210: My Stupid Thumb
24 Feb 2017Overcast 3 is out, WWDC is moving back to San Jose, and Uber is awful.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Noses, Sinuses, and Snot
- Follow up:
- Control Center and AirPods
- Stagehand
- Online chat latency
- Booting macOS from case-insensitive APFS
- Overcast 3
- Uber is a total cesspool
- WWDC 2017 in San Jose announced
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Gaming on the Apple TV
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Chapters
- Intro: Casey’s sick
- Follow-up: Switching to AirPods
- Stagehand
- Follow-up: Chat support
- APFS successfully booted
- Sponsor: Indochino (code ATP)
- Overcast 3
- HIG as gospel
- Sponsor: Warby Parker
- Overcast’s new ads
- Sponsor: Hover (code ATP10)
- Uber is horrible
- WWDC announced
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Marco plays games
Intro: Casey’s sick
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much easier when everything was monochrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those were the days, right, John? Those were the days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You kids these days and your multi-bit displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pixels could be on or they could be off. What more did you need?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sick. You know, I should actually save that for right before follow-up because if you don’t leave in that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick, then everyone’s gonna bitch at you about how the sound’s all wrong for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco would never edit something out of a podcast that causes a stream of feedback for an entire week even though we discussed it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally, I try to edit I try to remove things that we that we say kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if it’s this way that like we’ll find out two seconds later are wrong because that way like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we actually if I don’t do that then we will get tons of email from people who have who pause at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point before we realize that we are wrong and write it and tell us for that we’re that we were wrong. So normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will edit out like the first half of something like that Just because like it doesn’t do anybody any good to hear us speculate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being wrong that we’re gonna learn is wrong shortly after But sometimes I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that in mind Before anyone writes in I am a little sick I actually feel fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I guess I don’t know Maybe my sinuses are all clocked up because I sound weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sound like hell But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I but I really do feel okay like I haven’t been snotting that much I mean everything seems okay, but I can feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we hear more detail about your about your your nasal situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I would love to. I would love to. Actually, it’s funny because I— How’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your butt? Let’s hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s—God, I wish I remembered that Scrubs song about, uh, it all comes down to poo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I listened to Dubai Friday, which I resisted listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to for a while for no particular reason. I guess just because I don’t feel like I have a lot of availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my schedule for new podcasts. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But, uh, well, and as it turns out, I’m glad I folded, um, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dubai Friday is excellent. And on Dubai Friday they were talking about, um, some sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sinus cleansing device that I think came from Walgreens. Don’t do that either. It was a neti pot, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, neti pot or something along those lines. I forget the details.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, that’s the thing. And so on the one side, I feel like, I think my sinuses are like clogged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as hell. one of these neti pot like things would theoretically clear it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that being said I really do not want a brain amoeba and so I will just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pass and sound like a moron for the rest of the episode and not die from a brain amoeba and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be okay with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now in in fairness for the Dubai Friday brain squirting device that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one did have a micro filter of some kind that purported to block the brain amoebas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from entering your brain
⏹️ ▶️ John and if there’s anybody you want to trust with keeping microbes out of your body but through use of a paper thin filter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s a 14 dog thing at Walgreens. Oh Walgreens, sorry not CVS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry that’s a whole different story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah if it’s Walgreens then you’re okay. Oh my goodness. So yeah so don’t yell at Marco his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels aren’t wrong my levels aren’t wrong I just sound weird. So yeah, apologies for that.
Follow-up: Switching to AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we should start with some follow-up. We are aware that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use Control Center to switch to AirPods on iOS devices. The whole of the Internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in to tell us this. And this was very confusing for John and I, because we spoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this on the show, and I didn’t understand why nobody spent the time to figure that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And as it turns out, we later discovered that this was one of those instances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Marco got a little aggressive with the edits, which, truth be told, happens extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely. But every great once in a while, something slips through the cracks. And this was one of those instances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where John and I discussed this, and it was in the midst of other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that should have been cut and apparently the slicing and dicing was not quite surgical enough. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are aware that you can use control center to switch to AirPods on iOS devices. So thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the entirety of the Internet for writing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But more importantly for the people who listen to the show the vast vast majority of people that information was cut
⏹️ ▶️ John and they Didn’t get the benefit of knowing that yes, obviously the people who wrote in to tell us
⏹️ ▶️ John That we can use a control center. You know like that. I was surprised by them writing in because I
⏹️ ▶️ John said oh Like Marco said sometimes people pause the show to send feedback, and then they resume
⏹️ ▶️ John playing it And there’s some standard amount of feedback you get of someone saying saying something
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know will be addressed maybe 20 or 30 seconds later in the show. And that’s fine. That happens all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. I do it myself. Everybody does it right. Yep. I usually expect to see one or
⏹️ ▶️ John two pieces of feedback after that saying, Oh, ha ha. I should have waited 20 seconds and you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I didn’t see any of those. I was like, this is weird. Large volume of people apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John pausing the podcast to get feedback, but nobody saying, Oh, sorry, I should have kept listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was that was my clue that this was going on. But anyway, the important piece of information denied
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the other listeners who didn’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or didn’t listen live,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that that you can do this. If you have AirPods and multiple iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to go to settings and Bluetooth and switch it, you can do it in control center, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it is more convenient. So try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And to be clear just in case it wasn’t obvious, there are two panes in Control Center,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is the rightmost pane. There’s a kind of a drop-down list-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing on the bottom where you can and select your output device, and that’s what you want.
Stagehand
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually speaking of control center one of the reasons that it is not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John as convenient for me to use control center is because as of right now I have control central control
⏹️ ▶️ John center disabled on my iPad every place except for springboard you know there’s a setting
⏹️ ▶️ John if you whether you want to be able to swipe up and get control center either just in springboard or in all apps I forget how it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phrased but anyway I had to disable control center in during in applications
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iPad which is the main device I would be switching to because of stagehand which is an excellent game
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should try but it involves a lot of swiping rapidly upward from the bottom of your iPad and I really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want control center to appear I don’t even want the little tabby thing to appear because you know it makes you do it twice just to show
⏹️ ▶️ John that you really mean it that little tabby things appears and I’m instantly dead so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a great game everyone should buy it and try it and you should disable
⏹️ ▶️ John control center first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the the style of that game I love the music of of that game, I love the idea of that game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but my brain just can’t do it. Like, I know there’s some kind of learning curve maybe, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried playing it for like a good 15 minutes, I could not get my brain
⏹️ ▶️ John it right. It’s not a learning curve, it’s a two state machine. There is, I don’t get the
⏹️ ▶️ John game, and then you will cross a humongous gap somehow magically, and then all of a sudden you get the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was in the beta for that game, and I played it a lot during the beta, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John and my high score was like one or two hundred for several
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks. And then as the beta went on I got close to four
⏹️ ▶️ John hundred. And I was asking I was asking Nevin like what did all people get for high
⏹️ ▶️ John scores like I know it’s just the beta testers but like am I am I just terrible at this game or
⏹️ ▶️ John am I like average and he was saying there’s a lot of variability and so on and so forth. It’s trying to make me
⏹️ ▶️ John feel better about my terrible high score. Once the game got closer to release,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was actually around the time of release, my brain figured it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Figured out how to play the game, and instantly went up into the thousands and have them look back.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a fun game, it’s a cute little trifle, you can play with it, but unfortunately, unlike Alto’s Adventure,
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately slash fortunately, once you figure the game out, it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly time-consuming as you spend your days plunking away at this thing but there
⏹️ ▶️ John is there is a big leap so if you don’t you know if you don’t want to ever make that leap that’s fine I still think it’s worth the three bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the game costs just to play with it because it is a really novel interesting idea very well executed
⏹️ ▶️ John but there is another game on the other side of it once you once you cross the hurdle once your brain gets the
⏹️ ▶️ John game and then you can like me spend most of your time being incredibly frustrated that you
⏹️ ▶️ John made some tiny minute mistake after playing for literally 20 minutes and just missed your high score.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This sounds vaguely like the Smarter Every Day video with the backwards bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you seen this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, you know, with where they had like a gear or something like that such that when you turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the handlebars right, the bike went left. And if you watch the video, spoiler alert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically, eventually you just flip this switch or your brain just flips the switch where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it understands and then you can actually ride the bike. Also, real-time follow-up, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example of us saying something that we don’t realize is wrong. People will have already paused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show and written in, and now I will correct it. For the three of you that actually use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomeKit, HomeKit is the rightmost pane on Control Center. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audio stuff, but there’s only three of you that use HomeKit, so I appreciate all three of you writing in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco will cut that out, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. Do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Opera users? Ah, you know, that’s an interesting point. Very well could be. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. So write in if you, no actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not really.
Follow-up: Chat support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long waits when you use the chat feature for most customer support tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is when you use the online web chat. Because like me, you hate the telephone and don’t want to spend any time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the telephone if you can avoid it. Tom W. writes in to point out web chat works on the premise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one person speaks to a few people at once, many up to 10. And perhaps that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latency is so atrociously bad when you’re having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these online chat experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of people wrote in with that feedback. And that makes perfect sense. And it should have occurred to me but didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was using it because the phone lines were closed. But I mean, it just it just falls out of like, okay, so the phone lines are closed. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John is the text chat open? Because in text chat, you get a 10 to one multiplier on your people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I gotta wait 10 minutes for reply because someone is replying to 10 other
⏹️ ▶️ John people. And that’s actually kind of an amazing slash terrible job because who wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John have If you ever tried to conduct 10 simultaneous text conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John that are productive in any way with anybody, you can’t even joke around with three friends
⏹️ ▶️ John at once. I feel like I’m frazzled doing that. It’s like, all right, I mean, you can have I can have multiple things going
⏹️ ▶️ John with a not in a non time critical nature, like just, you know, whatever, like someone says something funny, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John say something funny backward, like, that’s fine, and multiple slack channels, all that stuff. But 10 customer service
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations with the person on the other end is potentially angry and wants to just complete a transaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I feel really bad for these people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m guessing that there’s, you know, software assistants here that they’re probably using special tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have like a checklist script that they’re going through with each person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, macros, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but even just like, I’m sure there’s like a script or like a checklist that each one can probably keep a state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, here’s what I’ve done with this customer so far. So there’s probably some kind of like special software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design to help them out here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is a perfect application for everyone’s favorite 80s AI technology, expert systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can’t make a general purpose AI because it’s really hard, but what you can do is make a text-only
⏹️ ▶️ John chat thing that knows how to handle customer service, the top five customer service
⏹️ ▶️ John concerns and punts to a user if it can’t figure it out. And those can
⏹️ ▶️ John work fine too, and I think I would probably be mostly okay with those if it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I would type in something and it would repeat back to me it’s understanding of the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for confirmation. And that can get frustrating if you go around in circles, but if it just punts you to a person, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine it would probably be good for, you know, covering at least half of the cases of, I have a product, there’s a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want a return, and it would ask me for the order number and give me the RMA, but like, a machine can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I’m trying to put more people out of work with AIs, but, you know, efficiencies. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s get to the John Siracusa portion follow-up as if all the follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t John’s already.
APFS successfully booted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t you tell us about APFS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Somebody on the internet named Tyler Locke or Locke successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John booted Mac OS Sierra from an APFS file system. As we all know, APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John was introduced in Sierra as a developer preview, and presumably sometime this year will be
⏹️ ▶️ John the official supported bootable file system for what I suppose is
⏹️ ▶️ John the next major version of Mac OS. But who knows, they could do it at a point release to whatever. already coming to iOS and 10.3
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s not even the next major release. And up till now you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been able to boot from it but many many parts of it are getting more and more mature and obviously if it’s going to be the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to convert all your iOS devices to APFS in 10.3 I bet the file system is pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John ready for prime time the only reason it’s not on the Mac is because the Mac is obviously a lower priority. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he tweeted about this we’ll put some links in the show notes to these tweets just so you can get in touch with him and tell him to
⏹️ ▶️ John write a blog post about it if he hasn’t already. He did it by taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a 10.12.4 drive, cloning it, running the APFS, HFS convert command line utility, which exists
⏹️ ▶️ John to convert it in place just like it does in the iOS devices, right? That’s why that utility exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then manually edited the global partition table UUID to some big
⏹️ ▶️ John hex string that apparently is the right one. And then did some other stuff that I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John because he tried to compress it all into a tweet and changed some kernel flags and rebooted
⏹️ ▶️ John and he was booted into APFS and the other thing to note is his little screenshot showing hey look I’m booted
⏹️ ▶️ John into APFS showed as the volume type APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John and in parentheses case insensitive so in case you’re one I don’t know if this is just a choice he made or if it’s gonna be the official
⏹️ ▶️ John one but APFS case insensitive is certainly a thing so maybe if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re having problems with case sensitive hfs plus you won’t have to worry about that with apfs
⏹️ ▶️ John because you won’t be forced to make your mac case sensitive if this screenshot is any indication
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Overcast 3
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, big week for Marco, as they say. You have released Overcast 3, so congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. There’s only one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug. What’s the massive bug?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there were 15 minor bugs that I fixed in a point release yesterday, but created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one less minor bug where now you just can’t create playlists anymore. Oh that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no big deal. I’ve heard from surprisingly few people about it because creating playlists is not a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common action. You get the all episodes list for free and if you queue things that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco created automatically so that’s fine. I have the fix ready iTunes Connect has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco undergoing maintenance stuff all day so I haven’t actually been able to submit it but that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should be fixed in a couple days probably by the time this podcast goes live.
⏹️ ▶️ John You found this bug the playlist bug after you released, after you uploaded 301? 301 caused the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Now that’s a point release.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a rapid turnaround. You had 3.0.1 which had a bunch of little minor fixes and it got approved really quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John and it went up on the store. It’s like, wow, everything’s working as designed, but then you added a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, because 3.0 had a pretty serious bug where the gesture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for dismissing the now playing sheet, it would interfere with the speed slider’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little thumb if you would set the speed to the very bottom setting, the minus, which is like.7x or.8x, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So basically if you set the speed all the way down, you could never change it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you had like an iPad or something that you could like sync it back from. And so that was a pretty serious bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had to get 301 out quickly and there were a couple of other like minor things. So like, you know, let me throw in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever I could do quickly that’s not going to require lots of testing to validate and everything. Let me just do that quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I slipped up when fixing a playlist reordering bug. Basically I pulled the playlist editor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the card environment because for various implementation details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are too boring to get into here, UI table view reorder controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break if they’re in a card that isn’t my now playing card. So I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revert the playlist editor back to the regular environment which is not in a card because it’s a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full screen sheet. And in doing that, I mistakenly forgot to re-add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the done button back to it. So now you can cancel your creation of the playlist, but you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John finish it. I was surprised that your comprehensive suite of automated tests didn’t catch this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was waiting for it. Thank you, John Syracuse. I love you so much. No problem. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey save your voice. Thank you. All right. So you’ve gone on a justifiable media blitz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I listened to Under the Radar already moments before we started recording. It turns out, as per tradition,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are on the talk show. What do you want to talk about here, either that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve touched on previously or that you’d like to elaborate upon? I mean, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your show, so now’s the time to really—well, not that Under the Radar isn’t, you know what I mean. Now’s the time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really go deep on any of this stuff or do what I expect you to do and say, hey, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t—I mean, what do you guys want to know? I mean, what do you think would be interesting? Because, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so I’ll tell you, you know, on Under the Radar I talked about the idea of basically how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much stuff changed, but it was actually not a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release in terms of a list of features that are new. There are very few new features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of an interesting thing to do. Here’s a new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this app. There’s been tons of work to it. It’s a lot better, but I can’t tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything new in it because it’s It’s not that kind of better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the work was in revamping the UI. It doesn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look incredibly different than how it did before. It just works differently in certain places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the whole card UI with the now playing screen, the two-stage episode selection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now with the action row on the bottom of it, those are the big things. And then the queuing system that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around that whole thing and moving all the actions into visible places. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a similar way that it’s hard for me to come up with a feature change list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, here’s the big new headlining features. It’s also hard for me to come up with like, what should I talk about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you want to know? I don’t know. Chatroom, what do you want? What do you think I should be covering here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Chatroom wants to know why swipe to delete is gone. And having been
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on the Overpass 3
⏹️ ▶️ John beta for how many months, I thought, oh, I’ll eventually get used to it and it will go away. I’m still swiping them to delete.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I mean not that I don’t mind it because I don’t delete them that often like they go away when you know I still have the setting
⏹️ ▶️ John that deletes them when you finish listening so it’s not a thing that comes up often but I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the past week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The short version of why this is the way it is and then you can yell at me for an hour is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old way of you know like you have your list of episodes you could swipe one of the cells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would reveal the iOS standard table view delete button along with a couple other actions like there was a star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for recommending and there was a download button there. if it wasn’t downloaded. This has always been the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to delete episodes in Overcast. You could also just listen to them all the way through and the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting was to delete after listening. I got so many emails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tweets over the last two and a half years since 1.0 with people asking, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I delete episodes? Or how do I delete episodes without listening to them all the way through? Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of funny if you think about like that means people were actually like trying to play episodes all the way through just to delete them. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why is because I thought when I was designing this app that you know of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone using an iPhone knows that you swipe table views to delete you know like that’s that’s obvious everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows that right or you tap the edit button in the corner and it shows the delete controls and you then you delete from there. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know this. A lot of people don’t know this. And you can kind of understand why because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get an iPhone and you just start using it like at no point do you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that? Like in the rest of the iPhone interface, that doesn’t really, like there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a delete button somewhere or something else, or it’s in some contexts like messages where it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really matter, you know, like here where you don’t often delete entire conversations. So like a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use iPhones don’t know like the, the quote standards for some of the standard controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like swiping table cells to show a delete control or hitting the edit button to show other controls or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Apple Mail have a way to delete?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s delete buttons right on the toolbar. A huge design goal of Overcast 3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wrote this in my post, but a huge design goal of Overcast 3 was basically to, because every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature that I had that was hidden behind some kind of gesture, people wouldn’t find. And they would write in confused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or mad that I didn’t have this feature, or disappointed. And so my main goal with Overcast 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was to take all the things I’ve learned with two and a half years of basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback and user testing, and try to address as many design flaws as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s so many features, so much functionality that I’ve had since 1.0 that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good portion of my users either can’t find or just assume I don’t have or they misunderstand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was very much like a clarifying release, like to clarify how things work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and et cetera. You know, and I knew going into it, I knew that the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, now playing, being this card that’s coming from the bottom instead of a navigation pane that slides from the right. I knew that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, you know, a minor thing. People get used to quickly. But I also knew, and I even said on the post, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new two stage, where like now you tap the cell, and rather than immediately playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the episode, it shows like a little action menu, kind of like when you select a tweet in TweetBot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s buttons, and the middle button there is play. And then the one to the far right is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete. I’m a little curious from people like you guys and the entire chat room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many people on Twitter. By the way, I should say before I make jokes like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the response to this update has been massively positive. I am very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with the response. It has been very, very positive. And for something that changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things, that’s a more positive reaction than I would have guessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that aside, for the people who are not so positive about it because of this new, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it takes two taps to delete something thing it always took two taps to delete something but before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was swipe tap now it’s tap tap so I’m kind of curious like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I mean it’s different but is it actually worse
⏹️ ▶️ John uh… you know why I do, Casey and I shouldn’t, don’t give him the answer chatroom don’t tell him, Marco will now explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to us why uh… why there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is feedback about the swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand the people who who don’t like that there’s two taps to play something I understand that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was one tab before and now it’s two even though it’s much less error prone now and the interface is way clearer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everybody but why is it worse to have delete be two taps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of a swipe and then a tap
⏹️ ▶️ John and now the other part of Marcos brain answer answer that question good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I honestly like I
⏹️ ▶️ John oh I know you can do it Casey and I know you can do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just different but is it worse nice it’s actually easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John do it’s more precise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s why the one of the reasons this was that the swipe to delete I would often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally start playing the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me give you my answer which I think is the same as John’s but who knows. My answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you should never ever ever deviate from what is the norm on the platform and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the norm on the platform is if you want to do some sort of destructive change like that in a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like gestural way you swipe from right to left and there will be some sort of destructive action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can take right then and there. And like you’ve said previously, Marco, that’s on pretty much every table view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the system that allows you to remove a table view row. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is exclusively a power user thing, although it certainly, in my mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skews towards power users. But you should never fight the frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which you’ve done with this table view actually in many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you should never fight the HIG, the Human Interface Guidelines. And I feel like you’re fighting the HIG.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t beaten you up about this too bad previously because I understand where your head’s at and it makes sense to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the overwhelming majority of users, I bet you anything. This was a positive change But for someone like me and thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely myopically you are behaving differently than the rest of the platform And that feels gross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way that you get that grossed out feeling when you look at a material design Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app on an iPhone. I don’t use any Google apps on my phone. Well, you know what I mean, though like And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a bit of an unfair comparison and a bit slanderous to be to be fair because you are nowhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that out of left field. But it’s a similar scenario, right, where you have something that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite feel right. But it doesn’t quite feel right to a power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even a moderate power user. I think to most people, you’re I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you made the right change, even though it drives me batty.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let me let me just boil that down to a more to a simpler, more visceral
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. Everything you said is right. But the result, the result of that is that
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line, I keep swiping things. That’s, that’s the bottom line. After many, many weeks, I keep swiping.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not a big deal. And the discoverability is 100%. Like I’m, even though it is non standard
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that tweet bot is non standard. I like it like it is good because you have a complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John application. And I think this is better and discoverability. There’s no arguing as that you were getting tons of feedback about discoverability people will find
⏹️ ▶️ John the trash can outcome when they couldn’t 100% on that. But why? Why do people complain?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not about speed. It’s not about efficiency. Why do I keep swiping? It’s like Casey said, because I swipe everywhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, can’t convince my stupid thumbs not to swipe.
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything you said about why you why you, you know, added the bar and discoverability. All that’s 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John true, but exactly in the same way that that underscore convinced you
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a sideways swipe inexplicably do a thing that you should totally not do just because that’s the way the old one
⏹️ ▶️ John worked. You keep the same controls exactly where they are, but if my finger stupidly
⏹️ ▶️ John swipes for the umpteenth time, just let it delete. That’s all I’m asking for, like, keep exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same stuff that’s in there now, make a discoverable so-and-so forth, but for the admittedly
⏹️ ▶️ John very small handful of people. And that’s why this is not a big deal, that’s why 3.0 is a net win no matter what, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you never had this feature back. But for the small handful of people who are either on this podcast with you or in the chat room,
⏹️ ▶️ John who stupid thumbs keep swiping, this is another case to do one of those features
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the one I was referring to the underscore talked you into, which was the old gesture was to get rid of now
⏹️ ▶️ John playing you could swipe to the side, even though the new one comes up from the bottom, you still made swipe to the side work because it’s no skin off anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else’s back. No one else is going to discover it except for people who have muscle memory from the old overcast. Guess what? I can make that work
⏹️ ▶️ John for you too. the butt to make swipe to delete work in the context of
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever unholy things that you’ve done to this table view to make it so super custom and by the way I love the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can reorder now with the little grippy tabs everywhere so you know again it’s totally a net win but for this
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little minor feature you know it would be neat if the old muscle
⏹️ ▶️ John memory still worked and I guess I’ll probably eventually get used to it but I thought I would have gotten used to it by now and I think it’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what Casey said if the whole rest of the system is training me again and again to swipe to
⏹️ ▶️ John delete, it’s very difficult to sort of contextually untrain myself from that gesture on something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks for all the world like a table view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a general rule, use standard gestures. People are familiar with the standard gestures and don’t appreciate being forced to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different ways to do the same thing. In games and other immersive apps, custom gestures can be a fun part of the experience. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other apps, it’s best to use the standard gestures so extra effort isn’t needed to discover or remember them. Straight out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So you guys make good points. I don’t disagree with a lot of what you’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, the idea of doing both, of adding the swipes back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually never occurred to me until this moment. There is probably something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing to that table view that would make that probably not work well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t like drawing glitches? Come on, that’s all part of the fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will try it, because I admit, if I can do that with no horrible side effects,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it is kind of a no-brainer to offer that affordance to have
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to see the little orange bar appear as the thing above it swipes sideways and the orange
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bar starts to get
⏹️ ▶️ John clipped and filled in. It would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so awesome. Oh, you have no idea what I’ve done to poor UITableView.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever TweetBot did, same type of thing. Like this, and to be fair, like I don’t know if TweetBot was the originator
⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing, but a lot of applications do this, where they want to have more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to do in a TableView, they can’t off it under a magic edit button where you go into a mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so they do this thing where it reveals more controls when you tap the thing. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, even though it’s not in the Higga or whatever, is kind of standard and tried and true. But since you can’t delete a tweet,
⏹️ ▶️ John the TweetBot never had to deal with, well, I guess you can. Speaking of which, you can delete a tweet. What the hell does TweetBot do when you
⏹️ ▶️ John swipe? I guess I don’t delete tweets as often as I-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swipe, I think, is view conversation. Yeah. There’s two different directions. One of them is view conversation, the other one I think is favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right. They use both directions for the, yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, so, okay. So there’s a number of things to respond to here. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when you’re thinking about how this app should be or how this thing should be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually work through the entire thing in your head to see, maybe think, maybe there’s a reason why it isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, right? Or maybe that would present more challenges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we often do this with trying to, as our armchair people trying to tell Apple what to do, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if they did that? What are the other ramifications of that? So, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t do the button bar thing, if I kept the delete in there, what other way, how else could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make it actually discoverable to people? And so, the way that the Apple apps do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re reading from the Hig as if this is a gospel, well I’ll get to that next, but the way they do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on the resulting screen, so look at Mail. Mail is always a good example of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard UI kit stuff. It’s always a good inspiration or reference point for that. So, look at Mail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with mail you open the message as if you see if you assume that you don’t know how to swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on table cells to to delete things which most people don’t if you open the message in the message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window there’s delete button so if you don’t know how to swipe on the table view you’re still seeing delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons all the time so if i were to go down this path uh… with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast in a tent to head to to have like you know single tap to open the message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have a swipe offer the delete uh… or you know still have to be in play that the way i had before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how else could i make delete more discoverable so what they did you it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if i put delete in the info pain which i could do with it i forget whether i did or not but i could do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to leave you one of the buttons in the info pain in typical playback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not using the info pain typical playback your hidden that the episode and it begins playing in the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s this way and so it would have to be in the now playing screen So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the now playing screen and where would I put it?
⏹️ ▶️ John No no one’s arguing that you should get rid of the bar. Well at least I certainly wasn’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco totally you know people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are you have to it’s an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like adding swipe to delete as a shortcut for the people who happen to know it which is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny detail nice to have thing that is not essential for 3.0. That’s why I said the bar is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John an improvement like just you know 100 percent and in fact I think you can it’s not obvious to a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of people on Twitter. Well, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing the bar gives you looking at it is I don’t know how much metrics you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John collecting in terms of usage, but you have a lot of room, not a lot. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what how common the, you know, add to playlist, you know, the plus
⏹️ ▶️ John hamburger thing and the star thing are or even the share. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough room to actually use that bar as a place to highlight new features in 4.0
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, as they come. And I think it’s important to have an element like that and burying
⏹️ ▶️ John it under info or putting in the now playing screen or all much worse. This was merely a question of and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how this is spun out into this giant big thing because this is such a minor thing. Like this is not a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John the application at all. It’s just like it’s a problem with my thumb still doing a thing. And I’m just exploring why
⏹️ ▶️ John it might do that is to continue to provide affordances for the tiny amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who who are used to or their thumbs are used to doing a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in a way that doesn’t detract at all from the increased discoverability provided by the little
⏹️ ▶️ John bar if people are arguing against the bar entirely to go back to the old way I think they probably just haven’t been using
⏹️ ▶️ John the app long enough because when I first started using with a little bar too it feels weird you’re used to using overcast for at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John like years right used to tapping to play a thing and you tap to play a thing and the podcast doesn’t start playing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s something I got used to. And it’s not as if the first step doesn’t do anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first step reveals the bar. So it’s not like with swiping, where the swiping just literally does nothing does not give you any
⏹️ ▶️ John progress towards your delete action that you’re trying to perform. tapping reveals the bar, you have a visual
⏹️ ▶️ John cue that there’s something else that you have to do. And usually I’m doing playlist anyway. So it’s just playing one after the other. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I again, I until this podcast did not even consider the idea of leaving the swipe buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and also leaving the bar in. So I actually I’m going to going to see if I can do that easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or without massive horrible side effects because of my tableview abuse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you have any old one? I don’t even know if you had this. Did you have the mail style? Super duper swipe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was like three buttons over there. Yeah, I had that. But like where you go all the way to the end, it just deletes it. Oh, no, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was never made available. Mail always whatever tableview mail uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always gets cool features like that before they’re available in the public API. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had the first action buttons there for I think an entire iOS version before it was easy to do that with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ways. And then they later, once they gave us the API to make those action buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then Mail got the ability to have the full drag all the way across for delete. And I don’t think they ever made that available to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a cool feature. I hope that does come to table views because it’s definitely like they were getting into the realm of like
⏹️ ▶️ John not expert features but features that hopefully never bother anybody if you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John they exist but once you know they exist it becomes like addictive to be able to go and just you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing I don’t like about that feature is that if you swipe if you swipe mail messages left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s an unread option on the other side which does the same thing like you swipe a hard enough and it just marks it on red and that’s cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you swipe it right you have that super mode where if If you swipe it far enough, it just deletes it, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far most button is trash. But the other two buttons it offers are more and flag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you’re opening that menu in order to flag the message, that’s kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite of putting it in the trash. But if you drag just very slightly too far when you’re opening that message up, it deletes
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s a fine line with the swiping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a bad decision. Like to me, I think that everything that’s not trash should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other direction swipe menu if they’re gonna do that, if you’re going to have this all the way swipe gesture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s too easy to do this destructive action when you’re trying to do flag
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the opposite problem where I guess I’m too lazy with the swipe and I wanted to delete it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it didn’t quite go far enough and I have to give a second attempt on it, but I can see the opposite being true too. Definitely with anything gestural,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem. That’s the good thing about the bad thing about gestures. They feel so good when they’re right, but you get it, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John controlling a video game. You get it a little bit wrong, and because it’s not a precise thing, because it is inherently
⏹️ ▶️ John a fuzzy thing. It’s really difficult to get sort of the control scheme just right for everybody. And
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody is a little bit different. As opposed to the much more analytical world of
⏹️ ▶️ John pointers and mouse control and how big targets have to be, it’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John measure that. And it’s generally a more precise thing. Although, you did the basics here for the little bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trash is far away from the Play button. Play is not all on the left. And Trash is not all around the
⏹️ ▶️ John right, because the middle is easier to hit than the edges of the screen. You know everything you’ve just described
⏹️ ▶️ John about the ergonomics of where items are in relation to each other and how easy this do accidentally is revealed in
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar the only thing you can maybe argue about is Whether the center is appropriate for
⏹️ ▶️ John play, but I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, oh, yeah, I that I don’t I don’t think I would hear any other arguments about that Again, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like if you think about where where else would you put these things like it you come to pretty similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conclusions I think with a lot of this stuff anyway So yeah, I’ll look into the double gesture thing because that that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does make some sense
HIG as gospel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to address though the whole Higg, adherence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to standards, everything else as gospel. Apple, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of you who don’t know, Higg is the Human Interface Guidelines. It’s been a document Apple has published forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They revised it over time with new OSs and new knowledge. But basically it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standards for how your interface should look and work and be laid out for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s platforms. Over the years, there’s always been tons of debate over the Higg and whether it’s okay to violate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, when it’s okay to violate it. I think it’s similar to rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of grammar for poetry. I think it’s like, you’re allowed to violate the Higg if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what you’re doing and you have good reason, basically. It’s not like this set-in-stone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Apple violates the Higg all the time with their own apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They blatantly violate it and they don’t care because they think they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And in many cases that’s true. I am a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For years I said I am not a designer. And when it became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear to me that I was doing the vast majority of the design in my apps, I stopped saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think now, no matter what anyone else says, I think of myself as an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer and app designer. Combo in one. though I’m not as good at the design part as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am the development part, I now do both of those roles. I think that I now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a good enough design sense that I can judge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I can kind of have some leeway in deciding when to break a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard rule. And it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I have to roll it back. I have lots of crazy ideas and many of them are awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think I now have earned earned myself the right to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break rules sometimes because the fact is, in order to do good design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially in order to move things forward, you have to break the rules. The rules were never written to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be gospel. They were never written to be adhered to 100%. As soon as any version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hig is published, Apple already has apps out there that violate it all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Hig is, it’s kind of like using stock UI kit controls with stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themes on on them. It’s like, you can do that. For most people, that’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default. That’s a good starting place. If you aren’t confident whether you can break the rules, you should just do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine. But it’s also nice to have apps that don’t follow all the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They push things forward or they do things differently. And that is how progress gets made. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that often is necessary to result in an overall better designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more usable app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, the thing of it is that to me the best user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface is one you don’t have to think about, right? And it just feels frictionless, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are where you expect them to be. As an example, as an unrelated example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my car I feel like everything is where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect it to be. Even within iDrive, which a lot of people hate, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense to my brain. it doesn’t to yours or to whomever’s, but it makes sense to me. And so the best,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, the best user interface is one you don’t have to think about. And the moment I have to think about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user interface, about how I accomplish a task, then I’m experiencing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friction and I’m taken out of the moment of what I’m trying to do. And we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beating up a lot about this, you know, swipe to delete thing because I think I speak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for John in saying my natural gut reaction is to just immediately swipe and And then I have to think, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, this is that place that doesn’t work. Oh, what do I do? Oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tap. And then I tap again. Well, that’s fine. It’s just, why can’t it work the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way I expect it to? And that doesn’t really negate anything you said about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how The Hig isn’t, it’s not laws, it’s guidelines, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was that stupid movie? Parts of the Caribbean style. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it takes someone who is very confident and with a lot of skill, like you had said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to violate it in ways that make sense. Like somebody in the chat room, I already lost who it was, noted that pull
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to refresh wasn’t in the HIG. And that’s a perfect example of something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wasn’t in the human interface guidelines but just made freaking sense. And that was a great choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But other times, I think you have to be very confident and very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very sure you’re right in order to get away with violating it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the Higgins changed over the years. It’s time for me to do a more old man stuff here. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you guys talk about the Higg, you’re talking about. Like the umpteenth iteration in the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John era. I know you guys started with Apple before iOS, but not much before, like three years before or something. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, the human interface guidelines used to be very, very different than they, than they are now. Uh, one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they shared is the thing that, uh, you were talking about Casey, in the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of what was revolutionary about both the Mac and the human interface guidelines that came along with it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the selling point of the Mac and a selling point of the graphical user interface was there would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a standard set of controls and a standard guideline for how to use them so that if you learned
⏹️ ▶️ John how to use one program on a Mac you could go to another program and reuse a lot of those skills
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would also have a menu bar with pull-down menus it would also use the same command keys for things it would also have
⏹️ ▶️ John windows with the button confirmation button on the right and the cancel button on the left and all you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole nine yards interface consistency, which was a revolutionary and novel thing in an
⏹️ ▶️ John age when on DOS you use WordStar and it had absolutely nothing in its interface in common
⏹️ ▶️ John with WordPerfect or whatever some other contemporary even though they were both word processors, they didn’t copy and paste text
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way they didn’t format the same way they didn’t have the same menu structure didn’t use the same keys. It was like I know WordStar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I transfer those skills over to you could transfer your basic skills of knowing where the keys are on the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe if you’re lucky, they shared something about how their interface work, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they rapidly diverge. Whereas if you use Microsoft Word, or Mac, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, some of the menus were the same, there was a font menu, there was font sizing, the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a menu bar at all like that. And just in general, using anything on the Mac, you were
⏹️ ▶️ John able to take the skills that you learned and build on them to more rapidly get up to speed
⏹️ ▶️ John in another application. That’s the whole point of the interface guidelines. And the way the document was different is
⏹️ ▶️ John that especially in the beginning it did way way less of explaining to
⏹️ ▶️ John you how things should look or what you should do and way way more
⏹️ ▶️ John of explaining the reasoning behind it. Do this with your whatever’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John and then explain the philosophy behind it and very often that philosophy had had more of a foundation
⏹️ ▶️ John on you know user testing and If I look at the HIG today, even just the
⏹️ ▶️ John first like Aqua HIG for Mac OS X, so much of it is about how
⏹️ ▶️ John big the borders should be between items. Like, I mean, this isn’t even talking about like size, minimum size of touch targets,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just like, this is how you should lay out your dialogues. This is how far away buttons, labels should be from their fields
⏹️ ▶️ John and buttons should be from their whatever. And this is how tall this should be. And this is how much padding there should be. And all the things is like, that’s all great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you should totally have that. And interface builder should do it for you automatically, which they added, you know, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all fine. But that does not tell me why. And that is how things should
⏹️ ▶️ John look, which is related to how they work very often in terms of the size of touch targets and
⏹️ ▶️ John readability and why labels that are aligned this way are easier to scan and all that other stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s less of the less of the philosophy, less of like, look, let me just explain to
⏹️ ▶️ John you the concepts. And here are some guidelines. But now you see these guidelines, you see, here’s the concepts
⏹️ ▶️ John that they flow out of. And when you’re provided with the concepts, and actually, I feel like given more free reign in the
⏹️ ▶️ John old days to say follow these these concepts in your custom interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John and yours will feel like ours rather than saying just use our controls because that’s the only way you could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. The new ones feel more like make your applications look like ours
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the pixel use our standard controls and we won’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John explain to you the reasons why is why is this alignment or the spacing beneficial why should you phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John words in the dialogue in this manner, whether it’s imperative, why should you use verbs for buttons? Or why
⏹️ ▶️ John should you know, like, the whole night? Why should you not use differently styled text? And you know, they used to have reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, they would say, when our testing, we found out if you put a bunch of bold words and dialogues, that’s all people read. So don’t make bold words,
⏹️ ▶️ John make everything in the same consistent font. I’m just making this up. This is not a real thing. But like, to explain the reasoning behind things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I feel like has been lacking. And because that’s lacking, I feel like the human interface guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS and even for the Mac are way less authoritative now in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John how how developers should take them like just because it’s in the Hague. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one other person’s or a couple other people’s ideas. And it’s important for you to know what they expect from you from cons for
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent for the sake of consistency with the other applications. But if they’re not going to explain their reasoning,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you suspect that you might have a better way, I think you are much more likely today to actually have a better
⏹️ ▶️ John way than you were back in the old days where a nobody knew anything and be
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple knew so much more than everybody else because developers were coming upon us for the first time and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple at least had put many, many years into it. And they were you know, the world’s leading experts on making
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer facing personal computer GUIs for a very long time. And they would they would show their work, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here’s why, here’s why we’re doing all this stuff. And you’d read it and you go, Oh, that makes sense. And if they
⏹️ ▶️ John said they did a bunch of user testing, you don’t have a user experience lab for you to test this stuff. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Part of the transition from the from the jobs era was seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John he was much less of a fan of, you know, the scientific method and user testing and much more of a fan of using
⏹️ ▶️ John his gut. And his gut was pretty good. But sometimes you got like, you know, stitch leather and stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, all this is to say that I have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I put much less stake in the in Apple’s human interface guidelines now than I did many decades ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the guideline that you know the guiding principle I think every developer uses who’s making their applications
⏹️ ▶️ John is to try to make it fit in with what the user expects. Again like if you made
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac application and you didn’t have a menu bar or you’re like the file and edit menus were in the opposite order,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you think you have a really good reason for that it’s probably not a good idea. But if you want to put different items
⏹️ ▶️ John in your file menu as long as quit is at the bottom if you’re really old that’s where it used to be everybody as long as quit is
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bottom people are okay with you shoving in a few other items and when and you know third party applications
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said push the interface forward because the apple can’t cover all your possible scenarios so if Photoshop starts doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something and Photoshop does it for 25 years eventually whether that’s in the human interface guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John or not if you’re making a graphics application it would be a good idea for you to perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John take a few conventions from Photoshop because it’s so important in its field. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the same way a lot of Twitter clients can get away with the side swipes, which I don’t know who invented that, but it’s all over the place in Twitter clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you use a lot of Twitter clients, eventually that’s what you get used to. And in the realm of podcast apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like if you use a lot of podcast apps, I don’t use a lot of them. But I imagine there’s some conventions for
⏹️ ▶️ John controlling things that they would have some commonality between them that you would begin to read, read
⏹️ ▶️ John the landscape and get used to using now that you want every genre of application to be different. But
⏹️ ▶️ John where you start falling back to the bedrock of expectation is that for things like muscle memory,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, the fact that you’re using a table view at all, and the fact that you know, the transitions between things are sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of mental and spatial model of how the application flows from left to right and coming up from the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of judgment calls to make there. But in general, you try to keep it consistent. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you miss one little tiny corner, where now delete works a little bit It’s probably not a big deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since delete is probably not a common operation.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s not but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s if it’s a place where you can, if it’s a place where you can return
⏹️ ▶️ John that where you can fulfill that expectation in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you retain all the other benefits. It’s a pretty clean win. I mean, I would question even more the
⏹️ ▶️ John feature you did have there, which I mentioned before it was like, being able to dismiss a thing that comes up from the bottom by swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John sideways makes not much sense. No, spatially speaking, as probably a misfeature.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only reason it’s there is to honor the muscle memory of users of your specific application.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you didn’t ever use the previous version of overcast, you would never expect that to work and you would never even try it, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re just doing that to just give a little help to those people. I think this is the same category of things. In fact, I would, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John trade these in terms of what is more beneficial in the long run, I would say, if
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to sacrifice the ones you don’t, you should just keep both of them. But if If I had to sacrifice one, I would say the sideswipe people will get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to the card coming from the bottom pretty quick. And it’s just a gesture in a different direction. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John the swipe to deleters are still being trained by the whole rest of their entire iOS device to keep doing
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we move on from Overcast, I did want to briefly ask you about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new ad model. I’m not entirely sure I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nuances of it, and so I’m going to defer my chief summarizer and chief role
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, Marco, if you could summarize what this new setup is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and kind of how it works in broad strokes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. So basically, before, you know, I have, as John likes to remind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I change my business model on Overcast roughly every, you know, 9 to 18 months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gone through many of them now. The one I’ve settled on since this past September, which is just kind of a tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the one before it, is basically ads as like the main source of income, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid subscriptions to remove the ads if you want to. And the way this has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked out over time is actually not that way. The way it has worked out since September
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I added these Google AdMob ads, and by the way, just as a quick clarification,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there are other ad networks, but they’re all worse in some major way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either they have creepier code or they require more SDK integration, they’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like meta networks where they have to add lots of SDKs to your app for all these different companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they just don’t sell enough inventory. You end up getting very little money from your ads and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like unsold inventory that you have to just like show nothing for or show your own you know splash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for whatever else. So I think if you’re going to do third-party ads I think AdMob is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way to do it and but what I found with AdMob ultimately is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads were of lower quality than I wanted and they made very little money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as I kept going through and going in their control panel and turning off various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco categories of crappy ads that I didn’t want to see. Things like casino stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird sexy dating services. Like I would find those and I’d turn them off and then I’d make even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less money because it turns out all the crap ads make a lot of money which is why they run them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically it was making very little money. It ended up like I thought I was gonna make most money from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads and then some money from subscriptions and it ended up I was making 90% of the money from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions. Totally flipped, and that’s actually fine. I like it that way. I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have people paying me than have to deal with ads. And the ads, the presence of the ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increased subscriptions dramatically from the previous system, which is basically pay if you feel like it. Like patronage, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pay if you like me. And that worked a little bit, but it wasn’t working enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it succeeded as a business model, but not because of the ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it succeeded because there were ads there, but the ads could be anything. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure I will. I might actually see a slightly lower subscription rate because the ads are no longer crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, but I, they’re also now in the now playing screen. So you see them more. Um, so I don’t know. That’ll probably bounce itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out anyway. So I decided that I was no longer interested in running Google ad mob ads for lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. Uh, quality of the ads, low revenue. Uh, those are major factors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also as I talked about in the blog post and a little But here I think I’m no longer very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable embedding closed source ad libraries into my app from ad companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think as a developer you have to be conscious of that. There has to be a really good reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to embed someone else’s closed source code in your app because that can do anything and it’s on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that can access all of your user data, whatever users are doing with the app, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are entering into the app, that code has complete access to it. that code can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in trouble with Apple, that code can do things that are prohibited, that code can require you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all these advertising disclaimers that your users see or that AppReview sees, that can get you in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trouble with AppReview. And there’s all sorts of baggage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you sign up for when you are adding someone else’s closed source code to your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I thought there had to be a really, really good reason for that to be in there, and I no longer had a good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only reason I did it in September was because I thought it was the only option. The option was between that and going out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business, basically. And so I took that option, but then the business model changed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the environment changed. That all happened in September. Then November happened. Then January
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. It’s a different world now. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically went into this saying, all right, well, now let me see what can I do myself?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because the Google ads made so little money for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other people have more success with Google ads than I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to say that they don’t work for anybody, because they obviously work for lots of people, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my tap-through rate was awful. And basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much money you make depends extremely heavily on your tap-through rate. And there’s lots of reasons for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, none of which I was willing to fix. So there’s like, for example, if you want a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to make more money, you should put the ads somewhere where people are more likely to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap them. I’m not gonna do that. You should have the ads on every screen of your app or more screens of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, but I wasn’t doing that. I had them only in the list screens before because they were too big to fit on now playing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should enable things like animated banners. I didn’t want to do that. Because there’s a lot of like, because those pay better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s like, there’s all sorts of things that you can do to make ads work better that I was unwilling to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not entirely AdMob’s fault that I had such a bad experience. It was just my app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my strict requirements for it, just what I could stomach and what I was willing to do. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided since AdMob ads were making so little for me, I could replace them with pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much anything, and it probably wouldn’t negatively affect my business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the main risk with running my own ads is what if no one buys them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if it turns out they’re really hard to sell, which they might be. These aren’t podcast ads. They’re display ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And display ads are hard to sell right now. I only have very, very limited data right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now with these trial partners that I have now in there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea even what kind of views or tap-through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rates or subscription rates that they’re going to get in like three months. Right now, it’s all everyone’s looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and poking them and seeing what they’re like. So the data right now is nice, but it’s not really representative probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have no idea how they’re going to perform but the fact is I am way happier with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. They are totally under my control. There is no weird closed source code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the world’s biggest advertising company. It is just completely my app doing my thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I designed it under my control. The privacy of them is great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t collect anything because I don’t want any of your data. Like I don’t I I want the least data I can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get from you to make my app work. If you ever are curious what I call it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read the Privacy Policy in Overcast. It’s very short, human readable, I wrote it all, it’s very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear. And so I’m much happier with this setup now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what the setup is, is my own ads. They show in the Now Playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and in the Ad Podcast screen. The ad unit can show either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads for websites, apps in the App Store, or podcasts in Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you can actually advertise for a podcast in the podcast app. And when you tap these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, it brings up the sheet that is just the Overcast ad podcast screen, the standard screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it has all the episodes in it. They all have all the buttons that Casey and John hate with you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add to queue, you can subscribe there, you can download whatever else. And so it’s all this, the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native interface. I don’t know how many podcasters are going to be willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ads long term. I can tell you I have an inbox full of emails from podcasters who are interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now that I am having a very hard time answering all at once. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s tons of interest right now, but once you get into the nitty-gritty of getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to actually commit and to pay, everything changes. So I have no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be like long term. But the fact is, I don’t need to sell very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ads to make more than I was making before. And even if I make less than what I was making before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as people keep subscribing, I’m still fine. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made the right move. Also by the same logic, and for all the same reasons, I also in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this update removed the Fabric Analytics from the app. So there’s no more third-party analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services either. All I do now is I have a very, very basic analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class that I wrote myself that just logs some very basic information. And it can be used to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what you were describing earlier, John, about measuring how many people use the delete button or whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were asking about. I can do stuff like that. Right now, I’m measuring almost nothing in the app. I talked a little bit about this under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the radar this week. The short version there is I’ve done analytics for a while now with Fabric, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found some actionable things from it, but most of the data I was collecting was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither useful nor actionable. I find analytics are great to—when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a specific question you’re trying to answer. So when I was developing—I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was curious a while back, maybe a year ago now, so I added analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what type of output device people were listening on. And I learned from that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people use the built-in speaker, way more than I thought. And so that’s why I did the voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boost optimized speaker profile for the iPhone speaker. Because it was I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, wow, a lot of people do this, this is worth focusing attention on. I also learned during times like that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I measured parts of the watch app, like, does anybody even use the watch app? What features of the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app do they use? Like, do they actually go to the force touch menu? By the way? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do they actually like, ever use the buttons on it? Or are they mostly using it to read information?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as I glance, or yes. So I learned stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can do that myself with very basic analytics. I don’t need everything that a full-blown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analytics package offers today, like various conversion tracking different things and funnels all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all these retention. That’s the kind of stuff that venture-funded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies need. I don’t need that. I don’t have anybody asking for that information. I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that information, so I don’t need to collect it. So basically I’m getting away now with incredibly simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analytics of just my own, you know, you know, hand rolled thing. Oh, God, I’m a hipster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My own artisanal analytics. And now it’s just a lot simpler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lower tech. And but I can just now I can tell things like, you know, what, how many people are using different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices? Like how many iPhone sevens versus seven pluses do I have? And that helps me decide things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what should I optimize this interface for, you know, should I optimize it for 5.5 inch screens or for 4.7? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 4.0, you know, and stuff like that. That stuff I need to know. I don’t need to know the level of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detail that all these commercial analytics packages provide, and especially at the cost of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own closed source code in my app and exposing all my user data to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I like best about these new ads is the fact that they are podcast ads and a podcast player,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they have built-in relevance. And if you ever run out of inventory, which you wouldn’t, because you could just lower the price and
⏹️ ▶️ John get any inventory you wanted, but if you ever did run out, I would be happy to see that slot spilled was just
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled from your own like most recommended section because you have ready-made inventory of
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know how relevant but like hey, here are some popular here are some podcasts with some
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes that are being recommended a lot in insert time window and then just throw them in the most recommended
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you tap them and you go right to the episode. It’s like a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John also echo your fear that they will not be offensive enough to make people
⏹️ ▶️ John pay because Because they’re pleasant, they’re podcast ads, and it’s not to be like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is it, mesothelioma or whatever. Yep, yep. By the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to clarify, they’re not all podcast ads. There’s an ad for Hover, there’s an ad for Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there are a couple of website ads
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Now that you mention that, when I saw the Hover ad, I was like, because I see Hover and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, oh, that’s a podcast ad too, because obviously they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey advertise on a lot of podcasts that I listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to. if it was like synchronized like when the hover ad is playing on the show that
⏹️ ▶️ John the hover ad got the hover banner got to display down in the thing and included the people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John codes there’s all sorts of crazy business ideas that you could do here or competitive advertising where people
⏹️ ▶️ John could buy podcast advertisings against that would run against other podcasts in the same genre
⏹️ ▶️ John this is all getting way too complicated and i agree that if you know if this is simply a way to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John that 10 of money with a more pleasant experience uh Uh, then it’s, then it’s a win no matter what. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, I think that kind of like the, uh, what was this? I think I’ve said rectifs. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the fantasy Google ad that, you know, it’s far fewer ads, but far more valuable because they’re better
⏹️ ▶️ John targeted by some magic AI thing. I think even just basic, better targeting of the fact that, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you’re interested in podcasts because you’re listening to one, you are a great audience for me to advertise other podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John too, because you are a proven podcast listener and you’re using a podcast client. And guess what? Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another podcast. And that’s why you can charge more money for that than you can for an ad, or even for something
⏹️ ▶️ John like Hover or something, because although they advertise in lots of podcasts, Hover is not technically podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John related, but another podcast is. And then a podcast can spend money advertising to each other and it
⏹️ ▶️ John can do just like the App Store ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, cool, because that’s one of the reasons I made this for Podcasts, because I was like, and I’ve had all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crazy ideas on how to possibly sell these things and things like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately it came down to like, of course this is the perfect place for an ad for a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only question is, the only doubt in my mind is, you know, whether enough podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be willing and able to pay for an ad for their shows, because most podcasters don’t make a lot of money from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsorships. Most podcasts don’t even have sponsorships. Most podcasts don’t have audiences big enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get sponsors. So how many podcasts are gonna be willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ads? Like I have no idea. it doesn’t take a lot to make this work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it doesn’t take, you know, you don’t need thousands of advertisers. You need tens of advertisers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this work really well. Like, you know, so I think it will probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. I think one of the big challenges is gonna be like, I don’t think podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have ever had a way, have ever even thought about buying ads because there’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really been a place where you could buy an ad for a podcast that made sense. because as you were just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t just buy a Google search ad or a Facebook ad for your podcast and get anybody to click through to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because you start losing, targeting really fast there. The chances that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are a podcast listener and who want to listen to your show, that combination gets multiplied and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be a pretty low number.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s too much friction if you’re in other venues of doing it on the web. If you’re not already in
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast player, getting successfully subscribed to a podcast in your player of choice
⏹️ ▶️ John is difficult I encounter that when I’m on the web and I find a podcast that I like and I’m disappointed when I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John like either a link to the overcast URL where I can do save an overcast like if they just give me an iTunes link or something like that. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John no good to me. I don’t use that player right because you don’t the website can’t know what player I use but if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John already in the player that I use and there’s a one tab way to get an episode that’s way less friction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. So I am really curious to see how this plays out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to see who buys these ads. Once people can actually start seeing my prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publicly, like a few emails, once people have data of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month’s worth of clicks and new subscriptions look like and for how much money that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change things. Right now, none of us, me, the advertisers, none of us know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether these are going to be a good deal or not because we don’t have enough data yet. So we’re going to find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it might be an incredibly good deal. It might end up being by far the best way to get new listeners to a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it might be that there’s just too few people for it to make any financial sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. We’re going to find out. And if that’s the case, then I’ll just fill it up with hover ads. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a few quick hits regarding that. Do you want to disclose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even an order of magnitude of pricing? Like are we talking tens of dollars or ten thousands of dollars?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you narrow it down? Because I assume that you’re going to get a thousand emails about, you know, I don’t even know how much this costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I afford this? So is there like a rough order of magnitude you can say for pricing as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record tonight, which obviously could change? No. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ask me in a few weeks. That’s when I will have a much better idea of what these things will actually be charged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, long term.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is currently trying to talk himself off the ledge of making this an auction system. So let’s all root for him in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One system that I thought was, there should be some way to automatically scale with demand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so one thing I thought was just sell them for 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days and just say, here’s how many ads there are in the system right now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep the price fixed. And just the market kind of works that out, right? Because if the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really low, then a bunch of people will buy it and then every ad will just get fewer impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of is self-regulating, I think. I don’t know. I’m throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around all these different ideas in my head of how this should be billed, how this should be sold. And there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why there are so few initial partners on board, because everyone who’s advertising it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I’ve worked out, I’ve gone to them in advance and said, like, hey, here’s what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. I don’t know what this is gonna be yet. And so we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna go into this in this kind of like trial mode and we’re gonna share data. I’m going to tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this gets you, and you’re going to tell me if you get click-throughs on your website and everything else, and we’re going to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this actually works. Because right now I have no idea. So it’s way too early. I mean, this has been in the store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like a day and a half. So it’s just way too early for me to have useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is the appropriate mechanism by which you could be contacted if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to buy an ad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you go to the site, go to the contact page, and it says there, it says for ad inquiries, email here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do that. But it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be… What site is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it might be a week or two before I can actually get back to you with something useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, out of… And this is more out of my own curiosity. How are you…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you providing… I mean, you just hinted at it a second ago. Are you providing any sort of analytics? And is there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a portal for that? Or is this just you ripping off emails when the time comes? What’s your intention with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My intention is that people who buy the ads will be able to log into a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portal and see the performance of the ads they bought. I haven’t actually built that yet. I do have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just have one giant dashboard that I can see in my admin panel. I can see how they’re doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m only tracking I say all this in the privacy policy. The only thing I’m tracking is three things clicks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco views, and subscriptions. If they’re podcast ads, that’s it for websites. It’s just clicks and views
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can be targeted by podcast category. So you can say show this to everybody or you can say show this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people who listen to shows that are in the iTunes technology category. I have targeting by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top level podcast category in the directory optionally and so that helps a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s it. So you know it’s a very very simple system. It’s very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on data because A I find too much data in that situation kind of gross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and B I don’t believe it’s necessary for this. So we’ll find out.
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Uber is horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to hover for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I feel like we should spend a few minutes talking about how much of a cesspool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uber is cuz What a disaster that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean what a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like this latest horrible thing they did It’s like it’s just the latest in a string of horrible things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have done over the relatively short time They’ve been in existence like there are horrible company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run by horrible people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so if you’re not aware, a woman who goes by Susan J. Fowler has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey written Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber. It is not a terribly long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post, but it’s long enough that you’re going to want to leave yourself a few minutes to read it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you absolutely should read it. And it is worth reading in its entirety. Don’t skip around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth it because it is flabbergasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how unbelievable it was, the behavior of Susan’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey superiors and, in some cases, peers and the HR department at Uber. Suffice to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I should really pull a summarizer in chief on this one because there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this post. But the short version, and again, please read it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, please read it, but the short Her version is she was sexually harassed in various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways and in various magnitude pretty much from the moment she got there until the moment she left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to me, the most despicable thing that I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this whole story was that she was told when she bubbled up these complaints to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HR at Uber that she was the only one complaining about this one particular individual.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was a first-time offense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I’m sorry. That’s an important distinction. That’s absolutely correct. It was a first-time offense. I will call this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person Bob. Bob has never done this before. It’s Bob’s first time being a complete turd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, it’s first time. Yeah, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Don’t worry about it. Which is such a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to approach this kind of a situation. Like I, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco understand why. Yeah, like why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is the first offense even considered free? Like even if it was true, like, which it wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, why, why is that even an okay response, even if it was true?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, an ATP tipster in the chat is phrasing it well in this is all caps but my voice is shot so I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to scream, is this first grade, why the F is sexual harassment a strike-based system?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Like, truth. Exactly!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why is this the way this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco works? You don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free strikes on that. Like, no, immediately fired, maybe arrested, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh god. I completely agree. So anyway, so Susan ends up talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some of her peers, and her peers are like, oh, that’s weird. I was talking to HR about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bob, and they told me that it was a first-time offense. And we are not the same person. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not reporting the same incident. Looks to us like HR is full of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, you know, there’s, there’s always a chance that, that this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fabricated, but man, I don’t believe that for a second. Like this is not one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those rage quit kind of posts where, Oh, you know, I, I, I didn’t, I didn’t fit in well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m just going to make up stuff about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not how this reads at all. And this reads like a intelligent, mature person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just stating the facts of what they went through. And God, is it terrible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was another, there was a report that came out. I don’t have a link handy, but we’ll find it for the show notes about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m butchering the details, but it was something like, if you don’t make men
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use their real names or anything like that, about 5% of them think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have any room to grow with regard to like relations to women or other minority
⏹️ ▶️ Casey groups. And guess what? Like all of us are a problem. I like to think of myself as relatively woke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this department and I’m a damn problem. Like I don’t get this right all the time. And oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the utter overwhelming self-confidence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that these Uber employees have shown, not the women, the men in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HR, it’s just preposterous. Like oh my God. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t believe that this is a thing and that it’s continued going on. Now, since this blog post, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Travis Kalanick, Kalanick, is that his name? So the CEO, whoever he is, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to his credit, I guess, taken a pretty strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stance on this in that he’s taking it as true. He’s taking it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evidence that there is a real problem, but I don’t know, man, it’s pretty late, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone has known that Uber is really fricking slimy and a lot of freaking ways and now is when you’re finally jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on board and being like oh you know maybe we have something to change. It’s just this whole situation is just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I mean that’s like the CEOs in these situations always act so surprised I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was going on. Okay like that’s either complete BS or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were really doing a bad job at looking at your own company for very for things that should be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common sense like something something is wrong seriously wrong here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like the evil HR department is the cause of this. No, the HR department
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in service to the company. The HR department, it’s not anybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend. It’s not like a third party judge system. HR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their main role is to prevent the company from getting sued and to mitigate risks that might cause
⏹️ ▶️ John This HR department isn’t even doing that job well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco by the way. That’s true. Like so
⏹️ ▶️ John many parts of this company, this HR department is terrible at its, even at its ostensible job,
⏹️ ▶️ John not even at its like theoretical job in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. Right, right. But like the point, like the HR department’s job is to protect the company from its employees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is literally their job. Yeah. If the HR department is being directed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or being incentivized to do horrible things by the people who run the company, they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do horrible things. And it should come as no surprise, and I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it’s BS that it did come as a surprise, I’m pretty sure this was no surprise, it should come as no surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the CEO of a company that horrible stuff goes on in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HR when he himself seems to be a pretty horrible person from the little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I know, and the company does lots of horrible things and has a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco culture of being horrible and toxic and disrespectful of everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially women. This is not the first time they’ve had problems with women in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, this is not their first one, not by a long shot. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his whole thing about, I’m shocked, I’m going to investigate this immediately, that’s BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s complete BS. Like, yeah. So I don’t believe that for a second. None of this should be forgiven,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of it should be isolated to a couple bad apples in the HR department, because it’s not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a deep-rooted cultural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco problem. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systemic failure. It is absolutely a systemic failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it comes right from the top. It comes right from the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why this is such a great example. Like, very often people who are not steeped in these issues don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John spend all the time, you know, reading about them or whatever. Here, here the phrase institutional
⏹️ ▶️ John underscore, institutional sexism, institutional bias or whatever. And it seems like a buzzwordy thing. It doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John any sense. But a reasonable working definition is based on examples
⏹️ ▶️ John like this where you find yourself in a situation where there where there is some kind of institution
⏹️ ▶️ John or authority that structure could be the government but it could also be the company that you work for which even though it is not the government
⏹️ ▶️ John it is it is a a you know an organizational structure with authority over your
⏹️ ▶️ John life that you work within for as long as you decide you want to work there and in this case
⏹️ ▶️ John as in so so many other cases in many other companies, you know, forever and ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The institution has certain attitudes towards
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you want to be, whether it be minorities or older people or women or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and those, those policies and, and biases and views
⏹️ ▶️ John come through in the rules that govern everybody else. So you have an HR department that
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was functioning well, in its role, as Marco described it to protect the company from its people.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know part of it is like HR like any other part of the company is supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the company more successful. So if there is a problematic employee HR has to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. If that employee is doing things that could get the company sued it is in the company and HR’s best
⏹️ ▶️ John interest to solve that problem and the most reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John way to solve it is to try to make the company a place where people will want to work. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John usually means taking the toxic person and, you know, disciplining them or getting rid of them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It becomes much more difficult when that person is high up in the organization, or as they say, this thing was a high performer.
⏹️ ▶️ John person’s valuable to the company, right, right, right. But But, you know, there is the larger value to the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, these institutions have control over many of these employees lives for as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as they work at the company. And yes, it is always often just get another the job someplace else. But the thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John institutional sexism or any other sort of institutional biases, it’s not always
⏹️ ▶️ John clear. And it very often is not the case. And it’s very difficult to tell that if I were to leave this tech job and go
⏹️ ▶️ John to a different tech job, will that company have better attitudes towards,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever my thing is, but it’s minorities or women, or maybe, maybe not like that’s, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a selling point of a company. But if you’re in this control is a it’s not that easy to change jobs. And B, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John within this control structure, these policies and attitudes
⏹️ ▶️ John and the things that will happen to you seem like an injustice, because they are an injustice,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you view the authority of the company
⏹️ ▶️ John as the arbiter of the rules of play within the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as if people are getting murdered, right? So it’s not, for the most part, it’s usually not a criminal type of thing. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the rules as set out. And if there are any violation of the rules, or violation
⏹️ ▶️ John of what I think should be the norms, there is an authority that I appeal to whether it be my manager, my manager’s
⏹️ ▶️ John manager, the HR department, whatever it may be. For example, if you found an error in your payroll, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you got paid the wrong amount, you go to the payroll department. And in a functioning company,
⏹️ ▶️ John the payroll department’s job is to make sure that everybody gets paid the amount they’re supposed to be paid. And if there’s an error, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John brought it to the payroll department, if the institution is functioning correctly, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John correct the error or tell you that it’s not an error because they did some weird thing with taxes that they would then explain to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the function of the payroll department. I don’t think anybody would argue with like, you know, like it would seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like an injustice if you found you’re missing 100 bucks on your paycheck, and you brought it to the payroll department
⏹️ ▶️ John of the institution that you are in. And they didn’t correct that error or tried to tell you that you did your math wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John or said, Well, it’s only the first time we made this mistake, so don’t worry about it. Like, that would feel like an
⏹️ ▶️ John injustice, even though, you know, it’s just the payroll department of the company you work in. If you don’t like it, get another
⏹️ ▶️ John job, right? That’s the whole attitude you hear. But it is an injustice, because that’s what the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to do. So if the company says, Oh, we’re an inclusive employer, and we love everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, we certainly don’t condone sexual harassment, which any company will take it will say if you ask them, hey, company
⏹️ ▶️ John x, do you condone sexual harassment, they’ll all say they don’t, right? So it’s their stated policy not to. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if this happens to you in a company, in any company that in this day and age is going to say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you take this thing to the authority of the institution that you are working within and you say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John HR department, we’re supposed to be a company in which people don’t get sexually harassed. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my first day at my job and my boss is propositioning me for sex. Here you go. It’s on a silver
⏹️ ▶️ John platter. Now HR, do your job as stated, you know, like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, it’s not as if like, oh, I’m expecting HR to protect me. They should be protecting the company by having
⏹️ ▶️ John someone like this in it because it’s against their state of policy and it’s bad for business, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only reason you wouldn’t do that is if there is institutional bias and sexism
⏹️ ▶️ John from the highest levels to say, actually, the strategy we want to take here is to sweep that
⏹️ ▶️ John under the carpet, to shuffle the victim off someplace else, to put the blame on them,
⏹️ ▶️ John to give them an option like, well, you can either stay under this manager, but he’s going to give you a bad performance review because we’re going to totally
⏹️ ▶️ John tell him that you reported him. And if he does give you a bad performance review, you really only have yourself to blame for report
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m not making this up, read the thing. This is what’s happening in the company, you really only have yourself to blame. And
⏹️ ▶️ John because we did give you the option to transfer someplace else. And the employer was like, but but this is the department I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in. This is where my skill set lies. And if I transfer, I’ll have to learn a new thing like well, we gave you a choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you can just quit your job. Like they don’t mention that. But it’s always an option like you’d always just quit your job. But
⏹️ ▶️ John she had skills that were a perfect fit for the job that she was in. She enjoyed doing it technically.
⏹️ ▶️ John She liked some of the people she was working with. There just was one niggling problem, right, about being sexually harassed at
⏹️ ▶️ John work. So she ended up transferring to a different department, which was painful, and did well. Like, it’s just, it’s such a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John story of, you know, and then she had problems there as well, and other issues, and she would bring them to HR,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they would do the same thing, and finding about all the other people. This is institutional sexism, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the institution is working against her. She has a reasonable expectation, according to the stated policies of the company, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John people whose job it is to be the referees for this area, just like the payroll department is
⏹️ ▶️ John the referee for how much you get paid, are failing to act. And that is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John definition of injustice. And when it’s an institution, it’s the definition of institutional sexism. And you can expand
⏹️ ▶️ John that out to any institution you want, whether it be your family unit at the smallest institution, where maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone in your family thinks all the wives should stay at home with their kids, all the way up to the government with policies
⏹️ ▶️ John that are, you know, biased in one direction or another against people who are minorities
⏹️ ▶️ John or people who are women, which is the opposite of a minority. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s what’s maddening to like, there’s a reason, you know, the whole social justice movement
⏹️ ▶️ John and the pejorative SJW that’s used. The reason they have the word justice
⏹️ ▶️ John in them is because all of them derived from a recognition that every large
⏹️ ▶️ John grouping or organizational structure has, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John has a behavior as an overall organism that is that emerges from
⏹️ ▶️ John the attitudes of the people running it. And despite what people may say,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty easy to find out if you’re in a situation where the institution is working against you
⏹️ ▶️ John and where the supposed places you go to resolve
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever issue you have, whether it’s a discrepancy in your paycheck or someone violating what you think is an HR policy.
⏹️ ▶️ John If those institutions fail to act or actively work against you,
⏹️ ▶️ John that feels like and is an injustice. And that’s what people are fighting against, you know, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that the payroll analogy is the one that probably works because most people think that’s a no brainer,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they understand the role of the payroll department. And if they don’t get paid the money they were promised, that is an injustice.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you apply the exact same thing to other things like, well, he’s a really nice guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s really important in the company. And can’t you just change to a different place? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like, it just, it boggles my mind that any modern company like that these things would ever happen is
⏹️ ▶️ John almost sounds fantastical. But then you’ll hear the same story from tons like talk to women
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know, who’ve worked in large companies for any part of their career. You’ll hear the same stories everywhere. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another clue to you that this is an institutional thing. It’s not just Uber that Uber is a bad company. Uber is the one bad Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else is fine. It is everywhere. It is systemic, it is societal, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John cultural, it is institutional. That’s the definition. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John the stories like this are depressing, because no matter what Uber does, A, it’s probably not going to change Uber,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they haven’t changed by now, they probably never will. And B, it’s not going to solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem in all the other places. The only way you can fix it systemically is with systemic solutions and cultural change
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff, and that takes a really long time and it’s very difficult to do and that’s why stories like this are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since this original blog post was written and in just the last few hours as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record, somebody’s tweeted, we’ll put a link to it, that 118 people have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resigned or given their notice since yesterday, which I guess is Tuesday. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of days is really what it amounts to. And that was only in San Francisco. This is that Uber in San
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Francisco. That’s a lot of people, 120 people. And, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I power to you, man, if you are willing to, to stand up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this and, and, and say, I cannot be a part of this anymore. Like, here again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I like to think of myself as reasonably woke, but if I mean, I don’t know if I would have the gumption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just walk away from my job that’s putting food on my table, like, that’s awesome. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m men or women, you know, it doesn’t matter whoever’s whoever these 118 people are. Good for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s tremendous that you have put your money where your mouth is. And yeah, I can’t emphasize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. I see it from time to time at my work and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even necessarily like, I don’t have my antennae up, if you will, to search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it. I just see it from time to time and I try to do my best to correct it when it happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this stuff happens everywhere. It’s not unique to San Francisco. It’s not unique to Uber, although Uber seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excelling in this department. Uh, it’s, it’s everywhere and. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to everyone, but particularly those of us who are not oppressed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the three of us to, to give credence to the stories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those who are to pay attention to the stories of those who are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to try to fix or speak for, or Or really even better, give the microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, which is comical since I’m talking into a mic right now and not doing this, but anyway, give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the microphone to someone who is oppressed and who allow them to speak for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I like about this post is I think it does a good job of explaining why
⏹️ ▶️ John someone might stay in a job where this happens because that’s always the reaction is like, well, just quit. If you don’t like it, just quit,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There are mitigating factors, one of which may be you really
⏹️ ▶️ John like the work you’re doing And it’s technically interesting and you are, you know, growing your skills
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you even like the people you work with, right? You know, it’s very possible to be in a company whose institutions
⏹️ ▶️ John are failing you, but nevertheless, you, you enjoy your peers and employees. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you enjoy your direct manager, but you know that it only takes one bad person and
⏹️ ▶️ John then one, one non-functioning institution to fail to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to fail to do its job, to protect the company from toxic employees like this, to, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, retention is part of the job of HR. When 100 people quit because of something like this, that’s HR
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing his job, right? But it’s like, why? Why did she stay in this job? I think this this article
⏹️ ▶️ John has a good description of why someone why it’s not just like, Oh, well, someone, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John said something, you know, lewd to me, and therefore I got to quit the next day. And if you don’t quit the next day, it’s your own
⏹️ ▶️ John fault, right? That’s a ridiculous thing. Like, people are more complicated than just they’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, It’s not just one thing, right? And so that’s why this thing is like reflecting on a very strange
⏹️ ▶️ John year. Like, it is very even handed. And I think when you read it, you can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John excitement of working for a company with a lot with a lot of VC money doing interesting technical stuff with people that you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John and expanding your skills and generally having a career, a thing that most people get to have, like and that is that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John tension. Do you want to have a career? Or is your entire career going to be sending reports to
⏹️ ▶️ John HR, every time someone does something bad to you? And it’s like, I shouldn’t have to choose between those two things. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t I have a career and not be sexually harassed? Is that even an option on the table?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it makes people have these ridiculous choices like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really that bad, is it? And I guess I’ll just tolerate it. And I just keep reporting it to
⏹️ ▶️ John HR, maybe we’ll do something eventually. And it’s just, it’s not a healthy situation. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the expectation that everything is your fault if you don’t immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John storm out and quit the first time someone does something you don’t like, otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John as the HR department goes, well it’s really your own fault at that point, he’s going to give you a negative performance review but you can’t really blame
⏹️ ▶️ John the guy, right? That might have been over a lot of people’s lines,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it really depends on what state you are in your career and how much you know of the world and what capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to leave your job at that moment, and how excited you are to be able to work
⏹️ ▶️ John in this thing. And it’s like, well, it’s just that one bad person. And if I work in a different department, I want to deal with them. But there’s always people at work
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know how to deal with. And if you’ve lived your entire life as a woman in virtually any culture in the entire history
⏹️ ▶️ John of the universe, you are sadly very used to dealing with people crapping
⏹️ ▶️ John on you and treating you badly, and so have probably internalized some notion that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you have to tolerate to get ahead in the world. And sadly, you’re also probably kind of right about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s that’s like, I think will give people reading this, I think will give people
⏹️ ▶️ John a better idea of what of what it might be like to be in the situation and why
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not do all the things that I’m assuming people down in the comments are screaming that this person was supposed to do, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, run out with your hair on fire at the first sign of anything going wrong, which
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, might have actually been the better choice in the case of Uber, but
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a realistic thing to demand of people. Otherwise, they somehow lose their right to justice and somehow lose
⏹️ ▶️ John their lose their expectation of being in a functioning institution that doesn’t hate them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just ridiculous. It’s and again, I know I said it before, but truly, it is worth your time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to read this entire post. It is extremely well thought out and extremely mature and it just spells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the facts the way Susan saw them and and I believe every word of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, even if even hypothetically, if this was, you know, laced with BS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again, I truly do not believe this, this to me sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that absolutely could have happened. And maybe and maybe if it if it didn’t happen, it may not have been an Uber. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this this is stuff that happens every day. And I don’t see it. And I want to I want to I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to impart by talking to the three of you and anyone else that’s listening or two of you. God, I can count.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s late. We I’m trying to to open my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes wider to these sorts of things and be more aware of them and and try to figure out how I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey react appropriately in these situations. But golly, this is this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas. And I am. There’s also an
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity for people at their jobs to I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s my job that has sparked this discussion that I think, you know, whatever venue you have to have this discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you work for a company, like people might be talking about the story, especially if you’re in the tech industry, it’s time
⏹️ ▶️ John to ask around, hey, has any good HR department
⏹️ ▶️ John should be doing this? Hey, does anyone in our company feel like they can’t go to HR or has
⏹️ ▶️ John gone to HR and has felt like HR has failed them in some way? Things like this happen all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. I mean, is, you know, people are people and there’s always communication gaps, but it’s like a teachable
⏹️ ▶️ John moment type thing where what a good company will do with a good HR department is
⏹️ ▶️ John use this to say, if this is happening here, we don’t want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John and let us know and employees should talk amongst themselves. Like sometimes people don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, like they’ll report some of the HR, but maybe you don’t tell like your peers that you did that, you know, because you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to, because you fear retribution, which is itself a very bad sign right off the bat. But sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes something like this. It’s the same reason they didn’t know the women. This company didn’t get together
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately. They had to eventually figure out, but I reported that same guy, and they told me it was the first time. These conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John need to happen in a healthy company should happen. And as this story went around people
⏹️ ▶️ John at my job, people started talking about it and talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about their experiences with HR at our company and and how it compares to this story. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you don’t hear about these stories, and you don’t think it’s happening in your company, maybe it’s totally not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe it is. And you’re just not hearing about it, because it hasn’t happened to you. And the people has happened to you haven’t felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like they could tell you for you know, and like, the worse it is probably, the more hesitant people
⏹️ ▶️ John will be to share these stories, because if it really is bad, and you really are punished for reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John And this and you know the HR justifies retaliation against you based on and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna tell your co-workers that it’s happening You’re gonna keep your mouth shut and you’re not gonna report another one because you need this job
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the case where everyone clams up whereas if there really is an expectation and a functioning HR
⏹️ ▶️ John department and someone has a bad interaction and they they should feel free to tell everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John all their co-workers and their boss about it because they’d have an expectation like this is not functioning correctly and And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John told something that does not seem to comport with the supposed policies of this company.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the only way these things get worked out. Because if people are just quiet and go about their business and try not to rock the
⏹️ ▶️ John boat, like that’s not a good culture for anything. But you know, period in a company, but certainly not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good culture for making sure you have a company that
⏹️ ▶️ John is able to retain employees, good employees, because this person seems like a good employee. She wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John an O’Reilly book on the topic and speaks at conferences. It’s not like she’s just this random cog in the machine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, just throw her away. We don’t need to have that. It’s more important to protect the high-performing sexual harasser.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ridiculous. But anyway, a good HR department will try to make a company that is attractive to employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John People want to work there, and then once they do work there, they want to stay there. That is, again, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a role that is in service of the employee, but it’s a virtuous cycle if the HR
⏹️ ▶️ John department realizes that by making it a better company to work at, they will be protecting the
⏹️ ▶️ John company and they will be making the company more successful even if their main goal is to, main loyalty
⏹️ ▶️ John is to the company and not to the employee.
WWDC announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it Thursday of last week the day after we recorded that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a very weird Announcement out of Apple was a Thursday or would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was sometime after we recorded and not too long after we record it ten minutes After we recorded yeah, right. That’s what it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like for sure I think Apple’s trolling us because clearly they care about our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording schedule WWDC 2017 has been announced. It is a week before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it would be it is The 5th through 9th of June I had guessed and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pretty confident. It would be the following week. I am wrong I’d also guessed it would be in San Francisco and that’s not right either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s going to San Jose Which apparently is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boring big city in all of America from what I’m told. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a thing people who say that have never been to any other cities in America. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true And I mean, I’ve never been to San Jose I’ve heard it’s nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really know anything about it. But one way or another, they have announced WBDC, they’ve announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dates. This is way sooner than they’ve done it in many years. Usually it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey April or even May when they announce that, oh, in a couple of days you can buy tickets, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get ready. And this is convenient if you’re somebody like us that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to go, regardless of whether or not you have a ticket. It’s also convenient if you’re someone that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live in the United States and needs to work out the entry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey procedure. And I’m just going to dance around this whole topic. It’s nice to know way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in advance. And I think part of, if not most of the reason that it was announced this far out is because it’s not in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Francisco, and that changes things. And nobody really knows how it changes things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I bet you we’re going to talk about it for a while. But it certainly changes things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to see how this turns out, because it certainly gave me pause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a minute, because everything I’ve understood about San Jose is that it is a really sleepy town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after all the local businesses go to sleep, if you will, after business hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a lot of the reason that I go to WWDC each year is so I can hang out with you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all my other friends and mutual friends and socialize and have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun and continue to build existing relationships and build new relationships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know how conducive San Jose is to that for all I know it could be great I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean I really honestly don’t know but but it’s certainly different and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what how we gonna go to the house of prime rib if it’s an hour away like that’s not gonna work what do you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean this is terrible so I don’t know John what do you think about all this
⏹️ ▶️ John well I don’t like I don’t like traveling and I don’t like change and I don’t like change to travel.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple must have detected
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had gotten used to the flight to San Francisco and the
⏹️ ▶️ John arrangements there and was familiar with enough of the city to start to feel comfortable, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’ve ruined everything. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John they said, we need to change things up. As many people pointed out, the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they would change this is because it’s more convenient for Apple because it’s closer to their headquarters. It’s got to be cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing anything in San Francisco. In theory, it was supposed to be cheaper for attendees. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that will be the case because obviously, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John traditional WWDC attendees plus the people who go without a ticket or some fraction of them
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, are going to drive up prices. But I did get
⏹️ ▶️ John hotel reservations, provisional hotel reservations for less money than I could have gotten them and San Francisco for the same
⏹️ ▶️ John much less, but a little bit less and certainly an extra location. So… Mine’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thousand dollars less. Yeah, same here. But I have not independently confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but I had people that I saw on Twitter saying that within a couple hours of this announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all those prices went up to effectively equivalent to San Francisco prices. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last couple of years, it has been and I’m sure we’ve talked about this on the show, but it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a middle of the road hotel for the area. And admittedly, it’s not the greatest area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sightseeing, and there’s a bunch of problems with the area in which WWDC used to happen in San Francisco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the point of the matter is, for a unremarkable hotel, but not slummy, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like $400 a night. I think I spent like $2,500 or $3,000 for a week, or well, five nights in San Francisco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And somebody said to me at some point, I wish I could remember who it was, but somebody pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out last couple of years in San Francisco, you’re basically buying an Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single night you were there and then throwing it away. That’s how expensive the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hotels were. Was it you, John? Yeah, it was WDRDC. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So that’s barbaric. Like that’s just San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least that part of San Francisco is not a nice enough city to justify that kind of price. Like it’s just not. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so here it is for fleeting moments. San Jose’s seemed like it would be a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot better. But from what I understand, all of the excess inventory that was low-priced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been snapped up. Now, that very well could be because Apple has also bought a bunch of hotel rooms for attendees, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve done in years past. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very, very likely. Apple almost certainly has blocked out discounted rooms for attendees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that basically, if you plan to try to get a ticket, don’t book a non-refundable
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the strategy, we’ve been doing this strategy in San Francisco for a few years. as soon as you find out the dates you book
⏹️ ▶️ John refundable ticket and then what I would do is wait to see that if I do get a ticket which I have
⏹️ ▶️ John in years past look at the rates that Apple offers for like hey we reserved a block of room for you some
⏹️ ▶️ John years the Apple reserve room rate is cheaper than the one I provisionally booked sometimes it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually more expensive so it really depends on how quick people are on the draw and how quickly the hotels
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what’s going on but in this case by the time you’re listening to this if you haven’t already booked something
⏹️ ▶️ John probably Apple’s reserve block of room rate is gonna be better than anything you get right now
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are it seems like there are more hotels at formerly reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John prices closer to whatever the convention center is in San Jose because Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ John has some super expensive hotels fairly close to it and some cheaper ones like 15-minute
⏹️ ▶️ John walk away and then it goes down from there whereas the San Jose one right around it within like the same block there’s a couple of big hotels
⏹️ ▶️ John which don’t seem as nice and And we’re going for, you know, 100 and something a
⏹️ ▶️ John night if you were really quick on the draw. Of course, now they’re all up to four or 500. But you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can you do? Yeah, mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, I got mine for like 189 or something. I mean, I haven’t paid a rate that low in San Francisco in a few
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I haven’t seen anything with a one in front of it in many years.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. So true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness. So true. So yeah. So on the on the one side, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess at first that seems like an improvement because it It seems like it’s more accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financially until you have to fly there because there seem to be considerably fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options to get into San Jose than there are San Francisco, which makes sense. San Francisco is a much bigger airport from everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gathered. I am more than a little bitter that no matter where I fly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of, I’m going to have to change planes. In the past, I’ve driven two hours northbound to Dulles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone’s favorite airport, and gotten a direct flight on Virgin America, which is non-sarcastically my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite airline in the States. And typically, Underscore and I have flown on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same flights out and back, and it’s been wonderful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m going to have to change planes like an animal, which I’m perfectly capable of doing, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care for doing. And that’s a bummer. Alternatively, we could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fly to San Francisco and take like an hour-long drive or Caltrain or something along those lines, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bummer. So getting there is a little bit tougher and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more expensive, which stinks. But in the grand scheme of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, I think this has a lot of potential upside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does make a lot of things different and at first glance, potentially worse, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could make a lot of things better. Also announced today, which we’re not going to talk about very much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple Campus too, has been officially named Apple Park, and it will start to receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employees that will be moving in in April, and WWDC is in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey June. So it is certainly possible that there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be one or more WWDC events at Apple Park, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be kind of neat, I guess. We’ll what happens. There’s been a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of theorizing and scheming about where things like the beer bash will happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where will the keynote happen. And we know the name of the conference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center or event center, whatever it is, that WWDC is happening. I’ve already forgotten what it is. It doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. But there’s a lot of questions about this. And additionally, somewhere on the website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe it was in the announcement, they made passing reference to how Apple’s working with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Jose to kind of have stuff to do after hours. What does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that mean that they work with people like layers and alt conf to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something going on, but that’s not really after hours that’s during the show. So is it, is it that they’re working with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relay folks to get something going? Probably not, but you never know. Uh, you know, there’s a million questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, very few answers. However, at least we know when it is, and at least we know where it is. and we’d know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that before what feels like 10 seconds in advance, which is good. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tentatively optimistic, but we’ll see how we’ll see how it works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to miss the convention center. Like, I don’t even know what the San Jose one is like, but Moscone was cool looking,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that. I like that space. I mean, obviously, the rooms themselves are like, you know, boring partitions that they
⏹️ ▶️ John move around and stuff. But I think Apple always did a good job of making it feel so that familiarity
⏹️ ▶️ John will be will be a little weird. The potential upsides of San Jose is that nerds will be able to more thoroughly
⏹️ ▶️ John dominate the place because in San Francisco, yeah, there’s a lot of nerds. And when you’re around Moscone, you
⏹️ ▶️ John see a lot of little black WC jackets. But San Francisco is a big, busy city full of people going about their business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you move outward, nerds don’t dominate the city like the people who live in the city
⏹️ ▶️ John and work there. I mean, it’s other nerds, the people going to work at Twitter and stuff, right? But it’s a different set of nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ John In San Jose, because the population is lower and, you know, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a less of a big city than San Francisco, I would imagine that we will dominate
⏹️ ▶️ John more. I’m worried a little bit about facilities, as people have pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out, I’m not so much interested in bars, but even just as simple as like, hey, where do you want to go for dinner tonight? If it’s any remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John good restaurants, they may be overwhelmed by the additional volume of people. But then again, it is a convention So maybe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John used to it. I don’t know. It’s hard. It’s hard to gauge that. But again, San Francisco has a much larger capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John to absorb people’s activities just because they’re used to, you know, it’s a big city. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John many more options, more places to go places that are more used to large volumes of people on an ongoing basis. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John this surge for WRC could be large as far as San Jose
⏹️ ▶️ John is concerned, or it could not be because I think maybe their convention center regularly houses conventions
⏹️ ▶️ John that are seven times the size of WRC, in which case, you know, not a big deal. And also maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John people who previously went to San Francisco for WRC without a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ John to just, you know, enjoy the company will think twice of it, either because there’s not a direct flight or because
⏹️ ▶️ John they think there won’t be stuff to do. You know, won’t be as much stuff to do or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the idea of people going into San Francisco from San Jose is crazy because that’s a ridiculous trip and it’s a long distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John even without traffic. You’re not going to want to make that trip back when your, you know, meal ends at 2 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I mean, certainly I would never do that, but I think most people wouldn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine getting back in like an Uber to go ride for an hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 2 in the morning to go back to the park? 55? No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hard pass. No, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And maybe the weather will be nicer. Maybe it’ll be freezing cold.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey My understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that’s accurate, that it will be considerably warmer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems that San Jose is actually in California.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, for me, because I hate flying and I hate traveling, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to take a direct flight to SFO. I can’t do the change. Like one six hour
⏹️ ▶️ John flight, I can’t do two four hour flights with an hour in between or whatever the hell it would be if I went through Texas or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m curious, how are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get down to there from there? How does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get someone to drive me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Yeah, I’ve debated doing the same thing, especially inbound where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the schedule is a little less intense. And I haven’t booked plane travel yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, neither
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have I. But I think what I’ll likely do is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fly into San Jose and deal with the fact that I have to put on my big boy pants and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change planes at some point. We’ll say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re hearing from you because your connection got canceled or got missed how excited you are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey misregistration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, true. I agree. No, that’s why like, sure, I am being a little bit of a baby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t want to change planes, but truly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, that’s why I drive two hours because driving two hours to a larger airport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something I can control when I get stranded in Dallas or or Charlotte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Chicago or something like that. I’m screwed. Like, there’s nothing I can do about that at that point. So I’m with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you john i completely understand
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i mean that’s one of the many reasons to try to go direct um and then for for me personally
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a potential that i won’t be able to go at all because my wife might have work travel during that time and then i wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John watch the kids so potentially i’m not going at all and of course always the option of me not getting a ticket and if i don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John one as always i will have to reconsider because i’m not really going
⏹️ ▶️ John there for super duper nightlife and drinking i’m going to sit in boring nerd sessions and learn
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my life of the party
⏹️ ▶️ John people yeah right I’m sure I’ll be terribly missed you will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would be certainly by the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of us mark would
⏹️ ▶️ John be so excited to be able to figure out a new recording rig where he’s got two people live one person remote
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh god don’t make me do that that would be awful yeah anyway I will
⏹️ ▶️ John entering the lottery anyway and hopefully I’ll be able to either work out something
⏹️ ▶️ John with childcare or my wife’s work travel will change because it’s not set in stone at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I totally, I love the fact that we, in case you already mentioned it, we found out so much earlier. Like, even before,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we can’t even put our, you know, name into the hat for the lottery
⏹️ ▶️ John until the end of March. So they gave us so much notice, which is great. It’s like so much more relaxing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, the mad rush is still there, because as soon as everyone, I felt like I found out like
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour after everybody else did, despite the fact that through many venues, if I had just opened my eyes, I would have known
⏹️ ▶️ John much sooner. And then I’m scrambling to try to get a number with a one in front of it as my hotel room,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I mean, all in all, I’m, I’m tentatively excited. Like I said, I think I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this could be a bunch of awesome changes. Now it certainly could be garbage and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could work out really poorly and there’ll be nowhere to go after hours, nothing to do. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited. I think I think it could be a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I became just a little more on the venue stuff. Do we all agree that the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be in the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s too small. It’s not big enough. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I always wondered about that theater, why they made it. I mean, I guess for press events, a thousand is probably plenty, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has had a lot of press events in bigger venues. Even the Watch event held 5,000 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder why they made it so small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure the rationale was basically like, we can have some events on campus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we do and like the smaller events that aren’t like 5,000 people in a room, they just have on their campus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the rationale is probably like to make it meaningfully bigger. It’s like, do we want to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 5,000 person theater in our campus? And that’s a lot of people to shove into one room. It’s a really big room. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that’s probably a massive undertaking for relatively little benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they can just go book a place in San Francisco for that or book the San Jose Conference Center for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s probably fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John hope that whole Steve Jobs theater is just a facade for the 800 levels of sub basements where they do the car development right
⏹️ ▶️ John The underground in the underground test track facility. That’s a complete Recreation of Nurburgring.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s it. We’re the artificial sunlight over the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Would not assume that there’s gonna be any involvement between Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new campus and this and WBC like I don’t I don’t think there’s gonna be anything there there. They don’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and it would be a pretty big ordeal. Like, 5,000 people is a lot. To do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything with 5,000 people, that is a large logistical challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when the people can just walk to different buildings that are all within the same downtown area, that’s way easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. We’ll see what happens. Well, good luck, you two, getting tickets. I’m not trying for a ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re not? No. I decided last year, I’m always so double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and triple booked for things I want to do during that week, during every time of every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Humblebreck. That there is just a ticket on me at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, I would feel better with somebody else getting it. I feel like it’s wasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on me now because there’s so much else I want to do during those daytime slots. And last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year I didn’t go to that many sessions and I felt really bad about that. So this year I’m just going to be like, you know, I’m just going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to let someone else get my ticket this time because I think I don’t need it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m giving you a hard time, but I actually felt very similarly. Now, I did have Layers that I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to almost the entirety of last year. And quick aside, if you, for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be in that area and you don’t get a ticket or perhaps you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want something a little less developer-centric, Layers is a great conference. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, I could have sworn I saw that they were at least contemplating going to San Jose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I might be lying about that, so double-check me. But yeah, if Layers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a thing again, be it in San Francisco or San Jose, it is definitely worth checking out. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last year, I had a lot more availability because I didn’t have a conference ticket to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC. I had one to Layers and I still felt a bit overwhelmed and triple booked. And I’m giving you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hard time about humble bragging about how busy you were, but truth be told, I totally understand and I am in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact same boat. I will be trying for a ticket for sure because I think I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a lot to get from it. Um, in a, in a way that I don’t know that you necessarily do Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I agree with what you just said. Um, but we’ll see what happens. Uh, John, obviously we’ll be putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his, his hat in the ring and we’ll see how it goes. But, but I’m looking forward to it one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I forgot about layers. That’s an option. Like I would, that would be an excuse for me to go. It’s like, well, I didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John a ticket, but oh, well, I’ll buy a ticket to layers instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And you know, I feel guilty because I feel the same way, but truth be told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layers really is a great conference. Like I shouldn’t be positioning it as an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also-ran, because it really is really, really good. Now full disclosure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the women that runs Layers, Jessie Char, she also does our ad sales, and so we’re inclined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like her anyway. But the truth of the matter is she’s awesome. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it went the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She does our ad sales because we liked her so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s true, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. And Layers is just such an unbelievably good conference, a very diverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conference in a way that WWDC is not, which is super refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really, really awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, that’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is one of the biggest things that I want to do instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of going to WWDC this year. Like, I really want, I hope Layers happens. If it does happen, I’m there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, it shouldn’t be positioned as an also-ran. It is a peer to WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is truly a tremendous show. So anyway, so yeah, so we’ll see what happens, but I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it one way or another, and I really, really hope that all three of us make it out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I will put in a good word with Tina to temporarily quit her job or something, if need be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Small price to pay, am I right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Warby Parker, and Indochino, and we will see
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 notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental! Check the podcast SOONGLONG!!
Post-show: Marco plays games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had, I’ve been gaming again on the Apple TV with Adam, my son,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a while back, like right after I finished playing through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the emulator stuff with Provenance on the Apple TV, I was playing them all with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the SteelSeries, is it? The Nimbus controller? It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever the Nimbus is, I think it’s SteelSeries. And it’s one of the many $50 Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV gamepad controller things. And it’s fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great, but it’s fine. And right after I finished playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these old platformers with that controller, somebody recommended that I check out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HORI Pad Ultimate. This is a company I was not familiar with it, but apparently they’re well-respected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HORI company, I guess. They’re well-respected for making gamepads. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a model called the Hori Pad Ultimate that is, as far as I can tell, only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold at Apple stores and through Apple’s online site. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been playing with that the last couple days, and night and day better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is so good. It is so much better than the Nimbus for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual D-Pad and playing old games with the D-Pad. The analog sticks and everything I couldn’t care less about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m not that picky the analog sticks, but the D-pad and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons and the responsiveness of it is just so much better than the Nimbus and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s more practical, like it’s easier to turn on and off and everything and there’s the actual power switch on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. It also charges via lightning. So it’s very nice, very convenient, highly recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Hori Pad Ultimate Apple TV game controller. Apparently it also works with iPads and iPhones, but I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet tried it with those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what have you been playing that isn’t emulated or is that basically it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s kind of an asterisk on that. So I have not actually loaded up Providence yet, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point in the last few months since I last touched it, all of my games got deleted out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is probably some kind of Apple TV storage purge thing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably have to reload them all on, but I will have lost all my progress and I’m not looking forward to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I instead have been playing the official Sega authorized ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Apple TV of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sonic 1, 2, and CD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were done, oh God, I forget the guy’s name already. They were done by a really good person. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually have remastered the Sonic games, the original, these three Genesis Sonic games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be natively widescreen, to have built-in saves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Christian Whitehead is the guy, thank you, Chloe D. Guzman in the chat. Christian Whitehead is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person or company, I guess, I think it’s a person, who ported the game. And it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, these are very well done ports, actually like nice widescreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of these old Sonic games. And they actually don’t break in widescreen, like things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t worse or weird in some way. It’s actually a couple of, they made, they had to make a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks to the games to make it not break like in Sonic 1, the boss of Spring Yard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zone, kind of depends on the field of the game being a certain width. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so in this remaster that’s widescreen, They just put up these two big walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like on like two sides to force it back into the right width Stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway really good ports of all three these games of Sonic 1 Sonic 2 and Sonic CD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re awesome. We’ve been having a lot of fun playing them and apparently he has been hired to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Sonic mania Which is like a basically a new Sonic game in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the style of the old ones because there have been a million Garbage Sonic games like since the Genesis like all the stuff they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards and it has largely gone nowhere really and it has not been that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memorable but there’s a new one now being made I don’t know what’s coming out but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s for the Nintendo switch I should mention I’m getting a Nintendo switch what why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I feel it’s gonna be fun
⏹️ ▶️ John how are you getting into the switch because I want to get one and I I missed the like the one hour pre-order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so did I but a friend of the show who I I Would name but I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to in case he would get like Bombarded with requests a friend of the show ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an extra header I had it basically had an extra pre-order and offered it and I I grabbed it I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have to figure out what games to get for it, but I think it’s gonna be fun
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t get my fancy version of the Zelda game either. I missed the pre-order window on that I have notifications on Amazon for
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things like email me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when they’re available I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I was like working and I missed the day when you could put in the pre-orders
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and I missed them for like an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour and by the time I went there it was like, oh, too late I already sold out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no, I’m sure I’ll get the console, like I have no problem with that, I just would like the fancy version of the Zelda game because that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John want. I want the console and I want the Zelda game and the pro controller and that’s what I’m going to do with it and I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John care about any other games for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping, do we still know nothing about the virtual console for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure we know something. I haven’t been keeping up with it, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well anyway, I’m hoping the virtual console becomes like, you know, what it is, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has been before, like a pretty good thing, pretty good resource, because I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play like some of, basically some of like the Mario and Mario Kart games that I have missed in the last 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mario Kart 8, the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It has so many freaking tracks from past games.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, I ordered they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John adding 16 more. I think on top of that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to order that it’s my it’s my Amazon cart to pre-order that but But yes, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s obvious, but like is there anything else I would like it seems like Mario games themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of absent for a while until the big one comes out like in a year or something right something like
⏹️ ▶️ John That they’re spacing it out. I think it by like by the end of this year I think a lot of the games are basically done, and they’re just spacing it
⏹️ ▶️ John out to give like every two months They’ll be a major new game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my so far my my launch list of things. I want to launch are basically like Bomberman
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Puyo Tetris and Mario Kart which isn’t actually a launch, but is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to launch again, I guess But I don’t really know what else to get I’m not really that in Zelda so I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t get that unless Tiff wants to play which you might but I don’t know what Else to guess you’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda is gonna be like it might be within tips window of tolerance But I recall her not being a big
⏹️ ▶️ John fan of the 3d Zeldas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s she was a fan of like some of like I think the very first one for n64 But not even the second
⏹️ ▶️ John must be very different and more open-world He’s like could be worse or better But we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which one is the one where you drive around the dragon boat and play all the flute songs Wind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, she played that one. I think but I think that was it play all the flute
⏹️ ▶️ John flute? What what is it the recorder? It’s a it’s a wand. It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John the wind waker It wakes the wind. You don’t blow into it, you wave it around.