74: One Of Us Shipped Something
18 Jul 2014Unfortunately, it wasn’t Fast Text for iOS 7.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Showbot status and pull requests
- Older phones still being bought today, like the iPhone 4S
- Long-term device limitations and upgradeability, RAM, spinning disks, and Mac/iOS purchasing strategies
- Vindictive but self-defeating defections
- Screen size, small hands, and pants/trousers/jeans/khakis/whatevertheyrecalled.
- 4K Plasma TVs, as pointed out by Awax, which lists for $500K
- Overcast has shipped!
- Planning for server load and timing a release in the App Store
- Why require user accounts, and why not iCloud?
- Why freemium?
- What took so long? Why no streaming? Why does that even matter?
- IRL Talk
- RSSRadio
- ARM SIMD Extensions
- AltiVec
- Features users will hopefully appreciate
- Linking to other independent podcast apps
- Some serious dedication on Hacker News
- Posted after we recorded: Castro's response
- Podcast directory design motivations
- Possible web-hosting on an A7-based Apple TV like at Mac Mini Vault
- After-show:
- John gets Hypercritical about Overcast
- Electric Shadow
- Back to Work
Sponsored by:
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use code ATP for 15% off. (Marco's app-icon Fractures)
- Squarespace: A better web starts with your website. Use promo code ATP for 10% off.
- Need: A refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men. Email here after ordering to get some bonuses and 25% off your next order.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me start by saying that I have started work on the ShowBot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey title ordering, but it is not done. And I apologize for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a pull request. Someone sent you the code. The dirty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. But I don’t know if I’ve only glanced at it, but I’m a little opinionated about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I want it done. So I’m going to give it the college try. One of us shipped something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re so mean to me. I’m going to give it the college try and see if I can do it the way I I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it, and if I can’t do it in basically the one time I sit down to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I’ll take the pull request and walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about this alternate strategy? Accept the pull request and let us use that while you work on your solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John then revert that integration and put in your change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be honest, that’s probably the better approach, but that’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so nothing really happened this week, so let’s start with follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently some stuff we’ve said in the past has been wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’d like to talk now for a half hour to explain why it was wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John This first item, I didn’t put this first one in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Who put the first item in? Oh, that might have been me, actually. We got a lot of feedback that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were talking about what would cause someone to switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android from an iPhone, and we got a piece of feedback that we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an an episode or two ago that said, Hey, you know, a lot of these, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these new versions of iOS can kind of slow down your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and make the response time to everything a lot less quick. And that’s maybe why people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch. And so somebody wrote in, I don’t have who it was, but somebody wrote in many people have noted, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the perceived slowdown on older phones could likely be purchasing an old phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, buying a forest today, which is still on store.apple.com. Actually, I think I wrote that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, the point being that you can still get a 4S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. And iOS 8 is presumably coming out in September
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and probably isn’t gonna run too well on a 4S because I believe it is supported. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 4S is supported on 8, that’s correct. 4S and up. So all the A5 devices are supported on 8.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is interesting because there’s a lot of them. Like if they cut off the A5 devices, they cut off the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad mini, which is still for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So there’s a lot of older devices being sold that are still going to be supported.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that’s, that’s something to consider and something that would perhaps drive you away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple, because here you get this, perhaps not amazing experience. You know, what if this was your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first iPhone or first smartphone and you buy a 4S today and it runs all right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iOS 7. And then in a couple of months, you, you see that iOS 8 is available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You go and update it. And all of a sudden it runs like crap. I mean, that’s no bueno. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just something to consider.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about that on past shows. We were talking about why the heck the iPad 2 was around so long. They finally
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped selling that, right? I don’t know. You’re probably right. Anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve had that same complaint. And another one of my hobby horses is not putting enough RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John in things, especially when you can’t upgrade it. It’s short-sighted from a sort of customer
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfaction and brand satisfaction level to skimp on RAM, even though it helps your margins,
⏹️ ▶️ John because some people will say, well, I’m just going to get it with the minimum. And if the minimum is not a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable amount, like if you’re just setting someone up for it’s much, much better now in the days of SSDs, but when it was spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John discs, it was just torture to get a Mac with the minimum amount of RAM and then use it for several years. And by the end of its lifetime,
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS and all the apps need way more RAM. And the thing was always swapping, and especially it was like a 5,400 RPM laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John drive, and it was just it was bad. Yeah. When we talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole having it upgrade that slows down your thing. I don’t think any of us Thought that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a phenomenon that happens I mean I think we’ve all actually owned devices that we’ve either Decided not
⏹️ ▶️ John to upgrade to iOS 7 or regretted upgrading to iOS 7 and all the way back I mean, I remember on my
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my original iPod touches I think I didn’t want to upgrade to 4 or something and then
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually I gave in and regretted it like this is a thing That happens if you keep if you keep devices
⏹️ ▶️ John long enough I actually I did add two tiny notes to this bit of follow-up here I guess the first
⏹️ ▶️ John one is that if you buy a device if Apple sells you something that they probably shouldn’t still
⏹️ ▶️ John be selling like you get an iPad 2 and when it was so clearly long in the tooth or you end
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a Current non-retin iPad mini or you know poor Margo’s mom buying the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad iPhone 4 when she shouldn’t have been like That’s Apple’s fault
⏹️ ▶️ John for selling those things and and the customer gets it and they they get a bad experience Sometimes this is just a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John experience right out of the box, right? But the idea that the solution to
⏹️ ▶️ John that is to try another vendor, in some sense, makes sense if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know anything about Apple and its products or whatever. You bought an Apple thing, it sucks, you try a different one, right? But for tech
⏹️ ▶️ John savvy people, I would imagine that they
⏹️ ▶️ John could have a similar reaction, but for a different reason. Tech savvy people are gonna do it for the airline reason, where
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s vindictive, where you’re like, well, I bought this thing, I was satisfied with it, I used it for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, I upgraded it, Apple shouldn’t have even allowed it to be upgraded, so that’s Apple fault, I hate Apple now,
⏹️ ▶️ John my solution is for my next phone, for my next tablet or whatever, I’m going to buy from a different vendor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that can very quickly turn into, you know, I just hate Apple, I’m not buying their stuff anymore, when in reality,
⏹️ ▶️ John the optimal solution for that person who maybe used and enjoyed Apple products for a while is the next time they buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, buy a higher end Apple product, spend more money, I’m sure Apple would love this. Spend
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco money on Apple products
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually it’ll work well. Like again, it’s Apple’s fault for selling these old devices too long. It’s Apple’s fault for allowing the upgrades to
⏹️ ▶️ John go on them when they don’t perform well. Arguably it’s Apple’s fault that the software doesn’t perform well. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if for example, I had a relative who had that experience and I knew that they were
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfied with Apple devices in general, I wouldn’t recommend, oh, well for your next one, you should get an Android phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I think that they would not get a better experience out of that. Yes, they get the satisfaction of saying, well, now I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy Apple stuff anymore, but it’s like, really, you’d be super satisfied with an iPhone 5S for
⏹️ ▶️ John your next phone, right? So if you say you had a 4S, you upgraded it to get slow. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you really loved your iPhone for all of its life, except for this last part, which again, totally Apple’s fault for putting
⏹️ ▶️ John them in this situation and everything, it’s like, you know, cutting off your nose to spite your face by saying, well, the next phone I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get is an Android phone, because that probably won’t be a satisfactory experience, especially if someone just is
⏹️ ▶️ John used to iOS or whatever. So that’s one angle on this, that the whole idea of just, I’m angry,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna get revenge at Apple, and I’m gonna do something that’s technically not really in my best interest. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, this is why, again, everyone loves to spend money on Apple, so this is why I recommend people, don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple device if the only one you can afford is the cheapest one they sell, because the cheapest one they sell always sucks. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true of, you know, you get an iMac, it was like the $1,000 iMac, that’s like 15% less expensive and 50% slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, if you can’t get the expensive one, you
⏹️ ▶️ John actually are probably better off with something else. And then the other point I had on this topic is,
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, hardware and software sort of catches up to
⏹️ ▶️ John the baseline of what the OS, what people want to do with the OS. If you think about the early
⏹️ ▶️ John history of OS X, where it was just super slow for just years at a time, just years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years. It felt gross. It felt like molasses. It was really slow. It was compositing on the CPU. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John when they got the compositing onto the GPU, Drawing and the window resizing and all the event handling. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just slow. It was crappy At a certain point the cheapest Mac you could buy
⏹️ ▶️ John Could pull down windows fast could scroll fast like these days no matter what Mac you buy buy the least
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive new Mac from Apple It will scroll a page Okay, and that sounds stupid, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we went through years where it couldn’t scroll and where everything was just super slow. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I think iOS devices are very close to getting to the point where no matter what piece of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy from Apple, you’ll be able to scroll through a webpage okay. It’ll load a webpage okay. No
⏹️ ▶️ John OS upgrade will screw them in the way that iOS 8 is probably able to screw the
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest supported device today. We’re getting very close to that tipping point where the hardware is good
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for the basics to work. We’re not there yet though, and I think this is a painful period.
⏹️ ▶️ John in the beginning of iOS, like, forget it. The iOS 1 was like, once
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3G and especially the 3GS came out, you didn’t even want to look at those old devices anymore. You could not go back. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John do eventually hit some minimum threshold of, like, on the Mac, menus work, window resizing
⏹️ ▶️ John works, scrolling works. You can launch applications without waiting a year. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco still tons of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do that will make your thing feel slow or whatever, but we just need the basics to work, and we’re not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John there yet. So I’m hoping this time period where Apple keeps doing the strategy of selling devices for
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time, giving them OS upgrades for a long time, will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John work out for them when the cheapest device they’re selling meets the minimum threshold required for
⏹️ ▶️ John just the basics to not be awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think certain generations age better than others, too. Like in the case of the iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’ll have basically the old models being kept around for two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, certain certain chips and models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot more headroom in them than others and so like you know the original iPad was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept around because it did not have a lot of headroom had way too little RAM the A5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iPad 2 at the time had tons of headroom which is why they’re still selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A5 devices today you know certain you know the original iPad mini you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an iPad these days it’s kind of sluggish but it still works so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they can still sell it. But you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 was a bad move. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the A6 and A7, especially the A7, really has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of headroom in it. So like the current 5C is the A6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how long they’re going to keep selling A6 devices. aren’t any iPads with it anymore but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess that the 5c internals from the iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the a6 I would guess those stick around for another couple years and that really won’t be that bad
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM problem is gonna be an issue for even for the a7 device it’s not like the CPU is gonna get bad but again Apple’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John so stingy with RAM they’ve gone multiple generations without bumping the you know the RAM specs and
⏹️ ▶️ John these things and that is gonna hurt it much sooner than like, you know, you’re not going to top
⏹️ ▶️ John out the A7 doing basic stuff. It’s fine. The A7 is fully adequate for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sliding views back and forth, scrolling them, responding to tap events, doing doing all the basic
⏹️ ▶️ John things you’re going to need that we’re just talking about. But if applications start
⏹️ ▶️ John using more memory because the applications become more sophisticated, that A7 is not going to save you if everything keeps getting swapped out
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t fit things around, you play one game and it boots out all your Safari tabs and it’s all sorts of, you know, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I say we’re getting close to the threshold, but we’re not there yet. So I would think even the most expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John fanciest iOS device you can get today has still not met the minimum threshold of
⏹️ ▶️ John you can keep that device for like five years and it will still be basically competent. Whereas, I mean, I’m sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John next to a Mac right now, granted it’s the top end one, but again, if you bought a top end Mac in 2008, it
⏹️ ▶️ John still runs OS 10 perfectly well. I’m running a current version of Photoshop. I run
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of applications. Granted, I upgraded the RAM and all that stuff. That’s not true today. If you buy a top-end
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone today, in a couple years, it will not be up to the task of running
⏹️ ▶️ John all the applications that, even just the basics of just being able to, I feel like, oh, every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John launch this, this other thing gets booted out of memory, and I can’t even run this game because it requires
⏹️ ▶️ John more RAM this thing has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s something that, well, first of all, real-time follow-up, I was wrong. They are still selling the iPad 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which has the A6 CPU. It’s an A6X, but it’s the same CPU. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mistake. Also I think you’re right that high-end Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can last longer, but also don’t forget, you’re talking about a Mac Pro where almost everything is upgradable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And modern Macs, not only are most Macs sold not Mac Pros, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Macs don’t even have a lot of upgradable parts anymore. It used to be, if you bought a MacBook or a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years ago, five years ago you could you could upgrade the RAM and hard drive over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could maybe swap out the old spinning disk for the SSD and get another couple of good years out of it you can max out the RAM you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is exactly what I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right a lot of people do that it’s a great idea to do that especially now that SSDs are so cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that you know now the devices we buy today because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are so not upgradable you know almost every Mac that’s sold now doesn’t have replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not saying but if you buy a top been writing a MacBook Pro today everything’s sealed up can’t upgrade anything I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that machine will be fine for the basics in five years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but I would I would say you know if you’re if you’re specking out a MacBook Pro I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say get the most RAM you can afford up front that because the RAM will make the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference over time with how well it ages
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah someone just asked me a Twitter recently if they should I forget which machine they were specking out but should I take the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade for to an i7 or should I take the extra RAM and it’s a difficult choice but I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to go with the RAM because again like you know you can always do like if
⏹️ ▶️ John things take a little bit longer fine but RAM is like capabilities speed versus capability do you want to be able to run
⏹️ ▶️ John these two programs at the same time without swapping or do you want to be or do you want these programs to run 15%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and being able like capability is more important than speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and and the difference between you know 8 and 16 gigs of RAM say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or especially are there is there anything still with 4 gigs of RAM in the lineup, maybe the low-end MacBooks. But you know, the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the base amount of RAM and twice as much of that is a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger difference usually than the CPU choices you have, where for the same price of doubling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the RAM, you might get an extra 5% CPU performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t a big jump on the CPU for the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be better, but these days, you don’t get much for your extra CPU money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, going back to the iOS devices, I think this is why you’re right to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus on RAM, because that is a limiting factor so often. That was definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case with the iPad One. And feedback from the chat, yeah, tons of stuff with 4GB of RAM still coming as stock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the low end stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to make a snarky comment about, oh, I’m sure Apple’s still selling stuff with 4GB, but I wouldn’t have actually believed that this list
⏹️ ▶️ John is true. So now I’m even more depressed.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco tells me throw means blanket I guess but it’s fancier if you call it a throw.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could at all isn’t that also a pillow is couldn’t they be a throw pillow that that exists right? I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John you’re domestic is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re asking me about the terms for furniture items from a British ad. That’s correct. Not my
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco because i feel like saying the classic oxford watch would be so much cooler if i had a british accent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true and it is a damn fine looking watch
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re British. Correct. It’s maths. So, yeah, no, no, it’s edition, EDI, you know, that
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, thanks to Matt Alexander and the Need crew. That’s extremely cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got red shoelaces from them. That was amazing. It turns out if you take a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair of shoes and you put red shoelaces in them, they become fashionable shoes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some more follow up from Melissa Savage, who is the wife
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of one of the co-hosts of the Mobile Couch podcast. And she actually has her own podcast, which I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it is. So I’m a terrible person. Very helpful. Yeah, thank you. She wrote in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought I’d just drop you a note about screen size because it illustrates why it’s important to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more women in tech. We are on average smaller than men, meaning our reach is not so large. Despite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you say about getting over the bigger screen within a week, the iPhone 5 annoys me daily because I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite stretch my right thumb to the left corner, sight of 1,001 key functions for most apps. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is where, of course, the back button is. So she goes on to say, not only this, but women’s clothes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost never have pockets, or when they do, they are crappy tiny ones. The iPhone 5 doesn’t fit properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into any of my jeans pockets. Modern purses have phone slots, but these are not large, maybe 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches by a half an inch. So real-time follow-up, by the way, her podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Silver Screen Queens. Anyway, the point being that we were lamenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that our jeans pockets, or if you’re Matt Alexander, our trouser pockets are not big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those the same things? I thought trousers were like khakis or are trousers all pants if you’re in a British person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they were all pants. Don’t say pants to a British person. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I know. I thought they were all the things that we put over our underwear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll have to get some clarification with Matt Alexander on the underwear hierarchy.
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those CPG Gray videos to show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John of the lower body of men.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, a random stranger in the chat room with no credibility is saying that trousers are all pants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by pants, you mean not underwear. That’s a good, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good question. This is very confusing. Why did the British take our language and mess it up so badly?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously. They ruin everything. So, yeah, so to come sort of back to point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea is that here it is we’re lamenting the fact that our trouser slash jeans pockets are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not big enough. And we actually have pockets that are designed to fit things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas women don’t often have pockets at all, and occasionally when they do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have pockets, they’re tiny. And that is something that, quite frankly, I did not even consider.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not just that. I mean, there’s two points here. One is the clothing thing. And the second is
⏹️ ▶️ John small hands and reaching the corners of the screen. Even on when
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone, when the iOS devices got taller, it was a little bit harder to reach over there. But here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about the women in small hands and reach issue. When I see people out
⏹️ ▶️ John on the street with comically large phones, it seems to be most frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John women with comically large phones. And I don’t know why that is. Like you would think if they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John on average have smaller hands, they would favor smaller phones. That is not what I see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see, I mean, at the very least it’s equal, But my impression is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John you are more likely to see a really, really just a really big phone in use by
⏹️ ▶️ John a woman than a man. I don’t know if that is that match your experiences. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, really? See, I have seen only a handful of comically large phones. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that the first one that I saw amongst my peer group was a dear friend of mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is extremely petite, has a just ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large phone. To me, it looks like an iPad mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, for me, I think, first of all, the smaller hands and reach issue is not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a women’s issue. My hands are kind of medium-sized and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple increased the screen size with the iPhone 5, I had changed the grip I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone. I used to hold it a certain way with all the old size and then I had to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choke up a little bit on the phone, like in T-ball terms, because that was the last time I played sports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to choke up a little bit to get a better reach when the 5 came out. And there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things you gotta hold it back a little bit in your hand. I had to adjust the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even touch it to hit certain corners. And so I don’t think it’s necessarily a men
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and women issue. I think it’s just like there’s already even within both genders there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big range of hand sizes. And I think a lot of like iOS has with 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when they added the edge swipe gesture to go back and stuff like that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re making the interface more like screen gesture based instead of based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on tapping a certain button in a certain spot on every screen overall helps this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem because it makes it so that you don’t have to touch a very certain far away area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often you can you know just use these gestures and I think I think this is the kind of problem that can be worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around with those kinds of decisions for the most part I mean obviously within reason you can’t really use an iPad one-handed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of sucks. But, you know, and the five and a half inch phone, which apparently might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now be fake or delayed, or, you know, it’s one of those things where the analysts, there’s basically zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evidence for the five and a half inch phone anymore. So the analysts who all predicted it are now saying, well, it’s gonna be delayed till next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because they don’t want to say they were wrong. But I forgot where I was even going
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the you’re onto something with the grip thing, because when I see people using large phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John just the really big ones that you notice, you’re like, whoa, is that a tablet? No, that’s their phone. I see them using
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a different way. Like they’re not one-handing it with a thumb on the thing. Maybe they’re two-handing it. Maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ John something, the ones that have a stylus, obviously that’s totally, you know, the Galaxy Note things or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you use it in a different way. I mean, and you do see, remember back when we had sliders with QWERTY keyboards and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, the whole deal was people would pull out the phone, hold it sideways, flip down the keyboard. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it was kind They’re like, you know, in landscape orientation, where you’re holding it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John side like it’s a Game Boy Advance. So I’m making game references. You guys don’t get it. Anyway, landscape.
⏹️ ▶️ John And using two thumbs on it with the keyboard. But now that it’s touch-oriented, that grip is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for a while, we were in the one-hand thing with the thumb on the thing. But now with the larger phones, I see more two hands
⏹️ ▶️ John and like two-hand portrait, two-hand landscape, one hand holding it, one hand tapping it like old people
⏹️ ▶️ John use remotes. You know, you hold the remote in one hand, And then you take the second hand and come from
⏹️ ▶️ John above with a pointer finger and you hit the buttons on the remote. None
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things are, I think, necessarily bad. People like the devices and are choosing to,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, that’s why Apple is going to make a phone with a bigger screen. People like the bigger phones. They’re adapting
⏹️ ▶️ John their usage behavior to adjust for it. But as Melissa writes in, if you like to use your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone with one hand, like with the traditional sort of iPhone style grip,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will be annoyed along with the rest of the people who like that, no matter what your hand size,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the phones keep getting bigger. Because I mean, like I said, when the phones got taller, I found it harder to reach some
⏹️ ▶️ John sections on the screen. You have to do a little shimmy where you, remember we talked about that when the iPhone 5 first came out, they got
⏹️ ▶️ John a little grip shimmy, right? And it’s going to be even worse. We’re going to have to adjust our habits. And if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John stops selling phones of this size, then you know, we’ll just suffer along with everybody else. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, a little bit of quick follow-up. John, this is for you, I believe, about TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re talking about 4k and plasma. And one of the reasons that Panasonic exited the plasma
⏹️ ▶️ John business is it’s going to cost them a lot of money to try to get a 4k plasma TV, because those little
⏹️ ▶️ John cells or pits that are in plasma televisions that make up the picture elements, if you were
⏹️ ▶️ John to quadruple the number of those or roughly quadruple the number of those in the same area, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get much, much smaller. And that’s harder to manufacture. And AWACS, I think this was on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John sent me a link to say that Panasonic actually did make a 4k plasma television.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 152 inches diagonal. That way you don’t have to make the cells any smaller. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just make the television massive. It weighs 1,300 pounds and draws 3,700 watts. So and it’s not cheap either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco must have a six figure price tag.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. I didn’t I don’t think I remember the price was but I will put the link in the show notes just to go to see I mean, again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the fact that 4k is an impossibility for plasma. It’s it’s the technology to make the little picture
⏹️ ▶️ John elements, whatever they’re called in plasma smaller, they would have to do a lot of R&D to get that working.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m assuming this gigantic television was simply whatever their latest and greatest regular
⏹️ ▶️ John high definition plasma process was, and just made it way bigger with the little cells being exactly the same size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only there was already a word for little picture elements.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not pixels, because a pixel is the resulting image on the screen. I’m trying to talk about, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no equivalent in CRTs, because it’s just a big vacuum and an electron gun and scanning over the phosphorus. they’re
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco your website. So Marco, big day?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A little bit. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When did you wake up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t sleep well last night. So it’s, it’s kind of a blurry line. Well, that was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next question was, did you sleep any? When did you actually remove yourself from bed?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About 8 I decided I was probably done sleeping and I had to come downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had the launch scheduled for 11 and I had it in the state in iTunes connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it just has an availability date set in the future because the problem was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know so I wanted to launch it today. If you set it to be released in the App Store today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’ll start going on at midnight you know last night and I didn’t want to stay up all night if there were server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues you know like because I that was the big question mark was will the server stay up under under the load
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of however many people tried out in day one I had no idea because I didn’t really know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how heavy is each user on the server I really had no measure of that
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t do load testing with like a bunch of VMs and hit it from you know that’s that’s the great thing about EC2
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff you can just get a fleet of instances briefly and bombard your service to simulate
⏹️ ▶️ John the load of thousands of users and I mean it costs some money, but you could just ditch them all when you’re gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I thought of that. It would have been very hard to mimic the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage pattern of Overcast users without having a bunch of iPhones, connecting at weird times, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts being released at certain times. It would have been hard to simulate well. And so, instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I opted to use that wonderful cloudness of modern hosting to instead just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temporarily get way more resources than I actually needed. So I temporarily, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days ago, I went from two web servers on Linode to eight. And a very easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to create more if I needed to. And it turns out I ended up needing way less than that. Anyway, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was scared of what the servers would do and I didn’t want to be kept up all night. So instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I set it to be released tomorrow. And then today at 8am, I changed the date back, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it immediately get released at that point. But immediately released on the App Store doesn’t mean it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately available to everybody whenever they check and showing up in search results, because it has to propagate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to different CDNs around the world, different servers being replicated. However Apple does it, it usually takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few hours. So I wanted to launch at 11 a.m., so I made the switch of the date at 8 a.m.,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring that by 11 it would be available everywhere and showing up in search results. And it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that was too early. It actually showed up by about 10 or 9 30 even. It only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took like an hour and a half, but I waited anyway. I had all the people who had advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta copies, the press people, I told them all don’t publish before 11. So I waited and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t publish before 11 either. And yeah, so spent the morning just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking over everything, tweaking everything, and then I launched it. And the response was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong immediately. I was scared of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of potential things. I knew that I had made an app that I was very happy with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta testers were generally very happy with it as well. But that’s only like 30 people. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this this app was downloaded by thousands of people today. So the opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 30, especially this relatively undiverse group, are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very reflective of the web at large. So I didn’t know what to expect from either the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load or from just the reception of the app. And are there any really crazy bugs that are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really edge case that none of these testers or I hit that, you know, would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be major showstoppers and that I’d have to like freak out and issue a quick emergency update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turned out none of that happened. It was great. Like it was just smooth. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so worried. I haven’t eaten for I haven’t eaten well for like a day before this. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday I was like feeling terrible all day. I was it was just it ended up being nervousness. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my back is a mess. I’ve been holding all this tension in my back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my lower back is just destroyed today. It’s awful. Because I was really taking this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nervousness inwardly. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everything went very well. I mean, the downside is I spent most of today reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of tweets and hundreds of emails. I still, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly keeping up with the tweets. I still have at the time of reading this 524 emails that I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten to yet. What are
⏹️ ▶️ John people email? These like support emails to the support address or personal emails to you? Or is there a difference?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s well, there isn’t really a difference yet. I have a support person I’m going to hire, but I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to I wanted to receive all the emails on day one. You know, first of all, just from pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standpoint, I wanted to know about bugs immediately. So I could try to fix them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But these are emails that like from the application, you’re in the application, is a button somewhere you can hit that emails you. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And it’s mostly people with little feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requests, some bug reports, some tech support kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying to be careful and set expectations for tech support very low.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use the word support anywhere. And the descriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these email addresses is feedback and I say everywhere I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t respond to everything
⏹️ ▶️ John well you have an auto responder that says please explain to me why you wouldn’t want the number one podcast app available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice so anyway I have a lot of email to go through I don’t think it’s that bad everything I I’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens day to day like you know I didn’t know if I should hire someone because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know as far as I know maybe my next week it’ll be like five emails a day. I have no idea. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what to expect yet for daily volume. And so until I know that, I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make any decisions about whether I’m going to hire someone or not. But I probably will end up doing it if I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, most of the emails are stuff that takes a few seconds to look at and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a minute to respond to if I have to respond, a minute at most. But when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, that adds up quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, the launch went well, the servers didn’t croak, all is good in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world? Yeah, I mean, the database server load never went above like 0.4, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome, because that’s the hard one to scale. The web servers were negligible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you cranked back on some of the expanded footprint? Like have you gotten rid of some of those VMs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there? No, they’re all still there. I mean, if I keep all of these up for an entire month, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire hosting bill of Overcast is like $540 a month, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I sold Instapaper, the hosting bill was about $7,000 a month. For more or less hardware? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was more overall horsepower, but not by a whole lot, because hardware has gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then, and Linode upgraded all their stuff. So, like, Linode’s current pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is almost cheaper than most dedicated pricing for, like, for similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. It’s extremely competitive. Like I was looking before this I was I was going to host it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Limestone Networks which is a really cheap dedicated host
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had a server there for a while when I was developing doing crawling and stuff and that server was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 260 bucks a month for what I’m what you can now get at linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about 160. I mean it’s crazy how good linode is right now. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is another example of like hardware catching up to something that doesn’t change as much so
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, hardware always gets better. But for textual data
⏹️ ▶️ John in small amounts, it used to be that no matter how small your textual data was, if you just wanted to store an address
⏹️ ▶️ John book for people that’s bounded in size, only text, not a lot of things, even that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be super expensive just because hardware hadn’t caught up. Hardware has gotten so much better, people’s address
⏹️ ▶️ John books are similar in size. Maybe they’re twice as big, five times as big, still mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John text, maybe with little pictures. that grows much more slowly than computing power, price, performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, and stuff like that. So I think the cost of like, fast forward 15 years, the cost of doing a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John service to Overcast, like podcast feeds, keeping track of what podcasts are, all their metadata, what their feed addresses,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff, that’s not going to grow at the same rate as how cheap memory and storage and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John grows. So you’re getting to the point where it’ll be like, oh, I run my podcast metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John service on a puck in my home that I keep in the attic and never look at. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s well that well honestly the dream is not that the dream is closer to what line it offers because like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing runs somewhere else that you don’t have to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John know but I’m talking about hardware requirements like it would be like oh it’s like five dollars a month you know unlimited CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly I was thinking actually as a temporary as a side note which all I guess all set notes are temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple updates the Apple TV with an a7 chip to take advantage of like metal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making a game console version and everything I wonder about like the web hosting potential you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know It’s it’s like Mac mini colo times times to like the web hosting potential of like of Apple TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because a sevens are really good chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not I mean for for web hosting looks like you got to have memory to have all this the
⏹️ ▶️ John Disc stuff cache in memory, so you don’t actually you know you don’t have to pull it off the disc everything your
⏹️ ▶️ John Disc caches are all warmed up, right? So you need a lot of memory for that and you probably need lots of small weak
⏹️ ▶️ John cores more than what is a 7f still? Just to to fairly expensive course.
⏹️ ▶️ John still something like I mean That’s why the server chips are all like tons and tons of relatively
⏹️ ▶️ John weak small core So you could be processing lots of things at the same time and each one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things is no longer That demanding if you’re just getting and sending again sending and receiving small bits
⏹️ ▶️ John of textual information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so apparently A similar company to to Mac mini colo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever was anyway similar company called a Mac mini vault They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host they already have a page host on an Apple TV We’ll put that link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, no fans in the Apple TVs. You don’t have to, you know, I guess you have to add your own fans because maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John if you packed enough Apple TVs in, I mean, they do produce heat. If you packed enough of them in, you need something to push that heat into
⏹️ ▶️ John the hot aisle and the data center. So you have to like add fans to the front of it. Very strange.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I imagine like, you know, computing power to density ratio has to be pretty good with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an A, if there’s an A7 based Apple TV, that has to be pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Mac minis, though, these are not purpose-built hardware for the data center. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who do make purpose-built hardware for the data center have access to more or less the same technologies, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not as if this is the optimal solution. It’s just funny and interesting from, like, imagine if you just got a bunch of these
⏹️ ▶️ John pucks and you put them in this little drawer. But realistically speaking, Google’s still making their own blades out
⏹️ ▶️ John of God knows what, and it’s even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So first day went well. Do you care to share how many users you have? I saw you tweeting earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today how many sign-ups you had, what are we at in at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least a vague order of magnitude?
⏹️ ▶️ John is that accounts registered server side or those number of downloads from the app store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is accounts registered server side. Number of downloads I won’t have until tomorrow morning when I get the stats.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean you figure it would be similar because it’s, you know, you can’t really use the app until you
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up. So if people download it and then launch it I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so I mean, I would imagine the number of downloads is probably substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher because there are going to be some people who downloaded it and just haven’t launched it yet. Some people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloaded it, got to the login screen and said, I don’t want to create an account and deleted it or said, I’ll come back to this later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do this. So I would guess number of actual downloads might even be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as high as twice that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have the the FAQ linked from that first screen that says, you know, create
⏹️ ▶️ John an account or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I wrote the fact and that’s why it’s called the skeptics fact is because I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would say why do I need an account and that’s why that’s the very first question or I know I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second question
⏹️ ▶️ John you should keep track of if if they launch the app for the first time and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hit either one of those buttons the second time they launch the app you should make the skeptics fact like
⏹️ ▶️ John more bold you know because I don’t even remember seeing it there but like you want you want
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an explanation you might as well given now there is an explanation of why why do I have to make an account of any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind for a podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and and this was I’ve had a couple I didn’t know that this was another kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risky thing I didn’t know like if there would be a lot of people who were offended by this and who would who would skip it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know who would cancel their efforts to try overcast entirely just because they didn’t want to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason the accounts are there is because this is an entirely server backed app like the server does all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawling all the updating all the notifications and everything the server does a lot of the work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like the app doesn’t even have an XML parser the server does everything and just outputs JSON to the app which it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you know decode quickly and natively anyway and so there has to be some kind of user identification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method between the app and the server now if all I ever had was an iPhone app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even even if if all it ever was was iOS apps that were all in the same account I could I could do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of hack around this I could do like you know generate a random ID the first time you use it and then use that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your username behind the scenes and never even show the user what their username is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that could work just fine. I could also store a user ID string
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iCloud in the key value store so that way they could launch it on their iPad after I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an iPad version and it syncs over. There are things like that I could do. The big problem with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is first of all that would almost completely rule out web functionality. of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, if I then had a way for them to add an email address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and password to this account, believe me, I know what would happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had similar issues with people making accounts at Instapaper. What would happen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would make duplicate accounts. They would, you know, rather than associate an email address with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current account, they would create a new account inadvertently with the email address. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have two accounts and they email me saying, all my podcasts are gone because I logged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the new one. They didn’t know. And then you have to find ways to merge accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it basically becomes a big issue with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perceived customer stability and data loss because they will do something weird that makes them think they lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and then blame me and be very unhappy. And also it’s just a massive burden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on support email. And so I chose, you know what, let me try instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just require the account right up front, explain it as best I can. I know a lot of people are still going to not do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me just show you, let me just require the account up front, make it always require an email address so I can do password resets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And let’s just see if that works, you know, like maybe that’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, in the future, if it ends up a lot of people are being turned off by that and I really want their business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe I can add the system where, okay, it just starts up with an anonymous ID, and then you can add an email address later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I would rather try this first, because if this can work well enough, it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much easier to support, and it’s so much easier as a user that it’s always the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And you say all these things as though you’ve been burned once or twice before. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s about. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let me start with a couple of obvious questions. And then I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some hopefully less obvious questions. And then as we talk, I’m sure John we’ll start tearing apart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bits and pieces of what you’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so looking forward to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do want to save that for probably the end if we don’t get to it in the middle. Why freemium?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not that confident in the market for a paid up front app anymore, especially because I wanted to charge a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good price for it. You know, I’m my in-app purchase. So the model is in summary, the app is free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are some limits. The in-app purchase removes the limits. That’s it. It’s one purchase one time five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks, and that removes all the limits. So it’s kind of like a trial version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of my hacky way of doing a trial version, except that the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app doesn’t expire. Just certain things just don’t work. Certain things don’t work unless you pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the two big things that don’t work, the smart speed and voice boost, you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demo them without paying for five minutes. There’s like a five minute trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those features. I actually wasn’t even sure if Apple would allow that, but they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is basically a trial version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, so going back a minute, so that’s five bucks. I don’t think, if I launched today in the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure my day one sales at five bucks would be decent, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I know I got way more people as this model than I would have with that model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that. of all, I know over time that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be very hard to sustain, because once the initial PR is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, and you know, once all your friends and all your blog readers have bought it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and once everyone who’s going to write about it has written about it, then the sales of every app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just tail off like crazy. They just drop, you know, if you look at the graph it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a roller coaster. And then they settle into a point and then that eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of lowers and lowers and lowers. If your app is paid up front that happens faster and it happens more severely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen this happen and you know Instapaper was always that model the entire time I own it. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that model today. I know that model very well, the paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front model. I also know that in today’s App Store in a competitive category where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even have the most features and people are very, very picky with what they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they don’t I knew that a $5 paid up front app was not a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term solution. So that’s why. And so I found a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make free work. You know, I saw with Instapaper there were so many people who I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would come in contact with in real life even. Like, even like family friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like, you know, be visiting them and I’d see on their phone they were still using Instapaper free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, even like two years after I discontinued it. Like, there are so many people who,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how much they like you, they just, they don’t pay for apps. It isn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just that they like won’t, it’s that they in their minds don’t. Like they, that’s just something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do. It’s like that’s, that’s the kind of, of the kind of mindset it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who buys batteries, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. There’s, there’s just, there’s a lot of people. This is not a small group.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people who really just don’t buy apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I knew that the biggest podcast app in the world by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very large margin is Apple’s podcast app. The second biggest by a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large margin is Stitcher. Both of those are free. I wanted to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app that’s good and free because the fact is the Apple podcast app is not bad. It’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not bad. that’s the biggest competition in the market and it’s free and it has a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and it has some features I can’t I can never have like the integration with iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are alternatives here you know I could have like somebody in the chat said I could have done ads you know but I’ve never seen an ad in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that I thought made the app look good you know like it’s it takes ads in apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very intrusive because they take up so much space and the inventory is usually I don’t I don’t mind doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast ads here because our advertisers are good and because for the rest of the show you know we’re giving like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know six minutes of ads out of a 90 minute show. When it adds in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, not only are the advertisers usually terrible, but it’s taking up a pretty big chunk of the screen all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. That’s a much bigger cost on the user than the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads I respect like podcast and you know well done blog ads like the deck ads. It’s a very different ratio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the advertisers are all cheap and crappy and so I just I don’t like app ads at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are also features in the app like the Twitter feature where, you know, so I offer these like Twitter based recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can connect your Twitter account and you can get recommendations based on the people you follow based on what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to and you know, if they’ve connected their accounts and that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature works best the more people you have. It’s a social feature and this is why all social apps are free, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because this social network value exponential blah blah blah. And so this is the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way where that feature becomes a lot better if I have more people using it so I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than you know get five bucks from everybody I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to try to get five bucks from us from a few of the people who use the app and just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the app as cheap as possible to host like and I focus on that from day one because I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to get to the point with instant where I was with instapaper where it was very very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to host this with with with overcast I have made every possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus on keeping it as cheap as possible on the servers. That’s why I’m on Linode. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my big expanded version of the hosting was only gonna be 500 bucks a month and I’m probably gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away with more like two or three hundred after this is all done. The whole point of this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap hosting. Make this sustainable. That way and so this the next question is which a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have already asked is why not a subscription price? And I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that a while too. My model for the in-app purchase. I’ve been all over the place with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in planning this. Originally, I was going to do everything is unlocked and you just pay what you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the app. And that, you know, I thought about that. I got some input from some trusted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and that just… it wasn’t very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that even allowed on the App Store? How would you get the money from them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually asked them that because that’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I talked to a couple people at Apple, whoever you know the people I could find happily it’s they don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish a directory or anything but the people I could find who might have been relevant to it at Apple I tried emailing in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got various places and all of them kind of ended with well maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it was kind of a question mark as to whether that would be allowed and it generally with App Store stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want to live on a question mark edge of a rule what you said earlier John exactly right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the cost of hosting each user goes down with time. So the only way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my if I’m if I’m responsible about how I host this and how I manage the resources,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way that the cost really meaningfully go up over time is if the user base is growing substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. Because otherwise, if the user base stays the same and usage stays the same, then the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hosting will slowly decrease as hardware gets better and hosting gets cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it won’t be like like Instapaper where people like me just have this massive backlog where you’re saving just thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands of articles. Even when you archive them, right? I forget what your policy was on archive things. It used to be like a window, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you paid for it, you’ve had various rules. But anyway, people’s Instapaper collections could in theory grow, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts, there’s some working set, and then after you’ve played an episode, you’re not retaining that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m retaining the row in the database, which is a row of five integers of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast ID, the user ID, whether you completed it or not and when.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying is you could turn that stuff off like you don’t need to keep a record of that. I listened to this episode
⏹️ ▶️ John three years ago because it’s no longer visible in the app hasn’t been visible in the app for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually, if the podcast has fewer than 1500 entries, it is still visible in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s, you know, the reality is like, I mean, I know I know from Tumblr how these tables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grow and what that means and what it costs to host. And the fact is, a table full of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hundreds of millions of integer associations like that is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing to host. It sounds like a big number, but in reality, a table with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five integer rows, that could be like – your service could be as big as Tumblr, and that table might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only be like nine gigs. We’re not really talking a massive amount of data here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of table where the index is bigger than the table, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you were saving the textified versions of web pages in the Instapaper database, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was saving them on s3 I wasn’t saving the database all
⏹️ ▶️ John right well but it but it but somewhere you were saving them because you had the buddy caught the
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone had a different view of a website than somebody else you couldn’t just save that web page As they saw
⏹️ ▶️ John it and allow everyone to see that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right it was a way to work with login barriers So that you know so that if you if you were logged in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s like required a login barrier If you saved with the bookmark lit the book from it would send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a copy of what you were seeing to the servers We could save it just for you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so where was I oh yeah, so subscription, so yeah, that’s I didn’t do subscriptions because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My costs aren’t high enough where I really need them like I can I can get all get along just fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without them And I might do them in the future like with instapaper when when I sold instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what it is now I haven’t I haven’t been you know bugging them about stats or anything because honestly that’s not my job anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when I sold instapaper It was making about half of its income from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions and the industry was an industry model. It was you know the app was a few bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you most of its life it was five and it became three about halfway through the time I had it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I launched these monthly subscriptions that would allow me to offer a very small subset of users very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features. It started out with search. Well it started out with nothing then it became then I added search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people who subscribe did not subscribe because of search. Most people who subscribed out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sense of goodwill to me for providing years worth of app updates without charging them and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, making, you know, basically giving them building up a surplus of goodwill among my audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of my plan here is if I need more money later on to address hosting costs or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I’ll do a few years of free updates. People will like me enough that if I if I put in like a tip jar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something or like, you know, a monthly voluntary subscription that does nothing, I could you know you can make good money with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean really think about it, I was making half of my income from those when I sold Instapaper and most of those people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never searched. That you know that was not the reason they were buying it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I that’s that’s that’s the plan for money is what I’m saying. Did I miss anything there? I’m sorry it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a long day I’m kind of mentally fried.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that last bit though you were saying like the idea of having the equivalent of a tip jar even if it technically is
⏹️ ▶️ John for search or whatever and having or having a subscription thing already mentioned that those are both viable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like you’re saying, oh, that can’t work. I mean, because you know from experience that it can work in a reasonable fashion.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it about that approach that you didn’t like that made you change your mind this
⏹️ ▶️ John time and go with the, you know, $5 to unlock the rest of the functionality thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is a combination of not having a lot of faith in that because keep in mind, I sold into paper over a year ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when I sold it, sales were not great. And so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw the writing on the wall for the paid up front model back then and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not very confident in it now. Part of it is also that now is a different model. You know, Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had basically one and a half competitors. The podcast app market has lots of competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many of them are free. And so I recognize there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, you know, stiffer competition here. I was going into it, you know, I was going into a very mature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. Like with Instapaper, even though there was competition from, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months after I launched, the competition and I evolved together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we both started from the same spot of not much and then, you know, we were able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like grow over time in complexity and advancement. With the podcast market, I’m going into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it while everyone like everyone else who’s in this market has been writing their apps for like four or five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. Like these are these are now like old apps. They’ve been around the block. have tons of features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of infrastructure in place. I was starting late to this game, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to come in with fewer features by necessity. And so that’s another thing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I tried with that. I realized that I would need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would need to do something a little more dramatic than just launched five bucks if I wanted to get a decent user base.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking it was comparing it to also launch it free, but have a you know $20
⏹️ ▶️ John I like Marco because he makes nice things thing that unlock some feature that no one’s going to use like search
⏹️ ▶️ John but people would do out of the goodness of their heart like that that’s the model I’m comparing it to not the five dollar up front
⏹️ ▶️ John but the large in application quote-unquote subscription whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to call it that that isn’t really unlocking anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the big tip jar yeah the main reason why I didn’t do something like that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just didn’t think most people would would buy something that expensive And like one of my ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was to have like a three-tier system of like pay what you want, you know, two dollars a year, five dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year, ten dollars a year, or something like that. And I was a little afraid that, you know, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it complicated, because those things are all kind of complicated, by making it complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, you know, I think you reduce dramatically the number of people who will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, because some of those words kind of scare people away. You know, I was even thinking like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe using like the public radio vocabulary, calling these things pledges, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could be like a supporter of the app. You know? Matthew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feeney Would you run a telethon like once or twice a year then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tyler Hoewen If I did that, maybe I’d have to consider it. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all those models in various showers I’ve taken over the last two years. And I… Matthew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Feeney because that’s in the showers when I think about pricing for my app most. I don’t know why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s my life. So I went with this model because it’s simple and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a low barrier to entry. The price is relatively high. It’s five bucks. I was tempted to charge 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, but I knew nobody would buy that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows, I might discount the in-app purchase in the future. you know, I’ll play with the price. It’s not hard-coded anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided in the end to just keep it simple because it’s simpler for everyone. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simpler for me. It’s simpler for the users. This gives me flexibility. I can do things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain places, people who can’t use an app purchase, I can like put up a web Stripe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying form and then, you know, sync that over with their account. So it unlocks the app. Like there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by keeping it simple, I have many options. So that’s really it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. All right, we are also sponsored this week by fracture fracture. They sponsored us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while ago back. I think in May they sponsored us. Fracture is great fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prints photos directly on glass in vivid color. It’s really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have a bunch of fracture prints around my office because they’re good. I mean, you know, it started out. Obviously, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a sponsor. That’s how I learned about them. So disclaimer, but even even when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m not being sponsored by them, I have on multiple occasions bought fracture prints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at full price because I like them. Fracture, their printing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method, it’s great. Like you upload a picture or whatever and then you get it printed. And it’s really, the picture is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printed directly on a thin piece of glass that’s then mounted to a thin piece of foam board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can hang it up easily. So these prints are relatively lightweight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you don’t have to worry about them falling off the wall and pulling your wall down and shattering or anything. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just immensely practical because what you get is this really nice looking glass print
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s border to border frameless and then it is kind of its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame. You don’t need to then get a picture framed. And compared to getting a picture framed, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an amazingly good value. So I have a bunch of these things. I have a couple of big ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing off various nice pictures I’ve taken and I have these three that are the smallest size they have, which I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is five by five inches. And I use those to print out app icon pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the apps I’ve worked on. So I have this row hanging in the wall of my office, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco row of app icons that I’ve worked on. It’s kind of like a trophy collection for the things I’ve done in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because when you make apps, there aren’t a lot of physical, you know, artifacts like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great because like the five by five print is just 12 bucks. So it’s really, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, no barrier to entry here if you want to get a couple of app icons made. You know, yeah, spend 12 bucks. It’s no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, Fracture puts everything you need to get your photo on the wall right in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the box. They, you know, they give you your own little picture anchor thing, or if you get the little, the desk version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a little stand already built into the frame. Prices start at just 12 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the prints. They’re very reasonable. Even the big ones are really reasonable. And every Fracture is handmade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and checked for quality by a human being in their small team in Gainesville, Florida.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way to display your favorite photos. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best thing is you can even get 15% off with a coupon code ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So please use coupon code ATP to get 15% off. Go to fractureme.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s F-R-A-C-T-U-R-E-M-E.com. Fractureme.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again. I definitely recommend them. They are great. Let’s see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five of them right now in my field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they are really good and I recommend them as well Let me ask another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious question, then I’ll get into one or two that are less obvious. What took so damn long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started writing this in October 2012 and That was when I still own in paper in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the magazine That’s when I had the idea for the audio processing stuff And so I wanted to make a little prototype to see if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even possible possible. So I did and it was and it was great, but I didn’t really have time to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a full podcast app around it at that point. I had other projects. Then you know eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other projects went away and I had time so I worked on them and so then you know let by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last fall when I when I announced overcast at XOXO last September, so almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago when it’s when I announced it by that point I’ve been working on a full time for I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know four or five months something like that. I really thought it was almost done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because as a typical programmer I was like oh well you know it works for me for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works on my phone. It’s fine. So yeah I should have it out in what two months?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That turned out not to be the case. It just podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are so incredibly complicated and I didn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully appreciate that at the time. And I knew about stuff like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeds, you know, having to manage weird feeds and everything else, like, you know, edge cases there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But just the interface that there’s so many screens in a podcast app, it’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I have ran some of this briefly a couple weeks ago in the after show, so I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just so, there’s so much that goes into a podcast app. And the I now have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five hundred and forty five emails in my inbox, at least half of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are asking for features that I haven’t even done yet. You know, it’s a very demanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market, as I’m learning today. I thought I was launching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a lot for a one point. Turns out, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, people are fine with it, but there’s a lot of people out there who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really demanding more, a lot more, even from day one. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want one point, I anticipated some of this, so I didn’t want to disappoint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people a lot in day one. So I didn’t want to leave like massive gaping holes. Now, streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a big one and you know video is a medium sized hole. I don’t ever plan to support video because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of a different medium and it demands different things. able to use my audio engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and any of the effects and everything else. I could use the compressor, but I couldn’t use smart speaks. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be weird. There’s a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t… that it would be harder to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with video. And the whole interface, you have to accommodate video. And then you have the question of like, all right, well, are you allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mix video into playlists? And if so, what do you do? Do you start playing video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast episodes right in the middle of audio podcast episodes? What if you’re in the car? There’s all sorts of weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with supporting video that that I don’t think are worth it because I don’t think video podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are that big of a requirement. I would venture a guess the majority of podcast listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t listen to any video podcasts. It’s just such a different medium. Video, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was for me, at least, it was an easy decision not to support. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do it at the same time as audio pod. It’s a different demand. And I think also most videos move to YouTube these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was going to say. Like, are video podcasts even a thing anymore? Haven’t YouTube channels more or less replace them, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I suppose they’re still out there. But like, that definitely sounds – if I was into video podcasts, I would want
⏹️ ▶️ John an app that was built around video podcasts because they’re different enough. And I suppose you could make
⏹️ ▶️ John one super app that does both audio and video, but that’s a tall order. And like, I would be perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John happy getting separate applications for video and audio podcasts. I mean, you know, and people use the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John application if they’re watching YouTube channels and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So that’s why no video. streaming was harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take basically. The reason I don’t have streaming is not because it’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oversight that I just forgot to add it, as some emailers have assumed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not why. The reason I don’t have streaming is that all my audio processing stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done using raw low-level core audio APIs that don’t inherently automatically provide streaming support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other apps use AV player and AV player. The AV player framework is higher level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The downside of AV player is that it removes a lot of the control that you have. There is a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do voice boost, not quite as well, but you can do it. It’s a little more CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intensive if you do it that way, but it is possible to do voice boost with AV player. To the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my knowledge, it is not possible to do smart speed. And I’ve thought about lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few years, I’ve thought about lots of different ways to maybe attempt to hack smart speed into AV player
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just could not come up with anything that was that was remotely doable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reasonable and not like a ridiculous horrible pile of terrible fragile hacks that would break immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in order to make smart speed I had to do raw core audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought smart speed was a good enough feature to make that worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding months of development time and making me have to reimplement things that everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets for free with AVPlayer, including streaming. The other thing is when the other apps that do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming, they have to do it in a limited way because AVPlayer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through reasons that I believe, I tried asking Apple about this at WBDC in the labs this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one really knew for sure or at least told me, but it seemed like the reason why is because of HTTP live streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s DRM and its expectations thereof. You can’t save a stream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can’t turn a download into a stream. You have to either stream something or download it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t do both. You can’t just like start playing a partial download and you definitely can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert a stream into a download. Like you know just stream it and just save it. Just save what you’re streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it’s done and then save that as a file. You can’t do that. What I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do when I do add streaming, which is I’m gonna begin work on that shortly, once 1.0 stuff settles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, I’m going to do it so that you can just start playing a progressive download.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doing that well in the background download system requires new capabilities that are in iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only. So it made sense to wait until iOS 8 came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do it then. And so that’s what I’m going to do with streaming. Steven Connelly So let me ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a genuine question. Why is streaming such a big deal, not from a development side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but from a user side? Like there have been times I’ve wanted to listen to a show and it hasn’t been downloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I just wait for it to download. Like, what am I missing that makes this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a big deal to so many people?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the benefit of streaming, I think, has been removed with background downloading in iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 7. I really think that, you know, for the most part, most people are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have things downloaded when they’re, you know, at home or the office, on Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they will never even notice it downloading and then, you know, they’ll go out and start listening and they’ll just listen to whatever they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloaded. But streaming is really useful, like when you’re adding a podcast and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to start playing it immediately. And so for that instance, like, oh, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discovered this episode or this show. Let me start playing this right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can’t, I mean, not you personally, but you can’t wait like literally 60 seconds. Also, the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room is saying storage space. I mean, I shouldn’t be arguing with anyone. I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that people were running within like 50 or 100 megs of the limits of their device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised to hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got to leave gigs free. I just tried to upgrade my iOS to 7.1.2, which I’d forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John that I hadn’t upgraded it to that. Every time I try to upgrade iOS on that thing, it tells
⏹️ ▶️ John me I don’t have enough space. Only 1.4 gigs are available, so I’ve got to go delete stuff. You
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of room just for even small OS upgrades.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, there’s the issue of download speed also. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what the chat room is now telling me is that I’m spoiled by LTE slash decent Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, some podcasts are hosted on servers or CDNs that themselves don’t send the files very quickly or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t send the files very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that is a big problem. So my experience, obviously I don’t have an iPhone, but with my iPod Touch is with
⏹️ ▶️ John the background downloads, Every time I pick up my iPod Touch and go
⏹️ ▶️ John to Overcast over the past month or so I’ve been using it, everything’s already downloaded. Because it’s just been sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ John in my Wi-Fi all day. But on the occasion when I’ve said, oh, actually, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to get, like you just said, I just want to get this episode, I do the thing you just said, Casey, and I go to download it. And I look,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like 1%, 2%. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh, no, this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John very. And for me, I can’t say, well, I’m going to get in the car and drive away anyway. Because as soon as I leave my house,
⏹️ ▶️ John stops because it’s an iPod Touch. So I think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John two use cases. One are the people, like when you say streaming, you think of people like just wandering around constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling audio over cell data that goes right into their ears. But I think the other
⏹️ ▶️ John use case is I just I don’t want to have to wait for the download to finish, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be able to start listening as fast as I can. Because presumably, the service can send audio data
⏹️ ▶️ John fast enough that you can listen to it in more or less real time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I would like out of the streaming. That’s like, I remember being frustrated when the Apple first added podcast iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got all excited, went into the podcast, got a subscription, and then I clicked on an episode and saw the
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading bar. I’m like, why isn’t it playing? It’s not gonna play until it finishes downloading. This is ridiculous, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, because you’re used to like everything, you know, web browsers, if you go to an audio file, a video, like of course it starts playing before
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing downloads. It’s not, you know, but podcasts weren’t like that, probably for framework reasons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, a lot of people in the chat room I’ve mentioned lots of other podcast apps that already do this. I think what Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying is that the frameworks Apple provides don’t give you a convenient way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So if you want to do that, it is entirely possible you have to do it yourself though. And what Marco was saying is he wants to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John until iOS 8 because there are frameworks that make that easier. All these other people with podcast apps, like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John got a big head start on him. They’ve already implemented their own ways to do all these things. Essentially, I think what it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John down to for streaming is you gotta pick what’s gonna make it into 1.0 and that one didn’t make the cut.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean if you had added streaming you’d be waiting many more months before the thing came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and specifically what they’ve added in 8, you know, this is no big top secret,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’ve added in 8 is the ability to basically use streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the same download that can become a background download if it has to. In 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to do a background download when the app wasn’t running or whatever, you kick off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco request and it says all right and then it can tell you progress updates but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it you can’t get to the data until it’s done so there’s no way to stream that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you were offering streaming before you had to offer streaming in a way that oh and you also can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert any other downloads into a background download so you’d have to offer streaming in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were streaming hit pause and you know the app got terminated or got backgrounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that download would get canceled and fail you and you have to start over again with a background download if you wanted that file. Where what they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added in 8 is the ability to convert a streaming data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download into a background download. So that use case can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue and can do that well. So that’s what I’m going to use. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about the dev process surprised you the most? Was it just that there are that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many screens or was there something else?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was most surprised that all this audio stuff worked on an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually a pretty good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really because it was like oh my god the amount of processing I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on every sample that goes through 44,100 times per second or if you’re if stereo podcast 88,200 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of like just processing and math like I look at almost every sample in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some way when smart speed is on at least and even when smart speed is off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to render the little peak meters animation little EQ animation I’m looking at every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample I’m looking like I’m doing an FFT on every sample that’s crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to like in like thinking about that like just logically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shouldn’t be so fast on an iPhone it’s it runs at 30 frames a second on an iPhone 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I can and without maxing out the CPU. And to answer people in the chat talking about battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact and everything, I was concerned about battery impact. I’ve been using this for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over a year now and the battery impact is fine. It’s fine. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not… What hits the battery the hardest is playing shows faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1x. And so to some degree SmartSpeed does that because the reason why that’s so hard is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re then asking the hardware to process more than 44,100 frames per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second. You’re asking it to, you know, if you’re playing at 1.5x it’s going to process, you know, 60 whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames per second. So it’s going to, when you’re playing faster than 1x, it still has to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decode the mp3, read all that data, process all that data, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s doing all that work more per second. That is what makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big battery impact. If you look at like the CPU usage meter as you’re running one of these things. But that’s true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the podcast apps including apples like they all have that problem because that’s just the reality of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing data quickly is that you have to then read and process it more quickly. So you have to do more of it and it costs CPU time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not doing the the equalizer animation when the screen’s off, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct. Yeah, if if there isn’t one on screen, or the screen is off or the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not foreground, then it does not do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what’s What’s your favorite feature, which may or may not be the one you’re most proud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely… Okay. I think my favorite one is playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reordering. The way playlists are implemented is crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I really wanted this particular feature, which is I didn’t want to have to distinguish between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a manually organized playlist and a smart playlist, the way most iTunes does it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted all playlists to be smart and manually organizable. So that’s how I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overcast. So you can set your criteria for your playlist of what should be included,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can always just drag it around and reorder it. And then when new things come in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your order is preserved and it just tries to obey the filters in a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and the priority settings and everything to try to fit a new episode in where it should probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, given your reordering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, when you first told us about Overcast, you know, that was quite a while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago and you were talking about things like smart speed and things that you were trying to include in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you had told us about your playlist ideas, possibly it was underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I down in South Carolina, but regardless of when, I’d never used playlists ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any podcast app I’ve ever used. And so when you gave us the beta, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a playlist for things that just Aaron and I listened to, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just IRL talk and then everything else. And every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started fiddling with the playlist settings or perhaps reordering the playlist like you were describing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very quickly apparent to me that this was something that I’ve always wanted in my life. I just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know it yet. And it’s really, really well done. And I am not surprised that you count
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as your favorite feature. I think my favorite is probably SmartSpeed because I think it is so transparent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the playlists are a close second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, SmartSpeed, I think, is definitely what I’m most proud of. Because you know, SmartSpeed is a big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a hard thing to do. Like one of my formulas for my own happiness and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intellectual happiness, as well as success in the app world, is it’s nice if you do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one hard thing and a lot of easy things in an app. really good balance to have because if you do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one really hard thing that makes it harder for competitors to do and to copy you feature by feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then all the easy things help it be easier to maintain for you and usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of things that are very hard to do aren’t really worth it like they don’t they don’t bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like it isn’t a must-have feature for customers so you gotta be careful what you pick but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know I talked in the last after show about how like I worked so hard on the Kindle feature for Instapaper paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in reality that probably wasn’t worth all the effort I put into it because it was hard. It’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days with some other tools, but it was hard. Anyway, smart speed is a very hard feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to implement well. You can do it badly in a few easier ways, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to do it right and I want to do it well and doing it well is not easy. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t anything stopping the other podcast app developers from doing it. So you know like just time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dedication and you know possibly having to rewrite a lot of code you know they could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s not like it’s going to be exclusive to me forever like I’ll be lucky if it’s exclusive to me for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months you know but anyway and yes I know RSS radio already does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to prevent any feedback like that. So it is even exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today but yeah so anyway I’m very proud of that. I’m also very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very proud that my EQ meters animation thing actually works because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole reason I did that is because Apple in their music app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iOS 7, like the problem I was trying to solve with that was how do you indicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the list of episodes, how do you indicate which one is currently playing? And the way Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles this is they have a little pink animation in the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen that is like a tiny version of this in like a little circle on the side or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. It’s a tiny version of a Peak Meter’s view. What drives me crazy about it is that it’s fake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is just it’s just a canned animation of some bars moving up and down. It is not actually reflecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music that is playing. So me being a smart ass and being arrogant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you know what I bet I could do that for real in my app. And so I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like you know and at first I was like I’m probably gonna have to use OpenGL and to make it really fast and everything kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hard to use OpenGL on a translucent blended layer that’s going to be blended into the rest of UI kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s not easy. And I really didn’t want the overhead of doing GL because I didn’t want to be spending two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this one little feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John What made you think you knew we’re going to need to use OpenGL for it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just to get the animation fast enough to or you know, or for battery reasons, like, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I could do it with with Quick Draw or whatever, but maybe it would take too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Quick draw, right. But you mean the actual, you mean the actual drawing process though, like so what you’re worried about is not
⏹️ ▶️ John so much the, because you know core animation will be run through OpenGL, but it’s like that you didn’t want to have to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John the little lines with core graphics thinking that would, but you wouldn’t be able to get 60 frames per second out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was worried about that and I was also worried about you know the FFT that’s running in the background and processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the sound, like what is that going to do to battery life?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s funny to think that GPU is sitting there waiting to run your DSP functions on it, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve thought about that, but but honestly the the CPU versions of it works so incredibly well For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this for the scale. I’m running them on I don’t I don’t think the GPU will make a big difference
⏹️ ▶️ John I the libraries they have those what are they called the the arm extensions the arm SIMD extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yep, so like you presumably Apple’s libraries are you know using that behind the scenes on the CPUs that support
⏹️ ▶️ John it So it’s kind of like you get your own. You know it’s like Altevec all over again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly Yeah, so I made, you know, very heavy use of the accelerate framework, the VDSP functions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which all do that. I, as far as I know, they all they all use neon when whenever they can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so yeah, so I made this this visualizer with that. I realized how quickly it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran. And it was originally only going to be on like, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlaying the artwork on the table cells. That’s all I needed it for. And then I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is really cool. And I also I added it to the main playing screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, because it looked cool and it’s gonna make a waste to have it on like the navigation screens and not on the now playing screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also because I thought it might help like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re listening to a podcast on your phone, but you’re like you’re not doing something else. If you’re just like sitting on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the couch looking at your phone like nothing else is going on or you’re like sitting commuting on a plane or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know something like that you wanted to signal to other people that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted well first of all it is nice that it has that feature where like you know a lot of other in a lot of other apps and the only way you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re playing is you know if the time is moving basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know or you know the symbol changes on the play button but like it’s it’s these are pretty subtle signals with overcast it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clear when it’s playing something but also I wanted to give people who were just sitting there with their phone and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had nothing else to do something to look at like just something to like keep you visually entertained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit so that maybe just maybe you’ll for few seconds more not switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to Twitter and stop paying attention to what you’re listening to. So it was kind of like a political statement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well like let me give you some reason to stay in this app and something to just lock your visual attention so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can pay attention to the podcast rather than switching to something else and so and you know zoning it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why did you mirror all the bars Johnny Ive?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Exactly that’s it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked better. Simple as that. There were there were a number of good reasons why the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of bars had to be 19 18 19 yeah there were a number of reasons the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number had to be no greater than 19 like the FFT window size it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have been really difficult and more and much more complicated and much more CPU intensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had more FFT buckets so I couldn’t do more bars than that and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not not only does it look better to have the shape be symmetrical the bars form rather than just being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a big slope and you fall off the edge of the screen. So not only is the shape nice and symmetrical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also the bars can be nice and thin relative to like you know not being like these these you know big fat
⏹️ ▶️ John You can always cheat and interpolate between the bars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah but that’s stupid. Yeah I couldn’t do that. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right so I’ve got two more questions and then I’d genuinely like to hear John destroy your user interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, firstly, what do you hope people appreciate? And perhaps you feel like you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answered that. But an example of something we haven’t really talked about yet is the link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Wait, before we made this entirely the me show, do we have any other topics we wanted to get to? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to take over our show. Too late.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do have topics, but they’ll keep until next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I keep asking you questions. So it’s my fault. So yeah, so what do you hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people appreciate? And what I was starting to say was an example of this that I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, from, whatever, was the linking to the other independent podcast apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve seen a lot of comments fly by about how that was a classy thing to do. Maybe that’s your answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it isn’t. But what do you hope users of the app really appreciate?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To answer the question directly, what I hope people really appreciate is a smart speed and the voice boost,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because these are the things that just were the hardest. took the longest like and for the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being they set me apart. These are features that they don’t immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scream oh my god must have to a lot of people. Some people sure but not to probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the majority of people, but once you try them they’re incredibly valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you care about those things and some people don’t. Some people never play podcast faster than 1x. They don’t want to. They don’t see the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they don’t like the sound or whatever. A lot of people couldn’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about the volume normalization and everything. That’s fine. You don’t need everyone to love you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t need everyone to appreciate the amount of work you put into anything. The amount of work you put into something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not correlate to its value. So that’s fine. But I hope people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciate that stuff who care. And so that’s the answer to that. Now to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the question that you kind of asked about why I did the link to other apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the I basically have a section settings that links to all my competitors for not all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link to some of my competitors probably the biggest ones the main reason why I did that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was kind of it was kind of a what the hell moment it was like you know what I want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing and I think it would be pretty cool I was afraid though it was a risk and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw it as a risk in two reasons one small and one big the small risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that Apple would reject it because they have pretty strict rules about whether you can display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and link to other apps within your app and under what conditions. And if you read the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like, well, this might qualify, this might not. Like it was a little bit vague and I wasn’t sure if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would approve it. Turns out they don’t care as far as not yet, at least. So we’ll see, you know, future updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see if this feature lasts, but so far they don’t care. The second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concern, which and that’s a minor concern, because if they say I can’t do it, I take it out and I resubmit, no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The second reason though was I was afraid that it would… My goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with doing this, with linking to my competitors, was really well-meaning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was really to just like, you know, some of these people are my friends. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small business. These are all indie developers like me. We’re not talking about… Like I’m not linking to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like major corporations with VC funding who were trying to crush everybody and put everyone out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s that’s not this business. This is a business of small independent developers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very similar to me and I wanted to kind of show solidarity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it almost like just kind of be friendly with the business rather than being hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards my competitors and again and some of these people are friends of mine which made it even easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. I was afraid though that it might be perceived as like me looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down on these people like oh you don’t like my app will fine just take one of these you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m like the arrogant who everyone hates and you know like that’s I was I was worried about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that perception happening but it didn’t and in fact not only did it not happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I didn’t see a single person who seemed to think that having that feature in the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think has gotten me more tweets more comments more emails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are all positive than anything else in the app including like all my future smart speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like people people like that more than everything else I’ve done in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app according to what people are telling me about him what people are posting on Twitter people love it they
⏹️ ▶️ John love it I was just gonna bring up the one jerk who I saw who was who was yelling at you about that on hacker
⏹️ ▶️ John news I guess you didn’t see that one but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rest assured that the Internet
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t read through all of hacker news if you yeah read the hacker news to this one guy it’s all upset
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve linked to your like it takes a special kind of determination to dislike somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out a way that someone linking to his competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John in a respectful way from his application is somehow, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that he is a terrible person. But this person took their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So my last question, which I think you just answered seconds ago, was what was your most surprising response?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it sounds like the linking to other people’s apps was that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely that and a combination of both of how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Immediately saw that and immediately cared about it in a positive way. So that’s number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, I was really just overall very pleasantly surprised at how positive the reactions generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. I didn’t know like Until this launch. I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether anyone would care about the the new cool stuff I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have because I you know I don’t support the iPad the Mac Android I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely support the web I don’t have streaming I don’t support videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s all these limitations in overcast pretty you know those are pretty big omissions to a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not very big to me I only listen on my iPhone I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel myself that all these other platform clients were important to have on day one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as important as launching, you know, a year earlier, say. So there was that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, you know, I never listened to video. I never watch video podcasts because I’m always listening to podcasts in context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I can’t look at a screen. So I don’t use video podcasts and streaming. As I said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to add streaming. I didn’t make it into version one because it wasn’t so important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hold back the release for another three months while I did it and wait for iOS eight like So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why Overall, though. I didn’t know how many people out there thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me on this Like certain features. I don’t even have big and small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t know how many people that would anger and Offend and turn off and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who would just say useless one star and it turns out there are there are a few of course I there’s always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a few but it’s a much smaller percentage of people than I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s awesome. And I should back up just a brief moment. I should point out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was curious how you were going to handle ordering the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast apps that you were linking to because one could perhaps unreasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey construe that, oh, whatever you put at the top is clearly your most favorite of all your competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t remember if it was that you told me or I noticed, but you found a way around that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was very clever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just randomized the list every time you open the screen. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I thought was that was a very clever idea and a really good touch as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do the same thing for the same reason with the directory categories. Like the category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list itself is ordered intentionally, but the podcast in each category are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco randomly ordered every time you load it. Nice. Same reason because it’s like, you know, I don’t want to like, I don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have to rank these like, you know, one through six in this category. Like, I don’t, I don’t I don’t care that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t want it to be like that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know he’s do alphabetical for the directory I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but then you have like triple a tech show you have the elephant
⏹️ ▶️ John probably gonna be gaming your particular iPod podcast application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well but like your lessons to Casey it’s like you want to add that security now or later so yeah that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and also by the way another risk that I thought the only developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was in that list who knew about it beforehand was underscore David Smith because he’s a friend of ours news on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta so pod wrangler so by underscore David Smith that was the only app on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there that knew about it beforehand I was also afraid and this could still happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one of those developers you get really pissed off at me for including them on that list and would demand removal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that happens I can do it server side it’s no big deal but
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would they demand removal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t maybe they really hate me as a competitor and don’t want to be in my app at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link to their app. I don’t I It was a risk it was I don’t think it was a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk But I was worried like what if one of these competitors gets really upset with me putting them in here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s an insane thing to have to worry about but I concur with you Marco that that is something I would worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about As well if I were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I mean keep in mind. I’m I’ve been kind of over overly sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what you know what of this thing I’m doing that I think is well-meaning and harmless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what could people possibly have a major problem with because everything I’ve written on the internet or said here has been attacked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that kind of standard recently so like I have to be very careful like anyways just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think like in what ways can this be totally misconstrued that would cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems for me or other people
⏹️ ▶️ John so in the chat room thought of something that I thought of when I first saw this is like if you had put
⏹️ ▶️ John things from megacorps in there they’d be like you can’t use our trademark image in your application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically maybe however it’s their app icon which I’m loading from the App Store using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to show their app page so that I’m not sure that would really hold water but you know if anybody complain I would remove them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no big deal like I said I could do it server-side and by commenting out one line in an array but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still like it’s I’d rather I’d rather avoid conflicts rather than like invite them and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to escape them but But overall, based on the response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that competitor’s list, I think it was the right move. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally blown away by how many people just love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the chat room would like me to ask, how do you handle the retired greats?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And perhaps in general, could you give us just a quick blurb on how you handled the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directory overall?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I whipped it together three days ago and I intend to update it sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. That’s kind of what I thought. I’m not sure what they’re looking for you to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but at least we
⏹️ ▶️ John have the directory part like the categories that where it’s like, oh, this is a tech podcast. Is that how
⏹️ ▶️ John is that term and is that metadata that’s in the podcast? Is that you just saying, oh, this is a tech podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are all handpicked in my admin panel. Like I can create categories and put whatever I want into them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so it’s not it’s not exhaustive. I didn’t have no browser. It’s just like, here’s a bunch of tech podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s meant to be a starting point. So there’s every category has in it a subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all button. And the idea of adding this, like one of my beta testers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked, you know, is this here because a lot of people need to do this? Like, is this a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common request? Why is there a subscribe to all button taking up a whole table row in the directory?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why it’s there is not because anybody has ever asked anybody for that feature, as far as I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of an opportunistic like, well, let me give them a chance. Maybe somebody will do this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way, in my opinion, it’s a way to promote podcasts and to give people a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way if they subscribe to nothing. If this is their first time ever using a podcast app, they don’t know what to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, go pick a category, hit subscribe to all, and you’ll have enough content to last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you most of your time that you need to listen to something. So that’s basically it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like a these are like little mini collections like little mini curated collections of you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six to eight podcasts in each category. The idea was not to be exhaustive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but to provide like a starter kit to people and this was this is a hedge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if the directory will prove to be the most important part here in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which case I should probably make it more robust or if most people will use search and Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find their stuff. So this is kind of a hedge where I have this, I have, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a medium strength Twitter feature, a basic directory, and a good search. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a good search you always have to have. So that’s, that’s out of the question. You have to have that. But between like the Twitter and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory, like which one do I focus more time on in the future? That will be determined by what people actually
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can, you can amp up your directory as people start using the application, because then you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff that Apple does in its store. I’m assuming you don’t have access to Apple’s metadata, right? Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John new and noteworthy, top rated or whatever, but you can say like popular. Pretty soon you’ll know
⏹️ ▶️ John what are the popular tech podcasts, not just from your list, but in general. Like, if you are willing to categorize
⏹️ ▶️ John a large portion or scrape categorizations from place to place, a large portion of the podcast, you will have data to know,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this one, I mean, you could rank them by popularity. Like, you know, what is the most popular comedy podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and put that one up at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well the podcast put their they put iTunes category metadata in the feed usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the because the iTunes has this this RSS spec that almost every podcast feed adheres
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to so they can be listed in iTunes and and so many podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claim their own categories in the feed. So if I wanted to do something like that I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not convinced the value of that if you if you browse around like the iTunes top list like once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave the editorial areas of iTunes like the editors picks and stuff. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to just like the raw top things in this category list, I don’t know how useful that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. I’m not sure. This is the thing. I don’t know yet. I don’t know. Do most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people find their podcast by browsing the directory or by searching for something by name?
⏹️ ▶️ John The social one is probably the most reliable view, even though it seems like the weirdest and the weirdest. I got to put my Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in or whatever, because recommendations from your friends or people you follow. Like the top lists,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you rank by popularity, like just the same stuff always, it’s like, this American life is going to be the number one. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, spoiler. That’s what’s going to be the number one thing. There was this really super pod. But who hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John heard of this American life? And in some respects, it’s like, well, that’s a good podcast. People, you know, there’s a high
⏹️ ▶️ John chance that just an average person picked out of a hat will like this podcast because lots of people like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But with podcasts, with a curated list, then it’s like, well, if your taste is
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco’s, then you may like one of these picks more than you would like this American Life because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just it goes it’s quirky as your particular thing but that’s why I think the social one is actually the best because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to find someone who has similar taste to you and then follow their recommendations. The super popular
⏹️ ▶️ John one only works if you are not an individual but are rather
⏹️ ▶️ John the average human being because then you’re like oh yes exactly I am the average human and I like like
⏹️ ▶️ John the best things, you know, it’s, I find with podcasts, people are most excited when they find something
⏹️ ▶️ John that may not be particularly popular, this show for example, that may not be particularly popular in the grand scheme of things on this
⏹️ ▶️ John American Life type level, but exactly speaks to their particular
⏹️ ▶️ John interests of like, I like people who have one particular kind of model
⏹️ ▶️ John train and they will be so excited about a podcast just about that kind of model train, they will love
⏹️ ▶️ John that show more than this American Life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s I really think the social features are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more useful than the directory for most people. I think the role of a directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to provide a starting point, right? And that’s why, you know, I have like my little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starter kits in each of the little categories. That’s fine. But, you know, once you get past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me a few things in X category, the browsing experience is terrible. The usefulness of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rankings is off, you know. why I think you know I this whole social thing is the way to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John do your worst. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Need, Squarespace and Fracture and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin cuz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A-R-M, D-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USA Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to. Accidental, tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did he really just do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it should be in the after show. This is just, I mean, I was on the beta, so it’s not like I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that I should have been giving more feedback during the beta, but every time I went to the beta feedback thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and I read everyone else’s feedback, I’m like, yeah, they’re getting all this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John People would say things, yeah, good, someone said that, you had a lot of good beta testers, so they
⏹️ ▶️ John covered everything, more or less. Although, I mean, I have a few things I could
⏹️ ▶️ John throw out. Some of these have already been said, but they’re worth saying in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did they cover insufficiently?
⏹️ ▶️ John Eh, not insufficiently. Not insufficiently. So I talked to you about this once in an after show before like things were revealed, but
⏹️ ▶️ John so let me just start with some, what I tweeted was like, I’m using this app instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPod shuffle. And I am like, I’m off of my iPod shuffle. Now, part of that is due to Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John and not so much the application because I’ve switched over to like, you know, wirelessly playing it during my commute. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the other part is, here’s the other part. I’m one of those people who does not care about smart speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t listen to things that more than 1X. I don’t need a volume booster. So all those features you spent a long time ago are
⏹️ ▶️ John meaningless to me. But I would not be using your application at all because I have other podcast apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that I purchased, right? And I didn’t use them for you for too many time. Part of that is Bluetooth. But it’s because what I was doing with my iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Shuffle, besides cursing at it, I was bringing it back to iTunes, plugging it
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And at various times, I would either, with my old iPod Shuffle, I would manually
⏹️ ▶️ John drag individual episodes onto the iPod Shuffle. like
⏹️ ▶️ John manually sync individual episodes. And then when I got a new iPod Shuffle, it didn’t let me do it that way. And I had to make a playlist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was still just a manual playlist. So I would drag individual episodes into a manual playlist
⏹️ ▶️ John and then sync them to the iPod Shuffle. And what I was doing when I dragged them into the playlist is I was like, all right, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John order that I want to listen in. Because I didn’t have a screen on the iPod Shuffle. I just have to hit play when I get in the car. I need them to
⏹️ ▶️ John play in exactly in the right order. So I was prioritizing them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say, oh, well, as soon as an episode of whatever, RouterConline comes out, I want to listen to that right away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if I’m in the middle of an episode of some other thing that I was listening to, I want the RouterConline to come on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I want to do these three episodes in this order, and I want to do them as a block. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John priority order, but with manual adjustments. And if that sounds familiar, it’s exactly what Overcast does. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is probably maybe the one and only main reason I use this application is because the playlists
⏹️ ▶️ John allow me to make an arrangement that’s exactly what I was doing manually before. The difference is now
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I mean, you know, it’s on a server somewhere, it’s synchronized, so like
⏹️ ▶️ John I installed Overcast on my iPad too, not that I’m gonna listen from there. It keeps track of where I am.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to have the problem of like switching off different environments if I don’t have the shuffle with me or whatever. Like anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an iOS device will know where I left off, what episode I was on, what the play positions are, and all of those things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as I reorder things, that follows me around as well. So this is an automation of the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John manual process I was doing before. So that’s why I use the application. But all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so this is supposed to be me complaining. I’m basically, what I’m trying to do. This is a great complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m trying to explain here is that when people said, oh, well, you know, people on Twitter were having, there was like this mini debate
⏹️ ▶️ John that spun off from me saying that I use the application. If, unless you care about exactly the things, the
⏹️ ▶️ John same things that I care about, that doesn’t mean this application is necessarily for you, right? Because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you care about the SmartSpeed stuff and I don’t, Like that’s it’s a whole different set of priorities.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what you’re getting at with all the people with the feature requests. If you demand, if a podcast app is useless to
⏹️ ▶️ John you, if it doesn’t use video podcasts, you’re not going to like this app because it doesn’t do video podcasts. And everybody has some
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like that. And so the same reason that I really like this application is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason that someone else might reject it entirely. Or, you know, it’s like the, the, the demands
⏹️ ▶️ John people have a podcast applications are so different that hearing just people like, well, John recommends it. It must
⏹️ ▶️ John be good. No, maybe it’s no good for you. Maybe you want a feature that it doesn’t have or and or in the case of
⏹️ ▶️ John video that it’s probably never going to have that Just because I recommend it doesn’t mean that though. It’s automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John good Like it just means it fits my needs appropriately and and I think the playlist feature in
⏹️ ▶️ John particular I can’t be the only one who does maybe I’m the only one who did it manually because it’s just too much
⏹️ ▶️ John of a pain But once people can do it without the pain that I was going through like I can just do by just dragging their thumb Around
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of people will find that feature. I mean like you were saying your favorite feature I think that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the killer feature, even though it’s like, oh, you let you let people reorder stuff in a table view and did a little algorithm to make stuff land
⏹️ ▶️ John in the right place, more or less. That I think is the most important thing for me for this
⏹️ ▶️ John application. But my first complaint is related to that. When I went to try to say, Okay, well, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John has this application, he says it does all this playlist stuff. Let me I didn’t first of all, I didn’t have faith that I was gonna be able to do that. I figured I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just make a manual playlist. I’ll just manually do stuff like I was doing before even that would be an upgrade because manually dragging tracks onto
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod shuffles a nightmare compared to doing it on the screen as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a previous iPod shuffle owner using an iPod shuffle in any way other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing a random selection of music tracks is horrible
⏹️ ▶️ John even random selection of music tracks is horrible if you have other stuff on there because the voiceover thing where it tells you
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you happen to have you know music and podcasts you got to make sure you’re in the right realm before you start playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh wow yeah that was that was added after my shuffle time i had the very first shuffle and i think the third
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i’ve I’ve had a series of them and they’ve they’re not my friends. A lot of it has to do with iTunes being crappy too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, when I was trying to make my first like playlist, I saw that it has this priority
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast thing. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, that’s what I want. And then I remembered you talking about the manual rewriting with the priorities.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why priority podcasts as a thing or a concept in the application like that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is two kinds of podcasts, there is a priority podcast, meaning a podcast that can and have a priority, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then non-priority podcasts. Why not just make all the pod, because the first thing I do when I make any playlist
⏹️ ▶️ John is I say, select priority podcasts, and I select them all, because they all have a priority.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there’s no tail at the end where I’m like, okay, this is my top five, but everything else is just exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John equal. Because what I find myself having to do is go into the thing and say, select priority podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John select, select, select, select, select, and that step feels like it doesn’t need to exist. Like, that concept of a priority and
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-priority podcast seems like a complication could confuse people into thinking they can’t get the playlist they want
⏹️ ▶️ John when really they can it’s like oh no you got to mark those as priority podcasts first now maybe I’m wrong and other people really
⏹️ ▶️ John do want to say I have three priority podcasts and everything else I don’t care it’s just a big it’s just a big mush for
⏹️ ▶️ John me but that’s me that’s me too I want I want all of them to be priority podcasts because I know I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not that many I mean I’ve read off my my list it’s like maybe 10 12 subscriptions uh
⏹️ ▶️ John I know which ones I what order I want them in all 12 of them it’s not as if I haven’t confused about any ones
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bottom. Anyway, people in the chat room are saying they just wanted to prioritize a few of them. But for me, that is an additional complication
⏹️ ▶️ John that confused me at first, and then it frustrated me every time I had to go make a playlist because I had to select the priority.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even now when I add a subscription, because I still haven’t even caught up. Like, I think I didn’t even put core intuition on here yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I go add that, I’m going to have to remember to go into my playlist and mark that as a priority podcast and
⏹️ ▶️ John sort it rather than it just becoming the last priority podcast or whatever or the first one or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. Now it’s in the non-priority podcast category. So I find that freshening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couple people have already complained to you about this, but like this, I know I have a crappy A5 device, but there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pause sometimes when I tap on a thing before it switches screens, before it starts playing. I don’t know what it’s doing during that pause, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not playing the audio. It’s for already downloaded stuff. Do you have any idea what that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, that’s real. Yeah, that is like, I have to async that basically. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the API for reading audio files, It’s just like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old blocking C API. And what I would love to do is have lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level access to the files so I could like, whatever it’s doing for on certain files where it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to preload something or preread something to get from zero to playing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to do that when it downloads and then cache the result of that so that way when you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play it, it can play instantly. But I don’t have that kind of access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any APIs and maybe I can go lower level somehow, but I haven’t found a way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some kind of like Amazon Fire predictive, like if I’ve just added a podcast or if I’ve just downloaded it,
⏹️ ▶️ John chances are good that that’s gonna be the one that I’m next gonna play. Or even if you wanna fake it out and make it
⏹️ ▶️ John perceptually faster by changing screens before the playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts. Right, so that’s the right answer and that’s what I have to do. I just haven’t done it yet. The right answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I have to kick off the screen load and then give the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a loading state and then give the now playing screen a loading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state and then kick off the load of the file asynchronously. So I have to do that. It’s on my to-do list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 1.1 or whatever. I haven’t gotten to it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, another thing that several people have already complained about, and I’m sure you know about,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s worth airing out for the listeners as well, is the idea of going through and cherry-picking individual episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John having it boot you back out to whatever screen it sends you back out to. It’s not as easy to just go through, oh, I want that
⏹️ ▶️ John episode or that, oh, I want that episode or that. You get sent back out to the home thing you gotta dig your way back in again and find
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been frustrated by that a few times. In this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you got complained about this too, but I don’t remember what your answer for it was. If you are
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunate enough to hit the end of a podcast before you realize you’ve hit the end of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it goes away. Like I don’t know what the solution is, but you’re saying like maybe you could have a holding
⏹️ ▶️ John bin for it or whatever. It was several times I’ve either accidentally scrubbed to the end of the podcast, which is easy to do the fat thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John on the little scrubber thing or whatever or it has run out when I’ve like you know it’s been playing and
⏹️ ▶️ John I took my earphones off and didn’t notice it was still playing or whatever and hit the end and now the thing is gone and I have to re-download
⏹️ ▶️ John it what is what are you doing about that one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s tricky this most of the feature requests I’ve gotten so far today or the people who are like oh I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot use the sat because I need to manage x almost all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are storage management of some sort like a lot of people are like one request that I keep keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting which I never really considered that you know people want this, but they do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just didn’t cross my mind, I guess, is a different state, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state of things that are new or you know that you know that you haven’t played and deleted. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like the active state of the item, but that is not downloaded and won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be downloaded, because right now my states are basically needs to be downloaded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloaded, and deleted. That’s it! Like Those are the three states and I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John be in yeah like a pre download like a will be downloaded queue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but what people are asking for is they want items that like on certain devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just are never automatically downloaded,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like it’s a cue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t run it like it’s a new item Yeah, it’s a new item that I want to keep as new like keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as unplayed, but don’t have the app try to download it And maybe I’ll try to download some other time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so there’s And that’s a very common request so far in the email. Again, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not expecting that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John In general, like looking at the state of episodes, like when I’m going through any list, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John always easy to tell like, is that, like what state is, like some kind of iconography
⏹️ ▶️ John or visual elements to say, because you have those states in your head, like is this, does this need to be downloaded?
⏹️ ▶️ John Has it already been downloaded? Has it been downloaded and started? Like how far progress in it? Or is it one of those weird
⏹️ ▶️ John things you just described where it’s not supposed to be downloaded on this device? You’ve got the little eye there to try to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what’s what. But I mean, Instacast is the main other application that I’ve used. And I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s iconography. It’s like a little green corner thing when it’s been downloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe there’s a progress bar or something. I don’t even know what the hell it uses. But some visual way to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at a list. And when I look at these lists, I mentioned before my nervousness about going on a plane flight to the WBC
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, I don’t know if all the podcasts I want to listen to are downloaded or not. I can’t glance at the app and tell that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could go into each individual thing and see if it’s downloaded and try to start playing to make sure that it’s there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like some sort of visual reassurance or acknowledgement of the state of each episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See and that, this is going to be a hard balance to strike. You know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast apps, you know, I think on one extreme you have apps like Downcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think iCatcher is like this, where they just have tons of customizable settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everything. comes at a pretty big cost of interface complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I’m trying, this app is trying to be mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. I’m trying to, I’m really trying to compete with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Stitcher. Like that’s what I’m looking at. I’m not trying to compete with Downcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Pocketcast and Instacast like…
⏹️ ▶️ John But this isn’t like a twitchy feature. This is like a simple, like a visual, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I I guess it’s like visual clutter you’re trying to not have. Like you want to, you need to convey a certain amount of information and you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it clutter. You don’t want to have like, you look at an episode list and it has like a million little stickers and dials all
⏹️ ▶️ John over it telling you like obscure icons that you’re like, what does that mean? It’s like a lollipop and there’s a red circle and there’s a line
⏹️ ▶️ John through it. And there’s a thing that looks like it could be a progress bar. But I think that state
⏹️ ▶️ John information about which one was I just playing? Which thing is currently paused? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, with the big giant EQ meter over the things, like that gives an indication what’s currently playing
⏹️ ▶️ John but for all the other states like has this been downloaded is this going to be downloaded how far am I
⏹️ ▶️ John in the episode is it played or not and by the way someone in the chat room mentioned a reasonable solution to the what happens when the
⏹️ ▶️ John the timer goes off the end have a recently played list that like you just pull off the end and delete
⏹️ ▶️ John from that after some period of time so if you accidentally scrub your way through an episode you can go to the recently played list I don’t I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the good solutions are like the reason the reason I didn’t put a lot of these in like the the beta feedback is there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t say oh obviously you you should need to do whatever. Because I would try to think, well, how would you solve that problem? They’re not easy. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s only so much room for buttons. There’s only so much room for visual clutter. And you have a navigation hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John that you, I mean, you don’t want to break out of that and start going like three-dimensional chess where like, you normally go right to left, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can also zoom in and out. And it gets confusing because like you said, there’s a lot of screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the question with all these features, you know, if, OK, I want a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do x. I want a way to toggle this state without affecting this state. So I want a new state of this. I want a new option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. One of the big questions is where do you put all this stuff and what do you do in the interface?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that hidden behind a gesture? If so, how does it explain to anybody?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it behind an info button? Well, where do you put the info button? In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the settings screen, well then how big is the settings screen? The apps I’ve mentioned, the ones that have a lot of options like Downcast and iCast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have six different pages in their settings screens because they have all these settings that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco request have to go somewhere and the UIs for that can be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clunky and cumbersome and can turn off a lot of people. And so I’m trying to balance this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to balance between trying to give people what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want, or rather, trying to give people what they ask for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trying to be a mass market appeal app. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add a million features. I’m never gonna win that race and because I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz I can’t but secondarily cuz I don’t want to you know if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of fine-grained controls over all that stuff I think you’ll be better off using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downcast just like just use downcast
⏹️ ▶️ John you just concentrate on adding making it the features you already have the features that are already
⏹️ ▶️ John there making it clearer to the people using those features what’s going on because you have a certain amount of state
⏹️ ▶️ John that you already support right and you have certain features that you already support but a lot of them like I said like
⏹️ ▶️ John it might be hidden like for just to give another example I’m looking at the app now on the little download
⏹️ ▶️ John icon it has a badge it says five I tap first of all I don’t know what that badge means I assume that means
⏹️ ▶️ John this five downloads are they in progress or whatever I tap on the little five I see a list of five episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John they all say download paused underneath them and very light text that would be hard to read if I was even older
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why these are all paused and like this This is an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of the mysteries of Overcast. Sometimes it does things that I don’t understand. It’s best,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s best, working best when it’s like you’re in the cycle. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see why I wrote three downloaders.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s best when you’re in sort of the cycle where I was in a long period of time where I was just like, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to the application. I had set up my subscriptions. I had set up my playlists. I would wake up in the
⏹️ ▶️ John morning. All my podcasts would be there in exactly the order that I wanted them. And I would just
⏹️ ▶️ John play. Like, that’s how you want it to work. It’s like, I don’t have to touch this application. It does exactly what I want. I
⏹️ ▶️ John never have to wait for it or whatever. But when something does go wrong or I want to do something weird, like, oh, you know, someone recommended,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was before the Twitter recommendations, but someone recommended that I should listen to that episode of the Electric
⏹️ ▶️ John Shadow where they talk about Apple TV. So I go into search, find Electric Shadow, find the episode. I’m like, well, how do I get this into my
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? Oh, now I got to mark it as a priority podcast or maybe I can just manually arrange that. Am I subscribed to Electric Shadow
⏹️ ▶️ John now or did I just download the one episode? Is it going to download all the rest of the Electric Shadows
⏹️ ▶️ John or does it, no, I just got that one? These are features that already exist. You can do all of these things, but I was unsure
⏹️ ▶️ John whether I was using the app in the right way to do them. You know what I mean? And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, rather than adding features other than the ones you think you have to add, is probably the place to concentrate,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for a mass market, because this app already does tons of stuff and already has tons of features. But it’s not always
⏹️ ▶️ John clear to the inexperienced user or the new user that
⏹️ ▶️ John those features exist or that people are successfully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re totally right. I mean, I agree. I’m not going to argue with you there. I agree. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of things in the app that are not as clear as they should be and that are not as intuitive as they should be and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of features that are kind of hidden that probably shouldn’t be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s 1.0 and I’m open to suggestions. So, file a
⏹️ ▶️ John bug. Yeah, well, that’s the problem. If I had all the good suggestions, I’d be telling you exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what to do, but it’s not an easy problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Exactly. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, it’s just a lot of times it is. You use an application, you’re like, oh, this is obvious. You should be doing this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for some of the feature features are easy to do. Like, oh, Mark, you should totally let me start listening immediately and then save
⏹️ ▶️ John that as a download. Like, you know you need to do that. That’s a technical thing. You can tell the person exactly how you want it to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fine. But the UI things, it’s like, so what do you add? What buttons do you add? What buttons do you remove?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we’ve already got swipe and tap. Where else are you going to stick this other thing? That’s why I keep thinking visually,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know what the design would look like. I don’t think I think you could get something that fits in
⏹️ ▶️ John the theme, but that’s the only thing I have a concrete suggestion for is like some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of visual indication of the states that already exists for episodes and such and the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of when you’re trying to cherry pick episodes not getting chalked back out. But again, you’ve heard most all this feedback before. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less just airing it on the podcast so other people can know that you’ve heard this feedback. You should just make that you should just
⏹️ ▶️ John make the beta board public and say people have said all these things before. Take a look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To some degree, it’s a difference of philosophy on how much of this stuff that people are asking for or should even offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would much rather favor good default behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a preference, if I can get away with it. And there’s sometimes when you can’t get away with that. You know, sometimes, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if people are really divided on something and it’s like, you know, 50-50, half people want this, half people want that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither of them is clearly better than the other or just like a difference of preference, like, then you usually have to have a setting somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John think you need a setting for the hit the end of the episode it immediately gets deleted and you can’t find it again
⏹️ ▶️ John because the disk space people probably want that people who like I want I want it to be gone immediately, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if you just put them into the Recently played episodes thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and got rid of them after five minutes the disk space people Wouldn’t care but the I accidentally went to the
⏹️ ▶️ John end people It’s kind of like the I access did you mean to scroll to the top by hitting the status bar? Did you’re not really an insta paper,
⏹️ ▶️ John need to have that feature, but sometimes people do it accidentally This is a similar situation like it’s a frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John situation when you hit especially when I’m trying to scrub around it even on our own episode I was trying to listen to something we were
⏹️ ▶️ John saying in an after show and I was trying to scrub around near the End of the thing to find to go back because I had missed
⏹️ ▶️ John something because you know I’ve been distracted for a second and I scrubbed off the end of the episode went away That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. And like the disk space people. I’m like you can wait five minutes disk space people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m one of those people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe me. I will get those emails
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always running a space on my devices, too but it’s much worse to accidentally try to you know
⏹️ ▶️ John scrub back to hear something that Casey said accidentally go off the end and Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are listening isn’t for a skip to skip the ATP theme song I’m like, oh people like the theme song, right? But I
⏹️ ▶️ John was at I find myself speaking going off the end at the end of back to work I don’t like listening to that theme
⏹️ ▶️ John song soon as it starts playing I want to be done But to make the episode go away, I have to manually
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know Manually thumb the scrubber to the end to make that episode, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John be marked as played Where as far as I’m concerned as soon as the little music starts playing I’m done with the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I just hit I just hit fast forward like three times which is enough to cover and then I just and it deletes itself and Goes
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. Yeah, there’s no good solution to that but I’m what I’m saying is like the things that happen near the
⏹️ ▶️ John borders at the end of the episode and And fighting with the little, you know, the behavior of should
⏹️ ▶️ John it go away? Sometimes I want it to go immediately. Sometimes I don’t want it to go away accidentally. And so, but I think just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like the, you know, recycle bin or trash can or whatever, having, having some sort of buffer zone
⏹️ ▶️ John for things to stay in for a short period of time without any settings related to that, just say that’s the behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John that the people who need the space will just, you know, just tell them it’s immediately freed. And then five minutes later it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean that that’s worth considering but then then I have to have a UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for okay. Well, how do you get to these deleted? Do they show up in a special list somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we just I mean like a like you have playlists, right? So I would just keep using that metaphor. Like these are
⏹️ ▶️ John smart playlists that are built in. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean? Yeah, it’s I don’t know. I there’s enough cost to that feature that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure it’s worth it. Like and then there’s also there’s like there’s like the cognitive burden that you put on all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users when an app could behave in two or three different ways then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if then the user is trying to figure out okay well wait I just did this then you know where is this or what happened or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I have this file like you come you said earlier that you were you know you wanted to be sure if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting on a plane or something you want to know whether everything’s downloaded or not right one of the reasons why I’ve kept the storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model so simple is to provide that assurance to to know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay if if the if there is no number badge or frowny face on the downloads icon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I have everything. That’s it. Like, that’s it. That’s it. If the downloads icon is not showing a status,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that that that concept is clear to you. But I didn’t know that that I’m glad I now know
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So I will look at that. And if that’s the model, but that model, that’s the you know, the programmer model that’s in your head,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the user model is not like there’s nothing in the UI that tells me that that should that that should be the case
⏹️ ▶️ John that the only the way I can know that I’m safe is I just look to see if there’s any badge on the download icon and if there isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and that’s and you you got burned early in the beta because I changed this halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the beta earlier on when it first hit you when you first complained about it I was not validating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files I was getting if the download gave me a file and the download completed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successfully I said okay it succeeded done and I moved on and then you tapped you tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file and you’d get the that is unfortunate error so and it would say oh can’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t play this file I don’t know why like that That that that error that error means that opening the file in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio processor failed and often that was because it was a bad download. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like it was not actually an audio file. It was like somebody’s 503 page that when there was a server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error like so what I do now in the downloader after you made that complaint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you that was correct and so what I do now was is as soon as the files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download there’s a brief pause where it seems to freeze at 99%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reason why is because it’s loading it into the audio processor right then to see is this a real audio file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how long is it and you know is there anything I need to get any information to get from this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way once it downloads it can give you an accurate duration and if it’s not actually audio file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can consider that a failed download and then show it in the UI and maybe try to retry it later or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now with that you can be pretty sure that what you’re getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like as soon as it was downloaded it was tested in the thing that opens audio files. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Well I know you’ve got the accidental delete by scrubbing complaint before and I think you’ll get it again. So maybe, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like you got it from a couple of people in the beta. Maybe you can, you’ll check your email to see if it comes up more often. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I still say that scrubbing around in a downloaded episode should never
⏹️ ▶️ John cause that episode to be deleted. Despite the fact that yes, I agree that when you’re done playing the episode, having it be
⏹️ ▶️ John automatically deleted is pretty much what people want to do. But me moving my thumb around or
⏹️ ▶️ John even hitting the fast forward button should never cause that episode to be. Because if I am on the plane, everything’s downloaded,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m listening to something, and at the beginning of the episode, they make a reference to something at the end, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I want to skip to the end and see what they’re referring to. And I go skip to the end, it gets deleted, like I wanted to listen to that two hour podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m in a plane with no Wi-Fi and I can’t. Like scrubbing, using the scrubber does not
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like it should be something that causes data loss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but because like…
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you just wait to see what the feedback is. Like maybe I’m the only one, there was like three, two or three
⏹️ ▶️ John other people who had similar comments in the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’ve had it happen. I’ve had it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, just, if it’s a problem, you’ll find out. Because right now, like when the people download it on day one, maybe they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John notice. Once they use it for a week or so, you’ll find out what the real percentage is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, one thing I did about, in like the second or third beta, I exchanged the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that before it was continuous, as soon as you would drag it around, it would seek to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you just held your finger over and dragged to the right, it would just, it would eventually, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as soon as you hit the far right edge, bam, deleted the podcast. The way it’s released now and the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was about a third of the way into the beta, is it’s momentary, or rather, you know, so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to touch down, drag it around, as you’re dragging it around, it doesn’t actually seek
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you release it. So you in order to hit the end and delete the file on the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to drag it to the end and release It while it’s at the end to actually have that happen
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah But like when you’re trying to get to like the last 30 seconds of a two-hour podcast and your big
⏹️ ▶️ John thumb is covering like the time Stamp and you can’t really you know It’s easy to accidentally even release
⏹️ ▶️ John do you mean just to take a look at what the time stamp is and not realize you’ve hit The end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s fair. I mean what you’re identifying is Definitely not ideal. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question is is whether the alternatives are worse. Like whether the alternative complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually overall worse. And I don’t know the answer to that. I’m sure there’s ways I can improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that I haven’t thought of yet. But adding this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different state of episodes of this purgatory state, which would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be confusing. A lot of people would never even realize they could go back and get them and the story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would be very upset by it and it would be more work and things would be more complicated and there’d be more weird bug edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case potential. So like…
⏹️ ▶️ John Orange people would never know. Anyway, you can always make it a setting in that case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s five minutes. You deleted in fact five minutes out. The other weird thing that like, I mean, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John limited space for navigation here, but like I wanted to show my wife the directory today
⏹️ ▶️ John and I had to think, now where was the directory under? Because if you look at the top, it’s icon that really should be a gear, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Download. Oh no, no. Add a playlist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a plus. I agree with the icon. I don’t like the gear. Well, that’s not fair. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a perfectly nice icon. I’m just saying that gear is the symbol for settings. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I had to think, well, it’s not going to be under downloads, because it’s a directory. The little plus thing with the
⏹️ ▶️ John document, I have to keep reinforcing to myself that that means add. That’s add playlist, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. And so the plus is, well, by a process of elimination, it has to be the plus
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the directory. That makes sense because you’re adding a podcast kind of but like it’s like I
⏹️ ▶️ John expect that to be like the search or whatever But it’s also the directory Anyway, my wife searched for ATP and didn’t find this
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. That’s her bug report. You already got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one, too, though Oh, it’s probably somewhere in my It’s now my 590 emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John some someone I mean, you know, someone tweeted My wife showed it to me and I said take a screenshot and send it to Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use bug shot put a big red arrow. It’ll be side I think she actually did email you about it But anyway, that that has to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with like we have to put ATP somewhere in our metadata or description or something for that To work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know You’re toast Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well the other option is when you launch the application just have a gigantic big subscribe to a TV button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s already in the directory. It’s it’s in it’s in the tech category, which is the top left category in the directories
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Anyway, that’s that’s that’s plenty for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now See, the important thing here is that I shipped before FastText’s update for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot believe I beat you. To be honest, I’ve worked on FastText like once, maybe twice since iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out. But that doesn’t negate your point, which is that you wrote, what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three quarters of an application in the time that I couldn’t basically just recompile for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the best. I’m so happy. you first joked about that it was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months ago. Oh probably. And I thought for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure oh yeah. I thought for sure I’d make it but I just haven’t I haven’t found the time. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah that makes me so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did it to myself I can’t even be upset. Well certainly not at you anyway because I did it myself.