0:00:00Still booting.
0:00:03This is the most interesting podcast ever.
0:00:04Well, it's not a podcast yet.
0:00:06Well, unless you keep this in the show, which you better not do.
0:00:11I might put that in somewhere.
0:00:13Oh, please, dear God, no.
0:00:16First of all, I want to start this show with a story about the theme song.
0:00:21Our theme song by Jonathan Mann, spelled the same way as Merlin Mann, but with Jonathan
0:00:27in front instead of Merlin.
0:00:29Our theme song, so here's what happened.
0:00:31When we started this show, I went to Merlin Man because he made the theme song to his
0:00:37Back to Work podcast.
0:00:39And I went to Merlin and I said, "Look, I'm looking for, for this show that we're
0:00:42doing, I'm looking for something that is kind of punchy the way those opening chords
0:00:47are to Back to Work."
0:00:49[music]
0:00:50Hello.
0:00:51Did you mention bleeps and boops to him?
0:00:53I did not.
0:00:54Damn it.
0:00:55[laughter]
0:00:56Just to irritate you.
0:00:58So, anyway, so I went to Merlin and I said, "Do you have, you know, could you like whip
0:01:02something up in GarageBand or something?"
0:01:04Because he likes doing that kind of stuff and he's really good at it.
0:01:06So I said, "You know, could you whip something up in GarageBand or something just to be like
0:01:10a quick opener and a quick closer to the show?"
0:01:17And he said, "Yeah, okay, I'll work on it."
0:01:19And then like a week later, Jonathan Mann does this song and releases it on YouTube
0:01:25during his song of day thing, which we will link to in the show notes.
0:01:28Jonathan Mann did this awesome theme song that we've been using in almost every episode since then.
0:01:34If not every episode.
0:01:35♫ Accidental ♫
0:01:37It was so damn catchy.
0:01:38Like, it came out shortly before Casey and I went on our big Germany car trip.
0:01:43And we were talking about it on the trip, it was in our heads the entire time.
0:01:47It was in our wives' heads the entire time.
0:01:49It's so catchy, and we've gotten so many responses on Twitter saying
0:01:53the show is stuck, or the theme song is stuck in my head.
0:01:56It's been stuck in my head all day or all week or whatever.
0:01:58And people just love this thing, and I love it,
0:02:00and we love it, except Jon.
0:02:02But the rest of us love it.
0:02:03(laughs)
0:02:04And so eventually I went to Merlin, and I'm like,
0:02:08"You know, I think we're just gonna have to keep this
0:02:11"'cause it's so good."
0:02:12And he was like, "Yeah, I agree.
0:02:13"You should definitely keep that.
0:02:15"It's really good."
0:02:16- Well, when you gave Merlin the assignment for the song,
0:02:18did you make sure it had a budget,
0:02:20a deadline, and resources attached to it?
0:02:21I didn't and
0:02:23Therefore I guess it wasn't it wasn't a priority project. No, it wasn't a priority I think
0:02:30Priorities it didn't have like a level 10 priority. Maybe might have only had a level 8 priority, but there's 19 other level 8 priorities
0:02:37Something like that. I think I'm getting this right right Merlin. Mmm anyway, so I think that was a Merlin impression
0:02:44It's not that good of one. I
0:02:46Don't have any cards to flat also be lemon grab
0:02:50Well, no, that's more stressful.
0:02:54I can't do it, because I don't even know what show that is.
0:02:57I've heard Merlin do it enough times
0:02:58that I know what you're talking about.
0:03:00Anyway, so I went to Jonathan Mann, and I said, hey,
0:03:06can we just keep using this?
0:03:08Like, can we give you something for it?
0:03:11Can we keep using it?
0:03:12Because people love it.
0:03:13And he said, all he wants is for us
0:03:16to mention his site and his business.
0:03:18Because what his business is.
0:03:20So this guy, you've probably heard his songs before,
0:03:22at least one of them.
0:03:23One of the biggest ones is when Apple did the Antennagate
0:03:27press conference back in 2010, was it?
0:03:30Late 2010, whenever that was.
0:03:33They opened the press conference with the song
0:03:36about the Antennagate issue.
0:03:38And that song was Jonathan Mann's songs.
0:03:40I think it was just his song of the day for one of those days
0:03:42or something like that.
0:03:42He had released it right before then.
0:03:44And Steve Jobs came out and said--
0:03:46Good morning.
0:03:47Thanks for joining us here.
0:03:48We saw that on YouTube this morning and couldn't help but want to share it.
0:03:54They opened the conference with that.
0:03:55So Steve Jobs likes his songs.
0:03:57His song gets stuck in your head, and he has a business where he can write a song for your company if you want him to.
0:04:04So go to his site. It's JonathanMann.net.
0:04:09And we'll put that in the show notes also.
0:04:12You can also just follow his YouTube channel because he posts all these songs every day and they're really catchy.
0:04:16catchy. He did a hypercritical song a few months back when that was still going, and
0:04:22that was really catchy. So he's just really good at writing songs that get stuck in your
0:04:27head. And so if you have a podcast or a company or anything like that, you kind of want that
0:04:32because that's really good for you. One of the reasons I wanted to keep this song for
0:04:35us is because it gets stuck in your head, that's good for the show. That's like promotion
0:04:39for the show, and it gives you a good feeling when you hear us every week. So thanks a lot
0:04:44to Jonathan Mann for letting us use this song. And check out his site. I'm willing to in
0:04:48the show notes. JonathanMann@2n.net.
0:04:50Yeah, I feel compelled to point out that when you say they're catchy, that's like the good
0:04:55kind of catchy, not like the modern pop music annoying catchy, where it's like this thing
0:05:01burrowing into your brain. It's the happy catchy, the one that you kind of giggle about
0:05:05every time you hear somebody humming it or singing it as Tiff and all of us did for most
0:05:10of the Germany trip. So it's the good kind of catchy.
0:05:13Yeah, it's not like you know pop music that you want to you want to drill your brain out right with a spoon
0:05:17Because you just cannot get it out of your head. I mean this is like yeah, you're right
0:05:20It's the good kind and and this guy obviously
0:05:22You know Jonathan has real talent here because he's he's made lots of songs that are that catchy
0:05:27Like it's not like he had one that was really catchy and that was it. He was done
0:05:31He seems to be really really good at specifically creating good catchy songs. He makes a song every day doesn't he still doing that?
0:05:38Yeah, and I believe his reasoning for that was like to keep himself sharp and you know and develop these skills
0:05:43And he really I mean you could tell this guy. Yeah, he's he's really good at it
0:05:47Anyway, so thank you to Jonathan man
0:05:49That was a freaking great to have this theme song and I love it and well at most of the hosts on this show
0:05:56Absolutely. Love it two-thirds of the hosts
0:05:58And the other one seems to be a lot versions of the song. I like this one is catchy. I like it
0:06:02I just I'm partial to bleeps and boops
0:06:06And I agree with the people who said that the bleeps and boops, the weakest of the bleeps and boops song is that it sounds
0:06:11like there should be more song and there isn't, whereas the other one
0:06:14it kind of is a complete thing, you know?
0:06:17Oh, I should point it also. I even adjusted the EQ in the way I edit things.
0:06:22I adjusted the EQ for starting in last week's episode just to make the song sound better.
0:06:27Like it needed any help.
0:06:30Well, yeah, just, well, because I was killing its audio quality with, because I was applying the voice EQ to the global track to all
0:06:36of us, including the song track. So now the song track is untouched and so you get to
0:06:40hear it in its full glory.
0:06:41All right, so now that we have...
0:06:43You know, at 64 kilobits.
0:06:46Now that we have two consecutive podcasts about podcasts...
0:06:49Yes.
0:06:50...a really quick bit of follow-up that I just wanted to mention. A lot of people have
0:06:53come out of the woodwork and recommended a million different List Apps to me after my
0:06:58complaining about the way that List Apps work and how I want something super simple. And
0:07:02One of the things I heard a lot of is, "Dude, why don't you just use the Reminders app?"
0:07:06Which at first I didn't even realize that you could share lists in that, but apparently
0:07:09you can do it, I think, on the website and definitely on OS X, but not on iOS.
0:07:15It's close to what I want.
0:07:16It's not really what I want.
0:07:17It's not worth discussing what I want because it's really boring and not that exciting,
0:07:20but I just wanted to thank everyone for pointing these things out, but also say I've heard
0:07:24every recommendation under the sun at this point, and if you really want to engage me
0:07:28on Twitter to argue about this kind of minutia,
0:07:31then you know where to find me.
0:07:33Just listen to the song.
0:07:34It's right in there.
0:07:35(laughing)
0:07:37- Yeah, I also, I was talking about List apps yesterday
0:07:40because I was going grocery shopping,
0:07:41and a lot of people brought this up to me also.
0:07:44And I just, you know, my problem is I like the Clear app.
0:07:49I actually like using that in the store.
0:07:50It's because it has such a minimal interface,
0:07:54and everything is like a big touch target,
0:07:55and you can swipe everything.
0:07:57it's really easy to use while shopping.
0:07:59And I like that as you cross things off,
0:08:00they fall off the list.
0:08:02And so the view that you're looking at gets smaller.
0:08:05It's actually really, really very nice
0:08:07when walking around a store.
0:08:08You don't have to look that closely at the phone.
0:08:11You don't have to be that precise with your gestures.
0:08:14Everything is big and friendly to one-handed use
0:08:17while shopping.
0:08:18And I was lamenting problems I was having
0:08:21with it syncing to the Mac client
0:08:22and not being able to multi-line paste.
0:08:24Although apparently if you do a shake gesture
0:08:26or something.
0:08:28There was some kind of crazy gesture
0:08:29that I would never have guessed to attempt
0:08:32to multi-line paste something.
0:08:33I don't know.
0:08:34I didn't try it since then.
0:08:35But anyway, so I was expressing my disdain
0:08:40for shopping list apps.
0:08:42And just like Casey, I got a billion recommendations
0:08:46from everybody about their favorite shopping list app,
0:08:49or in many cases, the shopping list app
0:08:51that they make themselves.
0:08:54It's so funny how so many of these apps were like--
0:08:59they only did like a third of what I asked for.
0:09:02What I asked for is fairly simple.
0:09:04And I didn't even have the sharing requirement
0:09:06that Casey had.
0:09:06All I want is to have a sync between the Mac and iOS,
0:09:11for the iOS client to be as easy to use as clear when
0:09:14I'm actually shopping.
0:09:16And if sync for some reason doesn't work very well,
0:09:19let me at least type the list in the Mac, email it to myself,
0:09:23and then copy and paste into the list in a multi-line
0:09:26to multi-item action.
0:09:28And so many recommendations couldn't
0:09:31fit my fairly minimal requirements.
0:09:33So anyway, the problem that I have
0:09:40when people give me all these recommendations
0:09:42is that it takes time to try these things out.
0:09:45And if I have something that works 90% of the way,
0:09:50or 80% of the way, the chances that I'm going to take an hour one day and try 14 different
0:09:56other list apps, that's just never going to happen. The pain of using the one I'm already
0:10:02using is never going to be great enough to make it worth even looking at the other ones.
0:10:07Here's something else about recommendations, because I get them a lot, too. People do recommendations
0:10:12kind of like they're participating in personal computer gamesmanship on the internet in 1992,
0:10:18like they do with feature check boxes.
0:10:20Well, this has X, Y, and Z and Q.
0:10:21Well, this has X, Y, Z, Q, and P. Oh, well, then it wins, right?
0:10:24And especially for iOS apps, I find that a lot of the time,
0:10:29the application that I use, I like for reasons that have
0:10:33nothing to do with the features.
0:10:34I acknowledge that this lacks features and has an annoying
0:10:37bug that drives me insane, but I like how it looks better.
0:10:40Or I like where the three buttons that I press most
0:10:43frequently, I like where they are because of the way I hold
0:10:45it with my thumb.
0:10:46Crap like that.
0:10:47That determines which app I pick.
0:10:48The one that recently came up was people yelling at me on app.net about why I should use other
0:10:53app.net clients because I'm constantly complaining about netbots annoying bugs with not marking
0:10:58replies as read and silly things like that.
0:11:01I've bought every app.net client that exists, so I already have all these apps.
0:11:06They're like, "This one has it, and this has had that feature forever."
0:11:08I know I have all of them, but there's just something about how netbot looks, or it looks
0:11:13like app.net to me, or I like where the buttons are.
0:11:16The intangibles.
0:11:17That could be why you end up using an application over another app.
0:11:21It doesn't always have to be feature checkboxes.
0:11:24It's crazy to me that people who are in the Mac community and in our circle, that part
0:11:29of their brain shuts off when comparing applications.
0:11:33"Oh, you should use this application because it has the feature you want."
0:11:35Well, if it's ugly, I'm not going to use it.
0:11:37Well, why is it ugly?
0:11:38It's not really ugly.
0:11:39It's just not to my taste.
0:11:40I'm not impugning other people's applications that somehow they do a bad job laying it out,
0:11:43but sometimes you like how one looks better than the other.
0:11:46like where a button is or what's a button and what's a slide and what's not a slide,
0:11:50and people don't like to hear that. Whenever people ask me about app recommendations, I
0:11:55always have to do this whole song and dance about, "This is the application that I like,
0:11:59but it's not necessarily the best one for you because maybe you like different things
0:12:02than I do."
0:12:03Oh, yeah.
0:12:04Oh, that's exactly what I ran into with the recommendations to me because everyone said,
0:12:09"Oh, you want something super simple. You want it to be shared. What's wrong with you?
0:12:12not use reminders. And there's several reasons why I don't really want to use reminders,
0:12:17none of which matter, and it's really not worth going into, but I tried to tell people
0:12:21this, and they're like, "But that should work for you." And I'm thinking to myself, "Well,
0:12:26I just told you it doesn't."
0:12:28Well, now that you're a famous person, that's the thing, is that you want the famous person
0:12:31to use your app, because it's like, "Oh, well, this is used by this person who has this voice
0:12:38to the world," or whatever. But it's nothing against a lot of these apps. Some of them
0:12:42I acknowledge are better applications than the one I'm choosing to use. But if one is
0:12:46green and one is red and I really like red, I'm going to use the red one, even if the
0:12:50green one is technically a better app. And that's how people actually are. And I don't
0:12:53think we should be excluded from being allowed to be just like people are and just picking
0:12:58the green one because you like green. As long as we're clear when people ask about recommendations,
0:13:03it's like, "This is the app that I like, but there are plenty of other really great
0:13:06apps too. Try the ones and see which one or do what I did and buy every single one of
0:13:10and then pick the one that you like best.
0:13:12Oh yeah, and what you said a minute ago, you said you like this button being red and the
0:13:17other app is blue.
0:13:19Back when I worked at—I've told this story a few times on Build and Analyze, so I'll
0:13:22be quick—back when I worked at Vivissimo in Pittsburgh and we made the Cluste search
0:13:26engine, among other things, we would get support emails from Cluste saying, "I use you over
0:13:31Google because I like the color scheme on the site," or "I like your logo."
0:13:37You would think, oh, Google in 2006 or 2005,
0:13:40when we were doing this, they were on top of their game.
0:13:43They were dominating the search market.
0:13:44Bing wasn't around yet.
0:13:46DuckDuckGo wasn't around yet.
0:13:47Everything was Google back then.
0:13:49And you would think an alternative search engine,
0:13:52there'd be no market for it.
0:13:54But there was.
0:13:55There wasn't another market for a Google-sized company
0:13:58to have their own search engine.
0:13:59But when you had a little one, like we did,
0:14:01run by only a handful of people, you
0:14:03can pay them with the revenue.
0:14:05you can be sustainable with a small company
0:14:07having a small product with a small market share,
0:14:10because the market is just so damn big
0:14:12that if you can get half of 1% of it
0:14:15to prefer your product over the other one,
0:14:18you can support a company on that,
0:14:21as long as it's not that big of a company.
0:14:23And that applies to so many things.
0:14:24It applies to the app store.
0:14:25That applies to so many things where
0:14:28you think there's no more room in the market for your product.
0:14:31But there is.
0:14:32There might not be a whole lot of room for your product.
0:14:35You might not be able to have a ton of users
0:14:37and make a ton of money, but there
0:14:39is enough space for sustainable living
0:14:42to be made by one or a handful of people in a lot more markets
0:14:46than you think.
0:14:46Cool.
0:14:51Thanks.
0:14:53You can always rely on me to break that awkward silence.
0:14:55It's hard not to think of this position by Marco
0:14:59as like a foreshadowing of his future endeavors.
0:15:02It's going to be a to-do app, isn't it?
0:15:04You can just admit it.
0:15:04Yes, that's it. I already posted a screenshot. I posted my preview of the To-Do app with
0:15:11filters.
0:15:12To-Do? I missed that. Did you post it on your site or Twitter?
0:15:14On Twitter. Yeah, because now I'm thinking there aren't enough apps in the App Store
0:15:19that let you take a photo and apply a filter to it.
0:15:22I saw it. That was one of your shopping lists, yes.
0:15:25Yes. That market, I think, is underserved. There just aren't enough photo filter apps.
0:15:29we just discussed, there are many to-do apps, but there aren't really any that we all
0:15:35love. So I'm going to combine the two and maybe throw in a flashlight as well, because
0:15:40those are pretty bad too. And I was thinking maybe a weather feature as well, because all
0:15:46those things are dramatically underserved. And so it would be a flashlight weather shopping
0:15:52list with filters.
0:15:53For your shopping list, I have two words for you.
0:15:56Animated kale.
0:15:57Done.
0:15:58Million dollar idea.
0:15:59What?
0:16:00And you should call it— Should that be the name of the app?
0:16:02No, it should have animated kale in it.
0:16:04When you write down kale on a list, I want to see kale leaves.
0:16:06I know they want them to be animated.
0:16:09Like as if you're shaking the water off of them from the fruit sprayers?
0:16:11No, not at all.
0:16:12Now you're getting it.
0:16:13No, they should blow with— in proportion to the wind velocity where you're standing.
0:16:17You can use the accelerometer and the gyroscope, you know.
0:16:20Run with it, Marco.
0:16:21You can figure it out.
0:16:22Call it Instalist.
0:16:24[laughs]
0:16:25Well, I was saying too, I don't plan to ever reuse the prefix "insta" anymore
0:16:30because ever since Instagram came out and became insanely popular,
0:16:35that prefix has been so overused now that if I use it again,
0:16:42I will look like I'm copying the trend and not just copying my own previous product
0:16:48that predated most of the Insta craze.
0:16:50And so I just, and you know, there's like, there's nothing I can really do about that.
0:16:56You know, you just gotta accept that, you know, that phrase has been ruined and move
0:16:59on.
0:17:00Anyway.
0:17:01Do you want to talk about Google I/O?
0:17:05That happened today.
0:17:06>> Do we care?
0:17:07>> I think we probably--
0:17:08>> I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
0:17:09>> We probably should care.
0:17:10>> No, actually there were some interesting--
0:17:11>> I think it's relevant.
0:17:12>> Yeah, there were some interesting bits.
0:17:13I'm just trying to be--
0:17:14>> So I didn't see any of it because I was working and then, you know, at dinner and
0:17:19school concerts.
0:17:20And really, I saw the tweets about it, but I really know nothing.
0:17:23So hopefully you guys know more about it than I do, and then you can explain it to me who
0:17:26doesn't know any of the stuff, and that will serve to also explain it to the listeners
0:17:31who could not endure three and a half hours of that keynote.
0:17:34Or maybe they have jobs and had to work.
0:17:36Well, to that end, I did not watch the three and a half hour keynote.
0:17:39And after I got home, I lazy Twittered for a brief recap, and my good friend Larry King
0:17:47definitely called me out and asking basically all of Twitter to do my show prep on my behalf.
0:17:52So thank you, Twitter.
0:17:53But then Panzer did it for you, so there you go.
0:17:55Yeah, but Panzer did it for me because who doesn't like Panzer? I mean, he's the man.
0:18:00So anyway.
0:18:01He has very tall hair.
0:18:02He has extremely tall hair.
0:18:03Don't be jealous.
0:18:04I can't hide it. I am jealous. My hair cannot get that tall. And he can pull it off. Just
0:18:10like Jeff Rock always has. Jeff Rock is a cool enough guy that he can pull off any facial
0:18:16hair. Like, mutton chops, full beard, partial beard, goatee, anything. He can pull off any
0:18:21facial hair combination. And I'm very jealous of that because I can't pull off anything
0:18:25except clean shaven, which I don't do very well. Like, I'm sorry, guys. I did not shave
0:18:29for the podcast.
0:18:30I thought something felt just a little bit wrong tonight.
0:18:33Yeah, I'm a little sharp. Anyway, so, Google I/O. Go on.
0:18:38You watched it, didn't you?
0:18:40No, I didn't, actually.
0:18:41Oh, I thought you did.
0:18:42watching Google I/O, I took a new allergy medicine this morning because my allergies
0:18:47have been crazy and slept all afternoon. So I was able to tweet a few things in response
0:18:52to some of the live blogs that I was reading before and after the giant nap. Amazingly,
0:18:57I woke up from the giant nap and it was still going on.
0:19:00Yeah, so apparently, so I'm going to recap. So let me try that again from the top. I know
0:19:07almost nothing, but apparently of the three of us I know the most.
0:19:10So based on Panzer's excellent punch list, which I'll try to find while one of you start
0:19:16talking and put in the chat so we can put it in the show notes, there were a few different
0:19:20things that I kind of grouped everything into.
0:19:23And so the general themes that I saw were general stuff about Google's business and
0:19:30Android and Android's business.
0:19:33Then there was a bit about dev tools, of course a bunch about cloud services, and then finally
0:19:36some hardware. In terms of iOS and Android or Google's business, they did note that they
0:19:43have 900 million Android activations, which is quite a bit, and 48 billion apps downloaded.
0:19:50Which given that Apple just rolled over 50 billion, I thought that was kind of interesting
0:19:54and unsurprising that they had a me too moment about that.
0:19:57>> Oh, definitely. >> So I don't know if you guys have anything
0:20:00else to add on that before I continue. Doesn't sound like it.
0:20:03OK, so DevTools, they mentioned a few different things.
0:20:07Firstly, apparently there's a mechanism
0:20:09by which you can ask for app translation to happen,
0:20:12or maybe not ask for as though it's free,
0:20:14but you can request app translation
0:20:17to happen within the Google equivalent of iTunes Connect,
0:20:21I guess.
0:20:22Yeah, I wasn't clear on that.
0:20:23Was that human powered?
0:20:25I don't know.
0:20:25My impression was you have to-- somebody is doing it somehow.
0:20:29So yes, it's human powered.
0:20:31And I don't think it's free.
0:20:32but again, I'm not 100% sure.
0:20:34It's still very good though, because
0:20:36you know, I've always rallied
0:20:38in favor of
0:20:40good voiceover support in apps
0:20:42to the point where I think Apple should be testing
0:20:44apps with voiceover on during app review
0:20:46and rejecting the ones that are
0:20:48unusable or otherwise terrible
0:20:50for voiceover users.
0:20:52And my reasoning for that would be to get more apps to do this fairly trivial thing to support
0:21:00accessibility better.
0:21:03And I think it would be interesting if somebody were to do the same thing with basic
0:21:06localization.
0:21:07The way Google...
0:21:08Like now that Google has this infrastructure in place where
0:21:11you can very easily localize your app or at least do the basics
0:21:15right within their developer portal.
0:21:18Like what if Apple did that and made it a basic requirement of
0:21:22app review? That like you have to localize all
0:21:25important strings in your app for, you know, strings that are important to use it.
0:21:29That was a question I had about the localization thing, because although I didn't watch it,
0:21:32I saw tweets going by about it.
0:21:34Is this a service they provide?
0:21:37You give them some money or something and then people localize your app?
0:21:40Or is this just a way for you to localize your own app?
0:21:45My impression was that it was a service and somebody in the chat is saying that yes, it's
0:21:51human powered and you pay per word.
0:21:53If your name was pronounceable in the chat, I would pronounce it, but it's a series of
0:21:57consonants.
0:21:58And so I guess your name is G-G-G. But anyway, so they were saying that it's human powered
0:22:03in pay per word.
0:22:04And I agree with you, Marco, that voiceover support is so unbelievably trivial in iOS,
0:22:09it's really just saying, hey, for this UI element, this is what you should read to a
0:22:13vision impaired user.
0:22:15And when you got on a kick about this, geez, I don't know, it was like two years ago now,
0:22:19I did that with my really crummy and really simple app in the App Store and it took me
0:22:23about an hour.
0:22:24And I expected it to take forever.
0:22:26So that's not translation, that's a little bit different, but I completely agree that
0:22:32not having voiceover support is inexcusable, and shame on you if you don't.
0:22:36This translation thing highlights, if it is as you described, how is the difference between
0:22:43Apple and Google?
0:22:44Because I can never imagine Apple offering a service like that, because what Apple would
0:22:48want you to do is to get your own translators and work closely with them to make sure it's
0:22:54exactly the way you want it because it's not that it's automated translation or machine
0:22:59translation it's just that this generic pool of translators aren't going to know your particular
0:23:04application to the same degree that someone that you hired personally and worked with
0:23:09would know.
0:23:11It seems like what you'd end up with is more applications that are translated but the ones
0:23:15that are translated would not be very good translations and it seems like Apple would
0:23:18be like "just don't even bother translating if you're not going to sweat the details over
0:23:22the exact precise word in this other language is going to be the right word for your application.
0:23:27And you're going to go back and forth with your guy 50 times about it, you know?
0:23:30One thing, too, like one of the reasons why I never localized Instapaper, which honestly
0:23:34was probably very bad for business, but the reason I didn't localize the app is because
0:23:39Instapaper is much more than just the app, and there's the entire website that would
0:23:43go along with it. And the Instapaper app and website and the way they interact, the bookmarklet,
0:23:50installation procedure, all that stuff. It's very text intensive,
0:23:54very language intensive, and the language is very nuanced in a lot of cases.
0:23:58And also, there's the question of, you know, shouldn't you also,
0:24:02if you're selling an app in a language, giving the impression that you support that
0:24:06language, do you also need to provide support
0:24:10in that language? Like, that's another question. So there were all these,
0:24:14the task of localizing Instapaper would have been so large to do it well
0:24:18that I never got around to it as my limited time and resources permitted. I just never
0:24:24got around to doing it because I knew that it wasn't just localizing a few button labels
0:24:30in the app. It was much, much more than that. And localization, even when it is just localizing
0:24:36button labels in an app, that alone is not trivial. There's a lot of problems with, again,
0:24:43with nuance, you know, not the company, with nuance the noun, of, you know, just when you
0:24:52say, you know, "accept" or "okay" or if you say "read later," what does that mean, you
0:24:56know, in another language? Like, it would, if you directly translate that, you know,
0:25:01is there a better alternative than what you come up with or is it confusing if you directly
0:25:05translate it? There's all these little exceptions that, as you said, John, like it's not as
0:25:10as easy as, here, just blindly take the strings file
0:25:14and give me the output.
0:25:15And then there's other issues like, do the new strings
0:25:18fit on the buttons?
0:25:20Do they overflow the boundaries of the labels?
0:25:22[INAUDIBLE]
0:25:23Oh, yeah.
0:25:24Hence German and their expensive spaces.
0:25:26Right, or like Japanese, where you
0:25:27should be using larger font sizes slightly
0:25:29or different fonts.
0:25:31There's all sorts of differences that you need to consider
0:25:35and edge cases all over the place,
0:25:37to the point where they're not even really edge cases.
0:25:40It's just regular cases.
0:25:42Localization is not a trivial thing.
0:25:44And just translating the strings is step one.
0:25:49And there's a lot more to it than that.
0:25:53But at the same time, you could possibly
0:25:54argue, is a badly translated app better than an app that
0:25:59is not translated at all?
0:26:00Yeah, and I'm not making a value judgment about it.
0:26:03Apple's system of priorities is such
0:26:06that they would prefer that you do a super awesome job or not do it.
0:26:11Whereas Google, their philosophy is definitely it's better to make translation as easy as
0:26:17possible even if the translations aren't going to be that great, because we think it's more
0:26:22important to just have 10,000 okay translated apps out there instead of 100 ones with great
0:26:30translations.
0:26:31But yeah, but the same thing with the layouts.
0:26:34and forget about, you know, when you were doing Instapaper testing, having your 17 Kindles,
0:26:38your 800 iOS devices, now multiply that by the number of languages, and make sure you
0:26:42check every screen in every language, because you never know when that label's going to
0:26:44poke out of the button or get truncated. It's just a nightmare.
0:26:47Oh, yeah. Like, I remember when we, back in Tumblr, before I even left to do Instapaper,
0:26:53when Tumblr started localizing, it was just a massive amount of work. And fortunately,
0:26:58I didn't have to do it, but it took a dedicated staff of, I think, two people, one being—and
0:27:05it's hard enough to find a good translator, for one thing, because you have to find somebody—generally
0:27:09speaking, it's better to find somebody who is a native speaker of the destination language
0:27:15that you're translating to. So, you know, if you want to translate to Japanese, you
0:27:20should probably find a Japanese person who has grown up in Japan who knows enough English
0:27:25to be able to understand your app and translate it well
0:27:28to Japanese.
0:27:28But then it isn't just enough to find
0:27:30somebody who speaks the language and knows it well.
0:27:32You have to also find somebody who's good at writing interface
0:27:35text.
0:27:36Think about how hard it is to find people
0:27:38in your own language to do that.
0:27:42That's not an easy job.
0:27:43And that really can make a very, very big difference
0:27:47in how people perceive and use your product.
0:27:49And so you can't just find anybody.
0:27:52But here's the worst part.
0:27:54you can't really judge the quality of somebody for a language you don't know very well.
0:27:58You can't judge how good they are at that. It's very, very difficult.
0:28:01So there's the issue of how do you find good people to do this even.
0:28:06Yeah, Google's automated. The tools are actually a problem, because I've worked at companies
0:28:10where we extensively localized everything, and the tools to give to the people who are
0:28:16doing the localization, that is actually an issue, because we would hire the best people
0:28:21to do localizations, we could, but they weren't necessarily tech savvy.
0:28:25So you wanted to give them a really simple way for them to be able to update things quickly
0:28:29that integrated with the rest of your process.
0:28:31So this tool that Google is providing provides that piece of the puzzle.
0:28:35And I can also imagine a way for them to help with the problem that you were just describing,
0:28:39Marco, where you're like, "I hope this guy's doing a good job at these translations, because
0:28:42I can't read them."
0:28:45You could have a system whereby people rate the quality of the translations of those applications
0:28:50in the store.
0:28:51crazy for us in the iOS ecosystem to talk about adding features to the store or the
0:28:55backend to it, but for Google, they'd be like, "Oh yeah, we should do that."
0:28:59So then the people who participated in this human-powered translation process could be
0:29:04rated by the customers of the applications to say, "Is this application localized in
0:29:09your language very well, or did it read like when we read those manuals on how to assemble
0:29:14something that are clearly badly translated from Korean or Chinese or something?"
0:29:18And you can tell, right?
0:29:19And eventually you would probably start narrowing the pool of your human-powered translators,
0:29:25or at least marking this guy as like five-star.
0:29:28All the things you can do with the internet and the web could be brought to bear on these
0:29:33aspects of the translation problem.
0:29:36The difficulty of finding tools, finding people who are going to use the tools, and making
0:29:39sure those people—like having some sort of feedback mechanism whereby the people get
0:29:45better or at least you can see how good they are during translation.
0:29:49I think that also brings up an interesting side discussion related to this, which is,
0:29:55I think, seeing all the stuff that Google was adding to their developer portal today
0:30:01really makes iTunes Connect look terrible in comparison.
0:30:05I mean, iTunes Connect, which is what iOS developers use to manage their apps and upload
0:30:09them and everything, it's always been pretty terrible.
0:30:13It has gotten better over the years, but I would still not call it anywhere near good.
0:30:20There's lots and lots of old cruft there.
0:30:22It's very clearly made for the music industry to upload their stuff to iTunes back forever
0:30:29ago and they just kind of tack all this stuff onto this ancient infrastructure to support
0:30:33apps.
0:30:34I can't say it's just a website, right?
0:30:35Yeah.
0:30:36Because I never upload an iOS app.
0:30:38It's amazing to me that if you think of how far the tools that Apple's developers use
0:30:42have come since Project Builder when it was—was it still called Project Builder in Mac OS
0:30:4710? 10.0? I don't remember. I wasn't there for that.
0:30:50Way back when, Xcode did not look like it does now, and it was in as many complaints
0:30:55as people have about Xcode 4. It's leaps and bounds of where it was when things started.
0:31:02It's clear that Apple has invested very heavily, with some bumps in the road, fine, in its
0:31:07native IDE. But then if you look at any part of the development process that's not as
0:31:12not in a native application like Radar Web or apparently iTunes Connect, which I haven't
0:31:18used, or even just like the ADC side, which is kind of limped along.
0:31:22Those have not made the kind of progress that Xcode has over the same period of time.
0:31:27And it's frustrating for everyone involved.
0:31:29It doesn't make sense to me because in this particular case, it's not like they don't
0:31:33prioritize the developer experience.
0:31:35I mean, look at what they're doing with Xcode.
0:31:38they made their own compiler for crying out loud, or acquired/commandeered their own compiler.
0:31:44They're not afraid to do the hard things when it comes to trying to make great tools for
0:31:48developers, but somehow the web doesn't count.
0:31:51It's like, "Oh, we'll just suffer through this website," and I don't understand that.
0:31:55We're going to get to that if we get this far, since I'm on point one of Google I/O
0:32:00and we've already run for a few minutes.
0:32:02We'll get to that later in that Google announced a lot of cloud services, and that really made
0:32:06think about the comparison to Apple.
0:32:08But yeah, iTunes Connect definitely stinks.
0:32:11And in my, what is it, three or four years that I've been
0:32:15piddling with iOS as a developer, it has
0:32:18always been awful.
0:32:19And I couldn't agree with you more, Marco, that it's
0:32:22unsurprising to me that Google, who is so strong in web
0:32:26services and cloud computing sort of things, it's not
0:32:30surprising to me that they're doing so much better or appear
0:32:33to be doing so much better than Apple is at these sorts of
0:32:36of bits.
0:32:37So along the line with DevTools, another thing
0:32:40that they announced is native beta testing.
0:32:43And to be honest, I don't know specifically what that means.
0:32:46I'm assuming it's a TestFlight sort of setup, which
0:32:49is interesting because last I heard TestFlight was just
0:32:51becoming available on Android.
0:32:53But that is available now.
0:32:54And the other thing that I thought was very interesting
0:32:56is staged rollouts.
0:32:57So you can say, hey, for this new feature,
0:32:59perhaps for this new binary--
0:33:01again, I'm not totally clear on how it works--
0:33:04you can target or say only 10% of my users can see this new feature or new binary or
0:33:09whatever the case may be.
0:33:10And that strikes me as really useful and relevant for things like, what was the trendy mail
0:33:16app?
0:33:17Was it mailbox?
0:33:18Is that right?
0:33:19It doesn't matter.
0:33:20It doesn't matter.
0:33:21You got it right.
0:33:22So yeah, so mailbox who famously had or infamously had a queue system and I think a couple other
0:33:27apps have done that since.
0:33:28Instead they have this native mechanism
0:33:31wherein you can do a staged rollout, which I thought was really cool and interesting, but speaking of support
0:33:39problems, I can only imagine the support
0:33:42snafu that that would cause. So I don't know if this is more, if this would do more harm than good, and I'm curious Marco
0:33:47to hear your two cents about this. But it certainly, on the surface it sounds excellent,
0:33:51but as soon as I dig deeper mentally into what this would mean, it strikes me as maybe not the best idea in the world.
0:33:57Well, I think it really, it's necessary in the Android ecosystem more so than it is in
0:34:03the App Store or iOS ecosystem because, you know, the Android ecosystem is kind of this
0:34:09wild west where you can upload a binary at any time, there's no app review, it's just
0:34:15kind of, you do what you want whenever you want to. And so having something like a staged
0:34:19rollout actually makes some sense because you don't have that, first of all, that long
0:34:24delay between when you ship some code and when people can actually get it. And there's
0:34:29also not that big step of app review happening in the middle where there's someone else trying
0:34:37your app in an isolated environment and catching most really obvious major bugs. And therefore
0:34:44preventing you from submitting that to your customers.
0:34:48So I think with iOS, if you had a stage rollout, how would that really benefit you if you can't
0:34:57send a new binary up there for another week anyway? The benefit there is less so than
0:35:04if you just had, than in the Google case where you can just upload things whenever you want
0:35:08and it's pretty much immediate.
0:35:10Well, but that presupposes that an issue is with your binary and not with the backing
0:35:15web service that in this phantom app presumably is under your control and presumably you could
0:35:20fix whenever you want.
0:35:22Yeah.
0:35:23Did that make sense?
0:35:24Yeah, it did. I mean, yeah, I guess if you're rolling out something that's going to put
0:35:27a lot of strain on your servers or you don't know how it's going to be at scale and you
0:35:31might have to re-index some databases or optimize some things, then I could see some value there.
0:35:37But I think the overhead of having such a system probably is not worth it in most cases.
0:35:43I don't even know how much it's worth to Android, really.
0:35:46I think what we're seeing here, though,
0:35:48is that Google has to make all their tools awesome.
0:35:52They have to make all of these things for Android developers
0:35:56great, because they have to attract developers.
0:35:59Google needs developers to really start
0:36:01taking Android more seriously.
0:36:03And they are, slowly.
0:36:04But it is slowly happening.
0:36:05But Google needs to be attracting developers
0:36:09as hard as they can.
0:36:10Apple doesn't need to do that, because all the developers
0:36:12already go to Apple. So Apple, they don't need them as badly.
0:36:16And so that's why Apple can sit there with iTunes Connect
0:36:20being as mediocre as it is, and they can
0:36:24not support all of these cool new things that Google's doing
0:36:29and they can have app review and things like that. They can do all that because
0:36:33we go to them already. We're like knocking down the door. We are desperate to get
0:36:37into the Apple App Store because that's where the people and the money and the influence all are.
0:36:41And the Android app stores have been kind of this mixed game of usually not simultaneous release with iOS.
0:36:50Things usually debut on iOS first if they're going to be cross-platform at all.
0:36:55Certainly they almost never debut on Android first and then go to iOS.
0:37:00And most of the buzz of new apps happening is still happening on iOS.
0:37:04So Google really needs people to go to them first.
0:37:06So they need to be doing all this stuff, whereas Apple really doesn't.
0:37:10Yeah, I would agree with that.
0:37:11And the other thing that I forgot to mention
0:37:14in terms of developer tools on an iTunes Connect
0:37:16sort of scenario is I heard some rumblings of,
0:37:19I guess there's some sort of lead tracking
0:37:21or referral information like analytics-ish kind of,
0:37:25analytics is a poor choice of words,
0:37:26but some sort of referral information
0:37:29so you can see why somebody downloaded your app.
0:37:32And I don't, again, I don't know any of the details
0:37:33beyond that, but I heard some rumblings about it.
0:37:35And I know that would be really exciting
0:37:37if you take your presence in the App Store seriously,
0:37:40which I do not, but I know Marco, you certainly did.
0:37:43And--
0:37:44- Still do.
0:37:44- And still do.
0:37:45And so I can only imagine how awesome that would be
0:37:48if Apple provided even a rudimentary amount of information
0:37:52about where you've gotten downloads from.
0:37:55- Oh yeah, I mean, I've been yelling about that for years.
0:37:57That it is, and yeah, I think what they said was,
0:38:01like later this summer they're tying it in
0:38:02with Google Analytics and something like that.
0:38:05And so you could have App Analytics and the website
0:38:07and track where they came from and all that stuff.
0:38:08Basically everything iOS people want.
0:38:11As an iOS developer, it's very hard
0:38:13to know why people are buying your app.
0:38:16You can look at your rank, and you
0:38:17can see how well you're doing relative to other apps
0:38:19and everything like that.
0:38:20You can see your sales every day.
0:38:21You can see how many you're selling.
0:38:23And you can attempt to correlate, like, OK, well,
0:38:25I just did a big ad buy, and then the next day
0:38:28my sales were up.
0:38:29So that might have been because of the ad buy.
0:38:32Or it might have been because a lot of people just
0:38:34bought new iPhones that day.
0:38:36or I could have been featured somewhere in the App Store
0:38:40and not even known about it because they don't tell you
0:38:41when you're featured.
0:38:42There's all these conditions.
0:38:45And you don't know even,
0:38:47did somebody search for your app by name?
0:38:50Or did they browse an App Store section?
0:38:52And if they were browsing an App Store section
0:38:54and it popped up, what kind of section were they browsing?
0:38:56Was it a feature?
0:38:57Was it a top list?
0:38:59Was it a category list?
0:39:00It would be great to know where these people
0:39:04are coming from, why they bought your app,
0:39:05how they got there. If you're on a web campaign, there are things like Tapstream that will
0:39:11try to track people between things. But even those, they can't work all the time because
0:39:17Apple doesn't have any kind of hooks into their stuff. And so it would be great to know,
0:39:23"Oh, my app was downloaded from browsing the top list here, and therefore I might want
0:39:28to consider staying in the top list and maybe adjusting my price as a result." Or it'd
0:39:33be nice to know, well, most people download my app by searching for it by name. Therefore,
0:39:39I don't need to rely as much on the top list, and I can concentrate more on advertising
0:39:42my name and branding and all that stuff. It would be great to know that stuff, and you
0:39:48just have no insight into any of that with Apple today. You can attempt to get some of
0:39:53it through various hacks and services that attempt to tie IPs to purchases and things
0:40:00like that, but it's really, it would be so much better
0:40:04if Apple integrated that somehow,
0:40:06and they just ignore that completely.
0:40:09- Which is kind of their MO.
0:40:11Which is unfortunate, but it's certainly true.
0:40:15- So what if iTunes Connect, and all this stuff
0:40:18having to do with sales tracking and uploading new versions
0:40:21of your application and everything,
0:40:23was written as a native application instead of a web app?
0:40:25Does that solve the problem for us?
0:40:27Is that the only way we can make this happen?
0:40:29because maybe it would start out as kind of like the first version of Xcode 4 and be kind
0:40:33of a disaster and it would be like, "Oh, this is so much worse. At least the website
0:40:37worked." But maybe over time they would iterate on that native application, whatever
0:40:42it might be called. Hopefully it would not be called iTunes.
0:40:45Well, they already have a native app and Xcode integration doing part of the job. It used
0:40:51to be that you would prepare your binary with the special—you'd have to export it with
0:40:56the distribution signing profile and all this crazy certificate and profile stuff.
0:41:02And then make sure you upload that version of it into the file upload form.
0:41:06And now, first they had this application loader, I think, or I think that was the one that
0:41:11did it.
0:41:12First they had this app that you would do everything in iTunes Connect to prepare for
0:41:14the upload.
0:41:15You'd enter all the metadata, the screenshots, everything else, and then it would say, "Ready
0:41:19for upload."
0:41:20And then you'd launch this app and that would do it.
0:41:21And now that's built into Xcode.
0:41:23So Xcode itself can do that.
0:41:25People were super excited—I think this was last year's WWDC—when I think someone was
0:41:29discussing this feature of the integration of—and they were like, "Oh, do they integrate
0:41:33iTunes Connect into Xcode?"
0:41:35And everyone was excited about that, I think mostly because they figured if we can hook
0:41:40on to the train that actually has iterative improvements year after year, that'll be a
0:41:45good thing.
0:41:46And then everyone was disappointed an hour or two days later when they realized, "Oh,
0:41:51they didn't integrate it entirely.
0:41:52it's just slightly more stuff happens in Xcode,
0:41:54but still you're going to be going to that website.
0:41:56Right.
0:41:57And the stuff they integrated does work well.
0:41:59And it is better and faster and way less error-prone
0:42:02than the old way of doing it.
0:42:04But it's still not the full experience.
0:42:07But I don't even know if integration would really
0:42:10solve the problems of iTunes Connect.
0:42:12Because it's not that web apps are always terrible.
0:42:15There's lots of great web apps.
0:42:16I don't think this needs to be a native app to do the stuff
0:42:19that iTunes Connect mostly does.
0:42:21I think it just needs to be a better web app, and there's plenty of room for that.
0:42:25Are Apple's web apps always terrible? I don't think they are. Some of the iCloud apps, like the little
0:42:29fake mail application they have, they suffer from trying to look too much like native applications.
0:42:33Yeah. But other than that, there's competence there
0:42:37to do it. Competence that is not reflected in, for example,
0:42:41Radar Web. Oh yeah, Radar Web is way worse than iTunes Connect.
0:42:45Right, because they had, I think Apple helped fund/hired a bunch of
0:42:49the guys from SproutCore, and they had PastryKit, their internal thing that was doing emulated
0:42:55UI kit stuff in JavaScript. There's little fits and starts of web stuff that goes on,
0:43:00and then of course there's the WebObject guys toiling away, doing whatever it is that they
0:43:04do. But clearly, Google, the entire company, is focused on web development. And their web
0:43:11apps, you may not like them aesthetically, and you may not like Google and the things
0:43:15they collect or whatever, but they know how to make a web app, let me tell you.
0:43:18Oh yeah, they work great. Even if the visual design is often questionable, in fact I think
0:43:25it has always been questionable, functionally they work extremely well.
0:43:29And I think the visuals have gotten better. Like leaps and bounds. When they did that,
0:43:34they redesigned everything to be that kind of more widely spaced, sharp-cornered, Google
0:43:40colors, gray and red and blue. I'm not that big a fan of that design, but applying that
0:43:46coat of paint, at least it's finally giving them some kind of unified appearance across
0:43:50their product lines.
0:43:51And each new one that comes out, when they redid Google Images, it got a little bit better.
0:43:55And the new Google Maps looks like a little bit more modern, a little bit better.
0:43:59Gmail is still weird looking.
0:44:00Google Plus, even in its short life, Google Plus has stepped up.
0:44:03So the old thing we've said a million different times about a million different companies,
0:44:09but in this case it's Google and Apple, Google is becoming better at being like Apple, faster
0:44:15than Apple is becoming better, being like Google or whatever you want to phrase it.
0:44:18Google becoming Apple, Apple becoming Google. But it seems like Google is upping its game
0:44:23in all the areas where Apple is traditionally strong, and Apple is not really upping its
0:44:28game. I guess kind of. Pulling off maps at all was kind of a leg up, like now Apple proving
0:44:33they can kind of do this stuff. But that didn't come out great, you know?
0:44:37Yeah. Let's come back to that in a minute. This is a good time to do our first sponsor.
0:44:41Our first sponsor is An Event Apart, and I bring this up now because we were just talking
0:44:45about web design.
0:44:47An Event Apart is the design conference for people who make websites.
0:44:51They have upcoming events in San Diego, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin, and San
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0:45:03that the creators of great web experiences deserve a great learning experience, An Event
0:45:08Event Apart brings together 12 leading minds in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration
0:45:13and enlightenment, plus an optional day-long workshop on multi-device web design.
0:45:19So if you care about code as well as content and usability as well as design, an Event
0:45:24Apart is the conference you've been waiting for.
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0:45:30So go to aneventapart.com/atpfm.
0:45:34That's aneventapart.com/atpfm.
0:45:38Thank you to An Event Apart for sponsoring this show.
0:45:41I've been to Event Apart, and I highly recommend it,
0:45:43especially if you're a programmer developer type nerd
0:45:47and you've never been to a non-developer conference.
0:45:50Not that Event Apart is a developer conference,
0:45:52but it's not hardcore programming.
0:45:55They're going to talk about HTML, CSS,
0:45:57and they're going to talk a lot about design issues.
0:46:00It's great to go to a conference like that, especially
0:46:04good one outside of your core area of competency, right? Because maybe you're not a designer,
0:46:10maybe you're just, you know, you're a JavaScript programmer. But just to go to a conference
0:46:13where more than half the sessions are about things outside the realm of your little world
0:46:19of programming really helps expand your mind to the fact that your product is more than
0:46:25how nicely factored your classes are, you know?
0:46:28Oh, yeah. And I went to one as well. I learned a lot there. And it really is a very good
0:46:33balance of code and design and style. And it really is focused a lot on websites. Yeah,
0:46:40highly recommended if you're a web developer or web designer.
0:46:45And the quality of their speakers tends to be perhaps a notch above, in terms of public
0:46:49speaking skill, the average speaker you'd get at a Python conference or something. Not
0:46:54that I'm impugning programmers, but these people understand that it's part of their
0:46:58job to be entertaining and engaging, and they are. So, highly recommended.
0:47:03So back to what you said a second ago. I did want to talk a little bit about this, how
0:47:08it does seem like Google is advancing rapidly. And Apple seems to be going at a relatively
0:47:16stable pace that is noticeably slower than Google in a lot of these areas. And we had
0:47:22on our previous shows, we discussed what happened with the WebKit project and how Google just
0:47:26threw a ridiculous amount of engineering talent at WebKit and just totally blew past Apple's
0:47:33contributions pretty quickly.
0:47:34See, I don't know if it's so much as them throwing people at it, because that makes
0:47:38it seem like they have taken resources and directed it a certain thing. I just think
0:47:42they have more bandwidth. Like, they're a wider machine, you know? They just have more
0:47:47bandwidth for all the types of--for these types of things. How many people does Apple
0:47:51have to put towards making any kind of web application better, versus how many people
0:47:57does Google have to put towards that? And pick any other thing. How many people does
0:48:01Apple have to put towards their compiler versus how many people does Google have? It just
0:48:05seems to me, I'd love to see the real head counts here, but it just seems to me that
0:48:09Google has more bandwidth. They have more people. They have more smart people.
0:48:14And they seem to, through what is often a failure of Google, which is they're relatively
0:48:21hands-off management through most of their history, that always results in them having
0:48:24a million different half-finished, half-assed products and services, and they go into betas
0:48:30and they get shut down and then they get ignored.
0:48:32And they've always been kind of all over the place,
0:48:34but as a result of this lack of strict management for so long,
0:48:39you're right, they do have a lot of bandwidth.
0:48:40They can just get tons of stuff done
0:48:43because it isn't all flowing through a narrow funnel at the top,
0:48:45or at least it hasn't been so far.
0:48:47And at Apple, it's always been the opposite.
0:48:50At Apple, it's always been like everything goes through the top,
0:48:53everything is directed from the top,
0:48:55and so things that the top doesn't care about
0:48:58or doesn't have time to care about generally get neglected or get on very, very slow development
0:49:04cycles like iTunes Connect. And so I think--or the Mac Pro. And so I think, you know, Apple
0:49:14has always operated much like a small company. And that has really given them a lot of benefits
0:49:23in a lot of their products and a lot of their output.
0:49:27But I think in the case of things like web services,
0:49:31that just doesn't work.
0:49:33You just need more throughput.
0:49:34There's more to do.
0:49:36There's more that needs to be able to be done
0:49:38without the CEO having to approve everything,
0:49:41or the chief director of whatever
0:49:43having to approve everything, or be in all the meetings.
0:49:46And you're right that Google is just
0:49:49so capable of throwing tons and tons of bandwidth, as you say, at this problem. And Apple just
0:49:57has not seemingly done that. I mean, it's hard to know with Apple, because so few people
0:50:01really talk about what happens inside there. You know, they're not really allowed to. But
0:50:05it just seems, it seems from the outside like Apple has just never cared that much about
0:50:12things like web services, enough to get them as right as Google does.
0:50:16I have to say something about this every show, so this will be my time this show.
0:50:21Google seems so much more dedicated to caring about infrastructure, solving a general purpose
0:50:28problem that will benefit the entire company in a general purpose way rather than having,
0:50:32"Oh, the group that's working on this little thing will do whatever it takes to make it
0:50:37great whatever they're working on."
0:50:39So the Gmail team would like, "Oh, we really need to make storage work great for Gmail,
0:50:43so we're going to do a storage project."
0:50:44like, "Great, good job, we love Gmail, it came out great, we have people with good taste
0:50:48like the Apple model, people with good taste deciding what's in and what's out, and we
0:50:51really make a great product, but what did you do for the rest of the company? Great,
0:50:55so you made a great product, did you help the rest of the company in any way when you
0:50:58made that? Maybe some other projects in the company need some way to store stuff in a
0:51:02similar way that Gmail needs to store stuff." And I get the impression at Apple, especially
0:51:07before they went cross-functional, that it was like, the team working on iOS does all
0:51:11all sorts of crazy things to make the first version of iOS awesome, with minimal eye towards
0:51:19what are we doing that will help the rest of the company, not just today, but 10 years
0:51:23from now. And with all their concentration on, we just need to make this the best operating
0:51:27system it could possibly be. And there are pluses and minuses to both of those strategies,
0:51:30because if you spend all your time trying to make infrastructure, you'll have an awesome
0:51:33infrastructure and crappy products. And you can apply that slam to Google in many past
0:51:38scenarios and present scenarios, right?
0:51:40Because infrastructure is something that nerds love,
0:51:43but great products are something that customers love.
0:51:47But there's a balance.
0:51:48And it seems like Google is starting
0:51:51to get better at concentrating on making great product,
0:51:54not having a million different products,
0:51:56while retaining its religion about we
0:51:58need to make infrastructure.
0:51:59We need to make things better for everyone at the same time.
0:52:01Whereas Apple just seems to be doubling down on the we
0:52:03need to make the most awesome product.
0:52:05But at a certain point, you can't make your products
0:52:07more awesome if you just don't have the tools in place for your company to make great web
0:52:12services, to make great cloud computing things, all that stuff.
0:52:17It seems almost like they can't figure out why aren't our maps as good as Google's?
0:52:21Why isn't our iCloud service as good as the equivalent one?
0:52:25And soon they'll be asking themselves why Game Center isn't as good as this cross-platform
0:52:30web.
0:52:31And maybe it doesn't matter because iOS will still have better games than Google, more
0:52:36Games that make people more money, like in the end, that's all that really matters, right?
0:52:39But I worry about the infrastructure thing, and that's something that has historically been Google's strength.
0:52:44And they're playing strongly to it, like you were saying. So,
0:52:48the other section or grouping of things that we learned at Google I/O that I saw was just kind of cloud services.
0:52:55So, you mentioned Google Play Games. I think that's what it's called. I don't even know.
0:52:59They also have a
0:53:02cloud messaging thing, which my understanding is it's not as much iMessage as it is a more
0:53:08centralized version of push notifications.
0:53:12And so the understanding that I got was that if you're using some application that uses
0:53:18this service, say it's a website within Chrome, well, if you get a notification within Chrome,
0:53:26it will only go to that Chrome session.
0:53:28But the minute you leave that Chrome session, and I don't know by what mechanism it determines
0:53:33that you've left, then you'll start getting these notifications on your phone instead.
0:53:37And so this is the thing that all Apple users beg for, specifically around iMessage, but
0:53:41would be awesome in general.
0:53:43So if you say use Tweetbot, you would only get Tweetbot notifications on whatever thing
0:53:49you're actively using.
0:53:50And again, that would be really awesome for iMessage.
0:53:54And the interesting thing that I caught myself thinking was, "You know, I bet that'll
0:53:59work really well."
0:54:00Whereas, if Apple announced the exact same thing at WWDC in a month, or not even a month,
0:54:06I think my first thought will be, "Hmm, I hope that works."
0:54:09They can't even get iMessages to show up in the right order within a single application
0:54:12on a single device.
0:54:13Like, it's so far in terms of the confidence level in getting this stuff right.
0:54:17You know, speaking of Google Hangouts, which someone mentioned in the chat room and featured
0:54:21in various ways in this thing.
0:54:23It was integrated with the messaging stuff.
0:54:25Remember when they showed Google Hangouts,
0:54:26like Google+ came out and like,
0:54:27and there's also this Hangout thing,
0:54:28and you're like, some sort of like video thing,
0:54:31and I have to install like some sort of plugin
0:54:34from my browser so now we can do video chat
0:54:37inside a web browser?
0:54:38It seems lame.
0:54:39And like, you know, no big deal, right?
0:54:40Fast forward however long it's been
0:54:42since Google+ came out, and at my work,
0:54:45Google Hangout is now the way that we do teleconferencing.
0:54:48We have all these fancy teleconferencing hardware
0:54:50software which we do not use, everyone goes to Google Hangout in their web browser, and
0:54:55that is the way that we can successfully video conference. And they share their screens with
0:54:59each other and have different speakers doing things, and we do all the things that you
0:55:02would see in those 80s futuristic, like in the future you'll be able to do this. We do
0:55:06it and we're doing it all in a web browser in Google Hangouts.
0:55:11Does that require Google+ or is that its own thing now?
0:55:13I don't know what people are doing to do it. I think it might require Google+, but the
0:55:18point is all you need is a web browser. No one has to install any software, works on
0:55:22a Mac, works on a PC. I don't even know if everyone's using Chrome. Maybe they all are,
0:55:26but it's the one thing that actually works. It's amazing to me to see these people who
0:55:32have not been evangelized, as far as I know, by anyone from Google. Just a bunch of managers
0:55:38coordinating their non-technical people, coordinating their own five-person multimedia presentation
0:55:45in three different locations, and it just works in a web browser.
0:55:50It's amazing to me that if you had said, "Maybe Apple will be the one to bring us," because
0:55:54iChat and VideoChat was the first VideoChat that actually worked, and people could do
0:55:57it as long as everybody had a Mac.
0:55:59FaceTime works great, too.
0:56:00If everyone has an iOS device, FaceTime just works, so kudos for Apple on that.
0:56:05Things like Hangout that seem stupid and silly to begin with, just Google keeps hammering
0:56:08on them.
0:56:09Even just adding the ability to do screen share, integrating instant messages, and having
0:56:12file attachments. They'll just keep integrating that until you—you know, Hangout becomes
0:56:17this be-all, end-all, multi-person communication thing, and it started out as this weird chat
0:56:23roulette type thing attached to a social network that nobody wanted to join.
0:56:26Well, and apparently, according to Marcos Carr in the chat room, it still does require
0:56:31a Google+ account, which I think I have one, but God knows I haven't looked at it in
0:56:35like two years. But what's interesting about the way you describe it, John, and I think
0:56:39you're right is that it's been iteratively improved upon, which is a very Apple-like
0:56:45approach. It seems to be working really well for Google. I know that I've heard regular
0:56:52people talk about, "Oh, let's just do a Google Hangout real quick." I look at them like,
0:56:56"Wait, what? Really?" Obviously, I'm the one that's crazy because you're getting the
0:57:01same thing.
0:57:02But people can do it. They are successful at doing it. Whereas, think about any other
0:57:05way that you would do that. Let's all get on Skype video chat. Oh, forget it. Skype
0:57:08Skype is a train wreck, and try to get everyone to have it.
0:57:10I don't have Skype installed.
0:57:11Are I installed?
0:57:12Or does it see your camera and this and the other thing?
0:57:14FaceTime?
0:57:15FaceTime is pretty good.
0:57:16FaceTime works.
0:57:17The only problem with FaceTime is finding the other person.
0:57:18Like, what name do I put in?
0:57:19What Apple ID are you signed into?
0:57:21And that gets back to what you were talking about before.
0:57:23That insanity.
0:57:24And it rings in your iPad and not your computer.
0:57:26Right.
0:57:27And then eventually, when it finally works, you have to get your parents to turn the thing
0:57:30sideways.
0:57:31So they're not--
0:57:32So true.
0:57:33So their image fills the screen.
0:57:34God.
0:57:35Someone at Apple--
0:57:36So true.
0:57:37have some sort of mode that just, like, you can do that for vertical video shooting on
0:57:41the iPhone. Just force people to put it sideways. Because if you just put the image on the screen
0:57:45sideways, they will turn it sideways so the image is right side up and we will all thank
0:57:48you for it.
0:57:49So quick, quick. Let me channel neutral for a second. When we were going around the Nürburg
0:57:54ring and I was driving, I looked over briefly and saw Erin recording what was going on with
0:57:59her phone in portrait. And I very, very sternly explained to her that that was just not going
0:58:06cut it for a video of me driving around the Nurburgring.
0:58:08Yes, we actually had that discussion while Casey was driving the Nurburgring. We were
0:58:12discussing why you don't want to shoot video in portrait.
0:58:16It's called multitasking. Anyway, it's weird because I think FaceTime does work
0:58:22extremely well, but the problem with FaceTime is it's one-to-one. And just like you were
0:58:26saying, Jon, if you want a multi-person thing, that very quickly eliminates FaceTime unless
0:58:33I'm missing something.
0:58:34And that's like, even iChat video thing used to be able to share a document kind of off
0:58:38to the side in this weird thing.
0:58:39It still wouldn't work for business, because in business you want to put the big spreadsheet
0:58:42up so people can see it, or you want to share your web browser screen so you can demonstrate
0:58:46a web application while they can still hear your audio.
0:58:49We're not asking for the moon, but Apple's conception of this in iChat video chat was
0:58:54like that little thing where the people would have the little reflections like they were
0:58:57on this big virtual infinite black mirror finish plane, and then when you share a document
0:59:01that would come in and another one of those little things.
0:59:03But they weren't expecting you to share a picture of your baby you can all look at,
0:59:06right?
0:59:07It wasn't made for business where you wanted to fill the screen with stuff.
0:59:10Google Hangout has lots of features, and they're complicated and picky or whatever, but people
0:59:15can figure them out.
0:59:17They're not elegant and beautiful or whatever.
0:59:18At some point, just having those features means something.
0:59:21Why doesn't FaceTime have multi-person chat by now?
0:59:24Was that team, "Oh, okay, we're done with FaceTime.
0:59:26It works fine.
0:59:27Now go off and work on the next great thing, but we're not going to improve FaceTime anymore,
0:59:30or we're not going to add multi-person FaceTime,
0:59:32or maybe it doesn't work over 3G, who knows?
0:59:34But it's kind of depressing.
0:59:38It is.
0:59:39It is.
0:59:39And there are a few other things that Google announced.
0:59:43What else do they do?
0:59:44Well, they have the Google Play games,
0:59:48and then they also have Google Play Music All Access, which
0:59:51my friend Brad Lautenbach had tweeted that they really
0:59:55need a brand manager helper.
0:59:57I forget how he phrased it.
0:59:58he phrased it much better than I'm giving him credit for, but they need a way to come
1:00:02up with better names. But there's Google Play Musical Access, which is basically Spotify
1:00:06by Google.
1:00:07That's a terrible name.
1:00:08Oh, it's atrocious. It's really—
1:00:09It's just like we were talking about last week, how Microsoft puts Windows in front
1:00:13of everything, and they used to put Windows Live, blah, blah, blah. And now Google has
1:00:18put Google Play in front of all these different product names, and it just sounds ridiculous.
1:00:22Google Play itself is just no good.
1:00:24No, it isn't.
1:00:25That, whatever they came up with, like Google Play is going to be our, like, flagship brand for the way we sell you things for, like, that should not have, because you can't go anywhere from that. There's nothing you can put after Play that's going to improve it. Bad.
1:00:37Yeah.
1:00:38Yeah, so, I don't, to me, a Spotify-like clone by Google really, I don't think I care.
1:00:48I care because I don't actually don't care because I don't use streaming music
1:00:52But if I did use streaming music, I would be more comfortable in
1:00:56investing in in the
1:00:59Google to like they'll stream me music
1:01:01They'll let me upload all my stuff or whatever because I would have more faith that Google is going to be around long term in Spotify
1:01:06like
1:01:07Not that Spotify is a fly-by-night company or whatever
1:01:09But I just if something is going to involve mass uploading or mass downloading. I
1:01:15I like it to involve a big company that it would take a lot to kill.
1:01:20Well, but even somebody as fickle as Google who always kills things?
1:01:24That's the wild card, but for something where there's a business model that makes sense,
1:01:29like where they charge you money for it on a monthly basis, yeah, maybe the thing could
1:01:32just go away, right? So that's a risk with anything. Like, should I start buying iTunes
1:01:36music the day the iTunes store is open? You try it and you find out, but it's not like
1:01:41Google Reader where it's a free service that costs a tremendous amount of money to run
1:01:44you can't figure out how they make money. They charge you every month, and presumably
1:01:47they charge you enough money to cover their costs. So it's the same as with Spotify.
1:01:52This is one of Google's strengths. And Amazon's too, for that matter. Amazon's streaming service
1:01:57or whatever, they're always selling you things. They like to sell you digital things. That's
1:02:01not going away. Amazon's probably not going away. I feel more comfortable with that than
1:02:04I do with just some random company like Spotify. And maybe Spotify becomes as big as Google
1:02:11in ten years, and I'll trust them as much too, but I think there is something to be
1:02:14said for that type of thing.
1:02:16I don't know, but there's also something to be said for Spotify, that's their whole business.
1:02:22Whereas Google, this is kind of like the side business, it's brand new, and Google often
1:02:26tries things that don't work and then they shut them down, and Google doesn't really
1:02:30need this to succeed, they have other things they could be doing. Spotify, this is their
1:02:34entire business. So if you're going to try to figure out one company of those two that
1:02:38want to invest your time and effort into, I'd still pick Spotify.
1:02:42Well, I mean, it also has to do with integration, too. The reason we like the Apple thing is
1:02:46if you buy all Apple devices, you're sure that you'll be able to watch—you'll
1:02:49be able to listen to your iTunes music if you do iTunes Match on all your iTunes devices
1:02:53and your Apple TV, and you're all set, right? Well, Spotify has to do that as well, but
1:02:58they don't own any platform. So they're coming from the outside, whereas at least
1:03:02Google can put it on Android, and you know they're going to have an awesome version
1:03:04on the web, and then they're okay about making iOS apps, so they've got something
1:03:08covered there, but Spotify doesn't have any sort of native platform.
1:03:11Well, by that rationale, you shouldn't use Netflix.
1:03:14I was just about to say the same thing.
1:03:18That's the thing.
1:03:19If Apple had come up with a Netflix-like service, I would probably be using that instead of
1:03:23Netflix, but they didn't.
1:03:24You know what I mean?
1:03:25There's no reason Apple couldn't have done exactly what Netflix did around the same time
1:03:30Netflix did it, but they didn't.
1:03:33Netflix was out there alone making it happen.
1:03:36So that's why we're all doing it.
1:03:37And Dropbox is another example.
1:03:38Why aren't we all using Google Drive?
1:03:40Because Dropbox got there first, earned our trust,
1:03:42and Google Drive came out,
1:03:43and then Google Drive looks like the Me Too.
1:03:45And you're like, well, you know what?
1:03:46Even though Google might be around longer than Dropbox,
1:03:49Dropbox has proven itself to me,
1:03:51and it's stable and everything.
1:03:52I also don't like the Spotify app.
1:03:53I've tried it a few times,
1:03:54and it's a little bit offensive to me.
1:03:56- Oh, it's gotten better too.
1:03:57That's the sad thing.
1:03:58I agree with you.
1:03:59It's rough.
1:04:00It's not intuitive at all,
1:04:01or at least not for the way my brain ticks,
1:04:04but it's actually gotten a lot better
1:04:05since the early versions.
1:04:08So I think that's the majority of the cloud services.
1:04:12The only thing we haven't really talked about, which
1:04:14looks reasonably exciting-- and I do not say that
1:04:16sarcastically--
1:04:17is the new version of Maps, which seems to be a kind of
1:04:21quasi mashup of Google Maps of today with Google Earth, with
1:04:28just generally improved visuals, and everything just
1:04:32gets better.
1:04:32They've kind of-- I can't believe I just
1:04:35thought about saying this, but I was going to say they kind of
1:04:38+1'd everything, and now I think they need to shower.
1:04:41But no, I saw a very brief video that Google
1:04:44made of the new Google Maps.
1:04:45And it looks really darn good.
1:04:47It really, really, really does.
1:04:49They have really great representation
1:04:52of all the different directions you can take between places.
1:04:55And if you're lucky enough to live with somewhere that
1:04:57has public transport, they'll show that.
1:04:59They'll show car.
1:05:00They'll show bike.
1:05:00They'll show walking.
1:05:02It really, really looked good.
1:05:04It apparently uses-- what is it-- WebGL?
1:05:07The 3D API, if you will, for web browsers.
1:05:12So presumably it runs really, really quickly.
1:05:15Everything about it just looks like Google Maps, which
1:05:19almost everyone I know really likes,
1:05:21myself very much included, but better.
1:05:23And that's never a bad thing in my eyes.
1:05:25So did you guys see this?
1:05:27I think they didn't plus one it.
1:05:28I think they like, plus 100 it.
1:05:30It strikes me as like, that depressing thing that Apple used to do and still kind of does
1:05:35is particularly on hardware, where Apple comes out with an amazing hardware device and then
1:05:39for a year, the rest of the industry bends over backwards to try to come up with something
1:05:43that's even remotely as good.
1:05:44And as soon as they start getting close, Apple just leapfrogs itself.
1:05:47And they're like, "Oh, God, we just barely caught up with whatever the previous iPod
1:05:50model was, and now they have this thing.
1:05:52The iPhone was one of those things.
1:05:53We were just finally trying to get our digital music players to be half of it, and now they
1:05:57have this phone thing and everyone is screwed."
1:06:00Apple has not yet caught up with plain old, before this announcement, Google Maps.
1:06:04And, you know, Apple's working hard to make them better, and so on and so forth.
1:06:07And now they do this, and it's like, what?
1:06:09Oh, God.
1:06:10You guys, if you just stay still for a minute, we could catch up with you.
1:06:13But they won't.
1:06:14Like, they're driving forward, you know, every aspect of this map thing.
1:06:18It's not like we just have new data, or we added new features, like all new UI,
1:06:21all new look, all new vocabulary, all new set of things you can do,
1:06:24all new technology to run the thing.
1:06:26By the way, WebGL still freaks me out a little bit.
1:06:29I'm always afraid that I'm going to accidentally root my phone by…
1:06:33Yeah, security on that is tricky.
1:06:36I don't know.
1:06:37Yeah, that bothers me a little bit.
1:06:38But you can't say that Google is just adding tiny incremental improvements to maps.
1:06:42They're not resting on their laurel.
1:06:43Some team had been working on these maps to vastly improve it, and they already had the
1:06:48best map data.
1:06:49And it's just going to get better from there.
1:06:52Yeah, I don't see Apple catching up to that, honestly.
1:06:55I don't see, I see Google Maps always being way better than Apple Maps.
1:07:00Apple has never shown an ability to catch up with things of this nature at all, to even
1:07:08survive at all, let alone to be able to surpass Google.
1:07:13Google's so good at services and big data type stuff, and Apple is so bad at that.
1:07:19And leveraging the crowd, like the OpenStreetMap initiative.
1:07:24If I was counseling Apple on what their only chance to be competitive in the map space
1:07:27is, you have to go community-based, collaborative, find an open project, get the entire world
1:07:35behind it, because then it can be you and the entire world versus Google.
1:07:38I'm sure Google's doing the same thing with trying to...
1:07:41They'll do it on their own.
1:07:42They'll integrate feedback from all the people.
1:07:44That whole mechanism of if someone sees something that's in the wrong place, correcting it...
1:07:48Daniel Jackett was talking about this on Twitter the past week, about how he wishes if a store
1:07:52was in the wrong place he could correct it on his phone and he would at least see that
1:07:55change immediately even if everyone else didn't and then by doing that it would eventually
1:08:00filter upstream but it's like why torture himself with his own phone if he knows the
1:08:03pin is in the wrong spot let him drag it to the right spot and let that change stick local
1:08:07to his phone and everyone on Twitter told him how that wouldn't work because what if
1:08:10you share the map with somebody else and people could put in bad information and blah blah
1:08:13those are they're all correct those are all the hard problems solving those hard problems
1:08:18on a massive scale is how you get better map data you know you can't just do it on your
1:08:22You can't hire 10 people to improve your maps or sort through the backlog of 8 billion requests.
1:08:26You really have to just let the whole world participate.
1:08:28In fact, I wish the entire world, as I've said many times in the past, were all working together to provide the best map.
1:08:34This is only one planet. There's only one Earth. There's only one set of roads. There's only one set of buildings.
1:08:38There's no reason, other than good old capitalism and competition, that we couldn't all be collaborating to provide the single most accurate, unified set of information
1:08:48that individual companies could sort of average out and smooth
1:08:50off the edges and decide how they want to pull from that
1:08:53to make their maps better.
1:08:54But alas, that kind of cooperation
1:08:57between Apple and Google seems to be in the past.
1:09:00Well, it worked well with WebKit.
1:09:02For a little while.
1:09:04I was being sarcastic, actually.
1:09:05So a couple really quick thoughts,
1:09:06and then we can move on to something different.
1:09:09Firstly, in contrast to all the things
1:09:11that we said about how hideous Google properties tend to be,
1:09:15I actually think that the new maps looks really,
1:09:17pretty and I was very impressed by that. And the other thing on a more global
1:09:22scale in terms of Google I/O is that a bunch of people joke every year that
1:09:28this year's, whatever this year may be, this year's Google I/O is last year's
1:09:33WWDC. And to some degree I think that's true, especially let's look at the Game
1:09:38Center knockoff whatever you call it thing. But this year there were a lot of
1:09:42things that as even an amateur Apple developer I looked at them said hey man
1:09:46that would be really nice." Or, "Wow, I kind of wish Apple would do that." And
1:09:49I just think it's interesting that this year, and this comes back to what you guys
1:09:53were saying about how quickly Google is moving in this space. It's interesting to me that
1:09:58rather than being like, "Oh, ha, look at these copycats." Now we're saying, "Man,
1:10:02Apple, you should copy some of that because that's really good." And I don't know,
1:10:05maybe I'm the only one who thinks that way, but I thought it was very different than it
1:10:08was in the past. Oh, definitely. All right, moving on. Our second sponsor for this episode
1:10:15is Cococonf. Cococonf is a focused two-day multi-track conference for iPhone, iPad, and
1:10:21Mac developers featuring some of the biggest names in the Apple developer community. Each
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1:10:53So Early Bird Registration is now open for their 2013 CocoCon Fall Tour.
1:10:58That includes stops in Portland, Oregon, my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, Boston, and Atlanta.
1:11:05So listeners of this show can save even more by using the coupon code ATP for 20% off any
1:11:11ticket.
1:11:12That's pretty big, Jon.
1:11:13I think that beats our previous record, right?
1:11:17No, I thought that was half off.
1:11:19Wasn't that half off?
1:11:20Oh, that's right.
1:11:21Yeah, that's right.
1:11:22It was.
1:11:23I mean, let's not shake our fists at 20%, though.
1:11:24I mean, that's pretty good.
1:11:25This is a higher ticket.
1:11:26I don't know.
1:11:2720% off any ticket for Cococonf.
1:11:28So for all the details, go to cococonf.com.
1:11:32That's cococonf.com.
1:11:34use coupon code ATP for 20% off your ticket. Go check them out, and thanks a lot to those
1:11:39guys for sponsoring also.
1:11:41You know, I feel like this is like, we have two sponsors on this show that are both conferences,
1:11:46and they don't really overlap that much at all. You know, an event apart is really web
1:11:51apps and design of the web apps, and CocoaConf is iPhone, iPad, and Mac native Cocoa development.
1:11:59So really I think most most people listening can identify very well with one of these conferences. You can't really go wrong with either of them
1:12:06Alright so next up I wanted to talk about
1:12:12Apple's new Objective-C JavaScript bridge, which actually John you had tweeted about earlier today, and that was the first I had heard of it
1:12:18First are we talking about bridges with John, Syracuse?
1:12:23We are and that the chat was guessing that we might go here and I'm already getting pestered about the potential for a
1:12:30Syracuse a county title and I should probably tell you that I'm I'd find it unlikely. We'll go there
1:12:36I find it unlikely that John would let us go there
1:12:38Even if we wanted to and I'm not sure I do but I should point out to begin this
1:12:43Conversation that there is a picture of two Golden Gate bridges beside each other in this article, which I'll put the URL in the chat and
1:12:51The caption on this article of the picture of two Golden Gate bridges right next to each other is and I quote
1:12:58Syracuse a county is on the left. Don't you recognize that picture Casey? I don't actually
1:13:02WWC, isn't it Marco? I don't remember
1:13:06Their teases it was either for WDC or oppressive. It's from apples like, you know, they send out like a picture
1:13:12You know come to whatever someone in the chat room, please tell me I forget what it was
1:13:17Maybe it's a metaphor for the forking of WebKit. But anyway, no, no, it was it was from a past
1:13:21A. Pike in the chat room says it's from the WWDC 2008 invitation.
1:13:26Oh, that was before my time, so I wouldn't know.
1:13:28Me too.
1:13:29Anyway, they didn't make it up, that's what it was.
1:13:31Well, clearly they did not make up the fact that Syracuse County is on the left.
1:13:34I mean, that is geographically and factually fact.
1:13:38Factually fact?
1:13:40It is. There's a title if I've ever heard one.
1:13:42So anyway, so, John, since you brought this up by way of tweeting it earlier,
1:13:47Would you like to give the executive summary and get your first comments in?
1:13:51Yeah, well, because I've been busy today, I Instapapered this article and I skimmed
1:13:55it, but I have not yet actually read it.
1:13:57I tweeted it, I skimmed it, and I Instapapered it.
1:13:59That's what I do with all links that I run across now.
1:14:02Looking at it, first of all, this is a feature of WebKit, and I've already seen some people
1:14:06say that this is not new, that something similar to this has existed in the past, so I don't
1:14:10even know how much this is an improvement of an existing feature or an expansion of
1:14:14an existing feature.
1:14:16It's certainly not a bridge in the sense that the Cocoa JavaScript bridge was, where you're
1:14:19now writing your native applications in a language other than Objective-C. That's not
1:14:23what this is either.
1:14:25And since it's specifically related to WebKit, well, the JavaScript core part of WebKit,
1:14:31it's not a general purpose thing.
1:14:33But they've got the plumbing there where you can write JavaScript code that manipulates
1:14:39Objective-C objects and vice versa.
1:14:42And so just having skimmed this article, if you will ask me what I think it means, I think
1:14:46what it mostly means is all the developers I've seen complaining over the years about
1:14:50how little control you have
1:14:54over WebKit views in your native application.
1:14:58I would like it if I could intercept whenever this happened and make this happen
1:15:02in my Objective-C application, and I would like it if my Objective-C application
1:15:06could cause this to happen and manipulate the WebView in this way. This seems
1:15:10like a way where you could arbitrarily connect JavaScript code running in
1:15:14in a WebView with the state of your application and its objects and its methods in memory.
1:15:19And that strikes me as a much more powerful way to let people use WebKit views to do things.
1:15:24Now, could that same mechanism be used to let people write code as part of their native
1:15:28application in JavaScript for the hell of it?
1:15:30Perhaps, but the API you have now where you make a JS context and you just pass it strings
1:15:34and stuff, that's not the same thing as writing your application in JavaScript or whatever.
1:15:39So I don't even know if you would call-- I mean, I guess it is kind of technically a
1:15:42because they're calling objectives from JavaScript
1:15:44and the other way around.
1:15:45But it's not what people think of when they read the title.
1:15:48Like, oh, now I'm going to write all my Cocoa and UI Kit
1:15:52applications, but I'm going to use JavaScript instead
1:15:54because now I don't have to worry about pointers anymore.
1:15:57That's not this.
1:15:58Well, and there already are a lot of cross-platform frameworks
1:16:02that work on that principle of you write things in JavaScript
1:16:06and on both iOS and on Android, they
1:16:11have these shell apps that interpret that for you.
1:16:13So you already can write apps in JavaScript
1:16:16on the mobile platforms.
1:16:18And there's certainly nothing stopping you
1:16:20from doing it on the desktop as well if you want to.
1:16:23But I think what's interesting about this-- there's
1:16:27two big points I think worth thinking about.
1:16:29One is this might not necessarily
1:16:32be how they want to move forward to say all apps will
1:16:36be JavaScript coming soon.
1:16:39it might just be like right now people do tons of hacks
1:16:43with like passing URLs back and forth between the WebView
1:16:47and the Cocoa code, you know, passing URLs
1:16:51and evaluating JavaScript string literals and stuff like that. It's just a pile of hacks right
1:16:55now. Having a WebView that you communicate with your app and going
1:16:59back and forth. So they might just be trying to improve that. Certainly it would improve performance
1:17:03and it would make things a lot cleaner and a lot less bug prone and error prone
1:17:07and everything else.
1:17:08Oh, this is also-- like, you said that it's so hacky the way you had to do it before.
1:17:12This is still kind of hacky, where you're applying the protocol to built-in classes
1:17:15so they can have visibility to the JavaScript world.
1:17:18Believe me, it's less hacky.
1:17:20It is.
1:17:21It's less like you're not sipping through a straw anymore.
1:17:22You're not making up, you know, like, "I only have three ways to communicate with these
1:17:25web views.
1:17:26Everything must funnel through them."
1:17:27Now you have a new way, and you can really hook up arbitrary stuff, but it's still, like,
1:17:32it's still kind of creepy and weird, you know?
1:17:36It's not even as good as the various other bridges they've had, like the Ruby, what is
1:17:41the popular Ruby one, where it really is a fairly transparent bridge where things just
1:17:48work and you don't have to worry about the plumbing.
1:17:50This, the plumbing is visible.
1:17:51You're manually creating the plumbing, you're hooking things up, but as you said, the ability
1:17:57to do it at all is what I've heard many developers ask for over many years because it's just
1:18:01so frustrating to have a web view and have just so little control over it.
1:18:05seems to be solved, assuming this ships and is made a public API for developers and recommended
1:18:10to everyone at WWDC. Right, because the other interesting thing
1:18:13about this is that in WebKit, first of all, it was committed on New Year's Eve so that
1:18:19nobody would notice. And a lot of this stuff is wrapped in compiler macros to not compile
1:18:25it if it's not on 10.9. So it certainly looks like this is set to be a feature only of 10.9,
1:18:35And so whether they will do anything more with it outside of the WebKit tree, if they'll
1:18:42expose this API on a broader level or make a bigger deal out of it, we don't know that
1:18:46yet. But I think that's really interesting that they seem to make some effort to do this
1:18:52quietly.
1:18:53Well, the fact that it's in WebKit is the only reason we've seen it at all, because
1:18:57WebKit is open source. And I guess they could have still held the backup they wanted to
1:19:00like they do a lot with a lot of their big WebKit changes. They just hold them and hold
1:19:02them and then push them out. But yeah, like there's the question of will this even be
1:19:08a public API to WebKit? Because if it's not, like it doesn't matter if you're writing a
1:19:11Mac app, but if you're a Mac App Store app, it matters. And if you're certainly writing
1:19:14an iOS app, I know the app, I know the UI is there, I can see the headers, but Apple
1:19:19says they're private, so I can't use it. So you'd still be stuck if you're selling things
1:19:23through Apple, any of Apple's app stores, you'd still be stuck using the crazy hacks
1:19:27you had before. But like when I see stuff like this, I don't, it seems like the kind
1:19:32of thing that Apple would not do for the hell of it. And it all seems like the kind of thing
1:19:35that is not particularly useful to anyone outside Apple, because who else uses Objective-C
1:19:39and WebKit at the same time? So it strikes me that it's probably there to help one or
1:19:45more Apple applications. Maybe they're finally making the App Store apps better. I don't
1:19:49know. What is that company they bought to redo their store with the worse appearance
1:19:54and UI?
1:19:55It doesn't matter. Yeah.
1:19:56It was like starting with a "CH." Again, chat room can help me out.
1:19:59It's not even worth disparaging them because they did just make everything worse.
1:20:02Yeah, but maybe if they could do everything with a WebView.
1:20:07Remember the iTunes store was done with these crazy XML descriptions of the data,
1:20:10and then they had the iTunes app itself interpret the XML,
1:20:13and then I heard they had slowly transitioned to using WebKit views,
1:20:16but then they suffer from the thing of, well, you've got a nice WebKit view,
1:20:19but it has to hook into this application, and the hooks are very bad,
1:20:22and we're tired of doing these crazy hacks to do hooks.
1:20:25And here is now a slightly better system for integrating WebViews and stuff,
1:20:28stuff. So I would expect that the reason this API exists is because one or more applications
1:20:32on either iOS or the Mac are going to use this API to better integrate web views with
1:20:37the native application that surrounds them.
1:20:39That's very possible. It might just be for Apple for their own apps to use. Maybe if
1:20:46you're a Mac developer you'll be able to use it, but maybe they won't bring it to iOS because
1:20:49there's no less of a reason, or who knows.
1:20:52Chomp is the name of the company, says the chat room.
1:20:53I was hoping we'd do without it. Everyone was so excited when they bought Chomp. They
1:20:58"Oh, this is finally going to make everything better!" and it made everything worse.
1:21:00I don't know if you blame Chomp. It was like, the technology that enables the store may
1:21:06be better than the technology they had before, but it's just the choice of the UI that is
1:21:10not nice.
1:21:12So the passage of this article that I thought, Jon, you would be most fired up about and
1:21:18where the bridges of Syracuse County come in is, and I quote, "The most interesting
1:21:23possibility would be that this is the start of Apple's evolution away from Objective-C,"
1:21:27by the way they're linking to Copeland 2010 Revisited, into promoting a higher level language
1:21:32for their platform.
1:21:33It's too early to say at this point, but if JavaScript core is going to one day displace
1:21:37the Objective-C runtime, this would be a reasonable starting point.
1:21:40And I guess I see their point, but I feel like that's a really big leap.
1:21:45And to your earlier point, Jon, this isn't a bridge in the sense that you're making
1:21:51JavaScript a first-class citizen of the OS X or iOS API, it's just a mechanism by
1:21:59which you can call back and forth, which is a very, very, very big difference. And
1:22:02furthermore, JavaScript seems like a peculiar choice to me of a high-level
1:22:07language to choose in order to replace Objective-C. It's not that crazy because
1:22:10it's so insanely popular now and so many people are working so hard and making
1:22:14JavaScript fast, particularly Google, for example. But I don't like the
1:22:18JavaScript language. So that's... Yeah, but you like Perl. Yeah, I know Perl. I like Perl much better than JavaScript.
1:22:24Well, that's the funny thing about JavaScript is that nobody likes JavaScript, but it's everywhere. So everyone just kind of, you know, learns it eventually.
1:22:30The thing is, some people I think do like it. If you work with low-level language for a long time, and JavaScript is the first and maybe the only in the primary high-level languages, you're like, "Oh my God, high-level languages! It's amazing! I can concatenate strings with ease and run substitutions and just, you know, it's just so amazing to not have to do that."
1:22:47amazing to not have to worry about all these details of a strongly typed, low-level language
1:22:53like C or C++. It's like, "Wow, JavaScript. It's amazing. I feel so productive." But if you've used
1:23:00any other high-level language, you're like, "Oh, JavaScript." It has weird warts. It's kind of like
1:23:08PHP but not as bad in that it was not designed by an expert language designer. It just kind of came
1:23:14to be to scratch someone's itch under tight deadlines and progress from there.
1:23:21Of course, PHP sort of metastasized, and JavaScript was pinned down by the fact that it was implemented
1:23:26in web browsers and it couldn't advance that fast.
1:23:29But it's a similar type of thing.
1:23:30It's not, "Oh, we've got the world's best language designers together," and they come
1:23:34up with a language.
1:23:35In fact, most languages that end up being successful are not that way.
1:23:37C might be an exception because it's made by some really smart people who really thought
1:23:41about it, and that worked out pretty well.
1:23:43JavaScript. There's like one guy, right, at Netscape.
1:23:46Originally, yeah.
1:23:47Under a tight deadline, came up with this thing. And it has crazy warts that are still there today,
1:23:52because that's the way it was. And you can't break backward compatibility very easily when
1:23:57it's in a million web browsers. So are you thumbs up or thumbs down to this, John?
1:24:03I think it's good for integrating WebViews better with your native application. I think that's a
1:24:07worthy advancement. I don't think it indicates anything one way or the other about Apple's
1:24:12plans for anything. We've discussed this on past shows, like the path Apple has chosen
1:24:18and continues to walk along is enhancing Objective-C, and it seems like they'll continue along that
1:24:21path. And last year, WWCA was saying that, "Oh, you guys are going to have type inference
1:24:26next year while we're approaching. We'll see if they have anything like type inference
1:24:28or maybe just C++'s auto keyword brought into Objective-C." I think you can already use
1:24:32in Objective-C++.
1:24:34But yeah, advancing Objective-C by taking
1:24:37the reins of the compiler and adding features to the language
1:24:39seems like that will continue.
1:24:42All right.
1:24:43And with that, I think it's a good time to wrap up the show.
1:24:45What do you think?
1:24:46Sounds good.
1:24:47Good.
1:24:47All right.
1:24:48Thank you very much to our two sponsors of this episode.
1:24:50An event apart.
1:24:51Go to aneventapart.com/atpfm.
1:24:54It's the design conference for people who make websites.
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1:25:09Thank you very much, guys.
1:25:13Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin,
1:25:17'cause it was accidental.
1:25:19Accidental.
1:25:20Oh, it was accidental.
1:25:22Accidental.
1:25:23John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him,
1:25:28'cause it was accidental.
1:25:30It was accidental.
1:25:31It was accidental.
1:25:32Accidental.
1:25:33And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.
1:25:36And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
1:25:46So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
1:25:52Anti-Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-I-C, R-A-Q-S-A
1:25:59It's accidental, accidental, but you didn't mean to
1:26:05Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so long
1:26:12No, yeah, I've actually considered teaching myself to type the right way, but it seems like work.
1:26:18Well, I mess with what works. Plus you have RSI anyway or whatever.
1:26:21Yeah, exactly. I should just type all my talk on my code. Open curly base return.
1:26:27Tab tab. Dollar sign foo space equal space. No.
1:26:32Please put that in the show.
1:26:36If that actually worked, do you think that would be fast?
1:26:39No, definitely not.
1:26:41Oh God.
1:26:42I don't know because like a lot of the programming keys you have to hold down shift for
1:26:45And maybe I could speak it faster, especially if you could abbreviate, like you'd say "curly"
1:26:49or pick some other word that's like one syllable long for "gurlies."
1:26:52The Ruby people would love it. And a lot faster to say that than to type it.
1:26:57That's our show ending right there.
1:27:00Yeah, it is.
1:27:02You don't have to put that crap in.
1:27:03Oh, do it. Do it. Please.
1:27:07Maybe post-roll or something.
1:27:08Yeah, people love that.
1:27:10I love post-roll.
1:27:12There's something I complain, like all the people say, "Oh, I love this song, blah, blah."
1:27:14Now, it's already like two episodes after the song has been like, "Oh, I can't take
1:27:18the song anymore. It's so long. I have to fast forward through it to see if there's
1:27:21any post-roll."
1:27:22Yeah, yeah.
1:27:23It's like 30 seconds long. It's not even.
1:27:26Yeah, I think the full version is like 45. It's really a short song.
1:27:31And you don't have to hear the stupid gag at the end. You can just stop listening.
1:27:34Well, yeah, but you know as well as I do. Nobody thinks that way.
1:27:38I don't know. People can't please anybody.
1:27:42Let me see.
1:27:43if you put in bleeps and boops, which everyone loves.
1:27:45It is one minute and three seconds.
1:27:46Oh, listen to him! Oh my goodness, you are such a baby. It cracks me up. It's that spot
1:27:53about kettle.
1:27:53(laughs)