catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

88: Standing on Opposite Sides of the Gym

24 Oct 2014

Twitter and developers, Apple Pay, interest waning in OS X, and GamerGate.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
  • lynda.com: Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials. Free 7-day trial.
  • Igloo: An intranet you'll actually like, free for up to 10 people.

MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this a show? Is this what people tune in for?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it doesn’t matter because they’re here anyway. So this is what they’re getting regardless of whether this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what they tuned in for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. All right, let’s do some follow up. Why don’t we talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how my life took a turn for the better a day or two ago and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, we did not have Sprout yet. Sprout is still not born. But I saw a tweet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from our mutual friend, Michael Jurowicz, and he said something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I did not realize. What he said was that for you to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use, I keep calling it SMS relay, I’m not sure if that’s a blessed term or not,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for you to use SMS relay on iOS 8 and Yosemite, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually does not require Bluetooth low energy like a lot of other new continuity things do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It instead just requires both devices to be on an active

⏹️ ▶️ Casey network. And I haven’t done any testing to determine exactly what that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, but I’ve heard rumblings that basically as long as your phone is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey logged into your iCloud account and connected to the internet some way, somehow,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the computer that you’re using is connected to that same iCloud account and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the internet some way, somehow, then apparently you can send text messages by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of your phone, which is amazing, because I didn’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that was a possibility without Bluetooth Low Energy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this tweet was a nice summary to try to fit into a single tweet all the different requirements for the different continuity

⏹️ ▶️ John related features. We’ll put a link to the tweet in the show notes. But the summary is, handoff, tethering, and airdrop

⏹️ ▶️ John needs Bluetooth Low Energy. SMS, they just both need network connections. And the phone calling

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, they need network connections, and they need to be on the same network. Now this is compressed into a

⏹️ ▶️ John tweet, so if there are technical nuances that didn’t fit in the tweet, don’t blame jury, blame us We’re just relaying

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s it’s a reasonable summary. This this type of information is difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ John Convey to people because even if you tell them for example that handoff uses Bluetooth low-energy to discover

⏹️ ▶️ John things Nobody knows if their Mac has Bluetooth low-energy. Nobody knows what Bluetooth low-energy is So they see

⏹️ ▶️ John these features or even you know read about them in my review and then are disappointed that they can’t do it and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, they don’t know if they have something called BTLE so it’s It’s just a shame really,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Apple needs to communicate these technical nuances, but the bottom line is that if your machine doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have Bluetooth low energy, you’re not going to be scanning with regular Bluetooth at full energy all the time on

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and the Mac to be able to do handoff. For the feature to be feasible relies

⏹️ ▶️ John on low energy. And the SMS thing, that makes sense that they can

⏹️ ▶️ John coordinate it all through the server. The phone, I still don’t quite understand the technical details of why they need to to be on the

⏹️ ▶️ John same network, why, you know, they don’t apparently need to be in Bluetooth range. I know you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John to pair them. But anyway, it’s a magical, mystical voodoo, and

⏹️ ▶️ John all these weird technical details will be moot in five years when everybody’s computers has all this stuff. But for now,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit weird. If you’ve got an older Mac, you may not get all these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and that’s why I was so excited, because with the exception of Aaron’s MacBook Air, which is what I used to record,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the newest Mac in the house is a late 2011 high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro, which I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about numerous times on the show, and that is pre-Bluetooth low energy. And so, like I’d said before,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was devastated, man, that’s a strong word, but I was really sad that I wasn’t gonna be able to use a lot of this continuity

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And as it turns out, I haven’t tried the phone thing, although that should work, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have absolutely tried the SMS relay, and it’s really awesome. I’m really sad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to miss AirDrop. That I am most upset about of the things I’m missing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I can’t tether with my phone. and because I’m on an unlimited plan from AT&T still,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and handoff, eh, I don’t use Apple Mail, I use AirMail, so eh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was really, really excited to try, or to see that SMS Relay works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we break apart that tethering thing for a second? How much data per month do you typically use?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is where you basically back me into realizing that there is no need for me to hold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to the unlimited plan. That is a known issue, And I,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really know why I haven’t gotten rid of it yet, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t. And there is no reasonable reason for me to still have it. And to answer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your question, I haven’t looked in a while, but I guess I use between two and three, two and three gigs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month. Um, Aaron is still on a 200 megabyte a month plan and I keep begging her to let

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me get her more. Um, and she doesn’t really use it. and especially now that she’s at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey home almost all the time, doesn’t really need more than that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s almost no need for us to upgrade. Now, I haven’t crunched the numbers, but my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey limited understanding is it would probably actually be cheaper for us to ditch the unlimited plan and just get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a share plan, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Tiff and I did that recently. She was still on the unlimited just because she never had any reason to change it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had given it up for tethering long ago, But yeah, we found, I think, combined, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use something like two gigs a month on average, and it doesn’t really change that much month to month. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would I would venture a guess that if you had tethering, not only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you probably be paying less per month with this with a combined plan, but I would guess that whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit to your life that unlimited data sounds like it might eventually possibly someday maybe provide.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is if AT&T doesn’t throttle you too much in the meantime, which they do, because not really unlimited anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever benefit that’s providing to you, I bet the benefit of going to a tethering plan would be greater.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right. And as you just pointed out, and Pete here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat also pointed out, one time I got to either three or four gigs, I think it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three, and AT&T definitely sent me a nasty gram saying, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re going to slow everything down until the end of the month. Have fun with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So, you know, you’re basically not getting unlimited data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you might as well get the benefits of getting rid of that plan and getting the new features.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know you’re right. Like it’s one of those things that momentum is keeping me going in this probably silly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasteful direction. So meh, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, you were saying about Bluetooth Low Energy, continuing that on?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking about airdrop, right? The lack of airdrop is somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ John made less painful between iOS and Mac devices is made less painful if you have an older Mac doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John support it. iOS 8 extensions now there are so many more ways from any app with a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 8 extension support to you know to use a share extension to press

⏹️ ▶️ John push your files from one place to the other whether you I mean I guess you could always do it in a lot of apps supported Dropbox you could continue to

⏹️ ▶️ John do that but also things like I mean I heard people even using like transmit for iOS to transfer files

⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth like you’re not as trapped in individual iOS apps now as you used to be like you’re not reliant

⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple’s built-in airdrop to be the way that you quickly transfer any content

⏹️ ▶️ John from from your iOS device to your Mac. So that’s nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think also, iCloud Drive, I think is going to be a bigger deal. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all think it it is like, I think we’re probably underestimating it, because bringing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Dropbox like storage model to any iOS app that wants it is really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. And I think that’s going to have wide reaching ramifications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it works at all. And john, you seem to think that I was actually paying a lot of attention during that part of your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco review. I mean, you know, I pay attention to the whole thing, of course, but but in particular, the the iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive farm, because like, I’m very interested in, in, in, I’m really hoping that works very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Because it can it can really help iOS so much.

⏹️ ▶️ John The nice thing is that it’s there’s a it’s on reasonably level footing with all those other

⏹️ ▶️ John services that are like that, including Dropbox or Google Drive or what is Microsoft’s

⏹️ ▶️ John thing called? OneDrive. Once you’re on that sheet

⏹️ ▶️ John that comes up with your sharing things, anybody can have something in there. So it’s good that it’s like if

⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Drive flakes out or ends up being unreliable or something, you have so many other options. And reliability is,

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of things in the review, it’s so hard to gauge because Because anything, when I’m reviewing

⏹️ ▶️ John the OS, anything that relies on a server-side component, it doesn’t matter what bits

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sends me in a developer build of the OS. If there’s a server-side component that’s either not yet ready or

⏹️ ▶️ John not turned on or completely buggy, you can’t judge the feature based on that at

⏹️ ▶️ John all. And even when you get what you think is the final build, if Apple’s servers are still being wonky,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean that the bits in the final build are bad, it could just that the servers are still wonky and that, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John day of release they get that they push out the last, you know, builds of the server software and suddenly things

⏹️ ▶️ John work nicely. For iCloud Drive in the early beta, you know, either didn’t work at all or it

⏹️ ▶️ John was totally buggy, but that doesn’t mean anything because they’re still working on it at that point. And then once it did start working,

⏹️ ▶️ John I had like this series of tests that I went through to sort of gauge reliability

⏹️ ▶️ John of transferring large files, moving files, deleting files, putting folder with a bunch of little files in it to try to run it through

⏹️ ▶️ John its paces. And I rewrote that iCloud drive section many times because as

⏹️ ▶️ John it kept getting better, like I thought, okay this must be how it’s going to work and it’s not that great

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know it’s taking x number of seconds for my changes to appear on two different Macs, but it just got better and better to

⏹️ ▶️ John the point where by the time I wrote the final version of that section it’s like it more or less works without any huge

⏹️ ▶️ John delays. The UI issues I think are still a possible problem,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially now did you see that Dropbox has a a version out that uses the new file synchronization status

⏹️ ▶️ John extensions, I’m assuming, because it looks totally different.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How can you tell, just because they’re not over the actual file or folder anymore?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re not badged. I’m assuming that’s using it. I just noticed it today, because I upgraded my work Mac to

⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite last night. But yeah, the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John issues and reliability of the server part, not the client part, are I think where

⏹️ ▶️ John the rub really hits the road with iCloud Drive. Because I mean, there’s more than one client. There’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John the access to it from various apps on iOS and from the various extensions on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John to get to this. And then, of course, there’s the Finder as another client. And there’s a web client.

⏹️ ▶️ John The one part that we all worry about Apple getting right is the server part. We need it to be reliable,

⏹️ ▶️ John fast, up all the time. Because it’s kind of like Dropbox. Imagine if you had Dropbox and

⏹️ ▶️ John you had a bunch of little icons, and they didn’t have little green checks on them. They

⏹️ ▶️ John just had the little spinny blue, I’m trying to update thing and it never went green.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what do you do about it? You quit Dropbox and relaunch it. You delete Dropbox and reinstall it. It’s, you know, never

⏹️ ▶️ John goes green. Like that’s the, that’s the thing with, you know, it doesn’t happen with Dropbox, but if it did,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is your recourse? With all these cloud services, especially even, I mean, even Dropbox doesn’t have a like,

⏹️ ▶️ John force synchronize this file now, please thing. It’s just supposed to work, right? And when it doesn’t, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know what I can do. And so that’s what I’m always worried about with iCloud Drive. It’s so young now, I don’t know, Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John am I going to drag a file into it on my Mac at work and come home and see that

⏹️ ▶️ John the file’s not there and I just wait and stare at the folder and wait for the file to appear? Like, what do I do then? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. There’s not even anything to uninstall. I guess I could disable and re-enable iCloud Drive, but

⏹️ ▶️ John so far so good. But I have to admit that unless there’s some compelling reason for me to leave Dropbox, which I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been using for a long time and my habits are all built on, I’m going to keep using Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tend to agree. I don’t even, I enabled iCloud Drive. I’ve not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever. This is now the first time I’ve ever clicked on the iCloud Drive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey item in my Finder sidebar. And turns out there’s stuff in there. Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is does Dropbox on iOS offer that file picker extension yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like so it goes in the same dialogue as iCloud Drive?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does. I haven’t used an app with it. But I recall seeing screenshots of it. Maybe it might not be released yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tried it. I mean, my habits around iOS are

⏹️ ▶️ John not built around the expectation that there is anything like this available anywhere. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use any, it used to be that individual apps would have to build in support for Dropbox, right? And a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of them did, but it just so happens that none of the apps that I use on a regular basis had this built in support for Dropbox. And

⏹️ ▶️ John all those apps that do have that built in support, I’m assuming are slowly changing to use the system way to get at that

⏹️ ▶️ John same extension.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope so. That’s actually one thing like I in apps that I’m using. It’s actually really annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the ones that still present their own share sheets, like their own custom share sheet to that using the system one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s like, do you guys are you guys unreasonably annoyed with that? Or is it just just a me thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was kind of annoyed by the apps that I have that used to do a custom way.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now bring that giant sheet up because a lot of time I know I just want to go to Instapaper and that used to be one tap.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So it’s the opposite of my

⏹️ ▶️ John complaint. Now it’s two taps. Yeah, I mean, I’ll get over it, but like now it’s too ta— especially because of the stupid bug where the

⏹️ ▶️ John reordering of the things doesn’t stick. Oh, I don’t know about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t reordered anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have reordered it and it has not stuck and other people have complained about it as well. I don’t know what the— but anyway, it

⏹️ ▶️ John used to be one tap on a button to send Instapaper. Now it’s one tap to bring up the giant sheet. Luckily,

⏹️ ▶️ John Instapaper is usually within one scrolling section, but it’s not like the upper left one or wherever I want it to be. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John I tap the Instapaper thing and then the thing comes up. So anyway, I would much prefer it this way. it’s much better to have an

⏹️ ▶️ John extensible system. It’s just we need the kinks to be worked out of it first.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The people in the chat are saying that Dropbox doesn’t yet have the document picker thing on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a shame if true.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they showed that in the keynotes, but maybe those speculative like and Dropbox could make something like this and

⏹️ ▶️ John they just haven’t yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I thought they kind of danced like I don’t think they actually mentioned Dropbox by name, but I’m pretty sure like that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very strong implication like we are basically building this for Dropbox and a couple other things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it like, you same thing with the badging extension on Yosemite. It’s like we are basically building this entire capability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like Dropbox box and one driver SkyDrive or whatever Microsoft thing is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is backblaze. Go to backblaze.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP backblaze is unlimited and unthrottled online backup for just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five bucks a month. This is really I mean, we’ve talked about backblaze before. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t need to tell you guys why you need cloud backup, But I will anyway, because the fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, a backup, somebody wise recently said, and I’m pretty sure this is a very old thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somebody wise recently said that, that a backup is not a backup if it isn’t automatic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, I know, probably everyone’s has said that before. Anyway, moving on. If you have some kind of backup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system where you’re only backing things up in your house, then you could lose data.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If something happens to your house that would affect all the things in it or all the things plugged in. So for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you only have a computer with a time machine drive. If you get a big power surge or a fire or a flood

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a theft, that will wipe out both of those things in all likelihood. And so every like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want every copy of your data to be in your house, or plugged into your computer all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, most people have figured out along the way like, oh, an offsite backup would be nice offsite backup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some sort. And the problem with that is that usually it’s really, really hard to ever remember to actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. So most of the time, like, you might have like a hard drive in you know at your parents house or at work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some of your files on it that you’ve last updated six months ago maybe at most you know and then forgotten about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with online backup it’s so much better because it’s just continuously happening in the background you are always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backed up off site and the the class of problem this protects you from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so big and it’s so easy because you just don’t think about it you could you’re just always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being backed up online. And among the cloud backup providers, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried a number of them. And I personally stuck with backblaze even before they were a sponsor. I’ve I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chose them as the best for me. And I think they’ll be the best for you to they’re really extremely good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So big things first, unlimited disk space, five bucks a month, that’s it. Also, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unthrottled point is very important. Many cloud providers can’t accept the files quickly enough. So even though you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can upload them fast, they couldn’t accept them. And so it It was going to take months to upload

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my first backup. And with Backblaze, that was never a problem. They were always very fast. They can basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accept them as quickly as you’re willing to send them. And their client does a nice job of throttling automatically to make sure it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t mess anything up for you. Their app is native. It is a preference pane

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a menu item. They’re always up to date with Mac releases. It runs on Yosemite.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also have an iPhone, iPad, and Android app. You can access your backed up files from Backblaze

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the go from your apps. You can also, let’s say you’re like on a trip and you forgot to bring a file with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and it’s not like a Dropbox or anything. You can log into Backblaze and restore just one file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto your laptop as you’re traveling to get access to it. Things like that. It’s a really helpful system,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice, and all that backup is just, you know, to use the words of John Gruber,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re nuts if you don’t have online backup. And so anyway, thanks a lot to Backblaze. to backblaze.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP highly recommended I’ve used them myself for years now. And I definitely recommend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a cloud backup service. And if you’re going to have if you’re going to have one, I’d say this is the best one. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to backblaze for sponsoring the show once again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you have some real time follow up for us.

⏹️ ▶️ John chat room, and a couple other places have pointed screenshots of the Dropbox document

⏹️ ▶️ John picker. Okay, then this is from the teachers review of iOS eight. So it’s a thing. There go.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put the link to Vatici’s iOS 8 document providers

⏹️ ▶️ John story and everyone else take a look at it. I’m sure everyone else already knew

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I think about like what kind of apps do I have on iOS that would

⏹️ ▶️ John use a document picker, it’s kind of chicken egg because before you have a generic document picker if you keep all your stuff on Dropbox then

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to have one or whatever. But what apps do you guys use that you would find

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself using the Dropbox document to pick her with?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I think what’s interesting here is you know before one of the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems of doing any kind of like productivity task on an iOS device if you’re working with documents

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff one of the big problems is always just getting the files on and off of it and some apps would support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iCloud documents and data thing it was always limited and I personally was always a little bit afraid to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it because I was I never really knew where those files were and it was kind of weird. For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, iCloud Drive not only replaces that, but I think just having this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a thing right now, you know, it’s going to take us a while to realize that we can do this. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to take developers a while to realize that they can do something with this. So I think this is the kind of thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in six months or a year or two years, we might look back on this and say, Oh, my God, this this made such a big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. But right now it’s hard to see it because nothing’s really using it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can think of one place I would have liked to use it when it’s too late now, but when doing ebook previews,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have loved to not have to use iTunes. And in the past, what I could do is take the versions of the ebooks and

⏹️ ▶️ John throw them in my Dropbox and then I would go to the Dropbox client, the dedicated Dropbox app in the days before

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 8 and find the, you know, whatever file that I wanted to open and I would tap

⏹️ ▶️ John on it and it would download in the Dropbox app and then it would show me a little thing that says, sorry, Dropbox, the

⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox app doesn’t know how to display this thing. then there was a little button that said open in these applications which understand

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And the most recent version of the Dropbox app did not understand

⏹️ ▶️ John how to do that with with all the formats that I was using and it would just not offer to open it in the Kindle app or to open

⏹️ ▶️ John it in the the iBooks app. So if I had a Dropbox document picker,

⏹️ ▶️ John I could have gone to the iBooks app to use the Dropbox document picker assuming the document pickers are supported at all. They aren’t even know if they

⏹️ ▶️ John are and just pull it that way. And same thing from the Kindle app. So too late for me, but that’s one

⏹️ ▶️ John scenario I can think of. Anything so I don’t have to use iTunes to transfer files.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So to continue with some follow up, do you want to tell us, John, about some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person-to-person Bluetooth-based mesh networks that are particularly popular, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were particularly popular in Hong Kong?

⏹️ ▶️ John A couple shows ago, we were talking about Twitter and decentralized messaging

⏹️ ▶️ John services, not controlled by any one company like Twitter or whatever, protocols

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP instead of

⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary services like Twitter with APIs and OAuth tokens and all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t remember if we brought this up on the show, so I threw it into the follow up. I’m sorry if this is a repeat. But

⏹️ ▶️ John what I was thinking of when we were having a discussion and I might not have remembered to interject

⏹️ ▶️ John was when they’re having all those protests in Hong Kong, the people in the crowd were using

⏹️ ▶️ John an application for messaging that used Bluetooth person to person. So

⏹️ ▶️ John there was no connection to a centralized server over the internet. I think they might have actually not even had internet access. But

⏹️ ▶️ John since each individual phone had Bluetooth, the message could be passed from phone to phone to phone to phone to spread

⏹️ ▶️ John to all the people in the crowd. And this application is an application that was used for

⏹️ ▶️ John if you go somewhere where there’s no Wi-Fi signal, like you go camping or something, And so you and your friends

⏹️ ▶️ John can all, you know, send messages to each other on your information phones, even though none of you have internet access or cell

⏹️ ▶️ John access. And you’re all near each other? Yeah, well, you know, you’re in your, you know, a bunch of tents all

⏹️ ▶️ John set up somewhere, you know what I mean? I think that’s what it’s for. But anyway, regardless, they were using this technology

⏹️ ▶️ John to basically communicate with each other, despite the, you know, the government or whatever, the centralized authorities

⏹️ ▶️ John making other forms of communication impossible. So I think in this scenario, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird, because this was like a protest or whatever, but But the dystopian future, the dystopian

⏹️ ▶️ John sci-fi future is everybody uses Twitter and Twitter is controlled by one company. And the utopian

⏹️ ▶️ John future is everybody uses peer-to-peer mesh networks that

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be controlled by any single government or entity and like there’s nothing you can do to break communication in

⏹️ ▶️ John the entire world because we all are just connected to each other by proximity and mesh

⏹️ ▶️ John networks and you could black out little portions here and there but eventually the mesh will cover everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we are not in either one of those scenarios. We’re between the dystopia and the utopia. But

⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully we’ll push things in the right direction somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and a couple of shows ago, we were also talking about bent iPhones, which, by the way, did that just magically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go away?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still there, but I don’t think there’s any new news, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, anyway, Jared Villamer, I’m probably butchering that. Sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jared. Anyway, he said that with regard to Apple taking bent iPhones,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking about how we thought it was interesting that, or somebody had written in that it was interesting that a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genius or whoever it was took notes on the fact of what that person was doing when their iPhone bent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something along those lines. Well, anyways, Jared says, Apple taking bend iPhones. Apple always does quote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering captures, quote for specific issues on new products for a short time. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that is just a little bit of followup there. Um, and also it occurred to me, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened at that Twitter thing today? Was that a thing? wasn’t there a thing today?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they had a developer conference today. And honestly, I have not been paying attention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what they announced, except they announced something called, is it Digits? It’s like, basically, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SMS two-factor as a service that anybody can use, something like that. But I honestly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know the details.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. So more of the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t know. I keep meaning to blog about this. So I wrote an article the other day in anticipation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this conference, because WSJ had posted some kind of crazy thing saying Twitter is going to start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over again with developers and start fresh and reset their image. And I basically said, no, they’re not. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gist of my post was that they’re not trustworthy to developers. And there’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of responses. Dave Weiner notably responded pretty publicly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically saying, in short, and I hope I’m not butchering his argument here, but in short,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, we can like pick and choose are gatekeepers and that it’s hard for me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say this kind of stuff without pointing out that I accept the Apple App Store gatekeeper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple has done crappy stuff to developers in the past. And that’s all true. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main difference is alignment of interests, though. Twitter, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great quote. Let me see. I have it open here. It’s on the Verge today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a comment from somebody at Twitter that said, referring to their old API before they put in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrictions with the token limits and everything for clients. They said, our API was so open that we allowed people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compete with us. And and that this was, this was like their justification

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for locking it down two years ago with the token limits and everything. I think that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our API was so open that we allowed people to compete with us that right there says a lot more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that person probably planned to say. That explains a lot. So So what this means

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Twitter’s API made it possible for people to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete with Twitter and they shut it down because they had to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their API has the potential to make people compete with them. It gives people the ability to compete with them. It gives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people the ability to do things like build a whole following graph. Like when Instagram launched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram became a social network primarily by importing people’s Twitter friends and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then building its own side network and then you didn’t need Twitter anymore after that. And then Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, realized this and cut off access to the friend finder thing for them. And you know, these situations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will keep coming up. Twitter also had a problem where there were some client, I forget the name of it, but there was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was some company buying up a whole bunch of Twitter clients and they were going to start their own like shadow network next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Twitter and and and like you could like you’d be able to post to both of them and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate the timelines and everything. And that, I think, was the bigger freak out that Twitter had. That was a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years earlier than Instagram, I think. So Twitter got freaked out that you could use their API

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to steal value from them and devalue them and compete with them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at the situation Apple’s in with app developers, it’s a very different situation. I mean, yes, it’s possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can make an app that competes with one of Apple’s apps, but Apple’s primary interests are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling the hardware. And so if you’re a developer making apps, the chances that your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interests are going to conflict with Apple’s interests are extremely low. There’s almost no chance for that to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realistically happen in any plausible future scenario. At least enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a future, maybe on a Syracuse timescale, maybe. But in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next 10 years, how long is your software likely to last? 5-10 years,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re lucky. So in that time, are Apple’s interests really going to change dramatically to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point where they’re going to be at odds with what app developers do on their platform? And the answer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not. So I think it’s a very different argument to say that, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has complete control over their platform, and you buy into that, and you’re investing in that, and therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your argument is invalid. I don’t think that’s a fair counter argument. Twitter, on the other hand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many ways you can use a Twitter API in ways that if you say, well, if this gets big enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could be a real problem for Twitter, or we’ve just stolen a whole bunch of value from Twitter. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is so much more likely given what Twitter is and what their API allows access to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what makes it so untrustworthy, is that the chance that your interests will conflict with Twitter’s if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are successful are very, very high.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a structural difference, though. I think it is the actions of the companies

⏹️ ▶️ John involved. Because, I mean, when I heard that quote about Twitter saying

⏹️ ▶️ John we actually let people compete with us, I just shook my head thinking they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Their view of API usage is different. And it

⏹️ ▶️ John has caused them to act in ways that makes them untrustworthy because they’ve proven they don’t understand what the heck is going on there. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the aspects of competition you just talked about are real, and they’re there. But

⏹️ ▶️ John even before Instagram was able to steal value from Twitter by exploiting its relationship

⏹️ ▶️ John graph to bootstrap its own photo social network thing. Twitter only

⏹️ ▶️ John became Twitter, or so the story we tell ourselves go in our little circle. Well, not

⏹️ ▶️ John only, but at least partially, because third parties made clients that

⏹️ ▶️ John made the service more palatable for people who didn’t want to go to their ugly ass web page.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they were not those people who were using Twitter’s API to make client software for all these sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of platforms and to refine it and everything like that. for Twitter to view them as people, we

⏹️ ▶️ John even let people compete with, they weren’t competing with you, but they were helping you become the Twitter you are today. Without them,

⏹️ ▶️ John who knows if you would have become the Twitter, you could have still been, you know, like a tent, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like a service that nobody wants to use because they don’t like using your webpage and your client software

⏹️ ▶️ John is crappy, like, who cares? Like, you wouldn’t be worried about saving, protecting your value. Like, so to view

⏹️ ▶️ John those people as competition is just weird. Like that was the whole sort of, but why we all felt betrayed or the

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter client developers is like, they felt like they helped build this service into what it is today.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then Twitter was like, okay, don’t need you anymore, thanks, bye. Whereas Apple, for all its weird

⏹️ ▶️ John foibles and everything, still seems to be able to keep the eye on the ball and say, developers are actually

⏹️ ▶️ John an important part of, you know, they add value to our devices. We can sell our hardware because these

⏹️ ▶️ John app developers make apps from that. Apple’s constantly saying, hey, look at all these apps and not being like, we even

⏹️ ▶️ John let people make apps to compete with ours. Apple would never say that, because it’s like, you know, All they do is brag

⏹️ ▶️ John about how many people make that, how many apps are on the App Store, how much money they give to developers. Like, they

⏹️ ▶️ John know that the apps make, without apps, their hardware is way less valuable. So Apple pushes

⏹️ ▶️ John that like crazy. And you know, it’s the whole hierarchy of Apple needs of Apple first, or customers first,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple second and developers third, and that still annoys developers. And Apple still does have a tremendous amount of control over its

⏹️ ▶️ John platform, but it’s, as I said, it’s not structural. Twitter and Apple have similar amounts of control at this point over

⏹️ ▶️ John their platforms. But based on past actions, we believe Apple understands to some degree

⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone who makes an app for the App Store is increasing the value of Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John products. Whereas Twitter seems hell-bent on not understanding that people writing

⏹️ ▶️ John applications against the Twitter API in all sorts of ways makes Twitter more valuable. And you’re right,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still this possibility, you know, exploiting it to bootstrap some other network or stuff like that. But things like Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John clients, like the reason, you know, oh, doesn’t that add value to your networks? Like, no, because we have a monetization strategy

⏹️ ▶️ John that relies on you not being able to get tweets and we need to be able to insert tweets into your timeline and blah, blah, blah. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John that tension is kind of of Twitter’s own invention over there, an ability to figure out a

⏹️ ▶️ John business plan that benefits everybody. So I don’t trust

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter particularly, but it’s not because they have a lot of control because Apple has a lot of control too. It’s because it just

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like Twitter understands, you know, their view of the relationship between third parties and

⏹️ ▶️ John their service is just different than my view from the outside.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think Twitter’s view is very valid. Twitter’s view, you know, I totally see why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to own the client experience. You know, the changes they made were not only to to squash competition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, you know, stealing from Twitter and like taking over their network or replacing their network,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was also to take back control of the client experience for most people and to never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let a third-party client get as big as their client again. What that allowed them to do then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is have the power over their own experience. that their product is not an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API. It originally kind of was. But now you know, for a long time, their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product has not been the API. It has been the Twitter app. And

⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s their view of the service. Our view of the service was you’re like email, but smaller. Like you

⏹️ ▶️ John are you are you are a protocol, you are a message format. That’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John what they actually were. But like, that’s how we viewed it on the outside. In the same way we would make awesome email clients back in the day

⏹️ ▶️ John to work with email. And you know, Claris, I’ll listen for your time, but Claris email or come out and people love you, Dora and blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And those were all email clients. And we liked the client and, but email was email. Well, Twitter was Twitter, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter’s view of itself is not that. And you don’t make money being a company that invents a pop or

⏹️ ▶️ John SMTP or whatever. So that was the tension. But like, I still get back to Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John the service would be nothing, would be a footnote in history if it wasn’t for all of those clients that added value.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter didn’t make those clients. Twitter couldn’t make those clients. Twitter could only have made one of those clients at most

⏹️ ▶️ John if it had tried to take control earlier. But there was tons of clients. And that’s why Twitter is what it is today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. But that doesn’t matter anymore. That’s ancient history. I mean, anybody at Twitter who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly cared about that has probably left by now.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the betrayal. And that’s why we don’t trust them anymore. That’s why it’s not, again, it’s not structural. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John because of the control they have. It’s because what they have done with that control in the past. And it’s a bit of divorce

⏹️ ▶️ John between the way we saw Twitter and the way Twitter sees itself. And so no change

⏹️ ▶️ John of heart on their part unless they prove that they see their service differently and that we’re on the same page again. And we

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t see their service. They’re not on the same page. They’re still saying, oh, people compete with us. It shows

⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s still a disconnect. We want to think of Twitter as a protocol, a service, a message format,

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. We want to think of Twitter like blogging. No one owns blogging, right? Just conceptually.

⏹️ ▶️ John We know what blogging is conceptually, but there’s no owner of it technology-wise. But we want to think of Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John that way, too. But it’s not that way. I think we’ll always be sort of at, you know, standing as opposite sides of

⏹️ ▶️ John the gym during the dance, not ever going into the middle. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see a way out of this for I don’t see any overture unless Twitter changes its mind,

⏹️ ▶️ John decides to become like an infrastructure company. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, once the VCs come in and everything, it’s like, well, you know, they can want their money back

⏹️ ▶️ John somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the VCs were there. I think we we all thought you know, when Twitter when Twitter came

⏹️ ▶️ Marco came to, you know, to its initial rise, when we were writing all these clients, that was during the era of web development,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where every web app was expected to have an API often from the start, it was often best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wisdom to have an API first and then build your actual app on top of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Like the web app was like, who, like, who cares about the web app? It’s all about the API, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was kind of like this weird time in web development history, where everyone just kind I temporarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot about making money and granted this happens a lot but but this was an especially bad time that everyone’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s make an API and see what people mash up with it. And the reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there’s a reason why so many new services these days don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco full API’s and almost always don’t at least launch with them. Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a really hard thing as a business case to justify and it opens you up to a lot of risks of things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, like, what if Instagram had had a full API the beginning, where you could read and write and you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could make your own Instagram client. Then what happens when they want to change the way the client works? There

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that time in the mid-2000s where APIs were expected and were the cool thing, but that time is over and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been over for a while. And that’s never coming back because it’s just so difficult from a business

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective and from a control perspective. It’s so difficult to actually maintain that. So we might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect Twitter to someday go back to that, or we might be mad that they’re not doing that now, but the reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it would be a very bad idea for Twitter to ever do that again.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was a good move back. The reason everyone was doing it back then is because it’s kind of like a wolf in sheep’s

⏹️ ▶️ John clothing where if you make something look like a protocol

⏹️ ▶️ John or a piece of plumbing or part of the internet, you can get traction among a certain

⏹️ ▶️ John set of people that like, you know, we like that. the utopia we were thinking of is there, you know, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John we have some existing protocols and we have some old protocols. We have, you know, SSH, HTTP, FTP,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, NNTP, all these protocols, old and new, all kind of mixing together in this tube. But now if we

⏹️ ▶️ John make these APIs, we have this REST format, we can turn the web into a giant API machine

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just be like, it’ll be like the internet, but now people can innovate and, you know, like you said, the mashups and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you make it look like infrastructure, people are attracted to it, especially technical people, because immediately your mind goes,

⏹️ ▶️ John what could I do with this? I had this API and that API, I could pull this and that, and I could synthesize these things, and this is great.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what you don’t realize is that all those companies with APIs are lying in wait and just hoping

⏹️ ▶️ John they become massively popular. And then they can be like, aha, we’ve got you, because this wasn’t really a piece of infrastructure. Really, this is a wholly

⏹️ ▶️ John owned, proprietary thing. We are the only source of it. No one else can copy it. We have all the data.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter basically succeeded in that strategy of looking

⏹️ ▶️ John like infrastructure to people who weren’t thinking about it too hard. And then when everyone realized they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not, it’s too late, they’ve spread. Like it’s a good way to spread things where if you had just made a website, people would know

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I mean, just ask MySpace how that worked out. If MySpace had tried to be a protocol

⏹️ ▶️ John first and then turn the screws and turn it into a site, I mean, that really probably wouldn’t have worked for MySpace. But anyway, it’s much

⏹️ ▶️ John harder to get people to come to your site and make that like as big as Facebook, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone had APIs, people were mixing them all together and if any of them caught

⏹️ ▶️ John on, you could lie in wait and say like, I’m part of the internet. This is not, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not a single private company or a single website. I’m invisible. I’m a protocol I’m like app.net

⏹️ ▶️ John and then grow to tremendous size like that and then change your mind and That’s what everybody did and I still think that

⏹️ ▶️ John strategy could work Like if you made something look like a protocol Everyone would forget the fact that you’re a private company

⏹️ ▶️ John and completely control it and you can do exactly what Twitter did again I think that Strategy is not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John dead because we’ll all be fooled again by it I mean we did the same of app.net right like this

⏹️ ▶️ John is slightly better they’re charging up front, but it was the same situation we would have all done if if app.net had becomes

⏹️ ▶️ John tremendously successful would have been a small step up from Twitter, but they would have ended up doing the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re also sponsored this week by once again, our friends at igloo. igloo is an internet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will actually like go to igloo software.com slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco igloo is built with easy to use apps like shared calendars, Twitter, like micro blogs, file sharing, task management

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more. It’s everything you need to work better together in one very configurable It’s a comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud platform. Igloo has responsive design. Your internet already works like a champ on virtually any device. iOS, Android,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even support Blackberry. It will even work on your new plus-sized iPhone 6 Plus right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the very start. If you’re an Igloo customer, you don’t have to do anything. New devices come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, they take care of it for you, they support it for you. It’s great. You can review a document, you can post a project update,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can change admin settings or talk about how the U2 album snuck onto your iTunes library all from your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what brand that phone is. when you design your igloo, any change you make to the look and feel carries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco across all of these devices. Their file preview engine is also fully HTML5 compatible,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if one of your coworkers uploads a proposal or a JavaScript file, you can preview it inline, add comments, upload

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new versions, or assign action items all from your phone. Recently Gartner released their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco famed Magic Quadrant for social software in the workplace. Igloo appears for the sixth consecutive year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco along with tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, Google VMware Salesforce comment SAP, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still I still think should be pronounced SAP. It’s kind of a shame they went with SAP. In a report

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that values the size of the vendor, which in Gartner terms means viability, Igloo is praised for their responsiveness and customer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. From Gartner’s profile of Igloo, they said, feedback from Igloo’s reference customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was consistently positive. They praise the product’s quick deployment, configuration and customization flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with self service options for non technical users control over branding an information organization on ease of use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a big sentence. The breath is not in the sentence. I just took that because I had to. They also praise the responsiveness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Igloo as an organization. Anyway, if your company has a legacy intranet built on top of SharePoint

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of old portal technology, you’ve got to give Igloo a try. Igloo is free to use with up to 10 people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then of course, it’s very reasonably priced after that. But really, if you have up to 10 people, you might as well use it. It’s free.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP. Once again, that is igloosoftware.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you very much to our friends at igloo for sponsoring our show. Once again, they’re they’re long term friends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sponsors of our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. So john, I wanted to quickly ask you, what’s going on with the review?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s the initial feedback? Did you have to make any big updates? Or is it basically the status

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quo as usual?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s so last week, Casey, we’re still talking about that thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, you never know. A week has passed. It was like 24 hours or something like that when we when we got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to speak about it last.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, most of the updates come in the first 24 hours. I think I did one ebook

⏹️ ▶️ John update every couple of hours, every time for a while, but it’s been quiet since then. I only put

⏹️ ▶️ John in a couple of, one more update about core storage application, which

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we talked about this last week, type of things that you can’t test when the

⏹️ ▶️ John final bits aren’t out until after you publish your review. And also the type of thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that I personally can’t test because I don’t have a lab full of computers. just me here and I had loaner hardware from

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple which was useful but it’s still like a total of like five computers, many of

⏹️ ▶️ John which are the same vintage or similar. So I can’t do the type of like we installed this OS on

⏹️ ▶️ John you know five different computers with you know 10 different partition configurations each and both internal

⏹️ ▶️ John and external drives and determined you know so I still don’t know under what circumstances does it decide to turn

⏹️ ▶️ John your volume into a core storage volume. Does it sometimes? Doesn’t do it other times. I put

⏹️ ▶️ John a correction the most recent correction I put in was this doesn’t happen all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John It happens under these scenarios. It didn’t happen under this scenario and other people on twitter like installing it to their machines

⏹️ ▶️ John with different partition arrangements and stuff and seeing when it does and doesn’t happen. So I don’t know if I

⏹️ ▶️ John had known that it was that weird. Like it basically happened in every and every installation scenario that I did in my

⏹️ ▶️ John test hardware. So that’s why I thought it was done all the time and I asked Apple about it and they were giving

⏹️ ▶️ John me explanations of why they were doing it. They didn’t ever offer the information like oh by the way you know we we don’t actually do that all the

⏹️ ▶️ John time in these scenarios we won’t so missing information to be clarified basically what I’m trying to do is make

⏹️ ▶️ John it so that if Someone stumbles across this review five years from now or if I try to look something up in the review five years from

⏹️ ▶️ John now I will see these little corrections in there and understand that this was

⏹️ ▶️ John The way I thought things were on the day of release or before but actually things are more complicated

⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t take this as the final word, but other than that, it’s been fine

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s been a big difference in feedback over the years between these things. It used to be that I would do one of these reviews and I would have like 20 or 30

⏹️ ▶️ John pages of comments attached to them. Now, not that many comments. Most of

⏹️ ▶️ John the comments are no longer discussions of the article. They’re just people complaining about what they do or don’t like about Yosemite,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is fine I guess, but it’s definitely a change in commenter behavior at Ars Technica, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ John A lower volume of comments, maybe because they feel like they have other avenues to talk back to me like Twitter or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John and comments that aren’t interested in discussing the article but just are interested in hey everybody let’s talk about Yosemite how’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it working for you I don’t like this I do like that I had this bug I didn’t have that bug

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it’s mostly done it’s off the front page of ours slowly fading

⏹️ ▶️ John away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so sad with the exception of comments is it like like what is interest if you can I mean, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say, like, has interest remained high in recent years in the reviews

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is that going up or down?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going down. Like, I mean, it’s been going down for a couple of years. It’s still not awful, but definitely interest is

⏹️ ▶️ John going down. I mean, you know, people are just more interested in iOS these days. I don’t blame them. It’s the bigger platform. It’s more popular. More

⏹️ ▶️ John people are likely to have it. And yeah, so it’s still doing fine and everything. But it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to graph it with the past four or five reviews I’ve written, it’s a steady downward slope.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think it’s a problem with the fact that it’s now released every year? And so there’s more frequently, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a build up to new OS releases because they’re happening so much more frequently now.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s the frequency. I think it’s just the primacy of the Mac in the Apple nerd

⏹️ ▶️ John space is just so much less than it used to be. Like, they used to be all there was. It was all about the Mac. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS has been just coming on strong. And now, and it’s kind of like generational.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even when iOS was just insanely popular and it long eclipsed the Mac in terms of every possible

⏹️ ▶️ John number you can imagine, early on, the people who were interested in reading about

⏹️ ▶️ John it were the same people who had come up with Apple as Apple’s that company that makes Macs and I’m super into

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, right? And then iOS is this other thing that’s interesting too. Now there’s generations of people who

⏹️ ▶️ John barely even know the Mac exists. They grew up thinking of Apple as the iPhone company and they’re super interested

⏹️ ▶️ John in reading about iOS and they could care less about the Mac. and I really see a big generational turnover.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in the people who are Apple nerds on the web, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John whole generations of Apple nerds on the web now, maybe, I don’t know if it’s just one generation or two, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John who think of Apple as the iOS company, and that’s what they’re into. In the same way that the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac people replaced the Apple II people. People thought, I’m really into Apple, and it’s all about the Apple II, and this Mac thing looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cool too. Eventually, there was sets of people like me who entirely identified Apple as the company

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes the Mac and could care less about the Apple II. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a natural consequence of the different number of these products that they sell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the Mac is selling more than ever. So do you think it’s more of an issue of just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nerds not caring as much about each Mac update?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they sell way more iOS devices than Macs. Like in terms of numbers, in terms of revenue, in terms of profit, like

⏹️ ▶️ John every possible metric, the iOS devices eclipse Macs easily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, maybe it’s just me, I have never once read anybody’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long iOS reviews. Because part of it is like I’m involved in the iOS beta

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process, so I already know generally what’s different. But I’ve never felt the need because it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS changes are kind of more, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem very relatively surface level in what you could possibly really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco discuss about them. into a lot of the internals, a lot of the reasoning, a lot of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, under the hood stuff. I don’t see a lot of people doing that with iOS. It’s usually just like, here’s an overview of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the features and visuals that have changed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there’s less poking you can do to iOS. Like you can’t you can’t get a terminal, you can but you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like without going to more heroic lengths, you can’t get a terminal prompt and start screwing around with things. And

⏹️ ▶️ John moreover, if you do jailbreak and get a SSH in and get a terminal prompt start screwing with things

⏹️ ▶️ John that has zero to to do with most people’s interaction with the OS. Whereas on the Mac, if you open a

⏹️ ▶️ John terminal, a lot of people who use the Mac, that is part of their experience of using the OS. Like the terminal is not

⏹️ ▶️ John a jailbreak feature. Like you guys don’t remember, but back in the days before 10.0 came out,

⏹️ ▶️ John like in all the developer previews, that was a hot topic. Would

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ship the terminal with OS X? Would Apple ship it

⏹️ ▶️ John but have it disabled or hidden? Or like that was something we seriously thought about because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the old school Mac users saying, you’re not gonna sell a Mac with a command line or whatever. Those of us who are Unix nerds are like, please

⏹️ ▶️ John let them do this. Like the whole point is it’s supposed to be Unix plus a Mac combined. If they ship it without, but we were like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, Apple, maybe they’ll just, the terminal will be a developer download, kind of like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the graphic tools are, graphics tools are now for Xcode or whatever. Like you’ll have to go to ADC to get them, whatever. You’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to use it, but they won’t advertise it. But it turned out it totally shipped with it. They never got rid of it. They never hit it. It’s in the

⏹️ ▶️ John utilities folder. It’s still there today. All right, so, but that’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ John what iOS is like. And the second aspect is I’m kind of cheating with these

⏹️ ▶️ John reviews. I found myself doing it this year’s WWDC. I found myself going to the Metal sessions and taking notes. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell am I doing? Metal isn’t even a Mac technology, but you just start thinking of, and that was a big point of this review,

⏹️ ▶️ John you start thinking about all of these things as just part of Apple’s platform. Like I could have

⏹️ ▶️ John written that entire Swift section if this was an iOS review. Metal is iOS only, but I’m writing about

⏹️ ▶️ John it as if it’s an Apple technology because there’s nothing stopping it from appearing on the Mac except for Apple’s willingness to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John port it to the GPUs that are available on the Mac, which granted are much more numerous and it’ll be much more difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s much more reason for them to put it on iOS, but like so many technologies apply to both that a larger and larger

⏹️ ▶️ John portion of the review could have been, you know, I could change it to review iOS 8 and put

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of that same stuff in there. So I don’t know. I don’t know if that, whether

⏹️ ▶️ John that has to do with traffic numbers or I just I just think the the the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John is less of focus even though so many things that are relevant to the rack or a Mac are also relevant to iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John and vice versa it’s still iOS is where everyone’s eyes are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think it’s because there’s less to see on Mac every year or because no one’s paying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well this year was tons to see I mean like I mean this is the whole thing it looks totally different you wouldn’t it’s a layperson you could

⏹️ ▶️ John tell the difference I think between Mavericks and Yosemite or at least tell that these are two different OS’s because they just plain look different.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean there’s just as much as I mean iOS 8 when you look

⏹️ ▶️ John at it’s like oh it looks like iOS 7 what’s even different and unless you know all the extensions and people update they’re absolutely better

⏹️ ▶️ John in this way or whatever but it’s really like iOS 8 was a much more subtle change from 7 than Yosemite

⏹️ ▶️ John was from Maverick so I don’t think that was the problem either like if anything people should be super bored by

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 8 and really excited by Yosemite if just based on like the

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of in your face wow factor of the changes because iOS 8 does not in your face about almost

⏹️ ▶️ John anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know to go back Marco you had said who writes a really big iOS 8 review? A friend of the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rene Ritchie did a pretty solid one for iMore that we should definitely mention.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact I believe it was crashing Safari. I don’t remember if that was on the Mac or iOS but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the darn thing is a single page and it’s so darn big that it ended up causing issues for a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey users. That’s how in depth it was. I concur with what you were saying that it’s harder to poke at iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s harder to get the depth that that john does with the OS 10 review. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey his iOS a review was huge.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when I look at the iOS updates, I always thank my lucky stars that I’m not doing an iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John review, like maybe not so much an eight, but like in seven and everything, because there’s so many changes, so

⏹️ ▶️ John many things that are different so many screens and just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those screenshots you have to retake every time there’s a new beta

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah well you know i don’t know if it’s better or worse that you’d be filling your camera

⏹️ ▶️ John roll with screenshots or that you don’t have a good way to screenshot things you have to like crop and you know anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John i guess it’s kind of easier and that all your screenshots are full screen you don’t have to worry about windows and backgrounds and especially

⏹️ ▶️ John on your side but anyway various ios updates have been like wow i’m glad i’m not reviewing this because they

⏹️ ▶️ John added a a ton of new features because it was a young OS and they just added tons of you know like things so

⏹️ ▶️ John everything changed you know there’s not there’s very little the built-in apps changed the way you deal with

⏹️ ▶️ John you know the OS itself like when they added multitasking and stuff those are those are big changes so you expect that in

⏹️ ▶️ John the early versions of an OS now it seems like it’s settling down a little bit so now you have features like

⏹️ ▶️ John extensions which seem to be non features at all you’re just like oh I don’t see anything different it’s like you got to wait for the apps to update

⏹️ ▶️ John then it’ll be totally different but just trust me, but how do you really review that in an iOS review? You gotta talk about it

⏹️ ▶️ John speculatively.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the difference that I’m perceiving, and whether it’s real or not,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the difference I’m perceiving is that the iOS reviews that I’ve seen all seem to be extremely long.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want a comprehensive overview of everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because that’s like just a slideshow. Like a lot of people do that, you know, a gallery or a slideshow. Here’s every screen that’s different,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And ours did that too. Ours did a slideshow. Like, they asked me if I was going to have galleries

⏹️ ▶️ John in my review, because they have a gallery feature where you can just take a whole bunch of photos and have like a carousel that you flip through them, right, on the page.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, no, I’m not going to have any galleries, because I’m old. And the way I do things is I write words, then there’s a screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ John with a caption, then I write more words, then there’s a screenshot. You know, it’s like, it’s interleaved. Like, I would never

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, and here’s 50 photos of this new app. Even if I could put a caption on every single one, that’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just not how I do a review. But they, so since I didn’t do one, they did a slideshow

⏹️ ▶️ John that showed essentially, here’s what the screen looked like in Mavericks, here’s what it looked like in Yosemite, and I forget if each one had a caption

⏹️ ▶️ John or not. But that gallery was tremendously popular. Like a lot of people do want that out of

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. And the other thing you’re talking about, like a reference type thing, those are the old days where you’d go to the bookstore back

⏹️ ▶️ John when we had bookstores, and there would be like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John ultimate guide to Mac OS 8, or learn Mac OS 8 in 21 days or whatever. And it would

⏹️ ▶️ John just be this gigantic paperback book that would just take you through laboriously every single feature at a time. Here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how you rename a file in the Finder. Here’s how you move a file. Here’s how you copy a file. Like just every single freaking thing you

⏹️ ▶️ John need to know to use like essentially a manual for the OS. And that’s not a review at all. That is a

⏹️ ▶️ John manual, right? And there’s a place for that as well. But like these days, no one’s gonna write a book

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. At least not, it’s not gonna be out at the time Yosemite is launched. I get back to probably something like that in bookstores, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what people are looking for. And back in the day when I was on top of it and when the OS was small,

⏹️ ▶️ John I could pretty much document every single pixel that changed and every single new keyboard shortcut and behavior.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s been years since Mac OS X has been small enough for me to do that. Now it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John too big. And once I started to have to pick and choose which things were important, that was a big transition

⏹️ ▶️ John in my reviewing. Because going from 10.0 to 10.1, I could try to find every single little thing, because there was like

⏹️ ▶️ John five things that changed, except for it being faster and stuff, right? But going from 10.4 to 10.5, forget

⏹️ ▶️ John it. There was no way that I could fit everything in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that thunder?

⏹️ ▶️ John That is thunder. I still have power, though. You’ll be able to tell when I go out. I get emails from my

⏹️ ▶️ John Synology downstairs when the UPS kicks in. It sends me an email and says, Synology

⏹️ ▶️ John is running on UPS power. And then it sends me another email and says, oh, I’m back on regular power. And

⏹️ ▶️ John when I get that, that means either someone plugged in too many vacuum cleaners to the same circuit and did a little

⏹️ ▶️ John power blip. Or, as we just had here earlier, the houses

⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side of the street lost power and our power flickered for a second. So I know our power flickered because I got email about

⏹️ ▶️ John it from my network attached storage device.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, that is technological advancement right there. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. That timing was flawless, well done. You’re gonna have fun editing this episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just keeping that in. We are also sponsored this week by our friends at Lynda.com. Lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an easy and affordable way to help you learn with high quality, easy to follow video tutorials.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design, and so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more. You can go to lynda.com to see this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lynda.com has fresh new courses that are added daily. They work directly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with industry experts and software companies to provide timely training, often the same day new versions of releases hit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the market, so you can always be up to speed. They offer courses for all experience levels, whether you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a beginner or advanced, and every lynda.com course is produced at the highest quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not like the inconsistent homemade videos you get like on YouTube and stuff. These courses are professional quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have many tools for these, including searchable transcripts that play along with the video as you’re watching playlists,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they even do certificates of course completion, which you can publish to your LinkedIn profile. So if you work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an environment where people look at LinkedIn to value you, this can this can raise your value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on LinkedIn to those people who look at LinkedIn to see your value. You can even learn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re on the go with the lynda.com apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing about lynda.com is you can watch whenever you want with no pressure or commitment because you don’t pay per

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video. One low monthly price of just $25 gives you unlimited access to their over 100,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video tutorials. This is great for people like me who like to know a little about a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linda.com was a big help to me in learning how to edit this podcast, for example, using logic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and various things like, you know, how does a compressor and audio work and what are the settings actually mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is very helpful to me. They also offer an annual premium plan. Premium members can download courses to their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones, iPads or Android devices and watch them offline. And they can also download sample project files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and practice along with the instructors. Linda.com has all sorts of courses you might love from app and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web development in many languages including PHP, Perl, and KC’s, whatever you use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to productivity apps, creative pro apps like Adobe’s Creative Suite, Logic, Final Cut,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even professional skills like management and negotiation skills. They have all these great courses. Lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so useful that 30% of colleges and universities and most of the Ivy League schools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer Lynda.com subscriptions to their students and faculty members. So that’s pretty cool. Anyway, Lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is offering a seven-day free trial to access all courses for free. Visit Lynda.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP. Once again, that is a seven-day free trial with access to all their courses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during those seven days. Lynda.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring once again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk a little bit about Yosemite.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why I said it like that, but it sounded good in my head.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did Stephen or Mike say? Was it Yos10?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Yos10. That was amazing. Steven, who yells at me for Retinopad Mini, did I say Retinopad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini? I meant Retinopad Mini, said Yo S10. And I yelled at him about this, and he said, oh, it was an accident,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dude.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I think it’s better. I think that’s an improvement. I think we should go with that, using Yo S10. Well, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so too. But he’s the king of the pedantic people when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these sorts of things. So we’re gonna talk about your RyMac later.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, Steven. But for now, let’s talk about Yosemite. So, have you installed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. I have it on my laptop that I hardly ever use. I have not installed it on my desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a reason that will make you angry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably should know what you’re alluding to. Because you’re going to replace it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because Yosemite kind of apparently looks like crap on non-retina screens.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m trying to never see it on a non-retina screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look like crap. It just doesn’t look as nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so adorable for you guys who live, not you John, I should say you Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who lives in this oh so mighty fine tower high up in the beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey middle of the beautiful sea. Oh, well, I will only look at things on my flick of the hair. Retina

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screens. I don’t want to be, I don’t want my actual retinas tarnished by non-retina

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens. Okay, I hate towers. I have no hair. I hate the water. I’m nowhere near the water. You know what I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know what I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean. I have, seriously, I have precisely zero Retina Max in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my house and only a couple of people have them at work. Those of us who live in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the real world have to look at Yosemite on regular screens. And you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t think it looks bad. I will say, however, that there are, there’s so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white. It’s like white everywhere. And I kind of miss having a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of contrast. I do think it looks pretty, but gosh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s, especially since I’ve run multiple screens and I typically don’t use full screen mode for a lot of stuff, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just white everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John Where do you see, where do you see all the white? Like what, I don’t, I’ve heard people say that, but I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the impression that I get. I get, I have different impressions of the UI, but like, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s less contrast, but I don’t see all the white. Like where, where are you seeing this white coming from where it wasn’t before?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, here’s, here’s a question, Casey, You are the most recent Windows user among us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you a window maximizer?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only for a couple of windows. So I always run VMware Fusion, speaking of Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I always run that in a window, but taking up an entire screen. I find that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it behaves better when it’s in a window, rather than when it’s full screen. My text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey editor of choice for my website, when I’m writing for that, which isn’t that terribly often,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Atom, Judge as you will. I don’t care. It works for me. That’s the GitHub one. Yes. Is it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, by the way? I like it. But to be fair, I’m not a particularly heavy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey user of a text editor. I don’t have particularly involved or complex needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So those of you who are like face palming, and like somebody in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat is saying, yuck, seriously, yes, seriously, because you know what, it works for me. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have a lot of complex needs, and it works just fine. So that I run full screen, but just about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything else I run in a window. So where’s all the white? Where are you seeing so much? Any nonactive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey window, which if you have a few of them on the screen, maybe they’re gray.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I’m not a designer.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are. They’re, they’re, they’re light, they’re lighter gray maybe than they used to be. And there’s less contrast between the parts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the window widgets go lighter gray. There’s not, doesn’t contrast as much against the thing. And even things like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the window, like the toolbar thing, like in Safari or whatever is a little bit lighter and and less of a gradient, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t find it particularly blinding. I still find it pleasing and nice, and I think it’s a nice aesthetic upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ John My one big complaint, and I talked about it extensively in the review, is the whole transparency issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thrust of that section of the review was like, here’s what they’re doing, here’s the technology behind it,

⏹️ ▶️ John and here’s how it manifests in the OS, and then the question of why. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John are you doing this? What’s the point? What, like, you’ve done this thing, I see how you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing it, I see the different ways you’re using it, what are you trying to say? What are you, to what end

⏹️ ▶️ John is this transparency? What is it behind the menu bar that I desperately need to see? Do

⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I don’t need to see details, but I need to see hints of the color of my desktop background? Like, what is that helping me?

⏹️ ▶️ John All you’re doing is like, potentially impairing readability, potentially

⏹️ ▶️ John making things ugly, in exchange for dot, dot, dot. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John I asked Apple this, and I pulled Apple’s own quotes from WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ John which was public, and I was like, here’s what they said in exchange for the temperature and

⏹️ ▶️ John mood of your desktop background leaking through into the things. And by the way, this was discussed on the talk show, and lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John people were confused about it. And I tried to clarify it in my review, but maybe it was not enough sentences about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s two kinds of blending and vibrancy, this transparency thing. One is in-window blending, where you’re scrolling up something

⏹️ ▶️ John behind the toolbar. and whatever it is you’re scrolling up behind the toolbar kind of like shows through the toolbar a little bit, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one, the weirder one, is uh, I forget what it’s called. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John remember my own review.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the other kind of transparency is where it’s composited with the other things that are on

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. So like the sidebars have that kind of transparency. Where if you have something

⏹️ ▶️ John with a sidebar and you wave something around behind it, like another window, you can kind of vaguely see the thing you’re waving

⏹️ ▶️ John around behind it through the transparent thing. You can do like control drag or something so you don’t bring it to the, you know, only

⏹️ ▶️ John the window in the front has this transparent effect on it. So you have to sort of drag a window behind something or drag

⏹️ ▶️ John the window in front, back and forth in front of something. You can see that’s going on, right? For that transparency

⏹️ ▶️ John mode, where you can see the stuff that’s behind the window, Apple also takes a touch

⏹️ ▶️ John of your desktop pattern and also mixes it into that, right? And it’s subtle so that people don’t even see

⏹️ ▶️ John it if you don’t point it out. But if you just take like

⏹️ ▶️ John a transparent, I have little applications just as a, you know, a transfer of a light and dark

⏹️ ▶️ John transparent windows, I can just drag anywhere. But if you take anything with a sidebar, take a huge white text edit window,

⏹️ ▶️ John put it behind it and put the transfer window over it. You’re like, all right, the only thing that’s behind this window is in totally empty, 100% white thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And you’ll put it over it. And if you have like a very intense colored desktop background,

⏹️ ▶️ John like one of Apple’s things where it shows grass or something and everything’s all green, you’ll notice that your sidebar

⏹️ ▶️ John is tinted green. And you’re like, why the hell is my sidebar tinted green? The only thing behind this sidebar is 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John white opaque window. Where is the green coming out of? The answer is it’s coming from your desktop background. If you change your

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop background to something that’s all red, suddenly your sidebar will be tinged with red. Now, when

⏹️ ▶️ John you have something other than complete white behind it, it’s easy to miss this. Because if you take like a little hint of brown,

⏹️ ▶️ John because your desktop is kind of brownish, and you mix it with whatever is behind it, like a picture that’s behind it, you’ll never

⏹️ ▶️ John see that hint of brown. But if you just have white behind it, you’ll see this hint of this other color. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John does, you know, take the temperature and mood or whatever of your desktop and put it into your windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John But why? I have a desktop pattern that I like at work, which is like my son standing

⏹️ ▶️ John at a bunch of pumpkins. So it’s a lot of green, a lot of orange for the pumpkins and then his blue jacket that

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s wearing. And now all of my sidebars are infected with kind of this dull orange,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, rusty tinge. I love that desktop picture, I do not like a rusty

⏹️ ▶️ John orange tinge on all of my menus and sidebar. So I’m faced with a choice, change my desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John picture, which is now leaking into all of my windows, or turn off transparency. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like working as designed. It is changing the mood of my desktop, but

⏹️ ▶️ John not for the better, in my opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s so weird to me because I look at this and I genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, wow, this really is pretty. And I think to myself, you know, I like the look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And then two seconds later, I look at maybe the other screen because I’m a two screen kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of guy. And I’m, and that’s where all the nonactive windows are. And yes, maybe it’s gray. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white, whatever. It doesn’t matter. The point is there’s no contrast. And it’s just this like wall of very, very, very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very light gray. And that I don’t care for, but generally speaking, I do like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look of it. It does seem more modern. It seems nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little creepy going over to Windows and seeing, what is the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey metro?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Arrowglass.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thinking of. Why do I know this and you don’t?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. So anyway, I look at the arrow and I’m like, oh look, that’s, oh no, wait, that’s been that way for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they all kind of blend together a little better now. But all in all, I like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, even though it’s weird. I like a lot of the new features, like the SMS relay that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was talking about. really awesome. But I mean, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s new. It’s cool. I enjoy it. Thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m a little worried like looking at this. You know, sometimes when you introduce a new design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes people a while to really like adjust to it because it’s like it’s so shockingly different from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last one. Like iOS 7, when that was unveiled, it’s like, whoa, this is so different. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually people like this is really good. I think heavy use of translucency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in desktop interfaces with overlapping windows is questionable. It’s always been questionable. It was questionable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Windows Vista did it, what, a decade ago now. That’s kind of sad, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, we are so old. Looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this, I think it’s kind of up in the air, like, is this really a good idea? And like, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone’s looking at this and saying, this looks amazing. Everything about this is such a good idea. Like, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more measured. It’s like, well, some of this looks good. Some of this is kind of I don’t know what they’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I guess maybe we’ll get used to it. Like is anybody really enthusiastic about the design? I haven’t heard it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have this to say for like if you if you look at the screenshots, if you’ve scrolled through my review as many times as

⏹️ ▶️ John I have just you know, scrolling through looking at things stuff like that. The screenshots

⏹️ ▶️ John and the Yosemite review, I think are the most visually interesting of any review because like

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you know, all the other reviews, toolbars look like toolbars a window Chrome look like a window Chrome would never

⏹️ ▶️ John change. And this review Of course, I’m explicitly taking pictures of the window with different things behind it with different things scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ John up and do it They look amazing to me like as sort of like interesting works of art,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know Like I love when I scroll this year I love the crazy rainbow colors through this through these things

⏹️ ▶️ John like it looks it’s pretty to me like Obviously I made these screenshots to be

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m emphasizing I’m picking the most extreme scenario to show you what your windows might look like and Partially

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing it to show how bad it is Like for example in the Safari screenshot where I show the different rainbow colored windows like this

⏹️ ▶️ John is all the same window I’m just changing tabs look how crazily different the window looks But if you just look at an isolation as pieces of

⏹️ ▶️ John art or even like the docks on different backgrounds They all look really nice and interesting like so I can that was

⏹️ ▶️ John the other reasoning like we’re doing this because we want to Let you control the mood of your OS by changing your desktop picture

⏹️ ▶️ John and also we’re doing this So that things look pretty like the same reason you do anything. I was like fashion like we wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ John look pretty I think it does look pretty in a lot of scenarios and The thing is, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John they just went a little bit over the line. I think I put this in the review. Like this habit they have

⏹️ ▶️ John of trying to do something, going too far, and then having to back it off. They did it in iOS 7

⏹️ ▶️ John with the super thin fonts and backed it off before release. And you know, do they back up any stuff in iOS 8?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe a little bit more. I don’t know. I don’t know the details. But in OS X they’ve done it like crazy. In 10.0

⏹️ ▶️ John and in the developer previews they had a super translucent inactive title bar in all windows and they backed that off because it was a bad

⏹️ ▶️ John idea. They had all sorts of other kinds of pinstripes and translucency that were just way too strong

⏹️ ▶️ John that they had to back off later. Even the translucent menu bar, which I railed against and thought

⏹️ ▶️ John was ridiculous, they backed off on that and added a checkbox for it, right? So, I mean, maybe this is just the

⏹️ ▶️ John way you go, you know, go too far and then take it back a notch instead of being too timid. But I think they’ve essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John done it again. I think they only went a little bit too far. Like, I like the translucent dock. I think that is a perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John use of, hey, make it pretty and have crazy colors behind it, but you can still see your icons It’s pretty chunky like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s huge icons Maybe when you get it smaller gets worse They could have had the opacity increases

⏹️ ▶️ John they got smaller if they wanted to be clever But I think I’m fine with that the translucent title

⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar. I really don’t like I would have wished They had a check mark there, but it’s not the end of the world But the sidebars

⏹️ ▶️ John are what kill me because like using outlook all day at work. I Don’t want to see

⏹️ ▶️ John this muddy dingy sidebar where some text is doing a vibrancy blend

⏹️ ▶️ John and some text isn’t and when you select things it gets bold and it’s just like the people who made Outlook never

⏹️ ▶️ John designed their app with that in mind and all of a sudden they find themselves running on Yosemite and their entire sidebar is just totally

⏹️ ▶️ John screwed over and looking ridiculous and I’m looking at it every day and it’s like Casey said it’s lower contrast

⏹️ ▶️ John now than it used to be it’s muddier than it used to be and I’m faced with a little awkward decision about changing a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John picture I like because it’s infecting my windows so they’re so close Like if there was just one checkbox to

⏹️ ▶️ John say no translucent menu bar, no translucent sidebars everything else about the system I think is great. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the buttons look way better. I even like the little skinny progress bars I think it looks clean and crisp

⏹️ ▶️ John I like the window widgets, even though I keep moving the little things with my eyeglasses because of chromatic aberration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, did you see there was there was that thing? I think Stephen Hackett posted a pretty good photo I think it was him that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually like the X is actually off-center in the in the bubble

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just sub pixel sub pixel rendering for that. It’s not actually off-center.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, I think it actually is I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s a half pixel. I think it’s a half point off. So on retina screens, it’s actually one pixel off

⏹️ ▶️ John Someone sent in a screenshot of the actual pixels like from pixie Yeah, right and it was centered

⏹️ ▶️ John but be due to sub pixel if you look at the picture elements it gets off center But anyway, the chromatic aberration

⏹️ ▶️ John with my glasses trumps all of that I can move I can move that circle So the X is practically poking out of the

⏹️ ▶️ John side of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t just like turn your convergence knob in your head and fix it?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not that. That’s not how it works. Light enters the lens and has to enter the pupil and all

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. And anyway, that’s a whole separate issue. I almost put that in the review, but I thought it would have been a distraction, but I have been

⏹️ ▶️ John tweeting about it. People don’t know what we’re talking about. The window widgets in Mavericks are

⏹️ ▶️ John solid primary colors, red, yellow, and green, and different colors bend

⏹️ ▶️ John different amounts when they go through lenses. And the the little glyphs inside these circles

⏹️ ▶️ John are completely black. So if you have glasses, powerful glasses, and you turn your head

⏹️ ▶️ John so that the red light comes in at a different angle, the red, the green, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John yellow widgets will move, but the black will not move as much. So what it looks like to you, what it looks like is

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like the X that’s inside the red circle, it looks like that X is moving to the side. And so now the X is touching

⏹️ ▶️ John the left edge of the circle. Now the X is touching the right edge of the circle. Now the X is touching the top of the circle. Like, you want the X to be

⏹️ ▶️ John centered, but as you move your head, the X seems to move around. What’s really happening is that the circle is moving around and the axis is kind of staying still.

⏹️ ▶️ John But either way, we’ll link to the Wikipedia article on chromatic aberration. This is just how lenses and light work.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is an effect that is emphasized by the fact that it’s just plain flat red instead of being like the little

⏹️ ▶️ John jewel-like specular highlighted reddish thing where it is much less

⏹️ ▶️ John visible. So, and even if you don’t have glasses, what Marco was talking about is if you just look at the

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels, I know for sub-pixel rendering it’s going to be off by at least a partial sub-pixel,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco seems to think that it’s also off by one hairline half a point pixel on retina,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m not sure about but It wouldn’t surprise me if they just didn’t have the right number of pixels. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I Don’t fault the design for that. I think the design looks great and people

⏹️ ▶️ John with glasses all the colors are always shifting I mean everyone with glasses knows when we used to look at CRTs you could

⏹️ ▶️ John Deconverge the edges of the screen and see like a red line on one edge of the screen and a blue line on the other edge.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just the way glasses work. I would not design an OS around avoiding that. There’s no avoiding it. A white square

⏹️ ▶️ John will demonstrate misconversions if you tilt your head and have powerful enough glasses. So

⏹️ ▶️ John we glasses wearers just deal with it. And everyone else, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s fine. I guess that’s why I didn’t put it in the review because I knew about it from a long time ago, but I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like I didn’t want to make another Bendgate type thing. Like Yosemite comes with a feature that causes

⏹️ ▶️ John window widgets to leave their circles. It’s like it’s just it’s just physics guys chill.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be a really advanced parallax feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John I disabled parallax on my phone too. I don’t I don’t need any extra elements that are moving in relation to each

⏹️ ▶️ John other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So going back a minute before we move on, give me back a minute to the blur being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially annoying or being a downside. Certain designs like if you look at the design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Windows Phone 7 and the kind of Metro design that brought in. It has a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of downsides and just like the design language it creates has certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations with things like showing complex navigation and, you know, showing things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being tappable versus not and things like that. There’s certain challenges that that entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design language, that entire design style just has certain built-in shortcomings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like it is not possible to design X well in that style.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every design style has things like this. Do you think the iOS 7

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like aesthetic and the way that it has been kind of half taken for Yosemite,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you think that requires the blur in its language

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know to look right or to be harmonious with the aluminum and everything else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around it. Do you think it requires that? Or do you like do you think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blur is like just a cost that we have when building certain types

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of interfaces with this new style that we’re just going to have to live with? Or do you think they could have done something else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there that wouldn’t just totally look crappy?

⏹️ ▶️ John You could have gotten the family resemblance by using that blur in the places that were already translucent.

⏹️ ▶️ John So use it on the dock, obviously use it on the little overlays that come when you change the screen brightness or volume,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Use it on like, you know, floating palettes or like, you know, the menu pull down menus and

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that effect, which is not just a blur, it’s a blur plus a, you know, pulling

⏹️ ▶️ John forward of certain colors and increasing saturation in certain areas like that is aesthetically pleasing effect that

⏹️ ▶️ John adds interest without taking away, you know, readability, because that’s the whole point of the thing is like, we want to show what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John behind it. But we don’t want what’s What’s behind it to interfere so we have this crazy effect? It’s all over ios 7 for

⏹️ ▶️ John transient things it could be on You know Yosemite for transient things as well where you get

⏹️ ▶️ John into trouble is when you start making it part of permanent Interface elements like the sidebars and toolbars the toolbars.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can see what they’re doing there because If you just made the toolbar like opaque

⏹️ ▶️ John like as I said in the review completely opaque It still looks pretty handsome like it’s not it’s a nice design But it’s also kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John plain and the in window blending as annoying as it can be and as distracting as

⏹️ ▶️ John it can be and sometimes as ugly as it can be also sometimes adds interest and has less of a chance of impairing readability

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not a lot of words in toolbars like it’s a bunch of big fat buttons the buttons are still opaque you’re not really hurting

⏹️ ▶️ John readability the sidebars are just a bridge too far because they’re filled with text you are hurting readability

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s such a huge part of the application like a new Safari window the toolbars 100% gray because

⏹️ ▶️ John you haven’t scrolled anything up behind it yet or any web page scroll to the top like there’s nothing behind it It’s just you have a chance

⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be 100% gray But the sidebar and outlook is forever infected by my desktop pattern and possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John even worse infected If there’s nothing behind it except for the desktop or some other crazy window behind it So

⏹️ ▶️ John I I think you could have gotten the family resemblance without

⏹️ ▶️ John Going as far as they did, but I think what more what they were going for is How do we

⏹️ ▶️ John make this interesting and someone said hey look at this? I can mix colors into the parts of the UI and it is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John daring in like like the arrow glass which we talked about which is like kind of like what OS X did I

⏹️ ▶️ John forget what it was in 10.0 or in DP 3 or DP 4 or something where like I said any window

⏹️ ▶️ John that was inactive its title bar was kind of Aero-glassy they didn’t have the they didn’t have the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John blur back then because it would have taken it been too slow But they just made it super transparent like it really

⏹️ ▶️ John looked like frosted glass like 10% opacity, right? But you know Yosemite

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do that. Yosemite doesn’t make every single title bar translucent so you can see what’s behind it It makes the title bars 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John opaque until something scrolls up behind it if you happen to do in window blending and and Developers can choose to do that

⏹️ ▶️ John or not. It’s not like arrow glass arrow glass was a bridge too far. I hate seeing People’s Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John machines that have arrow glass because they just look like a damn mess. It’s like it’s just too much Sidebars

⏹️ ▶️ John are also too much, but not every window has a sidebar and you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not like they took the entire OS and said everything you see through They just made maybe one

⏹️ ▶️ John or two too many things show what’s behind them for no reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I like the transparency in principle, but I agree with you. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been turned up too high, if you will, and it needs to be backed off a bit.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not even up too high. It’s like, I think it’s the right amount. It’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I said in the review, if you’re developing an application, this actually ties into the extension section, believe it

⏹️ ▶️ John or not. The the old bad world of extensions is like I write a great app and then someone comes along

⏹️ ▶️ John and jumps into the Memory image of my process and starts screwing with it. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ John wrote an app. I debugged it. I tested it I’m sure it works correctly and then you’re gonna Jump

⏹️ ▶️ John into my code and put a jump instruction there and jump off into some other section of code and then jump back there after You change the

⏹️ ▶️ John state of something in my program. I can’t defend against that How can I debug something when I don’t know when someone is modifying

⏹️ ▶️ John my code while it’s running? running. Like, I have no idea who these people are, what their software does, what it’s doing to my application,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unsupportable. And that’s why people hate extensions that are memory memory patching extensions.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s screw, you know, because as a software developer, it’s like the worst thing in the world. It’s like, look, debugging my own program with code

⏹️ ▶️ John that I wrote is hard enough, on top of debugging the OS libraries and everything like that. But now you’re telling me that while my

⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly debugged, nice program is running some other program that someone who I never met wrote, it’s gonna jump into my

⏹️ ▶️ John program and change how it behaves. That’s crazy. It’s unsupportable, right? Well, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John a designer and you’re saying, I’m going to design an application and it’s going to look like this and I’m going to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ John everything is nice and I’m going to make sure all the text is readable and all the interactions are nice or whatever. And then I have

⏹️ ▶️ John no control over what the background of my sidebar is that the it’s up to whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John is behind that window and whatever the person’s desktop background is. And I’m just relying on the system to keep my text

⏹️ ▶️ John legible and not look ugly. That’s not as untenable as as memory patching

⏹️ ▶️ John extensions because it doesn’t crash your app. But from a design perspective, it’s almost untenable. You’re like, I can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you don’t even give me the option to make that completely opaque, I feel like I just can’t use a sidebar

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. I just have to, you know, use a different UI element because I do not want, I can’t control what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to put in my window. How am I supposed to design it when I can’t control that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else on Yosemite?

⏹️ ▶️ John I have tons more on Yosemite, but not for today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fine. I wanted to very quickly talk about Apple Pay and complain that I haven’t had a chance to use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it yet. and that was most of the reason for bringing it up. The other part of the reason I wanted to bring it up, what the other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the reason I wanted to bring it up is it struck me just a few minutes ago, it seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little odd that neither Target nor Home Depot, who arguably need Apple Pay the most, since

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they seem to be leaking like a sieve when it comes to credit card numbers, neither of them are supported right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a bummer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s a pretty big downside to this for them, and that is that the way they used to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco run credit cards, they could automatically track you everything you bought identified by your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit card number and the name that was read through the readers. And so, they were… I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that they did this, but they probably did. They had the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make money off of that and, you know, market to you in some way, or at least track what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were doing and sell that data to somebody. So, like, Apple Pay actually removes a revenue stream from these people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I can totally see why why certain vendors are not going to be interested in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this. And you know, eventually they’ll probably be pressured into doing it anyway. But I can see why they wouldn’t want to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch partners at least and wouldn’t want to do it sooner than they have to, because they depend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on being creepy as part of their business model and Apple is taking away one way that they can be creepy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes, but they already have all in the case of Target. Anyway, they have alternate ways of being creepy, which is their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoot. It’s like a shopping cart app. I forget the name of it now and it’s going to drive me nuts. But basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s an app that you can get and you can scan barcodes while you’re standing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the store and it will selectively issue you coupons.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so then when you go to check out, it puts up a QR code cartwheel. Thank you Friday

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pants in the chat. Interesting name by the way. It will show a it will show a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey QR code that they scan and on the cartwheel app and then And that’ll give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you money off. And granted, it’s nice for the consumer because you get a little bit of a discount, but I am quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident they’re doing exactly what you described, which is tracking that, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron and I went in and we looked at this thing and it didn’t have a discount. We looked at this thing and it didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a discount, but we looked at that thing and it did have a discount. And piecing that all together. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t it Target that ended up telling somebody’s dad that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey his daughter was pregnant? Yeah, there was that story. Yeah. house like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey diaper coupons or something like that because the daughter had gone to target and bought like pregnancy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tests or something along those lines. I forget exactly what the details were. So I, you make a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good point, which actually I hadn’t considered, but, um, nevertheless, I’m just bummed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m looking at the list of, of people that are accepting Apple pay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I occasionally go to McDonald’s. I actually happened to really like their breakfast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I more often go to Panera Bread but haven’t been back since Monday. We already spent all of our money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Babies R Us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wednesday.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. Well, I’m saying I haven’t been there in a couple of weeks. I haven’t been to Panera in two days. It’s really rough. It’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We spent all of our money at Babies R Us a week or so ago, maybe two weeks ago. I was actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a Walgreens just a few days back, but it was like Sunday. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, this is terrible. I haven’t used it yet. I don’t know what to do. go buy some stuff I don’t need.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume you haven’t used it, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used it once at Whole Foods yesterday or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how’d it go? Tell me about it. It was great. What I was really incredibly impressed by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was how insanely fast it was. Like, so, ever since I started using Touch ID on a regular basis on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone, my typical thing is I pull the phone out of my pocket. And as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pulling out of my pocket, my thumb’s already on the home button and has already tapped it. So it is unlocking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m lifting it up. By the time I raise it up to my face level or whatever level I’m using it at,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is almost always unlocking by then or has already unlocked by then. So I just did this instinctively.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I raised it up and I saw on screen my credit card for a split second.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw the Touch ID thing fill in the fingerprint for like literally half a second and it was done and that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I’m like, whoa, like it was so fast. It blew me away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still had to sign though. It was just over $100, so maybe that’s why. I did still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to sign, so that was like a little bit like an animal, you know. But then when I went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to another store later on that day to get some other stuff, and of course I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use a regular machine, it felt so archaic. Even after using it once, I’ve been doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like every day of my life, for my entire adult life, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never thought this was really a problem, and now all of a sudden everything else feels old and broken.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why did you have to sign?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s because it was over $100. There’s probably still a threshold.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t get out of Whole Foods without spending more than $100. I know. It’s impossible. They don’t let you leave

⏹️ ▶️ John the store, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing it’s just like other signature rules where there’s probably some threshold that is possibly dependent on the store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the type of merchant account they have or something. But we will see. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I expect the rich people to rebel at that because seriously,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of person goes to Whole Foods and comes out spending less than $100? It’s impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you bring up getting at a Whole Foods for $100. A really quick story, a couple of years ago, I typically bring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my lunch to work and I just eat at my desk. A couple of years ago, for whatever reason, I had forgotten it or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I decide, you know what, I’m going to go to Whole Foods, which is a store I very rarely go to. I’m going to go to their little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey salad bar that is way more than a salad bar. I’m going to get myself a little smorgasbord of randomness.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get a little box and I put all the food I want in there thinking, yeah, this is probably like five or ten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks worth of food. I go to checkout and it was a solid like $18 worth of food. Too many

⏹️ ▶️ John hard-boiled eggs, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go by weight. I know, to be honest, I think what it was, and this was my first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought as soon as I was checked out, was, mm, should have been a little lighter on the mac and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheese. That stuff’s dense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, that’s a rookie mistake. All those like, buy miscellaneous hot and cold food mixes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by weight things, like Manhattan’s full of those places, I’m sure they’re probably everywhere, but like, that was like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rookie mistake in like if you if you get a job in the city and you’re going to lunch everybody you go to a place that has one of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big hot bars in the middle like rookie mistake never go to those things because like it like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the stuff that looks good is so freaking heavy and you know you put like a little side of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some pasta and like you know a little piece of chicken in there eleven dollars like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s there’s no way of getting out of there getting a good deal i

⏹️ ▶️ John think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco i’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John complained about this before but the the cut up fruit where they will take a fruit and cut it into small squares or or something,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is like $1,000 a square of pineapple. Like I don’t know how they’re pricing the labor, but like you

⏹️ ▶️ John can buy a whole pineapple for X amount and you can buy a cut up quarter pineapple for 20X.

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know what happens to it to make that price change, but yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well clearly we’re in the wrong business. We should be getting into the cutting fruit business. Right. That’s obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth a large premium.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now John, since you have an iPhone, be it apples or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t, all my loan hardware is gone. And you mentioned before, other people were telling me like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you think Yosemite is fine because you get to look at our retina screen. I also have no retina max either at home or at work, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John so my loaner hardware that I use to review Yosemite is all gone including the phone. So I am back to my dumb phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m back to all my non-retina max. So I have not used Apple Pay to answer your question.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and what is the current plan with regard to getting an iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that still happening? Is it happening soon? Happening later?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll probably get one. Marco reminded me today that about Apple discounts, so they have those

⏹️ ▶️ John those friends and family discounts. And so I may be able to get one of those. And if I do do that, that will influence

⏹️ ▶️ John my hardware buying decisions. And I got to figure out how all those work and blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very annoyed that I didn’t even know these existed until today.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve known they existed because of various people have offered them to me in the past when I wasn’t buying hardware. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John just keep forgetting that they exist.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that in mind, let’s really quickly, I know we’re running a little long. Marco, did you order a Rymac?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think so. It’s a little vague with the business reps, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your order has actually been placed. I have not yet been charged for it. And I asked if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had an order number because they said it was it was already really preparing for shipment. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t know. I have no tracking number. I have tried like the look up my order number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing on the website. And I don’t even know what email address they put in for me. And I tried a few and they couldn’t find anything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It’s always vague with business reps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jared Ranere Fair enough. And John, are you intending to buy a Retina iMac?

⏹️ ▶️ John Not really. I’m still waiting for everyone else to get theirs and see what they’re like and all that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco jazz.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I keep, now that I’m hearing more and more about the iPad Air 2, I’m lusting after it more.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know. I don’t know. After my review is done, I have all these

⏹️ ▶️ John things I’m gonna buy to reward myself for finishing it and use some of

⏹️ ▶️ John the money I get paid for the review to buy stuff. And one of the things is I wanna get a PS4, But I’m like, I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ John need a PS4. There’s no games out for that. I want now I can still wait on that. Maybe by the time I buy it, slim version will be

⏹️ ▶️ John out if I wait long enough. They read an iMac. Well, I got to wait till Mark gets his. He’ll tell me what all the problems

⏹️ ▶️ John are. Blah, blah, blah. The iPhone, I’m probably going to get one, but then I got to deal with all the hassles of

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to, like, you know, get a Verizon family plan and doing all that billing stuff that I know is going

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a nightmare. And and then the hardware discounts all mixed into this. And so, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John paralysis means that I just end up sitting here not buying anything. but I will buy some things eventually, probably

⏹️ ▶️ John before the end of this year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s extremely useful.

⏹️ ▶️ John You

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t even know if you bought it

⏹️ ▶️ John at IMAX, so we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco both in the same boat

⏹️ ▶️ John here. That’s true. Hardware may or may not be showing up at both of our houses at some point in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Goodness gracious. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, Igloo, and Lynda.com,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental John didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse It’s accidental, accidental, they did it mean to Accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, check my podcast so long.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I went back to my smaller iPod Touch now, and I just used the big

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And then I went back to the smaller one. And the smaller one, the biggest things I feel are

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much skinnier. Not so much the height, but the skinniness. I just feel like I guess I just got used to

⏹️ ▶️ John the wider screen and just having more of a web page visible and stuff. Even reading tweets, where you’re like, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the big deal? feels wider. But the other thing is like even though I can reach so much more

⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPod touch, I don’t know, like I started to, even if the short time

⏹️ ▶️ John I had the 6, I started to get like the hand motions to reach the really far parts of the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the hand shuffle I would have to do to reach the upper left corner. I started to get good at that and now when

⏹️ ▶️ John I go back to the small one I start doing that motion and it’s like oh you don’t need to do that motion to get that corner

⏹️ ▶️ John and I like I don’t know it feels like I built up skills at playing a particular game

⏹️ ▶️ John and now the game has been taken away and those skills that I built up are not useful anymore and I’m kind of sad about it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a strange feeling I did not I did not expect to have this feeling but it just it just feels like

⏹️ ▶️ John I was getting good at that big thing I mean and it’s not there’s not so much positive feeling like

⏹️ ▶️ John oh this is so much smaller I like it so much better there’s not even that much of that I do I do feel it’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John less kind of it’s less precarious but again I I was using without a case. So it’s weird. We’ll see when

⏹️ ▶️ John we get my iPhone 6 eventually how I feel about it longer term

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So out of curiosity What what is making you not buy it yet? If you’ve already decided

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re probably gonna buy an iPhone 6 the iPhone 6 has come out We know it’s not going to change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until roughly a year from now when it will be a terrible time to buy an iPhone 6 Why not get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I just have to decide am I gonna go into an Apple Store and do it? How am I going to deal with phone number stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ John How am I? How are we going to change our Verizon plans? I just, you know, I’ll I’ll do it eventually. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just if there’s anything involved with it other than me clicking a bunch of buttons and waiting for a package to show up at my house, then

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it gets it gets put off, you know, and that’s what’s happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do you want to make a bet, Casey? I’m betting he doesn’t get an iPhone six. I’m betting this takes until close

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to next fall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that John just decides to wait

⏹️ ▶️ John and wait until next.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Here’s here’s the bet. I will take that bet. But if you lose,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get to give you a playlist for pre-show music one night.

⏹️ ▶️ John You picked the wrong thing to bet there, Casey, because you’re going to win this bet, so you should pick something much better than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I’m willing to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s it’s mood anyway. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. No deal. All right. What else is going on? Do we have anything to say about this Gamergate stuff? Is there really much to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say other than it’s terrible?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have two links that I’m going to put into the show notes. It’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still grinding on we talked about it in vague terms before But didn’t get a lot of bad feedback about it because I’m also

⏹️ ▶️ John because I think people who know about or care about this You don’t listen to our podcast which is nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honestly I’m kind of glad that the people who are All raging and crazy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Gamergate side of it like trying to like abuse all these people I’m kind of glad they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t listen to our show But this don’t sound like very good fans to have I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John right like we got one email from like that like the well-meaning people who like are,

⏹️ ▶️ John were affiliated with it, but you know, couldn’t understand why I was trashing it and so on and so forth. And I replied to one of them

⏹️ ▶️ John by email, who sent a longer email, and what I basically said is, even though your intentions may be good,

⏹️ ▶️ John and even though, this was like weeks and weeks ago, and even though you may not have done anything bad, and even

⏹️ ▶️ John though you agree with the stated aims of this movement, the movement itself has been

⏹️ ▶️ John entirely co-opted and tainted by all the bad things that happened, that it is irredeemably corrupted.

⏹️ ▶️ John And by associating yourself with it, you are bringing yourself down. Like, it’s basically, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, if I try to think of some group that this applies to, I’ll just get into other situations.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, this group and this name has been irredeemably tainted. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John matter what they do going forward. It doesn’t matter, like, the name, the banner, it’s just too many bad

⏹️ ▶️ John things have happened under this banner, and you can yell all you want about, that’s not what it’s really about, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. It’s too late now. So if you really believe in the good things that you think this thing, you know, that

⏹️ ▶️ John GamerGate said it was about, you must disassociate from them. Start a new hashtag, under a

⏹️ ▶️ John new banner, with a new name and a new platform or whatever, because this one is dead. And if you really cared about the things,

⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t care about the name it’s associated with, because you would just go off and do something else, and fight for whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ John is you think you’re fighting for. But GamerGate is, you know, is lost. Is lost to

⏹️ ▶️ John decent people. So, anyway, there’s been tons of links about this. I keep tweeting about it. People complain that I tweet about it, that they don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to hear about it. Yeah, tough luck. Like, if you don’t like it, follow somebody else. Lots of people, talk to Jason

⏹️ ▶️ John Snell about how many people love to tell him what he should be tweeting about or not. It’s like, that’s, you know, that’s the way it is. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it is the ultimate in luxury to be able to say, I’m tired of this Gamergate thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Stop telling me about it. Yeah, it must be nice. Anyway, whatever. I don’t want to get into it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the two links I have, these are actually from today. And there’s been a lot of good links and I’ve been reading them and tweeting them about,

⏹️ ▶️ John but these two good kind of bookends, not that this thing is over, but two good bookends as of where we are right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John One is from the perspective of a journalist who was trying to write stories about Gamergate and was frustrated with the process

⏹️ ▶️ John of trying to just, just do straight up, this is the view from the outside. This is the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John disengaged, dispassionate view of the thing where it’s like, I don’t know what this is, I’m not a gamer,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m a reporter and I’m trying to report on this. And here’s the frustrating situation of, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, here’s why it’s difficult to report on it. And so I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John put this in the show notes from New York Magazine. Who is the person who wrote this? I had the name up before

⏹️ ▶️ John Jesse single I don’t know if that’s a man or a woman It shouldn’t matter but when it comes to Gamergate it definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John does so that’s the view from the outside and the view from the inside is Felicia Day

⏹️ ▶️ John who you may or may not know as a actress and online media person doing

⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things and is also known as a gamer, hasn’t said

⏹️ ▶️ John much about GamerGate but finally posted something about GamerGate and hers is a personal story of like

⏹️ ▶️ John how it is affecting her and why she was afraid to say anything about it and why she is ashamed

⏹️ ▶️ John for being afraid and just what this has done to the gaming community. So two

⏹️ ▶️ John total huge, you know, opposite ends of the spectrum talking about GamerGate and I think if you

⏹️ ▶️ John read both of those things you have a good idea what this is like. You know, what the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ John is about and what it’s like. And by the way, she posted this thing and less than an hour later, the Gamer Gators attempted to

⏹️ ▶️ John doxx her according to what people are tweeting these days. But, you know, par for the course. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put those two links in. If you’re sick of reading about this stuff, but you haven’t read anything she last talked about, just read

⏹️ ▶️ John these two things and it will sort of get you up to speed, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it continues to grind on. Bad people continue to do bad things. The rest of us continue

⏹️ ▶️ John to suffer under it. all sorts of sideshows associated with it. I really wish it would

⏹️ ▶️ John just go away. I again urge everybody who is in any way

⏹️ ▶️ John associated with it, disassociate yourself, start something new. That one

⏹️ ▶️ John is poisoned by bad people who no decent person agrees with. Just stop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey COREY Yeah, that’s the thing is, I just can’t wrap my mind around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being upset about whether or not they’re women in video games, or let’s even assume being upset about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed impropriety in journalism. How does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lead to forcing Brianna Wu and her husband out of her home? How

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that a reasonable course of action? Maybe it’s because I’m sane?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get it. It’s just an excuse to lash out at things you don’t like. It

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t matter what

⏹️ ▶️ John it is, and I’m not going to use any analogies, but there are plenty of them. You hate something, Something happens and you use

⏹️ ▶️ John it as an excuse to lash out at the thing you hate. Like, no matter what happens, it’s an excuse to attack women. If women are tangentially

⏹️ ▶️ John involved in any way, it’s an excuse. I mean, the Felicia Day thing is like, she wrote this heartfelt thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John is not really an attack on much of anything, immediately gets attacked. And various men have written things and not

⏹️ ▶️ John gotten attacked in the same way. Various men have written things very recently that are much worse. Do they get attacked? No, they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. Why? Because these people have, you know, they have, they, they hate women. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re misogynists. Like, that’s their thing. And no matter what happens, it’s an excuse to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, woman, get in your place. No matter what happens. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s like, you gave my game

⏹️ ▶️ John a bad review or I don’t like what you said. It’s like, and therefore, that is an excuse to attack

⏹️ ▶️ John women. Everything is an excuse to attack women. They’re just looking for it, right? And again, this doesn’t, if you hear me saying

⏹️ ▶️ John this, this doesn’t apply to you because everyone says like, you’re saying all gamers hate women. Nope, nope, not you. I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ John you, the gamers who don’t hate women, don’t associate with Gamergate because it’s poisoned. Like, go someplace

⏹️ ▶️ John different to do what you wanted to do. Which should be fine, you shouldn’t care about this particular cause, this particular decentralized

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, this particular hashtag. You know, if you care about corruption in the gaming press, which is a thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John and has been a thing for years and years, fight that, but it has nothing to do with Gamergate anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it never really did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, Gamergate is not about hating women, it’s about journalistic integrity.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and that BS is now finally filtering through to everybody. Now, essentially everybody, even reporters who had no

⏹️ ▶️ John idea what it was, and come in and like, I tried to report on this, but everybody keeps telling me it’s not about hatred of women. And every time

⏹️ ▶️ John I look at the Gamer Gators, that’s all I see. And I say, oh, those aren’t the real ones. It’s like the no true Scotsman thing, which they talk about in this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, every time something bad happens, someone says, oh, that’s not really what Gamer Gator is about. It’s it’s a decentralized

⏹️ ▶️ John thing with no actual leadership, with no actual platform. And anything bad that happens is is say, well, that’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re about. That’s not how it works. You know, you can pick, you know, a political analogy,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. They have platforms. They have leaders. You can, you know, be expelled

⏹️ ▶️ John from them. You’re not allowed to say that you’re a member. You know, I am a representative of the Democratic Party. I

⏹️ ▶️ John am I am their duly appointed representative, and I will tell you what their position is. And then you say a bunch of hateful stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John You are no longer the duly appointed representative of the Democratic Party. They have an actual platform. They have actual

⏹️ ▶️ John leadership. They have things they can say, here’s what we want. Here’s what we stand for. But it’s Gamergate completely decentralized.

⏹️ ▶️ John Terrible things happen. And everyone’s like, well, that’s not what we’re really about. Well, that’s all you guys are doing. If you go into these Gamergate

⏹️ ▶️ John boards, it’s all about attacking women and saying terrible things or whatever, but that’s not really what it’s about. Well, that’s it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John matter what you say it’s about. It only matters what you do. And with no leadership and no platform and no formal organizing

⏹️ ▶️ John body, there’s no way for you to say these people are not part of gangrigate. If they use the tag

⏹️ ▶️ John and they do bad things, they’re part of it. If you you can’t kick them out because there is no centralization or you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t kick them out, everything they do, it just becomes what gangrigate is about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And and because and you know, there’s a difference between what you one person might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to be about or might believe it’s about versus what it actually is about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what it actually is about is widespread abuse. Like, that’s all it is. It’s widespread abuse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of women.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like Brianna has said, it’s like, I don’t care about what your theory is. All I care about is outcomes.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the outcome. The outcome is so plain as day. Like, you don’t, you know, it’s just ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ John with the outcome. And the worst part is the recent phenomenon has been sort of right-wing

⏹️ ▶️ John political, I don’t know what you’d call them, people are called like a D-list right-wing political

⏹️ ▶️ John celebrities, latching onto it as a way to further their agendas because they don’t know or care anything about games until they see this thing

⏹️ ▶️ John is going on here. And they’re like, oh well, you know, we can use this angry mob to our advantage to

⏹️ ▶️ John further our agendas which have nothing to do with video games and certainly nothing to do with ethics and video games press.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all a ridiculous sideshow. The worst thing about it is like, it shows

⏹️ ▶️ John that that sort of the immune system of decent people and sort of like our way of handling like this is a

⏹️ ▶️ John This this movement should not be giving us the trouble that it is right like where

⏹️ ▶️ John the Gamergators will organize sort of ballot stuffing campaigns to tell a sponsor not to support

⏹️ ▶️ John some website that said something negative about Gamergate and Sponsors will be like oh, we’re getting all these emails

⏹️ ▶️ John We better stop doing this and then they’ll bail out because they don’t know what Gamergate is They don’t know anything about this and then

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re like after the fact saying no What are you doing? Like you’ve been you’ve been fooled by a bunch of trolls there,

⏹️ ▶️ John too Yes, they did send you lots of angry letters but they don’t represent anybody except for terrible people like

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make financial decisions based on you know a Human driven letter writing campaign like

⏹️ ▶️ John people running stats on like the tweets that are going up about this like they said I

⏹️ ▶️ John forget what the percentage of some huge percentage of tweets with the game bring it hashtag were made by by

⏹️ ▶️ John only 100 Twitter accounts, most of which were created in the last two months. It’s entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John a sock puppet type. They are able to further their nefarious ends through

⏹️ ▶️ John means that are completely transparent and yet are able to fool large corporations into believing they represent

⏹️ ▶️ John an important constituency. And then all of us are out here like, I can’t believe this is even happening.

⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have a good way to deal with organized, extremely negative, terrible, anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ John trolling. And hopefully this whole terrible experience will sort of teach

⏹️ ▶️ John the civilized world, essentially, how to manage situations like this better,

⏹️ ▶️ John make us all more savvy, give us better tools, give us better organizing antibodies against this kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of disease. I don’t know. I mean, maybe it’ll take two or three more runs at this,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s terrible. I wish it would get better, but who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree with one small thing that you said. You said that Gamergate doesn’t have a platform, and I don’t think that’s true. Their platform is hate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They just hate things. They hate women. They hate supposed journalists.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They hate things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, it’s just women because men journalists seem to be doing okay. Fair point. They just hate women. That’s the platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I just – I don’t understand how any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sane and intelligent human being cannot see through this and see that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wrong. Like, these people who are doxing these women and making these threats against

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these women, like, I just, it does not compute how that is acceptable behavior.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How is that okay? What have these women really done to affect your world? And even if they have,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is that an okay reaction? Like, it’s just, I don’t understand how any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s lack of empathy, ends justify the means, all sorts of things that like, You know, and

⏹️ ▶️ John really as I said in the original show about this that these people, you know, don’t understand what they’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ John angry about Uh, and so many people were insulted by that because they always think i’m talking about them If you know what

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re angry about then i’m not talking about you. I’m talking to people who don’t know anyway, it’s kind of a tautology there, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John These are people who are in pain People who act this way are not like happy well-adjusted people

⏹️ ▶️ John with awesome family lives and fulfilling jobs and like, you know what I mean? that’s they’re in

⏹️ ▶️ John pain currently, they’re in pain from the past or whatever, and they’ve focused that on like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, why am I in pain? What’s wrong with my life? And, you know, they’re placing a lot of the blame on that, on

⏹️ ▶️ John the perceived enemies, whatever they may be. And in this case, it’s women and progressives and whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re, you know, but like the people who do this, like, you’re like, oh, I can’t understand it. Like, how can people

⏹️ ▶️ John believe that they’re the bad guys in their own stories? And sometimes they don’t, sometimes they don’t believe they’re the bad

⏹️ ▶️ John guys in their own stories, But sometimes they do believe, they do believe in their heart of hearts that they’re the bad guys in their own stories,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re doing it because they’re in pain for unrelated reasons, and they feel like they, they deserve to be

⏹️ ▶️ John the bad guy, or they should be, or whatever. Like, it’s not, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I have, I have empathy for the people who are on that side of the fence, because really, like, in my experience, people

⏹️ ▶️ John who do terrible things, unless they’re actually clinically insane, which most people are not, it’s because

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in pain, right? It doesn’t make it any better and we need to find ways to deal

⏹️ ▶️ John with this and help ourselves and secondarily help them, you know, but it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t, it’s easy to demonize people who do terrible things, but really like if you think about it, like when you’re trying to get

⏹️ ▶️ John into their headspace, imagine your life was not like it was. Imagine your life was

⏹️ ▶️ John just terrible in all possible ways and you had an amazingly bad childhood or you’re super angry about

⏹️ ▶️ John something or you have some kind of undiagnosed,

⏹️ ▶️ John unmedicated emotional imbalance that you have not been able to deal with. All of that

⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfaction and hatred and anger has to go somewhere and it ends up landing in weird places. Sometimes it turns inward

⏹️ ▶️ John on themselves. Sometimes they’re outward, sometimes both. So I think I vaguely understand

⏹️ ▶️ John what it is that’s making this happen. It’s just that as a society, one job is figuring out

⏹️ ▶️ John why that’s happening and we should prevent these outcomes by making people have better, happier lives and not end up in these terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John situations. But the other aspect is, how do we protect ourselves as a society

⏹️ ▶️ John against it to essentially say, as you will find out when your child arrives, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is not OK. This is not OK behavior to enforce limits on. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do that online. What is OK behavior online in real life? This is not OK. We don’t accept this. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the worst thing. It’s like part of what the whole what’s happening in games these

⏹️ ▶️ John days, the sort of progress games are making in doing and saying more interesting things,

⏹️ ▶️ John if the people who are on that side of the fence doing bad things to women had grown up in a world

⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of post, you know, like a feminist revolution of gaming,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like if these people had grown up in a world where women were not as objectified as they are in popular

⏹️ ▶️ John culture now, they would be less likely to direct all their hatred and bad feelings towards women. know

⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Like if they could see women as human beings instead of people, they would actually be happier

⏹️ ▶️ John people. Like they’re fighting against something that could have saved them from being the things that they are today. You know what I mean? Like, because

⏹️ ▶️ John all this contributes to like, why am I miserable? And where do I direct that that energy?

⏹️ ▶️ John The studio up in the same thing that’s making me say unintentionally, you know, racist

⏹️ ▶️ John or sexist things, because that’s just how I grew up, that that influences all of us. And like the people working

⏹️ ▶️ John for change in the games and everyone else are trying to make a world where people are less steeped in these bad

⏹️ ▶️ John things growing up so that when they come to adulthood, hopefully they won’t hold on to these

⏹️ ▶️ John antiquated and harmful notions about other people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, it seems like the same kind of playbook that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all oppressed groups have gone through. And I’m coming from very much a position

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of luxury because I don’t really know what that’s I mean, my dad’s family is Jewish,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I never really practiced growing up. So I’ve never personally been exposed to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of anti-Semitic behavior. But it seems like, from an outsider’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a luxury point of view, it seems like the same playbook that, you know, oh, let’s hate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jews and oh, let’s hate black people. And now it’s, oh, let’s hate women.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when does that ever work out? When does that ever end up okay?

⏹️ ▶️ John been working out well for hitting women because that is evergreen. Women have been subjugated for

⏹️ ▶️ John millennia and it will continue to be the case.

⏹️ ▶️ John Progress has been made on all these fronts, but they seem to go in cycles.

⏹️ ▶️ John And women is the one that most people don’t… I have to admit that I did not think about it as much. Because when I’m growing up, and again this has to do with education

⏹️ ▶️ John and environment and who you are, I’m growing up as, you know, like you Casey, just

⏹️ ▶️ John a white male, you know, the same as all of my peers, not different in any particular way.

⏹️ ▶️ John You learn about in school, you learn about Martin Luther King, you know, you learn about slavery, you learn about

⏹️ ▶️ John the Native Americans, you learn about all sorts of things. And you do women’s suffrage and voting and you’re like, oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so silly. At one point, women couldn’t vote. That’s obviously ridiculous. They can vote. But you don’t go

⏹️ ▶️ John that far. Like in my education, at least, we talked about the basic human rights of like women

⏹️ ▶️ John being able to own land and vote and and stuff like that. And we talked about slavery and civil rights and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s like, and we come to the present day and everybody’s equal. And it’s like, no, not exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John And at least in my education, in my pre-college education, there wasn’t a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John time spent on talking about feminism or the objectification of women or whatever. There’s just sort of like the

⏹️ ▶️ John natural undertones of everything, of everything you live in. You just accept it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you could say, I understand that racism is terrible and still exists. Women,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, white women are treated perfectly fairly now, right? And women, that’s not the issue. The issue is like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John minorities. That’s where all the problems is. But, you know, well, women are everything’s fine there. It’s like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not like it’s just this. It becomes the baseline that you don’t even notice that this it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even seem like it’s the whole thing with the Gamergate people. It doesn’t even seem like women are oppressed. It’s like, what

⏹️ ▶️ John are you talking about? That’s just the way things are. That’s not oppression. Everyone’s in their designated roles. The woman stays

⏹️ ▶️ John home and cooks. The man goes to work and like, that’s just the natural order of things. That’s not oppression. What are you

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about? And it just it seems so foreign. It’s like slavery. That’s oppression, obviously. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, it’s I have to admit it. It took me a

⏹️ ▶️ John much longer time to have a clear view on on pervasive sexism in the world than

⏹️ ▶️ John than it did for any of these other things. And as I said in the last time we talked about this, like

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just expose yourself to these things, don’t don’t necessarily engage them, don’t argue with them, like

⏹️ ▶️ John just expose yourself to women explaining what it’s like to be a woman in the

⏹️ ▶️ John world and don’t like and just just take it in like just accept it, listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, don’t take offense at it because you’re not the one doing these things to them right? You know maybe think about things you might have done to

⏹️ ▶️ John other people that are like this, maybe you can decide whether you think it’s good or bad but if you listen

⏹️ ▶️ John enough the preponderance of stories about this happening will slowly make the gears

⏹️ ▶️ John start turning in your head and realize the ridiculous inequalities that existed that you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John see before. And I don’t have any hope of that happening for people who are involved in Gamergate.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe when they’re older, if they’re young. Like I mean, again, it took me until my 30s to start

⏹️ ▶️ John to even think about these things in a serious way. And if you’re an 18 year old in a chat room

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to figure out how you’re going to send anonymous death threats to a woman, you’ve got a long road ahead

⏹️ ▶️ John of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly do. It’s just, it’s so terrible. And I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, it’s not fair. It just plain isn’t fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, John, you said something earlier, much earlier now, but you said something earlier that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we as a, you know, as technology or as a society

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the modern internet, we don’t really have good ways to deal with, you know, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong anonymous negative feedback. Among the many other things that we need to work on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a society that are more long-term and difficult to attack,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might be something we can do sooner, or at least start thinking about, you know, like in designing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our systems, in designing social networks, in designing technology, in designing the tools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the networks and the media that we as modern, technically connected

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people use, we need to consider what are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the possible abuses here? How much damage, how much abuse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can a very small group of determined individuals dish out with this thing that we’re building?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And is there a way that we can design it in such a way that both they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can abuse fewer people or in fewer ways and that somehow we can reduce their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentives to abuse. And this is, in many ways, like when I’ve designed similar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems for Tumblr, for Instapaper, for Overcast, I’ve always been concerned about spam. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the big things, like in Overcast, you can recommend episodes to your Twitter followers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is nowhere in the entire app, and there probably never will be anywhere in the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, where you can see a most recommended global list. And the reason for this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very deliberate. It’s because I didn’t want anybody to be able to spam to create a whole bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of accounts to all recommend certain things to boost them to the top of that list. It’s like the old dig front page problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want to have to deal with that. And you know, same thing with Instapaper. There was never like Instapaper had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its recommended global stories, but those were human picked. So, you know, there’s never like I intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to avoid creating things that can be reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spammed or I try to avoid spam by avoiding creating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentives to spam. Like there’s no reason to spam with a bunch of overcast accounts recommending

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes because only people who follow you on Twitter will ever see them and you know then and it’s attached to your name. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like you like that that kind of solves itself right in designing systems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know now and in the future I think we should in addition to considering things like spam incentives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to consider abuse incentives and you know how much attention can can one person get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with relatively little validation from others how much how much can anonymous anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comments be heard you know like like right now on Twitter anybody can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at reply anybody else and they will and it will show up in their replies timeline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and Twitter obviously Twitter is a A lot of people are pointing out and have been pointing out like Twitter’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco policies on dealing with abuse complaints. I don’t know the details of them, but they sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty terrible. I don’t know. That might not be solvable. I don’t know. It sounds like, because you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always a problem like saying, oh, well, Twitter should always suspend these accounts. And then it becomes a question of, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what if somebody files a false report against you? And so it’s, these are all tough problems. I think Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do better, but I don’t think they can magically solve the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like they could do a lot with just I’ve been looking more at like the problems of reporting on Twitter and

⏹️ ▶️ John it mostly has to do with how how Twitter approaches the problem like if if they

⏹️ ▶️ John if they approach their form for reporting people more like

⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of a crisis center would approach supporting someone who’s having some kind of crisis like domestic abuse or something

⏹️ ▶️ John like that like it’s a different approach like you assume that the person is in crisis you don’t you know what you can’t demand

⏹️ ▶️ John of the person like One of the big things is like enter all your information this form including your real Complete

⏹️ ▶️ John first and last name and by the way, we may send this information to the person you’re reporting Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I know what they’re kind of getting at in that but the way it’s worded Doesn’t isn’t made for a

⏹️ ▶️ John mindset for a person who’s coming in like in crisis and saying, you know Or or sorry, we

⏹️ ▶️ John rejected your report because you’re not the person who is you know Who is being attacked like if you send someone a link

⏹️ ▶️ John to an abusive tweet? But if you’re not the target of it, like they’ve just rejected out of hand Like it’s just not it’s just not designed

⏹️ ▶️ John the way it should be for something that people go to when they’re in crisis or when When someone they care about is in crisis

⏹️ ▶️ John It should be totally designed to put that person at ease to give strong guarantees that the things that they would reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ John fear for example that you reporting someone the person you report which would know who you are and

⏹️ ▶️ John would have more information about you because you reported it like You can’t have a form that even hints

⏹️ ▶️ John at that let alone you should firstly you should obviously never actually do that And I don’t think they would actually do that But the form makes

⏹️ ▶️ John it seem like they would and so if you’re in a crisis situation you land on that form You hate Twitter. He’s like what

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell I have a problem here Or if they bounce back your thing with her with a automatic response says

⏹️ ▶️ John sorry You’re you’re a report could not be processed because you’re not the target of the abuse. Yeah, that’s pretty bad I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John someone just posted it Someone just posted a death threat with someone’s full name and address on it Yeah, and you get a robo

⏹️ ▶️ John response like there are tons of things where you can do to make this better but you’re right that at the root of it, it’s like Like

⏹️ ▶️ John anonymity is important for large classes of people on the internet. And you can’t just say, Oh, everyone can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be anonymous. You need to use your, you know, full name and social security number and everything to have a strong

⏹️ ▶️ John correlated ID. Like anonymity needs to be there. But once you have anonymity, then just people keep making new accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like, it’s not 100% solvable, but Twitter could be doing a hell of a lot better job.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But I think though, ultimately, this is a design flaw of Twitter and systems like it like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the in the way like this. when I had that whole Wirecutter drama, I quoted Howard Stern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a blog post saying, you know, Howard Stern, he uses Twitter here and there, but he said on his show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few months ago, he was, you know, because he always complains about how like everyone on Twitter is basically a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge, you know, bad person to everyone else. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said, you know, why do we give these people so much access to us? Like, why do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let any random person yell at you 10 seconds after you you post anything and why do you go and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco read it and and why can anybody in the world have have your attention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so easily that I think it like the question of the the amount of access

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we and systems like Twitter allow other people to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us that is something that I think we we’ve assumed in in designing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco social and internet communication systems for the last you know decade or so we’ve we’ve all assumed that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had to be this way that of course that’s the power of the internet. Anybody can talk to anybody else. But maybe that’s a bad assumption. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a fundamental design flaw and maybe you know future social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks and future directions of current social networks maybe. Maybe future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks and future communication things like that need to be more limited. Maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t be able to at reply Howard Stern whenever I want to and have him see it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think that’s part of the beauty of Twitter? Like when it’s good that is an advantage. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s what we want out of Twitter. We like that direct connection to people we otherwise wouldn’t have had a connection.

⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason that works at all in Twitter is because people are constrained. They can’t send 500 paragraph

⏹️ ▶️ John screeds to Howard Stern. They just have to send one-liner insults. The problem is when it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John because the block function does exist. A system like Twitter without a block function at all would

⏹️ ▶️ John be terrible. The block function is not perfect, but it does exist. But the problem with the block function is it’s totally defeated by the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John creating new accounts right so if you are super famous and you get that abuse you’re like oh no problem I manage

⏹️ ▶️ John that with blocks and eventually you block all the most horrible people and you’re fine no you’re never fine they just keep creating new accounts

⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re crazy people right and that that is like it’s the anonymity

⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn’t keep creating new accounts if an account was strongly tied to your ID but anonymity I think is

⏹️ ▶️ John an important feature of Twitter and other internet services so you can’t say like Google tried to do oh no anonymity

⏹️ ▶️ John real names only like that’s that’s not a tenable solution either. So it is a very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John problem. But when I was talking about the tools we need to deal with this, I was talking more at the macro level than the

⏹️ ▶️ John micro level. Because at the micro level, you can just get off Twitter, like either permanently or for a certain period of time. But at

⏹️ ▶️ John the macro level, it’s like when sponsors are pulling ads from websites financially impacting

⏹️ ▶️ John that entire site and the jobs of various people because of a coordinated fake letter writing campaign of people like

⏹️ ▶️ John pretending to be concerned about some BS issue when in reality they’re trying to ruin the lives of women and journalists

⏹️ ▶️ John who happen to write for the site. When that happens, it shows that our corporations and organizations

⏹️ ▶️ John are not internet savvy enough to know when they’re essentially being trolled into stupid behavior that has real consequences

⏹️ ▶️ John for real people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither are our politicians with all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the policies that

⏹️ ▶️ John they make. We assume like, you know, this is like Intel and Adobe. We assume companies like Intel and Adobe would

⏹️ ▶️ John be a little bit more tech savvy than politicians, let’s say. And then finally, like, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John anonymous death threats, completely untraceable with no, you know, I mean, it goes with the anonymity. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want, you want anonymity when you’re trying to talk about how your husband is abusing you and you’re afraid

⏹️ ▶️ John for your life. But you would like the person who threatened your life to not have anonymity. So we kind of can’t have it both ways there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the solution is to that, but I guess a step would be law enforcement taking

⏹️ ▶️ John these reports seriously, being able to do anything. At this point, all these things get reported to the authorities. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like reporting a stolen bicycle to the police, basically. I think stolen bicycle probably has a higher priority the police

⏹️ ▶️ John than anonymous internet death threats. Stolen Bicycle, you’re disappointed

⏹️ ▶️ John about it and it might have been expensive, but it’s not a big deal. But series of considered death threats associated,

⏹️ ▶️ John plus your real address being sent out to people, like you don’t even care if the person who sent that death threat meant

⏹️ ▶️ John it, all you care is that other people who might be seriously unbalanced now have your address and now hate

⏹️ ▶️ John you because they’ve been riled up by this group or whatever, and yet what the heck can the police do? They’re not tech savvy.

⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t get IP addresses for these people. Even if they could, could they track it down? You know, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the solution to that is, but I can tell you that I would imagine law enforcement maybe would put on a good

⏹️ ▶️ John face, but what the hell are they going to do? It’s just, they’re not going to give you a personal bodyguard

⏹️ ▶️ John for the rest of your life. And if you, unless you’re rich, you can’t afford to have a personal bodyguard. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not a celebrity with an entourage and a compound in a fortress. You’re a person living in a house

⏹️ ▶️ John or an apartment and now you’re scared for your life. And the police tell you realistically, there’s nothing they can do about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what we can do about that, but we’re not doing a good job right now And this is a a new kind of threat, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know I mean, it’s kind of like and people, you know shrug it off But as many people pointed out like that that crazy misogynist

⏹️ ▶️ John guy who went and shot up that school Where was that? I forget what that was it? I don’t know. It was a while ago. But anyway, this guy had

⏹️ ▶️ John series of you know Anti-woman screeds that he had written on the internet YouTube’s videos that he ran then he went and just shot

⏹️ ▶️ John up a bunch of women And himself, right? It’s not as if we’re saying all this is never gonna happen like it has happened

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past This is a plausible threat that some crazy person who hates women and has put all his hatred

⏹️ ▶️ John for and all his pain in life Into that can get a gun and go shoot people up So when you make a threat like

⏹️ ▶️ John that, it’s like haha funny troll that would never happen, right? It has already happened. It is so plausible and yet

⏹️ ▶️ John we have no tools to deal with it All we can do is like well We’ll have to wait till someone shows up with the gun and then maybe we

⏹️ ▶️ John can do something about it and it’s like it’s too Late now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, and that’s that’s why I think like, you know, you’re right that like there’s always going to be like this like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a baseline number of disturbed people in the world that you know we just can’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything about that like we have like that’s they’re always going to be there and we can you know we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can attempt to do our best to produce fewer crazy disturbed people in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world that that’s the best we can really do and we can try to find them and treat them or imprison them or whatever like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a that’s a really hard problem to ever eradicate it’s like we’re going to eradicate all bad people. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not real. But I do think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to be said for removing the incentives here. So, right now, if Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco removes the ability for crazy people to coordinate their efforts and stalk people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and creep people out and dox them and everything, those people all have different places they can go. They can all go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to private message boards. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, that’s where they are. They’re coordinating on these private message boards. The worst thing is they’re not the message boards aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even private. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco public.

⏹️ ▶️ John These people aren’t the brightest, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John public message boards where they’re talking about how they’re going to do these things that if they had real names

⏹️ ▶️ John and addresses associated with these posts, you could arrest them all now for the things they’re all doing and talking about are already

⏹️ ▶️ John illegal. It’s just that well, you just have no idea who they are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And it’s like the you know, that’s that’s never going to be solved. Like we that like that problem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the way the internet works that like that’s anonymous coordination of things is always going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be possible. It’s always going to be and it’s going to keep getting easier as tools get better. You know, that we’re never going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve that problem. What we can solve or what we can help, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can reduce is the access people have to anybody they want, anytime they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. And that’s what I’m saying. Like, I think we need to really rethink these social systems we’ve built and say, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this really a good idea to allow this kind of totally, like, open,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in a way, you know, democratic, but like…

⏹️ ▶️ John But like, what would your solution be? Like, you make it like LiveJournal, where you only have to invite people to see your Twitter. You can already

⏹️ ▶️ John protect your Twitter feed, but that’s just not how Twitter works. Like, the openness of it, that anybody can follow you and that anybody

⏹️ ▶️ John can contribute, like, when it’s working well and when people are all nice to each other, that is the beauty of Twitter. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John beauty of, you know, life of relationships with people. So I don’t see how you can fix that without,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of going insular and making everybody sort of in their own little cocoons. Like, that would take

⏹️ ▶️ John away what’s good about Twitter. Like, when I think about how to try to fix this,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think for the people who are doing all these bad things,

⏹️ ▶️ John the people, those people in that group who live in the first world, who otherwise have

⏹️ ▶️ John more or less comfortable lives, and you know, because you don’t know what country these people are in. They could be

⏹️ ▶️ John in war-torn countries that were currently bombing, and their whole family is dead, and they’re starving to

⏹️ ▶️ John death, and they’re in internet cafes somewhere, or whatever, like so many more problems. But if your baseline

⏹️ ▶️ John comfort is taken care of and you sort of like have food and have shelter But you’re still super

⏹️ ▶️ John angry at the world, which is probably a large portion of this thing It’s like if we could have helped

⏹️ ▶️ John those people have their lives Turn out differently and have the things that influence

⏹️ ▶️ John them be different. They would not be doing this now like it’s the long-term plan of like we have to change

⏹️ ▶️ John society so that people are not raised in an environment where they see women as less than

⏹️ ▶️ John human and and direct all their anger at them when things don’t go the way they want. You know what

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? That’s the long-term solution. I have

⏹️ ▶️ John a more pessimistic view of the Twitter type stuff. Like you said, you can’t stop them from making anonymous chatboards.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re never going to. You can’t get rid of anonymity. And I don’t think the solution is to

⏹️ ▶️ John not give people public access to you, like to retreat to your compound, to keep yourself in a circle of people.

⏹️ ▶️ John We just need to make a society and a world

⏹️ ▶️ John that produces fewer of these people who are this angry about these things. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think, Marco, your point about when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re designing overcast, when you were designing all the other things you’ve designed in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not encouraging that kind of nefarious behavior, a lot of times I ask

⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, or sometimes others, and I think a lot of good intentioned individuals

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask, you know, what can I really do? Well, something that may seem as silly, but really obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t silly, is you doing the right thing and trying your best to not encourage nefarious behavior

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and overcast, that’s something that can be done. That’s what you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the royal you, can do, is make those decisions and make them intelligently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and try to do the right thing, even if it’s the harder thing, the right thing to prevent this kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of BS behavior?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I don’t, well, I don’t know what else to do. You know, I think, I really do think there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a lot that we can still, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit with the design of these systems that we can do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, to improve conditions. And yeah, we’re not going to get rid of these problems totally, but we can, we can certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start to address them and start to reduce their impact and start to reduce the incentive, the incentive to be problematic on these systems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if Twitter just had some simple filters you could set. Like, I would love for, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because whenever I say anything remotely controversial,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like which text editor I prefer, which is more dangerous to discuss than the Palestinian situation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I say anything about text editors, I would prefer to have some kind of setting on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter where I could say, like, don’t show me any, don’t even show in my timeline any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco responses from people who maybe I don’t follow or are not like within two degrees

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of following or something like that. Like because sometimes it gets really out of hand and I can’t handle it. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t even imagine like if you have a bigger audience or and especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you’re a woman with a big audience and you say anything remotely controversial like I can’t even imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what like there are many people, not least of which celebrities, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are many people out there who would leave a control like that on all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that’s actually an actionable thing. Because we talked about how you could have a protected account or it’s open to the public. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the openness is a strength of Twitter. But if there was a range between there where you could

⏹️ ▶️ John do something like Margo said, where, this is kind of techie, but like set up

⏹️ ▶️ John rules that say, don’t show me replies from someone who doesn’t follow me, who has fewer than 50 followers,

⏹️ ▶️ John whose account was created in the last month. Like basically sock puppet detection or

⏹️ ▶️ John a degrees of separation limit, or a temporary degrees of separation limit, because you know you just said something

⏹️ ▶️ John controversial. Like, those are controls that you can give individuals that is not turning Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John into like a live journal or like some private type thing. Twitter is still open, but give people control. And

⏹️ ▶️ John like some of the things people have been doing outside the system of like, have you seen the community block lists, where they

⏹️ ▶️ John will sort of pool together their blocks, because everyone is blocking the same sort of, and I know there’s sock poppers and

⏹️ ▶️ John they just recycle the accounts and everything like that, but just to have a communal block list that can be shared among people

⏹️ ▶️ John so that if, you know, if basically the decent people all band together, chances are good that

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the decent people in the circle has already blocked this troll. So you’ll never see his tweet and you didn’t have to see it and block

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like, why are we all individually blocking the same stupid accounts as they wander through saying terrible things to people, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If one person could block it, we could all benefit. Now, there are downsides to communal block lists as well, but this is the type

⏹️ ▶️ John of feature that if Twitter supported it and Twitter was more serious about those type of controls, You

⏹️ ▶️ John could make a communal block list, there could be a master block list of sock puppets. It becomes

⏹️ ▶️ John a big thing, and this has to be part of Twitter stuff anyway. Dealing with abuse in the system becomes

⏹️ ▶️ John a major part of what anyone who runs any big community site knows. Suddenly you find out your real job is just spending all your

⏹️ ▶️ John time moderating and dealing with trolls and dealing with sock puppets and dealing with hacks and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s probably not avoidable, but you know. Low-hanging fruit, Twitter could start by making their

⏹️ ▶️ John reporting system for abuse be a lot friendlier to the people who are reporting it a lot clearer, a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot nicer framed in terms of someone who is in crisis, not in terms of here’s a dry clinical form

⏹️ ▶️ John that protects us as a corporation and doesn’t really make any acknowledgement of what you might be going through.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real time follow up from Holgate in the chat room. Apparently Twitter verified accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which just make me angry. Twitter verified accounts already have features I’ve been talking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, that I’ve mentioned that I’ve been talking about on Twitter with people. isn’t verified something anybody

⏹️ ▶️ John can get if anybody like, like, if you will, like we would pay for like, whatever it costs Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of like, they can make a profit on it, whatever it costs them in terms of manpower and time, like because there is some,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not an automatic system, like someone has to verify your ID, you probably have to make a phone call, maybe you have to send someone a

⏹️ ▶️ John fax, because it’s 1991. Again, like whatever you have to do, right? That because people do get verified

⏹️ ▶️ John checkmarks, but it’s not on demand. So a lot of these people who are getting all this abuse, the trolls make

⏹️ ▶️ John fake accounts and pretend to be them and then the people the angry people get reangry all over again because they believe

⏹️ ▶️ John a fake tweet really came to happen to Brianna’s the other day.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They made

⏹️ ▶️ John a fake account with her made her say something terrible. And she got attacked from 50 different directions again, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Why does she not have a verified checkmark? Oh, it’s because she’s not important enough because she can’t control it. She should be able to call Twitter on the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone and say, here’s 100 bucks verify my damn account. I’ll send you like IDs and stuff like that. That

⏹️ ▶️ John is an example of another piece of low hanging fruit. Anybody should be able to get verified if they’re willing to pay to take the

⏹️ ▶️ John time and money. I mean if you want to do the cost you’re like oh that that cuts out people who can’t afford $100 or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s two ways. Twitter can just be more proactive at realizing look this person is under onslaught. Give them a stupid verified checkmark.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t charge them for it. But they’re not. They’re dropping the ball on that and there’s no there’s no way you can request

⏹️ ▶️ John verification and actually get it because you know you can say I’ve been impersonated, I’ve been attacked, look at all these people that

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m blocking, look at my daily activity, can I get a verified checkmark? And you get nothing from Twitter. So it is insane

⏹️ ▶️ John that those people don’t have verified checkmarks and the reporting system is stupid and broken. And this is

⏹️ ▶️ John before we get to the things that you were talking about of like, having those type of controls about seeing replies and having sock

⏹️ ▶️ John puppet detection and all the type of things anybody who is like, you know, does anything with

⏹️ ▶️ John big data. Like, I feel like it’s so easy for humans to detect sock puppets and trolls.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think computers could do a really good job of it too. Yeah. One more item before we finally leave this

⏹️ ▶️ John topic. Someone in the chat room was complaining like, you know, isn’t it okay to just dislike Anita Sarkeesian,

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s another person who’s talked about feminist issues and sexism in games. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John can I dislike her, whatever? Yeah, yeah, fine, right? And he goes, like, I just happen to believe that she’s a snake oil

⏹️ ▶️ John salesman who’s lying to us and blah, blah, blah. So I’m putting one more link in the show notes here. It

⏹️ ▶️ John is This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory. It’s an ongoing video series that I think is only about two parts so

⏹️ ▶️ John far. It’s by, who is it by? You guys should know. It’s the guy who did Everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ John Remix.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kirby Ferguson.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I think this is like a funding thing where like I paid for it, whatever you had to pay when you did a Kickstarter

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I’m seeing the new things as they release. I’m assuming you’ll be able to see all of them eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John once this is all over. But anyway, consider funding it if they’re really good. I think you can see the

⏹️ ▶️ John first part for free. The reason I put this in there is there is a very long,

⏹️ ▶️ John long, long history. And this is something as an engineering major, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but like if I can make everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John in the entire world take one sort of major in a college education, I would make everybody learn about history because

⏹️ ▶️ John everything, you know, it’s a cliche to say it But if you know anything about history How can you not see

⏹️ ▶️ John the same things happening because people don’t haven’t changed that much in the past 10,000 years or so Anyway, conspiracy theories have a

⏹️ ▶️ John long and illustrious history. There are readily explainable obvious reasons why people

⏹️ ▶️ John love people love conspiracy theories people fall conspiracy theories they believe them with every

⏹️ ▶️ John fiber of their being and It is just part of the human condition and yet when people are in

⏹️ ▶️ John in the midst of a conspiracy theory like that there is a giant cabal of feminists who are controlling

⏹️ ▶️ John the gaming industry and that Anita Sarkeesian is stealing money from people and getting rich and selling snake oil,

⏹️ ▶️ John these crazy conspiracy theories which everyone else sees as crazy seem perfectly rational to a lot of people. So I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John rather than attacking that issue head-on, if you just learn about the history of conspiracy theories and how they work with the human mind

⏹️ ▶️ John and society, you will eventually, I have to feel, at the end of all that, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ John re-examine what you believe about whatever conspiracy theory you happen to

⏹️ ▶️ John believe in. So anyway, it’s a really entertaining video series, even if it doesn’t change your mind about any of Sarkeesi, you should still watch it

⏹️ ▶️ John and fund it because it’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s sick to me that we still have to talk about this, but I’m glad we have.

⏹️ ▶️ John I try to, like, I could talk about it every week, and I tweet about it all the time, too, but it’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, we have to do something, and talking about it is one of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no, I’m not complaining. Even

⏹️ ▶️ John though this is a tech show. I know, people will complain, but, like, we saved it for the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, this could have been like a quote official topic. We just didn’t get to it until the after show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean it is an important enough story in our industry like this is not This is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as valid of a topic as what we think of the new iMac and all that crap I mean, this is this is more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important than everything that we had as real topics tonight

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not this is not a how to make the world a better place podcast, but But we’re in the world too.

Related posts