98: Landmines, Pitfalls, and Bottomless Pits
03 Jan 2015Marco’s Node results, Apple’s developer marketing survey, and getting back into the iPad.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- More on John's windowing strategy
- Application Switcher Menu (the developer's site is down)
- DragThing
- Why one would run SSL on "read-only" sites
- More on John's windowing strategy
- Marco (mostly) hates new things again
- Apple's Marketing Survey (via Joe Sieger)
- Marco's new thoughts on his new iPad
- Post-show
- Textshotting
- Boar's Head Pancetta
- Oxford comma
- When to give up on a language
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- Squarespace: A better web starts with your website. Use promo code ATP for 10% off.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use code ATP for 20% off your first order. (Marco's app-icon Fractures)
- Harry's: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Happy New Year and stuff. And happy birthday, John Syracuse, of 40 years old. How’s it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be an old man, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not my birthday today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the first time I’ve spoken to you since your birthday. It’s close enough. Beginning the year with a technicality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have some follow-up. Let’s talk about John’s OS X app window layering policy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I should have done a little bit of research of this, but I’ll have you do the real-time research for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion in episode a couple episodes ago about Windows and window
⏹️ ▶️ John management and stuff like that. One of the things that didn’t come up that probably should have was the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X window layering policy. Now, when you get OS X, if you’ve only ever used OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X, you probably just accept this as the way things work because it’s sort of like how Windows works,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in capital W, Microsoft Windows. You got a bunch of windows on the screen. If you click on a window, that
⏹️ ▶️ John window comes to the front and it comes and then you click another window and that window comes to the front of the other ones and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know it changes the window layering changes in that way. On OS X if you click on the dock icon
⏹️ ▶️ John all windows from that application come to the front. All right and this is again if you’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John ever used OS X you’re like yeah so what that’s just how everything works. And there are menu commands for hide others
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can option click on something to hide the the previous thing to show the new thing and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of shortcuts like that that people know but basically plain old unadorned click just brings the window to to the
⏹️ ▶️ John front, and the doc click brings all the windows of the app to the front. Now, back in the olden days,
⏹️ ▶️ John if my memory serves correctly, when you clicked on the window, all the windows belonging
⏹️ ▶️ John to that application came to the front. So it was sort of the opposite of the behavior in OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X, where a special click, in this case, a click on a doc icon, brings them all to the front. But a plain old regular
⏹️ ▶️ John click just brings the particular window. Now, since I am an old person,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve already established, And I come from the old school Mac world. When
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X came out, I didn’t like the fact that when I clicked a single window, only that window came
⏹️ ▶️ John to the front. And because my window arranging habits had been built up over years and years of using a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and classic Mac OS, I was used to the idea of being able to pull all the windows
⏹️ ▶️ John of an application forward by snagging a corner of one of the windows, and then they would all come to the front. And so it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like a two-layer policy where I’d snag a corner of a visible window, and then within all the windows of that application, which now
⏹️ ▶️ John visible pick the one that I wanted because they’d be tiled according to you know whatever and so there’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John utilities that came out for OSX in the early days of OSX that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John switch this policy to make it so regular click brings all the windows to the front and a modifier click does the other
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior and I’ve used lots of those utilities over the years I think the one I’m using now
⏹️ ▶️ John is I’m still using ASM which was supposed to give you an application switcher menu which is like a classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS thing in the upper right corner of the screen. I think that part doesn’t work anymore or even if it does I have it disabled.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just have the, you know, they call it classic window setting set to on
⏹️ ▶️ John and shift key is the suppression key. So if I click any Safari window all the Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John windows come to the front and if I click any terminal window all the terminal windows come to the front. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John I shift click a window only that window comes to the front. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying one of these policies is the right one or the wrong one because I think both behaviors are useful it’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of which one do you think should be the default and the defaults don’t really matter that much either I
⏹️ ▶️ John suppose I could have got used to just going down to the dock icon and clicking but I was just so used to arranging my windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John using them as these big click areas to do stuff that this is one of the few sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS policies that I still haven’t given up I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably like a little bit of a system hack to do this window layering. It’s not a really big system hack. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think drag thing also either had or still has this feature and there may be other utilities that do it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be like a global P list thing. I don’t even know what this thing is doing, whether it’s a system hack or not. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if my window management sounded strange to you and you’ve only ever used OS 10, that may
⏹️ ▶️ John be a piece of information you’re missing. And I would imagine that both of you have never done
⏹️ ▶️ John this or use any utilities like this and would probably drive you crazy Maybe if you click on a single window and they all came to the front from that app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Yeah, you should try it. It’s actually kind of neat. I mean, you obviously have to adjust your habits
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not losing the ability to do the other thing. You just have to, you know, shift click or option click or whatever modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John click you decide to make it. But it does change the way things work and it makes, I think it makes the way
⏹️ ▶️ John I manage windows a little bit more viable. Like I think it’s the correct default for the way
⏹️ ▶️ John I manage windows. not the correct default for yours, but a lot of people have
⏹️ ▶️ John emailed and tweeted at me since that show to say they were intrigued by my
⏹️ ▶️ John theories and would like to subscribe to my newsletter and so are trying out
⏹️ ▶️ John different window management. I didn’t have a chance to respond to most of the people who sent in emails
⏹️ ▶️ John and tweets saying they wanted to try it, but what I felt like telling them is if you’re going to try it you may not know
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but here’s the setting that I have had on my Mac since the dawn of OS X that you probably don’t have, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably essential to the way I work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I saw a lot of requests for was a screenshot of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. And I’m assuming people wanted perhaps like an expose screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they could see the 11 gazillion windows that you have open. And I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily formally request that because you would probably have to obscure a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. But should you decide that you would like to share that, I’m sure the world at large would
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there were requests But I can’t I mean I can’t take screenshots of my screen because all my stuff is on my screen I don’t want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John through blanking out the windows and in the end It just looks like a bunch of windows like there’s nothing to see
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. Maybe right to you That’s all it looks like then it’s like why don’t you set a vid make a video? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like well then again in a video you’d be seeing all my stuff I don’t show you all my stuff all my email all my
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs that I have open stuff like that But on the feedback front, I don’t know how much you’ve been following the feedback And
⏹️ ▶️ John I but I tried to to be vaguely scientific with following the feedback. And I have to say of the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John that has come directly to me, mostly through tweets, but also through email that’s not to the list thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John been overwhelmingly positive in terms of people saying, yes, that’s exactly how I work.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the old Mac users sent in those emails. Yes. They said, yes, you’re right. That’s how I work, too. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the curious people who are like, I’ve never thought of working that way, but it sounds interesting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very little negativity about it, which is surprising, considering how negative you two were. And I keep coming back to the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that how many windows was it in Safari?
⏹️ ▶️ John 19 or something like that. That was astronomical. Like that, I might as well have said 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John for the reaction you guys had to it because 19 windows is just not that much. And I thought maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. Maybe 19 windows is a lot, but then everyone’s like, are you kidding me? I have always have tons of windows
⏹️ ▶️ John open. It’s like, it’s like having a computer with like 32 gigs of RAM, but you keep four windows open per app. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what? Anyway, I don’t want to rehash the entire thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably better than whatever we have planned today. It’s probably true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’ve gotten different feedback than I have, but I have been very surprised that it has been overwhelmingly
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially on my side, whether, you know, decisively on my side, like, yes, that’s exactly how I do
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And it’s the one way you should do things or people saying that sounds interesting and I’d like to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So the feedback I have seen, the feedback I have seen, there has certainly been some and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t even say some a pretty decent amount of people saying, yes, that’s exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. The john approach is exactly what I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But most the overwhelming majority of feedback that I saw was my goodness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was hysterical. That was my favorite episode of ATP so far. So for all of you who said that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John of you. Yeah, like you, but you can’t categorize that because most of that was just like, Hey, I enjoy listening to the podcast, which is like, great, thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up. But it’s not like they’re not taking a aside or position, commenting on the substance of it. And yes, I did see a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of but I didn’t categorize that. What I did was I favored it as a as a form of tracking. So all the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that were all the tweets that were sent to me about it. So if you go back through my favorites and skip over the other stuff, it looks like it’s not related. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if you can do this on stupid Twitter, but scroll back to like the the week following the show and just look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the huge amount of favorites that are in there that. And I favorited the ones that were against as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’ll have a hard time finding a tweet anyway that was against and the email to the feedback forms. we
⏹️ ▶️ John all saw on the email directly to me was basically 100% that people
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy to have 19 windows open. And by the way, I will add and this is another thing that people seem to forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the idea that I’m not closing windows, as I think I said on the show, as I think I actually did in
⏹️ ▶️ John real time on the show when we were going through like, Oh, I can close this window now because I’m done researching like the date that these
⏹️ ▶️ John things are released or whatever. The windows close when I’m done with them. It’s not like I’m keeping them around, like
⏹️ ▶️ John for the hell of it, right. And so for example, I have two Safari windows open now. Why do I have two Safari windows open? Because I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John off work for like a week, and I’ve been at home, and everything is cleared out. And the only Safari windows open
⏹️ ▶️ John I have right now are stats windows that are sort of things that I’m currently monitoring. And even those will close when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not currently monitoring them anymore. Like, I’m still looking at the stats of my OS X review just to see
⏹️ ▶️ John as it slowly tails off into the long tail how it’s doing. Anyway, and Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, two minimized, three non-minimized. And the minimized
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are, yeah. Using, this is sort of like the Merlin man, using your inbox
⏹️ ▶️ John as a to-do list, which is a bad idea. Using Safari windows as a to-do list, probably also a
⏹️ ▶️ John bad idea. But I think it works pretty well. And the difference between your email
⏹️ ▶️ John inbox and Safari is your email inbox is subject to anything that anyone wants to send to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas your Safari windows, you have to open yourself. Oh, that was the other, before we get off this
⏹️ ▶️ John topic, the other interesting thing, Ruber did a post sometime the week after saying he’d had this tab
⏹️ ▶️ John open since October to remind him to read his article and he finally got around to it and then he posted a little link list
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on Daring Fireball. And then everyone jumped on him and said, you’re using the Sarcuse window technique too
⏹️ ▶️ John because he essentially had this window thing open in a tab like, oh, I’ll get around to it someday. And he did.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he read it and he posted it. And I bet he closed that window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t do it. I’m not going to let myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get roped into this again. So instead, I’m going to move on to another piece of follow up, unless, Marco, you have something to add.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right, good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you add to that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. So the next piece of follow up we have, I brought up the question, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was last episode, why would you run SSL on a site like caselist.com that all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does is display content? And many people wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with what, in retrospect, was a reasonably obvious answer that I certainly didn’t think of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is you’re, you could use SSL to prevent, um, injection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So say you’re on an airplane and you’re using one of the airplane wifi setups. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could choose to inject ads into my website because they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t, there’s no reason they couldn’t. Whereas if I was running SSL, there’s nothing they could do to intercept that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s also a bunch of like tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that go along with that. But the most obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that I saw, or the most reasonable one I saw was preventing like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad injection or any other sort of man in the middle sort of scenario with even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that’s brochure where so to speak like my site is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what’s even worse is some wireless carriers are starting to inject ad tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco codes or like actual ads into the pages themselves. So it’s it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just if you’re on a plane occasionally, it might just be like if you’re you’re an AT&T or Verizon customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen certain things. I don’t know if they’re widely deployed yet, but we’ve seen reports of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them rolling out or testing or trying certain things with certain wireless carriers, like injecting ad tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code into every HTML page that’s viewed over their data networks. And that’s really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible on so many levels. So this could also help defend against that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s not tinfoil hat. People send us screenshots that I didn’t know because I don’t travel a lot, Like that airline
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi, like when you’re on the plane, puts a, you know, southwest banner over every single page
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re on. Like this is not, this is not speculative. This is apparently a thing that happens and not in like
⏹️ ▶️ John a secret kind of like Verizon secretly putting in an HTTP header or a cookie or something, as in a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John banner for like, in case you didn’t realize that you’re on a southwest flight right now. Terrible, super terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea that if you use SSL that no one can, uh, no one can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John traffic or man in the middle you again with lots of unpatched, perhaps unknown vulnerabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. I’m not sure how secure that is, but I can tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the corporate world, it is not uncommon for corporations to either
⏹️ ▶️ John do this and not tell anybody or do it and tell everybody or try to do it until the employees revolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what kind of company you’re in to basically man in the middle, every single employee of the company by
⏹️ ▶️ John putting in an SSL proxy, making every computer in the company trust the certificate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re basically man in the middle and all your SSL traffic. So you can’t like do online banking from home unless you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re okay with the the IT department at your work knowing all of your passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. So SSL is not a panacea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. And then a final note, which may bleed from
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, tell us about why you hate new things again, other than that being your natural state.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So last week, I discussed that I had tried a new program and like we sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had written the beginnings of a feed crawler for to replace overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP feed crawler or to augment it. I’d written the beginnings of that in Node,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I already knew enough JavaScript to get by, so it wasn’t entirely learning a new language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was at least in a new context, using a new platform and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And first time certainly using JavaScript outside of the browser. I’ve been trying to make it work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really until today, and this afternoon, and I think I finally am giving up now. The problem I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve, as I mentioned last week, so I won’t go too far into it, that overcast feed crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically have to pull about 250,000 feeds now and I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pull them no less than once an hour each and the ones that are popular I like to pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every few minutes. So we’re talking about probably, I don’t know, a million feeds an hour, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, or more than that maybe. So it’s a good number of feed fetches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per hour and right now I use 240 PHP processes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pulling things off of the Beanstalk queue. It takes tons of CPU power, it takes tons of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s, you know, this is obviously not made for this, whereas the Node event loop kind of model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way, way better suited for this kind of large, parallel crawling of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network things, and then occasionally doing some work on them. It’s way better for that. It’s so much better suited for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I tried Node, and I’ve been playing with it for the last week or so, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just can’t get it to work properly. I have the crawler functioning perfectly fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I keep hitting either weird limits that cause weird performance issues, or the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common problem is memory leaks. And that’s the one that I’ve been able to solve all the performance problems, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weird, you know, little edge cases, all like the weird exceptions thrown from odd places that I can’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out where they’re coming from. Fixed all that. I still can’t fix the memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaks. And so So I could just post a script online and ask people, hey, fix the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory leak for me. But ultimately, I don’t want to depend on a platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems so weird and hacky. And what I found, last week I mentioned how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t foresee myself rewriting the whole back end or wanting to make a whole web app in Node just because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nature of web apps. You make a database request, and then you make a couple more, and then you put things together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doing all that in a pure asynchronous framework is really clumsy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it leads to all sorts of spaghetti code and callback hell and everything like that. And so I, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only that, but I just don’t like JavaScript. Like I really don’t respect it as a language. I really don’t like its crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco object system. There’s a whole lot about JavaScript that I really don’t like. Granted, this is a little early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to judge a whole language like this, but it certainly seems like Node and JavaScript,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that combo is really just as hacky as PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways and it seems like I’m taking a step sideways rather than a step forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have a lot of faith in this combo for the future of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my programming needs and career. So instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tonight I started trying Go and I’m gonna see how that goes. I’ve literally have, I’ve written like 10 lines of code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it so far, haven’t had a chance to do anymore, so maybe ask me next week how that’s going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason I’m picking Go right now to try next, it seems like the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing that I would enjoy, based on their philosophy, some of the decisions they’ve made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean obviously the language looks really weird to me because it doesn’t use C-style syntax for everything, and this is the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-C syntax language that I’m learning in a very, very long time. I used to say that if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to pick a new language today, it would be Python. And looking around the landscape today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that would still be a reasonable choice, but there’s no question that Python is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aging. And there’s all these new languages that are coming out that do things differently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are more advanced in certain ways, and I feel like I learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new languages so infrequently, and the way I do it is I prefer to really deeply master
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small number of them, rather than try a whole bunch of them and have some familiarity with all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because of that, I’m afraid that Python will fall out of favor sooner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by possibly as much as a decade than compared to something like Go or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Node or Rust or any of these newer languages. I could go that route, and I might still go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that route. I don’t know. We’ll see where this experiment ends. But I think what I’m doing right now, making this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has to crawl a whole bunch of feeds in parallel and then read stuff out of the database to know what to crawl and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write stuff into some kind of queue to hand it off to the rest of the app to do the rest of the processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting a pretty good feel. I think this might be a good task to try in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four different languages and just get some idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the language is like to use on this kind of scale and how appropriate is it for this kind of task. Right now I’m going to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in Go. I don’t know if it’s going to be the last language I use for this task. I hope it is. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way Go keeps the language itself seemingly fairly It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have things like generics and a whole bunch of like new things like that, that like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these like metaprogramming type features. It doesn’t seem to have all those things. I like that a lot. I really prefer a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language that can fit in my head and a language that is easy to… as easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read as it is to write. And it seems like a lot of the new languages these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are throwing that balance a little more towards the other directions. They’re they’re making it… they’re making all these like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really crazy little features and little exceptions, little conveniences to make the code look really cool when you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, or to make it make for like good conference slides or like a good hello world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco example where like, look, look at what you look at what you can do in these two lines of code and it’s all really dense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and concise and does cool things that all abstract away what’s actually happening, you know, below the scenes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t like that style because it makes it very hard to both learn and maintain that
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not that’s not a style. That’s abstraction. That’s programming. I mean, why not just why not use
⏹️ ▶️ John toggle switches? Then you’ll know what’s going on. Why not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco push the electrons
⏹️ ▶️ John from from the source of the drain and the transistors? I mean, like I kind of understand what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting at in terms of constructs that may look unfamiliar, but it’s not like it’s not a choice
⏹️ ▶️ John of styles of like crane technique and drunken monkey technique. It’s like it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a language that are trying to have, you know, ways to express more with
⏹️ ▶️ John with less typing. And the general argument in favor of that is history
⏹️ ▶️ John has more or less shown that the number of bugs per line of code written doesn’t change
⏹️ ▶️ John too much. So the only way to get fewer bugs is to reduce the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of lines of code you need to write to solve a given problem. Obviously, you can go to extremes there where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John compressing things down to the point where it’s not understandable. But I don’t think Swift, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift is not a good example of that. I don’t think anything in the language makes it like this one line
⏹️ ▶️ John is incomprehensible. I think the problem areas of Swift are more like the problem areas of C++ with like
⏹️ ▶️ John templates, generics and operator overloading, giving you the ability to make incomprehensible
⏹️ ▶️ John mumbo jumbo. But that’s the opposite. That’s where there’s more typing, not less. Like when you when you see some
⏹️ ▶️ John giant declaration with a million generic types and then you can’t make heads or tails of it, that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John concise. that is verbose. And that’s why you have problems figuring out what the hell is going on, because you got to parse
⏹️ ▶️ John a million tokens to figure it out. Whereas Go not letting you do that type of thing. You’re never going to see a
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy prototype like that, you know, or even like block syntax or pointers
⏹️ ▶️ John to functions and syntax and see where you have to like sort of be the compiler in your head and parse stuff out.
⏹️ ▶️ John You make the language simpler, you won’t see that. And that’s something that, you know, for example, JavaScript has that going for it. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much you can type in JavaScript that is too complicated to look at where you won’t even understand programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John intent. You may be surprised by what it actually does because of weirdness, but you will get the intent of
⏹️ ▶️ John the line of code. Whereas in C++ and Swift and a lot of other languages, sometimes you can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what the intent is without sort of, you know, parsing and lexing it yourself in your head to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out what it does. Right, exactly. Well, and also, like, I like it’s I like to be able to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some code that I’m reading and be able to roughly tell what it does without having to jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around to too much other code. And so if you have some crazy library or some crazy standard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like a lot of these new language features that a lot of the more crazy dynamic-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages offer, they’re a lot like C macros, where it’s like you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco define your own, and you know, same thing with operator overloading and generics, you could define like your own meta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language on top of this language for your own code. And so if you’re reading someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code written in this language, or you’re reading code you wrote a year ago in this language when you were being a little too clever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be really hard to figure out what’s going on or what causes certain behavior you’re seeing. That’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like Rails. And one of the reasons I avoided, back forever ago, why David and I decided to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tumblr and PHP instead of Rails, was because it had a lot of that, like the mix-ins, a lot of the behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caused by things that are hard to find. And I’m sure it isn’t like that anymore. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We only looked at it, literally, we looked at it once in 2006 for about a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So take all that with a grain of salt. But generally, I don’t like having all that magic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s hard to find and hard to follow when you’re reading the code or when you’re debugging the code. That’s why I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages like C and like Objective-C, because most of that magic is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible or at least is very, very rarely used.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, C, you said it in C, it’s macros. Macros make that a nightmare. And if you’re looking at someone, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John to give a great example, try looking at the the pearl source code, not like, you know, Pearl code, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the C program that is the pearl compiler and executable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is so filled with macros, it is almost nonsensical and macro people don’t like macros with good
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. But if you take macros and take away all of the evil sort of text processing crap about
⏹️ ▶️ John them, what falls out is lisp and people love lisp and that lisp means you know, when you said if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at a program, it looks like you know, some meta program you can’t figure out. That’s why people love lists that you essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John define a language to solve your specific problem and then use that language to to write your
⏹️ ▶️ John program in and so that’s the whole idea of Lisp is that you will there is no syntax
⏹️ ▶️ John to speak of it’s just you know fingernail clippings all the way down and then you just
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of define your own vocabulary and if someone else was to look at that yes they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John to say I don’t know what this does now I mean that’s that’s true of looking at any program it’s kind of weird hearing you say that because you’re working with like
⏹️ ▶️ John vast libraries have millions of lines of code that you a didn’t write and B usually don’t even have access to the source
⏹️ ▶️ John code too. And that’s the majority of the code in your program, like an overcast. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I mean? The problem I have is that Marco, all I’m hearing you say is I want to remain a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C programmer for life. And that’s okay. If that’s what you want to do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you grumbling about generics, which I know is just like an off the cuff example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you grumbling about generics is, is nails on a chalkboard to me because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love generics. Nobody loves generics, Casey. I do. And now I’m coming at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from C Sharp where it’s very, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generics came to C Sharp at a time when everything was extremely strongly typed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type inference wasn’t a thing, and you had to cast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything all the time. And it was the most annoying thing in the world. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, generics are being extremely deliberate about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re trying to accomplish. And I just, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, when you say that, oh, you don’t, you don’t feel like all the code is where you expect it to be. And you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to jump around in different files to find it all. All I’m hearing you say is I want to be a procedural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C programmer for the rest of my life and that’s okay, but gosh, that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limiting. And I hope that that’s, I hope that’s not what you’re, what you mean, even if that’s what I’m hearing you say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean that isn’t what I mean. However, you know, like the languages I know, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they work this way or I’ve been able to make them work this way. My goal is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ease of reading the code and simplicity of keeping things small, reducing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cleverness. I am not a very clever programmer. I program things in pretty straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways usually. All of the increase of cleverness that is infecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern language design, it makes things look cool up front, but it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really hard to use over time or with a team or with when maintaining code. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when using third party code, it’s it gets very, very difficult. I feel like a lot of this is complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its own sake or solving the wrong problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but your problem here is not a language problem. It’s kind of a library problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s mostly an implementation problem because it’s like you have a well defined problem to solve. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John the language matters at all. All that matters is the libraries and the sort of stability of the implementation of that
⏹️ ▶️ John language. And can it handle, because you’re doing things at a fairly large scale and you’ve got something that works, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of around the creaky edges of what PHP can handle. And it’s not particularly efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John as you saw when you did the node implementation, it could be more efficient, but the node is young and it’s flaky and has its own issues. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so like you’re, what you’re looking for is something that will work
⏹️ ▶️ John with fewer with less flakiness than node had fewer resources than PHP did.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think go is a reasonable thing to be looking at. And as I said on Twitter, and I wasn’t actually joking, like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to do this in Pearl with any event, which is a wrap around tons of event libraries, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could use the any event wrap around the EV libv library.
⏹️ ▶️ John This I think this would be fairly straightforward. And so would your would your pearl solution be
⏹️ ▶️ John use fewer resources than the PHP one? Probably because it would use a real event library written in C.
⏹️ ▶️ John Would it have fewer bugs than the Node one? Probably because that library and that Cpan module
⏹️ ▶️ John are all way more mature than the Node implementation of it. But Go would definitely be faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you do it in Go you’re left with, okay well am I going to use an existing event library?
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I going to sort of write my own event library? Because once you start writing your own event library in Go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re not going to use lib event or libby v or something like that, then that’s immediately worse. It doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how good the language is like no, don’t don’t use uh don’t don’t try to reimplement your own event
⏹️ ▶️ John library or you know directly with system calls into it like someone did that already. What you just want is a language that
⏹️ ▶️ John exposes one of these mature libraries that works really well in a way that’s not buggy. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John leak memory that’s fairly performant and so I would obviously try Pearl first because I know there’s a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John event library wrappers. In fact, there’s a rapper that wraps like pretty much any event library called any event
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you could go through like let me try seven different event libraries with the same Perl program and if they all suck you’re like well
⏹️ ▶️ John that didn’t work you know I haven’t done event driven programming in Perl anything
⏹️ ▶️ John more than like a trivial thing so I can’t tell you whether it will actually work but I can tell you that it’s old enough and been around
⏹️ ▶️ John long enough that there’s a million wrappers for event libraries and maybe that would just help you narrow down which event library you want to use and then you could
⏹️ ▶️ John just write against that one in C which you already also talked about hey let me go to lib event let me write it right directly against it
⏹️ ▶️ John in C. But I’ve also heard that live event is not the best event library if you’re looking to do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John with Lauren Berkley was just saying that he wrote an objective C around wrap around Libby V to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John similar. Yeah, I think that’s what’s going to come down to is either the language has
⏹️ ▶️ John something like this built in a couple of mentioned Erlang or whatever, like has some sort of parallelization event loop
⏹️ ▶️ John type of taking making efficient use of CPU when you’re going to when a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of things are going to be an IO wait, either it has that built into the language or it has a really good stable wrapper around
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the other low-level libraries that does this for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah well I mean and it should be you know in case the implication here was not clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not just looking for a solution to this one problem I’m also looking for a long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement to PHP in my toolkit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah but that’s I don’t think this is a great example for that because
⏹️ ▶️ John say you find something that does a really good job on this it still doesn’t say okay now I’m gonna write all of the the stuff I used to write in PHP I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to write in Go. I don’t think you would do that, but I think Go could be an appropriate choice for this provided you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the event stuff nailed down. And by the same token, were you to get a handy
⏹️ ▶️ John little solution to this in Perl with any event or something, doesn’t mean you would say, okay, now I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John rewrite all those PHP pages in Perl because that would, well, I think it would still be a big upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But anyway, you’re probably not going to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in addition to Perl having many of the same problems that I just decided with PHP and Python,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just would feel like a sideways step. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but I was suggesting it justice because you were at the point now where you’re like, look, I want to solve this problem without using 240
⏹️ ▶️ John PHP processes that are inefficient and use a lot of resources. It’s like an economic, it’s like a single purpose problem. Like I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem, there’s actual impact to me implementing this better. Node looked like it was going to do it, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little flaky. Try a few other things. This could be one of the other things you try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason I’m able to do the things I do, the reason I’m able as one person to run a web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service with a few hundred thousand users and an iOS app and be able to keep up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them semi-okay is because I don’t spend a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experimenting with new languages and new systems and making things just for fun. Most of what I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to serve the things I’m working on. And so I don’t want to go on an expedition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to learn a bunch of new languages try to pick the best one for just this one task, I want to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leverage this, to use this to basically build up my toolkit and modernize this one very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ancient part of it. Because I know that PHP is… Look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could keep using it for a long time, it’s going to be around for a long time, but I do keep running into things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s bad at. And I recognize that, as I said last episode, I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of faith in the quality of the direction it’s going. And there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other languages that I should be considering. I actually heard from Russell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ivanovich. Ivanovich? I forget how you say his last name. I tried to remember it and tried to learn it and I forgot. I’m sorry, Russell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s one of the guys in Chifty Jelly, one of my competitors in the podcast app space. They make pocket casts. And he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nicest guy in the world. And he told me privately they crawl what sounded like a pretty impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number with a pretty impressively low amount of hardware. And they do it all in Java.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about Java in the modern day. The last time I used Java was in computer science 101, back in 2001.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe people told me that I should be looking at C sharp for this. And Casey, I’m curious to know what you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But, you know, there are lots of other languages I could be looking at right now. I don’t know. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were faced with this problem, what would you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the first thing I’d do is I would try to write it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Node. And I thought you had said on Twitter that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue that you’re having with Node is that getting the process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to start again is where everything’s going wrong. Like the set timeout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what’s breaking. Is that, well, the set timeout is eventually leading to memory leaks. Is that a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco statement? Oh, it’s immediately leading to memory leaks. It’s like every set timeout is, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason, it seems to be that it’s capturing the scope of its calling scope and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retaining its calling scope, even though it’s just calling a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see why it needs to retain anything that’s in the calling scope, but for some reason it is. And if you search around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for node setTimeout or setInterval memory leaks, you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of other people hitting problems like this. And some of the fixes look like bugs to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them are like, well if you just call setTimeout, then you’ll get a leak, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assign it to a variable, say var t equals setTimeout, then it doesn’t leak. There’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of weird stuff going on with the way this captures things. Either it’s a bug, or it doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense, or both. Either way, that is a big problem for me. I don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep fighting issues like that in a language I’m going to invest much time into. Also, again, what I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before is like, I don’t like JavaScript. And I, I don’t I don’t foresee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this being my long term replacement for PHP. So it feels like I’m kind of wasting time doing a whole bunch in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think the reason I brought that up is, if the only issue you’re having with node
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boils down to just tickling that node process and getting it to do its thing, then couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you fire that from PHP and have no do the crawling?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no. The whole idea here and when I asked on Twitter, am I doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this wrong or like to set timeout like just not work without leaking memory and and I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few I got a bunch of responses from node programmers, none of them use it. All of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trigger recurring schedule to schedule events with like external cron tasks that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that call into the node with a web request or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m trying. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like or they use things like there’s something called I think node cron or something like that and it But if you look at the source, it’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set timeout internally. So it’s like that’s basically the only option. All I need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I need to crawl for all these feeds. Each of them has a TTL that I calculate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I calculate when the next one should run and I say, call me again with this ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this many seconds. That’s it. That’s all I have to do so that they shouldn’t be nesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not stacking up. I verified that. It’s not like they’re not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cleared and making more and more calls per second. It’s not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just something about the memory capture. But again, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Node expert could look at this and possibly fix it. It’s more that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to keep investing in a language that is clashing with me on such a fundamental level, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t feel is serving my long-term goals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to defend Node because I’ve not done an overwhelming amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Node programming, but the programming I’ve done in Node, I really like. I want to defend JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because although it is full of landmines and pitfalls and bottomless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pits, it is actually, to me anyway, fairly fun to write.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I were in your shoes, I’d probably be coming to a similar conclusion. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly sounds to be a pragmatic conclusion regardless. To go back and answer your question, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about like C sharp? Well, that’s, that’s challenging because the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the right way to do it, if you’re going to do it in C sharp is to run, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ASP net, IAS, the whole Microsoft stack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know right. And you have no interest in that. And honestly, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any interest in that. And you know what, when I was doing for fun programming and my own time, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to have to pay for. What did I, did I use C sharp and ASP.net? Hell no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t because I didn’t want to stand all that up. I didn’t have, I didn’t want to have to worry about all that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C sharp as a language, actually, I think would, I think you would like C sharp a lot, to be honest, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem is you’ve got all the periphery to deal with that I don’t think you would enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, of course you could take the approach of, well, let me look into Xamarin slash And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that might work. To be honest, I’m now outside of my comfort zone because I work in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Microsoft stack. So I don’t really know a lot about the Xamarin and Mono,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way that would be deployed. But it’s worth looking into. I don’t think C-sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t know enough about Go to be able to say, yes, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds like an excellent choice of something that has long-term viability. I think node is certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very trendy right now in the same way that Python and Ruby have been in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to your point earlier, are Python and Ruby going to remain trendy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. And is node going to remain trendy? I don’t know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although it seems a little weird to me to throw node out entirely because of set timeout.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can also understand how that’s the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. So if I were in your shoes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly don’t know what I would do. I guess I would try go and see how it worked. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Jesus, it’s a tough, it’s a tough call. I’m not sure what the right answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I was going to say, I think tangling both of these things up with each other, finding a new language to replace PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be worth your while long-term and solving the specific problem is over-complicating it. I think those are two
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you should do. And I don’t think they need to be combined. It’s something it’s, it’d be nice if you could combine
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I can understand the desire, like, Oh, if I could get them, you know, get them, you know, two birds with one stone. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John needs are so different. I mean, like, on the one hand, for example, the best bet for a new language for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John learn that you’re going to have to use later is probably at this point, Swift, and not because you’re going to use your place PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ John but because Apple’s going to make you use it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, well, and I might learn that also. But but because Swift is not open source, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Swift that can go on a server yet. And and so I, I’m going to have to maintain these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two languages like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Yeah, I know, you still need something to replace PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like Swift, put that aside. You’re probably gonna need to do that. Maybe look into it to see
⏹️ ▶️ John if it helps you here. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, probably it won’t. Then you got the problem of what do I need to replace PHP? And then you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem of what do I do short term to make this crawler take fewer resources?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would also point out, so I tweet shared this last week during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the break. Last episode of Core Intuition was really good. I’ll have to look up the number. I’ll put it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Daniel Jogget and Manton Reiss were talking about Swift and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how safe is it to use Swift today? Or how safe is it to invest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole lot of time in Swift today? And they rightly pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift is not a sure thing yet. It is a thing that is out there, that Apple has put out there. They’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put out things like Garbage Collection and Objective-C, things like the Java bridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back forever ago, that ended up being axed only a few years down the road because they just weren’t working out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know if Swift is actually going to be here for the longterm and actually be the eventual replacement for Objective-C yet. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know is that it seems like that’s the goal right now, but this is not the first time something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that has come around. Apple’s certainly in a better position now than they were when the other alternatives came around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is not a guarantee that Swift will be the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing thing for Objective-C programmers. All this is, is we’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something now. And I would point out, we seem to be in a somewhat turbulent time at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In addition, I mean, God, looking at how strained their engineering resources are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like a terrible time to have introduced a new language. Just for them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even just for us. I mean, we’ll deal with it, whatever they do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think Swift is much stronger of a if you had to bet on one of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just named a bunch of the Java Bridge. Java Bridge was done from a position of weakness because it was like, maybe people won’t use these
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy square brackets. That is a super weak position. And they were just trying to get people to develop for the rest.
⏹️ ▶️ John Garbage collection was always kind of halfheartedly pushed. It was like, we’re making garbage collection
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe we’ll dog food it here and you should make your apps work with it. But then they couldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John convince all Apple internal library people to use it for their libraries and make them garbage collection
⏹️ ▶️ John safe. It was just it was never like the the amount of publicity and the push
⏹️ ▶️ John behind and the specific team behind Swift is like
⏹️ ▶️ John their their team that has, you know, proven that they can get things done within Apple, having changed their
⏹️ ▶️ John whole compiler infrastructure over several years. And it was in a keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, it was also in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keynote. We’re going to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standards bodies starting tomorrow, And we’re going to make FaceTime an open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that was Steve Jobs saying random things on stage and people going crazy behind the scenes. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, of all of the sort of major technology-based things,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say this is even stronger than like, by the way, you should build your OS X apps using Project Builder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this was more emphatic than Project Builder. because it took them a while to get in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it basically took them until they had the Xcode name to say no this
⏹️ ▶️ John is it this is you know we’re telling you like we are completely taking over the compiler infrastructure which they were from
⏹️ ▶️ John the beginning anyway but they were kind of timid about you know especially coming off the whole code warrior thing and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John my recollection anyway is that they were externally not shoving it in your face that
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way if you’re going to develop applications for our platform you’re you’re going to use R IDE and R compilers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they were in a transition period there. And eventually they said, no, you’re going to use R stuff. And to emphasize that, it’s called Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John now instead of Project Builder. And you’re just going to have to deal with it. Swift was very bold
⏹️ ▶️ John and very strongly backed. And I would say that the thing you should be wary about
⏹️ ▶️ John using it now is they’ve said they’re going to just constantly break the syntax. And there could be all sorts of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John things having to do with source code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compatibility. And the tools are very immature right now. And the performance of the compiler sucks. all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, there’s plenty of reasons to stay away from it. But like, this is just so much stronger than the other things you’ve listed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though those things have happened in the past, and you had to be like, the problem with Swift is the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of not doing it seems much higher. Like you could sort of say, all right, well, they’re still supporting objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C, right? So I don’t have to do this Java thing. We’ll see how that shakes out. And the garbage collection is like, well, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John wait to see what happened. You can do it with Swift to let me wait to see what Apple actually inbounds and Swift. But even
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as Apple inbounds, like its first, you know, Swift only library or something, even then, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think you could potentially say, all right, I’m all in on switch and they could still change their mind. So I think we have probably
⏹️ ▶️ John three years to be sure, but I, I think the degree of confidence in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John being a thing, whether it’s a good or not, the fact that Apple’s going to stick to it, it’s pretty high at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And plus I don’t know Apple’s history with like Metro works and code warrior and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I came way later than that, but certainly it seems like a lot of the moves they’ve they’ve been making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last five to 10 years, probably five-ish years, have been to set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things in motion to get Swift to be a thing. You know, to work on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLVM, to work on Clang, to work on all of these things that make up the Swift tool chain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like a very deliberate multi-year process to get to where we are today. And yeah, Apple will throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things away on a whim if they so desire, but geez, it seems like that’s a lot of work to be
⏹️ ▶️ John for fun. And of course, they have the big problem that they throw it away. They just say, OK, well, back to Objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C, retreat to safety. They need, as I’ve said many times, they need
⏹️ ▶️ John something. You know, you can’t you can’t just stick with Objective C forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too soon. Should they retreat and then advance again in a couple of years in the future? I think they’re already behind and they need
⏹️ ▶️ John something like Swift. And it’s not Swift. This will be a huge mistake for them because they will have wasted years and tons of resources
⏹️ ▶️ John attempting the swift transition. And if it fails, it’s like, uh, what do we do now? Uh, C sharp, I guess. I don’t
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because in our world, you know, You don’t get a lot of physical recognition of things you make in software. I really like that and
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Any other thoughts on your adventure into the wilderness that scares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this will probably be an ongoing topic. I mean, heck, maybe 2015 will be the year of me learning too many programming languages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just switching to Java. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I doubt it’ll be you switching to Java, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Probably not, but you never know. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I would like to, time permitting, talk about your new iPad, but before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we do that, John, why don’t you tell us about some survey that’s been going on lately? I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get the survey because I don’t have any apps in any of the app stores, I assume. I don’t know if it was sent to everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a lot of people got a survey from Apple asking them questions about the App Store and people
⏹️ ▶️ John have been tweeting little pictures of it. I want to talk about the survey in general, but one specific
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the survey screenshot and sent to us by Joe Seeger. This is a question
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple survey says, which are the top three most effective marketing channels in driving downloads of your
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on the App Store? So this is asking people, how do you get people to download apps and apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are tons of choices, not just one. And there’s a little red arrow in this picture that shows the second
⏹️ ▶️ John choice in the list. The first choice is in-app messaging. And other choices like email, PR, community, social
⏹️ ▶️ John media, television, print, you know, different ways that you get people to come and download your app. The second choice
⏹️ ▶️ John is push notifications. And so this is great because you’re like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Are they trying to send it to people?
⏹️ ▶️ John then if you check push notifications, everybody who checks push notifications gets a little email from Apple and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve indicated that the most effective marketing channel is push notifications. You may not be aware, but section 5.6 says that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t use push notifications for marketing purposes and blah blah blah. Or did the person who wrote this question
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea that that rule exists and is merely reflecting the reality that push
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications are a common marketing channel? Or some combination thereof? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just baffling to me. Talking about one hand not knowing what the other is doing. You can’t tell from the question whether it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, another situation where some department doesn’t understand another department or
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s maybe they’re just like one. Just be honest and just see how many people will check
⏹️ ▶️ John that as there is. I don’t know. It confuses me greatly. But Marco, did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the survey? I did. And I honestly, I didn’t even if that was in mine, I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice it. I just blew right past it. Probably. I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s pretty clear from so many things that it seems like the only person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple who even thinks that rule exists, maybe, is the person who wrote that document,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which might have been Steve Jobs, so he’s not even there anymore. I don’t think, I mean, the rule against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push notification spam is sadly such a joke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I wish it was, I mean, we’ll go over this a million times, I wish it was enforced, I really do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think everybody would be better off, especially Apple and its customers, would be better off if that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule wasn’t enforced because the App Store and iOS is turning into such a spammy flea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market of garbage. And it’s annoying. Your phone is full of ads now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is completely the opposite of what I think Apple would want to encourage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would tolerate. But now your phone is full of ads because of this—primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of this one rule being flagrantly ignored. It is literally a way to push ads to your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever somebody feels like it with no penalties.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How often do you get these sorts of ads? I’m asking honestly because I get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once a month maybe. I do not receive these that often. Now they infuriate me when I do get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, but it doesn’t happen that often. Does it happen that often for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no. It doesn’t happen that often to a lot of nerds like us because we usually either don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the kind of apps that show them most often, or we turn them off. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not representative of the population at large. We talked about this before. If you see normal people using their iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, have a family member who uses an iOS device, have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them show you their notification screen if they’re willing, and see what’s there. You’ll see. It’s they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are extremely common in brand big brand apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and games free to play games. You know, it’s it’s so so common.
⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of common this survey here, is this the first survey about the app store you’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and I got six of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And and so this seems from the outside, looking in just seeing the stories about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this is like a response from someone inside Apple to all of like the bad press
⏹️ ▶️ John that the app I mean, getting lately with this current cycle of rejections and people complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. So I disagree entirely. You think it’s just a was that’s what I was going to ask is like, is this something
⏹️ ▶️ John we do every year? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why now? I think it’s something that the that like the App Store marketing team decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do on their own. Basically, I don’t think this has anything to do with the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policies. I don’t think you know, like we all posted on Twitter, like what we said in the final question, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, is there any other feedback you’d like to give Apple? So of course, you know, all those developers unloaded on them with like, well, here’s all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways the app store sucks. And I don’t think this is going anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I think this is going into a giant black hole. And I think the marketing team,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna ask you what’s going to happen from and I’m saying, why send the survey? Now? Why send this survey now? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it just a complete coincidence? Or is it because this is part of some like, well, we’re getting a lot of press.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first thing we need to know is like, where do we stand? Is it just a bunch of cranky people? Whatever. Let’s just gather information,
⏹️ ▶️ John send out a big survey that just covers all bases. and let’s just send it to everybody and see what we get back. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking at a bunch of news stories, a cranky developer doesn’t tell you anything because there’s thousands and thousands of developers and like five
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are angry. And so they’re just gathering information, not like they’re going to take this information and do anything with it. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a first. It seems to me this is a first step. And let’s see where we really are, because I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple, the argument is and always is that’s just a bunch of cranky people. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a website that doesn’t like us. That’s just someone going for page. It’s not actually a big deal. We have hundreds of thousands of developers, 99.99%
⏹️ ▶️ John of them love us and think we’re awesome in the app store is awesome and everything is great. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I can imagine VP saying. And you just we just have to manage these squeaky wheels with good PR and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. But realistically speaking, everybody loves us. Our developer sat is awesome. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s what that’s what they tell it. You know what I mean? And for all we know, that could be true. So the first step that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John could say is that’s what you keep telling me. But I don’t like reading stories. So step one proved to me that’s the case. Survey all
⏹️ ▶️ John the developers, send back this thing. And let’s see what the survey results say. And if they say like 99% love us and 1% hate us, then I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John believe you. But if not, then we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have further discussions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would believe that might be the case if I didn’t go through the survey. But having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone through the survey, it is pretty clear that this was written by marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, not developer relations. And so you did it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember if I got it, but I certainly saw the survey because we have certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen pretty much the entirety of the survey. I thought it was only two or three pages, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it was long. It was probably 20 screens, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, then maybe I clearly have not seen it then, but the pieces I saw just reeked to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me of marketing speak. And I agree with you, Marco, that this was marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acting on its own, just trying to figure out what the state of the world was. I don’t think this is any big conspiracy or
⏹️ ▶️ John was not. So but I’m so give me an example. Some of the questions were all the questions basically, like, how do you market
⏹️ ▶️ John your app? Yes. And how can we help you market your app better? Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, yeah. Like it was it was not I mean, I could be wrong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really did seem like this was like some app store marketing team doing their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own research for their own department. And it was not it didn’t seem representative of the developer program as a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the app store as a whole, caring what developers thought about the App Store and the like. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did seem like it was what it said and nothing more than that, which is a survey about how you market your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps like that. That really seemed like that was that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was there anything in there about like findability in the search and stuff like that? Very
⏹️ ▶️ John little. Now, a lot of it gets overshadowed, you’re right, by like the people posting the like the
⏹️ ▶️ John free response thing where you type whatever you want and everyone just dumping a pile of turds on the Apple Store step
⏹️ ▶️ John and not the other questions. But so if it’s just the marketing department, like I
⏹️ ▶️ John still question, it’s not like every individual department can decide to email every single developer
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever they feel like it or like lots of enough developers that, you know, it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the big names got this, right? That seems like something that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that you need a higher level. Okay about and maybe it was just the marketing department initiating
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. But why would you give the okay for like, I’m sure every department wants to do this. I’m sure you know, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John would love to email all developers and ask them questions about whatever their their thing developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ John or the development tools team or the frameworks team and send a how you like in this framework that we just made fill
⏹️ ▶️ John out the survey but you can’t everyone can’t email every single developer and you know Schiller’s organization
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess got the go ahead to send a 20 page thing that’s mostly about how you market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Schiller’s organization is the developer organization, but But it’s also marketing, right? The entire developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco division at Apple is under marketing, which is under Schiller, which is part of the problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly. But that’s what getting back to what I’m saying. Like if you said this is just marketing and not developer
⏹️ ▶️ John relations, but it was all in the same department, maybe the questions were just bad. Maybe you felt like the questions should have been asking you
⏹️ ▶️ John more about the stuff that you wrote about in the summary thing at the end, instead of just asking you
⏹️ ▶️ John how you advertise your applications to people. Was there questions about like, how do you deal with reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John on this? I don’t know. You should just post the full survey so we can all look at the questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I’ll go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I got like five or six of these links, and I didn’t even check to see what emails they were going to, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll go back and screenshot every page. It’s excessively boring. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely dull, and it is really mostly a marketing survey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the purpose of this was what you’re saying. However, there was something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, I think, posted a few days ago on December 30th to the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newsfeed. Here, I’m pasting the link in the chat here. You gotta look at this. I don’t know if you guys caught this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was away on vacation, so I didn’t blog about it yet, but which might be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. If you look at this, so this is a quick thing. I’ll just read it. It’s pretty short.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a quick thing posted to the Apple developer newsfeed posted on December 30th, titled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Getting Help with App Reviews and Rejections. So here’s the entire text of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes Connect is now available after the holiday shutdown. Please remember, if you need to appeal an app rejection or request
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the review of your app be expedited, the fastest way to get help is to contact the app review team through the Contact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Us form. To view app rejection details and ask for clarification, visit Resolution Center in iTunes Connect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We look forward to seeing the innovative new apps you’ll create in 2015. We look forward to seeing them
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe rejecting them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so this, I mean, this, this I think is much more interesting the marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco survey. What do you think this angle is? I mean, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is hilarious. And so I think this might be, I mean, obviously you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read a lot through the tea leaves here. It might be a thinly veiled threat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you read it as if it’s a threat, it kind of works. It
⏹️ ▶️ John says the fastest way, though. It doesn’t say, running to the press
⏹️ ▶️ John never helps anything, or whatever the phrase was in the guidelines thing. It is not as passive aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ John or as aggressive aggressive as those things were. It reads more like a reminder to like, if there are developers
⏹️ ▶️ John out there who don’t know about the resolution center, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very easy to read this as a threat, but I think this might, and maybe this is just me being optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this kind of stuff. I think this might be the kind of implied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mea culpa on some of the recent rejection crap. I think this might be like, hey guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t worry, getting this under control. I don’t know. Maybe again, maybe that’s unreasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimistic. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read it the same way that this is them saying, all right, all right, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone relax, everyone relax, just let us know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix you up, it’ll be okay. But man, does it frustrate me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple’s so institutionally crotchety maybe? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, why can’t they just say, Hey guys, you know, we’ve heard, we we’ve seen that there’s been some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey questionable choices on our part. We’re going to fix it. Like, is that so terrible?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is being, is being vulnerable really that bad? I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll never happen, but step one, admit
⏹️ ▶️ John no wrongdoing. Yeah. I mean like that’s not, that’s not Apple’s demo. Like they have admitted
⏹️ ▶️ John wrongdoing before, even when they think they aren’t wrong. Like Antenna gate, everyone gets a free bumper, even though we think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a problem or whatever. this specific part of Apple app review
⏹️ ▶️ John does not admit wrongdoing in like the whole, you know, we’ll reject your
⏹️ ▶️ John app and then you’ll make a big fuss about it and then we’ll accept it. And then like that, that cycle happens and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John never a part where Apple comes out and you know, sort of bears
⏹️ ▶️ John its soul and says, we’ve thought about this and we’ve, you know, had the like the admission
⏹️ ▶️ John of wrongdoing, I guess is okay. Now your app is back in the store, But it’s like this isn’t a systemic problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a one off case that just didn’t happen to go right. And it being in the press has nothing to do with it getting fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just one of those things that happens. And oh, well, it got fixed and don’t worry about it. And it just happens repeatedly over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s never any sort of public acknowledgement that this might be a thing and not just like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John those things just happen sometimes. And that’s what frustrates people so much that that part of the organization
⏹️ ▶️ John is a so different than individual Apple employees, which, as we all know, are human beings and are actually forthcoming. And
⏹️ ▶️ John B, it’s not like the the larger corporation in terms of when they make design mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John or when they have, you know, large scale problems like the labor difficulties
⏹️ ▶️ John in China, the diversity within the organization, things that Apple has, you know, fallen on its face about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they come back and say, we’re not doing well enough on diversity. Greenpeace yelled at them and they thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John was unfair. They got yelled at. But, you know, we are going to make that stuff better before we were worse at it. Now we’re better labor practices. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to try to be more transparent there. that we’re going to do it, you know, all of the situations where Apple did something wrong and it’s publicly
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do it better by admitting that the past was bad, the present is bad, and they’re trying to get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s never anything like that having to do with App Store review, at least not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public. No. Well, because again, this is all under Schiller. I mean, if you think about the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public persona that Schiller shows, I mean, I don’t know anything about the guy, you know, non-publicly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what he shows publicly, he is kind of like this, you know, terse, quiet guy who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t appear to be ever having any fun. I mean, even like, even in his presentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last few years, is it just me or does he just kind of seem angry? Like, it’s, it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t get, like, if you look at this person knowing he’s the one in charge of this organization, and knowing that he does have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of direct involvement with some of these decisions, it’s no wonder that the attitude we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just a brick wall with with occasional terseness coming out and not really openness or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friendliness because that appears to be the public persona Phil Schiller shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not Tim that’s not Tim Cook at all though like
⏹️ ▶️ John cooks persona and I think Tim Cook’s persona has been infecting more and more of this sort of higher level
⏹️ ▶️ John entire corporation Apple stuff it’s just that this is a corner of the corporation you know so the entire corporation
⏹️ ▶️ John is diversity labor practices finances you know the like
⏹️ ▶️ John the environment that is big picture stuff, human resources like charity,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. That is big, big picture. Hopefully that will be filtering down to the smaller thing. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the you know, the whole management reshuffle and collaboration is more important and unifying
⏹️ ▶️ John things under Johnny Ive. But it just that that influence and that tone seems not to have made it to app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I honestly, as long as Phil Schiller is in charge of the division that app review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was under, I don’t foresee any major changes in this area Because I really do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it goes to him and I think he’s the one who is in control to fix this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seems to believe that the way they’re doing it is the correct way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. That’s, I don’t know, part of the reason that we all love apples because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is so secretive and interesting and you never know what’s going to come next. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I feel like holding onto that apple is perhaps not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right approach anymore. not the underdog. They’re not, they’re not the apple they once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were, and they’re bigger than they once were. And it’s, it’s probably unfair for me to prescribe what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple should do from, from my chair here, the other coast, but I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to let that stop me. I, it just seems like, can’t we get a little more feedback? And I, all I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep reflecting on, and I’m not the first person to realize this is that when we all left WWDC this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, we were all so amped up and so excited and so. reinvigorated. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I feel like six months later, we’re all grumpy again. Maybe it’s just because we are all grumpy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people in general, but I don’t think so. I think we really were excited about all this stuff and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open they seem to be becoming and how they seem to be listening to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now six months later, it’s like, oh, we’re back in this same dull grind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re always in. And that’s just not a fun place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just not. And part of the reason that we’re all so attracted to this environment and attracted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to writing apps for this platform is because it’s fun and God, are they working hard to suck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fun out of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel right now about Apple development, the way Phil Schiller sounds on stage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the most recent keynotes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Completely unamused and bored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like just kind of like going through the motions, like kind of like almost angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like the mood has shifted from the Craig Federighi that we saw at WBDC showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us all the cool new technical stuff to the marketing hammer being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dropped and saying, nope, this is how things should be. This is not how things should be, period. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, back to old school. I mean, look, Phil is old school Apple. He was under jobs. He’s been there for a very long time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is he represents that attitude at Apple. And you look at the leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, Ben Thompson talked a lot about this, like a lot of the other leadership has changed. He’s one of the oldest SVPs there now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or longest running at least. And I really do think this is how this department
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is run. This is how he thinks is the right way to do it, clearly. Otherwise he wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be doing it this way. I mean, he has enough power in the company, he could change it if he wanted to. So we know that this is how they think they should be running the company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this division rather. So obviously, this goes to Phil. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all under Phil. Phil is the guy who’s responsible for this being this way, and the guy who could change if he wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, but he doesn’t want to. And maybe that’s it. Look, it seems to be working okay. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, as you said, like, who are we to say what they should do? Obviously, they’re doing something right. But certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not right for developers. It is right for Apple, probably, maybe. Long term, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questionable, but it is right for them for now. It benefits their users in certain ways, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco others. But, you know, overall, it’s probably a benefit. But yeah, you’re right. I mean, the overall attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty negative, and it’s pretty stifling and I think that that ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what is going to cause possible long-term problems for Apple. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do depend on developers to push the boundaries forward with their platforms and not just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone but especially the iPad and probably also in the future the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They need us to make reasons for people to buy these things. The phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an easy success because it’s a really good smartphone and everybody buys a smartphone. subsidized in so much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world. Everyone has decided they need one. I mean, smartphones are this magical business where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone buys them because they just provide so much utility and everyone is willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend whatever it takes as long as they can, which is a lot of people these days because they’re so cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re willing to do it because smartphones are just so ubiquitous. So the question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t, do I buy a smartphone? The question is, which smartphone do I buy? And so they can compete well there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at the iPad, the iPad is optional. It’s an accessory for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a luxury. It’s an extravagance. It’s a fun device. It is usually not your primary computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually most people don’t say, I need to have an iPad. It’s only a question of which, or rather, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to have a tablet. It’s only a question of which one do I buy. No, it’s just an extra. The watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be that same thing. Most people, I don’t think, wear watches, and certainly the ones who do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wear watches today, I don’t think it’s an obvious thing to say, well, I have to get a smart watch. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the watch is going to have the exact same challenge that the iPad has of it’s going to have to justify its purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is coming from zero. It is not going to be like a phone where they just have to pull people into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store who are already buying their phone anyway. The watch is going to be like, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me why I want this. And so much of that rests on what developers do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what apps are out there. So many people end up buying these devices because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one or a very small number of specific apps that run on them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if developers keep getting marginalized and restricted too severely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very hard for us to push those platforms forward. It’s very and it becomes less likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the next big thing is going to be on iOS. And how does that help Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. And I think perhaps the most obvious and specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example of this is watching everyone’s reactions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to WatchKit. And a lot of popular developers, and I wish I could think of a specific person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t off the top of my head, but a lot of big developers have said, yeah, it looks cool, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I’m going to wait and see how this shakes out before I do anything real. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a different reaction than I remember ever having seen before. Like when the iPad came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, if nothing else, everyone said, holy crap, I’m going to make an iPad app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can be a part of the gold rush. Where now I’m hearing a lot of really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popular developers say, well, we’ll see how it goes. And that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Apple wants to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And you know, like what Apple has shown this fall with all the iOS 8 stuff and all the crazy rejections, racing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward to be first to market is not necessarily a good idea. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, I think that feeds into this. And now we’re seeing WatchKit, we know it’s gonna be a new device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very restrictive with what you can do up front. There are gonna be more capabilities added over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but all the crazy policies and rejections that we’ve seen for iOS so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, the Watch is gonna have its own set of those. It’s gonna reset from zero. It’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an entirely new set of weird decisions Apple has to make, many of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer community will disagree with bloggers will get angry about it we’re going to start over we’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from scratch here and all the same people who cause all this stuff with ios rejection so far this fall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all still making the decisions they’re also making the calls and so the same systems in place is going to have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with this new platform the only question is will the watch sell enough and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know we we’re all here because a most most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ios developers upon all ios developers use ios devices themselves Like, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the devices we choose to have. So that makes us, already right there, encouraged to develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. And then secondarily, although it’s matter more for your big company, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of them out there. They sell so ridiculously well that it’s just a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business idea to target them in many cases, or in most cases. The watch, we don’t know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The watch, we don’t know if developers are gonna end up loving them, or if it’s gonna end up being like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a lot of us say about the iPad, which is like, ah, I don’t really use it that much ever, you know, ever since the big phones came out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also don’t know if they’re going to sell very well. That’s a big question mark right now. They might sell like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy. They might be blockbusters and we might be looking back at this episode in six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and laughing at how pessimistic we might have been or how much we might have underestimated how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would sell. Or they just might not sell that well for a while, if ever, and we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. And because of the attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have shown developers, I mean, since the beginning of the App Store, really, that’s not a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but especially because of the recent mood among the community of all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chilling effect coming from all these rejections, I think that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us even less excited to jump into this unknown, this big question mark. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is why I’m saying the timing of these things is terrible. The timing of all these really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frivolous or weird capricious rejections is just awful because this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when Apple needs all the enthusiasm that they earned this past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer. They need that enthusiasm now for all of us to start building cool stuff for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch to increase the chances of them selling lots of watches. And instead, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally burned so much of that with these rejections. And again, for what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was the benefit there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when I think of what the pointy head boss would say to all that, they would say, it’s just these weird indie
⏹️ ▶️ John developer blogger things that are angry at us. You know, Starbucks is going to have a watch app. Weight Watchers
⏹️ ▶️ John will have one. Nike will have one. You know, JetBlue will have one. Like they just go through all these big name
⏹️ ▶️ John brands and like, oh, my relationships with those other C-level executives is awesome. And we drive our Lamborghinis down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the golf course and have golf all the time. They’re totally making watch kid apps. Who cares if a bunch of these
⏹️ ▶️ John hipster people in Portland aren’t going to make a watch app right away? after the other apps are we don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as we can say that there’s a Walmart app on our watch and that’s all that matters. I mean you go past a Starbucks it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John bleep a little thing that’ll give you a discount and you can get a coffee you know like that’s the pointy haired boss like
⏹️ ▶️ John dystopian scenario that the idea that you know the people the things that we care about you know argument would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah but these little guys tend uh tend to make the most interesting things you’re not going to get a really super innovative app coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out of Starbucks or anything for your watch we agree that Starbucks has to be there right you need that on your
⏹️ ▶️ John watch you need like like you need a Twitter app, you need it, whatever, like whatever. You need the big names, but you also
⏹️ ▶️ John need this other community. And from their perspective, it might be, well, the other community is annoying and they bother us and they say mean things
⏹️ ▶️ John on websites about us. And Starbucks never does that. And we’re going to have them. And you better get on board
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want to have your app there. And day one, a million people writing applications, you know, all those people who make
⏹️ ▶️ John of those clone free to play or rip off applications, they’re all going to be able to watch on day one because that’s their whole friggin business.
⏹️ ▶️ John They make you know, they make a million clone copyright violating apps until they get pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John from the store. And it’s just the shotgun approach. And they’re all going to be all over the watch. So we’re going to have huge numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John we can put up on slides and we show a big pie chart. Look how many apps the watch has already, you know, because every app is
⏹️ ▶️ John created equal when it comes to stats on slides. Right. And we have all these big names. And
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s put up the logos of a bunch of Fortune 500 companies. And the fact that panic isn’t on there because panic was afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John about putting a watch thing because they wanted to take a wait and see attitude. Nobody in the audience cares. And we at Apple don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you care, boohoo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. However, it’s only a matter of time before the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram or the next dot or the next crossy road isn’t on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that’s that’s the argument we would make is like if you’re expecting, you don’t know where the next innovation is coming from,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s probably not going to come from Fortune 500 company. It’s probably going to come from one of these little random that you never know where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to come from. Somebody you’ve never even heard of. Who heard of the guy who made Flappy Bird? Who heard of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John made crossy road until they made, You know, like that’s that’s argument for. I’m not saying this is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John attitude. I’m saying these are the two. These are the two endpoints on this continuum. And I don’t know which endpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John is which. For all we know, Apple is totally on board with what we’re saying. They’re like, you’ve got to, you know, and they’re having this internal
⏹️ ▶️ John debate or there’s somebody in power at Apple who’s on the pointy haired boss side or whatever. Like, again, with
⏹️ ▶️ John an information vacuum, you can if you’re in a bad mood, you imagine that pointy haired boss side. And if you’re a good mood, you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John all the good people at Apple fighting the good fight and just haven’t quite gotten their acts together yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and as a quick little side note, I’m really curious to see what happens with WatchKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and games. Because WatchKit is really not designed for games pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly. And so when they do the native SDK, which they say later next year, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have been assuming that means WBDC next year, I actually think that might be too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early. I would guess next winter, just like a year from this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year’s WatchKit, which came out in November. I’m guessing maybe next November we get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and next spring, like spring 2016 new watches come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that can use it. So anyway, that’s just a guess, but we don’t know yet. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like all of watch kit so far was designed not only to not enable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games, but policy wise to prohibit
⏹️ ▶️ John most of them. Well, but it’ll have the most important gaming future. The most important game feature of the watch is to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you when gems are 50% for the next one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s unfortunately, god, that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the most important gaming feature of the watch and it will be supported because that is the one thing you’re able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is send up a little notification with a button that you press to make, you know, and that’s all they care
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to end on a potentially happier note, I hope. Last week, we had made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mention of you having new thoughts on the iPad. And then we genuinely just didn’t get a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about it. So would you like to talk about your new thoughts on your new iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want me to talk this whole episode? I mean, I can but I feel I feel kind of bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey monopolizing the whole show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever, nothing else going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll interrupt you and tell you why you’re wrong about it. So go ahead. Perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. I would ask nothing less. Alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was very impressed with the I’ve had Air 2’s spec upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. And we bought one as a gift for a family member, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was playing with them in the store, I was really won over by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The last full-size iPad I bought was the iPad 3. I skipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 4 and the Air 1. I bought both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad minis, the first terrible one and then the first Retina one. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad 3 and the two iPad minis made me hate the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the iPad 3 was, I love the Retina screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much, but it was so heavy. It also had weird performance characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it had boosted the GPUs to deal with the extra pixels, but it didn’t boost the CPUs. So any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of CPU-bound graphics operation or process was very slow on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was very weird for that. It was also, you know, the iPad 3, it ran warm, and it was a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I still use mine every day and love it. Go on. Perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. iPad mini 1 comes out. It instantly ruined the iPad 3 for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s so much smaller and lighter. It makes the iPad 3 seem like this giant boat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s such a massive difference. But the screen on the iPad mini 1 is so terrible because it’s non-retina.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just a miserable experience. Like, I would look at that and I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man this is the great form factor I love this form factor I think but man this screen is so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I try to look at something on the iPad 3 and it was so big and heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it was like the worst of both worlds I thought the retina mini would solve this problem it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you but you don’t even call it that you call it the retina pad mini right that’s right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right so sorry Steven I thought that would do it and and what I found instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that the Retina Mini had two main issues for me. Number one is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen is not as good as the Air 1 screen which TIFF has. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lower-end device in some ways and there are small ways but it is noticeable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen, like the color isn’t as good and you can really tell. The second thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the people who went through the progression of full-size iPad to iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then to a new phone this year. And a lot of them are saying, oh, I haven’t touched the iPad since I got my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 6 or 6 Plus or something similar to that. You know, the iPad is never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be always with you. It’s unless you have really giant pockets year round, but that’s unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people or you know, a purse maybe. Even then, I know a lot of people with purses, none of them carry an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all the time. The iPad is always gonna be a secondary device. It’s never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be always in your pocket the way a phone is. The things an iPad is better at or the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I enjoy more on the iPad all need the full-size screen. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all need the 9.7 inch screen or at least they’re better on it. What I found when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally got the mini that had a decent enough screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I found is that the things I would do on an iPad I wasn’t enjoying them as much. They weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good they weren’t as much better than on the phone because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all benefited from having larger screens and so this this smaller one even though it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same resolution it just wasn’t as good it wasn’t as much better than the phone the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad and the phone got smaller at least you know the enjoyment of it for me again again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is all for me this is all a very much an opinion not a fact piece here so please bear with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so this year I was so wowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the iPad Air 2 in so many ways most notably the size and weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also just the screen is really really nice it’s you know they did some new stuff with how the pixels are glued on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and it’s really really nice the anti-reflective coating is minor but also nice the speed is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insane because it has that triple core chip and the two gigs of RAM so it’s like this This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major upgrade to the iPad line. The Air and Air 2 were both major upgrades. I just skipped the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air 1. So I decided, you know what, let me try it. And let me also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unload the notion that I need to get every iPad for testing. Because here I am, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already skipped two generations, the 4 and the Air 1. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer of an iPad app, it didn’t matter at all. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I had Instapaper and even when I had the magazine, both of those were much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more heavily used on the iPad than Overcast was. I always thought, you know, someone’s going to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and say, you know, this works really badly on my iPad 3. You know, what’s up? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this crashes on the iPad 3. I always thought, I better save all these iPads and get every model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that way if somebody does this, then I’ll be able to really get in there and fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In practice, that has literally never happened. Not once. There has never been an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time developing Instapaper, the magazine, and Overcast, which has been since the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch. I was there on day one with the Instapaper. So that entire time, throughout every iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never had a single bug report or complaint about something that was specific to any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one iPad model. So I think that’s a bunch of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s something that developers tell themselves, myself included, to either paranoia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep existing iPads or justification to buy all the new ones. So that I can tell you if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer, if you’ve ever wondered about that, it is probably unnecessary. If you have a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end 3D game, that might be different because the GPUs do vary a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other than high-end game developers, I would say the differences are small enough that you don’t really need to care, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really need to have them. worst comes to worst, if you really need something, you can find a friend who has an iPad 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or buy one on eBay for cheap. Anyway, so I decided now I’m gonna sell every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad I have that’s not this one and just keep the Air 2, which I can make myself to buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Getting back to that, so anyway, sorry. Sorry for the long, selfish rant. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, before I move on, is that wrong? Do you guys disagree? I assume you do, because you have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve said just that were crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an iPhone six now as does all three of us do. And, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still reach for my iPad mini, um, regularly and I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I had an iPad one and iPad three and now the iPad mini with retina display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and. The iPad mini, I think is my favorite iPad so far in no small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part for two reasons, one, because it is so much more portable, which sounds so stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re, if you’re a, uh, big iPad owner, like when, when the first mini came out and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, Oh, it’s so much better because it’s so much smaller, I was like, are you people crazy? No, it really is so much better because it’s so much smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also because this is the first iPad I’ve ever had with cellular, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is awesome and between the two, that changes everything for me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take it with me. I’ll out with me a lot where I define out with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like, I throw it in the glove box of the car or something like that. Or maybe I’m at a meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t want to bring my computer, but I just bring my iPad. So if I need to look up something in an email or something like that, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even take brief notes, I can do that. I use my iPad mini constantly. I love reading. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to love reading Twitter on it, but speaking of apps that are old, a tweet bot is a little on the old side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it’s still for iOS six, isn’t it? Yep. And now you can’t make fun of me for fast tech. So, haha.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, sorry, Paul. I still love my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini and I use it constantly. And I know, John, that’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, obviously you have a big iPad, but almost everything else is you would echo. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so now I have the iPhone six, right? And the iPhone six has is better
⏹️ ▶️ John competition for my iPad three than my iPod touch was. But the vast,
⏹️ ▶️ John vast majority of the time when I’ve got both devices next to me, I pick the iPad three.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s like it’s gone from maybe, you know, 99% to 98% of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the iPhone 6 and I really think it is the bigger screen, the iPhone 6 on the bigger screen. The reason I reach for it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not because the CPU is like just vastly faster than the iPad 3, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what I tend to run into. Because I’m mostly just reading things and browsing the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John or even just playing games, I just don’t notice any speed difference of the silly games that I play.
⏹️ ▶️ John But because the screen is bigger. The reason the iPad three, this giant, everything you said about the iPad three is totally true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is just a massive battery slapped onto a retina screen. The reason I keep picking that is
⏹️ ▶️ John because basically when it’s not like, oh, I need the text to be bigger. I need to read more stuff. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I’m using it to do anything, it’s closer to being like a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I won’t get the mobile site. I won’t get the little tiny site like mobile sites frustrating me to no end.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can load full size web apps in it. I can see big and this doesn’t make sense given
⏹️ ▶️ John like the massive Advanced hardware advantage of the iPhone 6, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like if I need to do something on the website It probably won’t work on this handheld thing I’ll need
⏹️ ▶️ John a bigger screen to be able to do it and that’s obviously silly because it’s like if it’s something CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John Intensive or some stupid poorly implemented JavaScript scrolling ad banner crap But like it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be way worse on the iPad than it is on the iPhone 6 but I still find myself going to the iPad because I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m a desktop person. Like I want the real full web here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I want the real full article. And you know, if I’m looking at comics obviously or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with images or you were just looking for iPad Instagram apps, like I’ve always had an iPad Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John app. That’s how I prefer to go through Instagram even though the pictures are, you know, supposedly not high res
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to make a difference. Like they’re not, I like to see the pictures and the comments underneath them. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want a bigger screen. And so that’s why my current bigger screen, the iPad 3, with
⏹️ ▶️ John its terribly unbalanced hardware and the now aging battery and
⏹️ ▶️ John the heat and the weight and everything like that, still beats out the iPhone 6 when I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of have that experience of like, when you would, when I still would, because I still get
⏹️ ▶️ John print magazines, sit down and just read a magazine, sit down and just read the computer equivalent of a magazine
⏹️ ▶️ John I always go with the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s actually, I’m glad to hear that. And that’s actually kind of what I’m finding. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided, you know, let me give the iPad, you know, one last try before I write it off as just a device that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not right for me. So I got myself the mid-range Air 2 config and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured, you know, if I’m gonna give this a fair shot, I wanna give it a really fair shot. I wanna have no complaints about the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. You know, so the iPad 3, yeah, big, heavy, whatever. iPad mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just thought it was too small for the screen for my tastes and didn’t like the screen quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Air 2 is great. And what I found is that, you know, I have many of the same frustrations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you just mentioned about, you know, things like being served the desktop or the mobile website on a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know you can get third-party browsers to switch it. We all know that, so please don’t write in about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you can even, you can switch it in Safari now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, right, yeah. Those that you pull down and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So we, that’s all fine. The fact is there is still a lot of web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that’s out there that people need to do on a regular basis that is either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impossible by somebody’s stupid web programming or at least is very clunky or very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do on a phone. The screen is just too small for a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, at least, as you said, John, at least it’s better on a bigger screen. I’ve also had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a miserable time ever trying to get anything done on an iPad. Like, getting work done, I know a lot of people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s fine. But the kind of work I do and the way I like to work, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not work well on an iPad. Like, the iPad is a terrible work machine for me. I’ve also found that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m gonna be playing a game, I much prefer to play the game on the iPad. I will save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games for the iPad. Like our friends Nevin and Matt Comey made The Incident,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, that’s the old one, what’s the new one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t even know if Space Age ran on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it does, because I think it installed in both places, and I just deleted it off the phone as soon as it installed. Because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I wanna play this on the iPad. Like, this is a game, like I want to fully enjoy this, properly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this on an iPad. I find myself, if I’m gonna be doing games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like our family thing, we do a lot of games over the holidays, so one of the reasons I bought this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right before Christmas, because I figured I’d be using it a lot, which was true, I just really enjoy playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on a full-size iPad. And the Mini, I thought, was substantially worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for games, just because so many iPad games, they design the interface before the Mini was out, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still assume the big screen, and again, I think if you’re playing a game on it, no question the full size one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. I mean, unless it’ll make the difference between whether you bring it with you or not on a trip or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. But I don’t think the size difference between the two is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major enough difference that like, so many people would not bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad Air, but would bring an iPad Mini. Like, it’s still the same class of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that need a small bag or a very large jacket pocket. You know, so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. So I set up the new iPad. I did a clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install. I didn’t import any of my old iPad stuff. I downloaded all the games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had downloaded to the iPad and a couple new ones. I didn’t install anything to get any work done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most importantly, I didn’t install a Twitter client because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TweetBot on the iPad is, as you mentioned, very old. It has not been updated for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time. And it is just really, you know, it was fine for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time it came out, but that was a very long time ago and it’s pretty outdated now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and it’s functionally broken in a couple of ways. Like for example, the new, well, new-ish Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey animated GIFs, that’s just infinitely going, it infinitely opens that tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like screen. And so it’s getting to the point that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struggling to use it, even though I freaking love TweetBot. Like I use tweetbot on all my devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s hard to use it on the iPad. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about tweetbot and old because I have the same problem with it. Twitterific sometimes when you click
⏹️ ▶️ John on a twit pick or pick that Twitter or whatever link, it just shows the same tweet over and over again. And you just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey keep writing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter itself, the mobile website. When I give up and say open in Safari, that doesn’t load for me like 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to 90% for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s ridiculous. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand. Sometimes you just get a spinner forever. Somebody just not not. it won’t load an animated
⏹️ ▶️ John GIF, but like, I don’t even know if this is an animated GIF because all it will show me is the Chrome, you know, like, and then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a spinner or maybe it’s just gray, maybe the page is in it. Anyway, that’s, I don’t understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John these super famous, highly used sites have like a 50% failure rate of just viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John the content when you’re not using the official Twitter app, which I bet works great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re still mad about Vine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I set up the new iPad Air with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the primary things I’m doing on it are looking at email, not even responding to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email, just looking at email because it’s good for that and it’s good for me going through the overcast support email because I don’t respond to most of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games and browsing. Browsing is an important category. So browsing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t just mean a web browser, although that’s part of it, I mean anything that involves browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a feed mostly for consumption. Yes, I know it’s a cliche, it’s only for consumption. It might, for what I’m saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this actually works very well for me. So Amazon, for instance, works very well on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s, you know, shopping, Instagram, any kind of news browser, any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newsstand publication. Like there’s this objc.io,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of c.io, we’ll put that in the show notes. I like that a lot. I read that on the iPad, even though you can read it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, but it’s better on the iPad, I think. that involves browsing code in general is better on the bigger screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because usually it wraps too much on the iPhone screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why I can’t read like, you know, Reddit or Hacker News or anything, any sort of because you know you’re going to follow
⏹️ ▶️ John a link that’s going to have code in it. And as soon as there’s code, it’s like, well, forget it. I just cannot read this on the phone because like it’s truncated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got a two finger swipe to scratch. It’s like, what am I even doing? Because it’s fixed with like you can’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t you can’t just arbitrarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrap it. Right, exactly. And also any kind of web forums like Hacker News, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like old PHP BB kind of form, so many of those don’t have very good responsive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any responsive layouts. So many of those are still very hard to browse on a phone without having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either do it in landscape and only have two lines on screen at once or have these really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny little text columns that you have to squint to see the text because it doesn’t resize properly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many things like that. Browsing the web in general, if I have the option to use both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these devices to browse the web, I’ll prefer the iPad because everything we’ve been saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now that I’ve restricted the iPad conceptually to like not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve the exact same roles as my phone. If I want to browse Twitter and do stuff like that, the phone is a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device for that for me, mostly for software, but the phone is a better device for that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for browsing, lounging, and playing games, the iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very pleasant and better in a number of key ways. And so that’s how I’m reframing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the use of it. I think, as I said, like, you know, I got rid of my hardware complaints. I now have zero complaints about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware. The iPad Air 2 hardware is amazing. So I have no complaints about the hardware. I’m gonna sell every other iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have because I hate them all. And they made me hate the iPad, damn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m gonna get rid of all those and just keep this one for a while and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it goes. Chances are it’s not gonna stick as much as I want it to. Chances are I just bought it because it was shiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and new and light and thin. And you’ll be making fun of me in six months when I say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgot about it. But right now, I think I found a way to make this fit better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life by not making it just be a bigger version of everything on my phone, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of this is gonna be worse, but instead reframing it as like, this is the device that I keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to the bed, browsing at night, having fun, playing a game or reading the news. Like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think is gonna be a lot better for the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you really have no hardware complaints, not even the one I’m about to say, can you guess what it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you upset about the mute switch?
⏹️ ▶️ John I am, but that’s that’s minor in the grand scheme of things. I am annoyed they took that away because it’s like, why? You got all this
⏹️ ▶️ John friggin room for switches and it’s a really useful one. Anyway, yeah, my wife’s got an air to it as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John My complaint is the same complaint I had about the mini. Well, one of the complaints I had about the mini, the bezel
⏹️ ▶️ John width. Yes, yes. Why? It’s so like it’s so upsetting to me because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s that’s not there. Like I understand why they make the bezel with smaller and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John on on things like monitors and stuff, because like what’s the point of it or whatever? But there was an actual point to the border
⏹️ ▶️ John around the previous iPad. It wasn’t just there because that’s as small as they could make it. And they needed
⏹️ ▶️ John a buffer like, no, it’s there because that’s where you hold it and the thumb rejection stuff just driving nuts. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just me. Maybe I just can’t get over the idea of like, just go ahead, just put your thumb around. No worry, you’ll never accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally activate a button. The thumb rejection will totally handle this for you. I just can’t get over it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I constantly feel like I’m holding it by like the. I’m actually trying not to touch the screen with my thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just, it feels more precarious. It’s like, why, why do that? I just, just make it wider. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, if you make it ever so slightly wider, it doesn’t have to be as big as it was in the iPad 3, but it needs to be a thumb width,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If you make it wider, you can also fit more battery. Just saying. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a case on it by any chance?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, never. Cover? Yes. That’s another thing that I don’t like is that if you want to keep going
⏹️ ▶️ John into iPad Air complaints, the smart cover, the one with the metal hinge, which I’m sure had some kind of problems or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John way better in terms of going off axis when you open and close it, you know, like not staying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re talking about the iPad 3 one, the original
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. Yeah, the original smart cover, which I still have, there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of durability problem with it and maybe it scratches up people’s iPads. Like, I’m not sure what the issues are, but the one thing it did
⏹️ ▶️ John do is when you open and close it, the edge of the iPad matches up with the, like it doesn’t go off,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, at a different angle. Whereas the mini version where
⏹️ ▶️ John cloth hinge, The cloth hinge one is off axis all the time. That is just, you know, if you’re anal retentive, that really bothers
⏹️ ▶️ John me. You? But like, mute switch, the bad cover, the number three folds
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of four, like those are all minor things, but all of them are trumped by the little skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John edge, which I just feel like doesn’t need, especially since it’s so light and so thin. Like, I don’t feel like, oh, don’t we need, really need to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John an extra two centimeters narrower. No, you don’t. Let me, give me some place to put my thumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for whatever, I got the full wraparound case this time. This is my first time having one of those because they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so incredibly thin and light that the extra bulk of the wraparound case is so minimal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does make it easier to hold in certain ways or certain situations. The smart covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always seem like a good idea in theory. In practice, I always found them kind of annoying in various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. The case is, in some ways, slightly less annoying. That’s all I can say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not perfect. It still has the problem of, oh, you have this thing that flaps around in the back sometimes and doesn’t hold on very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it at least fixes any alignment issues you have because the case is always perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John I might try that case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, again, it’s not great, but I think it’s a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the in-house kind of magazine-like iPad like mine is, the awesome thing about the smart cover
⏹️ ▶️ John is, because I don’t have a lock code on it because the thing never leaves my house, when you open the cover, it’s activated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, there’s no…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case does that too, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know, so that’s the handy thing. And I also, of course, I leave mine face up with the cover
⏹️ ▶️ John on it so that I can stack things on top of the cover without fear of scraping anything. but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna scratch the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s nothing underneath. I mean, it’s actually sitting on top of like a, it’s sitting on top of its own case. I have a slip case
⏹️ ▶️ John for it that I use when I take it to WWDC. Oh yeah. For all the, I mean, this has come with me every single WWDC I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been to, and except for one small dent in the corner, which was my fault and I think I’ve discussed before,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not beaten up. It’s in pretty good condition. It’s, it’s survivable. I’ve found, in my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John full-size iPads are surprisingly durable. Maybe the air will change that because it’s so thin. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John any iPad Air bend gates. That’s what we need. a YouTube video of taking my iPad Air. They put it over their knee and they
⏹️ ▶️ John just lean on it really hard and then it bends and they build it up and go, huh? See? Totally a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. Marco, is your iPad cellular or Wi-Fi?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got cellular because I still do. And I think this might be my last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular one because I do think, I wasn’t sure, will I end up bringing it on trips again like I used to? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. And so far, I’ve been bringing it on the last couple trips I’ve taken,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the various holiday trips, but I haven’t actually used the cellular function yet. And I think if I don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again in the next like six months, I’m just going to stop buying them with cellular. Honestly, I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a few years before I buy another one. But I did always use it for carrier diversity. I would always have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Verizon iPad and the AT&T iPhone. And that way, wherever I was, I could tether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with either one. So if I went on a trip, I would never have to use terrible hotel Wi-Fi. I could always tether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with one of them. And usually Verizon was a better one to do that on. the places I was going, Verizon had better coverage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the last year or two, that has been less of the case. Verizon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage has gotten worse for me in many places I go, and more often than not now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the AT&T tethering because it just is faster where I am, and that, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is concerning. The world is turning upside down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it might just prove that I don’t need Verizon at all anymore, and I could dump them finally, but we’ll see. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. I do recommend if you’re the kind of person that’s gonna carry around an iPad with you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world, like not just leave it in your house all the time, definitely get cellular. It is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much worth it because if you’re using it by itself most of the time, tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still a little bit annoying. That being said, the new iOS 8 tethering with how it detects your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through continuity or whatever, that might make it a little bit better. That might close the gap a little bit, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do recommend still, I think, getting cellular if you’re gonna carry it around. But if it’s gonna be in your house the whole time, I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, because this is again, my third iPad for cellular. And I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure if the, what is it, like $130 was really worth it. I did the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you did in that I got a Verizon iPad, and I have AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my phone. I then got the, I don’t know if this is still a thing or not, but you could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right around the time the iPad mini with Retina came out, You could give T-Mobile 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks and they’ll give you a SIM and you could, that you, you, they will give you 200
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megs of data every month for free on the hope that if you already have their SIM card in your iPad, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to pay for data, well, a, you’ll be in a place that T-Mobile actually works and B that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will pay T-Mobile for that data. Um, and I find that for the, for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of time I’m running about. With my iPad, 200 megs of data is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually enough. And then if I’m traveling, I can either use T-Mobile if I’m in a major
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metropolitan area, or Verizon if I’m not, and get online with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I gotta tell you, being at the beach and being able to screw around on Twitter, if I so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desire, with my iPad, that’s pretty cool. So I agree with you that if you think you’re gonna be leaving the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house a lot, definitely spend the extra money to get a cellular iPad. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do think it’s worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that T-Mobile thing is still there. I looked when I was activating mine. I ended up just transferring the variety because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new ones had the Apple sim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assign to Verizon it locks to Verizon, which is stupid. I’m sure that was Verizon being a pain or something anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just transferred the sim from the old iPad, but The the Apple sim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does still offer that option So you don’t even have to go get 10 bucks and give them to a T-Mobile store like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can bypass that step you can just buy a new iPad air 2 with cellular today and and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco select T-Mobile from the startup screen on the cellular plan thing. And it does offer that 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megs for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome, I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Anyway, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harry’s, Fracture, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace. And we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin didn’t even mean to begin cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental accidental oh it was accidental accidental John didn’t do any research Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental oh it was accidental accidental and you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you’re into Twitter you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S E Y L I S S so that’s Casey list M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A R C O A R M N T Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, Tech Podcasts so long
⏹️ ▶️ John You were saying something about it was hard to see code on a tiny screen and stuff like that. Yep. This phenomenon,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s new for Twitter, maybe it’s not just Twitter, maybe it’s lots of things, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John find very often when I am doing stuff on my phone or iPod touch
⏹️ ▶️ John and somebody does that thing where they post a screenshot and either it is a screenshot trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to show some piece of software or something or more commonly I find it is that insane thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes no sense to me, except for maybe as a way to get around tweet limits, which I actually think this is about
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, where they post a picture of text. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey God, it’s so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a picture of a web page. Like they screenshot of their web browser and then put
⏹️ ▶️ John that in a thing. Sometimes it’s a picture of a tweet, which really boggles my mind because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a mechanism for retweeting. I guess maybe in
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-technical person’s view of the world, a screenshot is somehow proof in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John way that a photograph was proof, which really just makes zero sense. But anyway, my
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, alright, so people do this thing, and sometimes it’s just a legitimate screenshot like showing some application or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whatever I’m using, whether it’s a Twitter website or a Twitter client, or if it’s a Vine thing, or if it’s an imager
⏹️ ▶️ John link, or like, I don’t even know what software I’m using, but very frequently I find myself tapping something, seeing a picture,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t freaking read it, no matter how much I zoom, because it’s so massively low, like, the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John is not sufficient to resolve letters like the letters are just a jumble of, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John JPEG compression, prime with the, you know, like if it’s like a some big indented comment
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and it’s like, I know this is not the original image because nobody would have posted this image
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s illegible. They’re trying to make a point. And like sometimes it’s just the picture like, oh, look at this, read this text and become outraged
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the hell they’re trying to say, right? And it is 100% illegible. And that means something between
⏹️ ▶️ John me and them is causing a massively compressive version of this image to comment. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John probably it’s Twitter doing it like try say, Oh, we’ll give we’ll serve the mobile version. What
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting is that so many things, so many web services seem to have the idea that all pictures are photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no pictures are screenshots or contain text. And in my experience, it’s the opposite. Almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all pictures are not photos, and are like screenshots or text or something. And I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to read them. And these services like this is another reason I want to be on my iPad, because at least an I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a fighting chance that they won’t try to serve me the super duper compressed, tiny scaled version of the
⏹️ ▶️ John image. And I find that incredibly frustrating. It’s like I’m not allowed on the quote unquote real Internet. I have to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like being in a web browser again, like the toy version of this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t handle the full quote unquote photo. Here is this totally mangled version that is useless to you, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read a damn thing on it. It drives me up a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I can’t get over what is a tweet shotting or something like that. Somebody said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shit pic the other day. Was that, that’s like a thing? I have no idea, but, but basically where you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you, John was saying, where you take a screenshot of something and maybe if you’re really cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll like highlight the line, um, that, that you want to call attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, like that’s annoying, but I can get over it if you can include a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to whatever page you’re trying to, um, link to, but my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and by favorite, I mean, the thing I fricking hate is when they take a screenshot of this thing and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t provide a fricking link. Oh, God, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. People are posting examples like, you know, so this is like this
⏹️ ▶️ John one from M.G. Segaler is obviously a screenshot like mobile Safari because you can see they’ve highlighted the paragraph or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes it’s not like, you know, the content may be good. Like what people are trying to do with this. And there are strategies
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond like the using screenshots as proof. A lot of it is like I can’t fit this in a tweet. I can put a link to it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a tweet, but I think if I put a link to it, you won’t follow it. And so many Twitter clients in line images that if I put the actual image,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can read text that I couldn’t otherwise include in the tweet. It’s like people are just doing what works because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people will, quote unquote, engage with your tweet more if they can see the paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John of text that you’re, you know, I don’t even use a Twitter client that I mean, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter does in line images, but I have that feature turned off. And for a longest time, it didn’t in line images. And also my experience of Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John is very different. I would rather just follow the link. But sometimes it’s nice to be able to know exactly where it is. This is another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with like in-page anchors that either people don’t know how to use or they don’t exist or both. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ John best way people can communicate, there’s an article and this part about it I want, like basically what they’re doing is a link
⏹️ ▶️ John list kind of blog post where they’re running a link blog, they want to link you to something and they want to quote the
⏹️ ▶️ John passages that they found relevant and comment on them. And the way they do it is tweet on top 140 characters
⏹️ ▶️ John or less plus the link to the image and the image has the part highlighted that they’re interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of a mutant inverted form of blogging where you can’t intersperse the two things. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line, if you’re writing your mobile application, don’t assume all photos are text. If you’re going to want to be clever and you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to save bandwidth, figure out if their photos are text or not. If they’re text, make sure that you don’t scale them down so brutally
⏹️ ▶️ John that it becomes complete gibberish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. I’m tired. Do I do titles? SSL is not pancetta? Who said that? I
⏹️ ▶️ John we discovered that the boar’s head makes pancetta. I don’t know if that’s going to be any good because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really an Italian brand. I don’t think. But anyway, we bought some. We’re going to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I agree that SSL is not panchetta. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is true. Full of landmines, pitfalls and bottomless pits is pretty decent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I might have said that it was either me or Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it was you, Casey, talking about nodes. Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about how about get rid of how about get rid of the full of and just go with landmines, pitfalls and bottomless pits? I could
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I like that. And I’ll put the Oxford comma in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So landmines, comma, pitfalls, comma, and bottomless pits. It makes me so happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear that you also appreciate an Oxford comma. And is that unanimous? Did I hear Marco say the same? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. Appreciation. Everybody agrees with that. The only people who don’t agree with that are. No. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. It’s not like a style choice. Like, well, you can go one way or the other. It is a clarity choice. And everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t understand why there’s any argument. Because as soon as there’s an argument, someone pulls out one of the crazy examples and goes, see. And I guess those
⏹️ ▶️ John people are like, oh, well, I guess you’d have to use it there or don’t write that sentence or some crazy thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, no. Forget it. I’ve never heard a convincing argument against.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not agree with you more. Friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, swears that the Oxford comma is evil. And I am glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we all agree that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. So what does he say when people bring up the examples of this sentence? It changes the meaning
⏹️ ▶️ John of the sentence, and it’s totally crazy. And if you don’t let me put a comma there, I cannot express the intended meaning of the
⏹️ ▶️ John sentence. What does he say then?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea. We could probably call him, but I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, what drives me nuts about the absence of the Oxford comma when it’s absent, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I read, and I don’t know if everyone reads this way, maybe it’s just I’m a programmer, I don’t know. When I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read, I get tripped up if I hit what seems to be a parse error. Yes!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I write with this in mind, so I try to avoid giving people this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling. And it’s hard to know with your own stuff, and it’s good when somebody points out like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sentence that you wrote didn’t make any sense to me at first because I thought it meant this. So it’s good to pay attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that and reword things when you need to. For me, it’s like I read in a stream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t want to have to read the whole sentence to understand the beginning of it unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can push the clause on your stack and everything. But for the most part, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re reading, you don’t want to be tripped up by something like the end of a list not happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you thought it would, or parallel structure errors are a great example of this, stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the absence of the Harvard slash serial comma increases the likelihood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people tripping up as they’re reading that that list of items and like Misparsing it for a second and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go back like oh wait a minute. Oh, oh, that’s what they meant by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I Really don’t understand how people could think that that that not having the Oxford
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comma is an option because I agree with John like it dramatically changes the meaning of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sentence, but whatever I’m so it makes me genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy that we all agree on this the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well that knife heads aren’t a complete waste of money, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well ask me again six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true You gotta you gotta figure out this note issue I know you’re gonna give up on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you probably should but it makes me sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I loved everything else about note I would I would try to figure this out more.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just doesn’t seem like a Type, I mean it’s young It’s like it hasn’t been tested in this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that a lot of these older things have, especially if it’s if it seems like the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing where you, OK, so you run into this problem and you ask the question and the answer is not, oh, of course, everyone runs into
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem. Here’s how you fix it. The answer is, oh, of course, everyone’s into that problem. And you’re right. It’s a problem like that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because the beginner should not immediately find the thing that causes that causes people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know to say, yeah, no, that totally doesn’t work. I mean, what should really happen is you should run into all the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone should be like yeah that’s what everyone runs into here’s what you do and then you run to another one like it should be the progression of
⏹️ ▶️ John you learning a language shouldn’t be you know three days in you
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately hit a roadblock that is a legitimate roadblock and there’s not a commonly known workaround
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and it’s like and like what you can always tell the warning signs from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the community that this might be that this might be the wrong thing for you like if the questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you answer like so the question if the question is why is set timeout leaking memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if all of the answers are don’t use set timeout and there’s nothing else that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the same thing it’s like okay that’s it that’s a red flag right there that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means that something’s not right here this some part of this is a bad fit like this this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not what I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for yeah I remember trying to look for a sleep call in JavaScript early on I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, every language has some way to just, you know, I was just doing it to like induce a race condition or whatever. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like I wanted set timeout. I wanted like, just you do nothing for a while, please, because I wanted to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John race with some of the stuff that was going on. And it’s like, how can a language not have a sleep call? This is like
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix addling my brain, though, assuming every language has access to the Unix API. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, without without set time out, without without a way for you to say, don’t do this now.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in a little bit in a time that I’m going to specify in milliseconds do this and if you can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ John i was trying to think when you were asking that question well if i don’t use set timeout then what is what’s my alternative maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John node has an alternative because no you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no like that that is like node node implemented set timeout and set interval it itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in its engine to work this way and and like that is if you look at the they call it the timers module
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the node timers module that’s that’s it like those are the functions that you that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule something in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s and it’s not just like it’s not just like a thing where you have to be careful about what you reference inside the closure and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. There’s like no workaround like, Oh, everyone knows when you do set timeout, you got to be careful not to have
⏹️ ▶️ John not to close over these references or to like explicitly do something, you know, to make it happy. So you don’t leak memory. There’s nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t looked too far into it. I even tried. I’m like, you know, maybe maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is doing something way too literally the calls like set timeout, pull URL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CTO and then like ID. it and the ID is an integer and I even I even tried parse int on it just to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure it sends an integer it doesn’t try to retain something crazy and I even tried uh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it a string eval thing to set timeout but unfortunately no doesn’t support that um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so because I was like maybe maybe that would force it not to retain anything intelligently because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t know what I’m calling nope didn’t help that can’t be done
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah this and the memory limit which also seemed to turn out to be no actually that’s the limit and It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the limit and it’s low and and apparently people aren’t bothered by like it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s it’s like Chrome and emoji support. Some things just can’t be explained.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although isn’t that coming? I’m sure it’s coming. I’m sure anytime now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overall I think I would say if I had to predict and granted most of my predictions are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comically wrong. But if I had to predict the future of these languages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say Python and Ruby will outlive Node in common
⏹️ ▶️ John But Node’s not a language. JavaScript is a language. JavaScript as a language sucks, and the only reason anyone cares about it at all is
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s every freaking where we all have to deal with it. And so that’s that for JavaScript. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Node is like, well, wouldn’t it be great if you could use the same thing on the server side and client side? Yeah, kind of, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still using JavaScript in both places. I think there is a place for a mature server side JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. It just may be that no jazz is not the one or maybe it needs more time
⏹️ ▶️ John to bake or whatever, but there’s nothing about no that says like, oh, maybe, maybe no never works out. But then someone else comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John with a server side. There’s been there have been other service side JavaScript engines. There will be other ones in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John until we can get unless we can get JavaScript off of the browser. There will always be
⏹️ ▶️ John a place for JavaScript on the server and whether who implements it and who does a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if there are bugs and if it gets used in large scale applications, I think that will change over the years. But until we can get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of JavaScript on the browser side, we’re probably stuck with some kind of JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should point out that the current version of Node is 0.10.35,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which, I mean, obviously everyone’s version numbers mean something different than everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else’s. But we are far from, well, it looks to me like we are far from 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although this is something that should be solved
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean there’s nothing technically about Node that says it couldn’t be made to be better. Like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John young yet and people obviously haven’t stressed it to do the type of stuff that Marko is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or haven’t found that that’s where the limit is. It needs time to mature and become battle tested.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I mean maybe I’m using the wrong tool for the job here. But it really seemed like it was a good tool for this job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really bums me out because I really wanted you to like it. I don’t even know why. It doesn’t matter, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just seemed like this is the sort of thing I would use Node 4, to your point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like it’s a lost cause.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would work fine if you had 10,000 URLs to query, but once you’re up into 250,000, then it starts getting creaky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it would work fine if I was willing to restart the process every six hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with only 10,000 URLs to crawl. It’s a memory leak. It leaks forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It eventually gets too big, and yeah and when I’m crawling the full and I’m not even crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all 250,000 like I did my last test when I was just crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an eighth of them so whatever that is like you know 40 or whatever that is and even doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it would it would pass a gig within like 20 minutes it was really bad like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s doing so and like and I tried there’s a heap dump thing so I tried taking heap dump profiles and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loading them into Chrome’s developer thing and looking at all the stacks and I saw them it was like iTunes everything was other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and for the for the few objects it is it is tracking, you could see some of them had really, really deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recursive setTimeout calls. So you can tell that’s where the problem is. The problem is setTimeout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is retaining things recursively, even though I’m not calling functions recursively, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the function at the end of itself calls setTimeout on itself for some point in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future. And I even tried not doing at and doing a worse solution using set interval
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead. And I tried clearing the intervals, of course, I tried all that. I could not get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to work. I worked on this most of the afternoon today and I could not get it to not leak all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just, again, it just is not a good enough fit in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other way to what I want in new language to make it worth fighting on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this point. So I mean, but Casey, I mean, you’re getting what you want, which is you’re getting me to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new language. And now, because Node is not working out, I’m trying even more new languages. So really, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes and no. I think you’re predisposed to hate almost everything you’re trying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, to your credit, you are trying. And that is making me happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say I’m predisposed. Once I actually—I’m predisposed to hating things I haven’t tried before, because I don’t want to have to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Once I actually try a new language, now I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve spent two weeks or however long it’s been getting pretty decent at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one really complicated task in Node, and now I feel like I’m throwing away all this knowledge. Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least it was quick. At least I already knew the JavaScript syntax and everything. Go is going to take a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit longer to learn just because it’s so much more different than what I know. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be more upset if Go doesn’t work out. I try something I want it to work because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to learn something else. That’s just like it’s like natural human defensiveness like you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when something is new and unfamiliar most people’s default reaction is to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reject its relevance to them so that they can continue the way they’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things or the way they you know the way they think things are. Your instinct is to reject
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ideas or dismiss them as soon as you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a political joke here, but I’m going to let it go.