96: The Windows of Siracusa County
19 Dec 2014We wouldn’t use a Siracusa County title lightly.
Episode Description:
- Casey upgrades his podcasting setup after an awkward Apple store experience
- Follow-up:
- App Store Woes
- Crossy Road financials
- PS4 DLNA support is coming (via @asendra_)
- Plex has announced PS4 support (via @returnedlast)
- However, rollout will be staggered
- Sleazy Twitter app scans
- Nick Arnott corrects Marco
- Christmas comes early for John, perhaps because of Romain Moisescot
- Pastebot (RIP)
- Microsoft Acquires Hockey App
- Should HTTP or HTTPS be the default browser state?
- Finally, a very special after-show, starting with John missing WindowShade (image).
Sponsored by:
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of closing some of my pro windows that have been open for five years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I thought better of it. I have upgraded my podcasting setup, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have not yet posted about it on my site.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has it really happened then, Casey? The podcast setup upgrades in the woods,
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one hears about it on your blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have spent $10 before tax to upgrade my podcasting setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now what could that be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will not guess, but I would love to hear you try.
⏹️ ▶️ John $10 for the Snickers bars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna I’m guessing it’s either software. Nope. Or Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I was gonna guess like a giant blanket or something. But you sound you still sound a little bit echoey. So it’s probably not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s the blanket still on the wall, even though Aaron keeps asking me to take it down the chat room is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on it. It is not a spit filter, although I like that even better than pop filter. The microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m using now has one built in. Note is not gold audio table. No, it is not a heating pad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. 10 whole dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t get gold audio cable for $10. Yeah, exactly. At least gold gold cables start at $30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I will give you one better I will try to try to give this away. I purchased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this $10 item from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you purchase anything for $10 from Apple? That’s not software. Yeah, how about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was gonna say Yeah, yeah Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter is like 19 Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like you can’t go into the Apple Store and buy anything for less than at least 15 I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey succeeded in doing exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm. What does Apple sell for $10 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not software He said so it is not software hmm was it was that it’s actual like regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price Or is it they don’t really put something on sale at the stores? What do they sell at $10? Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a sim removal tool and somehow pay $10 for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is much more green protectors are 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least this is much more entertaining than I thought it was going to be actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has become a topic. It’s like what can you buy in an Apple store for $10?
⏹️ ▶️ John wait a second is it a retail Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online? Yes, no, no, no retail and the chat room the chat room has figured it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh magsafe adapter. Yes $10. Yep. Oh, wow Wow, I thought though I thought that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be $19 too just because it’d be like well We can’t sell something for $10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought for sure it must have been like a third-party product sold in an Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ John So is this so your your laptop won’t run out of battery power during the podcast or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to use my work Hi res anti-glare 2011 MacBook Pro 15-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro But the fans constantly screamed no matter what I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no matter what I did they were always screaming and Marco was very gentle about basically telling me to shut up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and deal and use a different computer and so Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had gotten Aaron a brand new MacBook Air. This was a few months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got her a brand new MacBook Air and I started borrowing that in order to record well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, unbeknownst to Marco and John, I was doing this on battery power on Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which if Dan Benjamin ever heard this, he will probably fly to Richmond and murder me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy you never told us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. You’re welcome. That was the right call. Now I’m still on Wi-Fi, but now at least I’m plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Wi-Fi thing I’m less concerned about because I know you’re a nerd, I know your setup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I know that you are probably right next to your router. I am indeed. And and Wi-Fi is not as unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as as it used to be you know modern Wi-Fi is really not that bad If you’re if you’re anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near the near the base station But the running on battery thing that would that would stress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me out like crazy Yep Like even if even if I was 100% like I would always have that stress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if I even if I had a fully charged 8-hour battery, it would still stress me out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep And the MacBook Air does last an eternity But I kid you not those times that I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you I needed to go because my battery was dying That was not a lie. That’s because the battery was dying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and real-time follow-up from me to me It was ten dollars and fifty two cents with tax.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. That’s incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that in that while I will also say that I walked in with my dad who happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be in at the time and I was all smug and happy with myself because he has a 5s. I have a 6 I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to go in use the Apple Store app I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Apple pay within the app and walk out and not have to speak to anyone Well, that would
⏹️ ▶️ John that would mean that you could actually find this adapter on a wall display where you could get it and someone didn’t Have to go into
⏹️ ▶️ John the back or whatever and get it for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? So as it turns out it was on the floor Although it was on the opposite side of the store from where I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was if you looking at any given Apple Store Any normal one anyway, and you know the genius bars in the back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was to the right It turns out it was to the left And so I grant well actually the person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Accosted me in a happy way when I walked in because it was surprisingly empty and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directed me to the thing and I said Okay, I’ll just pay for it with the app, you know in a nice way you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can go away now Well, then I go to open the Apple Store app and it hangs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I think to myself self. I’m a smart guy. I know there are I beacons all over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place in this store I wonder if having Bluetooth on is somehow confusing it So I turned Bluetooth off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forced quit, started again. Nothing. Still hangs. Self? Maybe it realizes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Apple Store Wi-Fi is nearby. You should kill the Wi-Fi and that’ll do the trick. Well then, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it even work after that? Yeah, because I have AT&T.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but I’m saying, like, does it even know that you are in the Apple Store if it doesn’t have one of those things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, good point, actually. I didn’t think about that. That’s a very fair point. So I forced quit the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turned off the Wi-Fi, started the app again, didn’t work. So fine. have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go over there to someone with my tail between my legs and say, Hey, can I play for this please? Cause I kind of can’t do it on my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all by myself. And so then, um, this nice person allows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to pay and I say to my dad, not thinking really about what I was saying. Oh, my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Apple pay moment is ruined. And then the, the gentleman said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, no, it’s not. You can Apple pay right here. And then because I had like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought of eye beacons in my head, I thought, oh, in the thought of using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Pay and app, I thought, oh, well, I guess I have to like turn Bluetooth on, aren’t I? And I say that out loud. And then I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the absurdity of what I just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all NFC. This is like how doctors make the worst patients, you know? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey seriously. Tech
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds make the worst Apple Pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, yeah, so that’s the thing is that I said out loud, that was my critical mistake was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out loud. Oh, I should probably turn Bluetooth on, shouldn’t I? And then I I realize the absurdity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I said, and he just sets his iPod Touch on the counter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I realize what he means, and so I put my phone on top of his iPod Touch, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds awkward but it wasn’t, and sure enough, everything worked no problem. Well then it gets better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I start to walk away thinking, oh, he’ll send me my receipt no problem because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they know what my credit card is and they’ll send it automatically. I just had this exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue. And they go to walk away and then the guy says, oh, do you want your receipt? And I said, oh yeah, you can email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to me and you know, whatever the email is on file. And he looks and he’s like, oh, I don’t have an email on file. And at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point it occurs to me, the whole freaking point in Apple pay is that I have, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, whatever, whatever ID. So it’s a unique credit card number for the device. Of course they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because I’ve never used it there before. So basically I should not be allowed in an Apple store unsupervised
⏹️ ▶️ John The only way this could have gone worse is maybe if your credit card was declined and And then if you left the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like or the payment didn’t go through but you didn’t know it So you started walking out and then you get tackled by security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uplifting a $10 MagSafe adapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Anyway, do you want to start with some follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up. We have a lot. It’s not a lot. Oh, it says the king
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Let’s talk about a transmit the app by panic. What happened with them John?
⏹️ ▶️ John on. They so they got their app rejected for what was it for like sending exporting files to iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and we complained about in the past two shows. And I think towards the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John our last show bemoaning the state of the app store and the various rejections I said
⏹️ ▶️ John both the worst and the best thing that could happen is that these people who have had their apps rejected
⏹️ ▶️ John get contacted by someone in Apple and they quietly work out their differences and their apps are reinstated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, that’s the best thing that happened. Because hey, yeah, we get the apps that we wanted. Those application developers
⏹️ ▶️ John get their apps onto the store just like they wanted. And it seems like everybody’s happy. But it’s the worst thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John can happen. Because this is what happens all the time. Like there’s some there’s some problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people get their apps rejected or you know, or pulled from the store.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of blog posts about it. We all complain, Apple contacts them quietly works it out with them
⏹️ ▶️ John and puts and back in and then the cycle just repeats itself. Like you’re never going to, we don’t, we never get our Christ-a-tunity,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’re never gonna get, it never gets bad enough that something has to be done. Now I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say that’s necessarily the case this time because sometimes the outcome is the app gets pulled,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a whole bunch of brass people complain and Apple doesn’t change its mind. Like an example of that from the early days would be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know, like NES emulators or MAME type things or all sorts of things that have
⏹️ ▶️ John been on the store briefly and then immediately pulled because you’re not allowed to do emulation or run code or stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple pretty much hasn’t budged on that, except for scripting engines and games and other little
⏹️ ▶️ John gray areas that I think eventually got written into the guidelines. It doesn’t always turn out positively. But this type of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where they make dumb decisions, they linger, we have to make a bunch of noise, and then it gets worked out,
⏹️ ▶️ John that never makes anything get better. We’re not making progress. If
⏹️ ▶️ John we were making progress, the cycle wouldn’t keep repeating itself. So that best worst thing that was going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John did happen. And I just saw someone add to the notes that didn’t just happen for transmit also happened for drafts,
⏹️ ▶️ John which got pulled for its extension. And of course, we talked about p calc, which got rejected and then reinstated.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s good in that, in this case, the apps that we want to see on the store actually
⏹️ ▶️ John did get on the store eventually. It’s bad in that it seems like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem like that Apple is making forward progress on it. The only hope I have is that
⏹️ ▶️ John under this new Apple regime, where it just seems like Tim Cook is less stubborn.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook’s Apple seems to me to be slightly less stubborn than Steve Jobs’ Apple was. Is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook is less stubborn than Steve Jobs? Maybe I’m just projecting. I don’t know. But we already talked about how the engineering organization has
⏹️ ▶️ John made progress in doing things that previously they were quote unquote, too stubborn to
⏹️ ▶️ John do, whether that was a corporate directive or whatever. But for years, there were things we wanted that we didn’t think oh they’re never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna let you do use keyboards custom keyboards on iOS and then they did and extensions and all that other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that is good forward progress and it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be I’m holding out hope maybe that some one high up in the organization
⏹️ ▶️ John is sent the word down that the App Store needs to do less of this stuff and maybe this will be
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the next time this happens we’ll have a better faster response or maybe this won’t happen again
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way. I don’t know. I mean, we’ll just have to wait. But for some reason I find myself slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more optimistic even though the best worst thing did happen. I found myself slightly optimistic that Tim Cook’s going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why do we keep seeing all these stories about this stuff? Why can’t we get our acts together on that? You know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? What is it that we’re doing that’s making us do these things in the reversing ourselves? Obviously, we’re not even
⏹️ ▶️ John happy with our own decisions because it’s not like they’re reversing. I don’t think because of pressure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s like inattention, You know, the banal
⏹️ ▶️ John evil of inattention where it’s like, is there something going on over there? Did somebody reject something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t we take a look at that? And by the time people take a look at that, they’ll be like, oh, this is panic. They’re great. Why are we rejecting this? This thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John just fine. You know, like they reverse because if the best minds in the company were put on it, they never
⏹️ ▶️ John would have rejected it in the first place. It just gets rejected because of, you know, the whims of some individual reviewer or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a structural problem. fact that that type of thing can happen and not be resolved without
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time passing. Anyway, so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and this is a little bit better. A full-on rejection is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit better than what some developers go through. Mark Christian wrote me a little while ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of weeks ago, saying that he’s one of the developers of the app Dragondrop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s D-R-A-G-O-N-D-R-O-P, which I’ve mentioned a long time ago on the show. Well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he wrote in, he said, I have another idea or excuse me, another app in the store called Time Bar. When I tried to publish an update for Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AppReview decided that the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable. And I think that’s because it kind of paints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the menu bar as a progress meter. And the idea of this app, I guess, is to count down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until you get up and walk around or maybe, you know, the turkey’s done or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Anyway, so AppReview decided that the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable. It violates the max menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and rejected me. he’s stuck in limbo because it isn’t kicked out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store but he can’t update it and that’s an even worse place to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than a full-on rejection as far as I’m concerned and you know get the hell out of here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I mean I guess maybe that’s what panic had to deal with I don’t know I guess so maybe that is the same well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can always pull your own app right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just did so and it is you know it’s different on the Mac because you don’t have to use the Mac App Store you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know on iOS right if if you have that limo and I was like your your product is just dead like you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will never be able to do that product again in that way and like so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel less bad for Mac developers in this regard just because there is another option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and it’s not it’s not a bad option where the iOS option is like well you can put it on the city
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a store it’s yeah that’s like that’s like the iOS equivalent of like you know we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live in the woods. Like, there’s nothing… like, that is not a business model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please email Casey if you disagree. I think that it’s important to, when we hear things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmit and drafts getting their bad decisions reversed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reason why we were mad about this is not that we disagreed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the rule. I mean, some of us might have disagreed with the rule, but that’s not the main reason why this is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destructive. The main reason why it’s so so destructive is that we can’t tell in advance what the rules will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. And Apple’s refusal to document more of these rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again, part of that is just because they haven’t decided it yet. And I recognize that that’s an issue, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it also is like, at the very top of their rules document it says this is a living document and it’s been pretty dead for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. There’s a lot of rules that are not on it, a lot of newer rules that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have seemingly no intention of ever getting onto it. And it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, When Apple does things, like with many of the rules, it just seems like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that makes sense. Like it’s common sense, or you can see why they’re doing it, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sensible rule, it’s not, you can’t really argue too much with it, or you at least see their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view. And you can predict when you’re developing an app, like Launcher, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that that was going to be rejected because they’ve had a longstanding rule against kind of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like home screen kind of like home screen within an app style of apps launchers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that like they’ve had a lot of issues with those in the past so there are certain rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like that the developers all know like okay you know this idea for an app before I even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start building it this will almost certainly get rejected so I shouldn’t build it the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the rules start getting really capricious and unpredictable and unjustifiable then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers start wasting time or actually shipping apps first and then they get rejected later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which hurts their relationship with their customers in addition to wasting all the time of having the app being built. You know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty bad when developers waste months on something that they’re pretty sure is gonna get approved.
⏹️ ▶️ John The worst part is that it’s like Apple doesn’t speak with one voice on any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things. I mean again the reversals are not because they change their mind but just because the
⏹️ ▶️ John the the corporation as whole believes that the panics app should be allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John but the people who were tasked with the individuals who are tasked with that decision at that particular time said no
⏹️ ▶️ John so what I was thinking of is you know well what if we had a you know if you have a questionable app
⏹️ ▶️ John or feature idea as part of your dev mentorship blah blah you get two or three of these you know instead of a technical
⏹️ ▶️ John support instance you can say ask Apple I am playing a feature like this and
⏹️ ▶️ John you just describe it before you’ve written a line of code will this be allowed in the store and have
⏹️ ▶️ John a system whereby if they say yes it will be allowed in the store that you have some reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John hope that that that answer is meaningful in any way well that’s hard though barring
⏹️ ▶️ John a rule change if you were to ask you know like the same type of people who came up with the decision now
⏹️ ▶️ John to say uh transmit is allowed in the store with that feature right when
⏹️ ▶️ John faced with this question hey there’s a feature say that that same group of people whoever they are were faced with the same
⏹️ ▶️ John question before panic had written a single line of code and said, we’re thinking about this feature to transmit, it’s going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John x, y and z. Is that going to be allowed those same people hopefully could
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with the same answer six months ago, like I don’t think that much has changed since then. And so yeah, go ahead and build
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Or, you know, or just be able to ask them ahead of time. But the idea now is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can get somebody an app review and ask them, depending on who I get an app review, the answer means nothing because if I get a different person on
⏹️ ▶️ John my app is reviewed, and they don’t share information, oh, yeah, so that guy could do that feature. And it’s okay. Or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if the answer is, we don’t know yet, and we have to like sort of regroup and have a big meeting and decide whether it’s like, do
⏹️ ▶️ John that beforehand. Like ideally, do that before you even write the guidelines and then put it in the guidelines. But
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s something you never thought of, like, hmm, we never considered this, because that can happen. We never even considered doing this for an
⏹️ ▶️ John application. We’ll get back to you. And then you’re kind of in a holding pattern, but at least you’re not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John either just guessing or like asking the best sources you do have and then them telling you probably
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, no, maybe, because those mean nothing, right? the idea that the company can’t decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t speak with one voice on this, there is no one voice, there is no and I know there’s millions of app developers, and every single one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them can’t be bugging Apple and saying, Can I have this feature? But that’s why I’m saying like, it would have to be a limited resource like technical support
⏹️ ▶️ John incidents, because there’s a cost associated with it, and so on and so forth. But this is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is a system that could work if again, Apple could get his act together with with App Store stuff. And, and some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things like, oh, you know, if it’s a situation they didn’t think of some of these things with like sending a file to iCloud Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, people were baffled because like, Marco just said, Well, it’s not because we didn’t like the rule.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, like what rule what you know, the rule they were saying didn’t even mention iCloud Drive. And the second thing is everyone said,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t that the whole point of iCloud Drive? Maybe we’re misunderstanding what the point of iCloud Drive was supposed to be able to send files that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s a tight, you know, it just it doesn’t make any sense. And clearly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the the so called living document hasn’t been updated to reflect all these new things we’ve got like there’s no new clauses
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything in there for all these features that we got an iOS eight. I’m still gonna say that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s dealing with server side software and services is worse than this. But this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store, the iOS App Store, and I guess the Mac App Store to are their worst external
⏹️ ▶️ John externally visible administrative problems in the company, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These kind of decisions usually not like one random reviewer somewhere. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets escalated at least a couple levels up. From what I understand and from what I’m kind of hearing rumblings of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a mid-level fight with an Apple, like it’s a mid-level conflict between mid-level
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there are always mid-level things, but like when a mid-level thing, like when stories start coming out and
⏹️ ▶️ John when people are writing blog posts, that becomes the message of the day is, Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ John something bad and we’re angry about it. Eventually those mid-level fights start to filter up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John higher levels. The higher level people go, what’s going on down there with you guys? I saw some stories about this, that, and the other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like nobody likes bad press. Nobody likes to, you know, and if it gets up to their level, then all of a
⏹️ ▶️ John sudden, you know, whoever it is, a more senior vice president goes down to the mid-level people and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get your stuff together. Uh, what, what the hell are you guys doing? Work it out when your internal problems
⏹️ ▶️ John end up and, you know, on the pages of, uh, you know, tech news sites, we have a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that happens too many times, hopefully somebody really high up will be like, we have a
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a structural problem here and we need to sort this out like see, like it seems like they did
⏹️ ▶️ John sort out and decide to do in the engineering side. They made massive structural changes
⏹️ ▶️ John that have resulted in what we feel on the outside is positive change. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And you can tell, like, you know, we right now, nothing is resolved. You know, with with transmit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting approved, draft getting reapproved. This doesn’t actually resolve anything yet. What will resolve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if we stop hearing about things like this, where it’s like, oh surprise, there’s this rule no one could have predicted and we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-enforce it with some apps. That’s the problem here. So this, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what that upgrade that happened in engineering that got them to increase collaboration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in Tim Cook’s words, I hope they can apply that to this area too, because clearly this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one rogue employee making bad decisions. This is clearly an ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conflict within, you know, like the middle of these organizations that somebody has to resolve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not going to resolve itself at the levels it’s at. Obviously there’s some kind of back-and-forth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on here that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t even talk about this last time but we had a link and last week’s show notes it was about that
⏹️ ▶️ John post where I think it was someone quoting from, either quoting from or like recalling what someone
⏹️ ▶️ John told them over the phone and the idea was that, again I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the launcher developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. That said that the App Store people said, we rejected your app because it’s a high profile
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And we figured by rejecting your app, a lot of people will notice. And it will get the message out to the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the developers that they shouldn’t do things like you’ve done, like that they were making an example of you. Like that’s their, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly articulated this philosophy of App Store, of this is how we communicate our policies. We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t write them into guidelines. Instead, we pick a high profile app and make an example of it. So all the other application
⏹️ ▶️ John developers its head on the on the pike. And you know, no, not to go there anymore. No, don’t do what this developer
⏹️ ▶️ John did, which is a it’s amazing. Someone would say that out loud to a developer. And be even if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your secret strategy. It’s a terrible secret strategy to like that is not the correct way to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John to your application developers. There are better ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s what I call disgusting on my blog, because it’s like that is really, truly disgusting. And yeah, so it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer of launcher, I think his name is his name is Greg something, I’ll look it up and put it in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes. And yeah, he was paraphrasing the conversation he had with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a reviewer called him in response to some of his inquiries. That’s what they do, like you inquire and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re lucky you get like a random phone, this is what I said as the Agent Smith phone call, you get like a random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone call from somebody who usually you don’t get a name or any way to like contact them again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a one way, one time phone call coming from like the main Apple Switchboard number, you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s nothing you can do about it. And they’re usually very terse. Like they, I’ve gotten a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple these calls for various questions I’ve asked, or issues I’ve run into, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually they’re pretty terse. Because they know that there’s a good chance they’re going to be quoted and put on a blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere. And so, you know, they conserve words and they’re very non-committal with many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things they say. And occasionally you will get somebody who is a little bit more helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he did. And I think they were a little too helpful in explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they’re doing some of these things. If that is true, we don’t have any validation. We will never get any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco validation from Apple whether this is true or not. I don’t think he has any reason to lie about it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if he’s exaggerating about it, even then it’s still pretty terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those people who call, those are mid-level people. That’s not the person who spends six minutes with 10,000 apps a day. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a mid-level manager you’re talking to. like that’s like through the app the the approval review board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever they call it that like that’s where that phone call comes from so anything they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say usually is pretty credible as the current policy of
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I know but I still hear say because we’re going by what the developer says that someone from Apple said so I’m just I’m just saying this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no but I’m saying I’m sure you know the the nitty-gritty details are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspect because, you know, people have bad memories. I don’t know if he recorded the call, probably not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the big picture, like the general idea, is probably right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the person who called him said that, that is not the actions of just one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little employee somewhere buried in an apple. That’s the actions of a mid-level person, and that’s substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m all depressed now, so why don’t you tell me about something that’s really cool?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Absolutely. So we have something a little bit special this week a song sponsor this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a a song instead of me doing a sponsor read it’s not a fish song is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it is way better than that it is a Jonathan Mann song oh that is way better yeah see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got it we got a good one this time this is this is for dash at the dash.com and I get before I split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta give you a quick story so I met Scott O’Reilly from from Dash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Singleton this year, he came up to me and said, Hi, I’m the guy from Dash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for the first 20 or 30 seconds of that conversation, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was the guy who made the developer documentation app Dash, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John documentation app that runs on the
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna guess Mrs. Dash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was not salty. The first 20 or 30 seconds, I said some things that were like, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that probably did not make any sense to him at all. Like, looking back on it, it was pretty embarrassing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the truly embarrassing thing is I never corrected it. Like I never said, oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were that other guy. I just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, once I realized it, I just kind of rolled with it. So here I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during his average, I’m first going to apologize to him publicly because I still haven’t told him that. So this is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming out on that. And second of all, he was such a nice guy that even if he thought what I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t quite make sense, he didn’t let on at all. he just rolled with it and he as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell I was not busted there so if you knew he was nice enough not to embarrass me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so anyway he’s a really nice guy and so here it is the Jonathan Mann song for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dash at the dash.com Well goddamn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can easily create real-time dashboards that show information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are dozens of
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-built widgets for services like App figures, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Analytics, GitHub, and don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter. Go to the Dash.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need no credit card.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go to the Dash.com, play with it because it is fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, god damn, it’s Dash. You can also show custom data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s got a great API to share from Dropbox or the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things like line charts, speedometers, tables or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used iframes. Pricing model is a lot like github. All the public
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dashboards for free. For 10
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks a month unlimited private dashboards could be yours. So go
⏹️ ▶️ John to thedash.com, they’re currently running a promotion. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you sign up at thedash.com, private dashboards you’ll be able to get one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So thanks a lot to the dash.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go there and check out Dash. It’s pretty cool. Um, and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guy who runs it, Scott, is really, really nice. So thanks a lot to, uh, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dash. Go to the dash.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So the whole of the internet has sent us a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to Crossy Road, which I almost called Crossy Bird. It was built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by two Victorians, Andrew Summ, who is 24, and Matthew Hall, who is 39.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Among other things, they said that the game has generated enough for them to retire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote, seven figures is correct, one of them said. So that answers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the question as to whether or not they’re making any money on this game. And it sounds like the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah I mean to be fair my original statement when they were positioned at like number five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top free app But number 200 top grossing my original statement was that basically it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was probably out of proportion That they were not really making as much money as they probably should with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of free downloads And then of course last week after a couple of updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed it and dramatically improved their rank So yeah, good job for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most interesting thing in this story is that, uh, whoever, who is this developer? One of the developers was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a quote, We always wanted to build a popular game, but we didn’t think we could build a game that could generate money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone else in the industry will tell you that you need to squeeze people and you need to do this and that and get some things behind
⏹️ ▶️ John a paywall. You’re told that if you’re not making Clash of Clans, a Clash of Clans clone, you’re doing it wrong. I felt very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very strongly that there were other ways of doing this. So they had the same doubts about like, can we make a game that isn’t annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ John that monetizes in a nice way? way. They, you know, they wanted to make a popular game, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think they could build a popular game that would actually generate money because they didn’t want to do all the scummy things that all those other
⏹️ ▶️ John free-to-play games do. And so this is a feel-good story because they made a great game, they
⏹️ ▶️ John did it the way they wanted with extremely gentle monetization,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they made a lot of money. And, you know, as Marco said, they could have made even more money, but once you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into enough money to retire, I think they’re going to enjoy their retirement a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ John having made a game that they’re proud of rather than having even double the money but just feeling bad
⏹️ ▶️ John about the way they got it because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they seem like that kind of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh and one of the developers said it took him, what did he say, six weeks to
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the characters just by playing the game, like not paying any money, and he says other people have done it in two weeks. So they made
⏹️ ▶️ John this game and they knew it was both possible and probably pretty darn fun to not pay a cent and play the game
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet they’re still ended up making tons of money Because this is I mean half of it is make a really good game
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other half is make it make a really good Game that happens to get some traction in the market and
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind of need both of those But making a really good game helps a lot Yeah, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like you said it is a happy story and and that really does make me feel good for not having paid anything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, I still haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John paid anything for it because I don’t I just play with the black sheep all the time I don’t want it in a gumball machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. I should I should give some money for it eventually I don’t know. And no one in my family has paid for it. None of my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids have paid. My wife has found out that when you get the trial thing where it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John you, hey, try out these three characters for a limited time, she tells me that when they offer them
⏹️ ▶️ John to you at the discounted price, that you can pay for them with the little coins that you get for free. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to put any actual money in it and you can still quote unquote buy the characters that are offered to you for trial.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is yet another way that they’re not getting money from you. It’s like, pick up these fake coins in the game
⏹️ ▶️ John and use the fake coins to buy the characters. no real money ever passes to us at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really is surprising, but it shows that it can be done, which is really exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about your PlayStation 4 and DLNA support.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was complaining about how crappy the PS4’s media center features are compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the PS3. That was kind of part of the fact that the PS4 was like, no, this is a game machine, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John media center like the Xbox One, like it’s kind of a differentiator. It’s also probably a prioritization
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where like Sony was concentrating making the best consoles or playing games hardware wise and if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your priority you’re going to put all the other stuff off. Alberto Sendra sent a tweet that said
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor is that DLNA support is coming in early 2015 and that the holdup
⏹️ ▶️ John was it was waiting for a final certification on a new DLNA spec so that could have been also another reason it was being delayed
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m glad to hear that it’s coming and Ben Wu was the first person to tweet at me the story
⏹️ ▶️ John that Plex is coming to the ps4 in fact depending on what country you live in it may already be out for the ps4
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not out yet for the us because as plex says on the link we’ll put in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John uh sony has multiple business units to cover different regions and each of the business units need to approve the app and
⏹️ ▶️ John so the approval processes don’t all go in sync and i think sony’s probably also preoccupied with things at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John um anyway we’re waiting for them to approve the plex app for the us store and once
⏹️ ▶️ John that is available i don’t know if it’s going to be free or pay or what but anyway plex will be on the ps4 which kind of makes sense since
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s It’s an Intel processor and Plex is available for a million other things anyway. So multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John media related features are on their way for the PS4 and I am happy about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we never found a compatible Bluetooth remote, did we?
⏹️ ▶️ John No one sent one, I asked and no one has sent me any tweets or anything. Although a couple people have said their Harmony remote works with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, if you want to buy a Harmony
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote. Well, DinWorld in the chat says, apologies for recommending the Harmony, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s limited aka no playback controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John people have tweeted at me that like there is someone said, Hey, I use my harmony with it. And I tweeted them which
⏹️ ▶️ John was the exact model that you have and didn’t get a reply. I mean, there are like I said, there are IR solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can buy a little you know, USB IR dongle or something and shove it in there and then but all those get bad reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want that anyway. But yeah, no, no rumors of a media remote yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s look at the media center features first, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. In the last episode, I think it was or certainly recently, we talked about Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad creepiness and this was spoken about kind of violently on a recent episode of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connected on RelayFM. And a little birdie told us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they had Twitter in their offices for a few hours in the last couple of weeks and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposedly Twitter said they had over 20 million devices that opted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into that creepy thing where the Twitter app will scan what other apps are on your device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you have the latest Twitter app version, you could have opted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of this. Apparently I have never, I haven’t run the official Twitter app in ages, but the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like cancel or X or whatever was so small that everyone literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just missed it. But apparently according to Twitter, according to this little birdie,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was done entirely to build up some new ad targeting capability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re rolling out next year. And with regard to what John was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, well, maybe Apple’s going to do something about this, but either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Twitter’s big or maybe they can’t because Twitter is big, well, apparently they’re the number five globally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ranked iOS app. And so Apple is extremely aware of what Twitter is up to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All that from a little birdie.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aware, but then it’s like, OK, so are they talking? They’re like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to just be like, well, you know, some mid-level person is not just going to pull the Twitter app. It sounds like these
⏹️ ▶️ John are really more higher level negotiations between the companies to discuss what their app is doing and to work out something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping that’s happening now. If it’s not, then Apple is dropping the ball because they’re just not paying attention,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or they see it happening and don’t care and figure well if people don’t know, but I don’t know. I can’t fathom
⏹️ ▶️ John the strategy like it’s so this whole thing is just so at odds with everything else they do. We just talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Apple pay stuff and how it’s not sending even the information in case you would like to share with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store. It’s just, you know, complete anonymity. And you know, we don’t collect your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John We won’t let the NSA look at your messages, you know, all this, all this stuff. And then, but we’ll let the Twitter app scan
⏹️ ▶️ John every app on your thing and report back for ad targeting. Like that just seems crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it’s important to clarify too, that it isn’t just Twitter that does this. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other, there are ad packages out there, ad analytics packages that many apps integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do the same kind of like super creepy scanning for all the apps you have installed thing. And that’s why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, I think Apple should care about this problem because as I said last week, it does violate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the perceived walls that exist between apps and iOS. Like I as a user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that apps can’t creep on each other, like that they can’t look around and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else on your system. And they can’t see your data, but even the list of apps you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have installed, that can do things like probably pretty easily uniquely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identify you within like maybe an IP range. And so all these different things Apple’s trying to do to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ways they can uniquely identify you between app installs, those are out the window, or between apps from the same vendor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are all out the window, all the advertising identifier stuff. So Apple has done things in this area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that show that they care about this problem. I would say this is a similar facet to that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of user privacy expectations and device tracking and uniqueness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And so I hope Apple is thinking about taking steps in the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this technically impossible, or at least substantially more limited than how it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, also related to this, I said last week that in iOS 7 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward, MAC addresses were returned as all zeros. The best QA engineer I’ve ever met, Nick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arnott, who knows how to break everything that I write, also broke that statement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points out that that’s close but it’s actually zero to followed by all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zeros so there’s mostly zeros except there’s a single to in there thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nick are not for finding a little bug is something I said once again
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly zeros mean slightly non-zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s I don’t know what that’s from
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry I got nothing I’m done one of those in a while a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alright John why don’t you tell us about the Google Authenticator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that you are overjoyed with?
⏹️ ▶️ John Two groups of three. So this is the Google Authenticator app that you
⏹️ ▶️ John run that gives you your little time-based two-factor authentication code. It’s just got a set
⏹️ ▶️ John of a six-digit number that changes every 30 seconds or whatever the interval is. And so when you log
⏹️ ▶️ John in with two-factor authentication, you put in your name and your password, and then it gives you a challenge. It says enter your code, then you take your trusted
⏹️ ▶️ John device, like your phone or whatever, and you read this number off of it. it’s a six digit number and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you read this number off and type it in a lot of boxes as you tend to do when
⏹️ ▶️ John you first enable it it’s not so bad after that you’ll find it annoying that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John transcribe a six digit number under mild time pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John some iOS apps make it worse because I just recently used an iOS app where it challenges
⏹️ ▶️ John you with the code but if your Google Authenticator is on the same device of course then you have to either double tap home
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s in the multitasking switcher or single tap home to go you know to go to the Google Authenticator app to get the number,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the number. Now you have to memorize the number because you have to switch back to the other app. So you memorize
⏹️ ▶️ John the number, switch back to the other app. And when I do that with this one app, I forget what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would resume the other app. And it would immediately take me back to the username and password screen
⏹️ ▶️ John away from the end. So then I was under time pressure based on how much time was left to
⏹️ ▶️ John enter on the iOS keyboard with no autocomplete my username and my password, which are pretty darn long, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then enter that six digit code. But my complaint many, many shows ago, I don’t remember when was that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Authenticator app presents a six digit number, and does not present it as two groups of three numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just is a six digit number all stuck together, which is crazy, because it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John USB connector and all these other things. It’s like, if if your job is to make this application, and if what this
⏹️ ▶️ John application does is display a a six digit number. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you even thinking about? I say, how can I do my job well? Think for, you know, your only job is to display
⏹️ ▶️ John a number. Your only job is to make a connector. Like, what is it that makes a good connector? What is it that makes it easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at and transcribe a three digit number? You always break bit long numbers into groups, right? I think credit card numbers are broken up into
⏹️ ▶️ John groups of four. Like, phone numbers, like you don’t just put all the numbers together. Six is too many.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, Alexandre Duhil tweeted at me that the new update
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Google Authenticator app has two groups of three numbers, finally. And then later in the
⏹️ ▶️ John day, Romain, what was his last name? Moisescott? Is that the same as Moises
⏹️ ▶️ John Chouyan? But anyway, Romain said that, when I worked at Google last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John after listening to one of your podcasts, I filed a feature request for breaking out the digits in Google Authenticator iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John app. Glad to see they finally paid out. So whether this was directly related to his feature request or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I thank Romain greatly for connecting the dots, connecting my complaining to an actual feature request
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Google, and then many months later, now finally, I get two groups
⏹️ ▶️ John of three numbers. That is fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So your life is complete. Everything is right in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. I get annoyed about these things all out of proportion, because people posting a link to youhadonejob.org,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not kind of like you had one job, but just like, if you think at all about doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John simple job well, Like if you had to put on a big whiteboard, okay, what are the things that contribute
⏹️ ▶️ John to me doing my job well? Like on the connector, what are the properties of a good connector versus bad? Just
⏹️ ▶️ John even just think about it for a second unless like the top five, like a family feud or whatever, you know, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John and for showing numbers, like there’s not that many things. Make sure the numbers are readable. Like it’s just numbers. You don’t even have to worry about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does the O look like a zero or any other, just all you’ve got is numbers and you don’t have to pick anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else about it. It’s already six digits. You know everything about it. They did stuff like make it flash red when it’s about to
⏹️ ▶️ John expire, like all subtle things like that, but nowhere do they think, you know what, six digits shoved all together is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to transcribe or memorize or read easily. If we do two groups of three, it’ll be a lot easier. And it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John people are unfamiliar with grouping. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s done now. I’m done complaining. I’m happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I will preemptively say once again, everyone who thinks I should not be using Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Authenticator and I should be using whatever their favorite app is, I know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week by Lynda.com. L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will almost certainly never use it. Like John mentioned earlier, developer technical support tickets as a limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource for the Apple Developer Program. I have never used a DTS ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get, I think it’s two a year. Is that right? I think that’s right, but I’m not sure. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a registered Apple developer since 2008. I’ve never used a single one of those because I’m always afraid that, oh, I’m burning
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⏹️ ▶️ John my gear in the chat room reminds me that if I’m doing the authentication code on iOS, I can just copy
⏹️ ▶️ John and paste the code rather than memorizing it. I’m so accustomed to only
⏹️ ▶️ John using the authenticator app to like enter it on you know, on my Mac or something. And yes, I know I could use a copy paste synchronization
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning to check out one of those because that frustrates me a lot. Like when I have something on my on my iOS device that I want to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Mac. I know there’s a million utilities that do that synchronization, but I never quite get around to loading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But anyway, let me know if you find a good one. Because I’ve also I’ve always intended to set something like that up and just never actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, whatever happened to paste bot, because that was amazing when it first came out. And I don’t even think it works anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, originally, the problem they had was that you had to go launch paste bot in order to get it To to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copy because like and remember they were the ones I believe yeah, who did the silence yeah? Yeah, that’s right try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep running in the background,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now that’s not a problem anymore And I assume all the good ones out there. Just you know do it as a background thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well You still can’t no you still are not running in the background constantly unless you’re playing audio like I could I could build that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Into overcast as a feature if you happen to be playing a podcast it’ll continuously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync your clipboard to something
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can use it as do as an extension I was like you just flick up or go to you know like it seems like there’s other ways to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it as a today center widget and watch Apple reject you. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s talk about hockey and I don’t mean the sport. So Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acquired hockey app and that’s weird, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of awesome. Um, I really like the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, um, Azure like has spawned from insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they’re not the old guard where if If it’s not Windows and not Office, then get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the crap out of here. It’s the new we are all things to all people kind of Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not sure what the play is with regard to HockeyApp, but I like the thinking there. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea. And I think it’s a really good idea that could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fit in really well with their existing Azure Mobile Services offerings. So I really dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in principle. But I was curious to hear what the two of you, especially Marco, thought about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you before Marco chimes in, can you explain it to me? Because I know HockeyApp only because I’ve been on
⏹️ ▶️ John betas that use HockeyApp to distribute the beta versions of their iOS apps to me. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what Microsoft would do with this. Do they distribute beta
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of Windows Phone apps? Does Hockey already do that? I don’t understand the synergy
⏹️ ▶️ John here at all. But I confess that I just don’t know what HockeyApp, maybe I just don’t know what HockeyApp does
⏹️ ▶️ John besides what I’ve used it for, which is install betas on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to be clear, that’s all I’ve used it for. But the way I’m theorizing this is that Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of quietly, especially with Azure specifically, trying to be kind of a one-stop shop for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, all the backend stuff with regard to mobile apps. So mobile services, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to do a really good job with, you know, Hey, we’ll give you a decent API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do some basic stuff. Like I think that you can, they give you an API that’ll make it really easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do user accounts based off of Twitter or Facebook. Um, they make, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of other things that they’ve, they’ve got in there. I haven’t looked at it in a while, but my guess is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to make it so that if you’re writing, like, let’s say I’ve thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing a shared grocery list app and I don’t want any more recommendations of what to use. I’ve got it under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control, but in the same way, John doesn’t need any more recommendations about two factor stuff. Well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d, I’d like to write that sort of app, but I need to have a way of doing user accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to have a database backend. I need to have some sort of web-based API. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to distribute beta builds. Well, three of these things I could do on Azure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the beta builds I’ll soon be able to do on Azure if that’s what envelops HockeyApp. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming they’re trying to be a one-stop shop for anything that isn’t on the device that your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mobile app would need in order to be successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is the type of play that Apple doesn’t play
⏹️ ▶️ John nice with anymore, which is if you’re doing something that is like a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John function, like I want to write a compiler that lets you build iOS apps, or I want to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you know, write, write something lets you manage the assets for your application or build your interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything having to do with the development stack. Apple wants to own the on the ID, they
⏹️ ▶️ John made their own compiler, like they own all the tools, you know, verification
⏹️ ▶️ John tools, code signing tools, like it’s all Apple stuff and beta distribution, Apple bought test flight, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and before that, like, it’s just not that Apple’s going to go out of their way to break hockey app now because they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John before anyway. And it’s relying on technologies that Apple is making it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re, I would not sign up to try to make a tool that supports
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple ecosystem for developing applications, because I would just know that even if I’m I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to live, my time is limited. Because either Apple will start making a free
⏹️ ▶️ John competitor to me, or they’ll do something that breaks my thing without any pity, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like, Look, you should never have been making that in the first place, not intentionally, but it’ll just it’ll just happen like that is a that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very dangerous business to be in these days. It’s, you know, I mean, I guess it’s okay for Microsoft because
⏹️ ▶️ John why do they care they get
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue to support this type of effort. But I mean, I guess that’s kind of part of the acquisition. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John once Apple bought test flight, it’s like, Apple has decided what they’re gonna do about this because there was a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know There was these third-party utilities who did this thing that Apple wasn’t doing so Apple could have developed their own thing in-house So they could have bought
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody when they buy somebody Hockey app had to say well they bought somebody and it wasn’t us So now it’s time to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell to whoever else wants to buy us and I guess that’s Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean it’s important to point out Hockey does other things beyond just the beta stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance they have their crash reporting tool It aggregates all the crash logs and sends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in from the app and everything. And they also have, you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cross-platform stuff. So there is still some value even if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t develop betas to Apple anymore, or they can’t ship betas to Apple devices anymore. It’s less value,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly. And they are never going to be able to match what the new Apple TestFlight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, because the new Apple TestFlight completely does away with the annoying UDIDs and you just email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address people and it lets them install your app and all their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they have the advantage that they’ll hopefully be able to be more reliable and responsive than Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right so right now. So as soon as Apple test flight thing came out, I canceled my hockey plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I said I’m never going to use this again because I don’t need it for the crash reporting because the other thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use crashlytics for my crash reporting. Crashlytics also has a beta shipping product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also have analytics and Twitter bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think crash reporting is in the exact same category? Like I want, you know, nice
⏹️ ▶️ John symbolic hated crash reports with all sorts of information. iOS doesn’t provide it for me natively. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John use crashlytics, right? Like that’s exactly the type of tool that it’s like something that Apple should do. There’s a gap, a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party comes in to fill that gap, is able to succeed until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple either buys them, buys a competitor or does something else that makes it so, you know, so that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody stops using them and uses whatever Apple has officially blessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In theory, yes. In practice, most of the time Apple does things like this, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple version sucks. That was the case with the Crash Reporter.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right, the Apple version often does suck, but once the Apple version exists at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John then there’s an even greater chance that the way the third parties are doing it will
⏹️ ▶️ John become less supported or break or whatever, because Apple then has a good story like, oh, we’re sorry, we
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to break that or whatever, but it’s not really a high priority for us to make sure that the crash keeps working
⏹️ ▶️ John because we do have our own offering and have you checked it out and then you can say yeah but your thing sucks but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no but I mean theoretically that’s been the case for a long time but in practice like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like iTunes Connect has included crash logs since before crashlytics existed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since all of these crash loggers that came out all all have come out after Apple has included
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crash logs and iTunes Connect. Originally the iTunes Connect crash was were delayed by like a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were never symbolicated. had to like download them and some all get them yourself. And I think some of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been approved since then. But it’s still also they have to they have to abide by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the system setting that says do you want to send diagnostics to Apple and app developers? And if users say no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, you won’t get crash logs from them through iTunes Connect, but your app doesn’t know about that setting. It can’t read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that setting even if you wanted to. And so your app bypasses that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the any crash logger that you embed in the app like Crashlytics or Hockey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those will send it regardless. So you’re getting more data from more people faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re just hoping with those type of tools that you are below the notice. This feature is below the notice of Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Apple has bigger fish to fry. They’re not gonna worry about making a much better crash reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, because they have something there, and you know, like, on their priority list, it’s really low down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, you have to think they will get to it. And this is the history of Mac software. It’s been some third party makes something cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems like Apple will never do something like that or is not interested in something like that. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John these little things get snapped up relatively quickly. Like for the old timers out there,
⏹️ ▶️ John the clock in the menu bar was a third party application. And fairly quickly, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was maybe it was less than a year, maybe it was only a couple of years, but fairly quickly, Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, clock the menu bar is a good idea. We should build that into the OS. Right. So that’s the end of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, well, not the end of third party clocks in the menu bars, but for most people at the end of third party Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ John menu, because it’d be a little use the built in one, right? And other times, there’ll be something
⏹️ ▶️ John that third parties make that everybody loves that Apple just doesn’t do for years and years and years,
⏹️ ▶️ John either because they they’re just like philosophically opposed to it, or because it’s a frivolous
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they’re not, they don’t care that much about it, they have much higher priorities, the crash reporting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me that eventually, they’ll get around to making their crash reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing better. So it’s closer to the best third party ones out there. But it hasn’t happened in what, how
⏹️ ▶️ John many, you know, how many years have these things been out a couple of years, like six, it’s been a lot of years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it must be I mean, to be fair, if you had to make a prioritized list of things that Apple has to work on in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of developing for the Mac and iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably wouldn’t put crash reporting very high on the list either. You probably put things like code signing and provisioning
⏹️ ▶️ John and, and beta stuff. I mean, so test flight is obviously the better thing to be
⏹️ ▶️ John concentrating on right now. But it’s difficult business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the range between like what what’s the what’s the best third party crash reporter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you that is possible to build given the structure that we have an iOS versus what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best crash reporter Apple can or is likely to ever build. Like, there isn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole lot of room for improvement there. The crash reporters like between hockey and crashlytics. I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them both. Now I first use hockey for overcast during the beta and I switched over to crashlytics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s I’d say they’re pretty much the same in the quality of the crashes they report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how they do that that role like there’s only so so much you can do there realistically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with the way the runtime works and everything so that’s all fine so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting back to the topic of like why Microsoft want to buy hockey I think the fact is simple like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a multi a multi-tool company they have multiple tools to support developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter bought crashlytics for the same reason Twitter bought crashlytics because Twitter wanted to own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer tools platform It gives them a lot of useful analytics. It gives them a lot of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like inns with developers to sell their other SDK services on Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants the same thing that’s what they’re going for here. They’re going for developer tools, and I think it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move for that and You know the the beta thing is Basically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost worthless now where the beta thing is nice with hockey and the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m about to sign up with them again probably is the the Apple test flight beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally requires app review and that makes it pretty inflexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a limit of only two betas per day and everything else like there’s all these like little limits and delays in place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s Apple and I’ve had to build a lower cast sitting there for six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days with nothing I can’t it’s it’s in review it isn’t even waiting for view it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in review for six days a beta so I can’t cancel it I can’t upload a new version like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my testing process has just stopped like it has completely stalled for six days because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something is wrong with Apple and I’m sure it’s gonna run into the holiday iTunes Connect shutdown in a few days and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t ship new versions like I can’t even ship versions to testers right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s really crummy.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not confirmation of but it’s like the worst nightmare for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John said that Apple’s gonna buy test flight and they’re gonna ruin it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No I mean like But, so you know, the Apple version of beta testing is way better than what third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parties can do. When it works. Yeah, but what third parties can do is not useless, it’s not worthless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not nearly as good in, you know, like the core function. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is still value. If you’re shipping an app on iOS and Android and Windows Phone, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, from what we hear, Microsoft is getting into the cross-platform developer tools game. Like, somewhere I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read, I don’t know if it was a rumor or if it was actual news, Somewhere there was a thing that said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that early next year, Microsoft is going to be, or not, I don’t know when, but sometime soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft is going to be releasing new Visual Studio type stuff that will be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cross compile the same app onto all three platforms. And that would be really cool. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of developers will use that. I mean, they’re, they already, there are tools that do cross platform stuff now, but from what I gathered, none of them are particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. So if that’s the business Microsoft is going into, I think it’s a very smart business and hockey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plays right into that. Because with hockey, then you can have testers on all three platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you can have, you know, you can have like, you know, 10 people on iOS, 20 people on Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can get the one guy who uses Windows Phone, probably also, he’s probably also the Opera user, if you’re developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them together with this Microsoft stack, it makes sense to be able to test them together, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to collect crashes from them together and all this stuff like so it, from that point of view, it makes a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sense why they would want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and also consider that they’re, you know, open sourcing.net and really embracing mono
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Xamarin even more than they ever have before. So it’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this all seems to indicate to me just like you said, Marco, that they’re kind of going all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on being the developer platform for all people for all platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John do we know? Is that true? Are we kind of being the kind of being the developer platform for all
⏹️ ▶️ John people if what you want to make is a kind of mediocre app for all platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like not mediocre, like
⏹️ ▶️ John not kind of middle of the road because they have to vend functionality that is platform agnostic. And so that means
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess the server side things that make sense because it’s always platform agnostic. At least you want it to be. That’s the benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ John Azure is there is their best bet because it’s like, I don’t want my back end to be tied to one platform is the whole point of it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be accessible from the web, Mac, blah, blah, blah. But almost everything else, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s not right once run anywhere, but kind of you really have to buy into
⏹️ ▶️ John the native structures of the individual platforms to make a really great app on the individual
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. And the only exceptions are back-end services and things like games that are like, I don’t care about your platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John I control the whole screen. I’m a game. Uh, and so that’s why you have things like, you know, the middleware for, for
⏹️ ▶️ John games and stuff, but everything else, like, I wonder how much of a, if that’s their strategy, say to succeed, it’s like now
⏹️ ▶️ John we are the biggest and best middleware vendor for
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile applications. Is that a big win? Like I still feel like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that entire business is kind of in the middle of I was going to say in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of hungry tigers or we’re going continuing with animal analogies. You’ve got all the actual platform
⏹️ ▶️ John like it just it just seems like Microsoft would be better off
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were in Samsung’s position and Windows Phone was
⏹️ ▶️ John a big dominant platform. Then they can make Windows Phone and Windows Phone apps really awesome instead of worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John creating technologies to help people make their mobile apps on other people’s platforms better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but if you look at the you know, the position Microsoft is in, like in reality, which I think you know, the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with them in the later part of the bomber years is that they weren’t really looking at their reality, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were creating an even worse reality reality for themselves. But if you look at the position they’re actually in today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a very smart move. They’ve already shown that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have built no market share whatsoever, realistically, in the new world of mobile at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. Even their PC business is not going to go away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think the growth is certainly gone. There’s a problem there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole move to Azure as a company focus, having the guy who ran Azure become the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CEO. This is a sign like Microsoft is recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only like a good business to be in, but probably the best business that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be in because their their attempts at being otherwise have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked. And there are certain like in some ways it’s too late, like, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they do to Windows Phone, it is not going to be significant like Windows Phone has missed its window.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s never too late, not for Windows Phone specifically. But first of all, Windows Phone is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s always too late for Windows Phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Windows Phone is not bad. Like, the hardware and the software is not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but it’s, you know, even if you agree that it’s better, they’re in like a Mac-like situation where Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John making better personal computers with better software for years, but nobody cared because it wasn’t better enough
⏹️ ▶️ John or because it was too expensive or whatever other excuses you want to make, right? But you can’t say like, well, there’s no hope
⏹️ ▶️ John because there was hope. Like, all Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to do is make a translucent teal phone and they’re all set, right? And there’s always hope to turn things around.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seemed like the Mac couldn’t get anywhere and was never going to succeed. But it,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, succeeded by A, having the iMac turn things around, and B, hanging in there long enough for everyone else to
⏹️ ▶️ John get destroyed. And they’re left with the only remaining paying customers who pay a lot of money for their
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, right? But then they also did the iPod and the iPhone, right? And those are not the Mac, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John similar in that they’re their own proprietary platforms that Apple made. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying is Microsoft still has the skill set to make very competitive hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and software products like the PC was and like all the things that Apple makes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just so happens that the Windows phone, their timing was terrible, and two
⏹️ ▶️ John big competitors got there before them, and now they’re kind of stuck. And it’s kind of unfair. Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is not succeeding in proportion to its quality. It’s succeeding in proportion to its timing, more or less.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I wouldn’t give up on that entirely because it’s kind of like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and saying, well, we
⏹️ ▶️ John lost the PC wars. So what we really need to do is concentrate on some business that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like this. We can’t make a hardware software integrated product like we were trying to with the Mac. We should do something entirely different. We’ll become
⏹️ ▶️ John like a services company or whatever. And it’s weird with Microsoft because Microsoft has so many
⏹️ ▶️ John different skills. They’re good at services. They’re good at hardware. They’re good at software. They’re doing a game console. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John good at so many different things. It’s harder to know what to focus on. But when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he said, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, we can make the Mac like people take notice of that again with the iMac. And B, we can think of something
⏹️ ▶️ John new that is very much like the Mac, a hardware and software product integrated, takes advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the things that quote unquote only Apple can do and all that stuff. And then the iPhone, the iPad and so on and so forth. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs took a company that was failing to get traction with one product and made it get traction
⏹️ ▶️ John with products that are exactly the same, like exactly the same strategy, just, just better executed and better timing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if Microsoft says, well, I guess we can’t be that company that we were. Now we have to be a services company.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some reputation management, resurrecting the reputation as people thinking Microsoft is cool
⏹️ ▶️ John and developers liking it and sort of the alpha geeks, as we used to say when OS X was
⏹️ ▶️ John becoming popular, the alpha geeks finally paying attention to Microsoft again. That’s good. And if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good business for them, fine. But I would not like to see Microsoft give up on doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John else like Windows Phone and having that succeed because they don’t wait, you know, five
⏹️ ▶️ John years before they get off their butts and do something good. So, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It kind of scares me that this sort of, Microsoft does
⏹️ ▶️ John become the Azure company or the company that does that type of stuff, plus I guess Exchange and
⏹️ ▶️ John SQL Server and stuff like that. That will be a sad end for the company. I’d rather see them do more things
⏹️ ▶️ John like Windows Phone, but better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t think they’re going to lose control of their software platforms. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re going to become less and less relevant over time. And they’re always going to be there in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same way like IBM, I think, still has a mainframe business. And I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but IBM is the worst example. They’re selling everything. They even sold their x86 server business. Aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they doing that now? They got rid of their PCs, the servers, the mainframes, all that’s left. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, I don’t, IBM is exactly what I don’t want Microsoft to become.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but I’m saying like, like there are, there are healthy businesses in the computer world like printers, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printers are always going to exist, but they’re just going to get increasingly less and less important over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. They’re already pretty much completely forgettable and unmentionable. This is probably the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time you’ve heard about a printer today and that’s, you know, no big deal. It doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if that’s where Windows and Office and Windows Phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, that’s fine. That’s not a huge deal. They can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used every day by millions of people and be completely unmemorable and unimportant to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft should sell Office and Windows to Samsung to destroy the company, to destroy Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John as a virus. Because they’ll be like, this is awesome. We’re going to own Microsoft’s Windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John Office. Those things are great. and trying to maintain and work on that code base for products
⏹️ ▶️ John that people don’t really like anymore. Like, that will just, it will distract and crush Samsung and
⏹️ ▶️ John then Microsoft can beat them to market with whatever the next big thing is. And by the way, with IBM, I think what, they sold
⏹️ ▶️ John their PC business, and I’m pretty sure they sold their x86 server business a long time ago. I think now they’re serving their power server
⏹️ ▶️ John business, the Power 7, Power 8 processors. And maybe they’re also selling the mainframe thing, or maybe they’re one and the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, Microsoft is the Marco of the corporate world. They’re just selling everything. No, IBM you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John I my brain said IBM and my mouth did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have no idea how much follow-up I’m gonna get from my father over all this
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find out what they’re actually selling, but I think they’re selling everything everything must go
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so our friend Whitby in the chat suggested this topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a chromium. They wrote a proposal sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called marking HTTP as non secure. So they’re proposing that browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vendors change their UI paradigm. So instead of saying, instead of like showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lock or some indicator when a site is served over SSL to show that it is secure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually mark non SSL sites as insecure in the browser to make to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, yell at people into recognizing like, hey, what you’re doing here is insecure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re saying the absence of an icon doesn’t really communicate much to people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas an active alert saying this is insecure might be more helpful. So they’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they intend to transition Chrome to this sometime in 2015, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe other browser vendors will follow. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in browsers these days with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSL and trying to make it a bigger deal. Chrome seems to be leading the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that, but the other browser vendors tend to follow pretty quickly what do you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about this like do you think because I have my own opinions on this how much do you think this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would help and doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all for dating this if you look at the screenshots that’s not the current version of Safari so
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate I hate web pages that dates in them but
⏹️ ▶️ John is the potential for this to be old because that is not Safari 8 in the screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it says they they intend to be in for a transition plan for Chrome in 2015 so it It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be sometime recent,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I know, but who knows? This could have been written at the beginning of 2014. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John for this particular idea, my question is always, say you
⏹️ ▶️ John communicate this to people. You change the wording. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a death tax, not a state tax, right? This is now insecure instead of the other one being secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do people do about that? What action? Is there a readily available action
⏹️ ▶️ John people can take to make them not just ignore this like all the other crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John technical things that their computer yells at them that they don’t understand. Like a big giant red button that
⏹️ ▶️ John says switch to secure. If we can make that big giant red button why doesn’t the browser just try it
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time anyway? Why don’t we just make it try HTTPS by default all the time and fall back
⏹️ ▶️ John to it? Like that’s what you need. Not so much like communicating to the user
⏹️ ▶️ John information that they don’t understand what they can do with, but rather simply just doing the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like making the browser do HTTPS by default all the time. Now I know that’s not quite easy. I know you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t just try HTTPS first and then HTTP. There are technical
⏹️ ▶️ John hurdles to, you break different websites if you try this all the time. Like maybe it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be something that people click or whatever, but that’s my big question about this. If you communicate this information,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do I do with this information? What action do I take?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey, what do you think? I understand the idea, but it just seems weird to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of flip everything on its head like that. But I’m also probably reading too much into it insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as, does anyone even, and does any regular human really pay attention to whether or not a website they’re looking at is secure?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know people look, they used to back when, back when web browsers were more stable and there were fewer of
⏹️ ▶️ John them and it was just Netscape and Internet Explorer, which, and people usually used
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them. They knew to look for the little lock icon or whatever, like in their browser, Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’d be like, is this secure before like, I just want to look for the little lock. And certain people were kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of trained to look for the little lock, but then a little lock started moving all over the places and black browsers got weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes the lock had a line through it, if there was like a certificate error, and it just, it started to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of become just more noise that your computer throws at you. Sometimes it puts up a dialog box, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John says allow or disallow. And you ask, you know, You talk to people about computers and they will be, they’re either
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who just always say allow or the people who just always say disallow. And you may be thinking that the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who always say allow are stupid and naive and are doing insecure things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’ve ever had to try to help a person who’s one of the disallow people or deny
⏹️ ▶️ John people or whatever, I just always say disallow, I just always say deny. And then they wonder why nothing works on the web because they refuse to
⏹️ ▶️ John enable JavaScript or something. Neither approach is great. And the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John that regular users shouldn’t have to understand all this technical mumbo-jumbo just to get the thing they want done
⏹️ ▶️ John done. So that’s why I’m thinking exposing more of this technical mumbo-jumbo to
⏹️ ▶️ John regular people is not really helping matters. What I would be more in favor
⏹️ ▶️ John of is… I mean, they’re kind of doing it. Wasn’t the EFF doing the thing where they’re giving SSL certificates for free just to
⏹️ ▶️ John encourage more sites to have them? Make more sites SSL by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John run the websites redirect HTTP to HTTPS all the time immediately on first hit and just
⏹️ ▶️ John like people don’t have to know about that right if they don’t care if they don’t know what the lock icon is anymore it should
⏹️ ▶️ John just this is a discussion that should take place amongst the people who are making websites
⏹️ ▶️ John less so amongst the people who are using web browsers maybe also amongst the people who are making web browsers but their
⏹️ ▶️ John their customers are the individual users not the websites so I feel like this should be you know more
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking inwards as an industry and less outwards to the users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think the main problems with this, number one, I would even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, John, when you said that at the beginning, when we only had very few browsers, people knew to look for the lock icon. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet nobody even did then. I bet the percentage of internet users who looked for the lock icon is about the same as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always been, which is probably embarrassingly low. I think the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is trying to address, it’d be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing as like forming a consortium to figure out how can we make people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better read text and error dialogues. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John if they read the button text. Yeah, like there’s very little you can do. Maybe they just recognize the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John of okay and hit it before even reading it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or in their head they’re saying, How do I cancel out of this? Just get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of this, I don’t know what to do. Like it’s a very hard problem that is most likely unsolvable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So same thing here, it’s like, how do you make people pay attention to the level of connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encryption that they have in there? I mean, we can’t even make people pay attention to the host they’re connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Like, that’s its own problem. So like, so the other problem with this scheme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that all it does, you know, It’s hard to say you are secure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you are insecure, because what does that mean? If you are reading a blog or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York Times or something and it’s insecure, what does that mean? Does that mean the blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to hack you? Like that’s confusing to people at best if they even look, and it’s misleading,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly. Similarly, if you say you are secure, you are secure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like somebody in the chat said, a secure connection to totally.bankofamerica.lols.ru
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a good thing. It’s like, you can have an SSL certificate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a totally different domain that is still a phishing domain, and you can still be insecure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, you can look into the EV stuff and get the name of your company, Bank of America Incorporated, to show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a green button in the bar, but it’s like, those can probably also be easily faked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with enough effort, and also, no one looks for those either. Like all the people who don’t look for lock icons, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t look for EV certificates either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even if you’re looking for it, like it appears so differently or sometimes not at all in different browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I met people who used to look at the lock icon, but once it became more complicated than that, once it became more complicated than a binary
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that was generally represented the same way everywhere, then people can’t be bothered. And speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of the secure thing, I don’t know if anyone’s posted in the chat room yet, but because I’m scrolled
⏹️ ▶️ John up to look at something else, but I think Eric Schmidt had something where he was telling people to use incognito mode in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John to avoid the NSA. Like, that’s what gets back to what Mark was saying. What does secure
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? Or what does insecure mean? They don’t mean what those words read as to
⏹️ ▶️ John a technically unsavvy user. Because it’s like, either I’m safe or I’m not safe. That’s what they’re looking for. That’s basically all they can handle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even that, only conscientious people can handle. Am I safe or am I not safe? And like, the real answer is so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated than a binary you’re safe and you’re not safe. That you can’t, like, even if you could successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John communicate that simple information, it’s misleading. And if you could successfully communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John the the more nuanced information, which you can’t, but if you could, people would still be left with Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I understand the exact parameters of the situation I’m in. What do I do about it? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I not use the web
⏹️ ▶️ John browser anymore? And then you just go there said that two strategies are allow everything or deny everything dismiss everything
⏹️ ▶️ John with cancel dismiss everything with Okay, and I think there are more dismiss every allow allow
⏹️ ▶️ John allow all I think there are more allowers than deniers because deniers really just can’t get anything done. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very frustrating people. But they’re like, No, I just didn’t buy everything. I need I need a long explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John of why I’m supposed to not you know, it’s just like what you can just keep hitting deny, but you’re never gonna be able to install any software. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna be able to watch any videos on the web. All your websites will be broken. But you’re like, I feel safer this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people learn very quickly that if you hit OK to everything, you get overall fewer boxes, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically That’s basically the strategy. It’s like a… The SSL question, like it doesn’t assure you that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the site is secure. All it ensures you is that you have an encrypted connection to the site, and even that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a questionable validity these
⏹️ ▶️ John days. Yeah, and the incognito has nothing to do with anything, but even SSL, we could say at this point, does not protect you from,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, with heart bleed and everything, that doesn’t protect you really anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, well, and even then, it’s like, there’s a whole class of security issues that SSL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t protect you from. Things like password leaks and hacks. like it like if you if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the secure icon, does that mean you can type in the one password you use for everything, including your bank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use that on this website because it’s a secure site and won’t lose your password? Like No, of course not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so again, what does that mean? So that’s, I think this is this is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the move to do HTTPS everywhere that that a lot of people are moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards. I think in many ways that that’s a good move. And that is probably the way we’re going. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but but this conversion to SSL reminds me of, I mean, it’s amazing that it’s taken this long. It’s taken this long
⏹️ ▶️ John because the sort of artificial barrier to this happening earlier was that SSL certificates cost money and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a lot of money, but it’s still, they cost money and they’re annoying. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John people who sell them are generally annoying. Uh, and so EFF trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John reduce that barrier is better, but it’s like, what it reminds me of is the transition from the old days
⏹️ ▶️ John of Telnet and FTP to basically SSH and SSH was free and open source.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and That’s why it’s spread everywhere. And nobody’s telling that into their machines anymore. And nobody’s using FTP
⏹️ ▶️ John with plain text passwords anymore because that would be crazy. And yet we still continue to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John use essentially the web equivalent, you know, it’s totally unencrypted, tell them that FTP, like unencrypted protocols are crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But we use HTTP all the time. And yeah, we hope that when we’re typing in a password, I mean, I know I don’t even check.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I look up to see it’s HTTPS? I just assume, because what kind of crazy website would put up a password and prompt it not having to be HTTPS?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, but you don’t. So really everyone fish John We should be HTTPS
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere instead of just like we’re SSH everywhere because nobody uses telnet anymore Although
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad it’s still installed because I still use it to debug web servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the big problem with with adoption of SSL everywhere of HTTPS everywhere rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is That the certificates expire And I think it used to be you get a five-year one I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they killed that last year right now can you only get like a three or two year one? Something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSH keys never expire. So you can have the same SSH key for 10 years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll continue to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a website is more heavyweight than a server, the server that you remotely connect into, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I just feel like the main barrier was that it cost money and that you had to deal with these weird vendors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they could make it easier and make it simpler to update these things, and you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just has to happen. Because if you’re running a website, like, that’s a big thing that’s worth an investment of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple minutes every three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, yeah, the problem is that it is a very highly technical process that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very error-prone, very intimidating, and very complicated that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do every two or three years. And that’s like on a grand scheme of things, like in the grand scheme of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the internet, no one’s going to do that. Like, yeah, the big sites will do it, but everything else out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people, people, what’s left is not a big site. People don’t run their own websites so much anymore, and if they do, they’re probably tech nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. We just need the big sites to do it, like Facebook, you know, WordPress
⏹️ ▶️ John has to have like idiot proof support for it built in where you just click a button and it connects everything. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s possible to get this to happen. And I think the money making, making it
⏹️ ▶️ John free, if this actually works out, like if you had like the SSL certificate equivalent of Hover,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Hover sells it. I think they do. Well, there you go. But like, but they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing. They don’t can’t do a thing where you set up your own WordPress site and you just press a button and then it says I’m going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John and install an SSL certificate for you. This is how much it costs. You want me to do this? And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it auto renews like every couple of years. Oh, and it sends you an email. By the way, we’re going to update your SSL certificate in a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks. You want us to do that? Yeah, go ahead. That’s not how it works now. You know, you have to look at different encryption
⏹️ ▶️ John protocols and include the right ones and create your key with some crazy command line program
⏹️ ▶️ John that asks you a million questions that you don’t know the answers to that uses vocabulary you’re not familiar with. Even if you are familiar with it, you forget which
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you’re supposed to write there, name or your company name or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, well and then like and the instructions are gonna say like these last three things you must skip them don’t enter anything in like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these three fields and it’s like oh come
⏹️ ▶️ John on. But anyway I still think all that stuff the people who have to deal with that are
⏹️ ▶️ John better equipped to deal with it than users are to deal with more interface elements
⏹️ ▶️ John telling them something that they don’t understand about the the pages they’re using. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John my mother still emails me things and says I got an email
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wants me to go to this site. Is this site safe? And just
⏹️ ▶️ John in my default answer, I’m now, no I’m the denial, I’ve said no, deny, deny, just do not do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That email didn’t come from who you think it came from. Yeah. And like even, I remember early on
⏹️ ▶️ John in the days of the engine that I demonstrated how you can send email from anybody, by you know, telnetting to port 25,
⏹️ ▶️ John back when that was all, back when that was all unencrypted, I’m like, you know, president at unitedstates.com. Look, you got an
⏹️ ▶️ John email from President of the United States. See how I did that? And that didn’t take. And so still to this day, she’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the email came from you. I’m like, it did not come from me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Now it looks like it came from me, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t. Did it? So even that concept, like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mental model of how people think the internet works is so different from how it actually works that it’s very difficult to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can’t get the models in sync because the way the internet really works is too complicated for people to know or care
⏹️ ▶️ John about. And so you really just have to not give them choices
⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of be safe by default and make it so that you don’t have to do anything through
⏹️ ▶️ John no action of your own. You are slightly more protected now than you were before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Automatic, Linda Dotcom and Dash,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John You can follow them It’s Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to. Accidental, Tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Podcasting So Long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to, accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech podcasts, so long
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to address eschatologists concern that
⏹️ ▶️ John the clock in the menu bar wasn’t integrated into the OS quickly He says, it didn’t come until
⏹️ ▶️ John system 7.5 And I’m going to say, yeah, that was quick was quick. It was only four years between the time
⏹️ ▶️ John it was introduced and the time it got scooped up. That’s in a 30 year history of the Mac. That’s relatively quick compared to,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I don’t know, like theming, which almost made it in, but then no, not at the last minute. And we were still waiting for it
⏹️ ▶️ John to come. But anyway, yeah, the history of the Mac from 1994 until today has that a clock in the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Uh, it’s a pretty long time. And for a couple of years before that, it was a third party utility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was window shade third party. You guys don’t know. Maybe someone in the chat room knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember window shade and I remember getting a crappy knockoff for my PC because I thought it was awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is awesome It was awesome and it is When a shade had to go back to being third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John after being integrated to the eyes because they took it out in OS 10 And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had so in practice you guys have like all these like sticks around your screen like these windows
⏹️ ▶️ John Awesome window shade was awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes Marco. That is basically how it works. Why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John want that? This is why I window shade was awesome of a screen full of sticks. If you’re a person like me,
⏹️ ▶️ John who arranges your windows on the screen, like doesn’t maximize everything, doesn’t tile
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, but actually arranges them like you’d arrange items on a desk in front of you so you know where everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. I always got very mad whenever anybody would move my like aim window or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, then not just aim window, but everything, all your terminal windows, all your editor windows, stuff like that. Being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to essentially minimize them without having them move,
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you want them back, you go to where they were, but they don’t take up visual space on your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. You just have the little stick thing. Like, displace minimization, like into
⏹️ ▶️ John the dock, or hidden, also has its place. But being able to sort of maintain the
⏹️ ▶️ John spatial state of your windows while having them minimize themselves, having them hide,
⏹️ ▶️ John having them curl up and get out of your way until you want them, lets you quickly find them again without going to a menu, without
⏹️ ▶️ John hovering over a bunch of little identical-looking icons in the dock, because you know exactly where it is, Because you can visualize where it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you just have the top part of it. So I miss window shade. It wasn’t the ultimate thing for window minimization.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the other tools we currently have now are also good, but they took away that one. It’s kind of a shame. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably just as well because nobody arranges their windows anymore. They just do everything full screen or just have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea where their windows are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine having all these sticks all over the place. Because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like- Well, you don’t minimize all of them. It’s not like you have a million sticks. You just minimize the ones you’re not using right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Why is that so much better than hiding? because hiding gets it all the way gone. Like how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get it back then? You hit the icon on the dock, you use the alt tab
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. What icon on the dock? There’s seven icons on the dock that are all badged from the same application. I mean, you don’t know which one is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. You gotta do the mystery meat hover and find out which one it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I never minimize. I only hide. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you hide, how do you get it back then? You have to go back to the application, go to
⏹️ ▶️ John some menu or yeah, go to the dock icon and pull it up by its name. And I hope you remember the name and I hope your application is good about
⏹️ ▶️ John giving titles to the windows that make sense. that you know especially if it’s a window that has tabs and it doesn’t convey
⏹️ ▶️ John the tab title up spatial memory is a lot better for me anyway I think for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I spatial memory of where things are on the dock seriously like like but the things are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same place in the dock so I
⏹️ ▶️ John application icon or the little yeah but you have to the application icon doesn’t magically make the window appear
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to look at the list of windows that are minimized under it how many windows do you keep in one app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe this is our disconnect here. Like I generally don’t, like in each app, I usually keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between one and two windows. Like, and I use tabs very heavily in Terminal and the browsers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, I don’t keep a whole lot of windows open.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have 11 windows in Calliope right now, to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco give an example.
⏹️ ▶️ John What, oh my God. In BbEdit, I frequently have, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve pushed up into 100 before, maybe 20 or 30 most of the time. I don’t even know how many we had multiple windows. Me neither!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I usually have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 or 9, maybe 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hell is wrong with you? Each of those windows has tabs in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you not believe in, yeah I was going to say, do you not believe in tabs? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the terminal windows have tabs, I love terminal tabs. Obviously my browser windows have tabs. How many browsers, I don’t have a lot of browser
⏹️ ▶️ John windows open now. Right now I have…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that every week we’re finding out like some crazy computer habit from John that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody would have expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have 19 Safari windows open right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god. Windows? 19 Safari windows? Not even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John tabs? Tons of tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco window has a lot of tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only there was a way for you to save things to a reading list or something to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John read it later.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what this is for. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have, this is why I
⏹️ ▶️ John need a bigger screen too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I have a lot of things. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger screen, this is like giving a hoarder a bigger house. Like you don’t, that’s not gonna fix your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John no. I’m not hoarding things. I’m not collecting windows. They each have a thing that I’m doing in them. It kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sounds like you are. John, you cannot have 19 windows with multiple tabs per window that you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m using scare quotes, doing things in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I definitely can. I sometimes have sort of like sedimentary layers, like for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the work, my work windows, because I was doing work earlier today are, you know, separate from my other
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. I don’t use spaces either. How could you manage all that without space? My 19 colloquy
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, by the way, are precisely arranged in the same place they’ve been for years. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John windows because each one window per channel one window per channel, and they are precisely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arranged And you hang out in 19 channels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my how do you get anything done during the day? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John in numbers idling. Did you know how I see works? You don’t have to be there paying attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re all in like the little tabs in the side. They’re not oh my no No, the windows are open. I see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would having little us little minimized window sticks everywhere How would that help you for
⏹️ ▶️ John for for colloquy when I’m doing a podcast? I don’t want to look at any of the windows except for
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I’m doing so I have to minimize all of them to the dock except for the one that I’m doing. If I could option
⏹️ ▶️ John window shade them and they would all shade up and then shade down the one I want, I wouldn’t have to do that. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John I can option click to make them all and minimize or whatever. I probably wouldn’t use it for call. I probably use it for editing windows more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just use it for Finder windows too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m stuck on I cannot maybe I cannot cognitively handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than a couple of Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’re window users, you’re used to maximizing everything. You can only handle one window at a time, I know. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I can only, I can only handle like a sum total of maybe 10 tabs across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John windows. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should see my work computer. It has so many windows on it. Like there is an unbelievable amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of windows. My home one, sometimes I have to go through and clean up things. Like I know what’s in a lot of these windows and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, sometimes these things are from Instapaper, but a lot of times there are things that I can’t view.
⏹️ ▶️ John I look at Instapaper on my iPad and some video won’t play because it’s like flash or because the thing is choking on today on my
⏹️ ▶️ John poor iPad 3 I was reading a blog post and I have like text and then like a Google ad next
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and I double-tap the text to just have the text fill the screen and it was some crazy JavaScript on
⏹️ ▶️ John this page it was like no I will always have to show you the ad so the largest you can make this page
⏹️ ▶️ John is where it shows my little pretty blue margin and then my white margin and
⏹️ ▶️ John then a text and then another white margin and then the ad then a blue margin and if you pinch to zoom all it did was make a text smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John so it could fit the ad in and scrolling the page was super slow so it’s like I just want to read that and I need a 2.8
⏹️ ▶️ John gigahertz processor to read this friggin blog post apparently because I’m not gonna scroll this on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and watch it like stutter and accidentally make it seem like I click the ad when I’m trying to scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John very frustrating anyway there reasons that I might have thing in a browser window instead of looking at them
⏹️ ▶️ John in this paper on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow I just I don’t even know what to say right now like 19 Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windowses did I hear that right 19 yeah how do you Tell which one oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no that is the one number 17 is the one I have them I have them arranged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just seems like there would be a lot of churning going on here because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you can’t yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t fit 19 windows on screen, and you said you said you don’t use virtual desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called it’s called. Oh, they overlap. That’s called tiling you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so and you have only one physical monitor connected to your machine Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah? I’m one monitor person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s what is it a 24 inch class or 30 inch or what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, so 24
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch size. Okay, so wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is making me hurt. I want to cry just thinking of you trying to manage all this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not managing it. Like this is just how I work. This is like seeing someone’s messy decks and say, how can you do anything done with
⏹️ ▶️ John all those markers and pencils everywhere? And there’s just paper and erasers. I don’t understand how you get anything done. It’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m concentrating on the thing, concentrating on it. I know where the things are. All these paints and cups
⏹️ ▶️ John and buckets. And how do you get anything done? You have a stick and an easel. And I don’t understand how you get anything done. How do you
⏹️ ▶️ John know where everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is right I have 367 sticks on my desktop and I can tell exactly which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the window I need
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like it’s someone who looks like a mechanic who’s got an entire tool chest next to him and everything is in a drawer and every
⏹️ ▶️ John drawer there’s a little cubby and everything is there and it’s all within arm’s reach when he’s working on a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s that’s how the mechanic sees it in his head and in real life it’s a giant pile of unsorted tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and oh I know I know I can find these
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway the beauty of the computer is things never get dirty and what the The beauty
⏹️ ▶️ John computer for window arranging should be, I still want this utility, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anyone’s ever gonna make it because it’s something that Apple should make, is I want something that lets me arrange windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I’m pretty sure that many of those exist. Second of all, this is your app, John. This is your great
⏹️ ▶️ John is your- Yeah, but it’s the type of app I would never make because I would know this is a doom from the start because Apple would never,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have to use private APIs, and it can never go in the Mac App Store, and there’d be one user of it, me. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps you’re already talking about, Everyone always, every time I mention this, people send me the million apps. Like they’re mentioning a chat room already. Here comes
⏹️ ▶️ John Moom. What’s that other one called? Divi is gonna come
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up next. Like I know all these apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like these apps are made by people who like the eye on window manager. They’re like for tiling or
⏹️ ▶️ John like even Windows does it where like I can make it half my screen or a third of my screen. It’s like no, I’m not subdividing my screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want auto layout for Windows. You wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this window has the same center X coordinate as this window from this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, but is always 30 pixels to the right of the window edge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that, but that’s too complicated. Like there are, there is an app that does that. There’s an app where you can like type in those
⏹️ ▶️ John type of things and have like bind them to keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that. I don’t think it does auto layout stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does basically springs and struts type thing. Like you can very precisely, but I would never want to do that. I would need it to be a GUI. What
⏹️ ▶️ John I want is something that apps used to do. A couple of neat little apps used to do, like individual
⏹️ ▶️ John apps would do it. It wasn’t a system wide thing. And you know, some apps still do it kind of like where you would drag
⏹️ ▶️ John a palette and it would kind of snap the palette into the corner of your screen, but it wouldn’t be touching in the corner,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would leave a little margin. And if you brought one of the other palettes of the application up below it, this is before everyone’s palettes were
⏹️ ▶️ John dockable, like, you know, in the Adobe apps today. You bring another palette below it, it wouldn’t stick to the bottom of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John palette, but it would leave a little margin, that margin was the same. And like, what I basically want is, for example, my Calico
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. I have arranged in a particular way, and I have them in groups, and the groups I want all to be the same
⏹️ ▶️ John width, and I want them to be vertically aligned with each other. And if they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John overlapping, I want them to be a consistent margin between them above and to the ones to the right. But if they are overlapping, I just want them
⏹️ ▶️ John to stay within their right and left edges. Like basically sort of magnetic, sticky, smart
⏹️ ▶️ John guide kind of things, kind of like what Keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like what OmniGraffle does with its layout constraints, like a combination of those two things. It would take some
⏹️ ▶️ John experimentation to get it right. And you need modifier keys when you don’t want it to snap and stuff like that. Just a few
⏹️ ▶️ John simple snapping rules. Oh, totally. Just a few small rules. Yeah, for making things the same
⏹️ ▶️ John width and lined up with each other stuff like and now I just do it manually and it’s it’s Fine, it’s not that big of a deal
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know or tiling just regular tiling windows like there are certain tiling offsets that you don’t want to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t make let me tile a window and leave like two pixels visible on the left and right edges because that’s not good enough like I want
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of magnetic kind of Snap to gritty,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not really a grid like with I don’t care about the screen grid I only care about what your position is relative
⏹️ ▶️ John to other related windows in the same app or something like that. It’s complicated That’s why no one makes
⏹️ ▶️ John this app. I don’t think anyone would actually want it but people who are Meticulous window
⏹️ ▶️ John arrangers all five of us really like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, John Maybe if you didn’t have 19 Safari windows, it wouldn’t you wouldn’t need to be quite as meticulous with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your range No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John but wouldn’t help. That’s just one application Terminal I get bad in terminal terminal tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John of like they’re a problem because now every window has like a million tabs in it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you could just not have as many windows and tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ John use them for work like they they have a purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could use a Well, I’m gonna choose not to throw stones on the pearl issue
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what I’m doing with the terminal windows all the pearls open and BB at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how many windows are there there?
⏹️ ▶️ John At home now, I just have one window open and BB edit, but at work. I have many more than one Every
⏹️ ▶️ John once in a while. I flush everything out close all the windows in an application Start over again, but I do it by
⏹️ ▶️ John checking what I have there and making sure there’s nothing I still want to save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that happen like annually?
⏹️ ▶️ John No like BB edit like when I’m done with the project usually I will review all of my windows and make sure I’m not keeping anything
⏹️ ▶️ John Open that I don’t want to and close everything and you know BB edits a cool
⏹️ ▶️ John like quit is now bound to save all my window positions and state and then quit
⏹️ ▶️ John so I never close anything just quit bb-edit and relaunch it everything is back where I found it that’s that’s the way I like the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just 19 Safari windows oh my god
⏹️ ▶️ John how many Chrome windows do I have open? oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god I didn’t even think about that of course there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John multiple browsers of course 12 Chrome windows in addition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John windows. I run
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari and Chrome all the time Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Why on God’s green earth do you need more than 30 web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey browser windows open? Why is that necessary? How many fricking tabs are in all 30
⏹️ ▶️ John browsers? I can close some now. I can close the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m making web browser secure that we just looked at. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John close like four of them. Woo! I can close the pages with the dates of the super clock dates in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the average number of tabs per window you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can still see the titles. Like usually, you know. eight no that’s too many one two three four
⏹️ ▶️ John like five or six like for example when i was looking up i wanted to look up the dates for super clock i had one window
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated to looking up the date that uh that super clock was uh was released one window looking
⏹️ ▶️ John up the date that uh system 7.5 was released and within those windows i have the google
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and then i have tabs for the google search results that i thought would be likely and then one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the tabs eventually led to the answer that window is done off to the side next window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is it off to the side And why is it not closed?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I could refer to it when I just discussed this and did the math in my head about what the dates were. Right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John did I not close the tabs behind it? Because I knew when I would come in at the end of the show, I could close this entire window. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John little mini research windows. That entire window goes. That entire window goes. Oh my god. I had
⏹️ ▶️ John the email that I wanted to talk about in the after show from Grant open in a window here. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John ADP notes in the other window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, now you have to be honest with us, please. we’re doing this because we’re your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends. Do you have any other browsers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just, do you keep any other browsers? You know, we’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John help you, John. Keep
⏹️ ▶️ John any other browsers in my application folder or like run them? I don’t run any other browsers, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John do have the latest version of, what do you call it?
⏹️ ▶️ John another version of Hopper in there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When’s the last, how often do you use Firefox, John? never okay you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while i launch it just to see like i i got in the situation before where when i launched it the in
⏹️ ▶️ John application updater didn’t even know about like the newest version of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey firefox like the
⏹️ ▶️ John updater wasn’t new enough to know that like actually they’re on firefox version like 30 or something and it wanted to download
⏹️ ▶️ John it wanted to go to like version 12 or something and it thought that was the latest so sometimes i don’t run it so long
⏹️ ▶️ John that it just goes completely i occasionally i fire it up just to see what it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco i used to maintain firefox
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day but Chrome totally replaced it for me. So you only use Firefox socially. I
⏹️ ▶️ John used to like when I mean maintain like to get Firefox to be tolerable back in the day, I had a series of
⏹️ ▶️ John themes that I had to apply and the themes would break with new versions. So every time the new version came out, I would update Firefox
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to find the new version of the cool theme that I liked. And then just Firefox went crazy. And I said, forget it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I’m still bad. So you have 30 web browsers open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with roundabouts of six tabs per per window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh god what do you need 180 tabs for
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff there’s stuff in there look at this one i have of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s stuff in there there’s 180 things of stuff this stuff’s gonna be worth something someday i have to keep it
⏹️ ▶️ John the ux the ux of mobile settings i’m gonna read that one eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like the reason i’m
⏹️ ▶️ John there is because things tend to get buried in instapaper because they fall off the end but this one i really want to read i
⏹️ ▶️ John can leave it open in a web browser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how are you gonna find it you have 180 tabs to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John go through i’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do some cleaning now This Swift’s blog post I read already so I can close that one. I got ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoarders This is just this is hoarders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah Did you hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest rhetoric on where they’re going to this the the levels of hoarding I haven’t finished
⏹️ ▶️ John it yet I’m like halfway This is a relevant topic to them But anyway, this is definitely not because
⏹️ ▶️ John as you will find out when you listen to the episode hoarders don’t know where their stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you are you are just an indexed hoarder?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not it’s not hoarding at all. It’s a key characteristic of the hoarders They just don’t know where their stuff is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saving this stuff to think it’s gonna be worth something someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet hoarders… First of all, you are saving it because you think you’re gonna actually get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will! I do get to it! How do you think things close? Things close because I got them. I don’t necessarily get to them on this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I might get to them someplace else. Oh, see, I can close this one because this is from last night’s Incomparable. Boom.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Another window
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs gone. All right. So why was it open all day? Well, it wasn’t open all day because I just got on
⏹️ ▶️ John my computer. I’ve been busy. I haven’t had time to like sit at my computer and do anything except for open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since when? 96? Someday I’ll clean it all out when I retire.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I opened that window with all those tabs in it for movie information for an incomparable that
⏹️ ▶️ John I did like last night. And I didn’t close all the windows before I left the computer because it’s late.
⏹️ ▶️ John My way of computing is extremely efficient. People, people for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t understand that. Like, how can you have all these windows open? How can you find anything? And I see somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ John when I tell them to open up a new file. They they open a terminal window.
⏹️ ▶️ John They see the into the directory They said VI the file name they edit the file then my have to open a new file
⏹️ ▶️ John They close that file they see the even another directory They type VI that file name and they edit the file that is inefficient
⏹️ ▶️ John And then all the while they’re doing this in one window zoom to their entire gigantic 23 inch screen Instead
⏹️ ▶️ John instead I have different terminal windows open in different locations. I don’t need to walk over to a different directory to do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John I have shortcuts it for commands to do things It is much more efficient than the people who think I should I need
⏹️ ▶️ John everything clean just one window that covers my entire screen I’ll do everything there. You’re basically it’s multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John versus single tasking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a lot of room between those two extremes
⏹️ ▶️ John be towards one end,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but it’s not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not like Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re looking back on the rest of society and we’re saying geez I remember what that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’ll find a lot of old-school Mac users work like this with multiple windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John And people who didn’t grow up managing Windows, Windows are their enemy. They just want to get them off the screen. They can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John handle them. They don’t, it doesn’t occur to them to try to arrange or shape them as they would physical objects. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John they just, they just appear randomly and they’re at the mercy of their Windows. And so their only solution is to only, to have very
⏹️ ▶️ John few Windows because it’s the only way they can feel like they have any mastery of the computer. I don’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, let me assure you that whether or not you are aware of it, Windows are your enemy as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re my friend. We need to have a Windows 0 intervention.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the tip for the two of you who both, I assume, use Terminal at various times. Yeah. Have a Terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John window arrangement that you can save in Terminal, where you dedicate
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes, shapes, and regions for windows dedicated to specific purposes. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John here are my remote windows for this type of machine. This is my log tailing
⏹️ ▶️ John window. This is my window for root on a local machine. This is my window
⏹️ ▶️ John for starting and stopping the web server. And within those windows, you can have tabs for sub-purposes or whatever, but dedicate a few
⏹️ ▶️ John major regions to the things that you do. The things I listed are things I commonly do, but whatever the things are you commonly do,
⏹️ ▶️ John have windows, size, shapes, and regions for them. You will never find yourself command-tilding
⏹️ ▶️ John through windows again. You will never find yourself hunting for a window because everything will be exactly where you need it. And terminal windows are the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing where you can actually have them not overlapping that much because you don’t need that many terminal windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with tabs, to cover all of your bases and all of your needs. And then you never need to wonder where to
⏹️ ▶️ John look. You never need to rearrange things so you can see a log being tailed or something, because everything is always
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly where you want it. Try that just in one application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have that. I mean, I know where things are. I just get by with fewer windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what are your categories of windows of like, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of task? Describe them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What, for terminal? Yeah. Okay. I can’t believe this is the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I have right now four terminal windows, most of which are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single tab except the main, I have like one main one on the bottom, that’s where I keep like six or seven tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open. And they’re always in a similar order, like the far left tab is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, just like somewhere in my home directory, whatever I’m currently working on, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current project terminal window. And then as you go to the right, one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the most recent ATP I’m working on that because I do encoding on the command line and transcoding on the command line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have tab titles?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, I just shows the command because I can tell like in this one says like root
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at DB one. I know what that means. Like that’s like that. So I have a couple of web servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, depending on what I’m doing, if I’m doing local web development, I’ll have a MySQL window open, I’ll have a PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window open, like, you know, but it’s, it’s always in the same spot, like and I keep the same tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same spots. I just get by with a lot fewer of
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I do the same thing within tabs. I have different builds that I’m working in, arrange and tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John by date order. And I always have the release build in the far left tab for the window that I’m that I’m doing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John dev machine, which is which is the window where I’m typing commands into. Then I have a separate window for a separate project
⏹️ ▶️ John in a different place with a similar arrangement. And then my log talent windows is in a totally different spot. And it’s much wider because of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lines. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got one of those up top. Yeah. I mean, I feel like… So, a while ago, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was in Bruce Togmazzini’s Tog on Interface book, like from, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when was that from, like the late 80s or early 90s, whenever that was from. And he mentioned there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a study that they were doing when they were designing the original Mac UI and stuff like that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, comparing keyboard shortcuts to doing things with the mouse. And at the time, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably is not true anymore, but at the time, they said that, you know, doing these UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studies and people would always think the keyboard shortcuts were faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than doing things with the mouse but then when they actually observe people they actually measured how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast people were doing tasks oftentimes I think in their study I think it was the majority of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time again I don’t think this would hold true today but even though people thought that the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was always going to be faster in practice when the way people actually worked using the mouse was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster and they didn’t think so but when you actually measured it by wall clock time, it was faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the other thing that drives people crazy, especially nerds who are like, the big
⏹️ ▶️ John power nerd thing is, I do everything from the keyboard. My hands never leave the keyboard. I’m a touch typist. My hands never leave the
⏹️ ▶️ John home keys. Everything is a keyboard shortcut. I never need to touch the mouse. If you watch me use the computer, I am constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John bouncing between the mouse and the keyboard, sometimes using them both at once if it’s a modifier thing. And people think, that
⏹️ ▶️ John must be incredibly inefficient. But it’s not, because there are certain things, I mean, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing things, spatially arranging anything, the whole point of spatially arranging things is you can grab at it in a moment’s notice,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know exactly where it is, right? And part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the little game, the gamification of spatially arranging things is, look, you’re not gonna have room for everything. Things are gonna overlap.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you need to have is a region that can be relied, some corner of a thing that can be reliably visible. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, you’re arranging things like a little puzzle so you can find the corner, but it becomes second nature where you quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John grab the mouse, snag the corner of the window you’re interested in because it’s always in the same place and you know exactly what’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. If you need to change tabs within that window, some people will be like, oh, I can just cycle through them with a keyboard shortcut. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. Your hand is already on the mouse. Click the tab that you know that you want to do because you want to go to the release build and it’s the far left
⏹️ ▶️ John tab. You could never have gotten to that prompt faster with a series of keyboard shortcuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just couldn’t because you’d have to like, you’d have to like, it’s like, you know, it’s like iterative versus,
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say iterative versus, uh, you know, declarative, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite of imperative versus declarative. They’re probably not the opposite anyway. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re running a program in your head. Some people do that some people are good at running programs in their head like in VI down five
⏹️ ▶️ John lines over three words insert character like that’s not the way I think though I think it’s over there and I just grab it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse and that is second nature to me and I don’t have to think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, okay, so two devil’s advocate points. Number one, the reason I brought up that whole talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on interface study is like like You might be thinking what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing is faster, but it might not be faster
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s faster because when people see when people see me use my computer, they can’t follow it Like what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t wait. I didn’t see that. Wait go they cannot follow what I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I I think a person who is Who is like an experienced power user for computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that? I think that would apply to almost all those people like people who are really fast with work on their computer regardless of how they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arranging things. So anyway, my second devil’s having a point is the way the way you arrange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, how you’re describing this, the reasons you’re citing for doing this, make it sound like what you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoid is like having to like pull something back out of like where it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it lives like in an offline storage. So like having to open up a new window to go to something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to like, you know, pull out a file out of a Finder window or open up a new terminal window and CD to the right directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or SSH to the right thing or whatever. But in reality, like, if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re accustomed to, like if somebody with the same level of skill and familiarity with computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using them and whatever system they’ve built up over time, if they do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other way, which I think is closer to what Casey and I do, which is like a smaller number of windows with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher tolerance of having to go fetch something from disk or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t stand to watch over the shoulder of those people because they’re like, oh I have to go do this thing, let me open a new window, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me go into the right directory. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey already there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you end up and then let me let me close the window when I’m done to clean everything up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John do the same thing five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. But if that was the system that you had chosen to implement, if that was if that was the way that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked, I would posit that you would be very similarly fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not indistinguishably fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not it’s not about fast. It’s like, it’s like I said before, it’s efficiency and efficiency doesn’t just involve speed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also involves cognitive load and this is the type of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So your cognitive load there is manageable?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yes, because you don’t…
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are within reach you don’t think about. If you find yourself thinking words in your head or thinking little programs
⏹️ ▶️ John or macros or series of steps, that is a much higher cognitive load than you not thinking about it at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. In the same way you don’t think about it when you pull your phone out of your pocket, it’s always in the same pocket. You don’t think, okay, reach
⏹️ ▶️ John down, get phone out of pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only have one pocket. I don’t have a hundred fricking pockets to go searching through.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but you have a working set of things. I’m trying to show you that spatial memory is different than having… I know
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same reason what’s going on with Marco doesn’t name his tabs, right? How do you know where they are? Well, you know where they are by position.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need to have custom tab titles on them, because if you had custom tab tiles, that would imply that you’re reading the titles of the tabs. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ John find yourself reading the titles of the tabs, it shows you don’t know where the thing is you’re looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they also have labels to help that. Just like, you know, they’re pretty lightweight, but like, you know what it
⏹️ ▶️ John main Chrome window always has Gmail as the far left tab. I don’t even know what the title of the Gmail tab is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s always in the same place. I always know exactly where it is. I have all my tabs on my main
⏹️ ▶️ John Google window are always in exactly the same order. It’s not just because occasionally if I accidentally close that window and
⏹️ ▶️ John lose it in history, I can recreate it. I know where everything is by position because those are the tabs that I use
⏹️ ▶️ John most frequently. And going for something based on where it is or what
⏹️ ▶️ John shape it is or even the color it is or whatever, like recognizing the icon, that does not require high-level
⏹️ ▶️ John neurocognitive functions. It just happens the same way you can find all the light switches in your house and you can recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John what your car looks like in the parking lot without reading the model number off the side of the thing. It’s just visual recognition and
⏹️ ▶️ John where things are in space and especially as it relates to you reaching for them, even if it’s virtually with a mouse, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more efficient than ever having to read or count things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I always have terminal open on my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It always has no less than three tabs, and they are always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing the same things. I didn’t even know it was possible to name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tab because I only have three fricking tabs open at a time. Well, you just don’t do a lot of things at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I just oh my God, it stresses me out so much. Just thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the way you work. I mean, obviously it works for you. I mean, I’m not trying to. I mean, I think you’re fricking nuts,
⏹️ ▶️ John it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t stress you. It really is just the amount of things you have to do. And also your tolerance for like Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t manage this mess, if you can’t sort of like deal with this swarm of things, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like they’re overwhelming you rather than you controlling them, then that’s a problem, right? But it should, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like these things don’t come into existence on their own. I make them and I put them in places. The thing that bothers me are things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are created that I can’t arrange that like any application, for example, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the messages app, where as far as I know, well, I guess you can pull out a separate conversation, but really, it really
⏹️ ▶️ John wants you to use a single window for everything. And I can’t stand that because I have no control over what order things
⏹️ ▶️ John are in the left sidebar. And it’s just one window. And if something happens in some other conversation, I have to go find
⏹️ ▶️ John it and click on it. I have to go find it and click on it. Whereas I might use idiom. It remembers window positions on a per person
⏹️ ▶️ John basis. And I can tell who I’m talking to, like, how many times do I accidentally type the wrong thing into the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John to the wrong person in idiom? Almost never. How many times I do it in messages all the freaking time, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same text box for everybody. If you didn’t notice that you didn’t change the mode to switch to the conversation you wanted to talk in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up typing the wrong thing to the wrong person. ADM, that doesn’t happen, even though every single ADM window is identical,
⏹️ ▶️ John visually speaking, like the colors are the same and everything’s the same. The only thing that’s different is the size
⏹️ ▶️ John and position of the windows, and if I have four conversations going on at the same time, I can keep track of which four people I’m talking to, not
⏹️ ▶️ John by memorizing, okay, this person’s in the upper right, but their window never moves unless I move it, it’s tied to the person
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking to. My wife’s window is always in the same spot on the screen, and so I never accidentally type something
⏹️ ▶️ John to a QA person that I should be typing to my wife because I would never do that it’s totally in a different position I would never grab
⏹️ ▶️ John for that window whereas in messages I have to pay super careful attention to which little thing is scrolled up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John top and which little message I’ve clicked on it’s it’s terrible all right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so can we do titles before I just weep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite title so far that was actually said during the regular show is something that we can say right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now which is nothing is resolved
⏹️ ▶️ John where is the where’s the title thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait wait you didn’t know where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John was expanding I
⏹️ ▶️ John was expanding the little link thing on the top of the my IRC window and I said
⏹️ ▶️ John where is the link to the titles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why don’t you already have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like you just lost it you didn’t know exactly where it was
⏹️ ▶️ John I well here’s let me tell you why cuz I expanded I expanded the link not
⏹️ ▶️ John the window I didn’t have any windows over why didn’t I have any windows open with the title thing in it because I close it when the show is over
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I turned on a little thing and what I was
⏹️ ▶️ John for was titles because the incomparable one is titles.incomparable.com and so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read all the text that’s in the topic recording most Wednesdays 9 p.m. blah blah blah I didn’t read it I was just looking for the
⏹️ ▶️ John word title and didn’t see it and so I unexpanded it and then re-expanded it and then I said oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John showbota doesn’t say title
⏹️ ▶️ John titles.incomparable.com something like that anyway oh my god and see
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a hoarder would leave that leave the show about open all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not I close it as soon as we’re done with titles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hoard everything under the Sun, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you know I don’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t that’s gotta hurt your self-esteem.
⏹️ ▶️ John What things do you think I keep open that aren’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean I keep
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail open because mail is always coming in You know if there’s something if I’m done reading something or if
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need it now it gets closed And if I don’t need if I don’t want to like I have to remember The titles
⏹️ ▶️ John are a thing I have to look at no, there’s no pending task for titles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh My god, I haven’t been this upset since the Mac Pro episode
⏹️ ▶️ John I should keep titles open all the time? I’m afraid it’s gonna open a bunch of web sockets and exhaust my file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I don’t think it actually even works if you leave it open all the time because it clears itself
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually breaks and then dies. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it eventually times itself out. But oh God, I just can’t handle this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I literally can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing is resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is this is either the best or worst ending to the show that I’ve ever heard
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean we get to talk about the the follow-up by the PlayStation 4 controller, but I’ll save it for next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll need something next week. So that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John That window is always open to ATP show notes Set a tab in my main window always
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the show notes are close
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes are always there Yeah, cuz I’m all week. I’m finding things and throwing in the show notes. Don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to open a new window for it Don’t need to go to a bookmark. Don’t even know what the URL is because there’s some crazy Google Docs thing I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s a question. Why don’t you do that with more things that you keep in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tabs? Do what? Like why don’t you take so many of those tabs that you have open for a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Make a document somewhere with them or save them somewhere so that you can recall them later So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to have all these tabs open. That’s what Instapaper is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. If they’re open in a browser window It’s because they’ve gone up to another level because it’s like I don’t want this to get
⏹️ ▶️ John buried in Instapaper because I’ll forget about it I actually do want to read it So leave it here either want to read it or
⏹️ ▶️ John show it to somebody or it’s something that I can only do on my Mac. So I want to remember. Oh, yeah, when I’m on my Mac, there was that one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I couldn’t look at on my iPad, but for some reason, trying to remember to like, oh, now that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m on my Mac doing something, I should look at that one thing that I couldn’t good example, which I have open right now is
⏹️ ▶️ John zero punctuation, which does this thing of like pay if you want the HTML five version. So you they intentionally make it
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can’t watch it on iOS device, which is generally when I want to watch these videos. So I have window open
⏹️ ▶️ John to remind me, hey, you’re sitting at your Mac and you have some free time to do something. Zero punctuation is there and you can only
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it when you’re here. So don’t leave the computer until you do. And I did watch a bunch of them the other day, but I’m not all caught up. So I left the window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t even concentrate right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the seven rabid window shade fads all right in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like window shade that I don’t take issue with. I take issue with you having 300 windows open.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco couldn’t handle the sticks. the sticks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it looks really weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to me like why i don’t think of it as like a phantom window like only like it’s like the shadow of the
⏹️ ▶️ John window is there like well then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t you just leave the window there like the whole point of hiding or minimizing windows is to get them off the screen completely
⏹️ ▶️ John i know but like most of the window is gone it’s just the title bar and title bars tend to be near the top anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ John see you can see like where the window was you can visualize it being there and the other thing is like it used to be for like peeking behind
⏹️ ▶️ John a window like you just want to see what’s behind it briefly but you don’t want to change the focus you just go you
⏹️ ▶️ John know double click or click and zip zip you know like actually shade to peek at the thing that’s behind
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have a good way to do that these days you can you know if you option click the window behind you’ve hidden the
⏹️ ▶️ John one before and you can’t get back to it if you manage the docket to go chase it down there to get it to come back out or do a keyboard combo for
⏹️ ▶️ John it but if you peek peek peek you would use it if it was there surprisingly useful maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t use it as like all the time or have lots of things minified but I think you know that that peaking thing actually comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in handy. I’m telling you this is your app. I know I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an app that I wanted but I’m never write an app like that because it’s really complicated to make and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to tie deeply into like the Windows Server essentially using like private undocumented
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs who wants to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? Maybe instead of making this be your app the file system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I think that the file system crusade has been fought as much as you can fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and I think it’s out of your hands now. Like there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John more. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John ever in my hands when was it in my hands tell me about that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing more you can do to try to convince Apple to make a new file system. Like you’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything you possibly could to do that. I can continue to complain. But you still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you could you could refocus your efforts from that which I think is it probably is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably has reached the end of what you can really do with that. Now you can start not making a window shade app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but trying to make Apple add that feature back to the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a Windows Shape, it was a Windows Shape for OS X for a long time, remember? You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remember that? No. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was an insanity thing, it was a hacksy. Oh, okay, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t count.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But I used it for years, that was the last one I used. Eventually, you know, I ridded my system of all those weird system
⏹️ ▶️ John extensions and that was the last one to go. But now, you know, it’s long gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use any of those things anymore and, you know, Windows Shape, I get along without it. I don’t miss it that much. I don’t miss it
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as like a, you know, a working finder. I thought I missed more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Can I go to bed and like weep for john?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to weep for my computing. It’s if you saw me
⏹️ ▶️ John using my computer wouldn’t seem that weird to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have no idea how happy this crystal meth makes me just let me keep abusing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t it doesn’t do it. There’s no harmful effects. In fact, the harmful effects seems to be on you. Not me. It does. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just stop doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like I said, I feel the same way when I see someone using a computer, this incredibly powerful computer with a huge screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have like two windows open. And every time they want something new, they open a new window, use it and then close it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they never sort of arrange their workspace into like a set of things that they’re currently working
⏹️ ▶️ John close a window. Well, like I said, the worst thing is when someone’s working, you know, if you’re doing programming, you end up editing multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John files. Even if, you know, like if you have a header file and implementation file, and there’s multiple like programming is necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with multiple files web programming even more so because it’s just a lot of files and you’re working on them all
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time it’s not like you’re working on one then you stop and you work on another then you stop I mean you kind of do
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re cycling between them so often that if the overhead of going to fetch the other one is
⏹️ ▶️ John too high you’ll kill yourself and I see people they will only have one window one they call it their
⏹️ ▶️ John text editing window and it fills the entire screen or whatever their editor is they work on one document and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they close it, they open another document, they work on it, and they close it, they open another document work on and close it. And occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll split the view and open one document and like a single splitter so they can see them both at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is on you know, a giant screen often in portrait orientation. And that is like, it’s so and
⏹️ ▶️ John then if you want them to like do something in the command line, they close all their editing windows because that’s also the terminal window
⏹️ ▶️ John and the type of command. And if that command doesn’t return and give them their prompt back, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the frequent phrase I find myself saying to to people is, you know, open another terminal window or get
⏹️ ▶️ John me another shell prompt. It’s like, they just work with one. And whatever that one shell prompt, and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the equivalent of Casey not understanding my millions of windows. I can’t understand how people get anything done
⏹️ ▶️ John with one. Like they just use one. No tabs, no multiple windows. This is such a false dichotomy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, it’s not. This is the other end of the spectrum. And I’m trying to say, I understand Casey’s frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John in seeing someone use a computer the way they don’t think. But the thing is, he’s not even seeing me use a computer. He’s just visualizing
⏹️ ▶️ John it in his mind. But that’s the way people feel comfortable. Like that’s the, what they can keep track of is one thing at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you guys can keep track of is like, you know, your four terminal windows with a couple of tabs that I can keep track of a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been doing this a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing is, is if you told me you had like four windows, four Safari windows open, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few tabs in each. Yeah. I would still think you’re a little crazy, but you know, whatever. But what did you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say? 30 windows with something to the order of six tabs, a window, no human being I
⏹️ ▶️ John not every window has six tabs like I mean so my my bug tracking window has four tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John here my titles window has one you know has no tabs cuz it’s just a bug tracker
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally I consolidate but I don’t like consolidating things that aren’t grouped together like I wouldn’t stick I
⏹️ ▶️ John would never stick the zero punctuation window as a tab in the same window as the titles thing cuz
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’re not related
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t picked the title Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolved. Nothing is resolved, Marco. Oh, God. I’m frustrated enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I looked at CMF saying the windows of Syracuse accounting and almost thought to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, maybe we should use that. It doesn’t really matter, obviously, but oh, just thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just stresses me out. Let’s talk about the Mac Pro some just to calm me down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look, there’s another window shade app out there. I’ve never heard of this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m gonna install it, because I’m assuming it’s a crazy system hack, but WindowMizer. WindowMizer
⏹️ ▶️ John is an application that lets you see what’s behind the front window without minimizing the current window to the dock. That’s their pitching
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that use is the main feature. Oh my God, no thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, your choices are nothing is resolved or the county one. No, that is not a choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. Now I’m tempted to do it just because I know it’ll bother you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there was ever a time to do a Syracuse County title, this is it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we’re not doing one. There is no time. What are you talking about? Like suddenly a time for this. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I’m coming around. I’m coming around. Once you give in to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sarge’s account. I know that’s the thing. I can’t give CMF his her her. No, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nothing is resolved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So but if there was ever a time, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, there is not. This is not something county about this. Windows doesn’t sound like bridges. You’d have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John for a bridge’s angle. That’s where it came from. It was a show
⏹️ ▶️ John about bridges. You can’t just take like, well, I’m gonna take the Syracuse County part. Like there’s nothing geographic.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense. You just take the blank of Syracuse County. That’s the worst of the Syracuse County titles. This means,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can take anything and stick it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just all you’re doing is encouraging us to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it now. It’d be your show with this title on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Think about it. No, I have never, in every other suggestion that people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had of some stupid Syracuse County title, I have never thought it was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John using. I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John How is this one better? How is this noun stuck into the Mad Libs better than the other one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This, I think this is completely worth it. I think if we use the Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco County title once in this entire podcast, in the entire run of however long we end up doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a good candidate for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh god, I agree. So you’re committing to only do it once then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Yeah, I think we only could do it once and I think this is such a good opportunity. I would do it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John feel free. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to do it. Yes, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s terrible titles. And then enjoy the crazy amount of suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ John that you will like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing. We are all agreeing, ahem, CMF, ahem, that we are never going to recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this again if this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m sure this will work. Yeah. No, I’m telling you, that’s it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the deal. At
⏹️ ▶️ John least we stopped getting, that’s fine for Buddha.
⏹️ ▶️ John was the thing? I never noticed that. It wasn’t. It was a holdover from back to work that somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John leaked into our titles early on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought we’d have to talk about tonight me too. I think this is gonna be a short show We’d like barely get like to an hour 20.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea what to talk about cuz you know the news isn’t that interesting and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought we’d be scraping around for you know desperation topics
⏹️ ▶️ John I can talk to people all day about how they’re not using their computers to their false potential
⏹️ ▶️ John Like think of it this way when you see somebody else use a computer Do you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they could be doing it better or faster?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course. Yeah all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John I have that feeling so much. I cannot look at other people who use computer I can’t imagine what it’s like for you
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that there is that there like this is the hell of your life It’s not as bad as like
⏹️ ▶️ John having two hands on the mouse slowly Up to the closed box, but that’s what it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like And I feel better when I see you ever see the people who do everything in one window but do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John on keyboard those touch type as people at least I feel better about those people because They
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be as efficient as they could be But it’s clear that they have a system And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like just a flurry of commands and the screen is splitting and flashing and changing from one thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John the other And they’re probably doing more work than they have to but things are happening versus the person you see
⏹️ ▶️ John using the computer and You make a suggestion. It’s like alright, so I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John go to that that server I guess I get a new window here and I could type
⏹️ ▶️ John s s You go to the server every day you
⏹️ ▶️ John know There’s no shortcut. There’s no alias. There’s no keyboard shortcut. There’s no existing
⏹️ ▶️ John open window. It’s like a brand new thing every time. Open a new terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John window, type google.com. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can’t, you know, that’s how I feel when I see anybody using a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lighter version of that same feeling when I see someone using a computer, a massively powerful computer with a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge screen that has three windows open.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So would it just drive you insane if I told you I kind of like the full screen mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatever came in online?
⏹️ ▶️ John That full screen like is appropriate for certain things like especially if you have an 11 inch MacBook Air or something Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John The full screen is not that big anyway And you just want to get rid of the window chrome and fill it up and people use spaces
⏹️ ▶️ John I can kind of see what they’re doing at least something is happening I am obsessive about space as they swipe from place
⏹️ ▶️ John to place the spaces makes you arrange things like this is my goofing off space And this is my workspace, and this is my you know know
⏹️ ▶️ John console logging space or whatever and it makes people sort of arrange things I think swiping between them with the animation
⏹️ ▶️ John gets a little tiresome and kind of make me seasick which is one of the many reasons I don’t use it and I hate forgetting what
⏹️ ▶️ John space something is in every time I’ve tried to use it I guess I don’t have a system but it is a system it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John I just have like a window here and like when I watch my parents use a computer I want them to only have one window because they cannot handle
⏹️ ▶️ John overwrapping windows at all like once there’s one window behind another window they’ve lost it it’s gone they
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have object permanence for Windows like where did that go? Same place where it was before
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you moved it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they have they have the same number of windows as you but for a Completely different reason
⏹️ ▶️ John no they have like two windows They have two maybe three windows like they do not have a lot of windows
⏹️ ▶️ John But they even two or three because they can’t all be on the same because they want the browser window to be really big eventually It hides all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones and they lose track of So they have a very different problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t even handle this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to go to bed. We
⏹️ ▶️ John And you wondered why I was excited about splitting the screen on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. Oh, no, I don’t. How many icons do you have on your desktop?
⏹️ ▶️ John My desktop is pretty neat. I have a cluster to the left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How could you? When’s the last time you’ve seen your
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop? I just see it right now. You know how I saw it? Without even thinking about it. How do you think I did it? Hot corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, hot corner, of course. Hot corners are awesome. I did not have to think about how I’m gonna go to my desktop. Should
⏹️ ▶️ John I click on the finder and then command option H? No, it happened before without even thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John look at my desktop. Boom. It’s there in front of me I don’t know how it happened my hand flicked the cursor into the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John All right On my left side. I’ve got a couple of folders for the things
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m working on now. I’ve got my Callrecorder recording folder. I got a folder that my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps on my thing I have my ars technica folder, I have my media drive
⏹️ ▶️ John alias, I hate server aliases, do you have server aliases break for you in the finder? Like you’ll make an alias of a server
⏹️ ▶️ John that you mount and you’re like now I’ll be able to mount that easily and then every once in a while the icon just goes generic and it doesn’t work anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hell’s going on. I have never been able to reliably reconnect to a finder network share in any way besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the computer in the list and remounting it. Like every other method has always failed eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John work for me for a while and I keep recreating because I use it a lot and then I’ve got nothing in the whole middle of the desktop and on the right
⏹️ ▶️ John side of the desktop I have a bunch of files that are kind of like temp scrap files for
⏹️ ▶️ John work one of the files is a garage band file that I used to check my levels occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John because it shows the waveform when I talk into it I want to make sure I’m not clipping to adjust the gain and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got Kate’s coloring pages in a folder there she’s always having me find pictures for her and print
⏹️ ▶️ John them out so she can color them in. I’ve got a couple of podcasts that I wish I could put into
⏹️ ▶️ John Overcast, but I can’t because Marco won’t let me upload the files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a link to, what is this a link to? A toilet
⏹️ ▶️ John part that I just bought that I need to like file that away somewhere, and that’s about it. So it’s maybe like one, two,
⏹️ ▶️ John three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight, nine icons, and then two drive icons. Yeah, how many I
⏹️ ▶️ John have? One. Oh, you’re not doing a lot of stuff. You didn’t just repair a toilet. You’re not checking your microphone
⏹️ ▶️ John levels. You don’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did just repair a toilet three times, actually, because I kept doing it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you save links to the place where you got the parts so you can find it next time it breaks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, because, first of all, who cares? Second of all, I bought them all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Amazon, and Amazon keeps a whole history of everything I ever bought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I always end up getting it from these random plumbing supply companies when I find these. Now, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John just need to turn that into a noting your Jimbo. Like, for example, when I get replacement wiper blades, I always forget what sizes they are for the
⏹️ ▶️ John different cars, so the first time I buy them, I just write them down with links to the things. And yeah, Amazon is good about finding
⏹️ ▶️ John your orders. Although sometimes when I search their order history, I wonder if it’s like losing things. It’s difficult because sometimes I buy
⏹️ ▶️ John through my wife’s Amazon account, sometimes through mine. But anyway, I keep a pretty neat desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I wanna see the picture that’s there. That’s not a lot of icons for a big screen. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ John desktops look like of people who don’t manage their desktops. It’s just basically covered with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they look like your browser windows is what they look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. No, everything’s managed. I know exactly where everything is. It has a place. Everything has a place. I don’t need, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can just mouse over it. It just happens. I don’t even know how it gets there. My mouse just guides itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right there. I could close any of these anytime. I just choose not to. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, how many icons do you have on your desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Margo? Uh, I don’t want to count. So eyeballing, it’s probably about 10 or 12. See,
⏹️ ▶️ John same as me. It’s just whatever stuff you happen to be working on that’s in flight and like the kids coloring page stuff, I just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John in the desktop just because, I mean, I could put it in Quixel or two if I wanted, but it’s just convenient to have it there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also because I drag things out of Safari windows, want to drag them you know once you get to the full-size version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the image it’s convenient just to be able to drag it out of a window and drop it into the folder you know I mean and
⏹️ ▶️ John so then the folder if the folder was on the desktop is easy to do that cuz just start the drag flicking to the corner or since they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right edge halftime they’re visible anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t you just leave the window open all the time with the image you don’t have you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I print it and when I print it it’s gone it’s done I’m not leaving things around for for no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John they all have a purpose and once the purpose is done they close yes unless it’s a monitoring type thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m looking all the time like Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the wonderful thing is, John, on an infinite time scale, everything has a purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how the infinite time scale argument works.
⏹️ ▶️ John An infinite time scale, every window closes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re done. We’re done. We’re done. I can’t take this anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John The thing is, the infinite time scale
⏹️ ▶️ John argument, we’re not done because you guys keep bringing this up like it’s a running gag and you don’t quite understand it. The Infinite Time Stew Argument…
⏹️ ▶️ John for the benefit of the chat room and the people and the other two hosts of this program, the Infinite Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Stew Argument is for when somebody agrees with you that something will happen, but anytime you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to pin it down with a date they say, oh well no that won’t happen then. So it’s like you agree this is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen, but the only way I can get you to agree with that is say, well
⏹️ ▶️ John what about 500 years in the future? And say, oh yes well of course that’ll happen in in the 500 years future. What about next week? Never.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about next year? Never. What about next five years? Never. What about 500 years in the future? Okay, I agree. So if you agree,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s somewhere between 500 years in the future. And now where between there is you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John get someone to you know, this is something that you both agree will eventually happen. But every time you throw out a date in the
⏹️ ▶️ John in the conceivable future, they say no. So that’s what the that’s what you’re doing with
⏹️ ▶️ John an infinite timescale argument is basically getting someone to agree this we both think this is going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John All we’re arguing about is when. And the only way you can get to that is by throwing out a ridiculous date like, well, what
⏹️ ▶️ John about 500 years in the future? Then will we have more than 16 gigs of flash
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey memory on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices? And you say, oh, sure, 500 years in the future. Of course you will. Right? And then it’s like, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John then let’s back that up and see where we can get. It’s not, uh, let’s extrapolate into the future
⏹️ ▶️ John and say that something’s going to happen if we just keep advancing time. It’s not quite the same thing as that as saying, you know, well, every
⏹️ ▶️ John window has a purpose if you wait long enough. It’s a nuanced thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you guys keep using it wrong. I want you to be able to employ this in your life as well. I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John what I originally used it on. I think it was convincing Marco of some, what was the original
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco timescale argument?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was something with me, you’re right, but I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was something about a hardware feature coming to Macs or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you know what I think it was, was whether Apple needed what ended up being Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole Copeland 20 whatever. I was saying like Objective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C is fine and it will be fine for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and right and I was like, okay, what does a long time mean? And it’s like, I don’t know, you know, it’s like, well, eventually they’re going to need a language
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, what does eventually mean or whatever it turns out eventually mean it like six months from then. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the whole point. The whole point was not to convince you that if you wait for the heat death of the universe, Apple will have a new programming
⏹️ ▶️ John language. The point was to get us to both agree that they need a new one. And then all we’re arguing about is when.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, glad we got that
⏹️ ▶️ John resolved. And that eventually I win that argument. Yeah, well naturally.