75: You Had Your Moment
24 Jul 2014Summer amusements, server-side parsing, UI meets the real world, sapphire, and the Apple/IBM partnership.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: John visits Six Flags
- Follow-up:
- Overcast week one update
- Server side vs. local feed crawling
- XML wonkiness
- UI Changes in 1.0.1
- What should the rewind and fast-forward buttons do in a podcast app?
- Episode 1 of the Debug Epic with Nitin Ganatra
- More on priority podcasts
- Sapphire iPhone 6
- Overcast week one update
- Apple & IBM Partner in the Enterprise
- Post-show:
- Keeping devices & sceens pristine
- Used cars, kids, dings, and knicks
- John criticizes recent showbot changes
- TV Talk
- Which Mike Judge creations are funnier than others
- Halt and Catch Fire
- Silicon Valley
- Veep
Sponsors:
- Cotton Bureau: High-quality, design- and tech-focused T-shirts. Get 15% off any order in July with code ATP15 at checkout.
- Squarespace: A better web starts with your website. Use promo code ATP for 10% off.
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, how was the Six Flags the other day?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it water or not water? I guess not
⏹️ ▶️ John water? We went to the water part, but I didn’t go in the water part. I was the pack mule for the day, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I was carrying the backpack with everyone’s like, you’re not allowed to bring food in, but like, you know, the water
⏹️ ▶️ John bottles that we sold in the park and all the possible bathing suits and towels for the
⏹️ ▶️ John water things, which is fine. Like I was willing to be the pack mule, but like, I’m too old to be spending
⏹️ ▶️ John seven hours just walking around on hot black asphalt. It wasn’t like, it was in the 90s, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t like super hot or super humid, but it doesn’t matter. It just wears you down. Like I was, I was hunting for shade. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a dumpster. There must be shade on one side of that dumpster. Let me crouch in the shade while my kids wait on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, two hour line to go on a roller coaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, are you a, oh no, you’re not a roller coaster person. Cause you get motion sick. Nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ John No roller coasters is I’m not a teacup person. Teacups are the worst ride in the entire amusement park because
⏹️ ▶️ John that is repeated motion to puke your brains out. Right? roller coasters over 90 seconds. It doesn’t matter what they can do to you
⏹️ ▶️ John in 90 seconds. You’re fine. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like roller coasters?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like them in general, because I feel like I’ve gone on. I’ve experienced everything there is to experience on a roller coaster from
⏹️ ▶️ John a thrill perspective. And now the risk reward ratio is way off because I don’t want to go on these rides run
⏹️ ▶️ John teenagers that were the risk of death. And what is what is my reward? To have an experience that I’ve already had before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not anything new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the most John answer I’ve ever heard. I feel like you need to slide that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John somehow. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey family going on. Because like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John teenagers running these things. They’re not well maintained. And Six Flags is not Disney and you know accidents happen
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time and it’s like that’s a tiny risk but then for the reward it’s like why am I doing this? Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not you know. So anyway my kids go on them. They can have all the experiences that you have. I feel like I’ve already done all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there anything at an amusement park that you are amused by?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the roller coasters. I enjoy the ride on a good roller coaster but I just always think about like
⏹️ ▶️ John all I can do is like look at the machinery and I look at the 12 year olds running the thing like It’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll see. I mean, just wait until Adam’s old enough to go on these things. You’ll be like, he’s going to go, I want to go on the roller coaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be like, do you really want to go on it? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’ve seen the machinery. Have you seen the people running it? Like it’s like it’s just there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no adult supervision and the maintenance on these things is not great. Like it’s not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fantastic. I’m sure I’ll feel the same way. And so I could start driving, but at least, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John If something goes wrong in a roller coaster, there’s nothing there to save you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, except the like quadruply redundant systems that are keeping you on the track.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there that’s what they tell you. No, these are just ancient Ricky. The best thing was that my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to go on like that have a roller coaster there called the cyclone, which is the name that they were used because there’s six flags
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a wooden coaster and it was closing July 20th. So I was there what like four
⏹️ ▶️ John or five days ago or whatever. So that’s when they were closing the ride. like it won’t be the last one to ride it and it looked like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was a roller coaster as well
⏹️ ▶️ John like paint is peeling and I’m watching the roller coaster go around and seeing the thing sway and bend they’re like oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to sway and bend that’s what wooden coasters do it’s like yeah no thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah we’re gonna ride it right before everyone decides it’s no longer worth maintaining for safety reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly and I was like well today it’s fine but tomorrow will be closed like what’s the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey today and tomorrow exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not yeah anyway we all survived and you
⏹️ ▶️ John from that experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do we want to talk about overcast for a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we have to oh i had this one this one that i wanted to answer um i mean i have to answer other questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want but you know that i don’t want to like totally make everyone sick of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no you had your moment you’re done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly you made me have my moment i wasn’t i was going to give it like 10 minutes on the show i know i’m just giving you a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So there was one thing a listener named John wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, kind of curious if you could talk about how weird it is that you have to do so much server side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work to do a podcast client. The reader guide doesn’t have to deal with this stuff. There’s a whole group of web based RSS processors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people can use for syncing. It seems wasteful that each indie podcast developer has to reinvent the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they’re differentiating themselves on usually has nothing to do with the server side work, but the client features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what he’s asking about is things like how we have, you know, we used to have Google Reader as a big sync service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before that, everyone just crawled their own feeds from their RSS readers. After Google Reader’s death, we now have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Feed Wrangler and Feedly and stuff like that, other, you know, sync services. And so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to, if you just want to write a feed reader, you don’t have to write the whole server side yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, you probably shouldn’t write any server side code, you should probably just use these sync services. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, basically, why isn’t there one of those for podcasts? And I think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few reasons for that. First of all, there’s, I mean, I’m sure you could go to underscore David
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Smith and say, hey, I want to make one of these based on a feed wrangler. And I’m pretty sure either that’s possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or he would let you do it like either it’s already there. Or you could just ask him and he’d be like, Okay, sure. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure most of these sync services, if they don’t already support that wouldn’t have a problem with you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that. I think the bigger question, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is… I think there’s two big questions here. Why do it yourself? And why use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a server-side model at all? And I think both of those are very good questions. I mean, why do it yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is applicable to lots of things. And the number one answer to that is because I’m me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t trust anyone, and I don’t like third-party dependencies, much to a fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The simple fact is, when I make things, I make things with the intention of them lasting a long time. or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s another story. But I want them to last for a long time. And I look at when I first started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instapaper in 2008. What was the common wisdom at the time? If I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to base on some other service, what service would that have been in 2008? Because Instapaper is still running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. And if I would have based the whole thing on the original Facebook app platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think was coming out around that time, where would that be today? Stuff like that. Basing yourself on on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else’s entire service, what if your entire business was making Twitter clients? This is a very real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that’s happened to a lot of people in our industry. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can say, Oh, why don’t you just build it on X? But over time, X will go away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or change in a way that makes it impossible for you to keep doing that. And the question is, do you plan to still be around at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time? And something you make now might be around longer than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I was starting Instapaper in 2008, I don’t think I thought it would still be around in 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably hoped it would, but I’m sure that was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my mindset at the time of, I better make decisions now that will last at least seven years or whatever. You know, six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. I can’t do math when I’m podcasting. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to realize the ground shifts constantly in this business, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can find some stable ground to stand on, you probably should. And so, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means building mostly your own stuff on just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on very stable, long-standing, boring things that don’t shift around. Things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux and your own servers. Things like old languages like PHP and Perl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Ruby and Python. These are all well-established languages. It’s a pretty safe bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write something in Python and host it on Linux and have the database be Postgres or MySQL these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a pretty safe bet. So anyway, that’s one reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it yourself. And then the second question is, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a server-side based infrastructure at all? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t a clear win with that. It’s a design decision, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like a technical design decision. a lot of advantages to it, there’s a lot of disadvantages to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I chose to do it because I was okay with the disadvantages. The disadvantages, of course, being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to write the whole thing, first of all. And you also have to support servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a whole class of problems that you then have to deal with whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you support a service, a website service. And that’s even if you run it on something like Azure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still have to support all of that in some way. Maybe you don’t have to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the servers going down if it’s on one of these abstract platforms, but you still have to support like, oh, well, they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a change and all of a sudden they’re requiring this. Or all of Azure is down for the next 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can’t do anything about it. Like I’m not saying that, you know, I’m not to pick on them. I mean, like that happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S3 all the time. That happens to EC2 all the time. Like this, that happens to these big cloud services where the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service has a problem or like a quarter of it will just go down. An Amazon data center will just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreachable for 20 minutes. And there’s nothing you can do about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s your problem. It isn’t your fault, but it’s your problem. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, this is a diversion, but any kind of service that you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t build a service, you might rely on something like iCloud to do your syncing. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the service. It’s just not yours. You still have all those problems to deal with. You just can’t do anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. So all those problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to accept. I’ve done it a lot before. I know what’s involved in hosting servers. It only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets easier with time. So I was fine doing it eight years ago. I’m even more fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it now. It’s even easier and cheaper than ever. So that’s all fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the advantages of what this allows me to do is not only things like have a web player, the obvious stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but things like fix crawling errors without shipping an app update. if there were certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeds, I wasn’t parsing correctly, because they use crazy MIME types. One of them use an XML header that left out the M.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just an Excel document. And I’m supposed to think of that. There’s all sorts of crazy, stupid stuff people do in feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve been crawling podcast feeds for almost a year. But there’s still… Once I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real users, they added way more feeds than what I had. And so there’s still new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems I’ve run into. And I didn’t have to ship an app update to fix them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how do you handle the one-off feed exceptions, for lack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a better word? And I don’t mean like, you know, a code exception. What I mean is, well, the people at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP, they don’t know how to make an XML file. So I need to handle specifically the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feed at this URL differently. Like, do you have a series of if-else’s, a switch statement, or do you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something a lot more clever than that? I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the latter. You assume wrong. wrong. So far, I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little about this. So the XL feed, I have not fixed yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s like, again, it’s faced with this problem of what do you do? Do you special case it? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have a list of conditions and you just do a streaming place of question mark XL version equals 1.0? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change that to the right thing? Like, you know, what do you do? So far, I haven’t quite figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out yet. What I have instead, most of the problems were people using crazy wrong content types for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosures. one thing I do. I don’t support video. And so I have a white list of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are the content types that I support. And then I map them all to whether this is generally MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or MP4 format. And certain people mark their enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as text HTML. Which they’re not. They’re like MP3s, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say content type text HTML. And they expect that to work. So I have to do crap like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for that I just have like, you know, a list of content types that I accept anyway that I know aren’t videos and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. So server-side lets me do stuff like that. It also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lets me do things like keep the app code very simple. And there’s all sorts of benefits for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like having to pull a whole bunch of feeds all the time and then that uses a bunch of data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and battery life on your device, stuff like that. Fast updates, you pull a bunch of feeds at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, one of the biggest benefits is my app does not have to know XML and does not to parse feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The server can just crawl everything in all of its crappy condition, normalize it all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strip out the stuff the app doesn’t even need, and then send the app small normalized JSON blobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it can decode very easily. So it lets me do more work on the server side, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more work in a higher level language that allows me to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like string processing much more easily and, you know, has all sorts of built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normalization. I have the whole power of Iconv, and so I can convert even character sets and solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those kind of problems server-side very easily. So it’s more of a division
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of labor. It’s not that the app wouldn’t need all this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to put all that logic somewhere, and I’ve chosen to put much of it on the server where it’s easier to update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, in some cases, easier to write. Then the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can focus more on the UI and not have to deal with some crazy new feed that’s a one off exception.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. I just didn’t know if you were going into like, some crazy design pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whose name escapes me where basically each of these one offs is perhaps in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encapsulated in a class and you just run through a series of classes to say, Oh, does this does this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little one off care about this particular feed and you could go totally crazy down that road or you could have like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if else chain from hell, and that’s a different way of approaching I was thinking about this earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was curious how you handled that sort of thing. And yeah, it’s the same sort of problem I’m sure you had at Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with really weird DOM parsing, trying to find the bits that you cared about, which that you used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey XPath, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, for yeah, for Instapaper, I went through a few things. The very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first text parser was actually an XSL document. And because my previous job in Pittsburgh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did crazy things with XSL, and I knew it extremely well. And for the purpose of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parsing through a DOM and outputting something as a result, it’s really good. It’s a specially suited language for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task. Yeah, if you’ve seen the past, it is very good. Yeah, like it does things that if you just have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a DOM interface and a programming language, like there are certain entire classes of problems for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which XSL is just way, way easier to use. And in many cases, really fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so yeah, inspaper referred then I did a dom thing that I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XPath and I ended up with like a big dom crawling parser that would like it would like step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the dom and tag everything with scores and then it would have XPath to do things with special rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I had a thing where you could like you could say okay for this site this is the XPath for the title
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the XPath for the body strip anything matching this XPath stuff like that obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with feeds that’s a lot easier I do I do do run through the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes that are in podcast feeds. I run those through a bunch of parsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually to try to normalize them. So to do things like, like if there isn’t a P tag around the text,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put one around it. You know, some things just have one little quick line of text as their show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put a P tag around it so that way it renders the same way that things that use P tags do on the client side. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strip out inline style tags and certain like inline JavaScript things and things that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would mess up or are possible security holes on the client side. Strip all that out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and normalize stuff, remove empty paragraphs, remove the one-pixel GIFs and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the paragraph around them because it’s now empty, stuff like that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John about? If you find yourself writing lsifchains to handles variations in input
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re not writing a parser, you’re probably doing something wrong. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like. The solution is always write
⏹️ ▶️ John your own XML parser. No, no. I mean, I’m saying like if you’re doing a parser and you’re switching based on the token or something, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But in this case, you should never, don’t even get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where you’re writing the code. If it’s this feed, do this. If it’s that feed, do that. Especially when you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re going to be doing is parsing feeds. And the world of feeds is large. And the number of special
⏹️ ▶️ John cases is large. I would probably just do a series of.
⏹️ ▶️ John associated with each feed, you have a default parser, and then you have a series of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you run in order before you get to the default parser. And so then you could reuse. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John the text HTML thing is a common problem, one of your things is, one of your rules is fix broken MIME types.
⏹️ ▶️ John And another rule is add the M back in XML, right? And so you just apply those rules
⏹️ ▶️ John to each podcast. So then that way, when if 700 feeds have the bad MIME type, you can use that
⏹️ ▶️ John one rule to fix all of them. If one feed has the missing M in XML, you just do one more rule to that. But anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John not an LSF chain. Oh, yeah, of course. That’s not Casey, because he was offering that as like, in case anyone’s listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do that, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, I wasn’t being serious about that, for God’s sakes. I would definitely do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably very similar to what you described, John. But I was curious, because Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tends to kind of do the down and dirty approach occasionally. And I was curious what you chose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially early on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of the other day, I was thinking about handling weird feeds and stuff, and if you have access
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I don’t know if you do, if you could get access to the iTunes catalog, I suppose you could with like screen
⏹️ ▶️ John scraping iTunes or doing whatever, but a good exercise for your feed parser would have
⏹️ ▶️ John been, I’m going to parse and normalize every single podcast feed
⏹️ ▶️ John available on iTunes. And then make sure the results conform to something reasonable, and then you would
⏹️ ▶️ John have found many, many exceptions. I just don’t know if you have access to that corpus of data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by a new sponsor. It’s Cotton Bureau.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we had… When we were making t-shirts for this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after we made our t-shirts, we had tons of people recommend that we should have gone with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cotton Bureau. And I took a look and honestly, it looks pretty good to me. Cotton Bureau with a t-shirt printer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing where you upload a design and then and people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can then preorder it, kind of like Kickstarter. You know, you can preorder your shirt and then if they get enough preorders, they ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and they print them and they ship them, which is great because nobody wants to deal with t shirt sales in other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, like having to like get a bunch of t shirts printed with your own money up front,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get boxes of 1000 shirts shipped to your house and then have people like that have to be doing order fulfillment for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for yourself. You know, if you have like a podcast, you might sell t shirts. a pain in the butt. Nobody wants to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cotton Bureau is, in their words, of the internet. They came out of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group called United Pixel Workers. I have a few of their t-shirts, actually. And the desire to help their designers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and partners make and sell t-shirts. In the past, they’ve worked with Dribbble, with 3B’s, so it must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be good. Rodeo, RDO, is it RDO? Stephen Hackett would probably tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He used to have a show about streaming music I’m guessing it’s RBO, Lauren
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brichter, Jeff Atwood, and more. Cotton Bureau shirts are soft, tagless, and the highest possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. Cotton Bureau is a rejection of the contests and gimmicks that some sites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to create demand. They require only 12 preorders, which is the minimum necessary to cover their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs, to print a shirt. They’re brutally honest about what they’re doing and why, as you can see on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their blog. Bureau’s previous work includes Tapbots, The Incomparable, RealMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pacific Helm, Nevin Murgon, Buzz Anderson, and more great designers than you can shake a stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, all selling t-shirts featuring everything from coffee and bacon to sports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop culture, and goofy animals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many great shirts are currently on Cotton Bureau, including the Future Friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tee, which donates all proceeds to Archive.org. Even by the time this is published,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will even have a Kennebalt t-shirt. Coming soon to Cotton Bureau,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have upcoming tees from The Incomparable, maybe even a Bionic tee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly because Matt Alexander from Need blazed the trail of ATP being a fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor, which I still find kind of funny. And they might maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hint, hint, possibly have a Roderick on the Line shirt coming in the future, but I cannot confirm or deny that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to Cotton Bureau dot com. I honestly, Bureau is one of those words I never know how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spell. I always misspell it, so I’m going to spell it for you. Cotton, you know how to spell cotton. Bureau is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco B-U-R-E-A-U dot com. Cotton Bureau dot com. Check out the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fame there. If you see a previously made shirt that you like, you can actually sign up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vote for it to be brought back. If they have enough votes, they will bring it back and do a second printing for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cotton Bureau just celebrated their first birthday in June. They plan on being around and staying proudly independent for a long time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come. They add amazing new shirts every day. So check it out. Go to cottonbureau.com, browse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, see if you like anything, buy it. If you want to upload one and make your own shirt, go for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very high quality shirts. You can get 15% off any order in July when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use the code ATP15 at checkout. Once again, CottonBureau.com, 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off any order in July by using the code ATP15. Thank you very much to Cotton Bureau
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show. Really good company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anything else about Overcast? There are a couple other bullets here that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Well, I figured Marco should go through the UI changes he made or is making
⏹️ ▶️ John if he wants to and you talked about them on Twitter already so you might as well talk about your reasoning in more
⏹️ ▶️ John than 140 characters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right so basically I’m trying to make this stuff useful to more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides just me and people who want to hear about everything Overcast so please forgive me as I try to stumble through and generalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to be more applicable to possibly the work that you the listener are doing. Anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the first things I did was I got a few notes and this came up in the beta a little bit but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t pay enough attention to it. I got a few notes from people saying the font is too small and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I run everything through an appearance manager class where I set all my defaults of okay this is the main font name this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the you know secondary font name and I have all these methods for things like you know the preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco font for you know because like you know how iOS 7 has all this dynamic text stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it has like things like preferred font descriptor for style and you can say you know UI font text style body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headline Caption one, caption two. I have an appearance class that accepts those same arguments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks at the system dynamic text setting to get an idea for how big the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system thinks this text should be, and then returns to the caller my fonts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the system font settings and based on those styles. And so I can do things like specify, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you fetch font style caption two, always return the small caps font.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the default color for that font should be this. Here’s the size for it based on the system size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco etc. And that’s why I… That’s one of the reasons why Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so easily supports dynamic text. Because I wrote all this crap with iOS 7 in mind and everything else. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also had a master font adjustment. And I had set that to negative one. So that any font, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checked through the system mechanism. And if the app requested a 14 point font,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would actually return a 13 point font. Because I was testing out various fonts a year ago last summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out what my font would be and I was trying to normalize the sizes between them. Certain fonts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look bigger and I’m sure there’s official terms for this and things like the X height and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. But I’m not an expert on that kind of stuff. But I can tell you certain fonts look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better or bigger than others and so it’s hard to make direct comparisons. So I normalized them all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for this font I settled on negative one being its fair comparison size. and then design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole app that way, ship the whole app that way, everyone’s saying, hey, you know what, this is kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s a little bit too small, you know, let me fix this. So I increased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font size by one pixel by changing that negative one to a zero. Now everything looks better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s fine. I realized like, yeah, it sucks to lose the extra one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to two characters on each line of title, but I realized that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fonts were a little too small before it does look better now and it is a little more accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Anyway, secondarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I replaced the skip back and skip forward button icons with the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple number in the circle with the little back forward symbol kind of on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tail of the circle. If you listen to any podcast app ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no actually that’s not true, if you listen to Apple’s podcast app and you look in control center or even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they even have those on their icons on the buttons I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know either it doesn’t no one no one uses that up the biggest podcast app in the world by far
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they do because I recognize the icons and where else would I have seen them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right exactly so anyway there Apple has established a standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon for skip back and skip forward by X number of seconds that is different from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double triangles slash double triangles with the bar at the end kind of thing that tape players and CD players
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did and I had I’ve been using the double triangle icons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on overcast now playing screen and I decided to change that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people were confused as to what those did a lot of people were writing in asking me to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 30 second skip button to the app even though the app already had that feature they just had never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tapped that button
⏹️ ▶️ John I got tweeted that I was doing tech support for overcast for people tweeting as I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that reply I’m like you know this came up during the beta too and you said yeah but the arrows look better and then
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody pursued it further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and the arrows do look better
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right they do but I mean it’s always the but right exactly in the beta
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use five people say hey I can’t tell how far back or forward
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is gonna go or I forget or I don’t know that features there and you answer those five ten people done and done
⏹️ ▶️ John wipe your hands of it but luckily when you release to the app to everybody it becomes clear very quickly that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more than five people you have to explain this to. And so like I said, I had to explain it to some people. So that’s that’s where I draw the line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I had multiple people tell me that they they had just never touched those buttons on the now playing screen because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they assumed they would like, you know, fast forward or skip to the next track, which no one ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to podcast app like, overcast actually has no control. That means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skip to the next track or skip to the previous track or the horrible annoying behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the previous track button in podcast apps usually which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally in most podcast apps including apples I think I think this still the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you push the previous track button it does what CD players do when you push the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track button which is before it goes to the previous track on the first press it just goes to the beginning of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current track which loses your position in a podcast which is horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I I decided there was no place for that control in a podcast app. And so I just don’t have those controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything like if you have a car, but like fast forward, fast rewind buttons, any kind of integration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headphone clicker, anything that normally triggers a previous track, next track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action in Overcast does those second skip buttons instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I noticed that today I was driving around and listening to the tail end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six hour debug epic with the dude from Apple that was on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps team whose name escapes me. Well, anyways. Yeah, Neaton Ganatra. Yes, thank you. And they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible. Like when I saw that there were six hours of this, I thought to myself, oh, this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey painful and I’m probably not going to listen to any of it. And my goodness, they’re incredible. They’re definitely worth listening to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the point is I hit the little button on my steering wheel to either fast forward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or rewind. I forget which one. enough. As I’m doing that, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope this does what I think it does. And then it did. And it was wonderful. So I don’t know if that was a deliberate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move on your part. I assume so. But it was a great, great, great call.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s like I told you, like there there literally is no code and overcast that can respond to a button click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with backtrack or forward track. Like there there is that doesn’t exist because I hate that behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can make an argument for skip to the next track. I can see the argument there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the previous track feature I think is awful and it skips the next track thing like I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to someone about that I’m not sure if he wants me to use his name, so I will default to no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know he was trying to argue for a next track button and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I can see an argument for that like like a show comes on and you know you’re in your car you’re driving or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that and you don’t want you you know you can’t easily play with the controls. A shot comes on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not what you want to hear at that moment, so you want to skip to the next one. I get that. But the question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, if I add something like that, where does it go? I’m not even talking about on the screen. The screen I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can figure out. I’m talking about if you have a headphone clicker, or a car control, or control center buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you only have like the seek back, seek forward spots or rolls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a control, where does a track, where does the next track button go? And, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t want to replace the skip forward 30 seconds button. It’s very frequently used. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, where does it go? I don’t think there’s a good answer to that. And so for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I’m not going to do it. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, priority podcasts, again, was written in the show notes document. I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on my show, we’re talking about priority podcasts and how I thought that that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be a thing, a separate place where it says select priority podcast, then go to a different place after you’ve done that to
⏹️ ▶️ John order the podcast that you have selected as priority podcast. And I always want
⏹️ ▶️ John them all to be priority podcasts. Lots of people don’t know what that means as they’ve been tweeting at me. That doesn’t mean that all podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John are the same priority. It’s not the same thing as not selecting any. Basically selecting, this is why it’s confusing, selecting something
⏹️ ▶️ John as a priority podcast merely means that now this podcast can be ordered. Now you can say this is my number
⏹️ ▶️ John one, this is my number two. a podcast but to participate at all in that ordering you
⏹️ ▶️ John must say it is a priority podcast and I’m making quotes with my fingers. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I always want all of them to be priority podcasts because I want to set an order for all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. Some people don’t want all of them to be priority they just want one two or three to be priority podcasts and the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of them too I’m assuming they sort by whatever you pick the order like whichever has the newest or oldest episode or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Whereas your you know your number one podcast will always be your number one podcast regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of what new episodes come out in your non-priority podcast. I wanted to revisit it because
⏹️ ▶️ John last show, we were just talking about the whole concept and who would want to have priority, non-priority, turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people. Now I just want to get back to the root of the problem, which is, why do I have to go to the separate place to elect
⏹️ ▶️ John things to participate in the priority podcast? And so I was trying to think of a UI. What I want
⏹️ ▶️ John is to select the podcasts that are part of a playlist and right on that screen where I’m selecting
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast, be able to sort them. And if I don’t sort them, they stay in sort of the unsorted
⏹️ ▶️ John bin at the bottom. And if I do sort them, they stay in the sorted section. And there’s not really a good analog that I
⏹️ ▶️ John could think of. Because it’s kind of like the Netflix queue, which is kind of like, you know, in Netflix, DVD, they’re all priority podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then it’s like a dividing line with the non-priority ones. It’s difficult to come up with a UI for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that would be clearer to people like this concepts that we’ve talked about and the
⏹️ ▶️ John people tweeted back and forth about. I’m not sure how many people understand all
⏹️ ▶️ John the nuances of how. I mean, I certainly didn’t and people tweeting me questions early And then all the nuances of how
⏹️ ▶️ John priority and non-priority podcasts interact with each other If you just had one screen that showed when you were making a playlist
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s all the podcasts that could participate in this playlist and some of them are sorted by priority and some of them are not and
⏹️ ▶️ John here They are and you could drag between those two regions in a big list or something I think that would make
⏹️ ▶️ John more sense and would save me a trip into the separate region for electing before I go back to the other region for sorting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s a fair idea idea there’s a big question mark there it’s too like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay you know how do you do this as you said I mean it’s it’s a hard problem to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure it’s a net win like if the current problem is a combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of if you know what you’re doing already like if you already understand these features then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s kind of annoying to have to go to two different places to do to do this thing you know to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new show to a podcast that wasn’t there and make a priority and put it in order with the other priorities. I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then the other problem is, you know, for people who don’t already understand this feature, this seems like it might even add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complexity to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the current division makes it harder to understand what the app is capable of. That’s what I’m getting at. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback that I’ve gotten on Twitter for people is that they’re not, that people won’t discover. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, as I said last show, I think the playlist creation stuff is the most important feature of the application to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it is not as discoverable as it could be, because people don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that process. Go over here, select these things. Now they’re eligible. Go over to this other place and order them and what
⏹️ ▶️ John that all means and the resulting sort of workflow of when podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John come in, where do they fall on my list of things that I’m playing? And the fact that they can essentially set up almost
⏹️ ▶️ John any reasonable ordering that they want by a combination of priority, non-priority podcasts and playlists, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is powerful. It’s the question is, how do you show people that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s possible without some crazy tutorial or some other thing like that? And right now, I think a lot of people don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do that with this app that they already have, because it’s not clear from the naming and from the interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I can’t think of any other analogous interface with this elective process. Then you go
⏹️ ▶️ John back to a different region, and the things you elected are now able to be manipulated in a new way in this other place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, and the whole concept of Playlist and Overcast is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a challenge for me to sell people on because I hear from so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people who all say, I’ve never used playlists before in my podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I don’t see the point. I don’t see why I need to use this. And it’s hard to… And in some cases, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the beta said that. And I told them, hey, you know what? Here’s how I use them. Why don’t you try it? See
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you like it. And every time the person has come back saying, oh my God, I love this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I use playlists. Now I get it you know now there’s a reason to use it and it’s hard for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for people to realize that that’s one of the reasons why as soon as you subscribe to at least two shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I create your first playlist for you as soon as you subscribe to any to enough shows where it would matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I create the all episodes playlist for you server side and I could sync to your account you can edit it you can delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it you can do every want but the first time you do that I create that for you to kind of force you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe just maybe click on that one time to see, hey, what is all episodes? That sounds convenient. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and, you know, I use the word playlist because that’s what everyone else uses because that’s what iTunes uses and people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, people are used to the idea of playlists. I would love if a different word would solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. I just don’t think a different word would solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not a playlist is a problem because people think like, why would I want to manually arrange? It sounds like what
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to do with my iPod shuffle and the whole, the whole idea is like, this is a hybrid smart playlist, regular playlist.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the best of both worlds combined. And then within the realm of these playlists,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I define it? I use the all episodes playlist. I have modified it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very close to what I want, minus all the prioritization and the exclusions and stuff that I do, and the manual
⏹️ ▶️ John reordering. It’s just a question of once they understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John playlists are good, they say, well, why? What can I do with them? And they get into that settings screen, which is probably one of the more intimidating
⏹️ ▶️ John settings screens in the app. And then understanding how can I get the result that I want?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think, again, if people say they only have
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two or three priority podcasts, if we force them to order all of them, would they have trouble?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is there a second class citizen type of show where they never want to bubble up?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like if you told anybody to say, rank all of your podcasts in order of how much you like them,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe when you get down to the bottom it’s weird. I feel like people could do a ranking.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if you need the two regions, but again, people have disagreed on that. I just think that if you forced everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort everything, they would have a very similar experience to the current one, where they sort one or two or three, and then have everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else in a bucket. But either way, an interface that makes it clear that you can do one or both of those things, or makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it clearer that you can do one or both of those things, would help a lot of people. Because like you said, I think a lot of people think that
⏹️ ▶️ John Playlist means more work for them, when it’s the exact opposite. It means less. It means almost no work. that let the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John do the work for you and all you have to do is launch the app and hit play and it will just go through the podcast in exactly the order that you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Right. I mean, it’s like I thought of the word like the word filter or something like that, like some other kind of word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but again, it’s overall like I still think playlist is the best word for this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and the fact that even even after people know playlist are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they still often are reluctant to use them because they never have used them in a podcast before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s just the kind of thing where I’m going to have to do my best. You’re right, that that the playlist editor screen is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not intuitive. I definitely have some things I can improve there. No question. I completely agree with you there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also I recognize the inherent complexity in this in this concept and these capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know that there is a way to make it easy enough to to to win
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over some of these people. But I don’t know. I’ll certainly play with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So why don’t you tell me about something that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week by Backblaze, our friends at Backblaze. Backblaze is so simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s five dollars a month for unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated online backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your files that are available anywhere on your iOS devices, if you have Android, I don’t think they have Android app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but who cares? You probably have an iOS device. I mean, let’s be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you disagree with that, please email Casey. No! So anyway, Anyway, Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online backup, really five bucks a month per computer. And so for most of you, that’s five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks a month. What makes us more interesting. So online backup, man, there’s there are so many reasons you should be doing online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup. I’ve used Backblaze myself for years long before they were a sponsor. I’m very glad they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a sponsor now because it makes it easier for me to talk about them because I actually use them. They’re fantastic. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite online backup service. I’ve tried other ones. They are by far my favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just works like your uploads are unthrottled, which is great. Like I had a throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue with another service where I can upload with this awesome files connection at 65 megabits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second, which is awesome. But this other one wouldn’t take it, they would take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it at like, you know, 200 kilobits a second or something and backblaze will upload. It’ll accept the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files as quickly as you’re willing to send them. So you know, and you can devote certain percentage your bandwidth, but usually the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client’s smart enough and you can just leave it running and it’ll do the right thing. Online backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really important because you never know what could happen. You should always have local backups too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s easy and fast to recover from them, but worst-case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you always know that you have this online backup ready if you need it. And you never know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if there’s like a fire or a flood or you know like if you’re in an apartment, what if the apartment above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like they have a water leak and then it leaks all over your computer and destroys everything on your desk, including your time machine drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That happens that you know ask people that happens all the time. And so it’s always good to have off-site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backups to protect against things that happen to your dwelling and therefore all the stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged into your computer. But off-site, you know, usually everyone’s like, oh yeah, I’m gonna put something at my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parents house and I’ll cycle it out every few months and then you forget to do it and that’s out of date and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can maybe restore from the backup you made one six years ago and that’s no good. So back plays you could just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all in the cloud. It’s great. They also have things like email notifications. They can notify you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they haven’t heard from your computer in a while. So that way, you know, you aren’t caught off guard. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great service. Go to backblaze.com. That’s backblaze.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can get a 15 day free trial with no credit card required. All you got to do is enter an email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and password and begin. That’s it. There’s no add ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges, five bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per computer per month. That’s it. Unlimited, unthrottled backup. I got like three terabytes up there. Simplest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup. Go to backblaze.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring our show once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should probably briefly touch on the Sapphire iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six screen that may not be Sapphire at all. Is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show going to be all follow up? I think it might be. It’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that we talked an episode or two ago about a video that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we weren’t familiar with whose name I’ve forgotten again.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I put the link in there so we can give him credit this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Thank you. It is Marcus Brownlee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that a Francis first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going with Marcus. Hopefully I’m right. He put up a second video, which was actually, I liked the first video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I thought the second one was even better. And basically, he used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of science to explain why the screen is not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made of pure sapphire. And I don’t know if you guys have any commentary on that. We’ll link it in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, but it’s worth checking out. It’s a few minutes long. It was really good. Yeah, it was really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John good. I think a little bit of science is the correct modifier for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however. Well, so what he did was basically, so in the last video, he had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this leaked part that was purported to be an iPhone 6 display cover glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he showed in the first video all these crazy stress test of like taking a knife to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it bending it so it was almost like a u-shape all this crazy stuff and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not scratch or crack or shatter it was just it was just perfect even after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like bending it into you it still would not shatter and he’d end you know the knife test and everything would not scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so the problem is as we as I’ve learned and as I think most people have learned if they look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look into it at all pure sapphire crystal is extremely strong but it is not flexible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that right? Does that match what you guys have found?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what my understanding is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it was based on the incredible flexibility of this panel that was being shown in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video, it made it pretty unlikely that it was pure sapphire. There’s also some concerns people have brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up who are more familiar with manufacturing and stuff like that, that an all sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel of that size would also be pretty expensive and so it makes it less likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not totally ruled out but it makes it less likely that Apple would use an all sapphire panel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so what this guy did, Marcus I hope I’m pronouncing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name right, anyway what he did was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he took the panel again after reading these you know people saying hey that might not be sapphire and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sapphire has a a very high hardness on that on like that diamond hardness scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so he took sandpapers of materials that should be able to scratch or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch Sapphire and showed it and actually scratched up. I feel bad for the iPhone 5s he used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He had an iPhone 5s that he actually… Yeah. Oh my goodness. He took sandpaper through a 5s because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5s we know has a non-Sapphire glass cover on the screen, but a Sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home button cover over the Touch ID home button that’s pure sapphire and so he took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these sandpapers to it and showed that you know they would scratch the glass but they would not scratch the sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch ID cover so and then that same thing would scratch this new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaked part but not quite as much as it scratched the iPhone 5s so it appears as though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the this part that he has is not pure sapphire because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it scratched more easily than the Touch ID home button, but it is much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more strong against resisting scratches than the glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s currently on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason I said he was using a little bit of science in this test, there are a couple reasons. First, the
⏹️ ▶️ John sandpaper he was using, I’m not entirely sure that 100% of the particles glued
⏹️ ▶️ John onto that piece of paper are of the material advertised on the sandpaper. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea what the quality control is on sandpaper things. I know that kids who are allergic to nuts can’t eat
⏹️ ▶️ John food that is manufactured in the same factory as nuts, which makes me believe that there’s a large possibility that
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be particles other than the ones advertised on those pieces of sandpaper. So right away, it’s not a particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled test for hardness, scientifically speaking. Second,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that the Touch ID sensor is somehow pure sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ John or solid sapphire, or that is the only material that it’s made out of. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John where that’s coming from and the way he tested it by kind of digging his finger into the little thing with the sandpaper and
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to scratch it in the other little region. It’s not, it’s better than not testing it at all, but it’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing as being able to rub the sandpaper on the giant surface of the 5s because it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of down and a little divot and you don’t really have enough room to scratch back and forth and it was hard to tell if he was making
⏹️ ▶️ John any dent at all in that thing there. The most clear test obviously was
⏹️ ▶️ John same piece of sandpaper 5s versus this new thing new thing better that’s what we were missing in the first video because
⏹️ ▶️ John all these impressive things he did with it within the first video the question was always alright fine so how
⏹️ ▶️ John would a 5 how would an existing iPhone screen fair on those exact same tests maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly as sturdy and what he was basically saying when he talked about the hardness scale is yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the regular iPhone screen probably would have fared just as well because he was using soft metals that weren’t going to scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John even glass no matter what. So this was a much better test. Still doesn’t tell us
⏹️ ▶️ John what we want to know, is this really the iPhone 6 thing? In terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of the pureness or real or full sapphire or whatever, as I said on past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed obvious that if they’re going to make something as big, it was always going to have to either be a laminate or use some deposition process.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can’t tell which one of those things they did, But like Marco said, the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John it being solid 100% sapphire all the way through would mean it would be much too brittle. This thing was obviously not brittle.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just a question of how thick is that top layer of sapphire. Is it just atomized
⏹️ ▶️ John and heated and then deposited on there through some process, like sort of coated
⏹️ ▶️ John with it? Is it a separate thin layer of sapphire that’s bonded to it in some way? Are there multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John sapphire layers? We have no idea what the manufacturing is. I’m sure if Apple wants to brag about it, they’ll show us a cool
⏹️ ▶️ John slide and maybe some robots something and some layer sandwich things who knows what they’ll say but uh
⏹️ ▶️ John this video was more informative than the last uh and i was kind of disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John to see to yeah i mean if we’ve thought about it for a while you know kind of disappointed to see how easily
⏹️ ▶️ John sandpaper scratches even the new one because he wasn’t even rubbing that hard and it’s like well at least at one point
⏹️ ▶️ John the video he said unless you have uh high quality sandpaper in your pocket you don’t have to worry about this. Well, you know one thing that does
⏹️ ▶️ John go in pockets? Sand. If you go to the beach,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have sand in your pocket. And so if the idea is like, this iPhone is indestructible, I don’t have to worry about anything
⏹️ ▶️ John unless there happens to be, you know, I mean, maybe it’s because I’m from Long Island and I just expect to have sand in all my clothing pockets, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I still would not put a naked iPhone in my pocket with sand because you don’t know what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mixed in with it. Anyway, I look forward to the day someday of being able to get a caseless iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John that is basically impervious to scratches in any normal condition. This one looks
⏹️ ▶️ John much more sturdy than the five s by a long shot. But I was kind of depressed to see how
⏹️ ▶️ John easily he could scratch even the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Step one should be you should get an iPhone at all, and then you can worry about it scratching
⏹️ ▶️ John us. What baby steps we’re getting there. We’ll see what the iPhone six looks like. If I could get one, it’s conceivable.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I wish I had one right now for Yosemite handoff testing so I didn’t have to take my wife’s five s and upgrade it to iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John eight, which I’ve still still have not done yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you want to take a bet right now on whether you will get one? I’m gonna bet no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like 50-50. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to take that bet?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’m not gonna bet it. Why would I, first of all, why would anyone take a bet with me when I control the outcome?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you don’t control the outcome. Your neurosis
⏹️ ▶️ John does. No, that’s not accurate. The amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you bet controls the outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will bet you for nothing, just betting to be right. I will bet that you won’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see. Casey, do you think I’m gonna get one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to abstain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well then, now it’s just, alright, we’ll find out. We also don’t know what the product looks like at this point. You don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know whether you’re getting the big giant one or the regular one, so we have to just wait to see what’s what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, going back to the video just for a second, I still maintain that we don’t actually know whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any sapphire is involved with this thing at all. This could just be another type of material,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe something new from Corning, you know, they make their Gorilla Glass. don’t know like
⏹️ ▶️ John this so they could have used some sort of mass spectrometer or something just to actually tell you what elements are on the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like if you know I want to go full dr. drang on this like we have the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t actually find out what exactly what the screen is made out of if we cared but you know it’s just people doing
⏹️ ▶️ John bending stuff on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only thing that that we know that the only thing that people are basing this on is that Apple has built this giant sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plant in Arizona right or they’re invested in whatever they’ve done they’re involved in a big sapphire plant but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not be for this. That might be for more touch ID sensors. That might be for a potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iWatch cover or something like that. That could be for so many other things besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone cover glass. And so I really don’t think that we can assume yet. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s enough information to assume that Sapphire is being involved with the screen at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a bit early. We are also sponsored by our friends at Squarespace. Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the all-in-one platform that That makes it both fast and easy to create your own professional website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portfolio and or online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enter offer code ATP at checkout. A Better Web starts with your website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace is simple and easy. They have drag and drop content editing and blocks. You can add a new block to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the post, just drag it and drop it really simple. You can drag and drop around your style. You can change the way things look on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site. They have beautiful design that you can start with and customize. You can inject
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML and JavaScript all the way up to full graphical editing. They have responsive design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all your designs look great on any size device and they all look like your site. They don’t look like some canned design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you shrink down to iPhone size or anything like that. They have 24-7 support through live chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and email with representatives located in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. The plans start at just $8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month and that includes a free domain if you sign up for a whole year up front. Squarespace also features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commerce on all of their plans if you want to. You can add a store to your site. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell digital or physical goods. They have things like shipping, tracking, and everything else all built in, shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carts, all that stuff that you’d expect. Really great stuff with Squarespace commerce and that comes at no additional charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all of their plans if you want to use it. You can start a trial with Squarespace today with no credit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card required. A real free trial, no credit card. All you got to do is start building your website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide to sign up, you can make sure to use offer code ATP to get 10% off your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first purchase and to show your support for our show. Thank you very much to Squarespace for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your support. Once again, they support lots of our shows, lots of other people’s shows, and we really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciate that quite a lot from them. Thank you very much to Squarespace. A better web starts with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last week, when Marco was so selfish about the show and refused to move along from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overcast. There was some actually legitimate news about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and IBM. And we didn’t get a chance to talk about that last week. We should probably talk about it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what happened was Apple and IBM announced a partnership to I guess, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IBM is going to kind of sell and push Apple stuff in the enterprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that what’s a better summary of this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, so a lot of people were scratching their heads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this one. And for me, it was particularly interesting because my dad just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retired from IBM after a long, long time, just a few weeks ago. And unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even after pushing, he either didn’t have any insider information he could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share or refuse to if he did have it. But this is certainly an interesting partnership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an interesting, I don’t know, reacquaintance of a couple of companies that have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been kind of flirting with each other on and off for forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, John, what did you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John So in past shows and past podcasts, I’ve talked a lot about enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John entanglements and how, you know, even on this podcast, we defined enterprise software as software where the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who buys it is not the person who uses it. So the people who make it are motivated to to satisfy the buyer rather than the user, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the software is crappy. And enterprise entanglement is when a company
⏹️ ▶️ John starts deriving a lot of its profits or revenues or both from serving the enterprise, and then it becomes beholden to the
⏹️ ▶️ John small number of people who determine whether software is satisfactory to the enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than the large number of consumers who might buy our product. So it is worse to
⏹️ ▶️ John be beholden to a small number of companies and to a small number of powerful people in those companies. It makes your products
⏹️ ▶️ John worse, and then you get tied to them. like, you know, it’s like golden handcuffs. So that’s where you get most of your money from. This happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to Microsoft a lot. Some companies immediately just go completely off the deep end on this, like SAP and
⏹️ ▶️ John Oracle. And that’s all they do is they, you know, they don’t sign a contract for less than five figures
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, want them to be six, seven, or eight figures most of the time. And they have a huge sales
⏹️ ▶️ John force that goes out there to sell these contracts. And the software they make is terrible and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John hates it, but they stay in, but like, that’s the worst case scenario, right? So Apple is at the far other end of the spectrum. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have anything to do with these stupid enterprises. They don’t want to deal with companies like that. They don’t want their softwares to
⏹️ ▶️ John get worse. They don’t want their agenda, their products, their features, anything they do to be dictated to a small
⏹️ ▶️ John number of people anywhere, except for inside the company, obviously. And so for all this
⏹️ ▶️ John time, we’ll be talking about Apple doing this thing with the iPods and the iPhones and their personal computers. All this time,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, Apple doesn’t want to get into that business where you sell like exchange servers. And there was a brief dalliance with the XServe
⏹️ ▶️ John and OS X server that has mail servers and stuff like that, but their heart was never in it. They were never willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what enterprises want. They want service contracts. Does Apple gonna have value-added resellers? They’ve had that
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, but then they have their own official channels and they have their business liaisons. Like, you could tell
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is just never willing to do what it takes to serve the enterprise. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve talked to anybody who does IT in a big company, it’s like, my customers, my users,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially, the employees of the company want Apple hardware, but it’s such a pain in the ass to support, and Apple’s tools
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t that great, and getting anything from Apple is a pain, and depending on which reseller you go through, if you go through
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple directly, or, you know, I mean, Apple does what it has to do for the enterprise. It did all that stuff in like iOS 3
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it was to integrate with Exchange servers and to be better with the enterprise. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise app deployment for their app stores. Like they do, it’s not like they do nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they’re willfully hostile to it, but in general, their reputation in the enterprise is
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. That other companies do more for the enterprise than Apple. And it’s always been this thing. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John tough luck guys. Apple doesn’t want its company to be reshaped by contact
⏹️ ▶️ John with the enterprise, because direct contact with the enterprise will reshape your company. And so we’re just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John at this impasse. Apple doesn’t want to take this business. Microsoft currently has the business, but it’s not an
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting business to be in. Like nobody, even Google is kind of like half-hearted. Well, there’s Google Apps for Business.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could use that instead of Office and Exchange. But it’s like, nobody wants that business. It’s a crappy business,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, except for Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Microsoft. And Apple wasn’t willing to take it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’ve been languishing in this place, this weird place, where nobody wants BlackBerrys anymore. Everyone hates Exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John and SharePoint. But that’s what we all use, because no one is saying, oh, I want to take that business from Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to pervert my company to the needs of enterprise IT. It’s just poisonous
⏹️ ▶️ John if you like companies like Apple and don’t like companies like Oracle, as every
⏹️ ▶️ John right-thinking person should. So this deal is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple finally, the important thing here is Apple is finally saying, all right, we’ll take that business.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we don’t want to touch it directly. And now it’s too big. It’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John calculus must be, we shouldn’t just let Microsoft have this business by default. It shouldn’t just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to Oracle and IBM and say, like, why do they just get it by default? It’s a big business.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people who work at these companies want to use our products, we’re not willing to do what it takes directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to change our company to be an enterprise company. But now we are saying, we’re raising your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, all right, we’re going to go after that business. So no longer do all the other companies get
⏹️ ▶️ John it by default because Apple is just no good at this. And they’ve tapped IBM as their lucky partner
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, we’re not going to touch it directly. You touch it directly, but we’re going to sick you on them and say, go
⏹️ ▶️ John get them. Go make every single company, make them happy to use our products,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You sell them, you have the Salesforce out there doing all that thing, you do all those icky
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise deals. They complain to you, not us, right? You make the special
⏹️ ▶️ John applications so they can integrate iPads with their business and do all this other stuff or whatever. We don’t wanna deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when the customers complained to IBM that that was just the typical relationship between IT and
⏹️ ▶️ John vendor, but IBM will be like, well, we don’t control what Apple does with their OS. Like, oh, we’ll tell them,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll tell them you don’t like it when they upgrade too fast and screw over users. We’ll tell them that you want them to keep making the iPad 2
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, like whatever. But like, well, what can we do? It’s not us, they’re Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so IBM is the go-between there. And IBM, of course, gets the money off the top of that. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, get more business, because now they are, I think this is an exclusive relationship, they are the exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John gateway into the enterprise for all of Apple’s stuff. I’m not quite sure how this deal
⏹️ ▶️ John works in terms of the existing value-added resellers of Apple’s stuff and the existing retail
⏹️ ▶️ John chain and business relationships or whatever. But theoretically, at the time of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the press release announcement, it looks very much like Apple is now finally saying that it wants
⏹️ ▶️ John in on the enterprise business and the way it has found to do it without ruining its own, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ruining the company, ruining everything that’s good about the company is having a go between do all the dirty work for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you do realize that there is a Apple Salesforce directly targeting enterprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no. Yeah. You can like I mean, it’s it’s better than it was before like they will sell it You know, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do your volume discounts that like there’s the whole enterprise enterprise app score things They’ll do the service You know how to bring your stuff into
⏹️ ▶️ John that used to be the you have to bring your stuff to the Apple store to get a fix now they have you know there but The more
⏹️ ▶️ John you get into that business like they’re sort of dipping their toe in all these things It’s kind of like well Apple has that level
⏹️ ▶️ John kind has that but they’re not really good at it They’re not really engaged in it in the way these other companies are
⏹️ ▶️ John and so your choices were were, become engaged in it. Make this a big part of your business. Get serious
⏹️ ▶️ John about the enterprise. Or don’t do that. Have someone else do it for you. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of lets Apple continue to be Apple and be sort of wild and fancy free and run with flowers
⏹️ ▶️ John in its hair through the fields, while IBM has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John there signing these contracts and doing the support stuff and writing the custom applications for the big companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what IBM is doing anyway, right? So IBM’s more than happy to take this business.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it works, it is a very clever solution to get some of that money that has been going
⏹️ ▶️ John to these companies with, quote unquote, worst products for just decades,
⏹️ ▶️ John and without it changing what Apple is, without changing all
⏹️ ▶️ John the good things that are good about Apple for consumers and stuff. So I don’t know if that can work. Does adding
⏹️ ▶️ John a buffer make it OK and now it will work out? Or is there more to it than that? that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will always be defeated by the companies that are actually willing to do what enterprises
⏹️ ▶️ John want directly. And maybe IBM will not be able to convince people or not be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do enough on its own to make Apple more palatable to the enterprise. Like the past strategy was
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just make our stuff so good that IT companies want to choke down whatever we do. And we’ll do a little bit to support them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re never going to do what those other companies do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I don’t understand is I don’t see how this can really make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big difference until the support strategy changes pretty dramatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m looking at the press release and it says, and I’m quoting, mobile service and support. AppleCare for Enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will provide IT departments and end users with 24 seven assistance from Apple’s award winning customer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support group with on-site service delivered by IBM. And I can tell you that I I work in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty small firms and most of the reason that I’ve ever heard for us to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy Dells, which all the companies I’ve ever worked for, almost exclusively, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favored Dells over anything else. And the reason was, or the primary reason was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either that they were very cheap or if something breaks, the next business day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a Dell repair service person, operative, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the office replacing what’s broken or just handing us a new computer. And without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that kind of just immediate service, I don’t know if this will ever really take
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, isn’t that what you just read that IBM is supposed to provide? IBM provides on-site service? Because like that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that Apple as a company is not equipped to do to provide that for all of enterprise that is not built that
⏹️ ▶️ John way. But IBM is built that way. They’ll send a guy. That’s what IBM has is guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. that’s what I’m kind of asking. And we don’t know the answer was a semi rhetorical question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But until this Apple care for enterprise gets more concretely defined,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I really see this making a big difference, unless it really is doing all the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that these Dell, you know, tiger team people come in and do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I mean, again, we’re at the press release stage. So we have nothing concrete to go in here, right. But at the
⏹️ ▶️ John press release stage, like, Like, IBM is not unfamiliar with doing all those things you just described that Dell
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Like, that is, IBM is exactly that kind of company for
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of stuff. And it’s just, I would have to assume that the whole point is IBM is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do all those things. That all the things that Apple either wouldn’t do or wouldn’t do as enthusiastically or wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John give the same guarantees about. And IBM will make the, you know, the contracts that you sign
⏹️ ▶️ John that specify exactly what this stuff is and lets you pay through the nose so that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop repaired or replaced with one business day’s notice if that’s part of your service contract or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like all these enterprise-y things that, I mean, because it takes so much to do that. So much hand-holding, so much
⏹️ ▶️ John salesmanship, so much relationship, dealing with the relationship for these big companies. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not Apple’s forte. That’s not what the company’s built around it. And having someone else do it for you goes a
⏹️ ▶️ John long way towards making it possible. You’re still left with the problem of, OK, well, what about
⏹️ ▶️ John service and support and OS upgrades and compatibility and all this other stuff that Apple, generally Apple’s too busy
⏹️ ▶️ John running forward. We can’t look back. I don’t care what we’re breaking. We’re just running forward as fast as we can because that’s how we
⏹️ ▶️ John win the race in the consumer space and that’s ultimately where we win everything. So this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to slow Apple down from that race, but at least someone’s left holding the bag and that’s IBM having
⏹️ ▶️ John to apologize for Apple, explain things, and IBM perhaps to bend over backwards and make things
⏹️ ▶️ John better for the people who are having problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What else going on? Marco, you don’t have any thoughts about the enterprise?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all. I think I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be a good time for me to give everyone a break from me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Is there anything else going on or are we done?
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a real-time follow-up on sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Cotton Bureau, Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter You can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anti-Marco-Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental They didn’t mean to, accidental, tech podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot what the real-time follow-up on San was. I lost it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Scroll back in the…
⏹️ ▶️ John My own San story that I think I’ve told before is when I brought my aluminum PowerBook G4
⏹️ ▶️ John to an Apple store, to the Genius Bar, And the guy slid it like two inches across
⏹️ ▶️ John the Genius Bar to himself and there was one grain of sand
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco underneath that laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It went someone was talking about a Sand is mostly made of softer materials. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t take much it takes One grain of sand in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wrong place rubbing the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong way to make a nice little scratch. Nobody cares about that That’s that’s the worst thing that can happen Like
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple Thunderbolt display has been back to the Apple Store three times to fix various problems It is
⏹️ ▶️ John now fully functional, but those three trips to and from the Apple Store have left scars on it and
⏹️ ▶️ John The people in the Apple Store are super careful compared to the people like Best Buy, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not as careful as I would be. No one would be as careful as I would be. And even I would accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John damage it eventually. It’s just, you know, big heavy things being manipulated
⏹️ ▶️ John Aluminum is not as hard as sapphire, let’s just say Yeah, things
⏹️ ▶️ John scratch. It’s tough. And a scratch like that, no one will take you seriously if you explain
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re upset that it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey has a scratch. Oh, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John barely see it. But, I mean, maybe Mac users will understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you care that your laptops get stretched?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, absolutely. I used to care a lot more. I mean, like, my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I sold it after about three years of using it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked brand new. Like it didn’t have the keyboard marks on the screen like so many of them did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I read early on that if you put it like in a backpack facing out versus facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in then it wouldn’t get the marks because the screen wasn’t being squeezed in that way. And even like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have a dedicated laptop bag, I just had like a backpack that was just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a general purpose backpack. And so I kind of fashioned this big felt pocket that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I inserted this big like felt sleeve into one of the pockets and made that a dedicated laptop pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it only ever had this big thick black felt in it with it. And so this thing was pristine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was and even when I was using it, it was usually connected to a keyboard and mouse and monitor. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard wasn’t even worn away or all greased up. Like it looked brand new when I sold it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since then though I’ve only used laptops for like travel and stuff, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is happening more now as I’m you know an adult and keep doing family stuff. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my machines don’t stay that pristine and it kind of makes me upset. They’re still very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say they’re still far and away like you know the top one percentile of condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for age but that doesn’t mean much these days because people I see some that are ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah so that’s like that’s what’s worst about like I think a monitor. It’s supposed to just be sitting on a desk. In theory it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to your house you unpack it it’s perfect at that point you hope you put it on your desk and then you never touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it again. a monitor, maybe you touch it to adjust the angle every once in a while, but in general, like a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, it’s not going anywhere. And so to have that, that big heavy thing make three trips to and from the
⏹️ ▶️ John back of an Apple store, it’s inevitably going to come out with little nicks and scratches that you won’t see. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one will see them. No one will know they’re there. You’re just looking at the picture on the screen, right? But I know they’re there. I know where they are. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, you just try to forget it. I mean, it could be worse. It could be like the bad old days of the Apple 2020 22 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John cinema display with the big clear two little feet and dead pixels and then you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah I still
⏹️ ▶️ John remember where the dead pixels were I could point to them right now on my screen I had one there and one there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and it’s also it’s it’s not great to like with the current Mac of the the iMacs and I think the cinema displays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the same thing where the construction is such that like with yours they were probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on like the the logic board that has like the little peripherals and stuff plugged into it they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t like working on the panel but like if you’re working on an iMac the way you work on an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you take the screen off like you suck the glass off with these suction cups and then you like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lift the whole screen out to get to the inside like that’s how you get into these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so the chances of you putting that screen back exactly right while making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only no scratches but leaving no dust anywhere and like no dust getting between the layers and getting in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s the chances of that going perfectly are pretty remote.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple stores have special rigs just solely for that purpose to vacuum out, blow out
⏹️ ▶️ John any dust because I’ve been again, three trips and every single time those glasses come off, every single time they’ve separated the
⏹️ ▶️ John glass from the like, you have to to get at the insides, right? They weren’t touching that part but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there could have been dust every single time and every time I got it back I would dread looking at it and seeing some piece of dust
⏹️ ▶️ John trapped over there. They have not done that but the little nicks on the aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like I mean and these are really tiny nicks that again people would think you’re crazy for saying you even notice but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know if you’re if you’re that type of person you just have to put it on your mind like that pixels like what are you gonna do about there’s nothing you can do about it you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna complain and say I want a new thing because you put this microscopic nick on it right
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of reminds me of like the worst experience I have like this was when I was a kid and I
⏹️ ▶️ John had my Mac SE 30 which was my favorite Mac ever But when I first got it
⏹️ ▶️ John the power supply had a whine like a high-pitched whine, you know I don’t know if it was a transformer
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it was that was causing the noise But and I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John I was coming off a Mac plus at that point which has no fans in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a great machine Yeah, the 128 512 and the plus didn’t have fans in them the SE 30
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure had a fan but also the power supply one was the the
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant noise I don’t know if it had a fan. I have to look that up. Anyway, and it was loud enough that
⏹️ ▶️ John I complained about it. And we brought it back to not an Apple store, because they didn’t exist, to our
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple retail store and said, hey, this thing makes a high-pitched whining noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone at the Apple store claimed they could not hear it. And the thing is, I believe them, because when you get older, you
⏹️ ▶️ John lose the high frequencies. Right? Yep. And so they probably couldn’t hear it. But here I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John whining to my parents, and the people are like, this thing, trust me, I know you can’t hear it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can because I’m 12 years old and it’s really annoying. And it just, could
⏹️ ▶️ John you just replace the power supply and just, they never did anything about it. We took it to a different place, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I guess you could still do that with Apple stores, take it to a different Apple store. They did replace the power supply and it was silent
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was happy. But for a while I was like, I thought I was being gaslighted. Like I thought I was going insane.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like no one else can hear this noise, but you can hear it and my computer is haunted. Well, I feel the same way about these NICs. Like no one else can even see these NICs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you insist that they’re there. further you insist that this is a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s one of the benefits of getting a used car, because the BMW I bought used, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had a couple of very, very, very minor nicks, for lack of a better word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That has some amount of freedom associated with it, because the car has already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been mega air quotes, tainted. If something appears,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, well, okay, it’s already been nicked here and nicked there, and it’s not the end of the earth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s actually been, to some degree, a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nicer experience. Now, with that said, I still park in the furthest most corner of the parking lot like a jerk. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least I do it in only one spot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, wait until you have kids. Then you’ll get chocolate ground into your seats, like I just found when I cleaned my car this weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, my god. And when we got my new car, I was also kind of putting off getting a new car until
⏹️ ▶️ John after the kids were out of big car backseat-destroying car seats, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like the little booster seats that just raise you up so the, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it, the shoulder harness doesn’t go across your neck, right? And those don’t strap in. And it’s like, oh, there should be no problem here. But
⏹️ ▶️ John food and other crap finds its way between the little booster and your actual seat.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it gets ground into the fabric. So I’m there trying to get that stuff out this weekend. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, them putting their muddy, dirty feet all over the back of the front seats of your car. Kids destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. There’s no way around it. You have that to look forward to yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward to it I mean the good news is you know like I mean my kid is like 2.25 ish right now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know he still is not old enough to destroy the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John He can’t reach the back of your seats yet He’s not kicking you in the back while you’re driving it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right He’s still real he’s still rear-facing, but it were
⏹️ ▶️ John he could be getting to the part where he’s kicking the seat back Not your seat back, but the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one yeah He’s able to do that, but we don’t notice and and I have like this this like cover over it So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the covers those covers are expensive and I I almost got them several times
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was like it was like 15 bucks Well, like the big fancy ones like if you buy like the the branded
⏹️ ▶️ John ones like the BMW branded or the Honda branded
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you don’t get those full full backseat cover. Well, they’re good. My brother has one like they the full Yeah, but they’re fitted
⏹️ ▶️ John to your car They’re super thick but I’m just always worried about something getting caught between the cover and the
⏹️ ▶️ John seat and then there’s just like, you know Recipe for disaster you guys two giant things are rubbing. It’s again the
⏹️ ▶️ John grind to get into the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the bra problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep Without the tan lines all you probably get tan lines from that too depending on how much UV
⏹️ ▶️ John gets into the the cabin of the car Anyway titles
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh Sorting by vote. It’s not optional. It’s mandatory, but that’s fine because that’s the only way I probably want to sort it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well see I actually like to have both like I like to be able to sort by most recent So I can troll through the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent ones and vote them up as the show goes on. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we have a rich get richer problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can make a Safari extension or a Chrome extension that just throws the jQuery data tables
⏹️ ▶️ John at this table and gives some sorting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s one library. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John point it at the elephant. It’ll make everything sortable. Ay, ay, ay. You’re the worst. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the arrows, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you might like the arrows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they still don’t look like buttons. Can you put them in a circle or a little rounded brick? Are you? What?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to aim for a skinny little button. My cursor doesn’t even, what’s the click area on
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing? Let’s see. It’s like, it’s moving too much. I can’t see. I’m gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 72 points wide. You just gotta have,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the click area is not bad. The click area is not the width of the arrow. It’s a little bit wider, but if you highlighted the click
⏹️ ▶️ John area when the little cursor went over it, anyway, And the arrows don’t line up. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers are left aligned instead of right aligned. So like, the 1 in 13 is right above the 8 in 8.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas the 8 should be underneath the 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Always something to complain about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I posted into the chatroom in the beginning when I first loaded the page and there was no titles on it. The headings,
⏹️ ▶️ John votes, title, author, time.
⏹️ ▶️ John it said was like, titles, vote, title, author, time. Like it was a sentence because they were all squished together.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was nothing in it and there was no min widths in there. Anyway, UI is hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m fine. I must have some sort of client side issue because occasionally the two tables kind of decide to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mate with each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now I have I have links in the titles table that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why that keeps happening I’m gonna have to play with that If you refresh the page, it’ll straighten itself out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will definitely have to look at that I’m afraid it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crash if I refresh the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You had your moment you’re done that was kind of funny, but I don’t think that’s good I don’t think that’s a good title.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you do that one you can use a semicolon in the title.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like semicolon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well you can’t use a comma, it’d be a comma splice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These titles are all moving around as they sort which makes it hard to find the last.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well what do you want people? You only get to pick one.
⏹️ ▶️ John No you can have both. You can have sorting and you just have manual refresh.
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. You don’t need to use websockets. Now it’s no longer a feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah now you’ve eliminated the whole point in using websockets in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate you John Syracuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should just add a setting, add a preference. That’s what everyone tells me to do. Just add a setting for everything. Maybe a pause button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pause updates and then resume them later.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. You got to figure out which of those things you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like it’s always the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is pretty good. Actually, I do like that one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember that. What was that? I thought you said it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember a lot of what I say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s all right. We do. it for us so we don’t have to remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My email account for the listeners paying attention to what I say on different podcasts is currently 1923 unread but I answered about 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them today. So I had crossed 2,000. There’s a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on Twitter who are like tracking the order in which I’ve recorded the various podcasts I’ve been on because I keep saying like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh I have 300 unread messages and then oh I have 900 unread messages and the number keeps going up.
⏹️ ▶️ John assume you’re never answering answering any of them, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the fact is they’re coming in fast. I’m answering them like my strategy was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than spend like three days just answering email.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would instead read many of them, read all of Twitter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix as many problems as I possibly could by shipping an update. Like so actually writing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update, testing the update and shipping the update to Apple and then start tackling the email inbox. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can then tell people rather than I’m working on this, I can actually tell people I fix this, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually give them useful news. And you know, the update isn’t out yet, but I can at least say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fixed this in the update that submitted to Apple and should be out soon. Like some people I’m able to say that. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of text expander shortcuts, and I’m going through the email now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some people get text expander. Some people get a custom thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re gonna get a support person to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m bringing on a support person, but I wanted to get through the initial batch myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just have Adam do it. Time for him to start earning his keep. Just bang on
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard with his hands. Every once in a while you hit send. Problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that would be fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Adam’s free ride is over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you guys have, or have you been watching Halt and Catch Fire, whatever the hell that thing is called.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you know what I’m talking about? I know what you’re talking about. That show looked terrible to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard it’s amazing. I’ve never, I’ve not seen a single frame of it in any capacity and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve, I’ve seen all the ads and it was like, I know what the show is about. I know a lot of this history
⏹️ ▶️ John from reading it in books and they make it sound like it’s like, well, the actual story is not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough and they’re probably right. The actual story isn’t enough unless you’re a nerd. So we get to jazz it up and it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, that’s not, that is not what computer work is like, that’s not what engineering is like, that’s not what’s exciting about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is this a story of?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, uh, Compaq, uh, uh, Cleanroom cloning the IBM PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, okay. There’s, there’s, what is it, a TV show? A movie?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like a series or miniseries. But it’s, it’s supposed to be like in the Mad Men vein of like, oh, it’s a period piece
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s the 80s, right? And the reverse engineering thing that’s so dramatic. I mean, it was dramatic and technically interesting and
⏹️ ▶️ John it changed the industry, but not in a way that anyone, that regular people would be interested in. so they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to make it all exciting and the nerds are super good-looking and exciting and it’s dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything’s happening in the Dark instead of just like these pudgy, you know pale Losers
⏹️ ▶️ John with acne pouring over technical manuals and programming just like no one wants to see that but that’s how it is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John gets done No one wants to know how the sausage is actually made Silicon Valley is actually pretty good. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not I finally watch it. I really enjoyed it. It is not Well, first of all, we can all agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not representative or anything related to technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second No, but it’s I think it’s funny in a Mike Judge kind of way Like the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes fun of Silicon Valley. I think is really good and smart
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it’s making fun of it’s it’s making fun of a caricature of Silicon Valley It doesn’t exist when there’s plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John legitimate things you can make fun of from the real Silicon Valley And that’s what like I think Beavis and Butthead was
⏹️ ▶️ John was funnier I think King of the Hill was funnier to pick two more Mike Judge properties.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco probably funnier than the accuracy But
⏹️ ▶️ John the accuracy was more incisive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say this is like between idiocracy and like a king of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hill. It is a social commentary on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this part of our culture, no question. And a pretty good one at that. Yes, it is exaggerated and ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is a pretty good social commentary. And it’s also pretty funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the total exclusion of human females is supposed to be a commentary or just accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that’s intentional. It’s hard to tell because occasionally they throw in a woman for two seconds, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that’s intentional as a commentary That’s I think it’s pretty clear
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just disappointed in it because you could have had a show that was a lot smarter and a lot funnier than actually
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually made fun of the way things really are because like they started with a character and they say isn’t this character funny?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s make fun of the caricature. It’s like well, you’re it’s like it’s like a straw man You’re making something nothing this ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John ever existed So, of course, it’s easy to make fun of something that ridiculous The reality has plenty of things that are ridiculous about it
⏹️ ▶️ John as well But in I guess in nuanced ways that people wouldn’t understand or care about I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you know like you probably can’t base a lot of the stuff on real on real people for various legal reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John I also think that Mike judge doesn’t really Know anything about computers, which is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John like he knows a lot about he used to be a programmer I know, but like it’s not he’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not his thing. He’s been a media person for ages He knows a lot about being a jerky,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, teenage boy. So Beavis and Butthead was good. He apparently knows a lot about people in Texas. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s from Texas. Right. So that worked out and he may have worked as a programmer for a little while, but his adult life is essentially been
⏹️ ▶️ John set, been making television programs. So I think he just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like but like office spaces is actually based a lot on himself and the job he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John used to have
⏹️ ▶️ John office space was. I mean, I think office space was good. And it didn’t go too far over the top. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Lumberg was a little bit over the top, But everything else about it just like the office environment like it wasn’t made
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t you know so they have like the holographic tube and the crazy headquarters They really that is more over the top office space
⏹️ ▶️ John was an actual cubicle office building right and there’s enough Ridiculous about an actual cubicle office building you
⏹️ ▶️ John get humor out of you don’t need to make it more oppressive than it actually is Should be an incomparable talk about Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Valley nobody else likes it You can be the lone voice of dissent
⏹️ ▶️ John There was some people still I think Jason still still watching it and I I’ve been letting them pile plenty vocationally I’ll watch a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only eight episodes in like 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John long. I know but like I’ll watch one everyone So I’m not engaged in the story so to speak so if I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want some a couple of gags here and there They have some funny gags
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like my judges other shows where it’s not the best show in the world But it’s a good show and it’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and if you if you if you take it You know take everything with a grain of salt and if you just look at it Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as something that’s trying to be accurate, but something that’s trying to be funny
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s difficult for me with tech shows though like but like I mean, Halt and Catch Fire, again, I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also getting bad reviews. But if I knew something about the advertising business, maybe Mad Men would bother
⏹️ ▶️ John me a lot more than it does. But I don’t, so it doesn’t bother me. Whatever liberties they’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John with the advertising business, I’m willing to accept. Whereas anytime you touch any topic that, anytime you touch tech, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, there’s not a good history there in terms of interesting or accurate representations. And especially, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Walter Isaac movie, especially that I do find tech interesting. And I think a show that did tech right would be interesting, but
⏹️ ▶️ John only to me, obviously. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John What should you be watching instead of Silicon Valley? Veep is funnier than Silicon Valley, and shorter,
⏹️ ▶️ John and more interesting, and doesn’t involve technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shorter than eight 20-minute episodes?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s the same length. Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John seems longer. I take three viewings to get through one episode of it. Anyway, I think Veep is on what? It’s on Showtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. All right, then. Bedtime? Yeah. All right, kids, so I’ll I’ll talk to you Thursday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Editing schedule tomorrow. I’m going to the lake. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s tough. Yeah. Your constant work schedule. I know what it’s like. This is like third time you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram from the lake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, actually, tomorrow I’m going to the lake because I my backup royally. And our friend up there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massage therapist and is going to help me fix
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Christ. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly like my schedule. Yeah, I too am going to a lake to get a massage tomorrow. What about you, KC?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you know the lake is actually coming to me and that I’m getting a massage?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you gonna have a corn dog? I’m thinking of having a corn dog. It would never look more like an
⏹️ ▶️ John Ohio boy than sitting there with a corn dog on your dirt beach in front of your mud lake.
⏹️ ▶️ John why I follow people on Instagram now. I don’t actually participate in Instagram, but
⏹️ ▶️ John a nicer window into people’s lives. Oh, God. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome. Wow. We’re all just…
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you and I are just bitter and jealous people. Yeah, that’s what it boils down to.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s exactly what it boils
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bitter, jealous,
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting older every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have the secret glee of knowing what you’re in for. when this baby comes.