79: Tip Ring Ring Sleeve
21 Aug 2014Reversible USB, Twitter further ruining itself, and whether we’ll ever get a major iTunes rewrite.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Relay FM and Casey's new show about feelings
- Follow-up:
- Rumored Lightning cable with reversible USB end, too
- Lightning cables breaking at the strain-delay cuff
- Cables' Springy Bits
- Non-spammy Verizon DNS
- Console sales
- How do you pronounce "Haxe"?
- Twitter continues to try to ruin itself
- Being a completionist versus following Glenn Fleishman
- Twitterrific with unified timelines and Tweetbot without
- Build an Acura in a tweet!
- App.net and Tent
- iTunes 12
- Will iTunes ever get a complete rewrite or have functionality spun off into multiple apps?
- Photos in Yosemite
- Post-show:
- Non-ideal times to decide whether to have another baby or write another OS X review
- How old is Stephen Hackett, really?
- Could you use an iOS device as a media-sync host for an iPod?
- Transferring large files over wireless (including Eye-Fi cards)
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your new shows are good, man. Oh, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t heard it yet, so I don’t have any complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That might be the most John Syracuse-y thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve said that phrase more than once in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, you gotta keep pushing the bar forward if you want to succeed. My goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t heard it yet, so I don’t have any complaints. I don’t even know where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have some follow-up, mostly about lightning cables galore, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that that begins with an image of a lightning cable with a reversible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB connector. John, why don’t you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is confusing if you just hear it. What it’s talking about is a cable that you have now that
⏹️ ▶️ John you use to connect to your lightning connector-enabled iOS device. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got a little lightning connector on one end, and it’s got a regular, plain old, big, fat USB thing on the other end. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not changing the lightning connector, and the rumor is on these rumor sites that they’re going to change the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John end to be reversible. And they do that by, like, if you look at a USB connector head-on, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an empty part and then a part filled with plastic, sort of. And this sort of takes
⏹️ ▶️ John the empty part, draws a line through the center of the connector and then flips it. So now there’s an empty part on top, empty part on
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom, and plastic part in the middle. And this type of connector is not like an Apple invention, and it’s not a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been around, I don’t know, for how many, for a couple years, I think I’ve seen these. How long have these things been
⏹️ ▶️ John around? Have you guys seen them before? Never seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t seen it before this, but someone did point out it quickly after this article came out that some other company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually has a patent on it. And then they already sell cables like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was I think the reason I saw it was like back on hypercritical so long ago when I was talking about the USB connector
⏹️ ▶️ John and how I hated how it was externally symmetrical but internally asymmetrical. Everybody sent me links to Oh, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this company selling these things that are externally and internally symmetrical. And it’s still kind of work.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, the rumor is that Apple is going to adopt one of those. I don’t know much credence to give
⏹️ ▶️ John this rumor, but when I think about it I’m wondering like, will
⏹️ ▶️ John this make people’s lives easier? Like obviously reversible is a good thing, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a collection of wires in your house, some of them are reversible and some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t, I’m thinking it will probably still make things better, especially if they put the logo on both sides of
⏹️ ▶️ John the reversible one, because for people who don’t know, the Apple code for figuring out how to put your your USB connector
⏹️ ▶️ John in, as long as it’s not vertical and then you’re screwed, good luck, is the little logo
⏹️ ▶️ John faces up. And so they only put the logo on one side of their USB connectors and that one faces up. So if they just put
⏹️ ▶️ John the logo on both sides of this, people will look down at the connector and be reassured, Apple people, will be reassured
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re putting it in the right way. And it just so happens that there’s a logo on both sides. They were both poisoned. I’ve spent the last few years
⏹️ ▶️ John building up an immunity to Iocane powder. It’ll work out good for everybody. You guys both
⏹️ ▶️ John got that? Did I finally get one that you both got?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I just thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John was funny. Oh, I got it. All right. All right. Anyway, I think like I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the average experience, the average frustration experience will improve with this. Now, that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple going to do this? Are they going to pay for whatever stupid patent is on this? Does it decrease the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John of the connectors? I have no idea, but I’m cautiously optimistic about this. If it does come
⏹️ ▶️ John to pass, I think I have to give it a tentative thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which at this point is about as high praise as you could give or would.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rather have that cool reversible USB, you know, whatever connector which is much
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller than these giant things And you know, honestly if you keep looking to the sides of those Mac books, it’s like well
⏹️ ▶️ John now that now that the Ethernet is gone USB is looking pretty fat on the edges,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Got a slim down to the skinny one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think two quick comments on this new connector one or this new old USB reversible connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is that I think it is a little bit less important that end of it be reversible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have to imagine that many in many condition in many cases possibly the majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet a lot of people leave that end of the cable plugged in pretty much all the time and they just have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other end like the end that goes into the phone that’s the part that’s dangling and you connect the phone so like if for example if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a charger that’s always pulled into the same spot on the same wall and you just have the cable dangling there and every night you plug the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that or if you have a desktop computer or if you have a laptop docked at the same place every day and then you have the cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just always plugged into the laptop and then the phone end is open you know so it’s a little bit less important although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly if you can get it there it’s better the other thing is if you look at this connector if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at those pictures that that that are in this article about you know basically looking at it head-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like the way they did this was to leave less space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know the part on the computer end that slides in to this enclosure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the like it is like the part they cut out to make the second side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the plug like they didn’t it isn’t the same size as the full size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cutouts on the one side of plug. And so I fear that if you did this, I don’t know how the port is constructed. I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are springy pins on the computer side of it that press against these terminals in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole white thing, the whole plastic bit in the middle might move. I don’t know if it’s that’s if that’s rigid it
⏹️ ▶️ John might actually it might actually move I have no idea how this connector is made presumably like since it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John since this is an actual product in the market presumably it fits in all standard ports somehow does it fit
⏹️ ▶️ John with more wiggling does something move is it awkward or are there like weird non-compliant ports that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right because my see my concern would be that if it’s rigid which I it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably is I don’t I think making it move would be problematic if it’s rigid then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like it might compress the spring pins in the port significantly more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a regular plug and possibly like loosen them up a little bit so that regular plugs might not work as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that same port in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if Apple puts this out, presumably they will have tested it to death with every single one of their products and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, screw you if you try to plug it into your PC laptop or something to charge your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s more likely Apple will skip this connector and just wait until the reversible USB plug is an official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Wait until Intel chipsets support whatever version of USB that needs, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just move to that on other computers and call the problem solver. And put out a cable that has that on one end, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so like I said, I have no way to rate this rumor as just some random thing, and the picture
⏹️ ▶️ John tells you nothing. So who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of lightning cables, a friend of the show, Daniel Jalkut, was sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with us, amongst others, some shots of his frayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightning cable and how it’s always fraying. What is the little sleeve there, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cuff there? I always forget the name of it. Strain relief. Yes, thank you. So, outside of the strain relief cuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what? It got strained and split.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like it’s more of a strain delay cuff. It just moves the strain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the cable by a half inch and just puts all the strain at that point instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Strain concentrator was the term some people use.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I think maybe Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ John it that. And so he wasn’t the only one who posted this. As soon as he posted this, and we’ll put the link to the tweet in the show notes so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can all look at the picture, it’s a lightning cable. Just underneath the strain relief, the plastic that surrounds
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire is split open. Tons of people tweeted pictures of their own cables all split in that
⏹️ ▶️ John exact same spot. I mean, obviously, this is not a representative sampling. As soon as one person sees
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else’s picture, they say, I have one. But it’s clear that this is where these things break, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem with these connectors. And one of the interesting theories I saw from somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John was that this might have to do with, aside from just bad strain relief design, might have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with all of the harmful chemicals that Apple has been trying to take out of its manufactured products. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John that the earliest analog I can think of is when they tried to remove lead from all their solder joints,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has the potential to make the solder joints weaker until they figured out how to do it without the lead. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some toxic chemical that someone in the chat room will look up and paste sometime later in the show that they used to
⏹️ ▶️ John use for the plastics that made them sort of more resilient. And they didn’t crack. They would bend or whatever. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad chemical and had bad environmental effects. So they changed to using plastics without
⏹️ ▶️ John that chemical. And it was like a transition period where the headphones felt like, someone in the chat room is saying PVC. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. But the headphones felt kind of weird. And it takes them a while to figure out, we could use what
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else uses that makes the best product. But if it’s environmentally unfriendly, we have to figure out a way to do it without that chemical.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s one possible theory. The other theory, the bad strain relief, that it’s not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John gradually decreasing the strain of the bend, but rather saying, OK, well, the part with the sleeve isn’t going to bend at all, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John concentrate all the bending right after it, and that’s where your thing will split.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I saw a million of these pictures, like you were saying, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t remember not one lightning cable that I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has broken in any way. I have a handful of first party ones. I have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Amazon ones that I don’t really care for because the lightning end is kind of fat. And I have a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of monopriced ones, which I actually quite like. And not a one of probably 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightning cables that I have has frayed in any or split or what have you in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of these ways. And I don’t know if maybe it’s because I have so many and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey splitting my time between all these different cables. I don’t know if I treat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them better. I doubt that. I sincerely doubt that. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the magic touch, But I don’t have this problem. I did with the 30-pin connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tore through almost all my 30-pin connectors. But I have not had an issue with lightning cable thus far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m sure I’m the weirdo, not everyone else. But man, I was looking at everyone else thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s weird, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, usage definitely is a factor because I have never broken a 30-pin connector or a lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John connector. And I’ve had tons of them. They’re all over the house. They’re still all here, right? I’ve never broken any
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. And it’s not just dumb luck. And I’m not like, I’ve had too many cables for this to be. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just got lucky and never got one that failed. And these are super old. I mean, all the way up to the original iPod in
⏹️ ▶️ John the attic with the cable. But that doesn’t have any problems with it. That’s not to say that it’s these people’s fault,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s clear that people are going to use these devices in a way that breaks them. And it’s Apple’s job to make sure they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t break when people use them the way they use them. What are those people doing differently
⏹️ ▶️ John than I’m doing? Probably pulling them out by the cable. Like, that’s my guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do that all the time. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling them out on an angle. I mean, I baby my hardware. And so most people don’t. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is not these people’s fault. It’s Apple’s job to make a product that withstands normal use, normal wear and tear.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lightning cables seem to have a weakness for normal use. All these people aren’t abusing their, all these people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have cats or children yanking them out. It’s just that they are not carefully pulling the connector
⏹️ ▶️ John out exactly perpendicular to the surface of the phone and all this crazy crap that people who are, you know, anal
⏹️ ▶️ John retentive about their hardware do. So I think this is something that Apple should address
⏹️ ▶️ John and I really hope it’s not another one of those Johnny Ives situations where it’s like, yeah, we can make a more robust strain
⏹️ ▶️ John relief, but that would require those little ribs or ridges. Those are ugly. And it looks so nice when we just have a little sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s smooth and it’s only a little bit wider than the cable. So I really hope that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John case. And I hope they do improve the cable. And by the way, a lot of people in that same thread on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John were saying, if you have a busted lightning cable that you just used in a normal way but broke,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some chance that you could go into an Apple store and just get a new one for free. How that works, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people said I had to make a genius bar appointment. Maybe you just look sympathetic and are nice and say, boy, I just got this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone a couple months ago and I’ve really just been using it normally and this thing broke. Is any chance you can get me a new cable? Blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. Because the cables are ridiculously expensive, you know, and what are they, are they 30
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks? 20. I still feel like that’s way high for, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the point is occasionally, I don’t think this is an Apple policy. It’s not like it’s like a warranty where they replace them forever when
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re broken. It’s not like an L.L. Bean type thing. But if you are nice and you talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John someone at the Genius Bar and they happen to have one, maybe you’ll get a new connector. And this, I tell everybody this, like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a weird situation where it’s not like you can guarantee them that they’re gonna get nice free stuff from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but enough people do that you say it’s worth a try. Go in there, be pleasant,
⏹️ ▶️ John be nice, explain the situation in a nice way, maybe you get a new cable. And if you don’t, don’t be all angry. That’s I read on the
⏹️ ▶️ John internet, I’m supposed to get a new cable. I don’t think so, but give it a try.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and speaking of cables, let’s talk about springy bits, shall we?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, I presume it was you that put this in the show notes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week we talked about where the springy bits are on the cable, where the parts that we just talked about this week, where the parts that move
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Are they in the cable or are they in the connector? The cable is easier to replace than the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that the connector inside your phone or your computer or whatever. And a lot of people pointed out in reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John to the last show that there is one very popular kind of connector where the springy bit is inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the port and that’s the regular headphone jack. What is that Marco? You would know eighth inch is that called?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the eighth inch TRS jack or in the iPhone TRRS.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what any that means but presumably somebody does besides Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tip ring sleeve it’s you know like the segments on the plug tip ring sleeve is the regular stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and then tip ring ring sleeve is the one that has the extra pin for the headphone thing for the clicker
⏹️ ▶️ John so tip is one contact then there’s a ring then a ring and then what is the sleeve part yeah the bottom part like the long
⏹️ ▶️ John part that’s just another point along the uh the little cylinder that goes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s it’s how many you know tip ring sleeve has three conductors right and ground shared and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then tip ring ring sleeve has the left right ground shared on the remote doesn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like both of the rings are also part of the sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever semantics so that connector has been around forever obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John well maybe not so obviously you might say well it’s been around forever that has to spring a bit inside the connector obviously putting the springy bit inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John connector is not a death sentence for a connector but then the counter to that is well how many people have
⏹️ ▶️ John a headphone jack on some device they’ve had for a long time that’s wonky now. Like, it doesn’t, sometimes you have to twist
⏹️ ▶️ John the little connector inside it, sometimes it doesn’t stay in. Or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps you have a circa 2011 high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you’ve plugged a headphone jack, or headphone set into it just a handful of times, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the sensor or something got stuck between that and the infrared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line out. Optical. Maybe it’s line in. Thank you. Thank you. the optical line in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so the point is I had to get a motherboard replaced in order to get that fixed, thankfully under warranty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because something inside the headphone connector got totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of whack and it refused to play via headphones or via the system speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, in my experience, the Apple headphone jacks are very stiff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re going to get loose over time, maybe they will, and maybe the springy bit will get loose. But when you plug, especially Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you plug an Apple headphone jack into an Apple iOS device, that is a stiff little click in there. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John not just a kind of… it feels secure to me. Now, maybe over time that will get loose,
⏹️ ▶️ John but especially with iOS devices, like the ticking time bomb in every iOS device is the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. Eventually the battery is going to be useless, probably long before any of your ports go bad. You can get the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced, but then by that point it would be like me taking my second gen iPod Touch and go, well, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John on my second gen iPod Touch is fried. I could get it replaced for $99. But then what do I have? I have a second gen iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John touch running like iOS four. So it’s pointless. But anyway, that everyone sent
⏹️ ▶️ John in that example. So I thought I just bring it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if they stop making the iPod touch, or if they just stop updating it ever again, you’re going to be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy because you’re going to refuse to get an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t. You think I’m going to use like iOS seven when iOS 12 is out? No, of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the alternative is to buy an
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll find a way. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we only have a little bit more follow-ups. Let’s power through real quickly. Local boy Sam Davies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some feedback for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last week, I talked about using Verizon. Casey was debating whether he should
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for that Verizon thing where they get a source-born child. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me quickly interrupt and say I did. I did get my 75 symmetric internets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have not yet had to sell Sprout. So all seems well in the world. Carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, he’s not here yet. But you’ll see. They’ll come. They’ll come for it. But I was talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use Verizon as an ISP and not use any of their crap. They’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ John their router, not having any of their cable boxes in your house, not doing any of their on-demand stuff, not downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John their software. And I said the only thing I had left that I was still using for Verizon was DNS because if I used
⏹️ ▶️ John Google DNS, I didn’t get like, it didn’t know, the content delivery networks didn’t know where
⏹️ ▶️ John I was geographically and would connect me to a crappier server instead of the ones that are nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I was still using Verizon DNS. But I hated it because if you type in a domain name that’s, you know, you typo
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever, you get sent to some stupid Verizon landing page with ads all over it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Sam Davies and a couple other people sent in a link to a page on the Fios site saying, hey, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t like that spammy DNS redirection, here’s what you can do to change it. And as soon as I saw the page, I realized, I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John this before. I’ve been to this page, and I did it. And it’s basically just you change
⏹️ ▶️ John the last digit of your DNS addresses from 12 to 14. The first three, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are they called? Octets? Yeah, there you go. The first three octets are going to be different
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody. That’s the whole point. You have different DNS servers depending on where you are geographically. But if you just change the 12s to the 14s, you won’t get redirected.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did that years ago, and I just must have forgotten about it in one of the OS upgrades, or maybe during the time when
⏹️ ▶️ John I changed to Google DNS and I changed it back. So thank you, Sam Davies and other people, for reminding
⏹️ ▶️ John me, because I’m an old man and forget things, to rechange my DNS to be the non-hijacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Console sales. We, I guess, didn’t get this 100% correct? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just another data point that someone threw up in a tweet that I thought was interesting, because we
⏹️ ▶️ John keep talking about how the Xbox One and PS4 are doing, and we keep saying they’re doing fine. And Jeff,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are we going to say for this? Keeley? That’s what I was going to say. All right. Anyway, Jeff Keeley
⏹️ ▶️ John says, US sales for Xbox One and PS4 are up 80% compared to the first nine months of sales
⏹️ ▶️ John of last generation Xbox 360 and PS3. So not only is the PS4 selling faster than the PS3, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a little bit faster, it’s 80% faster. And the Xbox One is selling faster than the Xbox 360 was.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this generation is not just doing OK. And growth-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John the uptake was faster for this generation than it was for the previous one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a little surprised by that. I knew the PS4 was doing better than the PS3. I figured the Xbox One and the Xbox 360
⏹️ ▶️ John were maybe neck and neck. But it seems like both consoles are off to a pretty good start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. And then finally, we enter the pronunciation section of the follow-up. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have two entries. The first is regarding the thing that Tivo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is using that isn’t Flash that is spelled H-A-X-E.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, hover. Yeah. Well, apparently, the correct pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that, as per high endian is hex not hack see which is I believe what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us agreed it probably was
⏹️ ▶️ John I went for Hicks or hacks those are my two guesses last time but I would not have guessed hex because that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John no sense but there you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a new sponsor this week it is Casper this is Casper sleep.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP that’s Casper like the ghost Casper sleep.com slash ATP this is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool so it’s a mattress and they’re an online mattress vendor and the way they do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think, worth noting. I think this is something really special here. So Casper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sells a premium mattress for a fraction of the price of most premium mattresses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The mattress industry has inherently forced customers into paying notoriously high markups. And you know this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’ve ever gone to, you know, buy a mattress, which I hope at least some of you have bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mattress in your life, it is quite useful to have a mattress. You sleep, usually, every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s nice to get a good mattress, in my opinion. And I’ve always told people, when you want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mattress, get a really good one. Because how many times in your life do you buy a mattress? Maybe three or four.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. Not a lot of times in your life you’re going to buy a mattress. So Casper is revolutionizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers and showrooms and passing that savings directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the consumer. They’re selling direct on their site. Now one of the ways they can do this is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their mattresses are really cool. actually like bunched down. They come in a box, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular size box, and then you take it out and it basically like expands into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your regular mattress.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me stop you there. So, I got a Casper. They were nice enough to send me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mattress. And it did come in this, I got a full-size mattress and it came in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reasonably sized box. I’m not going to try to rattle off dimensions because if I do, it’ll be in imperial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey units, then all the metric people are going to yell at me. So suffice to say, it was a normal size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Well, because usually when you get a mattress delivered, it has to come on a furniture truck. Right. Because it’s way too big for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like UPS and FedEx to want to deliver.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And this was not the case. In fact, it actually accidentally got delivered to my neighbor’s house. And he single-handedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like dragged the box over to our house and was not a sweaty, disgusting mess when he arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so we take the mattress out of the box. And it has this neat little card with neat diagrams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think acceptable typography, Setting up your Casper. So step one, your Casper has arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes. Step two, make sure to unpack your Casper in the room it belongs. Step three, use the handy sharpened steady
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blade to unbind your Casper. Start on the dot when there’s a little dot on the packaging. Step four, unfurl your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casper and cut open the remaining plastic wrap. Hear it sigh with relief.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I saw this and I was like, are you kidding me? And then sure enough, I opened this thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess because you were like, you were saying it’s vacuum wrapped or whatever. And so So it’s like sucking in all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this air. It sounded like it was sighing with relief. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a lie. It is really trippy, but really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these mattresses, so they’re made of, here, let me see how they describe it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an interesting combination. They call it just the right sink and just the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bounce. So you know, like it sinks down as you said, but you know, it can bounce back up. They use a combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of latex foam and memory foam. They combine these two things together for basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best of both. They call it better nights and brighter days. I call it a good mattress. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get for this, you know, this is this is a premium mattress. And you know, when I bought a premium mattress about 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, it cost about $1,700 for a queen size. These mattresses started just $500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for twin size, and the prices go up very reasonably. Queen is $850, $950 for King.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, these are really, really great prices for this quality mattress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is roughly, I would say, roughly half of what you’d be likely to pay at a sleepies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or mattress store kind of thing. So this is really quite something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also very, I would worry, how do you buy a mattress without going and lying on it in a store? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying a Catford mattress is completely risk-free. They have free delivery and free returns within 100 days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can buy this thing and try it out for three months and then decide whether you like it or not. Really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite awesome. It’s that simple. Because when you go to the showroom, you’re lying on it for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of minutes and there’s some guy standing over you with a clipboard and…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mattress showroom! It’s like every stereotype of used car sales places. That’s how mattress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showrooms usually are. And you can actually just take this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order it, get it delivered in this tiny box, let it sigh of relief in your house, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try it for three months. And they have this 100-day policy. So that’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand the importance of trying it out in your own home, actually sleeping on it, actually sleeping on it for more than one night, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really getting a good feel. So Casey, what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So last night, Aaron and I went into the bedroom that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Casper mattress was in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, stop there. Oh, relax. And we had a night’s sleep on that mattress, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I quite liked it. I am not a fan of memory foam, despite what most people think. I actually…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, everyone loves memory foam. I don’t care for it. mattress was just the right balance. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t be making a big deal out of this if I didn’t think it was just the right balance of a little bit of foam, like Marco was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not so much that it felt like synthetic and weird. So yeah, so I really liked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I definitely recommend it. They’re really good mattresses. And just the unboxing experience is pretty neat, if nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, but they are really good mattresses as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, from what I understand, if you’re if you’re a mattress geek, from what I understand, one of the biggest benefits of this over pure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory foam is that this doesn’t have the the hotness effect, right? Because a lot of people don’t like memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foam because it kind of makes them feel hot. And this supposedly dramatically reduces that or eliminates that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. Anyway, so go to caspersleep.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s C-A-S-P-E-R sleep.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re asked for a promo code at any point during the checkout, use promo code ATP. And these are made in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USA. And they do a cool thing. So normally they have this thing where if they have a referral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program where if you refer a friend to Casper, they send you a $50 gift card and they give the friend $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off their mattress. Instead of us taking gift cards, we are donating our $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Casey’s Charity of Choice for Every Bed Sold. They’ve set this up so that this $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes to a good cause. So if you buy through our code, you’ll get $50 off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through Code ATP. Get $50 off and then $50 will go towards a good cause. So once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check out caspersleep.com slash ATP. This seems pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the world, you know, the world needs something like this. You know, this is met by mattresses in person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so annoying. And yeah, this is this is pretty cool. I gotta say. Thanks a lot once again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Casper for sponsoring the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are we talking about tonight? Want to talk about iTunes? We don’t want to do we want to talk about open source?
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys didn’t add anything to the topics file, did you just just leave those old ones in there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s late August. Nothing is happening. No one does anything in the tech industry in late August. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of crappy stuff happening in the world, but for the stuff that we usually talk about on the show, nothing is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We could get political, but I don’t think any of us want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I’m exhausted from it. I can’t take it anymore. I’m just so exhausted from it. Yeah, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those times where I am happy to talk about anything else, and I’m happy to immerse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself in anything else besides current events for this two hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a topic that Casey should address on his other show where he talks about his feelings that I haven’t listened to
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. Because part of the exhaustion is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the aspects of technology. One is it’s good that we’re in touch
⏹️ ▶️ John in real time with these events that we care about, because we see them by who we
⏹️ ▶️ John follow on Twitter and stuff like that, or whose blogs we read or whatever. But it can be exhausting
⏹️ ▶️ John in that at a certain point, you just start to feel overwhelmed with it. whatever the issue of the day happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to be, if you have it flooding into you on all possible streams
⏹️ ▶️ John that you consume content on the net, it can it can be tiring. I actually unfollowed
⏹️ ▶️ John some people during this whole recent flare up, not because I disagreed with them, or because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like anything bad is just in my in my typical, you know, I try
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to read my whole Twitter stream and it just becomes too much and I feel like I’m just getting anxious and it’s not being happy. That’s, you know, temporary,
⏹️ ▶️ John temporary, possibly permanent unfollow of people who I totally agree with on whatever issue they’re complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just too much, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, you’ll notice that John doesn’t follow you anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is not a high-volume tweeter on this topic. Not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a high-volume retweeter. I was mostly retweeting Glenn Fleischman. You retweeted like three things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are you kidding? Like three things an hour every night for the last week?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, three an hour is low volume compared to some of the people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s true, especially since I’m retweeting Glenn Fleischman. And, you know, so if you follow him, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I know I had done follow Glenn to don’t don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco take it. He won’t take it. He won’t take it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will I will end up refollowing him because I have unfollowed him. You follow Glenn many times. Just one of those things you have to do. It
⏹️ ▶️ John comes a time where you have to unfollow Glenn Fleischman. And then maybe you follow him again. And then you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, he totally tells people to do that because he knows that he tweets way more than most people can can read.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other day, I actually – now, I’m totally crossing over. But the other day, I abandoned being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a completionist on Twitter because I had like 400 tweets from a not very long amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time and I just went all the way to the top and this was a very traumatic experience for me. But I’m glad that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve done it. I learned a lot that
⏹️ ▶️ John day. Paul Moore I think that means I win, Casey, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey Penn Yeah, I guess so because you’re still a completionist, right? Paul Moore Yep. Casey Penn I mean I am 99% of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was gone for like two hours. And suddenly I had hundreds of tweets waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And I was like, oh, screw this.
⏹️ ▶️ John My problem is my favorite Twitter client has a limit on how far back you can go in the timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if I fall very far behind on a busy day, I have to switch to my second favorite Twitter client to get
⏹️ ▶️ John back far enough. And my second favorite one doesn’t have a unified timeline. That drives me insane because now I have to read two
⏹️ ▶️ John different things far back and like mentally reinterleave them in chronological order. How you
⏹️ ▶️ John people use these clients that aren’t chronological.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why you, unquestionably one of the smartest men I’ve ever met, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such cognitive difficulties interleaving these two things. Or even, why do you even need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them interleaved? Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s a running conversation. It’s a time-ordered sequence of messages. They’re not random.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not two separate streams. It’s one thing. One person says one thing, another person says another thing. Just because one person
⏹️ ▶️ John put an at in front of his message, it somehow is in a different timeline? No. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that everything should use unified timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the unified timeline makes sense if you’re a completionist always,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like for me like I used tweet bot and which doesn’t have this feature which sounds like it’s probably your secondary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client. I use tweet bot because overall I like it more but like I don’t need the unified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timeline because I’m not a completionist. I used to be and it took way too much time and now like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t do that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even even if you’re not a completionist when you’re skimming though it’s better to skim and unify time because then you just have one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to skim and you can you can sort of see the flow of the conversation are these two people bantering back and forth interspersed
⏹️ ▶️ John with random people mentioning them or like I mean just I just think it’s easier overall but anyway whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well yeah but well but I am a completionist for my mentions just not for my my public timeline by the way yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in the chat are pointing out do we want to talk about the things twitter is doing by messing with your timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen it have any have any of you seen it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t because none of us, none of us is the official client. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, what is there to really say? It’s probably self-serving for Twitter. It pisses off all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time… Well, explain what it is first. All right. So, Twitter has decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if you favorite something and Twitter believes it to be…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, if somebody else favorites something and Twitter decides that that’s relevant to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever reason, they will show that favorite in your timeline. So, let me give you an example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John favorites some weird thing that has to do with video games. And for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am interested in video games, according to Twitter. That favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John gave to someone I may or may not follow could appear in my timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so suddenly Twitter is taking control of your timeline, which is a very Facebooky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to do. Whereas as many people have pointed out, Twitter in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until this change has been more or less allowing you to control your own timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is doubly true of third-party clients where they’re not doing like sponsored tweets and stuff like that, or at least not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the more passionate Twitter users are really up in arms about this. But I don’t, I mean, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense that Twitter’s doing this because it’s completely self-serving. It makes sense that I don’t like it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m completely self-serving and I’m either going to deal with it when it affects me and TweetBot or I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, I don’t see that there’s that much debate here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s a crappy thing to do, though. And, you know, it matters a lot because we’re locked in. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, for so there’s two problems here. Number one is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter has now ruined favorites, basically. They’ve now, like, favorite favoriting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tweet used to be a way that you could passively and very subtly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give someone some slight positive feedback that they might see. And that was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So, I favorite all sorts of stuff that, you know, like, Yeah stuff that I wouldn’t retweet necessarily because I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to necessarily repost it to people who follow me, but it’s like You know a nice quick passive feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing So now they’ve added more weight to that now Favorites have always been kind of broken because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was always very hard to view Who favored your tweets and to be notified of it and everything like in any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of scale so it it wasn’t necessarily? You know a great system at first But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they’ve quote fixed it now is kind of redundant because they have retweeting and so now they’ve they’ve made paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorites basically act like retweets in many places. They haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, as far as I know, on their page about how they’re now ruining our timelines, I don’t think they’ve said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will work this way exactly forever. I think they’ve just said, we are going to start inserting things into your timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be relevant. This is one of the ways they might determine what to insert is what’s been favorited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by other people. But I wouldn’t expect it to always work that way or for that to be the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cause things to appear in your timeline that you people you don’t follow. The thing is, you know, like Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the what Facebook has done with their timeline has basically made it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, by default, hide almost everything from you. And you know, if you let’s say you have 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who like your page on Facebook or whatever. And if you post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something on your timeline, on your wall, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m not a Facebook user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. So I don’t really know how most of these terms work and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, only a very small percentage of the people who have expressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interest in seeing everything you post will actually see that. And then you can pay Facebook to increase that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage. But it’s really a pretty scammy system and it frustrates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people. You know, it frustrates companies who have made Facebook pages because that’s where people are and then all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sudden like their traffic to page drops to nothing because they don’t pay Facebook for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads to reach the people who have already said they want to be reached. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like imagine if Twitter, imagine like if your tweets were only shown to 10% of your followers. It’s like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people chose to follow you, but your tweets are only showing 10% of them, unless you join their ads program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and start paying them for every person who follows. That’s what Facebook does. That’s Facebook’s current business model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s crappy for Facebook. And it doesn’t affect most of us, because most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us are Twitter people. So Twitter doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is breaking the way the timeline works. Now they already have broken it with ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of us who use third-party clients have never seen these Twitter ads, because they don’t show in third-party clients yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s no guarantee they ever will. Twitter might choose not to, just so they can control what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads can do, give them the rich experiences with the cards, like somebody posted earlier today, that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your new Acura within this Twitter card and all this crap, you know, because people want to engage with brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what Twitter is doing here is breaking the medium, potentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can say, well, maybe they’ll do it tastefully. And that’s true. Maybe they will. Maybe Twitter’s leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have some idea of why their product is so good and what’s so good about it and why people like it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s so important about it. And maybe they’ll do something that is best for the the product and the users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I’m not holding my breath on that, because their record in those departments is pretty poor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. The problem with Twitter doing this is that all of us geeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a whole lot of non-geeks have decided over the last few years that Twitter is this new medium where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get all of our news, and many people have replaced RSS with Twitter, and many other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to get news and discuss things with Twitter. Imagine if RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was centrally controlled by one private company, well, public company, whatever, by one company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and every RSS client in the world all of a sudden started inserting things you didn’t subscribe to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you couldn’t opt out of that, and you couldn’t stop that. That would make the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium of RSS kind of weirder and not as useful to you and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad long-term, potentially, you know, kill it long-term. it would change it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that probably is not for the better. And you’d have no recourse because the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium is controlled by this one company. Well, that’s what Twitter is. Twitter is what should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a public open standard, but by various coincidences and actions and technical realities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social realities, etc., it is a whole new medium, but it’s just one company controlling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. There is no open standard for Twitter. And whatever hope there was of having, you know, APIs and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter killed that years ago. So, what they’re doing is breaking a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very important medium. And this should be a wake-up call to all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us, especially the geeks who listen to this show, and us, who are those geeks. This should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a call to all of us to see how important it is to build open standards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of trying to let one company concentrate so much of their power, and not to trust these big companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Twitter started out, it was geeky and friendly and there’s people with one syllable names running everything and they were cool and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were in California and everything was going to be great. They’re going to change the world. Well, you know what? They did change the world. Then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took it all for themselves and now they have complete control over it and it’s being run by a bunch of people who don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit the original attitude of the founders and the founders are mostly all checked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So, and this is what happens. companies move on, people leave. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let this happen. We let this entire monster grow. We helped it grow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re all still using it. I’m still using it. I’m going to keep using it because that’s where all the people are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the one place I can reach them, the people who I actually want to reach. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let this happen. And I think we need to be very careful in the future not to assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these companies that seem like they have all all of our best interests in mind always will because we’re you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see time after time that they don’t. Anyway, so that’s why I think of the new timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say that when this happened, like it made me think again, Oh, you know, where do we go
⏹️ ▶️ John if this goes south, like his app.net is gone and tent is not like we went through this once when they were doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of things that we all hated. And then a couple of things sprung up to try to replace it. And none of those really worked
⏹️ ▶️ John out. But it’s like, because if they went full Facebook on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would, I don’t know if we would leave, but I would be desperately looking for someplace else to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John because all I need is my little circle of people to be there. And that’s the reason I went to app.net.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always looking for alternatives. This is obviously a hostile environment for people like us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, they’ve been walking this line where it’s like, well, the people who really care about this are just
⏹️ ▶️ John people like us or people who are listening to this show. It’s such a small percentage in the grand scheme of things. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John throw you a bone and give you this token system for the third party clients. Third party clients won’t have ads, but you won’t get the new
⏹️ ▶️ John features, but you guys don’t care about that either. And the same thing with this, they could continue to sort of walk that
⏹️ ▶️ John tightrope to say, we’re gonna do all this Facebooky crap to everyone else, but we won’t do it to third party clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not gonna tell you we’re not gonna do it. We’re not gonna promise anything, but they basically just won’t do it. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John will be their policy. Silently don’t screw up the timeline of
⏹️ ▶️ John the small group of obnoxious tech nerds who nevertheless might have a disproportionate
⏹️ ▶️ John influence over whatever, or might have the wherewithal to go and make something else. So
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t anger them. Don’t tell them you’re not angering them on purpose. Leave the fear and uncertainty
⏹️ ▶️ John there about what’s going on. But really, don’t stir the pot too much. And just kind of ignore them,
⏹️ ▶️ John leave them off in the corner. And so far, that strategy’s been working. Like, they’ve been doing obnoxious things to the people who use the official
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter client, which is like everybody else but us, and I guess Cable Sasser. Sorry, Cable. I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ John he does. but he said about this too. And then just kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of don’t rile up the hornet’s nest that is those tech nerds who might try to go elsewhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, I don’t like this at all. I hope it doesn’t happen to me. And if it does start happening, I don’t know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John would do. It takes a pretty big critical mass of people to make someplace else viable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And app.net didn’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I think app.net is still, strictly speaking around, but certainly no one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I am familiar with still uses it as far as I’m aware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing I wanted to ask the two of you guys is how do you use favorites today? So as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to come down in the Marco camp where if somebody does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that I want to kind of give a kind of quiet nod of approval to, I’ll typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a favorite Or perhaps if someone, usually guy English, makes a joke at my expense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I want him to understand that I think it’s funny and we’re cool, bro. Favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are plenty of other ways that you could use favorites. Like a lot of people, for example, tend to use it for bookmarking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, you kind of covered how you do it. John, what do you do for favorites? How do you what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purpose do they serve in your world?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to tell you that I still am using app.net just so you know. I still have it running every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Occasionally people post something there and I see it. I don’t really post anything there Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll reply to some of the runs in a while, but I still run it I’ll probably run it until like the servers don’t work anymore. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a tree falls in
⏹️ ▶️ John the woods. Yeah Anyway, I mean right now it’s really low traffic. I got it. I can check it like twice
⏹️ ▶️ John a day and be all caught up I Think there was like two posts in the past two days
⏹️ ▶️ John in my timeline. So for favorites, I favorite I favorite things
⏹️ ▶️ John as a way to, you know, like, it’s the little same reason I reply to
⏹️ ▶️ John people with thumbs up is like the little social thing trying to say I approve of what you have done here you have made a good joke that made
⏹️ ▶️ John me laugh you said something clever you said something I thought was insightful like I’d use it in that capacity which I think is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the supposed to be the primary capacity and the other way I use it is
⏹️ ▶️ John I will want to find this tweet later so like a bookmark so favorite it so that when I say where the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John was that tweet because Twitter search still sucks balls. And I hate Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to Google site Twitter.com, type in some words, or use in URL to try to narrow it. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. So favorite is my way of saying, I don’t have time to deal with this tweet now. But either
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to put it in the ATP show notes, or it’s something that I want to think about or write later. It’s some OS X thing that I want to put in
⏹️ ▶️ John my notes. I favorite it as a bookmark. And I don’t have so many favorites during the day that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to go through them. I only do a handful of favorites a day. It was easy for me to find old stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I’m trying to quickly figure out how many favorites we had, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t talk long enough, so I don’t know. But I was going to compare, because I favorite constantly. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vomit stars on Twitter. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are an over-favoriter. Like, the same
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you just explained a situation that I would essentially never do a favorite, where if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John teases me about something, I don’t feel the need to favorite them to let them know
⏹️ ▶️ John not mad at them because I feel like that’s the default and if you know whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Wait, Casey, you do that? Like if somebody like if somebody makes a joke at you that is insulting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you, you favorite it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no. So if it’s somebody that I like and again, we’ll pick on Guy English because we all like Guy
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. Well, you retweet them, Marco, speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John behaviors. Anyway, go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so I want Guy to know that I may not be replying to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with some snarky comeback of my own. But we’re still cool. I’m not offended by it. I’m not running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away with my tail between my legs. I thought it was funny. I got a gag or I got a, you know, giggle out of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to take the effort to continue this conversation. But hey, here’s a favorite to let you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand. I saw it. And it was funny. We’re cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing is, like, do you guys ever check the favorites that you’re receiving?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get notified on my computer, but not on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John you get notified with with like an actual OS 10 notification that comes sliding in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because sometimes again, well, firstly, I don’t have but a fraction of the followers that you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, although over 9000 what’s up anyway. So the point is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a lot of times I’ll make a really sarcastic, obnoxious joke that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meant in a guy English kind of way. Now we’re now that’s become becoming a verb. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making like a guy English kind of joke. And I I want to know that if I’m making a joke at I don’t know maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell’s expense that he Thinks it’s okay and funny and cool, and if he throws me a favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I know all right I don’t need to apologize profusely and hate myself, and if he doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throw me a favor Why not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that the default? Well just assume you don’t have to apologize and hate yourself and assume that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets your jokes unless they actually tell you that they Didn’t Marco. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference between you and I I’m kind of serious, but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think it’s funny that like, you know, like we all seem to be using favorites kind of correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except that like all the people who I follow who I’m favoriting, they probably all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use third-party clients and most of them have enough followers and get enough favorites that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be annoying to be notified of each one. And the third-party clients, like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really show your received favorites in any way useful because there is no good API for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I think most people do what I do, which is go to a site that shows you your accumulated favorites. I go
⏹️ ▶️ John HowToFaveStar. Tons of people use those services. And I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonably healthy thing. It’s not good to be obsessed with it. It’s a feedback mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you made a funny joke or not? If nobody faves it or nobody RTs it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is less funny. Or to be surprised that you said something you didn’t think resonated, but then a huge percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of your followers fave it or RT it. And the ratio of fave and RT, There’s something people are faving to try to give like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you made me laugh or I thought that was interesting, or they are teeing it in like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John something I want my followers to see as well. So I definitely look at FaveStar, but that is like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t come at me. I go to FaveStar when I’m interested. How have I done for today? You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, like anything, some people can get obsessed with it. And as soon as they tweet this and they’re on their favorite saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John did I get any favorites? Did I get any favorite? Who would favor me? But you know, it’s a balance. You don’t use any
⏹️ ▶️ John site to show you the number of favorites or retweets you got on your tweets?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’ll occasionally be notified by FaveStar that I did something that got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of favorites. I crossed some threshold like 100, 200. Yeah, those emails are obnoxious. No, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just reply me on Twitter. They say, Congratulations on your 100 star tweet or whatever. And that happens a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times a year. It’s not a frequent thing that I get. I did recently start checking my retweets tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that the third third-party clients can show, just like, you know, your last few tweets and, you know, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many retweets they got, basically. So I did check that. Boy, this is boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, really quick real-time follow-up, then we’ll go to the next awesome thing. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 8,753 faves. Marco has 7,969. John, Mr. Stingy, Syracuse, 1,489.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I have the right number.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, you do. I think I’ve been on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John longer than you guys, too. probably think you have too many. Yeah that’s that’s I mean half of those are bookmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John or more than that probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t actually like that much stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about something cool Marco other than favorites.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a cool move. So thanks Squarespace for doing that too. Those guys are friends of ours. In Casey’s case, they are one
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco to customize a few things. But for the most part, our site is one of their stock templates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it looks fantastic. It’s only a couple of tweaks to it that we did. But I think it looks great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked through their templates and there’s so many good things. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it if you don’t want to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do want to, you can customize the crap out of it, basically. So we like Squarespace a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I could make a website from scratch in some other way. Most of the listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this show probably could make their own website if they wanted to. But there’s a time when it’s worth doing that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a time when it isn’t. And most of the time it isn’t. Most of the time, if you’re making
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects, whatever the case may be, most of the time you don’t need to code your own website from
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Marco, are you running Yosemite in any of your computers? What are you crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Okay. I am not either. So I have not seen the new version of iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m assuming it’s Yosemite only, isn’t it? Or am I crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been assuming that it, like all versions of iTunes, that will be released, not just for Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for all recent versions of OS X, which is why I’m basically not saying anything about it in the review because
⏹️ ▶️ John for all I know it could be released before Yosemite even comes out. Like they do that all the time. It’s only visible
⏹️ ▶️ John on Yosemite now, but there’s no reason to believe that they could release that iTunes whenever it’s ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like it’s going to be Yosemite only, I assume. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true. Right, right. But today
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s Yosemite only. As far as I know. I mean, I haven’t gone looking. You know, sometimes they have like iTunes beta downloads in the
⏹️ ▶️ John developer portal. I haven’t looked for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, neither have I. All right. So, but you have spent some amount of time with iTunes, John. Is that right? The new one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve played around with it. And do you have any thoughts about it?
⏹️ ▶️ John As I’ve said on past shows, the first thing I do with every new version of iTunes is bring up the preferences window and see if it’s still app modal. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I lose interest. And? And it’s still app modal. Oh, sorry. Probably NDA.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever. This is not the gigantic, like, so iTunes 11, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John was the one where they did the larger overhaul where the sidebar was hidden by default. And it’s like the one we’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I think it’s 11, right? Yep. And that was like, well, look, they really changed the UI. And it was different. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things that are interesting improvements. and it’s clear a lot of thought went into it. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. I’ve gotten used to it, more or less, but I did make the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ John visible, so I kind of go back to the old mode. The new one even goes farther
⏹️ ▶️ John in that direction, but it’s not a complete rethinking. And so it’s like, well, you’re breaking my habits, but
⏹️ ▶️ John are you giving me an application that’s faster, that’s more stable, that does its job better, or
⏹️ ▶️ John are you just kind of like redecorating? And I’m not going to say the current version
⏹️ ▶️ John of iTunes using is just redecorating because I think the way I know some people hate this because they got used to the old one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like the way they handle the up next stuff and everything is interesting. If you like the old way,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I can understand why you’re pissed off that they made this new way. But I wasn’t all that happy with the old way and the new way has
⏹️ ▶️ John some features that I like. But it’s just it just doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John it just doesn’t feel refreshing. And the this this topic is coming to us because
⏹️ ▶️ John Todd Vizier wrote and asked about like photos on the Mac. We talked about this in the past show, you know, photo is going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhoto. We don’t really know what that’s going to mean. But one thing we do know is it’s not going to be iPhoto with like the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John refreshed, right? It’s going to be let’s rethink how we do photo management.
⏹️ ▶️ John And his question was, he was wondering if we might see Apple do the same thing with iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, everyone’s been waiting this when is Apple going to do something with iTunes either split
⏹️ ▶️ John it up into a bunch of individual applications just rethink what it means to do whatever the hell iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John does which is like play music and let you buy things and watch movies but also
⏹️ ▶️ John sync and back up your iOS devices and it’s just I don’t know and so I that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s I think that’s a good question what what does it mean what does the next-gen iTunes look like what does it mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s see there’s there’s a lot there I think what a lot of people forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that iTunes has to run on Windows and the reason it has to run on Windows is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s it’s not necessarily because Apple needs to sell music and movies to Windows people I mean they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they like doing that I’m sure that’s a significant portion of buyers but the biggest reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that people who sync iPods and I have an iPhone and iPads people who sync iDevices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need something to sync them with on Windows and by keeping all this functionality in iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it lets them have the shared code base that runs on both Windows and Mac and handles all iOS syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and media needs for them. So, I would say we’re not going to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of big rewrite and split up a functionality that I think most of us would like, in theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d say we’re not going to see that until it’s no longer necessary to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a version of iTunes that runs on Windows. So, what does that mean? So, right now…
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, why do you think we won’t see that until iTunes doesn’t run it? Why? If anything, it would make that job
⏹️ ▶️ John easier. If they split it up into pieces the only piece that needs to live on Windows is the piece that lets you sync your iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and that presumably would be a simpler app than constantly having to keep the full functionality of iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John updated and running on Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well not necessarily well first of all they you know keep in mind what syncing iOS devices includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still you can still and I still do manually sync media over to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices because you know what iTunes match doesn’t always work and a lot of times it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot easier to sync over a whole bunch of downloaded files that you already have on your computer, put it over a wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put it on your device, then to try to do the same thing over the internet and use God knows how much bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, you know, no idea how fast it’s going to go. And you know, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John how does this, how does this stuff get onto your Mac? Like you’re saying like home movies that you take or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music, movies, you know, whatever the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I think a lot of stuff comes from the network to begin with. For most people, like I don’t think a lot of people are taking home movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and then putting them into their iTunes that way. Like if they’re on their iOS device already because they take them
⏹️ ▶️ John on their iOS device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but a lot of I’m talking more like, you know, movies that you buy from iTunes music that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accumulated over the last decade, you know, like people, people have large media collections that they want to sync quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a device and a lot of times redownloading it all over the internet is impossible or impractical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there is still there is still the need for this. Also a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might well not a lot of some people might still back up over cable. less important these days because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I cloud backup is by far more popular but either way there are still a lot of people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this now there is one other major part here which is iPods which still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist they don’t they’re not doing that well but they still exist they’re still for sale and there’s still a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of them out there and and you know the number is probably going down over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but it has a long way to go down so so iPods iPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them have no network connection. And so you need to sync an iPod from iTunes. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other way to get music onto, excluding the Touch, but the non-Touch iPods are what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about here. Oh, the Touch isn’t doing so hot either. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to have some way to get the media onto those and manage that media, and iTunes is still required for that. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not going to see… So I think Apple is a very patient company, especially when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big technical shifts like this. I think Apple is probably going to do what it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with iTunes only after it can discontinue the Windows version or substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shrink it down. And I don’t think that’s going to happen until it is no longer important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to sync music to iPods from Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they have a technical debt problem, though, that even if you decide that every ounce of functionality that’s in iTunes, including visualizers
⏹️ ▶️ John and crap like that, needs to stay there because just because a
⏹️ ▶️ John rewrite of the iTunes application like long-term eventually will be required.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how much weird, crufty carbon stuff is in there. I know a lot of their Windows libraries were based on carbon and if
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac version was off of carbon then you’re diverging the code bases, but it’s not like you’re in a port Cocoa to
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows and so how do you deal with that like to make the application better? Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John the application gets old and gross and you need to rewrite portion of it and I’m sure they’ve been doing that slowly over
⏹️ ▶️ John the years. But depending on how long it takes to wait out, if they’re doing that strategy, like, well, eventually, we won’t need it on Windows anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if they’re going to wait that out, it may take such a long time. And really, like, the state of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John on Windows is already moving on. And not that Apple’s been keeping up with it. But eventually, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do something on Windows. Like, their application won’t fit in. Maybe it will stop working. I know Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John historically has been super good about making old applications work for a really long time. But maybe the new Microsoft isn’t as excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. So it’s kind of a game of chicken with progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, well, we’ll keep doing this thing. We’ll keep kind of refreshing it. But we are held back by the fact that our Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John UI library is based on old QuickTime libraries and Carbon code or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what we have to use. And if we want to have a shared code base, we have to keep using that on the Mac. And iTunes becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John this increasingly weird application both on the Mac and on Windows. I mean, already on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s supposedly native, it’s odd. It’s always been a little odd. And on Windows, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also always been a little bit odd. So I wonder how long they can keep going in this
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. And I still think you can make a smaller, simpler, more purpose-built app that fulfills
⏹️ ▶️ John all of Apple’s needs on Windows for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take out as much as you can, but still let people sync their iPods and buy things and put them on. But it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole purpose of that application is like what you said. Why do they need it on Windows? This is a companion application for your
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices, and that’s all it is. And if that’s how you focus the application, it looks and works very differently
⏹️ ▶️ John than it does now. It doesn’t look like a music player that also has this other little thing you can click that changes
⏹️ ▶️ John it into kind of an iOS device management application. That’s all it is. It’s just an iOS device management application.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would think that if they did that, that iTunes is important enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that they could dedicate a team to write iTunes for Windows as a separate application, to not be obsessed with sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John all the UI code and everything, to say, look, you’re like the biggest technology company in the world. This is a core
⏹️ ▶️ John part of your business. iTunes sales keep going up and up. Can’t you spare a small
⏹️ ▶️ John team to write a full native, I’m sure Windows people would love this, a full native Windows application. The only parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would share would be like underlying faceless code and have the UI be all custom for Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that may be actually easier than trying to keep these two code bases handcuffed together
⏹️ ▶️ John as they sort of lurch onward through history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just so much to redo though, Because as I’m listening to you guys, I’m looking at the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just enumerate all these other things that iTunes does. And one thing that I came up with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe it was in the chat as well, is like iTunes can still burn CDs, right? That’s still a thing, believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or not. And rip them, yep. And rip them in various different codecs with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constant or variable bit rates. I mean, there are so many things that iTunes does. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that we’re really gonna get a rewrite, I think, is just like you said, John, to do something, is to change the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iTunes, which I think coming back to Todd’s point, change the purpose of iTunes and look at it more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as device management than as anything else. But if that’s the case, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you do with the store? I mean, I think Marco, you made a great point earlier. Is that its own app? Is it the- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got the Mac App Store app, right? Which is separate. That was the whole thing. When the Mac App Store came, people were like, what is that going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be, another tab in iTunes? And the answer was no, it’s going to be a separate, terrible, crappy application, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s going to be a separate application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, do we actually want them to try to make separate applications?
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s separate, no one is saying, boy, the Mac App Store app is so bloated and slow, and it crashes my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s finicky. It’s limited. It’s super simple, but it is not a pig.
⏹️ ▶️ John It launches. It runs. It’s got this thing. It’s got one window. And it’s got no tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s super limited, but it’s lightweight. And you could iterate,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they cared. They could iterate within that single purpose thing to make an application that gets better
⏹️ ▶️ John over time. With iTunes, they just kept adding stuff. It’s an impossibility to have one application that does all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. And for the Windows purpose, if you really think the
⏹️ ▶️ John only purpose of iTunes on Windows is so people can sync iPods and iOS devices, then make
⏹️ ▶️ John an application for syncing iPods and iOS devices for Windows. And then the question is, what do you do on the Mac? Well, on the Mac, we want to also
⏹️ ▶️ John offer a music player. Windows people can use whatever Windows Media thing that they’re offering these days. On the Mac, we want to offer
⏹️ ▶️ John a music player, and we also want to let you buy stuff, and we want to put it into a single pool. like
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhoto, like it used to be one application that managed all your stuff. And now they’re like, well, actually, your photos are going to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John this photos and iCloud thing, which is based on this whole new framework and blah, blah, blah. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John app will be an interface to it. And we also have an app that’s an interface to it, like a sort of a cloud centric thing where it stops
⏹️ ▶️ John being this monolithic application and starts being a series of windows into a set of data. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why you can get it like, well, if you if you had a separate music player and a separate iOS syncing app, would they have to have duplicates of the data?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’d be like one pool of your stuff. and where would your stuff be? Probably in the same amorphous
⏹️ ▶️ John place that your photo stuff is going to be. Like that’s, you know, and if they really wanted to go crazy I know this is crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, hold on to your seats. I suggest this, I don’t want you to fall over.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s one way you can make a single interface for multiple platforms to have access to data
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on a server somewhere, and it’s called a web page. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John have web app, like I’m not saying this has to be the main interface. Once again, are you sure you want this? I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the way it has to be, but like every other company in the world, like they would immediately go to that. And of course we
⏹️ ▶️ John also need to have a web interface to whatever, you know, to our email system. And we’ll call it Gmail. You can use local clients
⏹️ ▶️ John too, because that works great. It’s not ideal for, I like Gmail. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal for iTunes type stuff. But if like, if they’re going to put all your photos into the cloud and just some local subset
⏹️ ▶️ John is on your machine, why can’t all the stuff you buy through iTunes also be, I mean, it’s already in the cloud, right? iTunes match, all my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is already in the cloud, but I have no access to it anywhere except for on a Mac or Windows computer running iTunes or
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iOS device. Web interfaces are such a natural fit for a pool of data
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s already on a server somewhere. Why should it be tied and just have local caches
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff? Like, I think that’s where all of Apple’s applications are going. They just don’t want to go the last step to do the web interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’d be perfectly happy to have slim client side interfaces, that stuff. But if they wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John address Windows and didn’t want to write a separate Windows application, some kind of web integrated thing
⏹️ ▶️ John could work for them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re saying is that you think it would be an improvement if Apple made more applications that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Mac App Store app and more web apps?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but for and less like iTunes. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But aren’t the aren’t the store apps basically mostly HTML anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re they’re sort of like Apple’s version of web apps where it’s not really a web app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like they want to have control over everything. But it’s like a really poor performing web app because like
⏹️ ▶️ John The time it takes for Mac App Store pages to load is way more than the time it takes like an Amazon dot
⏹️ ▶️ John com page. Well, there’s Amazon dot com pages are filled with crap and yet they load instantly. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store is like load. It’s like going back in time to Netscape four.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now getting back into this discussion about iTunes for a second, I have one one little thing to say here that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure will be a quick topic that nobody will argue with Is iTunes really that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad does it really justify? Oh, it is it is bad Does it really justify all of the work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it would take to? Rewrite the whole thing break it up into different apps lose Windows Support
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not losing Windows Support You’re making a new one of those to remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well well Yeah, but then like you know is the media is the media store still there? you know like right now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also enjoy a benefit of if you have an iPhone and you want it to sync to your computer you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to install the iTunes music store and you have to look at it sometimes and so that has to drive sales to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iPhone you mean and you mean an iPod right yeah I guess you don’t need you don’t need iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John for iPhone iOS devices don’t need iTunes anymore but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway yeah so some devices don’t need the most don’t I guess but the point is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes works it doesn’t work great all the time but it does work And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, is it really worth them spending so much time to rewrite all of this stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a massive amount of time where it would not only be very expensive for them and would take a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of talent away from other projects, but it would also, in the meantime, probably get worse before it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, because rewrites always have a ton of bugs at first. You know, the bugs they fixed over the years were addressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some other weird way. They’ve got to, like, re-solve all the same problems again. It would be a massive,
⏹️ ▶️ John more important to Apple iTunes or iPhoto?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question actually I’m not sure…
⏹️ ▶️ John And and they’re rewriting iPhoto what I’m getting at is like yeah but you can keep going with an application for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time but at a certain point you need to sort of overhaul it like and it’s like oh I don’t want to do this always there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always some excuse not to not to redo it because you’re like well but eventually like time runs out like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know 10 years 20 years 5,000 years from now iTunes will be rewritten right you know and you have to do it it’s the same thing with the new
⏹️ ▶️ John language stuff everyone just wants to put it off forever and iTunes is not just some obscure application. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. We’re getting along with it. It’s OK. iTunes is like the cornerstone of their entire strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John for selling digital content. And that’s why they’re afraid of changing. Like, oh, don’t touch iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need it to be like, if you screw it up, if you make the new version crappier or whatever. And maybe that is why that iPhoto gets
⏹️ ▶️ John the treatment. Because like, well, we screw up iPhoto. It’s all right. We already screwed up iMovie a couple of times. And we survived that or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But iTunes, you can never change. Well, you can’t just like never touch it. And you can’t just like, well, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll just keep rearranging the furniture. We’ll just keep doing changes to the UI because basic functionality has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John super terrible. Like podcasts, which I thankfully, thanks to you Marco, do not manage on iTunes anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ John right up until you’ve released Overcast beta, I was doing it in iTunes and it’s just gotten worse and
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. And I don’t listen to that many podcasts. I’m kind of like moderate podcast, you know, maybe 10, 12
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions, but managing them in iTunes was a nightmare. And it’s like, these are just like little MP3 files.
⏹️ ▶️ John I felt like all these people who manage stuff in folders, it’s like I can manage this stuff in folders better than you can. And now it’s gotten so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, like they’ve added features, but now, like I was trying to clean through my iTunes podcast library to try to like
⏹️ ▶️ John delete episodes and find ones that I haven’t downloaded and mark ones for saving. It is, it’s just torture.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not friendly. I can never expect anybody but me to go through this. I would never instruct someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else. Oh, get iTunes, it’s an easy way for you to manage your stuff. Like I can barely use to listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to music just because I have it set up the way I want. I have my playlist that I want. I have iTunes match, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is a valuable service. And I just get it just so and just hit Play, essentially, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Next Track to skip over because I use a random play through my playlist. It is not a pleasant experience. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make me feel good about the application. And I’m not saying it needs to change right now, but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to do something. And I don’t know if they can wait out until the Windows version doesn’t work. And all the excuses
⏹️ ▶️ John about why you don’t want to rewrite something that’s critical, like you can say that about anything. They said it about classic Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS for way too long. iTunes is not at that point. The programming language arguably wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point, but these things take time and they’re hard to do. And so sooner or later, it’s got to be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I actually, I think it does need to be done eventually, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I lean towards Marco’s view on this one in that I don’t ask that much of iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it does its job just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it ever download movies for you and fill your disc with movies that you purchased elsewhere just for
⏹️ ▶️ John No. No, never. It does to me. that ever consume all memory on your computer when you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John it does to me. No, nope. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Mac Pro’s too old.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iTunes is a buggy
⏹️ ▶️ John program, and it has unfriendly bugs, and it has tons of crap in it. And this is like a delicate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you don’t want to touch too much as a user. And it’s not pleasant. It’s not friendly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, and I, for a regular, not super duper power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not so sure you’re right. I think it gets the job done. Could it be better? Yes, it could be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John You keep saying it gets the job done. Yes, obviously it functions. Like it does what it’s supposed to do, but we’re arguing
⏹️ ▶️ John like, is it good enough? Is it up to Apple standards? Could it be improved? Or are we just going to keep like,
⏹️ ▶️ John has the trend in iTunes progress? Like, is it positive? Is every new version of iTunes better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous one? Even if the slope is really shallow, going back maybe five, you know, seven years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the slope is flat or trending down. And that is not a good trend for an application that’s so important for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree with that, But there’s so much technical debt there that it’s moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mountain in order
⏹️ ▶️ John and the longer you wait, the bigger the mountain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets. And that’s true as well. I just… I don’t know. To me, I think they have bigger fish to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fry than fixing iTunes,
⏹️ ▶️ John personally. I think this is a bigger slam dunk than new programming language, because new programming language
⏹️ ▶️ John had people on the opposite side. Not only is Objective-C just fine, in fact, it’s better than anything you can suggest, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they sure as hell don’t need a new language. And luckily, Apple disagreed with that. iTunes, I don’t think anyone’s going to say
⏹️ ▶️ John not only is iTunes just fine. In fact, it’s better than any alternative you can imagine. Therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the most you get like, well, iTunes is all right. It doesn’t bother me on a daily basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does what it’s supposed to do. That’s a low bar. I really like again, I don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an impending crisis and I have to do this now, but the reason people keep bringing this up and have been bringing it up for years is it
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like it’s due. You know, so maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime but in the next maybe 5, 10 years, they have to address this. They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something. And maybe they’ll be able to wait, like Marco said, until the Windows version is irrelevant. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, we don’t have to worry about Windows version. And it simplifies our transition. But then maybe they will have built
⏹️ ▶️ John up too much crap. Maybe by then, all Macs will be ARM, and there’s a bunch of weird, crazy x86-only code in iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t know about. And I mean, you brought up the CD stuff. Eventually, they’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of the CD ripping stuff, I would assume. I mean, obviously, Apple still sells
⏹️ ▶️ John computers without down. They don’t sell any computers with optical drives now, do they? They still sell an optical drive that’s external.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that’s Apple branded. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I guess you’re right. They don’t have any. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left now, right? I don’t think so. Where’s Hackett when we need him?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the question of, rather than arguing about whether iTunes needs to be fixed or replaced or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of, all right, so fast forward to whatever your arbitrary year is. Then again, bringing back the programming language,
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s like, OK, I will concede that 500 years in the future, Apple will need a programming language, but not a year sooner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, for iTunes, whatever year you concede that iTunes will need to be rewritten
⏹️ ▶️ John or redesigned or refactored, the question remains, what does that redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ John refactor, rewrite look like? Does it look exactly the same as the current iTunes but better written and
⏹️ ▶️ John with a non-app modal preferences dialog box? Or do you envision it breaking up into multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John applications? Do some applications become irrelevant? Do some features of iTunes get integrated into the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that you know, that is not that doesn’t feel like an application, but feels more like a notification
⏹️ ▶️ John center where it’s like integrated? I don’t know those. Those I think are interesting questions. I don’t have any good answers. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the most interesting line of thought about this rather than worrying about when something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I would disagree with your assumption that iTunes is more important to Apple than photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you think about where they make most of their money, which is you know, the iOS devices and everything, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people tend to do on the iOS devices most, and what’s important to people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and why people might choose one mobile platform over another. I think handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of photos and videos, you know, that are captured by the device handling of photos is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more important than everything iTunes does to most of Apple’s consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ John how important is to Apple, not how important is it to Apple’s consumers. Like anything, like photos, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff they do is like, OK, well, that makes the hardware more valuable to customers. And Apple makes
⏹️ ▶️ John this money by selling the hardware. But it’s like, OK, well, what percentage of the value that
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the hardware is added by photos versus what percentage is added by FaceTime versus what percentage is added by iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John versus what percentage is added by Safari? And you start carving it up into pieces. And yeah, iPhoto
⏹️ ▶️ John does contribute value to the hardware. But iTunes, I mean, what you really need is
⏹️ ▶️ John a breakdown of iTunes usage inside and outside of iOS. Because iTunes revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John is going up, up, up. But you don’t know is that like, what is it, 99.9% of that people making
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase on their iOS devices? Then that decreases the value of iTunes to the company, the application.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if a lot of people are still buying things on their computers, and like, for example, Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, is something that a lot of Mac nerds have. But, you know, I forget what the
⏹️ ▶️ John sales numbers are for Apple TV, but there’s way more iPads and iPhones out there than Apple TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are people buying movies and watching them on their iPads and iPods or are people buying them and watching them on their computer still like
⏹️ ▶️ John that? We’re in transition between iTunes, where you did everything on your computer to
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff where you do everything on your handhelds. And I know, for example, that even though my daughter has access to iPads and iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John touches and all sorts of stuff, she still watches videos on a laptop computer Rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than the giant TV, by the way. I don’t understand that choice, but it makes me wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes as a vehicle for both purchasing and consuming digital content is not as completely passé
⏹️ ▶️ John as it seems to be in our circles, because we’ve all moved on to, you know, AirPlay and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe your TV’s fans are too loud. Kids don’t hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John fans. I hear them. The kids don’t. I’m kind of glad, because then you don’t have to worry about them
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally leaving it paused and getting burned in or whatever, but it is weird. Marshall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we good? Stan Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm, And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they did it mean to, accidental, accidental That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I’m so glad you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t check my cast so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be dead in three weeks. I hope not. That was 10 review. It’s going to kill me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. Well, that’s possible. So how’s it going? I wasn’t going to bring it up, but how’s it going?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s terrible. Like, I don’t want to talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how I’m going to. I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I don’t know how I’m going to finish this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re taking time off your J-O-B job?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I just, I mean, I would like a release date
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. I hope they don’t surprise me and say, hey, it’s ready early. But I mean, it doesn’t seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be ready early, but I have too much stuff to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even sections that I thought I knew what I was going to write, I get into them and realize I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I just, I just started writing about Swift. I saved it like to the end. Like I saved it until like
⏹️ ▶️ John this past weekend. I’m like, finally, now I can do the swift section. I know exactly what I’m going to do. Turns out I don’t know exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to write. And I’m stuck in the friggin swift section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t know what to say about that. Other than I’m sorry. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this really may be my last one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You sound surprisingly serious when you say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John 1010 is a nice round number. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not, but I bet it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope it’s not as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll talk about it after. I don’t want to overthink it now. Now I just got to get this done but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well you don’t have to really decide till next summer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah exactly. That’s what you know you don’t want to like so you don’t decide whether you’re gonna have another kid right after you have the first one. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the worst time to decide that actually. Well this is really my like 15th kid so if we go
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in review terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and this this is the worst time for you to decide whether to write another one of these the next year or not. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah because you sounded pretty much exactly the same a year ago if memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ John It gets worse every year Though like and I don’t know if like the review that every year to yeah But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if the reviews are getting worse like that’s anyway. We’ll talk about after that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like deciding whether to have another kid during contractions This is like the worst possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time Anything else going on I don’t know I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still don’t I don’t think iTunes is that bad and and I say that having had a lot of weird little iTunes problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen over the years just gonna use it a lot for various things, but But it mostly works for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t see like it works for me. Yep. Just be
⏹️ ▶️ John glad you don’t use it for podcasts. You should try that for like a week to try to use it for podcasts like I
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Yeah, me too. They’re actually paying attention to the podcast feature now, which you think would be good, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually kind of like they’re adding features that are good. Like, oh, I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell iTunes that they should that it’s just save this episode. I’ve always wanted better control over which ones it downloads and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. But everything is so slow and painful and everything is at a different mode on a different screen and a different
⏹️ ▶️ John view. And I don’t understand how it could be so damn slow. The recent update had had a note in the release notes. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John improved performance problems in podcast, blah, blah, blah. And I haven’t checked whether to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got that much better. But at least they acknowledge that it’s a problem. Like, I would select like five podcasts and hit the delete
⏹️ ▶️ John key and you count 123, like just waiting for it to do something like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was it was multiple seconds before anything would happen. You’re like, Come on, guys, I’m deleting four
⏹️ ▶️ John MP3 files. I don’t know what you’re doing behind the scenes, but it’s, you know, are you communicating with
⏹️ ▶️ John a server? Are you updating some gigantic PLIST file because you didn’t want to make like, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John you SQLite back end for core. I don’t even know what they’re doing. It’s all carbon code and stuff. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what’s going on behind. All I know is that the experience of using the application is not up to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think like, you know, pointing out the carbon code, that’s almost certainly there and the modal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences box. Like, I think those are really not, I think those are red herrings.
⏹️ ▶️ John The modal preferences box, someone brought that up in the chat room. That’s not like, I don’t care that the preferences, I’m just using that as a canary
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, when that goes away, I will know that they seriously refactored the application because it’s not important
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to address directly. Like, who cares, right? But if it is changed, it means they did such a sweeping
⏹️ ▶️ John change that this came out of it as a side effect, and therefore they really made changes. So that’s why I’m checking preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because I care about app modal preferences or anything like that. just as an extra quick external indication
⏹️ ▶️ John of how much refactoring work was really done in this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I think we all say that we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, we’d love we think they should rewrite iTunes. And we say that with the implied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco following sentence, that will solve everything. And in reality, of course, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that when Apple rewrites a major application all new, especially in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, that not only doesn’t solve everything, but often makes things worse for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, well, I think I’m in I’m speaking for myself here. I’m I acknowledge that I’m willing to accept like photos
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to be very talk about it. Like how how few features will photos have in the initial version
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much worse than I photo will it be? And will it like you have to just accept those kind of transitions
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t stick with one thing forever. And I think that the most
⏹️ ▶️ John confusing thing is like, first of all, it’s not rewriting because it’s huge swaths of non UI related code that presumably they
⏹️ ▶️ John would reuse that have nothing to do with UI, nothing to do with carbon, they’re just, you know, this just tons of code in there that does
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that does even all the code they’ve been doing that talk, you know, talks to iTunes match and all that network related code.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you assume that that was factored reasonably, they’re not rewriting that, like, they’ve added all that code over the years, they will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it and wherever they use it, hopefully they did it in a modular way. What you’re mostly talking about is, what’s the glue
⏹️ ▶️ John that holds that all together? And especially like the local glue of like, is there still a local
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes database that can get corrupted and cause your app to go crazy? Is everything server side? Does it move to more of
⏹️ ▶️ John a photos model where it’s like, well, it used to be all about local SQLite databases and files on disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s all about some cloud thing with everything local being like a cache to make things faster
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. So photos will be the first guinea pig in this area, I guess, although
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably with photos, they’ve already kind of done several versions of that on iOS, albeit
⏹️ ▶️ John with a very spare interface. I’m assuming the back end is going to be very similar in terms of how does how does photos on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John know what photos you have and how does it get little thumbnails for them and are they all on your phone and all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m optimistic that what they do with photos will be a good learning opportunity for when
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to do something similar to iTunes later. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big use of when when the when the real world might be if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got to be when what would it’s 500 years 1000 years what are you willing to agree to everyone always wants to push
⏹️ ▶️ John it out seriously though this is actually a mental exercise but But you feel like it’s not imminent. It’s not imminent, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But everyone agrees that on a long enough timeline, something has to happen or Apple will be out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s like, do you assume iTunes lasts until Apple goes out of business? What timeline are you comfortable with?
⏹️ ▶️ John Keep shrinking it until you get a feel for where it is. Because if you can’t bring it down to, well, iTunes will be
⏹️ ▶️ John in its current form until Apple goes out of business. And I believe that will happen in 200 years. It’s a pretty good bet
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are not factoring in all information available because that’s a little bit crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just what do you think? What kind of range do you think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable? Well, again, I think it’s much more likely that they’re gonna stick with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current iTunes architecture and not break all this stuff out, not do crazy UI rewrites and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna stick with that until most of what iTunes does is no longer relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no longer necessary. And then they’ll do a Final Cut 10, an iMovie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrite. They’ll do one of those rewrites where they delete the whole thing basically rewrite the the core 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when does that happen that’s a good question you know again like iTunes does so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say since they’re you know they’re still selling iPods those are still doing you know not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re still selling them you know they still have certain things with iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that are using iTunes like I think it’s gonna be there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be some future iOS device or version of iOS that doesn’t sync with iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. I think that is going to be when they when they do this. And so when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might that be? I don’t know, maybe five years. I mean, I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be shorter than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone likes to round numbers for five years is reasonable. I think I was even go longer than that. But here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the easy way to get rid of the the iPod requirement. And I think this is probably if if I pod
⏹️ ▶️ John stay around, I think this will happen sooner rather than later is that just make all the iPods sync with
⏹️ ▶️ John your iOS devices, Because your iOS devices already have access to all your media through cloud services or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they already have tons of wireless protocols. And wireless chips get cheap enough, even if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John do it over some high bandwidth version of Bluetooth or something. You get some turdy little iPod. Why in the hell should you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to sync that with a Mac? Why can’t the iOS device be the home base for you? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a hierarchy. You have a tiny little iPod or your iPod Shuffle. That can pull songs over some
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless thing from your iOS device just fine. And then you go all the way up to the big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hard drive, even that. Eventually, if iPods stay around, which I don’t think is
⏹️ ▶️ John guaranteed at all, but if they do stay around, one way you can get iTunes out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture for iPods is by having them sync with iOS devices, which more people have than, maybe more people
⏹️ ▶️ John have than PCs or Macs at the point that happens, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think Marco’s right. I think it’ll be, something will change external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iTunes itself itself to make it not really requisite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not necessary in its current form. And that’s when it’ll make sense to start cleaving
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we’re talking about. The current form will become obsolete, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will still want to have, for example, a way for you to play music on your Mac. And so it’s like, well, we don’t need this giant
⏹️ ▶️ John beast that is iTunes, but we want you to have a music player, and the music player should be integrated with your music collection.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe we also wanted to have a way for you to watch movies on your laptop when you’re on the plane. Is that the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the music player? Is that a separate app? You know, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. It’s not different than what I’m saying. It’s not like just take
⏹️ ▶️ John the existing iTunes and rewrite it in Cocoa, but have it look exactly the same. Like it’s not, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful thing. I think what the way I’m looking at it is the implication of what Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with him is saying is that it can happen some time in the future that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terribly near term. Whereas-
⏹️ ▶️ John He said five years. That’s a closer timeline than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would know I would say at least five years you know I it might even be longer than that again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know who knows but I what I’m basically saying is I don’t think it’s anytime soon because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the iPods are still being sold they’re still being used by people hell Stephen Hackett just bought a new iPod classic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s probably the last person to ever have bought one and will probably like I bet they’re going to discontinue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it next week and he’ll he will be like that will be literally the last one that was ever sold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he is the oldest young man I’ve ever met.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s be honest. Some of the chat room pointed out that the current iPod Nano apparently has Bluetooth. I don’t know if current
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth standards have enough bandwidth to get songs over them. Probably for a shuffle they do because they just don’t hold that much songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t really want to be transferring large files over Bluetooth. That is, it is not made for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t let you forget that. It’s just, it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John But like Wi-Fi, I mean, you know, we’re at the point now where maybe it would
⏹️ ▶️ John make them a little bit more expensive, but you could build in a little Wi-Fi thing inside. Certainly a nano, maybe not a shuffle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, well, they have those little, what, those SD cards with the Wi-Fi thing of the iFi, remember those for cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and those aren’t that good either. And those are also extremely slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Well, I’m just saying in terms of like how small can you make a Wi-Fi thing? You can make it really small. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have to bury it inside a potentially metal camera or something like You could design, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we have the technology to do this now. It’s just like, is it worthwhile? Does Apple even care about iPods? Or does it just
⏹️ ▶️ John let them fade off into the sunset? We’ll see. But I’m saying like that’s an out. If you want to keep selling things
⏹️ ▶️ John that only sell music that are really cheap, eventually putting a little Wi-Fi chip set in a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing that plays music that syncs with your iOS devices, not with your Macs, is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what does it need to sync for? How do you get music on it? How do you get anything? iTunes Match.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if iTunes Match is no longer paid?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but you don’t want the Wi-Fi to be used all the time because it’s got a tiny little battery. You just want it to be like that. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just have it like a lot of you down wandering around my house, picking up my songs from like you would want it to basically have the radios
⏹️ ▶️ John off all the time, except when when you’re syncing and why I would have to sync with with iOS because
⏹️ ▶️ John it has another screen on it in the case of a shuffle. So you need something to say, what do you want on your iPod shuffle? Pick the songs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And that’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s your point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And really, you wouldn’t want to pick like the nano screen and even the classic screens, you don’t want to use the screen on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod, the screen on your soon to be much larger or soon to be larger. Anyway, iPhone or
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad is a much nicer way to pick what you want, even though you could technically maybe with,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, turn on the Wi-Fi on your Nano and fiddle around with it and try to pick stuff. It would be annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t I don’t think the iPod line is even worth enough of Apple’s attention to make that change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it sync to an iOS device. Yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, it’s it’s like I don’t I don’t necessarily think so either. But if I’m saying if they wanted to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it around, that would be a way to do it without getting rid of iTunes. But it just seems like they’re fading away. Like they don’t bother
⏹️ ▶️ John really updating them. No one cares about them. The sales keep going down, down, down.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there looks like they’re just going to fade away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that’s by far the most likely outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, we keep saying the classic iPod should be dead by now too. But somehow it continues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, at this point, it will be a surprise when they do kill it. Like it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, I was predicting every event, they’re going to kill the iPod Classic and they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t it’s still there they’re still selling it and at least one person out there is actually still
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not even going to notice when they do it because it’s not like they’re going to announce it we’re just going to have to someone’s going to go to the store and go hey
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I can’t find the iPod Classic anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just one night it’ll be like when the Fed takes over a bank like just one night every Apple store they’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be gone and the next morning just like that table just has you know a couple more beats on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will still take a few more days for someone to notice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re not in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not in the corner anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder how I bet it would take a while before anyone noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s if you work in an Apple store and you have a flexible manager, don’t tell Apple headquarters, but just take
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod Classics off the show floor in your Apple Store and see how long it takes. It counting days before