92: You Don't Know My Pants
19 Nov 2014WatchKit, the Nokia iPad Mini, and John’s iPhone.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Inside info on why iWork seems so screwed up
- More on open source .NET, from @Scionwest
- Germany's equivalent of Consumer Reports tests the bendiness of the new iPhones (link in German)
- Nokia's new tablet features the USB Type C connector
- WatchKit
- Post-show:
- John's iPhone activation woes
- John critiques cutting-edge apps:
Sponsored by:
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m drinking a little hot chocolate right now and now I’ve gone from freezing cold to overheating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is your hot chocolate of choice? I will answer that question. You don’t want me to answer that question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I had to choose just one, this is me dodging by the way, it would be the Mud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey House in Charlottesville, which is a little coffee house in Charlottesville, Virginia. Do they have winter there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, I’m all right. I had to really bottle that one up for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please take note of who is doing this to you. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this particular hot chocolate, which I do find to be quite delicious, is a Keurig K-Cup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a… shoot, for the life of me, I don’t remember who makes this hot chocolate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, on one hand, when you said I was not going to like the answer, I never thought it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I wouldn’t have predicted that either. Well, did you think it was like the Swiss Miss instant stuff? Yeah, yeah, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably better. That used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be my hot chocolate of choice. you think about like what hot chocolate requires really I mean yeah you can do it the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way with milk in a pot and you slowly heat up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey dump it a bunch of powder much work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really isn’t that much work just cleaning the pot but if you think about like what most hot chocolate really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just like you know the packet where you add water and heat and you mix it and that’s it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Keurig machine is probably does just as good of a job at that as dumping a packet into a mug and stirring it like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably is not that much worse it might even be slightly better in some ways so yeah that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is a is an official Marco approved usage of a Keurig machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is if you’re not going to ever actually make coffee in it, which I’m kind of curious why you even own one of these machines, because you hate coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, actually the funny thing about it is this machine was given to me by Aaron as a Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gift like two years ago because I freaking love the hot chocolates that come out of it in the winter time. Now, inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what ended up happening is Aaron uses it constantly. So it was like a bowling ball gift.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean? Like the stereotypical bowling ball gift. Did it was the bowling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say Aaron on it? Yeah, right. But no, I asked for it. I was like, no, I really honestly want a Keurig.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then she got it for me. And inevitably, I use it like three months out of the year. You know, the only time that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey winter down in Virginia. And she uses it the entire year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. You want to do some follow up? Let’s do it. We got a really good email from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anonymous former Apple employee. And John, do you want to talk about this for
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. about iWork, which we’ve been kind of half-heartedly complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John for the past two shows, speculating about Apple’s commitment to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Office suite and what effect its mediocrity might or might not have on the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here is a supposed report from an anonymous employee from what’s going on with iWork.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here she says, iWork for the iPad basically needed to be a rewrite for various reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John compatibility on the Mac though this basically meant we needed to port the iWork for the iPad to the Mac which meant we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John re-implementing a 10 year old office suite. So that’s what we were talking about before, Marco mentioned as well
⏹️ ▶️ John the strategy tax of the idea that iWork has to be on the iPad and on the web and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the strategy and the tax is we have a personally good Mac version but tough luck we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John basically take the iOS one and port it to the Mac even if it means losing features even if it means spending a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And so here’s anonymous confirmation of that. And then the other, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John this could be considered a tax as well. The strategy is not really a strategy tax, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a cost of being a first party piece of software is that when Apple comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out with new features in its OS, whether it’s like auto save from lion or spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ John and tiger or quick look and leopard or continuity and Yosemite God,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can keep these names straight. It’s the responsibility of Apple’s first party apps
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement those features. So in the same way, I mean, third party developers feel harried by this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. It’s like, Oh, there’s a new version of the OS, I got to support all this extra stuff. But Apple is even more pressure internally,
⏹️ ▶️ John say I work needs to implement all these great new features. So when they would rather be, you know, working
⏹️ ▶️ John on features that are important to the applications, like, well, we can’t, if we’re going to do autosave,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to have it on our apps, because it looks bad. If we say, hey, developers, everyone, you should do autosave. But oh, by the way, iWork won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do autosave, or you should implement QuickLook, but our applications don’t implement QuickLook. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this person concludes, yes, I can definitely feel from the outside that iWork is understaffed and not a priority, but the iWork
⏹️ ▶️ John team is actually pretty large for a team in Apple. In some ways, it’s the fact that it is a priority and the consequent
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy taxes that push the team this way and that that results in less obvious future progress for
⏹️ ▶️ John iWork year to year. So there you go. One report purportedly from the inside about
⏹️ ▶️ John what the deal is with iWork.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. It makes sense. It’s still a bummer and it’s hard. You know, if I wasn’t a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’d find that very hard to swallow, but I mean, I get it. Just stinks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s more or less what we thought. Like you could see from the outside the whole unification
⏹️ ▶️ John and how that’s going to be a cost, right? And the pressure to implement the new technologies,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, people, third party developers feel that from the outside as well. So we just like to think that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is kind of a silly thing to think, but it’s difficult to avoid that Apple’s got so
⏹️ ▶️ John much money. Surely they can get enough resources to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a good enough job on this office suite, right? And money doesn’t turn into developers. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the gets back to the sort of, you know, the second level meta problem of how does Apple hire and retain good employees
⏹️ ▶️ John and do good employees want to stay at a company where what they do is dictated so heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John and constrained so heavily, would they rather work at someplace like Google where you’re allowed to try 20 different things?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a difficult problem to have, but we seem like, oh, you know, you’re the mighty Apple. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do this. You have all this time and all these resources and all this fame and all this prestige and
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day, all these potentially valuable stock options to give. And yet somehow you can’t manage
⏹️ ▶️ John to release and maintain a decent, insert your favorite application
⏹️ ▶️ John that you think Apple is neglecting here. But it’s a lot more difficult than
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems from the outside. Excusing it is just, like you said, it’s kind of a bummer all around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, so we also, I don’t know if it was we or me, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a handful of tweets from Jonathan Sullinger, who is Scion West on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regarding Microsoft and.NET. I have not had the time to look into any of this since we spoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it last week, about the open sourcing of more bits of.NET. But Jonathan said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can take ASP.NET source and dump it on OS X. It includes, the new.NET
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff includes, an IIS platform agnostic version of the server runtime. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally run IIS on OS X or Linux. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John God. The new Roslyn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compi… Yeah, well, it’s weird. But the new Roslyn compiler compiles the source at runtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you deploy source to the server and IIS compiles and loads it for you. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and again, this is why a common language runtime or what’s the Swift equivalent, SIL, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John that. No, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John language runtime equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Swift. Well, I thought that it compiled down to some, all right, whatever. Well, now that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve, you can compile anything to LLVM bytecode, but that’s not really buying you anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, fine. Well, here it was. I thought I was smart and I was wrong. Anyway, the, uh, new Roslyn compiler, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already talked about that. But deploying ASP.NET source includes cross-platform.NET runtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and IIS runtime. So you can run it on Linux from thumbsticks. So you could actually run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internet Information Server if you so desired, which is what IIS is, which is kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft equivalent of Apache, if you’ll permit me to make a terrible analogy. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually run that on OS X, which is either new… Please email Casey. Please email me, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why you would want to necessarily, but you could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the chat room says Microsoft has released Docker images for ASP dotnet. I guess this makes sense because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we should have you know, Jeff, I would honor something, ask him how they deploy Stack Overflow and discourse. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Stack Overflow might actually be on Windows servers. I don’t know. Anyway, they do ASP.net. And I think he’s using it for discourse
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. And it makes sense. They have Linux servers. And this, the most interesting thing about this is something that’s I’m sure not
⏹️ ▶️ John new, but it’s new to me, the idea that you deploy the source to the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it’s like a scripting language. And I s doesn’t just I s will compile it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems nice to me. I don’t know why. But I don’t like the idea of like building
⏹️ ▶️ John a binary and then pushing a binary up doesn’t feel a webby you know, for someone who’s spent so many years
⏹️ ▶️ John writing stuff and then it just, you know, just runs like the JavaScript ones runs in the browser or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John your you know, PHP or Perl or Python or whatever runs on the server
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no compilation step. And so it’s neat that they’re doing the same thing. Which I mean, it’s not you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John an amazing technical feed, but I just think it feels feels webby to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and even in Windows, there are there are a lot of things that get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compiled at runtime the first time they’re necessary. And in fact, a project I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a few years ago, we were using what is now Microsoft Dynamics, but at the time was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called CRM. And what it ended up happening was we were leveraging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CRM API, which is a bunch of soap, of course, because it’s Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the way CRM works is you can kind of build up entities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the, well, not on the fly, but you direct CRM to build up these entities. So, you know, a customer includes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever unique fields you want it to include, and you basically build a relational database in the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what ends up happening is they have strongly typed, like, classes and everything for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these different entities that you’ve built. So in turn, what ended up happening was the WSDL for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the particular CRM environment we were trying to hit was something like 40,000 lines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of XML. It was enormous. And what we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running into was every time we started IIS, on a dev box, on the real box, it didn’t matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, every time we started IIS, it would pause for literally a minute. And for the life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, we couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, fast forward a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of playing with it, and it turns out what we were doing was, since we were using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proxy objects that were strongly typed versions of classes that represented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WSDL, those were all getting compiled at runtime as IIS started. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that took a really darn long time, since it was a 40,000 line WSDL, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the case may be. And so what we ended up having to do was explicitly pre compile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of those proxy classes and include that DLL in our deployment in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prevent that heinous runtime. And I bring all this up, or load time and I bring all this up because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my point is I was doing a compilation or perhaps the dotnet framework was doing that compilation based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a request on is
⏹️ ▶️ John correction from the chat room discourse is Ruby not ASP dotnet stackoverflow is ASP dotnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the chat room is saying Discourse is Ruby in all capitals. I’m not sure, is that something else? Like, R-U-B-Y?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is that like an initialism for something? Other
⏹️ ▶️ John people capitalized it correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, Igloo is an intranet you will actually like, and they are sponsoring our show this week, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’m telling you this. Igloo is built with easy-to-use apps like Shared Calendars, Twitter-like microblogs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file sharing, task management, and more. They are everything you need to work better together in one very configurable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud platform. Go to igloosoftware.com It is free for up to 10 people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is really, really, really good. If you have a company of 10 people or fewer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is just free to use forever. You can just use this internet product for free. And then after that, it’s very reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priced if you’re a larger company. It has responsive design. Your internet works like a champ on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every device, iOS, Android, even Blackberry. And it will even work on iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 5, all the different iPhones. I’m guessing once they can make something for the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch, I bet they will. really good about responsive design, making it work on every screen. And what’s really cool about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, they have all sorts of HTML five powered features for things like document previews, annotations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that, where like, there’s no flash plugin required for any of that stuff. So you can actually annotate a document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your with your co workers, right on your phone. And even if your phone has no native device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this kind of thing, you can just do it right there. All your design is carried over between all the devices. If you customize the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logo, if you customize colors, all that stuff, you know, all your custom design that you want to do you. That carries across every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device as well. And Gartner even likes them. So Gartner is a company that enterprises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay money to to tell them where to pay money. Igloo appears for the sixth consecutive year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this magic quadrant alongside tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, Google, VMware, Salesforce.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and SAP. In a report that values the viability of the vendor, Igloo is praised for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsiveness and customer experience. This is what Gartner wrote about them. feedback from igloos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reference customers was consistently positive. They praise the product quick deployment, configuration, and customization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexibility with self service options for non technical users, control over branding and information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organization and ease of use. They also praise the responsiveness of igloo as an organization. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your company, chances are if you work for a company of more than 10 people, you almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what Gartner is. And you probably need to tell your boss here Gartner approved this, therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can use it. That’s basically how it works. Yeah. Like John, I mean, you, you work in the enterprise. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your company use an internet platform that was not recommended by Gartner?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what calculus goes into our choice of internet platform, but whatever it is, I don’t like the result.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, if your company is like John’s and you don’t like the result, which is pretty likely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, get them on Igloo, show them the Gartner report or have them look it up. Give Igloo a try. Free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use for up to 10 people. Very reasonably priced after that, sign up at igloosoftware.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Igloo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you want to tell me about some of the stuff that the Germans have been doing with bendy iPhones?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we got to go entirely based on the feedback here. This is from Julian, pointing us to a website that’s written in German.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even bother doing the Google Translate thing or whatever because Julian was nice enough to summarize it for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is more on bending iPhones and it gets into something that I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John on a of our past episodes about we don’t know what the environment of the pocket is
⏹️ ▶️ John like on an iPhone. What kind of forces can be applied in the pocket? And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John this website, which is sort of the German equivalent of Consumer Reports, according to Julian,
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to figure this out by putting pants on people and having them sit down on different
⏹️ ▶️ John surfaces and so on and so forth. So here are the bullet point conclusions. He
⏹️ ▶️ John says, it seems impossible to bend a phone when when located in your front pocket. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I could get it done. I feel like it’s just a question of how tight the pants are, whatever, but it’s. You don’t know my pants. Yeah. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John testing this, and it seems impossible. Sitting down on your phone in the back pocket results in deformation if you sit
⏹️ ▶️ John on a hard edge. The testing person reported that deformation was painful, so
⏹️ ▶️ John no unconscious bending possible. Again, I contest this because I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s possible to be wearing something very large and very tight
⏹️ ▶️ John on a person who is not in good touch with their body or parts of their body have become numb
⏹️ ▶️ John and sit and not notice. But anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhones and the Sony Xperia Z2, which I assume is a phone, were the only phones that bent
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wearing test. So there are some results. If you can read German, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out whether this summary is accurate or not. But I’m glad people are not letting this, are continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John to delve into the research here and say what is it like in a pocket for a phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any other follow-up? I don’t know if it’s follow-up or not but forever ago we were talking about the new USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type-c connector, basically the USB clone of the lightning connector where it’s reversible and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and today the news came out about the Nokia N1 tablet which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically Nokia’s clone of the iPad mini and it includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a clone of the lightning port in the form of the new USB type-c connector and I think this is the first one we’ve seen is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never seen it I’m sure there was one that shipped on some PC somewhere before that but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the highest profile one I’ve seen anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here you know you can see on this Verge article they they showed this you know this whole thing and and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much like it looks exactly like a lightning connector in the picture. We don’t have a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture of like the of all the angles of the plug on it I think do we do you know
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones besides We had it when we talked about it before, but not in this particular shot. And I don’t think it’s fair
⏹️ ▶️ John to call the USB type C connector the clone of lightning. I wish it was a clone of lightning connector instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a small rounded USB connector with little pins on the inside instead of the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, whatever. But this tablet is totally fair to call this a clone of the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad mini because it’s a type of clone where when you see the
⏹️ ▶️ John places where they deviate, you think to yourself that deviation is intentional so they can sleep at night.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just differently shaped, when they did like the holes for the speakers in the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John like instead of having them be rectangular regions, they put a little, you know, extra little curves so
⏹️ ▶️ John they look kind of like rounded edge regions all. And as John Gruber’s son pointed out, a different number
⏹️ ▶️ John of, instead of having two rows of dots, there’s three rows of dots. And it’s like, you know, when they’re doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, look, you know what you’re doing. You’re cloning the iPad mini. And then you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John We have to do something to be different. And so they differ in the smallest, tiniest little details
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can feel like they’re not copying it. This is an extremely shameless hardware design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like looking at this, do you think honestly, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said they do this so they can sleep, and I just think that they have just decided that they are morally bankrupt,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they just don’t even care, and they just say, you know what, if we’re gonna partially clone it, let’s just go all the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t though, like the holes for the speakers are like, We’re giving our own twist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s such a little thing. Like everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is so close. It’s basically like if you copy and paste someone else’s source code, but you change the names of the variables.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is basically the hardware equivalent of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like you change the name of one global variable in one file and that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and here’s the argument against cloning. Just take the other side of it. Because people are going to look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is a kernel of truth underlying the BS that I’m about to spew here. And it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have a tablet, just basically like a rectangular screen. There’s only so many ways you can
⏹️ ▶️ John slice that. There’s no sense putting a bunch of lumps there that don’t need to be there. Rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John edges like you’re not going to make the edges pointy to say oh well your edges are rounded or is a pointy pointy edges are dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John like there is very little room for interpretation in a utilitarian device like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the argument for like well it’s not really a clone but you know it’s got to be a screen like this or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John that is mostly BS because nevermind that like this thing copies just not just the
⏹️ ▶️ John overall shape of the details, but also, it’s only obvious, because it’s been done, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John have just as well been obvious to say if the surface came out that every tablet has a kickstand, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was a well, you know, of course, it’s going to look like a surface, you know, everyone knows tablets have kickstands, like if the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad didn’t exist in the surface with a standard bare of a tablet, it could have been very different. It’s only like this is what tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John look like, because the iPad established the form. And so I give people a pass
⏹️ ▶️ John for aping the form, like yeah, it’s a big rectangular screen with rounded edges. I say that’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even that you have to admit like that comes from the existence of the iPad. But this doesn’t just copy
⏹️ ▶️ John the form as so many other tablets have before. It copies down to the minutest little
⏹️ ▶️ John details, except for the parts where it consciously deviates in the minute details to try to say, see, we’re not really copying.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is just, I almost have more respect for like, the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John clones from China that try to clone it exactly right down to try and say the word iPhone on the back, but they use an
⏹️ ▶️ John F instead of a P or something. At least they know what they’re doing. They say we’re going to copy the iPhone. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Appearance wise, unless you look really close. And that I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John almost a more noble endeavor than what Nokia is doing here. Because Nokia is like, No, this is a legitimate product.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not like a clone, we’re not gonna get sued by Apple. I just, it’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but this is Foxconn. Apparently, if you look at this verge article, now I’m quoting Nokia is partnering with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Foxconn to build the N1 licensing, the industrial design, Nokia brand and Z launcher software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the device maker. Well, I guess the industrial design means it was Nokia’s design.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, everyone’s licensing things to people like Foxconn to have them built.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but does that require licensing just to build it? Like as Apple licensing the design to Foxconn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know the details of how that works. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were stories like with the first BlackBerry, and maybe the only BlackBerry playbook, where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was Foxconn, one of the big manufacturers had this basically stock tablet design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and BlackBerry just said, all right, make that, stick our name on the front, stick our software in it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s the playbook. And then, remember the first Kindle Fire was almost the exact same thing. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design by the same people with like slightly different, you know, they’re basically just white labeling it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like slightly different things on the front, That was the kindle fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure Apple does not do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. No Apple definitely does not do that They have occasionally done it with Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where from what I’ve heard at people feel free to write it and correct me from what I’ve Heard oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel will do a lot of the design work of Apple’s motherboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are they called logic boards in Apple land and sing occasionally? I forget slip into my native tongue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Yeah, but I don’t think it extends really much past that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that it probably is not that frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple has helped designs like this a little bit though in that Apple’s push for wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John those machines that like Milling the computer control milling machines
⏹️ ▶️ John that take a block of aluminum carve it into a case or whatever like Apple starting with the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has put a lot of money into buying more and more of those machines
⏹️ ▶️ John or financing the purchase of those machines for factories that build it stuff. And now there are a bunch of factories
⏹️ ▶️ John with the ability to, you know, the companies that make those machines made money because they sold more of them and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can make more of them make them better. So essentially, the manufacturing technology to make something like the products
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has made, is now more available than it would have been if Apple hadn’t pushed for this type of design.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there is sort of a global effect on the supply chain of Apple selling a lot of devices like this and putting a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of money into the tooling to to make devices like this, which means now this manufacturing capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John and this manufacturing know-how and the companies with experience doing this is available to companies other
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple, partially because Apple did this. In the same way, Apple benefits from all
⏹️ ▶️ John the semiconductor technology that it takes advantage of in memory and stuff like that, because other people are buying a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all part of an ecosystem, so it’s not too strange to see successful materials and
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing processes that Apple may have pioneered now being popular everywhere because, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good idea, more people should be doing it. But I just feel like at the very least,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mind you making a rounded rectangle screen thing because that’s what a tablet is more or less. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll give you that it can be very iPad like, but there’s something with the DLs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I kind of like the, what was it? The Nexus 6 tablet, whichever one had like a rubbery back on
⏹️ ▶️ John it and stuff like that. That I think was better than an iPad. I wish my iPad had a rubbery back like that because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s great. You know, it makes it grippy and more comfortable and everything like that. That’s a way to differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself from Apple. Do something different and better. Don’t try to do exactly the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, do something Apple probably won’t ever do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even though they probably should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, yeah, there’s a market for some of those things. I said, like, things like the rubberized back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like, you know, have a version of the tablet that’s half an inch thick and has amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, week-long battery life. Like, things that Apple would probably never do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of those things can be markets, and it’s perfectly respectable to address those. I feel like if you’re going to knock it off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knock it off all the way. Like don’t knock off 95% of it. Really knock it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or go your own way and make something that would not be mistaken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by many, many casual observers to be this other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I have two thoughts on this. But first, some real time follow up from the chat room. It’s apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Nexus 7 that you were thinking of or so I’m told. Either way, first question I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is looking at this Verge article, the hero image at the top is that Monument Valley on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, it’s available for Android. Oh, it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Maybe that’s maybe that’s like a 95% clone of Monument Valley.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s the real thing. I’m pretty sure it’s available. That’s definitely the real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, I did not realize it was available for Android. And then finally, if you look all the way at the bottom, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see a close up of both ends of the reversible USB port. Obviously, the one end looks just like any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB port. But the one that looks like the lightning connect connector, I’m pretty sure we knew this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what with the pins being on the inside, I guess that just looks weird. Not bad. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks so funny because I’m thinking I think to myself, oh, that’s no, that’s not a lightning connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the USB version of this tablet. On a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick glance, you would definitely think it’s a lightning connector. And then Oh, no, it’s actually not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s bigger than the lightning connector. Like it’s wider, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thicker, probably, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to tell here. Yes, but it is very similar. And there is a place that I wish the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John spec kit more closely copy lighting connector despite the fact that we went through this before everyone telling me that Apple’s lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John cables are garbage and shred and you know, I’m still going through
⏹️ ▶️ John never having destroyed any first party Apple USB to anything connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously I baby my hardware to a degree that is outside the norm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And no one is surprised by that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s actually a little bit funny. And I mean, I don’t know if this is how these things are supposed to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had to buy an Android tablet like for testing something I would probably buy this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one because it’s least different it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s most likely to have the hardware not be horrible like I every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I bought an Android test device it’s been it’s gone very poorly it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always get like I got it I got a Kindle fire I got one of the first Nexus sevens and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s woo and and a Barnes and Noble look tablet which was a big mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve all been these awful devices, like just hideous, like just terrible to use, awful like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery issues and plastic. Everything about them was horrible. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I’m gonna buy an Android tablet maybe maybe like just get the one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a complete ripoff and it might be somewhat usable to to what I’m you know compared to what I’m used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not in software obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well Nokia makes nice hardware so there’s there’s a chance that it would actually, would be high
⏹️ ▶️ John quality, but the Chinese knockoff clone things are always like they look the same from a distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as soon as you press one button, you’re like, oh, this is not an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And see what worries me is this has, they’re talking about their Z launcher thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. So this is gonna be crapped up with their software, so it’s probably still a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just buy a Google tablet for Android testing. Which is unfortunate, because I’m not crazy about their hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people in the chat are like saying, Oh, the first Nexus 7 was bad? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t you ask any owners of the first Nexus 7 how it’s doing these days, and how it was doing even a year after they bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Anyway, in better news, things that are not cheap knockoffs but are actually the best in their class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are also sponsored this week by our friends at Hover, or the cheap knockoff version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover. Hover is the best way to buy a man’s domain names. Go to
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s say you have a name for something, you want to go register it. Hover is the place to do that. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well-designed, they’re respectful, they’re not scammy. You get a great value. So many things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco included at no additional charge. Their add-on services that are paid are very reasonably priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very good. Things like their email hosting and they have Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apps for your domain hosting, stuff like that. Hover gives you easy to use powerful tools to manage the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names after you’ve bought them. So they have this awesome GUI interface. It’s very, did I hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mike saying it’s very web 2.0? It very well could be. Beautiful designs here, very respectful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you, the user. There’s not like a billion different check boxes everywhere with trying to like, you know, trick you into getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add-on services or anything else. It’s really just, it’s nice, it works, it’s highly functional and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also still looks good. If you have any trouble, they have amazing customer support. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the usual email options and everything. They also have phone support. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call them up during business hours and a human being answers the phone who can talk to you. There’s a no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold, no wait, no transfer phone support policy. It’s really, it’s incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you need phone support, even if you just kind of want to talk to somebody nice from Canada, if you need phone support, call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them up. They are fantastic. They also have value transfer service, where if you want to transfer names into Hover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how many if you’re transferring one name, you’re transferring 100 names, if you’re transferring names to hover, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will if you want them to, they will log into your old registrar and do the transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. So they will move everything over properly DNS settings, email settings, stuff like that. That’s kind of tricky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get right and very error prone. They’ll do all that for you. If you want them to if you want to do it yourself, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no big deal. You know, there’s no pressure but but if you’re willing to give them your login to your old site, they’ll do it all for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really, really great to not have to worry about Oh, did I forget a DNS setting somewhere? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know, because if you mess that up, you’re down for hours. They’re really, really great at this. They have all the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy top level domains if you want to get like a dot coffee or a dot plumbing or I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today there’s dot world is now available. So you can make anything you want dot world, all these wonderful new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domain names to make wonderful new joke sites, and maybe an occasional actual real site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hover.com use promo code Casey needs drink. All one word. We will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put that in the show notes in case you forget. Thanks a lot to hover.com for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to get Mac that world and Disney that world now. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s smart thinking. Those are probably taken and would probably be under squatting trademark
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t Disney Disney that world sounds like something that would be said on a sitcom in like 1994
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone’s trying to write a line about the Internet. Let’s go to Disney that world. And now it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a real domain name. It’s going to to actually redirect to Disney.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the problem with all these new TLDs, they all sound like terrible jokes. We
⏹️ ▶️ John just need to be able to include backslashes in our URLs and we will finally arrive
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, OS X was essentially the movie OS, like OS’s that do ridiculous animations that they’d show
⏹️ ▶️ John in movies. Like, no real computer works like that, and then Apple made a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John works like that. It’s like, well, there’s your movie, although it doesn’t beep every time letters appear on the screen. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John movie domain names. Disney.world backslash, yeah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It drives me nuts any time I watch any television show or movie where everything that the computer does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creates a noise or some sort of sound effect. Beep, beep,
⏹️ ▶️ John boop, boop. A window appears on the screen and it makes a noise. No one has had the guts to do that yet because people would smash their
⏹️ ▶️ John computers to bits in about, you know, in an office space style, you know, printer destruction sequence
⏹️ ▶️ John on the first day if every window that appeared made a noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there have been occasional system plugins and stuff to do that as jokes based on movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would imagine it’s the kind of thing, kind of like if somebody in front of you in line at the grocery store is trying to use currency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing if you tried to actually use one of those things in an office, you would get your butt handed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John In an office, your noise is bothering people. Even if you’re just alone in your house, though, it would drive you insane.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they need, there’s a whole, I think there’s an Every Frame a Painting talking about showing texts and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, which is much more tasteful. But yeah, they do it in movies so that you know to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John something. But it’s just, at this point, everyone is so familiar with computers and phones of all
⏹️ ▶️ John kinds that I don’t think you can get away with that anymore. I think you have to come up with another way to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John the viewer’s attention. Because everybody knows what those look like. It’s not like, well, most people know what computers work like anyway, so we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do whatever we want. No, you can’t. Everybody knows now. Even little kids know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just disappointed we don’t have the, what was it, like a spatial finder or whatever from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jurassic Park. Oh God, don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John started. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a spatial finder, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There goes the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a real thing, SGIs. We had that when I was at BU,
⏹️ ▶️ John the little flying through 3D interface thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. We
⏹️ ▶️ John had those in the SGI lab. That is actual software that somebody made. It was useless and stupid,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want it. It’s a Unix system, I know this. Wow. See, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that reference. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. No, that’s just you maintain a passing grade in that category.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re avoiding failing. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not achieving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey praise from John Syracuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, thanks. I feel great now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right, so let’s talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about apparently something big happened today, big week. You want to talk about WatchKit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually did my homework. I watched the video. I am stupefied that you have actually done your homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, did you also do your homework?
⏹️ ▶️ John I read a lot of stuff and read a lot of tweets and I watched half of the video. It is now paused halfway through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you are maintaining a passing grade.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll watch the rest of it later. You know, it was, it’s like a half an hour long. So, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John does go kind of slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s given at like the WBDC video pace. And the problem is like, WBDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos, you can open them up in QuickTime, you can speed them up, play them at like 1.4X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The this video that was only a HTP live streaming thing and I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a half hour to watch it and I knew it would have taken me about 15 minutes of that to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get FFmpeg to download all the little segments and join them all together into a file that I could speed up and I would therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose the gains I would have gotten from speeding it up but yeah this is something that could use a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed boost but otherwise I thought was really interesting so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did we ever talk about underscores article like two weeks ago when he was basically predicting what WatchKit would allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to do based on what Apple had said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t know if we ever spoke of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was more right than wrong, but not 100% right, which is surprising because I thought he had nailed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it when I read that article.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely. So our friend, underscoreDavidSmith wrote this article, we’ll link to it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty sure we actually didn’t get to it. I think you’re you’re right. But anyway, we’re gonna have full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native watch apps allegedly later next year, is what Apple said originally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is not, this was not announced today, this was announced when the watch was announced. So that, and so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most likely outcome is that at WWDC next year, they will unveil like the native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SDK. Between now and then, you don’t get native apps, you get like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get like limited access to to the watch and everything seems to run basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controlled through an extension on your phone. So it’s like, so your iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app has a WatchKit extension that, and I don’t think any of this is NDA’d, right? Isn’t it like
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that main public page, the thing that I have quoted and bolded in the show notes was right off of Apple’s site,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to be logged in to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So your app is basically running as an extension that launches on your phone when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user taps the thing on the watch to launch. You also, if your app sends push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ll show up on the watch, but we knew that already. So the phone, this is all from the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s interesting. I think you should watch it if you’re at all interested in this stuff. What we have now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more than I thought we would have, but definitely less than a full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native SDK. So I thought we would only have what they are calling glances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actionable notifications. And actionable notifications are exactly what we see in iOS 8 where notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have a couple of buttons on them. So you could like, you know, get a notification for a podcast and tap a play button,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which yes, I know overcast does not support yet. I’m waiting for streaming to do that anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured you can show those on the watch as well and have there be a couple of buttons and that might be all you get. And then a glance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured it’d be like a read-only view of, you know, some information from your app and tapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would do basically nothing. I thought and we have those kind of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that was going to be all we were going to get until next summer. Turns out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get a little bit more and it’s pretty interesting, it’s pretty limited, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all more than I thought we’d get. So what we have in WatchKit so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like the, not quite the native apps, but like the apps that will run on the watch that interact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your phone, the phone is basically running a very, very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storyboard runner. define in your app in your iOS app bundle, you define
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this extension and you give it like a static storyboard. All the graphics and everything have to be included in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some things can be dynamically generated like like table rows obviously can be dynamically generated but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most things are static. Like you define them at compile time and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch OS basically like plays through this and any interaction that’s taken it communicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to your iPhone to the extension running on your iPhone to have that do any kind of actual computation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty limited and it looks pretty… I haven’t had time to actually write any code with it yet, but it looks pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited in things like any kind of dynamic abilities besides table cells and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s also very interesting is the layout system. You can’t specify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an X and a Y coordinate for an element that you’re putting on screen. You basically specify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here are the elements I want to be on screen, and by default they just flow downwards. They’re just stacked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it becomes like a scrolling downward view. And then you can group things into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these groups and groups can be arranged, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sub-layouts. So you can have a group that itself is arranged with its own little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack or you can have it arranged horizontally in a stack instead of vertically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finally, all those table-based layout skills that you’ve been left withering from the 90s, they’ll be relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of this, but isn’t this a lot like swing? Remember the original Java UI
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there’s a lot of you. I think the first one I’ve ever seen that did this and we can find a show notes link for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to see if anyone in the chat room remembers is GeoS I think GeoS was a GUI with
⏹️ ▶️ John a similar layout paradigm. It’s like, right, I think swing did it as well. I forget what it’s called. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the packing problem, but it’s a similar type of thing where you, you just take
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of boxes and fill in the empty space with it. I think Geos had a little bit of gravity associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with it as well. But yeah, this is not a new way to lay out GUIs, but it’s not a great way to
⏹️ ▶️ John lay out GUIs either for sophisticated things, but for a very, very tiny screen. When I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ John through all the SDK documentation, it’s like they are removing as many options as possible. Rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than making you lay out your UI the same way you would on a phone or on a Mac, but just in a small screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re saying just take away your ability to specify any of this stuff. And how simple can we make it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is pretty darn simple. Bunch of boxes, they plunk in, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to control those. You got settings for like foreground color, background color, margins and spacing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it’s like table-based layout, you know? Cell padding, cell spacing. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a very rudimentary level of control. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems as though like multitasking, it seems like is non-existent for these types of apps. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure in the future we’ll have better multitasking I’m sure the the watch system apps can probably multitask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things like continue playing audio while you’re looking at something. But from the description, it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s most likely to happen here is is when the user interacts with your app. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the user launches your app or responds to notification, the extension on your phone launches it controls the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco session. And then as soon as they said in the video that when the user stops interacting with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your watch kit app, then your app is terminated. So there’s basically no multitasking is what it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. And all the so it’s very similar in some ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the very first iPhone SDK, the iPhone OS 2.0, the very first SDK for the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store has a lot of similar kinds of restrictions. In some ways, it’s even more restricted than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, they can do a lot of things that you couldn’t do back then. But it’s a similar level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of permissibility and complexity where you’re building pretty simple things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have pretty basic control over them, there’s a lot of guard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rails set up, there’s a lot of restrictions set up, there’s a lot of limitations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re not going to see like, you know, Angry Birds for the watch in this kind of system. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually a big thing, I think games are going to be pretty much impossible. I also think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can look at some of the recent Notification Center app rejection drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iPhone and and I and looking at both that and some of the some of the hints they’re dropping in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the watch kit documentation and video it seems as though they’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more strict about what you can and can’t do in a watch app like on iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the frameworks limit you you know if you can do something without calling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a private API you know so if you can do something really crazy like if if let’s say there was no OpenGL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPhone if you can just make a buttload of CA layers and do everything you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that, Apple wouldn’t reject you for that. You know, like, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch, and it seems like kind of the new Apple App Store stuff with some of these new areas that we’re allowed to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, it seems like they’re gonna be a little more restricted and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that you can’t do you actually are not meant to do and we won’t let you do them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it would not surprise me to see like Like back when the App Store first launched on iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it was open, when we had the SDK and we knew the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least we thought we knew the rules, that changed quickly, but during those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few months where we could build apps but we couldn’t launch them yet, one of the rules in the App Store guidelines originally was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, we’re going to look at your apps and if they aren’t high quality, we might reject them. And I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as a bunch of other developers, I thought that they would actually be pretty strict. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app would have to be Apple-levels of quality to be approved in the App Store. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course, that ended up not being the case at all. There’s tons of garbage apps in the App Store because that’s kind of an unenforceable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard to keep up. It kind of seems like they might be trying to do that with the Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the things they’ve said, with some of the implications they’ve made, and some of the notification center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrictions we’ve seen so far, it wouldn’t surprise me if they They are a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strict about what you can do in a watch app and how good it has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m curious to see how that goes. But no matter what, I am really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised by the fact that this kind of paired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or split apps where the phone is doing pretty much all the heavy lifting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised that we’re seeing that now. And it’s really exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that means whenever the Apple Watch does come out next year, there should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully a fairly robust ecosystem of apps available shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after launch. And that’s really awesome. And the only thing that you won’t be able to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run an app where your iPhone isn’t nearby. So the most obvious example of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can think of is like a RunKeeper or RunMonster or something like that, where you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave your iPhone at home, but go for a jog or something along those lines. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re a third-party podcast app. Yeah. And so something like that won’t be permissible yet or possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet to your point, Marco. But, but pretty much everything else that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve announced will be available is available. And that, that’s really exciting and I’m really looking forward
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you think about this implementation here with all these Restrictions we just described I can’t help
⏹️ ▶️ John that think the entire watch is acting kind of like choose your analogy either kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the push notification service on iOS or kind of like What I had heard I’d never actually
⏹️ ▶️ John confirmed that the old or possibly the current Apple TV is where it’s just one process that does That sort of loads
⏹️ ▶️ John loadable bundles in that the resources are so constrained what they want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John is a single process running all the time in memory with its working set with
⏹️ ▶️ John they can control the CPU yourself and all it does is sort of you know receive
⏹️ ▶️ John and load static packages of simple descriptions of UIs
⏹️ ▶️ John basically storyboards or whatever static assets and that’s all it does and display
⏹️ ▶️ John them and relay information over Bluetooth to say the person click this button you want me to
⏹️ ▶️ John you know transfer this bundle thing you want me to display this thing okay I’ll display this thing I’ll wire this stuff up. When someone presses, I’ll tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John which button they press. I’m like, and that’s it. And that makes me think, like, why would
⏹️ ▶️ John they launch different processes for that? Why wouldn’t it just be one small process
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s always in memory that is responsible for for doing all these type of things? Glances,
⏹️ ▶️ John actionable notifications and these, you know, watch kid, whatever they’re going to be called, not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John native app type things. Maybe that’s three separate applications instead of one. But the whole idea is
⏹️ ▶️ John constrain your resources in the same way. there’s only one push notification service on iOS like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that process will be running, it will be in memory, and it will do work on behalf of the applications they need to work
⏹️ ▶️ John down rather than every single application. This was back before background rather than every single application running in the background,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be one process that runs in the background and it would tell you tell your application when you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John resource constraints. And what it’s making me think is what are the resource constraints
⏹️ ▶️ John of this this phone? Is it memory? Is it CPU? Is it battery? I mean, it’s all those things to a degree more than iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what is the what is the key one that that would make that type of implementation, assuming it
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they’re doing possible and whatever it is, I have to think like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how are they going to do native apps on the same hardware? If they’re I mean, that’s I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a real question. Like why? Why don’t we have native apps now? And I guess one answer is like, they’re just not ready with the software stack in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t ready. Well, they didn’t plan on an iPhone 1.0. But anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John SDK is not ready for the native apps, right. But as the other part of it that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John native apps, they have to figure out how to let you run native apps without
⏹️ ▶️ John letting people do something that will destroy the watch’s battery in 15 minutes. Like I don’t know how this is all going to
⏹️ ▶️ John work out. But this seems so incredibly constrained, and makes me think the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John is being so careful with with with everything with memory with
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU with battery that I’m having trouble envisioning
⏹️ ▶️ John what the native app interface is going to look like if this is so constrained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, part of it, I think you’re right that the tools are most likely the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest cause for why we don’t have it up front. But there’s also there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side effects to that. Like I think that’s the cause. But there’s a couple other fortunate side effects to that being the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case that Apple will benefit from. One of the biggest is people are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forming their opinions and their evaluations of the watch’s battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before there are these full native apps. So you know, because people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t tell people like, oh well, you shouldn’t run these things or you shouldn’t overuse these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of things because that will negatively affect battery life. No, people will do whatever they want to do and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll yell at Apple if the battery is not as good as they want it to be. So by restricting what they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first X months of the thing being out, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forcing people to do things the way Apple wants them to be done and to keep things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of reasonable during the time when everyone’s figuring out what kind of battery life does this thing get, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this thing used for. And secondarily, having that kind of training wheels period where you can’t do everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want also gives it it it kind of forces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to think about like do I really want these things on a watch like do I really need a native app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever function I want like do like I mean for overcast I’m probably gonna have to make a native app to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to play when the phone’s not around like on in the jogging scenario but for a lot of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch kit iPhone hybrid app might be all they need and so maybe this is this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also having the fortunate side benefit of Apple kind of forcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers, if you want to get in early, if you want to be aggressive and get into watch kit now, or get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch development now, you have to do it the simple way first. And then later on when we unveil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, then you’ll be faced with the question of, do I throw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all away and rewrite it with this new system or not? And many developers are gonna choose no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that benefits Apple and it benefits the watch and it benefits users as long as they don’t need all those extra functions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would have been getting because then there’s less for the watch to do, there it gets better battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like all these things. So I think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple needs this time to both let people love the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its battery life, hopefully, and also to force both customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and developers to not just jump to, oh, I need to port my game to the watch, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I need to port everything I ever do to the watch, like to force us to kind of give the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch a clean start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re right. And it’s just a really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering decision on both software and the hardware sides to limit everything. This is what John was driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, you know, to limit everything so severely in order to presumably preserve battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But before we talk any more about WatchKit, why don’t you tell me about something else that’s really cool.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, any other thoughts on watch kit?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on the on the resource constraints and everything. The advantage to the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John had and maybe the watch will have to was that like So there was no SDA in the beginning because we were going to write web apps or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I sort of hastily slap one together for two point oh, and it was very immature
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t do a lot. And your apps were extremely constrained. And slowly over time, we got, you know, push
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications. Then we got real background and we got multitasking. Then we got real background. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that were slowly added to iOS came along with advancements in hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John lower power chips, more CPU power, more RAM. The batteries probably
⏹️ ▶️ John stayed about the same size, but you know, like the basically the hardware became more power efficient,
⏹️ ▶️ John did more with that power, and we definitely got more RAM. So if the watch is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to start off really constrained like this, and you know, we’re going to have native apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably, you know, within the first year of the thing, those native apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would imagine would be have to be like at least as constrained, more constrained than the very first,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it, iOS 2.0 was the first SDK? Yep. Than the very first iOS apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that means no background processing. Like they already have push notifications, so they’re already up ahead of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the iOS apps were at that time. It could be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even, you know, even more constrained, like these, these two tweets are one from Craig Hockenberry saying that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even subclass the, the WatchKit classes, you know, WK interface things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t even subclass them with the current paradigm. And then Pete Burtis replied on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like that would help because there’s no draw rect for you to override. There aren’t views. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John really constrained way to draw applications. It’s not like, oh, hey, you can just start drawing whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, draw custom controls, do you know? I have to imagine this is gonna be super constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John and that those constraints will only be lifted if and when the watch hardware becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John more capable because it’s not like Apple suddenly discovered how to do multitasking in iOS 4.0 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, this is what we can do with the hardware available. And so everything for the original iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John including complete lack of third-party apps, was made so, like Marco said, so you could show
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look how awesome this phone is. Isn’t it amazing? Like people thought it was fake. Like you can’t make a
⏹️ ▶️ John UI that fast or, well, you can do it if you just have, if you control everything and put incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John constraints on everything and have one process running at a time and have the entire phone dedicated trying to give you that smooth
⏹️ ▶️ John animation, right? And so the watch is going to follow that same path, not because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t know how to do those things, but because the hardware just isn’t ready for it yet, even more so than the first iPhone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really looking forward to seeing how they can hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves out of this situation to eventually get to the point where the watch hardware can
⏹️ ▶️ John start to get some of those things that iOS 3.0 and 4.0 and 5.0 had. And I think that’s gonna be a long road
⏹️ ▶️ John because as we said, we were talking about power constraints many, many, many shows ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, battery technology, the capacity of batteries for a given mass
⏹️ ▶️ John of battery, how much energy can you get out of it is getting better slowly. But that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John what we had a graph that showed was like 15% year over year. If you’re lucky or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the way you’re going to get any big wins. The way you get big wins is by making everything on the electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John device, use less power so the CPU uses less power, the screen uses less power, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John radios use less power. That is the only way forward because you can’t rely on like, well, next year, we’ll have double
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery capacity. No, you won’t unless you’re gonna make the watch twice as thick or, you know, much thicker anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that finally, this all gets back to the idea that if you buy the very first Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John watch, will your Apple watch ever have multitasking? Probably not the first iPhones didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John write you couldn’t run iOS 4.0 whatever it was that You know, we’ll have background processing. Now the original iPhone could
⏹️ ▶️ John not do background processing because by the time the OS could do that, it couldn’t run on the original iPhone. And if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy a piece of hardware, and it’s gonna be obsolete because it can’t have these features that we think are gonna be added over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you deal with your 10K gold version of the watch?
⏹️ ▶️ John There we are, we’ve come full circle on the Apple Watch again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m honestly, you know, seeing what we get today in WatchKit, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned earlier, this is actually more than I expected that we’d be able to do compared to what we saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier. As we see this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then also knowing that next fall there’s going to be this supposed new SDK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next summer and fall with native apps, I think you’re right. Unless they’re going to make a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch next fall, which would be really terrible, unless there’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a six-month product cycle there, I’m kind of surprised. why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it almost certainly is because of just tools limitations that it doesn’t make sense that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is all we can do for iWatch one or cheese for Apple Watch 1.0 hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why next fall can we suddenly do more like that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s you know, next fall is when you’re going to be able to do sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could pretend that third party applications were available on iOS 1.0 or iPhone OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John How constrained would they have been, that’s what you’re gonna get to do. Even more so maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Igloo, Hover, and Lynda.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cuz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm, and if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey Liss, m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m, and T. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Tech podcasting’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so long. So John, what’s going on with your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone? Because you’ve received an iPhone, but is it activated? What’s happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forget when I ordered it. the beginning of the month I think I mentioned on the show when I had ordered
⏹️ ▶️ John it and then it was like expected to ship in seven to ten days and it did
⏹️ ▶️ John and it finally arrived and it arrived on Monday and
⏹️ ▶️ John I stayed over from work to sign for it and I was all excited took it out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ John and you see that little screen that says hello in several languages and you swipe to the right and then it makes you pick
⏹️ ▶️ John a language and then it makes you pick the country that you’re in and then what does it do after that then I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it wants you to connect to either a Wi-Fi network or a cellular network and I connected it
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Wi-Fi and put in my Wi-Fi password and then it says activating your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it says your phone could not be activated because the activation servers are temporarily unavailable
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem persists call you know contact apple.com slash support blah blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, all right, well, maybe the server had hiccup there, I’ll try it again. And I went,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s a try again button at the bottom that didn’t work. And I said, Well, maybe something weird with my Wi Fi network,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me try it over cellular. So I turned off the Wi Fi did forget this network, tried over cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ John same message activation servers are temporarily unavailable. I think the exact wording of the message was was something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, the error messages, you know, have no real bearing on what’s actually going on. But that was the
⏹️ ▶️ John error message I got. And so I put it aside and you know, continue working for
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of that day and then try it again later and it was still going I’m like All right. Well, it said like try again in a few minutes and if the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John persists and like well No, the problem is persisting So I contacted Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to figure out what the problem was because it was an activation problem I say hey, I’ve got this new iPhone just came out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t activate it and there’s a little like on the first screen that says hello Or in several languages
⏹️ ▶️ John a little I and in a circle in lower right corner if you tap that it gives you all your information about the phone like the SIM
⏹️ ▶️ John ID and the I am eid and all those different numbers. So I’m like, all right, I have enough information. I can call Verizon here
⏹️ ▶️ John So I spent a while talking to Verizon eventually got disconnected called back again got disconnected
⏹️ ▶️ John again Like just Verizon’s phone support their their phone system
⏹️ ▶️ John is not great. The people who work there seem You know nice enough
⏹️ ▶️ John they more or less knew what they were doing or could transfer me to someone who did but that the
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not good for a phone company that the audio quality of the phone interface as you’re going through the menus,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is just terrible. It just sounds all staticky and gross. You get disconnected a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I got disconnected mid sentence with people. I guess they’re not disconnecting me. They’re in the middle of talking and then click boom, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and the worst part is in whatever call center they’re in, you can hear all the conversations going
⏹️ ▶️ John I can listen to that. Like, it’s just the basic requirement of a call center. I shouldn’t be able to hear other people’s conversations.
⏹️ ▶️ John like a privacy concern more than anything else. It just sounded like they were calling from Grand Central Station. It was just so-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grand Central Station is a post office. You’re thinking of Grand Central Terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was waiting for it. Thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Frankenstein’s monster, right? I know all about it. Um. Ha ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, I feel for these people’s work environment. But anyway, they looked everything
⏹️ ▶️ John up and they’re like, okay, well, they went through this thing and like, well, make sure this number is activated, figured out what my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone number is, because I couldn’t, since I have a track phone, when you buy the iPhone online, you can’t port your number
⏹️ ▶️ John during the online. You can only bring it for if it’s another Verizon number or something. You can’t like, basically if you have a track
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and you want to order an Apple phone online, you have to let them give you a new number, which is fine, whatever. I just wanted to get activated on the new number.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Verizon activated my number, told me what it was. This is my wife’s Verizon account.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to go through this whole rigmarole every time I call, explaining that I’m not the account owner. We eventually worked
⏹️ ▶️ John that out. So I’m allowed to do this now, but they did a lot of calling her to ask for permission for me to do things. Anyway, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John silly. And they said like everything is active. You know, after going through like five or six people and several
⏹️ ▶️ John calls and several transfers, I kept working my way up to people with quieter and quieter offices. Until
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking to somebody on like my third call and my seventh transfer, who I could not hear
⏹️ ▶️ John anything in the background. So this person actually had a nice office and they’re like, look, everything on our end is active. Your phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John is activated. We tried every possible remedy up to and including taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the SIM out and putting it back in, which led me to tweet, which I now regret. hey, these things don’t come with sim
⏹️ ▶️ John removal tools anymore. And then for the next month, I’ll be getting tweets from people telling me whether they did or didn’t get a sim
⏹️ ▶️ John removal tool. Bottom line is everybody thinks whatever their experience with phones are,
⏹️ ▶️ John with iPhones is the same for everybody. So some people are like, I always get a sim removal tool. And other people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, I’ve never gotten one. And other people will tell me what the Apple store told them
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. I have no idea. If there’s a sim removal tool in my case, I have not yet found it. Yes, I’ve looked in the
⏹️ ▶️ John paper packet. No, it’s not connected to the cardboard. with a little semi-circle thing that folds
⏹️ ▶️ John out, like many people send me screenshots of. I’m willing to believe that it’s still in there somewhere and I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John found it, but anyway, it’s not obvious. It doesn’t matter, I used a paperclip. But anyway, taking a SIM
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in and out. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you delete the tweet? I mean, like it was more, I wasn’t really asking a question, it was just like amusing, like, do these things not
⏹️ ▶️ John come with, or no, I think I said what the, eventually, later in the story, I got in the phone with Apple support
⏹️ ▶️ John and they told me, I asked about the SIM removal tool and the person didn’t really know, and they’re like, I think it only comes with unlock phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then people are like, no, I’ve bought unlock phones I’ve never had one or I bought locked phones and I always have one. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John every possible combination of answer I’ve gotten from Twitter people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve bought unlocked phones before, I’ve bought locked phones before, I’ve never gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a SIM removal tool in any of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, people are like, oh, you only get a SIM removal tool if your phone doesn’t come with the SIM. Basically, like if there’s no SIM inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone when you buy it, then you get a tool, you know. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a paperclip. For the longest time, I thought SIM removal tool was a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, they use liquid metal to make it. Do you remember the liquid metal thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s right. Everyone was wondering like, they’re going to use that for. And that’s kind of it so far. That’s the only thing that we know they’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ John Or we think I don’t know if it’s ever confirmed that they use it for it. But it looked kind of liquidity and meddling. I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so they bought a whole company just to replace paperclips as much as they possibly as the best paperclip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement you can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s seamless. It’s really true, true to the material.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now really quickly, for the record, I have received definitely one SIM removal tool and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encircling the little half circle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John tab. Yeah, no, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what you were describing earlier. So that was my experience. But we’ve had, I don’t know, something like six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or seven iPhones between the two of us over the last few years. And I think I’ve only gotten maybe one of them. And I did that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never really occurred to me until you were talking about it earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the weird thing is a lot of all the people telling me that, like, they didn’t have the little semicircle thing, but that it was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of buried in with like the quote unquote, manual, the little paper packets they give you, you know, and like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ John slides down in there, it’s easy to get lost. And I can I can see that happening. I don’t see it in mine yet, but I haven’t torn the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John apart because I don’t really care. Anyway, we did all Verizon, during the
⏹️ ▶️ John various calls, all the Verizon people had to go through all the remedies, most of which I’d tried already anyway, but I was willing to humor them because they weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things on their end, or at least said they were in response to these things. Turning the phone all the way off and having them
⏹️ ▶️ John do server things, turn it back on, trying it on cellular and not, doing a restore from iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John where you put it into recovery mode and reinstalling. And by the way, this is at the same time the iOS 8.1.1
⏹️ ▶️ John release came out. So people are like, oh, that’s what the problem is. Apple servers are down because of the release. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple servers, this is all before I even called to check their server status page. Like I had exhausted my possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ John before calling Verizon, believe me. And Verizon had me redo a lot of the things that I had already done. But I’m like, well, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was nice because I had already downloaded all the software updates, so I didn’t have to wait for the, you know, 1.9 gig
⏹️ ▶️ John download of iOS 8.1.1 or whatever it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, before you leave the Verizon topic, because I assume they did not fix your problem because they never fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any problems. Because every time I, so when I was a Verizon Wireless customer for a few years before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone came out, every time I called Verizon to do anything to my account, they messed it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like whether it was adding a data plan, removing services, like changing things, asking a question, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time they touched the account, they messed it up in some horrible way that would cause me to get like triple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco billed or they would like remove the plan for the first half of the month that was there. So then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be billed like the per minute rate and all this crazy stuff they would do, everything they did screwed something
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was kind of afraid to ask them about that because when I did the, I ordered this from the Apple online
⏹️ ▶️ John store, which I had to explain to several Verizon people and they’re very confused about this. Store, I wanted to say
⏹️ ▶️ John store.apple.com. Like that’s where I went because they thought I was in an Apple retail store. Like, oh, they should have activated that
⏹️ ▶️ John for you before you left the store. I’m like, no, store.apple.com. Anyway, when you do that, it asks you
⏹️ ▶️ John like, are you adding an existing line? And it wants you to put in the previous number. I enter my wife’s iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John line and all her information and it asks you for crazy information about your Verizon account, your
⏹️ ▶️ John username, your billing password, which is different than your regular password,
⏹️ ▶️ John last four digits of your social security number. The Verizon phone thing
⏹️ ▶️ John has you, this is like, I think I’ve told this story before, the first time I was on a telephone answering
⏹️ ▶️ John tree type thing and I got to a menu that wanted me to say what I wanted to happen and I froze
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, what do you mean say? Could they possibly have a system that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, with limited vocabulary, could they do speech? And so my brain is just trying to think of like, this is like whatever, 1987
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever they were talking about, like trying to think, is this technically possible or someone playing a joke on me? So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, this one, I think this is the first time this has happened to me. They wanted, they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, please enter the password for your Verizon wireless account. And I’m like, I’m calling
⏹️ ▶️ John you on a phone. It’s got a number pad. Do you want me to enter
⏹️ ▶️ John my pa- but that would reduce the possibilities by like a factor of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, cause like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to do the math in my head of like how many passwords are now hashed to the same bucket because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the seven key is three different letters. I don’t know. And here’s the best thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I got to be an old pro at this because I called them a million times. Every time it said that, like I sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of figured out their menu system to like hold down the zero key, then speak a certain phrase to get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John voice thing and then get, eventually it will ask you to enter your Verizon password, which
⏹️ ▶️ John you type out on the number pad, like just pick whichever number has the letter you want, capitals, lowercase
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t matter. And you know, if it’s anywhere in these group of letters doesn’t matter. Every time I did it the first
⏹️ ▶️ John time it told me the password didn’t match. I was willing to believe the first two or three times that I had mistyped it the first time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it always worked on the second try. It’s like the seventh time I was doing it, I’m like, you know what, this never works on the first try. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the first letter is missed because I’m not, I didn’t know what the problem is. Anyway, their system is very weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did all that stuff and they basically did everything they could do on their end. Like I exhausted, I tweeted this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I exhausted all support possibilities with Verizon. Not because they were not doing what they could, but that basically they did everything
⏹️ ▶️ John they could. They said this number is active, it’s active in our system, here’s what it is, here’s all this, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John your account isn’t good standing, it’s connected to the right account, it’s like just everything as far as they’re concerned
⏹️ ▶️ John is working. And I was totally willing to believe that because it seemed to me like this, this software I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going through these, you know, white screens at the beginning of the iPhone setup Connect to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John servers to do something Apple servers then probably connect to Verizon servers But the bottom line is I totally
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine that I was using Apple software on an Apple device that’s connecting to an Apple server and it’s giving
⏹️ ▶️ John me a response that says Something and I’m getting the you know servers unavailable, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though an Apple status page that says the server is available So that was the end of Verizon and the Verizon helpfully
⏹️ ▶️ John connected me me, transfer me directly from Verizon to an Apple support person to a knowledgeable
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple support person, not just like, you know, so they have like a direct line and on like the good, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, I mean, like the, the
⏹️ ▶️ John support people. So I didn’t have to go through the lower tier of Apple support, but can I do the higher tier support person
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple support person was was excellent. It was clear they were a, you know, again, no voices
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background, very helpful, very professional. So it was the top tier Verizon person I got to so it was a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John they were nice. They transferred me over. I explained the situation. They looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at everything on there and he the Apple guy started by explaining to me how the system works
⏹️ ▶️ John on there and which I’ve since forgotten but it’s something like what I was saying before like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John connects to an Apple server, the Apple server tries to authenticate with the Verizon server and wants to get a response back so
⏹️ ▶️ John it can proceed or whatever. It seemed to me that basically if I could if I could have DNS poison
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone and spoof the Verizon server and figured out what the correct response is, I could have gotten past these white screens like that
⏹️ ▶️ John everything was fine. Like as far as Verizon is concerned, all I needed to do was get past this software. You know, there’s probably more to it
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. But anyway, um, they said they couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but they would open a ticket for
⏹️ ▶️ John it and get back to me the next day. So that was the end of that support thing. It was like several hours. Most of
⏹️ ▶️ John it spent on hold or waiting for things. So it wasn’t really that bad. Um, the next day came
⏹️ ▶️ John and uh, you know, the Apple people gave me their direct number and told the guy told me he was going to be off today, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John said, you can call this number to Anyway, someone else called me back and they said they figured
⏹️ ▶️ John out what the problem was and it was some problem with… I forget what it is. It’s not provisioning profiles, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just in my head from all the Apple developers I see complaining on Twitter all the time. But like, something having to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the profile for the phone was screwed up in there. And anyway, the bottom line, it was something that Apple could fix. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John said they did fix it. And so I tried to activate my phone again and I got farther and it said, your phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John is blah blah blah. Is that correct? I’m like, yep, that’s what Verizon told me. That’s supposed to be my phone number. the next button
⏹️ ▶️ John I still got the error so I had to call Apple back again and they said you need to do something special which I don’t want to describe
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s probably some terrible security flaw that they don’t want revealed but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John there was something special I had to do on the phone to get past that process I did it I got past that process
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone was up and I’m happy so it was but maybe 30
⏹️ ▶️ John hours 36 hours after I got the phone plus like maybe three or four hours on hold with
⏹️ ▶️ John various people that I actually did activate my phone. The next step, of course, is to get my
⏹️ ▶️ John old number ported. And I began that process with Verizon. And when my wife got her number ported, it
⏹️ ▶️ John took a couple of days for it to activate. But at least I have a working iPhone right now with a phone number that will soon
⏹️ ▶️ John go away as soon as my old number gets ported to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So has your life been changed thus far?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, although I had the fun ceremony today where like when I got the phone out of the package. I didn’t put the
⏹️ ▶️ John leather case on it, but the case that I’ve had for a week or whatever. I wanted to get the phone set up first before I put the case
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And I’m like, this is this was a good plan because if I have to return this phone because there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware wise wrong with it, which by the way, I didn’t think there was lots of people tweeting at me. Why don’t you go to the Apple store? Don’t you have an Apple retail
⏹️ ▶️ John store? But my, you know, nerd Spidey sense was telling me there is nothing wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with this phone hardware wise. Like I can look at it. Everything worked. It seems that all his radio seemed to work correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John The sim looked fine. Like it did not seem like that I needed my phone to be swapped, although many people tweeted to me that when they
⏹️ ▶️ John had similar problems, they had to get their phone swap to get it activated. I felt like this was all happening on the server side, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John actually was all happening on the server side. But anyway, I was putting off putting the case on until it was working.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I finally got the thing working. And you know, got to springboard or whatever, then
⏹️ ▶️ John finally I could put the case on and now it has become my iPhone case and all and leather case is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John nice so far. It’s not changed my life otherwise. You’ve said more about the case and you have about the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, seriously. Well, you know, I had an iPhone 6 before. I know we talked at length about all the
⏹️ ▶️ John sizing things. I haven’t decided. I think leather case does make it nice. Like I said, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always had a case on my handheld iOS devices. So this is not anything new for me. In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, it was new for me to use it without a case for a week. But I think it definitely improves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is this is the first time that you’re really getting to like move into a phone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I I just, you know, I just started that. So like I did that when I was on the phone, it just, you know, I did set up this new
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and I finally did a restore from iTunes to buy the iTunes. I hate it so much. Like I did
⏹️ ▶️ John a backup of my iPod touch right before I knew I was going to do this. And then, okay, now I’m going to plug in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and I’m going to restore from backup. And it says, what do you want to restore from? And I see like seven backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them are like iPhone 4g that I know were like old, right? I don’t want those.
⏹️ ▶️ John About 50% of them have dates after them. And then there’s three called John’s iPod Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t have dates next to them. Nice. I’m like, why do some have dates and some don’t have dates?
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes no sense. But of course, me being a clever, long-time computer user, immediately knew the
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to this problem. Can any of you guess? To look at the files and see their modification dates? No, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the files are in, don’t you know what mobile backups directory looks like? There are these big giant hash things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I’m honestly kind of surprised because you just moved into an SSD also. How are you still keeping all these backups?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should only have the one device you use.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a terabyte SSD. I did amazing house cleaning. I moved tons of stuff to the Synology, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I moved all my video and movies to the Synology. I have plenty of room left.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, the mobile backups directory is all, the directories are named big, long, hexadecimal
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey strings. Yeah, they’re all like G-UIDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, no, no, the solution is, so all I need to do is plug in my iPod Touch, change
⏹️ ▶️ John the name of my iPod Touch something that doesn’t exist in the list, do another backup, then just look for that crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John name I just put in. Oh, that is not how I would have done it, but cool. But that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how, to be working software long enough, you learn this is the immediate
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to the problem. I don’t care what the actual problem is. I don’t care why some don’t have dates, just make work now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I changed it to like, you know, iPod touch, this is the one, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John did a backup and then plugged in my iPhone and said, where do you want to restore from? I want to restore from iPod touch, This is the one which by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John still did not have a date, but that was the right one. And then what I learned is for the second handheld
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS device in a row, I’m screwed on my icons because I went from
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3.5 inch iPod touch to the four inch and I
⏹️ ▶️ John an extra row of icons. And now I just went from the four inch to the six and now I need an extra row of icons again. So I spent
⏹️ ▶️ John a while tonight rearranging my icons to try to figure out how I’m gonna fill these out. And I basically rearranging
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to be within the new thumb sweep. So like the top row is dead to me now. I got to take all the things that I
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have up there because they were important, like Safari was upper left. Safari’s not upper left anymore, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so this is even more, I think, revealing than that you leave the camera shutter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound on. You’re saying you don’t leave any empty rows and that you actually hate empty rows so much that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill them when they occur?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would I leave empty rows? My iOS background has always been complete black. There is nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John behind my icons. It’s complete black. but my lock screen is a picture of my dog. Is it your
⏹️ ▶️ John extended dog? It is, it is my extended dog. I had to use my extended dog, I forget who it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ John someone with Photoshop skills extended the background of the dog picture I had and finally I got to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s my lock screen, but my home screen is all black. Why would I leave an empty row? What would I be getting? Especially an empty row at the bottom, that’s prime
⏹️ ▶️ John thumb reaching area. Wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, the argument in the past has been both it looks nice and also can give you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some forgiving dead swipe zone if you wanna like flip between pages more easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need a swipe zone, you grab anywhere and swipe. I’ve never accidentally launched an
⏹️ ▶️ John app while swiping home screens, never, not once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need a swipe zone, but it helps, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. It may make you feel better, but like have you ever accidentally launched an app by trying to thumb a swipe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not, but I always leave an empty rose.
⏹️ ▶️ John The empty rose, the only purpose for an empty rose, what we discussed in the past show is if you have a picture of like your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John or something you wanna see, or a beautiful background or a sunset or whatever, and you wanna see more of the picture. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only, I think, legitimate reason for the empty row. Swipe area does not strike me as legitimate reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep an empty row at the bottom as well. And I believe it was because Marco had said something and I was like, you know, let me try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And especially with the new phone, I really think pretty much anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use on a regular basis is indeed on the first screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the empty row.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the empty row has to be in the bottom, doesn’t it? You can’t get an empty row on the top, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, which would be, well, you can if you use underscores. The black
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, yeah. Right. That should tell you, like the fact that you have to use black icons, like what are you getting
⏹️ ▶️ John out of that empty row? Like it doesn’t even make it like symmetrical because you still have the dock at the bottom, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I just feel like it looks cleaner that way. It makes no logical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense, I’ll be the first to tell you. But I don’t know, I just, I like it better that way. And like I said, anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use on a regular basis is on that first screen, even with the empty
⏹️ ▶️ John get a bigger phone, but then you don’t put on you leave the row empty. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, no, no, I, but I added a row. So I have one more row than I used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Right. Cause I have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an empty one. You’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always an off by one error.
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Anyway, no, I, I backfilled. I had to, I had to promote a bunch of new things to the front page.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a bunch of apps in the front page. I don’t really use that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what did you promote? Are you willing to share?
⏹️ ▶️ John I put reader on the front page, even though I basically only read that on my iPad. I put
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram on my front page. I guess I do use that a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, have you ever posted a picture to Instagram? If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’d know that. I could swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I follow you, and I do not think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve posted a grand total of five pictures to Instagram. But I look at other people’s pictures, basically what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What else do I have on the front page?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you have an iPhone. Now you actually can take a picture of your breakfast every morning and put
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. That is not going to change. Having an iPhone will not change my habit of not posting pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John for my life. That is not not what I do. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make an artistic statement and just post a blank black picture every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Are you Syracuse on Instagram?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I I forget what my Instagram name is, but like every very I joined so late because I was
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, I didn’t have an iPhone. Why am I going to Instagram? By the time I joined Instagram, which was like two years ago, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John every variation of my name was taken. So I am some big, long, crazy thing. I’ll I’ll send it. I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John if I follow you. I follow Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, thanks. Well, I don’t know. I should follow
⏹️ ▶️ John you now. You’re going to post something you might be interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What, baby or something? Baby
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures instead of like constant pictures of your food. My tolerance for my tolerance for pictures of what people are eating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. If you look at my Instagram feed profile, whatever, it’s actually very little food, but an extraordinary
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I should I should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Look at me. I see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I am following. Let me see. Whereas I can’t. This app kills me. The stupid icons in the bottom little house magnifying
⏹️ ▶️ John glass Circle in a square. Heart, favorite thing, people. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John am I following? I’m gonna guess that I hit the people icon. Is that right? Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it. No, wait, no, that’s just me. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey says, 10 posts. Yeah, in the upper right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Followers, 26. I’m following 26 people. Do I tap 26? That’s actually a button. Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have this be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new segment on the show? Just John does UI review of an app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, they are alphabetical, it looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is your, are you Casey List?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m following you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and you are, may I share your name or is it a secret?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not a secret. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can see all five of his pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I was already following you. And I do recall the beach pictures now that I’m looking at them again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I posted 10 pictures total lifetime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, is that like a firm Catholic? Are you, are you planning on posting any more ever, or do you want to keep it at a good round
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’m doing Instagram right. Because all these pictures were not taken with an iOS. Well, that’s not true. A couple of them were taken
⏹️ ▶️ John with an iOS device, but most of them were taken with my my Canon super zoom camera when I was on vacation. And some of
⏹️ ▶️ John them are. But the first one is a scan of a picture from 1979. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t taken with an iPhone either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely have started cheating and using the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey micro four thirds camera that we got and posting some of those pictures to Instagram, which I will be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first to tell you is indeed cheating, but I don’t really care.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why that’s cheating. Like, are you sharing images from your life or is it? Are you is it like a video
⏹️ ▶️ John game where you’re trying to use your crappy camera attached to your iOS device to take good pictures? I’m not interested in the video
⏹️ ▶️ John game. I’m only interested in the pictures from people’s life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and that’s why I started cheating and I am not being repentant about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John while we’re complaining about Instagram, by the way, am I the only person in the entire world that reads Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John like I read Twitter? I would think this would be a more common thing. You know, Twitter, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter application I use when I launch it puts me where I last left off.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I can scroll, read, read, read, read, and then hit the home screen and I’m back, right? When
⏹️ ▶️ John I launch it again, it’s right where I left off. And obviously if I wait two days, I’m gonna be missing stuff. But within 15, 20 minutes, an hour,
⏹️ ▶️ John two hours, it picks
⏹️ ▶️ John up where I left off. Every time I launch Instagram, it scrolls me to the top and I have to scroll backwards 75 pictures to
⏹️ ▶️ John find out where, like, do people think I don’t care about the people I follow? I’m not interested in seeing their pictures?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what’s the point of the application? I follow these people because I want to see their pictures. Now I have to scroll backwards until I find the one picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, whatever, you know, tree or something that I like. Was that the last picture I saw? The worst part is
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of people tweet the same things they put on Instagram. It’s like, oh, I’ve seen that picture already. I must be up to that point. But no, because I just
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that one because it was on Twitter. This is basic functionality for Instagram. This is a billion dollar company.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t send me back to where I was last time I launched the application. Or doesn’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not agree more. It actually ended up being worth a lot less than a billion because Facebook’s stock tanked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, whatever. point is they can retain a little bit more state than they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Now that that does drive me absolutely nuts. The not holding your position thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never read a complaint about that either. I follow a lot of people who are heavy Instagram users, so apparently other people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use Instagram the way I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I do. Well, you and I are of the same mold cut from the same mold, whatever the phrase is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John They broke the cloth when they made us, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that too. Or whatever. I know I’m the worst. I don’t really care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta get John using Vine. No, don’t get me started on Vine. Because the Vine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is like the Instagram app, but a little bit worse in almost every regard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you remember when Vine first came out, people would tweet Vines, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John could tap the Vine URL and it would launch in Safari. Oh, that’s right, we did a whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John On your iPad, and you couldn’t watch the Vine. Yep. On any, at least certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad, and I think I’m gonna, Sometimes some vines would half play and it was like how long did this go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot longer than it should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah And this was it was what like 2012 or something like it was like the iPad had been out for a while at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John point Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just like I guess that that mark is not important We don’t want people in iOS to be able to watch our vines when
⏹️ ▶️ John someone tweets them But not so let’s not bother making this this thing work in mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari. It’s a minor browser We’re not interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will never forgive them for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, I go through momentary very, um, like moments where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really enamored with Vine, but those moments last like 45 seconds when I think of something clever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Vine. And then, uh, the, I almost have no use for it outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that. I don’t know. It seems like a great idea. I just never really use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not into it. I don’t see myself ever posting a Vine. Sometimes you can see ones that are clever, but I just feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like do it on YouTube instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s a very different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but like at least YouTube has a client ecosystem where I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John confident that I can watch what you produce instead of it being some sort of game where I have to try to get
⏹️ ▶️ John my uh try to get your 30 second movie to play or three second or 10 second or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See I kind of feel the opposite like I I hate watching anything on YouTube because YouTube is such garbage itself like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of watching on YouTube is terrible it’s always covered in all these little rectangles and and ads and everything, the apps are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, I know there’s all this great stuff going on in the YouTube ecosystem, all this great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I even have like a few things I’ve subscribed to. Because like things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I aspirationally want to watch YouTube frequently, so I never actually do. But there’s, you know, funny stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like CGP Grey’s videos, or like Dave Whiskas’ new video, like stuff I want to follow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just never go to YouTube to watch it, because I just hate, I hate everything on YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate everything about YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the YouTube app. My one complaint with YouTube app is they did an opposite Instapaper where
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to end up using YouTube like I use Instapaper, which is probably not a healthy way to use it, but it’s the way I use it, where
⏹️ ▶️ John everything I look at that I’m interested in, like I don’t have time to read that now, but I will read later. And I do it like
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy, so much so that my Instapaper queue is gigantic. And I know I’m never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get, like things go by, like I just keep shoving on this queue and every once in a while I go back through it and read stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there are things I’m never gonna get back to. But the key feature of Instapaper with regard to this workflow
⏹️ ▶️ John is that when I launched the app, the thing at the top of the app is the most recent thing that I added.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it gives me a fighting chance. YouTube, on the other hand, puts things in the watch later thing at
⏹️ ▶️ John the end. So when I launched the YouTube application and go to my watch later list, I have to scroll and then it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John click here for more load, scroll, click here for more load, scroll, click here
⏹️ ▶️ John for more load. And then I get down to the one I added, like, and it’s just ridiculous. And I think I have maybe have
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred and something in my watch later queue, which I think is not unreasonable considering the size of my
⏹️ ▶️ John Instapaper queue, which Marco knew when he was running the thing and probably doesn’t want to know now. And it’s ridiculous, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that really hampers my ability to go. And I still do it because I still go back down there and get stuff. And then after I watched them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to delete them from the watch later queue. And then the YouTube app tells me there was an error trying to delete them. And I try to remind myself
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to go delete
⏹️ ▶️ John them from the web interface later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Now, what I would recommend is because I only follow, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I follow as a portrait of words, but I only subscribe ish to a couple of, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube channels, uh, CGP gray being one and, uh, whiskers is better elevations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other. And what I’ve done is gone to their video page or what, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like their uploads page and then grabbed an RSS feed from there and just stuck that and feed Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I find that that works pretty well because it just, you know, is another RSS item. Whereas if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to go to like the YouTube app in order to check these things out, I would I would never watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the app isn’t great, but like I subscribe to a bunch of channels too, like some of the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned also the Vi Hart’s channel is great and the secret Vi Hart Vi Hart channel and
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it that sequelitis one that is infrequently updated? There’s a whole bunch of good things to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to but like YouTube has this problem where it’s really good related searches because my children
⏹️ ▶️ John children navigate YouTube entirely by going to one video that leads to another of these
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that is their interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it works amazingly. It’s like how do they even find this is just because one thing led to another they click on something interest
⏹️ ▶️ John them and is entirely viable way. It’s like their version of channel surfing, instead of just flipping through the channels
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It amazes me the things they find through this, you know, sort of word association thing, without ever typing anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John all they do is click. So that works great. But when I find something that says like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John how to, you know, some meal part three of seven, like, show me where
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts are. Sometimes they’re in related videos, like it’s amazingly good at showing you here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part four, part five, part one, but you’ll be missing part two, and you’d be like, for crying out loud, the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who put up these videos is trying to give you the metadata. Like if you put a field that said like maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ John field exists, and people just don’t use it. I don’t know that said, this is a multi part series. And this is part two, give
⏹️ ▶️ John me arrow keys to show and those are called playlists and they exist or whatever. But anytime I land on one of those like
⏹️ ▶️ John it should know if it says part one in the title I want the other parts and if the people didn’t enter the metadata and didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John a playlist YouTube could do that for me there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to search for part two when you’ve got all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts and you just can’t find it because you know it’s it doesn’t come up in the search and it’s not related videos
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just yeah it things could be improved greatly I understand your frustration with the interface but
⏹️ ▶️ John my like I said my bottom line is can I watch the video and when I watch YouTube video especially on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John device you just make it full screen and everything’s black anyway. So that’s I
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I can see the content if I can somehow find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you really love YouTube and Instagram, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John I I like YouTube more than Vine, I’ll tell you that.