PodSearch

The Talk Show

8: Like Giving Natalie Portman a Trucker Cap, with Merlin Mann

 

00:00:00   So you're talking about you got a hammer to fix your MacBook Pro.

00:00:03   I've got a four-year-old MacBook Pro and I put...

00:00:07   That's a tough age.

00:00:08   I'm five years old. I don't know. I mean the thing still has a silver keyboard.

00:00:11   You know what I mean? It's ancient. And I put the SSD in there by hand

00:00:16   and used a hammer because it's the only tool I have in the house. I don't have any of these little

00:00:20   screwdrivers and stuff like that. And it works.

00:00:23   And it was a remarkable upgrade. It really was. And there's a whole debate over, you know,

00:00:26   the fact that you can't upgrade the new MacBook Pro, blah, blah, blah.

00:00:29   this one put in a $700 SSD in there, it was like getting a new machine.

00:00:35   My desktop machine is this four-year-old MacBook Pro and I put an SSD in there myself a couple

00:00:42   years ago, gave it a big upgrade but I don't have good tools. I used a hammer instead of

00:00:46   these little precision screwdrivers. I don't know what else I did in there. The thing seems

00:00:50   very fast but it doesn't do IO consistently. So when I do like a recording, I'll get like

00:00:59   minutes of good stuff and then it just hiccups. It's not good. So I can't use it for Skype.

00:01:05   So I use my MacBook Air, which is a secondary computer for Skype. But it's also the machine

00:01:11   on which I try out things like Mountain Lion. And I think Mountain Lion, the latest version

00:01:17   of Mountain Lion, it's a beta, so I'm not complaining really, but it seems to have had

00:01:21   a bit of an allergic reaction with the MacBook Pro.

00:01:24   Could your hard drive really have something to do with your USB?

00:01:29   Well no, on this machine I don't know.

00:01:31   There's something going on with the mountain lion, the latest beta on this.

00:01:35   Because for example, one of the reasons I was a little late starting this call is I

00:01:38   just opened it up.

00:01:40   And Macbook Air you open it up and it should be ready to go, right?

00:01:43   And instead I got the beach ball and the beach ball just never went away.

00:01:46   And that's the sort of thing, I have never had problems like that with the Macbook Air.

00:01:49   You got beach ball at the login screen?

00:01:51   Yeah, well, you know what? The one I have it set up so that after it wakes up its sleep

00:01:56   that it, you know, prompts you for a password.

00:01:57   Yeah, me too. But you had a beach ball with the…huh. I haven't gotten that. I have

00:02:01   gotten it goes to sleep and, you know, it's euthanized. Like, it just won't come up

00:02:07   sometimes. Are we allowed to talk about that? This is…

00:02:11   Nah, not really. But who cares? I mean, it's a beta. I'm sure they're going to fix

00:02:15   it, you know, before that thing actually ships. But it's just funny.

00:02:18   I want you to stay in their good books is all I'm saying. I'm not on the radar screen, but you need to watch that stuff.

00:02:23   Yeah, but what are they gonna do? Yeah, I mean, I'm not still in state secrets.

00:02:29   You know what I mean? I mean what the beta release of an operating system is bugging us. A little unstable.

00:02:34   Right on a you know one particular model of

00:02:37   MacBook Air. I have not if you know they do this sometimes on forums on fora

00:02:43   Where if you're gonna learn how to snort bath salts in a different way the way you say it is

00:02:49   I think you say it's a friend who's not me

00:02:51   Right this is the parlance okay, so a friend who's not me

00:02:55   May be running that on the MacBook Air pretty much with no problems

00:03:00   But the problem is now for myself not my friend my I was very bummed to find out that my Mac Pro

00:03:08   Not gonna run it. It's it's too old the one I'm talking on right now

00:03:12   It's just it's not gonna go. I'm not in the window

00:03:15   It won't run. I can't do mountain lion. I try to get it from the thing

00:03:18   I mean a friend of mine tried let me start over. I it's not gonna run on my Mac Pro

00:03:22   It's totally blowing my head. It's making me rethink my entire setup

00:03:25   Do you ever get to those stages like every like five years where you go hmm?

00:03:28   There might be time to really rethink a lot of these things

00:03:31   Yeah, exactly. I got it. I mean I got I got you know four drives in here. I recently probably

00:03:38   Advisably switched from one terabyte everything to two terabyte stuff, which I'm already kind of regretting

00:03:43   But you know, I got a I got a butt ton of space on this thing

00:03:46   I can you know, keep everything hooked up. I don't have thunderbolt anything yet

00:03:50   So if I wanted to do all that hooking up, it'd be a real pain. You know what I mean?

00:03:54   But

00:03:56   I'm gonna miss that. I don't know what to do with this thing. I'm gonna have to I it just is just a big shell

00:04:01   I don't know what I'm gonna do with it

00:04:02   I

00:04:02   Can't I came to sell it right because if I sell it somebody's gonna have to like gut the whole thing and put all new

00:04:07   robot parts in it, right, if they want to run them out in line.

00:04:11   Yeah, I guess. People like these though. They'll buy them just for the case. They can make them ashtrays and stuff.

00:04:15   People love Marco. You want to sell one of these? Marco.

00:04:17   He'll give you $8,000 today for a Mac Pro.

00:04:21   He bought the quote,

00:04:24   dick quote, new Mac Pro.

00:04:29   That was a pretty light upgrade, is that correct?

00:04:32   I mean, almost really, really

00:04:35   featherweight in its lightness, right?

00:04:38   Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, it's like a...

00:04:41   I think it went from 2.66 GHz to 2.7 GHz.

00:04:46   But he's so hungry.

00:04:49   He's been so focused on this that he couldn't let it go by.

00:04:53   Well, the funny thing is, this is one of the things that I love about WWDC.

00:04:57   I go out there for the week and it's like all of a sudden

00:05:01   my entire internet is now within like three city blocks of each other and uh...

00:05:08   is a totally true story i forget where i was coming

00:05:11   from

00:05:12   but it was on but you know what it was pete's i went over to the pete's

00:05:15   coffee that's over there at uh... i think it's like third and howard

00:05:18   and i was walking back to moscone west and uh... marco was behind me i think

00:05:23   marco might have been staying at the w and and i went down that way

00:05:26   he caught up to me

00:05:28   and uh... he was heading back over

00:05:30   And he goes, "You know what?"

00:05:32   And it just, you know, it's like he just opened up.

00:05:35   He's thinking.

00:05:36   He's like, "You know, I think I'm going to buy that new Mac Pro."

00:05:37   And it's like Wednesday.

00:05:38   And he like talked me through.

00:05:40   I was like there, like in between, like right in front of Moscone North and South, which

00:05:45   is between the W and Moscone West where WWDC is.

00:05:50   That's where Marco talked himself into buying the Mac Pro.

00:05:53   And I was just there nodding my head.

00:05:54   I didn't encourage it.

00:05:55   I didn't discourage it.

00:05:56   But I was there.

00:05:57   And then next week on his show, he said he bought one.

00:06:00   Hmm. He didn't complain about your coffee at all?

00:06:02   He, no, I think he considers, he considers Pete's to be pretty burned because

00:06:08   people end up putting a lot of junk in it and he doesn't like that.

00:06:11   Yeah. I, well thank God I don't have his taste in coffee.

00:06:14   I couldn't, I couldn't live like that. But no, him, that's a big deal because he's,

00:06:17   can I ask one favor? This is your show, but can I ask one favor?

00:06:20   And it's your show, but just, just for the sake of, uh,

00:06:25   having some kind of a contrivance,

00:06:26   can we act like I don't know all that much stuff about computers?

00:06:29   Yeah.

00:06:30   Okay.

00:06:31   That's how I always treat you.

00:06:32   Okay, thank you.

00:06:33   Okay.

00:06:34   You know what?

00:06:35   That's going to help so much.

00:06:36   Now, in Marco's case, when he's making the software, he needs the fastest conceivable

00:06:40   -- like, that changes his career, if he can make the software turn into software faster,

00:06:46   right?

00:06:47   He doesn't want to be sitting around on some kind of hobbled Gen 1 MacBook Air.

00:06:50   He needs something that's going to -- what do you call it?

00:06:53   Building, right?

00:06:54   Right.

00:06:55   Because that takes time.

00:06:56   That takes time, and it takes -- you're pegging at your processors when you're trying to make

00:06:59   the Instapaper, is that correct? Yes, that's one of those things where the rest of us,

00:07:04   the people who, you know, like I don't think there's anything I do anymore in a computer

00:07:08   that I have to wait for the computer. I have to wait for the Internet sometimes. Unless

00:07:12   something has gone wrong, that's exactly the same for me. There's nothing I do that

00:07:17   was in a runaway process that, I mean occasionally you'll see something squirrely happen. For

00:07:21   some reason, occasionally multi-markdown pegs for processors and I don't know why. And

00:07:26   and it's not even running anything, which is weird, but you know, whatever. You quit

00:07:31   the process. But no.

00:07:32   Well, if I get real crazy and I have, you know, 30 Safari windows open and a bunch of

00:07:37   tabs in each one and there's a couple of them that are doing JavaScript or whatever, and

00:07:41   I open up Activity Monitor and it says Safari is using 90 some percent of my CPU just idle

00:07:46   in the background, then yes, things get slow. And presumably if I had a faster machine,

00:07:50   I could still have all of that going on and it wouldn't be as noticeable. But in general,

00:07:54   my Macs, I'm never waiting for the CPU, whereas developers absolutely are.

00:07:59   Like a...

00:08:00   Or video.

00:08:01   Like if you're doing video, there's a really kind of a neat...you might have seen this

00:08:03   on the App Store.

00:08:04   There's a...I saw it extensively because I was trying to test some new drives.

00:08:08   You know, when you get new drives, it's a good idea to kind of put them through a torture

00:08:11   test and at least find out to the extent possible how...you know what I mean?

00:08:16   They say if a drive goes bad, it's going to be in the first few weeks, which has been

00:08:18   my experience.

00:08:19   I actually did find one.

00:08:20   I got a clunker.

00:08:22   There's this app you can get and something disk something and

00:08:26   Couldn't Google it

00:08:27   And I think what it does is it's made for video folks and so you pound on this drive super hard

00:08:32   And it shows you how much like what's what sizes of video you can reasonably do with your computer

00:08:39   So right, so if you're if you're pushing out whatever 1080p

00:08:42   Giant video you want all the power you can get right because that's heavily math intensive stuff, right?

00:08:48   Yeah, and ditto ditto for pushing on instapaper

00:08:51   And so you think that was a good purchase for him?

00:08:58   I don't know. Maybe. I guess the thing I'm confused about is how slow, what kind of machine

00:09:06   he's replacing with it.

00:09:08   See, I would always feel like it's the same thing as like moving somewhere. You know,

00:09:12   like when you're in a house, you notice everything that's wrong with where you live. You notice

00:09:15   the parking sucks, your neighbor, your neighbors, I don't know what you're allowed to say on

00:09:19   but your neighbor's an unpleasant person.

00:09:22   You know what I mean?

00:09:23   Like you notice everything that's wrong,

00:09:24   and then when you move, you suddenly notice

00:09:27   all these things that you never knew were right before.

00:09:30   And as I get older, I start to think more

00:09:31   about the overhead involved in changing anything.

00:09:34   And even today, with like Migration Assistant,

00:09:36   everything's so much better.

00:09:38   I have successfully restored an iPad

00:09:41   from the iCloud in like minutes.

00:09:43   You know, sometimes it works.

00:09:45   But you know what I mean?

00:09:46   It's like to me, the overhead of moving to a new machine,

00:09:48   there'd be so much juju that I would worry about

00:09:50   that I would want a bigger,

00:09:52   like I'm thinking about getting a new MacBook Air,

00:09:53   'cause even though mine's still working great

00:09:55   from almost two years ago, I'm attracted to the new ones.

00:09:59   But don't you think, I mean, like I would weigh that

00:10:01   in terms of that bump in speed,

00:10:02   I would think a lot about whether it's worth,

00:10:04   you know what I mean, just for the chance

00:10:05   that maybe it's got a bum USB port or something,

00:10:08   you know what I mean, like that stuff happens,

00:10:09   the overhead of that.

00:10:11   - Yeah, I also worry about,

00:10:13   when I buy a Mac, I do, I still feel like this,

00:10:17   I still feel like you start over right don't you go totally clean and well, that's no I don't really do that, but I I

00:10:24   Feel like I'm gonna. I'm in with this thing for four years

00:10:27   That's what I like to do

00:10:29   I like to get it set up

00:10:30   And then I add all my stupid little

00:10:32   Extras and get all the little preferences moved over and and the things that don't happen automatically just through migration assistant

00:10:39   Although I guess what I do is I don't really use the migration assistant

00:10:43   I try to like start using the thing new and then slowly one by one as I miss things move

00:10:49   them over.

00:10:50   That used to be that used to be easier in some ways that back when you know what I mean

00:10:55   like back when you could just pull over an application drop it in the folder.

00:11:00   I mean for that matter you know extensions you could just drop an extension in and restart

00:11:03   you right you know what I mean you knew and even if you're not doing any ape stuff or

00:11:07   crazy kek stuff or anything like that there's still there's still a certain amount of juju

00:11:11   you today. Whereas Migration Assistant, knock on wood, if you've got the time and the connection,

00:11:18   I'm blown away with how Migration Assistant works, I have to say. Does it work pretty

00:11:22   well for you?

00:11:23   Yeah, it does. Especially, it works a lot better for Amy. As just a normal person who

00:11:28   doesn't have stupid system extensions and stuff like that. She gets a new machine, you

00:11:37   just do the standard migration assistant thing and all of a sudden an hour or two later her

00:11:42   machine has all of her stuff on it.

00:11:44   Steve: Yeah, that still feels like magic to me. I got to say for this next one, I don't

00:11:48   know if I want to spend the dough because I've always said that the SE30 that I had

00:11:53   whatever in their I guess early 90s always still feels like in my head like pound for

00:11:58   pound still feels like the fastest Mac I ever had. That's probably not accurate but given

00:12:03   the balance of running like word 5.1, you know what I mean? Like everything I was doing,

00:12:08   it just, it felt lightning fast on that computer. But I gotta say this MacBook Air, I bought

00:12:12   it on my birthday, like November 2010 I bought this thing. And it's, to this day it still

00:12:16   feels, it still feels ridiculously fast. I know part of that's the SSD drive. But I mean,

00:12:22   this, when I get my Mac Pro, it's like Beach Ball City. And I'm forever Applejacking and

00:12:26   FSCK-ing and doing all the mojo to try and, you know, I don't know if this is true for

00:12:31   In my experience, it feels like most of the time I get beach balls, it's not because of processor stuff or whatever.

00:12:36   It's because, yeah, maybe I'm low on space, but it feels like it's always like a tiny little nick of disk damage that might be causing it.

00:12:44   Do you ever get that?

00:12:45   Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

00:12:48   But I don't think I get it anymore with the SSDs. I think the SSDs have sort of wiped that out.

00:12:52   Well, that's the thing. I don't know. So the new MacBook Airs don't get the retina. That's only on the MacBook Pro, right?

00:12:59   Exactly.

00:13:00   - Yeah, so that's, you know, it's kinda like why

00:13:03   I didn't get the iPad 3, is 'cause there's not enough

00:13:08   there yet, it's why, for the sake of argument,

00:13:11   a friend who's not me would not put iOS 6 on a carry phone.

00:13:15   Isn't this not, like I don't need sports scores,

00:13:17   a friend that's not me does not need sports scores.

00:13:19   You know what I'm saying?

00:13:20   Like there's not enough quite there yet,

00:13:22   and it's almost there with MacBook Air,

00:13:23   just because now I'm hungry, in the same way,

00:13:25   I'm guessing, like Marco, I'm hungry for that like,

00:13:28   that pounding speed.

00:13:29   So you know that phenomenon that's so common that it's a cliche, which is you get your

00:13:36   new computer and you go, "Oh my God, this is so much faster than my other computer."

00:13:41   And within four to nine days you stop noticing that it's faster.

00:13:46   Now maybe this is by virtue of the fact that I do have two main Macs that I do stuff on,

00:13:52   but that MacBook Air still feels so freaking fast to me.

00:13:55   I mean, everything, everything feels so fast.

00:13:57   It's like it really is like a completely different experience.

00:14:00   And I remember where I very first noticed, I've gone back and forth, but now I'm back

00:14:04   on Launch Bar.

00:14:05   But what I really remember was when I first got it and I was still on Quicksilver, it

00:14:08   was the first time in years that Quicksilver was a no-look app.

00:14:10   It had been so long since I could just hit a thing and know that it was working in type.

00:14:15   Do you know what I mean?

00:14:16   Yeah.

00:14:17   Because for a long time, it went, I don't know if it was Quicksilver or my Mac, but

00:14:21   it got to where I'd hit the thing and then I'd look to make sure it got it.

00:14:25   and I'd type to make sure that it had caught up.

00:14:28   And as with that stuff,

00:14:30   I think you linked to this a long time ago,

00:14:32   I think that was you,

00:14:33   linking to the difference in portions of a second

00:14:37   in terms of whether people will buy something on Amazon

00:14:39   or on a site, it's imperceptible.

00:14:41   But it is perceptible somewhere in your brain.

00:14:45   And anyway, that MacBook Air just is so blazing fast.

00:14:47   I think I'm addicted, I'm hungry,

00:14:48   and that's why I think a person like Marco,

00:14:50   who probably has a little too much money,

00:14:52   he'll go out and get that extra little bit.

00:14:53   Because, you know what I mean?

00:14:54   It's like, now at least you know in your mind,

00:14:57   when you're sitting there and waiting

00:14:59   for the Instapaper to get made,

00:15:00   at least in your mind you're knowing

00:15:02   that there's no chance you could be working

00:15:03   on something that's faster.

00:15:05   - Yeah, I see the logic of that, I do.

00:15:07   Especially if you're there.

00:15:08   It's the same reason that I think it's worth it

00:15:10   to buy a good chair.

00:15:12   You know, that you're in it all the time.

00:15:15   You know, I spent, I think I bought this chair

00:15:20   about a year ago, but I spent like the last,

00:15:23   I think I bought that chair at IKEA in 1999 or something like that and it was like IKEA

00:15:28   price desk chair.

00:15:30   So I don't know, maybe I spent 60 bucks in '99 on a chair that I thought was pretty

00:15:36   comfortable.

00:15:37   It didn't have adjustable armrests but they just were perfectly placed for my arms, very

00:15:42   comfortable chair.

00:15:44   And I sat in that chair in my home office until like last year I think and then it finally

00:15:48   – it literally just broke.

00:15:51   My standards for buying a chair were, well, I think, you know, 70, 80 bucks is about what

00:15:55   you spend on an office chair.

00:15:57   And you know what?

00:15:58   I thought that's nuts.

00:15:59   I should get – I should do some research.

00:16:00   Because I'm there – I'm here all day long.

00:16:02   I'm here – I don't know.

00:16:04   How long do I work?

00:16:05   I think I work at least an hour a day.

00:16:07   Well, more importantly, you spend that in like three minutes in Vegas.

00:16:10   Exactly.

00:16:11   So I don't know.

00:16:12   And then I – so I got this chair and I love it.

00:16:13   And I think I spent, I don't know, like $700 on it or something like that.

00:16:17   Which seems crazy to me.

00:16:19   It still seems crazy.

00:16:20   Is that an Aeron?

00:16:21   It's not an Aeron. It's like an Aeron. I forget the name of it, but it might even have been designed.

00:16:28   But it's like super adjustable, ergonomic, that kind of thing?

00:16:33   Yeah, it doesn't have, I don't think, anywhere near as many points of adjustment as an actual

00:16:39   Aeron, but it's like that, and it has a couple of key ways that it's adjustable. And I have it set

00:16:45   up just right, and I always, you know, very, very comfortable in the chair. But it's worth it, you

00:16:50   you know, because I expect to have this chair at least 10 years.

00:16:53   Well, it's like having a sharp knife in the kitchen.

00:16:55   Exactly.

00:16:56   You know what I mean?

00:16:57   It's not that much more money to get and maintain a good knife and keep it sharp because you're

00:17:03   going to be driven a little bit crazy every time you almost cut your finger or every time

00:17:06   you touch a cucumber.

00:17:07   That's no way to live.

00:17:09   I agree with you and that's why I mean like I don't know.

00:17:11   Again, I have so much like probably out of date accumulated Mac conventional wisdom in

00:17:16   my head but I still always feel like if you're gonna buy a Mac by the by the top

00:17:22   of the line one in whatever you're buying but put in as much RAM as you can

00:17:25   get the biggest hard drive you can everything everything and even if it's

00:17:28   imperceptible like when I got that MacBook Air I got the most tricked out

00:17:31   one I could because there's never gonna be a day where I go I wish this thing

00:17:34   was just a little bit slower and you can you know the RAM you can always use more

00:17:39   RAM that's never you're never gonna not need more RAM exactly no I totally agree

00:17:43   It is funny though to think about that. I mean, I use your markdown, I mean it's what I, to the point where people are sick of hearing about it, it's what I do all day long.

00:17:51   And what is that? I mean, it's a text file, and then occasionally it runs a little filter. But I mean, that's really the extent.

00:17:59   Acorn? Like, I go in Acorn and I do stuff in layers, and I mean, it's nothing like what I used to do with Photoshop back in the day.

00:18:06   It's kind of funny though that as that computing power has gone through the roof, I'm doing

00:18:11   less and less stuff that would need it.

00:18:13   I don't play games.

00:18:15   You know what I mean?

00:18:16   But it does make a difference in your, if you like, workflow.

00:18:18   There's so many little things, if you have added little bits of stuff to make your computer

00:18:23   work more the way you want, I think it will tolerate a lot of that stuff better.

00:18:27   I mean, you have more like, I almost want to say like, I don't know, headroom.

00:18:31   Like you're not going to run into those barriers as fast.

00:18:34   You're not going to have to delete stuff from your drive as often.

00:18:36   You're not going to have to run all those utilities we used to have to run to find out

00:18:41   what weird thing was causing the problem.

00:18:44   I like the chair analogy though.

00:18:46   I forget who.

00:18:48   I'm under strict orders from my family to get a new chair.

00:18:52   It looks like something that used to be a well-loved teddy bear and now somebody in

00:18:56   a bus station has been sleeping on.

00:18:58   It is disgusting and it's not ergonomic and I can't feel my left arm.

00:19:03   I think the problem is with you, you should have got the air on because now you don't

00:19:06   have the tricep flexor.

00:19:09   It is.

00:19:10   You're going to have a numb arm too.

00:19:11   It is.

00:19:12   Also, mine is like an Aeron, which is in that it's like a mesh.

00:19:17   Like instead of a padded foam thing that you sit on, it's a mesh thing, which I think if

00:19:24   you really want to think about the accumulated toots that go into a chair, I do think that's

00:19:30   the way to go for long term.

00:19:31   I mean not to get too scatological but there's something.

00:19:36   - Oh, you're saying you air that thing out a little bit.

00:19:39   - You know, I'm saying that that, you know,

00:19:41   I'm saying that maybe that IKEA one that I had

00:19:44   for 12 years had a lot of, you know,

00:19:45   maybe I shouldn't have just thrown it out in the trash.

00:19:47   Maybe I should have taken that to like

00:19:49   some kind of special disposal.

00:19:52   - Will you ever get stuff like, you know,

00:19:53   it's so crazy making, you get stuff in the mail

00:19:55   that's got like private information on it.

00:19:57   You're like, "No, I don't want a credit card thing.

00:19:59   "I don't want this."

00:20:00   And then what do you do?

00:20:01   all of your identifying information.

00:20:03   If you're like me and you're a weirdo,

00:20:05   you either shred it or you tear it into pieces

00:20:07   and put it in different trash cans.

00:20:08   A friend who's not me.

00:20:09   In your case, you probably should have cut out,

00:20:11   I don't want to say the center of the seat,

00:20:13   you should have cut out at least an oval.

00:20:16   I'm thinking an, I don't know if I can say that,

00:20:19   an assalypsis, and then you should probably

00:20:21   either shred that or put that in several garbage cans.

00:20:23   Maybe a hazmat bag.

00:20:24   - Exactly. - Nobody's gonna want that.

00:20:25   You put that on the street, you can harm a kid.

00:20:27   - Exactly.

00:20:28   You live in Philadelphia.

00:20:29   You like a good meal.

00:20:33   I don't know.

00:20:34   Something drives me crazy.

00:20:35   Like on NPR, when they're constantly advertising

00:20:39   the Aeron chair in true black.

00:20:41   I don't know if you get that there.

00:20:42   No.

00:20:42   Every time I hear that, I get angry about Aeron chairs.

00:20:44   It's like, oh, no.

00:20:45   Exclusive Aeron chair, now available in true black.

00:20:49   And you're like, oh, god damn it.

00:20:51   I wish I hadn't bought just that horse crap black one

00:20:53   a few years ago.

00:20:55   Because it really is closer to charcoal.

00:20:56   I have not heard this.

00:20:58   What is the difference? Do they explain the difference between black and true black?

00:21:01   I don't think they need to explain. I think you're in a Johnson rod type situation with this chair stuff.

00:21:06   I mean, I think it's Aerons all the way down. You could, there's always probably, I'm guessing, there's always a more costly, it's like mattresses.

00:21:12   You know what a racket mattress is.

00:21:13   Oh, yeah.

00:21:14   Right? Same deal. Also, can I just say mattresses? Another situation where you should probably cut the ellipsis.

00:21:19   Yeah.

00:21:20   Well, probably several ellipses, especially if you have a main or...

00:21:22   You might need a shredder, like a giant industrial size shredder. You should just run the thing through a shredder.

00:21:26   I don't listen to the radio much. I don't listen to commercial radio much, but when I do it's all about mattresses

00:21:31   I'm just thinking there's a lot of mattresses out there that probably should be dealt with

00:21:34   You know you see street mattresses right you get street mattresses. I

00:21:37   You mean when you just see mattresses on the street

00:21:41   Yeah, people just they're not they put this way John

00:21:45   They're not putting a lot of care into what happens to the mattress a lot

00:21:47   It's a lot of stuff has gone down on that mattress Jonas and Jonas

00:21:50   And I have a running gag when we see a street mattress. This is just something you see in a in a

00:21:54   you know I think any urban area you'll often just see a mattress like shoes on

00:21:59   the wires you just see matches on our joke is you want an app I don't know

00:22:08   what I would do we got one of those we got a phoney Swedish one but now you got

00:22:13   me thinking about the that that aerated butt hammock and now it's gonna be

00:22:18   troubling to me and I feel like I'm have to need to stand up every time I need to

00:22:21   Breakaway I'm thinking the true black Aaron is you say that and all I can

00:22:26   think of is the the business card scene from American Psycho yeah right and then

00:22:34   they're talking about their errands and then the last guy he says well is yours

00:22:38   true black and then the guy knows you know then he gets like the sweat because

00:22:42   he knows he's he's been beaten doesn't have to but that's the sort of thing

00:22:46   And that's why I was reluctant to even consider these $500 and more office chairs because

00:22:53   I just didn't want to get into that whole thing.

00:22:55   And I, you know, it's…

00:22:56   Steven: Don't you feel like a sucker?

00:22:58   I mean, you feel like a sucker for spending…

00:22:59   I mean, I don't know about you, but like I don't spend $700 on chairs very often.

00:23:04   But sometimes I'll go like, "You know, I need to go spend some money on myself to

00:23:07   feel good," let's say.

00:23:09   Maybe the chair… and the chair is a good way to do that.

00:23:11   I don't know if I spend that much.

00:23:12   That's a lot of dough for me.

00:23:13   But my problem is I would go in there and I would want some kind of a John Siracusa

00:23:17   with me.

00:23:18   I would want some kind of a seating lawyer who could go in there and make sure that I'm

00:23:22   not getting the scrooge.

00:23:23   Right.

00:23:24   Because I could easily go in there, like the mattress thing, which let's be clear, it

00:23:27   is a racket.

00:23:28   Mattresses are a racket.

00:23:30   But in my case, it's the same for everything I buy.

00:23:33   And really, not to be on topic, but one thing to Apple's credit is there's really only

00:23:37   so many things you can do to trick it out.

00:23:39   You can go and get a calfskin case for your dingus, but by and large, you're not going

00:23:46   to be able to get—you can't get 96 gigs of RAM just to say you've got it.

00:23:53   The device will work fine with this kind of thing.

00:23:56   I think this is an upscale market thing, Jon.

00:23:57   I think there are always add-ons.

00:23:59   You like Las Vegas.

00:24:00   I bet there's always a nicer suite you can get.

00:24:02   I bet there's a suite no one's been in yet.

00:24:04   There's one that they've just been saving.

00:24:06   Right?

00:24:07   Maybe that's the gimmick.

00:24:08   The gimmick is it's a virgin sweet.

00:24:12   That's pretty good.

00:24:13   I could see two reasons for that.

00:24:14   I could see the one is, which is like, "No, don't even look over there.

00:24:18   That's not for you.

00:24:19   No one's ever been in there."

00:24:20   And that makes them want to upgrade.

00:24:22   But also, for somebody who is a cost-conscious multi-gajillionaire, you go in and say, "Give

00:24:27   me your second nicest sweet."

00:24:28   We got a pope sweet, but we also got a pope John Paul sweet.

00:24:33   Obviously, the man is deceased.

00:24:34   God rest his soul.

00:24:35   He's never even been in there.

00:24:36   I would like the vice presidential suite.

00:24:41   There's a lot of vice in Vegas.

00:24:43   You know, electoral system stays in.

00:24:46   I would like the second wedding suite.

00:24:53   You know what?

00:24:54   We're here on a budget.

00:24:55   Give me the practice wedding suite.

00:24:56   Give me the first marriage suite.

00:24:58   It's in there.

00:24:59   You got some cooks and you got some things that will eventually become misunderstandings,

00:25:05   Maybe a fruit basket.

00:25:06   You imagine that?

00:25:07   You go on your second marriage and you go on your honeymoon and then that night, the

00:25:10   first night you're out on your honeymoon and you call this psalm over to your table

00:25:13   and you're like, "Hey, this is our honeymoon.

00:25:16   Let's go big."

00:25:17   But hey, second marriage.

00:25:18   You know what I mean?

00:25:20   Well, there's a classic line from The Simpsons that I use all the time.

00:25:24   It was celebrating the anniversary and Homer says, "Waiter, bring us a bottle of your

00:25:29   second cheapest champagne."

00:25:31   Yeah.

00:25:32   You know what's hard?

00:25:34   I think you realize, you know, ah, God, don't get me started on weddings.

00:25:37   But okay. So for example, though, I'm, I am so un-ergonomic.

00:25:41   I had a nerve pinch nerve recently that was really, really awful.

00:25:45   And I think I'm still getting rid of it a little bit,

00:25:47   but my ergonomic situation is bad.

00:25:49   And I'm going to confess something on your program that I've never,

00:25:51   I don't think confessed before, which is that my desk. Um,

00:25:56   I was always frustrated with the size of desks because I used to be a very messy

00:25:59   desk person. I'm just, I'm just a not think about it desk person now.

00:26:03   But I used to be, when I had a job, I had piles and piles and piles of stuff on my desk.

00:26:08   But the worst part is, and this is, I'm going to confess something to you, I don't think I've ever said before,

00:26:12   the desk that I have is actually, uh, it's a cafeteria table that I stole from my college.

00:26:19   [laughter]

00:26:21   Okay? So, if anybody's ever seen a photo of anything I've ever done on my desk,

00:26:26   you'll see it's this fake wood grain, and it's one of those giant, like, folding tables that you would have.

00:26:33   in, say, a student center in Sarasota, Florida. So it's a good height for eating inexpensive

00:26:38   food, but it's not a great height for doing work. So I'm doing—you know, the key rookie

00:26:44   mistake in economics, as I understand it, eye stuff aside, is that my elbows are lower

00:26:49   than my hands. And this is why I can't feel my arm. Do you have that?

00:26:52   No, I'm actually—I think in terms of—I don't know. I'm sure an expert could come

00:26:57   and correct me. Now, long ago, I had enough wrist pain and etc. that I did the research

00:27:03   and bought a desk that's very low. So my wrists are always lower than my elbows.

00:27:08   Dr. Justin Marchegiani Do you have one of those

00:27:09   fruity keyboard drop deals with a little drawer?

00:27:11   Dr. Tim Jackson No.

00:27:12   Dr. Justin Marchegiani Doesn't that seem a little bit

00:27:13   unmascaling?

00:27:14   Dr. Tim Jackson No. It all does. I think—

00:27:16   Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah.

00:27:17   Dr. Tim Jackson Unless you're working on it, you know.

00:27:18   Dr. Justin Marchegiani I think anytime you introduce hinges

00:27:20   or anything that's like a drawer, it's kind of emasculating. Do you remember when you could get

00:27:25   You get a roll-out mouse drawer.

00:27:26   You go to the Office Depot, you get a roll-out mouse drawer.

00:27:29   That and you get the little media, you get the CD, like a Billy Bookcase type box thing

00:27:33   where you could put CDs on your desk.

00:27:35   You remember that?

00:27:36   Yeah, I do.

00:27:37   And I always remember thinking with the mouse drawer, "When are you ever going to put that

00:27:40   away?"

00:27:41   I mean, I guess maybe other people aren't like me and if they're doing other things

00:27:45   at their desk than using their computer.

00:27:47   But if I'm at my desk, I'm using the computer, why in the world would I want to put the mouse

00:27:50   away?

00:27:51   Especially then.

00:27:52   Yeah, right.

00:27:53   Exactly.

00:27:54   I said the same thing until I started having relatives.

00:27:57   And now my relatives have these kinds of things,

00:28:00   where it's not really a good,

00:28:02   like it's not a nice desk to have in your kitchen,

00:28:05   and it's really not a nice computer space either.

00:28:08   It's got bills and old pictures of the kids

00:28:10   from when they were cute,

00:28:12   and then you got your mousing area.

00:28:14   I totally agree.

00:28:15   And this is why I'm so angry

00:28:18   about my Mac Pro and Mountain Lion,

00:28:19   is I, as ugly and gross and unhygienic

00:28:22   as my setup is here, it works.

00:28:24   Like everything's where I want it to be.

00:28:26   You know what I mean?

00:28:27   I don't have to noodle with stuff.

00:28:28   I've got the Dell 30-inch deal here.

00:28:31   I got a Dell 20-whatever.

00:28:33   Remember back in the day when you get the Radius

00:28:35   and turn it on its side?

00:28:36   - Oh, I do.

00:28:37   - That's what I do.

00:28:38   So I've got my main screen,

00:28:39   and I know according to all the nerds,

00:28:40   you're supposed to have like seven of the same screen.

00:28:43   But I've got a 30-inch Dell in front of my face here.

00:28:47   And then off to the right, I got my other Dell,

00:28:49   that generic Dell everybody has, turned to the side.

00:28:52   And that's where I keep my mark.app running, so I can see the big document in portrait.

00:28:57   But it all works great. And I got the clicky keyboard, and it just, it all works together.

00:29:03   And I feel like I'd be giving away something if I had either a mouse drawer or...

00:29:07   Now, you have just... Doesn't that seem weird?

00:29:10   You have a clicky keyboard, but do you run it lid down your MacBook Pro?

00:29:14   No, I run it lid open, but screen off.

00:29:17   And that's off to the side?

00:29:21   Off to the side.

00:29:22   Isn't that distracting?

00:29:23   No.

00:29:24   No, because it's turned the other way.

00:29:25   It's turned sideways.

00:29:26   I don't like that at all.

00:29:29   Well, it's not good.

00:29:32   It all looks terrible.

00:29:33   It really does.

00:29:34   I can't even send you a photo because it's embarrassing.

00:29:36   I think I've seen some pictures.

00:29:38   It looks like something out of Brazil.

00:29:40   It looks a little crowded for a man of your stature.

00:29:42   Is it a little crowded in your room?

00:29:43   Yeah, it is, but I need a small room because I will – however big the room is, I'll

00:29:49   fill it up with junk like Andy Rooney. Can I ask you a candid question? Yeah. Does this

00:29:55   have anything to do with your TV? I don't want to be judgey, but is there any chance

00:29:59   that your TV has become a problem? No. Why would my TV be a problem? Because you have

00:30:04   the largest TV anyone's ever owned. Yeah, but that's in a different room. Okay, but

00:30:08   here's what I'm saying. Has an ottoman moved in there? Maybe books? No. Maybe some Tom Petty

00:30:14   records need to be in the other room, but you have so much TV that there's just no room

00:30:17   in there now. That's all, you know, that room is great, but that's because I have

00:30:21   nothing to do with that room. It's just a sofa and a giant 172-inch

00:30:27   plasma screen. That's incredible. And now do you get burned in with that?

00:30:32   Nope. Nope. You don't have to run a screensaver on that or anything? You just

00:30:36   leave it on all the time? No, well, you turn it off when you're done watching

00:30:39   watching your shows. Don't leave it paused, you know. See, Syracuse has got me

00:30:43   spooked about that. He shuts it off the second. He has to go and take a

00:30:47   Whiz he shuts the whole thing down all the way down. Nah, I don't do that. Do you worry about that?

00:30:52   I've got a really really we need to get a new TV

00:30:55   Monitor deal. It's it's from Costco and it's got like three big black marks on the screen at the top

00:31:03   Oh, that doesn't sound good. Looks cloudy. I don't think that's supposed to be like that. I don't know

00:31:07   we got a Mac mini running at home for all of our media stuff, but it's

00:31:12   It's not first first generation, but it's so old

00:31:17   And this sounds crazy, but it's kind of related.

00:31:20   When you're on a MacBook Air a lot of the day,

00:31:21   for that matter an iPad, my iPad 2 is 1,000 times faster

00:31:25   than the thing that's running WMVs, whatever those are,

00:31:28   or MKVs, whatever those are.

00:31:30   You know what I mean?

00:31:31   No, I do know what you mean.

00:31:33   You're mostly an Apple TV man, though, right?

00:31:35   Yeah, pretty much everything I watch is Apple TV.

00:31:38   Are you streaming it or running it off a local box?

00:31:40   Streaming.

00:31:42   Just connect to iTunes, and if it's not on iTunes,

00:31:44   then I'm not watching it.

00:31:45   If you'd asked me six months ago whether that would work, I would say sometimes.

00:31:49   I can't believe how well that works.

00:31:51   It works really well.

00:31:52   It's one of the few things Apple has going on in the cloud that I think they've really

00:31:56   got down stone cold.

00:31:59   No.

00:32:00   There's like three things in that space that they're getting right and almost everything

00:32:04   else is a mess.

00:32:05   Yeah.

00:32:06   I totally agree with you.

00:32:07   I told you.

00:32:08   I think I actually—it was in messages.app, so it probably didn't go through.

00:32:12   but i'm telling you i watched the uh... i would meant to tell you i was the

00:32:14   johnny carson thing

00:32:15   uh...

00:32:16   which is which is really

00:32:18   really interesting

00:32:19   but i watched it like you'd suggest i watched on my ipad in the p_b_s_ at right

00:32:23   which was completely crazy making it was like africa my iphone and i had to go

00:32:27   back to occasionally doing anything on my chumby

00:32:31   or or newbie

00:32:32   i guess anything that ends with an eyes can be a terrible interface except i

00:32:35   had to punch it had to get a special prodding stick

00:32:38   to make the chumby work

00:32:40   You know what I mean?

00:32:40   Like when your kid picks up a Kindle

00:32:41   and tries to touch the screen.

00:32:43   - Yep.

00:32:44   - That's how I felt.

00:32:44   I've gotten so spoiled already on Apple TV streaming

00:32:48   that like when I wanted to watch this PBS thing

00:32:51   and like a notification popped up

00:32:52   and then I'd have to like start over or something.

00:32:54   It was so weird.

00:32:56   - Yeah, I run into that sometimes with

00:32:58   the baseball games 'cause I have the,

00:33:02   I'm a baseball addict.

00:33:03   - MLB thing.

00:33:04   - Yeah, and it works great on Apple TV,

00:33:05   but every once in a while,

00:33:06   and I don't even think it's happened this season,

00:33:08   But every once in a while, the streaming on Apple TV with MLB would get janky.

00:33:14   And I would think, "Well, I'll switch to my phone," because it's right here in my pocket,

00:33:18   "and do the AirPlay to the Apple TV."

00:33:21   And then that's just as good.

00:33:22   But then all of a sudden, somebody sends you a text message and the whole thing just falls

00:33:26   apart because the phone drops the AirPlay so it can show you the alert.

00:33:31   I find that extremely frustrating, personally.

00:33:36   And if I had my druthers, I would wish that that would

00:33:41   work a little bit differently.

00:33:42   And here's a use case from literally

00:33:44   10 minutes before our call.

00:33:46   I was on a phone call with somebody, a long phone call,

00:33:49   and you know what a long phone call means for a man who's 45.

00:33:52   You gotta take a little breather in between, right?

00:33:54   - Yeah.

00:33:55   - Gotta go spend a penny.

00:33:57   And so Jonathan Colton got to hear me urinate

00:33:59   for about 15 seconds, because I thought that I had hit the thing to shut off the call,

00:34:06   but the dingus was up telling me that I had a podcast with Jon Gruber in 10 minutes, and

00:34:10   so Jonathan got a little cross-country treat.

00:34:13   Now doesn't it seem like I should be able to hit the red button?

00:34:18   I mean, you know, there's always the joke about like you can't like slam the phone down

00:34:21   with anybody with a mobile phone, like unless you got a feature phone, but doesn't that

00:34:25   weird that I have to dismiss a pop-up in order to like turn the phone off? Yeah, I

00:34:30   think that the pop-ups those blue pop-up alerts in iOS are oddly modal. They're

00:34:35   like the the JavaScript alerts you know when you just in JavaScript you just

00:34:39   type alert space you know whatever the string here and you get this thing that

00:34:45   just pops up and you can't use anything else in your browser until you you know

00:34:49   it just seems oddly reminds me of not OS 9 but whatever system 9. Well like

00:34:53   like system 6 though, you know what I mean? Where everything was modal.

00:34:56   Well, like where you had to click OK or Cancel and that was it. There was no desktop to click

00:35:00   on.

00:35:01   Right. Anytime an alert in any app would come up, it was system modal. You couldn't switch

00:35:04   to another app. It just seems very, very modal. It just seems, I don't know, just one of those

00:35:10   things where I think I missed it in my, "Hey, little things Apple could fix in iOS 6." It

00:35:16   just seems like they should, I don't know, be at the top and slide down and just sit

00:35:20   there until you deal with them.

00:35:22   Sort of more like a, not called, what's the thing called on the Mac that now they have

00:35:28   in the notification center in Mountain Lion?

00:35:33   Like where you choose between, it's almost like, you're talking about the thing that's

00:35:36   like Growl?

00:35:37   Yeah, Growl.

00:35:38   It should be like Growl and the way that they've done it.

00:35:41   It should just be there and it'll be visible and if you're looking at your phone you can't

00:35:45   miss it.

00:35:46   It's there, but it doesn't interrupt everything that's going on.

00:35:49   Too much of that would be a little Android, but you know how you can choose when you go

00:35:53   to Notification Center, you can choose like none.

00:35:55   And by the way, what a mess.

00:35:57   Ugh.

00:35:58   God.

00:35:59   You know, have me on the show another time where I can just whine.

00:36:02   I've got so much to whine about right now.

00:36:03   Well, you know what?

00:36:04   Let me, before you keep on, let me just stop and do the first sponsor.

00:36:06   Yeah.

00:36:07   Do you have anything you want to talk about that you like?

00:36:08   I do.

00:36:09   I think you're going to like this one.

00:36:10   Okay.

00:36:11   I want to tell you about Launch Center Pro from our friends at AppCubby.

00:36:16   I'm predicting that you've heard of this app.

00:36:18   It's an app for the iPhone and I think it's one of those apps that's really, really hard

00:36:26   to describe. It's sort of like in theory maybe sort of like a Quicksilver for iOS. And I

00:36:34   just wrote this the other day about the Chrome for iOS where if you want to fire off a bookmark

00:36:39   lit in Chrome for iOS, you have to type it in their little Omni box. You go up there

00:36:43   and type this box where you type URLs and search queries. You can also type the name

00:36:47   one of your bookmarks and if it's a bookmark let then you can fire it off.

00:36:51   Whereas on Safari you just tap bookmarks and then there's a list of your bookmarks so tap tap you've

00:36:57   done it. On iOS I like to tap. I don't like to know when you in your little short piece I was

00:37:03   totally with you. I thought I opened Chrome and I was completely perplexed about where I would go.

00:37:07   I rely very heavily on Safari. I have a very carefully crafted series of bookmarks to show

00:37:13   up first. Exactly. Like it's like I've made my own little interface to Safari, which is

00:37:17   like the top six bookmarklets in my bookmarks list, which do things and I know exactly I

00:37:23   can almost navigate it by distance without even looking. I use on the Mac, I use launch

00:37:29   bar, which is a competitor to quicksilver. Alfred's another one. And these are these

00:37:34   things where you fire them up, you type something and hit return. Launch Center Pro is the same

00:37:40   thing in theory for iOS, but instead of firing it and typing something, you fire it and you

00:37:44   tap something. And it's all customizable. You can configure it for the shortcuts you

00:37:48   need. And the idea is that you're going to put it somewhere where it's super, super convenient.

00:37:54   I think it's really, honestly, I think it's intended to be in the dock. It's supposed

00:37:58   to be one of your, like, top four things. And what you can do is you could take something

00:38:02   out like, let's say, your phone app, take it out and create launch center shortcuts

00:38:07   for the people you call the most frequently and then you go home screen launch center

00:38:13   boom call merlin because i call you i mean i probably call you three four times a day

00:38:18   yeah at least especially on weekends um that's there's only one thing that's frustrating about

00:38:24   this app which is that you have to launch it at all right because once it's open there's nothing

00:38:29   the closest i can think of is well you know it's funny like a lot of people like i use search on

00:38:35   on iOS like I would Quicksilver.

00:38:36   Like I'm forever-- I don't like flipping around.

00:38:39   So like if I know I want to get to something,

00:38:40   and I've filled every screen, I've

00:38:42   gotten to that point where I can't see all my apps.

00:38:44   You know what I mean?

00:38:45   So I'll flip over to search and type in some letters,

00:38:48   and that pulls up an app.

00:38:49   That's great.

00:38:50   But the launch center-- I don't want to hijack your thing here,

00:38:52   but I've really been using this app, and it's amazing.

00:38:55   You're right, you go in and customize it.

00:38:56   But it's not even just a launcher.

00:38:59   And you're probably getting to this.

00:39:01   But what's amazing is you can go in, and with a click,

00:39:04   You could do things like create an item in a calendar I like called agenda, create an

00:39:08   item with this location, create an item with this default title.

00:39:12   So like daddy daughter time is a, that's a button.

00:39:14   I click that.

00:39:15   You can, and then you can also have put in the clipboard or put in a contact name or

00:39:19   put in input like manual input and it makes stuff like creating an OmniFocus task, dialing

00:39:24   a number, sending a message to this person.

00:39:26   It's got little variables.

00:39:27   It's a little bit limited, but it's growing and you can launch apps.

00:39:31   It's – I think it's a terrific app.

00:39:34   Dave Asprey A special note just for you.

00:39:37   In upcoming version 1.03 at the top of their list, TextExpander support and arrow.

00:39:44   Tim Cynova Whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:39:46   TextExpander, is it works in the app or it can explode TextExpander shortcuts?

00:39:50   Dave Asprey I think it's going to explode TextExpander

00:39:52   shortcuts.

00:39:53   It's going to work in the app.

00:39:54   Tim Cynova No, that would be magic.

00:39:55   Dave Asprey You just have to see it.

00:39:58   And it also, I have to admit, I was very skeptical.

00:40:01   And this is from our friends at AppCubby.

00:40:03   David Barnard is sort of the poobah over there.

00:40:07   And he's a great guy.

00:40:08   I've linked to him many times from Darren Farb

00:40:08   I've linked to him many times from Darren Farbond.

00:40:10   He's also very open about his iOS experiences.

00:40:15   He documents pretty much OpenKimono,

00:40:19   the financial aspects of being an indie iOS developer.

00:40:23   And he sort of admitted that Launch Center

00:40:25   was sort of just a little like scratching his own itch idea.

00:40:30   And it's turned into a big hit for them, I think.

00:40:32   It's at the top of a lot of these lists in the App Store.

00:40:35   I have to admit, when I first heard it,

00:40:37   I didn't even think it was possible

00:40:38   because it seems like that sort of extending the system type of utility isn't really

00:40:44   possible in the iOS model.

00:40:45   I'll tell you what it seems like. It seems like one of those apps that goes, "Unlock

00:40:49   your screen with a gesture." Or, you know what I mean? One of those apps where you're

00:40:53   like, "Use your fingerprint," and it's totally not that. And that's why it's

00:40:57   got one-star reviews. It seems like it's one—it seems like one of the—and I'm

00:41:00   saying it's not this, but there's all these apps that get on the top 10 with a joke.

00:41:05   seems like a joke. And when I opened this thing up, I thought, "Oh, ha ha. How funny

00:41:09   is that? Click here to add an OmniFocus task with an input thing." And it's hard to explain

00:41:13   this except that it's getting--I would put it up with maybe--I don't know. You know I

00:41:19   don't understand computers. I would put it up with one password in TextExpander in the,

00:41:23   "Oh, my God, how did they get away with something this useful?" Because there's so--and I don't

00:41:28   know how this is working, but more and more apps seem to get added to this. Yes, it's

00:41:32   It's great to be able to launch the app, but I don't know if I'm being clear about this.

00:41:36   You can have preset stuff.

00:41:37   If you do stuff all the time, it's all in there.

00:41:40   That's why I say the only thing that's frustrating is having to launch it.

00:41:43   I wish it was open all the time.

00:41:45   In the same way that you use a folder.

00:41:46   I'm sorry I've hijacked your app.

00:41:47   That's all right.

00:41:48   It's really – I mean, I've really – did you tell me this was going to be the sponsor?

00:41:52   Did I know this?

00:41:53   No, you did not.

00:41:54   No.

00:41:55   This is all through my heart.

00:41:56   This is all top secret.

00:41:57   I don't tell anybody.

00:41:58   I spring the sponsors on the guest of the show.

00:41:59   See, that's smart.

00:42:00   You've got to make people wait for it.

00:42:01   Exactly.

00:42:02   I mean, I'm just telling you, as Merlin Mann, former productivity guru, I think this is

00:42:07   really useful.

00:42:08   And if there's some way that you guys could add in Nebula's Notes, that would be really

00:42:11   awesome.

00:42:12   But launch a text file with this stuff in it.

00:42:15   If you just think it's...

00:42:16   One of those things like TextExpander, and I don't want to turn this into a TextExpander

00:42:19   app, but like, to me, once you use TextExpander, you feel like a sucker to not use it.

00:42:23   I find myself gravitating toward an app.

00:42:25   I will write an email in Nebula's Notes just because it's got all the stuff I want in it.

00:42:29   And in this instance, I mean, I see this app going some very interesting places, as long

00:42:33   as it can get away with it.

00:42:36   Well, one of the things it really takes advantage of, and I think that the heart and soul of

00:42:40   the Launch Center Pro is these URLs that apps support.

00:42:45   And I think most people don't know about this.

00:42:48   Even people like nerds and people who listen to our shows don't know that on iOS, really

00:42:52   the only way one app can talk to another is through custom URLs.

00:42:57   And so like you could have a note taking app like Byword or something like that where Byword

00:43:04   has a special URL instead of HTTP colon slash slash. It's like Byword app or X dash Byword.

00:43:10   I don't know what it is. But Launch Center is programmed with knows about all of these

00:43:17   hundreds maybe I don't know but dozens and dozens of apps.

00:43:18   Steve McLaughlin Yeah. I'm sending you a thing in the dingus

00:43:19   here. There's sites that will show you that there are so many like if you put one password

00:43:25   Is it one password colon slash slash?

00:43:27   It works.

00:43:27   It's an URL scheme, just like would work on the web,

00:43:29   or, as a lot of people don't know, on your Mac as well.

00:43:32   Right.

00:43:33   And so Launch Center knows about these things.

00:43:35   It already knows the format for these things,

00:43:37   so you fill them in.

00:43:38   So you can do stuff.

00:43:40   It's really surprising the shortcuts you can make.

00:43:42   So if you always want to fire off

00:43:45   a new note in this one app for certain things,

00:43:49   boom, you're two taps away.

00:43:50   One tap on Launch Center, one tap on your custom shortcut

00:43:53   that you've made for the thing that you do the most frequently. It's a great app. You

00:43:59   can visit appcubby.com for more information and they have a demo video or just search

00:44:04   for Launch Center in the App Store. I think it's like $1.99 or $2.99, something like that.

00:44:11   I don't know. Just buy it.

00:44:12   I don't want to make your ad too long but maybe after we're done, I'll give you a couple

00:44:14   of these because I got some good ones in here.

00:44:16   Yeah. I knew you would love this app because you're the master of stuff like this.

00:44:19   How about this? You go and you buy one of those stupid – I don't know if the ad's

00:44:23   But you know you go on by one of those stupid flashlight apps

00:44:25   How about this you hit a button called flashlight, and it hits your LED dingus at 100%

00:44:29   How about this have you used toggle yet?

00:44:31   Toggles giant like so you don't want to keep your lady up or your sorry your your mattress partner

00:44:37   And so you hit toggle and you have a selection of two ranges you pick a number between one and a hundred and say when I

00:44:43   Hit toggle change the I don't know how this works John Gruber you hit toggle and suddenly my screen changes to 2% brightness

00:44:50   I hit it again. It goes to like what I keep it around 60 60% brightness, but you go in and you pick what that is

00:44:56   And that sounds weird, but like I mean think about this

00:45:00   This is one thing I loved on my HTC Android that I missed here was the ability like flip a thing and you flip Bluetooth

00:45:06   On and off or whatever, but to have to go change your your embed in your iPad

00:45:09   I can't get an iPad dark enough to not keep my wife awake, but in this instance, yeah

00:45:13   But you know I'm saying it works so if I hit Dropbox you go do a thing

00:45:18   It's like it's it's crazy and then anything you do with contacts. This is gonna obviate 50 different

00:45:22   No offense to anybody else

00:45:23   But it'll obviate like five other apps that you might be using for this hacky stuff because you can just say

00:45:28   Make a phone call to this person with this one click. I'm sorry. I'm going on to I'm gonna try I

00:45:32   You went real fast. You got real merlin II there the total thing is fascinating

00:45:37   It's you hit this button and it toggles your screen brightness between like super bright

00:45:41   You need it because the sun shining and you're otherwise not gonna see it or really really dim

00:45:45   him, like you said, you're in bed, it's nighttime and somebody's next to you trying to sleep,

00:45:52   two taps away instead of fishing into the settings app and going down to display.

00:45:55   Steven: And if you're a nerd, you pick X and Y. That's the neat part.

00:45:58   I can't believe that's possible.

00:45:59   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:00   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:01   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:02   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:03   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:04   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:05   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:06   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:07   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:08   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:09   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:10   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:11   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:12   I can't believe that's possible.

00:46:13   break stuff. This is right there in the App Store. It's a great app.

00:46:16   I've got a bunch. The only calendar app, so my favorite calendar app right now is called

00:46:19   Calendars. It's really, really great. But I also really like one called Agenda. And

00:46:24   so I've got one here where I click on this. I click on, so you've got these, it's hard

00:46:28   to describe. You've got a grid of, what's four times three? You've got 12 of these buttons

00:46:33   on a screen. But then you can have the equivalent of a folder by clicking. And you don't have

00:46:37   to double click. You click it and it pops straight up. So it's thumb, thumb, thumb and

00:46:41   you're just doing your thing. And so it'll go and create an item and like, you know,

00:46:45   whatever. I have a family. Like, go create like time for me and my kid to hang out. You

00:46:49   hit that, it goes and creates it. You can create with a certain location and it's there.

00:46:53   And like any of this life hack nonsense, if you do anything more than once automated,

00:46:57   like write a shell script for it or whatever. And in this instance, it's all baked in here.

00:47:00   The only two downsides, yes, you have to launch it. It would be nice if it were open all the

00:47:03   time. But you know, that's a joke, Jon, when I say that. I'm saying I wish this were bound

00:47:07   to my home key. But the other thing is I could spend all day making these because they are

00:47:12   so useful and they're adding new ones all the time.

00:47:14   Yeah, and it's a very quick – it would be nice if you could set it to launch on double

00:47:18   tap a home or something like that or triple tap home like a way that you could boom just

00:47:24   launch.

00:47:25   Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:26   Anyway, it's a great app.

00:47:27   You could create a new text on it.

00:47:28   Launch Center Pro in the App Store. You could do it all. We'll have a new show next week.

00:47:33   I'll have you back and we'll talk more about our Launch Center shortcuts.

00:47:36   I'd enjoy that. Do you use do? I like do. For timers, do you use do?

00:47:39   Uh, no, I think I just use the...

00:47:42   D-U-E?

00:47:42   Oh yeah, I do use that.

00:47:45   Yeah. Usually you just talk to the lady usually?

00:47:47   No, no, no, no, no. I do use do, D-U-E. I use that, um...

00:47:52   I learned about it from your stupid site, I think. It's like,

00:47:54   I became the nerd go-to timer app. It's got natural language and stuff.

00:47:58   So in here, like let's say for example, I steep in my, you know,

00:48:01   you know how important it is to have a fiddly way to make coffee.

00:48:03   I don't know if you know about this.

00:48:05   I do know about that.

00:48:06   I have an AeroPress and I do them doing the inverse.

00:48:08   We should talk about this on our third show.

00:48:10   I do the inverse, but you know, I'm doing two minutes now, which is a little crazy,

00:48:13   but I will forget about it.

00:48:15   That sounds nuts.

00:48:16   I know myself well enough to know I will forget.

00:48:17   So I've got a two minute timer in, I used it, but I don't know the name launch center

00:48:22   where I hit it and I get a two minute timer.

00:48:24   Boom.

00:48:25   Cause I do that enough.

00:48:26   Now I know anyway.

00:48:28   No.

00:48:29   And I use do for my weekly reminders.

00:48:32   Friday afternoon I have a do that goes off to remind me to thank this week's

00:48:36   during fireball RSS sponsor by a handle of vodka exactly or the trash Wednesday

00:48:43   night trash on with do that way I do that in OmniFocus but yeah that's you

00:48:47   never want to think about that so you don't want that stuff in your calendar

00:48:49   either you know I mean like you don't want your calendar I just want that at

00:48:53   10 o'clock at night on Wednesday just tell me to take the trash out and do do

00:48:57   has nice little things like for this week because Wednesday was not trash day

00:49:01   because of the great US holiday, then there's one button that just says "Tomorrow," same

00:49:06   time.

00:49:07   So that snooze is awesome.

00:49:08   Right.

00:49:09   And it's just one tap and it's done and it doesn't give you any of this stuff like, "Hey,

00:49:12   this is a recurring thing.

00:49:13   Do you want to change this for all of them or just this one?"

00:49:16   You just hit "Tomorrow" and then it bugs me tomorrow.

00:49:20   There's this – the example I always bring up of this, I think we've talked – I'm

00:49:23   positive we talked about this before.

00:49:24   It's like – does it mean bird feed, which was a Twitter app done by Buzz and Nevin,

00:49:30   Yeah, and it got

00:49:33   Picked up by bristly which made it got a little weird

00:49:37   But that was me that app was way where if I got a little weird you mean

00:49:40   Good well what they did was the funniest thing about you got to open a wound

00:49:53   Well, what are you gonna make buzz buzz is gonna have a blog post now

00:49:56   Well, the funniest thing about that though is that it went in the strangest possible way, which was that it was

00:50:01   Say nothing about the usability of the app. Just take a look at it. It was exquisite. It was quiz it

00:50:08   You did not see anything

00:50:09   You didn't need to see it was you needed to see it if you're a power user

00:50:12   You knew where it was and if you weren't you didn't care and Nevin Murgen is a designer

00:50:17   He now works at panic alongside cable Sasser. I mean that that's the caliber of work that Nevin does

00:50:22   I mean, we're talking about a guy who went on to work.

00:50:25   I don't think he worked at Panic!

00:50:26   Yet, but maybe he did.

00:50:27   But anyway, he is a world-class UI designer, and the app looked like it.

00:50:32   It was exquisite.

00:50:34   And then they sold it to Brizly, and Brizly came out with a version that looked like me

00:50:37   and you designed it, you know, like on a cocktail napkin.

00:50:40   Like, it wasn't bad per se, but it was like they erased all of the exquisiteness, and

00:50:46   it was just sort of genericized.

00:50:50   You know what I mean?

00:50:51   sat down and fired up Photoshop and spent a week trying to make a Twitter app, we could

00:50:56   make like what Brizly came out with. And then we would hand it to someone like Nevin and

00:51:00   say, "Now make it look actually good." Like they went the other way.

00:51:03   Right. No, it was like giving Natalie Portman a trucker cap. You're moving in the wrong

00:51:08   direction, Johnny. But it was not… Now for me now, are you a Tweetbot user?

00:51:13   I use the Tweetbot.

00:51:14   See, the Tweetbot for me is another one. Paul guy, he seems a little aggravated sometimes

00:51:18   on the internet, but I love the Tweetbot.

00:51:20   He's a bristly little guy sometimes.

00:51:23   But I really like the Tweetbot and those gestures.

00:51:26   You know, there's this thing, John,

00:51:27   that I've always loved on Macs,

00:51:29   I guess Apple stuff in general,

00:51:31   which is this magical thing where I'll do something

00:51:35   and maybe not even realize what I was doing

00:51:37   and something happens that I didn't even realize

00:51:39   I expected to happen and it worked,

00:51:42   and suddenly it feels like a moment of magic.

00:51:44   And that happens sometimes now in apps where I'll do,

00:51:46   like, I'll go, you know what?

00:51:47   I'm going to try and swipe to the right and see if this takes you back.

00:51:50   I took me back to a list.

00:51:52   That's so freaking cool.

00:51:53   The first time I had my Edomotix plugged into my MacBook Pro and I forgot that I wasn't

00:51:58   on my iPhone and I hit mute and I went, wait a minute, the mute worked on my MacBook Pro.

00:52:06   You know what I mean?

00:52:08   That's so magic when you don't have to sit there and read documentation for that stuff.

00:52:12   It's just, there's a term for this in the user experience, right?

00:52:15   the thing you'd most expect to happen when you do something.

00:52:19   Yeah, there is a term, but we'll just call it the thing that you most expect to

00:52:22   happen. But they also, but the other thing is, you know, and boy I'm creating this

00:52:27   and stuff like Habari, like if I want to, somebody says something nice about Rod

00:52:30   Arc on the line and I want to retude it, I'll let you do a long hold on the

00:52:35   retude button and it asks you which account you want to retude it to. That's

00:52:39   really, that's really, that's really clever because you're not doing all the

00:52:41   modality stuff. I got to change, I got to go over here, I got to re-enter a thingy.

00:52:45   It really is. I do understand that there's a lot of people who think that the whole Tapbots

00:52:50   UI aesthetic is too heavy-handed. I mean, because it is. I mean, it's way over the top,

00:52:55   you know, the whole robot theme. And, you know, I turn off the sounds.

00:52:59   I like the sounds. It's the only app where I keep that nonsense on.

00:53:03   Sometimes I – but sometimes I'll fire up a new device and I'd forget. I don't turn off the sounds.

00:53:08   I don't mind them, but –

00:53:09   Keyboard clicking?

00:53:10   Exactly.

00:53:11   That's a rookie. Oh, man, the keyboard clicking.

00:53:14   I love the keyboard clicking.

00:53:15   You don't use keyboard clicking in iOS?

00:53:18   You really don't?

00:53:19   You're screwing with me.

00:53:20   No, I do use it.

00:53:22   And I have a hard time--

00:53:23   I would type 40 times faster if I had the clicking,

00:53:25   but it just feels so douchey to me to have that on.

00:53:29   I really need it.

00:53:29   I need the feedback.

00:53:31   Huh.

00:53:32   Mine's been getting bad.

00:53:34   Have you gotten this?

00:53:35   I'm ready to do a reset, because I now

00:53:37   get auto corrections of things I've typed incorrectly before.

00:53:41   I'll try to type anything and it'll go like,

00:53:43   for live of dope.

00:53:44   - You know, that's another one of those things

00:53:46   that I can't believe I haven't gotten in the iOS yet is--

00:53:49   - Would you please have me back,

00:53:50   'cause I seriously listen to this.

00:53:52   Do you hear this?

00:53:53   Go ahead.

00:53:55   - What is that?

00:53:55   - No, I've just said that's the beans in my bonnet.

00:53:57   I've been so angry about so many things

00:53:59   Apple's doing right now, I'm losing my mind.

00:54:00   - I thought it was actual letters from actual viewers.

00:54:03   - Actual listeners?

00:54:04   - Yeah, actual viewers.

00:54:05   - Aww, got a pencil here.

00:54:06   - Oh, why can't you go in there in settings?

00:54:09   Why can't you go settings, I don't know,

00:54:11   keyboard and then have a list of the auto-corrections. And you could add, you

00:54:17   know, and fix the ones that get in there. It still seems like you can...

00:54:20   I can totally tell you why not.

00:54:21   You can groove a bad auto-correct, right? You let an auto-correct go once or twice,

00:54:27   and then all of a sudden it's in there and there's nothing you can do about it.

00:54:30   Well, do you get this? I don't know where this is coming from.

00:54:33   At first I thought this was lagginess or me being hitting the wrong

00:54:39   target. Have you gotten the thing where it goes... So I do this thing. Sometimes I want

00:54:43   to speak in a jokey vernacular, and so I'll go, "Hang in!" And so I type "hang in!"

00:54:49   apostrophe, and he goes, "Don't you mean hanging?" I'm like, "No, I absolutely do not mean hanging."

00:54:56   And so I hit the thing. Nothing happens. "Don't you mean hanging?" And I hit it again. Three

00:55:02   times, you get three shots. I hit it three times, I hit on the X, I hit not on the X,

00:55:06   I hit every possible target on the goddamn phone, and then it says, "I've changed this

00:55:10   to hanging." Did you ever get this?

00:55:13   Yeah, I did.

00:55:14   Well, you can't—what—is it trying to grow with me? Why won't it let me be wrong?

00:55:20   I don't know.

00:55:21   But you know the phenomenon—it didn't used to do this for me, and now it does, and I

00:55:25   think it's become sentient, and I don't like it.

00:55:29   It has at least given up on correcting swears.

00:55:32   Did you do the trick?

00:55:34   Duck you. No. What? When you—

00:55:35   make contacts? Yeah, I did. It works for me now that I've taken them out of my address book.

00:55:42   Well, here's a funny one for you. It used to work for me until my contacts stopped syncing right. I

00:55:47   lost—I recently lost—now, bad on me for trying to do more than one sync. I don't know why I think

00:55:52   I can sync with more than one thing. I got all my names. Oh, all the Twitter addresses work fine,

00:55:57   but I lost tons of phone numbers and addresses for no reason that I can understand. They just

00:56:01   went away last week. Which one away?

00:56:05   He got Zeldman. I got Zeldman. You know my favorite though was, I think I told you this one,

00:56:09   my favorites a couple years ago I had 14 copies of Jason, Santa, Santa, Santa, Santa,

00:56:13   Santa, Santa, Santa, Santa, Santa, Maria.

00:56:15   Every time it synced it added an extra Santa.

00:56:19   I blame him. You don't need three names. That seems excessive to me.

00:56:23   How did that happen? We should talk about this

00:56:26   on another show because this is probably too long already, but this is the thing.

00:56:31   What you're describing, yes, I wish I had that.

00:56:33   I wish I could do that on the desktop.

00:56:35   I wish there was a desktop dingus where I could go in and say,

00:56:38   here's all the auto-- you know what I mean?

00:56:40   I know that sounds ridiculous, but why is it

00:56:43   that I have to re-enter those hobbled iOS abbreviations

00:56:46   on every device?

00:56:47   I sit there with two devices open to try and make a match up.

00:56:50   That should be synced through iCloud.

00:56:52   That seems like a no-brainer.

00:56:53   But then what?

00:56:54   Now, going to the experience on iOS of having to do that,

00:56:58   you get this long ugly list that's totally unwieldy and that's the problem with notifications.

00:57:04   Like tell me how a normal person who's not a nerd with time to kill gets all their notifications

00:57:09   the way they want. Because here's what happens. You got a new app? Hey, this thing would like

00:57:13   to give you notifications. Well, of course I want notifications. I'm not an idiot. You

00:57:17   hit it and suddenly you're finding out that somebody just leveled up on Food Book or whatever.

00:57:22   Yeah. You know, Jonas has an old 3GS sitting right now that he plays the games on and he's

00:57:28   always getting notifications from the stupid games he plays. Like, you know, he installs

00:57:32   it, gets a new game for 99 cents and he OKs the get notifications. And it's stupid stuff

00:57:38   like, you know, you haven't played...

00:57:41   We miss you. You're eligible for a smart bomb.

00:57:43   Yeah. Or there's new bullets available in the cowboy game. You know what I mean? And

00:57:47   And it's like, I see that.

00:57:50   I go in there and I just turn it all off.

00:57:52   It's like, no, you don't get to send text messages to my kid

00:57:56   telling them that there's new bullets.

00:57:58   I don't want to rehash my extensive whining I did on Mac

00:58:01   Power Users a couple weeks ago, because I went into a pretty

00:58:04   long thing on this.

00:58:05   But I mean, this is one part that I wish that iCloud, I

00:58:09   think, could do a better job with.

00:58:11   OK, the basic value proposition of the Apple products, the way

00:58:15   that it's evolving in a way that I like and am happy with,

00:58:18   is that they are trying on some level

00:58:20   to simplify the experience.

00:58:22   I mean, you go in, you buy your new iOS device,

00:58:25   you don't need to own a Mac.

00:58:26   That's really cool in theory.

00:58:28   But then how do you delete large files?

00:58:30   How do you know how much space is left on your phone?

00:58:32   Well, obviously, you drill down into Settings

00:58:34   and go into Usage and then go in there.

00:58:35   And you delete all of your music or you keep all of your music.

00:58:38   That's a little ham-fisted for me.

00:58:40   But the problem is, in that instance,

00:58:43   the idea of just owning a phone is great, but like, well, let's take the total corner case.

00:58:47   Let's say you're a super rich guy. You're a super duper rich guy, you just retired, and you say,

00:58:51   "You know what? I'm going to buy one of these iPhones. I'm going to buy the most tricked out one I can.

00:58:54   I'm going to buy all my favorite Thelonious Monk records. I'm going to get a 720p of my granddaughter

00:58:59   taking her first steps, producing your phones full." You walk into the foundation meeting and you look a dick.

00:59:04   Like, how do you deal with all that stuff on there without either going through a million fiddly swipes

00:59:11   or buy a Mac. I actually think Android does a better job of this. Where the first the

00:59:19   first run you mean? Yeah, well that you the basic idea is you buy a new iOS device, let's

00:59:25   just say an iPhone, and you give it your iCloud ID. And it knows some stuff about you. And

00:59:31   it will set up some stuff. And you can do stuff like go to the App Store and see apps

00:59:38   you already own that aren't installed on the phone, and it'll offer to let you back up

00:59:42   from an iCloud backup. But everything doesn't come with that, it seems to me. It doesn't

00:59:48   seem like you get everything. It's pretty close.

00:59:50   If you do a rest—no, no. I've done—I've had two unsuccessful restores and one successful

00:59:56   restore. The first time it was successful, which seemed like Disney magic, but I did

01:00:01   a restore of my iPad—when I got an iPad 2. Oh, you know, and the thing is, John, this

01:00:06   This is the albatross. We must constantly mention this to people. Click to encrypt in

01:00:10   iTunes because it will keep your passwords. Why is that not default?

01:00:13   I have no idea.

01:00:15   You will not get your settings unless you have that turned on. That's a Marco trick.

01:00:18   Are we being clear about what this is?

01:00:20   I got it. When you back up an iOS device to your Mac or presumably a Windows machine,

01:00:28   not to iCloud but to your Mac. I say do both. I do the iCloud backups and the Mac backups

01:00:32   because I figured you can't lose with too much backup.

01:00:35   Yeah, built in suspenders.

01:00:36   When you back up to your Mac, if you encrypt the backup, even if you are not worried about

01:00:40   somebody snooping into your backup, even if you are completely certain that even if you're

01:00:45   using the file vault and you feel like you're covered because your whole disk is encrypted,

01:00:49   so why encrypt your backup?

01:00:51   You got to click that button and encrypt your backup with a password because then and only

01:00:57   then your backup will include your passwords.

01:01:01   And then when you restore from that backup, you don't have to enter every single email

01:01:04   accounts password again which could have been so much easier to explain if there

01:01:09   was a checkbox that said remember my settings right and then a question mark

01:01:14   for help I can't tell you I I'm the exact same as you were I was went years

01:01:18   on iOS without doing that because I was not concerned about the the the security

01:01:23   I anybody who had access to my Mac what's the wrong way to phrase it I mean

01:01:27   right it's the it's really it's really bananas I mean because that's what your

01:01:31   the value of that, that seems like a nerd bit to flip.

01:01:35   - Right.

01:01:36   - Right?

01:01:36   But it's absolutely, and you know,

01:01:38   when it saved my butt was a friend who's not me

01:01:42   was on iOS 5 beta, Lion beta, and ATV beta,

01:01:47   ATV 2 beta all at the same time.

01:01:51   No, sorry, originally.

01:01:53   Anyway, the point being, I was constantly restoring,

01:01:56   constantly, constantly, constantly restoring.

01:01:57   I mean, you were probably on the 5 beta.

01:02:00   Do you remember when it was like, oh my god,

01:02:02   suddenly wifi syncing worked.

01:02:03   - Yeah. - Ah!

01:02:04   And you're like, this is the most amazing.

01:02:05   And then suddenly one day, not only did it stop working,

01:02:09   but it wouldn't take a tethered.

01:02:11   Did you get this one?

01:02:12   Where it wouldn't not only stop backing up,

01:02:14   excuse me, not only stop syncing with iTunes,

01:02:17   but you couldn't re-tether it.

01:02:19   It thought it was like a dead other,

01:02:21   somebody else's phone.

01:02:23   So you had to do a full restore.

01:02:24   So God save you, you better have a full backup of that

01:02:28   with your passwords, or you're gonna lose half a day

01:02:31   every time that happens.

01:02:32   So, I mean, that's an example though.

01:02:35   That would be a piece of UI.

01:02:37   What I'm trying to say though is like,

01:02:38   in the past in iTunes, as flawed and goofy as iTunes is,

01:02:42   at least I always had a sense that there's a folder somewhere

01:02:44   where all my MP3s live, and let me be clear,

01:02:47   I love iTunes Match.

01:02:48   I have become a big fan of iTunes Match in a lot of ways,

01:02:51   but we're losing our sense of place with Apple devices,

01:02:53   and that's one thing that's starting to frustrate me.

01:02:55   We're getting a collision of the embarrassment of riches,

01:02:59   of all the great stuff we can have.

01:03:00   My gosh, you're kidding me.

01:03:02   I throw in some 128K version of this song

01:03:05   and now it's just everywhere?

01:03:06   How is that allowed to happen?

01:03:08   That's amazing.

01:03:09   But if I pull down, if that rich guy goes, or gal,

01:03:12   goes and pulls down every Thelonious Monk record at 256K,

01:03:17   bit, whatever, those are big files.

01:03:20   They bought all that music.

01:03:21   Where does that music live?

01:03:22   Well, obviously, you just go to iTunes

01:03:23   so you can delete it and redownload it.

01:03:25   Is that super obvious to most people, do you think?

01:03:28   - I don't know.

01:03:29   I don't know that it is.

01:03:30   And I still think, I think that the roots of iOS

01:03:34   being without any iCloud,

01:03:36   just being something that syncs to your Mac,

01:03:39   it still is not shaking those roots.

01:03:41   I don't think it's as clear

01:03:42   that the stuff canonically lives in,

01:03:46   or to put it in there--

01:03:48   - There's certainly not one--

01:03:48   - The truth is in the cloud.

01:03:50   - There's certainly not one correct way to do it anymore,

01:03:52   either in theory or practice.

01:03:54   I mean, the iCloud syncing is great.

01:03:56   Again, though, I mean, there's all kinds of things where the trust is not there for me.

01:04:02   I still don't understand why I can't enter this one email address in through a CI messages

01:04:07   in this one place.

01:04:08   It's in use on another device.

01:04:10   Okay, what device is that?

01:04:13   Like I don't know how to fix that and I went to college and stuff.

01:04:16   I think there's a lot of stuff that's pretty confusing, but the collision that I think

01:04:20   is interesting from a John Gruber standpoint is that it is so great that we've got all

01:04:24   this stuff. The fact that iCloud works at all is amazing. The fact, you know, I've

01:04:28   liked Dropbox in some ways, which is better. It is amazing that that works, but now you've

01:04:34   got this collision of, "Oh my gosh, abbreviations on iOS are great." But if they don't sync,

01:04:39   I've got to go reenter those. I mean...

01:04:41   Yeah, why don't they sync?

01:04:42   Exactly.

01:04:43   Are they supposed to... Is it a bug or... I don't get that.

01:04:45   I don't know. For now, though, it certainly doesn't make me worry about the future of

01:04:49   TextExpander, that's for sure. At least in my head. But here's the problem with that.

01:04:54   Okay, so that's frustrating.

01:04:55   I understand Apple's great about rolling stuff up,

01:04:57   rolling stuff out when it's ready.

01:04:59   So I get that.

01:05:00   You don't want to overwhelm people

01:05:01   with all these different things.

01:05:03   But first of all, that feels real hacky.

01:05:05   I'm glad it's there, but it's hacky.

01:05:07   I would have to manually keep those updated

01:05:09   all over the place.

01:05:10   But look at every app I use.

01:05:11   Instacast, Nebula's Notes,

01:05:14   Nebula's Notes Macros I can export

01:05:16   and then import through Dropbox to anywhere.

01:05:19   I can spit out my Instacast as OPML and move it anywhere.

01:05:23   And this is where I get my tinfoil hat on, is that collision of the power of what this

01:05:30   can do, the ability to have these high-quality files.

01:05:34   You know, those 720p videos add up.

01:05:38   You know what I mean?

01:05:39   All that stuff then colliding with, "Okay, now how do I handle having all these notifications?"

01:05:44   That's a lot of bits to flip on a screen that size.

01:05:46   Do you know what I mean?

01:05:49   It's an interesting inflection point for Apple, because as they try and make this more simple,

01:05:52   they do add the sandboxing as they try and bring in this fatter middle part of

01:05:56   the adoption curve I think these collisions are gonna get interesting to

01:05:59   watch and I'm sure they will in the in time fix them even as new collisions

01:06:02   come up but do you see that as attention at all did I'm afraid I don't know if

01:06:07   I'm posing this question right yeah I'm not sure you are either you've got a lot

01:06:12   of great stuff out there they're trying to make it simple but they're trying to

01:06:14   potentially introduce simplicity into something that has native complexity

01:06:18   Yeah, like where my music lives and how I not get this notification or even where your preferences live

01:06:24   Like in the old days. It used to be real simple. It was in your preferences folder

01:06:28   Even an island you would well on the Mac not on iOS because you never had access to the folders even on even on iOS

01:06:35   Though I mean why increasingly I'm seeing preferences inside of apps

01:06:39   But there's still tons of times where I buy an app and I buy a lot of apps and I'll open it up

01:06:43   And I'll go hmm I can change some things in here

01:06:46   but it feels like I can probably change more,

01:06:48   so what do I do?

01:06:49   I click the home button, I go to settings,

01:06:52   and then I go to discover that there's an area in there

01:06:54   where I can change more.

01:06:56   And sometimes that is one, I forgot what they call it,

01:06:58   not a radio button, but one flip check box

01:07:01   that'll be reset cache, it might just be that.

01:07:03   It might be, or it might be something like GoodReader

01:07:07   where you're like, oh my god,

01:07:07   there's like 16 pages of preferences in here.

01:07:10   - Right.

01:07:10   - And I don't feel like there's any kind of standard for,

01:07:12   is there a standard for where that stuff should go?

01:07:14   No, not really. They used to say that used to be the HIG, the guideline was that all

01:07:22   settings go in the settings app and that apps shouldn't have settings. And that's, they

01:07:27   might even still be in the HIG, but nobody, nobody follows that.

01:07:31   Because there's too many settings that are too, you don't want to, you know, like in

01:07:38   Tweetbot on a per account basis you can set up a read it later service like instapaper

01:07:45   or pinboard.

01:07:46   Steve: Or image posting or shortening or muting. I think you can mute hashtags and people on

01:07:55   one account and not on another.

01:07:56   Dave: Right. It would be infuriating if you had to go to the settings app to do that.

01:08:02   It belongs in the app. But my point though is more like in the old days, if you had two

01:08:08   machines and two Macs and you want the exact same BB edit set up in both, you

01:08:14   knew what to do. Go to the one that set up the way you want to, take the

01:08:18   preferences, copy them over to the other one, put them in the preferences folder,

01:08:21   and then boom you've got them. Now that wouldn't it wouldn't stay in sync but

01:08:24   you could at least you knew though that it wouldn't stay in sync, you know, and

01:08:28   you could start with a known good preferences file, put it over on the

01:08:32   other one, and then you'd have those preferences. You can't, there's no way to

01:08:35   to do that in iOS? Like if you've got this, you know, you've got all these cool abbreviations

01:08:41   set up on the one device and now you've got this other device and you want those abbreviations,

01:08:44   well how do you, you've got to sit there and type them all out by hand.

01:08:48   Right. Yeah. I, hmm, I don't know. There's, there's, I guess the, the, the, the tinfoil

01:08:56   ha part for me is that the, um, I don't want to say lack of vision because there's certainly

01:09:03   lot of vision happening. But there's certainly a lot of ambition going on with all of these

01:09:07   things. But it's a weird universe where--it's a strange universe to me where something like

01:09:14   the hacky abbreviation stuff sits alongside the ability to restore an iPad and where--I

01:09:24   don't know. I just feel like I don't have this total level of confidence, like you just

01:09:27   said. I mean, of course, back in the day, you could just take extensions out and restart

01:09:31   and that would work.

01:09:32   I'm happy to give that up if stuff runs,

01:09:35   you know what I mean?

01:09:36   I don't know what that is.

01:09:38   I don't know if that's protected memory, journaling,

01:09:39   whatever, like I'm glad I don't have to deal

01:09:40   with that stuff anymore personally.

01:09:42   But at the same time, the implementation of this simplicity

01:09:47   combined with things like sandboxing gives me the fear

01:09:52   in terms of how I actually work.

01:09:53   And I don't mean to whine.

01:09:55   I know people will say I'm whining about Apple,

01:09:57   but do you know what I'm saying?

01:09:58   Like it's still, like when I open up TextEdit

01:10:01   and it gives me a dialog box.

01:10:03   Oh, sorry, when a friend who's not me opens TextEdit

01:10:07   on Mountain Lion and gets a dialog box for the cloud,

01:10:10   it's like, what?

01:10:12   Like, I don't, you know what I mean?

01:10:14   That feels really perplexing to me.

01:10:17   - It's kind of awesome, though, in a different way,

01:10:19   if you're not, if you just come at it as like,

01:10:21   with like a fresh set of eyes.

01:10:24   - I could see that particularly being true for you

01:10:27   as, for example, a BB Edit user, right?

01:10:30   Because do you ever sit there and go, oh,

01:10:32   what should I open this text file in?

01:10:36   I'm guessing you very rarely-- and it's

01:10:38   going to be BBEdit or the terminal, maybe, right?

01:10:42   I mean, if you open a text file, it's going to be in BBEdit.

01:10:45   And so having all of your cloudy stuff, iCloud-ish stuff,

01:10:50   in that one BBEdit barrel is OK with you.

01:10:55   Yeah, but that's-- for somebody like me and you,

01:10:59   Dropbox is the better solution.

01:11:01   Everything I do in BB Edit is saved in a Dropbox folder.

01:11:04   I'm not really looking-- I don't really care if BB Edit ever

01:11:07   supports iCloud.

01:11:08   I don't think I would-- I doubt I would run an app store

01:11:12   version of BB Edit.

01:11:13   Do you wonder if it'll ever have to?

01:11:15   Don't you wonder?

01:11:19   I mean, I can't see-- I don't see a way

01:11:21   that that's not coming.

01:11:23   And I'm not trying to be slippery slip guy.

01:11:24   But it's hard for me to imagine a feature where that's not

01:11:29   the way you're at least supposed to do it.

01:11:31   Yeah, it's, I think I wrote about this recently where there's some weird carrot and stick

01:11:36   action and I don't think Apple is ever, ever going to, I really don't. I think as so long

01:11:42   as there is a Mac that there will not, there will not be a everything has to come through

01:11:47   the app store rule. The gatekeeper thing is a lot of work and they're trying to really

01:11:52   trying to do the right thing, which is allow third party apps that didn't go through the

01:11:56   App Store to have the security and sort of peace of mind that hey it's not

01:12:01   malware or and it's not going to do anything it's not supposed to do and if

01:12:05   it is Apple can revoke this sort of certification and keep it from running

01:12:11   elsewhere again great great stuff and I really don't think that that's a half

01:12:15   step towards making everybody do the App Store I really think it's a half step

01:12:18   towards hey let's bring some of these advantages of the App Store to other apps

01:12:23   the way that they're doing it other is to add these new features that you can

01:12:28   only get through the App Store and if the features are compelling enough

01:12:31   everybody's going to opt in you know and you said as much in your article if you

01:12:37   want I think is yes it's you're feeling excited I read but if you want to have

01:12:42   iCloud stuff you have to sell your it has to go through the App Store is that

01:12:47   correct right that's and you know and I can see there's good reasons for that

01:12:51   that beyond just being trying to get 30% of the revenue from the apps being sold.

01:12:59   It's not just about the money and I really you know financially the money

01:13:02   that Apple gets from the app store it's nothing to sneeze at but it's a red

01:13:05   herring I think the security thing is a great idea that's also a red herring.

01:13:08   It's about control. They value the control far more than they value

01:13:14   the money. I mean that's you know they could you know the money from the App

01:13:19   store probably doesn't even I don't even know if it covers the charitable contributions they

01:13:22   that they do for the employees with the matching funds I mean it's just not that much money it's

01:13:27   the control they want control more than they want more money they make all the money all the money

01:13:31   comes from selling the hardware where by all I mean all right effectively all yeah yeah you know

01:13:38   put a little asterisk there it's the control and it's the fact that hey we've got these this nice

01:13:45   these data centers and this is where all the iCloud stuff is sold and we control everything

01:13:51   that's stored here. We know everything. Now that you know like you can set you can email yourself

01:13:56   a copy of anything so it's like you know and the email is served on their iCloud servers but they

01:14:01   know that you know that's going through IMAP it's under their control. They're not going to so I

01:14:08   don't mean it in that they control the content I just mean that they control the means right.

01:14:13   So if every single app that wants to do read-write to iCloud has to, they want to have control

01:14:19   over it, that means it has to go through the app store.

01:14:23   So I understand that.

01:14:24   And for some apps, iCloud syncing is so compelling that they're going to go app store only.

01:14:28   I mean, and speaking of bare-bones software, that's what they're going to do with Yojimbo.

01:14:31   Jared Ranerelle They have to, right?

01:14:34   I mean, the MobileMe things, they're one of the most notorious examples.

01:14:40   I mean, not that they're notorious, but that one of the heartbreaking examples of they

01:14:44   had this app that was working great for nerds.

01:14:47   And now it's not as simple as just changing a few lines of code.

01:14:51   It's really a different API, right?

01:14:53   Right.

01:14:54   I mean, yeah, heartbreaking in the sense of an awful lot of very smart guys, long-term

01:15:01   Apple developers.

01:15:03   I mean, honestly, personal friends of mine also.

01:15:06   But just the good guys.

01:15:08   I mean, I don't think there's anybody, whether you use their apps or not, nobody thinks about

01:15:12   barebone software and thinks that they're anything other than good guys.

01:15:14   But they're burning cycles on trying to keep up with this thing.

01:15:17   Well, no, but they've lost – no, but it's the tragedy – I mean, again, and it's tragedy

01:15:21   in terms of lost developer time, not tragedy in terms of, you know, Darfur or something

01:15:25   like that.

01:15:26   You know, I mean, we're, you know, we're nerds.

01:15:29   But, you know, so keep it in perspective.

01:15:31   But no, but the way Yojimbo used to work with MobileMe was fantastic.

01:15:36   It was like the – it was the existence proof that MobileMe actually wasn't a total garbage,

01:15:41   its reputation notwithstanding.

01:15:43   In fact, they actually – the syncing that Yojimbo did through MobileMe, like it shook

01:15:47   out a ton of bugs in MobileMe's sync service.

01:15:52   And it worked.

01:15:53   It absolutely worked.

01:15:54   I can vouch for it.

01:15:55   For a long time, I did two Macs, both running Yojimbo and synced through MobileMe and I

01:16:02   don't think I ever lost a keystroke.

01:16:05   And I would type it on one, on my air, and shut the lid,

01:16:09   and turn, and just 10 seconds later,

01:16:11   I'm looking at my other machine,

01:16:12   and there's that bookmark that I just YoJumbo'd

01:16:14   on the machine right next to it.

01:16:16   It was great, and now it's gone, 'cause MobileMe's gone.

01:16:20   And if you want to sync to YoJumbo libraries,

01:16:22   which is super, super useful,

01:16:24   you can do it now through Dropbox,

01:16:27   but it's kind of a hack, and you have to quit one copy

01:16:31   of YoJumbo before you launch the other, and stuff like that.

01:16:33   And they're gonna switch to iCloud syncing,

01:16:34   but because they're switching to iCloud syncing,

01:16:37   now it has to be an app store only app.

01:16:39   And I think you're going to hear that story more and more.

01:16:41   Well, and yeah, you're going to see people like Manton

01:16:44   or Smile that's just going to have to take it someplace else,

01:16:48   which is certainly a bummer as well.

01:16:50   But it feels like-- and I'm not saying this is by design,

01:16:53   but there's always a little bit of sugar in the medicine.

01:16:56   There's always-- I mean, iCloud, syncing your iCloud documents

01:17:01   through various things, it's great.

01:17:03   I mean, it's a really neat thing.

01:17:04   iCloud preferences, any of that stuff, it's a really neat idea.

01:17:08   On some level, it does really feel like they're solving a problem that's already been solved

01:17:13   better by Dropbox, which for me has just worked so well that it's kind of scary how well it

01:17:19   works.

01:17:20   But just for an edge case like me, what I give up in potentially losing the ability

01:17:26   to have this text file being usable by different apps, that's a sucky tradeoff for me.

01:17:34   But I don't know, I mean, we've talked about this before,

01:17:37   everybody's talked about this,

01:17:38   but you gotta follow Apple's lead,

01:17:40   or you're gonna get totally left behind.

01:17:41   - Right. - You know, thinking,

01:17:43   you know what, if you want your scroll to go this way,

01:17:48   enjoy that for maybe a year,

01:17:50   because that little legacy button, I like it the old way,

01:17:54   is probably gonna go away at some point.

01:17:56   You know what I mean?

01:17:57   But the hard part for me, as a person who's used this stuff

01:18:02   25 years or however long it's been. Is that right? Something like that? Wow, that's freaky.

01:18:06   Yeah, 25 years. Is that I've always found the most interesting stuff on the edges and

01:18:12   the things that compensate for something Apple wasn't doing often ended up being the thing

01:18:16   that I really love. Even if it was something that Apple was doing, I frequently found a

01:18:20   way to do it better and that was okay. You know what I mean? Obviously, there's things

01:18:25   like transmit. I don't think they had an FTP app apart from the terminal. So, I mean, stuff

01:18:30   I transmit no problem, but you know, I don't even say deficits. I mean, I would say that

01:18:36   Apple has for the last however many, five, ten years, has been getting better and better

01:18:40   and better at making something extremely stable that you could add on to to enhance your experience

01:18:47   with what you're doing on your Mac in particular. And I've developed certain habits around that

01:18:54   and I have certain expectations about how things work. And, you know, a friend who's

01:18:59   not me has been really wondering, like, "I wonder why Open With isn't available in the

01:19:05   Finder sometimes?" And seeing that -- because I use -- oh, do you use Open With a lot? Probably

01:19:11   not.

01:19:12   Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:19:13   I use Open With all the time. So here we're talking about control click or right click

01:19:18   on a document and you're presented with a menu of every app that your Mac knows of that

01:19:24   could open this document. So if that's a text file or a .mov, there'll be a lot. Well, why

01:19:29   the heck would you want this? Wouldn't you just want to click on HTML and have it open

01:19:32   in Safari? No. I might want to go edit that in BBEdit, which is my go-to for HTML editing.

01:19:39   I might want to open that in TextMate if I want to turn that into Markdown and do the

01:19:42   writing because that's where I do the writing. I might want to open it in Chrome. If it's

01:19:45   movie so when we're done with this call I will have a .mov file of two tracks

01:19:50   and the only app that lets me edit that well is QuickTime Player 7 right if I

01:19:58   open that in QuickTime it's not I mean it's not even a comparison do you keep

01:20:03   quick do you keep seven around I think I do on my machine but I haven't had a

01:20:07   reason for it to use it for a while but on the face of it clicking .mov that

01:20:11   makes a lot of sense that that would open in whatever I guess that would be

01:20:14   iTunes. But like what if you like VLC? Well, that's a much better experience in a lot of

01:20:20   ways for me, but...

01:20:21   Yeah. Yeah. Media files are the big use for Open With, because, you know, what are you

01:20:25   going to do with an image? It could be widely, widely varied. I just want to look at it.

01:20:28   Right.

01:20:29   Well, then I just open in preview or whatever. But I want to edit it.

01:20:31   Yeah, preview is a good guess. But if, yeah, exactly, if you want to open that with Acorn.

01:20:34   I want to edit it. I want to open it in Acorn. But I actually, I don't want to use Acorn

01:20:38   because I want better... I specifically want to put text in it, and I like the way that

01:20:43   Pixelmator does text better, so I want to open it in Pixelmator, you know.

01:20:46   Right.

01:20:47   Or something like that.

01:20:49   Or I just want to open it in a browser because I actually want to see how this ping, if the

01:20:53   colors are actually going to look good in the browser as I think they are because it's,

01:20:56   you know, it's got a color profile.

01:20:58   Right.

01:20:59   So yeah, I always open with all the time.

01:21:01   And is that – it might just be me, but I feel like –

01:21:05   I think that's just you.

01:21:06   I'm looking in – or a guy over here who I –

01:21:09   Is not you.

01:21:10   Did you get an open list?

01:21:11   He was not me.

01:21:12   Yeah, I got an open list.

01:21:13   I think you might have to add that for your app.

01:21:17   I'm not sure.

01:21:19   You know what, I have no idea, I'm talking on my butt.

01:21:20   I'll ask my friend who's not me to check it out.

01:21:22   But I don't know.

01:21:23   Anyway, eh.

01:21:24   It's, there's so much exciting and good stuff happening,

01:21:27   and I think it's sometimes frustrating

01:21:30   for people inside and outside the Apple bubble,

01:21:34   because there's so much that Apple does really well

01:21:36   a lot of the time, and there's almost always something

01:21:39   that they could be doing better,

01:21:41   that I think as you have documented over time,

01:21:44   that they're probably working on.

01:21:46   And that's served me so well in the last few years,

01:21:49   and it's only recently that I've gotten

01:21:50   a little bit of the fear.

01:21:52   And really it is because it's not because

01:21:54   I'm being perfidious, it's because I really,

01:21:56   this is what I use.

01:21:58   I don't know what else I would use besides this stuff.

01:22:00   But at this point for me, I can afford to be a jackass

01:22:03   who makes fun of people who are fiddly with their workflow

01:22:05   'cause I have a workflow that's bulletproof.

01:22:08   But it's a workflow that I will have to amend, for sure.

01:22:11   if I want to keep using all this stuff in the way that I suspect it's going.

01:22:15   Yeah, the show's running a little long.

01:22:17   Oh, I'm sorry.

01:22:18   No, that's all right.

01:22:19   Well, who knew that would happen with you?

01:22:21   But I have a little bit more I want to talk to you about.

01:22:23   But I want to stop and do a second sponsor break.

01:22:26   I want to tell you about Tapstream for iOS, Mac, and Android.

01:22:32   May ring a bell.

01:22:33   They sponsored my website.

01:22:35   Maybe you've heard of it, Daring Fireball?

01:22:37   They sponsored the site last week.

01:22:40   guys. What they've got, they're app developers and they made this for themselves to sort

01:22:46   of scratch their own itch. It's a little bit of analytics that you can put in an app. You

01:22:51   can put in a Mac app, iOS app, Android app. And a little bit of that, a little bit of

01:22:58   JavaScript on your website and boom, you can track all sorts of stuff that people are doing

01:23:03   in your app and see where your app is getting recognized from, where you have a thousand

01:23:11   downloads of your app.

01:23:12   Well, where did people hear of it?

01:23:14   Did they hear about it on Daring Fireball?

01:23:16   Did they get it from the unofficial Apple web blog?

01:23:20   Did they get it from Kung Fu Grip?

01:23:23   This will tell you.

01:23:26   It's a great service, super easy to implement.

01:23:28   They give you the code, just a little bit of JavaScript that you add to your website.

01:23:31   They have an SDK.

01:23:32   You just drop it in your app and that's it.

01:23:34   You're done.

01:23:35   Very, very reasonably priced.

01:23:38   They've got a free thing that you can try it out.

01:23:43   You get the basic limit.

01:23:45   You get the basic features with a free account so you can see how it works before you pay

01:23:48   for anything.

01:23:50   A lot of developers, they may not even need anymore for that, but they have a pro account,

01:23:55   reasonably priced.

01:23:57   Gives you all the information you want.

01:23:58   And the best thing about this, this is my favorite part.

01:24:00   I mentioned this last week on the site, but it makes me so happy is that the whole reason

01:24:08   they're sponsoring this show and the reason they sponsor my website to promote Tapstream

01:24:13   was that they used Tapstream while it was in development to measure the effectiveness

01:24:18   of a daring fireball sponsorship for their app called Tapfolio Trending. That's the name

01:24:26   of their stock app. It's actually a very beautiful app too. You could take a look at that too

01:24:29   on the App Store tap folio tapstream while it was in development saw that it was an effective

01:24:34   way of getting an app known and then they came back to sponsor again to tell you about

01:24:39   tapstream if you're an app developer go look at it go to tapstream.com and it's great stuff

01:24:47   so hungry they're so hungry for that kind of information yeah because you get nothing

01:24:53   from apple you just get nothing you just get a thing from apple that you get nothing and

01:24:57   you'll like it.

01:24:58   Right.

01:24:59   It just gives you a number.

01:25:00   That's just it.

01:25:01   You go to the Apple.

01:25:02   What does Apple tell you if your app has – they just give you a number.

01:25:06   It says 500.

01:25:09   And that's it.

01:25:10   And then the next week, it just says 375.

01:25:12   That's it.

01:25:13   That's all you know.

01:25:14   And then a check comes at the end of the month.

01:25:16   You don't know anything.

01:25:17   You've got to have something like Tapstream if you want to figure out how the hell people

01:25:19   are actually finding out where your app is coming from.

01:25:22   Can you imagine running a website if you didn't have something that tells you you're like

01:25:24   referrers?

01:25:25   It would be really frustrating to, again our friend Marco is an example that comes to mind,

01:25:32   but somebody who's wanting to decide how to keep, I'm not going to use that as a transitive

01:25:39   verb, if they want to make sure their business keeps growing, they're going to need to decide

01:25:43   where to level resources, where to put things.

01:25:45   And it's not simply a douche thing or an ego surfing thing, it's business intelligence

01:25:50   in the actual sense of the word.

01:25:51   again you're having to hack that in yourself but boy what a great service to

01:25:56   have and does it do stuff like I mean so so how would it know that it came from

01:26:01   your site because you can't say Disney Magic you know I don't even know how it

01:26:08   works I guess because the link you give it with the link and then the link comes

01:26:12   in with a little bit of like a refer code type thing and but it works and you

01:26:19   Now are you are you making your own dog food eating your own dog food because it sounds like there's dog food involved here

01:26:23   This is actually work the reason they're advertising here if I understand you correctly mr.

01:26:27   Carson is that is that it actually worked. This is they're here because it works right that's pretty cool

01:26:32   Where do people go to learn learn more about this?

01:26:35   You go to tap stream calm tap stream calm

01:26:44   You need any one of those things like I've got where people know when the ads over yeah

01:26:48   I don't know. I don't really have that they kind of just fade to gray

01:26:51   Hey, we're back I

01:26:56   That was good we got into some good stuff in now hey seem brave

01:27:01   No, not yet. I have not we haven't taken the boy to see any of these summer movies it now

01:27:05   We're so far, but we saw the Avengers, but I haven't seen one since so we haven't seen brave

01:27:09   We wanted to see Men in Black

01:27:11   I don't even know if that's even in the theaters anymore. So forget about that. Gotta see brave. Haven't seen Spider-Man

01:27:15   You gotta hand me back

01:27:18   Did you want to ask me a question? Well, here's the thing I wanted to I just want to go through this list

01:27:22   It's a little newsy. It's a little topical a little little, you know, it satisfies, you know

01:27:28   I feel like we have a chance to talk about the the tablet rumors. Well, we could do that

01:27:32   Okay

01:27:34   And it kind of ties in with this which is all this stuff that Google announced at the IO

01:27:37   conference. And it made me think about the fact that almost everything Google and Apple

01:27:42   are doing, they're like two gears where, you know, what do you call it, the way that the

01:27:51   teeth go together. Like, in almost every regard, one of them is ahead and the other's catching

01:27:58   up or the other one's ahead and the other one's catching up, right? And the Google I/O

01:28:03   Here's just my notes I watch.

01:28:04   I watch their keynotes.

01:28:07   And almost everything is-- it's always one or the other.

01:28:10   So one of the first things they mentioned

01:28:12   was Project Butter to get everything

01:28:14   up to 60 frames per second and triple buffering and all

01:28:17   this stuff.

01:28:18   Clearly, they're trying to catch up to iOS there.

01:28:20   iOS has always been very smooth animation-wise,

01:28:23   touch response-wise.

01:28:24   Android has not.

01:28:25   Say whatever you want about Android, it hasn't.

01:28:27   Now even Google's tacitly acknowledging that.

01:28:30   They're catching up.

01:28:31   That's a catch up for Google.

01:28:35   Then they did offline voice typing, where you can dictate to the phone and it even works

01:28:39   without a net connection.

01:28:40   Well, that's something where Google has been ahead of Apple.

01:28:44   Google's had voice dictation in Android for a couple years now and it works really good.

01:28:51   And I do think, I think it's faster.

01:28:55   Do you use the dictation on the iPhone?

01:28:57   I use it all the time.

01:28:58   I guess a city person. I'm always out walking around and if I, you know, to send a text to my

01:29:03   wife or whoever, if I'm on the sidewalk walking, I'll just hold down the button and dictate it. And

01:29:08   it is so much better than trying to thumb type while you're actually walking. But sometimes you

01:29:12   do it and you get the little purple blinking lights and they're blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

01:29:16   It's totally drunk dad. Like drunk dad, drunk dad comes to the play just enough,

01:29:21   just often enough to break your heart. And like I sit there and like I try to demo that for

01:29:25   for somebody and I look like I'm out of my mind. I'm just talking into my phone and nothing

01:29:29   happens. And then sometimes I'll be sitting there and I'll be outside and it's windy and

01:29:33   there's a train going by and I'll say three sentences and it gets it flawlessly in like

01:29:38   a tenth of a second.

01:29:39   It's like it's already done it before you finish the sentence.

01:29:41   It's completely crazy making. You know what? I wish it was always exactly one second. Put

01:29:47   it in a delay. I don't care. But I want it, you know what I mean? I'm sorry. But yes,

01:29:51   it should work and it makes me so crazy and then Siri forgets, doesn't understand my name

01:29:55   anymore.

01:29:56   But I think Google's ahead on that.

01:29:57   I do.

01:29:58   And the fact that now they have offline voice typing definitely puts them ahead.

01:30:02   So you can still – you can get some of this without even having a network connection.

01:30:06   So if – I mean I think that clearly puts them ahead.

01:30:11   Although it is right now – the offline stuff is US English only.

01:30:15   But Apple doesn't have any offline voice dictation.

01:30:19   What else did they announce?

01:30:20   Expand…

01:30:21   Including on Mountain Lion, oddly enough.

01:30:23   Yes, true.

01:30:24   Notifications with like reply buttons and stuff like that. I think that the whole notification center thing in the phone

01:30:31   I think Android is still I think you know

01:30:33   I think it's pretty safe to say it's ahead of the iPhone in that regard like so if you get an email and a notification

01:30:38   Thing there's a little button they have you can just reply to it right there and make it go away

01:30:42   That seems super convenient to me

01:30:45   Here's my favorite

01:30:48   This is my favorite then they and I might I'm not going in the order that they announced stuff because this I think came then

01:30:53   in their day two keynote, but it was Chrome tab syncing.

01:30:58   Do you use Chrome or do you use Safari?

01:31:01   Yes and yes.

01:31:01   I mean, no, no.

01:31:03   Yes, I do use both, but I use Chrome

01:31:04   and I've got the tab syncing and I--

01:31:06   It's amazing.

01:31:08   It is amazing.

01:31:09   And I run into this situation all the time.

01:31:10   And then maybe this is me because I'm

01:31:12   John Gruber, the guy who links to lots of things.

01:31:14   But I know that there's this thing that I

01:31:16   read that I want to link to.

01:31:17   But I don't remember where the hell I read it.

01:31:19   Did I read it on my phone?

01:31:21   Did I read it on my Mac?

01:31:23   I read it on the MacBook Air?

01:31:24   Is it on the iPad?

01:31:26   But I know I left it open wherever it was because I wanted to link it right from there

01:31:31   and still hadn't done it and where the hell is it.

01:31:34   And if you use Chrome and you have on this tab syncing, you could just go there and it

01:31:38   will show you all of your open tabs from all your devices and it updates instantly.

01:31:43   And to me, it's a brilliant feature as a guy who leaves open tabs on browsers all over

01:31:48   the place.

01:31:51   I'm playing around with it with the Chrome for iOS and there's, you know, it never misses a beat.

01:31:56   Whereas Apple, on the other hand, now they're working on the same type of feature, but it's

01:32:00   not coming to iOS 6 and it's not coming to the Mac until Mountain Lion. But in the meantime,

01:32:05   they've got the one thing they do sync with Safari is the reading list, which is sort of like their

01:32:10   built-in Instapaper thing. I use that. I use it not, you know, I don't use it as a replacement

01:32:17   for Instapaper. Instapaper is where I send stuff where I really do want to sit down in a nice

01:32:21   comfortable chair and read stuff. I will use the Apple reading list just to send a URL

01:32:26   from one machine to another right now.

01:32:27   Oh, I see.

01:32:28   Like, I never have more than three or four URLs in my reading list for Apple because

01:32:33   that's all I use it for. I am on the iPad and I want to link to this. I know I want

01:32:38   to link to it from during Farball, but I want to write more than I want to type on the iPad.

01:32:41   So I'll add it to my reading list, go over, sit down in front of my Mac, go to reading

01:32:46   list and the damn thing isn't there and there's no reload button. You just have to sit there

01:32:51   and wait until you get lucky and it decides to do a sync and get it. And I figured out

01:32:57   that it does help though. You can trigger it. There's no reload button, but you can

01:33:01   trigger it by adding another thing to the reading list on the machine you're on just

01:33:07   to get it to say – just to say – just to tell Safari, "Hey, talk to the reading

01:33:12   list server."

01:33:13   Dropbox, or I'll create a folder, or I'll touch. I'll do a touch on something just to,

01:33:16   like, say, "Okay, update."

01:33:18   But here's the craziest thing. The craziest thing is with Safari, with the reading list.

01:33:24   Other times, though, you'll say, "Add to reading list," and you get an alert. You get a dialog

01:33:27   box that says it can't do it right now because bookmarks are syncing.

01:33:31   I get that all the time because I'll go in and want to do one of my bookmarks. I do my

01:33:35   bookmarks mostly from the little book, the little – you know what I mean?

01:33:38   Yeah, I know what you mean.

01:33:39   my bookmarks menu, bookmarks bar, whatever it is. I just leave that open. I don't use history much,

01:33:44   so I just leave that open. I'm forever going in there. What do I have? Quix or Qix or whatever,

01:33:49   Instapaper, Bitly, any of those. Yeah, but then suddenly it'll go boop and there'll be these

01:33:54   folders in there. It's like, sorry, nothing's here right now, which is harrowing. Even for a second,

01:33:59   isn't that weird? Oh, it's awful. I mean, it's like you got default.ping, right? There should

01:34:03   be something where it at least looks like my stuff is there. I had an iPhone replaced a while ago.

01:34:08   It was in the syncing era and I had to go to the Apple store and get a unit swapped

01:34:14   out.

01:34:15   I got the new one and I opened it up and I put in my—and they're like, "Hey, we've

01:34:18   got super fast Wi-Fi here to connect to.

01:34:20   You could restore from the iCloud backup."

01:34:26   I was like, "Yeah, why don't I just do that?

01:34:29   It seems super convenient.

01:34:30   Why don't I just—as I walk out of the store, I'll have all my stuff on my phone."

01:34:34   I type in my iCloud name and password and it says, "You want to restore from a backup?"

01:34:39   And the most recent backup was like seven months before.

01:34:41   And I was like, "Oh my God."

01:34:44   Now I double backup.

01:34:46   I also backup to my Mac at home.

01:34:48   But still as a nerd, that's like a heart attack right there, right?

01:34:53   And the guy was like, "Ah, I know what it is."

01:34:56   It's because you probably have the phone you just swapped out had iOS 5.1 and this phone

01:35:02   has 5.0.1.

01:35:03   In other words, the phone that they gave me, the replacement, had an older version of iOS.

01:35:09   But it did let you log in and everything.

01:35:11   Yeah, but in other words, it only let me update from the backup from when I was using that

01:35:14   version of iOS.

01:35:17   You know what I mean?

01:35:18   Like…

01:35:19   I do, and I think that must be what happened to me one time when my iPad didn't do the

01:35:24   restore.

01:35:25   So I had to update the phone to the new version of iOS first.

01:35:28   Then I could restore to the thing.

01:35:30   But that's that same thing, though, that momentary thing

01:35:33   where what it shows you is not what you expected.

01:35:36   And what it's showing you involves data loss.

01:35:38   It's like, oh my god.

01:35:39   And you did that from your Mac, from your laptop?

01:35:43   The restoring or the--

01:35:45   Yeah, I just said-- what I ended up doing

01:35:47   is just leaving the store with the phone in factory condition.

01:35:49   It just went home and updated all from the Mac.

01:35:52   How would you-- OK, I guess--

01:35:54   But anyway--

01:35:55   How would you have done that-- I'm sorry.

01:35:56   How would you have done that if you didn't have a Mac?

01:35:58   I would have first updated the OS to iOS 5.1 over the air.

01:36:03   - From what? - Over the air, okay.

01:36:05   - And then restored from backup.

01:36:08   - Okay.

01:36:10   - So you could do it.

01:36:11   - Better plant a hand on that one for your backup to work.

01:36:14   - All right, but anyway, with Apple syncing tabs,

01:36:17   right now it's syncing bookmarks,

01:36:18   you can't even add a new bookmark

01:36:21   while it's syncing bookmarks.

01:36:23   And this seems to happen to me all the time.

01:36:25   And it's not like something I ran into once.

01:36:27   I mean, this is a dialogue I get all the time.

01:36:29   Where on the other hand with Chrome and Google,

01:36:32   all of your open tabs are synced instantly

01:36:34   between everything, let alone your bookmarks.

01:36:36   So anyway, Apple clearly chasing Google in that regard,

01:36:40   syncing the browser data.

01:36:42   The Google Now, now there's one where I actually think

01:36:47   even though that's like their Siri-like thing,

01:36:50   that's something that even though they haven't had anything

01:36:53   that's quite like Siri in terms of the user experience,

01:36:55   In terms of the actual, "Hey, who knows how to do stuff like this?"

01:36:59   That's right in Google's wheelhouse, right?

01:37:01   In other words, what is Siri?

01:37:03   Siri is, "Let me give you a couple of words and you figure out what I mean and then show

01:37:08   it."

01:37:09   And all Google really had to copy from Apple was this idea of, "You know what?

01:37:13   If we really know, if we know exactly what the user's asking for, if they just say

01:37:18   'Yankees score,' we know.

01:37:21   We're not 99% sure.

01:37:22   We're 100% sure.

01:37:23   guy wants to know what the most recent Yankees score is. We can show that information using

01:37:29   a designed template known for this particular nugget of data. I think the Google Now thing

01:37:38   looks great. The only thing I hate about it is the name. The name is so stupid. Last week

01:37:42   on the show, I got confused when Adam was talking about it because he was saying something

01:37:45   about Google Now and I thought he meant Google the company today. Today is Google.

01:37:51   here would be better. No, because how would you spell here? See that? See, this is why

01:37:57   you got the popular blog. That's true. But that, you know, that is, you talk about the

01:38:03   special sauce. Supposedly, the truly special sauce that's just for Mrs. Google is the scale.

01:38:08   Everybody says the real thing about Google is scale, but the thing that we see, the consumer-facing

01:38:14   thing is that, like, we're pretty sure we know what you want. Right. We know what you

01:38:18   And because we know what you want, we can show it to you in a way that is far more both

01:38:25   pleasing and informative and conveys the information better than just a list of text results of

01:38:35   anything and everything.

01:38:36   And we won't throw up our hands the way that Siri does because Siri's got three levels

01:38:41   of problems, which is first of all, there's the connectivity issue.

01:38:44   I was trying to explain this to my relatives yesterday who are recent iPhone people.

01:38:47   I said, "You know, it's a little..."

01:38:49   This is probably another one of my typically terrible analogies, but it's kind of like

01:38:52   having an eight-lane freeway where you really need, like, you could be okay if it was a

01:38:58   16-lane freeway and you'd still find room.

01:39:01   Like, your series got to get to the cloud or it's got to get to whatever you want to

01:39:06   call it, the sky.

01:39:07   Siri has to talk to something to get it.

01:39:09   So there's the problem of, like, if the bandwidth isn't there or you're not hooked up, right,

01:39:13   you're not hooked up to where it can get, it's not going to happen.

01:39:15   But even then, you could get the server error, which I read as it's just too busy.

01:39:22   It's pretty taciturn about explaining why it didn't work.

01:39:25   But then the other problem that I feel like I run into more, and it doesn't make sense

01:39:30   to me, is that it just doesn't get words right.

01:39:33   Words that I say all the time, unless I'm having some kind of a palsy, I don't understand

01:39:37   why it's having a harder time rather than better time understanding me.

01:39:43   I don't have that problem.

01:39:44   Siri does seem to understand me.

01:39:45   I get the fallback to--

01:39:47   I don't mind the Wolfram Alpha fallback,

01:39:49   because that's pretty good.

01:39:51   But I do get a lot of, do you want

01:39:53   to search the web for Mambo Dogface to the banana patch,

01:39:57   or whatever.

01:39:57   But in this instance, I think what you're describing here

01:39:59   is really great, especially if you're busy,

01:40:01   you're on the run, the ability to just say two words.

01:40:04   Like, I forget what it is in Philadelphia,

01:40:06   but I might say nearest muni.

01:40:09   And just by understanding, there's

01:40:12   There's several factors that could go into having a pretty good idea what it is I'm looking

01:40:15   for.

01:40:17   And even being able to fall back on, "Did you mean one of these three things?"

01:40:20   You know, like Wolfram Alpha is pretty great at that.

01:40:22   I mean, I use the website a lot.

01:40:24   I do too.

01:40:25   I use it for all my stock stuff when I link from Darren Farrow.

01:40:28   I find that they're really good.

01:40:31   And I'm not surprised at all that Apple's relying on them for a lot of the serious stuff.

01:40:37   My only beef with the website is they've got a little bit bananas with all the sign up

01:40:40   for the pro account stuff.

01:40:42   They've taken out a lot of features,

01:40:43   but you know, you gotta make money, whatever.

01:40:45   But like, I do this all the time.

01:40:46   Yesterday, you know, I said, you know,

01:40:49   how many days is it from this date in this year to today

01:40:53   to show my daughter how many days old she was?

01:40:55   And it had it in a second.

01:40:56   You know, what is 111% of $46?

01:40:59   Because I just wanna know what the tip is for delivery.

01:41:04   I'm not that, you know, as you know, like you,

01:41:06   I'm a good, but you know,

01:41:08   don't you think that's pretty good for delivery?

01:41:09   - Yeah, I, yeah, delivery. - What do you tip for delivery?

01:41:13   - Oh man, that's a hard one.

01:41:15   - See, I used to be one of those $2 people.

01:41:17   For a long time I was a 20% person.

01:41:18   I think it's a sucker thing to tip 20% on delivery.

01:41:22   It's ridiculous.

01:41:22   - I tip 20 rounding down rather than rounding up.

01:41:26   - I usually do 11% and a round up,

01:41:29   which I think is very generous for delivery.

01:41:31   - Yeah, so like a $55 delivery, I'll tip 10 bucks.

01:41:35   - All right, let's find out. - All right.

01:41:37   - Let's see here.

01:41:38   throw in ten bucks what's 111% what was it again what was the $55 bill $55 a

01:41:44   55 even yeah okay what's 111% of $55 I'm talking fast cuz I know we're almost out

01:41:52   of time okay here you go

01:41:57   oh give me 11% business $6 see now my wife I did differ on this oh that's got

01:42:02   a little picture of a nickel that's cute well look at that but I always do it

01:42:06   Anyway, see again, my demos, they're the worst.

01:42:11   But I could see this being super useful.

01:42:13   So what you're saying here, your larger point that I keep interrupting you on, is

01:42:17   that gears and teeth.

01:42:18   So the thing I wonder about that in terms of moving forward with things is…

01:42:23   Dave Asprey

01:42:24   Gears and teeth might be the wrong analogy.

01:42:25   I don't know.

01:42:26   I know, I know.

01:42:27   But they seem to complement each other where they're each working on the other's strengths.

01:42:31   Let me just keep going.

01:42:33   Maps.

01:42:34   Maps.

01:42:35   Google.

01:42:36   We've been way ahead of the game on maps.

01:42:38   And now everybody's buying these map companies.

01:42:39   Everybody's doing their own maps.

01:42:41   I think the iOS maps in the beta that I can't talk about

01:42:44   is actually pretty good.

01:42:46   It's faster than snot.

01:42:48   And it is so fast.

01:42:49   Have you noticed that?

01:42:49   Yeah, and it looks beautiful.

01:42:51   Crazy.

01:42:51   I think part of the speed is that they're

01:42:53   using vector graphics.

01:42:54   But the scrolling?

01:42:55   Scrolling around in the maps is crazy fast.

01:42:57   Yeah, it's really, really nice.

01:42:58   But it is missing the transit information,

01:43:01   which flawed or imperfect as it is from Google

01:43:05   is better than nothing.

01:43:07   And Street View is—we talked about this, Adam and John August and I talked about this

01:43:12   last week.

01:43:13   Street View is more practically useful than the flyover view that Apple has.

01:43:17   Apple's flyover view is far more impressive.

01:43:19   It feels like you're making a movie.

01:43:22   But in terms of, "Hey, I'm in this city or this neighborhood I'm not familiar with.

01:43:27   What am I supposed to be seeing if I'm looking—this is what I'm looking for."

01:43:30   And Street View is like that.

01:43:32   And that cool thing that they demoed, I don't know if you saw this.

01:43:34   call it compass view they I think the Nexus 7 does it but you hold up like

01:43:38   your tablet and it using the accelerometer and whatever else is in

01:43:43   there you it it gives you like a live street view like as you pivot the thing

01:43:49   around it it's like a window into the world Oh like Google Earth where yeah

01:43:54   it's not just it's not just the horizontal axis when you move it up

01:43:57   right like if you want us like Google goggles if you want to - yeah if you

01:44:00   want to turn around you actually just hold the thing up in front of your face

01:44:03   and turn around and it shows you what you would see and it's super useful. I think Apple

01:44:08   could, you know, even Apple would acknowledge they're catching up on maps. But then you

01:44:13   get to Google Play, which is their store and the apps, everybody knows, the Android apps

01:44:19   are nowhere near as good as the iOS apps. And they have way less like media content,

01:44:25   like they don't have music from Warner Brothers and like if you use iTunes, you don't even,

01:44:30   who the hell knows what the record stations are, right? I mean, record companies are.

01:44:37   Who knows who's on Warner Brothers and who's on Universal or whatever like that. You just

01:44:42   know that it's in the...

01:44:43   It's very rare these days that I don't find what I want for music. Books are a different

01:44:48   situation, far, very far a different situation. But no, with music, I very seldom... If anything,

01:44:54   I have to go figure out which one of this I want. Do I want the deluxe edition? Do I

01:44:57   want this?

01:44:58   The movie store, they have nothing from Fox.

01:45:00   So no Ice Age, X-Men, Avatar, none of the Twilight movies.

01:45:05   The TV store, they don't have anything.

01:45:08   CBS, Fox, WB, HBO, BBC, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime,

01:45:13   Discovery, History Network, so no Mad Men, no Modern Family,

01:45:19   no Family Guy, I'm stealing this all from David Pogue.

01:45:23   That stuff's hard, and I, you know, it's like one of those

01:45:26   little underappreciated things about Apple

01:45:28   is the way that they have over the decades since they've opened the iTunes Music Store

01:45:32   negotiated with all of these little fiefdoms of media, major media content holders in the

01:45:39   US and around the world most importantly. And I know that like even Apple doesn't have

01:45:44   TV shows all over the world but they certainly have more than just in the US, right? Because

01:45:50   that was the other thing that came out yesterday is that you can buy the new Google 7-inch

01:45:54   tablet in the UK but you don't get any TV shows or movies or magazines or something

01:45:59   like that because they don't have the rights for it. Really, really hard and Apple is clearly

01:46:04   ahead of them there. And I think clearly Amazon is too.

01:46:12   The Nexus Q, the crazy $300 media player, I mean it's ridiculous. It's $300 and it does

01:46:18   less than the Apple TV that cost $99. I mean Apple is clearly ahead of them there. I mean

01:46:23   And the AirPlay thing is actually pretty awesome, right?

01:46:26   I mean, I think that's what they're--

01:46:28   - AirPlay is ridiculous.

01:46:30   - Right, bottom line-- - It's magic.

01:46:32   - Yeah, bottom line is that's what they have to catch up on

01:46:34   'cause it's a killer feature,

01:46:35   is I've got this video or this photo on this--

01:46:38   - Well, like with my kid, I wanna watch this YouTube video,

01:46:41   but it's no fun for three people to watch a video on a phone.

01:46:44   - Right. - I hit a button

01:46:45   and it's on the Apple TV and it really,

01:46:47   unlike so many things, it really does just work.

01:46:49   - Right. - It's crazy

01:46:50   that it just works.

01:46:51   - Right, and yeah, exactly.

01:46:53   It could just be a YouTube.

01:46:54   And now that everybody is shooting everything in HD, and YouTube accepts everything in HD,

01:46:59   and you show it.

01:47:00   And when you're playing it in a web browser window on your Mac, the HD thing is nice.

01:47:04   But when you play it on your Apple TV, you can tell this is actually like HD.

01:47:09   Really really nice.

01:47:10   So Google clearly catching up to Apple right there.

01:47:13   I feel like everything they announce though is something that's either reinforcing one

01:47:17   of their strengths that the other one doesn't have, or announcing some sort of catch-up

01:47:22   initiative in the other regard? Well, I think there's probably, I mean, I

01:47:28   don't follow this stuff anywhere near as close as you do, but I mean, I think

01:47:32   there's probably a lot of good reasons for that. I mean, one thing is

01:47:38   that I imagine that shareholders and a lot of, there are still a lot of people

01:47:42   that respond very well to tables with checkmarks. And it's, you know, it's one of

01:47:49   those frustrating to me to me personally it's one of those frustrating like okay

01:47:52   I go I want to find out which version of this Adobe thing I've got to buy and I

01:47:57   got to sit there and like move my finger down the screen to figure I'm talking

01:48:01   about doing it though the web professional enterprise well what about

01:48:05   your buddy Brett Terpster's iOS text editor chart which is like one of the

01:48:10   eight wonders of the world but you can flip off the columns you don't need right

01:48:15   Sometimes, you know, but sometimes I'm positing that, I'm putting that as, you know, a place

01:48:20   where that actually is useful.

01:48:22   Well, but just to go straight to your thing, though, I mean, like, I think it's pretty—and

01:48:27   I jokingly referred to this earlier—but I think it is pretty great that you can make

01:48:31   fun of Apple for their, like, buy this white thing or that white thing.

01:48:35   But I think it is pretty great that you can actually—it's not really that hard to

01:48:39   go in and buy this thing on your phone.

01:48:42   Like, if you want to buy an iPad, it's not super hard.

01:48:44   Like, "Oh my gosh, it's so overwhelming.

01:48:46   There's eight options," or whatever.

01:48:47   I think that's really, really neat.

01:48:49   You're reducing your number of SKUs.

01:48:50   You're making it easier to buy.

01:48:51   You're not doing this—somebody had that whole post about trying to go to the Dell

01:48:55   site and having to identify whether they're a student or a multimedia user.

01:48:59   It's just that kind of brain-dead business unit thinking that led us to those terrible

01:49:04   websites where it was organized around company fiefdoms.

01:49:08   The point I want to make is that for a lot of people—I just wrote a phrase down—good

01:49:13   to not be nothing. And I don't know if that's good or not, but I just wrote that down. Sometimes

01:49:17   you just want to, I think in a company, a lot of companies that have a pretty popular,

01:49:23   normal kind of approach to business, they need something that's good enough to not be

01:49:26   nothing. And I think that's the kind of thing that really grinds your gears, is when somebody

01:49:31   does something that is merely something that's good enough to not be nothing. And I think

01:49:35   it strikes me that that is very frustrating to you when a lot of polish, care, business

01:49:40   document integration at every step of the-- the kind of thing

01:49:44   that makes an iPhone, which is a really magical device.

01:49:47   It shouldn't be as simple as just going, oh, yeah,

01:49:49   we got that too, kind of.

01:49:53   So you're Googling, you're like, oh, we got some movies.

01:49:55   OK, check.

01:49:58   For somebody who buys in that way--

01:49:59   and let's be honest, a lot of enterprise people

01:50:01   buy stuff like that.

01:50:02   They're buying by who's got the most checks.

01:50:03   And the thing is, it isn't the consumer

01:50:05   who came up with that grid.

01:50:07   You know the kind of grid I'm talking about?

01:50:08   I know.

01:50:08   You got the three levels of service.

01:50:10   Well, if you get this one, you get the free Johnson rod or whatever.

01:50:14   I think that good enough to not be nothing is plenty for a lot of people.

01:50:19   You know, Netflix, when Netflix streaming came out, boy, it was really the kind of thing

01:50:25   I used to – that would make me want to cancel my cable, that level of quality.

01:50:30   But also, I mean, there's also just this philosophical difference in approach.

01:50:33   And I mean, I guess – and I don't mean this in the way that it sounds, but I wonder

01:50:36   how much this matters to people who are not strictly

01:50:39   partisans for Google, Apple or otherwise.

01:50:42   I mean I think a lot of people just want a cheap phone that does stuff and they go,

01:50:45   "Oh cool, I can do movies now too."

01:50:48   Well I think part of it... Do you wonder, because it's close enough to looking like that thing in the

01:50:50   ads,

01:50:51   it's not gonna cost me as much and they're not gonna sit there and

01:50:54   analyze whether this is closer to a Kindle Fire or an iPad

01:50:58   or a Playmeister or whatever it's called. I don't think that's how most

01:51:02   best buy kind of people think.

01:51:05   And that's kind of who they're going for?

01:51:06   I don't know.

01:51:07   Don't don't you think that they're kind of going for people who want a $20 phone or want to go to Best Buy and get a black thing that's not an iPad?

01:51:13   I guess maybe

01:51:16   is that reductive? I mean, that is probably super reductive and insulting to everyone involved.

01:51:19   I don't think so. I think with the play that I think they actually were very honest about it. And that is or not to play the Nexus seven, but that it's all about the play store when that they just said like three or four times they reiterated. This is the thing that you buy for using content, consuming

01:51:34   content from Google Play, apps, movies, TV shows, magazines, books. We've got all this

01:51:39   stuff. You buy this thing for $199 and that's how you use it. That's why I think it's so

01:51:45   much more clearly.

01:51:46   Steve: Which is kind of what the first Apple TV was.

01:51:48   Dave: Yeah, definitely.

01:51:49   Steve; I mean it was kind of a hardware device for iTunes.

01:51:52   Dave; Yeah. And it's funny because it got cheaper but got more versatile. The more expensive

01:51:58   original one was far more limited to the iTunes universe than the current one.

01:52:04   That's a really interesting point.

01:52:06   'Cause I actually, I kind of wish,

01:52:08   so I used to have a hacked Apple TV.

01:52:10   I used to have a hacked Apple TV that would let me run all that stuff on it.

01:52:14   I used to do it a lot. To be honest, it was during the beta that I got sick of restoring and then rehacking,

01:52:19   'cause it's a little bit of a pain.

01:52:21   But you know what's funny is I didn't really miss it.

01:52:23   I could still use my Mac Mini with VLC to watch whatever.

01:52:27   But like, you know what's funny is if anything with my Apple,

01:52:30   I don't have those super super latest because I don't have a 1080p TV, but I have a 1080i TV. Can you believe that exists?

01:52:37   Bizarre, I don't even know what that is. That's like biometric gasoline or something. It just doesn't I don't even know what that means

01:52:43   So but what are ours if anything? I wish I could take some icons away like I you know, it's funny

01:52:48   We met that Palier's the MLB guy. I made that crack about how like

01:52:52   You do an incredibly impressive job with something

01:52:55   I couldn't care less about and I mean that as the biggest compliment in the world and then we'll be things amazing like but I

01:53:00   I don't need to see that on my screen.

01:53:01   I wish I could just see computers, settings, movies, TV, Netflix, podcasts.

01:53:08   You know what I mean?

01:53:09   But –

01:53:10   It seems crazy that you can't move those around.

01:53:11   I don't know how you would do it because I know the way that it looks like something

01:53:14   you would do by touch.

01:53:15   But it does seem though that somebody who is a huge NBA fan should be able to move the

01:53:22   NBA one to be more prominent than the Major League Baseball one.

01:53:26   And somebody who doesn't like sports at all ought to be able to move those to the

01:53:28   bottom.

01:53:29   In an ideal world, this is a little bit Android, I guess, but if you like, not channels. If

01:53:35   you could say—and again, this is a problem that has not been solved by stuff like Boxee.

01:53:40   Or Boxee Swell, Plexus Swell. I've tried all of them.

01:53:44   I think that's where Apple's going with the Apple TV, though, is that it's going

01:53:47   to be apps and that the apps are like channels and that you're going to get some kind of

01:53:52   customization.

01:53:53   Yeah, but I don't mind all of those because most of the stuff I want is, apart from podcasts,

01:53:59   is up near the top. Like I can get to Netflix in a couple of clicks. I still got a lot of

01:54:02   beefs with the interface. For some reason, the remote app on my phone isn't working anymore.

01:54:06   I don't know why. I run up against the home sharing thing constantly having to reenter

01:54:10   all my stuff everywhere. I don't know. I guess I'm hitting my limit or something.

01:54:13   But the Apple TV thing is really kind of transformative. What?

01:54:18   Dave: I think by far and away, the worst Apple experience you can possibly have right now

01:54:24   today is entering a halfway decent password.

01:54:28   Just don't even say the words.

01:54:30   On the Apple TV without them.

01:54:32   I wish Steve Jobs had lived long enough that I could watch him try to enter like a medium

01:54:37   security password with the white dingus in Apple TV.

01:54:41   Or even –

01:54:42   The dots will echo.

01:54:43   The dots will echo over and over and over.

01:54:44   Even just entering a horrible password, your first child's first name as your password,

01:54:51   all lowercase.

01:54:52   What if it has a capital letter?

01:54:53   [LAUGHTER]

01:54:55   I totally agree with you.

01:54:57   It's totally crazy now.

01:54:57   And the thing is, SirQsa didn't realize

01:55:00   that the remote app existed.

01:55:01   So he had to go through that.

01:55:02   Really?

01:55:02   Can you imagine-- no, I know it's crazy.

01:55:04   You should listen to his show.

01:55:05   It's really good.

01:55:05   Oh, my god.

01:55:06   He had to go through that.

01:55:08   Can you imagine that poor guy, as comfortable as he

01:55:10   is with a four-way dingus?

01:55:12   But the other thing with that is that--

01:55:14   The one thing that's inescapable--

01:55:16   this is the thing, though.

01:55:16   It's inescapable.

01:55:17   So everybody has to experience this once,

01:55:19   even if you know about the remote app,

01:55:21   is that you can't use the remote app until you've got the thing on your Wi-Fi.

01:55:25   And so unless you have a no password Wi-Fi, you've got to at least enter one password,

01:55:31   which is your Wi-Fi network, using the remote.

01:55:34   Everybody gets to do it at least once.

01:55:35   Jon, this is three shows, but this is such a whole.

01:55:39   This is such a whole.

01:55:40   I think we've had this discussion, but in 10 seconds or seven minutes, here's the problem.

01:55:45   Is it still Thursday?

01:55:46   I think so.

01:55:47   You buy your iOS device, you get your phone, what do you do?

01:55:49   You flip it on.

01:55:50   You got to start an account.

01:55:51   You say, you know, monkeybutt35@me.com and pencil69 is my password.

01:55:56   Whatever, right?

01:55:57   Because you're sitting there on your phone, you mistype it a couple times, right?

01:56:00   And you go, "Okay, I should pick something simpler."

01:56:02   So you pick pencil69, right?

01:56:04   Oh, that'll be secure.

01:56:05   It's got, just like the guy with the beeper told me, now I've got a mix of numbers and

01:56:09   letters, so I'm good.

01:56:10   I've got a thousand-year password, pencil69, right?

01:56:13   And you know the cascade here.

01:56:15   Oh, I love it, so I buy a Mac.

01:56:16   So I turn on back to my Mac with pencil69 as the password.

01:56:19   I use pencil 69 because it's a real pain in the butt to enter that on my Apple TV.

01:56:23   So now you've got like five problems. First of all you have like a 20 second

01:56:27   password.

01:56:28   Second of all you've got the same one on all of your devices. Because

01:56:31   who do you know in your family that has different passwords for different things?

01:56:35   Right? I had a family member who got, I told you this, you guys,

01:56:39   "I'm rolling you like all that, I got hacked. You know, I got hacked."

01:56:43   Really, Bon? How'd you get hacked? "I got hacked on iTunes." Oh,

01:56:46   "Oh my god, you're one of those like 200 people that, what happened?"

01:56:49   "Ah, I got hacked."

01:56:50   "How'd you get hacked?"

01:56:51   "Well, ah, they got anything."

01:56:53   "What was your password?"

01:56:54   "Oh, it was the same as my name."

01:56:56   And, I mean, the thing is, I don't want to make this a thing, but I'm telling you, this

01:57:00   is going to be, there's going to be, there's going to be a Security 9/11 about this someday.

01:57:04   And, you know, and it's going to be because people had to go enter this ridiculously childlike

01:57:10   password.

01:57:11   And I'm telling you, I don't have any numbers on this, Jon, but I will bet you, dimes to

01:57:13   donuts that most people keep the first password that they put in whatever device they started

01:57:19   on for as long as they can, and they will use it for as many different devices and accounts

01:57:23   as they can. And they pick one. They don't go to password generators or try to test these

01:57:30   things. You've seen me. You've seen how long it takes me to do my me.com password.

01:57:34   There was a session at WWDC on security, and they had a Q&A afterwards, which is rare anymore

01:57:42   WWDC, people have ruined the Q&A with bad questions.

01:57:46   So there used to be almost every session had Q&A and now very few do, but there were Q&A

01:57:50   after the security session.

01:57:52   There was an incredibly astute question, which was off topic for the thing, but it was like

01:58:00   Apple security guys were the guys doing the session.

01:58:02   They were like, "What have you guys been working on to just completely eliminate the

01:58:07   broken password paradigm?"

01:58:11   And it was like three seconds of silence,

01:58:13   and the guy just said, "No comment."

01:58:15   Or no, he didn't say no comment.

01:58:19   He said, he didn't say no comment.

01:58:21   I take it back, he said,

01:58:22   "We have nothing to say about that at this point."

01:58:24   Which is a more affluent way to say it.

01:58:25   - So that's either silly or saying too much.

01:58:28   - Could be anything, could be nothing, could be--

01:58:29   - He should have immediately said,

01:58:30   "Well, it's something we're always working on."

01:58:32   - Right.

01:58:33   Well, I do, but I do think that it's something

01:58:34   that they're working on.

01:58:35   - Yeah, well good.

01:58:36   And didn't you say there's some dude now?

01:58:37   Isn't there somebody who's like single-mindedly,

01:58:39   like some famous guy who's on this at Google?

01:58:41   I'll bet there is I don't think you say that somebody's there knows this app somebody somebody

01:58:46   I need to get a brain somebody's talking about how like there's a dedicated person now dealing with the identity problem in general

01:58:52   I thought that was you. I don't think so. Yeah also cover that

01:58:55   To go back five minutes that was Peter bright at Ars Technica who wrote about trying to buy a PC laptop

01:59:02   It was a very very it was you know just telling that story straight would have been funny

01:59:07   But the way he did it was I thought was very very fun

01:59:09   He went to Dell to buy a laptop and the categories he had to start with.

01:59:13   He had to choose between everyday computing.

01:59:14   You know, it's so funny.

01:59:18   I was just thinking this morning.

01:59:20   Design and performance.

01:59:21   I'm an everyday computer user.

01:59:22   I'm just finally realizing that.

01:59:24   Everyday computing, design and performance, and the other one was thin and powerful.

01:59:29   So which one do you want?

01:59:32   Motion of the ocean.

01:59:33   Right.

01:59:34   Oh, see, that's—

01:59:35   Now, the better one was Lenovo, though.

01:59:37   Lenovo had three categories to choose from. This is great. Powered for productivity, optimized

01:59:43   for entertainment, and no-nonsense features built for versatility.

01:59:48   Steve: No nonsense. Say that again.

01:59:52   Tim Weiss (01h00m

01:59:52   Say that again.

01:59:53   No nonsense features built for versatility.

01:59:56   Okay.

01:59:57   Huh.

01:59:58   That's a good category.

01:59:59   You're poor?

02:00:00   I guess.

02:00:01   That means poor.

02:00:02   Yeah, but what's the difference between optimized for entertainment and powered for productivity?

02:00:06   Which one's good?

02:00:08   Image porn or video porn?

02:00:10   Yeah, I don't know.

02:00:12   But the thing is, Jon, I mean, they're getting to an important point, which is that you really

02:00:16   should be optimized.

02:00:17   I have often—

02:00:18   But you know, they should take every goddamn whiteboard out of that place and break it

02:00:21   in half.

02:00:22   That's a shame.

02:00:23   I have often said that the best thing about being a Mac person

02:00:26   is when you buy a new computer, it's actually not that hard.

02:00:30   Yeah.

02:00:30   Really, I think I would go nuts if I had to buy a Windows PC.

02:00:34   I totally agree.

02:00:35   I totally agree.

02:00:36   Hey, so why do you think you can't

02:00:37   buy HD movies a lot of times?

02:00:39   Oh my god.

02:00:40   On iTunes?

02:00:41   Because I think that they want--

02:00:43   Why can you only rent it?

02:00:44   Do you think that's a label or a--

02:00:45   Yeah.

02:00:46   They don't want to--

02:00:47   So frustrating.

02:00:48   Yeah, it's the worst.

02:00:50   I think renting's for suckers.

02:00:52   I mean, if they let you rent, so here's, if it were me,

02:00:55   and I could negotiate it, here's what I would say.

02:00:57   You rent a movie, and you get to start it

02:01:00   and finish it once in the next 30 days.

02:01:03   Right, that would be, if it were me,

02:01:06   that's what I would say, you know what I'm saying?

02:01:07   So you can have sittings of this movie,

02:01:10   maybe you can even rewind five minutes a couple times,

02:01:12   something, something, but you know what I mean?

02:01:14   My problem is that expiration within a short period of time,

02:01:16   I will, I have a four-year-old daughter,

02:01:18   I will never watch that movie that way.

02:01:21   Like even in a hotel room you can like go pause it

02:01:23   and like watch it on the other TV,

02:01:24   like if you're in a suite or something like that.

02:01:26   - Right.

02:01:27   - But no, that drives me a little bit crazy.

02:01:31   - Somebody somewhere thinks that,

02:01:32   I don't know if they think it's gonna be pirated,

02:01:34   but it can't really be piracy

02:01:36   'cause then why would they let you rent it?

02:01:38   Anybody who-- - That's what the point.

02:01:39   I mean, again, you're back to the whole like,

02:01:40   we're not making business and so we're like, anyway.

02:01:43   I think that's super weird.

02:01:45   - I do too.

02:01:46   - It's so nuts the other day,

02:01:48   we're trying to be good about setting limits on things.

02:01:51   Just any limit, as long as there's a limit, right?

02:01:53   That's the thing, right?

02:01:54   With the kid stuff.

02:01:55   It doesn't matter.

02:01:56   Like, you know, a lot of people focus on

02:01:57   like what the limit is.

02:01:58   I think it's just important to have a limit

02:02:00   and then enforce it.

02:02:00   So if we're gonna have movie night,

02:02:02   we schedule movie night tonight, it's movie night.

02:02:04   But you go in, you hit the thing,

02:02:05   and like in a second, WALL-E is streaming,

02:02:07   and it's prettier than anything I could get on the internet.

02:02:09   That is really amazing to me.

02:02:12   That still blows me away every time.

02:02:14   And so you stream, you don't store 'em.

02:02:17   - Nope.

02:02:18   (scoffs)

02:02:19   But now I don't need to

02:02:21   You know and I have some blu-rays because some of the movies I truly truly that's adorable

02:02:26   I buy on the blu-ray

02:02:27   But you know what as time goes on though and I get more and more used to Apple TV

02:02:30   Even if I'm really in the mood to watch one of my very favorite movies that I've bought on blu-ray

02:02:35   The the idea of getting standing up and getting a disc and I mean it's all involves about four steps

02:02:41   Combined to get up get the desk change the HDMI cable and all that

02:02:46   But it all seems so daunting when I could just watch, you know, 21 Jump Street movie

02:02:51   on iTunes in 10 seconds.

02:02:54   I hate to admit this because I'm really not the kind of person that blows money.

02:02:58   I blow money on some stupid things like alcohol, but I don't just go buy electronics.

02:03:02   I'm just not that kind of a person.

02:03:05   But I was like, "Okay, look.

02:03:07   Clearly the winner has been chosen.

02:03:09   It's Blu-ray."

02:03:10   And so I went and I got the total middle of the road.

02:03:15   is not that expensive, whatever, 200, 300, whatever.

02:03:18   Off Amazon, I got the Blu-ray.

02:03:20   And I swear to you, Jon, my hand to God,

02:03:21   I have owned more DVD players

02:03:24   than I have used the Blu-ray player.

02:03:26   I bought the Blu-ray player and I bought exactly one thing,

02:03:29   which is the Godfather trilogy,

02:03:31   and I've watched two of them,

02:03:32   and everyone should own it, just for the documentary,

02:03:34   I think we've talked about this,

02:03:35   but seriously, it's in the closet with the old TiVo now.

02:03:39   It's just like it was, 'cause in our case,

02:03:41   we have this Jurassic TV, we don't have a great media setup,

02:03:44   and we would have to go change the HDMI cable and all that?

02:03:47   I guess, do you think HDMI is where it's going now?

02:03:50   I mean, do you think that's gonna become the USB of stuff?

02:03:53   - I guess, I don't know.

02:03:58   It seems like it's-- - We gotta go, right?

02:03:59   We gotta go. - This is crazy.

02:04:00   I mean, this show is nuts, but.

02:04:01   - Okay, here's what I do. - You know what I do?

02:04:02   I'll tell you what I do.

02:04:03   I'll give you a similar example,

02:04:04   and I know it's one of your current obsessions,

02:04:06   is that you and Ellie, I believe,

02:04:08   are into "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

02:04:10   - Oh, big time.

02:04:11   is one of my favorite movies of the last few years,

02:04:14   and it's one of those movies that it really does.

02:04:18   I've watched it so many times,

02:04:19   and I keep liking it more and more.

02:04:22   I remember when I saw it the first time,

02:04:24   and I'm almost certain the boy and I

02:04:26   went to see that one in the theater,

02:04:27   'cause I thought, I can't miss a chance

02:04:29   to take my kid to see a Wes Anderson movie.

02:04:30   I mean, he's never, you know,

02:04:31   when's the next time that's gonna happen?

02:04:33   - We thought about Rushmore, but that's got hand jobs.

02:04:35   - Exactly.

02:04:36   And I remember when I watched it,

02:04:39   I wasn't really sure I liked the movie at one point,

02:04:42   and then it kinda got to the end,

02:04:43   and in the very end, the final scene in the supermarket,

02:04:47   all of a sudden, I realized, it just hit me,

02:04:50   oh my God, I love this movie, love it.

02:04:54   And how great is that song at the end?

02:04:56   Which is-- - Oh, the Bobby Fuller 4?

02:04:57   - Yeah. - You know what,

02:04:58   you would love John Gruber.

02:04:59   You would love to hear two things.

02:05:02   First of all, my daughter demanding

02:05:03   that I play Street Fighting Man on repeat.

02:05:05   - Oh, that is-- - I know,

02:05:07   it's not Rock Soft, but it's pretty good.

02:05:08   And then, as soon as it comes on, she goes, "Oh yeah!"

02:05:13   So awesome.

02:05:15   And you know, my experience was 100% the same.

02:05:18   I watched the first 20 minutes of it

02:05:20   whenever it came out and I could watch it somewhere.

02:05:22   And I went, "Hmm, this is cute."

02:05:24   You gotta watch that movie all the way through once

02:05:25   and then watch it again.

02:05:26   And every time you look at one of those faces

02:05:29   straight on looking at the camera, it's the most delight.

02:05:31   And then Ash's ear twitching and spitting,

02:05:34   it's a total delight.

02:05:35   - But it's such genius filmmaking too,

02:05:37   if you listen to the lyrics of the song it's a guy who's lost his girl right but

02:05:42   yet they're great at that it's a guy who lost his girl but in the movie it's

02:05:45   triumphant it's triumphant and it makes you it makes you feel happy even though

02:05:52   the lights did you buy it on the we know what we did here's the thing here's my

02:05:55   here's what made me think about it and it's a perfect way to end the show is

02:05:58   that we bought the blu-ray and it's I think I think it was one of those one

02:06:01   I'm almost certain I think it's one of those ones where you buy the blu-ray and

02:06:05   It comes with a DVD and a digital download from iTunes, but it's SD.

02:06:12   It's not HD.

02:06:13   Steven: The extra features are totally janky.

02:06:15   Eric Kuzuian But rather than get the Blu-ray out and go

02:06:18   through it, I'll just hit play on Apple TV and play a lesser version.

02:06:22   Maybe it is HD.

02:06:23   I don't know, but it still doesn't look as good as the Blu-ray.

02:06:26   Even though I'm the type of guy who really cares about how stuff looks, and I bought

02:06:29   the Blu-ray because I really want to see the actual hairs on the characters, Twitch and

02:06:34   stuff like that. It's so much more convenient to just fire it up on iTunes and stream it.

02:06:39   It's ridiculous. We've talked about this before. I know your wife's a Weezer fan. I can't tell you

02:06:44   how many copies of Weezer I bought because I didn't want to go in the other room and get the

02:06:47   CD, the blue record. It's asinine. And once you get into that, Apple has me bent over something

02:06:55   white. I've done that too. I've bought a lot of albums. I've bought a lot of albums that I just

02:06:59   don't want. And the torpedoes, I think that's in another room. Right. I just don't want to

02:07:02   Because then I think too even I have to find the disc and then I gotta wait for it to rip and it takes like

02:07:06   10 minutes to rip a CD or it's let's show whether using handbrakes. I just discovered this one called I flicks

02:07:12   It's pretty great. Have you used I flicks? No. Oh, okay. You should check it out

02:07:16   But no, I totally agree with you and they I mean like I can't believe in a million years that I ever got that comfortable

02:07:20   You've run that app that shows how much you spend on apps. No, I don't do it. No, don't do it. Don't do it

02:07:26   Yeah, why would I already look at my PayPal receipts? I don't even want to know I don't even want to know

02:07:29   And you should go.

02:07:30   Can I ask you one question?

02:07:31   Yeah.

02:07:32   Do you really use dashes instead of asterisks for ULs?

02:07:37   I do.

02:07:37   Well, you know what?

02:07:39   I vary on that.

02:07:40   OK.

02:07:40   I know you can use both, right?

02:07:42   Yeah.

02:07:42   Multi Markdown--

02:07:43   You picked that up from the email I sent you.

02:07:44   Yeah, I did.

02:07:45   I did.

02:07:45   I'm looking at it right now.

02:07:46   OK.

02:07:47   All right.

02:07:48   Just checking.

02:07:48   Because sometimes, some of the stuff,

02:07:49   like some of the Brett Terpstra stuff,

02:07:51   does better with asterisks.

02:07:52   Like, do you use his Markdown services?

02:07:55   I don't think so.

02:07:56   Oh, god.

02:07:57   I should teach you about Markdown.

02:07:58   It's really cool.

02:07:59   Yeah, I write Markdown like a caveman.

02:08:02   That's shame on you.

02:08:04   I think I do.

02:08:04   I'm pretty sure I would write it like a caveman.

02:08:06   Share me on again.

02:08:07   I'll talk to you about Markdown.

02:08:08   But you know what?

02:08:11   I use the dashes, I think, because I so pretty, I so overly associate the

02:08:17   asterisks with italicized as talusization.

02:08:20   Yeah, I still disagree.

02:08:23   I still disagree with the design decision about asterisks versus underscores,

02:08:26   but that's just cause I was it.

02:08:28   "Well, you know, I still have a preference.

02:08:29   "If I can, I will go in and edit something so that..."

02:08:34   Before I even knew you, I wrote to you about this

02:08:37   and you sent me a taciturn response, as you do.

02:08:40   But I said, like textile, I think asterisks,

02:08:43   I think it's textile, I think asterisks should be bold

02:08:47   and underscore should be italics.

02:08:49   But no, of course, I've changed my life

02:08:51   around your goddamn thing, you don't maintain it anymore.

02:08:52   But now I'm okay with that, 'cause now it's muscle memory.

02:08:56   You should meet this Brett Terpstra guy, though.

02:08:57   He's doing amazing stuff with your stuff.

02:08:59   I do maintain it.

02:09:00   I maintain it by not screwing around with it.

02:09:01   That's smart.

02:09:03   And everybody tells me that I need to do more with Mark.

02:09:06   It's a different show, John.

02:09:06   You're out of time.

02:09:07   We've got a different show.

02:09:08   And every week, there's more and more people using it

02:09:11   with this thing.

02:09:12   I guess that proves it.

02:09:14   Right?

02:09:14   Doesn't it?

02:09:15   I don't know.

02:09:15   I just feel like if I was dicking around

02:09:17   with the syntax all the time, it would confuse the hell out of me.

02:09:19   Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

02:09:21   No, different show.

02:09:21   But OK, it's all right.

02:09:22   I'll try that.

02:09:23   But he has stuff like you select these lines.

02:09:25   click lines and hit command shift 8 and it turns it all into UL. Hit command shift 1

02:09:32   and it turns the Mo into OL.

02:09:33   That's not bad.

02:09:34   Oh, it's fast as hell. It's fast as hell.

02:09:35   Yeah, I could see that.

02:09:36   You should look into this.

02:09:37   All right, I'll look into it.

02:09:38   I'll look into it.

02:09:39   It's in Perl. Is that all right?

02:09:40   Yeah, I think so.

02:09:41   Okay. All right.

02:09:42   Before we sign off, let me just double thank our sponsors. We've got Tapstream at tapstream.com,

02:09:50   for iOS and Mac and Android apps and Launch Center Pro in the iOS app store. Fantastic

02:09:58   utility for quick launching stuff on your iPhone. Go get them.

02:10:04   Merlin, thank you. Thank you for doing this. I think the whole thing came off pretty well.

02:10:08   I'm very friendly for two guys who the last time I saw you in person, you were doing a

02:10:12   photo shoot in the House of Shields bathroom with my wife.

02:10:15   Yeah, those turned out good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the thing is I I want to make it accessible

02:10:19   I was charging 10 bucks at first

02:10:21   For them and then I realized that 99 cents I could actually get more out of it was kind of an instant paper model for

02:10:27   Photos of your wife. I don't think I sent I sent you all of them

02:10:29   I got my she gets got all of them. I don't know. I think they're handsome photos

02:10:32   Yeah, they look like I love the way she looks like she's trying like she realizes someone's taking a picture of the urinal

02:10:37   They call photo bombing and she like wants to just get make sure she's in the picture

02:10:41   [laughter]

02:10:43   That was so funny.

02:10:45   It looked like something we should send to American Apparel.

02:10:47   [laughter]

02:10:49   (laughing)

02:10:51   (laughing)