0:00:00What the hell's on the live stream right now that everyone's freaking out about?
0:00:02Warm it up, Chris!
0:00:03I'm about to- Jesus.
0:00:04We're not live yet, right?
0:00:08We do have some follow-ups.
0:00:10Something happened a few hours ago, thank goodness, because otherwise this would have
0:00:13been a short show.
0:00:14But yeah, we do have some follow-ups.
0:00:17So, Jon, would you like to tell us about how people do or do not play games?
0:00:22Yeah, last week I mentioned the average age of gamers and none of us knew what it was,
0:00:28if someone wrote it in the chat room, I didn't notice, so I apologize for that.
0:00:31But I looked it up, you know, it's not hard to find this information, so here are the stats.
0:00:36This was in regards to both of you saying that you had grown out of playing games,
0:00:39and me saying that's ridiculous, because most people who play games are even older than you,
0:00:43or adults. Wait, hold on. Neither of us said we grew out of games. That's going to get us
0:00:49some feedback, which it already has, which is not accurate.
0:00:53I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something like you just felt like you were
0:00:57out of it. Anyway, everyone responding thinks that's what you said. So obviously there was
0:01:00a miscommunication and you can feel free to clarify because they keep saying, I agree with
0:01:03Casey and Marco, I also grew out of games. Like we're seeing those responses. Again,
0:01:07that doesn't mean that's what you said. But that's clearly the message that people were getting.
0:01:10What we both said was that we didn't see games, correct me if I'm wrong Casey, that we didn't see
0:01:16games as like a juvenile thing that you would grow out of, but rather we played games for a long time.
0:01:22And then we, you know, in recent years or, you know, after we left college or whatever,
0:01:26we just didn't choose to spend our time playing games or didn't have the time to play games
0:01:30anymore. So it's not necessarily a growing out of it, because that implies that it's,
0:01:34you know, like a juvenile thing. It's more that we just chose not to spend our time doing that
0:01:39anymore. Yeah, I would agree with that. Our priorities shifted. Right. It's like the same
0:01:43result, but with a different reason and with less judgment in the reason. Initially, one of you said,
0:01:50I don't know. I guess I just grew out of it. Maybe that was a joke. And yes, later you did say that
0:01:54at least Marco said that he didn't think they were juvenile or anything, but everyone latched on to
0:01:58the growing out of it angle. But anyway, here is the information I was trying to get across.
0:02:01This is the average age of gamers, and no one else knew what it was. The average age of game players,
0:02:06according to the Entertainment Software Association, which is a trade association
0:02:10that tracks these type of things for video games, is 31 years old. This is the United States
0:02:17stats only, I think it's only US. Anyway, the average age of the US population is 37.2. So,
0:02:22yes, the average age of the people in the United States is slightly older, but I think that makes
0:02:27sense considering video games were introduced partially into the lives of many people who are
0:02:31alive today, so you don't have a sample, you know, everyone alive wasn't born when video games were
0:02:36introduced. The ratios are 52% male, 48% female, and out of the most frequent game purchasers,
0:02:43The ratios are exactly even, 50/50 male/female.
0:02:46They say 59% of Americans play video games.
0:02:50And here are some stats and breakdowns.
0:02:52Women over 18 are 36%.
0:02:54Boys 18 or younger are 17%.
0:02:57So twice as many adult women play games as juvenile boys do.
0:03:02And they say 51% of U.S. homes have a game console,
0:03:05and there's an average of two game consoles in each house that has any.
0:03:10So, like I said, most game players are more or less our age.
0:03:13I'm older than 31.
0:03:14You guys are also-- you're both older than 31, right?
0:03:17I am 31.
0:03:18Yep.
0:03:18There you go.
0:03:19So you are exactly the average age of a gamer.
0:03:21And I think it makes sense, because people your age, Marco,
0:03:24and my age are basically like--
0:03:26video games were invented more or less when we were young.
0:03:28By the time we were old enough to play them, they were popular.
0:03:32We played them.
0:03:33We grew up.
0:03:33We continue to play them.
0:03:34Whereas people who were 30 years old before the Atari 2600
0:03:39was introduced are much less likely, I think,
0:03:41to have gotten into it.
0:03:42So we are sort of the first generation of people to have grown up with games and it makes sense that we continue to play
0:03:46them
0:03:47Whereas the people who are sort of ahead of us may have never gotten into it at all
0:03:51And I think I made all these points in the last show people talking about growing out of games and stuff
0:03:55And tweeting about it and so on and saying well I do it
0:03:58I don't do it as much now as I used to
0:04:00You may grow out of the games that you played when you were a child in the same way you grow out of the books
0:04:05That you read or you don't read little golden books anymore
0:04:07You don't watch a Hannah-Barbera cartoons
0:04:09Anyway, like there are many things you did as a child that you grow out of
0:04:11but video games are a medium and they're fairly diverse.
0:04:16And so even though you, of course, you don't have the time to play games that you use,
0:04:20because you don't have time to do anything. You don't have time to just
0:04:22pick any sort of leisure time activity. Of course, you have more time than that when you're a kid.
0:04:26But as you get older, you will like different games, just like you like different movies and
0:04:31different television shows and different books. And that, I think, is natural.
0:04:35I think a lot of the people who say, "Well, I grew out of games. All I do now is..."
0:04:40And then they insert like the three games that they play, but I barely have time for that
0:04:43Well, yeah, so of course you barely have time, but if you're still playing games like that
0:04:46Then you didn't really grow out of games. You just grew out of the games that you played as a child
0:04:50It's true that some people never go out of the games. They played as a child. Maybe they played super mario
0:04:53Bellas as a child they love super mario to this day and they keep playing it. That's fine, too
0:04:57Same thing with books. I mean how many adults out there read young adult books as like
0:05:02you know and love them like the harry potter series is a good example or a lot of these things even like the
0:05:07Hunger Games and stuff like that. A lot of these books are technically young adult books,
0:05:10but many adults enjoy them. Did they not grow out of that? Should they have grown out of books? Should
0:05:14they have grown out of those specific books? I don't think it's an important distinction. But
0:05:18the idea that games are something that most people played when they were a kid and don't
0:05:23play anymore, I think is not borne out by the statistics, at least in the United States.
0:05:27Do people count as gamers if they just have like Angry Birds and throw it on their phones
0:05:33versus a console game or a PC game?
0:05:36Is there a distinction and should there be a distinction?
0:05:39And maybe the answer is no.
0:05:41But should there be a distinction between people
0:05:43who have a couple of casual games on their phone
0:05:46versus people who own dedicated gaming hardware
0:05:49or have bought a $40 or $50 game before?
0:05:53- I don't think they're making those kind of distinctions.
0:05:56I think they consider all games games and so would I.
0:05:59If you say, well, I don't play games, all I do is
0:06:01and then you insert some iOS game
0:06:02that you obsessively play in every moment of your spare time.
0:06:04Like, yeah, you play games.
0:06:06They do add information on consoles,
0:06:09which you would consider, like, that's not casual, right?
0:06:11I don't know if that's still true,
0:06:12but like, this thing is saying 51% of homes
0:06:14have a game console in them.
0:06:16Someone in those homes is playing those games, right?
0:06:19And so it's, you know, it's not like,
0:06:20well, 51% of homes have game consoles,
0:06:22but the only people who play game consoles
0:06:24are the 17% of gamers who are male and younger than 18.
0:06:28Like, that seems unlikely.
0:06:29But anyway, I count them all as games.
0:06:30There's iOS, there are plenty of legitimate games on iOS.
0:06:34I mean, maybe they're not counting like Solitaire and Minesweeper, but I think maybe these days
0:06:39those have sort of fallen by the wayside.
0:06:41But yeah, I don't think there's a useful distinction between them.
0:06:44That's not a real game.
0:06:45That's not a real book.
0:06:47That's just a, I don't know, a mystery novel, a romance novel.
0:06:50Do these not count as real books or something?
0:06:52It has to be Tolstoy.
0:06:53A game is a game is a game.
0:06:56Fair enough.
0:06:57Actually, I do have a question for you.
0:06:58Does Tina get involved in any of the video gaming around your house?
0:07:03She plays games on her phone a lot, and I think that's where she plays the majority
0:07:07of her games, but at various times she has been very into, as an adult, very into both
0:07:11console games and computer games.
0:07:14But these days, any time she—I don't want to reveal her dirty gaming secrets, but I
0:07:20would say certain iOS games that have the ability to get their hooks into people have
0:07:25gotten their hooks into her.
0:07:26And so she is very susceptible to that.
0:07:28I don't approve of most of the games that she plays, but she definitely does play them.
0:07:32Fair enough.
0:07:33Now what about your kids?
0:07:34Because I know your son, last I heard, is really into Minecraft.
0:07:39Is that still the case?
0:07:41Yes, Minecraft has destroyed his life and ours.
0:07:46He had a very diverse gaming education up until the age of, I guess, nine.
0:07:51Sometime in his ninth year of life, Minecraft came in and destroyed everything else having
0:07:57to do with his life.
0:07:58He is obsessed with Minecraft.
0:07:59Has he played any game other than Minecraft recently?
0:08:03I don't think so.
0:08:04He's totally obsessed.
0:08:06And neither your son nor daughter got into the Wii U very much?
0:08:09Well, I mean, that's the other—when his friends come over, he plays the Wii U with
0:08:13his friends, because I guess Minecraft is not as much of a social game.
0:08:17So he does still play that, and I assume the next—recently I've been playing games
0:08:22that he can't play with me, but I'm assuming the next game that we can all play together
0:08:25comes out, he'll play with me, like the next Zelda game or—what do you call it,
0:08:29God, I can't even remember the name anymore, because the Last Guardian, if that ever comes
0:08:33out, he'll play that with me.
0:08:35But he's not clamoring to play those games.
0:08:36We have all his game consoles hooked up, and I've been playing games on them more than
0:08:40he has.
0:08:41But yeah, it's natural for kids his age to get obsessed with things like this, and
0:08:46just ask Marco with his total annihilation units and everything.
0:08:49You get really—at a certain point, you get really into one game.
0:08:52Like, yeah, you like lots of games, but then a certain game comes and it absorbs you.
0:08:56This has happened with Minecraft.
0:08:57My daughter, I keep trying to get her to play games many, many times on many different consoles
0:09:02and on the computer.
0:09:03She'll play a little bit of kind of casual games on iOS, but she's just not into it.
0:09:08I don't want to really push it, but I keep putting them in front of her.
0:09:11I actually had her play Monument Valley, and that, I think, was about her speed.
0:09:14I still haven't played that yet.
0:09:16She just turned seven.
0:09:18I did buy that game and have not even opened it.
0:09:20Like now, ever since iOS 6, I believe, added that new badge on apps so that you could tell if you have an app that you've never launched before,
0:09:28I've really been shamed by those badges on my phone because it's all games.
0:09:34And there's like, there's, I probably right now on my phone probably have like seven or eight games that I bought in the last six months that I haven't even launched yet.
0:09:43Like, I want to be a gamer in theory, but I never decide to spend the time doing that.
0:09:49Monument Valley is actually a great example of an application that takes advantage of
0:09:54retina.
0:09:55They go, "Oh, it doesn't matter for games.
0:09:57Who cares?
0:09:58Half of those are low-res, 3D things scaled up to..."
0:10:00But Monument Valley has graphics that really benefit from the retina resolution, because
0:10:06they're just such beautiful little finely detailed things.
0:10:10It's not like a typical 3D game with stuff flying all over the place.
0:10:14It's very precise, and it looks great in retina, I think.
0:10:18The game itself, I think it's more of a casual game.
0:10:21I think it is very beautiful and interesting, but it's way too easy for anyone who's an
0:10:27actual experienced gamer and plays games a lot.
0:10:31And it's a little bit short.
0:10:32I don't really care about length.
0:10:33It's not like I'm buying it for the length.
0:10:34If it was short and fulfilling, I feel like it just...
0:10:38should have been a little bit more there in terms of the overall experience. Maybe if it was harder
0:10:42and I had more of a challenge, but I recommend it for lots of people who find the games that I enjoy
0:10:48too challenging. So I think that's why I had my daughter play. It's like, well, you'll be able to
0:10:52play this. You'll be able to do well and it will challenge you a little bit. I think you'd be bored
0:10:57by it, Margot, but you should still just launch it just to look at the graphics because, like I said,
0:11:00it is the rare game that I can't even imagine on a non-retina screen being half as nice looking.
0:11:08So you said that it's probably way too easy for an experienced gamer, so now a little
0:11:15concern that I won't be able to handle it.
0:11:17You will, it's not.
0:11:18I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
0:11:20I need to try it.
0:11:21I haven't bought it yet.
0:11:22I keep forgetting about it anytime I'm sitting in front of my phone or iPad just goofing
0:11:26off.
0:11:27I need to get it.
0:11:28Although, I don't know.
0:11:29Maybe my things are skewed, because I have seen tweets from people talking about not
0:11:33so much getting stuck, but having difficulty, and I can't tell if they're joking.
0:11:36So maybe my idea of what's difficult and what's not is totally skewed.
0:11:39So one of you should just play it.
0:11:41Just play through two levels, it'll take you five minutes.
0:11:42And just tell me, wasn't that like, there's almost no choice.
0:11:46Like it leads you, it is very linear.
0:11:50There's not many places that you can go wrong.
0:11:52I mean, the same could be said of Journey, but it's different.
0:11:56Anyway, try it.
0:11:58Homework for you two.
0:11:59If I try the first two levels and it takes me 35 minutes, should I not admit that?
0:12:03It will not.
0:12:04The first level will take you 30 seconds,
0:12:05the second level should take you about two minutes.
0:12:07- One more quick theory about gaming
0:12:11and losing interesting gaming over time.
0:12:14And maybe this is just me, I don't know.
0:12:16And Jon, I'm sure you're gonna have
0:12:17a good explanation for this.
0:12:19I've found that one of the biggest factors
0:12:23I think that got me out of gaming,
0:12:24and maybe it's just coincidence
0:12:25'cause it overlapped my age progression
0:12:28and my work progression,
0:12:29but one of the things I think got me out of gaming
0:12:31is so many of the types of games that I enjoyed
0:12:35fell out of favor and we would get
0:12:38almost none of them made anymore.
0:12:39So for example, I love 2D platformer games.
0:12:43Sonic, Mario, any of the good 2D platformers, I love those.
0:12:47But almost nobody makes 2D platformers anymore.
0:12:49- Incorrect.
0:12:50- Well, hold on, hold on.
0:12:52And I did play that awesome one on Xbox Live,
0:12:53the Shadow Complex, I think it's called.
0:12:55I did play that one and loved it.
0:12:58So for a while-- and maybe now the indie scene
0:13:02is getting this back, fortunately.
0:13:04But for a while, once the 3D systems came out,
0:13:08the PlayStation, the N64, the Saturn,
0:13:11it became-- 2D platformers basically
0:13:15went extinct for a while.
0:13:17And the same thing happened with RTS games,
0:13:20where I loved RTS games, as you mentioned in my Total
0:13:23Annihilation phase earlier.
0:13:25loved RTS games through my, through almost my entire teenage
0:13:28hood, if that's a word. And, and then RTS has kind of stopped
0:13:34being made very well after maybe 2003, 2004-ish. Like, Supreme
0:13:40Commander was kind of, was like a big one that was awesome, but
0:13:42nobody bought it. And then they kind of went by the wayside as,
0:13:45as fantasy and MMOs kind of took over. And so like that kind of
0:13:51bothered me too and and and now like iOS and I also I also love turn-based
0:13:56strategy games but those are very few and far between and are you almost never
0:14:00commercial hits and now with iOS like some of the best casual games is you
0:14:07know are they used to be great in iOS you get them for like five bucks and
0:14:10they were awesome and now they've all been ruined with freemium and free-to-play
0:14:14and all that crap and so I wonder like you know is this just me am I am I just
0:14:19kind of missing the new stuff because I stopped looking around like I do with
0:14:24PHP or is this like is this a legitimate reason why I've been kind of kicked out
0:14:29of gaming for a while I don't know well there's two there's two things here one
0:14:33there are genres that become more and less popular over time think of in terms
0:14:39of movies like murder mystery movies where the whole plot of the movie is
0:14:43someone is murdered and you have to figure out who it is you don't see a lot
0:14:45of them anymore. You do see some of them, but that genre has become less popular over
0:14:51time. So that does happen. And it comes in cycles, you know, what's popular now may not
0:14:54be what's popular 50 years from now and goes around in circles. On that front, by the way,
0:14:59the reason I said incorrect for the 2D games is right now there's a massive renaissance
0:15:03in 2D platformers, which I don't particularly like because I'm not into 2D platformers,
0:15:06but they're all over the place. And not just indie games. Nintendo has been putting out
0:15:10brand new 2D Mario games that I enjoy way less than their 3D versions and there's just
0:15:16a constant stream of them and those are not indie things, those are like, you know, they're
0:15:20Nintendo flagship titles and tons of indie ones.
0:15:23So if you're into 2D platforming, like, you cannot throw a rock without hitting a 2D platformer.
0:15:29But one of the genres you mentioned, real-time strategy, the type of real-time strategy game
0:15:33you're talking about, like, isometric sprite-based, you know, 2D map kind of thing, like even
0:15:40before the age of 3D games.
0:15:41Hey, wait.
0:15:42Hang on a second.
0:15:43Total Annihilation was none of those, by the way.
0:15:45Go ahead.
0:15:46All right.
0:15:47I don't know what vintage your real-time strategy games are, but yes, they eventually went 3D
0:15:50and you could, yeah.
0:15:52Anyway.
0:15:53They became less popular.
0:15:54A lot of the reason they became less popular is because computers became more able to do
0:15:58the genres that became more popular.
0:16:00So once first-person shooters started to take over the entire universe and you could do
0:16:03any genre in first-person perspective, so there was first-person everything, real-time
0:16:09strategy games became less popular. They're still out there. I mean, there's still StarCraft.
0:16:14There's the things that they've kind of, you know, that same type of perspective you'll
0:16:17see, not that Diablo is not a real-time strategy game, but it's a similar perspective in that
0:16:21you're looking down on what looks like a little board and clicking on people and doing things.
0:16:26Yeah, if you get really into a particular game and a particular genre and a particular
0:16:32implementation of that genre, because people will be like, "Well, I like real-time strategy
0:16:35games, but I don't like the ones that do X, Y, and Z. I only like the ones that, like,
0:16:37when I was, I think I talked about myth on a past show, about how much I liked it and
0:16:41it was so different than other RTS games. If you're into those specifics, you may have
0:16:45to wait for another one of those things to come around, but what I would say is that
0:16:49the things you like about that type of game exist in other games, and you shouldn't really
0:16:53be married to the genre. Like, if you just like watching murder mysteries, it's like,
0:16:58what is it that I like about murder mysteries? Do I like the fact that someone gets killed
0:17:02and I could get the same thing out of a horror movie? Do I like the fact that there's suspense
0:17:05and I could get it out of a different kind of thriller or am I just looking for a puzzle that I have to solve and
0:17:10Instead I should be watching the you know M. Night Shyamalan movies with a stupid twist
0:17:13I mean like what you were getting out of those games the things you enjoy systemizing things
0:17:17Micromanaging things you know do you enjoy like working the tech trees?
0:17:21There's a lot of games you can play now perhaps like a role-playing game with a big crafting tree and like character
0:17:26Develop like you may be able to get the same experiences out of different types of games
0:17:31Or it may be that you just really like real-time strategy games
0:17:33and you just have to wait until something like that becomes popular again.
0:17:36That's conceivable too.
0:17:37And like I said, it's the same thing in every other medium.
0:17:40What kind of books are popular now?
0:17:42What kind of movies?
0:17:43What kind of TV shows?
0:17:44I mean, look at TV for crying out loud.
0:17:45If you are totally into formulaic half-an-hour sitcoms, it's there.
0:17:49So hard to find now, but everyone has to have some sort of twist or angle, and the one-hour
0:17:53drama is hugely popular now.
0:17:56The one-hour drama was like an aberration 20, 30 years ago, and now it's like everything
0:18:00has to be this gritty one-hour drama.
0:18:02Like they make a show about Sleepy Hollow and it's like this big gritty thing, you know
0:18:05and whereas like
0:18:06The old sitcoms are they used to be everywhere now
0:18:09They're very rare and each one of them has some weird twist about them
0:18:12So I think that's part of it
0:18:14But like I said, like gaming is not as broad as books movies or TVs not yet anyway, but it's getting close
0:18:20But there's probably something out there that you would get the same type of enjoyment out of and who knows like maybe if you're like
0:18:25Oh, they don't make murder mystery movies anymore. All of a sudden you start going to see like, you know
0:18:30goofy comedies, you may find out, hey, I never watched goofy comedies before, but I really enjoy them. So there's a lot out there.
0:18:35You know, the funny thing for me is, to take this aside just a smidge, is that I find that I get
0:18:42really into certain games, but only for a very small window of time. And most recently it's been iOS games, but
0:18:49I think I mentioned last episode, or I might have, that I played Metal Gear Solid
0:18:55the whole way through. I used to love the Zelda games. Well, I played Ocarina of Time,
0:19:00and I don't think I ever had whatever it was for the Wii. But I'll find these games that I just
0:19:05am obsessed with. So I'm looking at my iPhone, and I only have a handful of games on there,
0:19:08but like, you know, right when the iPhone came out, I played the crap out of flight control for
0:19:13forever. When the incident came out, I loved that. Letterpress loved that. Tiny Wings.
0:19:19Ramp Champ by the Icon Factory, which is a much better game than anyone, well,
0:19:23then a lot of people gave it credit for threes when that came out recently. So all these games,
0:19:27I just madly in love with them and I'll play them to death. Not unlike what I do when I find a song
0:19:33I like, and then I just never look back. So I haven't played threes in like a month and I was
0:19:39playing it nonstop for two or three weeks. And maybe that's just my personality, but I don't
0:19:43know. It's just the way I've approached gaming lately. You're in the middle of a letterpress
0:19:47game against me, Casey. So anytime you want to move like six months, I was about to say,
0:19:52I haven't opened that that happened forever. It's not that it's bad
0:19:54Like I still do enjoy it when I open it
0:19:57But I just never think about it anymore and I think I heard Marco say that you're the same way like I get these
0:20:02Obsessions, but then just as quickly as I get the obsession then it's done
0:20:07That's why I like with my limited time as an adult and a parent and all this other stuff
0:20:11The type of game that I gravitate to are two kinds one is the kind that I can just spend for a couple of minutes
0:20:17Of fun like whatever less as asynchronous turn-based games like letterpresser
0:20:20Words with friends and threes even though it's single-player. You know it's just like yeah, whatever just some quick fun and the other type of
0:20:26Game I like is the kind
0:20:27Kind of like the like true detective or the new popular thing of one hour dramas that have a season long arc that that that ends
0:20:34And then the cast changes
0:20:36There's a couple of shows doing that now and that I think is a good model because people like I don't want to invest in
0:20:41This show that could go on some X number of seasons that might not have a satisfying ending or whatever like where I met your mother
0:20:49I don't even watch that show.
0:20:51But it's like, well, if people don't have a lot of time,
0:20:54let's make a one-hour thing, a one-season arc
0:20:58that you can consume as a thing and be satisfied with.
0:21:01And so the video games that I--
0:21:03the non-casual video games that I play
0:21:05are ones that are going to give me
0:21:07an experience for a defined amount of time.
0:21:08And it's not going to be open-ended.
0:21:10And I'm going to play through it.
0:21:11I mean, not necessarily that they're story-based games,
0:21:12because Journey is not really a story-based game.
0:21:14But that's two hours of gameplay.
0:21:16In and out, that is the perfect--
0:21:18You know, it's cheap, I can get it as a digital download.
0:21:21Amazingly enjoyable for me, loved it, two hours, done.
0:21:24And even something like The Last of Us,
0:21:25I think I only, I don't remember how many hours
0:21:26I put into that, maybe 16 or 11 or 20,
0:21:28I don't remember what the stat was,
0:21:30but that's a little bit longer,
0:21:31but it's a single player,
0:21:33there is a multiplayer aspect that I don't care about,
0:21:35single player game with a story,
0:21:36I play it as a beginning, middle, and end, and I'm done.
0:21:39It's not like I feel guilty, like,
0:21:40"Oh, I never go back to it."
0:21:41Yeah, I finished it, I played the game.
0:21:43Like, there is a, it is a unit of entertainment,
0:21:45This just happens to be a longer unit than a movie, but actually a similar length to
0:21:49watching True Detective, for example.
0:21:52We are sponsored this week by our friends at Fracture.
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0:22:28And I use a little 5 by 5, so I spent $12 for that.
0:22:30It's amazing.
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0:22:33You don't need a frame.
0:22:35In fact, I don't think you even could frame them.
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0:22:44So if you look into buying a frame or getting framed,
0:22:47this is really a massive improvement
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0:22:52It looks nice, it looks modern,
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0:22:55- Well, let me actually, let me interrupt you.
0:22:57I was at your house recently
0:22:58and got to see fractures for the very first time.
0:23:01I keep meaning to order one, or order several actually,
0:23:04of my Instagram, some of my Instagram pictures,
0:23:06but I can't freakin' pick which ones I want,
0:23:09which is a personal problem.
0:23:10But anyway, I saw the ones at your house,
0:23:12And I expected them to look good or even great,
0:23:16and they looked better than great.
0:23:17They really, really, really genuinely look awesome.
0:23:20- Yeah, I'm very happy with them.
0:23:21That's why I keep, even though some of these I've ordered
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0:24:06Thank you very much.
0:24:07So we should take note that we have finally the three of us figured out a
0:24:14design that we felt was worthy of printing a t-shirt mostly because we
0:24:19wanted to get it out for WWDC like all the cool kids do and we were running out
0:24:23of time.
0:24:23So we have t-shirts available for sale.
0:24:27It we are recording this on the last day of April of 2014 and they are going to be
0:24:34available for purchase until May 11. Is that right?
0:24:38Something like that, yeah.
0:24:39Yeah, they have a little over a week, so we'll talk about this one more time and only one
0:24:42more time on the next episode. They are $19. They have basically a stylized version of
0:24:49our show art on the front and a little surprise on the back. I don't know if you want to talk
0:24:53about that or you want to leave it as a small surprise. That's up to you, Marco.
0:24:56I think you should check it out. I think you should go to the final URL of the thing is
0:25:02teespring.com/accidental. However, we made a little shortcut in case you don't know how
0:25:08to spell teespring. If you go to ATP.fm/shirt, it will redirect you to the shirt. So ATP.fm/shirt.
0:25:17You must buy this shirt within the next roughly 10 days or so. And actually by the time this
0:25:22episode comes out, it's gonna be more like eight days. So hurry up and buy the shirt.
0:25:26We've already sold a lot through past the goal. So this is awesome. Thank you very much.
0:25:31And so these will definitely be printed and made.
0:25:34They will make it in time for the US for WWDC probably.
0:25:38Internationally, it depends on where you live.
0:25:41We've heard reports of some of them coming right before,
0:25:43some of them coming right after.
0:25:44So we can't really guarantee internationally.
0:25:46But in the US, they should be there in time for WWDC.
0:25:51And yeah, so check it out, teespring.com/accidental
0:25:56or atp.fm/shirt.
0:25:59And keep in mind that since we are so--
0:26:02it's so difficult for us to pick a design that we like.
0:26:05If we have shirts next year, it's
0:26:07very likely that it will be a different design.
0:26:09So even if you are living internationally
0:26:12or aren't going to WWDC at all anyway,
0:26:15don't worry so much about whether you're
0:26:17going to get it in time for this year's WWDC.
0:26:20If you order it now, you'll have it for next year's WWDC.
0:26:22And next year's shirt, if there is one,
0:26:24will very likely be different.
0:26:25So this may be the only time to buy this shirt.
0:26:28You can decide whether that's a good or bad thing when you go look at the shirt, but please
0:26:31do keep that in mind.
0:26:32Because tons of people keep asking me if they want to order a Hypercritical shirts, and
0:26:36I did Hypercritical shirts already, and I'm not sure I'm doing them again anytime soon,
0:26:41if ever.
0:26:42And those people should have ordered when they were available for sale, so don't let
0:26:44this happen to you.
0:26:45Order them when they're available for sale.
0:26:47Yeah, and I also wonder, for those who are international, I have not tried this myself,
0:26:52obviously, but I wonder if you could arrange with your hotel, "Hey, would you accept a
0:26:56package for me or so on and so forth. So you might even be able to get it delivered to your hotel.
0:27:00I know that is a possibility. So I mean, the hotels usually will charge for that.
0:27:04But I know it is possible because I did that one year to get a shirt delivered to
0:27:08the conference, to a hotel at the conference. But look into it anyway.
0:27:12And also because, so Teespring is kind of like Kickstarter where they have like the buying period
0:27:18for a limited time and then they do the whole run at once, they print them all and that's it. You
0:27:22you can't order them after that. So it is very unlikely, I think, that we will get our act together and make a new design that we like in the next year.
0:27:30So definitely, if you want a shirt anytime between now and next May, you should probably buy this one.
0:27:38All right, thanks a lot.
0:27:41Okay, so we were actually, I was a little nervous about not having a lot to talk about on this show,
0:27:47And then just today Facebook decided to try their own hand at X callback URL.
0:27:53Which was surprising for me anyway.
0:27:57So they came out with Facebook app links and I should probably point out, I guess
0:28:01it's the pulse, what is it like?
0:28:03It's not a subsidiary of Facebook.
0:28:04It's I'm not familiar with what pulse is, but I guess it came from there.
0:28:08Do you guys know what that is?
0:28:10Okay.
0:28:11Good talk.
0:28:12Well, anyway, so apparently it's some like sub section for lack of a better way of
0:28:16phrasing it, Facebook.
0:28:18And they came up with App Links.
0:28:20And so one of you guys put this in the show notes.
0:28:23And it's probably for the best if I read this very quickly.
0:28:26Quote-- and this is from their website--
0:28:27"With App Links, Facebook wants to standardize deep
0:28:29linking to native apps by using special metadata attached--
0:28:33excuse me-- added via HTML.
0:28:35The basic premise of App Links is that if a user taps on a
0:28:38link on a mobile device, and that link belongs to a website
0:28:41that in turn offers the same content in a native app with
0:28:45better features than a web view, the link could automatically redirect the user to the
0:28:49app if installed on the App Store, with support for deep linking to content inside the app.
0:28:55The goal, according to Facebook—actually, I guess it isn't from this site. Anyway,
0:28:58the goal according to Facebook is to provide the best experience to a user who clicks a
0:29:02link on a mobile device with features to control what happens when a link is clicked on iOS,
0:29:07Android, or Windows Phone. Is that from Federico's write-up, actually?
0:29:10Yeah, I think it is.
0:29:11OK.
0:29:11So I pasted in this paragraph.
0:29:14First of all, I saw this Facebook app link thing
0:29:16like 15 minutes before the show started,
0:29:17so I know very little about it.
0:29:19But I pasted in this thing because it sounds like something
0:29:21I would never, ever want.
0:29:23The idea that I'm on a web site, and I tap on a link,
0:29:27and it takes me out of the web browser, puts me into an app,
0:29:30and shoves me into some deep thing in the app.
0:29:32The example in the video was like, say you're on a website,
0:29:34and you see a movie, and you want
0:29:36to know if it's playing towards you, and you tap on it.
0:29:37And it launches a movie app and takes me into there.
0:29:39I know that there are examples like,
0:29:41yeah, it's annoying to have to go back to the home screen,
0:29:43launch your ticket buying app,
0:29:45do the same search you just did on the web.
0:29:47But if I'm in a website and I found the thing,
0:29:50I would like to buy it there on the web.
0:29:51I hate that little banner that comes down and says,
0:29:54hey, I know you're looking at our website,
0:29:56but did you know we have an app?
0:29:57You should try that.
0:29:58The whole idea that the app could provide
0:30:00better features than the web view.
0:30:02Look, if I'm on a web browser and I'm doing stuff,
0:30:04I wanna just do it on the web.
0:30:06I'm not saying that native apps don't have a place,
0:30:07but if I'm navigating around the web,
0:30:09The last thing I want is to be chucked into an application,
0:30:12deep linked or otherwise.
0:30:13So I do not like the idea of this thing.
0:30:18I'm assuming people are commenting on this
0:30:19about the interapp communication thing
0:30:22that maybe iOS 8 will do something about or whatever.
0:30:26We'll talk about that in our WWC prediction show
0:30:29in the future, I'm sure.
0:30:30But that's about native apps talking to each other
0:30:32and cooperating, multiple native apps coordinating
0:30:35to get a single job done.
0:30:37And I guess the web browser is one of those other native apps,
0:30:39but if I'm on a web page, I don't like those two things
0:30:44being-- I don't like switching between those two things.
0:30:46I don't care how coordinated they
0:30:48can be about where I jump back and forth.
0:30:50I question whether jumping out at all
0:30:52is ever the right thing to do.
0:30:54Well, and see, generally speaking,
0:30:56I would agree with you that if I'm in the browser,
0:30:59it's probably a deliberate action,
0:31:01and I want to remain in the browser.
0:31:04And the app banners, whatever they're called, at the top,
0:31:07They just get in the way and are very annoying, especially in the case that the app is already
0:31:11installed.
0:31:12Well, maybe less so if you're trying to advertise that you have an app.
0:31:15In any case, the one time where I think this makes a lot of sense is if, for example, for
0:31:20some reason I've browsed something in Safari and I end up on some really heavy media app.
0:31:26Let's take Spotify, for example.
0:31:29I'm probably going to want to listen to whatever the song or playlist or what have you is in
0:31:34Spotify's app rather than in mobile safari. So for things like that, it makes sense. But other than that, I tend to agree with you, Jon.
0:31:42I guess it's not the capability that's bad so much. It's just that I see the potential for abuse.
0:31:47And that if there was a big badge that was like, "Open this up and insert name of native app here," and it was clear that that's what it was going to do, it's fine.
0:31:54But these websites, these companies are so desperate to get you to install and use their app.
0:32:00I don't know why they just, you know, better engagement with our, I'm not going to do Marco's voice, "Brains!"
0:32:05Like, it's just annoying. It's like, I would rather you just make your website good, and I'll use your app if I want to, but like, now if we give them the ability to make every single link a potential minefield that's going to take you out into some native app, I'm not enthusiastic about this.
0:32:20I'm not enthusiastic about this.
0:32:25Yeah, I think definitely, I totally agree that
0:32:28this has nothing to do with X callback URL
0:32:31or internet communication, really.
0:32:33That's a different problem.
0:32:36I think there's a couple problems with this.
0:32:39I agree with everything Jon said so far,
0:32:40which is that, yeah, there are probably some conditions
0:32:42where this is what you'd want as a user,
0:32:47but there's also probably just as many, if not more,
0:32:46where it's not what you'd want as a user.
0:32:48And yeah, you could then prompt the user
0:32:50to ask what they want,
0:32:51but then that's more clunkiness, more complexity.
0:32:53It's one of those things where,
0:32:56I have a feeling this solves a problem
0:32:57that Facebook thinks they have,
0:32:59and they assume everyone else has the same problem,
0:33:01but it doesn't really,
0:33:03there's probably not a good problem
0:33:04to be solved in a good way here.
0:33:06Furthermore, I don't know how they could possibly get this
0:33:09to work very well because,
0:33:11or very effectively in the real world,
0:33:13because the most common mobile browsers
0:33:15are mobile Safari and Chrome,
0:33:17at least the ones that are actually used for web browsing
0:33:20instead of sitting in a drawer playing videos.
0:33:22And I don't see, you know, Apple,
0:33:26there's almost no chance in hell
0:33:28they would ever implement this in mobile Safari,
0:33:30so that's out.
0:33:31Any chance of like, you know, a plugin architecture
0:33:34in mobile Safari that would enable plugins for this
0:33:36is probably also out.
0:33:37Google implementing this in Chrome, maybe,
0:33:41but Google hates Facebook,
0:33:43so I don't know if that's gonna happen either.
0:33:45What's in it for them? Probably nothing. Does this require browser support?
0:33:49I didn't even read enough of it to know whether it requires browser support. Well in the documentation
0:33:53I read through all the documentation and it did I didn't like it. I didn't think it was very good
0:33:57I thought their examples were the
0:33:59Examples are always contrived, but these were crummy. They were just crummy examples, but the way I understood it is if
0:34:06You tap a link
0:34:09In or if you end up on a page in a web browser
0:34:15including like a UI web view in say Tweetbot for example,
0:34:18then if you see all these meta tags, meta tags, whatever they're called, at the top of your of this HTML document,
0:34:25you can say, oh I can build a URL based on the information in these meta tags and
0:34:32make a check, you know with the with iOS and say hey does this URL, is this a URL that you know about?
0:34:38And if so, just quietly, well, I guess not so quietly actually redirect into the app. So say I'm in Tweetbot,
0:34:44I land on—I'm using a browser in Tweetbot—I land on a Spotify page,
0:34:49then Tweetbot can say, "Oh, I see that there's this app link," or whatever it's called, and
0:34:54I see that Spotify is installed on Casey's phone, so let me just punch you over to Spotify. Marco,
0:35:00did you read into this at all?
0:35:01No, I actually spent about five minutes before the show looking at this because I didn't see it before then,
0:35:06but so I could be totally wrong on this. Yeah, I mean, that's the way I interpreted it.
0:35:11hopefully we'll either get a lot of email saying I'm right or a couple emails saying I'm wrong.
0:35:16Well, the key diagram on the site is the one that's like, "Hey, it works across, you know,
0:35:20Windows Phone and Android and iOS." And like right away, well, Apple has no interest in this. And the
0:35:27thing is if Apple has no interest in it, and I think as Renee tweeted, that's why the link to
0:35:31Renee in our show notes is like doing this right before WWDC, there's a reasonable chance, I'm not
0:35:38to say a good bet, but there's a reasonable chance that Apple might have some similar type of
0:35:42thing having to do with maybe like a better version of xCallback URL or something.
0:35:46Whatever Apple decides to do that's remotely in this area, that's what Apple's going to do,
0:35:50that's what they're going to support, and that's what everybody on the iOS platform is going to
0:35:53support. Making it cross-platform standard is so hard when one of the vendors, Apple,
0:35:58is just going to ignore you forever and might potentially do its own thing. Because if Apple
0:36:03does its own thing, people will do whatever the hell iOS supports because it is still by far the
0:36:08most popular platform for games where people will actually give you money, or for applications,
0:36:12not just games, but half games. Anyway, yeah, so I totally expect Apple to ignore this, and if Apple
0:36:19ignores it, it's a non-starter for the Apple platform anyway, and that means it's never going
0:36:23to be cross-cross platform. I know it's an open standard and blah blah blah, but good luck getting
0:36:26Apple to sign in with that. Like, your best bet would be to get it to be supported as like a
0:36:30W3C standard because Apple does support those. But something coming from Facebook and trying to
0:36:36solve their cross-platform development difficulties, Apple is just not interested in that at all.
0:36:42And that's not to say that Apple is the one who added that stupid annoying dialog box. And
0:36:46I complained about that dialog box. It says, "Hey, download your app." But before they did that,
0:36:51it was every individual website doing something even worse in client-side JavaScript to do the
0:36:56the same feature. So really I'm mad at everybody who keeps trying to make me get their app.
0:37:00Apple adding the feature to standardize it at least standardizes the annoyance and makes it like,
0:37:05it doesn't slow down the browser as much because it's no longer terrible client-side JavaScript
0:37:09running, but it's no longer a modal dialog box or something that would like animate,
0:37:14but they wouldn't use this. The GPU is accelerated animation. So it would be like,
0:37:18you know, JavaScript redrawing. Oh, it was bad. Yeah. So reading more on the Vitechy's article,
0:37:25quoting again, "Apps that implement app links will be
0:37:28able to scan a link that's been tapped by the user and,
0:37:30in a matter of seconds, understand whether it can be
0:37:32opened inside a native app through deep linking, fall
0:37:35back to a web view, or offer a way to download the app from
0:37:38the App Store." So this corroborates what I was
0:37:39thinking earlier, that you're in Tweetbot.
0:37:41You land on some page.
0:37:43It looks at the page as HTML and says, hey, is there
0:37:45something I can do with this or not, and then can handle it
0:37:48and dump you into the app in question.
0:37:51I mean, I guess that's nice.
0:37:52but to both your points, without Safari supporting this,
0:37:55I don't see how this is gonna be that fantastic.
0:37:58- By the way, this also requires a page fetch.
0:38:00It requires for, let's say you open a link in Tweetbot,
0:38:04it requires Tweetbot to first fetch the HTML of the page,
0:38:07parse it, look for these tags,
0:38:10and then possibly offer you the option
0:38:12to redirect into an app.
0:38:13So that's pretty crappy.
0:38:15- Yeah, the reason I put that quote in there,
0:38:17that one that Casey just read,
0:38:18was not because of the information in it,
0:38:19but because I wanted to shame the copywriter
0:38:22who wrote it, who's like-- so the little bit was like,
0:38:25app links will be able to scan a link that's
0:38:27been tapped by the user and comma in a matter of seconds,
0:38:30comma.
0:38:30Understand whether it can be opened in a matter of seconds.
0:38:33I sure as hell hope not.
0:38:35I know it's an expression, but the copywriter
0:38:38is-- that's the wrong order of magnitude
0:38:39for how long it should really take to scan for links in HTML.
0:38:42Because if it really does take seconds,
0:38:44there's a serious problem.
0:38:45Well, and even the wording there, scan a link,
0:38:47that's not really true.
0:38:48It's fetch the contents of a link
0:38:50and then look at the contents to see if maybe you can open it.
0:38:52I mean, that's a different proposition.
0:38:55I don't see this being widely adopted.
0:38:58John, as you said, if there's no chance
0:39:00that Apple's going to implement this, which I'm pretty sure
0:39:02that's the case, then how much of a standard is it?
0:39:05Facebook has a lot of this platform-itis going on,
0:39:08and they always have.
0:39:09This is nothing new.
0:39:10Where Facebook always comes out--
0:39:12Facebook and Apple both have their-- and Google and Amazon,
0:39:15everyone-- they all have their own breed of arrogance.
0:39:18And Apple's arrogance is well known and well documented.
0:39:22Apple's arrogance is, we're just going to make our own thing
0:39:24and you can make it a standard if you want to.
0:39:27Facebook's arrogance is, we're going to launch
0:39:29all these platforms and standards that are going to be useful
0:39:31and implemented by everybody, even when that's almost
0:39:34never actually the outcome to what they make.
0:39:37And it almost always just serves them at best
0:39:40and even they often abandon the things they make.
0:39:42So, you know, it's, I think this is a nice sounding story,
0:39:47But I don't see it being implemented by almost anybody
0:39:50important, and certainly not widely enough to matter.
0:39:53Yeah, Facebook is not a trusted actor in this relationship.
0:39:56Right.
0:39:57Because yes, they're trying to make an open standard,
0:40:00but it's so clear that it is designed to solve a problem
0:40:03that Facebook has, which is how do we
0:40:04deploy our application on all the different platforms.
0:40:07Apple does not have that particular problem,
0:40:09or at the very least has it in a very small version
0:40:12and that they still make iTunes for Windows.
0:40:14But beyond that, they do not want
0:40:15to deploy their software on every mobile platform.
0:40:18So this isn't a problem they have.
0:40:19And it's like, why would we get on board with this thing
0:40:23that, yes, it's open and trying to be standardized,
0:40:25but it clearly exists to serve Facebook
0:40:27and will probably evolve to continue to serve Facebook
0:40:31if we're not sure that-- the W3C is the only thing.
0:40:34And even that is just like these big companies are all
0:40:37on the whatever in these working groups for W3C
0:40:40at each other's throats trying to fight for the little details
0:40:43of what image elements can be used for multi-resolution images
0:40:47on the web, and whether we should support Canvas
0:40:49and all this other stuff.
0:40:50And so that is a form in which they
0:40:52feel like it's a more level playing field, where
0:40:54all the big companies are at each other's throats trying
0:40:57to deal with web standards.
0:40:59And whatever gets through, more or less Apple implements.
0:41:01But Apple also does the thing where it proposes a standard,
0:41:05then implements it and ships it to millions and millions
0:41:07of people, and says, well, we already kind of implemented
0:41:10this and shipped it to everybody.
0:41:11Does that help you guys think maybe you should adopt it
0:41:13as a standard W3C?
0:41:16It's not a-- yeah.
0:41:18That's how standards work in the real world.
0:41:20The sort of kumbaya, sit around the campfire,
0:41:24think we're all going to get along type of thing.
0:41:26Like, oh, Facebook released it at an open standard.
0:41:28Everyone should use it now.
0:41:29That's never what it's like.
0:41:31So what is benefiting Facebook by having a standard way
0:41:37with which to deep link into an app?
0:41:39Because that's the ostensible premise behind this.
0:41:42Not only that you can launch an app, which everyone knows how to do reasonably easily,
0:41:45but here's a standard by which we define what data you're passing to that app,
0:41:51or that needs to be passed to that app in order to get to the exact content you want.
0:41:54So what's the play for Facebook here?
0:41:57Well, it's pretty obvious. It's for Facebook's app.
0:41:59It's so that, you know, if you...
0:42:01Let's say, you know, Facebook obviously encourages sharing all their crap as much as possible.
0:42:05Let's say you hit a sharing link in something that goes to a Facebook property.
0:42:10they want to be able to launch one of their apps directly into that so that they control the whole experience and it isn't just showing their web page.
0:42:17Or it goes right to their app and they get more information, or it's faster for the user so they don't have to go through the web first.
0:42:22They clearly want this for themselves. I mean, that's why they did it.
0:42:26Didn't Facebook just have, I was seeing tweets about it today, didn't they have their little developer PR thing or some kind of...
0:42:33Yeah, it's called Fate.
0:42:35Oh god, I didn't even think of it that way.
0:42:37Anyway, like, I did not watch this speech thing, but from what I've seen from Facebook
0:42:43in past months, I'm going to pretend that I did and pretend this is what they said.
0:42:47And I imagine that this is all part of the strategy that they have to stop being a single
0:42:53thing called Facebook, which is a website that you go to, or more abstractly an application
0:42:57that you use through the web browser and other things, and start being a series of more special
0:43:04purpose applications circling around this giant hub of information that they have about
0:43:09everybody.
0:43:10And so I think things like paper, paper didn't replace the Facebook app.
0:43:16It just kind of augments it.
0:43:17I think what they want to make is a fleet of mobile applications, a fleet of native
0:43:21mobile applications that all cooperate and interoperate with each other and with the
0:43:25Facebook website to make one single unified Facebook experience.
0:43:29And that's why they want to deep link from paper into the official Facebook app, from
0:43:33the Facebook website into whatever other app they come out with, like the idea that they're
0:43:37transitioning into, well, they already were a platform, but they want to be a different
0:43:41kind of platform where all these different pieces on all these different platforms can
0:43:45all talk to each other and sort of cooperate.
0:43:48So in some ways it is kind of like inter-app communication, but all their data is on the
0:43:51web and in the cloud, and so they have to, their version of inter-app communication is
0:43:56a way to basically deep link from one application to another into the web out of the web.
0:44:01So it makes sense from what they want to do.
0:44:03Why do they think they want to do it as an open standard?
0:44:06That just tends to be the way they do things.
0:44:08And I think they would be happy if it became commonly supported
0:44:11because then they would have some assurance that the OS
0:44:14or the web browsers or whatever wouldn't change in a way that
0:44:16prevents their nice standard from working.
0:44:19Yeah, I guess.
0:44:20I don't know.
0:44:21At first, I was like, oh, this sounds-- actually, no, this
0:44:24doesn't sound that impressive after all.
0:44:26It sounds like a cool idea until you think about it a little bit
0:44:29or try to implement it and start thinking
0:44:30about the realities of it and how Apple will never support
0:44:33Mobile Safari and everything.
0:44:35It kind of falls apart under scrutiny, I think.
0:44:37- Yeah, yeah, that's a very good way of phrasing it.
0:44:39What else is cool these days?
0:44:41- Our friends at Backblaze, we are also sponsored this week,
0:44:44once again by Backblaze, which I still pronounce
0:44:47sometimes in my head as backblaze,
0:44:49'cause I think it sounds fancier, but.
0:44:50- Oh, God.
0:44:52- Anyway, they're awesome.
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0:44:56It's a Mac native app, and at five bucks a month
0:44:59gets you unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated backup.
0:45:03We've talked a lot about the value
0:45:05of online backup here before,
0:45:06and to quote one of John Gruber's sponsor reads,
0:45:10if you don't use this, you're nuts.
0:45:12I mean, online backup is amazing.
0:45:14There's an entire class of problems, hazards, events,
0:45:18where if you just have a local clone or time machine backup,
0:45:21like sitting in your office next to your computer plugged in
0:45:24things like power surges, lightning strikes,
0:45:26floods, fires, theft, there's all sorts of bad things that can happen that would affect
0:45:32both the main computer and the backup if all you have is the one in your house. And so
0:45:37online backup takes care of that and a whole bunch of other problems. It's a fantastic
0:45:41solution. I've been using it myself. My wife uses it. We've been using Backblaze for a
0:45:45couple of years at least now. Very happy with it. So they also have easily, you can easily
0:45:51restore all of your files of course, but you can also easily restore just one file right
0:45:56through the web interface. You also have an iOS app that you can use to access any of
0:46:00your backed up files and even share them if you want to. They just added email alerts
0:46:07so that you can say, for instance, like every week or two weeks the email you is saying,
0:46:12"Alright, this is the status of your backups. Here's what we have. We have this computer,
0:46:15we have this many gigs, this is the last time it checked in," etc. So you can always be
0:46:20confident at what it's doing. You can of course also try to restore anything on the web whenever
0:46:24you want to to confirm that. It's also founded by ex-Apple engineers. It is a
0:46:29native application. It's not some weird cross-platform runtime
0:46:33thing. It's a native application. It sits in your system preferences. There's also a
0:46:37little menu bar thing. It's pretty nice. It runs natively on Mac and on Mavericks
0:46:41and it's also a PC application as well. So there's a 15-day trial with no credit
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0:47:10Once again, it's backblaze.com/atp, and I use it and also recommend it.
0:47:14Thank you very much to Backblaze for sponsoring the show.
0:47:18So God help me, but I'm about to bring up comics.
0:47:20Skip, skip, skip.
0:47:21[laughter]
0:47:22I actually don't really have that much to say about the ComiXology Amazon thing, but
0:47:28I thought I should at least ask you two if you had anything to say.
0:47:32To me, it seems like everyone is acting selfishly as expected and there's nothing here of
0:47:37note.
0:47:38But I don't know, what do you guys think?
0:47:39I think Merlin covered it very well on Back to Work this week, so we'll just listen
0:47:43to that.
0:47:44He did a really good job of covering the nuance of this problem.
0:47:49I mean, I had a quick blog post about it,
0:47:52and I'm not going to rehash it here.
0:47:53Basically, my opinion is that Amazon,
0:47:56as the new owners of Comixology, Amazon
0:47:58is doing what they always do, the kind of thing they always
0:48:00do.
0:48:01It's not really a surprise to anybody,
0:48:02and it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody
0:48:04that Amazon is acting the way they always do.
0:48:06And it kind of sucks, but they have their reasons,
0:48:09and that's it.
0:48:10Whenever we talk about tech topics
0:48:13where there is something that upsets, basically,
0:48:17people who are into following the tech industry
0:48:20and they get angry about it on Twitter
0:48:21and they write blog posts and stuff like that.
0:48:24There's a couple of different reactions
0:48:27that I see that are sort of reaction types.
0:48:31One is the easy one where people are
0:48:34partisans for a particular company.
0:48:36If they like one company, they don't like another company,
0:48:38whatever happens, they're going to find out
0:48:39why this proves that Google is evil,
0:48:41why this proves that Apple is evil, like whatever.
0:48:42Like they have their favorite company,
0:48:44they have the companies they don't like.
0:48:46whatever happens, those people will come out of the woodwork and do that.
0:48:49So you have people who are really big Amazon fans defending Amazon,
0:48:52and you have people who hate Apple saying it's Apple's fault, they come out, you know,
0:48:55that is straight up.
0:48:57The other way are as people trying to figure out what's really going on and saying, well,
0:49:01it's really nobody's fault, and they're just kind of sort of trying to do the middle
0:49:05of the road type thing where they don't want to assign blame, but they're sad about it,
0:49:10and it's just like, well, it's just the way it is because everyone just has to be selfish,
0:49:12is kind of what Casey said before.
0:49:15And my reaction to it is always a little bit,
0:49:18I don't know if it's less common
0:49:19or people who have my reaction
0:49:20just don't tweet about it as much.
0:49:22I come in from like a parenting angle
0:49:24where whatever company I like the best,
0:49:27like in this case will be Apple, right?
0:49:29Something bad will happen and I will decide
0:49:33that I'm very disappointed in the company that I like.
0:49:35And so-- (laughing)
0:49:37- You give them a thumbs down?
0:49:38- Instead of taking it out on the companies,
0:49:39instead of taking out the companies that I don't like,
0:49:41I'm like, oh, well, you are the company I don't like
0:49:44and this is your fault.
0:49:45Instead I will say, "What is it that my company did that caused this to happen?"
0:49:49You know, it's like, I'm disappointed in my child, like that I hold my children to a higher
0:49:53standard, right?
0:49:54I don't care what other kids are doing.
0:49:56Why were you involved?
0:49:57And so, I mean, maybe that's not the real origin of this thing, but that's just, you
0:50:01know, like, the way I was thinking was like, my first reaction is always to blame Apple.
0:50:05Is it because I dislike Apple?
0:50:06No, it's because I expect more of them, you know what I mean?
0:50:09Like, I have a high standard and I'm disappointed in them.
0:50:12Yeah, and we should point out, by the way, what we're talking about. In case anyone was living
0:50:16under a rock this week and didn't realize what happened, Comixology, the popular comic buying
0:50:20app for iOS, especially iPad, was bought by Amazon. And then like within a month, Amazon did
0:50:28basically exactly what the Kindle app does, which is they removed the ability for Comixology to have
0:50:32in-app purchase for new comic issues. And is that even the right term, comic issues? I'm sorry, I'm
0:50:38I'm not a comics person.
0:50:39So anyway, I'm not sorry.
0:50:41Anyway, they removed in-app purchase.
0:50:44And so now you have to go out to the Amazon website
0:50:47separately, or the comiXology website owned by Amazon,
0:50:50buy the comics there, and then go into the app
0:50:52and download them, download things you've bought.
0:50:54It's the exact same way the Kindle app works.
0:50:57And that's almost entirely just to avoid paying Apple
0:51:02their 30% on in-app purchases.
0:51:05And Apple has a couple of rules
0:51:07that you have to give them their 30% on an app purchases
0:51:11and also that if you have a way on your site
0:51:16for people to pay you without going through Apple
0:51:18for something that is digital,
0:51:21you can't advertise that in the app
0:51:22and you can't link to it from the app.
0:51:24So you can't, for instance, like,
0:51:26you can't just have an app or like a link in the app
0:51:28that kicks you out to Safari for a second,
0:51:30you enter your credit card stuff on your site,
0:51:32avoid Apple's charge, and then kicks you back into the app.
0:51:35That's no longer-- that was only allowed for two weeks,
0:51:39then they killed that.
0:51:42So the issue is, obviously, Comixology under Amazon--
0:51:47Amazon did not want to keep paying Apple 30%.
0:51:49And many people are blaming Apple for this,
0:51:52including John, I guess.
0:51:53Many people are blaming Apple, saying, well, they
0:51:55shouldn't be taking 30%, or they shouldn't have that rule
0:51:57that you can't link to your store.
0:51:59And that's certainly something worth discussing.
0:52:01A lot of people are mad at Comixology,
0:52:03because they're ruining the experience here,
0:52:04making it much more clunky to buy things,
0:52:06and probably eliminating a lot of impulse buys.
0:52:09'Cause what would happen, I guess, from what I've heard,
0:52:11is that you'd get to the end of a comic
0:52:13and it would ask you to buy the next issue.
0:52:14And you could buy it right there and start reading it.
0:52:16And you can't do that as easily anymore.
0:52:18So that's probably gonna impact sales.
0:52:20- Let me explain why I blame Apple for this,
0:52:22and have blamed Apple for it ever since they did
0:52:24the same thing with the Kindle app way back when.
0:52:27And it's not about the particulars,
0:52:29it's about the big picture.
0:52:30And the big picture is the technology exists
0:52:33to provide an experience that customers like.
0:52:37And not only just the customers like,
0:52:39but that actually is beneficial
0:52:40to the people selling the goods as well.
0:52:42Like you said, the ability to just write in the app,
0:52:44impulse purchase comics.
0:52:45Every comic I've ever purchased in my life,
0:52:47with the exception of I think one flimsy paperback
0:52:50anime comic back when I was 15 years old,
0:52:52has been through the Comixology app.
0:52:54And why?
0:52:55Because it is so ridiculously easy.
0:52:56I'm not even into comics.
0:52:57I don't even like comics,
0:52:59but I've got the Comixology app,
0:53:00and if you read one issue,
0:53:01and if it puts that button and says,
0:53:02"Do you wanna read the next one?"
0:53:03And it puts a little price like, "Eh, whatever."
0:53:05You tap the button.
0:53:06Like that's the whole killer,
0:53:07that is the killer app of the app store.
0:53:08The fact that you could with your thumb go,
0:53:10"Yeah, all right, I'll do that."
0:53:11And the game goes, and you're like, "Oh, is it all right?"
0:53:13I mean, that's why the 99 cents.
0:53:15The barrier to entry is so low.
0:53:16So technology exists for sure to do that.
0:53:19And the experience is really awesome for customers.
0:53:21They love it.
0:53:22And it's usually pretty good
0:53:23for the people selling the stuff too,
0:53:25because they sell more stuff,
0:53:26because the barrier to buying it is less.
0:53:29Anything that prevents that from happening,
0:53:31anything that says, yeah, we could do this,
0:53:32and yeah, it would be good in all these sorts of ways,
0:53:34but I don't care what the but is.
0:53:36Is the but like, well, they have to get 30%
0:53:38'cause it's fair and they wanna have a flat,
0:53:39I don't even wanna hear about the reasons.
0:53:41All I know is that this is technologically possible,
0:53:44it is not financially infeasible, but it doesn't happen.
0:53:49And so you say, well, Apple sets the rule,
0:53:51Amazon is choosing not to follow them,
0:53:53it's Amazon's fault for doing that.
0:53:55This is not just one occurrence.
0:53:56I mean, I guess Kindle is also Amazon as well,
0:53:58but a lot of businesses don't have 30% to shave off
0:54:02to give to Apple.
0:54:04And you say, well, they used to pay way more
0:54:05than that brick and mortar retail stores.
0:54:07That's true as well.
0:54:08We're supposed to be getting better over time
0:54:09and the value you're getting out of being in the App Store,
0:54:14is that worth 30%?
0:54:17The relationship you had with retail establishments,
0:54:20even though they took more off,
0:54:21was much more complicated in terms of being able to ship,
0:54:23for books, in the case of books,
0:54:24being able to ship things back and dealing with inventory
0:54:27and having a remainders market and like,
0:54:30I would think that we would be having
0:54:31more efficiencies in the system.
0:54:33I'm not saying they should charge less than 30%,
0:54:35I'm not saying they shouldn't charge 30% at all,
0:54:36I'm saying that it is in Apple's interest
0:54:38as the platform owner to figure out
0:54:41what they have to do to make it so there's a good experience
0:54:43that is definitely a win-win.
0:54:45I don't know if it's a win-win-win
0:54:47to use the business speak.
0:54:48I don't know if everyone's gonna be happy,
0:54:50but at least two of the three parties here
0:54:51are gonna be happy with this.
0:54:53They need to figure out a way to make it happen.
0:54:54And the second thing that annoys me about it
0:54:56the strategy tax thing and that, oh, by the way,
0:54:58did you know that Apple has a bookstore?
0:54:59And they pay themselves 30%, don't worry.
0:55:02You know, that seems like, is that the reason
0:55:05they're not doing it, 'cause they wanna promote iBooks?
0:55:07Well, I don't think iBooks even sells comics,
0:55:08so probably not in this case,
0:55:09but in the Kindle store, it really burns me
0:55:11that, you know, Kindle can't, you know,
0:55:13if Kindle wants to sell their books inside the app,
0:55:16which everyone who uses the Kindle app would love,
0:55:18they've gotta give Apple 30%.
0:55:20And really, there was just, I don't think there's 30%
0:55:22hanging around to shave off of these things, right?
0:55:24And so, yeah, they could just crank up their prices
0:55:26by 30%, but then they have to match the store on the web store.
0:55:29All these rules that Apple set up are made to introduce inefficiencies in the system
0:55:33to force people to either use their system and therefore not be able to offer people
0:55:38a discount for going to the website or whatever, or don't use it.
0:55:41People are choosing not to use it.
0:55:42You can say, "Well, they're playing hardball, and that's Amazon's fault."
0:55:45At this point, I think it's clear that Apple's strategy of just holding the line on 30% and
0:55:49saying, "Nope, it's going to be this way for everybody, and that's it," it's not working.
0:55:54It's not making people-- it's having the opposite effect.
0:55:56People aren't saying, well, what choice do we have?
0:55:58I guess we just got to do it, because we
0:55:59want to give our customers a good experience,
0:56:01and we get more sales.
0:56:02The opposite is happening.
0:56:03They say, well, they're just opting out.
0:56:05And if they think they're calling Apple's bluff
0:56:08or whatever, I think Apple's bluff is called.
0:56:10Apple needs to do something about it, because we
0:56:13want to have--
0:56:14I mean, there are so many other things that
0:56:16aren't as good in Android.
0:56:17But Android at least gives you the option
0:56:19of not paying Google whatever percent if you
0:56:22use your own payment processor.
0:56:23- Right, yeah, so on Android you can,
0:56:25if you use Google, they charge 30% just like the others,
0:56:29but there's no rule against using your own,
0:56:31so you can build on your own, and many of the big apps have.
0:56:35And I wanna point out also,
0:56:36Amazon, when they sell something,
0:56:40they also tend to usually charge at least 30%,
0:56:44especially on digital goods,
0:56:45especially for smaller publishers, for self-published people
0:56:48they actually often charge more than 30%.
0:56:51And so this isn't like Amazon wants
0:56:54to give more to the authors.
0:56:56It's more like Amazon just wants that 30% for themselves.
0:56:59Well, the authors will get more.
0:57:01But we're ignoring how Amazon splits up its money.
0:57:04Because that is a whole separate issue of yes,
0:57:06you can definitely complain about Amazon.
0:57:08They're not great about--
0:57:09they want all the money for everything.
0:57:11They want to sell your stuff below cost
0:57:13and give you nothing for it.
0:57:14They want to give your thing away for free.
0:57:15Like Amazon deals with that.
0:57:16I'm just talking about the relationship between Apple
0:57:18and everyone else.
0:57:19Because that's where the dysfunction is.
0:57:21If we could address this and we could buy things
0:57:23inside the thing, then the secondary dysfunction
0:57:25would be like, okay, well how much of this purchase price
0:57:27after Apple gets its cut goes to the creator or whatever.
0:57:30So I think that's a little bit of a sideshow
0:57:32and a lot of people are like, well this is better
0:57:33because some of that 30% will go to the content creators
0:57:36and that's probably true, but that's not why,
0:57:39like don't hang your hat on that as the reason
0:57:41we shouldn't be able to buy things inside an iOS app.
0:57:43It is an artificial situation brought on by
0:57:46a platform owner and someone who wants to be in the platform
0:57:49butting heads and we are the loser.
0:57:52The customers are the loser in this situation.
0:57:54And in the beginning it was like,
0:57:55well, let's just see how this shakes out.
0:57:56But now after all these years,
0:57:58I think Apple needs to do something different.
0:58:00I don't know what that different thing is.
0:58:01Is it different thing you buy Amazon?
0:58:03No, maybe not.
0:58:04Is it different thing you lower your percentage,
0:58:06you come up with a different kind of deal?
0:58:08Because consumers are suffering for it.
0:58:09And that I think is the primary response.
0:58:13Apple's like, oh, we just care about making great products.
0:58:15It is not a great product when I can't buy a Kindle book
0:58:17inside the Kindle app.
0:58:18It's just not.
0:58:19So yeah, I disagree on this point, on the idea that Apple has to do something, that
0:58:24Apple is somehow losing here or they have to. I mean, there's one side of this that's
0:58:28an entitlement argument that I don't think is entirely fair. One side of this is, well,
0:58:33we should be able to do whatever we want on this computing platform because we're able
0:58:36to do whatever we want on Macs and PCs. But the reality is, like, iOS is, yeah, it's
0:58:44mostly like a computing platform, but there's no third-party software that doesn't go
0:58:49through the App Store unless you jailbreak, but that doesn't really count.
0:58:51But this isn't a technical issue. This isn't a safety issue. This isn't a technical issue.
0:58:55This isn't an ease of use. It is like, it's a capability thing that we know is possible.
0:59:00It's an artificial business constraint. Well, sure, but okay, so this is only a contentious
0:59:06issue because iOS is the dominant tablet platform for people who buy things and read them on
0:59:12tablets that they also use for anything else in the world. So what if the dominant portable
0:59:18computing platform was, you know, what if it ended up differently? What if the dominant
0:59:22tablet or the dominant portable computing platform was the Sony PSP? Or what if it was
0:59:27the E Ink Kindle? You know, then you look at like the E Ink Kindles, no one ever had
0:59:33apps on that. I mean, they had a quick little KDK thing that died, thank God, it was half
0:59:37baked at best. You know, you couldn't make apps for the E Ink Kindle. Apple could not
0:59:41make iBooks for the E Ink Kindle. Apple probably also couldn't make iBooks for the PSP. It's
0:59:47game console. Game consoles work very differently, similar to how the App Store works, although
0:59:51probably on worse terms, I would imagine. And so, you know, you look at other types
0:59:57of computing devices that aren't just PCs and Macs, other types of computing devices
1:00:01that are owned by one company, that are kind of vertically integrated, et cetera. They
1:00:08work usually the same way that Apple does with the same kind of rules, or more restrictive,
1:00:11where they take bigger cuts.
1:00:13So, and including one of Amazon's own platforms
1:00:17that is very, very popular,
1:00:18which is the E and Kindle platform.
1:00:19So I don't really think that it's,
1:00:23that Apple has to do anything here,
1:00:25or that they're necessarily unjustified,
1:00:26or that they're being excessively greedy.
1:00:28I really--
1:00:29- So your argument is that because other people
1:00:31do bad things, Apple is also entitled to do bad things?
1:00:34- No, my argument is that you, as company X,
1:00:39or as individual X, you are not entitled
1:00:42to access Apple's customer base
1:00:44on your own terms that you dictate.
1:00:47- But it's not the Amazon that has the entitlement.
1:00:50I'm having the entitlement as the customer.
1:00:51I'm supposed to be the one that Apple is serving.
1:00:53Like they're reducing the value of their products to me
1:00:56through this fight that they're having
1:00:58with Amazon over this.
1:00:59Like Amazon is certainly, yes,
1:01:00certainly not entitled to access to Apple's customers.
1:01:02That's the hope that the whole fight is over.
1:01:03Like those two companies are fighting,
1:01:04but we are the losers.
1:01:05We are caught in the middle.
1:01:07And at a certain point, us being the losers affects Apple
1:01:11more than it affects Amazon.
1:01:12Because Amazon can go anywhere, can sell--
1:01:14whoever-- Amazon cares much less about who the winner is
1:01:17in the whatever space than Apple does.
1:01:19Because Amazon is promiscuous.
1:01:22Will try to get you to buy-- yes,
1:01:23they have their own platform too,
1:01:25but it's not like they're shunning iOS and Android.
1:01:28They will still sell what they want to sell.
1:01:30It's us that's losing.
1:01:31And I was willing to give it a couple of years
1:01:34to see how it would shake out.
1:01:36But if, for example, Apple had become ridiculously dominant,
1:01:39like they had 90% market share and everything,
1:01:41maybe Amazon would have lost this one.
1:01:43Maybe they would have gone back to selling in the app,
1:01:44but it didn't work out that way.
1:01:46And so now I think it's time to readjust.
1:01:49- I see, I just don't see the pressure
1:01:53being that strong on Apple here.
1:01:55- I think Apple is not fulfilling its responsibility
1:01:58as a platform owner to make its products
1:02:00the best they can be for its customers in the long term.
1:02:02Not just the short term.
1:02:03Like I said, I was willing to give them
1:02:05a year or two to play hardball and see how it went, but it is going badly for them.
1:02:10And I blame Apple because they're my child.
1:02:15I will disagree that it's going badly. But also, one more thing.
1:02:18I think Apple could probably look at this from another angle and say,
1:02:21"If you're proposing a change to App Store policy, you can't just look at it as what would good implementations do with that.
1:02:25What would good people do with that? How would that be used well?"
1:02:33You have to also look at it as,
1:02:34how would that be used terribly?
1:02:36How would that be used by scammy people,
1:02:37by crappy companies like King?
1:02:39Like how would that be used by terrible people
1:02:42and terrible companies?
1:02:44And if, and allowing other in-app purchase systems
1:02:48that Apple does not run would also introduce a huge risk
1:02:53of an erosion of trust in the payment system
1:02:56by bad actors, like big game companies
1:03:00with in-app purchase schemes, stuff like that.
1:03:02Like bad actors having their own credit card input things
1:03:06in their apps that then behave badly.
1:03:09- But who's suggesting that though?
1:03:10No one is suggesting that.
1:03:12- Well, so that's one of the options.
1:03:14There's a couple options to solve this.
1:03:16One of the options is to reduce Apple's cut.
1:03:19Let's say they cut it in half to 15%.
1:03:21Do you think that would change Amazon's mind?
1:03:22I'm guessing not.
1:03:24Let's say all the rules stay the same,
1:03:25but the cut goes down.
1:03:26- The most feasible option for them,
1:03:28if you're looking like what's the practical solution,
1:03:29what do you actually want them to do?
1:03:32Two things, one on the technical side,
1:03:33they should make it possible for someone with a catalog
1:03:36volume the size of Comixology, let alone Amazon itself.
1:03:39If there's any limit, Amazon is going to hit it
1:03:41with like an Amazon.com app, for example.
1:03:44Like it sells everything that Amazon sells
1:03:46'cause their catalog is massive.
1:03:47But anyway, make sure that's all set,
1:03:50make sure you have a system in place.
1:03:52And then what I would change about it is it's ridiculous
1:03:55that they have this hardline thing
1:03:56where it's gotta be 70/30 with everyone.
1:03:58Cut a deal with Amazon.
1:04:00I think it's not insane, like, oh, it's unfair.
1:04:03Why does Amazon get it?
1:04:04They get a special deal because they're Amazon.com.
1:04:06You are not Amazon.com, you get a different deal.
1:04:08I don't think that's unreasonable.
1:04:10And Apple seems so tied to like, it's 70/30,
1:04:12it never changes, everyone is treated equally,
1:04:14isn't that nice and fair for everybody?
1:04:17It stops being a tenable strategy
1:04:20when your consumers are made to have worse experiences
1:04:23because of, I don't know, what crazy principle
1:04:25that you want, like, you know,
1:04:26in each individual Apple developer to feel fair.
1:04:29I don't think it's unreasonable to cut a deal with Amazon.
1:04:31Figure out what you have to do.
1:04:33The terms of that deal don't even need to be public.
1:04:35I don't care what Amazon and Apple have to do
1:04:37to or with each other behind closed doors
1:04:40to get this deal to happen.
1:04:41Just do what you have to do.
1:04:43If someone complains, hey, Amazon's getting a special deal.
1:04:46When you get to be the size of Amazon,
1:04:48then you'll get a special deal too.
1:04:49Like, is that crazy?
1:04:50Am I breaking secret rules of the App Store
1:04:53by suggesting this insane idea?
1:04:55- Well, it would be breaking with a lot of precedent.
1:04:58Historically, Apple has generally very consistently
1:05:03enforced the same rules for everybody, big and small.
1:05:06And much of the big companies should grin in a lot of cases.
1:05:09But they generally do not negotiate major exceptions
1:05:14to rules like that, even with companies
1:05:16as big as Amazon or Facebook or The New York Times
1:05:18or anything like that.
1:05:19They really have not done that.
1:05:20I agree they haven't.
1:05:21I think it's silly that they haven't.
1:05:23See, I don't know.
1:05:24I mean, there is-- a lot of the App Store,
1:05:27and a lot of its problems, honestly,
1:05:30are because of this almost mostly democratic system
1:05:35that it has often been or it is in a lot of respects.
1:05:40The top list is famously minimally filtered.
1:05:44And so you see crappy scam apps up there all the time
1:05:47because they're not really monitoring it that closely.
1:05:50And it's worth arguing whether that's
1:05:52a good thing or a bad thing.
1:05:55But for the most part, the App Store is run
1:05:58on a pretty level playing field,
1:06:00where big companies are not allowed to break rules
1:06:04that small companies can't also break.
1:06:06- Well, it's not breaking a rule if you have a deal.
1:06:08Like I said, there's anger in the chat room about this.
1:06:10Here's, let me address a couple of the things.
1:06:11Dented Meat says, "Do you really think
1:06:13"that if Amazon is given a better deal,
1:06:14"they will automatically pass the money
1:06:16"to the content creators?"
1:06:16No, of course not, I didn't say that.
1:06:18I don't think anyone said that.
1:06:19Again, we're not talking about
1:06:20Amazon divides up the money.
1:06:21That's a whole separate issue.
1:06:22That's totally not what I'm talking about.
1:06:24I don't know what Amazon would do with it, probably not,
1:06:26because that's not how they work.
1:06:28And then people say, comparing it to bribes and corruption.
1:06:32It's a business relationship.
1:06:35When Apple is buying parts from someone who makes
1:06:38screens or widgets or whatever,
1:06:40they negotiate a deal to buy those screens.
1:06:42They get a better price than you do
1:06:43if you wanna buy 10 of them.
1:06:44That's business, that's not bribes and corruption.
1:06:46That's just how business works.
1:06:47You get volume discounts.
1:06:48If you're going to drive a certain amount of business,
1:06:50you get a better deal.
1:06:51I don't think that's corruption or bribes.
1:06:53That's just how business works.
1:06:56It's a contract and no one else is entitled to see,
1:06:58hey, how much is Samsung paying you for screens?
1:07:00Apple's not entitled to see that.
1:07:02That's individual contracts with businesses.
1:07:05If someone's bringing up antitrust,
1:07:06Apple doesn't have the market share in any market
1:07:09to be even remotely considered for antitrust,
1:07:13except for the crazy people who are gonna say
1:07:14that Apple has a monopoly on Apple computers,
1:07:16and I love that one, that everyone gets old.
1:07:18(laughing)
1:07:20You know, I understand why you'd want to have uniform rules.
1:07:24And that's a good idea right up to the point
1:07:26where it seems like there's some sort of problem.
1:07:28Here, there is definitely a problem.
1:07:30And maybe they can never come to a deal.
1:07:32Like, if they can't come to a deal, they can't come to a deal.
1:07:34But as far as any of us are aware,
1:07:36they've never even considered this as an option.
1:07:38I mean, another example is they held the line on--
1:07:42I imagine a lot of the rumors are about Microsoft and Office
1:07:45and why isn't Office available.
1:07:47- Microsoft doesn't wanna give Apple 30%
1:07:49of its software sales, right?
1:07:50And so that went on for a really long time
1:07:52until eventually Microsoft blinked and produced Office,
1:07:55but they found a way to do it without giving Apple a cut
1:07:57because you have to sign up for Office 365
1:07:59and all this other--
1:08:00- Wait, is that true?
1:08:01I thought they were giving Apple the cut
1:08:03if you bought it in the app.
1:08:04- For the subscription, you mean?
1:08:06- I thought it was a little of both.
1:08:07I thought that the way that Microsoft hopes you go
1:08:11is you already have an Office 365 subscription
1:08:13you got on your own accord, but I believe, Marco,
1:08:16you're also right that there is an in-app purchase of some capacity that Apple does get a cut of.
1:08:23But like the thing everyone was talking about early on was Microsoft Office will be available
1:08:26for the iPad, it'll be $99 and Apple will get 30% of that and that's not what Microsoft did,
1:08:30that's not what happened. You know, like they have the subscription model and the apps are free,
1:08:36right? It's a free download? Yep. Yeah, I mean, so that is, you know, it's a different monetization
1:08:41strategy as opposed to simply selling Office at a premium price and giving Apple 30% right
1:08:47off there. And in that case, there would be no way to get Office without paying Apple
1:08:5130%. And now there is a way. You download a free app, go to Microsoft's website where
1:08:54they offer you the same prices, you know, in-app purchase. And even that took a long
1:08:57time to figure out. And I think customers didn't really lose out in that one. And I
1:09:01think Apple kind of won that battle. But the battle over an application through which you
1:09:06naturally want to buy things and consume them right in them, Apple is not winning that battle
1:09:10for whatever reasons, and I think something should be done about it.
1:09:13And I mean, thus far, because Google is so incompetent in this area
1:09:17and has not been able to penetrate the market, people aren't like, well,
1:09:20screw Apple, I'm just going to get an Android dress because you're not like,
1:09:22I think the iPad is still better.
1:09:24You know, I think it's Apple still.
1:09:28Maybe that's what they think, too.
1:09:29Like we're still in the driver's seat.
1:09:30Eventually we'll win this.
1:09:31But there's a lot of years of suffering that's gone on already with the Kindle app.
1:09:34And just the comiXology is a drop in the bucket.
1:09:37And we just see a lot of it because, you know, we know people who
1:09:40read comics and are angry about it, but I think it is a of a type that will continue coming up until
1:09:46someone figures something out. So what about this as a proposed alternative? So the times in which
1:09:54we all get bitter about the 30% seem to be, as far as I can tell, reselling. So Amazon or Comixology
1:10:03is reselling the comics in their app.
1:10:07What if Apple announced that, "Hey, if you come to us and can prove to us that you're
1:10:12a reseller, then we'll drop the fee to 15%," or something like that.
1:10:17And so for things like games where you're not really reselling anything, then you still
1:10:22have to pay the 30%.
1:10:24And you can't just make a shell company and say, "Yes, I promise that this shell company
1:10:28isn't me."
1:10:29You have to actually go to someone in Apple and prove to them by whatever means they want
1:10:35that you are simply reselling and you are not providing your own original content, and
1:10:40thus it's not reasonable to give Apple 30%, you will give them the lower tier cost.
1:10:46Well, you don't need to think that hard about this.
1:10:48You can do things, if you're so stuck on doing uniform rules for everybody, you just give
1:10:51like volume discounts.
1:10:52If you sell X amount of dollars, we get X percent, and if you sell 10 billion dollars,
1:10:56I mean like there are plenty...
1:10:57Right, which Microsoft does that.
1:10:58These are not like new technologies in the world of business.
1:11:01Like this is how business has worked forever.
1:11:03It's just that the app store is the aberration.
1:11:05Can we apply this uniformly to everybody and not have any variability for volume
1:11:09so that if you sell three in-app purchases for virtual coins versus 30
1:11:13billion in-app purchases, when you get exactly the same percentage,
1:11:16it's nice and convenient to everyone, you know, but like, again,
1:11:18it's only a problem until like it's making your platform worse to deploy
1:11:22applications on it.
1:11:23The Kindle app is worse on iOS in this respect than it is on other platforms
1:11:27that allow purchase. And Comixology just got worse because the previous company that owned
1:11:31it was willing to bite the bullet and give the 30% surely shaving its margins and potentially
1:11:37also shaving how much money go to content creators, but who cares? They were willing
1:11:40to do this because that was how they got traction. They got enough traction, they got bought
1:11:43out by Amazon. Amazon doesn't need traction. Amazon is Amazon.com. So yeah, they take away
1:11:47the 30% because that's what Amazon does. It's not like I'm saying Amazon is the scorpion
1:11:53here. It's like, well, it's in its nature. It's going to do that. Like I think Amazon
1:11:55and does plenty of evil things too.
1:11:57All I'm thinking about is why is the platform
1:11:59that I use on my tablet getting worse
1:12:00for me to do things I like to do on it?
1:12:02And I just want it to be worked out.
1:12:05- Marco, before you jump in, I'd just like to point out
1:12:07I understand the Scorpion reference.
1:12:08- That's what you talked about on Hypercritical
1:12:10and you listened.
1:12:12- You know, Jon, you're assuming
1:12:14that Apple needs to address this.
1:12:16And in your position, you're arguing that,
1:12:19it is an assumption, you're arguing
1:12:21that Apple needs to fix this.
1:12:22And I just don't see the urgent need.
1:12:24And I think the Kindle app being this way for so long,
1:12:28I mean it's been what, four or five years,
1:12:30probably three or four years that the Kindle app
1:12:32has been this way?
1:12:34That's been there long enough and it doesn't seem
1:12:38to really be affecting Apple sales or customer satisfaction.
1:12:41You know, overall it doesn't seem to be that
1:12:45you know, Apple's really like being held with a fire here,
1:12:47that they really have to change this.
1:12:49I don't see the big push, I don't see why they would
1:12:52have to do any of these things,
1:12:54And by the way, I think lowering their cut to anything
1:12:58would not please Amazon.
1:12:59I think Amazon wants to own that whole experience
1:13:00and the whole processing of anything.
1:13:01- That is potentially right, but at that point,
1:13:04I could stop blaming Apple and say,
1:13:05"Well, Apple offered them like 0.001%
1:13:08and they just still rejected it."
1:13:09It's like, "Well, then it's not Apple's fault anymore."
1:13:10- Yeah, I mean, and honestly, I really do think
1:13:13Amazon wants to own the entire customer process,
1:13:16not just that commission.
1:13:17They want everything to be going through them only.
1:13:20And so they have full control and full access.
1:13:23I really don't think that a rate cut would do it for them.
1:13:26- Well, the idea that they don't need to do it
1:13:27'cause it's like, well, they've been doing it
1:13:29for years with Kindle and it hasn't hurt them, right?
1:13:30It's difficult to sell what hasn't hurt them,
1:13:32but the one thing I would point to, like a metric,
1:13:35you're just like, well, maybe they would have sold more iPads
1:13:38if you could have bought things.
1:13:38Like, that's hard to prove, like, whatever.
1:13:40But the one thing you could point to
1:13:42is good old Tim Cook's favorite, customer sat.
1:13:44Customer sat among people who read comics.
1:13:46Has suddenly gone down, I can tell you that.
1:13:48And I think customer, I mean, Kindle app didn't have it,
1:13:51So like, customer sat among people who use the Kindle app would go, you know, way higher
1:13:56for their iPads if they could buy things through it.
1:13:57Because think about that.
1:13:58Like, some people, they consider their iPad like, it's my comic reading device.
1:14:03And like, that's what they use it for.
1:14:04And I bet there are people out there who consider it their Kindle reader.
1:14:07And if suddenly those people could buy the things, like they got to the end of series
1:14:10one, of a book series, and there was a little page at the end of the Kindle thing that said,
1:14:13"Do you want to start reading the next one?
1:14:14Tap this button."
1:14:15You tap the button, a little spinner appeared for two seconds, and you're reading the next
1:14:18book.
1:14:19sat with their iPad would go up.
1:14:21Like, that is a metric that you can track,
1:14:23that they talk about a lot, that they should be watching.
1:14:26Is it causing people to not buy iPads?
1:14:28I don't know.
1:14:29Like, maybe customer satisfaction is disconnected
1:14:32from their bottom line in vague ways,
1:14:34but they do care about it, because that's their whole thing.
1:14:35It's like, we're trying to make great products
1:14:37that make people happy.
1:14:38And here's a case where they're intentionally choosing
1:14:40not to do something that they know will make people happy
1:14:42because of a fight they're having
1:14:43with a competitor about pricing.
1:14:45And like I said, it's okay to do that for a while,
1:14:48but the way it's shaking out doesn't seem like Amazon's
1:14:50gonna budge and customer satisfaction with these experiences
1:14:54is either still not going up to the level they know
1:14:57it could be or going down in the cases where applications
1:14:59have to backslide.
1:15:00So assuming that there's no rate change that could get
1:15:04Amazon to actually accept that and do everything directly
1:15:07through Apple, assuming that the only thing that would allow
1:15:09them to offer in-app purchases on Apple's platforms
1:15:12in a way that Amazon would approve would be to do what
1:15:16Google allows, which is to just have their own payment
1:15:18processing in the app, and Apple would just remove the rule that you can't do that. Do
1:15:23you think the net gain from that in overall Apple ecosystem customer satisfaction, assuming
1:15:30that anybody else could do that same thing, assuming that anyone, as I said earlier, assuming
1:15:33that King could put their own payment system in Candy Crush to make 30% more, and that
1:15:38any random app could put their own credit card system in.
1:15:40But you keep going back to your own payment system. No one is suggesting that. I would
1:15:44never suggest that people be able to do their own payment systems.
1:15:47So you're basically putting forth the idea that Apple should negotiate a lower rate with
1:15:51Amazon and that Amazon would probably accept a lower rate.
1:15:55It's not just Amazon.
1:15:56Say Amazon plays hardball and we will not give you a red cent.
1:15:58You'll never get anything if you don't.
1:16:01For example, Amazon's policy was, "If you don't let us implement our own payment, then
1:16:05screw you."
1:16:06And then I would say it's in Apple's interest not to ever do that because we'd say, "Well,
1:16:09you implementing your own payment system would make it worse for our customers."
1:16:12So it's not actually, "We're not better than our customers, so I'll use this and forget
1:16:15it."
1:16:16mean like Marvel Unlimited and all these other like comicsology had white label
1:16:19versions of their apps to other people so I don't know how it's gonna work out
1:16:21now that Amazon owns them but there's a potential for other people in the market
1:16:25to say well we'll do a deal for the people who own these comics and we will
1:16:28sell comics electronically and we will let them but you buy them from within
1:16:31our app and you would see the people who enter comics say well screw
1:16:33comicsology I'm not using them anymore you can't even buy inside the app I'm
1:16:36going to this other thing or I'm going to this description plan like those ones
1:16:38where you pay a monthly fee and you can read X number of comics like the
1:16:42competition hopefully at least in the realm of comics maybe not in the realm
1:16:45with books or anything else, would make it so that other people would spring up and say,
1:16:49"Well, you're not willing to pay Apple 2%, but I think 2% is a reasonable transaction
1:16:52fee and we're going to pay it and now everyone's going to come to our app and no one's going
1:16:55to buy through your thing because they don't want to go to your website to buy stuff."
1:16:58I'm looking at just what effect these kind of decisions would have on the entire iOS
1:17:03ecosystem and on all developers and all users of it. I don't see a scenario here where Apple
1:17:10could make a change that would dramatically improve
1:17:14the situation with Amazon stuff and would be a net benefit
1:17:18and wouldn't have too high a cost in user satisfaction,
1:17:23even ignoring the money Apple would lose on that reduced
1:17:26or lost commission.
1:17:28I don't see this as being a net win.
1:17:30I see bad people taking advantage of it
1:17:34and an erosion of trust in buying iOS apps
1:17:36and paying for things on iOS,
1:17:37which should reduce customer satisfaction.
1:17:40What would the bad people do with a reduced rate based on volume or otherwise?
1:17:44Yeah, the reduced rate, that's something that I think would probably only negatively
1:17:49affect Apple, but I also don't—again, I don't see Amazon taking that deal.
1:17:53And you're right, maybe someone else will, and maybe that'll be the situation.
1:17:56But see, I just—again, I don't see the big need for this.
1:18:00I mean, people are mad this week.
1:18:03They'll be over it next week.
1:18:05And even now, most of the anger is going to Comixology and Amazon.
1:18:08Apple's not even getting hit by most of it.
1:18:10Yeah, but the customer satisfaction with their iPads goes down.
1:18:12They're less satisfied with their product.
1:18:15Maybe it's like it doesn't reflect on Apple, maybe they blame Comixology, but what if the
1:18:18next time they need to buy a tablet, by then they've long since heard that this isn't a
1:18:23problem on Android and they read comics there and can buy them right in the app.
1:18:27Maybe that will change their decision.
1:18:29It's small, but these little things add up.
1:18:32Books I think is bigger.
1:18:33The Kindle app is bigger and the Kindle app has the advantage that I'm pretty sure you
1:18:35you could never buy them inside the Kindle app,
1:18:37so it's not like anything was ever taken away.
1:18:39But if people find out that, oh, if you get a Kindle Fire,
1:18:41you can buy within the app,
1:18:43that may attract them more to a Kindle Fire,
1:18:44especially if they start using their tablet mainly
1:18:46as a Kindle device.
1:18:48- I feel like, and you might have even said this earlier,
1:18:50because the iPad, or maybe it was Marco,
1:18:51because the iPad is so much better
1:18:54than everything else on the market,
1:18:56I don't think that customer sat,
1:18:58will be influenced negatively enough
1:19:01to level the playing field.
1:19:03- Yeah, you're probably right,
1:19:05And that's what Apple is counting on too, but these little things add up.
1:19:08And I was going to say that Sam the Geek in the chat room says that the white label versions
1:19:11of Comixology are keeping their in-app purchase.
1:19:13But like I said, now that Amazon owns them, I wonder how long those white label versions
1:19:17of Comixology app are going to be in the world at all.
1:19:21But clearly the people who are currently using them, I think the companies that put out the
1:19:24comics themselves actually white label them.
1:19:27Those people are highly motivated to get away for people with iOS devices to be able to
1:19:31easily buy their comics and apparently they have been willing to pay the 30%.
1:19:35I assume they will continue to be willing to buy the 30% and that could be a way that
1:19:39Apple quote unquote wins this one by basically saying, well, no one will use comicality anymore.
1:19:44We'll still get 30% and we'll get 30% from these other people instead.
1:19:49That's potentially true as well.
1:19:51Like I'm just tired of the game of chicken.
1:19:53I feel like it's gone on for too many years and I don't want to see apps coming onto the
1:19:59platform and we'll all just assume, well, of course you can't buy within the application.
1:20:02Of course you have to do this dance to go through a website and then like, some kid's
1:20:06gonna ask me, "Grandpa, why can't I buy things inside applications?"
1:20:10And I say, "Well, ten decades ago, three decades ago, wherever I went, I can't do math anymore
1:20:15because I'm old, Apple decided that they wanted to charge everybody 30% and everyone else
1:20:20decided they weren't gonna pay it.
1:20:21And Apple still makes the best tablets, but we have to do this because of the fight between
1:20:24these giant corporations."
1:20:25Wow.
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1:22:14- So are we done in the comics thing
1:22:15that we don't have anything to say about?
1:22:17- I didn't listen to the Back to Work episode yet.
1:22:19I'm still behind, so I don't know what Merlin had to say
1:22:21about it, but sorry if I repeated any of the stuff that he said.
1:22:25He mostly took the middle, moderate round of this is all more complicated than we understand,
1:22:30and we shouldn't be making assumptions like we understand everything going on with these
1:22:34big companies.
1:22:35Okay, well, I guess we didn't overlap. Although, I did talk about, I tried to add disclaimers
1:22:39as far as we know. Because who knows what overtures any one company's making to Apple,
1:22:43who knows what response Apple's making to them. We just know what these people announce
1:22:47publicly and what they end up doing.
1:22:49I don't think this issue's gonna be resolved anytime soon
1:22:51between Apple with their 30% rules
1:22:54and their no external payment processing rules
1:22:57versus Amazon and their desires
1:22:59versus customers and their experience.
1:23:00I just, you know, the Kindle app has been this way for years
1:23:03and it has not budged.
1:23:05Neither side has budged at all,
1:23:08so I don't see that changing for a very similar app
1:23:12with the same parties involved
1:23:14that has a much smaller audience.
1:23:15I just don't see it changing.
1:23:16The volume discount thing has the advantage that it lets everybody pretend that they didn't budge.
1:23:21Because Apple can say, "Well, we still apply the same rules to everybody." And other people say,
1:23:25"Well, we weren't going to do it, but we got Apple to change the rules." Because what that encourages
1:23:30is you are encouraged to drive more business through iOS. Sell tons of crap, because the more
1:23:36stuff you sell, the lower our percentage goes. And so that would let everybody save face. And
1:23:41like you said, maybe it wouldn't bring Amazon back to the table. But even if it'd ignore Amazon,
1:23:45If they're going to be butts about it, then fine. Tons of other people would be like, "Oh,
1:23:49now I am much more highly motivated to figure out a way to sell goods through
1:23:52the App Store," because if I just sell a little bit of them, fine, but if I sell tons of them,
1:23:57the percentage that gets taken goes down. Unfortunately, the people selling the most
1:24:01stuff for the App Store are the companies you mentioned who are using the existing in-app
1:24:05purchase system to sell digital coins to people for bazillions of dollars.
1:24:11- Right, well and there too, there is pretty much,
1:24:14besides Amazon, what other major examples are there
1:24:19that would have enough of an impact,
1:24:23that are inconveniencing customers enough,
1:24:27and are bad enough and inconvenient enough for customers
1:24:29that Apple would be more pressured to act
1:24:32beyond just, let's just keep our 30%
1:24:34'cause it's working great for us.
1:24:36- Yeah, I mean you're looking for potential things.
1:24:39Like if Apple wants some people to buy things through iPads,
1:24:44and I think they should, because I think that's
1:24:46a great way to buy a lot of content that can be digital.
1:24:49And I think it should use a single unified system
1:24:51that Apple controls for in-app purchases,
1:24:53so everyone is like, all the things about it that we like,
1:24:56if there was more of that, it would be better.
1:24:58So anybody who's gotten anything to sell that could potentially
1:25:00find its way through the invisible airwaves
1:25:02to your iPad should be encouraged to do so.
1:25:05Someone in the chat room brought up,
1:25:07look where the revenue is coming from.
1:25:09If it's all coming from the big guys,
1:25:10then they wouldn't want to change the rate
1:25:12because then every,
1:25:13they basically, Apple would be losing money.
1:25:15Like why would Apple ever do a volume discount
1:25:16if all their income or a huge amount of their income
1:25:19is coming from the big guys?
1:25:20Yeah, Apple would make less money.
1:25:22Like this is the problem with this whole thing
1:25:23is that people used to be like,
1:25:25oh, Apple runs the iTunes store at break even
1:25:27and it's not really a profit center.
1:25:28And oh no, the app store is like, yeah, they take a cup.
1:25:30It's really just enough to keep the lights on.
1:25:32But it has always been like Apple's,
1:25:34I don't know if it's their secret strategy or whatever,
1:25:36but it's been pretty clear.
1:25:37Like, you could see Apple five years ago
1:25:40rubbing their hands together saying,
1:25:41"Yes, ignore our breakeven businesses.
1:25:43"They're totally not there to make money.
1:25:44"It's just to make our devices more valuable."
1:25:47They know that it is, you know, this is what you want.
1:25:50The type of system where we don't have to do anything more
1:25:53and we magically get money.
1:25:54Like, people can drive more and more money
1:25:56through our systems.
1:25:57Like, we like that.
1:25:57The margin is better than having to make
1:25:59another metallic widget to sell to somebody.
1:26:02It's much easier to just simply let someone
1:26:04tap another button and send, get another 30% cut
1:26:07of a transaction is going through our system.
1:26:08And lo and behold, years down the line,
1:26:10suddenly Apple's businesses like iTunes and stuff
1:26:12that were, oh, just run at break even,
1:26:14are starting to make some significant money.
1:26:15And the app store, same thing, like, oh, it starts out
1:26:17as just enough for us to cover our costs or whatever.
1:26:19But I have a feeling that Apple would like it
1:26:22if these businesses stopped being break even
1:26:24and started making some serious money.
1:26:25And while people aren't paying attention,
1:26:26that's where they're going.
1:26:27So any potential plan that says, oh, we're gonna give you
1:26:30less revenue because of your volume discount,
1:26:32it's like Apple might be thinking,
1:26:35I know we've always kind of pretended this is like a break-even business, but if we're gonna do this
1:26:38It might actually be a break-even business and we're not Amazon. We don't we actually want profits. So
1:26:43there are forces against any
1:26:45idea like this but
1:26:48It's almost like I wish it would hurt them more because you're right that it's not hurting them enough
1:26:52That it's clear that they have to do this. They're gonna be out of business or they're doing that's totally not the case
1:26:56It's just like it's it's just like a little thorn in your side where you know, it could be better and someday
1:27:02You are going to have to explain to your mom who got a Kindle fire when she gets her iPad. I'll get the iPad
1:27:07It's better but on my Kindle fire
1:27:08I could buy the books and the thing you will have to explain that to her and good luck making it sound
1:27:12Reasonable. This is impossible. It's not reasonable. Apple's product is worse than this one small way and it it galls me
1:27:18Or she'll just get an iPad and just buy things and iBooks
1:27:21That's a fate worse than death
1:27:24Alright thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week fracture back blaze and new relic and we will see you next week
1:27:32[music]
1:27:34Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin
1:27:39'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:27:44John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:27:50'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:27:55And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:28:00And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:28:10So that's K-C-L-I-S-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A
1:28:22♪ It's accidental, accidental ♪
1:28:25♪ They didn't mean to ♪
1:28:28♪ Accidental, accidental ♪
1:28:30♪ Tech podcast so long ♪
1:28:33- You wanna talk about this weird test flight thing
1:28:38that we've been putting off forever?
1:28:39It's really old news now.
1:28:40- I've forgotten what it is by now.
1:28:42- So Bursley was acquired.
1:28:44Do we even know, like is there any actual confirmation
1:28:47that Apple was the acquirer?
1:28:48- The internet said so?
1:28:50- Right, like I think even that is not definite,
1:28:54like not confirmed, but TestFlight basically
1:28:57just like very quietly shut down.
1:29:00Like it stopped accepting new applicants or new customers
1:29:04to beta test the apps with it.
1:29:06And it's just like quietly shutting down.
1:29:09And they never made an announcement about this,
1:29:11they never explained it,
1:29:13it's just like a very, very quiet shutdown.
1:29:15And so the theory is that Apple bought them
1:29:19and they're probably going to integrate maybe first party,
1:29:24maybe Apple might actually integrate TestFlight-like
1:29:26functionality into the provisioning portal for iOS apps
1:29:29so that we could stop doing the stupid UDID dance
1:29:31with things like Hockey and TestFlight
1:29:33and other beta testing type things.
1:29:36But I don't know.
1:29:38I would love that to be the case.
1:29:41I would love for the story with TestFlight
1:29:43to be that Apple's building something like this in,
1:29:46and that's why it's shutting down.
1:29:48but first it was also a big mobile ad company, right?
1:29:51Wasn't that, or analytics, one of those things?
1:29:53So Apple might've wanted it for that,
1:29:55and TestFlight was this little side project they had
1:29:57that wasn't making any money,
1:29:58so Apple just made them quietly shut it down.
1:30:00Like it could be any of these things.
1:30:01- I would put money that they're going to do the thing
1:30:03that TestFlight did inside Apple,
1:30:05just because it makes so much sense.
1:30:07I mean, anytime you see a bunch of third-party sites
1:30:10popping up that developers are using,
1:30:12like lots of developers using HockeyApp,
1:30:14lots of developers are using TestFlight,
1:30:16Apple hates that.
1:30:19If there's something that third-party developers need
1:30:22to be done, there should not be a thriving ecosystem
1:30:25of companies that serve these developers' needs to do
1:30:28these things if the thing they're doing
1:30:31is something like-- it's common.
1:30:34So Apple wants to eventually have a solution to do that.
1:30:36If they bought this company and this company did that,
1:30:39I would say it's almost guaranteed
1:30:40that what they're trying to do is
1:30:41get something in-house that does similar to the thing
1:30:43that they did.
1:30:45See, I don't know.
1:30:46this is probably just like--
1:30:47- You're saying nothing can ever get better
1:30:48in the App Store, but it can sometimes.
1:30:50- Yeah, it's some kind of psychological barrier
1:30:53that I have where, especially in areas like this,
1:30:55like the provisioning of devices, the UDID limits,
1:30:59the beta testing being such a pain,
1:31:01I can't fathom Apple actually making
1:31:05a major improvement to this.
1:31:06And again, I would love to be proven wrong.
1:31:08- They'll probably still give you a fixed list of IDs
1:31:11that only rotates at a certain,
1:31:13there will still be plenty of things to annoy you, I'm sure,
1:31:15Like just the general experience of provisioning
1:31:18and the ability for people to easily download betas
1:31:21and distribute them.
1:31:22Like I'm assuming they will fix some of the annoyances
1:31:25but I guarantee there'll be more of the remainder.
1:31:26Just don't worry, code signing will still be terrible.
1:31:28So you'll have that.
1:31:29- Yeah, I don't know.
1:31:31I mean like I've heard rumblings here and there
1:31:34from the rumor sites and everybody that like,
1:31:36you know, this might finally be the year
1:31:37where Apple like really makes things better
1:31:40for developers in the App Store.
1:31:42So like, you know, the tools side,
1:31:43like the Xcode is fantastic.
1:31:45It's been improved a lot.
1:31:46You have to see the language has been improved a lot,
1:31:48and all the tools are really great.
1:31:50But then you cross over into the provisioning
1:31:53and the iTunes Connect and the App Store rules
1:31:56and the pricing mechanism and upgrades and trials
1:32:00and all that stuff that developers have been wanting forever.
1:32:03I have no faith that Apple will ever improve that stuff
1:32:08because they just haven't.
1:32:10The App Store has been running now for, what,
1:32:13six years, five years, and this stuff has almost not changed
1:32:17at all, there have been very minor changes.
1:32:20- But don't you think they've been kind of in the middle
1:32:22of a multi-year arc where they've been adding lots of stuff
1:32:25so fast that they haven't had enough time
1:32:27to essentially make it work?
1:32:28- Yeah. - You know what I mean?
1:32:29Like the whole, I mean there's the iOS thing,
1:32:32and there's like, they've been doing a lot of stuff
1:32:34to code signing provisioning profiles and betas,
1:32:37and like, and sandboxing, and the sandbox bookmarks
1:32:40on the Mac for opening up, like, they're adding all sorts
1:32:42things you can do and revving their compiler toolchain like they've kind of
1:32:46been outrunning themselves leaving a trail of crappy half implemented things
1:32:49behind them hopefully at some point they will get to a point where they can
1:32:53circle back and say that's what I hope they're doing by buying test fly it's
1:32:55like okay we had a way to do this before the way sucked for years now we finally
1:33:00have a chance to take a breath and say let's go back and instead of adding a
1:33:03new capability let's merely make it less incredibly unpleasant to do with
1:33:07something that you could previously do you know I mean I'm hoping that they're
1:33:11at that point. I mean iOS 8 maybe I'm moving that direction as well now that we're over the 7 hump.
1:33:15You know, so we'll see. Yeah, maybe. I hope you're right. I don't have high hopes or I don't have a
1:33:23lot of faith, but I hope you're right. It might not be this year. It could be next year. Yeah, maybe.
1:33:27Anything else going on? Nope. I quietly relaunched my website that's not on Tumblr anymore.
1:33:38What is the URL?
1:33:39www.caseylist.com. Really inventive.
1:33:42And that's my second crack,
1:33:46or third crack, if you will. I don't really have a name for it.
1:33:50What is the directory called for the project? It has to have something.
1:33:54It does. It's camel, C-A-M-E-L, which is
1:33:58kind of a port menu. I don't know how to pronounce the word,
1:34:02but you see it on Wikipedia all the time. It's a mash of my first
1:34:06middle names. But anyway, so yeah, so that's all written in Node and everyone's probably breaking it now, and that's okay.
1:34:12So what's it going to take to get you off of the using your last name as a pun thing? Is that an impossible task?
1:34:18It's never going to happen. No, I mean, I couldn't think of a good name. And I was, so that site, in many ways, is kind of a mashup of underscores and your two sites, both in terms of inspiration for CSS, inspiration for layout, things of that nature.
1:34:33nature. And, um, and so I, I looked at underscore site after I had decided to call this thoughtless
1:34:42and, um, he just calls his David Smith and obviously there's hypercritical there's Marco.org.
1:34:48I didn't like Casey list.com. Um, I don't have a fancy pants name, like hypercritical
1:34:53that I've been using for forever. Um, so I dunno, this was the first thing that I came
1:34:59up with that didn't make me gag, but I'm not in love with it either.
1:35:04Didn't you read that whole post that you wrote about not doubting yourself? You should
1:35:08not have a title of the thing that says that you're thoughtless.
1:35:12I knew that was coming. That's why, like I said, I'm not in love with what I've
1:35:15got here, but that's all right.
1:35:18You see, I've never seen you use the list last name pun in a way that wasn't self-deprecating.
1:35:24Well, yeah, and that's kind of my shtick.
1:35:27Well, because it sounds like less and there's not a lot of good words.
1:35:30Weightless, I don't know, whatever.
1:35:35But anyway, this is node and I I've been piddling with it a little bit lately.
1:35:40Let me do a clock on it.
1:35:42405 lines of code.
1:35:43Basically the way it works is there's a series of Markdown files in a, in
1:35:49directories that match the directories you see in the URLs, and then there's a
1:35:54header and footer Markdown file.
1:35:56And so if you go to any of these, any of these URLs and during fireball style,
1:36:01if you put dot MD at the end, it'll show you the source.
1:36:04And so I have a little bit of metadata at the top.
1:36:06And then other than that, it just processes the markdown files, throws on a
1:36:11header, throws on a footer and calls it a day.
1:36:13And so it's a 405 lines of, of node using several packages because I haven't yet
1:36:21been horribly burned by third-party software.
1:36:24And I know I'm pretty proud of it.
1:36:25I like it. It's not flawless, but I like it. I should call it flawless. That's what I should call it.
1:36:30There you go. Finally, you figured one out that is not self-deprecating.
1:36:35No, because that has "flaw" in it. It's like, "The flawless? Is this a list with the flaw?"
1:36:39It's not. It doesn't. It's like, you can't use the last name as a pun.
1:36:43I know, I know. I gotta think of a better name.
1:36:45That's great. Even your brag had a self-deprecating root in it.
1:36:51If this software didn't use Markdown, I might replace mine with it, but it does, so I won't.
1:36:56What's wrong with Markdown? I don't like it.
1:36:58You're a purist, right? Don't you write everything in actual HTML straight?
1:37:01Yeah, I find that, for me, I find it better in all ways than writing in a Markdown. I don't want
1:37:06to go through another translation. I'm going to publish HTML. I know how to write HTML. I write
1:37:12it. I publish it. There's no, I don't have to say, "How is this going to transform? I don't need to
1:37:16do a transformation." It's just, I don't know. That's how I work. I don't say that everyone else
1:37:20has to do that, but that's the way I do it.
1:37:22But anyway, most people seem to like Markdown,
1:37:23and so they make all these apps that work with Markdown,
1:37:25and if you don't want to use Markdown, it's not good.
1:37:27Well, for what it's worth, Mark--
1:37:30how am I-- I'm going to phrase this wrong, but Markdown is HTML?
1:37:33No, that's the other way around.
1:37:34Yeah, I know.
1:37:34You can just write HTML and Markdown too,
1:37:36but it's like, once I'm doing that,
1:37:37then what the hell is the point?
1:37:38Well, so what I'm saying is, with the-- so
1:37:40if you look at any one of these URLs and put the .md at the end--
1:37:43I did.
1:37:44So I'm looking at the ATP Shirts one as an example.
1:37:48You would have to have the at at and then, you know, the couple of metadata entries,
1:37:52but everything below those, everything below that can all be straight HTML.
1:37:56This looks, I know, but like this looks like my thing. Like I have the same format.
1:38:00I only don't have at ats. I just have metadata on the top. I just use the mail format where
1:38:04the first blank line ends the header section. And then I have the HTML.
1:38:08Yeah. I do something similar, which is I have, I have like header format on top.
1:38:13I don't know. Yeah. Keep talking. I'll, I'll show you one of mine.
1:38:17Mine's weird, but it makes sense to me.
1:38:21So that's what this is about.
1:38:23It made sense to me.
1:38:24I wanted to try something that I hadn't done before, which is Node.
1:38:28And I like the code.
1:38:31I don't love the code.
1:38:32A part of me wants to throw it on GitHub and embarrass myself, but I really want to fix
1:38:38a few things up before I do it.
1:38:40Like for example, it's a good thing I only have two posts on there because if I go past,
1:38:45I don't know, 10, it's gonna look ridiculous because I don't do pagination at the moment.
1:38:49You'll figure that out.
1:38:51Yeah, I mean, I actually already have a plan. I just haven't implemented it yet. I'm
1:38:55gonna do like the world's worst pagination, which is kind of a loose pagination. Once
1:39:00I get it worked out, maybe we'll talk about it in another after show. But yeah, so I'm
1:39:04pretty proud of it. It's white, not because, "It's Casey who always says white."
1:39:08It's white because I couldn't figure out a background color that I wanted.
1:39:12It's white, of course.
1:39:14But I don't know, I felt like I needed to spend all this time working out better CSS
1:39:19because I suck at CSS.
1:39:21For a brief moment, I thought about copying the Marco one color at the top and then everything
1:39:25else below.
1:39:26And then I looked at it the way it was and I was like, "You know, it's good enough.
1:39:30Why fuss over it?"
1:39:31So I'm pretty proud of it, as simple as it is, and maybe I'll open source it, maybe
1:39:36I won't.
1:39:37If you're even thinking about showing this code to anybody, it is a lot better than the
1:39:40code that's running my chat because I would never show it to anybody.
1:39:43I don't even like looking at it myself.
1:39:45It's bad, but it's not awful.
1:39:47There's definitely a lot of places where it could be cleaned up and spruced up and
1:39:53made a lot cleaner.
1:39:54I'm repeating myself in several places, but by and large, I don't think it's terrible.
1:39:59I mean, to be honest, how bad can you really screw up 405 lines of JavaScript,
1:40:02leaving aside the fact that it's JavaScript?
1:40:04I've seen a lot of bad JavaScript.
1:40:06Right.
1:40:07It's definitely possible.
1:40:09And the other thing is this, this, and I'm looking at the, uh, source that you
1:40:13paste in the chat, Marco, uh, this is not a link blog.
1:40:17I have no.
1:40:18I have no support for like a link post versus a regular post, but so it's just
1:40:24a blog, but I don't know, I dig it so far.
1:40:26Yeah.
1:40:27I don't have any support for link things either.
1:40:29Not that I ever post them, but I mean, if I did, I would guess I would go and add
1:40:33support to whatever the real, here's the real problem with adding links.
1:40:36Everyone has already used up all the obvious characters for indicating links.
1:40:39Yep, I completely agree. I 100% agree.
1:40:43There's 100% the problem.
1:40:45Well, you could steal my arrow afterwards. Is it arrow after arrow before?
1:40:48It's not your arrow. Everybody uses the arrow. And then Daring Fireball uses a star for none,
1:40:53and a lot of other people use it. Everyone uses the infinity for permalinks. And it's just like,
1:40:57there's no more glyphs left. So the game over.
1:40:59Well, what's wrong with just using the standard glyphs that everyone else uses?
1:41:03Because you want to be different, Marco. You want to be your own special snowflake.
1:41:06- Exactly, you wanna be a brand.
1:41:08- Well you can't be your own special snowflake
1:41:09'cause that's Dr. Drang.
1:41:10- The real problem with link blogs, I think,
1:41:13is that, you know, whether, there's two problems.
1:41:17Number one is like what the feed items link to.
1:41:21No matter which option you pick,
1:41:23people will be upset and confused.
1:41:25It's just different people.
1:41:26- Yep, that's true.
1:41:27- So that's one problem.
1:41:28There's no good solution to that.
1:41:30The other problem is when you choose a title
1:41:35and a length of the post, it's confusing as to whether
1:41:38you wrote this, whether that's your title of your post,
1:41:41and then some people will get to your link post
1:41:46permalink page and not realize that that big title
1:41:50at the top is a link to something else.
1:41:52- Well, I mean, you can avoid that by not making
1:41:54the title be a link to anything on the page
1:41:57when you're viewing it, you know what I mean?
1:41:59When you're viewing just the page that just shows
1:42:03that story, the title is not a link.
1:42:05Every place else the title is a link
1:42:06and then you have to choose where you want it to go.
1:42:08But I would say you would make it go to the,
1:42:09you know, I don't know, it's.
1:42:11- Like where does the link go in a link post
1:42:13on its promo page?
1:42:15- I would mostly say it goes to the story.
1:42:16Like I like the idea of linking from the text
1:42:20that you write to the thing you're talking about
1:42:22and not relying on the title to fill that role.
1:42:25- Then it's kind of redundant, but then I don't know.
1:42:27Like the big problem with link blogging
1:42:29is that all of these questions,
1:42:32like there's no clear good solution.
1:42:34Like whatever you pick is gonna have issues.
1:42:37- Yeah, you just have to pick one
1:42:38and people just have to get used to it.
1:42:40- Yeah.
1:42:41- The RSS one is worse,
1:42:42but most people don't seem to use RSS anymore these days,
1:42:44so that kind of takes care of itself.
1:42:45- I just use both.
1:42:46I have an alternate feed in my footer
1:42:47that has the other link style.
1:42:51- I just noticed that earlier today,
1:42:52which I'd never seen before, obviously.
1:42:54The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly about this
1:42:56was how I'm hosting it,
1:42:59which is to say that I put it on Heroku
1:43:02because for a one web dino, as they call it, it is absolutely free.
1:43:08And from what I can tell, this didn't get absolutely crushed under the load of live
1:43:12listeners.
1:43:15But what was unique to me was that when I went to deploy to Heroku, having never used
1:43:22Heroku before, I looked at how to do it.
1:43:27And what it amounted to was I needed to add a proc file
1:43:31to my source, which specifies that it is a website,
1:43:35not like a worker or anything like that,
1:43:38and its node and which node file to run.
1:43:42I needed to clean up my package JSON,
1:43:45which defines what my dependencies are, but that was it.
1:43:49And then I pushed to a Git repository that they set up,
1:43:53and suddenly I had a website.
1:43:55- All right, now I'm not using your system anymore,
1:43:57I thought it was generating static files, but I forgot that you're actually using it. Code runs when you yeah
1:44:02No, I got a static. Well, and so basically everything is generated on the fly lazily
1:44:09But once it's generated it's held in memory for some amount of time. I don't recall so you're right. It isn't static but
1:44:16Nevertheless, I would assume that it should hold up to some pretty heavy load
1:44:23Well, you can do the the cruddy thing which I considered doing before I decided even this was too much work with make a system
1:44:29of dynamic generates web pages and then just crawl it yourself to create your static pages and then just upload the static ones
1:44:35Maybe it's my own ignorance coming through but if I have everything in memory
1:44:39How is it going to be that hard to answer a gazillion requests?
1:44:44Like it's all there. It's rendered HTML in memory
1:44:48I just got to look it up from a hash and dump it to the to the
1:44:52to the request or to the response object.
1:44:55So what else is there to worry about?
1:44:58- That's the thing, I mean,
1:44:59with all these static blogging systems,
1:45:01static blogging is really great,
1:45:04but, and I use it on my site,
1:45:06but you can get almost all of the benefit
1:45:09from just caching.
1:45:11I mean, 'cause static blogging,
1:45:12you have to change a few things.
1:45:14If you do static, one of the main things is
1:45:16you have to serve the same markup to everybody
1:45:18and the same, like you have to serve the same content
1:45:21for every hit.
1:45:22You can't do server-side browser detection
1:45:25or device detection and altering what you send,
1:45:28mobile layout separately.
1:45:30You have to serve everyone the same markup,
1:45:31but with responsive design and with the removal of comments
1:45:35or even outsourcing comments to other services
1:45:37like Disqus where you used to embed a static JavaScript link
1:45:40and the thing works,
1:45:41if you relegate all dynamic functionality
1:45:45to JavaScript embeds or to CSS with responsive design,
1:45:50then it works.
1:45:50you can do that exact same thing
1:45:53either through a static system
1:45:54or just put like a caching proxy in front of your server
1:45:58and put like Varnish or Nginx in caching mode,
1:46:03put those in front of your server,
1:46:04just have it cache every hit for one second.
1:46:08That's it, cache every page it serves
1:46:09with a TTL of one second
1:46:12and you'll be able to tolerate
1:46:13almost every possible flood of traffic you will ever get
1:46:16even if the thing is being generated from a database
1:46:19on every hit that actually gets through.
1:46:21It's static blogging, it does offer high performance,
1:46:25but it also just offers a pretty strong degree
1:46:27of simplicity for deployment.
1:46:29- That's what I get, I'm not doing it for performance
1:46:31reasons, I'm doing it 'cause I'm cheap,
1:46:33and 'cause then you can deploy anywhere,
1:46:35super, like I don't need anything to run any code,
1:46:37and that's like, it's not just cheap,
1:46:39but like you have the most options,
1:46:40like it will literally work everywhere.
1:46:41There is no, you don't need to run anything,
1:46:43you don't need to have any software,
1:46:45there is no software, like that's,
1:46:47I mean, static blogging is not done for performance reasons.
1:46:49It's just mostly for just you have all the options
1:46:52in the world, it's gonna work everywhere,
1:46:54on every single hosting system you could possibly imagine.
1:46:56And yes, it will also happen to be performant
1:46:58in all of them, but that's not really why you're doing it.
1:47:01Like it just keeps--
1:47:01- But hold on though.
1:47:02There is software, they just move it.
1:47:04I mean, that's the thing, like you said,
1:47:05there is no software, but unless you're actually
1:47:06writing HTML pages, which most people are not doing,
1:47:09there absolutely is software involved
1:47:11and that has to be maintained and it has to run somewhere.
1:47:14It's just running on your computer.
1:47:16like the thing that generates the files.
1:47:18- Oh yeah, no, yeah, well I mean, yeah,
1:47:20but you control that.
1:47:21Like it's not, your deployment options are unlimited.
1:47:24You can move from one hosting provider to another.
1:47:26You don't have to worry if they don't support Node.js
1:47:29or have a different version
1:47:30or make some sort of complicated thing
1:47:32or need a different deployment.
1:47:33It's like you just are syncing files somewhere.
1:47:36And that's, you know,
1:47:36and if you have a site that actually gets traffic,
1:47:38then you don't have to worry about this, then fine, right?
1:47:40Some code deployed, but like,
1:47:42my site doesn't get any traffic.
1:47:43I want the cheapest possible thing I can possibly get,
1:47:46and that ends up being static hosting.
1:47:48And you know, you get what you pay for,
1:47:50but that's why I did it static,
1:47:52not because I was looking for performance.
1:47:54Although occasionally I do get traffic bursts,
1:47:56and it's nice that I don't have to worry about them
1:47:58because, again, it's static.
1:47:59I don't even use, it is super static.
1:48:02Some people are like, "Well, it's static,"
1:48:03but I use some server-side include system
1:48:07or something to put in headers.
1:48:08Nope, 100% static.
1:48:10- Yeah, and that's the thing is that,
1:48:12Admittedly, this is dynamic the first run, but like I said, you know as soon as I've parsed the markdown for any of these pages
1:48:18It's held in memory for at least half an hour
1:48:21If not more than that until I either deliberately toss the cash or you know at times out or whatever
1:48:28So this isn't a challenge or anything like that
1:48:31But I I feel like I should in principle be able to understand to
1:48:35Handle a crud load of traffic without crumbling
1:48:38Yeah, you should.
1:48:39But yours is static in the respect that really matters
1:48:42for performance in that you're not talking to a database.
1:48:45For example, the files that you're reading are static.
1:48:48They just happen to be filled with Markdown,
1:48:50and you do a little bit of post-processing in memory.
1:48:52And it's not even like-- Node is a single process,
1:48:54like event-driven, right?
1:48:56Yep.
1:48:56It's a single process.
1:48:57So you don't even have to worry about your cache getting
1:48:59divided through Apache Children or some other concern
1:49:01that you might have with-- yeah, you're fine.
1:49:04And really, just like me, no one's
1:49:06going to read your blog, so we're both fine.
1:49:08Except really, really no one's going to read my blog.
1:49:11Whereas nobody reads yours.
1:49:13We can compete.
1:49:13You'd be surprised how few people read my blog.
1:49:15Well, you never post, which that's exactly.
1:49:18If you never post anything, nobody reads it.
1:49:20I don't know how that works.
1:49:21And admittedly, I'm not good at that either.
1:49:22And I'm hoping this will make me better, but I don't know.
1:49:25So yeah, I don't, I just, it was a lot of fun.
1:49:27It was a lot of fun to do.
1:49:28I'm still, I'm still very impressed with how unbelievably simple Heroku was to
1:49:33deploy to because truly I had heard of it, but never really done anything with it.
1:49:38And it must have been well under half an hour, maybe even under 15 minutes between the time
1:49:43I said, "You know what?
1:49:44Let me just see if I can throw this on Heroku and if it'll work," and the time that I had
1:49:47it not only up there, but I'd updated my DNS to point to it.
1:49:51It was unbelievably quick and easy, and that really is awesome.
1:49:55Yeah, but is it $5 a month?
1:49:58It's $0 a month.
1:49:59Oh, that's right.
1:50:00You're doing that.
1:50:01Yeah.
1:50:02Yeah, he's beating you, Jon.
1:50:03Yeah, I guess that's true, but then he's stuck deploying someplace that supports Node.js.
1:50:06You know, they also support PHP.
1:50:08- Yeah, great.
1:50:09What are the limits?
1:50:11Like when do you start to start paying?
1:50:12- I have no, I honestly don't know.
1:50:14I mean, basically if I add more web front ends,
1:50:17then that costs money.
1:50:19But in terms of like bandwidth or, you know,
1:50:22I don't know if after 30 gigs used or something like that.
1:50:25- Well, you're not gonna hit the bandwidth limit.
1:50:26It might be like CPU time or something.
1:50:28What we need to do is get one of your stories
1:50:30to go up on like Hacker News
1:50:32and like a bunch of other sites simultaneously
1:50:33And the Daring Fireball link, and Marco will link it.
1:50:36And everyone will tweet it, and we'll
1:50:38see if you get into the pay zone.
1:50:40Because even though I don't have anything on my blog
1:50:42and don't post anything, every once in a while,
1:50:44some random story will land on some social media site.
1:50:46And all of a sudden, I'll have a spike.
1:50:48It's not a big spike, but it's big enough
1:50:49that I would worry that I would go out of the free zone
1:50:51and start getting charged some crazy amount of money.
1:50:54I love how that's how the world control Casey,
1:50:57by making him popular.
1:50:58Yeah.
1:50:59We need a way to test the system here, right?
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