0:00:00this week's episode of the talk show is brought to you by back blaze online
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0:00:11blaze comm slash daring fireball for more information I saw you I saw you're
0:00:19getting you're digging in deep on the PHP stuff again I am yeah and now you're
0:00:26going to switch to NGINX? Are you thinking of mine?
0:00:29It's Enginex.
0:00:30Enginex. I don't know how to pronounce it.
0:00:32Yeah.
0:00:33Why don't give -- nobody name your software something where it's ambiguous how you're
0:00:35supposed to pronounce it.
0:00:37[laughter]
0:00:38Enginex. Jesus Christ. What a stupid way to spell that.
0:00:43I'm still like -- I'm one of those people where even if the project owner or the project
0:00:48maintainer insists that the correct pronunciation is a certain way, if I think that pronunciation
0:00:53is stupid, I won't use it. So like, like, SQLite is one of those things where I think
0:00:59the, the, the actual official pronunciation I believe is, is SQLite or something or it's
0:01:07something weird that, that I thought was dumb so I don't use it. Same thing with like GIF
0:01:12versus GIF. I say GIF and I don't really care what the correct pronunciation is. It's GIF.
0:01:16You know?
0:01:17I was about to ask you how you pronounce GIF. I pronounce it GIF as well and, and it's,
0:01:23I know that it stands for graphics interchange format, so I feel like there's a reason to
0:01:28stand on that.
0:01:29And it ends up, it ends up though that the guy who invented it pronounces it JIF.
0:01:33And all the JIF people say, well, if he invented it and he calls it JIF, it must be JIF.
0:01:39And I say, no, it's GIF.
0:01:40I don't care what the hell.
0:01:41See, I feel like this is like a George Lucas scenario.
0:01:43Like at some point, you got to override the creator.
0:01:46Right.
0:01:48We're not changing the format.
0:01:49No.
0:01:50Right?
0:01:51redefined what the GIF interchange, you know, graphics format is. I haven't rendered it
0:01:57technically, you know, and it's some kind of incompatibility. I'm just telling you it
0:02:01should be pronounced GIF.
0:02:02Exactly. And at some point, you just have to say, you know what? I respect you for creating
0:02:07this thing or working at the company that created this thing, but you're just wrong
0:02:12on this.
0:02:13Also, GIF already is a thing. It's peanut butter. It's kind of a crappy mass-produced
0:02:17peanut butter but it is a very popular peanut butter whereas GIF is out there
0:02:22for the taking there is no GIF right it's unambiguous if you say that this
0:02:26image format is going to be pronounced GIF then anytime you hear GIF you know
0:02:31that they're talking about peanut butter and not an image format I'll go even
0:02:35further and say hey look we've got a whole bunch of words in the English
0:02:38language that have a G and it's sometimes hard G sometimes a soft G but
0:02:43if you're gonna make up a new word with a G why not go the unambiguous route and
0:02:47and use the G in the hard G format,
0:02:50where there is no other letter that makes that sound.
0:02:53And if you want the soft G sound, use a J.
0:02:58- Right, and 'cause then also when you hear GIF,
0:03:00there's no ambiguity on how it's spelled.
0:03:03- Exactly, exactly, exactly.
0:03:06I tell you to get a GIF file,
0:03:07and you don't even know what it is.
0:03:08Well, how are you gonna write that down?
0:03:10Maybe you'll add an extra F, I don't know,
0:03:12but at least you'll be in the ballpark.
0:03:14- Or at the worst, you add an extra F.
0:03:16You read it.
0:03:17See, and I'm one of those guys who, like, I know people say "ping" for the PNG format,
0:03:23but I stuck with PNG for a long time. I think I might even still say it. I don't get a chance
0:03:28to say it very often, so I'm not positive on that, but I still say "png" for the ambiguity
0:03:32reason.
0:03:33Hmm. I think I'm not quite sure. Hmm. I think ping evolved so late in the game relative
0:03:43that I was already sort of working by myself most of the time by the time PNG became widely
0:03:48used. Whereas GIF and GIF, that was when I was collaborating and working with people.
0:03:57So I had to say it a lot. I don't remember saying PNG a lot.
0:04:00Tim Cynova Yeah, now that you work in a hole alone, you
0:04:05can avoid saying everything out loud except when you podcast or speak somewhere.
0:04:08In my head though I think of it as a PNG.
0:04:11Yeah. It just seems right. Ping already means something in computers.
0:04:16And business people stole it to mean something even worse.
0:04:20What's that? Oh, you're like, "Hey, I'll
0:04:24ping you later and we can talk about our action items."
0:04:27They stole download, they stole so many things.
0:04:31Terrible. Speaking of business people,
0:04:34you hear Windows Live,
0:04:37they're like phasing out that brand and they're totally getting rid of the Hotmail brand.
0:04:42I saw something on Twitter last night before I went to bed about that.
0:04:47Aren't there like, there's like a billion people on Hotmail?
0:04:50Yeah, I'll have to double check. I believe, I know it was the largest webmail service for quite a long time,
0:04:56even long after Gmail was released. I believe it might still be the largest.
0:05:01Oh, I thought Yahoo was the biggest.
0:05:03Gmail's always been third place there,
0:05:05but especially like worldwide,
0:05:08if you go past just the US,
0:05:09I think Gmail's more popular in the US,
0:05:10and then worldwide it gets worse for Gmail.
0:05:14But it's crazy, like Hotmail was the first
0:05:18mass scale webmail, and that name is now
0:05:21gonna be totally gone.
0:05:23But Microsoft changes the name of their online
0:05:25consumer service stuff like every five years.
0:05:28When did Windows Live start?
0:05:30Like with Xbox Live after that,
0:05:32You know who knows what was that seven or eight years ago? They started that that's all gonna be gone
0:05:38And now they're going to outlook calm and who knows what else?
0:05:40That's not very interesting they don't think Microsoft often doesn't have their shit together in terms of
0:05:49Getting acquisitions on brand
0:05:54Like I you know like the hotmail thing if they were gonna do that why not do it years ago. Why wait ten years?
0:06:00Well, I'm not really sure Microsoft knows what their branding is, you know
0:06:04they I think one of the problems is they keep changing their own minds about it and
0:06:07Like over like about five years ago. They started really maybe even more than that
0:06:12They started really shoving windows in your face more like they started adding the word windows
0:06:17To the names of all the programs that they made that ran on Windows
0:06:20it was like, you know Windows Explorer Windows Internet Explorer and
0:06:24Windows every and like things that the end and they starting the same thing with office
0:06:29So now it's like Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, which is just kind of clumsy.
0:06:34And I don't really know what the goal there was, except like to beat people over the head
0:06:39with the fact that it's Windows that you're using and Office that this is a part of. But
0:06:42I think there's better ways to do that, and I think people don't really care. It just
0:06:46made everything more clumsy.
0:06:47Yeah, I've always interpreted that from the outside as being Balmer. That Balmer thinks
0:06:51that Windows is a winner, because Windows makes a lot of money, and Windows is a clear
0:06:57market winner. And so it just, it's like him insisting that everything is Windows. Whereas
0:07:03it doesn't even make any sense, you know, like, and I've said this before, like when
0:07:07with this whole thing where they couldn't figure out what to call Metro after they lost
0:07:10the name Metro and they still call it, you know, Windows. But it doesn't even, the whole
0:07:14thing with the new UI is that it doesn't even involve Windows. I mean, literal Windows,
0:07:20lowercase W Windows. I mean, it was at least, the name Windows at least applied to the software
0:07:27originally. It was, "Hey, here's the thing you put on your computer and everything runs
0:07:30in a rectangle that's called a window and you can have lots of them." And everything's
0:07:36in these overlapping rectangles called windows.
0:07:39Yeah, but they lost that long ago. I mean, even back with Windows CE and what then became
0:07:46Pocket PC and then Windows Mobile 2003, they kept changing the name of that too. But even
0:07:53like it looked like Windows but I think everything was full screen wasn't it?
0:07:57Yeah I think so I think it was sort of like Windows it looked like the Windows
0:08:02Chrome but you couldn't couldn't make the Windows over right and they crammed
0:08:05it that was another example of them overusing the Windows brand and the
0:08:09Windows theme of Windows everywhere like they they crammed in the start menu and
0:08:13they crammed in like the little minimize and close buttons and the title bars and
0:08:17so yeah you're right like it looked like Windows but it didn't really work that
0:08:21way and it didn't work very well on devices of that size.
0:08:23Right. And to me it makes even less sense for the online stuff.
0:08:27Yeah, because what is, I mean, well, I mean, but obviously, you know, they're not thinking
0:08:31of the word Windows in the lowercase w way anymore.
0:08:34Right.
0:08:35And they haven't thought about it that way for a very long time. You know, they own that
0:08:39word now.
0:08:40It's like a weird extra superfluous level of hierarchy though, branding-wise, where
0:08:45why not just emphasize Microsoft, right? There's the thing that you can get that everybody's
0:08:50he's heard of and it's already familiar and it, you know, it, you know, it's a well-known
0:08:58popular brand. I mean, I know for years and years, you know, Microsoft was, you know,
0:09:03in the worldwide brand survey was like top three, I think. Like a head of Apple, a head
0:09:07of Google, like up there with like Coke and something else.
0:09:10Yeah, I never understood why they didn't emphasize that more because you're right that, you know,
0:09:16been driving home the Windows brand for years so hard, but I don't think it really sticks
0:09:21with people. If you ask people, "Do you have a Windows computer?" I bet more people would
0:09:27not really know what to say to that than if you asked them if they had a Microsoft computer.
0:09:33I feel like people don't really care about the Windows brand.
0:09:37If you want something to parlay your new product, your new initiative, "Here's a new thing we're
0:09:42doing, we're doing online services, why not just stick with the company instead of, you
0:09:48know, going two levels deep and having Microsoft Windows live. Now you've got these two levels
0:09:53of branding hierarchy. Everything's under Windows.
0:09:55Right. Or Office.
0:09:56Right. It'd be like if you took your hard drive and put everything in one folder at
0:10:02the root level.
0:10:03Called hard drive.
0:10:04Right. Called hard drive. Or called folders.
0:10:08Yeah.
0:10:09Right.
0:10:10Files.
0:10:11Why have that one extra level of hierarchy at the top?
0:10:17It doesn't make any sense.
0:10:19I don't know.
0:10:21They always have this kind of like, you kind of think something's maybe in the water
0:10:25up there.
0:10:27It just seems like Microsoft lives in a slightly different reality than the rest of us when
0:10:32it comes to things like branding and marketing of their stuff.
0:10:36just seems like you can tell that they, like in their world of Redmond and their various
0:10:43office campuses and everything, like in their world where all those people live and hang
0:10:47out and talk to each other, this all makes perfect sense. And then when you get like
0:10:52some kind of weird new commercial out of there or some kind of weird new product name they
0:10:57come up with, the rest of the world, you're just kind of like, "Eh." It's a little
0:11:02bit off. You know, it's like if you ever spend any time in Western Pennsylvania, especially
0:11:08Northwestern Pennsylvania in the Erie region, almost everything there is just a little bit
0:11:13off.
0:11:14Yeah, I've never been up there. Been to Pittsburgh many times.
0:11:18Pittsburgh is a pretty nice place. Western Pennsylvania, like Northwestern Pennsylvania,
0:11:21I went to college there and spent quite a lot of time there. And it's, you know, Microsoft
0:11:26could be headquartered there. It's very much like the same kind of, just a little bit off.
0:11:31Pittsburgh's a little off too though. I always joked with Amy that Pittsburgh is a little
0:11:38bit like the Simpsons Springfield where it's sort of sequestered like half part of-- well,
0:11:47mostly part of modern North American pop culture but it has its own stuff. And the best example
0:11:53is the way that Springfield has Duff Beer. They've got the Iron City Beer in Pittsburgh
0:11:59which you can buy nowhere else. No one else carries Iron City beer. And in Pittsburgh,
0:12:05it's everywhere. It's like Budweiser and Miller and Coors all rolled into one.
0:12:11Yeah, Pittsburgh is is I live there for a couple years. I like Pittsburgh a lot. It's
0:12:17it's a really nice city in a lot of ways. But yeah, there are some things about that
0:12:21are like that are just kind of bizarre. And but no one there thinks it's bizarre to them.
0:12:26you know, it's just that's how things are. And I guess it's true of most places, but
0:12:31I feel like Pittsburgh has more of a quirky personality than most cities do. But that's
0:12:38true of a lot of things in Pennsylvania in general. I mean, Pennsylvania is just kind
0:12:41of quirky.
0:12:42Totally. So tell me something weird about the Erie people or what's going on up there.
0:12:50Well first of all, I think the whole place is made of cigarettes.
0:12:52What?
0:12:53What?
0:12:54It's just like you can just – if you're driving anywhere within 20 miles of Erie,
0:13:00you'll smell cigarette smoke the entire – I mean I don't know what – like everyone
0:13:03there smokes.
0:13:05And I mean it's kind of a depressing place.
0:13:08It's – the economy of Erie has been pretty terrible for a pretty long time.
0:13:12It's one of those post-industrial places that just never really recovered when everything
0:13:15was outsourced.
0:13:18The climate is awful.
0:13:21gets way more snow than you would expect based on its latitude, and it's just really miserable
0:13:27most of the time. And it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, too. So it has everything
0:13:33working against it. But people who live in Eerie, people who are from Eerie, and I include
0:13:40a lot of my family in this, actually, a lot of my family is from Eerie, but people who
0:13:44live in Erie tend to be perfectly fine with it and not recognize or not care that it's
0:13:51such a depressing place. And a lot of them have literally never been anywhere else, like
0:13:56never left the Erie area. And it's just fine, as long as they smoke constantly. I guess
0:14:03that makes it okay. So, I've never been a cigarette guy, so I don't really know what
0:14:06it does to you, but that makes it okay to live in Erie. So, hey, you know, whatever
0:14:12it takes shirts I'm sure they're fine people oh yeah they're very nice I would
0:14:17be interested in seeing a map that shows like areas where smoking is still
0:14:26permitted and like restaurants Pennsylvania is the big red dot well you
0:14:33you've heard of James Carville the form I guess he's on TV now but yeah the
0:14:39Is that a Clinton guy?
0:14:40Yeah, a Clinton guy.
0:14:41But his description of Pennsylvania, I think it applies both politically and culturally.
0:14:47But he said it's Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the
0:14:51middle.
0:14:52Yeah.
0:14:53That's pretty accurate.
0:14:57To win the state, you've got to run that way.
0:15:01You don't just campaign in Pennsylvania.
0:15:03You campaign very differently on the Pittsburgh and Philly areas than you do in Harrisburg.
0:15:08Yeah.
0:15:09And New York is very similar too. I mean, everyone thinks of New York who's not from
0:15:12here, who's from the other side of the country. Everyone thinks of New York as being like
0:15:16the city. But in fact, it's this extremely diverse state and a very large state with
0:15:23lots of different political climates, lots of different types of people, and lots of
0:15:26different types of places. But yeah.
0:15:29Right. Like the state legislature in New York is nothing like the city politics in New York
0:15:34City.
0:15:35Oh yeah, and the state can't get anything done because the state is so incredibly diverse
0:15:38that the state legislature just can't agree on anything.
0:15:42Yeah. I think it's a little bit. I think Pennsylvania's non-urban areas, though, have more people
0:15:49than New York's. I could be wrong. Or if I am wrong about it being more split, like I
0:15:57feel like New York is so big. It's clearly way bigger population-wise than Philly and
0:16:03Pittsburgh combined. It may not even be that the non-urban areas in Pennsylvania are more
0:16:11populous. It's just that the urban area isn't as populated enough to compensate the way
0:16:16that New York City can in New York. But I feel like when we get a Republican governor,
0:16:23we get much more of a regular Republican governor, just like typical Republican governors throughout
0:16:29the country as opposed to New York where you get like a Pataki who's you know is
0:16:34a little bit more moderate same thing with New Jersey with what's his name
0:16:40over there big guy Christy yeah it's Christy Chris Chris Chris yeah how can
0:16:44you forget a name like that it sounds like he's a comic book character Chris
0:16:47Christie he signed a bill that if if you're taking drugs with your pals and
0:16:53one of them has an overdose and you report it you can't you won't be you
0:16:58You won't get pro- you know, you're immune from prosecution for having taken the drugs
0:17:03yourself.
0:17:04That seems very sensible.
0:17:05I'm kind of surprised that wasn't already the policy.
0:17:07Can you- I mean, that's the thing is that can you believe that the conservatives are
0:17:10giving the guy shit for signing the bill like that?
0:17:13Yes I can, but-
0:17:15I love the guy.
0:17:16His explanation on TV is like, look, I don't want anybody breaking laws.
0:17:19I don't want anybody taking drugs, but if you think it's more important to prosecute
0:17:24someone for taking drugs than saving somebody else's life, then, you know, we're going to
0:17:28a disagreement. Exactly. But anyway we don't get Republicans like that in Pennsylvania.
0:17:34Anyway enough politics. Now that we've lost all the listeners.
0:17:39Right. Now that we've lost all the listeners let me take the first sponsor break and tell
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0:18:18slash daring fireball. Now that's weird too because this is the talk show not
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0:18:26Kind of interesting. Kind of interesting I thought that's a little nutty and then
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0:19:52That's a pretty good line. www.backblaze.com/daringfireball. My thanks to them.
0:20:01A couple other things that I wanted to add to that also. So first of all, I'm a Backblaze
0:20:04user. I've been a Backblaze user for a couple of years. I just checked. I currently have
0:20:081.3 terabytes from my computer backed up, and then my wife's computer, I believe, has
0:20:12about another 1.8 terabytes.
0:20:15So we're looking at over three terabytes of stuff
0:20:17we've backed up to them over the last couple of years.
0:20:19And it's pretty great, especially
0:20:21if you have big photos and stuff like that, where
0:20:24other options can be more expensive or unwieldy.
0:20:28Also, one thing that's really great that I've used before
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0:20:33And I don't use Dropbox for everything.
0:20:35I have small documents, a handful
0:20:38of small documents in Dropbox, but nothing really big
0:20:40and not all of my stuff.
0:20:42So what you can do is--
0:20:44like I was away from home one time,
0:20:46and I couldn't get back to my computer
0:20:48because back to my Mac or whatever it's called this year
0:20:51was not going through the airport extreme properly
0:20:53or something.
0:20:53Well, whatever reason, I couldn't access my files
0:20:56directly.
0:20:57And I needed a file off my desktop.
0:20:58So I just went to Backblaze and pulled it off there
0:21:02onto my laptop from vacation.
0:21:04And it was fine because it's online backup.
0:21:06It has all your files.
0:21:07And so it's kind of like an infinitely sized dropbox
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0:21:11you know, you can go, if you forgot to bring a file with you on vacation, you can go fetch
0:21:15it from your Backblaze backup.
0:21:16>> It's amazing. I actually didn't know that you could do that.
0:21:19>> Yeah, it's pretty cool. And that's, and I believe that's one of the headlining features
0:21:24of the iPhone app they just released, is the ability to do that from the iPhone too, which
0:21:28is pretty nice.
0:21:29>> Yeah, it is pretty neat. That way you don't have to worry about syncing stuff to your
0:21:31iPhone. You just sort of pick and choose and access.
0:21:33>> Exactly.
0:21:34>> And again, I make a joke about their pun about losing your stuff in a Fireball or a
0:21:40Blaze or whatever. But the truth is if your only backups are in your house, you are at
0:21:44risk of what if your house catches on fire? What if you get robbed? If you get robbed
0:21:48and a burglar comes in your house, they're probably just going to grab anything that
0:21:52looks computery, including your hard drives and stuff like that.
0:21:55Oh, yeah. I would say if you have any kind of reasonable upstream, if you're still on
0:22:00a 128K upstream DSL, then you've got to be careful with what you back up online. But
0:22:05If you have anything faster than that, if you're on cable or if you're on optical like
0:22:08Fios, you got to do this.
0:22:13Online backup is awesome.
0:22:15I will say that they didn't pay me or you for me to say this, but online backup is ridiculously
0:22:20awesome and I've tried a few of the options and my favorite by far is Backblaze.
0:22:24It's amazing.
0:22:25I had no idea that you were a regular Backblaze user.
0:22:28I did not invite you to be my guest this week because of that.
0:22:31Honestly, I don't even know.
0:22:32That would have been a pretty weak reason.
0:22:33It would have, but it's a happy accident.
0:22:35But smart sponsors, smart guests, and it's not entirely coincidental that they're already aware of each other.
0:22:45It was like Molt last week with the Igloo, the internet people. It was exactly what Molt needed in his last job.
0:22:57What else this week? The big thing I guess, well one of the big things is this all of
0:23:04a sudden like this week there was like a spate of reports. I think Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac
0:23:14was first and then John Pachkowski at all things D and Adam Cetoriano at Bloomberg all
0:23:23sort of reported on iOS 7 being a little bit late behind schedule sort of under
0:23:30the gun to get it ready to show at WWDC and have it ready to ship presumably you
0:23:37know September October when a new iPhone and maybe iPads or something like that
0:23:42are coming out and be that it's one of the reasons it's behind is that they're
0:23:47they're doing like a top-to-bottom UI overhaul. I presume you've read these stories.
0:23:53I have, yeah. And I mean, first of all, you know, what is... whenever something is reported
0:23:59to be behind that's still, you know, six months out, you gotta wonder like what...
0:24:04what... is it actually running behind schedule or is it just not the schedule
0:24:08that the reporter assumed or wanted? Yeah, I... well, in this case I... I, you know, and... and all of
0:24:14them, I think, I don't know about Germin. Germin's story at 9to5Mac was so long and
0:24:18meandering that I did not finish it. He's a good kid and he's doing really good work,
0:24:22but boy, that story he had was a lot of words for very little information.
0:24:27But I will say, and I'm not the type of person who gets hung up on it, but I started rolling
0:24:34my eyes at all of this because I put all this in a branch discussion like a month ago. They
0:24:41gave me credit. Both Satoriano and Pachkowski graciously said that it was first reported
0:24:48at Daring Fireball, but it was like a month ago. So I did hear that, and that was like
0:24:55a month ago, that iOS 7 is behind not just in terms of speculation, but within Apple
0:25:03it was behind where they wanted it to be in terms of... And I think that it actually affected
0:25:10the WWDC announcement date in terms of they were not 100% sure that it would be ready
0:25:17even to show at WWDC until late in April. I don't think that they really purposefully
0:25:24like announcing WWDC only five or six weeks before the date. In years past sometimes they've
0:25:32announced it in March and I think that if everything had gone perfectly according to
0:25:36schedule I think that they might have announced WWDC a month earlier but that it was a, you
0:25:41know, are we sure that we're going to have it in shape to show in June?
0:25:45Right. And then whatever they show in June, you know, it's such a high profile event with
0:25:49the keynote and they're expected to show iOS 7 and show details about it during the keynote
0:25:54and then tell all the developers about it for the next few days. So, you know, it pretty
0:25:59much has to be feature complete and ready to demo what is that six weeks from now five
0:26:06weeks from now and it's really soon.
0:26:09And they don't have to give a developer beta but it's it would be weird if they don't because
0:26:14if they're gonna be telling you about these new things like things that are different
0:26:19and things that are new and they want you to start working on them it would be I mean
0:26:25and usually they do usually they have you know a developer beta you know that
0:26:29you if you're you know after the keynote you can sign into ADC and then there's
0:26:34you know iOS 7 beta 1 or something like that exactly and and also you know they
0:26:41they have to have it ready a couple weeks ahead of the presentation so they
0:26:44can make the presentation and make sure that's gonna be solid right and you know
0:26:47it's the developer betas of iOS and Mac OS 10 they are betas I mean you know and
0:26:54it's just the people who, and somebody always does it, because it's new and shiny and they
0:27:01have to have the newest shiny thing, they go ahead and install it on their regular day-to-day
0:27:05iPhone an hour after it's available.
0:27:07You're never going to let me forget that.
0:27:08You did. I don't mean to, but you're an actual developer though, and you knew what you were
0:27:13getting into. You did that at WWDC.
0:27:16Yeah, I did it for iOS 5. I will never do it again.
0:27:21I actually remember where I was when I gave you shit about it. We were in the lobby at
0:27:24at the W. No, we were in a taxi going somewhere. Oh, no. I thought it was. But wasn't it when
0:27:30we left the W? I remember being in the... I think there were multiple shit-given occasions
0:27:34there. Yeah, I remember being in the lobby bar at the W Hotel and you were like, "Damn,
0:27:39this doesn't work." And I'm like, "What did you think?" But that's, you know, even given
0:27:47the fact that bugginess is excusable and understandable and that's the whole reason that it's a beta
0:27:51and it's not actually released, it has to be, there's a certain minimal functionality
0:27:55that has to be there.
0:27:58Right. And almost all of the headlining features, whatever those are going to be, those have
0:28:05to be at least working. They don't have to be done, but they have to be demo-able to
0:28:10some degree. They have to be functional.
0:28:12Right.
0:28:13And that's going to be tough.
0:28:16Was Siri functional last year? I think it was, right?
0:28:19I think so.
0:28:20Yeah.
0:28:21Well, no, Ciri didn't come as the WVDC release. Ciri came as, I think, a 4.1 or 5.1 kind of
0:28:30thing when the 4S actually came out.
0:28:32Oh, that's right. That's right. That explains why. Yeah, that's right.
0:28:39I'm looking forward to 7, though. I want to see what they do. We don't really know how
0:28:47much is going to change since 4Stall's been out, because he hasn't been out for that
0:28:51long. And so, you know, it's going to be hard to really look at 7 and say, "Wow, this was
0:28:56all Johnny Ive stuff." Like, certainly, it's going to be a lot of difference, but it hasn't
0:29:02been long enough for us to see the full effects of what that major change in design leadership
0:29:07is going to lead to.
0:29:11And to Patch Kowski and Satoriano's credit, especially Patch Kowski in his report, "At
0:29:15things deep. Again, I'm not real good with show notes, but I'll put it in the show notes.
0:29:21But anyway, a lot of this stuff I don't put in show notes because I've linked to it on
0:29:24Daring Fireball and I just presume that everybody out there who listens to this podcast listens
0:29:29or reads my site too. But Pat Czkowski had some quotes from sources at Apple, which was
0:29:35new, like people who are obviously familiar with what they're doing with Iowa 7 talking.
0:29:42There's no names, but it's still better than the rest of us have.
0:29:47I've talked to people, but I've not talked to anybody who'll let me quote them.
0:29:51I've not talked to anybody who's actually told me anything specific about what it actually
0:29:56looks like.
0:29:57What did the guy say?
0:30:00It's a deforestallation.
0:30:01It's impossible to pronounce a word.
0:30:05Right.
0:30:06It was funny.
0:30:07Somebody on Twitter—I wish I'd favorited it or something—but somebody on Twitter
0:30:10last night said, "What's this I hear about iOS 7? A deforestation?" Shame on Apple.
0:30:17The Wall Street Journal front page scandal ahead tomorrow.
0:30:20That's awesome.
0:30:21iOS 7 is going to lead the deforestation.
0:30:24Maybe the next New York Times Pulitzer?
0:30:26Yeah, I don't know. It's hard. I don't know. Seriously, I'm not being coy. I have
0:30:31not spoken to anybody who's actually seen iOS 7 and what the direction they're going
0:30:36and is... I don't know anybody who's actually seen it. What I've heard is people who've
0:30:40seen people who have seen it and know about those filters that they put over the phones.
0:30:46Yeah, the security filters. So you have to be looking at it at exactly the right angle
0:30:50to see it.
0:30:52And I also know that this is, in fact, the first time that they've done that, like with
0:30:57iOS 6 and 5 and 4 and 3, that the people who had the permission to carry the builds before
0:31:06was released on their personal phones outside the campus did not have those filters.
0:31:11Right. So obviously, that supports what we hear from everyone else, which is basically
0:31:16that it's a big change. Six didn't look that different. Six had a minor refresh on some
0:31:22of the gradients and some of the coloring and some of the shading, but it was a pretty
0:31:24minor overall difference in appearance. And if you were just looking across a bar and
0:31:30saw someone's phone on, you wouldn't really notice that that was something really different.
0:31:34But in this case, it sounds like they are prepared for that particular outcome and want
0:31:39to prevent that.
0:31:40And, you know, so it's different enough that you would notice.
0:31:43So one comment I've gotten from a couple people by email and Twitter.
0:31:49Here's one.
0:31:50It's a tweet that I noted from a reader named Sven Siewitz.
0:31:54Siewitz, S-E-W-I-T-Z.
0:31:56Sven, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right.
0:32:01He tweeted yesterday to me, "Johnny Ivan software.
0:32:05I fear he might take the fun out of the OS.
0:32:08Mac software has always had elements of playfulness."
0:32:12That's a sentiment that's perfectly expressed that a bunch of people have said, "Hey, this
0:32:18whole flat thing."
0:32:19I hate that term, but "This whole flat thing and the anti-skewomorphism, is this all going
0:32:26to be like no fun?"
0:32:28I don't think that's something anybody should be worried about.
0:32:33I think that there's a difference between the sort of exuberance-- I don't know what
0:32:42you want to call it-- the corniness even of Game Center.
0:32:46Game Center is one of the ones that they mentioned specifically, that it's not going to look
0:32:49like a craps table anymore.
0:32:51Well, in Game Center, I mean, Game Center was always like an extreme example of just
0:32:57something really, I mean, it was just really inexcusably bad because, you know, that was
0:33:02back from the, from various oddly into the Steve Jobs era and it was pretty clear throughout
0:33:08Steve's career that he did not really respect or understand the gaming market at all. And,
0:33:16And that's like, you know, if this is what they think gaming is, like this felt card
0:33:20table from a casino, like that's their interpretation of video games.
0:33:26I mean, it's like, it's so different from the actual world of video games, and it's
0:33:31so -- it betrays a deep misunderstanding or lack of respect of the gaming market.
0:33:37Right.
0:33:38So that's always been looked at as a very extreme example.
0:33:42Yeah.
0:33:43And I think that's a good way to put it.
0:33:44And again, I don't know.
0:33:47For all I know, it could be that the new look of iOS 7
0:33:51is completely sterile and no fun and unemotional and robotic.
0:33:57I don't know.
0:33:57But I don't think so.
0:33:59I'd be very surprised at that.
0:34:00Because I think the key word to keep in mind is--
0:34:03or one of them is emotion.
0:34:06And Apple is always designed for emotion.
0:34:10That stuff they make makes you feel a certain way.
0:34:13And I would say look no further than their product marketing,
0:34:15right?
0:34:16Their commercials and stuff.
0:34:17The latest one is the one with the iPhone camera,
0:34:19which I think is one of the best commercials they've
0:34:22had in a while.
0:34:24And there's nothing silly about it,
0:34:29like in the way that Game Center is silly,
0:34:31or the leather in the calendar app is silly.
0:34:37It's not silly, but it's definitely emotional.
0:34:40And it's definitely-- there's playfulness and fun.
0:34:42There's kids on skateboards.
0:34:44You know, there's-- it's not dead serious either, right?
0:34:49I feel like that's exactly what they'd probably
0:34:53be going for in a less textured, less fake 3D depth OS
0:35:02look and feel.
0:35:04Yeah, and we have to consider, too,
0:35:05what exactly their styling and where
0:35:08the fun and playfulness and emotion should come from.
0:35:11I mean, if they're going to give the default UI kit
0:35:15widgets new default styles, like they kind of did with iOS 6,
0:35:19but if they're going to do a more severe version of that,
0:35:22then what that's going to affect are apps that
0:35:24use the default UI kit widgets.
0:35:27And I mean, I think I could argue,
0:35:29and you would probably argue, that you probably
0:35:32shouldn't be looking to the default widgets
0:35:34to provide a whole lot of personality
0:35:35to your application.
0:35:36If you're going to want to add that emotion and personality,
0:35:39Or even if you're going to want an application that everyone says, "Wow, that's a fantastically
0:35:42designed app," these days you probably should not be using stock appearances of anything.
0:35:48You should be custom skinning almost everything or custom designing almost everything that
0:35:52your app uses, or at least tweaking the defaults. And if you look now, apps that use just the
0:35:57defaults, they don't show any emotion. They don't show much playfulness. Apps that use
0:36:03defaults today look old and terrible.
0:36:05Yeah, and there's certain... maybe there's some playfulness to it though. Like one thing
0:36:10is that the default look across iOS has a lot of glossiness, you know, and just starting
0:36:17even with app icons where if you do nothing, your app automatically gets that fake U-shaped
0:36:24gloss across the top third. And I know you can suppress that, you know, there's a way
0:36:28that you, you know, like in your P list file, you can suppress that by specifying something.
0:36:34But you get that by default. And most-- a lot of icons have that.
0:36:37And all their--
0:36:38Apple's icons have that.
0:36:39They do eat the dog food on that.
0:36:41If you look at--
0:36:45I think Safari has it.
0:36:46If not, they've-- yeah, they have it on Safari.
0:36:48But messages and phone and stuff like that,
0:36:51they have this glossicride that's across the top.
0:36:55You get it in the system standard alert box,
0:36:58that blue translucent thing that pops up
0:37:01you need to put your Apple ID password in or when it says, "Hey, you've got airplane
0:37:08mode on and this thing requires network access. Do you want to go to settings or cancel?"
0:37:14Everybody has seen that dialog box 10,000 times. It has that fake glossiness to it.
0:37:19Like that...
0:37:20A big swoop through the middle.
0:37:21That, I can guarantee you, that's going away. I don't know if they're going to completely
0:37:25redesign the look of that dialog, but the glossiness is going away.
0:37:30What I would love as a developer is for half of what I just said to be wrong.
0:37:36What I would love would be enough of a refresh of the default components that you can start
0:37:42using them again.
0:37:44Right now, if you release an app that uses default components, it will look old, just
0:37:49because the style is kind of outdated now.
0:37:51A lot of that still looks like 2007.
0:37:56And iOS 6 tamed some of it.
0:37:58They changed some of the gloss to just flat gradient, stuff
0:38:00like that.
0:38:01But there's still quite a lot of it there.
0:38:03And I would love, as a developer,
0:38:06to have better defaults again, or to make it easier
0:38:10to customize those defaults.
0:38:12Right now, if you want to pop up an alert dialog box, like what
0:38:15you were just talking about, with a custom look on it,
0:38:19you have to re-implement the entire alert dialog box
0:38:22yourself.
0:38:23You have to re-implement all the behavior of it yourself.
0:38:26And they've been slowly integrating more--
0:38:28the UI appearance stuff-- slowly integrating more of that
0:38:31into the OS since iOS 5.
0:38:32But there's still so many things that
0:38:35are so fixed in their default style
0:38:38that the most you can do maybe is tint them or replace
0:38:41the entire thing manually.
0:38:44And if the new defaults are kind of less heavy-handed
0:38:50with their looks, with their default looks,
0:38:53the default styles, if they're a little bit
0:38:55lighter and simpler, and if that's what people mean by flat,
0:38:58you know, if they're a little bit lighter and simpler,
0:39:00then it'll be better for everybody.
0:39:01It'll be better for developers,
0:39:03it'll be, you know, less old looking for users,
0:39:06and easier for designers to work with.
0:39:10- Yeah, and I think we've gotten some hints already
0:39:14about the direction they're going
0:39:16and maybe the magnitude of it.
0:39:18So one of them is the podcast app,
0:39:20the Apple podcast app, I think it's just called Podcasts.
0:39:24And the new version that came out a couple weeks ago
0:39:28is not just like a bug fix release
0:39:30compared to the original version.
0:39:32They famously got rid of the reel-to-reel tape recorder
0:39:36interface, which was--
0:39:40if that doesn't count--
0:39:41and there's all sorts of arguments
0:39:42about what counts as quote unquote "skeuomorphic."
0:39:44But that's as skeuomorphic as anything can get.
0:39:48I mean, it actually looked like a 3D reel-to-reel tape
0:39:51recorder.
0:39:51That's gone.
0:39:52But there's other things in the change, just aesthetic changes in there that like the buttons
0:39:57have become a lot less 3D. They don't look as much like physical buttons on a Braun tape
0:40:04recorder from 1965. They're just, you know, they're just, you know, a triangle for play
0:40:10and, you know, a thing for fast forward and stuff like that. If you look, if you Google
0:40:14for like, you know, the changes between the podcast app, it's not radical. It's not like
0:40:19unfamiliar. It's not like if you were already familiar with the old podcast app that now
0:40:24you're lost in the new one. It's, you know, just taking out some of the exuberance of
0:40:30the fake diviseness. I think it's, you know, and I'm not super down on the skeuomorphism,
0:40:39but I do think, though, that it's taken to the level that it has been in certain of the
0:40:43apps. It's dishonest. Yeah. And a lot of times it's unnecessarily clunky.
0:40:49That's, I think, where it gets in the way.
0:40:53People often cited "Find My Friends" and its crazy leather thing as being the epitome
0:40:58of bad skeuomorphism.
0:40:59I don't really think it was that bad.
0:41:00It was just a skin, and it didn't really interfere with how you use the app.
0:41:04It was just, that's just how the toolbars look.
0:41:06But the podcast app, with that giant reel-to-reel thing, that was actually interfering.
0:41:12It was taking up too much space.
0:41:14Things like gestures didn't work.
0:41:15The speed knob thing didn't work the way you'd expect it to, and it was hard to use. That's
0:41:21when it actually is a problem, when it gets in the way.
0:41:22Right, and it's dishonest. Here's a perfect reason why I use the word "dishonest," because
0:41:27if you have a real reel-to-reel tape, or any sort of tape, you have a real limiting factor
0:41:33in terms of seeking to go ahead. If you have an hour-long podcast, and you know that the
0:41:40part that you're interested in is 45 minutes in, and you're at the beginning, you've got
0:41:45to wait and hopefully, you know, and fast forward can only go so fast or else it's going
0:41:50to shred the tape.
0:41:51Right.
0:41:52And you've got to wait to get there.
0:41:53Well, there isn't, you know, one of the great advantages of going digital with our video
0:41:57and audio is we no longer have to do that.
0:42:00Right?
0:42:01And so using that as the metaphor, it's a false metaphor because all the limits that
0:42:05apply to actual, to tape or to a strip of film, you know, if you wanted to do that and
0:42:12have like, you know, carry that analogy to a video player and have a film projector.
0:42:16None of those, it doesn't hold up.
0:42:18Right.
0:42:19And that's why, that's always been my complaint with calculator apps and why I always prefer
0:42:23solver instead.
0:42:25Because like calculator apps, they would just mimic this old type of device, you know, the
0:42:30old calculators that would have this one line of digits and there'd be like no real backspacing
0:42:36ability.
0:42:37Like you can't like hit 100 plus and then go back and edit that number, you know.
0:42:40And there's all these stupid limitations
0:42:42of real calculators were carried on exactly directly
0:42:46to computer calculator apps, to almost all of them.
0:42:50There are very few that have broken that.
0:42:52And whereas Solver is rethinking the entire way,
0:42:57rethinking what a calculator is,
0:42:59because now it's a computer and you don't have to do
0:43:01all that old crap that you used to,
0:43:03and you don't have all those old limitations
0:43:04that you used to have.
0:43:05And skew-a-morphism gets in the way
0:43:07when it starts bringing in those limitations
0:43:10unnecessarily. Yeah. No, that's a good example. Says the guy who
0:43:14still loves p calc. But I agree with you. I do agree with you.
0:43:19But that's for me the reason and the main reason that I agree is
0:43:24that if I was doing something that would involve more than
0:43:26just one, you know, a couple of digits in a multiplier or
0:43:32something like that, I probably would use salt silver instead of
0:43:35p calc, like for, you know, it's a neat middle ground between
0:43:40what I might have in the old days gone to a spreadsheet for as opposed to a calculator.
0:43:44Whereas if I just want to multiply two numbers together, PCAL still works perfectly for me.
0:43:49There's a new version of PCALC out too.
0:43:52Every page.
0:43:53Great app.
0:43:54Here's a good example too, I think, of where Apple's going and why I don't think people
0:44:00who are worried about the fun or the playfulness being taken out of the OS, I think it's
0:44:05needless.
0:44:06And I think that these have been up for a couple of weeks now.
0:44:10Obviously, anybody who's listening to this show years from now, you know, you can't do
0:44:14it.
0:44:15But if you go and load apple.com now in two different tabs, once to get the iPad Hero
0:44:21layout, and once to get the iPhone Hero layout, you can see some of the apps, like third-party
0:44:29apps that Apple is celebrating.
0:44:31So on the iPad one, they've got two apps.
0:44:34I'm not sure what the one on the right is.
0:44:36some kind of photo app, but it's mainly a big photo of a little girl playing in a
0:44:42tent or in a balloon or something like that. But it's, you know, it's there
0:44:45because it shows the color and it's a happy kid. But if you look at the...
0:44:49One of those elementary school gym parachutes. Yeah, something like that. But if you look at
0:44:52the UI around it, though, there's no 3D depth to it. It looks good, but it's like
0:44:57just a translucent overlay to put text and thumbnails. Very... It is flat, I mean,
0:45:05but it's, you know, it's attractive.
0:45:06And in the other app that they're showing,
0:45:07they're showing letterpress, which, again,
0:45:11is not really flat.
0:45:12It actually does, and you can see it in the screenshot,
0:45:15it does use depth.
0:45:16It's when you play a tile, it pops off the screen
0:45:20three-dimensionally and, you know,
0:45:22so it's, that's why I say flat's not quite the right word.
0:45:25But, famously, it's relatively unadorned and minimal.
0:45:29But I think anybody who's played letterpress
0:45:32would realize that it's a very playful and fun interface.
0:45:39It's perfectly appropriate for a game,
0:45:43but in a way that is not at all like Game Center visually.
0:45:50Well, Letterpress achieves a lot of that fun and playfulness
0:45:53with gesture response and animations.
0:45:57And everything is very tactile.
0:45:59And it can be tactile without looking like a textured button.
0:46:05Certainly there are some design challenges there
0:46:08with usability and getting people
0:46:09to figure out what's touchable and what's draggable.
0:46:12But I think letterpress is a great example
0:46:15to show that it can be done in the flat aesthetic.
0:46:19It can still be done.
0:46:20And you don't have to make everything
0:46:23look like a 3D textured button for people
0:46:25to know that they can touch it.
0:46:27And then if you look at the iPhone Hero layout, it's three apps.
0:46:31They show one built-in photo app.
0:46:34And again, I think that's just to put a photo up there.
0:46:37But not a particularly skeuomorphic design.
0:46:41Then the two third-party apps.
0:46:42I don't know what the photo one is.
0:46:44Do you know?
0:46:46That is the Tumblr app.
0:46:48Oh, is it?
0:46:49OK.
0:46:49Wow.
0:46:50Yeah.
0:46:51I didn't even know that till just now.
0:46:52So there you go.
0:46:53It's the Tumblr app.
0:46:54Yeah, that's the Tumblr app.
0:46:54See, I don't use that.
0:46:55So I didn't know.
0:46:56And then there's, it's a notes, note-taking app called Catch
0:47:01that I actually just checked out last week.
0:47:03Not entirely flat, you know, it's,
0:47:07but it is more flat than a lot of apps, you know,
0:47:10it's flatter.
0:47:11Maybe that's the better way to describe,
0:47:13like I think the trend.
0:47:14It's not flat design.
0:47:16It's not Windows 8 style, completely flat,
0:47:19no textures, no gradients.
0:47:20It's just flatter.
0:47:21- See, and looking at this shot with,
0:47:24It shows a full screen photo in the camera roll,
0:47:30but with the toolbars showing.
0:47:32And so it has these semi-transparent, kind
0:47:34of glossy toolbars overlaying this photo.
0:47:37And to me, that looks old.
0:47:39Like, I think what we've seen for a while
0:47:42is that the default UI kit styles are out of style.
0:47:47And they've been holding on-- iOS 6 did a slight tweak,
0:47:50but they've been holding onto them still
0:47:52a little bit too long.
0:47:53But even if you go back to the iPad hero layout,
0:47:57I think one of the reasons they didn't put anything there
0:47:59that uses default widgets is because UIKit on the iPad
0:48:02has always looked horrible, I think.
0:48:04I mean, it's always been, you know,
0:48:06if you use the default UIKit navigation bars on top
0:48:10or if you use the default alerts,
0:48:12like it's always looked like a scaled up version
0:48:14of the iPhone.
0:48:15It's never really come into its own
0:48:16if you use the built-in stuff.
0:48:18And a lot of it just, I think, is ugly.
0:48:21Like, one of the things I loved most with doing the magazines app was that I finally
0:48:26could really replace the popover chrome.
0:48:30Because the default popover chrome, which is a border of a navy blue gradient thing,
0:48:37framing something with a deep shadow inset in the middle of it, that should always look
0:48:41like a hack.
0:48:43And until iOS 6, you could not fully replace it.
0:48:45iOS 5, you could change the chrome, but you were stuck with that weird inset shadow.
0:48:49and six, you could finally hide the shadow also.
0:48:52And so I think the popovers are some of the best looking
0:48:58interface I've ever done.
0:48:59Because-- well, I'm taking credit to Louis Mantilla,
0:49:02who actually drew it.
0:49:03And you're talking about the ones
0:49:04you get for the footnotes.
0:49:06For any popover.
0:49:07I replaced every popover in the magazines app for iPad.
0:49:10In fact, my goal with that was to not show any default
0:49:14Chrome ever.
0:49:15And the only time I do show default Chrome
0:49:17is logging into Instapaper, I have some text inputs
0:49:21and an alert box if you do it wrong.
0:49:23And then if you subscribe, then I have to show the systems
0:49:27in-app purchase dialogues, which look completely out of place
0:49:30in the rest of the app.
0:49:31But my goal there was to make this look well-designed,
0:49:35I'm going to have the entire app just be custom-designed.
0:49:38And that alone looks better than if you just use,
0:49:41like the default pop-overs I think look horrible.
0:49:43- I think it's a great design in the abstract.
0:49:46I love popovers as opposed to, and I think that popovers should be used a lot more in
0:49:53iPhone apps, not just iPad apps.
0:49:56Oh yeah, me too.
0:49:57I wish I could.
0:49:58There's tons of developers who have made their own popover class for iPhone because Apple's
0:50:03popover class only works on iPad.
0:50:04Right.
0:50:05I think that the iPhone, maybe just because it's called "phone," I think maybe like back
0:50:13in 2006 when they were cranking out and iterating on that initial design I think
0:50:20they got too caught up thinking about it as a phone and in traditional phones
0:50:23every time you got a new menu it would be a new screen and everything so many
0:50:27things are an entire screen and you go in and do it like you know just look at
0:50:32like when you do you when you want to toggle Bluetooth and you go to settings
0:50:37and you hit Bluetooth and you get an entire new screen just for a checkbox to
0:50:43toggle Bluetooth. Now, I do think it's important to have that checkbox be a nice, big, fat
0:50:49target like big 44 pixels in every dimension so that you have a nice, big, fat, thumb-friendly
0:50:55target. But why not just a popover that comes underneath it when you hit Bluetooth and settings
0:51:01that would give you the checkbox?
0:51:05I think this might change in the future as phone screens get bigger. The iPhone 5 already
0:51:11give us tons more real estate and then we'll see, you know, my prediction is that they're
0:51:14going to have a bigger screen iPhone fairly soon. You know, we'll see if that actually
0:51:18happens or not. I think the hint that Cook gave on the earnings call sounds like it might
0:51:24be happening soon. And, you know, I think as we see, I mean, one of the great values
0:51:30of bigger screen devices, including the crazy phablets that everybody hates, except for
0:51:35all the people who keep buying them, which is a lot of them, one of the great things
0:51:39about them is that you can bring you have more space to bring in some of the
0:51:43conveniences of tablets and tablet interfaces and you know you aren't
0:51:49limited to just these very very deep navigation stacks of full-screen things
0:51:53on a little phone screen yeah but to your point from a minute ago I do think
0:51:57that the iPad has suffered all three years of its life from having default
0:52:02default Chrome that really originates with the 2007 iPhone oh yeah and the
0:52:08scale is all wrong. Like, I can't even look, the screenshots of my first version of Instapaper
0:52:14for iPad are unbearable for me to see because it was just blowing up the iPhone interface.
0:52:21It was everything that you would never do today if you were designing a new iPad app.
0:52:27I did everything wrong in that first version because I didn't have an iPad yet. I designed
0:52:32it before anyone had iPads so it would be there on day one and as soon as it was out
0:52:36realized, "Oh man, this is... I got some work to do. This is bad."
0:52:41I had forgotten that you're the guy who did Instapaper.
0:52:43Yeah, it's been so long. Yeah, it's been so long. I had totally forgotten
0:52:48about that. That the other weird thing about the evolution
0:52:54of iOS over the years, because now, you know, it's been six years, right? This is six years
0:53:00since we've had the original iPhone, is that if you compare it to Mac OS X, Mac OS
0:53:06Mac OS X has undergone numerous aesthetic tweaks every, you know, two or three revisions
0:53:13or so, you know, and it's slowly evolved what the default look and feel of the system is
0:53:19every couple of years and has never gone this long, not six years, with so many of the elements
0:53:27looking exactly the same.
0:53:30But if you look at the way that, like, you know, whenever there has been a visual refresh
0:53:35in Mac OS X, like the time that they got rid of brushed metal
0:53:39and just replaced everything with the, you know,
0:53:42the non-brushed metal windows, the brushed metal windows, all of them, all of a sudden
0:53:46looked exactly the same.
0:53:49Which is, you know, in some ways, in terms of like the textures and the actual
0:53:53pixels you see on screen, that was a pretty major change.
0:53:57But, nobody who was a Mac user
0:53:59was lost or confused or,
0:54:02"Oh my god, where is everything?
0:54:04I don't know how to use my computer."
0:54:07Like that's to me is what I think they're going to do
0:54:10with iOS 7.
0:54:11Like I don't think,
0:54:12and that's the other concern I've seen out there,
0:54:14that, oh my god, if my parents,
0:54:16I just got my parents an iPhone last year,
0:54:19and now they're going to what?
0:54:21To get an automatic upgrade to iOS 7,
0:54:23and then they're gonna call me
0:54:25and they can't find anything, right?
0:54:27I don't think it's gonna be that type of,
0:54:28I don't think that's what they're working on at all.
0:54:31I think it's like when they change the way the windows look in Mac OS X.
0:54:34Right.
0:54:35Right?
0:54:36There's still a red button up in the corner that you use to close the window.
0:54:40You know, there's still an Apple menu up in the top left corner where you go to get to
0:54:44system preferences and stuff like that.
0:54:46I think too, you know, you can look at the trend that they've been doing with OS X design
0:54:51and with Mac.
0:54:52Oh, didn't they drop the word Mac?
0:54:54I don't know what to call it anymore.
0:54:55Yeah.
0:54:56I still like calling it Mac OS X though.
0:54:58To me, it immediately emphasizes the word Mac,
0:55:02whereas otherwise with OS X and iOS, OS is at the middle of it,
0:55:06and I have to think about which one is which.
0:55:10Right.
0:55:11Anyway, with Mac OS X, Mac in brackets there,
0:55:14I think the trend has been very clearly towards less
0:55:19ornamentation for the most part, and making the default Chrome
0:55:23be less visually noisy, and making it easier
0:55:26to ignore or forget about.
0:55:29And iOS started out being the complete opposite of that,
0:55:33with all this very heavy-handed visual kurama
0:55:35as all the defaults.
0:55:36And so, as I said earlier,
0:55:38if they move towards a more subtle default look,
0:55:43then people who make custom-designed apps
0:55:47are still gonna make very high-personality designs.
0:55:50Now, that's not gonna be a risk,
0:55:52but it'll just make everything else a little bit less,
0:55:56I don't know, saccharin.
0:55:57- Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
0:56:01So yeah, I think we're on the same page
0:56:05in terms of the scope of the sort of redesign
0:56:07that we're gonna see.
0:56:09I don't typically, this is the last point I'll make on this,
0:56:12is I don't typically do the game
0:56:14where you read into Apple's invitations,
0:56:17the design of the invitation,
0:56:20and try to interpret what it means
0:56:22about what they're going to announce.
0:56:25But I know a lot of people have taken this whole flat UI,
0:56:27you know, that they're going to get rid of this.
0:56:29And then they look at the WWDC logo.
0:56:32Yeah.
0:56:33And they say, well, that must be the direction they're going.
0:56:36And maybe there's something to that, you know?
0:56:39Because the one thing I noticed with that,
0:56:41it's like a stack of these vibrant primary color, like--
0:56:46Gels.
0:56:47Yeah, like app shapes, right, though?
0:56:49It's the--
0:56:50Yeah, it's the round rec, the icons.
0:56:51The round square.
0:56:52It's like if somebody cut out an icon's shape out of lighting gels and stacked them up.
0:56:57Right. But they're not, you know, there's no gloss on them. But there is depth, right?
0:57:03And there is translucency. So, you know, again, I think it's like a don't throw the baby out
0:57:08with the bathwater. I don't think that, you know, I really, really would be shocked if
0:57:13they went full on, like, Windows 8, no depth, sharp.
0:57:18You know, I didn't notice that until now. But now that you mention it, I'm looking at
0:57:21and on the corners, especially on the left side of the low,
0:57:23you can see there are shadows between each layer,
0:57:26so it does show depth,
0:57:27that this isn't just a pile of lighting gels
0:57:30that are just flat and have no meaningful depth.
0:57:32This is a pile of, it's more like letterpress tiles.
0:57:34- Right.
0:57:35- Because it's a stack of things
0:57:36that have some depth to them,
0:57:39but the things themselves are flat.
0:57:41I don't know, yeah, this could be interesting.
0:57:43- Yeah.
0:57:43- If this really is an indicator.
0:57:44- I'm stealing it from our friend Brad Ellis,
0:57:48great user interface designer now at Pacific Helm.
0:57:53But the line I've heard from him is,
0:57:56if you're going to have something stacked visually
0:57:59on the z-axis in your UI, and it's going to have a shadow,
0:58:03it doesn't have to be four inches off the surface.
0:58:06Like, just a little, just a tiny little bit goes a long way.
0:58:11Whereas I think that that original 2007 iOS design
0:58:15is everything.
0:58:16if it has a shadow, it's like four inches of shadow.
0:58:20- Right, exactly.
0:58:22And Six actually made that worse.
0:58:23Six made the shadow depth bigger on some things,
0:58:25and it even added shadows where there weren't any before,
0:58:28like under navigation bars and above toolbars.
0:58:31There's now, by default, there's a shadow there.
0:58:34And before Six, that wasn't there.
0:58:36- Let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor.
0:58:41Our second sponsor is a very interesting company.
0:58:46It's Transporter.
0:58:48It's the name of the product, and the company is Connected Data.
0:58:51And it's a team.
0:58:55You go to their website and you can check it out.
0:58:56They tell you this.
0:58:57This is the team that originally made the Drobo.
0:59:00And what they've done is the team that made the Drobo has gotten together,
0:59:04and they've made a thing.
0:59:06You buy it.
0:59:06It's called the Transporter.
0:59:08It's a physical device that you have in your hand.
0:59:12Put a hard drive in it.
0:59:14You connect it to the internet and you sign up with Transporter and that drive is accessible
0:59:20anywhere.
0:59:23They'll say this too.
0:59:24It's not like I'm mentioning Dropbox and it's uncouth because it's sort of a competitor.
0:59:30No, they actually – it's sort of like having your own private Dropbox.
0:59:35They sent me one to let me try it out.
0:59:40It works great.
0:59:41It's very simple to set up.
0:59:43you buy it, you just plug it in, you install the software on your computer,
0:59:46and it's like you have your own little private Dropbox. And so instead of it's
0:59:52cloud access being the access is everywhere and where is your stuff
0:59:57stored is I don't know it's out there. The where is my stuff stored is right
1:00:03here and you know where it is and so there's a privacy layer and the cloud
1:00:08aspect that they've solved is punching a hole through your local network to the
1:00:14internet at large so that you can access the stuff from anywhere and what you can
1:00:19also do is if you anybody else like if you sign up for their service you don't
1:00:25even have to buy the transporter you can just go to their website and sign up for
1:00:29an account once you're signed up I can share stuff with you from my transporter
1:00:34and you can access it on a folder by folder basis. So I could just say just
1:00:39for this folder invite Marco and then you're in and you can you can use it. If
1:00:44you have a transporter yourself then it'll also mirror it'll sync to your
1:00:52device the shared folder so that you'll be faster for you to access when you're
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1:01:01you can mirror them so that you could say have one at home and one at your
1:01:07office or one at your parents home or something like that and it'll mirror
1:01:14both of them and it's you know effectively like backing up the data
1:01:18that you have on one transporter it'll be exactly the same on the other one
1:01:22really really simple the big pitch is that it's private because they don't
1:01:28have access to any of your data. Your data is only stored on your actual transporter devices,
1:01:34which are completely under your control. So for some people, that might just be personal privacy,
1:01:39like stuff that you just don't want to put on Dropbox or on some kind of cloud-based service
1:01:44because you don't trust it or, you know, for whatever reason. For a lot of people, though,
1:01:48it's actually a legal-type issue, like if it's medical data and stuff like that and you have
1:01:53have these laws to comply with, where you have to have physical control of where the
1:01:57stuff is stored.
1:01:58So you get cloud-style access from anywhere, over the web or on your Mac or Windows through
1:02:04the transporter software, which puts a folder right in your finder so you can see it all.
1:02:13But you get the privacy of storing your data on your own hard drive.
1:02:19So it's really, really interesting.
1:02:22great. They have apps for the iPad and iPhone, no surprise. You can use it. It's
1:02:30great for stuff like storing and sharing photos, all sorts of stuff like that. And
1:02:34you get to put your own hard drive in it so you can have as much data as you want.
1:02:38As big a hard drive as you can put in it is as much data as as you can store.
1:02:42That's pretty cool. It's very cool. See, what I like about this is that they
1:02:48don't need to, like, act in denial that Dropbox exists.
1:02:52Exactly. That's a great way to put it.
1:02:54A lot of things are like, you know, you hear about something and you're like, "Well, why
1:02:56don't I just use X?" You know, and, you know, because X is better or free or whatever. And
1:03:02in this case, I think this is like, this is some really concrete advantages over Dropbox.
1:03:06And so they don't have to, like, hope you don't hear about Dropbox.
1:03:09Exactly. No, that's exactly why I brought it up. Let me tell you what to do to find
1:03:15out more. Here's the URL. It's file transporter.com slash talk, file
1:03:22transporter.com slash talk. They have an overview video. It's a good video. It's
1:03:28very short, but it really, you know, it gives you the gist of what the heck
1:03:32they're doing, why you would do it very, very succinctly. And they have three
1:03:36different configs to buy. And the first is when I was sort of going on, which is
1:03:40the 0 terabyte model you supply any 2.5 inch drive it's 199 bucks but you could
1:03:46also if you want just save the hassle you can buy a 1 terabyte or 2 terabyte
1:03:52version that'll just ship with the drive already in it for 299 or 399 respectively
1:04:00and the most important thing for listeners of this show you can save 10%
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1:04:42but there's no charge for the service you buy the thing and then it just works
1:04:47and so if you want to share it like if you're sharing with clients or friends
1:04:50or something like that who don't have a transporter doesn't cost them any money
1:04:53to sign up for the service so there's no monthly fee you just buy the device and
1:04:59then you you get to use it my thanks to transporter for sponsoring the show
1:05:04let's see what else we got Winky you see the Winky app it is as creepy as it
1:05:12sounds yet it isn't what it sounds like Winky is a is an app somebody's developed
1:05:17for Google Glass that lets you take photos by winking so you don't have to
1:05:23say okay glass take a photo you could just wink your eye and it starts snapping
1:05:27photos?
1:05:28You know, I think you can… I mean, I think every generation, as we get older, looks at
1:05:37the newest technology at some point in their lives and says, "I don't understand why
1:05:42anybody would want that. That's going to be so problematic for our culture." Whatever.
1:05:48And maybe this is my moment to do that, but I just cannot understand Google Apps. I don't
1:05:54and why anybody would want to wear that on their face all the time. I don't understand
1:05:59why any right-thinking person would trust Google with all that extra data on them. And
1:06:04I don't understand why Google thought it would be a good thing for society if everybody
1:06:08started wearing these things. I mean, there's so many problems, including the picture-taking
1:06:13aspect of like, you know, there's a problem enough where you kind of don't know if someone's
1:06:17paying attention to you, even if they're looking right at you, sort of. And then there's
1:06:21it was the secondary problem of like, now it's even easier than it was. And we've already
1:06:25made it pretty easy as a society to take photos and videos covertly with our phones. But now
1:06:32Google is trying to bring it even more mainstream in a way that is even easier to take photos
1:06:38or videos of people without their knowledge. And that's, I just think that's kind of creepy
1:06:44in so many ways. Plus, I mean, you look ridiculous with the thing on. But besides that, I think
1:06:49it's just it's just kind of socially kind of gross yeah I want to write about
1:06:54this I have to get it out of my system is sort of a why I'm so down on Google
1:06:59class and I'm not against heads-up displays in general right and I'm not
1:07:07denying that there's a bright future in them and that you know that the amazing
1:07:11stuff is going to happen in the next decade or two along the lines of this
1:07:17it's this particular product in the current configuration that I just think
1:07:25is absurd right and it gets back I don't know if you listen the last week's show
1:07:28but like moltz pointed out a thing I wrote back in 2003 about the quote-unquote
1:07:33iPhone and that I said that you know it was like a New York Times story that's
1:07:37that claimed in 2003 that Apple was working on a I thing that they call the
1:07:44iPhone that ran a stripped-down version of Mac OS X and involved apps like Sherlock and
1:07:49stuff like that.
1:07:51And what they said was, you know, the article made it seem as though that it was something
1:07:55that might come out like next year.
1:07:58And it wasn't true.
1:07:59It wasn't -- I wrote, "That's impossible.
1:08:00There is no technology that would do it."
1:08:02And I was right.
1:08:03There was no --
1:08:04HOFFMAN, Off-screen -- less space than a nomad, lame.
1:08:05SIMON ROGERS Right.
1:08:06But it wasn't -- I didn't say that Apple would never be able to make a device that would
1:08:10would run a stripped-down version of OS X and, you know, like a cell phone or something
1:08:15like that, and that would have software like that. What I was saying was impossible was
1:08:19that in 2003, it was impossible, and that they weren't working on anything like that.
1:08:25And in fact, they weren't, right? It was – they were working on a tablet-type thing. Like,
1:08:28the thing that eventually became the iPhone was in some level of work, but it was more
1:08:32like they had the idea that it was like a tablet-type thing.
1:08:35The story that I said wasn't true in 2003 wasn't true. It does seem funny in hindsight,
1:08:39though because that is actually what they ended up doing four years later.
1:08:42It's the same thing with Google Glass where I'm not denying that there won't
1:08:46be cool and maybe even possibly useful wearable headset type things eventually.
1:08:54But this one is not. This one is ridiculous. It looks stupid.
1:09:01Yeah. Well, and yeah, it looks like a medical device.
1:09:04Right. Doesn't it? It looks like some kind of like enhanced hearing and visual aid.
1:09:09but not in a tech way, in a medical assistance way.
1:09:13Right, or something that you might have to wear for certain jobs, you know?
1:09:17Yeah, if you're like inspecting a plane in the airport, walking around the runway
1:09:23wearing one of these things with a clipboard in your hand.
1:09:24Right, and I could even see that there are uses, especially the camera part, that if you,
1:09:32even if you look stupid, I could see it how it, for certain people, it might be useful to have a
1:09:39have a stupid looking camera that you wear like this over your eyes so that you can get
1:09:44a first person perspective while you do something where you want your hands free. Right? Like
1:09:50so you can make, I don't know, like the one that Google even made. Like if you're going
1:09:54to take a video while you jump out of an airplane with a parachute, well, I don't know. You
1:09:58don't want to have a camera in your hands. That's for sure.
1:10:01Right. I mean, and you can look at aspects of this and you can say, okay, well, the technology
1:10:06will get better in Area X, so that's not going to be a problem for long. I think you
1:10:11can look at especially things like size and battery life. You can say, "Okay, well,
1:10:15those will get better over time." It will get smaller. It will look sleeker. The battery
1:10:20life will get longer. But I think the social aspects of it are the big, long-term, what-the-fuck
1:10:30moment.
1:10:31And, you know, I guess, you know, and again, I'm right there with you, where maybe it's
1:10:36just that we're too old and we're getting curmudgeonly and we just, you know, stuck
1:10:42in the mud and we're, you know, already old-fashioned.
1:10:45Because I could see how if, you know, you went back to the '80s and told somebody about
1:10:50how all of us have little pocket computers with three, four-inch screens that we check
1:10:57all the time and if we go out to dinner and you go to the bathroom, I'm going to get my
1:11:02phone out until you come back.
1:11:05I could see how someone would say, "Well, that sounds like hell on earth of everybody
1:11:10always looking at these computer screens."
1:11:14Whereas I see it as, "My God, it's a relief from boredom."
1:11:17It's great.
1:11:18I try never – like if I'm at dinner with people, I try never to be on my phone while
1:11:23we're at the table together, but if I'm out with one person and that person gets up, I usually take
1:11:29out my phone. I don't know. I do that and I can see how that's, you know, there's like a slope
1:11:38along the lines of, well, how far away is that from having your computer always in your field
1:11:44of visual stream in your glasses? That it's, you know, it's along the same continuum. But to me,
1:11:49that goes over this border that to me is just ridiculous. Yeah and you know we
1:11:56don't know how that's going to change over time with with generations and
1:12:01social stuff. Like I think there was this great video I'm trying I think it might
1:12:05have been by Dan Savage maybe? I'll have to find it and put it in your
1:12:14in your non-existent show notes but there was this great video where this
1:12:17guy was talking about, I think it was back with the governor or senator, Wiener, whatever
1:12:24that was, when he sent his pictures of his junk to people and then they got out.
1:12:28He was a congressional representative from New York, New York City.
1:12:33Right. So there was a big deal about that. And he made this video about it afterwards.
1:12:39It's on YouTube somewhere. I've got to find it. And I think it's Dan Savage, but I'm not
1:12:42positive on that. And he basically said, "Yeah, today our politicians are so afraid of pictures
1:12:52of their junk getting out that if it does happen, then you're like, 'Well, that's pictures
1:12:57of someone's junk. I don't know.' You try to deny it. And then at some point, the tide
1:13:04will change socially because everyone's having pictures of their junk all over the place,
1:13:08especially if you're younger, and sending it all over the place." I'm so glad to acknowledge
1:13:11like this did not exist when I was younger.
1:13:13(laughing)
1:13:15And then eventually, a politician can get up there
1:13:19and say, "Yeah, that's my junk.
1:13:21"Of course, who cares?"
1:13:23Eventually, the times will shift in social tolerance
1:13:27of certain things that it will just become normal.
1:13:32And so I think with my concerns with Google Glass
1:13:36of it kinda sucks when you can't tell
1:13:39someone's looking at a screen overlaid over your face or looking at you, and it kind of
1:13:44sucks if everyone can be taking pictures or video all the time and you can't even tell
1:13:48if they're doing it or not. You know, all those things make me nervous, but having a
1:13:54cell phone in my pocket that can take a quick picture or video makes other people nervous,
1:13:59especially older people, in older contexts. You know, it's like everything we're doing
1:14:04is adding more things that make people uncomfortable
1:14:07who are older or who are more conservative.
1:14:11And we keep pushing that boundary back
1:14:13in all these other ways.
1:14:14We've been pushing it back for decades.
1:14:17So maybe this is just the next step of that.
1:14:19But I don't know.
1:14:20This to me seems like it crosses a line
1:14:23that shouldn't be crossed.
1:14:26And I think we'd actually be worse off
1:14:27if that line was crossed.
1:14:29But I don't know.
1:14:30People probably say the exact same thing about camera phones.
1:14:34Yeah, probably.
1:14:35You know, I see my difference with that is, and what's his name?
1:14:39I don't know how you pronounce his name.
1:14:41He's the guy who writes the OS news site, Tom Holwerda.
1:14:44I don't know.
1:14:46T-H-O-M.
1:14:47You know who I'm talking about.
1:14:50I know the site.
1:14:51But he, Twitter replied me yesterday after I linked to the Winky app and my only comment
1:15:01was a fake quote from a hypothetical Glass user saying, "Okay, Glass, let's be creepy."
1:15:10And his Twitter thing was, "Oh, come on." Because he's a huge Glass enthusiast. He's
1:15:15super excited about Glass and thinks that I'm being some either like a Pollyanna or
1:15:25combination of a prude and a if it isn't from Apple it's crap zealot which the
1:15:34Pollyanna part the the prude part maybe is true that's what we're talking about
1:15:38the Apple part man I would be so depressed if Apple came out with Google
1:15:42Glass it's exactly like this I would think I would then then that's I in some
1:15:48sense it would be great though and I've talked about this before because man I
1:15:51Nothing would be better for my reputation than for me to have something to really dig
1:15:56into and just rip Apple apart on.
1:15:58Like, you know, I don't do it because they haven't released anything that I think is
1:16:03terrible, you know, but it would be great.
1:16:04Right.
1:16:05I mean, they have, but they've been smaller things.
1:16:06Right.
1:16:07You know, like the iPod HiFi was a massive flop.
1:16:10But who cares?
1:16:11It was a speaker dock.
1:16:12You know, no one—it wasn't like a big PR problem for them to release a speaker dock
1:16:16that was actually a pretty decent speaker dock, just too expensive.
1:16:20But the difference, yeah, and the difference,
1:16:24his reply to me was, oh come on,
1:16:26like nobody's taken a surreptitious picture before?
1:16:31Like it's not happening all the time now?
1:16:32And that is true, people do sneak photos, you know,
1:16:36and you can be creepy by taking photos with your phone now.
1:16:40But there's a physical,
1:16:42there are physical limitations to it, right?
1:16:44Like you have to be sly about it.
1:16:48And so yes, somebody could take a picture of you in someplace
1:16:52where you don't want to be photographed,
1:16:54and you don't know it, and you may not notice them doing it.
1:16:58Presumably, especially if the flash is off on the computer
1:17:02or on the camera, obviously.
1:17:04But they have to work at it.
1:17:07It's not they're strapped to their forehead always,
1:17:11constantly.
1:17:12I would find it so uncomfortable if I went out to dinner
1:17:17and somebody just had their phone up
1:17:19and in a position that looked like it was filming
1:17:23a video of the entire meal.
1:17:25And I don't know if they're--
1:17:26Exactly.
1:17:26I don't know if they're doing it or not,
1:17:28but they're holding it up the entire time.
1:17:29Well, to me, that's what it would
1:17:31be like going out to dinner with Scoble with his glasses on.
1:17:36Glass on, I guess.
1:17:37You have to--
1:17:38Who knows how you--
1:17:39--singularize it.
1:17:40I think also it's worth considering
1:17:44If you are a user of Google Glass,
1:17:47do you want Google getting all that information
1:17:51from your face all the time?
1:17:53- Right.
1:17:53- Do you want Google to know
1:17:55that you just loosed up the waitress's butt?
1:17:57And what are they gonna do with that information?
1:18:00They're an advertising company.
1:18:02People think Google just does some of this stuff
1:18:04for the fun of doing it,
1:18:06and some of their projects do seem like
1:18:07they're just kind of engineering for fun,
1:18:09although since Google+ has come out
1:18:11and the company's focus has been shifted,
1:18:13you can tell those have been lessened in the company.
1:18:15But at the end of the day,
1:18:17they gotta make this a business somehow.
1:18:19They have to make it work with the rest of their businesses.
1:18:21And the way they're going to do that, in all likelihood,
1:18:24is by tying this in extremely deeply
1:18:28with everything they know about you,
1:18:30which is their business.
1:18:31Their business is to know as much as they possibly can
1:18:33about you so they can charge more for the ads
1:18:36that get shown to you.
1:18:38And so when you look at it from that perspective,
1:18:41it just feels kind of dirty.
1:18:43Like, wait, do I really want Google
1:18:45to know every minute of every day of my life what I'm doing?
1:18:50It's bad enough that I'm carrying a phone in my pocket.
1:18:53If you have an Android phone, then you
1:18:55can already do quite a lot of that stuff today.
1:18:58But it's different when it's your face.
1:19:01When your phone is this thing that you can kind of put away,
1:19:04and technology is such that phones can't really
1:19:08afford the battery problems of keeping GPS on all the time.
1:19:12So they at least aren't live tracking you precisely yet.
1:19:17But who knows in the future?
1:19:19There was that thing this week with the Google Now app
1:19:21burning battery time on iPhones.
1:19:23That's exactly what I was going to say.
1:19:25We're segueing perfectly into the next thing.
1:19:28Well, and there's a thing--
1:19:31I'm not even sure I completely understand the why of it
1:19:36and the way that knowing your location helps Google serve you ads and stuff better.
1:19:43And part of it, obviously, is not even about advertising or creepiness, and really is.
1:19:47And this is why I think it is so insidious, because there's obviously usefulness to it,
1:19:54where in theory, if they know where you are and you say, hey, I'm hungry,
1:20:02I'm in the mood for pizza but I don't you know this is I'm not familiar with
1:20:06this neighborhood it's useful if they know where you are and can say you know
1:20:11there's a well-regarded pizza place two blocks over to the left right and you
1:20:17know and if they know even more about you and they know and you've you have
1:20:21you know a Google+ the pizza restaurants that you've been to in the past and
1:20:31and said, "I like this one and I don't like that one," that they can, if they have millions
1:20:36of users, that they can correlate all of that and say, "Given the type of pizza that you've
1:20:40said you've liked before and the ones you've said you don't like, this is almost certainly
1:20:44a pizza place that you're going to like." And that, if it's accurate and it works, that's
1:20:48-- that is -- I do understand that is useful, right? That's the whole pro-Google argument.
1:20:53Right. Well, it's useful sometimes. It's useful when you have purchasing intent. And so if
1:21:01you think about these examples, and that makes sense. You think about these examples of,
1:21:07where should I go eat pizza right now? You have purchasing intent. And that's what Google—Seth
1:21:11Godin did a talk about this a while ago. There's a video of it online somewhere. But that's
1:21:16what Google and their advertising model excels at. And that's why Facebook's advertising
1:21:20model sucks.
1:21:21Google's advertising model excels at that
1:21:23because it's really easy to sell ads against purchasing intent.
1:21:27If you're searching for something like,
1:21:28what kind of coffee maker do I need to get from my office?
1:21:32Then that's a great place for not only Google
1:21:35to recommend things to you based on knowledge it has from Yelp
1:21:39or user reviews or whatever, but they can also then integrate
1:21:42ads really well into that in a way
1:21:43that the ads are not trying to distract you.
1:21:46The ads are actually possibly helpful to you.
1:21:48And same thing with-- that's why local search matters so much
1:21:52to them, because it's the same kind of thing, where
1:21:55if you are looking for a pizza place around you,
1:21:58that's a great time for Google to not only use all this data
1:22:01they know about you to give you better recommendations,
1:22:04but then for them to be able to go and sell that
1:22:07to the advertisers, for them to go to local advertisers,
1:22:09for local advertisers to be able to say,
1:22:11I'll pay you $1.50 to put my ad on top
1:22:13and put a yellow box around it.
1:22:15And so in all those contexts, that's great.
1:22:19It's great for Google, and it actually
1:22:21is kind of helpful for the user at those times.
1:22:24The problem is all the other times,
1:22:26when you don't have that purchasing intent,
1:22:28or when you're doing something that is not
1:22:30commercial in nature or that you don't think
1:22:32of as commercial in nature, and they kind of surprise you
1:22:36with either an ad that you weren't expecting,
1:22:39or they surprise you with knowledge
1:22:42that they have that you didn't think they had about you
1:22:45or what you did or what you intend and that's when it that's when it gets
1:22:48creepy yeah and you know and Amy has run into this recently where she's noticed
1:22:54and she's you know called my attention to it with her computer where like
1:23:00she'll she'll have searched for and who knows even if it's Google I might you
1:23:05know I don't even know it might be through some other similar to type
1:23:09aggregate collection of stuff we're like she searched for product X like four
1:23:15days ago. And now she's on this other website that isn't even related to that product and
1:23:21here are ads for exactly what she was searching for four days ago.
1:23:26Yup.
1:23:27Right?
1:23:28And it's not like a general audience thing like that. It was definitely not a coincidence.
1:23:30Right. And it, the result is not, "Oh yeah, I should buy that." The result is, "I am creeped
1:23:36out and I'm going to tell my nerd husband and, you know, this is freaking me out." Right?
1:23:44It is creepy.
1:23:45And that to me is where I see that Google and I really do think Google has shifted over
1:23:51the second half of its life.
1:23:53In the first couple of years of its life, it just seemed amazing and helpful in the
1:23:59second half of its life.
1:24:01And especially I think, even though I think Eric Schmidt is a pretty creepy guy, I think
1:24:06it's really accelerated though since Larry Page took over as CEO.
1:24:09Yeah, it's really accelerated since Facebook really. Since Facebook got so big that it
1:24:14started becoming an obvious threat to many of their core markets.
1:24:17Yeah, I think that really is the – I think – and again, correlation is not causation,
1:24:23but boy, the correlation is very strong that when Facebook got big and when it became clear
1:24:29that Facebook was not the next MySpace but was going to be a standalone thing and they're
1:24:37to be acquired there they've reached the critical mass where they were going to IPO which was
1:24:42far in advance of you know years in advance of when they actually did IPO like it was a long you
1:24:48know there were a couple of years there where it was clear that Facebook was going to eventually
1:24:52IPO and no you know Google wasn't going to have a chance to buy Facebook uh that's when it does seem
1:24:58like that they really had like a freak out and have really gotten creepy about the personal stuff
1:25:05And any and and so it all goes back to the location
1:25:07I mean not all but in terms of what we're talking about here is that they really want to know where you are
1:25:14like all day every day and
1:25:16I find that in the context of everything else Google is doing very very disturbing and it it
1:25:23I think it's actually the root. I think you know in terms of their desire to know where you are. I
1:25:31I think is the entire reason that Apple Maps exists.
1:25:36Oh, yeah, definitely.
1:25:37You know, and I feel like everybody has this wide--
1:25:40and it's held up as the criticism of Tim Cook as a CEO,
1:25:45and that Apple--
1:25:46it's all of these stories, these, hey, Apple's hit a rough patch,
1:25:51Apple's doing poorly.
1:25:53Inevitably, they bring up Apple Maps,
1:25:55and that Apple Maps is a disaster and a shit show,
1:25:57and it's terrible and inexplicable.
1:26:01Well, it's not inexplicable.
1:26:02I think it's that Google--
1:26:04and some of this I actually know-- is that Google,
1:26:07to up the offering in terms of getting the vector maps
1:26:13instead of the bitmap map tiles and turn-by-turn direction
1:26:18for driving, which was sorely missing from iOS,
1:26:22that they wanted--
1:26:24they were-- their deal was that if you want that from us,
1:26:27you've got to let us let people sign into their Google account
1:26:31And that would let us track their location
1:26:35through their iPhone, through the built-in maps
1:26:37functionality that ties to our maps.
1:26:39And Apple was not willing to budge on it.
1:26:41And so they were so unwilling to budge
1:26:43on that in terms of the privacy implications
1:26:46that they went ahead and shipped a map service that they--
1:26:51and I know that--
1:26:52I think it's probably a little bit worse than they expected
1:26:54in terms of the reaction.
1:26:56But I think that they knew that it wasn't going to be--
1:26:59wasn't going to be as good as Google Maps. And they did it anyway for the privacy reasons.
1:27:06Yeah, I don't... For some reason, you know, with Apple it's very, very clear to everyone
1:27:12where they make their money. So it's... Most people don't ascribe weird motivations to
1:27:17Apple's business decisions. Usually it's just, "Well, okay, they want to charge more for
1:27:21that," or, "They want you to buy this thing." But yet, with Google, it seems like most people
1:27:26just kind of give them a pass, especially nerds, because Google did have a very long
1:27:32period where they really did things that really appealed to people like us. As you said, the
1:27:38first half of their life, they really, really appealed to people like us because they were
1:27:42a nerdy company doing nerdy things and with seemingly little care about making money because
1:27:47they owned the online ad business pretty early on in their lifetime, especially the search
1:27:52ad business at least, not display ads for a while, but they owned the search ad business
1:27:57pretty quickly and they were making tons of money. And so I think it was easy to stay
1:28:03in that kind of small, geeky, engineering-driven spirit and keep making things that endeared
1:28:08them to us. But now that spirit's been gone for a couple of years at least. I think it's
1:28:16probably longer than that. Certainly the spirit is certainly not there at the moment. And
1:28:22I think you can look at that honestly and say, "Well, okay, they grew up. They had to
1:28:29make a lot of these moves." But so many people in our circles or so many nerds like us still
1:28:36kind of give them a pass on their motivations and why they are doing things and where their
1:28:40money is going to come from. It's not that they look at what Google is doing and say,
1:28:44I'm okay with that," it's that they don't even think about it in their mind, like,
1:28:48"Wait, so what's their motivation for doing this? What's in it for them
1:28:51here? How are they gonna pay for this?" etc. And so Google can be doing some
1:28:58pretty creepy or questionable things and get relatively little skepticism or
1:29:03relatively little scrutiny, I should say, from the geek audience. Yeah, in a way
1:29:09that Facebook doesn't, because Facebook has somehow, like, their initial
1:29:14first impression of them was that they were going to do these sort of things.
1:29:19Right. And I think, to be fair, I think Facebook is pretty creepy overall as well.
1:29:24Right.
1:29:25And what Facebook had—one of the design challenges Facebook has always had,
1:29:30and you can see they've failed a few times on this, is that Facebook and Google's the same way.
1:29:36They both have enough data on you that if you knew what they knew, you'd be creeped out.
1:29:41creeped out. And so they always have to kind of hide what they know or use restraint in
1:29:46designing new features or designing the interfaces to things or designing how they reveal what
1:29:50they know about you to avoid creeping you out with data they already have or inferences
1:29:56they can already draw about you. And I heard something like Facebook can tell when you're
1:30:02going to break up with your girlfriend before you can. There's all sorts of things like
1:30:07like that, like there's, like Facebook knows a lot about you.
1:30:09But in, you know, the recent history where Google
1:30:13has been kind of pushing into social so hard,
1:30:16I think we've seen a pretty clear pattern
1:30:18that while they both have enough data on you
1:30:20to appear quite creepy if they do it wrong,
1:30:23Facebook is generally a little bit better
1:30:25at avoiding that problem.
1:30:27Facebook is a little bit better at designing
1:30:29in such a way that it doesn't feel as creepy
1:30:31as it really is.
1:30:33And Google is not quite good at that yet.
1:30:36Yeah, I agree.
1:30:37Boy, they really wanna know where you are.
1:30:41- They really, I mean that's,
1:30:42I don't use any of the Google apps.
1:30:43- Right, the new Google app.
1:30:44Now, so it's not called, the feature's called Google Now,
1:30:48but the new feature on iOS is just in the Google app.
1:30:52It's just in the regular, which originally was just a way
1:30:54to do Google searches.
1:30:56But you open it up, and if you're not,
1:30:59or even if you are signed in,
1:31:01there's a big button at the bottom
1:31:02that says location service is off.
1:31:05Like, and they don't let you use, I think, some of the, a lot of the now features unless
1:31:11you turn location on.
1:31:14And I realize, and it seems to me, and some of them obviously require location, but I
1:31:20think the thing that's weird though is that it, by default, if you turn location on, it's
1:31:24not just for, and this gets back to your thing about like, what was the Seth Godin thing
1:31:30about when you're in the mood to buy something?
1:31:32Yeah, it's like purchasing intent or I think he calls it permission-based marketing.
1:31:36Right.
1:31:37It's not just when you're asking for something.
1:31:40And if I'm asking for pizza now, well, now we need your location to see where you are
1:31:45and we'll give you the recommendation because that's what you're looking for.
1:31:49It's that they want to know where you are all throughout the day and where you've been.
1:31:54And that to me is the difference.
1:31:56That's like the line that I'm very uncomfortable with.
1:32:00And so I don't have it, the location, turned on in my Google app.
1:32:04You know what I mean?
1:32:05There's a huge difference between granting them permission for your location right now
1:32:09when I'm asking where can I get coffee versus granting them permission to track me throughout
1:32:15the day.
1:32:16And one thing too that, you know, iOS has always kind of felt like a safe place to experiment
1:32:22with new apps because apps are so heavily sandboxed and restricted with what they can
1:32:26do and, you know, when they can run even.
1:32:29You know, iOS's lack of fully permissioned background modes for apps where you can run
1:32:36in the background indefinitely doing anything you want.
1:32:39iOS's lack of that and all the heavy sandboxing makes it okay as a consumer to say, "You
1:32:45know what?
1:32:46I can try this Google app, even though I don't really love Google that much or I don't
1:32:49trust them to know everything about me.
1:32:51I can launch this app, and when I'm done with it, I can shut it down and that's
1:32:54it.
1:32:55I'm good."
1:32:56you aren't surprised a month later to learn that
1:33:00it's been running in the background for a month
1:33:02and it knows everything everywhere you've gone
1:33:03for the last month.
1:33:04- Right.
1:33:05- You know, iOS by design kind of limits that,
1:33:07but location services are an exception,
1:33:11and the whole battery thing, do you wanna recap that?
1:33:14- Well, you can.
1:33:16- Okay, so basically, app comes out,
1:33:19everyone's reporting massive drops of battery life
1:33:21when it's on, and Google issued a statement
1:33:24basically saying, "We don't constantly monitor
1:33:26your location, so therefore you're all wrong and the battery's fine, we tested it. But
1:33:29it seems pretty universal from almost everybody using it that it is indeed doing bad things
1:33:34with the battery life. And I think it's important for me as a developer to clarify what exactly
1:33:38they're doing, because when you…
1:33:41Well, before you do that, I'll just reiterate that I'm always a little suspicious of when
1:33:47software updates come out and there's vague arguments that, "Hey, the iOS 4.1 point
1:33:53whatever is killing my battery and it wasn't before and a lot of times when
1:33:58this happens it just seems like whenever any new software comes out somebody has
1:34:01something wrong with their battery and they false you know they it's that
1:34:05correlation causation thing well I just upgraded to this thing so that must be
1:34:08the reason and it doesn't seem to be a lot of any kind of cause-and-effect
1:34:13proof whereas with this Google now thing you it's a lot of people telling the
1:34:18exact same story which is that I upgraded to the new Google app my
1:34:22battery life went to complete shit. I uninstalled the Google app and my battery life went back
1:34:28to normal.
1:34:29Exactly.
1:34:30And Google, and the weird part is that Google is really adamantly saying, "No, not us."
1:34:35And I can't help but think that it's effectively a, "Please don't turn off location."
1:34:40Right. So here's what I'm thinking here. I haven't used the app, so I can't confirm this.
1:34:46And we don't have a chat room, so they can't confirm it either. And you don't have location
1:34:49services, so you can't confirm it either. Probably should have done more research on
1:34:52on this beforehand, but oh well.
1:34:54There are three different ways you can track location on iOS
1:34:58with very, very different battery implications.
1:35:01One of them is full on GPS tracking,
1:35:04where you're continuously tracking locations.
1:35:06So you pretty much only need that
1:35:08if you're doing a turn by turn navigation app or something
1:35:10like that.
1:35:10That destroys the battery, because you
1:35:13have the GPS radio running constantly,
1:35:14which itself is a huge battery drain.
1:35:17Plus your app is running constantly.
1:35:19So any processing you're doing, if the user has something else
1:35:22in the foreground, you have two apps being fully active.
1:35:26So that destroys battery life.
1:35:27As anyone knows, if you've ever done turn by turn,
1:35:29even with Apple's own stuff, constant GPS fixes
1:35:32are very, very expensive to battery life.
1:35:35And Google says they're not doing that.
1:35:38Great, that's fine.
1:35:39I believe them.
1:35:39They don't need to be doing that.
1:35:43And then on the other end, there's the geofence.
1:35:46I did it with Instapaper to do the background
1:35:48update when you cross a certain threshold.
1:35:51News.me actually invented that.
1:35:53It's funny, actually, the guy who invented that at News.me
1:35:55is now working on Instapaper at BetaWorks.
1:35:59I stole this feature from him, and then now he--
1:36:01Now it's no longer stolen.
1:36:02Exactly.
1:36:03Right?
1:36:03It's like if you steal something from somebody,
1:36:06and you keep it, and then you get married to that person,
1:36:09well, now it's no longer stolen.
1:36:10Exactly.
1:36:11It's joint property.
1:36:13Exactly.
1:36:13So anyway, so it's this feature where you can--
1:36:17And the various reminders apps have this too, including apples.
1:36:20And almost every to-do list has this kind of thing
1:36:23where you can say, wake up my app when you enter or leave
1:36:28this particular set of radii and points.
1:36:32So you can say, when I leave my house by more than 80 meters,
1:36:38wake up my app.
1:36:39And so it kind of works like a border crossing thing.
1:36:41So sometimes I don't get called.
1:36:43It's a very low power way to monitor for locations.
1:36:47And the phone and the radios are all
1:36:49optimized to make this very, very low power.
1:36:52And I believe it only uses the radios
1:36:53and does not even turn on the GPS chip at all.
1:36:56Yeah, and it's a loose enough fence where I, for example,
1:37:00can't use it to remind me to buy stuff at the supermarket.
1:37:05Because the supermarket is about 2 and 1/2 blocks from our house.
1:37:08Oh, yeah, it's too close.
1:37:09Yeah, it goes off at home.
1:37:11It's two and a half blocks and is way too close.
1:37:15So I can't use it for that.
1:37:16- And critically, if you're using the geofence API,
1:37:19you can only monitor up to 10 locations at once.
1:37:22So you can't just say,
1:37:23notify, wake up my app for me to do whatever I want
1:37:27every time you move 10 feet.
1:37:30That's different.
1:37:31So there is an op,
1:37:32and geofencing doesn't have much of an effect
1:37:34on battery life because it's not really keeping the radios on
1:37:38more than they otherwise would be on
1:37:40you have cell service. So it's really, it's almost free. And if you have geofencing active
1:37:44in an app, you'll see the location services arrow just as an outline in the status bar.
1:37:49It won't be the solid white. It'll be just the outline of white around it to indicate
1:37:53something is using geofencing. But the battery life for that is pretty much free. Because,
1:37:58again, like you aren't, the app isn't waking up that often, and you aren't using any, you
1:38:04aren't using the GPS radio. Like no radios are more active than they otherwise would
1:38:06would have been.
1:38:08But what Google's probably doing with the Google Now app
1:38:11is the significant location change service, which
1:38:15I believe it uses the same radios
1:38:18and the same method of monitoring location
1:38:21as geofencing.
1:38:22So it's not using the GPS chip.
1:38:23So when they say we are not continuously
1:38:25tracking your location, that is technically correct.
1:38:30But if what they're doing with that information
1:38:32is waking up the app every time you move like 100 feet.
1:38:37If the app gets woken up on every single one
1:38:40and they're doing some processing
1:38:41and possibly sending your new approximate location
1:38:44to a server, then that's keeping other parts of the phone
1:38:48way busier than they otherwise would have been.
1:38:50Even if it's not using the GPS chip,
1:38:52it is at least using data radios,
1:38:55it's transmitting things and it's using the CPU.
1:38:58So that is probably the call.
1:38:59If I had to guess, and having not run this app myself,
1:39:02I would guess they're doing that service,
1:39:05which they can say technically is not continuous tracking,
1:39:08by Apple's definition, it's not continuous tracking,
1:39:10it's not using the GPS chip,
1:39:11but if they're waking up the app constantly
1:39:14every time you go anywhere,
1:39:15it's gonna destroy your battery life, no question.
1:39:16- And I wonder too then, if therefore it's also true
1:39:19that it doesn't destroy the battery for everybody,
1:39:22which I think if that were the case,
1:39:23there's no way they would have shipped it.
1:39:25Maybe it's people, it's affecting people who move a bit,
1:39:30know like you said who knows 100 feet 200 feet but like me who wakes up makes
1:39:35a pot of coffee and sits down in a chair for eight hours maybe wouldn't trigger it
1:39:40but somebody like a college student who's going between buildings all day or
1:39:45somebody who works in a hospital work in a big office right big offices can be
1:39:49hundreds of feet long you know it's it's pretty easy to trigger trigger changes
1:39:52with just walking around your own office exactly going to meetings or going you
1:39:56walking to the restroom and going to the wherever you go to eat lunch and etc etc.
1:40:00Exactly. Right. You might be engaging this, you know, once an hour or something
1:40:05like that and driving the phone nuts. And if that is what they're doing, then I
1:40:10think it is a little bit disingenuous to say we aren't tracking a location
1:40:14constantly. Right. Or imagine what would happen in that case on a
1:40:17commute, right, if you have an hour drive to work. Yeah, then it's basically running
1:40:22constantly. And if they are submitting that to a server or saving
1:40:25information in any way every time they get woken up for a "significant location change,"
1:40:31then I would say they are continuously tracking you, just not very precisely. But it's precise
1:40:36enough to know what neighborhood you're in. It'll tell them that. It'll tell them what
1:40:42restaurants and subways you're near. It's precise enough for that kind of use. It's
1:40:48precise enough within a few hundred feet as opposed to whatever GPS is, like three feet.
1:40:53It's very, very precise for advertising purposes.
1:40:57And the bottom line is that as this app has evolved,
1:41:00the Google app-- and Google now is just--
1:41:04with the locations of it is just the latest part of it.
1:41:06The app is-- almost all of the new stuff
1:41:10requires you to be signed into your Google account.
1:41:12Even if you're not-- and you can sign in and be signed in
1:41:16and do the location preference separately.
1:41:22Although in my opinion, they actually,
1:41:24they kind of bury the preference for the location stuff
1:41:28in a sort of Facebook-y sort of way
1:41:31of making it not that obvious where you go to toggle it.
1:41:36And the language surrounding it is slightly obtuse
1:41:39in my opinion, which I don't think is a coincidence.
1:41:42Like it is hard, it is really hard to just look at--
1:41:46- Uncheck this box to disable location-based
1:41:48privacy settings.
1:41:49- Yes or cancel.
1:41:51Yes or okay? I don't know. It's a little like that. But boy, the whole thing, if you're
1:41:59not signed in, the app really doesn't do it as anywhere near as much. Whereas, you know,
1:42:03when the app first came out, it was just like Google.com where being signed in would let
1:42:08them remember stuff, but for the most part, you could do the whole thing without being
1:42:11signed in. Like, they really want to know who you are.
1:42:14Right. And this is why, like, I don't even keep a Google account logged in on my main
1:42:18browser. Like I have, I use Safari as my main browser and then I have Chrome as like my
1:42:23my ghetto and Chrome has Flash and a Google account signed in.
1:42:26Right. And so anything I need that requires those
1:42:29things I can switch over to Chrome for but most of my browsing I'm doing not there. And
1:42:33just because you know, and I know Google knows who I am and they're tracking me anyway through
1:42:37what it means. Exactly.
1:42:38But you know it gives me a little bit of peace of mind because it just seems like over time
1:42:42Google just wants more and more and more from us. And you're right that they're bringing
1:42:47the Google account in a more heavy-handed way into more of their stuff, and they really
1:42:53want you to be signed in so they know exactly who to attribute all this behavioral data
1:42:56to and they don't have to just infer it with less confidence.
1:43:01It just seems like you give them an inch and they take a foot.
1:43:04Every time I sign in, it prompts me to add a phone number.
1:43:07And they say that's for security.
1:43:08That's great.
1:43:09But I don't trust them.
1:43:10They're an advertising company.
1:43:11So what do they do my phone number for?
1:43:13So I don't give it to them.
1:43:14And I'm sure they found it through some other means.
1:43:17I'm sure that something I've done somewhere on the internet
1:43:19has given them my phone number in some other way.
1:43:22But--
1:43:22It's not the same.
1:43:23It's not the same.
1:43:24And so I know-- I try to keep my privacy reasonably mine,
1:43:32reasonably mine if I can with Google.
1:43:35And every time they add a new feature, if I want to use it,
1:43:38usually I've got to give up a little bit more of that.
1:43:42And you can say, oh, well, that's fine.
1:43:44I trust them.
1:43:45Or they're not going to do anything weird with it.
1:43:47But you never know.
1:43:49And people are not skeptical enough, I think,
1:43:52of companies like this.
1:43:53And even if you say, oh, I have nothing to hide,
1:43:55well, that's not really the point, is it?
1:43:58I feel like, are there any people in your life,
1:44:03besides your wife-- and for a lot of people,
1:44:05even that's not the case-- where you would want them to have
1:44:09a record of everywhere you ever go?
1:44:12Like, for them to have that location-- like,
1:44:14Remember when the Apple location database got out
1:44:17that they were accidentally keeping on the phone
1:44:18and you could upload it and see a map of where you went?
1:44:21That was creepy as hell.
1:44:23And is there anyone in your life that you know
1:44:27besides your spouse who you would want
1:44:29to have that information?
1:44:31Like if there's no people who you would trust with that,
1:44:33people who you know who you know with their motivations,
1:44:35you know what they're gonna do with that information,
1:44:37if anything, you wouldn't trust people with that.
1:44:40Why do you give it to Google?
1:44:41- Right.
1:44:43You know, so it just seems like people don't look at this
1:44:46with enough skepticism, and that's why the model works.
1:44:49But, you know, increasingly I find myself
1:44:51more and more alienated by Google,
1:44:55because they keep wanting more from me,
1:44:57and I don't wanna give it to them.
1:44:58And I wanna remain at a safe distance from them,
1:45:02you know, information and privacy-wise.
1:45:05And they're increasingly trying to pull that line in
1:45:07with people and say, no, our minimum distance is now shorter.
1:45:10- Yeah, totally.
1:45:12I noticed one thing that I thought was a little weird just before we sign off and
1:45:18is I do have Google Maps. I do have the app installed on my phone but I'm not
1:45:25signed in because you know although I'm pretty happy with Apple Maps there are
1:45:30times if it doesn't work right then it you know I want Google Maps there to do
1:45:34it for example when I was in actually in Dublin Apple Maps did pretty good but
1:45:39When I was in New Zealand for web stock,
1:45:42Apple search was just not that good.
1:45:43And Google's was great in terms of like finding--
1:45:46everybody says they're going to such and such restaurant.
1:45:50But in Instagram-- and I almost made my famous Instapaper
1:45:54Instagram conflation.
1:45:55Instagram, the other day, I clicked
1:45:57on a map on somebody's photo.
1:45:58I wanted to see where they were.
1:46:00And when I tapped the map in Instagram,
1:46:04it took me to Google Maps, not Apple Maps.
1:46:09the app. And I'm betting that they're doing the thing that you did with, I think, the
1:46:14magazine or was it…
1:46:15Yeah, with Chrome, yeah, which was actually a mistake.
1:46:17Yeah, you – which is not a bad idea, but in practice is not. It was not what people
1:46:22wanted, where you made this decision that if Chrome was installed, assume that they
1:46:28want to use it as their default browser. It was a way to work around the fact that Apple
1:46:32doesn't let you specify a non-Safari default browser. But the downside of it is there's
1:46:38lot of people who do have Chrome installed but don't want it to be their
1:46:41default browser. Yeah. And I kind of think that that's what Instagram is doing with
1:46:46Maps. Yeah, because I mean you would think because that's a Facebook owned
1:46:50property now, you would think they wouldn't want to be overly friendly
1:46:53towards Google. Right. I can't understand why, how else they would do that, but
1:46:58anyway it was weird. Any other thing that's weird, it's a little, I don't know, I
1:47:01guess it's not weird, but it's, it emphasizes it though, is that inside the
1:47:06app they're using the OS mapping service which therefore looks like Apple Maps so
1:47:12you're not looking at a bigger version of the map you saw you're looking at a
1:47:15different map that's weird that I wonder if that's just like something some kind
1:47:20of old part of the code that they forgot about that haven't touched and see yeah I
1:47:24wonder if maybe you should shoot off the URL in a certain way that it does go to
1:47:28Google Maps I don't know maybe maybe that's what it is I don't know it's a
1:47:34weird thing. Anyway, we could probably call it a show. That's a good long show.
1:47:39Yeah, we got a solid almost two hours. Marco, thank you very much for your time.
1:47:43Thanks for the fun. People can find out more at Marco.org and the magazine.
1:47:49What's the URL for the magazine? Oh, it's a terrible domain. It's the-magazine.org.
1:47:55Yeah, well, you just go to the App Store and look at the magazine.
1:47:59And, uh, uh, boy I had stuff I wanted to talk to you about that, but, uh, we ran out of
1:48:04time.
1:48:05I really liked that piece you guys had.
1:48:06I think it's the most recent issue, the one with the doctor on, uh, vaccinations.
1:48:09Yeah, that was my favorite piece of the issue.
1:48:11Yeah, that was great.
1:48:12That was really good.
1:48:13That was the best one.
1:48:14That was the best article I've read.
1:48:15Not just in the magazine, but it was like one of my favorite articles of the week.
1:48:19So anyway, everybody, if you want something good to read, go check out the magazine and
1:48:22look up this article on, uh, these idiots who don't vaccinate their kids.
1:48:27And my thanks to our sponsors again back blaze go to back blaze comm slash daring fireball
1:48:34not the talk show and
1:48:37File transporter or transporter and their URL is file transporter comm slash talk and
1:48:46Save 10% with the discount code talk Thank You Marco. Thanks
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