ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► We are so over time.

00:00:01 ◼   ► You're going to cut most of this out, though.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Of course.

00:00:04 ◼   ► You're doing better about cutting the crap at the end of the show.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Yeah, thanks.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I should point out that I am still fighting that cold off a little bit because when you

00:00:12 ◼   ► get up at five in the morning to go get a phone when you're sick, it doesn't really

00:00:18 ◼   ► help.

00:00:19 ◼   ► So if I start hacking up along, just carry on and we'll get it in post.

00:00:23 ◼   ► But at least the good news is you got your phone before I did by a little bit.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Do you have your phone?

00:00:30 ◼   ► Of course I do.

00:00:31 ◼   ► God damn it, Marco.

00:00:32 ◼   ► It came today.

00:00:33 ◼   ► I hate you so much.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I hate you so much right now.

00:00:37 ◼   ► This is my one crowning moment to have something fancier than you and you effing ruined it.

00:00:44 ◼   ► You didn't even have it until the next episode of the show.

00:00:47 ◼   ► All that waiting was for nothing.

00:00:48 ◼   ► "Oh, look at me.

00:00:49 ◼   ► I'm Marco Armin.

00:00:50 ◼   ► I'm going to go to Portland and I'm still going to get my friggin' phone before the

00:00:53 ◼   ► next taping."

00:00:54 ◼   ► I hate you so much.

00:00:55 ◼   ► You make me so angry.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Yeah, so I can say that if you woke up at 3 a.m. and you know place the order on the moment

00:01:03 ◼   ► You could place the order and didn't go to any stores

00:01:05 ◼   ► It probably if you got one of the first batch it probably arrived today or something close to say in the US

00:01:12 ◼   ► And I've heard I've heard from other people too that it's really easy to just go to a store

00:01:17 ◼   ► Now and just get one like it seems like the the major supply constraints that everyone was so concerned about

00:01:25 ◼   ► It does seem to be applying to the gold one which is hilarious, but not to the other ones

00:01:29 ◼   ► It seems like you can pretty much go into any Apple store you want to most of these days now and just get one

00:01:33 ◼   ► As long as it's not cold

00:01:35 ◼   ► Yeah

00:01:36 ◼   ► I want to know how many of each

00:01:37 ◼   ► Color they made and how many they shipped to the stores because lots of people were reporting in from Apple stores about

00:01:42 ◼   ► Which color sold out first and stuff but that information is not useful unless you tell us how many

00:01:47 ◼   ► Proportion wise of each color did you get right?

00:01:51 ◼   ► I mean that was always a trick like that didn't Microsoft pull some kind of trip like that with the surface

00:01:55 ◼   ► When it launched where like they were bragging about how it sold out

00:01:58 ◼   ► But they didn't tell you how many they made or how many they shipped and so it was like oh yeah

00:02:03 ◼   ► It's sold out of all of its inventory, but you know we didn't make a whole lot of them

00:02:07 ◼   ► Right now for what it's worth at my apple store. Which is for

00:02:12 ◼   ► arguably the middle of nowhere, it's it's actually a fairly big store and

00:02:17 ◼   ► We they got I guess a handful of golds

00:02:21 ◼   ► I never got a clear answer

00:02:23 ◼   ► But I did ask a couple people a couple employees and the impression I got was that they had roundabouts of five golds

00:02:29 ◼   ► and that went almost immediately and

00:02:31 ◼   ► So when I when I went I woke up at five and was at the store

00:02:36 ◼   ► 530 which was annoying because the local mall said they weren't opening until six and you know apple and the mall both

00:02:44 ◼   ► independently told me that on Friday when I was a big enough nerd to ask both of them

00:02:48 ◼   ► about this.

00:02:49 ◼   ► So, anyway, so I'm loitering with a friend of mine, Eric, waiting for another friend

00:02:53 ◼   ► of mine, Keith.

00:02:55 ◼   ► This is at 5.30, and then a security guard walks by.

00:02:58 ◼   ► We were loitering at the edge of the mall.

00:02:59 ◼   ► The security guard walks by and says, "Hey, if you guys are waiting to get phones, you

00:03:03 ◼   ► better go because they're lining up."

00:03:04 ◼   ► And so the two of us were like, "Crap," and ran for it.

00:03:08 ◼   ► And so I was 40 or 50 people back, I'd say.

00:03:11 ◼   ► almost immediately when they started doing the dance with the tickets or business cards for lack of a better term.

00:03:17 ◼   ► So what happens is they have a business card basically for every device they got in stock and they go down the line and they give you a little card and that expedites

00:03:26 ◼   ► figuring out what's going to happen when you actually get to the point of buying your phone.

00:03:30 ◼   ► Well, they announced almost immediately that I think that as far as I know, they got zero non-space grays for Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile.

00:03:40 ◼   ► and I never heard any talk of any whites or golds for AT&T until later on when I asked what the situation was and they said they got a handful of golds.

00:03:49 ◼   ► So I waited in line from 5.30 on, I got my phones, both Aaron's and mine, at 8 or 9-ish, and I was reveling in this moment, thinking I would be the only one with the fancy new phone for this recording.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And then everything was ruined.

00:04:05 ◼   ► So, based on that story, and your story anyway, it's not that gold was super popular, it's

00:04:12 ◼   ► that there was no gold phones.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Because surely there's going to be five people in a line of 100 people who want gold, and

00:04:19 ◼   ► then they're all sold out.

00:04:20 ◼   ► It's like, "Boy, is everyone buying gold?

00:04:21 ◼   ► No, it seems like they're not."

00:04:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not sure.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Although, did you see the story that somebody posted about the woman going berserk about

00:04:30 ◼   ► not getting a gold?

00:04:31 ◼   ► Yeah, and that also reported five gold iPhones.

00:04:35 ◼   ► of any variety of any product seems crazy for an Apple store. No matter how small the

00:04:40 ◼   ► Apple store is, there should be more than five of everything.

00:04:42 ◼   ► It does seem like, the story came out right after the first day of sale, the story came

00:04:48 ◼   ► out that Apple was apparently ordering more of the gold ones, increasing their orders

00:04:53 ◼   ► for gold ones from their suppliers. I think it's probably safe to assume, based on what

00:04:56 ◼   ► we've heard about stock relative levels, that they really did not make a lot of golds.

00:05:02 ◼   ► I think, you know, you can ask yourself whether they thought that they wouldn't sell very

00:05:06 ◼   ► well. I think that's charitable. I think obviously this was a move that they made to,

00:05:15 ◼   ► so that everyone would know that the golds were in short supply. And so when, you know,

00:05:20 ◼   ► they introduced this new color for the first time and it's hard to get and it's backordered.

00:05:25 ◼   ► So it makes it more prestigious, it makes it more rare. I think it was a brilliant,

00:05:29 ◼   ► intentional move.

00:05:30 ◼   ► That seems kind of cynical and also, like, I don't know if...

00:05:34 ◼   ► You know, you want to make money.

00:05:36 ◼   ► You want to sell them.

00:05:37 ◼   ► So if they could have sold more golds, wouldn't they have made more of them?

00:05:40 ◼   ► It just seems...

00:05:43 ◼   ► I don't think they've intentionally made fewer of them.

00:05:46 ◼   ► Especially since, like, in the introduction video, like, the introduction of the 5S was

00:05:52 ◼   ► that, you know, the liquid gold CG thing forming into the phone shape.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Like, that was their pitch.

00:05:57 ◼   ► If you're going to lead with that, surely you know you're artificially creating more

00:06:05 ◼   ► demand for gold, and then you're going to intentionally not capitalize that by giving

00:06:10 ◼   ► each Apple Store five gold phones?

00:06:12 ◼   ► Maybe they just couldn't create that many more phones, or maybe their projections changed

00:06:18 ◼   ► and they didn't have time to ramp up.

00:06:20 ◼   ► I think it was the iFixit site that...

00:06:22 ◼   ► Well, maybe it was just the CPU.

00:06:24 ◼   ► I think it was in the iFixit site.

00:06:25 ◼   ► They said this something was manufactured in July.

00:06:29 ◼   ► And I don't know if they meant the whole phone

00:06:30 ◼   ► or just the part of the phone.

00:06:32 ◼   ► But the point is they've been doing this production ramp

00:06:34 ◼   ► for a while now.

00:06:35 ◼   ► So maybe in the beginning,

00:06:37 ◼   ► they either didn't have gold at all

00:06:39 ◼   ► or didn't think gold was gonna sell very well.

00:06:42 ◼   ► And so those factories are cranking away,

00:06:45 ◼   ► churning out phones for weeks and weeks

00:06:47 ◼   ► and possibly even months and months before the launch date.

00:06:50 ◼   ► And then at some point in there,

00:06:51 ◼   ► they either decide to have gold at all

00:06:53 ◼   ► or do some market research or something,

00:06:56 ◼   ► or see the hype on the internet and figure out,

00:06:57 ◼   ► boy, we should make more of these gold than we thought,

00:06:59 ◼   ► but it was too late for launch day to do that.

00:07:01 ◼   ► So Apple will never tell us how many gold they made,

00:07:04 ◼   ► and we'll never get color breakdowns.

00:07:06 ◼   ► And I assume that unless gold is like the old white iPhone

00:07:11 ◼   ► where it was likely they had trouble manufacturing it,

00:07:14 ◼   ► I assume the levels of the various colors will stabilize

00:07:18 ◼   ► in time for the holidays,

00:07:19 ◼   ► and anyone who wants any variety and any color they want

00:07:21 ◼   ► we'll be able to get it by then.

00:07:23 ◼   ► On the other side of this, though, you

00:07:25 ◼   ► have to look at a couple of things.

00:07:29 ◼   ► First of all, before I forget, there

00:07:31 ◼   ► is a way to tell in software what the color of the phone is.

00:07:35 ◼   ► There's some info or some plist key on, I believe,

00:07:39 ◼   ► what's an unsupported method on UI device.

00:07:43 ◼   ► So it would be hard to get an app into the App Store that

00:07:47 ◼   ► reads that key, I think.

00:07:49 ◼   ► But if for some reason their analyzer that

00:07:53 ◼   ► scans for private APIs being called,

00:07:55 ◼   ► if it does not catch that or if it does not prohibit that,

00:07:58 ◼   ► then you could actually have some popular app or component

00:08:03 ◼   ► maker run profiles and measure how many of each are out there.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Anyway, so besides that, though, I

00:08:12 ◼   ► think you can look at one other thing they did that

00:08:15 ◼   ► was a little bit unusual this time to suggest

00:08:18 ◼   ► that maybe this was planned to make people realize that this

00:08:24 ◼   ► is still in high demand.

00:08:25 ◼   ► And that is that you could pre-order the 5C, but not

00:08:27 ◼   ► the 5S before its launch.

00:08:30 ◼   ► The 5S, if you wanted to get a 5S,

00:08:33 ◼   ► on the first day it was available,

00:08:34 ◼   ► you had to go stand on line.

00:08:36 ◼   ► And this is not the first time they've done this.

00:08:39 ◼   ► I believe it was the iPhone 5, I believe,

00:08:42 ◼   ► had the same thing where if you wanted an iPhone 5 on launch

00:08:45 ◼   ► day, I believe you had to go get it in person.

00:08:48 ◼   ► And because the Verizon iPhone 4, I believe, kind of

00:08:53 ◼   ► slapped him in the face in that everyone expected

00:08:56 ◼   ► there'd be huge lines for the Verizon iPhone 4.

00:08:58 ◼   ► Oh, no, so it was the 4S, my mistake.

00:09:00 ◼   ► Everyone expected there'd be huge lines for the iPhone 4

00:09:03 ◼   ► for Verizon, and there weren't.

00:09:04 ◼   ► And it was a huge thing in the press and in the blogs.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Like, oh my god, there weren't these huge lines.

00:09:10 ◼   ► It was really kind of a non-launch,

00:09:12 ◼   ► because you could just order them online,

00:09:13 ◼   ► and everyone just did that.

00:09:15 ◼   ► So when the 4S came around six months later,

00:09:17 ◼   ► however long it was, Apple said no pre-orders. You have to go to the store.

00:09:21 ◼   ► No, I pre-ordered. I pre-ordered my 4S. Well, our 4S is, yeah.

00:09:25 ◼   ► Maybe I'm thinking of the iPad that came out at that time.

00:09:29 ◼   ► I thought it was an iPad.

00:09:30 ◼   ► It must be that.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Because you're right. I think you're right about the Verizon iPhone 4,

00:09:33 ◼   ► that they were expecting these tremendous lines and didn't get them,

00:09:36 ◼   ► and then I think the knee-jerk reaction or the cynical answers that the knee-jerk

00:09:40 ◼   ► reaction was for whatever came next. It was one of the iPads.

00:09:43 ◼   ► I think it was the iPad 3 that came after that, right?

00:09:46 ◼   ► - You know, the iPad 3 you could pre-order too as well.

00:09:50 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter.

00:09:51 ◼   ► - Was the iPad 2?

00:09:52 ◼   ► Anyway, yeah.

00:09:53 ◼   ► So the point is, the next big thing they released,

00:09:56 ◼   ► whether it was an iPad or an iPhone, we can't remember,

00:09:58 ◼   ► but the next big thing they released after that,

00:10:00 ◼   ► there were no pre-orders.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And of course then there were big lines.

00:10:05 ◼   ► So I think this might be the same kind of thing.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Apple is very sensitive to the on-go,

00:10:11 ◼   ► and as they should be, they're very sensitive

00:10:13 ◼   ► to the ongoing media narrative

00:10:14 ◼   ► that they've lost their cool, they're going down,

00:10:18 ◼   ► they can't innovate, no one wants their stuff anymore,

00:10:20 ◼   ► et cetera.

00:10:21 ◼   ► And so by creating a big launch day line,

00:10:24 ◼   ► big launch day hype, and this new hype around this gold

00:10:27 ◼   ► color, I think they're fighting back against that perception.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Well, not giving pre-orders doesn't

00:10:35 ◼   ► reduce your number of sales.

00:10:36 ◼   ► All it does is shift them.

00:10:39 ◼   ► You're not foregoing those sales,

00:10:40 ◼   ► you're just making those people go buy it at a store.

00:10:42 ◼   ► Oh, sure.

00:10:43 ◼   ► But then everyone knows who hears about lines in an Apple store or who drives past an Apple

00:10:50 ◼   ► store that day and sees the lines or who sees people on stupid cable news channels that

00:10:56 ◼   ► fly the helicopter near the line and say, "Look how big the line is," or they interview

00:11:00 ◼   ► people on the line.

00:11:03 ◼   ► That all adds up, and that all adds up to a perception that Apple is still in demand

00:11:07 ◼   ► and hip, and look how many of these phones they're selling.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Yeah, but I was saying that's why I still don't think they intentionally made few gold

00:11:14 ◼   ► phones because then you do lose sales, right? Versus this strategy of just not providing

00:11:18 ◼   ► pre-orders, you don't lose nearly as many sales because you're just shifting them mostly.

00:11:22 ◼   ► I mean, some people just won't order at all on that first date because they couldn't pre-order

00:11:26 ◼   ► and they couldn't get to the store fine. But I can't see these people in the meeting saying,

00:11:33 ◼   ► "All right, we're going to create hype for the gold, but let's intentionally not make

00:11:38 ◼   ► as many of those as we think they're going to have. In fact, let's give each Apple

00:11:41 ◼   ► store like five of them and then give each Apple store like 150 of all the other colors.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem like something they would do. And they would say, "Well, why would we do that?

00:11:49 ◼   ► Don't we want big opening weekend sales?" Yeah, but all those people who want gold opening weekend,

00:11:54 ◼   ► only five people per store are going to be able to get gold, and literally only five people per

00:11:57 ◼   ► store because we don't have pre-orders? It just seems like they didn't have enough gold to go

00:12:00 ◼   ► around. I find that the more plausible explanation. What if this is actually kind of like an

00:12:06 ◼   ► an amplification of mania. What if there actually were more golds than we all thought, but everyone

00:12:15 ◼   ► bought them because they heard they were running out of golds? And so it inflated them. Maybe

00:12:23 ◼   ► everyone bought all the gold ones to sell them on eBay, or because they thought they

00:12:26 ◼   ► wouldn't be able to get them. And so maybe there were a little bit less, but because

00:12:30 ◼   ► of all the scalpers now trying to gobble them up, maybe that made them even more... The

00:12:36 ◼   ► same way like whenever there's like a gas shortage like a big storm comes in

00:12:40 ◼   ► or something and everyone goes out and fills up with gas because they're afraid

00:12:43 ◼   ► that's a gas shortage which causes a gas shortage. See but I don't think that

00:12:47 ◼   ► could be the case though because as the people were walking down the line at 5

00:12:52 ◼   ► or 7 o'clock in the morning whatever was on Friday I can tell you that they had a

00:12:55 ◼   ► stack of little cards for space gray 5S's for AT&T and there were just a

00:13:02 ◼   ► handful of 64 so I was very lucky to get one of those. If memory serves there were a fairly

00:13:07 ◼   ► decent number by the time it got to me of 32s which is what Aaron got and then there

00:13:11 ◼   ► were like a handful of 16s as well. And then and so that was one person that was holding

00:13:17 ◼   ► I would say 50 to 100 cards. Meanwhile there were people walking around with like box fulls

00:13:24 ◼   ► of cards of five C's. And one thing I wanted to ask was who who bought a 5C like I've

00:13:30 ◼   ► I've seen 5Ss in the wild, mostly from friends who are like, "Oh, did you get the new phone?

00:13:33 ◼   ► I got the new phone," blah, blah, blah.

00:13:35 ◼   ► But I have yet to see a 5C in the wild.

00:13:38 ◼   ► Well, the bigger question is, why did somebody line up to buy it?

00:13:41 ◼   ► Yeah, who's going to line up for the 5C?

00:13:44 ◼   ► No one's going to pre-order a 5C, no one's going to line up to buy the 5C, but a lot

00:13:47 ◼   ► of people are going to get the 5C when their contracts are up and they're thinking of buying

00:13:51 ◼   ► an iPhone and their choice is the cool colorful one for less money or the fancy one with 64-bit

00:13:56 ◼   ► something or other that is a hundred bucks more and they're not sure they can, you know,

00:14:00 ◼   ► afford that one. Like, I think the 5C will do fine, but it's not an early adopter product.

00:14:05 ◼   ► It's not going to be the tech nerds, the people who are lining up, or the people who are pre-ordering.

00:14:09 ◼   ► Well, for whatever it's worth, so I was at the XOXO conference this past weekend, and

00:14:16 ◼   ► so there were a whole lot of nerdy-type people there, and I did see two iPhone 5Cs. And that's,

00:14:23 ◼   ► And that's, you know, this is only a handful of days after they came out.

00:14:28 ◼   ► What color are they?

00:14:29 ◼   ► One was white and one was green.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Alright then.

00:14:32 ◼   ► The white one was hard to spot.

00:14:34 ◼   ► Like I looked at it and I'm like, "Is that a 5C or is it just a 5 with a case on it?"

00:14:39 ◼   ► But I looked closer and it was indeed a 5C.

00:14:42 ◼   ► And the green one was obvious and the guy let me hold it and everything.

00:14:45 ◼   ► It's actually, it's really slick.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Like I thought that it would be more of a matte finish, but it really is like an enamel,

00:14:52 ◼   ► a hard slippery enamel. I was actually I was pretty impressed by how it felt. I

00:14:58 ◼   ► didn't get a hold of time with it. I was impressed by how it felt like physically

00:15:01 ◼   ► but you know it's just an iPhone 5. That being said though so I have my my

00:15:06 ◼   ► iPhone 5s now. I hate you. I know and I've had it I've had it for I don't know about

00:15:13 ◼   ► five hours maybe so not not a lot of time yet I haven't been using it heavily

00:15:17 ◼   ► yet. But so far it does seem kind of like it's a smaller upgrade in day-to-day feel.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Part of that is because I never used a passcode before. So I'm trying now with Touch ID.

00:15:31 ◼   ► So part of it is like I didn't get that big speed-up of being able to bypass my passcode

00:15:36 ◼   ► because I never really used one. And then part of that is that I haven't taken pictures

00:15:42 ◼   ► But I feel like, you know, the 5, since I was using it up until today and been using it with iOS 7 for a while,

00:15:49 ◼   ► the 5 works fantastically on iOS 7. It really does.

00:15:54 ◼   ► And, you know, we're getting to the point now, yes, the 5s is a nice improvement on paper and in benchmarks and in a few of these cool areas,

00:16:02 ◼   ► but these phones are just so fast that I think we're going to feel these improvements less and less.

00:16:09 ◼   ► less and less, even though, yeah, the CPU is like 50% faster or something like that

00:16:14 ◼   ► in a lot of these tests, or 100% faster in some of these tests. So it's really, really

00:16:18 ◼   ► big on paper, but what we feel is not that big. In the same way that, yeah, my Mac Pro

00:16:26 ◼   ► is 3.3 GHz, if the new one comes out and it's twice as much CPU performance as this one,

00:16:34 ◼   ► which actually it probably won't be, unfortunately, but if it's twice as much CPU, let's say

00:16:39 ◼   ► it's 50% more, I'm not likely to feel that in day-to-day usage.

00:16:44 ◼   ► And so eventually you get to these points, these barriers

00:16:47 ◼   ► where either it takes a while for the software to catch up

00:16:51 ◼   ► or the software never catches up for certain uses.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And I think we're getting there in phones

00:16:56 ◼   ► now where the reason why the 5C is going to sell very, very

00:17:00 ◼   ► well is not because it's really cool, new plastic design.

00:17:06 ◼   ► That'll help a little bit.

00:17:08 ◼   ► The reason it's going to sell really well is because it actually is good enough.

00:17:10 ◼   ► It's actually a really good phone.

00:17:12 ◼   ► The iPhone 5 is a really good phone.

00:17:15 ◼   ► And it's still a really good phone, even with this brand new, radically redesigned OS

00:17:20 ◼   ► that is presumably heavier to run than iOS 6.

00:17:24 ◼   ► It's still, like, the 5 is still great.

00:17:27 ◼   ► So I would not discount sales of the 5C or the kinds of people who might buy them

00:17:33 ◼   ► or the reasons they would buy them.

00:17:34 ◼   ► because I think you can make a pretty good case for the 5C being the new default phone

00:17:42 ◼   ► that you tell people you should buy.

00:17:45 ◼   ► So all of that may be true if you've upgraded from a 5.

00:17:49 ◼   ► Those of us who are a little bit less spoiled and upgraded from a 4S, this is a whole new

00:17:55 ◼   ► world for me.

00:17:57 ◼   ► This is the first time I've experienced LTE, and it is amazing.

00:18:01 ◼   ► So when we moved into this house in 2008, we were coming from a different town and we

00:18:06 ◼   ► knew we were going to get Fios.

00:18:08 ◼   ► And Verizon Fios, for those who maybe aren't from the United States or don't have it

00:18:12 ◼   ► nearby, it's fiber optics directly to the house.

00:18:15 ◼   ► And at the time, in 2008, I was arguably more excited about getting Fios at my new domicile

00:18:20 ◼   ► than I was about purchasing my first home.

00:18:23 ◼   ► And at that point, we were getting 15 megabits symmetrical.

00:18:27 ◼   ► So 15 megabits upload, 15 megabits download.

00:18:30 ◼   ► On my phone, five years later, just earlier today I think I got 40 megabits down and like

00:18:36 ◼   ► 10 or 15 up.

00:18:38 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:18:40 ◼   ► That in and of itself is worth upgrading for from a 4S.

00:18:45 ◼   ► On top of that, I didn't think that iOS 7 ran poorly on the 4S, but now that I've seen

00:18:53 ◼   ► it on the 5S, I was so wrong.

00:18:56 ◼   ► It runs phenomenally well on the 5S and I didn't know it until I tried it, but it runs

00:19:02 ◼   ► like crap on the 4S.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And so animations are quicker, they don't get in the way, they're not jittery, everything's

00:19:08 ◼   ► better.

00:19:09 ◼   ► The camera is also fantastic.

00:19:11 ◼   ► I took, I've taken a handful of slow motion videos.

00:19:15 ◼   ► I was, by pure dumb luck, we were at a UVA football game this past weekend and I happened

00:19:20 ◼   ► to take a slow motion video when they were throwing like a 30 or 40 yard bomb pass, which

00:19:27 ◼   ► I know neither of you probably understand any of this, but suffice to say it was a very

00:19:30 ◼   ► impressive play and I just so happened to choose that play to take slow motion video

00:19:35 ◼   ► and it's really cool.

00:19:36 ◼   ► And then last night just goofing around, Aaron took a video of me like Supermanning into

00:19:40 ◼   ► bed and it's really funny and I should probably post it somewhere, but it's really impressive,

00:19:47 ◼   ► the slow motion camera and very cool.

00:19:48 ◼   ► So I'm not saying that you're wrong about coming from a 5, you're probably right,

00:19:53 ◼   ► but let me tell you, from a 4S it is night and day different.

00:19:57 ◼   ► It is a whole new experience, and I would say a much better upgrade than it was to go

00:20:02 ◼   ► from the 3GS to the 4S.

00:20:04 ◼   ► I mean really this shows quite how big of an upgrade the 5 was.

00:20:11 ◼   ► The 5S is certainly big, but I think people shat all over the 5 when it came out, and

00:20:18 ◼   ► It was really good.

00:20:20 ◼   ► It was night and day difference from even from the 4S to the 5.

00:20:24 ◼   ► It was a massive difference.

00:20:25 ◼   ► The combination of the new thinner, lighter body, the bigger screen, LTE, the way faster

00:20:30 ◼   ► ASIC CPU, it was a big, big difference.

00:20:34 ◼   ► And it really did not get the credit that it deserved by a lot of the press at the time.

00:20:38 ◼   ► And the 5S is, from what I can tell so far, again with half a day of usage, the 5S is

00:20:46 ◼   ► certainly an upgrade, but it's not, I don't think it's the magnitude of an upgrade that

00:20:51 ◼   ► the 5 was.

00:20:52 ◼   ► It depends on if you have any apps that you had to wait for on the 5.

00:20:56 ◼   ► Like you tap it on the home screen, how long do you have to wait before you can use the

00:20:59 ◼   ► app?

00:21:00 ◼   ► You probably didn't have, the 5 was probably fast enough that you didn't have many apps

00:21:02 ◼   ► that took more than like a second, or a second and a half or two seconds, right?

00:21:06 ◼   ► But if you had something like a game that you played frequently that had like a 5 second

00:21:10 ◼   ► load time, and it reduces to a 2.5 second load time on the 5s, that would, you would

00:21:14 ◼   ► feel that change.

00:21:16 ◼   ► So I think part of it depends on--

00:21:18 ◼   ► and that has less to do with the CPU,

00:21:20 ◼   ► probably, than the speed of the flash memory or other factors

00:21:22 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:21:23 ◼   ► But when people run benchmarks on it,

00:21:24 ◼   ► they're like, oh, look at these apps.

00:21:26 ◼   ► They launch twice as fast.

00:21:28 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if it launches twice as

00:21:29 ◼   ► fast if the majority of the time on the 5

00:21:32 ◼   ► was spent doing the animation in iOS 7.

00:21:35 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:21:37 ◼   ► That starts to become the gating factor, where, OK,

00:21:39 ◼   ► so the 5s is faster, but there's a 0.3 second transition

00:21:44 ◼   ► from the home screen to the launch screen, right?

00:21:46 ◼   ► That's never gonna get any faster

00:21:48 ◼   ► than how fast your phone gets.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Like you may have more frames of animation,

00:21:51 ◼   ► it may, on a slower phone,

00:21:52 ◼   ► it may take a while before that animation begins,

00:21:54 ◼   ► so you got an extra 0.2, 0.1 seconds

00:21:56 ◼   ► before the animation begins, right?

00:21:58 ◼   ► But if you had an infinitely fast phone,

00:22:00 ◼   ► someone has programmed the core animation,

00:22:01 ◼   ► you know, an animation with a fixed amount of time.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And that becomes, once your phone is infinitely fast,

00:22:08 ◼   ► the amount of time programmed for all the animations

00:22:11 ◼   ► becomes the limiting factor in how fast your phone feels.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I won't talk about animations,

00:22:16 ◼   ► we can talk about iOS 7 a little bit later,

00:22:17 ◼   ► but that could be, those two things combined.

00:22:20 ◼   ► One, that you didn't run a lot of apps

00:22:22 ◼   ► that took a long time anyway,

00:22:23 ◼   ► and two, that iOS 7 cranked up all of the transition speeds

00:22:27 ◼   ► and now they become sort of the long stick

00:22:29 ◼   ► in the pole of lunchtimes or transitions.

00:22:32 ◼   ► That may be why it doesn't feel faster.

00:22:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, very well could be.

00:22:36 ◼   ► I mean, all I can tell you is that

00:22:39 ◼   ► I don't know that I would say that the 5S feels faster than the 4S because of actual speed, to your point, but the animations are so much more fluid.

00:22:49 ◼   ► Like the frame rate, based on just my eyeballs, when no scientific test or empirical test whatsoever, the frame rate seems so much better.

00:22:58 ◼   ► And it really improves the experience. And I didn't notice it.

00:23:01 ◼   ► I know I said this before, but I didn't notice it in the 4S until I had tried it on the 5S,

00:23:07 ◼   ► and then it was just immediately apparent, and it is a world better.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Stuttering is terrible, and the thing I notice on my iPod Touch is the very, very brief pause

00:23:19 ◼   ► before the animation begins, but you will never notice unless you have another device

00:23:22 ◼   ► like that you also use frequently that doesn't have that pause.

00:23:25 ◼   ► So yeah, there's the frame rate, and then there's the pause before it begins.

00:23:29 ◼   ► Any time the phone is unresponsive, even for a microsecond, it's just crazy making, right?

00:23:34 ◼   ► And so that unresponsive time doesn't count towards time taken to complete the task, because

00:23:39 ◼   ► as far as you're concerned, the action that you want it to perform hadn't begun yet, but

00:23:44 ◼   ► it makes the phone feel slower.

00:23:45 ◼   ► And I have my fourth generation iPod Touch, should not have even upgraded to iOS 6 because

00:23:51 ◼   ► it's all slow and crappy there, and upgrading my iPod Touch to iOS 7, it does okay, but

00:23:56 ◼   ► I definitely noticed the length of the animations increasing.

00:24:00 ◼   ► So anything else about hardware?

00:24:03 ◼   ► This episode is sponsored in part

00:24:06 ◼   ► by something that's not hardware.

00:24:08 ◼   ► It's a new sponsor, though.

00:24:09 ◼   ► It is called Ding.

00:24:11 ◼   ► That's right, Ding.

00:24:13 ◼   ► It's ding.io/atp.

00:24:17 ◼   ► So what is Ding?

00:24:18 ◼   ► Ding is a time tracking web app and iOS app,

00:24:22 ◼   ► time tracking for people who run their own show.

00:24:25 ◼   ► They've given us an awesome promo code ATP for a 90 day free trial.

00:24:29 ◼   ► That's a lot of days.

00:24:30 ◼   ► 90 days.

00:24:31 ◼   ► That way you can really get a feel for what Ding's about and how it fits for you, your

00:24:35 ◼   ► company or yourself and your workflow.

00:24:37 ◼   ► So, Ding is built for freelancers and small teams.

00:24:42 ◼   ► They built it because they want to use this product every day.

00:24:45 ◼   ► It has all the features for managers stripped away.

00:24:48 ◼   ► So it focuses just on the hours that the people who are working on this stuff put in and the

00:24:54 ◼   ► and the money they make and what they bill people.

00:24:56 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:24:57 ◼   ► It has a beautiful UI.

00:24:59 ◼   ► This is a tool that is made to fit

00:25:01 ◼   ► into the workflow of creative people.

00:25:03 ◼   ► It is blazingly fast.

00:25:04 ◼   ► You can log in with the iPhone app,

00:25:06 ◼   ► designed with iOS 7.

00:25:08 ◼   ► So, once again, go to ding.io/atp.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Their app, they got kind of the short end of the stick here.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Their app was rejected for a minor thing last week.

00:25:18 ◼   ► They've resubmitted it.

00:25:19 ◼   ► It's probably gonna be app

00:25:20 ◼   ► by the time this podcast comes out.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Just in case it's not, the app is right around the corner, so hang back in there.

00:25:25 ◼   ► And you know, Casey, I mean, you do client work.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Now do you have to track your hours?

00:25:30 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:25:32 ◼   ► How fun is hour tracking for people like you?

00:25:38 ◼   ► It is extremely un-fun, and the more things, more projects you're on, the less fun it

00:25:44 ◼   ► is.

00:25:45 ◼   ► So if I'm working a nine-hour day and it's all for one client, that's not too terrible.

00:25:49 ◼   ► But if I'm even splitting that day between two clients,

00:25:52 ◼   ► or God forbid, three or four,

00:25:54 ◼   ► it gets really annoying really quickly.

00:25:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, and the software to track time,

00:26:03 ◼   ► I mean, there's like a million things out there to do this.

00:26:05 ◼   ► - Oh, and most of them are terrible.

00:26:06 ◼   ► - Exactly, I mean, it's not a great field.

00:26:10 ◼   ► So Ding has walked in there,

00:26:12 ◼   ► they sent me the screenshots of their app,

00:26:14 ◼   ► 'cause you can't get the app yet

00:26:15 ◼   ► at the time of recording this,

00:26:16 ◼   ► but they sent me the screenshots of the app,

00:26:18 ◼   ► and it is beautiful.

00:26:19 ◼   ► They have this awesome iOS 7 redesign, or design, rather.

00:26:22 ◼   ► And we're probably going to talk later.

00:26:24 ◼   ► I have seen a lot of pretty mediocre iOS 7 redesigns

00:26:29 ◼   ► of apps, where an app that was just default UI kit stuff

00:26:36 ◼   ► continues to be default UI kit stuff with no other rethinking

00:26:39 ◼   ► of anything.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And it ends up just looking really terrible.

00:26:43 ◼   ► And they have taken iOS 7 design to heart,

00:26:48 ◼   ► and they have made apps that I think are better designed

00:26:51 ◼   ► than many of Apple's iOS 7 apps.

00:26:53 ◼   ► The Ding app is really incredible.

00:26:57 ◼   ► You can tell these are designers at heart,

00:26:59 ◼   ► and it's just really fantastic.

00:27:02 ◼   ► The capabilities it has are awesome.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Signing in is really quick.

00:27:05 ◼   ► You can add comments to things, you can track your time.

00:27:08 ◼   ► It's really beautiful.

00:27:08 ◼   ► So check out Ding at ding.io, that's D-I-N-G dot I-O,

00:27:14 ◼   ► slash ATP and use coupon code ATP for a 90 day free trial.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Ding for sponsoring ATP this week.

00:27:25 ◼   ► That's just a cool name too.

00:27:27 ◼   ► - It's like Ding.

00:27:30 ◼   ► - In fact, to give you some,

00:27:31 ◼   ► just one little quick thing.

00:27:32 ◼   ► To give you some idea of the attention to detail

00:27:36 ◼   ► that Ding pays here in their screenshot.

00:27:38 ◼   ► You know, earlier today I saw somebody tweet,

00:27:40 ◼   ► I forget who, I think it was Vitici,

00:27:42 ◼   ► Somebody who tweeted that it annoys them whenever

00:27:45 ◼   ► they see carrier on somebody's status bar in an App Store

00:27:49 ◼   ► screenshot.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Because when you screenshot the simulator where they normally

00:27:53 ◼   ► say AT&T or whatever, it just says the word carrier.

00:27:55 ◼   ► And that's really tacky if you leave that in your App Store

00:27:58 ◼   ► screenshots.

00:27:59 ◼   ► Ding on the screenshots they've sent me to show off their app,

00:28:03 ◼   ► it's made by a company named Tight.

00:28:06 ◼   ► And the carrier string has been replaced with TG.HT for Tight.

00:28:11 ◼   ► And that's just, it's just like a nice little touch.

00:28:13 ◼   ► Like they thought about that, you know?

00:28:15 ◼   ► And I mean, you'd be, you'd be amazed

00:28:18 ◼   ► how many like crappy status bars I see

00:28:20 ◼   ► like in app screenshots, like,

00:28:21 ◼   ► where like the battery's down to zero, it's in the red

00:28:24 ◼   ► and there, and it has like some weird long carrier name

00:28:26 ◼   ► or the word carrier.

00:28:27 ◼   ► You're like, just crop that out.

00:28:29 ◼   ► No, they, they take these things seriously and really great.

00:28:33 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to Ding for sponsoring.

00:28:34 ◼   ► All right.

00:28:36 ◼   ► - So, iOS 7.

00:28:38 ◼   ► John, you seem to have some thoughts about this.

00:28:41 ◼   ► We're not gonna talk about Overcast?

00:28:42 ◼   ► - Well, we're getting there.

00:28:44 ◼   ► - All right, I'll save that to the end then.

00:28:45 ◼   ► - Wait, that's not a secret anymore?

00:28:46 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I talked about that.

00:28:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:28:48 ◼   ► I've been trying so hard to not talk about that on this show.

00:28:52 ◼   ► - When I saw that tweet, who was that?

00:28:54 ◼   ► I saw a guy English tweeted or somebody tweeted,

00:28:57 ◼   ► tweeted the word Overcast and like,

00:28:58 ◼   ► "Oh, someone slipped that was supposed to be at the end.

00:29:00 ◼   ► "Oh no."

00:29:01 ◼   ► Then like scroll up and I had,

00:29:03 ◼   ► like this is like in real time

00:29:04 ◼   ► while you were giving your talk probably.

00:29:06 ◼   ► - Right, yeah.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Oh my God, that was a rush.

00:29:09 ◼   ► - Felt bad for you for a moment.

00:29:10 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:29:12 ◼   ► Just for a brief moment.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Yeah, so do we want to talk about iOS 7 for a little bit?

00:29:16 ◼   ► Yeah, sure.

00:29:18 ◼   ► So John, how was your first week with iOS 7?

00:29:20 ◼   ► Yeah, so you guys have been using it for a while.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Marco's been developing on it, and you, did you upgrade to WWDC immediately?

00:29:26 ◼   ► No, no, I waited, I don't remember what beta it was, but it was like maybe three or four, I'd say.

00:29:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I did beta 2.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Yeah, you were before me for sure, by like one or two betas.

00:29:36 ◼   ► So I've been running it for maybe a month, maybe two now, I'd say.

00:29:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and everybody has talked about it and done it, but I only saw it at WWDC, I only

00:29:43 ◼   ► played with it on other people's phones briefly and then just like said goodbye to it and

00:29:47 ◼   ► said, "Well, I'll come back to that again when it's released, I guess."

00:29:51 ◼   ► Because I know I'd be busy with Mavericks and I didn't want to distract myself with

00:29:54 ◼   ► that stuff, and plus I figured it would give Apple a lot of time to fix stuff, so by the

00:29:58 ◼   ► time I see it, I'll see the good final version.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And so now I put it on my iPod Touch the day it was released, which was a little bit of

00:30:06 ◼   ► of a challenge because of Apple's usual server woes.

00:30:10 ◼   ► And I've been using it and I tweeted sometime earlier this week.

00:30:15 ◼   ► What was it?

00:30:16 ◼   ► What did I say about that?

00:30:17 ◼   ► It was the only video review of iOS 7 that you need to watch.

00:30:21 ◼   ► And it's only 17 seconds long.

00:30:24 ◼   ► And this is a YouTube video that we'll put in the show notes of a little boy named Jack

00:30:29 ◼   ► who looks to be, I don't know, four, five, three, two, I can't tell kids ages, even though

00:30:34 ◼   ► I have kids of my own who have passed through those ages. I still can't tell kids ages.

00:30:39 ◼   ► In the short video, it shows the boy crying. He's crying about something, and the mom says,

00:30:46 ◼   ► "What's different?" The kid is crying about iOS 7. Then Jack says, "Everything!" The dad

00:30:52 ◼   ► says, "Well, you're just going to have to get used to it." Jack says, "No, I don't want

00:30:56 ◼   ► to." That's the whole video. A little boy crying about iOS 7.

00:31:02 ◼   ► That was you?

00:31:03 ◼   ► Well, so that's what I posted.

00:31:04 ◼   ► I said, "This is the only video review of iOS 7 you need to watch.

00:31:06 ◼   ► It's only 17 seconds long.

00:31:07 ◼   ► Post it at the link to Twitter."

00:31:09 ◼   ► So there's multiple possible interpretations of that tweet.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And occasionally I do this, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not intentionally.

00:31:15 ◼   ► This time was kind of intentionally, where I didn't offer interpretation.

00:31:21 ◼   ► I wrote that one thing which said, "This is the only review you need to watch."

00:31:24 ◼   ► And you can't even tell if that's sarcastic or sincere.

00:31:26 ◼   ► And even if it is sincere, what does it mean?

00:31:28 ◼   ► So, possible interpretations.

00:31:30 ◼   ► one is, "IOS 7 is so bad it makes little kids cry." That interpretation would be like, "I

00:31:37 ◼   ► hate IOS 7. I'm tweeting this link to this video." Other people would interpret it that

00:31:41 ◼   ► way, whether they liked it or not. You get people saying, "IOS 7 isn't bad. You're a

00:31:45 ◼   ► doody head because you think it's bad." Or people going, "Yeah, right on. IOS 7 isn't

00:31:49 ◼   ► a piece of crap." There's a huge swath of my following public that thought I was posting

00:31:55 ◼   ► that video because I thought iOS 7 was so bad it makes children cry.

00:32:00 ◼   ► And the other popular interpretation is that iOS 7 is great and anybody who complains about

00:32:04 ◼   ► iOS 7 is a big baby just like this big baby.

00:32:07 ◼   ► And so I got the replies from those people going, "I'm not a big baby just because I

00:32:11 ◼   ► hate iOS 7.

00:32:12 ◼   ► iOS 7 has legitimate problems."

00:32:13 ◼   ► Or other people saying, "Yeah, that's right.

00:32:15 ◼   ► All those people complaining about iOS 7 are just a bunch of whiners."

00:32:18 ◼   ► So it's like four distinct reactions to these two possible interpretations in pretty even

00:32:24 ◼   ► supply, and very little, very, very little kind of people asking me what I meant by that

00:32:30 ◼   ► tweet because everyone responding thought they already knew exactly what I meant by

00:32:33 ◼   ► that tweet, whether they agree with it or not.

00:32:36 ◼   ► So what did I mean when I posted that tweet?

00:32:38 ◼   ► Did I mean that it's so bad it makes kids cry, or did I mean that people complaining

00:32:40 ◼   ► about it are big babies?

00:32:42 ◼   ► I meant both.

00:32:43 ◼   ► That's why I said this is the only review you need to watch because it contains all

00:32:47 ◼   ► possible positions, and I think all of those positions are valid.

00:32:52 ◼   ► I'm going to get touchy-feely for a moment here, but this is the reason I posted and

00:32:57 ◼   ► the reason I thought the video was so great.

00:33:00 ◼   ► We like to think that as we get older and we mature that we change into something better.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Little kids are crappy and stupid and do dumb things, and now we get older and we're like,

00:33:12 ◼   ► "Oh, we're better people than that now."

00:33:14 ◼   ► When we drop our ice cream cone on the sidewalk, we don't cry.

00:33:17 ◼   ► We don't throw tantrums when it's time for bed at night.

00:33:20 ◼   ► When someone tells us that we can't have something, we don't fall on the floor and

00:33:24 ◼   ► kick our feet and scream.

00:33:26 ◼   ► Those are things that little kids do, and we're grown-ups.

00:33:28 ◼   ► We don't do that.

00:33:29 ◼   ► So obviously, we have changed into a better form, a higher form of life.

00:33:36 ◼   ► That's the common view of aging and maturing stuff.

00:33:40 ◼   ► But another model that I think works equally well, possibly better, is to not think of

00:33:44 ◼   ► it as us transforming from this crappy little mewling, screaming pink thing that poops its

00:33:48 ◼   ► pants into some high-minded ideal, but think of it more like Russian nesting dolls.

00:33:53 ◼   ► You know what those are?

00:33:54 ◼   ► Like the little doll and then you put another big doll around it.

00:33:57 ◼   ► Is that what it's called?

00:33:58 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:33:59 ◼   ► I think so.

00:34:00 ◼   ► Isn't that what the video file format is based off of?

00:34:01 ◼   ► Is that what it is?

00:34:02 ◼   ► Oh.

00:34:03 ◼   ► I think so.

00:34:04 ◼   ► That makes sense, yeah.

00:34:05 ◼   ► But the Wikipedia page in there.

00:34:06 ◼   ► I just call them Russian nesting dolls.

00:34:08 ◼   ► But so, and in that model, as we get older, all you're doing is adding layers, increasingly

00:34:13 ◼   ► sophisticated layers.

00:34:15 ◼   ► The reason this model is interesting is because the screaming, crying four-year-old is still

00:34:22 ◼   ► in the middle as the smallest doll.

00:34:25 ◼   ► It doesn't go away.

00:34:26 ◼   ► It's still there.

00:34:27 ◼   ► So when something like iOS 7 comes along, all of our inner cranky four-year-olds are

00:34:32 ◼   ► crying about it.

00:34:33 ◼   ► It doesn't matter how old we are, how mature we are.

00:34:36 ◼   ► We're the big nesting doll, and inside every one of us is a little tiny four-year-old crying

00:34:42 ◼   ► in there.

00:34:43 ◼   ► some people's inner four-year-olds cry louder than others.

00:34:46 ◼   ► And in this model of viewing human behavior, the extreme reactions to iOS 7,

00:34:52 ◼   ► both the extreme good reactions and the extreme bad reactions,

00:34:54 ◼   ► can kind of be seen as reactions to that inner child.

00:34:59 ◼   ► So the extreme bad reaction is like, "Your inner child is cranky about iOS 7.

00:35:03 ◼   ► I don't like it. I don't want change."

00:35:06 ◼   ► But the outer sophisticated layers are like, "Well, come on.

00:35:09 ◼   ► I'm not going to cry and stamp my feet about it.

00:35:10 ◼   ► But I will channel that energy into a more sophisticated form of protest, which will

00:35:14 ◼   ► be tweeting the words "Iowa Seven Sucks" and writing blog posts where you explain at length

00:35:20 ◼   ► exactly why Iowa Seven Sucks. And the extreme good reaction is that same four-year-old crying,

00:35:25 ◼   ► going, "Oh, everything's different than it was in six. I don't know what's going on."

00:35:27 ◼   ► Still crying and everything. But the other reaction is, "But wait a second. I'm better

00:35:32 ◼   ► than that. I'm not a four-year-old, not a big baby." And then trying to find, "Let me look

00:35:36 ◼   ► at Iowa Sun, there must be something good about it, that four-year-old is just crying

00:35:41 ◼   ► because things have changed, but I'm a much more sophisticated, rational adult, and so

00:35:45 ◼   ► you're reacting against your inner four-year-old and calling yourself a big baby, and then

00:35:50 ◼   ► you react most strongly to people who have the same kind of reaction. So when you see

00:35:54 ◼   ► someone else whining, you're like, because you felt that same feeling inside yourself,

00:35:57 ◼   ► like, oh my god, everything's changed, I don't know where anything is, and it's kind of ugly

00:35:59 ◼   ► and jarring, you fought that feeling back and figured out what the real situation is.

00:36:05 ◼   ► And then you see someone else exhibiting it, you're like, it's kind of like where you like pick on people who have the same weaknesses as you do, like more violently than you would for people who have weaknesses that you don't have.

00:36:14 ◼   ► There's probably some psychological phrase for that or whatever.

00:36:17 ◼   ► But I think that's definitely the case when any piece of software or operating system or thing that tech nerds are like intimately familiar with changes in a big way.

00:36:26 ◼   ► Whether the change is actually good or actually bad, change causes that little four year old to cry just like this little boy Jack in this video cries.

00:36:33 ◼   ► And I think understanding why Jack is crying and how our inner Jacks are also crying about this helps us to,

00:36:40 ◼   ► you know, if you're aware of that, if you're aware of this thing, if you have this Russian nesting doll model in your mind,

00:36:46 ◼   ► then you can sort of figure out what the real situation is and not become a slave to these sort of inner

00:36:51 ◼   ► motivations. Because if you don't think about it, if you don't like

00:36:54 ◼   ► think about these feelings and try to like analyze them rationally,

00:37:00 ◼   ► you will not be aware that they're there at all. You will deny their existence, but they will subconsciously

00:37:04 ◼   ► sort of affect how you react to things.

00:37:06 ◼   ► So that's why I really like this video of Jack crying, and I definitely experienced

00:37:11 ◼   ► all of his feelings with my inner four-year-old when using iOS 7.

00:37:16 ◼   ► So that video was 17 seconds you've been talking for five or ten minutes?

00:37:20 ◼   ► I thought it was a great video.

00:37:22 ◼   ► This is not... John, this is why I love you. I just want you to know, and I'm not being funny.

00:37:26 ◼   ► I liked how everyone else's reaction to it was part of it. It's like performance art,

00:37:32 ◼   ► that one tweet. Everyone else's reaction to it was like, "Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking

00:37:35 ◼   ► about. All of you people." And I'm not telling any of them that they're right or wrong. It's just

00:37:38 ◼   ► that that's what's going on with iOS 7. The only other thing I have to say about iOS 7 is,

00:37:45 ◼   ► well, I've said this in the past show, everything Marco posted on his post about the animations

00:37:50 ◼   ► being longer and annoying him, yes, of course it annoys me. Of course it annoys me that the

00:37:54 ◼   ► animations are longer. I would love... The first thing I did was turn down

00:37:57 ◼   ► reduce motion because I could not stand that parallax stuff. Lots of people

00:38:01 ◼   ► when talking about motion sickness, which I am susceptible to, maybe...

00:38:05 ◼   ► Like, I did feel a little bit of vertigo, even with reduced motion off,

00:38:08 ◼   ► just from the animations, but I found that my normal way of dealing with

00:38:13 ◼   ► motion sickness also works in iOS 7. So the normal way in, like, a moving

00:38:18 ◼   ► vehicle is to make sure that what your eyes see agrees with what your

00:38:20 ◼   ► inner ear feels. So you want to be looking out some window that lets you

00:38:24 ◼   ► you know when the car turns you see the scenery turning and so then you know

00:38:28 ◼   ► everything matches up and you're fine. Well things move on the screen in iOS 7

00:38:32 ◼   ► and there's no way my interviewer is going to agree with that but I can at

00:38:35 ◼   ► least help my brain along by once I realize what the animation is going to

00:38:40 ◼   ► be looking in that direction. So if I tap the lower right icon and it zooms in to

00:38:44 ◼   ► fill the screen once I know that that's going to happen I can focus my eyes down

00:38:49 ◼   ► that thing and sort of follow the animation through you know not like it's

00:38:52 ◼   ► a big conscious thing that you do, but eventually you learn where to look.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Before I was looking at the center of the screen because iOS 6 would just make everything

00:38:58 ◼   ► zoom out of the center, but now when I tap in the lower right, my eyes look in the lower

00:39:02 ◼   ► right and follow it as it zooms out into full screen.

00:39:05 ◼   ► And that has helped me not feel quite as dizzy when the animations are taken, or just don't

00:39:10 ◼   ► look at the font at all when the animations are going on.

00:39:12 ◼   ► But yes, they do take longer.

00:39:14 ◼   ► I understand why they're there, I understand the model that they're providing.

00:39:17 ◼   ► I'm willing to give Apple mostly a pass on it, but I would like things to happen faster

00:39:22 ◼   ► if I had my choice.

00:39:23 ◼   ► And the final bit here is,

00:39:26 ◼   ► and the notes are with the science of usability.

00:39:30 ◼   ► This is something that I love from the old world, Apple.

00:39:35 ◼   ► That's, I don't know if it's missing from the current Apple,

00:39:37 ◼   ► but certainly when Steve Jobs came back,

00:39:39 ◼   ► he did not like this and he got rid of it

00:39:41 ◼   ► as much as he possibly could.

00:39:42 ◼   ► The science usability idea is that

00:39:46 ◼   ► there's a way that you can test with science.

00:39:49 ◼   ► Imagine that, whether something is usable or not.

00:39:51 ◼   ► like that it's, yes there's an art to it and there's style and there's creativity and stuff like that,

00:39:55 ◼   ► but there's also things you can actually test.

00:39:57 ◼   ► You know, like FitzLaw is the one everyone knows about, the guy who's testing how easy it is to acquire

00:40:02 ◼   ► and click on targets based on their size and distance from the cursor and all sorts of things like that.

00:40:07 ◼   ► And that same thing applying to physical things, right?

00:40:11 ◼   ► So you could have multiple designs of how do we arrange these things?

00:40:15 ◼   ► Where do we put the buttons? How big are the buttons? Do we have buttons at all?

00:40:17 ◼   ► Do we have scroll bars? What's easier to discover? So on and so forth.

00:40:19 ◼   ► and you can argue about it all you want,

00:40:21 ◼   ► but one of the tools you have in your toolbox

00:40:24 ◼   ► to figure out whether something's actually

00:40:28 ◼   ► a good interface or not is science.

00:40:29 ◼   ► You can have a theory, you can construct an experiment

00:40:32 ◼   ► to test that theory, you can test it on actual people,

00:40:35 ◼   ► and you can take the results and decide

00:40:36 ◼   ► whether it was good or bad and refine and go on and on.

00:40:39 ◼   ► Now, that's not to say that that's the only approach

00:40:41 ◼   ► you should take, because if that's all you do

00:40:43 ◼   ► is actual scientific usability testing,

00:40:45 ◼   ► you can end up with an interface that is quote-unquote usable

00:40:47 ◼   ► but is not pleasant to use, is not attractive,

00:40:49 ◼   ► like has other qualities that may actually

00:40:51 ◼   ► be at odds with usability, but make for a more

00:40:53 ◼   ► pleasant overall experience.

00:40:54 ◼   ► So when Jobs came back to Apple, it

00:40:57 ◼   ► seems like he was not in favor of the old Apple Human Interface

00:41:01 ◼   ► Group, which did a lot of this research.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Because as far as he was concerned,

00:41:04 ◼   ► they were doing interesting research.

00:41:06 ◼   ► Fine, but where were the great products they were making?

00:41:08 ◼   ► And he wanted to make great products.

00:41:09 ◼   ► And all that sort of academic scientific research

00:41:12 ◼   ► was not producing great products,

00:41:13 ◼   ► therefore it needed to go, and screw that,

00:41:15 ◼   ► I can use it in my gut and my artistic taste,

00:41:18 ◼   ► and then a bunch of smart people to make things that I want,

00:41:20 ◼   ► and we'll go with that.

00:41:22 ◼   ► And iOS 7 has brought back a little bit

00:41:25 ◼   ► of the science of usability stuff in the criticism of it,

00:41:29 ◼   ► because people are like, OK, all these little outline icons,

00:41:32 ◼   ► I don't like them.

00:41:33 ◼   ► I don't like those outline icons.

00:41:34 ◼   ► And so someone will pull out-- and I put a link in the notes

00:41:39 ◼   ► file here--

00:41:40 ◼   ► I think those outline icons are harder to recognize.

00:41:43 ◼   ► And so someone says, "Okay, well, let's sort of kind of use science to test that.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Let's make a bunch of icons, some of them with outlines, some of them with solid things,

00:41:49 ◼   ► and see, you know, test recognition speed and stuff."

00:41:52 ◼   ► And the results were inconclusive in this thing.

00:41:54 ◼   ► But the whole idea that when something is not to your taste for some reason, whether

00:41:59 ◼   ► it's because it's a change or because you just don't like how it looks, only then people

00:42:05 ◼   ► will go, "Well, I think this is worse, and I'll try to find a way to prove it," which

00:42:08 ◼   ► is kind of the reverse of the way you should be doing.

00:42:10 ◼   ► You would hope that Apple would only make these decisions because they found them to be usable in some way,

00:42:14 ◼   ► but I think it's a pretty good bet that Apple just doesn't do that kind of thing anymore.

00:42:18 ◼   ► They go almost entirely off their gut in artistic creative decisions, and almost none of it is based on actual scientific usability testing.

00:42:25 ◼   ► Certainly not directly, and maybe not even indirectly.

00:42:29 ◼   ► And a lot of what I see in iOS 7 is a lot of art, a lot of style, and a lot of things, whether I like them or not,

00:42:36 ◼   ► that I have to think are not the result of testing.

00:42:40 ◼   ► and iOS 6 was the same way. They're not testing like, you know, leather and stitching and stuff like that,

00:42:44 ◼   ► and maybe it doesn't even make a difference, but sort of the underlying philosophy of how things should work.

00:42:49 ◼   ► I think they had a philosophy. I think they're less interested in science than they should be,

00:42:54 ◼   ► and this is not just true of iOS 7, it's true of everything.

00:42:56 ◼   ► It just comes to the front now because iOS 7 is a transition point,

00:42:59 ◼   ► so now all the things that are different stylistically, the people who don't like them are trying to look for

00:43:03 ◼   ► explanations of why they're empirically bad.

00:43:06 ◼   ► And I don't think there are good explanations of why they're empirically bad or good,

00:43:10 ◼   ► because individual bloggers are not going to do their own scientific experiments,

00:43:13 ◼   ► and Apple has very little to support themselves, or at least that they've shown to support their

00:43:17 ◼   ► decisions, other than this is the way we like it, and we think this is sort of like a metaphor for

00:43:21 ◼   ► layering that works. I put another link in the notes to Dr. Drang's post about the iOS 7 parallax

00:43:27 ◼   ► effect, like when you pull up Control Center and tilt the phone, how it doesn't quite work the way

00:43:31 ◼   ► it should according to their physical model, and whether that's a feature or a bug or whatever.

00:43:36 ◼   ► Yeah, that's basically my thoughts on Iceland. Oh, and one more thing. If you were making

00:43:43 ◼   ► a magazine design or a road sign or a newspaper or anything that you would want to be laid out

00:43:52 ◼   ► with a bunch of information that's easy to consume and to find like this important information and

00:43:56 ◼   ► there's secondary information and you want it to be readable and organized in a nice way,

00:44:01 ◼   ► Nobody in any of the established mediums for displaying,

00:44:05 ◼   ► you know, basically text and images in a rectangular background would use hair lines for everything.

00:44:12 ◼   ► I know they're excited that you can use hair lines because it's a retina screen.

00:44:16 ◼   ► And I understand going to an interface that recognizes that everyone's going to be using retina,

00:44:20 ◼   ► so we can use these hair lines, except for the iPad mini, of course.

00:44:23 ◼   ► We can use these hair lines and do fancy things, and everything will be retina in the future, so we can use them.

00:44:27 ◼   ► but overuse of hairlines is just like an epidemic in iOS 7, both in Apple's own apps and in other people's apps.

00:44:33 ◼   ► I think it's fine to use hairlines, but you can't use them everywhere, because if you use them everywhere, they lose their effect.

00:44:40 ◼   ► You should use them, I don't know, I mean, I don't know, not as highlights so much, but like,

00:44:45 ◼   ► it should be used for a reason and in balance with other things, because if you do everything in hairlines,

00:44:50 ◼   ► all you've done is just make the entire thing like weaker and lighter and dimmer.

00:44:54 ◼   ► It's the same complaint people have about the typography.

00:44:58 ◼   ► Hair lines allow the bold things to contrast even more, but if you use hair lines everywhere,

00:45:01 ◼   ► you've lost that.

00:45:02 ◼   ► And I think the same thing is true of the outline icons, which aren't always hair lines,

00:45:05 ◼   ► but they're kind of like fading off into the distance.

00:45:09 ◼   ► And I know that's kind of what they want, where it fades into the background and that's

00:45:11 ◼   ► not supposed to be content, and the content comes to the front, but it's such a fuzzy

00:45:16 ◼   ► philosophy.

00:45:17 ◼   ► If I had one sort of artistic, again, non-scientific complaint about this, it's that the hair lines

00:45:23 ◼   ► seems to be a little bit too much for me.

00:45:25 ◼   ► You know, really quick to go back a step, I actually want to point out that to me, the

00:45:30 ◼   ► 5S screen is actually considerably better than the 4S's.

00:45:34 ◼   ► And I can't put my finger on why other than maybe that it's brighter, and I understand

00:45:38 ◼   ► there's a control for that, blah, blah, blah.

00:45:40 ◼   ► But I do think it looks a lot better.

00:45:41 ◼   ► And I'm sure on paper it's not supposed to be, and maybe it's just the newness of everything.

00:45:46 ◼   ► No, it's supposed to be.

00:45:47 ◼   ► It's a better screen than the 4S, yeah.

00:45:49 ◼   ► But better color reproduction.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I definitely noticed it.

00:45:51 ◼   ► Although I think it's the same as the 5 screen this time.

00:45:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:54 ◼   ► I think they didn't change that component.

00:45:55 ◼   ► But yeah, every major redesign they like improve the color gamut and the brightness and the

00:46:01 ◼   ► contrast and everything.

00:46:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:04 ◼   ► So John, would you say iOS 7, one thumb up, two thumbs up, still to be determined?

00:46:11 ◼   ► What do you think in summary?

00:46:14 ◼   ► It doesn't bother me.

00:46:16 ◼   ► I like the new…

00:46:17 ◼   ► Glowing and dorsey.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Well, I like the new look of things,

00:46:21 ◼   ► because you get kind of tired looking at the old thing.

00:46:23 ◼   ► And I've said ever since Windows Metro appearance came along

00:46:27 ◼   ► on the scene however many months or years ago,

00:46:30 ◼   ► that you can't go back to-- once you see that kind of interface,

00:46:33 ◼   ► when you look back-- I was saying

00:46:35 ◼   ► when I saw the Windows Metro demo,

00:46:36 ◼   ► I looked back at my iPod Touch, which was then running iOS 6,

00:46:41 ◼   ► I guess, maybe even 5, and it looked like a piece of crap.

00:46:44 ◼   ► Because that's the way-- the artistic ebb and flow

00:46:48 ◼   ► like bell-bottoms are in, bell-bottoms are out, long hair, short hair, long skirt, short

00:46:51 ◼   ► skirts.

00:46:52 ◼   ► The fashion had gone way in one direction and now it's swinging in the other direction.

00:46:57 ◼   ► So having iOS 7, which is along those lines of like, you know, the opposite direction

00:47:01 ◼   ► as iOS 6 with the, you know, less clutter and more sort of matte colors and shades and

00:47:08 ◼   ► stuff like that, that's refreshing.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I even like, you know, the stupid new shape for the icons, whatever you want to call that

00:47:15 ◼   ► thing.

00:47:16 ◼   ► I like that.

00:47:17 ◼   ► And on the right of the screen...

00:47:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and they're slightly bigger now, Marco? You would know.

00:47:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like three points bigger.

00:47:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I noticed it. I like that. It's like, yeah, why weren't they so small before? I think they should be bigger. It's nice.

00:47:30 ◼   ► And I like the little outline, and I like everyone's doing their redesigns of their apps, which is great.

00:47:35 ◼   ► I don't like the new Instapaper icon, though. You shouldn't tell them about that.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Really? I do.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I don't dislike it, but I like the old one better.

00:47:43 ◼   ► Well, the old one would have looked ridiculous in iOS 7.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Actually, I know it did, because when I was running the first few betas before I had the

00:47:51 ◼   ► InstaPaper beta, I did have the old icon, and it did look ridiculous.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Yeah, the thing that bugs me about it is the images on the pseudo-newspaper behind there.

00:48:00 ◼   ► The images look like they're blurry.

00:48:02 ◼   ► And I know they're not.

00:48:03 ◼   ► I know they're just super low-contrast shrunken versions of the actual pictures, but they

00:48:10 ◼   ► don't look as crisp.

00:48:11 ◼   ► the background look a little bit muddy to me. And the previous version had the same

00:48:15 ◼   ► muddiness problem, but it made up for it with the super sharp curling edges, which again

00:48:18 ◼   ► wouldn't fit an iOS 7, but it was like enough sharpness there to balance out the muddiness.

00:48:22 ◼   ► Anyway, that's getting off track, but I'm liking iOS 7. The features are the part that

00:48:28 ◼   ► I'm enjoying the most, like being able to swipe up and turn off rotation lock makes

00:48:33 ◼   ► such a big difference to me, even though swiping up is sometimes a little bit slower and laggier,

00:48:37 ◼   ► just because I hate hitting the home button. I don't understand why I hate hitting the

00:48:40 ◼   ► the home button so much, maybe I'm the only person who feels this way, but I hate hitting

00:48:43 ◼   ► the home button. You don't know how much I wish for like three finger squish to get back

00:48:47 ◼   ► to home, because on the iPad I never touch that home button if I can help it.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Yeah, you just have to hold hand pinch out and that's it.

00:48:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and I can't fully articulate why does that incredibly awkward looking big hand pinch

00:49:01 ◼   ► feel so much better to me than pressing that home button on the iPad. And it's not because

00:49:04 ◼   ► the iPad's in different orientations and I forget where the home button is, I just despise

00:49:08 ◼   ► double tapping the home button for multitasking, I despise hitting it to get back to the home

00:49:12 ◼   ► screen because I just feel like a touch device should be all about, you know, my fingers

00:49:16 ◼   ► against that glass and not about pressing a button in and out.

00:49:20 ◼   ► So I like being able to get the control center and do the rotation lock, which is my most

00:49:24 ◼   ► frequently used feature on the thing, even though it's probably faster for me to do it

00:49:29 ◼   ► the other way just because it means I don't have to press a button.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Well, you guys don't feel that way?

00:49:36 ◼   ► I mean, maybe I'm the only one who hates hitting the home button.

00:49:38 ◼   ► You know, it's funny.

00:49:39 ◼   ► On the iPad, where I do have the five-finger pinch in to go home, I do that pretty much

00:49:44 ◼   ► always.

00:49:45 ◼   ► On the iPhone, it doesn't bother me.

00:49:46 ◼   ► I don't know if it's because the screen is so much bigger on the iPad.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And so, to your point, once I'm committed to being in an app or to operating only with

00:49:55 ◼   ► the screen, it breaks the illusion if I have to hit a physical button.

00:50:02 ◼   ► But on the phone, it doesn't bother me at all.

00:50:04 ◼   ► It's the double tap on the phone that kills me.

00:50:07 ◼   ► Double click, it's just not a good button to double up on.

00:50:11 ◼   ► The new multitasking in 7 is so much nicer where you can see the thumbnails.

00:50:15 ◼   ► I still don't like how they scroll.

00:50:16 ◼   ► I still feel like when I'm trying to flick my way through them, it still feels like it's

00:50:20 ◼   ► getting away from me, or it's a runaway car.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Although one thing that is really cool is that you can close multiple apps at once just

00:50:26 ◼   ► by dragging them all away at the same time, most of the time.

00:50:30 ◼   ► The problem is there's this bug that's still in the GM where sometimes, well pretty regularly,

00:50:35 ◼   ► if you try to push away a few apps at once, the screenshot portion of the UI will be flung

00:50:41 ◼   ► away, but the icon on the bottom will stay and the app will stay running.

00:50:44 ◼   ► So you have to exit the multitasking picture, go back in, and clear away the few that that

00:50:48 ◼   ► happened to because then their screenshots will reappear when you go back into it.

00:50:52 ◼   ► I'm still happy to do them just one at a time because that means anything that removes a

00:50:55 ◼   ► tap and hold from iOS is my friend. Because I can't stand tap and hold in any context.

00:51:00 ◼   ► It drives me nuts.

00:51:01 ◼   ► And tapping those tiny little Xs always sucked too.

00:51:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it was like tap and hold, jiggle mode, hit the little X, and now it's just like flick,

00:51:06 ◼   ► flick, flick. So much nicer.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Yep. Yeah.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Oh, and I will say that the, to go back to the hardware again, the Touch ID is magic.

00:51:13 ◼   ► It is absolutely magic, and I love it. I never ran, we talked about this before, I never

00:51:18 ◼   ► ran a passcode except when I was traveling. Now, like Marco said, I'm running one. And

00:51:22 ◼   ► I would say my success rate is somewhere in the 90 to 95% range, and it is really fantastic

00:51:28 ◼   ► and very, very stupefyingly quick. So two thumbs up for that.

00:51:34 ◼   ► And I never did a passcode on my things. I never have numeric passcodes, so it would

00:51:40 ◼   ► be in Marco's camp where if I was to get something with Touch ID, it would be like, I'm increasing

00:51:43 ◼   ► my security for hopefully a very small and new inconvenience. But for the people who

00:51:49 ◼   ► don't have a passcode, iOS 7's ability to let you swipe the whole screen to the right

00:51:53 ◼   ► is kind of the equivalent of before you had to get your thumb down onto this little narrow

00:51:57 ◼   ► thing, which granted I could do with my eyes closed with both hands by this point, but

00:52:00 ◼   ► it was still a little bit fidgety.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Now knowing that I can swipe to the right anywhere on the entire giant lock screen,

00:52:06 ◼   ► I do that now and I find that I naturally swipe much higher than I did before.

00:52:09 ◼   ► Yeah, same here.

00:52:10 ◼   ► So now the line of thumb grease is now no longer just along the bottom part of my phone,

00:52:16 ◼   ► it's kind of like in an arc across the top, which is much more natural. So thumbs up for

00:52:19 ◼   ► those of us without a fingerprint sensor still getting the benefit of more comfortable

00:52:25 ◼   ► opening up of your phone after powering it on. I will say, so I've never used a passcode. When I

00:52:31 ◼   ► got the 5S, of course, this is actually pretty interesting. During the little activation thing,

00:52:37 ◼   ► like the little welcome process where it had you log into iCloud and stuff like that, it tells you,

00:52:43 ◼   ► "Alright, enter a passcode." Like, now it's time to enter a passcode. And you can skip it,

00:52:48 ◼   ► but it presents it as the default that, "Okay, now you have to set a passcode. And hey, do you want

00:52:53 ◼   ► to set up TuxID while you're at it?" So it's interesting that they're really pushing people

00:52:58 ◼   ► to do this. That being said, I'm not sure I'm going to keep that on all the time. It's good

00:53:04 ◼   ► enough—and granted, again, this is a few hours of use, so ask me again next week—but it's good

00:53:10 ◼   ► enough that I'm perfectly happy to leave it on if I'm going to be at a conference or traveling,

00:53:16 ◼   ► where it would be more likely somebody might steal my phone or pick it up off the table

00:53:20 ◼   ► or something like that, even though my phone's always in my pocket.

00:53:21 ◼   ► But as I'm just sitting at home, working at home, not going anywhere except the pizza

00:53:28 ◼   ► place most days, I don't really think it's worth it.

00:53:32 ◼   ► Because it is still some friction.

00:53:34 ◼   ► There's still, between having a passcode or not having a passcode, there still is a few

00:53:39 ◼   ► little delays here and there, even with Touch ID, there's still a few things you can't do.

00:53:43 ◼   ► One thing I immediately found is that you can't launch an app for development from Xcode

00:53:50 ◼   ► over the cable while it's locked. So you have to go unlock the phone so Xcode can launch the

00:53:56 ◼   ► app if the phone was asleep. So there's little things like that. I am hitting some friction still.

00:54:00 ◼   ► So I'm not entirely sure I'm going to keep it, but we'll see. I will certainly turn it on for

00:54:06 ◼   ► for conferences and stuff.

00:54:07 ◼   ► No question about that.

00:54:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I never understood the people who did the passcodes

00:54:10 ◼   ► while they were in their house.

00:54:12 ◼   ► It's kind of like going from room to room in your own house.

00:54:14 ◼   ► And each time you go from room to room,

00:54:15 ◼   ► you lock the door with the key behind you.

00:54:16 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:54:17 ◼   ► Every time you go into the kitchen,

00:54:18 ◼   ► open the kitchen door with the key, go into the kitchen,

00:54:20 ◼   ► close the kitchen door with the key, lock it.

00:54:22 ◼   ► You're in your own house.

00:54:23 ◼   ► I mean, everyone has a different threshold for security

00:54:26 ◼   ► and how sensitive the information is in their phone.

00:54:28 ◼   ► But even if I got something with Touch and Be,

00:54:30 ◼   ► I would only enable it if ever when I was going out somewhere.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing to consider, though,

00:54:35 ◼   ► that a lot of people have devices either provided by their employer or that are by virtue of

00:54:43 ◼   ► being connected to their employer's exchange server or email server, they are subject to

00:54:47 ◼   ► their employer's ridiculous passcode requirements. And so I haven't tested this, but to my understanding,

00:54:54 ◼   ► even if you have a 39-character full-text passcode, because your employer requires a

00:54:59 ◼   ► 39 character full text passcode.

00:55:01 ◼   ► Touch ID, I believe, will still bypass that.

00:55:04 ◼   ► And that has got to be just an incredible win.

00:55:09 ◼   ► And luckily, my company is small enough

00:55:12 ◼   ► that we don't have any of those draconian policies,

00:55:14 ◼   ► but I got to imagine for people who are members

00:55:16 ◼   ► of really big companies, that must be fantastic.

00:55:19 ◼   ► - Although, how many of those big company IT people

00:55:23 ◼   ► are going to have read the various stories

00:55:25 ◼   ► that say, oh, we found out how to take a finger

00:55:28 ◼   ► bypassed and now they're gonna say, "Oh, by the way, you can't use that either."

00:55:31 ◼   ► Well, that's probably true, but not yet. That FUD hasn't spread yet.

00:55:35 ◼   ► That's good. It only takes like one spreading of that and then like half the people out there can't use it.

00:55:41 ◼   ► That's true. You want to tell us about something else that's awesome?

00:55:44 ◼   ► I would love to. It is, once again, our wonderful friends at Squarespace.

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00:57:28 ◼   ► Give it a shot.

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00:57:59 ◼   ► They are everything you need

00:58:00 ◼   ► to create an exceptional website.

00:58:01 ◼   ► - Let me tack onto that.

00:58:03 ◼   ► We actually got an email from a listener

00:58:05 ◼   ► which was completely unsolicited.

00:58:06 ◼   ► And so Rivenda wrote in and said,

00:58:08 ◼   ► "Keep it up, guys.

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00:58:24 ◼   ► So just like Marco said, ATP9, go check it out.

00:58:31 ◼   ► So do you do anything over the weekend, Marco?

00:58:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I traveled halfway across the country, went to do product, then traveled back and

00:58:36 ◼   ► made a couple blog posts.

00:58:37 ◼   ► What did you do?

00:58:38 ◼   ► Eh, not much.

00:58:39 ◼   ► Went to a football game.

00:58:41 ◼   ► That's good.

00:58:43 ◼   ► So tell us about this app.

00:58:45 ◼   ► Well, without making this too much of the Marco show, I announced at the XOXO Festival,

00:58:57 ◼   ► which I guess is a lot like a conference, but it's good, so they want you to call it

00:59:03 ◼   ► a festival because there are parts of it that are more like a festival than a conference.

00:59:06 ◼   ► But I spoke at the conference portion of the festival.

00:59:09 ◼   ► I believe I have this hierarchy correct.

00:59:13 ◼   ► And it's in Portland.

00:59:14 ◼   ► And it was my first time in Portland.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And so first of all, from what I saw of Portland, a quick little anecdote here.

00:59:22 ◼   ► And I hope this doesn't offend the Germans or the Portlanders.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Portlandias?

00:59:28 ◼   ► Portlandees?

00:59:29 ◼   ► Okay, anyway.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Portlandics?

00:59:31 ◼   ► So a couple years ago, I went to Munich.

00:59:36 ◼   ► Munich, and it was my first time in Germany, and my first time in Munich, and I was there

00:59:41 ◼   ► only for a couple days for another conference, actually.

00:59:45 ◼   ► And I had a friend in France who drove in to take me and Tiff out for the night, because

00:59:51 ◼   ► he was familiar with Munich.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And he took us to the Hofbrauhaus, which is famous.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Now, I didn't know that it was famous.

00:59:59 ◼   ► At the time, I had never heard of it.

01:00:00 ◼   ► I didn't know anything about the place or the city or anything like that, because I

01:00:04 ◼   ► was a stupid American.

01:00:05 ◼   ► So, and I still am a stupid American now, I just know about the Hopper House. Anyway,

01:00:08 ◼   ► so, so we were in Munich and he takes us to this place and he said, "Just so you know,

01:00:14 ◼   ► the Bavarians take their culture very seriously. And even though there's a lot of tourists here,

01:00:21 ◼   ► this is all, there's also a lot of people who just live here who come here. And this is like,

01:00:25 ◼   ► this is not a joke. This is not like a tourist trap. This is not over the top. Like, this is

01:00:31 ◼   ► actually just like normal for Bavaria. And you go into this place and it's like

01:00:36 ◼   ► every stereotype you could possibly imagine hearing about Germans as a

01:00:40 ◼   ► stupid American. It's like the giant mugs of beer, the big guys playing the big

01:00:45 ◼   ► accordions and everything, like every everyone's happy and there's this big

01:00:49 ◼   ► hall and everyone's singing beer songs. I mean it's and there's sausage everywhere

01:00:53 ◼   ► which by the way is delicious. I mean it's it's every stereotype you could

01:00:56 ◼   ► imagine, you would think that you walked into like a Times Square terrible,

01:01:01 ◼   ► insensitive, like, parody of what we think Germans are. But that was real. And

01:01:10 ◼   ► according to our friends, that's that is actually like taken reasonably seriously.

01:01:14 ◼   ► Like that's that's not that's not like an insensitive joke. That's how Portland

01:01:22 ◼   ► was. Like you see, and granted I was only there for a few days, but you see like that

01:01:32 ◼   ► just every stereotype you've heard about Portland, like every everything, and even

01:01:39 ◼   ► if you've seen a few episodes of Portland, yeah, like I saw a few of them, it's exactly

01:01:43 ◼   ► like that. Like it's not a joke that actually like the people are all like, I don't know

01:01:48 ◼   ► how to describe it very well except that it's as if the entire city is really nice.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Everyone wants to give you a hug figuratively. I didn't get any

01:01:58 ◼   ► physical hugs, but figurative—well actually no, I did get a few—but most people just

01:02:02 ◼   ► want to figuratively and emotionally give you a hug. And everyone's laid back,

01:02:07 ◼   ► nice, non-judgmental, and everyone's driving crappy cars and going to

01:02:13 ◼   ► really cool coffee shops and beer plants. Everywhere has cool coffee and cool beer,

01:02:16 ◼   ► and all the coffee is very lightly roasted because that's the right thing to do and there's

01:02:21 ◼   ► tons of stores that just sell like gourmet ice cream.

01:02:24 ◼   ► I mean it's like, oh, it basically seems as though the entire city is built by Etsy

01:02:31 ◼   ► and Kickstarter.

01:02:33 ◼   ► Like just everyone there, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure the entire population of

01:02:37 ◼   ► Portland works on their own project that was either funded by Kickstarter or is sold on

01:02:44 ◼   ► Etsy.

01:02:45 ◼   ► Now, some of this obviously is the crowd I was with, but definitely the entire city had

01:02:52 ◼   ► that vibe to it where, like, I could not believe that it wasn't a joke, that it was real, and

01:02:59 ◼   ► in all the best possible ways, but it was very real.

01:03:04 ◼   ► So Portland was awesome.

01:03:06 ◼   ► Anyway, while I was there, I spoke at the conference, and there's going to be a video

01:03:10 ◼   ► posted soon.

01:03:11 ◼   ► I don't know when, but it will be soon.

01:03:13 ◼   ► And I announced during the video my next new app project,

01:03:18 ◼   ► the big app that I've been talking about on the show

01:03:19 ◼   ► for a few months, which I announced as a podcast app.

01:03:24 ◼   ► And it is a podcatcher, as some people would call it.

01:03:27 ◼   ► It's an app that plays podcasts.

01:03:29 ◼   ► It does not record podcasts or help you produce podcasts.

01:03:32 ◼   ► It is a podcast playing app, and it's called Overcast.

01:03:37 ◼   ► And it's not out.

01:03:40 ◼   ► It's not even close to being out.

01:03:42 ◼   ► but I'm probably three to five months away maybe

01:03:47 ◼   ► from releasing 1.0.

01:03:48 ◼   ► So yeah, that's what I'm doing.

01:03:51 ◼   ► - So why bother announcing?

01:03:53 ◼   ► - A few things.

01:03:54 ◼   ► One was that I was filing for various trademark things

01:03:58 ◼   ► and company creation and stuff like that.

01:04:00 ◼   ► I was, similar to how Apple announced the original iPhone

01:04:04 ◼   ► six months in advance 'cause they were filing

01:04:05 ◼   ► all this FCC stuff and they figured it might leak.

01:04:08 ◼   ► So part of it was that,

01:04:11 ◼   ► I was doing a lot of paperwork stuff that if anybody did any digging, they would be

01:04:16 ◼   ► able to find.

01:04:17 ◼   ► And normally, I would not be so arrogant as to think that people were digging through

01:04:23 ◼   ► my trash looking for secrets because I'm not that important.

01:04:27 ◼   ► But the possibility that somebody might come across a trademark filing or something, I

01:04:32 ◼   ► thought, "You know what?

01:04:34 ◼   ► I don't want to have to deal with that."

01:04:38 ◼   ► I also wanted to talk about it.

01:04:41 ◼   ► I'm facing a lot of interesting decisions and design

01:04:45 ◼   ► challenges and technical challenges

01:04:46 ◼   ► during a lot of this, some of which

01:04:49 ◼   ► are going to be interesting to talk about in public,

01:04:53 ◼   ► some of which-- I don't want to have

01:04:55 ◼   ► to be worried about if I ask a question on Twitter or Stack

01:04:58 ◼   ► Overflow about some core audio code.

01:05:00 ◼   ► I don't want everyone to have to try to guess what I'm

01:05:02 ◼   ► making with core audio, stuff like that.

01:05:06 ◼   ► There's a lot of practical advantages.

01:05:07 ◼   ► I'm also trying to open source a lot of this stuff.

01:05:09 ◼   ► I open sourced the FC model class last week,

01:05:13 ◼   ► and that went well.

01:05:15 ◼   ► I want to be able to open source some of my utility classes

01:05:18 ◼   ► that I'm making.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And I guess I don't want people trying to connect the dots

01:05:22 ◼   ► and figure out what I'm making based on what I'm releasing

01:05:24 ◼   ► and the questions I'm asking.

01:05:26 ◼   ► So all of that combined into me deciding-- oh,

01:05:29 ◼   ► and I was giving this talk in front of this audience that

01:05:32 ◼   ► is pretty much the perfect audience to announce

01:05:34 ◼   ► something like this at.

01:05:36 ◼   ► So I figured it was a very good opportunity for me to say,

01:05:40 ◼   ► you know what?

01:05:41 ◼   ► I'm just going to announce this here.

01:05:43 ◼   ► And yeah, and I did.

01:05:46 ◼   ► And it went very well.

01:05:48 ◼   ► I've done the secrecy until release thing before,

01:05:52 ◼   ► and it certainly has its advantages,

01:05:54 ◼   ► that there's a reason why Apple almost always does that.

01:05:57 ◼   ► But as I said in the talk, it is very stressful.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And so one of the things is I'm experimenting here.

01:06:04 ◼   ► I don't know if I'll always do this.

01:06:05 ◼   ► I'm experimenting and I'm trading the stress of trying to keep it secret for the stress of everybody asking me if it's done yet

01:06:12 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's gonna be overall better. We'll find out

01:06:16 ◼   ► Did you feel like you needed that pressure that external pressure a little bit certainly, you know, I think

01:06:23 ◼   ► III there's certainly been like

01:06:27 ◼   ► diversions like I

01:06:29 ◼   ► Discussed I believe I discussed on this show

01:06:31 ◼   ► but I at least discussed on Twitter how I had an original trademark issue with the name that I had picked. And that name was overcast.

01:06:37 ◼   ► And I ended up working it out. I made a big post on my site, I'm not going to go into it now, about how I worked it out and why I worked it out.

01:06:44 ◼   ► But, and you know, how I came up with other names and why I didn't use any of them.

01:06:48 ◼   ► But that demotivated me for a while because it was holding things up as like, alright, without settling for a name, I can't yet create the company,

01:06:58 ◼   ► so I can't create my developer account,

01:07:00 ◼   ► so I can't easily test things like push notifications,

01:07:03 ◼   ► stuff like that.

01:07:05 ◼   ► There was all sorts of little things

01:07:07 ◼   ► that demotivated me in both psychological and roadblock

01:07:13 ◼   ► ways.

01:07:13 ◼   ► OK, it kind of would help if I had this thing first

01:07:16 ◼   ► before I could really work on this part of it.

01:07:18 ◼   ► So there was a lot of that.

01:07:20 ◼   ► But certainly the external pressure will help.

01:07:22 ◼   ► And yeah, my original goal was to have it out for iOS 7.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Obviously that didn't happen.

01:07:27 ◼   ► and that's not even close.

01:07:30 ◼   ► So we'll see.

01:07:31 ◼   ► So best guess, do you have a goal

01:07:34 ◼   ► for when you want to release?

01:07:37 ◼   ► I would like to have it out this year.

01:07:40 ◼   ► In reality, that's probably going to mean late December,

01:07:43 ◼   ► if anything.

01:07:45 ◼   ► But we'll see.

01:07:47 ◼   ► I don't think there's a great chance it's

01:07:49 ◼   ► going to be earlier than that.

01:07:51 ◼   ► There is a decent chance it might

01:07:52 ◼   ► be a couple months after that, maybe January, February,

01:07:55 ◼   ► something like that.

01:07:56 ◼   ► I really don't know.

01:07:57 ◼   ► I'm absolutely terrible at estimating time like this,

01:08:00 ◼   ► and as most developers are, but I'm even worse at it.

01:08:03 ◼   ► I really have no idea.

01:08:06 ◼   ► The underlying data and sync and audio layers

01:08:11 ◼   ► are all basically done.

01:08:12 ◼   ► I'm basically now building the interface.

01:08:15 ◼   ► And parts of it are done.

01:08:17 ◼   ► Parts of it are very much not done.

01:08:19 ◼   ► There's still a lot of missing features that I

01:08:21 ◼   ► haven't implemented yet.

01:08:22 ◼   ► Basics like adding and removing subscriptions,

01:08:24 ◼   ► I haven't done that yet.

01:08:26 ◼   ► there's big, big things that are not done yet that would block a 1.0.

01:08:30 ◼   ► So there's still a lot to do.

01:08:34 ◼   ► So I really have, it's very hard for me to estimate

01:08:38 ◼   ► when it's going to be. Now, do you feel like, you brought up the interface

01:08:42 ◼   ► a second ago, do you feel like you've got a pretty clear design

01:08:46 ◼   ► or idea and you're just kind of filling

01:08:50 ◼   ► in the blanks at this point, or are you still toying with it, messing around,

01:08:54 ◼   ► trying totally different paradigms.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Where do you feel you are with the UI side?

01:09:00 ◼   ► Well, I said in my post, the most important

01:09:04 ◼   ► navigate, or the most important design challenge in a podcast app is the

01:09:08 ◼   ► Now Playing screen. Because you have all these incredibly

01:09:12 ◼   ► competing pressures, and you know, like you can't satisfy everything.

01:09:16 ◼   ► Like there was this great blog post on Joel on Software forever ago, but not

01:09:20 ◼   ► as forever ago as some of his other posts.

01:09:22 ◼   ► I think it was in the 2010s decade.

01:09:26 ◼   ► And it was talking about the design of a city garbage can.

01:09:32 ◼   ► And he was saying how, OK, it has

01:09:34 ◼   ► to be both heavy to stay in place,

01:09:38 ◼   ► but also lightweight so that people can empty it easily.

01:09:40 ◼   ► And it has to be easy to throw things in,

01:09:43 ◼   ► but hard to throw certain things in, and hard to get things out

01:09:46 ◼   ► and tip things over.

01:09:47 ◼   ► So it had to be heavy and light, big and small,

01:09:51 ◼   ► easy and hard to use.

01:09:52 ◼   ► There's all these competing pressures.

01:09:55 ◼   ► There's a lot of that in the design of lots of things

01:09:57 ◼   ► in software, and the podcast now playing screen

01:10:00 ◼   ► is no exception.

01:10:03 ◼   ► You look at all the controls that most of these apps

01:10:06 ◼   ► try to cram in there, and you can see why they do it.

01:10:12 ◼   ► If you have the big album art, it looks really nice.

01:10:16 ◼   ► but it also takes up the vast majority of the vertical space.

01:10:19 ◼   ► So you can not have the big album art,

01:10:22 ◼   ► which is what Downcast does.

01:10:25 ◼   ► You can shrink that away, and then it leaves room

01:10:27 ◼   ► so you can show show notes.

01:10:29 ◼   ► But you still lose a lot of that vertical space.

01:10:31 ◼   ► You can show the big album art like what everyone else does,

01:10:34 ◼   ► but then you have these basically two zones

01:10:37 ◼   ► to put skinny controls, the top bar and the bottom area.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And what most of these apps have done

01:10:43 ◼   ► is basically clone the iOS 7 music app

01:10:48 ◼   ► with its arrangement of controls, for the most part.

01:10:51 ◼   ► That's what almost all these major apps have done then.

01:10:55 ◼   ► And I don't think that's necessarily

01:10:57 ◼   ► the best arrangement.

01:10:58 ◼   ► There's a lot of that I'm going to do separately

01:11:00 ◼   ► or differently from what they're doing.

01:11:04 ◼   ► And yeah, but this is not an easy problem at all.

01:11:08 ◼   ► A lot of them have also done things that I think

01:11:10 ◼   ► are a little bit odd.

01:11:12 ◼   ► The cool new thing, which a few of them have done, is to pull colors from the artwork to use as the interface tint color.

01:11:20 ◼   ► I've had this running in development for a while. I actually turned it off a couple of weeks ago because it just was...

01:11:28 ◼   ► Like, the colors it pulls are not always good for the controls.

01:11:32 ◼   ► And it was weird having the interface be that inconsistent. Like, every time we'd look at it, it would be a different look.

01:11:38 ◼   ► different look and it was it was a little bit jarring it causes a few other

01:11:42 ◼   ► problems like okay well if the now playing screen has that tint color what

01:11:46 ◼   ► about the rest of the app do you give it to the whole app or do you give it just

01:11:49 ◼   ► to that screen and if you give it to the whole app well then what happens you

01:11:54 ◼   ► know if you're not playing anything what color do you use you like that or if you

01:11:57 ◼   ► give it to use that screen then how do you make the transitions between those

01:12:00 ◼   ► two screens look look okay there's all sorts of little like bothering

01:12:05 ◼   ► challenges involved in that.

01:12:07 ◼   ► So that's annoying.

01:12:08 ◼   ► The other thing they also do is most apps, including Apple's,

01:12:13 ◼   ► show the artwork in the list screen as a grid.

01:12:17 ◼   ► You have just the big thumbnails of each show as a grid.

01:12:22 ◼   ► And it looks really cool.

01:12:24 ◼   ► It looks like you're scrolling through a grid of LPs,

01:12:26 ◼   ► if anybody listening to this actually knows what an LP is.

01:12:30 ◼   ► So you're scrolling through this grid.

01:12:33 ◼   ► I have that working in mine too. It's easy because it's a collection view and collection views make that extremely easy to do.

01:12:38 ◼   ► But I'm pulling it out because it drives me crazy whenever I have to find a show in it.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Because finding a show in a grid is terrible. When you're just like skimming with your eyes and looking at a screenshot,

01:12:50 ◼   ► it looks good. It looks really good.

01:12:52 ◼   ► However, it doesn't work because you have to zigzag with your eyes back and forth and it just does not work well.

01:13:01 ◼   ► In fact, John, didn't you always complain about Instapaper's iPad app in that regard?

01:13:06 ◼   ► I did. You showed me the grid at WWC 2011 or something.

01:13:11 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:13:11 ◼   ► So I didn't like it. You kept it anyway.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Wasn't that in the CAF area? Because I believe I was sitting there when this happened,

01:13:18 ◼   ► and my recollection of it was you said, "Hey, John, look at what I'm doing for Instapaper on

01:13:24 ◼   ► the iPad," and it was, "I don't like it." Immediately. There was no hesitation.

01:13:28 ◼   ► No, I think I think it was I think it was in Presidio and then when you'd first showed me the grid

01:13:32 ◼   ► But yeah, no, I don't not a fan right and and you know with instant paper

01:13:37 ◼   ► It was a little bit better in that I'm not usually scrolling through to find something in particular

01:13:42 ◼   ► I'm usually just looking at the top of you and saying oh give me that one

01:13:45 ◼   ► But I am and it was killing me because I would read I would wouldn't always read from the top

01:13:49 ◼   ► I'd read like, you know the fifth one down on the right and that would shift everything over

01:13:54 ◼   ► so items that used to be on the left are now on the right and items that used to be on the right are now on

01:13:58 ◼   ► the left because it's two columns. And so now I couldn't even use like my spatial

01:14:01 ◼   ► memory of where was that article about the whatever. I start skimming the left-hand column

01:14:06 ◼   ► not realizing that because I had read something higher up everything had shifted and now I

01:14:09 ◼   ► have to look in the right-hand column and then eventually you just go revert to zigzag

01:14:13 ◼   ► because that's the only viable hit every point to make sure you're finding a thing. Whereas

01:14:17 ◼   ► when it was just a big linear list it looked awkward because it seemed like they had too

01:14:20 ◼   ► much horizontal room, although I liked seeing all the titles. But then you just look at

01:14:23 ◼   ► one spot with your eyes and scroll.

01:14:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's also easier if you know they're going to be sorted in some way, especially

01:14:31 ◼   ► if they're going to be sorted alphabetically or something like that.

01:14:32 ◼   ► It's really, really easy to then browse that and find what you're looking for.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Or even time.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I just find it more natural to go back in time as a linear list instead of going back

01:14:41 ◼   ► in time as left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:14:45 ◼   ► So yeah, I'm going to be making very different decisions in some areas as these other apps,

01:14:51 ◼   ► because obviously, as you can tell, if you've ever listened to me ever anywhere, I have

01:14:55 ◼   ► opinions that are pretty strongly held sometimes. And I'm not afraid to look at something and

01:15:00 ◼   ► say, "You know what? Everyone else is doing this this way, but I think that's wrong."

01:15:04 ◼   ► Or "I think I have a better way to do it."

01:15:06 ◼   ► You want a free feature suggestion?

01:15:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:09 ◼   ► This is one you probably shouldn't use because, kind of like my annoyance with the home button,

01:15:14 ◼   ► it only applies to me. But it definitely applies to me, and me and probably like five other

01:15:18 ◼   ► people. So if you want to sell six copies of this program, you know, this is the feature

01:15:22 ◼   ► of you. I listen on my iPod shuffle so I'm really not in the audience for your app at

01:15:27 ◼   ► all anyway because I like to have the physical button, I like having the little thing I can

01:15:30 ◼   ► clip onto my, you know, clothes or whatever. And I like to be able to use it without looking,

01:15:34 ◼   ► all of which you pretty much can't do no matter what you do with that, with the now playing

01:15:37 ◼   ► screen so you shouldn't even bother optimizing for that case. But anyway, when I am using

01:15:42 ◼   ► an iPod touch to listen to the podcast, which I occasionally do, like I hook it up to a

01:15:45 ◼   ► speaker dock, I don't have an AirPlay one, but I hook it up to a speaker dock and, you

01:15:48 ◼   ► listen to it in the house and stuff. The challenge for me is going to an episode

01:15:53 ◼   ► and then moving the little scrubber thing to find where I like left off

01:15:57 ◼   ► because maybe I was listening to it on my iPod shuffle which of course doesn't

01:15:59 ◼   ► synchronize the play point with you know my iPod touch doesn't synchronize with

01:16:03 ◼   ► it like it's all an island they're not synchronizing with each other at all

01:16:05 ◼   ► because it's too many different devices. So I need to find like where was that

01:16:09 ◼   ► spot where I was listening and very long podcast which I listen to when you have

01:16:13 ◼   ► two hours on the width of an iPhone screen, there's not enough resolution in moving that

01:16:19 ◼   ► little thumb thing to be able to get to the spot that you want.

01:16:23 ◼   ► You can get close, but then you're like, "Okay, I've got to grab that little circle thing

01:16:27 ◼   ► with my thumb and I move it one pixel.

01:16:29 ◼   ► Oh wait, no, one pixel is actually like a minute and a half and I'm too far and I'll

01:16:32 ◼   ► go back.

01:16:33 ◼   ► Whoa."

01:16:34 ◼   ► It's really, really ... I mean, it's just not possible.

01:16:35 ◼   ► There's just not enough resolution there.

01:16:36 ◼   ► So when I think about how I would like this to be, I think about it like a video game

01:16:40 ◼   ► where instead of being the direct manipulation,

01:16:43 ◼   ► which you're totally supposed to do on iOS and on the Mac,

01:16:45 ◼   ► where I move my thumb an inch,

01:16:47 ◼   ► the little circle moves an inch,

01:16:48 ◼   ► it stays right under my thumb.

01:16:50 ◼   ► That's exactly how it works.

01:16:51 ◼   ► You have to end up going to a model

01:16:53 ◼   ► where you are controlling the little line

01:16:57 ◼   ► that's intersecting the timeline of audio.

01:17:00 ◼   ► And you have kind of like a jog, shuttle, whatever thing,

01:17:03 ◼   ► where as I push it to the right,

01:17:05 ◼   ► that little line goes faster and faster.

01:17:06 ◼   ► And as it goes faster and faster,

01:17:09 ◼   ► the zoom zooms out to see more of the line.

01:17:12 ◼   ► So at maximum speed, I can see the entire two hours of audio.

01:17:16 ◼   ► But at slower speeds, I'm actually

01:17:18 ◼   ► seeing in the full width of the screen,

01:17:20 ◼   ► maybe like a minute of audio or 30 seconds of audio.

01:17:23 ◼   ► And so you kind of understand-- it's kind of hard to explain.

01:17:25 ◼   ► Where you're not sliding the thing back and forth,

01:17:27 ◼   ► you're basically doing accelerate to the right

01:17:30 ◼   ► or accelerate to the left, depending on how far off center

01:17:32 ◼   ► you put that thing.

01:17:33 ◼   ► And the key thing is that as your little guy goes faster,

01:17:37 ◼   ► You have to zoom out, kind of like in Super Smash Brothers where when you get far away

01:17:41 ◼   ► from each other on the board, it zooms out so they both stay in view, but when they get

01:17:44 ◼   ► closer together it zooms in.

01:17:46 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm explaining it well, but this is the type of system that would give

01:17:50 ◼   ► me enough control to when I get closer to where I want to go to fine tune it.

01:17:54 ◼   ► This is true actually in any audio editing application, any video editing applications.

01:17:59 ◼   ► When I want to fine tune something, I want that second, that half second, that microsecond

01:18:04 ◼   ► to fill the full width of my screen so I can really finally adjust it.

01:18:08 ◼   ► But when I want to select an hour and a half of it, I want to see the whole thing, right?

01:18:11 ◼   ► And you have the little zoom in, zoom out that you can manually do,

01:18:14 ◼   ► but I would like it to sort of be automatic based on how fast my little guy is moving to scrub around.

01:18:18 ◼   ► That, I don't know who wants that feature.

01:18:20 ◼   ► 30 second back, 8 second forward, whatever is perfectly fine for normals.

01:18:24 ◼   ► But for me, I would definitely be interested in any audio playback application

01:18:30 ◼   ► that let me scrub and find my spot with that kind of precision.

01:18:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, I totally get what you're saying.

01:18:37 ◼   ► And I have actually really thought about doing

01:18:40 ◼   ► some kind of really cool scrubber

01:18:42 ◼   ► to allow that kind of precision,

01:18:45 ◼   ► kind of like a logarithmic type of view.

01:18:48 ◼   ► I've talked in the past about how I wish

01:18:51 ◼   ► somebody did a logarithmic calendar view.

01:18:53 ◼   ► Same thing applies to GPS and directions display,

01:18:58 ◼   ► where I wanna see the next block of my direction

01:19:03 ◼   ► in great detail, but then I also want to see,

01:19:06 ◼   ► what am I doing over the next half hour in far less detail?

01:19:09 ◼   ► Same thing with the calendar.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I really need to see today in hour by hour detail,

01:19:16 ◼   ► but maybe the rest of the week I don't.

01:19:19 ◼   ► And then for the next three weeks,

01:19:22 ◼   ► I really don't need to see that at all.

01:19:23 ◼   ► So having that kind of logarithmic decay of the view scale

01:19:28 ◼   ► in some kind of sensible way,

01:19:33 ◼   ► I've always really enjoyed thinking about that

01:19:35 ◼   ► and occasionally trying to build it.

01:19:36 ◼   ► I think I can apply a similar kind of technique here

01:19:41 ◼   ► with the scrubber.

01:19:42 ◼   ► - The good thing about the scrubber is you don't actually,

01:19:44 ◼   ► unlike the calendar thing,

01:19:45 ◼   ► which is definitely also a good idea,

01:19:46 ◼   ► you don't actually have to see,

01:19:48 ◼   ► like you just need to see today in detail

01:19:50 ◼   ► when you're moving slowly,

01:19:52 ◼   ► and the only time you need to see more of the outside

01:19:54 ◼   ► is when you start to move faster.

01:19:56 ◼   ► - Right.

01:19:56 ◼   ► - Because like there's no,

01:19:57 ◼   ► like I'm not saying show the audio waveform,

01:19:59 ◼   ► it could just be a horizontal line

01:20:00 ◼   ► and like the thickness of the line

01:20:01 ◼   ► shows how far zoomed in you are.

01:20:02 ◼   ► So when you're moving super slow, the line is super thick,

01:20:05 ◼   ► and your vertical line intersecting it

01:20:06 ◼   ► is just moving along slowly.

01:20:08 ◼   ► But when you move fast, you can tell you're zooming out

01:20:10 ◼   ► because the line gets thinner.

01:20:11 ◼   ► You could use the audio aim forward, I guess,

01:20:12 ◼   ► but it just seems like more work than necessary.

01:20:15 ◼   ► And maybe it would help in terms of showing loudness levels

01:20:17 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:20:17 ◼   ► But this is a type of UI that most people would think,

01:20:21 ◼   ► that's stupid eye candy, and you'd

01:20:22 ◼   ► be just trying to go for an ADA by making this cool iOS 7

01:20:25 ◼   ► looking zoomable waveform at 60 frames per second.

01:20:29 ◼   ► It's like a little OpenGL game embedded in your application.

01:20:32 ◼   ► And there is an aspect of that, like it would be neat and cool and a lot of people would

01:20:35 ◼   ► see it and be like, "This seems ridiculous."

01:20:36 ◼   ► But I think there's an actual practical benefit for the five people on earth who want precision

01:20:41 ◼   ► when trying to find where they left off on their seven other non-internet connected iPod

01:20:47 ◼   ► podcast playing devices.

01:20:48 ◼   ► All right, so we're running a little bit long.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Let me ask you a couple quick questions.

01:20:53 ◼   ► One, how much is it going to cost?

01:20:54 ◼   ► Do you want to announce that?

01:20:55 ◼   ► Nope.

01:20:56 ◼   ► All right.

01:20:57 ◼   ► But you said you were thinking about some UI things that you were going to make it special,

01:21:03 ◼   ► that were going to make Overcast special.

01:21:04 ◼   ► Is there anything else that you're willing to talk about that would make this special?

01:21:07 ◼   ► Nope.

01:21:08 ◼   ► All right.

01:21:09 ◼   ► I just want to make sure we establish that lest we get a million questions about it.

01:21:13 ◼   ► I'll announce the price for them.

01:21:14 ◼   ► It's $100 million, right?

01:21:15 ◼   ► Isn't that what you said on your blog?

01:21:17 ◼   ► That's for the dot com.

01:21:20 ◼   ► You just need to sell one copy and you can finally get that dot com.

01:21:25 ◼   ► You could finally get the .com you've always wanted.

01:21:27 ◼   ► No, wait.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Didn't he come down to 95?

01:21:30 ◼   ► Yes.

01:21:31 ◼   ► He came down by 5 million in his first email.

01:21:34 ◼   ► That's right.

01:21:35 ◼   ► You haggled someone down $5 million in price.

01:21:38 ◼   ► You're quite a negotiator.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Just like that.

01:21:41 ◼   ► All right.

01:21:42 ◼   ► Does that mean we're done?

01:21:44 ◼   ► I think so.

01:21:45 ◼   ► All right.

01:21:46 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Squarespace and Ding.

01:21:48 ◼   ► And we'll see you next week.

01:21:52 ◼   ► Now the show is over.

01:21:54 ◼   ► They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:21:58 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:21:59 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:22:01 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:22:02 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:22:08 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:22:09 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:22:11 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:22:12 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:22:17 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:22:27 ◼   ► So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M E-N-T Marco Arment

01:22:34 ◼   ► S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:22:42 ◼   ► They didn't mean to Accidental (Accidental)

01:22:47 ◼   ► Tech broadcast so long

01:22:52 ◼   ► Wait, so we have a major issue. Arkegon in the chat is saying, "Hey, TP guys, I was just in Montreal and I tried the bagels and you were wrong. New York bagels are better."

01:23:02 ◼   ► When did we ever say New York bagels were not better?

01:23:04 ◼   ► I certainly never said that.

01:23:05 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:23:07 ◼   ► I never said that.

01:23:08 ◼   ► I mean, we've—well, most of us are going to be at Singleton in a couple of weeks in

01:23:12 ◼   ► Montreal, but I've never had the bagels in Montreal.

01:23:16 ◼   ► I just heard that I should.

01:23:17 ◼   ► The same.

01:23:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:19 ◼   ► So I've gone there the last two years for Singleton, but I still have never had the

01:23:24 ◼   ► bagels there.

01:23:25 ◼   ► I've already had the bagels from Montreal, so one up on you guys.

01:23:28 ◼   ► No, no.

01:23:29 ◼   ► It's fancy.

01:23:30 ◼   ► I've talked about it.

01:23:31 ◼   ► I mean, they're a thing.

01:23:32 ◼   ► They're a thing.

01:23:33 ◼   ► It's like Chicago pizza.

01:23:34 ◼   ► It's like Chicago pizza. It's not what I expect from pizza.

01:23:38 ◼   ► Right. It's using the same word to describe what should be a different food classification.

01:23:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, you could still call it a bagel. It's a regional bread product

01:23:45 ◼   ► shaped in a ring. It's a Montreal bagel. It's like, you know, and granted, mine had endured

01:23:52 ◼   ► the--how long did it take to get down from Boston? Because mine were basically purchased

01:23:55 ◼   ► and then driven down to Boston, and then I ate them. And so it's not that long.

01:23:58 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like five, six hours probably.

01:24:00 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's—I mean, they weren't super fresh, but they were, you know, made that day.

01:24:04 ◼   ► Yeah, Chicago pizza, though, that's not pizza. That's like pie or cake or something.

01:24:10 ◼   ► I know. It's the same type of thing. Like, the Montreal bagels are very kind of doughy,

01:24:13 ◼   ► and they're a little bit misshapen and differently sized, and, you know, but it's fine.

01:24:18 ◼   ► It's like, they're just not New York bagels.

01:24:20 ◼   ► You know, well, they're Canadians. They're like a little bit off.

01:24:24 ◼   ► They're more than a little bit off. Like, no one would confuse—if you took a New York bagel and

01:24:28 ◼   ► that thing next to each other, no one would be able to, you could tell they were different.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Maybe you wouldn't know which is which, but you would know these are clearly different.

01:24:35 ◼   ► Do they apologize when you bite into them?

01:24:38 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:24:39 ◼   ► Are you resisting the hairlines and overcast UI?

01:24:43 ◼   ► I have like one or two.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Actually, so I'm doing most of the UI design myself, but I'm running everything by Louis

01:24:52 ◼   ► Louis Mantilla, and so he's kind of like an editor of my insane ideas sometimes.

01:24:58 ◼   ► So like my first pass at the Play/Rewind/Fast Forward icons, I'm doing all the—or as many

01:25:05 ◼   ► of the graphics as I can, I'm drawing them procedurally.

01:25:08 ◼   ► So I had them all as just a stroke, like at the thin outline.

01:25:12 ◼   ► And Louis is like, "What are you doing?

01:25:13 ◼   ► Fill those."

01:25:14 ◼   ► And I did, and it looked better.

01:25:16 ◼   ► So I'm keeping this.

01:25:17 ◼   ► Like I really don't like most of the iOS 7 icon designs,

01:25:22 ◼   ► like the action or toolbar icons,

01:25:26 ◼   ► them being so thin and hairline,

01:25:29 ◼   ► like being outline based rather than being filled shapes.

01:25:32 ◼   ► I'm not crazy about that.

01:25:34 ◼   ► - Did you see that link?

01:25:35 ◼   ► - You know, like the Safari icons.

01:25:35 ◼   ► - Did you see that link?

01:25:36 ◼   ► I put it in the Skype thing about that?

01:25:37 ◼   ► Did I mention it?

01:25:38 ◼   ► - I haven't opened it yet though.

01:25:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, like it was someone, I feel the same way.

01:25:41 ◼   ► A lot of people I think feel the same way

01:25:43 ◼   ► 'cause we see all of them and like your eyes just rebel

01:25:47 ◼   ► and you start to think that these must be worse

01:25:50 ◼   ► in some measurable way because of how much they annoy us.

01:25:53 ◼   ► And then some guy went out to measure it

01:25:55 ◼   ► and he was not successfully able to prove that they're worse.

01:25:57 ◼   ► And it doesn't mean they're not worse, but he didn't do it.

01:26:00 ◼   ► But I feel that way too.

01:26:01 ◼   ► There's a sameness to them.

01:26:03 ◼   ► And it's not just the sameness to them in terms of recognition.

01:26:05 ◼   ► There's a lightness.

01:26:06 ◼   ► Everything in the UI can't be light.

01:26:09 ◼   ► That's what-- feeling them is not so much

01:26:11 ◼   ► that they were bad when they were outlines

01:26:12 ◼   ► and that you shouldn't do outlines.

01:26:13 ◼   ► It's just that if everything else on the page is an outline,

01:26:16 ◼   ► And they're an outline too, it just becomes this like,

01:26:18 ◼   ► it's like a lisp programming,

01:26:20 ◼   ► it's like a fingernail clippings an oatmeal.

01:26:22 ◼   ► It just becomes a sameness of like everything is outlines.

01:26:27 ◼   ► When everything is outlines, you know, nothing stands out.

01:26:30 ◼   ► Whereas you can make some things hairlines

01:26:32 ◼   ► and like those are, once you fill them,

01:26:34 ◼   ► they're probably the biggest solid color

01:26:37 ◼   ► recognizable shapes on the page.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And I was like, oh yeah,

01:26:39 ◼   ► now I see where the play and the pause button

01:26:41 ◼   ► are right off the bat.

01:26:42 ◼   ► I don't have to scan 17 little things of outlines.

01:26:45 ◼   ► So yeah, I think I'm still experimenting with a lot of the visuals.

01:26:50 ◼   ► The playback screen, I'm pretty well set for the design for 1.0 of the playback screen.

01:26:58 ◼   ► All the other screens, like the navigation, the lists, the playlists...

01:27:02 ◼   ► Oh my god, I just reloaded I have playlists.

01:27:05 ◼   ► All of those screens are pretty much undesigned right now.

01:27:09 ◼   ► They all just have placeholder table views and collection views and stuff.

01:27:12 ◼   ► But I'm working on that.

01:27:14 ◼   ► We should do every show from now on.

01:27:15 ◼   ► I'll give you a future suggestion,

01:27:17 ◼   ► because I already have two more queued up

01:27:18 ◼   ► for the next two shows.

01:27:19 ◼   ► That's great.

01:27:20 ◼   ► Yeah, let's do it.

01:27:21 ◼   ► And you should implement none of them.

01:27:24 ◼   ► I'll just keep suggesting them and explaining

01:27:27 ◼   ► why you shouldn't implement any of them, but why, if you did,

01:27:29 ◼   ► I would be the one person to use them,

01:27:31 ◼   ► if I actually used an app like yours, which I don't.

01:27:34 ◼   ► So what you're saying is you would pay $95 million

01:27:37 ◼   ► if he actually implements all these things?

01:27:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:27:41 ◼   ► I still like physical buttons.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Listen to the podcast when I'm on the move,

01:27:45 ◼   ► and I'm in the car, you know,

01:27:47 ◼   ► in places where I can't look to touch a touch screen.

01:27:50 ◼   ► - That's why the now playing screen is so hard to design,

01:27:53 ◼   ► because you wanna have everything at easy reach,

01:27:57 ◼   ► but for me, I also listen to podcasts a lot

01:28:01 ◼   ► while I'm on the move, while I'm walking,

01:28:03 ◼   ► or in the car or something, and so I can't,

01:28:05 ◼   ► either like in the case of the car,

01:28:07 ◼   ► where I really can't look at the screen most of the time,

01:28:11 ◼   ► in the case of walking where I can look at the screen

01:28:15 ◼   ► but I'm moving and so I'm not going to be that precise with my touches and I'd rather

01:28:19 ◼   ► not have to look at the screen for longer than I have to.

01:28:23 ◼   ► There's all these conditions where having a bunch of tiny

01:28:27 ◼   ► controls and trying to cram all this functionality into one screen

01:28:31 ◼   ► while also making it look good and

01:28:35 ◼   ► making it hard to hit the wrong thing. It's very hard to

01:28:39 ◼   ► find the balance there.

01:28:40 ◼   ► How's the review coming, John?

01:28:43 ◼   ► Any new news?

01:28:45 ◼   ► I know it was pretty much done.

01:28:46 ◼   ► Ah, some new benchmarks.

01:28:47 ◼   ► I've got to update some more graphs.

01:28:49 ◼   ► I've spent some time squishing my JPEGs.

01:28:51 ◼   ► You know, it's like just waiting around.

01:28:55 ◼   ► I think there are people doing copy editing now.

01:28:58 ◼   ► They're copy editing text that we know is not final.

01:29:01 ◼   ► Nice.

01:29:02 ◼   ► How does the most recent beta feel?

01:29:03 ◼   ► Does it feel releasable?

01:29:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

01:29:06 ◼   ► I mean, now that everything works,

01:29:10 ◼   ► and now that most of the iCloud stuff seems to,

01:29:14 ◼   ► because that's the other part of it,

01:29:15 ◼   ► it's like, are these bits on disk, or you know,

01:29:18 ◼   ► not on disk, but are these bits that you're downloading

01:29:20 ◼   ► ready to ship versus are the bits on Apple server

01:29:24 ◼   ► is somewhere ready to ship with them?

01:29:26 ◼   ► And half of it is the servers,

01:29:27 ◼   ► because for the longest time, like,

01:29:29 ◼   ► you know, iCloud stuff was like not working,

01:29:31 ◼   ► it was crazy wonky.

01:29:32 ◼   ► Was it because of the client side stuff?

01:29:34 ◼   ► Was it because of the server side stuff?

01:29:35 ◼   ► But now when you have the same build, like DPA's been out for a while, and it's gotten

01:29:40 ◼   ► better I think, and it's like, well, the bits haven't changed on disk, so it must be Apple

01:29:44 ◼   ► servers getting better.

01:29:46 ◼   ► It's close.

01:29:47 ◼   ► Like, I don't think they could say, hey, the DPA you've had the whole time was the GM,

01:29:51 ◼   ► because they're not in a hurry.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Obviously, they're not in a hurry.

01:29:54 ◼   ► They're shipping the iMacs with Mountain Lion, right?

01:29:57 ◼   ► Yeah, it's kind of weird, huh?

01:29:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, they're not in a hurry.

01:30:01 ◼   ► But that is totally, now it's thinking, oh, if they're going to do that, they didn't mention

01:30:05 ◼   ► anything about a free upgrade, so maybe Mavericks is going to be free. I don't know. If it is,

01:30:10 ◼   ► it'd be good to tell me, so I could write about that. But they're close. If they say

01:30:16 ◼   ► the next build is a GM, I would not be shocked. So you don't sound too stressed, which is good.

01:30:22 ◼   ► Well, it's like, what can I do about it at this point? At this point, I don't even want to look

01:30:26 ◼   ► at it anymore. I just want to know the information, update the final text, give it one last read

01:30:32 ◼   ► through to make sure I'm not crazy, and make a bunch of books, and get into the second phase of

01:30:37 ◼   ► it, just fighting with the ebook stores and getting everything upright on the website so everything

01:30:43 ◼   ► works, and fixing broken links, and doing all the stuff that you do. I want to move on to that phase

01:30:49 ◼   ► to know how spectacularly I'm going to screw up the ebook part of it this year.

01:30:54 ◼   ► Do you want to tell us how long it is?

01:30:55 ◼   ► It's like the same length as the last one. It's a little bit shorter, I think. In terms of words,

01:31:01 ◼   ► it's a little bit shorter, but in terms of, you know, size and number of the screenshots,

01:31:07 ◼   ► maybe it's similar, but the screenshots are all retina. So volume-wise, in terms of megabytes,

01:31:13 ◼   ► it's like twice as big because, you know, that's where all the size is. So it's not that long.

01:31:19 ◼   ► You know, it's funny when R splits it across, you know, 39 pages, because that's how long it is,

01:31:25 ◼   ► that is one of the few times that like, AnandTech or NonTech or whatever, whatever it's called,

01:31:30 ◼   ► Those are the only times that being split across 100 pages, I do not find annoying.

01:31:35 ◼   ► And I split it across the pages. They don't paginate it. When I did my initial run of

01:31:39 ◼   ► paginating, I tried to do on logical sections, like, "Here, I'm talking about this. Now I'm

01:31:43 ◼   ► going to talk about that. Okay, now I'm going to talk about that." And sometimes you're talking

01:31:46 ◼   ► about something that goes on for a long time, like the energy, about energy saving stuff.

01:31:50 ◼   ► There's a lot of energy saving stuff in there because that's a lot of what Mavericks is about.

01:31:54 ◼   ► Clearly, that section needs to be cut up into sections. So here's parts one and two of that

01:31:58 ◼   ► section and the next page is parts three and four or whatever. And I just do my

01:32:01 ◼   ► initial logical run-through and I end up with way too many pages. And then I go

01:32:05 ◼   ► back and say, "Okay, well, I start counting how long the pages are in terms of page

01:32:10 ◼   ► downs. How many times can I hit page down before I hit the bottom of this quote-unquote

01:32:13 ◼   ► page?" And it varies wildly because one could be like four page downs and the other

01:32:17 ◼   ► one could be like seven or eight. And one quote-unquote page is twice as long as the

01:32:22 ◼   ► other. It's like, "Yeah, but I do want to split it into logical sections." So I play

01:32:26 ◼   ► play with that up to the last minute, trying to strike a balance between logical breaking

01:32:30 ◼   ► points where you can be like, "All right, I'm done with page two or page three," and

01:32:33 ◼   ► then know where you want to come back to, and also not leaving any pages super short

01:32:37 ◼   ► or any pages ridiculously long.

01:32:39 ◼   ► It's not easy to do because when I write it, I don't have that in mind.

01:32:42 ◼   ► This is all a post-processing step.

01:32:44 ◼   ► I ended up initially with way more pages than last year, and I've been cutting it down slowly

01:32:48 ◼   ► to be the same number or fewer pages than last year.

01:32:51 ◼   ► Nice.

01:32:52 ◼   ► I think I've just figured out when it is that you should stop writing the reviews,

01:32:56 ◼   ► and that's when somebody makes a killer infographic about how many links you had per review, and

01:33:01 ◼   ► how many words, and how many occurrences of how many of these particular words, and a

01:33:06 ◼   ► tag cloud, because that's still trendy, right?

01:33:08 ◼   ► And when that mega infographic happens, kind of like the person that did the mega research

01:33:14 ◼   ► into—maybe it was David Smith, actually—but whoever did the mega research into hypercritical

01:33:19 ◼   ► show lengths and all that stuff. When that moment happens, that's when you can mic

01:33:24 ◼   ► drop and walk away.

01:33:25 ◼   ► I think that's already happened. And if you look at all the trends, it's like they

01:33:28 ◼   ► got longer and longer, they peeked around Tiger, and now they're getting shorter and

01:33:31 ◼   ► shorter. But again, I don't measure my things. I'd rather have a fewer number of higher

01:33:38 ◼   ► quality words than more crappier words.

01:33:42 ◼   ► We have one more important thing to discuss on the air. How about that new M3/M4?

01:33:47 ◼   ► Oh man, that looks awesome.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Oh, it looks so nice.

01:33:50 ◼   ► Send me a link, because you guys have been talking about it, and every time I click on

01:33:53 ◼   ► that stupid Beamer whatever forum thing on my iPod Touch, the page is unreadable, because

01:33:58 ◼   ► people don't understand that mobile devices exist.

01:34:00 ◼   ► So, send me it again.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Well, to be fair, it's like a PHP BB site, so it's basically stuck in 2002.

01:34:08 ◼   ► You should look at that page on your phone now.

01:34:10 ◼   ► It's the craziest page I've ever seen rendered on a phone in my life.

01:34:13 ◼   ► No, there's no way I'm looking at that on my phone.

01:34:15 ◼   ► I like my phone.

01:34:16 ◼   ► My phone's brand new. I'm not gonna...

01:34:18 ◼   ► I just put it...

01:34:19 ◼   ► [HONK]

01:34:20 ◼   ► Oh, I just put that in the link in the chat.

01:34:22 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:34:23 ◼   ► I think this is the one we were passing around earlier.

01:34:25 ◼   ► Wow, I never would have guessed that this is what it looks like.

01:34:27 ◼   ► Yeah, this is the one. And this is like a big hack to the forum.

01:34:30 ◼   ► Also that they like, they always do this on this site.

01:34:32 ◼   ► They'll have like their big info block sections.

01:34:35 ◼   ► Like they'll have like a thread for each thing.

01:34:37 ◼   ► And yeah, it does look ridiculous on phones.

01:34:41 ◼   ► But you can see the big news here

01:34:44 ◼   ► is the very powerful engine.

01:34:47 ◼   ► The big news is that it's a twin turbo inline six,

01:34:52 ◼   ► which we knew it would be an inline six,

01:34:55 ◼   ► and we knew it would be turbo.

01:34:56 ◼   ► Number of turbochargers is new information,

01:34:58 ◼   ► although it's pretty obvious.

01:35:00 ◼   ► And the biggest news is,

01:35:03 ◼   ► we knew it would have a little over 400 horsepower,

01:35:06 ◼   ► so apparently it's roughly 430, and tons of torque.

01:35:11 ◼   ► The biggest news, though, is that the thing is really light.

01:35:13 ◼   ► saying is quote, under 3,300 pounds, or under 3,306

01:35:18 ◼   ► pounds.

01:35:20 ◼   ► And that's really good.

01:35:22 ◼   ► I mean, for a car to have 430 horsepower and be that

01:35:28 ◼   ► lightweight is really, really impressive.

01:35:31 ◼   ► Yeah, it's going to be nice.

01:35:32 ◼   ► And the interesting thing to me was that it's basically my

01:35:34 ◼   ► motor with another turbo and much better internals.

01:35:37 ◼   ► And 18 pounds of boost is a huge load of boost.

01:35:40 ◼   ► I mean, it's a huge boost.

01:35:42 ◼   ► is a load of boost. I mean that is ridiculous.

01:35:45 ◼   ► And what does your car weigh just for comparison?

01:35:47 ◼   ► Now I have an xDrive which makes it worse, but I want to say it's like 36, 3700 pounds, something like that.

01:35:52 ◼   ► I don't remember offhand. Let me see if I can find it.

01:35:55 ◼   ► E90... whoops.

01:35:57 ◼   ► 3560 it looks like.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Well, you type better and faster than I do apparently.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Is that an xDrive or not an xDrive?

01:36:05 ◼   ► And you said how much?

01:36:07 ◼   ► 3560 on this one site.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Okay, so yeah, I mean, and I have, what, 300 horsepower or something like that?

01:36:12 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:36:13 ◼   ► So, so, uh, you're talking about 130 more horsepower and what, 300, 400 pounds less?

01:36:19 ◼   ► 500 pounds less?

01:36:20 ◼   ► Uh, about 250 less, roughly.

01:36:22 ◼   ► Okay, I mean, that, that's gonna be ridiculous.

01:36:26 ◼   ► It's gonna be absolutely ridiculous.

01:36:29 ◼   ► And they also, they, they, they made some moves to try to push the center of gravity

01:36:32 ◼   ► lower.

01:36:33 ◼   ► Um, they have like a carbon fiber roof if you, uh, delete the sunroof and, um, a few

01:36:38 ◼   ► other little tricks that they're pushing the weight lower. So basically, it's probably

01:36:42 ◼   ► going to be a really, really good car for enthusiasts.

01:36:46 ◼   ► Yeah, the LaFerrari is what, 2,100 pounds? 900 horsepower? Really the center of gravity.

01:36:52 ◼   ► Is it really that little?

01:36:54 ◼   ► I believe you can buy probably about 10 M3s for the price of the Ferrari LaFerrari.

01:36:59 ◼   ► Then they'll just weigh even more.

01:37:01 ◼   ► Yeah, no. That was supposed to be the goal for the new M's, right? To actually make them

01:37:07 ◼   ► lighter than the non-M variants, which is a change from recent years.

01:37:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that was exactly the goal, was try to keep roughly the same horsepower, but go to

01:37:17 ◼   ► a natural V8 to a turbo I6 and save a bunch of weight.

01:37:23 ◼   ► That was the goal.

01:37:24 ◼   ► And yeah, it looks like they definitely have.

01:37:28 ◼   ► And of course, to make both of you happy, it still comes with a manual transmission.

01:37:32 ◼   ► As it should.

01:37:33 ◼   ► It has automatic rev-blipping.

01:37:35 ◼   ► As it should not.

01:37:36 ◼   ► No, no, it's optional.

01:37:38 ◼   ► I thought it wasn't optional.

01:37:39 ◼   ► I thought it was hard-coded.

01:37:40 ◼   ► No, somewhere I've read that the way they do-- oh, no,

01:37:43 ◼   ► they-- it's headed on the M5, and I'm pretty sure it's

01:37:46 ◼   ► going to be the same here, where in Sport+ mode,

01:37:51 ◼   ► it does not rev-blip, so that you can still

01:37:53 ◼   ► heel-toe if you want to.

01:37:55 ◼   ► See, as someone who does heel-toe regularly,

01:37:58 ◼   ► I can tell you there are few feelings better in the world

01:38:00 ◼   ► than doing a perfectly rev-matched heel-toe downshift

01:38:04 ◼   ► while braking.

01:38:05 ◼   ► I mean, it's just fantastic.

01:38:07 ◼   ► And so having that taken away from you would really suck.

01:38:10 ◼   ► - We should take the synchros out of your car too, Casey.

01:38:12 ◼   ► It'd be more exciting.

01:38:13 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:38:14 ◼   ► - How about the electric starter, take that out.

01:38:16 ◼   ► - Well, it was either your rev matching

01:38:18 ◼   ► in a car with synchros.

01:38:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:38:22 ◼   ► There's no matching required, but yes, I understand

01:38:24 ◼   ► you wanna get the engine up to more RPMs,

01:38:25 ◼   ► so it serves a purpose, but I wouldn't call it rev matching.

01:38:29 ◼   ► - The big question mark here, I think,

01:38:32 ◼   ► is the electric steering.

01:38:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was gonna say,

01:38:35 ◼   ► is this a hydraulic steering or no?

01:38:37 ◼   ► - It doesn't, and it's a brand new electric steering system

01:38:40 ◼   ► that the M division was not happy

01:38:43 ◼   ► with the regular one on the new 3 Series.

01:38:44 ◼   ► I don't blame them, it's terrible.

01:38:46 ◼   ► Like I've driven a couple of the new 3 Series cars

01:38:49 ◼   ► and I like them in every other way,

01:38:50 ◼   ► except that steering really is just totally numb.

01:38:53 ◼   ► It feels like Tiff's Lexus.

01:38:54 ◼   ► - I have not noticed that.

01:38:56 ◼   ► I have not noticed that.

01:38:57 ◼   ► Now I've only driven the new F33 Series a couple times.

01:39:01 ◼   ► It was always quickly, but I was actually,

01:39:03 ◼   ► I had lunch with a friend of mine, Brad, who has a F30 328 Sportline, and I didn't drive

01:39:08 ◼   ► his car today, but I have in the past. And I've never noticed it, but again, I've

01:39:12 ◼   ► only driven them very briefly, never really chucked them around very much. So I'm not

01:39:16 ◼   ► saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I never found it to be egregious.

01:39:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it didn't feel good to me. Anyway. I've never driven any of these, but every

01:39:24 ◼   ► review I've read of every car company's first generation electrical steering, everybody

01:39:29 ◼   ► hates. It doesn't matter if it's BMW, Honda, it takes a while to figure out how to do it

01:39:33 ◼   ► right. And so this is a second crack at it. It's kind of good that they waited for the

01:39:36 ◼   ► M car because either you go with the hydraulic system that they knew had down pat, but it's

01:39:41 ◼   ► kind of like old tech and you get worse mileage and blah, blah, blah. Or go with the new tech,

01:39:46 ◼   ► but wait, so you at least get to be the second generation electric steering system.

01:39:50 ◼   ► I mean, I think what we're seeing here, like, you know, and people have thought about this

01:39:54 ◼   ► before, there's the big softening of these cars. BMW is becoming closer to Lexus. Lexus

01:40:01 ◼   ► is trying to become more like BMW. BMW is a major luxury car maker and the market demands

01:40:11 ◼   ► a soft ride and a soft feel and easy turning of the wheel and stuff like that. There's

01:40:16 ◼   ► all these things that the market demands that enthusiasts hate. But the fact is, if you

01:40:23 ◼   ► look around at people on the road who you see driving 3 Series and 5 Series cars, you

01:40:29 ◼   ► see like I would say the vast majority of them would not want firmer, more direct feeling

01:40:36 ◼   ► steering. The vast majority of the people I see on the road, I would guess they would

01:40:41 ◼   ► like the softer, cushier, more disconnected ride.

01:40:45 ◼   ► And so now what we're seeing is in a lot of previous generations the M cars weren't

01:40:51 ◼   ► different from the regular consumer variants. Now I think this is the beginning of them

01:40:57 ◼   ► starting to be more different by a lot. Because the goals are totally different. The enthusiasts

01:41:02 ◼   ► want a totally different set of things a lot of the time, not all the time, but a lot of

01:41:05 ◼   ► the time as the rest of the customers. And so we're seeing the regular 3 Series and 5

01:41:11 ◼   ► Series become bigger, heavier, softer. And then now we're going to see these M variants

01:41:17 ◼   ► it to a more extreme enthusiast direction where they're more expensive but they're lighter,

01:41:22 ◼   ► there's more carbon fiber, they use more highly tuned engines and they have more enthusiast

01:41:30 ◼   ► friendly transmission options and firmer suspensions and all these crazy new steering

01:41:39 ◼   ► technology stuff like that. Chat room is complaining about my rev matching comment on the Syncros.

01:41:45 ◼   ► Did you understand what I was saying, Casey?

01:41:47 ◼   ► Well, yeah, because in theory with synchronized gears, you don't actually have to rev match.

01:41:53 ◼   ► You're not matching the revs so the gears can mesh together because the synchronous is bad for you.

01:41:57 ◼   ► That's what I would call rev matching. When you're heel-toeing,

01:41:59 ◼   ► you're just trying to get the RPM of the engine up so that it's not like, you know,

01:42:03 ◼   ► it takes a while for an engine to go from low RPM to high RPM.

01:42:05 ◼   ► So if you're, you want to be braking, but you also want to be getting ready for the downshift that's coming,

01:42:10 ◼   ► so get the engine revs up, you know, like it's not, you're not matching. There's no matching type thing.

01:42:14 ◼   ► You just want the revs to be higher because you know you're gonna be changing

01:42:16 ◼   ► I guess you're kind of imagining because in the lower gear the range and rpm will have to be higher at your current speed and

01:42:21 ◼   ► If the engine rpm is lower you shift into a lower gear then you get engine braking blah blah blah

01:42:25 ◼   ► That's what I was getting at not saying that you would you would like to double clutch although

01:42:29 ◼   ► I can imagine Casey is the kind of person who would also

01:42:31 ◼   ► Double clutch in a car with synchros just because it's fun

01:42:33 ◼   ► Would but but no it it it's they're not dog gears

01:42:38 ◼   ► So you're absolutely right and my friend Bob bark

01:42:42 ◼   ► I mean, Keith in the chat also points out it helps to avoid weight transfer.

01:42:45 ◼   ► So yeah, because it's engine braking.

01:42:48 ◼   ► You don't want, you don't want, if you're switching into a lower gear and the

01:42:50 ◼   ► engine is going at the appropriate speed for the higher gear that you were in,

01:42:53 ◼   ► once you switch into the lower gear and re-engage everything, you're going to

01:42:55 ◼   ► get engine braking if your revs are not higher and, but you're in the middle

01:42:59 ◼   ► of braking and the turns, you want to get the revs up so that when you do

01:43:01 ◼   ► the downshift, then you'll, you know, and the weight transfer is because

01:43:04 ◼   ► the car decelerates.

01:43:05 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:06 ◼   ► Um, happy everybody.

01:43:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:43:08 ◼   ► Let's see, defending his honor.

01:43:10 ◼   ► Mic drop not included.

01:43:13 ◼   ► [door slams]