0:00:00So screw the space guy, we'll start the talk show.
0:00:07Since we're in Montreal, I thought, and Brent, I'm here with Brent Simmons, who wanted me to introduce him.
0:00:13I wanted to be Cable Sasser.
0:00:14I wanted to be Cable Sasser.
0:00:15Cable is so much funnier than I am.
0:00:17Right, and every single live thing I've ever done with an interview thing has always been with Cable Sasser.
0:00:22Because he's brilliant.
0:00:23Right, it's like a cheaty move.
0:00:25Yeah.
0:00:26because then me who's like sort of miserable and not really that good in person, the effusiveness
0:00:30of cable sass just rubs off and anybody would look friendly and professional on stage. So
0:00:38there's a lot of pressure on you Brent.
0:00:40Brent: Yeah, okay. Well, I'll do what I can. The truth is I was up a bit late last night,
0:00:45entirely the fault of John's wife who wouldn't let me sleep. Anyway. Got anything with that?
0:01:01You've already gone such a different direction than cable goes. I know. I thought, here's
0:01:07the thing, one thing maybe people don't know, you spent a year, two years living in France?
0:01:12Yeah, yeah, many years ago.
0:01:14But I thought since we're here, we're here today as we record, it is Sunday, October 14th, we're in Montreal, Quebec,
0:01:23at the tail end or after, like the after party of the Singleton, the second Singleton symposium.
0:01:29I thought it would be nice if we did the whole show, conducted the whole show in French.
0:01:33D'accord.
0:01:35So, how do you say welcome?
0:01:37Bienvenue.
0:01:38Bienvenue le talk show.
0:01:41I think it's Le Chote de Toc. Je m'appelle Jean Grubert. Je m'appelle Kébo Sasser. Merde.
0:01:57No, fuck you. I'm out of French. That's all I got. Alright, so before I have a couple
0:02:08I want to talk about and and
0:02:10We're here. There's I don't know 100 people here 100. It seems like everybody stayed which is great. Thank you for staying
0:02:15Obviously we can't just recap the whole conference. You really had to be here
0:02:21You should have been here shame on everybody who wasn't here. You're looking right at me
0:02:24You know, but it was really really good
0:02:28But I do think there are a couple of things that I picked up from the talks over the weekend
0:02:33That you didn't have to be here and we can we can use them to start the show from
0:02:37So, the official theme of the conference was "scale." And, you know, I think it kind of
0:02:44fit, but I think what I saw from seeing all of the things, to me, it was more about change.
0:02:48Yeah. Starting with Jason Snell's keynote, the opening night, which really talked about
0:02:53change in the technology industry, change in the publishing industry, and how, in his
0:02:58role at Macworld and at IGG, it's sort of like the nexus of both. It's all about the
0:03:04change in technology over the last 15 years and the change in the publishing industry
0:03:07and I think it carried on from there. I think Mike Jurich's talk the next morning was really
0:03:16about change in being an Apple developer, which is, you know, I mean everybody here
0:03:21knows, I mean it's, you don't have to list all the ways that life has changed for iOS
0:03:25developers.
0:03:26>> Well, there was no such thing as iOS developers.
0:03:28>> Right, well I should say Objective-C developers, Apple developers, you know.
0:03:32Yeah, life has changed.
0:03:33You know, my career started in, my professional software career started around '95, '96,
0:03:39and I wanted to be a Mac developer at the very worst possible time to be a Mac developer.
0:03:46Things have certainly changed for the better since then.
0:03:48Well, and I think you're a good example, too, of somebody who sort of followed the advice.
0:03:53And Marco's thing about your career and Rand's thing, Michael Lop's thing was everybody here
0:04:00should be thinking that they're going to do something different in three years. Every
0:04:03three years ago you tend to be doing something different.
0:04:06Yeah, with the exception of working for nine years on NetNewswire. But there were three
0:04:11different versions maybe.
0:04:14But it did, it changed a lot over those years. I mean you never, it became a big hit and
0:04:20it was really all on your Mac and then there was a huge change where it went to syncing
0:04:25somehow.
0:04:26Right. I spent a lot of time working on syncing. Before there was really any good syncing solutions
0:04:32out there. Of course, now we have iCloud, which is perfect.
0:04:38Problem solved.
0:04:39Yeah, no doubt. Syncing remains just one of the most difficult and ball-busting things
0:04:44to work on. I hate it with a passion. And I don't do it anymore.
0:04:52thing I thought was, and Marco called his talk scaling your career, but I really thought
0:04:58it would have fit better if titled changing your career, adapting your career, right?
0:05:03And the other underlying message I thought in session after session all weekend long
0:05:08is that a lot of this change is not really your choice. It's not you making, you do often
0:05:15have a lot of choices in life, but a lot of it is you've got to get with the program because
0:05:20the train is leaving the station and if you're not on it you're gonna get left behind.
0:05:24Well it's um, it makes me think of swimming in the ocean. So much different than swimming
0:05:30in a pool right? In a pool you can do what you want, do laps, whatever. In the ocean
0:05:34you have to, you've got waves to deal with and they're gonna come whether you're looking
0:05:38or not and whether you're ready or not. Yeah that makes me think that as soon as you said
0:05:43that I thought you were gonna go in different. I was gonna say there's that phrase rising
0:05:45tide lifts all boats, right?
0:05:47Oh yeah, that's totally not true.
0:05:48And so that's good.
0:05:49And that's half the people.
0:05:50Right, and also a rising tide often like washes you out in the undertow and you drown.
0:05:54Yeah, indeed.
0:05:55Like you've got to be careful.
0:05:56Beware the undertowards.
0:06:01So you've switched and now your thing right now, your big thing you're working on is Glassboard.
0:06:08Right, yeah.
0:06:09So how many people here have been using Glassboard this weekend?
0:06:11Awesome.
0:06:12Thanks guys.
0:06:13That's really, really awesome.
0:06:14was for those of you listening at home I would say that was everybody's hand and there's
0:06:19still one guy with his hand up. He really likes Glassboard. In a sense, like honestly,
0:06:26I mean this in a sincere way, like I know there's the, you can't get up here and talk
0:06:30without mentioning Steve Jobs at least once, but like and he had that phrase, he wanted
0:06:35to make a dent in the universe. Right? So Glassboard has made at least to some extent
0:06:40a little dent in the conference going experience for everybody, like at least in the tech circle.
0:06:45Well, sure, it keeps your Twitter feeds or ADN feeds a bit more clear since we can move
0:06:53all this stuff to Glassboard.
0:06:57But the most rewarding thing to me is seeing my peers and friends use my software.
0:07:00I've had that experience before with NetNewswire and Mars Edit and having it again with Glassboard,
0:07:06just seeing it on people's phones is just fucking awesome.
0:07:09I totally love it.
0:07:11I don't even care about money at this point.
0:07:14If my friends are using my stuff, I feel good.
0:07:16- But you still need to pay the bills.
0:07:19So you've got the thing--
0:07:20- I don't need to pay, someone else has to pay the bills.
0:07:22- So Glassboard started as totally free
0:07:26and including the backend.
0:07:28And that's gotta be a significant part of it.
0:07:30Like you've got real messaging stuff.
0:07:32- So the cost of that stuff have come down a ton
0:07:35over the years.
0:07:36we're using Azure, which is one of these many scalable virtual things that I don't understand
0:07:44because I write client apps, but it's a lot less expensive than it used to be to do these
0:07:49back end services.
0:07:50But recently you guys have added, do you call it a pro tier?
0:07:54I forget what you call it.
0:07:55Premium.
0:07:56Premium.
0:07:57Right.
0:07:58How is it taken off?
0:07:59We have a few customers.
0:08:00Yeah?
0:08:01I signed up.
0:08:02And by a few, I mean, yeah, I think it's like three.
0:08:05How hard was it to draw the line at where you switch from the free service, which you
0:08:15really do want to be useful to everybody, right? Because if it was all paid or if it
0:08:19was really limited, there's no way all those hands would have gone up.
0:08:21Right, of course. I think we took the slightly lazy way and we said, "Whatever we haven't
0:08:27done yet, that's for pay, and whatever it is now is the free."
0:08:32interesting way to do it. So going forward, most new features are going to be on the premium
0:08:37end.
0:08:38>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Not all, but most.
0:08:41>> And I have to admit, as somebody who works alone, it's unsurprising that I tend to use
0:08:45it. I put it a couple screens back, and then I come to a conference and, boom, drag it
0:08:50to the front screen. I mean, to me, it's like conference board. That's when I use Glassboard.
0:08:55But you guys designed it also specifically with yourselves in mind, like in an eating
0:08:59your own dog food way that this is the way your team is going to communicate with each
0:09:04other for work.
0:09:05Yeah, totally.
0:09:06Yeah, it's our, you know, we don't use email, we don't use, you know, IRC or whatever.
0:09:12We just use Glassboard all day long.
0:09:14And it works great as, you know, a way of working together.
0:09:17It's fantastic.
0:09:18And that was the plan.
0:09:19I mean, we didn't set out to make conference wear.
0:09:21We set out to make, you know, work group thing.
0:09:24And yeah, it's fucking great.
0:09:27When you're working a typical work day, are you using the web interface to it?
0:09:32Because there's no Mac client for it.
0:09:35It's iOS and web.
0:09:37Well, I use the web mainly during the day because the iOS client I'm actually working
0:09:45on at the moment and it may not actually build and run.
0:09:48So I tend to use the web a lot.
0:09:52And I ask that because, and maybe it should have been obvious because it, well of course
0:09:57you're going to use the web because you want to use your big keyboard and if there's no
0:10:00Mac client you're going to use the web.
0:10:01But the reason I ask is because I often find myself during the day while I'm working, if
0:10:06I'm going to check Twitter or use Twitter, I will use my phone instead of something on
0:10:12my Mac a lot of the time because then I'll keep it not running on my Mac to not be distracted.
0:10:16But if it's off, it actually is like a useful way, it almost feels like using my iPhone
0:10:21as a second screen and I just keep Twitter there and it kind of keeps me from using it
0:10:28more than I would if it was on my Mac.
0:10:30Right.
0:10:31Sure.
0:10:32Yeah.
0:10:33Your phone is great for bathroom breaks and so on, right?
0:10:34It's just perfect.
0:10:35No, I actually use it at the desk though.
0:10:37I find myself using my iPhone at my desk specifically for Twitter.
0:10:41Like if I just take a little break from whatever I'm writing or working or reading, I'll check
0:10:46Twitter.
0:10:47See?
0:10:48an iOS developer, my phone is useless because it's running my software in debug mode.
0:10:56>> I want to go back to some of the stuff that Juri had talked about yesterday. For
0:11:03those of you who don't know, Mike Jurovitz used to work at Apple. He recently left to
0:11:08go to BlackPixel, worked in developer relations. From a very recent vantage point, he was giving
0:11:14everybody at the conference a sort of, here's some dope from a guy who is inside Apple,
0:11:21really at the intersection of where third party developers interact with Apple and giving
0:11:25them some honest advice as to how to deal with Apple. And a lot of it goes back to what
0:11:33I said about change being outside your control, right? So like Sandbox and Mac apps is a perfect
0:11:43example of that. Where developers have all sorts of problems with it. It didn't roll
0:11:50out as smoothly technically as it could have and it's a really hard transition. You know,
0:11:55it's definitely, I think one of the biggest problems with it is that the Mac has not had
0:11:58sandboxing for 20 some years.
0:12:01>> Right.
0:12:02>> And now it does and that's a lot harder than iOS which debuted with this sandboxing
0:12:09mindset.
0:12:10Yeah, we never even thought of it as sandboxing really, it's just how it worked.
0:12:16And jury's advice was, what did he say, I wrote this down, get over it, I think.
0:12:20I think that's what he said.
0:12:21Mike, is that what you said?
0:12:25And that's sort of a brash way of saying it, but I do think he's kind of right, because
0:12:29you can sit there and complain about it and not get anything done, or you can deal with
0:12:34it and move forward.
0:12:35And I have always thought over the years, like when you blog about development and how
0:12:40you approach stuff. You never get upset. You don't. Maybe you do privately but like you
0:12:46always seem unruffled and even when you get a raw deal it's like you just don't seem to
0:12:50be like well that's what I got to deal with. Yeah right well there's you know there's no
0:12:55fighting city hall I guess is the old phrase right. Right so like if you know there are
0:13:00things you just you can't change. I'm not going to make I'm not personally going to
0:13:05get Apple to stop sandboxing. I mean, so.
0:13:08>> So like years ago, when you were still developing that newswire, I would say one
0:13:12of your city halls that you had to fight was Google Reader.
0:13:15>> Oh, Jesus Christ. >> Which you used, you guys used that Newsgator
0:13:18as a syncing back end. >> Right, yeah.
0:13:21>> I mean, just, can you just talk some of the problems you dealt with with that?
0:13:24>> Well, man. Google Reader, fantastically popular RSSI
0:13:31aggregator and we used it as our syncing backend.
0:13:33And it has an undocumented and unsupported API.
0:13:38And I had sworn to myself earlier in life, don't ever
0:13:42use undocumented, unsupported APIs.
0:13:45And yet there I was, suddenly doing it.
0:13:47And I had little choice.
0:13:48Google Reader was the thing that everybody used.
0:13:51And it was a must do feature.
0:13:56And I lost a lot of hair and a lot of sleep trying to get that to work.
0:14:03And I don't think I ever got it working all that well before I ended up selling it to
0:14:07the Black Pixel folks.
0:14:09And now it's their headache instead of mine.
0:14:11But you know, it was a thing.
0:14:14But you never publicly really, you would explain if there were deficiencies or you know, you
0:14:21would explain as best you could.
0:14:22But you never seem to get upset.
0:14:23And you're just like, this is my hand to play.
0:14:25to move forward on it.
0:14:27Exactly.
0:14:28Because life's too short to spend it bitching.
0:14:31You got to get your work done and ship software.
0:14:34And I think one of the things people, you know, developers I think because they're so
0:14:42by definition rationally minded have a keen sense of justice.
0:14:47And of course everybody's self-interested and everybody, you know, if it's close call
0:14:52wants things to go their way.
0:14:55But I think what developers, what third party developers see and complain about with the
0:15:00Mac App Store and sandboxing is that Apple is kind of cheating with their own apps.
0:15:07>> Well, they totally are.
0:15:09But we always knew they would, right?
0:15:10I mean...
0:15:11>> Right, because it's their store.
0:15:12>> Exactly.
0:15:13>> Right.
0:15:14>> They can do whatever they want to do.
0:15:15>> And so, you know, I don't even, I hope this isn't getting Paul into trouble.
0:15:22I know Paul Kofasis had told me that I think Fission, Rogue Amoeba's audio editor, had
0:15:27problems with the sandboxing restrictions for something something that happens to be
0:15:32the exact same thing that GarageBand does technically at an API level. And I don't even
0:15:36know if GarageBand is sandboxed yet, but the fact that if it isn't even sandboxed yet,
0:15:40that just speaks more to the rules, you know, for third party developers are not the same
0:15:45rules that Apple plays by.
0:15:47>> Yeah. And, but we never expected that they would. And anybody who did expect that Apple
0:15:52would play by those rules is, must be new here.
0:15:55(audience laughing)
0:15:59- One of the other things that a jury had talked about,
0:16:03and I think it comes up a lot in a developer conference,
0:16:06is the concept of technical debt.
0:16:08And it manifests itself in many ways.
0:16:11And I think Marco's talk about your career
0:16:13kind of touched on this, certainly Michael Lop's thing,
0:16:17did too where if you're too attached to what you've done to the way things were
0:16:23to what you were good at you can really get into trouble because the world
0:16:27around you moves forward right right and one of the things you it's like a
0:16:31repeating thing like it always comes up is that you Brent Simmons love to delete
0:16:37code it's what gets me up in the morning I love deleting code almost more than
0:16:42anything else.
0:16:45I've written some wonderful, clever, great things that then the OS had support for and
0:16:51I can just delete those.
0:16:52What did you say about the thing about table cells?
0:16:55Yeah, so in the last version of NetNewsWire for Mac I did, I did a UI table view like
0:17:02thing on the Mac, so it was a table that used views instead of cells and it had the same
0:17:08dequeuing mechanism and all that kind of stuff. And it was really fast. I tested it with a
0:17:14million rows and did everything. And it was magical and I loved it. And it was some of
0:17:18the coolest UI code I ever wrote. And then they added support for that in the OS. And
0:17:22I could go, "Pshh, gone. Get rid of it. Delete the whole thing."
0:17:25And I think your natural instincts always lead you to your -- I think you're a little
0:17:31off the charts in that direction. Where you don't -- it's not like you have this regret
0:17:35"Oh man, that was beautiful code.
0:17:38Now I have to, maybe I should delete it."
0:17:39You're like happy to do it.
0:17:41- I totally am.
0:17:41I get a thrill out of deleting my best code.
0:17:44- Yeah, I think I, if I were writing code for a living,
0:17:47I would probably be more likely to be at the other end
0:17:50and be too attached to the thing I did.
0:17:53Like I do, and I, if I have a weakness
0:17:55as a one man show writing operation
0:17:58is that I probably should delete more
0:18:02of what I've written sometimes
0:18:04if it interrupts. Like if it's a good passage and I feel like there's something good about
0:18:09it, but it might make the whole piece better if I just took it out. I'm less likely to
0:18:14kill that than I probably should be or than I would be if I had a separate editor or something
0:18:18like that.
0:18:19Well, you know, there's old writing advice. Is it kill your darlings?
0:18:22Yeah.
0:18:23Something like that.
0:18:24Murder your darlings.
0:18:25Murder your darlings. Or, you know, when I was very young, my journalism teacher said,
0:18:31Brent, find the best sentence in that and delete that,
0:18:34and then ship the rest of it.
0:18:36- Right.
0:18:37- You know, because, and she was fighting against
0:18:39the tendency to, you know, get too attached
0:18:42to some, you know, clever bit of wordplay or something,
0:18:44you know, and stuff is stronger when you get rid of that.
0:18:48- Right, and the one thing I do find myself doing often
0:18:50is deleting the first sentence of a piece,
0:18:53which I am attached to, because it's something that's good,
0:18:57and it got me started, and broke the change
0:19:00got me actually moving my fingers on the keyboard. But then when I go back and read it all over
0:19:06again, it really, really reads better if I start with the second paragraph.
0:19:09>> Yeah, yeah. It happens to me all the time. The real lead is the second sentence or second
0:19:14paragraph. >> Something overly clever and off the tone
0:19:18of the rest of the piece. >> Right.
0:19:23>> Probably a good -- we're about 20 minutes in. So why don't I take the time now and I'll
0:19:30do the sponsor break. We only have one sponsor for this very special show. The magazine from
0:19:36our good friend and we've already mentioned him a few times this show, Marco Arment. So
0:19:42where's Marco? I think he's out there taking pictures. So the magazine is really interesting.
0:19:49Marco has taken what's sort of the skeleton of Instapaper, which I'm going to assume everybody
0:19:55out there knows. And instead of making a thing where you send articles to it and stash it
0:20:01and read it, he's taking the skeleton of here's articles and here's a nice presentation area
0:20:06and a really nice reading interface. And he's gone into publishing himself and he's had,
0:20:13you know, one issue is out right now as we do the show. There's one issue and it's just
0:20:18It's loaded up with singleton talent. We've got an article by our friend Guy English.
0:20:26We've got an article on baseball and tech from Jason Snell. Who's the other? Oh, Michael
0:20:35Lobb. And Alex Payne, who is not here. Shame on him. Why is Alex Payne not here? If everybody
0:20:42else from issue one.
0:20:43>> I don't think I've seen him since C4 probably.
0:20:46I don't know. But it was a really great article. It was four dynamite articles all over the
0:20:52place. Or not all over the place, but of widely different topics. And it's just a real simple
0:20:59idea. And the simple idea financially is buck 99. How often? A month? Buck 99 a month. And
0:21:09you get two issues a month of really thoughtful, really interesting articles. And it seems
0:21:19so simple. And I think it's going to work. Like Marco in his introduction said, "Do
0:21:23I know that this is going to work? I don't know." But it's going to. And it has all
0:21:27sorts of stuff that I think is just, it sounds ridiculous that this is the sort of thing
0:21:32that deserves praise, but you can select text. How crazy is it that that's actually a feature
0:21:41deserving praise in an app for reading when the OS has a feature that you select a word
0:21:47and you can get a little button to define if somebody uses a word you don't know. Have
0:21:53you subscribed? Do you read the magazine?
0:21:55>> I will, but I've been traveling, so I've been too busy to actually get in front of
0:22:00devices, but I will as soon as I get home. Very much looking forward to it. I love the
0:22:07I like the model where he has like 30 days or something, exclusive rights, and then the
0:22:13person can republish it. But I think what that does is it encourages the writers to
0:22:18write something timeless rather than just the news of the day. Something that will last
0:22:25a while. And I think that's a good call.
0:22:28magazine, the idea for it fits or fills so many needs that have been left as everybody
0:22:34has moved towards blogging and tweeting and doing these things that when you hit the publish
0:22:42button, the people who it's intended for can start reading it seconds later. And, you
0:22:51know, there's obviously, and it, that publishing model obviously, and even in my case, definitely
0:22:56leads me to writing things that are more about the here and now or this week or the thing
0:23:01that just came out the two days ago or the thing that now we all know or have heard is
0:23:05coming out on October 23rd as opposed to thinking about things that just so the audience at
0:23:12home knows John's holding an iPad mini as we speak. I swear I've got my show notes.
0:23:22And it does. I mean, and these, and I would say four for four in the first four articles
0:23:28in the issue one of the magazine, all four of them, if Marco had like taken one of them
0:23:33and put it in his pocket, editorial pocket and published it in issue 26 a year from now,
0:23:41it would still work. First anniversary issue, it would be just as timeless and would fit
0:23:44just as well.
0:23:45- I bet he does have articles in his pocket.
0:23:48- He probably does. We should probably do so.
0:23:52So anyway, everybody out there, if you haven't already, check out the magazine. You can go
0:23:58to the app store and search for the magazine and you won't find it.
0:24:02>> Okay.
0:24:03>> But maybe by the time the show airs, you will. It is a weird problem with naming it.
0:24:08And I will add this is that before he launched, Marco ran the idea by me and I pooh-poohed
0:24:14the title of the magazine as being too generic in a chat.
0:24:21Mr. Talk Show. And that's exactly it. And then as soon as I hit return, I realized I
0:24:25had to immediately type this coming from the guy whose podcast is called The Talk Show.
0:24:31And I was like, so and then I read like next line was like, so now we're going to call
0:24:34you the john. No, I was like, I went from I think it's too generic. And then I wrote
0:24:40this coming from the guy whose podcast is the talk show. And then I wrote, so great
0:24:43title. And I believe that what's the URL? I don't have it handy. I should have.
0:24:50>> Are you sure? So Marco says the URL is the-magazine.org.
0:25:01>> .org is this a nonprofit? >> People used to tell me with DaringFireball.net
0:25:09because it used to be I think the original ICANN definition of .net was you had to be
0:25:13like a service provider or something like that.
0:25:16and dot orgs had to be nonprofits and I still want a dot edu. Brent Simmons dot edu. It's
0:25:22um school mixology. I was going to say I'm deathly frightened to know what you learned
0:25:30at Brent Simmons dot edu. I also want Brent Simmons dot gov. I'm sure that Brent Simmons
0:25:38dot edu all the ads are from lawyers, bail bondsmen. I did another podcast where I talked
0:25:46about going to jail. I did hear that. I don't know if you've heard that one. That was pretty
0:25:50good. That's Dave and Lex, unprofessional, and this is their little plug. Yeah, go ahead.
0:25:56And I'm done, that was a short plug. So one of the things that I find interesting, and
0:26:06I feel like everybody has to deal with it. I would just say this, there's been a lot
0:26:10of talk this week because it's new and everybody isn't really sure whether it's going to take
0:26:13off it's like it just seems like this is app.net. What's your take on app.net?
0:26:20I don't know if it's going to live. I like it a lot because I like the service and I
0:26:29really wanted Twitter to be the thing that I loved because it was the thing I loved for
0:26:32a long time but I just don't love the company. And it seemed that when Netbot came out, alpha.net,
0:26:42What the hell is this thing called?
0:26:43But that's part of it.
0:26:44Suddenly, suddenly there's a lot of people actually using it.
0:26:47And I'm like, eh, I'm not checking Twitter anymore.
0:26:49I'm using ADN or whatever the hell it's called.
0:26:53There, there's a, this is like where I fail as a talk show host.
0:26:57But there's like three things about app.net that I want to talk about and none of them
0:27:01really seem to lead to each other and you just touched on all three of them.
0:27:06So let me just say them and you guys can remind me when we go off on a tangent on one of them
0:27:09to go back.
0:27:10But one of them is that it's a terrible name.
0:27:11It's not even a name. That's like…
0:27:15One of them is that if Twitter had behaved in what seems to be the most obvious way,
0:27:20in a way that they should, there'd never be any room for it to happen and we'd never
0:27:23be talking about it.
0:27:24Right.
0:27:25And the third one is that it's like, it's been a great little science experiment since
0:27:33Netbot came out about the importance of apps.
0:27:36Yeah, totally.
0:27:37Versus web clients.
0:27:39Yeah.
0:27:40So, those are the three things. Let's talk about the name first, which is terrible. Nobody
0:27:44even knows what to call it. Some people call it app.net. Some people call it ADN, which
0:27:49comes from app.net. I've never even seen that before, where the dot in something's name
0:27:54becomes part of its initials. I've never seen that.
0:27:57People are grasping at straws. Anything to give it an identity.
0:28:01Right. And then their reference implementation of a client for the service they called alpha.
0:28:08And so it's like the URL is alpha.app.net and then there was some confusion. Maybe the
0:28:13thing is called alpha and nobody really…
0:28:15Right. They can't go into beta now ever because alpha is the name.
0:28:21And I forget. I was just talking about it, I think the first night that I was here in
0:28:24Montreal and just how it's almost impossibly generic, the name app.net.
0:28:34everything if you're writing software is an app and when is the last time any of us has
0:28:38had a new app that hasn't in some way used the net? Right? Like I'm trying to think,
0:28:46like even games, games are still connecting with game center and sending saved stuff like,
0:28:52it really is almost impossibly generic.
0:28:56>> Yeah, yeah. And you could look at it in one way, all the personality for whatever
0:29:02it's called, is going to come to the clients. When I think of whatever this is called, I
0:29:07picture the netbot icon.
0:29:09>> Right. That's, and that is, you know, it famously happened with Twitter in the early
0:29:16days when…
0:29:19>> Is Craig here still? Yeah, if I hadn't been for Twitterific…
0:29:23>> Craig, stand up. We can't see you.
0:29:24>> Yeah.
0:29:25>> All right, there he is.
0:29:26>> If it hadn't been for Twitterific, I would never, I mean, I saw Twitterific before I
0:29:30I saw Twitter. And I'm like, "I like this app. What do I have to do to use this thing?"
0:29:33>> No, but famously, well, maybe not famously, actually, much to the injustice of it, but
0:29:40Twitter itself didn't use any kind of bird iconography at all. Not the silhouette or
0:29:47anything. They were using a lowercase "T" bubble font thing as their logo. And Twitterific
0:29:55shipped with, what's the bird's name?
0:29:58>> Ollie.
0:29:59Ollie, the bird, and it was such a spectacularly perfect icon for the Twitter experience that
0:30:08all of a sudden it became one of the most like ripped off things in the universe. Like
0:30:15everybody all across the web when they would link to their Twitter account would put the
0:30:19Twitter-ic icon there as a representation of Twitter.
0:30:22>> I don't know how that escaped the Twitter people. They named their service after the
0:30:26sound a bird makes and didn't use a bird. I don't know it's one of those great you
0:30:32know I like like so many great ideas it's so obvious in hindsight but you
0:30:35know it's it's like a forgotten fact that it was the icon factory that. Oh and
0:30:40the word tweet I guess was an icon factory thing and and like 10 or 20
0:30:45other things we all have to thank Craig and his people for. And and because of
0:30:50all the royalties that icon factory is getting from Twitter that's why Craig
0:30:55will be the one who issues the refunds for everybody's singleton.
0:31:05>> Which one?
0:31:07>> Craig says to meet him on his private jet.
0:31:11So the name stinks.
0:31:12And I think names matter.
0:31:14>> I think names matter.
0:31:16On the other hand, their attitude seems to be, hey, we're going to make a generic service
0:31:21and developers are the ones who are going to add personality to it.
0:31:24I don't know if that will work, but as a developer I kind of don't mind their humility there,
0:31:29right?
0:31:30I do.
0:31:31I do.
0:31:32But I do think that it also speaks to one of the… as it seeps into the background
0:31:37of your consciousness, what a tremendous advantage Twitter has that they own this word "tweet,"
0:31:44which acts as both a noun and a verb.
0:31:46And it's a thing, so these things that you send to Twitter are tweets.
0:31:50And when you do them, you're tweeting.
0:31:53And that's a really, really powerful psychological advantage.
0:31:58And very much along the lines that doing a web search is called Googling.
0:32:03>> Right.
0:32:04Sure.
0:32:05Yeah.
0:32:06You ever Google something at Bing?
0:32:07>> Yeah, I do.
0:32:08You know, I think that I would easily find myself saying that I did.
0:32:12>> Yeah, right.
0:32:13Of course.
0:32:14Yeah.
0:32:15So what we're saying, though, is that Craig and his team need to step up and come up and
0:32:20invent a personality and names and stuff for Alpha.net.
0:32:25Right. So, second thing is that just, and it's more, well maybe not more important,
0:32:29because I do think names are important, but the honestly indignation that I feel
0:32:34towards the way Twitter is acting towards third-party developers and their
0:32:39APIs. And it's brought to light by this App.net thing and as these App.net
0:32:46clients start appearing where it's explicit, not even implicit. It's not like you have
0:32:52to kind of like squint and think about it. It's like absolutely clear as day. One of
0:32:56the few things that's as clear as day in the Twitter API guidelines is if you're using
0:33:01the Twitter API, you cannot intermix the tweets that you're getting or any of the data you're
0:33:07getting from Twitter with the content from anything that even any other service. Yeah.
0:33:13And that to me is such bullshit. It is exactly like an email provider. Like imagine an email
0:33:17provider that said you cannot put any email from us into a unified inbox.
0:33:24- Yeah, imagine Google saying that about two email clients or something. Yeah, that.
0:33:29- It just makes no sense because it's just totally, and again, and you know, and people
0:33:35often call me out on this because, you know, I will write pieces that were, I'm not, I
0:33:42really don't see myself as defending Apple's App Store. I'm trying to explain what they're
0:33:46thinking. And so I do understand, I'm not saying Twitter can't do this, you know, or
0:33:53even that they're morally wrong for doing it. I just think that they're being foolish
0:33:58because I think being that…
0:34:00What's the word?
0:34:03Arrogant. Arrogant.
0:34:04Arrogant. Right, sure. Well, they've lost the love of this room and many rooms like
0:34:08it.
0:34:09said, you know, it's easy to say that hardcore geeks don't matter much, but we do because
0:34:16we tell our parents and siblings and family what software to use. And, you know, we have
0:34:21an outsized amount of power. And when you lose the geeks, you lose a lot, I think.
0:34:27Well, they've turned their backs on a lot of people who truly had and even have remaining
0:34:33and to some extent, but it's dwindling, affection for Twitter.
0:34:36Right.
0:34:37really liked them and they've just turned their backs on that and it just seems like
0:34:42that is something that they seem to be acting as though it's irrelevant now. Whereas I don't
0:34:48think that's the case at all. I think that they should be to the top levels absolutely
0:34:54positively like hey we need to actually have like one of these like change courses right
0:34:59now thing because of just even the extent that app.net got off the ground. Whether it
0:35:05stays up like I said it's yeah we'll see it seems iffy but the fact that there
0:35:08was any enthusiasm at all for it really should have I think if I were there I
0:35:13would be like this is this is awful we've you know this is existence proof
0:35:17that we have screwed this up mm-hmm yeah and and to me just you know it just
0:35:21seems so ridiculous like why wouldn't you let them integrate tweets into some
0:35:25other thing if that's what they want to do sure you know let a thousand flowers
0:35:30bloom right let all let people write all kinds of software it's just gonna make
0:35:34your service all the more valuable and beloved. And they're like, no.
0:35:41>> And it often, I think it easily comes back to a lot of the stuff you've done like RSS.
0:35:46And now the difference is Twitter is in a unique position where they can do this because
0:35:50they are, become so popular and they are big that they can do it. And they can make developers
0:35:58write separate apps for app.net than Twitter, even though it would make a lot more sense
0:36:05if they would just integrate it into the same app. But it reminds me of publishers who wouldn't
0:36:12want to publish RSS feeds or wouldn't want to publish full data RSS feeds. And of course,
0:36:18there are good reasons. There are reasons you think, "Well, all of our ads are coming
0:36:22this other way and we don't have ads in the RSS. We don't know what to do." But when you
0:36:26try to take your stuff and keep it in your own little box. Good stuff never happens because
0:36:31the users, people, I say users, but just people want the stuff to just let me put it where
0:36:37I want it.
0:36:38Right, right, exactly. Yeah. And trying to control stuff in that way is swimming against
0:36:45the tide. That's rarely works out.
0:36:49And I, you know, Net News Wire is a perfect example where my life a year before to a year
0:36:57after the existence of Net News Wire was that I was suddenly reading all sorts of stuff,
0:37:03not on the website where it was written, which maybe, you know, in some ways was a loss for
0:37:08those websites if I previously read them, but reading so much more in the aggregate,
0:37:14including a lot of sources where I wouldn't be reading them regularly at all, and at least
0:37:17I'm reading them, right?
0:37:19So I can't help but think that it was a win for so many websites, not that me in particular
0:37:24was reading it, but that everybody using NetNewswire was reading it.
0:37:27People were reading a lot more than they could have before.
0:37:31Right.
0:37:32And then it comes down to, I don't think there's too many people, but people who accuse an
0:37:38app like Instapaper of somehow usurping or flipboard or something like that, of stepping
0:37:46on the toes or pulling content.
0:37:47It's really no, they're just giving people other options for consuming your content.
0:37:53And shouldn't you just be thrilled that people want to consume, want to read your stuff?
0:37:56Yeah, absolutely.
0:37:57Hopefully, that's your goal.
0:38:00If not, choose another business, I think.
0:38:03And I just think Twitter has totally lost that.
0:38:05So what was my third thing?
0:38:06My third thing was...
0:38:07Oh, I don't know, but I have a Dick Costello story, actually.
0:38:12That is good.
0:38:13And I think I haven't thought about this in years, but it was at...
0:38:17>> You're a CEO of Twitter. >> Chief executive officer and chief Dick
0:38:23officer of Twitter. >> Right. So it's easy to not like him because
0:38:27he's in charge of this whole thing and it seems awful. But the first time I met him
0:38:32was years ago and it was evening at Adler or the first C4 perhaps. So I was in Chicago
0:38:38and I had just started working at NewsGator and FeedBurner was in Chicago and Dick was
0:38:44at FeedBurner. And both those companies were funded by Brad Feld and Mobius or whatever
0:38:50he was doing at the time. So Brad encouraged me to go to the FeedBurner offices and meet
0:38:56Dick and everybody. And so I go into their office and it's a big open space. And I walk
0:39:01in there and I can't remember if it was Dick or somebody else, introduces me to the entire
0:39:05company all at once. And this was probably 2004 or something like that. NetNewsWire was
0:39:11was just starting to become a really big hit.
0:39:13And of course, the guys at Feedburner had stats on that
0:39:16and knew exactly how big it was.
0:39:18And the entire office applauded me.
0:39:21And I was just really, really fucking cool.
0:39:26Just like for being the guy who wrote the software.
0:39:30I loved that.
0:39:31And then we went out to lunch
0:39:32and Dick was charming and funny.
0:39:34I think he has a theater background.
0:39:36And I had a great time.
0:39:38And it was, it's only years later where I'm like,
0:39:40God, what a dick.
0:39:41It's just, it's so easy.
0:39:47- Yeah, right.
0:39:47- To go with the joke about his name, but.
0:39:50- But you can't help it, right?
0:39:52- Yeah.
0:39:53- Is George here?
0:39:53George Dick?
0:39:54There he is.
0:39:57- I had an uncle Dick.
0:39:59My father's brother was Richard Gruber
0:40:05and everybody called him Dick,
0:40:06but he was a little bit older even than my dad
0:40:08and he died a couple years ago.
0:40:11But he was of that generation now.
0:40:14He was like Dick Cheney and those guys.
0:40:17- I had a grandpa Dick, Dick Davis.
0:40:20- I mean, he was a good name back then.
0:40:21- Oh yeah, totally.
0:40:22He had a mug, a white mug with black lettering,
0:40:26big bold letters, Dick.
0:40:28And he drank his coffee out of that every morning.
0:40:30And I'm like, that's a hell of a good way to start a day.
0:40:33- For some reason, the name seems to have fallen
0:40:35out of favor in recent decades though.
0:40:37Let's bring it back. All right, name your kid's dick, even the girls.
0:40:43>> All right, so last thing on App.net, we can probably wrap up the show with it. But
0:40:47I did think that it was really an interesting experiment. And I certainly have the belief
0:40:55that native clients, native for the Mac, native for iOS, are the way to go for so many -- if
0:41:03if at all possible, that's the way to go. And it just, it makes everything better. Latency
0:41:07is better. Interface is better. You can, you're less restricted about where things go. You
0:41:12can make things look just right. And as hard as it may be, and you can go back to, you
0:41:18know, Brad's talk about how hard it is to get things looking exactly right when you're
0:41:22truly a perfectionist. It certainly is a lot, how hard it could be and how much work, way
0:41:28easier with a native app than with, with the web.
0:41:30A great example I think was tweeted or outfit or something by I think Matt Drance.
0:41:35He put up a screen shot of that web platform.org or something.
0:41:40Have you seen this site?
0:41:42Well it's talking about the web as a platform.
0:41:44And of course if you open it on your iPhone it is completely fucked up.
0:41:49It's like yep and that pretty much just nails it.
0:41:53And it also ties in again to Marco's talk from yesterday.
0:41:58And Marco at one point, he was talking about a conference that he had spoken at and that
0:42:03he didn't mention because it ended up being a rather unpleasant experience, but as he
0:42:07described it, it was a conference for web developers and web designers.
0:42:14And Marco, you know, he did work at Tumblr, but you know, is certainly far more well known
0:42:20for his work on clients like Instapaper.
0:42:25more or less the message he gave was, "You guys shouldn't be thinking so much about the
0:42:30web. You should be thinking about what's the best experience for your users. And in a lot
0:42:33of cases, it's going to be an app, a native app. And maybe even only a native app." And
0:42:41he held up Instagram as an example. Here I am getting my Instapapers and Instagram is
0:42:46exactly right so far. I haven't made a mistake.
0:42:48>> It's too bad Pixelmator isn't a sponsor today.
0:42:52>> No.
0:42:53>> Because I wanted to hear that in person.
0:42:54Well, no, I would say with a French accent here in Quebec. Pixel métoré.
0:42:58>> Windows Vista.
0:43:00>> Yeah. But I thought that, and I thought Marco didn't extrapolate that though to the
0:43:06right degree. And Marco is, you know, is usually, he's a nice guy, but he is not artificially
0:43:11humble. Is that he kind of took away from that that I gave these guys this message and
0:43:15he got, it ends up, long story short, he, this conference gives, all the attendees get
0:43:19to rank the speakers and Marco came out ranked very, very poorly or dead last or something
0:43:24like that. Not because what he said wasn't true. In hindsight, he was exactly true. And
0:43:27Instagram was a remarkably apt thing because they sold for a billion fucking dollars.
0:43:32Yeah, right. I mean, now it's like 400 million because Facebook's tank.
0:43:36And they have a billion fucking users too. Yeah, right.
0:43:38But yeah, and they still have more and more users. And it is by all accounts the most
0:43:45successful social networking thing to have launched in the last couple of years. So it
0:43:51was a great example. He was exactly, that's the thing is he should draw satisfaction from
0:43:55the fact that he was dead right. The reason he got ranked poorly by the speakers wasn't
0:44:00because what he said wasn't good advice and it wasn't true. It was because it wasn't what
0:44:03they wanted to hear.
0:44:04Exactly. What is it that this crowd doesn't want to hear that we can tell them? There
0:44:09has to be something.
0:44:11Bars closed?
0:44:12Bar's closed.
0:44:14I can't think of anything.
0:44:15There's got to be something there.
0:44:16I think that's one of the great things about this conference though is that people who
0:44:21have come here are thinking ahead.
0:44:24And to Marco's point about maybe you should think about an app, I thought the interesting
0:44:28thing about app.net is it seemed to me like usage was going down and down and down and
0:44:33then netbot shipped and there was this huge spike.
0:44:37Yeah, that day was like the change.
0:44:39And I'm sure they will always remember that day, right? When Netbot comes out and suddenly
0:44:46it validated everything. And there were a lot of new users and a lot of activity.
0:44:54I think that the idea, I think there was, and it was almost taken as religion, is that
0:45:00once we got to the point where you could write web apps and web apps would run everywhere,
0:45:05that that was like some sort of endpoint in the continuum of how software evolved. And
0:45:10that not everybody, certainly not everybody, but there were a large number of people who
0:45:14I think sort of took it and still take it. And I think that they, and now they give Marco
0:45:19check minuses on his talks, that they've broken this dogma that web apps are the future. And
0:45:27I think people are still dug in on that and that there were, you see a lot of people and
0:45:30they look at the app store and the success and they say, well, that's just temporary
0:45:34soon web apps will take over that.
0:45:38I don't think that's true.
0:45:39>> Yeah, I don't buy it because it's not an arms race exactly, but it's kind of like that.
0:45:46What we as client developers are going to be able to do is always going to outstrip
0:45:50what the web can do.
0:45:52So people who love web development will say, hey, we're getting this and this.
0:45:56I'll be like, hey, great, awesome, you're going to really enjoy that.
0:46:00But meanwhile, we're going to be another mile ahead because it's not like the platform stops
0:46:05and waits for equality.
0:46:08It totally doesn't.
0:46:09One of my all-time favorite Brent Simmons-isms, I don't even know how many years ago it was,
0:46:16could be a long time ago, but I'll never forget it, but you were writing about why, and it
0:46:23was clearly predates the iPhone, but it was why write software for the Mac.
0:46:28And maybe it was in response to a Joel Spolsky thing talking about just how much bigger the
0:46:31Windows market was.
0:46:34And your piece was that it went beyond economics.
0:46:38It wasn't about the size of the audience.
0:46:40It was that writing Mac apps was the show.
0:46:45With a capital S.
0:46:46>> Right?
0:46:48It's the only big leak there is at the time.
0:46:50Of course now we have iOS.
0:46:52But yeah, the idea was if you're making software, you care about user experience first.
0:47:00And everything you do comes from that premise, right?
0:47:04Your choice of platform, your choice of technologies, all choices start with user experience and
0:47:10wanting to do the very best.
0:47:12And I'm ambitious and wanted to play in the best playground that there was because everything
0:47:18else sucks.
0:47:19And, you know, to throw another, keep it, you know, because the show is a reference
0:47:27to like that's like a baseball term for making it to the big leagues, to the major leagues.
0:47:32Where baseball, professional baseball in the United States has these hierarchies of, you
0:47:36know, they're all professional, but you go from A to AA to AAA and I don't even know,
0:47:41it might even be thousands of players active at any given time to fill all these teams
0:47:46and all sorts of local teams, you know, all really small towns have a professional baseball
0:47:51team. But it's, you know, amateurs or not amateurs, but guys making like $1,000 a month.
0:47:56Yeah, right. Sleeping on buses and stuff like that. And then you make it to the show. Yeah,
0:48:00that's the real deal. And all of a sudden, the bright lights are on. And the big money's
0:48:05there. And you're not playing in front of 700 people. You're playing in front of 35,000
0:48:09people. Yep, yep. And you're on television and you have groupies and, and you make a
0:48:14a mistake and it's on the front page of the sports section the next day. And if you do
0:48:18something good, it's on the front page of the sports section the next day. So there's
0:48:23scrutiny. But it's really, I think it comes down to you've got to be obsessed. Right?
0:48:30So why play baseball instead of basketball? For those guys who play baseball, it's because
0:48:33that's the sport. A lot of guys who are athletic could do anything, but it is the sport that
0:48:38captivates the mind and you can't get unhooked from it. And I think that's what great user
0:48:43experiences for a developer like you.
0:48:48I have nothing to add to that.
0:48:50Well Brent thank you for being here.
0:48:52Thank you to the hosts at Singleton.
0:48:55Absolutely thank you so much.
0:48:56Even with the bad badges it was remarkable and extraordinarily generous to offer this
0:49:01stage to me to do the show here today and absolutely most of all thank you to all of
0:49:07you who stayed here to watch this.
0:49:10It's always a thrill to do a show live and just a great thrill.
0:49:14Thanks, John.
0:49:15Thank you, Brent.
0:49:16[Applause]
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