74: One Of Us Shipped Something
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Let me start by saying that I have started work on the Showbot title ordering, but it is not done.
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And I apologize for that.
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There was a poll request. Someone sent you the code.
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I know. I know. But I don't know if I've only glanced at it, but I'm
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a little opinionated about how I want it done. So I'm going to give it the college try.
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One of us shipped something.
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You're so mean to me. I'm going to give it the college try and see if I can do it the way I want
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to do it and if I can't do it in basically the one time I sit down to do it, then I'll
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take the pull request and walk away.
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How about this alternate strategy?
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Accept the pull request and let us use that while you work on your solution, then revert
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that integration and put in your change transplant.
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To be honest, that's probably the better approach, but that's all right.
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All right, so nothing really happened this week, so let's start with follow-up.
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Apparently some stuff we've said in the past has been wrong.
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I would like to talk now for a half hour to explain why it was wrong.
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This first item is, I didn't put this first one in there.
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Who put the first item in?
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Oh, that might have been me actually.
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We got a lot of feedback that when we were talking about what would cause someone to
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switch to Android from an iPhone and we got a piece of feedback that we talked about an
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episode or two ago that said, "Hey, a lot of these new versions of iOS can slow down
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your phone and make the response time to everything a lot less quick."
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And that's maybe why people switch.
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And so somebody wrote in, I don't have who it was, but somebody wrote in, "Many people
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have noted the perceived slowdown on older phones could likely be purchasing an old phone,
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For example, buying a 4S today, which is still on store.apple.com.
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Actually I think I wrote that.
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The point being that you can still get a 4S today, and iOS 8 is presumably coming out
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in September, and probably isn't going to run too well on a 4S, because I believe it
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is supported.
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Is that right?
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The 4S is supported on 8, that's correct.
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So all the A5 devices are supported on 8.
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Which is interesting because there's a lot of them.
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Like if they cut off the A5 device,
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if they cut off the original iPad mini,
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which is still for sale.
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- Exactly, so there's a lot of older devices being sold
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that are still going to be supported.
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And so that's something to consider
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and something that would perhaps drive you away from Apple
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because here you get this perhaps not amazing experience.
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You know, what if this was your first iPhone
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or first smartphone and you buy a 4S today
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and it runs all right with iOS 7
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And then in a couple of months, you see that iOS 8 is available, you go and update it,
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and all of a sudden it runs like crap.
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I mean, that's no bueno.
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So that's just something to consider.
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We talked about that in past shows.
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We were talking about why the heck the iPad 2 was around so long.
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They finally stopped selling that, right?
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I don't know.
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You're probably right.
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Anyway, yeah, we've had that same complaint.
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And another one of my hobby horses is not putting enough RAM in things, especially when
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you can't upgrade it.
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It's short-sighted from a sort of customer satisfaction and brand satisfaction level
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to skimp on RAM, even though it helps your margins, because some people will say, "Well,
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I'm just going to get it with the minimum," and if the minimum is not a reasonable amount,
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like if you're just setting someone up for -- it's much better now in the days of SSDs,
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but when it was spinning disks, it was just torture to get a Mac with the minimum amount
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of RAM and then use it for several years.
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And by the end of its lifetime, the OS and all the apps need way more RAM, and the thing
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was always swapping, especially it was like a 5400 RPM laptop drive and it was bad.
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When we talked about this, the whole having an upgrade that slows down your thing, I don't
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think any of us thought that wasn't a phenomenon that happens.
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I think we've all actually owned devices that we've either decided not to upgrade to iOS
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7 or regretted upgrading to iOS 7, and all the way back.
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I remember on one of my original iPod touches, I think I didn't want to upgrade to 4 or something,
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and then eventually I gave in and regretted it.
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This is a thing that happens
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if you keep devices long enough.
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I actually, I did add two tiny notes
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to this bit of follow-up here, I guess.
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The first one is that if you buy a device,
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if Apple sells you something
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that they probably shouldn't still be selling,
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like you get an iPad 2
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and when it was so clearly long in the tooth
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or you end up with a current non-retin iPad Mini
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or poor Marco's mom buying the iPhone 4
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when she shouldn't have been.
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That's Apple's fault for selling those things.
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And the customer gets it and they get a bad experience.
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Sometimes it's just a bad experience
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right out of the box, right?
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But the idea that the solution to that
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is to try another vendor, in some sense,
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makes sense if you don't know anything about Apple
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and its products or whatever.
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You bought an Apple thing, it sucks,
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you try a different one, right?
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But for tech savvy people,
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I would imagine that they could have a similar reaction,
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but for a different reason.
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Tech savvy people are gonna do it for the airline reason,
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where like it's vindictive, where you're like,
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well, I bought this thing, I was satisfied with it,
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I used it for a while, I upgraded it,
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Apple shouldn't have even allowed it to be upgraded,
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so that's Apple's fault, I hate Apple now,
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my solution is for my next phone,
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for my next tablet or whatever,
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I'm going to buy from a different vendor.
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And that can very quickly turn into,
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you know, I just hate Apple not buying their stuff anymore,
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when in reality the optimal solution for that person
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who maybe used and enjoyed Apple products for a while
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is the next time they buy,
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you know, buy a higher end Apple product.
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Spend more money, I'm sure Apple would love this,
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spend more money on Apple products
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and actually it'll work well.
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Again, it's Apple's fault for selling these old devices
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too long, it's Apple's fault for allowing the upgrades
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to go on them when they don't perform well.
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Arguably it's Apple's fault that the software
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doesn't perform well, but like,
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if for example I had a relative who had that experience
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And I knew that they were satisfied with Apple devices in general.
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I wouldn't recommend, oh, well, for your next one, you should get an Android phone,
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if I think that they would not get a better experience out of that.
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Yes, they get the satisfaction of saying, well, now I'm not going to buy Apple stuff anymore.
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But it's like, really, you'd be super satisfied with an iPhone 5S for your next phone.
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Right? So if you say you had a 4S, you upgraded to get slow.
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If you really loved your iPhone for all of its life, except for this last part, which again, totally Apple's fault for putting them in this situation and everything.
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it's like cutting off your nose to spite your face
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by saying, well, the next phone I'm gonna get
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is an Android phone, because that probably won't be
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a satisfactory experience, especially if someone
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just is used to iOS or whatever.
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So that's one angle on this, the whole idea of just,
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I'm angry, I'm gonna get revenge at Apple,
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and I'm gonna do something that's technically not really
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in my best interest.
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And by the way, this is why, again,
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everyone loves to spend money on Apple.
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So this is why I recommend people,
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don't get an Apple device if the only one you can afford
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is the cheapest one they sell,
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'cause the cheapest one they sell always sucks.
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Like, that's true of, you know, you get an iMac,
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but it was like the $1,000 iMac,
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it's like 15% less expensive and 50% slower.
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Like, and you know, if you can't get the expensive one,
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you actually are probably better off with something else.
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And then the other point I had on this topic is,
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at a certain point, hardware and software
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sort of catches up to the baseline of what the OS,
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what people wanna do with the OS.
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If you think about the early history of OS X,
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where it was just super slow for just years at a time,
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just years and years, it felt gross,
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it felt like molasses, it was really slow,
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it was compositing on the CPU,
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even when they got the compositing on the GPU,
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the drawing and the window resizing
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and all the event handling, it was just slow, it was crappy.
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At a certain point, the cheapest Mac you could buy
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could pull down Windows fast, could scroll fast.
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Like these days, no matter what Mac you buy,
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buy the least expensive new Mac from Apple,
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it will scroll a page, okay?
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And that sounds stupid, but we went through years
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where it couldn't scroll
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and where everything was just super slow.
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I think iOS devices are very close to getting to the point
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where no matter what piece of crap you buy from Apple,
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you'll be able to scroll through a webpage, okay?
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It'll load a webpage, okay?
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It won't, like, no OS upgrade will screw them
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in the way that iOS 8 is probably able to screw
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the lowest supported device today.
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We're getting very close to that tipping point where the hardware is good enough for the
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basics to work.
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We're not there yet, though, and I think this is a painful period.
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And in the beginning of iOS, like, forget it, you know.
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The iOS 1 was like, once the 3G and especially the 3GS came out, you didn't even want to
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look at those old devices anymore.
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You could not go back.
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But you do eventually hit some minimum threshold of, like, you know, on the Mac menus work,
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window resizing works, scrolling works.
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You can launch applications without waiting a year.
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There's still tons of other things that you can do without, that will make your thing
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feel slow or whatever, but we just need the basics to work and we're not quite there yet.
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So I'm hoping this time period where Apple keeps doing the strategy of selling devices
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for a long time, giving them OS upgrades for a long time, will eventually work out for
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them when the cheapest device they're selling meets the minimum threshold required for just
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the basics to not be awful.
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- I think certain generations age better than others too.
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Like in the case of the iOS devices,
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where you'll have basically the old models
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being kept around for two years or so.
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Certain chips and models have a lot more headroom in them
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than others, and so the original iPad was not kept around
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because it did not have a lot of headroom,
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had way too little RAM.
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The A5 with the iPad 2 at the time had tons of headroom.
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which is why they're still selling A5 devices today.
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And the original iPad mini, for an iPad these days,
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it's kinda sluggish, but it still works.
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So that's why they can still sell it.
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But running iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 was a bad move.
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And I think the A6 and A7, especially the A7,
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really has a lot of headroom in it.
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So like the current 5C is the A6.
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I don't know how long they're going to keep selling A6 devices.
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There aren't any iPads with it anymore.
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But I would guess that the 5C internals from the iPhone 5 with the A6,
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I would guess those stick around for another couple of years.
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And that really won't be that bad.
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The RAM problem is going to be an issue for-- even for the A7 device.
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It's not like the CPU is going to get bad.
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But again, Apple's been so stingy with RAM,
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They've gone multiple generations without bumping the RAM specs and these things.
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And that is going to hurt it much sooner than like, you know, you're not going to top out
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the A7 doing basic stuff.
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The A7 is completely adequate for sliding views back and forth, scrolling them, responding
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to tap events, doing all the basic things you're going to need that we were just talking
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But if applications start using more memory because the applications become more sophisticated,
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that A7's not gonna save you if everything keeps getting swapped out and you can't fit
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things in RAM, you play one game and it boots out all your Safari tabs and it's all sorts
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of, you know, so that's why I say we're getting close to the threshold but we're not there
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So I would think even the most expensive, fanciest iOS device you can get today has
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still not met the minimum threshold of you can keep that device for like five years and
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it will still be basically competent.
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Whereas, I mean, I'm sitting next to a Mac right now, granted it's the top-end one, but
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But again, if you bought a top-end Mac in 2008, it still runs OS X perfectly well.
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I'm running a current version of Photoshop, I run lots of applications.
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Granted I upgraded the RAM and all that stuff.
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That's not true today.
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If you buy a top-end iPhone today in a couple years, it will not be up to the task of running
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all the applications that...
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Even just the basics of just being able to...
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I feel like, "Oh, every time I launch this, this other thing, it gets booted out of memory,
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and I can't even run this game because it requires more RAM this thing has.
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Well that's something that, well first of all real-time follow-up, I was wrong. They
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are still selling the iPad 4, which has the A6 CPU. It's an A6X, but it's the same
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CPU. So, my mistake. Also, I think you're right that high-end Macs can last longer,
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but also don't forget, you're talking about a Mac Pro where almost everything's upgradeable.
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And modern Macs, not only are most Macs sold not Mac Pros, but modern Macs don't even have
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a lot of upgradeable parts anymore.
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It used to be, you know, if you bought a MacBook or a MacBook Pro three years ago, five years
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ago, you could upgrade the RAM and hard drive over time.
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You could maybe swap out the old spinning disk for the SSD and get another couple of
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good years out of it.
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You can max out the RAM, you know.
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Which is exactly what I did.
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A lot of people do that.
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It's a great idea to do that, especially now that SSDs are so cheap.
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But the devices we buy today, because they are so not upgradeable, almost every Mac that's
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sold now doesn't have replaceable RAM anymore.
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That's what I was saying.
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But if you buy a top-end Retina MacBook Pro today, everything's sealed up, can't upgrade
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anything, I think that machine will be fine for the basics in five years.
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Yeah, but I would say if you're specing out a MacBook Pro, I would say get the most RAM
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you can afford up front.
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the RAM will make the biggest difference over time with how well it ages.
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Yeah, someone just asked me on Twitter recently if they should—I forget which machine they
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were specing out—should I take the CPU upgrade to an i7 or should I take the extra RAM? And
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it's a difficult choice, but I have to go with the RAM, because again, like, you know,
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you can always do—like, if things take a little bit longer, fine, but RAM is like capabilities.
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Speed versus capability. Do you want to be able to run these two programs at the same
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time without swapping, or do you want these programs to run 15% faster? And being able,
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like capability is more important than speed.
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Right, and the difference between 8 and 16 gigs of RAM, say, or especially, is there
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anything still with 4 gigs of RAM in the lineup, maybe the low-end MacBooks? But the difference
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between the base amount of RAM and twice as much of that is a much bigger difference usually
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than the CPU choices you have where, you know, for the same price of doubling the RAM, you
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might get an extra, you know, 5% CPU performance. It isn't a big jump on the CPU for the money.
00:14:22
◼
►
It used to be better, but these days, yeah, you don't get much for your extra CPU money.
00:14:28
◼
►
Exactly. And, you know, going back to the iOS devices, I think this is why you're right
00:14:31
◼
►
to focus on RAM because that is the limiting factor so often. Like, that was definitely
00:14:37
◼
►
the case with the iPad one. And feedback from the chat, yeah, tons of stuff with 4GB of
00:14:41
◼
►
RAM still coming as stock, some of the low end stuff.
00:14:44
◼
►
I was going to make a snarky comment, but I'm sure Apple is still selling stuff with
00:14:47
◼
►
4GB, but I wouldn't have actually believed that this list is true, so now I'm even more
00:14:53
◼
►
We are sponsored this week, once again, by our friend Matt Alexander and his company,
00:14:58
◼
►
Need. Need is a refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men. Each month, Need curates
00:15:05
◼
►
and sells a limited quantity of exclusive products from the world's top men's brands.
00:15:10
◼
►
These collections are presented in the form of a monthly editorial, built around a certain
00:15:14
◼
►
theme, and are shot by local independent photographers.
00:15:18
◼
►
Beyond Clothing, which they have a lot of really nice clothing, but Beyond Clothing,
00:15:22
◼
►
Need also sells coffee, literature, furniture, and so forth.
00:15:25
◼
►
So you can tell this is written by a British person because he uses the phrase "and so
00:15:28
◼
►
forth" in the script.
00:15:29
◼
►
Soon, they'll localize to certain cities around the world, the first of which will
00:15:34
◼
►
just launched volume 8 assembly it features some of the best products for
00:15:38
◼
►
evenings with friends hosting parties and so forth see look again very British
00:15:43
◼
►
their favorites this month are the Stewart throw which Matt tells me throw
00:15:48
◼
►
means blanket I guess but it's fancier if you call it a throw it could at all
00:15:53
◼
►
isn't that also a pillow is couldn't they read a throw pillow that that
00:15:56
◼
►
exists right I think so John you're domestic is that right you're asking me
00:16:01
◼
►
about the terms for furniture items from a British ad.
00:16:04
◼
►
- That's correct.
00:16:05
◼
►
- Not my area of expertise.
00:16:06
◼
►
- Okay, well, if you want it to become
00:16:08
◼
►
your area of expertise, go to need.
00:16:10
◼
►
So their favorites are the Stuart Throw,
00:16:12
◼
►
which might mean a blanket, the Schwood sunglasses,
00:16:16
◼
►
that has to be something cool,
00:16:17
◼
►
and the classic Oxford watch.
00:16:20
◼
►
See, I wish I could have a British accent
00:16:22
◼
►
'cause I feel like saying the classic Oxford watch
00:16:25
◼
►
would be so much cooler if I had a British accent.
00:16:27
◼
►
- That's true, and it is a damn fine looking watch.
00:16:29
◼
►
It really is.
00:16:30
◼
►
way better than all the smartwatches
00:16:32
◼
►
that our industry's coming up with these days.
00:16:35
◼
►
All right, so there's also a special offer for ATP listeners
00:16:39
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anyone who places an order with need and was sent from ATP,
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send an email to hello@neededition.com
00:16:46
◼
►
with the subject line overcast trousers.
00:16:51
◼
►
Once again, that is send an email to hello@neededition.com
00:16:54
◼
►
subject line overcast trousers.
00:16:57
◼
►
- And to be clear, to be clear, that's need edition
00:16:59
◼
►
like a newspaper edition, not edition like mathematics.
00:17:03
◼
►
- Maths, if you're British.
00:17:05
◼
►
- Correct. - It's maths.
00:17:06
◼
►
So yeah, no, no, it's edition, EDI,
00:17:08
◼
►
you know, that kind of edition, neededition.com.
00:17:12
◼
►
Subject line overcast trousers.
00:17:13
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Anyway, they will throw in a bunch of extras
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with those orders, so you know, things like magazines,
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field notes, socks, scarves.
00:17:20
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See, what I've learned from need is that a scarf
00:17:23
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is not only something you should wear in the wintertime
00:17:25
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when it's freezing.
00:17:27
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You can also wear them when it's less freezing as a fashionable item to improve your fashion
00:17:34
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So anyway, they will, and then also if you do that you will also be put on a list to
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get 25% off your next order.
00:17:40
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your order at hello@neededition.com, subject line overcast trousers to get all sorts of
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cool stuff and a discount on your next order.
00:17:55
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Thanks a lot to Need, once again.
00:17:58
◼
►
They can really show you how to be much more fashionable
00:18:01
◼
►
and cool than I could ever possibly explain to you,
00:18:03
◼
►
because I am not fashionable or cool.
00:18:05
◼
►
However, I've had some things from Need,
00:18:06
◼
►
and they make me look much more fashionable and cool
00:18:09
◼
►
than I really am.
00:18:14
◼
►
- Well done.
00:18:14
◼
►
No, thanks to Matt Alexander and the Need crew.
00:18:17
◼
►
That's extremely cool.
00:18:19
◼
►
- I got red shoelaces from them.
00:18:21
◼
►
That was amazing.
00:18:22
◼
►
It turns out if you take a regular pair of shoes
00:18:25
◼
►
and you put red shoelaces in them,
00:18:27
◼
►
they become fashionable shoes.
00:18:28
◼
►
- We have some more follow up from Melissa Savage,
00:18:32
◼
►
who is the wife of one of the co-hosts
00:18:35
◼
►
of the Mobile Couch podcast,
00:18:37
◼
►
and she actually has her own podcast,
00:18:39
◼
►
which I don't remember what it is,
00:18:40
◼
►
so I'm a terrible person.
00:18:41
◼
►
- Very helpful.
00:18:42
◼
►
- Yeah, thank you.
00:18:43
◼
►
She wrote in to say,
00:18:45
◼
►
"I thought I'd just drop you a note about screen size
00:18:48
◼
►
"because it illustrates why it's important
00:18:50
◼
►
"to have more women in tech.
00:18:52
◼
►
We are on average smaller than men, meaning our reach is not so large.
00:18:55
◼
►
Despite what you say about getting over the bigger screen within a week,
00:18:58
◼
►
the iPhone 5 annoys me daily because I can't quite stretch my right thumb to the left corner,
00:19:03
◼
►
site of a thousand and one key functions for most apps."
00:19:06
◼
►
This is where, of course, the back button is.
00:19:08
◼
►
So she goes on to say, "Not only this, but women's clothes almost never have pockets,
00:19:13
◼
►
or when they do, they are crappy tiny ones.
00:19:15
◼
►
The iPhone 5 doesn't fit properly into any of my jeans' pockets.
00:19:18
◼
►
Modern purses have phone slots, but these are not large, maybe four inches by a half an inch.
00:19:23
◼
►
So, real time follow up, by the way, her podcast is Silver Screen Queens. Anyway, the point being
00:19:30
◼
►
that we were lamenting the fact that our jeans pockets, or if you're Matt Alexander,
00:19:35
◼
►
our trouser pockets are not big enough. Wait, are those the same things? I thought
00:19:39
◼
►
trousers were like khakis or are trousers all pants if you're a British person?
00:19:44
◼
►
I thought they were all pants. Don't say pants to a British person.
00:19:48
◼
►
I thought they were all the things that we put over our underwear.
00:19:51
◼
►
We'll have to get some clarification with Matt Alexander on the underwear hierarchy.
00:19:55
◼
►
Any one of those CPG Grey videos to show the hierarchy of the lower body of men.
00:20:04
◼
►
So a random stranger in the chat room with no credibility is saying that trousers are
00:20:09
◼
►
And by pants you mean not underwear.
00:20:11
◼
►
Yeah, that's a good question.
00:20:13
◼
►
This is very confusing.
00:20:15
◼
►
Why did the British take our language and mess it up so badly?
00:20:18
◼
►
Seriously, they ruin everything.
00:20:20
◼
►
So yeah, so to come sort of back to point, the idea is that here it is we're lamenting
00:20:25
◼
►
the fact that our trouser/jeans pockets are not big enough, and we actually have pockets
00:20:31
◼
►
that are designed to fit things.
00:20:33
◼
►
Whereas women don't often have pockets at all, and occasionally when they do have pockets,
00:20:39
◼
►
they're tiny.
00:20:40
◼
►
And that is something that, quite frankly, I did not even consider.
00:20:42
◼
►
Well, not just the—I mean, there's two points here.
00:20:45
◼
►
One is the clothing thing.
00:20:47
◼
►
And the second is small hands and reaching the corners of the screen.
00:20:53
◼
►
Even when the iPhone, when the iOS devices got taller, it was a little bit harder to
00:20:57
◼
►
reach over there.
00:20:58
◼
►
But here's the thing about the women in small hands in reach issue.
00:21:02
◼
►
When I see people out on the street with comically large phones, it seems to be most frequently
00:21:08
◼
►
women with comically large phones.
00:21:11
◼
►
And I don't know why that is.
00:21:12
◼
►
You would think if they, on average, have smaller hands, they would favor smaller phones.
00:21:17
◼
►
That is not what I see.
00:21:19
◼
►
I mean, at the very least it's equal, but my impression is that you are more likely
00:21:25
◼
►
to see just a really big phone in use by a woman than a man.
00:21:30
◼
►
I don't know if that—does that match your experiences?
00:21:35
◼
►
See, I have seen only a handful of comically large phones, but the first one that I saw
00:21:41
◼
►
amongst my peer group was a dear friend of mine who is extremely petite, has a just ridiculously
00:21:50
◼
►
large phone. To me it looks like an iPad mini.
00:21:52
◼
►
- See, for me, I think first of all, the smaller hands and reach issue is not just a woman's
00:21:58
◼
►
issue. My hands are kind of medium-sized and when Apple increased the screen size with
00:22:05
◼
►
the iPhone 5, I had changed the grip I had on the phone. I used to hold it a certain
00:22:10
◼
►
with all the old size and then I had to like kind of kind of choke up a little
00:22:15
◼
►
bit on the phone like in in t-ball terms because that was last time I played
00:22:19
◼
►
sports I had to choke up a little bit to get a better reach when the five came
00:22:24
◼
►
out and I there's still like certain things you gotta like kind of kind of
00:22:27
◼
►
hold it back a little bit in your hand like dude I had to adjust the way I even
00:22:30
◼
►
touch it to hit certain corners and so I don't think it's necessarily a men and
00:22:35
◼
►
women issue I think it's just like I mean there's already even within you
00:22:39
◼
►
Within both genders, there's a pretty big range
00:22:41
◼
►
of hand sizes.
00:22:42
◼
►
And I think a lot of, like iOS has,
00:22:45
◼
►
with 7 especially, when they added the edge swipe gesture
00:22:49
◼
►
to go back and stuff like that,
00:22:51
◼
►
like they're making the interface more screen gesture based
00:22:55
◼
►
instead of based on tapping a certain button
00:22:57
◼
►
in a certain spot on every screen,
00:23:00
◼
►
overall helps this problem because it makes it
00:23:02
◼
►
so that you don't have to touch
00:23:04
◼
►
a very certain far away area so often.
00:23:07
◼
►
You can just use these gestures.
00:23:08
◼
►
And I think this is the kind of problem that can be worked around with those kinds of decisions
00:23:13
◼
►
for the most part.
00:23:14
◼
►
I mean, obviously within reason.
00:23:15
◼
►
You can't really use an iPad one-handed.
00:23:16
◼
►
It kind of sucks.
00:23:19
◼
►
And the five-and-a-half inch phone, which apparently might now be fake or delayed or
00:23:23
◼
►
– it's one of those things where the analysts – there's basically zero evidence for
00:23:27
◼
►
the five-and-a-half inch phone anymore, so the analysts who all predicted it are now
00:23:30
◼
►
saying, "Well, it's going to be delayed until next year," because they don't want
00:23:33
◼
►
to just say they were wrong.
00:23:36
◼
►
I forgot where I was even going with this.
00:23:40
◼
►
You were onto something with the grip thing, because when I see people using large phones
00:23:44
◼
►
just really big ones that you notice, you're like, "Whoa, is that a tablet?" No, that's
00:23:48
◼
►
their phone. I see them using it in a different way. They're not one-handing it
00:23:52
◼
►
with a thumb on the thing. Maybe they're two-handing it. Maybe the ones that have a stylus
00:23:56
◼
►
obviously, that's totally the Galaxy Note things or whatever.
00:24:00
◼
►
You use it in a different way. And you do see, remember back when
00:24:04
◼
►
we had sliders with QWERTY keyboards and everything,
00:24:06
◼
►
the whole deal was people would pull out the phone,
00:24:09
◼
►
hold it sideways, flip down the keyboard,
00:24:10
◼
►
and it was kind of like, you know,
00:24:12
◼
►
in landscape orientation,
00:24:14
◼
►
where you're holding it on the side
00:24:16
◼
►
like it's a Game Boy Advance.
00:24:17
◼
►
So I'm making game references, you guys don't get it.
00:24:19
◼
►
Anyway, landscape.
00:24:21
◼
►
And using two thumbs on it with the keyboard,
00:24:23
◼
►
but now that it's touch-oriented, that grip has gone,
00:24:26
◼
►
and for a while we were in the one-hand thing
00:24:28
◼
►
with the thumb on the thing,
00:24:29
◼
►
but now with the larger phones, I see more two hands,
00:24:31
◼
►
and like two-hand portrait,
00:24:33
◼
►
two-hand landscape, one hand holding it, one hand tapping it,
00:24:35
◼
►
like old people use remotes, you know?
00:24:37
◼
►
You hold the remote in one hand,
00:24:40
◼
►
and then you take the second hand and come from above
00:24:42
◼
►
with a pointer finger and you hit the buttons
00:24:43
◼
►
on the remote.
00:24:44
◼
►
None of these things are, I think, necessarily bad.
00:24:49
◼
►
People like the devices and are choosing to,
00:24:52
◼
►
again, that's why Apple's gonna make a phone
00:24:53
◼
►
with a bigger screen.
00:24:54
◼
►
People like the bigger phones.
00:24:55
◼
►
They're adapting their usage behavior to adjust for it.
00:24:58
◼
►
But as Melissa writes in,
00:25:00
◼
►
If you like to use your phone with one hand,
00:25:03
◼
►
like with the traditional sort of iPhone style grip,
00:25:07
◼
►
you will be annoyed with,
00:25:08
◼
►
along with the rest of the people who like that,
00:25:10
◼
►
no matter what your hand size,
00:25:12
◼
►
that the phones keep getting bigger.
00:25:14
◼
►
'Cause I mean, like I said, when the phones got taller,
00:25:16
◼
►
I found it harder to reach some sections on the screen.
00:25:18
◼
►
You had to do a little shimmy where you,
00:25:19
◼
►
remember we talked about that
00:25:20
◼
►
when the iPhone 5 birth came out?
00:25:22
◼
►
- Yep. - You had a little
00:25:23
◼
►
grip shimmy, right?
00:25:24
◼
►
And it's gonna be even worse.
00:25:25
◼
►
We're going to have to adjust our habits
00:25:27
◼
►
and if Apple stops selling phones of this size,
00:25:29
◼
►
then we'll just suffer along with everybody else.
00:25:33
◼
►
All right, a little bit of quick follow-up.
00:25:36
◼
►
John, this is for you, I believe, about TVs.
00:25:39
◼
►
- Oh yeah, we're talking about 4K and plasma,
00:25:42
◼
►
and one of the reasons that Panasonic
00:25:44
◼
►
exited the plasma business is it's gonna cost them
00:25:45
◼
►
a lot of money to try to get a 4K plasma TV,
00:25:48
◼
►
because those little cells or pits
00:25:51
◼
►
that are in plasma televisions
00:25:52
◼
►
that make up the picture elements,
00:25:54
◼
►
if you were to quadruple the number of those,
00:25:57
◼
►
or roughly quadruple the number of those
00:25:59
◼
►
in the same area, they have to get much, much smaller, and that's harder to manufacture.
00:26:03
◼
►
And AWACS—I think this was on Twitter—sent me a link to say that Panasonic actually did
00:26:08
◼
►
make a 4K plasma television.
00:26:11
◼
►
It's 152 inches diagonal, though.
00:26:13
◼
►
That way, you don't have to make the cells any smaller.
00:26:16
◼
►
You just make the television massive.
00:26:17
◼
►
They said it weighs 1,300 pounds and draws 3,700 watts.
00:26:21
◼
►
So it's not cheap either.
00:26:23
◼
►
That must have a six-figure price tag.
00:26:26
◼
►
It is, yeah.
00:26:27
◼
►
I don't think I remember what the price was.
00:26:28
◼
►
But anyway, we'll put the link in the show notes just to go to see.
00:26:30
◼
►
Again, it's not the fact that 4K is an impossibility for plasma.
00:26:34
◼
►
It's the technology to make the little picture elements, whatever they're called in plasma,
00:26:39
◼
►
They would have to do a lot of R&D to get that working.
00:26:41
◼
►
But I'm assuming this gigantic television was simply whatever their latest and greatest
00:26:46
◼
►
regular high-definition plasma process was and just made it way bigger with the little
00:26:50
◼
►
cells being exactly the same size.
00:26:53
◼
►
If only there was already a word for "little picture elements."
00:26:56
◼
►
not pixels, because the pixel is the resulting image on the screen. I'm trying to talk
00:27:00
◼
►
about—and there is no equivalent in CRTs because it's just a big vacuum and an electron
00:27:03
◼
►
gun and scanning over the phosphorous. I think they're called cells.
00:27:08
◼
►
We are also sponsored this week by our friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one
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00:29:05
◼
►
- So Marco, big day?
00:29:07
◼
►
- Little bit.
00:29:09
◼
►
I'm so tired.
00:29:10
◼
►
- When'd you wake up?
00:29:13
◼
►
- I didn't sleep well last night,
00:29:16
◼
►
so it's kind of a blurry line.
00:29:18
◼
►
Well, that was my next question was did you sleep any?
00:29:21
◼
►
When did you actually remove yourself from bed?
00:29:25
◼
►
- About eight, I decided I was probably done sleeping
00:29:28
◼
►
and I had to come downstairs
00:29:30
◼
►
'cause I had the launch scheduled for 11
00:29:33
◼
►
and I had it in the state in iTunes Connect
00:29:35
◼
►
where it just has an availability date set in the future.
00:29:38
◼
►
Because the problem was, you know,
00:29:41
◼
►
so I wanted to launch it today.
00:29:42
◼
►
If you set it to be released in the App Store today,
00:29:46
◼
►
then it'll start going on at midnight last night.
00:29:49
◼
►
And I didn't want to stay up all night if there were server
00:29:52
◼
►
Because that was the big question mark was,
00:29:54
◼
►
will the server stay up under the load of however many people
00:29:58
◼
►
tried out on day one?
00:29:59
◼
►
I had no idea, because I didn't really know how heavy
00:30:03
◼
►
is each user on the server.
00:30:04
◼
►
I really had no measure of that.
00:30:07
◼
►
You didn't do load testing with a bunch of VMs
00:30:09
◼
►
and hit it from-- that's the great thing about EC2 and stuff.
00:30:12
◼
►
You can just get a fleet of instances briefly
00:30:15
◼
►
and bombard your service to simulate the load
00:30:17
◼
►
of thousands of users.
00:30:18
◼
►
And I mean, it costs some money,
00:30:20
◼
►
but you can just ditch them all when you're gone.
00:30:21
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean, I thought of that.
00:30:23
◼
►
It would have been very hard like to mimic
00:30:26
◼
►
the exact usage pattern of overcast users
00:30:29
◼
►
without having a bunch of iPhones connecting at weird times,
00:30:31
◼
►
having podcasts being released at certain times.
00:30:33
◼
►
It would have been hard to simulate well.
00:30:36
◼
►
And so instead I opted to use that wonderful cloudness
00:30:39
◼
►
of modern hosting to instead just temporarily
00:30:43
◼
►
to get way more resources than I actually needed.
00:30:46
◼
►
So I temporarily, a couple days ago,
00:30:48
◼
►
I went from two web servers on Linode to eight,
00:30:51
◼
►
and a very easy way to create more if I needed to.
00:30:54
◼
►
And it turns out I ended up needing way less than that.
00:30:56
◼
►
Anyway, so I was scared of what the servers would do,
00:31:00
◼
►
and I didn't wanna be kept up all night.
00:31:02
◼
►
So instead, I set it to be released tomorrow,
00:31:05
◼
►
and then today at eight a.m., I changed the date back,
00:31:08
◼
►
which makes it immediately get released at that point.
00:31:10
◼
►
But immediately released on the App Store
00:31:13
◼
►
doesn't mean it's immediately available to everybody
00:31:15
◼
►
whenever they check and showing up in search results.
00:31:17
◼
►
Because it has to propagate to different CDMs
00:31:20
◼
►
around the world, different servers being replicated.
00:31:22
◼
►
However Apple does it, it usually takes a few hours.
00:31:25
◼
►
So I wanted to launch at 11 a.m.,
00:31:27
◼
►
so I made the switch of the date at eight a.m.,
00:31:29
◼
►
figuring that by 11 it would be available everywhere
00:31:32
◼
►
and showing up in search results.
00:31:34
◼
►
And turns out that was too early.
00:31:37
◼
►
It actually showed up by about 10 or 9.30 even.
00:31:39
◼
►
It only took like an hour and a half.
00:31:41
◼
►
But I waited anyway and I had all the people
00:31:44
◼
►
who had advanced beta copies, the depressed people,
00:31:47
◼
►
I had told them all, don't publish before 11.
00:31:49
◼
►
So I waited and I didn't publish before 11 either.
00:31:52
◼
►
And yeah, so spent the morning just looking over everything,
00:31:56
◼
►
tweaking everything and then I launched it
00:31:58
◼
►
and the response was strong immediately.
00:32:03
◼
►
I was scared of lots of potential things.
00:32:08
◼
►
I knew that I had made an app that I was very happy with.
00:32:11
◼
►
And my beta testers were generally very happy
00:32:14
◼
►
with it as well.
00:32:15
◼
►
But that's only like 30 people.
00:32:17
◼
►
And this app was downloaded by thousands of people today.
00:32:20
◼
►
So the opinions of 30,
00:32:23
◼
►
especially this relatively undiverse group,
00:32:27
◼
►
are not very reflective of the web at large.
00:32:30
◼
►
So I didn't know what to expect from either the server load
00:32:33
◼
►
or from just the reception of the app.
00:32:35
◼
►
And are there any really crazy bugs
00:32:37
◼
►
that are just really edge case that none of these testers
00:32:40
◼
►
or I hit that would be major showstoppers
00:32:44
◼
►
and that I'd have to freak out
00:32:46
◼
►
and issue a quick emergency update.
00:32:48
◼
►
And it turned out none of that happened.
00:32:50
◼
►
It was great, it was just smooth.
00:32:52
◼
►
I was so worried, I haven't eaten well
00:32:57
◼
►
for a day before this.
00:32:59
◼
►
Yesterday I was feeling terrible all day.
00:33:01
◼
►
It ended up being nervousness.
00:33:03
◼
►
Now my back is a mess.
00:33:05
◼
►
I've been holding all this tension in my back
00:33:08
◼
►
and my lower back is just destroyed today, it's awful.
00:33:12
◼
►
'Cause I was really taking this nervousness inwardly.
00:33:17
◼
►
But it seems like everything went very well.
00:33:21
◼
►
I mean, the downside is I spent most of today
00:33:25
◼
►
reading thousands of tweets and hundreds of emails.
00:33:28
◼
►
I still, I'm mostly keeping up with the tweets.
00:33:32
◼
►
I still have, at the time of reading this,
00:33:35
◼
►
524 emails that I haven't gotten to yet.
00:33:37
◼
►
- What are people email, is this like support emails
00:33:39
◼
►
to the support address or personal emails to you
00:33:41
◼
►
or is there a difference?
00:33:43
◼
►
- It's, well there isn't really a difference yet.
00:33:45
◼
►
I have a support person I'm going to hire
00:33:47
◼
►
but I wanted to receive all the emails on day one.
00:33:51
◼
►
First of all, just from a pragmatic standpoint,
00:33:54
◼
►
I wanted to know about bugs immediately
00:33:56
◼
►
so I could try to fix them.
00:33:58
◼
►
- But these are emails that like from the application,
00:34:00
◼
►
you're in the application, there's a button somewhere
00:34:01
◼
►
you can hit that emails you,
00:34:02
◼
►
that's what you're talking about, right?
00:34:03
◼
►
- Yeah, yeah, and it's mostly people
00:34:08
◼
►
with little feature requests, some bug reports,
00:34:11
◼
►
some tech support kind of stuff.
00:34:13
◼
►
I would try to be careful and set expectations
00:34:18
◼
►
for tech support very low.
00:34:20
◼
►
I don't use the word support anywhere.
00:34:24
◼
►
And the descriptions of all these email addresses
00:34:27
◼
►
is feedback.
00:34:28
◼
►
And I say everywhere, I can't respond to everything.
00:34:32
◼
►
- Well you have an auto responder that says,
00:34:34
◼
►
please explain to me why you wouldn't want
00:34:36
◼
►
the number one podcast app available on the app.
00:34:40
◼
►
So anyway, I have a lot of email to go through.
00:34:44
◼
►
I don't think it's that bad of a thing.
00:34:45
◼
►
I'll see what happens day to day.
00:34:47
◼
►
I didn't know if I should hire someone
00:34:51
◼
►
because as far as I know, maybe by next week
00:34:53
◼
►
it'll be like five emails a day.
00:34:55
◼
►
I have no idea.
00:34:56
◼
►
I don't know what to expect yet for daily volume.
00:34:58
◼
►
And so until I know that, I'm not going to,
00:35:02
◼
►
I'm not gonna make any decisions about
00:35:03
◼
►
whether I'm gonna hire someone or not,
00:35:05
◼
►
but I probably will end up doing it if I can.
00:35:07
◼
►
But yeah, most of the emails are stuff
00:35:11
◼
►
that takes a few seconds to look at
00:35:13
◼
►
and maybe a minute to respond to
00:35:15
◼
►
if I have to respond, a minute at most,
00:35:18
◼
►
but when you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
00:35:20
◼
►
of them, that adds up quickly.
00:35:22
◼
►
- So the launch went well, the servers didn't croak,
00:35:25
◼
►
all is good in the world?
00:35:27
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean the database server load
00:35:29
◼
►
never went above like .4,
00:35:31
◼
►
which is awesome, 'cause that's the hard one to scale.
00:35:35
◼
►
The web servers were negligible.
00:35:37
◼
►
- Have you cranked back on some of the expanded footprint?
00:35:41
◼
►
Like, have you gotten rid of some of those VMs,
00:35:43
◼
►
or are they still--
00:35:44
◼
►
- No, they're all still there.
00:35:44
◼
►
I mean, if I keep all of these up for an entire month,
00:35:48
◼
►
the entire hosting bill of Overcast is like $540 a month,
00:35:53
◼
►
something like that.
00:35:54
◼
►
When I sold Instapaper,
00:35:55
◼
►
the hosting bill was about $7,000 a month.
00:35:58
◼
►
- For more or less hardware?
00:36:00
◼
►
Well, it was more overall horsepower,
00:36:02
◼
►
but not by a whole lot,
00:36:04
◼
►
because hardware has gotten better since then,
00:36:06
◼
►
and Linode upgraded all their stuff.
00:36:08
◼
►
So Linode's current pricing is almost cheaper
00:36:13
◼
►
than most dedicated pricing for similar things.
00:36:17
◼
►
It's extremely competitive.
00:36:19
◼
►
Before this, I was gonna host it at Limestone Networks,
00:36:24
◼
►
which is a really cheap, dedicated host.
00:36:27
◼
►
And I had a server there for a while
00:36:28
◼
►
when I was developing, doing crawling and stuff.
00:36:30
◼
►
And that server was like 260 bucks a month
00:36:33
◼
►
for what I'm, you can now get at Linode for about 160.
00:36:38
◼
►
I mean, it's crazy how good Linode is right now.
00:36:41
◼
►
- This is another example of hardware catching up
00:36:44
◼
►
to something that doesn't change as much.
00:36:46
◼
►
So yes, hardware always gets better,
00:36:48
◼
►
but for textual data in small amounts,
00:36:53
◼
►
it used to be that no matter how small
00:36:54
◼
►
your textual data was, if you just wanted to store
00:36:56
◼
►
an address book for people that's like bounded in size, only text, not a lot of things. Even
00:37:01
◼
►
that would be super expensive just because hardware hadn't caught up.
00:37:04
◼
►
Hardware has gotten so much better, people's address books are similar in size. Maybe they're,
00:37:10
◼
►
you know, twice as big, five times as big, still mostly text, maybe with little pictures.
00:37:14
◼
►
But that grows much more slowly than computing power, price performance, memory, and stuff
00:37:18
◼
►
like that. So I think the cost of like, you know, fast forward 15 years, the cost of doing
00:37:22
◼
►
a similar service to Overcast, like podcast feeds, keeping track of what podcasts are,
00:37:26
◼
►
all their metadata, what their feed addresses, all that stuff.
00:37:29
◼
►
That's not going to grow at the same rate as how cheap memory and storage and everything
00:37:34
◼
►
So you're getting to the point where it'll be like, "Oh, I run my podcast metadata service
00:37:39
◼
►
on a puck in my home that I keep in the attic and never look at."
00:37:44
◼
►
And that's...
00:37:45
◼
►
Well, honestly, the dream is not that.
00:37:46
◼
►
The dream is closer to what Linode offers, because this thing runs somewhere else that
00:37:49
◼
►
you don't have to think about it.
00:37:50
◼
►
I know, but I'm talking about hardware requirements.
00:37:52
◼
►
it would be like, oh, it's like $5 a month,
00:37:54
◼
►
unlimited CPU and memory.
00:37:56
◼
►
- Oh yeah, exactly.
00:37:57
◼
►
I was thinking actually as a side note,
00:38:00
◼
►
which I guess all side notes are temporary,
00:38:02
◼
►
if Apple updates the Apple TV with an A7 chip
00:38:06
◼
►
to take advantage of metal
00:38:07
◼
►
and making a game console version and everything,
00:38:10
◼
►
I wonder about the web hosting potential.
00:38:13
◼
►
It's like Mac mini colo times two,
00:38:15
◼
►
the web hosting potential of Apple TVs,
00:38:18
◼
►
'cause A7s are really good chips.
00:38:19
◼
►
- But it's not, I mean, for web hosting,
00:38:21
◼
►
It's like you got to have memory to have all this the the disk stuff cache in memory
00:38:26
◼
►
So you don't actually you know see you don't have to pull it off the disk ever your disk caches are all warmed up
00:38:31
◼
►
Right so you need a lot of memory for that and you probably need lots of small weak cores more than what is a seven?
00:38:37
◼
►
I've still just two two fairly expensive course. I think still something like I mean
00:38:42
◼
►
That's why the server chips are all like tons and tons of relatively weak small cores, so you could be processing lots of
00:38:48
◼
►
things at the same time and each one of those things is no longer that demanding if you're just getting and
00:38:53
◼
►
Sending again sending and receiving small bits of textual information
00:38:56
◼
►
so apparently
00:38:58
◼
►
A similar company to to Mac Mini colo or whatever was anyway similar company called a Mac Mini vault
00:39:06
◼
►
They host they already have a page host on an Apple TV
00:39:10
◼
►
We'll put that link in the show notes. Hey, no fans in the Apple TVs
00:39:15
◼
►
You don't have to, you know, I guess you have to add your own fans. Maybe if you packed enough Apple TVs in,
00:39:20
◼
►
I mean, they do produce heat. If you packed enough of them in, you need something to push that heat into the hot aisle in the data center,
00:39:25
◼
►
so you'd have to like add fans to the front of it. Very strange.
00:39:28
◼
►
I imagine like, you know, computing power to density ratio has to be pretty good with an A7-based Apple TV.
00:39:36
◼
►
That has to be pretty good.
00:39:37
◼
►
Yeah, but I mean, like the Mac Minis though, these are not purpose-built hardware for the data center.
00:39:42
◼
►
And the people who do make purpose-built hardware for the data center have access to more or
00:39:46
◼
►
less the same technologies, right?
00:39:48
◼
►
So it's not as if, you know, this is the optimal solution.
00:39:50
◼
►
It's just funny and interesting from like, imagine if you just got a bunch of these pucks
00:39:53
◼
►
and you put them in this little drawer.
00:39:55
◼
►
But realistically speaking, Google's still making their own blades out of God knows what,
00:39:59
◼
►
and it's, you know, even better.
00:40:01
◼
►
So first day went well.
00:40:04
◼
►
Do you care to share how many users you have?
00:40:05
◼
►
I saw you tweeting earlier today how many signups you had.
00:40:10
◼
►
What are we at in at least a vague order of magnitude?
00:40:16
◼
►
- Now is that accounts registered server side
00:40:19
◼
►
or are those number of downloads from the App Store?
00:40:21
◼
►
- That is accounts registered server side.
00:40:23
◼
►
Number of downloads I won't have until tomorrow morning
00:40:25
◼
►
when I get the stats.
00:40:26
◼
►
- I mean you figure it would be similar
00:40:28
◼
►
'cause it's, you know, you can't really use the app
00:40:30
◼
►
until you sign up.
00:40:32
◼
►
So if people downloaded it and didn't launch it I guess.
00:40:34
◼
►
- Yeah, yeah, but yeah.
00:40:35
◼
►
So I mean I would imagine the number of downloads
00:40:38
◼
►
is probably substantially higher
00:40:40
◼
►
because there are gonna be some people who downloaded it
00:40:42
◼
►
and just haven't launched it yet.
00:40:44
◼
►
Some people who downloaded it got to the login screen
00:40:46
◼
►
and said, "I don't wanna create an account,"
00:40:48
◼
►
and deleted it, or said, "I'll come back to this later
00:40:49
◼
►
"and do this."
00:40:51
◼
►
So I would guess number of actual downloads
00:40:54
◼
►
might even be as high as twice that.
00:40:56
◼
►
- Do you have the FAQ linked from that first screen
00:41:00
◼
►
that says, you know, create an account or whatever?
00:41:02
◼
►
- That's why I wrote the FAQ,
00:41:04
◼
►
and that's why it's called the Skeptics FAQ.
00:41:06
◼
►
It's because I knew people would say,
00:41:09
◼
►
why do I need an account?
00:41:10
◼
►
And that's why that's the very first question.
00:41:12
◼
►
Or no, I think it's the second question.
00:41:14
◼
►
You should keep track of it.
00:41:16
◼
►
If they launch the app for the first time
00:41:18
◼
►
and don't hit either one of those buttons,
00:41:21
◼
►
the second time they launch the app,
00:41:22
◼
►
you should make the Skeptic's Fact more bold.
00:41:27
◼
►
Because I don't even remember seeing it there, but you want--
00:41:30
◼
►
there is an explanation.
00:41:31
◼
►
You might as well give it now.
00:41:33
◼
►
There is an explanation of why do
00:41:34
◼
►
I have to make an account of any kind for a podcast app.
00:41:38
◼
►
- Yeah, and this was, I've had a couple,
00:41:41
◼
►
I didn't know, this was another kind of risky thing.
00:41:44
◼
►
I didn't know if there would be a lot of people
00:41:45
◼
►
who were offended by this and who would skip it,
00:41:48
◼
►
who would cancel their efforts to try Overcast entirely
00:41:52
◼
►
just because they didn't wanna do that.
00:41:54
◼
►
The reason the accounts are there
00:41:56
◼
►
is because this is an entirely server-backed app.
00:41:58
◼
►
The server does all the crawling, all the updating,
00:42:00
◼
►
all the notifications and everything.
00:42:02
◼
►
The server does a lot of the work.
00:42:04
◼
►
And the app doesn't even have an XML parser.
00:42:07
◼
►
the server does everything and just outputs JSON
00:42:09
◼
►
to the app which it can decode quickly and natively.
00:42:12
◼
►
Anyway, and so there has to be some kind
00:42:14
◼
►
of user identification method between the app and the server.
00:42:17
◼
►
Now if all I ever had was an iPhone app,
00:42:20
◼
►
or even if all it ever was was iOS apps
00:42:24
◼
►
that were all in the same account,
00:42:25
◼
►
I could do things to kind of hack around this.
00:42:27
◼
►
Like I could do like, you know,
00:42:28
◼
►
generate a random ID the first time you use it
00:42:30
◼
►
and then use that as your username behind the scenes
00:42:32
◼
►
and never even show the user what their username is.
00:42:35
◼
►
and then that could work just fine.
00:42:38
◼
►
I could also store a user ID string in iCloud
00:42:42
◼
►
in the key value store so that way they could launch it
00:42:45
◼
►
on their iPad after I make an iPad version
00:42:47
◼
►
and then it syncs over.
00:42:49
◼
►
There are things like that I could do.
00:42:50
◼
►
The big problem with that is first of all,
00:42:52
◼
►
that would almost completely rule out web functionality.
00:42:55
◼
►
Second of all, if I then had a way for them
00:43:00
◼
►
to add an email address and password to this account,
00:43:04
◼
►
Believe me, I know what would happen,
00:43:08
◼
►
because I had similar issues with people
00:43:09
◼
►
making accounts at Instapaper.
00:43:11
◼
►
What would happen is people would make duplicate accounts.
00:43:14
◼
►
They would, rather than associate an email address
00:43:17
◼
►
with their current account, they would create
00:43:19
◼
►
a new account inadvertently with the email address.
00:43:23
◼
►
And then you have two accounts, and they email me saying,
00:43:26
◼
►
all my podcasts are gone, because I logged into the new one.
00:43:29
◼
►
They didn't know.
00:43:31
◼
►
And then you have to find ways to merge accounts.
00:43:34
◼
►
And it basically becomes a big issue with
00:43:37
◼
►
perceived customer stability and data loss,
00:43:41
◼
►
'cause they will do something weird
00:43:43
◼
►
that makes them think they lost everything,
00:43:45
◼
►
and then blame me and be very unhappy.
00:43:47
◼
►
And also it's just a massive burden on support email.
00:43:51
◼
►
And so I chose, you know what, let me try instead,
00:43:54
◼
►
just require the account right up front.
00:43:57
◼
►
Explain it as best I can.
00:43:58
◼
►
I know a lot of people are still gonna not do it,
00:43:59
◼
►
but let me just require the account up front,
00:44:02
◼
►
I make it always require an email address
00:44:04
◼
►
so I can do password resets.
00:44:06
◼
►
And let's just see if that works.
00:44:09
◼
►
Maybe that'll be fine.
00:44:12
◼
►
And in the future, if it ends up a lot of people
00:44:14
◼
►
are being turned off by that
00:44:15
◼
►
and I really want their business,
00:44:17
◼
►
then maybe I can add the system where,
00:44:19
◼
►
okay, it just starts up with an anonymous ID
00:44:21
◼
►
and then you can add an email address later.
00:44:22
◼
►
But I would rather try this first
00:44:24
◼
►
because if this can work well enough,
00:44:27
◼
►
it is so much easier to support
00:44:29
◼
►
and it's so much easier as a user
00:44:31
◼
►
that it's always the same.
00:44:32
◼
►
All right, and you say all these things as though you've been burned once or twice
00:44:37
◼
►
I don't know what that's about.
00:44:38
◼
►
Yeah, exactly.
00:44:39
◼
►
All right, so let me start with a couple of obvious questions, and then I have some hopefully
00:44:44
◼
►
less obvious questions, and then as we talk, I'm sure Jon will start tearing apart little
00:44:49
◼
►
bits and pieces of what you're saying.
00:44:50
◼
►
I'm so looking forward to this.
00:44:52
◼
►
Yeah, I do want to save that for probably the end if we don't get to it in the middle.
00:44:57
◼
►
Why freemium?
00:44:58
◼
►
I'm not that confident in the market for a paid up front app anymore, especially because
00:45:03
◼
►
I wanted to charge a good price for it.
00:45:06
◼
►
The model is, in summary, the app is free, there are some limits, the in-app purchase
00:45:11
◼
►
removes the limits.
00:45:13
◼
►
It's one purchase, one time, five bucks, and that removes all the limits.
00:45:17
◼
►
So it's kind of like a trial version.
00:45:19
◼
►
It's kind of my hacky way of doing a trial version, except that the entire app doesn't
00:45:25
◼
►
just certain things just don't work.
00:45:28
◼
►
Certain things don't work unless you pay.
00:45:30
◼
►
And the two big things that don't work,
00:45:33
◼
►
the smart speed and voice boost,
00:45:35
◼
►
you can actually demo them without paying for five minutes.
00:45:39
◼
►
Like there's like a five minute trial of those features.
00:45:42
◼
►
I actually wasn't even sure if Apple would allow that,
00:45:44
◼
►
but they did.
00:45:45
◼
►
So it is basically a trial version.
00:45:50
◼
►
And again, so going back a minute, so that's five bucks.
00:45:53
◼
►
I don't think, if I launched today in the App Store, I'm sure my day one sales at five
00:45:59
◼
►
bucks would be decent, but first of all, I know I got way more people as this model than
00:46:06
◼
►
I would with that model.
00:46:07
◼
►
I know that.
00:46:09
◼
►
Second of all, I know over time that would be very hard to sustain because once the initial
00:46:16
◼
►
PR is over, and once all your friends and all your blog readers have bought it, and
00:46:23
◼
►
once everyone who's going to write about it
00:46:24
◼
►
has written about it.
00:46:26
◼
►
Then the sales of every app just tail off like crazy.
00:46:30
◼
►
They just drop.
00:46:32
◼
►
If you look at the graph, it looks like a roller coaster.
00:46:35
◼
►
And they settle into a point,
00:46:38
◼
►
and then that eventually lowers and lowers and lowers.
00:46:41
◼
►
If your app is paid up front, that happens faster,
00:46:43
◼
►
and it happens more severely.
00:46:44
◼
►
I've seen this happen.
00:46:45
◼
►
And Instapaper was always that model the entire time I owned it.
00:46:48
◼
►
It's still that model today.
00:46:52
◼
►
I know that model very well, the paid-up-front model.
00:46:55
◼
►
I also know that in today's App Store, in a competitive category where I don't even
00:46:59
◼
►
have the most features and people are very, very picky with what they want and what they
00:47:04
◼
►
don't want, I knew that a $5 paid-up-front app was not a good long-term solution.
00:47:12
◼
►
So that's why.
00:47:14
◼
►
So I found a way to make free work.
00:47:16
◼
►
I saw with Instapaper there were so many people who I would come in contact with in real life
00:47:22
◼
►
even, even like family friends. I would be visiting them and I'd see on their phone,
00:47:28
◼
►
they were still using Instapaper free, even like two years after it just continued. There
00:47:33
◼
►
are so many people who, no matter how much they like you, they don't pay for apps.
00:47:40
◼
►
It isn't just that they won't, it's that they, in their minds, don't. That's just
00:47:45
◼
►
something I don't do. That's the kind of mindset it is.
00:47:49
◼
►
- Who buys batteries, Marco?
00:47:50
◼
►
- There's a lot of people, this is not a small group,
00:47:56
◼
►
a lot of people who really just don't buy apps.
00:48:01
◼
►
And I knew that the biggest podcast app in the world
00:48:06
◼
►
by a very large margin is Apple's podcast app.
00:48:11
◼
►
The second biggest by a pretty large margin is Stitcher.
00:48:14
◼
►
Both of those are free.
00:48:17
◼
►
I wanted to make an app that's good and free.
00:48:19
◼
►
'Cause the fact is the Apple podcast app is not bad.
00:48:22
◼
►
It's not great, but it's not bad.
00:48:25
◼
►
That's the biggest competition in the market,
00:48:26
◼
►
and it's free, and it has a lot of features.
00:48:29
◼
►
And it has some features I can never have,
00:48:32
◼
►
like the integration with iTunes.
00:48:33
◼
►
There are alternatives here.
00:48:35
◼
►
I could have, like somebody in the chat said,
00:48:36
◼
►
I could have done ads, but I've never seen an ad
00:48:38
◼
►
in an app that I thought made the app look good.
00:48:41
◼
►
Ads in apps are very intrusive,
00:48:45
◼
►
because they take up so much space.
00:48:47
◼
►
and the inventory is usually,
00:48:48
◼
►
like I don't mind doing podcast ads here
00:48:50
◼
►
because our advertisers are good
00:48:52
◼
►
and because for the rest of the show,
00:48:53
◼
►
we're giving like six minutes of ads
00:48:56
◼
►
out of a 90 minute show.
00:48:57
◼
►
When an ad's in an app,
00:49:00
◼
►
not only are the advertisers usually terrible,
00:49:02
◼
►
but it's taking up a pretty big chunk of the screen
00:49:04
◼
►
all the time.
00:49:06
◼
►
That's a much bigger cost on the user
00:49:08
◼
►
than the kind of ads I respect,
00:49:10
◼
►
like podcast and well done blog ads like the deck ads.
00:49:13
◼
►
It's a very different ratio
00:49:15
◼
►
and the advertisers are all cheap and crappy,
00:49:17
◼
►
and so I just, I don't like app ads at all.
00:49:20
◼
►
There are also features in the app,
00:49:22
◼
►
like the Twitter feature, where, you know,
00:49:24
◼
►
so I offer these like Twitter-based recommendations,
00:49:26
◼
►
where you can connect your Twitter account,
00:49:27
◼
►
and then you can get recommendations
00:49:29
◼
►
based on the people you follow,
00:49:31
◼
►
based on what they listen to,
00:49:32
◼
►
and, you know, if they've connected to their accounts.
00:49:35
◼
►
And that kind of feature works best
00:49:38
◼
►
the more people you have, it's a social feature.
00:49:40
◼
►
And this is why all social apps are free, right?
00:49:42
◼
►
'Cause the social network value, exponential,
00:49:44
◼
►
blah, blah, blah, and so this is the same way
00:49:47
◼
►
where that feature becomes a lot better
00:49:50
◼
►
if I have more people using it.
00:49:51
◼
►
So I decided rather than get five bucks from everybody,
00:49:55
◼
►
I was going to try to get five bucks
00:49:59
◼
►
from a few of the people who use the app
00:50:01
◼
►
and just try to make the app as cheap as possible to host.
00:50:05
◼
►
And I focused on that from day one
00:50:07
◼
►
because I did not want to get to the point
00:50:10
◼
►
where I was with Instapaper where it was very,
00:50:12
◼
►
very expensive to host this.
00:50:14
◼
►
With Overcast, I have made every possible focus
00:50:18
◼
►
on keeping it as cheap as possible on the servers.
00:50:21
◼
►
That's why I'm on Linode.
00:50:22
◼
►
That's why my big expanded version of the hosting
00:50:26
◼
►
was only gonna be 500 bucks a month,
00:50:27
◼
►
and I'm probably gonna get away with more like two or 300
00:50:30
◼
►
after this is all done.
00:50:31
◼
►
The whole point of this was cheap hosting.
00:50:34
◼
►
Make this sustainable that way.
00:50:37
◼
►
And so the next question is,
00:50:38
◼
►
which a few people have already asked,
00:50:39
◼
►
is why not a subscription price?
00:50:42
◼
►
And I thought about that a while too.
00:50:45
◼
►
My model for the in-app purchase,
00:50:47
◼
►
I've been all over the place with it in planning this.
00:50:50
◼
►
Originally I was gonna do everything is unlocked
00:50:53
◼
►
and you just pay what you want for the app.
00:50:56
◼
►
And that, I thought about that,
00:50:59
◼
►
I got some input from some trusted people
00:51:01
◼
►
and that just, it wasn't very good.
00:51:03
◼
►
- Is that even allowed on the App Store?
00:51:05
◼
►
How would you get the money from them?
00:51:07
◼
►
- I actually asked them that.
00:51:09
◼
►
Because that's a good question.
00:51:11
◼
►
I talked to a couple people at Apple,
00:51:13
◼
►
whoever, you know, the people I could find at Apple.
00:51:16
◼
►
They don't necessarily publish a directory or anything,
00:51:18
◼
►
but the people I could find who might have been relevant
00:51:20
◼
►
to it at Apple, I tried emailing in and got various places
00:51:24
◼
►
and all of them kind of ended with, well, maybe.
00:51:27
◼
►
So it was kind of a question mark
00:51:29
◼
►
as to whether that would be allowed.
00:51:30
◼
►
And generally with App Store stuff,
00:51:33
◼
►
you don't wanna live on a question mark edge of a rule.
00:51:36
◼
►
What you said earlier, Jon, is exactly right,
00:51:38
◼
►
which is the cost of hosting each user goes down with time.
00:51:42
◼
►
So the only way that my, if I'm responsible
00:51:46
◼
►
about how I host this and how I manage the resources,
00:51:49
◼
►
the only way that the costs really meaningfully
00:51:51
◼
►
go up over time is if the user base
00:51:53
◼
►
is growing substantially over time.
00:51:55
◼
►
Because otherwise if the user base stays the same
00:51:57
◼
►
and usage stays the same, then the cost of hosting
00:51:59
◼
►
will slowly decrease as hardware gets better
00:52:01
◼
►
and hosting gets cheaper.
00:52:03
◼
►
- And I won't be like Instapaper where people like me
00:52:05
◼
►
just have this massive backlog where you're saving
00:52:07
◼
►
just thousands and thousands of articles, even when you archive them, right? I forget
00:52:10
◼
►
what your policy was on archive things. It used to be like a window, but if you paid
00:52:13
◼
►
for it, you've had various reels. But anyway, people's Instapaper collections could in theory
00:52:17
◼
►
grow, whereas podcasts, there's some working set, and then after you've played an episode,
00:52:22
◼
►
you're not retaining that info, are you? Well, I'm retaining the row in the database, which
00:52:27
◼
►
is the row of five integers of the podcast ID, the user ID, whether you completed it
00:52:33
◼
►
or not, and when. Well, I was saying you could trim that stuff
00:52:36
◼
►
Like, you don't need to keep a record of,
00:52:38
◼
►
I listened to this episode three years ago,
00:52:41
◼
►
because it's no longer visible in the app,
00:52:42
◼
►
hasn't been visible in the app for years.
00:52:45
◼
►
- Well actually, if the podcast has fewer than 1,500 entries,
00:52:48
◼
►
it is still visible in the app.
00:52:50
◼
►
But that's, you know, the reality is,
00:52:53
◼
►
like I mean, I know from Tumblr how these tables grow,
00:52:56
◼
►
and what that means, and what it costs to host,
00:52:58
◼
►
and the fact is, a table full of, you know,
00:53:01
◼
►
hundreds of millions of integer associations like that
00:53:05
◼
►
is really nothing to host.
00:53:07
◼
►
It sounds like a big number, but in reality,
00:53:10
◼
►
a table with five integer rows,
00:53:12
◼
►
your service could be as big as Tumblr
00:53:16
◼
►
and that table might only be like nine gigs.
00:53:18
◼
►
We're not really talking a massive amount of data here.
00:53:21
◼
►
And that's the kind of table where the index
00:53:24
◼
►
is bigger than the table usually.
00:53:25
◼
►
- And you were saving the textified versions of web pages
00:53:29
◼
►
in the Instapaper database, right?
00:53:30
◼
►
Because if a--
00:53:31
◼
►
- I was saving them on S3, I wasn't saving the database.
00:53:34
◼
►
- All right, well, but somewhere you were saving them
00:53:36
◼
►
because you had the, what do you call it,
00:53:38
◼
►
if someone had a different view of a website
00:53:42
◼
►
than somebody else, you couldn't just save that webpage
00:53:44
◼
►
as they saw it and allow everyone to see that.
00:53:46
◼
►
- Right, it was a way to work with login barriers,
00:53:50
◼
►
so that if you were logged in,
00:53:52
◼
►
if a site required a login barrier,
00:53:54
◼
►
if you saved it with a bookmarklet,
00:53:56
◼
►
the bookmarklet would send a copy of what you were seeing
00:53:58
◼
►
to the servers which would save it just for you.
00:54:01
◼
►
And anyway, so, where was I?
00:54:03
◼
►
Oh yeah, so subscriptions.
00:54:04
◼
►
So yeah, I didn't do subscriptions
00:54:06
◼
►
because my costs aren't high enough
00:54:09
◼
►
where I really need them.
00:54:10
◼
►
Like I can get along just fine without them.
00:54:14
◼
►
And I might do them in the future.
00:54:15
◼
►
Like with Instapaper, when I sold Instapaper,
00:54:17
◼
►
I don't know what it is now,
00:54:18
◼
►
I haven't been bugging them about stats or anything
00:54:21
◼
►
'cause honestly that's not my job anymore.
00:54:23
◼
►
But when I sold Instapaper,
00:54:25
◼
►
it was making about half of its income from subscriptions.
00:54:30
◼
►
And the Instapaper, it was an interesting model.
00:54:31
◼
►
It was, you know, the app was a few bucks,
00:54:33
◼
►
Most of its life it was five, then it became three.
00:54:36
◼
►
About halfway through the time I had it,
00:54:38
◼
►
I launched these monthly subscriptions
00:54:40
◼
►
that would allow me to offer a very small subset of users
00:54:43
◼
►
very expensive features.
00:54:44
◼
►
It started out with search.
00:54:46
◼
►
Well, it started out with nothing,
00:54:47
◼
►
then I added search.
00:54:48
◼
►
Most people who subscribed did not subscribe
00:54:52
◼
►
because of search.
00:54:53
◼
►
Most people who subscribed subscribed out of
00:54:55
◼
►
a sense of goodwill to me for providing
00:54:57
◼
►
years worth of app updates without charging them
00:55:00
◼
►
and basically building up a surplus of goodwill
00:55:04
◼
►
among my audience.
00:55:06
◼
►
That's kind of my plan here,
00:55:07
◼
►
is if I need more money later on
00:55:08
◼
►
to address hosting costs or whatever,
00:55:11
◼
►
I'll do a few years of free updates.
00:55:14
◼
►
People will like me enough that if I put in a tip jar
00:55:17
◼
►
or something or a monthly voluntary subscription
00:55:19
◼
►
that does nothing, you can make good money with that.
00:55:23
◼
►
I mean, really, think about it.
00:55:24
◼
►
I was making half of my income from those
00:55:27
◼
►
when I sold Instapaper,
00:55:27
◼
►
and most of those people never searched.
00:55:30
◼
►
you know, that was not the reason they were buying it. So that's the plan for money,
00:55:36
◼
►
is what I'm saying. Did I miss anything there? I'm sorry, it's been a long day. I'm kind of
00:55:40
◼
►
mentally fried. So that last bit, though, you were saying, like, the idea of having
00:55:44
◼
►
the equivalent of a tip jar, even if it technically is for search or whatever,
00:55:48
◼
►
or having a subscription thing, you mentioned that those are both viable. It's not like you're
00:55:52
◼
►
saying, "Oh, that can't work," I mean, because you know from experience that it can work in a
00:55:56
◼
►
in a reasonable fashion.
00:55:57
◼
►
What is it about that approach that you didn't like
00:56:00
◼
►
that made you change your mind this time
00:56:03
◼
►
and go with the $5 to unlock
00:56:05
◼
►
the rest of the functionality thing?
00:56:07
◼
►
- It really is a combination of not having
00:56:09
◼
►
a lot of faith in that, 'cause keep in mind,
00:56:11
◼
►
I sold Instapaper over a year ago.
00:56:13
◼
►
And when I sold it, sales were not great.
00:56:15
◼
►
And so, I saw the writing on the wall
00:56:20
◼
►
for the paid-up front model back then,
00:56:22
◼
►
and I'm not very confident in it now.
00:56:26
◼
►
Part of it is also that now is a different model.
00:56:29
◼
►
Instapaper had basically one and a half competitors.
00:56:32
◼
►
The podcast app market has lots of competitors
00:56:34
◼
►
and many of them are free.
00:56:36
◼
►
And so I recognize there was stiffer competition here.
00:56:42
◼
►
I was going into it, I was going into a very mature market.
00:56:45
◼
►
Like with Instapaper, even though there was competition
00:56:48
◼
►
from six months after I launched,
00:56:51
◼
►
the competition and I evolved together.
00:56:56
◼
►
Like we both started from the same spot of not much.
00:56:59
◼
►
And then we were able to grow over time
00:57:02
◼
►
in complexity and advancement.
00:57:04
◼
►
With the podcast market, I'm going into it,
00:57:07
◼
►
while everyone else who's in this market
00:57:09
◼
►
has been writing their apps for four or five years.
00:57:11
◼
►
These are now old apps.
00:57:13
◼
►
They've been around the block.
00:57:15
◼
►
They have tons of features, tons of infrastructure in place.
00:57:19
◼
►
I was starting late to this game,
00:57:21
◼
►
So I was going to come in with fewer features by necessity.
00:57:24
◼
►
And so that's another thing, I tried with that.
00:57:28
◼
►
I realized that I would need to do something
00:57:32
◼
►
a little more dramatic than just launch to five bucks
00:57:35
◼
►
if I wanted to get a decent user base.
00:57:37
◼
►
- Well, what I was thinking of was comparing it to,
00:57:39
◼
►
also launch it free, but have a $20,
00:57:43
◼
►
I like Marco 'cause he makes nice things thing
00:57:45
◼
►
that unlocks some feature that no one's gonna use,
00:57:48
◼
►
like search, but people would do
00:57:49
◼
►
out of the goodness of their heart.
00:57:51
◼
►
Like that's the model I'm comparing it to.
00:57:52
◼
►
Not the $5 upfront, but the large in-application,
00:57:57
◼
►
quote unquote, subscription, whatever you wanna call it,
00:57:59
◼
►
that isn't really unlocking anything.
00:58:02
◼
►
- Like the big tip jar.
00:58:04
◼
►
- The main reason why I didn't do something like that
00:58:07
◼
►
is that I just didn't think most people
00:58:08
◼
►
would buy something that expensive.
00:58:09
◼
►
And like one of my ideas was to have like a three-tier
00:58:13
◼
►
system of like pay what you want, you know,
00:58:15
◼
►
$2 a year, $5 a year, $10 a year, something like that.
00:58:20
◼
►
And I was a little afraid that by making it complicated,
00:58:24
◼
►
'cause those things are all kind of complicated,
00:58:26
◼
►
by making it complicated,
00:58:28
◼
►
then I think you reduce dramatically
00:58:31
◼
►
the number of people who will do it.
00:58:33
◼
►
Because some of those words kinda scare people away.
00:58:37
◼
►
I was even thinking maybe using
00:58:39
◼
►
the public radio vocabulary,
00:58:41
◼
►
calling these things pledges.
00:58:42
◼
►
Or you could be a supporter of the app.
00:58:46
◼
►
- Would you run a telethon once or twice a year then?
00:58:50
◼
►
If I did that, maybe I'd have to consider it.
00:58:52
◼
►
I thought of all those models in various showers
00:58:57
◼
►
I've taken over the last two years.
00:58:59
◼
►
And I, 'cause that's in the showers
00:59:02
◼
►
when I think about pricing for my app most.
00:59:05
◼
►
I don't know why.
00:59:06
◼
►
That's my life.
00:59:09
◼
►
So I went with this model because it's simple.
00:59:12
◼
►
And because it's a low barrier to entry.
00:59:16
◼
►
The price is relatively high.
00:59:17
◼
►
If it's five bucks.
00:59:18
◼
►
I was tempted to charge 10 actually,
00:59:21
◼
►
but I knew nobody would buy that.
00:59:22
◼
►
And who knows, I might discount the in-app purchase
00:59:27
◼
►
in the future, I'll play it with the price,
00:59:29
◼
►
it's not hard coded anywhere.
00:59:31
◼
►
I decided in the end to just keep it simple
00:59:34
◼
►
because it's simpler for everyone,
00:59:36
◼
►
it's simpler for me, it's simpler for the users,
00:59:38
◼
►
this gives me flexibility, I can do things like,
00:59:41
◼
►
in certain places, people who can't use in-app purchase,
00:59:45
◼
►
I can put up a web Stripe buying form,
00:59:48
◼
►
and then sync that over with their account
00:59:51
◼
►
so it unlocks the app.
00:59:52
◼
►
By keeping it simple, I have many options.
00:59:56
◼
►
So that's really it.
00:59:58
◼
►
- All right.
00:59:58
◼
►
- We are also sponsored this week by Fracture.
01:00:01
◼
►
Fracture, they sponsored us a while ago back,
01:00:03
◼
►
I think in May they sponsored us.
01:00:06
◼
►
Fracture is great.
01:00:08
◼
►
Fracture prints photos directly on glass in vivid color.
01:00:12
◼
►
It's really interesting.
01:00:13
◼
►
So I have a bunch of Fracture prints around my office
01:00:16
◼
►
'cause they're good.
01:00:17
◼
►
I mean, you know, it started out obviously,
01:00:18
◼
►
they were a sponsor, that's how I learned about them,
01:00:20
◼
►
so disclaimer, but even when I'm not being sponsored
01:00:25
◼
►
by them, I have on multiple occasions bought Fracture prints
01:00:29
◼
►
at full price because I like them.
01:00:31
◼
►
Fracture, their printing method, it's great,
01:00:35
◼
►
like you upload a picture or whatever
01:00:36
◼
►
and then you get it printed, and it's really,
01:00:39
◼
►
the picture is printed directly on a thin piece of glass
01:00:43
◼
►
that's then mounted to a thin piece of foam board
01:00:45
◼
►
so that you can hang it up easily.
01:00:47
◼
►
So these prints are relatively lightweight.
01:00:50
◼
►
Like you don't have to worry about them
01:00:51
◼
►
like falling off the wall and pulling your wall down
01:00:53
◼
►
and shattering or anything.
01:00:55
◼
►
They're just immensely practical
01:00:57
◼
►
'cause what you get is a really nice looking glass print
01:01:02
◼
►
that's border to border, frameless,
01:01:04
◼
►
and then it is kind of its own frame.
01:01:07
◼
►
You don't need to then like get a picture frame.
01:01:09
◼
►
And compared to getting a picture framed,
01:01:12
◼
►
it's an amazingly good value.
01:01:14
◼
►
So I have a bunch of these things.
01:01:15
◼
►
I have a couple of big ones,
01:01:17
◼
►
showing off various nice pictures I've taken.
01:01:19
◼
►
And then I have these three
01:01:21
◼
►
that are the smallest size they have,
01:01:22
◼
►
which I believe is five by five inches.
01:01:24
◼
►
And I use those to print out app icon pictures
01:01:28
◼
►
of the apps I've worked on.
01:01:29
◼
►
So I have this row hanging in the wall of my office,
01:01:32
◼
►
this row of app icons that I've worked on.
01:01:35
◼
►
It's kind of like a trophy collection
01:01:36
◼
►
for the things I've done in my life.
01:01:38
◼
►
Because when you make apps,
01:01:40
◼
►
there aren't a lot of physical artifacts like that.
01:01:43
◼
►
And it's great because the 5x5 print is just $12.
01:01:48
◼
►
So it's really no barrier to entry here if you want to get a couple of app icons made.
01:01:52
◼
►
You know, yeah, spend $12.
01:01:53
◼
►
It's no big deal.
01:01:55
◼
►
Anyway, Fracture puts everything you need to get your photo on the wall right in the
01:02:01
◼
►
They give you your own little picture anchor thing or if you get the desk version, it has
01:02:06
◼
►
a little stand already built into the frame.
01:02:09
◼
►
Prices start at just $12 for the prints.
01:02:11
◼
►
They're very reasonable.
01:02:12
◼
►
The big ones are really reasonable.
01:02:15
◼
►
And every fracture is handmade and checked for quality by a human being in their small
01:02:19
◼
►
team in Gainesville, Florida.
01:02:21
◼
►
It is the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way to display your favorite photos.
01:02:26
◼
►
And the best thing is you can even get 15% off with a coupon code ATP.
01:02:32
◼
►
So please use coupon code ATP to get 15% off.
01:02:36
◼
►
Go to fractureme.com.
01:02:38
◼
►
That's F-R-A-C-T-U-R-E me dot com.
01:02:41
◼
►
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
01:02:45
◼
►
I definitely recommend them, they are great.
01:02:46
◼
►
I'm looking at, let's see, five of them right now
01:02:49
◼
►
in my field of view.
01:02:50
◼
►
- Yeah, they are really good and I recommend them as well.
01:02:53
◼
►
Let me ask another obvious question,
01:02:56
◼
►
then I'll get into one or two that are less obvious.
01:02:59
◼
►
What took so damn long?
01:03:00
◼
►
- I started writing this in October 2012
01:03:03
◼
►
and that was when I still own Instapaper in the magazine.
01:03:07
◼
►
That's when I had the idea for the audio processing stuff
01:03:09
◼
►
and so I wanted to make a little prototype
01:03:10
◼
►
to see if it was even possible.
01:03:12
◼
►
So I did, and it was, and it was great.
01:03:14
◼
►
But I didn't really have time
01:03:15
◼
►
to make a full podcast app around it at that point.
01:03:17
◼
►
I had other projects.
01:03:19
◼
►
Then, you know, eventually other projects went away,
01:03:23
◼
►
and I had time, so I worked on them.
01:03:25
◼
►
And so then, you know, by last fall,
01:03:27
◼
►
when I announced Overcast at XOXO last September,
01:03:31
◼
►
so almost a year ago, that's when I announced it,
01:03:34
◼
►
by that point I'd been working on it full-time
01:03:36
◼
►
for, I don't know, four or five months,
01:03:38
◼
►
something like that.
01:03:39
◼
►
I really thought it was almost done.
01:03:42
◼
►
Because as a typical programmer, I was like,
01:03:44
◼
►
oh well, you know, it works for me for the most part.
01:03:48
◼
►
It works on my phone, it's fine.
01:03:50
◼
►
So yeah, I should have it out in what, two months?
01:03:53
◼
►
That turned out not to be the case.
01:03:55
◼
►
It just, podcast apps are so incredibly complicated.
01:04:01
◼
►
And I didn't quite fully appreciate that at the time.
01:04:05
◼
►
You know, I didn't, I knew about stuff like,
01:04:08
◼
►
know, feeds, you know, having to manage weird feeds and everything else, like, you know,
01:04:12
◼
►
edge cases there. But just the interface, there's so many screens in a podcast app,
01:04:18
◼
►
it's crazy. Like I have rinsed up about this briefly a couple weeks ago in the after
01:04:22
◼
►
show, so I'm, you know, it's just so, there's so much that goes into a podcast app. And
01:04:28
◼
►
the, I now have 545 emails in my inbox, at least half of which are asking for features
01:04:37
◼
►
that I haven't even done yet. It's a very demanding market as I'm learning today.
01:04:44
◼
►
I thought I was launching with a lot for a 1.0. Turns out, for the most part, yeah, people
01:04:52
◼
►
are fine with it, but there's a lot of people out there who are really demanding more, a
01:04:58
◼
►
lot more, even from day one. And so I didn't want one point. I anticipated some of this,
01:05:05
◼
►
So I didn't want to disappoint people a lot on day one.
01:05:10
◼
►
So I didn't want to leave like massive gaping holes.
01:05:12
◼
►
Now streaming is a big one and you know video is a medium sized hole.
01:05:17
◼
►
I don't ever plan to support video because it's kind of a different medium and it demands
01:05:21
◼
►
different things.
01:05:22
◼
►
I wouldn't be able to use my audio engine and any of the effects and everything else.
01:05:26
◼
►
I could use the compressor but I couldn't use smart speaks it would be weird.
01:05:30
◼
►
There's a bunch of stuff that I couldn't,
01:05:33
◼
►
that it would be harder to do with video.
01:05:35
◼
►
And the whole interface, you have to accommodate video
01:05:37
◼
►
and then you have the question of like,
01:05:39
◼
►
all right, well, are you allowed to mix video into playlists?
01:05:42
◼
►
And if so, what do you do?
01:05:43
◼
►
Like, do you start playing video podcast episodes
01:05:46
◼
►
right in the middle of audio podcast episodes?
01:05:48
◼
►
What if you're in the car?
01:05:49
◼
►
Like, there's all sorts of like weird things
01:05:50
◼
►
with supporting video that I don't think are worth it
01:05:54
◼
►
because I don't think video podcasts
01:05:56
◼
►
are that big of a requirement.
01:05:58
◼
►
I would venture a guess,
01:05:59
◼
►
the majority of podcast listeners don't listen
01:06:01
◼
►
to any video podcasts.
01:06:03
◼
►
It's just such a different medium.
01:06:05
◼
►
Video, I think, was, for me at least,
01:06:07
◼
►
it was an easy decision not to support.
01:06:09
◼
►
You don't, you just don't do it at the same time
01:06:12
◼
►
as audio podcasts.
01:06:13
◼
►
It's a different demand, and I think also most videos
01:06:16
◼
►
move to YouTube these days.
01:06:18
◼
►
- That's what I was gonna say, like,
01:06:19
◼
►
are video podcasts even a thing anymore?
01:06:21
◼
►
Hasn't YouTube channels more or less replaced them?
01:06:23
◼
►
But I mean, I suppose they're still out there,
01:06:24
◼
►
but like, that definitely sounds,
01:06:26
◼
►
if I was into video podcasts, I would want an app
01:06:29
◼
►
that was built around video podcasts,
01:06:30
◼
►
'cause they're different enough.
01:06:32
◼
►
And I suppose you could make one super app
01:06:34
◼
►
that does both audio and video, but that's a tall order.
01:06:37
◼
►
Like, I would be perfectly happy getting separate
01:06:39
◼
►
applications for video and audio podcasts.
01:06:42
◼
►
I mean, you know, and people use the YouTube application
01:06:45
◼
►
if they're watching YouTube channels and stuff.
01:06:48
◼
►
So that's why no video, no streaming was harder
01:06:51
◼
►
to take, basically.
01:06:53
◼
►
The reason I don't have streaming is not because
01:06:57
◼
►
it's some oversight that I just forgot to add it,
01:06:59
◼
►
like as some emailers have assumed.
01:07:02
◼
►
That's not why.
01:07:04
◼
►
The reason I don't have streaming is that
01:07:06
◼
►
all my audio processing stuff is done using raw,
01:07:09
◼
►
low-level core audio APIs that don't inherently
01:07:12
◼
►
automatically provide streaming support.
01:07:14
◼
►
The other apps use AVPlayer.
01:07:17
◼
►
And AVPlayer, the AVPlayer framework is higher level.
01:07:20
◼
►
The downside of AVPlayer is that it removes
01:07:22
◼
►
a lot of the control that you have.
01:07:24
◼
►
There is a way to do voice boost.
01:07:27
◼
►
Not quite as well, but you can do it.
01:07:30
◼
►
It's a little more CPU intensive if you do it that way,
01:07:31
◼
►
but it is possible to do voice boost with AVPlayer.
01:07:35
◼
►
To the best of my knowledge,
01:07:36
◼
►
it is not possible to do smart speed.
01:07:38
◼
►
And I've thought about lots of, over the last few years,
01:07:41
◼
►
I've thought about lots of different ways
01:07:42
◼
►
to maybe attempt to hack smart speed into AVPlayer.
01:07:46
◼
►
And I just could not come up with anything
01:07:48
◼
►
that was remotely doable and reasonable
01:07:52
◼
►
and not like a ridiculous, horrible pile
01:07:55
◼
►
of terrible, fragile hacks that would break immediately.
01:07:58
◼
►
So in order to make Smart Speed, I had to do raw core audio.
01:08:03
◼
►
And I thought Smart Speed was a good enough feature
01:08:07
◼
►
to make that worth adding months of development time
01:08:10
◼
►
and making me have to re-implement things
01:08:13
◼
►
that everyone else gets for free with AVPlayer,
01:08:15
◼
►
including streaming.
01:08:16
◼
►
The other thing is, when the other apps that do streaming,
01:08:19
◼
►
they have to do it in a limited way
01:08:22
◼
►
because AVPlayer, through reasons that I believe,
01:08:26
◼
►
I tried asking Apple about this at WWDC
01:08:28
◼
►
in the labs this year, no one really knew for sure,
01:08:31
◼
►
or at least told me, but it seemed like the reason why
01:08:33
◼
►
is because of HTTP live streaming and its DRM,
01:08:36
◼
►
and its expectations thereof.
01:08:38
◼
►
You can't save a stream, and you can't turn a download
01:08:42
◼
►
into a stream.
01:08:44
◼
►
You have to either stream something or download it.
01:08:46
◼
►
You can't do both.
01:08:47
◼
►
You can't just start playing a partial download,
01:08:50
◼
►
and you definitely can't convert a stream into a download.
01:08:53
◼
►
Like, you know, just stream it and just save it,
01:08:55
◼
►
just save what you're streaming until it's done
01:08:57
◼
►
and then save that as a file.
01:08:58
◼
►
No, you can't do that.
01:08:59
◼
►
What I'm going to do when I do add streaming,
01:09:03
◼
►
which is, I'm gonna begin work on that shortly
01:09:05
◼
►
once 1.0 stuff settles down,
01:09:07
◼
►
I'm going to do it so that you can just start playing
01:09:09
◼
►
a progressive download.
01:09:11
◼
►
Doing that well in the background download system
01:09:14
◼
►
requires new capabilities that are in iOS 8 only.
01:09:18
◼
►
So it made sense to wait until iOS 8 came out
01:09:22
◼
►
and do it then.
01:09:23
◼
►
And so that's what I'm gonna do with streaming.
01:09:25
◼
►
- So let me ask a genuine question.
01:09:27
◼
►
Why is streaming such a big deal,
01:09:30
◼
►
not from a development side, but from a user side?
01:09:32
◼
►
Like there have been times I've wanted to listen to a show
01:09:35
◼
►
and it hasn't been downloaded
01:09:36
◼
►
and so I just wait for it to download.
01:09:39
◼
►
Like what am I missing that makes this such a big deal
01:09:42
◼
►
to so many people?
01:09:44
◼
►
- Most of the benefit of streaming I think has been removed
01:09:46
◼
►
with background downloading.
01:09:48
◼
►
in iOS 8 or 7.
01:09:50
◼
►
I really think that for the most part,
01:09:53
◼
►
most people are going to have things downloaded
01:09:56
◼
►
when they're at home or the office on WiFi
01:10:00
◼
►
and they will never even notice it downloading
01:10:01
◼
►
and then they'll go out and start listening
01:10:04
◼
►
and they'll just listen to whatever they have downloaded.
01:10:05
◼
►
But streaming is really useful
01:10:07
◼
►
like when you're adding a podcast
01:10:09
◼
►
and you wanna start playing it immediately.
01:10:12
◼
►
And so for that instance,
01:10:14
◼
►
like oh, I just discovered this episode or this show,
01:10:17
◼
►
Let me start playing this right now.
01:10:19
◼
►
- You can't, not you personally,
01:10:21
◼
►
but you can't wait like literally 60 seconds.
01:10:23
◼
►
Also the chat room is saying storage space.
01:10:25
◼
►
I mean, I shouldn't be arguing with anyone.
01:10:28
◼
►
I just, I didn't realize that people were running
01:10:30
◼
►
within like 50 or 100 megs of the limits of their device.
01:10:35
◼
►
I'm surprised to hear that.
01:10:36
◼
►
- You gotta live gigs free.
01:10:38
◼
►
I just tried to upgrade my iPhone to 712,
01:10:41
◼
►
which I'd forgotten that I hadn't upgraded it to that.
01:10:43
◼
►
And every time I try to upgrade iOS,
01:10:46
◼
►
and that thing, it tells me I don't have enough space.
01:10:47
◼
►
Only 1.4 gigs are available, so I gotta go delete stuff.
01:10:50
◼
►
And you need a lot of room just for even small OS upgrades.
01:10:55
◼
►
- Also, there's the issue of download speed also.
01:11:00
◼
►
- Yeah, which is what the chat room is now telling me,
01:11:02
◼
►
is that I'm spoiled by LTE/decent wifi.
01:11:06
◼
►
- Well, and also, some podcasts are hosted
01:11:08
◼
►
on servers or CDNs that themselves don't send the files
01:11:10
◼
►
very quickly or can't send the files very quickly.
01:11:12
◼
►
- Yeah, that is a big problem.
01:11:14
◼
►
So my experience, obviously I don't have an iPhone,
01:11:16
◼
►
but like with my iPod touches,
01:11:17
◼
►
with the background downloads,
01:11:19
◼
►
every time I pick up my iPod touch
01:11:22
◼
►
and go to Overcast over the past month or so
01:11:24
◼
►
I've been using it, everything's already downloaded
01:11:27
◼
►
'cause it's just been sitting there in my wifi all day.
01:11:29
◼
►
But on the occasion when I said,
01:11:32
◼
►
oh, actually I wanna get like you just said,
01:11:33
◼
►
oh, I just wanna get this episode,
01:11:35
◼
►
I do the thing you just said, Casey,
01:11:36
◼
►
and I go to download it and I look, it's like 1%, 2%.
01:11:40
◼
►
And you're like, oh, no, it's gonna be,
01:11:42
◼
►
and for me, I can't say,
01:11:44
◼
►
well, I'm gonna get in the car and drive away anyway
01:11:45
◼
►
Because as soon as I leave my house, the download stops.
01:11:48
◼
►
It's an iPod Touch.
01:11:49
◼
►
So I think there are two use cases.
01:11:52
◼
►
One are the people-- when you say streaming,
01:11:54
◼
►
you think of people just wandering around,
01:11:57
◼
►
constantly pulling audio over cell data that
01:12:00
◼
►
goes right into their ears.
01:12:01
◼
►
But I think the other use case is I
01:12:05
◼
►
don't want to have to wait for the download to finish,
01:12:07
◼
►
and I want to be able to start listening as fast as I can.
01:12:10
◼
►
Because presumably, the service can send audio data fast
01:12:13
◼
►
enough that you can listen to it in more or less real time.
01:12:16
◼
►
So that's what I would like out of the streaming.
01:12:19
◼
►
That's like, I remember being frustrated
01:12:21
◼
►
when Apple first added podcast to iTunes.
01:12:23
◼
►
I got all excited when it's a podcast, got a subscription,
01:12:26
◼
►
and then I clicked on an episode
01:12:28
◼
►
and saw the downloading bar.
01:12:29
◼
►
I'm like, why isn't it playing?
01:12:31
◼
►
It's not gonna play until it finishes downloading.
01:12:33
◼
►
This is ridiculous, you know,
01:12:34
◼
►
because you're used to like everything, you know,
01:12:35
◼
►
web browsers, if you go an audio file, a video,
01:12:37
◼
►
like of course it starts playing
01:12:38
◼
►
before the whole thing downloads.
01:12:40
◼
►
It's not, you know, but podcasts weren't like that,
01:12:42
◼
►
probably for framework reasons.
01:12:43
◼
►
And by the way, a lot of people in the chat room
01:12:45
◼
►
have mentioned lots of other podcast apps
01:12:47
◼
►
that already do this.
01:12:48
◼
►
I think what Marco was saying is that
01:12:50
◼
►
the frameworks Apple provides
01:12:52
◼
►
don't give you a convenient way to do that.
01:12:54
◼
►
So if you want to do that, it is entirely possible
01:12:56
◼
►
you have to do it yourself though.
01:12:58
◼
►
And what Marco's saying is he wants to wait until iOS 8
01:13:00
◼
►
because there are frameworks that make that easier.
01:13:02
◼
►
All these other people with podcast apps,
01:13:04
◼
►
like Marco said, got a big head start on him.
01:13:06
◼
►
They've already implemented their own ways
01:13:07
◼
►
to do all these things.
01:13:08
◼
►
Essentially, I think what it comes down to for streaming is
01:13:11
◼
►
You gotta pick what's gonna make it into 1.0,
01:13:13
◼
►
and that one didn't make the cut.
01:13:14
◼
►
I mean, if you had added streaming,
01:13:15
◼
►
you'd be waiting many more months before the thing came out.
01:13:18
◼
►
- Right, and specifically, what they've added in 8,
01:13:22
◼
►
you know, this is no big top secret,
01:13:24
◼
►
what they've added in 8 is the ability
01:13:26
◼
►
to basically use streaming on the same download
01:13:31
◼
►
that can become a background download if it has to.
01:13:34
◼
►
In 7, if you wanted to do a background download
01:13:37
◼
►
when the app wasn't running or whatever,
01:13:39
◼
►
you kick off the request and it says,
01:13:42
◼
►
all right, and then it can tell you progress updates,
01:13:45
◼
►
but you can't get to the data until it's done.
01:13:49
◼
►
So there's no way to stream that.
01:13:51
◼
►
So if you were offering streaming before,
01:13:53
◼
►
you had to offer streaming in a way that,
01:13:55
◼
►
oh, and you also can't convert any other downloads
01:13:58
◼
►
into a background download.
01:13:59
◼
►
So you'd have to offer streaming in a way
01:14:01
◼
►
that if you were streaming hit pause
01:14:04
◼
►
and the app got terminated or got backgrounded,
01:14:07
◼
►
that download would get canceled and fail
01:14:08
◼
►
and you have to start over again with a background download
01:14:10
◼
►
if you wanted that file.
01:14:11
◼
►
Where what they've added in 8 is the ability to convert
01:14:16
◼
►
a streaming data download into a background download.
01:14:20
◼
►
So that that use case can continue and can do that well.
01:14:24
◼
►
So that's what I'm gonna use.
01:14:26
◼
►
- All right, what about the dev process
01:14:31
◼
►
surprised you the most?
01:14:32
◼
►
Was it just that there are that many screens
01:14:34
◼
►
or was there something else?
01:14:36
◼
►
- I was most surprised that all this audio stuff
01:14:38
◼
►
worked on an iPhone.
01:14:40
◼
►
- That's actually a pretty good answer.
01:14:41
◼
►
- Really, because it was like, oh my god,
01:14:44
◼
►
the amount of processing I do on every sample
01:14:49
◼
►
that goes through 44,100 times per second,
01:14:54
◼
►
or if you're a stereo podcast, 88,200 times per second,
01:14:58
◼
►
the amount of just processing and math,
01:15:02
◼
►
I look at almost every sample in some way
01:15:04
◼
►
when smart speed is on, at least.
01:15:07
◼
►
and even when smart speed is off,
01:15:09
◼
►
to render the little peak meters animation,
01:15:11
◼
►
the little EQ animation, I'm looking at every sample.
01:15:15
◼
►
I'm doing an FFT on every sample.
01:15:19
◼
►
That's crazy talk.
01:15:20
◼
►
Thinking about that, just logically,
01:15:24
◼
►
that shouldn't be so fast on an iPhone.
01:15:27
◼
►
It runs at 30 frames a second on an iPhone 4
01:15:30
◼
►
and without maxing out the CPU.
01:15:33
◼
►
And to answer people in the chat
01:15:34
◼
►
talking about battery impact and everything,
01:15:37
◼
►
I was concerned about battery impact.
01:15:39
◼
►
I've been using this for over a year now
01:15:42
◼
►
and the battery impact is fine.
01:15:44
◼
►
It's fine, like it's not.
01:15:47
◼
►
What hits the battery the hardest
01:15:48
◼
►
is playing shows faster than 1X.
01:15:52
◼
►
And so to some degree, Smart Speed does that
01:15:54
◼
►
because the reason why that's so hard
01:15:56
◼
►
is that you're then asking the hardware
01:15:58
◼
►
to process more than 44,100 frames per second.
01:16:02
◼
►
You're asking it to, you know, if you're playing at 1.5X,
01:16:05
◼
►
it's gonna process 60 whatever frames per second.
01:16:08
◼
►
So it's going to, when you're playing faster than 1X,
01:16:12
◼
►
it still has to decode the MP3, read all that data,
01:16:15
◼
►
process all that data, so it's doing all that work
01:16:20
◼
►
more per second.
01:16:21
◼
►
That is what makes a big battery impact.
01:16:24
◼
►
If you look at the CPU usage meter
01:16:26
◼
►
as you're running one of these things,
01:16:28
◼
►
but that's true of all the podcast apps, including Apple's.
01:16:31
◼
►
They all have that problem,
01:16:32
◼
►
because that's just the reality of playing data quickly
01:16:35
◼
►
is that you have to then read and process it more quickly,
01:16:37
◼
►
so you have to do more of it and it costs CPU time.
01:16:39
◼
►
- You're not doing the equalizer animation
01:16:42
◼
►
when the screen's off, right?
01:16:43
◼
►
- Correct, yeah.
01:16:44
◼
►
If there isn't one on screen, or the screen is off,
01:16:47
◼
►
or the app is not foreground, then it does not do anything.
01:16:52
◼
►
- All right, what's your favorite feature,
01:16:54
◼
►
which may or may not be the one you're most proud of?
01:16:58
◼
►
- I'm definitely, okay.
01:17:01
◼
►
I think my favorite one is playlist reordering.
01:17:04
◼
►
The way playlists are implemented is crazy
01:17:08
◼
►
because I really wanted this particular feature,
01:17:12
◼
►
which is I didn't want to have to distinguish
01:17:13
◼
►
between a manually organized playlist and a smart playlist,
01:17:17
◼
►
the way most iTunes does it that way.
01:17:20
◼
►
I wanted all playlists to be smart and manually organizable.
01:17:24
◼
►
So that's how I did in Overcast.
01:17:27
◼
►
So you can set your criteria for your playlist
01:17:30
◼
►
and what should be included,
01:17:32
◼
►
But you can always just drag it around and reorder it.
01:17:35
◼
►
And then when new things come in,
01:17:37
◼
►
your order is preserved and it just tries to,
01:17:40
◼
►
it tries to obey the filters in a reasonable way
01:17:43
◼
►
and the priority settings and everything
01:17:45
◼
►
to try to fit a new episode in where it should probably go
01:17:49
◼
►
given your reordering.
01:17:50
◼
►
- Yeah, you know, when you first told us about Overcast,
01:17:55
◼
►
that was quite a while ago and you were talking about
01:17:57
◼
►
things like smart speed and things that you
01:17:59
◼
►
were trying to include in it.
01:18:01
◼
►
And you had told us about your playlist ideas.
01:18:05
◼
►
Possibly it was underscore and I down in South Carolina.
01:18:08
◼
►
But regardless of when, I never used playlists ever in any podcast app I've ever used.
01:18:14
◼
►
And so when you gave us the beta, I tried to do a playlist for things that just Aaron
01:18:20
◼
►
and I listened to, which is basically just IRL talk, and then everything else.
01:18:25
◼
►
And every time I started fiddling with the playlist settings
01:18:30
◼
►
or perhaps reordering the playlist
01:18:32
◼
►
like you were describing,
01:18:33
◼
►
it was very quickly apparent to me
01:18:35
◼
►
that this was something that I've always wanted in my life,
01:18:37
◼
►
I just didn't know it yet.
01:18:39
◼
►
And it's really, really well done.
01:18:41
◼
►
And I am not surprised that you count that
01:18:43
◼
►
as your favorite feature.
01:18:44
◼
►
I think my favorite is probably Smart Speed
01:18:46
◼
►
because I think it is so transparent,
01:18:48
◼
►
but the playlists are a close second.
01:18:51
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean, Smart Speed, I think,
01:18:53
◼
►
is definitely what I'm most proud of.
01:18:54
◼
►
because smart speed, it's a hard thing to do.
01:18:57
◼
►
Like one of my formulas for my own happiness
01:19:01
◼
►
and intellectual happiness as well as success
01:19:03
◼
►
in the app world is it's nice if you do like one hard thing
01:19:08
◼
►
and a lot of easy things in an app.
01:19:11
◼
►
That's a really good balance to have
01:19:12
◼
►
because if you do like one really hard thing,
01:19:14
◼
►
that makes it harder for competitors to do
01:19:16
◼
►
and to copy you feature by feature.
01:19:18
◼
►
But then all the easy things help it be easier
01:19:21
◼
►
to maintain for you.
01:19:23
◼
►
And usually, a lot of things that are very hard to do
01:19:27
◼
►
aren't really worth it.
01:19:27
◼
►
Like they don't bring,
01:19:29
◼
►
it isn't a must-have feature for customers.
01:19:31
◼
►
So you gotta be careful what you pick.
01:19:33
◼
►
But I talked in the last after show about how
01:19:36
◼
►
I worked so hard on the Kindle feature for Instapaper.
01:19:40
◼
►
And in reality, that probably wasn't worth
01:19:41
◼
►
all the effort I put into it.
01:19:43
◼
►
'Cause it was hard.
01:19:44
◼
►
It's easier these days with some of their tools,
01:19:46
◼
►
but it was hard.
01:19:47
◼
►
Anyway, Smart Speed is a very hard feature
01:19:50
◼
►
to implement well.
01:19:51
◼
►
You can do it badly in a few easier ways,
01:19:55
◼
►
but I wanted to do it right and I wanted to do it well,
01:19:57
◼
►
and doing it well is not easy.
01:20:00
◼
►
That said, there isn't anything stopping
01:20:02
◼
►
the other podcast app developers from doing it.
01:20:04
◼
►
So, you know, like just time and dedication
01:20:07
◼
►
and possibly having to rewrite a lot of code,
01:20:10
◼
►
you know, they could do it.
01:20:11
◼
►
It's not like this is gonna be exclusive to me forever.
01:20:14
◼
►
Like, I'll be lucky if it's exclusive to me for six months,
01:20:17
◼
►
you know, but anyway.
01:20:20
◼
►
And yes, I know RSS Radio already does it
01:20:22
◼
►
to prevent any feedback like that.
01:20:24
◼
►
So it is even exclusive today.
01:20:27
◼
►
But yeah, so anyway, I'm very proud of that.
01:20:31
◼
►
I'm also very, very proud that my EQ meters
01:20:34
◼
►
animation thing actually works.
01:20:36
◼
►
Because the whole reason I did that
01:20:38
◼
►
is because Apple in their music app and iOS 7,
01:20:43
◼
►
like the problem I was trying to solve with that
01:20:46
◼
►
was how do you indicate in the list of episodes,
01:20:49
◼
►
how do you indicate which one is currently playing?
01:20:52
◼
►
And the way Apple handles this
01:20:55
◼
►
is they have a little pink animation in the music screen
01:20:59
◼
►
that is like a tiny version of this
01:21:02
◼
►
in like a little circle on the side or something like that.
01:21:04
◼
►
It's a tiny version of a peak meter's view.
01:21:06
◼
►
What drives me crazy about it is that it's fake.
01:21:09
◼
►
It's just a canned animation of some bars moving up and down
01:21:13
◼
►
it is not actually reflecting the music that it's playing.
01:21:17
◼
►
So me being a smart ass and being arrogant,
01:21:20
◼
►
I thought, you know what,
01:21:21
◼
►
I bet I could do that for real in my app.
01:21:24
◼
►
And so I tried and I'm like, you know,
01:21:26
◼
►
and at first I was like,
01:21:27
◼
►
I'm probably gonna have to use OpenGL
01:21:28
◼
►
and to make it really fast and everything.
01:21:30
◼
►
It's kind of hard to use OpenGL
01:21:32
◼
►
on a translucent blended layer
01:21:34
◼
►
that's gonna be blended into the rest of UI kit.
01:21:35
◼
►
Like that's not easy.
01:21:37
◼
►
And I really didn't want the overhead of doing GL
01:21:39
◼
►
'cause I didn't wanna be spending two weeks
01:21:40
◼
►
on this one little feature.
01:21:42
◼
►
- What made you think you knew
01:21:43
◼
►
we're gonna need to use OpenGL for it?
01:21:45
◼
►
just to get the animation fast enough,
01:21:48
◼
►
or for battery reasons.
01:21:51
◼
►
Maybe I could do it with QuickDraw or whatever,
01:21:53
◼
►
but maybe it would take too long.
01:21:55
◼
►
QuickDraw, right.
01:21:57
◼
►
You mean the actual drawing process, though.
01:21:59
◼
►
What you're worried about is not so much the core animation
01:22:02
◼
►
will be run through OpenGL, but you
01:22:03
◼
►
didn't want to have to draw the little lines with core graphics
01:22:07
◼
►
thinking that you wouldn't be able to get 60 frames per second
01:22:09
◼
►
out of that.
01:22:10
◼
►
I was worried about that, and I was also
01:22:12
◼
►
worried about the FFT that's running in the background
01:22:15
◼
►
processing all the sound, like what is that going to do to battery life?
01:22:18
◼
►
What do you think the GPU is sitting there waiting to run your DSP functions on it, right?
01:22:23
◼
►
I've thought about that, but honestly the CPU versions of it work so incredibly well.
01:22:28
◼
►
For the scale I'm running them on, I don't think the GPU will make a big difference.
01:22:33
◼
►
The libraries, they have those, what are they called, the ARM extensions, the ARM SIMD extensions,
01:22:38
◼
►
neon or something? Yeah, yeah. So like presumably Apple's libraries are using that behind the scenes
01:22:43
◼
►
on the CPU's that support it.
01:22:44
◼
►
So it's kind of like you get your own, you know,
01:22:46
◼
►
it's like Ultivec all over again.
01:22:48
◼
►
- Exactly, yeah.
01:22:49
◼
►
So I made very heavy use of the accelerate framework,
01:22:52
◼
►
the VDSB functions, which all do,
01:22:54
◼
►
as far as I know they all use neon whenever they can.
01:22:58
◼
►
And so, yeah, so I made this visualizer with that.
01:23:03
◼
►
I realized how quickly it ran,
01:23:05
◼
►
and it was originally only gonna be on,
01:23:09
◼
►
like just overlaying the artwork on the table cells.
01:23:11
◼
►
That's all I needed it for.
01:23:13
◼
►
And then I realized, oh, this is really cool.
01:23:16
◼
►
And I added it to the main playing screen,
01:23:20
◼
►
first of all because it looked cool
01:23:21
◼
►
and it seemed like a waste to have it
01:23:22
◼
►
on the navigation screens and not on the now playing screen.
01:23:25
◼
►
And also because I thought it might help,
01:23:29
◼
►
if you're listening to a podcast on your phone,
01:23:32
◼
►
but you're not doing something else,
01:23:34
◼
►
if you're just sitting on the couch looking at your phone,
01:23:36
◼
►
like nothing else is going on,
01:23:38
◼
►
or you're sitting commuting on a plane
01:23:40
◼
►
or something like that,
01:23:41
◼
►
You wanted to signal to other people that you're listening?
01:23:44
◼
►
- No, I wanted, well first of all,
01:23:45
◼
►
it is nice that it has that feature
01:23:47
◼
►
where like in a lot of other apps,
01:23:49
◼
►
the only way you can tell that they're playing
01:23:51
◼
►
is if the time is moving, basically.
01:23:54
◼
►
And you know, or the symbol changes on the play button,
01:23:57
◼
►
but like it's, these are pretty subtle signals.
01:23:59
◼
►
With Overcast, it's very clear when it's playing something.
01:24:02
◼
►
But also, I wanted to give people
01:24:04
◼
►
who were just sitting there with their phone
01:24:05
◼
►
who had nothing else to do, something to look at.
01:24:08
◼
►
Like just something to like keep you
01:24:10
◼
►
visually entertained a little bit,
01:24:11
◼
►
so that maybe, just maybe, you'll,
01:24:13
◼
►
for a few seconds more, not switch over to Twitter
01:24:16
◼
►
and stop paying attention to what you're listening to.
01:24:19
◼
►
So it was kind of like a political statement as well,
01:24:21
◼
►
like, let me give you some reason to stay in this app
01:24:23
◼
►
and something to just lock your visual attention
01:24:26
◼
►
so that you can pay attention to the podcast,
01:24:28
◼
►
rather than switching to something else
01:24:29
◼
►
and zoning it out.
01:24:31
◼
►
- So why did you mirror all the bars, Johnny Ive?
01:24:34
◼
►
- It looked better.
01:24:35
◼
►
Exactly, that's it, it looked better.
01:24:37
◼
►
Simple as that.
01:24:39
◼
►
There were a number of good reasons why the number of bars
01:24:43
◼
►
had to be, it's 19, 18, 19, yeah.
01:24:48
◼
►
There were a number of reasons the number had to be
01:24:51
◼
►
no greater than 19, like the FFT window size.
01:24:54
◼
►
It was like, it would have been really difficult
01:24:56
◼
►
and much more complicated and much more CPU intensive
01:25:00
◼
►
if I had more FFT buckets.
01:25:02
◼
►
So I couldn't do more bars than that.
01:25:04
◼
►
And so not only does it look better to have the shape
01:25:07
◼
►
be symmetrical that the bars form,
01:25:10
◼
►
rather than just being like a big slope
01:25:12
◼
►
and you fall off the edge of the screen.
01:25:13
◼
►
So not only is the shape nice and symmetrical,
01:25:16
◼
►
but also the bars can be nice and thin
01:25:18
◼
►
relative to like, you know, not being like these,
01:25:20
◼
►
these, you know, big fat ones.
01:25:21
◼
►
- You can always cheat and interpolate
01:25:23
◼
►
between the bars, right?
01:25:24
◼
►
- Yeah, but that's stupid.
01:25:25
◼
►
Yeah, I couldn't do that.
01:25:27
◼
►
- All right, so I've got two more questions
01:25:30
◼
►
and then I'd genuinely like to hear John
01:25:32
◼
►
destroy your user interface.
01:25:35
◼
►
All right, firstly, what do you hope people appreciate?
01:25:39
◼
►
And perhaps you feel like you've already answered that,
01:25:41
◼
►
but an example of something we haven't really talked
01:25:43
◼
►
about yet is the link to other ads.
01:25:46
◼
►
- Do we, wait, before we made this entirely the me show,
01:25:49
◼
►
do we have any other topics we wanted to get to?
01:25:51
◼
►
'Cause I don't wanna like take over our show.
01:25:54
◼
►
- Too late, we do have topics,
01:25:55
◼
►
but they'll keep till next week.
01:25:57
◼
►
- Yeah, and you can blame me
01:25:58
◼
►
'cause I keep asking you questions, so it's my fault.
01:26:02
◼
►
So yeah, so what do you hope people appreciate?
01:26:04
◼
►
And what I was starting to say was,
01:26:05
◼
►
an example of this that I've seen a lot of positive feedback
01:26:09
◼
►
for from whatever was the linking
01:26:12
◼
►
to the other independent podcast apps.
01:26:14
◼
►
And I've seen a lot of comments fly by
01:26:16
◼
►
about how that was a classy thing to do.
01:26:18
◼
►
Maybe that's your answer, maybe it isn't,
01:26:19
◼
►
but what do you hope users of the app really appreciate?
01:26:23
◼
►
- To answer the question directly,
01:26:25
◼
►
what I hope people really appreciate is the smart speed
01:26:27
◼
►
and the voice boost, because these are the things
01:26:29
◼
►
that just were the hardest.
01:26:31
◼
►
They took the longest.
01:26:32
◼
►
And for the time being, they set me apart.
01:26:35
◼
►
These are features that they don't immediately scream,
01:26:39
◼
►
oh my God, must have to a lot of people.
01:26:42
◼
►
Some people, sure, but not to probably
01:26:44
◼
►
the majority of people.
01:26:46
◼
►
But once you try them, they're incredibly valuable
01:26:49
◼
►
if you care about those things.
01:26:51
◼
►
And some people don't.
01:26:52
◼
►
Some people never play podcasts faster than 1X.
01:26:53
◼
►
They don't want to, they don't see the point,
01:26:55
◼
►
or they don't like the sound or whatever.
01:26:57
◼
►
A lot of people couldn't possibly care
01:27:01
◼
►
about the volume normalization and everything.
01:27:02
◼
►
That's fine.
01:27:03
◼
►
You know, you don't need everyone to love you
01:27:05
◼
►
and you don't need everyone to appreciate
01:27:07
◼
►
the amount of work you put into anything.
01:27:08
◼
►
That's, you know, the amount of work you put into something
01:27:10
◼
►
does not correlate to its value.
01:27:12
◼
►
So that's fine.
01:27:14
◼
►
But I hope people appreciate that stuff who care, you know?
01:27:19
◼
►
And so that's the answer to that.
01:27:21
◼
►
Now to get to the question that you kind of asked
01:27:23
◼
►
about why I did the link to other apps in the,
01:27:27
◼
►
I basically have a section in settings
01:27:29
◼
►
that links to all my competitors for, well not all of them,
01:27:32
◼
►
linked to some of my competitors,
01:27:34
◼
►
probably the biggest ones.
01:27:35
◼
►
The main reason why I did that,
01:27:38
◼
►
it was kind of a what the hell moment.
01:27:41
◼
►
It was like, you know what, I wanna do this thing,
01:27:44
◼
►
and I think it would be pretty cool.
01:27:46
◼
►
I was afraid though, it was a risk,
01:27:48
◼
►
I saw it as a risk in two reasons,
01:27:51
◼
►
one small and one big.
01:27:53
◼
►
The small risk was that Apple would reject it
01:27:55
◼
►
because they have pretty strict rules
01:27:57
◼
►
about whether you can display and link to other apps
01:28:01
◼
►
within your app and under what conditions.
01:28:03
◼
►
And if you read the rules, it's kinda like,
01:28:05
◼
►
well, this might qualify, this might not.
01:28:07
◼
►
It was a little bit vague,
01:28:09
◼
►
and I wasn't sure if they would approve it.
01:28:10
◼
►
Turns out they don't care, not yet at least.
01:28:12
◼
►
So we'll see future updates,
01:28:14
◼
►
we'll see if this feature lasts.
01:28:16
◼
►
So far they don't care.
01:28:17
◼
►
The second concern, and that's a minor concern,
01:28:21
◼
►
'cause if they say I can't do it, fine,
01:28:23
◼
►
I take it out and I resubmit, no big deal.
01:28:25
◼
►
The second reason, though, was I was afraid that it would,
01:28:30
◼
►
My goal with doing this, with linking to my competitors,
01:28:35
◼
►
was really well-meaning.
01:28:36
◼
►
It was really to just like, you know,
01:28:39
◼
►
some of these people are my friends.
01:28:41
◼
►
This is a small business.
01:28:43
◼
►
These are all indie developers like me.
01:28:45
◼
►
We're not talking about,
01:28:46
◼
►
like I'm not linking to like major corporations
01:28:48
◼
►
with VC funding who were trying to crush everybody
01:28:51
◼
►
and put everyone out of business.
01:28:52
◼
►
Like that's not this business.
01:28:54
◼
►
This is a business of small independent developers
01:28:57
◼
►
who are very similar to me.
01:28:59
◼
►
and I wanted to kind of show solidarity with it almost,
01:29:03
◼
►
just kind of be friendly with the business
01:29:06
◼
►
rather than being hostile towards my competitors.
01:29:09
◼
►
And again, some of these people are friends of mine,
01:29:12
◼
►
which made it even easier to do it.
01:29:14
◼
►
I was afraid though that it might be perceived as
01:29:17
◼
►
me looking down on these people,
01:29:19
◼
►
like, oh, you don't like my app?
01:29:21
◼
►
Well fine, just take one of these,
01:29:23
◼
►
'cause I'm like the arrogant (beep)
01:29:24
◼
►
who everyone hates.
01:29:26
◼
►
I was worried about that perception happening,
01:29:30
◼
►
but it didn't, and in fact, not only did it not happen,
01:29:33
◼
►
I didn't see a single person who seemed to think that.
01:29:37
◼
►
Having that feature in the app,
01:29:39
◼
►
I think has gotten me more tweets, more comments,
01:29:43
◼
►
more emails that are all positive
01:29:46
◼
►
than anything else in the app,
01:29:47
◼
►
including all my features, Smart Speed,
01:29:49
◼
►
people like that more than everything else
01:29:54
◼
►
I've done in the app,
01:29:55
◼
►
according to what people are telling me about and what people are posting on Twitter. People
01:29:58
◼
►
love it. They love it.
01:30:00
◼
►
I was just going to bring up the one jerk who I saw who was yelling at you about that
01:30:04
◼
►
on Hacker News. I guess you didn't see that one. But anyway, rest assured that the internet—
01:30:08
◼
►
I haven't read through all of Hacker News yet.
01:30:09
◼
►
Yeah, read the Hacker News story. There's one guy who gets all upset that you linked
01:30:13
◼
►
to your comp— like, it takes a special kind of determination to dislike somebody. To figure
01:30:20
◼
►
out a way that someone linking to his competitors in a respectful way from his application is
01:30:27
◼
►
somehow a, you know, shows that he is a terrible person. But this person took their best shot
01:30:36
◼
►
Yep. So my last question, which I think you just answered seconds ago, was what was your
01:30:40
◼
►
most surprising response? And it sounds like the linking to other people's apps was that.
01:30:45
◼
►
- Yeah, definitely.
01:30:46
◼
►
That and a combination of both of how many people
01:30:50
◼
►
immediately saw that and immediately cared about it
01:30:53
◼
►
in a positive way, so that's number one.
01:30:55
◼
►
Number two, I was really just overall
01:30:57
◼
►
very pleasantly surprised at how positive
01:30:59
◼
►
the reactions generally were.
01:31:01
◼
►
I didn't know, like until this launch,
01:31:04
◼
►
I had no idea whether anyone would care
01:31:07
◼
►
about the new cool stuff I did
01:31:11
◼
►
because I have the, 'cause I don't support
01:31:13
◼
►
the iPad, the Mac, Android, I barely support the web.
01:31:18
◼
►
I don't have streaming, I don't support videos.
01:31:22
◼
►
Like there's all these limitations in Overcast.
01:31:25
◼
►
Those are pretty big omissions to a lot of people.
01:31:28
◼
►
But they're not very big to me.
01:31:29
◼
►
I only listen on my iPhone.
01:31:31
◼
►
I didn't really feel myself that all these other platform
01:31:36
◼
►
clients were important to have on day one.
01:31:39
◼
►
Not as important as launching a year earlier, say.
01:31:42
◼
►
So there was that.
01:31:44
◼
►
I also, you know, I never watch video podcasts
01:31:48
◼
►
because I'm always listening to podcasts in contexts
01:31:51
◼
►
where I can't look at a screen.
01:31:52
◼
►
So I don't use video podcasts.
01:31:54
◼
►
And streaming, as I said, I'm going to ad streaming.
01:31:57
◼
►
I didn't make it into version one
01:31:58
◼
►
because it wasn't so important to hold back the release
01:32:02
◼
►
for another three months while I did it
01:32:04
◼
►
and wait for iOS 8.
01:32:05
◼
►
Like that, so that's why.
01:32:08
◼
►
Overall though, I didn't know how many people out there
01:32:11
◼
►
thought like me on this.
01:32:13
◼
►
Like certain features I don't even have, big and small,
01:32:17
◼
►
I didn't know how many people that would anger
01:32:20
◼
►
and offend and turn off and who would just say,
01:32:23
◼
►
"Useless, one star."
01:32:25
◼
►
And it turns out there are a few, of course.
01:32:27
◼
►
Yeah, there's always gonna be a few,
01:32:29
◼
►
but it's a much smaller percentage of people
01:32:30
◼
►
than I expected.
01:32:31
◼
►
- Yeah, that's awesome.
01:32:34
◼
►
And I should, to back up just a brief moment,
01:32:36
◼
►
I should point out that I was curious
01:32:39
◼
►
how you were going to handle ordering the podcast apps
01:32:44
◼
►
that you were linking to,
01:32:45
◼
►
because one could perhaps unreasonably construe that,
01:32:49
◼
►
oh, whatever you put at the top
01:32:51
◼
►
is clearly your most favorite of all your competitors.
01:32:54
◼
►
And I don't remember if it was that you told me
01:32:57
◼
►
or I noticed, but you found a way around that,
01:33:00
◼
►
which I thought was very clever.
01:33:01
◼
►
- I just randomized the list every time you open the screen.
01:33:04
◼
►
- Right, which I thought that was a very clever idea
01:33:08
◼
►
a really good touch as well.
01:33:09
◼
►
- Yeah, I do the same thing for the same reason
01:33:12
◼
►
with the directory categories.
01:33:13
◼
►
Like the category list itself is ordered intentionally,
01:33:16
◼
►
but the podcasts in each category are randomly ordered
01:33:20
◼
►
every time you load it.
01:33:22
◼
►
- Same reason, because it's like, you know,
01:33:23
◼
►
I don't wanna like, I don't wanna have to rank these
01:33:26
◼
►
like, you know, one through six in this category.
01:33:28
◼
►
Like I don't care that much.
01:33:30
◼
►
I don't want it to be like that.
01:33:31
◼
►
- You can always do alphabetical for the directory, I mean.
01:33:34
◼
►
- Yeah, but then you have like AAA Tech Show,
01:33:39
◼
►
That you have the yellow pages problem.
01:33:41
◼
►
- People are gonna be gaming your particular
01:33:43
◼
►
iPod or podcast application.
01:33:45
◼
►
- Well, but like your lessons to Casey.
01:33:47
◼
►
It's like, you wanna add that security now or later?
01:33:50
◼
►
It's better off to add it now.
01:33:53
◼
►
So yeah, that's why I did that that way.
01:33:55
◼
►
And also, by the way, another risk that I thought,
01:33:59
◼
►
the only developer who was in that list
01:34:02
◼
►
who knew about it beforehand was _DavidSmith,
01:34:04
◼
►
'cause he's a friend of ours, he was on the beta.
01:34:07
◼
►
So Pod Wrangler, by _DavidSmith,
01:34:09
◼
►
that was the only app on there that knew about it beforehand.
01:34:12
◼
►
I was also afraid, and this could still happen,
01:34:16
◼
►
that one of those developers would get really pissed off
01:34:18
◼
►
at me for including them on that list
01:34:19
◼
►
and would demand removal.
01:34:20
◼
►
If that happens, I can do it server side, it's no big deal.
01:34:25
◼
►
- Why would they demand removal?
01:34:27
◼
►
- Maybe they really hate me as a competitor
01:34:30
◼
►
and don't wanna be in my app at all, I don't know.
01:34:31
◼
►
- They don't want you to link to their app?
01:34:34
◼
►
- It was a risk.
01:34:36
◼
►
I don't think it was a major risk, but I was worried,
01:34:39
◼
►
like what if one of these competitors gets really upset
01:34:41
◼
►
with me putting them in here?
01:34:42
◼
►
- I think it's an insane thing to have to worry about,
01:34:45
◼
►
but I concur with you, Marco, that that is something
01:34:47
◼
►
I would worry about as well if I were you.
01:34:50
◼
►
- I mean, keep in mind, I've been kind of overly sensitive
01:34:54
◼
►
to what, of this thing I'm doing that I think
01:34:57
◼
►
is well-meaning and harmless, what could people possibly
01:35:01
◼
►
have a major problem with?
01:35:02
◼
►
Because everything I've written on the internet
01:35:04
◼
►
or said here has been attacked with that kind of standard
01:35:06
◼
►
recently. So like, I have to be very careful.
01:35:08
◼
►
Like, anyway, so just try to think like,
01:35:10
◼
►
in what ways can this be totally misconstrued
01:35:14
◼
►
that would cause problems for me or other people?
01:35:17
◼
►
- So in the chat room, I thought of something
01:35:18
◼
►
that I thought of when I first saw this.
01:35:20
◼
►
It's like, if you had put things from Megacorps in there,
01:35:23
◼
►
they'd be like, you can't use our trademark image
01:35:25
◼
►
in your application.
01:35:27
◼
►
- Technically maybe, however, it's their app icon,
01:35:31
◼
►
which I'm loading from the app store,
01:35:32
◼
►
using it to show their app page,
01:35:34
◼
►
so that I'm not sure that would really hold water,
01:35:35
◼
►
But if anybody complained, I would remove them.
01:35:38
◼
►
It's no big deal.
01:35:38
◼
►
Again, I said I could do it server side
01:35:40
◼
►
and by commenting out one line in an array.
01:35:42
◼
►
But still, I'd rather avoid conflicts
01:35:46
◼
►
rather than invite them and then try to escape them.
01:35:49
◼
►
But overall, based on the response
01:35:53
◼
►
from that competitors list, I think it was the right move.
01:35:57
◼
►
I'm totally blown away by how many people just love it.
01:36:02
◼
►
- All right, so the chat room would like me to ask,
01:36:05
◼
►
How do you handle the retired greats
01:36:07
◼
►
and perhaps in general, could you give us just a quick blurb
01:36:11
◼
►
on how you handled the directory overall?
01:36:14
◼
►
- I whipped it together three days ago
01:36:17
◼
►
and I intend to update it sometimes.
01:36:22
◼
►
- That's kind of what I thought.
01:36:22
◼
►
I'm not sure what they're looking for you to say,
01:36:25
◼
►
but at least we did.
01:36:26
◼
►
- The directory part, like the categories though,
01:36:28
◼
►
where it's like, oh, this is a tech podcast,
01:36:29
◼
►
is that, how is that determined?
01:36:31
◼
►
Is that metadata that's in the podcast?
01:36:33
◼
►
is that you're just saying, oh, this is a tech podcast?
01:36:35
◼
►
- These are all handpicked in my admin panel.
01:36:37
◼
►
Like I can create categories
01:36:39
◼
►
and put whatever I want into them.
01:36:40
◼
►
- But so it's not exhaustive.
01:36:42
◼
►
I haven't even browsed through it.
01:36:43
◼
►
It's just like, here's a bunch of tech podcasts.
01:36:45
◼
►
- Yeah, it's meant to be a starting point.
01:36:47
◼
►
So there's, every category has in it
01:36:50
◼
►
a subscribe to all button.
01:36:51
◼
►
And the idea of adding this,
01:36:54
◼
►
like one of my beta testers asked,
01:36:57
◼
►
is this here because a lot of people need to do this?
01:37:00
◼
►
Like, is this a common request?
01:37:02
◼
►
Why is there a subscribe to all button
01:37:04
◼
►
taking up a whole table row in the directory?
01:37:07
◼
►
And the reason why it's there is not because anybody
01:37:09
◼
►
has ever asked anybody for that feature as far as I know.
01:37:11
◼
►
It's kind of an opportunistic, like,
01:37:13
◼
►
well, let me give them a chance.
01:37:15
◼
►
Maybe somebody will do this.
01:37:17
◼
►
It's a way, in my opinion, it's a way to promote podcasts
01:37:21
◼
►
and to give people a quick way,
01:37:23
◼
►
if they have, if they subscribe to nothing,
01:37:25
◼
►
if this is their first time ever using a podcast app
01:37:26
◼
►
and they don't know what to subscribe to,
01:37:28
◼
►
go pick a category, hit subscribe to all,
01:37:30
◼
►
and you'll have enough content to last you
01:37:33
◼
►
most of your time that you need to listen to something.
01:37:36
◼
►
So that's basically it.
01:37:38
◼
►
It was like a, these are like little mini collections,
01:37:40
◼
►
like little mini curated collections of six to eight
01:37:44
◼
►
podcasts in each category.
01:37:45
◼
►
The idea was not to be exhaustive,
01:37:48
◼
►
but to provide like a starter kit to people.
01:37:51
◼
►
And this was, this is a hedge.
01:37:53
◼
►
I don't know if the directory will prove to be
01:37:56
◼
►
the most important part here,
01:37:58
◼
►
in which case I should probably make it more robust.
01:38:01
◼
►
Or if most people will use search and Twitter
01:38:04
◼
►
to find their stuff.
01:38:06
◼
►
So this is kind of a hedge where I have this,
01:38:08
◼
►
I have like a medium strength Twitter feature,
01:38:12
◼
►
a basic directory, and a good search.
01:38:15
◼
►
And I think a good search you always have to have,
01:38:17
◼
►
so that's out of the question, you have to have that.
01:38:19
◼
►
But between the Twitter and the directory,
01:38:21
◼
►
which one do I focus more time on in the future,
01:38:23
◼
►
that will be determined by what people actually use.
01:38:27
◼
►
Well, you can amp up your directory
01:38:29
◼
►
as people start using the application,
01:38:31
◼
►
because then you can do the stuff
01:38:32
◼
►
that Apple does in its store.
01:38:33
◼
►
I'm assuming you don't have access to Apple's metadata,
01:38:36
◼
►
Like, yeah, new and noteworthy, top rated or whatever,
01:38:39
◼
►
but you can say it like popular.
01:38:41
◼
►
Pretty soon you'll know what are the popular tech podcasts,
01:38:44
◼
►
not just from your list, but in general.
01:38:46
◼
►
If you are willing to categorize a large portion
01:38:49
◼
►
or scrape categorizations from some other place,
01:38:51
◼
►
a large portion of the podcast,
01:38:52
◼
►
you will have data to know, oh, this one,
01:38:54
◼
►
I mean, you could rank them by popularity,
01:38:56
◼
►
like what is the most popular comedy podcast
01:38:59
◼
►
and put that one up at the top.
01:39:00
◼
►
- Well, the podcast put iTunes category metadata
01:39:04
◼
►
in the feed usually,
01:39:06
◼
►
'cause iTunes has this RSS spec
01:39:09
◼
►
that almost every podcast feed adheres to
01:39:12
◼
►
so they can be listed in iTunes.
01:39:13
◼
►
And so many podcasts claim their own categories in the feed.
01:39:18
◼
►
So if I wanted to do something like that, I could.
01:39:22
◼
►
I'm not convinced of the value of that.
01:39:24
◼
►
If you browse around the iTunes top list,
01:39:26
◼
►
once you leave the editorial areas of iTunes,
01:39:30
◼
►
like the editor's picks and stuff,
01:39:32
◼
►
if you go to just the raw top things in this category list,
01:39:36
◼
►
I don't know how useful that is.
01:39:37
◼
►
I'm not sure, this is the thing, I don't know yet.
01:39:41
◼
►
I don't know, do most people find their podcasts
01:39:43
◼
►
by browsing the directory,
01:39:45
◼
►
or by searching for something by name?
01:39:47
◼
►
- The social one is probably the most reliable view,
01:39:49
◼
►
even though it seems like the weirdest
01:39:50
◼
►
and the weirdest thought,
01:39:51
◼
►
"Oh, I gotta put my Twitter thing in," or whatever,
01:39:53
◼
►
because recommendations from your friends
01:39:55
◼
►
or people you follow, it's like the top list,
01:39:57
◼
►
if you rank by popularity, just the same stuff always,
01:40:00
◼
►
it's like this American life is gonna be the number one.
01:40:03
◼
►
You know, spoiler, that's what's gonna be
01:40:05
◼
►
the number one thing there, it's really super popular.
01:40:07
◼
►
But who hasn't heard of This American Life?
01:40:09
◼
►
And in some respects, it's like, well,
01:40:10
◼
►
that's a good podcast, people, you know,
01:40:12
◼
►
there's a high chance that just an average person
01:40:14
◼
►
picked out of a hat will like this podcast
01:40:17
◼
►
because lots of people like this.
01:40:18
◼
►
But with podcasts, with a curated list,
01:40:22
◼
►
then it's like, well, if your taste is like Marco's,
01:40:24
◼
►
then you may like one of these picks
01:40:26
◼
►
more than you would like this American Life
01:40:28
◼
►
because it's quirky as your particular thing.
01:40:30
◼
►
That's why I think the Social one is actually the best
01:40:32
◼
►
because you have to find someone who has similar taste
01:40:36
◼
►
to you and then follow their recommendations.
01:40:38
◼
►
The Super Popular one only works if you are
01:40:42
◼
►
not an individual but are rather the average human being.
01:40:46
◼
►
Because then you're like, oh, yes, exactly.
01:40:48
◼
►
I am the average human and I like the best things.
01:40:51
◼
►
I find with podcasts, people are most excited when they find something that may not be particularly
01:40:56
◼
►
pop—this show, for example—that may not be particularly popular in the grand scheme
01:40:59
◼
►
of things on this American life type level, but exactly speaks to their particular interests
01:41:06
◼
►
of like, "I like people who have one particular kind of model train, and they will be so excited
01:41:12
◼
►
about a podcast just about that kind of model train, they will love that show more than
01:41:16
◼
►
this American life."
01:41:17
◼
►
- Yeah, and that's, I really think the social features
01:41:22
◼
►
are much more useful than the directory for most people.
01:41:26
◼
►
I think the role of a directory
01:41:28
◼
►
is to provide a starting point, right?
01:41:30
◼
►
And that's why I have my little starter kits
01:41:34
◼
►
in each little categories, that's fine.
01:41:37
◼
►
But once you get past give me a few things in X category,
01:41:42
◼
►
the browsing experience is terrible,
01:41:43
◼
►
the usefulness of the rankings is off.
01:41:46
◼
►
That's why I think this whole social thing is the way to go.
01:41:49
◼
►
I don't know.
01:41:52
◼
►
- All right, Jon, do your worst.
01:41:55
◼
►
- Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,
01:41:57
◼
►
Need, Squarespace, and Fracture,
01:42:00
◼
►
and we will see you next week.
01:42:02
◼
►
(upbeat music)
01:42:04
◼
►
♪ Now the show is over ♪
01:42:07
◼
►
♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪
01:42:09
◼
►
♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪
01:42:11
◼
►
♪ Accidental ♪
01:42:12
◼
►
♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪
01:42:14
◼
►
♪ Accidental ♪
01:42:15
◼
►
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
01:42:20
◼
►
'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)
01:42:23
◼
►
It was accidental (accidental)
01:42:25
◼
►
And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
01:42:31
◼
►
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
01:42:35
◼
►
@C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
01:42:39
◼
►
So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
01:42:44
◼
►
Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean too
01:42:57
◼
►
accidental. Tech podcast so long. Did you really just do that?
01:43:06
◼
►
No, it should be in the after show. I was on the beta, so it's not like I'm
01:43:11
◼
►
saying anything that like I should I should have been giving more feedback during the beta but
01:43:14
◼
►
every time I went to the the beta feedback thing and I read it I read everyone else's feedback I'm
01:43:18
◼
►
like yeah they're getting all this stuff like you know people would say things yeah it's good
01:43:23
◼
►
someone said that are you outbound good something you had a lot of good beta testers so they they
01:43:27
◼
►
covered everything more or less although yeah I mean I have a few things I could throw some of
01:43:32
◼
►
these have already been said but they're both saying in the show what did they cover insufficiently
01:43:36
◼
►
ah not insufficiently so I talked to you about this once in an after show before like things
01:43:40
◼
►
are revealed. But let me just start with some... What I tweeted was like, "I'm using this app
01:43:47
◼
►
instead of my iPod Shuffle." And I am. I'm off of my iPod Shuffle now. Part of that is
01:43:52
◼
►
due to Bluetooth and not so much the application because I've switched over to wirelessly playing
01:43:57
◼
►
it during my commute.
01:43:58
◼
►
Just let me believe it's the app.
01:44:00
◼
►
Yeah. But the other part is... Here's the other part. I'm one of those people who does
01:44:03
◼
►
not care about smart speed. I don't listen to things at more than 1X. I don't need a
01:44:06
◼
►
to volume booster.
01:44:07
◼
►
So all those features you spent a long time ago
01:44:09
◼
►
are meaningless to me.
01:44:11
◼
►
But I would not be using your application at all
01:44:13
◼
►
because I have other podcast apps that I purchased, right?
01:44:16
◼
►
And I didn't use them for you for two
01:44:17
◼
►
and again, part of that is Bluetooth.
01:44:18
◼
►
But it's because what I was doing with my iPod shuffle,
01:44:21
◼
►
besides cursing at it,
01:44:23
◼
►
I was bringing it back to iTunes, plugging it in.
01:44:26
◼
►
And at various times I would either,
01:44:28
◼
►
with my old iPod shuffle,
01:44:29
◼
►
I would manually drag individual episodes
01:44:33
◼
►
onto the iPod shuffle.
01:44:35
◼
►
like manually sync individual episodes, right?
01:44:38
◼
►
And then when I got a new iPod Shuffle,
01:44:39
◼
►
it didn't let me do it that way,
01:44:40
◼
►
and I had to make a playlist,
01:44:41
◼
►
but it was still just a manual playlist.
01:44:43
◼
►
So I would drag individual episodes into a manual playlist,
01:44:46
◼
►
and then synced them to the iPod Shuffle.
01:44:48
◼
►
And what I was doing when I dragged them into the playlist,
01:44:50
◼
►
I was like, all right, here's the order
01:44:52
◼
►
that I wanna listen to,
01:44:52
◼
►
because I didn't have a screen on the iPod Shuffle.
01:44:55
◼
►
I just have to hit play when I get in the car.
01:44:56
◼
►
I need them to play in exactly in the right order.
01:44:59
◼
►
So I was prioritizing them.
01:45:01
◼
►
And so I would say, oh, well, as soon as an episode of,
01:45:04
◼
►
you know, whatever, Roderick on the Line comes out.
01:45:05
◼
►
I wanna listen to that right away.
01:45:07
◼
►
Even if I'm in the middle of an episode
01:45:09
◼
►
of some other thing that I was listening to,
01:45:11
◼
►
I want the Roderick on the Line to come on the top.
01:45:13
◼
►
But, you know, I wanna do these three episodes
01:45:16
◼
►
in this order and I wanna do them as a block.
01:45:18
◼
►
It was like priority order but with manual adjustments.
01:45:20
◼
►
And if that sounds familiar,
01:45:21
◼
►
it's exactly what Overcast does.
01:45:24
◼
►
And that is probably the,
01:45:26
◼
►
maybe the one and only main reason I use this application
01:45:28
◼
►
is because the playlists allow me to make an arrangement.
01:45:32
◼
►
This is exactly what I was doing manually before.
01:45:34
◼
►
The difference is now that, I mean, you know,
01:45:36
◼
►
it's on a server somewhere, it's synchronized,
01:45:40
◼
►
so like I installed Overcast on my iPad too,
01:45:42
◼
►
not that I'm gonna listen from there.
01:45:44
◼
►
It keeps track of where I am.
01:45:45
◼
►
I don't have to have the problem of like,
01:45:47
◼
►
switching off different environments
01:45:49
◼
►
if I don't have the shuffle with me or whatever.
01:45:50
◼
►
Like anything that's an iOS device
01:45:52
◼
►
will know where I left off, what episode I was on,
01:45:54
◼
►
what the play positions are, and all of those things.
01:45:55
◼
►
And as I reorder things, that follows me around as well.
01:45:58
◼
►
So this is an automation of the terrible manual process
01:46:02
◼
►
I was doing before.
01:46:02
◼
►
So that's why I used the application.
01:46:05
◼
►
But-- all right, so this is supposed
01:46:07
◼
►
to be me complaining.
01:46:08
◼
►
I'm basically--
01:46:10
◼
►
This is a great complaint.
01:46:12
◼
►
What I'm trying to explain here is that when people said,
01:46:14
◼
►
oh, well, you know, people on Twitter
01:46:16
◼
►
were having-- there was this mini debate that spun off
01:46:18
◼
►
from me saying that I used the application.
01:46:20
◼
►
If, unless you care about exactly the same things
01:46:23
◼
►
that I care about, that doesn't mean this application is
01:46:25
◼
►
necessarily for you, right?
01:46:26
◼
►
Because if you care about the smart speed stuff,
01:46:31
◼
►
And I don't.
01:46:32
◼
►
It's a whole different set of priorities.
01:46:34
◼
►
And that's what you're getting at with all the people
01:46:35
◼
►
with the feature requests.
01:46:36
◼
►
If a podcast app is useless to you,
01:46:39
◼
►
if it doesn't use video podcasts,
01:46:40
◼
►
you're not gonna like this app
01:46:41
◼
►
because it doesn't do video podcasts.
01:46:43
◼
►
Everybody has something like that.
01:46:44
◼
►
And so the same reason that I really like this application
01:46:48
◼
►
is a reason that someone else might reject it entirely.
01:46:51
◼
►
Or it's like the demands people have
01:46:54
◼
►
of podcast applications are so different
01:46:57
◼
►
that hearing just people like,
01:46:58
◼
►
"Well, John recommends it.
01:46:59
◼
►
It must be good."
01:47:00
◼
►
No, maybe it's no good for you.
01:47:01
◼
►
Maybe you want a feature that it doesn't have,
01:47:03
◼
►
or in the case of video,
01:47:04
◼
►
that it's probably never going to have.
01:47:06
◼
►
Just because I recommend it doesn't mean
01:47:08
◼
►
that oh, it's automatically good.
01:47:10
◼
►
It just means it fits my needs appropriately.
01:47:13
◼
►
And I think the Playlist feature in particular,
01:47:15
◼
►
I can't be the only one who does,
01:47:17
◼
►
maybe I'm the only one who did it manually
01:47:19
◼
►
because it's just too much of a pain,
01:47:20
◼
►
but once people can do it without the pain
01:47:22
◼
►
that I was going through,
01:47:22
◼
►
like they can just do it by just dragging
01:47:23
◼
►
their thumb around,
01:47:25
◼
►
I think a lot of people will find that feature,
01:47:28
◼
►
like you were saying, your favorite feature,
01:47:29
◼
►
I think that is the killer feature,
01:47:30
◼
►
Even though it's like, oh, you let people reorder stuff
01:47:33
◼
►
in a table view and did a little algorithm
01:47:34
◼
►
to make stuff land in the right place, more or less.
01:47:37
◼
►
That, I think, is the most important thing for me
01:47:40
◼
►
for this application.
01:47:41
◼
►
But my first complaint is related to that.
01:47:43
◼
►
When I went to try to say, OK, well, Marco has this application.
01:47:46
◼
►
He says I do his playlist stuff.
01:47:47
◼
►
Let me-- first of all, I didn't have faith
01:47:49
◼
►
that I was going to be able to do that.
01:47:50
◼
►
I figured I'll just make a manual playlist,
01:47:51
◼
►
and I'll just manually do stuff like I was doing before.
01:47:53
◼
►
Even that would be an upgrade, because manually dragging
01:47:55
◼
►
tracks onto the iPod Shuffle is a nightmare compared
01:47:57
◼
►
to doing it on the screen.
01:47:59
◼
►
As a previous iPod Shuffle owner,
01:48:01
◼
►
using an iPod Shuffle in any way other than
01:48:04
◼
►
playing a random selection of music tracks is horrible.
01:48:08
◼
►
- Even random selection of music tracks is horrible
01:48:10
◼
►
if you have other stuff on there.
01:48:12
◼
►
The voiceover thing where it tells you
01:48:13
◼
►
like if you happen to have music and podcasts,
01:48:16
◼
►
you gotta make sure you're in the right realm
01:48:17
◼
►
before you start playing.
01:48:18
◼
►
- Oh wow, that was added after my Shuffle time.
01:48:21
◼
►
I had the very first Shuffle and I think the third one.
01:48:24
◼
►
- Yeah, I've had a series of them
01:48:26
◼
►
and they're not my friends.
01:48:28
◼
►
A lot of it has to do with iTunes being crappy too.
01:48:30
◼
►
But anyway, when I was trying to make my first playlist,
01:48:33
◼
►
I saw that it has this priority podcast thing.
01:48:36
◼
►
And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I want.
01:48:38
◼
►
And then I remembered you talking about the manual
01:48:39
◼
►
reordering with the priorities.
01:48:41
◼
►
I don't understand why priority podcasts as a thing
01:48:44
◼
►
are a concept in the application.
01:48:45
◼
►
Like, there is two kinds of podcasts.
01:48:47
◼
►
There is a priority podcast, meaning
01:48:49
◼
►
a podcast that can have a priority,
01:48:51
◼
►
and then non-priority podcasts.
01:48:53
◼
►
Why not just make all the pod-- because the first thing I do
01:48:55
◼
►
when I make any playlists is I say select priority podcasts
01:48:59
◼
►
and I select them all because they all have a priority.
01:49:02
◼
►
Like there's no tail at the end where I'm like,
01:49:04
◼
►
okay, this is my top five,
01:49:05
◼
►
but everything else is just exactly equal.
01:49:08
◼
►
Because what I find myself having to do
01:49:09
◼
►
is go into the thing and say,
01:49:11
◼
►
select priority podcasts, select, select, select,
01:49:13
◼
►
select, select, and that step feels like
01:49:15
◼
►
it doesn't need to exist.
01:49:16
◼
►
Like that concept of a priority and a non-priority podcast
01:49:19
◼
►
seems like a complication that could confuse people
01:49:21
◼
►
into thinking they can't get the playlist they want,
01:49:23
◼
►
when really they can, it's like,
01:49:24
◼
►
"Oh no, you've got to mark those as priority podcasts first."
01:49:26
◼
►
Now maybe I'm wrong and other people really do want to say, "I have three priority podcasts
01:49:29
◼
►
and everything else I don't care, and it's just a big mush for me."
01:49:33
◼
►
But I want all of them to be priority podcasts, because I know, I mean, there's not that many.
01:49:39
◼
►
I mean, I read off my list, it's like maybe 10, 12 subscriptions.
01:49:43
◼
►
I know which ones, what order I want them, all 12 of them.
01:49:47
◼
►
It's not as if I haven't confused about any ones at the bottom.
01:49:49
◼
►
Anyway, people in the chat room are saying they just want to prioritize a few of them.
01:49:51
◼
►
But for me, that is an additional complication that confused me at first, and then it frustrated
01:49:57
◼
►
me every time I had to go make a playlist, because I had to select the pri—and even
01:50:00
◼
►
now when I add a subscription, because I still haven't even caught up, like I think I didn't
01:50:03
◼
►
even put core intuition on here yet.
01:50:05
◼
►
When I go add that, I'm going to have to remember to go into my playlists and mark
01:50:08
◼
►
that as a priority podcast and sort it, rather than it just becoming the last priority podcast
01:50:14
◼
►
or whatever, or the first one or something like that.
01:50:16
◼
►
Now it's in the non-priority podcast category.
01:50:19
◼
►
So I find that refreshing.
01:50:20
◼
►
a couple of people have already complained to you about this,
01:50:22
◼
►
but like this, I know I have a crappy A5 device,
01:50:25
◼
►
but there's a pause sometimes when I tap on a thing
01:50:27
◼
►
before it switches screens, before it starts playing,
01:50:29
◼
►
I don't know what it's doing during that pause,
01:50:31
◼
►
but it's not playing the audio.
01:50:32
◼
►
It's for already downloaded stuff.
01:50:33
◼
►
Do you have any idea what that?
01:50:35
◼
►
- Yeah, no, that's real.
01:50:36
◼
►
Yeah, that is like, I have to async that basically.
01:50:39
◼
►
Like the API for reading audio files,
01:50:43
◼
►
it's just like this old blocking C API.
01:50:48
◼
►
And what I would love to do is have lower level access
01:50:52
◼
►
to the files so I could like, whatever it's doing
01:50:54
◼
►
for uncertain files where it has to like preload something
01:50:57
◼
►
or preread something to get from zero to playing,
01:51:00
◼
►
I would love to do that when it downloads
01:51:04
◼
►
and then cache the result of that
01:51:06
◼
►
so that way when you go to play it, it can play instantly.
01:51:09
◼
►
But I don't have that kind of access in the APIs
01:51:12
◼
►
and maybe I can go lower level somehow
01:51:14
◼
►
but I haven't found a way.
01:51:15
◼
►
- Some kind of like Amazon Fire predictive,
01:51:17
◼
►
like if I've just added a podcast
01:51:19
◼
►
or if I've just downloaded it,
01:51:20
◼
►
chances are good that that's gonna be the one
01:51:22
◼
►
that I'm next gonna play.
01:51:23
◼
►
Or even if you wanna fake it out
01:51:25
◼
►
and make it perceptually faster
01:51:27
◼
►
by changing screens before the playing starts.
01:51:29
◼
►
- Right, so that's the right answer
01:51:31
◼
►
and that's what I have to do.
01:51:32
◼
►
I just haven't done it yet.
01:51:34
◼
►
The right answer is I have to like kick off the screen load
01:51:38
◼
►
and then give the screen like a loading state
01:51:42
◼
►
and then like give the now playing screen a loading state
01:51:46
◼
►
and then kick off the load of the file asynchronously.
01:51:48
◼
►
So I have to do that, it's on my to-do list
01:51:50
◼
►
for 1.1 or whatever, I haven't gotten to it yet.
01:51:53
◼
►
- Yeah, another thing that several people
01:51:55
◼
►
have already complained about,
01:51:57
◼
►
and I'm sure you know about,
01:51:58
◼
►
but it's worth airing out for the listeners as well,
01:52:00
◼
►
is the idea of going through
01:52:01
◼
►
and cherry picking individual episodes,
01:52:03
◼
►
having it boot you back out to whatever screen
01:52:04
◼
►
it sends you back out to.
01:52:05
◼
►
Like, it's not as easy to just go through,
01:52:07
◼
►
oh, I want that episode of that,
01:52:08
◼
►
oh, I want that episode of that,
01:52:09
◼
►
you get sent back out to the home thing
01:52:11
◼
►
and you gotta dig your way back in again,
01:52:12
◼
►
and fine, I've been frustrated by that a few times.
01:52:15
◼
►
In this one, I know you got to complain about this too, but I don't remember what your answer
01:52:23
◼
►
If you are unfortunate enough to hit the end of a podcast before you realize you've hit
01:52:27
◼
►
the end of it, and it goes away, like, I don't know what the solution is, but you're saying
01:52:33
◼
►
like maybe you could have a holding bin for it or whatever.
01:52:36
◼
►
Several times I've either accidentally scrubbed to the end of the podcast, which is easy to
01:52:39
◼
►
do with the fat thumb on the little scrubber thing or whatever, or it has run out when
01:52:43
◼
►
and I have like, you know, it's been playing
01:52:45
◼
►
and I took my earphones off and didn't notice
01:52:47
◼
►
it was still playing or whatever and hit the end
01:52:48
◼
►
and now the thing is gone and I have to re-download it.
01:52:50
◼
►
What is, what are you doing about that one?
01:52:53
◼
►
- That's tricky.
01:52:54
◼
►
Most of the feature requests I've gotten so far today
01:52:56
◼
►
or the people who are like, oh I cannot use this app
01:52:58
◼
►
because I need to manage X.
01:53:01
◼
►
Almost all of them are storage management of some sort.
01:53:06
◼
►
Like, a lot of people are, like one request
01:53:08
◼
►
that I keep getting which I never really considered
01:53:11
◼
►
that people would want this, but they do,
01:53:13
◼
►
I just didn't cross my mind, I guess,
01:53:15
◼
►
is a different state, a state of things that are new
01:53:21
◼
►
or that you haven't played and deleted,
01:53:23
◼
►
so they're the active state of the item,
01:53:26
◼
►
but that is not downloaded and won't be downloaded.
01:53:30
◼
►
'Cause right now, my states are basically,
01:53:32
◼
►
needs to be downloaded, downloaded, and deleted.
01:53:36
◼
►
That's it, those are the three states an item could be in.
01:53:38
◼
►
- Yeah, like a pre-download, like a will-be downloaded queue.
01:53:41
◼
►
- No, but what people are asking for is
01:53:43
◼
►
they want items that, like on certain devices,
01:53:47
◼
►
just are never automatically downloaded.
01:53:49
◼
►
- Right, like it's a queue that doesn't run.
01:53:51
◼
►
- Like it's a new item, yeah, it's a new item
01:53:53
◼
►
that I want to keep as new, like keep as unplayed,
01:53:56
◼
►
but don't have the app try to download it.
01:53:59
◼
►
And maybe I'll try to download it some other time.
01:54:01
◼
►
You know, so there's, and that's a very common request
01:54:05
◼
►
so far in the email.
01:54:06
◼
►
Again, I was not expecting that at all.
01:54:07
◼
►
In general, looking at the state of episodes, like when I'm going through any list, it's
01:54:12
◼
►
not always easy to tell what state is that.
01:54:16
◼
►
Some kind of iconography or visual elements to say...
01:54:19
◼
►
Because you have those states in your head, like, "Does this need to be downloaded?
01:54:23
◼
►
Has it already been downloaded?
01:54:24
◼
►
Has it been downloaded and started?
01:54:26
◼
►
How far progress in it, or is it one of those weird things you just described where it's
01:54:29
◼
►
not supposed to be downloaded on this device?"
01:54:31
◼
►
You've got the little "i" there to try to figure out what's what, but...
01:54:36
◼
►
Instacast is the main other application that I've used, and I forget what its iconography,
01:54:39
◼
►
it's like a little green corner thing when it's been downloaded, and maybe there's a
01:54:45
◼
►
progress bar or something, I don't even know what the hell it uses, but some visual way
01:54:48
◼
►
to look at a list, and when I look at these lists, I mentioned before my nervousness about
01:54:52
◼
►
going on a plane flight to WVDC and saying, "I don't know if all the podcasts I want to
01:54:55
◼
►
listen to are downloaded or not."
01:54:57
◼
►
I can't glance at the app and tell that.
01:54:59
◼
►
I could go into each individual thing and see if it's downloaded and try to start playing
01:55:02
◼
►
to make sure that it's there, but like,
01:55:05
◼
►
some sort of visual reassurance or acknowledgement
01:55:07
◼
►
of the state of each episode.
01:55:09
◼
►
- See, and that, this is gonna be a hard balance to strike.
01:55:13
◼
►
You know, podcast apps, you know,
01:55:16
◼
►
I think on one extreme, you have apps like Downcast,
01:55:20
◼
►
I think iCatcher is like this,
01:55:22
◼
►
where they just have tons of customizable settings
01:55:25
◼
►
for everything.
01:55:26
◼
►
That comes at a pretty big cost of interface complexity.
01:55:30
◼
►
And this app is trying to be mass market.
01:55:35
◼
►
I'm trying to, I'm really trying to compete
01:55:40
◼
►
with Apple and Stitcher.
01:55:42
◼
►
Like that's what I'm looking at.
01:55:43
◼
►
I'm not trying to compete with Downcast
01:55:46
◼
►
and Pocketcast and Instacast.
01:55:48
◼
►
- But this isn't like a twitchy feature.
01:55:50
◼
►
This is like a simple, like a visual,
01:55:53
◼
►
I mean, I guess it's like visual clutter
01:55:55
◼
►
you're trying to not have.
01:55:56
◼
►
Like you want to, you need to convey
01:55:57
◼
►
a certain amount of information
01:55:58
◼
►
and you don't wanna make it clutter.
01:55:59
◼
►
You don't want to have like you look at an episode list and it has like a million little
01:56:03
◼
►
stickers and dials all over it telling you like obscure icons that you're like, what
01:56:06
◼
►
does that mean?
01:56:07
◼
►
It's like a lollipop and there's a red circle and there's a line through it and there's
01:56:09
◼
►
a thing that looks like it could be a progress bar.
01:56:13
◼
►
But I think that state information about which one was I just playing, which thing is currently
01:56:20
◼
►
I mean, like you said with the big giant EQ meter over the things like that gives an indication
01:56:23
◼
►
of what's currently playing.
01:56:25
◼
►
But for all the other states, like has this been downloaded?
01:56:27
◼
►
Is this going to be downloaded?
01:56:29
◼
►
far am I in the episode, is it played or not? And by the way, someone in the chat room mentioned
01:56:32
◼
►
a reasonable solution to what happens when the timer goes off the end. Have a recently
01:56:38
◼
►
played list that you just pull off the end and delete from that after some period of
01:56:42
◼
►
time. So if you accidentally scrub your way through an episode, you can go to the recently
01:56:44
◼
►
played list. I don't know what the good solutions are. The reason I didn't put a lot of these
01:56:48
◼
►
in the beta feedback is there was no-- I can't say, oh, obviously you should need to do whatever.
01:56:53
◼
►
Because I would try to think, well, how would you solve that problem? They're not easy.
01:56:57
◼
►
There's only so much room for buttons,
01:56:58
◼
►
there's only so much room for visual clutter,
01:57:00
◼
►
and you have a navigation hierarchy that you,
01:57:02
◼
►
I mean, you don't wanna break out of that
01:57:04
◼
►
and start going like three-dimensional chess
01:57:05
◼
►
where you normally go right to left,
01:57:07
◼
►
but you can also zoom in and out.
01:57:09
◼
►
It gets confusing, 'cause like you said,
01:57:11
◼
►
there's a lot of screens.
01:57:12
◼
►
- Right, and the question with all these features,
01:57:15
◼
►
you know, if, okay, I want a way to do X,
01:57:18
◼
►
I want a way to toggle this state
01:57:19
◼
►
without affecting this state,
01:57:20
◼
►
so I want a new state of this,
01:57:21
◼
►
or I want a new option to do this.
01:57:23
◼
►
One of the big questions is,
01:57:24
◼
►
well, where do you put all this stuff,
01:57:25
◼
►
and what do you do in the interface?
01:57:27
◼
►
Is that hidden behind a gesture?
01:57:30
◼
►
If so, how does it explain to anybody?
01:57:33
◼
►
Is it behind an info button?
01:57:36
◼
►
Well, where do you put the info button?
01:57:38
◼
►
Is it in the settings screen?
01:57:40
◼
►
Well, then how big is the settings screen?
01:57:42
◼
►
The apps I've mentioned, the ones that have a lot of options
01:57:44
◼
►
like Downcast and iCast, they have six different pages
01:57:47
◼
►
in their settings screens 'cause they have,
01:57:49
◼
►
all these settings that people request have to go somewhere.
01:57:52
◼
►
And the UIs for that can be pretty clunky and cumbersome
01:57:57
◼
►
and can turn off a lot of people.
01:57:58
◼
►
And so I'm trying to balance this,
01:58:01
◼
►
I'm trying to balance between trying to give people
01:58:06
◼
►
what they want, or rather, trying to give people
01:58:09
◼
►
what they ask for, and trying to be a mass market appeal app.
01:58:14
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I don't want to add a million features.
01:58:17
◼
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I'm never gonna win that race,
01:58:21
◼
►
mostly 'cause I can't, but secondarily,
01:58:23
◼
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'cause I don't want to.
01:58:24
◼
►
If you want tons of fine-grained controls
01:58:28
◼
►
over all that stuff,
01:58:30
◼
►
I think you'll be better off using downcast.
01:58:33
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►
Just use downcast.
01:58:34
◼
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- You can just concentrate on adding,
01:58:36
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making it, the features you already have,
01:58:38
◼
►
the features that are already there,
01:58:39
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►
making it clearer to the people using those features
01:58:42
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what's going on, 'cause you have a certain amount of state
01:58:44
◼
►
that you already support, right?
01:58:46
◼
►
And you have certain features that you already support,
01:58:48
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►
but a lot of them, like you said,
01:58:50
◼
►
might be hidden.
01:58:52
◼
►
Just to give another example, I'm looking at the app now.
01:58:54
◼
►
On the little download icon, it has a badge that says five.
01:58:57
◼
►
I tap-- first of all, I don't know what that badge means.
01:59:00
◼
►
I assume that means it's five downloads.
01:59:02
◼
►
Are they in progress or whatever?
01:59:03
◼
►
I tap on the little five, I see a list of five episodes.
01:59:05
◼
►
They all say download paused underneath them
01:59:07
◼
►
in very light text.
01:59:09
◼
►
It would be hard to read if I was even older.
01:59:11
◼
►
I don't know why these are all paused.
01:59:14
◼
►
And this is an example of the mysteries of Overcast.
01:59:19
◼
►
Sometimes it does things that I don't understand.
01:59:21
◼
►
It's best, it's best, working best
01:59:24
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when it's like you're in the cycle.
01:59:25
◼
►
- Now you see why I wrote three downloaders.
01:59:28
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- Well, it's best when you're in sort of the cycle
01:59:29
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where like I was in a long period of time
01:59:31
◼
►
where it's just like I didn't do anything to the application.
01:59:34
◼
►
I had set up my subscriptions, I had set up my playlists.
01:59:37
◼
►
I would wake up in the morning,
01:59:38
◼
►
all my podcasts would be there
01:59:40
◼
►
in exactly the order that I wanted them.
01:59:42
◼
►
And they would just play.
01:59:43
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Like that's, you know, that's how you want it to work.
01:59:45
◼
►
It's like, I don't have to touch this application,
01:59:47
◼
►
it does exactly what I want.
01:59:48
◼
►
I never have to wait for it or whatever.
01:59:49
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But when something does go wrong
01:59:51
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or I wanna do something weird like,
01:59:52
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►
oh, someone recommended,
01:59:53
◼
►
this is before the Twitter recommendations,
01:59:55
◼
►
but oh, someone recommended that I should listen to
01:59:57
◼
►
that episode of Electric Shadow
01:59:59
◼
►
where they talk about Apple TV.
02:00:00
◼
►
So I go into search, find Electric Shadow,
02:00:01
◼
►
find the episode, I'm like,
02:00:02
◼
►
well, how do I get this into my thing?
02:00:04
◼
►
Oh, now I gotta mark it as a priority podcast
02:00:05
◼
►
or maybe I could just manually arrange that.
02:00:07
◼
►
Am I subscribed to Electric Shadow now
02:00:09
◼
►
or did I just download the one episode?
02:00:10
◼
►
Is it going to download all the rest of the Electric Shadows
02:00:14
◼
►
or does it know I just got that one?
02:00:15
◼
►
Like these are features that already exist.
02:00:16
◼
►
Like, you can do all of these things,
02:00:18
◼
►
but I was unsure whether I was using the app in the right way
02:00:23
◼
►
You know what I mean?
02:00:23
◼
►
And that, I think, rather than adding features other
02:00:26
◼
►
than the ones you think you have to add,
02:00:27
◼
►
is probably the place to concentrate, especially
02:00:30
◼
►
for a mass market.
02:00:30
◼
►
Because this app already does tons of stuff
02:00:32
◼
►
and already has tons of features,
02:00:34
◼
►
but it's not always clear to the inexperienced user
02:00:37
◼
►
or the new user that those features exist
02:00:41
◼
►
or that people are successfully using them.
02:00:44
◼
►
Yeah, you're totally right.
02:00:46
◼
►
I'm not gonna argue with you there.
02:00:48
◼
►
I agree, there's a lot of things in the app
02:00:50
◼
►
that are not as clear as they should be
02:00:51
◼
►
and that are not as intuitive as they should be.
02:00:54
◼
►
And a lot of features that are kind of hidden
02:00:56
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►
that probably shouldn't be.
02:01:00
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►
It's 1.0 and I'm open to suggestions, so file a bug.
02:01:04
◼
►
- Yeah, well that's the problem.
02:01:05
◼
►
Like if I had all the good suggestions,
02:01:07
◼
►
I'd be telling you exactly what to do,
02:01:09
◼
►
but it's not an easy problem.
02:01:10
◼
►
- That's exactly.
02:01:12
◼
►
- It's not like, oh, it's just,
02:01:14
◼
►
it's a lot of times it is.
02:01:14
◼
►
You use an application and you're like,
02:01:16
◼
►
This is obvious you should be doing this and it's up for some of the feature features are easy to do like oh marker
02:01:20
◼
►
You should totally let me start listening immediately and then say that as a down like you know you need to do that
02:01:24
◼
►
That's yeah technical thing you can tell the person exactly how you wanted to work, and it's fine
02:01:28
◼
►
But the UI thinks it's like so what do you add? What buttons do you add? What buttons do you remove?
02:01:32
◼
►
But you know you've already got swipe and tap where else you're gonna stick this other thing
02:01:36
◼
►
That's why I keep thinking visually like I don't know what the design would look like
02:01:41
◼
►
I don't think I think you could get something that fits in the theme
02:01:43
◼
►
but that's the only thing I have a concrete suggestion for is like
02:01:46
◼
►
some kind of visual indication of the states that already exists for episodes and such and the navigation thing of when you're trying to
02:01:54
◼
►
Cherry-pick episodes not getting chalked back out
02:01:56
◼
►
But again, you've heard most all this feedback before and I'm more or less just airing it on the podcast
02:02:00
◼
►
So other people can know that you've heard this feedback
02:02:02
◼
►
You should just make that you should just make the beta board public and say people have said all these things before take a look
02:02:07
◼
►
To some degree it's a difference of philosophy and on how much of this stuff that people are asking for I should even offer
02:02:13
◼
►
I would much rather favor good default behavior
02:02:18
◼
►
than a preference if I can get away with it.
02:02:22
◼
►
And there's sometimes when you can't get away with that.
02:02:24
◼
►
Sometimes if people are really divided on something
02:02:26
◼
►
and it's like 50/50, half people want this,
02:02:28
◼
►
half people want that, neither of them is clearly
02:02:31
◼
►
better than the other or just a difference of preference,
02:02:33
◼
►
then you usually have to have a setting somewhere for that.
02:02:35
◼
►
- Do you think you need a setting for the
02:02:37
◼
►
hit the end of the episode and it immediately gets deleted
02:02:39
◼
►
and you can't find it again?
02:02:41
◼
►
Because the disk space people probably want that.
02:02:43
◼
►
People who are like, I want it to be gone immediately.
02:02:45
◼
►
But if you just put them into the recently played episodes
02:02:52
◼
►
thing and got rid of them after five minutes,
02:02:54
◼
►
the disk space people wouldn't care.
02:02:56
◼
►
But the I accidentally went to the end people.
02:02:58
◼
►
Did you mean to scroll to the top by hitting the status bar?
02:03:01
◼
►
Or did you not really?
02:03:02
◼
►
An Instapaper?
02:03:03
◼
►
You need to have that feature, but sometimes people
02:03:06
◼
►
do it accidentally.
02:03:07
◼
►
This is a similar situation.
02:03:08
◼
►
It's a frustrating situation when you hit-- especially
02:03:11
◼
►
when I'm trying to scrub around, even on our own episode,
02:03:13
◼
►
I was trying to listen to something we were saying
02:03:14
◼
►
in an after show, and I was trying to scrub around
02:03:16
◼
►
near the end of the thing to find, to go back,
02:03:19
◼
►
'cause I had missed something, 'cause you know,
02:03:21
◼
►
I've been distracted for a second,
02:03:22
◼
►
and I scrubbed off the end of the episode, went away.
02:03:24
◼
►
That's not good.
02:03:26
◼
►
And like the disk space people, I'm like,
02:03:27
◼
►
you can wait five minutes disk space people.
02:03:30
◼
►
I'm one of the disk space people.
02:03:31
◼
►
- Believe me, I will get those emails.
02:03:33
◼
►
- I'm always running out of space on my devices too,
02:03:35
◼
►
but it's much worse to accidentally try to, you know,
02:03:38
◼
►
scrub back to hear something that Casey said,
02:03:40
◼
►
accidentally go off the end and uh...
02:03:42
◼
►
yeah, and people were asking for a skip to skip the ATP theme song and I'm like
02:03:46
◼
►
"Oh, people like the theme song, right?" But I was at... I find myself, speaking of going off
02:03:50
◼
►
the end, at the end of Back to Work, I don't like listening to that theme song. As soon as it starts
02:03:54
◼
►
playing I want to be done. But to make the episode go away, I have to manually,
02:03:58
◼
►
as far as I know, manually thumb the scrubber to the end to make that episode,
02:04:03
◼
►
you know, be marked as played, where as far as I'm concerned, as soon as the little music
02:04:06
◼
►
starts playing I'm done with the episode.
02:04:08
◼
►
- Yeah, I just hit fast forward like three times,
02:04:11
◼
►
which is enough to cover it,
02:04:11
◼
►
and then I just delete the cell phone
02:04:13
◼
►
and goes to the next episode.
02:04:14
◼
►
- Yeah, I know, there's no good solution to that,
02:04:16
◼
►
but what I'm saying is like the things that happen
02:04:18
◼
►
near the borders at the end of the episode
02:04:21
◼
►
and fighting with the little, you know,
02:04:23
◼
►
the behavior of should it go away?
02:04:24
◼
►
Sometimes I want it to go away immediately,
02:04:25
◼
►
sometimes I don't want it to go away accidentally.
02:04:28
◼
►
But I think just like the recycle bin or trash can
02:04:32
◼
►
or whatever, having some sort of buffer zone
02:04:34
◼
►
for things to stay in for a short period of time
02:04:36
◼
►
without any settings related to that,
02:04:38
◼
►
Just say that's the behavior,
02:04:39
◼
►
the people who need the space will just, you know,
02:04:42
◼
►
just tell them it's immediately freed
02:04:43
◼
►
and then five minutes later it will be.
02:04:45
◼
►
- Yeah, right.
02:04:47
◼
►
Yeah, I mean that's worth considering,
02:04:49
◼
►
but then I have to have a UI for,
02:04:52
◼
►
okay, well, how do you get to these deleted,
02:04:55
◼
►
do they show up in a special list somewhere?
02:04:57
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean like you have playlists, right?
02:05:00
◼
►
So I would just keep using that metaphor,
02:05:01
◼
►
like these are smart playlists that are built in.
02:05:04
◼
►
You know what I mean?
02:05:05
◼
►
- Yeah, it's, I don't know.
02:05:07
◼
►
there's enough cost to that feature
02:05:09
◼
►
that I'm not sure it's worth it.
02:05:12
◼
►
And then there's also, there's like the cognitive burden
02:05:14
◼
►
that you put on all the users.
02:05:16
◼
►
When an app could behave in two or three different ways,
02:05:20
◼
►
then the user's trying to figure out,
02:05:22
◼
►
okay, well wait, I just did this, then where is this,
02:05:25
◼
►
or what happened, or do I have this file?
02:05:27
◼
►
Like you said earlier, that you wanted to be sure
02:05:31
◼
►
if you're getting on a plane or something,
02:05:32
◼
►
you wanna know whether everything's downloaded or not.
02:05:35
◼
►
One of the reasons why I've kept the storage model so simple
02:05:38
◼
►
is to provide that assurance, to know like,
02:05:42
◼
►
okay, if there is no number badge or frowny face
02:05:47
◼
►
on the downloads icon, then I have everything.
02:05:49
◼
►
That's it, like that's it.
02:05:51
◼
►
If the downloads icon is not showing a status--
02:05:53
◼
►
- I didn't know that.
02:05:54
◼
►
That concept is clear to you,
02:05:56
◼
►
but I didn't know that that should have,
02:05:57
◼
►
I'm glad I now know that, so I will look at that
02:05:59
◼
►
and if that's the model you're,
02:06:00
◼
►
but that model, that's the, you know,
02:06:02
◼
►
the programmer model, that's in your head,
02:06:03
◼
►
but the user model is not, like there's nothing in the UI
02:06:06
◼
►
that tells me that that should be the case.
02:06:09
◼
►
The way I can know that I'm safe is I just look
02:06:11
◼
►
to see if there's any badge on the download icon
02:06:13
◼
►
and if there isn't, I'm safe.
02:06:14
◼
►
- Right, and you got burned early in the beta
02:06:17
◼
►
because I changed this halfway through the beta.
02:06:20
◼
►
Earlier on when it first hit you,
02:06:21
◼
►
when you first complained about it,
02:06:23
◼
►
I was not validating the files I was getting.
02:06:26
◼
►
If the download gave me a file
02:06:29
◼
►
and the download completed successfully,
02:06:31
◼
►
I said, "Okay, it succeeded, done," and I moved on.
02:06:34
◼
►
And then you'd tap the file and you'd get the
02:06:36
◼
►
that is unfortunate error.
02:06:37
◼
►
So, and it would say, "Oh, I can't play this file,
02:06:41
◼
►
"I don't know why."
02:06:41
◼
►
That error means that opening the file
02:06:45
◼
►
in the audio processor failed.
02:06:47
◼
►
And often that was 'cause it was a bad download.
02:06:50
◼
►
Sometimes it was like, it was not actually an audio file,
02:06:53
◼
►
it was like somebody's 503 page
02:06:55
◼
►
that when there was a server error.
02:06:58
◼
►
So what I do now in the downloader,
02:07:00
◼
►
after you made that complaint that was correct.
02:07:02
◼
►
And so what I do now is as soon as the files download,
02:07:07
◼
►
there's a brief pause where it seems to freeze at 99%.
02:07:11
◼
►
And the reason why is 'cause it's loading it
02:07:13
◼
►
into the audio processor right then
02:07:15
◼
►
to see is this a real audio file and how long is it
02:07:18
◼
►
and is there anything I need to get,
02:07:21
◼
►
any information I need to get from this.
02:07:22
◼
►
That way once it downloads,
02:07:24
◼
►
it can give you an accurate duration.
02:07:26
◼
►
And if it's not actually an audio file,
02:07:28
◼
►
it can consider that a failed download.
02:07:30
◼
►
and then show it in the UI and maybe try to retry it later
02:07:32
◼
►
or something like that.
02:07:33
◼
►
So now with that, you can be pretty sure
02:07:37
◼
►
that what you're getting, as soon as it was downloaded,
02:07:40
◼
►
it was tested in the thing that opens audio files.
02:07:43
◼
►
So it will open.
02:07:45
◼
►
- Well, I know you've got the accidental delete
02:07:47
◼
►
by scrubbing complaint before,
02:07:48
◼
►
and I think you'll get it again.
02:07:49
◼
►
So maybe you got it from a couple of people in the beta.
02:07:53
◼
►
Maybe you'll check your email
02:07:54
◼
►
to see if it comes up more often.
02:07:55
◼
►
but I still say that scrubbing around in a downloaded episode
02:08:00
◼
►
should never cause that episode to be deleted.
02:08:03
◼
►
Despite the fact that yes, I agree
02:08:04
◼
►
that when you're done playing the episode,
02:08:06
◼
►
having it be automatically deleted
02:08:07
◼
►
is pretty much what people wanna do.
02:08:09
◼
►
But me moving my thumb around
02:08:11
◼
►
or even hitting the fast forward button
02:08:13
◼
►
should never cause that episode to be deleted.
02:08:14
◼
►
'Cause if I am on the plane, everything's downloaded,
02:08:16
◼
►
and I'm listening to something,
02:08:18
◼
►
and at the beginning of the episode,
02:08:20
◼
►
they make a reference to something at the end,
02:08:21
◼
►
I'm like, oh, I wanna skip to the end
02:08:23
◼
►
and see what they're referring to,
02:08:24
◼
►
and I go skip to the end, I guess delete it,
02:08:25
◼
►
like I wanted to listen to that to our podcast,
02:08:27
◼
►
now I'm in a plane with no wifi and I can't.
02:08:29
◼
►
Like scrubbing, using the scrubber does not seem
02:08:32
◼
►
like it should be something that causes data loss.
02:08:35
◼
►
- Well, but because like--
02:08:37
◼
►
- But I mean, you just wait, wait to see
02:08:39
◼
►
what the feedback is.
02:08:40
◼
►
Like maybe I'm the only one, there was like three,
02:08:41
◼
►
two or three other people who had similar comments
02:08:43
◼
►
in the beta.
02:08:44
◼
►
- No, I've had it happen, I've had it happen.
02:08:46
◼
►
- I mean, just, if it's a problem, you'll find out.
02:08:49
◼
►
'Cause right now, like when the people download on day one,
02:08:50
◼
►
maybe they don't notice.
02:08:51
◼
►
But once they use it for a week or so,
02:08:53
◼
►
you'll find out what the real percentage is.
02:08:55
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean one thing I did about,
02:08:57
◼
►
in like the second or third beta,
02:08:59
◼
►
I changed the scrubber so that before it was continuous,
02:09:02
◼
►
as soon as you would drag it around,
02:09:04
◼
►
it would seek to that point.
02:09:05
◼
►
And so if you just held your finger over
02:09:07
◼
►
and dragged to the right,
02:09:09
◼
►
it would eventually,
02:09:10
◼
►
like as soon as you hit the far right edge,
02:09:13
◼
►
bam, deleted the podcast.
02:09:14
◼
►
The way it's released now,
02:09:15
◼
►
and the way it was about a third of the way into the beta,
02:09:18
◼
►
is it's momentary, or rather, you know,
02:09:20
◼
►
so like you have to touch down, drag it around.
02:09:23
◼
►
As you're dragging it around,
02:09:25
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it doesn't actually seek until you release it.
02:09:28
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And so in order to hit the end and delete the file
02:09:31
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on the scrubber, you have to drag it to the end
02:09:33
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and release it while it's at the end
02:09:35
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to actually have that happen.
02:09:37
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- Yeah, when you're trying to get to like the last 30 seconds
02:09:39
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of a two hour podcast and your big thumb is covering
02:09:42
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like the timestamp and you can't really, you know,
02:09:44
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it's easy to accidentally even release,
02:09:47
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even just to take a look over the timestamp
02:09:49
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is not realize you've hit the end.
02:09:50
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- Yeah, that's fair.
02:09:51
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I mean, what you're identifying is definitely not ideal.
02:09:55
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The question is whether the alternatives are worse.
02:09:59
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Like whether the alternative complexity
02:10:01
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is actually overall worse.
02:10:04
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And I don't know the answer to that.
02:10:05
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I mean, I'm sure there's ways I can improve it
02:10:07
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that I haven't thought of yet.
02:10:08
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But you know, like adding this whole different state
02:10:13
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of episodes of like this like purgatory state,
02:10:17
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which would be confusing.
02:10:19
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A lot of people would never even realize
02:10:20
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they could go back and get them,
02:10:22
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and the story people would be very upset by it,
02:10:25
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and it would be more work, and things would be
02:10:26
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more complicated, and there'd be more weird bug
02:10:28
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edge case potential, so like--
02:10:30
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- Storage people would never know.
02:10:31
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Anyway, you can always make it a setting in that case.
02:10:35
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It's five minutes, you deleted in fact five minutes out.
02:10:39
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The other weird thing that, I mean,
02:10:40
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there's limited space for navigation here,
02:10:42
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but I wanted to show my wife the directory today,
02:10:46
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and I had to think, now where was the directory under?
02:10:48
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'cause if I look at the top,
02:10:49
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it's icon that really should be a gear,
02:10:51
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but Marco's stubborn.
02:10:52
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Download, add a playlist, and then a plus.
02:10:56
◼
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- I agree with the icon.
02:10:57
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I don't like the gear.
02:10:58
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Well, that's not fair.
02:10:59
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I think that the icon works.
02:11:02
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- It's a perfectly nice icon.
02:11:03
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I'm just saying that gear is the symbol for settings.
02:11:06
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Anyway, and I had to think like,
02:11:08
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well, it's not gonna be under downloads
02:11:10
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'cause it's a directory.
02:11:11
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The little plus thing with the document,
02:11:13
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►
I had to keep reinforcing to myself
02:11:15
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►
that that means that's add playlist, right?
02:11:18
◼
►
And so the plus is like, well, by a process of elimination,
02:11:22
◼
►
it has to be the plus to see the directory.
02:11:24
◼
►
And that makes sense, because you're adding a podcast,
02:11:26
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But it's like, I expect that to be like the search or whatever,
02:11:29
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but it's also the directory.
02:11:31
◼
►
Anyway, my wife searched for ATP and didn't find this podcast.
02:11:33
◼
►
So that's her bug report.
02:11:35
◼
►
You already got that one, too, though.
02:11:36
◼
►
Well, it's probably somewhere in my--
02:11:39
◼
►
it's now my 590 emails?
02:11:41
◼
►
I mean, someone tweeted.
02:11:43
◼
►
My wife showed it to me, and I said, take a screenshot
02:11:45
◼
►
and send it to Marco.
02:11:46
◼
►
You can use Bugshot.
02:11:47
◼
►
Put a big red arrow.
02:11:48
◼
►
I think she actually did email you about it.
02:11:50
◼
►
But anyway, that has to do with like,
02:11:51
◼
►
we have to put ATP somewhere in our metadata
02:11:53
◼
►
or description or something for that to work.
02:11:55
◼
►
- I don't even know.
02:11:56
◼
►
I got, I don't know.
02:11:58
◼
►
- You're toast.
02:12:00
◼
►
- Yeah, well, the other option is
02:12:02
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►
when you launch the application,
02:12:03
◼
►
just have a gigantic big subscribe to ATP button.
02:12:06
◼
►
- Well, it's already in the directory.
02:12:08
◼
►
It's in the tech category,
02:12:10
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►
which is the top left category in the directories.
02:12:12
◼
►
- Yeah, yeah, we're almost there.
02:12:14
◼
►
Anyway, that's plenty for now.
02:12:17
◼
►
- See, the important thing here is that I ship
02:12:20
◼
►
before FastText's update for iOS 7.
02:12:22
◼
►
- Yes, yes, yes.
02:12:24
◼
►
- I cannot believe I beat you.
02:12:26
◼
►
- To be honest, I've worked on FastText
02:12:27
◼
►
like once, maybe twice since iOS 7 came out,
02:12:30
◼
►
but that doesn't negate your point,
02:12:32
◼
►
which is that you wrote, what,
02:12:34
◼
►
three quarters of an application in the time
02:12:36
◼
►
that I couldn't basically just recompile for iOS 7.
02:12:42
◼
►
- Oh, that's the best.
02:12:43
◼
►
I'm so happy.
02:12:44
◼
►
When you first joked about that,
02:12:47
◼
►
It was probably six months ago.
02:12:49
◼
►
- Oh, probably.
02:12:49
◼
►
- And I thought for sure, oh yeah, I'm never gonna--
02:12:51
◼
►
- I thought for sure I'd make it,
02:12:52
◼
►
but I just haven't found the time.
02:12:55
◼
►
- Oh, that's amazing.
02:12:57
◼
►
- That makes me so happy.
02:12:59
◼
►
- I did it to myself, I can't even be upset.
02:13:01
◼
►
Well, certainly not at you anyway,
02:13:02
◼
►
'cause I did it to myself.