ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Oh, how was the Six Flags the other day? Hot.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Was it water or not water? I guess not water. We went to the water part, but I didn't go in

00:00:08 ◼   ► the water part. I was the pack mule for the day. I was carrying the backpack with everyone's like,

00:00:14 ◼   ► you're not allowed to bring food in, but like the water bottles that we sold in the park and

00:00:19 ◼   ► all the possible bathing suits and towels for the water things, which is fine. I was willing to be

00:00:24 ◼   ► to be the pack mule, but like I'm too old to be spending seven hours just walking around

00:00:29 ◼   ► on hot black asphalt. It wasn't like, it was in the nineties, but it wasn't like super

00:00:33 ◼   ► hot or superhuman, but it doesn't matter. It just wears you down. Like I was, I was

00:00:37 ◼   ► hunting for shade. I was like, there's a dumpster, there must be shade on one side of that dumpster.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Let me crouch in the shade while my kids wait on this, you know, two hour line to go on

00:00:44 ◼   ► a roller coaster. Now, are you a, Oh no, you're not a rollercoaster person because you get

00:00:49 ◼   ► motion sick. Nevermind. No, roller coasters is, I'm not a teacup person. Tea cups are

00:00:52 ◼   ► the worst ride in the entire amusement park because that is repeated motion. You puke

00:00:56 ◼   ► your brains out, right? Roller coasters over 90 seconds. It doesn't matter what you can

00:00:59 ◼   ► do 90 seconds. You're fine. So the shorter, so you do like roller coasters. I don't like

00:01:03 ◼   ► them in general because I feel like I've gone on, I've experienced everything there is to

00:01:07 ◼   ► experience on a roller coaster from a thrill perspective. And now the risk reward ratio

00:01:10 ◼   ► is way off because I don't want to go on these rides run by teenagers with a risk of death.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And what is my reward to have an experience that I've already had before? Like it's not

00:01:18 ◼   ► anything new. That is the most John answer I've ever heard. I feel like you need to slide

00:01:21 ◼   ► that in the show somehow.

00:01:22 ◼   ► - I don't like my family going on them.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Because teenagers running these things,

00:01:25 ◼   ► they're not well maintained.

00:01:27 ◼   ► Six Flags is not Disney.

00:01:28 ◼   ► And accidents happen all the time.

00:01:30 ◼   ► And it's like, that's a tiny risk.

00:01:32 ◼   ► But then for the reward, it's like, why am I doing this?

00:01:34 ◼   ► Like, it's not, you know.

00:01:36 ◼   ► So anyway, my kids go on them.

00:01:37 ◼   ► They can have all the experiences that you have.

00:01:39 ◼   ► I feel like I've already done all that.

00:01:41 ◼   ► - Is there anything at an amusement park

00:01:43 ◼   ► that you are amused by?

00:01:44 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:45 ◼   ► - I like the roller coasters.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I enjoy the ride on a good roller coaster.

00:01:49 ◼   ► But I just always think about,

00:01:50 ◼   ► Like all I can do is I look at the machinery and I look at the 12 year olds running the

00:01:54 ◼   ► thing.

00:01:55 ◼   ► Like, it's not.

00:01:56 ◼   ► You'll see, I mean, wait until Adam's old enough to go on these things.

00:02:00 ◼   ► You'd be like, he's gonna be like, "Oh, I want to go on the roller coaster."

00:02:02 ◼   ► You'd be like, "Do you really want to go on it?"

00:02:05 ◼   ► Because you're like, "Have you seen the machinery?"

00:02:07 ◼   ► "Have you seen the people running it?"

00:02:09 ◼   ► Like it's like, it's just, there's no adult supervision and the maintenance on these things

00:02:14 ◼   ► is not great.

00:02:15 ◼   ► Like it's not really, you know.

00:02:17 ◼   ► Oh, that's fantastic.

00:02:18 ◼   ► I'm sure I'll feel the same way once my kids start driving, but at least you know

00:02:22 ◼   ► If something goes wrong in a roller coaster, it's nothing there to save you yeah, except the like quadruply redundant

00:02:29 ◼   ► Systems that are keeping you on the track. Oh there. That's what they tell you no

00:02:33 ◼   ► These are just ancient Ricky the best thing was that my kids wanted to go on like they have a roller coaster

00:02:39 ◼   ► They're called the cyclone

00:02:39 ◼   ► Which is the name that they were used because there's six flags and it's a wooden coaster, and it was closing

00:02:45 ◼   ► July 20th, so I was there what like four or five days ago or whatever?

00:02:48 ◼   ► So that's what they were closing the rides like won't be the last one to ride it and it'll look like it was

00:02:53 ◼   ► Paint is peeling and I'm watching the rollercoaster go around and seeing the things sway and bend like oh, it's supposed to sway and bend

00:03:00 ◼   ► That's what wouldn't go just do it's like yeah, no, thanks. Yeah, we're gonna ride it right before everyone decides

00:03:05 ◼   ► It's no longer worth maintaining for safety reasons exactly and I was like well today

00:03:09 ◼   ► It's fine, but tomorrow will be closed like what's the machine today tomorrow exactly?

00:03:13 ◼   ► Anyway, we all survived, and I was so tired from that experience.

00:03:25 ◼   ► Do we want to talk about Overcast for a little bit?

00:03:28 ◼   ► Do we have to?

00:03:29 ◼   ► Oh, I had this one that I wanted to answer.

00:03:31 ◼   ► I mean, I'm happy to answer other questions if you want, but I don't want to totally

00:03:36 ◼   ► make everyone sick of this.

00:03:38 ◼   ► No, you had your moment.

00:03:39 ◼   ► You're done.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:03:41 ◼   ► You made me have my moment.

00:03:42 ◼   ► ten minutes on the show.

00:03:43 ◼   ► - I know, I'm just giving you a hard time.

00:03:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:46 ◼   ► - All right, so there was one thing

00:03:48 ◼   ► a listener named John wrote in to say,

00:03:52 ◼   ► "Kind of curious if you could talk about how weird it is

00:03:55 ◼   ► "that you have to do so much server-side work

00:03:57 ◼   ► "to do a podcast client.

00:03:58 ◼   ► "The reader guide doesn't have to deal with this stuff.

00:04:00 ◼   ► "There's a whole group of web-based RSS processors

00:04:02 ◼   ► "that people can use for syncing.

00:04:03 ◼   ► "It seems wasteful that each indie podcast developer

00:04:06 ◼   ► "has to reinvent the wheel,

00:04:07 ◼   ► "and what they're differentiating themselves on

00:04:08 ◼   ► "usually has nothing to do with the server-side work

00:04:11 ◼   ► but the client features.

00:04:12 ◼   ► So what he's asking about is things like how we have,

00:04:15 ◼   ► you know, we used to have Google Reader

00:04:16 ◼   ► as a big sync service.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Before that, everyone just crawled their own feeds

00:04:20 ◼   ► from their RSS readers.

00:04:21 ◼   ► After Google Reader's death, we now have things

00:04:23 ◼   ► like Feed Wrangler and Feedly and stuff like that,

00:04:27 ◼   ► other sync services.

00:04:28 ◼   ► And so you don't have to,

00:04:30 ◼   ► if you just wanna write a feed reader,

00:04:32 ◼   ► you don't have to write the whole server side yourself.

00:04:34 ◼   ► In fact, you probably shouldn't write any server side code.

00:04:36 ◼   ► You should probably just use these sync services.

00:04:38 ◼   ► And so, you know, basically why isn't there

00:04:41 ◼   ► one of those for podcasts?

00:04:43 ◼   ► And I think there's a few reasons for that.

00:04:46 ◼   ► First of all, there's, I mean,

00:04:48 ◼   ► I'm sure you could go to _david.smith and say,

00:04:51 ◼   ► "Hey, I wanna make one of these based on a feed wrangler."

00:04:53 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure either that's possible

00:04:55 ◼   ► or he would let you do it.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Like either it's already there or you could just ask him

00:04:59 ◼   ► and he'd be like, "Okay, sure."

00:05:00 ◼   ► Like I'm pretty sure most of these sync services,

00:05:04 ◼   ► if they don't already support that,

00:05:05 ◼   ► wouldn't have a problem with you doing that.

00:05:07 ◼   ► I think the bigger question though is,

00:05:12 ◼   ► I think there's two big questions here.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Why do it yourself and why use a server-side model at all?

00:05:18 ◼   ► And I think both of those are very good questions.

00:05:20 ◼   ► I mean, why do it yourself is applicable to lots of things.

00:05:24 ◼   ► And the number one answer to that is because I'm me

00:05:28 ◼   ► and I don't trust anyone and I don't like

00:05:29 ◼   ► third-party dependencies, much to a fault.

00:05:31 ◼   ► The simple fact is when I make things,

00:05:35 ◼   ► and make things with the intention of them

00:05:36 ◼   ► lasting a long time, whether they do or not,

00:05:38 ◼   ► it's another story, but I want them to last for a long time.

00:05:41 ◼   ► And I look at when I first started Instapaper in 2008,

00:05:45 ◼   ► like what was the common wisdom at the time?

00:05:48 ◼   ► If I wanted to base on some other service,

00:05:49 ◼   ► what service would that have been in 2008?

00:05:52 ◼   ► Because Instapaper's still running today.

00:05:54 ◼   ► And if I would have based the whole thing

00:05:56 ◼   ► on the original Facebook app platform,

00:05:58 ◼   ► which I think was coming out around that time,

00:06:00 ◼   ► where would that be today?

00:06:02 ◼   ► Stuff like that, like the whole,

00:06:03 ◼   ► basing yourself on someone else's entire service.

00:06:07 ◼   ► What if your entire business was making Twitter clients?

00:06:09 ◼   ► This is a very real thing that's happened

00:06:10 ◼   ► to a lot of people in our industry.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And you know, so you can say,

00:06:16 ◼   ► oh, why not just build it on X?

00:06:18 ◼   ► But over time, X will go away,

00:06:20 ◼   ► or change in a way that makes it impossible

00:06:22 ◼   ► for you to keep doing that.

00:06:23 ◼   ► And the question is,

00:06:24 ◼   ► do you plan to still be around at that time?

00:06:26 ◼   ► And something you make now

00:06:28 ◼   ► might be around longer than you think.

00:06:30 ◼   ► I don't think, you know, like,

00:06:31 ◼   ► When I was starting Instapaper in 2008,

00:06:33 ◼   ► I don't think I thought it would still be around in 2014.

00:06:37 ◼   ► I probably hoped it would,

00:06:39 ◼   ► but I'm sure that was not in my mindset at the time of,

00:06:43 ◼   ► I better make decisions now

00:06:44 ◼   ► that will last at least seven years or whatever.

00:06:46 ◼   ► Six years, I can't do math when I'm podcasting.

00:06:49 ◼   ► So you have to realize the ground shifts constantly

00:06:55 ◼   ► in this business, and if you can find some stable ground

00:06:58 ◼   ► to stand on, you probably should.

00:07:01 ◼   ► And so that means building mostly your own stuff

00:07:04 ◼   ► on very stable, long-standing, boring things

00:07:09 ◼   ► that don't shift around.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Things like Linux and your own servers.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Things like old languages, like PHP and Perl

00:07:18 ◼   ► and Ruby and Python.

00:07:19 ◼   ► These are all well-established languages.

00:07:22 ◼   ► It's a pretty safe bet to write something in Python

00:07:25 ◼   ► and host it on Linux and have the database

00:07:26 ◼   ► be Postgres or MySQL these days.

00:07:28 ◼   ► That's a pretty safe bet.

00:07:29 ◼   ► So anyway, that's one reason to do it yourself.

00:07:34 ◼   ► And then the second question is,

00:07:37 ◼   ► why do a server-side based infrastructure at all?

00:07:41 ◼   ► And it isn't a clear win with that.

00:07:46 ◼   ► It's a design decision basically,

00:07:50 ◼   ► but like a technical design decision.

00:07:52 ◼   ► There's a lot of advantages to it,

00:07:54 ◼   ► there's a lot of disadvantages to it.

00:07:56 ◼   ► I chose to do it because I was okay with the disadvantages.

00:08:00 ◼   ► The disadvantage is of course being

00:08:02 ◼   ► you have to write the whole thing first of all,

00:08:04 ◼   ► and you also have to support servers.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And there's a whole class of problems

00:08:09 ◼   ► that you then have to deal with

00:08:11 ◼   ► whenever you support a service, a website service.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And that's even if you run it on something like Azure,

00:08:16 ◼   ► Azure, you still have to support all of that in some way.

00:08:21 ◼   ► Maybe you don't have to support the servers going down

00:08:24 ◼   ► if it's on one of these abstract platforms,

00:08:26 ◼   ► but you still have to support like,

00:08:27 ◼   ► oh, well, they made a change,

00:08:29 ◼   ► and all of a sudden they're requiring this,

00:08:30 ◼   ► or all of Azure is down for the next 20 minutes

00:08:33 ◼   ► and you can't do anything about it.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I'm not saying that, not to pick on that,

00:08:37 ◼   ► I mean, that happens to S3 all the time,

00:08:39 ◼   ► that happens to EC2 all the time.

00:08:41 ◼   ► That happens to these big cloud services

00:08:43 ◼   ► where the entire service has a problem,

00:08:45 ◼   ► or like a quarter of it will just go down.

00:08:47 ◼   ► An Amazon data center will just be unreachable

00:08:50 ◼   ► for 20 minutes, and there's nothing you can do about that.

00:08:54 ◼   ► But it's your problem.

00:08:56 ◼   ► It isn't your fault, but it's your problem.

00:08:58 ◼   ► And so, anyway, this is a diversion,

00:09:01 ◼   ► but any kind of service that you have,

00:09:05 ◼   ► if you don't build a service,

00:09:07 ◼   ► you might rely on something like iCloud to do your syncing.

00:09:10 ◼   ► Well, that's the service.

00:09:11 ◼   ► Like, it's just not yours.

00:09:13 ◼   ► You still have all those problems to deal with.

00:09:14 ◼   ► You just can't do anything about them.

00:09:17 ◼   ► Anyway, so all those problems, I'm willing to accept.

00:09:22 ◼   ► I've done it a lot before.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I know what's involved in hosting servers.

00:09:25 ◼   ► It only gets easier with time,

00:09:27 ◼   ► so I was fine doing it eight years ago,

00:09:30 ◼   ► I'm even more fine doing it now.

00:09:32 ◼   ► It's even easier and cheaper than ever, so that's all fine.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And then the advantages of what this allows me to do

00:09:38 ◼   ► is not only things like have a web player,

00:09:40 ◼   ► the obvious stuff, but things like fixed crawling errors

00:09:44 ◼   ► without shipping an app update.

00:09:46 ◼   ► Like if there were certain feeds

00:09:47 ◼   ► I wasn't parsing correctly

00:09:48 ◼   ► 'cause they used crazy MIME types,

00:09:49 ◼   ► one of them used an XML header that left at the M,

00:09:52 ◼   ► So it's just an Excel document

00:09:54 ◼   ► and I'm supposed to think of that.

00:09:55 ◼   ► There's all sorts of like crazy, stupid stuff

00:09:56 ◼   ► people do in feeds.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And I've been crawling podcast feeds for almost a year.

00:10:02 ◼   ► But there's still, like once I had real users,

00:10:04 ◼   ► they added way more feeds than what I had.

00:10:06 ◼   ► And so there's still like new problems I've run into.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And I didn't have to ship an app update to fix them.

00:10:13 ◼   ► - So how do you handle the one-off feed exceptions,

00:10:18 ◼   ► for lack of a better word?

00:10:19 ◼   ► And I don't mean like a code exception.

00:10:21 ◼   ► what I mean is, well, the people at ATP,

00:10:24 ◼   ► they don't know how to make an XML file,

00:10:26 ◼   ► so I need to handle specifically the feed

00:10:29 ◼   ► at this URL differently.

00:10:31 ◼   ► Do you have a series of if-else's, a switch statement,

00:10:33 ◼   ► or do you do something a lot more clever than that?

00:10:36 ◼   ► I would assume the latter.

00:10:37 ◼   ► - You assume wrong.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So far, I'm doing very little about this.

00:10:42 ◼   ► So the XL feed, I have not fixed yet,

00:10:45 ◼   ► because that's like, again, it's faced with this problem

00:10:49 ◼   ► of what do you do?

00:10:50 ◼   ► do you special case it, do you just have a list

00:10:53 ◼   ► of conditions and you just do a streamer place

00:10:54 ◼   ► of question mark XL version equals 1.0,

00:10:57 ◼   ► change that to the right thing, like, what do you do?

00:11:00 ◼   ► So far I haven't quite figured that out yet.

00:11:02 ◼   ► What I have instead, most of the problems

00:11:04 ◼   ► were people using crazy wrong content types

00:11:07 ◼   ► for the enclosures.

00:11:08 ◼   ► 'Cause one thing I do, I don't support video.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And so I have a whitelist of these are the content types

00:11:14 ◼   ► that I support and then I map them all

00:11:15 ◼   ► to whether this is generally MP3 or MP4 format.

00:11:20 ◼   ► and certain people mark their enclosures as text HTML,

00:11:25 ◼   ► which they're not, they're like MP3s,

00:11:28 ◼   ► but they say content type text HTML,

00:11:30 ◼   ► and they expect that to work.

00:11:32 ◼   ► So I have to do crap like that.

00:11:34 ◼   ► But for that, I just have like, you know,

00:11:35 ◼   ► a list of content types that I accept anyway,

00:11:37 ◼   ► that just I know aren't videos and stuff like that.

00:11:39 ◼   ► Anyway, that doesn't matter.

00:11:41 ◼   ► So, server side lets me do stuff like that.

00:11:44 ◼   ► It also lets me do things like keep the app code very simple

00:11:48 ◼   ► you know, and there's all sorts of benefits

00:11:49 ◼   ► things like having to pull a whole bunch of feeds all the time and then that you

00:11:53 ◼   ► know uses a bunch of data and battery life on your device stuff like that fast

00:11:57 ◼   ► updates you pull a bunch of feeds at once for me one of the biggest benefits

00:12:02 ◼   ► is like my my app is on have to know XML and it's not to parse feeds the server

00:12:07 ◼   ► can just can crawl everything in all of its crappy condition normalize at all

00:12:12 ◼   ► strip out the stuff the app doesn't even need and then send the app small

00:12:16 ◼   ► normalize JSON blobs that can decode very easily.

00:12:21 ◼   ► So it lets me do more work on the server side,

00:12:24 ◼   ► which means more work in a higher level language

00:12:27 ◼   ► that allows you to do things like string processing

00:12:31 ◼   ► much more easily, and has all sorts of built-in

00:12:34 ◼   ► normalization.

00:12:38 ◼   ► I have the whole power of iConv,

00:12:39 ◼   ► and so I can convert even character sets

00:12:41 ◼   ► and solve those kind of problems server-side very easily.

00:12:43 ◼   ► So it's more of a division of labor.

00:12:43 ◼   ► It's not that the app wouldn't need all this stuff.

00:12:47 ◼   ► It's still like, you have to put all that logic somewhere,

00:12:51 ◼   ► and I've chosen to put much of it on the server

00:12:52 ◼   ► where it's easier to update,

00:12:53 ◼   ► and in some cases, easier to write.

00:12:56 ◼   ► And then the app can focus more on the UI

00:13:00 ◼   ► and not have to deal with some crazy new feed

00:13:03 ◼   ► that's a one-off exception.

00:13:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, that totally makes sense to me.

00:13:06 ◼   ► I just didn't know if you were going into like,

00:13:08 ◼   ► some crazy design pattern whose name escapes me,

00:13:10 ◼   ► where basically each of these one-offs

00:13:13 ◼   ► is perhaps encapsulated in a class

00:13:16 ◼   ► and you just run through a series of classes to say,

00:13:18 ◼   ► oh, does this little one-off care

00:13:21 ◼   ► about this particular feed?

00:13:22 ◼   ► And you could go totally crazy down that road.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Or you could have like the if-else chain from hell.

00:13:27 ◼   ► And that's a different way of approaching it.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And I was thinking about this earlier today.

00:13:30 ◼   ► I was curious how you handled that sort of thing.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And yeah, it's the same sort of problem

00:13:34 ◼   ► I'm sure you had at Instapaper

00:13:36 ◼   ► with really weird DOM parsing,

00:13:38 ◼   ► trying to find the bits that you cared about,

00:13:40 ◼   ► which that you used XPath, didn't you?

00:13:42 ◼   ► - For Instapaper, I went through a few things.

00:13:46 ◼   ► The very first text parser was actually an XSL document.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And because my previous job in Pittsburgh,

00:13:54 ◼   ► we did crazy things with XSL and I knew it extremely well.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And for the purpose of parsing through a DOM

00:14:00 ◼   ► and outputting something as a result, it's really good.

00:14:02 ◼   ► 'Cause it's a specially suited language for that task.

00:14:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, if you've said in the past, it is very good.

00:14:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, it does things that if you just have

00:14:09 ◼   ► a DOM interface and a programming language,

00:14:11 ◼   ► Like there are certain entire classes of problems

00:14:14 ◼   ► for which XSL is just way, way easier to use.

00:14:18 ◼   ► And in many cases, it's really fast.

00:14:20 ◼   ► Anyway, so yeah, Instapaper referred,

00:14:23 ◼   ► then I did a DOM thing, then I did XPath,

00:14:25 ◼   ► and I ended up with like a big DOM crawling parser

00:14:29 ◼   ► that would like, it would like step through the DOM

00:14:30 ◼   ► and tag everything with scores.

00:14:32 ◼   ► And then it would have XPath

00:14:34 ◼   ► to do things with special rules.

00:14:35 ◼   ► And so I had a thing where you could like,

00:14:37 ◼   ► you could say, okay, for this site,

00:14:39 ◼   ► this is the XPath for the title.

00:14:40 ◼   ► this is the XPath for the body,

00:14:42 ◼   ► strip anything matching this XPath, stuff like that.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Obviously with feeds, that's a lot easier.

00:14:47 ◼   ► And I do run through the show notes

00:14:51 ◼   ► that are in podcast feeds.

00:14:54 ◼   ► I run those through a bunch of parsing actually

00:14:56 ◼   ► to try to normalize them.

00:14:57 ◼   ► So to do things like,

00:14:59 ◼   ► like if there isn't a P tag around the text,

00:15:01 ◼   ► put one around it.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Some things just have one little quick line of text

00:15:05 ◼   ► as their show notes, I put a P tag around it

00:15:07 ◼   ► so that way it renders the same way

00:15:08 ◼   ► of things that use p tags do on the client side.

00:15:11 ◼   ► I also strip out inline style tags

00:15:13 ◼   ► and certain like inline JavaScript things

00:15:16 ◼   ► and things that just would mess up

00:15:17 ◼   ► or are possible security holes on the client side.

00:15:20 ◼   ► I've strip all that out and normalize stuff,

00:15:23 ◼   ► remove empty paragraphs, remove like the one pixel GIFs

00:15:26 ◼   ► and then the paragraph around them

00:15:28 ◼   ► because it's now empty, stuff like that.

00:15:30 ◼   ► Anyway, what were we talking about?

00:15:33 ◼   ► - If you find yourself writing Lsif chains

00:15:36 ◼   ► to handles variations in input and you're not

00:15:38 ◼   ► writing a parser, you're probably

00:15:40 ◼   ► doing something wrong.

00:15:42 ◼   ► So it's just--

00:15:44 ◼   ► The solution is always write your own XML parser.

00:15:46 ◼   ► No, no.

00:15:47 ◼   ► I'm saying if you're doing a parser

00:15:48 ◼   ► and you're switching based on the token or something,

00:15:50 ◼   ► that's fine.

00:15:50 ◼   ► But in this case, you should never--

00:15:54 ◼   ► don't even get to the point where you're writing the code.

00:15:56 ◼   ► If it's this feed, do this.

00:15:57 ◼   ► If it's that feed, do that.

00:15:59 ◼   ► Especially when you know what you're going to be doing

00:16:02 ◼   ► is parsing feeds, and the world of feeds is large,

00:16:05 ◼   ► and the number of special cases is large.

00:16:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I would probably just do a series of,

00:16:09 ◼   ► associated with each feed, you have a default parser

00:16:14 ◼   ► and then you have a series of things that you run in order

00:16:17 ◼   ► before you get to the default parser.

00:16:19 ◼   ► And so then you could reuse,

00:16:20 ◼   ► like if the text HTML thing is a common problem,

00:16:23 ◼   ► one of your things is,

00:16:24 ◼   ► one of your rules is fix broken MIME types.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And another rule is add the M back in XML, right?

00:16:30 ◼   ► And so you just apply those rules to each podcast.

00:16:33 ◼   ► So then that way, if 700 feeds have the bad MIME type, you can use that one rule to fix

00:16:38 ◼   ► all of them.

00:16:39 ◼   ► If one feed has the missing M in XML, you just do one more rule to that.

00:16:42 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah, not in LSEV chain.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, of course.

00:16:45 ◼   ► It's not Casey, because he was offering that as like, "In case anyone's listening,

00:16:48 ◼   ► don't do that, please."

00:16:49 ◼   ► Oh, no, I wasn't being serious about that, for God's sakes.

00:16:52 ◼   ► I would definitely do something probably very similar to what you described, Jon, but I

00:16:58 ◼   ► curious because Marco tends to kind of do the down and dirty approach occasionally,

00:17:03 ◼   ► and I was curious what you chose, especially early on.

00:17:06 ◼   ► I was thinking of the other day, I was thinking about the handling weird feeds and stuff, and like

00:17:11 ◼   ► if you have access to, I don't know if you do, if you could get access to the iTunes catalog,

00:17:15 ◼   ► I suppose you could with like screen scraping iTunes or doing whatever, but

00:17:19 ◼   ► a good exercise for your feed parser would have been, I'm going to parse and normalize every

00:17:26 ◼   ► every single podcast feed available on iTunes,

00:17:29 ◼   ► and then make sure the results conform

00:17:31 ◼   ► to something reasonable,

00:17:32 ◼   ► and then you would have found many, many exceptions.

00:17:35 ◼   ► I just don't know if you have access

00:17:36 ◼   ► to that corpus of data.

00:17:37 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by a new sponsor.

00:17:41 ◼   ► It's Cotton Bureau.

00:17:43 ◼   ► And we had, when we were making T-shirts for this show,

00:17:48 ◼   ► after we made our T-shirts, we had tons of people recommend

00:17:53 ◼   ► that we should have gone with Cotton Bureau.

00:17:54 ◼   ► And I took a look and honestly it looks pretty good to me.

00:17:57 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau with a t-shirt printer,

00:17:59 ◼   ► it's the kind of thing where you upload a design

00:18:01 ◼   ► and then people can then pre-order it.

00:18:05 ◼   ► Kind of like Kickstarter, you can pre-order your shirt

00:18:07 ◼   ► and then if they get enough pre-orders, they ship them.

00:18:09 ◼   ► And they print them and they ship them.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Which is great because nobody wants to deal

00:18:13 ◼   ► with t-shirt sales in other ways.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Having to get a bunch of t-shirts printed

00:18:18 ◼   ► with your own money up front,

00:18:20 ◼   ► get boxes of a thousand shirts shipped to your house

00:18:22 ◼   ► and then have people that have to be doing

00:18:24 ◼   ► order fulfillment for them, for yourself.

00:18:26 ◼   ► You know, if you just have like a podcast

00:18:27 ◼   ► and you want to sell t-shirts,

00:18:28 ◼   ► that's a pain in the butt, nobody wants to do that.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau is, in their words, of the internet.

00:18:34 ◼   ► They came out of a group called United Pixel Workers,

00:18:37 ◼   ► I have a few of their t-shirts actually,

00:18:39 ◼   ► and the desire to help their designers and partners

00:18:41 ◼   ► make and sell t-shirts.

00:18:43 ◼   ► In the past, they've worked with Dribbble,

00:18:45 ◼   ► with 3B's, so it must be good.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Rodeo, is it R-D-O?

00:18:50 ◼   ► Stephen Hackett can probably tell us,

00:18:51 ◼   ► he used to have a show about streaming music services.

00:18:54 ◼   ► I'm guessing it's audio.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Lauren Brikter, Jeff Atwood, and more.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau shirts are soft, tagless,

00:19:00 ◼   ► and the highest possible quality.

00:19:03 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau is a rejection of the contests and gimmicks

00:19:06 ◼   ► that some sites use to create demand.

00:19:08 ◼   ► They require only 12 pre-orders,

00:19:10 ◼   ► which is the minimum necessary to cover their costs

00:19:12 ◼   ► to print a shirt.

00:19:14 ◼   ► They're brutally honest about what they're doing and why,

00:19:16 ◼   ► as you can see on their blog.

00:19:18 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau's previous work includes TapBots,

00:19:21 ◼   ► The Incomparable, Real Mac, Pacific Helm,

00:19:23 ◼   ► Neven Murgon, Buzz Anderson,

00:19:25 ◼   ► and more great designers than you can shake a stick at.

00:19:28 ◼   ► All selling T-shirts featuring everything

00:19:30 ◼   ► from coffee and bacon to sports,

00:19:33 ◼   ► pop culture and goofy animals.

00:19:35 ◼   ► And honestly, I took a look through their stuff

00:19:36 ◼   ► earlier today and it's really nice.

00:19:38 ◼   ► You can tell this is the site that designers like.

00:19:41 ◼   ► It's very clear from that, with good reason too.

00:19:44 ◼   ► Many great shirts are currently on Cotton Bureau

00:19:48 ◼   ► collecting orders including the Future Friendly Tea which donates all proceeds to archive.org

00:19:53 ◼   ► and even by the time this is published later this week they will even have a Kennebault

00:19:57 ◼   ► t-shirt. And coming soon to Cotton Bureau they have upcoming teas from the Incomparable,

00:20:05 ◼   ► maybe even a Bionic Tea, possibly because Matt Alexander from Need blazed the trail

00:20:10 ◼   ► of ATP being a fashion sponsor which I still find kind of funny. And they might maybe hint

00:20:18 ◼   ► hint possibly have a Roderick on the Line shirt coming in the future but I cannot confirm

00:20:22 ◼   ► or deny that. Go to CottonBureau.com. I honestly, Bureau is one of those words I never know

00:20:28 ◼   ► how to spell. I always misspell it so I'm going to spell it for you. Cotton, you know

00:20:32 ◼   ► how to spell cotton. Bureau is B-U-R-E-A-U.com. CottonBureau.com. Check out the wall of fame

00:20:39 ◼   ► there. If you see a previously made shirt that you like, you can actually sign up and

00:20:44 ◼   ► kind of vote for it to be brought back and if they have enough votes, they will bring

00:20:47 ◼   ► it back and do a second printing for you.

00:20:50 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau just celebrated their first birthday in June.

00:20:52 ◼   ► They plan on being around and staying proudly independent for a long time to come.

00:20:56 ◼   ► They add amazing new shirts every day.

00:20:57 ◼   ► So check it out.

00:20:58 ◼   ► Go to cottonbureau.com, browse around, see if you like anything, buy it.

00:21:03 ◼   ► If you want to upload one and make your own shirt, go for it.

00:21:05 ◼   ► Very high quality shirts.

00:21:07 ◼   ► You can get 15% off any order in July when you use the code ATP15 at checkout.

00:21:14 ◼   ► Once again, cottonbureau.com, 15% off any order in July by using the code ATP15.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Cotton Bureau for sponsoring our show.

00:21:22 ◼   ► Really good company.

00:21:24 ◼   ► All right.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Anything else about Overcast?

00:21:27 ◼   ► There are a couple other bullets here that I didn't write.

00:21:30 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Well, I figure Marco should go through the UI changes he made, or is making, if he wants

00:21:35 ◼   ► to.

00:21:36 ◼   ► You talked about them on Twitter already, so you might as well talk about your reasoning

00:21:40 ◼   ► in more than 140 characters.

00:21:41 ◼   ► All right.

00:21:42 ◼   ► So basically, I'm trying to make this stuff useful to more people besides just me and

00:21:48 ◼   ► people who want to hear about everything Overcast. So please forgive me as I try to stumble through

00:21:52 ◼   ► and generalize this to be more applicable to possibly the work that you, the listener,

00:21:56 ◼   ► are doing. Anyway, so one of the first things I did was I got a few notes, and this came

00:22:03 ◼   ► up in the beta a little bit, but I didn't pay enough attention to it. I got a few notes

00:22:07 ◼   ► from people saying the font is too small. And I run everything through an appearance

00:22:11 ◼   ► class where I set all my defaults of, okay,

00:22:13 ◼   ► this is the main font name, this is the secondary font name.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And I have all these methods for things like,

00:22:19 ◼   ► you know, the preferred font for, you know,

00:22:22 ◼   ► 'cause like, you know how iOS 7 has

00:22:24 ◼   ► all this dynamic text stuff, so it has things like

00:22:26 ◼   ► preferred font descriptor for style.

00:22:28 ◼   ► You can say, you know, UI font text style, body,

00:22:31 ◼   ► headline, caption one, caption two.

00:22:34 ◼   ► I have an appearance class that accepts those same arguments,

00:22:37 ◼   ► looks at the system dynamic text setting

00:22:39 ◼   ► to get an idea for how big the system thinks

00:22:42 ◼   ► this text should be, and then returns to the caller

00:22:46 ◼   ► my fonts based on the system font settings

00:22:50 ◼   ► and based on those styles.

00:22:51 ◼   ► And so I can do things like specify, okay,

00:22:53 ◼   ► when you fetch font style caption two,

00:22:56 ◼   ► always return the small caps font.

00:22:59 ◼   ► And the default color for that font should be this.

00:23:01 ◼   ► Here's the size for it based on the system size, et cetera.

00:23:05 ◼   ► And that's why I,

00:23:07 ◼   ► That's one of the reasons why Overcast

00:23:09 ◼   ► so easily supports dynamic text,

00:23:11 ◼   ► because I wrote all this crap that iOS 7 in mind

00:23:13 ◼   ► and everything else.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Anyway, I also had a master font adjustment,

00:23:18 ◼   ► and I had set that to negative one,

00:23:20 ◼   ► so that any font checked through the system mechanism,

00:23:23 ◼   ► and if the app requested a 14-point font,

00:23:27 ◼   ► I would actually return a 13-point font,

00:23:28 ◼   ► because I was testing out various fonts a year ago,

00:23:31 ◼   ► last summer, trying to figure out what my font would be,

00:23:33 ◼   ► and I was trying to normalize the sizes between them,

00:23:35 ◼   ► certain fonts, they kind of look bigger,

00:23:37 ◼   ► and I'm sure there's official terms for this,

00:23:40 ◼   ► and things like the X height and stuff like that,

00:23:42 ◼   ► but I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff,

00:23:44 ◼   ► but I can tell you certain fonts look better

00:23:48 ◼   ► or bigger than others, and so it's hard

00:23:50 ◼   ► to make direct comparisons, so I normalize them all.

00:23:53 ◼   ► And so for this font, I settled on negative one

00:23:55 ◼   ► being its fair comparison size,

00:23:57 ◼   ► and then designed the whole app that way,

00:23:59 ◼   ► shipped the whole app that way, everyone's saying,

00:24:01 ◼   ► hey, you know what, this is kind of,

00:24:04 ◼   ► It's a little bit too small.

00:24:06 ◼   ► Let me fix this.

00:24:07 ◼   ► So I increased the font size by one pixel

00:24:10 ◼   ► by changing that negative one to a zero.

00:24:12 ◼   ► Now everything looks better.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And so that's fine.

00:24:16 ◼   ► I realized like, yeah, it sucks to lose the extra

00:24:19 ◼   ► one to two characters on each line of title.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But I realized that the fonts were a little too small before

00:24:26 ◼   ► and it does look better now.

00:24:27 ◼   ► And it is a little more accessible now.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Anyway, secondarily, I replaced the skip back

00:24:36 ◼   ► and skip forward button icons with the standard Apple number

00:24:42 ◼   ► in the circle with the little back forward symbol

00:24:45 ◼   ► kind of on the tail of the circle.

00:24:47 ◼   ► If you listen to any podcast app ever,

00:24:49 ◼   ► no, actually that's not true.

00:24:51 ◼   ► If you listen to Apple's podcast app,

00:24:54 ◼   ► you look in control center or even,

00:24:56 ◼   ► do they even have those on their icons on the buttons?

00:24:57 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:24:59 ◼   ► Anyway. - I don't know either.

00:25:00 ◼   ► No one uses that app.

00:25:02 ◼   ► No, I'm just kidding.

00:25:03 ◼   ► The biggest podcast app in the world by far.

00:25:04 ◼   ► - I think they do.

00:25:06 ◼   ► Because I recognize the icons

00:25:07 ◼   ► and where else would I have seen them.

00:25:09 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:25:10 ◼   ► So anyway, Apple has established a standard icon

00:25:14 ◼   ► for skip back and skip forward by X number of seconds.

00:25:18 ◼   ► That is different from the double triangles,

00:25:20 ◼   ► slash double triangles with the bar at the end

00:25:22 ◼   ► kind of thing that tape players and CD players did.

00:25:26 ◼   ► And I had been using the double triangle icons

00:25:30 ◼   ► on Overcast's Now Playing screen.

00:25:33 ◼   ► And I decided to change that because a lot of people

00:25:36 ◼   ► were confused as to what those did.

00:25:37 ◼   ► A lot of people were writing in asking me

00:25:40 ◼   ► to add the 30 second skip button to the app.

00:25:44 ◼   ► Even though the app already had that feature,

00:25:46 ◼   ► they just had never tapped that button.

00:25:47 ◼   ► - I got tweeted that.

00:25:49 ◼   ► I was doing tech support for Overcast for people tweeting.

00:25:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:25:52 ◼   ► They didn't even have tech support.

00:25:53 ◼   ► As I'm doing that reply, I'm like, you know,

00:25:55 ◼   ► this came up during the beta too, and you said,

00:25:57 ◼   ► "Yeah, but the arrows look better,"

00:25:58 ◼   ► and then nobody pursued it further.

00:26:00 ◼   ► - Right, and the arrows do look better.

00:26:02 ◼   ► - You're right, they do, but, I mean,

00:26:04 ◼   ► it's always the but, right?

00:26:06 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:26:07 ◼   ► - In the beta, you can, five people say,

00:26:09 ◼   ► "Hey, I can't tell how far back or forward

00:26:12 ◼   ► "the thing is gonna go, or I forget,

00:26:14 ◼   ► "or I don't know that feature's there,"

00:26:15 ◼   ► and you answer those five, 10 people,

00:26:17 ◼   ► done and done, wipe your hands of it.

00:26:18 ◼   ► But luckily, when you release the app to everybody,

00:26:21 ◼   ► it becomes clear very quickly that

00:26:23 ◼   ► there's more than five people you have to explain this to.

00:26:25 ◼   ► And so like I said, I had to explain it to some people.

00:26:27 ◼   ► So that's where I draw the line.

00:26:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I had multiple people tell me

00:26:30 ◼   ► that they had just never touched those buttons

00:26:33 ◼   ► on the now playing screen because they assumed

00:26:35 ◼   ► they would fast forward or skip to the next track,

00:26:38 ◼   ► which no one ever wants in a podcast app.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Overcast actually has no control

00:26:43 ◼   ► that means skip to the next track

00:26:45 ◼   ► or skip to the previous track,

00:26:46 ◼   ► or the horrible, annoying behavior

00:26:50 ◼   ► of the previous track button in podcast apps usually,

00:26:54 ◼   ► which normally in most podcast apps, including Apple's,

00:26:59 ◼   ► I think, I think that's still the case,

00:27:01 ◼   ► if you push the previous track button,

00:27:03 ◼   ► it does what CD players do

00:27:05 ◼   ► when you push the previous track button,

00:27:07 ◼   ► which is before it goes to the previous track,

00:27:09 ◼   ► on the first press,

00:27:10 ◼   ► it just goes to the beginning of the current track,

00:27:12 ◼   ► which loses your position in a podcast, which is horrible.

00:27:16 ◼   ► And I decided there was no place

00:27:19 ◼   ► for that control in a podcast app.

00:27:20 ◼   ► And so I just don't have those controls.

00:27:22 ◼   ► Anything, like if you have a car,

00:27:24 ◼   ► with like fast forward, fast rewind buttons,

00:27:26 ◼   ► any kind of integration, the headphone clicker,

00:27:28 ◼   ► anything that normally triggers a previous track,

00:27:32 ◼   ► next track action in Overcast

00:27:33 ◼   ► does those second skip buttons instead.

00:27:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, I noticed that today I was driving around

00:27:38 ◼   ► and listening to the tail end of this six hour debug epic

00:27:43 ◼   ► with the dude from Apple that was on the iOS apps team

00:27:47 ◼   ► whose name escapes me.

00:27:48 ◼   ► Well anyways.

00:27:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, Neaton Gennatro.

00:27:49 ◼   ► - Yes, thank you.

00:27:50 ◼   ► And they're all incredible.

00:27:52 ◼   ► Like when I saw that there were six hours of this,

00:27:54 ◼   ► I thought to myself, oh, this is gonna be painful

00:27:57 ◼   ► and I'm probably not gonna listen to any of it.

00:27:58 ◼   ► And my goodness, they're incredible.

00:28:01 ◼   ► They're definitely worth listening to.

00:28:02 ◼   ► Anyway, the point is I hit the little button

00:28:05 ◼   ► on my steering wheel to either fast forward or rewind,

00:28:08 ◼   ► I forget which one, and sure enough,

00:28:10 ◼   ► as I'm doing that, I'm like,

00:28:11 ◼   ► I hope this does what I think it does, bink.

00:28:15 ◼   ► And then it did, and it was wonderful.

00:28:16 ◼   ► So I don't know if that was a deliberate move on your part,

00:28:19 ◼   ► I assume so, but it was a great, great, great call.

00:28:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, I told you, there literally is no code in Overcast

00:28:25 ◼   ► that can respond to a button click

00:28:27 ◼   ► with backtrack or forward track.

00:28:29 ◼   ► There is, that doesn't exist, 'cause I hate that behavior.

00:28:33 ◼   ► You can make an argument for skip to the next track.

00:28:36 ◼   ► I can see the argument there.

00:28:37 ◼   ► But the previous track feature, I think, is awful.

00:28:41 ◼   ► And the skip to the next track thing,

00:28:43 ◼   ► I was talking to someone about this,

00:28:45 ◼   ► I'm not sure if he wants me to use his name,

00:28:46 ◼   ► so I will default to no.

00:28:48 ◼   ► And he was trying to argue for a next track button.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And I can see an argument for that.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Like a show comes on and you're in your car,

00:29:00 ◼   ► you're jogging or something like that,

00:29:01 ◼   ► and you can't easily play with the controls.

00:29:04 ◼   ► A show comes on, it's not what you wanna hear

00:29:06 ◼   ► at that moment, so you wanna skip to the next one.

00:29:08 ◼   ► I get that.

00:29:10 ◼   ► But the question is, if I add something like that,

00:29:11 ◼   ► where does it go?

00:29:12 ◼   ► I'm not even talking about on the screen.

00:29:15 ◼   ► the screen I can figure out.

00:29:16 ◼   ► I'm talking about if you have a headphone clicker

00:29:18 ◼   ► or a car control or control center buttons.

00:29:21 ◼   ► When you only have the seek back, seek forward

00:29:24 ◼   ► spots or rolls in a control,

00:29:27 ◼   ► where does the next track button go?

00:29:30 ◼   ► 'Cause I wouldn't wanna replace

00:29:33 ◼   ► the skip forward 30 second button,

00:29:35 ◼   ► it's very frequently used.

00:29:37 ◼   ► So again, where does it go?

00:29:39 ◼   ► I don't think there's a good answer to that.

00:29:42 ◼   ► And so for now I'm not going to do it.

00:29:44 ◼   ► But we'll see.

00:29:46 ◼   ► All right, and then finally, priority podcasts, again,

00:29:49 ◼   ► was written in the show notes document.

00:29:50 ◼   ► I assume that's John?

00:29:53 ◼   ► Yeah, on last show, we were talking about priority podcasts

00:29:56 ◼   ► and how I thought that didn't need to be a thing,

00:29:59 ◼   ► a separate place where it says select priority podcasts,

00:30:01 ◼   ► then go to a different place after you've

00:30:03 ◼   ► done that to order the podcast that you have selected

00:30:05 ◼   ► as priority podcasts.

00:30:07 ◼   ► And I always want them all to be priority podcasts.

00:30:10 ◼   ► Lots of people don't know what that means

00:30:11 ◼   ► as they've been tweeting at me.

00:30:12 ◼   ► It doesn't mean that all podcasts are the same priority.

00:30:15 ◼   ► It's not the same thing as not selecting any.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Basically, selecting, this is why it's confusing,

00:30:18 ◼   ► selecting something as a priority podcast

00:30:20 ◼   ► merely means that now this podcast can be ordered.

00:30:23 ◼   ► Now you can say, this is my number one,

00:30:24 ◼   ► this is my number two.

00:30:25 ◼   ► For a podcast to participate at all in that ordering,

00:30:29 ◼   ► you must say it is a priority podcast,

00:30:31 ◼   ► and I'm making quotes with my fingers.

00:30:33 ◼   ► - Thank you.

00:30:34 ◼   ► - And so I always want all of them to be priority podcasts

00:30:37 ◼   ► because I want to set an order for all of them.

00:30:40 ◼   ► Some people don't want all of them to be priority,

00:30:43 ◼   ► they just want one, two, or three to be priority podcasts,

00:30:44 ◼   ► and then the rest of them, too, I'm assuming they sort

00:30:46 ◼   ► by whatever you pick the order,

00:30:47 ◼   ► like whichever has the newest or oldest episode or whatever.

00:30:51 ◼   ► Whereas your number one podcast

00:30:53 ◼   ► will always be your number one podcast,

00:30:55 ◼   ► regardless of what new episodes come out

00:30:56 ◼   ► in your non-priority podcast.

00:30:58 ◼   ► I wanted to revisit it because last show,

00:31:02 ◼   ► we were just talking about the whole concept

00:31:04 ◼   ► and who would want to have priority, non-priority,

00:31:06 ◼   ► turns out a lot of people.

00:31:07 ◼   ► Now I just wanna get back to the root of the problem,

00:31:09 ◼   ► which is why do I have to go to the separate place

00:31:11 ◼   ► to elect things to participate in the priority podcast?

00:31:13 ◼   ► As I was trying to think of a UI,

00:31:15 ◼   ► what I want is to select the podcasts

00:31:18 ◼   ► that are part of a playlist

00:31:19 ◼   ► and right on that screen where I'm selecting the podcast,

00:31:23 ◼   ► be able to sort them.

00:31:24 ◼   ► And if I don't sort them,

00:31:26 ◼   ► they stay in sort of the unsorted bin at the bottom.

00:31:28 ◼   ► And if I do sort them, they stay in the sorted section.

00:31:30 ◼   ► And there's not really a good analog that I could think of

00:31:32 ◼   ► because it's kind of like the Netflix queue,

00:31:34 ◼   ► which is kind of like, you know, in Netflix DVD queue,

00:31:36 ◼   ► they're all priority podcasts,

00:31:38 ◼   ► within it's like a dividing line with the non-priority ones.

00:31:41 ◼   ► It's difficult to come up with a UI for it,

00:31:43 ◼   ► but I think that would be clearer to people.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Like these concepts that we've talked about

00:31:48 ◼   ► and the people have tweeted back and forth about,

00:31:50 ◼   ► I'm not sure how many people understand

00:31:53 ◼   ► all the nuances of how, I mean, I certainly didn't,

00:31:55 ◼   ► and people tweeting me questions,

00:31:57 ◼   ► all the nuances of how priority and non-priority podcasts

00:31:59 ◼   ► interact with each other.

00:32:00 ◼   ► If you just had one screen that showed

00:32:02 ◼   ► when you were making a playlist,

00:32:03 ◼   ► here's all the podcasts that could participate

00:32:05 ◼   ► in this playlist, and some of them are sorted by priority

00:32:07 ◼   ► some of them are not, and here they are, and you could drag between those two regions in

00:32:10 ◼   ► a big list or something. I think that would make more sense and would save me a trip into

00:32:15 ◼   ► this separate region for electing before I go back to the other region for sorting.

00:32:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's a fair idea. There's a big question mark there as to, like, "Okay,

00:32:24 ◼   ► you know, how do you do this?" As you said, I mean, it's a hard problem to solve. I'm

00:32:30 ◼   ► not sure it's a net win. Like, if the current problem is a combination of if you know what

00:32:36 ◼   ► doing already. If you already understand these features, then yeah, it's kind of annoying

00:32:41 ◼   ► to have to go to two different places to do this thing. To add a new show to a podcast

00:32:47 ◼   ► that wasn't there and make it a priority and put it in order with the other priorities.

00:32:50 ◼   ► I get that. Then the other problem is, for people who don't already understand this

00:32:54 ◼   ► feature, this seems like it might even add more complexity to it.

00:32:58 ◼   ► I think the current division makes it harder to understand what the app is capable of.

00:33:02 ◼   ► That's what I'm getting at. The feedback that I've gotten on Twitter is that there

00:33:06 ◼   ► not the people won't discover I think as I said last show I think the the

00:33:11 ◼   ► playlist creation stuff is the most important feature of the application to

00:33:14 ◼   ► me and I think it is not as discoverable as it could be because people don't

00:33:19 ◼   ► understand that process go over here it's like these things now they're

00:33:22 ◼   ► eligible go over to this other place and order them and what that all means and

00:33:26 ◼   ► and the resulting the resulting sort of workflow of like when podcasts come in

00:33:31 ◼   ► where do they where do they fall on my list of things that I'm playing and the

00:33:34 ◼   ► fact that they can essentially set up almost any reasonable ordering that they

00:33:37 ◼   ► want by a combination of priority, non-priority podcasts, and playlists. That

00:33:40 ◼   ► is powerful. It's the question is how do we, how do you show people that that's

00:33:46 ◼   ► possible without some crazy tutorial or some other thing like that? And right now

00:33:49 ◼   ► I think a lot of people don't know that they can do that with this app that they

00:33:52 ◼   ► already have because it's not clear from the naming and from the interface.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Because I can't think of any other analogous interface with this elective

00:33:59 ◼   ► process and then you go back to a different region and the things you

00:34:02 ◼   ► elected are now able to be manipulated in a new way in this other place.

00:34:06 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and the whole concept of Playlist and Overcast is a challenge for me to sell

00:34:12 ◼   ► people on because I hear from so many people who all say, "I've never used Playlist

00:34:20 ◼   ► before in my podcast app. I don't see the point. I don't see why I need to use this."

00:34:24 ◼   ► And it's hard to—and in some cases, people on the beta said that. And I told them, "Hey,

00:34:29 ◼   ► "You know what, here's how I use them, why don't you try it?

00:34:31 ◼   ► "See if you like it."

00:34:33 ◼   ► And every time the person has come back saying,

00:34:35 ◼   ► "Oh my god, I love this, now I use playlists,

00:34:38 ◼   ► "now I get it, now there's a reason to use it."

00:34:40 ◼   ► And it's hard for people to realize that.

00:34:43 ◼   ► That's one of the reasons why,

00:34:45 ◼   ► as soon as you subscribe to at least two shows,

00:34:47 ◼   ► I create your first playlist for you.

00:34:50 ◼   ► As soon as you subscribe to enough shows

00:34:52 ◼   ► where it would matter,

00:34:54 ◼   ► I create the all episodes playlist for you server side,

00:34:57 ◼   ► and I can sync to your account.

00:34:58 ◼   ► And you can edit it, you can delete it,

00:34:59 ◼   ► you can do whatever you want, but the first time you do that,

00:35:01 ◼   ► I create that for you to kind of force you to maybe,

00:35:04 ◼   ► just maybe click on that one time to see,

00:35:06 ◼   ► hey, what are all episodes?

00:35:07 ◼   ► That sounds convenient.

00:35:09 ◼   ► And I use the word playlist because that's what everyone

00:35:12 ◼   ► else uses because that's what iTunes uses.

00:35:15 ◼   ► And people are used to the idea of playlists.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I would love if a different word would solve this problem.

00:35:21 ◼   ► I just don't think a different word would solve this problem.

00:35:24 ◼   ► - Well, it's not, playlist is a problem because people think

00:35:26 ◼   ► like, why would I want to manually arrange?

00:35:28 ◼   ► It sounds like what I used to do with my iPod Shuffle, and the whole idea is like, this

00:35:32 ◼   ► is a hybrid smart playlist, regular playlist.

00:35:34 ◼   ► It's the best of both worlds combined, and then within the realm of these playlists,

00:35:40 ◼   ► how do I define it?

00:35:41 ◼   ► Like, I use the All Episodes playlist, like I have modified it, because it's very close

00:35:46 ◼   ► to what I want, minus all the prioritization and the exclusions and stuff that I do, and

00:35:50 ◼   ► the manual reordering.

00:35:52 ◼   ► It's just a question of, once they understand that playlists are good, they say, "Well,

00:35:57 ◼   ► why?

00:35:58 ◼   ► they get into that setting screen, which is probably one of the more intimidating setting

00:36:01 ◼   ► screens in the app, and then understanding how can I get the result that I want.

00:36:07 ◼   ► Because I think, again, if people say they only have one or two or three priority podcasts,

00:36:13 ◼   ► if we force them to order all of them, would they have trouble or is there a second-class

00:36:20 ◼   ► citizen type of show where they never want to bubble up?

00:36:22 ◼   ► I feel like if you told anybody to say, "Rank all of your podcasts in order of how much

00:36:27 ◼   ► you like them. Yeah, maybe when you get down to the bottom it's weird, but I feel like

00:36:32 ◼   ► people could do a ranking. I don't even know if you need the two regions, but again, people

00:36:35 ◼   ► have disagreed on that. I just think that if you forced everyone to sort everything,

00:36:39 ◼   ► they would have a very similar experience to the current one where they sort one or

00:36:42 ◼   ► two or three and then everything else in a bucket. But either way, an interface that

00:36:45 ◼   ► makes it clear that you can do one or both of those things, or makes it clearer that

00:36:49 ◼   ► you can do one or both of those things would help a lot of people, because like you said,

00:36:52 ◼   ► I think a lot of people think that Playlist means more work for them when it's the exact

00:36:55 ◼   ► It means less, it means almost no work.

00:36:57 ◼   ► It means let the thing do the work for you,

00:36:59 ◼   ► and all you have to do is launch the app and hit play,

00:37:01 ◼   ► and it will just go through the podcast

00:37:02 ◼   ► in exactly the order that you want it to hear them.

00:37:05 ◼   ► - Right, I mean it's, like I thought of the word filter,

00:37:08 ◼   ► or something like that, like some other kind of word,

00:37:10 ◼   ► but again, it's overall, I still think playlist

00:37:14 ◼   ► is the best word for this feature,

00:37:15 ◼   ► and the fact that even after people know playlists,

00:37:20 ◼   ► that they still often are reluctant to use them

00:37:23 ◼   ► 'cause they never have used them in a podcast before.

00:37:26 ◼   ► I think it's just the kind of thing where

00:37:28 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to do my best.

00:37:29 ◼   ► You're right, that the Playlist Editor screen

00:37:31 ◼   ► is definitely not intuitive.

00:37:32 ◼   ► I definitely have some things I can improve there,

00:37:34 ◼   ► no question, I completely agree with you there.

00:37:37 ◼   ► But I also, I recognize the inherent complexity

00:37:40 ◼   ► in this concept and these capabilities.

00:37:43 ◼   ► And I don't know that there is a way

00:37:45 ◼   ► to make it easy enough to win over some of these people.

00:37:49 ◼   ► But I don't know, and I'll certainly play with it.

00:37:52 ◼   ► - All right, so why don't you tell me about

00:37:53 ◼   ► something that's cool.

00:37:55 ◼   ► - We are also sponsored this week by Backblaze,

00:37:57 ◼   ► our friends at Backblaze.

00:37:59 ◼   ► Backblaze is so simple.

00:38:00 ◼   ► It's $5 a month for unlimited, un-throttled,

00:38:03 ◼   ► uncomplicated online backup.

00:38:06 ◼   ► Your files that are available anywhere on your iOS devices.

00:38:09 ◼   ► If you have Android, I don't think they have Android app,

00:38:11 ◼   ► but who cares?

00:38:12 ◼   ► You probably have an iOS device.

00:38:13 ◼   ► I mean, let's be honest.

00:38:14 ◼   ► And if you disagree with that, please email Casey.

00:38:19 ◼   ► - No!

00:38:20 ◼   ► So anyway, Backblaze online backup,

00:38:23 ◼   ► really five bucks a month per computer.

00:38:25 ◼   ► And so for most of you, that's five bucks a month.

00:38:28 ◼   ► But it makes this more interesting.

00:38:29 ◼   ► So online backup, man, there are so many reasons

00:38:31 ◼   ► you should be doing online backup.

00:38:33 ◼   ► I've used Backblaze myself for years,

00:38:35 ◼   ► long before they were a sponsor.

00:38:36 ◼   ► I'm very glad they are a sponsor now

00:38:38 ◼   ► because it makes it easier for me to talk about them

00:38:39 ◼   ► 'cause I actually use them.

00:38:41 ◼   ► They're fantastic.

00:38:42 ◼   ► They're my favorite online backup service.

00:38:43 ◼   ► I've tried other ones.

00:38:44 ◼   ► They are by far my favorite.

00:38:46 ◼   ► And it just works.

00:38:49 ◼   ► like your uploads are unthrottled, which is great.

00:38:52 ◼   ► Like I had a throttling issue with another service

00:38:54 ◼   ► where I can upload with this awesome files connection

00:38:57 ◼   ► at 65 megabytes a second, which is awesome.

00:39:00 ◼   ► But this other one wouldn't take,

00:39:03 ◼   ► they would take it at like, you know,

00:39:03 ◼   ► 200 kilobits a second or something.

00:39:05 ◼   ► And Backblaze will upload,

00:39:07 ◼   ► it'll accept the files as quickly

00:39:09 ◼   ► as you're willing to send them.

00:39:10 ◼   ► So, you know, and you can devote certain percentage

00:39:12 ◼   ► of your bandwidth, but usually the client's smart enough

00:39:14 ◼   ► and you can just leave it running

00:39:15 ◼   ► and it'll do the right thing.

00:39:18 ◼   ► Online backup is really important because you never know what could happen.

00:39:21 ◼   ► You should always have local backups too because it's easy and fast to recover from them,

00:39:26 ◼   ► but worst case scenario you always know that you have this online backup ready if you need

00:39:32 ◼   ► it.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And you never know.

00:39:34 ◼   ► Like what if there's a fire or a flood or if you're in an apartment, what if the apartment

00:39:38 ◼   ► above you they have a water leak and then it leaks all over your computer and destroys

00:39:42 ◼   ► everything on your desk including your time machine drive?

00:39:44 ◼   ► That happens.

00:39:45 ◼   ► Ask people.

00:39:46 ◼   ► That happens all the time.

00:39:47 ◼   ► And so it's always good to have off-site backups to protect against things that happen

00:39:53 ◼   ► to your dwelling and therefore all the stuff that's plugged into your computer.

00:39:56 ◼   ► But off-site, usually everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to put something at my

00:40:00 ◼   ► parents' house and I'll cycle it out every few months."

00:40:03 ◼   ► And then you forget to do it and then it's out of date and you can maybe restore from

00:40:06 ◼   ► the backup you made once six years ago and that's no good.

00:40:09 ◼   ► So back-plays, you can just have it all in the cloud.

00:40:11 ◼   ► It's great.

00:40:12 ◼   ► They also have things like email notifications.

00:40:14 ◼   ► They can notify you if they haven't heard from your computer in a while, so that way

00:40:19 ◼   ► you aren't caught off guard.

00:40:21 ◼   ► It's a great service.

00:40:22 ◼   ► Go to backblaze.com.

00:40:23 ◼   ► That's backblaze.com/atp.

00:40:27 ◼   ► And you can get a 15-day free trial with no credit card required.

00:40:31 ◼   ► All you've got to do is enter an email, a password, and begin.

00:40:34 ◼   ► That's it.

00:40:35 ◼   ► There's no add-ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges.

00:40:37 ◼   ► Five bucks per computer per month.

00:40:39 ◼   ► That's it.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Unlimited, un-thraddled backup.

00:40:41 ◼   ► I've got like three terabytes up there.

00:40:42 ◼   ► The simplest backup, go to backblaze.com/atp.

00:40:45 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring our show once again.

00:40:49 ◼   ► So we should probably briefly touch on the Sapphire iPhone 6

00:40:56 ◼   ► screen that may not be Sapphire at all.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Is the show going to be all follow-up?

00:41:00 ◼   ► I think it might be.

00:41:01 ◼   ► It's possible.

00:41:03 ◼   ► So we talked an episode or two ago about a video

00:41:07 ◼   ► that somebody that we weren't familiar with,

00:41:10 ◼   ► whose name I've forgotten again--

00:41:11 ◼   ► That's why I put the link in there,

00:41:12 ◼   ► so we can give them credit this time.

00:41:13 ◼   ► - Thank you.

00:41:14 ◼   ► It is Marcus Brownlee.

00:41:17 ◼   ► - Is that how you pronounce his first name?

00:41:18 ◼   ► - No idea.

00:41:19 ◼   ► - M-A-R-Q-U-E-S.

00:41:20 ◼   ► - I'm going with Marcus.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Hopefully I'm right.

00:41:23 ◼   ► He put up a second video, which was actually,

00:41:24 ◼   ► I liked the first video,

00:41:26 ◼   ► but I thought the second one was even better.

00:41:28 ◼   ► And basically, he used a little bit of science

00:41:32 ◼   ► to explain why the screen is not actually made

00:41:36 ◼   ► of pure sapphire.

00:41:37 ◼   ► And I don't know if you guys have any commentary on that.

00:41:40 ◼   ► We'll link it in the show notes, but it's worth checking out.

00:41:43 ◼   ► It's a few minutes long.

00:41:44 ◼   ► - It was really good.

00:41:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was really, really good.

00:41:47 ◼   ► - I think a little bit of science is the correct modifier

00:41:50 ◼   ► for that description, however.

00:41:53 ◼   ► - Well, so what he did was basically,

00:41:55 ◼   ► so in the last video he had this leaked part

00:41:59 ◼   ► that was purported to be an iPhone 6 display cover glass.

00:42:03 ◼   ► And he showed in the first video

00:42:06 ◼   ► all these crazy stress tests of taking a knife to it,

00:42:09 ◼   ► bending it so it was almost like a U shape,

00:42:11 ◼   ► all this crazy stuff and it would not scratch

00:42:15 ◼   ► or crack or shatter.

00:42:17 ◼   ► It was just perfect.

00:42:18 ◼   ► Even after like bending it into U,

00:42:20 ◼   ► it still would not shatter.

00:42:21 ◼   ► And the knife test and everything would not scratch.

00:42:24 ◼   ► And so the problem is, as I've learned

00:42:28 ◼   ► and as I think most people have learned

00:42:29 ◼   ► if they look into it at all,

00:42:31 ◼   ► pure sapphire crystal is extremely strong

00:42:33 ◼   ► but it is not flexible.

00:42:34 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:42:36 ◼   ► Does that match what you guys have found?

00:42:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what my understanding is.

00:42:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it was, based on the incredible flexibility

00:42:44 ◼   ► of this panel that was being shown in the video,

00:42:45 ◼   ► it made it pretty unlikely that it was pure Sapphire.

00:42:48 ◼   ► There's also some concerns people have brought up

00:42:50 ◼   ► who are more familiar with manufacturing and stuff like that

00:42:53 ◼   ► that an all-Sapphire panel of that size

00:42:57 ◼   ► would also be pretty expensive.

00:42:59 ◼   ► And so it makes it less likely, not totally ruled out,

00:43:02 ◼   ► but it makes it less likely

00:43:03 ◼   ► that Apple would use an all-Sapphire panel.

00:43:06 ◼   ► But, so what this guy did, Marcus,

00:43:11 ◼   ► I hope I'm pronouncing that name right.

00:43:13 ◼   ► Anyway, what he did was he took the panel again

00:43:18 ◼   ► after reading these people saying,

00:43:20 ◼   ► hey, that might not be Sapphire.

00:43:21 ◼   ► And Sapphire has a very high hardness

00:43:24 ◼   ► on that diamond hardness scale.

00:43:26 ◼   ► And so he took sand papers of materials

00:43:29 ◼   ► that should be able to scratch or not scratch Sapphire

00:43:33 ◼   ► and showed it and actually scratched up.

00:43:36 ◼   ► I feel bad for the iPhone 5s he used.

00:43:37 ◼   ► He had an iPhone 5s that he actually--

00:43:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh my goodness.

00:43:41 ◼   ► - He took sandpaper through a 5s,

00:43:42 ◼   ► 'cause the 5s we know has a non-sapphire glass cover

00:43:46 ◼   ► on the screen, but a sapphire home button cover

00:43:49 ◼   ► over the Touch ID home button.

00:43:51 ◼   ► That's pure sapphire.

00:43:52 ◼   ► And so he took these sandpapers to it

00:43:54 ◼   ► and showed that they would scratch the glass,

00:43:57 ◼   ► but they would not scratch the sapphire Touch ID cover.

00:44:00 ◼   ► And then that same thing would scratch this new leaked part,

00:44:04 ◼   ► but not quite as much as it scratched the iPhone 5S.

00:44:07 ◼   ► So it appears as though this part that he has

00:44:11 ◼   ► is not pure sapphire because it's scratched more easily

00:44:15 ◼   ► than the Touch ID home button,

00:44:17 ◼   ► but it is much more strong against resisting scratches

00:44:22 ◼   ► than the glass currently on the iPhone.

00:44:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, so the reason I said

00:44:28 ◼   ► that he was using a little bit of science to this test

00:44:30 ◼   ► are a couple of reasons.

00:44:31 ◼   ► First, the sandpaper he was using, I'm not entirely sure that 100% of the particles glued

00:44:38 ◼   ► onto that piece of paper are of the material advertised on the sandpaper.

00:44:42 ◼   ► I have no idea what the quality control is on sandpaper things. I know that kids who are allergic

00:44:48 ◼   ► to nuts can't eat food that is manufactured in the same factory as nuts, which makes me believe that

00:44:52 ◼   ► there's a large possibility that there could be particles other than the ones advertised on those

00:44:56 ◼   ► pieces of sandpaper. So right away it's not a particularly controlled test for

00:45:00 ◼   ► hardness, you know, scientifically speaking. Second, the idea that the

00:45:06 ◼   ► Touch ID sensor is somehow pure sapphire or solid sapphire, or that is the only

00:45:11 ◼   ► material that's made out of, I'm not sure where that's coming from and the way he

00:45:17 ◼   ► tested it by kind of digging his finger into the little thing with the sandpaper

00:45:20 ◼   ► and trying to scratch it in the other little region. It's better

00:45:23 ◼   ► than not testing it at all, but it's not quite the same thing as being able to rub the sandpaper

00:45:28 ◼   ► on the giant surface of the 5S, because it's kind of down and a little divot and you don't

00:45:32 ◼   ► really have enough room to scratch back and forth, and it was hard to tell if he was making

00:45:36 ◼   ► any dent at all in that thing there.

00:45:39 ◼   ► The most clear test obviously was, same piece of sandpaper, 5S versus this new thing, new

00:45:44 ◼   ► thing better.

00:45:45 ◼   ► That's what we were missing in the first video, because all these impressive things he did

00:45:47 ◼   ► with it in the first video, the question was always, "Alright, fine, so how would a 5,

00:45:53 ◼   ► would an existing iPhone screen fare under the exact same test? Maybe it's exactly as

00:45:57 ◼   ► sturdy and what he was basically saying when he talked about the hardness scale is, yeah,

00:46:01 ◼   ► probably the regular iPhone screen probably would have fared just as well because he was

00:46:05 ◼   ► using soft metals that weren't going to scratch even glass no matter what. So this was a much

00:46:10 ◼   ► better test. Still doesn't tell us, you know, what we want to know is, is this really the

00:46:15 ◼   ► iPhone 6 thing? In terms of the pureness or real or full sapphire or whatever, as I said

00:46:21 ◼   ► on past shows, it seemed obvious that if they're gonna make something as big it was always

00:46:25 ◼   ► gonna have to either be a laminate or use some deposition process.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And we can't tell which one of those things they did, but like Marco said, the idea of

00:46:34 ◼   ► it being solid 100% sapphire all the way through would mean it would be much too brittle.

00:46:38 ◼   ► This thing was obviously not brittle.

00:46:39 ◼   ► So it's just a question of how thick is that top layer of sapphire?

00:46:42 ◼   ► Is it just, you know, atomized and, you know, heated and then deposited on there through

00:46:48 ◼   ► some process, like sort of coated with it?

00:46:51 ◼   ► Is it a separate thin layer of sapphire that's bonded to it in some way?

00:46:55 ◼   ► Are there multiple sapphire layers?

00:46:56 ◼   ► We have no idea what the manufacturing is, I'm sure.

00:46:59 ◼   ► If Apple wants to brag about it, they'll show us a cool slide and maybe some robots building

00:47:02 ◼   ► something and some layer sandwich things, who knows what they'll say.

00:47:05 ◼   ► But this video was more informative than the last, and I was kind of disappointed to see

00:47:12 ◼   ► ... I mean, we've thought about it for a while, kind of disappointed to see how easily sandpaper

00:47:17 ◼   ► scratches even the new one, because he wasn't even rubbing that hard.

00:47:20 ◼   ► It's like, well, at one point in the video, we said,

00:47:22 ◼   ► unless you have a high quality sandpaper in your pocket,

00:47:25 ◼   ► you don't have to worry about this.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Well, you know one thing that does go in pockets?

00:47:28 ◼   ► Sand.

00:47:29 ◼   ► If you go to the beach, you have sand in your pocket.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And so if the idea is like, this iPhone is indestructible,

00:47:38 ◼   ► I don't have to worry about anything

00:47:39 ◼   ► unless there happens to be, you know,

00:47:40 ◼   ► maybe it's because I'm from Long Island

00:47:42 ◼   ► and I just expect to have sand in my clothing pockets,

00:47:44 ◼   ► but I still would not put a naked iPhone

00:47:46 ◼   ► in my pocket with sand,

00:47:47 ◼   ► because you don't know what's mixed in with it.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Anyway, I look forward to the day someday

00:47:52 ◼   ► of being able to get a caseless iPhone

00:47:54 ◼   ► that is basically impervious to scratches

00:47:58 ◼   ► in any normal condition.

00:47:59 ◼   ► This one looks much more sturdy than the 5S by a long shot,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but I was kind of depressed to see how easily

00:48:06 ◼   ► he could scratch even the new one.

00:48:08 ◼   ► - Step one should be you should get an iPhone at all,

00:48:10 ◼   ► and then you can worry about it scratching us.

00:48:12 ◼   ► - What baby steps we're getting there.

00:48:13 ◼   ► We'll see what the iPhone 6 looks like.

00:48:15 ◼   ► I could get one, it's conceivable.

00:48:17 ◼   ► In fact, I wish I had one right now

00:48:18 ◼   ► for Yosemite handoff testing,

00:48:20 ◼   ► so I didn't have to take my wife's 5S

00:48:21 ◼   ► and upgrade it to iOS 8, which I still have not done yet.

00:48:24 ◼   ► - Do you wanna take a bet right now

00:48:26 ◼   ► on whether you will get one?

00:48:26 ◼   ► 'Cause I'm gonna bet no.

00:48:28 ◼   ► - I think it's like 50/50.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - Do you wanna take that bet?

00:48:32 ◼   ► - I don't know, I'm not gonna bet it.

00:48:33 ◼   ► Why am I betting?

00:48:34 ◼   ► Why would I, first of all, why would anyone take a bet

00:48:36 ◼   ► with me when I control the outcome?

00:48:38 ◼   ► - Because you don't control the outcome.

00:48:39 ◼   ► Your neurosis does.

00:48:41 ◼   ► - No, that's not accurate.

00:48:43 ◼   ► The amount of money you bet controls the outcome.

00:48:45 ◼   ► - I will bet you, for nothing,

00:48:48 ◼   ► just betting to be right. I will bet that you won't get it.

00:48:51 ◼   ► - I don't know. I haven't decided yet. We'll see.

00:48:54 ◼   ► Casey, do you think I'm going to get one?

00:48:56 ◼   ► - I'm going to abstain.

00:48:58 ◼   ► - Well then now it's just, all right, but we'll find out.

00:49:00 ◼   ► I mean, we also don't know what the product looks like

00:49:02 ◼   ► at this point. You don't even know whether you're getting

00:49:03 ◼   ► the big giant one or the regular one.

00:49:05 ◼   ► So we have to just wait to see what's what.

00:49:07 ◼   ► - I also, going back to the video just for a second,

00:49:10 ◼   ► I still maintain that we don't actually know

00:49:12 ◼   ► whether any Sapphire is involved with this thing at all.

00:49:15 ◼   ► this could just be another type of material,

00:49:18 ◼   ► you know, maybe something new from Corning,

00:49:20 ◼   ► you know, they make her a gorilla glass,

00:49:21 ◼   ► maybe it's like, you don't know, like this--

00:49:23 ◼   ► - Well, I said they could have used some sort of

00:49:24 ◼   ► mass spectrometer or something just to actually tell you

00:49:27 ◼   ► what elements are on the thing, like if you know,

00:49:29 ◼   ► if you wanna go full Dr. Drang on this, like,

00:49:31 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:49:32 ◼   ► we have the technology, we can actually find out

00:49:34 ◼   ► what exactly what the screen is made out of, if we care,

00:49:36 ◼   ► but you know, it's just people doing,

00:49:38 ◼   ► bending stuff on YouTube.

00:49:40 ◼   ► - The only thing that we know that,

00:49:43 ◼   ► the only thing that people are basing this on

00:49:45 ◼   ► is that Apple has built this giant sapphire plant

00:49:47 ◼   ► in Arizona, right, or they're invested in it.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Whatever they've done, they're involved

00:49:49 ◼   ► in a big sapphire plant.

00:49:51 ◼   ► But that might not be for this.

00:49:52 ◼   ► That might be for more touch ID sensors.

00:49:55 ◼   ► That might be for a potential iWatch cover or something.

00:49:58 ◼   ► Like that could be for so many other things

00:50:01 ◼   ► besides the iPhone cover glass.

00:50:04 ◼   ► And so I really don't think that we can assume yet.

00:50:07 ◼   ► I don't think there's enough information

00:50:09 ◼   ► to assume that Sapphire is being involved

00:50:11 ◼   ► with the screen at all.

00:50:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is a bit early.

00:50:14 ◼   ► We are also sponsored by our friends at Squarespace.

00:50:18 ◼   ► Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it both fast and easy to create your

00:50:23 ◼   ► own professional website portfolio and/or online store.

00:50:27 ◼   ► For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout.

00:50:34 ◼   ► A better web starts with your website.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Squarespace is simple and easy.

00:50:38 ◼   ► They have drag and drop content editing and blocks.

00:50:40 ◼   ► You can add a new block to the post, just drag it and drop it really simply.

00:50:43 ◼   ► You can drag and drop around your style.

00:50:45 ◼   ► You can change the way things look on your site.

00:50:47 ◼   ► They have beautiful design

00:50:49 ◼   ► that you can start with and customize.

00:50:51 ◼   ► You can inject HTML and JavaScript

00:50:53 ◼   ► all the way up to full graphical editing.

00:50:56 ◼   ► They have responsive design.

00:50:57 ◼   ► So all your designs look great on any size device

00:50:59 ◼   ► and they all look like your site.

00:51:01 ◼   ► They don't look like just some canned design

00:51:03 ◼   ► once you shrink down to iPhone size or anything like that.

00:51:06 ◼   ► They have 24/7 support through live chat and email

00:51:09 ◼   ► with representatives located in New York City

00:51:11 ◼   ► and Dublin, Ireland.

00:51:12 ◼   ► Plans start at just $8 a month,

00:51:14 ◼   ► and that includes a free domain

00:51:15 ◼   ► if you sign up for a whole year up front.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Squarespace also features commerce.

00:51:20 ◼   ► On all of their plans, if you want to,

00:51:22 ◼   ► you can add a store to your site.

00:51:24 ◼   ► You can sell digital or physical goods.

00:51:26 ◼   ► They have things like shipping, tracking,

00:51:28 ◼   ► and everything else all built in,

00:51:29 ◼   ► shopping carts, all that stuff that you'd expect.

00:51:31 ◼   ► Really great stuff with Squarespace commerce,

00:51:33 ◼   ► and that comes at no additional charge

00:51:34 ◼   ► with all of their plans if you want to use it.

00:51:37 ◼   ► You can start a trial with Squarespace today

00:51:39 ◼   ► with no credit card required.

00:51:40 ◼   ► a real free trial, no credit card.

00:51:43 ◼   ► All you gotta do is start building your website.

00:51:45 ◼   ► When you decide to sign up,

00:51:46 ◼   ► you can make sure to use offer code ATP

00:51:49 ◼   ► to get 10% off your first purchase

00:51:51 ◼   ► and to show your support for our show.

00:51:53 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Squarespace for your support.

00:51:56 ◼   ► Once again, they support lots of our shows,

00:51:58 ◼   ► lots of other people's shows,

00:51:59 ◼   ► and we really appreciate that quite a lot from them.

00:52:02 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Squarespace.

00:52:04 ◼   ► A better web starts with your website.

00:52:07 ◼   ► So last week when Marco was so selfish about the show and refused to move along

00:52:12 ◼   ► from Overcast,

00:52:13 ◼   ► there was some actually legitimate news about Apple and IBM and we didn't get a

00:52:20 ◼   ► chance to talk about that last week. We should probably talk about it now.

00:52:23 ◼   ► And so what happened was Apple and IBM announced a partnership, um, to,

00:52:27 ◼   ► I guess,

00:52:28 ◼   ► so IBM is going to kind of sell and push Apple stuff in the enterprise.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Is that, what's a better summary of this?

00:52:37 ◼   ► I think you got it.

00:52:39 ◼   ► All right.

00:52:41 ◼   ► So a lot of people were scratching their heads

00:52:44 ◼   ► on this one.

00:52:45 ◼   ► And for me, it was particularly interesting

00:52:47 ◼   ► because my dad just retired from IBM after a long, long time,

00:52:51 ◼   ► just a few weeks ago.

00:52:53 ◼   ► And unfortunately, even after pushing,

00:52:56 ◼   ► he either didn't have any insider information

00:52:59 ◼   ► he could share or refused to if he did have it.

00:53:03 ◼   ► But this is certainly an interesting partnership

00:53:06 ◼   ► and an interesting, I don't know,

00:53:08 ◼   ► reacquaintance of a couple of companies

00:53:11 ◼   ► that have been kind of flirting with each other

00:53:14 ◼   ► on and off for forever.

00:53:16 ◼   ► I don't know, John, what did you think about this?

00:53:19 ◼   ► - So in past shows and past podcasts,

00:53:23 ◼   ► I've talked a lot about enterprise entanglements

00:53:25 ◼   ► and how, you know, even on this podcast,

00:53:27 ◼   ► we've defined enterprise software

00:53:28 ◼   ► as software where the person who buys it

00:53:30 ◼   ► is not the person who uses it.

00:53:31 ◼   ► So the people who make it are motivated

00:53:33 ◼   ► to satisfy the buyer rather than user,

00:53:35 ◼   ► That's why the software is crappy.

00:53:38 ◼   ► And enterprise entanglement is when a company starts

00:53:40 ◼   ► deriving a lot of its profits or revenues

00:53:42 ◼   ► or both from serving the enterprise,

00:53:43 ◼   ► and then it becomes beholden to the small number of people

00:53:46 ◼   ► who determine whether software is satisfactory

00:53:49 ◼   ► to the enterprise rather than the large number of consumers

00:53:52 ◼   ► who might buy a product.

00:53:53 ◼   ► So it is worse to be beholden to a small number of companies

00:53:57 ◼   ► than to a small number of powerful people

00:53:58 ◼   ► in those companies.

00:53:59 ◼   ► It makes your products worse.

00:54:01 ◼   ► And then you get tied to them.

00:54:03 ◼   ► It's like golden handcuffs.

00:54:04 ◼   ► that's where you get most of your money from.

00:54:05 ◼   ► This happened to Microsoft a lot.

00:54:06 ◼   ► Some companies immediately just go completely

00:54:08 ◼   ► off the deep end on this, like SAP and Oracle,

00:54:11 ◼   ► and that's all they do is they, you know,

00:54:13 ◼   ► they don't sign a contract for less than five figures

00:54:16 ◼   ► and you know, want them to be six, seven, or eight figures

00:54:18 ◼   ► most of the time, and they have a huge sales force

00:54:21 ◼   ► that goes out there to sell these contracts,

00:54:24 ◼   ► and the software they make is terrible,

00:54:26 ◼   ► and everyone hates it, but they stay in,

00:54:27 ◼   ► like that's the worst case scenario, right?

00:54:29 ◼   ► So Apple's at the far other end of the spectrum.

00:54:31 ◼   ► They don't want anything to do

00:54:32 ◼   ► with these stupid enterprises.

00:54:33 ◼   ► They don't wanna deal with companies like that.

00:54:35 ◼   ► They don't want their softwares to get worse.

00:54:37 ◼   ► They don't want their agenda, their products,

00:54:39 ◼   ► their features, anything they do to be dictated

00:54:41 ◼   ► to a small number of people anywhere,

00:54:42 ◼   ► except for inside the company, obviously.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And so for all this time,

00:54:47 ◼   ► where we're talking about Apple doing its thing

00:54:48 ◼   ► with the iPods and the iPhones and their personal computers,

00:54:51 ◼   ► all this time, it's like, well, Apple doesn't wanna get

00:54:53 ◼   ► into that business where you sell like exchange servers.

00:54:55 ◼   ► And there was a brief dalliance with the Xserve

00:54:57 ◼   ► and OS X server that has mail servers and stuff like that,

00:55:00 ◼   ► but their heart was never in it.

00:55:01 ◼   ► They were never willing to do what enterprises want.

00:55:03 ◼   ► they want service contracts,

00:55:04 ◼   ► does Apple have value-added resellers?

00:55:06 ◼   ► They've had that as well,

00:55:07 ◼   ► but then they have their own official channels

00:55:09 ◼   ► and they have their business liaisons.

00:55:11 ◼   ► You could tell that Apple is just never willing

00:55:13 ◼   ► to do what it takes to serve the enterprise.

00:55:17 ◼   ► And if you've talked to anybody who does IT

00:55:18 ◼   ► in a big company, it's like my customers,

00:55:22 ◼   ► my users essentially, the employees of the company

00:55:24 ◼   ► want Apple hardware, but it's such a pain

00:55:25 ◼   ► in the ass to support, and Apple's tools aren't that great,

00:55:28 ◼   ► and getting anything from Apple is a pain,

00:55:30 ◼   ► and depending on which reseller you go through,

00:55:32 ◼   ► if you go through Apple directly, or you know.

00:55:34 ◼   ► I mean, Apple does what it has to do for the enterprise.

00:55:36 ◼   ► It did all that stuff in like iOS 3 or whatever it was

00:55:38 ◼   ► to integrate with Exchange servers

00:55:40 ◼   ► and to be better with the enterprise.

00:55:42 ◼   ► And they have enterprise app deployment

00:55:44 ◼   ► for their app stores.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Like they do, it's not like they do nothing.

00:55:48 ◼   ► It's not like they're willfully hostile to it.

00:55:51 ◼   ► But in general, their reputation in the enterprise

00:55:53 ◼   ► is not good.

00:55:54 ◼   ► That other companies do more for the enterprise than Apple.

00:55:56 ◼   ► And it's always been this thing.

00:55:57 ◼   ► Well, tough luck guys.

00:55:59 ◼   ► Apple doesn't want its company to be reshaped

00:56:03 ◼   ► by contact with the enterprise,

00:56:05 ◼   ► because direct contact with the enterprise

00:56:07 ◼   ► will reshape your company.

00:56:08 ◼   ► And so we're just kind of at the zim pass.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Apple doesn't want to take this business.

00:56:12 ◼   ► Microsoft currently has the business,

00:56:14 ◼   ► but it's not an interesting business to be in.

00:56:15 ◼   ► Nobody, even Google is kind of like half-hearted,

00:56:17 ◼   ► well, there's Google Apps for business.

00:56:20 ◼   ► You could use that instead of Office and Exchange.

00:56:22 ◼   ► But it's like, nobody wants that business.

00:56:24 ◼   ► It's a crappy business, except for Oracle and SAP

00:56:26 ◼   ► and Salesforce and Microsoft.

00:56:28 ◼   ► and Apple wasn't willing to take it.

00:56:30 ◼   ► And so we've been languishing in this place,

00:56:32 ◼   ► this weird place where nobody wants blackberries anymore.

00:56:35 ◼   ► Everyone hates Exchange and SharePoint,

00:56:37 ◼   ► but that's what we all use because no one is saying,

00:56:39 ◼   ► "Ooh, I wanna take that business from Microsoft.

00:56:41 ◼   ► I wanna pervert my company to the needs of enterprise IT."

00:56:44 ◼   ► It's just, it's poisonous if you like companies like Apple

00:56:49 ◼   ► and don't like companies like Oracle,

00:56:51 ◼   ► as every right thinking person should.

00:56:54 ◼   ► So this deal is basically Apple finally,

00:56:58 ◼   ► the important thing here is Apple is finally saying,

00:57:01 ◼   ► "All right, we'll take that business."

00:57:03 ◼   ► But we don't wanna touch it directly.

00:57:06 ◼   ► Now it's too big.

00:57:07 ◼   ► It's like, calculus must be,

00:57:10 ◼   ► we shouldn't just let Microsoft

00:57:12 ◼   ► have this business by default.

00:57:13 ◼   ► It shouldn't just go to Oracle and IBM

00:57:16 ◼   ► and say, why do they just get it by default?

00:57:18 ◼   ► It's a big business.

00:57:21 ◼   ► The people who work at these companies

00:57:22 ◼   ► want to use our products, we're not willing to do

00:57:25 ◼   ► what it takes directly to change our company

00:57:28 ◼   ► to be an enterprise company.

00:57:29 ◼   ► But now we were saying, we were raising our hands saying,

00:57:33 ◼   ► all right, we're gonna go after that business.

00:57:35 ◼   ► So no longer do all these other companies get it by default

00:57:38 ◼   ► because Apple is just no good at this.

00:57:40 ◼   ► And they've tapped IBM as their lucky partner to say,

00:57:43 ◼   ► we're not gonna touch it directly, you touch it directly,

00:57:46 ◼   ► but we're gonna sic you on them and say, go get 'em.

00:57:48 ◼   ► Go make every single company, you know,

00:57:51 ◼   ► Make them happy to use our products, right?

00:57:54 ◼   ► You sell them, you have Salesforce out there

00:57:56 ◼   ► doing all that thing, you do all those Icky Enterprise deals

00:57:59 ◼   ► they complain to you, not us, right?

00:58:01 ◼   ► You make the special applications

00:58:04 ◼   ► so they can integrate iPads with their business

00:58:06 ◼   ► and do all this other stuff or whatever.

00:58:07 ◼   ► We don't wanna deal with that.

00:58:08 ◼   ► And so when the customers complained to IBM

00:58:11 ◼   ► that that was the typical relationship

00:58:13 ◼   ► between IT and vendor, but IBM will be like,

00:58:15 ◼   ► "Well, we don't control what Apple does with their OS."

00:58:18 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, we'll tell them, we'll tell them

00:58:19 ◼   ► "you don't like it when they upgrade too fast

00:58:21 ◼   ► and screw over your users.

00:58:22 ◼   ► We'll tell them that you want them to keep making the iPad 2 forever,

00:58:24 ◼   ► like whatever, you know, but like, well, what can we do?

00:58:27 ◼   ► They're not, you know, it's not us, they're Apple.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Right. And so IBM is the go between there.

00:58:31 ◼   ► And IBM, of course, gets, you know, gets the money off the top of that.

00:58:34 ◼   ► They in theory get more business because now they are.

00:58:36 ◼   ► I think this is an exclusive relationship.

00:58:38 ◼   ► They are the exclusive gateway into the enterprise for all of Apple's stuff.

00:58:43 ◼   ► I'm not quite sure how this deal works in terms of the existing value

00:58:47 ◼   ► added resellers of Apple stuff and the existing, you know, retail chain

00:58:51 ◼   ► in business relationships or whatever, but theoretically,

00:58:54 ◼   ► at the time of the press release announcement,

00:58:57 ◼   ► it looks very much like Apple is now finally saying

00:59:00 ◼   ► that it wants in on the enterprise business,

00:59:02 ◼   ► and the way it has found to do it without ruining its own,

00:59:05 ◼   ► you know, ruining the company,

00:59:07 ◼   ► ruining everything that's good about the company,

00:59:08 ◼   ► is having a go-between, do all the dirty work for them.

00:59:11 ◼   ► - Well, you do realize that there is a Apple sales force

00:59:14 ◼   ► directly targeting enterprise, right?

00:59:17 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, no, yeah.

00:59:18 ◼   ► You can, I mean, it's better than it was before.

00:59:20 ◼   ► Like they will sell, you know,

00:59:21 ◼   ► they'll do your volume discounts,

00:59:23 ◼   ► they're like this the whole enterprise app score things,

00:59:25 ◼   ► they'll do the service,

00:59:26 ◼   ► you don't have to bring your stuff into,

00:59:27 ◼   ► it used to be that you had to bring your stuff

00:59:28 ◼   ► to the Apple store to get a VIX.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Now they have, you know, they're,

00:59:31 ◼   ► but the more you get into a business,

00:59:33 ◼   ► like they're sort of dipping their toe in all these things,

00:59:36 ◼   ► and it's like, well, Apple has that,

00:59:37 ◼   ► well, Apple kinda has that,

00:59:38 ◼   ► but they're not really good at it.

00:59:39 ◼   ► They're not really engaged in it

00:59:41 ◼   ► in the way these other companies are.

00:59:42 ◼   ► And so your choices were become engaged in it,

00:59:45 ◼   ► make this a big part of your business,

00:59:47 ◼   ► get serious about the enterprise,

00:59:49 ◼   ► Or, don't do that, have someone else do it for you.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And that sort of lets Apple continue to be Apple and be sort of wild and fancy-free and

00:59:57 ◼   ► run with flowers in its hair through the fields.

01:00:00 ◼   ► Well IBM has to be there signing these contracts and doing the support stuff and writing the

01:00:07 ◼   ► custom applications for the big companies.

01:00:09 ◼   ► And that's what IBM's doing anyway, right?

01:00:11 ◼   ► So IBM's more than happy to take this business.

01:00:14 ◼   ► If it works, it is a very clever solution to get some of that money that has been going

01:00:19 ◼   ► to these companies with "worse products" for just decades, without it changing what

01:00:28 ◼   ► Apple is, without changing all the things that are good about Apple for consumers and

01:00:32 ◼   ► stuff.

01:00:33 ◼   ► So I don't know if that can work.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Does adding a buffer make it okay and now it will work out?

01:00:38 ◼   ► Or is there more to it than that?

01:00:39 ◼   ► is that Apple will always be defeated by the companies

01:00:42 ◼   ► that are actually willing to do what enterprises

01:00:45 ◼   ► want directly, and maybe IBM will not be able

01:00:48 ◼   ► to convince people, or not be able to do enough on its own

01:00:52 ◼   ► to make Apple more palatable to the enterprise.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Like, the past strategy was, we'll just make our stuff

01:00:56 ◼   ► so good that IT companies will have to choke down

01:00:58 ◼   ► whatever we do, and we'll do a little bit to support them,

01:01:00 ◼   ► but we're never gonna do what those other companies do.

01:01:02 ◼   ► - What I don't understand is, I don't see how this

01:01:07 ◼   ► can really make a big difference

01:01:09 ◼   ► until the support strategy changes pretty dramatically.

01:01:13 ◼   ► And I'm looking at the press release and it says,

01:01:15 ◼   ► and I'm quoting, "Mobile service and support.

01:01:17 ◼   ► AppleCare for Enterprise will provide IT departments

01:01:19 ◼   ► and end users with 24/7 assistance

01:01:21 ◼   ► from Apple's award-winning customer support group

01:01:24 ◼   ► with onsite service delivered by IBM."

01:01:26 ◼   ► And I can tell you that I work in pretty small firms

01:01:29 ◼   ► and most of the reason that I've ever heard

01:01:33 ◼   ► for us to buy Dell's,

01:01:34 ◼   ► which all the companies have ever worked for,

01:01:36 ◼   ► almost exclusively, generally favored Dells over anything else.

01:01:40 ◼   ► And the reason was, or the primary reason was, either that they were very cheap, or

01:01:46 ◼   ► if something breaks, the next business day, there is a Dell repair service person, operative,

01:01:53 ◼   ► whatever, in the office replacing what's broken, or just handing us a new computer.

01:01:59 ◼   ► And without that kind of just immediate service, I don't know if this will ever really take

01:02:04 ◼   ► off.

01:02:05 ◼   ► of what you just read that IBM is supposed to provide.

01:02:07 ◼   ► IBM provides onsite service.

01:02:09 ◼   ► 'Cause like that's exactly the type of thing

01:02:10 ◼   ► that Apple as a company is not equipped to do,

01:02:13 ◼   ► to provide that for all of enterprise

01:02:14 ◼   ► that is not built that way.

01:02:15 ◼   ► But IBM is built that way.

01:02:17 ◼   ► They'll send a guy.

01:02:18 ◼   ► That's what IBM has is guys to send.

01:02:21 ◼   ► - Right, and that's what I'm kinda asking.

01:02:24 ◼   ► And we don't know the answer,

01:02:25 ◼   ► it was a semi-rhetorical question.

01:02:26 ◼   ► But until this Apple Care for Enterprise

01:02:29 ◼   ► gets more concretely defined,

01:02:32 ◼   ► I don't know if I really see this making a big difference,

01:02:35 ◼   ► Unless it really is doing all the things that these Dell, you know, Tiger team people come in and do

01:02:41 ◼   ► Well, yeah, I mean again, we're at the press release stage

01:02:44 ◼   ► so we have nothing concrete to go in here right but at the press release stage like

01:02:48 ◼   ► IBM is not unfamiliar with doing all those things you just described that Dell did like

01:02:53 ◼   ► that is IBM is exactly that kind of company for this type of stuff and it's just I

01:03:00 ◼   ► I would have to assume that the whole point is IBM is going to do all those things,

01:03:03 ◼   ► that all the things that Apple either wouldn't do or wouldn't do as enthusiastically

01:03:07 ◼   ► or wouldn't give the same guarantees about, and IBM will make the, you know,

01:03:11 ◼   ► the contracts that you sign that specify exactly what this stuff is and lets you pay

01:03:16 ◼   ► through the nose so that you can get a laptop repaired or replaced with one business day's

01:03:21 ◼   ► notice if that's part of your service contract or whatever.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Like all these enterprising things that, I mean, because it takes so much to do that,

01:03:26 ◼   ► So much hand-holding, so much salesmanship,

01:03:29 ◼   ► so much relationship, dealing with the relationship

01:03:31 ◼   ► for these big companies, that's just not Apple's forte.

01:03:34 ◼   ► That's not what the company's built around it.

01:03:36 ◼   ► And having someone else do it for you

01:03:38 ◼   ► goes a long way towards making it possible.

01:03:40 ◼   ► You're still left with the problem of,

01:03:42 ◼   ► okay, well, what about service and support

01:03:44 ◼   ► and OS upgrades and compatibility

01:03:46 ◼   ► and all this other stuff that Apple,

01:03:47 ◼   ► generally Apple's too busy running forward.

01:03:49 ◼   ► We can't look back.

01:03:50 ◼   ► I don't care what we're breaking.

01:03:52 ◼   ► We're just running forward as fast as we can

01:03:53 ◼   ► because that's how we win the race in the consumer space

01:03:55 ◼   ► and that's ultimately where we win everything.

01:03:58 ◼   ► So this is probably not going to slow Apple down

01:04:00 ◼   ► from that race, but at least someone's left

01:04:02 ◼   ► holding the bag and that's IBM having to apologize

01:04:05 ◼   ► for Apple, explain things, and IBM perhaps

01:04:07 ◼   ► to bend over backwards and make things better

01:04:09 ◼   ► for the people who are having problems.

01:04:11 ◼   ► - All right, what else is going on?

01:04:14 ◼   ► Marco, you don't have any thoughts about the enterprise?

01:04:17 ◼   ► - Nope, not at all.

01:04:19 ◼   ► I figured this would be a good time for me

01:04:21 ◼   ► to give everyone a break from me.

01:04:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:04:24 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

01:04:25 ◼   ► Is there anything else going on?

01:04:26 ◼   ► Or are we done?

01:04:28 ◼   ► - There was some real time follow up on Sand.

01:04:30 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

01:04:31 ◼   ► - Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.

01:04:33 ◼   ► Cotton Bureau, Backblaze, and Squarespace.

01:04:36 ◼   ► And we will see you next week.

01:04:38 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:04:43 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:04:46 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:04:48 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:04:49 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:04:50 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:04:52 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:04:56 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)

01:04:59 ◼   ► It was accidental (accidental)

01:05:02 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:05:07 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:05:12 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:05:16 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:05:21 ◼   ► Anti-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C

01:05:26 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse

01:05:28 ◼   ► It's accidental

01:05:30 ◼   ► (It's accidental)

01:05:32 ◼   ► They didn't mean to

01:05:34 ◼   ► Accidental (Accidental)

01:05:36 ◼   ► Tech broadcast

01:05:38 ◼   ► So long

01:05:40 ◼   ► I forgot what the real time follow up on the sand was, I lost it

01:05:44 ◼   ► Scroll back in the

01:05:46 ◼   ► Let's do this.

01:05:49 ◼   ► My own sand story that I think I told before is when I brought my aluminum PowerBook G4

01:05:55 ◼   ► to an Apple store, to the Genius Bar, and the guy slid it like two inches across the

01:06:00 ◼   ► Genius Bar to himself, and there was one grain of sand underneath that laptop.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And it went, "Shh."

01:06:06 ◼   ► Someone was talking about sand is mostly made of softer materials.

01:06:11 ◼   ► It doesn't take much.

01:06:12 ◼   ► takes one grain of sand in the wrong place,

01:06:15 ◼   ► rubbing the wrong way, to make a nice little scratch.

01:06:17 ◼   ► And nobody cares about that.

01:06:19 ◼   ► That's the worst thing that can happen.

01:06:20 ◼   ► Like, my Apple Thunderbolt display

01:06:22 ◼   ► has been back to the Apple Store three times

01:06:24 ◼   ► to fix various problems.

01:06:26 ◼   ► It is now fully functional, but those three trips

01:06:28 ◼   ► to and from the Apple Store have left scars on it.

01:06:30 ◼   ► And the people in the Apple Store

01:06:33 ◼   ► are super careful compared to the people at Best Buy, right?

01:06:37 ◼   ► But they're not as careful as I would be.

01:06:40 ◼   ► No one will be as careful as I would be.

01:06:42 ◼   ► And even I would accidentally damage it eventually.

01:06:44 ◼   ► It's just this, you know, big heavy things being manipulated.

01:06:47 ◼   ► Aluminum is not as hard as Sapphire, let's just say.

01:06:52 ◼   ► Yeah, things scratch, it's tough.

01:06:55 ◼   ► And a scratch like that, no one will take you seriously

01:06:58 ◼   ► if you explain that you're upset that it has a scratch.

01:07:01 ◼   ► Oh, you can barely see it.

01:07:02 ◼   ► But I mean, maybe Mac users will understand.

01:07:07 ◼   ► Do you care that your laptops get stretched?

01:07:09 ◼   ► - Oh, absolutely.

01:07:10 ◼   ► to care a lot more. I mean like my first Mac was it was a PowerBook G4 aluminum

01:07:14 ◼   ► and I sold it after about three years of using it and it looked brand new. Like it

01:07:22 ◼   ► had it didn't have the keyboard marks on the screen like so many of them did

01:07:25 ◼   ► because I read early on that if you put it like in a backpack facing out versus

01:07:30 ◼   ► facing in then it wouldn't get the mark so the screen wasn't being squeezed in

01:07:33 ◼   ► that way. And in the even like I had I didn't have a dedicated laptop bag I

01:07:39 ◼   ► I just had a backpack that was just a general purpose backpack.

01:07:43 ◼   ► And so I kind of fashioned this big felt pocket that I inserted this felt sleeve into one

01:07:49 ◼   ► of the pockets and made that a dedicated laptop pocket.

01:07:52 ◼   ► And it only ever had this big thick black felt in it with it.

01:07:55 ◼   ► And so this thing was pristine.

01:07:58 ◼   ► Even when I was using it, it was usually connected to a keyboard and mouse and monitor.

01:08:02 ◼   ► So the keyboard wasn't even worn away or all greased up.

01:08:05 ◼   ► It looked brand new when I sold it.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Since then though, I've only used laptops for travel and stuff, which is happening more

01:08:14 ◼   ► now as I'm an adult and keep doing family stuff.

01:08:18 ◼   ► So now my machines don't stay that pristine, and it kind of makes me upset.

01:08:23 ◼   ► They're still very good.

01:08:24 ◼   ► I would say they're still far and away the top one percentile of condition for age, but

01:08:31 ◼   ► that doesn't mean much these days because I see some that are ridiculously bad.

01:08:36 ◼   ► Yeah, so that's what's worst about a thing like a monitor.

01:08:39 ◼   ► It's supposed to just be sitting on a desk.

01:08:40 ◼   ► In theory, it comes to your house, you unpack it, it's perfect at that point, you hope,

01:08:44 ◼   ► you put it on your desk, and then you never touch it again.

01:08:46 ◼   ► It's a monitor.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Maybe you touch it to adjust the angle every once in a while, but in general, it's like

01:08:51 ◼   ► a desktop monitor.

01:08:52 ◼   ► It's not going anywhere.

01:08:53 ◼   ► And so to have that big, heavy thing make three trips to and from the back of an Apple

01:08:57 ◼   ► store, it's inevitably going to come out with little nicks and scratches that you won't

01:09:01 ◼   ► see.

01:09:02 ◼   ► No one will see them.

01:09:03 ◼   ► No one will know they're there.

01:09:04 ◼   ► You're just looking at the picture on the screen, right?

01:09:05 ◼   ► there, there. I know where they are. You just try to forget it. I mean, it could be worse.

01:09:09 ◼   ► It could be like the bad old days of the Apple 22-inch Cinema Display with the big, clear

01:09:15 ◼   ► two little feet and dead pixels. And then, you know, that's just like, yeah, I still

01:09:19 ◼   ► remember where the dead pixels were. I could point to them right now on my screen. I had

01:09:22 ◼   ► one there and one there.

01:09:23 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:09:24 ◼   ► Well, and it's also, it's not great too, like with the current Mac, the iMacs, and I think

01:09:29 ◼   ► the Cinema Displays are the same thing where the construction is such that, like with yours,

01:09:34 ◼   ► they were probably working on the logic board

01:09:36 ◼   ► that has the little peripherals and stuff plugged into it.

01:09:40 ◼   ► They weren't working on the panel.

01:09:41 ◼   ► But if you're working on an iMac,

01:09:44 ◼   ► the way you work on an iMac is you take the screen off,

01:09:46 ◼   ► like you suck the glass off with these suction cups,

01:09:49 ◼   ► and then you lift the whole screen out to get to the inside.

01:09:53 ◼   ► That's how you get into these things.

01:09:55 ◼   ► And so the chances of you putting that screen back

01:09:58 ◼   ► exactly right while making not only no scratches

01:10:01 ◼   ► but leaving no dust anywhere

01:10:03 ◼   ► and like no dust getting between the layers

01:10:04 ◼   ► and getting in there.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Like there's, the chances of that going perfectly

01:10:08 ◼   ► are pretty remote.

01:10:10 ◼   ► - I think Apple stores have special rigs

01:10:12 ◼   ► just solely for that purpose to vacuum out,

01:10:14 ◼   ► blow out any dust because I've been, again,

01:10:16 ◼   ► three trips and every single time this glass has come off,

01:10:18 ◼   ► every single time they've separated the glass from the,

01:10:20 ◼   ► like you have to to get at the insides, right?

01:10:22 ◼   ► They weren't touching that part, but you know,

01:10:26 ◼   ► there could have been dust every single time.

01:10:28 ◼   ► And every time I got it back, I would dread looking at it

01:10:29 ◼   ► and seeing some piece of dust trapped over there.

01:10:32 ◼   ► They have not done that, but the little nicks on the aluminum thing, like, I mean, these

01:10:36 ◼   ► are really tiny nicks that, again, people would think you're crazy for saying you even

01:10:40 ◼   ► noticed, but, you know, if you're that type of person, you just have to put it out in

01:10:43 ◼   ► your mind, like, dead pixels, like, what are you gonna do about it?

01:10:45 ◼   ► There's nothing you can do about it.

01:10:46 ◼   ► You're not gonna complain and say, "I want a new thing because you put this microscopic

01:10:50 ◼   ► nick on it," right?

01:10:52 ◼   ► It kind of reminds me of, like, the worst experience I had, like, this was when I was

01:10:55 ◼   ► a kid and I had my Mac SE30, which was my favorite Mac ever, but when I first got it,

01:11:02 ◼   ► The power supply had a whine, like a high-pitched whine, you know, I don't know if it was a

01:11:06 ◼   ► transformer or whatever it was that was causing the noise.

01:11:11 ◼   ► But I remember I was coming off a Mac Plus at that point, which has no fans in it.

01:11:17 ◼   ► That was a great machine.

01:11:19 ◼   ► Yeah, the 128, 512 and the Plus didn't have fans in them.

01:11:23 ◼   ► The SE30 I'm pretty sure had a fan, but also the power supply one was the dominant noise.

01:11:29 ◼   ► I don't know if it had a fan, I have to look that up.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And it was loud enough that I complained about it.

01:11:35 ◼   ► And we brought it back to not an Apple store, because they didn't exist, to our Apple retail

01:11:40 ◼   ► store and said, "Hey, this thing makes a high-pitched whining noise."

01:11:44 ◼   ► And everyone at the Apple store claimed they could not hear it.

01:11:47 ◼   ► And the thing is, I believe them, because when you get older, you lose the high frequencies,

01:11:51 ◼   ► right?

01:11:52 ◼   ► Yep.

01:11:53 ◼   ► And so they probably couldn't hear it.

01:11:54 ◼   ► But here I am whining to my parents and the people like, "Trust me, I know you can't hear

01:12:00 ◼   ► But I can because I'm 12 years old and it's really annoying and it just could you just replace the power supply and just

01:12:07 ◼   ► They never did anything about it. We took it to a different place

01:12:10 ◼   ► Which is I guess you could still deal with Apple stores take it to a different Apple store

01:12:13 ◼   ► They did replace the power supply and it was silent and I was happy

01:12:16 ◼   ► But for a while I was like I thought I was being gaslighted

01:12:19 ◼   ► Like I thought I was going insane like no one else can hear this noise, but you can hear it

01:12:23 ◼   ► My computer is haunted

01:12:23 ◼   ► Well, I feel the same way about these nicks like no one else can even see these nicks

01:12:26 ◼   ► But you insisted they're there and further you insisted. This is a problem

01:12:29 ◼   ► Well, that's one of the benefits of getting a used car because the BMW I bought used and

01:12:36 ◼   ► it had a couple of very, very, very minor nicks, for lack of a better word.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And that has some amount of freedom associated with it because the car has already been "tainted".

01:12:50 ◼   ► And so if something appears, it's, well, okay, it's already been nicked here and nicked there

01:12:56 ◼   ► and it's not the end of the earth.

01:12:58 ◼   ► And that's actually been, to some degree, a little bit of a nicer experience.

01:13:04 ◼   ► Now with that said, I still park in the furthest most corner of the parking lot like a jerk,

01:13:08 ◼   ► but at least I do it in only one spot.

01:13:10 ◼   ► Well, wait until you have kids, then you'll get chocolate ground into your seats, like

01:13:13 ◼   ► I just found when I cleaned my car this weekend.

01:13:15 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

01:13:16 ◼   ► When we got my new car, I was also kind of putting off getting a new car until after

01:13:21 ◼   ► the kids were out of big car backseat-destroying car seats, right?

01:13:25 ◼   ► They just don't like you know like the little booster seats that you know that just raise you up so the

01:13:30 ◼   ► What do you call it the shoulder harness doesn't go across your neck right and those don't strap in and it's like oh

01:13:35 ◼   ► there should be no problem here, but

01:13:37 ◼   ► food and other crap

01:13:39 ◼   ► Finds its way between the little booster and your actual seat, and then it gets ground into the fabric

01:13:44 ◼   ► So I'm there trying to get that stuff out this weekend

01:13:47 ◼   ► And then of course then putting their muddy dirty feet all over the back of your of the front seats of your car kids kids

01:13:52 ◼   ► Destroy cars. There's no way around it

01:13:54 ◼   ► So you have that to look forward to yeah, I'm looking forward to it

01:13:57 ◼   ► I mean the good news is you know, like I mean my kid is like

01:14:00 ◼   ► 2.25 ish right now and

01:14:03 ◼   ► You know, he still is not old enough to destroy the car. He can't reach the the back of your seats yet

01:14:08 ◼   ► He's not kicking you in the back while you're driving yet, right?

01:14:10 ◼   ► He's still real he's still rear-facing but it were he could be getting to the point where he's kicking the the seat back

01:14:14 ◼   ► Not your seat back, but the other one

01:14:16 ◼   ► Yeah, he's able to do that, but we don't notice and and I have like this this like cover over it

01:14:21 ◼   ► So, you know, it's no big deal. Yeah, this covers those covers are expensive and I I almost got them several times

01:14:27 ◼   ► But I was like it was like 15 bucks

01:14:29 ◼   ► Well like the big fancy ones like if you buy like the the branded ones like the BMW branded or the Honda branded full

01:14:35 ◼   ► Well, you don't get those full full backseat cover. Well, they're good. My brother has one like they the full

01:14:39 ◼   ► Yeah, but they're fitted to your car

01:14:40 ◼   ► They're super thick

01:14:41 ◼   ► But I'm just always worried about something getting caught between the cover and the seat and then that's just like, you know

01:14:47 ◼   ► Recipe for disaster you guys two giant things are rubbing. It's again the grind to get into the actual fabric. It's the bra problem. Yep

01:14:53 ◼   ► Without the tan lines all you probably get tan lines from that too depending on how much UV gets into the the cabin of the car

01:14:59 ◼   ► Anyway titles Oh

01:15:04 ◼   ► Sorting my vote. It's not optional. It's mandatory, but that's fine. Cuz that's the only way I probably want to sort it

01:15:09 ◼   ► Anyway, well see I actually like to have both like I like to be able to sort by most recent so I can troll through

01:15:14 ◼   ► the most recent ones and vote them up as the show goes on. Otherwise, now we have a rich

01:15:20 ◼   ► get richer problem.

01:15:21 ◼   ► I can make a Safari extension or a Chrome extension that just throws the jQuery data

01:15:26 ◼   ► tables at this table and gives some sorting.

01:15:29 ◼   ► You're done.

01:15:30 ◼   ► It's one library. You just pointed at the other one. I'm like, "Everything's sortable."

01:15:35 ◼   ► Ay yi yi. You're the worst.

01:15:37 ◼   ► I like the arrows, though.

01:15:39 ◼   ► I thought you might like the arrows.

01:15:40 ◼   ► They still don't look like buttons. Can you put them in a circle or a little rounded brick?

01:15:44 ◼   ► Are you-- what?

01:15:45 ◼   ► I got to try to aim for a skinny little button.

01:15:47 ◼   ► My cursor doesn't even--

01:15:49 ◼   ► what's the click area on this thing?

01:15:51 ◼   ► Let's see.

01:15:51 ◼   ► It's like--

01:15:52 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:15:55 ◼   ► Oh, it's moving too much.

01:15:56 ◼   ► I can't-- let's see.

01:15:56 ◼   ► I'm going to make these damn arrows like 72 points wide.

01:16:01 ◼   ► You just got to have-- like, the click area is not bad.

01:16:03 ◼   ► The click area is not the width of the arrow.

01:16:04 ◼   ► It's a little bit wider.

01:16:05 ◼   ► But if you highlighted the click area when the little cursor

01:16:08 ◼   ► went over it-- anyway.

01:16:10 ◼   ► And the arrows don't line up because the numbers

01:16:12 ◼   ► or left align instead of right align.

01:16:14 ◼   ► So like the one in 13 is right above the eight in eight.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Whereas the eight should be underneath the three.

01:16:20 ◼   ► - Always something to complain about.

01:16:22 ◼   ► - I posted into the chat room in the beginning

01:16:24 ◼   ► when I first loaded the page and there was no titles on it.

01:16:27 ◼   ► The headings, votes, title, author, time.

01:16:29 ◼   ► It said it was like titles, vote, title, author, time.

01:16:33 ◼   ► Like it was a sentence 'cause they were all squished together

01:16:35 ◼   ► 'cause they had nothing in it

01:16:36 ◼   ► and there was no amendments in that.

01:16:37 ◼   ► Anyway, UI is hard.

01:16:39 ◼   ► - I'm finding, I must have some sort of client side issue

01:16:42 ◼   ► because occasionally the two tables kind of decide

01:16:44 ◼   ► to mate with each other.

01:16:46 ◼   ► - Right now I have links in the titles table that kind of--

01:16:50 ◼   ► - I don't know why that keeps happening.

01:16:51 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to play with that.

01:16:53 ◼   ► If you refresh the page, it'll straighten itself out,

01:16:55 ◼   ► but I will definitely have to look at that.

01:16:56 ◼   ► - I'm afraid it'll crash if I refresh the page.

01:16:58 ◼   ► - Oh, stop it.

01:17:00 ◼   ► Stop it.

01:17:01 ◼   ► You had your moment, you're done, that was kind of funny,

01:17:04 ◼   ► but I don't think that's good.

01:17:06 ◼   ► I don't think that's a good title.

01:17:07 ◼   ► - If you do that one, you can use a semicolon in the title.

01:17:10 ◼   ► - I don't like semicolon.

01:17:11 ◼   ► Well, you can't use a comma. That would be a comma splice.

01:17:15 ◼   ► These tiles are all moving around as they sort, which makes it hard to pull.

01:17:19 ◼   ► No, what do you want, people? You only get to pick one.

01:17:23 ◼   ► No, you can have both. You can have sorting and you just have manual refresh.

01:17:27 ◼   ► Oh, that's terrible. You don't need to use WebSockets. Now it's no longer a feature.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Yeah, now you've eliminated the whole point in using WebSockets in the first place.

01:17:35 ◼   ► I hate you, John Saracusa. You should just add a setting, add a preference.

01:17:39 ◼   ► That's what everyone tells me to do just add a setting for everything

01:17:42 ◼   ► Maybe a pause button to pause updates and then resume them later

01:17:45 ◼   ► You got to figure out which of those things you want. I like it's always the butt. That is pretty good

01:17:51 ◼   ► Actually, I do like that one. Mmm. I don't remember that. What was that? I thought you said it you did say it

01:17:58 ◼   ► I don't remember a lot of what I say. Yeah

01:18:00 ◼   ► Sorry, we do the chat room records it for us. So you don't have to remember

01:18:08 ◼   ► My email account for the listeners paying attention to what I say in different podcasts is currently

01:18:13 ◼   ► 1923 unread, but I answered about 200 of them today

01:18:16 ◼   ► So I had crossed 2000

01:18:19 ◼   ► There's a couple of people on Twitter who are like tracking the order in which I recorded the various podcasts

01:18:23 ◼   ► I've been on because I keep saying like oh I have 300 unread messages and then no I have 900 messages and the number

01:18:29 ◼   ► Keeps going up

01:18:31 ◼   ► Assume you're never answering answering any of them, I guess

01:18:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean the fact is they're coming in faster than I'm answering them. Like my my my strategy was

01:18:39 ◼   ► rather than

01:18:42 ◼   ► Spend like three days just answering email. I would instead read many of them read all of Twitter and

01:18:50 ◼   ► Fix as many problems as I possibly could

01:18:53 ◼   ► by shipping an update like so actually writing the update testing the update and shipping the update to Apple and

01:18:58 ◼   ► Then start tackling the email inbox so I can then tell people rather than I'm working on this

01:19:04 ◼   ► I can actually tell people I fixed this, you know and actually give them useful news and you know

01:19:09 ◼   ► The update isn't out yet

01:19:11 ◼   ► But I can at least say I

01:19:12 ◼   ► Fixed this in the update that submitted to Apple and should be out soon like some people I'm able to say that so I have

01:19:17 ◼   ► a whole bunch of text expander shortcuts and

01:19:20 ◼   ► I'm going through the email now and some people get text expanded some people get a custom thing

01:19:25 ◼   ► Oh, you're gonna get support person to do that

01:19:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm bringing on support person, but I wanted to get through the initial batch myself

01:19:33 ◼   ► Just have Adam do it.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Got time for him to start earning his keep.

01:19:38 ◼   ► Just bang on the keyboard with his hands.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Every once in a while you hit send.

01:19:42 ◼   ► Problem solved.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Oh, that would be fantastic.

01:19:46 ◼   ► Adam's free ride is over.

01:19:49 ◼   ► Do you guys have, or have you been watching Halt and Catch Fire, whatever the hell that thing is called?

01:19:54 ◼   ► No.

01:19:55 ◼   ► Do you know what I'm talking about?

01:19:56 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about. That show looked terrible to me.

01:19:59 ◼   ► to me. I've heard it's amazing. I've not seen a single frame of it in any capacity and I've

01:20:04 ◼   ► heard it's great. I've seen all the ads and it was like, I know what the show is about.

01:20:09 ◼   ► I know a lot of this history from reading it in books and they make it sound like, it's

01:20:13 ◼   ► like, well, the actual story is not enough. And they're probably right. The actual story

01:20:17 ◼   ► isn't enough unless you're a nerd. So we've got to jazz it up. And it's just like, no,

01:20:21 ◼   ► that's not, that is not what computer work is like. That's not what engineering is like.

01:20:24 ◼   ► not what's exciting about it. Terrible. What is this the story of?

01:20:29 ◼   ► A Compaq clean room cloning the IBM PC. Oh yeah, okay. There's, what is it, a TV show?

01:20:35 ◼   ► A movie? Yeah, it's like a series or miniseries. But

01:20:38 ◼   ► it's supposed to be like in the Mad Men vein of like, "Oh, it's a period piece because

01:20:41 ◼   ► it's the 80s, right? And the reverse engineering thing that's so dramatic." I mean, it was

01:20:45 ◼   ► dramatic and technically interesting and it changed the industry, but not in a way that

01:20:49 ◼   ► anyone that regular people would be interested in. So they have to make it all exciting and

01:20:53 ◼   ► the nerds are super good looking and exciting

01:20:56 ◼   ► and it's dramatic and everything's happening in the dark

01:20:58 ◼   ► instead of just like these pudgy, you know,

01:21:00 ◼   ► pale losers with acne pouring over technical manuals

01:21:04 ◼   ► and programming 'cause like no one wants to see that,

01:21:06 ◼   ► but that's how it actually gets done.

01:21:08 ◼   ► No one wants to know how the sausage is actually made.

01:21:10 ◼   ► - Silicon Valley's actually pretty good.

01:21:12 ◼   ► - No, it is not.

01:21:13 ◼   ► - I finally watched it.

01:21:14 ◼   ► I really enjoyed it.

01:21:15 ◼   ► - It is not, well, first of all,

01:21:17 ◼   ► we can all agree that it is not representative

01:21:18 ◼   ► of anything related to technology.

01:21:19 ◼   ► Second-- - No, but it's,

01:21:21 ◼   ► I think it's funny in a Mike Judge kind of way.

01:21:23 ◼   ► - No.

01:21:24 ◼   ► - Like the way it makes fun of Silicon Valley,

01:21:27 ◼   ► I think is really good and smart.

01:21:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it's making fun of a caricature

01:21:32 ◼   ► of Silicon Valley, it doesn't exist.

01:21:33 ◼   ► When there's plenty of legitimate things

01:21:35 ◼   ► you can make fun of from the real Silicon Valley.

01:21:37 ◼   ► And that's what, like I think Beavis and Butthead

01:21:39 ◼   ► was funnier, I think King of the Hill was funnier

01:21:41 ◼   ► to pick two more Mike Judge properties.

01:21:43 ◼   ► This is probably funnier than Idiocracy,

01:21:45 ◼   ► but Idiocracy was more incisive.

01:21:47 ◼   ► - I would say this is like between Idiocracy

01:21:52 ◼   ► like a king of the hill in it is a social commentary on this part of our culture, no question.

01:22:00 ◼   ► And a pretty good one at that. Yes, it is exaggerated and ridiculous, but it is a pretty good social commentary.

01:22:06 ◼   ► And it's also pretty funny.

01:22:08 ◼   ► I don't know if the total exclusion of human females is supposed to be a commentary or just accidental.

01:22:13 ◼   ► I believe that's intentional.

01:22:15 ◼   ► It's hard to tell, because occasionally they just throw in a woman for two seconds, but...

01:22:19 ◼   ► pretty sure that's intentional as a commentary.

01:22:21 ◼   ► That's, I think it's pretty clear.

01:22:24 ◼   ► - I'm just disappointed, 'cause you could have had a show

01:22:26 ◼   ► that was a lot smarter and a lot funnier,

01:22:28 ◼   ► that actually made fun of the way things really are.

01:22:31 ◼   ► 'Cause like they started with a character and they say,

01:22:33 ◼   ► "Isn't this character funny?

01:22:35 ◼   ► "Let's make fun of the character."

01:22:36 ◼   ► It's like, well, it's like a straw man.

01:22:38 ◼   ► You're making something,

01:22:39 ◼   ► nothing this ridiculous ever existed.

01:22:40 ◼   ► So of course it's easy to make fun

01:22:41 ◼   ► of something that ridiculous.

01:22:42 ◼   ► The reality has plenty of things

01:22:44 ◼   ► that are ridiculous about it as well.

01:22:45 ◼   ► But in, I guess in nuanced ways

01:22:47 ◼   ► that people wouldn't understand or care about? I don't know.

01:22:51 ◼   ► Or you know, you probably can't base a lot of this stuff on real people for various legal

01:22:56 ◼   ► reasons. And I also think that Mike Judge doesn't

01:22:58 ◼   ► really know anything about computers, which is a problem. Like, he knows a lot about—

01:23:03 ◼   ► Well, he used to be a programmer. I know, but like, it's not—he's not—this

01:23:07 ◼   ► is not his thing. He's been a media person for ages. He knows a lot about being a jerky,

01:23:13 ◼   ► you know, teenage boy, so Beavis and Butthead was good. He apparently knows a lot about

01:23:17 ◼   ► people in Texas. Yeah, he's from Texas. Right. So that worked

01:23:20 ◼   ► out. And he may have worked as a programmer for a little while,

01:23:22 ◼   ► but his adult life is essentially been set been making

01:23:24 ◼   ► television programs. So I think he does not. Right. But like,

01:23:26 ◼   ► but like office spaces is actually based a lot on himself

01:23:30 ◼   ► and the job he used to have office space was, I mean, I

01:23:33 ◼   ► think office space was good. It didn't go too far over the top.

01:23:36 ◼   ► Like I guess lumbar was a little bit over the top, but everything

01:23:39 ◼   ► else about it, just like the office environment, like it

01:23:41 ◼   ► wasn't made, it didn't, you know, so the other like the

01:23:43 ◼   ► holographic tube and the crazy headquarters and everything

01:23:45 ◼   ► That is more over the top office space was an actual cubicle office building, right?

01:23:48 ◼   ► And there's enough ridiculous about an actual cubicle office building you get humor out of you

01:23:52 ◼   ► Don't need to make it more oppressive than it actually is should be an incomparable talk about Silicon Valley. Nobody else likes it

01:23:58 ◼   ► You could be the lone voice of dissent

01:24:01 ◼   ► But some people still I think Jason's now still watching it and I I've been letting them pile up on TV

01:24:06 ◼   ► Occasionally, I'll watch a couple minutes. It's only eight episodes in like 20 minutes long

01:24:09 ◼   ► I know but like I'll watch whenever once in a while. I'm not engaged in the story so to speak

01:24:13 ◼   ► So if I just want a couple of gags here and there,

01:24:16 ◼   ► they have some funny gags.

01:24:18 ◼   ► - It's just like Mike judges other shows

01:24:19 ◼   ► where it's not the best show in the world,

01:24:21 ◼   ► but it's a good show and it's funny.

01:24:23 ◼   ► Like if you take it, you know,

01:24:25 ◼   ► take everything with a grain of salt,

01:24:26 ◼   ► and if you just look at it not as something

01:24:28 ◼   ► that's trying to be accurate,

01:24:30 ◼   ► but something that's trying to be funny.

01:24:32 ◼   ► - That's difficult for me with tech shows though.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Like, Halt and Catch Fire, again,

01:24:37 ◼   ► I mean, it's also getting better reviews,

01:24:38 ◼   ► but like if I knew something about

01:24:40 ◼   ► like the advertising business,

01:24:41 ◼   ► Maybe Mad Men would bother me a lot more than it does, right?

01:24:44 ◼   ► But I don't.

01:24:44 ◼   ► So it doesn't bother me as much.

01:24:46 ◼   ► Whatever liberties they're taking with the advertising business,

01:24:49 ◼   ► I'm willing to accept.

01:24:49 ◼   ► Whereas anytime you touch any topic that--

01:24:52 ◼   ► anytime you touch tech, basically, it's like--

01:24:53 ◼   ► there's not a good history there in terms of interesting or accurate

01:24:57 ◼   ► representations.

01:24:57 ◼   ► And especially-- it's like the Walter Isaac--

01:24:59 ◼   ► especially that I do find tech industry.

01:25:01 ◼   ► And I think a show that did tech right would be interesting,

01:25:03 ◼   ► but only to me, obviously.

01:25:04 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:25:07 ◼   ► Nice.

01:25:08 ◼   ► What should you be watching instead of sitting on?

01:25:10 ◼   ► Veep.

01:25:11 ◼   ► Beep is funnier than Silicon Valley, and shorter, and more interesting, and doesn't involve

01:25:16 ◼   ► technology.

01:25:17 ◼   ► Shorter than eight 20-minute episodes?

01:25:20 ◼   ► I guess at the same length.

01:25:21 ◼   ► Something really seems longer.

01:25:22 ◼   ► I take like three viewings to get through one episode of it.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Anyway, I think Beep is on what?

01:25:27 ◼   ► It's on Showtime or HBO?

01:25:28 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:25:29 ◼   ► All right then.

01:25:30 ◼   ► Bedtime?

01:25:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:32 ◼   ► All right, kids, so I'll talk to you Thursday.

01:25:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:35 ◼   ► Editing schedule.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Tomorrow I'm going to the lake, so…

01:25:38 ◼   ► Oh, that's tough.

01:25:39 ◼   ► - This is your tough, your constant work schedule.

01:25:42 ◼   ► I know what it's like.

01:25:43 ◼   ► This is like third time you've Instagrammed from the lake.

01:25:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually tomorrow I'm going to the lake

01:25:47 ◼   ► because I (horn honks)

01:25:48 ◼   ► my backup royally and our friend up there

01:25:51 ◼   ► is a massage therapist and is gonna help me fix it.

01:25:54 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, it's rough.

01:25:56 ◼   ► - Jesus Christ, Marko.

01:25:57 ◼   ► - That's exactly like my schedule.

01:25:59 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:25:59 ◼   ► - I too am going to a lake to get a massage tomorrow.

01:26:01 ◼   ► What about you, Casey?

01:26:02 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:26:03 ◼   ► - Did you know the lake is actually coming to me

01:26:05 ◼   ► and then I'm getting the massage?

01:26:06 ◼   ► - Are you gonna have a corn dog?

01:26:07 ◼   ► I'm thinking of having a corn dog.

01:26:09 ◼   ► It would never look more like an Ohio boy than sitting there on your corn dog.

01:26:15 ◼   ► On your dirt beach in front of your mud lake.

01:26:18 ◼   ► I can't breathe!

01:26:23 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:26:26 ◼   ► This is why I follow people on Instagram now.

01:26:31 ◼   ► I don't actually participate in Instagram, but it's a…

01:26:33 ◼   ► It's just for the shaming.

01:26:34 ◼   ► …a nicer window into people's lives.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:26:41 ◼   ► That was awesome.

01:26:42 ◼   ► Wow.

01:26:43 ◼   ► We're all just…

01:26:44 ◼   ► Casey, you and I are just bitter and jealous people.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what it boils down to.

01:26:48 ◼   ► That's exactly what it boils down to.

01:26:50 ◼   ► We need to be true to ourselves and admit that.

01:26:54 ◼   ► We're bitter, jealous, and getting older every day.

01:26:58 ◼   ► Yeah, but I have the secret glee of knowing what you're in for when this baby comes.

01:27:04 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]