68: Siracusa Waited Impatiently For This
03 Jun 2014WWDC reactions.
Episode Description:
Our initial WWDC reactions.
Recorded live at Macworld's podcast studio. Thanks, Jason Snell!
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re going to hear all the coughs and sniffles and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else that normally we have time to take out. It has nothing to do with our studio, which is excellent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m very enthusiastic about this, but has everything to do with the fact that we want to get this out immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meanwhile, I’m watching John and Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John take pictures. Put your
⏹️ ▶️ John camera down. I’m trying to get every time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures. Okay. So this is our special WWDC episode. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording it the day of the keynote, and it is right after the keynote, or I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right after the afternoon session. We are at the Macworld Studios. So thank you very much to Jason Snell for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey letting us crash his studio and use his equipment in order to get this podcast to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lickety-split and not sound like garbage. So thank you very much, Jason Snell. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweet him a big thank you just so his inbox explodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At jsnell, or you can listen to his podcast, The Incomparable, on 5x5. Email Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So some stuff happened today. Today was a busy day. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you have any thoughts about today by chance?
⏹️ ▶️ John We should have talked about a plan of attack for this podcast. Because there is way too much that happened today for
⏹️ ▶️ John us to discuss on one episode of the podcast. No doubt we will be talking about these things for many episodes to come.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it probably would have been a good idea for us to have a plan of like, OK, today we’re just going to talk about iOS 8, or we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about Swift, or we’re just going to talk about, But we don’t have a plan because we are disorganized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggesting that you did not do your homework?
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t know what was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John announced until today. But anyway, I think that we, what do you want to do? Do you want to focus on a particular area? Do you just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to give broad sweeping stuff? Because if we want to do everything, we need to have a list of bullet points and say, OK, we’ve got to talk about this, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that, and get through them all. Otherwise, we’re going to dive into one of these topics and spend the whole show on it, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also fine with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let’s just start going down the list. And if we end up going off on a tangent that lasts 12 hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then so be it. So what did we see today? Well, firstly, on the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, we got celebrated by the line people, which was weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t, I’ve never seen that before. So as you’re on your way in, so you wrap around the block a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, and then at something like 7, 730, well, something around 730, they let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you into Moscone, and you end up going to the second level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Moscone. And so you go up these escalators and we hear cheering. We hear cheering going on. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking to myself, what is happening? And sure enough, they had, I guess they’re Apple employees,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they had all these Apple employees lined up saying like, all right, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be excited. It’s like 7.30 in the morning, we’re all exhausted and jet lagged, and they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pump us all up. And I’d never seen that before, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John odd. That’s what they do with Apple Store openings, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ John retail employees come out and applaud for everybody. Like, yeah, I mean, at least at that point, people know what they’re excited about, but
⏹️ ▶️ John on the way into the keynote, we don’t know what we’re going to be excited. And there was plenty in the keynote worth applauding. Had we known what we
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to see, we would have been jazzed as well probably. But we didn’t, so it was just a bunch of tired people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was different, to say the least. Then they tried to get a WWDC chant going, which was extremely odd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It was odd. But then we made it into the keynote room. That worked out well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the keynote started fairly slow, I thought. I didn’t think it had that much speed to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And everyone seemed really confident and really relaxed. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t know what to make of it. So what was some of the first stuff they covered? I didn’t start taking notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until about halfway through, so I don’t know if you guys, all right, this is an accidental podcast. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, one of the things I noticed first was just like the mood of everyone. Tim comes out and Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is relaxed and laid back. And this is a side of Tim we haven’t seen a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if any, really, and he was kind of fiery. And he was taking jabs at Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Windows and stuff. And it was the kind of thing, We’ve seen that from jobs in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Tim has always shown a more reserved approach to those usually, and he’ll put in jabs here and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are more subtle in the past, but I think this was the first time we saw him really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel free to just dig in. And I think what we saw play out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the reason he was so confident and laid back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the same reason that all the presenters were so confident and laid back, is because they knew they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kick-ass lineup that they were announcing. And they were very proud and confident in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they were about to show us. And we didn’t know yet. So at the time, we were just like, wow, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem like they’re really relaxed today. And it flowed very well. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more put together, much more seamless than I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any Apple event in the last three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that he seemed less rehearsed. Not that, I mean, we know they rehearse like crazy, right? But in
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook’s first several keynotes, you could tell that he was well rehearsed and he would come out there
⏹️ ▶️ John and say what he was gonna say and it was like, oh, I can see that he is saying something that he has prescripted, whereas,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, now, it was the same exact thing this time, but he sounded less rehearsed. So again, because he was relaxed. As for
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the keynote, there was so much stuff in this keynote that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John important technologies got like a slide in five seconds. And it was like, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was that? And then they’re on to the next thing. Because there just wasn’t enough time. And it’s obvious they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep it to a two-hour keynote. They’re trying not to go three hours, four hours. Whereas other companies, I mean, Google’s done that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft’s gone really long. Sony, if you want to go to the gaming space. There have been press conferences where when
⏹️ ▶️ John people have a lot to announce, they say, well, we’ve got a lot to announce, and everybody will love it. And they just go. And Apple was like, we have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce, but we’re going to hold it to two hours because we’ve got a schedule to keep. So there was so much in this keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John that there were things that got one slide that are more significant than things that got 10
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes in previous years. MARK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MANDEL-BROWN Yeah, it was. You could tell that we were, what I love about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that so much of it was a surprise. There were very few spoilers of any value here. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest spoilers, Health Book, was kind of wrong in how. MARK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey MIRCHANDANI And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an asterisk on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of the presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was like, oh, yeah, we got this health thing. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John MARK MIRCHANDANI Yeah. Well, I mean, it was like we said, possibility of them introducing APIs for integration with third party
⏹️ ▶️ John things and then maybe something of their own in the future. And so Apple was not going anywhere near anything wearable or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John today. It’s like we have a bunch of APIs and third party applications can use it and I think that’ll be great guys, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, moving on. I mean, it was one in the scope of this keynote, it was a minor announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was really wild. And I gotta say to back up just a smidge that I loved snarky Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was great. I really, really did. And I think that the corny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jokes that Apple made like during last WWDC, and I can’t think of them off the top of my head, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was with Eddie Cue and I work and he did like the band poster or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. And I just felt like that was so corny and contrived. And this year with the exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hair thing, which I think we’ve taken a little too far, I thought everything else was well done. I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the right amount of snark, the right amount of humor, which is not something I’m used to seeing from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, Jobs had his own schticks here and there, but generally speaking, they’ve been fairly by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey book, and I loved this slightly more casual Apple. The titles in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WWDC sessions where it was like, well, wouldn’t you like to know, and well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could tell you. I love this new Apple. I don’t know, John, as the old man of the three of us in terms of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lineage, what do you think about this more casual setup?
⏹️ ▶️ John Think about the humor and the jokes. There’s two parts to that. One is how relaxed the people are making things,
⏹️ ▶️ John We already said like the people seem relaxed because they were confident because they had a lot of good stuff to show and because their experience like when they brought out the newer
⏹️ ▶️ John people who hadn’t presented as many times they were shakier kind of like you know Craig was in the beginning but now he’s more experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John but the second thing is the jokes were just as silly and corny as they’ve always been
⏹️ ▶️ John but when you’re announcing things that get the audience excited the audience is predisposed to forgive your mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re so jazzed about what you just showed before and so that is the effect basically if you have great things to show
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have announcements that the audience is gonna love they will also be in the mood to laugh at your stupid jokes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re showing stuff that’s boring and you make a stupid joke, you’re like, not only are you not entertaining me and releasing things that I want, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making a stupid joke and wasting my time. So it’s all about audience atmosphere. And we were, you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ John the announcements rolled on, we were all very receptive to anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. And I think that the pace in general seemed not that brisk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the beginning, But by the end, my goodness, it was a fire hose just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting leveled at all these developers and in the best possible way. But things got fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this comes back to what you were saying earlier about, oh, yeah, well, we’ve got this health thing. Oh, yeah, and we’ve got these new dev tools. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, and we’ve got this new language. And it was unbelievable how quick it was. There was a lot happening today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was also just a level of refinement that we haven’t seen in a while. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with Jobs, like this isn’t really a Steve Jobs thing, is even with Jobs, there were some weird and sloppy moments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the events. For the last couple of years, Apple’s events have seemed stuffy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost sterile, kind of uptight. And I was even worried, because when we saw Eddie Cue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Jimmy Iovine last week, I think Eddie Cue did not come off that well either. I think he came off a little uptight there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was kind of worried. That’s kind of the Apple we’ve seen recently. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year, you said some of the jokes were kind of overplayed or stale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They ran too many videos last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s another good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and then they kept running the same video for like three events in a row. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, this year they ironed out all those bugs in their presentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was just a smooth presentation from start to finish. There were no remote control cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just very, very well done. And I mean, what they announced, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know where to begin, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. I think we can begin with OS X because I think, despite people thinking that this is going to be, and us also saying this was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a big OS X release, and it is visually, I guess, from the user perspective, I think it was the smallest of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they announced today because they put out the big slide. It’s going to be OS X, iOS 8, and then dev,
⏹️ ▶️ John developer tools. And all of those three things, they led with the smallest one, like they always do. You save the best for last.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we can dispense with OS X pretty quickly if you want to cover that in the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so your review is going to be short as well then.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be. I don’t know. I mean, the thing about it is, I mentioned to you guys before, that a lot of the things they put
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iOS section or in the dev developer tools section of the keynote also apply to OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X. It’s just that we don’t think of them that way because anything that’s shared between OS X and iOS is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John go into the iOS session because that’s what everyone cares about because the Mac is a smaller platform. But that stuff applies to OS X as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not entirely sure. But I think we can start with OS X. What we thought was going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John was a big visual refresh. What we got was a big visual refresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that big a visual refresh though. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was actually surprised how radical it wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s exactly my point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did you expect that you didn’t see? Well, I expected everything to be all white and thin and wispy, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t. It still looks like Mac OS X. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still, it’s not a jarring change. It is an evolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change, and it’s exactly, I think, the kind of change that was warranted. They didn’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally throw away everything. Like remember, and we’ll probably talk about this on Gruber’s show, but remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gruber was even saying, what are they gonna do about shadows, about layering windows? And it turns out, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything different. We still have window shadows, because windows still are windows. They still look like windows. They’re still layered. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t as radical of a change as I think a lot of people were assuming or fearing that it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are a few weird issues with it that I’m not thrilled with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the translucency difference between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sidebar is translucent to the desktop, and the title bar is translucent to the view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under it within its own window. And there’s like these weird layering things that are conceptually a little odd, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think overall it looks great. And it looks like a nice modernization of what they already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, rather than throwing it all away and making something totally radically different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John that new look. It’s not the type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to install this new OS, and all your apps are going to look like the apps that they showed in the keynote. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff doesn’t get enabled by default. Like, you have to opt into it. And so Apple’s apps are going to look like that. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John apps are going to have title bars with the window widgets right in line with them, like they do already in some apps. Like, the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store app is like that, I think, and a couple other ones. And Apple’s apps are going to have a translucent sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple’s apps are going to have translucent title bar. But it’s not going to transform all your
⏹️ ▶️ John apps into this crazy translucent thing. So for the most part, what most people’s Macs are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John look like is their existing apps with different title bars, different fonts in the menus and a different
⏹️ ▶️ John dock, but everything else looking more or less the same. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if Apple will be able to get everybody on board the, hey everybody, make all your sidebars translucent,
⏹️ ▶️ John make all your title bars translucent and tuck the content underneath it. I don’t know if they’re gonna go in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m trying to think about what real Macs will look like running your 70, not what we saw in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. The other thing that struck me about the visual refresh was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I saw Windows 7 for the first time, and this is when I’d already had a Mac at this point, and I was already all in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on OS X, I felt like, what did they call the Windows 7 visual refresh? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t remember now. It doesn’t matter. But anyway, but where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco everything got trimmed. It’s not Metro, right? It’s something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was pre-Metro. But anyway, the point is it was all very translucent and similar ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually thought from the very first time I saw it that the Windows 7 stuff looked pretty good. I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, especially with this odd amount of translucence where I’m translucent to one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing here, but I’m translucent to this other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s Arrow, by the way, feedback from the chat, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what? Oh, Arrow, yes, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Arrow, I thought, looked great from the beginning, and I don’t even know if Microsoft has backpedaled on that or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new OS X setup, it looked good, but I have my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John reservations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what I’m saying, think your screen is going to look like that. I think it’s going to look like what it looks like now. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari might look different. And Mail will look different. Most of your apps will look the same. That’s a fair point. The whole thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the translucency is to what end? To what end are our
⏹️ ▶️ John why are these things translucent? That is always the question. And it’s Apple’s job, I think, to
⏹️ ▶️ John justify why someone would want to do this to their application. Because there are downsides in terms of readability,
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of variability. Is this something that people want? Does it look really awesome on people? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Brush Metal, the justification was basically people think it looks cool, and so everybody made their apps Brush Metal. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it was or not, that was, you know, if you were to ask Apple, why should people do this? They’d be like, well, people think it’s cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they did think it was cool, and they used Brush Metal everywhere. Well, I don’t know if people think this translucence is
⏹️ ▶️ John all that cool. I mean, iOS 7 has it as well. Granted, the APIs were not as open, so everyone couldn’t go hog wild with it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it will really depend on whether people think it’s worth adopting these things. Because if they don’t, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10, but everything, you know, candy colored and I was seven to five.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but didn’t they say during the keynote that the idea was to give you some context within your document, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John really like. What does that mean? What does that mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John previously, I wasn’t aware that my document continued off the top of this page. But now that I can see the green image showing through
⏹️ ▶️ John my title bar, I’m aware that it goes off like how does that provide you any more context than simply clipping the image at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point or God showing out always showing a scroll bar so you could see the scroll position. I
⏹️ ▶️ John forget which word they were using. I don’t think it was context, but they did have a talking point of like how translucency provides you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing was like you can pick your desktop background and that will influence how your apps look to let the personality of your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John background show through in your apps. Is that something that people want? Do they want the personality of their desktop background showing through
⏹️ ▶️ John in their apps? They just want to use their apps to like read their mail and stuff. They don’t want to see the desktop image behind it. It looks like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John model mess. But again, these are all opt-in things. Your apps aren’t just going to all of a sudden become translucent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is obviously opting into them and they will be a good test bed and it’ll be interesting to see if this
⏹️ ▶️ John is something people want. Whether developers think it looks cool and they just ship it to people and then people complain or developers never
⏹️ ▶️ John even ship it and it just ends up being a different looking Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anything else on the visual refresh? Because I mean I think that’s pretty much all I had to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I like the idea of them redoing the, trying to constrain the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John into the different arrangements of having circle icons and square icons and having all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the little slanty, they showed them, people were taking pictures the iMac screen up, but I’m sure there’s more. Showing all
⏹️ ▶️ John the little slanted rectangle icons all looking identical, identically slanted and everything. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable unification. It’s a nice middle ground between people thinking, oh, OS X is going to use round recs for all its icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. They are still distinct shapes. And again, I think third parties might just ignore this
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well, that’s good for you, Apple. You can do whatever the hell you want with your icons, but we’re still making our icons look like we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think there will be a continued tension between what Apple is doing with Yosemite
⏹️ ▶️ John and what third-party developers do with it. And it might be a little weird, kind of like iOS 7 is, where some apps just don’t come
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way on the iOS 7 train. So you’ve got these apps that, you know, their icons haven’t changed since
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 6, and their interfaces may be different, but they don’t look like iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still don’t have the iPhone 5 screen size support? Not that bad, but yeah. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, we are sponsored this week first by our friends at Igloo. Igloo is the intranet you’ll actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and it’s about to get even better. Igloo’s next release, Unicorn, is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer. With it comes social task management, a brand new feature fully integrated throughout the
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can manage projects with task lists, optimize for large groups of people, you can assign tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from any piece of content like requesting changes to be made in a document, and you can create personal tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are assigned to you or another person. And you can see all your tasks in one unified view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can learn more about this at igloosoftware.com slash ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can come see Unicorn in person. Igloo is hosting an event in Toronto,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think is in Canada, on June 12th, with customer presentations by Hulu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Nextel International. So go to igloosoftware.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash Toronto to register for that event. Otherwise, once again, go to igloosoftware.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to check out Igloo, the intranet you’ll actually like, and all the cool stuff they’re working on these days. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to our friends at Igloo for sponsoring our show once again. Speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John Igloo and other web type applications, you know all the web apps that started to change their look to look like
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7 after iOS 7 came out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, I’m just glad that websites aren’t still trying to look like iOS old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because that looked terrible on websites.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people who have either web components to their products or have web apps took the hint from yeah, Windows 8 as
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but also iOS 7, especially in the Mac world to make their websites look like that. And with the change in look of
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X now, that turns out to be a good move. Even Apple is doing it. They showed what the App Store looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they were showing, right? The new App Store app on the Mac looks all different.
⏹️ ▶️ John That look, that kind of flat, candy-colored look, if you did that everywhere across your website on your
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS device, and now the Mac has switched over to it, that was a good planning. Because people like
⏹️ ▶️ John that look. It’s simple, it’s clean, and now it is across the entire Apple platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So this keynote was, to some degree, wonderful and terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And it was wonderful because they announced that we’re getting airdrop between devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between OSes, I guess I should say, between Yosemite and between iOS 8, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the downside was that we also learned later on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s this handoff thing that where, if you’re, let’s say, working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an email or something like that, And then you want to finish that email. You’re working on it on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone. You want to finish it on your computer. And then all of a sudden, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pitch this email through the ether, through the air, onto the computer. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds awesome. And I’m really enthusiastic about it. However, I think, and they never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirmed or denied, that that’s probably using Bluetooth Low Energy. And none of my Macs have Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Low Energy on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be using AirDrop, because if AirDrop works between them, and it’s supposed to be, the whole idea is it’s proximity-based,
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like they mentioned, like, oh, you won’t have things from your home showing up on your work computer
⏹️ ▶️ John or vice versa. So it could be Bluetooth, it could also be AirDrop, which uses that ad hoc Wi-Fi networking
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I think. But all of it requires developer support. This is not magic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple’s mail, if you use Apple mail on your Mac and you use Apple mail on your iOS device, then
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you can do that. But what if you use something else on either one of those places? Or what if the things you use, the developer
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t added support for this? It still seems like a thing that you have to do, and it could kind of be fidgety enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that it demos really well, but I don’t know. I understand the frustration they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at, because I know when I’m doing something on one device and I want to just transition to it over there, it would be nice
⏹️ ▶️ John if everything picked up, but this requires so many parties to cooperate and everything to work
⏹️ ▶️ John for that handoff to work. Getting the handoff to work could end up feeling like, from
⏹️ ▶️ John the user’s perspective, more trouble than it’s worth. Maybe it’s just better to just save it as a draft and then go over and
⏹️ ▶️ John then pull up the draft over there. Like the old things that we used to do. It demos well and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s a good idea for this product, but I’m skeptical about how seamless it will really be in real life. So I think we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to be one of those things like notification syncing between devices and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were talking last week how there seems to be this grace period in current infrastructure that we have now where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get an iMessage and you’re at your computer, if the window’s focused then your phone won’t buzz in your pocket, but if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attend to it within a few seconds your phone will buzz. It’s that kind of thing, and they have worked on that over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has gotten better over time. It’s still not perfect, but it’s gotten better. This is probably going to be the same kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing, where it’s going to start out probably a little wonky and then get better over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s probably built on that exact same system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hopeful that it is the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi thing. I’m skeptical, but I’m hopeful, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see what happens. But what else did we learn OS X wise?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, one thing that’s very interesting, I think, and I don’t know if we’re going to talk about this, is the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, we talked about whether they were backpedaled. Would they just decide to show the file system?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or would they try to figure out something else? And this is kind of like an interesting compromise. What it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to me is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, which is they wanted to have the existing iCloud experience, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like, there’s no file system. You don’t have to worry about that. Every app owns its own files. Everything is in iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything is ubiquitous and available everywhere. They wanted to keep that because they
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s good. But they also wanted to add the ability for people who knew what they were doing
⏹️ ▶️ John to have something that was more like Dropbox. And they didn’t want to destroy one with the other. So they want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so if you’re using the system the way you’ve been using it for the past several years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will look the same to you. But if you know what to do, then suddenly you get the equivalent of an open save dialog box that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John showing you, like, you know, the iCloud sidebar and suddenly shows you documents. And what I think will happen is once you put iCloud in the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Finder, people are gonna click on it. People are gonna learn they can make new folders there and people are gonna use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll end up using it like Dropbox. And I think Dropbox has proven
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you can, it doesn’t make any sense, but if you can strain the world of the file system to
⏹️ ▶️ John a single place that they can hang their hat on, like, it’s in my Dropbox or it’s on my desktop. People
⏹️ ▶️ John are fine with that. It doesn’t matter that the number of levels of hierarchy they create under that are the same as they could make anyplace else.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just gives them a starting point and it makes them feel comfortable. So now, with iCloud and the sidebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who… Imagine someone who gets a computer like, oh, you should install Dropbox. And you know they can’t install
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox. You know that phrase, you should install Dropbox, is like Greek to them. Like, well, I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know how to install
⏹️ ▶️ John software. I don’t know if I go to a website. Do I do something? Do I download a disk image? Do I get it? Like, nobody knows. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like, look, go to your Finder. In the sidebar is a thing called iCloud. you put there when you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can put stuff there and you’ll see it everywhere. And that is like Dropbox. It’s a folder that syncs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now iCloud, it’s a cloud that syncs, we hope. I mean, all this is about to see how reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, but it’s a reasonable compromise. I like that it acknowledges the fact that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John failed to come up with something so much better that eliminates all the evil of the file system. And I think they’ve taken less
⏹️ ▶️ John of Dropbox. It’s like the file system is big and confusing, but if you constrain it
⏹️ ▶️ John to this one place, it makes sense or not, people suddenly are able, a larger group of people are suddenly able
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with it. Not everybody, but a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group. Yeah, and I think it’s also, this has a huge value in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PR for Apple, because now, like, you know, we’ve been talking before, like iCloud is always,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this umbrella term that refers to lots of different things, most of which are behind the scenes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, Eddie Q talked about this on the Jimmy Iovine thing last week. This is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very public-facing version of iCloud, and it works the way people expect modern quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud things to work. It’s a cloud sync service for this folder full of files. That’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people want from a cloud service today, you know, for the most part. There’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on top of that, but this is what people want. And this is going to be this big thing, and everyone’s face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses a Mac saying, look, it’s iCloud, it works, we get it, we’re in the cloud, we are doing web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services, and they mostly work most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John When it comes with your Mac, it uses the iCloud account that they make you set up when you install the OS or when you set up
⏹️ ▶️ John the device. Like you don’t have to go to a third party. All the advantages of being part of the platform. Like all those
⏹️ ▶️ John barriers that prevented people from getting Dropbox installed. And in fact, I think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John new APIs in OS X and in iOS. And I guess we’ll probably talk about the whole extensions. Is that what they call it? Extensions?
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that’s right. That was in the iOS section. But extensions apply to OS X as well. And so there are extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John in OS X that will let, for example, Dropbox make their application better. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is not just saying, oh, iCloud is built in and we’ll be able to do Dropbox-y like things. But in fact, we’re helping Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John out here too, or helping ourselves out as well. For example, in not having Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John in-memory hack the Finder to put those little badges on all your icons to show the green. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got an official API for that through extensions, which is their safe mechanism for extending functionality. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the notification widget things are similar. aren’t those under the umbrella of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey extensions? I believe so. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, yeah. I don’t know, the iCloud Drive thing struck me as so interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was the tangible manifestation of Dropbox as a feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a product. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And then secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was, I believe, the first thing we saw of a series of different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features and enhancements and products and whatnot that are all heavily relying on iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe I’m amongst a group of people that are giving iCloud a bad rep for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no really good reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John anymore. No, they’re good reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so either way. But they’re like, if they double down on secrecy, which it appears they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, they’ve like quadrupled down on iCloud being the bus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for their entire ecosystem. And in principle, that’s wonderful, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a lot of pressure to put on a system that I’m not so sure can
⏹️ ▶️ John handle. Yeah, they were saying a lot of the right things. Like for example, I forget, maybe this was in the State of the Union,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not supposed to talk about it or whatever. But one of the services they were talking about, they
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned push notifications in connection with it. And as we’ve said on past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John push notifications is one of the things that’s under the iCloud umbrella that seems to work pretty well. And we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all hoping that more like that, less like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iCloud Core Data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this presentation was, I mean, maybe it’s just an optimistic thing, but when they show these things, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m optimistic that these new things will be more like push notifications and less like the things that haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John gone well. Although iMessages, I mean, they added tons of stuff to iMessage as well, and that still continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a little bit weird and creepy. So yeah, you’re right. They really put a lot of eggs in the CyCloud basket.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically what Apple is doing is, I’m assuming, forcing themselves to get better at this crap. by. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fair point. Because it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be disastrous if they continue to fumble and keep putting more and more important things into the iCloud basket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually pretty confident in what they’re doing because it seems like, you know, Casey, you said like, you know, they’re building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this stuff on what appears to be the push notification slash iMessage part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iCloud. And that seems to be the part that is operating at probably the biggest scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is probably the most reliable. I know people have had iMessage problems here and there but we don’t know how much that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco related to like this like the client side software it seems like the server side end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that you know the push notification and the whole push system has been really rock-solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the vast majority of its existence and certainly recently so I’m actually pretty confident that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the iCloud part of this is probably not going to be a problem other parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it you know that like the client side code might be right but it seems like the iCloud services end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what they’re doing you know and People, you know, iCloud core data sync was a disaster, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was also probably mostly a client side and design issue, like design of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John capability. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, or even like documents in the cloud, or those, like a lot of those things kind of work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but had weird things about them, or you know, they started off as synchronous, then they made them asynchronous, and there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of visibility, and when it doesn’t work, even today, like if you launch Apple’s Notes app, and you know there are notes that you
⏹️ ▶️ John put in on your iOS device, the notes have to sit there for a while, And then eventually your notes
⏹️ ▶️ John show up, you hope. But if they don’t, you have no recourse. There’s no visibility. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John moving to iCloud in the sidebar and putting stuff there for documents, I mean, at least that gives you some visibility
⏹️ ▶️ John into what’s going on. But the other APIs, that’s still a problem with their cloud system. They’re making it
⏹️ ▶️ John better from a developer’s perspective. So developers can tell what the hell’s going on. But from a user perspective, man, this stuff better work because you
⏹️ ▶️ John have nowhere to go if it doesn’t. You just stare at your app. There’s not even a busy indicator. You’re just like, is my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John there? Is it going to come?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. Now, aren’t they, but they did mention, and I think this was in the NDA session, so I’ll be very vague, but I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they mentioned that they’re dogfooding a lot of the stuff they’re providing to developers. So a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving developers, they’re using those APIs for their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new features and applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was heartening, although it’s like, it’s helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John What that means is that if they did a bad job, Apple will know about it. That is the best thing about it, is that at least they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John know they did a bad job. It doesn’t necessarily mean they did a good job, and it’s kind of bad if they didn’t, because now
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re screwing up their own services. Their own headline features are screwed up by their own bad APIs. But presumably, because they are dogfooding
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they’ll find out that it’s bad, and it won’t just be this, like, we won’t have to wait for developer backlash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Apple’s own engineers would be like, your server-side crap is broken, and I can’t ship my app because it’s broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is there anything else that’s fun and exciting to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about? Oh, I know, before we get off OS X,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want one more thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not done with OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. Then the notification center sidebar and the widgets there and like everyone’s like what does that mean for
⏹️ ▶️ John dashboard? Where is dashboard? And they didn’t say anything about it I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John dashboard is still there and Yosemite Jason cannot his head because yep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they didn’t say the the implication is that you should probably not get to attach right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is a grace period it seems like that I said nothing about the future of dashboard But anyone who knows anything about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will know that the future of dashboard is not bright And this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is not I’m saying next year. It’s gone. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is yeah, Jason just pulled up dashboard in Yosemite I’m staring at it anyway still there, but like this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John news like dashboard has been kind of stagnant and just Sitting there doing nothing for many
⏹️ ▶️ John many years. It is a pretty old feature was it come in 10-4 or something like that Yeah, it’s been around for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. I use it every day I still think it’s great, but it’s clear that it’s not just like this year that Apple decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to kill it It died of natural causes essentially so dashboard is still there you can continue to use it in
⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite I don’t know how much longer it will be around and I bet most people won’t mourn it even though I
⏹️ ▶️ John will because I think It’s kind of cool And you can’t I mean it’s not it’s not a direct replacement like the notification center is a skinny little
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebar where his dashboard took up your whole screen, but third party opportunity people
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco They will show, they can even use webcams to help you measure in case your eye doctor won’t give you the prescription
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco very accurate. And so you can preview everything there, and that’s cool. But the best thing about Orie Parker, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, is that they have this home try-on program. So you can go online, you can pick out up to five styles
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve told the story a hundred times and I’ll make it really quick but when I got a set of Warby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Parker sunglasses I put in like four pairs, maybe three pairs of sunglasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were my stereotypical, like, this is Casey’s style. And then I put in a pair or two that were just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely not the sort of sunglasses I would normally buy. And sure enough, the ones that I ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choosing were one of the ones that I didn’t expect to like. So it actually ends up working out pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So really quickly, real-time follow-up with regard to dashboard, I believe the quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I was informed by Jason, was, we suggest you quickly adopt this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new technology with regard to the notification center, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple code for this is going to die, prepare yourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and dashboard was like a weird one-off thing with these HTML-y kind of widgets or whatever, whereas their replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of a larger system that spans both iOS and OS X, this extensions system. And I mean, maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just an umbrella term, and there’s no real relation technologically. We haven’t learned the details yet. But they’re using that term
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, you can write extensions for it, which is, I mean, people in that audience don’t know, but extensions, we already
⏹️ ▶️ John used that term once on the Mac. It has bad connotations. These are different. And on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, it has a totally different thing, which we’ll get to when we talk about iOS 8. But these new widget things
⏹️ ▶️ John on the sidebar are part of that system. It’s a way to extend the system. And I look forward to new ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to extend the system, because what this means is Apple has basically come up with a way for both iOS and the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John for people to write system extensions, to extend the functionality of the system. And that whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ John has been like, yeah, all right, we’ll let you put an icon in the menu bar, but you should really make it black and white, because we don’t like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we won’t let you move yours around. We can only do that with ours. Yours just go in a random order. Tough luck. Download bartender.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping this is the dawning, certainly on iOS, it’s the dawning of a new age of extending the system. I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac as well that it’s a sort of a renaissance of extending the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John in interesting and safe ways, and Apple-approved ways, versus the old way, which is just like third
⏹️ ▶️ John parties figuring out how to get it done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The keynote as a whole, and perhaps this relates more to iOS than the Mac, but I felt like the keynote as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole was an exercise in Apple doing all the things that we never thought they’d do. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gave us a whole bunch of photo, well, sort of, gave us a whole bunch of photo storage. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are allowing extensions, like you were saying, both on OS X, which is to be expected, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iOS, including stuff as wild as replacing the system keyboard. And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple other things, now I’m drawing a blank, but there were, oh, well, Swift. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco are all these things. The entire extension thing, I mean, that’s a huge thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right there. But so these are all the, there are all these things that we, I think the three of us, everyone really have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, oh, they’ve got to do this, but they’re never going to do it because they’re Apple, they’re stubborn, they’re belligerent.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think it’s like a stubbornness or like a philosophical objection. I mean, a lot of us say like, oh, previously there was a philosophical
⏹️ ▶️ John objection and now that has changed. But with a lot of these things, it’s like Apple always wanted to do them, but it had to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for certain things. And on iOS, which I guess we’ll transition to soon anyway, but like it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS was like, we don’t have the CPU to do that. We don’t have the memory to do that. We don’t have the whatever, like background
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff, because they just had priorities and didn’t fit into them. And for
⏹️ ▶️ John the sandbox and stuff, we don’t have a safe way to do that. And so all of it was like, when we have the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we have the memory, when we’ve come up with a safe way for you to do it, we will let you do it. But not before then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not like, oh, just add it. I know how you can get this to work. Look, if I go to the jailbreak stores, I can get
⏹️ ▶️ John something that does this right now that lets me put widgets on the lock screen. It’s like Apple wanted to come up with,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything had to be in place. And the final thing that had to be in place is we have to have a safe way for you to do things. So you’re not compromising
⏹️ ▶️ John the stability of the system. So you’re not allowing malware. So you’re not doing all, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or your own privacy as well. Because they talked about how extensions, very briefly, they spoke about how extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are going to be sandboxed. And this might be in the NDA session, so I should probably shut up. But suffice to say, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took not only security of the system, but also your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John information security very seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John the things they prioritize for, you know, you are safe using iOS in these ways, and we’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John let you do all the things that you guys all want to do until we have safe ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it within the current envelope of hardware. And then, of course, it’s a lot of work for them to make those APIs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the year. This is the year where finally they have crossed the threshold for all of these things. And there probably is a philosophical
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect of it as well. And there’s been so much shakeup at the high levels of Apple management that you can’t discount that as one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the possible reasons. But you have to just look at it, look at the way they’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ John us all this stuff. And all of it is not the same way that the jailbreak stories gave it to us. It is an official supported
⏹️ ▶️ John API that works with their existing sandboxing and prioritization stuff on the Mac as well as on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So as a way to transition from Mac to iOS, I wanted to briefly talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what they called it, what their marketing term for it was, but when you can send traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SMS messages via the Mac, but it’s at the, your iPhone does the sending.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can actually even take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco voice calls. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John BluePhone Elite. Yeah, like eight years ago. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John very much, in the demo you might be mistaken for thinking it’s like, oh, I’ve been able to do that on Google Voice for years, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John paired with your phone. No iPhone, none of this stuff works.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But yeah, but it’s the same type of thing, like the third party products that would basically say, you’ve got a phone, but you wanna do stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone could only do on your Mac screen. And it just connects the dots. and it looks really nice and it’s very seamless
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s something that you’re like, yeah, that should work that way. Why do I have to go and pick up the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or having the caller ID show up as a notification, having to be able to answer that call
⏹️ ▶️ John from your Mac? It’s using your phone, but they’re all in the same house, even if it’s another room,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all connected on the same network, why shouldn’t this work? And Apple made it work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I hope it works well, and here again, I hope it doesn’t rely on Bluetooth Low Energy. I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the case of phone calls, it certainly wouldn’t. But nevertheless, I just think it’s a really impressive way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to leverage the platform and really do what you would hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and expect these things to do. And I’m really excited about that. So with that in mind, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of shift gears to iOS. There’s so much to talk about. I don’t even know where to
⏹️ ▶️ John remember when I said that iOS 8 was going to be like the Mavericks of iOS. It was just not a lot of outgoing on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John and some stuff on the inside. But this is way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mavericks release. It’s true that it didn’t change the appearance that much, like very little visually has been changed, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of things that are changing in every other part of iOS is just huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s really surprising. There were a couple of things that jumped out at me really quickly because they’re things that have been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have really bothered me over the years. They didn’t talk a lot about it in the keynote, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like for iMessages and SMS’s and things like that, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like all media is ephemeral by default. If you look closely at the keynote after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an image or after one of these audio clips that’s, I believe, new, or after a video clip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after each of these it says, keep. And so the implication, I think they made a very quick mention of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but the implication was, if you don’t hit the keep button in the next three days or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the number may be, then that’s just gonna go away. And I especially have lamented numerous times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how I had gigs upon gigs of, well, probably animated GIFs, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one way or the other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs upon gigs of photos in my messages app, on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I didn’t really need and I didn’t really want. I wanted them to go away and I wanted them to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily and quickly. And this seems like it’s probably gonna be the answer for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, they did so, I mean, and this leads very closely to the photos discussion, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yep, absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, so to recap, basically they announced this new, a few new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things around photos that’s basically, like, you know, it’s basically what people wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is like, you know, photo stream as a standalone thing is kind of going away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what it was before. You still have the shared photo streams, that’s more of a feature. But as a storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism, PhotoStream has been massively upgraded. Now you just have all of your photos are just in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud. And they use your iCloud storage, which now has a couple of bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper plans. And it’s not, we’re not talking about revolutionary pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was 200 gigs for four bucks a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think it was-
⏹️ ▶️ John It was only like 20 gigs for four bucks or there was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cheap plans.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s much cheaper than it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? But like- But it’s still not like Google level pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have enough information yet to see what this is really going to be like, but they said the right things. One of the things they said
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m glad about was they said, we keep your full res pictures which is- And videos. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and videos which is opposed to what Marco was saying in the past shows that like if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to, they should just do a lower res stuff if they can’t handle it. Everyone at Apple is basically saying, no, actually, we can handle it. Not only
⏹️ ▶️ John can we handle your Flores pictures, we’ll handle your video, too, which seems crazy, but hey, go for it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the pricing, it’s like all that announcement means nothing unless they adjust the pricing, and they did adjust the pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have they adjusted it enough? We’ll see, but the previous pricing was crazy and punitive, and now—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Powell, Jr.: Well, I’m not in love with this pricing because it was at five gigs for free, which I just think is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco absurd. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It’s a little low.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell, Jr.: That is ridiculous. And then I think it was 20 gigs. Is that what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you’re saying? 20 gigs was some— 200 and 20 gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like up to a terabyte, but they didn’t say how much those cost but it’s I mean either way We’re talking you know it’s it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dirt cheap, but it’s not that expensive. You know you’re not you’re not paying like s3 rates for this Yeah, we would
⏹️ ▶️ John hope what we would hope is that Say you’re say you’re starting off as an Apple customer now And you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John becoming an adult and taking pictures or whatever like we would hope that as you accumulate pictures that Apple’s pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps pace And comes down but for people with existing large collections We’re gonna have to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John that and do the math and say is this worthwhile for me to this and they didn’t mention anything about iPhoto and I have no idea what the fate of iPhoto
⏹️ ▶️ John is and they showed this Photos app which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the iOS. Oh, come on. You know what the fate of iPhoto
⏹️ ▶️ John is. The iOS Photos app. No, because the iOS Photos app doesn’t do anything close. There’s iPhoto on iOS, too. You know what I mean? The Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John app is on iOS and there’s also iPhoto on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think iPhoto is going with Dashboard. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can’t use them for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, like, the whole idea that, you know, can you take your photo collection and just put it all up into the cloud and
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with your photos that way? I don’t know what the answer to that is yet. I don’t think that the keynote gave
⏹️ ▶️ John us enough information to know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think the implication is very clear. You know, iPhoto has always had this problem where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, you know, it was, iPhoto was originally conceived in a world before the iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sync and it never had multi-device Sync and everything else. And PhotoStream kind of like half-assed it in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it wasn’t a very good solution and certainly it was very confusing. And then the iPhone comes out and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out and they have this Photos app, which is not iPhoto, you know, distinctly not iPhoto, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has its own way to do things and store things and manage things. And then they bring iPhoto to iOS, which is weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they didn’t replace photos with it. They just brought this other photo management program, which iPhoto and iOS, in my opinion, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never been good. But maybe that’s just me. But it certainly, I don’t think, has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John widespread adoption. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John how could iPhoto be any good on iOS if all your photos are in the Photopop? Exactly. But what they’ve… It seems like what they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done is brought that same dichotomy to the Mac. And I don’t understand why iPhoto can’t be the same app it is today,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all the photo storage done the iCloud way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I think the new Photos app on the Mac they showed off that’s coming out, was it next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or this fall?
⏹️ ▶️ John They said it’s not tied, they said next year. And so basically it means it’s not tied to an OS release and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, like it got pushed basically. It didn’t make it into Yosemite, right? So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure the implication there though is that the new Photos app for Mac that’s coming next year is the replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, but what they showed
⏹️ ▶️ John was not. What they showed was the iOS Photos app inside a window with a dinky little toolbar. It doesn’t come close to like doing
⏹️ ▶️ John keywords and maps and slideshows and all the stuff that, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it will, because the Photos app on iOS already has much of it. It doesn’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management stuff, but it has the maps and the albums, and it’s getting a lot of that already. I think the implication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where they’re going is very clear, like, iPhoto’s going away, this is the replacement, we’re just not done
⏹️ ▶️ John it yet. I mean, the good thing is, from the photos in the cloud, it’s what we’re talking about with messages. What they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying is, some of these photos will be on your local device, but you have access to more photos. Like, I mean, EverPix did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t have every single photo in your photo library on your phone just because you uploaded to EverFix, but you could scroll through all of them and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can show any one of them, and Apple is doing that now. Apple is saying, yeah, we’re going to do that, too. All your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be on your iOS device. Will still are your photos, but you can get to all of them from your iOS device, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get to them all from your Mac sometime next year. And that’s what we’re looking for, unified photos, protected in
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud, hopefully locally cached on your Mac when the hard drive is big enough, and some of them on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if the Mac version is good enough and able to and willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also import SLR pictures and you know pictures from standalone cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that will be amazing. So I don’t know. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very clear where they’re going. I think Aputure, do you think Aputure continues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, I think it probably does, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the pro stuff will lag, but like the whole idea, it’s what we want. We want to have local, fast access
⏹️ ▶️ John to our photos, but we want not to worry that if our computers die that we lose our photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we want Apple to store them and back them in the cloud, have it be synced everywhere, but have fast local
⏹️ ▶️ John copies. And Aperture, as the pro app, may be like, well, the pro people don’t want their stuff in the cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s too big anyway, so let us have it on local hard drives. But this is going to come. The
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea of a transparent storage hierarchy where the canonical version is stored in a a data center
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere really safely for you, hopefully not on HFS+, and all of your local
⏹️ ▶️ John versions are just caches of it, and everything is synchronized, and everything is fast because of local caching, and it’s all seamless.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where all storage is going, and for giant bins of data that we have, and our giant bins are
⏹️ ▶️ John basically photos and video for regular people, that’s what we want, a storage hierarchy that ends in the cloud and that is transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I feel like the photos set up that Apple’s building,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still grumbly about the price, but if that’s the most of my complaints, then we’re still doing a pretty good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really looking forward to it. I’m really looking forward to trying it. The only thing I wonder though is how are we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to get the years upon years upon years of photos that we’ve already taken
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was thinking, like if they came out with a new version of iPhoto or if the Photos app is the new version of iPhoto, that we would import
⏹️ ▶️ John say, okay, now we’re just going to transparently make your iPhoto library in the cloud. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it would take forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John a path to that. Did they talk about in the keynote that CloudKit for a slide and a half,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Gruber said they gave CloudKit 90 seconds. It was quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they mention what you get with CloudKit in terms of storage limits, or was
⏹️ ▶️ John that only in the State of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say- They went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over it very quickly. They said that it was free with limits, and you get like- The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits were not stated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so we can’t tell you which limits are. I thought they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve done a document
⏹️ ▶️ John that, yeah. Anyway, they said free with limits. And those limits are pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ John high, we could say from the sessions we’ve seen. So high that I don’t understand how Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is able to provide the Cloud Kit free with limits. It looks too good to be true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, to correct, they did give the limits in the presentation for what the global, like you store whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco petabytes of data. They did say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that, but they didn’t tell you what you get
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, well, yeah. But that’s interesting, though. Because, sorry, so if they gave the petabyte stat, They’re saying if you make an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John app and say your iOS app is going to store something big like audio files or video, who knows what it’s going to store, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The limits are like with the free thing, before you start paying any money, is, oh, you can store a petabyte of data for
⏹️ ▶️ John all users of your app combined. We don’t know if anything is per user or whatever, but why is it that if you develop
⏹️ ▶️ John an app, you get to store a petabyte for
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to store your photos on iCloud, you have to pay $0.99 to get like 20 gigs and $3 to get 200 gigs. I couldn’t agree more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per user, what you get per user, I don’t think we’re allowed to say, but it’s pretty small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s safe to say that. You’d have to have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John users of your app to hit these limits. Yeah, I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John their way. But still, and the bottom line is, say you make some viral app like Candy Crush and you store a bunch of crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John content for everybody and you run into the pedophile. Apple is storing a pedophile of your data for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, Amazon and Microsoft are storing a pedophile of your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems like the pricing is still a little bit out of whack. I would rather see Apple try to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how to rationalize that. I don’t know how to rationalize their willingness to do this stuff for free for an app developer
⏹️ ▶️ John while charging individual users so much more to get. I mean, I like the new pricing better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the old pricing, but I still can’t decide whether it’s something that fits with
⏹️ ▶️ John their own offering for app developers or fits with what people are going to be willing to pay for. Because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing with this. If someone gets a Mac and you’re like, oh, you should totally sign up for iCloud and do this monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John bill, that’s going to be a hard sell on people. Same thing with when you get your iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ John and you run into the free storage limits, you’ve got to say, oh, well, you have to pay money now. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John seems a little bit like a bait and switch. I would rather have it be more up front and to have some assurance that this is something that regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people are going to do, that we’re all going to take advantage of, and that it’s a price that we’re willing to deal with instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ John it creep up on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, and just a real-time follow-up quickly. limits per user are made public in a public document, which we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put in the show notes if I remember to, which I probably won’t because I’m very hungry and tired. It is 100 megs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per user for assets, one meg for database, and then there’s some transference limits. But yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s- All right, so those limits are tiny, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple’s- Like, you couldn’t build Instagram with that. Like, that would- Yeah, no. You would probably hit that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know? You’d have to have like a wildly popular app that just saves like high scores or some crap like that. But still, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s willingness is like, go ahead, try to make an app that has 300 million users, then we will end up storing a petabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John of data for you, but somehow that’s okay with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But, and I think, you know, this, and there are limits with CloudKit. As far as we know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we haven’t learned much about it yet, and I haven’t looked at the docs much because I haven’t had time yet, but as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as we can tell, like, this is not gonna let you build a website. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t even run anything server-side, as far as we know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seemed like it’s all local, it’s all client-side code that tells the servers roughly what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do, but it’s like, you know, fetchers and stuff. It’s like you, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way, for instance, like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me with Overcast or like underscore with Feed Wrangler, like it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to like run persistent crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their servers and have them notify you when new stuff comes in like that. Well, they do have the notification thing. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a client has to pick up that data or generate that data to tell other clients that it’s available. It,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John your server can’t do it. Right, exactly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can’t have a web version, you can’t have obviously Windows or Android versions. Like it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very limited system. It’s not gonna replace servers for a lot of people. And it’s not like, you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build the next Instagram with this because the next Instagram is gonna want to, just gonna wanna have to work, gonna have to work on Android at some point. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you can take it as a different take on what Core
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, definitely. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, because now we have, they have a scheme-less database with, you know, queries that they’ll run for you to notify your
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And that’s the bucket you put your thing in. But it’s like, it’s a different take on iCloud Core Data and that it’s not something that started
⏹️ ▶️ John local and went cloud. It started cloud the whole time. It’s always in the cloud. Very
⏹️ ▶️ John similar things can be done with both of them. I don’t know what the interface is to programming. Like, does it make it look like you just have a bunch of objects and
⏹️ ▶️ John they magically persist? But again, they say all the right words.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems like this will be a more reliable, easier to understand, easier to debug way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do some of the same tasks that people are currently doing with Core Data and iCloud. Exactly.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a couple of questions about iOS and then I think we should talk about Swift before we wrap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Firstly, do we know, we don’t really know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey identification, authentication, that sort of thing with regard to CloudKit, right? Because it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really neat, even if I didn’t use barely anything else with relation to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud, like say I’m Marco and I’m writing Overcast, it would ostensibly be really great to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the accounts system out of CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but do everything else myself. You know, just get a token from CloudKit to identify who this person is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then everything else I take care of on my own.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But we don’t know that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Could you do that already if you wanted to through iCloud? I guess you just sort of make yourself a little vestigial iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John document container that you never use.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I guess you could.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what you could do is you could just generate a random key, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generate a random ID and store it in key value storage. And then you could read that later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then when you base your authentication on iCloud, you get this big benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re already logged into this thing. But it also comes with a lot of weird little downsides and complexities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John people don’t like. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John sign out of iCloud, then you have to put their stuff off to the side in case I slide back into it to restore
⏹️ ▶️ John it for them, and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right So there’s there’s a number of weirdnesses with that now the good thing is something else that that’s totally unrelated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this that they announced Is the family sharing which oh thank God yeah? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so family sharing you can you can you can have up to like six people if you all have the same credit card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is a good limitation to prevent weird fraud issues you can have up to six people have basically pooled Purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the you know iTunes media as well as apps and in-app purchases which is awesome because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will dramatically cut down on people who need to keep signing in and out of different Apple IDs because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have one ID that purchases everything that they share with their wife or their kids or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is going to really help that anyway. So that’s beside the point. So if you use iCloud as your authentication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism, you’re tied to that. Sometimes that isn’t what users expect. So if someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signing into different iCloud accounts and they launch your podcast app And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden everything’s gone because they sign into a different account to download a movie and they forgot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And they launch your app and your app has no idea who they are or where all the stuff is because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s a little weird. Apple’s always been pretty good about
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you a different Apple ID for each of the individual apps. I’ve learned that setting up old devices for my kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised at the number of places I have to go hunt down my Apple ID and remove them and put in a different
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. Oh, I forgot that iMessage is still signed in as me. oh, I forgot that the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store was signed and it’s me. And they’re pretty good about spreading it around. But the big thing with the families
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I mean, they haven’t really finished this job. They’ve just started this job. But it’s acknowledging,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tweeted during the thing, acknowledging the existence of families. It’s acknowledging how regular people use their products, that we exist in families,
⏹️ ▶️ John that kids might have their own devices, that they get the hand-me-down devices, that we don’t wanna buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the app multiple times. One of the other acknowledgments is that in general, The family has
⏹️ ▶️ John a family collection of photos, whereas individual kids might have individual collection of photos, but you don’t want to, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to go on my wife’s computer because that’s the photo computer. That’s where all of our photos are. They haven’t gotten that point yet, so the no
⏹️ ▶️ John iLife is an island type of thing, but at the very least, they acknowledge your kids want to buy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t want them to be able to sign in, so now you get a notification on your device that says so-and-so
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to buy something, approve or reject. That’s what happens in real life anyway, and so they’re building into the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John electronically, which is, they must all have iOS devices in their family and it’s taken this long to
⏹️ ▶️ John create a product that acknowledges how everybody knows everybody’s using
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these products to begin with. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I mean, this is just one of those things, like the amount of crap they unveiled today, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I said two weeks ago or last week that Apple lacked server-side hustle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And- Oh, that’s a good point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s probably still the case in general with their online services, but I think this shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where all the hustle’s been spent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you picked an unfortunate word, because all I can think about is the kid who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John running for a football or trying to go somewhere for a pass
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t get there in time, but the coach says, all right, all right, good hustle, good hustle. But he didn’t make it there. But good
⏹️ ▶️ John hustle, son. And sure, yeah, they are showing hustle. I just don’t know if they’re the kid who
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t fast enough and the coach just wants to sound encouraging anyway. We want to see them catch the touchdown
⏹️ ▶️ John pass, not just to say, good hustle, son.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, it’s and it seems like, you know, server and service side stuff. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still keeping pretty limited, but I think they’re doing like what we see today or we saw today is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing a lot more like the whole iCloud Dropbox copy thing. I did not expect that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that was like a line I didn’t think they would ever cross with iCloud. And it solves a lot of problems that we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about with iCloud. Things like the file siloing and document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John siloing and how the heck you address that.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they first showed it, the silos are right there. Look, there’s a folder called Keynote. That’s the Keynote silo. And look, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a folder called Pages. That’s the Pages silo. I mean, the unification of those apps across the unification of iWork
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them be able to have those silos in both places, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. You’d have iOS Pages versus whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The silos are still all there. The whole idea is that if you just want to be siloed like you are now, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s other way you can look at things. And the question is, when I look at that, when I look at iCloud and it says Keynote and Pages
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, can I make my own folders alongside them? Yes, you can. Like, well, whose sandbox is that in?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that in somebody’s, is that in the keynote sandbox? Is that in the whatever sandbox? And the answer is no, it’s not in the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John document container is over there, pages document container over there, but within pages on iOS, you can hit the little
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that brings up the iOS equivalent of the open save dialog box and go to someplace else that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not in your document container and get a document, like the folder that you made called, you know, garage sale that’s gonna be your product
⏹️ ▶️ John for all your crap for the garage sale. And so, like I say, having their cake and eat it too,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna work the old way, it still works 100% the old way. If you want to work the new way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just pretend that old way didn’t exist, and just make a bunch of folders at the top level and never look in your document container. It’s all from
⏹️ ▶️ John the little extension of the sandbox, reaching out into this other world and allowing you to access these files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I should point out, I do not like the look of that quote unquote open save dialog.
⏹️ ▶️ John think it looks like crap. They never showed list view, so I don’t know what it looks like list view.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Ah, fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it might be reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the other thing I wanted to talk about really quickly about iOS, and maybe you guys have some other stuff too, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving and muting of group messages is wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John an acknowledgement of how people, like, who, is there a larger concentration of people who use iPhones and iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices than Apple employees? They must all know what it’s like to be, you know, to have the friends with the green bubbles that you can’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about, to not be able to leave the group chats, to, you know, to have, again, with the messages with the keep button,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, acknowledging that you have the wrong defaults. Like, you thought the default would be keep everything and let people individually
⏹️ ▶️ John delete, and it turns out that the right default is delete everything and let people individually keep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I’m just so excited. I’m excited that you can leave a conversation, although it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never made clear to me that this is SMS and iMessage. Like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this is just iMessage. That’s, I think, still unclear. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But not only can you leave a conversation, but you can also mute a conversation. I think they called it a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey term, but in effect, you don’t get buzzes in your pocket and so on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, you’ll still receive the messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be SMS, too, because they’ll just ignore, like, it’s a software thing. You’d still be getting the SMSs. They’re just not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you could do it all client side, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I completely agree with you. But it was never made clear. And so I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch. But I’m extremely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely excited about that. Because I get on these group messages, and it’s like one or two people I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then like 10 random phone numbers. And of course, nobody’s courteous enough to just reply to the author
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individually. And then I’m on these damn conversations that last two days, often at odd hours in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco morning. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most frustrating thing in the world. So I’m really excited about that. Anything else about iOS that you
⏹️ ▶️ John have? I think they did everything that we ever wanted for iOS, except for, that we talked about previously, for iOS, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for letting you pick a different default app. Because they did third-party keyboards, they did widgets on the lock screen. They didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets on the home screen, but they did widgets on a lock screen. You know, being able to share documents
⏹️ ▶️ John between applications for interapp communication, they just didn’t do, hey, I want to use Chrome as my default browser, I don’t want to use Apple Mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail. Right, and that was, I mean, wishing for that has always been a stretch. They might still do it someday, but that’s… I think that is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, I think third-party keyboards is even more of a stretch. Like that is exactly in the ballpark of the things they
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Like they did things that are as radical as letting you change your default app, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. Oh yeah, I mean, and you know, the entire extension system is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like shockingly robust and just changes everything. I mean, there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to take us, I was talking to Underscore about this earlier, I think, you know, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sudden now, for all of iOS’s history, for all, you know, for a lot of listeners of this show, certainly for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have been working on iOS apps all this time so far, there’s been these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire categories of apps that were impossible or impractical to make on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Entire capabilities that we lacked, that we couldn’t do well. Stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacks, like for Instapaper, having to make the stupid bookmarklet. Stupid hacks like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire URL scheme thing that we’ve been hacking around now. So many of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are totally obsolete now with the new extension system. Not only do we have all these existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things we’ve been doing that will now be able to be a lot better and a lot more robust, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s entire classes of apps that have never been possible to make before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are now possible. Or entire classes of activities that before you could do, but it was so clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would never really take off and would never really be that much of a good product. Now those things can be native and can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. It’s gonna take, I would say, at least a year for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of us who have been doing this for a while to forget that we can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things. It’s like, because now we have so many new capabilities that all came at once in addition to this whole new language that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to learn, which we’ll get to. We have all these new things that we can now do. It’s gonna take a while for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to finally internalize these things so that we can start realizing, wait a minute, we can do X, Y, and Z. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh man, this would be a great idea for an app, or this would be a great enhancement to our existing app, now we can do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That list is so long of what you can now do that this is just, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be ridiculously good for us, I think, long term, and it’s gonna take a while to see the full effects.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they did the obvious implementation. Like, I remember when we were talking about, oh, what if they let you do an activity sheet thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have your thing add to Instapaper or add to Pinterest, and like, well, if they do that, then every dog and his
⏹️ ▶️ John brother’s gonna have a little stupid icon in the thing, so it’ll need some kind of preference for you to turn them on and off. And with
⏹️ ▶️ John the simplicity of iOS, Notification Center was the first thing that showed, they’re not afraid to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you a wall of checkboxes or switches in iOS. And so they do that. The obvious implementation is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John register that you’re able to hand URLs, you let the user have a gigantic wall of on-off switches to tell which ones they want to see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Done and done. That’s what we were all saying. You’re like, well, you can’t do that. And it’s just like, no, they can. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the great thing about Apple doing it is the ecosystem they’re creating now is not just like one app vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John manages to do something within their, like, oh, my three apps cooperate. All the apps are going to be able to cooperate. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be able to reap the benefits or latch on to and enhance some other app because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can work on the same data and integrate with each other, you don’t need third parties to cooperate
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other outside the realm of the store. App developers that never knew each other, the user
⏹️ ▶️ John can now use their apps to work together on a single thing. And that’s what it’s been like on the Mac always, but now it’ll be like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s really impressive and I feel like we’re seeing a whole new, I don’t know if progressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the right word, but a whole new progressive Apple that’s willing to do the things that we never thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would be willing to do. And I’m really excited about it. Now granted, I’m always amped up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited and jazzed after the keynote and so on, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more excited today about not only what they’ve announced, but what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can imagine in the future, because all of these impenetrable doors that have been triple locked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cement sealed and welded shut, a few of them were blown open today. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they’re willing to do a new keyboard, gosh knows what they’re going to be willing to do in the future. And so, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really excited. I mean, it’s almost like they came out with a new — oh wait, they did come out with a new language today, didn’t they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lewis But I think a lot of this is decision changes at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Possibly it’s leadership changes. But I think, you know, what John said earlier is very correct, where it’s like, you know, they were able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff because of both hardware advances with the, now the ability to have, you know, more things in memory at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once, and also the, all the security features that they’ve added, that they’ve, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John many of the things… They had to build
⏹️ ▶️ John the infrastructure to enable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like many of these features, uh, nowaday, like now that they’re doing them and the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing them now, many of them have no downside. Like there’s, there’s no cost to doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It’s, you know, there was always a good reason not to before, but once Once you have the infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and once the hardware has caught up enough to allow a lot of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t give us home screen widgets on Springboard because the home screen’s always showing. But when you pull in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notification center, now they can intelligently refresh those only when you pull in a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center. A lot of people never pulled in a notification center so they never have to update them. There’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of optimizations they can do, all sorts of just restrictions and limits on where they’re choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do these things and how they’re choosing to do these things, make them possible and make them come with low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or no cost overall to the experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of Apple’s secrecy thing is that, like, it’s obvious now in hindsight how they were laying the groundwork
⏹️ ▶️ John for all these things. Like laying the groundwork by allowing technology to advance, by the hardware getting better, but also building all
⏹️ ▶️ John the APIs, enhancing them so that they’re able to deliver this. And you could say, oh, this was the grand plan all along, but
⏹️ ▶️ John three years ago when we were complaining about this stuff it’s just Apple couldn’t say it was a secret they were doing this. And we don’t know whether that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the case or not, But it seems like from the outside that their priorities haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John changed. Every time we’ve gotten a new feature, it’s been like, now, within the bounds of the priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John we set out for iOS in terms of safety and responsiveness, we are now able to deliver this feature that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted a long time. And it’s like, aha, Apple has changed direction. They’ve simply stuck to their priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John and waited, not just waited in terms of the hardware, but also said, if we’re going to ever do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s figure out the steps we would have to take. Over a series of iOS releases, they lay the groundwork
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly, slowly, and now finally they can come out. And in iOS 8, it seems like a whole bunch of those things came
⏹️ ▶️ John to a head at the same time. Like, finally they had the infrastructure to do all of these things, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Yeah, it’s been really impressive. So we should talk about this new language.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I feel vindicated in some ways, because if you think about, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Copeland 2010 thing, and 2010 came and went and nothing happened. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John when I revisited. Oh, right, right, right, right. Because you had written the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original in like 2003 or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And all… 2003?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Whatever, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or 2005, as you say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where’s Jason when we need him?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John How many numbers are… Anyway. John
⏹️ ▶️ John whole debate amongst us on the outside of Apple is about, why
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think they need a new language in runtime? Why can’t they just use Objective-C and continue to enhance it? And
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple came out with was not a continued enhancement of Objective-C. It was a new language,
⏹️ ▶️ John unequivocally a new language. It looks different. It’s got a different name.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing they haven’t changed is the API. It seems to be under the cover of the same API. but the way you
⏹️ ▶️ John use it is different because there are so many language features that essentially convert to
⏹️ ▶️ John a big whole mess of Objective-C code. So they’re sort of getting a new API without
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a new API, which is very clever. They’re not saying, oh, this language is so different.
⏹️ ▶️ John We are going to need all new APIs, all new function names, all new arguments or whatever. Instead, they said, here’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John compact way to say something that essentially is this big long block of,
⏹️ ▶️ John not block, but this big wad of Objective-C code. You don’t have to write that big WAD anymore. All of
⏹️ ▶️ John that intent is expressed in this thing. And it’s not a new API. And that, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ John very clever. Now, I haven’t had time to look at the language itself. It looks a lot like
⏹️ ▶️ John a language written by people who like C and C++ and Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not necessarily one of those people, but for people, it should be familiar to them. I heard
⏹️ ▶️ John Joel Spolsky say on Twitter that it looked a lot like Go, and his comparison was C sharp is to Java
⏹️ ▶️ John as Swift is to Go. And again, not having looked at it very long, that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems vaguely apt. But the bottom line is, they have a new language.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re committing to it going forward. It builds on everything they’ve done before. Built in LLVM, it builds
⏹️ ▶️ John on their whole compiler infrastructure, builds on their IDE. On
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on Arc. And, you know, it is the compromise we talked about, Objective-C without the C,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was actually on a slide. the actual phrase, it said Objective-C, I couldn’t even friggin’ believe it. I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to remember who originally came up with that phrase on the web. It wasn’t me. It was in the discussion, like, why don’t they just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John shaving the edges off Objective-C? Like, it’s Objective-C, but you won’t need pointers. Like, Swift doesn’t have the friggin’ stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not, you know, you can mix it with Objective-C code, there are pointers behind the scene, but you don’t have access. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to dereference them and start doing random crap, and this is their compromise. Unsafe code mixed with safe code,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the safe code is so very clearly safe. it’s super fast because under the covers,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s compiling down to, you know, LVM intermediary code, which is optimized. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s the same. It’s calling the same API’s. Someone was asking when they get to the RC
⏹️ ▶️ John for benchmark, like, look how much faster Swift is at RC for benchmark that objective C, how could objective C
⏹️ ▶️ John be so slow? And doing this RC for benchmark? What is it about Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it faster? I mean, people would say, Okay, so fine. So Swift is just as fast. Good. How can how can Swift be faster?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the answer to that Having just come out of the keynote, but my guess is that Swift lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John Express what you want to do in a way that doesn’t have all the baggage of C and C++ And all those
⏹️ ▶️ John other languages because they have to be so cautious about well I can do this optimization, but what if the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I call actually writes this memory address exactly and Swift can say I tell you that’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John happen because they have no way to get at that There’s no way for them to dereference something and go scribble over the section right
⏹️ ▶️ John like trust me. It’s gonna be the same What was that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, we’re back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trust me, it’s going to be safe to do this optimization because the program has expressed its intent and we don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about all these cases in a C and C++ compiler that are unsafe, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John compiler cannot make strong guarantees about. It has to do with the cautious thing. Now, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s why the RCA4 benchmark is faster, but that’s what I’ve always been talking about all these years about
⏹️ ▶️ John what can you do with a new language. It’s not just syntactic sugar. because you can allow the pro to express
⏹️ ▶️ John their intent without having all these details of the implementation of a memory unsafe language that the runtime
⏹️ ▶️ John and compiling system has to worry about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. The performance gains don’t make a lot of sense otherwise, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be about optimizations and all the assumptions that the compiler can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make. The optimizing compilers are so advanced these days, and the more information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can give them about what they need to do and what they don’t need to do, the better optimized code that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can generate. It makes a huge difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was a big presentation by someone on the LLVM thing. It might have been Chris Lander or somebody else that was going through like undefined
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior according to the C specification. C specification says if you do X or Y, it’s undefined behavior. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are so many cases that it comes up and it ties. They’re raking LLVM and the optimizer and the code
⏹️ ▶️ John generator. It ties their hands. It’s like, boy, we would love to do this optimization, but according to the C
⏹️ ▶️ John spec, it’s not safe for us to do it. And so they would just be sitting there just waiting to unleash these
⏹️ ▶️ John optimizations. And with Swift, they can define a language that is not impaired in that way, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have all these edge cases and say, now, finally, we can pull all those optimizations. It is safe to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John guaranteed. Do it and make your code faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The other thing that was really impressive about Swift, which comes back to what you were saying earlier about constant priorities,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the protections around doing something stupid. A great example being overrunning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an array. So if this array is 20 items and you ask for item 25, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to catch that and not let you do something either stupid or dangerous. And it’s going to probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fail dramatically. But that’s a much better approach than just letting you run amok in memory that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t belong to you. And that’s just one example of many different protections they’ve made in order to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like the Heartbleed
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t want to give up anything. So like, compile time, static analysis, strong typing, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so we can catch the, you know, if there was an array out of bounds error, they would catch that at compile time if they
⏹️ ▶️ John could, you know, if it wasn’t a runtime value being put in there. because they didn’t give up any of the typing stuff. Like I saw this tweet today, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t read it myself, but someone was saying in the Swift book that Apple put out on the iBook store, which you can go get for free right now, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, Swift is designed to be a language that you can use to write everything from operating systems up to applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a single language that it’s not like, oh, well you just use this to make your fancy GUI apps. When you write the OS, you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in C. Seems like Apple is saying, we can be Swift from top to bottom. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John we make, all the software we make is Apple, from the operating system itself, all the way up to all of our GUI applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory could be written in Swift because that’s how it’s designed. It’s designed to be as efficient as the low-level languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even more pleasant to use than Objective-C was. And that is an ambitious goal, and I applaud them for it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure they’ve achieved it yet because I haven’t read enough about the language, but I mean, what more can you ask?
⏹️ ▶️ John The new language, you know, from top to bottom, fully committed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it always seemed, like this is one of the reasons why I don’t learn new languages very often, much to your chagrin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it always seems like a waste of technology and resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and effort. To have these languages that have, you know, great feature X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Y, and Z, and then, oh, but it doesn’t run on Linux, or you can’t use it to build GUIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like, there’s all these limitations that’s like, it’s not really the fault of the language, it’s more of a library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue usually, or an implementation, or VM issue, or something like it. You know, and there’s, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like a waste to have, you know, to become an expert in a language that you then can’t use for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X, Y, or Z. Like, at least from my point of view, of not wanting to learn new languages very often. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing, like looking at this, obviously, yes, I’m going to learn this, because I think every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Objective-C programmer today should start learning Swift as soon as they can, because it’s not like Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be deprecated or go away in a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at how long Apple has supported the old C APIs, all the core foundation stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C++ compilation and everything, this is gonna be here for, Objective-C’s gonna be around for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while. I mean, but they map to each other, that’s the freaky thing about it. Like, they showed a thing where they said, you can look in Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John header and we’ll translate it mechanically to the Swift header. Because they didn’t change
⏹️ ▶️ John the API. Underneath it is like, you can write the equivalent Objective-C code, the Objective-C code that would be unsafe, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you could dereference anything and do crazy stuff. The Swift code is safe, because what you write doesn’t include any of that stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fairly genius, saying that we’re gonna, we’re going to make, I mean, in that respect, it’s like Go.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a low-level language with a high-level syntax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other interesting thing to me was that as much as we all bemoan Xcode, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent enough time to make the Xcode tooling good. Just like you said, when you look at documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will mechanically translate from Objective-C to Swift. Additionally, they have, what is it, Playground?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Which is basically like not quite a command line, like interactive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interpreter. It’s better than that and it’s GUI based. And so they were showing demos of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, rewinding and playing animations and doing things that I would love to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. And that’s just, this is just Xcode’s Swift tooling. There’s a bunch of other tooling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think most of which is NDAed, that’s also extremely impressive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t just throw this language out there and say, hey, you’re probably gonna need to learn this and oh, you know, we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really gonna help you. Just there’s some documentation, go figure it out. There’s the iBook that John mentioned. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Playground thing within Xcode. There’s a whole bunch of documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their website. I mean, they’re really, they’ve taken this seriously. And the rumblings I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a few friends is that not everyone at Apple knew about this, but those that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did have been working on it for a long time. And I think that’s pretty apparent pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and all the more impressive that it was kept secret all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time. Absolutely. I mean, there were people, from what I’ve gathered, there were people at Apple that had no freaking clue this was about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me is just mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, that’s the genius of the transparency. They didn’t need to know because it’s not as if,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, once you saw them translate that header file, it’s like, they could translate your
⏹️ ▶️ John objective C course source to Swift mechanically, perhaps, if they wanted to. I mean, probably not because you have
⏹️ ▶️ John the C parts that they wouldn’t be able to, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s a bit of a- I bet they
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of it. So the rest of the organization doesn’t need to know because under the, like, it’s all binary compatible. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the State of the Union thing, which someone just tweeted that you could stream the State of the Union without any kind of password so that it must be public.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they mentioned that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They said it was going to be binary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John compatible. Oh yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not necessarily source compatible because what they’re saying is like, we don’t know whether we even have the syntax of this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing nailed down, even though we’ve been developing it for who knows how long internally. They’re reserving the right to change
⏹️ ▶️ John their mind about the syntax before the release of any of the OSs that are built on it during the dev period.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, they’ll go on Swift 1.0, Swift 2.0, like they’ve done with Objective-C that extended it like crazy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift is designed, they were saying it was defined in terms of itself, which any Perl 6 fans out
⏹️ ▶️ John there, the five of you, hi guys, will know Perl 6 is also defined in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of itself. The language spec was written, the language itself was written in Perl 6.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have the mutable syntax of Perl 6, but that whole philosophy that
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift is sort of designed to be self-hosting and that these things that we think that are intrinsic to the language, like arrays and
⏹️ ▶️ John collections or whatever, are actually not, but rather It’s library-based. They’re part of the libraries that build on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a modern construct of how to build language. Don’t just define a syntax and say, this is the language forevermore,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then have different versions of it. Rather, design a line, like LLVM. LLVM is a compiler system made as a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of libraries. Swift, made by the same people, surprise, is a language made as a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of libraries, and the libraries will change and be added to over time. And the core language itself is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this was also a very wise way to do it in that they didn’t replace the frameworks. They didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like. I mean, they couldn’t, it’s too much work. Right, and that’s the thing. And that’s why we were always kind of worried, like, well, they sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do seem to be adding a lot of frameworks. And this is gonna be a big job to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever convert this to a new language. And instead, they just designed a language that didn’t need that conversion. And that’s gonna help us, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not gonna take very long for us to learn Swift, because we’ll learn the syntax in a weekend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll get the bits and pieces, like the fringes over time, but we already know the entire library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the libraries have not changed. We know all the frameworks already, and that’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there’s still the win that they’re not getting, which is like using some of these APIs from Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John may seem silly. Like in other words, if these APIs were designed in a world with Swift, would these APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John look the way they do? I mean, even stuff like, I don’t know how they’re going to handle like error parameters, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John error parameters, stuff like that. I’m sure there’s massaging to be done there. So they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s the right compromise for them, but it is still a compromise in that if you were to design a new API in a
⏹️ ▶️ John world where Swift was the beginning instead of the end point of language evolution, your API would look different.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s just not an option for them. And so this compromise, like Arc kind of, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John right compromise for Apple this time. I’m just happy that
⏹️ ▶️ John they saw the light, because I’m not convincing anybody of anything. But I’m just happy that it happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I thought it needed to happen, and I’m excited that it did. And
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming this process has been going on for years, this means I’ve been having conversations with people from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John who knew that Swift was happening and could not tell me. And we would
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it. I can just imagine what they must have been thinking as I’m talking to them and saying, but look at what you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do with a whole new language instead of just extending Objective-C. And they would, yeah, well. They
⏹️ ▶️ John knew. It’s amazing. They did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And at some point, they’re going to start making APIs that only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in Swift. You know, like there’s so many APIs in previous transitions, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when going from Carbon to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for example. Exactly. Yeah. Don’t work without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks. Right. And yeah, there are certain things like that where they’re just not going to, like, certain APIs, they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not going to make Objective-C versions anymore. And remember that. But the amazing thing about these tools and the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built this thing is that you can opt into Swift. It’s just like, oh, you can opt in per compilation unit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is per source file. And so you can have an app. Like, I don’t have to convert my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire app to Swift to use any of it. I can convert one file. I can just start writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new modules in Swift and eventually port the whole application slowly over time as I update things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there’s so many. The way they’re doing this is so immensely practical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the environment that we’re actually in today. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now think of hide site. Remember how gross the block syntax looks and looked with the carrot and all that crazy stuff? I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the dot syntax. It was like, I don’t know about the dot and the regular thing. Some people stuck with a square bracket. In hindsight, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, don’t worry about the ugly block syntax, guys. In Swift, it’ll just be curly braces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry about the stupid dot syntax, guys. In Swift, it’ll all be dots. If you look backwards at the Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John enhancements, and some of them are awkward and weird or whatever, all of them are just laying the groundwork to get Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John up to speed. And that’s what makes me think Swift must have been a multi-year long process. And it would be poetic
⏹️ ▶️ John if I think back to, would this project start in 2010? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually based on some things we’re hearing it sounds like that might be around when it started That’s certainly in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ballpark And you think about how long is this how long this kind of effort takes anyway? You know it would have to have been at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know I’m sure they didn’t start this in 2013 2012 like you know probably you know probably 10 11 ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know but you know this is This is I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy with how they’re doing this. It’s just it’s extremely pragmatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly it really is and And it’s a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use their strengths. Apple’s really good at recognizing when they have something good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and being able to leverage their strengths in new creative ways. The DevTools team especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just so, so good. The only thing I’m upset about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, besides that I have to learn something new, which I guess is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, the only thing I’m upset about is I finally figured out block syntax. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally stopped having to go to our effing block syntax friend’s site. I finally stopped having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go there last month. I finally got it. I can write block as method parameters. I can write it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variables. I finally figured out block syntax reliably this month,
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t feel bad, Marco. I know how to do Perl 4 formats. No one knows what that is in
⏹️ ▶️ John but the five people out there who knew the Perl 6 stuff understand that, and that information became useless as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so today, your knowledge of blocks, the syntax of blocks went out the window. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wearing the ATP shirt, and now all the code on the back is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John deprecated. Yeah, why didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you write that in Swift? What’s wrong with you? But no, it’s been an extremely exciting day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t wait to learn more about it, because just like John was saying, we’ve had no time today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look at this. And so at a glance, this all looks really compelling. And I presume that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we look deeper and deeper, going to look more and more compelling, but you never know. But I’m so excited to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what the next four days bring and see what we’re going to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about all of this. I mean, I noticed that in the sessions, there’s like beginner level Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advanced level Swift, or intermediary and advanced, like all this week. And maybe that’s under NDA, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if so, my bad. But suffice to say, they’re doing multi-tier Swift sessions on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the span of a week. So I don’t know who they think is going to intermediate level in the span of like 24 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like if you’ve never seen like if you’re a new developer period like they’re gonna go through the basics whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if you have experience with seven languages I think you could jump right into the advanced Swift thing and they’d be like oh I understand like
⏹️ ▶️ John right you know if you don’t know what closures are them just showing you that in the advancing like wait I don’t even know what it is
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re talking about let alone how it behaves and you know in terms of like like again with all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift code I didn’t think I double underscore weeks or strongs or yeah like how
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the scope of the variables, how they’re retained, and then Swift is like, you don’t need to worry about that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anymore. I’m hoping you don’t need to. I haven’t looked people up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but… Well, because it does use the ARC model underneath, so things like weak references, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John still a thing. Right, but
⏹️ ▶️ John do you need to annotate that anymore is what I’m getting at, or is it built into the language that there are guarantees?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Within the ARC model, you can’t prevent retain cycles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain scenarios without having the content of a weak reference. What we’ve seen so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Swift is we’ve seen the curated good stuff that demos well. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t seen the ugly stuff that they have to have yet. It might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get less pretty, but the fact is I’m sure it’ll be close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be good. They
⏹️ ▶️ John remove so much noise, even just with type inference, which again, I’m talking about last year was like, oh, they could add type
⏹️ ▶️ John inference to Objective-C. They kind of did, but that wasn’t the next thing on the list, but it’s part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John big giant language that incorporates everything you’ve seen before. Getting rid of the types everywhere, getting rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously retain release went away with arc. And I’m hoping like the silly annotations
⏹️ ▶️ John needed for the compiler to figure out what to do. Like you said, you probably need something to break cycles,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know what that’s going to look like. And it could be that they just have strong guarantees in the language and it won’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to create cycles if you use the structures in this way. And if you create them in this way and you do create them, there’s no way to break them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just don’t do that. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know yet. are gonna need, because like for certain delegate methods. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll need it, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, just.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we learned today is that, I feel like I learned today that Apple is not only floored, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are standing on the gas. And so many things, like, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of things I talked about with regard to layout. So like, if you’re not doing auto layout, which I’m not, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to learn it, if you’re not doing auto layout, you gotta get on that train, because you’re getting left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind. You know, if you’re not using dot syntax, You’ve got to get on that train or you’re getting left
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to get on the Swift train, like Margo said. Right. Like, learn Swift. And we should talk about that section of State of the Union, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently public, about what was it called? Size,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are they called?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John adaptive UIs is their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco umbrella term. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what are the size modes or size
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco class? Yeah, I mean, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, you know, they were like screaming with a megaphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of subtlety. We
⏹️ ▶️ John are making a bigger iPhone. Get ready. And also possibly side-by-side apps on the iPad, but we’re not sure yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Get ready. And get rid of the app. Yeah, start using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff, please. And I’m actually curious. I haven’t even looked at the APIs. I hope you don’t have to use storyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. Yeah, I don’t think you do. I think that’s just their vision. Like, you could do it all in code.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I hope so. It’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John storyboard is the way to lay it out. And it may be complicated to do in code. But yeah, like we said on the previous show, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that they just don’t say anything about these things and just have a bunch of APIs about making your app different sizes. They totally do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, just there was a long section of that thing about it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was extremely awkward, because they were dancing all around the fact that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically saying, there are bigger iPhones coming, prepare yourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the side-by-side app things, which require exactly the same thing. And their sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John were so vague. It was like, compact vertically, compact horizontally. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John just, forget about resolution. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco telling you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re making a square iPhone. Because there’s a new, you can do square.
⏹️ ▶️ John that was for the iWatch. It was a gigantic square watch. That’s it. But this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John example where Android, I think from the beginning, it always had your UI It could be any size, because our phones
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, we’re not going to control the size. So your UI better adapt. So you have like a bag grid type of things
⏹️ ▶️ John where you put items in and constraints. And Apple was just like, the iPhone is here. It’s fixed. This fixed pixel size is just
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with it, right? And they worked over the series of eight releases to slowly creep up on this concept.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what they’ve come up with is kind of a weird mongrel of like half fixed layout, half auto layout, and people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the transition. But during that whole period, they had the right product for the right time. And now it is finally
⏹️ ▶️ John the right time for what Android was at from the beginning, which is like, look, You’re not going to know what size your device is. Try to make a UI that looks good everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple made a UI that looks good in all of its previous devices. And now Apple is trying to show people
⏹️ ▶️ John how to continue to make UIs that look good in any size device, not, you know, quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, any size. And it’s a difference in philosophy because, you know, Android apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make a UI that scales to any size and shape is really hard. And that’s why a lot of Android UIs
⏹️ ▶️ John were weird, especially like the stretched out apps on the Android tablets and everything. Apple never did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John At every step of the way, Apple says, we have a way for you to make awesome looking apps in every possible size thing, and that way keeps
⏹️ ▶️ John changing as the number of sizes change, and this is the newest way. And it is the most complicated way, but it’s still also the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think this way is also probably the end game of that path, because at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was the Springs Instructions, like a very, very basic model of scalable windows and views and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you have Auto Layout, which is much more advanced, but the main limitation with Auto Layout is like, without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being all crazy with dynamic checks and everything, you basically were applying the same constraints,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same layout to a view regardless of what size it was. And now you have more of a concept of like responsive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web design, which is like, all right, for this size class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna use this set of constraints. For this size class, you’re gonna adjust them in this way or you’re gonna use this entirely different set of constraints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is like, it’s the end of that road and they can make it better, But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of system that they’ll pretty much need for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John next 15 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John all they have to do is
⏹️ ▶️ John classes. Right. I mean, the size classes in the beginning are stupid. It’s like compact. What does that even mean? But they use the same
⏹️ ▶️ John constant values for the enums or whatever the hell they are and just keep adding size classes. And then it’s like, well, now
⏹️ ▶️ John we have Apple that works on your wall-sized display with the new Apple wallpaper that you paint on 2075.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is just a different size class. Yeah, why not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably wrap. But what do you think, Marco? Thumbs up, thumbs down?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you excited? Are you happy? Are you disappointed? What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m extremely happy and excited. I’m a little afraid of my future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, most of the things they’ve added, like I was afraid going into this, like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if iOS 8 adds something ridiculous that I must have, and I have to then delay my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app until 8 ships? And assuming that you can get the widgets, types in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the embed type stuff if you can get that conditionally compiled the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve been able to do with previous versions like if I can ship an app with the seven with you know ship an app with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SDK when it ships that I can have all these things but still be compatible with seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that’s fine I can still ship the app like you know this summer sometime I don’t have to wait until October or whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have to I do have a lot more work to do now with what you know getting all this stuff supported by the time eight ships
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not like, you know, freaked out about having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to massively change my plans. And the new things that they gave us are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I mean, they gave us so much of what we both wanted and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never thought we’d get that it’s, I’m just so excited to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it. And this week, we’re gonna be here for the next four days and learn about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these these things in sessions, but we’re not gonna get a full appreciation for it until we go home and start actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using these things. And that’s gonna happen over the span of months and years. And over months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and years, we’re all going to appreciate the scale of what we got today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, it’s still very new, and it’s still gonna take a lot of thought and experience with it before we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize the full effects.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you gonna do the size class stuff so you’re ready for the bigger iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will probably do that once I make an iPad interface. That’ll probably be part of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. I haven’t done that yet. I’m not gonna launch, as far as I know, with an iPad version. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll probably come later, fall or winter or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so John, how do you feel?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that they’ve put out there. I’m not sure, like, ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John all that I care about in these announcements is the OS X stuff and I’m thinking about my review and I still don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John OS pinned down. I still haven’t even used it. I don’t really know what to make of that. People’s like, oh, this is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be a big review, but my initial impression is that it’s not going to be that big, it’s gonna be small, but I may be misled
⏹️ ▶️ John by the things that are OS X, that are relevant to OS X, that were presented in
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts of the keynote. So I don’t know yet. But Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s interesting, it’s strange. The Mac was due for a visual refresh. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if I like it or not yet. I’ll have to spend some time with it and see. But all the other stuff, I mean, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John excited as a user about the iOS 8 stuff. I’m excited to use all the apps that people will make on iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ John that take advantage of these features. Like, really, this is iOS’s time to shine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s finally coming into its own. And that’s what I’m excited about from a user perspective. And of course, the language stuff from an academic
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective seems like just, yeah. I mean, I will – the never-ending nitpicking of Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John itself will begin once I learn what the heck is it. But bottom line is, like, they did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John got a new language and it may not have been the way I wanted it or
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that I wanted out of a new language, but just merely the acknowledgement that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not objective C forever, it just feels good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Now, like I said, I’m just so pleased to see that Apple is really moving and they’re moving quick and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, I have no reason to doubt that any of this is going to work well. Ask me about this in three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or four months when iOS 8 comes out and all this iCloud stuff actually happens and maybe nothing works and then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regret being excited about how how quick Apple’s moving but sitting here now It’s it’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encouraging and I’m really Excited to play with all of this stuff and it should it should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really awesome. We’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I I really can’t wait. This is They’re they’re clearly firing on all cylinders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know We didn’t even mention the lack of hardware updates today because the simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is it just didn’t matter They gave us so much on the software and dev tools end which is appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a developer conference They they gave us so much there that you know we’re we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content for a while. I can learn Swift on my old crappy monitor I can I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can They’ve made me busy enough that I can temporarily forget for maybe the next couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of months I can forget that we don’t have written a thermal screens yet, and I and thank goodness They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release a TV and a watch for us to all develop for this summer. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John come on I mean, yeah, no new category, but nobody cares. I mean, the thing is, like, at WWDC, the hardware announcements,
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as I love them, are a distraction from everything else. Because for the rest of the week at the
⏹️ ▶️ John conference, they don’t talk about the hardware. Like it’s all about software. This is a developer’s conference, and we love it when there’s hardware, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s exciting, and you see them in the little glass tube. But then they go away, and for the rest of the week, people are not talking about… I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe if, like, you know, they have retina screens, that’s a developer-facing feature, but there’s so much developer-facing stuff. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John this whole keynote was filled with stuff that the rest of the week is going to be filled with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there was enough consumer stuff in there, too, that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t like a PR disappointment for Apple today. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure some site analyst is saying that Apple’s doomed because they didn’t release an iUnicorn or whatever, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is, I think most of the sensible places that are usually sensible about these things will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the value here for everyone, and developers, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just showing that Apple does have hustle, like the real hustle. They do have massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering resources. They’re not applying to things like Street View cars and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else, but they are applying to different problems that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we didn’t get transit directions and maps and everything, and that stuff can come in time. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not trying to criticize Google, because Google has engineering resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spare and it shows with their weird side projects, but their core stuff is still really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is showing that Apple can not only still compete on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core stuff, just a different set of it, not only can they still compete, but they can still compete really well, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitively. They’re raising the bar in so many areas that other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies and platforms aren’t or lag behind in. And so Apple, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It’s an end of a lull, I feel like. It’s like there was a lull where we were
⏹️ ▶️ John making a lot of demands. We didn’t even talk about all the App Store changes, but we were making a lot of demands and people wanted things
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple wasn’t releasing it. And it’s almost like a whole bunch of stuff all came out of the oven at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know how long any of those things were baking in there, but the bottom line is they opened the oven doors and 50 cakes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re all done.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re all ready now.” And, you know, from the outside, it’d be like, well, they must
⏹️ ▶️ John have heard what we complained about since iOS 7 and done all this stuff. So much of this stuff in this keynote must
⏹️ ▶️ John have taken more than a year. They just all came due at the same time. And so, I mean, again, we
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t even gotten to new category. TV, forget about that stuff. This was a lot of like…
⏹️ ▶️ John Their sort of quiet period of just doing small incremental things. Arguably, it ended with iOS 7 making
⏹️ ▶️ John the big transition, but like, man, a lot of stuff Came out today a lot of big
⏹️ ▶️ John things that we wanted for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was really awesome, and I’m so stoked for the rest of the week So thank you so much to Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell and the people of Mac world for letting us steal his studio for a while It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely kind of you, so thank you, and we have some sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to thank. And thanks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot to our three sponsors this week Warby Parker, Igloo, and Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and We’ll see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin Cause it was accidental, accidental, oh it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John him Cause it was accidental, accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve got a lot to talk about, but yeah, we will see you next week. Thanks,
⏹️ ▶️ John guys. Or tomorrow on a different podcast, but whatever. There’s that too.