38: Auto-Update My Parents
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You know, if only you had a picture management solution.
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Yeah, that would be nice.
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Wouldn't that be awesome?
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We should talk about that for another hour.
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Let's do that.
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Last week we talked about the problem of turning on the reduce
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motion thing.
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And if you turn it off, then you get the parallax effect
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and it zooms in your background image
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and it was cutting off my background image
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that I wanted to use with my dog.
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And so I was talking about if I could extend the background
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of the image of my dog to make the image bigger
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so it kind of looked like-- I could get the same crop as I
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had with reduced motion on and off
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by using two different pictures.
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And I mentioned using Content-Aware Fill
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to try it in Photoshop.
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And I did that.
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Content-Aware Fill is not magic.
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It worked OK.
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I tried touching it up, and I made
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a version that was extended a little bit, but it wasn't great.
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And then a lot of people recommended to me
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an iOS app called AntiCrop.
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And I'm like, well, that's probably going to work about the same as Content-Aware Phil,
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but that was not the case.
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It worked way better than Content-Aware Phil.
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Obviously, Photoshop in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing might be better
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than Andy Krop, but for me, who just wanted to spend two minutes in Andy Krop, I just
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pressed the button, extended it, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I did in Photoshop over
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the last five minutes, only this is a better job.
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So I was impressed by that, but of course, Andy Krop has the same limitations as Content-Aware
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a film in Photoshop, and then it has no idea what a dog looks like. And my dog is going
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off the top and right edges of the screen. So neither one of these programs is going
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to draw the rest of the dog. It'll draw the rest of the deck, which is pretty regular
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straight lines and, you know, a single color and stuff like that, but it cannot draw the
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rest of the dog.
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Until maybe Photoshop CS10.
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Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. So someone named Jim Pierce on Twitter said, "Hey, I'm
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a visual effects artist. Do you want me to extend the picture to every dog?" He said,
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So I sent him the picture, he sent it back to me, and he did an amazing job.
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He extended not only the deck edges, but also the dog, because he knows what a dog looks
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So once again, humans triumph over computers.
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His website, I believe, is hatandsuitcase.com.
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You can look at his portfolio and everything up there.
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But I'm not sure if I'll use the picture, because I just couldn't stand the parallax
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with the picture crop looking right,
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the dialog boxes still move,
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and the icons in the home screen still move.
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Like my background is black,
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but the icons still move on the black background,
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then I can see it and it drives me nuts.
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So I'm still in reduced motion land,
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despite the fact that I don't like the cross fades.
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- Yeah, it's funny you say that.
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So my friend, Chris Harris,
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who I believe both of you guys have met,
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he works for the other media
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and has been making a few waves lately
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for being the head of the company
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or product called Glide, which DownRipple's using for his rebooted Loop magazine.
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Well anyways, he saw me or heard me complaining about the same issue and did some sort of
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Photoshop magic on my picture of Aaron that I took in 2008 and extended, it was taken
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in our kitchen, so he extended all the bits that are easy to extend.
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And that was the first time I'd seen a instance of Content-Aware fill in my world.
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I'd seen the original video from whenever, a few years ago, when this concept was kind
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of invented.
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And my goodness, it worked flawlessly and looks really good.
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It's kind of creepy how good it can just invent something out of nothing.
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So I was very impressed.
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So thanks, Chris, for that.
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And then I guess something happened with Lynx and Mavericks.
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Is this you, Jon, that added this?
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I think we talked about a couple of shows maybe way back at the beginning.
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I don't remember even which podcast it was on.
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I mentioned that I have a little folder or a little tag set in Yojimbo where I keep the
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starting point of my notes for each new version of OS X, and I have to make those notes before
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I know what the name of the OS would be, and I always guess and put the name down there.
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And then for 10.9, I made a links folder, L-Y-N-X.
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And not necessarily because I thought that would be the name of the next big cat thing,
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I've always thought like where can you go from a lion and you know mountain lion seemed kind of lame
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But it's like all right well, they're done. You know it can't possibly be a cat
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But if it was a cat it should be links and so I wrote links and then you know of course
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It's called maverick has nothing to do with big cats, but
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This past week. I did get a tip that
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Apple was at the very least
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Investigating the word links if they were to go with cat names which of course they didn't in the end
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So I feel feel slightly vindicated in my instincts for links because I got mountain lion I
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I, you know, if you had forced me to guess, I would have said, "Well, it's got to be some
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sort of thing on Mountain Lion or something like that."
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I feel like I have a good sense of what the cats could be.
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I think we talked about this on the recent episode of "Talk Show" more about the cat
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But anyway, I feel good knowing that Lynx was in play and that it could have been a
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10.9 name, and I would have been perfectly happy with it.
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But we're on to the places in California, so that's fine.
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Well, it's funny because looking in the show notes, the only entry is OS X 10.9 LYNX.
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And I assumed this was going to be you lamenting the lack of the web browser or something changing
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about the web browser in Mavericks.
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That would be lowercase links, right?
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Because the executable is lowercase.
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And I always install it, install links on OS X.
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Do you test your websites in it?
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With JavaScript off?
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I don't know.
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I can finally find myself firing it up, even if it's just to run Lynx --dump or something.
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I haven't used it in forever.
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Okay, so the other big news that just happened this week, and then I think we have a tremendous
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amount of Mavericks review-related follow-up, is Everpix folded, which I'm really, really,
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really disappointed by.
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After listening to, I don't recall what episode it was of the prompt and I don't think Hackett
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is in the chat to correct me, Bradley Chambers came on the prompt to talk about photo management,
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which is something I've classically been very bad at, and said, "Oh, you should really try
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It's really good, blah, blah, blah."
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I tried it and decided it is really good and actually paid for your subscription.
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It turns out that they have just decided to close their business.
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I'm very sad about that, and I don't know what you guys have to add.
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Certainly there's some things we can talk about here in the show notes, but Jon, it
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seems like you've taken a keen interest in this.
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Yeah, I signed up for Everpix just because I'm, like a lot of people, looking for some
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way to deal with all my pictures to give me a little bit more security.
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And I'm all paranoid and have all these multiple backs of my pictures, but the thing about
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Everpix was like, "We'll store all your pictures for you.
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We'll suck them out from all the places where they are."
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So it didn't want to own the pictures.
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it was like, we'll pull them out of iPhone,
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we'll pull them off your phone, we'll pull them from wherever,
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and we'll store them forever, and there's no limit.
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And the price was like $50 a year or something.
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So I was like, all right, I'll pay $50 for one year
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just to try this thing out, see if it'll give me like a fourth
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or fifth backup of my stuff.
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And the fringe benefits of it were
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that I had access to all of my pictures
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from any device that could run a web browser.
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And they had a nice iOS app as well.
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So if there's some picture I wanted
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to see from like seven years ago or something. I'm not going to have it on my phone because
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I can't have all my photos on my phone and if I didn't pick that one it's not going to
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be there. I can wait until I get home and go through my iPhoto library or something,
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but Everpix gave me access from anywhere to all of my pictures. And you could easily give
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full resolution download links to relatives if they wanted. "Oh, I want to do new prints
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for my wall, this picture of whatever." It was just convenient. It's the way, you know,
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What everyone's saying about Everpix now that they're gone is like, "This is the way insert
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companies should do photo management, whether it's Google or Microsoft or Apple or anybody."
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And actually, Google sort of comes close to this with their photo stuff, but they don't
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have as many hooks into Apple's applications and stuff.
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But anyway, you don't have to worry about your photos.
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They're all in the cloud.
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We'll save them all for you forever.
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Storage is unlimited.
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The pricing is reasonable.
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You have access to them anywhere.
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So it was great.
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And mostly I didn't think too much about it because I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to try this
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for a year, and if it seems like it works out, I'll sign up for another year."
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So I didn't just sign up for a month.
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I was like, "Well, 50 bucks, I'll try the whole year."
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And had it gone through the whole year, I probably would have signed up for it again.
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If only for just like—I would pay $50.
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It's like even if they didn't store them but somehow gave me magical access to them
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from everywhere by tunneling through to my home computer or something.
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It was just great to have access to them.
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And there was a feature that Lex talks about a lot, Lex Friedman of the Unprofessional
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podcast, and other things, that he liked the flashback emails that it would send you. It
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would send you an email like, "This is what happened a year ago today, two years ago today,
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three years ago today." And if you don't have kids, you may think, "Well, nothing happened
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three years ago today." But when you have kids, you take pictures, especially when they're
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young, you take pictures every single day. And so it's kind of nice to see on this day
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in history when your kids were three years younger, these were the pictures you took.
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And I thought that was a little bit silly, and I didn't sign up for the emails because
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I don't need to get any more emails. But occasionally when I'm flipping around on my phone, I would
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to the Everpix app and look at the flashback, and it was cute and enjoyable. But alas, the
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company is gone, and they're supposedly refunding the prorated amounts for the people who subscribed
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and their subscriptions weren't up yet. And I think it's sad for everyone involved, because
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I think when we first talked about Everpix, we said, "Apple should buy this company. It's
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filled with a bunch of ex-Apple people. They're doing things better than Apple does. I don't
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understand why Apple can't do what they're doing or couldn't do what they're doing, but
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They're not, so why don't you just buy this company and do it?"
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And that didn't work out.
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Nobody wanted to buy them.
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They tried to sell themselves.
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They had a couple of close calls, but no takers, and they just ran out of money.
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Yeah, and it's funny that you mention the daily flashback email, because when I started
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the trial with Everpix, which would give you, I think, a year of photos, and then you can
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pull a Mike Hurley and sell your soul in order to get more time for free.
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Well, even the one year of flashbacks, even for a person who doesn't have children, I
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thought was really cool.
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And man, as soon as I signed up for the full year like you did and started getting the
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flashback emails from as much as like 10 or 12 or whatever years ago, it was the neatest
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thing to be able to see.
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And I found myself, I realized that I was sending pictures to like Aaron and my friends
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of, "Oh, look what we were doing six years ago."
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I was probably getting to the point that I was becoming a spam bot.
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It's probably for the best in my personal relationships that Everpix is going away.
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But the point I'm driving at is that the flashback emails were incredible, even as someone who
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doesn't have kids.
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You had mentioned being able to get to your pictures from basically anywhere.
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Not unlike Mike, I was one of those people who had a camera roll of three gazillion pictures.
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And the reason I did that, even though I had gotten them off my phone and onto my computer,
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I always wanted to be able to show a friend or someone I just met or family member a picture
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if I felt the need.
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So for example, if I'm talking about when Marco and Tiff and Erin and I went to Germany,
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I want to be able to have those pictures always.
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Or the top-year parties that we throw or whatever the case may be.
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I want to be able to show someone those pictures.
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And with Everpix, I could do that.
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And I didn't have to have a camera roll that was 3,000 pictures, which is literally what
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And now, I don't really have a solution for that at the moment.
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And perhaps in a minute, we'll talk about some of the alternatives, but it seems like,
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from what I've gathered, there's no clear winner.
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And the other thing that I thought was interesting about this, I don't think it would have worked
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because it's too fiddly.
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What I was surmising on Twitter earlier, what would have happened if you could provide your
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own storage, but Everpix provided the software?
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So I'm thinking kind of along the line, kind of a cross maybe between File Transporter,
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a past sponsor of the show, and the Fever RSS reader, where you need a web server that
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you install their software on, or at least that's the way it was originally, it may
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not be any more.
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even like Arc, the backup app for Mac, which uses S3 as a storage engine, but you provide
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your own S3 credentials. So you're paying for all the costs and they just sell you the
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Right. And so I was thinking, I wonder if S3 bills weren't an issue for Everpix, could
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they have survived? And both Bradley and Steven Hackett, who I was talking, or I was exchanging
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tweets with, of course called me out, and rightfully so, saying, "Well, then nobody
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would have bought it because it's way too fiddly, and that's true. But on the other
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side of the coin, I can't help but wonder what could have been. And it's very easy
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to be an armchair quarterback in this capacity. But I'm really, really bummed about what's
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happened with Everpix, and I wish that Apple had bought them up. Although, John, you had
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exchanged a few tweets with, I guess, one of the employees, one of the founders. I don't
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know if you want to talk about that at all.
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Yeah, so a couple of people were responding to the news and responding to my retweet of
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whatever announcement it was, and one of the people,
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Rorio on Twitter, said the classy thing
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to do for these failed companies is to open source
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their technology.
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So the stuff that they wrote doesn't just go away.
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OK, well, the company failed.
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Why not make all your code open source?
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And one of the engineers of the company
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said, we wish we could have, but we
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had to sell the technology to pay for an orderly wind
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down and refund.
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So they already sold the underlying technology, I guess.
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And they did that so they would have enough money
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to keep the lights on long enough
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wind down the service and to give everyone back their refunds. You know, I have to pay
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their bills and all the outstanding stuff. So they're trying to shut the company down
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in a good way, like giving you a refund for the time that you paid for that you don't
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get because the service is going away and doing all that stuff. And to do that, apparently,
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they had to sell the tech. And so, of course, I asked, "Who bought it?" And he said, "That's
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currently private." So we don't know who bought it. So for all we know, Apple bought the tech,
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Yahoo bought the tech, Microsoft, Google, who knows who bought it. So that was interesting.
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So they couldn't sell the company, but apparently they could sell the tech or whatever at fire
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sale prices.
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And then some other back and forth about, you know, why didn't the company make it?
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There's like, you know, big long blog posts about it and speculation, but this is from
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the guy at the company who said, "Variable costs were covered by customer income."
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So they had enough subscribers to cover their variable costs, but they hadn't yet reached
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►
the economy scale to cover their fixed costs.
00:14:46
◼
►
Like basically, they didn't have enough customers to make the fixed costs of like running the
00:14:49
◼
►
service infrastructure and everything to cover all that stuff.
00:14:53
◼
►
And that was really the problem.
00:14:54
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►
They needed to scale up to get bigger and bigger.
00:14:57
◼
►
I think this is another one of the guys the company said.
00:15:00
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►
If they had three times their current subscriber base,
00:15:02
◼
►
they would have been profitable.
00:15:03
◼
►
So they just needed more people.
00:15:04
◼
►
And so that's another thing, to put another nail
00:15:06
◼
►
in the coffin of Casey's idea, to have your own server
00:15:09
◼
►
and your own storage.
00:15:10
◼
►
They had to make it more accessible.
00:15:11
◼
►
They needed to market it to more people.
00:15:13
◼
►
And there's been a lot of articles
00:15:14
◼
►
written about how having an awesome product
00:15:16
◼
►
is not enough in the startup world.
00:15:18
◼
►
Because everyone who used Everpix loved it,
00:15:20
◼
►
and their conversion rate from free to paid was excellent.
00:15:23
◼
►
It's just that they didn't get enough customers fast enough,
00:15:26
◼
►
and they couldn't get more funding
00:15:28
◼
►
with the tiny subscriber base they had,
00:15:30
◼
►
which was measured in the thousands,
00:15:31
◼
►
and their growth curve of how many new subscribers
00:15:33
◼
►
they were getting was just too small.
00:15:34
◼
►
So they were so close, like, oh,
00:15:36
◼
►
if we only had three times more customers.
00:15:37
◼
►
Well, that's not that big of a deal
00:15:38
◼
►
when you've got a couple thousand customers,
00:15:40
◼
►
or whatever it was, I forget what it was,
00:15:42
◼
►
like 55,000 free customers and like six or 7,000 paid.
00:15:47
◼
►
They just needed to grow a little bit faster.
00:15:49
◼
►
They just ran out of money too fast,
00:15:51
◼
►
despite the fact that the product was great.
00:15:54
◼
►
So that's kind of a shame, but when I look at companies
00:15:57
◼
►
like this, I think, and everyone thinks it,
00:16:00
◼
►
why is this company with this great product
00:16:01
◼
►
that everybody loved, with this team of like six people,
00:16:04
◼
►
able to do something, this giant company
00:16:06
◼
►
that has billions and billions of profit,
00:16:07
◼
►
like burning a hole in its pocket,
00:16:09
◼
►
has got so much cash, it's trying to give it back
00:16:10
◼
►
to the shareholders to the tune of billions of dollars a year
00:16:13
◼
►
and it still can't get rid of the cash fast enough,
00:16:15
◼
►
this cash pile is still growing,
00:16:16
◼
►
I'm talking about Apple here, of course,
00:16:18
◼
►
how come their thing people don't like
00:16:21
◼
►
and is confusing and is crappy and doesn't cost more money
00:16:24
◼
►
than Everpix.
00:16:25
◼
►
But it's like Apple has huge profitable businesses that
00:16:29
◼
►
could easily subsidize the cost of an Everpix-like service.
00:16:34
◼
►
And it's just an opportunity for these big companies
00:16:38
◼
►
to see, to learn from the small companies.
00:16:40
◼
►
As everyone says, whoever uses Everpix,
00:16:44
◼
►
the big thing is, why doesn't PhotoStream,
00:16:46
◼
►
which Apple seems to now be rebranding as just iCloud,
00:16:49
◼
►
you know, it's an application. Why doesn't it work in reverse? Why is it your device has the
00:16:53
◼
►
last thousand photos and then the stuff? Why isn't it reversed? Like where the photo stream
00:16:58
◼
►
keeps all your photos and only the most recent thousand are on your device instead of being,
00:17:03
◼
►
oh, well, you know, your pictures, once you hit a thousand photos in photo stream,
00:17:07
◼
►
the pictures aren't in the cloud anymore. Only the most recent 1000 are in the cloud. And of course,
00:17:11
◼
►
the rest of them will be an iPhoto or on your phone or whatever. Like the whole point of any
00:17:16
◼
►
any kind of cloud-type service for pictures and photos.
00:17:19
◼
►
The whole point is you don't want people to worry.
00:17:21
◼
►
It has to be, you don't want to have to do math in your head
00:17:24
◼
►
of like, well, where are the photos?
00:17:25
◼
►
Will they have a sync this recently?
00:17:26
◼
►
And if I run out of room on my phone, that's fine
00:17:28
◼
►
until I hit the thousand picture limit
00:17:29
◼
►
and then they start going off the end
00:17:30
◼
►
and I gotta make sure I sync the iPhoto on my computer
00:17:32
◼
►
but then I gotta backup my computer.
00:17:33
◼
►
It's like, people shouldn't have to worry about it.
00:17:36
◼
►
And if you have to charge money to cover the cost, fine.
00:17:38
◼
►
Charge money to cover the cost.
00:17:39
◼
►
Can you work it into the margins of your other products?
00:17:42
◼
►
I feel like a company like Apple could.
00:17:44
◼
►
The big win only happens when someone says, "Oh, you should get an Apple whatever phone,
00:17:49
◼
►
iPad, computer, because then you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe."
00:17:53
◼
►
Nobody ever says that now.
00:17:55
◼
►
And Everpix, you could have when the company was still around, say, "Get Everpix, then
00:17:59
◼
►
you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe."
00:18:02
◼
►
And speaking of that, the second issue that a lot of people are responding about is like,
00:18:05
◼
►
"Oh, you know, we heard you talk about Everpix.
00:18:07
◼
►
Now look what happened.
00:18:08
◼
►
Now we've learned our lesson.
00:18:09
◼
►
Never trust anybody."
00:18:11
◼
►
I think we emphasized this in the past show about backups.
00:18:13
◼
►
The whole point is you never put all your eggs in any one basket.
00:18:17
◼
►
So if a company like Everpix goes down, you shouldn't lose your photos because that should
00:18:21
◼
►
not have been the only copy of your photos.
00:18:23
◼
►
You should have your photos in multiple places.
00:18:26
◼
►
And if all those places can be like fire and forget all my photos are saved forever, like
00:18:30
◼
►
you have them all on your computer and your computer is backed up with like CrashBanner
00:18:33
◼
►
BlackBlaze or something like that, or it's backed up to a transporter in your house and
00:18:37
◼
►
that transporter syncs with the transporter, you're obviously like many, many layers of
00:18:40
◼
►
of backup and all those you want to be as brain dead simple, don't have to think about
00:18:45
◼
►
it, everything gets backed up automatically as you want.
00:18:48
◼
►
And if any one of them goes down, if your hard drive dies and your Mac dies, you should
00:18:51
◼
►
be able to get your stuff back from like your time machine backup.
00:18:53
◼
►
If your house burns down, you should be able to get your stuff back from your cloud backup.
00:18:56
◼
►
If your house burns down and your hard drive dies, you should be able to at least get your
00:18:59
◼
►
family photos back from Everpix or whatever other online service you're using to just
00:19:03
◼
►
store your photos.
00:19:04
◼
►
You need to have multiple layers and if any one of those layers goes out of business,
00:19:08
◼
►
down, breaks, you replace it. Replace Everpix with another service does the same thing.
00:19:13
◼
►
Replace your online backup with another backup thing. Replace your house with a new house.
00:19:16
◼
►
Replace your Mac with a new Mac that works. Replace your broken hard drive. That's the
00:19:19
◼
►
whole point of backups. It's not that all these things are going to be around forever.
00:19:23
◼
►
It's acknowledging that every one of these things that you're backing up for will eventually
00:19:26
◼
►
not be around. Either the company will go out of business or the hardware will die,
00:19:29
◼
►
and you should be able to replace it because that shouldn't be the only place you have
00:19:33
◼
►
I think you guys are being a little bit easy on Everpix.
00:19:37
◼
►
I think everything you said about backup is correct. I agree with everything you just said.
00:19:41
◼
►
I have nothing to add to that. So I'm going back a step instead.
00:19:45
◼
►
You know, you look at, you know, they say their variable
00:19:49
◼
►
costs are already covered by customer income. Well,
00:19:53
◼
►
is S3 a variable cost? I don't even know if they were using S3. They were.
00:19:57
◼
►
And so, there's this article on the Vergs that we'll link to
00:20:01
◼
►
that is like kind of like a first person account.
00:20:06
◼
►
Anyway, we'll link to it.
00:20:08
◼
►
And they mentioned they had a $35,000 S3 bill
00:20:11
◼
►
that was about to come in that was going to be a problem.
00:20:15
◼
►
So anyway, I think it's obvious that they were not
00:20:19
◼
►
about to be profitable.
00:20:20
◼
►
Because if they were about to be profitable,
00:20:22
◼
►
then it wouldn't be an issue to refund everyone's
00:20:25
◼
►
annual pre-purchases.
00:20:27
◼
►
Because their annual pre-purchases
00:20:29
◼
►
wouldn't all be spent already.
00:20:30
◼
►
No, they needed three times the current subscriber base to be profitable.
00:20:35
◼
►
But like I say, three times 6,000 is not insurmountable with another funding round.
00:20:40
◼
►
I feel like they could have got to three times.
00:20:42
◼
►
Their biggest cost was personnel.
00:20:43
◼
►
They spent the vast majority of the money invested on people.
00:20:46
◼
►
So yeah, that's their fixed cost.
00:20:48
◼
►
We have six people, we pay them salaries, and that's where all their money went.
00:20:52
◼
►
And so if you can get three times the subscriber base, you don't need three times the number
00:20:55
◼
►
of employees, and they would have been in the black.
00:20:58
◼
►
I'm not saying they were just this close.
00:21:00
◼
►
They weren't.
00:21:01
◼
►
That's why they're gone.
00:21:02
◼
►
They didn't make it.
00:21:03
◼
►
And they didn't make it probably because they spent
00:21:04
◼
►
too much time trying to make their product better
00:21:06
◼
►
and not enough time trying to get more customers.
00:21:08
◼
►
But, you know, lesson learned.
00:21:10
◼
►
- I mean, I think they committed a massive strategic error
00:21:14
◼
►
in their product creation and in their business plan,
00:21:18
◼
►
which is, generally speaking, when you're making
00:21:21
◼
►
a new service like this or a new product like this,
00:21:24
◼
►
you gotta choose one extreme or the other.
00:21:26
◼
►
You know, like as we learned when _DavidSmith and I taught Casey how to play Puerto Rico
00:21:31
◼
►
a few weeks ago, in the game of Puerto Rico, generally speaking, you have to pick one extreme
00:21:37
◼
►
strategy and stick with it.
00:21:39
◼
►
If you try to do like a middle strategy that combines elements of like, "Oh, I'm going
00:21:43
◼
►
to ship a whole lot of goods, but also I'm going to build a bunch of buildings," you're
00:21:47
◼
►
not going to do either of them well enough to win.
00:21:49
◼
►
VC funded company, or I mean, web services and new services like this are kind of similar
00:21:55
◼
►
in the growth factor versus financing and versus paying your own bills, which is you
00:22:00
◼
►
have to either go for something that is very cheap to scale but will attract tons of users
00:22:07
◼
►
very quickly, in which case you can pay for it by lots of VC money coming in because you
00:22:12
◼
►
have tons of growth, or pick something that's hard and expensive to do, like hosting a ton
00:22:19
◼
►
of photos on S3, but don't go into that with a free growth-based model upfront. Go into
00:22:26
◼
►
that with a more bootstrapping, more self-financed model, which is you shouldn't be losing money
00:22:32
◼
►
on every new customer. And you should also enter that kind of market with very low expenses
00:22:39
◼
►
to begin with. Not a big staff, not an office. Enter that market with low expectations of
00:22:46
◼
►
profit for a while and adjust your cost accordingly.
00:22:51
◼
►
And instead, Everpix kind of tried to ride the middle.
00:22:55
◼
►
They chose to do something that's very expensive to scale.
00:22:58
◼
►
They chose something that was not likely, and maybe this was their error, I don't
00:23:03
◼
►
think it was ever likely to have booming explosive growth, because the market for it is not everyone
00:23:10
◼
►
who ever takes pictures needs this and is driven to do this.
00:23:14
◼
►
It's really only people who care about their photo storage
00:23:17
◼
►
and who know enough about photo storage
00:23:19
◼
►
to know why they would need something like this.
00:23:21
◼
►
And that is not a big market relative to something
00:23:24
◼
►
like Instagram.
00:23:26
◼
►
And this, to give you some idea, Tumblr,
00:23:29
◼
►
like three or four years into it,
00:23:31
◼
►
had something like 20 terabytes of photos.
00:23:35
◼
►
By my math, Everpix had 400 terabytes or so,
00:23:40
◼
►
if their S3 bill was correct.
00:23:43
◼
►
And so obviously they were scaling at a storage level
00:23:47
◼
►
that's insane.
00:23:48
◼
►
This was one of my main things-- and John,
00:23:50
◼
►
if you go back a sec, what you were saying about how
00:23:54
◼
►
we all wish PhotoStream kind of worked this way,
00:23:56
◼
►
and it doesn't.
00:23:58
◼
►
It's because people's photos can vary so much in size.
00:24:03
◼
►
The idea I've ever picked of upload all your photos to us
00:24:05
◼
►
and we'll store all of them forever,
00:24:09
◼
►
You're talking potentially hundreds of gigs for people, or even terabytes for people,
00:24:17
◼
►
and that's not that uncommon of a case.
00:24:20
◼
►
But Apple could absorb that easily.
00:24:21
◼
►
If this company would be profitable with their income stream with three times the number
00:24:25
◼
►
of subscribers—and remember, they're doing freemium.
00:24:27
◼
►
If they take the freemium out of the equation, it's even more close to being profitable.
00:24:31
◼
►
Fifty dollars a year, Apple just adds fifty dollars a year, spread across all its profitable
00:24:36
◼
►
product lines.
00:24:38
◼
►
You wouldn't even notice that.
00:24:39
◼
►
who knows how much money they're already spending to do photo stream? It seems like,
00:24:42
◼
►
I feel like a company like Apple, with their margins and their profit and what they're already
00:24:47
◼
►
doing, could easily absorb this business. A six-person startup with a freemium model where
00:24:53
◼
►
they have 55,000 customers but only 7,000 are paying, can't absorb it. And they came close.
00:24:59
◼
►
If they got one more funding round, which they might have gotten, if they might have gotten
00:25:03
◼
►
another funding round, if they had started this company 10 years ago earlier, because it's just
00:25:06
◼
►
harder to get funding now because people want to see, you know, Instagram or something and
00:25:10
◼
►
if they don't, they're like, "Meh, don't bother funding them."
00:25:12
◼
►
No, I mean, the problem is that they were never going to have the rate of growth needed
00:25:17
◼
►
to get tons of VC money to pay these ridiculous costs. Like, they are paying tons and tons
00:25:23
◼
►
and tons of money as people upload massive photo collections. And that's another thing
00:25:28
◼
►
too, like, if the whole point of your service is upload everything you've ever shot, like,
00:25:32
◼
►
you first start using it, then your storage needs don't grow slowly over time as people
00:25:37
◼
►
accumulate new photos. Your storage needs spike up at the beginning. I mean, the whole
00:25:42
◼
►
thing was a very, very expensive business to run, not even considering the staff, which
00:25:47
◼
►
staffing is insane. I mean, like, the staff cost of something like this, because what
00:25:51
◼
►
do they have, like five or six people, something like that?
00:25:53
◼
►
If you took away 90% of their storage costs, they would be fine. It's the freemium guys
00:25:57
◼
►
that killed them, because they said, "Hey, sign up for free, upload a year of photos."
00:26:01
◼
►
and 40 or 50,000 people did that.
00:26:03
◼
►
The people who were paying,
00:26:04
◼
►
that was a sustainable business.
00:26:06
◼
►
If it was pay $50, we'll store all your photos,
00:26:09
◼
►
because people have variable sizes of photos,
00:26:12
◼
►
but apparently they had figured out a model
00:26:13
◼
►
where they could store all your photos
00:26:15
◼
►
and be profitable as a six person company
00:26:17
◼
►
with like 7,000 subscribers.
00:26:19
◼
►
- Here's the other problem.
00:26:20
◼
►
$50 for a year of Amazon storage buys you about 20 gigs.
00:26:25
◼
►
Maybe by the time they're getting into their bulk pricing,
00:26:28
◼
►
maybe you're talking 25 or 30 gigs.
00:26:30
◼
►
So for everybody, I mean, maybe that's the average.
00:26:34
◼
►
That sounds a little low to me though.
00:26:35
◼
►
For anybody who would use a service like this,
00:26:36
◼
►
that sounds low.
00:26:37
◼
►
Like I shoot 20 gigs in a year.
00:26:39
◼
►
- They were doing, I'm pretty sure they were doing
00:26:41
◼
►
lossy compression though.
00:26:42
◼
►
So I think they were saying they get 5x compression.
00:26:44
◼
►
- Did they support RAWs?
00:26:45
◼
►
'Cause that matters a lot.
00:26:46
◼
►
And that makes it like five times bigger.
00:26:48
◼
►
- No, it was not.
00:26:49
◼
►
That was the other thing, talk about going
00:26:50
◼
►
in the middle road.
00:26:51
◼
►
Like they had a thing where they thought this could be
00:26:53
◼
►
for everybody, but they weren't storing RAWs.
00:26:56
◼
►
And they were doing 5x lossy compression.
00:26:59
◼
►
all things that professional photographers would never accept.
00:27:02
◼
►
And the pricing, I think, was priced like that.
00:27:04
◼
►
It's like, well, it's $50 a year.
00:27:05
◼
►
This is not a thing for professional photographers.
00:27:07
◼
►
It's a thing for everybody who just wants access to all their pictures from everywhere
00:27:10
◼
►
and wants to know they're safe.
00:27:13
◼
►
And if you're the type of person that says, "Well, you're not saving my raw, so my pictures
00:27:15
◼
►
aren't really safe," this is not the service for you, right?
00:27:19
◼
►
So they had a misbalance of their business model and their funding, and they made mistakes,
00:27:28
◼
►
But it's not entirely crazy because I think this same company, like I said, this same
00:27:32
◼
►
company had gone 10 years ago in that VC environment.
00:27:34
◼
►
I don't know if 10 years it was in the middle of a bubble crash.
00:27:36
◼
►
But at this point, I think it's getting harder to find VC funding for a company in the state
00:27:42
◼
►
that this thing was.
00:27:43
◼
►
Whereas when you're in the midst of a run-up or a bubble, people are like, "Oh my God,
00:27:46
◼
►
you have actual paying customers?
00:27:48
◼
►
And you have a product that people like here?
00:27:51
◼
►
Take our money."
00:27:52
◼
►
But now they're like, "No, you have actual paying customers.
00:27:54
◼
►
That means you're never going to grow that fast.
00:27:56
◼
►
"Yeah, people like your product, but who cares? No thanks. We'll pass." It's the
00:28:00
◼
►
curse of a business model. If you didn't take money from anybody, then you would be
00:28:06
◼
►
on the Instagram type thing. "We have no revenue. We don't take money from anybody."
00:28:10
◼
►
Well, not the Instagram. Whatever.
00:28:12
◼
►
Yeah, but if that was the case, then their user number would be impressive, and it wasn't.
00:28:16
◼
►
I know. Then you have the potential for explosive growth. So they were in this... It's an unfortunate
00:28:22
◼
►
situation. And the thing about it is I get the feeling that the vultures surrounding
00:28:26
◼
►
Both the VCs and the other companies were like, "Why would we ever buy your company?
00:28:29
◼
►
Why don't we just wait for you to run out of money and then scoop up the technology?"
00:28:32
◼
►
Which seems to have been what happened, because it's like, you don't need the company, and
00:28:36
◼
►
you don't need to invest in the company if you don't think it's going to be the next
00:28:39
◼
►
If you think the technology is interesting, just wait, sit back and wait.
00:28:42
◼
►
And then after it all goes down, I bet you can get the technology involved really cheaply.
00:28:47
◼
►
That's true.
00:28:48
◼
►
You know, I—well, firstly, real-time follow-up.
00:28:51
◼
►
Someone in the chat who—I've already lost your name.
00:28:53
◼
►
It was savvy.
00:28:54
◼
►
Posted a tweet from one of the gentlemen that worked at Everpix saying, "We use perceptually
00:29:00
◼
►
lossless 5x compression."
00:29:02
◼
►
So you were right about that, John.
00:29:05
◼
►
Yeah, but perceptually lossless means lossy.
00:29:07
◼
►
It's like virtually spotless.
00:29:11
◼
►
But the thing that I really take issue with is something that Marco said a few minutes
00:29:14
◼
►
ago, which is this isn't for everyone.
00:29:18
◼
►
And I actually strongly disagree.
00:29:19
◼
►
I think Everpix in principle was maybe not literally for everyone, but was for any normal
00:29:24
◼
►
human being that shoots pictures with any device that they don't want to lose, which
00:29:31
◼
►
is to say almost everyone.
00:29:33
◼
►
We don't have kids, but if we were to lose some of the pictures we've taken of vacations,
00:29:39
◼
►
of family gatherings, of us goofing off at BMW in South Carolina, if we lost those pictures,
00:29:47
◼
►
I'd be devastated.
00:29:48
◼
►
And Everpix was such an easy and reasonably cheap way of getting yourself a backup.
00:29:57
◼
►
And John, I completely agree with what you said a while back, that this is just one leg
00:30:01
◼
►
in a chair that holds up all of your pictures and makes sure they're safe.
00:30:07
◼
►
But it's a very easy way to do that.
00:30:10
◼
►
And if you think about it, I don't think most people that I know use a crash plan or a back
00:30:14
◼
►
blaze or anything like that.
00:30:16
◼
►
And so getting all of your pictures into the cloud is such an improvement over having no
00:30:22
◼
►
backup or just having Time Machine, which by the way, most people I know don't use
00:30:27
◼
►
And so I agree with you guys that this probably was doomed.
00:30:32
◼
►
And Marco, your Puerto Rico analogy, while ridiculous, is actually fairly accurate.
00:30:37
◼
►
But on the other side of the coin, I strongly disagree that this wasn't for everyone.
00:30:41
◼
►
It may not have appealed to everyone, but I think it should have.
00:30:44
◼
►
Well, it's not for everyone in the sense that Marko meant that it's not that everyone can't
00:30:48
◼
►
benefit from this, because they can. It's that it's not of interest to everyone, which
00:30:52
◼
►
I think is totally true.
00:30:53
◼
►
They're not going to rush to it.
00:30:54
◼
►
Right. For everyone, it doesn't mean if everyone's to have this, they would get benefit from
00:31:00
◼
►
it, because everyone would get benefit from this. The question is, is this a type of product
00:31:04
◼
►
that if you describe to anyone, they immediately say, "Oh, yeah, I totally would like that.
00:31:08
◼
►
And yeah, here's $50." And the answer to that was definitely no, because it's the type of
00:31:11
◼
►
thing that people don't really know that they need. And it's also the type of thing that
00:31:14
◼
►
we've been conditioned by sort of modern computing platforms to assume is a platform-level concern.
00:31:20
◼
►
Like, "Oh, doesn't Apple take care of that for me? Or doesn't Google take care of that
00:31:24
◼
►
for me?" And it really properly should be a platform-level concern, which is why everyone
00:31:28
◼
►
kept saying someone should buy Everpix, because it's like, you know, it's the type of third-party
00:31:33
◼
►
thing where you're like, "Whoever my platform vendor is should be providing some way for
00:31:38
◼
►
me to do this, whether it's paying for iCloud storage or as part of my really expensive phone
00:31:44
◼
►
or as part of my Google account so they get all my personal information or whatever. It should be
00:31:48
◼
►
a platform-level concern. And so people aren't going to say, "I'll pay an extra 50 bucks to
00:31:52
◼
►
this other company if you do this thing," that, yeah, I may get value of it, but it's not something
00:31:56
◼
►
that's eating it. It's only people who are really bothered by it are crazy people like us who think
00:31:59
◼
►
about backups and stuff. And that's the terrible thing about Everpix is most people don't think
00:32:05
◼
►
they need this at all even though they do. And if you gave them to them for free, they
00:32:08
◼
►
would probably enjoy it, but they're not going to go out and buy it. And if you have something
00:32:11
◼
►
people aren't going to go out and buy, you basically have a business that's "not for
00:32:15
◼
►
everyone" because everyone does not come to you to buy it. And it's a subtle distinction,
00:32:19
◼
►
but it's an important one when you're sitting there waiting for the customers to arrive.
00:32:23
◼
►
Also, I want to address two quick follow-ups here. One, the idea that Apple should just
00:32:29
◼
►
do this for everyone, it is, to put it bluntly, it is not that easy. Because Apple is so big,
00:32:37
◼
►
and the number of iOS devices being used and having photo shots on them is so large, that
00:32:42
◼
►
like, S3 isn't big enough for that. Like that's the kind of scale that we're talking about.
00:32:46
◼
►
They're too big for S3. And doing something like this on Apple's scale is such a completely
00:32:54
◼
►
different ballgame than doing it on the scale of a new web service with 10,000, 50,000,
00:33:00
◼
►
whatever users. It's not even close to the same game.
00:33:05
◼
►
Number two, the idea that a startup is only worth, is worth a lot less once they've made
00:33:11
◼
►
any money at all is mostly not true in practice. In practice, growth matters above everything.
00:33:20
◼
►
Even if you aren't making a whole lot of money right now, if you are getting user growth
00:33:24
◼
►
traffic growth, attention growth, but especially user growth. That papers over everything.
00:33:29
◼
►
That's what the entire VC world is based on, just like the stock market, is the potential
00:33:34
◼
►
for future money. If you've made some money now, but it's been disappointing, but your
00:33:38
◼
►
user growth is totally through the roof, that doesn't mean you're worthless. It means you
00:33:42
◼
►
didn't try the right business plan yet or the right revenue plan yet, but that doesn't
00:33:46
◼
►
mean there isn't one. If you have user growth, VCs will give you money, period.
00:33:50
◼
►
Yeah, but the easiest way to get that explosive growth and to make people believe that there's
00:33:54
◼
►
going to be explosive growth is to not charge anybody money for anything, because then people
00:33:59
◼
►
will truly believe, "Oh, this can scale to all the people who have computers." As soon
00:34:03
◼
►
as you charge any money for anybody for anything, they're like, "Well, that automatically puts
00:34:07
◼
►
a cap on your potential growth rate," because you're asking for money, period.
00:34:12
◼
►
Totally agree. But I'm saying if your actual growth rate is really good, regardless of
00:34:16
◼
►
whether you're charging for anything, if your actual growth rate is consistently good, you'll
00:34:20
◼
►
keep getting VC money. And that's why VC-funded companies always give everything away for
00:34:24
◼
►
free because you're correct that since the whole game is based on growth for as long
00:34:29
◼
►
as possible, the last thing you want to do is inhibit growth by charging money for any
00:34:34
◼
►
part of the product.
00:34:35
◼
►
And their growth rate was not great, and they kept touting their conversion rate, which
00:34:38
◼
►
was very good, but your conversion rate doesn't matter if you're converting on peanuts' worth
00:34:42
◼
►
of people who are not growing fast enough.
00:34:45
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- All right, so do we want to,
00:37:46
◼
►
oh, I should note actually before we move
00:37:48
◼
►
into the review followup,
00:37:50
◼
►
that a lot of people have been wondering
00:37:53
◼
►
what are the alternative SaverPix?
00:37:54
◼
►
I can only speak for myself, I don't know about you guys,
00:37:56
◼
►
but I haven't looked into any yet,
00:37:58
◼
►
I haven't had the chance,
00:37:59
◼
►
but the three that we're aware of are Loom,
00:38:03
◼
►
Picture Life, and Adobe, is it Revel, is that right?
00:38:07
◼
►
- Yeah, Revel, yeah.
00:38:08
◼
►
- Okay, and those are the three that we're aware of.
00:38:10
◼
►
I don't know, John or Marco,
00:38:11
◼
►
if you have anything to add about those three,
00:38:12
◼
►
but those are the ones that are the obvious ones.
00:38:16
◼
►
- Revel is interesting.
00:38:17
◼
►
I have a brief conflict of interest
00:38:20
◼
►
in that they sponsored my site when they launched Revel
00:38:22
◼
►
for something like eight weeks in a row.
00:38:24
◼
►
But it's an interesting product, I think.
00:38:28
◼
►
It seems as though Adobe is not paying a lot of attention to it recently and maybe,
00:38:33
◼
►
I don't know, Adobe, it seems like the Lightroom team is rocking it with the success of Lightroom
00:38:38
◼
►
and I wish these things were just part of Lightroom and it seems like there's no good reason,
00:38:44
◼
►
or rather, I'm sure there's a good reason, but I wish Revell was just like a Lightroom cloud.
00:38:50
◼
►
And it's not. It's a separate thing and Lightroom can publish to it, but it doesn't store RAWs and
00:38:54
◼
►
and stuff like that.
00:38:56
◼
►
And it kind of tries to bridge the gap between consumer and pro
00:39:00
◼
►
and doesn't really satisfy either of them amazingly.
00:39:03
◼
►
And so it's kind of an odd product.
00:39:06
◼
►
And it seems like it's kind of getting lost in Adobe's
00:39:09
◼
►
But what I would love, really, is Lightroom Cloud.
00:39:13
◼
►
Like, I would pay a good price for that
00:39:17
◼
►
to basically have the revel ability
00:39:22
◼
►
to store everything online and just have thumbnails and stuff on iOS devices and be able to download
00:39:26
◼
►
anything by tapping it. To have that but integrated fully with Lightroom and supporting RAW, that
00:39:34
◼
►
would be amazing. But it doesn't exist.
00:39:37
◼
►
I haven't tried any of these services yet either, although I did look at all of their
00:39:41
◼
►
pages and the one thing they all have in common is much higher prices than Everpix. So take
00:39:47
◼
►
that for whatever you will. Are there chances of surviving better than Everpix? Are they
00:39:52
◼
►
worse? I mean, I don't know if I need them to even have a freemium model. I think they
00:39:55
◼
►
all just charge up front. Is that the case? I don't know. I haven't investigated it. But
00:39:59
◼
►
anyway, maybe I'll look into them all and try it. But one of the things that I found
00:40:03
◼
►
attractive about Everpix was that it was so inexpensive. It's kind of like the back place.
00:40:08
◼
►
When they first came out many, many years ago, they're like, "Oh, well, this company
00:40:11
◼
►
will be out of business because they're charging like $5 a month for unlimited backup. How
00:40:14
◼
►
How can that be sustainable?
00:40:16
◼
►
And here we are many, many years later, and they're still around, and they have competitors,
00:40:20
◼
►
and apparently they've been able to make that work.
00:40:21
◼
►
And actually, I want to get back to what Marco was saying before about how Apple's scale
00:40:26
◼
►
will be much larger.
00:40:27
◼
►
I think that's true, but Everpix said they would be profitable with three extra subscriber
00:40:32
◼
►
rate, and that's $50 a year per person, right?
00:40:35
◼
►
So Apple will have 300,000 times their subscriber rate.
00:40:40
◼
►
So presumably, if it's profitable with three times Everpix's subscriber rate, it would
00:40:43
◼
►
be profitable through $100,000. And I think Apple is especially positioned to be even
00:40:47
◼
►
more cost effective for this thing because Everpix had to pay S3, which means Amazon
00:40:54
◼
►
gets to skim some profit off the top because they're reselling the storage service.
00:40:58
◼
►
Apple presumably would implement its own storage solution or have its own storage stuff that
00:41:05
◼
►
it doesn't have to give Amazon or some other company a piece of its profit. And that's
00:41:09
◼
►
it before you get into what I was talking about, like, okay, we'll take some of your
00:41:13
◼
►
massive profit from your other product lines and plow it into that, which presumably is
00:41:17
◼
►
what they're doing with the iCloud storage, which must be subsidized by their other products
00:41:22
◼
►
And iCloud storage, I don't know how it compares to $50 a year.
00:41:25
◼
►
It's obviously not $50 a year for unlimited.
00:41:27
◼
►
But again, I feel like if Everpix, with their technology that they were using, was able
00:41:31
◼
►
to be profitable at $50 a year, if Apple charged $50 a year and they would store all your photos
00:41:37
◼
►
in iCloud for you and then just put the most recent thousand on your phone or something,
00:41:42
◼
►
they would have, I think, a service that at the very least breaks even, if not makes profit
00:41:48
◼
►
Yeah, I mean, the issue I don't think would be profitability. It would just be dealing
00:41:52
◼
►
with that scale. It would be a ton of engineering time and resources just to deal with the scale,
00:41:59
◼
►
not necessarily the raw costs of, "Okay, we're paying for this many servers and this
00:42:03
◼
►
much bandwidth." It's not that. It's the massive engineering effort required to
00:42:08
◼
►
to operate something at that scale where something like S3 is really not suitable. And by the
00:42:12
◼
►
way, an S3 is not cheap. I mean, none of Amazon's web services are cheap. And there's this culture
00:42:19
◼
►
in tech startups these days that the default of you're starting anything, the default answer
00:42:24
◼
►
is let's host it all on Amazon Web Services. And that is not cost effective at all for
00:42:30
◼
►
almost anything. You do it on Amazon Web Services because the scaling is effectively free up
00:42:37
◼
►
to a limit that's so high that even Tumblr probably hasn't reached it yet. Although
00:42:42
◼
►
Apple I think would with that dataset. But you're talking, Amazon scales very, very
00:42:50
◼
►
easily with some of their services. EC2, maybe. S3, definitely. And you pay a big premium
00:42:57
◼
►
for that. If your entire business, like Backblaze, if Backblaze was based on S3, they would not
00:43:04
◼
►
be able to offer that kind of pricing.
00:43:07
◼
►
Backblaze very famously made their own storage servers.
00:43:10
◼
►
Like they designed their own storage servers
00:43:11
◼
►
with massive numbers of hard drives.
00:43:13
◼
►
Cram into this case, they even open sourced the design
00:43:15
◼
►
and something like that.
00:43:17
◼
►
And they actually designed custom hardware
00:43:21
◼
►
to get tons of storage as cheaply as possible.
00:43:25
◼
►
And that's why they can offer that.
00:43:27
◼
►
If your entire business is storing a very large amount
00:43:31
◼
►
of data for as little money as possible,
00:43:34
◼
►
S3 is not actually a good fit for you. That's not going to scale very well. But it's the
00:43:39
◼
►
easy quick fix up front, at least, while you figure out whether your business has legs.
00:43:43
◼
►
And that's the problem is that EverFix didn't.
00:43:45
◼
►
Yeah, I mean, it lets you get in without putting a bunch of money down. Because with S3, it's
00:43:51
◼
►
like, "Hey, zero dollars," and you put your first byte of storage in, and you pay for
00:43:55
◼
►
that first byte of storage, and you keep going. And eventually, it becomes ridiculous and
00:43:58
◼
►
unsustainable because now you're giving all your slim ploppet margins to Amazon. But it
00:44:02
◼
►
you get off the ground. For companies like Apple, though, at a certain point, this is going to
00:44:08
◼
►
become the price of entry if you are a platform vendor. Google's already there where there are
00:44:12
◼
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certain things people just start to expect. A long time ago, Apple didn't give you an email address.
00:44:19
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Nowadays, if you are the platform vendor, even if a lot of people don't use it, and even if your
00:44:24
◼
►
thing doesn't become the most popular email thing, Apple has to offer people a way to have a Mac.com
00:44:28
◼
►
or an iCloud.com email address.
00:44:30
◼
►
Is it a core part of the business?
00:44:32
◼
►
Are they ever going to threaten Gmail or Hotmail?
00:44:34
◼
►
But it's the price of entry.
00:44:35
◼
►
You just have to do that because you're
00:44:37
◼
►
going to have an email application.
00:44:39
◼
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And so at a certain point, I hope, eventually,
00:44:41
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►
a price of entry will be, of course,
00:44:44
◼
►
whoever my platform vendor is will store all my pictures
00:44:47
◼
►
for me in the cloud.
00:44:48
◼
►
As per some yearly fee, part of my cell phone plan,
00:44:54
◼
►
some way to get enough money to cover the cost for that,
00:44:57
◼
►
it'll become the price of entry because Google is almost already doing it.
00:45:01
◼
►
And if people get used to that, it is terrible for Apple to be like,
00:45:04
◼
►
well, let me show you this diagram showing you where your pictures are
00:45:07
◼
►
and how much money you have to pay and which device burns down,
00:45:10
◼
►
which photos you'll lose at what time.
00:45:12
◼
►
You just want to not have to think about it.
00:45:14
◼
►
And so it's difficult to do.
00:45:17
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►
And they can't do it through Amazon because why would you
00:45:20
◼
►
give Amazon all that money?
00:45:21
◼
►
Apple's supposed to do it themselves.
00:45:23
◼
►
Apple has to figure out a way to do it.
00:45:26
◼
►
time is coming where they're just going to have to face that music and just do it.
00:45:29
◼
►
Although, again, I'll make the same argument I made last time we talked about that, which
00:45:32
◼
►
is that the reality is that people's photos and, God, especially videos, are so large
00:45:40
◼
►
file size-wise that you're into pretty severe upstream bandwidth problems and data cap problems
00:45:47
◼
►
if you try to do a lot of this.
00:45:49
◼
►
I mean, that's another one of the problems that Everpix had, is that for Everpix to be
00:45:54
◼
►
useful to you, you had to upload a lot of photos to it.
00:45:56
◼
►
And a lot of people just don't have a fast enough connection
00:45:59
◼
►
to do that in a reasonable amount of time.
00:46:00
◼
►
Online backup has a similar problem for a lot of people.
00:46:03
◼
►
And I think that limitation of just bandwidth
00:46:07
◼
►
not catching up very quickly, and when it does catch up,
00:46:11
◼
►
you start getting data caps and stuff like that.
00:46:14
◼
►
That's always going to be a problem.
00:46:16
◼
►
And as bandwidth increases, so will photo size,
00:46:20
◼
►
and so will the amount of videos people take.
00:46:22
◼
►
Bandwidth is already out running photos. I think video you're it's still true because video
00:46:26
◼
►
It's a big problem
00:46:28
◼
►
It's gonna take a long time for bandwidth to catch up to video
00:46:30
◼
►
And I don't think 4k videos around the corner
00:46:33
◼
►
But 1080p video is already way too big for anyone to do, but I think photos
00:46:36
◼
►
I think we're already there for photos
00:46:38
◼
►
I think anybody with a photo collection and any what you would call broadband thing
00:46:43
◼
►
It's gonna take a while, but all your photos will eventually go up
00:46:45
◼
►
Which is not true of video, so I think I think we've it's kind of like the when we passed the point where you could download
00:46:50
◼
►
download music on Napster, but you couldn't download feature-length movies. We're at that
00:46:54
◼
►
point. You can do photos, all right? Most people don't have RAWs, and they just have
00:46:58
◼
►
cruddy JPEGs. And yes, the pictures are getting bigger, but I think bandwidth is getting bigger
00:47:02
◼
►
faster. I mean, just look at Casey with his LTE nirvana, where he's amazed at the speed
00:47:06
◼
►
he gets on his little phone. Like, the speed that he gets on his phone is sufficient for
00:47:11
◼
►
any photo collection of anybody who's been alive less than 100 years and takes a dozen
00:47:17
◼
►
pictures a day. I think we've passed the photo realm. The fact that videos are mixed in is
00:47:21
◼
►
a problem, but I would say for Apple, they can just say, "Oh, we don't back up your videos."
00:47:25
◼
►
Because what can they do with videos? This 1080p is just too much data already from ... Maybe
00:47:30
◼
►
when they do H.265, whatever the next standard is, I think that's ... I got the number right,
00:47:35
◼
►
it's supposed to give you another 2x or 3x compression thing with no loss. Maybe we start
00:47:40
◼
►
... And then LTE becomes common and people's broadband has to at least match LTE. Then
00:47:44
◼
►
maybe we start to enter the realm of video. But like I said, if we ever go to 4K, it just
00:47:48
◼
►
starts that all over again. But pictures, I think, are going to probably top out at
00:47:52
◼
►
like 30, 40, or 50 megapixels. Like regular people are never going to want more pixels
00:47:57
◼
►
than that in their images because what are you going to do, put it on the side of a building?
00:48:00
◼
►
Like it's big enough to get a 24 by 24 inch print and you're fine, right? And so I think
00:48:05
◼
►
that will top out and I think we've passed that. But if Apple doesn't start trying to
00:48:10
◼
►
do it now, it's not like they're going to wait until bandwidth can carry it and say,
00:48:14
◼
►
"Okay, now that we feel like we can so comfortably do it and everyone can upload their total
00:48:18
◼
►
photo collection in an hour, now let's do it." They've got to start now. I mean, arguably
00:48:22
◼
►
they have started somewhere with PhotoStream. It's just that it's kind of a shame to do
00:48:26
◼
►
a half solution. They should just try to do the whole thing and bite the bullet now.
00:48:32
◼
►
All right. We've spent quite a bit of time talking about Everpix, and I think that's
00:48:38
◼
►
because I know I speak for myself and probably both of you that I'm really bummed that it
00:48:43
◼
►
left. Any other thoughts, though, real quick before we move along?
00:48:47
◼
►
Rob Mathers in the chat room thinks that upload bandwidth is still a problem. I point to Casey's
00:48:51
◼
►
phone. You had good upload speeds, too, right? It wasn't just download that you were impressed
00:48:55
◼
►
No, no, no, no.
00:48:56
◼
►
What was your upload speed on that LTE?
00:48:57
◼
►
I forget off the top of my head, but it was something to—I'm trying to look—but
00:49:00
◼
►
it was something to the order of like 1515, which—
00:49:02
◼
►
15 megabits up. That's plenty. And that's on a phone. Everyone will have a phone.
00:49:08
◼
►
upload speeds are fine. Home broadband upload speeds are terrible.
00:49:11
◼
►
I know, but if that happens, home broadband will be eclipsed by the people who are selling
00:49:16
◼
►
LTE, because everyone already knows they need a cell phone, and everyone is eventually going
00:49:20
◼
►
to have an LTE cell phone. And that's bad for cable companies if they can't get their
00:49:23
◼
►
acts together to get their upload bandwidth better, and people realize they have faster
00:49:27
◼
►
upload bandwidth from their iPad or their iPhone. And that's not even a problem from
00:49:31
◼
►
Apple's perspective, since if everyone's taking their pictures with their iPhone, and it's
00:49:34
◼
►
already on LTE, there you go. There's your upload bandwidth.
00:49:38
◼
►
Right, but then you have data cap limits. I mean, there's no clear path for this immediately.
00:49:44
◼
►
Like, maybe in five years, typical carrier data caps will be two or three times as high.
00:49:51
◼
►
Who knows? Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll be exactly the same as they are today, or lower.
00:49:54
◼
►
Who knows? Well, data caps are artificial, though, so that is the type of thing that can
00:49:59
◼
►
change without people running new copper or putting up new cell towers or doing the infrastructure
00:50:03
◼
►
thing. Someone just changes a number in a spreadsheet, and all of a sudden you're allowed
00:50:06
◼
►
to upload. I feel like that's the type of thing that will solve it.
00:50:11
◼
►
Well, there's also issues with radio spectrum space and crowding of the towers, though.
00:50:17
◼
►
None of this scales particularly gracefully, and all of it's controlled by companies that
00:50:21
◼
►
historically have not shown much of a willingness to lower prices over time or to give you more
00:50:26
◼
►
over time. You never know what's going to lead, though,
00:50:29
◼
►
because sometimes it's competition amongst the people providing the service where they
00:50:34
◼
►
compete with each other, oh, Fios is coming. Now we need to-- as soon as Fios enters town,
00:50:37
◼
►
you see all the cable people crank up their bandwidth and everything. Because that's one
00:50:41
◼
►
level competition. And the other level competition is if there's something on the net that draws
00:50:45
◼
►
customers, customers will be drawn to it. Like, say, oh, I've got to have Netflix. And Netflix
00:50:52
◼
►
doesn't work on Time Warner Cable, just to pick something out of a hat, because I don't have
00:50:56
◼
►
enough bandwidth and it's terrible. I'm going to find a new ISP, assuming there's any competition
00:51:00
◼
►
at all, which is another big problem. But I'm going to find another ISP, even if it's wireless
00:51:04
◼
►
or WiMAX or whatever the hell it's going to be because I need to watch Netflix.
00:51:07
◼
►
And in that case, Netflix is the draw.
00:51:08
◼
►
So you have forces on both sides.
00:51:12
◼
►
And I think the forces on the side of competition among service providers is so terrible that
00:51:16
◼
►
we should be relying on the force of "make this thing on the net that people want and
00:51:21
◼
►
who will get pissy if they can't get it."
00:51:23
◼
►
And if part of the thing is, "Oh, all my photos are backed up and safe because I have
00:51:27
◼
►
a decent ISP or my caps are high or whatever and yours isn't," you should switch to T-Mobile,
00:51:32
◼
►
whoever the hungry competitor is who gives you some insane no limit, you know,
00:51:36
◼
►
T-Mobile doing like the 200 megabytes free bandwidth or whatever.
00:51:40
◼
►
Despite the incredible dysfunction in our thing, I think if you make a product
00:51:44
◼
►
or service out there that everybody wants, they will be pissed if they can't get it, and they will be pissed
00:51:48
◼
►
at their carrier and they will look for any alternative. That's a market opportunity for the people who are
00:51:52
◼
►
currently losing in the market to do something.
00:51:56
◼
►
So real-time follow-up from myself. I just ran a speed test on my phone
00:52:00
◼
►
phone on LTE and I got 25 megabits down and 15 up and I know I've told the story
00:52:05
◼
►
at least once or twice before but I'll tell it again when Aaron and I bought
00:52:08
◼
►
our house in 2008 I was arguably more excited about getting files than I was
00:52:12
◼
►
about owning our first home and at that point in time the reasonable MacDaddy
00:52:18
◼
►
service was 15 15 and that was just 2008 which is just five years ago and on my
00:52:25
◼
►
My cellular telephone, I just got 2515.
00:52:29
◼
►
At this point, we're past the point in which photo uploads are doable over even LTE, with
00:52:36
◼
►
the exception of the data caps like we talked about.
00:52:39
◼
►
Yeah, you should see—how much of your data do you use per month?
00:52:41
◼
►
Like, not counting—you know, you're not uploading photos, but just like regular phone
00:52:45
◼
►
I'd say between one and two gigs in a general month.
00:52:48
◼
►
And I don't even know how, to be honest with you, because I'm on Wi-Fi always, but
00:52:52
◼
►
somehow or another I find a way.
00:52:54
◼
►
If you're running the Overcast Beta, it doesn't do cell filtering yet for the downloads.
00:52:58
◼
►
I'm not? Wait, there isn't? Is there a beta? No. I was gonna say.
00:53:02
◼
►
I just saw my usage today and it was like 400 megs for the month so far.
00:53:06
◼
►
I'm like, "Whoops." Our second sponsor this week is
00:53:10
◼
►
FSim Space Shuttle. This is interesting. This is a new kind of sponsor
00:53:14
◼
►
for us. FSIM.com, as in Flight Simulator.
00:53:18
◼
►
FSim Space Shuttle is an iOS and Android flight simulator
00:53:22
◼
►
that is highly realistic and it's designed to simulate specifically the landing of the
00:53:31
◼
►
U.S. space shuttle in its final descent into Kennedy or Edwards Air Force Base.
00:53:38
◼
►
When I first saw this, I was like, "They have a whole app for that?" And then I tried the app.
00:53:42
◼
►
It's incredibly detailed. I mean, they've... You've got to read the reviews. I mean, the reviews back this up.
00:53:47
◼
►
it's not just them paying us to say this.
00:53:49
◼
►
There's this great review on the Mac observer.
00:53:51
◼
►
I'm not really a flight sim person in general,
00:53:54
◼
►
but you can look at people who are flight sim people
00:53:57
◼
►
and you can see what they say about this.
00:53:59
◼
►
And they just love this thing.
00:54:03
◼
►
It simulates very realistically these space shuttle landings.
00:54:06
◼
►
And you can configure everything.
00:54:07
◼
►
You can challenge yourself.
00:54:08
◼
►
You can be like, all right, well, let
00:54:10
◼
►
me turn on a major turbulence, and I'll
00:54:13
◼
►
do it at night with really cloudy visibility.
00:54:16
◼
►
and I'll simulate the failure of one of these instruments,
00:54:18
◼
►
or my flaps won't work, or something like that.
00:54:21
◼
►
And I'll have to still try to land it well
00:54:24
◼
►
under these challenging conditions.
00:54:26
◼
►
Or you can just do it straight and do it
00:54:29
◼
►
under perfectly clear conditions and just try to get it exactly
00:54:32
◼
►
right without slamming down too hard
00:54:35
◼
►
and putting too much force on the landing gear,
00:54:38
◼
►
or being unsafe, or missing the glide path, things like that.
00:54:43
◼
►
It's just really interesting.
00:54:44
◼
►
I didn't realize there is this whole world around this stuff
00:54:49
◼
►
until we were sent this app for review for this spot.
00:54:51
◼
►
And I have to admit, I'm terrible at it.
00:54:54
◼
►
I mean, I've tried a bunch of landings myself.
00:54:57
◼
►
And the best I can get is what they call a crash landing,
00:55:02
◼
►
which is like you don't crash, but you've landed hard enough
00:55:06
◼
►
or wrong enough that you've put too much force
00:55:09
◼
►
on certain parts and it's not proper and it could be unsafe.
00:55:13
◼
►
So there's the crash, which I haven't gotten.
00:55:15
◼
►
There's the proper landing, which I haven't gotten.
00:55:17
◼
►
And then in the middle, there's the crash landing,
00:55:19
◼
►
which is what I keep getting.
00:55:21
◼
►
But it's an exercise in precision and just practice
00:55:26
◼
►
and self-control.
00:55:27
◼
►
It's really cool.
00:55:28
◼
►
The graphics are amazing, by the way.
00:55:30
◼
►
Flight Sims are always-- and again,
00:55:32
◼
►
I don't know that much about Flight Sims,
00:55:34
◼
►
but I've always noticed that they've always
00:55:36
◼
►
been amazing with the visuals, with the graphics
00:55:40
◼
►
and everything.
00:55:41
◼
►
And this is no exception.
00:55:42
◼
►
You can play this on a retina iPad.
00:55:45
◼
►
It works on iPhone too, and I did it on both, but man, it looks fantastic, especially on
00:55:50
◼
►
the retina iPad.
00:55:52
◼
►
So check out fsim space shuttle.
00:55:57
◼
►
You can search for that in the app store, or you can go to f-sim, with or without the
00:56:00
◼
►
dash, doesn't matter, fsim.com.
00:56:04
◼
►
It's only $4 US and probably some similar amount elsewhere.
00:56:09
◼
►
for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android. Check out the screenshots, check out they
00:56:14
◼
►
have videos. It's not like an arcade game or anything, but if you like flight sims,
00:56:19
◼
►
you will like this.
00:56:20
◼
►
I think the amazing thing that they did about it is that when you get thinking about flight
00:56:24
◼
►
sims like that, you're like, Oh, this is gonna be too technical for me, I'm not gonna be
00:56:27
◼
►
able to do it, there's gonna be too many buttons, it's gonna be too fidgety. The amazing thing
00:56:30
◼
►
about this game is that you can start it and just start playing. No, don't read a single
00:56:35
◼
►
Don't don't don't read the help don't look at the controls won't do anything just start the game and play it and you can
00:56:42
◼
►
Successfully do what you think is a landing until it tells you that it does technically is a crash landing because you just jam the
00:56:48
◼
►
Space shuttle into the ground way too fast and you'll get a low score and you feel bad
00:56:52
◼
►
But the point is you don't have no idea what to do
00:56:54
◼
►
You can immediately pick it up and use it and the one thing I really liked about this game is that I hate games with
00:56:59
◼
►
Tilt controls, but this game when you do the tilt controls and I don't haven't seen any other games
00:57:03
◼
►
do this, but I think they all should now that I've seen it. When you tilt the iPad, the
00:57:08
◼
►
picture stays level. So like the horizon stays level with your eyes, even as you tilt the
00:57:13
◼
►
iPad. And tilting the iPad is how you control, you know, like rolling the thing from left
00:57:16
◼
►
to right. But this image on the screen doesn't tilt. There's nothing worse than playing like
00:57:20
◼
►
a game like this driving game, so you try to turn to steer the wheel, and the whole
00:57:24
◼
►
world tilts when you tilt the screen.
00:57:25
◼
►
I hate all those games.
00:57:27
◼
►
This works in that mode if there's like an option to turn on that mode if that's what
00:57:29
◼
►
you prefer, but I vastly prefer the mode where, as I turn the iPad, the horizon does not tilt
00:57:35
◼
►
with me until the thing is rolling. So that made it immediately accessible. I played just
00:57:43
◼
►
long enough to beat all you guys' scores, because you guys are terrible.
00:57:47
◼
►
My best is like 7,000, which is terrible.
00:57:50
◼
►
My best is like 40,000, but all my scores for the 40,000 still were crash landings.
00:57:55
◼
►
It is really, really hard.
00:57:57
◼
►
And I'm playing with-- I'm not turning on the inclement weather, or I did random a few
00:58:01
◼
►
times or whatever.
00:58:03
◼
►
This is a game that if you're into it, you can pick it up immediately and do it.
00:58:07
◼
►
And then if you are obsessive or into flight sims, you could-- I don't know how long it
00:58:11
◼
►
would take you to do this perfectly.
00:58:13
◼
►
Forget about failures.
00:58:14
◼
►
Forget about that this thing doesn't work and the wind picks up.
00:58:19
◼
►
Can you actually do a perfect landing in perfect weather, perfect visibility, and no other
00:58:24
◼
►
I think that would take you a long time.
00:58:25
◼
►
This is an extremely deep game that nevertheless you can pick up and just immediately play
00:58:30
◼
►
and do something with.
00:58:31
◼
►
And it's short.
00:58:32
◼
►
Like, if you do a final approach, it's like two minutes' worth of gameplay.
00:58:35
◼
►
It's not something you're going to be there for seven hours flying across the country
00:58:38
◼
►
in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
00:58:40
◼
►
That's what I was going to say to really quickly kind of wrap up the spot, that it's
00:58:45
◼
►
a really good in-line game, or online, depending on who you ask, in that it's only a couple
00:58:49
◼
►
minutes long.
00:58:50
◼
►
And so, unlike, say, Flight Control, which is a very good game but could last forever
00:58:55
◼
►
if you do well, no matter what, you're going to land that shuttle. So it's a matter of
00:58:59
◼
►
just a couple of minutes. It really works well when you just have a couple of minutes
00:59:03
◼
►
to kill, which is when I typically play these kinds of short games.
00:59:07
◼
►
That's the brutal thing about the shuttle. No engines. You're going to land the shuttle
00:59:10
◼
►
because gravity is like, "Okay, I'm going to come in for another approach. Let me just
00:59:14
◼
►
hit the engines and circle back." Nope. It's going down like a rock if you don't do it
00:59:19
◼
►
right. It's definitely an extra twist on flight simulator landing because I'm accustomed to,
00:59:23
◼
►
OK, I'm coming a little low.
00:59:25
◼
►
Let me just boost my engines a little bit here to get--
00:59:27
◼
►
nope, there's none of that.
00:59:29
◼
►
You're going down.
00:59:30
◼
►
Yep, it's a glider.
00:59:31
◼
►
Yeah, anyway, so thanks a lot to fsimspaceshuttle.
00:59:34
◼
►
You can find it on iOS or Android app stores, fsim.com.
00:59:39
◼
►
So John, when you install Mavericks,
00:59:42
◼
►
do you do a fresh install or do you update?
00:59:43
◼
►
And I should say that this is from listener Mike.
00:59:46
◼
►
There's going to be a series of questions, which
00:59:48
◼
►
I will attribute to him.
00:59:49
◼
►
So do you do a fresh install?
00:59:51
◼
►
I've answered this before.
00:59:52
◼
►
do an update install on OS X.
00:59:54
◼
►
I did manually integrate-- in the classic days,
00:59:58
◼
►
I would do a fresh install.
00:59:59
◼
►
And then I would manually bring over all the little files
01:00:01
◼
►
that were part of the system folder,
01:00:03
◼
►
because I like to manually merge it together.
01:00:05
◼
►
But when an OS X came, I realized,
01:00:08
◼
►
A, there are way too many files for me to do that manually
01:00:11
◼
►
And I didn't know them like the back of my hand,
01:00:13
◼
►
like I knew the classic ones.
01:00:14
◼
►
And B, once I started doing the update installs
01:00:17
◼
►
and saw that it didn't lose my settings--
01:00:19
◼
►
because that was the old slam against classic Mac OS.
01:00:21
◼
►
If you tried to do an update install, you could lose some of your settings or overwrite
01:00:25
◼
►
your preferences with new ones and it wasn't that friendly.
01:00:27
◼
►
But OS X has always been pretty good about that.
01:00:29
◼
►
So I always do an update install.
01:00:31
◼
►
So much so that I probably have plist files from companies that have long since gone out
01:00:34
◼
►
of business just lurking inside my library folder.
01:00:37
◼
►
And it's fine.
01:00:38
◼
►
Works fine year after year.
01:00:40
◼
►
Always do an update install.
01:00:41
◼
►
JONATHAN: Do you have auto app updates on or off?
01:00:44
◼
►
JEREMY CHAPMAN-MCCABE I'm assuming they're asking on the Mac.
01:00:46
◼
►
On the Mac, no, I don't.
01:00:49
◼
►
I haven't really decided what I'm going to do in the Mac.
01:00:52
◼
►
I think probably I won't, just because I don't want to be bothered by the little dialog that
01:01:01
◼
►
says, "Oh, we have an update ready.
01:01:03
◼
►
All you need to do is restart, and it will start your install."
01:01:06
◼
►
I would rather be bothered by a little badge on the App Store or something like that than
01:01:10
◼
►
be bothered by the, "Oh, we've already..."
01:01:12
◼
►
I know it's the same amount of bother.
01:01:14
◼
►
The file's on your disk or it's not.
01:01:15
◼
►
It's the same kind of nagging.
01:01:16
◼
►
it makes me feel worse when it says, "We've already downloaded it. In fact, all you need
01:01:21
◼
►
to do is restart, and we'll start the installer." Somehow that still bothers me, so I still
01:01:26
◼
►
have it set to manual.
01:01:28
◼
►
Now for family members' computers, will you have them on auto?
01:01:31
◼
►
I don't know. I think I would put a family member that I wasn't going to be—like,
01:01:37
◼
►
if I go visit my parents in Colorado, I think I would put them on auto update after I update
01:01:42
◼
►
them, because I'm not going to be there to every once in a while run updates for them.
01:01:46
◼
►
But for a computer in my house, I won't set my wife's computer to auto-update.
01:01:50
◼
►
If I'm not going to be there, I'd rather set an auto-update to at least have some confidence
01:01:53
◼
►
that updates are being plied in some fashion at some point.
01:01:57
◼
►
But if I have access to the machine in any way, I'd rather handle that myself just so
01:02:02
◼
►
Like I wouldn't put my wife on auto-update because what if some update ran and she didn't
01:02:06
◼
►
I want to be able to clear this with her.
01:02:10
◼
►
When I'm far away, I'd rather just have the updates run.
01:02:12
◼
►
So I guess it's a distance thing.
01:02:14
◼
►
And then what are your thoughts on the yearly release cycle?
01:02:17
◼
►
From your view, I got the impression
01:02:19
◼
►
that you have some concerns that large important features will
01:02:21
◼
►
have a hard time fitting in.
01:02:23
◼
►
It was mostly-- I talked about it in the review.
01:02:25
◼
►
It was mostly about the idea that Apple shouldn't
01:02:29
◼
►
feel like it has to do yearly updates just because iOS
01:02:32
◼
►
does yearly updates.
01:02:34
◼
►
Just as if we didn't have yearly updates,
01:02:36
◼
►
people would say, oh, they're ignoring the Mac.
01:02:38
◼
►
And the reason I worry about it is
01:02:39
◼
►
because if you're always in that yearly update cycle,
01:02:41
◼
►
it's more difficult-- not impossible,
01:02:43
◼
►
but more difficult to do features
01:02:45
◼
►
that can't be done in a year.
01:02:48
◼
►
Because then you gotta sort of half do them,
01:02:51
◼
►
all the while you're tracking the two versions of OS X
01:02:54
◼
►
that slide by underneath you
01:02:56
◼
►
and see which one you can land in.
01:02:57
◼
►
And that is a little bit more uncomfortable.
01:02:59
◼
►
It's like, well, if we had 18 months, or even two years,
01:03:02
◼
►
we could do a really impressive update.
01:03:05
◼
►
And in the middle of that 18 month or two year cycle,
01:03:08
◼
►
we don't really have anything releasable that's worthwhile,
01:03:10
◼
►
so why bother going through,
01:03:12
◼
►
this is overhead for each release,
01:03:13
◼
►
overhead for the QA process and putting out the marketing message and figuring out what
01:03:18
◼
►
it is you're going to highlight.
01:03:21
◼
►
Even now, especially now that the thing is free, it's not like you're forgoing any income
01:03:25
◼
►
that you could have gotten in there.
01:03:26
◼
►
So I'd be perfectly fine with them sort of slackening off a little bit, but I think Apple
01:03:31
◼
►
thinks that they need to do every year you get a new iOS and every year you get a new
01:03:35
◼
►
Mac OS and they're both free.
01:03:38
◼
►
And I understand why they're doing it.
01:03:39
◼
►
I just think it's actually going to delay
01:03:42
◼
►
some interesting new features more so
01:03:44
◼
►
than they would be if the OS X releases were allowed
01:03:46
◼
►
to come out sort of as they naturally wanted to.
01:03:50
◼
►
That makes sense.
01:03:51
◼
►
Now, can you estimate how much time you took on your review?
01:03:54
◼
►
Well, you guys know, and listeners of the podcast
01:03:56
◼
►
know, because you could just track based on when
01:03:58
◼
►
the whining began about working on it.
01:04:02
◼
►
For Mountain Lion, I had a huge amount written
01:04:05
◼
►
before I ever went to WIDC.
01:04:07
◼
►
This year, didn't have anything written before I went to WIDC.
01:04:09
◼
►
I had lots of notes and stuff of things to look into.
01:04:13
◼
►
But did we know anything before WWC?
01:04:15
◼
►
I don't think we knew anything of substance.
01:04:18
◼
►
I don't think so.
01:04:19
◼
►
We didn't have builds.
01:04:20
◼
►
We didn't have a name.
01:04:21
◼
►
We didn't have, "Oh, here's what's going to be in the OS."
01:04:24
◼
►
And insider hints were thin on the ground.
01:04:27
◼
►
There wasn't, in all the stories about, "Here's what might be in 10.9," there wasn't even
01:04:31
◼
►
the whole, "10.9 is going to be about energy saving."
01:04:33
◼
►
Even that vague rumor was not in the air before WWC.
01:04:36
◼
►
So I didn't have much.
01:04:38
◼
►
So I guess you could probably track it from—as soon as the old release is done—not as soon
01:04:44
◼
►
as the old release is done.
01:04:45
◼
►
I haven't created my new document for 10.10 yet, but I guess when I do I'll mention
01:04:48
◼
►
it on the air.
01:04:49
◼
►
Once I have anything to put in a document, I'll make it and I'll start adding stuff
01:04:53
◼
►
But I didn't start doing real work until WWDC.
01:04:57
◼
►
And then it just worked on it basically straight through from what?
01:04:59
◼
►
I forgot this year.
01:05:01
◼
►
Yeah, until October.
01:05:02
◼
►
So when did I work on it?
01:05:08
◼
►
After the kids were in bed, and towards the run up to the end, I stole a couple of weekend
01:05:13
◼
►
days when my wife would take the kids out somewhere during the day, and I'd get some
01:05:16
◼
►
work done during the day as well.
01:05:18
◼
►
So I don't know how you'd add up the hours.
01:05:20
◼
►
It's not as long as it seems, because again, this is not my full-time job, as many people
01:05:24
◼
►
It's what I do on nights and weekends.
01:05:26
◼
►
And then you just hibernate for the entire rest of the year.
01:05:30
◼
►
Well, you know, maybe I'll actually post something to my blog again.
01:05:34
◼
►
It could happen.
01:05:36
◼
►
If my life is, "Wake up, get the kids out of the house, feed them breakfast, get them
01:05:40
◼
►
off to school, go to work, pick the kids up, make them dinner, get them to bed, go to work
01:05:46
◼
►
on a review, go to sleep," I can't sustain that.
01:05:52
◼
►
I need downtime.
01:05:53
◼
►
desperately need some kind of downtime where I just sit like a vegetable and don't do something
01:05:56
◼
►
with my brain. Sometimes at the end of a long day of work, I don't want to use my brain anymore.
01:06:03
◼
►
At work, I'm not just twiddling my thumbs. I'm using my brain. I'm programming. That can burn
01:06:09
◼
►
you out. And plus, sometimes you want to have that downtime. I'm sure Marco and Casey both do this,
01:06:15
◼
►
where you spend the day programming, right? And you come home, and that break where you're not
01:06:21
◼
►
not doing anything where you're just making dinner and you're just watching some dumb
01:06:25
◼
►
TV show or whatever, that's when your brain is working on the programming problems that
01:06:30
◼
►
you encounter that day.
01:06:31
◼
►
So when you come in the next morning, now you have a much better approach to that problem.
01:06:35
◼
►
It maybe occurred to you during dinner or in the shower in the morning or whatever.
01:06:39
◼
►
If you didn't have that downtime, if you had just sat there plugging away at the problem,
01:06:43
◼
►
you never would have come up with that.
01:06:44
◼
►
It's almost like sometimes, "You know what?
01:06:45
◼
►
I should have stopped working sooner because as soon as I stopped working and just let
01:06:48
◼
►
my brain chewing that, it became obvious to me, "Oh, what are you doing? That's stupid.
01:06:52
◼
►
Do it this way." And then you go in the next morning, all ready for that stuff to just
01:06:55
◼
►
dump out of your fingers, and you're like, "Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, done, done, done.
01:06:58
◼
►
I worked on this for three hours before I went home yesterday and got nowhere, and all
01:07:02
◼
►
I needed to do was stop working, let my brain stew for a couple hours, go to sleep, wake
01:07:05
◼
►
up, and 15 minutes of work." And it's like, "Yep, that's what I should have done last
01:07:10
◼
►
night." So that's the way I feel. And if I try to take that time when my brain will be
01:07:16
◼
►
working on work programming problems and say, "Okay, nope, switch gears. Now you've got
01:07:19
◼
►
to work on this whole other thing. Work, work, work." You burn out. So I really try to save
01:07:27
◼
►
the crunch time for just a couple of weeks or maybe a month of crunch time where it's
01:07:31
◼
►
like every waking moment I have to do it. And even then, I try to give myself downtime,
01:07:35
◼
►
even if I'm sacrificing sleep. Like, "Okay, I've got to stop writing for the night. It's
01:07:38
◼
►
11 o'clock. Let me watch an hour and a half of TV and then go to bed," because I need
01:07:41
◼
►
that hour and a half to decompress.
01:07:44
◼
►
Right. There's also a little bit of feedback from Michael James Boyle. I guess this is about the
01:07:49
◼
►
ebook. Is that right? Yeah. We're asking about how the ebook stores handle updates and how Amazon is
01:07:56
◼
►
very bad at it. And the question really is, if you do stuff to your ebook and you make notes and you
01:08:01
◼
►
make highlights and you do stuff like that, and then you update the ebook, how well does each
01:08:05
◼
►
ebook store handle that updating process? Do you lose all your notes, all your bookmarks,
01:08:10
◼
►
and all your highlights and everything, or does it try to incorporate them? And so he gave the
01:08:13
◼
►
the answer for how iBooks works. And he said, "It does not lose everything you have. It
01:08:19
◼
►
tries its best to preserve it and doesn't do a very good job, but it's better than deleting
01:08:24
◼
►
everything."
01:08:25
◼
►
So even highlights of passages of text that have not changed, the highlights will be off
01:08:30
◼
►
because they'll be shifted by other texts or other things, but the highlights will be
01:08:34
◼
►
there and the notes will be there. And so you could, in theory, if the book hasn't changed
01:08:37
◼
►
that much, manually fix them, which is vastly preferable to wiping out everything, but it's
01:08:43
◼
►
It's not as great as like, oh, we figured out they added a paragraph here.
01:08:47
◼
►
So I'm just going to shift all my other highlights down because I can find where they begin and
01:08:51
◼
►
It's not like running diff intelligently and trying to figure out, oh, this was inserted
01:08:54
◼
►
here and then shifted everything over.
01:08:56
◼
►
It sounds like it's literally just like storing a text offset and length for each highlight.
01:09:01
◼
►
Yeah, and which is better than nothing.
01:09:03
◼
►
I mean, for example, one of the updates of my iBooks thing I did was I changed all the
01:09:08
◼
►
primes and double primes into curly quotes and smart apostrophes and everything.
01:09:13
◼
►
And that will totally—if it was trying to track the text, if the text has any sort of
01:09:16
◼
►
contraction in it or quotation mark, the text is different.
01:09:20
◼
►
That would totally throw off any kind of, "Oh, I'll fake diff algorithm," unless
01:09:24
◼
►
the diff algorithm was also smart enough to know, "Oh, this character is more or less
01:09:28
◼
►
equivalent to that one."
01:09:29
◼
►
So it's very difficult to do this correctly, but I think Apple's solution of doing it
01:09:32
◼
►
badly but attempting it is way better than what used to be the Kindle solution—I'm
01:09:36
◼
►
sure if it still is, of like, you lose everything. No trace. Tough luck.
01:09:42
◼
►
Anyway, all right, let's wrap it up for the week. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors
01:09:47
◼
►
this week, Hover and FSim Space Shuttle, and we will see you next week.
01:09:53
◼
►
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin
01:09:58
◼
►
'Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental
01:10:05
◼
►
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
01:10:09
◼
►
'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)
01:10:12
◼
►
It was accidental (accidental)
01:10:15
◼
►
And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
01:10:20
◼
►
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
01:10:25
◼
►
@c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s
01:10:29
◼
►
So that's Casey List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
01:10:34
◼
►
Anti Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A
01:10:41
◼
►
It's accidental (it's accidental)
01:10:44
◼
►
They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)
01:10:49
◼
►
Tech broadcast so long
01:10:54
◼
►
Before the show started, Erin was in the office with me and so I played the live
01:10:58
◼
►
feed just to hear what awful drivel you were putting all of our
01:11:01
◼
►
beloved listeners through. And she said to me something to the effect of, "How come you never
01:11:07
◼
►
get to pick the music?" Because your music's terrible. Speaking of your terrible music,
01:11:10
◼
►
there's somebody in the chatroom named Pills who is asking what my opinion of Dave Matthews' band
01:11:17
◼
►
is. And I think I've talked about it before, and this is—I'm going to cut this out of the actual
01:11:21
◼
►
show—but my opinion of Dave Matthews' band is that they are not a jam band. And I know that is a
01:11:27
◼
►
contentious position to take among DMB fans, but I... a jam band... like people don't really
01:11:36
◼
►
know... people who are not really fans of jam bands rarely have a good idea of what they are.
01:11:41
◼
►
Are you really going hipster on us? Are you really going hipster on us right now?
01:11:43
◼
►
Most people who are big jam band fan... or most people who are not jam band fans think that what
01:11:50
◼
►
makes a jam band a jam band is that they play really long songs. And that's not really it. That
01:11:55
◼
►
happens to be a side effect. They usually do play long songs, although we're not talking
01:11:59
◼
►
like half-hour songs usually. That might happen once every three years that a band might play
01:12:03
◼
►
a three or a 35-minute song. Most fish songs are like eight minutes long. By pop standards,
01:12:10
◼
►
yeah, that's long, but we're not talking half hour every night.
01:12:14
◼
►
But a jam band is really a lot more about improvisation and style. It really is a genre,
01:12:23
◼
►
necessarily a type, if that makes sense. And there aren't that many of them that anyone's
01:12:28
◼
►
ever heard of. There's a very, very small number. So I think Dave Matthews Band is really
01:12:35
◼
►
a rock/... not really a pop... they're a rock band that happens to play their songs a little
01:12:42
◼
►
bit longer live sometimes. But for the most part, you're still hearing like... for the
01:12:47
◼
►
most part, you're hearing the album version of the song every time. It doesn't vary as
01:12:51
◼
►
as much as a real jam band.
01:12:53
◼
►
Oh, I'm so angry right now.
01:12:55
◼
►
Oh, we got to change the subject.
01:12:56
◼
►
I'm so angry I'm about to get in my car
01:12:58
◼
►
and drive up and beat you.
01:13:00
◼
►
By Marco's definition, I think Paul and Storm are a jam band.
01:13:03
◼
►
But neither one of you know who Paul and Storm are.
01:13:05
◼
►
I've heard of them.
01:13:06
◼
►
People in the audience might know.
01:13:08
◼
►
30 minute songs, improvisation, changes every night,
01:13:11
◼
►
Paul and Storm.
01:13:13
◼
►
I'm so angry right now.
01:13:14
◼
►
All right, now that I'm all punchy, let's start the show.
01:13:18
◼
►
You're so wrong.
01:13:19
◼
►
Oh, you're so wrong.
01:13:21
◼
►
Anyway, okay. So we have a lot of follow-up this show.
01:13:24
◼
►
Also, Dave Matthews is always just kind of like asleep.
01:13:26
◼
►
Like, he always-- I don't know if he's drunk, like the Eddie Vedder style of singing or what.
01:13:31
◼
►
I hate you so much.
01:13:33
◼
►
I'm trying so hard to be the better man and I'm about to lose my self-control.
01:13:37
◼
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That is Eddie Vedder.
01:13:38
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Yeah, right? Like, jam bands are, you know--
01:13:42
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A lot of it is from Phish, of course, but overall the jam band culture is very, like, happy, upbeat most of the time.
01:13:50
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Whereas Dave Matthews Band is like, "Hey, hey Virginia."
01:13:57
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He's so just down and drunk and he never seems like he's having any fun.
01:14:04
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Oh my god, I am so angry right now. Alright, I'm not engaging with you anymore. I'm so f***ing fired up.
01:14:13
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Also that voice, I mean, come on.
01:14:15
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That I will give you.
01:14:16
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Alright, so...