The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► this week's episode of the talk show is brought to you by back blaze online

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00:00:11 ◼   ► blaze comm slash daring fireball for more information I saw you I saw you're

00:00:19 ◼   ► getting you're digging in deep on the PHP stuff again I am yeah and now you're

00:00:26 ◼   ► going to switch to NGINX? Are you thinking of mine?

00:00:29 ◼   ► It's Enginex.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Enginex. I don't know how to pronounce it.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Why don't give -- nobody name your software something where it's ambiguous how you're

00:00:35 ◼   ► supposed to pronounce it.

00:00:37 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:38 ◼   ► Enginex. Jesus Christ. What a stupid way to spell that.

00:00:43 ◼   ► I'm still like -- I'm one of those people where even if the project owner or the project

00:00:48 ◼   ► maintainer insists that the correct pronunciation is a certain way, if I think that pronunciation

00:00:53 ◼   ► is stupid, I won't use it. So like, like, SQLite is one of those things where I think

00:00:59 ◼   ► the, the, the actual official pronunciation I believe is, is SQLite or something or it's

00:01:07 ◼   ► something weird that, that I thought was dumb so I don't use it. Same thing with like GIF

00:01:12 ◼   ► versus GIF. I say GIF and I don't really care what the correct pronunciation is. It's GIF.

00:01:16 ◼   ► You know?

00:01:17 ◼   ► I was about to ask you how you pronounce GIF. I pronounce it GIF as well and, and it's,

00:01:23 ◼   ► I know that it stands for graphics interchange format, so I feel like there's a reason to

00:01:28 ◼   ► stand on that.

00:01:29 ◼   ► And it ends up, it ends up though that the guy who invented it pronounces it JIF.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And all the JIF people say, well, if he invented it and he calls it JIF, it must be JIF.

00:01:39 ◼   ► And I say, no, it's GIF.

00:01:40 ◼   ► I don't care what the hell.

00:01:41 ◼   ► See, I feel like this is like a George Lucas scenario.

00:01:43 ◼   ► Like at some point, you got to override the creator.

00:01:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:01:48 ◼   ► We're not changing the format.

00:01:49 ◼   ► No.

00:01:50 ◼   ► Right?

00:01:51 ◼   ► redefined what the GIF interchange, you know, graphics format is. I haven't rendered it

00:01:57 ◼   ► technically, you know, and it's some kind of incompatibility. I'm just telling you it

00:02:01 ◼   ► should be pronounced GIF.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Exactly. And at some point, you just have to say, you know what? I respect you for creating

00:02:07 ◼   ► this thing or working at the company that created this thing, but you're just wrong

00:02:12 ◼   ► on this.

00:02:13 ◼   ► Also, GIF already is a thing. It's peanut butter. It's kind of a crappy mass-produced

00:02:17 ◼   ► peanut butter but it is a very popular peanut butter whereas GIF is out there

00:02:22 ◼   ► for the taking there is no GIF right it's unambiguous if you say that this

00:02:26 ◼   ► image format is going to be pronounced GIF then anytime you hear GIF you know

00:02:31 ◼   ► that they're talking about peanut butter and not an image format I'll go even

00:02:35 ◼   ► further and say hey look we've got a whole bunch of words in the English

00:02:38 ◼   ► language that have a G and it's sometimes hard G sometimes a soft G but

00:02:43 ◼   ► if you're gonna make up a new word with a G why not go the unambiguous route and

00:02:47 ◼   ► and use the G in the hard G format,

00:02:50 ◼   ► where there is no other letter that makes that sound.

00:02:53 ◼   ► And if you want the soft G sound, use a J.

00:02:58 ◼   ► - Right, and 'cause then also when you hear GIF,

00:03:00 ◼   ► there's no ambiguity on how it's spelled.

00:03:03 ◼   ► - Exactly, exactly, exactly.

00:03:06 ◼   ► I tell you to get a GIF file,

00:03:07 ◼   ► and you don't even know what it is.

00:03:08 ◼   ► Well, how are you gonna write that down?

00:03:10 ◼   ► Maybe you'll add an extra F, I don't know,

00:03:12 ◼   ► but at least you'll be in the ballpark.

00:03:14 ◼   ► - Or at the worst, you add an extra F.

00:03:16 ◼   ► You read it.

00:03:17 ◼   ► See, and I'm one of those guys who, like, I know people say "ping" for the PNG format,

00:03:23 ◼   ► but I stuck with PNG for a long time. I think I might even still say it. I don't get a chance

00:03:28 ◼   ► to say it very often, so I'm not positive on that, but I still say "png" for the ambiguity

00:03:32 ◼   ► reason.

00:03:33 ◼   ► Hmm. I think I'm not quite sure. Hmm. I think ping evolved so late in the game relative

00:03:43 ◼   ► that I was already sort of working by myself most of the time by the time PNG became widely

00:03:48 ◼   ► used. Whereas GIF and GIF, that was when I was collaborating and working with people.

00:03:57 ◼   ► So I had to say it a lot. I don't remember saying PNG a lot.

00:04:00 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah, now that you work in a hole alone, you

00:04:05 ◼   ► can avoid saying everything out loud except when you podcast or speak somewhere.

00:04:08 ◼   ► In my head though I think of it as a PNG.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Yeah. It just seems right. Ping already means something in computers.

00:04:16 ◼   ► And business people stole it to mean something even worse.

00:04:20 ◼   ► What's that? Oh, you're like, "Hey, I'll

00:04:24 ◼   ► ping you later and we can talk about our action items."

00:04:27 ◼   ► They stole download, they stole so many things.

00:04:31 ◼   ► Terrible. Speaking of business people,

00:04:34 ◼   ► you hear Windows Live,

00:04:37 ◼   ► they're like phasing out that brand and they're totally getting rid of the Hotmail brand.

00:04:42 ◼   ► I saw something on Twitter last night before I went to bed about that.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Aren't there like, there's like a billion people on Hotmail?

00:04:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I'll have to double check. I believe, I know it was the largest webmail service for quite a long time,

00:04:56 ◼   ► even long after Gmail was released. I believe it might still be the largest.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Oh, I thought Yahoo was the biggest.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Gmail's always been third place there,

00:05:05 ◼   ► but especially like worldwide,

00:05:08 ◼   ► if you go past just the US,

00:05:09 ◼   ► I think Gmail's more popular in the US,

00:05:10 ◼   ► and then worldwide it gets worse for Gmail.

00:05:14 ◼   ► But it's crazy, like Hotmail was the first

00:05:18 ◼   ► mass scale webmail, and that name is now

00:05:21 ◼   ► gonna be totally gone.

00:05:23 ◼   ► But Microsoft changes the name of their online

00:05:25 ◼   ► consumer service stuff like every five years.

00:05:28 ◼   ► When did Windows Live start?

00:05:30 ◼   ► Like with Xbox Live after that,

00:05:32 ◼   ► You know who knows what was that seven or eight years ago? They started that that's all gonna be gone

00:05:38 ◼   ► And now they're going to outlook calm and who knows what else?

00:05:40 ◼   ► That's not very interesting they don't think Microsoft often doesn't have their shit together in terms of

00:05:49 ◼   ► Getting acquisitions on brand

00:05:54 ◼   ► Like I you know like the hotmail thing if they were gonna do that why not do it years ago. Why wait ten years?

00:06:00 ◼   ► Well, I'm not really sure Microsoft knows what their branding is, you know

00:06:04 ◼   ► they I think one of the problems is they keep changing their own minds about it and

00:06:07 ◼   ► Like over like about five years ago. They started really maybe even more than that

00:06:12 ◼   ► They started really shoving windows in your face more like they started adding the word windows

00:06:17 ◼   ► To the names of all the programs that they made that ran on Windows

00:06:20 ◼   ► it was like, you know Windows Explorer Windows Internet Explorer and

00:06:24 ◼   ► Windows every and like things that the end and they starting the same thing with office

00:06:29 ◼   ► So now it's like Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, which is just kind of clumsy.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And I don't really know what the goal there was, except like to beat people over the head

00:06:39 ◼   ► with the fact that it's Windows that you're using and Office that this is a part of. But

00:06:42 ◼   ► I think there's better ways to do that, and I think people don't really care. It just

00:06:46 ◼   ► made everything more clumsy.

00:06:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I've always interpreted that from the outside as being Balmer. That Balmer thinks

00:06:51 ◼   ► that Windows is a winner, because Windows makes a lot of money, and Windows is a clear

00:06:57 ◼   ► market winner. And so it just, it's like him insisting that everything is Windows. Whereas

00:07:03 ◼   ► it doesn't even make any sense, you know, like, and I've said this before, like when

00:07:07 ◼   ► with this whole thing where they couldn't figure out what to call Metro after they lost

00:07:10 ◼   ► the name Metro and they still call it, you know, Windows. But it doesn't even, the whole

00:07:14 ◼   ► thing with the new UI is that it doesn't even involve Windows. I mean, literal Windows,

00:07:20 ◼   ► lowercase W Windows. I mean, it was at least, the name Windows at least applied to the software

00:07:27 ◼   ► originally. It was, "Hey, here's the thing you put on your computer and everything runs

00:07:30 ◼   ► in a rectangle that's called a window and you can have lots of them." And everything's

00:07:36 ◼   ► in these overlapping rectangles called windows.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Yeah, but they lost that long ago. I mean, even back with Windows CE and what then became

00:07:46 ◼   ► Pocket PC and then Windows Mobile 2003, they kept changing the name of that too. But even

00:07:53 ◼   ► like it looked like Windows but I think everything was full screen wasn't it?

00:07:57 ◼   ► Yeah I think so I think it was sort of like Windows it looked like the Windows

00:08:02 ◼   ► Chrome but you couldn't couldn't make the Windows over right and they crammed

00:08:05 ◼   ► it that was another example of them overusing the Windows brand and the

00:08:09 ◼   ► Windows theme of Windows everywhere like they they crammed in the start menu and

00:08:13 ◼   ► they crammed in like the little minimize and close buttons and the title bars and

00:08:17 ◼   ► so yeah you're right like it looked like Windows but it didn't really work that

00:08:21 ◼   ► way and it didn't work very well on devices of that size.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Right. And to me it makes even less sense for the online stuff.

00:08:27 ◼   ► Yeah, because what is, I mean, well, I mean, but obviously, you know, they're not thinking

00:08:31 ◼   ► of the word Windows in the lowercase w way anymore.

00:08:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:08:35 ◼   ► And they haven't thought about it that way for a very long time. You know, they own that

00:08:39 ◼   ► word now.

00:08:40 ◼   ► It's like a weird extra superfluous level of hierarchy though, branding-wise, where

00:08:45 ◼   ► why not just emphasize Microsoft, right? There's the thing that you can get that everybody's

00:08:50 ◼   ► he's heard of and it's already familiar and it, you know, it, you know, it's a well-known

00:08:58 ◼   ► popular brand. I mean, I know for years and years, you know, Microsoft was, you know,

00:09:03 ◼   ► in the worldwide brand survey was like top three, I think. Like a head of Apple, a head

00:09:07 ◼   ► of Google, like up there with like Coke and something else.

00:09:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I never understood why they didn't emphasize that more because you're right that, you know,

00:09:16 ◼   ► been driving home the Windows brand for years so hard, but I don't think it really sticks

00:09:21 ◼   ► with people. If you ask people, "Do you have a Windows computer?" I bet more people would

00:09:27 ◼   ► not really know what to say to that than if you asked them if they had a Microsoft computer.

00:09:33 ◼   ► I feel like people don't really care about the Windows brand.

00:09:37 ◼   ► If you want something to parlay your new product, your new initiative, "Here's a new thing we're

00:09:42 ◼   ► doing, we're doing online services, why not just stick with the company instead of, you

00:09:48 ◼   ► know, going two levels deep and having Microsoft Windows live. Now you've got these two levels

00:09:53 ◼   ► of branding hierarchy. Everything's under Windows.

00:09:55 ◼   ► Right. Or Office.

00:09:56 ◼   ► Right. It'd be like if you took your hard drive and put everything in one folder at

00:10:02 ◼   ► the root level.

00:10:03 ◼   ► Called hard drive.

00:10:04 ◼   ► Right. Called hard drive. Or called folders.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:09 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:10 ◼   ► Files.

00:10:11 ◼   ► Why have that one extra level of hierarchy at the top?

00:10:17 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:10:19 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:10:21 ◼   ► They always have this kind of like, you kind of think something's maybe in the water

00:10:25 ◼   ► up there.

00:10:27 ◼   ► It just seems like Microsoft lives in a slightly different reality than the rest of us when

00:10:32 ◼   ► it comes to things like branding and marketing of their stuff.

00:10:36 ◼   ► just seems like you can tell that they, like in their world of Redmond and their various

00:10:43 ◼   ► office campuses and everything, like in their world where all those people live and hang

00:10:47 ◼   ► out and talk to each other, this all makes perfect sense. And then when you get like

00:10:52 ◼   ► some kind of weird new commercial out of there or some kind of weird new product name they

00:10:57 ◼   ► come up with, the rest of the world, you're just kind of like, "Eh." It's a little

00:11:02 ◼   ► bit off. You know, it's like if you ever spend any time in Western Pennsylvania, especially

00:11:08 ◼   ► Northwestern Pennsylvania in the Erie region, almost everything there is just a little bit

00:11:13 ◼   ► off.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I've never been up there. Been to Pittsburgh many times.

00:11:18 ◼   ► Pittsburgh is a pretty nice place. Western Pennsylvania, like Northwestern Pennsylvania,

00:11:21 ◼   ► I went to college there and spent quite a lot of time there. And it's, you know, Microsoft

00:11:26 ◼   ► could be headquartered there. It's very much like the same kind of, just a little bit off.

00:11:31 ◼   ► Pittsburgh's a little off too though. I always joked with Amy that Pittsburgh is a little

00:11:38 ◼   ► bit like the Simpsons Springfield where it's sort of sequestered like half part of-- well,

00:11:47 ◼   ► mostly part of modern North American pop culture but it has its own stuff. And the best example

00:11:53 ◼   ► is the way that Springfield has Duff Beer. They've got the Iron City Beer in Pittsburgh

00:11:59 ◼   ► which you can buy nowhere else. No one else carries Iron City beer. And in Pittsburgh,

00:12:05 ◼   ► it's everywhere. It's like Budweiser and Miller and Coors all rolled into one.

00:12:11 ◼   ► Yeah, Pittsburgh is is I live there for a couple years. I like Pittsburgh a lot. It's

00:12:17 ◼   ► it's a really nice city in a lot of ways. But yeah, there are some things about that

00:12:21 ◼   ► are like that are just kind of bizarre. And but no one there thinks it's bizarre to them.

00:12:26 ◼   ► you know, it's just that's how things are. And I guess it's true of most places, but

00:12:31 ◼   ► I feel like Pittsburgh has more of a quirky personality than most cities do. But that's

00:12:38 ◼   ► true of a lot of things in Pennsylvania in general. I mean, Pennsylvania is just kind

00:12:41 ◼   ► of quirky.

00:12:42 ◼   ► Totally. So tell me something weird about the Erie people or what's going on up there.

00:12:50 ◼   ► Well first of all, I think the whole place is made of cigarettes.

00:12:52 ◼   ► What?

00:12:53 ◼   ► What?

00:12:54 ◼   ► It's just like you can just – if you're driving anywhere within 20 miles of Erie,

00:13:00 ◼   ► you'll smell cigarette smoke the entire – I mean I don't know what – like everyone

00:13:03 ◼   ► there smokes.

00:13:05 ◼   ► And I mean it's kind of a depressing place.

00:13:08 ◼   ► It's – the economy of Erie has been pretty terrible for a pretty long time.

00:13:12 ◼   ► It's one of those post-industrial places that just never really recovered when everything

00:13:15 ◼   ► was outsourced.

00:13:18 ◼   ► The climate is awful.

00:13:21 ◼   ► gets way more snow than you would expect based on its latitude, and it's just really miserable

00:13:27 ◼   ► most of the time. And it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, too. So it has everything

00:13:33 ◼   ► working against it. But people who live in Eerie, people who are from Eerie, and I include

00:13:40 ◼   ► a lot of my family in this, actually, a lot of my family is from Eerie, but people who

00:13:44 ◼   ► live in Erie tend to be perfectly fine with it and not recognize or not care that it's

00:13:51 ◼   ► such a depressing place. And a lot of them have literally never been anywhere else, like

00:13:56 ◼   ► never left the Erie area. And it's just fine, as long as they smoke constantly. I guess

00:14:03 ◼   ► that makes it okay. So, I've never been a cigarette guy, so I don't really know what

00:14:06 ◼   ► it does to you, but that makes it okay to live in Erie. So, hey, you know, whatever

00:14:12 ◼   ► it takes shirts I'm sure they're fine people oh yeah they're very nice I would

00:14:17 ◼   ► be interested in seeing a map that shows like areas where smoking is still

00:14:26 ◼   ► permitted and like restaurants Pennsylvania is the big red dot well you

00:14:33 ◼   ► you've heard of James Carville the form I guess he's on TV now but yeah the

00:14:39 ◼   ► Is that a Clinton guy?

00:14:40 ◼   ► Yeah, a Clinton guy.

00:14:41 ◼   ► But his description of Pennsylvania, I think it applies both politically and culturally.

00:14:47 ◼   ► But he said it's Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the

00:14:51 ◼   ► middle.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:53 ◼   ► That's pretty accurate.

00:14:57 ◼   ► To win the state, you've got to run that way.

00:15:01 ◼   ► You don't just campaign in Pennsylvania.

00:15:03 ◼   ► You campaign very differently on the Pittsburgh and Philly areas than you do in Harrisburg.

00:15:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:09 ◼   ► And New York is very similar too. I mean, everyone thinks of New York who's not from

00:15:12 ◼   ► here, who's from the other side of the country. Everyone thinks of New York as being like

00:15:16 ◼   ► the city. But in fact, it's this extremely diverse state and a very large state with

00:15:23 ◼   ► lots of different political climates, lots of different types of people, and lots of

00:15:26 ◼   ► different types of places. But yeah.

00:15:29 ◼   ► Right. Like the state legislature in New York is nothing like the city politics in New York

00:15:34 ◼   ► City.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and the state can't get anything done because the state is so incredibly diverse

00:15:38 ◼   ► that the state legislature just can't agree on anything.

00:15:42 ◼   ► Yeah. I think it's a little bit. I think Pennsylvania's non-urban areas, though, have more people

00:15:49 ◼   ► than New York's. I could be wrong. Or if I am wrong about it being more split, like I

00:15:57 ◼   ► feel like New York is so big. It's clearly way bigger population-wise than Philly and

00:16:03 ◼   ► Pittsburgh combined. It may not even be that the non-urban areas in Pennsylvania are more

00:16:11 ◼   ► populous. It's just that the urban area isn't as populated enough to compensate the way

00:16:16 ◼   ► that New York City can in New York. But I feel like when we get a Republican governor,

00:16:23 ◼   ► we get much more of a regular Republican governor, just like typical Republican governors throughout

00:16:29 ◼   ► the country as opposed to New York where you get like a Pataki who's you know is

00:16:34 ◼   ► a little bit more moderate same thing with New Jersey with what's his name

00:16:40 ◼   ► over there big guy Christy yeah it's Christy Chris Chris Chris yeah how can

00:16:44 ◼   ► you forget a name like that it sounds like he's a comic book character Chris

00:16:47 ◼   ► Christie he signed a bill that if if you're taking drugs with your pals and

00:16:53 ◼   ► one of them has an overdose and you report it you can't you won't be you

00:16:58 ◼   ► You won't get pro- you know, you're immune from prosecution for having taken the drugs

00:17:03 ◼   ► yourself.

00:17:04 ◼   ► That seems very sensible.

00:17:05 ◼   ► I'm kind of surprised that wasn't already the policy.

00:17:07 ◼   ► Can you- I mean, that's the thing is that can you believe that the conservatives are

00:17:10 ◼   ► giving the guy shit for signing the bill like that?

00:17:13 ◼   ► Yes I can, but-

00:17:15 ◼   ► I love the guy.

00:17:16 ◼   ► His explanation on TV is like, look, I don't want anybody breaking laws.

00:17:19 ◼   ► I don't want anybody taking drugs, but if you think it's more important to prosecute

00:17:24 ◼   ► someone for taking drugs than saving somebody else's life, then, you know, we're going to

00:17:28 ◼   ► a disagreement. Exactly. But anyway we don't get Republicans like that in Pennsylvania.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Anyway enough politics. Now that we've lost all the listeners.

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00:19:35 ◼   ► hard drive restore to a flash drive they they support 11 different languages I'll

00:19:41 ◼   ► bet most listeners of this show speak English but they have a support for a

00:19:45 ◼   ► 11 different languages. Online backup, five bucks a month, unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated.

00:19:52 ◼   ► That's a pretty good line. www.backblaze.com/daringfireball. My thanks to them.

00:20:01 ◼   ► A couple other things that I wanted to add to that also. So first of all, I'm a Backblaze

00:20:04 ◼   ► user. I've been a Backblaze user for a couple of years. I just checked. I currently have

00:20:08 ◼   ► 1.3 terabytes from my computer backed up, and then my wife's computer, I believe, has

00:20:12 ◼   ► about another 1.8 terabytes.

00:20:15 ◼   ► So we're looking at over three terabytes of stuff

00:20:17 ◼   ► we've backed up to them over the last couple of years.

00:20:19 ◼   ► And it's pretty great, especially

00:20:21 ◼   ► if you have big photos and stuff like that, where

00:20:24 ◼   ► other options can be more expensive or unwieldy.

00:20:28 ◼   ► Also, one thing that's really great that I've used before

00:20:31 ◼   ► with their service-- so I have a desktop and a laptop.

00:20:33 ◼   ► And I don't use Dropbox for everything.

00:20:35 ◼   ► I have small documents, a handful

00:20:38 ◼   ► of small documents in Dropbox, but nothing really big

00:20:40 ◼   ► and not all of my stuff.

00:20:42 ◼   ► So what you can do is--

00:20:44 ◼   ► like I was away from home one time,

00:20:46 ◼   ► and I couldn't get back to my computer

00:20:48 ◼   ► because back to my Mac or whatever it's called this year

00:20:51 ◼   ► was not going through the airport extreme properly

00:20:53 ◼   ► or something.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Well, whatever reason, I couldn't access my files

00:20:56 ◼   ► directly.

00:20:57 ◼   ► And I needed a file off my desktop.

00:20:58 ◼   ► So I just went to Backblaze and pulled it off there

00:21:02 ◼   ► onto my laptop from vacation.

00:21:04 ◼   ► And it was fine because it's online backup.

00:21:06 ◼   ► It has all your files.

00:21:07 ◼   ► And so it's kind of like an infinitely sized dropbox

00:21:10 ◼   ► for you.

00:21:11 ◼   ► you know, you can go, if you forgot to bring a file with you on vacation, you can go fetch

00:21:15 ◼   ► it from your Backblaze backup.

00:21:16 ◼   ► >> It's amazing. I actually didn't know that you could do that.

00:21:19 ◼   ► >> Yeah, it's pretty cool. And that's, and I believe that's one of the headlining features

00:21:24 ◼   ► of the iPhone app they just released, is the ability to do that from the iPhone too, which

00:21:28 ◼   ► is pretty nice.

00:21:29 ◼   ► >> Yeah, it is pretty neat. That way you don't have to worry about syncing stuff to your

00:21:31 ◼   ► iPhone. You just sort of pick and choose and access.

00:21:33 ◼   ► >> Exactly.

00:21:34 ◼   ► >> And again, I make a joke about their pun about losing your stuff in a Fireball or a

00:21:40 ◼   ► Blaze or whatever. But the truth is if your only backups are in your house, you are at

00:21:44 ◼   ► risk of what if your house catches on fire? What if you get robbed? If you get robbed

00:21:48 ◼   ► and a burglar comes in your house, they're probably just going to grab anything that

00:21:52 ◼   ► looks computery, including your hard drives and stuff like that.

00:21:55 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. I would say if you have any kind of reasonable upstream, if you're still on

00:22:00 ◼   ► a 128K upstream DSL, then you've got to be careful with what you back up online. But

00:22:05 ◼   ► If you have anything faster than that, if you're on cable or if you're on optical like

00:22:08 ◼   ► Fios, you got to do this.

00:22:13 ◼   ► Online backup is awesome.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I will say that they didn't pay me or you for me to say this, but online backup is ridiculously

00:22:20 ◼   ► awesome and I've tried a few of the options and my favorite by far is Backblaze.

00:22:24 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:22:25 ◼   ► I had no idea that you were a regular Backblaze user.

00:22:28 ◼   ► I did not invite you to be my guest this week because of that.

00:22:31 ◼   ► Honestly, I don't even know.

00:22:32 ◼   ► That would have been a pretty weak reason.

00:22:33 ◼   ► It would have, but it's a happy accident.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But smart sponsors, smart guests, and it's not entirely coincidental that they're already aware of each other.

00:22:45 ◼   ► It was like Molt last week with the Igloo, the internet people. It was exactly what Molt needed in his last job.

00:22:57 ◼   ► What else this week? The big thing I guess, well one of the big things is this all of

00:23:04 ◼   ► a sudden like this week there was like a spate of reports. I think Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac

00:23:14 ◼   ► was first and then John Pachkowski at all things D and Adam Cetoriano at Bloomberg all

00:23:23 ◼   ► sort of reported on iOS 7 being a little bit late behind schedule sort of under

00:23:30 ◼   ► the gun to get it ready to show at WWDC and have it ready to ship presumably you

00:23:37 ◼   ► know September October when a new iPhone and maybe iPads or something like that

00:23:42 ◼   ► are coming out and be that it's one of the reasons it's behind is that they're

00:23:47 ◼   ► they're doing like a top-to-bottom UI overhaul. I presume you've read these stories.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I have, yeah. And I mean, first of all, you know, what is... whenever something is reported

00:23:59 ◼   ► to be behind that's still, you know, six months out, you gotta wonder like what...

00:24:04 ◼   ► what... is it actually running behind schedule or is it just not the schedule

00:24:08 ◼   ► that the reporter assumed or wanted? Yeah, I... well, in this case I... I, you know, and... and all of

00:24:14 ◼   ► them, I think, I don't know about Germin. Germin's story at 9to5Mac was so long and

00:24:18 ◼   ► meandering that I did not finish it. He's a good kid and he's doing really good work,

00:24:22 ◼   ► but boy, that story he had was a lot of words for very little information.

00:24:27 ◼   ► But I will say, and I'm not the type of person who gets hung up on it, but I started rolling

00:24:34 ◼   ► my eyes at all of this because I put all this in a branch discussion like a month ago. They

00:24:41 ◼   ► gave me credit. Both Satoriano and Pachkowski graciously said that it was first reported

00:24:48 ◼   ► at Daring Fireball, but it was like a month ago. So I did hear that, and that was like

00:24:55 ◼   ► a month ago, that iOS 7 is behind not just in terms of speculation, but within Apple

00:25:03 ◼   ► it was behind where they wanted it to be in terms of... And I think that it actually affected

00:25:10 ◼   ► the WWDC announcement date in terms of they were not 100% sure that it would be ready

00:25:17 ◼   ► even to show at WWDC until late in April. I don't think that they really purposefully

00:25:24 ◼   ► like announcing WWDC only five or six weeks before the date. In years past sometimes they've

00:25:32 ◼   ► announced it in March and I think that if everything had gone perfectly according to

00:25:36 ◼   ► schedule I think that they might have announced WWDC a month earlier but that it was a, you

00:25:41 ◼   ► know, are we sure that we're going to have it in shape to show in June?

00:25:45 ◼   ► Right. And then whatever they show in June, you know, it's such a high profile event with

00:25:49 ◼   ► the keynote and they're expected to show iOS 7 and show details about it during the keynote

00:25:54 ◼   ► and then tell all the developers about it for the next few days. So, you know, it pretty

00:25:59 ◼   ► much has to be feature complete and ready to demo what is that six weeks from now five

00:26:06 ◼   ► weeks from now and it's really soon.

00:26:09 ◼   ► And they don't have to give a developer beta but it's it would be weird if they don't because

00:26:14 ◼   ► if they're gonna be telling you about these new things like things that are different

00:26:19 ◼   ► and things that are new and they want you to start working on them it would be I mean

00:26:25 ◼   ► and usually they do usually they have you know a developer beta you know that

00:26:29 ◼   ► you if you're you know after the keynote you can sign into ADC and then there's

00:26:34 ◼   ► you know iOS 7 beta 1 or something like that exactly and and also you know they

00:26:41 ◼   ► they have to have it ready a couple weeks ahead of the presentation so they

00:26:44 ◼   ► can make the presentation and make sure that's gonna be solid right and you know

00:26:47 ◼   ► it's the developer betas of iOS and Mac OS 10 they are betas I mean you know and

00:26:54 ◼   ► it's just the people who, and somebody always does it, because it's new and shiny and they

00:27:01 ◼   ► have to have the newest shiny thing, they go ahead and install it on their regular day-to-day

00:27:05 ◼   ► iPhone an hour after it's available.

00:27:07 ◼   ► You're never going to let me forget that.

00:27:08 ◼   ► You did. I don't mean to, but you're an actual developer though, and you knew what you were

00:27:13 ◼   ► getting into. You did that at WWDC.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I did it for iOS 5. I will never do it again.

00:27:21 ◼   ► I actually remember where I was when I gave you shit about it. We were in the lobby at

00:27:24 ◼   ► at the W. No, we were in a taxi going somewhere. Oh, no. I thought it was. But wasn't it when

00:27:30 ◼   ► we left the W? I remember being in the... I think there were multiple shit-given occasions

00:27:34 ◼   ► there. Yeah, I remember being in the lobby bar at the W Hotel and you were like, "Damn,

00:27:39 ◼   ► this doesn't work." And I'm like, "What did you think?" But that's, you know, even given

00:27:47 ◼   ► the fact that bugginess is excusable and understandable and that's the whole reason that it's a beta

00:27:51 ◼   ► and it's not actually released, it has to be, there's a certain minimal functionality

00:27:55 ◼   ► that has to be there.

00:27:58 ◼   ► Right. And almost all of the headlining features, whatever those are going to be, those have

00:28:05 ◼   ► to be at least working. They don't have to be done, but they have to be demo-able to

00:28:10 ◼   ► some degree. They have to be functional.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:13 ◼   ► And that's going to be tough.

00:28:16 ◼   ► Was Siri functional last year? I think it was, right?

00:28:19 ◼   ► I think so.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:21 ◼   ► Well, no, Ciri didn't come as the WVDC release. Ciri came as, I think, a 4.1 or 5.1 kind of

00:28:30 ◼   ► thing when the 4S actually came out.

00:28:32 ◼   ► Oh, that's right. That's right. That explains why. Yeah, that's right.

00:28:39 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to 7, though. I want to see what they do. We don't really know how

00:28:47 ◼   ► much is going to change since 4Stall's been out, because he hasn't been out for that

00:28:51 ◼   ► long. And so, you know, it's going to be hard to really look at 7 and say, "Wow, this was

00:28:56 ◼   ► all Johnny Ive stuff." Like, certainly, it's going to be a lot of difference, but it hasn't

00:29:02 ◼   ► been long enough for us to see the full effects of what that major change in design leadership

00:29:07 ◼   ► is going to lead to.

00:29:11 ◼   ► And to Patch Kowski and Satoriano's credit, especially Patch Kowski in his report, "At

00:29:15 ◼   ► things deep. Again, I'm not real good with show notes, but I'll put it in the show notes.

00:29:21 ◼   ► But anyway, a lot of this stuff I don't put in show notes because I've linked to it on

00:29:24 ◼   ► Daring Fireball and I just presume that everybody out there who listens to this podcast listens

00:29:29 ◼   ► or reads my site too. But Pat Czkowski had some quotes from sources at Apple, which was

00:29:35 ◼   ► new, like people who are obviously familiar with what they're doing with Iowa 7 talking.

00:29:42 ◼   ► There's no names, but it's still better than the rest of us have.

00:29:47 ◼   ► I've talked to people, but I've not talked to anybody who'll let me quote them.

00:29:51 ◼   ► I've not talked to anybody who's actually told me anything specific about what it actually

00:29:56 ◼   ► looks like.

00:29:57 ◼   ► What did the guy say?

00:30:00 ◼   ► It's a deforestallation.

00:30:01 ◼   ► It's impossible to pronounce a word.

00:30:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:06 ◼   ► It was funny.

00:30:07 ◼   ► Somebody on Twitter—I wish I'd favorited it or something—but somebody on Twitter

00:30:10 ◼   ► last night said, "What's this I hear about iOS 7? A deforestation?" Shame on Apple.

00:30:17 ◼   ► The Wall Street Journal front page scandal ahead tomorrow.

00:30:20 ◼   ► That's awesome.

00:30:21 ◼   ► iOS 7 is going to lead the deforestation.

00:30:24 ◼   ► Maybe the next New York Times Pulitzer?

00:30:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. It's hard. I don't know. Seriously, I'm not being coy. I have

00:30:31 ◼   ► not spoken to anybody who's actually seen iOS 7 and what the direction they're going

00:30:36 ◼   ► and is... I don't know anybody who's actually seen it. What I've heard is people who've

00:30:40 ◼   ► seen people who have seen it and know about those filters that they put over the phones.

00:30:46 ◼   ► Yeah, the security filters. So you have to be looking at it at exactly the right angle

00:30:50 ◼   ► to see it.

00:30:52 ◼   ► And I also know that this is, in fact, the first time that they've done that, like with

00:30:57 ◼   ► iOS 6 and 5 and 4 and 3, that the people who had the permission to carry the builds before

00:31:06 ◼   ► was released on their personal phones outside the campus did not have those filters.

00:31:11 ◼   ► Right. So obviously, that supports what we hear from everyone else, which is basically

00:31:16 ◼   ► that it's a big change. Six didn't look that different. Six had a minor refresh on some

00:31:22 ◼   ► of the gradients and some of the coloring and some of the shading, but it was a pretty

00:31:24 ◼   ► minor overall difference in appearance. And if you were just looking across a bar and

00:31:30 ◼   ► saw someone's phone on, you wouldn't really notice that that was something really different.

00:31:34 ◼   ► But in this case, it sounds like they are prepared for that particular outcome and want

00:31:39 ◼   ► to prevent that.

00:31:40 ◼   ► And, you know, so it's different enough that you would notice.

00:31:43 ◼   ► So one comment I've gotten from a couple people by email and Twitter.

00:31:49 ◼   ► Here's one.

00:31:50 ◼   ► It's a tweet that I noted from a reader named Sven Siewitz.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Siewitz, S-E-W-I-T-Z.

00:31:56 ◼   ► Sven, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right.

00:32:01 ◼   ► He tweeted yesterday to me, "Johnny Ivan software.

00:32:05 ◼   ► I fear he might take the fun out of the OS.

00:32:08 ◼   ► Mac software has always had elements of playfulness."

00:32:12 ◼   ► That's a sentiment that's perfectly expressed that a bunch of people have said, "Hey, this

00:32:18 ◼   ► whole flat thing."

00:32:19 ◼   ► I hate that term, but "This whole flat thing and the anti-skewomorphism, is this all going

00:32:26 ◼   ► to be like no fun?"

00:32:28 ◼   ► I don't think that's something anybody should be worried about.

00:32:33 ◼   ► I think that there's a difference between the sort of exuberance-- I don't know what

00:32:42 ◼   ► you want to call it-- the corniness even of Game Center.

00:32:46 ◼   ► Game Center is one of the ones that they mentioned specifically, that it's not going to look

00:32:49 ◼   ► like a craps table anymore.

00:32:51 ◼   ► Well, in Game Center, I mean, Game Center was always like an extreme example of just

00:32:57 ◼   ► something really, I mean, it was just really inexcusably bad because, you know, that was

00:33:02 ◼   ► back from the, from various oddly into the Steve Jobs era and it was pretty clear throughout

00:33:08 ◼   ► Steve's career that he did not really respect or understand the gaming market at all. And,

00:33:16 ◼   ► And that's like, you know, if this is what they think gaming is, like this felt card

00:33:20 ◼   ► table from a casino, like that's their interpretation of video games.

00:33:26 ◼   ► I mean, it's like, it's so different from the actual world of video games, and it's

00:33:31 ◼   ► so -- it betrays a deep misunderstanding or lack of respect of the gaming market.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:33:38 ◼   ► So that's always been looked at as a very extreme example.

00:33:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:43 ◼   ► And I think that's a good way to put it.

00:33:44 ◼   ► And again, I don't know.

00:33:47 ◼   ► For all I know, it could be that the new look of iOS 7

00:33:51 ◼   ► is completely sterile and no fun and unemotional and robotic.

00:33:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:33:57 ◼   ► But I don't think so.

00:33:59 ◼   ► I'd be very surprised at that.

00:34:00 ◼   ► Because I think the key word to keep in mind is--

00:34:03 ◼   ► or one of them is emotion.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And Apple is always designed for emotion.

00:34:10 ◼   ► That stuff they make makes you feel a certain way.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And I would say look no further than their product marketing,

00:34:15 ◼   ► right?

00:34:16 ◼   ► Their commercials and stuff.

00:34:17 ◼   ► The latest one is the one with the iPhone camera,

00:34:19 ◼   ► which I think is one of the best commercials they've

00:34:22 ◼   ► had in a while.

00:34:24 ◼   ► And there's nothing silly about it,

00:34:29 ◼   ► like in the way that Game Center is silly,

00:34:31 ◼   ► or the leather in the calendar app is silly.

00:34:37 ◼   ► It's not silly, but it's definitely emotional.

00:34:40 ◼   ► And it's definitely-- there's playfulness and fun.

00:34:42 ◼   ► There's kids on skateboards.

00:34:44 ◼   ► You know, there's-- it's not dead serious either, right?

00:34:49 ◼   ► I feel like that's exactly what they'd probably

00:34:53 ◼   ► be going for in a less textured, less fake 3D depth OS

00:35:02 ◼   ► look and feel.

00:35:04 ◼   ► Yeah, and we have to consider, too,

00:35:05 ◼   ► what exactly their styling and where

00:35:08 ◼   ► the fun and playfulness and emotion should come from.

00:35:11 ◼   ► I mean, if they're going to give the default UI kit

00:35:15 ◼   ► widgets new default styles, like they kind of did with iOS 6,

00:35:19 ◼   ► but if they're going to do a more severe version of that,

00:35:22 ◼   ► then what that's going to affect are apps that

00:35:24 ◼   ► use the default UI kit widgets.

00:35:27 ◼   ► And I mean, I think I could argue,

00:35:29 ◼   ► and you would probably argue, that you probably

00:35:32 ◼   ► shouldn't be looking to the default widgets

00:35:34 ◼   ► to provide a whole lot of personality

00:35:35 ◼   ► to your application.

00:35:36 ◼   ► If you're going to want to add that emotion and personality,

00:35:39 ◼   ► Or even if you're going to want an application that everyone says, "Wow, that's a fantastically

00:35:42 ◼   ► designed app," these days you probably should not be using stock appearances of anything.

00:35:48 ◼   ► You should be custom skinning almost everything or custom designing almost everything that

00:35:52 ◼   ► your app uses, or at least tweaking the defaults. And if you look now, apps that use just the

00:35:57 ◼   ► defaults, they don't show any emotion. They don't show much playfulness. Apps that use

00:36:03 ◼   ► defaults today look old and terrible.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's certain... maybe there's some playfulness to it though. Like one thing

00:36:10 ◼   ► is that the default look across iOS has a lot of glossiness, you know, and just starting

00:36:17 ◼   ► even with app icons where if you do nothing, your app automatically gets that fake U-shaped

00:36:24 ◼   ► gloss across the top third. And I know you can suppress that, you know, there's a way

00:36:28 ◼   ► that you, you know, like in your P list file, you can suppress that by specifying something.

00:36:34 ◼   ► But you get that by default. And most-- a lot of icons have that.

00:36:37 ◼   ► And all their--

00:36:38 ◼   ► Apple's icons have that.

00:36:39 ◼   ► They do eat the dog food on that.

00:36:41 ◼   ► If you look at--

00:36:45 ◼   ► I think Safari has it.

00:36:46 ◼   ► If not, they've-- yeah, they have it on Safari.

00:36:48 ◼   ► But messages and phone and stuff like that,

00:36:51 ◼   ► they have this glossicride that's across the top.

00:36:55 ◼   ► You get it in the system standard alert box,

00:36:58 ◼   ► that blue translucent thing that pops up

00:37:01 ◼   ► you need to put your Apple ID password in or when it says, "Hey, you've got airplane

00:37:08 ◼   ► mode on and this thing requires network access. Do you want to go to settings or cancel?"

00:37:14 ◼   ► Everybody has seen that dialog box 10,000 times. It has that fake glossiness to it.

00:37:19 ◼   ► Like that...

00:37:20 ◼   ► A big swoop through the middle.

00:37:21 ◼   ► That, I can guarantee you, that's going away. I don't know if they're going to completely

00:37:25 ◼   ► redesign the look of that dialog, but the glossiness is going away.

00:37:30 ◼   ► What I would love as a developer is for half of what I just said to be wrong.

00:37:36 ◼   ► What I would love would be enough of a refresh of the default components that you can start

00:37:42 ◼   ► using them again.

00:37:44 ◼   ► Right now, if you release an app that uses default components, it will look old, just

00:37:49 ◼   ► because the style is kind of outdated now.

00:37:51 ◼   ► A lot of that still looks like 2007.

00:37:56 ◼   ► And iOS 6 tamed some of it.

00:37:58 ◼   ► They changed some of the gloss to just flat gradient, stuff

00:38:00 ◼   ► like that.

00:38:01 ◼   ► But there's still quite a lot of it there.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And I would love, as a developer,

00:38:06 ◼   ► to have better defaults again, or to make it easier

00:38:10 ◼   ► to customize those defaults.

00:38:12 ◼   ► Right now, if you want to pop up an alert dialog box, like what

00:38:15 ◼   ► you were just talking about, with a custom look on it,

00:38:19 ◼   ► you have to re-implement the entire alert dialog box

00:38:22 ◼   ► yourself.

00:38:23 ◼   ► You have to re-implement all the behavior of it yourself.

00:38:26 ◼   ► And they've been slowly integrating more--

00:38:28 ◼   ► the UI appearance stuff-- slowly integrating more of that

00:38:31 ◼   ► into the OS since iOS 5.

00:38:32 ◼   ► But there's still so many things that

00:38:35 ◼   ► are so fixed in their default style

00:38:38 ◼   ► that the most you can do maybe is tint them or replace

00:38:41 ◼   ► the entire thing manually.

00:38:44 ◼   ► And if the new defaults are kind of less heavy-handed

00:38:50 ◼   ► with their looks, with their default looks,

00:38:53 ◼   ► the default styles, if they're a little bit

00:38:55 ◼   ► lighter and simpler, and if that's what people mean by flat,

00:38:58 ◼   ► you know, if they're a little bit lighter and simpler,

00:39:00 ◼   ► then it'll be better for everybody.

00:39:01 ◼   ► It'll be better for developers,

00:39:03 ◼   ► it'll be, you know, less old looking for users,

00:39:06 ◼   ► and easier for designers to work with.

00:39:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think we've gotten some hints already

00:39:14 ◼   ► about the direction they're going

00:39:16 ◼   ► and maybe the magnitude of it.

00:39:18 ◼   ► So one of them is the podcast app,

00:39:20 ◼   ► the Apple podcast app, I think it's just called Podcasts.

00:39:24 ◼   ► And the new version that came out a couple weeks ago

00:39:28 ◼   ► is not just like a bug fix release

00:39:30 ◼   ► compared to the original version.

00:39:32 ◼   ► They famously got rid of the reel-to-reel tape recorder

00:39:36 ◼   ► interface, which was--

00:39:40 ◼   ► if that doesn't count--

00:39:41 ◼   ► and there's all sorts of arguments

00:39:42 ◼   ► about what counts as quote unquote "skeuomorphic."

00:39:44 ◼   ► But that's as skeuomorphic as anything can get.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I mean, it actually looked like a 3D reel-to-reel tape

00:39:51 ◼   ► recorder.

00:39:51 ◼   ► That's gone.

00:39:52 ◼   ► But there's other things in the change, just aesthetic changes in there that like the buttons

00:39:57 ◼   ► have become a lot less 3D. They don't look as much like physical buttons on a Braun tape

00:40:04 ◼   ► recorder from 1965. They're just, you know, they're just, you know, a triangle for play

00:40:10 ◼   ► and, you know, a thing for fast forward and stuff like that. If you look, if you Google

00:40:14 ◼   ► for like, you know, the changes between the podcast app, it's not radical. It's not like

00:40:19 ◼   ► unfamiliar. It's not like if you were already familiar with the old podcast app that now

00:40:24 ◼   ► you're lost in the new one. It's, you know, just taking out some of the exuberance of

00:40:30 ◼   ► the fake diviseness. I think it's, you know, and I'm not super down on the skeuomorphism,

00:40:39 ◼   ► but I do think, though, that it's taken to the level that it has been in certain of the

00:40:43 ◼   ► apps. It's dishonest. Yeah. And a lot of times it's unnecessarily clunky.

00:40:49 ◼   ► That's, I think, where it gets in the way.

00:40:53 ◼   ► People often cited "Find My Friends" and its crazy leather thing as being the epitome

00:40:58 ◼   ► of bad skeuomorphism.

00:40:59 ◼   ► I don't really think it was that bad.

00:41:00 ◼   ► It was just a skin, and it didn't really interfere with how you use the app.

00:41:04 ◼   ► It was just, that's just how the toolbars look.

00:41:06 ◼   ► But the podcast app, with that giant reel-to-reel thing, that was actually interfering.

00:41:12 ◼   ► It was taking up too much space.

00:41:14 ◼   ► Things like gestures didn't work.

00:41:15 ◼   ► The speed knob thing didn't work the way you'd expect it to, and it was hard to use. That's

00:41:21 ◼   ► when it actually is a problem, when it gets in the way.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Right, and it's dishonest. Here's a perfect reason why I use the word "dishonest," because

00:41:27 ◼   ► if you have a real reel-to-reel tape, or any sort of tape, you have a real limiting factor

00:41:33 ◼   ► in terms of seeking to go ahead. If you have an hour-long podcast, and you know that the

00:41:40 ◼   ► part that you're interested in is 45 minutes in, and you're at the beginning, you've got

00:41:45 ◼   ► to wait and hopefully, you know, and fast forward can only go so fast or else it's going

00:41:50 ◼   ► to shred the tape.

00:41:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And you've got to wait to get there.

00:41:53 ◼   ► Well, there isn't, you know, one of the great advantages of going digital with our video

00:41:57 ◼   ► and audio is we no longer have to do that.

00:42:00 ◼   ► Right?

00:42:01 ◼   ► And so using that as the metaphor, it's a false metaphor because all the limits that

00:42:05 ◼   ► apply to actual, to tape or to a strip of film, you know, if you wanted to do that and

00:42:12 ◼   ► have like, you know, carry that analogy to a video player and have a film projector.

00:42:16 ◼   ► None of those, it doesn't hold up.

00:42:18 ◼   ► Right.

00:42:19 ◼   ► And that's why, that's always been my complaint with calculator apps and why I always prefer

00:42:23 ◼   ► solver instead.

00:42:25 ◼   ► Because like calculator apps, they would just mimic this old type of device, you know, the

00:42:30 ◼   ► old calculators that would have this one line of digits and there'd be like no real backspacing

00:42:36 ◼   ► ability.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Like you can't like hit 100 plus and then go back and edit that number, you know.

00:42:40 ◼   ► And there's all these stupid limitations

00:42:42 ◼   ► of real calculators were carried on exactly directly

00:42:46 ◼   ► to computer calculator apps, to almost all of them.

00:42:50 ◼   ► There are very few that have broken that.

00:42:52 ◼   ► And whereas Solver is rethinking the entire way,

00:42:57 ◼   ► rethinking what a calculator is,

00:42:59 ◼   ► because now it's a computer and you don't have to do

00:43:01 ◼   ► all that old crap that you used to,

00:43:03 ◼   ► and you don't have all those old limitations

00:43:04 ◼   ► that you used to have.

00:43:05 ◼   ► And skew-a-morphism gets in the way

00:43:07 ◼   ► when it starts bringing in those limitations

00:43:10 ◼   ► unnecessarily. Yeah. No, that's a good example. Says the guy who

00:43:14 ◼   ► still loves p calc. But I agree with you. I do agree with you.

00:43:19 ◼   ► But that's for me the reason and the main reason that I agree is

00:43:24 ◼   ► that if I was doing something that would involve more than

00:43:26 ◼   ► just one, you know, a couple of digits in a multiplier or

00:43:32 ◼   ► something like that, I probably would use salt silver instead of

00:43:35 ◼   ► p calc, like for, you know, it's a neat middle ground between

00:43:40 ◼   ► what I might have in the old days gone to a spreadsheet for as opposed to a calculator.

00:43:44 ◼   ► Whereas if I just want to multiply two numbers together, PCAL still works perfectly for me.

00:43:49 ◼   ► There's a new version of PCALC out too.

00:43:52 ◼   ► Every page.

00:43:53 ◼   ► Great app.

00:43:54 ◼   ► Here's a good example too, I think, of where Apple's going and why I don't think people

00:44:00 ◼   ► who are worried about the fun or the playfulness being taken out of the OS, I think it's

00:44:05 ◼   ► needless.

00:44:06 ◼   ► And I think that these have been up for a couple of weeks now.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Obviously, anybody who's listening to this show years from now, you know, you can't do

00:44:14 ◼   ► it.

00:44:15 ◼   ► But if you go and load apple.com now in two different tabs, once to get the iPad Hero

00:44:21 ◼   ► layout, and once to get the iPhone Hero layout, you can see some of the apps, like third-party

00:44:29 ◼   ► apps that Apple is celebrating.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So on the iPad one, they've got two apps.

00:44:34 ◼   ► I'm not sure what the one on the right is.

00:44:36 ◼   ► some kind of photo app, but it's mainly a big photo of a little girl playing in a

00:44:42 ◼   ► tent or in a balloon or something like that. But it's, you know, it's there

00:44:45 ◼   ► because it shows the color and it's a happy kid. But if you look at the...

00:44:49 ◼   ► One of those elementary school gym parachutes. Yeah, something like that. But if you look at

00:44:52 ◼   ► the UI around it, though, there's no 3D depth to it. It looks good, but it's like

00:44:57 ◼   ► just a translucent overlay to put text and thumbnails. Very... It is flat, I mean,

00:45:05 ◼   ► but it's, you know, it's attractive.

00:45:06 ◼   ► And in the other app that they're showing,

00:45:07 ◼   ► they're showing letterpress, which, again,

00:45:11 ◼   ► is not really flat.

00:45:12 ◼   ► It actually does, and you can see it in the screenshot,

00:45:15 ◼   ► it does use depth.

00:45:16 ◼   ► It's when you play a tile, it pops off the screen

00:45:20 ◼   ► three-dimensionally and, you know,

00:45:22 ◼   ► so it's, that's why I say flat's not quite the right word.

00:45:25 ◼   ► But, famously, it's relatively unadorned and minimal.

00:45:29 ◼   ► But I think anybody who's played letterpress

00:45:32 ◼   ► would realize that it's a very playful and fun interface.

00:45:39 ◼   ► It's perfectly appropriate for a game,

00:45:43 ◼   ► but in a way that is not at all like Game Center visually.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Well, Letterpress achieves a lot of that fun and playfulness

00:45:53 ◼   ► with gesture response and animations.

00:45:57 ◼   ► And everything is very tactile.

00:45:59 ◼   ► And it can be tactile without looking like a textured button.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Certainly there are some design challenges there

00:46:08 ◼   ► with usability and getting people

00:46:09 ◼   ► to figure out what's touchable and what's draggable.

00:46:12 ◼   ► But I think letterpress is a great example

00:46:15 ◼   ► to show that it can be done in the flat aesthetic.

00:46:19 ◼   ► It can still be done.

00:46:20 ◼   ► And you don't have to make everything

00:46:23 ◼   ► look like a 3D textured button for people

00:46:25 ◼   ► to know that they can touch it.

00:46:27 ◼   ► And then if you look at the iPhone Hero layout, it's three apps.

00:46:31 ◼   ► They show one built-in photo app.

00:46:34 ◼   ► And again, I think that's just to put a photo up there.

00:46:37 ◼   ► But not a particularly skeuomorphic design.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Then the two third-party apps.

00:46:42 ◼   ► I don't know what the photo one is.

00:46:44 ◼   ► Do you know?

00:46:46 ◼   ► That is the Tumblr app.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Oh, is it?

00:46:49 ◼   ► OK.

00:46:49 ◼   ► Wow.

00:46:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:51 ◼   ► I didn't even know that till just now.

00:46:52 ◼   ► So there you go.

00:46:53 ◼   ► It's the Tumblr app.

00:46:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the Tumblr app.

00:46:54 ◼   ► See, I don't use that.

00:46:55 ◼   ► So I didn't know.

00:46:56 ◼   ► And then there's, it's a notes, note-taking app called Catch

00:47:01 ◼   ► that I actually just checked out last week.

00:47:03 ◼   ► Not entirely flat, you know, it's,

00:47:07 ◼   ► but it is more flat than a lot of apps, you know,

00:47:10 ◼   ► it's flatter.

00:47:11 ◼   ► Maybe that's the better way to describe,

00:47:13 ◼   ► like I think the trend.

00:47:14 ◼   ► It's not flat design.

00:47:16 ◼   ► It's not Windows 8 style, completely flat,

00:47:19 ◼   ► no textures, no gradients.

00:47:20 ◼   ► It's just flatter.

00:47:21 ◼   ► - See, and looking at this shot with,

00:47:24 ◼   ► It shows a full screen photo in the camera roll,

00:47:30 ◼   ► but with the toolbars showing.

00:47:32 ◼   ► And so it has these semi-transparent, kind

00:47:34 ◼   ► of glossy toolbars overlaying this photo.

00:47:37 ◼   ► And to me, that looks old.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Like, I think what we've seen for a while

00:47:42 ◼   ► is that the default UI kit styles are out of style.

00:47:47 ◼   ► And they've been holding on-- iOS 6 did a slight tweak,

00:47:50 ◼   ► but they've been holding onto them still

00:47:52 ◼   ► a little bit too long.

00:47:53 ◼   ► But even if you go back to the iPad hero layout,

00:47:57 ◼   ► I think one of the reasons they didn't put anything there

00:47:59 ◼   ► that uses default widgets is because UIKit on the iPad

00:48:02 ◼   ► has always looked horrible, I think.

00:48:04 ◼   ► I mean, it's always been, you know,

00:48:06 ◼   ► if you use the default UIKit navigation bars on top

00:48:10 ◼   ► or if you use the default alerts,

00:48:12 ◼   ► like it's always looked like a scaled up version

00:48:14 ◼   ► of the iPhone.

00:48:15 ◼   ► It's never really come into its own

00:48:16 ◼   ► if you use the built-in stuff.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And a lot of it just, I think, is ugly.

00:48:21 ◼   ► Like, one of the things I loved most with doing the magazines app was that I finally

00:48:26 ◼   ► could really replace the popover chrome.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Because the default popover chrome, which is a border of a navy blue gradient thing,

00:48:37 ◼   ► framing something with a deep shadow inset in the middle of it, that should always look

00:48:41 ◼   ► like a hack.

00:48:43 ◼   ► And until iOS 6, you could not fully replace it.

00:48:45 ◼   ► iOS 5, you could change the chrome, but you were stuck with that weird inset shadow.

00:48:49 ◼   ► and six, you could finally hide the shadow also.

00:48:52 ◼   ► And so I think the popovers are some of the best looking

00:48:58 ◼   ► interface I've ever done.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Because-- well, I'm taking credit to Louis Mantilla,

00:49:02 ◼   ► who actually drew it.

00:49:03 ◼   ► And you're talking about the ones

00:49:04 ◼   ► you get for the footnotes.

00:49:06 ◼   ► For any popover.

00:49:07 ◼   ► I replaced every popover in the magazines app for iPad.

00:49:10 ◼   ► In fact, my goal with that was to not show any default

00:49:14 ◼   ► Chrome ever.

00:49:15 ◼   ► And the only time I do show default Chrome

00:49:17 ◼   ► is logging into Instapaper, I have some text inputs

00:49:21 ◼   ► and an alert box if you do it wrong.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And then if you subscribe, then I have to show the systems

00:49:27 ◼   ► in-app purchase dialogues, which look completely out of place

00:49:30 ◼   ► in the rest of the app.

00:49:31 ◼   ► But my goal there was to make this look well-designed,

00:49:35 ◼   ► I'm going to have the entire app just be custom-designed.

00:49:38 ◼   ► And that alone looks better than if you just use,

00:49:41 ◼   ► like the default pop-overs I think look horrible.

00:49:43 ◼   ► - I think it's a great design in the abstract.

00:49:46 ◼   ► I love popovers as opposed to, and I think that popovers should be used a lot more in

00:49:53 ◼   ► iPhone apps, not just iPad apps.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Oh yeah, me too.

00:49:57 ◼   ► I wish I could.

00:49:58 ◼   ► There's tons of developers who have made their own popover class for iPhone because Apple's

00:50:03 ◼   ► popover class only works on iPad.

00:50:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:05 ◼   ► I think that the iPhone, maybe just because it's called "phone," I think maybe like back

00:50:13 ◼   ► in 2006 when they were cranking out and iterating on that initial design I think

00:50:20 ◼   ► they got too caught up thinking about it as a phone and in traditional phones

00:50:23 ◼   ► every time you got a new menu it would be a new screen and everything so many

00:50:27 ◼   ► things are an entire screen and you go in and do it like you know just look at

00:50:32 ◼   ► like when you do you when you want to toggle Bluetooth and you go to settings

00:50:37 ◼   ► and you hit Bluetooth and you get an entire new screen just for a checkbox to

00:50:43 ◼   ► toggle Bluetooth. Now, I do think it's important to have that checkbox be a nice, big, fat

00:50:49 ◼   ► target like big 44 pixels in every dimension so that you have a nice, big, fat, thumb-friendly

00:50:55 ◼   ► target. But why not just a popover that comes underneath it when you hit Bluetooth and settings

00:51:01 ◼   ► that would give you the checkbox?

00:51:05 ◼   ► I think this might change in the future as phone screens get bigger. The iPhone 5 already

00:51:11 ◼   ► give us tons more real estate and then we'll see, you know, my prediction is that they're

00:51:14 ◼   ► going to have a bigger screen iPhone fairly soon. You know, we'll see if that actually

00:51:18 ◼   ► happens or not. I think the hint that Cook gave on the earnings call sounds like it might

00:51:24 ◼   ► be happening soon. And, you know, I think as we see, I mean, one of the great values

00:51:30 ◼   ► of bigger screen devices, including the crazy phablets that everybody hates, except for

00:51:35 ◼   ► all the people who keep buying them, which is a lot of them, one of the great things

00:51:39 ◼   ► about them is that you can bring you have more space to bring in some of the

00:51:43 ◼   ► conveniences of tablets and tablet interfaces and you know you aren't

00:51:49 ◼   ► limited to just these very very deep navigation stacks of full-screen things

00:51:53 ◼   ► on a little phone screen yeah but to your point from a minute ago I do think

00:51:57 ◼   ► that the iPad has suffered all three years of its life from having default

00:52:02 ◼   ► default Chrome that really originates with the 2007 iPhone oh yeah and the

00:52:08 ◼   ► scale is all wrong. Like, I can't even look, the screenshots of my first version of Instapaper

00:52:14 ◼   ► for iPad are unbearable for me to see because it was just blowing up the iPhone interface.

00:52:21 ◼   ► It was everything that you would never do today if you were designing a new iPad app.

00:52:27 ◼   ► I did everything wrong in that first version because I didn't have an iPad yet. I designed

00:52:32 ◼   ► it before anyone had iPads so it would be there on day one and as soon as it was out

00:52:36 ◼   ► realized, "Oh man, this is... I got some work to do. This is bad."

00:52:41 ◼   ► I had forgotten that you're the guy who did Instapaper.

00:52:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it's been so long. Yeah, it's been so long. I had totally forgotten

00:52:48 ◼   ► about that. That the other weird thing about the evolution

00:52:54 ◼   ► of iOS over the years, because now, you know, it's been six years, right? This is six years

00:53:00 ◼   ► since we've had the original iPhone, is that if you compare it to Mac OS X, Mac OS

00:53:06 ◼   ► Mac OS X has undergone numerous aesthetic tweaks every, you know, two or three revisions

00:53:13 ◼   ► or so, you know, and it's slowly evolved what the default look and feel of the system is

00:53:19 ◼   ► every couple of years and has never gone this long, not six years, with so many of the elements

00:53:27 ◼   ► looking exactly the same.

00:53:30 ◼   ► But if you look at the way that, like, you know, whenever there has been a visual refresh

00:53:35 ◼   ► in Mac OS X, like the time that they got rid of brushed metal

00:53:39 ◼   ► and just replaced everything with the, you know,

00:53:42 ◼   ► the non-brushed metal windows, the brushed metal windows, all of them, all of a sudden

00:53:46 ◼   ► looked exactly the same.

00:53:49 ◼   ► Which is, you know, in some ways, in terms of like the textures and the actual

00:53:53 ◼   ► pixels you see on screen, that was a pretty major change.

00:53:57 ◼   ► But, nobody who was a Mac user

00:53:59 ◼   ► was lost or confused or,

00:54:02 ◼   ► "Oh my god, where is everything?

00:54:04 ◼   ► I don't know how to use my computer."

00:54:07 ◼   ► Like that's to me is what I think they're going to do

00:54:10 ◼   ► with iOS 7.

00:54:11 ◼   ► Like I don't think,

00:54:12 ◼   ► and that's the other concern I've seen out there,

00:54:14 ◼   ► that, oh my god, if my parents,

00:54:16 ◼   ► I just got my parents an iPhone last year,

00:54:19 ◼   ► and now they're going to what?

00:54:21 ◼   ► To get an automatic upgrade to iOS 7,

00:54:23 ◼   ► and then they're gonna call me

00:54:25 ◼   ► and they can't find anything, right?

00:54:27 ◼   ► I don't think it's gonna be that type of,

00:54:28 ◼   ► I don't think that's what they're working on at all.

00:54:31 ◼   ► I think it's like when they change the way the windows look in Mac OS X.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:54:35 ◼   ► Right?

00:54:36 ◼   ► There's still a red button up in the corner that you use to close the window.

00:54:40 ◼   ► You know, there's still an Apple menu up in the top left corner where you go to get to

00:54:44 ◼   ► system preferences and stuff like that.

00:54:46 ◼   ► I think too, you know, you can look at the trend that they've been doing with OS X design

00:54:51 ◼   ► and with Mac.

00:54:52 ◼   ► Oh, didn't they drop the word Mac?

00:54:54 ◼   ► I don't know what to call it anymore.

00:54:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:56 ◼   ► I still like calling it Mac OS X though.

00:54:58 ◼   ► To me, it immediately emphasizes the word Mac,

00:55:02 ◼   ► whereas otherwise with OS X and iOS, OS is at the middle of it,

00:55:06 ◼   ► and I have to think about which one is which.

00:55:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Anyway, with Mac OS X, Mac in brackets there,

00:55:14 ◼   ► I think the trend has been very clearly towards less

00:55:19 ◼   ► ornamentation for the most part, and making the default Chrome

00:55:23 ◼   ► be less visually noisy, and making it easier

00:55:26 ◼   ► to ignore or forget about.

00:55:29 ◼   ► And iOS started out being the complete opposite of that,

00:55:33 ◼   ► with all this very heavy-handed visual kurama

00:55:35 ◼   ► as all the defaults.

00:55:36 ◼   ► And so, as I said earlier,

00:55:38 ◼   ► if they move towards a more subtle default look,

00:55:43 ◼   ► then people who make custom-designed apps

00:55:47 ◼   ► are still gonna make very high-personality designs.

00:55:50 ◼   ► Now, that's not gonna be a risk,

00:55:52 ◼   ► but it'll just make everything else a little bit less,

00:55:56 ◼   ► I don't know, saccharin.

00:55:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

00:56:01 ◼   ► So yeah, I think we're on the same page

00:56:05 ◼   ► in terms of the scope of the sort of redesign

00:56:07 ◼   ► that we're gonna see.

00:56:09 ◼   ► I don't typically, this is the last point I'll make on this,

00:56:12 ◼   ► is I don't typically do the game

00:56:14 ◼   ► where you read into Apple's invitations,

00:56:17 ◼   ► the design of the invitation,

00:56:20 ◼   ► and try to interpret what it means

00:56:22 ◼   ► about what they're going to announce.

00:56:25 ◼   ► But I know a lot of people have taken this whole flat UI,

00:56:27 ◼   ► you know, that they're going to get rid of this.

00:56:29 ◼   ► And then they look at the WWDC logo.

00:56:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:56:33 ◼   ► And they say, well, that must be the direction they're going.

00:56:36 ◼   ► And maybe there's something to that, you know?

00:56:39 ◼   ► Because the one thing I noticed with that,

00:56:41 ◼   ► it's like a stack of these vibrant primary color, like--

00:56:46 ◼   ► Gels.

00:56:47 ◼   ► Yeah, like app shapes, right, though?

00:56:49 ◼   ► It's the--

00:56:50 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the round rec, the icons.

00:56:51 ◼   ► The round square.

00:56:52 ◼   ► It's like if somebody cut out an icon's shape out of lighting gels and stacked them up.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Right. But they're not, you know, there's no gloss on them. But there is depth, right?

00:57:03 ◼   ► And there is translucency. So, you know, again, I think it's like a don't throw the baby out

00:57:08 ◼   ► with the bathwater. I don't think that, you know, I really, really would be shocked if

00:57:13 ◼   ► they went full on, like, Windows 8, no depth, sharp.

00:57:18 ◼   ► You know, I didn't notice that until now. But now that you mention it, I'm looking at

00:57:21 ◼   ► and on the corners, especially on the left side of the low,

00:57:23 ◼   ► you can see there are shadows between each layer,

00:57:26 ◼   ► so it does show depth,

00:57:27 ◼   ► that this isn't just a pile of lighting gels

00:57:30 ◼   ► that are just flat and have no meaningful depth.

00:57:32 ◼   ► This is a pile of, it's more like letterpress tiles.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Right.

00:57:35 ◼   ► - Because it's a stack of things

00:57:36 ◼   ► that have some depth to them,

00:57:39 ◼   ► but the things themselves are flat.

00:57:41 ◼   ► I don't know, yeah, this could be interesting.

00:57:43 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:57:43 ◼   ► - If this really is an indicator.

00:57:44 ◼   ► - I'm stealing it from our friend Brad Ellis,

00:57:48 ◼   ► great user interface designer now at Pacific Helm.

00:57:53 ◼   ► But the line I've heard from him is,

00:57:56 ◼   ► if you're going to have something stacked visually

00:57:59 ◼   ► on the z-axis in your UI, and it's going to have a shadow,

00:58:03 ◼   ► it doesn't have to be four inches off the surface.

00:58:06 ◼   ► Like, just a little, just a tiny little bit goes a long way.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Whereas I think that that original 2007 iOS design

00:58:15 ◼   ► is everything.

00:58:16 ◼   ► if it has a shadow, it's like four inches of shadow.

00:58:20 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:58:22 ◼   ► And Six actually made that worse.

00:58:23 ◼   ► Six made the shadow depth bigger on some things,

00:58:25 ◼   ► and it even added shadows where there weren't any before,

00:58:28 ◼   ► like under navigation bars and above toolbars.

00:58:31 ◼   ► There's now, by default, there's a shadow there.

00:58:34 ◼   ► And before Six, that wasn't there.

00:58:36 ◼   ► - Let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Our second sponsor is a very interesting company.

00:58:46 ◼   ► It's Transporter.

00:58:48 ◼   ► It's the name of the product, and the company is Connected Data.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And it's a team.

00:58:55 ◼   ► You go to their website and you can check it out.

00:58:56 ◼   ► They tell you this.

00:58:57 ◼   ► This is the team that originally made the Drobo.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And what they've done is the team that made the Drobo has gotten together,

00:59:04 ◼   ► and they've made a thing.

00:59:06 ◼   ► You buy it.

00:59:06 ◼   ► It's called the Transporter.

00:59:08 ◼   ► It's a physical device that you have in your hand.

00:59:12 ◼   ► Put a hard drive in it.

00:59:14 ◼   ► You connect it to the internet and you sign up with Transporter and that drive is accessible

00:59:20 ◼   ► anywhere.

00:59:23 ◼   ► They'll say this too.

00:59:24 ◼   ► It's not like I'm mentioning Dropbox and it's uncouth because it's sort of a competitor.

00:59:30 ◼   ► No, they actually – it's sort of like having your own private Dropbox.

00:59:35 ◼   ► They sent me one to let me try it out.

00:59:40 ◼   ► It works great.

00:59:41 ◼   ► It's very simple to set up.

00:59:43 ◼   ► you buy it, you just plug it in, you install the software on your computer,

00:59:46 ◼   ► and it's like you have your own little private Dropbox. And so instead of it's

00:59:52 ◼   ► cloud access being the access is everywhere and where is your stuff

00:59:57 ◼   ► stored is I don't know it's out there. The where is my stuff stored is right

01:00:03 ◼   ► here and you know where it is and so there's a privacy layer and the cloud

01:00:08 ◼   ► aspect that they've solved is punching a hole through your local network to the

01:00:14 ◼   ► internet at large so that you can access the stuff from anywhere and what you can

01:00:19 ◼   ► also do is if you anybody else like if you sign up for their service you don't

01:00:25 ◼   ► even have to buy the transporter you can just go to their website and sign up for

01:00:29 ◼   ► an account once you're signed up I can share stuff with you from my transporter

01:00:34 ◼   ► and you can access it on a folder by folder basis. So I could just say just

01:00:39 ◼   ► for this folder invite Marco and then you're in and you can you can use it. If

01:00:44 ◼   ► you have a transporter yourself then it'll also mirror it'll sync to your

01:00:52 ◼   ► device the shared folder so that you'll be faster for you to access when you're

01:00:56 ◼   ► at home because it'll be right there on your local network. If you have two of

01:01:01 ◼   ► you can mirror them so that you could say have one at home and one at your

01:01:07 ◼   ► office or one at your parents home or something like that and it'll mirror

01:01:14 ◼   ► both of them and it's you know effectively like backing up the data

01:01:18 ◼   ► that you have on one transporter it'll be exactly the same on the other one

01:01:22 ◼   ► really really simple the big pitch is that it's private because they don't

01:01:28 ◼   ► have access to any of your data. Your data is only stored on your actual transporter devices,

01:01:34 ◼   ► which are completely under your control. So for some people, that might just be personal privacy,

01:01:39 ◼   ► like stuff that you just don't want to put on Dropbox or on some kind of cloud-based service

01:01:44 ◼   ► because you don't trust it or, you know, for whatever reason. For a lot of people, though,

01:01:48 ◼   ► it's actually a legal-type issue, like if it's medical data and stuff like that and you have

01:01:53 ◼   ► have these laws to comply with, where you have to have physical control of where the

01:01:57 ◼   ► stuff is stored.

01:01:58 ◼   ► So you get cloud-style access from anywhere, over the web or on your Mac or Windows through

01:02:04 ◼   ► the transporter software, which puts a folder right in your finder so you can see it all.

01:02:13 ◼   ► But you get the privacy of storing your data on your own hard drive.

01:02:19 ◼   ► So it's really, really interesting.

01:02:22 ◼   ► great. They have apps for the iPad and iPhone, no surprise. You can use it. It's

01:02:30 ◼   ► great for stuff like storing and sharing photos, all sorts of stuff like that. And

01:02:34 ◼   ► you get to put your own hard drive in it so you can have as much data as you want.

01:02:38 ◼   ► As big a hard drive as you can put in it is as much data as as you can store.

01:02:42 ◼   ► That's pretty cool. It's very cool. See, what I like about this is that they

01:02:48 ◼   ► don't need to, like, act in denial that Dropbox exists.

01:02:52 ◼   ► Exactly. That's a great way to put it.

01:02:54 ◼   ► A lot of things are like, you know, you hear about something and you're like, "Well, why

01:02:56 ◼   ► don't I just use X?" You know, and, you know, because X is better or free or whatever. And

01:03:02 ◼   ► in this case, I think this is like, this is some really concrete advantages over Dropbox.

01:03:06 ◼   ► And so they don't have to, like, hope you don't hear about Dropbox.

01:03:09 ◼   ► Exactly. No, that's exactly why I brought it up. Let me tell you what to do to find

01:03:15 ◼   ► out more. Here's the URL. It's file transporter.com slash talk, file

01:03:22 ◼   ► transporter.com slash talk. They have an overview video. It's a good video. It's

01:03:28 ◼   ► very short, but it really, you know, it gives you the gist of what the heck

01:03:32 ◼   ► they're doing, why you would do it very, very succinctly. And they have three

01:03:36 ◼   ► different configs to buy. And the first is when I was sort of going on, which is

01:03:40 ◼   ► the 0 terabyte model you supply any 2.5 inch drive it's 199 bucks but you could

01:03:46 ◼   ► also if you want just save the hassle you can buy a 1 terabyte or 2 terabyte

01:03:52 ◼   ► version that'll just ship with the drive already in it for 299 or 399 respectively

01:04:00 ◼   ► and the most important thing for listeners of this show you can save 10%

01:04:07 ◼   ► by using the discount code TALK. T-A-L-K. All lowercase after you select your model

01:04:15 ◼   ► of transporter that you want to buy. So go there if you're interested you want

01:04:19 ◼   ► to buy one. Put it in your cart then use the discount code TALK and you'll save

01:04:26 ◼   ► 10%. Oh and the other thing I should definitely mention too is it's sort of

01:04:31 ◼   ► an Apple like model where their business model is selling you these transporters

01:04:36 ◼   ► right you buy it you buy the thing for 199 299 399 use the code save 10% talk

01:04:42 ◼   ► but there's no charge for the service you buy the thing and then it just works

01:04:47 ◼   ► and so if you want to share it like if you're sharing with clients or friends

01:04:50 ◼   ► or something like that who don't have a transporter doesn't cost them any money

01:04:53 ◼   ► to sign up for the service so there's no monthly fee you just buy the device and

01:04:59 ◼   ► then you you get to use it my thanks to transporter for sponsoring the show

01:05:04 ◼   ► let's see what else we got Winky you see the Winky app it is as creepy as it

01:05:12 ◼   ► sounds yet it isn't what it sounds like Winky is a is an app somebody's developed

01:05:17 ◼   ► for Google Glass that lets you take photos by winking so you don't have to

01:05:23 ◼   ► say okay glass take a photo you could just wink your eye and it starts snapping

01:05:27 ◼   ► photos?

01:05:28 ◼   ► You know, I think you can… I mean, I think every generation, as we get older, looks at

01:05:37 ◼   ► the newest technology at some point in their lives and says, "I don't understand why

01:05:42 ◼   ► anybody would want that. That's going to be so problematic for our culture." Whatever.

01:05:48 ◼   ► And maybe this is my moment to do that, but I just cannot understand Google Apps. I don't

01:05:54 ◼   ► and why anybody would want to wear that on their face all the time. I don't understand

01:05:59 ◼   ► why any right-thinking person would trust Google with all that extra data on them. And

01:06:04 ◼   ► I don't understand why Google thought it would be a good thing for society if everybody

01:06:08 ◼   ► started wearing these things. I mean, there's so many problems, including the picture-taking

01:06:13 ◼   ► aspect of like, you know, there's a problem enough where you kind of don't know if someone's

01:06:17 ◼   ► paying attention to you, even if they're looking right at you, sort of. And then there's

01:06:21 ◼   ► it was the secondary problem of like, now it's even easier than it was. And we've already

01:06:25 ◼   ► made it pretty easy as a society to take photos and videos covertly with our phones. But now

01:06:32 ◼   ► Google is trying to bring it even more mainstream in a way that is even easier to take photos

01:06:38 ◼   ► or videos of people without their knowledge. And that's, I just think that's kind of creepy

01:06:44 ◼   ► in so many ways. Plus, I mean, you look ridiculous with the thing on. But besides that, I think

01:06:49 ◼   ► it's just it's just kind of socially kind of gross yeah I want to write about

01:06:54 ◼   ► this I have to get it out of my system is sort of a why I'm so down on Google

01:06:59 ◼   ► class and I'm not against heads-up displays in general right and I'm not

01:07:07 ◼   ► denying that there's a bright future in them and that you know that the amazing

01:07:11 ◼   ► stuff is going to happen in the next decade or two along the lines of this

01:07:17 ◼   ► it's this particular product in the current configuration that I just think

01:07:25 ◼   ► is absurd right and it gets back I don't know if you listen the last week's show

01:07:28 ◼   ► but like moltz pointed out a thing I wrote back in 2003 about the quote-unquote

01:07:33 ◼   ► iPhone and that I said that you know it was like a New York Times story that's

01:07:37 ◼   ► that claimed in 2003 that Apple was working on a I thing that they call the

01:07:44 ◼   ► iPhone that ran a stripped-down version of Mac OS X and involved apps like Sherlock and

01:07:49 ◼   ► stuff like that.

01:07:51 ◼   ► And what they said was, you know, the article made it seem as though that it was something

01:07:55 ◼   ► that might come out like next year.

01:07:58 ◼   ► And it wasn't true.

01:07:59 ◼   ► It wasn't -- I wrote, "That's impossible.

01:08:00 ◼   ► There is no technology that would do it."

01:08:02 ◼   ► And I was right.

01:08:03 ◼   ► There was no --

01:08:04 ◼   ► HOFFMAN, Off-screen -- less space than a nomad, lame.

01:08:05 ◼   ► SIMON ROGERS Right.

01:08:06 ◼   ► But it wasn't -- I didn't say that Apple would never be able to make a device that would

01:08:10 ◼   ► would run a stripped-down version of OS X and, you know, like a cell phone or something

01:08:15 ◼   ► like that, and that would have software like that. What I was saying was impossible was

01:08:19 ◼   ► that in 2003, it was impossible, and that they weren't working on anything like that.

01:08:25 ◼   ► And in fact, they weren't, right? It was – they were working on a tablet-type thing. Like,

01:08:28 ◼   ► the thing that eventually became the iPhone was in some level of work, but it was more

01:08:32 ◼   ► like they had the idea that it was like a tablet-type thing.

01:08:35 ◼   ► The story that I said wasn't true in 2003 wasn't true. It does seem funny in hindsight,

01:08:39 ◼   ► though because that is actually what they ended up doing four years later.

01:08:42 ◼   ► It's the same thing with Google Glass where I'm not denying that there won't

01:08:46 ◼   ► be cool and maybe even possibly useful wearable headset type things eventually.

01:08:54 ◼   ► But this one is not. This one is ridiculous. It looks stupid.

01:09:01 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, and yeah, it looks like a medical device.

01:09:04 ◼   ► Right. Doesn't it? It looks like some kind of like enhanced hearing and visual aid.

01:09:09 ◼   ► but not in a tech way, in a medical assistance way.

01:09:13 ◼   ► Right, or something that you might have to wear for certain jobs, you know?

01:09:17 ◼   ► Yeah, if you're like inspecting a plane in the airport, walking around the runway

01:09:23 ◼   ► wearing one of these things with a clipboard in your hand.

01:09:24 ◼   ► Right, and I could even see that there are uses, especially the camera part, that if you,

01:09:32 ◼   ► even if you look stupid, I could see it how it, for certain people, it might be useful to have a

01:09:39 ◼   ► have a stupid looking camera that you wear like this over your eyes so that you can get

01:09:44 ◼   ► a first person perspective while you do something where you want your hands free. Right? Like

01:09:50 ◼   ► so you can make, I don't know, like the one that Google even made. Like if you're going

01:09:54 ◼   ► to take a video while you jump out of an airplane with a parachute, well, I don't know. You

01:09:58 ◼   ► don't want to have a camera in your hands. That's for sure.

01:10:01 ◼   ► Right. I mean, and you can look at aspects of this and you can say, okay, well, the technology

01:10:06 ◼   ► will get better in Area X, so that's not going to be a problem for long. I think you

01:10:11 ◼   ► can look at especially things like size and battery life. You can say, "Okay, well,

01:10:15 ◼   ► those will get better over time." It will get smaller. It will look sleeker. The battery

01:10:20 ◼   ► life will get longer. But I think the social aspects of it are the big, long-term, what-the-fuck

01:10:30 ◼   ► moment.

01:10:31 ◼   ► And, you know, I guess, you know, and again, I'm right there with you, where maybe it's

01:10:36 ◼   ► just that we're too old and we're getting curmudgeonly and we just, you know, stuck

01:10:42 ◼   ► in the mud and we're, you know, already old-fashioned.

01:10:45 ◼   ► Because I could see how if, you know, you went back to the '80s and told somebody about

01:10:50 ◼   ► how all of us have little pocket computers with three, four-inch screens that we check

01:10:57 ◼   ► all the time and if we go out to dinner and you go to the bathroom, I'm going to get my

01:11:02 ◼   ► phone out until you come back.

01:11:05 ◼   ► I could see how someone would say, "Well, that sounds like hell on earth of everybody

01:11:10 ◼   ► always looking at these computer screens."

01:11:14 ◼   ► Whereas I see it as, "My God, it's a relief from boredom."

01:11:17 ◼   ► It's great.

01:11:18 ◼   ► I try never – like if I'm at dinner with people, I try never to be on my phone while

01:11:23 ◼   ► we're at the table together, but if I'm out with one person and that person gets up, I usually take

01:11:29 ◼   ► out my phone. I don't know. I do that and I can see how that's, you know, there's like a slope

01:11:38 ◼   ► along the lines of, well, how far away is that from having your computer always in your field

01:11:44 ◼   ► of visual stream in your glasses? That it's, you know, it's along the same continuum. But to me,

01:11:49 ◼   ► that goes over this border that to me is just ridiculous. Yeah and you know we

01:11:56 ◼   ► don't know how that's going to change over time with with generations and

01:12:01 ◼   ► social stuff. Like I think there was this great video I'm trying I think it might

01:12:05 ◼   ► have been by Dan Savage maybe? I'll have to find it and put it in your

01:12:14 ◼   ► in your non-existent show notes but there was this great video where this

01:12:17 ◼   ► guy was talking about, I think it was back with the governor or senator, Wiener, whatever

01:12:24 ◼   ► that was, when he sent his pictures of his junk to people and then they got out.

01:12:28 ◼   ► He was a congressional representative from New York, New York City.

01:12:33 ◼   ► Right. So there was a big deal about that. And he made this video about it afterwards.

01:12:39 ◼   ► It's on YouTube somewhere. I've got to find it. And I think it's Dan Savage, but I'm not

01:12:42 ◼   ► positive on that. And he basically said, "Yeah, today our politicians are so afraid of pictures

01:12:52 ◼   ► of their junk getting out that if it does happen, then you're like, 'Well, that's pictures

01:12:57 ◼   ► of someone's junk. I don't know.' You try to deny it. And then at some point, the tide

01:13:04 ◼   ► will change socially because everyone's having pictures of their junk all over the place,

01:13:08 ◼   ► especially if you're younger, and sending it all over the place." I'm so glad to acknowledge

01:13:11 ◼   ► like this did not exist when I was younger.

01:13:13 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:13:15 ◼   ► And then eventually, a politician can get up there

01:13:19 ◼   ► and say, "Yeah, that's my junk.

01:13:21 ◼   ► "Of course, who cares?"

01:13:23 ◼   ► Eventually, the times will shift in social tolerance

01:13:27 ◼   ► of certain things that it will just become normal.

01:13:32 ◼   ► And so I think with my concerns with Google Glass

01:13:36 ◼   ► of it kinda sucks when you can't tell

01:13:39 ◼   ► someone's looking at a screen overlaid over your face or looking at you, and it kind of

01:13:44 ◼   ► sucks if everyone can be taking pictures or video all the time and you can't even tell

01:13:48 ◼   ► if they're doing it or not. You know, all those things make me nervous, but having a

01:13:54 ◼   ► cell phone in my pocket that can take a quick picture or video makes other people nervous,

01:13:59 ◼   ► especially older people, in older contexts. You know, it's like everything we're doing

01:14:04 ◼   ► is adding more things that make people uncomfortable

01:14:07 ◼   ► who are older or who are more conservative.

01:14:11 ◼   ► And we keep pushing that boundary back

01:14:13 ◼   ► in all these other ways.

01:14:14 ◼   ► We've been pushing it back for decades.

01:14:17 ◼   ► So maybe this is just the next step of that.

01:14:19 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:14:20 ◼   ► This to me seems like it crosses a line

01:14:23 ◼   ► that shouldn't be crossed.

01:14:26 ◼   ► And I think we'd actually be worse off

01:14:27 ◼   ► if that line was crossed.

01:14:29 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:14:30 ◼   ► People probably say the exact same thing about camera phones.

01:14:34 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

01:14:35 ◼   ► You know, I see my difference with that is, and what's his name?

01:14:39 ◼   ► I don't know how you pronounce his name.

01:14:41 ◼   ► He's the guy who writes the OS news site, Tom Holwerda.

01:14:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:14:46 ◼   ► T-H-O-M.

01:14:47 ◼   ► You know who I'm talking about.

01:14:50 ◼   ► I know the site.

01:14:51 ◼   ► But he, Twitter replied me yesterday after I linked to the Winky app and my only comment

01:15:01 ◼   ► was a fake quote from a hypothetical Glass user saying, "Okay, Glass, let's be creepy."

01:15:10 ◼   ► And his Twitter thing was, "Oh, come on." Because he's a huge Glass enthusiast. He's

01:15:15 ◼   ► super excited about Glass and thinks that I'm being some either like a Pollyanna or

01:15:25 ◼   ► combination of a prude and a if it isn't from Apple it's crap zealot which the

01:15:34 ◼   ► Pollyanna part the the prude part maybe is true that's what we're talking about

01:15:38 ◼   ► the Apple part man I would be so depressed if Apple came out with Google

01:15:42 ◼   ► Glass it's exactly like this I would think I would then then that's I in some

01:15:48 ◼   ► sense it would be great though and I've talked about this before because man I

01:15:51 ◼   ► Nothing would be better for my reputation than for me to have something to really dig

01:15:56 ◼   ► into and just rip Apple apart on.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Like, you know, I don't do it because they haven't released anything that I think is

01:16:03 ◼   ► terrible, you know, but it would be great.

01:16:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:05 ◼   ► I mean, they have, but they've been smaller things.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:07 ◼   ► You know, like the iPod HiFi was a massive flop.

01:16:10 ◼   ► But who cares?

01:16:11 ◼   ► It was a speaker dock.

01:16:12 ◼   ► You know, no one—it wasn't like a big PR problem for them to release a speaker dock

01:16:16 ◼   ► that was actually a pretty decent speaker dock, just too expensive.

01:16:20 ◼   ► But the difference, yeah, and the difference,

01:16:24 ◼   ► his reply to me was, oh come on,

01:16:26 ◼   ► like nobody's taken a surreptitious picture before?

01:16:31 ◼   ► Like it's not happening all the time now?

01:16:32 ◼   ► And that is true, people do sneak photos, you know,

01:16:36 ◼   ► and you can be creepy by taking photos with your phone now.

01:16:40 ◼   ► But there's a physical,

01:16:42 ◼   ► there are physical limitations to it, right?

01:16:44 ◼   ► Like you have to be sly about it.

01:16:48 ◼   ► And so yes, somebody could take a picture of you in someplace

01:16:52 ◼   ► where you don't want to be photographed,

01:16:54 ◼   ► and you don't know it, and you may not notice them doing it.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Presumably, especially if the flash is off on the computer

01:17:02 ◼   ► or on the camera, obviously.

01:17:04 ◼   ► But they have to work at it.

01:17:07 ◼   ► It's not they're strapped to their forehead always,

01:17:11 ◼   ► constantly.

01:17:12 ◼   ► I would find it so uncomfortable if I went out to dinner

01:17:17 ◼   ► and somebody just had their phone up

01:17:19 ◼   ► and in a position that looked like it was filming

01:17:23 ◼   ► a video of the entire meal.

01:17:25 ◼   ► And I don't know if they're--

01:17:26 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:17:26 ◼   ► I don't know if they're doing it or not,

01:17:28 ◼   ► but they're holding it up the entire time.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Well, to me, that's what it would

01:17:31 ◼   ► be like going out to dinner with Scoble with his glasses on.

01:17:36 ◼   ► Glass on, I guess.

01:17:37 ◼   ► You have to--

01:17:38 ◼   ► Who knows how you--

01:17:39 ◼   ► --singularize it.

01:17:40 ◼   ► I think also it's worth considering

01:17:44 ◼   ► If you are a user of Google Glass,

01:17:47 ◼   ► do you want Google getting all that information

01:17:51 ◼   ► from your face all the time?

01:17:53 ◼   ► - Right.

01:17:53 ◼   ► - Do you want Google to know

01:17:55 ◼   ► that you just loosed up the waitress's butt?

01:17:57 ◼   ► And what are they gonna do with that information?

01:18:00 ◼   ► They're an advertising company.

01:18:02 ◼   ► People think Google just does some of this stuff

01:18:04 ◼   ► for the fun of doing it,

01:18:06 ◼   ► and some of their projects do seem like

01:18:07 ◼   ► they're just kind of engineering for fun,

01:18:09 ◼   ► although since Google+ has come out

01:18:11 ◼   ► and the company's focus has been shifted,

01:18:13 ◼   ► you can tell those have been lessened in the company.

01:18:15 ◼   ► But at the end of the day,

01:18:17 ◼   ► they gotta make this a business somehow.

01:18:19 ◼   ► They have to make it work with the rest of their businesses.

01:18:21 ◼   ► And the way they're going to do that, in all likelihood,

01:18:24 ◼   ► is by tying this in extremely deeply

01:18:28 ◼   ► with everything they know about you,

01:18:30 ◼   ► which is their business.

01:18:31 ◼   ► Their business is to know as much as they possibly can

01:18:33 ◼   ► about you so they can charge more for the ads

01:18:36 ◼   ► that get shown to you.

01:18:38 ◼   ► And so when you look at it from that perspective,

01:18:41 ◼   ► it just feels kind of dirty.

01:18:43 ◼   ► Like, wait, do I really want Google

01:18:45 ◼   ► to know every minute of every day of my life what I'm doing?

01:18:50 ◼   ► It's bad enough that I'm carrying a phone in my pocket.

01:18:53 ◼   ► If you have an Android phone, then you

01:18:55 ◼   ► can already do quite a lot of that stuff today.

01:18:58 ◼   ► But it's different when it's your face.

01:19:01 ◼   ► When your phone is this thing that you can kind of put away,

01:19:04 ◼   ► and technology is such that phones can't really

01:19:08 ◼   ► afford the battery problems of keeping GPS on all the time.

01:19:12 ◼   ► So they at least aren't live tracking you precisely yet.

01:19:17 ◼   ► But who knows in the future?

01:19:19 ◼   ► There was that thing this week with the Google Now app

01:19:21 ◼   ► burning battery time on iPhones.

01:19:23 ◼   ► That's exactly what I was going to say.

01:19:25 ◼   ► We're segueing perfectly into the next thing.

01:19:28 ◼   ► Well, and there's a thing--

01:19:31 ◼   ► I'm not even sure I completely understand the why of it

01:19:36 ◼   ► and the way that knowing your location helps Google serve you ads and stuff better.

01:19:43 ◼   ► And part of it, obviously, is not even about advertising or creepiness, and really is.

01:19:47 ◼   ► And this is why I think it is so insidious, because there's obviously usefulness to it,

01:19:54 ◼   ► where in theory, if they know where you are and you say, hey, I'm hungry,

01:20:02 ◼   ► I'm in the mood for pizza but I don't you know this is I'm not familiar with

01:20:06 ◼   ► this neighborhood it's useful if they know where you are and can say you know

01:20:11 ◼   ► there's a well-regarded pizza place two blocks over to the left right and you

01:20:17 ◼   ► know and if they know even more about you and they know and you've you have

01:20:21 ◼   ► you know a Google+ the pizza restaurants that you've been to in the past and

01:20:31 ◼   ► and said, "I like this one and I don't like that one," that they can, if they have millions

01:20:36 ◼   ► of users, that they can correlate all of that and say, "Given the type of pizza that you've

01:20:40 ◼   ► said you've liked before and the ones you've said you don't like, this is almost certainly

01:20:44 ◼   ► a pizza place that you're going to like." And that, if it's accurate and it works, that's

01:20:48 ◼   ► -- that is -- I do understand that is useful, right? That's the whole pro-Google argument.

01:20:53 ◼   ► Right. Well, it's useful sometimes. It's useful when you have purchasing intent. And so if

01:21:01 ◼   ► you think about these examples, and that makes sense. You think about these examples of,

01:21:07 ◼   ► where should I go eat pizza right now? You have purchasing intent. And that's what Google—Seth

01:21:11 ◼   ► Godin did a talk about this a while ago. There's a video of it online somewhere. But that's

01:21:16 ◼   ► what Google and their advertising model excels at. And that's why Facebook's advertising

01:21:20 ◼   ► model sucks.

01:21:21 ◼   ► Google's advertising model excels at that

01:21:23 ◼   ► because it's really easy to sell ads against purchasing intent.

01:21:27 ◼   ► If you're searching for something like,

01:21:28 ◼   ► what kind of coffee maker do I need to get from my office?

01:21:32 ◼   ► Then that's a great place for not only Google

01:21:35 ◼   ► to recommend things to you based on knowledge it has from Yelp

01:21:39 ◼   ► or user reviews or whatever, but they can also then integrate

01:21:42 ◼   ► ads really well into that in a way

01:21:43 ◼   ► that the ads are not trying to distract you.

01:21:46 ◼   ► The ads are actually possibly helpful to you.

01:21:48 ◼   ► And same thing with-- that's why local search matters so much

01:21:52 ◼   ► to them, because it's the same kind of thing, where

01:21:55 ◼   ► if you are looking for a pizza place around you,

01:21:58 ◼   ► that's a great time for Google to not only use all this data

01:22:01 ◼   ► they know about you to give you better recommendations,

01:22:04 ◼   ► but then for them to be able to go and sell that

01:22:07 ◼   ► to the advertisers, for them to go to local advertisers,

01:22:09 ◼   ► for local advertisers to be able to say,

01:22:11 ◼   ► I'll pay you $1.50 to put my ad on top

01:22:13 ◼   ► and put a yellow box around it.

01:22:15 ◼   ► And so in all those contexts, that's great.

01:22:19 ◼   ► It's great for Google, and it actually

01:22:21 ◼   ► is kind of helpful for the user at those times.

01:22:24 ◼   ► The problem is all the other times,

01:22:26 ◼   ► when you don't have that purchasing intent,

01:22:28 ◼   ► or when you're doing something that is not

01:22:30 ◼   ► commercial in nature or that you don't think

01:22:32 ◼   ► of as commercial in nature, and they kind of surprise you

01:22:36 ◼   ► with either an ad that you weren't expecting,

01:22:39 ◼   ► or they surprise you with knowledge

01:22:42 ◼   ► that they have that you didn't think they had about you

01:22:45 ◼   ► or what you did or what you intend and that's when it that's when it gets

01:22:48 ◼   ► creepy yeah and you know and Amy has run into this recently where she's noticed

01:22:54 ◼   ► and she's you know called my attention to it with her computer where like

01:23:00 ◼   ► she'll she'll have searched for and who knows even if it's Google I might you

01:23:05 ◼   ► know I don't even know it might be through some other similar to type

01:23:09 ◼   ► aggregate collection of stuff we're like she searched for product X like four

01:23:15 ◼   ► days ago. And now she's on this other website that isn't even related to that product and

01:23:21 ◼   ► here are ads for exactly what she was searching for four days ago.

01:23:26 ◼   ► Yup.

01:23:27 ◼   ► Right?

01:23:28 ◼   ► And it's not like a general audience thing like that. It was definitely not a coincidence.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Right. And it, the result is not, "Oh yeah, I should buy that." The result is, "I am creeped

01:23:36 ◼   ► out and I'm going to tell my nerd husband and, you know, this is freaking me out." Right?

01:23:44 ◼   ► It is creepy.

01:23:45 ◼   ► And that to me is where I see that Google and I really do think Google has shifted over

01:23:51 ◼   ► the second half of its life.

01:23:53 ◼   ► In the first couple of years of its life, it just seemed amazing and helpful in the

01:23:59 ◼   ► second half of its life.

01:24:01 ◼   ► And especially I think, even though I think Eric Schmidt is a pretty creepy guy, I think

01:24:06 ◼   ► it's really accelerated though since Larry Page took over as CEO.

01:24:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really accelerated since Facebook really. Since Facebook got so big that it

01:24:14 ◼   ► started becoming an obvious threat to many of their core markets.

01:24:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that really is the – I think – and again, correlation is not causation,

01:24:23 ◼   ► but boy, the correlation is very strong that when Facebook got big and when it became clear

01:24:29 ◼   ► that Facebook was not the next MySpace but was going to be a standalone thing and they're

01:24:37 ◼   ► to be acquired there they've reached the critical mass where they were going to IPO which was

01:24:42 ◼   ► far in advance of you know years in advance of when they actually did IPO like it was a long you

01:24:48 ◼   ► know there were a couple of years there where it was clear that Facebook was going to eventually

01:24:52 ◼   ► IPO and no you know Google wasn't going to have a chance to buy Facebook uh that's when it does seem

01:24:58 ◼   ► like that they really had like a freak out and have really gotten creepy about the personal stuff

01:25:05 ◼   ► And any and and so it all goes back to the location

01:25:07 ◼   ► I mean not all but in terms of what we're talking about here is that they really want to know where you are

01:25:14 ◼   ► like all day every day and

01:25:16 ◼   ► I find that in the context of everything else Google is doing very very disturbing and it it

01:25:23 ◼   ► I think it's actually the root. I think you know in terms of their desire to know where you are. I

01:25:31 ◼   ► I think is the entire reason that Apple Maps exists.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:25:37 ◼   ► You know, and I feel like everybody has this wide--

01:25:40 ◼   ► and it's held up as the criticism of Tim Cook as a CEO,

01:25:45 ◼   ► and that Apple--

01:25:46 ◼   ► it's all of these stories, these, hey, Apple's hit a rough patch,

01:25:51 ◼   ► Apple's doing poorly.

01:25:53 ◼   ► Inevitably, they bring up Apple Maps,

01:25:55 ◼   ► and that Apple Maps is a disaster and a shit show,

01:25:57 ◼   ► and it's terrible and inexplicable.

01:26:01 ◼   ► Well, it's not inexplicable.

01:26:02 ◼   ► I think it's that Google--

01:26:04 ◼   ► and some of this I actually know-- is that Google,

01:26:07 ◼   ► to up the offering in terms of getting the vector maps

01:26:13 ◼   ► instead of the bitmap map tiles and turn-by-turn direction

01:26:18 ◼   ► for driving, which was sorely missing from iOS,

01:26:22 ◼   ► that they wanted--

01:26:24 ◼   ► they were-- their deal was that if you want that from us,

01:26:27 ◼   ► you've got to let us let people sign into their Google account

01:26:31 ◼   ► And that would let us track their location

01:26:35 ◼   ► through their iPhone, through the built-in maps

01:26:37 ◼   ► functionality that ties to our maps.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And Apple was not willing to budge on it.

01:26:41 ◼   ► And so they were so unwilling to budge

01:26:43 ◼   ► on that in terms of the privacy implications

01:26:46 ◼   ► that they went ahead and shipped a map service that they--

01:26:51 ◼   ► and I know that--

01:26:52 ◼   ► I think it's probably a little bit worse than they expected

01:26:54 ◼   ► in terms of the reaction.

01:26:56 ◼   ► But I think that they knew that it wasn't going to be--

01:26:59 ◼   ► wasn't going to be as good as Google Maps. And they did it anyway for the privacy reasons.

01:27:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't... For some reason, you know, with Apple it's very, very clear to everyone

01:27:12 ◼   ► where they make their money. So it's... Most people don't ascribe weird motivations to

01:27:17 ◼   ► Apple's business decisions. Usually it's just, "Well, okay, they want to charge more for

01:27:21 ◼   ► that," or, "They want you to buy this thing." But yet, with Google, it seems like most people

01:27:26 ◼   ► just kind of give them a pass, especially nerds, because Google did have a very long

01:27:32 ◼   ► period where they really did things that really appealed to people like us. As you said, the

01:27:38 ◼   ► first half of their life, they really, really appealed to people like us because they were

01:27:42 ◼   ► a nerdy company doing nerdy things and with seemingly little care about making money because

01:27:47 ◼   ► they owned the online ad business pretty early on in their lifetime, especially the search

01:27:52 ◼   ► ad business at least, not display ads for a while, but they owned the search ad business

01:27:57 ◼   ► pretty quickly and they were making tons of money. And so I think it was easy to stay

01:28:03 ◼   ► in that kind of small, geeky, engineering-driven spirit and keep making things that endeared

01:28:08 ◼   ► them to us. But now that spirit's been gone for a couple of years at least. I think it's

01:28:16 ◼   ► probably longer than that. Certainly the spirit is certainly not there at the moment. And

01:28:22 ◼   ► I think you can look at that honestly and say, "Well, okay, they grew up. They had to

01:28:29 ◼   ► make a lot of these moves." But so many people in our circles or so many nerds like us still

01:28:36 ◼   ► kind of give them a pass on their motivations and why they are doing things and where their

01:28:40 ◼   ► money is going to come from. It's not that they look at what Google is doing and say,

01:28:44 ◼   ► I'm okay with that," it's that they don't even think about it in their mind, like,

01:28:48 ◼   ► "Wait, so what's their motivation for doing this? What's in it for them

01:28:51 ◼   ► here? How are they gonna pay for this?" etc. And so Google can be doing some

01:28:58 ◼   ► pretty creepy or questionable things and get relatively little skepticism or

01:29:03 ◼   ► relatively little scrutiny, I should say, from the geek audience. Yeah, in a way

01:29:09 ◼   ► that Facebook doesn't, because Facebook has somehow, like, their initial

01:29:14 ◼   ► first impression of them was that they were going to do these sort of things.

01:29:19 ◼   ► Right. And I think, to be fair, I think Facebook is pretty creepy overall as well.

01:29:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:29:25 ◼   ► And what Facebook had—one of the design challenges Facebook has always had,

01:29:30 ◼   ► and you can see they've failed a few times on this, is that Facebook and Google's the same way.

01:29:36 ◼   ► They both have enough data on you that if you knew what they knew, you'd be creeped out.

01:29:41 ◼   ► creeped out. And so they always have to kind of hide what they know or use restraint in

01:29:46 ◼   ► designing new features or designing the interfaces to things or designing how they reveal what

01:29:50 ◼   ► they know about you to avoid creeping you out with data they already have or inferences

01:29:56 ◼   ► they can already draw about you. And I heard something like Facebook can tell when you're

01:30:02 ◼   ► going to break up with your girlfriend before you can. There's all sorts of things like

01:30:07 ◼   ► like that, like there's, like Facebook knows a lot about you.

01:30:09 ◼   ► But in, you know, the recent history where Google

01:30:13 ◼   ► has been kind of pushing into social so hard,

01:30:16 ◼   ► I think we've seen a pretty clear pattern

01:30:18 ◼   ► that while they both have enough data on you

01:30:20 ◼   ► to appear quite creepy if they do it wrong,

01:30:23 ◼   ► Facebook is generally a little bit better

01:30:25 ◼   ► at avoiding that problem.

01:30:27 ◼   ► Facebook is a little bit better at designing

01:30:29 ◼   ► in such a way that it doesn't feel as creepy

01:30:31 ◼   ► as it really is.

01:30:33 ◼   ► And Google is not quite good at that yet.

01:30:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree.

01:30:37 ◼   ► Boy, they really wanna know where you are.

01:30:41 ◼   ► - They really, I mean that's,

01:30:42 ◼   ► I don't use any of the Google apps.

01:30:43 ◼   ► - Right, the new Google app.

01:30:44 ◼   ► Now, so it's not called, the feature's called Google Now,

01:30:48 ◼   ► but the new feature on iOS is just in the Google app.

01:30:52 ◼   ► It's just in the regular, which originally was just a way

01:30:54 ◼   ► to do Google searches.

01:30:56 ◼   ► But you open it up, and if you're not,

01:30:59 ◼   ► or even if you are signed in,

01:31:01 ◼   ► there's a big button at the bottom

01:31:02 ◼   ► that says location service is off.

01:31:05 ◼   ► Like, and they don't let you use, I think, some of the, a lot of the now features unless

01:31:11 ◼   ► you turn location on.

01:31:14 ◼   ► And I realize, and it seems to me, and some of them obviously require location, but I

01:31:20 ◼   ► think the thing that's weird though is that it, by default, if you turn location on, it's

01:31:24 ◼   ► not just for, and this gets back to your thing about like, what was the Seth Godin thing

01:31:30 ◼   ► about when you're in the mood to buy something?

01:31:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like purchasing intent or I think he calls it permission-based marketing.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:37 ◼   ► It's not just when you're asking for something.

01:31:40 ◼   ► And if I'm asking for pizza now, well, now we need your location to see where you are

01:31:45 ◼   ► and we'll give you the recommendation because that's what you're looking for.

01:31:49 ◼   ► It's that they want to know where you are all throughout the day and where you've been.

01:31:54 ◼   ► And that to me is the difference.

01:31:56 ◼   ► That's like the line that I'm very uncomfortable with.

01:32:00 ◼   ► And so I don't have it, the location, turned on in my Google app.

01:32:04 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:32:05 ◼   ► There's a huge difference between granting them permission for your location right now

01:32:09 ◼   ► when I'm asking where can I get coffee versus granting them permission to track me throughout

01:32:15 ◼   ► the day.

01:32:16 ◼   ► And one thing too that, you know, iOS has always kind of felt like a safe place to experiment

01:32:22 ◼   ► with new apps because apps are so heavily sandboxed and restricted with what they can

01:32:26 ◼   ► do and, you know, when they can run even.

01:32:29 ◼   ► You know, iOS's lack of fully permissioned background modes for apps where you can run

01:32:36 ◼   ► in the background indefinitely doing anything you want.

01:32:39 ◼   ► iOS's lack of that and all the heavy sandboxing makes it okay as a consumer to say, "You

01:32:45 ◼   ► know what?

01:32:46 ◼   ► I can try this Google app, even though I don't really love Google that much or I don't

01:32:49 ◼   ► trust them to know everything about me.

01:32:51 ◼   ► I can launch this app, and when I'm done with it, I can shut it down and that's

01:32:54 ◼   ► it.

01:32:55 ◼   ► I'm good."

01:32:56 ◼   ► you aren't surprised a month later to learn that

01:33:00 ◼   ► it's been running in the background for a month

01:33:02 ◼   ► and it knows everything everywhere you've gone

01:33:03 ◼   ► for the last month.

01:33:04 ◼   ► - Right.

01:33:05 ◼   ► - You know, iOS by design kind of limits that,

01:33:07 ◼   ► but location services are an exception,

01:33:11 ◼   ► and the whole battery thing, do you wanna recap that?

01:33:14 ◼   ► - Well, you can.

01:33:16 ◼   ► - Okay, so basically, app comes out,

01:33:19 ◼   ► everyone's reporting massive drops of battery life

01:33:21 ◼   ► when it's on, and Google issued a statement

01:33:24 ◼   ► basically saying, "We don't constantly monitor

01:33:26 ◼   ► your location, so therefore you're all wrong and the battery's fine, we tested it. But

01:33:29 ◼   ► it seems pretty universal from almost everybody using it that it is indeed doing bad things

01:33:34 ◼   ► with the battery life. And I think it's important for me as a developer to clarify what exactly

01:33:38 ◼   ► they're doing, because when you…

01:33:41 ◼   ► Well, before you do that, I'll just reiterate that I'm always a little suspicious of when

01:33:47 ◼   ► software updates come out and there's vague arguments that, "Hey, the iOS 4.1 point

01:33:53 ◼   ► whatever is killing my battery and it wasn't before and a lot of times when

01:33:58 ◼   ► this happens it just seems like whenever any new software comes out somebody has

01:34:01 ◼   ► something wrong with their battery and they false you know they it's that

01:34:05 ◼   ► correlation causation thing well I just upgraded to this thing so that must be

01:34:08 ◼   ► the reason and it doesn't seem to be a lot of any kind of cause-and-effect

01:34:13 ◼   ► proof whereas with this Google now thing you it's a lot of people telling the

01:34:18 ◼   ► exact same story which is that I upgraded to the new Google app my

01:34:22 ◼   ► battery life went to complete shit. I uninstalled the Google app and my battery life went back

01:34:28 ◼   ► to normal.

01:34:29 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:34:30 ◼   ► And Google, and the weird part is that Google is really adamantly saying, "No, not us."

01:34:35 ◼   ► And I can't help but think that it's effectively a, "Please don't turn off location."

01:34:40 ◼   ► Right. So here's what I'm thinking here. I haven't used the app, so I can't confirm this.

01:34:46 ◼   ► And we don't have a chat room, so they can't confirm it either. And you don't have location

01:34:49 ◼   ► services, so you can't confirm it either. Probably should have done more research on

01:34:52 ◼   ► on this beforehand, but oh well.

01:34:54 ◼   ► There are three different ways you can track location on iOS

01:34:58 ◼   ► with very, very different battery implications.

01:35:01 ◼   ► One of them is full on GPS tracking,

01:35:04 ◼   ► where you're continuously tracking locations.

01:35:06 ◼   ► So you pretty much only need that

01:35:08 ◼   ► if you're doing a turn by turn navigation app or something

01:35:10 ◼   ► like that.

01:35:10 ◼   ► That destroys the battery, because you

01:35:13 ◼   ► have the GPS radio running constantly,

01:35:14 ◼   ► which itself is a huge battery drain.

01:35:17 ◼   ► Plus your app is running constantly.

01:35:19 ◼   ► So any processing you're doing, if the user has something else

01:35:22 ◼   ► in the foreground, you have two apps being fully active.

01:35:26 ◼   ► So that destroys battery life.

01:35:27 ◼   ► As anyone knows, if you've ever done turn by turn,

01:35:29 ◼   ► even with Apple's own stuff, constant GPS fixes

01:35:32 ◼   ► are very, very expensive to battery life.

01:35:35 ◼   ► And Google says they're not doing that.

01:35:38 ◼   ► Great, that's fine.

01:35:39 ◼   ► I believe them.

01:35:39 ◼   ► They don't need to be doing that.

01:35:43 ◼   ► And then on the other end, there's the geofence.

01:35:46 ◼   ► I did it with Instapaper to do the background

01:35:48 ◼   ► update when you cross a certain threshold.

01:35:51 ◼   ► News.me actually invented that.

01:35:53 ◼   ► It's funny, actually, the guy who invented that at News.me

01:35:55 ◼   ► is now working on Instapaper at BetaWorks.

01:35:59 ◼   ► I stole this feature from him, and then now he--

01:36:01 ◼   ► Now it's no longer stolen.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:36:03 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:03 ◼   ► It's like if you steal something from somebody,

01:36:06 ◼   ► and you keep it, and then you get married to that person,

01:36:09 ◼   ► well, now it's no longer stolen.

01:36:10 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:36:11 ◼   ► It's joint property.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:36:13 ◼   ► So anyway, so it's this feature where you can--

01:36:17 ◼   ► And the various reminders apps have this too, including apples.

01:36:20 ◼   ► And almost every to-do list has this kind of thing

01:36:23 ◼   ► where you can say, wake up my app when you enter or leave

01:36:28 ◼   ► this particular set of radii and points.

01:36:32 ◼   ► So you can say, when I leave my house by more than 80 meters,

01:36:38 ◼   ► wake up my app.

01:36:39 ◼   ► And so it kind of works like a border crossing thing.

01:36:41 ◼   ► So sometimes I don't get called.

01:36:43 ◼   ► It's a very low power way to monitor for locations.

01:36:47 ◼   ► And the phone and the radios are all

01:36:49 ◼   ► optimized to make this very, very low power.

01:36:52 ◼   ► And I believe it only uses the radios

01:36:53 ◼   ► and does not even turn on the GPS chip at all.

01:36:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's a loose enough fence where I, for example,

01:37:00 ◼   ► can't use it to remind me to buy stuff at the supermarket.

01:37:05 ◼   ► Because the supermarket is about 2 and 1/2 blocks from our house.

01:37:08 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, it's too close.

01:37:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it goes off at home.

01:37:11 ◼   ► It's two and a half blocks and is way too close.

01:37:15 ◼   ► So I can't use it for that.

01:37:16 ◼   ► - And critically, if you're using the geofence API,

01:37:19 ◼   ► you can only monitor up to 10 locations at once.

01:37:22 ◼   ► So you can't just say,

01:37:23 ◼   ► notify, wake up my app for me to do whatever I want

01:37:27 ◼   ► every time you move 10 feet.

01:37:30 ◼   ► That's different.

01:37:31 ◼   ► So there is an op,

01:37:32 ◼   ► and geofencing doesn't have much of an effect

01:37:34 ◼   ► on battery life because it's not really keeping the radios on

01:37:38 ◼   ► more than they otherwise would be on

01:37:40 ◼   ► you have cell service. So it's really, it's almost free. And if you have geofencing active

01:37:44 ◼   ► in an app, you'll see the location services arrow just as an outline in the status bar.

01:37:49 ◼   ► It won't be the solid white. It'll be just the outline of white around it to indicate

01:37:53 ◼   ► something is using geofencing. But the battery life for that is pretty much free. Because,

01:37:58 ◼   ► again, like you aren't, the app isn't waking up that often, and you aren't using any, you

01:38:04 ◼   ► aren't using the GPS radio. Like no radios are more active than they otherwise would

01:38:06 ◼   ► would have been.

01:38:08 ◼   ► But what Google's probably doing with the Google Now app

01:38:11 ◼   ► is the significant location change service, which

01:38:15 ◼   ► I believe it uses the same radios

01:38:18 ◼   ► and the same method of monitoring location

01:38:21 ◼   ► as geofencing.

01:38:22 ◼   ► So it's not using the GPS chip.

01:38:23 ◼   ► So when they say we are not continuously

01:38:25 ◼   ► tracking your location, that is technically correct.

01:38:30 ◼   ► But if what they're doing with that information

01:38:32 ◼   ► is waking up the app every time you move like 100 feet.

01:38:37 ◼   ► If the app gets woken up on every single one

01:38:40 ◼   ► and they're doing some processing

01:38:41 ◼   ► and possibly sending your new approximate location

01:38:44 ◼   ► to a server, then that's keeping other parts of the phone

01:38:48 ◼   ► way busier than they otherwise would have been.

01:38:50 ◼   ► Even if it's not using the GPS chip,

01:38:52 ◼   ► it is at least using data radios,

01:38:55 ◼   ► it's transmitting things and it's using the CPU.

01:38:58 ◼   ► So that is probably the call.

01:38:59 ◼   ► If I had to guess, and having not run this app myself,

01:39:02 ◼   ► I would guess they're doing that service,

01:39:05 ◼   ► which they can say technically is not continuous tracking,

01:39:08 ◼   ► by Apple's definition, it's not continuous tracking,

01:39:10 ◼   ► it's not using the GPS chip,

01:39:11 ◼   ► but if they're waking up the app constantly

01:39:14 ◼   ► every time you go anywhere,

01:39:15 ◼   ► it's gonna destroy your battery life, no question.

01:39:16 ◼   ► - And I wonder too then, if therefore it's also true

01:39:19 ◼   ► that it doesn't destroy the battery for everybody,

01:39:22 ◼   ► which I think if that were the case,

01:39:23 ◼   ► there's no way they would have shipped it.

01:39:25 ◼   ► Maybe it's people, it's affecting people who move a bit,

01:39:30 ◼   ► know like you said who knows 100 feet 200 feet but like me who wakes up makes

01:39:35 ◼   ► a pot of coffee and sits down in a chair for eight hours maybe wouldn't trigger it

01:39:40 ◼   ► but somebody like a college student who's going between buildings all day or

01:39:45 ◼   ► somebody who works in a hospital work in a big office right big offices can be

01:39:49 ◼   ► hundreds of feet long you know it's it's pretty easy to trigger trigger changes

01:39:52 ◼   ► with just walking around your own office exactly going to meetings or going you

01:39:56 ◼   ► walking to the restroom and going to the wherever you go to eat lunch and etc etc.

01:40:00 ◼   ► Exactly. Right. You might be engaging this, you know, once an hour or something

01:40:05 ◼   ► like that and driving the phone nuts. And if that is what they're doing, then I

01:40:10 ◼   ► think it is a little bit disingenuous to say we aren't tracking a location

01:40:14 ◼   ► constantly. Right. Or imagine what would happen in that case on a

01:40:17 ◼   ► commute, right, if you have an hour drive to work. Yeah, then it's basically running

01:40:22 ◼   ► constantly. And if they are submitting that to a server or saving

01:40:25 ◼   ► information in any way every time they get woken up for a "significant location change,"

01:40:31 ◼   ► then I would say they are continuously tracking you, just not very precisely. But it's precise

01:40:36 ◼   ► enough to know what neighborhood you're in. It'll tell them that. It'll tell them what

01:40:42 ◼   ► restaurants and subways you're near. It's precise enough for that kind of use. It's

01:40:48 ◼   ► precise enough within a few hundred feet as opposed to whatever GPS is, like three feet.

01:40:53 ◼   ► It's very, very precise for advertising purposes.

01:40:57 ◼   ► And the bottom line is that as this app has evolved,

01:41:00 ◼   ► the Google app-- and Google now is just--

01:41:04 ◼   ► with the locations of it is just the latest part of it.

01:41:06 ◼   ► The app is-- almost all of the new stuff

01:41:10 ◼   ► requires you to be signed into your Google account.

01:41:12 ◼   ► Even if you're not-- and you can sign in and be signed in

01:41:16 ◼   ► and do the location preference separately.

01:41:22 ◼   ► Although in my opinion, they actually,

01:41:24 ◼   ► they kind of bury the preference for the location stuff

01:41:28 ◼   ► in a sort of Facebook-y sort of way

01:41:31 ◼   ► of making it not that obvious where you go to toggle it.

01:41:36 ◼   ► And the language surrounding it is slightly obtuse

01:41:39 ◼   ► in my opinion, which I don't think is a coincidence.

01:41:42 ◼   ► Like it is hard, it is really hard to just look at--

01:41:46 ◼   ► - Uncheck this box to disable location-based

01:41:48 ◼   ► privacy settings.

01:41:49 ◼   ► - Yes or cancel.

01:41:51 ◼   ► Yes or okay? I don't know. It's a little like that. But boy, the whole thing, if you're

01:41:59 ◼   ► not signed in, the app really doesn't do it as anywhere near as much. Whereas, you know,

01:42:03 ◼   ► when the app first came out, it was just like Google.com where being signed in would let

01:42:08 ◼   ► them remember stuff, but for the most part, you could do the whole thing without being

01:42:11 ◼   ► signed in. Like, they really want to know who you are.

01:42:14 ◼   ► Right. And this is why, like, I don't even keep a Google account logged in on my main

01:42:18 ◼   ► browser. Like I have, I use Safari as my main browser and then I have Chrome as like my

01:42:23 ◼   ► my ghetto and Chrome has Flash and a Google account signed in.

01:42:26 ◼   ► Right. And so anything I need that requires those

01:42:29 ◼   ► things I can switch over to Chrome for but most of my browsing I'm doing not there. And

01:42:33 ◼   ► just because you know, and I know Google knows who I am and they're tracking me anyway through

01:42:37 ◼   ► what it means. Exactly.

01:42:38 ◼   ► But you know it gives me a little bit of peace of mind because it just seems like over time

01:42:42 ◼   ► Google just wants more and more and more from us. And you're right that they're bringing

01:42:47 ◼   ► the Google account in a more heavy-handed way into more of their stuff, and they really

01:42:53 ◼   ► want you to be signed in so they know exactly who to attribute all this behavioral data

01:42:56 ◼   ► to and they don't have to just infer it with less confidence.

01:43:01 ◼   ► It just seems like you give them an inch and they take a foot.

01:43:04 ◼   ► Every time I sign in, it prompts me to add a phone number.

01:43:07 ◼   ► And they say that's for security.

01:43:08 ◼   ► That's great.

01:43:09 ◼   ► But I don't trust them.

01:43:10 ◼   ► They're an advertising company.

01:43:11 ◼   ► So what do they do my phone number for?

01:43:13 ◼   ► So I don't give it to them.

01:43:14 ◼   ► And I'm sure they found it through some other means.

01:43:17 ◼   ► I'm sure that something I've done somewhere on the internet

01:43:19 ◼   ► has given them my phone number in some other way.

01:43:22 ◼   ► But--

01:43:22 ◼   ► It's not the same.

01:43:23 ◼   ► It's not the same.

01:43:24 ◼   ► And so I know-- I try to keep my privacy reasonably mine,

01:43:32 ◼   ► reasonably mine if I can with Google.

01:43:35 ◼   ► And every time they add a new feature, if I want to use it,

01:43:38 ◼   ► usually I've got to give up a little bit more of that.

01:43:42 ◼   ► And you can say, oh, well, that's fine.

01:43:44 ◼   ► I trust them.

01:43:45 ◼   ► Or they're not going to do anything weird with it.

01:43:47 ◼   ► But you never know.

01:43:49 ◼   ► And people are not skeptical enough, I think,

01:43:52 ◼   ► of companies like this.

01:43:53 ◼   ► And even if you say, oh, I have nothing to hide,

01:43:55 ◼   ► well, that's not really the point, is it?

01:43:58 ◼   ► I feel like, are there any people in your life,

01:44:03 ◼   ► besides your wife-- and for a lot of people,

01:44:05 ◼   ► even that's not the case-- where you would want them to have

01:44:09 ◼   ► a record of everywhere you ever go?

01:44:12 ◼   ► Like, for them to have that location-- like,

01:44:14 ◼   ► Remember when the Apple location database got out

01:44:17 ◼   ► that they were accidentally keeping on the phone

01:44:18 ◼   ► and you could upload it and see a map of where you went?

01:44:21 ◼   ► That was creepy as hell.

01:44:23 ◼   ► And is there anyone in your life that you know

01:44:27 ◼   ► besides your spouse who you would want

01:44:29 ◼   ► to have that information?

01:44:31 ◼   ► Like if there's no people who you would trust with that,

01:44:33 ◼   ► people who you know who you know with their motivations,

01:44:35 ◼   ► you know what they're gonna do with that information,

01:44:37 ◼   ► if anything, you wouldn't trust people with that.

01:44:40 ◼   ► Why do you give it to Google?

01:44:41 ◼   ► - Right.

01:44:43 ◼   ► You know, so it just seems like people don't look at this

01:44:46 ◼   ► with enough skepticism, and that's why the model works.

01:44:49 ◼   ► But, you know, increasingly I find myself

01:44:51 ◼   ► more and more alienated by Google,

01:44:55 ◼   ► because they keep wanting more from me,

01:44:57 ◼   ► and I don't wanna give it to them.

01:44:58 ◼   ► And I wanna remain at a safe distance from them,

01:45:02 ◼   ► you know, information and privacy-wise.

01:45:05 ◼   ► And they're increasingly trying to pull that line in

01:45:07 ◼   ► with people and say, no, our minimum distance is now shorter.

01:45:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally.

01:45:12 ◼   ► I noticed one thing that I thought was a little weird just before we sign off and

01:45:18 ◼   ► is I do have Google Maps. I do have the app installed on my phone but I'm not

01:45:25 ◼   ► signed in because you know although I'm pretty happy with Apple Maps there are

01:45:30 ◼   ► times if it doesn't work right then it you know I want Google Maps there to do

01:45:34 ◼   ► it for example when I was in actually in Dublin Apple Maps did pretty good but

01:45:39 ◼   ► When I was in New Zealand for web stock,

01:45:42 ◼   ► Apple search was just not that good.

01:45:43 ◼   ► And Google's was great in terms of like finding--

01:45:46 ◼   ► everybody says they're going to such and such restaurant.

01:45:50 ◼   ► But in Instagram-- and I almost made my famous Instapaper

01:45:54 ◼   ► Instagram conflation.

01:45:55 ◼   ► Instagram, the other day, I clicked

01:45:57 ◼   ► on a map on somebody's photo.

01:45:58 ◼   ► I wanted to see where they were.

01:46:00 ◼   ► And when I tapped the map in Instagram,

01:46:04 ◼   ► it took me to Google Maps, not Apple Maps.

01:46:09 ◼   ► the app. And I'm betting that they're doing the thing that you did with, I think, the

01:46:14 ◼   ► magazine or was it…

01:46:15 ◼   ► Yeah, with Chrome, yeah, which was actually a mistake.

01:46:17 ◼   ► Yeah, you – which is not a bad idea, but in practice is not. It was not what people

01:46:22 ◼   ► wanted, where you made this decision that if Chrome was installed, assume that they

01:46:28 ◼   ► want to use it as their default browser. It was a way to work around the fact that Apple

01:46:32 ◼   ► doesn't let you specify a non-Safari default browser. But the downside of it is there's

01:46:38 ◼   ► lot of people who do have Chrome installed but don't want it to be their

01:46:41 ◼   ► default browser. Yeah. And I kind of think that that's what Instagram is doing with

01:46:46 ◼   ► Maps. Yeah, because I mean you would think because that's a Facebook owned

01:46:50 ◼   ► property now, you would think they wouldn't want to be overly friendly

01:46:53 ◼   ► towards Google. Right. I can't understand why, how else they would do that, but

01:46:58 ◼   ► anyway it was weird. Any other thing that's weird, it's a little, I don't know, I

01:47:01 ◼   ► guess it's not weird, but it's, it emphasizes it though, is that inside the

01:47:06 ◼   ► app they're using the OS mapping service which therefore looks like Apple Maps so

01:47:12 ◼   ► you're not looking at a bigger version of the map you saw you're looking at a

01:47:15 ◼   ► different map that's weird that I wonder if that's just like something some kind

01:47:20 ◼   ► of old part of the code that they forgot about that haven't touched and see yeah I

01:47:24 ◼   ► wonder if maybe you should shoot off the URL in a certain way that it does go to

01:47:28 ◼   ► Google Maps I don't know maybe maybe that's what it is I don't know it's a

01:47:34 ◼   ► weird thing. Anyway, we could probably call it a show. That's a good long show.

01:47:39 ◼   ► Yeah, we got a solid almost two hours. Marco, thank you very much for your time.

01:47:43 ◼   ► Thanks for the fun. People can find out more at Marco.org and the magazine.

01:47:49 ◼   ► What's the URL for the magazine? Oh, it's a terrible domain. It's the-magazine.org.

01:47:55 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you just go to the App Store and look at the magazine.

01:47:59 ◼   ► And, uh, uh, boy I had stuff I wanted to talk to you about that, but, uh, we ran out of

01:48:04 ◼   ► time.

01:48:05 ◼   ► I really liked that piece you guys had.

01:48:06 ◼   ► I think it's the most recent issue, the one with the doctor on, uh, vaccinations.

01:48:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that was my favorite piece of the issue.

01:48:11 ◼   ► Yeah, that was great.

01:48:12 ◼   ► That was really good.

01:48:13 ◼   ► That was the best one.

01:48:14 ◼   ► That was the best article I've read.

01:48:15 ◼   ► Not just in the magazine, but it was like one of my favorite articles of the week.

01:48:19 ◼   ► So anyway, everybody, if you want something good to read, go check out the magazine and

01:48:22 ◼   ► look up this article on, uh, these idiots who don't vaccinate their kids.

01:48:27 ◼   ► And my thanks to our sponsors again back blaze go to back blaze comm slash daring fireball

01:48:34 ◼   ► not the talk show and

01:48:37 ◼   ► File transporter or transporter and their URL is file transporter comm slash talk and

01:48:46 ◼   ► Save 10% with the discount code talk Thank You Marco. Thanks

01:48:52 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]