Journey. And figuring out why, why is Journey so much
⏹️ ▶️ John better game than Monument Valley, despite them sharing so many characteristics,
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is a interesting thing to think about it that I would probably blog about if I ever blogged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the funny thing is, if I were to describe Monument Valley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In just a couple of words, it would be broken promises. An example of this is the level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selector, which I didn’t realize when it was first introduced to you. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of like – and I’m using huge air quotes here – the menuing system. It’s a building
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you twist the building to advance from level one to two to three, et cetera, et cetera. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they show you this building originally, they spin the building around and I didn’t pay close attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I get through level one, level two, level three, level four, and at this point I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all four sides of the building. And so I’m like, okay, well, am I going to see a new building now or what’s going to happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sure enough, there’s a fifth side of the building. And that was a silly example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just a continual series of broken promises.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s, that’s part, didn’t you catch that, that being part of the theme, like how can something have more than four sides is
⏹️ ▶️ John the impossible geometries?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely. And it’s not a bad thing. I don’t mean to make that sound like it’s a bad thing, but any time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you didn’t think that something was an option, like for example, walking vertically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or walking off the side of something where in the real world, you would just fall right off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you – or at least I didn’t suspect that such moves were legal and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you find out, oh, you can do that. It’s like one series of broken promise – or one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken promise after the other, which is what made it so magical and wonderful. But at the same time, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, OK, I guess that’s a thing. So I really liked it. The only thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I didn’t get a chance to press Erin on this because I really wanted to hear her opinion, and we didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any research. But when it was all over, and it lasted, like I said, about an hour, hour and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half, it was all over and Erin said, wait, that’s it? How much did we pay for this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was so interesting to me because my first reaction, which I didn’t say out loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, wait, that’s it? much did I pay for this? And then immediately after that, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, well, you know, a lot of work went into this game.
⏹️ ▶️ John It costs half as much as a movie ticket and it lasted about as long as half a movie, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny. You it’s funny you say that because I didn’t talk to Aaron about this, but that’s exactly what I thought to myself. And in our case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we shared this quote unquote movie ticket because we have the same store account. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid $4 once and got. Each got an hour to an hour and a half of enjoyment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of it. So really it’s a great deal. But something about software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has just programmed both of us. I wish I could, I don’t mean this that way, but I kind of wish I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could throw Erin under the bus and be like, oh, well, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s not a developer. But no, I had the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought. And it’s really kind of crummy that there’s this race to the bottom and race to free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I enjoyed it. I’d recommend spending the $4. I would have done it again, but I’d be lying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I said I didn’t think to myself, wow, that was short.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, I have to say the production values were super high, though. Like that game is so, so polished, like everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no part of that game that looks like it’s broken, that looks artificial, like every part of it, even
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, the menu system, it’s all of a piece. It is a beautifully made game. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if there’s a bug in that game, I didn’t find it. If there’s any if there’s some visual element out of place,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t find it. And it’s not a simple game. It’s not like, oh, I mean, not to say that threes is simple,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like Graphics wise and gameplay wise, Threes is
⏹️ ▶️ John a much simpler game than the things that Minion Valley pulls off. It is an amazingly well made game in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John just the construction of how the pieces are put together. So production values are high, so I don’t mind paying more for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy things based on length and price or anything like that. I just wish that if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to have difficult gameplay for experienced gamers, it should have a more compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John story. Like Year Walk was like that. And the gameplay in your walk is not particularly difficult for anyone who’s played point
⏹️ ▶️ John and click adventures their entire life. But the atmosphere and mood and story
⏹️ ▶️ John pulls you in and feels and like makes it feel like more of an experience. I feel like your walk
⏹️ ▶️ John was was a better game overall, but also one that would probably repel most casual players.
⏹️ ▶️ John Monument Valley, I don’t know, like I hate I hate coming down with like a mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ John opinion on this, and people feel like I’m pushing them away like you shouldn’t get this game. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I wanted you to play it, to see if someone who doesn’t, who’s not a, you know, doesn’t consider himself a gamer,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t play games all the time, will they find this game much more compelling than I did? And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John you identified a lot of the same problems as I did. And the one thing you brought up that I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ John was that I didn’t think of is that if you’re not familiar with sort of the joke,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, not the joke, or the background or the theme, like the moment I saw a screenshot of this game, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s an MC Escher game. of the entire game because I played a lot of games I know what MC Escher is I know I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be walking on walls I know if it looks like it touches it touches like I I see the whole game
⏹️ ▶️ John before I before I even installed the thing whereas if you come into a cold and have some vague memory of some water
⏹️ ▶️ John impossible waterfall looking thing or you’re not a you know a big gamer maybe you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John realize immediately oh that’s what this game is gonna be about and I think that’s a lot of the complaints that gamers have about this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you show them a screenshot and I feel like they’ve played the whole game and then you play the whole game you’re like yeah that’s more or less what I expected
⏹️ ▶️ John be beautifully made, you know, nicely constructed, but they didn’t add a lot on top of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree. And I was familiar with Escher, but not intimately familiar. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew what the point of the game was, but it still took thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to figure out what I needed to do to accomplish things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as a casual gamer, I absolutely recommend it. I thought it was very good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will say the story either was way over my head or was way too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey esoteric for me to understand what they were saying. I’m not going to spoil it or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I definitely think the game is worth it. It is, to John’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about half as much – well, probably at this point, a third as much as a movie ticket and will probably keep you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occupied about half as long. So Marco, I do recommend playing it. It’s only about an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour, maybe two of time to spend, but it’s really, really good and And I definitely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely liked it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, let Adam play it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can try. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he’ll be able to do well on it. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So maybe maybe a couple of years. He can play it. He can play it and report back to you.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s breaking news. Breaking. About an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour or two ago. And apparently, Apple and Google are sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a tree now. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is that about? I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know if we can really talk about that Yeah, cuz it just happened. We don’t really know it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we know enough I mean I’ve been what I posted into the notes that you should be looking at is enough It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like where people will know about it by the time they listen to this of course or whatever But so Apple and Google have
⏹️ ▶️ John been suing each other over patents because that’s what big companies do these days I mean, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ John see it’s they had this diagram in some article once like the diagram of who’s suing who? Everyone’s suing everybody anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple and Google were suing each other You know, over the over you’d expect iPhone patents and Android stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and who knows what else And now they’re not anymore. They have agreed to dismiss
⏹️ ▶️ John all current lawsuits that exist between the two companies And they’ve agreed to work together
⏹️ ▶️ John on Patent reform of some core some form. I don’t they haven’t said what I’m assuming nothing will come with that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway They basically agreed to put their guns back in the holsters for now
⏹️ ▶️ John on the pattern So they’re not doing a patent cross-license, which is what Apple has done with Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, which is, OK, you can use my patents and I can use your patents. So they’re keeping their own patent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how that works. Like, we just agree we won’t sue each other anymore? I mean, they don’t even agree to that. Just saying they’re stopping all current
⏹️ ▶️ John lawsuits. I guess they probably both reserve the right to sue each other about it later. And they declined to comment
⏹️ ▶️ John as to why. And so both companies, this is like the net neutrality thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Technology companies, I mean, I heard some comedians about net neutrality, and they assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that technology companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, or if they’re really old, Comedian, IBM,
⏹️ ▶️ John are on the bad side of net neutrality, that they’re against it, when that’s not the case. In fact, companies
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple, Google, and even AOL, I saw recently, are on the good side of net
⏹️ ▶️ John neutrality. They’re in favor of net neutrality. And Apple and Google, they hate patents. Yeah, they have millions of patents because they have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But they don’t like the systems any more than anyone else does. It’s just a cost of doing business. a terrible cost
⏹️ ▶️ John center for them. They have to spend billions of dollars on defending their patent. I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs would disagree. He seemed to love patents and love patenting things. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John technology companies, I think, would all agree that patents, there’s a problem with the current patent
⏹️ ▶️ John system, and it’s just an annoying thing they have to do. So these two companies agreeing now in Steve Jobs’ absence,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps, to say, OK, let’s stop all these lawsuits. They’re just costing us money. No one’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John really win definitively. It’s just going to distract us for a long time. let’s concentrate our
⏹️ ▶️ John lobbying efforts in Washington, however meager they may be, on getting some sane form of patent reform
⏹️ ▶️ John through. And my first reaction to this, which I tweeted and also put in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John was, I guess it’s Tim Cook holding up a picture of Samsung logo
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, fight the real enemy, and then tearing it up on screen, which is a reference that I assume neither one of you would get. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey put it in the link.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually did. I did. I honestly did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yay, Casey. Maybe this is the year of Casey. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you get that reference or not? No, of course not. Come on. All right. But anyway, it’s in the show notes and I tweeted it so you can look at it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s just the knee jerk reaction. The idea being that Apple and Google, that’s not the real problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s real problem is Samsung, which is ripping off not just their patents, but like their entire phone and experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, this doesn’t really have anything to do with Apple fighting Samsung.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just the whole idea is fight the real enemy and saying, oh, maybe Google is not your real enemy or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is a good thing overall for both companies, because lawsuits really are a stupid distraction, and they are expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And after the Samsung, whatever, the result of that lawsuit where Apple got peanuts,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably don’t even cover their cost of litigation. They got like $120 million settlement or something after years of fighting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Rubin was saying that he thought it was like the principle of it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, see, we’re willing to waste all of our money and just fight you in court to the death, even though we know we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to win anything at the end, just to show how mad we are at you, to show how Apple is irrationally aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ John with its intellectual property and to try to stop people from stealing their things. But if that is their purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t think it is, it’s stupid because what everyone else has learned from this is, if you have deep enough pockets,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can steal everything Apple does and you’ll get a slap on the wrist after a couple of years, but you will reap the huge
⏹️ ▶️ John market benefits of having stolen their stuff. Again, this presumes that you believe in patents and all the other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I do not, and I don’t think Marco does either. But anyway. Nope. I’m glad to see Apple and Google
⏹️ ▶️ John dismiss their current lawsuits. I’m glad to see them concentrate on doing better
⏹️ ▶️ John things, making their products better, and maybe helping patent reform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe. Do we really think that, A, they’re actually going to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to reform patents? And B, even if they want to, is there anything they can really
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they will. They do. They do lobbying. Apple and Google do lobby for their interests in Washington. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John their money is massively outweighed by the people on the other side of this. And so, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s good to see more of the good guys, good guys being people that I agree with, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting into the fight. But realistically speaking, the bad guys on
⏹️ ▶️ John the other side have way more money and way more influence. And the whole thing’s about patents. Like, that’s the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John when I talk about patents that are hypocritical, that I didn’t talk at all about changing the system. Because it’s like, it’s in the Constitution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good luck with that. You can’t get people to agree. You can’t even get laws passed that 90% of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the country agree with. Good luck trying to get something that’s in the Constitution. So I have dim hopes that things
⏹️ ▶️ John will get fixed there. But but I do like to see these companies, you know, actually fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John for their interests when their interests align with mine.
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⏹️ ▶️ John There’s another reason you should go to backblaze.com. They have a great blog where they do what I think every tech company should
⏹️ ▶️ John do is they blog about not like, oh, here’s they do blog about, but here’s the new feature of our new version 2.0 of
⏹️ ▶️ John the product. They blog instead. What they do is mostly blog about the crazy things they have to do to store your
⏹️ ▶️ John data, like their big devices filled with hard drives and all the stats on their hard drives and the failure rates. And the most
⏹️ ▶️ John recent one was trying to correlate, uh, failure rates with temperature changes. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome stuff. If you care about storage, just to look at, uh, you know, it’s kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, open source type development where they discover things
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of doing their work and then they write about it in this sort of an open way. And you’re like, oh, don’t you want your competitors not knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John how you do things? So like, they don’t care. Here’s everything we learned. Here’s the reliability rates for hard drives over multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John years. You know, they have like, what did they say? Like 34,000 hard drives or something. So they have a pretty good sample size going.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love reading that stuff. And it makes, you know, it should be unrelated to the product, but it makes me feel better using
⏹️ ▶️ John the product, reading those blog posts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I definitely enjoy those myself as well. So beats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Apple supposedly is spending some serious money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the best part of the story before we even get to the story. The best, my favorite part of the story is
⏹️ ▶️ John the, and I’m sure you two both do the same thing. You’ll see some tweets go by
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can infer what it is they’re about. Because they’re like the first, maybe the first couple of tweets you see don’t link to any story,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they make some kind of vague comment. And you know something’s up. Sometimes you know a company is involved,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not sure what the deal is. And you have to scroll and you see a couple more. If you’re lucky, some person
⏹️ ▶️ John will put a link in, a link to a story that explains what it’s talking about. But a lot of the times, in my experience anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just get the commentary. I won’t get the story. And I had to figure out what it’s about. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John do my own, sometimes you go to Google and you just type in a couple of keywords and then you find the top result. And so this
⏹️ ▶️ John one was that Apple was supposedly in talks to buy Beats,
⏹️ ▶️ John the music company that makes the headphones and has the streaming music service and stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the next question is, did they already buy them? And people are writing snarky tweets about the fact that it happened, or
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just a rumor? And so more googling around, you find, oh, it’s just like an article that says
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple isn’t talks to blah, blah, blah. And that process repeated itself and continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to repeat itself to this very day. Every time I see people tweeting about it, people will write headlines like, why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John bought Beats. I’m like, oh, did they announce it? Nope, nope, not yet. Why Apple should buy Beats? OK, I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John get that one. You know, it’s like why Apple buying Beats is the best thing ever. I can’t really tell. So I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I see tweets like they announce it, do they announce it? And this has been going on for what, a week now, more than a week.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just yeah, it’s it’s both frustrating and hysterical that this can be a story without
⏹️ ▶️ John actually there being an announcement yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose it’s real, because I think there’s there’s enough. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s tons of smoke. It’s just and there’s been no denials from anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s been it was reported by the Wall Street Journal at first. Like these are, you know, there’s this is pretty substantial smoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say it’s very likely to be real at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So the next question is, why has it not been announced? Assuming we all believe that it’s real and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything points in that direction. Why no announcement?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, they could just be delaying it until WBDC to combine it into one big PR announcement. They it could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really not be finished, you know, not be a done deal yet. So they kind of can’t and shouldn’t talk about it yet. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s lots of plausible reasons why it was leaked but not announced yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC was my guess as well. But then, like, why leak so early? That seems like if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a planned leak. It’s not that early. Well, I guess maybe I’m in denial about when I’m going to have to be on a plane for six hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s coming up soon, isn’t it? But yeah, I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit weird. Because normally, Apple’s sort of planned leaks happen
⏹️ ▶️ John in closer proximity. Maybe there, you know, maybe this just was an unplanned leak or whatever. But anyway, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John weird story. The fact that it just lives on in the zombie mode. Like everyone is writing as if
⏹️ ▶️ John it has already happened, which will be funny if it doesn’t happen for some weird reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John But just like we’ve moved on now. Now we’re just talking about like the repercussions of this deal. It hasn’t been announced. All right. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can talk about the actual deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, so if if it’s true, let’s assume for now it’s true. So, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really interesting because, you know, first of all, yeah, for $3 billion and that’s more than what they bought next for. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, you know, that’s a mid-priced acquisition. That’s not even like a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acquisition in tech anymore. So, you know, okay, it’s a lot of money, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are a profitable hardware company. I think somebody said that Beats makes like a billion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year, something like that. So the price really isn’t that crazy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But anyway, so it’s unusual for Apple. It’s worth mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is not the kind of acquisition Apple has really ever done. You know, normally they buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like small technology companies that are doing something cool and they buy them for the technology or for the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you never hear about it. You know, they don’t they don’t buy big established consumer brands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know like Beats and do God knows what with it. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is very unlike Apple. But you know this is a new Apple. This is Tim Cook’s Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a shifting landscape and Apple does what they think is best and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a lot of reasons why this makes sense. You know a lot of people like what are they gonna do this doesn’t make any sense this is stupid. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this makes tons of sense. Before I explain why what do you guys think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really have that much of an opinion which Which bothers me because I know I should,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve thought about it on and off since we heard this going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only opinion I have about it is that I’m really pissed off that I didn’t immediately think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pitch Dr. Dre as the WWDC beer bash artist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took me a couple days to think of that joke. It’s way too big for that. I know. It took me a couple days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think of that joke though, and I’m a little bothered by that. I guess it makes sense. hard to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are two wildly different businesses that beats has. There’s the streaming music service kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to Spotify, although I’ve never used it. And then there’s the headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And from everything I’ve heard from audiophiles, which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to piss them off ever again, because by God, that was a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That was awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You and I have different definitions of awesome. Anyway, Anyway, every audiophile I’ve ever heard who has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a set of Beats headphones on their head says that they’re terrible. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not saying that’s right. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying that’s what I’ve heard and I’ve never tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. I probably should find a pair somewhere that’s been on 3,000 years because they’re at like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Best Buy or whatever and try them. But there’s the hardware business and then there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming music business, which supposedly is very, very good. And then once you talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming music business, does Apple get licenses if they just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy up Beats and otherwise leave them alone? Does Beats keep the licenses? There’s so many different moving parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. I don’t know what to make of it, and I can’t decide if it’s good, bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or somewhere in between. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is weird in a couple of ways. A lot of them have to be speculative ways because it hasn’t been announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know anything about it, and so everyone has to first decide, okay, assuming it’s true, does
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple keep the Beats brand or do they fold it in? Does Apple keep the streaming service or just use the technology to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a new service? Does Apple keep the headphones or ditch them? And so everyone has to sort of build their own Beats acquisition.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a kid. I think they’re going to keep the brand. They’re going to drop the headphones. They’re going to integrate the
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming service with iTunes Radio. I think they’re going to keep the brand and keep the streaming service but drop the headphones. I think they’re going to keep the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John but drop the streaming service and keep, you know, there’s so many possible comments. I think the licenses won’t come with them because they’ll have to be renegotiated.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, actually, I think licenses will come with them. Actually, I don’t think it doesn’t matter because they’re going to have the Beats guys negotiate with the
⏹️ ▶️ John record labels instead of Apple, and they’ll do better. Why will they do better? Isn’t it once they become part of Apple, don’t they become
⏹️ ▶️ John the enemy as well? It’s like so many permutations and so many unknowns, it’s hard to solve for things. A few
⏹️ ▶️ John things I think we can address, and I think Marco talked about some of them already, are one, the people saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a sign of weakness because if Apple has to go outside for this stuff, it shouldn’t have to go outside the company
⏹️ ▶️ John for this. This is in its strength. Why does it have to buy another company to do streaming music? Why does it have to buy another company to
⏹️ ▶️ John do headphones? Why does it have to buy another company to make deals with record labels? It’s a sign of weakness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That strategy always worked for Microsoft. Keep everything in-house. Don’t never look at anything outside. Never admit anything outside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than what you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing is, Apple has never been like that. When they wanted to get semiconductor manufacturing expertise, they bought PA-Semi.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they wanted to, you know, well, this is a bad example. When they wanted to upgrade their store,
⏹️ ▶️ John they bought the company that did the app store thing, that Chomp or whatever it was. They’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John buying outside companies right in the areas of expertise because it’s hard to staff up, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s much easier to buy a bunch of experienced people who’ve already done what you want. They’re constantly buying. These small companies
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re buying, it’s because they have people and technology that Apple wants, and yes, they do fold them in, but that’s a separate question. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think this acquisition is a sign of Apple’s weakness, and I don’t think it’s unprecedented to acquire
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that have things that Apple wants instead of building them all in-house. So that’s all fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unprecedented would be keeping the Beats brand keeping it separate from Apple, because they don’t do that. Once you get acquired by Apple historically,
⏹️ ▶️ John your people and your technology become part of the Apple fold and whatever branding and product you had before goes away. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that works with small companies, but once you’re buying companies for multiple billions of dollars, it’s like, do we really want to throw away that
⏹️ ▶️ John brand? And that brings me to what I think this acquisition is about, this phantom
⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition with no announced parameters, so that I have to just speculate about. And this says
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing to me and one thing about the future of Apple, and we’ll talk about if we were talking about wearables, is fashion,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has always been a part of what Apple does. Every part of the resurgence
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple has been about fashion in some way, from the Bondi Blue iMac to
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod and all their advertisements on television with the dancing silhouette
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Yes, fashion has always been part of Apple. This, I think, is going
⏹️ ▶️ John further down that road with a possible wearable coming out the line. And what does Beats bring?
⏹️ ▶️ John Beats is a fashion phenomenon. You talked about the quality of the headphones not being that great.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fashion, it doesn’t matter that much what the quality of the headphones is. It’s the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re cool and that people like them. And you could say they’re right or wrong to like them, but they are definitely in fashion.
⏹️ ▶️ John The streaming service as well. Could Apple do a streaming service? Sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Beats is not a big streaming service. As you know, Spotify and Rdio are way bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Beats seems to have a good brand And it’s possible, and people like their streaming service, and if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John got behind it, they could get the numbers up. But this just, I mean, without knowing anything, this definitely seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a fashion acquisition. And when you buy something with fashion, like if Apple bought Versace or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m probably mispronouncing, sorry fashion people, they would not get rid of the brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you buy Calvin Klein, you don’t say, and we’re not gonna use the Calvin Klein name anymore. Of course you’re gonna use the name, like that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you bought. So if I’m right in that Apple has bought Beats because of, for fashion reasons, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that it’s going to keep the brand because you don’t buy something. You don’t buy a fashion company
⏹️ ▶️ John and then throw away the name brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I think you’re on the right track with all this. I mean, so I think again, first to address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that question, everyone’s asking, you know, what will they do with the beats brand? I think it’s a no brainer. The beats brand is really strong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re going to keep it. No question like that. It’s it would be royally stupid to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, shut all this down and be like, all right, here now just Apple headphones and this is now the new iTunes Radio 2.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be a huge mistake. I really I don’t think Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is stupid in this regard like that would be that would be really stupid. So that’s one thing. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other thing is you know the if you look at this is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is two very different businesses right this is headphones you know headphone hardware that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the premium price segment that is very high margin versus this music service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is probably very low margin and and not very popular yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s you know, here’s what I think. Basically, the head for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beats, you know, people, people think I’m all up in arms about beats headphones because they’re bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is, I don’t think they’re that bad. They’re not great. And you can you know, it’s it’s like Bose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bose headphones are not bad headphones. You can just get better sound quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at those prices from other brands or you can get better sound quality for less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually from other brands that are that are less well-known or less fashionable or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know just targeted differently or prioritized differently. So Beats headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not terrible. They’re better than the earbuds certainly they’re better than any earbud I’ve ever tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they look nice and they’re pretty comfortable. at least most of them are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really that’s pretty good and they you know they don’t necessarily sound accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do not accurately represent like with like a flat frequency response but most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like flat frequency responses. Most people like a boost and bass and treble and that’s what they supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And so you know they make the sound more appealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s artificial. And so you combine the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco package here is pretty appealing to people. You have good-looking headphones that are cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re from a popular brand, and they sound appealing to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they make you look good, or you know, like they make you look like a status symbol. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a very appealing thing. Now, you know, I was in an Apple store a couple days ago, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had these two giant tables set up with all premium headphones. Like the cheapest pair of headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these tables was I think $200, probably the Bose AE series. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried a bunch of them because I had to wait a little while. And the Beats ones were fine. Like you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t sound amazing, but they sounded good. You know, just not great. They didn’t sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like $300, but they sounded like maybe $80. You know, I’ve had $80 headphones that sounded worse than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really quickly, what is the price point for a set of Beats headphones? Because I genuinely don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe they span two to four or two to three at least. A hundred? Yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m actually not that familiar with the product line. Like I’ll try them out in the Apple store every once in a while, but I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t usually do more than that. But if you look at everything else in that segment in the store, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else they have at the Apple store on those tables, there are all these like premium fashion-y brands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands like Bose or Bang & Olufsen, like these like super high-end brands that audiophiles really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even look twice at because their sound profiles are almost never very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neutral. They usually have a pretty, pretty wacky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound profile. Like the frequency response line is nowhere near flat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, for audiophiles, that’s not really what we’re looking for. But the fact is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these headphones are popular. They’re expensive, they’re nice, they’re well-made, they look cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are usually extremely comfortable and lightweight. Some of them have noise canceling, which is a very useful feature for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travelers, air travelers especially. So like, they’re useful to people, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practical. So it’s a very successful headphone brand in a very successful segment that is booming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partially, in fact, a lot because of Beats. Beats has made this segment popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among young people who were previously just wearing crappy earbuds. So if you’d like Beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, and I mean this in the good and bad ways, there are good ways here, Beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has done to headphones what Starbucks did for coffee. You know, it isn’t the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee, but it brought coffee to the masses that was above and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond both the price and the quality of like 7-Eleven crap that you’d get at gas stations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, you know, Beats has done that to headphones. It’s way better than earbuds by a long shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s way better than the crappy little, you know, $20 things you’d get, you know, at the drugstore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a lot more expensive and you can do a lot better, but it’s bringing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it brought full-sized headphones to the masses again. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s bringing this whole category of expensive headphones to the masses and making that cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it cool to walk around wearing anything beyond earbuds. I mean, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walk around wearing nice big headphones that sound good, but until about this year, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have felt like an idiot walking around like that because I would look ridiculous. Now, everyone’s wearing big headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was, and that was largely started by Beats. So, anyway, it’s a very good headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand. It’s not for me, but it’s a very good, successful brand. And they’re selling a lot of $300 things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple stores. And it’s a very high margin business. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look at this primarily as a retail buy. Like, I think the music service, I’ll get to that in a second, but I think the music service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually a secondary deal here. I think this is primarily about the retail headphone brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they already have tons of real estate in Apple stores. Apple sells a ton of them, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get a nice boost in just retail margins from this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But do they really need that? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t buy that they’re not going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beats headphones become Apple headphones, because they don’t need more money. I mean, they’re freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey printing money. Apple is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, but think of it as a strategic thing, like about wearables. How many things does Apple sell
⏹️ ▶️ John that you wear that they’re successful selling?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, the earbuds.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess them, and they kind of, like the iPod Nano at various times, is clipped to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the shuffle, stuff like that. But it’s clear that, seems clear that Apple wants to get into wearables.
⏹️ ▶️ John Beats is the company that sells something you wear, that is very popular. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I said I think they’ll keep the brand, the reason this build your own acquisition thing is so much fun is,
⏹️ ▶️ John all scenarios are plausible. Because it would be plausible that they bought Beats, they will destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John the Beats brand, never use it and merely have bought it because they want the
⏹️ ▶️ John expertise of people who know how to sell something expensive that you wear that is cool and say please do that for
⏹️ ▶️ John us and they want Jimmy Iovine to do deals with the record labels because he knows them or whatever like that is less
⏹️ ▶️ John likely than what I think but it’s not it’s not outside the realm of possibility like most people aren’t talking about that but do you guys think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s impossible that they would ditch the headphones turn the streaming service into an Apple streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John service and what they would be getting out of deal is relationships with music companies if not necessarily license
⏹️ ▶️ John agreements, but depending what legality is and the expertise of a company that had figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to build something with 300 bucks that people wear that they’ll happily buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so let’s let’s get to the music thing then because this I think again, I think the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business is way too big and successful for Apple to you know, shut down that brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know, get rid of that. That’s I still disagree, but people love beats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone except audiophiles loves
⏹️ ▶️ John beats, but see if they if they killed of the business, it would leave a vacuum in the market. Because as Marco pointed out, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Starbucks moment for big headphones, kind of like a retread of the 70s where big headphones were in briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the 60s and 70s where big headphones were in then, mostly because you couldn’t have decent sounding
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones. But I don’t think it’s implausible that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I think if anything, they would become Beats by Apple, and then it would become just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. Like maybe they don’t flush the Beats brand its entirety immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know if if they’re after headphones at all, which obviously none of us know if that’s the case, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they’re after headphones, I don’t see the point in owning a company that continues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to operate autonomously when you’ve already got a crap load of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’d be one thing if Apple was barely profitable and then they buy this hugely profitable business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, in that case, don’t mess with what works. But Apple, like I said, they’re printing money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would they not fold that into the Apple brand and hopefully bring those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those customers with them?
⏹️ ▶️ John But they would by getting rid of the beats brand, you’d be putting a void in the market and who fills that void? You’re hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be Apple to fill that void, but you’d be immediately. It’s like if Starbucks folded and then it’d be like, well, but someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got to buy their, you know, high price coffee from somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying stop having Starbucks stores. I’m saying put the words blue bottle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in front of the on the store instead of Starbucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Email Casey. Yeah. But like what they’re what they’re sell, what they’re selling is the brand though. Like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Like beats beats is not the headphone. If someone else sold the headphone that it looks slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John different and didn’t have the word beats in front of it, someone would ask you, Hey, does that a new pair of beats? You’d say, no, it’s what insert
⏹️ ▶️ John name of credit knockoff. You’d be creating a void in the market that would have to be filled by somebody. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be up to Apple to fight with all the other people to fill that void. Oh, please buy our Apple headphones. They’re designed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the same guys who design beats. Fine beats by Apple. That will take over the cache that that
⏹️ ▶️ John beats it established. And I mean, it’s fashion, you know, if Calvin Klein goes away, you don’t immediately get their
⏹️ ▶️ John market share because you made them go away. Like if you acquire Calvin Klein and sunset the brand, you don’t get all
⏹️ ▶️ John those customers automatically. Everyone’s got to fight for him again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also, like you can’t underestimate the impact that beats has had on the market. If you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around at any other headphone company, like, you know, even old companies like Sennheiser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AKG, you know, they like these these big old old headphone companies are making these things forever. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all now have headphones in the one to three hundred dollar range that have like certain colors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colored cables, like all this stuff, like all these design cues and adjustments and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these brands, brands, all these like these, these these old boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands made these like new young model names and like the Sennheiser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Momentum and all this stuff. And they all look like Beats. They all took all those design cues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s clearly inspired by Beats, if nothing else. And yeah, they sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better. I would have the same momentum over Beats any day, even though I didn’t even like the momentum that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s impossible to understate how dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Beats is in this market and how much their brand is really worth and how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have been inspired by and are aspiring to be like them. and other headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands are copying them left and right, trying to be more like them, but they are dominant in this market. So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think this all ties in. So the hardware business, I think, is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a nice boost to their retail margins and everything else. That’s fine. I think the bigger… And John, I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right that this is more about Apple becoming a fashion and lifestyle company. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very, very good reason for this. But I think the music angle and the cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor is the biggest. If you look at what iTunes is, iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is never been that financially important to Apple, but it’s always been spiritually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important and important for their public perception and marketing and branding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Jobs said a long time ago, he had dismissed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming services or or the demand for them saying that people want to own their music. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has proven to be wrong. Like many, like many Steve Jobs dismissals over time. I’m sure I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure if he was still around today, he would totally deny that and say, Oh yeah, stream service is great because now we have one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, but you know, in typical job style. But, you know, he Steve Jobs was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. And it turns out that sorry, Merlin, turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of people don’t care about their music. And a lot of people want streaming. and that’s all they want. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people, I mean listen to the prompt every week, I talk about this. Like, and you know, so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people just use streaming music now, and they don’t, like they don’t even keep iTunes libraries anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes, like Apple is dominant in that, in the digital music realm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in selling digital music. But I think the world of selling digital music is on the decline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like iTunes posted pretty disappointing numbers recently, and this has been kinda, kinda, you know, in the analysis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in the analyst world a little bit. But I think it’s pretty clear that Apple is the king of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sinking ship here. This is a terrible mixed metaphor. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, Apple is so dominant in this world that a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of people no longer care about. And they try to get into streaming with iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Radio and nobody cares. It isn’t, iTunes Radio was not that good. I’ve used it here and there because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use streaming enough to get one of the better services, but even I can look at iTunes Radio and say, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, the worst of the streaming services. And they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, they’re not getting it, you know? And Beats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the other streaming services that are more successful than Beats in raw user numbers, I think they’re a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less Apple-like. Like Beats is much more about editorial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice and like featured playlists made by actual artists and editors and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s less about like just pure algorithms. And I think that’s more Apple style. And I think that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit in better with the iTunes store if it was ever merged in where like, it’s more about like editorial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curation from the music industry, right? That is kind of very Apple versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RDO or Spotify or the other ones. So I think it makes sense for them to buy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, there’s only, they have to be realizing that, you know, Apple is run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a, for the most part, uh, the same very longstanding group,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, of pretty uncool middle aged white guys who work at a tech company in California.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was cool for a while. And I think that time has passed and I think they know it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty clear now that Apple is no longer like inherently cool. They make good stuff here and there that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, But Apple as a brand is no longer like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the coolest thing in the world where it was, you know, three to five years ago, say it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer up in that peak. And Beats is, you know, it’s not as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Apple, but it is probably better regarded. And it’s certainly in the area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of music alone, you know, obviously Beats doesn’t make phones and everything in the area of music alone. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beats is a way better and more promising brand now and in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than iTunes is. I think iTunes is really on its way out of dominance just because the thing it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is falling out of favor so quickly and probably more quickly than Apple even imagined. And Beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good at it and it has a really good foundation and they can bring these people in. You know they’re gonna bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the executives from Beats and you know if the rumors are true they’re gonna like take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on executive roles and like lead the music division on Apple, that’s awesome, because that’s exactly what Apple needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s think about why downloads, why Steve Jobs thought that streaming wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing and that downloads would be better. I mean, a lot of it is that times change
⏹️ ▶️ John and that the infrastructure changes that make streaming more feasible. But even when he said it,
⏹️ ▶️ John if he had thought about it a little bit differently, I think he would have realized that streaming was inevitable,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe he did because he very often did not reveal his inner thinking about these things. But it was like he was coming from
⏹️ ▶️ John an era where there was two ways to get music You’d bought a record at the record store or you turn on the radio
⏹️ ▶️ John and listen to it and one you controlled entirely and you Purchased music and you owned it you could pick which songs you wanted you could go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John store and buy them you could play Them whenever you want and the other one you had no control over other than changing the radio station Even
⏹️ ▶️ John that was limited control due to payola and limited bandwidth and various other things
⏹️ ▶️ John But he should have seen coming is that okay? We’re offering a digital version of you going to the record store and buying
⏹️ ▶️ John music there will be a digital version of the radio, but you will have some control
⏹️ ▶️ John over it. It won’t be like the radio radio where it’s broadcast over a certain, you know, wavelengths and you all just receive
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a certain number of stations. Why shouldn’t the listener be able to have almost as much control
⏹️ ▶️ John over what they listen to on a streaming service as they do buying things? And that’s basically what’s happened. No one wants to listen to just
⏹️ ▶️ John a radio station that, you know, that just plays music. Oh yeah, radio sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, they want control. And the service is like, fine, we can give you that. Give us a seed
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll make you a playlist. We’ll have people editorially pick things. We’ll have you be able to say songs that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to hear again or songs that you do like. All that technology is there. And once
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s there, you’ve got the buying music and now you’ve got the listening to the radio. But listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to the radio starts to have almost all the advantages, in fact, some advantages that buying music doesn’t have, which is you’re surprised what’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John come next. You’re gonna discover new music that way. And yet the business model is different. It’s not free with interminable
⏹️ ▶️ John ads. you have to pay some money for it, or iTunes Radio does have ads. Is there a pay tier for iTunes Radio?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know. It’s tied into iTunes Match.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you pay for iTunes Match, you don’t get ads on iTunes Radio.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it’s streaming, but it’s streaming with many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many of the advantages of purchasing music. So it seems like it was almost inevitable that, like, radio’s been popular
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. Why were people willing to put up with that crap? Well, it was a nice way to ambiently have music on the go and be surprised,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it wasn’t. and just our standards were lower. Well, we had fewer alternatives. Radio has always been
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea that like somehow purchasing music of your own would completely replace any kind of broadcast medium,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was never going to happen. And it was clear that streaming would be able to become the thing that is today.
⏹️ ▶️ John And interestingly, about beats and speaking of streaming, everything people talk about how beats, and I just said it earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John is so small in the streaming market compared to the big players in the streaming market. And even in the headphones market.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, they’re the big gorilla and big expensive headphones, but in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John of things, which I think is what Casey was getting at, how much money is that? A billion here, a billion there. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John loses that in its sofa, right? But when you’re going to buy a company,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we talked about this with Facebook, you want to buy it before you have to pay $19 billion. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John think a company is going to be a $19 billion company, buy it when you can get them for $3 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like all the people who are saying, why Why would they buy this small company? You don’t, you know, it’s buy low,
⏹️ ▶️ John sell high, or buy low, sell never. It’s not wait until they’re gigantic and say, oh, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the number one streaming company, because if they tried to buy, you know, the number one streaming company ever, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is Spotify at this point, it would probably cost them more, and it’s not, this is a safer bet, because like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, $3 billion, if it goes out, the beat fizzles out, because fashion things often do, it ends up
⏹️ ▶️ John not being Calvin Klein, but it ends up being, like, I don’t know, the Swatch Watch, or
⏹️ ▶️ John something else the 80s it kind of came and went because that happens in fashion all the time. Hey, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John only out $3 billion. No big deal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Also, I mean, and this is probably a much smaller concern, but it might it might grow to be a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Beats is on all the platforms, or at least on Android. I mean, who cares about Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mobile, but it’s on, you know, so beats might be a way. I don’t think Apple would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swallow its pride and bring iTunes to Android. But but having beats, radio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, what’s the music service called? It’s called beats the beats music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe yes beats music. OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple would be opposed to keeping beats music on Android and maintaining it and growing that business there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. So it’s a way for them to, you know, for their music streaming business to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to get as many people as
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. iTunes for Windows. I mean, that’s the precedent is sometimes in some businesses that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to be in. You have to be on other platforms. Yeah. to be a 70
⏹️ ▶️ John cent market share of digital music players, you need iTunes for Windows. And if Apple ever wants to be some
⏹️ ▶️ John big number market share in streaming music, they’re going to have to be another platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where is Beats music available? Is it only in the States?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so. So, but it’s a very young service. Like usually the streaming services start out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one country and they broaden as they can negotiate the rights everywhere else. Beats has only been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for a few months, right? It’s a very young service. Launched at the end of January. Yeah it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s i’m pretty sure i’m pretty sure that’s not really that much of a concern right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i’m sure if apple really is buying beats that they will make it available worldwide as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon as they can negotiate all that i don’t think that this is gonna come inherently with the deals that beats negotiated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already i have a feeling there’s gotta be a clause in this contract that says that they’re that they get renegotiated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On acquisition, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I should also point out that beats apparently was MOG Way back when an MOG was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available is available or was available in the US and Australia But I believe beats is only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right, but well, you know, it’s available worldwide Tell us Marco our next sponsor
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping they put that in there knowing I would read it like that. We’ll find out.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so there’s been some interesting developments in the JavaScript world lately. There have?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. It’s like he doesn’t even read my Twitter feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or the show notes. I’ve been a little busy. Overcast isn’t going to ship this year. So why are you bothering?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways. I’m waiting for iOS 8. All right. So there’s been some interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion in WebKit and JavaScript. And it’s It’s funny because I put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes and I’m going to put it in the chat. And it’s about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WebKit is leveraging LLVM to do some optimizations. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get into what that means in just a second. But it’s funny because in the show notes, I knew that one or both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you, probably just Marco was going to get snarky about JavaScript. And so in the show notes, I have JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optimization WebKit using LLVM, which is the link. Then in the show notes I have, or in our show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, when do we realize that JavaScript is for real? Marco, explain to us how this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse than HHVM. And I don’t want you to go there yet, but start thinking. So what the crap are we talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m a little fuzzy on the boundaries. And John, interrupt me whenever you’re ready. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you run JavaScript in WebKit, there are different stages of compilation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interpretation that the JavaScript will go through. So at first crack, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just run the JavaScript interpreted, which is very quick to get going, but not terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey efficient because it doesn’t look for ways to make the code that other people have written to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a little leaner and a little more efficient. If your code, if any bit of code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey runs so many times that it crosses a threshold, and this is where I start to get fuzzy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will do like a kind of quickie compilation into native code. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John? Or am I already going off the rails?
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have stuck with broader generalities, but I confess that I don’t know the specifics either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, let’s keep it broad, then that’s fine. Good call. So basically, with time, you can go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several stages, where each further stage requires a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit more upfront work, in some cases, a lot more upfront work, but the results
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are that much quicker. And the final stage was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the final stage, I should say, the WebKit developers started thinking to themselves, well, you know what? We really should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optimize this code that we’ve generated. So we’ve taken JavaScript and kind of translated it into a different kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of code. We should try to optimize this really well, because if you’ve gotten all the way down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this path, this is something that we feel like is running a lot. Oh, and to be clear, WebKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the rendering engine that’s used in Safari and Chrome. So if you’ve gotten all the way to stage three, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maximum stage up until now, then you’re running this code a lot. It’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made as quick as can be without some serious optimizations. Well, they thought, all right, well, let’s optimize this code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and start trying to cut things out that we don’t need, kind of like MP3s, if you will. And so then they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided- Wait, it’s lossy? No, okay, fair enough. That was a poor analogy. All right, but I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get here. I’m gonna get there. That would be amazing. Give me time, I’m gonna get there. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided, well, you know what? There’s another project that’s really, really, really good. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about optimizing and that’s LLVM, which is half of the Clang and LLVM compilation combo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they thought, well, why don’t we just leverage LLVM to do this optimization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us? And so if you’ve got JavaScript that runs in WebKit so often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it escalates all the way to this fourth level or fourth tier, I believe they call it, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compilation and optimization, in theory, it will get optimized the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native Objective-C code gets optimized. And so in principle, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should run pretty darn fast. OK, that’s the setup. John, go ahead and tear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me apart or add what you have to add.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s how I would have summarized it, because I don’t have the thing in front of me, so I wouldn’t go into the details of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You basically hit all the points. But for people who want the even shorter summary of it, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript comes down as a bunch of text. And you have
⏹️ ▶️ John two things you have to balance here. One is how fast can I start running code? And second is how fast is that code
⏹️ ▶️ John when I run it? And that’s an important trade-off because if you have some tiny little snippet of JavaScript,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to wait like, I’m going to make up numbers here, these aren’t real, but you don’t want to wait a second
⏹️ ▶️ John to start running it and then run the code for like a 10th of a second. That’s a waste. You want to
⏹️ ▶️ John start running immediately, right? And that continuum exists, they had three tiers previously to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this. We can run code immediately, but it’s not going to be that fast. We can take a little bit longer and then the code will be a little bit faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John We could take even longer than that and the code will be really fast and they’re adding a fourth tier This is the FTL.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it fourth tier?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I’m not what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking but I can’t Oh fourth
⏹️ ▶️ John tier LLVM Yeah fourth tier LLVM the joke of my Twitter is that the you know and people think
⏹️ ▶️ John FTL I think faster than light obviously the the but the secret internal code name might as well be as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’m concerned F this language because They’ve already had they already had an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John three tiers of figuring out how can we run this language? And you know fast we want to start
⏹️ ▶️ John running immediately and also have it run fast and figure out which one of these tiers We do everything else. That’s the trade-off They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making and the fourth tier is all right For code that you know we’ve gone through all
⏹️ ▶️ John three of those other tiers And we still want to go faster, and this is just in this piece of code That’s running. You know it’s running
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. It’s in some tight loop. It’s using a lot of CPU we will take a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time relatively speaking and figure out how to compile it with our actual compiler our actual
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that their core compiler system LLVM system and the tricky part of this and the reason why I say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John F this language is because all along those three tiers you don’t want to stop and be like okay we compiled
⏹️ ▶️ John everything with the really fast one that starts running stuff immediately but it’s kind of slow when it’s running we know we got up
⏹️ ▶️ John and running really fast but it’s kind of slow when it’s running we would like to for this function in this function this function
⏹️ ▶️ John use the second tier. You can’t pause the world and say, wait a second, wait a second, it turns out these two functions are called
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. I want to take a little some time here to compile this in a faster form and run
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You can’t pause execution. That will kill your performance. You have to sort of, you know, the old programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John analogy, you have to swap the engine while the airplane is in the air, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to let everything run along and make an optimized version of this thing on another thread in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John and swap it in for the new one and all the way down the line. And the same thing with the LLVM thing, the fourth tier is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna take you a long time to compile. But you find out something, you think this is running so much, we really want this to be super
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, we’re gonna spend the time to compile this with our actual compiler. You cannot pause
⏹️ ▶️ John execution when that’s going on, you have to compile it with the compiler, and then when it’s ready, swap
⏹️ ▶️ John it in. And this technology for swapping in the faster versions of functions take longer to compile, they already had
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less, and this fourth tier is more difficult because what they’re compiling is like, LLVM is used to compiling
⏹️ ▶️ John more static languages like C, C++, where variables don’t change their type, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John and where you know the type of things up front. And they had to put in, they have to make a compiled version that they can sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of self-modify to say, oh, well, it turns out this optimization or this assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John is violated. So bump back down to one of the slower versions that has the more dynamic properties. Oh, it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John this, we don’t actually know the type of this. It’s actually a different type now. Swap in a different type there. You can read the
⏹️ ▶️ John article, which I’ll put in the show notes, it is very long and very complicated. But this is essentially the trick they’re doing, is
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing this trade off between how fast can we start running and how fast do we run. And they’re doing this thing all in
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel where they don’t stop the running of the program to swap in the faster versions. And finally, in the fourth
⏹️ ▶️ John tier, they’re shoving in a much more rigidly optimized version in the hopes
⏹️ ▶️ John that all their assumptions about the version will be correct. And when they’re not correct, they have fallbacks. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a really great article in the same sense as the backblaze thing, telling you the internals of how they
⏹️ ▶️ John decided to do something. It’s great insight into how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John make JavaScript fast, essentially, how do you F this language? How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you apply brains and engineering experience and say, we’re gonna make JavaScript fast. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care if this is a terrible language that is incredibly resistant to optimization. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna throw engineering resources at it until we get fast. I mean, same thing with the PHP and HHVM.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have enough money and enough engineering resources, You can make them with any language fast. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing. They’re just, and it’s an amazing engineering feat. And by the way, the other
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript engines that used by Firefox and that Chrome is doing with
⏹️ ▶️ John their V8 engine, Google’s doing in the V8 engine. And by the way, Casey, you said that WebKit is used by Chrome. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, that’s Blink now, which is fork of WebKit. But anyway. Right, right, right, right. They
⏹️ ▶️ John all have similar things to this. They all have to make the same exact trade-off. How do we start running immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also be able to run the thing that runs a lot faster. And they do similar type
⏹️ ▶️ John of things of tracing execution, seeing which things are run frequently and compiling them into a faster form and swapping them in. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John not an amazing breakthrough from Apple that is unprecedented in the JavaScript industry. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of really smart people all trying to make JavaScript faster. And as to your question, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John when do you realize JavaScript is for real? I think everyone realizes we’re stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John with it, except for maybe Google, who’s trying to make Dart. It’s in web browsers everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s why we’re like, well, we’re just gonna have to make it faster. And we’re trying to make JavaScript better, but that’s such a slow process. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to wait for all the web browsers to turn over and to get a new version of ECMAScript approved. And it’s just such a
⏹️ ▶️ John long timeline. It’s like JavaScript is what we’ve got. Is it for real? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s what we’re stuck with. And so we’re just gonna do what we can to make it fast. And I think everybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John is into dynamic programming languages, pick your favorite, you know, PHP, Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ John Python, Ruby, We all wish that we had the engineering resources put towards our favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John language to make it fast, because it suffers from all the same hard to optimize bits about typeless
⏹️ ▶️ John variables or dynamic types or things that could be faster. It’s like, man, can you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John how fast Python would run if it had this amount of engineering resources thrown at it, or Ruby,
⏹️ ▶️ John or Perl? Or I mean, PHP is kind of getting a similar amount of resources thrown at it at least by one company.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s interesting, not so much because it’s novel, But just because you get
⏹️ ▶️ John to see Apple doing what it does best, which is great engineering. The WebKit team is very skilled. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing something similar to what other people have done, but in a slightly different way. And it’s smart of them to leverage
⏹️ ▶️ John the compiler that they’ve sort of brought up to be a world-class compiler, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is open source. Other people could have used LLVM as well. And I saw a lot of people pooh-poohing LLVM, saying, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too slow. You can’t use that for a just-in-time compiler. No, you can’t. You have to save it for the bits that you really
⏹️ ▶️ John know are going to be running quickly, and you have to be able to swap them in. And they did some clever changes to LLVM itself to make this
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, which is nice when you’re kind of steering the LLVM project as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I tweeted, I don’t know whether to give a standing ovation or weep. And the standing ovation would be, good job,
⏹️ ▶️ John guys. This is great engineering. It’s interesting, great blog post about it, thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up. I like JavaScript being faster. And weep to say, you guys have got to go through
⏹️ ▶️ John heroic measures to make JavaScript fast. And why? because it’s the language we’re all stuck with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess I’ve turned a new leaf in my appreciation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for JavaScript because in so many ways, it really is a terrible, terrible language. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget the name of the guy, oh, Gary Barnhart did a great, like literally two or three minute video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how JavaScript and Ruby are really kind of wonky. And we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes. But in that, be that as it may,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like JavaScript, like it or not, whether or not it’s academically a good language,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, just like you said, John, it’s here. And this is the real deal, and this is what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using, or what we’re using for certain things at certain times. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come back to, I’ve started to write, or do a lot more DOM manipulation in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my day job with JavaScript and jQuery. And the things that you can get done are really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressive with not that much code. I wrote not a lot of code to get my blogging engine going.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, granted, I stood on the work of many other people in a lot of code that they wrote, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write that much. And I feel like, and this is the same guy, Gary Barnhart, did a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great talk about the birth and death of JavaScript. We’ll put that in the show notes. This one is about half an hour, but it’s worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And really, I agree that JavaScript is academically just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a terrible language in so many ways. But at what point do we realize, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s good enough. And to me, I don’t see why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s that terribly different than PHP, which in some ways is, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far superior academically, but really in the same boat, you know, it was kind of slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or slow enough that, that you need HHVM to make it quick. So Marco, I’m, I’m trolling, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also honestly asking you, like, how do you feel like PHP and JavaScript are not very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar? Why do you like PHP so much? I’m not talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the particulars of the language, but why do you like PHP so much and why do you snicker so much at JavaScript?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP is actually a pretty C-like language. There’s a lot that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like about it that is because it resembles the way C works, and not at the low level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, but conceptually, syntaxically, a lot of the direct mappings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to C libraries that are available within it, stuff like that. I like that about it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that it’s everywhere. It is way faster than JavaScript. Even like five years ago it was way faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript. Like even before HHVM, just inherently it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is possible to make way faster, I think. I don’t know if I’m about to say that for sure, but it at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always has been way faster. No one has ever really complained that, oh my God, the PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my server is too slow, except Facebook. Only because they have a billion servers, so it actually matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them. But PHP in general has always been very fast. There’s lots of other problems with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but performance has never been one of them. And you know, obviously it’s not as fast as like C or a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy compiler, like the way HFVM can make it super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimized and just compile and everything, but it’s still really fast for what it is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see a whole lot of parallels here, honestly, except that they’re both academically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad languages that we are stuck with by ubiquity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good point. Or by familiarity. I don’t like JavaScript. To me, I still don’t look forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to having to use JavaScript to do anything. I try to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it where possible. Even on the web, I will use it sparingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I certainly have never been tempted by Node because of the language that it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I like the idea of Node, of its structure and its event-driven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. I don’t like the JavaScript language at all. And so that’s why I’ve never been tempted by it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I try to tempt you for a moment? Yeah, sure. So the temptation
⏹️ ▶️ John that should get you into JavaScript is that it lets you run your code on other people’s computers instead of your
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. And it lets you make your servers act more like boring transaction processors that send and receive JSON
⏹️ ▶️ John in response to like RESTful requests. And it’s kind of refreshing as
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who’s sort of gone from the server side programming to the client side programming through throughout the history of the web
⏹️ ▶️ John to suddenly be able to run all your crap on someone else’s computer. Because their computer is way faster than your server, way faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than the proportion of your server that they’re going to get, right? They’re not going to get your entire server. They’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John get 1,000th of it, depending on how people are hitting it. And there’s a lot of freedom in that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then it lets you write your server in a more sort of structured, boring
⏹️ ▶️ John way, where it is just like you end up just writing an API.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t make the language any better, but it is kind of an interesting change. If you think of web development as, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to write things on the server that spit out HTML to my clients with a little bit of JavaScript. And changing it to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I send my clients something once, and they run a persistent JavaScript application that talks to my server
⏹️ ▶️ John through API endpoints that just talk in data. that is, it’s a refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ John change for web development. It may make you think on it less harshly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s certainly interesting. And there are some benefits to that, by all means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not denying that at all, especially with modern browser support for things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing onto the URL bars without actually making a request so that you can take over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back button and kind of simulate a hierarchy without actually causing page reloads, stuff like that. There are a lot of benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, to a lot of different application types. But I hardly write web applications anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hardly ever wrote them to begin with. And usually, I write web backends. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started writing iOS frontends. And my web applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have always been like, I’ll do the minimum required to get the job done. But as I mentioned in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really not into it. I’m not driven to make an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web frontend for anything. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you ever needed one, though, since you have to write the back ends talk to your iOS app, you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John got a back end. It’s ready for your JavaScript app to talk to like you wouldn’t have to you wouldn’t have to, you know, duplicate that
⏹️ ▶️ John code in like having direct queries from your PHP to your database that does the same thing with the API endpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John like you just if you do it once for your iOS app, you can use that same back end if you’ve done a good job to do to do
⏹️ ▶️ John your web front end as well. And that would save you some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? And like one of the things one of the things I like, like in overcast, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually using a CDN for part of the API as a way to and I’m thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, what API requests can be cacheable at the CDN layer. So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a it’s another layer of caching that is both faster for clients to access and doesn’t involve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many hits to my server. And so that that you know, that’ll make scaling a lot easier, because not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single request will hit me. And so like, you know, if I’m looking at it from a JavaScript perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be useful there too, like, if I can pull, you know, feed or episode data off of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CDN, because like, you know, a feed no matter who’s looking at it has the same episodes in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just might have different, you know, different progress, different settings, stuff like that. But, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode list itself is shared data. So there’s, you know, cool things I could do with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, like, I just, I don’t see myself putting that much effort into the web side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things. So I’m a bad example to even be asking this question to, but I don’t know, like, I see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole thing with JavaScript optimization is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically interesting progress and solution to a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t care about and that I don’t really personally have very often. I don’t even use very many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy JavaScript web apps. Like I use Google Maps on the web, but that’s it, like I don’t use Gmail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use a whole lot of crazy web stuff like that. So I don’t even, this will benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, but not me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will definitely benefit you, because the bottleneck on mobile clients still is
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript execution speed. you don’t think it is you think all this page is loading slowly, but JavaScript,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s tons of it everywhere. And the speed of JavaScript execution on mobile phones
⏹️ ▶️ John is still a limiting factor. I mean, just compare the render times on desktop versus, you know, it’s not like over the
⏹️ ▶️ John same connection desktop versus mobile. Yeah, phones are getting faster. But JavaScript is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s difficult to optimize, look at all these things are doing to optimize it. So you’ll benefit from it as a user more than
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer, perhaps, if you know if they do a good job, it should, Again, not in web use
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, because we assume this is all going to only be in Safari. But hey, at least in mobile Safari, things will get a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit faster. In some respects, what Apple is doing here is just the cost of being in the web browser business.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to be in this business, which is we make a web rendering engine, and Apple does want to and should be in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to keep up with the Joneses. Competition is good, and everyone’s getting faster along the same rate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you will benefit from it. If you don’t think you will, try loading the same web page. Pick
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these web pages that you think doesn’t use any JavaScript to speak of. Load it in a web view, which presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John run without the optimizations, and then load it in mobile Safari and just time it, and see which one takes longer before you can interact
⏹️ ▶️ John with the page before it renders. I think you’ll be able to measure the difference with a stopwatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, out of curiosity, I didn’t think you did very much front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end development at your day job. So what is the stack that you’re using? Are you using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Angular or something like that? I know you’re using-
⏹️ ▶️ John A full stack developer, Casey, didn’t we know this? That’s what they call it in the resumes. We need a full
⏹️ ▶️ John stack developer. Anyway, yeah, now web development, as I’ve said- Ninja rockstar. As I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, yeah, right. Being a web developer means you, like
⏹️ ▶️ John in most places, they don’t have these regimented roles where you are a back end and you are a front end. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up having to learn everything, the full stack. It’s not a ridiculous term to
⏹️ ▶️ John say full stack developer. I’ve used a lot of different frameworks. The thing about JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John that people love and hate is that the framework that’s popular now will not be popular in 18 months.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a lot of churn. There’s a lot of sort of the Cambrian explosion of different
⏹️ ▶️ John species. And we’re hoping there’s some sort of consolidation, but it never seems to come. So it is a young and vibrant community.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, I’ve tried a lot of the ones that are out there. At a certain point, each project has
⏹️ ▶️ John to commit to one library or framework or a set of them. And then you use them for a long period of time. and then the next thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you do, we’ll go through the same process and you’ll make different choices, including new things that didn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John when you made the first choice. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the flavor of the month over it where you work?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, jQuery seems to have more or less won out over the alternatives. Although the alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ John are still out there and people still like them. So it hasn’t totally squashed them. But jQuery is fairly dominant in the realm of, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me manipulate the DOM without crying, that category of thing. Underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John and Backbone, I’m not saying have their individual markets sewn up but they seem to be pretty popular
⏹️ ▶️ John these days. I don’t even know what those are. Yeah, well, so that’s why you hate JavaScript so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John They take away some of the pain like in the same you know jQuery is right like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although I’ve hardly used it honestly I use jQuery very little because I just haven’t I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed to like most of my DOM stuff is simple and I just use the DOM straight for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so using the DOM straight used to be a nightmare because of IE right and maybe you you miss those days, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I just never cared about supporting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, part of the big selling point initially of jQuery is, oh, god, thank god I don’t have to do the 8,000 things I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do to manipulate the DOM directly, because the APIs were just so incredibly different semantically and different
⏹️ ▶️ John function names and everything. It’s like, I need something to paper over that. And these days, the DOM
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs are more or less the same on all popular browsers. You still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use them directly, because you want to do stuff like use CSS selectors to select elements, and you’re relying on jQuery to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s fast. It’s kind of like using a database where you’re like, oh, I can just type arbitrary CSS selectors into jQuery
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll get the elements that I want and my problems are all solved. And that’s like the honeymoon period of jQuery. Do you realize,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the query planner that makes poor life choices, you say, I’m assumed right now it will do, you know, get
⏹️ ▶️ John elements by class name, which is native. And then I assume after it does that, it will do, no, it is not, the query
⏹️ ▶️ John optimizer in jQuery, again, it has to do the same trade-off. Trade-off between start doing what you asked me to do
⏹️ ▶️ John right now or spend some time thinking about what you asked me to do, with a really awesome plan and execute that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so like in a database, you have to learn, well, you can write this expression in jQuery, but your code will be 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ John faster if you split it up into two jQuery selectors, or if you use native DOM to get these elements
⏹️ ▶️ John and then use jQuery on them. And anyway, I think I’ve lost my thread while I’m wandering
⏹️ ▶️ John in discussion of jQuery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The question was, what is your framework or frameworks du jour at the moment? You had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore and jQuery and one other one that is-
⏹️ ▶️ John Backbone for, I don’t know, what else are we using that’s?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, are we talking about David Smith or a different underscore? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John different underscore. Yeah, I’m surprised people don’t make that joke more often, maybe different circles.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing is, how do you modularize JavaScript? Because the JavaScript designers were kind
⏹️ ▶️ John enough not to include namespaces, just like some other language we are all familiar with. Yep. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the various conventions for defining JavaScript modules, which are standardized, and AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John modules, I don’t know if that’s an ECMA thing or not. But anyway, there’s require.js, which is sort of AMD-like modules,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s nodes module system, which actually is AMD, I believe. And then they’re sort of half compatible with shims. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this whole practice of how do I write a JavaScript application? Because you’re not going to write your JavaScript application
⏹️ ▶️ John by writing a big, long, single.js file from top to bottom, right? That’s not PHP we’re talking about here.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to do it in modules. And how do the modules require each other and integrate with each other and
⏹️ ▶️ John stay out each other’s namespaces and then you know that’s I mean Casey’s familiar with it because he’s done a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of the node stuff but that’s what modern JavaScript looks like these days and it’s not great but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can every part of it if you squint at it you’re like yeah I can kind of see why if you’re gonna write a serious application
⏹️ ▶️ John you need something that does this and you need something that does that and if you’re gonna manipulate the DOM it would be nice to have something like jQuery that
⏹️ ▶️ John can paper over some of the weird things for you and and provide some conveniences and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to go really insane you could talk about was the meteor thing with the it lets you query
⏹️ ▶️ John the database directly from JavaScript, which seems like a terrible idea to me. But anyway, there’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting things out there. Ember and Angular are the cool things that I’ve only vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at and not used to do anything serious. So maybe Casey can write his next blogging engine using one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell us how it is. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of co-workers using Angular and have very good things to say about it. I’d like to check out React, both React
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and JavaScript and Reactive of Coco, but I haven’t had the time. Um, and shoot. Oh, that I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say the other, the other reason that JavaScript is really appealing to me, which will mean nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Marco is that in my day job, I tend to work, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of content management systems, things like SharePoint, although not always SharePoint and a recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey project we did, uh, we did, we did it using this really not awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud-based, um, content management system where we had not a lot of control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over what CMS was doing. And so, a condom management system, if you’re not familiar, basically means it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy for a regular schmo to go in and add and edit the things that are on the website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, in our case, we had this cloud-based CMS that we really couldn’t do all that much to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, what we ended up doing was basically just making an API to get data in and out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of its database, and then hitting that with JavaScript, with jQuery, with Handlebars,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a templating engine. And in that situation, it was great because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t do a lot of the things that I would have otherwise chosen to do server side. So just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John was saying earlier, I pushed that to the client and it actually worked out really, really well. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the beginning of perhaps not my love affair with JavaScript. But that’s when I started to turn the corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Marco’s point of view of, oh, this is crap to, you know what, this actually can be pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re using it for the right reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another one I forgot to mention. Handlebars, mustache, JavaScript templating systems, all of which I think are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people are always looking for, speaking of Node, you don’t want to duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John code in the client side and server side. And if you write any serious JavaScript application, you end up having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. It’s like, what if we just use JavaScript on the server side, thus, Node.js? Then we could use the same
⏹️ ▶️ John code on client side and server side, but you wouldn’t have this duplication. And what if we had, and then you want, I want to use the same templating
⏹️ ▶️ John system client side and server side, too. So they came up with these terrible templating system using multiple curly braces that I hate because
⏹️ ▶️ John hate them? You know how many templating systems there have been in Perl? Like 9,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve evolved way past the like, this is like my first template. I had an idea. Let’s let you put variables.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we don’t want to have too much logic because that would mix code and templates. So I’ll make some kind of simple conditional, but no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco loops. OK, we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John loops. But we only have a simple kind of. But you’ll start to make a Boolean to check. Or you just pass in a flag.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, stop it. We did this already. We did it for two decades doing this. Nevermind,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll figure it out in 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what drives me nuts about this, what turns me off from learning a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new web stack stuff, is when you’re talking about, like I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat, I’ve never heard of almost anything that we’re talking about. Somebody pasted a link to React, and so I looked at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a second, and when you look at React, it is not JavaScript, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco React, it’s its own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JQuery is kinda like that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, JQuery is exactly like that, where they add so much on top of the language and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace so much built-in functionality with their own way of doing it that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become like a little sub-language of themselves. Like the language, like…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even started talking about like CoffeeScript and…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coffee TypeScript.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and like if I were to invest a whole bunch of my time learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote JavaScript, well, what does that include? And you have all these, it seems like the web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers these days so happy to pile on pretty large frameworks and components,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty, pretty complex stuff that replaces so much built in stuff that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re really a jQuery developer, you’re really a react developer, you’re really an x developer. And, and the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that changes quickly over time. And, and that fragments everything. And so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have a problem with something in, in, you know, iOS development using a vector C and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cocoa frameworks, Everyone’s using that. Everyone’s using the same thing and it doesn’t change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over years and years and years. And so it’s easy for me to like, to both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn it, to master it, and to find answers to questions I have about it because everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working with the same base and with the same API. Whereas if you go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web development world, and CSS has the same problem with all the crazy stuff they have, all the crazy frameworks they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have going on with CSS, with JavaScript, this crazy stuff, there are all these like bolt-ons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all want to be radically different and all want to provide like extremely rich functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like you write three characters and you have a blogging engine and you know like all this all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that it just it’s it piles on so many layers and layers and layers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it all feels not only very brittle but you specialize your learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this one little set of what you have have, and you have to be constantly updating your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge and throwing away expertise to keep up with all the crazy new stuff that’s always coming out with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s going to be a new JavaScript framework next week. And after that, like there’s going to be a new CSS compiler or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the month after that, like, there’s so many of these things, and they they’re none of them are ever dominant. jQuery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is as dominant as any of them has ever ever become. And that’s even pretty old, but it’s by today’s standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you end up having such fragmented knowledge that you end up being like a master in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, liquid markup or whatever, you know, one of these crazy things. And it’s like, okay, well, the next year that’s out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fashion, and you got to relearn everything from whatever’s new then.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as bad as you make it out to be, because jQuery is vastly more popular than Objective C,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the grand scheme of things. And it’s like, what you end up doing is you pick the technologies for your
⏹️ ▶️ John current project, and you use them for your project. And your current project is I’m making an iOS app. And yes, you’re lucky that an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS technologies change much more slowly than the JavaScript world. But at a certain point, you pick what you’re going to use, I’m going to use core data,
⏹️ ▶️ John am I going to use auto layout or whatever. And you may change your mind and evolve that product. But when you go your next product, say, Oh, this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to use auto layout, whereas I’m going to use our previous one, I didn’t. So it’s a slow motion version of the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But in terms of like being able to find an answer, believe me, you can find answers to your jQuery questions, your backbone
⏹️ ▶️ John questions, your underscore questions, like, I’ve, you know, there’s enough popularity, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the total market size of people who write web developers is so much bigger than the size of people who write iOS apps, you’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John find the answers. But you’re right, there is more turnover and less stability. But the analogy I would use in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John building on top of things is, first you learn C, that will really help you
⏹️ ▶️ John understand Objective-C, because Objective-C is essentially a program written in C. The Objective-C runtime, if you understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how C works, then you can understand how the Objective-C runtime works, then you understand this new syntax that is basically like CoffeeScript,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that lets you run, you know, I write this crazy syntax with square brackets, and it calls the C functions,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a runtime, and the runtime is fairly small and understandable, and once you understand it, like, that’s the layering,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, oh, now I’m not a C programmer, I’m an Objective-C programmer. You can go a bridge too far. I would say things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like source filters, like CoffeeScript and stuff, that maybe is taking it too far, and obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to dive into one of those expecting it to disappear, but at this point you’re pretty sure Objective-C is not a flash in the pan
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS development, and even though it’s like based on C and there’s a C runtime, if anything it’s evolving into
⏹️ ▶️ John a direction where that may not necessarily be the case if they can help it. But it’s not much different
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. It’s like, first, you have to learn the JavaScript language, because without that, you’ll be lost. In the same way, you have to learn C
⏹️ ▶️ John before you know Objective-C, at least these days anyway. And then you build
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that and pick a library and a framework and use it for an entire project and use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like AF networking is very popular in the iOS space. So for example, are you using AF networking in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only part I’m using is the category that lets you load images off the network,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I just haven’t had much of a reason to rewrite that. But I actually, like, the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AF networking before iOS 7 made a lot more sense. It added a lot more value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New AF networking with URL session stuff is such a thin layer on top of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t think it’s necessary for the most part. And I have, I wrote my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API layer wrapper around my API so I could standardize things like, you know, what different return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco values mean and stuff like that. And so I read everything through that. But so it’s a little bit different. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s tons of reasons to use it networking. But I think. If if what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it presented was a vastly different interface, like like reactive cocoa is is something that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot about, but I’ve seen a few things here and there about it. And reactive cocoa is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very different in from from the way you’d regularly write stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, like, that’s a big risk because it’s so different and it’s so specialized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, that’s it’s not from
⏹️ ▶️ John the platform vendor. Like I know these were all talking about third party things, but like to give an example, something that’s sort of from the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John vendor and web parlance, it would be like local storage where it’s like if you’re deploying a web application for
⏹️ ▶️ John people with iPads, like hospital or something. Right. And you know, they’re all going to have iPads and Apple adds local storage
⏹️ ▶️ John to mobile safari. You have more confidence in that than you do. And like, I’m going to build everything on reactive
⏹️ ▶️ John cocoa, even though it’s awesome, because what if the company that makes reactive cocoa goes out of business? Whereas you’re not worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple going out of business, because if it does, you have bigger problems than WebKit local storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And, you know, and I don’t want to pick on that. That was just the first thing I thought of. I mean, you know, maybe maybe this doesn’t apply to them as much as as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much as I’m thinking. But but, you know, like generally, like I don’t I don’t add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of third party code that requires dramatic changes in everything I’m doing and something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I try to add things that are small and thin, like, you know, self-contained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility functions. Like, I added a thing called lockbox, which is an easy wrapper and the keychain APIs, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are terrible. So like, it’s a perfect thing to have like CocoaPod install, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me this nice little wrapper that’s a couple of files around this terrible API so I can use it simply, done
⏹️ ▶️ John But but see, the JavaScript guys are writing these same things, but they’ve written them for you. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially writing, you know, they’re essentially writing Coco, right? And so- Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re writing a different Coco every six months.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I know, but like, but if you pick the ones that you want to use, again, there’s different Cocos for how am I gonna do layout, springs
⏹️ ▶️ John and starts are all layout. How am I gonna do my data, core data, a bunch of plists, my own custom thing. Like there’s always choices within
⏹️ ▶️ John the stack and Apple keeps adding new choices, granted at a slower pace and with more definitive, like this is officially
⏹️ ▶️ John supported than the JavaScript community, but it’s not all that different. And a lot of the things that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John writing yourself to get like the keychain API, if you’re doing the JavaScript world, someone would have already written several
⏹️ ▶️ John different wrappers for that, you would have found a reasonable one and you could have used like, I think you’d be working
⏹️ ▶️ John at a higher level in the JavaScript world. It may be more confusing, especially if you don’t know which ones
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick or whatever, but a lot of the work you’re doing with FC model, like it’s like there
⏹️ ▶️ John are equivalent JavaScript frameworks that multiple ones of them that have already hashed it out and there have been one
⏹️ ▶️ John or two ones that have sort of come out on top that you could use. And you wouldn’t have to do that. you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, oh, I’ll just use Backbone. I don’t have to write FC model. Like, it’s already there for me or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t like it, and maybe you’d write one yourself anyway. But it’s not that as different
⏹️ ▶️ John an experience as you might think coming in from the outside. It’s just that I think you’re more comfortable doing the things you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing in Objective-C, because it seems like you have more of an idea of like, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is the firmament upon which I build, and they provide so much stuff already. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those libraries, they’re not third party, they’re first party. the entire framework and everything there is from Apple and you can trust
⏹️ ▶️ John it and when they add new stuff, you can choose from it and then you just add a thin layer of third party stuff on top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I prefer the strong, rich framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in platform to the official language. The Microsoft world is very much like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right Casey? Like the.NET framework is very rich and full featured and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, I mean, I haven’t done Microsoft stuff ever professionally and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even as a hobby not for about 15 years but but how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much third-party code you end up having to add to a typical dot net project.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See this is a very simple question with kind of a complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer but the short version is you don’t really have to add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. But there’s a project called Nuget, N-U-G-E-T,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is approximately the equivalent of NPM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or CocoaPods. And so because of that, it used to be that nobody ever used third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything because it was impossible to add to the project. But now with Nuget, it’s just like CocoaPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just like NPM, where you can just point in the case of Microsoft, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point and click your way into getting a package added into your project. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of that, what used to be a pain and kind of taboo is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now actually fairly popular. And you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of projects that are like underscore in JavaScript or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reactive Cocoa is probably not the best example. AF Networking is a better example. So you’ll see a lot of that, but that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, that’s a very new thing. And Microsoft actually started bundling NuGet in with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visual Studio, which is a big deal because this was a third-party thing that they decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of unofficially, yet officially bless as being the package manager
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for.NET applications. So years ago, you never saw third-party code used, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly not often. Today, it happens relatively often.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s having a good management system like Cocoa Pods or NPM or C pan with
⏹️ ▶️ John Pearl makes such a difference in the experience of using a language and that like, I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of it’s not surprising that Apple wasn’t all going, Oh, let’s give you guys a great way to add. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the community had to come up with its own way to do it. And it seems like Cocoa Pods is the popular one now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And having that really changes the culture in terms of there. It’s not just like a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing their projects. So if you want to have network and go to this GitHub page and you can get it, like it’s so much easier
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s like a command you can type and say, oh, now you’ve got it. Now it’s added to your project. And obviously doing that without
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple support is in itself risky and weird. And you never know when Apple will do something that makes CocoaPods
⏹️ ▶️ John stop working or have to update stuff when you would hope that Apple would do something. Think of how easy it would be if Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to share, like basically the equivalent of CPAN and PERL or NPM
⏹️ ▶️ John even. It was just a giant directory of third party code in a particular format that you could easily
⏹️ ▶️ John integrate with your Xcode projects and share between projects. Developers would love that. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure Apple would love it, because Apple was saying, what are you using AF networking for? That shows there’s a hole in our API. We’re going to go back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the drawing board and come out with the NS URL session, or what is it called? Yeah, that’s it. NS
⏹️ ▶️ John URL session, yeah. Anyway, same thing with all their file handling. Every time they would come out with an API,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should probably just sit there in GitHub and look at all the third-party Cocoa things and see what
⏹️ ▶️ John people are wrapping. Granted, it hasn’t happened with Keychain yet, so sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John see the things that people are wrapping. And then come back the next year at WREC and say, stop doing those wrappers.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t like that. We don’t like it. All our applications are using this particular wrapper. We don’t like when all our applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are built on PowerPoint to PowerPlant to go way back in time and talk about a dark time
⏹️ ▶️ John that both of you missed. That’s a bad situation to be in. And now Apple is totally crazed about
⏹️ ▶️ John avoiding that in the future. So I don’t know if it’s a healthy dynamic, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad something like CocoaPods exists and I wish it was even better than it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think in the end of the day, what we’re running against, and Marco, you and I went back and forth about this on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an episode or two ago, is that you tend to have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just deep-rooted need for control over almost everything. And so that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you reticent, I think, to use some of this third-party code. It makes you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reticent to use Heroku, where you would rather just roll your own VPS. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is another reflection of that, that you want to control everything. And I think that is both your greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strength and your biggest weakness all at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, certainly there are some weaknesses. There are some downsides to that, no question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I am overly controlling in some ways. However, a lot of that comes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having gotten burned in the past. Sure. And that’s what, people as they get older tend to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more conservative with choices that they make because they’re fighting the last battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re trying not to repeat bad things that have happened to them in the past, even to a fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I try to avoid third-party code. I’ve relied on so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bad third-party code before that I’ve had to replace or rewrite under pressure because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stopped working or it broke or it had some major shortcoming that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t hit until a certain point that oh crap this is really bad and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the servers down as a result and stuff like that or oh yeah we this doesn’t support this many users anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that like you know just little you know just stuff that that you know it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has caused small and large problems in the past and I also try to get by with as little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code as I can you know I try to to not have thousands of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of lines of third-party includes in my files if I only need like one function
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why like I’m trying to remove AF networking from my project because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only using it for that one small thing now and as soon as I can you know write my own thing or just even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pull those files out and just use those I’ll do that it just hasn’t been worth the time yet but it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so so common to get burned by this stuff that you know And that’s why I’m so conservative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And from a lot of it’s also from a laziness angle, you know, like I, when it comes to learning a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language or learning a new platform or learning a new library, I don’t want my knowledge to be out of date in six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months. And so that’s why, like I look at the, at the web language landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s, there’s, it’s so easy now to, there’s so many people who make new frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and new tools and new compilers and new languages and new libraries on top of everything else. there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a new everything every six months and all the cool kids are gonna switch to it and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch to the next thing right after that and so if I take that six months to learn something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really get involved and to become an expert in it, which takes longer than six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months usually, but if I invest a whole bunch of my time to become an expert in something that goes out of fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon after I become an expert in it, that sucks. That’s a lot of waste of time and effort and I don’t want to spend all of my time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaining expertise in constantly new things. I want to spend my time applying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that expertise to build stuff. That’s where I get more satisfaction. And a lot of programmers aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. A lot of programmers get more satisfaction out of learning the new stuff, and that’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not me. And so it’s much more important to me to master
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small number of things and then use that knowledge to produce stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is satisfying to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you don’t want want your knowledge to be out of date in six months. Is that what you just said?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you better get the hell off PHP because that shit’s older than hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Lynda.com, PDFPenScanPlus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Backblaze. we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am Duke your Twitter You can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey K C S M A R C O A R M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S I R A C U S A Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m singing to you I’m singing to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We went long, but that felt good. I really didn’t want to stop. In fact, I kind of wanted to keep going on this conversation, which is probably for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best that we killed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I mean, there’s just there’s so much to say on it, you know, because it’s this isn’t even the first time we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this conversation. Yeah, yeah. But there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John more to say, you know, this topic is Marcos developer therapy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to work through his issues as a developer and trying to make sure that everything he’s doing is the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, and the only point I wanted to bring up, so now we’re starting it again, it’s my fault, but I wonder if part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason you’re so against using third party code is because so much of the PHP third party code is crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure that’s a big part of it. By far, like the objective C code that I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from third parties has been way better than any third party PHP code I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever seen from anybody. Um, from Zend all the way down. It’s… The PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code that I’ve seen third party is awful. Now granted, I haven’t… Because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t looked at third party PHP code in probably three years or so? For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part. So, I miss the whole Composer revolution that’s happened since Composer is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new package manager for PHP that everyone loves. I miss that whole revolution. So, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better now. but it was so terrible for so long, I’m not willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try it again. And, and, and I don’t, you know, my PHP needs are pretty small. I have my own framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve written over the last, you know, eight years or whatever. It’s great. It works for me. It’s fantastic. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open source it eventually. In fact, I even bought a dot plumbing domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Because I figured that, you know, it’s, it is plumbing. So that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. And there were no other good ones available. So, you know, like PHP works for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I do it. But one of the reasons why I have an open source framework in the last eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years yet is because I don’t think anyone cares except me. Everyone has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own way of doing PHP, and that’s fine. There’s the whole community of pro PHP people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I that I not only am not a part of, but never want to be a part of and have never wanted to even pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention to because it’s so different from the way I do things with the language. Whereas, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Objective-C, I care a lot about the way the community does that. Like, I write my Objective-C code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the goal of it looking like Apple code, and with the APIs looking like Apple APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to the standards that third parties consider best practices. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I want to be part of the good, elite Objective-C community, or at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least pay very close attention to it if I can’t be a part of it. part of it. Whereas PHP has always been so awful, I’ve never even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to be a part of that community.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s hard for me to reconcile you, I don’t know if slandering is the right word,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you being very dismissive of the community, yet being, and sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often even the language, and yet being such a repeat customer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of a better way of phrasing it, of this language. Like, I don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Microsoft community, but man, do I love the language. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do love C-sharp and it is really, really, really good. It’s got problems, but it’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. And it would be really crummy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, for me to use a language that I don’t respect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but a language I don’t respect in a community I don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and make my living off of that. And if it works for you, which it clearly does, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, that’s so different than what I would want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but again, it’s like I don’t care as much about the web side of things. I care about the client side of things a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, if it was flipped, if I was very unhappy and critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the community and not caring about quality relative to what other people think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the client side where I really care that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discouraging at least but because I just don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the website like the reason I use PHP still and I keep using the same framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I keep modifying over time but it’s still basically the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I keep doing that is because it allows me to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done with the website quickly in a way that I know know will work, that will scale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that will be cheap to run and easy to run. That’s why I do it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do respect the language for a lot of those things. And there’s a reason why, like, the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why I haven’t learned a new language, you know, on the website anytime recently is because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t really been motivating me to. Like, there has been no language that I’ve been very tempted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn, you know, on the website. There’s like the advantages they offer just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get me like they don’t they don’t motivate me to go through the massive cost of switching so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m like because I have to keep in mind like You know with overcast the last thing I want to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if I launch this thing if it gets popular The last thing I want to be doing is having to mess with the server for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days and weeks on end to just you know Get it optimized get it to scale. I just can’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly That would crush my spirit if I had to spend a lot of time doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I stick with what I know on that side of things, I know I’ll have to do very little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to do titles we probably should do titles It is self-serving. I do think the year of Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is adorable But I think if this language is probably my second favorite although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little on the risque side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m I think I’d go year of Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the year of Casey’s is better as a better title than if this language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also the clear winner by a long shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. We haven’t had a well accepting some stupid title like a Syracuse County title, which we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use. We haven’t had this clear winner in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all the more unfortunate that you two both didn’t get the reference and made me explain it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someday, John, someday we will get a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sad thing is I, John and I were having a conversation in the Google Doc and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wrote in it. Sounds exciting. Yeah, it was it was
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty bad. Yeah, don’t please to speaking of ways to different mediums for communication, please The google doc
⏹️ ▶️ John is instant message casey. This is this is a hybrid of your discussion on irl talk. I know I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um But yeah, so we were kind of typing back and forth very briefly and I wrote you’re killing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me smalls And I felt compelled to indicate that I knew that was sandlot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by putting sandlot
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you were making the reference. You don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John show me that you know your own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted you to know that it wasn’t just something I’ve heard somewhere that I knew where it was from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Have you seen the movie? Yeah, and I didn’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Okay. Well, I’ve seen it too Also didn’t like it, but I got the reference.