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The Talk Show

252: ‘The Dustin Egress Problem’ With Cabel Sasser, Steven Frank, and Greg Maletic From Panic

 

00:00:00   Hi, John. It's been a while. So here we go. Special episode. This is a very special episode

00:00:08   of the talk show. And it's not just one guest. It's three. It's panic. Co founders, cable

00:00:15   Sasser and Stephen Frank. No strangers to being guests together on this show. And first

00:00:21   time guest, Greg Maletic. Hello, everybody. Hey, John. How are you? Thanks. Thanks for

00:00:27   having us. Hello. We are here to talk about the most exciting piece of hardware and handheld

00:00:36   gaming in years. Just today Apple released an update to the iPod touch. Are you guys

00:00:45   excited? Finally. Sure. I think it's a great platform to be honest. iPod touch? Yeah. It

00:00:54   It is really nice. So I think that it is exciting.

00:00:56   Uh, I have, of course, I'm kidding. We're here to talk about play date,

00:01:01   but the iPod touches new. We could briefly touch on it. It's a, it's,

00:01:05   it is such, isn't it such an oddball device? Like it,

00:01:09   it obviously must sell in high enough quantities that they don't get rid of it.

00:01:14   Right? Like they don't sell old spin wheel, click wheel iPods anymore. Right.

00:01:18   At some point people stop buying them and Apple stop making them. They're not,

00:01:21   They don't keep making things for nostalgic purposes.

00:01:24   But on the other hand, they didn't update it in four years,

00:01:27   which is a long time.

00:01:30   Do they make any other iPod product right now?

00:01:32   Do they still make the--

00:01:34   nothing else, right?

00:01:34   There's no Nano.

00:01:35   There's no Shuffle.

00:01:36   I don't think so.

00:01:36   Are they all-- so the iPod touch is the last remaining iPod.

00:01:40   And when the Nano and Shuffle existed,

00:01:43   that was even weirder because there was that clone OS of iOS.

00:01:48   Somebody has to work on this every day.

00:01:50   That always seems super strange to me, but I think that touch is really cool

00:01:54   I mean that iPad mini is the closest thing to it actually true, huh, but that's too big for some cases

00:02:02   Yeah, and and it's always

00:02:04   Surprisingly thinner than whatever the state-of-the-art iPhone is. Mm-hmm

00:02:09   I remember and I've told this story before but at some point I'm pretty sure it was a WWDC but it was something at

00:02:17   Moscone West it was an Apple keynote. They let the press in it was like an hour before they were gonna open the doors and

00:02:22   Let us go into the theater and take our seats and we're mingling about and they have you know coffee and Danish whatever

00:02:29   So that pegs it in my mind whenever this anecdote take place

00:02:34   It was sometimes at sometime after Steve Jobs passed and Tim Cook was the CEO

00:02:39   It was probably early because when Steve was in charge the press got nothing

00:02:44   We got we got absolutely nothing we just sat and then they they dropped a rope and then we we'd scramble it

00:02:51   We got no coffee

00:02:53   We got nothing

00:02:54   So it's sometime in the in the cook here and we're mingling about and I saw this guy with the most it was

00:03:00   Clearly he was talking or he was holding it up to his face somehow

00:03:04   Like I don't know if he was doing like a FaceTime or what?

00:03:06   But it was clearly like not at any existing iPhone it

00:03:11   I was like what kind of a madman from Apple is using like this crazy super thin prototype. This is amazing

00:03:18   Right, I got closer and I realized oh, it's an iPod touch

00:03:21   I was like, wow, if that was an iPhone people would would crap their pants. Yeah, that'd be pretty sweet actually

00:03:29   Anyway, I mean, yeah, it's a real market iPhone without the cell connection. That's a thing to me. Yeah for sure

00:03:36   How do you feel about the announcement John? Are you excited? No, not really

00:03:41   It's like one of the only iOS devices I've never bought I've never had a purpose for it

00:03:45   And it's like I wrote on during fireball today like I think I don't know

00:03:48   I'm just pulling this out of my own observation from friends and family and what I see at airports

00:03:52   it seems to me like in the early years people bottom for their kids and

00:03:56   in

00:03:58   Recent years kids get hand-me-down iPhones and instead, you know, like I don't really see kids with the iPod touch anymore

00:04:05   What I see is kids with an old iPhone in like an otterbox case

00:04:09   So I guess the question is who's buying the iPod touch?

00:04:13   Yeah, I don't know somebody told me and again, it's anic data

00:04:17   It's not it

00:04:18   I can't prove it but somebody told me a while ago on DM that a ton of them get sold for like industrial purposes

00:04:23   You know like Amazon Amazon warehouse, and I don't know if Amazon particular does it but like scanning things in a warehouse?

00:04:29   hospitals use them for like secure

00:04:33   You know like nurses can just take one around and then they can get all sorts of stuff on it instead of carrying

00:04:39   a full iPad, all sorts of industrial purposes like that, which are no fun. So Apple's still

00:04:45   like, on the product page, still talking about like AR games, music, you know, listening

00:04:52   to music, but that it's really just like a bunch of like doctors and people who work

00:04:55   in factories and stuff like that. I think Apple still uses them in the stores, right?

00:04:59   Yeah, I think that might be true with the with the thing on the back that allows them

00:05:03   to do the card scanning and everything. Yeah, that's right. All right, so they're making

00:05:06   it for themselves. I understand that. Well. All right, there we go. Here's iPod touch.

00:05:14   The only other thing I could think to talk about is Apple last week announced the they've

00:05:18   got a new third and a half generation MacBook Pro keyboard with these speed bumps. Cable

00:05:24   Am I misremembering that you actually like the feel of the new these new keyboards? Is

00:05:30   that no, you're totally right. 100% I love the keyboards. I feel like I can type extremely

00:05:36   quickly on them with their like super tippy tappy action. That's the technical term for

00:05:41   it. And I think they're great. And unbelievably, I have never had a problem with them. But

00:05:47   it is very clear that one cannot say well, it works for me. Therefore, it's fine. Lots

00:05:52   of people clearly have had incredible problems with this keyboard. How do you feel about

00:05:57   that? Do you know do you not like the shallow action? I so the most time I spent with it

00:06:02   It was last summer when in July when the then new MacBook Pros came out and I got a review

00:06:07   unit from Apple and it was a 15 inch and I used it exclusively for six weeks. I didn't

00:06:15   use my didn't touch my iMac didn't touch my or I mean barely touched my personal MacBook

00:06:19   Pro. If there's like some oddball thing that's only on that device, I'd copy it over. But

00:06:24   for the most part, I did six weeks nonstop work using it and within a week I got used

00:06:29   to it. I think it's fine. I think all I think all laptop keyboards have certain trade-offs

00:06:35   and once you get used to that shallow throw it is kind of fun to click and I can see how

00:06:39   you go faster. Yeah. And again I didn't have any problems. Although I did tweet. I tweeted

00:06:45   last summer. It was like I don't know two two and a half weeks into this six week period.

00:06:49   My E key got stuck. I wiggled it. It got unstuck and it never got stuck again. So one time

00:06:57   the E got like wedged under the aluminum. I wiggled it, it got unstuck. Never a problem

00:07:03   again. I used it for another three and a half weeks. And someone from Apple PR was on vacation

00:07:07   at the time because it was like end of July or something. So like two weeks later, I got

00:07:10   like, Oh my god. Oh my god, I just got back from vacation. Is that keyboard? All right.

00:07:17   And I was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, it was like, I guess you saw that tweet. But, you know,

00:07:20   I wiggled it, it got unstuck hasn't been a problem since and they're like, Oh, thank

00:07:24   Does it seem weird? I've never had any of the stuck key problems or anything.

00:07:29   Does it seem weird that always seems to be the E key?

00:07:31   Yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:07:32   Yeah, I think it's clearly, I think there was a Dustin Egress problem at some point

00:07:40   and I feel like this membrane…

00:07:41   Great John Grisham novel.

00:07:42   Dustin Egress.

00:07:43   The Dustin Egress problem. Sorry. Keep going.

00:07:47   Sorry. Keep going.

00:07:51   What's the name of the author of the series of books in Firewatch?

00:07:55   Oh, Richard Sturgeon.

00:07:58   Richard Sturgeon. I love those book titles.

00:08:00   I should have gone with a Richard Sturgeon reference, but yes.

00:08:04   No, Dustin Egress wouldn't work as one of those titles.

00:08:07   Dustin Egress now sounds like a special agent to me.

00:08:11   Yeah, Dustin Egress.

00:08:13   Dustin Egress.

00:08:15   Yes, clearly he has a problem.

00:08:17   I do think they had a Dustin Eager's problem that could be fixed with spray cans of compressed air

00:08:23   It was ridiculous really ridiculous for it is a premium product

00:08:28   Hold it upside down and like that support page is almost comical. They're like hold it at a 65 degree angle

00:08:35   No, but but lately when I see people complaining about it, it's clearly

00:08:46   clearly the most used keys. It's E, it's the spacebar. It's clearly some kind of durability

00:08:56   issue. And so I'm optimistic that this quote unquote "material change" might do the trick.

00:09:05   I think something wears out or breaks upon smacking it or whatever.

00:09:09   Well have to say that I can't help but feel a sense of empathy now

00:09:12   More potentially terrifying than shipping your thing to

00:09:18   People and then the emails start to trickle in like hey, what's up with my keyboard?

00:09:23   Like now I could only just be like, oh, please don't be my future. What's what's up with my

00:09:29   What's up with my d-pad? I can't go up. Yes

00:09:32   Our office into a repair depot

00:09:36   Anyways, so I sympathize with you Apple. I hope that you have solved this problem. All right, that's over. There we go

00:09:43   I get karma. Yes. There we go. Apple news out of the way. Forget about it. Let's talk about our little yellow friend

00:09:48   Play date. Yes

00:09:52   This is amazing. When did you guys announce it? This is all a blur to me. It was sometime last week my god

00:09:59   It's a way to raise wells. So it hasn't even been a weekend. Yeah, dear God. We're recording on Tuesday

00:10:04   28th the show will probably be out tomorrow Wednesday. So a week later. Yeah, what kind of a week have you had? I mean, it's just

00:10:11   It's hard

00:10:14   It's I can barely

00:10:16   It was beyond I think anything that we could have imagined the struggle with working on this project the entire time

00:10:23   Has been not knowing if a hundred people are gonna care about this or a thousand people will care about it

00:10:30   You know, we're not doing focus testing because we can't because it would spoil the surprise and we wouldn't even know how to do that

00:10:36   even if we wanted to

00:10:38   You know, we're just flying blind on this project. So

00:10:41   to have it be announced to have it immediately picked up by all of these outlets and

00:10:48   Seem I mean, of course, there's some skeptics which I get like it's not you know for everybody

00:10:54   But to know that we seem to be reaching the people for whom it's for has felt extremely good and the first hint

00:11:02   I got of maybe this is gonna work out slightly

00:11:04   Okay was when I first showed the device to Jen who wrote the edge

00:11:10   Feature about played it which maybe you'll want to mention. Yeah. Well tell me about that how so that was at

00:11:17   E3 you guys weren't it says there's a bit of you know, sort of you are there style reporting in inner story

00:11:24   It says that you guys were in San Francisco and you're like trying to find a place where you can

00:11:29   show her this thing. It was incredibly awkward, but perfect. So it was during GDC. And you have

00:11:34   to understand that I've been reading E3. I've been reading Edge magazine for literally ever. I have

00:11:41   the premiere issue of it here in the office with, you know, still in its little plastic baggie,

00:11:45   because I'm a huge nerd. And when I reached out to them, just kind of on a lark before going to GDC,

00:11:53   and they naturally assumed that I would be talking about a new game, maybe like a follow-up

00:11:59   to Untitled Goose Game or whatever we're doing next. And so, yes, this comical farce, you

00:12:04   know, Jacques Tati movie scene began where we're going from building to building and

00:12:09   location to location and I'm trying to figure out where at GDC am I gonna produce this thing

00:12:14   from my pocket and not totally ruin it for everybody. And we ended up, of all places,

00:12:19   like a back stairwell of the Metreon, which I felt was kind of an amazing and yet appropriate

00:12:27   place for this weird device that also feels not from the past, but also not from the future.

00:12:34   And you know, and she just couldn't believe it, which was great, because, you know, one

00:12:40   of the best things about it is being able to do this shirt pocket reveal where you just,

00:12:43   you know, pull it out of your shirt pocket.

00:12:45   And yeah, she lost her mind. And within 15 minutes of talking to her, she's like, boy,

00:12:52   I think we might even want to put this on the cover. And of course, you know, I'm trying

00:12:55   to like, hold it in and play Mr. Cool.

00:13:00   Tell me a little bit about Edge magazine. I'm not a gamer. I've been out of video games

00:13:04   for the most part for years. So I've heard of it, but it has a rarefied status in gaming.

00:13:12   Even when there were multiple video game magazines, and today there are not.

00:13:16   Like there, I mean, in the US newsstands, I think the total may be zero.

00:13:22   The UK still somehow can still, you know, sustain a magazine industry, which I've always

00:13:28   been told is because distribution is really simple.

00:13:31   You just put all the magazines on a train and the train goes down the center of the

00:13:34   country and that's, you know, that's all there is to it.

00:13:38   And it's just always been sort of the,

00:13:41   rarefied is a good way to put it.

00:13:43   They sort of cover the artistic side of gaming,

00:13:47   they always do in-depth interviews with creators.

00:13:50   Like it's not just, here's the new game coming

00:13:52   from Rockstar and we gave it a nine out of 10 or whatever.

00:13:55   And so I've always looked up to that magazine.

00:13:57   And so to have that come full circle for me as a reader,

00:14:02   I even believe I sent a letter to the editor at one time

00:14:05   when I was like in college or high school,

00:14:07   which is really embarrassing to admit.

00:14:09   They totally printed it.

00:14:10   And for that to come full circle

00:14:13   was just completely mind-blowing.

00:14:15   - It's print only, which blows my mind.

00:14:17   - Yes. - Right.

00:14:18   - I didn't even know that was possible.

00:14:20   - Right.

00:14:21   - But they're doing it.

00:14:22   - And we're like, so does this article show up online later?

00:14:25   Nope.

00:14:26   - But you can't.

00:14:27   So the asterisk on that is that they are part

00:14:31   of Apple News Plus.

00:14:33   - Correct.

00:14:33   - And so if you want to read it

00:14:35   and you don't wanna find a print edition,

00:14:38   which might be hard to do in the US,

00:14:40   you can sign up for Apple News Plus and get it there

00:14:43   and read it in the wonderfully convenient Apple News.

00:14:46   (laughs)

00:14:48   - There's nothing like zoom in a PDF on an iPhone.

00:14:51   - So here's my little aside on that.

00:14:54   So you sent me a PDF of the article in advance,

00:14:57   so I'd read it and I'm reading it again.

00:14:59   And I remembered that there was something about using,

00:15:03   you guys ran into a problem with going diagonal

00:15:06   on an up, down, left, right D-pad.

00:15:09   And so I wanted to find that.

00:15:11   And it's a long story.

00:15:12   It's like 30 pages.

00:15:14   I mean, a lot of it is photos.

00:15:15   There's two page spreads of wonderful, wonderful.

00:15:17   I mean, that's one thing about this magazine.

00:15:19   It is gorgeous.

00:15:20   It is gorgeous photography.

00:15:22   It is an incredibly well-written story by Jen Simpkins.

00:15:25   It's not just like, oh, hey,

00:15:27   you guys are getting this unbelievable promotional value

00:15:31   in arguably the most revered game magazine

00:15:35   in the world right now.

00:15:37   It's just a good article.

00:15:39   It's like, it's a really well-written article.

00:15:42   - I can't wait to read it.

00:15:44   (laughing)

00:15:45   I'm really excited to look at it.

00:15:46   - You still haven't read it?

00:15:47   - I still haven't read it.

00:15:48   I'm trying to wait until I can get the paper in my hands.

00:15:52   - How can you not?

00:15:53   (laughing)

00:15:55   - It's driving me crazy too.

00:15:57   I just, I have--

00:15:58   - How do you not have the print version yet?

00:15:59   Couldn't somebody just FedEx it to you?

00:16:02   That would have been nice.

00:16:03   It's a box of 500, by the way.

00:16:06   We ordered a few issues for the office.

00:16:09   Couldn't you just get one in addition to that?

00:16:11   Yeah, I should.

00:16:12   Why spend all the money on one more copy

00:16:15   when we've got 500 coming?

00:16:18   Anyways, I can't wait to read it.

00:16:20   I'm glad to hear that it turned out good.

00:16:22   It's a really well-written article.

00:16:23   And I wanted to look up this diagonal thing,

00:16:26   because I think I got it the wrong way.

00:16:27   I read it the first time as that you guys still didn't have diagonal movement working.

00:16:32   Turns out I misread it. It's it was just that that was a tricky thing. But anyway, I'm in

00:16:36   Apple news app and I hit command F to find diagonal and it just is that because it's

00:16:44   in a caption. No, you can't find it all. Really? Yeah. So you what you can do and I tweeted

00:16:52   this and of course, it's tweet so I didn't really write it carefully. You can search

00:16:57   in the sidebar for titles. So if you search for edge, you will find edge magazine and

00:17:03   a bunch of other magazines that have edge. But that's only like a title search. Like

00:17:07   if if you want to find the word diagonal in this 30 page story, you've literally got to

00:17:12   do it the old fashioned way with your eyeballs.

00:17:16   There was like a two day period where all the PDF magazines and Apple News just mysteriously

00:17:21   disappeared. And the entire list of magazine you can read just shortened dramatically.

00:17:26   for a second I thought, oh, maybe they just like formally gave up and knew that this is

00:17:30   not a good experience for reading things, particularly on an iPhone. But then they all

00:17:34   came back. So what happened there?

00:17:37   John Greenewald All right, I got now I got to carefully not

00:17:40   spoil this magazine article.

00:17:42   Dr. Justin Marchegiani No, no, you feel it's okay. You can say anything

00:17:47   you want about it. I've seen a couple of things. Don't worry. Don't worry about me.

00:17:50   John Greenewald All right. But when when was GDC? So when

00:17:53   When did you when did this magazine cover story first come into?

00:17:57   In the ocean?

00:17:58   When did they go to GDC?

00:17:59   Was that in March March of it in March?

00:18:01   Yep.

00:18:02   Yeah.

00:18:03   So we had no intention actually, of announcing this product at all until the end of the year

00:18:09   when it would go up for sale.

00:18:12   But suddenly the opportunity seems so great that we were like, Well, I guess we're doing

00:18:16   this now then.

00:18:17   And it was time to design and build a web page and like write all of our copy and like,

00:18:22   messaging figured out. So in a way, that's been really nice, because we've answered a lot of

00:18:26   questions. And we can get a lot of feedback now before we actually go up for sale later. So I

00:18:32   think that strategy accidentally turned out to be a really good idea. I've been I was thinking it

00:18:37   was March because Apple semi frequently has, you know, product announcements in March. And so I've

00:18:45   been in San Francisco during GDC, like for like a rando iPad announcement or something

00:18:52   like that. A couple of years, you know, just tends to coincide. It is massive. It is seriously

00:19:03   just almost staggeringly big conference. And of course, Apple always tells the press like

00:19:10   six days before an event. So like, I'm like searching for

00:19:12   hotels. It's like, it's like the the high is like $600 a night.

00:19:17   That's correct. Yeah.

00:19:19   I mean, just the fact that it absorbs every part of the

00:19:23   convention center, not just West, you know, I must have

00:19:26   wwc being tucked in that one little building, but it is every

00:19:30   single corner. Yeah.

00:19:32   And you know, so I sympathize with this part of you trying to

00:19:35   find a place to show this because the other thing too is

00:19:37   It's like I've gone out like, you know for a drink or something at the end of the day with a friend

00:19:43   Who just lives in San Francisco just hey, let's meet up. Let's have a beer and everybody around us is talking about games

00:19:49   They're all clearly GDC attendees like you can't take yeah, and I have to say playdate is not an inconspicuous device

00:19:56   No, there's no way to hide that and we didn't do Apple and put it in like a funky weird pretend case or whatever. Yeah

00:20:05   Although we should have done that kind of amazing

00:20:08   So we've got our first little nugget here the first little nugget

00:20:12   I was gonna ask is why announce now and the answer seems to be because you had this opportunity to be on the cover of

00:20:18   Edge you got it, right? And so

00:20:21   Instead of saying here's this thing you can order it. Now. You're saying here's this thing. You can order it later in the year

00:20:27   Yeah, please just give us your email

00:20:33   an easy decision. We talked about it a lot. Yeah. Because we had always been of the mind that

00:20:38   we're not going to tell anybody about this until like, it's done. Yes. We always want to have that

00:20:44   confidence to go out to people and say, Yep, we can definitely do this for you. Yep. Now,

00:20:48   we do have that confidence, to be fair, but we have a few things to finish off still. So it was

00:20:52   it was a big decision. Yeah. Well, and I think everybody in our world is a bit unnerved by the

00:20:59   airpower thing. Yeah, sure. Everybody and I've talked to people at Apple and people

00:21:05   who work on totally different things. They are like, there is like a serious like, hey,

00:21:09   let's not let's cool it with the pre announcements. Like, yeah. And that was so weird because

00:21:13   that was so unusual for Apple. And it's so ironic that the one time they really did such

00:21:18   an early announcement it bit him in the ass. That's I don't know. That's there's a lesson

00:21:22   there somewhere. Well, they did it with the iPhone too. That's and that to me is the comparison

00:21:27   to play date, right? So the iPhone was announced in January 2007 at Mac World Expo and didn't

00:21:35   ship until the very end of June. So about six months. And by all reports, they made

00:21:41   a day they had a lot of software left to write. Because if you remember the people who got

00:21:46   hands on, I was not in that rarefied status at that time. So I didn't even I didn't I

00:21:53   just got to look at it in the plexiglass like, like a regular schmo. But the people who got

00:21:57   the hands-on, half of the apps were just screenshots. You'd open the calculator and it was just

00:22:03   a screenshot of what the calculator was going to look like.

00:22:06   Sure, sure. Okay, you're right. It's kind of similar in a way.

00:22:10   And then there was other stuff too, like in May or at some point like April or May, I

00:22:14   don't know if it was a press release or if it was just the opening statement for a quarterly

00:22:19   finance thing. But they announced apps like Steve Jobs announced, "Hey, we're on pace.

00:22:26   We're still going to ship at the end of June, like we said, but we've replaced the plastic

00:22:29   screen with Gorilla Glass.

00:22:32   And it's like, this is like going on in May.

00:22:35   And it's like, holy shit.

00:22:39   That was the moment where it really dawned on me that this Tim Cook fellow must be some

00:22:43   sort of genius.

00:22:45   Because how is that possible?

00:22:46   Right, right, right.

00:22:49   So you know, you're in good company there.

00:22:51   And I think that there's a similar, you know, you guys wanted to have a surprise announcement.

00:22:58   You made a surprise announcement.

00:23:00   Maybe if you had waited until it was ready to ship, it might have leaked.

00:23:04   That's extremely possible.

00:23:06   And I think we're all stunned that it didn't, given the length of time that we're running

00:23:10   on.

00:23:11   It's been a long time.

00:23:12   And particularly, you know, we've had to involve so many devs in making games for this thing.

00:23:16   Many of them didn't even work out.

00:23:18   there's nothing keeping those people from leaking it. So maybe

00:23:22   it's just because, you know, you're looking for the next

00:23:25   Apple leak, right? Like, that's what everybody wants to know.

00:23:28   But this is maybe so out there that it wasn't enticing to

00:23:32   anyone for any reason. But yes, I think that would have happened.

00:23:36   So I think it's really good that it worked out the way that it

00:23:38   did.

00:23:38   You guys do have like working prototypes, though, like you

00:23:42   like when you showed it to Jen, you took out a thing that turns

00:23:45   on has games you can play.

00:23:49   - But you have hundreds of them actually.

00:23:50   - Yeah, that's true.

00:23:51   - We have a lot.

00:23:52   We do have a lot.

00:23:53   They are everywhere.

00:23:54   - Why do you have so many of them?

00:23:58   - Just several rounds of manufacturing,

00:24:00   just making sure everything is right,

00:24:01   the fit and finish and the PCB, the circuit board.

00:24:05   It just takes a lot of revs to get this thing right.

00:24:09   And there have been tests of various things.

00:24:13   We have some in the office

00:24:14   we tried different colors and you know we're always experimenting with different stuff.

00:24:20   We maybe redid the design of the D-pad and the buttons a couple of times.

00:24:24   We changed it because it was hard to get that working properly and so we've changed that

00:24:27   a few times.

00:24:28   And here's the thing that sucks about hardware.

00:24:32   You just don't hit, you know, build and run and then see if your fixes worked.

00:24:37   You have to call your factory in Malaysia and fire up the line.

00:24:42   Wow, that is definitely been

00:24:44   Challenging for us to wrap our heads around it is you know, I want to get into it

00:24:48   But you know you guys come everybody knows you guys come from a software background

00:24:51   It is very different doing a build of software, you know

00:24:54   And when you do a new build of software like oh we fixed a bug or you know

00:24:58   There's this icon was was two pixels off here. I'll nudge it back over build and run. You just throw the old building the trash

00:25:04   It's just a bunch of ones and zeros that get de-referenced by the file system like with hardware you end up

00:25:12   hundreds of these things.

00:25:13   This is our life. Every drawer is packed with prototype devices. And I mean, you know, again,

00:25:20   to talk about the difference, like Dave, who really did software before he did the hardware

00:25:25   for this project, talks a lot about how wild that is, because, you know, then you're also factoring

00:25:29   in like weird physics into the equation and how, you know, you want to, we all know how frustrating

00:25:35   it is in software when you can't reproduce a bug, but at least there's a chance you could reproduce

00:25:41   a bug, but with hardware! I mean, you don't know what happened with that solder and that chip and

00:25:49   who knows what's going on in that situation until you like take it all apart and you know,

00:25:54   it's just a whole different level. I have such profound respect for what Apple manages to pull

00:25:59   off with hardware. Truly it gives you a deep understanding of the intricacies of that world

00:26:04   once you try it yourself and I guess I could have seen it coming, but we still decided to try it

00:26:09   anyways. All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. And this week,

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00:27:46   months of clear.

00:27:49   Take me back to the beginning.

00:27:50   When I know this, I know a little bit of this, but when, when, what came first?

00:27:57   Like firewatch came first and then you guys started thinking of this, like not

00:28:01   All of this stuff, to a degree, kind of gestated at really the same timeframe.

00:28:08   But I went back into my email and I found a very early email that I had written "Teenage

00:28:16   Engineering," which is the company that we partnered with.

00:28:19   They designed the look of the device and they did some of the mechanical engineering and

00:28:23   they had the crank and we can talk about that in a bit.

00:28:25   But I forget what year that was.

00:28:28   2011.

00:28:29   Oh my god.

00:28:31   OK, so the year was 2011.

00:28:33   So that's a lot longer than I thought.

00:28:35   That's eight years.

00:28:37   It was not a game at this point.

00:28:38   Correct.

00:28:39   It was just, let's do a hardware thing.

00:28:41   Exactly.

00:28:41   So the very core idea of we should push ourselves and try

00:28:46   to do something with hardware goes that far back.

00:28:51   It took us a long time.

00:28:54   That conversation dropped off for a while.

00:28:56   We started doing some other stuff.

00:28:57   And then the core idea in that email

00:29:00   was we should make a little hardware thing as just

00:29:03   like a panic anniversary 15th anniversary gift.

00:29:09   We just keep scratching it out on the cases every year

00:29:11   passing.

00:29:12   And we were thinking maybe like a cool clock or maybe--

00:29:16   you know, like just really trying

00:29:18   to think of an excuse, really, to try to build something.

00:29:23   That conversation just kept going.

00:29:25   And eventually I found the screen, which is called a Sharp Memory LCD.

00:29:32   And it's very unique as a screen in that it has the look and feel of like a classic LCD

00:29:37   screen that you would remember from the 80s or on a Game Boy.

00:29:40   But it doesn't have the little grid lines.

00:29:43   It doesn't blur.

00:29:45   It's like incredibly sharp and crisp and like really viewable and light.

00:29:49   It's because we had settled on the idea of doing a game and watch game.

00:29:53   Exactly.

00:29:54   that screen sort of conversely, yeah, we were talking about Game & Watch, we found that

00:29:59   screen and then we thought, well, what if we made a Game & Watch game, but we used a

00:30:06   real bitmap screen? And then that led to well, what if people think it's a segmented LCD,

00:30:14   like a Game & Watch? In other words, you know, Game & Watch is like a calculator screen,

00:30:17   right? There's just different pieces of art that can turn on and off. We thought what

00:30:22   of people think it's that. And then like a month later, it like

00:30:26   magically transforms into another LCD game. Thanks to this

00:30:30   cool screen. That would be a cool trick. So then you can see

00:30:33   the seeds getting planted. Like, Oh, what if it changes from one

00:30:36   game to another game? Like it's all this. Greg and expensive

00:30:40   idea.

00:30:40   I had a Donkey Kong handheld that I would qualify as a game

00:30:47   and watch. I didn't actually that that is new to me. But so

00:30:51   The way that I recall it, and again, my dad, God bless him, I love him to death, he's a

00:30:56   great man, but he's a thrower aware of all sorts of stuff I still wish I had.

00:31:04   I had a Don Mattingly rookie card that's worth like $2,000 to me.

00:31:07   I threw it right out when I went to go home.

00:31:12   But as I recall, it was only the first level of Donkey Kong because it's a Game of Watch,

00:31:20   So the actual board was printed on the plastic,

00:31:24   the actual levels of the building you have to climb up.

00:31:27   And then there was just Mario sprites

00:31:29   every eighth of an inch all the way up.

00:31:32   So it's like you're saying, it's not like little bitmaps.

00:31:35   It was actual, you know,

00:31:37   Mario sprites and barrel sprites were just on the screen.

00:31:41   And then they would turn on them.

00:31:41   - Those things must've been super interesting to design

00:31:44   because you try to pack so much information into the screen,

00:31:48   But they can't overlap.

00:31:50   And it's a really interesting design constraint.

00:31:53   How do you convey the motion of a barrel when it's just--

00:31:56   Like two positions of a barrel.

00:31:58   Yeah.

00:31:59   We thought that'd be fun, actually,

00:32:01   to have that constraint.

00:32:03   The first concept was the games would

00:32:06   have to conform to the Game & Watch format.

00:32:09   That's right.

00:32:09   So you couldn't break those rules.

00:32:11   You couldn't draw on the screen.

00:32:12   You'd just turn on these stencils.

00:32:14   And we started to design a game that was like a transmit game,

00:32:18   where you were like a truck on the highway delivering

00:32:21   zip files and ping files left and right to dudes that

00:32:24   are waiting, fully following all of these constraints.

00:32:27   We still have this art somewhere.

00:32:29   And it was an interesting constraint.

00:32:32   But then as we kept going and iterating and talking

00:32:36   about this, we suddenly realized that actually, those Game

00:32:39   One games aren't super fun.

00:32:42   They get boring really quick.

00:32:44   There are like two good ones and they've already been done.

00:32:47   I mean, do you remember that with your Donkey Kong?

00:32:49   - Yeah, I remember it was no fun at all.

00:32:50   - Right, yes, correct.

00:32:51   - Once I beat it, once I got the timing down

00:32:54   well enough to beat it once,

00:32:56   it was like, well, now it goes in the door.

00:32:58   - Yes, and so that then unlocked, I think,

00:33:01   a door that we had been avoiding,

00:33:03   which was, well, crap, if we've got this actual pixel screen

00:33:07   and we're building an engine

00:33:09   and we're coding these games and all this stuff,

00:33:11   Maybe they're just real games with the constraint being now that they're black and white and that there's a crank

00:33:18   Well, take me back a little bit here. You said you found this screen the sharp one

00:33:24   sharp memory LCD so

00:33:28   The way I'm hearing this is that it's just sort of like

00:33:32   I mean you probably did it from Portland, but it you know, maybe or did you go to Japan?

00:33:38   I mean, how do you know I'll find a screen like this? This was just a tremendous amount of googling

00:33:44   That's really all there was to it. I was I think a very smaller version of the screen

00:33:49   Would have been used on pebble watches. Hmm, and I think that I might have seen a pebble watch

00:33:56   I thought oh that's kind of interesting that looks a bit like that LCD thing. We're trying to emulate

00:34:00   It's just really paying attention and googling and trying to figure all this stuff out

00:34:05   And then it turns out that like the rep for the screen or one of the reps for the screen happened to actually be in

00:34:11   Portland so she came by with some demo units and all that like all these things sort of connected together

00:34:16   But just yeah just us sitting in the office with google.com

00:34:21   And it sounds to me like there's the story that John Rubenstein was talking to

00:34:27   Toshiba executives, you know like around 2000 or early 2001 and they were like hey

00:34:34   I know you guys are using all of these 2.5 inch hard drives in your MacBooks. We love our relationship

00:34:40   We've got this new thing this 1.8 inch hard disk

00:34:43   And nobody nobody seems to know what to do with it

00:34:47   What do you guys think and Rubenstein took it back and they sort of built the iPod around the drive?

00:34:53   Cool, I think I got most of that from Steven Levy's great book

00:34:57   I forget the title on the iPod but that he had this thing and it was like well

00:35:01   we don't need a drive that small in a MacBook, but if we had a drive that small, we could

00:35:06   make something a lot smaller. And it sounds to me like that's what this screen is. Like,

00:35:09   now you found this screen, here we can build from here.

00:35:13   Yeah, that's exactly right. And I hope that, you know, they're always coming up with new

00:35:20   versions of the screen. So we're like, you know, listening to that and seeing what they

00:35:24   do in the future. But we did learn that this screen is widely used in Japan on the coffee

00:35:31   machine in every 711. Okay. Can you get it? When you order something like this, can you

00:35:42   get it in the exact dimensions you want? Or is it the resolution set set like it's all

00:35:49   177 pixels per inch that said, but you could get it cut into a square or a 16 by nine or

00:35:56   no luck. No, if you're way bigger than us, you could probably have a custom screen built

00:36:02   to your specifications, but that doesn't work for our scale. And they had other sizes.

00:36:07   This is larger size of the screen. But ironically, the larger size of the screen has a lower

00:36:11   resolution. So for us, it was balancing those two things and determining the size of the

00:36:16   device and the size of the screen. But being as small as we

00:36:19   are, we have a website that lists six part numbers, we

00:36:22   choose one basically.

00:36:23   Well, but then again, it becomes one of those design constraints

00:36:27   that can exactly you know that, okay, here it is, it's 400 by

00:36:31   240. It's 2.7 inches diagonal. And then now you've got this

00:36:35   linchpin at the at the center of the of the design. And you go

00:36:40   from there.

00:36:43   So how, when did you find this screen?

00:36:45   Oh boy, Greg.

00:36:48   Steve, do you remember?

00:36:49   We, it was a long time ago because we did base our original game machine prototype

00:36:58   off of this probably 13 or 14, 20, 2000.

00:37:01   Oh God, I thought you meant 13 years ago.

00:37:02   It just feels like I was 13 or 14 at the time.

00:37:07   Oh, right.

00:37:08   Yeah.

00:37:09   It was a really long time ago and we got the screen and we picked

00:37:13   a processor that seemed like it might work and ordered their discovery board. And what

00:37:20   that is, is to evaluate processors for your projects. They make these discovery boards

00:37:26   which give you a lot of the breakout connectors and stuff. So you can really easily get up

00:37:32   to speed with a processor without having to do a bunch of boards and stuff on your own.

00:37:38   And I think I tweeted that very first version.

00:37:41   It was that really janky plastic case.

00:37:43   It had no crank, because we hadn't talked about that yet.

00:37:46   The buttons are all like crazy angles,

00:37:49   because it was 3D printed in the office.

00:37:51   The board is sticking out of the bottom,

00:37:53   and so it's all held together with a rubber band.

00:37:57   But it played the game, right?

00:37:58   Like we actually kind of got it to work.

00:38:00   Dave got that working so fast after we got the screen.

00:38:02   Yeah, but that was a problem.

00:38:03   It was deceptive, yeah.

00:38:04   It was deceptive.

00:38:05   He got it working in like three months.

00:38:06   Yeah.

00:38:07   We're done.

00:38:07   is it? We can get this far in three months? We'll wrap this thing up in six easy!

00:38:14   Jim - Somebody get started on the website.

00:38:19   Bill - What are we calling this thing? Yeah, anyways, that was a trick. Don't be fooled

00:38:25   by that if you're into a hardware project. But yes, the screen was in place at the very

00:38:30   beginning and the processor actually. We did end up bumping to a more recent version of

00:38:35   the processor that has more speed and was theoretically pin compatible. So we could

00:38:40   just drop it in, although it has its own quirks. But the basics of that original prototype

00:38:47   are still kind of there in the device, which is pretty well

00:38:49   what is it? It's like an ARM processor, right? I mean, you guys don't really talk to tech

00:38:53   specs. Yep, yes. What st micro? Okay. I remember the exact Yeah, it's an F seven. F seven sounds

00:39:01   right? Yeah. And yeah, it's it's arm based.

00:39:07   And again, you know, I probably should have said this before we

00:39:12   started recording. Let me let me just preface the remainder of

00:39:16   the show with this that if I asked you guys a question that

00:39:19   you don't want to answer, you can just laugh and say, you know

00:39:21   what, we don't want to talk about that yet. So like, if you

00:39:24   know, there's, you know, there's all sorts, you know, I know you

00:39:26   got games that you want to keep under wraps. There's the Yes, I'm

00:39:29   I'm not going to ask stuff like that.

00:39:30   But if something is a state secret, if you want to be like Apple and not tell me how

00:39:34   much money...

00:39:35   I was just going to say, I got to learn the Schiller brush off.

00:39:38   Everything has been fine so far.

00:39:42   Yeah, you're doing fine.

00:39:45   Yeah, but with the screen though, is there any sort of fear like, okay, it's 2013 or

00:39:51   2014, you find this screen, it's from obviously Sharp is a well-known company.

00:39:57   looks good. This is something we could build a little handheld thing around. Is there any

00:40:02   fear that Sharp is going to stop making the screen? I mean, you're still four or five

00:40:05   years out or did you like stockpile them in advance?

00:40:09   There is a fear that we try to have failures out to make sure that they're going to make

00:40:13   this and it seems like they're going to make it for a while. Well, the companies are also

00:40:15   really good about this in that there is a very strict process for end of lifing screens,

00:40:21   right? Where they give you like years notice, right? They don't just like, Hey, guess what?

00:40:26   week your screen's done. You gotta make a new coffee machine for 7-11." There's definitely

00:40:31   some super advanced notice. But of course we're nervous about that at all times. Like,

00:40:38   the clock is ticking, we don't want to announce, and then the next week it's end of life. So

00:40:43   please cross your fingers for us. Hopefully we have a sliver of clout at this point, we

00:40:50   it's a but it's on the cover of a magazine. You can't cancel it.

00:40:55   We're singing sharps praises every chance we get.

00:40:58   Right, right. We're trying. We're really trying. Yeah, but yes, that is a fear. That's a total

00:41:03   fear with any of the components actually. It is. I mean, this happened to Teenage Engineering.

00:41:08   They just had to change their screen because they're all that got end of life.

00:41:12   Did these a bigger screen? Do you know? It's a little bigger, although I think they might be

00:41:16   masking it. I think it's the same visible size. That's so funny. But inside the case,

00:41:20   it's larger. Amazing. Yeah. Hopefully that wasn't a secret. Yeah. I'm sure they're fine.

00:41:26   Well, tell me a little bit about Teenage Engineering. Okay. So,

00:41:31   God, where do I begin? I know them as a musical instruments company. They

00:41:35   make an incredible synthesizer called the OP-1. And the best way I can describe my

00:41:42   feeling about this company is that they give me the same kind of

00:41:46   "these guys care about everything" that Apple always has. And I can think of very few companies that can generate that

00:41:56   response in my brain. You know, like the

00:41:59   the case itself is just immaculately designed. They have this cool OLED screen, but they're limiting themselves to

00:42:07   four colors. It almost looks like an old vector screen.

00:42:11   Those are the exact same colors they will use on all of the knobs and packaging and like

00:42:17   Every single detail is well considered. You know, there's like a hidden game

00:42:22   Helicopter game that you can play under synthesizer

00:42:25   Something about this company just like these guys are operating at a level beyond

00:42:31   They're not known for being

00:42:33   Super affordable their products are thought of as quite expensive

00:42:38   I've always felt that it was worth it, but you know, it depends and

00:42:42   They also are really good at doing

00:42:45   Experiments like they have a partnership with IKEA

00:42:48   of all people right now where they're designing some lights and a speaker and

00:42:54   really interesting things for them they designed a a

00:42:57   Disposable digital camera for IKEA. There's literally a piece of cardboard with a battery and

00:43:05   and a viewfinder and like a little flip out USB stick.

00:43:08   It was like a $10 digital camera.

00:43:10   Just really unique products all across the board.

00:43:14   And so when we started this thought process early on,

00:43:19   and again, before we had even settled on video game,

00:43:22   I was really hoping that in some way they would be involved.

00:43:26   And so I just sent them a classic cold email.

00:43:29   Hey, how are you?

00:43:30   We are thinking about doing this thing.

00:43:32   and they were immediately enthusiastic about helping us in whatever. They said that they

00:43:39   loved using Transmit, which was great. We got in the door with Transmit. And yeah, it

00:43:46   just has become this really great partnership and they're just ridiculously talented.

00:43:53   It seems like part of what, and I think part of what some people who, when they first saw

00:44:00   playdate were like, "Really? That's it?" Some of this may be skepticism. Some of it

00:44:06   may come from somebody who just doesn't have any nostalgic feeling for old handheld games.

00:44:12   It's all reasonable. But I think the thing that's confusing to some people is that this

00:44:16   is not something designed to make a few billion dollars. And it sounds to me like you guys

00:44:23   are copacetic with the teenage engineering crew in the same way, that they're not setting

00:44:28   out to make a couple billion dollars and become the next Facebook or Snapchat or something

00:44:35   of that size, that they're willing to just be craftspeople who make good money that supports

00:44:41   a company in a healthy way but isn't really there to change the world.

00:44:46   That's exactly it. We've never had grand delusions about this thing. It's not going

00:44:51   change the world. It might improve your day. But it's, I think both of our companies are driven by

00:45:00   this feeling of just wanting to make a thing and bring it into the world. And, you know, you hope

00:45:07   it's the same with our software, really, you hope that it will resonate with people. But there's

00:45:11   always a chance that it might not. But then you just move on to the next thing. And I don't I

00:45:16   I always love that attitude.

00:45:17   Yeah.

00:45:18   Most of my friends, the people who, you know, the mutual friends, people you know, but the

00:45:24   one thing that we all share is an appreciation for good tools.

00:45:28   And, you know, if you're going to be sitting there working all day and you've got an FTP

00:45:33   client open all the time, why not have it look nice?

00:45:37   I know the engineering mindset, like, you know, all those tools are built into the command

00:45:42   line.

00:45:43   Right.

00:45:44   You could do it all from there.

00:45:46   But why not have it look nice?

00:45:48   In the same way that if you're gonna have a pen or a pencil,

00:45:51   why not get a nice pencil and have it feel good

00:45:53   and leave a nice mark on the paper?

00:45:55   - Yep.

00:45:56   - And sure, most people don't look at it that way.

00:45:58   I mean, that's the world we live in

00:46:00   where most people go in to the store

00:46:02   and find whichever pencil is the cheapest.

00:46:05   And then there's little Sally's 12 pack of pencils

00:46:08   for the school year.

00:46:09   - And that's totally fine.

00:46:10   And there's people that can get by completely fine

00:46:13   with free FileZilla or whatever.

00:46:15   And there's people that can, you know,

00:46:18   go buy a used Nintendo 2DS for the same price as our thing.

00:46:22   Like, and that's totally okay.

00:46:25   Yeah.

00:46:26   - Well, there's one other thing that I find interesting

00:46:28   is that it's part of what makes that,

00:46:31   this whole Asian manufacturing world, especially China,

00:46:36   let's just emphasize 'cause they're so big,

00:46:38   is what's driving the prices of some things,

00:46:40   just common things, seriously,

00:46:42   pencils or you know notepad are

00:46:44   Cheaper than they ever could have been like and it in some ways

00:46:48   It doesn't make any sense to me that it's cheaper to make 10 billion pencils in China and then ship them over the Pacific

00:46:54   And then somehow moving from the west coast to the east coast to get them into a target here in Philadelphia

00:47:00   It doesn't really make sense to me, but I guess at a certain point scale wins and but that same

00:47:08   Asian supply chain that's revolutionizing the price of everything, you know of cars, you know, you can get a cheap car for unbelievable price

00:47:16   Is also what's enabled you guys to do hardware like I don't think you got I mean correct me if I'm wrong

00:47:24   I don't think you could do this all in the United States. I don't think so. We looked into it. We thought about it

00:47:29   There's a lot of reasons to do that with local and we could say that but it was not gonna work out financially, right?

00:47:36   That's what I meant by can't it's yes. Yes, right it playdate doesn't cost

00:47:42   $149 if it's entirely assembled in Portland, Oregon

00:47:45   Extremely correct, which is unfortunate. Yeah

00:47:49   Right. I say this with no joy, but it's just right the world is but in some ways the same

00:47:54   the same

00:47:57   economic

00:47:58   fundamental change that has so much cheap stuff cheap mass market stuff being made in Asia also enables

00:48:06   boutique I don't know if that's the right word but

00:48:09   the niche products to be moving right there's a

00:48:12   great I'm I won't get sidetracked too long but I have a couple of

00:48:18   automatic watches and some of my very favorites are from this small company called Halios. Halios

00:48:25   is a guy named Jason Lin is a one-man company up in

00:48:33   Vancouver. And he assembles the watches himself and designs them himself. But like the actual

00:48:40   steel cases he gets made some most of the time. I think he has somebody in Canada he

00:48:44   works with sometimes but when he does a run, they're made in China. He has to go over there

00:48:48   sometimes. But it enables you know, part of it, you know, it's not just electronic gadgets,

00:48:53   like he's a here's a guy making old fashioned automatic wristwatches. But part of it is that

00:48:59   part of what makes it possible and that he could sell them for 700 $800, which is to me,

00:49:03   extraordinary, is that he can get these steel cases made to his exact specifications in China.

00:49:10   And correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not a big watch person, but Shinola watches as well,

00:49:15   even though they say that they're, you know, from Detroit and made in the US, also depend heavily on

00:49:20   parts from China, I think as well. Yeah, they're assembled in Detroit. But so yeah, I think you're

00:49:27   You're right, that there is--

00:49:30   that stuff enables things that wouldn't be possible for us

00:49:34   while at the same time it being really unfortunate that we

00:49:37   can't pull it off here.

00:49:40   It would be nice if that changed.

00:49:41   But I mean, I think a lot about Apple building the Mac Pro

00:49:45   at Foxconn in the US.

00:49:49   And what a wild situation that was for a variety of reasons.

00:49:54   Gosh, John, did I ever tell you this story?

00:49:56   I'm not gonna ramble.

00:49:57   Did I ever tell you the story about the watch

00:49:59   I backed on Kickstarter that was also gonna be assembled

00:50:01   in the US by Flecktronix?

00:50:03   - No. - I'll keep it really short

00:50:05   'cause I know you're gonna love one part of the story.

00:50:08   - Hold on a second, let me do another--

00:50:09   - Stephen Craig, forgive me.

00:50:11   Forgive me for telling the story again.

00:50:12   Okay, go ahead, John.

00:50:13   - We know, 'cause that way we know where we'll pick it up.

00:50:15   We'll pick it up with your story.

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00:51:49   All right, let's hear a story about the watch you back on Kickstarter.

00:51:53   This is my manufacturing is hard slash things can be more challenging.

00:51:57   So I backed this watch on Kickstarter that was pre Apple watch.

00:52:01   It was going to be this extremely thin watch that curved around your wrist.

00:52:05   It was like the CST 01 or something like that.

00:52:08   And it is like many Kickstarters.

00:52:10   They had bitten off way more than they could chew.

00:52:13   It quickly became clear in the updates that things were going not great.

00:52:19   They chose, I think, Flextronics to manufacture at any US facility.

00:52:25   And there's all this drama started to spring up about how they're holding some of their

00:52:31   equipment hostage and batteries and all this other stuff.

00:52:34   And then eventually there was just the saddest possible update where they said, "Hey everybody,

00:52:41   we've moved into a van in the Flextronics parking lot and we're just living in this

00:52:46   van now but we're gonna try to make this work" and it didn't work and when they

00:52:52   canceled the project they posted this graph showing timelines of where all

00:52:57   their money went and there's this it's just seared into my brain because at the

00:53:02   end of this graph there's this line with the label "van living begins" and just and then nothing.

00:53:10   And I think about, I thought about that a lot as you can imagine throughout the

00:53:13   course of this project, will there be a line on our graph that says "van living begins."

00:53:19   The sad part about that is the factory even disputed that they were living in a van! They

00:53:25   were like "that's not true, we have no proof of them living in the van." And so then they

00:53:29   posted additional photos of their van, the inside of the van, the parking lot at the

00:53:34   factory, like it was just the darkest thing. Anyways, manufacturing is hard.

00:53:39   and the watch was a huge quite the opposite. I never saw that money again. But let us all

00:53:47   pray that we never have van living begins. We had a I mean, I think everybody has spent

00:53:54   some money on some kickstarters that did not come to fruition. We had one I forget how

00:53:59   much Amy spent. But our son has a dairy allergy, very severe dairy allergy has had his whole

00:54:05   He's doing great. Just you know has to stay away from all dairy products. Okay, and you know, we've been really lucky

00:54:11   He's a cautious kid anyway, so he just doesn't eat random stuff even when he was little he's 15 now

00:54:15   So he's on his own. But anyway a couple years ago, maybe five six years ago

00:54:18   Somebody came out with a Kickstarter project and and they seemingly had an academic background

00:54:23   They didn't seem like a you know out of like a Yahoo

00:54:26   But they claim to be making a device that you could just sort of

00:54:30   Hold up about an inch away from food and it would tell you everything that was in it

00:54:34   (laughs)

00:54:37   - That sounds awesome though is the thing.

00:54:39   Like, yes I want that.

00:54:40   - And they had phrase, you know, spectromography

00:54:43   or what, I don't know what the hell their terms were.

00:54:45   And Amy was like, what do you think of this?

00:54:46   And I said, I think this is bullshit.

00:54:49   I can't believe that this would work.

00:54:51   But if you want to back them, you know,

00:54:54   think of it as like playing a couple hundred dollars

00:54:57   at Blackjack, you know, you're probably gonna lose.

00:54:59   (laughs)

00:55:00   If you want to back it because, you know,

00:55:03   need the kick if it was going to work they needed the Kickstarter funding to get there and so we did

00:55:08   it and there were a couple of updates I don't think I ever moved into a van but they just sort

00:55:12   of they just sort of stopped sending updates that's the other solution yeah I don't think that they

00:55:18   were a fraud I think that they genuinely I do think and if they were they were really good at

00:55:24   the copywriting I think that they were earnest and that they really thought they were on the cusp of

00:55:29   being able to do this and they just needed money to find out. We ended up talking about this stuff

00:55:36   all the time and I track these quite obsessively. There was the laser razor that was a razor that

00:55:42   was going to use like a laser beam to cut your hair. I don't know if you knew this.

00:55:46   I don't remember that one. Oh, everybody in the comments is like, "Hi, I am a master's in physics

00:55:52   and what you're making is not possible." They just kept at it and they still think they're going to

00:55:58   do it their last update they said that they had moved into Silicon Valley

00:56:04   laughing for like five minutes anyways I do believe you in this situation too I

00:56:11   don't think there are fraudsters I think they really thought we have an idea on

00:56:16   paper that can maybe work and let's just immediately go to Kickstarter how sad

00:56:21   would it be if you met them and like their cheeks are all scarred please

00:56:28   don't look at me. I'm idiots. The laser razor. They all look like the bad guys in a Bruce

00:56:36   Willis movie. They're all scarred up. No refunds. Anyways, well, anyway, these are my name,

00:56:45   though, while we're talking about Kickstarter, a lot of products of the scope and scale of

00:56:51   Playdate these days go through Kickstarter or or one of the Kickstarter like services Indiegogo

00:56:58   There's a dozen of them. I'm sure

00:57:01   I'm gonna guess that you guys never really even considered that route. No, did you did you great?

00:57:08   We talked about it for you know for a little while and we would we did go back and forth for like a week

00:57:13   I think so. What should we do? But ultimately, I mean we decided it was not quite

00:57:18   the right platform. We wanted to have a

00:57:20   surprise. Right. And we wanted to have the same kind of pop out fully formed with complete confidence. Yes. It was gonna work.

00:57:30   Yeah, I didn't want anyone to go on a journey with us, you know, like I just wanted it to be

00:57:34   "Here it is. It exists and it's real." Now ironically,

00:57:39   announcing early because of the magazine kind of took us back a little bit from that original dream. We're a little bit,

00:57:44   But we're still pretty far.

00:57:45   The plus of doing a Kickstarter, which some people pointed out

00:57:48   to us, is there's a built-in audience.

00:57:50   And you get notified when your friends follow--

00:57:52   well, at least I do-- your friends follow something

00:57:54   on Kickstarter.

00:57:55   That would help.

00:57:56   But I think we just were mostly confident that we could

00:58:00   accomplish that on our own.

00:58:01   And also, yeah, I love Kickstarter.

00:58:04   And actually, the vast majority of the things I backed

00:58:06   have been successful and been delivered.

00:58:08   Same here.

00:58:09   Have you ever gone to your Things I Backed page, John?

00:58:12   That's really interesting because they have a check mark for, "Yes, I got this, but you

00:58:15   do it yourself."

00:58:16   It's kind of a self-selected process.

00:58:19   I wish they had a second column for "This thing will never show up," but they didn't

00:58:22   seem interested in my idea.

00:58:25   But I'm amazed at how many things did ship successfully.

00:58:28   So definitely not knocking Kickstarter, but there is definitely a feeling of you now,

00:58:35   when you back something on Kickstarter, you just have to be prepared for the fact that

00:58:37   it might never show up.

00:58:38   And I just don't think we wanted to give anyone that feeling.

00:58:41   I'll bet you guys have a copy or two of this the

00:58:44   I'd forget his name, but there was a book that came out recently that was I think Kickstarter

00:58:49   But if not, it was like in D go go the Secret History of Mac gaming. Oh, yeah, definitely

00:58:53   Yeah, and it's it didn't just ship it is a very nice book

00:58:59   It is extremely very very nice hardcover book with the design is amazing

00:59:05   High quality paper high quality printing and that's the sort of thing that is an author you really?

00:59:11   You can't do you if you don't you know, you don't have the money to do that in advance

00:59:16   You can't print the book, but I had confidence he'd written previous books

00:59:20   So it's like I you know, I think he can do this, but I'm blown away by how nice it is

00:59:24   It's actually a nicer book than most of the books I get in a real bookstore. That's definitely true

00:59:29   Yeah, so I see that with the surprise and you guys are in a position where you have a successful company and you could write

00:59:37   you could write back this with the

00:59:39   the you know

00:59:41   The back of the profits on the back of the profits of the software you're already writing

00:59:45   Ironically it kind of reminds me of the question of do you put your app in the App Store or not?

00:59:50   Because you know the argument for the App Store one of the arguments for the App Store is that it's a marketing machine

00:59:56   And you don't have to set all these things up and all that other stuff

00:59:59   But of course for us having been around for a long time

01:00:02   We we already have a way to take credit cards and we already have an audience and a list that we can email and stuff

01:00:07   that makes that decision but that's like maybe a different podcast for another time.

01:00:11   We could really ruin the rest of this one by going there.

01:00:16   Let's not crack that open.

01:00:18   But you are, what's back in the App Store now?

01:00:21   Transmit. Transmit back in the App Store as a subscription.

01:00:24   As a subscription. What's the price?

01:00:26   Oh, got it. Twenty-nine.

01:00:29   Twenty-four.

01:00:30   Twenty-four.

01:00:31   Twenty-nine.

01:00:32   Or a year.

01:00:32   I'm glad that I'm on the ball.

01:00:34   Yeah, it's a yearly subscription.

01:00:37   Consummate businessman.

01:00:39   Yeah, did you like that?

01:00:40   I got that number straight.

01:00:42   I have a very small side story about that.

01:00:45   I'll keep this short.

01:00:47   Earlier in this year, throughout a series of dumb circumstances

01:00:51   that I won't get into, we ended up having to redesign

01:00:53   the subscription page that pops down in the app

01:00:57   to ask you to subscribe.

01:00:59   This was not our choice, but we were asked to.

01:01:02   And so when we were redesigning it--

01:01:04   and I keep meaning to blog about this,

01:01:06   so I guess this is an exclusive.

01:01:08   That's so dumb, nobody cares.

01:01:10   When we were redesigning that,

01:01:12   in the corner of that sheet,

01:01:14   we added a little link that just says,

01:01:16   "Don't like subscriptions? Email us."

01:01:19   And I think that was one of the smartest things

01:01:21   that we have ever done,

01:01:22   because we were getting a bunch of negative reviews,

01:01:25   of course, from people who don't like subscriptions.

01:01:28   But we also can't say anywhere in the app

01:01:32   that we sell a full-price version from our website.

01:01:36   However, we can set up an autoresponder on an email link

01:01:40   that says, hey, sorry you don't like subscriptions,

01:01:44   but you can always buy it here.

01:01:46   And people click that link like two or three times a day.

01:01:49   Fortunately, we get more subscriptions

01:01:51   than we do people complaining about subscriptions.

01:01:53   But it provided this great funnel and this great outlet

01:01:57   for people to not only say--

01:01:59   and it's amazing.

01:02:00   Some people just say, I don't like subscriptions.

01:02:02   But some people actually go into detail about it.

01:02:04   But it's really fascinating to Yes, it's a lot of detail. But

01:02:08   anyways, I'm really happy that we did that. I don't know why

01:02:12   that's just that has nothing to do with playdate whatsoever. I

01:02:14   just thought you might find it interesting. Yeah,

01:02:16   it reminds me of Netflix when Netflix for years allowed you to

01:02:20   sign up in the app and went through the revenue split with

01:02:24   Apple. And I don't think Apple still publishes at least the

01:02:27   other day when I look for it. I can't find the top grossing list

01:02:30   anymore. If it if they still have it. Does it even exist?

01:02:33   That's a great question. I don't know they definitely de-emphasized it, but what is great, but as as of the moment

01:02:38   It was still there when when Netflix decided they were going to cease taking signups in that

01:02:44   And Netflix was at the time the top the top grossing app in the App Store like Apple makes was making so much money off

01:02:51   Their 15% or whatever they negotiate share was Netflix. It was number one

01:02:56   but the thing that I find so bizarre about Apple's rules on this is the the

01:03:02   the rule that you're not allowed to tell the user what the hell is, what's the situation.

01:03:08   Like you can't Netflix can't say, here's what you have to do. You have to go to our website.

01:03:14   Not only are they you know, even if they weren't allowed to put a link in that would open the

01:03:18   browser, if they could just tell you go to any t f dot com and sign up there, then come

01:03:25   back with your new account. But they had a phone number. So I called the phone number.

01:03:31   And this is my dedication to my work.

01:03:34   You guys can imagine how much I enjoy making a phone call.

01:03:37   Not much at all.

01:03:39   But I did it.

01:03:40   I called.

01:03:41   I talked to a friendly gentleman at Netflix Support.

01:03:42   It was not too long of a wait online.

01:03:46   They actually pinpointed it.

01:03:48   They answered the call and it was like, "Your call will be answered in 2 minutes, 41 seconds."

01:03:54   I don't know if it was that precise, but they were like, "2 minutes, 40 seconds."

01:03:57   And 2 minutes, 40 seconds later, I was on the phone with a guy.

01:03:59   I said, Hey, I've got my iPad here. I want to sign up for

01:04:03   Netflix. And it's asking me for a login. I don't have a login.

01:04:06   What do I do? And he says, Oh, you go to netflix.com. And you

01:04:09   sign up there. And then you go back to the app. Like he had it.

01:04:11   He was ready, right? But who what other companies? How many

01:04:15   companies can have phone support all the time? So that people can

01:04:19   who are confused? How do I sign up for a thing? Where's the

01:04:22   great account? It's such a bizarre situation. It is

01:04:25   extremely bizarre. Anyway, congratulations on making it

01:04:29   back to the app store. It's funny because you guys it's not

01:04:31   a coincidence because Apple has been courting certain longtime

01:04:35   developers not coincidence that BB edit is back right right on

01:04:38   the same time. You know, yes, there was a coordinated effort

01:04:41   there on the app stores part to sort of make power tools for the

01:04:44   Mac a little happier. Which is nice anyway. Okay, next. Yeah.

01:04:51   And then I'll have to set up my server to like IP block Apple's

01:04:56   I just want Steve to lean into the microphone and start talking at this

01:05:00   way but I know he's suspiciously hanging back.

01:05:05   Well I'm sure it was fun to get it back in the app store.

01:05:09   It was, it definitely was.

01:05:12   God, where were we?

01:05:16   Where we made a handheld gaming system, that's right.

01:05:19   Yeah.

01:05:20   So

01:05:21   Let's talk about the actual design of the device itself. Like what point did you guys go to teenage engineering?

01:05:29   So you guys had like prototypes working where you could make a gameplay on the sharp?

01:05:33   Electromagic whatever it's called

01:05:36   I'm calling it that it's a much better name. Yes

01:05:40   Sometime after our prototype was up and running that we

01:05:45   formally met with teenage engineering at

01:05:49   Moogfest in Asheville, North Carolina,

01:05:53   which is a big electronic music festival.

01:05:55   And that was just convenient

01:05:57   'cause they were gonna be in the US

01:05:59   and we had never been there.

01:06:00   And that, as a side note for trivia fans,

01:06:03   is why the code name for Playdate was Asheville.

01:06:06   In fact, I'm still not used to being able

01:06:08   to say the word Playdate,

01:06:10   which is how Apple employees always feel, right?

01:06:12   Like, "Oh, I see you picked up the new Tango.

01:06:14   "Oh, I mean."

01:06:15   (both laughing)

01:06:16   Now I'm that guy.

01:06:18   But-- - Yeah, I've had that too,

01:06:19   I'd been in the product briefing like after the keynote talking to like a high-level executive not Phil Schiller, but let's

01:06:26   Say his name rhymes with was

01:06:28   You know, it was like one of the years where there were two sizes of new iPhones

01:06:37   You know the plus and the regular and he called the one like j22 and he's like forget that I never said that

01:06:45   Classic. Yeah, so we met with them in Asheville and that was I think

01:06:49   after that meeting and talking about possibilities and what we want to do

01:06:53   I think a few days after we came back and correct me if I'm getting this timeline wrong because

01:06:57   That's when we got the first renders from Jesper

01:07:01   That's right of his ideas and the very first render not only was there a crank

01:07:06   but there was a slider and there was like there's all sorts of unique input ideas and

01:07:13   Just seeing that that idea at all because we never thought beyond a d-pad and a B buttons

01:07:19   To be able to say why not put a crank on there would have never have occurred to us

01:07:23   So that was like the whole project went to like level four. I don't know I picked four

01:07:28   There was just an instant we have to have that. Yeah, like it just it was the exact right level of

01:07:33   Different weird and maybe actually useful and so

01:07:40   Yeah, and the phrase that it's in the story from teenage engineering is that one of the reasons they wanted to put this

01:07:48   analog

01:07:49   Rotating crank was to break people of their psychosis such psych. I will never forget him saying those words to us

01:07:56   Because iOS gaming was getting huge to be fair the Nintendo switch did not exist yet

01:08:02   so the idea of bringing something with you that was

01:08:07   Not a touchscreen of just us repeatedly tapping a piece of glass was driving him crazy

01:08:12   And this is somebody that loves knobs and switches and dials and synthesizers

01:08:17   And yeah, and I definitely I that was one of my favorite moments of all. I want to break people of their touch psychosis

01:08:23   Well

01:08:31   It's fascinating though. I mean it's you know, it's obviously I

01:08:35   iOS gaming and iPhone gaming in particular is just huge

01:08:38   You know Apple calls it the biggest gaming platform in the world and by some measures

01:08:42   I'm sure it is a certain number of titles and there are some games that are perfect for a touchscreen

01:08:48   They tend to be games that wouldn't even exist without a touchscreen like you couldn't I can't imagine how you would play candy crush with a

01:08:56   D-pad

01:08:57   It just doesn't make sense because not to touch it

01:09:00   But then there's all sorts of other games that are in my opinion no good on a touchscreen

01:09:05   Right, and especially the games that put the little virtual D-pad and buttons on the screen,

01:09:11   which at that point, yeah.

01:09:13   I've never enjoyed one of those at all.

01:09:15   No.

01:09:16   I really don't.

01:09:17   My finger always slides off eventually and I can't figure out why my character stopped

01:09:19   moving and like, it's tough.

01:09:21   I thought Nintendo did a pretty good job with Mario Run as an endless runner, you know,

01:09:27   and there's a couple of other of those endless runner type things where you just tap and

01:09:31   like your only real controls are tap and long tap.

01:09:34   I thought they did a really good job of that because of course they're Nintendo and they're

01:09:37   really good feel.

01:09:38   I agree.

01:09:39   That's probably one of the best examples.

01:09:42   But still, I don't know, I tired of it quickly.

01:09:46   Me too.

01:09:47   So yes, that's why when we saw the crank I think we're like, "Oh man, this is something

01:09:51   totally different."

01:09:52   We've all had analog spinning controls.

01:09:56   We grew up playing Tempest and having the little rotational knob or whatever.

01:10:02   That idea is not groundbreaking by any means, but the idea of having it attached to this

01:10:08   little portable thing.

01:10:09   And it was funny because, god, right after that, I forgot about this, fairly recently

01:10:15   after we came up with the idea for the crank, then Apple introduced the Apple Watch with

01:10:18   the digital crown.

01:10:19   And I remember going, "God damn it!

01:10:21   They have a little spinner thing on the side of their thing!"

01:10:26   The irony is, I don't think I've ever used the digital crown

01:10:29   on your watch since I've gotten it.

01:10:31   And other than-- yeah.

01:10:33   I mean, even when I'm activating Siri,

01:10:35   I always press the wrong button.

01:10:36   I always press the sleep button, and then

01:10:38   it asks if I want to do an emergency SOS or power

01:10:41   off my phone.

01:10:42   No memory for which button to use.

01:10:44   But anyways, I remember definitely

01:10:46   having two days of sadness that there was a digital crown,

01:10:49   but it makes sense.

01:10:51   It's kind of a nice feeling input method.

01:10:53   And so we're using it for games, but of course, we're

01:10:55   using it in the OS, and not every game uses it, and it flips out from the side, and there's even

01:11:02   a little sensor in the cavity where it rests where we can tell whether it's in there or not. So I'm

01:11:08   hoping that some games, like when you flip the crank out, will make a cool sound effect or

01:11:12   something. There's all sorts of possibilities with it, but what it really unlocked for us was

01:11:17   exciting these devs, these amazing game creators that I think just wanted something different,

01:11:25   a break from the routine of making a 3D game for whatever, where it's just like that to the right

01:11:32   person, the existence of that crank just opens up this incredible box of ideas. And that was

01:11:38   the true power of the crank. Right. So the one title that you've shown the most of is...

01:11:44   Yes is crank its time travel adventure. Right? What a name for a game. I love it

01:11:50   but yeah, it reminds me a little bit of

01:11:54   Nintendo's strategy with their new platforms where over the years they tend to have an opening title

01:12:02   Yeah that

01:12:04   exemplifies what they think is special about the platform the one that pops into my mind in particular is

01:12:10   The Mario game that shipped with the n64 because all of a sudden all of a sudden Mario's in 3d

01:12:16   2d and it's like

01:12:19   This is amazing. This is so I cannot believe that this still feels like a Mario game even though it's in 3d

01:12:26   and

01:12:28   Actually have the word cranking like that

01:12:30   Name is cranking

01:12:33   You know, it is like here's playdate here it is

01:12:39   Here's crankin'!

01:12:41   Yes, well, so the reason we like that game obviously is because it's exclusively the crank

01:12:50   and it's something that would be really difficult to do with a regular controller. Your thumb would get super tired rotating an analog stick

01:12:56   or over and over forever.

01:12:58   And it's just kind of funny and it has funny sound effects and the plot is totally ludicrous and

01:13:07   It looks really cool

01:13:09   one weird piece of trivia about that game is that the bulk of the graphics not all of the graphics are

01:13:16   pre-rendered frames so

01:13:19   What's funny about that is the artist that did all the graphics actually rendered the graphics in Maya

01:13:25   So this incredibly advanced 3d modeling application and then exported to one bit

01:13:31   400-240 or whatever, which is my favorite thing in the world

01:13:36   And so yeah, anyways, it's it's a good mix of

01:13:40   gameplay and uniqueness and funniness and I also have a huge fan of that guy's games and so like it really sort of

01:13:48   Ticked all the boxes for us. So the can the the inputs you have there's deep d-pad up down left, right?

01:13:55   and a B buttons and

01:13:57   there's a

01:14:00   Button that I'm hoping is called the panic button, but I still think is

01:14:03   There's a name in the top right.

01:14:08   There's a button which brings up sort of like a system menu where you can take a screenshot.

01:14:17   And the crank and that's it.

01:14:18   Yeah, there's a sleep wake button on the very top of the device, which reminds me a lot

01:14:22   of an iPhone or whatever.

01:14:24   So that sleep wake button also has a small little RGB LED light in it so that we can

01:14:31   do cool blinking notifications of new games or whatever. But yes, D-pad, A/B button, menu

01:14:40   button, Frank.

01:14:41   I've complained about this to you privately and now I'm going to complain.

01:14:44   I'm ready. You're going to talk about the buttons, aren't you?

01:14:47   Why call them A/B buttons?

01:14:49   Greg, do you have an answer? Steve, I'm going to just leave the room for a second.

01:14:55   Long, long, long discussion. And it's been almost everything.

01:15:00   I mean, they were A, B, and B, A. We're B, A now. Just like Nintendo.

01:15:05   They were one dot and two dots.

01:15:08   One dot and two dots.

01:15:09   That's right.

01:15:10   Did we ever do shapes or anything?

01:15:11   We tried shapes. Also like a Roman numeral one, Roman numeral two kind of thing with

01:15:16   two lines, one line. Yeah, we kept having to switch the API. That was the most embarrassing

01:15:21   part of it actually.

01:15:22   Like the developers?

01:15:23   The developers, we kept on switching the API.

01:15:24   Hey, happy Monday. Guess what? The button's on different now.

01:15:28   Eventually we added an extraneous left and right API.

01:15:32   So you can actually just do it that way.

01:15:34   Is that true?

01:15:34   Yes.

01:15:35   I did not know that.

01:15:36   Yes.

01:15:36   Oh, that's so good.

01:15:37   So then we can change them forever.

01:15:39   That's right.

01:15:39   OK, good.

01:15:40   As the button names change in your API, so you can--

01:15:45   Yeah, because when it was one and two dot,

01:15:47   I remember Sean actually baked graphics

01:15:49   into his game where the character would say whatever.

01:15:52   Press the and circle with one dot or whatever.

01:15:55   That was awkward, we thought, I think.

01:15:57   it's hard to talk about that. Just press two dots to continue. That's weird, but A and B

01:16:03   communicate. It's A, it's B. Also, there's some Nintendo nostalgia there because of course,

01:16:10   that's the classic NES controller, AB, actually BA technically, right? B first, A second, which is

01:16:17   also the secondary debate. Is it? Yeah, like you said, is it AB or BA? We chose BA.

01:16:22   - Yeah, huge debate. - But yeah, John, it's a nightmare.

01:16:25   Well, at least you consider it. That's all I need to know is that you consider it. My

01:16:29   fear is that it was like, well, Nintendo has BA so we all have BA.

01:16:33   Well, see, the button on the right is just kind of easier to push. And it's the primary

01:16:37   button for doing stuff in the UI. It just felt weird to have that be be. I think that

01:16:41   on the PlayStation, the OK and cancel buttons are different in the US and in Japan, no,

01:16:49   like at a system level. And if you localize your title into Japanese, you also have to

01:16:54   swap out these buttons. And the reason is, because the X button in X in Japan is like

01:17:00   no means no, but circle in Japan means yes. We do check mark, but in Japan they do circle.

01:17:07   And so that circle is on the right. Yeah. And then X is the bottom, but in the U S that's

01:17:12   instinctively backwards for what we're used to in controllers. Anyways, we are not the

01:17:16   only company to face this challenge. We actually had to localize that in Firewatch. Yeah. In

01:17:21   in Firewatch. I think we actually got dinged in cert or

01:17:24   whatever because we haven't localized those buttons in

01:17:26   Firewatch and then a Japanese person was mad at us.

01:17:29   Yes. But so I was looking at my switch before we started

01:17:34   recording the show and I I play it but I'm a simplistic player

01:17:40   and I tend to play super dumb games. I love that playdate

01:17:45   doesn't have all these buttons right so my switch has let me

01:17:48   think I'm if I'm recalling this right they've got a B then x y

01:17:51   I don't know but why not Z but then there's the shoulder buttons which I

01:17:56   guess are the Z and there's four shoulder buttons even on the tiny little

01:18:00   controller that is partly colorful ones if you use the little the ones that click

01:18:04   into the switch itself yeah there's up down left right and then there's a B XY

01:18:10   four shoulder buttons and then other buttons for like home and click the

01:18:16   analog sticks also. So my theory totally made up by me is that

01:18:22   they really wanted to conform to kind of what the industry

01:18:25   standard is right now. Right? So games would be easier to port.

01:18:28   That's the one thing Nintendo hasn't had in the past. So I

01:18:33   think they probably have actually more buttons they would

01:18:34   like. Yeah, that's exactly my theory, too, is that Nintendo

01:18:37   isn't really happy about all those buttons, but they they

01:18:40   need the buttons as standards on the controller so that, you

01:18:43   know, cross platform games don't have to magically make do with

01:18:47   fewer buttons than they need.

01:18:48   Yes.

01:18:48   Yeah, the PS Vita was was missing some of those, it was

01:18:52   missing two shoulder buttons and the ability to click the

01:18:54   round sticks. And it may, you know, when you're used to that

01:18:57   sort of quote unquote, standard control scheme that made those

01:18:59   games a lot harder to play on that system.

01:19:01   I'm, I'm too old. And like my like, the last system I really

01:19:06   played a lot on was the N64. And I forget how many buttons that

01:19:09   had, but it had like a trigger button, I had like two shoulder

01:19:12   buttons and it had the four x, y, a, b, that my brain maxed out

01:19:17   at that point. Like, when I watch my son play and he's using

01:19:20   all these shoulder buttons, it is like, I cannot believe that

01:19:23   you can't play the piano or something useful instead of

01:19:27   able to use eight fingers at once on a controller. So here's

01:19:31   a question for you. When you're using the crank is it

01:19:34   ergonomically Can you still access the A B buttons?

01:19:40   Yes, you can with you. I mean, I'm right handed, I crank with

01:19:43   the right hand, and then I use left thumb to hit A and B and

01:19:46   sometimes D pad. I mean, but it is something that has to be

01:19:49   balanced. You can't just have games that were you doing them

01:19:52   all simultaneously. That does not work. But our developers

01:19:56   have been, you know, learning how to balance those and figure

01:19:59   out what what combination of controls makes sense at one

01:20:02   time.

01:20:02   I noticed that the your BA buttons aren't they're set

01:20:06   horizontal to each other. And my most systems, they're diagonal, including I think the classic

01:20:12   Nintendo controller like the NES. So I'm sure I think as was straight, but Game Boy definitely

01:20:18   switched today. Oh, yeah, you might be right that any s right. Let me guess you guys spent some time

01:20:23   on this. They were diagonal. They were diagonal. Yeah. Yep. For a while. For a long time. Yeah.

01:20:30   What what was the reason we changed it again? Like ran out of room or something and engineering

01:20:34   switched it. It was their suggestion. And it looked nice.

01:20:38   And we were skeptical, I think, because it is very different. I

01:20:42   think in practice, it isn't really a problem. You can push

01:20:45   both buttons simultaneously. And they're both easy to reach. So

01:20:48   it wasn't a big deal. And I admit it did look better that

01:20:52   way. Yeah. So we went for it. Yeah.

01:20:54   And you guys spent one of the things touched on in the edge

01:20:57   articles that you guys spent a lot of time on the feel of the

01:21:00   the buttons.

01:21:01   Yeah.

01:21:02   Yes.

01:21:03   Easily one of the hardest parts of this project, right, was making that feel correct and clicky

01:21:07   and responsive.

01:21:08   Yeah, and the weird thing was, like, you'd hand somebody two buttons and ask, you know,

01:21:12   which one feels better to you.

01:21:14   And they would press one, and it was always, they'd always say it was button A. Like, just

01:21:18   the first one we gave them.

01:21:20   But then after they pushed it for about 30 seconds, all of a sudden, that one had too

01:21:24   much tension and was getting too hard to press.

01:21:26   Was actually this slightly mushier one that was better in the long term. So but it was a lot of experimentation

01:21:33   Yeah, so what I mean and at that point

01:21:35   Do you even have games that you can play or you just like?

01:21:37   Sitting there and pretending like you've got like an inert hardware device and you just we were pretending at that point

01:21:43   I think we just had literally a button maybe or something like I don't know

01:21:46   Button that we really liked but they ended up

01:21:51   Stress testing out of the factory and it wasn't even close to what it was rated for first round of buttons

01:21:55   We had for whatever reason died after about

01:21:58   2,500 presses

01:22:01   Yeah, we're in the hundreds of thousands if not here the millions down but yeah

01:22:09   How did they test that? I mean, I guess it's like a robot. Yeah, they have a machine

01:22:15   They place the device on there and the thing just sits there and presses it and yeah

01:22:20   They have all sorts of machines that will drop them or ascend like this huge electric current through them

01:22:25   Just they do everything to them. They totally torture them

01:22:28   I used to love you brought up IKEA before you guys ever at your local IKEA. Did you ever have the robot but

01:22:34   For the Poang chair

01:22:41   They had our I think they got rid of it

01:22:45   They moved the Philadelphia IKEA a couple years ago, and I think they got rid of the robot

01:22:48   butt, but it was this industrial butt that and the machine you could, of course it was all in metric

01:22:56   because it was from you know from IKEA so it was but you'd set a simulated weight of the individual

01:23:03   in kilograms and then it would just stand up sit down stand up sit down and then there was a counter

01:23:08   and I and my wife it would drive my wife nuts because she's got like an agenda she wants to buy

01:23:15   XYB she then she wants to go downstairs and just sort of browse through the the

01:23:20   knick-knack level and then get the hell out of IKEA in the meantime I just want

01:23:24   to stand there and watch the robot but watch the number increment like if you

01:23:32   put it in your back pocket or whatever like how does it fare sitting on a bus

01:23:37   so was there a debate on adding more buttons earlier like how quickly did you

01:23:44   settle on look, let's keep it simple. Up, down, left, right,

01:23:47   AB.

01:23:47   There was no debate on the standard controls. There was a

01:23:51   debate on sort of how many kind of weird gimmick controls you

01:23:55   might have. Yes. Like there was a touch area that te kind of

01:23:59   wanted to have underneath the BA button. So yeah, to be a touch

01:24:02   sensitive strip. Yeah. But eventually we thought, if we

01:24:05   put too many, it really would feel like a huge gimmick. Yeah.

01:24:09   And also the story is just cleaner if it's just the rank,

01:24:12   Like instead of having the game console with wacky controls, it's the crank.

01:24:18   I always imagine myself writing the copy and it's always like, "Oh my god."

01:24:22   Like, "Oh, and there's a crank!"

01:24:23   "And also a touch strip!"

01:24:25   "Oh, and a slider on the side!"

01:24:26   And at that point, people just close the tab and move on, I think.

01:24:30   Right.

01:24:31   At that point, it starts to sound like the old sample project from Next that it was like...

01:24:35   Right?

01:24:36   You're totally right!

01:24:37   I think Stephen Trouton-Smith just posted a screenshot of it, but it was just a sample

01:24:41   project for the old project builder and it was just a square window with one of every

01:24:45   control. Just to show you, here's how you use a pop-up menu and a slider and a checkbox

01:24:50   and a radio button. It starts to sound like that.

01:24:54   Exactly.

01:24:55   Because one of the things about it is it is so clearly, instantly, the moment you just

01:25:02   look at it, you know exactly what it is. It's a game playing device. You add enough controls

01:25:08   to it and all of a sudden maybe it loses that clarity, right?

01:25:12   Some sort of thing used in boating or something.

01:25:15   Right.

01:25:16   Or is it a musical device?

01:25:18   Is it?

01:25:19   Yes, correct.

01:25:21   So we kept it, well, relatively simple.

01:25:24   And I have seen some people on the internet be like, "This thing doesn't have enough buttons,"

01:25:27   which is kind of a hilarious criticism to me.

01:25:31   But I get it because modern controllers have a bunch of buttons, but our games are not

01:25:35   that complicated.

01:25:36   Yeah. One of the other things character defining characteristic of this device is that the display

01:25:42   is black and white, not grayscale. It is black and white. And, you know, how early did you settle on

01:25:52   that? And was that a concern? You know that in today's world, nobody wants a black and white

01:25:57   screen. You guys know, I think we settled. First thing we settled on was the screen. And that was

01:26:02   actually, it's the one foundational element that's been

01:26:05   there the entire time. Yep. So yeah, there have been moments

01:26:08   when we questioned, you know, gosh, is this going to be right,

01:26:11   but it was always what we were based on. And developers have

01:26:16   actually been kind of excited about it.

01:26:17   The other thing that seems contentious, I think for obvious

01:26:20   reasons, because we on the outside haven't seen it and used

01:26:23   it is the lack of backlighting.

01:26:25   Yes, that we've struggled with that nonstop because it doesn't

01:26:31   feel... it feels risky. But, so we did an experiment. So the first thing that needs to be understood

01:26:39   is that this display, like a traditional LCD, is somewhat transparent underneath and that's

01:26:44   how it works. The backlight shines through the LCD to give you the image. This display is basically

01:26:50   zero percent transparent on the back. It is opaque and that allows it to be super reflective and work

01:26:57   super good in sunlight. Their suggested solution, if you want to try to lighten up the screen,

01:27:04   is actually a little front light. And it's like a thin piece of plastic that has, you

01:27:09   wouldn't even be able to detect them, but ridges basically? Yeah, what's on like the

01:27:12   left side. Right, and the light hits this plastic sheet and the ridges and the plastic

01:27:19   direct the light towards you. Or towards the screen, one of the two. And we tried it and

01:27:26   And it just did not look good.

01:27:28   Not only did it not look good lit,

01:27:31   but it actually made the screen look worse unlit.

01:27:34   So it's kind of the best worst,

01:27:36   I mean the worst of both worlds.

01:27:39   And so we just decided kind of to own it.

01:27:43   Like that's just gonna be a quirk of this system,

01:27:46   is that you'll need a little bit of light

01:27:49   to play the screen.

01:27:51   And that's definitely gonna bother people.

01:27:54   And I just think we just have to kind of accept it.

01:27:58   I don't know.

01:27:59   - It's like the whole world has consolidated

01:28:02   on color displays.

01:28:03   And you know, it's for obvious reasons.

01:28:06   I mean, I always say like the biggest regret

01:28:07   I have in my computer purchasing life is in 1991

01:28:11   when I went to college, Drexel required freshmen

01:28:14   to have a Macintosh or at least have access, quote unquote.

01:28:17   So if you couldn't really afford to buy one,

01:28:18   you could, you know, but you had to be,

01:28:20   you had to say, I will go to the library

01:28:22   or the computer center and use it.

01:28:24   But we had classwork, like we had teachers who gave out like hypercard stacks and stuff.

01:28:28   It was all, it was like we were living in an Apple commercial, really.

01:28:33   Amazing.

01:28:34   But I made a terrible mistake.

01:28:37   There were three options.

01:28:38   There was the, I forget the third one, but I didn't want the third one because it was

01:28:42   the cheapest.

01:28:43   So my choice came down to an SE30 or the LC.

01:28:47   And I picked the LC because it had a color display.

01:28:50   Oh, sure.

01:28:51   And I wanted to play games, not realizing just how much faster

01:28:55   an SE 30 is and how gorgeous it really is.

01:28:59   And we had Max in my high school, but I didn't like them.

01:29:03   I was like an Apple.

01:29:04   I like the Apple two GS.

01:29:05   So I spent more of my time on the Apple two GS.

01:29:08   Like the Mac was a curiosity to me.

01:29:10   Always regretted it.

01:29:12   Regretted it ever since it was a terrible decision.

01:29:14   But it was all because of the color display.

01:29:17   I was like, I got to have that color display.

01:29:20   So I see it that's the way the world's gone even goofy Apple watch as a really really good color display

01:29:26   Even though there's a lot of trade-offs that we all sort of collectively forget like the fact that your Apple watch

01:29:33   Doesn't stay on all the time

01:29:35   like

01:29:37   Was you know, we don't want the games to look like poor versions of iPhone games

01:29:42   Like we wanted an experience that is distinctly different from that and the black and white screen is part of that

01:29:47   Yeah, there have to be a

01:29:50   I'll try to toss one over to Steven

01:29:52   There have to be a bunch of like Bill Bill Atkinson level tricks for dithering and

01:30:00   all sorts of work that that Atkinson and the original Mac team did in the 80s with their black and white displays to

01:30:07   Simulate grays and patterns and stuff like that. Like you guys have got to be using a bunch of cool stuff like that, right?

01:30:14   Yeah, I mean

01:30:17   It handles dithering really nicely.

01:30:21   I have a game that I've been working on with some folks here that uses, I think it's 32 or 33 levels of dithering.

01:30:30   The screen is dense enough that it reads pretty well.

01:30:34   I mean, you can still tell it's a dither pattern, but it looks like there's more going on on the screen than there really is.

01:30:42   There was a...

01:30:44   someone did a prototype of like a software rendered 3d object rotating that was shaded and

01:30:49   That was pretty convincing that it wasn't just black and white and in fact Dave wrote a little

01:30:55   1-bit video codec

01:30:57   And he had a little clip of Big Lebowski

01:31:02   You gotta use that as your test and it looked it's really it reads really well considering there is no color

01:31:08   the trick that Dave did I think is really reduce the

01:31:11   redithering on portions of the screen that aren't changing so you don't get that like

01:31:16   constant dancing pixel distraction. So yeah, remind me to show that to you sometime. It's

01:31:21   pretty cool. Did you guys you guys are way more juiced into video games than I am. So

01:31:25   you probably know but there was a video game that came out like, I'm gonna say like a year

01:31:28   ago where you were like a pirate. And the whole game is over did. Yeah, over did. Yeah,

01:31:34   that's a return to the over then. Yeah, Lucas Pope's game and it definitely. He was very

01:31:41   open about his dev process and it was really fun to watch him try different dithering approaches

01:31:46   and how to make this thing look right. And that thing just looks incredible to me.

01:31:50   Yeah. And I think, but that what made me think of it was your thing about not re dithering

01:31:55   because my son was playing it and I just, I was just captivated watching it. But I think

01:31:59   that it, like you said, like somehow he figured out a way to do it without the dancing pixels.

01:32:04   You know, like even as you're like panning, it seems as though what was dithered stays

01:32:08   did the same way, even though you know all of the pixels are moving because you're panning

01:32:12   your vision.

01:32:13   Exactly.

01:32:14   Very convincing. I think that the potential, I think people might be underestimating the

01:32:18   potential for how graphically rich a game on the playdate screen could be.

01:32:22   I think so too.

01:32:23   Plus, you know, anyone who's an artist or creative, you know, loves a good constraint.

01:32:28   And, you know, it's been said about Twitter a lot of times is you've got to really distill

01:32:34   your thoughts to fit into, you know, the character limit. And it's kind of the same thing with

01:32:37   with getting rid of color and just going to black and white, you know, it's like, how

01:32:41   do I make something that reads well in that environment? And it kind of kind of pushes

01:32:46   you a little bit like you have to really stop and think about it and maybe put a bit more

01:32:50   effort into it than you you would if you could just kind of fall back on color.

01:32:55   What's the battery story?

01:32:56   What is our battery story? We haven't done our final test yet, right? Yeah, it's always

01:33:00   in flux because occasionally we introduce a bug that just drains the battery in, you

01:33:04   know, seven minutes.

01:33:05   But is a battery built in?

01:33:07   Oh, yes. Yeah, it's a rechargeable battery built in and we can't really say exactly how long it's gonna be

01:33:13   Yeah, it's gonna be plenty long we think

01:33:15   But we'll say more when we know yeah, okay. I just want to make sure it wasn't like double A's or something like that

01:33:22   I think it's so thin. I don't even know if it could use double it probably I don't even know

01:33:34   It's a it looks very thin. I mean and it's one of those things that thinness often even in a picture

01:33:40   It's hard to convey you have to kind of pick it up to really appreciate it

01:33:43   But is that how it feels in hand?

01:33:45   Yeah, it's very thin. Yeah, actually if you look at the the firewatch

01:33:50   Play date the one we embedded in that game

01:33:52   It's about two or three times as thick as this one because that's what we thought we were gonna have to do with the time

01:33:57   That's true

01:33:59   So for the people who don't know this so firewatch is a game that you guys

01:34:03   Co-produced is that the maybe the best way of sure attributing your contribution with Campo Santo indie game makers

01:34:11   Wonderful wonderful game. It's won awards. It's very successful all deservedly. So it's one of the few games I've played in recent years

01:34:20   I loved it my son. I think I told you this cable. My son played it twice played through. That's amazing

01:34:25   That's really and you know, and I'm really blown away by by that because he's you know, he's typically playing

01:34:32   You know destiny or something like that with with a slightly different vibe and fire watch

01:34:38   But you guys put in one of the I forget where it was was it like in another one of the watchtowers or

01:34:46   Some stuff and one of his things was what is it called broken or handheld game?

01:34:57   Yeah, and if you flip it over there's actually like a PD logo on the back

01:35:02   too. So we like went pretty far. But actually that one was from when the buttons were diagonal.

01:35:08   Yes. And so that's why the buttons are diagonal on that one.

01:35:11   You know what, though, even if I would have really noticed it, if I would have actually,

01:35:15   you know, even if we would have said playdate by panic, I still wouldn't have thought I

01:35:21   would not have thought it was a teaser that you're actually going to make that device.

01:35:27   I would just think that's a fun Easter egg.

01:35:30   Like imagine if Panic made a little handheld video game.

01:35:35   You're right.

01:35:35   We were maybe more worried about it than we needed to be.

01:35:37   Yeah.

01:35:37   I could have noticed it.

01:35:39   It could have been like a big article on Max Stories

01:35:42   or something like that.

01:35:44   And I wouldn't have even asked if it was real.

01:35:47   I just would have thought, well, that's easy.

01:35:49   It's a lot easier to make a playdate in a video game

01:35:52   than it is to make one in the real world.

01:35:55   Turns out, yeah.

01:35:57   Quite a bit easier.

01:35:58   You mentioned the thinness.

01:35:59   One of the interesting things about that and the D-pad,

01:36:02   which we were talking about, it's

01:36:04   very hard to make a good D-pad with a device that's

01:36:07   that shallow.

01:36:09   I'll bet.

01:36:09   And that's been one of the challenges also.

01:36:11   I think we've cracked it, but that took a few redesigns

01:36:14   to get it working.

01:36:15   Well, and that brings us right back

01:36:16   to the opening of the show in the MacBook keyboards,

01:36:19   that you make these MacBooks so much thinner.

01:36:22   I mean, I still go in the Apple Store.

01:36:25   And when I see the little 12 inch MacBook,

01:36:28   the MacBook One port, the poor begotten,

01:36:31   you know, forgotten to, I think they forgot to update it.

01:36:34   (laughing)

01:36:35   But when I see it, I'm still blown away by how small it is.

01:36:38   It's so tiny.

01:36:39   And I'm sure it's the same type of thing

01:36:41   where really to make like, you know,

01:36:42   like on a Sega Genesis or something,

01:36:44   the controller has so much room for the D-pad to have depth.

01:36:48   - Right.

01:36:49   - That just isn't possible on something like this.

01:36:51   - Uh-huh.

01:36:52   - Were you concerned as that maybe you guys

01:36:54   making it too thin? That was a question. Yeah, I think we're good. I think it looks great and

01:37:01   feels great. And TE was the one pushing for the thinness. And it made things harder to do it that

01:37:09   way, but it worked out great. It feels good and it looks kind of cool. I can only judge by how

01:37:16   it looks, obviously, but it certainly the thinness vastly contributes to the uncanny valley where

01:37:24   this sort of seems a little retro, but it also seems incredibly modern, right? Because nothing

01:37:30   old was that thin. Like literally, like I just said, like you had to put like nine volt batteries in there.

01:37:36   What about the sound? Everybody that from what I've, I was going to say heard, no pun intended,

01:37:45   What I've heard, it has surprisingly good sound.

01:37:50   I mean, the weird thing about it being modern

01:37:53   is that it's not like a chip can create four channels of sound

01:37:58   or whatever.

01:37:58   We can play real sound.

01:38:01   We are working on a synthesis engine in addition

01:38:04   to being able to just play a WAV file or whatever.

01:38:07   And the speaker is small, but way louder than it

01:38:11   has any right to be.

01:38:12   We actually are not going to run it at full volume

01:38:14   because it is too loud.

01:38:15   It is.

01:38:16   That's great.

01:38:17   So, of course there's a headphone jack as well.

01:38:20   And we went to great lengths to support the mic in through the headphone jack.

01:38:24   So if you have an Apple headset or whatever and a game requires microphone, in addition

01:38:29   to the microphone that's on the playdate, that will work as well.

01:38:32   But yeah, it's surprisingly good sound.

01:38:35   Where is the headphone jack?

01:38:36   Bottom or top?

01:38:39   Bottom center.

01:38:40   Dead center.

01:38:41   Yeah.

01:38:42   Right?

01:38:43   Or is the USB port dead center?

01:38:44   and microphones on the left.

01:38:45   - Got it, okay.

01:38:46   - USB, you guys have USB-C, not the gross micro USB.

01:38:51   - Right, God, I hate that one, yeah.

01:38:53   - I hate it too.

01:38:55   I still, I can't believe how many devices

01:38:56   I still have that use it.

01:38:58   - Incredible, it's just the most unfulfilling port to use

01:39:03   on anything ever and it always feels

01:39:05   like it's gonna break off.

01:39:06   - Right, always feels like it's gonna break

01:39:08   and my close eyesight is not as good as it used to be.

01:39:12   So especially like in the dark,

01:39:14   and it is the prototypical buttered piece of toast.

01:39:18   Of course, it's always the wrong way when I first try it,

01:39:22   or it's the right way and I can't quite get it in.

01:39:25   And there, I think it's the wrong way

01:39:27   and flip it, it's terrible.

01:39:29   So I'm glad you guys are.

01:39:29   - It's wrong the first two times.

01:39:31   - It's wrong the first two times, that's true.

01:39:34   - So USB-C, when did you guys,

01:39:37   like I forget how long ago USB-C came out,

01:39:39   but you guys must've had this idea in your heads.

01:39:42   And when USB-C came out, you must have been like, "Oh, thank God, we can have a nice

01:39:46   part."

01:39:47   Yeah, for sure.

01:39:48   And I remember it was actually really hard to get, for a little while, USB-C parts, because

01:39:51   I think Apple had locked down the market because they were going to add USB-C to something.

01:39:57   I wonder what it was.

01:39:58   What was their first device with USB-C?

01:40:00   Huh.

01:40:01   Maybe a laptop, probably?

01:40:02   Yeah, probably a laptop.

01:40:03   Yeah.

01:40:04   I think it was the 12-inch MacBook.

01:40:06   Got it.

01:40:07   I think so.

01:40:08   And so we decided to use USB-C definitely immediately.

01:40:11   And for a long time, we couldn't even get I remember going to Alibaba.com hoping to

01:40:16   find some USB C parts.

01:40:19   And so yeah, I'm so glad that appeared when it did.

01:40:22   And you guys have a it's going to ship with a matching yellow USB C cable.

01:40:28   Yes, correct.

01:40:29   Well, you got it.

01:40:31   What's on the other end of the cable?

01:40:33   Is it just a USB A USB A, but you're not shipping a charger?

01:40:39   We are not. Now we're not planning on shipping one. We kind of figured everybody had one,

01:40:43   but we may or 50. I have a few. Yeah. So yes, it's not going to be included with the system

01:40:52   itself. I think that's reasonable. But I think it's you know, it's interesting. It's interesting

01:40:57   me how many things do come with a charger. Like there's certain gadgets I buy and I'm

01:41:01   I'm like, why did you give me a charger with this?

01:41:04   - Right.

01:41:05   - I have so many of these.

01:41:08   All right, what else do I have?

01:41:12   I wanted to talk about the software.

01:41:14   And I don't know why I'm hung up on this.

01:41:17   I don't know why I'm hung up on the fact

01:41:19   that you guys wrote your own OS.

01:41:20   - Should I bring Dave in here?

01:41:24   Should Dave talk about,

01:41:25   do you wanna ask him direct questions

01:41:26   about this mythical OS?

01:41:29   It just blows me away because I and I guess you didn't write the whole thing right like you didn't write your own

01:41:34   Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks, right?

01:41:36   Right, right. So how do you make a custom OS but use an existing open source like Wi-Fi stack? I

01:41:44   Mean is there is it like a POSIX operating system? Is there like a can you get like a terminal?

01:41:50   No, I

01:41:52   Mean even calling it a no less feels like

01:41:57   That's true. It has an OS in the way that an Apple II has an OS, you know what I mean?

01:42:02   Like it has, there's enough code in the firmware to service the hardware on the device, you know,

01:42:09   read the inputs and display stuff on screen. And then beyond that, it's primarily just hosting

01:42:17   a Lua runtime, which is, Lua is a scripting language that some people are writing their

01:42:23   and some people are going straight to C,

01:42:27   but Lua is a friendlier alternative.

01:42:29   And so that Lua runtime sort of exposes a set of APIs

01:42:32   for drawing stuff, playing sounds, reading the inputs.

01:42:37   And so the quote-unquote OS is basically just the glue

01:42:42   between the physical hardware and that runtime.

01:42:45   Not to understate what Dave has done,

01:42:49   it's quite an achievement, especially for a single person.

01:42:52   But yeah, it's not like we had to write a whole window manager and consider the types

01:42:59   of you know, what kind of word processor is going to need to run on this.

01:43:02   And it's so in other words, you're not going to teach like a computer science 201 course

01:43:07   on operating system design using this OS.

01:43:10   Probably not.

01:43:11   It's practical.

01:43:12   It's it's all very practical.

01:43:16   is all just the what do we need? Running a processor to get it

01:43:22   just to make this thing work? Yeah, it has to be less than a

01:43:25   megabyte. Actually, that's true. Yeah, the flash on the, on the

01:43:29   chip is only has only about that much space. Yeah, but yeah, it

01:43:32   does just enough to run a play date. That's impressive. That's

01:43:36   floppy disk sized. I mean, right? I mean, megabytes code is

01:43:42   small, you take all of the, you know, it resources, resource

01:43:45   stuff out and code is very small. I feel like code of the app is 99% icons, right?

01:43:50   And I have an app that was I think 75 K the actual binary and because it had

01:43:57   like all of the different icon sizes up to retina it came out to be something like

01:44:00   three megabytes. Did you guys see the Captain Marvel website that Marvel did

01:44:06   before the movie came out and because the movie takes place in like 1995 or

01:44:10   something like that. And so they did the website. Yes, they

01:44:14   extremely good. They did this really, really good Geo cities

01:44:18   style 1995 website. But like, people poked it apart. And it

01:44:23   was like hundreds and hundreds of megabytes. It's like, it's

01:44:28   like a backend. It's all running on like node node. JS, and

01:44:32   rendering all this stuff. And it's like, no part of the

01:44:35   challenge was making so that it would work over 14, four modem

01:44:39   Connection and I feel like that website was definitely inspired by the Space Jam website, which I don't know if you know

01:44:45   It's still running today

01:44:47   You can I don't know what whose closet that computer still is that is still running the Space Jam website

01:44:54   But it's my favorite thing on the internet

01:44:56   All right, I'm gonna put it in the show that

01:44:58   Space Jam website. All right, everybody in Space Jam. Yeah, you're gonna enjoy that website

01:45:04   I promise you but that's the challenge though

01:45:06   like the part of the, you know, it wasn't just making a website that looks so

01:45:09   cheesy. It was that we had to do it in this, you know, we had to pinch every single

01:45:15   bite out of our images, not just megabytes. So, hearing about this project that has to fit in

01:45:21   one megabyte of memory is, again, it just tickles my nostalgia. Like, that's impressive.

01:45:26   Awesome. So, what's the story with IDE for games? Is that something you're talking about? Is that

01:45:34   that come to ship before playdate?

01:45:37   - Do you wanna, I'm not sure about the timing yet,

01:45:39   but do you wanna explain in general how it works, Steve?

01:45:42   Here, I'll lean this close to you.

01:45:44   - The SDK is composed basically of a compiler

01:45:50   and a device simulator that's pretty much

01:45:54   like the iPhone simulator if you've ever developed for iOS.

01:45:57   It's like a mini virtual playdate that runs on screen.

01:46:02   and you develop your game, like I said before,

01:46:06   in either Lua or C.

01:46:08   Lua is a much more approachable scripting language.

01:46:12   Anyone who's ever written a program before

01:46:14   can probably pick it up in a couple of hours,

01:46:17   versus C, which has better performance characteristics,

01:46:20   but it's a higher learning curve

01:46:23   if you're not already familiar with it.

01:46:25   And actually the Lua runtime runs quite well

01:46:27   for all but the most demanding of games.

01:46:31   And you can kind of intermix the two if you want.

01:46:33   If you have a mostly Lua game

01:46:35   that is having bad performance in one particular area,

01:46:38   you can write a little C library to handle that one part

01:46:42   so it runs faster and call into that from your Lua code.

01:46:45   So yeah, you basically run this compiler

01:46:50   against your Lua code

01:46:52   and it kind of bundles it all up for you.

01:46:53   It does some stuff with the resources.

01:46:56   It compresses the images and wraps it all up

01:46:59   into a little single bundle file

01:47:01   that then can be run in the simulator.

01:47:05   And you can try it out and see how it goes.

01:47:07   And from there, you can also transfer it

01:47:10   onto a physical device if you have one attached

01:47:13   by the USB cable and see how it runs on the device.

01:47:16   - And we have a plugin for Coda 2 that makes this easier.

01:47:20   Also, it will deploy to the device, et cetera.

01:47:24   - This is the upcoming new version of Coda

01:47:26   that you guys are working- - For the existing one.

01:47:28   - Oh, the existing one.

01:47:28   But also the new one.

01:47:29   - We can do it with the new one too.

01:47:31   - That you're-- - A forthcoming,

01:47:33   a forthcoming unnamed editor has a--

01:47:34   - Right. - Yes, a very good--

01:47:37   - The app you guys are working on in your spare time.

01:47:39   (laughing)

01:47:42   - Right. - But that is before we go,

01:47:43   I know this is part of your announcement,

01:47:44   but this, it is coming, the next version,

01:47:47   as yet unnamed to the outside world,

01:47:49   the successor to Coda, is still coming sometime in 2019?

01:47:54   I think that's as much as you're willing to promise?

01:47:57   - Yep, for sure, we're closing in on it.

01:47:59   I think it'll be a developer release kind of situation

01:48:02   because we know that there's gonna be a lot of feedback

01:48:04   and we wanna make sure to shape the product

01:48:06   to meet the needs of today's web developers.

01:48:09   Yep, that's coming soon.

01:48:11   - Have you gotten any negative feedback

01:48:13   from people who are not interested in Playdate

01:48:17   but are interested in Transmit and Coda?

01:48:20   - Oh, for sure.

01:48:21   It's a classic running joke that's not really a joke

01:48:25   that no matter what we ever announce ever,

01:48:29   someone's mad that it's not another thing.

01:48:31   And so it doesn't matter.

01:48:33   This is the extreme version of that by far.

01:48:36   And that's partially why the panic blog post specifically

01:48:39   is, but don't worry, we're working on the next.

01:48:41   We always have to be one step ahead of that

01:48:44   because it just happens every single time.

01:48:46   Jake Rodkin at Campo still jokes every time I tweet,

01:48:50   but what about candy bar three to this day?

01:48:54   Except we actually made Candy Bar 3.

01:48:56   Oh, did we make Candy Bar 3?

01:48:58   Okay, Candy Bar 4.

01:49:00   I mean, yeah, it's easy to have that perception from outside that, you know, they're a small company.

01:49:04   They probably pulled all their engineering resources off of all their apps to put them to work on this stupid game idea.

01:49:10   Right, right, right.

01:49:11   Now everything's languishing, but that's not quite really the case.

01:49:15   I would say that the apps have all been under steady development the whole time.

01:49:19   I agree with that.

01:49:20   This has been going on on the side, so.

01:49:21   actually better about that now than we've ever been. Everything is rolling. I definitely

01:49:26   remember when it took a little while for Transmit 5 to come out, somebody would be like, "Well,

01:49:29   maybe if you weren't making that sign for your building, you would have made Transmit

01:49:33   5." And I'm like, "I don't. We don't make signs. That was a different person." But I

01:49:38   understand the sentiment, which is just, "I want that thing that I want," which is totally

01:49:42   fine. And I'm guilty of it doing, guilty of doing it too. You know, like, a look at Apple

01:49:45   and like, "Well, you're putting all your work on this watch or whatever, and you're working

01:49:49   No, my is like a how many thousands of people work at the company?

01:49:53   They're not all working.

01:49:54   Yeah.

01:49:55   My favorite are the people who think that their foray into original TV content is just

01:50:00   is detracting from like the Mac OS.

01:50:04   If Tim Cook wasn't directing the premiere episode of the new Jim Henson project or whatever.

01:50:09   Yeah, like I totally get and again, it'd be a whole episode onto itself.

01:50:13   I get the idea that you can make a very strong argument that maybe Apple shouldn't be worried

01:50:17   about original content period.

01:50:19   should just make the TV platform and let other people fill it with their Netflix and Hulu

01:50:23   and HBO. I get that. But the idea that the people who Apple has hired to make these shows

01:50:29   were like taking off like the I/O.

01:50:33   They're not cocoa engineers yet.

01:50:36   But imagine if they were. Imagine that's programming I want to see.

01:50:41   He's like the gaffer.

01:50:43   Are the drawing APIs higher level like SpriteKit or something like that or is it more like

01:50:49   direct drawing to a screen buffer?

01:50:52   It's kind of comparable to QuickDraw.

01:50:56   So you get-- you're drawing primitives.

01:50:58   You can-- circles, lines, rectangles, polygons,

01:51:02   and those can be outlines or filled with a pattern.

01:51:06   And of course, you can put images onto the screen.

01:51:11   And we do have a built-in library

01:51:13   for managing sprites that just provides the basics.

01:51:18   And if you want something more complex than that, you can, of course, write your own.

01:51:21   And we support some things like tile maps built in and, yeah, fonts.

01:51:26   >> Fonts?

01:51:27   Oh, tell me about the fonts.

01:51:29   >> They're pretty basic.

01:51:31   Yeah, just imagine a very small image containing all of the characters from your font and then

01:51:38   like a little sidecar text file that explains here's the spacing of the letters and the image.

01:51:43   >> So, are they all bitmap fonts?

01:51:46   you're not doing like rendering of true type on the fly

01:51:48   or something like that.

01:51:49   - No, none of that.

01:51:50   - So it's a classic black and white display bitmap font.

01:51:54   - Yep.

01:51:55   - We do things like kerning pairs, which is nice.

01:51:57   (laughing)

01:51:59   That's a plus, yeah.

01:52:01   - All right, let me take one last break.

01:52:03   I thank our third and final sponsor and then we'll wrap up.

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01:53:59   support of this podcast. Anything that I, is there anything about it that you guys haven't

01:54:05   talked about that, that, that you know, like maybe I wouldn't think to ask.

01:54:10   boy that we can talk about yet? Maybe not. What do you think?

01:54:13   There's the season of gaming we haven't really touched on. Yeah,

01:54:17   there we go. That's concept. When did when did you come up on

01:54:19   that? That's a great and it truly a differentiator. I mean,

01:54:23   I've never heard of anything like that. So the basic idea for

01:54:26   anybody who's not paying attention, you buy your play

01:54:28   date for $149 I guess you get some kind of an account or

01:54:31   something, you know with and then every Monday for 12 weeks,

01:54:36   Get a new game. It just shows up and your your little LED

01:54:40   Light blinks to let you know that there's a happy little surprise there on the play date. I

01:54:44   Mean that came that came from the Game & Watch days. We were thinking about having the device transform into a new game every week

01:54:52   That's true. But how did we then take it to season of games? I feel like we were also subconsciously inspired by your

01:54:58   match cut movie club which

01:55:03   Neven and Greg have an occasional party movie showing where you go to the movie but you

01:55:10   have no idea what's going to be screened.

01:55:12   You can tell it better than I can.

01:55:13   They give you a couple hints, right?

01:55:15   Yeah, but that's the story.

01:55:17   It was really...

01:55:18   This didn't start as a season, per se.

01:55:20   It started as surprises.

01:55:21   How do we surprise people with this thing over and over again as they're using it?

01:55:26   And eventually we couldn't figure out how to describe it, but eventually we settled

01:55:30   on a TV season being the right metaphor.

01:55:33   And so that's how we came to that point.

01:55:36   And you're, you know, let's not get ahead of ourselves, right?

01:55:39   You still have to ship.

01:55:41   And that's a lot.

01:55:43   Yes.

01:55:44   Very true.

01:55:45   But you've hinted, you know, like what is the future?

01:55:47   Like let's just say, okay, it ships and it works and people are happy and the games are

01:55:54   actually delivered on Monday right on schedule.

01:55:58   You get to the end and you've got all 12 games.

01:56:01   I mean, number one, I know you guys were tinkering with the idea that every Monday the last game

01:56:05   would be replaced by the new game.

01:56:07   Absolutely, yeah, the device would completely become the new game and that was it.

01:56:12   People are staying up all night on Sundays.

01:56:14   Right, yeah, that would be a little intense.

01:56:16   But you backed away from that.

01:56:18   And if you buy it, if you get yours a month late, you'll already have the first four games

01:56:23   or something like that, right?

01:56:25   It's an option, I think.

01:56:27   We're still debating it, but it may be an option where you get to start your season

01:56:30   late or you can start it in progress.

01:56:37   What about after that though?

01:56:38   I mean obviously there's the potential for this to be an indie platform.

01:56:43   You're already talking.

01:56:44   I mean you said there's going to be an SDK and support and Coda so other people can start

01:56:49   making games.

01:56:50   What happens with those games?

01:56:52   Like will people just sideload them?

01:56:54   Are you going to make an app store?

01:56:57   This is definitely something we're figuring out right now.

01:57:00   We've talked about all sorts of options.

01:57:01   Side loading, we want to always be an option, but it's very possible that in the ultimate

01:57:07   of Cosmic Ironies, we might find ourselves making an app store.

01:57:11   Apps is so great.

01:57:13   There's a lot of questions about that.

01:57:17   So I think we're gonna really just take a look at how many people are interested, which

01:57:21   so far is an overwhelming number of people, and what's the best way for us to get the

01:57:26   the games on there, but that's later.

01:57:28   - Yeah, I mean, I think we'd love nothing more than to see

01:57:30   like a thriving, you know, homebrew community of developers

01:57:34   who are able to put things out there

01:57:36   and, you know, get paid as well.

01:57:39   - One of the great ironies to me of the modern world

01:57:42   is that there's more adherence to, for lack of a better term,

01:57:46   a human interface guidelines, unlike the major platforms.

01:57:49   Like you were just talking about how on PlayStation

01:57:51   that there's buttons for, you know, okay and cancel,

01:57:54   They're different in Japan in the US and they won't let you ship if you don't obey

01:57:59   But there's all sorts of other conventions that that the console makers make game makers apply so that there's consistency

01:58:06   Through the game. So you guys have like the equivalent like the play date

01:58:09   Like a play date human interface guidelines dear God, we're gonna have to write that aren't we?

01:58:15   Yeah, we

01:58:17   Around as an idea of something we need to do, but we haven't quite gotten there yet. You've got time

01:58:22   I want to talk a little bit about the website. Number one, the domain name, Play.date. When did

01:58:35   you come up with the name Playdate and when did you figure out that there is a .date top-level

01:58:40   domain? The name was very early on. It was one of the first things that really stuck with the

01:58:46   project and playdate.com was of course unavailable. It's some sort of

01:58:54   intense blog and so gosh I don't know I must have just every now and then I

01:58:59   would load up Uniregistry which is who we use for a lot of our domain name

01:59:03   stuff and just type the word playdate in again and see what kind of possibilities

01:59:07   we had playdate.systems at one point and all sorts of ideas but play.date

01:59:13   was always there, but was pretty expensive. And then eventually, we just bit the bullet and decided

01:59:19   that that would be the best possible home for our website. And it is a wonderful website. You guys

01:59:26   are, I often criticize the modern web. And, and I've said, there's a part of me that wishes that

01:59:34   browsers had never even supported JavaScript, but that I wish it was still just a document viewer

01:59:40   for text and images and video and just put your multimedia

01:59:45   up there and have no interactive element to it

01:59:46   because it's all being abused, right?

01:59:48   It's so much of the JavaScript

01:59:50   that your individual devices are running

01:59:52   is not for the stuff you wanna see, it's all this ad tech.

01:59:57   But then I see something like the Playdate website

02:00:01   and I think this is why browser makers at W3C

02:00:06   spent so much time making something like this possible.

02:00:08   Like this, this 3d model is so great.

02:00:12   I'm playing with it right now.

02:00:14   It's so a while ago, actually it was for the transit five webpage when we were

02:00:20   thinking, gosh, what can we do?

02:00:21   That's interesting.

02:00:22   And I, it dawned on me that WebGL is just sorely underutilized and we have an icon

02:00:28   artist that knows how to do 3d and we, and you know, the transit truck icon is a 3d

02:00:33   model.

02:00:33   So it seemed like something we could take advantage of.

02:00:36   And so I think I literally googled like good WebGL people or whatever and found

02:00:42   these two guys in France that run a little consultant shop called Little Workshop and so they did the

02:00:50   rotating transmit truck which was super exciting for us because it's gonna be sharper and crisper than any

02:00:56   rendered movie is ever going to be plus we can do clever things like as you scroll the

02:01:02   the Transmit 5 webpage, we very gently shift the perspective

02:01:06   of the truck to match how far you scrolled,

02:01:09   which if we were rendering that, pre-rendering that,

02:01:11   would be enormous.

02:01:12   So that tradition just continued with this.

02:01:14   It just seemed like, man, if we're gonna have this device

02:01:16   on this page, we might as well make it a 3D model.

02:01:20   - It's so nice.

02:01:23   - Thank you.

02:01:24   - But it really gives you a sense of the device.

02:01:26   It's both, I'm sure it's a ton of work

02:01:29   and it makes my old MacBook Pro cry.

02:01:32   (laughing)

02:01:33   - Sorry.

02:01:34   - It's a lot more fun on iPad,

02:01:39   because it's more fun to use your actual fingers.

02:01:41   And then the other thing you guys have

02:01:42   is on the media page, you go to playdate/media.

02:01:46   If you scroll down on an iPhone or an iPad,

02:01:49   you've got links to ARKit models.

02:01:52   - That's correct.

02:01:53   At the very last second,

02:01:54   we realized we already have a 3D model,

02:01:57   so maybe we can do,

02:01:58   I think they technically call it ARKit Quick Look,

02:02:01   which is the ability to view a model

02:02:05   and see the model in AR in your own space

02:02:08   on an iPhone or iPad by just linking to the model itself.

02:02:13   It couldn't have been easier to do.

02:02:15   So that's a pretty cool thing that Apple made.

02:02:18   - Again, is it useful?

02:02:20   I don't know.

02:02:21   (laughing)

02:02:22   But I think it's a fun way to sort of get a sense

02:02:25   of the size of the thing.

02:02:27   I tweeted a picture of it next to my iPhone

02:02:29   And it looks super realistic.

02:02:32   - Yeah, that was impressive.

02:02:33   - Totally fooled some people.

02:02:35   I felt bad about.

02:02:39   - It's a good prank.

02:02:42   - But it's really great.

02:02:43   Do you guys ever have to go?

02:02:44   Do you go to Malaysia to actually oversee?

02:02:48   - Yeah, we do.

02:02:51   For various reasons to help set up all the QA

02:02:54   that needs to be done is one of the big things.

02:02:56   We have a lot of test code that we've written

02:02:58   and you kind of load the Play Date right into this little jig

02:03:02   and plug into USB cable.

02:03:03   Actually, they have this cool kind of slide-in adapter

02:03:06   that goes in automatically.

02:03:08   And we start running software on it,

02:03:10   and people start pushing buttons.

02:03:12   The screen tells them what to do,

02:03:13   and they push the buttons and make sure it works right.

02:03:17   And that's taken a lot of time and effort,

02:03:19   but it's been really, really interesting.

02:03:22   And the factory where we do it is really cool,

02:03:24   and people have been great.

02:03:26   It's just a fun environment.

02:03:28   How do you find a factory?

02:03:30   I mean, was that something that teenage engineering could help with?

02:03:33   We know this company in Malaysia is good.

02:03:37   We found a manufacturing consultant through teenage engineering.

02:03:41   He had done some work with them before.

02:03:44   He was the one that set us up with this particular contract manufacturer.

02:03:51   I can't imagine what we've done if it was just us trying to cast by searching on Google.

02:03:55   There's no way.

02:03:56   This was a big help in getting the whole we couldn't have built this thing without him. His name is Steven Nersessian

02:04:03   When you guys ship I I think I mean I'm sure I mean this is you know, literally a million-dollar question

02:04:12   How many of these things do you make so that you have enough to meet demand and how?

02:04:17   How do you guess demand I mean, I know you know how many people signed up for the email

02:04:23   But it's a lot easier to sign up for an email. They sure is and to pay 150 bucks

02:04:28   Well, I'm pretty sure we know that a hundred percent of the people that gave us their email will buy the product, right?

02:04:33   That's how that works. Yeah, so that's great news for us. No, I it's gonna be really tough and

02:04:38   that's what we're gonna have to be facing soon is that balancing act of

02:04:42   Yeah pre-order to man

02:04:45   Versus you know email demand. It's gonna be tough

02:04:49   Yeah, there's things like part lead times that we have to factor in also some some parts takes a long take longer than other ones

02:04:55   So we have to buy ahead and then what do you got? You know, alright, it ships people, you know

02:05:01   They're going out in lovely boxes, which we've seen hints of the packaging in the magazine

02:05:06   And people open them and they turn them on and it it makes fun sounds and you play a game

02:05:11   What do you guys do at that point for like customer service? Like how much?

02:05:17   I know you already have good customer service for your apps and that people who are using transmit can email and and get you know

02:05:24   Submit bugs or get questions answered, but this seems like a totally different ballgame

02:05:28   Yeah, it's gonna be tough and we're gonna definitely have to

02:05:32   You know, I mean we're gonna have to handle returns and we're gonna have to handle repairs. Although probably we'll just do returns and

02:05:39   We probably need some more customer service people. It's gonna be I feel like we can do it

02:05:45   But it's just another one of the long strings of things that we've tackled for this project.

02:05:50   What is considered a good hardware failure rate?

02:05:55   Pointy no, Greg.

02:05:57   It's been told to me before, but I've forgotten. Yeah, it's a really good question. We don't know

02:06:05   it. That's what we have a consultant for. That's where the consultant comes in.

02:06:10   Hopefully a small number.

02:06:11   Yeah, exactly. Tiny. 90 to 95%.

02:06:14   Yeah, all right. Well, I I wrote and I've taken some guff for it, but I mean it I wrote

02:06:21   Let me see if I I don't want to misquote myself, but I wrote

02:06:24   The story is about played date the most amazing and exciting product announcement for me

02:06:30   since the original iPhone

02:06:33   That's very nice of you to say the verge class cast crew had made some hay over that on their podcast

02:06:41   Recently and Eli seemed incredulous that I would compare it to the original iPhone

02:06:45   But I feel like I wrote that sentence very carefully

02:06:48   I'm not saying and and it seemed to be misconstrued along the lines of how do you think this?

02:06:52   $150 black-and-white game playing thing is gonna change the world like the iPhone did and that's not what I that's not it

02:06:58   It's a couple of things but I really mean it since I've written this is a week ago when I wrote it

02:07:04   I still can't think of any other product that since the iPhone that gave me the feels like play date

02:07:10   And the only one I can think of maybe is the iPad.

02:07:14   The original iPad was a very exciting announcement.

02:07:17   But part of what made the iPhone seem so...

02:07:22   I specifically remember, I think, Steven tweeting about it.

02:07:26   Like that it was the mythical...

02:07:27   Like the day of the announcement, like the mythical shrunk down version of Mac OS X that

02:07:32   we'd all been talking about for years.

02:07:34   What if they shrunk Mac OS X down and you could run it on like a pocket-sized device?

02:07:38   They did it.

02:07:39   It seemed like something we always wanted them to do,

02:07:41   but it wasn't possible.

02:07:43   And everything about the iPhone seemed impossible.

02:07:45   The frame rate seemed too,

02:07:46   it just all seemed too good to be true.

02:07:48   The iPad, on the other hand,

02:07:52   seemed sort of inevitable once you saw it.

02:07:54   It's like, yeah, it's just a big iPhone, right?

02:07:56   There was nothing in it that wasn't already there.

02:07:58   I'm not saying it hasn't changed the world.

02:08:00   I'm not saying it didn't take a lot of work

02:08:01   to make it scale up like that,

02:08:03   but there was a certain inevitability to it.

02:08:05   It didn't seem like it dropped out of nowhere.

02:08:07   Whereas Playdate seemingly to me, you guys, I mean, we're pals, but you definitely didn't

02:08:12   let me in on this until like a week before you announced it, which is fine.

02:08:15   It was very exciting.

02:08:16   I'm not complaining.

02:08:17   But when you did tell me, it really seemed like this dropped out of a black hole.

02:08:23   Like I cannot believe this.

02:08:25   And I honestly can't think of another device that's given me that feeling since the iPhone

02:08:29   in 2007.

02:08:30   Awesome.

02:08:31   That's really nice of you to say.

02:08:33   I hope we can deliver on that excitement.

02:08:37   But really, the part of that sentence that people seem to be missing is the…

02:08:40   Why are you laughing, Steve?

02:08:42   Did that seem too soft?

02:08:44   No, no.

02:08:46   I remember reading John's article where he said that about the most amazing product announcement

02:08:53   for me since serious life.

02:08:54   Even I was a little bit like, "Gosh, John, calm down.

02:08:57   It's been fun."

02:09:00   And part of it too, part of the "for me" aspect of it is that I know you guys.

02:09:05   know, you're my friends. And so I'm excited for you. And I'm

02:09:08   excited that I've got your ear. You know, like, I could, I could

02:09:13   maybe make suggestions and have the actual decision makers

02:09:17   listen to me. It's very, very exciting. I really just can't

02:09:21   say enough. How excited I am. And I really think that the

02:09:25   Daring Fireball audience gets it. I really think so too.

02:09:28   I think so too. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

02:09:31   Thank you guys for your time. I know you have a lot to do.

02:09:35   busy

02:09:37   These apps back right themselves the games themselves

02:09:40   Anyway, my thanks to all of our sponsors - we had Squarespace. We had Express VPN and

02:09:47   Clear the the thing he gets you through security at the airport faster my thanks to cable Sasser Stephen Frank and Greg

02:09:55   Maletic

02:09:57   Thanks, John. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. All right, I'll be standing by the door waiting for my my plate of

02:10:05   Show up. We'll get back to work