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390: I Invented This Anti-Pattern

 

00:00:00   It's been so long since we've talked. I know, I feel like it's been far, far too long.

00:00:05   I did tear apart my entire beach office and put it back together. Why? I finally got like

00:00:10   the setup I wanted in most ways. Like I try it. One of the ways that I'm different at

00:00:16   the beach is that I try to have as minimal of a setup as possible. Now this is still

00:00:21   me here, so I still have, you know, speakers and a carplay dev kit and all this, you know,

00:00:27   and I still have a lot of stuff here, but I try to keep it simpler than what I have

00:00:33   in my regular life. Anyway, so yeah, took apart the whole thing, rewired, I finally

00:00:38   did like the zip ties in the back and then of course as you do, instantly upon zip tying

00:00:43   a bunch of cables together, I would realize, oh, I want to put one more cable in there.

00:00:46   - Yep, that's the rules.

00:00:47   - Yep, break that zip tie or just put another one on top of the whole bundle and then you

00:00:51   have like four different levels of zip ties simultaneously working with each other.

00:00:54   - Oh God, poor Steven Hackett is getting so stressed.

00:00:57   - You gotta get the Velcro ones. Don't use actual zip ties, it's way overkill for wires.

00:01:01   The Velcro ones is much nicer than you can just un-Velcro and re-Velcro there.

00:01:04   - I have some of those. The kind I got for the beach is not a very good one. Like I just

00:01:11   got some Amazon generic one thinking it would be as good as the Monoprice ones I have from

00:01:15   a few years back and it's totally not. The Monoprice ones are way better than whatever

00:01:18   the generic one is that I got, but I figured they'll all be the same, but nope. Anyway,

00:01:23   the problem with the Velcro ties, first of all they collect tons of dust and hair and

00:01:27   everything on the Velcro side. Second of all, they are bulkier and then third of all they

00:01:32   tend to slide down the cables if it's a vertical cable. You can try to do it really tight and

00:01:37   it'll stay a little bit better there, but it will still slide way more than a zip tie

00:01:41   will.

00:01:42   - I wonder if you're talking about the same product. The ones I'm talking about are smooth

00:01:44   on the outside, they're very thin, they thread through themselves and they do not move. You

00:01:48   should have sent me a link to what you're getting.

00:01:51   - I wouldn't necessarily describe mine as very thin. And mine come in the multi-color

00:01:56   pack, so you know it's like all the primary colors of Velcro.

00:02:00   - I don't have any colored ones, but that doesn't mean they don't come with semi-like.

00:02:03   - I gotta find it, hold on.

00:02:05   - It's in your order history.

00:02:07   - You know I had terrible luck with my Amazon order history search recently. It seems like

00:02:11   the search of your order history has gotten way worse. Like it won't find stuff based

00:02:15   on pretty basic keywords that occur in it. Oh here we go, yeah. Monoprice 106463.

00:02:23   - Those look kind of similar, but mine are not that shape. I think it's the same concept,

00:02:29   but yeah I think the quality really varies. I mean you said these are the good ones, but

00:02:33   they look wider than the ones I'm talking about and the slip through mechanism looks

00:02:37   different. I don't know, I wouldn't give up on the Velcro. All the problems you described

00:02:41   to them about collecting dust and stuff and not holding it, I have not experienced at

00:02:45   all. My whole TV is put together with these things and they do not move and there's no

00:02:50   undue dust collection and they're not as fuzzy on the outside as these. They actually look

00:02:54   like they're made of plastic, but it just has the stuff. Anyway, zip ties, like actual

00:02:58   real zip ties, those are, I would never actually use those unless it was something serious

00:03:03   and like structural.

00:03:04   - No it's great because like you buy a bag of like 200 of them for nothing and you know

00:03:10   the downside is whenever you change your mind you gotta cut them.

00:03:13   - And then you can accidentally cut the cable if you're not being careful and then they

00:03:16   can be squeezing the cables too much if you tightened it up too much, it's bad.

00:03:19   - If you're an animal, like yeah obviously, but like if you use them carefully it's fine.

00:03:23   - No, it's Velcro, it's something gross, but anyway by the way, the thing I learned

00:03:26   when I was a very very small child, if you ever want to undo zip ties without cutting

00:03:30   them, a sewing needle is your best friend.

00:03:32   - I didn't know that.

00:03:33   - The thing you have in the house, I mean obviously tons of things will work, but a

00:03:36   sewing needle will disengage the little ratchety thing and you can just take them right off

00:03:39   without cutting them.

00:03:40   - Oh that's interesting, you can actually like lift up the little latches inside there

00:03:43   and loop it back through?

00:03:44   - Yeah you just shove the sewing needle between the two little things because it's really

00:03:47   thin at the tip and it's wider as it goes down and it will just open it up enough for

00:03:51   you to just take it right off and everyone has a sewing needle because if you try to

00:03:54   use like a jewelry screwdriver or like the tip of a knife, nothing works, but a needle

00:03:58   will do it.

00:03:59   - Interesting, look at that, life hack from John Syracuse.

00:04:02   - Yeah, they didn't call them life hacks when I was five and then you had to undo zip ties

00:04:06   and things and I would undo them by the way for the same reason, well not the same reason,

00:04:09   but I wouldn't have a pack of 100 of them, I'd have like one or two zip ties and I'd

00:04:12   realize I needed to take it off and then I said there's got to be a way to take these

00:04:16   on and off about destroying them and that's what it is, sewing needle.

00:04:20   Today I learned.

00:04:21   Be careful with the wires because you can still poke the wire with the needle, like

00:04:23   obviously I wasn't zip tying wires, like there is still a danger but it is much less.

00:04:27   - Unfortunately I have way more zip ties than sewing needles so I'm probably still going

00:04:31   to keep doing it my way, but that's a good hack.

00:04:36   - The end of the show, Kyle's the Gray has things to say about public policy advocacy.

00:04:40   - Yeah, he just wanted to clarify, just listen back to quote unquote last week's episode

00:04:46   and at one point I made a blanket statement about how all these companies give to both

00:04:51   political parties, yada yada yada and not Kyle's the Gray but Kyle Seth Gray pointed

00:04:56   out that unlike all the other companies, I think Apple does, this is from Apple's own

00:05:02   webpage quoting now, "Apple does not make political contributions to individual candidates

00:05:07   or parties and we do not have a political action committee."

00:05:09   They do have lobbyists but they don't give directly to candidates and that is not true

00:05:13   of most other big companies and most other tech companies so credit where credit is due.

00:05:17   We will put a link in the show notes to Apple's public policy advocacy webpage where you can

00:05:22   read about this.

00:05:23   - I actually didn't know that, that's interesting.

00:05:25   - Yeah, I didn't know that either.

00:05:27   I had assumed as you that they do the sleazy advocacy and what's the word I'm looking for?

00:05:34   The thing where you send people to, oh lobby, there it is.

00:05:38   - No, they have lobbyists but they don't contribute directly to candidates or parties.

00:05:42   - Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, that is a fine line there.

00:05:43   - They have fewer lobbyists than other companies.

00:05:45   There was one thing that came up before these hearings showing how many lobbyists the various

00:05:50   companies have.

00:05:51   They have on their below average number of lobbyists among their peers but like Google

00:05:56   and I think Facebook and much like how we give directly to candidates like they give

00:06:00   the maximum amount you're allowed for corporate donations.

00:06:03   They don't have a political action committee, a PAC which is another way to get money to

00:06:06   people so maybe it's a distinction without a difference but I think it's significant

00:06:11   enough that I shouldn't have lumped them in with everybody else.

00:06:15   - And then tell me about Big Sur and Catalina and APFS.

00:06:20   - I haven't tested this yet but I've seen multiple reports that Mac OS 10.15.6 which

00:06:26   is the latest Catalina update now understands Big Sur's new APFS volume format so you won't

00:06:31   get that message in the finder when you reboot into Catalina that says I don't understand

00:06:37   this this format of this weird disk here.

00:06:41   I haven't had my, I have a bunch of stuff running that like prevents external drives

00:06:45   from mounting like back in the old days I would just not turn on my external drives

00:06:50   but of course all my drives are now like SSDs and they're bus powered so if they're plugged

00:06:54   into my computer they're powered but that's the application I talked about a while back

00:06:58   Mountain or whatever you can just tell it not to mount them automatically and so they

00:07:02   don't appear so I never see that message but in theory if I was to mount that drive now

00:07:06   it would be able to it would be mountable and visible in Catalina which is nice because

00:07:09   it's always annoying when the old operating system can't see any something about the new

00:07:13   operating system and vice versa so assuming this is true I'm very happy.

00:07:19   I haven't tried booting Catalina, oh no I did boot Catalina earlier tonight and I don't

00:07:25   remember seeing that message so I think that's accurate I don't even know but that is good

00:07:30   and because that that that notification I forget exactly what the verbiage was we talked

00:07:34   about on the show but it was it was alarming to me because I guess I just didn't know what

00:07:38   was happening and once you think about it it's like okay that makes sense but at the

00:07:41   time I was like oh god what happened here so so yeah I'm glad that's fixed improved

00:07:46   etc.

00:07:47   Anytime you get that disk isn't recognized or error or anything like that it makes you

00:07:52   freak out a little bit because exactly because like what do you mean disk doesn't recognize

00:07:56   you know the old Mac OS would always say do you want to initialize it and you're like

00:08:00   no wait no what are you talking about don't it it's perfectly good disk why are you telling

00:08:05   me to you know and if you if you weren't paying attention and you just click the wrong button

00:08:09   yeah I think Mac OS used to be a lot more dangerous.

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00:09:43   All right, so we'll start tonight with Wade Trigasquez who writes if there was a legitimate

00:09:51   way to distribute iOS apps outside of the App Store would any of you actually do that?

00:09:56   This could allegedly be an Ask ATP but we already have a full slate of Ask ATP and I

00:10:01   didn't put this here but I agree I'm assuming it was John who put this here.

00:10:05   It is an interesting thought.

00:10:07   So for me I had recently sunset vignette but peak view is still in the App Store.

00:10:11   Sunset?

00:10:12   Sunset, sunset.

00:10:13   Big Sur.

00:10:14   So anyway, so I still have peak view in the store and in fact I'm waiting for review on

00:10:20   a very small update now and I was thinking about this a little.

00:10:25   I don't know if I would.

00:10:28   Maybe I would I'm leaning toward no because for me I don't know what it would really get

00:10:34   for me other than like presumably reduced or an improved cut I guess I should say.

00:10:41   I would get more than 70 percent but then I would have to manage all the things I don't

00:10:45   really want to manage like payments and so on and so forth and since it's not like a

00:10:48   subscription app like Overcast I don't necessarily need to have a more direct relationship with

00:10:54   my customers so I don't think I would but Marco I have a feeling that you might have

00:11:00   a very different answer here.

00:11:03   You'd be surprised and there's so much more of a larger discussion here around the 30

00:11:09   percent, the 15 percent, all that stuff.

00:11:11   Much of which is happening because of the antitrust hearings and everything.

00:11:16   The discussion around Apple and potential anti-competitive or anti-trust issues with

00:11:21   the App Store has focused a lot on the 30 percent and many people have suggested well

00:11:28   what if they just lower the commission could that fix things and would that be good enough?

00:11:35   Apple has even focused a lot of their kind of defense or rebuttal that they're not

00:11:40   being anti-competitive on the 30 percent and I think they do that intentionally because

00:11:45   they know that if they can reduce the discussion around other angles of it they not only can

00:11:51   they control the message but this is an area where what they have is slightly more defensible

00:11:56   because they can point to the other big app stores that all copied them and be like hey

00:11:59   look Google charges 30 percent or whatever but it's really not about the 30 percent

00:12:04   so much.

00:12:05   30 percent is a ton.

00:12:07   Don't get me wrong.

00:12:09   It is a very large commission.

00:12:11   It is substantial and I don't think they deliver enough value to have earned 30 percent

00:12:18   and they would love for everyone to only talk about the percentage because if you're only

00:12:22   talking about the percentage you are not talking about all of the other problems that are actually

00:12:27   anti-competitive.

00:12:28   The percentage isn't that big of a factor.

00:12:32   If Apple dropped it from 70/30 to like 85/15 across the board so every app could be 85/15

00:12:39   that still wouldn't make companies like Netflix or Hey want to have their services in the

00:12:44   App Store or use an app purchase in the App Store.

00:12:47   The 30 percent is not the problem.

00:12:50   I don't think you would get somebody like Amazon or Netflix, HBO, all these big companies.

00:12:57   They wouldn't participate in an app purchase at any price.

00:13:01   Even if Apple somehow made it zero percent they still wouldn't do it because there are

00:13:05   so many more angles here that are about things like integration with your existing system,

00:13:10   things like control, owning the billing relationship.

00:13:14   There's so much stuff that you can't do if you're using Apple's system.

00:13:17   There's a lot of things that Apple's system simply can't do or doesn't do well.

00:13:23   Certain purchase methods or even just like managing what purchases are available and

00:13:27   accounting for them.

00:13:28   There's a lot of things that Apple's system either doesn't do at all or doesn't do

00:13:32   as well as other systems do.

00:13:34   Any kind of admin control like we have no ways developers to refund people who purchase

00:13:39   our stuff.

00:13:40   So like if I get an email from somebody saying, "Oh, I purchased Overcast Premium.

00:13:43   I thought it would do this."

00:13:45   I get an email almost every day from people who say, "I purchased Overcast Premium so

00:13:50   I could send files to my watch.

00:13:52   It doesn't work.

00:13:53   I want a refund."

00:13:54   That's not what it does.

00:13:55   I don't know where they're finding this information.

00:13:57   Did I ever charge for that?

00:13:59   I don't remember.

00:14:00   I don't think I ever made that a premium feature.

00:14:02   But regardless, I frequently have a need where I wish I could issue somebody a refund.

00:14:09   And instead I can't do that.

00:14:10   All I can do is direct them to Apple's page about how to maybe possibly sometimes get

00:14:13   a refund.

00:14:14   That's a terrible customer approach.

00:14:17   I wish I could offer refunds.

00:14:19   I have no way to tell if someone's charge went through.

00:14:23   For our ATP.fm member CMS, we use Stripe.

00:14:26   And I'm able with Stripe, there's a whole dashboard I can go into.

00:14:29   And it's super easy for me to either use their dashboard or build my own on our admin

00:14:35   back end that can do things like see what a customer has been charged.

00:14:39   See, if their credit card was declined, if the charge actually was issued or not, I can

00:14:44   give partial or full refunds for any payment they've made.

00:14:47   There's so much control that we have in Stripe that I don't have with Apple's in-app purchase

00:14:54   system.

00:14:55   So there's a lot of reasons why people would maybe not want to use Apple's in-app purchase

00:14:59   system that are not just about whatever percentage they happen to charge.

00:15:04   Now the percentage they charge is high, for sure.

00:15:06   Even the 15% that you can get on years two forward on subscriptions, even 15% is high.

00:15:12   For Stripe, we pay something like 3%.

00:15:15   And that's pretty typical for most payment processors.

00:15:18   The percentage is important.

00:15:21   But all this other stuff, all these angles of control, and being able to have your own

00:15:26   billing system and being able to own that customer relationship, being able to look

00:15:30   up what somebody paid to solve customer support problems, being able to issue refunds yourself

00:15:34   to solve other customer support problems.

00:15:36   There's so many reasons that Apple's system is not good.

00:15:40   There are things that Apple's system literally can't do that make certain businesses possible

00:15:46   or not possible.

00:15:47   Like I was saying in the past about how if I wanted to have some kind of system where

00:15:51   you paid overcast 20 bucks a month and then I split it up between all the podcasts that

00:15:54   you listen to, I currently have no way with Apple's system to associate your purchase

00:15:59   with how much money I've actually received from you.

00:16:02   So I can't split up your money without, like I can estimate and get it wrong.

00:16:07   I don't really want to do that.

00:16:08   I can put myself at risk of actually losing money if that happened, and I wouldn't be

00:16:14   incredibly accurate with where people's money was supposed to go because there's no way

00:16:17   for me to look up an Apple system.

00:16:19   How much money did I actually receive from this user this month?

00:16:22   I can't do that.

00:16:23   There's all sorts of other things like that where Apple's system, it's great in certain

00:16:28   ways, and it's really not great in others.

00:16:31   And Apple wants us to keep talking about 30% to avoid talking about all that other stuff.

00:16:35   The real problem with the App Store being anti-competitive, the real thing that's going

00:16:40   to make Apple have to get regulated by governments because they clearly won't do it themselves,

00:16:46   is going to be the rules about not letting other people use their own purchase systems.

00:16:52   That's the key thing here.

00:16:55   Apple doesn't want us talking about that because that would cost them a lot in control, and

00:17:01   that would make them fully lose all the big companies that they're already mostly losing,

00:17:05   like things like Amazon, Netflix, et cetera.

00:17:07   But ultimately, for the App Store to have significantly reduced antitrust problems,

00:17:16   they have to allow apps to use their own purchase systems if they want to.

00:17:20   And they can put as many restrictions around that as possible except what they've done

00:17:24   so far to date with the stupid reader app distinction, which is really just, we're going

00:17:28   to allow the big apps to do it because we have to because they're big, but we're not going

00:17:31   to allow new small apps to do it.

00:17:33   That's a terrible distinction.

00:17:34   They have to get rid of the reader app distinction that says you're allowed to do it, but you're

00:17:38   not.

00:17:39   They have to allow apps to mention, go to our website to sign up.

00:17:43   They don't have to let you link out.

00:17:45   They don't have to let you build it into the app, but I think they need to do those two

00:17:48   things.

00:17:49   Get rid of the rule that lets only some apps do this at all, and relax the rule about mentioning

00:17:54   it at all, and allow apps to mention in text in the app, go to our website to sign up.

00:17:59   And that's it.

00:18:00   That would solve so many of these antitrust problems.

00:18:04   They won't do that unless they're forced apparently.

00:18:07   But we're not asking for alternative app stores, sideloading.

00:18:14   I don't think those things would be very good for the platform.

00:18:16   I don't think the iPhone would benefit from sideloading or alternative app stores.

00:18:21   I will eventually answer this question by Wade, by the way, which is about this.

00:18:25   It was about distributing apps outside of the app store.

00:18:27   If sideloading or something like that became possible, I will get there in a second.

00:18:31   But basically, I don't think that would be good for the platform at all.

00:18:35   Having the app store and having forced app review for all apps on iOS in particular,

00:18:40   I wouldn't accept this on Mac OS, but on iOS, I think it does make sense and the platform

00:18:46   is better off for it.

00:18:49   However, I also think that rule about external payment systems needs to be relaxed.

00:18:54   And I'm not even saying it needs to be relaxed very much.

00:18:57   Just a little.

00:18:58   All apps do the Netflix trick and let the Netflix trick be slightly nicer for users

00:19:03   in that let the app actually say in text, "You may sign up on our website."

00:19:07   With those changes, again, these problems mostly disappear.

00:19:10   Anyway, so going back to the question about whether I would distribute my apps or any

00:19:16   apps of mine, I guess, outside of the app store if there was a way to do it.

00:19:21   No.

00:19:22   At least nothing I've currently written.

00:19:24   Not Overcast, for sure.

00:19:25   Apple's payment system does come with some significant benefits.

00:19:30   And if they were actually forced to compete more with others, maybe they'd make it even

00:19:34   better, I choose to use it willingly and I'm glad I can use it because Apple's payment

00:19:42   system is really, really good for the case of Overcast Premium where I need to know roughly

00:19:49   if somebody paid or not, but I don't really need to know how much they paid me.

00:19:53   I don't need to know exactly how much I earned from their account after any possible

00:19:58   foreign currency conversion.

00:20:00   I don't need to know any of that.

00:20:02   And if a couple of people get through fraudulently who paid me and then got refunds and kept

00:20:07   the account anyway, you know what?

00:20:09   That doesn't matter that much to me.

00:20:10   I'm not going to lose money over that, really.

00:20:12   They could fill their uploads with 10 gigs of files and I would lose, just look at whatever

00:20:15   S3 charges, that amount of cents per month.

00:20:17   It wouldn't be that big of a loss.

00:20:20   Apple's system is good if you don't need all that precision about who exactly bought

00:20:25   exactly what and did they get refunds or chargebacks or anything.

00:20:29   If you don't need that kind of granularity, it's fine.

00:20:33   And then you get the benefit of the incredible ease of use it gives users.

00:20:39   The reason why I've always liked Apple's purchase system is that it's super easy.

00:20:45   Your billing info's already entered, even before Apple Pay was a thing on websites,

00:20:49   your billing info's already entered, everything is already ready to go, you just authorize

00:20:53   it with a password or touch ID or face ID or whatever, and it's purchased and that's

00:20:57   it.

00:20:58   And so as a user, I love that, and as a developer, I love that because I like having things be

00:21:03   really, really easy to purchase in my app.

00:21:05   And then all the things that Apple removes from my control, for the most part, is stuff

00:21:12   that I don't really need to deal with with this particular app, with this particular

00:21:15   offering of a paid thing.

00:21:17   I don't need to deal with most of that stuff.

00:21:20   So it's totally fine, and I will, I gladly, for this app, I gladly accept the trade-off

00:21:24   of I will accept all of Apple's shortcomings, I accepted that they're 30% forever, and

00:21:31   then with, you know, most recently, now that I'm entirely subscription-based on iOS,

00:21:36   I accept they're, you know, 70, 30 the first year, 85, 15 subsequent years, because I like

00:21:43   not having to deal with all that stuff for this particular app, and I like the incredible

00:21:47   ease of use that people have for buying it, and that allows me, ultimately, I believe,

00:21:53   to make more money from over-cached premium than I would if I had to have my own payment

00:21:58   system and people had to enter their own billing details and everything like that, because

00:22:02   I think that would cause more friction and I would lose more sales.

00:22:06   So I think ultimately I'm making money with this that I probably wouldn't be making

00:22:10   doing a different system, and I'm able to have all that ease of use of all this stuff

00:22:15   I don't have to really deal with that they deal with for me.

00:22:18   That being said, this doesn't apply to everything.

00:22:21   I also sell ads, and I sell ads only on the over-cached website, not through the app,

00:22:26   I don't have any in-app purchase, I actually do accept Apple Pay for them, all through

00:22:31   Stripe again, because that's like a different thing, like that's offering something on

00:22:34   the web that is mostly, you know, from people who are not using their phones at the time

00:22:38   of purchase, they're like people who work for big podcasting companies who are spending

00:22:43   a marketing budget from their computer at their office and they're going to websites,

00:22:46   and I need to know then who actually paid and if anybody did get chargebacks or refunds,

00:22:51   I need to know that because it's larger sums of money for a smaller number of purchases

00:22:54   and it matters more.

00:22:55   That's a different thing though.

00:22:57   For the actual app, I am very happy to be in the App Store and to use the in-app purchase

00:23:03   system because it does get me more users and more purchases than the alternative would,

00:23:09   but that's only because I have this like set of trade-offs and priorities for this

00:23:15   particular app and for this particular purchase for Evercast Premium where that makes sense.

00:23:20   That doesn't make sense for everybody and it never will, and they're always going

00:23:23   to have antitrust problems until using alternative payment systems for apps that don't want

00:23:28   to use in-app purchase become possible, and then Apple can try to actually compete on

00:23:31   their merits.

00:23:32   Why didn't you put Forecast in the Mac App Store?

00:23:35   I know that's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but why not put Forecast there then?

00:23:42   The main reason I didn't put Forecast in the Mac App Store is that Forecast is free

00:23:46   and I don't have any purchase in it.

00:23:47   I don't have any way to make money in it.

00:23:49   It's just easier on the Mac not to because like if I'm dealing with the App Store,

00:23:54   I'm dealing with, on the Mac I have to deal with things like sandboxing and the weird

00:23:59   limitations of the Mac App Store apps and everything, and I didn't want to deal with

00:24:04   any of that and it didn't make sense for a free app to go through all that trouble.

00:24:08   However, if Forecast was a paid app, I would do it through the App Store just so I wouldn't

00:24:13   have to deal with any of that stuff.

00:24:14   John, I know you don't have iOS apps, but you could have elected to do your own distribution

00:24:20   for your stuff, but you ended up in the App Store.

00:24:23   Yeah, I put this question in here and now doesn't ask any people.

00:24:26   I think as Marco has just discussed, it's very relevant to the antitrust stuff and in

00:24:32   particular, two aspects.

00:24:34   One that Marco also kind of touched on, like when and many people have mentioned, like

00:24:38   when Apple has asked about, you know, they offer themselves when describing here's the

00:24:43   App Store and here's why it's awesome.

00:24:44   They go through the whole thing and they say it used to be you had to pay retailers a huge

00:24:48   amount and then they skip right to the App Store, right, which is another silly thing

00:24:51   for them to do because they have a good case for explaining the App Store without skipping

00:24:57   over the multiple decades where people sold software over the internet without the App

00:25:01   Store, right?

00:25:02   There's no reason to skip from retail to the App Store.

00:25:05   You can say, yeah, people used to sell, you know, software from their websites, but then

00:25:10   they had to do payment processing and they had to deal with it themselves and it was

00:25:13   even harder before Stripe happened and it was harder for users and if a user wanted

00:25:17   to buy five applications, they had to enter their payment information into five different

00:25:20   websites and like Apple has a case that can be made about the App Store.

00:25:24   Apple made this very case when they introduced the App Store, like it's right there in front

00:25:28   of us and as Mark said, it's easy for people to buy things on the App Store.

00:25:31   It's why users like it and developers like it because there's less friction between people's

00:25:36   money and your thing and, you know, part of that is the foundation of that is Apple sort

00:25:41   of parlayed its success in digital music into the App Store because why did they have all

00:25:47   those credit card numbers?

00:25:48   It was your quote unquote iTunes account, right, you know, and like people trusted,

00:25:52   people have been giving Apple money with their credit cards for a long time, so it wasn't

00:25:55   so much of a stretch.

00:25:56   Say, hey, you get a new phone, you can use your Apple ID, enter payment information,

00:26:00   yeah, yeah, like it's all, it was all, you know, snowballing, right?

00:26:04   And they only had to do that once and once they do that, any app in the App Store, they're

00:26:07   going to say purchase, purchase, purchase, purchase, like it's just, you know, you don't

00:26:11   have to, every time you purchase an app, you don't have to enter your credit card information

00:26:14   in that developer's website, right?

00:26:16   So there's a strong argument to be made for the value that the App Store provides without

00:26:21   making some completely disingenuous argument about how in the bad old days, right before

00:26:26   the App Store, you had to pay CompUSA to put a cardboard box and you get like 1% of that

00:26:31   sale or whatever the heck it was, right?

00:26:33   That's not the predecessor that the App Store was competing with.

00:26:36   It was competing with direct sales through websites.

00:26:38   Now direct sales through websites had the advantages that Margot listed before, which

00:26:42   is like, oh, you have the customer relationship, you can easily issue refunds, so on and so

00:26:45   forth.

00:26:46   And obviously, the bigger the software company, the more important that is, because they probably

00:26:50   have more sales and more applications.

00:26:53   And for a company like Adobe, for example, you know, you may, you're probably not just

00:26:57   going to buy one Adobe app if you're going to be a big customer for them.

00:27:00   So you give Adobe your payment information once and then you can buy all sorts of Adobe

00:27:03   things year after year, right?

00:27:04   So it's not so bad.

00:27:06   But for small developers, it makes more sense.

00:27:09   And I don't, I'm not quite sure why Apple doesn't make that pitch.

00:27:14   But I think everybody knows, you know, you know, either the top of their mind or just

00:27:19   instinctively.

00:27:20   That's why that's what makes the App Store good.

00:27:22   And this question about alternate App Stores, if you think about it for more than a couple

00:27:29   of seconds, leads you to some weird scenarios, which is why I wonder how this will work out,

00:27:34   legally speaking, right?

00:27:36   What would it take to have an alternate App Store?

00:27:39   I know there are ones like the jailbreak App Stores of like, was it Cydia and there's a

00:27:42   whole bunch of like things that are out there that do this.

00:27:45   But I think we'd all agree that's a little bit, a little bit sketchy and weird and not

00:27:50   a mainstream thing, right?

00:27:52   If there were an alternate App Store, it would actually need substantially, you need to be

00:27:58   jailbreak, which I think we can set aside and say no one wants to compromise the security

00:28:02   over their phone that much for an App Store, right?

00:28:06   You didn't have to compromise the security of your computer that much to buy things from

00:28:08   a website.

00:28:09   So why, you know, that's just a curiosity.

00:28:11   Like say there was like a legit alternate store for your phones, right?

00:28:17   That would basically necessarily need support from iOS, support from Apple for it to reach

00:28:25   feature parity with the App Store and all the areas that the App Store is good.

00:28:29   Oh, I want to be able to automatically install applications with a single tap without doing

00:28:33   anything a weird jailbreaky, without defining, like you can't do that on a phone without

00:28:40   the privileges that Apple offers to the App Store.

00:28:44   Like there is no way like from a website to install an app onto your phone.

00:28:49   And you know, probably thankfully there is no way to, you know, get it, you know, how

00:28:53   would you get, how would you bootstrap the process?

00:28:55   How do you get the, the store application?

00:28:57   Like the App Store comes on our phones, right?

00:28:59   But how would you get the alternate store application onto your phone in the first place?

00:29:03   It would probably have to be hosted on the App Store, right?

00:29:07   Otherwise there'd be this convoluted install process.

00:29:09   And then all these things that I'm talking about without sort of support from Apple in

00:29:13   the operating system for alternate stores, every alternate store would be at a massive

00:29:17   disadvantage because nobody wants to figure out how to sideload or use Xcode to put a

00:29:23   thing on or do some weird big page or jailbreak.

00:29:26   Regular people do not want to do that.

00:29:28   So you've just narrowed your customer base to this incredibly thin sliver of tech nerds.

00:29:33   Everyone else would be like, oh, I don't know how to do that.

00:29:34   I'll just go to the App Store because it's on my phone to begin with.

00:29:37   So Apple would need to actively support alternate App Stores.

00:29:42   And the only way they would ever do that is if the law made them do it.

00:29:46   And laws that make companies do technical things never work because the law doesn't

00:29:52   understand the technology, the technology changes too fast.

00:29:54   And it just like when I think about alternate App Stores, I think no one would want to use

00:30:01   an alternate App Store.

00:30:02   Users wouldn't want to use an alternate App Store because it can never be as good as the

00:30:06   App Store is in all the ways that the App Store is beneficial to everybody involved.

00:30:13   And that's kind of disappointing, but also sort of, this is kind of like Microsoft and

00:30:17   IE, the argument that it's part of the operating system, but also the argument of like, look,

00:30:22   well, I don't know, it's a little bit different because it was easier to put alternate browsers

00:30:25   on.

00:30:26   But anyway, alternate App Stores would need good support from Apple and Apple will never

00:30:32   provide that unless they're forced to, and if they're forced to, they'll do it weirdly

00:30:36   or badly because the law will not be able to say, and you have to do a good job and

00:30:41   it doesn't really make any sense.

00:30:43   So I feel like the alternate App Store thing is a pointless thing to consider.

00:30:50   Sideloading isn't because you can say, look, in special cases for particular kinds of applications,

00:30:55   it's great to have an out and a way to install things.

00:30:57   But for the mass market case of like, I bought an iPhone, now I want to get a bunch of apps,

00:31:02   we're never going to be in a world where there are a bunch of App Stores, all of which are

00:31:06   as easy to use, reliable and trustworthy as the App Store because Apple doesn't want that

00:31:10   to be the case.

00:31:11   If Apple changed their mind and figured out some way to make more money doing that, yeah,

00:31:16   they can definitely do it.

00:31:17   Like it's not a technical barrier, it's just sort of a business case barrier.

00:31:21   As for my particular things distributing outside the App Store, the only reason I didn't do

00:31:26   it is because I'm not like, my two apps are small and barely hobbies, right?

00:31:35   Both of my apps would benefit from not being in the Mac App Store because I wouldn't have

00:31:38   to sandbox them and I wouldn't have a bunch of stupid limitations.

00:31:42   Like to just give one example from Switch Glass, I implemented a feature where you right

00:31:46   click on an icon in the little App Switcher and the bottom item was quit because it's

00:31:51   handy to be able to quit an application from the App Switcher, right?

00:31:54   I implemented it and then it just totally didn't work.

00:31:57   And I was like, "Oh yeah, you can't do that with sandbox and you cannot tell an arbitrary

00:32:02   application to quit."

00:32:03   You can whitelist them and say, "I want to be able to send the quit Apple event to these

00:32:08   five applications but you have to ship that with your binary and I'm not going to list

00:32:12   every application in the world, right?"

00:32:14   So there's one example of a feature I implemented, granted it's like five lines, but I implemented

00:32:18   it before I discovered that it can't be implemented.

00:32:20   People ask for it all the time.

00:32:21   I have a fact item on it.

00:32:23   If I wasn't in the Mac App Store, it would have that feature.

00:32:26   So there are reasons, especially for my weird utility type applications that I would love

00:32:30   to be outside the Mac App Store.

00:32:31   But because it's just a little tiny hobby and I'm not going to sell a lot of these things

00:32:34   but I do want to sell them, I'm not going to set up a payment processor for the piddling

00:32:38   amount of money these things make.

00:32:39   I'm not going to set up my own store and have a customer relationship and blah, blah, blah.

00:32:44   It's not, I don't have enough sales and I never will have enough sales to justify the

00:32:47   effort for me to make my own sort of software store outside the App Store because I'm not

00:32:52   a Mac App developer who's trying to start a Mac App development business.

00:32:57   So for me, no, I wouldn't do it for my Mac Apps, even though I think about it from time

00:33:01   to time.

00:33:02   I'm like, maybe when, like if I go through like six months with zero sales, maybe I'll

00:33:06   just make it a free app and put it outside the App Store and make it not sandboxed anymore.

00:33:10   I also thought maybe like, oh, well, you know, I'll just, I'll build a non-sandbox version

00:33:15   for my own personal use.

00:33:16   In practice, I don't, partially because of the convenience.

00:33:19   I bought my own application, which is another weird thing that you do if you're, anyway,

00:33:24   I bought my own application and in every Mac that I'm on, I just download it from the Mac

00:33:28   App Store again.

00:33:29   It's just more convenient than doing it the other way and having a special build.

00:33:32   It's just easier to have just one build.

00:33:35   And for iOS, if I ever made an iOS application, that's even more of the case because like

00:33:38   I said, there's, there's no way there will ever be another App Store that is as friendly

00:33:45   to customers as the App Store.

00:33:46   So if I want to get any kind of sales or any kind of downloads, I have to be in the App

00:33:51   Store.

00:33:52   I wouldn't be in the quote unquote alternate App Store.

00:33:54   But I was making some weird, like, you know, the ability to sideload, even like some weird,

00:33:58   you know, the ability to load an application, even if it's a long multi-step process, but

00:34:03   it's officially supported by Apple.

00:34:04   That's what I mean by sideloading.

00:34:06   I would do that if I had a good idea for a strange iOS application that needed to violate

00:34:10   some rules or something that the App Store enforces, but that the OS doesn't, because

00:34:15   that's another distinction I have to remember on iOS.

00:34:16   It's not like if you can sideload something, you don't have sandboxing, but if you can

00:34:20   sideload, one thing you don't have to deal with is I don't like your metadata.

00:34:24   I don't like this kind of application.

00:34:25   I don't like that you use the private API.

00:34:27   All that crap you don't have to deal with if you're outside the App Store.

00:34:29   But once you get onto the phone, it's not like you have a free for all.

00:34:32   Like there's a difference between jailbreaking and sideloading.

00:34:34   So anyway, if I was on iOS, unless I had one of those weird type of applications that was

00:34:40   techy and just a one-off like a dev tool or something, I'd be in the App Store.

00:34:46   And Wade, I know this is probably maybe not exactly what you were asking about, but I

00:34:49   think the heart of it is, would we be in the alternate App Store?

00:34:54   Would anyone?

00:34:55   Not without massive, extremely unlikely support from Apple to make the alternate App Store

00:35:01   be able to do the basic things that an App Store does.

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00:37:05   I have been dabbling with, and I think Jon has even longer than I, a very recent sponsor

00:37:11   as in two days ago as we record this, but last, the sponsor from last week, Hey, which

00:37:16   is the new email service from, from Basecamp and formerly known as 37 signals.

00:37:22   Is that right?

00:37:23   37?

00:37:24   I think that's right.

00:37:25   And I have to, I have thoughts.

00:37:29   Let me start by saying everyone started gushing over this new email web app slash iOS app.

00:37:37   And obviously this made a lot of, that's made a big splash when, when it was released because

00:37:44   there was a big kerfuffle that we've covered on the show with Phil Schiller amongst others

00:37:48   about whether or not Hey has to support in app purchase and so on and so forth.

00:37:53   And I don't know, all the things I heard at first I go, we're reinventing email.

00:37:56   Oh, okay, sure.

00:37:57   You know, the Jennifer Lawrence.

00:37:58   Huh?

00:37:59   Okay.

00:38:00   Gif.

00:38:01   Okay guys, whatever you say, sure.

00:38:03   You're reinventing email.

00:38:04   And I didn't try it.

00:38:05   I didn't sign up.

00:38:06   I should have signed up and gotten a sweet username, but I didn't because I never do.

00:38:10   And then a couple of weeks back I did sign up and I started playing with it and I played

00:38:16   with it for a few minutes with no email coming into it except one that I sent myself.

00:38:20   And I was like, Oh, okay, I guess this is interesting.

00:38:23   And then when they were a sponsor, I wanted to play with it some more.

00:38:27   And then I found out we were going to talk about it because I think John had asked us

00:38:30   to, or maybe I had asked us to, I don't recall.

00:38:32   And so I actually forwarded my, it's not, it's Google apps for my domain, but I'll probably

00:38:39   just call it Gmail.

00:38:40   I forwarded my Gmail account to, to Hey to really try to live the life of a Hey user.

00:38:49   And I have to say that I really didn't think the hype was justified before I started really

00:38:56   improperly using it the way they intended to go figure.

00:39:01   And I still not entirely sure the hype is justified, but a lot of it is justified because

00:39:07   I actually am really impressed with this.

00:39:10   And I think it's really, really clever.

00:39:12   And I'm really, I really want to switch this, switch my email to, to use Hey, or at least

00:39:19   I do right now.

00:39:22   I'm not going to do that until it supports custom domains, which I've said many, many

00:39:25   times is coming, but I am very impressed by it.

00:39:31   And outside of some quibbles here and there, most especially Imbox, I M B O X, which just

00:39:38   is so cringy.

00:39:39   I have a few other quibbles by and large.

00:39:42   I really like it before, before I go into details about what makes Hey different.

00:39:48   Would the two of you perhaps starting with John, since you've had it longer, like to

00:39:52   discuss any like initial impressions or if you'd rather just dive into the nitty gritty,

00:39:56   we can do that.

00:39:58   One thing about initial impressions that I think is important for many services.

00:40:04   And I think a lot of services do this is creating FOMO about getting your username, which is

00:40:11   a, usually a pretty good marketing tool on certain times of people, me being one of those

00:40:15   types of people, obviously not Casey, cause you have the FOMO, but not enough for you

00:40:19   to go get your name.

00:40:20   Right.

00:40:21   So like the general case of this phenomenon is a new service appears.

00:40:24   And even if you have no interest in it whatsoever, if it's free to sign up, you just sign up

00:40:28   to reserve your name.

00:40:29   Just in case it turns out to be the next big thing.

00:40:31   So you've got your name.

00:40:32   So many services I've signed up for.

00:40:35   That is the explanation.

00:40:36   The one service that I didn't do that for, I regret massively Instagram.

00:40:39   I didn't sign up for years and years and years.

00:40:41   Cause I thought I would have no use of it.

00:40:43   And when I finally did sign up like seven years after Instagram existed or the hell it

00:40:47   was like way late, I signed up like no remote normal variation of my name existed.

00:40:52   And I have this horrendous username and Instagram and I regret it.

00:40:55   I should have just signed up to get the name.

00:40:57   I still barely use Instagram, but anyway, boy, that was a mistake.

00:41:01   But Basecamp being smart company that they are takes this one step further where yeah,

00:41:08   I was going to sign up for, Hey, no matter what I, in fact, I signed up for like that

00:41:12   early, you know, they said, Hey, if you're in, Hey, if you're interested in our email

00:41:16   thing, send us your send us your current email address and we'll let you know when, you know,

00:41:22   they have had like a thing where they let people in slowly.

00:41:24   Right.

00:41:25   I was on the waiting list.

00:41:26   I was fairly early on the waiting list to get in this because I wanted to get my name

00:41:29   and it was, you know, sign up for free, get your names on and so forth.

00:41:34   But when they actually came out, they said, okay, if you sign up and I think if you, if

00:41:41   you pay, if you like subscribe, cause it's like, there's a free like 14 day trial or

00:41:45   something and then after that you have to pay, if you pay for your name, pay for pay,

00:41:50   subscribe for like a month or a year or whatever you want to subscribe.

00:41:52   I forget what the terms are.

00:41:55   And then later you just stop subscribing.

00:41:57   You say, Oh, this isn't for me.

00:41:58   And you still pay anymore.

00:41:59   They'll hold your name for you forever.

00:42:03   So once you get your name, you don't have to worry like, Oh, if I just, if I let this,

00:42:08   if I let the subscription expire, someone else can steal my name.

00:42:11   It's always there waiting for you to come back and start paying again, which is smart

00:42:14   on multiple levels, but especially smart for people like me who are like, well, that's

00:42:17   it.

00:42:18   I'm going to instantly pay for my name.

00:42:19   Uh, you know, so that's, and for email services, like Casey mentioned, not wanting to go for

00:42:24   it until it's on your domain, which I totally understand this type of stuff is important

00:42:28   because the email is not only the linchpin too many different things, but also it's kind

00:42:33   of like your address or like for most people who don't have like their own, their own,

00:42:38   like, you know, web servers or websites or anything like that.

00:42:41   It represents you online and having to change it as a gigantic pain.

00:42:47   Right?

00:42:48   So if someone does sign up for, Hey, they'll want to keep using it for a very long time

00:42:55   and not, you know, they won't want to enter that as their email address and something

00:42:58   and then just say, Oh, well that was when I was first trying out, Hey, but I decided

00:43:02   I didn't like it and I've lost that name forever and can never get it back.

00:43:05   So I think that's cool.

00:43:06   Um, and in general, most of their policies, uh, the policies around, Hey, and the reason

00:43:11   I was so willing to sign up for it, it's based on the company's reputation.

00:43:14   Um, all the stuff that Marco talked about that you can't do on the Apple app store in

00:43:19   terms of customer relations, they are exactly the things that base camp is good at having

00:43:25   good customer support, being really easy with the refunds, like all that stuff, knowing

00:43:30   the customer and their relationship and whether they paid you or not.

00:43:32   And like just all that stuff.

00:43:35   Uh, you know, it's, it's back to the old world of buying things where when you buy from a

00:43:41   brand that you know and trust, like this brand loyalty to, to like the particular maker of

00:43:47   the thing that you're buying, whether it's a car manufacturer you really like or a department

00:43:52   store or a software maker, right?

00:43:54   These companies build their reputation on how they treat their customers and how good

00:43:59   their products are.

00:44:01   And it also means that if there's some random one person company that you've never heard

00:44:05   of, you don't have that established trust and it might be more dangerous.

00:44:08   But the flip side of that is when you're buying from a company you know and trust a lot and

00:44:13   have experience with their products and like them, you have some assurance that everything

00:44:17   will be fine.

00:44:19   And that company is empowered to do all the good things that you like them for.

00:44:23   And the app store, you're paying Apple and that's it, which is great for the small companies

00:44:27   because you're like, well, I don't trust them, but I trust Apple, right?

00:44:29   Or it's mostly great for small companies, the app can still be a scam.

00:44:33   But on the flip side, the very best companies are forced down to sort of the level that

00:44:39   Apple enforces for everybody.

00:44:41   It's like you can't give amazing customer service because Apple won't let you, but nobody

00:44:46   can give awful customer service because Apple won't let them.

00:44:49   I didn't want to turn this back into the app store topic, but anyway, all this is to say,

00:44:53   I was totally on board with trying out how, even though my history with email things is

00:44:58   I try them all and I pretty much reject them all, but I love seeing people do new things

00:45:04   with email because every once in a while, one of them hits with me.

00:45:08   Marco, you seemed a lot less enthusiastic about Hey.

00:45:11   In fact, the only reason I think you would have looked at it all is because after the

00:45:14   last show, I said, "Hey, let's look at Hey."

00:45:17   And you're like, you grumbled about it and you're like, "No, I don't want to look at

00:45:20   it."

00:45:21   Because you do not seem like you're constantly looking for new innovations in your email.

00:45:25   Did you sign up and try it?

00:45:27   I signed up, but I haven't really done anything with it yet.

00:45:29   I haven't forwarded any accounts to it or anything because I'm like the typical worst

00:45:36   case scenario for a service like this because I have my workflow, muscle memory for all

00:45:41   the built-in mail apps on Mac and iOS.

00:45:45   That being said, I've not been incredibly happy with mail.app ever since iOS 13.

00:45:51   Mail.app has been very increasingly buggy.

00:45:54   It still, even in the 14 betas, still has the bug where new messages sometimes stop

00:46:00   appearing at the top of the list.

00:46:02   They appear at the bottom of the list so you don't usually see them until you go back out

00:46:06   and back into your main inbox.

00:46:08   It's kind of amazing.

00:46:09   I still can't believe this bug has been there since iOS 13 beta one.

00:46:13   Here we are through the iOS 14 beta cycle.

00:46:15   It's still here.

00:46:19   I don't love mail.app on Mac that much either.

00:46:23   Under the Catalina version, I've had massive performance problems, especially on my laptop.

00:46:28   Under the Big Sur version on the laptop, the performance problems are mained and they ruin

00:46:32   the whole interface with Big Sur's new stupid toolbar design.

00:46:34   So I'm really not incredibly happy with mail.app.

00:46:39   I should be more on board with trying something new, but there's just so much inertia that

00:46:47   I feel behind the way I've always done it.

00:46:50   I'm not a person to just play with different tools for the sake of it.

00:46:54   I'll do that with certain things like microphones, but for the most part, I don't enjoy doing

00:47:00   that for most things.

00:47:01   I enjoy really moving into one and settling in for the long haul.

00:47:06   I'm a tool monogamist.

00:47:07   I really want to just use the one thing that I find to be great and just stick with it

00:47:12   forever for things that I don't really care that much about.

00:47:17   And email is one of those things.

00:47:18   I am not an email power user.

00:47:21   I don't practice any reasonable email philosophy or filing system or getting things done or

00:47:27   anything like that.

00:47:29   I just use email crappily like everybody else and I don't care that much about it.

00:47:34   Email is not something where I ever want to spend a lot of time to learn a new system

00:47:40   or even install, let alone learn, new apps everywhere.

00:47:44   I've also historically not been a fan of webmail type things, like web-based email.

00:47:51   I really love native apps and while Hay has apps, they are web views.

00:47:57   If anybody can make a good web view, it's Basecamp.

00:47:59   They know how to make web views really well.

00:48:03   They are amazing with web technology, but I still do love fully native apps way more.

00:48:08   I also don't want to move stuff because I have a lot of inertia in the system just in

00:48:12   my archive.

00:48:14   Like I mentioned last week, I believe I mentioned that email search is very important to me.

00:48:20   And the reason why is because I've been using the same email app forever with the same email

00:48:24   account on the same email IMAP server forever.

00:48:27   And so I know that I can go in and do a search and find some email that I'm trying to look

00:48:34   for from like 2008 and it's there.

00:48:37   If I start switching systems, I lose that history.

00:48:41   So I don't care enough about tweaking my email workflow to jump through all the hoops to

00:48:48   install something new, migrate to a new system, learn a new system, learn the new apps, and

00:48:54   also then lose that big history and then have to what, search two places?

00:48:59   Or somehow import my entire email archive into Hay, which I don't even know if that's

00:49:03   possible.

00:49:04   So it's just, I don't know.

00:49:05   Should I really be pushing myself to change this or does that sound reasonable to you?

00:49:09   - It does sound reasonable and I mostly agree with you.

00:49:15   It's funny because I love my dear friend and co-host of Analog, Mike Hurley, so much.

00:49:21   But him spending just hours upon hours going through different email apps, I always thought

00:49:28   was the most preposterous thing in the entire world.

00:49:31   Particularly before you could switch a default email app, which I think you can do in iOS

00:49:34   14.

00:49:35   Is that right?

00:49:36   Or did I make that up?

00:49:37   - I think you can do.

00:49:38   I think it's mail and browser, but nothing else, right?

00:49:40   - Yeah, right.

00:49:41   I thought that's correct.

00:49:42   I might have that wrong.

00:49:43   But anyways, I always thought it was bananas.

00:49:45   And I always thought, not just Mike, of course, but all these people who are living their

00:49:49   lives a quarter mile at a time, living their lives by using snoozing and this and that

00:49:56   and all these other super proprietary things and this client that's working with arbitrary

00:50:02   IMAP servers in many cases.

00:50:05   I never understood it.

00:50:06   I never got it.

00:50:07   And I still mostly don't.

00:50:10   And I agree with you, Marco, that there's a couple of things about Hey that I consider

00:50:15   non-starters most especially.

00:50:17   I wanna keep my email address and I can't right now.

00:50:19   I would have to use a hey.com email address.

00:50:22   And in general, this is not something that I feel like I need to fix.

00:50:26   Like my email sucks.

00:50:27   I get way more than I want.

00:50:29   I feel compelled to respond to way too much of it.

00:50:33   And I haven't gotten to the point that Marco has where I can just outright ignore everything.

00:50:37   I'm getting better with it.

00:50:40   I'm getting better at ignoring it every passing day, but I'm still not great at it.

00:50:44   But in so many ways, this was not a problem I felt like I needed solving.

00:50:47   But I wanted to try it.

00:50:49   And I really am surprised by how much I enjoyed it, especially since like on the Mac, on the

00:50:55   Mac most especially, I have no interest in a web app.

00:50:58   Like again, my current email is Google Apps for my domain.

00:51:02   I open the web app maybe once a month, maybe.

00:51:07   I'm not a John Syracuse who lives in it.

00:51:09   And I don't know how you live in it, John, to be honest with you.

00:51:12   But I much prefer having native apps.

00:51:16   But there are a lot of really, really clever things about hey that are really making me

00:51:20   think this might be fixing problems that I've always wanted to fix but couldn't find a good

00:51:24   way to do it.

00:51:26   And I can dig into the specifics.

00:51:27   But before I do that, John, any other things you wanna say about what Marco or I just said?

00:51:31   >> Yeah, I think before we start detailing the specific features of hey, this is gonna

00:51:36   sound like it's just a giant ad for Gmail.

00:51:38   But I think it's going to explain how I use my email and why hey, well, I'm not gonna

00:51:45   say it's not a good fit for me.

00:51:46   But it's gonna explain the advantages of hey based on how I use Gmail.

00:51:49   So I used to use native apps for a long time, had a bunch of favorite applications.

00:51:54   And then Gmail came out.

00:51:56   And Gmail solved a lot of problems I had with the way I worked with mail.

00:52:00   So my way for working with mail is I tried to funnel everything into one big fire hose

00:52:06   and then I just have a huge amount of rules to file the mail automatically as it comes

00:52:11   in.

00:52:13   Back in the day I was filing into the folders, filing into subfolders, doing stuff with the

00:52:17   messages, marking as read and marking as unread, forward filing a duplicate.

00:52:21   Like just my mail is processed and it's processed by a series of rules.

00:52:26   And one of those would be like filing spammings but like actual rules.

00:52:30   Very, very, very, very little of my mail ends up in what most people think of as an inbox.

00:52:35   Pretty much all of it gets auto-filed somewhere, categorized and auto-filed.

00:52:38   And this is how I've always used email because I've always had a lot of email.

00:52:42   Back in the day the reason I had a lot of email is I'd sign up for like every mailing

00:52:44   list.

00:52:45   The Perl community was big on mailing lists, so was the Unix community.

00:52:47   I just had tons of very high volume mailing lists.

00:52:50   So that got me on the bandwagon.

00:52:52   That sounds awful.

00:52:54   That got me on the bandwagon of like auto-filing because there's no way to deal with mail if

00:52:58   you're on a mailing list.

00:52:59   And you have to auto-file the mailing list.

00:53:00   In fact, some of my favorite email clients had features specifically for mailing lists

00:53:03   where you could say, "This email is for a mailing list.

00:53:06   Please handle it and they would file it away for you."

00:53:08   But I do that with all my mail.

00:53:11   And that was a super pain.

00:53:12   First of all, it was a pain back in the day when all email was like pop because you had

00:53:16   the problem of like you're on one machine and you start your email client and it pulls

00:53:19   some messages and they get sorted.

00:53:21   And then you go on another machine and it hasn't seen those messages yet from using

00:53:24   pop and it has to get the same messages again.

00:53:27   And that would mean I had to have the rules, I had to have the same set of rules on every

00:53:31   computer.

00:53:32   And there was no cloud sync.

00:53:34   Like this is the 90s, right?

00:53:36   No cloud syncing of rules.

00:53:38   And these apps didn't even make it easy to bring – there was no even export and import

00:53:42   so I had to re-implement the rules.

00:53:44   This is especially egregious if I wanted to check my personal email at work, which is

00:53:47   definitely a thing that I've always wanted to do because you might get an email about

00:53:50   something about somebody in daycare or something like that.

00:53:54   I had to re-implement the rules on my work computer, which was another big pain.

00:53:58   Gmail solved that big problem for me because suddenly my email wasn't a native application.

00:54:05   And even with IMAP, trying to apply rules to IMAP like server-side rules would help

00:54:09   but server-side rules were implemented spottily.

00:54:11   Like Exchange had server-side rules but people didn't have personal Exchange accounts.

00:54:14   And IMAP could sometimes have some kind of server-side rule but it really depended and

00:54:17   it depended on the client.

00:54:19   Pop didn't have server-side rules at all so it was all client-side.

00:54:21   But Gmail just solved that.

00:54:22   It's like, "Okay, your rules are where everything is.

00:54:26   It's all in the cloud, right?

00:54:28   It's a web browser.

00:54:29   You can open any web browser that can load Gmail, can see your mail.

00:54:32   It's always going to look exactly the same because the mail is literally not on your

00:54:35   machine.

00:54:36   It's someplace else.

00:54:37   And if you define a rule in Gmail, that rule is everywhere you see Gmail.

00:54:41   No more defining multiple rules, no more syncing rules, no more nothing.

00:54:45   And all of your mail is available everywhere.

00:54:47   And Gmail had features that sound like they would appeal to Marco.

00:54:52   I'm not sure if you use these when Gmail first came out.

00:54:55   Gmail would take all of your old mail.

00:54:57   The very first thing when I got Gmail, besides reserving my name, was to upload literally

00:55:02   all of my old email that I had at that time.

00:55:05   And I'm sure I'm missing some stuff.

00:55:07   I just did search in Gmail.

00:55:08   I can go back to the '90s in my Gmail email.

00:55:12   I put like day one, I just said like exported everything from whatever I was using, probably

00:55:17   Entourage at that point, exported my entire email history and shoved it into Gmail.

00:55:21   And Gmail dutifully took it down.

00:55:23   And the other thing that once I did that is like I'm also big in email searching.

00:55:27   Guess what Google's really good at?

00:55:29   They're really good at search.

00:55:30   The search is fast.

00:55:31   The search is good.

00:55:32   The search is never broken.

00:55:35   So I got my rules in one place, and I've got really good search, and it's the same everywhere.

00:55:42   And the final thing is I have so much email that I don't have like a multi-gig archive

00:55:46   of email on my local disks anymore.

00:55:49   So I save disk space on top of it.

00:55:52   And Gmail has a bunch of extensions and features and keyboard shortcuts and other nerdy things.

00:55:55   So that's why I like Gmail.

00:55:58   What Hey is bringing to the table is, and by the way, needless to say, I think my way

00:56:03   of dealing with email is good.

00:56:06   Otherwise I wouldn't do it.

00:56:07   It's efficient, it's nice, it lowers the cognitive burden of email for me.

00:56:12   The fact that everything gets sort of auto-filed away, I can look at it in different buckets

00:56:16   and sub-buckets and deal with them when I want to deal with them.

00:56:18   Whereas the stuff that actually is in the inbox is so few that I know they're actually

00:56:22   important.

00:56:23   Like I built this system myself.

00:56:24   Hey is telling people, "You're not going to do, regular people are not going to do what

00:56:30   I did."

00:56:31   They're going to sit there and build up a series of like dozens and dozens of rules

00:56:34   over the course of many years and tweak them.

00:56:37   People are never going to do that.

00:56:39   Even if you show them how to make a rule and a filter and how nice it is, they won't keep

00:56:42   up with that process because that's not their inclination.

00:56:46   And honestly, I'm not saying it's a lot of ongoing work, but I did put a lot of work

00:56:50   in upfront when I was younger to establish all these rules and systems.

00:56:55   Hey is a system that says, "Since most people won't do that and don't want to do that, and

00:57:01   many can't do that, Hey has a system already.

00:57:04   Hey has a series of rules, a series of buckets and rules that apply to those buckets and

00:57:09   interface that applies to them.

00:57:10   And it's already established for you.

00:57:12   You don't do anything.

00:57:13   You just sign up and it's like, you're getting this set of rules."

00:57:15   Now, the reason Mike Early and many other people fret about email applications, they're

00:57:19   like, "Oh, but that's not exactly the set of rules that I want."

00:57:22   That's not the appeal of Hey.

00:57:24   The appeal of Hey is to people who have never had a "system" for email.

00:57:29   Having a system is way better than having no system.

00:57:32   And Hey's system is pretty good, as we'll get into in a little bit.

00:57:36   But I think that is the main appeal.

00:57:38   If you have never had a system for email and have just treated it as this giant avalanche

00:57:42   that lands on your head that you just swim your way through, Hey is just going to relieve

00:57:49   you of so much stress and pressure and annoyance in your life.

00:57:53   If on the other hand, you have a bespoke, hand-assembled, complex system, or even if

00:57:59   you have a notion of an exact system that you want, Hey is not going to match that,

00:58:03   because Hey is the system that they made.

00:58:05   It's not the system that you have in your head, and it's certainly not the system that

00:58:08   you may have implemented directly.

00:58:12   That said, seeing Hey's system gave me some interesting ideas for my system.

00:58:16   A lot of the ideas I've had for my system I've seen reflected in other things.

00:58:21   I forget what it was.

00:58:22   Maybe it was Inbox or something.

00:58:24   One of the companies, I think Gmail might have even bought them, a couple companies

00:58:28   in the most recent decade or so who have come out with email things had features that are

00:58:31   like, "Ha, that is a great feature.

00:58:33   I know, because I've been doing that since 2001."

00:58:37   But now we're finally getting to the reverse, where I'm seeing email applications that

00:58:40   have ideas that I hadn't even thought of and I'm interested in trying out.

00:58:44   So Casey, you want to take a crack at describing what the heck Hey does to your email?

00:58:48   What is the system that you get out of the box with Hey?

00:58:51   Yeah, certainly.

00:58:52   And both of you, feel free to interrupt me at any time.

00:58:55   And just very briefly, I think you're describing me.

00:58:58   I don't have a good system.

00:58:59   I have some labels in Gmail that I almost never use.

00:59:02   I do use native apps connected to Gmail as faux IMAP servers, and it doesn't work great,

00:59:10   but it works.

00:59:12   So what is Hey all about?

00:59:14   So Hey, most especially and primarily, asks you to do a little bit more work up front

00:59:23   with the theory that it will provide oodles of time savings over time.

00:59:28   So as you get an email from someone that Hey has never seen before or someone that your

00:59:33   email address has never seen before, when that email comes in, Hey will ask you to classify

00:59:38   it as one of three different things.

00:59:40   And one of them is the Imbox, which I'm just going to call Imbox because it's silly.

00:59:44   One of them is the Imbox, and that's stuff like your partner or your kid's school or

00:59:49   something like that.

00:59:50   These are things that you really want to have in your face.

00:59:53   The next bucket is what they call the feed.

00:59:56   And so these are things that maybe you would be interested in seeing, but you can really

01:00:00   do it on your own time.

01:00:02   And you can just kind of wade through them, not unlike you would wade through, say, your

01:00:07   Twitter feed.

01:00:08   And so you can start from most recent and keep going backwards and just kind of see

01:00:13   what sorts of things have come in.

01:00:14   So these would be newsletters or updates about things that aren't critical, maybe like a

01:00:19   shipping notification, for example, or something like that.

01:00:21   Things that may or may not be critical, but you still kind of care about.

01:00:25   And then a third bucket is what they call paper trail.

01:00:28   And this is for actually shipping notification might be a great example for this too, but

01:00:32   things like receipts, you know, stuff that you want to be able to refer to at some point,

01:00:37   but the likelihood of you actually needing to read it as it's coming in is slim.

01:00:43   So you can call it up, but you probably don't need to see it as it's coming into your inbox.

01:00:49   So it doesn't need to go in your inbox.

01:00:50   It doesn't even need to go in the feed.

01:00:51   It can just go straight to the paper trail.

01:00:53   So if you want to refer to that Amazon receipt, you certainly can, but you don't necessarily

01:00:57   need to see it arrive in your inbox.

01:01:00   And then on top of that, they have the standard things in 2020 for all email.

01:01:07   I want to set this aside and reply and have it for easy reference later.

01:01:12   I want to reply to this later, which is slightly different.

01:01:15   And there's a few other things that I'm not thinking of, but the IO, and you can screen

01:01:19   emails out.

01:01:21   So that's not really blocking them necessarily.

01:01:24   It's slightly different than spam.

01:01:25   I'm not entirely clear how it's different, but it's different.

01:01:29   And so the idea is that it's a very, I view it anyway, as a fairly low maintenance way

01:01:38   to establish a system.

01:01:40   And I didn't think of it that way until you described it, John, but I think you hit the

01:01:42   nail on the head.

01:01:43   That this is providing me anyway with a system that I never really had.

01:01:47   And to some degree, I could probably replicate this in Gmail, but I do like the way this

01:01:52   works.

01:01:53   I do like the way the web app works.

01:01:54   Like I'm not a huge web app fan, but I do like the way it works.

01:01:56   The mobile apps are also very good.

01:01:59   And I assume that as I'm filing these senders into these three different buckets, it's certainly

01:02:09   even already, even just a couple of days, bringing my inbox such that it's a little

01:02:16   bit less chatty, which is exactly what I want.

01:02:19   And I also do not receive an overabundance of email, but the three of us from ATP alone

01:02:24   probably get 10 to 20 emails a day.

01:02:27   And I typically try to read all of them and I respond to almost none of them, but that's

01:02:33   relatively chatty.

01:02:34   I am subscribed to some newsletters, but not a lot.

01:02:37   And so that can get chatty.

01:02:39   And I just get, I mean, I think everyone, I don't think this is unique to me.

01:02:42   Everyone gets more email than you want.

01:02:44   And so I guess it's a far cry for when I was like 15 and just begging somebody to send

01:02:48   me an email.

01:02:49   I was just so waiting for somebody to send me an email.

01:02:51   It'll be amazing.

01:02:54   And so I do think that Hey is very, very good at giving me/the Royal You a system to work

01:03:02   with.

01:03:03   And I think it's very well thought out and very clever.

01:03:06   And another example, I don't recall what the feature's name is, but I saw somewhere that

01:03:09   you can like highlight a specific portion of a email and store that somewhere.

01:03:16   I don't even remember how you do that, but I guess in summary, and I'll stop talking,

01:03:20   but it's very clear to me that a lot of thought has been put into how do people use email

01:03:28   and how can we meld this service around that?

01:03:31   Now, if you're John Syracuse, maybe this isn't a good fit, but if you're me and don't really

01:03:35   have a system, like I keep saying, this is a really, really clever and interesting way

01:03:40   to do it.

01:03:41   Yeah, and they take advantage of the fact that they write the app.

01:03:43   Like, to be clear, Hey is not an email client.

01:03:46   Hey is an email service like Gmail.

01:03:48   The email's all on their server and again, you're trusting them because they're a good

01:03:51   company to do encryption.

01:03:53   They can't see your email.

01:03:54   It's all encrypted in transit and in rest.

01:03:56   And it's all web interface.

01:03:57   You can see the same thing everywhere.

01:03:59   Yada, yada.

01:04:00   The system has a lot of features, like I said, that I would love to see elsewhere or be able

01:04:03   to implement because they control the client.

01:04:05   They can do things like when you view the different categories, like when you view the

01:04:09   paper trail versus your inbox and stuff, they look different because you consume them differently.

01:04:14   Like the feed looks more like you're looking at an RSS feeder.

01:04:16   Like it expands all the emails and you can just scroll through because that's the nature

01:04:19   of the feed, right?

01:04:21   And the type of features they have are like things that people do with email.

01:04:24   They have a dedicated files view at the top level because so often you're looking for

01:04:27   that one file.

01:04:29   And even though you may get a lot of emails and of course in an email client you can search

01:04:33   for things with attachments.

01:04:34   Do you remember the syntax in your weird email client to find files that have attachments?

01:04:38   Do you want to sort by attachment by clicking the header thing?

01:04:42   Just go to the files view.

01:04:43   It shows you all your files, right?

01:04:44   Stuff like that is sort of very thoughtful ways to just, you know, if you make a general

01:04:50   purpose tool, oh, we have a query syntax or we have customizable sortable column headers

01:04:54   like every Microsoft email client.

01:04:57   That's too much of a barrier for most people and even me, like I'm no longer copying my

01:05:01   rules around everywhere, but every time I set up like my preferred native email client,

01:05:09   I have to rearrange the columns and size them the way they want them because that's not

01:05:13   cloud synced.

01:05:14   Most things should be cloud synced, people, the modern day.

01:05:16   But anyway, they're not.

01:05:17   I want my columns to be in this order and this, you know, this email client decides

01:05:21   that that's not the default.

01:05:22   And sometimes in the worst case, in every new folder that I make in my local email client,

01:05:26   this is mostly for work where I'm not using Gmail, obviously, every new folder that I

01:05:31   make has the columns back in the default order, right?

01:05:33   All that, you can learn to use an application and you can make a general purpose application

01:05:37   that has all the features like, oh, whatever you think you can do in Hey, I can do that

01:05:41   too.

01:05:42   It's like, yeah, but they already did it for me.

01:05:44   They already made a big button with the five most likely things that I'm going to do.

01:05:49   And some things you can't do like, what if I want to have a different view for a particular

01:05:52   label or folder in Gmail where I want the emails to be bundled by sender and expanded?

01:05:57   I can't do that in Gmail.

01:05:59   I would love to be able to do that.

01:06:00   And like you just said, saving a snippet of one thing from the other.

01:06:03   Gmail has a bunch of sort of respond to this later, save for later type things.

01:06:08   But Hey is such a comprehensive worldview that if you buy into it, it will take a lot

01:06:14   of work off your plate.

01:06:15   And they try to lead you through it by sort of, you just start using the app and you don't

01:06:18   know the system because you didn't make the system.

01:06:21   It leads you through understanding what the system is by asking you a series of questions.

01:06:24   And in general, I think part of the appeal is that it makes you feel empowered.

01:06:29   I imagine it would make people feel more empowered over their email than they have been in the

01:06:33   past because immediately you're asked to make decisions about your email, value judgments

01:06:38   about your email.

01:06:39   An email will come in or the top of the app, it'll be like, you have five unscreened emails.

01:06:43   You're like, Oh, it's time for me to be a screener.

01:06:46   Well, let me just look at my emails and you can thumbs up and thumbs down just like in

01:06:50   gladiator, you know, like just this email, this email.

01:06:54   Yes.

01:06:55   Right.

01:06:56   And then if you say yes to it, you can say, what kind of email is this?

01:06:58   And it describes examples and says, if it's this kind of email, put it here or there.

01:07:03   That I think is one of the weakest system, weakest part of their system.

01:07:08   You know, obviously this is not going to be perfect for everybody, but they do ask you

01:07:11   to make decisions about emails and most of the time it's good and empowering, but occasionally

01:07:15   maybe it's just me because I'm so picky about my email.

01:07:19   You'll get an email and it will say, tell me about this email.

01:07:23   Do you want to see email from this or not?

01:07:25   And unlike the powerful case where you're like, no, I never want to see this email.

01:07:29   This is garbage.

01:07:30   You're like, well, it's email from something related to like the, you know, parent teacher

01:07:36   organization.

01:07:38   So it's not like I never want to see that email, but my choices, it's not a receipt.

01:07:45   I don't want it in my inbox, but do I, maybe I do want it in my inbox.

01:07:49   What if it's like an emergency?

01:07:51   It's not a paper trail.

01:07:53   Maybe it's feed.

01:07:54   Like even when you know what the systems are, because the system has fairly chunky buckets,

01:08:00   right?

01:08:01   And it's not a general purpose system for doing this where I can't just write a new

01:08:03   set of rules.

01:08:04   And by the way, I looked at Gmail and we were talking about this.

01:08:06   I have approximately 200 rules in Gmail and God knows how many labels.

01:08:12   You kind of get into a situation where you can't decide what bucket it's in and you just

01:08:16   have to pick the next best one.

01:08:17   It's not the end of the world.

01:08:18   You can change your mind later.

01:08:19   It's, you know, nothing is destructive, but that's something to keep in mind that you

01:08:23   really have to buy into the system.

01:08:24   The system is necessarily simpler than the one you would build exactly for yourself.

01:08:30   But other than that, I think the overall effect of using this, and then in case you've experienced

01:08:34   this, it suddenly seems like you have less email.

01:08:37   It seems like you get less email.

01:08:40   It seems like you have less email nagging you.

01:08:42   And it's still there.

01:08:43   It's just like in my system, being transparently shuttled away to the correct bins for you

01:08:47   to look at at your leisure.

01:08:48   And you've put them in bins based on your expectation, whether you know it or not, based

01:08:52   on your own personal expectations of how you're going to deal with them.

01:08:56   Things that are in the paper trail, you do not need to look at even to mark as read just

01:09:00   to get it off of your little unread to-do list.

01:09:03   They're auto-filed in the paper trail.

01:09:04   You never see them.

01:09:05   They're there if you need them.

01:09:06   You can find them in search, but they don't become a to-do item.

01:09:09   You don't even need to click on them once to make them unbold in your email client.

01:09:13   And then you open Hey and it's like, "Oh, no new email."

01:09:18   And for most people, that's a good feeling, unlike 15-year-old Casey.

01:09:22   If you like seeing one, there's no new email.

01:09:23   Like I forwarded, I have so many freaking email addresses.

01:09:25   They all go through Gmail, but I forwarded one of my lower volume ones to Hey, but I

01:09:31   still kept getting it in the other places.

01:09:33   And so I can compare what is it like to read this email address like my old way versus

01:09:38   doing it in Hey.

01:09:39   And at first I thought, "Is everything really getting forwarded?"

01:09:43   Because every time I look at Hey, it says there's nothing.

01:09:47   And even for things like spam, I don't know what they're doing for spam filtering, but

01:09:50   if I get garbage spam in the "real" email address that I look at with mail.app or whatever,

01:09:55   I never see that spam in Hey.

01:09:57   Maybe they just have better spam filtering too, but it doesn't bother me with it.

01:09:59   It doesn't ask me to do anything about it.

01:10:02   So I hope we've described Hey well enough.

01:10:05   The reason I'm mostly excited about it, despite the fact that I'm probably not going to use

01:10:08   it because I have my weird system, is that I love seeing people innovate in what seems

01:10:14   like a dead space.

01:10:16   I would recommend Hey to anyone who I see who looks like they do not have their own

01:10:21   system for email to try this system.

01:10:23   Because obviously if you don't have a system for your email by now, you probably are not

01:10:26   the type of person who's going to build the system.

01:10:28   And I think the Hey system is pretty good.

01:10:29   And it shows what you can do when you control everything.

01:10:31   They control the server side, they control the client side, as much as Apple will let

01:10:35   them.

01:10:36   And they've made very different choices.

01:10:38   It does not look like a normal email client.

01:10:40   It doesn't behave like a normal email client.

01:10:43   It behaves like Hey, in the same way that Gmail on day one did not behave like any native

01:10:48   email client, some people didn't like that.

01:10:50   I thought it was great because of what it was.

01:10:52   It was unabashedly a Google web based server side thing.

01:10:58   And its interface didn't look like Outlook.

01:11:00   It didn't look like Apple Mail at all.

01:11:02   Like there's no pretense of it being anything like that.

01:11:05   And that's refreshing.

01:11:06   And of course Gmail was like what, 2004?

01:11:09   Like you know, a decade and a half ago.

01:11:12   And I feel like with the exception of a few other innovative client side things like the,

01:11:19   what was it?

01:11:20   I don't remember all the names then Mike Hurley would know.

01:11:23   But there have been a couple of client side innovations.

01:11:25   But until Gmail, there hasn't been any sort of comprehensive rethink of the entire thing

01:11:31   from top to bottom until Hey.

01:11:33   So I recommend everyone check it out.

01:11:34   It's a free trial thing.

01:11:36   And like I said, if you pay for your name, and then just cancel the next month, I think

01:11:40   you can do monthly, I forget, you keep that name forever.

01:11:43   Everyone should at least check it out because the final thing to say here is like, since

01:11:47   email addresses are so important, it's kind of important that Hey.com stays around, right?

01:11:55   Because if they decide five years from now, oh, we're not gonna do email anymore.

01:12:00   Well, you know, maybe they'll, because they're a good company, they'd set up forwarding and

01:12:04   everything, but that's a hassle and that's a disruption.

01:12:06   So when selecting what your email address is going to be, if you're not a geeky person,

01:12:12   I'm not going to recommend this, we're all going to say you should have your own domain.

01:12:15   That's absolutely true.

01:12:16   You should absolutely have your own domain and use your own domain because then you're

01:12:18   beholden to no one.

01:12:19   But even then, it's a disruption.

01:12:21   Like Marco was saying, it's a disruption to change your back end, not because your email

01:12:25   address changes, but because it's a disruption to deal with where that name leads and you

01:12:31   don't want to miss any emails, you don't want to move stuff around or whatever.

01:12:34   But there is always the nagging thought in the back of your mind of like, if I sign up

01:12:37   for this email service and I'm a normal person, I don't have my own domain, am I going to

01:12:42   regret it?

01:12:43   Like, is this thing going to go away?

01:12:45   And that's why in general, I say, sign up for email with companies that you have some

01:12:50   faith will continue to be around.

01:12:53   Now 37signals/basecamp has been around for a long time.

01:12:56   Hey, as far as I can tell from the outside, seems really popular and it's a pay service.

01:13:01   So I think its sustainability is very sensible.

01:13:03   It's easy to understand.

01:13:04   How are they going to stay in business with this hey.com thing?

01:13:07   Everybody who uses it pays them, except for the free trial people, right?

01:13:11   It's a very simple business model.

01:13:12   People exchange money for goods and services.

01:13:15   So there's some faith that'll be around.

01:13:16   Gmail, one of the other reasons I was going home on Gmail is like, Google seemed like

01:13:20   a pretty well established company in 2004.

01:13:22   Today even more so, I am not in fear that Google will go away.

01:13:26   Granted Google cancels services all the time, but I think Gmail is probably too valuable

01:13:32   for them to candid.

01:13:34   This is where you can save this clip for the episode of ATP in 15 years when they sunset

01:13:38   Gmail and I'm frantically trying to export 75 gigs of email, but I'll cross that bridge

01:13:44   when I come to it.

01:13:45   Was that a hyperbole or do you really have 75 gigs of email?

01:13:49   How much email do I have?

01:13:50   Remember that?

01:13:51   That was another big feature of Gmail from day one.

01:13:52   It's like, we'll give you like a gig of email.

01:13:55   People are like, "A gig of email for free?

01:13:58   How can they do that?"

01:14:01   Is this just my email?

01:14:02   Yeah, I only have two gigs of email.

01:14:06   That's how much it says.

01:14:07   Percentage of two gigs used.

01:14:08   I'm only using 1.3 gigs out of my two gigs of email.

01:14:12   But I think if I was-

01:14:13   Lower, slow down, slow down.

01:14:15   Look at this closely because I'm looking at 861 gigs of 1,039 gigs used.

01:14:22   Are you sure you're reading that right?

01:14:24   Oh, that's not a period.

01:14:25   Okay, that's a comma.

01:14:27   All right.

01:14:28   Oh no.

01:14:29   That can't be right.

01:14:31   1,385 gigabytes of 2,000-

01:14:37   You have 1.3 terabytes of email.

01:14:39   Yeah.

01:14:40   All right.

01:14:41   Sorry.

01:14:42   And apparently I have eight tenths of a terabyte, which is way more than I thought.

01:14:44   Yeah, that's a little more than half of what I have.

01:14:47   Yeah, email is big.

01:14:48   But here's the thing with their account.

01:14:50   I think if I was to approach two terabytes, it would just give me more room.

01:14:54   I don't think that's actually a limit.

01:14:56   I don't know.

01:14:57   Maybe we'll find out someday.

01:14:58   And unlike Marco, I don't delete my email.

01:15:00   Oh, you're missing out.

01:15:02   Like, spam gets filed as spam and then gets deleted, whatever.

01:15:05   But why would I delete it?

01:15:07   People delete it to get out of their face or to get some kind of emotional satisfaction.

01:15:11   I don't need the emotional satisfaction and it's not in my face.

01:15:13   Well, I'll tell you why.

01:15:16   So it's kind of like a digital clutter management thing.

01:15:20   So first of all, a lot of the emails I get are notifications from my servers of various

01:15:26   things I have to deal with or various conditions, like thresholds keep crossing.

01:15:31   So like, the load on the server went too high.

01:15:33   I'll get an email about it.

01:15:34   Granted, I'm probably using email wrong for even sending this to email, but oh well,

01:15:38   don't have me.

01:15:39   So a lot of the email I get literally has no value after a few hours because it's

01:15:45   some kind of notification for something.

01:15:47   Or it's like an Amazon shipment notification.

01:15:51   Great.

01:15:52   Amazon emails stopped including anything about your orders in the last couple of years ever

01:15:55   since companies were scraping data out of them and everything.

01:15:59   And so Amazon emails are useless now.

01:16:01   If I want any kind of Amazon status, I have to go to my Amazon account.

01:16:04   So any email from Amazon is pretty useless after about five minutes too.

01:16:08   There's all sorts of stuff like that where I look at this and I'm like, "This email,

01:16:11   I don't need this ever.

01:16:12   I will never, ever need to look this up or find this ever again."

01:16:16   Even a lot of email that we get from either an angry listener maybe who writes in and

01:16:22   tells us how much we suck or if I get an email to overcast that's just a feature request

01:16:29   that I've gotten a hundred times before, do I really need to save all of those forever?

01:16:36   Or can you look at it, make a quick judgment call and think, "You know what?

01:16:40   Am I ever going to need to look for this ever, ever again?"

01:16:44   And a lot of times the answer is maybe, and so I'll archive those.

01:16:50   But a lot of times the answer is no, I will never need to look at this again and so I'll

01:16:53   just delete them.

01:16:54   I'm not deleting everything.

01:16:55   I'm archiving a good amount every day.

01:16:57   But there's also so much that I can just delete.

01:16:59   Then that's less to store.

01:17:01   It's less to clutter up search results when I do want to find something.

01:17:04   It's less to manage.

01:17:05   It's not kind of against my storage limit, although I'm way under it for my current

01:17:08   host which is Fastmail.

01:17:11   It helps keep a little bit of clutter outside of my digital life.

01:17:15   And these days when you have infinite storage on everything, like disks are so big, it's

01:17:21   so easy to just collect garbage forever and to never delete anything.

01:17:27   And then you end up with overwhelming collections and larger storage needs over time and stuff

01:17:34   like that.

01:17:35   So I like situations like this where I can look at it and just say, "You know what?

01:17:38   I can just delete this.

01:17:39   I'm never going to need this again."

01:17:41   Even if it was something nice.

01:17:42   Like, in real life, I will throw away greeting cards after a while.

01:17:47   I enjoy them for a little while and then I throw them away.

01:17:50   That's physical.

01:17:51   We're not talking about physical things.

01:17:52   The beauty of digital things is they don't take up space like that in three dimensions.

01:17:56   It's not in the same way anyway.

01:17:58   But still, it's useful to apply the heuristic.

01:18:01   When you're looking at an email, when you're deciding what, like, I decide whether to archive

01:18:05   or delete something.

01:18:06   That's like I make a quick decision.

01:18:08   And if it's something like a server notification, that's already irrelevant by the time I

01:18:12   even see half of them, then fine, delete.

01:18:14   I'm never going to need this email again.

01:18:16   Yeah, I think I only have one kind of email.

01:18:20   One, yeah, I think this is maybe the first email that I routinely get that I actually

01:18:25   do delete.

01:18:26   I don't delete anything.

01:18:27   It doesn't take any space in my hard drive.

01:18:28   It's all Google stuff.

01:18:32   By the way, someone said click on manage at the bottom to get your storage breakdown.

01:18:35   Casey, you should do this too.

01:18:37   Because I don't have 1.3 terabytes of email.

01:18:40   I have 12.22 gigabytes of email.

01:18:44   What am I looking at in here?

01:18:45   You have to click manage, it shows a storage breakdown.

01:18:48   Oh, I see it, I see it, I see it.

01:18:49   15 gigs.

01:18:50   You have more email than I do then.

01:18:51   And mine doesn't go back, mine goes back to 2004.

01:18:53   I don't think it goes back over here.

01:18:54   Mine goes back to the 90s, but I guess I don't have a lot of attachments.

01:18:57   Maybe that's building up the size.

01:18:59   Anyway, the one email that I routinely delete is I have a, like a watch on various websites

01:19:07   to find my cheese grater.

01:19:10   When they come up for sale.

01:19:11   Wait, why?

01:19:12   Wait, why?

01:19:13   Do you need more?

01:19:14   Yeah.

01:19:15   What?

01:19:16   For what?

01:19:17   Because I told you, I was dwindling.

01:19:18   I was down to like two spares.

01:19:19   Right, because they break every year or year and a half or whatever.

01:19:23   I was down to two spares and I couldn't find them anymore.

01:19:26   Oh, the actual like dairy cheese.

01:19:29   The actual thing that grates cheese.

01:19:31   Oh, yeah, I definitely heard Mac Pro.

01:19:33   Like from a cow.

01:19:35   I thought you were talking about your 2008 Mac Pro.

01:19:37   No, the good cheese grater like for my parmesan cheese.

01:19:42   The number of those were dwindling and normally when the number would dwindle, I would just

01:19:45   go online and I would search for one and I would buy it.

01:19:47   But the last few times that they broke, I went online to search and I couldn't find

01:19:50   any.

01:19:51   So I'm like, I need to set up one of those like watch services that just watches for

01:19:54   anybody, anywhere on the web selling one of these things.

01:19:57   So I do that.

01:19:58   But of course, my search terms are like OXO cheese grater.

01:20:02   OXO makes a lot of cheese graters, let me tell you.

01:20:04   So I get sort of a digest report, I don't know what it is, every week, every few days

01:20:10   or no, every time it gets a hit essentially.

01:20:11   Every time I get a hit on this, I get a little report of like here are all the OXO cheese

01:20:15   graters I found.

01:20:16   And 99.9% of the time, it's just all not my kind of cheese grater like it's the other

01:20:21   kinds because I sell lots of them.

01:20:23   And I delete those emails because I'm never going to see them again.

01:20:26   And it's not a lot of them, but that is the only email I think I routinely delete other

01:20:29   than obviously spam.

01:20:30   Because I mean, spam, my file is spam and then it gets auto deleted after 30 days.

01:20:34   Anything else, I just keep it.

01:20:35   I don't have to make a decision about it.

01:20:36   It's already auto filed, it's already out of my face.

01:20:38   It's not taking up a lot of storage.

01:20:41   And the value of doing that is like, I do find myself doing like forensics and trying

01:20:46   even it was like Amazon notifications with no information about the product, I can correlate

01:20:51   based on the dates of things or see if I got a notification about shipment while I was

01:20:55   on vacation at this place or whatever.

01:20:57   The paper trail, I do a lot of the paper trail stuff in my various systems and categorize

01:21:01   them and Gmail lets me export them and all that other good stuff.

01:21:05   But anyway, even if your system is I just delete everything, you never know those people

01:21:10   who delete everything after they read it and so they have literally no email.

01:21:13   My mom does that.

01:21:14   It's a surprisingly common pattern.

01:21:15   I cannot, that's like my nightmare, but to each their own.

01:21:20   If you don't have a system for email, I recommend checking out Hey.

01:21:25   And even if you're not going to use it for your email, like Marco's probably not going

01:21:28   to use it for his email, check it out just to see what a company is doing with an app

01:21:33   for a thing that everyone is familiar with.

01:21:34   Everyone knows email and has used it all the time.

01:21:37   It's so different and strange and interesting that I think it's worth just signing up for

01:21:43   a free trial to see what it's like.

01:21:45   You have to actually send it some email.

01:21:46   If you sign it up for a free trial and never send it an email, it's not interesting.

01:21:51   And you can't just send yourself two emails.

01:21:52   You have to like do the thing.

01:21:54   Almost anybody with like an iCloud account can do this.

01:21:56   You can forward a copy of your email.

01:21:58   So you're not messing up your email flow or redirecting it or whatever.

01:22:01   It's just a second redundant copy of the same email you're getting elsewhere.

01:22:04   So it shouldn't be disruptive to your actual email system, but it will let you get a real

01:22:08   flow of email into Hey.

01:22:10   And do that for a week or two and just see how it goes.

01:22:12   Yeah, I agree.

01:22:13   I've really been impressed with it.

01:22:15   And you know, they sponsored last episode, this was entirely us.

01:22:21   They couldn't have paid us to go on for this long about it.

01:22:23   It's been in our show notes for like four weeks as usual.

01:22:27   We are sponsored this week by Eero.

01:22:30   These days, your house isn't just your home.

01:22:33   It's also your office, your school, your movie theater, your restaurant.

01:22:37   It's everything.

01:22:38   All these and more put a strain on your wifi.

01:22:42   It's not good enough if your wifi is only good in like one or two rooms.

01:22:46   You need solid wifi in your entire house.

01:22:49   Everyone isn't working like on top of each other crowded in like the one good room.

01:22:52   You need Eero to help you out here.

01:22:55   Eero is an Amazon company now, and they cover your whole home with fast, reliable wifi inside

01:23:02   and out.

01:23:03   So if you have rooms with bad to no wifi, dropouts on your back patio, maybe Eero makes

01:23:08   every square foot of your house usable by eliminating poor coverage and dead spots.

01:23:12   You have a consistently strong signal wherever you need it.

01:23:15   So you can be on a work call.

01:23:16   The kids can be doing remote learning and someone else can be sharing videos all at

01:23:20   the same time without any weird buffering or dropouts when you have Eero.

01:23:24   It's super fast and easy to set up an Eero system.

01:23:26   Just plug it in, plug in your modem, and you are just good to go.

01:23:29   The app is super simple.

01:23:31   You manage it all from their simple app.

01:23:32   You can do all sorts of wonderful features from the app too.

01:23:34   So you can do things like pause for dinner so your kids aren't on their phones throughout

01:23:38   dinner.

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01:23:42   And for a limited time now, you can get up to 20% off select Eero models.

01:23:47   So we ask a lot of our Wi-Fi.

01:23:50   Eero can help yours do more.

01:23:53   Go to Eero.com/ATP and enter code ATP at checkout to get free next day shipping with your order.

01:24:00   That's Eero, E-E-R-O dot com slash ATP.

01:24:04   Code ATP at checkout to get your Eero delivered with free next day shipping.

01:24:09   Eero dot com slash ATP.

01:24:11   Code ATP.

01:24:12   Thank you so much to Eero for fixing our Wi-Fi and for sponsoring our show.

01:24:16   [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:24:19   Let's do some Ask ATP.

01:24:22   And I am genuinely looking forward to this because we got a question from John Allman

01:24:28   who writes, "I find myself switching jobs about every two to three years in the startup

01:24:31   tech sector, and I know Casey and Marco don't have traditional jobs.

01:24:34   But would you all suggest moving data to my new company computer starting fresh?

01:24:38   If moving, what's the best way?

01:24:39   Target, Dismoke, Migration Assistant, et cetera.

01:24:42   Thanks."

01:24:43   I actually really am deeply uninterested in this question because I feel like we've answered

01:24:46   it a thousand times.

01:24:48   And I have definitely put them in the show notes a handful of times myself, so I am not

01:24:53   without guilt here.

01:24:55   But I'm starting to get a little frustrated and curious.

01:24:59   Why are we getting this question over and over and over again?

01:25:07   And John, you apparently have a theory.

01:25:09   Yeah.

01:25:10   So the reason why we answer it at least once a year is because it's so common and everyone

01:25:14   doesn't listen to every episode and yada, yada, yada.

01:25:17   So that's practically speaking why we might answer it.

01:25:19   But the real question is why do we keep getting this?

01:25:21   Why is everyone always asking us this very specific question?

01:25:25   I got a new Mac.

01:25:26   I've got an old Mac.

01:25:27   How do I get my crap off my old Mac onto my new Mac?

01:25:29   And I think it reveals an ongoing problem area with computers, which we've discussed

01:25:36   on and off in the show for many years, which I just discussed today in the context of email

01:25:41   rules.

01:25:42   My problem back in the '90s and early 2000s was I'd get a new computer or have a computer

01:25:49   working at home or whatever, and I wanted some stuff to be the same in both of those

01:25:53   places and I would have to manually make it the same because there was no cloud sync.

01:25:58   Today, we're like, "Oh, you don't have that problem.

01:26:00   Everything cloud syncs."

01:26:01   It's either all on the server like your Gmail or it syncs through iCloud or CloudKit or

01:26:08   everything syncs through Dropbox and your files are the same everywhere.

01:26:12   Syncing is a solved problem.

01:26:13   Cloud syncing is a solved problem, yada, yada.

01:26:17   But the fact that we keep getting this email about Macs in particular shows that this is

01:26:25   not a solved problem in the personal computer space.

01:26:29   Compare this to the phone space.

01:26:31   How many questions have we gotten about, "Hey, I got a new iPhone.

01:26:35   How do you guys move your stuff from your old iPhone to your new iPhone?"

01:26:38   We used to get that question in one very specific context, which was like, "Do you do encrypted

01:26:43   iTunes backups or not?"

01:26:45   But even that has gone away with iTunes going away and with encrypted Macs going away because

01:26:50   basically Apple solved this problem once and for all for normal people and mostly for geeks

01:26:56   by making their own system for getting your stuff from your old iPhone to your new iPhone

01:27:01   just work.

01:27:02   Like you get a new iPhone, you take it out of the box, it asks you if you want to get

01:27:05   stuff from an old iPhone and it does a little thing where it shows a funny image and you

01:27:08   show it in the camera and it just sits there for an hour and it just does it.

01:27:11   And we don't get that question.

01:27:13   People aren't constantly asking us, "How do I get stuff off my old phone and my new phone?"

01:27:16   That's how you can tell it's problem has been solved.

01:27:18   Absolutely not solved for the Mac.

01:27:20   Even though migration assistant is really good, it's weird.

01:27:23   First of all, it's not cloud sync or anything having to do with the cloud.

01:27:29   And Macs aren't...

01:27:31   You can't hold them in your hand and they don't all have cameras attached to them.

01:27:34   So you can't do like how the phone does.

01:27:36   They don't even have...

01:27:37   Even though they have Bluetooth, sometimes you can't bring them near each other because

01:27:39   they're big and heavy things.

01:27:42   And I think this problem is not solved and it's not likely to be solved anytime soon

01:27:47   just because the data volumes are big, the computers are big, and they're weird and different

01:27:51   from each other.

01:27:52   And the fact that we keep getting this question is just reinforcing this problem with personal

01:27:58   computers and Macs specifically.

01:28:01   It doesn't apply to iPads, it doesn't apply to phones, which is part of the reason people

01:28:04   love iPads and phones and stuff like that.

01:28:06   And it's something that we've talked about.

01:28:08   The most recent, most relevant example is when we talked about...

01:28:11   Oh, what the hell was it?

01:28:12   Was it Chromebooks?

01:28:15   Whenever Google made their initial pitch for, "We're going to make a computer for you, but

01:28:19   it's not like a computer.

01:28:20   It runs everything on the web."

01:28:22   And part of their little cartoon pitch advertisement for this thing was like...

01:28:28   This is why I keep saying, "Chuck it in the lake."

01:28:30   You can chuck this thing in the lake.

01:28:31   Don't worry.

01:28:32   All your stuff is always automatically saved in the cloud.

01:28:34   If you get a new one, you open it up, you log into your Google account, all your stuff

01:28:38   is there.

01:28:39   Sound familiar?

01:28:40   That's kind of like what we do with our phones now, with the expectation in general, if you

01:28:42   do cloud sync and cloud backups, if you do get a new phone and you don't even have your

01:28:45   old phone, it fell overboard on a boat.

01:28:47   Get a new phone, sign in to your Apple ID, tell it to sync all your stuff down from your

01:28:51   last iCloud backup, your new phone now looks like your old phone did, as of whatever the

01:28:55   last backup was.

01:28:57   And Google was promising that for their...

01:28:59   I think it was Chromebooks, but whatever it was.

01:29:01   And I remember when we talked about that on the program, I was gushing over it saying,

01:29:07   "Yes, yes, this is great.

01:29:08   This is how personal computers and laptops should be.

01:29:11   They should be just like that."

01:29:12   Or like Casey says, "Everything is ephemeral.

01:29:15   If I drop this in a lake, I just get another computer and let it churn for a while and

01:29:20   it's back to exactly how my old computer was.

01:29:22   And there's no missing stuff and no stuff that didn't transfer and no other limitations

01:29:25   like that."

01:29:26   Google's Chromebook or whatever initiative, I don't think it was fabulously successful

01:29:32   for a variety of reasons, partly because native software still has significant advantages

01:29:38   that people like, and for a bunch of other less interesting non-technical business reasons,

01:29:43   it doesn't seem like it's been hugely successful.

01:29:45   But I think they had the right idea.

01:29:47   At the time I said, "This is how computers should work."

01:29:51   But they still don't work that way, and that was like five years ago or whatever it was.

01:29:55   And I keep hoping it will.

01:29:56   And we'll know that this problem is solved when we stop getting this question at ATP,

01:30:00   but that day is not today.

01:30:02   So are we actually answering it?

01:30:03   No, but you should just use migration assistant.

01:30:05   That's what you use there.

01:30:08   That's probably the right answer.

01:30:10   But if you want to be nerdy, I'll put a link to a post I put up about how you can do this

01:30:15   with Homebrew if you are willing to suffer through Homebrew and do some preparation.

01:30:21   John's answer is, "You are not alone.

01:30:23   This is a problem.

01:30:24   You have correctly identified it."

01:30:26   We will answer it at least once a year, but I think we already did it for this year.

01:30:30   Let's see, 3.83.

01:30:31   What episode are we on now?

01:30:33   3.90.

01:30:34   Seven episodes ago.

01:30:35   Yeah, it's way too soon for us to answer it again.

01:30:38   Oh, no, I'm sorry.

01:30:39   That was about my new MacBook Pro.

01:30:41   Maybe I lied.

01:30:42   Maybe it wasn't that episode.

01:30:43   All right, there's--

01:30:44   So far, if all our episodes were in Gmail, I could find it real quick.

01:30:47   Oh, there it is.

01:30:48   I should email myself the show notes.

01:30:49   That's another system I have, by the way.

01:30:50   This is an anti-pattern that nobody should do, but that I do because I don't know.

01:30:55   I invented this anti-pattern, emailing crap to yourself.

01:30:58   I email crap to myself all the time because I know my system will file it away, and I

01:31:02   know it's super easy to search.

01:31:05   Email was my first Instapaper before Marco made Instapaper, and I still use it for that.

01:31:10   Obviously, I still use Instapaper and other reader services for that purpose, but I still

01:31:15   email myself stuff.

01:31:16   By the way, if anyone wants to make an iOS app to please a single customer who's willing

01:31:20   to pay at least-- I don't know, I'd pay $30 for this app, and no one else would.

01:31:25   Mail to Self.

01:31:26   Mail to Self used to be a cool application that all it did was you had a share sheet,

01:31:30   and it would mail something to yourself in a single tap.

01:31:33   I want that application to be as good.

01:31:35   If I ever write an iOS app, it would probably be Mail to Self.

01:31:37   Couldn't you do that with shortcuts?

01:31:39   No.

01:31:40   I mean, you can do-- everyone thinks they can do it.

01:31:42   They're like, here, look, I made a shortcut to do it.

01:31:43   It's like, no, but I actually have more specific requirements.

01:31:46   Really, when I do it on a tweet, I want it to get the body of the tweet and the link

01:31:50   to the tweet and write the subject just so.

01:31:53   It's more complicated than that, right?

01:31:55   It's not as simple as just, oh, something's on the pace board, and it's the URL.

01:32:00   Put it in an email.

01:32:01   Like, yeah, you can do that.

01:32:02   I have 50 shortcuts to do that.

01:32:05   My requirements are actually more complicated than that.

01:32:07   The old Mail to Self thing would do my complicated requirements.

01:32:11   Using the share thing and saying mail, that does 50% of what I want, but I have to type

01:32:18   in my own email address every time.

01:32:19   I just type in the first three letters, and it auto completes, but it's still one extra

01:32:23   step.

01:32:24   I don't want to compose.

01:32:25   I just want it to be done in a single tap.

01:32:26   So obviously, just like my other apps, if you have one very specific thing you want done

01:32:29   in a specific way, just write the damn app yourself.

01:32:32   Then you can make it do exactly what you want, and you'll be the only customer, and you'll

01:32:35   be fine.

01:32:36   In keeping with my two other applications that are very, very, very, very tailored to

01:32:40   my specific needs, if and when I write an iOS app, it'll probably be this Mail to Self

01:32:44   thing.

01:32:45   That might be the quickest scope creep I've ever witnessed.

01:32:48   Oh, just want to send an email to myself.

01:32:50   Well, if it's Twitter, it needs to do this, and if it's this, it needs to do that.

01:32:54   It's mostly Twitter.

01:32:55   That's the thing.

01:32:56   But when it's Twitter, I want the entire text of the tweet to be in there, and I want a

01:33:00   link to the tweet, and I want the date, and I want the sender, and I want the subject

01:33:03   to say the, you know, like, that's useful to me, because then I can search for it later

01:33:08   in my email.

01:33:09   Like, that's how, if you wonder, how has Babby formed?

01:33:12   How has ATP show notes formed?

01:33:14   Boy, this is some old crusty memes we're getting out here.

01:33:19   I email stuff to myself all week long that gets auto-filed into the here's what you're

01:33:24   going to build the show notes from, and then I process them in whenever I have time to

01:33:30   process them by going through the queue, finding the things that I emailed to myself, and not

01:33:35   leaving my email, because all the text that I need to assess whether this is a thing I

01:33:38   want to go into the show notes or not is in the email.

01:33:41   Like, so if I just got the tweet URL, I'd be clicking on tweet URLs all the time to

01:33:44   say, what is this tweet about?

01:33:45   What is that tweet about?

01:33:46   What is this thread about, right?

01:33:48   And that's sort of my queue of stuff that builds the show notes, and I just work my

01:33:52   way through that queue, and that queue is never zero.

01:33:55   Like the queue, there's stuff in the queue right now, but normally right before a show,

01:33:58   I will take one more brief pass at the queue and see if there's anything pressing.

01:34:02   That's my crappy system.

01:34:04   I mean, I know, I'm sure productivity gurus are now cringing that you should never use

01:34:09   emails and inboxing.

01:34:11   You shouldn't use it as a queue, and you shouldn't email yourself stuff.

01:34:13   Quiet.

01:34:14   I have a system.

01:34:15   It works for me.

01:34:17   All right.

01:34:19   And John Demko writes, with iOS apps coming to macOS, will iPhone-only apps be rotated

01:34:25   appropriately for the Macintosh display, will iPhone-only apps finally be rotated appropriately

01:34:29   on an iPad in landscape orientation?

01:34:32   I don't see that.

01:34:34   I mean, maybe it's tough.

01:34:36   So it's funny because the fix that I am waiting on review for in Peekaview has to do with

01:34:41   rotation lock in the onboarding screens.

01:34:45   And in iOS apps, you can say on an application level, you would like this to only be portrait,

01:34:52   only be landscape or support, only head-up portrait rather than feet-up portrait and

01:34:57   so on.

01:34:58   There's different things you can enable.

01:35:01   And so it's not exactly cut and dry, right?

01:35:03   You could have an app that says, "I am locked to portrait."

01:35:05   Well, then what do you do?

01:35:07   And then there's apps that maybe they're a little bit better in portrait, but they kind

01:35:12   of support landscape, which especially in today's phones is like a postage box or like

01:35:17   a slit in a door where you would stick a letter.

01:35:20   These things are so darn...

01:35:21   The aspect ratio is so very tall to so not very wide.

01:35:27   To directly answer the question, I don't...

01:35:30   Maybe they would auto-rotate if the app lets them, but I just don't see that happening.

01:35:34   I think they would be assumed to be portrait.

01:35:36   What do you think, Marco?

01:35:37   I think on the Mac, iPhone only apps will literally just show up as non-resizable iPhone-shaped

01:35:44   rectangles in portrait orientation.

01:35:47   And so they're going to be weirdly small windows.

01:35:49   I don't know which phone they will simulate.

01:35:53   Obviously, iPhones have multiple different screen sizes they could be.

01:35:58   I seriously doubt they would be resizable.

01:36:00   I think it's going to be a fixed size, and we just don't know which size that's going

01:36:04   to be yet.

01:36:06   The problem is iPhone apps are not written to be resized typically.

01:36:11   You can do that.

01:36:12   You can write it that way if you have a universal app that's made for iPad multitasking as a

01:36:16   universal binary with the iPhone app.

01:36:17   You can do that, but Apple can't assume that all apps do that.

01:36:21   So for this question, I assume this is about...

01:36:24   Because John right here says iPhone-only apps.

01:36:27   So typically for an iPhone-only app, you're not writing in resizing support.

01:36:32   Rotation is another thing, but rotation, it doesn't really make sense on a Mac to support

01:36:38   rotation on iPhone apps because if it's not resizable, what's it going to do?

01:36:43   Like offer a diagonal drag handle, but it just only snaps to the two orientations that

01:36:48   it could be in, but it's still the same size rectangle?

01:36:51   That's no good.

01:36:52   So I have a feeling it's going to be very, very simple.

01:36:54   On the Mac, you get non-resizable rectangles that are the size of one of the phones.

01:36:59   And then on iPad, that's an interesting question, whether they would finally actually allow

01:37:04   the correct version of iPhone apps to be shown with proper rotation and maybe a little bit

01:37:11   bigger since they still show in like the four inch screen size or the three inch screen

01:37:17   size, whatever it is.

01:37:19   Anyway, I don't know if they would do it there because on the iPad, first of all, you're

01:37:25   running in a different environment and it would be a little bit more work, slightly

01:37:29   more work for them to enable UIKit to have an exception where it tricks the app into

01:37:37   being able to rotate between portrait and landscape, but only still in this black box

01:37:41   in the middle of the screen for these iPhone only apps.

01:37:45   And second of all, on the iPad, I think one of the reasons they've always made the experience

01:37:48   pretty bad for phone apps that are not optimized for the iPad, but that you happen to run there

01:37:53   anyway, is that they want developers to make iPad apps from their iPhone apps.

01:38:00   They want us to make universal apps.

01:38:02   People would probably make the decision of like, not only do we not want to spend additional

01:38:07   engineering time to make this nicer, we specifically don't want to make it nicer to force developers

01:38:13   to make iPad apps.

01:38:15   Now, you know, that's a thing they've done for a while now and with some success, some

01:38:22   not success like Instagram is a big one, but that seems to be their position on iPad.

01:38:28   But on the Mac, it's a different scenario because you're in a totally different environment

01:38:32   and having a bunch of like fixed iPhone size, little rectangle windows is totally fine on

01:38:37   the Mac.

01:38:38   So that's what I think we're going to do.

01:38:39   I don't remember if Steve John Smith or Guy Rambo or somebody actually started running

01:38:44   iPhone apps on the DDK and determined the definitive answer to this question.

01:38:50   I have vague memories of it, but I don't remember specifically.

01:38:52   But anyway, my guess is actually that they will allow rotation of iPhone apps on the

01:38:57   Mac and iPad apps.

01:38:59   It won't be by grabbing a drag handle.

01:39:01   I assume it will be a menu command because there's iPhone apps on the iPhone don't have

01:39:05   a menu bar, but on the Mac they do and there's all sorts of crap you could put in there.

01:39:08   And one of the things I would imagine they put in there would be rotation.

01:39:11   Just because you have the flexibility to do it, the Mac screens are big enough to do it.

01:39:15   iPhone apps support different features in landscape versus portrait depending on the

01:39:19   app.

01:39:20   And so to get access to those features, I think they'll allow you to rotate it with

01:39:23   the menu command.

01:39:25   Fingers crossed.

01:39:26   All right.

01:39:27   And then rounding out the triplet of John's this week, John Larson writes that John Syracuse

01:39:32   extols the virtues of having multiple backups of digital treasures.

01:39:35   Thus, I wonder what precautions he takes against the loss of physical treasures in his attic.

01:39:40   Fire, floods, tornadoes, bugs, mold, etc.

01:39:42   How does he protect his analog archive?

01:39:44   This is masterfully executed because this is such a trolly question written in such

01:39:49   a genuine kind way.

01:39:51   I applaud you, John Larson.

01:39:53   This is very well done.

01:39:55   John Syracuse, please answer.

01:39:57   What's trolly about it?

01:39:58   I mean, this is getting to the heart of why I love computers.

01:40:03   Digital bits can be copied losslessly.

01:40:06   If you have good checksums, you can keep them the same forever.

01:40:11   Things deleted digitally are completely deleted but can be restored.

01:40:15   Going back to the fundamentals of me as a little kid, you can write a word and backspace

01:40:19   over it as many times as you want and you will never wear through the paper because

01:40:22   there's no paper.

01:40:23   Right?

01:40:24   That's the beauty of digital things.

01:40:27   That's why I love computers.

01:40:28   That's why I feel comfortable preserving things in computers whether they be 12 gigabytes

01:40:34   of email or over 100,000 photos.

01:40:38   Digital.

01:40:39   I like digital.

01:40:41   In the meatspace world, everything sucks and there's no way to mitigate against disasters

01:40:51   and floods and bugs and mold because I can't easily make a perfect copy of all my physical

01:40:56   belongings elsewhere in three other places.

01:41:00   That's the physical world.

01:41:01   And unfortunately, there are limitations in the physical world where doing anything to

01:41:05   have sort of precautions and care and backups and mitigations costs money.

01:41:11   It costs money, it costs time, it costs space.

01:41:13   I don't have enough of those things to take any precautions.

01:41:16   So what precautions do I take against the loss of my physical treasures?

01:41:19   Almost none.

01:41:20   I mean, my house is up to code.

01:41:22   I have smoke detectors.

01:41:23   But the bottom line is almost nothing.

01:41:29   My house isn't air conditioned, first of all.

01:41:31   But my attic where the stuff is is both not air conditioned and also not heated.

01:41:35   So I don't even have climate control.

01:41:37   No rain gets in.

01:41:38   Like my house is weathertight.

01:41:39   But beyond that, no.

01:41:41   So all my capacitors are probably blown.

01:41:44   Things probably have mold in them.

01:41:45   My spiders, you name it.

01:41:48   And why don't I do anything else?

01:41:49   Because I can't.

01:41:50   I have a life to lead.

01:41:51   I have limited resources.

01:41:53   I'm doing the best I can.

01:41:54   The physical world, MeatSpace sucks.

01:41:56   That was sufficiently depressing.

01:41:59   Yeah.

01:42:00   That's why we all love computers.

01:42:01   Because it's a place where you can make a perfect world where everything is just so.

01:42:05   Because it's artificial.

01:42:06   So yay for computers.

01:42:08   Boo for MeatSpace.

01:42:09   Yeah.

01:42:10   The world we make is so perfect.

01:42:11   Well, you know, if it's not, we can always fix it.

01:42:14   And you can keep trying to fix it again and again and again.

01:42:16   Whereas my capacitor is blowing all my max and leaks stuff all over the place.

01:42:20   I can't go up there and fix that.

01:42:21   Jon, I wish you the best of luck in your second life.

01:42:24   Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Bombus, and Eero.

01:42:28   And thank you to our members who support us directly.

01:42:31   If you want to join them, you can get access to things like our bootleg feed or an ad-free

01:42:35   show.

01:42:36   See for yourself at ATP.fm/join.

01:42:39   Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next week.

01:42:45   Now the show is over.

01:42:47   They didn't even mean to begin.

01:42:49   Because it was accidental.

01:42:51   Oh, it was accidental.

01:42:55   Jon didn't do any research.

01:42:57   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:43:00   Because it was accidental.

01:43:02   Oh, it was accidental.

01:43:05   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:43:11   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

01:43:19   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A. Syracuse.

01:43:32   It's accidental.

01:43:33   It's accidental.

01:43:34   They didn't mean to.

01:43:35   Accidental.

01:43:36   Accidental.

01:43:37   Tech.

01:43:38   Water.

01:43:39   Water.

01:43:40   Tech.

01:43:41   Water.

01:43:42   Tech.

01:43:43   I've cast so long.

01:43:44   I thought of one mitigation that I make for my physical treasures.

01:43:49   Specifically about the issue of tornadoes and bugs.

01:43:52   I live in a place...

01:43:54   It's not the friendliest place to physical goods.

01:43:57   That would probably be like the high desert somewhere where there's no moisture to.

01:44:01   But I can tell you that if I live someplace swampy or more south, the bug situation could

01:44:08   potentially be much more dire, because I feel like the warmer you get, the more bugs are

01:44:13   available.

01:44:14   The harsh winters here do help tamp things down.

01:44:16   So even though we have weather and we have snow and tons of rain and all that other stuff,

01:44:22   in general, because the winter's going to come and freeze everything, we don't suffer

01:44:25   from the massive infestations of life and mold.

01:44:31   Like because again, it's going to get dry here in the winter too.

01:44:33   We have seasonal infestations, but no sort of prolonged ones.

01:44:37   And I suppose the cold weather chases the various animals to invade our homes perhaps

01:44:42   too.

01:44:43   But anyway, one partial mitigation is I guess not living in Florida.

01:44:46   Yeah that's not good.

01:44:47   Even if you live somewhere super dry, then you have issues with anything made of rubber

01:44:51   because it cracks and dries out.

01:44:53   Yeah I suppose.

01:44:54   I'm always jealous of like, even when we're in California, you look at these cars from

01:44:59   the 90s and they're pristine because they don't have road salt.

01:45:02   Yeah there's no rust.

01:45:04   Or winter or rust.

01:45:07   They're just beautiful.

01:45:08   Like I just love being in California and looking at all the old Hondas.

01:45:11   It's like being in a museum.

01:45:13   No Honda in New England looks like that anymore.

01:45:15   A Honda that age just looks like a pile of rust.

01:45:19   Jon I have a funny bone to pick with you.

01:45:23   I don't remember where it was I heard this.

01:45:24   I don't remember if it was this show Erectives or something else.

01:45:28   But you said that you leave live photos off.

01:45:32   And in and of itself, you monster.

01:45:35   Why?

01:45:36   And beyond that, I know that in your defense there's some slight weird things with the

01:45:42   11 Pro I think.

01:45:43   Where like if live photos are on you can't use night mode or something along those lines.

01:45:47   I forget the details.

01:45:48   But up until I think in the last year or two, for the first couple of whatever years that

01:45:53   live photos were around, as far as I knew it was only additive.

01:45:58   So why the hell wouldn't you capture a live photo man?

01:46:00   What's wrong with you?

01:46:01   Having live photos on is like leaving key clicks on.

01:46:03   Which I also thought was uncontroversial until I found these monsters who were like, "I leave

01:46:06   key clicks on all the time."

01:46:08   It's the same thing.

01:46:09   Key clicks are legitimately bad.

01:46:11   Key clicks are legitimately, inarguably bad.

01:46:14   But why would you turn off a live photo?

01:46:16   Here's the problem with live photos, and both of you manifest this problem.

01:46:21   Before I get to your problem with live photos, there is, just off to the side, I just want

01:46:25   to mention the privacy aspect of live photos.

01:46:28   Because if they're on and you forget that they exist, the camera could be pointing in

01:46:32   a direction that you don't want it to be pointing before you take a photo that you then send

01:46:34   to somebody and they're able to see something you didn't want them to see.

01:46:38   I will begrudgingly allow that.

01:46:39   So that exists, but that you can manage.

01:46:41   If you have it on all the time, you just change your habits, right?

01:46:44   The real problem with live photos, aside from the storage space, is that if you just have

01:46:50   them on by default all the time, and you share photos, as you two do, and every single freaking

01:46:55   one of them is a live photo, but 99.999% of them, there is no extra information or value

01:47:00   in the live photo.

01:47:01   I have to watch all of your live photos to find out, is this the one where there was

01:47:05   something cute in the live photo?

01:47:06   And no, it's not.

01:47:07   It's the one where I could see you adjusting your camera, from looking at the grass and

01:47:10   now looking at your kid.

01:47:11   But I have to force press on my stupid phone every single time to make that determination,

01:47:16   because every single photo you share is a live photo.

01:47:18   John, it's bad.

01:47:19   I understand your perspective and your point, but you are empirically wrong.

01:47:24   No.

01:47:25   And here's the second thing for me in particular.

01:47:28   The quality of the live photo video, if it was the same quality as the photos, I might

01:47:32   leave it on by default.

01:47:33   But it's so freaking blurry and gross that the only time I would ever do it is if I thought

01:47:37   there was going to be additional value, as in this photo is cute, but really you got

01:47:41   to watch the live photo to get some extra value of a cute thing that was said or done

01:47:45   or whatever.

01:47:46   Instead of just being on by default and me seeing you adjust the frame and framing your

01:47:50   subject in the photo, it's just terrible.

01:47:53   So my note to both of you would be, have live photos on all the time, fine, but then turn

01:47:59   it off on all the photos you're going to share where there's nothing of value in the live

01:48:01   photo so I don't have to force press on every single one of your pictures.

01:48:04   That's what I do.

01:48:05   I mean, I don't do a lot of shared albums, so it's not much of a problem there for me.

01:48:09   But whenever I message a photo to somebody, and Tiff and I have this convention between

01:48:14   each other, we've worked it out, and I do it to everybody, whether they know it or not,

01:48:17   which is like I choose whether I send you a live photo or not every single time.

01:48:22   And if I send you a live photo, then I think you should watch it.

01:48:26   But otherwise, like the vast majority of pictures I send, I turn off the live photo-ness of

01:48:30   it when I send it.

01:48:31   But I still leave live photos on for pictures that are being captured by the camera app,

01:48:36   because I still get some value out of that sometimes, and it's very cute.

01:48:41   So who controls the one shared album viewers that I'm on?

01:48:44   Because everything is a friggin' live photo.

01:48:46   That would be Tiff.

01:48:47   But look, I don't know if we can-- can you control when you add a picture to a shared

01:48:53   album?

01:48:54   Can you make that non-live?

01:48:55   You can just turn-- here's the thing.

01:48:57   If you take live photos all the time, surely for your benefit as well, you only want--

01:49:01   you're in the same situation as me.

01:49:03   When you look at these photos a year later, if they all have live photos, you won't know

01:49:07   which ones have live photos with value or not.

01:49:10   So you have to do this processing step where you go through all your photos and disable

01:49:13   the live photo on the ones that you didn't want to be live photos.

01:49:17   Otherwise, every single photo you have to force press on or otherwise tap and hold on

01:49:21   or whatever to see the live photo animation.

01:49:24   And additionally, many of Apple's UIs will autoplay the live photo when the thing comes

01:49:27   into view, so now you're subject to that.

01:49:29   So you have to process them.

01:49:31   You have to say, was this a real live photo or just an incidental real live?

01:49:34   And if you don't process them, then when you share, you'll just share them all the way

01:49:40   they are.

01:49:41   So I don't want to sign up for that level of work, especially for the value-- for the

01:49:44   quality that it adds.

01:49:46   Like I said, if it was full quality on either side, maybe I would do it because then I'm

01:49:49   thinking like I'm just taking a bunch of miniature movies and it's full quality, but I don't

01:49:53   like the blurry then clear then blurry thing, and I don't want to process my pictures.

01:49:57   So you'd rather have none of this information ever available to you than have it and ignore

01:50:04   it all the time?

01:50:05   And have to discard it manually on all the pictures I take?

01:50:08   No, I don't want to end the thing.

01:50:09   Why do you have to discard it?

01:50:10   I don't think they provide a lot of value.

01:50:11   I don't have to discard it.

01:50:12   It's so blurry though.

01:50:13   Just leave it.

01:50:14   It's too short and it's too blurry.

01:50:16   If it was longer and high res, I would probably keep it and they would all be short videos,

01:50:19   but it's not.

01:50:20   It's way too short and it's super blurry.

01:50:22   And no, I've never had it on.

01:50:27   I'm not ready for that feature.

01:50:29   That feature is not ready for me yet.

01:50:30   And honestly, even if it made it max quality, I still would only do it as opt in, like not

01:50:34   by default.

01:50:36   It's not hurting you, Jon.

01:50:37   Just leave it alone.

01:50:38   It's like a bee flying around you.

01:50:39   Just leave it alone.

01:50:40   It won't sting you if you just leave it a room.

01:50:42   It is hurting me.

01:50:43   It's taken up my storage space and it's given me a new job, which is to process a hundred

01:50:48   thousand new pictures I take every year or whatever and decide whether they're live photos

01:50:52   or not.

01:50:53   You know, I have to confess.

01:50:54   Well, first of all, I have to confess that I am correct about your incorrectness about

01:50:57   how you're handling this.

01:50:58   But beyond that, Marco, you said a minute ago that you turn off the live photo-ness.

01:51:04   And what?

01:51:05   And so I was messing about while you two were bickering.

01:51:08   And it turns out this, you knew this.

01:51:11   I did not know this.

01:51:12   You said this.

01:51:13   You didn't know that you could do that?

01:51:15   No, I honestly didn't.

01:51:16   Because it's not obvious that like, it doesn't look like, oh, a lot of the things in Apple's

01:51:20   photos interface is like, can I tap that and do something?

01:51:23   And you find out is by trying it.

01:51:25   You're like, oh, it did something.

01:51:26   What did it do?

01:51:27   And then you had to figure out what it did.

01:51:28   Exactly.

01:51:29   So what I did was I went into messages and I clicked the little photos iMessage app.

01:51:33   And then I found the most recent photo because it has the live image, because why would you

01:51:38   not capture it?

01:51:39   It doesn't hurt anything.

01:51:40   Anyway.

01:51:41   Agreed.

01:51:42   He says as he sends someone a picture of his balls.

01:51:43   That's fine.

01:51:44   Go ahead.

01:51:45   Hey, man, that's a little treat just for you, John.

01:51:47   Are they frequently out when you're taking pictures?

01:51:50   Hey, how I live my life is my business.

01:51:52   Exactly.

01:51:53   You don't know.

01:51:54   You don't know.

01:51:55   You can't have them out because then you don't know reflections across the room.

01:51:58   You can have like a vase.

01:51:59   That's true.

01:52:00   That's a chrome vase across the room.

01:52:02   Your wife could be walking by in her underwear and accidentally is in the frame.

01:52:05   You don't know.

01:52:06   There's lots of failure modes in live pictures.

01:52:08   I assure you, if Erin was walking by in her underwear, it would not be an accident if

01:52:11   she was in frame.

01:52:12   But anyway.

01:52:13   It's a good thing she doesn't listen to the show.

01:52:16   Anyway, the point is, so I went into Erin's iMessage conversation.

01:52:20   I clicked on or tapped on.

01:52:21   I hate it when I say click about touch stuff, but I just did it.

01:52:24   I tapped on the iMessage app for photos, selected the most recent photo that has a live component

01:52:32   to it.

01:52:33   And there's an X in the upper right, which I knew all along that was a tappable target.

01:52:36   I didn't get to remove the photo.

01:52:38   Turns out, little did I know, that the live photo icon in the upper left, it isn't just

01:52:43   like that gray, very thin, if you will, overlay.

01:52:49   It's a white circle with the live photo icon on top of that, which is supposed to indicate

01:52:54   to Captain Dunce over here that you can tap it and remove the liveness.

01:52:58   I had no idea you could do that.

01:53:00   And now I will try to do better about not sending this stuff if it's not useful.

01:53:05   I'm glad I could help.

01:53:07   The other thing is-- No, you didn't help me.

01:53:08   Marco helped me.

01:53:09   Marco said that.

01:53:10   I'm the one who's talking about you have to go through and remove the live photo-ness from

01:53:13   the ones where it doesn't have value.

01:53:15   So obviously I'm talking about this feature.

01:53:16   If you remember from the intro, what Apple said was, you take it and the live photos

01:53:22   are there and you can turn it off.

01:53:25   And I don't know if this is still true, but this was an intro.

01:53:28   They said, "And don't worry, we will-- if you turn off the live photo-ness and it's

01:53:32   been like 30 days and you haven't turned it back on, we will ditch that extra data to

01:53:35   save you the disk space."

01:53:37   So they will actually clean up the little whatever MP4 or whatever embedded thing that

01:53:42   has the video thing if you turn it off.

01:53:43   So be aware that turning it off is potentially destructive.

01:53:46   Not immediately destructive.

01:53:47   You can turn it back on, but after 30 days or so go by with it off, you go back to that

01:53:51   photo-- I don't remember what it was, 30 days, 7 days, whatever it was-- you go back to that

01:53:55   photo and you can't turn it back on because the data's really gone.

01:53:57   So if you're super into live photos and you want to preserve every ounce of those blurry

01:54:01   one-second videos, whatever they are, don't turn it off.

01:54:06   You can turn it off and share it and turn it back on.

01:54:08   Like, that'll work fine.

01:54:09   I just can't believe how wrong-- you're so right about so many things, you are so wrong

01:54:12   about this.

01:54:13   You are so incredibly wrong.

01:54:14   So you're saying you're going to keep sharing pictures of your kids where I get to see two

01:54:18   seconds of a shaky camera before the picture and after?

01:54:22   Because what does it hurt?

01:54:23   What does it hurt?

01:54:24   It hurts me because I have to check them all to see if this is the one where something

01:54:28   cute happened.

01:54:29   Why don't you just never check any of them?

01:54:31   Because sometimes there's something cute.

01:54:33   It's random reward, you know?

01:54:34   It's a Skinner box.

01:54:36   Sometimes there's a cute thing that happens before the photo.

01:54:38   So you'd rather these things just never even exist than for you to just ignore them?

01:54:43   No, I'm saying if you opted into them, then I know every time I saw a live photo that

01:54:48   I was in for a treat.

01:54:49   Instead, now it's just a chore where I have to find the one in 100 treats that's going

01:54:52   to be there.

01:54:53   I am so sorry for your difficult life, Jon.

01:54:56   The other thing I do like about live photos is, and maybe I misunderstand it and maybe

01:55:01   it's not full res, but if you're in the Photos app, you can change the key photo.

01:55:08   Do you know what I'm talking about, Marcos?

01:55:09   So you can go into a live photo and you can edit it.

01:55:12   That was from iPhoto.

01:55:13   Did I just say iPhoto?

01:55:15   Whatever.

01:55:16   No, that feature has been around since iPhoto.

01:55:18   Oh, sorry.

01:55:19   So yeah, you go into the photo, you edit it, and then there's some way...

01:55:22   Now I don't remember how the hell you do it.

01:55:23   Space bar, I think.

01:55:24   No, I'm talking about on the phone, damn it.

01:55:27   So you click the little...

01:55:28   Space bar on the phone.

01:55:29   God, I said click again.

01:55:30   I got to go to bed.

01:55:31   You tap on the little live photo icon and then there's several key photo options that

01:55:36   you can take.

01:55:37   And maybe if I choose a different one and change it, maybe I'm making the quality worse,

01:55:41   but I've never noticed that to be the case.

01:55:43   So that's another nice thing is if you capture it and the smile just isn't quite right the

01:55:48   way you see it in the Photos app on your phone, then you can go back and say, "Oh, actually

01:55:53   the next key photo option was perfect and that's the one I wanted.

01:55:57   And so now because I had this bonus data that wasn't hurting anyone, now I can change it

01:56:01   to the even better picture.

01:56:02   It's hurting your disk storage and it's hurting me when you send it to me.

01:56:08   You can see frames from the movie thing, but those aren't the same res as the photos.

01:56:13   That's what I'm not sure about.

01:56:14   All kidding aside, I really don't know if I'm losing quality.

01:56:16   I mean, you can take a burst photo.

01:56:17   Like when you do a burst, then you have a bunch of individual pictures and you can pick

01:56:21   the one that's good or whatever.

01:56:23   Anyway, you do you, I'll do me.

01:56:26   Different strokes for different folks.

01:56:27   The problem I have with this is because I'm picking a fight with you, the entire internet,

01:56:32   100% of which always agrees with you about everything even when you're wrong, like now...

01:56:36   I'm sure there's plenty of live picture lovers out there.

01:56:38   There are key click lovers out there.

01:56:40   We're going to hear from them.

01:56:41   Oh, God, no.

01:56:42   Oh, please no.

01:56:43   Key click lovers, we all, all three of us agree you're monsters.

01:56:45   Yeah, they're objectively wrong.

01:56:47   We know them.

01:56:48   We know people.

01:56:49   They're objectively incorrect.

01:56:51   I mean, in fact, I can second say, I can name names.

01:56:54   John Gruber on the last episode of the talk show outed himself as a key click lover.

01:56:58   He had some story about what he, why it makes him feel good.

01:57:00   It's terrible.

01:57:01   People are monsters.

01:57:02   You think you know somebody.

01:57:04   I know, right?

01:57:05   Well, I mean, no, we've known this about John for a long time.

01:57:07   I just, you know, it's just always fun to see him publicly say it because he's just

01:57:12   getting himself in to be yelled at.

01:57:13   Yeah.

01:57:14   So I'm sure there are live picture lovers and they love it everywhere.

01:57:17   And we'll hear about them just as much.

01:57:19   I do.

01:57:20   And because it's the default, I bet most people have it on, right?

01:57:23   Why?

01:57:24   Because the defaults, right?

01:57:25   Most people don't change them.

01:57:26   So I think everyone does live pictures and I wonder how many people don't know live pictures

01:57:30   there or don't know how to like see the live picture when they're sent pictures or wonder

01:57:34   what that little circle icon is at the top.

01:57:35   But bottom line is I think the vast majority of people have live pictures on all the time.

01:57:39   So I think I'm in the minority here.

01:57:41   As you should be because you're wrong.

01:57:43   Leave it, leave it on for yourself all the time.

01:57:45   All I ask is when you share photos, make a conscious choice about the live picture-ness.

01:57:49   All kidding, I don't think you can make that choice when you're uploading to an album.

01:57:55   I think you should make the choice for all your pictures period because you're getting

01:57:57   yourself in the situation.

01:57:58   But anyway, if you're going to share, it's probably not going to be a thousand pictures.

01:58:01   If you're sharing five pictures, just turn off live picture on the ones that shouldn't

01:58:04   have it, share them and turn it back on for all of them if that's what you want to do.

01:58:07   No, but that's my point is that I don't think that I have any mechanism for disabling them

01:58:13   as disabling the live photo-ness as it's going into a shared album or at least not from my

01:58:19   own.

01:58:20   You would have to delete the live photo-ness on those photos before you added them.

01:58:23   It's not deleting, it's just disable it, then share them, then re-enable it.

01:58:29   Or don't re-enable it because if you disabled it, you're showing it has no value, so just

01:58:32   let the system delete them.

01:58:36   Also this includes you yelling something before a picture.

01:58:39   That's true.

01:58:40   You're sending that to everybody too whether you know it or not.

01:58:43   F*** it, smile!

01:58:45   Exactly.

01:58:46   Yeah, that's true.

01:58:48   Do you have anything else?

01:58:49   I don't think so.

01:58:50   Actually, John gave us a better after show than what I was planning, but I was thinking

01:58:56   about maybe possibly buying another Synology.

01:59:01   We'll see you later live listeners.

01:59:04   What?

01:59:05   Don't do that to me either!

01:59:06   And we'll talk to you next week.

01:59:09   You want to get another Synology?

01:59:10   We've got to save it for the show, but you f***ing bastard.

01:59:12   Save it for the show.

01:59:13   We're not talking about it now.

01:59:15   Save it.

01:59:16   Oh God, you're such a d***.

01:59:17   I've been thinking about it for two weeks.

01:59:18   Oh, you're such a d***.

01:59:19   This is all I'm going to think about for two weeks now.

01:59:21   By then he'll have five Synologies and return two of them, so we'll be able to talk about

01:59:25   it.

01:59:26   I can't believe you're thinking about another Synology.

01:59:27   I don't want to talk about it, but I so desperately want to talk about this.

01:59:32   That's why it's great to just leave it here.

01:59:33   You're such a bastard.

01:59:34   God damn it.

01:59:35   [beeping]

01:59:35   God dammit.

01:59:37   (beeping)