93: I'm Not Running a Boarding House Here
26 Nov 2014Homescreen shaming, why there’s no Overcast for Mac yet, and a very special Neutral after-show.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Correction on battery increases year over year
- Hypercritical #74
- Apple's priorities and engineering tradeoffs
- The Prompt (succeeded by Connected)
- Palm V
- IIS on !Windows
- Casey can't manufacture that thing like Apple does
- Homescreens
- Correction on battery increases year over year
- Group homescreen shaming
- Why there isn't an Overcast Mac app (yet?)
- Post-show Neutral:
Sponsored by:
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code PHISHRULES for 10% off.
- Neat Ice Kit: Create perfect, clear ice for cocktails at home (Casey's review). Use coupon ATP for 10% off anything in the Studio Neat store.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh wait, we can’t do it on 31st, because Casey, you might want to be at a New Year’s party.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to any parties anymore, that part of his life is over now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, notice I didn’t even ask you, John. That’s my birthday. It is? The 31st? It’s his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 40th birthday, Marco. Get with the program.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, where have I been? Ugh. You’re the worst. Okay, so we won’t record that day.
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible- no! Why is it a terrible idea? I’m not going anywhere. Oh, that’s bullshit. I’ll be in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should be going somewhere, so we’re gonna do- I should not be. It’s my birthday, I gotta do what I want. What I wanna do is stay home.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the BS where people think your birthday is about them and what they want to do I
⏹️ ▶️ John care what you want to do on my birthday, I care what I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do Oh John, I love you so much. Well, I’ll talk to Tina and make sure that I understand the schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything. We never do anything for my birthday. We’re not doing anything for my birthday this year Is that her gift to you every year is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not doing anything? Yes. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I ask for every year What do you want for your birthday? No gifts and no party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to do some follow-up really quickly? starting with batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, I think we were talking about how on the watch, the components
⏹️ ▶️ John will have to go down in power because the battery’s not gonna save it because batteries were only increasing,
⏹️ ▶️ John not increasing as fast as the power usage of the internals of the watch might decrease in
⏹️ ▶️ John their power thirst. And I think I threw out a number like 15% year over year or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anthony Fitti wrote in to say that the number is actually much lower than that. And I talked about this on
⏹️ ▶️ John Hypercritical number 74, which is way back in when, June of 2012, had a
⏹️ ▶️ John similar show and wondered the same thing and probably got feedback probably from the same person, I don’t even remember. But anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual number is more like 7 to 8% year over year for battery increases. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking for battery technology to save the watch, that’s not going to happen, it’s going to be just like the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John where the components are just going to have to go down in power usage. And it’s going to be a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time before batteries are twice as good as they are now, four times times as good, 10 times as good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s something about the, a lot of the watch speculation from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has really kind of annoyed me. People keep saying, oh, well, you know, right now the watch is gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this battery life. It’s gonna have, you know, one day. But in only a few years, it’s gonna have way better battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. And I think this is not only, you know, related to the feedback, it’s not only an overestimation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how quickly batteries get better, but also I think it’s ignoring the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things usually tend to happen with computer form factors. Look at the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance. Look at the iPhone. The very first iPhone battery life was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly a day of usage. Almost every iPhone since then has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly a day of usage. The 6 Plus, now it’s maybe two days for some people, depending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how you use it. But the battery life in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone line in the last, what, seven and a half years, has stayed pretty much the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same, you know, give and take here and there, but in the same ballpark. We’re not talking about orders of magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference here. You know, it’s not going from a day to a week or to a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the reality is you’re bound by how much mass you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to devote to battery space, and generally what kind of power outputs you need. And things like radios,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to make those lower power because you just need a certain amount of transmit power, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens you know you have to emit a certain amount of light and so even like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch I suspect they’re gonna go to OLED screens either in the first version or soon afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s I suspect that’s why everything is designed with black backgrounds because I will lead is as far as I know actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only use electricity to light up the lit pixels is that right
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah each individual pixel in its light so if you have ones that are all entirely off they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right so if you have an all-black screen with a few thin white lines that actually doesn’t use a whole lot of a lot of power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the for the LED. Anyway, ultimately I think the watch is always going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be extremely battery constrained. It’s always gonna last roughly a day. That’s always gonna be the target
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what’s gonna happen when the battery gets 8% more efficient next year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna make the watch 8% thinner or something like that’s that’s what they do. They’re not gonna make it 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger and give you a week of battery life. Typically, if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different form factors of technology, look at the same thing in tablets. Tablets have roughly 10 hours of battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because everyone just kind of figured, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best balance of weight to brightness to computational power to radios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to size gives roughly these proportions, and it’s roughly in that ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The watch, I don’t think, is ever going to be at the point where it gets a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of battery life like a traditional watch or even longer. I think we’re always going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measuring it in small numbers of days. And, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not always on an infinite time scale, but maybe not on a Syracuse time scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the foreseeable future, and I’m talking probably a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly longer, I think that’s the kind of magnitude of battery life we’re going to be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about here. I don’t think that’s going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the battery stuff for these things. You can just think of the battery as constant, even though it’s seven to 8% a year compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to everything else is basically constant. And what what Apple in particular has done, if even if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John ignore thickness and stuff, which we talk about a lot, if you just made it a little bit thicker every year, they spend
⏹️ ▶️ John the additional resources like, you know, say they do a process shrink. Oh, now we have all this extra power
⏹️ ▶️ John overhead Because all our stuff takes less power. We just switched to OLED. We just got 40 50 percent of screen
⏹️ ▶️ John power back. What are we gonna do with all that? Well, what they do with all is they spend it on compute. They make the CPU faster They
⏹️ ▶️ John make the GPU faster and how much faster they decide to make it. How much do they spend on RAM, CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU? They spend as much as they possibly can while keeping the thing the same thickness or thinner and
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping the same battery life but that’s where they spend it all because the CPUs keep getting faster and faster and they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John with the shrinks like Like when they had the shrink, if they had the shrink and said, let’s just keep the CPU the same as it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not going to go to 64 bit. We’re not going to go to three cores. We’re not going to go to two cores. We’re just going to have one core. Our battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life can be tremendous now, but they don’t. They always spend it. I mean, as soon as they get the, the additional
⏹️ ▶️ John power savings from the major components, not the additional battery life, but the additional power savings, they spend
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as they can to meet their goals, which in Apple’s case tends to be thinner if possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whatever the target battery life is. people could be spending that same windfall again, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a windfall from battery gains windfall from lower power components, they could spend it in all sorts of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could spend it merely by increasing their battery life and just keep it the same, then we’d be using a CPU and a GPU that
⏹️ ▶️ John are as powerful as the iPhone one, but our battery life would be insane. But nobody wants that, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, probably not. I don’t know, we’re probably this is going to be our photo management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, like from the prompt, isn’t it where we just continually complained about the the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is insisting on thin over everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t complain about it. I think it’s a reasonable thing to do. It’s just that when you diversify the line of products,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there’s room finally for one that varies in this way. You know what I mean? Like when there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one product, and then you’re constantly making it thinner, it seems like you might be missing it. But they have such a range, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with the big giant phone. It seems like there’d be room in their lineup to make a different compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John in this particular area. Instead of going across the board, it’s always gotta be thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John for the target battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like what if there was an iPhone 6 thick? One millimeter thicker than the 5S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the 6, not the 6 Plus, cause that might be a little unwieldy at the 6 Plus size, but with the regular 6,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly thicker than the 5S instead of being slightly thinner than it. That might give it 40% more battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life and it would be a little heavier as a result. And see, this is the problem with batteries is that they’re heavy too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it isn’t just about making space for them, It’s also about weight.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I said you could go for the iPhone 5 form factor, like if they bring that back, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, well, you know what I mean, make a new phone in that size instead of just continuing the 5S and the 5C. If you made the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John phone thick, the cheap small phone, make it thick, then it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of the line one is super thin and sexy. If you get the four inch model,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, you know, I guess it’s still the 5S internals, like put a thicker battery on that one, then
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of makes sense in the lineup rather than trying to make the big expensive one thick because like you said, heavier feels like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, shouldn’t I, you know, this feels, shouldn’t I be getting the sleek one? Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Palm 5 was the sleek Palm and it was because it was so much thinner than the other one. Palm 5 was so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go, you ever look at one recently? I looked at mine recently. It’s just gigantic. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it just does not look like you remember it in your mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I had the 5X after my 3X finally died. Like it took so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long for anything else to come out that was as good as the 5X. Was that 160 by 160 pixel screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe so, yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s almost as big as an iOS icon or is it not even close? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is as big as most iOS icons. We are sponsored this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week by Studio Neat once again. The guys at Studio Neat design tools that make the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have just a little bit better. They started with the Glyph, that’s the G-L-I-F, the Glyph,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tripod mount and stand for iPhones. Well, now they have a new version of it that is adjustable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it adjusts with case size changes of the iPhone. So now, when the new iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus came out, it was compatible on day one. And it works whether or not you have a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your phone. They also make the Cosmonaut Stylus, which I like a lot, it’s my favorite stylus for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads. And now they’ve moved on to cocktails and cocktail products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Studio Neat guys, Tom and Dan, are on a mission to convince you making awesome cocktails at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t that hard. Cocktails are simple, you just need a few readily available ingredients. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to everything a fancy cocktail bar does, except clear and correctly sized ice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To fix this, Tom and Dan made the Neat Ice Kit. Neat Ice Kit is a set of tools for creating the right ice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your at-home cocktails. Now, Casey, you have a Neat Ice Kit, as do I.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you describe how it works?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. So the Neat Ice Kit has a few components. It is a silicone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sleeve, for lack of a better word, and then a foam insulated thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you put around it. It’s like a giant cozy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, is it cozy or koozy? Because I always thought it was cozy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re from Ohio. Anyway, this is about the Neat Ice Kit, and the Neat Ice Kit is amazing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made a whole review on my, I put a whole post on my blog, a review of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing, which I never do because I like it so darn much. And what you do is you have the silicone sleeve that you put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some water in, I think it’s like four inches long, two inches deep and two inches wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so you fill it up with water, you put that silicone sleeve inside the cozy, cozy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cozy whatever, and discuss the scuzzy, right? And you put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in the freezer, wait about a day. And what ends up happening is because of the way ice freezes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a four by two by two block of ice that’s about half really, really cloudy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and half crystal clear. And so what you do is you use the included mallet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and chisel to break the block in half and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the cloudy part for things like martini shakers or something like that where it’s not terribly important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have clear ice. And then you can use the clear piece for, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, just having a cocktail on the rocks or in this case on the rock. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can chisel it even further and use it in like a Tom Collins glass, etc, etc. This thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is amazing. It is totally, totally a waste of time by most measures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh my god, I love it so much. I really honestly do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m paid to say that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cool recommendation. No, it’s like I’m being paid to say I love it. But no, really, it, oh my god, it’s the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really, really is the best. And if you at all care about the quality of your cocktails, I cannot suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that you pick one of these up. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Each neat ice kit includes the scuzzy mold that we were just talking about, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chisel that includes a bottle opener, a club which also functions as a muddler, and a Lewis bag. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use these things to create essentially any ice type you could need for a cocktail. You can make a big, beautiful, clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ice cube for like an old fashioned or something. You can make smaller ice chunks for Tom Collins. You can make crushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ice for a mint julep. This makes an amazing gift for the holidays. You can give people for wedding gifts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. This is one of those things like, I always joke every holiday season about like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire category of gifts that are for other adults
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t really know what else to get them and maybe they’re hard to shop for because they hate everything or they already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have everything. This category of gifts is usually full of bunch of garbage. There’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small number of things that I would recommend in this category and this is one of them. Thanks a lot to Studio Neat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Neat Ice Kit for sponsoring our show once again. to studioneat.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use code ATP to get 10% off anything in the store. Once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studioneat, N-E-A-T, studioneat.com, use code ATP for 10% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check out the Neat Ice Kit. I also very highly recommend the Glyph and the Cosmonaut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we also got some feedback from JP Toto, who corrected, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think mostly me more than anyone else, about IIS or the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web server on anything other than Windows. And so he or she said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regarding the IIS on Linux.net business, it won’t actually be IIS running on Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the Mac. It is a new web server called Kestrel built on libuv, and it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Node web server. I don’t know the exact threading model, but you can front-end it with Nginx. Nginx?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you pronounce that? Nginx? Engine X, you got it. OK, thank you. Or something else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t worry, nobody will be running BigFatIIS on any Linux machines anytime soon. So that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more sense than what I think I said on the last episode. So I appreciate the follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from JP Toto. Moving on, can you manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing like Apple does, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t. It’s kind of insulting. So this is a story, we talked a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot about this, about how Apple manufactures things. Last show, we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple, deciding that it was going to make, essentially, its entire product line out of
⏹️ ▶️ John big blocks of aluminum that it had precision machines into certain shapes, affected the rest of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John and helped the rest of the industry have the expertise and have the machinery
⏹️ ▶️ John and the supplies out there to do this for their products as well, like that Nokia Mac mini clone thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there was a whole article on Medium. I forgot to copy down the author’s name here. you can look it up,
⏹️ ▶️ John about how you can’t manufacture like Apple does. In short, there’s a couple of throwaway
⏹️ ▶️ John one-liner anecdotes about things that Apple has done. They bought 10,000 CNC milling
⏹️ ▶️ John machines to make MacBook bodies instead of just a couple of them. They laser drilled those holes
⏹️ ▶️ John to let you see the LED, like it shines through the aluminum. You can’t see the holes when the light is off. When the light is on,
⏹️ ▶️ John it magically shines through. There was only one company that made the
⏹️ ▶️ John drills that could make those little holes, so it bought the company and took all of its existing inventory to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And, you know, they talk about manufacturing a battery to fit in some tiny space. If no one sells you a battery that fits
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and no one’s willing to make you one, you just make one yourself from scratch. That’s usually not an option for most people. A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John it just has to go with, you know, it’s good to be the king. It’s good to be a big, gigantic company with tons of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it also means that other companies that don’t make products that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look as nice as apples or like try to imitate Apple’s Apple’s products Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll use aluminum, they’ll use glass, they’ll use, you know, laser cut holes and everything like that. If you’re going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same thing as Apple, it may be very difficult for you to make something as good or at
⏹️ ▶️ John a similar price or both. Your best bet, I would imagine, is to make something that feels,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to make something that’s equally high quality, like why isn’t, why doesn’t everything feel like it’s made like an Apple product?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make something high quality, you just might have to make it out of a material that feels high
⏹️ ▶️ John quality, but but is either a more established process, or you know, it costs less money
⏹️ ▶️ John or it doesn’t require any special machinery, it can still feel expensive and high quality. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John chase Apple exactly if you do chase Apple exactly, you’re gonna have a very hard time doing exactly what they do for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same cost that they do because they just have massive economies of scales and a huge investment, and probably people
⏹️ ▶️ John on their payroll or people who are locked into exclusive contracts that are the the best at doing
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is they do. So you can take a look at that in the show notes. I think I pretty much just summarized
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire article.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, why don’t you tell us about how awesome it is to have an empty row on the bottom of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your iPhone home screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I told you about these people last week when we were talking about leaving the empty row and all that stuff like that. And I said, some people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any rows, and they just put everything in a set of folders. And one of those people sent us a screenshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put a link to their tweet in the show notes. It just has four folders in the dock, and each of the
⏹️ ▶️ John four folders has what looks like a color-coded set of nine icons, or there could be more, you can’t tell how many pages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s it, their screen is just blank. It’s just a big picture of the sun on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Different strokes for different folks. I mean, this could just be like an artistic stunt type of thing, but like I said, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want everything to be two taps away all the time, at least go for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, when you said that some people did this. You didn’t believe me. Yeah, I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, maybe in theory somebody might be able to do this, but there has to be nobody out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there who actually would make everything harder to use on their
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. I mean, this could be a stump, it’s from the color coding. It’s like, you know, maybe this is just like a silly thing they just set up this
⏹️ ▶️ John way to take a screenshot, but I’ve seen people in real life who don’t just have the dock, like what they will have is a row of folders
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top, and then the dock will have like, you know, phone and mail and Safari or whatever, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the dock will just have single icons, but then they’ll just have four icons at the top of page one, all of which are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever, I don’t know. This is not at all what my home screen looks like, but I’ll go with it. I mean, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why you have the ability to customize it, I suppose, so everyone can be their own special snowflake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Instagram completionist, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, this was a complaint email from Jonathan, another person suffering from iPad. I put the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in there because I thought it was a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco summary. Suffering.
⏹️ ▶️ John It echoes my complaints. Jonathan says, I try hard not to be an Instagram completionist,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is. Instagram’s behavior is maddening. Not only does it forget where you are, but as soon as a new image
⏹️ ▶️ John is posted, you are returned to the top of your feed to see it. I’ve never actually had this happen, like where you’re sitting there paging through images and
⏹️ ▶️ John a new image appears, because I don’t follow enough people, I guess, but if it scrolled me up to the top, that would drive me mad as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re also returned to the top of your feed if you switch away from the app. Worse, the feed has a fixed length. If you get to the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the feed, you might be missing photos older than the oldest one visible. This leads me to the crazy behavior of checking my feed twice
⏹️ ▶️ John a day so I don’t miss anything. This is probably exactly what Instagram wants. I hate them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, you know, I have an Instagram completionist as well, and I don’t know how many people I follow. I’ll run my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouth for a second while I look, but I don’t really have this kind of problem. Like I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with both you and Jonathan that, that it is maddening the way their app works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for completionists, but I don’t run into these same kinds of problems that apparently you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. Like I’ve never seen it, um, jump to the top while I was browsing Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I don’t think it even does
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t follow enough people to have it do that. But just merely the thing of just putting you at the top and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to scroll back to find what the last picture you saw was. And like Twitter does it intentionally. Like Twitter’s thing is you’re not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to care. You’re not supposed to be issuing police. And you’re supposed to be just like, what’s happening now? What’s in the moment? It’s like getting on a CB channel, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 70s or whatever. Like, hey, or ham radio or whatever. Keep going back in time. Everyone go on the Telegraph.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going on now?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not supposed to. Don’t worry about the past. The past is the past. what’s going on now, which I think is not a great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I don’t like that philosophy, and I certainly don’t use Twitter that way. But anyway, that’s what they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John for. Is Instagram going for the same thing? Don’t worry about what your people posted yesterday. Only worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John the pictures that are happening today. Like, I guess it is. I would wonder, like, what is their ideal,
⏹️ ▶️ John like volume? How many photos come from people that you follow per day? Is it one? Is it seven? Is it 100? Is it 7000?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t know what their their number is, but obviously my number is way below it. And if they think it’s very high, if you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know, you’re a teenager and all your friends are snapping 17 Instagram pictures a day and you follow 50
⏹️ ▶️ John people and it’s just every day, just hundreds and hundreds of pictures, of course you’re not gonna be a completionist.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just wanna say, hey, what are people doing now? Maybe you’ll scroll back for one or two pictures, but that’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ John I use Instagram. I just, I’m not an experienced Instagram user, so I can’t say like that’s not what Instagram is
⏹️ ▶️ John or what it started out as. And certainly Twitter did not really start out as a completionist
⏹️ ▶️ John medium either, But I don’t know, like I would love to ask if there is some person
⏹️ ▶️ John who has a vision for both Instagram and Twitter. Why is it that the vision of don’t worry about it happened in the past? What is
⏹️ ▶️ John appealing about that? Why is that the goal? Like I’m not saying it’s a bad goal, but it seems weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to me if Instagram is also like this and Twitter is also like this. Is there no room for anything where you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, like especially things where you choose who you’re gonna follow? I guess you’re just not supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John care about everything those people ever write. I mean Facebook, forget it. Facebook is gone. Nobody sees any everything of anything anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but but there it’s a monetization strategy. That’s very different
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but it like but it’s also to hold down noise and like They tied seeing things with friending
⏹️ ▶️ John so you could silence people so they would still be your friends They didn’t hurt their feelings, but you never see any other stuff and you can see things by friends
⏹️ ▶️ John of friends And it’s and you’re right the monetization strategy isn’t there too, but it the mental model
⏹️ ▶️ John long ago on Facebook I feel like broke down to the point where regular people don’t understand the permutations and they
⏹️ ▶️ John kept changing the rules anyway, so now it’s just forget it. But Twitter and Instagram are both so simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Vertical timeline, chronologically ordered with a few variations
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown in, but not many that haven’t changed that much. And yet they also want you to just apparently be like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the moment. Don’t worry about what happened five seconds ago. Those pictures are dead to you. Don’t look back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just real time follow up, by the way. I follow about 90 people on Instagram. And I would say based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no fact checking whatsoever, just gut feeling. I think I see between 10 and 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures in a given day, new, new photos in a given day. So I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many yet, even in that small quantity, this stuff all drives me crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should also point out as a responsible developer, the end skeptic, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why Instagram puts you up to the top whenever you launch the app, whenever there’s new stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably at least it probably at least started out that way, because that’s easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s just a lot easier to say everything belongs to the app, you just load the feed, whatever is the current feed, you load that up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to X items, and you show that period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that works up until well before your purchase for a billion dollars. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? That’s like version one, minimum viable product, don’t worry about it, blah, blah, blah. But then like some at
⏹️ ▶️ John some point, you get around to that some point in the multiple years before you’re acquired for a billion dollars, you get around to that if it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s that’s not a given at all though because there’s a lot of apps out there from very large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies where the apps just suck and where things just are never fixed. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac App Store. Apple doesn’t care about the Mac App Store. Right. How much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does Instagram care about the quality of their app for completionists?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s the quality. Their app is the main thing like that is Instagram. They don’t even want
⏹️ ▶️ John you to use the website. The website is like the Instagram website used to be. It was just like, yeah, yeah, and we have a website whatever. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John app is Instagram. That’s what was purchased for a billion dollars. If they’re not adding this feature, it’s because they don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s part of the product they want to make. And like, just like Twitter does not want you to be a completionist.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t want you to look back. They don’t want you to feel like you have to catch up. They want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be more kind of just dip in to the stream, look at it and dip and come back out. But Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, I don’t know, for some reason, especially pictures, it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re so much easier to look at and skim and you’d be more likely to be annoyed if you missed one like you miss someone’s tweet about
⏹️ ▶️ John what they had for breakfast who cares but if someone posted a baby picture and you missed it like I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know it’s not the same as photo stream it’s not the same as grandparents missing pictures of their grandkids it is just kind of like here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of photos from people I know and follow but I guess I’m just not uh there’s very few things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I that I’m interested in reading or following or doing stuff with we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna dip my toe in and be like oh let’s see going. It’s like it’s like not watching TV series like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just turn on the TV and whatever’s on. I just watch a middle episode of some show that I haven’t watched anything about and then I just forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. The next day, if some other show was on, I watched like never watching whole seasons, never watching shows in sequence.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just whatever’s going on right now and that that does not appeal to me and I can’t think of any media that appeals
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel compelled to note that despite that ridiculous coupon code, Hover really is fantastic. So don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t use that coupon code or don’t hold that coupon code against them. They really are
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re welcome, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, John, I wanted to know what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have on your iPhone’s home screen. And this is in part because Betaworks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has released an app called, what is it, Home Screen? Is that the name of the app? It’s Pound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Screen. Ah, my bad. It’s Pound Home Screen. So in any case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this has been flying around on Twitter where everyone is posting their home screens. And I was curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you have on your home screen of your iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought we talked about this last week. I’ll get to it in a moment. But first, I want to talk about this application,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I did download because it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone was downloading it and saying, Oh, you know, this home screen thing. So I downloaded the home screen app. I saw Marco complained that
⏹️ ▶️ John he couldn’t find it for the search and the app store. He searched for the exact app name and didn’t come up with it, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I downloaded the app and it wants you to take a screenshot of your home screen, which I did. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to come back to the app and then it does something and then it says, great period, your screenshot is shared.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like I have now used this app for its intended purpose, right? I’ve taken a screenshot of my home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve launched the app, it told me it gave me a confirmation message that says my screenshot is shared. What it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John me on the screen of the app is a tiny picture of my home screen like yep, that’s my home screen. It is now shared.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what to do from here. It did put up a little window that said would you like to tweet about this? No, I would not like to tweet
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And I didn’t. And that’s it. And now people like, hey, what? Why isn’t your home screen on there? Like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John shared it. Can people not find my home screen unless I tweet about it. I don’t want to tweet about it. I don’t understand his application.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you understand it? Have you guys shared your home screen? How How are other people able to see my home screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So by default it by the way, I didn’t build this app. Yes, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. It’s not Marcos app. I have been complaining to him directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so when I so beta works, it’s beta works as app. And yes, I sold its paper to beta works. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know them. I don’t work there. And when I tweeted my screenshot, so by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just shares it onto their website, onto the home screen. I think it’s home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is right. But how can other people see it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can go there and like there’s a URL if you if you open up the tweet sheet, you don’t have to actually post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tweet, you can it’ll give you the URL there is there is a public a public permalink on that domain where you can view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The point of this is to tweet it though. And and so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what clarify, when I tweeted it, I said in brackets, shameless app self-promotion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I was saying was I was basically voting for Overcast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instapaper because they were on my home screen. And one of the cool things about this site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you can go to homescreen.is. Is that it? I already forgot the domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what it says, but it’s not loading for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, you can go to the site and it’ll show you… It keeps a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tally of… Because what it it does is it looks at the picture of your home screen and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually uses image recognition to to recognize with pretty good accuracy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what apps those actually are and then it links to them you can like you can get to their iTunes pages and then it keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tally of which apps are most popular so I was voting for my apps that are on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my home screen and that’s why I said shameless app self-promotion not that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made the home screen app itself anyway why other people would want to post it. I don’t know. It’s up to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, who knows? A lot of people like to know that. A lot of people like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share their home screens. A lot of people ask us or other people they know on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is your home screen? There used to be a whole site dedicated to it by somebody. I forget who.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was one of our Apple blogger friends, right? Yeah, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people do that. So in the app, there is a share button, and it says tweet, which I don’t want to do. Open in Safari, I
⏹️ ▶️ John suppose that’ll take me to the URL. And confirm app detection where you can go and confirm that it got your, you know, did
⏹️ ▶️ John the image recognition. I did all that, but other people can’t find my home screen. People were asking me when are you going to
⏹️ ▶️ John share your home screen? I feel like I did. I feel like it should be easier for people to find my home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Not that they care. Like my screen, my home screen is a mess. So if you want to know what’s actually on it, like I said, I had to fill in a row of
⏹️ ▶️ John icons before, uh, I had to rearrange things to be in my thumb. I’m not really happy with my home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, it’s going to change, but it’s just the usual stuff. Like, uh, I don’t know if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything exciting on here. I’ve got the main apps that I use every day, which is Overcast, Twitterific,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Safari, Gmail app, which I use for my email. I’ve got, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the dock, I’ve got phone, photos, video, music. I’ve got Dropbox on here, the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John Messages, FaceTime, Google Maps and Apple Maps, Contacts. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just starts to tail off after that. I’ve got the WWDC app in, like, in a spot that has always been on my front
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. and I’ve been doing that for the past few years, just for the hell of it. Wait, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John is that there? Is it to watch the videos? No, I don’t use it, but like every year, I replace it with the new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the app. Like rather than having to rearrange everything, it is essentially a placeholder for itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you have an app on your home screen that by definition you don’t use for 51
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks out of every year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I use it on and off, but like there’s tons of apps in here that I don’t use all the time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how? That’s like a prime spot. It’s like right in thumb scanning range too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t have it. I have it far away. I have it in a bad spot, right? It’s in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John row. It’s far away from my thumb. It’s like I have to reach anything on that edge, you know? I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John I could swap it with settings or whatever. Like a lot of my problem has to do with muscle memory for where things used to be when
⏹️ ▶️ John I could reach the whole screen with my thumb. I still keep reaching for upper left for Safari, but it’s not there anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s too damn far away, but I still reach past where it is. So I have to adjust things. And the Google Authenticator,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use that very often, but I do want it on my home screen. So there’s just not enough apps that I use frequently enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to be deserving to be on the home screen. So then it’s like, maybe I should move these off to find icons that look nicer. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really not happy with the way this thing looks. I really don’t like the Instagram icon. It still looks like iOS 6 and it’s kind of mucking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the most baffling home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, this home screen is a mess. Like this is not the way I want it. Very few things, the only things that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure about more or less are Twitter, Ifrica and Overcast, which are really the main two apps I use every day. Gmail and
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari used to be in totally different places and I keep reaching for their old positions and
⏹️ ▶️ John Messages is kind of okay. I didn’t use it as much before I had an iPhone. I mean, Riposte, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use app.net a lot?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do, still check it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. And the iTunes Store, are you buying new albums a lot?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s on your home screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the App Store on the main page because I do manual updates. App Store, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the purple iTunes Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes Store, I’m like, it starts to tail off. It’s like, what else should I have in there? So I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John think like the official Apple stuff, you know? Like the main, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use a lot of these apps a lot. So I just, I don’t know. I have to sort it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is worse than the camera sound effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I’ve just moved to a new device. My iPod touch home screen I was very happy with, but here I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of lost until I figure it out. And the subsequent screens are even worse. It’s just kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You only get one more row. It can’t, like, you can’t blame that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not. It’s the row and the sizing. The sizing threw off all my good positions of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, now that is a bad position. I would never put like calendar on the upper left. I don’t use it at all. That
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be where Safari is. It’s impossible to reach from my thumb. So I gotta, you know, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to put something that I basically don’t launch there. And why is calendar on the front page? I guess so I can see the date, I guess, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the official calendar. I don’t use Apple’s calendar, I use Google calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, the thing that drives me nuts about your home screen, which R. Jonesy pointed out to me, is you made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rookie iPhone user mistake of having contacts and phone on the same screen, because you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do, to the best of my knowledge anyway, You can do everything in contact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything that you can do in contacts, you can do in the phone app. So having both is just completely wasteful and redundant.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t use either one of those apps. I don’t use the phone, I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contacts. That’s the thing, like Mac people make fun of Windows people for maximizing all their windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think iPhone people can make fun of former iPod Touch people for having the contacts app.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I said the only reason it’s there is because it’s like an official Apple app
⏹️ ▶️ John that actually contains some data that I might ever want to look at. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John you get through all the phone, but I don’t use the phone app. I don’t use, why would I ever go into the contacts app? What would I do
⏹️ ▶️ John there? Like if I’m gonna send someone a message, I do it from messages. If I’m gonna call someone, I do it from, you know, like I’m not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m not using, it’s just there, it’s there for the same reason Notes is. Like where the hell’s Notes there? It’s just the official
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, I have 50 Notes apps. Why is Notes on the front page? Because it’s the Apple one, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to address your, what I think is the most egregious icon taking up space on your home screen, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the WWDC one. One of the big advantages of having a partially or completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco empty bottom row on your home screen is that you can then place temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use icons in that bottom row. So like whenever I go to a conference or anything, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put conference related apps in the bottom row. Whenever I’m going on a trip, if there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travel related apps for the trip I’m going on, I’ll put those in the bottom row.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t like that idea. Not running a boarding house here. I’m gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey temporary room for Rogers to come in.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m going to eventually get my home screen to the way I like it. It will settle down. I
⏹️ ▶️ John had many, many years to hone my, because the iPod Touch never changed. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John many years to get that form factor right. I’ll settle it down. I mean, I don’t know. Like really at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, the home screen is so damn big that it just seems like there’s just not enough icons that I care about
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to be there. Like I said, it’s really just that little row of three. I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John Instapaper, Overcast, Twitterific, Letterpress, the one game I still play a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I guess Instagram. And then everything else is just like, man, I guess Safari. And people are asking
⏹️ ▶️ John why I have videos and music in the dock. Videos, occasionally I do watch. I have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of little old TV shows and anime things and movies and stuff in there. Occasionally I do watch
⏹️ ▶️ John things like that or more likely open something for the kids so they can look at it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Music, I don’t use either, but why is that there? Because it’s like, It’s in the doc. It’s the official,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the doc I don’t think is a great place. I never thought the doc was a great place. Like people, oh put your most important things in the
⏹️ ▶️ John doc, that way they’ll always be there. I don’t think it’s good for thumb reaching. You know what I mean? Yeah, it used to be better for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I never thought it was good. I always thought basically like, Overcast has essentially got the prime spot here. Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I do every day. I listen to podcasts in the car, you know, Overcast. It’s the first thing, you know, I launch Tordorific,
⏹️ ▶️ John I launch Overcast. So they were both like in the hot spots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And then you got Safari, Gmail, Messages, that’s probably good
⏹️ ▶️ John But I keep missing them. I keep going to their old spots. So I really need to make messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ll figure it out eventually. And I don’t like how it looks either. Aesthetically, it’s kind of gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we had your home screen on the topic list, I never imagined we’d get this much enjoyment out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my home screen on the topic list was dumb. And everyone who hates this topic, I agree with you. Ha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It’s funny because the only reason I even downloaded homescreen.is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because we were talking about it. Like I thought it was a little bit silly. I mean, it’s mildly intriguing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what somebody puts on their home screen, but I don’t know. It’s it was like one of those silly fads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just flew by Twitter and I was, you know, I was seeing thousands of home screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know that seeing it, how unbelievably bad you are at managing your own home screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does make me feel better about myself a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John My home screen looks better than both of yours though. Marcos is a ghost town. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, he’s got the dot on Instapaper which truncates the name. That’s just, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the dot is bad enough, but then having the dot actually push the name out like the blue dot does sometimes, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in your home screen. You gotta look at that all day. And then the Instagram is screwing
⏹️ ▶️ John up your home screen too. Because look at all the other nice iOS 70 style icons and all of a sudden Instagram’s there saying, hey, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at me, I’m from iOS 6. No good. Casey’s looks like an
⏹️ ▶️ John explosion of bad clip art. Like gift wrap
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is truncated with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a red dot. I don’t like the icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Baby connect has it has it the icon exactly the icon you would think baby connect had. ESPN football
⏹️ ▶️ John one is like we just took our logo and shrunk it down. That’s an icon, right guys? Moneywell’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John too hot looking. Fastex does not have feet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco he’s got three folders
⏹️ ▶️ John on his front page. Three folders. That is three folders, but an empty row. I need these
⏹️ ▶️ John things to be two taps away at all times, but I’m not going to put anything in the bottom row. If I use fantastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody know if I tried searching the app store? And this was futile. I went to read all the stupid descriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John after disclosing them. I was looking for a calendar app that would show me my Google calendar. Does that
⏹️ ▶️ John not exist? Does Google not have one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. Slow down. If Google, if your Google account is one of the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts in your phone. Is that the only way to do it? I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right. Because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it because I don’t want to do that. I was just hoping like this is a Gmail app that just says I’m an app and I will just connect you
⏹️ ▶️ John to Gmail. It’s mostly a web view anyway, whatever. Like I’m not saying it’s like native versus web, but I figured I
⏹️ ▶️ John was looking at what, you know, calendars five or fantastic or many of the other much better calendar apps that maybe I have a fighting chance
⏹️ ▶️ John of actually using if they would connect directly to my Google calendar without having me added
⏹️ ▶️ John as a calendar thing. And, you know, in my cloud account, someone says sunrise will do it. I saw I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple in there. Truth is, I really don’t look at my calendar on my phone, so I don’t know, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John are you looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, seriously. Because I figure
⏹️ ▶️ John now, maybe I’ll be on the phone with somebody and want to look at a calendar thing at the same time. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just trying to figure out how my usage might change, now that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a net connection everywhere instead of, because previously, I would never need to do that because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d be in my house with Wi-Fi, or I work at Wi-Fi, it usually means I’m near my computer and I could look at Google Calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John the big you know the web version which is what I use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh this is amazing. See I think one of the reasons why like this this does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid I agree a whole service devoted to sharing your home screen that does basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else that does sound stupid but it’s kind of it’s like looking at people’s houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like you kind of it’s kind of interesting you can tell a lot about a person by what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have on their home screen how it’s arranged maybe what their background is. What
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell from mine is this person just got an an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very true. Like I’m intrigued, John, like you have rotation lock on because, you know, I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like to be controlled, controlling that, that factor, but your battery is not fully charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m kind of surprised that you let, and of course, you know, your, your Verizon and Wi-Fi coverage are both kind of weak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m kind of surprised you let that out. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my battery is plenty charged, like a brand new iPhone six, that is a long battery life there. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Verizon signal, the cell signal in my house is terrible. Verizon is the best in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John signal. Some carriers can’t even get a signal inside my house. This is why I have a Verizon iPhone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John two bars, I’ll take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, I just noticed on your home screen that the wonderful new fast text icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not being recognized because that version is not yet in the app store. You should really fix that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I know. Don’t even get me started.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lacey doesn’t have a dot next to it. Do they really need to truncate for the dot end?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that with the blue dot too, but like, you don’t think that, like there’s plenty of room for the full name
⏹️ ▶️ John and the dot. It should know, it should do a better job of like, if there is room, like next to day one, the gift wrap thing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this room, you could show the rest of gift wrap, shift that dot over, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and they also could just put the dot on the corner of the icon the way badges are done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like maybe put it on the left corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so that it doesn’t hide
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand who that badge is for. Like, for people who have beta apps but don’t know they have beta apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John you forget which one is a beta I don’t know.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are paying them to manage all this for you, you don’t have to worry about disks failing. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your computer doesn’t backup properly to Backblaze after a certain amount of time, it will email you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warn you, hey, something’s wrong, we haven’t heard from you in a while. So many problems this protects you from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have these great mobile apps also for iOS and Android where you can browse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your files right from your device, you know, the files on your home computer so if you go on a trip or something, you forgot a file,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can access it there, you can also share the files right from your device. Very very handy. Backblaze was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco founded by ex-Apple engineers, they respect the Mac quite a lot and their app is fully native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac. This is not like a weird Java app or some other weird runtime. It is a native app. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs very well. I’ve backed up many terabytes of stuff to Backblaze over the years. I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for, you know, ever since before they were a sponsor. I was even using them then. And I use them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my computer, my wife’s computer, my mom’s computer. It’s great this weekend for Thanksgiving. If you’re going home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set it up on your parents’ computers. It’s fantastic because then if it doesn’t hear from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parents’ computers in a while, it’ll email you if you’re the account holder. So you can like then go help out your parents, say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your backup’s not working, let me go fix it. Backblaze, I love it. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unthrottled, you can upload as quickly as you can. I’ve had issues with a few other providers with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and I’ve never had an issue with Backblaze. It really is simple, it really is just five
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I’d like to yell at Marco for a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gladly. Where’s my freaking overcast Mac app?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, wait, before you yell at him about that, why do you want a Mac Overcast app?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so the reason I want a Mac Overcast app is because I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a lot of my podcast listening at work and if I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that, I’d like to do it on my Mac because it seems silly, in my personal opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have your phone or your iPad out just for the purposes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to a podcast when I have a perfectly functioning computer right in front of me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that would do the trick. And yes, I am aware that Overcast has a web app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, it is very good. No, it’s not. I mean, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s really not. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible. Good. Either way. But now that I’ve become addicted to smart speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I must have that in my life. And I can’t get that through HTML5 without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you spent going away for 10 years and you know, reinventing half of the internet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to know where my overcast for Mac app is, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so first of all, you know, there’s there’s a couple of cases to be made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, a couple of different options to take. Obviously, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the web app better. That is that is point number one. And if the web app is better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will read it will remove a lot of the reasons why people might want a Mac app. Not all of them, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not some big ones, but it will remove many of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would want a Mac app. It would also be a heck of a lot easier in many regards than making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole Mac app, especially because I’ve never made a Mac app before, so I don’t know anything about all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AppKit’s intricacies and weirdnesses and limitations, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I would have to learn all that from almost from scratch. I’m sure some iOS knowledge would carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over but not a whole lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you did write a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. Okay, I should clarify. I wrote one Mac app, the Tumblr backup app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was terrible. It was very clearly my first Mac app ever written. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent maybe two hours on it. And most of the actual work was done in a PHP file that was embedded in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app itself. Are you really serious? I am totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey serious. Oh, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. Because it was like connecting to the Tumblr API and making a bunch of downloads and making all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these directories and everything. And I had actually already written the PHP script just for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own personal use to back up my own Tumble log. And I asked David one day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, can I make a backup app? Because people keep asking me about this. And, you know, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me just make a Mac app. And so I just made like a wrapper that wrapped, executing that PHP script.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s it. Anyway, so I, I basically have no Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge. So that’s the reason? Well that’s a reason. So another reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, how do I put this gently? You don’t, you just let it rip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at other apps that are made by individual developers in the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, podcast RSS kind of space. Look at other apps that started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on iPhone, then went to iPad, and then went to Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then for many of them development basically stopped and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see this in a few apps that I used to use and it kind of scares me because clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean I don’t know I don’t know what anyone’s story is I haven’t looked into any of these in detail but it sure looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you when you go to that third platform especially because the Mac is so different from iOS it sure looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of developers just get stuck because there’s just so much to keep up with at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have these three different you know possibly these three different code bases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different platforms moving at different times. As the platforms advance, you have to try to keep up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And it just seems like the Mac app is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kiss of death for indie developers who started on iOS. It’s like, I’m going to make a Mac app. And then, inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t seem like they sell very well. I’ve never heard of anybody saying they made a ton of money off their Mac apps after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they came from iOS first. I mean, obviously, if you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity, professional software, that’s a different story. But in this kind of space, I haven’t heard of great success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So I’m very scared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it basically bogging me down, weighing me down, and making it very hard for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep everything updated. So that’s a major point. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think Overcast is really making enough money where it makes sense for me to pay somebody else to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I don’t think it would bring in enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money itself, really, to justify the expense of somebody else making it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it’s the kind of thing where if it’s going to exist, I’m going to have to make it. And so, again, that just scares me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a total engineering bandwidth perspective. That is scary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing is, how much of a gain am I getting from the web app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result? So to me the big things are smart speed and offline file saving. And those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are both very big things. And there’s a few other things like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly before, but I have a file upload feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s only enabled on my account right now. And I developed this a long time ago. It’s probably been there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a year. And I was initially going to launch with file upload support where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a special folder, just like your inbox or your uploads and you upload files to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and then you can play arbitrary files. This is useful for me because I record the Howard Stern show and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can play the Howard Stern files in my podcast app which is which is very convenient. I built the whole feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there it’s built out on S3 and I was a little scared with business concerns and things like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piracy concerns and like you know takedown notices and like if I don’t have to be responsible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these files for both the costs and liabilities of hosting people’s uploads, that would certainly be ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At WWDC, when iCloud Drive was announced, I thought, you know what, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to release that S3 uploads feature that I made. Ideally, I’m going to rebuild this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature using iCloud Drive and very easily also support Dropbox, like if it’s if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s easy to also support anything else that uses the document picker, which it probably is, I could do stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a way better feature. That being said, that will never work in the web app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are certain things like that, like handoff I can do from the web. A lot of people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know this. You can do handoff from web apps to iOS apps and vice versa. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do a handoff playback, but it isn’t as good or as easy from the web. And there’s a few little gotchas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The web, I’m always facing issues of like different browsers being a pain in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the butt about something. One of the biggest problems actually and this could end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being really problematic depending on the direction that web browsers go is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mixed content security you know right now it’s considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad for SSL if you have a page served over HTTPS that includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any assets that are not served over HTTPS the problem is overcast does not host the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast files because that would be insanely expensive and bring a a lot of other problems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lack of control, lack of download stats for the publishers, things like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most podcast files are hosted on regular HTTP links that are not HTTPS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because who cares? So my web interface is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure. So almost every Overcast player page has this mixed security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And that prevents a lot of things. For example, it also prevents me from ever making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Twitter card that includes the audio player feature, which is really annoying, because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love for Overcast’s Twitter links to have a built-in player and a card. If anybody uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the card interface, I don’t know. I don’t know how Twitter works. But Twitter cards are required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be all HTTPS, including all the resources they load, including the media they load. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t do that unless I proxy all those files, which again is very expensive and has a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco associated with it. I’m also completely held
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the whims of browser developers. Let’s say Chrome decides, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we think something is bad and we’re going to stop supporting it next week because of security or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that something is some kind of behavioral detail of the HTML5 audio player or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that, I’m just screwed. There’s all these problems with the web app approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s not worth killing the web app. having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast on Mac be the only way you could play overcast files on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s a lot of reasons why a web app might not be the or might probably shouldn’t be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way you can play things you know that makes sense like relying on on a web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app force for the kind of functionality I do I mean if you’re making something else that’s a whole different story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re relying on serving mixed security level resources with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this cutting-edge html5 audio player. And if I if I would try to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in things like effects and speeds into it, which some of that can be done with some of the new audio API’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart speed still can’t, which is unfortunate, although it would have to be written in JavaScript. So that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horribly slow. Anyway, the point is, I’m relying on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of like little edge cases and cutting edge features of web browsers to make this work at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s not a good place to be in because that could change at any time. I also I also just hate web development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so sick of it from having done so much of it in the last 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years or whatever. I’m so tired of web development. The idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of making a really amazing JavaScript player for the web does not interest me very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will eventually have to make it better. I was actually going to start doing that today, but I got sidetracked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t really answered your question at all, but that should give you some idea of where my head is on this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not started a Mac app, and I still am not sure if I’m going to make one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you do just like a little player app for the Mac that, you know, hand off or otherwise. You’re not gonna, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna like make a Mac version of the entire Overcast app where you can see all your playlists and edit them or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just a simple way to say somehow you will find your way to the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to play somewhere else and you will say play this on my Mac and that will let Casey, you know, use
⏹️ ▶️ John his play pause button on his keyboard to, you know, like, just, just a playback
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And I guess you’d have to either hand off from the web handle from the iOS app, or something similar, but really, what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be handing off is just the URL. And then once you’re into the Mac app is like, play this now. And it would, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess, have to show a title and get some information and maybe show some artwork, but it would save you from having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the, you know, the full UI. And it would so clearly just be like a player.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but at that point, Like, like, why half asset? Like what? Like, if I if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all I’m gonna do, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I guess anything’s better than the current web
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what you can do then is on the web app, which you’d be like, well, the web app might work for you. But if it doesn’t work for you, click
⏹️ ▶️ John this button and it’ll open, you know, whatever, you know, x overcast, whatever URL that will launch
⏹️ ▶️ John the overcast app, it’s installed. And you know, with that URL, then you’ll be off, you know, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, it would solve Casey’s problem anyway. Like he doesn’t need the full overcast app on his Mac. He just wants to be able to play
⏹️ ▶️ John without it, you know, independently. And I guess maybe it would be like, what would it do when it got
⏹️ ▶️ John to the end of the track? Would you send it to the entire playlist full of URLs and metadata? Would it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, would it be slaved kind of like your Mac is the watch and the phone is running overcast and it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John slaved out to communicating across a handoff initiated connection to feed it what the
⏹️ ▶️ John next track is? I don’t know. Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, ultimately, like all of my syncing code, that’s all Mac compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the audio processing code that’s all Mac compatible. All I’m really talking about is I’d have to basically write the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire UI from scratch. But the UI doesn’t necessarily have to be that complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On iOS it’s complicated because they do a lot of customization, like a lot of appearance customization to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my, you know, my fonts and my styles and everything. On OS X maybe I don’t need to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I haven’t looked into any of this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John got to do what Icon Factory did and port UIKit to the Mac first, right? That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty big prerequisite. I’m not sure I’m going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They already did it for you. It’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought they abandoned it because nobody was interested.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, probably, because it’s just a ridiculous prerequisite to writing a Mac app. You think you’re going to save time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, what did we sign ourselves up to maintain now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So anyway, that’s why I don’t have one yet, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have one in the future. There’s a bunch of other stuff I want to do first, and this is the problem, too. like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I work on a Mac app, which will probably be a six-month distraction, at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or do I spend that six months making the iOS app even better? Do I tackle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big problems like streaming, maybe like chapter support, things people ask for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chapter support, I’m less keen on because there’s so little demand for it, but the people who do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demand it are very loud. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very little demand for it in reality, and very few podcasts even have chapters. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s kind of low on the list. But like streaming, that’s a big deal. That’s something that I really need to do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes that makes some other nice features better and possible. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say you have you’re playing something on your phone and I implement handoff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you hand it off to a Mac app or vice versa. Let’s say the the app that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco receiving the handoff has not yet downloaded that file. If I don’t have streaming yet that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks because that means that you handed it off and then you have to sit there and wait while that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file downloads before you can play any of it. That’s not very good. And yeah, maybe I could do some kind of weird little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lansing thing where I try to send it quickly but that’s also hacky and not great. Ideally it would have streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can click any overcast share link, any handoff link, anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, and just start playing the file if you have an internet connection which if you’re receiving handoff stuff and browsing Twitter you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. So just start playing the file. You know, just start wherever, start at a certain time stamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even. Like if you start in the middle, that’s fantastic. If I can do that, that’s very hard to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, that’s what I actually want. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many features that are kind of being held back by streaming. That’s why I’m streaming is like is the thing I’m tackling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next. I kind of wrote some of it and then got sidetracked with other problems. And there’s always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something like that. You know, know, next year when iOS 9 comes out, maybe iOS 9 adds more things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to do. You know, when am I ever going to have time to make an entire Mac app? This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what worries me. And when I look around and I see like the kiss of death of the Mac apps from all these other indie developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t look like a good idea to do. I am intellectually, I’m interested in doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to do it, but it doesn’t look like I should do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, and I think the problem that you’re running into is you have Marco Myopia or Myopia, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the point is, because this is not something that you necessarily feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is missing from your world, it’s never going to happen. And that’s that makes sense. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I don’t I don’t fault you for that. But like, would the iPad app have happened if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t kind of accidentally make it a few weeks ago? Like what was the genesis of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad app? Remind me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a bug with using storyboards as launch images that would enable iPad sizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPad mode on apps that were not actually iPad apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And do you think you would have still had an iPad app version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it wasn’t for that? Probably not yet. Exactly. Okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I’m kind of driving at is the iPad thing didn’t really scratch an itch for you. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only reason it exists today is because, well, it kind of accidentally farted its way into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existence. And I think the Mac app, again, because it doesn’t really scratch an itch for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always going to be a lower priority. That makes sense, because if it doesn’t really scratch an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itch, you’re not going to care as much as you would if it was scratching an
⏹️ ▶️ John itch. I don’t think it’s so much about what he wants. He’s trying to address a market. He doesn’t feel like there’s market demand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Correct me if I’m wrong, Mark, but it’s not just like, oh, well, I wouldn’t use it there for a while. If 50% of your users
⏹️ ▶️ John were clamoring for a Mac app, you’d be considering it much more strongly whether you use it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s complicated. So first of all, it there is certainly the calculus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes on about like, okay, well, how many people are likely to even want this and use this? And you know, is there any money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it? Is there going to be any meaningful user growth as a result of it? And you compare that versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much time it takes to implement the iPad version, I don’t think is doing much for me long term, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t think like I think podcasts, Most people who listen to podcasts probably listen on their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure other people have discovered this information already. I don’t think this is an outrageous guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad app was only worth doing because it was relatively easy and is not going to impose a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing cost of maintenance with things changing. The way I did it was fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low effort. I did an adaptive UI with a split view. So I’m doing a lot of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock UI stuff. It is never going to win me a design award or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one is ever going to look at the Overcast iPad app and say, this is an amazing iPad app. This really shows off what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad can do. It doesn’t. It’s not. That’s not why I made it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t enough of a market on the iPad, as far as I know, to justify doing that for this type of app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did what made sense because basically it was cheap and easy. The Mac is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally different story. The Mac, I’m guessing the size of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible audience of people would play podcasts on a Mac with this with this app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably about the same size as the iPad audience. But it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to actually get there. It takes way more effort because I have to rewrite the entire UI from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maintain that over time and deal with you know, like, like, it’s so it’s so nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to like, you know, listen to core intuition and hear Daniel Jockett and Matt and Reese talk about like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible the Mac App Store is being some week with some terrible signing bug or something like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so nice to listen to that and know that I don’t have to worry about that because I don’t have anything in the Mac App Store. And the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, if I did this, I’d be in the Mac App Store. I’d want to use things like HandOff and iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco syncing and stuff like that, like for certain things, make things better. So like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right going to the Mac would be a very expensive proposition in time and an ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance. And I am very doubtful that enough of a market there exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that worth the loss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I understand it. I don’t know. It’s hard to say because I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no more convinced that I am right and also that you are wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I want a Mac app really badly, but for all I know, I’m the only one. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it very well could be that I’m steering you directly into financial ruin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figuratively speaking. But man, I feel like it would be a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good differentiator as well, because something what has a Mac app does downcast have Mac app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They definitely do. I don’t know. I don’t know if instacast does. I’m not sure. Downcast definitely does. I think instacast
⏹️ ▶️ John I think yes, I guess does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And underscore released a pod wrangler Mac app, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a beta capacity, and it was very much what you’re describing visually. I mean, it was super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple, very stock, nothing to nothing too exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was functional, and it got the job done. And I miss having that quite a bit. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not saying I’m the only one, but I may be the only one at the same time. Now, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you listen to podcasts as you’re you’re listening to fish as you work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m listening to music as I work. It’s often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fish your your when you’re in front of the computer. My point is, you’re not listening to podcasts most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I almost never listen to podcasts on my Mac or any Mac, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why I have not been motivated to either make this or make the web app better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, that’s exactly my point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco earlier. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you’re exactly right. I mean, that is probably the biggest reason, honestly. It isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about market demand. The biggest reason is that I don’t care. There are features I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to enable that would be cool, like I mentioned some of the cool handoff stuff. I would love to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that in a Mac app, but ultimately, I would very rarely use my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app as far as I can predict, because I don’t listen to podcasts while I work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t concentrate on both. I know a lot of people are like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah. Now, let me ask you honestly, do you have any interest in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people tweeting at you or anything like that if they are interested in the Mac app, or is that not going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, people have tweeted at me about that before. Whenever I bring up the topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever someone else does, I always get people saying, well, I’d buy it. And that is nice to hear. That does help,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t really indicate to me how much of a market there is. It just says, like, the market is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably greater than zero. But that doesn’t really meet… Hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a handful of people on Twitter does not really tell me, this will probably bring in 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grand a year or something. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me something I need to know. Or this might bring in 20,000 new users a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t tell me any of that information.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got to charge $10 for it. $9.99. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the other thing. So maybe I could make more money with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bigger on the screen. And the bigger it is in square inches, the more money you could charge. That seems to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the logic that’s in people’s heads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, yeah. However, if I’m going to charge good money for it, and I probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it if I wasn’t gonna charge another five or 10 bucks for the unlock for the things like smart speed and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I’m gonna charge good money for an app, I want it to be really good. I don’t wanna charge money for a terrible app. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, again, this is going back to the half ass thing. I’m not gonna make a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app that has almost no features with a $5 in-app purchase to unlock it’s almost no features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s not a very, that’s just not, I don’t wanna do that. I would feel bad doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m also not gonna make one that I don’t feel good charging for and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release it for free and have that be it. So if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do it, I wanna do at least a reasonable job on it. It doesn’t have to be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it could be the same approach as the iPad where it’s like I’m going for pure utility value,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t need to be fancy with the UI, will never win an Apple Design Award or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people would never even notice or care it’s there, never get any recognition whatsoever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would at least want it to be functional and to have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basic features of, you know, the iPhone app only has three levels of navigation. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like it’s a very complicated UI. So I don’t know, I mean, I could do a basically little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three pane kind of thing. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes sense. I just don’t want it to make sense. I want you to say, you know what, that’s a brilliant idea. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I would honestly I would like to do it because I’m curious about Mac development. This is one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why every time there’s a new OS X release I hope for some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bringing over of something from UIKit into AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of like replacement to AppKit that is more like UIKit because there are so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pretty fundamental differences between the two, between the way they work that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and I don’t know how hard it’s going to be yet. I’ve never tried really, but I know it’s going to be really irritating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s going to slow me down a lot as I learn all these flaws and limitations of AppKit and all these little weird behavioral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details and differences. And I think it would, you know, not only it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable some of my laziness, but I think it would serve Apple well to reduce that barrier between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two to make to make development for the Mac more like development for iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying bring over all of UIKit it because all of you it doesn’t make sense on the Mac and there’s a lot of things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac does that don’t make sense and you like it so I’m not saying they have to be unified but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to at least be closer together to be more similar than they are now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now like it is like the prospect of developing a Mac app for an iOS developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has all this expense that and all this risk I was just talking about and if Apple can do anything to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that barrier, to reduce the expense, to make it less overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional time to maintain a Mac app, then there will be more Mac apps and people will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be happier with their Macs and Apple will make more money on the Mac App Store and all these benefits. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope they’re going in that direction sometime soon. So maybe I should start a Mac app so they can then make everything easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year later. Yeah, we’ll see. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast for Mac. No. Thanks for the free sponsor this week. Studio Neat, Hover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Backblaze, and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally take the broadcast so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, on an extremely random note, you know what I think a little sliver of me kind of wants?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An overcast Mac app? Oh, no, that’s more than just a little sliver. I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am intrigued by the Golf R.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the car, the Volkswagen Golf? I thought he said golf too. We
⏹️ ▶️ John may have found another hover. Oh, golf, golf.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we did find another hover.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how they say it in the South. Of here in winter, we say golf. Fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m done talking to you two.
⏹️ ▶️ John So tell me what the golf are. Maybe you’re not Southern anymore. Maybe you’re becoming European because Americans don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like hot hatches. Oh, I hate hatchbacks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John absolutely hate hatchbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then why are you into the golf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I don’t know. That’s the problem. I need an intervention quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t like hatchbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like hatchbacks either, even though on paper they make a ton of sense because, you know, there’s just plenty of well,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s go far. Looks like it has rubber bands wrapped around its wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the tires are so low profile, it’s like hurting my butt just looking at the picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s marvelous. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a concept. Yeah, you definitely could not drive that in the state of New York. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our roads are not that good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I kind of want one. And I really like that blue actually that they do all the press shots in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, the problem that you’d have with this, I think, is that while it would be small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fun, it would most likely be a giant step down in so many interior amenities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and interior qualities things that… I’m not so sure. I think you might have ruined yourself with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current car, and it’s going to be hard to step down to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it looks like the inside of a hatchback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of shiny stuff. It’s a little shinier, I will give you that, but it doesn’t look that dissimilar from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve got now.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the deal with flat bottom steering wheels?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that so like you can have your legs
⏹️ ▶️ John crunched up more? I don’t know. My theory, and I don’t know if this is correct, someone can correct me, is that flat
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom steering wheels have their origin in race cars where they cram the driver into some little tiny thing and there’s not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John room for a full steering wheel. So they had a flat bottom and that wormed its
⏹️ ▶️ John way up into cars where there’s plenty of room just because, oh, flat bottom steering wheel equals race car. That may be entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, but that’s the only theory I can come up with, because as far as I can tell, functionally speaking, I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John what advantage the flat bottom would give you, because you can already tell what orientation the wheel is because
⏹️ ▶️ John the spokes, you know, like if you’re if you’re looking for and the lumps like there’s so many other things that you can tell, like you don’t need a flat side
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I can tell what angle you can always tell like they’re not. It’s not a smooth, symmetrical wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t understand the flat bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think I kind of want one. I’d like not not enough that I would get rid of the 335,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s something appealing now that I’m a dad to having a little bit more trunk space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the 335 strong not big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think this would have more trunk space? It’s a pretty small car.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got one tiny child. You have plenty of trunk space. What do you think you’re storing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I don’t. I don’t know, man. But when I put the stroller in my trunk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m losing, well, without some seriously creative Marco-level packing, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey losing a significant amount of trunk just with the damn stroller. And the reason we got the stroller we got was strictly because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it folded up as small as it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you just wait a year, and then Declan can go in an umbrella-type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stroller, which is just so much smaller. They fold up so much smaller. And then they’re almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size like a skinny golf bag, where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then put it long ways either direction. And well, in your car, you probably can’t put it parallel to the car. But you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely put it perpendicular to the car. And yeah, fits great. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re talking about trunk space, this is not going to help you. Hatchbacks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, they have wider trunk openings. And more vertical space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, vertical space. And if you’re willing to fold the seats down, you can replace most of the interior with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively trunk space. But if you have a car seat there, like you’re not folding the seats down or at least not both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would almost guarantee that your current car, your 3 Series has overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly the same amount of space as this or slightly more for cargo area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe. And what you’re really, really, I mean, if you’re looking at like larger trunk space, you’re looking at either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hatchback or GT version of a 3 Series sized car, or you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a larger car, like a five series or an accord or something like that. Like that’s, I don’t think like if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do more trunk space, this is not the way to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t even know what I need trunk space wise. I just feel like it, it will probably become an issue sooner rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than later. Only if you let it. Fair point. The other thing I was curious to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your two cents on the both of you is, Erin has no desire for a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She has a 2007 Mazda six, which is I think as nicely appointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it came at the time. If memory serves and she loves that car. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably get murdered if I ever tried to take it away from her. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were to get her something different, what would we get her? The obvious answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me is X five, yellow used X five. The bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer, which is a little more unique, but probably a terrible idea is an SRT eight grand Cherokee,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is crazy fast and crazy fun. But it would she would be stopping at a gas station
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s happening to you that you’re considering quote-unquote high-performance SUVs
⏹️ ▶️ John why not What’s what’s going on? What do you mean? Why not? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like it’s like getting an off-road Lamborghini I
⏹️ ▶️ John know they’re working on an SUV, but I mean like, you know if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean it’s the it’s the wrong combination of things if you’re gonna get some sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of big, tall, four-wheel drive, SUV-ish type thing. Don’t get it with like low
⏹️ ▶️ John profile tires and a super fast, like you’re mixing things that don’t work together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but that’s what makes it so magical.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s what makes it so ridiculous. I keep trying, the Lamborghini was my example, but they’re making an SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can’t think, I can’t, it’s as if you had a Porsche SUV, but they make one. It’s as if you had a Ferrari SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve got one in the works too. So there’s no more examples I can use that are like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe like a Lotus, they’re probably gonna make SUVs too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s no good examples,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, like it’s not a good mix of things. If you’re gonna get something that’s big and tall and off-roady,
⏹️ ▶️ John get something that’s big and tall and off-roady, don’t try to make it into a performance car, because it doesn’t make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also, SUVs have a similar problem as what I was saying a minute ago about cargo space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being, you know, so like a lot of people get these compact SUVs that are based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size platform. in BMW land that would be definitely the X1, which is based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the actual 1 Series, and probably even the X3, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s based on a compact car. Definitely the Lexus RX is one of these. I think it’s the best-selling luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one by a long shot. So the problem is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a nice trunk size opening, and if you’re willing to lose all the seats temporarily you can carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large things in it, but if you have one or both of the seats up, you’re not getting that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more space. Sometimes you’re getting less space compared to just a larger sedan or especially if you’re, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to go wagon or, or like crossover style hatchback, um, you can often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more space than you can in an SUV or at least comparable space without actually having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get an SUV and deal with the, you know, very different and generally worse handling, the large size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst gas mileage, all that stuff. So if, if what you’re looking for is hauling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around large pieces of furniture occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SUV. You know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s your best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And but but even then, like if you’re going to get an SUV for cargo space reasons, don’t get a compact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one because they’re usually not any more space than a reasonable sized car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re going to have to go X5 size. You’re going to have to go like, you know, full size sedan base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or small truck base to get massive cargo space in an SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pasted your answer in the chat room. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s unaffordable.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were looking at an X5 suddenly. This is unaffordable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I wouldn’t buy it an X5 new I couldn’t afford it new it would have to be a few years old
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then you have to wait a little bit longer But this will have plenty of this this this solves your problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is SUV like it’s going to have Pretty good performance and tons of cargo
⏹️ ▶️ John space. This is no engine We’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tesla Model X by the way If you’re going Tesla You can just do the Model S because the Model S has tons of it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very large stand and it doesn’t have the engine in the front. So it has, the Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S has more space than my car by a pretty big margin. Cause it’s just, it’s like, I think it’s like four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches longer. It’s a very long car and it’s a huge SUV. It’s a huge sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it is basically as big as a sedan can get without being completely outrageous in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day and age. So I would say, if you’re gonna go Tesla, just get the Model S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I can’t believe, I was going to ask you if there’s suicide doors because it looked like the door handles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are budding up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, are budding up against the door handles in the front. And then I realized, oh, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually not gull wings, John. According to this website, they are falcon wings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are they faster? Do they open faster than the DeLorean doors? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Is that the idea here? Oh, no. I didn’t even realize they have those kind of doors. Now I take back the recommendation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind. No, I got to read this to you. Whoa, falcon wings. Calling them doors would be an understatement. earning serious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style points. They’re functional. First, Falcon wings open up and out of the way. E and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the narrowest of parking spots. You easily step not climb into a model X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s really stupid. I also don’t think this is a particularly good looking car.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. It’s like catfish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The, uh, I think that the Teslas are getting progressively less good looking like the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S I like it. No, the model S is a step up from the roadster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eh, the roadster was the Lotus. I know, but it was ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Model S, I think, was pretty good in person. In person, it does look large. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not look like a small car, because it isn’t one. But besides how large it is, it looks pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, the right answer to my question, which is purely hypothetical of what do you get as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a family bombing around car, it is a minivan. Without question, that is the right
⏹️ ▶️ John For one kid, though, I feel like that’s not time for a minivan. I mean, it likes. I’m just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hypothetically. For one kid, the largest you’re allowed to go is a Subaru Outback.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I think, especially, you have to decide. Do you want a car or do you want a truck? Or do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want an SUV? That’s the first decision, because you go into off in totally different directions if you decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want something that’s car-like. Because then maybe you can look at wagons, but still you’re looking at cars. If you want something that’s SUV-like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a whole different category of things. And I feel like that should rule out anything with low-profile
⏹️ ▶️ John tires, anything with performance aspirations, because you should be going off in a different direction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So the thing is, so I think the right answer is a minivan for like once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if, and when we ever have another kid and then all the, then the two kids want to bring their friends along to wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re going, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not saying it’s required.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should go and test drive a minivan and that will dissuade you from them because they’re so terrible to drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I should also point out that this con the context of what you’re saying is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d replace your wife’s car with not your car. Exactly. I think Aaron would kill
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Right? Yeah. But I’m just saying at some point you may end up having to you may have to drive
⏹️ ▶️ John the minivan and minivan driving is like It’s just it’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, so here’s the thing Aaron and I have spoken about this in very big hypotheticals and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She has said she would Probably prefer to have an SUV but would absolutely entertain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea of a minivan But would absolutely vehemently refuse to have a wagon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s weird though. Yeah, a wagon is just like driving a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should really, really look at the 3GT, just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. It’s, if I wanted a Subaru Outback, I’d drive a Subaru Outback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, but it’s a Subaru Outback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really isn’t. If you see a Subaru Outback, it’s- It’s more like, think of it as an ugly 3 Series, really. An Outback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is definitely a wagon. Like an Outback is unquestionably a wagon. A 3GT does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really look like a wagon in person. Cause it’s a pretty different shape. Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, The giant backseat is amazing for car seats. It is so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has so much backseat room because it’s the Chinese platform, so it has the long wheelbase platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so amazing how much rear seat room there is in that car. And for car seats, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, this is all entirely hypothetical. I just thought it’d be an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussion to have that probably everyone will tell us that they hate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, screw them. It’s the after show. we want. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the answer is, is that you replace your wife who’s taking care of your child full time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you replace her car with whatever she wants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, absolutely. That’s the right answer to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. Without question, you are absolutely correct. I was just curious, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you guys do in that in this hypothetical where it’s probably going to end up being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a SUV or a minivan?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like wagons. And I think like it’s, it’s the great, it’s the greatest the greatest compromise between
⏹️ ▶️ John like you get a whole bunch of extra space but you still get to drive a car like a real life car like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing about it that’s not car like it handles that way the weight is usually similar like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s it’s far fewer compromise than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what i would have done if this was like a year or two ago and this was all happening and i needed to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family car absolutely would have rocked a ctsv wagon which is hideous it is like every other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much um it is unbelievably unbelievably hideous but god to just smoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything anything I run into except maybe Marco’s car maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh god that’d be fun. I mean you can look at like to answer you know what we do in this scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can I had the exact same scenario and I did do something and I got a 3GT for for Tiff got a 3GT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um I would you know among for given your priorities given Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities that I’m mostly just guessing based on her liking of the Mazda 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say, first of all, it’s worth looking into the current Mazda 6s. Do they still make them? I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and actually, they had several ugly years right after Aaron’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’ve gotten very pretty again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so look at that. I would argue that you’d,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so how long is Aaron likely to have this car? Are we talking like a decade, five years, less?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are we talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you mean like a hypothetical new one, you mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, I mean, her car we bought in 2007 and it’s 2014 and she’d probably kill me before she gave up that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re talking like, you know, pretty long-term. So you figure like, you know, you have to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself, like, are you going to have in this interval that you’re going to have this car, not forever, but just in the interval
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that she’s going to be likely to own this car, how many kids are you likely to have total and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how old will they be? Oh yeah. Fair point. And so you so yeah, so you have to look at that right? So in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next let’s say let’s say five to ten years in the next seven years, whatever it is, how many kids like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is your likely need going to be in this time span that should in that right there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because one kid, you’re fine with anything. One kid, you’re fine with the three series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is extremely likely that you’d be very fine with any full size sedan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a cord size five series size model. S would certainly do it. but it’s kind of overkill,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can do it. You know, a full-size sedan would serve you very well. Erin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently drives a full-size sedan. And so, you know, chances are she probably likes full-size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sedans. Right, right. So I would start with other full-size sedans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to go upscale, consider things like the Lexus ES, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not our style at all, but overall a very nice car. And it’s not that ridiculous, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tis’ mom drove them for years, and I spend a lot of time on them and various family trips with them. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold a ton. They’re huge cars. They’re based on the Avalon. And so they’re huge cars. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxurious inside and they’re not sporty at all. That’s the problem. But overall, they’re pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, things like the Accord. I mean, look, John, you have a family with two kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve never had an SUV, right? You have an Accord.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before I bought the Accord, what I would actually buy for myself if I was buying like a bigger car with more space,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I felt like I needed one is I would probably look at, I would maybe decide against, but I would look at
⏹️ ▶️ John Volvo wagons because I…
⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the day, I still have it in my head that Volvo was still the most safety
⏹️ ▶️ John focused company now that they’ve changed under seven times or whatever. Who knows if that’s still true. But I have good memories
⏹️ ▶️ John of Volvos and they make, I think they make a four wheel drive wagon that’s actually a wagon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would look at them. Maybe I would just decide that they’re way too expensive and that they don’t drive as well as
⏹️ ▶️ John a car I could never bring myself to pull a trigger. But I would look at that, because I see lots of people around the neighborhood driving
⏹️ ▶️ John around in Volvo wagons. And I like the idea of wagons to have something that’s car-like or whatever. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John would not be a nice car inside. And it would not handle nicely and not drive nicely. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ John have a feeling that it was safe, whether that’s true or not. So that’s what I would look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at. Volvo’s used to be very into offering five speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in the day, even in wagons. Is that still true?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. No, I had. That’s what I learned. That’s what I learned to stick on. I doubt it’s still true, I’m sure. Not anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think Volvo has changed a lot from the Volvo that I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in my youth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s what I would look at. And I think if I decided that a wagon was
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I wanted, I would wander over to the Audi. But in reality, I don’t have money for either one of these cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I have a Honda Accord, and that’s why I would continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy it. Well, and again, the key here is that if in this hypothetical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought exercise, it would almost certainly be like a two or three-year-old used car, because we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the money to spend on one of these ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John monstrosities. Yeah, I don’t like used cars. I mean, realistically speaking, if I ever really needed more, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would end up with a Honda Odyssey. That’s just what I would end up with. I would not like it, but that’s what I would get, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s tons of them around here. That is the minivan that I can most stomach. I have driven in one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not like them. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. And you can also, the world of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size sedans and medium-size SUVs like the X5 and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re looking at the luxury brands, you can do the same thing you do with your car. Get one that’s, you gotta use one. Get one that’s three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old or something. Like, get a three-year-old 5 Series or A6 I think would be a pretty solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. It’s a bit of money for that, but certainly cheaper than a Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I would start with full-size sedans and evaluate your needs based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how many kids you think you’re gonna have and how old they’re gonna be during this time span. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is a full-size sedan can hold enough for two kids. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t be the school bus that brings all of the kids on a field trip, but by the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is likely to happen, that might be like eight years from now. Because your kid’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco older by the time that’s actually a thing that happens. So that might be the end of this car’s lifespan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time this debate comes up, I always just think about our Volkswagen Rabbit that my parents
⏹️ ▶️ John took the three of us skiing in for a week routinely. That’s insane.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three kids, Volkswagen Rabbit, skis, ski equipment, boots, no rentals, like bringing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John with us, one week packing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the thing. Growing up, my family always had Corollas and then Camrys. And that was it. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were two kids, and that was it. And we made it work. you’ll make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work no matter what size car you have people make it work all the time people in Europe think we’re all big fat slobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re crazy for buying these giant things because because we are well they are right exactly they are right but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know families in Europe deal with much smaller cars and they just make it work like that’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do whatever size car you have you’re gonna make it work and and that’s it you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be more or less convenient certain times but also like you know don’t don’t choose your vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this imagined scenario of something that you might want to do once or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice while you have it. Like this is why so many people buy giant SUVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who will never really need a lot of that you know space or capability or off-road nests or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well what if I need to move furniture? Okay well how many times in the last three years have you moved furniture that needed an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SUV? Like you know ask yourself things like that. Rent
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Or pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 70 bucks to get it delivered because like, you know, how many times are you going to need to do that? You know, like it’s so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, look at look at your priorities like that, you know, just think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what you would actually need and use most days, like and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get something that fits that, because most of the time, you’re not going to be carting around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your kid and five of their friends in the next six years, like that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlikely to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re absolutely right. And on the list of things that I just do not understand, along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with people who don’t carry cash, is people who buy pickup trucks and use the pickup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bed to haul, like, pickup-y things twice a year, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like you’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do it zero times a year. They have covers on it. Nothing is allowed to touch the bed. You’ll scratch it. I don’t have a bed
⏹️ ▶️ John liner. Or I do have a bed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey liner, but you can’t scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John the bed liner. That’s why they have four-door pickup trucks. It’s a serious problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s massive sections of this country where a truck is just what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get. Like that’s just cult, that’s everybody has trucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fault is that Ford F-150, the best selling car in America for many, many years when we were growing up. I think it has
⏹️ ▶️ John been displaced by the Camry and the Accord now, but it’s still always in the top few.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it always depends whether you include fleet vehicles or not also.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but you’re so right about SUVs. Like the old SUV thing used to be like, oh, you’re never gonna take that off-road. But no one says
⏹️ ▶️ John that anymore because everyone realizes these are not made for off-road, like with the exception of maybe a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of Range Rover stuff, right? So everyone’s fine that they’re just cars, but then it’s like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is it that you’re getting? And so many SUVs have just squeezed in the edges so much that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have so little room for luggage, and they only have two rows of seats, and the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John seat is not more comfortable. And so it’s like, what you’re getting is a really tall, bad handling, gas guzzling
⏹️ ▶️ John car. And that’s what people want, because I need to be up high. Like, that is the big selling point, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be up high. There is some image stuff, like of, same thing with the image stuff of the pickup truck,
⏹️ ▶️ John like some part of your image, you know, you’re buying a car, like it’s like fashion. I’m the kind of person who drives a whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And some people feel like I’m the kind of person who drives a Lexus SUV, because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a suburban dad and I want to show that I’m a family man or whatever it is that you’re, whatever it is that you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John as John Roddick would say, repping with your vehicle, that’s part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John message, right? And it used to be that it was like off-road stuff, That went away so quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I feel like for the thing that you are presenting to yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are trading a lot with the SUVs because you’re no longer getting more luggage space. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never getting anything really off-road wise. A lot of them are just front wheel drive, not even four-wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. Like the best-selling models are always the front wheel drive ones. Yep. So it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big sacrifice in terms of cost and mileage and handling and the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of tipping over or whatever other things you might be giving up for this image that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John putting out. In the end, plain old boring cars and maybe wagons
⏹️ ▶️ John still offer the best compromise in exchange for having something that says nothing that you want to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Like, no one can, what does a Camry say about you? It says you bought the default car.