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Connected

35: The Popsicle Rumor

 

00:00:00   (upbeat music)

00:00:02   From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode number 35.

00:00:11   Today's show is brought to you by lynda.com

00:00:13   where you can instant-stream thousands of courses

00:00:15   created by industry experts, PDF Pen Scan Plus from Smile,

00:00:20   the app for mobile scanning and OCR,

00:00:23   and Wealthfront, the automated investment service

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00:00:28   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined as always by Mr Federico Vittucci.

00:00:32   Hello Michael.

00:00:33   How are you Federico?

00:00:34   I'm doing well.

00:00:35   How are you?

00:00:35   I'm very well.

00:00:36   Thank you.

00:00:37   I'm very well indeed.

00:00:38   And I'm also here with Mr.

00:00:39   Steven Hackett.

00:00:40   Hello, Steven Hackett.

00:00:41   Hello Myke Hurley.

00:00:42   You've you didn't do the titles.

00:00:44   We were so formal there for a couple episodes and now we're just back to those

00:00:47   guys to do a podcast with.

00:00:49   Okay.

00:00:49   I'll go back with the editor in chief of maxstories.net, Mr Federico Vittucci.

00:00:54   Good evening Federico.

00:00:55   How do you do?

00:00:56   Yeah, that's better.

00:00:57   Hi, and I'm also here with

00:01:00   the managing director of five twelve pixels

00:01:04   The one and only mr. Stephen Hackett. Hey, and

00:01:09   we also joined by

00:01:12   Media conglomerate owner of six colors and the incomparable and the host of upgrading clockwise and relay FM our special guest this week

00:01:20   Mr. Jason snail you're fired. I'm so sorry

00:01:25   Hi Jason, how are you? Hi Myke. How's it going? Good. Is it safe to say connected has been

00:01:31   Upgraded this week. Oh my god. You're definitely fired again. I

00:01:37   Stand by my previous comment. I'm just trying to get everybody to find me basically Federico. You're next

00:01:43   So we have Jason today

00:01:46   Because we want to talk about photos and as I was preparing this episode. I realized just how little I know about it. So

00:01:53   We're gonna go for just to try and understand exactly what's going on with the photos app

00:01:59   But I believe that we have before that some a tiny tiny piece of follow-up in two tiny tiny topics

00:02:06   That's that's correct tiny is the good word for the the pre topic part of the show today

00:02:13   We spoke I guess several weeks ago about HBO

00:02:19   Now coming to the Apple TV and we speculated that you know

00:02:23   Hey Tim Cook was basically an HBO like ad guy for a little while during their event

00:02:28   maybe you know, what's the what's the business deal there and

00:02:31   Article came out this week saying that Apple is taking a 15% cut of Apple TV apps

00:02:37   Not just HBO now, but possibly others which is of course is is less, you know when you're doing an app

00:02:44   It's 30% This is 15%

00:02:46   Seems like a concession that they could they you know could make for

00:02:52   Guys like HBO you these big media companies

00:02:55   So that it feels like they gave away an awful lot then

00:03:01   Yeah, I mean yeah, I think so but if they want to make their box more valuable and they want to

00:03:08   Sell more of them, you know

00:03:11   Maybe it's they figure they can make it up or maybe they view it as an investment as opposed to like a business model for

00:03:16   the Apple TV itself

00:03:18   Hmm I

00:03:21   Don't know. What do you guys think? I?

00:03:23   Have no thoughts on American television. So I

00:03:26   Trust what Myke says that's my opinion. I

00:03:30   Don't know anything about American television. Oh

00:03:33   Well Jason then Jason you watch the TV you are American

00:03:39   I'm American. I have seen a television. I own a television. Mm-hmm. What would you like to know?

00:03:43   How does it work?

00:03:46   It's too complicated to explain how it works. It's a mess. Yeah, it's a mess

00:03:52   And it's getting better

00:03:54   I feel like this is the year where where there's been at least a little bit of a breakthrough with the HBO now

00:03:58   stuff and with the sling stuff of

00:04:01   making it

00:04:03   Over the top kind of video which means like not through a cable provider

00:04:07   possible anyway. I don't think it's gonna save anybody any money in the long run,

00:04:12   but I do think it's going to change, you know, people's options.

00:04:17   I just wonder what it was that pushed this to 15% rather than 30%. Like, I just,

00:04:25   it's interesting to think what led to that happening, because surely Apple

00:04:30   would want to take 30%, but clearly they've not been able to. I assume that

00:04:34   Maybe it's one of those situations where like Apple maybe needs the media

00:04:39   companies more than the media companies need Apple. I don't know.

00:04:44   Yeah that's that's sort of my general thought so. I guess we'll see.

00:04:49   Yeah I think I think the HBO Apple TV deal was good for everybody though

00:04:54   because like with HBO it metered demand because you had to use iOS or Apple TV

00:04:59   in order to get it.

00:05:00   And it was, so it was good for Apple as a publicity

00:05:04   for their platform.

00:05:05   And it was good for HBO because they got to try this stuff

00:05:08   out without it being like literally day one,

00:05:10   everybody gets it.

00:05:11   And I think that's good.

00:05:13   And in three months everybody will get it

00:05:15   and it will be on every device you own.

00:05:17   You know, we'll be capable of doing HBO now.

00:05:20   - It's Game of Thrones on your watch

00:05:22   as you're walking down the street.

00:05:24   - It doesn't seem dangerous.

00:05:26   - No, it'd be fine.

00:05:27   Okay guys, can I tell you before we move on to topics, another little shame secret of mine.

00:05:34   I've never watched Game of Thrones.

00:05:37   Along with me, I've never watched Game of Thrones.

00:05:39   Oh yes! Finally. Myke, thank you for being different with me.

00:05:45   And that was one of those things where I'm like, yeah, I know people say it's good, but now I kinda just don't want to watch it.

00:05:50   Yeah.

00:05:51   And you can send an email to Steven about this, by the way.

00:05:55   Oh yeah, yeah, as usual please email Steven about the stuff that Myke and I get wrong.

00:06:00   He really appreciates the feedback.

00:06:02   I haven't watched it either.

00:06:04   Oh, you guys.

00:06:06   [laughter]

00:06:10   I feel like we just disappointed our father.

00:06:12   Shame.

00:06:14   You need to watch the show with the murders and the naked people.

00:06:19   Come on, it's fun.

00:06:22   Does it mean we cannot eat dinner tonight, Jason?

00:06:27   You can't eat dinner until you watch TV.

00:06:29   I think that's backward from what it's supposed to be.

00:06:33   It's different.

00:06:34   California is a crazy place.

00:06:35   Yeah, it's true.

00:06:36   Upside down.

00:06:38   So topic zero today, as we record this April 14th, Apple announced WWDC, second week of

00:06:46   June, right?

00:06:47   the week of June 8th or 6th or, you know, sometime in there. We're going, I'm going,

00:06:56   Myke you're going, Jason you live down the street, so you'll be there.

00:07:00   I will be, yes, I've made my reservations for WWDC, which is that I'm going to be at

00:07:05   my house and then come into the city. That sounds like it's a...

00:07:10   Travel plans. ...difficult.

00:07:11   Yeah, fancy. You gonna be okay? Pack a lunch.

00:07:15   This is actually, I really love it because everybody I know comes to visit for a week.

00:07:21   It's pretty sweet.

00:07:22   Right.

00:07:23   So it's the same as last year, right?

00:07:25   It's a lottery, so you enter and then... is it a change this year that if you are picked

00:07:33   that you are immediately charged?

00:07:34   It's not an option to buy, it's that if you win the lottery you get charged for a ticket?

00:07:40   Is that a change from last time?

00:07:42   Do you guys know?

00:07:43   Yeah.

00:07:44   seen on Twitter anyway it's different so well it seems like it's maybe that Apple

00:07:48   is trying to stop people from applying multiple times because otherwise you end

00:07:53   up with multiple tickets if you get more than one right suddenly you get charged

00:07:57   30 grand on your credit card yeah which is which is not ideal not good it's not

00:08:02   good and also they're going all the way through to Friday with sessions this

00:08:07   time I saw that so generally people you know kind of winds down like Friday

00:08:13   morning there might be a few sessions but then people are kind of heading out

00:08:16   and then now a lot of our friends are staying through till Saturday just to

00:08:21   make sure they hit those those Friday sessions. Another nice change they are

00:08:25   streaming live all the sessions so a long time ago you have to wait. I don't think it's all of the

00:08:32   sessions I don't think it's all of them I think it's select sessions. Okay so

00:08:38   but so a long time ago you have to wait weeks and weeks for the videos

00:08:42   sometimes like a month or two. Now the last couple years they've streamed the

00:08:47   so the WBC opens with a public keynote and then the rest of it's behind the

00:08:52   developer NDA but if you were a registered developer you could download

00:08:55   the iOS app and watch the session videos there and at least the last couple years

00:09:00   those videos have been available really quickly so I know that my sort of

00:09:06   ritual is to watch the platform State of the Union which is like the afternoon

00:09:10   sort of unpack the keynote a little bit more. I tend to watch that first like on

00:09:15   the airplane back and you know I can just download it on my iPad and watch it

00:09:18   so this time it seems like they're you know maybe not all but at least select will

00:09:22   be streaming at the same time which is really great right like it really stinks

00:09:27   to be at a disadvantage because you couldn't go especially now that it's a

00:09:31   lottery right it's like kind of unfair if you can't get this you know your

00:09:35   competition is there and you're not and you're not getting the information you

00:09:38   need to be relevant.

00:09:40   Yeah, we'll be live streaming select sessions daily and posting videos of all sessions throughout

00:09:46   the week of the conference.

00:09:47   You can watch on the web or in the WWDC app.

00:09:50   Sweet.

00:09:51   That'll be fun.

00:09:53   It's always a good time.

00:09:56   What do you guys think of the crazy speculation on the invitations?

00:10:01   There's an Apple TV in the middle.

00:10:03   Oh, there's going to be a round watch as well.

00:10:05   There's going to be a round watch.

00:10:07   I tell you what, those are going to be all Moto 360s being gifted to people who go to

00:10:13   WWDC for free.

00:10:14   It's because Google Now is coming to iOS, they're just embracing it.

00:10:20   Just giving away those units left in the warehouse, probably.

00:10:24   Guys, can I start a rumor?

00:10:27   Yes.

00:10:28   I want this to be a rumor.

00:10:29   There's going to be popsicles in all of those flavors at WWDC instead of the juice.

00:10:36   Instead of the IMAX. There'll be like an orange round popsicle and like a

00:10:42   cherry square popsicle. Can you imagine the the headlines popsicles

00:10:52   rumored to be a WWDC according to well-connected Apple blogger?

00:10:58   We should move on.

00:11:00   Yeah, well, so, I mean, the arts in line with what they've done the last couple years, I

00:11:07   for one just like, yes, Apple's almost clever with this stuff, but like, it seems like a

00:11:13   big waste of time to, like, Apple's not gonna hide their secret announcement and like the

00:11:18   logo.

00:11:19   I mean, they hinted at it sometimes, but like, maybe we should all just move on with our

00:11:23   lives and just not worry about it.

00:11:26   It's my two cents.

00:11:28   It's really sad, by the way.

00:11:36   I skip over every blog post about it because it's just dumb.

00:11:39   Cool.

00:11:40   They have some transparent shapes.

00:11:43   Apple does things with shapes and color and transparency.

00:11:45   Cool.

00:11:46   You're so cynical.

00:11:47   You don't want to see the magic in the shapes.

00:11:50   Come on, Steven.

00:11:52   Wow.

00:11:53   You've got to see the wonder in the imitations.

00:11:58   I don't know if I'm having eight colors though.

00:12:00   Too many.

00:12:01   Come on guys.

00:12:03   But it's, I mean, yeah, I mean,

00:12:06   it's obviously it's the round-wrecked of like iOS apps

00:12:09   and it's the little circles of the watch apps, right?

00:12:13   Right?

00:12:14   Yeah, yeah, or the iPod Nano apps,

00:12:15   like the joke I made in Slack earlier.

00:12:17   (laughing)

00:12:18   Totally.

00:12:19   So it's SDK for the iPod Nano,

00:12:21   that's the second rumor.

00:12:23   Can you imagine that?

00:12:25   We're opening up app development

00:12:27   one of our other platforms. Everybody goes "Whooooo!" It's the iPod Nano.

00:12:32   Cricket. Cricket. Yeah, fist pump guy just walked slowly out of the

00:12:38   auditorium. So, you know, I think we're gonna unpack more WDC stuff over the

00:12:46   coming weeks. Clearly we're gonna see watch stuff, but the big news of the

00:12:50   watch right now is that pre-orders opened up the end of last week after we

00:12:53   recorded and I know several of us or not if not all of us pre-ordered so did you

00:12:59   guys get what you want are you happy with what you pre-ordered etc etc I'm

00:13:04   not sure personally because the website was in German so I'm pretty sure that I

00:13:11   managed to get an order in but I don't know German myself so I think it's

00:13:19   It's saying that my watch pre-order is processing and that my money still hasn't been taken

00:13:27   from my credit card.

00:13:28   Yeah, mine hasn't been taken yet either, so don't worry about that.

00:13:32   Okay.

00:13:33   You don't take the money until it dispatches, I think, or just before it dispatches.

00:13:38   Do you have a mic?

00:13:40   Do you have any… like there's a bunch of steps in the order webpage on your account.

00:13:47   Are you stuck on step two?

00:13:48   - I'm gonna say yes.

00:13:52   - You don't know?

00:13:54   - Not often times I heard no.

00:13:55   - What does step two mean?

00:13:57   - I think it's processing.

00:13:59   Step two is processing.

00:14:00   - Yes.

00:14:01   - Have you not just run like a Google translate on the page?

00:14:03   - Oh yeah, but sometimes, you know, it's like,

00:14:06   I don't want to run Google translate

00:14:08   because it's too much work.

00:14:10   So just try to guess what it means.

00:14:12   - Well, I mean, if you open Chrome,

00:14:14   it would just translate automatically for you.

00:14:16   Yeah, but it's just, you know, I just open the website, then I look at German words,

00:14:20   and, you know, I kind of wanted to have some kind of learning exercise to learn a few German words.

00:14:26   So now I know how to say "Schippmann", I know how to say other, you know.

00:14:31   By the way, it's not a multi-step process in any of the other countries.

00:14:35   It's only in Apple Germany that does that, because they really like steps in German.

00:14:39   Yeah, there's many.

00:14:40   I apologize to the Germans.

00:14:41   Is that racist?

00:14:43   It's German jokes, you know, these are the German.

00:14:45   the German. I love, I actually, that was my language in school was German so I

00:14:49   I could probably translate badly for you but I think you guys should

00:14:54   you guys should FaceTime each other so you could read it through his camera to

00:14:58   your phone. That's the future of language. Federico I am on the second step

00:15:03   processing items. See told you though there were gonna be steps. Mine is as

00:15:09   well although I ordered a second I ordered a second charger with the longer

00:15:13   cable and it is it's got a ship date of like before before the watch that's

00:15:18   gonna be a little depressing to have the charger and not be able to hook it up to

00:15:21   anything but um anyways anything else on watch stuff it's exciting well the Apple

00:15:30   is showing the the watch in Milan this week on Friday and I think at some kind

00:15:35   of a conference about design and furniture. I saw there was on Twitter an article about

00:15:42   this on a website called Wallpaper or something. There was also a comment by Jonny Ive about

00:15:50   this conference in Milan. I won't be able to go to Milan with such short notice and

00:15:55   also I've already tried the watch so it's not like I need to go there. I'm just waiting

00:16:00   if Apple comes to Rome eventually I suppose that we'll go see the watch in Rome.

00:16:06   Otherwise I'll just wait for my German watch to come to me or I'll wait for, you know,

00:16:12   the Italian launch date which we still don't know anything about.

00:16:15   It's kind of sad but, you know, Italy.

00:16:17   That's how it works.

00:16:20   Yeah.

00:16:21   I'm sorry to hear that Federico.

00:16:23   Yeah we're not first at anything besides, you know, food but that's not...

00:16:29   And this is another discussion, don't make me talk about the state of Viral, it's really

00:16:33   just sad.

00:16:36   Can we move on?

00:16:37   Of course we can.

00:16:38   Thank you.

00:16:39   We have Jason with us to talk about photos today, so let's get right to that.

00:16:43   Just first, allow me to thank our first sponsor this week and that's our friends over at

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00:19:18   Linda for the continued support of this show and Relay FM. So Mr. Jason Snell, I

00:19:24   I will introduce you again at this point.

00:19:27   - Hello. - Hello.

00:19:29   You are writing a book about photos, is that correct?

00:19:34   - I am.

00:19:35   I've written about half of it,

00:19:37   and in this funny way that the internet works,

00:19:40   I'm writing it for Adam and Tanya Anx to do Take Control,

00:19:43   and you know, tidbits,

00:19:45   and they've got this whole Take Control ebook series,

00:19:47   and so they said,

00:19:48   "Would you like to write this book about photos?"

00:19:49   And I said, "Sure."

00:19:50   And what happened is I wrote about half of it,

00:19:53   And they said, "Tell you what, we're gonna release the first half and charge people for it,

00:19:59   and then tell them that in a month or so, they can get the rest of it."

00:20:04   And I said, "Okay, you know, you guys know best."

00:20:07   So technically it's for sale, and the way I've been phrasing it is sort of a pre-order where you get the first half of the book.

00:20:13   But technically, yeah, you can buy the book right now, even though I can tell you that less than half now,

00:20:19   But there's a big chunk of it that I just haven't written yet. I'm writing over the next week or two. It's weird

00:20:24   That's the internet. So it's like the it's like the last Harry Potter movie. It's in two. It's in two parts

00:20:31   You know, you'll be able to do I mean you don't have to pay twice though

00:20:33   You just you pay once and then there'll be an update and everybody will get the update

00:20:37   But it is a little weird because now I'm committed like people have bought the book

00:20:41   So I can't say well, I'm just not gonna I wasn't gonna do that

00:20:45   But it's like people have bought the book now. They have invested in the those chapters that I haven't written yet

00:20:51   So I need to I need to do that. So I mean I'm deep in on writing this book about photos. Yeah, I

00:20:57   really love the description like

00:21:00   On the on the take control page that Jason answers a bunch of burning questions including where's the sidebar? I

00:21:06   Just like that like what's the deal with favorites? I just imagine this like a Jason Snow miniseries

00:21:14   - Hey, favorites, what are they all about?

00:21:17   - What's the deal with favorites?

00:21:19   So you have quite literally written the book,

00:21:24   or half of the book.

00:21:25   - Or, yeah, I have written half the book on this subject.

00:21:30   - So I guess I can see from their perspective,

00:21:32   they probably wanted to get it out

00:21:33   because photos is now out, right?

00:21:35   - Yeah, they did it about a week or two

00:21:37   before photos came out,

00:21:38   and it has something to do with their production schedule

00:21:40   and that they felt there was a lot of interest in photos

00:21:42   and people were asking questions.

00:21:43   And in some other context, you might have just put it up for pre-order.

00:21:47   But since they had half the book, which was a lot of introductory material,

00:21:50   they thought, why not just offer that now if people want to buy it now,

00:21:54   and then we'll just do the rest of the book when it's ready.

00:21:57   - Yeah, that's way better than a pre-order,

00:21:59   because you can actually start working through some of it.

00:22:02   I'd like to think that part of the bit that people are getting

00:22:05   is the setup process.

00:22:06   They're not getting the end bit, you know?

00:22:09   - Right, right, yeah.

00:22:10   It's a lot of the intro—

00:22:11   I mean, essentially, it is the first half of the book.

00:22:13   it's not scattered throughout,

00:22:14   and so it's more introductory and setup stuff.

00:22:18   - So, when I was planning out this episode,

00:22:21   I kind of realized how little I personally know

00:22:24   about the Photos app.

00:22:26   It's kind of been one of those things I knew it's coming,

00:22:28   and then I kind of forgot about it for a while,

00:22:31   and then it's just been one of those things

00:22:32   where it's like, I know it's there,

00:22:34   but fundamentally I don't know a lot about it.

00:22:37   So I wanna ask some basic questions of you,

00:22:39   and then maybe, we've also had some listener questions

00:22:42   as well for some more specific things.

00:22:43   But what is photos.app?

00:22:46   Like, and why is it different to iPhoto or Aperture?

00:22:49   -Well, Apple announced it last year

00:22:52   and said it was the successor to iPhoto.

00:22:55   And then, like, a month later,

00:22:58   they didn't even release a press release.

00:23:00   They actually called me and said,

00:23:03   "We want to tell you something about Aperture,"

00:23:06   which was, "It's going to go away."

00:23:08   and Photos is the replacement for Aperture as well.

00:23:11   So that's how Apple has pitched it,

00:23:14   at least pitched it last year.

00:23:16   Looking at it, Photos is iPhoto redone.

00:23:20   It's essentially like a new version,

00:23:22   a rewritten version of iPhoto.

00:23:24   I'm a little surprised they didn't just call it iPhoto X,

00:23:27   you know, iPhoto 10,

00:23:28   but I think they're trying to get away from the i-whatever.

00:23:31   So it's just Photos app,

00:23:33   but it is very much a rethinking of iPhoto,

00:23:37   and it's got some new features,

00:23:39   and it's got some features that are removed.

00:23:41   It's not really a replacement for Aperture,

00:23:43   although they say that, and it will import Aperture libraries,

00:23:46   because a lot of the super fiddly technical,

00:23:50   professional-ish features of Aperture just aren't in it.

00:23:53   So it's very much a kind of like next-generation iPhoto.

00:23:58   -So whilst it doesn't replace Aperture,

00:24:01   Aperture is dying, right, at the same time?

00:24:03   -Yeah, they're not updating it anymore.

00:24:05   They said that they would update it

00:24:07   for any compatibility reasons with Yosemite,

00:24:09   which they did, I believe, and that's it.

00:24:12   So people, the way I've been phrasing it,

00:24:15   and it's actually in the book, I phrase it this way,

00:24:17   it's a little bit like when Final Cut did Final Cut 10.

00:24:20   The old version of Final Cut didn't stop working.

00:24:26   You could still use it.

00:24:27   People were up in arms about how little Final Cut Pro 10 did

00:24:31   and then over time, Apple added in more stuff.

00:24:34   I think that is at least the hope that Aperture users could have about photos, is that since

00:24:38   Apple has said this is a follow-on for Aperture as well, maybe what will happen is that in

00:24:43   the next year we'll see them add some more Aperture-like features to photos. It's possible

00:24:48   that they'll do that. It's just not there right now. Right now it's a much simpler kind

00:24:53   of app. It's very much in line with what you'd expect out of iPhoto.

00:24:56   Right, and you know, apertures going away shouldn't be all that surprising.

00:25:01   Right?

00:25:02   I mean, rumors from way back in the day of like, around like version 1.5 and like long

00:25:07   time ago rumors that, you know, Apple had blown up the aperture team and that it was

00:25:11   going to go away and, and even in this transition, they're, they're pointing people to Lightroom,

00:25:15   right?

00:25:16   Like, I think even Apple has said to customers that, you know, Lightroom is kind of the way

00:25:20   forward if you're looking for something more professional.

00:25:23   And I do wonder are they going to bring some of that stuff down because the reality is

00:25:28   photos, especially the editing tools, like yes, it is not as robust as Aperture clearly,

00:25:34   but for a lot of people, it's definitely powerful enough.

00:25:38   And so I wonder if they're just going to aim for like the middle 70 or 80% of people and

00:25:43   just let Adobe take the high end.

00:25:45   I don't know if they see it as a worthwhile investment to bring something like Aperture

00:25:49   back.

00:25:50   I agree.

00:25:51   And I, that's why I am a little bit baffled about their statement that, you know, Photos

00:25:57   is for both iPhoto and Aputure users that they made last summer.

00:26:02   And you know, they haven't talked about it since then, so, you know, we'll see.

00:26:07   You could theoretically through extensions in Yosemite, you could do more with it, or

00:26:12   they could add features to it, but I kind of agree that for most people, this is all

00:26:18   you're gonna need and does Apple even want to chase that extra stuff or do they want

00:26:23   to just say look there are other apps out there that'll do a better job if you really

00:26:26   wanted to do more. I mean it doesn't do it would be nice if it did something like support

00:26:30   an external editor so that you could edit it in one of those tools you could edit something

00:26:34   in Photoshop and then bring it back in when you were done and it doesn't even do that

00:26:38   now so there's some features they could add that basically said look it's open now you

00:26:42   can add other stuff to it you know but we're not going to do that but it doesn't even do

00:26:46   that. You also can't even, and this is an iPhoto feature, you can't do, you can't

00:26:50   add geotagging to photos after the fact in photos. You can't, like, take a bunch

00:26:55   of photos that you took with some device, some camera that doesn't have GPS stuff,

00:26:59   and then, like, put it on a map and say, "This is where I took those pictures."

00:27:02   Doesn't do it. It's just gone. So they've got a bunch of things that they need to

00:27:06   bring back even from iPhoto, but they could do something like edit an

00:27:10   external editor feature that would be, you know, it would not be Aperture, but at

00:27:15   least it would let you use other people's apps who want to do things that

00:27:18   are more fancy than what they're ever gonna do inside of photos. Right, I mean

00:27:23   they already have that on iOS with iOS 8, you know, with photo extensions like

00:27:28   one of those key things they brought up and, you know, you have something in the

00:27:32   camera roll and or in the photos app and, you know, pull in editing tools from

00:27:37   another application and all that hard, you know, all that hardware or hardware

00:27:42   all those hard connections and stuff like that's all wired into Yosemite as

00:27:46   well so I hope you're right that some developers if not Apple some third

00:27:50   party developers take advantage of that you know you could see photos kind of

00:27:54   become this hub of all these other tools and utilities that you can use as needed

00:27:58   not unlike something like Photoshop and bridge where you can go out and buy

00:28:02   plugins that give you more functionality it would be nice to see photos sort of

00:28:06   grow up a little bit because it it's weird right because photos is a 1.0 as

00:28:11   as it stands today, but it's really not,

00:28:13   because iPhoto is a decade old.

00:28:14   So, you know, for me, at least, there's this tension of,

00:28:18   there's something new, but something that also

00:28:20   is very not new at the same time.

00:28:23   And so something like the GPS tagging, it's like,

00:28:26   well, why is that gone?

00:28:27   Like, you already had it working.

00:28:29   So hopefully they'll just be rapid,

00:28:31   like they have been on Final Cut Pro X,

00:28:33   to get this stuff back in in the subsequent months.

00:28:36   - Yeah, it feels like they rewrote it.

00:28:38   I mean, it feels like this is much more of a 1.0,

00:28:41   and they were targeting a certain set of features.

00:28:44   But it feels, if they didn't rewrite it,

00:28:47   they certainly did a lot of work that feels new,

00:28:50   because it's so much faster than iPhoto was.

00:28:53   It's shocking. - Yeah, well,

00:28:53   it doesn't make your fans start up the second you open it.

00:28:56   I mean, iPhoto really, there the last couple years,

00:29:00   performance kind of fell off a cliff.

00:29:01   I mean, I've got 70 gigs of photos in the Photos app,

00:29:06   and on a MacBook Pro, I can just scroll through it

00:29:08   and occasionally I catch it drawing thumbnails,

00:29:11   but most of the time it's just really smooth and really quick,

00:29:14   which is quite impressive.

00:29:17   And I'm sure 70 gigs is not even the biggest you could go,

00:29:19   and it'd still be that way.

00:29:22   -So how does the iCloud Photo Library

00:29:26   factor into all of this?

00:29:28   Like, are they one and the same thing?

00:29:30   Are they separate?

00:29:31   Can you run them separately independently of each other?

00:29:34   Are these kind of like photos on the Mac

00:29:36   and iCloud Photo library all kind of tied in together?

00:29:41   -So, photos can be run without iCloud,

00:29:45   and then it's very much like iPhoto.

00:29:48   It's a standalone thing.

00:29:49   It just keeps your photos on your computer.

00:29:51   You can turn on iCloud Photo Sharing,

00:29:55   which is the feature that was introduced with iOS,

00:29:59   what, six, five, six? -Let's go with six.

00:30:02   Let's go with six. -Something like that,

00:30:03   where you can say -- or maybe it was five --

00:30:06   where you can say like, hey, here's a shared album

00:30:09   and we can all put pictures in it.

00:30:10   It supports that.

00:30:12   It supports PhotoStream so that it can optionally put,

00:30:16   you know, put new photos onto that 1000 photo PhotoStream

00:30:19   and it can also import from the PhotoStream on devices

00:30:23   like iOS devices that are previous to the OS versions

00:30:27   that have supported PhotoStream

00:30:28   or support cloud photo sharing,

00:30:32   but they support PhotoStream.

00:30:33   You can still kind of interact with them

00:30:35   even though they can't, on older versions of iOS,

00:30:38   they can't have access to the whole photo library thing,

00:30:42   they can have access to the photo stream part.

00:30:44   So it's sort of like a backward compatibility thing,

00:30:46   it does that.

00:30:47   And then it supports iCloud photo library,

00:30:49   which is the big one.

00:30:50   That's the one where you,

00:30:52   it's uploading your full resolution images,

00:30:56   unlike photo stream, which I think does a down res,

00:30:58   full resolution images into the cloud.

00:31:02   You have to pay for storage from Apple

00:31:04   and their rates aren't particularly good compared to a lot of their competitors, but what you

00:31:09   get out of it is integrated in with the OS and with the software.

00:31:13   And then once you've got iCloud Photo Library turned on, you can also do something which

00:31:18   is really nice for people who've got Macs with SSDs in them especially.

00:31:21   There are two options.

00:31:22   You've got "Download originals to this Mac" is an option, and that basically says, "Look,

00:31:28   all my photos are on my hard drive."

00:31:30   But they also have this option called Optimize Mac Storage, which is dynamic.

00:31:34   It basically says, look, all your photos are in the cloud, they don't have to be on your

00:31:38   local hard drive.

00:31:39   And I mentioned SSD Macs because my photo library is so large that none of the computers

00:31:45   that I use or that my wife uses on a daily basis have a big enough drive to store all

00:31:51   our photos.

00:31:52   So right now we don't see all our photos unless we want to plug in a really slow USB drive

00:31:58   use iPhoto, which is even worse, right? It's super slow. Slow upon slow. And now, now I

00:32:04   have access to my entire, right now I'm still importing them, but I've got like 36,000 photos

00:32:11   that I'm looking at right now in my iPhoto library on my iMac with the SSD. There's no

00:32:15   way it could fit all of those, and it doesn't have to. So, you know, it's got some of the

00:32:19   ones on there, and it kind of looks at how much storage space it's using, and it can

00:32:22   delete as it needs to, but if there's a photo that's not on here and I double-click on it

00:32:28   to look at it, it just downloads it off of iCloud. And then I can do whatever I want

00:32:32   and I can edit it and those edits go back to iCloud and the whole thing.

00:32:37   How have you found the performance to be on the iOS side? So during the, when it was still

00:32:43   in beta, I imported all my stuff out of my crazy Dropbox folder system, turned it on.

00:32:48   It took a while to upload, but you know, I've got decent internet at home. It took it a

00:32:52   couple days. But I could never get my iPad or my phone to see the complete library. Photos

00:33:00   it would load some of them, but it never seemed to finish. How has your experience been at

00:33:06   that sort of angle?

00:33:09   It's actually pretty good. I'm looking at my albums right now on my iPhone, and I've

00:33:15   I've got all the albums they, well, not all the albums,

00:33:18   smart albums don't sync, grr, but regular albums do.

00:33:22   So I've got all of these albums that I created in iPhoto

00:33:26   are now listed in the albums view.

00:33:27   And I can open any of those up, including the all,

00:33:30   you know, the all photos view with 37,000 pictures

00:33:33   or whatever.

00:33:34   And, and I think it works pretty well.

00:33:37   It does, it's sort of like summary view

00:33:41   where it tries to simplify it.

00:33:43   but I'm scrolling through on my iPhone 6 right now

00:33:46   and I've got like 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

00:33:49   I mean, they're all there with all those photos.

00:33:52   And if I touch and hold,

00:33:54   I can do the scrub thing through all of those photos.

00:33:57   And so, yeah, theoretically,

00:33:59   I have access to this entire library.

00:34:02   And if I tap on one of the images,

00:34:04   it brings up a low res preview

00:34:06   and there's a little clock icon essentially in the corner

00:34:10   that sweeps around.

00:34:11   when that's done the full rest preview drops in.

00:34:16   Yeah, I do wonder, you know, if it was... I was in a weird time with the beta. The other issue I had with it, I went to go...

00:34:25   when I was just playing with it, thinking I was gonna write about it, I tried

00:34:30   turning the iCloud footer library off and then back on and it was like, "Well, hey,

00:34:35   you know, you've got a mismatch here," and it didn't really put them back together

00:34:40   very well and actually had it like removing local photos before I caught it

00:34:44   which was stressful and so I've got it off still and I'm not like super eager

00:34:50   to turn it back on. I feel like it's more solid now. I ended up I had an issue

00:34:57   with the beta that it turned out it was I started using the OS 10 you know

00:35:04   10.10.3 beta that has the photos in it and so I started uploading like

00:35:07   10,000 or 15,000 photos to iCloud. And then I was trying to sync my iPhone and my iPad

00:35:15   with movies and stuff for my trip to Europe, and my iPhone was like, "Yeah, I'm out of

00:35:20   space." And I thought, "How is that even possible?" And it was something weird about the iCloud

00:35:26   photo library filling the space of the phone. But once I updated to—in that case, I updated

00:35:32   it to the latest 8.3 beta, and I did the latest version of iTunes, and once I was all running

00:35:42   the most current stuff, it all started to work okay. And I would say right now, because

00:35:47   I'm on the finals of 8.3 and the most recent version of iTunes and the most recent version,

00:35:51   10.10.3 of OS X, now everything seems to work okay. That said, I've had people ask me, "Do

00:35:58   you trust iCloud to back up your photo library?" And so you just don't have that local copy

00:36:03   anymore. Ah, you know, I have a Mac Mini that's a server that's got a big hard drive attached

00:36:08   to it, and I've got it set to download everything. And then I back that up again, because I don't

00:36:14   want to lose those photos, and I am a little worried that there's going to be some crazy

00:36:18   sync problem. But, you know, right now what I've seen is that it's kind of fulfilling

00:36:24   its promise that all of a sudden all my devices have access to, at the moment, 36,807 photos

00:36:32   and 864 videos, and there's probably another 10,000 that still have to go up, that upload

00:36:39   very slowly over time.

00:36:42   But they're all there, going way back, and that's pretty cool.

00:36:47   That's what I was looking for all along, was that ability to see everything instead of

00:36:53   to shuttle around a USB drive with a couple different libraries in it because

00:36:57   iPhoto couldn't handle a library that was big enough to hold all the pictures

00:37:01   and stuff like that. Right. It really seems, you know, in your situation where it's all

00:37:06   working smoothly, it really seems like the fulfillment of what Jobs said when

00:37:11   they introduced iCloud that, you know, before, you know, ten years ago, Digital Hub, the

00:37:15   computer was the center and all these devices revolving around it and now the

00:37:20   the Mac is just another client and the truth is in the cloud is sort of his you

00:37:24   know the statement out of that keynote that I remember clearly. It really seems

00:37:29   like that right that you know with iTunes match I can have all my music

00:37:32   everywhere or let alone any of the third-party streaming services and now

00:37:36   with this I can have all my photos with me everywhere because this this

00:37:40   infrastructure is tying it all together we're not running around syncing our

00:37:44   iPhones over USB anymore but just magically over the air I have all my

00:37:48   content with me no matter what. And that really, like standing back and looking at this from

00:37:53   the outside, that really feels like the future that I can have all of my albums, all of the

00:37:58   pictures of my kids, everything, like just on my phone. And I don't have to worry about

00:38:03   what I have locally or not anymore. And blurring those lines while scary to a nerd is definitely

00:38:09   feels like something for the future.

00:38:11   Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the dream, right? I theoretically I'm living the dream now.

00:38:16   I'm paying potentially $20 a month for the privilege

00:38:20   because I'm unclear whether I'm going to have 500 gigs

00:38:22   or a terabyte of storage that I have to pay for Apple,

00:38:25   and I'm not really thrilled about that price,

00:38:27   but it's really easy to use.

00:38:29   Right now, I would say the big place

00:38:31   where Apple is falling down here

00:38:33   is not in once you get it up and running.

00:38:35   It's that uploading it is kind of a pain

00:38:38   because Photos tries very hard to upload your library

00:38:42   as quickly as it can,

00:38:44   and I've heard from a lot of people who thought that their internet was going out, and I thought

00:38:48   my internet was going out, and it turned out, no, it is, Photos is, and iCloud really, is

00:38:53   saturating your connection, trying to upload all this stuff, and in fact it does it even

00:38:58   when your, when Photos isn't open, it's still doing it in the background, and the controls

00:39:04   you have over it are a pause button that's paused for 24 hours, and that's the only control.

00:39:10   It's not great.

00:39:11   Well, I mean, you think about Backblazer, Crash Plan or something, they'll let you set

00:39:15   bandwidth or it'll try to set the bandwidth dynamically and not eat all your bandwidth

00:39:18   or it'll only work at night, only work while you're sleeping or whatever, only won't work

00:39:22   when the computer is idle, and this seems to have none of that.

00:39:25   It just takes your whole connection and tries to upload everything as fast as it can.

00:39:30   And it can be a CPU hog as well.

00:39:32   I mean, I had it several times when I was uploading my initial batch of photos as closed,

00:39:37   I didn't have it paused. Go look at Activity Monitor and not only is it saturating my network connection,

00:39:43   but it is destroying my CPU and I

00:39:47   think they, you know, maybe that's better in the final version of 10.10.3, but I think they're gonna need to offer,

00:39:53   if they're not gonna offer more controls over it, at least make it smarter where it's like, "Hey,

00:39:58   I'm doing things on my network connection. Hey, I'm doing things to my CPU. Why don't you back off a little bit?"

00:40:03   You know something, you know, like Backblazer crash plane, you know.

00:40:07   Those things even have like hey pause for two hours. So I'm recording a podcast. I don't want to back up to the cloud

00:40:11   But you're right photos is a pause button pause for one day

00:40:16   And so I would do that in the morning and then I got home

00:40:20   put my MacBook Pro into power and Ethernet and let it back and let it do its thing overnight when you know who cares if it

00:40:26   if it

00:40:27   Saturates the network when everyone's asleep, right doesn't matter, right?

00:40:31   Yeah, I think I think that's exactly it. So Jason. What are some of your

00:40:36   favorite features and some of your annoyances about photos? Well, so biggest

00:40:44   annoyances, like I said, I think the upload thing needs to be smarter.

00:40:49   And I think the... what else? I mentioned the GPS thing. I'm unhappy about the fact

00:40:57   that you can't geotag photos once they're in, because that essentially

00:41:00   means that if you want to have geotagging on your photos from your SLR

00:41:03   you need to download them using image capture and then use a third-party

00:41:07   utility that will put GPS data on them or geotag them either arbitrarily by you

00:41:14   or using GPS tracking recording that you made on your iPhone while you were

00:41:19   taking the pictures. I mean there are lots of tools that do that but you have

00:41:21   to do that and then bring them in and then they'll work. So those are

00:41:27   I would say annoyances. I'm annoyed that smart albums don't sync.

00:41:35   Otherwise, I'm pretty impressed. It's fast. The editing tools are good.

00:41:40   They don't have spot editing tools. So, I mean, the idea that you would edit

00:41:46   a photo and find some, you know, take a brush and do some fine retouching of photos,

00:41:56   It's just, that's sort of not the point.

00:41:59   That's not what they're doing.

00:42:00   And again, I'm not sure I mind that,

00:42:02   but it could be, you know,

00:42:09   they could do a little bit more.

00:42:11   I want to be mindful of this being a 1.0.

00:42:13   They could do more, but it's early yet.

00:42:15   I'm very impressed with how fast it is though.

00:42:18   That really is my note.

00:42:19   The fact that it's fast and it holds my whole library,

00:42:22   that's what I was asking for.

00:42:24   Everything else is kind of a bonus.

00:42:25   I should mention the other thing that is weird is videos,

00:42:28   because it imports all your videos,

00:42:30   but it doesn't really know how to do anything

00:42:32   with your videos.

00:42:32   So they just sit there and you can play them.

00:42:34   It's not like you can edit them.

00:42:36   I'm not sure, you might be able to send them to iMovie

00:42:38   or something, but it's not like there's integration there

00:42:40   of any kind.

00:42:42   And that's weird.

00:42:43   It supports slow-mo and it'll let you see the slow-mo

00:42:46   and all of that.

00:42:47   But it's just, I find myself writing the book,

00:42:50   writing about like watching a movie or looking at a photo.

00:42:55   and it's like, I always want to just say,

00:42:57   your photos are in photos,

00:42:59   but your videos are also in photos,

00:43:00   but it doesn't really do anything with them.

00:43:03   That's a frustration, too.

00:43:04   I'm not quite sure if Apple has figured out

00:43:06   how to view photos.

00:43:09   You almost want a videos application

00:43:11   that is looking at iCloud,

00:43:13   but is not focused on photography,

00:43:17   or integrate that into iPhoto or iMovie somehow,

00:43:20   because right now the videos feel like

00:43:23   they're a second-class citizen.

00:43:26   So there were some questions that came in from listeners and quite a few of them

00:43:29   actually we've

00:43:31   answered, or Jason you've answered over the course of this, but I have two quick ones

00:43:35   and they're quite specific so you may or may not

00:43:38   know the answer. So this is from

00:43:40   a friend of the show, Dan Provost on Twitter.

00:43:42   Is there any way to convert flags from

00:43:46   Aperture into favorites in iPhotos? Do you know about that at all?

00:43:52   So there's a lot of weird conversion that happens.

00:43:55   I think maybe flags come in as favorites.

00:43:58   And if they don't, and there's no flag concept in photos,

00:44:02   instead there's a heart.

00:44:04   So it's a favorites.

00:44:05   I think those convert.

00:44:07   And if they don't convert to favorites,

00:44:09   they convert to a keyword.

00:44:11   Mostly what they've done,

00:44:12   what Apple has done is tried to save the metadata.

00:44:15   And if there's metadata types

00:44:16   that they don't support anymore,

00:44:18   it's not like they get thrown away.

00:44:19   They get turned into keywords.

00:44:21   So like, there are no star ratings for photos anymore.

00:44:24   You can't rate, this is a three, this is a four,

00:44:25   this is a five, you can't do it.

00:44:27   There's just favorites.

00:44:28   But, if you have a photo that was rated three stars

00:44:31   in iPhoto and you import it,

00:44:32   it has a keyword of three stars.

00:44:35   And in fact, if you have a smart album that says,

00:44:37   "Show me all the ones that are three stars or above,"

00:44:40   it will get converted into a smart album that says,

00:44:42   "Show me anything that's got a keyword of three stars

00:44:46   or four stars or five stars."

00:44:48   It does the conversion for you.

00:44:50   So I think at the worst, what you'd end up with is a flagged keyword,

00:44:55   and you could find all of the flagged photos and then mark them all as "favorite,"

00:44:59   and then you would be there.

00:45:00   But I think they may just automatically take flags and turn them into favorites,

00:45:05   since they're essentially that same concept, which is they're either marked or they're not.

00:45:10   - And Eddie Lee has asked, "Can I uninstall iPhoto or delete my iPhoto library after importing?"

00:45:18   Yes, you can. You know, deleting the library isn't going to save you a lot of space because

00:45:26   the way Apple has done this, and I wrote a thing on six colors about this, they're using

00:45:30   hard links, which basically means Apple didn't want you to have a 500 gigabyte photo library

00:45:38   and then install photos and have it say, "Yay, we want to make a photos library. You'll need

00:45:44   another 500 gigs free because who has that, right? So they used hard links, which means

00:45:50   that it's... I think iMovie maybe uses it for something, but it's basically what Time

00:45:54   Machine uses to make references that are more than just aliases to all of your files. And

00:46:00   the end result is that they're able to create a photos library that is essentially referencing

00:46:04   the same files as your iPhoto library is, so it doesn't double the disk space that's

00:46:10   required. But it's not like an alias where if you delete the old one, the new one breaks.

00:46:16   Hard links, if you delete or edit one, the other one remains the same. So what that means

00:46:22   is if you delete your iPhoto library after you've converted it to a Photos library, you

00:46:28   won't save a lot of space, actually, but it's safe to do it because your Photos library

00:46:33   has all that information. So what I'd probably advise is keep iPhoto and the Photos library

00:46:38   or the iPhoto library around a little bit until you're sure that you're never

00:46:42   going to go back to it, and then yeah, it's then it's safe to do it. I

00:46:46   should also mention that if you want to have multiple iPhoto libraries into one

00:46:51   library, there are two ways of doing that. One is there's a utility out there that

00:46:55   will let you, that's from Fat Cat software I think, that will let you merge

00:47:00   iPhoto libraries together. So you would do that first and then migrate them to

00:47:03   photos. You can also use Aperture. Aperture has an import iPhoto library

00:47:08   feature so you can create a new Aperture library and then import all your iPhoto

00:47:11   libraries and then open Photos and convert your Aperture library to Photos

00:47:16   and there you've got it. And then the other way to merge iPhoto libraries is

00:47:20   is to sync them all with iCloud and then they're all in iCloud and then you've

00:47:26   got one big library. So there are ways to do that too. Awesome stuff. Mr. Jason Snow,

00:47:32   thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, it was great to talk to you Federico most

00:47:36   of all. Yeah, my pleasure. No, I listen. It's just, you know, it's not really for me. It's

00:47:44   Max's next stuff. The photo library stuff is, it is cool that I've got access to all

00:47:49   that stuff on iOS too, and it does really work. I open photos up and I took some pictures

00:47:53   at the grocery store earlier today, and they're all there, and it's all automatic, and all

00:47:58   my albums are syncing across, and they sync across between my iPad and my iPhone too.

00:48:06   That's all there. That's all happening too. It's just that this is the photos.app on the

00:48:11   Mac is the Mac version of this same thing that they're trying to get everywhere, right?

00:48:16   It's the same icon. You know, it's the same nomenclature. They want this all to be of

00:48:21   a kind. And iPhoto was built before they had this concept of the iCloud photo library.

00:48:26   So that's what really Photos is about is can we give that experience? The edit screens

00:48:30   look a lot like the ones on iOS too. It's really interesting. They're definitely intended

00:48:34   to be really familiar for people who are using it, whether it's on the Mac or the iPad or

00:48:39   the iPhone.

00:48:40   I have just one question for you, Jason.

00:48:43   Do you know if the photos app on the Mac downloads new photos in the background while a Mac is

00:48:51   closed?

00:48:52   So a portable Mac.

00:48:55   So like if it's doing that...

00:48:58   What's the name of the feature like a...

00:49:00   Power nap.

00:49:01   Power nap.

00:49:02   - Yeah, yeah, right, which they called a dark, dark,

00:49:06   dark wake is I think what the technical term is,

00:49:08   and then the marketing feature is I think Powernap.

00:49:11   It's that thing where the lid is closed.

00:49:13   I don't know that.

00:49:14   I bet it might because it seems to be using

00:49:19   the iCloud syncing infrastructure.

00:49:21   So if your iCloud documents can sync

00:49:23   when the lid is closed, I think the photos can sync too.

00:49:27   But I don't know that for sure,

00:49:29   because I don't know if iCloud is working

00:49:31   during that state or not.

00:49:33   It definitely works when the app is closed,

00:49:36   because, you know, I've seen that happen,

00:49:39   where why is my Mac so slow?

00:49:41   And it turns out that it's uploading a million photos

00:49:44   in the background.

00:49:45   But I don't know if iCloud does its uploads and downloads

00:49:49   when you're in that closed, plugged-in state.

00:49:54   -Awesome. Okay.

00:49:57   -Right, so, Jason, where can people find you

00:49:59   and find the book that you've written

00:50:01   and that kind of stuff.

00:50:03   - Sure, you can find me on sixcolors.com.

00:50:06   You can find me on fine Relay FM podcasts

00:50:09   such as Clockwise and Upgrade with Myke Hurley.

00:50:14   And my book is available at takecontrolbooks.com.

00:50:18   It's called Photos for Mac, a Take Control Crash Course.

00:50:22   - Excellent stuff.

00:50:23   Thank you for joining us today, sir.

00:50:26   - Thanks, I love your show

00:50:27   and I'm honored to have been on it again.

00:50:29   - Anytime.

00:50:30   - Goodbye.

00:50:33   - Goodbye, Jason.

00:50:33   - Bye, Jason.

00:50:35   - Bye, Jason.

00:50:36   - Right, shall I do our second ad

00:50:39   and then we jump into some other stuff

00:50:41   that we wanna talk about today?

00:50:43   - Yes.

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00:52:56   So Mr Federico Vittucci.

00:52:58   Hi.

00:52:59   I have a couple of things here that I would like to ask you about.

00:53:02   Because you are a man in the know, as it were.

00:53:08   I think so.

00:53:09   Our friends over at Workflow have announced something pretty cool today.

00:53:14   Yeah.

00:53:15   What is it?

00:53:16   workflow is coming to the Apple Watch.

00:53:18   So you will soon be able to run workflows directly from your wrist, Michael.

00:53:24   Have you ever wanted to be some kind of special agent,

00:53:28   going around with workflows on your watch?

00:53:32   Well, I mean, now I can make my usual special agent work more special.

00:53:36   Yeah. So workflow will be, of course, a WatchKit app for the watch,

00:53:42   which means it'll only be capable of running workflows that you keep on your iPhone.

00:53:49   So the workflows that you create in Workflow for iPhone, they will be accessible from the watch app.

00:53:57   So something pretty cool that the Workflow team is doing for this release is,

00:54:03   because not every action from the iPhone can be executed natively on the Apple Watch,

00:54:11   they have built a system that basically whenever a workflow cannot be finished on the watch,

00:54:19   it'll be automatically handed off to the iPhone using Handoff. You don't have to do anything,

00:54:27   it just happens automatically, which is pretty cool I think. What's also nice is that you'll be

00:54:34   able to use a glance to basically just wipe out from the watch face and you get to the

00:54:43   workflow glance and you can just tap a workflow and it will run on your iPhone and you will

00:54:48   see the entire, the chains of actions on the watch.

00:54:53   So this is pretty cool and of course workflow on the watch cannot access all the native

00:55:01   features of the device like the heart rate monitor, the force touch,

00:55:08   the kind of stuff that is still not open to watch kit apps and to

00:55:11   watch developers right now. They can do some kind of native integration, they can,

00:55:17   for example,

00:55:19   workflows that you have on your iPhone that use the Apple Maps app,

00:55:23   they will

00:55:25   get the ability to open the native maps directions on the

00:55:29   watch. So there's some kind of native integration. There will be of course I'm guessing more

00:55:35   coming as Apple does a native SDK for the watch. In the meantime this is really really

00:55:40   cool and I just love the idea of tapping a workflow on my wrist and having it executed

00:55:46   on my phone. I'm kind of concerned about performance because when it comes to workflows I really

00:55:52   want them to be fast, otherwise the entire point of automating tasks is somewhat made

00:56:00   useless by slowness.

00:56:02   So I'm hoping that performance will be okay, because if you make workflow about convenience,

00:56:09   that convenience needs to be fast.

00:56:12   So we'll see when the watch comes.

00:56:16   In the meantime, yes, this is pretty cool and I'm excited.

00:56:19   I also saw today 1Password as well have announced their details of a watch app, which looks

00:56:24   pretty nice.

00:56:25   I mean, I would like to see more details from them, but one thing that I quite like the

00:56:30   look of is, and one of the best ways I think they illustrate it, is like they have a lady

00:56:36   at the gym and she can bring up the combination for her gym locker on her watch.

00:56:42   is useful for me because I can never remember the code to get into my

00:56:48   co-working space so I always bring it up on my phone to check but it would be

00:56:52   kind of nice if I was able to just bring it up real quickly on my watch. I'm just

00:56:57   wondering like a lot of that stuff like how many taps is it gonna take to get

00:57:01   through to these things so I'm excited to see more more about that

00:57:06   as well but yeah that's another one I mean I like that we're seeing this stuff

00:57:10   now because you can kind of see how these companies are thinking which makes

00:57:17   me think oh you know you know we were talking about like we don't even we can't

00:57:22   even foresee what developers will do with this stuff right and how that that's

00:57:26   what makes it exciting and and this these are a couple of those things that

00:57:29   I didn't really expect I didn't think that we would have a workflows app and I

00:57:33   didn't think we'd have one password either so seeing how these developers

00:57:37   use the Apple Watch could be really cool and I'm really excited about that.

00:57:43   I really want one password to put my one-time passwords on my watch.

00:57:49   Apparently that is one thing that they're doing. It's in the

00:57:54   blog post I think. Yeah because you can basically if you go to the

00:57:59   version 5.4 which is already on the App Store you can enable an Apple Watch

00:58:04   setting in the pro version. So once you do you get this special like add to

00:58:10   Apple watch option for each entry in your 1Password database. It's like a

00:58:16   bookmark system. That makes way more sense. Yeah and it seems in theory really nice

00:58:23   because you can go to any item like a login, a credit card, you can go to a

00:58:28   secure note, you can just pin it to the Apple watch and you will get it in this

00:58:34   set of bookmarks on the watch which seems nice because it means I can just

00:58:38   you know select a couple of logins maybe a couple of passwords and I can just

00:58:42   decide to keep those on the watch which makes sense because if I want the

00:58:46   full one password app I just open the iPhone so yeah it is exciting.

00:58:54   Just going back to workflow for a moment I've just gone to the App Store to update

00:58:59   and they have a post to Slack action.

00:59:03   - Oh yeah, they do now.

00:59:04   It's the 1.2 version from the App Store today.

00:59:08   - This makes me very happy.

00:59:09   - Does it mean you will soon be making Slack workflows?

00:59:14   - I'm just gonna be posting everything to Slack now.

00:59:17   - Do you remember when you went crazy with workflow

00:59:20   and you were like,

00:59:21   I'm messaging me about actions and stuff.

00:59:25   - Yeah.

00:59:26   - I feel like I sort of miss a workflow, Myke.

00:59:28   - Well, I just haven't had stuff to build.

00:59:30   Now I have stuff to build.

00:59:31   'Cause I use workflow all the time,

00:59:32   but I've built all the stuff that I think I need.

00:59:36   - Yeah.

00:59:36   Oh, I use workflow all the time as well,

00:59:38   especially from the extension.

00:59:40   And I, it's probably my most used extension.

00:59:42   - Me too.

00:59:43   - Every day for the podcast, Mac stories, super useful.

00:59:48   - Just some simple things like having a page open in Chrome

00:59:51   and then open it in Safari.

00:59:53   Like that is such a, when like things like TestFlight, right?

00:59:57   I'm in mailbox, I open it up, it's like, well, now I can't do anything.

01:00:00   So I can open the link up from Chrome in Safari.

01:00:03   Also adding things to HUFDA for I do all the time.

01:00:06   Whenever I need to send multiple thousands of emojis to people, you know,

01:00:10   these are just the really important things that I get done with workflow.

01:00:14   One other quick thing I want you to tell me about Federico.

01:00:18   What has happened to the music app in the 8.4 beta that came out yesterday?

01:00:24   Was it yesterday? Yes.

01:00:26   last night at my local 11pm, which was unexpected, but still, this is how Apple does stuff sometimes.

01:00:33   There's a new music app, and this is what you need to understand. People are saying

01:00:40   this is gonna be the next Beats Music. There's no streaming component right now in the music

01:00:47   app on the 8.4 beta. It's just a redesigned music app for your local music, iTunes Match

01:00:55   and iTunes Radio. But what you need to know is that everything Apple is doing is in clear

01:01:02   preparation for streaming. So I put 8.4 on my main iPhone 6 Plus because I also saw that

01:01:13   there were no API differences from 8.3 which usually means they are just adding a single

01:01:20   feature and everything else shouldn't break.

01:01:24   So it appears to be mostly fine and there's this new music app.

01:01:29   So they're doing this new design which I'm still not sure about.

01:01:34   I mean it's nice but it's really different from before and it's clearly inspired by Beats

01:01:40   Music.

01:01:41   So you get a mini player at the bottom of the app.

01:01:44   You can tap the mini player to get to this new now playing screen.

01:01:48   There's a lot of gestures involved, for instance you can swipe down on the Now Playing screen,

01:01:53   like you can in Google Music I think, you can swipe down to dismiss the screen and go

01:01:58   back to your music.

01:02:00   The main change is that there's just three tabs at the bottom now, and you can swipe

01:02:05   across these tabs, like you used to be able to in Twitter for iOS, you were able to swipe

01:02:11   between the timeline and this cover, you know, those are gone now, but you know, these gestures

01:02:17   on the main screen are used to switch between tabs.

01:02:23   You may be asking, so how do you change between artists and albums and songs?

01:02:28   There's a new contextual menu, which you can access at the top of the My Music screen.

01:02:36   There's a new recently added kind of overview at the top and the feature that really suggests

01:02:44   this is gonna be used for streaming is global search.

01:02:48   So there's a new search icon in the top right

01:02:52   and this search view lets you look for

01:02:56   anything either into your music, so

01:02:59   local music and iTunes match music, or radio.

01:03:03   So you will get results for songs, audits,

01:03:06   playlists, anything basically. And again

01:03:10   this just, you know, obviously makes sense for

01:03:13   Once Apple brings in music streaming you'll be able to look for any song,

01:03:18   whether it's from iTunes Radio or your music collection.

01:03:21   It's a nice update right now. There's a lot of

01:03:25   beats music kind of stuff going on.

01:03:28   Each album or each song gets a contextual menu

01:03:32   that you can use to play next or add to up next,

01:03:36   which is another major new feature you can now manage a music queue

01:03:40   directly on an iPhone or an iPad and there's a lot of touches. If you used to be a Beats Music user,

01:03:47   you will definitely see a lot of resemblance here. But it's obvious to me that they're gonna bring in

01:03:53   music streaming. I'm kind of wondering where they will put the music streaming component,

01:03:59   whether it'll be like another tab at the bottom or if it'll just be part of the "My Music" screen.

01:04:08   Am I the only one here with the 8.4 beta, Steven?

01:04:12   Myke?

01:04:12   Yeah.

01:04:13   Yeah.

01:04:13   I've not played with it.

01:04:15   Yeah, it's a nice refresh.

01:04:19   And of course, there's a few bugs right now.

01:04:22   Some animations are kind of glitchy.

01:04:26   It's nicer than before, but it's not the real update yet.

01:04:32   So we'll have to see when it's complete.

01:04:35   Because right now it's the same stuff in a different view, it's kind of weird on the iPad.

01:04:41   I think they haven't decided yet.

01:04:44   So we'll check back, yeah of course, as usual.

01:04:47   We'll check back I think when streaming comes out.

01:04:51   Assuming it does, I'm guessing it does eventually.

01:04:55   I mean, but they've got to do it in a way where if someone, like iTunes Match or, you know,

01:05:01   photos in iCloud, like if you're not using them the app still works and still

01:05:06   makes sense right because those things are optional paid services so wherever

01:05:10   they add it it's got to make sense for people like me who aren't going to use

01:05:13   it to still be able to get to my music that's local that I've synced over and

01:05:18   so I imagine whatever they do here it will be it'll be flexible in that way

01:05:22   like to have other places. Yeah. So from what you've seen so far it's just the

01:05:30   kind of stuff that you would want?

01:05:33   Well I'm not a music user myself because I have an iTunes match subscription and I have

01:05:41   a couple of iTunes radio stations but it's not the way that I listen to music every day.

01:05:46   So I think once they do streaming it can be a nice app and potentially because of the

01:05:57   native integrations that Apple has on iOS such as Siri or be able to control music from

01:06:04   other apps, I think someday this can potentially become my only music service.

01:06:12   Right now there's a bunch of things that I don't really like.

01:06:18   I think the interface needs to be cleaned up a little.

01:06:21   There's potential.

01:06:24   For me right now it's just a nicer design.

01:06:29   And I feel like my opinion isn't well informed because I don't rely on music every day.

01:06:34   If you ask someone like Steven, you know, he listens to all his music in the 19th and

01:06:39   the Music app on iOS, it'll have a different opinion than mine.

01:06:43   It's nicer and I think Apple is getting on board with some modern trends in Music app

01:06:50   design such as this wiped down gesture to dismiss the mini player.

01:06:56   The mini player itself which is very much reminiscent of Spotify, Google music, every

01:07:03   music streaming app at this point.

01:07:05   There's a bunch of graphical transitions with the blurs and the title bars that Apple is

01:07:12   doing which are also kind of similar to Twitter, RDO and other modern apps.

01:07:19   So it seems to me that Apple is kind of refreshing and modernizing the music app.

01:07:24   I'm just not sure for myself because all my music is listened to using music streaming

01:07:31   services.

01:07:32   So I'm not sure whether my take on this is the one that you want to listen to.

01:07:40   It's nicer, just not really done yet.

01:07:44   Okay, cool.

01:07:47   So last week we started speaking about the Steve Jells book and I know Steven you only

01:07:53   kind of got about halfway through what you wanted to talk about so I figured you'd maybe

01:07:58   want to finish that off this week.

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01:09:31   Guys, a quick aside before Steven talks about the book.

01:09:36   Can I just really quick, please don't hate me.

01:09:39   It's about teletext.

01:09:40   Oh no, it's not so...

01:09:42   So what?

01:09:43   No, okay, listen.

01:09:44   No, listen to me.

01:09:45   While Myke was reading the sponsor and he was doing his really fast voice at the end,

01:09:51   I realized that I never mentioned, but the teletext was really nice to have subtitles

01:09:59   for movies on TV.

01:10:01   Yeah, it was also the subtitles system, provided by teletext.

01:10:06   So in Italy, we used to go to page 777 and you would get the subtitles.

01:10:12   Yep, we had the same I think. I think it was 777, that sounds about right. It was a three-digit

01:10:18   number high up, maybe 777 or 999 or something like that.

01:10:22   Yeah. Okay, I'm done. Thank you.

01:10:24   No, you can interrupt the show anytime we talk about teletext. We just said we weren't

01:10:28   going to do any more follow-up on it, so we're going to break the rule.

01:10:31   We'll put it at the end.

01:10:32   Yeah. What would follow-up be called at the end? Oh no.

01:10:36   Follow down.

01:10:38   Follow in.

01:10:39   Oh, I think me and Jason spoke about this at all.

01:10:43   Like, follow on or something like that was what we were given a name for.

01:10:48   It makes sense at the top of the show though, because it's the glue.

01:10:51   It's the continuity.

01:10:52   Anyways, so last week we started talking about becoming Steve Jobs.

01:10:56   We talked about the book as a meta subject and we talked about what the book says about

01:11:03   Steve Jobs.

01:11:04   And this week I thought we'd talk a little bit about the two, two of the three companies

01:11:09   that really share the stage in this book.

01:11:12   So we're not going to talk about next so much.

01:11:14   Because really in the time period where Jobs has gone from Apple, the book focuses, I feel

01:11:20   like more on Pixar because again, going back to last week, this book is trying to tell

01:11:25   the story of Jobs' arc as a not only as like a figure in technology but as a

01:11:33   human being as a dad a husband a regular guy walking around and whether or not

01:11:38   they did a good job with that you know we'll leave for the listener to decide

01:11:42   but in telling that story they focus a lot on Pixar and I was really glad to

01:11:47   see that I like you guys love Pixar I love their movies love what they do

01:11:52   really I'm just fascinated by the the way that they make creative works happen

01:12:00   I think it's a lot there's a lot to learn from that and clearly Pixar and

01:12:05   guys like John Lasseter had a huge impact on him so Becoming Steve Jobs sets

01:12:16   the stage Apple kicks jobs out and they kind of dance around it I don't know if

01:12:22   they say it directly at any point that but that you know maybe the fact that

01:12:26   Jobs had adult supervision put in at Apple so you know these guys are

01:12:31   co-founders they're in their garage they're making these like boards with

01:12:35   like their sisters helping and they say hey you know what we need some adult

01:12:38   supervision we need we need to find a CEO we need to find some some capital

01:12:42   investment we need to kind of let the adults do their thing and we'll just be

01:12:47   done here making products right that's what that's what Jobs want to do is what

01:12:50   was I wanted to do. I wanted to make computers, make products, and let the business guys

01:12:54   take care of the business stuff. And it's sort of one of those assertions that's

01:13:01   just left, it's kind of left hanging like Jason said on upgrade a couple

01:13:06   weeks ago. But the end picks are, you know, Jobs got Ed Catmull and John

01:13:12   Lasseter to help shape him as mentors, and that the adult supervision at Apple

01:13:17   can never provide that for jobs.

01:13:19   And it's, again, it's not really fleshed out in the book,

01:13:22   which is one of my problems.

01:13:24   But looking at what we know about Pixar,

01:13:27   about how they sort of give creative people

01:13:30   the tools that they need and the runway they need

01:13:32   to make something great.

01:13:34   But there is a strong sense of product.

01:13:39   Look at a Pixar movie, it's somehow more than a film.

01:13:42   It's an experience, it's the whole gamut.

01:13:46   it is a product these these characters the lighting the sound everything come

01:13:50   together and I think you see that in Apple when Jobs gets back and I know Myke

01:13:56   you had a want to talk some about like the Pixar part in particular what sort

01:13:59   of jumped out at you in the book about about Jobs time with that company I

01:14:06   think it was interesting where they mentioned how Steve kind of had father

01:14:12   father figures at his time through Disney, like working with people with

01:14:18   Disney, especially when it talks about Bob Iger, who I did not know they

01:14:25   were as close as the book seems to suggest, which was very interesting to

01:14:32   me. There is a, I think a spoiler, I'm not gonna say it, but there's a

01:14:38   conversation between Bob Iger and Steve Jobs, which is in the book, which is very

01:14:42   very powerful that you find out had occurred. It was information that I didn't

01:14:47   know and I was very very surprised that that was something that happened. It was

01:14:53   also very interesting. I found the whole Bob Iger thing fascinating about all the

01:14:57   deals that they seem to have done and also I'm very interested in Bob Iger as

01:15:01   an individual now because it seems like he was very forward-thinking and

01:15:07   basically just bent over backwards to try and have a good relationship with

01:15:12   Steve and Apple because he thought it was the right thing to do for Disney, which is

01:15:16   really, really interesting. I didn't know any of that at all. But I think one of the

01:15:22   things that I found the most interesting about the whole Pixar discussion is Steve's involvement

01:15:29   in the building, the Pixar HQ headquarters, and talking through when our author, whomever

01:15:41   it may have been, who went and had this meeting with Steve at Pixar when they were building

01:15:49   things and talking through a lot of the decisions that Steve had made about the brickwork and

01:15:58   how he had been, you know, had that swayed.

01:16:00   And then like how many people, I didn't notice, I think many people are familiar with the

01:16:07   the idea that Pixar's office is built in such a way that it has a big center atrium that

01:16:13   everybody has to pass through to get to different parts of the building. Like if you want to

01:16:18   go from one meeting to another, you pretty much have to pass through this large atrium

01:16:23   and apparently it's where a lot of the business gets done because people talk to each other,

01:16:27   it's where people socialize, it's where people meet and work and collaborate and they say

01:16:31   that it's part of the things that is key to Pixar's success is that it helps foster the

01:16:35   culture in that way. That was Steve Jobs's idea. I didn't know that.

01:16:40   Yeah, it's sort of, you know, I work in an open office and there's a lot of pros and cons to that,

01:16:45   but the big one is you can go up and talk to somebody and have that collaboration.

01:16:49   But at Pixar they kind of did both, right? They talk in the book. It's been in Pixar documentaries

01:16:54   and you can find it online where a lot of the creatives are allowed to create their own

01:16:58   workspace. So you might walk by someone's office and the whole thing is done up like a,

01:17:03   like it's in Hawaii right with like palm trees and sand and there's a beach ball in the corner or you know people build like

01:17:09   Tunnels between offices and so you still get that private like intimate space that creatives crave so often

01:17:15   but you get all the upside of having an open office where you know, you can have a conversation with somebody that

01:17:21   Wouldn't have happened

01:17:23   Otherwise that can make a big difference in a project or in a or in a work and it's it's brilliant and I think you know

01:17:30   I wonder looking at Apple Campus too, if some of that is in there as well. They have a cafeteria

01:17:35   now at Infinite Loop. There's a real big one going in and there are some open spaces and

01:17:40   just getting people mingling to break down those walls between groups is... I think Jobs realized

01:17:45   that was a powerful thing. But also I like how he had to be reined in because he wanted to have

01:17:50   one bathroom. Yeah, in the middle, right? So it's like, "No, we can't actually do that."

01:17:58   with like law and being decent human beings. Yeah it's just it's it's nice you

01:18:05   know there's a there's like a 30-minute documentary on John Lasseter it's like a

01:18:09   day in the life thing we will we'll find it put that in the show notes. It's

01:18:15   definitely worth a watch and especially I've rewatched it a couple weeks ago in

01:18:20   light of this book right of thinking about hey this guy had a had a close

01:18:24   relationship with Steve Jobs and you can kind of see where you know John Lasseter

01:18:28   is going from meeting to meeting and and dealing with the very details of a

01:18:33   product and they're looking at like one single word in a sentence they need

01:18:38   change because of something happening in the world or sound or light you know

01:18:42   these little details that what make Pixar movies so great the same little

01:18:47   details that make Apple products so great and I think you see that like

01:18:51   Lasseter is really consumed with all those little details but he's not

01:18:55   micromanaging them all. That he's letting the smart people be smart and the people

01:18:58   who work hard work hard and he's coming in and speaking his vision into it. I

01:19:02   think you see Jobs do that a lot in his second coming, second time at Apple of

01:19:07   you know he's not designing the the tiny little details but he is definitely

01:19:14   expressing his wishes for those details. Good stuff. So yeah I have to say that

01:19:24   I'm still like an hour from finishing the book. I feel like I can't finish it.

01:19:28   Like I want to but I feel like I never get far enough. Yeah. But yeah so what

01:19:35   else? I mean I see the big header here is Apple. Yeah just one bullet

01:19:41   point. So really, I'll trim this down, really the story that this book tells

01:19:48   about Apple is that when Steve Jobs comes back he does it and he comes into

01:19:58   a company that I think is very different than a lot of us think, think about at

01:20:02   the time. So there are a couple little facts here that make sense with what we

01:20:08   know about Apple at the time right that after Windows 95 Apple wouldn't post

01:20:13   consecutive years of sales growth again until 2002 and in that same time frame

01:20:21   mid 90s there was a period where Apple had gone from being profitable to posting

01:20:26   a loss of three quarters of a billion dollars in a single quarter change of

01:20:31   1996. We know that we know that story of you know Apple was was not doing

01:20:38   so hot and and the truth is I think this book shows it from the next perspective

01:20:44   is that Apple actually did okay for a while that they yes like the product

01:20:48   lines got muddy but it really was the very end of that sort of you know

01:20:55   spindler-gillamelio period where it really came off the rails and the hero

01:21:01   of that story is a guy named Fred Anderson who is hired he comes as the

01:21:06   the CFO and while they are hiring him away from a huge company on the East

01:21:11   Coast they are also preparing bankruptcy paperwork right like Apple's like well

01:21:15   this guy's gonna save us or we're just done right like and they don't tell him

01:21:21   that until he shows up which I find like sort of hilarious and horrifying all at

01:21:25   the same time. I don't remember exactly what the the numbers are or the quotes

01:21:29   but like it always surprises me like it goes on at that point where it's like he

01:21:32   finds a bunch of money that Apple are then able to go and do something with

01:21:36   like they start a new project or something like that I'm sorry I have so

01:21:40   little information. Right so so he comes back and he gets what Fred Anderson works

01:21:46   on is financing and he gets Apple's debt refigured or reconfigured he gets some

01:21:51   money in the door and that that work allows them to buy next. They don't

01:21:57   have the capital to buy it until Fred Anderson shows up. That was it. It was

01:22:00   like this crazy thing it's like we're about to go bankrupt we hire a guy he

01:22:04   finds us enough money to buy a company like how big was the sofa that that

01:22:09   change was in huge huge green sofa so you know Fred Anderson gets Apple at

01:22:18   least financially stable enough to buy next and and what's really interesting

01:22:23   and and even as a close you know follower of this stuff I had sort of

01:22:27   lost track of this so they buy Next right and this book and a couple other

01:22:32   books sort of point at like the Next employees weren't super thrilled about

01:22:35   this because in their mind Apple was the failing company when reality like Next

01:22:39   was also a sinking ship right. This is two companies that are in trouble

01:22:43   Next had shuttered their hardware division they had a beautiful factory

01:22:47   they shut down they're just making software at this point it's not going

01:22:51   super well but you know so during the purchase job says okay look my guys need

01:22:56   to be running departments, you need to promise my guys they have jobs and

01:23:01   they're gonna help you with your transition." But Steve doesn't come back

01:23:04   and Steve basically sits on the sidelines for six months and the book

01:23:08   goes into this in great detail of Jobs is wandering around his neighborhood

01:23:12   wringing his hands not knowing what to do. He's calling friends. At some point he

01:23:16   calls Larry Ellison and Larry Ellison basically says "I don't care what you do

01:23:19   about Apple" and hangs up on him. Like his best friend in the world is like "Just

01:23:23   make your decision up Steve, like just make your mind. You could do what you

01:23:26   want but you have to quit being on the fence about it. It just takes six months

01:23:30   and when Jobs comes back you know he knows that he has to come back because

01:23:35   Gil Amelio is bad news and not the best CEO the company ever had but Jobs

01:23:41   puts his sights on him and and within a very short period of time does away with

01:23:44   him and Jobs very quickly starts fixing mistakes but if you if you read the book

01:23:54   and if you look at keynotes in this time especially, it's very slow. You know, it's

01:23:58   not like OS X is out the door immediately. They're fixing OS 8 and OS 8

01:24:03   is going to be a staggered release and they're gonna build up to OS X. In reality,

01:24:06   OS 9 happened in the middle of that because it took longer. They deal with

01:24:10   the hardware, you know, he goes in, there's the famous meeting of Johnny Ive who's

01:24:14   thinking about quitting and he's like, "Oh, I have these drawings of this computer.

01:24:17   What if we made it translucent?" and the world is saved. But it's very deliberate

01:24:23   and very it's very slow like the jobs coming back to Apple jobs putting Apple on the right track takes a long time and

01:24:30   when you compare and contrast that to the jobs of the 80s who is yelling at people and firing them and

01:24:37   making very rash decisions

01:24:40   Clearly the arc that the book is trying to paint is true to a degree that

01:24:44   Jobs while at next and at Pixar learned that decision-making is something that can that should take time and they should have

01:24:52   People speak into it besides just yourself, right? That shouldn't be a whim to

01:24:56   Blow up your entire product line. Jobs cancelled every just about every single product line Apple had

01:25:02   Really that the power book and the power Mac remained but all the consumer stuff gone away

01:25:07   You know thrown away for the iMac to come in

01:25:11   That's a really big change, but it took Jobs a while to get there because he's being deliberate. He's thinking through he is making plans and

01:25:19   that I think is is really the story of this book of

01:25:24   The and you know, there's lots of stuff in my notes about the iPad and other stuff like we see more of that

01:25:30   Then we've seen in other books. I think that's really interesting

01:25:33   But I think even in those later stories later in his life the story is he is taking more time to make decisions

01:25:40   he is being more deliberate he is planning and

01:25:44   He is not making decisions as that emotional young man we see in the first half of the book. Yes

01:25:50   There's still signs of that that still flare-ups, but overall I think what the book is trying to tell us is, you know

01:25:56   he did mellow out he did he did become more level-headed and

01:26:00   Even in things like in 2000 2001, you know

01:26:05   Apple pushed really hard into iMovie first and it was hard to gain traction

01:26:09   Because like video cameras weren't very good like you're burning DVDs

01:26:12   with the IMAX on DVD burners and there's all this weird stuff. And they come out nine months

01:26:20   after a Bill Gates keynote where Bill Gates and Microsoft actually talk about digital

01:26:24   hub strategy type stuff first. But nine months after that, Jobs is on stage with the iPod

01:26:32   in September, September 2001, which you haven't listened to connected Episode One. Within

01:26:37   the show notes, we talked about that keynote in depth, and the the situation, you know,

01:26:42   of the the landscape at the time. The iPod was a very fast product. The iPhone

01:26:47   happened relatively quickly after they saw multi-touch and he said you know

01:26:52   yeah we can make a tablet but oh my god we can make a phone let's do a phone and

01:26:56   and that was relatively quick. So you see him making these decisions once he makes

01:27:00   them he sticks with them and for the most part they're all the right decision.

01:27:06   I think that's clearly an impressive track history that a lot of people

01:27:10   aspire to right like you see CEOs saying I want to be Steve Jobs well that's not

01:27:13   being angry and being a bully that's making clear-headed decisions that are

01:27:18   the right decision and the sticking with them and what and you know following

01:27:22   through with them that makes sense yeah so I don't know I mean there's a bunch

01:27:28   of stuff in here maybe we can close out with it with a story about retail so

01:27:35   Ron Johnson came from Target. He hired Steve hired him away from Target to kind

01:27:42   of get Apple retail going. There's a great story in here in the book about

01:27:48   it's pretty well known they were doing mock-ups of stores in this big warehouse

01:27:52   like full-size mock-ups you could go walk through the store and see what it

01:27:56   would be like and it is sort of set up by product and then Ron Johnson has this

01:28:02   idea of well what if it's set up by subjects so we have iPhoto, iMovie, all

01:28:06   these things what if the store mimics that so I can go to the photography

01:28:09   section and go to the movie section go to the kids section whatever and there's

01:28:13   this story where Jobs and Ron Johnson are in the car and Ron Johnson brings

01:28:17   this up and they're super close to finishing the store plan and Jobs is

01:28:21   like what no like we have done all this work you have done all this work don't

01:28:24   blow it up and they get there and in the drive Jobs has changed his mind made

01:28:29   the right decision backs Ron Johnson's idea and that's what they go with.

01:28:34   I love that story of like he yells at him in the car and is like oh actually that

01:28:39   makes a ton of sense and it's gonna cost us money and cost us time but we're

01:28:42   gonna do it the right way and I think that's what separates Apple from its

01:28:47   competition in all sorts of ways that the willingness to spend time and spend

01:28:51   money and not be first to market you know the iPod the iMac the iPad the

01:28:56   watch all of it, not the first to market but arguably the best because of that

01:29:03   that mindset that Jobs drilled into the company so hard during his second time

01:29:08   there. Because that like that that scenario that story I could see so many

01:29:13   people reacting the way that Jobs originally reacts it's like what what

01:29:19   is wrong with you like you have a job to do which is to build me stores we've

01:29:25   been working on this, we set up this facility, we're basically done and now

01:29:29   you're like nope got to start over. It's like that's this is not how this stuff

01:29:32   works you know and it would be so easy for most people to be like well that's

01:29:38   gonna have to be version 2, we're far too long in this process now and such is

01:29:44   life like that's how you calm down and say like right okay let's get this what

01:29:48   we're doing now is finalize this and then we'll start planning maybe in two

01:29:54   years time we'll refine this idea a little bit more and then we'll refurb

01:29:58   the stores or rearrange the stores in some way we'll find a way to make this

01:30:03   work but instead it's like no let's start over like that's that's a big

01:30:08   difference I think to many people I think I would definitely be in that

01:30:12   first camp of like what is wrong of you why is it taking you so long to have

01:30:16   this idea let's think about how we can make that work for the future like I

01:30:20   think that's how I would originally think of something right that's that's a

01:30:23   phase two let's get this product out the door and we'll evolve to that yeah right

01:30:28   that's how I would approach it too I mean especially coming from like a

01:30:31   software like design development type job it's like very rarely can I walk

01:30:37   into a project and blow it up very often it's iterative sort of constant change

01:30:43   so it's it's bold to do that for sure. I bet Federico would would take the

01:30:50   Steve Jobs approach. I bet he would do it the right way. I knew it. It did take you a long time to finalize Max

01:31:02   stories 4 so we used Steve Jobs in it like the whole way along.

01:31:06   like three years. just like every six months just burn it to the ground. you had

01:31:13   some stuff come up there in the middle. Sylvia has all the mock-ups and the

01:31:17   the screenshots of the stuff that I didn't go through with.

01:31:20   Just like, yeah, that's what I am, you know.

01:31:24   Sometimes it's not like people don't like this, you know,

01:31:29   just in general, not just in technology, to take time to do stuff right.

01:31:33   It's complicated and it's emotionally heavy sometimes.

01:31:39   Time is money, man.

01:31:40   Yeah. And also his physical well-being, you know.

01:31:45   Yeah.

01:31:46   But still.

01:31:47   So Federico, how far are you in the book?

01:31:50   I know you should have been silent.

01:31:52   First chapter.

01:31:53   Okay, good, good, good.

01:31:54   What do you think of the first chapter?

01:31:57   I really like what Steven talked about.

01:32:01   So if the book is as good as the Steven segment, I think I'm about to get into a really, really

01:32:09   good book.

01:32:11   I've listened to the two episodes, the two segments.

01:32:15   Thank you, Steven.

01:32:16   Thank you especially for avoiding spoilers.

01:32:21   That was really nice of you.

01:32:23   It was tough.

01:32:26   There's some new information, there's some information I haven't heard in this way before.

01:32:30   I think that's kind of the main thing.

01:32:32   But I'm not at the very, very end yet either.

01:32:35   That's where a lot of it is.

01:32:37   I mean, naturally, right?

01:32:38   There's 30 books about the last 30 years, but only a few people had access to the things

01:32:43   like the way they got multi-touch working and some of that's in the Isaacson book but

01:32:47   again some of it's in a new light.

01:32:49   You know, there's been a lot of debate about the definitive Steve Jobs book, right?

01:32:55   I got this long email saying, you know, that usually things like this is not a definitive

01:33:00   book, there's a bunch of books and you piece them together and you kind of sort them all

01:33:04   out on the table and you get the whole story.

01:33:06   And I don't disagree with that at all.

01:33:08   I think when thinking of a definitive Steve Jobs book,

01:33:11   what I want is if someone is getting into this

01:33:15   and I point them to one book and say,

01:33:17   "This is the one you go read."

01:33:18   And now it is this book.

01:33:21   Is that gonna be true in five years?

01:33:24   Is there another book in the wing somewhere

01:33:26   that's gonna be more definitive, be more exact,

01:33:29   be more fair?

01:33:31   Probably.

01:33:33   I mean, I don't think we're done

01:33:34   reading new books about Steve Jobs,

01:33:36   but I think for now this is the book that sits at the top.

01:33:39   You know, I've read a bunch of them

01:33:41   and have bought a couple more recently

01:33:43   at John Zarkus's suggestion.

01:33:45   But I think that if you are looking

01:33:48   for a Steve Jobs book to read,

01:33:50   I think right now this is the one to do.

01:33:53   Yes, it's not perfect, there are flaws with it,

01:33:55   but overall I think it gives the best picture

01:33:58   of old Apple and new Apple.

01:34:00   And with access to current day Apple executives,

01:34:04   you get that point of view at the very end of the book

01:34:07   that no one else had because these guys have special access.

01:34:10   And so I think for that reason alone,

01:34:12   plus lots of other reasons,

01:34:14   it's definitely well worth the read

01:34:16   or the listen if you're Myke.

01:34:19   - Have you ever read

01:34:20   "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" by Alan Deutschman?

01:34:22   - I have, it's been a long time.

01:34:26   I know I have not read "The Infinite Loop"

01:34:28   which I just bought.

01:34:30   I know that's a big one.

01:34:32   know Sir Q-Sir has referenced it a couple times and that's that's on my list but

01:34:35   maybe in the fall I can't read another Steve Jobs book quite yet I got my head

01:34:39   full of the guy. You probably don't need to read the one I'm suggesting but I

01:34:44   really have liked that book I've listened to the audiobook maybe four or

01:34:50   five times in the last seven or eight years it's really good the audiobook is

01:34:55   fantastic as well. It's just a good book but I think now that that one really

01:35:02   really focuses on Pixar. There's a lot of Pixar on Next in there but it's good.

01:35:09   And if you haven't read Ed Catmull's book, we'll put a link to it in the notes,

01:35:15   it's a super great book talking about the way that Pixar works, the way that

01:35:20   they take these ideas and put them you know put them into life on the big

01:35:25   screen is just a really fascinating read and it sort of does you know that

01:35:30   there's things that are glossed over about Pixar in this book that the

01:35:33   Catmull book obviously which is called a creativity ink talks about in depth so

01:35:38   it's it's definitely a nice companion piece to this if not a great book on its

01:35:42   own. They're all in the show notes which you can find in your podcast app of

01:35:46   choice or relay.fm/connected/35. I think we'll come to about the end of

01:35:52   this week's episode unless anybody has anything more they would like to add.

01:35:56   Good. I'm good, Myke. Thank you.

01:36:00   Excellent. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, our friends over at Wealthfront,

01:36:04   Smile and Lynda.com. If you'd like to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can

01:36:08   do that. You can find Mr. Stephen Hackett over at 512pixels.net

01:36:12   and he is @ismh on Twitter. Federico Vittucci is @Vittucci

01:36:16   V-I-T-I-C-C-I and he writes the fantastic

01:36:20   Federico had a great post today detailing why Myke was right about the

01:36:27   6 Plus. Good post Federico. Thank you. So your iPhone 6 Plus review, I'll put that

01:36:34   in the show notes for people too. So they can read it if they would like.

01:36:38   It won't be news to listen to this show, I mean you know we all know

01:36:42   I'm right but they should read it anyway. I guess yes. They can get your

01:36:48   finalized opinions but they don't need the conclusion because they were you

01:36:51   know the conclusions been for gone for like six months now yeah they know they

01:36:56   know they know they know these guys they're smart they know if you'd like to

01:37:00   find me I am at I Myke I am y ke on Twitter thanks again to Jason for

01:37:05   joining us as well but most of all thank you for listening and to next time say

01:37:10   goodbye everybody are you there to adios