390: I Invented This Anti-Pattern
03 Aug 2020Whether we’d distribute our apps outside of the App Store, a deep dive on the Hey email service, and John’s true feelings about our Live Photos.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Zip ties vs. Velcro cable ties
- Follow-up:
- Apple’s Public Policy Advocacy (via Kyles the Gray)
- macOS Catalina 10.15.6 can read Big Sur APFS volumes (via Ole Begemann)
- Would we distribute our iOS apps outside the App Store? (via Wade Tregaskis)
- HEY
#askatp- How do we move data between computers? (Yes, again.) (via Jon Aumann)
- Will iPhone-only apps be rotated appropriately for usage on macOS/iPad OS? (via John Demco)
- How does John “back up” the junk valuable artifacts in his attic? (via John Larson)
- Post-show: John’s incorrect photo-taking preferences
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Chapters
- Zip ties vs. cable ties
- Apple’s public-policy… policy
- Big Sur + Catalina
- Sponsor: Bombas
- Would we offer sideloading?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Hey
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- #askatp: Mac migration again?!
- #askatp: iPhone apps on Mac/iPad
- #askatp: Protecting physical archives
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Zip ties vs. cable ties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s been so long since we’ve talked. I know. I feel like it’s been far, far too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did tear apart my entire beach office and put it back together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally got like the setup I wanted in most ways. Like I try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the ways that I’m different at the beach is that I try to have as minimal of a setup as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now this is, you know, still me here. So I still have, you know, speakers and a CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dev kit and all all this, you know, random. I still have a lot of stuff here, but, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to keep it simpler than what I have in my regular life anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, took apart the whole thing rewired. I finally did like the zip ties in the back and then of course as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do instantly upon zip tying a bunch of cables together, I would realize, Oh, I want to put one more cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Break that zip tie or just put another one on top of the whole bundle. And then you have like four different levels of levels of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ties simultaneously working with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, poor Stephen Hackett is getting so stressed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta get the Velcro ones. Don’t use actual zip ties. It’s way over-cal for wires. The Velcro ones
⏹️ ▶️ John is much nicer, and you can just un-Velcro and re-Velcro there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some of those. The kind I got for the beach is not a very good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just got some Amazon generic one, thinking it would be as good as the Monoprice ones I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have from a few years back, and it’s totally not. The Monoprice ones are way better than whatever the generic one is that I got. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured they’d all be the same, but nope. Anyway, the problem with the Velcro ties, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, they collect tons of dust and hair and everything on the Velcro side. Second of all, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are bulkier. And then third of all, they tend to slide down the cables if it’s a vertical cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can try to do it really tight and it’ll stay a little bit better there, but it will still slide way more than a zip tie will. I
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re talking about the same product. The ones I’m talking about are smooth on the outside, are very thin, they thread
⏹️ ▶️ John through themselves, and they do not move. You should send me a link to what you’re getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t necessarily describe mine as very thin. But there, and mine come in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the multicolor pack. So you know, it’s like all the primary colors of Velcro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any colored ones, but that doesn’t mean they don’t come in semi-like. I gotta find it, hold on. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’m in terrible luck with my Amazon order history search recently. It seems like the search of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order history has gotten way worse. Like it won’t find stuff based on pretty basic keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that occur in it. Oh, here we go, yeah. Monoprice 106463.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those look kind of similar, but they’re, mine are not that shape. I think it’s the same concept,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, I think the quality really varies, because these, I mean, you said these are the good ones, but they look
⏹️ ▶️ John wider than the ones I’m talking about, and the slip-through mechanism looks different. I don’t know, I wouldn’t give up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Velcro. All the problems you described to them about collecting dust and stuff and not holding, I have not experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. My whole TV is put together with these things, and they do not move. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no undue dust collection in there. Not as fuzzy on the outside as these. They actually look like they’re made of
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic, but it just has the stuff. Anyway, zip ties, like actual real zip ties, those are, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I would never actually use those unless it was something serious and structural.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s great because you buy a bag of like 200 of them for nothing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, yeah, the downside is whenever you change your mind, you gotta cut them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you could accidentally cut the cable if you’re not being careful, and then they can be squeezing the cables too much If you tightened it
⏹️ ▶️ John up too much, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re an animal, yeah, obviously. But if you use them carefully, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. No, no, no, it’s Velcro. I had something Velcro. But anyway, by the way, the thing I learned when I was a very, very small
⏹️ ▶️ John child, if you ever want to undo zip ties without cutting them, a sewing needle is your best friend.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that. The thing you have in the house, I mean, obviously, tons of things will work. But a sewing needle will disengage the little
⏹️ ▶️ John ratchety thing, and you can just take them right off without cutting them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s interesting. You can actually lift up the little latches inside there and loop it back through?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you just shove the sewing needle between the two little thingies, because it’s really thin at the tip, and it’s wider as it goes down,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will just open it up enough for you to just take it right off. And everyone has a sewing needle, because if you try to use a jewelry screwdriver,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the tip of a knife, nothing works, but a needle will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Interesting, look at that. Life hack from John Syracusa.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they didn’t call them life hacks when I was five. And I had to undo zip ties and things. And I would undo them, by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, for the same reason, well, not the same reason, but I wouldn’t have a pack of 100 of them. I’d have one or two zip ties, and I’d realize I
⏹️ ▶️ John need to take it off, and then I said, There’s gotta be a way to take these on and off without destroying them, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. Sewing needle. Today I learned. Be careful with wires, because you can still poke the wire with the needle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, obviously I wasn’t zip-tying wires. Like, there is still a danger, but it is much less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, I have way more zip-ties than sewing needles, so that’s, I’m probably still gonna keep doing it my way. but that’s a
Apple’s public-policy… policy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trevor Burrussus, Jr.: Friend of the show, Kyle’s the Gray has things to say about public policy advocacy. Kyle
⏹️ ▶️ John Grimstead, PhD.: Yeah, he just wanted to clarify. Just listen back to quote unquote last week’s
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. And at one point I made a blanket statement about how all these
⏹️ ▶️ John companies give to both political parties, yada, yada, yada. And not Kyle’s the Gray,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Kyle Seth Gray pointed out that unlike all the other companies, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple does – this is from Apple’s own webpage, quoting now. Apple does not make political contributions
⏹️ ▶️ John to individual candidates or parties, and we do not have a political action committee. They do have lobbyists, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t give direct candidates, and that is not true of most other big companies and most other tech companies. So
⏹️ ▶️ John credit where credit is due. We will put a link in the show notes to Apple’s public policy advocacy
⏹️ ▶️ John webpage where you can read about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually didn’t know that. That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I didn’t know that either. I had assumed as you that they do the sleazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advocacy and what’s the word I’m looking for? the thing where you send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people to, oh, lobby. There it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John lobby. No, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have lobbyists, but they don’t contribute directly to candidates
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or parties. Oh, that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fine line there. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer lobbyists than other companies. There was one thing that came up before these hearings showing
⏹️ ▶️ John how many lobbyists the various companies have. They have on the, they’re below average number of lobbyists
⏹️ ▶️ John among their peers. But like Google, and I think Facebook, and a bunch of other companies, give directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to candidates. Like they give the maximum amount you’re allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John donations. They don’t have a political action committee, a PAC, which is another way to get money to people. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s a distinction without a difference. I think it’s significant enough that I shouldn’t have lumped
⏹️ ▶️ John them in with everybody else.
Big Sur + Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tell me about Big Sur and Catalina and APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tested this yet, but I’ve seen multiple reports that macOS 10.15.6,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the latest Catalina update, now understands Big Sur’s new APFS volume format.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you won’t get that message in the finder when you reboot into Catalina that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, I don’t understand this format of this weird disk here. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John had my, I have a bunch of stuff running that prevents external drives from mounting. Like back in the old
⏹️ ▶️ John days, I would just not turn on my external drives. But of course, all my drives are now like SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re bus powered. So if they’re plugged into my computer, they’re powered. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that application I talked about a while back, Mountain or whatever. You can just tell it not to mount them automatically and so they don’t appear.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I never see that message. But in theory, if I was to mount that drive now, it would be mountable,
⏹️ ▶️ John invisible, and Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ John nice, because it’s always annoying when the old operating system can’t see something about the new operating system and vice
⏹️ ▶️ John this is true, I’m very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I haven’t tried booting Catalina. Oh, no, I did boot Catalina earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tonight. And I don’t remember seeing that message. So I think that’s accurate. I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that is good. And because that notification, I forget exactly what the verbiage was we talked about on the show, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was alarming to me because I guess I just didn’t know what was happening. And once you think about it, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, that makes sense. But at I was like, oh God, what happened here? So yeah, I’m glad that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed, improved, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any time you get that disk isn’t recognized or error or anything like that, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John you freak out a little bit because. Exactly. Because like, what do you mean disk isn’t recognized? The old macOS would
⏹️ ▶️ John always say, do you want to initialize it? And you’d be like, no way, no, what are you talking about? Don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s perfectly good disk. Why are you telling me to? And if you weren’t paying attention and you just click
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong button, Yeah, mangroves used to be a lot more dangerous.
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Would we offer sideloading?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’ll start tonight with Wade Trigaskis, who writes, if there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a legitimate way to distribute iOS apps outside of the App Store, would any of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually do that? This could allegedly be an Ask ATP, but we already have a full slate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Ask ATP. I didn’t put this here, but I agree. I’m assuming it was John who put this here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is an interesting thought. So for me, I had recently Sunset Vignette, but Peek-a-View
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still in the App Store. Sunset? Sunset, Sunset, Big Sur. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, so I still have Peek-a-View in the store, and in fact, I’m waiting for review on a very small update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. And I was thinking about this a little. I don’t know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would. Maybe I would. I’m leaning toward no, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, I don’t know what it would really get for me other than like presumably reduced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an improved cut, I guess I should say. You know, I would get more than 70%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then I would have to manage all the things I don’t really want to manage, like payments and so on and so forth. And since it’s not like a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, like Overcast, I don’t necessarily need to have a more direct relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my customers. So I don’t think I would. But Marco, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a feeling that you might have a very different answer here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d be surprised. And there’s so much more of a larger discussion here around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 30%, the 15%, all that stuff. Much of which is happening because of all the antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearings and everything. The discussion around Apple and potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-competitive or antitrust issues with the App Store has focused a lot on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 30%. And many people have suggested, well, what if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just lower the commission? could that fix things? And would that be good enough?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has even focused a lot of their defense or rebuttal that they’re not being anti-competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the 30%. And I think they do that intentionally because they know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can reduce the discussion around other angles of it, not only can they control the message, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an area where what they have is slightly more defensible because they can point to the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big app stores that all copied them and be like, okay, look, Google charges 30% or whatever, but it’s really not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the 30% so much. 30% is a ton. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me wrong, it is a very large commission. It is substantial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think they deliver enough value to have earned 30%. And they would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyone to only talk about the percentage, because if you’re only talking about the percentage, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not talking about all of the other problems that are actually anti-competitive. The percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t that big of a factor. If Apple dropped it from 70-30 to 85-15 across the board, so every app could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be 85-15, that still wouldn’t make companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Netflix or Hay wanna have their services in the App Store, or use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app purchase in the App Store. The 30% is not the problem. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you would get somebody like Amazon, or Netflix, HBO, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these big companies, they wouldn’t participate in an in-app purchase at any price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if Apple somehow made it 0%, they still wouldn’t do it. Because there are so many more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angles here that are about things like integration with your existing system, things like control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owning the billing relationship. There’s so much stuff that you can’t do if you’re using Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. There’s a lot of things that Apple’s system simply can’t do or doesn’t do well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certain purchase methods or even just like managing what purchases are available and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accounting for them. There’s a lot of things that Apple system either doesn’t do it all or doesn’t do as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well as other systems do. Any kind of admin control, like we have no ways developers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refund people who purchase our stuff. So like if I get an email from somebody saying, oh I purchased Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Premium, I thought it would do this. I get an email almost every day from people who say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I purchased Overcast Premium so I could send files to my watch. It doesn’t work. I want a refund.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know where they’re finding this information. I don’t think I… Did I ever charge for that? I don’t remember. I don’t think I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made that a premium feature. But regardless, I frequently have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a need where I wish I could issue somebody a refund. And instead I can’t do that. All I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is direct them to Apple’s page about how to maybe possibly sometimes get a refund. and that’s a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer approach. I wish I could offer refunds. I have no way to tell if someone’s charge went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through. For our ATP.fm member CMS, we use Stripe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m able, with Stripe, there’s a whole dashboard I can go into. And it’s super easy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to either use their dashboard or build my own on our admin backend that can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like see what a customer has been charged, see if their credit card was declined, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charge actually was issued or not. I can give partial or full refunds for any payment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve made. Like there’s so much control that we have in Stripe that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have with Apple’s in-app purchase system. So there’s a lot of reasons why people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would maybe not wanna use Apple’s in-app purchase system that are not just about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever percentage they happen to charge. Now, the percentage they charge is high for sure. Even the 15% that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get on, you know, years to forward on subscriptions, even 15% is high. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for start we pay something like 3%, and that’s pretty typical for most payment processors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The percentage is important, but all this other stuff, all these angles of control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and being able to have your own billing system, and being able to own that customer relationship, being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look up what somebody paid to solve customer support problems, being able to issue refunds yourself to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other customer support problems. There’s so many reasons that Apple’s system is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are things that Apple System literally can’t do that make certain businesses possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not possible. Like I was saying in the past about how if I wanted to have some kind of system where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, paid overcast 20 bucks a month and then I split it up between all the podcasts that you listen to, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently have no way with Apple System to associate your purchase with how much money I’ve actually received
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from you. So I can’t split up your money without, like I can estimate and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wrong. I don’t really wanna do that. I can put myself at risk of actually losing money if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happened, and I wouldn’t be incredibly accurate with where people’s money was supposed to go, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way for me to look up an Apple system, how much money did I actually receive from this user this month?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t do that. There’s all sorts of other things like that, where Apple system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great in certain ways, and it’s really not great in others. And Apple wants us to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about 30% to avoid talking about all of that other stuff. The real problem with the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store being anti-competitive, the real thing that’s going to make Apple have to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulated by governments because they clearly won’t do it themselves, is gonna be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules about not letting other people use their own purchase systems. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key thing here. Apple doesn’t want us talking about that because that would cost them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot in control and that would make them fully lose all the big companies that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re already mostly losing, things like Amazon, Netflix, etc. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the app store to have significantly reduced antitrust problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to allow apps to use their own purchase systems if they want to. And they can put as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrictions around that as possible, except what they’ve done so far to date with the stupid reader app distinction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is really just, we’re going to allow the big apps to do it because we have to because they’re big, but we’re not going to allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new small apps to do it. That’s a terrible distinction. They have to To get rid of the reader app distinction that says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re allowed to do it, but you’re not, they have to allow apps to mention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to our website to sign up. They don’t have to let you link out, they don’t have to let you build it into the app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they need to do those two things. Get rid of the rule that lets only some apps do this at all, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relax the rule about mentioning it at all, and allow apps to mention in text in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to our website to sign up, and that’s it. That would solve so many of these antitrust problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they won’t do that unless they’re forced apparently but that’s like we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking for like you know alternative app stores and side loading all I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think those things would be very good for the platform I don’t I don’t think the iPhone would benefit from side loading or alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app stores and I will eventually answer this question by Wade by the way which is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this it was about distributing apps outside of the app store like if you know side loading it you know something like that became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible I will get there in a second, but basically I don’t think that would be good for the platform at all. Having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store and having forced app review for all apps on iOS in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t accept this on Mac OS, but on iOS I think it does make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense and the platform is better off for it. However, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also think that rule about external payment systems needs to be relaxed and I’m not even saying these be relaxed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much, just a little. Let all apps do the Netflix trick and and let the Netflix trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be slightly nicer for users in that let the app actually say in text, you may sign up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our website. With that, with those changes, again, these problems mostly disappear. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so going back to the question about whether I would distribute my apps or any apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mine, I guess, outside of the App Store if there was a way to do it, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least nothing I’ve currently written in, not overcast for sure. Apple’s payment system does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come with some significant benefits. And if they were actually forced to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more with others, maybe they’d make it even better. I choose to use it willingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m glad I can use it, because Apple’s payment system is really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for the case of Overcast Premium, where I need to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly if somebody paid or not, but I don’t really need to know how much they paid me. I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know exactly how much I earned from their account after any possible foreign currency conversion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to know any of that. And if a couple of people get through fraudulently who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid me and then got refunds and kept the account anyway, you know what, that doesn’t matter that much to me. I’m not gonna lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money over that, really. They could fill their uploads with 10 gigs of files and I would lose, just look at whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S3 charges, that amount of cents per month. It wouldn’t be that big of a loss. Apple’s system is good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t need all that precision about who exactly bought exactly what and did they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get refunds or chargebacks or anything. If you don’t need that kind of granularity, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you get the benefit of the incredible ease of use it gives users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why I’ve always liked Apple’s purchase system is that it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. Your billing info’s already entered. This is even before Apple Pay was a thing on websites. Your billing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco info’s already entered, everything is already ready to go. You just authorize it with a password or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch ID or Face ID or whatever, and it’s purchased and that’s it. And so as a, as a user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that. And as a developer, I love that because I like having things be really, really easy to purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my app. And then all the things that Apple removes can remove from my control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part is stuff that I don’t really need to deal with, with this particular app, with this particular offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a paid thing, I don’t need to deal with most of that stuff. So it’s totally fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gladly, for this app, I gladly accept the trade-off of I will accept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of Apple’s shortcomings, I accept that they’re 30% forever, and then with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most recently, now that I’m entirely subscription-based on iOS, I accept they’re 70, 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first year, and 85, 15 subsequent years, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like not having to deal with all that stuff for this particular app, and I like the incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ease of use that people have for buying it. and that allows me, ultimately, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make more money from Overcash Premium than I would if I had to have my own payment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system and people had to enter their own billing details and everything like that, because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would cause more friction and I would lose more sales. So I think ultimately I’m making money with this that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wouldn’t be making doing a different system, and I’m able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all that ease of use of all the stuff I don’t have to really deal with that they deal with for me. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, this doesn’t apply to everything. I also sell ads, and I sell ads only on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Overcast website, not through the app. I don’t have any in-app purchase. I actually do accept Apple Pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them, all through Stripe again, because that’s like a different thing. Like, that’s offering something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web that is mostly, you know, from people who are not using their phones at the time of purchase. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people who work for big podcasting companies who are spending a marketing budget from their computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at their office, and they’re going to websites, and I need to know then who actually paid and if anybody did get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charged back some refunds, I need to know that because it’s larger sums of money for a small number of purchases and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matters more. That’s a different thing though. For the actual app, I am very happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in the App Store and to use the in-app purchase system because it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me more users and more purchases than the alternative would. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s only because I have this set of trade-offs and priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this particular app and for this particular purchase for Overcast Premium, where that makes sense. That doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense for everybody and it never will. And they’re always gonna have antitrust problems until using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative payment systems for apps that don’t wanna use an app purchase become possible. And then Apple can try to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete on their merits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why didn’t you put Forecast in the Mac App Store? I know that’s not an apples to apples, haha, comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but why not put Forecast there then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main reason I didn’t put Forecast in the Mac App Store is that Forecast is free and I don’t have any purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. I don’t have any way to make money in it. It was just easier on the Mac not to. Because, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if I’m dealing with the App Store, I’m dealing with, on the Mac you have to deal with things like sandboxing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the, you know, weird limitations of the Mac App Store apps and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t want to deal with any of that and it didn’t make sense for a free app to go through all that trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Forecast was a paid app, I would do it through the App Store, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I know you don’t have iOS apps, but you could have elected to do your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own distribution for your stuff, but you ended up in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put this question in here, and not as an ask ADP, because I think, as Marco has just discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very relevant to the antitrust stuff, and in particular, well, two aspects.
⏹️ ▶️ John One that Marco also kind of touched on, like
⏹️ ▶️ John and many people have mentioned, Like when Apple is asked about, you know, or they offer
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves when describing, here’s the app store and here’s why it’s awesome. They go through their whole thing and they say, it used to be you had
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay retailers a huge amount, and then they skip right to the app store, right? Which is another silly thing for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John do because they have a good case for explaining the app store without skipping
⏹️ ▶️ John over the multiple decades where people sold software over the internet without the app store, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason to skip from retail to the app store. you can say, yeah, people used to sell, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John software from their websites, but then they had to do payment processing and they had to deal all of themselves. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John even harder before Stripe happened and it was harder for users. And if a user wanted to buy five applications, they had to
⏹️ ▶️ John enter their payment information into five different websites. It’s like Apple has a case that can
⏹️ ▶️ John be made about the app store. Apple made this very case when they introduced the app store like it’s right there in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of us. And as Marco said, it’s easy for people to buy things on the app store. It’s why users like it and developers
⏹️ ▶️ John like it because there’s less friction between people’s money and your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that is the foundation of that is Apple sort of parlayed its success in
⏹️ ▶️ John digital music into the App Store, because why did they have all those credit card numbers? Oh, it was your quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes account, right? You know, and like people trusted, people have been giving Apple money with their credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. So it wasn’t so much of a stretch to say, hey, you get a new phone, you can use your Apple ID, enter
⏹️ ▶️ John payment information. Yeah, yeah, like it’s all, It was all snowballing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they only had to do that once. And once they do that, any app in the app store, they’re gonna say, purchase, purchase, purchase, purchase. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, you don’t have to, every time you purchase an app, you don’t have to enter your credit card information
⏹️ ▶️ John in that developer’s website, right? So there’s a strong argument to be made for the value that the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John provides without making some completely disingenuous argument about how in the
⏹️ ▶️ John bad old days, right before the app store, you had to pay CompUSA to put a cardboard box
⏹️ ▶️ John in and you get like 1% of that sale or whatever the heck it was, right? That’s not the predecessor
⏹️ ▶️ John that the App Store was competing with. It was competing with direct sales through websites. Now, direct sales through websites
⏹️ ▶️ John had the advantages that Margot listed before, which is like, oh, you have the customer relationship, you can easily issue refunds,
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. And obviously, the bigger the software company, the more important that is, because they probably
⏹️ ▶️ John have more sales and more applications. And for a company like Adobe, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you may, you’re probably not just gonna buy one Adobe app if you’re going to be a big customer for them. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John give Adobe your payment information once and then you can buy all sorts of Adobe things year after year, right? So it’s not so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for small developers, it makes more sense. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure why Apple doesn’t make that pitch, but I think everybody knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John either at the top of their mind or just instinctively, that’s what makes the App Store good. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John question about alternate App Stores, if you think
⏹️ ▶️ John about it for more than a couple of seconds leads you to some weird scenarios, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder how this will work out legally speaking, right? What would it take to have an alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John app store? I know there are ones like the jailbreak app stores of like, what is it, Cydia? And there’s a whole bunch of like things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are out there that do this, but I think we’d all agree that’s a little bit, a little bit sketchy
⏹️ ▶️ John and weird and not a mainstream thing, right? If there were an alternate app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would actually need substantial, it would need to be jailbreak, which I think we can set
⏹️ ▶️ John aside and say no one wants to compromise the security of their phone that much for an app
⏹️ ▶️ John store, right? You didn’t have to compromise the security of your computer that much to buy things from a website, so why, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just a curiosity. But like say there was like a legit alternate store
⏹️ ▶️ John for your phones, right? That would basically necessarily need
⏹️ ▶️ John support from iOS, support from Apple for it to reach feature parity with
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store in all the areas that the App Store is good. Oh, I want to be able to automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John install applications with a single tap without doing anything a weird jailbreaking without define, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t do that on a phone without the privileges that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John offers to the App Store. Like there is no way like from a website to install
⏹️ ▶️ John an app onto your phone and you know, probably thankfully me. There is no way to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get it, you know, how would you get, how would you bootstrap the process? How do you get the, the store application, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the app store comes on our phones, right? But how would you get the alternate store application onto your phone in the first
⏹️ ▶️ John place? It would probably have to be hosted on the app store, right? Otherwise, there’d be this convoluted
⏹️ ▶️ John install process. And then all the things that I’m talking about without sort of support from Apple in the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system for alternate stores, every alternate store would be at a massive disadvantage because
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants to figure out how to sideload or use Xcode to put a thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John or do some weird page or jailbreak. Regular people do not wanna do that. So you’ve just narrowed
⏹️ ▶️ John your customer base to this incredibly thin sliver of tech nerds. Everyone else would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I don’t know how to do that. I’ll just go to the App Store because it’s on my phone to begin with. So Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John need to actively support alternate App Stores and the only way they would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John do that is if the law made them do it. And laws that make companies do technical
⏹️ ▶️ John things never work because the law doesn’t understand the technology, the technology changes too fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, like, when I think about alternate app stores, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John no one would want to use an alternate app store. Users wouldn’t want to use an alternate app store because it can never be
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as the app store is in all the ways that the app store is beneficial
⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody involved, right? And that’s kind of disappointing, but also sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of like Microsoft and IE, you know, the argument that it’s part of the operating system, but also the argument of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, it’s a little bit different because it was easier to put alternate browsers on, but anyway, alternate app stores would
⏹️ ▶️ John need good support from Apple and Apple will never provide that unless they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John forced to, and if they’re forced to, they’ll do it weirdly or badly because the law will
⏹️ ▶️ John not be able to say, and you have to do a good job and it doesn’t really make any sense. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the alternate app store thing is a pointless
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to consider. Side loading isn’t, because you can say, look, in special cases for particular
⏹️ ▶️ John kinds of applications, it’s great to have an out and a way to install things. But for the mass market case of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought an iPhone, now I wanna get a bunch of apps. We’re never gonna be in a world where there are a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John app stores, all of which are as easy to use, reliable and trustworthy as the app store, because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want that to be the case. If Apple changed their mind and figured out some way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make more money doing
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they could definitely do it. It’s not a technical barrier, it’s just sort of a business case barrier. As
⏹️ ▶️ John for my particular things distributing outside the App Store, the only reason I didn’t do it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, like, my two apps are small and barely hobbies,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Both of my apps would benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John from not being in the Mac App Store because I wouldn’t have sandbox them and I wouldn’t have a bunch of stupid limitations like
⏹️ ▶️ John to just give one example from switch glass I implemented a feature where you right click on an
⏹️ ▶️ John icon in the the little app switcher and the bottom item was quit because it’s handy to be able to quit
⏹️ ▶️ John an application from the app switcher right I implemented it and then it just totally didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was like oh yeah you can’t do that with sandbox and you cannot tell an arbitrary application to
⏹️ ▶️ John quit you can whitelist them and say I want to be able to send the quit apple
⏹️ ▶️ John event to these five applications, but you have to ship that with your binary. And I’m not going to list every application
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, right. So there’s one example of feature I implemented. Granted, it’s like five lines, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I implemented it before I discovered that it can’t be implemented. People ask for it all the time. I have a fact item on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I wasn’t in the Mac App Store, it would have that feature. So there are reasons that especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for my weird utility type applications that I would love to be outside the Mac App Store. But because it’s just a little tiny hobby, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to sell a lot of these things, but I do want to sell them. I’m not going to set up a payment processor for the piddling amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money these things make. I’m not going to set up my own store and have a customer relationship and blah, blah, blah. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, I don’t have enough sales and I never will have enough sales to justify the effort for me to make
⏹️ ▶️ John my own sort of software store outside the app store because I’m not a Mac app developer who’s trying to start a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app development business. So for me, no, I wouldn’t do it for my Mac apps, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about it from time to time. I’m like, like maybe when, when like if I go through like six months with zero
⏹️ ▶️ John sales, maybe I’ll just make it a free app and put it outside the app store and make it not sandboxed anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also thought maybe like, oh, well, you know, I’ll just, I’ll build a non-sandbox version for my own personal
⏹️ ▶️ John use. In practice, I don’t, partially because of the convenience. I bought my own application,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is another weird thing that you do if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought my own application and in every Mac that I’m on, I just download it from the Mac app store. Again, it’s just more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing it the other way and having a special build. It’s just easier to have just one build.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for iOS, if I ever made an iOS application, it’s even more the case. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way there will ever be another app store that is as friendly
⏹️ ▶️ John to customers as the app store. So if I want to get any kind of sales or any kind of downloads, I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the app store. I wouldn’t be in the, quote unquote, alternate app store. But I was making some weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the ability to side load, even like some weird, you know, the ability to load an application,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s a long multi-step process, but it’s officially supported by Apple, that’s what I mean by side-loading.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do that if I had a good idea for a strange iOS application that needed to violate some rules
⏹️ ▶️ John or something that the App Store enforces, but that the OS doesn’t, because that’s another distinction you have to remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John On iOS, it’s not like if you can side-load something, you don’t have sandboxing. But if you can side-load,
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing you don’t have to deal with is I don’t like your metadata, I don’t like this kind of application, I don’t like that you use the private
⏹️ ▶️ John API, all that crap you don’t have to deal with if you’re outside the App Store. but once you get onto the phone, it’s not like you have a free-for-all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a difference between jailbreaking and side-loading, so. Anyway, if I was on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless I had one of those weird type of applications that was techie and just a one-off, like a dev tool
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, I’d be in the App Store. And yeah, Wade, I know this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not exactly what you were asking about, but I think the heart of it is, and you know, would we be in the alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store? Would anyone, not without massive, massive, extremely unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ John support from Apple, to make the alternate app store be able to do the basic things that an app store does.
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Hey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been dabbling with, and I think John has even longer than I, a very recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor, as in two days ago as we record this, but the sponsor from last week, Hey!,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the new email service from Basecamp, and formerly known as 37signals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right, 37? Yep. I think that’s right. And I have thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me start by saying everyone started gushing over this new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email web app slash iOS app. And obviously this made a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, that’s made a big splash when, uh, when it was released because there was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big kerfuffle that we’ve covered on this show with Phil Schiller amongst others about whether or not, Hey, he has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to support an app purchase and so on and so forth. Um, and I don’t know, all the things I heard at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first ago were reinventing email. Oh, okay, sure. know that Jennifer Lawrence, uh-huh, okay, GIF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, okay guys, whatever you say, sure. You’re reinventing email. And I didn’t try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I didn’t sign up. I should have signed up and gotten a sweet username, but I didn’t because I never do. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then a couple of weeks back, I did sign up and I started playing with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I played with it for a few minutes with no email coming into it, except the one that I sent myself and I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, okay, I guess this is interesting. And then when they were a sponsor, I wanted to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it some more. And then I found out we were going to talk about it because I think John had asked us to, or maybe I had asked us to, I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I actually forwarded my, it’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google apps for my domain, but I’ll probably just call it Gmail. I forwarded my, my Gmail account to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Hey, to really try to live the life of a Hey user.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have to say that I really didn’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hype was justified before I started really improperly using it the way they intended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go figure. And I still am not entirely sure the hype is justified,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a lot of it is justified because I actually am really impressed with this and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s really, really clever and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to switch my email to use Hey, or at least I do right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to do that until it supports custom domains, which I’ve said many, many times is coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am very impressed by it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside of some quibbles here and there, especially imbox, I-M-B-O-X,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which just is so cringy. I have a few other quibbles. By and large, I really like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before I go into details about what makes Hay different, would the two of you, perhaps starting with John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since you’ve had it longer, like to discuss any initial impressions, or if you’d rather just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dive into the nitty gritty, we can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing about initial impressions that I think is important for many services,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think a lot of services do this, is creating FOMO about getting
⏹️ ▶️ John your username, which is usually a pretty good marketing tool in certain times
⏹️ ▶️ John for people, me being one of those types of people. Obviously not Casey, because you have the FOMO, but not enough for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to go get your name, right? So the general case of this phenomenon is a new service appears,
⏹️ ▶️ John and even if you have no interest in it whatsoever, if it’s free to sign up, you just sign up to reserve your name, just
⏹️ ▶️ John in case it turns out to be the next big thing, so you’ve got your name. So many services I’ve signed up for,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the explanation. The one service that I didn’t do that for, I regret massively. Instagram, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for years and years and years because I thought I would have no use of it. And when I finally did sign up, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John seven years after Instagram existed or whatever the hell it was, like, way late I signed up, like, no remote
⏹️ ▶️ John my name existed and I have this horrendous username on Instagram and I regret it. I should have just signed up to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the name. I still barely use Instagram, but anyway. Boy, that was a mistake. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Basecamp being smart company that they are, takes this one step further where,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I was gonna sign up for Hey, no matter what. In fact, I signed up for that early, they said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re interested in our email thing, send us your current
⏹️ ▶️ John email address and we’ll let you know when, they have a thing where they let people in slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was on the waiting list. I was fairly early on the waiting list to get in this because I wanted to get my name. and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was sign up for free, get your name, so on and so forth. But when they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, they said, okay, if you sign up and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if you pay, if you subscribe, because there’s a free 14 day trial
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and then after that you have to pay. If you pay for your name, subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John for a month or a year, whatever you want to subscribe, I forget what the terms are. And then later you
⏹️ ▶️ John just stop subscribing, you say, oh, this isn’t for me, and you still pay anymore, they’ll hold your
⏹️ ▶️ John name for you forever. So once you get your name, you don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, if I let the subscription expire, someone else can steal my name. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always there waiting for you to come back and start paying again, which is smart on multiple levels, but especially smart
⏹️ ▶️ John for people like me, who are like, well, that’s it, I’m going to instantly pay for my name. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for email services, like Casey mentioned, not wanting to go for it until it’s on your domain, which I totally understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of stuff is important because the email is not only the linchpin to many different things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also it’s kind of like your address or like for most people who don’t have like
⏹️ ▶️ John their own like web servers or websites or anything like that, it represents you online
⏹️ ▶️ John and having to change it is a gigantic pain, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone does sign up for Hey, they’ll want to keep using it for
⏹️ ▶️ John a very long time and not, you know, they won’t want to enter that as their email address and something, and then just say, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, that was when I was first trying out. Hey, but I decided I didn’t like it and I’ve lost that name forever and can never get it back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think that’s cool. Um, and in general, most of their policies, uh, the policies around,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, and the reason I was so willing to sign up for it, it’s based on the company’s reputation. Um, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that Marco talked about that you can’t do on the Apple app store in terms of customer relations,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are exactly the things that Basecamp is good at. Having good customer support,
⏹️ ▶️ John being really easy with refunds, like all that stuff, knowing the customer and their relationship and
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they paid you or not, and like just all that stuff, it’s back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the old world of buying things where when you buy from a
⏹️ ▶️ John brand that you know and trust, like there’s brand loyalty to like the particular
⏹️ ▶️ John maker of the thing that you’re buying, whether it’s a car manufacturer you really like or a department store
⏹️ ▶️ John or a software maker, right? These companies build their reputation on how
⏹️ ▶️ John they treat their customers and how good their products are. And it also means
⏹️ ▶️ John that if there’s some random one person company that you’ve never heard of, you don’t have that established trust and it might be
⏹️ ▶️ John more dangerous. But the flip side of that is, when you’re buying from a company you know and trust a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ John have experience with their products and like them, you have some assurance that everything will
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine and that company is empowered to do all the good things that you like them for. In
⏹️ ▶️ John the app store, you’re paying Apple and that’s it, which is great for the small companies because you’re like, well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John trust them, but I trust Apple, right? Or it’s mostly great for small companies. The app can still be a scam. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the flip side, the very best companies are forced down to sort of the level
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple enforces for everybody. It’s like, you can’t give amazing customer service
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple won’t let you, but nobody can give awful customer service because Apple won’t let them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to turn this back into the App Store topic. But anyway, all this is to say, I was totally on board with trying
⏹️ ▶️ John out Hey, even though my history with email things is, I try them all and I
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much reject them all, but I love seeing people do new things with email because
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while, you know, one of them hits with me. Marco, you seemed a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiastic about Hey. In fact, the only reason I think you would have looked at it at all is because after the last show I said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s look at hey. Hey, and
⏹️ ▶️ John grumbled about it. And you’re like, I don’t want to look at it. Because you do not seem like you’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for new innovations in your email. Did you sign up and try it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I signed up, but I haven’t really done anything with it yet. I haven’t forwarded any accounts to it or anything. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like the typical worst case scenario for a service like this, because I have my workflow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco muscle memory for all the built-in mail apps on Mac and iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that being said, like I’ve not been incredibly happy with mail.app ever since iOS 13.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mail.app has been very increasingly buggy. It still, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 14 betas, still has the bug where new messages sometimes stop appearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the top of the list, they appear at the bottom of the list so you don’t usually see them until you go like back out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back into your main inbox. It’s kind of amazing. I still can’t believe this bug has been there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since iOS 13 beta one. and here we are through the iOS 14 beta cycle, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And then mail, I don’t love mail.app on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much either. Under the Catalina version, I’ve had massive performance problems, especially on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. And under the Big Sur version on the laptop, performance problems remained and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruined the whole interface with Big Sur’s new stupid toolbar design. So I’m really not incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with mail.app. So I should be more on board with trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something new, but there’s just so much inertia that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel behind the way I’ve always done it. And I’m not a person to just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play with different tools for the sake of it. Like I’ll do that with certain things like microphones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for the most part, I don’t enjoy doing that for most things. I enjoy like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving into one and settling in for the long haul. I’m like a tool monogamist. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to just use the one thing that I find to be great and just stick with it forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things that I don’t really care that much about. And email is one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not an email power user. I don’t practice any reasonable email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco philosophy or filing system or getting things done or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just use email crappily like everybody else and I don’t care that much about it. Email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not something where I ever want to spend a lot of time to learn a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system or even install, let alone learn new apps everywhere. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also historically not been a fan of webmail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type things, like web-based email. I really love native apps, and while Hay has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they are webviews. If anybody can make a good webview, it’s Basecamp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They know how to make webviews really well. They are amazing with web technology, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do love fully native apps way more. I also don’t want to move stuff because I have a lot of inertia in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system just in like my archive. Like I mentioned last week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I mentioned that email search is very important to me. And the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because I’ve been using the same email app forever with the same email account on the same email iMap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server forever. And so I know that I can go in and do a search and find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some email that I’m trying to look for from like 2008 and it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I start switching systems, I lose that history. So I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough about tweaking my email workflow to jump through all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hoops to install something new, migrate to a new system, learn a new system, learn the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, and also then lose that big history and then have to, what, search two places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somehow import my entire email archive into Hey, which I don’t even know that’s possible. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, I don’t know. Should I really be pushing myself to change this or does that sound reasonable to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does sound reasonable and I mostly agree with you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny because I love my dear friend and co-host of Analog, Mike Hurley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much, but him spending just hours upon hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going through different email apps, I always thought was the most preposterous thing in the entire world. Particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you could switch a default email app, which I think you can do in iOS 14, is that right? Or did I make that up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you can do, I think it’s mail and browser, but nothing else, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I thought that’s correct. I might have that wrong. But anyways, I always thought it was bananas. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always thought, not just Mike, of course, but all these people who are like living their lives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarter mile at a time. Now, living their lives by using snoozing and this and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all these other like super proprietary things and this client that’s working with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like arbitrary IMAP servers in many cases, like it just, I never understood it. I never got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I still mostly don’t. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you, Marco, that, you know, there’s a couple of things about Hay that I consider non-starters. Most especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to keep my email address and I can’t right now. I would have to use a hey.com email address.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in general, this is not something that I feel like I need to fix. My email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sucks. I get way more than I want. I feel compelled to respond to way too much of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I haven’t gotten to the point that Marco has where I can just outright ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. I’m getting better at ignoring it every passing day, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still not great at it. But in so many ways, this was not a problem I felt like I needed solving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wanted to try it. And I really am surprised by how much I enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, especially since like on the Mac, on the Mac, most especially, I have no interest in a web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. Like, again, my current email is googleapps, for my domain. I open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web app maybe once a month, maybe. I’m not a John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse who lives in it. And I don’t know how you live in it, John, to be honest with you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I much prefer having native apps. But there are a lot of really, really clever things about Hey that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really making me think, this might be fixing problems that I’ve always wanted to fix but couldn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good way to do it. And I can dig into the specifics. But before I do that, John, any other things you want to say about what Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think before we start detailing the specific features of Hey, this is going to sound like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a giant ad for Gmail, but I think it’s going to explain how I use my email and
⏹️ ▶️ John why hey, well, I’m not gonna say it’s not a good fit for me, but it’s gonna explain that the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John of hey, based on how I use Gmail. So I, I used to use native apps for a long time, had a bunch of favorite applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Gmail came out. And Gmail solved a lot of problems I had with
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I worked with mail. So my way for working with mail is I tried to funnel everything
⏹️ ▶️ John into into one big fire hose and then I just have a huge amount of rules to
⏹️ ▶️ John file the mail automatically as it comes in. Back in the day it was filing into folders, filing
⏹️ ▶️ John into subfolders, doing stuff with the messages, marking as read, marking as unread, forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John filing a duplicate. My mail is processed and it’s processed by a series of rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of those would be filing spam, but actual rules. Very, very, very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John little of my mail ends up in what most people think of as an inbox. Pretty much all of it gets auto-filed
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere, categorized and auto-filed. And this is how I’ve always used email, because I’ve always had a lot of email.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the day, the reason I had a lot of email was I had to sign up for like every mailing list. The Perl community was big on mailing lists,
⏹️ ▶️ John so was the Unix community. I just had tons of very high volume mailing lists. So that got me on the bandwagon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That sounds awful. That got me on the bandwagon of like auto-filing, because there’s no way to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with mail if you’re on a mailing list. you have to auto-file the mailing list. In fact, some of my favorite email clients had features specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John for mailing lists where you could say, this email is for a mailing list, please handle it and able to file it away
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. But I do that with all my mail, right? And that was a super pain. First of all, it was a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day when all email was like pop, because you had the problem of like you’re on one machine and you
⏹️ ▶️ John start your email client and it pulls some messages and they get sorted. And then you go on another machine and it hasn’t seen those messages
⏹️ ▶️ John yet from using pop and it has to get the same messages again, right? And that would mean I had to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the rules, I had to have the same set of rules on every computer. And there was no cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like this is the 90s, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no cloud syncing of rules. And it was, and they didn’t, these apps didn’t even make it easy to bring,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was no even an export and import, so I’d have to re-implement the rules. This is especially egregious if I wanted to check my personal email
⏹️ ▶️ John at work, which is definitely a thing that I’ve always wanted to do because you might get an email about something, about somebody in daycare
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like, you know. I’d have to re-implement the rules on my work computer, which was another big
⏹️ ▶️ John pain, Gmail solved that big problem for me because suddenly my email
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t, it wasn’t a native application. And even with IMAP, trying to apply rules
⏹️ ▶️ John to IMAP, like server-side rules would help, but server-side rules were implemented spottily. Like Exchange had
⏹️ ▶️ John server-side rules, but people didn’t have personal Exchange accounts. And IMAP could sometimes have some kind of server-side rule, but it really depended
⏹️ ▶️ John and depended on the client. POP didn’t have server-side rules at all, so it was all client-side, but Gmail just solved
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It said, okay, like your rules are where everything is. It’s all in the cloud, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a web browser. You can open any web browser that can load Gmail, can see your mail. It’s always gonna look
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same because the mail is literally not on your machine. It’s someplace else. And if you define a rule in
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail, that rule is everywhere you see Gmail. Like no more defining multiple rules, no more syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John rules, no more nothing. And all of your mail is available everywhere. And Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John had features that sound like they would appeal to Marco. I’m not sure if he used these when he first got,
⏹️ ▶️ John when Gmail first came out. Gmail would take all of your old mail. The very first thing when I got Gmail,
⏹️ ▶️ John besides reserving my name, was to upload literally all of my old email that I had at
⏹️ ▶️ John that time. And I’m sure I’m missing some stuff. I just did search in Gmail. I can go back to the
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s in my Gmail email. I put, like day one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just exported everything from whatever I was using, probably Entourage at that point, exported my entire email
⏹️ ▶️ John history and shoved it into Gmail, and Gmail dutifully took it down. And the other thing that once
⏹️ ▶️ John it did that is like, I’m also big on email searching. Guess what Google’s really good at? They’re really
⏹️ ▶️ John good at search. The search is fast, the search is good, the search is never broken, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got my rules in one place, and I’ve got really good search, and it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere, and the final thing is, I have so much email that I don’t have like a multi-gig
⏹️ ▶️ John archive of email on my local disks anymore, right? So I save disk space on top of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Gmail has a bunch of extensions and features and keyboard shortcuts and other nerdy things, right? So that’s why I like Gmail,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? What Hay is bringing to the table is, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John needless to say, I think my way of dealing with email is good, like otherwise I wouldn’t do it. It’s efficient,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice, it lowers the cognitive burden of email for me, the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John everything gets sort of auto-filed away, I can look at it in different buckets and sub-buckets and deal with them when I wanna deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John them, whereas the stuff that actually is in the inbox is so few that I know they’re actually important. I’m like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John built this system myself. Hey, is telling people, you’re not gonna do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Regular people are not gonna do what I did. They’re gonna sit there and build up a series of like dozens and dozens
⏹️ ▶️ John of rules over the course of many years and tweak them. Like people are never going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you show them how to make a rule and a filter and how nice it is, they won’t keep up with that process. Cause it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re just, that’s not their inclination. And honestly, you know, it, I’m not saying it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of ongoing work, but I did put a lot of work in upfront when I was younger to establish all these rules and systems, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, is a system that says, since most people won’t do that and don’t want to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and many can’t do that. Hey, has a system already, right? Hey, has a series of rules, a
⏹️ ▶️ John series of buckets and rules that apply to those buckets and interface that that applies to them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s already established what you don’t do anything, you just sign up. And it’s like, you’re getting this set of rules. Now, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike Hurley and many other people afraid about email applications They’re like, oh, but that’s not exactly the set of rules that I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the appeal of Hey. The appeal of Hey is to people who have never had a quote unquote system
⏹️ ▶️ John for email. Having a system is way better than having no system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Hey’s system is pretty good, as we’ll get into in a little bit. But I think that is the main appeal.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have never had a system for email and have just treated it as this giant avalanche that lands on your head that you just like
⏹️ ▶️ John swim your way through, Like, hay is just going to be, relieve
⏹️ ▶️ John you of so much stress and pressure and annoyance in your life. If, on the other hand, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bespoke, hand-assembled, complex system, or even if you have a notion
⏹️ ▶️ John of an exact system that you want, hay is not going to match that, because hay is the system that they made. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the system that you have in your head, and it’s certainly not the system that you may have implemented directly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, seeing Hayes’ system gave me some interesting ideas for my system.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of the ideas I’ve had for my system I’ve seen reflected in other things. I forget what it was. Maybe it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Inbox or something. One of the companies, I think Gmail might have even bought them. A couple of companies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the most recent decade or so who have come out with email things had features that are like, ha, that is a great feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know because I’ve been doing that since 2001. But now we’re finally getting to
⏹️ ▶️ John the reverse where I’m seeing email applications that have ideas that I hadn’t even thought of and I’m interested in trying out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Casey, you want to take a crack at describing what the heck Hay does to your email? What is the system
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get out of the box with Hay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, certainly. And both of you feel free to interrupt me at any time. And just very briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re describing me. Like I don’t have a good system. I have some labels in Gmail that I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never use. I do use native apps connected to Gmail as, you know, faux IMAP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers. It doesn’t work great, but it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is, what is Hey all about? So Hey, most especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and primarily asks you to do a little bit of, a little bit more work up front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the theory that it will provide oodles of time savings over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as you get an email from someone that Hey has never seen before, or someone that your, your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email address has never seen before, when that email comes in, Hay will ask you to classify it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of three different things. And one of them is the inbox, which I’m just going to call inbox because it’s silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them is the inbox, and that’s stuff like your partner or your kid’s school or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. These are things that you really want to have in your face, right? The next bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what they call the feed. And so these are things that maybe you’d be interested in seeing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can really do it on your own time and you can just kind of wade through them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike you would wade through, say, your Twitter feed. And so you can start from most recent and keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going backwards and just kind of see what sorts of things have come in. So this would be newsletters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or updates about things that aren’t critical, maybe like a shipping notification, for example, or something like that. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that may or may not be critical, but you still kind of care about. And then a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucket is what they call paper trail. And this is for, actually, a shipping notification might be a great example for this too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but things like receipts, You know, stuff that you want to be able to refer to at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the likelihood of you actually needing to read it as it’s coming in is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slim. So you can call it up, but you probably don’t need to see it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it’s coming into your inbox. So it doesn’t need to go in your inbox. It doesn’t even need to go in the feed. It can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go straight to the paper trail. So if you want to refer to that Amazon receipt, you certainly can, but you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily need to see it arrive in your inbox. And then on top of that, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the standard things in 2020 for all email. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to set this aside and reply and have it for easy reference later. I want to reply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this later, which is slightly different. And there’s a few other things that I’m not thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can screen emails out, so that’s not really blocking them necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s slightly different than spam. I’m not entirely clear how it’s different, but it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the idea is that it’s a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I view it anyway, as a fairly low maintenance way to establish a system. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t think of it that way until you described it, John, but I think you hit the nail on the head. That this is providing me anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a system that I never really had. And to some degree, I could probably replicate this in Gmail, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do like the way this works. I do like the way the web app works. I’m not a huge web app fan, but I do like the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works. The mobile apps are also very good. And I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as I’m filing these senders into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these three different buckets, it’s certainly even already, even just a couple of days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bringing my inbox such that it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less chatty, which is exactly what I want. And I also do not receive an overabundance of email, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us from ATP alone probably get 10 to 20 emails a day. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I typically try to read all of them and I respond to almost none of them, but you know, that’s high,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s, that’s relatively chatty. I am subscribed to some newsletters, but not a lot. And so that can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chatty and I just get, I mean, I think everyone, I don’t think this is unique to me. Everyone gets more email than you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I guess it’s a far cry for when I was like 15 and just begging somebody to send me an email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, you know, I was just so waiting for somebody to send me an email. It’ll be amazing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I do think that Hey is very, very good at giving me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash the Royal you a system to work with. And I think it’s very well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought out and very clever. And another example, I don’t recall what the feature’s name is, but I saw somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can like highlight a specific portion of a email and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store that somewhere. I don’t even remember how you do that, but I guess in summary, and I’ll stop talking, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very clear to me that a lot of thought has been put into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do people use email and how can we meld this service around that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now if you’re John Syracuse, maybe this isn’t a good fit. But if you’re me and don’t really have a system, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep saying, this is a really, really clever and interesting way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they take advantage of the fact that they write the app. Like to be clear, Hey is not an email client. Hey
⏹️ ▶️ John is an email service like Gmail. the email’s all on their server, and again, you’re trusting them because they’re a good company
⏹️ ▶️ John to do encryption. They can’t see your email. It’s all encrypted in transit and in rest, and it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John web interface, so you can see the same thing everywhere, yada yada. The system has a lot of features, like I said, that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to see elsewhere or be able to implement. Because they control the client, they can do things like, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you view the different categories, like when you view the paper trail versus your inbox and stuff, they look different
⏹️ ▶️ John because you consume them differently. Like the feed looks more like you’re looking at an RSS reader. Like it expands all the
⏹️ ▶️ John emails, you can just scroll through it because that’s the nature of the feed, right? And the type of features they have are like
⏹️ ▶️ John things that people do with email. They have a dedicated files view at the top level because so often you’re looking for that
⏹️ ▶️ John one file. And even though you may get a lot of emails, and of course in an email client you can
⏹️ ▶️ John search for things with attachments. Do you remember the syntax in your weird email client to find files that have attachments? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to sort by attachment by clicking the header thing? Just go to the files view. It shows you
⏹️ ▶️ John all your files, right? Stuff like that is sort of very thoughtful ways to just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you make a general purpose tool, oh, we have a query syntax, or we have customizable
⏹️ ▶️ John sortable column headers, like every Microsoft email client. That’s too much of a barrier for most
⏹️ ▶️ John people, and even me, like, I’m no longer copying my rules around everywhere, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I set up, like, my preferred native email client, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to rearrange the columns and size them the way I want them, because that’s not cloud synced. Everything should be cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John synced, people, in the modern day, but anyway, they’re not. I want my columns to be in this order and
⏹️ ▶️ John this email client decides that that’s not the default. And sometimes in the worst case, in every new folder
⏹️ ▶️ John that I make in my local email client, this is mostly for work where I’m not using Gmail obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John every new folder that I make has the columns back in the default order, right? All that, you can learn to use an application
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can make a general purpose application that has all the features like, oh, whatever you think you can do in
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I can do that too. It’s like, yeah, but they already did it for me. They already made a big button with
⏹️ ▶️ John the five most likely things that I’m going to do. And some things you can’t do, like what if I wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ John a different view for a particular label or folder in Gmail where I want the emails to be bundled by sender
⏹️ ▶️ John and expanded? I can’t do that in Gmail. I would love to be able to do that, right? And like you just said, saving
⏹️ ▶️ John a snippet of one thing from the other. Gmail has a bunch of sort of respond to this later, save for later type
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But like, Hey is such a comprehensive worldview,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that if you buy into it, it will take a lot of work off your plate. And they try to lead you through it
⏹️ ▶️ John by sort of, you just start using the app and you don’t know the system because you didn’t make the system. It leads you through understanding what
⏹️ ▶️ John the system is by asking you a series of questions. And in general, I think part of the appeal is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it makes you feel empowered. I imagine it would make people feel more empowered over their
⏹️ ▶️ John email than they have been in the past because immediately you’re asked to make decisions about your email,
⏹️ ▶️ John value judgments about your email. An email will come in, or at the top of the app, it’ll be like, you have five
⏹️ ▶️ John unscreened emails. You’re like, oh, it’s time for me to be a screener. Well, let me just look at my emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can thumbs up and thumbs down, just like in Gladiator, you know? Like just this email, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John This email, yes, right? And then if you say yes to it, you can say, what kind of email is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it describes examples and says, if it’s this kind of email, put it here or there. That I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the weakest system, weakest part of their system. You know, obviously the system’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna be perfect for everybody, but they do ask you to make decisions about emails. and most of the time it’s good and empowering,
⏹️ ▶️ John but occasionally, well, maybe it’s just me because I’m so picky about my email. You’ll get an email
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will say, tell me about this email, do you want to see email from this or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John And unlike the powerful case where you’re like, no, I never want to see this email, this is garbage. You’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s email from something related to like the, you know, parent teacher organization.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like I never want to see that email, But my choice is, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a receipt. I don’t want it in my inbox, but do I? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I do want it in my inbox, because what if it’s like an emergency? It’s not a paper trail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s feed. Like even when you know what the systems are, because the system has fairly chunky
⏹️ ▶️ John buckets, right? And it’s not a general purpose system for doing this, where I can’t just write a new set of rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I looked at Gmail when we were talking about this. I have approximately 200 rules in Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ John and God knows how many labels, you kind of get into a situation where you can’t decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what bucket it’s in, and you just have to pick the next best one. It’s not the end of the world. You can change your mind later.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing is destructive, but that’s something to keep in mind, that you really have to buy into the system. The system
⏹️ ▶️ John is necessarily simpler than the one you would build exactly for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But other than that, I think the overall effect of using this, and I think Casey experiences this, it suddenly seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like you have less email. It seems like you get less email, it seems like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have less email nagging you, and it’s still there, it’s just like in my system, being transparently shuttled away
⏹️ ▶️ John to the correct bins for you to look at at your leisure. And you’ve put them in bins based on your
⏹️ ▶️ John own, whether you know it or not, based on your own personal expectations of how you’re gonna deal with them. Things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in the paper trail, you do not need to look at even to mark as read just to get it off of
⏹️ ▶️ John your little unread to-do list. They’re auto-filed in the paper trail, you never see them. They’re there if you need
⏹️ ▶️ John them, you can find them in search, but they don’t become a to-do item for you don’t even need to click on them once to make them
⏹️ ▶️ John unbold in your email client. Like it just, and then you look at, you open Hey and it’s like, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ John no new email. And for most people, that’s a good feeling. Unlike 15 year old Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you like seeing when there’s no new email. Like I forwarded, I have so many fricking email addresses. They all go through Gmail,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I forwarded one of my lower volume ones to Hey, but I still kept getting it in the other places.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I can compare, what is it like to read this email address like my old way
⏹️ ▶️ John versus doing it in Hey? And I’m like, at first I thought, is everything really getting forwarded? Because every time I look
⏹️ ▶️ John at Hey, it says there’s nothing. And then, you know, and even for things like spam, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re doing for spam filtering, but I get garbage spam in the quote unquote real email address that I look at with like mail.app
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I never see that spam in Hey. Maybe they just have better spam filtering too, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bother me with it. It doesn’t ask me to do anything about it. I don’t know. So I hope we’ve described
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey well enough. The reason I’m mostly excited about it, despite the fact that I’m probably not going to use it because I have my weird
⏹️ ▶️ John system, is that I love seeing people innovate in what seems like a dead
⏹️ ▶️ John space. I think, I would recommend Hey to anyone who I see who looks like they
⏹️ ▶️ John do not have their own system for email, to try this system. Because obviously if you don’t have a system for your email by
⏹️ ▶️ John now, you probably are not the type of person who’s going to build a system. And I think the Hey system is pretty good. And it shows what
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do when you control everything. They control the server side, they control the client side, as much as Apple will let them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve made very different choices. It does not look like a normal email client. It doesn’t behave like a
⏹️ ▶️ John normal email client. It behaves like, hey, in the same way the Gmail, on day one, did not
⏹️ ▶️ John behave like any native email client. Some people didn’t like that. I thought it was great because of
⏹️ ▶️ John what it was. It was unabashedly a Google web-based server side
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And its interface didn’t look like Outlook. It didn’t look like Apple Mail. at all, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no pretense of it being anything like that. Uh, and that’s refreshing. And of course, Gmail was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, 2004, like, you know, a decade and a half ago. Uh, and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like with the exception of the exception of a few other innovative, uh, client side
⏹️ ▶️ John things like the, what was it? I don’t remember all the names then Mike early would know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John have been a couple of client side innovations, but until Gmail, there hasn’t been any sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John comprehensive rethink of the entire thing from top to bottom until hey. So I recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone check it out. It’s a free trial thing and like I said, if you pay for your name and then just cancel the next
⏹️ ▶️ John month, I think you can do monthly, I forget. You keep that name forever. Everyone should at least check it out because
⏹️ ▶️ John the final thing to say here is like, since email addresses are so important,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of important that hey.com stays around,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Right, because if they decide five years from now, oh, we’re not gonna do email anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, maybe because they’re a good company, they’d set up forwarding and everything, but that’s a hassle and that’s a disruption.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when selecting what your email address is gonna be, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John a geeky person, I’m not gonna recommend this, we’re all gonna say you should have your own domain, and that’s absolutely true. You should absolutely have your own domain
⏹️ ▶️ John and use your own domain because then you’re beholden to no one. But even then, it’s a disruption, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, it’s a disruption to change your back end, not because your email address changes, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a disruption to deal with where that name leads and you don’t wanna miss any emails and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna move stuff around or whatever. But there is always the nagging thought in the back of your mind of like, if I
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for this email service and I’m a normal person and I don’t have my own domain, am I gonna regret
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Like, is this thing gonna go away? And that’s why in general I say,
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for email with companies that you have some faith will continue to be around. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John 30-some signals slash Basecamp has been around for a long time. Hey, as far as I can tell from the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems really popular and it’s a pay service. So I think its sustainability is very sensible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s easy to understand. How are they gonna stay in business with this hey.com thing? Everybody who uses it pays
⏹️ ▶️ John them, except probably free trial people, right? It’s a very simple business model. People exchange money for goods
⏹️ ▶️ John and services. So there’s some faith that’ll be around. Gmail, one of the other reasons I was going home
⏹️ ▶️ John on Gmail is like Google seemed like a pretty well-established company in 2004. Today, even more so, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John in fear that Google will go away. Granted, Google cancels services all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think Gmail is probably too valuable for them to cancel. This is where you can save
⏹️ ▶️ John this clip for the episode of ATP in 15 years when they sunset Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m frantically trying to export 75 gigs of email, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was that a hyperbole, or do you really have 75 gigs of email? How much email do
⏹️ ▶️ John I, remember that? There was another big feature of Gmail from day one. It’s like, we’ll give you like a gig
⏹️ ▶️ John of email. And people are like, a gig of email for free? How can they do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this just my email? Yeah, I only have two gigs of email, it says.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how much it says, percentage of two gigs used. And I’m only using 1.3 gigs out of my
⏹️ ▶️ John two gigs of email. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think if I was- Slow down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow down. Look at this closely, because I’m looking at 861 gigs of 1,039 gigs used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you sure you’re reading that right? Oh, that’s not a period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, that’s a comma. All right. Oh no. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John That can’t be right. One, well, 1,385 gigabytes of 2000. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John terabytes of email.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sorry. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have eight tenths of a terabyte, which is way more than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a little more than half of what I have. Yeah, email is big. But here’s the thing with their
⏹️ ▶️ John account. I think if I was to approach two terabytes, it would just give me more room. Like I don’t think that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a limit. I don’t know, maybe we’ll find out someday. But yeah, I don’t, and unlike Marco, I don’t delete my email.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re missing out. Like spam gets filed as spam and then gets deleted, whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John why would I delete it? People delete it to get out of their face or to get some kind of emotional satisfaction. I don’t need the
⏹️ ▶️ John emotional satisfaction and it’s not in my face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ll tell you why. I mean, so it’s kind of like a digital clutter management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So first of all, a lot of the emails I get are notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my servers of various things I have to deal with, or various conditions that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, thresholds keep crossing. So like, oh, the load on the server went too high, I’ll get an email about it, you know? Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably using email wrong for even sending this to email, but oh well, you know, don’t at me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the email I get literally has no value after a few hours because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of notification for something or it’s like you know an Amazon shipment notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great! Amazon emails stopped including anything about your orders in the last couple years ever since companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like scraping data out of them. Everything! And so Amazon emails are useless now. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want any kind of Amazon status I have to go to my Amazon account. So any email from Amazon is pretty useless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after about five minutes too. There’s all sorts of stuff like that where like I look at this and you know this this email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need this ever I will never ever need to look this up or find this ever again even a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of email that we get from you know either as something like an angry listener maybe who writes in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tells us how much we suck or if I get an email you know for to overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like you know just a feature request that I’ve gotten a hundred times before do I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need to save all of those forever or can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at it make a quick judgment call and think, you know what, am I ever going to need to look for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ever, ever again? And a lot of times the answer is maybe. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ll archive those. But a lot of times the answer is no, I will never need to look at this again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’ll just delete them. I’m not deleting everything, like I’m archiving a good amount every day. But there’s also so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much that I can just delete. Then that’s less to store, it’s less to clutter up search results when I do want to find something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s less to manage, it’s not counting against my storage limit, although I’m way under it for my current host, which is Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just, it helps keep a little bit of clutter outside of my digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. And these days, when you have infinite storage on everything, like, disks are so big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so easy to just collect garbage forever and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never delete anything. And then you end up with overwhelming collections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and larger storage needs over time and stuff like that. So I like situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this where I can look at it and just say, you know what, I can just delete this. I’m, I’m never going to need this again. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was something nice, like, like, you know, in real life, I will throw away greeting cards after a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I enjoy them for a little while and then I throw them away.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s physical. We’re not talking about physical things. The beauty of digital things is they don’t take up space like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And three dimensions is not in the same way anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But still like it’s useful to apply the heuristic. Like when you’re looking at an email, when you’re deciding what, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decide whether to archive or delete something. That’s like, I make a quick decision and if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like a server notification that’s that’s already irrelevant by the time I even see half of them then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine delete I’m never gonna never gonna need this email again
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I think I only have one kind of email one yeah I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is maybe the first email that I routinely get that I actually do delete I don’t delete anything
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t take any space in my hard drive it’s all Google stuff by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m someone said click on manage at the bottom to get your storage breakdown in case you you should do this too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have 1.3 terabytes of email.
⏹️ ▶️ John have 12.22 gigabytes of email. What am I looking at in here? After
⏹️ ▶️ John you click manage, it shows a storage breakdown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I see it, I see it, I see it, 15 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have more email than I do then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And mine doesn’t go back, mine goes back to 2004, I don’t think it goes back older
⏹️ ▶️ John Mine goes back to the 90s, but I guess I don’t have a lot of attachments. Maybe that’s building up the size. Anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John one email that I routinely delete is I have a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John on various websites to find my cheese grater when they come up for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, why? Wait, why? Do you need more? Yeah. What? For what? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I told you, I was dwindling. I was down to like two spares, right? Because they break every
⏹️ ▶️ John year or year and a half or whatever, I was down to two spares and I couldn’t find them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey cheese. I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John heard Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you were talking about your 2008 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the good cheese grater I like from my farmer’s own cheese. Right, and I was, the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of those were dwindling and normally when the number would dwindle I would just go online and I would search for one and I would buy it, but the last few times
⏹️ ▶️ John that they broke I went online to search and I couldn’t find any. So I’m like, I need to set up one of those watch services that
⏹️ ▶️ John just watches for anybody, anywhere on the web selling one of these things, right? And so I do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But of course, my search terms are like, Oxo cheese grater, right? Oxo makes a lot of cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John graters, let me tell you. So I get sort of a digest report, I don’t know what it is, every week,
⏹️ ▶️ John every few days, or no, every time it gets a hit, essentially. Every time I get a hit on this, I get a little report of like, here are all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Oxo cheese graters I found. And 99.9% of the time, it’s just all not
⏹️ ▶️ John my kind of cheese grater, like it’s the other kinds, because I sell lots of them. And I delete those emails, because I’m never gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ John them again, right? And it’s not a lot of them, But that is the only email I think I routinely delete other than obviously spam.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because even spam, my file is spam and then it gets auto deleted after 30 days, right? Everything else, I just keep it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to make a decision about it. It’s already auto filed, it’s already out of my face, it’s not taking up a lot of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John The value of doing that is like, I do find myself doing like forensics and trying, even if it was like Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications with no information about the product, I can correlate based on the dates of things
⏹️ ▶️ John or see if I got a notification about shipment while I was on vacation at this place or whatever, the paper trail, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do a lot of the paper trail stuff in my various systems and categorize them and Gmail lets
⏹️ ▶️ John me export them and all that other good stuff. But anyway, even if your system
⏹️ ▶️ John is I just delete everything, you never know those people who delete everything after they read it and so they have literally no email.
⏹️ ▶️ John My mom does that. It’s a surprisingly common pattern. I cannot, that’s like my
⏹️ ▶️ John nightmare, but to each their own. But if you don’t have a system for email,
⏹️ ▶️ John I recommend checking out Hey, and even if you’re not gonna use it for your email, like Marco’s probably not gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ John it for his email, check it out just to see what a company’s doing with an app for a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone is familiar with. Everyone knows email and has used it all the time. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John different and strange and interesting that I think it’s worth just signing up for a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what it’s like. You have to actually send it some email. If you sign it up for a free trial and never send it an email, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. And you can’t just send yourself two emails. you have to do the thing, almost anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John with an iCloud account can do this. You can forward a copy of your email. So you’re not messing up your
⏹️ ▶️ John email flow or redirecting it or whatever, it’s just a second redundant copy of the same email you’re getting elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it shouldn’t be disruptive to your actual email system, but it will let you get a real flow of email in a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John And do that for a week or two and just see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. I’ve really been impressed with it. And they sponsored,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, this was entirely us. They couldn’t have paid us to go on for this long about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been in our show notes for like four weeks as usual.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. These days, your
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#askatp: Mac migration again?!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. And I am genuinely looking forward to this because we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a question from John Almon who writes, I find myself switching jobs about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every two to three years in the startup tech sector and I know Casey and Marco don’t have traditional jobs, but would you all suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving data to my new company computer starting fresh? If moving, what’s the best way? Target Dismote, Migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Assistant, et cetera. Thanks. I actually really am deeply uninterested in this question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I feel like we’ve answered it a thousand times. And I have definitely put them in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes a handful of times myself, so I am not without guilt here. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m starting to get a little frustrated and curious. Why are we getting this question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over and over and over again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And John, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently have a theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, the reason why we answer it at least like once a year is because it’s so common and
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone doesn’t listen to every episode and yada yada yada. So that’s like practically speaking why we might answer it. But the real
⏹️ ▶️ John question is why do we keep getting this? Why is everyone always asking us like this very
⏹️ ▶️ John specific question? I got a new Mac, I’ve got an old Mac. How do I get my crap off my old Mac onto my new Mac? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it reveals an ongoing problem area with computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ve discussed on and off in the show for many years, which I just discussed today in the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of email rules. My problem back in the 90s and early 2000s was
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d get a new computer or, you know, have a computer at work and at home or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted some stuff to be the same in both of those places. And I would have to manually make
⏹️ ▶️ John it the same because there was no cloud sync. Today we’re like, Oh, you don’t have that problem. Everything cloud sync. So everything’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s either all in the server, like your Gmail, or it syncs through
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud or CloudKid or everything syncs through Dropbox and your files are the same everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Syncing is a solved problem. Cloud syncing is a solved problem, yada yada. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that, you know, and we’re getting these emails about Mac stuff and Apple stuff, but the fact that we keep getting this email
⏹️ ▶️ John about Macs in particular shows that this is not a solved problem in the personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer space. Compare this to the phone space. How many questions have we gotten about, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a new iPhone. How do you guys move your stuff from your old iPhone to a new iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John We used to get that question in one very specific context, which was like, do you do encrypted iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John backups or not? But even that has gone away with iTunes going away and with the cryptic back
⏹️ ▶️ John going away, because basically Apple solved this problem once and for all for
⏹️ ▶️ John normal people and mostly for geeks by making their own system for getting your
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff from your old iPhone to your new iPhone just work. Like you get a new iPhone, you take it out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John It asks you if you want to get stuff from an old iPhone and it does a little thing where it shows a funny image and you show it in the camera and it
⏹️ ▶️ John just sits there for an hour and it just does it. And we don’t get that question. People aren’t constantly asking us, how do I get stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John off my old phone and my new phone? That’s how you can tell it’s problem has been solved. Absolutely not solved for the Mac. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John though Migration Assistant is really good, it’s weird. First of all, it’s not cloud sync,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like, or anything having to do with the cloud. And Macs aren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t hold them in your hand and they don’t all have cameras attached to them. So you can’t do like how the phone does. They don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have like, even though they have Bluetooth, sometimes you can’t bring them near each other because they’re big and heavy things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think this is, this problem is not solved and it’s not likely to be solved
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime soon just because the data volumes are big, the computers are big and they’re weird and different from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that we keep getting this question is just reinforcing this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with personal computers and Macs, you know, specifically. It doesn’t apply to iPads, doesn’t apply to phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is part of the reason people love iPads and phones and stuff like that. And it’s something that we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about, most recent, most relevant example is I think when we talked about, oh, what the hell was it? Was it Chromebooks?
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever Google made their initial pitch for, we’re gonna make a computer for
⏹️ ▶️ John you, but it’s not like a computer, it runs everything on the web. And part of their little cartoon
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch advertisement for this thing was like, this is why I keep saying chuck it in a lake,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can chuck this thing in a lake, don’t worry. All your stuff is always automatically saved in the cloud. If you get a
⏹️ ▶️ John new one, you open it up, you log into your Google account, all your stuff is there. Sound familiar? That’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like what we do with our phones now, with the expectation in general, if you do cloud sync and cloud backups, if you do get a new phone and you don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have your old phone, it fell overboard on a boat. Get a new phone, sign into your Apple ID, tell it to sync
⏹️ ▶️ John all your stuff down from your last iCloud backup, your new phone now looks like your old phone did, as of whatever the last
⏹️ ▶️ John backup was. And Google was promising that for their, I think it was Chromebooks, but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it was. And I remember when we talked about that on the program, I was gushing
⏹️ ▶️ John over it saying, yes, yes, this is great. This is how personal computers and laptops should be. They should be
⏹️ ▶️ John just like that, where, you know, or like Casey says, everything is ephemeral. Like if I dropped this
⏹️ ▶️ John in a lake, I’d just get another computer and let it churn for a while and it’s back to exactly how
⏹️ ▶️ John my old computer was. And there’s no missing stuff and no stuff that didn’t transfer and no other limitations like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s Chromebook or whatever initiative, I don’t think it was fabulously successful for a variety
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons, partly because web-only software, native software still has significant advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John that people like, and for a bunch of other less interesting non-technical business reasons, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like it’s been hugely successful. But I think they had the right idea. At the time I said, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is how computers should work. But they still don’t work that way, and that was like five years ago or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it was. And I keep hoping it will. And we’ll know that this problem is solved when we stop getting this question at
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP. but that day is not today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are we actually answering it?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but you should just use migration assistant. That’s what you should say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably the right answer. But if you want to be nerdy, I’ll put a post or link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a post I put up about how you can do this with Homebrew if you are willing to suffer through Homebrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do some preparation.
⏹️ ▶️ John John’s answer is, you are not alone. This is a problem. You have correctly identified it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will answer it at least once a year, but I think we already did it for this year, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see, 383, what episode are we on now? 390. Seven episodes ago. Yeah, it’s way too soon for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, I’m sorry, that was about my new MacBook Pro. Maybe I lied, maybe it wasn’t that episode. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there’s the- See, if all of our
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes were in Gmail, I could find it real quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Ah, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should email myself the show notes. That’s another system I have, by the way. This is an anti-pattern that nobody should do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that I do because, I don’t know, I invented this anti-pattern. emailing crap to yourself. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my gosh. I email crap to myself all the time because I know my system will file it away and I know it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to search. It’s like email was my first Instapaper before Marco made Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I still use it for that. Obviously I still use Instapaper and other reader later services for
⏹️ ▶️ John that purpose, but I still email myself stuff. By the way, if anyone wants to make an iOS app to please
⏹️ ▶️ John a single customer who’s willing to pay at least, I don’t know, I’d pay $30 for this app and
⏹️ ▶️ John no one else would. Mail to self, mail to self used to be a cool application that all it did was
⏹️ ▶️ John you had a share sheet and it would mail something to yourself in a single tap. I want that application
⏹️ ▶️ John to exist. If I ever write an iOS app, it’ll probably be mail to self.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couldn’t you do that with shortcuts?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, you can do, everyone thinks they can do it. They’re like, here, look, I made a shortcut to do it. It’s like, no, but I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ John more specific requirements. Really, like when I do it on a tweet, I want it to get the body of the
⏹️ ▶️ John tweet and a link to the tweet and write the subject, just so it’s more complicated than that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as simple as just, oh, something’s on the pasteboard and it’s a URL, put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John an email. Like, yeah, you can do that. I have 50 shortcuts to do that. My
⏹️ ▶️ John requirements are actually more complicated than that. And the old mail-to-self thing would do my complicated requirements.
⏹️ ▶️ John And using mail, using the share thing and saying mail, that does, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 50% of what I want, but I have to type in my own email address every time. I just type in the first three letters and it auto-completes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s still one extra step. I don’t want to compose. I just want it to be done in a single tap. So obviously, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John my other apps, if you have one very specific thing you want done in a specific way, just write the damn app yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you can make it do exactly what you want, and you’ll be the only customer, and you’ll be fine. So in keeping with
⏹️ ▶️ John my two other applications that are very, very, very, very tailored to my specific needs, if and when I run
⏹️ ▶️ John an iOS app, it’ll probably be this mail-to-self thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That might be the quickest scope creep I’ve ever witnessed. Oh, just want to send an email to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if it’s Twitter, it needs to do this, and if it’s this, it needs to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s mostly Twitter, that’s the thing. But when I get, when it’s Twitter, I want the entire text of the
⏹️ ▶️ John tweet to be in there, and I want a link to the tweet, and I want the date, and I want the sender, and I want the subject to say
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, like, that’s useful to me because then I can search for it later in my email. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how, if you wonder, how is Babi formed? How is ATP shown when it’s formed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, this is some old, crusty memes we’re getting out here. I email
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to myself all week long that gets auto-filed into the, here’s what you’re gonna build the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes from. And then I process them, and whenever I have time to process
⏹️ ▶️ John them, by going through the queue, finding the things that I emailed to myself, and not leaving my email, because
⏹️ ▶️ John all the text that I need to assess whether this is a thing I want to go into the show notes or not, is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John email. Like, so if I just got the tweet URL, I’d be clicking on tweet URLs all the time to see what is this tweet about, what is that tweet about,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this thread about, right? And that’s sort of my queue of stuff that builds the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I just work my way through that queue. And that queue is never zero, like the queue, there’s stuff on the queue right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but normally right before a show, I will take one more brief pass at the queue and see if there’s anything pressing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my crappy system. I mean, I know, I’m sure productivity gurus are now
⏹️ ▶️ John you should never use emails and inboxing, you shouldn’t use it as a queue and you shouldn’t email yourself stuff. Quiet, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a system, it works for me.
#askatp: iPhone apps on Mac/iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John Demko writes, with iOS apps coming to macOS, will iPhone-only apps be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rotated appropriately for the Macintosh display? Will iPhone-only apps finally be rotated appropriately on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad in landscape orientation? I don’t see that. I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s tough. So it’s funny because the fix that I am waiting on review for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Peek-a-View has to do with rotation lock in the onboarding screens. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS apps, you can say on an application level, you would like this to only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be portrait, only be landscape or support, you know, only head up portrait rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than feet up portrait and so on. There’s different things you can enable. And so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly cut and dry, right? Like you could have an app that says, I am locked to portrait. Well, then what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s apps that maybe they’re a little bit better in portrait, but they kind of support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey landscape, which especially in today’s phones is like a postage box or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slit in a door where you would stick a letter. These things are so darn, the aspect ratio is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so very tall to so not very wide. To directly answer the question, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe they would auto-rotate if the app lets them, but I just don’t see that happening. I think they would be assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be portrait. What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think on the Mac, iPhone-only apps will literally just show up as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-resizable iPhone-shaped rectangles in portrait orientation. And so they’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdly small windows. I don’t know which phone they will simulate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, iPhones have multiple different screen sizes they could be. I seriously doubt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would be resizable. I think it’s gonna be a fixed size, and we just don’t know which size that’s going to be yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the problem is, iPhone apps are not written to be resized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically. you can do that, you can write it that way if you have a universal app that’s made for iPad multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a universal binary with the iPhone app, like you can do that. But Apple can’t assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all apps do that. So for this question I assume this is about, because John right here says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone only apps. So typically for an iPhone only app you’re not writing in resizing support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rotation is another thing, but rotation, it doesn’t really make sense on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac to support rotation on iPhone apps because if it’s not resizable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s it gonna do? Like offer a diagonal drag handle, but it just only snaps to the two orientations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it could be in, but it’s still like the same size rectangle? Like that’s no good. So I have a feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be very, very simple. On the Mac, you get non-resizable rectangles that are the size of one of the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then on iPad, that’s an interesting question, like whether they would finally actually allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the correct version of iPhone apps to be shown, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with proper rotation and maybe a little bit bigger since they, do they still show in like the four inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen size or the three and a half inch screen size, whatever it is? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they would do it there because on the iPad, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, you’re running in a different environment and it would be a little bit more work, slightly more work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to enable like UIKit to have an exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it tricks the app into being able to rotate between portrait and landscape, but only still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this black box in the middle of the screen for these iPhone-only apps. And second of all, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, I think one of the reasons that they’ve always made the experience pretty bad for phone apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not optimized for the iPad, but that you happen to run there anyway, is that they want developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make iPad apps from their iPhone apps. Like, they want us to make universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Apple would probably make the decision of like, Not only do we not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to spend additional engineering time to make this nicer, we specifically don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it nicer to force developers to make iPad apps. Now, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a, that’s a thing they’ve done for a while now. And with some success,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some not success like Instagram is a big one, but um, that seems to be their position on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. Uh, but on the Mac, it’s a different scenario because you’re in a totally different environment and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of fixed iPhone-sized little rectangle windows is totally fine on the Mac. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I think we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. I don’t remember if Steve Trout and Smith or Guy Rambeau or somebody actually
⏹️ ▶️ John started running iPhone apps on the DDK and determined the
⏹️ ▶️ John definitive answer to this question. I have vague memories of it, but I don’t remember specifically. But anyway, my guess
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually that they will allow rotation of iPhone apps on the Mac and iPad apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John It won’t be by grabbing a drag handle. I assume it’ll be a menu command because, you know, there’s an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on the iPhone don’t have a menu bar, but on the Mac they do and there’s all sorts of crap you could put in there. And one of the things I would imagine they put in there would
⏹️ ▶️ John be rotation. Just because, you know, it’s, you have the flexibility to do it. The Mac screens are big enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. iPhone apps support different features in landscape versus portrait depending on the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so to get access to those features, I think they allow you to rotate it with the menu command. Fingers crossed.
#askatp: Protecting physical archives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then rounding out the triplet of Johns this week, John Larson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes that John Syracuse extols the virtues of having multiple backups of digital treasures. Thus, I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what precautions he takes against the loss of physical treasures in his attic. Fire, floods, tornadoes, bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mold, etc. How does he protect his analog archive? This is masterfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executed because this is such a trolly question written in such a genuine kind way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I applaud you, John Larson. This is very well done. John Syracuse, Please answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s trolly about it? I mean, this is getting to the heart of why I love computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Digital bits can be copied losslessly. If you have good checksums, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can keep them the same forever. Things deleted digitally are completely deleted, but
⏹️ ▶️ John can be restored. Going back to the fundamentals of me as a little kid, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John write a word and backspace over it as many times as you want, and you will never wear through the paper because there’s no paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the beauty of digital things. That’s why I love computers. That’s why I feel comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John preserving things in computers, whether they be 12 gigabytes of email or over 100,000 photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Digital, I like digital. In the meatspace
⏹️ ▶️ John world, everything sucks. And there’s no way to
⏹️ ▶️ John mitigate against disasters and floods and bugs and mold, because I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John easily make a perfect copy of all my physical belongings elsewhere in three other places.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, that’s, that’s the physical world. And unfortunately there are limitations in the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John world where doing anything to have sort of precautions and, and care and backups
⏹️ ▶️ John and mitigations costs money. It costs money, costs time, it costs space. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough of those things to take any precautions. So what precautions do I take against loss of my physical treasures? Almost none.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I, my house is up to code. I have smoke detectors, but the bottom line is
⏹️ ▶️ John I almost nothing I can’t I can’t I don’t even it’s not even my house isn’t air-conditioned
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all but my attic where the stuff is is both not air-conditioned and also not heated so I don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John climate control no rain gets in like my house is weathertight but beyond that
⏹️ ▶️ John no so all my capacitors are probably blown things probably have molds in them my spiders
⏹️ ▶️ John you name it and why did I do anything else because I can’t like I I have a life to lead, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John limited resources, I’m doing the best I can. The physical world, meatspace sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was sufficiently depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why we all love computers, because it’s a place where you can make a perfect world, where everything is just so,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s artificial. So yay for computers, boo for meatspace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the world we make is so perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, if it’s not, we can always fix it, and you can keep trying to fix it again and again and again, whereas my capacitor’s
⏹️ ▶️ John blowing all my max and leaks stuff all over the place. I can’t go up there and fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, Bombas, and Eero. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you to our members who support us directly. If you want to join them, you can get access to things like our bootleg feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an ad-free show. See for yourself at atp.fm.com. Thank you very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought of one mitigation that I make for my physical treasures,
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically about the issue of tornadoes and bugs. I live in a place,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the friendliest place to physical goods, that would probably be like the high desert somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s no moisture to. But I can tell you that if I live someplace swampy
⏹️ ▶️ John or more south, the bug situation could potentially be much more dire, because I feel like the warmer
⏹️ ▶️ John you get, the more bugs are available. The harsh winters here do help
⏹️ ▶️ John tamp things down. So even though we have weather and we have snow and tons of rain and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff, in general because the winter is going to come and freeze everything we don’t suffer from
⏹️ ▶️ John the massive infestations of life and mold. Like, because again it’s gonna get dry
⏹️ ▶️ John here in the winter too. We have seasonal infestations but no sort of prolonged
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. And I suppose the cold weather chases like the various animals to invade our homes
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps too. But anyway, one partial mitigation is I guess not living in Florida. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good. If you live somewhere super dry, then you have issues with anything made of rubber because it cracks
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose. I’m always jealous of like, even when we’re in California, you look at these cars
⏹️ ▶️ John from the 90s, and they’re pristine because they don’t have road salt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, there’s no rust.
⏹️ ▶️ John winter or rust. They’re just beautiful. I just love
⏹️ ▶️ John being in California and looking at all the old Honda’s is like being in a museum. Like no Honda in
⏹️ ▶️ John new England looks like that anymore. A Honda, a Honda that age, just, it looks like a pile of rust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I have a, a funny bone to pick with you. I don’t remember where it was. I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I don’t remember if it was this show, rectifs or something else, but you said that you leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live photos off. And in and of itself, you monster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why, but beyond that, it’s, uh, I know there, there in your defense, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some slight weird things with the 11 pro. I think we’re like, if live photos are on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t use night mode or something along those lines. I forget the details, but up until I think in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last year or two for the first couple of whatever years that live photos were around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as I knew, it was only additive. So why the hell wouldn’t you capture a live photo, man? What’s wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, live photos on, I was like leaving key clicks on, which I also thought was uncontroversial until I found these monsters who
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I I leave key clicks on all the time. It’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Key clicks are legitimately bad. Key clicks are legitimately, inarguably bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would you turn off a live photo?
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the problem with live photos. And both of you manifest this problem. Before I get to
⏹️ ▶️ John your problem with live photos, there is, just off to the side, I just want to mention the privacy aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of live photos. Because if they’re on and you forget that they exist, the camera could be pointing in a direction that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be pointing before you take a photo that you then send to somebody and they’re able to see something you didn’t want them to see.
⏹️ ▶️ John begrudgingly allow that. So that exists, but that you can manage. If you have it on all the time, you just change your
⏹️ ▶️ John habits, right? The real problem with live photos, aside from the storage space,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that if you just have them on by default all the time, and you share photos, as you two do,
⏹️ ▶️ John and every single freaking one of them is a live photo, but 99.999% of them, there is no extra information or value in the live photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to watch all of your live photos to find out, Is this the one where there was something cute in the live photo? And no, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the one where I could see you adjusting your camera, but I’m looking at the grass and now looking at your kid. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to force press on my stupid phone every single time to make that determination because every single photo you
⏹️ ▶️ John share is a live photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, it’s bad. I understand your perspective and your point, but you are empirically
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. No, and here’s the second thing for me in particular, the quality of the live
⏹️ ▶️ John photo video, if it was the same quality as the photos, I might leave it on by default, but it’s so freaking blurry
⏹️ ▶️ John and gross that the only time I would ever do it is if I thought there was going to be additional value as in
⏹️ ▶️ John this photo is cute, but really you gotta watch the live photo to get some extra value of a cute thing that was said
⏹️ ▶️ John or done or whatever. Instead of just being on by default and me seeing you adjust the frame and
⏹️ ▶️ John framing your subject in the photo, just it’s terrible. So my note to all
⏹️ ▶️ John of you, it would be have live photos on all the time, fine, but then turn it off on all the photos you’re gonna share
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s nothing of value in the live photo so I don’t have to force press on every single one of your pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s what I do. I mean, I don’t do a lot of shared albums, so it’s not much of a problem there for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but whenever I message a photo to somebody, and Tiff and I have this convention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between each other, we’ve worked it out, and I do it to everybody, whether they know it or not, which is like, I choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether I send you a live photo or not every single time, and if I send you a live photo, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you should watch it. But otherwise, like the vast majority of pictures I send, I turn off the live photo-ness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it when I send it, but I still leave live photos on for pictures that are being captured by the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app because I still get some value out of that sometimes and it’s very cute.
⏹️ ▶️ John So who controls the one shared album of yours that I’m on? Because everything is a friggin’ live photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be Tiff. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is- But look, I don’t know if we can, can you control when you add a picture to a shared album? Can you make that
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just turn, here’s the thing. If you take live photos all the time, surely for your benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, You only want, you’re in the same situation as me. When you look at these photos a year later,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they all have live photos, you won’t know which ones have live photos with value or not. So you have to do this processing
⏹️ ▶️ John step where you go through all your photos and disable the live photo on the ones that you didn’t want to be live photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise, every single photo you have to force press on or otherwise tap and hold on or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the live photo animation. And additionally, many of Apple’s UIs will auto play the live photo when the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John comes into view so now you’re subject to that. So you have to process them. You have to say, was this a real life
⏹️ ▶️ John photo or just an incidental? Real life, and if you don’t process them, then when you share,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll just share them all the way they are. I don’t wanna sign up for that level of work, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for the value, for the quality that it adds. Like I said, if it was full quality either side, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do it, but then I’m thinking like, I’m just taking a bunch of miniature movies and it’s full quality, but I don’t like the blurry
⏹️ ▶️ John then clear then blurry thing, and I don’t wanna process my pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’d rather have none of this information ever available to you than have it
⏹️ ▶️ John it all the time? And have to discard it manually on all the pictures I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco take? No, I don’t want that. And the thing is, I don’t think they provide a lot of value because it’s so blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco though. Just leave it, it’s not hurting
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s too short and it’s too blurry. If it was longer and high res, I would probably keep it and they would all be short videos, but it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s way too short and it’s super blurry. And no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve never had
⏹️ ▶️ John it on. I don’t, that feature, I’m not ready for that feature, that feature’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ready for me yet. And honestly, even if they made it max quality, I still would only do it as opt-in, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not hurting you, John, just leave it alone. It’s like a bee flying around you, just leave it alone. It won’t sting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you if you just leave it
⏹️ ▶️ John a room. It is hurting me. It’s taken up my storage space and it’s giving me a new job, which is to process 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John new pictures I take every year or whatever, and decide whether they’re live photos or not. You know, I have to confess, Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, I have to confess that I am correct about your incorrectness about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you’re handling this. But beyond that, Marco, you said a minute ago that you turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the live photo-ness. And what? And so I was messing about while you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were bickering. And it turns out, you knew this, I did not know this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t know that you could do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John didn’t. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not obvious that, like, it doesn’t look like, oh, what, a lot of the things in Apple’s Photos interface is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Can I tap that and do something? And you go home and you find out it was by trying it. And you’re like, oh, it did something. What did it do? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you had to figure out what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. Exactly. So what I did was I went into messages and I clicked the little photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage app. And then I found the most recent photo because it has the live image because why would you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not capture it? It doesn’t hurt anything. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Agreed. He says as he sends someone a picture of his balls. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go ahead. Hey man, that’s a little treat just for you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they frequently out when you’re taking pictures?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, how I live my life is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, you don’t know. You don’t know. You can’t have him out, because then you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reflections across the room. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have a vase, a chrome vase across the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your wife could be walking by in her underwear and accidentally is in the frame. You don’t know, there’s lots of failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures. I assure you, if Erin was walking by in her underwear, it would not be an accident if she was in frame. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John anyway. It’s a good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she doesn’t listen to the show. Anyway, the point is, so I went into Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage conversation. I clicked on, or tapped on, I hate it when I say click about touch stuff, but I just did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tapped on the iMessage app for photos, selected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most recent photo that has a live component to it, and there’s an X in the upper right, which I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all along that was a tappable target to remove the photo. Turns out, little did I know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the live photo icon in the upper left, it isn’t just like that gray,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thin, if you will, overlay. It’s a white circle with the live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo icon on top of that, which is supposed to indicate to Captain Dunst over here that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tap it and remove the liveness. I had no idea you could do that. And now I will try to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better about not sending this stuff if it’s not useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad I could help.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The other thing is- No, you didn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, Marco helped me.
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I’m the one who’s talking about, you have to go through and remove the live photo-ness from the ones where it doesn’t have value. So obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about this feature. If you remember from the intro, what Apple said was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you take it and the live photos are there and you can turn it off. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is still true, but this was an intro. They said, and don’t worry, we will, like if you turn off the live photo-ness
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s been like 30 days and you haven’t turned it back on, we will ditch that extra data to save you the disk space. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they will actually clean up the little, whatever MP4 or whatever embedded thing that has the video
⏹️ ▶️ John thing if you turn it off. So be aware that turning it off is potentially destructive, not immediately destructive. You can turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it back on, but after 30 days or so, go by with it off, you go back to that photo. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember what it was, 30 days, seven days, whatever it was. You go back to that photo and you can’t turn it back on because that data’s really gone. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re super into live photos and you want to preserve every ounce of those blurry one second
⏹️ ▶️ John videos, whatever they are, don’t turn it off. You can turn it off and share it and turn it back on. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t believe how wrong, you’re so right about so many things, you are so wrong about this. You are so
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re saying you’re gonna keep sharing pictures kids where I get to see two seconds of a shaky camera
⏹️ ▶️ John before the picture and after.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because what does it hurt? What
⏹️ ▶️ John does it hurt? It hurts me because I have to check them all to see if this is the one where something cute happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t you just never check any of
⏹️ ▶️ John them? Yeah, seriously. Because sometimes there’s something cute. It’s random reward, you know? It’s a Skinner box. Right? Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a cute thing that happens before the photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’d rather these things just never even exist than for you to just ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m saying if you opted into them, then I know every time I saw a live photo that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was in for a treat. Instead, now it’s just a chore where I have to find the one in 100 treats that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be there. I am so sorry for your difficult life, John. The other thing I do like about live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos is, and maybe I misunderstand it and maybe it’s not full res, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you go into, if you’re in the Photos app, you can change the, what do they call it, like the key photo?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know what I’m talking about, Marcos? So you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a live photo and you can edit it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That was from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhoto. Did I just say iPhoto?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Whatever. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature has been around since iPhoto.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sorry. So, yeah, you go into the photo, you edit it, and then there’s some way… Now I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think. No, well, no, I’m talking about on the phone, damn it. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John click the little… Space bar on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone. God, I said click again. I got to go to bed. You tap on the little live photo icon, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s several key photo options that you can take. And maybe if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose a different one and change it, maybe I’m making the quality worse, but I’ve never noticed that to be the case. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s another nice thing is if like you capture it and the smile just isn’t quite right the way you see it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the photos app on your phone, then you can go back and say, oh, actually the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key photo option was perfect. And that’s the one I wanted. And so now because I had this bonus data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wasn’t hurting anyone, now I can change it to the even better picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hurting your disk storage and it’s hurting me when you send it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see frames from the movie thing but those aren’t the same res as the photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you- Well, that’s what I’m not sure about. All kidding aside, I really don’t know if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John losing. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can take a burst photo. Like when you do a burst, then you have a bunch of, you know, individual pictures and you can pick the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good or whatever. But anyway, you do you, I’ll do me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Different strokes for different folks. The problem I have with this is because I’m picking a fight with you, the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet, 100% of which always agrees with you about everything, even when you’re wrong, like now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure there’s plenty of live picture lovers out there. There are key click lovers out there. We’re going to hear from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, no. Oh, please, no. Key click lovers, we all, all three of us agree, you’re monsters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re objectively
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. We know them. We know people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re objectively
⏹️ ▶️ John incorrect. I mean, in fact, I can say, I can name names. John Gruber on the last episode of the talk show
⏹️ ▶️ John outed himself as a key click lover. He had some story about what he, why it makes him feel good. It’s terrible. People are monsters.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think you know somebody. I know, right? Well, I mean, no, we’ve known this about John for a long time. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just always fun to see him publicly say it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because he’s just getting
⏹️ ▶️ John himself in to be yelled at Yeah, so I’m sure they’re live picture lovers and they love it everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll hear about them just as much I do and because it’s the default I bet most people have it
⏹️ ▶️ John on right what because the defaults right? They most people don’t change them so I think everyone does
⏹️ ▶️ John live pictures and I wonder how many people don’t know live pictures there or don’t know how to like see The live picture when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sent pictures or wonder what that little circle icon is at the top But bottom line is I think the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ John people have live pictures on all the time So I think I’m in the minority here as you should be because you’re wrong I said
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it leave it on for yourself all the time All I ask is when you share photos make a conscious choice about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I all kidding I don’t think I don’t think you can make that choice when you’re uploading to an album
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can just I think you should make the choice for all your pictures period because you’re getting yourself in the situation But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna share it’s probably not gonna be a thousand pictures If you’re sharing five pictures, just turn off live picture on the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t have it, share them and turn it back on for all of them if that’s what you want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but that’s my point is that I don’t think that I have any mechanism for disabling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them as disabling the live photo NIS as it’s going into a shared album,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least not from not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Iowa. You would have to like delete the live photo NIS on those photos before
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not deleting, it’s just disable it, then share them, then re enable it.
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or don’t re-enable it because if you disabled it, you’re showing it has no value, so just let the system delete them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, this includes like you yelling something before a picture. That’s true. You’re sending
⏹️ ▶️ John that to everybody too, whether you know it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey F**k it, smile! Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. I actually, Jon gave us a better after show than what I was planning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking about maybe possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying another Synology. Well, we’ll see you later live listeners. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t do that to me either. And we will talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You wanna get another Synology? We gotta save it for the show, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fucking bastard. Save it for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not talking about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Save it. Oh God, you’re such a dick. I’ll talk to you about it in like two weeks. Oh, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a dick. This is all I’m gonna think about for like two
⏹️ ▶️ John By then he’ll have like five Synologies and return two of them. So we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. I cannot believe you’re thinking about another synology. I don’t want to talk about it, but I so desperately want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why it’s great to just leave it here. You’re