PodSearch

ATP

67: Tim Said, Man

 

00:00:00   global branding strategies.

00:00:02   (electronic beeping)

00:00:04   - Did you just whip together a show bot in 20 minutes?

00:00:06   - Yeah, the only thing is I can't get Ajax to work.

00:00:10   - Yeah, I saw that you used forms for the buttons.

00:00:12   - Yeah, if I had like 10 more minutes,

00:00:14   I could get Ajax working, but I don't, so here we are.

00:00:17   - Did you find IRC code somewhere,

00:00:18   or did you actually write that too?

00:00:20   - Oh, there's no bot, there's no bot,

00:00:21   it's literally just a form.

00:00:22   I have no idea how to make an IRC bot.

00:00:25   And that was probably not going to fit

00:00:26   in my 20 minute budget to build this thing.

00:00:29   I was really starting to doubt my own self-worth when you said, "Oh my, I had to whip this

00:00:35   together in 20 minutes."

00:00:36   I'm thinking, "How the hell did he get an IRC bot in 20 minutes?"

00:00:39   Node is like the king or queen or what have you of having packages to do everything under

00:00:46   the sun.

00:00:47   And I doubt I could whip together an IRC bot in Node in 20 minutes.

00:00:50   Yeah, you could.

00:00:51   I could just download the IRC bot library and you just instantiate it, give it a channel

00:00:56   and a nickname and then tell it what to look for.

00:01:00   Like, the library does everything for you, you know what I mean? It's just a question of finding that library.

00:01:04   Yeah, and try to find it for PHP.

00:01:08   You know, the Showbot code is open sourced, I think. You could have just, why don't you use that?

00:01:12   I was racing people in the chat, seeing who could finish first. Me rewriting it

00:01:16   or them trying to get this installed because it's a Ruby thing and it's full of dependencies

00:01:20   and all this other crap. I don't know how to host Ruby, so I figured I could rewrite it faster

00:01:24   my hosted framework than the time it would take to figure out Ruby.

00:01:29   I want to make fun of you so badly, but I don't know crap about Ruby.

00:01:31   Right. I mean, could you have set it up in 20 minutes on a server?

00:01:35   Probably not. Oh, goodness. All right. Well, apologies in advance if I'm cranky tonight.

00:01:42   I'm a little stressed out. A lot of things going on in the LIS household, trying to keep

00:01:46   it all under control. Not really succeeding. So to make me feel better, let's start by

00:01:51   I make in front of PHP. John? What? You would know if you looked at the notes.

00:01:58   Anyway, I was a little busy. Yeah, and just a disclaimer up front, this is not my normal

00:02:04   voice, this is my I'm sick voice. I've done many podcasts with my I'm sick voice, including

00:02:08   I think like at least four of the six hours of Star Wars podcasts in the encounter role

00:02:15   I did with this voice. But anyway, we'll get through this. Which is kind of a shame because

00:02:19   next week we're not recording an episode and presumably I'll be better by then.

00:02:22   Oh yeah and speaking of we're recording on what is today Thursday the 22nd so

00:02:27   just like we talked about last episode if we say something extraordinarily

00:02:31   stupid it's because of time shift issues not because we're actually

00:02:36   unintelligent. Alright so quick follow-up a bunch of corrections follow-up. First

00:02:41   one is that I didn't notice this when we were recording the podcast but when I

00:02:44   listened back to it I noticed that Marco made some bold claims about PHP being

00:02:49   faster than JavaScript, much people wrote in to tell us that this is not the case.

00:02:52   If I had been paying better attention, I would have tried to call him on it, but

00:02:55   apparently I wasn't. I was kind of surprised that you didn't at the time. I

00:02:59   didn't even remember hearing it. As soon as I said it, I realized, yeah, this is

00:03:02   probably wrong. Yeah, so Jinji sent us a bunch of links to benchmarks. We'll put

00:03:07   this one in the show notes showing how incredibly slow PHP is compared to

00:03:10   JavaScript. Then again, it has nothing to do specifically with the language. This is what we

00:03:14   were talking about on that show. JavaScript has had so much engineering

00:03:17   resources put towards making it fast. PHP less so. Yeah, the core PHP runtime seems

00:03:24   like it's been held together by sticks and duct tape for its entire lifetime.

00:03:28   And that's why Facebook was able to come in and make such a massive upgrade

00:03:34   with HHVM performance. My point was not that PHP is a fascist language, I didn't

00:03:39   mean to say that, that that was kind of me stumbling around my words trying to

00:03:43   say my actual point, my intended point, which was that PHP,

00:03:48   like no one's ever really complained that PHP is slow.

00:03:52   It's not like, the PHP being slow has never really

00:03:55   been a problem for most people,

00:03:56   unless you're operating at Facebook scale.

00:03:58   It's fast enough and it's not,

00:04:00   like performance has never really been PHP's problem.

00:04:03   - Yeah, the thing with all these quote unquote

00:04:06   language performance benchmarks is they always end up

00:04:08   doing stuff like, they end up doing like integer

00:04:11   and floating point math, right?

00:04:13   and arrays of integers and floats and calculating fractals and playing the game of life and doing things that GNOME will ever ask one of these dynamic languages to do.

00:04:24   Because if you try to do anything math related or anything with densely packed structures, of course the language that uses native ints and can use the add operation on your CPU is going to destroy the thing where every single variable is this crazy-ass struct with a million different things in it.

00:04:39   you know, best case scenario is a big struct, worst case is something even worse.

00:04:43   Of course you're gonna get slaughtered by someone doing, you know, native operations

00:04:47   versus that, but these languages are used mostly to manipulate strings, and if you

00:04:51   do string manipulation stuff, like who can run regular expressions with, you

00:04:55   know, Unicode handling against huge strings and intelligently replace

00:05:00   things, and some of these dynamic languages, even the slow ones that don't

00:05:04   have a lot of attention paid to them, start looking a lot better. So I don't

00:05:08   pay too much attention to these benchmarks because every dynamic language gets slaughtered

00:05:11   when, you know, calculating fractals and who cares because that's not what they're being

00:05:15   asked to do. Right, like what matters most when you're

00:05:17   using one of these languages, what matters most is like how much can it handle on servers

00:05:23   in real life applications? Like how much, how many concurrent connections, how many

00:05:26   users, you know, how much can you fit, you know, per server, per CPU unit of performance

00:05:32   or, you know, per dyno if you're on some virtualized thing, you know, how much can it handle?

00:05:38   And that's related to lots of things besides low-level math performance.

00:05:42   And it's in those areas that almost all modern languages

00:05:46   and frameworks do pretty well at that, and you know, platforms and web servers

00:05:50   and everything like that. Modern standards are pretty high for that, and

00:05:54   you know, you can go Apache versus Nginx versus built-in

00:05:58   servers and stuff like that, and you can get into a lot of nitty-gritty there, but

00:06:02   the fact is, they're all pretty fast these days because they're all pretty well designed.

00:06:06   and pretty much any language you use on a reasonably hosted stack can handle a lot.

00:06:11   That's why Node is such an interesting hack, because it's like, well there's this language that we're all forced to use

00:06:16   that tons of people have worked really hard to make fast, why don't we just use that on the server?

00:06:21   Because then we can, you know, it's the V8 JavaScript engine that Google wrote that's super fast,

00:06:26   we'll just do that on the server, it sounds crazy, but it's like hey, someone already did the work, so here's a vaguely dynamic language

00:06:31   that someone has already made fast for us, and then we can concentrate and do

00:06:35   interesting things on top of that. Let me interrupt you real quick. What you were

00:06:38   saying about

00:06:39   performance on dinos and whatnot reminds me that

00:06:43   I had somebody from Heroku reach out to me and say

00:06:47   "Hey, we heard you talking about

00:06:49   how I had thought that I'd hit some internal dashboard because of the

00:06:53   traffic I got via Marco about the post about Aaron being pregnant."

00:06:57   Well, firstly I think I misread the URL and I do not think that that was an

00:07:00   internal app and people from Morocco have since confirmed that anyway.

00:07:04   But secondly, somebody from Morocco wrote me and I don't have his name handy and I

00:07:08   apologize but wrote me and said in so many words, "Your dyno was well under control

00:07:13   and not really getting taxed that badly at all."

00:07:16   And that was when Google Analytics was reporting roughly 500 concurrent users in the real time

00:07:22   tab and I think I got somewhere around 10 or 15,000 hits over the course of that day

00:07:27   that I posted that.

00:07:28   So to your point, in the right situation,

00:07:32   it's really not that bad.

00:07:34   Node is not that bad on the server side.

00:07:35   So I'm sorry, speaking of Node.

00:07:37   - Yeah, we were talking about JavaScript modularization

00:07:41   and the different systems for use,

00:07:43   and I said that I thought Node.js use AMD.

00:07:45   It doesn't, it uses CommonJS,

00:07:47   which is another one of those standards.

00:07:49   And there's also, someone pointed out to me,

00:07:51   the ECMAScript 6 modules thing.

00:07:56   ECMA, ECMA is the, I don't know what it stands for,

00:07:58   but it's the standard for JavaScript,

00:08:00   and they've been marching on making new standards

00:08:03   for the language well ahead of what browsers

00:08:05   are implementing, but if you look at the later ones,

00:08:07   there's a lot of interesting things in there,

00:08:08   including a formal language-supported way to do modules.

00:08:13   With, I have another link here in the notes

00:08:16   to this ES6 module transpiler that will write your,

00:08:21   lets you write your JavaScript using the ES6 module syntax

00:08:25   and then compile it into either AMD or common JS modules.

00:08:28   And all these things are trying to accomplish the same task.

00:08:30   Sort of keep things out of each other's name space

00:08:34   and provide a formal interface for defining what a module is,

00:08:37   what it's named, what it exports,

00:08:38   and all that other stuff.

00:08:40   So yeah, it's a great thing about standards

00:08:42   someone needed to choose from.

00:08:43   (laughing)

00:08:45   - All right, so additionally, you had mentioned,

00:08:48   I don't remember if it was the regular show

00:08:50   or the quote unquote after show,

00:08:52   but we had talked about iPhone earbuds,

00:08:55   and you were devout in your,

00:08:57   or fairly devout in your belief

00:08:59   that the iPhones do not come with earbuds.

00:09:01   Marco and I explained that you were wrong,

00:09:03   and then you had intended to go on a treasure hunt

00:09:05   for some of Tina's earbuds.

00:09:07   What was the result of that?

00:09:09   - I did find them.

00:09:11   I asked her where the box was, and she didn't tell me,

00:09:14   and maybe she didn't wanna tell me.

00:09:15   (laughing)

00:09:17   On my own, I found the box, and in the box,

00:09:21   lo and behold, completely, you know,

00:09:22   still in the little plastic shrink-wrappy whatever stuff,

00:09:27   were the earphones with the clicker.

00:09:29   I found the iPhone 5s box.

00:09:31   I bet the ones in the 4s box are still there as well,

00:09:34   because again, I have never seen one in this house,

00:09:35   so I think we've just never unpacked them.

00:09:37   So I unpacked the 5s clicker,

00:09:39   and I was wearing it tonight

00:09:40   when I was doing dishes and stuff.

00:09:42   I don't know if it's gonna solve my problem,

00:09:44   because it already has two issues I see

00:09:46   with the little clicker thing.

00:09:49   Well, that's three.

00:09:50   One issue, which is not really the fault

00:09:52   of the headphones I think is that I get a little bit of static.

00:09:58   Like when I twist, if I just twist the little connector, I get a little bit of crinkly static

00:10:02   and maybe I have some dirt or something inside my iPod Touch's headphone connector that only

00:10:06   shows up with the little plug as little extra segments for the clicker, the contacts.

00:10:12   That contact might be a little bit screwed up, so that's kind of annoying.

00:10:15   It shouldn't be audible because I believe it just uses the microphone contact for that.

00:10:19   Yeah, I don't know what it is about these,

00:10:21   but if I put on my regular headphones,

00:10:22   I don't hear any clicking.

00:10:23   And this is just in my pocket.

00:10:25   I wasn't intentionally doing it.

00:10:26   I took it out and I said, what the hell is that?

00:10:27   And if I just twist it, I can hear a crinkle, crinkle.

00:10:29   So who knows?

00:10:30   It's probably just dirt or something inside my connector.

00:10:33   What can you do?

00:10:33   Could also be that earbuds are pieces of crap.

00:10:36   Oh, would you stop it with that?

00:10:38   Earbuds are not bad-- or not good, rather.

00:10:40   Just listening to podcasts, who cares?

00:10:44   The second thing is--

00:10:45   and I understand why this did this,

00:10:46   because there's a microphone in it--

00:10:47   I really wish that the clicker was lower down on the thing because I don't want to reach

00:10:50   up that high to click the clicker.

00:10:53   I'd rather click lower down.

00:10:54   But obviously if they're going to make it a mic, they have to make it up higher.

00:10:56   So I kind of understand why they did that.

00:10:58   And the third thing is also related to where it is.

00:11:00   It means that one of the earphones has different weighting and different sort of, you know,

00:11:04   when I turn my head around and everything, one of the things is going to fly out and

00:11:07   pull out more because it has an extra weight on it there.

00:11:10   And it makes my right ear, the earbud in my right ear, start to work its way loose faster

00:11:15   and more aggressively than the one in my left ear does,

00:11:17   and I find that a little annoying.

00:11:19   - Wow.

00:11:20   - It is of no surprise to me

00:11:21   that you have immediate complaints.

00:11:23   Also, I should note that if I'm correct,

00:11:25   using ear pods, is that right?

00:11:27   Is that what they call the new earbuds?

00:11:29   - Yeah, yeah, the weird ones

00:11:30   that don't have a rubber gasket around them,

00:11:33   and they kind of go into your ear.

00:11:35   - Right, whereas the 4S, I believe,

00:11:37   came with the old earbuds,

00:11:38   which didn't have a formal name to my recollection.

00:11:41   - Yeah, I like the ear pods.

00:11:43   They fit my ears reasonably well,

00:11:45   I like the idea that there's not anything that's going to wear off on them.

00:11:48   Well, that's not true at all. It just might take a little bit longer.

00:11:51   Well, what's going to come off, though? There's no, like, it's just a solid piece of plastic, well, two solid pieces of plastic stuck.

00:11:56   I suppose the two pieces of plastic could come apart, but that seems much less likely than that stupid rubber thing coming off.

00:12:02   The way most headphones die is internal fraying of the cable where it meets the headphone.

00:12:08   That's, or occasionally where it meets the jack end, but usually it's the headphone end.

00:12:14   Almost always, because that's just, you know, it's one of those strain boot points, and

00:12:17   the strain boots never really do that much, and that's it.

00:12:20   I've never had a pair of EarPods, and I didn't have the original iPod, I believe the first

00:12:26   one I got was the terrible one with the four touch buttons on it, I guess that was the

00:12:30   third generation or something?

00:12:32   Anyway, I've never had a pair of Apple Earbuds go bad.

00:12:35   Like they all still work.

00:12:37   So I think I'm really gentle on them.

00:12:40   And speaking of being gentle on them, one of the things people were suggesting was to

00:12:43   solve the problem of like, you know, when someone walks up to you, you've got to fish

00:12:46   the iPod out of your pocket and turn it off if you don't have the clicker or whatever.

00:12:49   I said, "Oh, just yank the headphone jack out because that'll stop playback."

00:12:52   Yeah, it will, but you'll destroy your headphones doing that.

00:12:55   You'll probably destroy the jack too, but you'll definitely destroy the headphones.

00:12:58   It's not designed to be yanked out repeatedly.

00:12:59   So that is not a viable option for me.

00:13:02   One thing I actually looked into as a potential feature for Overcast is to allow you to just

00:13:09   tap the phone really hard with your finger while it's in your pocket and allow that to

00:13:13   mimic the clicker controls.

00:13:14   I thought of that and I was going to suggest that to you, but then I thought about it a

00:13:18   little longer and I said, "This is a terrible idea."

00:13:19   Well, yeah, that's pretty much what happened.

00:13:21   I mean, I tried reading some of the accelerometer data to see if I could reliably detect that

00:13:25   versus any other kind of motion and it was just really hard.

00:13:29   I don't think it would ever be good enough,

00:13:31   like reliable enough to detect that

00:13:34   without having a bunch of false positives.

00:13:35   - And you don't wanna encourage people

00:13:37   to be whacking their iOS devices,

00:13:39   even if it's just a fingertip,

00:13:41   because once you open that door,

00:13:43   you know how, human nature, you'll tap,

00:13:46   you'll tap harder, and you'll tap it again.

00:13:48   And it's like, I gotta make a Raymond Williams reference,

00:13:51   but you've never even heard of that movie.

00:13:54   - Nope, nope. - That's all right.

00:13:56   Finger go right through the iPhone, boom.

00:13:58   What?

00:13:59   - Okay.

00:14:02   - I'll get a show notes link for it, go ahead.

00:14:04   (laughing)

00:14:05   - We are sponsored this week, once again,

00:14:07   by our friends at Dash.

00:14:09   Go to thedash.com, T-H-E dash.com, not an actual dash.

00:14:13   This is like that McSweeney's hard to pronounce

00:14:16   email addresses, T-H-E-D-A-S-H.com.

00:14:19   So it's not like a hyphen or anything.

00:14:21   Anyway, go to thedash.com/ATP.

00:14:26   And this is really cool.

00:14:27   They basically allow you to build your own custom dashboard.

00:14:31   And it can be public or private. And you can fill it up with all sorts of widgets.

00:14:35   And you can customize it, you can make your own widgets, you can do

00:14:39   widgets for things like your site traffic, or recent tweets,

00:14:43   or your recent GitHub commits if you're a developer. All sorts of

00:14:47   things, social activity, traffic activity, all sorts of things.

00:14:51   If you can picture a graph or a status widget for it, they probably

00:14:55   have it or can or will add it. It's really great. So they have a bunch of pre-built widgets

00:15:00   for you to use. They're adding more all the time. Vanity searches, all sorts of stuff

00:15:05   you can put up there. You know, a lot of it, like we compared it last week to Panix Excellent

00:15:10   Status Board app for iPad. It's kind of like that for the web and, in my opinion, pretty

00:15:16   well expanded from that. They do a lot more. A lot more comes with it. Really great. Dashboards

00:15:22   from Dash look great on a TV if you want. You can connect it via Apple TV or via a Chromecast.

00:15:28   The pricing model is really quite simple. It's a lot like GitHub, so you can always

00:15:32   create unlimited public dashboards for free. And if you sign up, you can create one private

00:15:36   dashboard for free, and then if you want, you can just pay $10 a month to have unlimited

00:15:41   private dashboards. So you can have internal stuff kept private for your company or whatever.

00:15:45   But if you want to go there, play with it, create a public dashboard, go right ahead,

00:15:48   free. You can even get one private dashboard for free. Really great thing, go to thedash.com/ATP.

00:15:55   Run by great people. I met one of them last year, a really nice guy, and a big fan of

00:16:02   us. So if you go to thedash.com/ATP, you can even see the dashboards that he made for me,

00:16:08   John, and Casey, and they're actually pretty funny. So definitely check that out. Really

00:16:13   cool. Thanks a lot to Dash once again, thedash.com/ATP for sponsoring our show.

00:16:18   Couple people are asking on Twitter about different widgets because you

00:16:21   mentioned, you know, widgets to interface different services and stuff and if you

00:16:25   go to support.thedash.com you can vote on basically the next widgets that

00:16:30   they'll introduce. So this is ideas from the community for widgets they want

00:16:33   and you can vote up the ones that you want to see. So it's obviously an

00:16:37   expandable platform and they're adding widgets as they're demanded. So tell

00:16:41   - Tell us about your Accord.

00:16:43   - Yeah, so last week I said that I couldn't figure out

00:16:47   how to get, or I thought it didn't see my iPod touch at all,

00:16:49   but many people who have an Accord of the same vintage

00:16:51   and iPod touches of the same vintage said,

00:16:53   "No, it'll find it."

00:16:54   And so I took another run at it, and sure enough,

00:16:57   it's just because the interface is terrible.

00:16:59   Like it's got this thing that says connect new device,

00:17:00   and then it says search for devices, and it says searching,

00:17:03   and then this voice comes over and tells you,

00:17:05   "If your device isn't compatible, go to blah, blah, blah."

00:17:07   And it's searching, searching, searching, searching,

00:17:08   and then it says no devices found.

00:17:10   And I thought that was it looking for devices,

00:17:12   but apparently there's a whole other feature

00:17:14   where you have to say like,

00:17:16   I don't know the difference between searching for a device

00:17:18   and adding a new device is, but they're different functions.

00:17:20   And I don't even remember how I found that.

00:17:22   Eventually I found my way to a different menu,

00:17:24   which is not searching for device,

00:17:26   but adding a new device,

00:17:27   which is somehow a different thing.

00:17:28   And it did find my iPod touch.

00:17:29   So the next time I commute to work,

00:17:32   I will do so in Bluetooth glory.

00:17:35   - You're gonna see, you're gonna become a convert.

00:17:37   It's really, really convenient.

00:17:39   Like this is what I was saying last episode.

00:17:41   I think I was, I think this was edited out,

00:17:42   but being able to get in the car

00:17:44   and just have it start playing

00:17:46   is just so much better and more convenient

00:17:49   than having to plug in for any reason.

00:17:50   Like it's worth not having your phone charge

00:17:54   during your car ride just for that convenience.

00:17:56   And you know, anything that cars do

00:17:59   that requires me to plug in,

00:18:01   I'm gonna have a really hard time

00:18:02   convincing myself that's worth doing now

00:18:04   because it's just so nice to just get in,

00:18:06   it starts playing.

00:18:08   When you turn the car off, it pauses.

00:18:09   Done.

00:18:10   - I still gotta plug in my headphones

00:18:11   for the walk from the parking garage to the office.

00:18:15   So there's still a little bit,

00:18:17   I had to do that anyway with the iPod Shuffle,

00:18:18   but yeah, now I've got the clicker for that too, so.

00:18:20   - Is that long enough to justify rocking headphones?

00:18:23   - Oh yeah, definitely.

00:18:24   You gotta go down six flights of stairs,

00:18:26   up three flights of stairs, I mean,

00:18:28   it's then walk from the garage to the building.

00:18:31   We don't all live in rural Virginia

00:18:33   where your parking spot is right in front

00:18:35   of your ground level office building.

00:18:37   I'm going to choose not to engage.

00:18:40   So we should probably talk about WWDC predictions because by the time this episode comes out,

00:18:46   it will be mere days before the big event.

00:18:50   And I wanted to start with hardware and this is a little bit of a tangent, but there's

00:18:59   been a lot of talk about larger iPhones and it certainly does not stand to history or

00:19:06   or recent history that we'll see any new iPhones during WWDC.

00:19:10   But that being said, let's suppose, even if it doesn't happen during WWDC, let's

00:19:16   suppose that there are, what are the two sizes, 4.7 and 5.5?

00:19:22   5.5, which is pretty big.

00:19:25   Yeah, so I wanted to ask Marco specifically, because you seemed most enthusiastic about

00:19:30   these bigger sizes, let's assume, just for the sake of conversation, that both 4.7 and

00:19:35   are real and they exist.

00:19:37   So much anxiety.

00:19:39   Right, but let's also assume

00:19:41   that the

00:19:43   effective resolution is no

00:19:45   different. So,

00:19:47   I don't recall exactly what resolution the

00:19:49   iPhones are today, but

00:19:51   whatever the size is that they

00:19:53   blow it up to, they just,

00:19:55   they blow it up. There's no more

00:19:57   effective real estate.

00:19:59   Would you still want one? Or are you

00:20:01   really excited for them strictly

00:20:03   based on the thought that you could shove more things onto the screen.

00:20:06   Now, you know, there was a rumor a couple of weeks back

00:20:09   that iOS 8, I think this was on 9to5Mac, that iOS 8

00:20:12   was going to include some kind of new resolution

00:20:15   scaling feature. Possibly based on the way

00:20:18   Mac OS 10 does it on the Retina MacBook Pros.

00:20:21   If that actually happens, if there is some kind of

00:20:24   feature where you can actually simulate higher

00:20:27   resolutions or somehow adjust the size of things on screen

00:20:30   on screen to make everything small. I mean there's universal text sizing but

00:20:34   that isn't that well supported yet. But if this feature

00:20:38   exists and you can actually dynamically scale things then I would probably

00:20:42   be tempted to go with the big one. Or if the big one actually does have

00:20:46   a higher resolution I'd be pretty tempted to go for it.

00:20:50   I'm not sure I would keep it. Like the year after I might go back to the

00:20:54   "small" 4.7" size. I don't know. I'm

00:20:58   I'm curious to try it, I've never had a large screen phone

00:21:01   and I know a lot of people say they're too big,

00:21:03   but a lot of people love them.

00:21:05   And, you know, for how I use it,

00:21:09   especially since I don't really use an iPad very often,

00:21:13   I use my phone for everything when I'm not at my computer.

00:21:18   So I'd be really curious to try the big phone.

00:21:21   That being said, if it's only a pure scale up

00:21:27   and the resolution and there's not more pixels

00:21:30   and it doesn't put in more capability

00:21:33   to see more on screen with the same resolution,

00:21:35   I'd have a really hard time justifying the bigger one

00:21:38   because it's like, well, what am I really getting for that?

00:21:40   And you are getting something like,

00:21:42   you could theoretically set the universal text size smaller

00:21:44   and fit more on screen with text,

00:21:48   but it wouldn't quite have the same effect.

00:21:51   - Having also never had a larger phone,

00:21:56   I don't see myself carrying a larger phone in my pocket, anything over 5 inches for sure.

00:22:03   I'm not overly enthusiastic about a 4.7 inch phone.

00:22:07   But as with all things that I claim I either don't understand or don't like, like Macs

00:22:12   and iPhones and BMWs and many other things I'm not thinking of, I'm sure I will probably

00:22:16   come around on this.

00:22:18   But I don't know, I don't have an overabundance of pocket space as it is and I don't even

00:22:22   fancy skinny jeans or anything like that.

00:22:24   So I just can't imagine having like a five inch plus phone

00:22:29   sitting in my pocket all the time.

00:22:31   That does not sound enjoyable to me.

00:22:33   I think a lot of people, a lot of Apple enthusiasts

00:22:37   would end up getting it just like Margo said,

00:22:39   just to see what it's like.

00:22:40   Because presumably these people have only ever had iPhones.

00:22:43   Like they've only been buying iPhones.

00:22:46   Haven't tried any other kind of phone.

00:22:48   You're going to try it just--

00:22:48   I mean, I guess you won't be able to tell

00:22:50   from holding in the story.

00:22:51   But like, well, I don't know.

00:22:52   You'll want to just buy it, own it.

00:22:54   you know you're going to get a new phone next year

00:22:56   or the year after anyway, give it a try.

00:22:58   And then you'll find out probably

00:22:59   within the first couple of weeks or couple of months

00:23:01   if this is for you or not.

00:23:02   But since it's a novelty in the Apple iOS device space,

00:23:06   I think a lot of people are going to buy it

00:23:08   just to see what it's like.

00:23:09   So Apple kind of gets an out in that regard.

00:23:12   And regular people who aren't listening to this podcast

00:23:14   and aren't Apple enthusiasts, they're

00:23:15   already buying big phones.

00:23:16   So it's not a big deal to them.

00:23:18   It's only a big deal to people like us.

00:23:20   Also, the screen might not be the only difference.

00:23:23   obviously a larger phone can fit a larger battery,

00:23:25   and some of that battery power is going to be spent

00:23:28   lighting that larger screen, but probably not all of it.

00:23:31   Assuming they have the same logic board, motherboard inside,

00:23:37   and it's just that same board plus larger battery

00:23:40   on the bigger phone versus smaller battery

00:23:42   on the smaller phone, you'd probably get better battery life

00:23:44   on the bigger one, and it might not be by a whole lot,

00:23:47   but I bet it would be noticeable.

00:23:49   Secondly, if they do different thicknesses,

00:23:53   and I talked about this on the talk show,

00:23:55   which we'll get back to in a minute.

00:23:57   I talked about this on the talk show a while back

00:23:59   with talking about a big phone,

00:24:00   but if they do different thicknesses,

00:24:03   they might have different camera sensors.

00:24:06   And camera sensors on phones,

00:24:08   thickness tends to be the limiting factor

00:24:10   in how good they can be.

00:24:12   And that's why you see Android phones

00:24:13   having these big blobby things

00:24:14   where the camera is in the back

00:24:15   so they can make that thicker

00:24:16   and put a nice sensor in there and nice optics.

00:24:19   'cause optics, you just get to physical limits

00:24:22   where you just need depth to make larger sensors,

00:24:25   larger optics, things like that

00:24:26   to make better image quality.

00:24:27   And the rumors are that there's gonna be this iPhone Air,

00:24:32   it's the biggest one and it's super thin.

00:24:35   If the big one is thinner

00:24:38   and has a worse camera as a result,

00:24:42   then that's gonna be a pretty big downside for me

00:24:45   and I would almost certainly not get it.

00:24:46   I would say if the cameras are different at all between the two

00:24:50   sizes--

00:24:51   and obviously this is assuming a lot.

00:24:53   This is a disclaimer upfront.

00:24:54   This is assuming that there even are two iPhones.

00:24:56   And by the way, we probably won't hear about them next week.

00:24:58   We'll probably hear about them in the fall.

00:25:00   But assuming that there are two phones,

00:25:04   if there's any difference in the camera at all between them,

00:25:06   I will almost certainly pick the one with the better camera,

00:25:09   no matter what size it is.

00:25:10   You pre-derailed this, Casey.

00:25:12   You put in stuff about a phone, which

00:25:13   we all think is going to be released in September

00:25:15   in the section about WWDC predictions.

00:25:17   - Well, yes, I'm sorry.

00:25:19   I really wanted to ask Marco about this

00:25:20   because sitting here now, like I said,

00:25:22   I have no enthusiasm about a bigger phone,

00:25:24   although clearly the rest of the planet

00:25:26   quite literally does, so I don't know,

00:25:28   I just wanted to ask real fast.

00:25:30   - Before we move on and before we forget,

00:25:33   speaking of the talk show, so Gruber announced

00:25:36   on the talk show today that he's doing a live show

00:25:40   at WWDC on, what is it, Tuesday?

00:25:44   And we will be the guests on that live show.

00:25:46   So if you, you know, we decided not to do our own live show

00:25:50   'cause it's just a lot of work and you know,

00:25:52   he's doing one and we're like, oh, we'll just invade his.

00:25:54   So if you wanna hear us invade the talk show

00:25:57   live at WBC next week,

00:25:59   tickets are not available right now as we record,

00:26:02   but by the time we post this, they will be.

00:26:04   So we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:26:06   So let me, so key, you know,

00:26:08   look at the show notes basically and see.

00:26:09   Tickets are probably gonna go pretty quickly.

00:26:11   So go quickly if you want to come.

00:26:14   And hopefully we will see you there.

00:26:16   And where would people find those show notes?

00:26:18   Listen to this song, I don't know.

00:26:19   [LAUGHTER]

00:26:21   Yeah, see, the song has to fit every episode.

00:26:24   It says you can find the show notes at ATP.fm,

00:26:26   but in the back to work tradition,

00:26:28   you have to give the full URL.

00:26:29   And now that you've made the nice, short URLs,

00:26:31   you can do that, can't you?

00:26:32   Well, they're not that short.

00:26:33   It's ATP.fm/episodes/67, right?

00:26:38   Is this number 67?

00:26:39   Dan?

00:26:40   Dan?

00:26:40   Yes, it is.

00:26:41   - Okay. - And also, you are lying.

00:26:43   ATP.fm/67 should work.

00:26:47   - That does work, oh my God.

00:26:49   - So yeah, so ATP.fm/67.

00:26:52   - Once again, WWDC Tuesday evening.

00:26:55   I don't know what time, either six or seven.

00:26:57   - Six to nine at Mezzanine, which is a really nice venue.

00:27:00   - Yeah, it's gonna be a good show, so check it out.

00:27:02   - And yes, we will all be there, I will be there in person.

00:27:05   I am flying out to do a live podcast, you're welcome.

00:27:08   - We actually convinced him to do this.

00:27:10   'cause I do not wanna do a live podcast, and yet I am.

00:27:13   So if you wanted to see me--

00:27:15   - He doesn't wanna do a live podcast,

00:27:16   he doesn't wanna fly.

00:27:17   - No, I don't wanna do this at all.

00:27:19   But, you know, I'll survive.

00:27:20   So anyway, all three of us will be there in the flesh.

00:27:24   - So, okay, WWDC stuff.

00:27:26   Let's start with the rest of the hardware,

00:27:28   the stuff that they actually may announce at WWDC.

00:27:32   Do we see a retina MacBook Air happening?

00:27:35   - When they lowered the price on the current ones,

00:27:37   you know, when they revised them and took off $100,

00:27:40   At first I thought that was a clear sign

00:27:41   that they were making room for the one and only

00:27:44   12 inch Retina Air model, but then I thought maybe

00:27:48   it's just their preemptive move because they don't have

00:27:50   that ready and they just wanna make these more attractive

00:27:52   until they do have it ready and now I can't decide.

00:27:55   - Well I think you're right because Intel's having

00:27:57   some issues getting the next CPU, I believe it's Broadwell.

00:28:01   Intel's having some issues with that getting that on time

00:28:03   and so it's basically been pretty widely rumored,

00:28:07   speculated and maybe even said by Intel that they're basically not going to have new

00:28:12   CPU models out until like December at the earliest. And there's different like

00:28:17   there's different times the different releases so you know the MacBook Air

00:28:20   super low power CPU might come out at a different time than like the ones the

00:28:23   iMac uses and stuff like that but basically it's looking unlikely that

00:28:29   Apple was going to have a compelling reason to update the current line of

00:28:34   of anything anytime soon.

00:28:35   That doesn't mean they can't launch a new one.

00:28:37   Like if they wanted to do a retina MacBook Air,

00:28:40   or any new size of a laptop,

00:28:43   they could just ship it with the existing CPU family.

00:28:45   It wouldn't be that big of a deal.

00:28:47   - I don't know about that,

00:28:48   'cause I always assumed that retina

00:28:50   would be rating for Broadwell,

00:28:51   just for power concerns,

00:28:53   'cause the extra power needed by the screen.

00:28:55   - Is Broadwell a dice rink, or a process rink?

00:28:58   I think it is, but I'm not sure.

00:29:00   - Oh yeah, it is.

00:29:01   This is 14 nanometers, isn't it?

00:29:02   - So that does matter.

00:29:03   Yeah, but so like I would imagine that Apple's roadmap was based on the assumption that they

00:29:08   would have Broadwell in time for a mid-year, you know, retina MacBook Air. With the price drop and

00:29:15   the revisions before WWDC, like I said, that could go both ways. It could be like, well,

00:29:19   you would want to keep those in the lineup because they're still good computers, but like they revise

00:29:26   them. Did you see the Macworld speed tests on them? They're actually slower than the models they

00:29:30   they replace in a couple of measures.

00:29:32   - Well, was that just because of the SSD?

00:29:34   There was a thing that came out that first said,

00:29:36   oh my god, the SSDs are actually slower.

00:29:38   And then a couple days later it came out that,

00:29:40   oh well actually, there's always been variance

00:29:42   in which SSD manufacturer you get

00:29:44   when you buy your MacBook Air.

00:29:45   There's always been variances in them,

00:29:47   and the current variances are nothing new.

00:29:49   - Yeah, that could be true, but you would think

00:29:51   that MacWorld would get the models with the fast ones,

00:29:53   but I don't know.

00:29:54   But anyway, the point is, the revisions

00:29:56   of the existing models are not like,

00:29:58   oh these are so much faster than last year's.

00:30:00   It's a price drop and performance is the same, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little

00:30:06   bit worse depending on what your previous one and what your current one is.

00:30:10   Screens, not a big change there or anything.

00:30:12   So it's like that they're being pushed down market and kept on life support to make room

00:30:18   for something.

00:30:19   And I can't decide whether doing that before WWDC means they're making room for an announcement

00:30:25   or doing it before WWDC means this is not,

00:30:27   and we don't have anything nice to say,

00:30:30   so we won't say anything at all at WWDC

00:30:31   and you'll just all wait Mac Pro style

00:30:33   for us to come out with the real replacement machines.

00:30:37   - I'm guessing it's the latter,

00:30:39   just because we know that Intel's having these issues

00:30:41   with the new generation of CPUs,

00:30:44   so we know that this current generation of MacBook Airs

00:30:46   has to last longer than expected.

00:30:49   - I would still be excited for Apple to announce the machine,

00:30:53   show it and say it's not shipping until like October,

00:30:56   and then in October have it slip to December.

00:30:58   Like basically I wanna see what the new machine looks like

00:31:01   even if I can't have it until the end of the year.

00:31:03   - So basically exactly what they did

00:31:05   with the Mac Pro last year.

00:31:06   - Yeah, exactly.

00:31:07   It was, you know, it's like,

00:31:09   not that people are dying for new Airs,

00:31:11   but by pushing the existing ones down,

00:31:14   it's like now the Air feels like kind of a loser machine.

00:31:16   It's like we know there's a replacement coming

00:31:18   and it's not here yet.

00:31:19   So they haven't been waiting years like the Mac Pro people,

00:31:22   but still, I mean, we'll get to any other hardware

00:31:27   we think might be announced, but we all agree

00:31:29   probably no phones, 'cause they're in September these days.

00:31:33   The iPads have just been updated.

00:31:36   If they're not going to show a red in the air,

00:31:38   do they have any hardware to announce at WWDC?

00:31:41   - Well, there's always room for a new category.

00:31:43   - I was just thinking that,

00:31:45   and just put it in the show notes to talk about.

00:31:48   We may do the wearables thing.

00:31:50   I want so badly to have a clever idea

00:31:53   as to what that would be,

00:31:54   but I cannot come up with anything.

00:31:57   - We are also sponsored this week by Nature Box.

00:31:59   Nature Box delivers delicious and nutritious snacks

00:32:02   to your door every month.

00:32:04   Go to naturebox.com/atp,

00:32:07   and you will get 50% off your first box.

00:32:10   These are smarter snacks you can feel good about.

00:32:12   They have no high-fructose corn syrup,

00:32:14   no partially-hydrogenated oils, no trans fats,

00:32:17   no artificial sweeteners,

00:32:19   no artificial flavors or colors.

00:32:21   These are better for you and they're nutritionist approved.

00:32:25   When you sign up, you get a discovery box

00:32:26   filled with surprise snacks.

00:32:28   Then you have the option to either pick your own

00:32:30   or you can let NatureBox surprise you

00:32:31   with new snacks every month.

00:32:33   You can browse their site at naturebox.com/atp

00:32:37   to check out their full lineup

00:32:38   along with all previous NatureBox deliveries

00:32:40   with nutrition labels and ingredient lists for everything.

00:32:44   Each bag includes three to five servings of its snack

00:32:46   And you can choose from three quantities every month.

00:32:49   You can get five bags for just $19.95,

00:32:51   10 bags for just $29.95, or 20 bags for just $49.95.

00:32:56   All of those prices come with free shipping

00:32:58   to the continental US, and they'll even ship

00:32:59   to Alaska or Hawaii for just $2 more.

00:33:02   NatureBox is great for the home, office, or on the go.

00:33:05   Go to naturebox.com/atp to get 50% off your first box.

00:33:10   Thank you very much to NatureBox once again

00:33:12   for sponsoring our show.

00:33:14   So what about Apple TV at WWDC, either software or hardware?

00:33:18   The hardware is kind of like the iPod Touch hardware

00:33:23   at this point.

00:33:24   It's like Apple doesn't really--

00:33:26   Apple updates it, but is in no real hurry.

00:33:29   They're a single core A5 in the Apple TV, the current Apple TV,

00:33:32   right?

00:33:33   Yeah, the shrunk version.

00:33:35   At a certain point, it becomes like USB 1.0,

00:33:37   where it's more expensive to put on a computer than 2.0,

00:33:39   because everybody's making 2.0 chips.

00:33:41   I mean, it's different because only Apple's making the A5.

00:33:43   but still, at this point you feel like Apple

00:33:46   must have worked through their inventory

00:33:48   of A5s for the bump core.

00:33:50   - No, these are now custom chips.

00:33:52   Remember, and I think it was when Antec did the teardown

00:33:54   where like, as of like a year and a half ago,

00:33:56   they're actually making custom chips

00:33:58   that right now are only in the Apple TV.

00:34:00   They only have one core to begin with.

00:34:02   - Apple TV, it's not slow per se,

00:34:05   but it's certainly not a speed demon.

00:34:07   And the interface is clunky,

00:34:10   and no one's really talking about

00:34:11   Apple Television set anymore. We're just assuming they're gonna update the Puck,

00:34:15   but we all think the Puck software and experience needs to be updated, and I

00:34:19   think part of that updated experience, if they ever bring it, would have to be a

00:34:23   faster CPU and maybe some more memory to support what we hope is a better UI than

00:34:27   just a massive grid of rounded rectangles that you navigate between

00:34:31   and that appear randomly on your thing. So there are an awful lot of sessions on

00:34:35   on the WWDC schedule that are to be announced.

00:34:39   And those all can't be like, oh, here's the new Xcode.

00:34:43   Or we're like, there's gotta be something.

00:34:45   I should've done the count.

00:34:46   Did anyone do the count of how many are to be announced

00:34:49   this year versus last year?

00:34:51   - Well, I remember last year there were a lot

00:34:53   that were to be announced that weren't about any kind

00:34:55   of special secret thing.

00:34:57   Basically what they tend to do is anything that includes

00:35:03   in its name or description, the name of any unreleased thing

00:35:08   or unannounced thing does not get put in the app

00:35:10   until keynote day, until after the keynote.

00:35:13   And so it's like, it might even be like the title,

00:35:17   like a session might be one of those to be announced titles

00:35:21   now and it might just be like, what's new in networking

00:35:24   and iOS 8, you know?

00:35:25   And that's just because iOS 8 hasn't been announced yet

00:35:28   so they mark it as secret.

00:35:30   So you can't really tell by that.

00:35:32   I suppose, but I was trying to look at the categories,

00:35:35   because the secret ones do have categories applied to them.

00:35:38   So you can see one's dev tools.

00:35:40   You look at the day and the time and the fact that it's dev

00:35:42   tools, you're like, oh, that's the Xcode 6 session.

00:35:45   And there's a couple ones like media in a prominent slot.

00:35:49   What would they have to do about media?

00:35:50   Is it some new AV Foundation stuff?

00:35:52   And--

00:35:53   Oh, god, I hope not.

00:35:56   I'm trying to figure out that if they did a big Apple TV

00:35:59   revision, say, allowing apps of some kind

00:36:01   making an SDK for it or something like that, are there enough slots in prominent positions

00:36:07   to do that?

00:36:08   I don't know.

00:36:09   I mean, the Apple TV, I didn't put the iPod Touch down here too, but God knows when they're

00:36:12   going to update that.

00:36:13   But I would like to see a revision of the Apple TV, even if they just do a hardware

00:36:18   bump and like a reasonable software revision.

00:36:22   Like, I guess I could, we've given up for the Apple TV set, you've given up them fixing

00:36:27   because you know all the rumors are that any TV stuff they have is not this year

00:36:30   probably. I don't know. Again I'm trying to think of like so what hardware do we

00:36:36   get? No hardware in the WODC announcement? Which do you think will be

00:36:41   updated first? The iPod Classic, the iPod Touch, or the Mac Mini? I'm gonna go with

00:36:49   Mac Mini there I think. I think it'll be the iPod Touch. That's a tough race

00:36:54   though. They're both pretty in the glass. It's not gonna be the iPod

00:36:56   Classic, I'll tell you that that I don't think they'll change that until they can't get the parts anymore

00:37:01   Discontinuing it would count as an update. Yeah

00:37:04   In that case, maybe I really am having a hard time thinking of her

00:37:08   I get someone put a retina MacBook Pros and those are they're not due for an update

00:37:12   But they could be but then what would you do to them besides?

00:37:14   Reducing the price and maybe offering more ram or bigger faster SSD is like if Rodwell's not ready. You're not gonna change the CPUs

00:37:22   - Exactly, that's the problem.

00:37:23   That's why I don't think we're gonna see any new Macs

00:37:25   unless they are a new form factor using the old CPUs

00:37:28   because there's nothing new to put in them.

00:37:30   Apple does not do major updates to products

00:37:34   without a new Intel chipset to put in them.

00:37:36   They just don't.

00:37:37   They'll do minor stuff that won't even bother

00:37:40   with an announcement or they'll do a whole new line

00:37:43   that doesn't need a new CPU

00:37:44   'cause they can use something that was already available

00:37:45   in a new way, but they're not gonna release,

00:37:49   'cause you're right, yeah, what would they do?

00:37:51   It's like, I know they're not gonna announce

00:37:53   a new Mac Pro already because there's no new Xeon yet.

00:37:57   And you can always tell when they're gonna announce

00:37:58   new Mac Pros, well, usually.

00:38:00   You were able to always tell before they went three years

00:38:03   without doing anything to it

00:38:04   by just looking at the Xeon roadmap.

00:38:06   Say, all right, well, when are there new Xeons coming out

00:38:08   that are the series that the Mac Pro uses?

00:38:10   And as soon as there's new Xeons,

00:38:12   within a month or two, there's new Mac Pros.

00:38:15   Same thing with the laptops.

00:38:15   You can see Intel's roadmap and Intel releases new CPUs

00:38:19   about every year and this year's are delayed.

00:38:22   And so therefore, I suspect it's a pretty safe bet

00:38:27   that all new Mac launches are going to be delayed

00:38:30   until the winter or the spring.

00:38:32   - So this is the perfect time for them

00:38:34   to rev the iPod Touch WABDs.

00:38:36   'Cause it's so far behind that it's easy

00:38:40   that you put an A6 in it.

00:38:42   I'm not even asking you to ask for an A7 in it, who cares?

00:38:45   - Wait, it's still A5?

00:38:47   - Yeah, isn't it? - Oh my god.

00:38:48   I think it is.

00:38:49   I can't even keep track.

00:38:50   It's so old, I don't even remember how old it is.

00:38:52   No, it has the tall screen, right?

00:38:54   Like the iPhone 5, so it probably has an A6 in it.

00:38:56   Oh, I don't know.

00:38:57   Someone look it up.

00:38:59   It's super slow compared to the iPhone 5S, I'll tell you that.

00:39:01   Yeah, the chat room says A5 still.

00:39:03   Oh, that's terrible.

00:39:04   And not that I think they're going to do this,

00:39:06   but it's the one product that they have

00:39:08   that they could easily provide an update to if they cared,

00:39:10   but they don't, so whatever.

00:39:12   Well, and they hardly sell any of them.

00:39:14   Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

00:39:15   It's not going to happen.

00:39:16   you know, if they were desperate for some hardware, that would be a gimme.

00:39:19   You're keeping the entire line afloat. You're the only one buying one.

00:39:23   No, lots of children.

00:39:25   I just bought another one. Like, I couldn't believe I did this, because, like,

00:39:27   it's against my religion to buy an Apple device this old. Like, I bought one for my son because

00:39:34   he wanted one for his birthday. And so now he's got one. He's, like, it's the worst time to buy

00:39:39   this thing. But kids like them. My daughter's upset that she doesn't have one, so now she

00:39:43   wants one so I'm trying to resist buying a second one or a third one I don't know

00:39:47   how many we got a lot iPod touches in this house just just get the new iPhone

00:39:50   this fall and give her your current one done yeah we'll see about that we'll see

00:39:54   what the new iPhone looks like it's a big giant 5.5 inch thing I don't know

00:39:57   it's gonna look like an iPhone it's gonna look like an iPad mini if the

00:40:03   rumors are to be believed yeah and maybe the big one does you know maybe the

00:40:07   quote iPhone air that the big 5.5 inch one yeah we'll see I don't know all

00:40:13   - All right, so hardware, it seems like we don't know

00:40:15   what the heck is going on here with hardware.

00:40:17   None of us can think of anything that we think

00:40:18   is a slam dunk for hardware, WWDC.

00:40:21   - If they're gonna do another MacBook Air,

00:40:23   I bet they will do it here.

00:40:24   Like if they're gonna do a 12-inch something,

00:40:27   this would be a good time to do it,

00:40:28   because they have no other good existing product updates.

00:40:32   But really, I think the most obvious answer

00:40:36   is if they're going to announce any hardware at all,

00:40:37   which is not a given, but if they're going to announce

00:40:40   any hardware at all, it's probably gonna be

00:40:42   some new category, and not just Retina Mac,

00:40:44   but something like a watch sensor, earbud,

00:40:47   pinky ring, whatever, some kind of new thing.

00:40:51   Because this is a really good time to do that.

00:40:55   If they're announcing, and it could even just be

00:40:58   Apple TV 10.0 or whatever, where Apple TV

00:41:01   is now a full-fledged platform that you can write apps for

00:41:04   or something like that.

00:41:05   That could be the big thing this year.

00:41:07   And some of those sessions that we don't know anything about

00:41:09   that have to do with media could be Apple TV development.

00:41:12   - That's true.

00:41:14   - I haven't been following the rumors that closely,

00:41:16   but hasn't the consensus been that Apple wearable,

00:41:20   sensor support and stuff would come in iOS 6,

00:41:25   but Apple supporting hardware would only come

00:41:27   later in the year?

00:41:28   I haven't been keeping up.

00:41:29   - You mean eight, but yeah, I mean, I think it's tough.

00:41:32   I mean, it wouldn't be unprecedented for them

00:41:35   to have WWDC not mention anything,

00:41:38   and then announce new hardware in the fall

00:41:39   that has some new feature,

00:41:40   and then spring on developers with a .1 update

00:41:43   or the very last beta SDK or something like that.

00:41:46   They have done that before.

00:41:48   In fact, they did it with the M7,

00:41:50   the M7 chip and the iPhone 5S.

00:41:51   They did that whole thing.

00:41:53   But something that's actually a big deal,

00:41:57   like a whole new sensor type,

00:41:59   I mean, that would be tough.

00:42:01   And if they're going to show off Healthbook,

00:42:04   maybe they might pre-announce something involving that

00:42:07   'cause it's kinda, you know, HealthBook,

00:42:10   as we know it right now, with the sensors

00:42:11   that we know about now,

00:42:13   it's pretty much just pedometer plus plus.

00:42:15   But if you, if they're gonna do new sensors,

00:42:19   then they become more valuable.

00:42:20   So I don't know.

00:42:21   I'm guessing that we see some new category

00:42:25   be announced at WWDC,

00:42:27   and I don't know what that category will be,

00:42:28   whether it's Apple TV major update that's now developable,

00:42:32   or whether it's, you know, a wristband watch thing,

00:42:34   who knows.

00:42:35   I bet it's going to be something like that.

00:42:37   So something that we have not been able to develop for or use before that we can now

00:42:42   develop for or use.

00:42:43   I suppose.

00:42:45   Do you think it's about time for the Apple TV to get a visual refresh?

00:42:49   The software, not the hardware.

00:42:50   Yeah, that's what I was talking about.

00:42:52   Stop being a stupid grid of rounded rectangles and start having a richer interface.

00:42:57   Oh, and I'm thinking it's so dark now and iOS 7 is so bright.

00:43:01   I almost wonder if just making it brighter and more iOS 7-like would be an improvement.

00:43:08   And additionally, isn't it running not a fork, but kind of a fork of iOS?

00:43:12   Isn't that right?

00:43:13   So…

00:43:14   Yeah, I mean, it definitely does not… it looks dated, no question.

00:43:16   It looks dated.

00:43:17   I don't think the interface is scaling very well.

00:43:19   Like, as they keep adding more and more of these channels and the rounded oval keeps

00:43:25   getting… you know, the list of those keeps getting longer and longer and longer, it definitely

00:43:29   is not scaling well.

00:43:30   I mean, if you just look at Roku and Amazon's Fire TV thing, like, for where Apple TV, like

00:43:37   what its competition is currently doing, and Apple is still pretty far behind that.

00:43:41   Although as a Plasma TV owner, I hope Apple does not go the iOS 7 route and make it all

00:43:47   white, and anyone who owns a Plasma TV knows why.

00:43:49   Fair enough.

00:43:51   Wait, hold on, why?

00:43:53   Is it because it makes it hotter, or...?

00:43:56   Yeah, white screens use more power, more power draw causes the transformer buzz to be louder

00:44:01   and yes, all the lovely sacrifices that I make, including having fans in my television

00:44:06   to get superior picture quality.

00:44:08   One of them is if you make the screen all white, you get a more audible transformer

00:44:12   buzz.

00:44:13   So having a black background is preferable to me.

00:44:16   Our final sponsor this week is lynda.com.

00:44:19   L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.

00:44:23   Lynda.com helps you keep up to date with your software, pick up brand new skills, or explore

00:44:27   new hobbies with easy to follow video tutorials.

00:44:40   Lynda has over 2400 courses taught by industry experts, with more added every week.

00:44:46   They even work with software companies to provide you with updated training the same

00:44:49   day new versions hit the market, so you're always up to speed.

00:44:52   So for instance, if there's like a new version of Photoshop

00:44:54   or Microsoft Office or something,

00:44:56   they will often have a new version of their tutorial

00:44:58   ready to go when it's released,

00:45:00   so that way you can pick it up immediately.

00:45:03   They have courses for all experience levels,

00:45:05   whether you're a beginner or advanced.

00:45:08   All this is available for one low monthly price of just $25,

00:45:12   and that will give you unlimited access

00:45:13   to the entire lynda.com library.

00:45:16   So they have things like applications, as I said earlier,

00:45:18   you can learn Photoshop, Excel, Illustrator,

00:45:21   and you can even produce media like Logic and Final Cut,

00:45:24   all this crazy stuff.

00:45:25   You can even learn programming languages like PHP

00:45:27   if you wanna be like me and be an idiot,

00:45:29   or if you wanna learn something better like Node,

00:45:32   you can learn that.

00:45:33   You can even learn Perl.

00:45:36   I won't comment on what that will make you,

00:45:38   but you can learn Perl if you'd like.

00:45:40   lynda.com even has courses on branding.

00:45:43   Learn how to manage the way you're perceived online and off

00:45:46   with personal branding strategies.

00:45:50   You can also bring your iOS development skills up to speed.

00:45:52   Every time they release a new SDK,

00:45:54   lynda.com has videos out there for that.

00:45:56   So this fall, they were gonna do an iOS 8 video.

00:45:58   They already have an iOS 7 video.

00:46:00   You can even explore ASP.net.

00:46:04   If you really want to have a job where you can park

00:46:07   right in front of your office

00:46:08   and have no walking involved at all.

00:46:11   So improve your skills, keep up with technology,

00:46:12   and learn new applications.

00:46:14   These are great produced videos.

00:46:15   This is not like the stuff you see on YouTube.

00:46:17   This is produced by professionals.

00:46:19   They have these awesome transcripts on the side.

00:46:20   You can click around the transcript

00:46:22   and it seeks around in the video.

00:46:23   You can watch them on your iPhone or iPad.

00:46:25   Really, really great stuff.

00:46:26   Go to lynda.com/atp.

00:46:28   That's L-Y-N-D-A.com/atp to get a free seven day trial.

00:46:33   Thanks a lot to Lynda for sponsoring once again.

00:46:37   - I'm going to choose to believe that they deliberately

00:46:40   put that branding stuff in the ad read

00:46:44   because they knew that you would be the one reading it.

00:46:46   - Global branding strategies.

00:46:49   All right.

00:46:50   Anyway, anything else on wearables?

00:46:53   - Yeah, we've had it in the show notes for a while.

00:46:54   I mean, like to Craig Hockenberry's thing

00:46:56   about Apple wearables,

00:46:57   and I've been thinking about it as well,

00:47:00   and my thinking on wearables has changed over time,

00:47:03   over time of Apple doing nothing.

00:47:05   And the more I think about wearables,

00:47:09   I keep seeing, everyone keeps seeing in their head

00:47:14   like something that goes around your wrist

00:47:16   that has this amazing, futuristic-looking screen on it

00:47:19   that does something or that you interact with by swiping or, I don't know, like, it's just

00:47:23   like, you see these mockups and they look really cool, but it's like, well then how

00:47:27   would you use it?

00:47:29   And everything we're seeing from actual rumors from Apple are like the health book stuff,

00:47:34   and that's all about having an application on your phone that integrates information

00:47:39   from other sensors.

00:47:40   So when I think of Apple wearables now, I keep thinking of things that either don't

00:47:44   have screens or have things that are like barely screens.

00:47:48   I mean like the Fitbits have their various little displays with the LEDs and stuff

00:47:51   Because screens are a problem like you can't have a screen on all that

00:47:56   There's reason at least Fitbit and things like that don't have big LCD screens in them

00:48:00   You can't have a screen on all the time that the battery will run out

00:48:03   I mean you don't have your phone screen on all the time

00:48:06   You just take it out you look at the screen you put it away you turn the screen off

00:48:08   But the screen is not on all the time

00:48:10   But you can't really function as a watch because you got to you know

00:48:12   Think of all the smartwatches that make you do the little jiggle shake to turn on or tap it to turn on or you know

00:48:17   And I'm thinking like, what does Apple want out of this?

00:48:20   They want more sensors and more information integrated

00:48:24   into your phone.

00:48:25   Does that require a screen that's always on

00:48:27   or a screen at all?

00:48:29   Not that I'm saying that Apple Wearable won't have a screen,

00:48:32   but I think there is a place in our current conception

00:48:36   with the known information of what Apple is trying

00:48:39   to do with sensors and integration for a thing

00:48:43   that you attach to your person or clothing somewhere that

00:48:46   doesn't need to have a screen.

00:48:48   And it could be that they also have a device

00:48:49   that has a screen, but everything I'm seeing out of Apple

00:48:54   makes me think some little turd-y thing

00:48:57   that will look nice but doesn't need to have a screen.

00:48:59   Does that mean it's a ring like Hockenberry's thing?

00:49:01   No, I think that's still a fantasy.

00:49:03   I can't imagine them pulling that off,

00:49:05   although feel free to prove me wrong, Apple.

00:49:07   Does it mean it couldn't be around your wrist?

00:49:10   Maybe it could.

00:49:11   Maybe they're gonna use some breakthrough screen technology

00:49:14   that can be on all the time,

00:49:15   Maybe they're going to use color E ink or you know, there's all sorts of crazy things you can come up with and

00:49:19   certainly a lot of the rumors from years ago were like

00:49:22   Apple's investigating curved flexible screen technology for things that will go around your wrist and you can still touch them stuff like that, but

00:49:29   I just wanted to throw that out there that what the vibe I've been getting from the information available

00:49:35   is that there is a place in Apple's grand conception of

00:49:40   health monitoring and health book and stuff like that for something that that doesn't necessarily have to have something that we would recognize as screen

00:49:47   Yeah, I completely agree. I think if Apple does do some sort of wearable thing

00:49:51   I am pretty convinced it will not have a screen and

00:49:55   Additionally, I think it will have some sort of sensor almost certainly health related that the iPhone either

00:50:03   Can't or doesn't or perhaps won't have I don't know what that would be me

00:50:08   Pulse would be a great example if you could do it comfortably, but I can't imagine how that would work unless you could grab whatever latent electricity you have in your wrist or finger or whatever.

00:50:18   But I see it, personally I see whatever their wearable is as a mechanism to sell more phones because, hey, look at all this wonderful health or perhaps other kind of data you can get into the phone if you have the Apple iRing.

00:50:34   And I'm not sure it's going to be a ring, obviously, but just for the sake of conversation.

00:50:37   So I agree with you, John.

00:50:39   I'm pretty convinced it will not have a screen

00:50:41   and will be all about sensors.

00:50:43   - Yeah, and the sensor stuff,

00:50:45   I don't know a lot about medical sensors,

00:50:47   but talking about being able to track O2 levels,

00:50:50   don't those things use some kind of light,

00:50:52   they shine through your fingertips and stuff

00:50:54   and see how red things are?

00:50:55   I have no idea how these things work.

00:50:57   But when I think of stuff like that,

00:50:59   I think of, well, the iPhone 6 could have,

00:51:01   you know, the touch ID sensor

00:51:03   or some place that you put your hand,

00:51:04   but you're not gonna have something clipped

00:51:05   to your fingertip when you go through the day,

00:51:07   And you can't clip something to the end of your shirt

00:51:10   or your bra or something and have that measuring your O2

00:51:13   level.

00:51:13   So I don't even understand which parts of the body

00:51:16   you'd need to clip things to to get this information.

00:51:18   Or if it's going to be like a once or twice a day,

00:51:21   put your finger on this special spot on your iPhone 6 type

00:51:23   thing.

00:51:24   So Apple has been hiring these people for visualizations

00:51:28   of medical information.

00:51:29   Remember those hires back then?

00:51:32   There's so much smoke there, and I just

00:51:34   don't understand what form the fire is going to take.

00:51:37   - Maybe you're right, maybe it is the home button

00:51:39   because that's something that you,

00:51:40   like if you think about all the different places

00:51:42   you could have a wearable, you have like wristbands,

00:51:44   but that could be on the outside of a shirt.

00:51:46   Like if you have a long sleeve shirt,

00:51:47   the wristband could be on the outside of it.

00:51:48   And you know, maybe not always, but it might be,

00:51:50   you can't really count on that.

00:51:52   You know, rings, I think you're right,

00:51:53   I think we're probably not there technically yet

00:51:55   to be able to fit everything in something as small as a ring

00:51:58   and yeah, but the home button,

00:52:01   you're always pushing with your finger throughout the day

00:52:04   And so that actually makes a lot of sense.

00:52:07   The wrist thing, even stuff like pulse,

00:52:09   you would never want a wrist thing

00:52:10   that was tight enough on your wrist to measure your pulse.

00:52:12   Like, people don't like things dripping in that tightly.

00:52:14   You know what I mean?

00:52:15   It's not like you'd be in a blood pressure cuff all day.

00:52:18   But it's like, even just to pick up your pulse,

00:52:20   I feel like you'd have to have something that is slightly

00:52:23   uncomfortable.

00:52:23   And there's a reason that people don't walk around

00:52:25   with these sensors on them all day.

00:52:27   Like, we go into the doctor's office,

00:52:28   and they hook these things up to you,

00:52:30   and you want to get them off.

00:52:32   So I mean, I don't know, like, and the thing about wearables

00:52:36   is like, we're so much focused on health

00:52:38   'cause that's the little nugget of information that we have,

00:52:40   like vague screenshot rumor site type things of HealthBook,

00:52:44   and it's like, well, what good,

00:52:45   what good, you brought this up,

00:52:46   what good is HealthBook?

00:52:47   How is that any different than Penometer++?

00:52:49   Unless you have some other information.

00:52:51   And if you, where's that information coming from?

00:52:53   And that's why we get into like the,

00:52:54   well, that's a third party opportunity,

00:52:56   Apple will basically make these APIs,

00:52:58   and Fitbit and whoever can make new devices

00:53:01   that will feed into this API,

00:53:02   And then where is Apple-ness?

00:53:06   Where is the new category?

00:53:07   That's the question we continue asking.

00:53:10   And I guess we'll keep asking.

00:53:12   If this year ends and there's nothing

00:53:14   that you can wear from Apple and they haven't done anything

00:53:16   to Apple TV, something is wrong.

00:53:20   Because Tim said, man, new category this year.

00:53:25   I think you're right also that going back

00:53:27   a step with the whole no screen thing, whatever this thing is,

00:53:31   I've said it before and I'll keep saying it every episode,

00:53:35   I would never bet against the smartphone,

00:53:37   at least not for a long time.

00:53:39   In the current era that we are in, the smartphone is king.

00:53:42   Smartphones are awesome and it is so unwise

00:53:45   to bet against them.

00:53:46   As a tangent to that, if you're thinking about having

00:53:49   something that you're also going to be carrying around,

00:53:52   it makes so much more sense for it to be

00:53:55   a smartphone accessory than its own standalone thing

00:53:59   of some sort.

00:54:01   and the smartphone has all the power,

00:54:03   it has all the connectivity,

00:54:04   it has way more battery power than you can fit

00:54:08   in a quote wearable, unless the wearable is a backpack.

00:54:12   And so it is unwise to try to cram a whole bunch

00:54:15   of power sucking stuff into a wearable, including a screen.

00:54:18   And yeah, you could do like E Ink,

00:54:20   so it only takes power to change the content of the screen.

00:54:23   You could do that, but E Ink looks like crap

00:54:25   and I can't see Apple doing that.

00:54:27   You can't touch that.

00:54:28   - You can't touch this.

00:54:29   Well no you could, but it just takes more power.

00:54:32   It wouldn't respond to your touch in real time.

00:54:34   Like that's the whole point of touch is that you feel like you're directly manipulating

00:54:37   something.

00:54:38   And all the mockups are like some big curved glass screen that looks like you're wearing

00:54:41   like the bracelet equivalent of Cinderella's glass slippers.

00:54:45   Right?

00:54:46   Let me just make something that's like solid glass, put it on my wrist so I can bang my

00:54:50   wrist on the table and have shards of glass dry.

00:54:52   Anyway, you know, that's what the thing is.

00:54:55   But what would you do with that?

00:54:57   Can you imagine trying to swipe a smooth glass--

00:55:00   half the time you'd end up rotating it around your wrist.

00:55:03   Where are you swiping anyway?

00:55:04   Are you swiping longitudinally or across it?

00:55:07   And how could you use an interface?

00:55:09   If you've tried to use any of the recent iPod Nanos, where

00:55:12   they have touch screens in a tiny little space,

00:55:14   there's not much that you can do reasonably

00:55:17   with a screen that size.

00:55:19   And if you look at smartwatches that exist today

00:55:21   from other people, in order to have

00:55:24   any kind of interactivity on a smartwatch,

00:55:26   It has to be pretty big and bulky, and that's not cool.

00:55:29   It's not sexy, it is not appealing, it is a wearable, certainly, but it's a wearable

00:55:35   that nobody wants to wear.

00:55:39   And these things that are catching on big time, things like fuel bands and Fitbits,

00:55:43   they're smaller, they're subtle.

00:55:45   You don't have to take them out constantly.

00:55:47   You can leave them tucked under your sleeve or clipped to your bra or in your pants pocket

00:55:51   or something.

00:55:52   and leave them hidden away, because wearing electronics

00:55:56   is just not cool.

00:55:58   What they start looking like is, I guess,

00:55:59   they start with Lance Armstrong, maybe breast cancer.

00:56:02   Like all those things that people

00:56:03   would wear as showing their support for some cause,

00:56:07   or those little color--

00:56:09   the fuel bands look so much like the whatever, Lance Armstrong

00:56:13   bracelet things, or the breast cancer awareness pink things.

00:56:18   And we've just sort of accepted that you'll

00:56:20   have a regular outfit, and then there'll

00:56:22   be this other thing that you wear that doesn't call attention to itself and that you don't

00:56:25   spend much time interacting with. And those were totally non-functional, they were just

00:56:28   pieces of rubber that had words stamped into them. They increased awareness, John. Yeah,

00:56:33   right. And now we have one that at least has stuff inside it that at the end of the day

00:56:37   I get to count my steps or whatever and you know, I just again, we should get someone

00:56:42   here with a medical sensing expert to say, they could probably tell us exactly, look

00:56:46   if you want, you know, pulse, this is the only place you can get it and this is how.

00:56:50   if you want blood oxygenation.

00:56:53   This is the only places you can get it and this is how,

00:56:54   because these answers are all out there,

00:56:56   we just don't happen to know them.

00:56:57   - Alright, so let's talk about OS X 10.10.

00:57:02   10.

00:57:05   - La OSS, Ferrari La Ferrari.

00:57:08   - Yeah, I feel like Super Troopers with the Meow game.

00:57:10   Anyway, so I think we can round up our show with iOS 8,

00:57:15   but let's start with OS X, God, I'm already stumbling.

00:57:20   OS X, 10.10. What do we expect? To me, I expect some sort of visual refresh.

00:57:25   I don't think it'll be full bore iOS 7, but I think it'll be somewhere in that direction.

00:57:30   I expect it's going to have another name of a place I haven't heard of that's awkwardly pluralized.

00:57:35   I don't think it'll be awkwardly pluralized, but I do think that it will have--

00:57:40   Maybe it will end with like "ed" or "ing."

00:57:44   I'm going to go on record and say it will be a place that we recognize, even as--

00:57:45   Even as non Californians and in a place where we aren't on vacation all the time as much as I was rooting for the cat names

00:57:52   to end

00:57:52   Now that they have I realized that with their new theme

00:57:56   It's basically impossible to try to guess

00:57:58   You know what?

00:57:58   I mean like the certain number of big cats and they started to work their way through them

00:58:01   So it became a fun game to guess what the next one would be but there's a lot of cities in California

00:58:06   So forget about that a lot of places in California and yeah, there are the prominent ones we can all think of you know

00:58:11   Yosemite San Francisco whatever but like

00:58:14   Considering they started with Mavericks, it seems like they're going obscure.

00:58:17   I agree.

00:58:18   The other thing, this is very minor, but I really, really want, and I believe this is

00:58:23   a combination of iOS 8 and OS 10, I really want AirDrop between my iDevices and my computer.

00:58:32   Can we have that please?

00:58:33   Yeah, I'm still emailing pictures to myself because it's faster than everything else.

00:58:37   Yeah, it's so, so ridiculous.

00:58:39   I still email so much crap to myself.

00:58:41   It's really embarrassing.

00:58:42   Yeah, I'd really like that and I'd like a mail app that works properly.

00:58:46   Although I like Airmail quite a bit, but I'd like the standard out of the box mail app

00:58:50   to work again.

00:58:51   Yeah, I'm thinking about 10.10, besides the visual refresh, which I think is enough to,

00:58:56   you know, that will obviously be like the headliner feature of this release.

00:59:00   It's like, now we finally have time to revise how things look and we'll all either love

00:59:04   it or complain about it or depending on what they do.

00:59:08   But that's not, I mean that's a big change and it could affect applications in profound

00:59:12   ways.

00:59:13   But in terms of the underpinnings, that's not a big, like I don't think they're doing

00:59:17   anything to underpinnings to enable this new look or anything.

00:59:19   So then like what is this OS about?

00:59:21   Is it just a visual refresh?

00:59:23   What features, you know, what needs to be done to the Core OS and what could be done?

00:59:28   Will they continue to just, I mean I'm sure they'll make things better in little bits,

00:59:34   but like last year the big theme was power saving and they had lots of technology to

00:59:37   support that. This year the big theme will be visual refresh, but there's no

00:59:41   technology to support that really. I mean obviously new file system is evergreen

00:59:46   and they can bring that out anytime they want, but I have no expectations.

00:59:51   Everything else about the OS, like you can point to individual parts of the OS

00:59:55   that can be tightened up and made better, but Mavericks, with the exception of the

01:00:00   applications, because a lot of if you use the Apple Mail, you know, I feel sorry for

01:00:04   for you, but even before, I haven't been a fan of that app for a long time.

01:00:09   But that makes you think Mavericks was a terrible release, but in terms of the Core OS, very,

01:00:14   very few problems.

01:00:15   I upgraded Mavericks everywhere really early, and there just have not been a lot of weird

01:00:20   things.

01:00:21   Not even like weird application compatibility things.

01:00:22   And we're only on point three.

01:00:23   We went ten, one, two, and three since last year.

01:00:26   Yeah, I would say overall, with the exception of my clock always being fast, which I think

01:00:32   10.9.3 might have fixed. It's really solid. I mean, I've always wondered, well not always,

01:00:40   I've wondered recently if it will ever be worth it for them to modernize AppKit and

01:00:47   maybe not replace it with UIKit but bring a lot of the UIKit lessons back into AppKit

01:00:53   because right now if you want to write a GUI app for iOS and Mac there's very little GUI

01:00:59   code you can share because AppKit just works very, very differently than UIKit. It has

01:01:05   a lot of legacy baggage and I don't know enough about it to really talk that much more about

01:01:10   it besides this very high level overview, but I've often wished like, you know, I know

01:01:15   how to develop for iOS pretty well, now I know UIKit really well, I don't know anything

01:01:20   about AppKit. I just know it's very different and there's a lot of things that don't work

01:01:22   the same way and aren't as nice or aren't as simple. And so it would be, I would love

01:01:27   it if they would bring a lot of UI kit, the parts that make sense

01:01:31   obviously certain things aren't going to make sense outside of the full screen touch environment

01:01:35   but bring over the parts that make sense with things like how

01:01:39   views are dealt with, all the layer backed stuff that you can

01:01:43   do all that in AppKit but often times it's not the default or it's

01:01:47   hard or it's different or it's somehow tricky. If they would bring

01:01:51   some of that development framework and when you're doing a major visual refresh that would be

01:01:55   a pretty good time to do it, I think.

01:01:58   That would go a long way.

01:01:59   Unfortunately, I think that's very unrealistic

01:02:02   because it just seems like they're stretched so thin

01:02:05   and the Mac is not that high of a priority

01:02:08   that would justify all those development resources

01:02:11   if they're also having to work on iOS 8, iPad version of it,

01:02:15   which is still terrible, plus whatever else

01:02:20   engineering resources are being devoted to

01:02:22   for things like new categories,

01:02:23   whether it's Apple TV or something.

01:02:25   You know, we know from hints and bits and pieces

01:02:29   here and there, we know that a lot of people at Apple

01:02:31   are working on something secret that is relatively new,

01:02:34   or relatively recent, but we still don't know what that is.

01:02:36   So there's something else draining

01:02:39   engineering resources at Apple.

01:02:40   - Yeah, I hate that phenomenon,

01:02:42   like that, as far as we can tell from the outside,

01:02:45   that this happens inside Apple,

01:02:47   that something big, new, and important comes,

01:02:49   and that team like, you know,

01:02:51   harvests the best engineers from other teams,

01:02:54   Leaving them with the lesser people or the people who didn't want to move.

01:02:59   And those people go off and disappear for a while and work on some new thing.

01:03:02   That's fun and makes for good articles after the fact.

01:03:05   But it's kind of like, what if I like the products

01:03:08   that those guys used to be working on?

01:03:10   Now they're just going to get fewer resources.

01:03:12   But I think you're right about the main thing preventing--

01:03:16   like the reason we don't have parity.

01:03:18   Microsoft's been leaning on this recently.

01:03:20   Like, hey, you can write a GUI app and you can write it in Windows 8

01:03:22   and you can run it on tablets and you can run it on phones.

01:03:24   and it's like the same app with minor changes or whatever.

01:03:27   And Apple doesn't have that.

01:03:28   And I think it's mostly just because the Mac's not

01:03:30   that big a platform compared to iOS.

01:03:32   That's always going to be the thing when you're

01:03:33   trying to prioritize resources.

01:03:35   Well, how many iPhones did we sell last year

01:03:36   and how many Macs?

01:03:38   And they are modernizing AppKit.

01:03:40   Didn't they make a new table system that doesn't use NSL

01:03:43   a couple of years back?

01:03:45   It's not the same as like, so here you go,

01:03:46   here's UIKit on the Mac.

01:03:47   But the worst warts get covered over,

01:03:50   but it's just the people who are left there working on AppKit

01:03:54   are doing that and they don't have resources. The iOS 8 team is obviously

01:03:58   much bigger. I mean you're right, as part of the visual refresh, the visual

01:04:02   refresh includes like, especially if it looks a lot like iOS 7 or the visual

01:04:07   refresh relies more on layer back controls, maybe it's a time to revise a

01:04:11   few more APIs here and there, but I don't know. I'm having trouble thinking of core

01:04:16   OS features unless you're thinking of something, I mean not that I think it

01:04:20   doesn't need them, I'm trying to think of features that Apple would put the

01:04:23   resources towards. Like the kernel and the Core OS, like they could do lots of

01:04:27   interesting things there, but what's their motivation for that, right? I guess

01:04:30   their motivation would be we want to do this because it will benefit, you know,

01:04:34   the Core OS stuff benefits iOS and OS X, so if they change the kernel, you know,

01:04:38   the Mac would just reap that benefit as a side effect of doing that.

01:04:43   Right, like kernel stuff and Core OS and shared frameworks, you know,

01:04:46   things like, you know, from things like Core Animation all the way down to newer stuff,

01:04:50   like Grand Central Dispatch and Auto Layout, all these major advances that come to both

01:04:55   platforms because they're lower level, that will continue. That'll be fine. But it's

01:05:02   the high-level UI stuff that is so radically different between the two platforms. And obviously,

01:05:09   as I said, to some degree it should be because they're two different interaction paradigms,

01:05:13   but there's a lot of stuff that could be shared that isn't, only because of legacy

01:05:17   concerns it seems. But I think you're right, I think it will never be worth it to Apple

01:05:23   to invest their engineering resources, which are very limited and strained, which I think

01:05:28   is a big problem, but to invest their limited and strained engineering resources into this

01:05:33   platform that is such a small part of their business these days. Which is, again, I think

01:05:38   it's a shame and I think that's wrong. I think that's bad prioritization, but that's probably

01:05:43   what they're going to do, 'cause we see that

01:05:46   as much as we want Apple to have more resources,

01:05:48   for whatever reason, they just keep not having them.

01:05:51   And they just seem to have a very small

01:05:55   pool of engineering ability that they selectively choose.

01:05:59   That's why some of the applications,

01:06:02   the people in the chat were talking about

01:06:03   how long it's been since Aperture's been updated.

01:06:05   And Aperture has its own,

01:06:06   it's Aperture has always been dysfunctional in this regard.

01:06:09   But it just seems like things that are not the new hotness at Apple just get ignored

01:06:16   for years with nothing being done to them for years because there's nobody working

01:06:21   on them.

01:06:22   Or there's one person responsible for maintaining it while the rest of the team was sent off

01:06:26   to do something newer and more exciting that's some new product or that's going to get

01:06:32   them in the news again.

01:06:33   And it's a shame because there's a lot of Apple stuff that really could use some

01:06:37   some attention and some love.

01:06:39   And what happened with iWork having gone so long

01:06:42   with no update and then what feels like a pretty rushed

01:06:45   update that happened last fall that messed everything up.

01:06:49   This happens all across Apple's entire product line,

01:06:53   both hardware and software, but especially in software.

01:06:56   And you can just tell there's so much stuff in software

01:06:59   where it just seems like no one's working on it.

01:07:01   And that's probably the case,

01:07:02   'cause Apple's teams are kept pretty small.

01:07:05   Yeah, on the file system front, the only hope I have is the file system is the type of thing,

01:07:09   I mean, they could have been working on it for years without me hearing about it, I suppose,

01:07:13   but a file system is something I don't think you can develop between two major releases.

01:07:18   Like it's a multi-year project, you have to be super careful, you have to maintain all

01:07:21   your semantics, and presumably you're adding value so there'd be new features to deal with

01:07:25   as well.

01:07:26   And yes, Apple desperately needs a new file system, but they don't seem to be working

01:07:29   on one as far as I'm aware.

01:07:31   But they do have core storage, and as I pointed out in my past OS X reviews, a lot of the

01:07:35   things that core storage already does on Macs today are very similar to the things that

01:07:40   a file system would need to do.

01:07:42   And so it's possible that what they've done for core storage could slowly continue to

01:07:46   evolve its way towards a system whereby the disk appears to be HFS+, but most of the actual

01:07:52   management of blocks on disk and APIs and everything, it ends up being core storage

01:07:58   with a thin veneer of HFS+ over it.

01:08:02   Which is kind of, I mean, if you use core storage now,

01:08:05   that's not the lay, I don't know.

01:08:07   I don't know how they can manage the layering

01:08:09   between those things because, like I said,

01:08:12   core storage keeps track of where things are in disk

01:08:14   and manages blocks and does all these interesting things

01:08:16   and is actually one of the more interesting

01:08:19   modern file system type things that Apple has done

01:08:21   in recent years to enable things like the new file vault,

01:08:23   which is so much better than the old one.

01:08:26   But you know, this HFS Plus is still sitting there, still having crappy features, still

01:08:31   corrupting itself, still being its own cranky self.

01:08:40   And so, HFS Plus is on iOS devices too.

01:08:44   I'm always talking about this in the context of the Mac, but all your iPhones are running

01:08:47   HFS Plus as well.

01:08:48   I think they actually...

01:08:49   Just restore your phone and quit all your apps.

01:08:50   Do they run the case sensitive version of it?

01:08:52   I forget if they still did that or if they ever did that.

01:08:54   But anyway, a new file system or a lack of a file system or like a native core storage

01:08:59   against NAND or something, that would benefit iOS devices.

01:09:02   And so I think that's got to happen eventually because that's Apple's bread and butter, right?

01:09:07   It's not like, oh, this is just a Mac thing, it's never going to happen.

01:09:09   No, it's an entire Apple platform thing.

01:09:11   Everything uses HFS+.

01:09:13   And you know, there's performance to be had, there are features to be added, and there's

01:09:18   reliability to be improved.

01:09:20   Every axis along, you know, Apple can improve in this regard.

01:09:23   and none of them, I guess Apple doesn't think any of them are critical.

01:09:26   Well, it could be more reliable, but it's reliable enough.

01:09:28   Well, it could have better performance, but the performance is good enough.

01:09:31   You know, well, we could have more features, but the features we have are good enough.

01:09:34   They can keep saying that, but eventually it's going to not be true, and I hope they

01:09:37   don't, you know, this is not like a new language, an API thing where they have to start 20 years

01:09:43   ahead of time, but this is like a three-year project, easy.

01:09:46   I mean, we'll see what happens.

01:09:49   There's gonna have to be a time where the file system changes, and I'm a little scared

01:09:54   that if the file system does change that you'll just quit this podcast because you'll have

01:09:58   no reason to complain about it anymore.

01:09:59   That seems unlikely.

01:10:00   Yeah, I know, I know.

01:10:03   Anything else on the new Mavericks that won't be called Mavericks?

01:10:07   I'm really curious to just see what they do with it.

01:10:09   I mean, like, you know, besides visual refresh, OS X is—it's pretty mature at this point.

01:10:16   You know, the releases add less and less generally over time.

01:10:20   If only there was somebody we could ask to verify that.

01:10:22   But it seems like, obviously, it's a mature product.

01:10:26   The gains to be had are smaller and smaller in each release,

01:10:29   especially by speeding up to releases happening every year,

01:10:32   as opposed to before where it was like every 18 to 24 months.

01:10:36   Well, they still keep doing-- that's the thing, though,

01:10:39   with the yearly releases.

01:10:40   They still keep doing stuff to the internals

01:10:42   that I think I would never want to risk in a yearly release.

01:10:44   If you look at what they did with the power saving stuff and the new APIs, they're always

01:10:50   monkeying with, even if it's just screwing with Launch D again.

01:10:55   They're adding minor features and doing minor tweaks and minor improvements, but they're

01:10:58   to parts of the system that if you screw up in any way, nothing works.

01:11:05   Even though they're not big changes, every year they do that.

01:11:08   They did it in Snow Leopard too, like, "Oh, no new features," but they screw with everything

01:11:12   in there.

01:11:13   I think the CoreOS team does a great job with it.

01:11:15   They're like, you know what, lunch is there and it works,

01:11:17   but it could be better.

01:11:18   And let's add these features and tighten this up

01:11:20   and make it use less memory and do this.

01:11:21   And it's like, those features,

01:11:24   all the way down to the kernel,

01:11:25   if you mess up even the littlest bit of that,

01:11:27   it destroys the stability and reliability of the entire OS.

01:11:30   And Mavericks, I think they did a good job.

01:11:32   They didn't do that, they screwed up the applications.

01:11:34   Like mail and Gmail got all screwed up.

01:11:35   But that's like, I think end users

01:11:38   are more concerned about that.

01:11:40   Like they're like, oh, Mavericks sucks 'cause my mail broke.

01:11:42   and I understand that perspective,

01:11:43   but from my perspective, I think of the OS

01:11:45   as the core OS, and they continue to bravely make changes

01:11:50   to the core OS on a yearly schedule

01:11:53   in areas that are super risky

01:11:54   and manage to not screw it up.

01:11:56   - Yeah, that's true.

01:11:57   - Yeah, I was actually surprised

01:11:58   with all the Mavericks kernel changes,

01:12:01   changing kernel timings of things,

01:12:03   that sounds like a pretty risky thing to do,

01:12:06   but they did it, and it seemed like it was flawless.

01:12:08   I mean, it seemed like it caused no noticeable problems.

01:12:11   It was really quite solid.

01:12:13   - Or even your bad clock, like they screwed with NTPD,

01:12:16   like they screwed with how they do time or whatever.

01:12:18   Like that's the type of thing where like,

01:12:20   why did they change it?

01:12:20   Was it broken before?

01:12:21   Well, it's no, but someone said they could do it,

01:12:23   got a lot of it in terms of energy saving.

01:12:25   Well, you know, let's do it so we can, you know,

01:12:27   if we're doing things repeatedly,

01:12:28   we have, they had all these new instrumentation

01:12:30   to see who's waking up the CPU and stuff,

01:12:32   and like, oh, this stupid thing's waking up the CPU.

01:12:35   And like, so they change it.

01:12:36   And that's an example of where they screwed it up

01:12:38   and, you know, had bugs in it or whatever,

01:12:40   but everything's up for grads.

01:12:42   If you run PS and see all those bazillion processes,

01:12:45   those are all things that they continue to improve.

01:12:48   And one of the good ones is I haven't seen

01:12:50   the stupid blurry icon bug that has been haunting OS X

01:12:52   for years and years.

01:12:54   Did you guys get this one?

01:12:55   Where all of a sudden your doc icons

01:12:56   will look like they're half res

01:12:58   and be all pixelated and zoomed up?

01:13:00   - I've never seen that.

01:13:01   - I would occasionally get that with just one,

01:13:03   like one app would be half res

01:13:04   and the next time I'd launch it,

01:13:05   it would update it and be correct.

01:13:06   - Yeah, but it would spread like a virus,

01:13:08   you'd open a window and they'd all be, but some of them we messed up and some of them

01:13:11   be good. That bug was in the OS for so long and from people I talked to at App, they're

01:13:17   like, "Oh, Mavericks will actually fix that." And fingers crossed since upgrading to Mavericks,

01:13:20   I have not seen that bug yet. And so that makes me happy because someone, you know,

01:13:24   the icon services thing or, you know, it's like, it's like when they update the font

01:13:27   daemon or whatever, there's tons of processes there and they keep improving them. And I

01:13:31   like that. I just get a little bit nervous about it on a yearly schedule.

01:13:35   One thing that struck me as a little weird is we haven't heard very much chatter about

01:13:39   OS 10, 10.10.

01:13:41   There's been a lot of talk about Healthbook, about all the other things that may be coming

01:13:46   in iOS.

01:13:47   And I know that iOS is the darling of everyone's eye at the moment, but there's been very

01:13:52   little talk that I've heard about 10.10.

01:13:55   And that's a little scary if there's not much happening, but kind of awesome if they

01:14:01   really finally did double down on secrecy.

01:14:04   I don't know.

01:14:04   We'll see.

01:14:05   Well, all the things we listed would be big.

01:14:08   Visual refresh is going to be big.

01:14:09   That's what everyone's going to write about, right?

01:14:11   UI kit coming to the Mac would be big.

01:14:13   That would be a headliner feature.

01:14:14   Hey, all UI OS developers, now suddenly you

01:14:16   have an easy way to make a Mac app,

01:14:17   and we want to encourage you to do that because, you know,

01:14:19   the halo effect to get the Mac more popular, right?

01:14:22   New file system, core storage stuff would be big among nerds.

01:14:25   Like, there's plenty of areas that they could put on there

01:14:28   that they could put those bullet points on the website,

01:14:30   and everyone would be like, wow, Mac OS X Sausalito is great.

01:14:34   Is that in California? I don't even know.

01:14:36   I believe it is.

01:14:37   So to that end, before we start the IOS 8 talk, while you guys were going back and forth for a few minutes,

01:14:42   and Jon, you were making a couple of really brilliant points before I had the chance to make them,

01:14:46   and so I could have sounded brilliant, dammit, but I was looking at the schedule for WWDC,

01:14:53   and I was digging through it and looking at the amount or the categories that each of these sessions are a part of.

01:15:02   are part of because if you look at the schedule, even the ones that are TBA to be announced,

01:15:09   they still have the category listed.

01:15:11   So I looked and by quick count, as I'm still trying to pay attention to what you guys are

01:15:15   saying, there are 35 frameworks sessions, 17 media sessions, and 19 tool sessions.

01:15:23   Additionally, I thought, well, let me look at what's in Presidio, which if you don't

01:15:27   know is the biggest room within Moscone the way Apple sets it up.

01:15:33   And so really important things that are going to be really, really popular for everyone

01:15:37   to hear tend to be in Presidio, for example, the keynote.

01:15:41   So I recounted, and among the things that are not yet announced, so the things that

01:15:48   are still to be announced, there are six framework sessions in Presidio and eight media sessions

01:15:55   in Presidio.

01:15:57   And I didn't look at tools, crap.

01:16:00   But I think there are eight tool sessions in Presidio.

01:16:03   I did not look to see if any of them were to be announced.

01:16:06   But that's actually, it looks like at least half of them are to be announced.

01:16:10   Almost all of them.

01:16:11   All the tools ones.

01:16:12   That's a lot of tools and a lot of media and a lot of framework stuff all to be announced

01:16:18   in Presidio.

01:16:19   And it makes me wonder, is something big going on that we just don't realize more than

01:16:23   just a visual refresh?

01:16:24   What is the media category?

01:16:26   Look at the announced ones in the media category.

01:16:28   What the hell is the media category?

01:16:30   Probably too long to do live, but we

01:16:31   could look at last year's, where there's

01:16:33   nothing to be announced.

01:16:34   We know everything last year.

01:16:35   Because a lot of the sessions get repeated,

01:16:36   or at least something similar will get repeated.

01:16:38   Every year, there's going to be stuff

01:16:40   about UI, networking, accessibility,

01:16:43   working with media, working with Safari and web technologies.

01:16:46   Like, there's certain sessions that just

01:16:48   get repeated every year.

01:16:49   And so we can kind of look at that

01:16:51   to maybe eliminate some stuff.

01:16:52   But it certainly does sound like media

01:16:56   is being emphasized here.

01:16:58   - Oh, hold on, hold on.

01:16:59   I got that backwards, I'm sorry.

01:17:01   There are eight tool sessions

01:17:02   that are unannounced in Presidio.

01:17:04   I got my wires a little crossed.

01:17:06   So there are definitely some media ones as well,

01:17:08   but it was tools that I should have said instead of media.

01:17:11   I apologize.

01:17:12   So there are six new framework sessions in Presidio,

01:17:17   and I believe there are eight new media sessions in Presidio.

01:17:21   Something along those lines.

01:17:22   No matter how you, god darn it, I said media again,

01:17:25   tools, sessions, I'll get this right one day.

01:17:27   So, now that I've just completely confused everyone,

01:17:30   including myself, suffice it to say,

01:17:32   there's a lot of tools and a lot of frameworks

01:17:33   action going on, and to me, that's indicative

01:17:36   of something major and something big,

01:17:37   and something we're not thinking of.

01:17:38   - No, then it also could be like Marco said,

01:17:41   that every one of the descriptions says,

01:17:43   find out how to use the new blah

01:17:44   with iOS 8 and OS X Irvine.

01:17:48   - Right, I wouldn't read too much into,

01:17:51   into anything regarding the sessions at the conference

01:17:54   because it's so arbitrary, the categories are so large.

01:17:59   It isn't like the category is like OpenGL.

01:18:03   It isn't that specific.

01:18:04   It's media technologies or something.

01:18:06   You know, they're so broad and we're not dealing

01:18:10   with a massive data set here.

01:18:11   We're dealing with how many sessions are there?

01:18:13   Like 60 or something, like 100?

01:18:15   There aren't that many, it isn't that big of a set.

01:18:19   And there's not that much signal to the noise here.

01:18:22   Yeah, the only thing I can think of

01:18:23   is that when you do a visual refresh, like I did with iOS 7,

01:18:26   think of all the sessions that were

01:18:27   about how to make your app not look like ass in iOS 7.

01:18:32   Like it was how to get your views out

01:18:34   from under the status bar, Casey.

01:18:36   You can go to that session this week.

01:18:38   [LAUGHTER]

01:18:40   How to use the tint color and all that.

01:18:42   There was tons of sessions, because from the outside,

01:18:46   it's like, oh, everything looks different.

01:18:48   from a developer it's like, oh how am I gonna, you know,

01:18:50   if I have custom controls,

01:18:51   how are we gonna make them look nice?

01:18:52   Is there a new way to do these controls?

01:18:54   How do I deal with text size changing?

01:18:56   Like, any kind of visual refresh has tons of sessions

01:19:00   for the nitty gritty of like developers

01:19:01   to figure out how to make their apps look and work right.

01:19:04   So if OS X's getting a big visual refresh,

01:19:06   I would wager that, well I don't know these days actually,

01:19:09   I was gonna say that,

01:19:10   does OS X have more custom controls than iOS?

01:19:14   Maybe, I don't know, like.

01:19:17   It has a lot more controls total for the whole set,

01:19:19   like built-in controls.

01:19:20   - Like people with a drawing their own things,

01:19:22   where you know, I don't know, I mean some people

01:19:24   aren't even using native controls at all,

01:19:26   like they're drawing their own UI entirely themselves,

01:19:29   so that's not a big deal, but like,

01:19:30   I can imagine a lot of the bulk,

01:19:32   it was, you know, we basically know

01:19:34   that OS X visual refresh is coming.

01:19:36   A lot of the sessions are about how to make your app

01:19:39   look right in this new look.

01:19:41   - Right, and you know, and Apple's design principles

01:19:45   in this new look, 'cause it isn't just gonna be,

01:19:46   you know, here's a new skin.

01:19:48   It's, you know, like last year, it's like,

01:19:49   all right, well, here's a new look,

01:19:51   but we also want you to think about this, this, and this,

01:19:53   and you know, it's actually like a rethinking

01:19:55   and a redesign rather than just a reskin.

01:19:58   - Although there's still that baffling session

01:19:59   from last year, I always have it as an introduction,

01:20:01   and there's a whole session about how to make your icons,

01:20:03   and all the example icons were like super skeuomorphic,

01:20:05   like things look like they were made out of yarn

01:20:07   with grass growing on it.

01:20:09   - Yeah, it was weird.

01:20:09   They actually even said at the beginning, like,

01:20:11   keep making your icons the old way.

01:20:13   Don't use the new style that we're using,

01:20:15   which was really weird.

01:20:17   I remember, I was in there, and I remember thinking

01:20:19   that was a very strange thing to say.

01:20:20   - And that's the way I think of the icon factory.

01:20:22   Craig was putting up samples of the Xscope,

01:20:24   like experimentations and speculative experimentations

01:20:29   of how might the Xscope icon look like

01:20:31   in a flatter OS X world.

01:20:33   And they did two little samples of them.

01:20:35   They look really good, but what is the message

01:20:37   gonna be from Apple?

01:20:38   Is it gonna be, are all the OS X icons gonna be redesigned

01:20:42   to be iOS 7 style or whatever the new look?

01:20:44   But then they're going to tell us to make our icons the same?

01:20:46   I don't know.

01:20:47   Anyway, visual changes cause lots of churn and lots of things

01:20:51   that developers have to deal with.

01:20:53   So that covers at least a lot of the OS X side of things.

01:20:56   We should get to iOS 8, though, because iOS 8 will probably not

01:20:59   be a visual overhaul.

01:21:00   And yet, I'm sure there will be lots of sessions about iOS 8.

01:21:03   All right, so what's coming in iOS 8?

01:21:06   So I really want-- and I'm not going to get it--

01:21:08   but I really want some sort of inter-app communication.

01:21:11   Because as I think John said last episode,

01:21:14   if you fix inter-app communication,

01:21:17   then you don't need panes of apps running simultaneously

01:21:21   on the iPad.

01:21:22   So much gets fixed with better inter-app communication,

01:21:25   but I'm not hopeful that it's going to happen.

01:21:28   Well, aren't they going to do the remote view controller

01:21:30   stuff that's private?

01:21:32   One would think.

01:21:33   They have that.

01:21:34   We don't know if they're going to do anything with it.

01:21:36   Right, well, they make it public.

01:21:38   That's the usual MO.

01:21:39   It's like it's private for a while,

01:21:40   then they get the kinks worked out and they make it public, or do you still think it's going to stay private?

01:21:44   Well, I think it will stay an implementation detail

01:21:48   of the system they actually make public if they do something like this. Because you can't

01:21:52   what are you going to do? You can't launch your own process on iOS, like that way.

01:21:56   You can't do that. So, I would love to see them fix

01:22:00   not necessarily what a lot of people would consider interapp communication. I mean, interapp communication

01:22:04   is kind of a broad topic. There's a lot involved there.

01:22:08   address a nice chunk of it by doing something like the Windows 8 contracts or the Android Intents or whether I have that backwards, I don't know.

01:22:14   No, you had that right. Okay. Something like that, one of those systems where apps can register and say,

01:22:20   "I can provide photos to anything that offers a photo picker." Or somebody else can say, "I'm a search provider, I can search for things."

01:22:26   Or, "I accept photos." Or, "I accept URLs." And then be integrated into any kind of share sheet that comes up in other apps.

01:22:34   that comes up in other apps.

01:22:36   That's the kind of thing I want,

01:22:38   because that doesn't require--

01:22:40   there was something-- I think I was on Grouber's site--

01:22:43   something in the last couple days where somebody was saying,

01:22:45   the problem is if you add something like the side

01:22:50   by side thing that was rumored last week,

01:22:53   if you add something like that, you're also adding complexity.

01:22:56   And if you do something like the contraction intent systems,

01:23:00   you're adding a lot of power without adding

01:23:01   a whole lot of user complexity.

01:23:03   And there are certainly challenges to those systems,

01:23:05   things that you'll have to control

01:23:07   and possible problems that could come up.

01:23:10   There's a lot of weird things with fraud and confusion

01:23:13   that Apple would have to look for at App Review,

01:23:15   but they can do that.

01:23:16   They have all the tools in place to do that already.

01:23:18   Like, they're set up for that.

01:23:20   So I don't think that's necessarily gonna be a big problem.

01:23:22   I would just love to see them address that,

01:23:24   even if all they do is rip off

01:23:26   what Windows Phone or Android does,

01:23:28   or take bits and pieces from both.

01:23:31   That would be amazing.

01:23:32   that would be so much better than we have now

01:23:34   and that would enable so many third party app capabilities

01:23:39   that either weren't possible before

01:23:41   or were really clunky and rare before.

01:23:43   Like right now in Overcast, I have a thing

01:23:45   where if you tap a URL, what do you do with it?

01:23:48   And I have an open in Safari activity,

01:23:51   I have an open in Chrome activity

01:23:52   only because I wrote an open in Chrome activity.

01:23:54   It would be better if Chrome could just say,

01:23:58   I can accept URLs from anything that shares URLs

01:24:01   and then I bring up the sheet and I give it a URL

01:24:03   and it shows me a Chrome button.

01:24:05   They already have most of the pieces in place

01:24:07   to do that already.

01:24:08   That's been there since iOS 6

01:24:10   with the whole UI activity system.

01:24:11   It's almost all there already.

01:24:14   And the impression I got when poking around

01:24:18   back when iOS 6 was released two years ago,

01:24:20   the impression I got, hint hint from people,

01:24:23   is that that kind of system was discussed or in progress

01:24:28   and was canceled or was delayed.

01:24:30   And you can look at the UI activity system

01:24:34   and you can see, okay, this is obviously intended

01:24:36   for something like this, and the support for things

01:24:39   like remote view controllers.

01:24:41   The pieces are all there.

01:24:43   It's just a matter of doing a little bit more

01:24:45   to expose it as an API.

01:24:46   And certainly there's challenges.

01:24:49   There's a pretty big tools challenge

01:24:53   and code design structure challenge with,

01:24:56   "All right, well if I offer a remote view controller,

01:25:00   how do you present that to the user?

01:25:02   Do you launch my entire app in the background

01:25:03   and then have me bring up a certain view controller?

01:25:06   How does that work?

01:25:07   How does that work with memory and the API level

01:25:09   and backgrounding?"

01:25:10   There are certainly some things to consider,

01:25:12   but it seems like they've already done

01:25:13   most of the work for that.

01:25:15   And that, it is certainly a limited form

01:25:20   of interactive communication,

01:25:22   but it's a massive step forward from what we have now

01:25:25   And it would really be very beneficial.

01:25:27   Yeah, I've seen iOS 8 as kind of the mavericks of iOS

01:25:31   in that from a user's perspective,

01:25:34   it's going to seem like iOS 7.5.

01:25:37   It's not going to look all that different,

01:25:39   and a lot of the new features are going to be internal.

01:25:42   So while Mavericks is vaguely visually distinguishable

01:25:45   from Mountain Lion, from a user's perspective,

01:25:48   it wasn't that big a deal.

01:25:49   But there were a lot of changes under the hood.

01:25:51   And iOS 8, I would imagine, is going to be the same thing.

01:25:54   refinement of the look, features that probably aren't in the user space but

01:25:59   that will slowly appear as applications become you know iOS 8 savvy to use the

01:26:03   old term. And that what you're talking about having you know the activity

01:26:10   viewer type thing and having it list URLs and having some sort of system for

01:26:12   you to configure like oh I don't want you know I probably one of the reasons

01:26:17   that might have been canned is the whole idea of like on the Mac applications

01:26:20   that would say that they can handle you know star I handle any application so

01:26:24   the open with you'd always see this application for every single file like

01:26:27   sort of spamming the thing like what can open a URL and you see a list of 9,000

01:26:31   applications so you need some way to manage that as well and that's another

01:26:34   complication in the UI and that's the type of thing that could make you say

01:26:38   we're not quite ready to do that and the same thing with like sandboxing do we

01:26:41   just load your do we do we load like a loadable bundle or a framework but run

01:26:45   it in that sandbox of your application so that you have access to your document

01:26:49   container and everything but you're on the screen at the same time as somebody

01:26:53   And again, if they're doing side-by-side apps on the iPad anyway, they've already got to do probably two sandboxed applications that each have access to their own containers, both on screen at the same time.

01:27:04   Which is, you know, not a big deal. They're called Windows back in the old world.

01:27:08   So if they're doing that anyway, there's a place for that.

01:27:11   But yeah, it seems like a Maverick style release

01:27:14   where there's lots of new APIs for developers

01:27:16   to adopt a couple of new things on the settings screen,

01:27:20   some new applications, you know,

01:27:22   the health book stuff and everything like that.

01:27:25   But, you know, not, it's not gonna be like iOS 7,

01:27:29   that's for sure.

01:27:31   - Yeah, and I don't think it really needs to be.

01:27:33   I mean, iOS 7, iOS 7 was really a remarkable release

01:27:37   in that they crammed in not only a massive visual overhaul

01:27:40   and lots of rewriting of the built-in apps to accommodate that.

01:27:44   But a lot of cool frameworks, like major stuff, things like TextKit,

01:27:48   and all the background refresh stuff, and the URL session stuff,

01:27:52   major, major changes to frameworks. And they fit all that into one release.

01:27:56   I mean, what I would like to see from 8

01:28:00   is, besides the interactive communication stuff, which is a big deal,

01:28:04   just take all those frameworks they added last year and just do some tweaks here and there.

01:28:08   limitations and URL sessions that I'd like to see lifted,

01:28:11   but it's mostly minor stuff.

01:28:13   The frameworks are getting really good.

01:28:16   Even simple things, like I was complaining

01:28:18   two episodes ago, or last week, I was complaining

01:28:20   how the keychain API is ridiculous to use

01:28:23   'cause it's still one of the old C-based APIs

01:28:25   and they haven't made a nice Objective-C wrapper around it.

01:28:30   I think it did more of that, like just wrap a bunch

01:28:32   of the stuff that's hard to use, like the contacts API

01:28:35   and the keychain, stuff like that,

01:28:37   like stuff that still uses old C APIs,

01:28:40   like just wrap some of that in new classes

01:28:42   so it's easier for people to use.

01:28:43   I would love just a release like that,

01:28:45   just doing a bunch of small tweaks and improvements

01:28:48   to the existing frameworks,

01:28:49   and then having one or two major new features

01:28:51   and capabilities like the interapp sharing things.

01:28:56   - Yeah, we'll see.

01:28:57   - And then there's like the idea of, you know,

01:28:59   any new category or whatever is probably gonna have

01:29:01   a bunch of new frameworks and stuff

01:29:02   that you're not gonna care about

01:29:04   if you don't have any interaction

01:29:06   with whatever the hell is new.

01:29:07   If you're not writing Apple TV apps,

01:29:09   then you don't care about whatever new things

01:29:10   they added there.

01:29:11   If you're not going to integrate with some Apple wearable,

01:29:13   then you don't care about those frameworks.

01:29:15   But those are always the extras that they add on top,

01:29:18   sort of like the hardware controller interface.

01:29:22   If you're not writing a game that

01:29:24   has to have support for hardware control,

01:29:26   you're never going to look at that new API.

01:29:27   But hey, it's new in iOS 7, right?

01:29:29   So there's always that bushel of things

01:29:31   that can be new in iOS 8.

01:29:32   And with Healthbook supposedly in there

01:29:35   that we all seem to believe is coming,

01:29:37   there's gotta be a bunch of new APIs to do with that,

01:29:39   but maybe you're just not gonna look at them,

01:29:40   because especially if an Apple wearable doesn't come out,

01:29:42   you're like, well, fine, this is gonna be so long

01:29:44   before a third-party wearable

01:29:45   takes advantage of this anyway,

01:29:47   and I'm not interested in it for my podcast app,

01:29:48   so I'll just ignore that.

01:29:50   - Do you think that there'll be

01:29:51   any sort of new Springboard functionality?

01:29:54   Like, everyone keeps calling for widgets

01:29:56   in either Notification Center or Springboard.

01:29:58   I'm extremely unconvinced that would ever happen,

01:30:01   but is there anything that you can think of

01:30:04   that would make Springboard better.

01:30:06   - Yeah, have the little icons, not slide.

01:30:09   Someone tweeted that and I thought it was

01:30:11   a reasonably good idea.

01:30:12   Have you been able to delete icons

01:30:13   without all the other ones rearranging themselves?

01:30:16   I mean, just trying to deal with rearranging icons

01:30:19   on the device is just torture.

01:30:21   Like it's a terrible game that we all do to ourselves.

01:30:24   People just don't rearrange them because it's so hard.

01:30:26   There's certain positions, like the lower,

01:30:27   I think like the lower right corner is torture.

01:30:29   Or one of the corners--

01:30:30   - It's really hard to get there 'cause it'll like

01:30:31   scroll over to the next pane or something.

01:30:33   Yeah, or like as you're going through pages, especially on my super slow A5, as I'm going,

01:30:39   like I'm holding it against the edge and the things are scrolling by, sometimes I guess

01:30:43   the animation takes too long and it will end up shoving icons off.

01:30:47   Like I'm not landing on this page, I'm saying go to the last page, I'm going to take this

01:30:50   icon from the first page into the last, and as part of that process I will bump icons

01:30:54   off all the intermediary pages, so by the time I get to the last page two new icons

01:30:57   are there, and I've shifted everything over.

01:30:59   It's just maddening.

01:31:01   And if when I moved one, the other ones wouldn't slide into its place, that would help me rearrange

01:31:07   things with a slight extra little bit of sanity.

01:31:10   They're never going to do that, but it drives me insane.

01:31:13   Yeah, there's not really a lot of springboard changes that I would really care that much

01:31:17   about with the exception of, for god's sake, fix Newstand or give apps a way to get out

01:31:21   of it or give users a way to take apps out of it.

01:31:23   Because it is so annoying for everybody now, for publishers and for users.

01:31:27   I read stuff that's in Newsstand and it's like on the iPad, I think it's this way on

01:31:33   the phone, I only do it on the pad, but you have the app, you exit the app, and you have

01:31:38   to separately then exit Newsstand with another tap on the home button. You have to wait for

01:31:41   the animations to complete.

01:31:42   It's staring at a folder.

01:31:43   Right. It's so bad. And it's like, just, I read these same apps, like one of them's

01:31:50   a New York Times app. I read that every night. Can't I just move it out of there, please?

01:31:54   Just let me put it on the home screen, please, so I can get rid of the stupid newsstand crap.

01:31:58   It's so, so bad.

01:32:00   I mean, hell, let them all appear in newsstand fine, but also let them be outside.

01:32:05   Like no one will ever go into newsstand.

01:32:06   Or just let me drag them in and out.

01:32:08   We need to group them all in one spot.

01:32:10   What case do you mention though about the widgets in Windows Pawns, live tiles or something

01:32:14   like that?

01:32:15   That is a complication that I see Apple not wanting to add, but it may be inevitable.

01:32:21   know the today view that they have that shows you all the collection of

01:32:24   information which is kind of configurable but not really. Yeah it's not

01:32:28   that good. And we just have a bunch of icons and there's no real widgets like

01:32:31   opening the door to that complexity is something they definitely don't want to

01:32:34   do but at a certain point when everybody else's phone has some way to sort

01:32:39   of customize what you see on either your home screen or on your lock screen in

01:32:44   ways that are beyond what Apple allows you to customize I think Apple's

01:32:49   is wise to not do that stuff as much as everyone else is,

01:32:54   but I think they're far enough behind now

01:32:56   that they could make another baby step in that direction

01:32:59   with iOS 8 and no one would freak out.

01:33:01   - If the remote view controllers are a thing

01:33:05   that are being used for inter-app communication,

01:33:09   could that also be used for a widget,

01:33:12   like in the home screen or in Notification Center?

01:33:15   - I mean, in theory, yes.

01:33:16   Like in theory, they could use the background refresh system

01:33:18   and their remote view controller system together

01:33:22   to just like, you know, have an app

01:33:23   periodically update something.

01:33:25   And you know, you'd be woken up every,

01:33:27   you know, it wouldn't be frequent,

01:33:28   you wouldn't be able to like run,

01:33:30   like you know, a news ticker constantly scrolling across

01:33:32   or you know, constantly changing things maybe,

01:33:35   but maybe they'd wake you up every 20 minutes or something

01:33:38   to let you put an update there.

01:33:40   - Can you even change your icon like the calendar app?

01:33:42   Is that even public?

01:33:43   - No, that's never been allowed.

01:33:44   - And same thing with your default,

01:33:46   like whatever is the default ping,

01:33:47   like the thing that comes up before your app is launched?

01:33:49   - Yeah, you can't change that either.

01:33:50   Newstand can change its icon,

01:33:52   but other apps can't do either.

01:33:56   - So like we're talking about widgets

01:33:57   and they haven't even allowed you to change either your icon

01:33:59   or your default image, your default launch image.

01:34:02   And you know, Apple's allowed to change it

01:34:04   'cause they're allowed to have

01:34:05   a functional calendar application, but no one else is.

01:34:08   So forget about live tiles,

01:34:09   you can't even update your freaking icon.

01:34:11   So like I said, they should make some more moves

01:34:15   in that direction.

01:34:16   They don't have to go whole hog like, hey, you can have a view that you control that gets updated every

01:34:20   n minutes that's on the home screen that's the size of five icons put together, like the live tile

01:34:24   thing. Like that's too far, but they're way back in the prehistoric

01:34:28   era with the limitations. And a lot of that stuff was like, oh, we don't want people burning CPU

01:34:32   and stuff like that. But that, you know, they've come so far in terms of background refresh and everything.

01:34:36   And with, you know, the hardware that we have now, the restrictions on

01:34:40   no, you can't change your calendar icon to be today's date. That would take too much battery. That's ridiculous.

01:34:44   It's just, you know, that stuff should be opened up

01:34:47   a little bit more.

01:34:48   - Remember for a while, their calendar icon didn't update.

01:34:51   It wasn't until like, OS three or four.

01:34:53   Like it was, it was just, it would just always be

01:34:55   showing the wrong date.

01:34:57   Well, it would be showing the wrong date

01:34:58   most days of the month.

01:34:59   - Yeah.

01:35:00   - Yeah, I, you know, and one thing I wonder,

01:35:02   do you guys think they would ever,

01:35:03   and I think my answer is no,

01:35:05   but do you think they would ever give the ability

01:35:07   to set default apps to third party apps

01:35:09   for things like your default mail app,

01:35:11   your default web browser?

01:35:14   Ah, it seems highly unlikely, doesn't it?

01:35:18   Because they have that on OS X, but that's different.

01:35:24   Because that would go a long way with the URL

01:35:27   or with the data sharing system, like the contracts intents

01:35:29   thing.

01:35:30   That would go a long way towards not only enabling

01:35:33   a bunch of third party apps to be better,

01:35:35   but enabling what a lot of users want anyway.

01:35:37   Like it's not just like, oh, Google

01:35:40   wants to invade with Chrome and Maps.

01:35:42   It's like a whole bunch of people are choosing to use Chrome and Google Maps anyway,

01:35:47   and it just sucks that they don't have full system integration.

01:35:51   You know, if you tap a mail link in something, it doesn't just open Chrome or--

01:35:54   Yeah, the mail is the worst one, though.

01:35:55   Because I can imagine Apple will be like, well, we have to keep you on Safari,

01:35:59   because the web is such an important thing,

01:36:00   and only we get to use the good JavaScript engine, and blah, blah, blah.

01:36:03   We don't want people changing this.

01:36:05   But mail, man, like, there are so many good, interesting mail applications.

01:36:09   And I bet mail is the application that most people

01:36:11   are likely to use a third party one.

01:36:13   Because how many people use Chrome?

01:36:14   Probably not a lot, but I think the Gmail app

01:36:17   is probably very popular.

01:36:18   - Yeah, I bet you're right.

01:36:19   Well, Chrome was very popular,

01:36:21   but I think it's kind of fading now.

01:36:23   But Gmail app is very, very popular, no question.

01:36:26   - And then you have to,

01:36:27   I'm setting up these iOS devices for my kids,

01:36:28   you have to set up an email account in the mail app

01:36:31   'cause every application that sends email

01:36:32   is gonna throw you into that stupid mail app.

01:36:34   And if you don't have an account configured,

01:36:35   you just can't use that feature of those applications.

01:36:37   So you need some sort of little Sentinel mail application

01:36:42   configured in Apple Mail just to support emailing

01:36:44   from all the other applications that you're gonna use.

01:36:46   - Yeah.

01:36:47   - What about services?

01:36:48   We gonna see any improvement there?

01:36:50   - Like web services?

01:36:52   - Well, like iCloud for example.

01:36:53   - Oh, lol, no.

01:36:55   - I mean, they keep making things better

01:36:59   with the iCloud core storage and the key values there.

01:37:01   I'm sure there'll be improvements there and blah, blah, blah.

01:37:04   But I don't know, any new iCloud APIs?

01:37:08   Or even just it actually working?

01:37:12   Well, I mean, they've been making steady progress

01:37:14   in that area, but it's like, fundamentally,

01:37:18   it's like an architecture type thing

01:37:21   where you're not expecting an API that,

01:37:23   you just want it to work within the bounds

01:37:25   of its original design.

01:37:27   But if the original design precludes it

01:37:30   ever being, having a certain level of performance

01:37:33   or ever having a certain level of reliability, you're just like, well, just do as well as

01:37:36   you can within that.

01:37:37   And that's why I mentioned a new API, like a new API that does a new thing architected

01:37:42   differently.

01:37:43   Like you talked about the push API thing, you can imagine the back end for the push

01:37:48   notification system is substantially different than the back end for the iCloud Core data.

01:37:55   And those choices, those different choices they made, influence how the API is designed

01:38:01   and how it performs and how well it does what it's being asked to do.

01:38:04   And so I think new iCloud APIs would be your opportunity to make something much, much better.

01:38:11   Whereas the alternative thing is just take the existing APIs with the existing design

01:38:16   parameters and make them better and remove the bugs and add the features.

01:38:19   And they did a lot of that with Core Data iCloud stuff in Mavericks.

01:38:25   And I'm sure they're continuing that, but that's not the type of thing that's going

01:38:28   to wow someone in a session.

01:38:30   You know, I feel like we're being even more non-committal and hand-wavy than usual.

01:38:36   Like last year, we knew that it was going to be a visual refresh, and we were pretty

01:38:40   confident about that.

01:38:42   And that's about all we knew, but it's a lot more than I feel like we know now.

01:38:45   We know about HealthBook.

01:38:47   What else do we really know with any sort of certainty?

01:38:50   Anything?

01:38:51   The scheduling is really throwing things off, because we have these tees from starting from

01:38:55   late last year of new category, but it's too vague, so we don't know what it is, so we

01:38:59   just have to pick from like the, you know, vague wearable, vague TV, you know,

01:39:03   unknown, whatever. That tells us nothing. And, you know, the the gimme is to be like

01:39:09   "Oh, Mac hardware versions, well the CPUs are delayed." So it's like everything's up

01:39:12   in the air, you know. We feel like if you had to predict what was Apple's gonna

01:39:16   introduce this year, I think we would have, we would be more confident. But it's

01:39:20   like, what will they have ready in time for June? Yeah, that's a really tough call.

01:39:25   You're right. I mean, it's, there's no guarantee that they're going to have

01:39:29   anything mind-blowing ready for June. Like it could just be like, "All right,

01:39:32   here's a visual refresh for Mac OS X, here's, you know, a less significant

01:39:36   improvement in iOS 8, and go for it. Here you go, and here's my perception on how

01:39:41   to use the new stuff in iOS 10 and Mac OS 10 point ten point or iOS 8 and Mac OS

01:39:45   10 point ten point ten point ten." There's nothing stopping them from

01:39:49   that just being it. Like there might be no hardware announcements, no new category

01:39:53   announcements, nothing exciting at all except the new software, which, you know,

01:39:57   in a developer conference, that is technically adequate.

01:40:02   It also is not unprecedented, they've done that before.

01:40:07   - Yeah, then you'd be reading the tea leaves to see like,

01:40:10   are they really emphasizing being able to draw your app

01:40:12   at different sizes?

01:40:14   And then you'd be like, is that for the bigger iPhone 6?

01:40:17   Is that for side by side on the iPad Air?

01:40:18   Like, you can read those tea leaves.

01:40:20   And then there's the hidden stuff like, you know,

01:40:21   M7, you don't find out about until, you know,

01:40:24   the September iPhone announcement.

01:40:26   "Oh, then here's these new APIs," and they were kind of in iOS 7 all along, but, you

01:40:30   know, like, they could do that.

01:40:33   I think that would be sufficient for a conference.

01:40:37   We're revising all our OSes, and here's a bunch of hints for new APIs, but it would

01:40:42   be quite a letdown after the past couple of fun years of, like, even just stuff like the

01:40:46   Mac Pro, where you're like, "I think that was an exciting announcement," even if it

01:40:49   didn't have much impact on people's lives in general.

01:40:52   It definitely adds to the keynote experience.

01:40:54   I mean, as a user of all this stuff, and as a developer using all this stuff, I would

01:40:59   actually be really happy with just software improvements, because Apple has a lot of potential

01:41:04   software improvements, especially if they're tackling a major refresh in 10.10.10. There's

01:41:11   room for this. They could do a lot here. I would love if they weren't distracted on

01:41:17   all sorts of new projects and could focus their engineering resources on the things

01:41:23   needed. I just don't believe that's the case. I believe they are working on big stuff. It is pulling

01:41:28   resources away from everything else, and it is going to be new, but it might not be ready yet, or

01:41:32   maybe we'll all be proven wrong. I mean, honestly, it's kind of fun not knowing so much ahead of time,

01:41:37   because when there's a whole bunch of leaks, it kind of ruins the fun and the anticipation

01:41:43   of the keynote. This will sound great next week when all the leaks have come out.

01:41:46   We're going to be listening to the show. Yeah, we're recording this almost a week before we're

01:41:49   going to publish it, so yeah, you're right. Because, yeah, right, there's all the good

01:41:52   leaks that come out next week and well we'll find out. I put two questions in the

01:41:56   show notes here one was what are you most looking forward to WWDC and then

01:41:59   the other one which is kind of the same question rephrase but a little bit

01:42:02   different angle is if you had to choose one realistic thing that you want your

01:42:07   wishlist thing that you want to see announced at WWDC like it you don't have

01:42:11   to be predicting that it's gonna happen but it has to be you know within the

01:42:14   realm of possibility what would that be? Definitely interapp communication and I

01:42:20   I think it's possible.

01:42:21   I don't know how, but I think it could be done.

01:42:24   - That's definitely realistic.

01:42:25   If they say something about that in the keynote,

01:42:27   you'll be the most excited about that.

01:42:29   - I don't know if I'll be Mike Hurley

01:42:31   at Marco's XOXO talk excited, but I'll be--

01:42:34   - Yeah!

01:42:35   (laughing)

01:42:36   That was awesome.

01:42:37   - But I'll be really excited.

01:42:39   I don't know, we'll see.

01:42:41   - Marco?

01:42:42   - So you're asking what I think is the most likely

01:42:46   or what I would want the most?

01:42:47   - No, this is like your most wished for thing,

01:42:50   but it has to be realistic.

01:42:51   - Okay.

01:42:52   - To be announced at the keynote.

01:42:53   It doesn't have to be like you're predicting it,

01:42:55   but like, man, if it's possible for Apple to do this,

01:42:57   then I would be really excited if they did.

01:42:59   - Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to go with

01:43:00   Ferik in the chat room with a Thunderbolt Retina display.

01:43:04   But if that's not realistic, which I think it is,

01:43:09   I think they could very much do

01:43:10   4K Thunderbolt Retina display.

01:43:11   - Yep, that is definitely realistic.

01:43:15   - Otherwise, I would say,

01:43:15   Casey's thing of internet communication,

01:43:17   and if I can't do that 'cause it's already taken,

01:43:19   then I would say new UI kit-like framework for OS X.

01:43:24   - Realistic is the wrong word.

01:43:25   What we're saying is feasible,

01:43:27   because Apple would never announce a monitor.

01:43:29   It doesn't seem like the monitor would ever rate enough

01:43:32   to get in a thing, but it's a thing they could make.

01:43:34   - It didn't seem like the Mac Pro would ever rate enough

01:43:35   to get in the thing.

01:43:36   - Well, sure, well, the Mac Pro's interesting and new,

01:43:39   but anyway, Apple could make that right now if they wanted.

01:43:42   Why are they not doing it?

01:43:43   'Cause they hate us, but that's realistic.

01:43:45   My thing, I think, that's actually kind of surprising me

01:43:48   is the reason I put this question in,

01:43:49   is Retina MacBook Air, a new form factor,

01:43:54   a MacBook Air with a non-crappy screen

01:43:58   that's also better viewing angles,

01:44:00   Retina, and more interesting,

01:44:02   maybe it's not tapered as much,

01:44:03   maybe it's just like a super thin 13-inch thing.

01:44:08   That's, like I said, I think they could show it.

01:44:11   I think they probably have it all designed up and ready.

01:44:13   They just can't ship it because there's no CPUs for it.

01:44:16   But hey, I'll wait six months for a computer

01:44:18   I'm not gonna buy anyway.

01:44:19   - Done that before.

01:44:20   - Yeah, exactly.

01:44:22   I like seeing new laptops introduced.

01:44:25   I was excited when the Retina MacBook Pros were introduced

01:44:29   and I'll be excited again to see

01:44:31   what the next evolution of the Air is.

01:44:32   So I'm really hoping that they show that

01:44:35   even though it's not ready.

01:44:36   - I wonder, do you think the need

01:44:39   for a Retina 12-inch MacBook Air

01:44:43   is that strong because the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro

01:44:48   is so good, it's such a great all-arounder

01:44:50   for so many people.

01:44:51   It is not that expensive, it has the nice Retina screen,

01:44:55   it is very small, it is almost air-sized,

01:44:58   but it's big enough still to have a nice-sized battery

01:45:02   and a nice CPU in there.

01:45:05   Do you think the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro

01:45:07   reduces a lot of the need for the MacBook Air?

01:45:10   No, because I think they'll have to separate from each other a little bit, but basically

01:45:15   what I'm looking for is the air internals.

01:45:17   So forget about a discrete GPU ever.

01:45:20   I don't think the 13 doesn't have a discrete anyway, but it's possible they could in that

01:45:24   size form factor.

01:45:25   And like I said, maybe it won't be tapered as much as the old ones because they've got

01:45:27   to fit more battery for the Retina display, but it should still be, if you put one in

01:45:32   one hand and one in the other, it would be clear this is not a 13-inch Pro, this is the

01:45:35   12-inch Air.

01:45:36   And it may end up pushing the 13-inch up mark.

01:45:38   the 13 suddenly starts sprouting more powerful GPUs if not a discrete one

01:45:43   whereas the the air is always gonna have whatever the super ultra everything on

01:45:47   one chip CPU that Intel offers and the 13-inch Pro is gonna have the okay well

01:45:52   this isn't the super low power one it's a little bit more powerful than that so

01:45:56   I think there's room in the lineup for it and I'm excited to see I'm kind of

01:46:00   bored of the form factor of the MacBook Pros now that they've we sort of evolved

01:46:04   to what we think it's the final form here and they just keep getting thinner

01:46:07   But the errors, I still think there's room for something that looks a little different

01:46:12   than the current wedge type things.

01:46:13   And I'm so sick of those screens on the current errors.

01:46:16   I really want them to make a nicer screen on an error-sized device.

01:46:21   Someone in the chat room asked about iPad Pro.

01:46:22   The iPads were just revised.

01:46:23   Like, I don't even think that's within the realm of feasibility.

01:46:26   I don't think they're…

01:46:27   Well, not in June.

01:46:28   Yeah, this fall they'll probably announce new iPads, but…

01:46:31   And I don't think it's the type of thing, you know, because the MacBook errors are coming.

01:46:34   There's going to be Macbook Airs based on Broadwell and it could conceivably happen

01:46:38   this calendar year.

01:46:40   iPad Pro I think is outside the realm of possibility just because iPad Air is not that old yet.

01:46:46   But who knows with iOS 8 side by side I guess they could throw it in there.

01:46:49   But I would be more excited actually to see what the new Red and Air looks like hoping

01:46:54   that it's a different shape than just another increasingly thin slate type thing.

01:46:59   I don't know.

01:47:00   I don't know if it counts as realistic or not but the thing I'm most looking forward

01:47:03   is is there going to be a new product category?

01:47:06   And if so, what the crap is it?

01:47:08   And I would love for it to be something that's surprising.

01:47:13   And we'll see, I don't know.

01:47:15   I can't even conjecture what it would be.

01:47:17   - See, that's not my most look forward to thing

01:47:19   'cause I can't pin it down.

01:47:21   It's just an amorphous cloud of whatever.

01:47:22   And honestly, I'm not interested,

01:47:24   probably, in anything wearable.

01:47:26   And a TV thing, I have so little faith

01:47:29   that anything they'll do will be interesting to me.

01:47:32   And a revised Apple TV, I'm not sure I would,

01:47:35   maybe I would get it 'cause it's 99 bucks, who cares,

01:47:37   whatever, but like, it's too, I don't know what it is yet.

01:47:40   I can't say that I'm most looking forward to that

01:47:42   'cause I don't just want the novelty,

01:47:44   like I just want Apple to do something different.

01:47:46   - No.

01:47:47   - I have to see what it is.

01:47:48   If it's something awesome, I'll love it.

01:47:49   But if it's something I'm not interested in,

01:47:51   yeah, it's great they did a new thing,

01:47:52   but I'm never gonna get it, so whatever.

01:47:54   - Random question, are they going to

01:47:57   transition the MacBook Pros to be black aluminum

01:48:00   in the style of the Mac Pro?

01:48:02   - Yeah, I would love it, 'cause to tell you what,

01:48:03   like the Mac Pro is a nice looking machine.

01:48:06   It is basically, the color is basically a glossy version

01:48:10   of the iPhone 5S slate color.

01:48:13   And the iPhone 5S slate color is really nice too,

01:48:15   and they could definitely use that,

01:48:17   'cause glossy would not work on a MacBook obviously,

01:48:20   it would look terrible, it would have,

01:48:22   well they did it before, but glossy metal I think

01:48:24   would show a lot more fingerprints

01:48:26   than the old plastic MacBooks did, so I don't see that.

01:48:29   I would love it if a Retina Thunderbolt display

01:48:33   matched the new Mac Pro in color and finish.

01:48:37   Might be a little reflective,

01:48:38   but if it's just on the bezel,

01:48:39   or the bezel, as Jon would say, then who cares?

01:48:42   - They'll offer it in black, but it's $150 extra.

01:48:45   - Wow, old reference.

01:48:47   - Remember when they did that?

01:48:47   - Yep.

01:48:48   - The black books.

01:48:49   - Nice.

01:48:50   - Yep, that was around the time I bought my first Mac.

01:48:53   I don't know, I feel like it could be

01:48:55   a really neat differentiator to keep aluminum

01:48:58   for the quote unquote consumer grade stuff

01:49:01   and make everything black for the professional grade stuff.

01:49:05   So a black Thunderbolt display, a black Mac Pro,

01:49:10   black MacBook Pros, perhaps even a black,

01:49:14   what do you call the magic mouse that isn't a magic mouse?

01:49:16   The magic touch pad, track pad thing,

01:49:19   which then begs the question,

01:49:20   would you have a black magic mouse?

01:49:22   Do they sunset the magic mouse brand and make me very sad?

01:49:25   - I would love for them to kill that stupid mouse

01:49:27   make a decent mouse. It seems unlikely, but I like it. I like it too. Yeah, I mean a mouse

01:49:34   is, you know, something like that, something that you hold is going to have this broad

01:49:38   spectrum of do you like a high mouse or a low mouse, a wide mouse or a skinny mouse,

01:49:42   a mouse that's contoured or a mouse that's not, you know, and so I'm not going to say

01:49:45   this is a bad mouse, I'm just going to say I don't like a mouse that's that low. I don't

01:49:49   like a mouse that's that heavy, I don't like a mouse that's that low. And so if that's

01:49:53   the only mouse that Apple makes, Apple doesn't make a mouse for me.

01:49:56   And historically, not all of Apple's mice have been that heavy and that low.

01:50:01   This is a new kind of design direction.

01:50:04   I'm ready to see what the next design direction is for mice, but I don't think they care enough

01:50:07   to change it.

01:50:08   And so I'll just continue to...

01:50:09   I've been using a third-party mouse since, god, since the one that was semi-circle on

01:50:14   the bottom that came with the Power Mac 6100.

01:50:17   That's the last Apple mouse that I used, I think.

01:50:19   See, I use the Magic Mouse because I am a really heavy user of, what is it, screens

01:50:24   that they used to call it, the virtual desktops.

01:50:27   And to use a third-party mouse that doesn't have multi-touch to swipe between my virtual

01:50:32   desktops is terrible, or at least in any mouse I've ever tried.

01:50:35   Do I have to bring the violin music back?

01:50:37   Yeah, you do need to bring the violin music back.

01:50:39   No, it's true though.

01:50:40   Apple's, the touch surface on the Magic Mouse is so much better than the touch surface

01:50:44   on other touch surface type mice that I've used.

01:50:46   I mean, so it's sort of like Apple's trackpads

01:50:48   compared to everyone else's trackpads.

01:50:50   Like everyone else just uses whatever the cheapest sensor

01:50:53   they can put in the device and Apple doesn't.

01:50:56   - Yeah, and so I would love to see a more bulbous

01:51:00   Magic Mouse, I don't think it'll happen,

01:51:02   but I can't, I don't care for the trackpad very much.

01:51:06   I can use it, but I don't care for it.

01:51:08   I grew up on the track Point on IBM ThinkPad,

01:51:11   so I still miss having one of those.

01:51:13   And when I'm at my desk for more than a few minutes,

01:51:16   I tend to like to use a proper mouse,

01:51:18   and because of my obsession with virtual desktops,

01:51:21   it has to be a Magic Mouse.

01:51:22   - Yeah, the Magic Mouse is a beautiful piece of sculpture.

01:51:25   I love how it looks.

01:51:27   I just don't like holding it in my hand.

01:51:29   - I just love the inertial scrolling with it,

01:51:31   'cause I used to, before this,

01:51:32   I used the Logitech MX Revolution

01:51:34   that had this awesome heavy weighted flywheel scroll thing

01:51:38   that if you flicked it hard enough

01:51:41   and you had their software installed,

01:51:43   it would unlock and spin freely for a while

01:51:45   until you slowed it down or stopped it with your finger,

01:51:47   then it would lock and become notchy again.

01:51:48   It was a fantastic mouse that was plagued

01:51:51   with terrible software and terrible support

01:51:54   by alternative mouse drivers on OS X,

01:51:57   and then they stopped making it.

01:51:59   And so it was awesome when it worked,

01:52:02   and it just worked so rarely.

01:52:05   Now you can't buy a new one.

01:52:05   And so the Magic Mouse with its touch-inertial scrolling

01:52:09   kind of replaced that for me,

01:52:10   'cause once you get used to the inertia scrolling,

01:52:14   having an old like, notchy type scroll wheel

01:52:17   where you're scrolling by like a non-accelerating rate

01:52:21   is barbaric, like an animal.

01:52:24   - And on that bombshell.

01:52:27   - Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.

01:52:29   Lynda.com, Dash, and Nature Box.

01:52:33   And we will see you next week.

01:52:35   (upbeat music)

01:52:38   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:52:41   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:52:43   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:52:49   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:52:54   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:52:59   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:53:04   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:53:09   C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

01:53:17   E-N-T, Marco, R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse.

01:53:25   It's accidental.

01:53:26   It's accidental.

01:53:28   They didn't mean to.

01:53:31   Accidental.

01:53:32   Accidental.

01:53:33   Tech broadcast so long.

01:53:38   I was gonna say, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. If we're talking about

01:53:41   mouse revisions to the mouse, do we have hardware predictions? No, it's just like, what possible

01:53:48   hardware does Apple have that needs to be revised? Well, the Magic Trackpad is pretty

01:53:51   old, mouse hasn't been changed in a while, Apple doesn't seem to want to make monitors

01:53:56   anymore. I would like to see if they do end up doing some kind of cosmetic update with

01:54:00   a lot of the stuff, like the aluminum keyboard and stuff like that. They've used that bare

01:54:06   brushed aluminum look for so long that it might help to just do a little refresh on

01:54:11   that. That's what I'm saying, like, you know, do something like the space gray color or

01:54:14   the Mac Pro's glossy space gray looking color. Just do like a cosmetic refresh with not that

01:54:22   much different under the hood for all their little peripherals and stuff that all just

01:54:26   have brushed aluminum now.

01:54:27   I was saying, like, the MacBook Pros, like, in their final form, because it's like they

01:54:32   They went to aluminum and they slowly revised, revised, revised, removed doors, sealed everything

01:54:37   in, soldered everything to the board, and now it's like, okay, this is the logical conclusion

01:54:42   of making a MacBook Pro out of a solid brick of aluminum hollowing out and shoving the

01:54:47   insides in.

01:54:48   And now it's like, all right, can you change the color?

01:54:51   Can you change the texture?

01:54:52   Can you change the shape?

01:54:53   Because they're not going to go away from aluminum, that's for sure.

01:54:57   Well that's why I think if they were to hypothetically make a black Pro line, that

01:55:02   would be the perfect moment, like Marco was saying, to do this light visual refresh so

01:55:07   it's more than just painting black on top of aluminum.

01:55:11   Come on, writing a thunderbolt. Come on, you can do it.

01:55:13   Yeah, we didn't even talk about Sapphire.

01:55:15   Well there's all these rumors about where Sapphire's going to go. I think it's pretty

01:55:19   clear that they're going to keep using it for Touch ID, of course, and they need a lot

01:55:25   of it to do that because Touch ID is in every iPhone 5S and you would expect that this fall

01:55:33   when there's new iPhones and iPads it's now going to be in the new iPhone and the last

01:55:38   year's model if they keep the 5S around so there's going to be even more for iPhone demand.

01:55:44   Hopefully they would add it to iPads because it's really weird once you get used to it

01:55:46   on the phone to not have it on your iPad. So you're looking at a lot of Sapphire demands

01:55:51   right there versus some of the rumors that say like if you're going to use it for the

01:55:55   whole iPhone screen, that's a lot more.

01:55:59   It's such a massive quantity more.

01:56:01   I don't think they could make enough of it even in their new plant in Arizona or whatever.

01:56:05   That would require so much more sapphire than just what they have now.

01:56:09   I just think the volume is impractical.

01:56:11   I would like an iPhone 7.

01:56:13   Right.

01:56:14   So maybe if they are doing something that has like a watch face, you could see plausibly,

01:56:21   okay, maybe that's where it would be going.

01:56:23   Something where you have some kind of wearable

01:56:25   with a medium, small to medium-sized screen,

01:56:28   you need to be very, very resilient.

01:56:30   It could go there.

01:56:31   But this could just be one of those things

01:56:33   where there's just not much of a story here.

01:56:35   It's for iPhone Home buttons to just make more of them.

01:56:38   - I don't know, I'm getting more and more excited

01:56:40   the more I realize that we don't know crap

01:56:42   about what's going on.

01:56:44   - Yeah, it definitely is more exciting this way.

01:56:46   There's been so many recent keynotes in the last few years

01:56:49   where almost everything has been ruined ahead of time

01:56:52   and it just isn't fun.

01:56:53   Like, you know, we still go and we still pretend

01:56:55   to be excited, but it's so much better

01:56:56   when we're actually genuinely surprised.

01:56:58   - It's always excited for me 'cause I always have

01:57:00   the terror of when they're gonna announce

01:57:01   the release date for OS X.

01:57:02   (laughing)

01:57:03   - Right. - That's true.

01:57:05   You've won the lottery for the most part so far.

01:57:07   - Yeah, well they could say,

01:57:09   and it's shipping in three weeks and then I'm screwed.

01:57:12   - All right, do we wanna do titles?

01:57:15   - Are there any?

01:57:15   Let's check this crazy show bot.

01:57:17   We have my crazy hack together show bot

01:57:19   from 20 minutes before the show started.

01:57:21   By the way, I apologize in advance for how crappy this is.

01:57:26   - Where are you saving the data?

01:57:28   - In MySQL, what do you mean?

01:57:29   - Full overkill.

01:57:30   - What would you do if you had 20 minutes to rewrite this?

01:57:35   Where would you store it?

01:57:36   - Memory.

01:57:37   - I don't know, I guess they've got

01:57:38   the database there already.

01:57:39   If you're, you're supposed to be an iOS developer,

01:57:41   you should be storing this in a P list, duh.

01:57:43   (laughing)

01:57:47   No, this is actually, it was a fun exercise

01:57:48   'cause I've very rarely coded like mad under time pressure.

01:57:53   I certainly haven't done it recently,

01:57:55   so it was kind of fun.

01:57:56   It was like a fun hackathon for 20 minutes with myself.

01:58:00   Sounds terrible, but no, it was fun.

01:58:05   And obviously there's tons of stuff I could do

01:58:08   to make it better.

01:58:09   It probably won't be worth that,

01:58:12   but now I have something where like

01:58:14   if I end up open sourcing this framework

01:58:16   that I've been wanting to open source forever.

01:58:17   This could be like the test app that I open sourced with it

01:58:20   and say here's an example of how to use it.

01:58:22   - Is this not sorted by vote?

01:58:24   I have to click the sort by vote.

01:58:26   - There's also no Ajax voting,

01:58:27   which is much worse than the sorting problems,

01:58:30   but I ran out of time.

01:58:32   Come on, give me a break.

01:58:33   - Form submissions, the old ways are best.

01:58:35   (laughing)

01:58:37   - John, only you can bitch and moan about something

01:58:39   that was whipped together in 20 minutes out of the blue

01:58:43   and not sound like a world class jerk doing it.

01:58:46   But I think it sounds like it should take less time

01:58:49   and be less effort.

01:58:50   Like form submission is the hard way to do it.

01:58:52   You might get an entire form with a little field and a button

01:58:56   and then like-- yeah.

01:58:58   How hard do you think it is to make a form?

01:59:00   It just seems more heavyweight.

01:59:02   And then the whole page has to reload

01:59:04   and you lose your place.

01:59:05   You're sacrificing functionality for-- I guess if you don't know

01:59:10   know the APIs already, but if you have jQuery loaded, you just attach handlers and do the

01:59:15   submission, it's like super easy.

01:59:18   The final form, that's interesting. I like that. Oh, I've now lost my place because

01:59:23   I voted for it.

01:59:25   Wearing electronics is just not cool.

01:59:27   It's true. No, it's like, these modern smartwatches, they're like calculator watches

01:59:33   in the 80s.

01:59:34   They're worse. The calculator watches were sleek and elegant in comparison to like Pebble.

01:59:37   I don't know, I don't think so.

01:59:39   Oh, they were, yes.

01:59:40   Don't you remember them?

01:59:41   They were terrible.

01:59:42   Yeah, they were way thinner than a Pebble, way smaller

01:59:45   than a Pebble.

01:59:45   No, Pebble's way nicer.

01:59:47   Pebble's not nicer than a calculator watch.

01:59:48   It is.

01:59:49   It's not by a lot, but it is.

01:59:51   Oh, the Pebble looks like you're wearing a lunchbox

01:59:54   on your wrist, an ugly lunchbox with like grommets and like--

02:00:00   it's terrible.

02:00:01   I don't know.

02:00:02   I don't think it's that bad, but it's not great, obviously.

02:00:04   But yeah, it's just--

02:00:05   My grandfather had a metal calculator watch.

02:00:08   It was like a grown up, you know, it was a Casio I think,

02:00:11   but it was like the fancy, you know, gentlemen's one,

02:00:14   where instead of just being plastic

02:00:15   with a bunch of little plastic nubs,

02:00:16   it was all metal and smooth with flush keys.

02:00:18   It was awesome.

02:00:20   - Now what else is going on?

02:00:21   - Oh, I didn't do my homework, but I did play Flappy Golf.

02:00:26   Does that count as a game?

02:00:28   - No. - Sure, why not?

02:00:29   I play Flappy Golf too.

02:00:31   - It isn't that good of a game.

02:00:32   I mean, it's literally just like Super Stickman Golf 2

02:00:35   with the Flappy Bird thing as the mechanic instead of balls, but...

02:00:38   I know, but that's a clever, you know, remix/commentary on Flappy Bird.

02:00:44   It is!

02:00:45   It's a good way to reuse resources they already had, and I think if you had never seen Super Stickman Golf,

02:00:51   it's a reason, like, it works in a world where Flappy Bird exists.

02:00:55   I think it was clever. I just don't enjoy playing it that much.

02:00:59   Yeah, I kind of wish they had, like, made original courses for it,

02:01:02   some of the ones that come with it just don't make sense and it's kind of obvious, but

02:01:06   otherwise yeah, it's a fun diversion. It's a little too easy and there's zero replay

02:01:13   value but it's funny. So anyway, I did play that and I was greatly annoyed by the Game

02:01:19   Center popups in it. You were totally right, Game Center ruins everything. And I eventually

02:01:24   logged into Game Center just to make it stop bothering me to log into Game Center.

02:01:28   The thing is, it used to be that a green felt thing would come down and spoil your application.

02:01:33   And now a bubbulous white thing comes down and spoils it.

02:01:37   And you have to sit there watching it animate in.

02:01:40   You have to sit there for seven or eight seconds watching this thing show itself to you.

02:01:44   And it will never match anything that it goes on top of.

02:01:47   Because no one is ever going to make it an app that looks like either the old Game Center or the new Game Center.

02:01:51   So it's like, worried all about this visual stuff, let me take a window from another application that doesn't match yours

02:01:56   and shove it on top of your UI.

02:01:58   Like, it's never gonna work, ever.

02:02:00   - So you love it.

02:02:02   - Do you think Game Center will get any updates

02:02:03   on iOS 8?

02:02:04   - I don't know.

02:02:06   - I'm guessing zero.

02:02:07   I'm guessing like literally no changes at all

02:02:09   to Game Center.

02:02:10   - I would love to be in the meeting where they decided,

02:02:12   or we're getting rid of the felt,

02:02:13   what says game to you?

02:02:14   And someone said, ooh, ooh, I know,

02:02:15   puddles of colored goo, puddles of colored goo.

02:02:17   (laughing)

02:02:20   I mean, it's not even,

02:02:21   maybe they were smoking something, I don't understand.

02:02:23   - This is why I'm like, I'm just so,

02:02:26   As I said last week, with getting some new blood in the executive team.

02:02:31   I don't know.

02:02:32   I mean, I think it's -- design people don't play games, but I don't know if it's -- they

02:02:37   could be young people too.

02:02:39   I think everyone who works on Game Center should be forced to get an Xbox Live account,

02:02:43   to get a PlayStation account, to get a Steam, and just like -- not that those are great

02:02:46   examples of interface, but just see what everyone else is doing in the realm of things to keep

02:02:50   track of your friends and what games that you play.

02:02:54   This is not new territory.

02:02:55   of other companies do this and they all do it in a way that is more successful

02:02:59   visually and technologically, frankly, than what Apple does.

02:03:03   So I get the feeling that the people who do Game Center either have never used those

02:03:07   things or they've used them with their bosses to say "make it like this" and they just do what their bosses say.

02:03:11   Oh yeah, I'm talking about the bosses being the potential problem here.

02:03:15   Like, you know, the settings icon in iOS 7 where it has all

02:03:19   these inner-lined gears or these concentric gears

02:03:23   like do you think this is like how a bunch of 50 year old men view gears like

02:03:29   oh well how about on a bike that's where we've seen gears before that's

02:03:32   what settings should mean it just it seems like I don't know it just seems so

02:03:36   out of touch those aren't bike gears they're watching years they have to go

02:03:40   even better old men with watches yeah how about a high-end watch which like

02:03:45   how many 25 year olds have ever even seen a high-end watch that has the

02:03:49   exposed gears visible through the transparent glass like you know how many

02:03:53   How many people have ever seen that,

02:03:54   that are of this generation at all?

02:03:57   - You know, I'm kind of excited to see the OS X

02:04:02   new look introduction video,

02:04:03   'cause I think that was the best part

02:04:04   of the iOS 7 announcement,

02:04:05   was that little video they put together.

02:04:07   It was like the first time we were seeing iOS 7,

02:04:09   and it was crazy looking,

02:04:10   and it had all those animation.

02:04:11   You know that video?

02:04:12   - Oh yeah, and that was actually,

02:04:14   that was a major moment in last year's keynote,

02:04:16   because it was so shocking.

02:04:18   And I was down on them before

02:04:21   for leaning too much on videos in the recent keynotes

02:04:24   where like, you know, I don't think it's a very good

02:04:26   keynote if we have to sit there and watch like 20 minutes

02:04:29   of canned video clips that are basically commercials.

02:04:32   Like, I know the whole keynote is a commercial in a way,

02:04:37   but like, at least give us the dignity

02:04:39   of a human presentation as much as you can

02:04:41   and just use videos sparingly.

02:04:43   And I thought last year they went over the line

02:04:45   and used too much video.

02:04:46   That being said, that was a really good video

02:04:48   and that was a good use of it.

02:04:50   And the difference is that in the olden days, back when Jobs would do Macworld keynotes and everything,

02:04:56   the first time you saw the UI was either on a slide, like they would show you elements of it on a slide,

02:05:02   or like some sort of theme image, and then they would go to a computer screen where he would be using it and you'd see the screen.

02:05:07   Right.

02:05:08   Whereas this was a produced sort of like, what you're seeing is super high-res images of their sort of design document animating together,

02:05:16   showing, you know, and that's, I think that is a much more interesting way to be introduced

02:05:20   to a UI than seeing screenshots or seeing close-ups of themed things.

02:05:24   And so I hope OS X rates getting a similar video.

02:05:27   Yeah, when it's that dramatic of a redesign, I agree.

02:05:30   If it's like, you know, here's a new version of iWork, like that's, I don't think that

02:05:33   matters as much.

02:05:34   But, but yeah, I agree with the major redesign.

02:05:36   It's about a new design language.

02:05:38   Like, you know, everything's Helvetica and wider.

02:05:42   Really, really thin.

02:05:44   No more overlapping windows.

02:05:45   Yeah, well that's so last decade.

02:05:48   Exactly.

02:05:49   Last four decades.

02:05:50   Johnny Avago on screen, explain why overlapping windows are so passe.

02:05:53   Well they aren't true to the object's self.

02:05:56   You know, you don't really have overlapping monitors.

02:05:58   They're not true to the materials that you're using.

02:06:01   They're unapologetically tiled.

02:06:03   If only they did that and then Federighi would come in from the side

02:06:07   and push Johnny off his stool and say, "No, seriously, we didn't do that."

02:06:11   It's still a functioning OS.

02:06:14   - On a random note, about five or 10 minutes ago,

02:06:17   I started looking into a node IRC package,

02:06:21   and I now have a show bot that's at least listening

02:06:24   for suggestions that is doing zero with them,

02:06:27   but it's listening for them.

02:06:29   - The bot's the easy part.

02:06:30   Once you have the library, you can make it

02:06:31   join the channel, you make it watch everything.

02:06:33   When something matches exclamation point S

02:06:35   in a bunch of stuff, you build the URL and you hit it.

02:06:38   - Yeah. - Problem solved.

02:06:39   - Maybe I'll fiddle with this and see if I can get it.

02:06:42   That was my first CPAN module was a bot, a library for making bots.

02:06:47   You couldn't just make the bot?

02:06:48   You had to make the bot factory factory?

02:06:51   No, it's the same thing.

02:06:52   It was for, do you guys remember, you don't remember this because you weren't into Macs,

02:06:55   but there was an application called Hotline, do you remember that?

02:06:58   Maybe?

02:06:59   Nope.

02:07:00   No.

02:07:01   Well anyway, it was just like IRC, but it was an application, a client server application

02:07:04   written by like a 16 year old.

02:07:06   So right away you know it's going to be awesome.

02:07:09   And it was for the Mac only and it was used basically to trade illegal software.

02:07:12   You know, like people would set up servers in their house and you could join it as a

02:07:15   user and you'd get an account and they had files and it was all, it was basically like

02:07:19   how to design your own local IRC thing.

02:07:22   But anyway, it was a, the protocol was all binary because all the person was doing I

02:07:26   think was just shoving like native C structures out onto the wire.

02:07:31   I don't even think he was doing like H10 or you know all things that change into network

02:07:36   byte order and all that stuff.

02:07:38   It was just like native spewing out C structs onto the wire.

02:07:41   And it was not documented, so I had to reverse engineer it by watching hexthumps of the network

02:07:47   traffic and figuring out the packet formats.

02:07:50   And once I had done that, then I could write a library that knew how to read and write

02:07:53   those packets, and once I'd written the library, then you can write a bot.

02:07:57   And that's what I did.

02:07:58   My bot was cool.

02:07:59   Well, your bot factory was cool.

02:08:01   Someone else made the cool bot.

02:08:02   No, I made the bot.

02:08:04   I made the framework to make the bot, and then I made the bot with the framework.

02:08:07   You had icons and stuff, and the bot would change its icon based on what people said,

02:08:11   and you could send and receive files to people, and you could have private conversations with

02:08:15   the bot, and it would log things.

02:08:17   I mean, all the things that IRC bots do, but not in IRC, and with a few extra capabilities

02:08:21   don't exist in IRC.

02:08:22   But yeah, Hotline was terrible.

02:08:25   That code is terrible.

02:08:26   The module is terrible.

02:08:27   But, very first CPAN module.

02:08:29   So Casey didn't have to do that.

02:08:30   He just downloaded a node module.

02:08:33   He's up and running.

02:08:34   - Yeah, you two keep labbing, I might actually have it

02:08:36   posted in a barcode thing here in a few minutes.

02:08:39   - Why don't we just have KC rewrite the whole thing in Node?

02:08:42   - That's what I should do.

02:08:43   - I mean, if I could do this in 20 minutes in PHP,

02:08:47   can't you do it in like 30 seconds?

02:08:48   You just type in like, it's one line in Node

02:08:51   plus 150,000 lines of dependencies.

02:08:53   - Pretty much.

02:08:54   - Yeah, just do that.

02:08:55   Why would I write this in PHP if you can do that?

02:08:58   'Cause the one thing I really don't wanna have to

02:09:00   try to figure out IRC stuff with PHP,

02:09:03   I know I'd have to use some kind of third party code

02:09:05   and it would probably be awful.

02:09:07   And I'd rather not do that.

02:09:08   So yeah, just figure it out.

02:09:09   That's your next project.

02:09:12   That's your new homework.

02:09:12   Rather than play a game this week, do this.

02:09:14   You can probably write this whole thing

02:09:17   in less time than it takes to beat Monument Valley.

02:09:20   - What the, I already did my homework though.

02:09:22   - Yeah, I know.

02:09:23   I'm giving you my homework to do.

02:09:24   - Yeah, you can't assign homework

02:09:26   when you haven't even done your own homework.

02:09:28   - I was busy playing Flappy Golf

02:09:29   and could not play Monument Valley.

02:09:31   - Mm-hmm.

02:09:32   Monument Valley is a better game than Flappy Golf. I hope so. Low bar, but just saying.

02:09:37   [BLANK_AUDIO]