168: Coffee Stops Working
06 May 2016Server days from hell, Apple as a services company, Marco’s new Mac app, and multiplying Casey Lisses.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Our lack of T-shirts
- Casey's "Doppelgänger"
- Casey's "Doppelgänger's" Twin Brother
- Follow-up:
- No more WWDC failed-charge issues
- Volvo trashes Tesla
- Ejecting volumes in Windows
- Overcast quicksync
- Unit testing is a Good Thing™
- CloudKit JS
- CloudKit pros and cons
- Quitter
- Apple is doomed
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- John's mom got hacked
- Windows XP ad bumper sounds
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Chapters
- T-shirt lesson from Howard Stern
- I’m Casey Liss! No, I’m Casey Liss!
- Follow-up: WWDC charge failures
- Follow-up: Volvo self-driving car
- Follow-up: Ejecting volumes
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- Overcast quicksync
- CloudKit considerations
- Sponsor: Audible.com
- Quitter
- Sponsor: Hover (code EGGEVERYTHING)
- Apple earnings doom
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Kindle support help
- Post-show: Ad sounds
T-shirt lesson from Howard Stern
⏹️ ▶️ John Talk about Tevo next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re never talking about Tevo. So we’re in the midst of talking about what to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about shirts for this year. We’ve been talking about it, the three of us, for a couple of weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Ding! And and I really like it. Yeah, I really like it. And we haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up with any brilliant ideas in terms of design. We don’t want to just kind of phone it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do regurgitation of a prior design. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there are listeners that would like shirts, we want to fulfill that need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re in the midst of a debate over what to do. And we were currently leaning towards, I think, not doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shirts this year, in part because Teespring isn’t going to have them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done and delivered before WWDC, which is typically when we try to get this thing done by. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what to do. Yeah, so because basically, and you know, WBC is a nice target
⏹️ ▶️ Marco date because a lot of fans are there and people like buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shirts and showing off their geek shirts there. But the reality is the vast majority of purchasers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the shirt probably aren’t going to WBC. We’re talking like, you know, do people have t-shirt fatigue?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are people tired of t-shirts? Do people have too many t-shirts? Is there anything else we could sell? Maybe a hoodie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like mugs or other stuff that’s not shirts? Polo shirts. So and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my position is very strong that like, I think we should have an original design every time we do these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, because we don’t want to like, you know, I learned forever ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Howard Stern actually, I learned a lot from he had a thing he was he was kind of criticizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody else. I think I might have been Rush Limbaugh, so some other like talk show host for like constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nickel and diming the audience for just selling them all sorts of garbage with with his name on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or something like that. And Howard said his position is always to basically ask the audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for money as infrequently as possible. This is why you can’t get Howard Stern’s face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a bumper sticker. There’s pretty much no official merchandise for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s very little, if any. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen any. And he said that when he moved to Sirius, that was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big ask. That was like, alright, I’m moving from free radio to a paid service. He’s like, I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask the audience now for the pretty big ask come to me to this paid service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he said he was already asking them for that then he really didn’t want to ask them for more money like in anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. He really wanted to kind of like conserve the times he asked the audience for money, you know, as respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the audience and so that when he does ask it matters. And so I’ve kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of internalized that in a lot of stuff I do and that’s why I feel like with this show I feel like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to ask the listeners, hey go buy this thing. I want to make sure it’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want and I don’t want to ask that question too often and so that’s why like for me It’s not enough to just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s just do You know that the original shirt with the logo wanted with Swift on the back for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which one of the ideas we had? Look should be fine You know because the original version had just C code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the back We put Swift in the back and it would feel like phoning it in and We don’t want to do that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to the audience because if we’re gonna ask you to buy something We want to make sure it’s it’s like good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and that we are putting a lot of effort into our side as well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so in summary, we’re not sure what to do and when we don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do, we’ll probably just punt and wait until somebody has a clever idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do love that LavaLike in the chat suggested making an ATP watch strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think that is brilliant.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the Apple watches that the two of us aren’t wearing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could come in multiple versions. Mine could have a spring bar so you could put it on any watch. And John’s could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like something that you hang on the wall or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or it can come with the arm hair already torn out of your arm and attached to the strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well John We could get like we could get like custom Dynaflex is printed. I don’t know what that
⏹️ ▶️ John is I have no idea what that is when you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there the RSI the little like gyroscope spinny ball things that people use For our so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually really good. I did it for a while you guys are useless all
I’m Casey Liss! No, I’m Casey Liss!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of useless information, I have a very short story that I’d like to share. I apparently have a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the term for this? Somebody that has my exact same name but isn’t me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Doppelganger?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like a twin or doppelganger, but yeah, but he doesn’t look like me. When I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get myself onto the right timetable when I was in California on vacation, as everyone always is when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re in California, I probably was doing a vanity search or God knows what, and I somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came up with the link I just put in the chat that says, Casey Casey Liss, a senior computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering major at the University of New Hampshire, presented his research on, quote, IoT security,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ASIC implementation of the hash function Blake. And I was completely stupefied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by this because I’ve seen plenty of Casey’s and I’ve even seen a handful of Liss’s, but to see the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Casey Liss was startling. And then furthermore, I found another page. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is how bored and desperate I was during my bout of insomnia. I found another page that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some mention of a guy, Corey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-O-R-E-Y, who supposedly looks like Justin Timberlake, even though he really doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has a twin, Casey Liss. And this is doubly interesting because my dad’s name is Corey. It’s spelled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey differently, but yeah, very weird. And this totally weirded me out and I wanted to share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the group and we can cut this from the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what would be amazing? I’m not cutting this from the show because I think it would be amazing if it became like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that people did that whenever they wanted to give like a fake name to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a newspaper reporter or something instead of going for some like name that sounds like you know like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general reference when it’s said aloud that you know people have done before just start giving the name Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Liss. Oh God. And then wouldn’t it be amazing to just have like all like Casey Lisses like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just showing up everywhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No that’ll ruin all my vanity searches man come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the best reason to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that really weirded me out when I was in California. It was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like three in the morning or something like this. And I found that I have a quasi-doppelganger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s a term for this. I don’t think it’s doppelganger, because isn’t a doppelganger somebody that looks like you but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where’s the umlaut? It’s over the A. I got to get this right, lest we have all the pedants. Oh, my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Getting angry at us. That was for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. We’re all just one serial killer away from having our vanity searches ruined anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re going through life, serial
⏹️ ▶️ John killer or pop star, you’re going through life and your name is Michael Bolton as in office space and
⏹️ ▶️ John you feel like you’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was a good name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Until that no talent ass clown ruined it. Oh god, did we get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reference trifecta?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming down to your level. It’s one of the five movies I’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right, so we should probably do a little bit of follow-up.
Follow-up: WWDC charge failures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC charge failures. We had a lot of discussion in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode about what would happen if you win the lottery and you have won the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give Apple $1,600 of your money, and then they attempt to charge your credit card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the credit card company says, screw you. Listener David Beck wrote in and said, I got an email on Saturday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they failed to charge my card for WWDC. I updated my info and they successfully charged it today. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even got a phone call from an Apple dev relations representative to make sure everything worked out. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew wrote in, my credit card got declined, not for billing info. Apple gave me three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days to get it fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that’s great. It sounds like they have taken this really bad, like, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, you know, really like hurts to happen to you flaw from previous lottery systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the last couple of years and they have fixed it. So that’s great.
Follow-up: Volvo self-driving car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about Volvo’s level four self-driving car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the beginning of the, uh, beginning, beginning middle of the autonomous driving
⏹️ ▶️ John trash talking among car vendors. So Tesla gets a lot of the press for the self-driving cars
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco was talking about in the last show. How people are asking, well, is this the one that drives itself and everything? And so of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John every car maker has some variant on this type of technology. They’re out now or coming out soon. Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ John is hyping its self-driving stuff mostly on a safety basis
⏹️ ▶️ John and they are trashing Tesla saying that they have you know level 4
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about that on the past show the SAE levels of autonomous cars going from 0 to 5, 5 being full
⏹️ ▶️ John automation of Volvo’s thing is supposedly level 4 so it’s not only able to drive itself down the road but it is capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of handling any situation that come across without human intervention. Something goes wrong the car can even safely stop
⏹️ ▶️ John itself at the side of the road. And their senior technical leader of crash avoidance
⏹️ ▶️ John at Volvo says, if you don’t take over, meaning like if you don’t take over driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve fallen asleep or you’re watching a film, then we will take responsibility. We won’t just turn autonomous mode off.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s, you know, Tesla will do the, Marco can tell us what does it do, like beeps at you or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then eventually turns autonomous mode off. What does it do if you are, if you don’t take the wheel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It beeps like a quick error code, the beep, beep, beep. And then it’s like the same code if it fails, you’re kind of used to hearing it in bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations. And then it just, you know, I haven’t actually let it go to see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens if I don’t intervene. I probably won’t ever try that, but I would imagine it just coasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it like slows down or tries to pull over or anything, but I could be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so anyway, that’s what Valve was saying there. They’re claiming to have a level four system, which is called high automation, and this little
⏹️ ▶️ John diagram from the SE folks, one below full automation, and they claim that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry about it, we will handle everything. We won’t just handle like, oh, we’ll do the driving when it’s easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if we get confused, it’s your turn to take over this. And even if you fall asleep, we’ll handle it. Now, does handling
⏹️ ▶️ John it mean, oh, if you fall asleep, pull over to the side of the road because that can be extremely dangerous, depending on which road you’re on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the search for true artificial intelligence to drive your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, I mean, there’s there’s so many other things about this, about, you know, unintended automated driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just really hard. Like, as I’m driving around now town with this, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partially rudimentary—rudimental—rudimentary? What’s the word there? LEWIS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RUDIMENTARY. But in an adjective form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rudimentary-ly. Anyway, whatever that word is, if it exists, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m driving around with a car with that level of automation, I see so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many situations where, like, wow, a self-driving car would have a really hard time with with this thing I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did or this road that I’m on or this condition that I just passed and even simple things like those systems that are automated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the highway great but what about highways that have traffic lights on them you know then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s going to be that level of automation where it supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles you stopping paying attention it has to also do things like stop at traffic lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or you know follow a traffic cop directions through construction zones or something like There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many things like that where it’s just a really hard problem. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are even often hard for humans to figure out what to do or where to put their car. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just shows, once you start thinking about it and seeing in real life and seeing how limited these systems are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, I think it just goes to show quite how complex of a problem this is. Not that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unsolvable necessarily, but that, as we said last time, it just may not be as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imminent as a lot of people are predicting.
Follow-up: Ejecting volumes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A few people have written in to say, you know, you guys, you really are supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to eject volumes on Windows as well as on OS X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that I used Windows for a long, long, long time, and all I ever did was pay attention to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this was almost always with a USB key, pay attention to when the USB key stopped flashing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its little LED, and then I ripped it out and never thought twice. And I think I might have, may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have had data loss like once.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows how many files you corrupted
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you did a lot that
⏹️ ▶️ John you noticed once fair enough I didn’t know that you were supposed to unmounted I thought that was the the actual windows
⏹️ ▶️ John way was way for the blinking light to stop It must have been at some point like in the DOS days I guess cuz there’s no unmounting
⏹️ ▶️ John your floppy disk and DOS you just wait for the drive light to stop blinking and then you right Turn the little thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John yank out your five and a quarter But anyway If you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it in a monitor Windows 2 I have also not seen people do that They just wait for the light to blinking light
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop and yank it out and that is crazy in a world of our rodeo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. Well any other follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless unless we want to talk more about the bumper sounds. I mean we shouldn’t talk about that at some point I don’t know if it’s follow-up anymore though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we have more to talk about bell, we’re leaving the XP sounds because they’re perfect. All right, moving on.
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Overcast quicksync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you released a new version of Overcast, which has a much improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sync system, or maybe? Yeah. How was your day a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago? Well, I released two versions of Overcast in the last few days, if that tells you roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good the first one was. Fun! Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I released a new version of Overcast that had noticeable improvements to syncing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in particular, the speed of syncing between multiple devices. And I kind of codenamed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this QuickSync, even though I know lots of other things like Intel’s thing. There’s so many things in the tech industry called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QuickSync. That’s why I’m not really heavily branding it. And I didn’t capitalize it. And I’m not really…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t appear anywhere in the app. It just kind of is what I called it in blog posts. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is, is a weird, tricky sync system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that combines push notifications and iCloud Key Value Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to get fast syncing between multiple devices, most of which are Apple devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of which is my website. The technical details of it aren’t that interesting, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every syncable object has a sync version number on it, and when you make a change, you increment the version number,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the server manages conflicts when they arise. When you make a change, you also append
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to an iCloud Key Value Store list the object you just changed, like its ID and then the version number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you just set on it. When the Key Value Store syncs across other devices that are running Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will — within usually a few seconds or so — they will get that notification from iCloud, which has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a persistent connection to the phones. They will get the information from iCloud saying, hey, this dictionary just changed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now you can look and you can say, this has version numbers on these objects that I don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. So then that triggers the device to go to my servers and fetch the new information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even in the background? Well, if the app is running at all, it’ll get the notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if it’s playing audio, it will get them because it’s running. But if it’s suspended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the background when it’s not playing audio, it won’t get them until it wakes up again. Gotcha. So I made the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system and I tightened up a few other timings of various things. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you activate the app, how often does it sync? Does it sync every time you activate it, or does it have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain minimum every X minutes? And then certain things you do, like, should I sync every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time you pause or seek? And then if you’re just playing audio, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often should I sync the playback position of that so that it syncs properly to the website and to your other devices, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have any other devices? It’s just this kind of complex,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly boring solution to a really tricky problem, which is syncing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both a way that’s quick and efficient of data and power usage and server resources,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of hard to get right. And the first version I launched, I didn’t get it right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there was a sync loop issue, which fortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could fix server side. But all day yesterday, my server started collapsing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because this in theory creates more sync requests than before, I was expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And so on the server, I actually… The server tells the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how frequently to sync certain things and how long certain timeouts should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So things like to coalesce or… How did Federico say that? Koalas?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do some of that. And so the server, using just like… Tweaking some variables on the server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can slow down all the apps or speed them up. And so I launched out like a middle setting that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be good and a little bit conservative. And my servers were just collapsing. And I’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the heck is going on. So I start looking at the logs, I start adding more debug information, trying to optimize certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I immediately provision 50% more web servers, just more instances, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them out there. PHP 7 comes with a massive speed up and memory reduction. So in the midst of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this, I’m like, you know, I was running it on one server before. I’m like, let me just deploy it to the rest. I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any saves I can get right now. So I have PHP in all of them, doing all this crazy stuff, upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, optimizing checking database queries, spreading out memcache, doing all my crazy scaling stuff. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server day from hell. In my career, I’ve had many server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days from hell. Very few of them, though, after I left Tumblr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once I left Tumblr, I was dealing with things that were just much smaller scale. So, Instapaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had some of those days, but the scale wasn’t as big. And then with Overcast, I’ve had almost none of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server days from hell. Because, Because A, I’ve gotten better at doing server stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco B, the server stuff has gotten more powerful, and C, Overcast isn’t that big. As I get further from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having server days from hell frequently, each one I have now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like I have no tolerance for it anymore. So like each server day from hell I have now, at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end of it I’m just like, I’m just using iCloud from now on. I like, I don’t want to ever be doing this again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I am still doing it for the next few days at least. We’ll see what happens. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so eventually, to make a very long story short, eventually I figured out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under certain conditions after, basically there’s a race condition checker, if between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you start a sync and when you end a sync, if you change that object
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally, then you by definition have the most recent version, as long as that sync didn’t span
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours or days or whatever. But if it’s like an immediate mode sync, if you modify it during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sync operation The server comes back saying, what you have is out of date. Replace it with this stuff I got from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other iPad somewhere that’s in your closet. Then you know, like, no, what you have is correct. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a condition where the app can then tell the server, no matter what you think you have, replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with what I have. I’m forcing you to accept mine. It’s like a force overwrite kind of conflict resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a condition where the app was saying, no, force this, because there was just a race condition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The server was incrementing its version number on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response back, which meant it put itself in a loop. The app would say, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force it to have this. The server would say, okay, and then it would send back something saying, but the new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this. And the app would say, okay, but I’m also changing it now, so the new version is this plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. The server would say back, oh, no, okay, thanks, but now it’s this plus one. So it created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this loop under that certain race condition response scenario in which also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing was actually changed. This wouldn’t have happened for almost anybody. And I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a beta test that had 500 people on it. And it never happened in the beta. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have let it run to see if you could have overflowed the int. How big was the number?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Big enough that I would have gotten in very big trouble if I would have let that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I don’t think I used a big int. I think I used a regular int, so it’s at least 32 bits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was seeing revision numbers that were in the 600s range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it would have taken a while to get to 4.2 billion. If I unsigned it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was maybe 2 billion if I signed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was obviously a problem. Fortunately, that I was able to fix server-side, but it took me most of the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find that and to figure out what was causing certain clients to just hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sync service over and over again with seemingly identical-looking requests. So I resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my day from hell for the most part. There was also, separately from that, a race condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync bug, which causes episodes to basically come back from the dead sometimes. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you played it on an iPad and then went and finished on your phone, next time you long as the iPad app, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad would tell the server, hey, I have this version of this thing that I’m playing and it also can can cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird issues. So I submitted an expedited request which I’d hardly ever do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically it was it was a day and a half from hell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now my hands are all sore from RSI stuff, from the server day from hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to just talking for the next hour instead of, well not the whole hour, you guys are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna talk for most of the rest of it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the part where we tell Marco about unit tests again, I think, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John On our regular schedule, see what you do is, for every weird case you can think of, involving
⏹️ ▶️ John every weird device, you simulate those scenarios in a series of tests, and every time you come up with a new scenario that you’re worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about as you drift off to sleep, you’re like, I’m gonna write a test for that and see if it works. And then you run those tests to make sure you haven’t broken anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s every time you revise the sync system, and then you feel better when you do release.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re still not gonna find all the bugs, but every time you find one of them, part of fixing the bug is not just fixing it on your server
⏹️ ▶️ John and fixing it on your client and releasing new versions, but writing a failing test case to isolate the bug and then fixing the
⏹️ ▶️ John bug and see that it fixes your tests. And then every time you run those tests, you feel a little bit better about the changes you’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Did I cover everything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so John, in case you guys can come over and you can write a bunch of tests for me to show me how good they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t pay you, you’re doing it for exposure. And… Of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey course. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I like it, Maybe I’ll hire you in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I see how it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, so at the new gig, we’re implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company’s app all over again. We’re re-implementing our app. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the guy I’m working with, who Marco knows actually, Jamie, he has not really done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unit testing before, but has been really, really open to it and really interested in doing it on this project, because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to do everything as right as we possibly can. And over the last just 48 hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said to me at least three or four different times, oh my God, I’m so glad I wrote a unit test because I just exposed a bug I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even know was there. Just saying. They’re your friend, kids. They’re your friend.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, sync systems are a pain, especially in client server things are a pain. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like sort of designing for testability. If you know you’re gonna have a system like that, it’s a pain. You’re like, how am I gonna write
⏹️ ▶️ John tests against this? I need a server, I need a client. There are separate code bases, they’re running in separate places. Like it encourages
⏹️ ▶️ John you to make both ends of your sync system work
⏹️ ▶️ John disembodied, like have them to be divorced from both the client and the server. So you can actually test them. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing the client and the server are providing is like little homes and transport mechanisms. Then you can test the
⏹️ ▶️ John transport mechanisms independently. And then once you have those pieces and you’re confident that those tests show
⏹️ ▶️ John that they work the way that they work, then you can write your series of scenarios with just a bunch of, you know, test data
⏹️ ▶️ John and fixtures. And, you know, at the beginning of your test, make a whole bunch of theoretical devices in different states
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you make them collided each other in different ways and you can do fuzz testing and randomize them and have them you
⏹️ ▶️ John know be turned on and turned off at random intervals to make sure everything resolves and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know anyway yeah they are they are super annoying to code and super annoying to test but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you code with that in mind from the beginning you can save yourself a lot of a lot of headaches
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember what the worst one I think I recall doing was involved a whole mess of stored procedure
⏹️ ▶️ John code in the database, which
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly easy to divorce from the database itself and you can’t really mock
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Well, you can mock it the other sense of the word, but anyway. So you had to make a new
⏹️ ▶️ John database instance for your testing purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ John fill it with crap data, and then run the stored procedures because I couldn’t figure out how to get that logic out of there and
⏹️ ▶️ John it had to be, anyway. It always, that’s the worst and the best project
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can recall working on that way. And the worst and it was the hardest to make it testable and the best in that
⏹️ ▶️ John it was this Byzantine system came up, it was come up with by some business person with
⏹️ ▶️ John a very complicated Excel spreadsheet. And there’s no way in hell I would have any confidence that I was correctly implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John this crazy specification if it wasn’t for tons and tons and tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of unit tests. It was the only, I mean, that’s the only way I could have even known when I was done it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just it was just nonsensical but it’s like well this thing does what you say in every obscure scenario and if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a corner case that isn’t covered by your stupid specification i’ll ask you about it and whatever you say i’ll implement and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll say look this does everything enjoy i
⏹️ ▶️ John marco’s sync system is considerably less complicated than that bs thing that i still think about sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sweats about it is a fairly simple system it It really is. It just, like, most of the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in sync have been on the app side, not on the server side. This was really, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might’ve been the first server-side sync bug that I’ve ever had that was, like, meaningful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s a combination. I mean, it’s like, which side is the bug on? Who’s behaving badly? You could say the server was
⏹️ ▶️ John confused because it was sending back the wrong version number, or whatever, but it’s like, you know, it doesn’t really matter which side it’s on. You’re all on the same team
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just trying to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John not have infinite loops. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you know? coalesce to some version have those are the worst tests to make like
⏹️ ▶️ John performance tests and like average number of syncs tests to try to catch out of bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John errors where you just throw an order of magnitude you’re like look I’m gonna run this whole set of unit tests and
⏹️ ▶️ John it should run somewhere in the thousands of requests across the virtual wire if it runs 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John or 100,000 maybe throw off test failure and say hey I’ve seen an order of magnitude change
⏹️ ▶️ John in the amount of traffic maybe something is wrong that’s those type of like heuristics, especially when it’s just your own tests,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re just like, you know, because what you saw was a crazy increase in traffic. But it could have been legit,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you don’t know that you don’t you don’t know what’s out there on the world, how many how many units and maybe everyone just updated all at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time or whatever. But during your unit tests, if you had triggered that that loop,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have seen the number of requests going back and forth be much higher than it was before. And then if you had some alert and that you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, Alright, well, none of my tests caught this bug. But this is really doing way more sinking traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John than I think it should. And I have to figure what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for what it’s worth, protocol oriented design and Swift makes a lot of this much easier. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. You can come right all you can write on my Swift code too. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. So when you were doing all these fixes, you said a lot of it was server side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you just deploy that crap live everywhere and just pray that everything was good? Like, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle deployments in general, and then also in these like red alert, all hands on deck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of situations?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to go through code review first, and then QA had to take a look at it. Then he had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to get sign officer management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, has to go through legal, you know. Yeah, well, first I run my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arsenal of unit tests and integration tests, whatever that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t honestly know what that means. I then have a stand-up in the parking lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Would you stop and answer the damn question?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I use Git to manage my web server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source code. And when I… I have local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development environment on my Mac. So I test things locally here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively informally. And then I’m careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this sounds terrible. I apologize to everybody who’s yelling at me right now through their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car speakers or whatever. And then I go to one of the servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of like maintains the master checkout and I do a git pull on there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I have a deploy script from there that rsyncs all the files to all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other servers that matter. And that script runs a few additional checks to make sure things like I didn’t commit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PHP syntax error, like it will refuse to push anything like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fairly, for the most part, fairly rudimentary pre-flight checks there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it syncs it. And I watch logs and I watch stats afterwards to see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is anything reporting errors, is anything jumping up and load weirdly, or having way, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more of anything that I’m measuring or way less than anything I’m measuring. I measure things like cache hit rates and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of, you know, database performance database lag stuff like that so
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re pulling servers out of the pool as you update them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no that’s not a PHP works you literally just replace the files like live
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but you’re not you’re not replacing all the files at once though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco does I think it does no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I know what you’re saying in practice it doesn’t matter really like for the kind of things I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the for the speed at which these things are happening the way PHP manages it and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error rate likely to happen from like somebody getting a partially updated checkout.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s enough to usually cause like one crash a year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, at the traffic, your normal traffic rates, yes, but at 10,000 requests a second, the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of requests that come in between the time the first file are syncs to a server and the last file are syncs to the server could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Well, that’s why I mean, yeah, 10,000 requests a second, like, you know, that that’s when you develop better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems, but my normal traffic level is like 100. I know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you were at 10,000 requests a second. Yes. That’s what you were at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, those weren’t actually getting to the application servers. The application servers kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John falling over. Oh, those
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All right. Well, anyway. The application servers were getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 500 of them. Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that the good thing about a truly disastrous scenario? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can’t possibly make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically, it’s like, it’s so broken now, the least of my concerns is somebody hitting a web server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually getting a response and having that response be wrong because of these two files that were out of sync.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, a 500 error or something because, you know, it’s a half-updated source code or whatever. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that actually never happens. Like, the files are seemingly updated atomically, or maybe PHP is just smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about when it, like, repicks them up from its compiled cache. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. You can write a unit test for this with a bunch of sleep calls somewhere and induce this failure mode and see
⏹️ ▶️ John what happens. Add it to your list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then hell will freeze over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. No, I mean, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing, like, I am fully aware that the proper ways to do these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are not the way I’m doing them for much of this stuff. The stuff that matters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m pretty solid on. Things like security, privacy, that stuff I’m pretty sure I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly as much as I possibly can. But things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, it’s more kind of like the advanced software development proper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco methodology kind of stuff, I do play fast and loose with. I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of that is because I never learned any other way. And I do regret never having worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a big software development organization that was well run. I never had that experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only worked in small places where there were either just very few developers or I was the only one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s, I never learned the more fancy systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from anyone else’s work environment. And I do regret that career-wise
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a whole other set of pathologies associated with those. Don’t believe those are actually, I mean, it’s just a different set of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco come with those. Right, right. So I can…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that’s the main reason I don’t do some of the more formalized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly burdensome stuff is because I don’t know how, because I’ve never done it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the secondary reason is because I just don’t see the need or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the justification for the time as a one-person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically part-time project. It’s hard for me to justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending a whole bunch of time and overhead and extra money on some of this stuff because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t afford the time overhead for that. I know there’s going to be a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who say, well, if you can’t afford to do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all. Would you rather Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not exist? are the kinds of decisions that I face. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you do what you can. And when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working for yourself on your own with a project that has fairly slim margins, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really hire anybody else. You got to make cuts somewhere. And either the product doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship or it doesn’t progress, or maybe you don’t write every unit test or
⏹️ ▶️ John know, for any, I mean, the good thing is like that the app, I’m assuming,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, since I was using it during the time and didn’t notice any of this, the app is resilient to the server being wonky for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not going to see a bunch of, you know, just the, the failures behind the scenes to sink or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John are not stopping you from listening to your podcast. So in some respects you have a grace
⏹️ ▶️ John period and protection against users. You know, it’s not as if your, your server starts throwing errors and all of a sudden every
⏹️ ▶️ John single person who’s using Overcast can’t listen to their podcast anymore. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not how it manifests. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t even see an error message unless you manually initiate a sync. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the pull to refresh and that sync fails, you’ll see a box. But if a routine sync in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fails, you won’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so I bet for most people, even though this was a busy, stressful day for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John they had no idea any of this was going on unless they followed the Overcast Twitter account because as far as they’re concerned, I mean maybe if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John using multiple devices, they would have noticed that it didn’t sync or something and gotten a little bit of a frowny face about your sync system.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as long as once you fixed it, it got in sync again and they didn’t have to do anything about it, you still got one
⏹️ ▶️ John leg up on like the stubborn inability to sync stuff that we all complain about in iCloud or
⏹️ ▶️ John messages or whatever, where there’s nothing you can do and it never fixes itself automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. I mean, like, you know, I’ve built, I built all my sync stuff to fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in offline and failure scenarios and to do the right thing, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. We’ll see if I ever test it, but as far as I know, it does the right thing because like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all comes like when I made Instapaper that was designed for offline use. So the whole thing was designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be to have a bunch of changes happen while offline and then sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later at some point and have it have it be correct. And so I took that same ethos to Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like any state of connections coming up and down and doing stuff offline doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online. It should always do the right thing when it gets a chance to connect again. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, I mean most people who are on Twitter and stuff, I got almost no support email about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server problems, and I got only a very small handful of tweets, most of which were people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s being slow to load this directory category, or being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow to load something that’s dynamically fetched. For the most part, that’s part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to do overcast server stuff without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive stress weighing on me all the time because honestly I don’t have the capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that anymore. I’m able to do overcast level of it because if the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service goes down, you know, worst case scenario, everything goes down. Pingdom lights up all of my devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with alerts. If for some reason that stays down for like two hours, most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my customers won’t even know. And that’s kind of freeing in a way. Not that I let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happen, but that I don’t have to be in constant fear of that happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an interesting point. By the way, speaking of RSI that you were talking about for a little
⏹️ ▶️ John RSI tip from a longtime sufferer, many things contribute to RSI. We’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about in the past, one of the really big contributors, surprisingly, which people don’t think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John is stress. As in, I’m not sure how much typing you did, Marco, on that day,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I would wager that it’s probably not much more typing than you did on a really productive coding day. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you are doing that typing frantically, while stressed, it makes a big
⏹️ ▶️ John difference in terms of how much inflammation and problems you get. So you because you’ll be typing
⏹️ ▶️ John harder because you’ll be more prone to you know, whatever stress hormones are going through your system more prone to inflammation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Being working when under pressure when you are stressed is a huge contributor
⏹️ ▶️ John to in addition to the typical things we talked about, like, how many keystrokes did you type? How long have you been using the computer? How many
⏹️ ▶️ John breaks have you been taking? Yes, all those happen when you’re stressed, you tend to not take breaks and everything like that. But merely the act
⏹️ ▶️ John of being stressed, depending on your type of RSI can be a huge contributing factor. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always been aware of that. And the year since my worst flare ups that like, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you just have to chill out like you can continue to work productively and take breaks. But while you’re working, if you find yourself like
⏹️ ▶️ John tensing up, and all that, you know, just all the muscles in your body tensing that is terrible for most kinds of RSI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and that was totally the case yesterday and today. And I usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t feel that, and I think you’re right. I mean, that’s obviously very related to things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back pain. Very, very related. And so I’ve certainly seen that before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I’m pretty sure I’m getting sick, and whenever I’m getting sick, the day or two beforehand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee stops working and I start getting RSI pain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Coffee stops
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. What does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get like the the energy boost, the the awakeness boost from the caffeine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can quit anytime, don’t worry.
CloudKit considerations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you had mentioned earlier that you were thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, and you said it kind of jokingly, but you said you were thinking about switching entirely to iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t kept up with some of the more late-breaking changes to iCloud in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year or two. I know that there’s some amount of support for getting to user data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the web. Have you looked deeply or even slightly deeply into that to see, like, could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you still do the Overcast web app with just iCloud?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know about as much about it as what you just said, which is, I know there’s some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they call it like a JavaScript interface, but basically it’s web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could do from a server too, I think. So there are ways that you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloud Kit from something that’s not an Apple device. I don’t know anything more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it than that. And obviously, if I decided to do something like this, the first thing I would do would be to look into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see what I’m dealing with here.
⏹️ ▶️ John your personal stress for the impotent rage of Apple’s bugs that you can’t fix, that you can’t get them to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but, you know, like, every level, whenever you, whenever you like outsource some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of your app’s functionality to some kind of third-party service like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when things break it’s not usually your fault. It is your problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s often nothing you can do about it. Like oftentimes the solution is just, well, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to wait a few days for this to get better or we have to wait an hour for this thing to be up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again or whatever. If it becomes longer than that, if it’s like we have to wait a few years for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get better, that becomes a bigger problem for you. You know, then that’s kind of on you that you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move to something else. But something like, you know, I mentioned I’m hosting at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode. I don’t manage their switches and if they have a network outage for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes, There’s nothing I can do about it. So it’s kind of freeing in that way because it’s like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have to sit back and wait for this to get fixed. And, you know, maybe if it goes on for a while, I might file a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to make sure they really know about it. But in every instance, they already did know about it and it gets fixed a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few minutes later. So it’s, you know, not that big of a problem. I mean, like, this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s like the web hosting continuum. Like, as you can move up the hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like web hosting abstractions, and each one you go up you know you get more things that are taken out of your hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again they are still your problem but you know it’s because it’s your if your customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have your app stop working your service stop working they don’t care if your web host is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a temporary switch outage they will go to you and they will say you are down you are broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one star useless I want all my money back plus damages etc you know them and the more you go up the stack you are saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself work but you’re also adding more and more things to the a giant list of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are out of your control. And again, it’s a balance, for the most part, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is freeing when you do that. But it does become a problem if the service you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on just starts to suck. It’s not just a temporary outage, but if things just take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a turn or quality slips, or they decide to get acquired and shut down the service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you were using or something like that, like that becomes your problem. And I try to minimize ways in which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that can be a problem for me by doing things like, you know, I’m just using standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux to host my stuff, and it’s running on VPSs, but I’m not doing anything fancy with the VPSs, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can go to any other VPS or dedicated server host and run the exact same stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with the exact same servers and no changes, really, just like moving servers over, which is not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep things in such a way that I try to abstract away as much as I can so I don’t have to worry about the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like power, connectivity, failed disks, stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to go all the way to a service like App Engine or Heroku or even Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Web Services, honestly, where things are so abstracted away that it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace for core functionality. I do use S3 for storing file uploads and stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s easier to swap out if it sucks than, oh, my entire app is written based on the assumptions of these handful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of services that I can’t actually replicate anywhere else but this provider.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like those companies you listed at least more superficially responsive to your
⏹️ ▶️ John concerns than Apple because all those things like oh I’ve been I was using this web server so I’m using Heroku
⏹️ ▶️ John and my thing is broken there’s some person you can contact who will get
⏹️ ▶️ John back to you about whatever your problem is maybe they won’t solve it immediately or whatever but historically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple has not been up to the standards of the other sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure service provider things in terms of oh yeah no there’s totally a support mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John and a place where you can report problems and expect a speedy response and report bugs and issues and
⏹️ ▶️ John get them resolved with apple i mean i’m just thinking of like all the poor game center developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and like i mean surely they are trying every possible mechanism to complain to apple about their issues with the game
⏹️ ▶️ John center that are causing their applications to hang or do weird things or have bugs um and not only
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not getting like a ticket reply in five minutes and a response in 24 hours or or whatever. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are just problems that are festering for years on end. And I have no idea if there’s any official channel
⏹️ ▶️ John contact going back and forth between them. But anyway, Apple’s got I was measuring not not
⏹️ ▶️ John so much that you wouldn’t want to use one of these services, but that Apple specifically like I like cloud kit and
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud, no matter how good they may be, it just doesn’t seem like Apple set up to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John type of service provider like Amazon’s web services or Heroku or whatever, where those are
⏹️ ▶️ John entire businesses that are about like you’re a developer, we provide a service, you can use our services and if you have problems
⏹️ ▶️ John with them, here’s what you do and you can file bugs and track those bugs with the system. And again, none of them are perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John all have problems and you know, all the trade offs you just talked about, but Apple just seems so far from
⏹️ ▶️ John from having even the basic sort of like table stakes to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a reliable third party web services provider like Microsoft Azure or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John though they may have the tech stuff, I feel like they don’t have the surrounding infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the tech. The people, the service, the tracking, the transparency, all the things that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would want in any service like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the reason that I would consider iCloud, first of all, like iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an umbrella term that covers lots of different things. And the things that are under it, oftentimes are not related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have vastly different reliabilities and reputations and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of general suitabilities for certain tasks. Cloud Kit, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what I would be moving to if I did that, I don’t know of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of big users of it, but the bit I’ve heard so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it is somewhat limited, but what it does, it does very well and it tends to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think a lot of people that I know are having trouble with CloudKit the way they did with things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud Core Data Sync, which was always a disaster, or even things like the Key Value Store, which sometimes get messed up a little bit or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. But for the most part, people think CloudKit is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for what it does, as far as I know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of the better technologies they’ve released. But the question is, nothing is perfect. The question is, if something
⏹️ ▶️ John goes wrong with CloudKit, or you’re suspicious, or you think like you don’t have visibility into something, and you can’t tell whether it’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John problem or their problem, or it’s down for a while, or your requests are slow. Do you have any hope of getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John resolved? Or is it just like, well, I just sit here and wait impotently, and either it improves or it doesn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and there’s all sorts of little things that would be problematic with CloudKit as well. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re totally right that, like, generally speaking, the kind of relationship that Apple has with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public and with developers is, in many ways, completely the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of approach and attitude and openness than what you’d want from your web services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provider. You know, that’s, it’s like, especially as a developer, it is really like you want companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are transparent and that are constantly iterating and making things better and that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally 100% solid reputations for web services and things like that. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just isn’t those things. That’s not the way they operate. Cloud Kit would also bring the second problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tying your overcast data to your device’s currently logged in iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, which is not always a safe assumption to make. So I mean, even in my house, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have, TIFF’s iPad Pro has the best speakers of any iOS device in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house, because the iPad Pro speakers are awesome. So we have this iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro signed into my Overcast account, and in every other way, it’s TIFF’s iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s signed into my Overcast account because we use it frequently as a kitchen or table speaker to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play podcasts out loud together. If I moved to CloudKit, then we’d have to either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign that entire iPad out of iCloud so that it would have, so it could have my account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of her account, even though it has all of her apps and her email and like everything else is hers on that iPad, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a second iPad, which is probably the solution Apple wants us to do, or switch to listening to her Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account for anything we listen to out loud, which is kind of a clunky solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, there’s problems with tying it to iCloud. There’s also the major advantage, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason I would consider using CloudKit is that right now I’m kind of using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud Key Value Store as a kludge. Is that the right pronunciation of kludge?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey believe that. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kludge or kludge? I think it’s kludge. Anyway, right now I’m using this kludge of Key Value Store along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the server-side sync and occasional push notifications to try to trigger a somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real-time connection kind of thing to sync things quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to each other. Another way to do that would be to have a persistent connection whenever the app is running.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know kind of like kind of like a chat like where you just have an open socket and you know you can make very fast things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server can tell you as soon as it gets things the main reasons I don’t do that are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not set up for it server side and I could you know I could become set up for it server side but that’s just it’s another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure thing I’d have to set up and maintain and and and learn all the ways it fails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be the bigger reason is that I’m a little concerned about battery usage on the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple maintains one of those connections for the entire device. That’s what I cloud use. That’s what push notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. There’s already a persistent connection to the device that Apple’s maintaining for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. So if I move to an iCloud based sync solution, I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the connection that’s already there. So the battery penalty would be either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimal or non-existent compared to any other sync solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know that for a fact that the cloud kit uses an open connection? I thought it would
⏹️ ▶️ John do it on demand. I mean, sure, OS manage, coalescing of requests, only opening the connection, do it, whatever. But is
⏹️ ▶️ John it a constantly open one? I thought that was maybe only for push notifications and not for Cloud Kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s a detail that I just don’t know the answer to yet. I mean, Apple doesn’t talk about it, I don’t think. Right, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are silent push notifications with the content available flag that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that I do send to the app whenever there’s a new episode. When NotificatioN notification, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t a message-only push. that was a silent content available push that woke up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to tell it, here’s a new episode to download. The app receives that notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the server checks locally with its preferences on whether to send that to you while it’s also incubating it to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that and then shows you a local notification. So I could use those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time the server gets exchanged, send a content available notification to all the other devices on that account. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do that, but those notifications are throttled and are not guaranteed to be delivered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer to how many content available push notifications can one device receive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably in, you know, say an hour or a day. That information I don’t think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widely available and is probably not worth relying upon anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these like little tricks and limitations that iOS does for power management and for, you know, keeping apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of from making sync loops and taking over the whole phone. I have to work around all those whereas cloud kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iCloud stuff, I believe, has special privileges and is able to operate in, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, more special ways. I think I had to double check on that. But that would be the main driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor to use it over, you know, any other kind of system. So if it could actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that well and reliably, that it might be worth tolerating Apple’s potential weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and being your service provider.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or use Microsoft Azure and not worry about this whole iCloud business. You wouldn’t get the advantage of the privileged background
⏹️ ▶️ John demon doing your bidding for you, but it seems like it would basically be more similar to what you have now. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your own back end, you make it however you want, you got your own account system, do whatever you want with it, and hopefully Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John would be more responsive because they’re hungry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But see, that’s the thing, like that’s really not that much different from what I have now. Like I’m already right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running instances of cloud computing resources with code that I write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing almost everything and managing almost everything. And the stuff that something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Azure would give me, things like account management and push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff’s all easy to me. Those are all solved problems with a couple hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines of code that I wrote years ago and that still work. Those are all totally solved problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not where the difficulty lies, really. The difficulty is in the stuff that, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these providers, you have to write. Even with CloudKit. CloudKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like iCloud Core Data tried to do the crazy thing of like, just give us access to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your local database and we’re just going to make it sync. I’m just going to make that work. That could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never work. Like things are not things are more complicated than that. It’s not that Apple did a bad job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of implementing that. It’s that the entire idea was deeply flawed from the start. That was never going to work well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CloudKit, the reason why people like it so much better is because design in such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that it is kind of like a web service that you interact with that notifies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you on changes and then you locally in the app do things like resolving conflicts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can still make your own infinite loop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So like you’re still writing the hard stuff, you’re just not running the servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like you’re still writing all the tricky complex sync logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app. And that’s true of any of these services because sync is just hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there really isn’t a generalized sync library that just works for everybody. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was, sync wouldn’t be hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you use iCloud and CloudKit, I would imagine there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some chance that you would actually not have noticed this infinite loop bug for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. Surely, they have the server capacity, the surge server capacity to
⏹️ ▶️ John eat that. Maybe someone would have contacted you, or maybe your
⏹️ ▶️ John usage would have been throttled, or you would have gone into those weird asterisks where they’re like, you have a certain number of,
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of data, number of requests, and if you exceed that, like, call us, or whatever, you know, or we’ll call
⏹️ ▶️ John you, or, you know, when they’re not your servers, you notice this because you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoa, my servers are dying, but Apple’s probably wouldn’t die, but things would probably get slower, and it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John like this sort of general malaise over overcast syncing, you’d be like, I wonder what’s going on here, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t have access to probably like, let me query the table to see what the max version number is oh 600
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems big you know so maybe maybe you’re on the right system
⏹️ ▶️ John After all, maybe this is the best of all possible worlds for you.
Sponsor: Audible.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Odell So we should talk quickly about Quitter, which is your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Mac app. And we don’t have to say too much about it because I presume you’re going to save a lot of this from under the radar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like we should at least mention it. And hopefully you had at least a couple of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say or at least recap what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so basically a few months back I wrote this blog post called Automatic Social Discipline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my idea was, I’ve been struggling over the last few years to try to balance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time I spend on Twitter and other social-like distractions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the time I spend working. And because of the nature of what I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way I’ve chosen to go about my career and how to promote my stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do kind of have to use Twitter and social tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a semi-regular basis. And even if it’s something simple, like when we start the live broadcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tweet from the ATP account, we’re live now and we give a link. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I make new blog posts, I also tweet about them to promote them, because that’s where a lot of traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes from these days. I have tried at various times to just not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter apps installed at all on my on my desktop. It ends up just not working like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try like only using it on my phone or only using it like on a laptop that I keep you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off to the side that isn’t my main computer. I’ve tried all sorts of stupid things like that and they never stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re because the reality is I do have to use Twitter on a semi-regular basis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my job as well as for enjoyment in life. By far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most efficient way for me to use Twitter is using Tweetbot on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By far. I’m so fast that I can go through so much. It’s the Mac, so everything’s kind of like this multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick environment. I’m very efficient with that. So if I’m going to be using Twitter for work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be on the Mac, and it should be on my primary Mac. That’s just how it works for me most efficiently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the question is, how do I manage that without spending so much time on Twitter all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ever getting any work done. And the answer, of course, is self-control. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have enough of that when it comes to this. So we have to start building hacks and tools, like for to solve many people’s self-control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with other things like this is what we do. Right. We try to hack around. We try to build self-control replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools or at least assistance tools. And I started seeing this was a problem with Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I use the app called Rescue Time, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a like app time tracking app. It sits in your menu bar and it uses a web service which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit creepy. I’m a little wary about that. But it sits in your menu bar and it watches what apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re using and it times it and it categorizes things into like, you know, work versus entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus whatever. And then every week it emails you a report saying this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you worked on your computers for X hours and you spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six hours in Xcode, five hours in Logic, four hours in Adobe Audition. And then like every Every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was also seeing four hours in TweetBot. And it’s like, ooh, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of time spent in TweetBot. It started to add up over about a year. I’m like, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really not comfortable. I need to do something about this. Because I kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling like I wanted to work better and use my time more effectively and get more done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every week I’d be getting these emails saying, hey, you’re using Twitter. You used Twitter for six hours this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. And then Slack came around and made it a problem even worse, because now Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is even worse for blending work and distraction, because it’s made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work communication. And it’s so easy to just become like a constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drain of your attention and just constant like peppering all day of little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny distractions. Anyway, I started seeing Slack bubble up in the list as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then all of a sudden I’m spending like six hours a day on Slack and Twitter combined, or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day, six hours a week on like Slack and Twitter, and it just it started becoming so many hours. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, my god, this is like this is eating into all my productivity. Six hours, eight hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is terrible. I have to do something about this. As I said, a few months ago I wrote this post called Automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Social Discipline. What I did was I basically just wrote an Apple script and I scheduled it with LaunchD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every ten minutes it would run and it would just check is tweet bought the active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app right this second. If not quit the app and same thing with slack is slack is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the active app right now. Keep it otherwise kill it. And that ended up being way too aggressive for slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I do use slack oftentimes for work purposes. In fact, the majority of the time using slack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s for work purposes actually. So that like I couldn’t have slack be just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quit constantly like because the way this would work too. It’s like it was just checking every 10 minutes and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you active right now? If not, quit. So oftentimes you’d be, you know, click on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slack, type something, switch to another window, and two seconds later, Slack disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re like, okay, this is kind of unfortunate. Same thing, you know, with Twitter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. So it was just, it was a little bit too dumb of a solution. Recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started making a Mac app called Quitter. And it sits in the menu bar, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because a native app has a way better way to do this, rather than just like constantly pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like what’s the active app right now? Is it this? Quit. You can actually observe the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workspace and you can there’s no pulling involved. You get notified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the active window or the active application changes. And so now I’m able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things way more efficiently and way smarter where now I can have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch for changes and for the list of apps that you want to quit after certain time intervals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can quit them not every 10 minutes checking to see if they’re running and then quitting them immediately, but it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start the timer when you click away from the app and then after a certain amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you don’t click back to the app, then it can fire the timer and quit them. Or I also built in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option to hide them for Slack because for me that’s more efficient for the amount of use of Slack. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac app version of this is way better. It also isn’t an Apple script that has to have a launchd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco command-line process to register and register it so it’s also a lot more friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other people to use and for me to distribute as a thing people use. Now the effect of running this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is that it really does work. For me I have because I’ve been measuring this with rescue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time like I’ve been using first that script and then a few weeks ago switching to this app but using this for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while now and I have seen a reliable drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my usage hours as reported by rescue time of these social apps that I keep forcibly quitting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also has the interesting effect where it just makes Twitter seem unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The effect is basically it seems like Tweetbot just crashes every few minutes. So it kind of keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a little bit in check for me. It’s not this thing that’s always there. There’s not always a new thing I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be looking at. Also critically, I set it so that these apps are not in my dock. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running. So that when they get forced quit, they’re just gone. out of sight, out of mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to then explicitly think, oh, I want to go check Twitter now. And so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to do, not only has the total amount of time spent in these apps dropped noticeably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably by at least 50%, if I can guess, but I’m also finding that I’m now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more often having long, productive spans. Because that was where where these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps really hurt, is in that constant peppering of new stuff coming in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every minute, every 30 seconds, or or something new to look at, and you’re constantly context switching back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both technically and mentally, or context switching. And that, to me, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroys any kind of meaningful productivity I’m having on things like coding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or editing a podcast, or writing. These things that just, like, I was having such a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying focused on my work, when these things just kept coming in on a back of our window, just, oh, it’s off to the side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, oh, there’s something new to read, new ad reply, new Slack thing, somebody being funny, whatever. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps are so frequently just removed from view that I’m able to have these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long productive spans where I can like code for three hours straight, four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours straight. I can write an entire blog post and then open up Twitter after I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish it to go promote it. It just it really has changed the way I work a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot and it also gave me an excuse to learn how to write stuff for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a few little apps for myself or toy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps or half-butted apps that were not at all releasable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, I really don’t know how to make Mac software. At least, I don’t know how to make good Mac software, I should say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, this was a nice intro. I’ve been wanting to learn it for a while. This was a nice intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start that. It’s not in the App Store because it can’t be. It can’t be Sandbox because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sandbox apps can’t quit other apps, then it’s fine. I’m just distributing it. It’s free. It’s just a zip file you download off my website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of amazing to distribute software this way for somebody who’s only ever really professionally worked in the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we talked about this a few weeks back on the show, I got the impression that pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody wanted this except me, which is not unusual for things I make, by the way. I make all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crazy stuff for myself that nobody else would ever want. This I really thought was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things, but it ends up I released it and it’s gotten over 25,000 downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s free. I’m not making anything off of it, at least not yet. Who knows if I ever will, but a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least want to try this and that’s pretty cool. I don’t think it’ll ever become anything big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean if I if I wanted to give it all my time, maybe I could basically make it, you know, rescue time replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that, but I don’t think it’s worth quite that much. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really cool to just kind of see the other side, to see what it’s like having a Mac app, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what Mac programming is like to a very small extent, and to distribute apps directly. That’s kind of cool and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just am really happy that it works, that I’ve actually solved this problem I had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I’m not perfect yet by any means, but this is by far the most effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method that I’ve come up with yet for maintaining a healthy balance of distracting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps versus getting work done.
⏹️ ▶️ John The app has two big things going for it. One free everyone loves free right and second has got the same thing going for
⏹️ ▶️ John it that like self-help books have like everyone to some degree feels the thing that you’re talking about which is like boy
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could be more productive and I was less distracted or whatever. And it’s like you said well why don’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ John not be distracted well you know people need people want tools to help them with how they say like I’ve been trying to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John with just sort of willpower alone or trying to change my habit or turn over a new leaf and it hasn’t been working is there something I
⏹️ ▶️ John can do? Is there some system I can employ? Or better yet product I can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John or better you still product I can get for free, that will help me along this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so yeah, who doesn’t like who wouldn’t download this app if people know you, and they know
⏹️ ▶️ John you write software, and everybody has that feeling that they’re not particularly productive, and you offer a download
⏹️ ▶️ John for free, click on it, there you go, you got it. That offers a way to potentially help
⏹️ ▶️ John you be more productive, I bet a lot of people can try it. How many people find it useful and stick with it? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have any statistics on that, but that is a like, like a lot of self-help things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some systems work for some people. Sometimes they don’t work for other people. So who knows? Um, since it’s free, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John you really care one way or the other, but yeah, like the, I feel like the only way you could really turn this into a
⏹️ ▶️ John serious endeavor is to basically be a better rescue time. Um, and I, before you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, you should probably talk to the rescue time people to ask how their business is going before you go and try to take
⏹️ ▶️ John it all because it could be that if you totally replace rescue time in the market you would still make
⏹️ ▶️ John no money because it’s not a big market but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I mean the money thing is an interesting question I mean I I don’t know what it’s like to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac software I’m still not doing that so I don’t know what the market is I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure like any kind of software it probably depends a lot on what exactly you’re selling I I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rescue time I’ve haven’t actually paid for their business model is I think some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like premium service or something. I don’t know. I’ve been using it for years and never given them a dime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whatever their business model is does not include me in it. So maybe that’s a problem. I don’t know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to know what the money market is like on Mac stuff unless I actually try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know if I’m ready to do that yet or what I would do that with necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I do think it’s interesting to consider. And for whatever it’s worth, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have like analytics running in the app, but the The app does include Sparkle to check my server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for updates, which is the thing you have to worry about. How does your app update itself when you’re outside of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store? So I have checked while you were talking there at this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was listening also, don’t worry. But I checked as you were talking. And at this moment, I have 27,000 downloads of the zip file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 2,500 IPs that have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checking the auto-update XML file. So roughly a 10% rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who are actually like running this app after downloading it, which I think is actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I mean, yeah, that’s roughly along with what I would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since you don’t have one of those little disk images that opens that shows your app icon and an arrow drawn
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey background showing you
⏹️ ▶️ John to slash applications. I mean, you laugh at that, but like one of the advantages of the Mac App Store is
⏹️ ▶️ John that you press a button in the Mac App Store and in theory, an application appears in your application folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s no there’s no other process. Whereas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then that’s also mitigated. That’s mitigated by the problem of like a Alright, I clicked this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, I bought it. Now, where is it? How
⏹️ ▶️ John do I launch it? If people can find launch launch? What do you call lunch? What is the thing called
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in your dock by default for regular people. And if they download it, it’ll be all sparkly. And they should
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to find it. But like what you’re doing is best case scenario with the default settings, they they click your zip file
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari, it automatically unzips it and what they end up is your application icon in their downloads
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. If they even know how to get to your downloads folder, it’s a very good chance that if they can even find your
⏹️ ▶️ John application icon, they’ll just double click it and run it from your downloads folder, which will probably work fine with for your application unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you have specific code that says, Hey, it looks like you’ve launched me from the downloads folder. Would you like me to quit and put myself
⏹️ ▶️ John into the application folder and relaunch myself?
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to install apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s actually an open source thing that’s like moved to application folder. Yeah, like You’ve probably seen a lot of apps that offer this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. But these are all problems that are not part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac App Store experience. Like I said, the auto updating with Sparkle, handled by the Mac App Store. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the general problem of how do I, quote unquote, install a Mac application.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, anyone who knows anything about Macs, this is not a problem at all. But if you ever want to go to a broader market,
⏹️ ▶️ John which may not be like people who read your blog and your Twitter feed and download your applications because they
⏹️ ▶️ John know you, all those people probably know how to install applications. I can tell you in the general public, anything that involves
⏹️ ▶️ John even an auto-expanding zip file or a disk image or where do you put the application and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is still one of the areas that I think is underestimated.
⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t talk about it much these days, but it’s one of the huge advantages that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and phone apps and app stores have in general. It’s like, see app I want, put finger on screen
⏹️ ▶️ John now app now I have app tap
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tap like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it you know there is no mounting and unmounting speaking of uh casey yank out usb keys
⏹️ ▶️ John disk images there are no zip files there are no expanding there’s no dragging things to folders there’s none of
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff uh the mac app store is not as bad as zip files or dmgs but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as the ios app store and that that simple part that simple aspect of like how can we get more people to
⏹️ ▶️ John download and use more apps it’s like you got to get rid of the part where they have to quote quote unquote install it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, agreed. I mean that the whole system, especially with dmgs. I mean, that’s like the idea like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the idea of a disk image is it’s such like a geeky abstraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very confusing and tedious to manage for people like I it’s how that ever became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard. I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this camera. Just are awesome. Technologically speaking, they were especially they were awesome in the classic Mac OS days because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I mean, like for a text heavy people, disk images are an amazing convenience and a great
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But as a way, as the way to distribute software is one of two major ways, like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last 10 era, it’s like you’ve got your zip file that expands to an app bundle is one way, and then you’ve got your disk image
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the other way. And then the Mac app store is off to the side there. And all, both of those systems
⏹️ ▶️ John have problems for novice users. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, totally. Does this make you think any differently about some of those like tools that you’ve developed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for yourself that are native Mac apps? Does it make you think differently about perhaps releasing them for real?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, yeah. But I also saw with Quitter, this is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very simple app. And even just getting it up to a minimum level of quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would want to actually release it to the public was probably more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work than it deserves, logically business-wise. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distraction for me for the most part. It might become a business someday, but it isn’t today. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have just used Twitter to quit Xcode when it was in the front most app. Stop distracting me from your important Slack and Twitter work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distraction. One of the things is, a few hours after I released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter, there were a few embarrassing little shortcomings and bugs.
Quitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should talk quickly about Quitter, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your new Mac app. And we don’t have to say too much about it because I presume you’re going to save a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from under the radar, but I feel like we should at least mention it and hopefully you had at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least a couple of things to say or at least recap what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so basically a few months back I wrote this blog post called Automatic Social Discipline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my idea was I’ve been struggling over the last few years to try to balance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time I spend on Twitter and other social-like distractions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the time I spend working. And because of the nature of what I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way I’ve chosen to go about my career and how to promote my stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do kind of have to use Twitter and social tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a semi-regular basis. And even if it’s something simple, like when we start the live broadcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tweet from the ATP account. We’re live now and we give a link and you know when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I make new blog posts I also tweet about them to promote them because that’s where a lot of traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes from these days. I have tried at various times to just not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter apps installed at all on my on my desktop. It ends up just not working like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try like only using it on my phone or only using it like on a laptop that I keep you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off to the side that isn’t my main computer. I’ve I’ve tried all sorts of stupid things like that and they never stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re because the reality is I do have to use Twitter on a semi-regular basis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my job as well as for enjoyment in life. By far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most efficient way for me to use Twitter is using tweet bot on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far like I’m so fast that I can go through so much it’s the Mac so everything’s kind of like this multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick environment. It’s very I’m very efficient with that so if I’m going to be using Twitter for work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be on the Mac, and it should be on my primary Mac. That’s just how it works for me most efficiently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the question is, how do I manage that without spending so much time on Twitter all the time, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever getting any work done? And the answer, of course, is self-control. But I don’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that when it comes to this. So we have to start building hacks and tools, like, for instance, all of many people self-control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with other things like this is what we do, right? We try to hack around. We try I started to build self-control replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools, or at least assistance tools. And I started seeing this was a problem with Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I used the app called Rescue Time, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app time tracking app. It sits in your menu bar and it uses a web service, which is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit creepy. I’m a little wary about that, but it sits in your menu bar and it watches what apps you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using and it times it. And it categorizes things into work versus entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus whatever. And then every week it emails you a report saying this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you worked on your computers for X hours and you spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six hours in Xcode, five hours in Logic, four hours in Adobe Audition. And then like every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was also seeing four hours in TweetBot. And it’s like, ooh, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of time spent in TweetBot. It started to add up over about a year. I’m like, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really not comfortable. that I need to do something about this because I kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling like I wanted to work better and use my time more effectively and get more done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every week I’d be getting these emails saying, Hey, you’re using Twitter. You used Twitter for six hours this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. And then Slack came around and made the problem even worse because now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slack is even worse for blending work and distraction because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s made for work communication and it’s It’s so easy to just become a constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drain of your attention and just constant peppering all day of little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny distractions. Anyway, I started seeing Slack bubble up in the list as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then all of a sudden I’m spending six hours a day on Slack and Twitter combined, or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day, six hours a week on Slack and Twitter and it started becoming so many hours. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, my God, this is eating into all of my productivity. Six hours, eight hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is terrible. I have to do something about this. As I said, a few months ago, I wrote this post called Automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Social Discipline. What I did was I basically wrote an Apple script and I scheduled it with launch D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every 10 minutes, it would run and it would just check, is TweetBot the active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app right this second? If not, quit the app. And same thing with Slack. If Slack is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the active app right now, keep it, otherwise, kill it. And that ended up being way too aggressive for Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I do use Slack oftentimes for work purposes. In fact, the majority of the time I’m using Slack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s for work purposes, actually. So I couldn’t have Slack be just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quit constantly. The way this would work, too, it was just checking every 10 minutes and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you active right now? If not, quit. So oftentimes, you’d click on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slack, type something, switch to another window, and two seconds later, Slack disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re like, okay, this is kind of unfortunate. Same thing with Twitter and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a little bit too dumb of a solution. Recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started making a Mac app called Quitter. It sits in the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because a native app has a way better way to do this, rather than just constantly polling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see what’s the active app right now. Is it this? Quit. You can actually observe the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workspace. There’s no polling involved. you get notified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the active window or the active application changes. And so now I’m able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things way more efficiently and way smarter, where now I can have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch for changes and for the list of apps that you want to quit after certain time intervals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can quit them not every 10 minutes checking to see if they’re running and then quitting them immediately, but it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start the timer when you click away from the app. And then after a certain amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you don’t click back to the app, then it can fire the timer and quit them. Or else you build the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option to hide them for Slack. Because for me, that’s more efficient for the amount of use Slack. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac app version of this is way better. It also isn’t an Apple script that has to have a launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D command line process to register and register it. So it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more friendly for other people to use and for me to distribute as a thing people use. Now the effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of running this app is that it really does work. For me, because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been measuring this with RescueTime, I’ve been using first that script and then a few weeks ago switching to this app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using this for a while now, and I have seen a reliable drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my usage hours as reported by RescueTime of these social apps that I keep forcibly quitting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also has the interesting effect where it just makes Twitter seem unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The effect is basically it seems like Tweetbot just crashes every few minutes. So it kind of keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a little bit in check for me. It’s not this thing that’s always there. There’s not always a new thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be looking at. Also critically, I set it so that these apps are not in my dock. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running. So that when they get forced quit, they’re just gone. They’re out of sight, out of mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to then explicitly think, oh, I want to go check Twitter now. And so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to do, not only has the total amount of time spent in these apps dropped noticeably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably by at least 50% if I can guess, but I’m also finding that I’m now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more often having long, productive spans. Because that was where these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps really hurt, is in that constant peppering of new stuff coming in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every minute, every 30 seconds, or something new to look at, and you’re constantly context switching back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both technically and mentally, or context switching. And that to me just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroys any kind of meaningful productivity I’m having on things like coding, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing a podcast, or writing. These things that just like… I was having such a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying focused on my work when these things just kept coming in on a back of our window. It’s just, oh, it’s off to the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, oh, there’s something new to read, new ad reply, new Slack thing, somebody being funny, whatever. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps are so frequently just removed from view that I’m able to have these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long productive spans where I can like code for three hours straight, four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours straight. I can write an entire blog post and then open up Twitter after I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish it to go promote it. It just it really has changed the way I work a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot and it also gave me an excuse to learn how to write stuff for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a few little apps for myself or toy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps or half-butted apps that were not at all releasable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, I really don’t know how to make Mac software. At least, I don’t know how to make good Mac software, I should say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, this was a nice intro. I’ve been wanting to learn it for a while. This was a nice intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start that. It’s not in the App Store because it can’t be. It can’t be Sandbox because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sandbox apps can’t quit other apps, then it’s fine. I’m just distributing it. It’s free. It’s just a zip file you download off my website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of amazing to distribute software this way for somebody who’s only ever really professionally worked in the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we talked about this a few weeks back on the show, I got the impression that pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody wanted this except me, which is not unusual for things I make, by the way. I make all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crazy stuff for myself that nobody else would ever want. This I really thought was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things, but it ends up I released it and it’s gotten over 25,000 downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s free. I’m not making anything off of it, at least not yet. Who knows if I ever will, but a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least want to try this and that’s pretty cool. I don’t think it’ll ever become anything big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean if I if I wanted to give it all my time maybe I could basically make it you know rescue time replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that, but I don’t think it’s worth quite that much. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really cool to just kind of see the other side, to see what it’s like having a Mac app, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what Mac programming is like to a very small extent, and to distribute apps directly. That’s kind of cool and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just am really happy that it works, that I’ve actually solved this problem I had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I’m not perfect yet by any means, but this is by far the most effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method that I’ve come up with yet for maintaining a healthy balance of distracting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps versus getting work done.
⏹️ ▶️ John The app has two big things going for it. One free everyone loves free right and second has got the same thing going for
⏹️ ▶️ John it that like self-help books have like everyone to some degree feels the thing that you’re talking about which is like boy
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could be more productive and I was less distracted or whatever. And it’s like you said well why don’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ John not be distracted well you know people need people want tools to help them with how they say like I’ve been trying to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John with just sort of willpower alone or trying to change my habit or turn over a new leaf and it hasn’t been working is there something I
⏹️ ▶️ John can do? Is there some system I can employ? Or better yet product I can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John or better you still product I can get for free, that will help me along this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so yeah, who doesn’t like who wouldn’t download this app? If people know you, and they know
⏹️ ▶️ John you write software, and everybody has that feeling that they’re not particularly productive, and you offer a download
⏹️ ▶️ John for free, click on it, there you go, you got it. That offers a way to potentially help
⏹️ ▶️ John you be more productive. I bet a lot of people can try it. How many people find it useful and stick with it? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have any statistics on that, but that is a like a lot of self-help things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some systems work for some people. Sometimes they don’t work for other people. So who knows? Since it’s free, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John you really care one way or the other. But yeah, like the, I feel like the only way you could really turn this into a
⏹️ ▶️ John serious endeavor is to basically be a better rescue time. And before you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, you should probably talk to the rescue time people to to ask how their business is going before you go and try to take
⏹️ ▶️ John it all. Because it could be that if you totally replace Rescue Time in the market, you would still make
⏹️ ▶️ John no money because it’s not a big market. But who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, the money thing is an interesting question. I mean, I, I, I don’t know what it’s like to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac software. I’m still not doing that. So I don’t know what the market is. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure like any kind of software, it probably depends a lot on what exactly you’re selling. I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rescue time I’ve haven’t actually paid for their business model is I think some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like premium service or something I don’t know. I’ve been using it for years and never give them a dime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whatever their business model is does not include me in it. So maybe maybe that’s a problem. I don’t know I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to know what the money market is like on Mac stuff unless I actually try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know if I’m ready to do that yet or what I would do that with necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I do think it’s interesting to consider. And for whatever it’s worth, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have like analytics running in the app, but the app does include Sparkle to check my server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for updates, which is the thing you have to worry about. How does your app update itself when you’re outside of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store? And so I have, I checked while you were talking there at this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was listening also, don’t worry. But I checked as you were talking. And at this moment, I have 27,000 downloads of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zip file and 2,500 IPs that have been checking the auto-update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XML file. So roughly a 10% rate of people who are actually like running this app after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloading it, which I think is actually pretty good. I mean, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly along with what I would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since you don’t have one of those little disk images that opens that shows your app icon and an arrow
⏹️ ▶️ John drawn on the window
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey background showing you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey into a SYN link
⏹️ ▶️ John to slash applications. I mean, you laugh at that, but one of the advantages of the Mac App Store is
⏹️ ▶️ John that you press a button in the Mac App Store and in theory, an application appears in your application folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no other process, whereas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then that’s also mitigated. That’s mitigated by the problem of like, A, all right, I clicked this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, I bought it, now where is it? How
⏹️ ▶️ John do I launch it? If people can find Launch, what do you call it? Launch, what is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco called? Launchpad. Launchpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s in your dock by default for regular people and if they just download it, it’ll be all sparkly and
⏹️ ▶️ John they should be able to find it. But like, what you’re doing is, best case scenario with the default settings, they click your
⏹️ ▶️ John zip file in Safari, it automatically unzips it, and what they end up is your application icon in their
⏹️ ▶️ John downloads folder. If they even know how to get to your downloads folder, there’s a very good chance that if they can even
⏹️ ▶️ John find your application icon, they’ll just double click it and run it from your downloads folder, which will probably work fine for your application,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you have specific code that says, hey, it looks like you launched me from the downloads folder, would you like me to quit and put
⏹️ ▶️ John myself into the application folder and relaunch myself?
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to install apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s actually an open source thing that’s like moved to application folder. Yeah, like you’ve probably seen a lot of apps that offer this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. But this is all these are all these are all problems that are not part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac App Store experience. Like I said, the auto updating with sparkle handled by the Mac App Store, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the general problem of how do I quote unquote, install a Mac application,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, anyone who knows anything about Max, this is not a problem at all. But if you ever want to go to a a broader market,
⏹️ ▶️ John which may not be like people who read your blog and your Twitter feed and download your applications because they
⏹️ ▶️ John know you all those people probably know how to install applications. But I can tell you in the general public, anything that involves
⏹️ ▶️ John even an auto expanding zip file or a disk image or where do you put the application and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is by it is still one of one of the areas that I think is underestimated.
⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t talk about much these days, but it’s one of the huge advantages that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and phone apps and app stores have in general. It’s like, see app I want, put finger on screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John now app, now I have app, tap,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tap, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You know, there is no mounting and unmounting, speaking of Casey Yanking at USB Keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Disk images, there are no zip files, there are no expanding, there’s no dragging things to folders, there’s none of
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. The Mac App Store is not as bad as zip files or DMGs, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as the iOS App Store. And that simple part, that simple aspect of like, How can we get more people to
⏹️ ▶️ John download and use more apps? It’s like you gotta get rid of the part where they have to quote unquote install it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, agreed. I mean, the whole system, especially with DMGs, I mean, that’s like, the idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the idea of a disk image is, it’s such like a geeky abstraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very confusing and tedious to manage for people. Like, it’s, how that ever became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard, I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, disk images are awesome technologically speaking. They were especially awesome in the classic Mac OS days because
⏹️ ▶️ John you, you know, I mean, like for a text heavy people, disk images are an amazing convenience and a great
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but as a way, as the way to distribute software is one of two major ways, like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the OS X era, it’s like you’ve got your zip file that expands to an app bundle is one way. And then you’ve got your disk image
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the other way. And then the Mac app store is off to the side there. And all, both of those systems
⏹️ ▶️ John have problems for novice users. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, totally. Does this make you think any differently about some of those tools that you’ve developed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for yourself that are native Mac apps? Does it make you think differently about perhaps releasing them for real?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, yeah. But I also, I saw with Quitter, this is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very simple app. And even just getting it up to a minimum level of quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would want to actually release it to the public was probably more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work than it deserves, like, you know, logically, business-wise. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distraction for me for the most part. It might become a business someday, but it isn’t today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should have just used Twitter to quit Xcode when it was in the front most app. Stop distracting you from your important Slack and Twitter work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distraction. I mean, one of the things is, like a few hours after I released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter, there were a few kind of embarrassing little shortcomings and bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest things was in the app, I never explained the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of quitting after X minutes of what. And a lot of people who downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it who didn’t read the post very closely said, well, I told her to quit after a half hour. It didn’t quit. What
⏹️ ▶️ John happened? Your app is broken, one star, useless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so there was like this completely embarrassing oversight where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app it never said anything about quitting after what. And the answer is quitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after an activity which is defined as not being the foreground application. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t guess that’s what inactivity means. I would guess inactivity means the app isn’t doing everything. Like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it quit my mail app, but it was totally downloading mail in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, nobody downloads mail anymore. Some people have said it quit iTunes when it was playing music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, okay, well, that’s interesting. The app had a number of… The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other major shortcoming is the app itself didn’t have an about screen or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really to tell you, if you just forgot about where you got this app and a few months later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just saw this app and you launched it, you’d have no idea where it came from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to get more information about it, who made it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was no information in the app about the app. So the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a couple of those minor… Oh, and you could also enter negative times. That was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of like, you know, just minor polish flaws, basically, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas in which I did not make a releasable quality app, but released anyway, I wanted to issue a quick update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I fixed all the problems, tested it with all sorts of unit tests and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration tests and parking lot tests. And then I just put the new zip file on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my server and regenerated the sparkle manifest, which I have a script to do in one command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was released immediately to everyone. Neat, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody had to approve it. It didn’t have to sit around and wait for days. I knew that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the really worst case scenario, if I really botched things in this update, I could just issue another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. It was kind of amazing. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every Mac programmer is like, ugh, these stupid iOS fools. They don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re missing. Now I know what I’m missing, and so it’s kind of intoxicating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can see where it could be dangerous, but the appeal to me of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distributing apps directly to people without this giant middleman that is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinionated and picky and slow is very appealing on a number of levels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the experience of doing this… First of all, I’ve seen just enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what it’s like to develop a Mac app with AppKit and everything. it to know it would take me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time to become an expert at it and that it’s not easy and that there’s lots of things to think about and consider.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also showed me that it’s possible and that there is some kind of market here. I don’t know how big the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for all the other stuff I’d want to make, but there is a market there. And the idea of direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to your customers is so refreshing and foreign to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am definitely going to be more likely to try to make more Mac apps in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows what, if anything, will actually come out of that feeling to the public, you know, eventually, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m certainly interested. I’m much more likely to try it now than I was before. Wait
⏹️ ▶️ John till you learn you can charge $99 for them. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you have to answer
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you? That’s a good question. I don’t know. Wow. I’ve got to think outside the
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Apple earnings doom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you guys hear that Apple’s doomed? Doomed I tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, they’re fine. They’re gonna be fine. I’m gonna keep generating tons of money who cares, you know Like Wall Street cares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally get why Wall Street cares about Apple’s financial performance because that’s their job You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know It’s Wall Street’s job to care about quarterly earnings and stuff as an Apple user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even as an Apple developer I honestly don’t care. It’s worth hearing in broad strokes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh the iPads down everything’s kind of sagging for a quarter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everything sags for a year, let me know. That might be more interesting. But to have these little quarterly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates of, ooh, well this year, this quarter was a little bit worse than last year this quarter, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular pattern hasn’t happened in a long time, even though they made billions of dollars. It’s like, okay, well, it’s the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you’re an analyst, or if you’re the kind of person who reads analysts, this matters to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you are a user, or a developer, or a fan, I just don’t see how the finance stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think Apple’s reaction to the finance stuff might matter, like not so much the results themselves of what Apple says about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, that’s why I listen to the earning calls or read transcripts of them or whatever is, yeah, you want to get the news and
⏹️ ▶️ John the news is, you know, trends are continuing and there are no surprise. I mean, because Apple gives guidance on
⏹️ ▶️ John its on what it thinks its financial results are going to be next quarter and then the next quarter comes. And thus far, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much been within their guidance. They give a range like, well, we expect a low of this and high of that and they land somewhere in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And people still freak out about it. Wall Street still freaks out. But whatever, like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not earth shattering. But what Apple says during those calls to, I mean, for the most part, what Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do during these calls is to, if something seems bad, Apple says something to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John seem not so bad because Apple doesn’t like it when their stock price goes down. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if things are good, Apple trumpets that they’re good and tells you why they’re good and how amazing it is
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know how proud they are and blah, blah, blah. that’s the more interesting part of earnings is how the
⏹️ ▶️ John company reacts. And this, this recent one, and in the lead up to this recent
⏹️ ▶️ John set of results, uh, the thing I’ve been noticing about Apple is the emphasis
⏹️ ▶️ John on their services business. If talking about it, uh, you know, every chance they get.
⏹️ ▶️ John And during the earnings call, they emphasize it as a growth, you know, as the part of their business that’s growing and doing well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and That that bothers me a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit well It bothers me and it could be a good thing first. I’ll say the optimistic side It could be a good thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in that all right services business is growing and Apple you know what is the good
⏹️ ▶️ John news Apple well iPhone sales are down year over year, but they’re still doing really well But if you want a story about something that’s growing
⏹️ ▶️ John hey We’ve got things that are growing too, but that’s what everyone’s always looking for you know Where is the growth going to come from next?
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the Apple watch at least not for a little while or wearables or whatever but services are growing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s good. And Apple wants to emphasize that and maybe by emphasizing services,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by making more and more money from it, it will make Apple invest more in it. Because if they see that as their next big
⏹️ ▶️ John growth opportunity, they will you know, they will invest in themselves and try to continue to make it grow. And that will be better
⏹️ ▶️ John because historically speaking, Apple services have not been great. On the flip side, the pessimistic side,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Apple can be proud of the growth of its services segment,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also not really get any better at services. Like I don’t know if you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple into a services company. They seem so far from, we talked about before, but then you know the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John kit versus you know Microsoft Azure or AWS or any of these other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just don’t seem like they understand what it takes to be really great there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that’s going to become an important part of the business, they need to get way better at it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed instead of what it seems to me is they they’re finding ways to make more money from their existing customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s growing their quote unquote services revenue. Hey, we have all these people who buy these devices that they love. Can we find
⏹️ ▶️ John more ways to monetize them, which I guess is fine as far as business models go,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s kind of been the inverse of what it’s always been, which is by our hardware and the services just make our hardware more attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s like All those people who have our hardware, they’re our potential source of service revenue, so we should make services
⏹️ ▶️ John for them. But when I look at the services they offer, I don’t feel like for the most part they’re best in class in
⏹️ ▶️ John any category. And if your next big growth opportunity is
⏹️ ▶️ John as a services company, you’re gonna get way, way better at services. And I don’t see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe that’s going on internally, but externally Apple’s saying, we love services, we have a lot of customers, we
⏹️ ▶️ John found ways to get money from them, isn’t that great? And I think, no, that’s not really great. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, monetizing your existing, the existing customers of your hardware that we all love,
⏹️ ▶️ John and even your operating systems that we all love, trying to make them pay for services that we
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerate or accept because of platform integration, that doesn’t make me feel particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John good about Apple or its services. So I really hope my first scenario is what happens, that services end up being
⏹️ ▶️ John a growth business and that Apple gets much, much better at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s also option number three. This might have just been what they said to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spin on these calls that they knew were going to be down in hardware sales.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This might have just been something they told Wall Street to just kind of spin it and frame it in a better way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to soften the blow a little bit and to try to appear that they have major growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunities in the future in this other area. Let’s face it, you’re right. Apple is not really much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a services company. They are primarily a hardware company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, application, local applications, operating systems, platforms, hardware, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John services, I feel like is they have not been strong. And I count that as separate from,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, how good is the Mac operating system? How good are the applications available for your platform?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But so, you know, option one, as you said, is, you know, option one is like, Apple actually makes itself a really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services business. Option two is they just kind of tighten the screws and try to extract more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of us in ways that are not so great. three is they kind of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep doing what they’ve been doing. And that was just spin on the call to soften the blow of bad results.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All three of them, I think, are probably equally likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but the reason I don’t think it’s just been for this particular announcement is because the services push is not just this
⏹️ ▶️ John quarter, like Apple Music, the the Apple TV subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John business that they’ve been trying reportedly, you know, rumored to be trying to get off the ground forever and just couldn’t do when they launched
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware without But those are two potentially pretty big initiatives that predate
⏹️ ▶️ John a dip in iPhone sales year over year or whatever, who cares. But growth has
⏹️ ▶️ John been slowing in their other businesses. And I think the watch and everything is an attempt to find another big hardware product they can take,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the iPad efforts. Can we find the next big hardware product line that’s going to take off?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the services push, I feel like has been brewing even longer, especially since these services take a long time to get off the ground. and
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumored revamp of Apple Music at WWDC just shows like they’re serious about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, recurring revenue for network services
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who own our devices. I mean, you can even count iCloud and all the storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, charges for, you know, iCloud storage for your backups and for iCloud Drive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this has been a long time building like that service didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been slowly growing and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been inventing new ways for you to regularly give money to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple for the privilege of using their services that integrate with the hardware that you already bought from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t see the number of those services going down. If anything, like again, the Apple, the Apple TV one I’m counting, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it doesn’t actually exist just because there’s been so much smoke around that, that I feel like if Apple could have got the content
⏹️ ▶️ John deals done in a way that they thought made an attractive product, they would have launched a long time ago. It just seems like they can’t get the deals done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music is their most serious services offer, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John effort to date. And as a lot of articles have pointed out, like for the size of the installed base that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has for people who own Apple devices and listen to music, the penetration of Apple Music has not been great. Like maybe they were
⏹️ ▶️ John late with that because Spotify’s got too much of a foothold in that market or whatever. It could be the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with television. Maybe they’re too late and Netflix and HBO and Hulu and everything else have got too much of a foothold
⏹️ ▶️ John in that. But it seems like there is a real serious
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-year effort inside Apple to, maybe not the same way we’re thinking of a services like
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox or whatever, but to, it sounds bad to say to monetize
⏹️ ▶️ John their customer base, but to basically to offer network services to their customers, because that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly large and growing business of, you know, I will provide you music
⏹️ ▶️ John or video or some other kind of entertainment You know, we’ll give you content
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of you buying each one of these little items You just pay us a subscription fee and we will deliver it
⏹️ ▶️ John to you on all your devices And there’s lots of those businesses and Apple I think wants to be one of those businesses but thus far
⏹️ ▶️ John has just kind of been a Middle of the pack also ran and everyone that has entered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if Apple really wants to become a more serious services company I think they have shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the results, through their actions, that their current setup is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad at that. It seems to me that they would have to somehow dramatically restructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part of the organization that does services. Maybe that’s something as dramatic as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacing EDDQ, maybe it’s something less dramatic like just giving, you know, having somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else take some of those things out of the organization and make a new like services stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind like what just happened with Phil Schiller in the App Store. Like something has to change there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because whatever they have now just doesn’t work that well to achieve those goals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they could, yeah, I was trying to think or they could have a simpler service, but like this is something I had in the
⏹️ ▶️ John potential topic notes for many months and it’s just been slowly pushed down, but it was an article that Jason Snell wrote a
⏹️ ▶️ John while ago about the idea of Apple launching a Netflix-style
⏹️ ▶️ John video service in which they would fund original content. You know, it seemed kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John way back when it’s like Netflix, they’ll let you stream the movies and TV shows you like on your television
⏹️ ▶️ John or your computer, isn’t that great? And then it was like, Netflix is gonna make their own show starring Kevin Spacey
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna fund it themselves for how many million dollars? Netflix doesn’t make shows, Netflix just gives me the shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that other people have already made. Why would Netflix make a show? And it seemed absurd, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fast forward a few years and it’s not so absurd. and Netflix and Amazon pay for shows
⏹️ ▶️ John to be made and then they stream them exclusively on their services. And HBO, of course, came from the
⏹️ ▶️ John other direction where they paid, you know, even HBO used to be just home box office, you would watch movies that other people made on
⏹️ ▶️ John HBO. Then HBO started paying for its own content that you could only get on HBO. And then HBO decided to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a service that eventually divorced from the cable company. So all these other companies are getting into the funding
⏹️ ▶️ John of creative services. And Jason’s article was like, why, you know, why wouldn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John be something that Apple would want to get into the obvious answer is, you know, Apple’s currently in the business of selling other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John content. Apple doesn’t make music, they sell other people’s music. Apple doesn’t make movies and television shows, they sell other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John television movies and television shows and give the money to the people who made them and they’re just the middleman type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all those other companies that described started out in a similar place, and
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually came to make their own content. And it could be that if you want to be a successful, at least video
⏹️ ▶️ John service, for example, that again, table stakes is, by the way you also have to have some
⏹️ ▶️ John exclusive content and the only way you’re gonna the best way to get exclusive content is to fund it yourself and Apple’s got tons of money
⏹️ ▶️ John and connections to people in the entertainment industry why can’t they fund
⏹️ ▶️ John their own you know orange is the new black or house of cards or whatever and have it exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ John available on a theoretical subscription Apple TV service is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way that they could ever be a serious player in the market for video other than being simply a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Netflix app, a platform for the Hulu app, a platform for the HBO Go app. If that’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be fine. But I don’t know if that is the real growth opportunity that
⏹️ ▶️ John they think it is. And I think of simpler services, even something like Netflix. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about what Netflix does, like if you like this, you might like that. And just the basic, you know, polish of the
⏹️ ▶️ John application of automatically playing the next episode and keeping track of where you left off and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even that I feel like is above the degree of difficulty that Apple can handle based on our
⏹️ ▶️ John past episodes of talking about simply trying to watch a season of television on Apple TV and the difficulty of navigating
⏹️ ▶️ John to what the next show is going to be and everything. I just don’t feel like Apple is up to it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things Apple has that a lot of other companies don’t is a humongous pile of cash. And one of the things a humongous
⏹️ ▶️ John pile of cash can buy you if you are smart and know the right people is original creative content,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they be television movies, or I suppose even music. But But like Like I said at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John of all this, the big issue is how do those other companies that sell
⏹️ ▶️ John music or television shows or movies through your services feel about you making movies or television?
⏹️ ▶️ John They probably don’t like that very much and so maybe Apple would never do anything to sort of become
⏹️ ▶️ John non-neutral in that war. As far as now, it hasn’t happened in music. I don’t think Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John is funding its own music and starting its own record label and getting its own artists and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But in the video realm, it’s happening. And I don’t know if it’s helping or hurting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard like Netflix’s catalog has been shrinking. I have no idea if there’s any correlation between them making original content, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it definitely makes the relationship more complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify doesn’t have original artists, but it does commission original performances.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what they’re the Spotify sessions is I believe what they’re called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes does that too, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re right. And they’ll have artists come in and do a performance that’s exclusive to Spotify or You’re right Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iTunes not exactly what you were talking about John, but not too far away either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think what we’ve seen from these streaming services both for video stuff and music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that exclusive content is What drives people to go subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to these things for the most part like? Netflix was kind of like for a while before it had much original stuff Netflix was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the bargain basement like and it was one of the first big video streamers But the reason why a lot of people get Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now especially over something else that might do something you know kind of similar one of the biggest reasons they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get Netflix now is for the original content you know Amazon Prime video one of the reasons people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to watch that is because of stuff they have there that you can’t watch in other places also because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times you’re just getting it for free with your free fast shipping thing but you know I think an HBO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course is it probably the best example where like people paying for HBO whichever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is it go now I don’t know One of the HBO things, people paying for that are doing it not to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of movie that HBO lets them see for a few weeks. No, they’re doing it for the original content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think if Apple is serious about getting into that kind of business, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, if anything, the market is showing that Apple needs original content to really succeed there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think of the… I didn’t watch Amazon Video at all. And we have Amazon Prime. I could
⏹️ ▶️ John have been watching anything that was free for Prime Video people. The only reason I started watching it was Man in the
⏹️ ▶️ John High Castle, which was original content for Amazon. I suppose there are many shows that I
⏹️ ▶️ John could have watched on Amazon streaming that I also had available on Netflix streaming, you know, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the shows that everybody has, or the movies that everybody has. But you kind of get into a habit, like my habit tends
⏹️ ▶️ John to be my first go to for like, where is this movie streamed for free, I go to Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and only think about Amazon tangentially. But original content is what brought me to this. I already pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John HBO for my television, but if I didn’t, I would definitely pay for HBO
⏹️ ▶️ John Now to see Game of Thrones just for that one show. I have no idea what the hell else, you know, or whatever show,
⏹️ ▶️ John Deadwood in the past or The Sopranos or whatever. Original content is a huge driver. It still remains a question
⏹️ ▶️ John whether Apple has to be in the content business to be viable at all because again, Apple TV has apps
⏹️ ▶️ John for all these services we just listed. I just I’m not sure how much
⏹️ ▶️ John money Apple sees from that. I mean, you know, all these things are like fine, we’ll make people sign up for
⏹️ ▶️ John HBO outside of Apple TV. So we don’t have to pay you 30% or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and people will buy an Apple TV, but that’s Apple TV is a cheap device with fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John slim margins in the grand scheme of things. And once you buy one, you don’t have a bigger to replace it. And meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all paying, you know, 1020 bucks a month to all these different services to get this
⏹️ ▶️ John video content. I feel like Apple would be, their services business, they would be more happy
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a monthly small amount of money from the customers rather than you buying $150
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV once every three years. Well, and the other problem is, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do this and succeed, relative to the growth that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to make up for in hardware, it just isn’t that much money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that’s Apple’s problem. I mean, the bottom line problem is, is there anything that’s ever gonna be as big
⏹️ ▶️ John as the iPhone? Because so many, I mean, and again, Tim Cook pointed this out the other thing he was spinning in
⏹️ ▶️ John the call, which is, look, iPhone’s not done. Like, yeah, you know, almost every
⏹️ ▶️ John person in the world who can afford a smartphone has one, but not really because people still using dumb phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we only have like 40% market share. So we have a 60% that we can grow into. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everyone feels like that the the battle lines have been drawn and the fronts are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John settled. And it’s like, yeah, yeah, Apple, you’re right. You don’t even have, you know, more majority market
⏹️ ▶️ John share. but we feel like you’re never going to have majority market share. So unless you can suddenly start selling
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones to, you know, you know, billion people in India who previously you couldn’t sell them to, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the middle-class in China, you know, increase like all these things that are trying to say, here’s how we can sell more iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but it seems like, uh, there’s a lot of pessimism about the potential growth,
⏹️ ▶️ John both of the overall smartphone market, you know, in the short term anyway, uh, and in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ability to get more of that market to everyone is looking for the next thing. What else can you sell that will
⏹️ ▶️ John make you iPhone kind of money or half iPhone kind of money or quarter iPhone kind of money?
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I think wearables is a possible answer, but the Apple Watch is currently not a
⏹️ ▶️ John concrete implementation of that possible answer. Because I figure what category they lump it into.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, but it’s not, you know, it’s not setting the world on fire. And the Mac and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t look like they are on growth trajectories to be the next iPhones either. Maybe cars will be?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even then, if you look at the market caps for big car companies, Apple has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big and so successful, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smartphone has been such a revolution that was accelerated both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in speed and ubiquity and in profitability by a number of weird factors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way people weren’t really paying their direct prices in so many markets, and the upgrade cycle and how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need them, which is so many people, and the spread among the whole world, how quickly it happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The smartphone was such a combination of fairly unique factors that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is unlikely during our lifetimes that we will see any other device that allows that level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of insane, fast growth and profitability. It’s probably not going to happen again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not to say there isn’t any other area of growth, but that I don’t think there will be something that will provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite this level and explosiveness of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t need one thing. I mean, what it seems like they’re trying to do, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ John bits and pieces is diversification. Like they don’t want to be the iPhone company. So if iPhone slows down,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to have a hedge against that, right? And if your hedge is not one other product, then maybe it’s four other products that
⏹️ ▶️ John together make up an iPhone size lump. And that if the iPhone decreases, if you could be ramping those up at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you’ll still stay above water. It’s the if you look at all the little graphs you can see as you know as
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing rose to prominence and then faded something else came from out of nowhere to rise to prominence then
⏹️ ▶️ John fade and something else comes out of No, and as if the iPhone is it’s not fading that at least leveling
⏹️ ▶️ John off you may need a bunch of other lines to come and together sum up to something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like a reasonable hedge because you don’t want to be a company where like 95% of your revenues coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from one product line and Apple’s not I figure what the iPhone is I think it’s like 60-ish, 60% or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, which is still pretty good in the grand scheme of things, but you gotta get one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John other little pie wedges in the other 40% to be on a reasonable growth trajectory,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think the iPhone will keep growing. More people will be able to afford smartphones. The price of the product will eventually go down
⏹️ ▶️ John to let more people afford it. More people will be entering the middle class, and if Apple is lucky,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be able to claw a little bit more market share percentage point here and there from its competitors. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the iPhone is done done, but the giant rocket
⏹️ ▶️ John sled ride to the top of the chart is probably in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One other quick thing I do wanna tack on this topic before we wrap up. You know, we’re kind of basing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the idea that Apple right now is really bad at web services, or we’re not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them finding these major other growth areas quite yet, and maybe they’ll do a car, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s worth pointing out that companies can change and companies can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gain new expertise. Years ago, before Apple launched the iPhone, the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would have the in-house expertise to make a phone, to make a cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, all the crazy stuff like the baseband has to go into that, and then even the idea that they’d be making their own processors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least designing their own processors. These are the kinds of things that, before Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really set their mind to doing it, they couldn’t do and you would think at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be hard to see a path they would get there but because they really put their mind to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really made it a priority they funded it they gave it time they gave these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the the talent and the space to mature and the funds required to develop these things over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were able to become to develop expertise in these other areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they didn’t have yet services could be one of those areas They just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that process. They have to recognize that it’s a problem they don’t do well now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then invest in it. Make changes, invest money, invest time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the right talent, give them the space to grow, give them the space to operate, give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them what they need to develop that talent in-house and to become great in-house. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main reason we haven’t seen that yet from Apple is that there doesn’t seem to be much opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the top ranks at Apple that anything in the way they do services really needs to change. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not seeing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they think they’re already good at it. I think they’re already okay at it. Like we’ve been doing that for years. It’s not like a phone where
⏹️ ▶️ John we know we’ve never made a phone before. Boy, you really better bear down and like work on this or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, we’ve been doing service like this for ages. I mean, remember eWorld wasn’t that great anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we’ve done all these great things. We just need to get a little bit better. Like it’s just a matter of tweaking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas like I think you’re right. The mindset going into a phone was kind of exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John the Palm guy said, like the computer guys aren’t just going to walk in. Apple was like, we don’t know anything about making
⏹️ ▶️ John phones. I mean, we make computer devices and smartphones are kind of computers, but like you said, we’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John been in the phone market at all. So we really better go head down
⏹️ ▶️ John on this and figure it out and work really hard on it. It would almost be better if you could wipe all history
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple services from the earth and just say, starting from today, pretend you’ve got these iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS, you know, all these iOS devices out there and Macs and everything, but you’ve never made a network service
⏹️ ▶️ John before and you have all these billions of dollars, make one. And, you know, I think a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud revolution and cloud kit and everything has been a step in the right direction, but I still feel like because they’re coming from
⏹️ ▶️ John a position of okayed, you know, they’re not coming from a position of
⏹️ ▶️ John weakness as far as they’re concerned, they’re not coming from a position of strength, we’re like, we’re okay, right? It’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe MobileMe was kind of crappy, but all we need to do is just change a few things and it will be great. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, from my perspective on the outside and seeing other companies that do similar things, I think they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re far from average. I feel like there’s this huge weaknesses that are not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that don’t seem to be resulting in the kind of radical change that I feel like is necessary
⏹️ ▶️ John to just get on the same playing field with everybody else who’s doing the same stuff.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, accidental They didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to, accidental, accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s
Post-show: Kindle support help
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t even talk about Tivo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple bought Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John no, we’ll save it for next week. It’s fine I think we need to talk about bumper sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is anybody remember Tivo next week
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or we can talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John my mom getting hacked. Yeah, what’s that about? Yeah, what is that about? It happens happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to people it happens like my my mother is usually
⏹️ ▶️ John on the opposite side of the spectrum constantly messaging me or emailing me
⏹️ ▶️ John or forwarding me messages or saying I got this message or text or email
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever and it says this should I trust it
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a real thing is this a scam what should I do should I
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything and usually the answer is you know just delete it it’s a scam you’re right just delete
⏹️ ▶️ John it or like no that’s a legitimate email from Apple or that’s a legitimate receipt for something you bought like
⏹️ ▶️ John but always erring on the side of just asking like if you’re not sure what this thing is you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at ask ask one of your computer nerdy children
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the deal with this this is real or is it not real and all you know it doesn’t take much to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John just ask and if the answer is just delete the email then then you know fine this
⏹️ ▶️ John was the reverse case she had a problem with one of her devices a problem with her Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ John and And she does what I guess most people do when they have problem with their Kindle is like you type something into a web
⏹️ ▶️ John search Box it says like Kindle problem can’t sync whatever blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah And it turns out if you type a certain sequence of words involving
⏹️ ▶️ John Kindle and problem or whatever into Google one of the very top hits on the first page
⏹️ ▶️ John is a completely bogus Kindle support website and phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like oh you got a problem with your Kindle call this
⏹️ ▶️ John number and we’ll help you with your Kindle so she called the number which is like a one eight five five
⏹️ ▶️ John number or whatever and a nice person answered the phone and asked her about
⏹️ ▶️ John her problems with her Kindle and gave her instructions to download a Citrix client to her computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey took over control of
⏹️ ▶️ John her computer and then she said then terminal came up and a whole bunch of things started scrolling by.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So eventually she figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John once her cursor started moving that I’ve connected, you know, I’ve done screen sharing with her before and controlled
⏹️ ▶️ John her computer to solve problems, but she knew this was something that should not be happening with a stranger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although she got a lot of backtalk from the stranger, the person on the phone was like, you know, she was saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I know you really from Amazon? And the person at home was like, you called me and like, well, that doesn’t mean anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it was, it was, but you know, it just, it just shows like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get off on the wrong foot of like, you’re just Googling you, you think you, you know, it’s actually kind of hard to find a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John number to call Amazon. My mom was insistent that you can’t actually call Amazon on a phone, which is not true. You can call
⏹️ ▶️ John them on the phone, but anyway, it’s very easy to just think what the internet is, is a giant search box where you type words
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you click on the results. And then, you know, of course it’s trustworthy because I typed
⏹️ ▶️ John something in the problem with my Kindle and I found Kindle support the official Kindle support helpdesk that had a phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John and the person who picked up was Totally helping with me with my Kindle and just know what Citrix is.
⏹️ ▶️ John She doesn’t know, you know I’m amazed that I’m kind of impressed that the person got that her to successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John download install and launch the Citrix thing because that is no small feat and must involve a Frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John series of steps trying to instruct people on how to download things and unzip things or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway bottom line is I Had her just wipe her whole
⏹️ ▶️ John computer and erase the hard drive because like at that point you just have to assume every single thing I’m that computer is compromised.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Yeah, this is kind of the I mean You know this
⏹️ ▶️ John this was not a burner computer, but it wasn’t like her main computer She had long since it was a very
⏹️ ▶️ John old like a white MacBook So she had long since removed everything from it that she cared about so we could wipe
⏹️ ▶️ John everything on it She was using Dropbox on it. So in theory there could be something evil
⏹️ ▶️ John shoved into her Dropbox But hopefully that will be data and not executables. I don’t know I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John she could you know anyway And the other thing is because my mom eventually figured out that it was bad that the person did
⏹️ ▶️ John disconnect now Do they disconnect after installing the ransomware botnet blah blah blah rootkit on their thing
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe? maybe there was a one or two day delay on the rootkit thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or The keylogger or wherever the hell else was going on there Maybe it didn’t get installed
⏹️ ▶️ John fast enough because I don’t really know what the timeline is but But, you know, you do what you can. So we erased the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire hard drive, but we reinstalled the operating system, re-downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John and reinstalled the operating system, reinstalled the Dropbox client, it did resync all her files from Dropbox, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if those people snuck in something evil into Dropbox that somehow finds a way to execute itself from within
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox, she could be reinfected, but like what are we going to tell her to do, delete everything in Dropbox? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically like all her files. So I don’t know. This is just a, there’s actually an FTC
⏹️ ▶️ John page about this specific thing like tech support scammers or whatever and what you’re supposed to do if you’ve been scammed. So hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John being old retired people who don’t have anything better to do. They are doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that it says on that page, including reporting the phone number and you know, whatever, get, you know, trying to get them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the people who are doing this to stop them from doing it to other people. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, be careful out there on the internet. It’s dangerous. It sucks, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not fun. I just this stuff makes me so sad that like not that like people fall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People don’t know any better with this kind of stuff. It looks official you’re searching for something computers suck at being clear So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s understandable. What makes me sad is that there are people out there in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who every day do this for a living and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That they seem to be okay with that and
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t get caught I don’t understand how they don’t get caught like I entered the phone number into Google You find a million
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are like, yes, this totally happened to me, like years old reports of like, yep I called these people
⏹️ ▶️ John and they seemed a little bit shady and then weird things started happening on my computer And I think I might got a virus and blah blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how do they how do they go on doing this? How do we not like especially if they’re calling from within the united
⏹️ ▶️ John states? They feel like they should be arrested within like, you know days or weeks of the first report
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, they just go on for years and years and apparently this is just fine with everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s… we have two failures here. We have failure number one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these people doing this, like waking up every day and doing this and being okay with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, knowing what they’re doing. And then failure number two is… I mean, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re operating in the US, which is not a safe assumption, but, you know, if they’re operating in a country that has laws,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how is this continuing? But the reality is they’re probably outside of the
⏹️ ▶️ John US. I know, I think the phone number was someplace in Atlanta or something, I don’t know, like it seemed like it wasn’t…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, where the phone number is doesn’t necessarily mean where they… I mean, I get so much…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In recent months, I’ve had a massive uptick in the amount of phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call spam I get now from like robocalls and stuff, you know, not just people like Dun and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bradstreet who have humans spamming the crap out of you, but like robocalls that come from US numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes numbers like Merlin’s talked about. It’ll come from a very close exchange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to where I live, so that I’m thinking, well, what if this is somebody calling from my kid’s school? I better pick up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I get calls from San Jose. It’s like, well, if you’re an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer and you get a call from San Jose, you pick up that call. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve gotten so much phone spam recently, only in the last few months. Because I think what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on is there’s all these these virtual phone services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can use some API online to generate local phone calls. These things have existed for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing that spammers have finally figured out that these things exist and are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automating the creation of a whole bunch of calls that are local to each person they’re calling and spamming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them that way. Anyway, spammers and scammers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they find ways. They’re very creative. They find ways to create new spam and new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scams and it’s just, oh, it’s so sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and like this long 1855 whatever number, like the fact that there are
⏹️ ▶️ John old Google results for it shows they aren’t even being so smart as to like change numbers all the time and keep hopping
⏹️ ▶️ John around or whatever. Like they’re just using the same one over a long period of time. It’s still like, you figure at the very least what they could do is
⏹️ ▶️ John like have the government or whoever disconnect that number for fraud
⏹️ ▶️ John and force them to come up with another number. I mean, maybe that would make it worse so they would be hopping around more, but the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I have going for me in this situation is that
⏹️ ▶️ John these type of scans tend to be broad, and so they’re not like specifically targeting my mother
⏹️ ▶️ John or anybody else, and what they mostly wanna do is probably scrape for
⏹️ ▶️ John credit card numbers, turn your computer into a bot, or install ransomware. Very generic
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, not like, do they know where my specific secret files are, do they want my
⏹️ ▶️ John photos or whatever? No, it’s just it’s like a one-size-fits-all scam. They connect to your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John They find out what operating system you have They put whatever malware they I want on there and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know some percentage of it They just assume the malware is not gonna work or their everything’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be erased or whatever But enough percentage hit that it makes them money and for all I
⏹️ ▶️ John know the person on the phone doing the thing gets paid some percentage for the number of people they install the software
⏹️ ▶️ John on and then you know, like Like it is in some ways better than being individually targeted
⏹️ ▶️ John for a hack, like if you’re a bank or something and hackers specifically target you, this kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of generic, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John mass market scam is kind of reassuring in how little it cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about you specifically. So I have some dim hope that immediately erasing her entire computer has
⏹️ ▶️ John actually saved her from any sort of future problems. But who knows? Who knows what they got?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, she was, you know, her keychain was unlocked when they took control of her computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John She had an admin account, though she swears she never did enter her admin password. I’m hoping that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John case. But at the very least, her keychain was unlocked. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sucks. But I’m glad she didn’t really, in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t seem like she really lost any data or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s really that much worse for wear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well it’s just the question of like what do they get, you know, because, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you knew where to look on her computer there were plenty of things that people would want to steal,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because old people write things down.
Post-show: Ad sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s your beef with the completely flawless Windows XP
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think we already covered all my beefs. I just want to add one thing to bring together
⏹️ ▶️ John the two discussions about them, which is the fact that I don’t like the sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re terrible. And the idea that no matter what sounds we use, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John all listeners to the show, which includes me, will come to expect them as part of the show. That
⏹️ ▶️ John you will come to love the sounds. and it’s kind of the reverse situation of
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason why you never set your favorite song to be like the alarm that wakes you up in the morning or your ringtone
⏹️ ▶️ John because you will come to hate it like you would just make like never do that never if you like
⏹️ ▶️ John a song or anything like just you can make yourself hate anything by making
⏹️ ▶️ John it wake you up in the morning or making it be your ringtone or whatever um so you should never do that you’ll ruin things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you love this is is the reverse. This is taking something that I hate, which is these Windows XP sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to make me love it through repetition. So that’s what is
⏹️ ▶️ John the real horror of this choice of sounds. And yes, lots of people tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John that they also hate the sounds too. I continue to think that better sounds exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would like to find one, and I’m thinking about it. And if I come up with ones, I will send them to you. In the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would encourage you to use different sounds on every show just like you want to have different t-shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John every year and in that way none of us will be forced to come to expect
⏹️ ▶️ John and love windows xp sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that rationale you would always hate every sound i ever used because you wouldn’t have time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get acclimated and start loving any of them
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good point no they could just be you know they would just they could just be mediocre and who knows maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll hit on one that we all all think is great. You know what I mean? Like for the purpose, like the thing about the song
⏹️ ▶️ John is the purpose of the song is not to wake you up in the morning. The purpose of the song is like, oh, I listened to it and I enjoyed it. And you ruin
⏹️ ▶️ John that by making it the same that wakes you up. What we’re looking for is a purpose built sound to be this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning of the ad. This is the end of the ad. And if we find something that works like that, just like we found a theme
⏹️ ▶️ John song that we like, none of us like hate the theme song because we played it repeatedly, because the theme song didn’t exist outside the show
⏹️ ▶️ John and then was brought into it, especially in another context. So I feel like we could find a
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning of ad end of ad sound that we all like, that we like in the beginning, that we like
⏹️ ▶️ John even more as it continues down the road. And in the meantime, you just pick a different one every episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John a different set on every ad even. And it could be funny. And who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John by just random chance, we might hit on one that’s awesome. But I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t have any great ideas yet, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have already uploaded the sound files for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, it’s just it’s funny to me that a lot of people came out of the woodwork to say, Oh, those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds make me think of the day, the old days when I had to use these computers, blah, blah, blah. Now I have PTSD,
⏹️ ▶️ John And PTSD came up a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just relax, people. It’s a computer like you were if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were getting PTSD from Windows XP. It’s probably because you were in an office somewhere, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air conditioned, probably heated. You probably don’t have PTSD. You probably are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just getting yourself worked up for the sake of getting it getting worked up and or because John said so and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John can never be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re joking with PTSD. I don’t think they mean actual PTSD. Maybe it is a joke in poor taste, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are could be there could be bad feelings associated with it. Like if you play a sound, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s like say you worked like a drive through and there was a little sound when a car drove up and you work there for like three summers
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was miserable. If you heard that sound again, it can make you kind of get a, you know, a cold shiver like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it brings you back to the beginning. to a bad time in your life. And for many people, Windows XP was a bad time in their life, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I mean, I understand what you’re saying. It just, it seems excessive for people to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get that worked up over. Like, I didn’t enjoy Windows XP. I didn’t think it was that, well, I mean, I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, briefly, but by the end of my time with it, which was many, many years, I freaking hated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I hated it with a passion. And I hated those little noises. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this context, I think it works perfectly. And I think everyone just needs to chill out a little
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, it’s not so much the origin of the sounds that’s the problem, although that doesn’t help it at all, because I didn’t really like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac sounds that were chosen either. And not them being from Macs didn’t magically make them awesome sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John for the purpose. I just, I just feel like we haven’t found the right fit yet. I’m continuing to think about