116: Women Aren't a Minority
08 May 2015What can we do to get more women and girls to listen to the show?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco defends his backyard duck from raccoons
- Follow-up:
- HFS+ and Network Attached Storage
- Photos.app
- LaunchControl for managing
launchdjobs - Microsoft, iOS, Swift (via @esusatyo)
- Marco versus the raccoons, illustrated
- How do we encourage more women to listen to ATP?
- Overcast changes for Apple Watch
- Are watches destined to replace smartphones?
- What were the first iPhone apps we downloaded?
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- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code GLASSHALFEMPTY for 10% off.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going live. I’m tired of this. You got an appointment with the raccoon? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got somewhere you gotta be? You gotta be out in the backyard with a 2x4?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually what happened, and that actually worked. Since almost hitting the raccoon with a 2x4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has not come back. Hitting the raccoon with a 2x4? Is that code for something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you really take a 2x4 to a raccoon like it’s a friggin’ baseball bat? Yes. Have you ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey played baseball in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life? I have played. I don’t remember whether I’ve actually gotten a hit. It was probably
⏹️ ▶️ John polo really with the new sport that Marco Nanos exists. Oh yeah that’s right, wait but that’s on horses
⏹️ ▶️ John though right? Yeah but you’re swinging down to a thing on the ground. Were you riding hops?
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone please draw that. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Quixote on top of hops,
⏹️ ▶️ John jousting with a 2x4 against
⏹️ ▶️ John rabid raccoon in the corner of the duck hiding, guarding its eggs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now people think we’re crazy who don’t follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter. I mean, I didn’t like go and fetch a 2x4. I happened to have a few in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backyard from Adam’s party. We were holding down a big tarp with them. So I had a few very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long 2x4s in the backyard. And we were standing in the backyard with these two raccoons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stalking the duck that’s nesting in our backyard. And they’d already gone for it once and the duck made some crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise and scared them off temporarily. But they were just like sitting there, maybe 12 feet away, it wasn’t very far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they were just sitting in the tree. And we tried like shining the flashlight in their face, throwing pine cones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at them. We hit them a few times with the pine cones. They didn’t give two craps. So eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realized, oh maybe they don’t like water. So I got the hose and sprayed them and made them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly damp. I mean it wasn’t even that much pressure because it was a terrible hose. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically gave them a shower. It was like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe go put some conditioner in their hair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the least intimidating use of a hose probably in history and and they they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of seem to get annoyed by the hose and just kind of like walked away slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then eventually they came back and that’s they they were within swinging distance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this two by four which is probably if I had to guess six feet long so I tried swinging at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I missed completely but the the area that I hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it I like hit it into a tree and the area that I hit was I don’t know a couple of feet from the raccoon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they left and they have not come back that was and that was now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or three nights ago
⏹️ ▶️ John so can you explain why you think these unborn ducks have a greater right
⏹️ ▶️ John right to life than these raccoons that are hungry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of other food for the raccoons to eat around here they have no shortage of food they’d have no trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding food It used to be my trash, now it’s all the neighbors trash since I got a trash house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if it wasn’t this duck they would go eat somebody’s garbage and get a sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they are fine with food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this at all. Also raccoons are kind of a**holes and ducks, I know that ducks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be aholes to some people but ducks have not been aholes to me. Raccoons have been a**holes to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m sure I have a bias here. I’m sure we’re gonna hear from all the raccoon rights activists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I don’t like raccoons and I have no reason to dislike ducks also it just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a cheap shot like the mother duck is sitting on 11 eggs she has to sit there for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month to bake them that’s like that’s like hitting somebody in the back like it’s a cheap shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like to try to attack her like there and that could in that kind of situation like have a fair fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere you know go fight an adult duck
⏹️ ▶️ John well dwell on that the next time you’re eating an omelet but that doesn’t require murdering
⏹️ ▶️ John a Chicken what we do to the chickens that we get eggs from is way worse than anything that’ll ever happen to that duck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that is true. That’s a fair point. No, I mean and look I This is why I’m not like, you know Making a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco political stink about my animal policies here because I know that whatever opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have of the animals in my backyard is Completely it’s completely hypocritical for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep having meat And animal products in my life
⏹️ ▶️ John life. I think the motivation for this in the end is that the potential cuteness of baby
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and everyone’s to seek you baby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ducks. Well, it’s also the novelty. You know, we’ve we’ve we’ve seen raccoons around our house since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we moved in here almost five years ago. This is the first time we’ve had ducks and we have we’ve never seen baby ducks. This is the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time we’ve seen any duck. And, you know, and the adult duck is pretty good. Pretty cool looking like we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this awesome pictures of her, you know, because she’s a mallard. She has like the big blue square on her ring and everything. great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around her wing. So yeah, so she looks awesome. Great picture opportunities. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants a picture of a raccoon at night.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, if this was, I guess, I’m trying to think of Merlin would be able to come up with a reference, I’m just going to go with Adventure Time. This was an episode
⏹️ ▶️ John of Adventure Time. Those eggs would hatch and tiny alligators would come out of all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Never seen it. Nope. All right, so let’s start the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some follow-up. Do we want to talk about some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HFS Plus? That was fast today. Yeah, it was fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had a question about it. I think we were talking about our synologies, and Kane,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you pronounce his name, said that, aren’t you guys concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ John HFS plus corruption? Why aren’t you concerned about ext3 or 4 corruption on your synologies?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my understanding is that ext3, 4 don’t have any of the functionality John wants built into the next OS X file system,
⏹️ ▶️ John like checksumming, so on and so forth. I think that is correct, but I’m not sure. Either way, I’m pretty sure the
⏹️ ▶️ John synology does not have any checksumming. So why aren’t we concerned about corruption
⏹️ ▶️ John when using HFS plus and Synology? I am! I am concerned about it. I’m exactly as concerned about it as I am all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. I wish my Synology had data integrity. I wish it ran ZFS. Why don’t you build your own
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS and put ZFS on it? Because that sounds like a lot of work and really complicated. And I should reiterate,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we didn’t say this in the last show, we should reiterate for the people who haven’t listened to the whole series, our Synologies were given to us
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Synology Corporation. So these were gifts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably wouldn’t have bought this for myself. Now that I have it, I think it’s great, but it’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS I’ve ever owned, so I can’t tell you whether it’s better or worse than any other NAS. I do know that I really wish to have data integrity,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if someone made one of these things with ZFS on it, at this point, having lived with the NAS for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time, I think I would probably consider buying it. But I already have one, and so I’m just kind of living with the
⏹️ ▶️ John potential crappiness of what I’ve got, and worrying about the same amount I worry about everything else. I don’t know if you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys are worrying about it or just accepting your fate like so many other people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t care. Nope. And we should also mention, like John said, these are all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gifts from Synology. And I was in the same situation as John never had a NAS before. I freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love my Synology. And I’ve been asked a lot lately, lately. I’m not sure why,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we had we were all given DS 1813 pluses. And I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The modern version of that box is the 1815 Plus. Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has plenty of other models. This one is pretty large, both physically and in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of disk space, because it takes eight disks. But they have much smaller versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They also have a 214 Play, which they also sent me one of those, which is much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better for doing things like hosting Plex, if that’s your cup of tea, because it has the appropriate chips for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware transcoding, but we’ve been asked a lot likely a lot lately. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ds 1813 is our model ds 1815 is the modern version of it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I asked him as soon as I got mine out when you were talking to the person who gave him to us like, you know, what’s the outlook? Are you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys going to add data integrity features and you know, then don’t talk about future products, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, like the my request has been heard thus far, I don’t think anything has happened on that
⏹️ ▶️ John front. But I remain hopeful that some point in the future, they will come up with a new product or a new software update or something
⏹️ ▶️ John that adds data integrity features, especially on a NAS. I don’t stress it I.O. wise. I’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine for it to spend its time and energy doing checksumming. It
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t affect my use of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s not an issue of your request being heard. We know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your requests have been heard by people at Apple for years
⏹️ ▶️ John about their file system. I think Synology is slightly more motivated than Apple to, uh, because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a common feature of NASA. Like they, a lot of the, a lot of NAS products that are out there are built on ZFS plus
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other checksum and file system, or at least have it as an option. Like it’s a good bullet point, right? It’s in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if one of the features that people look for a NAS, this is one of them. And you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John them not adding it as probably just a statement on the state of like Linux ZFS support or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just how many ties their current software stack has with the, their current file system
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. But anyway, it could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So do we want to cover a few more things about photos the app on OS 10?
⏹️ ▶️ John Same person more questions about aren’t we concerned? There was one he wants to know what we’re concerned about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aren’t we concerned about the privacy aspects of using cloud sync with apples photos that app
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically about like, what kind of security they use to stop Apple employees
⏹️ ▶️ John or the NSA or whatever from viewing photos without your authorization now that they’re all in the cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my answer to this one is similar to the answer about checksumming. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the situation is. I assume the NSA can see all of my pictures. I think it’s a safe bet
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody. I assume that Apple is making a reasonable effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep them secure like they do with all their stuff. But in the end, you are uploading all of your
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures to a server controlled by a corporation that you have no control over.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have no idea if they have access to my pictures. I would recommend that if you have pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t want the world to see, don’t put them into a cloud photo syncing service. Period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s basically my answer is, uh, I don’t have any pictures that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be, that it would be a huge problem if somebody else saw them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you did, like the solution is like, there’s nothing you can do. The solution is do not upload them to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s it. That’s your own. That’s your only solution. knows they could be breaking into your computer and getting
⏹️ ▶️ John them or whatever. But there is no, I don’t think there’s any sort of technological guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John that at this point, that a company was well meaning as they might be could give that would make me think,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I previously didn’t want to upload these pictures of my tax returns and social security number to an online photo service.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now that I’ve heard this promise from this company, I will totally do it. It’s just I you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t I just you shouldn’t do it. There’s nothing even as it’s not their fault. They could be 100% sincere
⏹️ ▶️ John that they are doing everything they can to protect your photos. But I think history has shown that there are so many things between
⏹️ ▶️ John their promise and you, namely the Internet, that neither one of those parties has control
⏹️ ▶️ John over, that the NSA perhaps does. So just, yeah, just don’t upload it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. All right. And what about if you were to edit things
⏹️ ▶️ John is from Hampus. Three questions in a row. Don’t you care about? Aren’t you worried about? Aren’t you concerned about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Perhaps we are. This is what, yeah, don’t you care about your edits? Like so we talked about last time
⏹️ ▶️ John having a bunch of photos and they’re all just a bunch of JPEGs or raw files or whatever in a big folder
⏹️ ▶️ John hierarchy. So worst case scenario, you could extract all those files from this crazy bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and just have a bunch of JPEGs in folders like that by putting your photos into this
⏹️ ▶️ John system, whether it be I photo or the new photos application or anything else, you’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ John losing is because it’s very good about preserving the originals and the originals are still there for you to get.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can always pull those originals out and go back to just a bunch of folders, right? But what about your edits at that point? What if you spent
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time editing your photos, adjusting everything, or all those edits and adjustments are not in the photos that the whole point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t write them back to the photos, it keeps the edit separate. That’s a feature. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John know if you’re if you’re saying that you can just pull get rid of a library and play your photos that you’re losing all your edits.
⏹️ ▶️ John My answer to this is that I rarely edit my photos, because I have no idea how edit photos. So that solves
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem. I will crop photos occasionally. I will move some sliders
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny little bit. But for the most part, I feel like I’m making the photos worse and not better. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t edit them. And so it’s not a problem for me. If it’s a problem for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the solution is because I like the idea of never altering the originals. Obviously, if they’re raw,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of it. But I don’t know how you would save
⏹️ ▶️ John the edits in a way that is not specific to any one application that applies the edits?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean that’s that’s kind of the problem. Like, you know, Adobe in their apps, they have as part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DNG format, they can embed the edits into the DNG files. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s cool because then you can bounce between any Adobe program and load up those edits when they’re embedded in the file.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s kind of what I always wanted for so long, which is give me one file that has everything in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that I can move around in the file system and operate on as I need to. The Apple ecosystem as far as I know has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had that. But it’s a hard problem to solve because what do you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, you know, right now they just moved from iPhoto and Aperture to the new Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhoto, Aperture, and the new Photos app all have different editing controls with different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities that probably many of them use different algorithms from each other. So you couldn’t even say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, reduce highlights by 0.2. You know, if you save that in the file,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the next version of the program might interpret that differently. Or a different program 10 years from now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will interpret that differently. And it might not look the way you want. So I think the only really sane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term solution here is to either not care about your edits. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the ones you edit, when you’re going to move platforms, You’re going to move editors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write the ones that you want to save as JPEGs or be doing that the whole time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just maintain separate copies that have the edits baked in if that’s really important to you. It is a very good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is I don’t think there’s a good way to solve it that will actually last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long term and be cross-platform and cross-app. For me, it’s very similar to what John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said but just a little bit step further. I do know how to edit photos a little bit and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them look better sometimes, but I don’t edit most of the photos I take or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do it’s like a really basic crop and maybe a very small adjustment to exposure and stuff, but not you know not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy edits that would that are you know that important as I as time goes on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gotten better at editing so if I was going to go back and pull up an old photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably want to redo my edits to it with the tools and techniques and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities that I have today, rather than when I first did the edit five years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I didn’t know about white balance. Stuff like that. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very valid question to ask of what do you do with your edits and moving between systems. That is a very valid question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ask for a lot of people, but it sounds like none of the three of us are the kind of people who worry that much about that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also a great solution I don’t think exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you could always burn your edited copies to like a new copy, like burn them to JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I was saying, yeah. But I think that’s the only solution. I wouldn’t say that’s a good solution. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John program’s offer of that, I don’t even know if iPhoto even offered that as an option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could duplicate. I don’t know if it then stores it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could duplicate, but I think what it did was duplicate the original and now you just have the same thing. You just have a
⏹️ ▶️ John second file where you could do a different set of edits, but it would still try to keep them separate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. This is definitely an advanced user feature that most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will not need or use or ever care about. And so therefore, Apple’s apps probably will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover it very poorly. And if you really are very concerned about that kind of stuff, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be wanting more control over your stuff anyway. Like my wife, Tiff, she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pro photographer and she’s very serious even about her personal photography. And so she doesn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these programs. She uses Adobe Bridge and manages things in the file system. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she is very, very happy with that. She has no desire to go into one of these managed syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library kind of programs. She tried Aperture, she tried Lightroom, she hated them. She’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of person who, like, her edits are so much work and so important, and she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good at it that, like, she wouldn’t be able to do the kind of move where she would just throw away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the edits she’s ever done. But she does things manually. So she has all her raw files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then when she does heavy edits, she saves them out as JPEGs. And so like it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be a problem for her in her system. So anyway, I think the answer is if you’re a pro enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you’re really into it enough to have a lot of edits, you probably need to come up with your own long-term solution to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also got some feedback from Vincent Yonjongo. I’m so sorry that I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butchered that. But he said that he forgot to tweet this after episode 114, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flickr gives a terabyte of storage free and you can auto sync photos from your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is something I don’t think we covered when we were doing the rundown of competing photo services. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s probably worth taking note of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody forgets about Flickr. We forgot about them too. They still exist. They give you a terabyte of free
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and apparently they auto sync photos from your phone. So bad us on forgetting that they still
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. And you know, and it’s not bad. The new Flickr whenever they did that big redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a pretty nice update. And one terabyte free is nothing to sneeze at. I know a lot of people use it, enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a thing. Yep. Still a thing. Jiri Fiala,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I’m so sorry, I’m butchering all your names. When you disable iCloud Photo Library, there’s a grace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey period of 30 days. You can’t start from start from scratch within those 30 days. My library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now has now 32 days in 30,000 empty thumbnails, no image can be opened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t re-enable it, it would just merge with this mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a series of two tweets and it’s like, well, if there’s a 30 day grace period and you’re on day 32, shouldn’t the grace
⏹️ ▶️ John period be over? A lot of people told me about this 30 day grace period. Like if you turn iCloud photo library off, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t just dump all your photos immediately. They say, okay, well, I know you turned this thing off and you don’t wanna use it anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll hang on to the photos that you have uploaded for 30 days just in case you change your mind, is a nice safety feature
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t like whoops I turned it off and it deleted all my photos and I actually don’t have local copies on and don’t have my local copies
⏹️ ▶️ John like I have some copies are only in the cloud and then I turned it off another all gone right so they’re saving it for 30 days but
⏹️ ▶️ John this makes it all the more difficult it seems like to do the big reset button of saying look I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you Apple I’ve got them all on my local machine please clear out your cloud I want to start over
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s probably wise that that isn’t easy to do because people don’t actually know when they have all the photos in their computer and if you
⏹️ ▶️ John gave them the ability to do it they would do it and then feel sad when they realize they’re missing a year’s worth of photos and blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know it gets back to the same problem like how do you restore from backup how does it synchronize things
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people respond to that question as well showing us screenshots of what happens when you you know something gets
⏹️ ▶️ John screwed up and you go to a time machine backup and restore your photos library and
⏹️ ▶️ John you the new files plop onto your disk and then you launch the app and how does it how does it reconcile this
⏹️ ▶️ John you know this version on disk with what’s in the cloud and apparently it throws up this big like repairing photo library thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it basically just goes through there and reconciles and from the reports of people who have sent me pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John this it seems to more or less work correctly albeit after waiting for a really long time
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to go through all your photos that it will it’ll figure things out somehow I mean I’m still worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John there being something screwed up somewhere and I would still like to have some way to reset everything even if it’s through nine
⏹️ ▶️ John different dialogue boxes that all make me click on advanced and enter my admin password
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know swear oaths that I won’t sue Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco after you know whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like there to be a way and I’m still a little bit worried about it I just hope I never have to find out how it behaves in that situation
⏹️ ▶️ John again and I basis on my experience which I you know right or wrong because obviously contacts does not use cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John kit or anything like that so it’s very different in terms of code base but contacts is such a small set of state
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a lot of contacts and just doing this with contacts like drove me mad and took me hours so
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t want to do it for 60,000 photos or whatever the hell I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, we also got with regard to me discussing, um, launch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D and Cron last episode for, uh, tickling a web server to say that, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s Mac has not died, which by the way, it still has not died. I’m speaking on it right now. Um, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people suggested a launch control by Soma zone as an, another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app to manage launch D jobs. I have not tried it. It’s not something I’m really that particularly concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, but a lot of people recommended it, so I have to assume it’s probably pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And then our final piece of follow-up is from Enrico Susatio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why did I jump on this sword tonight? Maybe Susatio or Susatio? Thank you, Marco. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody’s saving me. He said, Microsoft is working on compiling Swift 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is in regard to Project Islandwood. I did get the chance to watch the video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for the most part, it’s what’s been reported. But toward the end, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a question and answer session—imagine that, a question and answer session in Moscone. Isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please file a bug. Exactly. Somebody asked, hey, what are you doing about Swift? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall if this was verbatim or not, but the quote was—there were two guys that did the presentation, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them said— What is the plans for adopting Swift into this as well?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going there, it’s just a day at a time. This is all
⏹️ ▶️ John preliminary. We’re going to be struggling to get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in time in the fall with VS Update 1, but that’s just as doable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the other guy said…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what Jim meant to say is we’re not making any comment on Swift today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this back and forth actually happened between the two of them on a couple of topics. But this is why Apple doesn’t have Q&A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to be fair, this is probably why Apple doesn’t have Q&A But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the reasons well one of the reasons that and they’re secretive even when they don’t need to be that in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also to be fair Have you ever been in a conference session where the Q&A was worth sitting through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an audience member?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s always at least one or two good questions that I wish I could find this video This is I’m going I’m gonna call
⏹️ ▶️ John on the listeners of ATP to help me here or tell me that I’m imagining things because I’m old But I seem to
⏹️ ▶️ John recall in one Q&A session long ago when Steve Jobs just came back some angry person in the
⏹️ ▶️ John audience And they were always angry people in the audience in the late 90s because they were Apple developers in late 90s And how
⏹️ ▶️ John could you not be angry? Held up a Newton and said what am I supposed to do with this?
⏹️ ▶️ John To Steve Jobs after he had canceled the Newton program, and I think Steve Jobs something like I’ll tell you what you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John with it it. Wow. Am I imagining that? Did that really happen? If
⏹️ ▶️ John so, is it on video somewhere? I have VHS tapes of WRDC upstairs. I haven’t gone through
⏹️ ▶️ John them all. I don’t know where it is. I can’t find it. Maybe I imagined it. Either way, it’s a good story, whether or not it’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still have a VCR? I don’t know. Maybe in the attic. There’s a lot of things in the attic.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, what is not in the attic? Between you and Stephen Hackett, we could probably load any piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of software on any Mac that has ever existed, ever. All right, let’s talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about something that’s awesome. Our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first sponsor tonight is a new sponsor, although I believe we all know the people behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is Glide. Glide is a beautiful, simple tool for professional app creation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to createglide.com slash ATP to see for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glide makes it easy to create beautiful apps that look professional right from the start. You simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put text, images, and movies into folders and glide will build the app for you. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the content, the app updates automatically with the new stuff. This is a remarkable tool for building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many common app types, especially content focused apps, things like portfolios, showrooms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making your own news apps, magazines, interactive books, kids books, mixed media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for conferences, events, special interests, filmmakers, musicians, products, businesses, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schools, universities, for galleries, museums, they even have iBeacon integration for museum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, which is pretty cool. There’s so much you can do with Glide. And they’re adding more capabilities at a remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pace. So Glide’s UK-based company, Glide Creations, has been building and using Glide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professionally in their own consulting work for large corporate clients since 2012. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of their clients have even won Best of the App Store awards from Apple. Wonders of the Universe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really famous one you’ve probably heard of. There’s also Wonders of Life, The Follow-Up, and also Jim Dalrymple’s The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Loop magazine. All of these apps were built with Glide. They all won awards from Apple for how good they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, any of you who went to the OOL Conference this year, the OOL Conference app was also a Glide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. That’s where I saw the iBeacon integration, which was really cool. I was very impressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with how great that app was overall. So I blogged about Glide when it was announced. This was before they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approached us for the sponsorship. I liked them that much, and I honestly think it’s gonna be a really big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way I think about Glide is I called it the Squarespace equivalent for app creation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It covers a lot of very common needs and very common tasks for app building with way less time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money than writing everything from scratch and the results are fantastic. You don’t even need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a programmer to make a great app with Glide. The source files are literally just like a bunch of folders on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox with text or images or media files in them and then when you make changes the app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated live with those changes. And you can do advanced logic, there’s scripting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do custom behavior that way, but you don’t have to. So it’s a very big deal for people who want to focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the content of their app, like if you’re making a magazine like Jim, and you know, not have to worry about the code behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And of course, keeping up with Apple and glide is a huge deal for app development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consultants as well. To me, this is a no brainer. If you’re a consultant, the market for custom coding, you know, this is not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go away, this is going to kill your job. But there’s a massive number of projects that shouldn’t be made from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or can’t afford to be. So if you’re a consultant using Glide, you could offer clients fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small-budget app creation far more efficiently and productively than before. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what’s driving Glide’s creators to bring this to Kickstarter and release it to the public. It’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. Their campaign has already succeeded. See, Glide believes everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be able to afford to make their own app. And so that’s why they went to Kickstarter to make this happen. Basically, it’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a big capital raise in pre-order to get them to be able to release this app to the public. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a few more days left to support or pre-order Glide on Kickstarter and be one of the very first people to have access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. I mean, to me, if you’re a consultant, this is a pretty big competitive advantage to have a tool like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I recommend checking it out. Go to createglide.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see more info or pre-order it. Thank you very much to Glide for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we all are friends with the people that make Glide. And so… They’re also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re like the nicest people in the world, too. Oh, God, so nice. But even if we weren’t friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with those people, genuinely, this stuff is amazing. And Chris Harris, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I think, CEO, CTO, CEO of Glide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he did a demo with me a long time ago now, probably a year plus ago, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how Glide works. And this was via FaceTime when he was in London, I was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey States. And just watching things happen in Dropbox and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app changing moments thereafter, it was mind-blowing. So truly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is amazing stuff. And if this is at all interesting to you, I highly suggest checking it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. And they even, like, they think of so many little details. I mean, the things I’ve seen them do, even like you said, the Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they read the files off Dropbox, but they don’t host them there. They host them on their own EC2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on Amazon Web Services because they want to make sure that if Dropbox goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, your app doesn’t go down. So they actually copy it over to their stuff after they read it off Dropbox. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even thought of that. So these are great people. I’m pretty sure I also still owe Chris a beer from Ool. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, these are great people. And yeah, seriously, check out Glide and hurry up because you’re running out of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we have a very important but fairly serious topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some real time follow up and that is that Evan Hindra in the chat has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you on you on the you you riding hops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to stave off the raccoons
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of punted on the face there though he just kind of drew a circle and wrote Marco on it I do appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the ATP shirt though
⏹️ ▶️ John even notice that that’s a good call he’s got the hose the hose the pathetic hose with a little puddle of water yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got the duck it’s It’s got the raccoon running away. Yep, the Apple Watch. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially given the time constraints. Yeah, I’m impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ditto, very impressed. All right, so I was being slightly snarky about the seriousness of that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all kidding aside, we do really have a serious topic that we should discuss, and we wanted to make sure we discussed it in the main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the show this week. And this all started with a tweet from John. So John, do you wanna kick us off?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, this was last month-ish, end of last month. I don’t remember what motivated this, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just no time like the president just tweet and ask this question. My tweet
⏹️ ▶️ John read, women and girls who listen to ATP, colon, what do you think we could do to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more women and girls to listen to ATP? Kind of wordy to go women and girls, but I was trying to be inclusive in this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I was, anyway. That’s who I’m addressing the question to. That was the question. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, we’ll put the link to the tweet in the show and so you can look at all the replies. There were a lot of replies, a lot of good replies.
⏹️ ▶️ John I plan to write a blog post about this. tried to write a post about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a lot of difficulty because I thought it would be straightforward but it ended up being fairly long
⏹️ ▶️ John and kind of boring so I figured we can make an attempt to talk about it on the show. It’d be nice to have a blog
⏹️ ▶️ John post that people could reference. Maybe I’ll still try to make one. But anyway what I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do in the blog post was explain what I felt like I couldn’t explain on Twitter which is why if you look at that giant
⏹️ ▶️ John thread you don’t see a lot of replies from me to people. Mostly I was just asked a question and I was getting input,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I was reading all the responses but not really replying to all of them. Mostly because I didn’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed to reply to all of them. Like I asked a question and people give their opinions and I listen to them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does I think require some explanation. A lot of people had legitimate questions about it and that’s what I was
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to address in my blog post. So I think I’ll probably start with those. The first thing are like
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of the the premises or the assumptions of all of this. My
⏹️ ▶️ John the premise of this question is that I think not a lot of women listen to ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John and many people will say how do you know that do you take surveys of your listeners no we don’t you’re basing it on t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John sales yeah kind of but you know women can buy men’s shirts and sometimes we don’t even know what the breakdowns are
⏹️ ▶️ John we base it on the names of people in who send feedback the names of people who tweet the avatars on
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s Twitter accounts like we have some inputs into the system, like we’re not taking a
⏹️ ▶️ John completely wild guess, but the information we have is admittedly imperfect. What if 99.9% of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John listen are women and they never write because women never like to write into the show for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But and all we get is feedback from men and all we sell are male dudes. That would be its own issue worth exploring.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s conceivable that we could be totally wrong, but I’m going to say that given the best information available to
⏹️ ▶️ John us, I would put money on the fact that mostly men listen to ATP. Certainly the majority, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John the vast majority. I don’t know if you two agree with that. Do you think do you get that feeling? Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s just like what you said, like the the few inputs that we do have with, you know, feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. It certainly does suggest that it’s mostly men.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So that’s that’s what we’re starting from. If we’re wrong about that, then this whole thing is is pointless and we’re barking
⏹️ ▶️ John up the wrong tree. But I would put money on it. That is just vast majority of the people listening to the show are men. My second
⏹️ ▶️ John assumption is that of all the potential people in the world who might enjoy this show if you
⏹️ ▶️ John say here’s that just put all those people on the board those are all the people who potentially might enjoy this show
⏹️ ▶️ John what percentage of the men who might enjoy the show are currently listening to it and what percentage of the
⏹️ ▶️ John women who might enjoy the show are currently listening to it i think we have a larger proportion of the men who might enjoy the show listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to it than we do the women so if we’re going to grow our audience which i would like to do and here’s the blog post
⏹️ ▶️ John is like suffice it to say that we want people to listen to the show i don’t know if you need to say that but like why are
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing this why do you care? I least personally want people to listen to the show because it’s gratifying
⏹️ ▶️ John when lots of people I don’t know if I need to explain this to people but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one of the premises like
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners equals good right if you want to grow the audience you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an untapped market of women who you know say say we’re doing say we’re getting like one percent
⏹️ ▶️ John of the men who might enjoy the show are listening to it right I think like point zero zero zero one
⏹️ ▶️ John percent of the women who might enjoy the show we’re listening to it so that seems like where we should go
⏹️ ▶️ John like because if we can get 1% of the men and 1% of them, it’s a big boost. But maybe, you know, 1% of the men, 1% of any
⏹️ ▶️ John group is our cap, you know what I mean? So I feel like that’s where we would want to go to grow the audience first.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there are other reasons to like, you know, all the other reasons you hear people talk about what people don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about is like, why, you know, why does diversity matter? Why do you care how many men or women listen to the show? Like, there are other
⏹️ ▶️ John really good reasons that many people will talk to you about. But I’m appealing to people’s sense of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just logic, like, we want listeners. If women are not listening to the show
⏹️ ▶️ John in much greater proportions than men, even though the women who we think would like the show, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. That is an untapped market. We want those people to listen too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ignoring everything else, which are very important points about we should be encouraging women to technology because there’s a culture of keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John them away and so on. Even just setting that aside, and if you think that is not important or whatever, just
⏹️ ▶️ John purely by the numbers. it appealed to anybody and say, Look, you know, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an audience out there that we feel like is not listening to the show in much larger proportions than another
⏹️ ▶️ John audience. And I want to figure out why and change it. Right. So that’s that’s the premise of this question. That’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John ask. And why did I ask the women and girls who do listen to ATP? Well, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask somebody who doesn’t listen to ATP because they don’t know what the show is about. And the people who do were
⏹️ ▶️ John once women who didn’t. And basically, they have the experience to say, I was once a woman who didn’t listen to ADP
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I listened to it and now how did you go from a non-listener to a listener? And you’re listening to it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think we’re doing that might be keeping women away from it or making it seem like the show is not welcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John to them and is not something they might be interested in and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I did listen and now I don’t and here’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, because this was done on Twitter. Like, I mean, you would assume, you know, there’s… Basically, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John any way to communicate with the women who don’t follow me on Twitter and don’t listen to the show or whatever. So I did what I could,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I specifically was addressing them because I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that men thought we could do to get more women to listen to ADP, even though they may be entirely right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I have the male perspective. We three of us collectively have the male perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ John here. I was looking for some, you know, different input. So that that is a very long
⏹️ ▶️ John winded setup for for this question. You guys want to add anything to that? Because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John consult either of you on this question. This is on my Twitter account, not the ATP Twitter account. I just threw this question out there. I don’t know how you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys felt about her. If it’s thing that you’re thinking about or whether you agree, this was a good thing to ask or have anything to add
⏹️ ▶️ John to my premises here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have anything to add other than that. I believe Marco and I both pretty much immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retweeted it and I think one of us retweeted it from the show account just as quickly. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty sure I speak for Marco and saying that we are completely behind This line of thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and I’m very curious to hear what it is We can do about about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the women that list or don’t listen I should say And we did definitely had some interesting feedback, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suspect we’re about to go into
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so before we talk about all the different, you know, how we feel about them Let’s just go through
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of responses and let’s go through some of them categorically Frequent suggestions. This is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered by frequency, but I guess I probably wrote them down in the order. They started coming in Uh, have women guests
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show, have women hosts on the show, do a host swap with
⏹️ ▶️ John other women tech podcasts where we, you know, someone from a, a, a, a woman from another tech podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John goes over here and one of us goes over there. Talk about women in tech topics, which are kind of doing now and we have kind of done
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past. Um, read feedback from identifiably female
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners on the episodes. uh stay away from
⏹️ ▶️ John male focused ads that are alienating uh ask women to try the show this was an
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting suggestion that i would not have would not have guessed came someone said you’re not going to get women
⏹️ ▶️ John to listen to the show unless you ask women to listen to the show which sounds stupid but is totally true and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know like you have to ask for it you have to say hey are you a woman interested in technology
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a podcast you might like like actually address them specifically uh lots of mentions of like word of
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth as in like how they came to know the show like I heard from a friend who heard from a friend, uh, talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about women who are in technology, talk about things they’re doing, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, companies, applications, whatever, then, you know, conference talks, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that women are actually doing in tech, talk about them the same way we talk about everything else, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, their blogs, link to them on Twitter, blog them, retweet them, follow them on Twitter, all that stuff, sponsor, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are focused on women like app camp for girls, which I think the ATP account and us have, uh, retweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John and posted about many times, but other similar types of things that are trying to get more women into technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see what else we have here. One specific piece of feedback was about how
⏹️ ▶️ John she thought that our show from the outside looks like it’s just a bunch of dudes talking about tech, which I’m going to say that pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much is. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John her words, not mine. You just look like another group of dudes talking about text, but it’s really much more. I think they mean the parts where
⏹️ ▶️ John we talk about Marco swatting raccoons in his backyard. But but yeah, the idea is that you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John optics from the outside is that the show looks like it’s a boring show about tech, but we do kind of cover slightly broader
⏹️ ▶️ John topics, maybe I don’t know. And that you know, that getting that image out there getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John message out there could make the show more appealing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s it for the categories of feedback. Let’s remember any other
⏹️ ▶️ John particular large categories that you saw going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by? I think you got I mean, I think the biggest one by far is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco female host slash guest and then I think second biggest was probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John and all these suggestions. Another reason I didn’t respond to them on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John was because, like, this is a trap that, you know, it has many names. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John male answer syndrome, but there are many different names. Like it’s not an invitation to debate
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things. if you ask a question like this on Twitter, your instinct and my instinct and the instincts
⏹️ ▶️ John of many people on Twitter, not just men, but everybody who’s kind of is to
⏹️ ▶️ John is to answer them to say, I think you should do X and then to answer by saying, well, we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do X because of this, or we don’t want to do X or we shouldn’t do X or I disagree that
⏹️ ▶️ John X would help. Like, and that believe me, that instinct is strong. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is very strong. Because even though I invited the question, every one of these responses is like, well, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason why, you know, you know, you get defensive, right? And so I fought that instinct, I think pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully, and did not answer that every single, you know, because basically, what it comes down
⏹️ ▶️ John to is, I think every single one of these responses is right for the person who answered, right? No
⏹️ ▶️ John one person who answered represents all women, but they represent themselves, and they give a perspective that we don’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I tried to just take them as what they were. Now, realistically speaking we are not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do all of these things and in particular I don’t want to focus on the idea of having women hosts
⏹️ ▶️ John or having women guests. Host is the easiest one. I think that all the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John said we should have women hosts because it would make it would get more women to listen are a hundred percent right but at a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain point you’re not getting more people to listen to your show you’re making a new show that is more
⏹️ ▶️ John appealing to women and I totally believe that that show would be more appealing to women but that doesn’t mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to change the show that I’m currently on. I think the women audience is underserved. I think shows like Rocket,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there should be 50 more of those because this is an underserved audience, right? There are as many people
⏹️ ▶️ John as the million shows with a bunch of guys talking about tech. But we are one of those shows. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the three of us on the show. I think this is the show. I recognize that we are sacrificing
⏹️ ▶️ John some audience by doing that. So the people who made that suggestion are not wrong, but speaking for myself, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to change the host lineup of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean that I I’m totally with you on I mean it is a great suggestion that is a big problem that we have three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys here, but We have never had guest hosts We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have like a regular format is the three of us talking it is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not a guest show We’ve you know we’ve occasionally had times like where my wife tiff has popped in during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the after show to talk about games with you guys People married to us do not count as either But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like but that’s you know and that’s even that’s only like in the after show, and it’s like it’s like a fun occasional thing it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like a regular feature of the show. The show is not regularly having different people in here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it were. And I know John Gruber for the talk show got criticized initially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, maybe a year ago when people started becoming a lot more aware of this issue, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the talk show is that format show. It does have guests every week. And since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, I think he took that to heart. And if you look at the list of hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since about a year ago, there’s a lot more women on that list. And it’s not even yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can see the progression is going in the right direction. So I think it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sense for shows that have rotating hosts or rotating guests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really obey that and to really pay attention to their gender breakdown and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakdown in all sorts of diversity categories, But for our show, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can safely say, you know, we can safely say, you know, we appreciate that feedback, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show is always just the three of us. It isn’t like we’re having different men every week. We don’t have anybody else in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and two things about that. That feedback is kind of disheartening because it shows how underserved this market
⏹️ ▶️ John is. They’re asking, the way they feel like they can get a show that appeals to them
⏹️ ▶️ John better is asking for changes in existing shows. It’s just like it’s like all the
⏹️ ▶️ John female gamers out there begging for, you know, female avatars and protagonists in games. They just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see themselves represented. And they it’s not enough out there. It’s an underserved market like
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they have to take the things they do like that are currently not catering to their needs and say, Could you change the thing you’re doing to cater
⏹️ ▶️ John to my needs? Because I’m so massively underserved that I can’t go elsewhere for something better than this. I feel like there should be
⏹️ ▶️ John more podcasts with three ladies talking about tech. But unfortunately there aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s and as I said this feedback is correct They are right that this would make our show more appealing, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just feel like it would be a different show And we’re not doing that show But more people should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and that’s also you know like like you know we don’t want to be condescending here and say well Women would listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only if there’s another woman on the show because that’s not true
⏹️ ▶️ John No We did but we did get that feedback a lot like some some people also said I like the show way it is you don’t Need to add any
⏹️ ▶️ John women like these none of these single women represent all women And they’re just voicing their own opinions. But that’s why I asked because
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to hear other people’s opinions. And we did get a lot of people who said the show be more appealing if there’s one and guess we
⏹️ ▶️ John got fewer people who said I like the lineup exactly way it is. There are other things that you can do to make it more appealing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I agree that the people who asked for that are correct. I just feel like it’s not a thing we’re going to do, which is disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John for us and disappointing for them. But that’s that’s how that one comes down. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second thing on this is you talked about like you mentioned different diversity in different aspects. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another question that I tried to get in my blog post and it was very difficult to explain. Why are you concentrating on women?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why not people of color or different sexual orientations
⏹️ ▶️ John or geographies or language or any other thing like that? I think we’re terrible in
⏹️ ▶️ John all those categories in terms of how our breakdown are and turns on a certain market. But here’s the thing, women
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t a minority. They’re half the planet. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with the biggest problem first. Our massive gender disparity, our massive underrepresentation
⏹️ ▶️ John that we feel exists based on the data that we have is not for a minority group, it’s for half
⏹️ ▶️ John the planet, right? So, address the biggest problem first, and I feel like this is our biggest problem. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like all those other problems are also there, but this is the biggest bang for your buck.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the worst thing we have going on here. I think all those other things we should be
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely aware of. What are we doing to alienate all those other groups that are minorities, that are marginalized,
⏹️ ▶️ John that we should be trying not to do anything that excludes them android users yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John well yeah anyway that’s that’s not a that’s not sort of a category that’s a choice
⏹️ ▶️ John um so i think i mean that is worth addressing that is a real thing but just like it the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John the very fact that all those things come up in the same conversation is women it’s like women are not a minority i was trying to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the stat i think they’re more than half the planet by like a tiny little bit but anyway uh there are
⏹️ ▶️ John minority in tech and that’s the problem we’re sort of trying to address here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what do What do we do about sponsors? Because one of the pieces of feedback that I saw most often,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than you should have a woman host or you should have women guests, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next bit of feedback that I think was the next most popular was, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should really try to stay away from advertisers that are clearly just for men. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean the hair coloring. I mean designed for men. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have used that. Not proud of it. Don’t use it anymore. but I did use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. That’s big of you, Marco. I’m very proud of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not recommended. Man, we’re getting deep into accidental analog right now. Mike Hurley’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be so upset at us. But yeah, we did get a lot of feedback of, well, you should really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have sponsors that are more, is unisex, unisex is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either gender, is that right? I always get it backwards. I would say gender neutral. Thank you, that’s a much better way of phrasing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gender neutral advertisers. And the three of us were talking about this very briefly via iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the show. And in our recollection at the time, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s others that we’re not thinking of, the only sponsor that I think we’ve run, or at least recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is clearly not gender neutral is Harry’s, which is shaving stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in actuality, that could very well be used for women for the parts of their bodies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they shave. But certainly the ad read, if nothing else, is more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aimed at men. And maybe it’s as simple as just trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be more inclusive on the ad reads, which is another thing that the three of us have talked about recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not sure what the right answer is on that. And I think, Marco, you especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some thoughts on this, if you want to kind of take the mic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, so I think this is a valid point. You know, the idea that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, again, like, it’s not like women will run away if we do a read for products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are aimed at men, but it certainly contributes to an overall feeling of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe this isn’t… maybe unwelcomeness or like not fitting in or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this isn’t meant for you. I’ve heard all those things from people who have sent this kind of feedback and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get that. I understand that. The reality is we have very few sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are gender specific and so it wouldn’t be a huge deal to stop having them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only list of recurring sponsors that I can think of off the top of my head are Harry’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Neid. Neid even now has Foremost. They have other businesses that are not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for men. So really, it’s Harry’s. We’re really just talking about Harry’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you said, Harry’s… I did some research to see how big of a problem is this with Harry’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question it’s aimed at men, but you know, they sell razors that are like male-styled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, definitely aimed at men. But women have used them and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blogged about using them and you know, they work on women. There’s nothing about a razor that makes it just for a man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Women can use them too. So you know, there’s marketing choices, there’s stylistic choices, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, language choices. Anyway, but if it came down to you us telling Harry’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, look, we’d love to keep advertising you, but we want to keep everything gender neutral now. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, call us back when you have, you know, a women’s option or something or when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer so male-specific. I’m fine with that. I think that would be a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is an easy one to solve. This does not require changing the show. This requires changing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, two sponsors to basically say, you know, sorry, we’re going to have this new policy now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we hope to work with you in the future if you know if we can work this out. So I think that’s an easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy little hanging fruit to change that. I don’t care at all. I don’t think the language of the sponsor reads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is itself a major part of the problem. I’ve actually edited the reads. A couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks ago we did a spot for Jack Threads, which was very male focused and I have very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily edited the read and to remove you know things that were like obviously you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco men in a style that I thought was not appropriate for a gender-neutral show. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edited the script. No big deal. Every script I get is to be more in our style, or to be easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read, or to say things that I think should be said, and delete things I think shouldn’t be said. So editing scripts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no big deal, but I think the script is not the problem. The product is the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s being advertised is the problem here, if you’re going to make this argument. So it doesn’t matter how I say it. It matters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we advertising products that are clearly aimed just at men?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what does that suggest to the women in our audience who are listening? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, my argument is, my idea was, why don’t we just drop these handful of sponsors that do this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s never fun to drop a sponsor. I feel bad. It could hurt relationships.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s inconvenient for them if they were counting on you, but I’d be perfectly fine to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, when this came up on I Am, I disagreed because I don’t think the problem is necessarily that there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John line of products that are aimed just at men because they’re these are men’s shaving supplies. First of all, the reality
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most of our audience is men. So this is you know, the advertisers want to have ads targeted at the people they think
⏹️ ▶️ John is listening. But I thought the problem was basically having to do with the reads
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s okay to have a product focused on just iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John users, just just men, just women, just people in a particular state, just people who
⏹️ ▶️ John live a lot of our stuff is just people in the US, example because a lot of people, a lot of these companies as we hear
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t ship overseas right so and we hear about that too right just for people in the US or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the problem actually is with how the reads can be done because
⏹️ ▶️ John just because you have a product for men doesn’t mean the ad read has to be targeted at men and
⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds crazy like what do you mean of course it has to be targeted at men it’s a product for men an example someone gave me on twitter is what
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were selling some sort of you know whether it be shaving or anything else product, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just for women. A leg shaving razor with a handle just for shaving women’s legs or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is or like some kind of product that only or mostly women use.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we did that ad read, the inclination would be the fairly shameful
⏹️ ▶️ John inclination, but I imagine it would be to pitch it as in like, oh, like buy this for your
⏹️ ▶️ John wife or girlfriend or whatever, as in, you know, assuming that our audience is mostly men, which again, we
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is and just saying, well, you know, of course, only men listen to this dude tech podcast. So let me if I ever died, if it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John woman’s product, we have to do the ad read differently. But if it’s men product, we say, hey, you will like this you as in the male
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And I think when you do and as you know, you said you’ve adjusted the language. When you do an ad read for a woman’s
⏹️ ▶️ John product, you should pitch it as if the person listening might be a man or a woman.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not saying the woman is going to use it for themselves. Buy this for the man in your life. Maybe try yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John but like if it’s totally focused to be a man’s product like again assume all
⏹️ ▶️ John our listeners are 100% women how would the ad read look be different if it would be different than probably the ad
⏹️ ▶️ John read is as making people feel excluded because we’re all used to living in a world where there are certain products aimed just at
⏹️ ▶️ John men or just at women right we always see ads on television or in the newspapers or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John on billboards that are specifically aimed at men or at women for whatever reasons you want to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John these products are culturally mostly for men or mostly for women none None of us feel like we get offended by that
⏹️ ▶️ John unless we listened to or watched a show and every single ad was like, you should buy this for yourself and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John woman-focused product. I’m like, but I’m not a woman. Why do you keep saying you? It’s not me. Like you never, you never pitched this
⏹️ ▶️ John product to me as if you could buy this as a gift for a woman that you know. It’s always you buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself and it makes me feel like, geez, maybe I shouldn’t be watching this program because all these ads for women’s stuff are telling,
⏹️ ▶️ John are telling me that I should buy it for myself, but don’t they know I’m not a woman? It seems like maybe this is not the place for me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the existence of gender-specific products is perfectly fine, especially if they’re not an overwhelming majority. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if all of our ads were men-only products, that’s a big problem. But if one ad of all of our sponsors, all of our recurring sponsors, is men-only,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see it as a big deal. But I think the ads, the reads themselves, have to be done in a way that’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, you should buy this for yourself. Because that’s excluding people. The existence of the ad is
⏹️ ▶️ John not excluding people. I think the way the ad is pitched is excluding people. And I think the fact that our
⏹️ ▶️ John audience is mostly men is the symptom, or is the root problem here and the symptom is the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John advertisers who advertise things for only men want to advertise on our program. If we got our audience to 50-50
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Harry’s will be less interesting in advertising with us and that’s fine but like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re interested now because they think I think most of our listeners are men and they’re probably right and that’s the root problem we’re trying to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure getting rid of that ad would change the gender disparity I think it just needs to be presented and
⏹️ ▶️ John my idea for the past Harry’s read was we should read just what I said do the Harry’s read as
⏹️ ▶️ John if a 100% of our listeners are women and see if anyone notices like see if people
⏹️ ▶️ John get confused and go I didn’t understand that ad wasn’t it for men’s products why were you advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John it to women and we said oh we’ll just assume 100% of the women people listen to show our women because you know tech podcast listeners
⏹️ ▶️ John are mostly women so we didn’t we did we didn’t get to that before we did that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Harry’s ad read before I communicated that idea to Marco but I thought that would be a fun thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John but that just shows like the fact that that doesn’t fact that’s not how it’s done shows that like everyone is sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of tacitly agreeing that like yeah well we just assume most of the listeners are women right and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem that’s the problem we’re trying to solve so I’m I’m not entirely opposed to teaching Harry’s but I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like it can be done in a way that is more inclusive than it is done now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with most of what you said the problem is most of the examples of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the negative things that you used are things that we don’t actually have in our ads things that we don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that aren’t in our ads aren’t in our scripts and like aren’t in our remarks usually even
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s tough yeah most of them are pretty neutral but we never make the explicit pitch to you should buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this for for some man that you know for your father for your your friend who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a guy for your husband for your boyfriend we never make that pitch it’s never you know
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would that would be explicitly saying I am addressing now you woman listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to this program we never do that it’s always You should buy this for yourself, it’s great, it’s much better than what you’ve currently been buying.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all about you, you, you, you are a man. Never the other side. And so I think that balances off. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John though you is generic and not gender specific, when it’s a male-focused product, it makes… We
⏹️ ▶️ John never go the other way in any degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could see that. But to me, I think the solution there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to have to address that issue either direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why do we need to advertise products on our show that are only useful to men
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or only aimed at men? But those
⏹️ ▶️ John products exist. Like, would you reject a product that was focused only on women? Like I mean, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. There’s just some products like that. And again, who says it’s only like, oh, we didn’t get pantyhose. Who says men can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wear pantyhose? They totally can. But culturally speaking, percentage wise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John etc., etc. Lots of caveats, so on and so forth. That’s a whole separate culture issue. But the fact is, there are products
⏹️ ▶️ John that are more often bought by women and more often from Bob and I. They’re not men only and not women only. They’re not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John excluding from the definitions, but we all know what we mean about these. You know, if Harry’s on their website, it’s men’s
⏹️ ▶️ John shaving products. That’s what they’re going for. I don’t think it’s crazy to make a product focused
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically on the needs of either men or women and whatever particular things they want to do. I think you should have
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those things. Is it shame? We will never be able to get women products for women’s things, even because if we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get more women listening to the show. So that’s what we’re trying to do. But I think if we ever got to 50-50
⏹️ ▶️ John distribution, I would gladly take a quote-unquote women-only advertiser any day
⏹️ ▶️ John of the week, just as much as I think I would take a men-only one. If it takes ditching the men-only sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ John to get more women to listen, I’d also be willing to do that, but I feel like, and some people also replied to this, that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no need to ditch the Harry spots, just be more inclusive in the reads, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you just said the problem is when you go to the site, it’s all about men. Right, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the reads, the product is for men, but women buy products that are for men as gifts all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but see, I just pulled up the Harry’s read when we started discussing this, and I pulled up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my script that I read when we do these ads, and there’s nothing in it that presupposes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are a man directly. The only thing is the absence of something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, get this for a man in your life. I don’t say anything like that, but I also don’t say get this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a woman in your life. The ad does not specify gender. It does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has the built-in assumption that this ad I’m reading saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you should go get this. You can do
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’ve been annoyed by buying razors the normal way. You should get this because it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Women have also been annoyed by buying razors the normal way. It’s like, looking at this, I don’t, this is what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, I don’t think the script that I actually use and practice for these kind of ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the script is really the problem. I think what is being advertised. If this is going to be a problem at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, if you can say we want to avoid advertisers that might suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a male focus or a male bias or male-only stuff, I think the issue is the advertisers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves. Because we can edit the scripts to be neutral, if they aren’t already.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if a bunch of women go to the Harry’s site and it says these
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s why if you said, buy this for the man in your life, you’d be explicit about the fact that this is a men’s product or
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how they frame it. and women can use it too, but this company is making a product that they’re aiming specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John at men and it might be a good gift idea because if you know someone who has problems and always complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John their shaving situation, you could get this for them. Trying to be inclusive with the read is more than
⏹️ ▶️ John just leaving it neutral because neutral plus men’s product equals not neutral. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you try to go in the other direction and make sure that people are included in it. And the same thing with,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to balance things out, if we could get a women-only sponsor, would be great but I don’t know if we could
⏹️ ▶️ John do that with the audience breakdown that we all feel like we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see I would say that the script editing is necessary but not sufficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John well I mean you know like that’s that’s possible as well I just I just feel like I would rather add sponsors than
⏹️ ▶️ John remove you know what I mean because Harry’s is like with the reason we keep doing Harry’s reads is because it’s a good product and you know people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know this but we are fairly picky about the sponsors that we take for the show if we don’t think it’s actually a decent product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But on the other hand, of all the sponsors that we have, we have, I don’t know, maybe ten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like regular recurring sponsors most of the time, I think only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two are gender-specific. Like, we’re a tech show. We’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a health and beauty show. We’re not a fashion show. We’re a tech show. And tech, as much as it often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t, tech should be gender-neutral. And so most of our sponsors, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace and Hover and Fracture like these are all totally ignoring gender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they it’s like we don’t it doesn’t matter what gender you are to use glide like it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there are enough people out there it’s a tech show like most of our sponsors are tech sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it you can say it’s kind of a fluke that we have sponsors like Harry’s and Warby Parker because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not a show about shaving our glasses you know like we we have a certain kind of audience but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it It is a lot more focused to run a tech ad on our show than to run an ad for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of tech because you at least know that we have this many people who care a lot about tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? So like, I agree with you that in practice, or I mean in theory, the gender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ad shouldn’t matter and it can be attempted to be neutralized or at least not always on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one side of it. But we’re a tech show, we only have a couple of advertisers who are gender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific. We don’t necessarily need to maintain that status quo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I’m curious to hear, and I can’t pass judgment on this because I’m not a woman, and so I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, but what I’m curious to hear is, is it better to just quietly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have male-focused sponsors, or is it better, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John was saying, to specifically call out, this is for the women that are listening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get this for the man in your life, or even get this for yourself? I don’t I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like maybe it would almost be more inclusive to go to bend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over backwards and Say that this ad which ostensibly is for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey men. We’re making it for women because we want to be inclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know. I’m not a woman. I don’t know how that feels
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like a lot of a lot of the things that you do for groups that are marginalized
⏹️ ▶️ John is You know is to You’re trying to make them feel welcome,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And neutral things like Squarespace don’t push them away,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also don’t make them feel particularly welcome. The best case would be ads focused on women, because that
⏹️ ▶️ John would really make them feel, this is a product for you. We were advertising this at you. This is a thing for you. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to you now, right? That would be best. Second best I feel like is
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is an ad that may feel alienating to try to be inclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John in that read to say, even though it sounds like this is not for you, this show is still for you. And in fact, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to you as if as if you as if 100% of the audience is women and I’m going to pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John this product for men to you, specifically you, the listener as a woman. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same thing as using, you know, she pronouns and all of the your pace is like, why is you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is it she all the time? Well, you’re trying to balance the scales of the massive inequity in the tech world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Throw a little pronouns in one direction, there’s no reason to complain, and it’s more inclusive because people would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, oh, I’m used to every single example being a he. Why don’t I, and I’m as guilty as anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John of constantly using he, you know, why, what, people take note that someone, something
⏹️ ▶️ John used she in this example. Isn’t that interesting? It may, you know, like I would, I wish that was done all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time that you’re trying, it is such a tiny drop in the bucket against all the other things that have stacked against them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The least, the very, literally the very least that you can do is try to make things like that more equitable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropping the ad entirely would also kind of make it more equitable, but then how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call out to them? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. That’s what I’m saying. That’s a really good summary of what I was trying to say. Speaking of advertisers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been a while, so we should probably move along with the advertising part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by talking about ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And we have more to say on this topic, but I think we can end the ad part of it. with a gender neutral
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that about Aaron’s poor MacBook Air that went in the drink?
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And believe me, there are a lot of domain extensions out there now. If you haven’t searched for domain recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god, there is a lot, a lot of new, mostly terrible, but sometimes good
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, glass half empty dot plumbing that’s probably out there somewhere. Anyway, if you’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used any other domain registrars, you probably have had at best a mediocre experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many of them are this This is not a great business, usually. It’s unpleasant, often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also very complicated, usually, at most other places, to just buy what you actually need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, let me just register a domain. I don’t need a bunch of add-on services. I don’t need a bunch of stuff to protect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me from spammers. Shouldn’t that just come with it? Just get me a name with reasonable settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please. This is what Hover specializes in. They don’t try to upsell you with all sorts of crazy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for example, the protect me from spammers thing, the Who is privacy, that just comes with hover names like they
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco once again. All right, so finishing the gender discussion, well, it’s never finished,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but continuing the general discussion for this show. I think it’s worth talking about the content of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. So I asked Tiff, my wife, earlier this evening, I said we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be talking about this, and I asked her, like, you know, what does she think, what can we do to address this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, from her point of view? And what I’ve heard from a lot of people, and which, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Tiff told me this, and we heard from a lot of people, even people in the chat have said this in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour that we’ve been talking about this. What What I keep hearing is we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of listeners who have wives or girlfriends or who are themselves women
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who listen for the more human general parts of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but don’t like or don’t listen for the in-depth programming stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is certainly an issue worth talking about because it’s not that there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no women programmers But as we know, the ratio of the gender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakdown in engineering jobs is really nowhere near even. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a bigger problem. I will note that we often get that exact same feedback from men
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are not programmers who listen to the show, but I would imagine it’s proportionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco — we keep hearing this as one of the reasons why women don’t like our show or don’t listen to all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show or to listen to our show consistently. Do you guys, I mean, to some degree we can say, like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just like we said earlier, the format of the show is the three of us. Like, we don’t have guest hosts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We could look at this topic and we could say, well, do we just say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, we are a programming show sometimes? Or is it something that we should change or something that will just always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be this way? What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is explicitly outside the bounds of my goals because my setup was
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the people in the world who I think would enjoy our show, how many of them are not listening to it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And our show means our show as it exists. We could appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ John a much broader base if we talked about politics or sports, but that’s not the show. Like anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s broad topics and there’s narrow topics. If we only talked about the details of a specific kind of model
⏹️ ▶️ John train, our audience would be way smaller. All right. We are doing what we
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about what we are passionate about. It has a necessarily a narrow audience, we can always broaden
⏹️ ▶️ John things up and get a larger audience and broaden things up. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just picked politics or sport because those are pretty broad topics, way more people care about politics and sports
⏹️ ▶️ John than care about any of the stuff we talked about. But this is the show we want to do. I will never give
⏹️ ▶️ John up talking about the minutia of programming languages and operating systems and, and API I
⏹️ ▶️ John want stuff because that’s what I want to talk about on the show. My focus is entirely on there are women
⏹️ ▶️ John out there who are interested in the minutiae of programming language and file systems and crap like that who
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t listening to the show because of stuff we’re doing to signal to them that the show is not for them. And that is entirely where my
⏹️ ▶️ John focus is. I think we do talk about broader topics occasionally. A lot of that might
⏹️ ▶️ John be as some of the feedback was pointing out that it’s not clear from the outside that
⏹️ ▶️ John we occasionally talk about touchy feely things that occasionally gets at Browdertop, maybe it’s not clear from the outside that
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally we talk about programming language for a half an hour. You know, maybe that would bring in more people as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, I want this show to be about tech stuff. And we were
⏹️ ▶️ John all interested, we all have our own little tech pet peeves and hang ups and things we want to go super into depth
⏹️ ▶️ John with. And that’s never going to change because that’s the show. The only thing I would take
⏹️ ▶️ John away from this is that like, that we should do somehow do a better job of
⏹️ ▶️ John representing to the outside world, the range of topics that we do talk about because there is a fairly weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to say a big range, but it’s definitely, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as narrow as it seems on the outside, I think. In some respects, it’s more narrow in particular areas, but we do
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of go to these other islands on the different ends of the spectrum.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. I think we, the three of us really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love doing this show. And it’s not that we’re opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to making tweaks, but I think we’re opposed to making tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes. And I think that having the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be an accident, having the show, yes, we have show notes that we kind of work off of every week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we just kind of throw things against the wall and sometimes they stick and sometimes they don’t. And keeping that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey format is critical in much the same way as keeping the three of us is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey critical. And I’m totally good with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweaking here and there, but to dramatically change the content of the show would be changing the show entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the best part of best piece of feedback we had about that is related to our recent revelation that people didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John the after show existed, because we would always put this stuff in the after show to try to maintain the balance, some semblance
⏹️ ▶️ John of like uniformity of like, well, there’s mostly the tech stuff in the beginning. And if we have something that’s less tech
⏹️ ▶️ John related because the show is called accidental tech podcast We should save the most non
⏹️ ▶️ John techie stuff or the time We just want to talk about like cars or whatever for the after show But having
⏹️ ▶️ John learned that a lot of people didn’t know the after show even existed a lot of the feedback We’ve gotten and what we’re doing now
⏹️ ▶️ John is say don’t leave that stuff for the after show because half the people don’t even know it’s There and because it makes it seem like it’s not as important
⏹️ ▶️ John move it to the main show which we are doing today And I think in the future will be less. Maybe we’ll still
⏹️ ▶️ John keep the car stuff there, but you know No, nobody likes that except us. Because cars have I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the cars have even narrower appeal, but then you got to be a tech nerd and be super into cars, your percentages
⏹️ ▶️ John start going down, right? But for things that have broader appeal than tech, like women in tech, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John a broader topic than HFS plus that should be in the main show. And I think that is definitely a change we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do because we were we were talking about that anyway. But I at least was under the impression like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was a separation in the show is like just dividing things up on your plate, right? Not like that’s the ghetto
⏹️ ▶️ John over there where things go and we don’t really want to talk about them and you know, like it wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ John lesser part. The after show was not lesser in any way, but it’s lesser if people don’t even know it exists. So we definitely need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s main course versus dessert. Really? It’s yeah. And and and you know, we last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week we we had this on the topic list. We had other things in front of it because like of news that had happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we could have done it in the after show and we chose not to because we wanted to give it the attention of being a main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. That’s why it was up first this week as the first main topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, absolutely. One more thing in the chat room. Tim in Austin says he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to someone who is with him there and saying three men discussing what women
⏹️ ▶️ John would like and don’t like. Matter of factly is very patronizing. Women are individuals, which I tried to make that point in the beginning, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John he missed that part of the show. Yes, all this feedback we’re getting is from a bunch of different people.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of them represents all women. They just are themselves, which is why you need a lot of feedback from a lot of different people
⏹️ ▶️ John there. None of these women speak for all women. We are trying to address women as a group, and so I have to discuss them
⏹️ ▶️ John as a group. But it’s where you just have to… We’re talking about them
⏹️ ▶️ John collectively, but every person is different. Every woman is different. That’s why I said the individual feedback. Some women say this, some women say
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They’re individuals, they’re not a group, but we are trying to address them as a group. So
⏹️ ▶️ John people may not want to hear three men talking about what we want, but what we’re trying to do is address them as a group and say, how can
⏹️ ▶️ John we make it so our show is doing fewer things that
⏹️ ▶️ John make you feel like the show is not for you and it’s you the collective now. It’s not any particular individual
⏹️ ▶️ John because if we wanted to address an individual, we could just simply ask that individual, what do you specifically want and address them
⏹️ ▶️ John and get that one thing we are trying to address women as a group. We’re not going to do something that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John likes and everybody hates. We’re just trying to do the best we can. You know what I mean? That’s why we’ve asked a lot of people and not just one person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And this issue is so big and so important and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on everyone’s mind right now, especially Like this has come up so much this year and and you know with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole Gamergate Horribleness and this is affecting the entire industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We it would be irresponsible of us not it would be weird if we didn’t address this It would be weird if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have conversations like what can we do to improve this with our show? Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a full topic This is a relevant topic that we have to cover and
⏹️ ▶️ John it actually is tech related because the tech industry is the industry with this Massive problem. It’s not just like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not But doctors and lawyers have much better representation of women than the tech industry. It’s a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in tech and in gaming and these things. So it is totally a tech topic. Not that it needs to be a tech topic, because we can
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about cars whenever the hell we want. But this is actually a tech topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’re going to keep discussing it. This is not going to be the last time you hear about this topic on our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and work on it. Because during the show, when I’m talking,
⏹️ ▶️ John after the show, when I listen to myself to hear all the things I did wrong, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it 17 times in this show, referring to people as he by default, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Using male-centered pronouns and discussions from a male perspective happens all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. It is very diff- not that I’m saying this as an excuse, but it’s difficult to change and we are working on it. We’re trying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just need to get way better at it. And constantly hearing feedback from women that tell us when we’re doing it wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will tell us things we don’t notice ourselves. All the things that I notice are things that people have told me. That’s why I notice them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that feedback is essential and that engagement of like asking women to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us, you know, again, they’re going to have conflicting opinions. They don’t speak with one voice, but if you don’t ask, you’re never going to
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Like, like what was the one that I highlighted from the, uh, the, the ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John about asking women to listen to the show. Why did that not occur to me? I don’t know. But like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t explicitly say, Hey, women who love tech stuff, we have a tech podcast. You might want to listen to it. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to come. And you know what I mean? Like that’s called being inviting. Literally, you are literally inviting them specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John them, not just like people like, Hey, out there, people, if you’re interested in tech, you know, people used to say
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that they, you know, they like the show or whatever. And I would say, that’s great. Tell your nerdy friends
⏹️ ▶️ John about the show. Like, and I would always say, tell your nerdy friends, because don’t just tell your friends, because your friends probably
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t into, you know, the minutiae that we talk about on a tech podcast, tell your nerdy friends, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point, I would modify that to do a specific call out to tell your nerdy friends, including
⏹️ ▶️ John your nerdy girl friends, right? And like, why do you have to call them out specifically? Because I think most people
⏹️ ▶️ John just hear nerd and picture a guy, which is wrong, but like, that’s, that’s the stereotype, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, you have to actually make an actual assertive effort to combat
⏹️ ▶️ John the overwhelming bias of the entire tech world towards mail. Because if you do nothing, it will just default
⏹️ ▶️ John to mail everywhere. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid here. And yeah, it’s, it’s It’s difficult to do. We
⏹️ ▶️ John all do it. I know I’m trying not to do it. You know, every week,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully, we’re getting better a little bit, maybe. But yeah, discussions like this will hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John produce some more feedback, and we’ll get more ideas and do
⏹️ ▶️ John better things going forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m, I couldn’t agree more. And I mean, all of us are trying, all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us are trying. And I’m sure all three of us have said some really dumb crap just now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s from a good place for what it’s worth, and we’re trying to get better. So if you are a woman
⏹️ ▶️ John or a girl, because I don’t want to be the ageist, it’s cumbersome, but like I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to with the feedback I’ve gotten many, many times is that female is not a great way to refer, which I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John three times in the show already. I understand that. But like it’s so clinical and just but women and girls is who we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about, because I don’t want to exclude kids from kids. I would love the show when I was a kid. Kids should listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John show. kids, boy kids, everybody and women and men show for everybody really.
⏹️ ▶️ John As long as you’re a nerd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you self identify, if you self identify as a as someone who is female,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then please, if you have feedback, then let us know. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dude, then I’m sure you’re going to give us your feedback anyway, because that’s exactly what happened when john
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked specifically for women and girls to give feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to I don’t want to call that out. I knew it it was going to happen. Like I admit being being the cynical person that I am.
⏹️ ▶️ John I part of the reason I got excitement about explicitly tweeting
⏹️ ▶️ John to women and girls like the tweet was to them is that I knew a million guys would answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just said it’s male answer syndrome. I have it 100%. I am a sufferer of this. I’m not just a client.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m the president. Okay, I think we all are. And sure enough, like go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go through this red and try to count up did more men than women. I mean, grant, I probably have more male followers than
⏹️ ▶️ John women. I looked at my follower ratio with one of those tools that tries to figure out if you’re a man or woman. It’s just massively
⏹️ ▶️ John unbalanced. I’m doing terrible at this. I’ve been trying to adjust my follow count, by the way, for the people who I follow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been unfollowing men and following women to try to get it even close. Like, I’m not even close to parity. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of men answered this question. And I’m not going to, like, shame them for answering, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand why they did it. And, you know, their input is just as,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, useful as anyone else’s. I just have to understand their input is coming from a male perspective. If you want a female perspective, which is what I
⏹️ ▶️ John was asking for. Look at that. You know, they’re, they could be saying the exact same things that the women are saying. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also a good idea, right? But, you know, I’m, uh, people jump on that bearing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I didn’t ask you men to like, bottom line on Twitter. If I addressed the question
⏹️ ▶️ John to only people who have a PlayStation for a thousand Xbox owners would answer me. That has nothing to do with gender. People just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco want to say what they want to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, it really doesn’t, you know, but you know, male answer syndrome is a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to shame any of the men who answered. That’s why I didn’t reply to any of them and telling them I didn’t ask you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was asking like all feedback. Welcome. You can’t control who answers your questions. You know, just
⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite person who gets fresher, but this is JWZ. Jamie, what’s his name? Zawinski or whatever the old. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John yep. Yeah. He always has like tech questions on his blog and he’s fairly famous.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when he asked a tech question like many of us, he gets lots of different answers but he’s so angry at people not
⏹️ ▶️ John answering the question he asked he always says I want to figure out how to get X to work with Y don’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me how I can do it by compiling my own things don’t tell me how I can write a program to do it don’t tell me if I use a different operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system I wouldn’t have this problem don’t tell me this program would do it I want to use this program with this thing and this and then a million people
⏹️ ▶️ John answer me they just ignore him and they just tell me whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they want you should really
⏹️ ▶️ John use gen 2 and compile from source and plants like it’s impossible I don’t know why he fights that battle I don’t fight
⏹️ ▶️ John that battle all feedback is welcome I will gladly find the feedback that I want and read it. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John read the other ones too. I can file it away to my own mind. Please never feel like you shouldn’t respond to anything. Even if I explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John address the question to PS4 owners, if you’re an Xbox owner and you want to give me an answer, just make it clear you’re an Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John owner and I’ll put it in the right bin and it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our final sponsor this week, which is also gender neutral, is Fracture. Fracture prints your
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And if you are a new customer, you can get 15% off your first order with coupon code ATP15.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Fracture is great. I have tons of Fracture prints hanging up all over my office, all over our house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve sent them as gifts now multiple times. People love them. You see these things, trust me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get compliments on them all the time, people who see this in my office. People love these things. They make great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gifts. You know, holidays, of course, Mother’s Day is coming up. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap, that’s gender specific, kind of. well anyway everyone has a mother at some point anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re over thinking it mother’s day just go with it just go with it mother’s day is fine you did not invent mother’s day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holidays exist reasons to give people gifts exist and if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a picture printed fractures the way to do it because here’s what’s great about these things so as I said it’s photos printed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on glass so the way these things are structured it’s a thin piece of glass, the ink is printed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right onto the back side of it and it’s shining through the front so that that way you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ink is not going to scratch off if anything happened to the front of the glass it’s not going to scratch off or anything. These
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are durable things but also because the glass is really thin it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the picture is printed on the top so you get this nice like reflective glossy photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco print that looks like it is just the picture on the front glass but it’s nice and shiny and durable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also because it’s because the glass layer is so thin, they’re light. So you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a nice big print. I mean the ones I have above my desk, I have a pair of them above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computer that I think are like 11 by 17, and they don’t weigh that much. Like a framed picture, that same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size would weigh more because the frame would weigh more. Fracture prints, they have this thin glass layer and then behind it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like some foam, that then, like some foam board, and so you can hang it. You can put like a little picture hanging nail in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there or whatever. So the whole thing is actually pretty lightweight. It looks like it’s a solid piece of glass, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s thin glass adhered to foam board. So it really gives the best of everything from a practical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view. Like I’m always afraid when I’m hanging up big pictures because I have a couple of large frame prints in my office too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always afraid they’re gonna fall off, they’re gonna shatter or whatever, they’re gonna get broken during shipping maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fracture, I’ve never had that problem. They’ve never fallen off, they’ve never broken anything, they never tore the nail out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the wall or anything. You don’t need a giant nail to hang them because they don’t weigh that much. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very practical. They have desk mounts also or desk stands. And again, I wouldn’t feel bad if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those on my desk and I accidentally knocked it over. It probably wouldn’t break. Even if it fell from my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk onto the floor, I bet it wouldn’t break. Because they’re durable, they’re well built, and they just look incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I said, tons of compliments on these things whenever anybody sees them. They always ask what that is. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are familiar, people who have heard the show who then come to my house for the first time, they always look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at those and are like, oh, are those fractures? They look really nice. Like, that has actually happened numerous times now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, always hear about them. They’re fantastic. They’re also really affordable. So their prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start at just 15 bucks for the five by five square print. That’s the kind that I kind of famously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I made my row of app icons hanging above my window. And I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this five by five square print, 15 bucks each. It’s a no brainer. They’re fantastic. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like print your app icon to kind of show like, here’s the thing I made. Or you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast album art if you’re a podcaster, any kind of square art. They also have rectangular sizes, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s just nice to have these trophies of things you made. And then also, of course, just photos. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of people take photos, as we talked about earlier. Whether you’ve edited your photos or not, they make great fracture prints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So really check them out. They are great. It is the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way to display your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorite photos. They’re all handmade by a small team in Gainesville, Florida and hand-checked for quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And their prices are just fantastic. So once again, go to fractureme.com. get 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first order with coupon code ATP15. Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So you’ve been busy, Marco, and you’ve been working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast, specifically for the Apple Watch. And from what we’ve gathered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John and I, or John and me, whatever, what
⏹️ ▶️ John whom have gathered. You want to make a third guess or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I’ll just, I’ll quit while I’m behind. So what have you been up to lately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what has caused you to make all these changes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got the Apple Watch. I got the one that was shipped on the first day they were available. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it arrived on the 24th and I started using my, I had written the app before then and I started using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app on the watch. And within like a day, I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at what I’d made and I’m like, okay, this, it works, but it’s not very good. And it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better. And there’s a number of things about this. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details of things that worked and didn’t, because that’s better off as a blog post, really. And therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote a blog post with tons of images. And it’s always bad to describe all that image stuff on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll say that for when I publish the blog post, which will be when the new version is approved. But I basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restructured the entire interface. original interface of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mimicked the three-level navigation hierarchy of the iPhone app. So you have like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco root level is listed playlists and podcasts then you pick one of those and it pops you into the second level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the list of episodes in the thing you picked and you pick an episode and it pushes you to the third level which is the now playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and you can go back to the other levels and change things and whatever. So I replicated that structure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto the watch. So I had you know you launch the app and you’d see you know list of things list of episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now playing. In reality anyone who’s had a watch has probably seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird lags and delays with loading apps loading WatchKit apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WatchKit is really slow at times and like in general like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once things are loaded it’s fine but the process of loading an app it’s doing all sorts of crazy optimizations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power savings and everything and so like whatever it’s doing to conserve power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has occasional bugs still. And I don’t know if it’s because it’s going over Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if it’s because this is just, you know, watchOS 1.0, and these are 1.0 bugs. Probably some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combination of both, if I can take a guess. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WatchKit apps are fragile to some degree, and they’re inconsistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The more you ask them to do, the more you exacerbate this problem. I had a number of issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my three level navigation structure being moved onto the watch. One of the issues was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I really wanted most of the time was the now playing screen to show up first, because that’s usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you need to interact with. Like changing things on the now playing screen, seeing what’s playing, seeing how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time is left, seeking back and forth within it, maybe recommending it is something I frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Because oftentimes I’ll be out walking my dog or something and I’ll love what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m listening to and I wanna recommend it, so I wanna quickly go to the watch, hit recommend and back, but you know, then get back to what I was doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that. None of that is going back to the list of podcasts and lists of playlists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s something I hardly ever do on the go. And if I’m going to, then I can take my phone out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had built this app to mimic the structure of the iOS app in practice that was adding a lot of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lots of things. Suffice to say, I restructured the whole app. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is centered on, rather than being a three-level navigation hierarchy where the final level is in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now playing screen, now it is basically a single screen interface where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, the root level, is the now playing screen. And any other functions are brought up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by slide-up modal sheets, like modal dialogues. That structure, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming across well on a podcast, but that structure ends up working a lot better because it’s simple. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking WatchKit to load a lot less on startup. Like, rather than loading a three-level deep navigation hierarchy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is now loading one screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, am I correct in characterizing this change as you choosing to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John things the watch can do quickly or responsibly over the things
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch does slowly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So, this is the part I wanted to actually talk about on the show, that that does translate well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a podcast, which is like my initial inclination, and I think what a lot of people would have initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to do and did try to do with WatchKit, my initial inclination was, well here’s this device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a that is another app platform for iOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s port over the iOS interface to make the watch version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. It’s assuming that the watch version of the app should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iPhone version of the app. Not only is that wrong, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s a deeper thing that’s even more wrong about it. I think you can look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened with these platforms growing up so far. First, Apple developers made Mac apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then iOS came along, and so a lot of the Mac developers at some point have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried in the last seven years to make an iOS version of their Mac app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an iOS counterpart to their Mac app. Usually these have not gone that well. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some that work. There are a lot that don’t. There’s a lot of apps that can be perfectly great, useful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-demand apps on a Mac that just the realities of iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iOS the platform, the OS itself, it just doesn’t work well on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS. Maybe things that need precise mouse control, keyboard shortcuts, big screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of stuff. I’m not going to edit the podcast on an iPad even though I can. There are tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that, but I can do it so much better on a Mac than I could ever do on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad that I’m just gonna do it on a Mac. You know there are certain things like that where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something might be technically possible to migrate over to a new platform but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful or compelling compared to just you know having it be on one. And same thing applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the opposite direction like a lot of iOS things are not very compelling or useful on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re compelling useful on iOS and you can say the same thing between iPhones and iPads. Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things work better on one device and the other, etc. So from that point of view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alone, you can look at the watch and the assumption that the watch should have apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corresponding to your iPhone app, you know, whatever whatever app you make or whatever app you’re thinking of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using. Chances are most iPhone apps don’t need watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco components and probably shouldn’t have watch components. Like for most iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, a watch component is not that compelling and not that useful in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially considering what the watch can do today. There’s limitations of things WatchKit can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. There’s quite a lot of things WatchKit can’t do. It’s a very simple system. So there’s limitations of what WatchKit can and can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, plus just speed and bugs. There’s also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inherent qualities of the watch as a platform, as a physical device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones have gotten bigger over time, but they’re still relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handheld touchscreen devices. They’re still the same general size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class of what they’ve always been. They are things that can fit in your pocket, that you can pick up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably use with one hand and then put back in your pocket when you’re done. iPads are bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. They don’t fit in most pockets. They can fit in most bags but not most pockets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you use them generally with two hands and that decides a lot of things. Laptops are different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even the super small ones like the MacBook One, laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are different. You generally don’t put them in any pockets of any size garment. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different classes and as technology progresses, most of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major lines between those different size classes don’t change. Laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the super small ones like the MacBook One, are generally not going to be brought in somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handbag to dinner if they don’t have to. Laptops are generally not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your back pocket. This is just how things work. So a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not going to be always with you. An iPad is not going to be always with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might have it in your house, but it might not be in the same room that you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no matter how much technology progresses, no matter how thin and light these things get, how good the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteries get, whatever else, those broad strokes, those broad lines tend not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shift. Whatever inherent limitations of a form factor exist tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay there. iPads and iPhones are inherently limited by not having physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards and precise mice. That limits the kind of apps that work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well on them, the kind of uses that work well on them. you get a keyboard for your iPad or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the same. It doesn’t, like, those lines always exist, right? So looking at the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, the watch is always going to be a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small screen, a very small battery. According to the iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco teardown, the watch is approximately a tenth the size of the iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery. So that’s literally an order of magnitude less battery capacity. So also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know much like a screen probably I don’t know maybe a tenth of the screen area or probably not that bad but it’s you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know close maybe a fifth of the screen area. It’s it’s a much smaller thing. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it’s also strapped to your arm and strapped to your wrist and so it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily as we discussed last episode a device that one of your hands can’t operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so you know you have to operate with your other hand or your nose or John’s tongue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever the case may be like so there’s these inherent limitations to this device now no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter how good the hardware inside the watch gets as technology will go over time no matter how good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gets it’s still always gonna be a small screen strapped to one of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrists that will have probably you know an order of magnitude less battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than whatever we can put into the phone in your pocket that’s That’s why, so there’s this assumption that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people have made that the watch is eventually going to replace the smartphone. Over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, the watch will get its own cell radios and GPS, and that part might happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that over time, the watch will become the dominant computing platform, that everything is just moving smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smaller, and first it was computers, then it was your phones, now it’s going to be your watch, or eventually it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your watch. And because of all these limitations of these, you know, as I was talking about, these physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Limitations physical characteristics. I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ John Mmm, you just said ever didn’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I did I know an infinite time scale. I know I know
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’ve you heard this from like I haven’t I haven’t heard in all the watch coverage people saying that the watch is gonna replace the phone Where have you
⏹️ ▶️ John like this most coverage is talking like near-term who’s who’s on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bandwagon? I’ve heard a lot of tech comment comment or said especially before the watch was out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people said that that’s where we were Going what’s more interesting is that I I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now from almost everybody in real life who I’ve talked to about the watch. Like people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are not geeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like regular people think like, oh this is the next new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally every single person who has asked me about the watch and we start talking about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this isn’t a huge group, but they have all said that. Every normal person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there in the world thinks that that’s where this is going. So I do think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a valid thing to discuss and it It especially pertains to app developers. So, A, as I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how good the technology gets, the phone that’s in your pocket is always going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have 10 times the battery life, 5 to 10 times the screen space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to be used one-handed in either of your hands at any time, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster processors, bigger, more aggressive, power-hungry radios, things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, less aggressive power-saving measures. there’s always going to be that difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because of the physical differences between those two roles. As long as humans still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have two hands and their wrists aren’t a foot wide, that’s going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being the case. So do you do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foresee a future in which wrists get a foot wide and people grow third hands?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like, so the I don’t think this is what these people are talking about. I think if people are coming up to you and saying that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they think they’re asking you as to what you’re placing your phone, they’re talking about exactly what you’re talking about. But long term, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John like the the futurist visionary, whatever people say that long term, that wearables and so on
⏹️ ▶️ John are the futurist because what they’re envisioning is input and output methods being radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different, right? So they’re envisioning doesn’t matter how big screen is, it’ll be projected onto your retina, it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be whatever size you want, or whatever distance from your head you want, right? That’s what you basically have to do. Because like I said, you’re never going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the stuff you do on a phone on a screen that small, it’s just not going to happen if you’re touching it with
⏹️ ▶️ John your fingers and looking at it with your eyeballs. But if the thing is projected onto your retinas and is a virtual 19 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John screen in front of you that comes and goes when you blink your eye in a certain way, like input methods have to input and output methods have to change
⏹️ ▶️ John radically from what they are now. If you envision a world that only contains capacitive touchscreens of various
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes, then everything you’re saying is 100% true. And that is our future for the next like, many decades, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But long, long term, I think the reason you hear all this wearable hype, most of the wearable have I read is that like
⏹️ ▶️ John as the cost and size of compute goes down to zero other things become possible
⏹️ ▶️ John when everything on your entire body is filled with tiny microprocessors that are 15 times more powerful than
⏹️ ▶️ John the A8 and it’s all powered by static electricity from you scuffing your feet on the carpet and you know like like that’s you need
⏹️ ▶️ John new input and output methods though and you know something that goes directly into your eyeballs or
⏹️ ▶️ John you know VR goggles are the first giant clunky versions of that or things that are in your ears waving your hands around
⏹️ ▶️ John in the air like connect style whole like that’s I think what people are talking about the tech the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John people who talk about future world wearables of the future but the people are coming up to you are legitimately it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like asking you are you not going to use your phone now that you have a postage stamp size capacitive touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John on your wrist I hope you’re telling them no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no they that is exactly people are making that assumption Pete like and and that’s gonna keep being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing as smartwatches grow in popularity over the next few years. Like that’s going to keep definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason I asked before about like, you’re making choices for overcast based on what the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone can do quickly is that it’s like, put another way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch did things just as fast as the phone, like multi level hierarchies, they work just like they did on you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are you making the choice because it’s the best UI? conceptually? Are you are you saying
⏹️ ▶️ John conceptually we better this way, but practically speaking, it’s too too damn slow with watch kit. So I have to choose
⏹️ ▶️ John a UI design that I wouldn’t otherwise choose just because performance is you know, so much more important
⏹️ ▶️ John than like, navigation hierarchy or whatever, like, well, you know, performance, like, I mean, it’s this whole reason the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John was awesome. Like, you know, what’s what’s different between the iPhone and all the other touch phones is like, the performance so massively
⏹️ ▶️ John better. It’s like a step jump in an experience, right? So you are definitely making the right choice. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wondering, you know, it’s a it’s kind of a shame that if you were forced to make that choice by crappy performance and watch kit and be
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wondering if the choices will change as the watch evolves because although obviously you always be able to get something more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John and something the size of a phone the watch will get faster and phone will get faster and they will see you march forward
⏹️ ▶️ John down the line of getting faster and so on eventually the watch will be hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John like either you know native apps or watch kit will be better or like five versions of the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John from now I’m hoping performance will be way way better and then you know what will happen
⏹️ ▶️ John does I look like then and given that watch, the five years from now watch, would you revisit your
⏹️ ▶️ John UI and say, now the performance isn’t a factor, how might I do this UI differently? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think for the most part, you can tell me, because you were iOS developer really early on when it was iPhone OS, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ever have to make that choice on iOS? Like that you’re making UI choices based on
⏹️ ▶️ John what the phone, the actual phone did, maybe with table views when they were scrolling really slow, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ever have to do that? Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, usually it was the opposite direction. Usually the things I would think in my head before I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that probably won’t be fast enough. And then I would try it and I’d be like, oh, this phone hardware is not as bad as I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the crazy way with this paper that I would do pagination and detection of where pages ended was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy. And it worked, and I’m shocked that it worked. Or even with Overcast, as I’ve said before, like with Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first was prototyping the audio engine with SmartSpeed and VoiceBoost. And the visualizer, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the visualizer, all of those things I thought would be too slow on the real hardware, and then I tried them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they all were like, oh yeah, 2% CPU usage. Like, wow, okay, I’ll do it
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is like yet another reason amongst all the other ones you already listed that the watch is different because I think it’s the first
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple platform in a while, except for maybe OS X, which is also butt slow in the beginning. That like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s the opposite. It’s like, actually it’s slower than you think it is. And actually WatchKit has more
⏹️ ▶️ John limitations than you thought it might. And not just like limitations and capability, but like, yeah, you can do it with WatchKit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John have you seen what it’s like how long it takes to load those things, right? So it’s just a different mindset. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of going back to, I don’t know, like old world mindset where you just assume the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John was really slow and you had to be like, I gotta figure out what this computer can do fast and then make my app do that
⏹️ ▶️ John because, especially when it comes to UIs, that’s so much more important than conceptual
⏹️ ▶️ John purity or some wireframe that you have that you’ve fallen in love with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but the fact is, we’re talking about like CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, but that’s not the problem on the watch. I mean, we don’t know. Our apps are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running on the watch’s CPU at all. Like, we really can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell. Right, it’s the whole Bluetooth connection or Wi-Fi between, like we talked about it before, like it’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get faster, faster, faster until the watch gets faster and you get native apps because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least anyway, my collective experience with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is there’s some inherent lag in that that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna, you’re never gonna get that down to a point where it feels as responsive as something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running on the device. Exactly and but you know even that being said like you know There as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like the performance for things like tapping buttons like yeah, you can feel there’s lag there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s acceptable overall It’s not great. It’s it’s acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John having used a watch for a grand total of three and a half minutes so far I one of the first thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was like swipe through like the glances or whatever and You know just just doing the swipe test
⏹️ ▶️ John And it didn’t feel slow, but it kind of felt like a couple generations
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, iPhone, like this is not a demanding test. This is all happening on the phone. It’s not watch get apps like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You know, I’m assuming it’s got the views all in memory. I’m just asking it to open GL if I transition things
⏹️ ▶️ John from one to the next in response to swipes and it felt a little bit like it didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t feel as snappy, certainly not as snappy as like an iPhone six. Maybe it felt like one of my old
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod touches or whatever. So even with native apps, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re kind of, we’ve moved back in time to, at best, Apple’s own apps have moved back
⏹️ ▶️ John in time several generations in the iOS world, even for simple, completely on-device, completely OpenGL accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John core animation transition from one tiny view to a next.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, totally. And the rumors, I mean, I don’t think we’ve had any confirmation on this now that we’ve had the thing, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors were always that it was roughly A5 performance, which would match your old iPod Touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was that the architecture they thought it was? Like it’s a tiny A5? Because it’s gotta be so massively
⏹️ ▶️ John underclocked in there. We don’t know, right? But I assume just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a good point about clock. Yeah, I don’t know. But look, I mean, the reality is what we’ve seen the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch do, it does certainly appear that computational performance is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not limiting factor here, at least not for any WatchKit app. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t even seeming to be the limiting factor for Apple’s apps. They do all sorts of like animations and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are probably not all pre-rendered images the way that watch kits have to be. Like, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do stuff that is clearly, you know, this is not running a 486 in there. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you know what that is, being a Mac person, John? I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Casey does. I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reference to an old CPU. Anyway. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Yeah, I knew you’d know it. You know, while John was watching every movie under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sun to make other references.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will wager that I have written more x86 assembler than both of you combined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thousands of lines anyway, so the point is like Technology will get better even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the watch hardware right now is too slow to do something that will change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know a few years that that’s not gonna be a problem for very long My argument is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how good the hardware gets the inherent limitations of like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you interact with this thing. The interface being like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timepiece is the home screen and the honeycomb of app icons is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like this, you kind of go there as a last resort to do something and many things are happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through glances and watch complications instead of going out to the app screen and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And still, it’s a very small screen that you can only access from one hand, that hand might be busy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always going to be these limitations of this device. So anyway, going back to the reason I brought this up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not every app needs to be on the watch, not every app should be on the watch, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would venture to say that overall, while the watch does add a lot of types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps that are now compelling that weren’t before, like a lot of kinds of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would love to have on the watch, if they had an iPhone version, I would have completely ignored them before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Like they wouldn’t have been useful enough on an iPhone wouldn’t have been interesting on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone. It would have seemed too simple or whatever. On the watch, I’m interested. The watch is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creating new opportunities. But I would argue there’s a continuum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computing devices and their uses. On one hand, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have full-blown computer-type devices where you can install applications, you can run them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do… It’s a general purpose. It could be your main computer. For some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people that is an iPhone or an iPad. For most people that’s going to be a PC or a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually, probably not most anymore. I bet the smartphone is winning. But anyway, for a lot of geeks at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least, that’s going to be a PC or a Mac. For a lot of people in the world, it’s going to be a smartphone. And for some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll be a tablet. But I don’t think the watch will ever get there. To me, the watch…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So on this continuum you have those kind of devices, which can be the general purpose computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then on the other end you have a Bluetooth headset, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a computing processor type thing in it, but it’s not an app platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will never be an app platform. It doesn’t need to be an app platform. What about my Thunderbolt cable? Can I run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on that? I think you might be able to, actually. But anyway, so… Last panic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have this continuum. On one end you have full blown computers, on the other end you have things that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing hardware in them but are really just like dedicated peripheral type things or dedicated you know specialized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I would say the watch is you know closer to the left than the right like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say it’s the watch is closer to a peripheral to an iPhone accessory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then to its own independent standalone platform
⏹️ ▶️ John well that’s going a little far I mean it’s running iOS for crying out loud like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the technical side I you’re right on the technical aside, it has a CPU, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a display, it has apps that you can access, but I think the way you actually use this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once everyone calms down, once the novelty’s worn off, I think the way we’re actually going to use this thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like a remote view onto the computing life of mine that lives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my iPhone. And that, like, not every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is going to need to be on the watch. A lot of uses where we’re now using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch, we’re going to go back to the phone and say, Oh, actually, it was easier to pull my phone out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do X, Y, or Z, rather than doing those things through clunky, slow apps on the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the watch is, in general, even though it does create new opportunities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to be a much smaller app platform in practice than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people might have been hoping for before we had them. And that’s not because Apple did a bad job with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. That’s just because of the realities of what watches are and what they have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I hope that’s just a temporary thing though because if I’m thinking of some specific applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that are actually better suited to the watch than the phone and we just can’t do it because The computing is not there
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, you know, so if you get a watch that has its own GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John That has a much faster CPU and GPU any kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John GPS based Hiking or walking around the city type thing It’s the worst to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to walk around a city while holding up a phone in front of you to see where it is if you had if you had basically if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John unlimited computing capacity and Onboard GPS on your watch you could navigate in a city with
⏹️ ▶️ John just a watch You know be an awesome experience better than fishing your phone out of your pocket every 10 seconds to find out what road you
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to turn on to and so I think there is a potential for
⏹️ ▶️ John This computing platform to come into its own and be a full-fledged computer but only for applications that are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John better on the watch, not because not now all of a sudden every one of your iOS apps can be your watch because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid. But for things that are actually better when they’re on your watch, that we just can’t do now is like, well, it’s always to the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. If you tried to use it that way as a remote display for the Apple Maps application, it’s going to be slow
⏹️ ▶️ John and clunky. And, you know, can you imagine like a watch that responded in basically real
⏹️ ▶️ John time to its orientation and direction? Like it had a map on it. And as you raised your
⏹️ ▶️ John arm, it would adjust in like 3D to point the arrow towards where you’re supposed to go. Like no matter how you waved your arm around, the
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow would constantly be pointing to the left turn you’re supposed to make. Like we’re not even close to that kind of computing power and
⏹️ ▶️ John and battery to support that, but it’s conceivable in our lifetime. And that is a way cooler experience to just be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to glance down at your wrist, put your arm into any position and have the big green arrow pointing exactly where you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to go on the trail next or whatever. Or, you know, what block you’re supposed to turn on or a little indicator to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how close the closest Starbucks is or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco needs that app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, every day. Yeah, but like, you know, I’m not willing to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John that the watch will be relegated to this forever because I think it’s just, we’re just stuck with what we’re stuck with now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just ramp up the technology, new classes of app, this is what everyone’s talking about, new classes of application will be possible. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, perhaps new classes are not possible. Like you said, it’s mostly just for a peripheral view
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that are going on on your phone and you don’t have to tell time and count your steps and do all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But eventually, several generations from now, on an infinite time
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not infinite, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the close time scale, you know what I mean? Like, we’ll get to this one, right? It doesn’t take much more. I mean, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes native apps, and then it takes, you know, lower power CPUs, and blah, blah, blah, a couple generations,
⏹️ ▶️ John new things will be possible on the watch. And GPS is just the one I thought off the top of my head,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s not even true. But like, people will try everything, Like that’s the good thing about it. People will try, maybe we can have
⏹️ ▶️ John games on there, and maybe that sucks Maybe it does like everyone people will try everything and you know one of those things is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the same thing We did with the phone It’s like No one knew it was gonna be great on the phone until we tried every possible
⏹️ ▶️ John thing including fart apps and eventually it settles on Other things that it does well. It’s just that you know right now I mean it’s kind of happening
⏹️ ▶️ John right now Everyone’s saying but I’m gonna make everything for watch kit and you know as a lot of the reviewers say there’s like thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of watch Kit apps and most of them suck because people were wrong about what would be good in a watch kit app
⏹️ ▶️ John But the WatchKit days hopefully will be gone in a few years and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll move on to trying the equivalent of fart apps on the watch until someone hits something good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well day one of the App Store, John I don’t know if you remember this, day one of the App Store they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar to what people are saying now which is like yeah the vast majority of these things are terrible. A few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are good but the majority are terrible. What was
⏹️ ▶️ John the first app you downloaded from the App Store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm I don’t know I remember that first day I downloaded a I downloaded Monkey Ball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John other. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Monkey Ball was probably my top three. I think I had Lights Out, remember that one?
⏹️ ▶️ John that was there early. But I remember, what I’m getting is the experience. I remember like, oh, so this is the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John what can we download? And like Monkey Ball was like nine bucks or something, wasn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, ten bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the old days, the app store as kids. Let me tell you, Monkey Ball was ten bucks and it was terrible. Yep. Because the control scheme was terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though I love Monkey Ball on the GameCube, awesome game. On the iPhone, terrible. Anyway, I downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of stuff, like went for, you know, big names, things made by people I know, blah, blah. And you’re right. You used
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them. You’re like, all right, guys, try again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah. You saw everybody with their like beer app, the beer pouring things and
⏹️ ▶️ John like lights out was the best game practically because that one had been developed before the app store. And it was a and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a game they knew would work on the phone because all you do is poke the screen, which you know, that is actually something that the phone is
⏹️ ▶️ John good at a big, you know, sort of board game grid type thing where you poke the screen. Good use of the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. That was like the best app that I remember on day one. Alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Glide, Hover, and Fracture. And We’ll see you next
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at, I went into my iPhone to the app store to purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You scroll to the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to the end of that list?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The very first one, AOL Instant Messenger. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco mistake. I know. I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used it for five minutes because I didn’t even remember that I had it. Next one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Labyrinth Light Edition. Oh, I had that too. Next one, Tap Tap Revenge Classic,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I had that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a couple of games, restaurant nutrition, air sharing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of VNC SSH, Apple Remote, and Flight Control, which is what I was really, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flight Control was the first one I had downloaded because when I got my phone, that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my memory, around the time that flight controls brand new and to my memory that was one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the first games top top revenge actually was kind of like this too but one of the first games that just everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had to have and oh my god I love flight control I play the thing for hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York Times Apple remote app net newswire chopper which like choplifter which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved tap tap revenge scribble light more cowbell yes I downloaded a cowbell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app nice banner free black and white which looks like a fellow Yeah, that’s right, I played that
⏹️ ▶️ John I wondered why I had that Banner app, and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was like one of those only apps on the store on day one. That’s why I have the same stupid thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m guessing it probably was originally just called Banner, and then they later added a paid version, just like I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Instapaper. I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s stupid, it’s cool. That’s the one that like, scrolls the message across your screen. I think that was actually a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea for a day one app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, on iPad it’s actually kind of useful. Because the screen isn’t big. Cube Runner, AP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco World 9, Parameze, Subway Shuffle, Labyrinth, Light, that’s right, We got all the labyrinth games on day one peg jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gal con is my first like no Reckon a known recognizable game. Yeah, so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of garbage basically. There’s some good stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you have the physical version of labyrinth light you know what they show on the icon for labyrinth?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labyrinth things made of wood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a few of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I love those things We have one to the physical one is much more satisfying than the iOS game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah Yeah of all these of all these things the thing I spent the most time playing was black and white the the Othello
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until Galcon came around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely flight control for me. I probably haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day one though no no no But it was my day one if you will because it was by the time I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPhone and I think I’ve played flight Control more than any other game on my phone any of my phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever I loved flight control Although I did play a lot of ramp champ.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was much later though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was it was much later
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta go get my phone to see what my apps are I’m curious hang on a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can find in iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you yeah go to the app store page go to purchases here we go So yeah, if you scroll all if you sort by most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent scroll all the way down to the bottom of that giant page It’s there Net news wire chopper tap tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scribble light Pandora radio Facebook I downloaded Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John Super monkey ball New York Times net news wire Apple remote Google
⏹️ ▶️ John aim I should make fun of the aim thing. I’ve got it to a the eBay app
⏹️ ▶️ John and And then to our fellow clones tap tap revenge trism banner free
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco boy Yeah, we all
⏹️ ▶️ John download the same damn app Sunday one labyrinth light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My twelfth app was flight control as previously discussed 15th app tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ John Another classic from the old days space dead beef. I think it’s still out there very cool game.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised I mean, maybe it’s not a good not good fit for the phone But I really love that game
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wish there were more games like that if not for the phone and for other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, two biggest pieces of nostalgia for me flight control icon and the Tweety icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John love iTunes, even though I have my thing set that we show scroll bar iTunes says I’m ignoring that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m gonna give you I’m gonna give you one of those auto-hiding scroll bars
⏹️ ▶️ John It is its own UI. It has no respect for the system settings.