00:00:00 ◼ ► Neil Gervarry, welcome to the show. What a big week for you. Yeah, thank you John, thank you John.
00:00:06 ◼ ► Yeah, it's been an absolutely crazy week for us. Just kind of getting finally after a couple years
00:00:13 ◼ ► of development, MimeStream 1.0 is out and out to the world. I am super duper excited about this,
00:00:23 ◼ ► and my enthusiasm, well number one, let's, I'll have you introduce the app. What is MimeStream?
00:00:29 ◼ ► So, MimeStream is a native macOS email client designed specifically for Gmail, and it is a
00:00:41 ◼ ► little different from other email clients that most people have used in the past because it
00:00:46 ◼ ► specifically uses the Gmail API to integrate very very deeply with Gmail. Most other email clients
00:00:54 ◼ ► are using the decades-old IMAP protocol, which certainly is fantastic and has its purposes, but
00:00:59 ◼ ► Gmail has kind of a different way of doing a lot of the basics. And by using the Gmail API,
00:01:06 ◼ ► we can really natively understand a lot of what Gmail does and integrate with a lot of its
00:01:12 ◼ ► features like labeling and creating server-side filters and having inbox categories. And so that's
00:01:18 ◼ ► what MimeStream is about. It's about a niche, at least to start with, but we wanted to really
00:01:27 ◼ ► It is, yeah, so I think that's no surprise that you were able to pitch it very well. It's like a
00:01:34 ◼ ► two-pronged, this app is different and special. And the first prong is that it is Gmail-specific
00:01:43 ◼ ► and uses the Gmail APIs and is very very Gmail. We can get into that first. And then the second prong
00:01:58 ◼ ► well I suppose it's not unique to be a Mac-esque Mac email client. There are a few, but the Gmail
00:02:06 ◼ ► specific thing I believe is unique. I don't think there's anything else for the Mac that is so
00:02:15 ◼ ► Gmail-specific. And for those people out there, and Gmail is so popular that I hesitate to waste
00:02:22 ◼ ► time on the show talking about it, but even people who are longtime Gmail users who, if you don't
00:02:29 ◼ ► think about it from the perspective of an email client developer, the, I don't know what the word
00:02:36 ◼ ► is, is impotence mismatch between Gmail conceptually and IMAP, but just traditional email.
00:02:45 ◼ ► Traditional email is much easier to understand, where it really is sort of mirrored on the file
00:02:52 ◼ ► system, right? Where in a file system, you've got files and you've got folders and a file is in a
00:02:58 ◼ ► folder somewhere, and that is where it is. It might be a subfolder, folder A with folder B with inside
00:03:05 ◼ ► it and it's hierarchically nested, but it's org and email messages on traditional email are like
00:03:11 ◼ ► that. The inbox is a mailbox and messages are either in the mailbox or they're not, and if
00:03:24 ◼ ► >> But, and I, now I'm laughing because it makes it, my laughter makes it seem like I'm putting
00:03:30 ◼ ► Gmail down, but actually I use Gmail, although I don't, we can get into my personal use of it,
00:03:36 ◼ ► which is weird. I'm not putting it down. It's sort of one of the genius ideas of the last,
00:03:42 ◼ ► I don't know, 20 years. It seems like a miracle that it actually works with a different
00:03:47 ◼ ► fundamental concept of how email is organized yet integrates with the wider world of email
00:03:58 ◼ ► >> Right. I think the number is closer to actually 1.8 billion is a number that I've read most
00:04:04 ◼ ► recently of the number of monthly active users they have. So I mean, by all measures, Gmail is a
00:04:10 ◼ ► highly successful email platform that a lot of folks out there use. When it first came out,
00:04:15 ◼ ► I forget what the year was, but it was just such a paradigm shift for people to go from having these
00:04:28 ◼ ► into like, oops, your inbox is full so you couldn't get your most recent email delivery.
00:04:33 ◼ ► That was a constant struggle and just Gmail with that first one gigabyte allowance, it was just
00:04:38 ◼ ► such a paradigm shift and so many people migrated as soon as that became available. Well, I remember
00:04:45 ◼ ► that it debuted on April 1st, whatever the year was, I don't know, it might be like 2004. I'll
00:04:50 ◼ ► look it up for the show notes. We don't have to waste time here looking it up, but it was April 1st
00:04:54 ◼ ► and it was either like you just sign up, it's free, you get your name at gmail.com and you got
00:05:00 ◼ ► like, I think it was a gigabyte, maybe it was more, I don't know, but it was at least a gigabyte.
00:05:04 ◼ ► Whereas every other yahoo.com or hotmail or AOL or wherever else you might've been hosting,
00:05:11 ◼ ► getting your email for free were measured into megabytes. And like you said, everybody was
00:05:17 ◼ ► constantly, I don't know, archiving to a local mailbox on their computer so that most of their
00:05:22 ◼ ► email wasn't even on the server anymore. And it was just a daily occurrence to sort of get an
00:05:29 ◼ ► alert like, hey, your inbox is full. I remember those days. I mean, I remember being really
00:05:36 ◼ ► excited when it first came out. I was one of those people where I couldn't get an invite
00:05:40 ◼ ► and I had to go to eBay and like pay some guy for an invite or something. I think I paid like
00:05:45 ◼ ► 10 bucks or something back in the day to just try and get in. But yeah, I was, I mean, as soon as I
00:05:50 ◼ ► got it, I was like, oh my gosh, this is such a relief to finally have the room to just let
00:05:55 ◼ ► all your stuff accumulate. And people thought it was a joke. I mean, because today's Google,
00:06:02 ◼ ► now that they've sort of got a couple of decades under their belt as a industry Titan are less
00:06:09 ◼ ► cheeky. Right. 20 years ago-ish, Google was sort of prankstery. There were a lot of people the
00:06:17 ◼ ► day it was announced who thought this can't be real. And there was an invitation system.
00:06:21 ◼ ► So everybody couldn't just jump on to prove it. But there was, I would say it was like 50/50 people
00:06:27 ◼ ► thinking like, well, this can't be true that they're giving everybody email with a gigabyte
00:06:30 ◼ ► of storage. But yeah, it was. And here we are. So explain, you can do it better than me because
00:06:38 ◼ ► you're obviously familiar with it about as perhaps as much as anybody in the world. But explain
00:06:45 ◼ ► for people, either even Gmail users, but especially for people who don't use Gmail or only use it
00:06:51 ◼ ► superficially, the conceptual difference between the way Gmail deals with messages compared to
00:06:56 ◼ ► traditional email. Sure. I mean, I think it boils down to this really fundamental distinction that
00:07:03 ◼ ► you alluded to earlier, which was the difference between kind of storing things in folders/mailboxes
00:07:16 ◼ ► all mail, and then letting you apply multiple labels to each message. So even things that are
00:07:23 ◼ ► in your inbox, it's not just in your inbox, it's in all mail. It just happens to have the inbox
00:07:29 ◼ ► label applied to it. So it's this really, really fundamental mismatch between the way that most
00:07:36 ◼ ► email clients worked before, the way that IMAP works before, and the way that Gmail works.
00:07:42 ◼ ► And it's powerful, right? To some degree, you look at it and it's really like, it's logically
00:07:47 ◼ ► correct. It's like, okay, I've got this message. I can apply multiple things to it. When Gmail
00:07:52 ◼ ► first got started, I think that was an aspect where people had a hard time kind of like fully
00:07:58 ◼ ► grasping. And they very quickly over the years made some UX refinements that I think made it a lot
00:08:05 ◼ ► easier to sort of disguise the whole labeling aspect of the system if you didn't want to get
00:08:12 ◼ ► into that. You could sort of over time begin to like drag and drop a message from your inbox to
00:08:18 ◼ ► some other label that you could then think of as a folder. But under the hood, it's all still just
00:08:25 ◼ ► one box of messages that have labels on it. And that's ultimately where I think a lot of the power
00:08:29 ◼ ► of Gmail as a platform does come from. But it also has been a challenge to sort of integrate
00:08:36 ◼ ► into the broader set of email tools that were already out there because that doesn't map
00:08:45 ◼ ► JS Yeah, I almost think it's better to think of it less as one big mailbox and more like a soup,
00:08:51 ◼ ► right? Like it's just all of the messages, whether you sent them or they came to you are just in a
00:08:56 ◼ ► soup on your Gmail account. And labels are it's just another word for tags in another system.
00:09:04 ◼ ► And it like you said, being in the inbox is just a tag on a message. And when you say archive in
00:09:11 ◼ ► Gmail, it just takes the inbox tag off and the message disappears from your inbox. But it's
00:09:23 ◼ ► Right. I am a huge fan of that. I mean, years ago, it's a long time at this point, I guess it's
00:09:29 ◼ ► 10 years. But me and Brent Simmons and Dave Whiskus made an app, a notes app for the iPhone
00:09:41 ◼ ► even to this day is it had no folders at all. All it had were tags. And I still have it on my phone,
00:09:49 ◼ ► but because it doesn't sync anywhere, I don't use it. But I still miss it. Because I like the
00:09:54 ◼ ► tagging metaphor. And again, with Vesper, the notes were all effectively in a soup. And everything was
00:09:59 ◼ ► just a tag. But one of the advantages of tagging or labeling, whatever you want to call it versus
00:10:05 ◼ ► folders is that a message can have more than one tag. So it could be in the inbox and it could have
00:10:14 ◼ ► a tag like newsletter. And there you could just go to your tag newsletter and just see all of your
00:10:20 ◼ ► newsletters, whether they're in the inbox still or not. And there they are. Or you could I mean,
00:10:29 ◼ ► shopping, right? Like if you just want to tag something for everything you want to think about
00:10:35 ◼ ► buying in the future, you could just tag it shopping, but it could have other tags too.
00:10:46 ◼ ► work. If it's stuff you want to buy for work or the name of a project or something like that,
00:10:52 ◼ ► it's just got both labels. And so it's in both contexts. And where I think things go wrong,
00:10:59 ◼ ► other systems go wrong is when there's a system. And I'll hold up Apple Notes as an example,
00:11:07 ◼ ► which is now my primary notes app. And I like Apple Notes. And I think it's a very strong
00:11:12 ◼ ► built-in default app and syncing on fantastic. Yeah. But my number one complaint with it is that
00:11:20 ◼ ► they've added tagging, but it already has a folder structure. And it's not that they're incompatible,
00:11:31 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, logically, I think this comes back to the point of where people sometimes have a
00:11:40 ◼ ► little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around tagging systems. Like they're objectively
00:11:46 ◼ ► more powerful, right? Like objectively speaking, a tagging system is a superset of a folder system,
00:11:52 ◼ ► right? Because if a folder system is just at most one tag per message, and a tagging system
00:11:57 ◼ ► is multiple tags per message. But like all things, people are familiar with what they've done in the
00:12:03 ◼ ► physical world and putting items into folders is something that people are very... It's easy
00:12:09 ◼ ► to understand. So I think there's a lot of that that just makes the whole tagging metaphor a
00:12:14 ◼ ► little difficult for, especially the folks that are a little less technical to like completely wrap
00:12:19 ◼ ► their heads around it at first. Right. And what helps with, especially with Gmail, is like you
00:12:25 ◼ ► said, you can still... Once those labels are over in your sidebar, and there you can think of them
00:12:31 ◼ ► as mailboxes, you can just drag a message to one and it seems like it moves it there, but it really
00:12:36 ◼ ► is just applying the label. But you still have the same... If you think, "Well, I guess I should
00:12:41 ◼ ► just click on the message and drag it over there and drop it and that will move it there," it still
00:12:47 ◼ ► works for you. You don't really have to think of it as applying a label. You can think of it as moving
00:12:53 ◼ ► and it still works. Right. They've definitely done a good job of if you don't really get labels,
00:12:59 ◼ ► you can sort of use Gmail and not really think about it that much if you want. So that refinement
00:13:05 ◼ ► has definitely happened over the course of a few years. All right. I want to keep going on the
00:13:10 ◼ ► Gmail I'm App Distinction, but let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor and it's our good
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00:15:04 ◼ ► Thank you to Rocket Money. rocketmoney.com/thetalkshow. So, you have it. I've been using
00:15:12 ◼ ► Gmail. I told you this as we were setting up the show. Years and years ago, before the iPhone,
00:15:17 ◼ ► I was a MailSmith user. MailSmith is a now nearly forgotten email client from Barebone Software,
00:15:24 ◼ ► the makers of BBEdit. It was sort of a weird duck. It was only Mac only. It never supported
00:15:30 ◼ ► IMAP, which is more or less the death of it. It was a POP only. POP was a... For those of you
00:15:35 ◼ ► who aren't old enough, POP was an email protocol before IMAP where you effectively would have a
00:15:42 ◼ ► client software on your computer. It would connect to the server. And if there were new messages,
00:15:49 ◼ ► it would download them to your computer and delete them from the server optionally. But most people
00:15:54 ◼ ► would just delete them from the server. So, it was a way to sort of keep all your email on your
00:15:59 ◼ ► computer, which is not the way people think of email anymore. But 20, 25, 30 years ago, when
00:16:06 ◼ ► people had like five megabyte storage allotments on their server, it made sense. It was also a much,
00:16:14 ◼ ► much, much, much simpler protocol than IMAP. I'm sure, Neil, you're going to burst out laughing
00:16:21 ◼ ► when I describe IMAP as somewhat idiosyncratic. POP is certainly a much more simple and
00:16:30 ◼ ► straightforward protocol compared to IMAP. So, I made do with POP for years and years because
00:16:35 ◼ ► I only really had... I just had one main Mac at a time. At the times when I did use more than one
00:16:42 ◼ ► Mac, I would keep my Mailsmith installation on an external drive. And then I could just quit it,
00:16:50 ◼ ► take the external drive, plug it into a different Mac. It's an old way of thinking about storage
00:16:55 ◼ ► and working, but it was sort of like, where was my email? It wasn't in the cloud. It wasn't on a Mac.
00:16:59 ◼ ► It was on this like LaCie... I don't know. That's just how people used to work with their, you know,
00:17:06 ◼ ► all of their data really just 20 years ago. It was one of those LaCie hard drives, like a FireWire
00:17:12 ◼ ► one that had the rubber coating, you know, and I had backups too, but I was like, I don't know,
00:17:19 ◼ ► rugged hard drives. But anyway, when the iPhone was announced, it was like, all of a sudden I was
00:17:25 ◼ ► like, well, this is the end of this because I want to... I know I'm going to want to use this.
00:17:29 ◼ ► Now I'm going to have two devices that I want to access my email from. So it's time to switch to
00:17:34 ◼ ► IMAP. Goodbye to my beloved Mailsmith. And I switched to Apple Mail, but I took the time.
00:17:41 ◼ ► You know, I was like, well, if I'm making this big switch, it's time for me to switch my email
00:17:45 ◼ ► hosting. And I switched all of my main email addresses to Gmail addresses. But at the time,
00:17:52 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure, unless I'm an idiot and I missed it, in 2007, I don't think you could hook up your
00:17:58 ◼ ► own custom domain names to Gmail officially. So the way I have things set up for 15 years now
00:18:04 ◼ ► is my like comments at Daring Fireball address is just a forwarder that I host that forwards
00:18:18 ◼ ► And then I have my Gmail account set up. You can say, would you like to send mail from like an
00:18:23 ◼ ► alias? And it's just a preference setting I set 15 years ago. So when I use that Gmail account,
00:18:27 ◼ ► the outgoing mail says it's from commented Daring Fireball. And it's worked. And here's the way that
00:18:35 ◼ ► it works is Gmail has... I think it's an off by default setting, but you can turn it on per
00:18:39 ◼ ► account to say, enable IMAP access to my account. And then any IMAP client can then authenticate
00:18:47 ◼ ► with Google and connect and will treat your Gmail account as an IMAP account. And it works mostly.
00:18:56 ◼ ► I mean, I've been doing it for 15 years. And one of the reasons I switched to Gmail at the time was
00:19:00 ◼ ► for their spam filtering, which was excellent at the time. It's still okay. I think it's gotten
00:19:10 ◼ ► Right. More on that. All right. More on that later. I'm going to make a note, but more or
00:19:13 ◼ ► less for 15 years, I've used Apple mail as my primary email client on Mac and iOS and treating
00:19:21 ◼ ► my Gmail as an IMAP server. And it's mostly worked. I mean, I don't really have... I don't
00:19:29 ◼ ► use lots of mailboxes. I more or less just do inbox to archive kind of works. And I've just
00:19:35 ◼ ► sort of sucked it up over the years. Yeah. I think the iPhone era obviously killed all the previous
00:19:42 ◼ ► email setups where people were using POP and trying to store everything locally. I think once
00:19:47 ◼ ► the iPhone came out and everyone was using smartphones, like IMAP was just sort of minimum
00:19:52 ◼ ► table stakes at that point for any reasonable multi-device user experience. And it served us
00:19:58 ◼ ► super well. And I think a lot of people out there sort of have this impression that IMAP is this
00:20:04 ◼ ► really janky, bad protocol. And it's actually not. There are some aspects of it that are
00:20:12 ◼ ► very thoughtfully designed and can work really, really well for the use cases that it addresses.
00:20:20 ◼ ► The real problem with it is just that it doesn't have a good fit with the Gmail data model. And
00:20:27 ◼ ► that's really where it fell apart with trying to use it with Gmail, is that there's a little bit of
00:20:32 ◼ ► a mismatch there. But otherwise, there's a lot of people who are using it very successfully with
00:20:36 ◼ ► other services. FastMail, for instance, is one that a lot of folks are really behind. And that's
00:20:43 ◼ ► something I'd love for us to eventually get to. But we have to obviously start with a very specific
00:20:48 ◼ ► focus to make something that's really different and get people on board. But yeah. All right. So
00:20:55 ◼ ► the big difference with MimeStream is right now, MimeStream 1.9. Now, how long have you been working
00:21:00 ◼ ► on MimeStream? You said years. Oh, years. Let's see. So I left Apple in 2017. And then for about
00:21:10 ◼ ► two years, I worked on a couple of different things kind of outside of technology. And then
00:21:16 ◼ ► eventually in 2019, I decided I really, really miss working on email. So I founded MimeStream in 2019
00:21:25 ◼ ► and kind of got to work every day building it. And it was just me, just me at that time. And in the
00:21:32 ◼ ► fall of 2020, I sort of opened up this public beta. I didn't actually intend to open up a wide
00:21:40 ◼ ► public beta. I did a quick post to Hacker News, thinking that I would get like 100 or 200 more
00:21:46 ◼ ► people to use what I was working on. And it sort of blew up a little bit from there, a little out
00:21:51 ◼ ► of my control. It all went a little faster than I was expecting. It seemed to resonate with people.
00:21:56 ◼ ► We sort of continued developing it from there. All right. So to be clear, when you were at Apple,
00:22:03 ◼ ► you were at Apple for, I'm going by your LinkedIn here, but for seven and a half years,
00:22:06 ◼ ► you were at Apple and you worked on Apple Mail and Notes, which is semi-related to mail, or at least
00:22:13 ◼ ► was for a while because, and again, I don't want to go off too much on a digression on Notes apps,
00:22:20 ◼ ► but until it switched to iCloud and modern iCloud storage and syncing APIs, Notes for syncing used
00:22:28 ◼ ► IMAP. Oh yes. Oh yes. So I actually worked on the first Notes app for OS X back in the day,
00:22:36 ◼ ► the first version and the second version used IMAP syncing under the hood, which there were pros and
00:22:42 ◼ ► cons. And that's not exactly the protocol that I think anyone would have chosen to start a brand
00:22:49 ◼ ► new Notes app with, but there was already pre-existing Notes in Mail, which were syncing
00:22:55 ◼ ► with IMAP and Notes on iOS, which was syncing with IMAP. So it was just sort of the default
00:23:01 ◼ ► choice for us as, well, we've got to be backwards compatible with what people already have. So we
00:23:07 ◼ ► need to do IMAP syncing of Notes. Now IMAP is not a great protocol for that specific use case,
00:23:14 ◼ ► but it got the job done well enough. And it was a light enough user experience that I think
00:23:19 ◼ ► quickly got a good bit of traction. If I recall correctly, because what I figured out very quickly
00:23:25 ◼ ► was when Notes was using IMAP for the backend for syncing, no surprise, my mac.com account
00:23:35 ◼ ► was pretty much rock solid. At the time it wasn't even called iCloud. It was either me.com or even
00:23:46 ◼ ► But because it was Apple's own IMAP servers, of course, Notes's use of IMAP for syncing
00:23:58 ◼ ► it didn't work well at all. And it was something, something, because if you think about it,
00:24:04 ◼ ► when you think about IMAP and email, a message is usually like, it's like dry ink. Like it's,
00:24:11 ◼ ► okay, I've typed up this message. I've hit send. It goes, it leaves me. And now it's a sent message
00:24:18 ◼ ► on my account. Done. It's sent. I already sent it. I can't go in there and edit it and change
00:24:26 ◼ ► some of the words other than by making a copy of it and resending it. And when I get an email
00:24:33 ◼ ► message from you, it's in my box. I can't edit. I can't just open the message that Neil sent me
00:24:40 ◼ ► and start typing in it and edit it. That's just not, you don't want email to work that way.
00:24:44 ◼ ► But a note is something you just go back to and you can add, add more text, replace. So I guess
00:24:51 ◼ ► IMAP has APIs that ostensibly support that sort of thing, but Gmail did not react well to it. As
00:24:58 ◼ ► I recall, every time you edited a note backed by Gmail's IMAP, you'd get a new copy of the note.
00:25:14 ◼ ► And it was backed by IMAP. And IMAP, unfortunately, the only way you can really change a message is by,
00:25:20 ◼ ► you can adjust the metadata of a message, but you can't easily change the contents. You basically
00:25:25 ◼ ► have to upload a whole brand new one and then delete the old one and then fake it out and
00:25:30 ◼ ► present it to the user as if no change has happened. And so that actually is one of the
00:25:36 ◼ ► serious engineering challenges when it comes to building an IMAP email client or really doing
00:26:03 ◼ ► a major one used by hundreds of millions of people. I guess if you work, did you work on
00:26:11 ◼ ► I worked on both. So I started when I first joined, I was on the Mac mail team and then
00:26:20 ◼ ► got loaned to the team that was working on iPad mail for the first iPad. So I worked on that for
00:26:27 ◼ ► about my first year or so at the company. Then I helped shipped Lion and a lot of the new features
00:26:34 ◼ ► there like conversation view. So I was on the Mac side for a while, then worked on Notes for
00:26:41 ◼ ► the first Mac version of Notes. And that was another year or two and then switched into
00:26:50 ◼ ► managing teams as an engineering manager, managing groups that were working on the backend
00:27:02 ◼ ► the front end of mail for the Mac and Apple Notes. But then eventually at some point or other made a
00:27:14 ◼ ► it was time for me to do something new. I never really would have thought that I would go back to
00:27:20 ◼ ► working on email. I knew what a difficult problem domain it was. I knew it was really difficult,
00:27:26 ◼ ► even just to get the table sticks working well, I knew would be a lot of work. So I think I had
00:27:33 ◼ ► started to crave working on something that was to be a little bit easier from the technology
00:27:39 ◼ ► perspective. Email is in some ways a house of a tower that has just been built one layer on top
00:27:50 ◼ ► of each other. Everything from the bottom up is just one extension, one addition, one refinement
00:27:58 ◼ ► on top of each other. So it's really complicated. But yeah, it was an interesting two years for me.
00:28:07 ◼ ► and I speak with some experience actually going back a long time, but hey, I know we should make
00:28:13 ◼ ► a new email client is right up there with we should launch a land war in Asia. It is something
00:28:21 ◼ ► that people often throughout history have thought and it's something people throughout history have
00:28:27 ◼ ► often started and very few make it what I say from personal experience. I think I don't even know
00:28:31 ◼ ► what year it was. But it was like 15 years ago, me and a bunch of friends, Brent Simmons, again,
00:28:37 ◼ ► who we did Vesper with, or I did Vesper with and a few others we thought about start well, we tried
00:28:42 ◼ ► starting an open source Mac, I map client, which we were going to call letters, which I still think
00:28:47 ◼ ► is a very good name. And we got a lot of design and we had a good we had a lot of ideas for how
00:28:55 ◼ ► the app would work and effectively gave up on it because we could not find a good I map engine.
00:29:04 ◼ ► That may or may not be different at this point open source, I don't know. But at the time,
00:29:08 ◼ ► we would need to do our own I map engine. And then it was deemed Well, this is not this is not a good
00:29:13 ◼ ► open source project. Effectively, I mean, and what modern day net newswire is, is exactly what we
00:29:21 ◼ ► thought letters would be if we got off the ground, which is open source, a great app, very, very Mac
00:29:26 ◼ ► like, but and net newswire has its own feed parsing engines, but feed parsing engines are
00:29:33 ◼ ► much, much simpler and as as convoluted and terrible and malformed as RSS feeds can be,
00:29:40 ◼ ► it's nothing like dealing with the morass of I map insta implementations out there. So we gave up
00:29:48 ◼ ► and it was it didn't work. And there have been many, many other email clients over the years that
00:29:53 ◼ ► have not made it so honest to God, I've just let me say this shipping a 1.0 is in and of itself. I
00:30:02 ◼ ► mean, obviously, you want to build a successful company and go from have this be a successful
00:30:06 ◼ ► endeavor. But actually just making something that works is just a remarkable accomplishment.
00:30:13 ◼ ► It really is. Thank you, john. Thanks, john. You're, you're absolutely right that email
00:30:17 ◼ ► clients are sort of extremely, they're definitely difficult to build. And I knew this going in,
00:30:23 ◼ ► I 100% knew this going in. And even knowing what I knew, I, I still underestimated how difficult
00:30:30 ◼ ► and how long and just how much work it would take to build something that was absolutely usable
00:30:37 ◼ ► as a 1.0. The thing about email is that most people have experience with it for decades,
00:30:44 ◼ ► and so therefore have very high expectations. It's not a brand new type of app where you're just sort
00:30:51 ◼ ► of learning some new novel interactions. People have memories of, oh, I used to do this in Eudora,
00:30:56 ◼ ► I used to do this in Outlook, I've been doing this in Thunderbird, Gmail has this feature,
00:31:02 ◼ ► like there's just a lot of them. And they sound simple, like to some degree, it's like, what's so
00:31:06 ◼ ► hard about this? It's a list of messages and you click one and you read it. What's so hard about
00:31:12 ◼ ► that? But it's, that's like saying, what's so hard about building a car? I get behind, I've got a
00:31:18 ◼ ► steering wheel and an accelerator and a brake pedal, and I press the accelerator and it goes
00:31:23 ◼ ► and I press the brake and it stops. And obviously, to build a modern car from first principles would
00:31:29 ◼ ► take an enormous, enormous amount of work and enormous budget. And people would immediately
00:31:35 ◼ ► criticize, oh, it doesn't shift very well from third to fourth gear. People are very in tune
00:31:42 ◼ ► with that sort of thing. And email clients and all productivity software is kind of the same way.
00:31:56 ◼ ► would expect. It's just because there's so much experience that most users have with these sorts
00:32:02 ◼ ► of apps. I don't really think it's possible to build something that's usable in less than
00:32:07 ◼ ► at least a few, a few man years of effort. You could stand up a prototype, sure. But for
00:32:13 ◼ ► something that checks off some of the table stakes, I don't think it's possible to do that
00:32:19 ◼ ► very quickly. You've been using the first person plural, we. So how many people is MimeStream now?
00:32:26 ◼ ► So MimeStream is now five people. It started as just me, but then after I got the public beta out
00:32:33 ◼ ► and then we started getting a lot more users and it was clear that there was demand for this.
00:32:39 ◼ ► That's when I sort of decided, okay, you know what? This is actually what I'm going to really
00:32:44 ◼ ► focus on. I'm going to invest my money into this. I'm going to invest 100% of my time into this.
00:32:49 ◼ ► This is going to be like what I'm really, really going to be pushing for and gunning for. This is
00:32:54 ◼ ► my, I'm all in this. So around end of 2021, started hiring some folks through 2022 as well.
00:33:02 ◼ ► It's been great. We're a small little remote team dotted around the world. And it's been really fun
00:33:14 ◼ ► Yeah, you know, right now almost everyone is technical. I have someone that helps out with
00:33:23 ◼ ► I have, I, and I, again, I used to work at Barebone Software and when MailSmith was out
00:33:31 ◼ ► Oh yeah. It's difficult. You get a lot. I mean, we just get so much email every day. It's if I were
00:33:48 ◼ ► It really is. And technical support for anything that you pay for is of course very important,
00:34:10 ◼ ► Yeah, that's definitely there. You know, one of the things that people really like about
00:34:14 ◼ ► my stream is that they can get a hold of us. So when something, if something isn't quite right,
00:34:21 ◼ ► we can take a look at it, help get them unjammed. There is some degree of handholding that we can do
00:34:27 ◼ ► with this. But you know, at the same time, when it comes to productivity software, I think on average
00:34:33 ◼ ► people, they're not very forgiving either. If you, if there's something wrong, like you try to send a
00:34:39 ◼ ► message again, an error, boom, all trust you have in that app is just gone. Like instant, it's eroded,
00:34:52 ◼ ► So that's been, that's obviously a challenge that the expectations of quality are super high
00:34:59 ◼ ► for this kind of productivity app. And it's taken a long time to really make sure that we are there.
00:35:04 ◼ ► And that's obviously a huge priority for us as a company. And it's something that always will be.
00:35:11 ◼ ► I mean, I think that that is just the core essence of the, it's one of the core essences of the
00:35:18 ◼ ► product is a focus on that. I took a look at MimeStream early on, just because I'm interested
00:35:25 ◼ ► in Mac native anything, and I've always been vaguely dissatisfied with Apple mail. And I looked
00:35:33 ◼ ► at it early and I remember thinking, this is promising. And I do use Gmail on the backend,
00:35:39 ◼ ► but I still had this idea in my head, but I kind of want to move my email off Gmail for reasons.
00:35:45 ◼ ► So maybe, and this is early, I'll come back and look at it later. Well, later for me was this
00:35:51 ◼ ► week when the 1.0 came out because the 1.0 came out, I saw a bunch of news. I got a very kind email
00:35:56 ◼ ► from you saying, Hey, we're finally hit 1.0. Here's some of the highlights. Here's a video with the
00:36:01 ◼ ► best features. And I thought, I got to look at this again. And after not having looked at it for
00:36:06 ◼ ► a while, I don't know when it was, it was early. So probably like two or 18 months ago or something
00:36:11 ◼ ► like that, I was just like, wow, like this, I mean, it is a very conservative 1.0, meaning
00:36:20 ◼ ► you really, really waited until it was robust feature rich and then, okay, now it's 1.0. I mean,
00:36:30 ◼ ► I think, and then again, maybe that's not too conservative. I don't know. I'm not saying you
00:36:35 ◼ ► made a mistake because email is so important. And like you said, the reputational harm of having some
00:36:40 ◼ ► kind of bug hit somebody early on, it may not be recoverable, but this is way, most apps are not,
00:36:54 ◼ ► SHAYE: Yeah, I think there's, at some point I might want to do like a retrospective on the
00:37:00 ◼ ► journey to 1.0. I've actually thought that it might be interesting for other folks if I wrote
00:37:05 ◼ ► that up at some point, but we did take a long time to get to 1.0. And I think on average, we
00:37:11 ◼ ► made sure that things were a little more polished and there were a little more features out there
00:37:17 ◼ ► than otherwise most people would push for, for 1.0. But at the same time, I think it comes back
00:37:21 ◼ ► to just the expectations and there's like one chance to make a good impression on users. So we
00:37:28 ◼ ► just, we decided to wait and make sure that we could do enough. So sometimes I look back at it
00:37:35 ◼ ► and I think, oh, we should have done this a year ago. And sometimes I look at it and I'm like,
00:37:45 ◼ ► Obviously we're going to be continuously developing this very aggressively over what I hope is the very
00:37:50 ◼ ► long-term horizon. Like I'm looking at this as something that I'm going to be doing for the next
00:37:59 ◼ ► Right. Exactly. That's the way I look at this. Like I'm all in on making sure that we build
00:38:05 ◼ ► Mindstream into being the best email client that anyone's ever tried. That's our mission.
00:38:12 ◼ ► But I think the other aspect of 1.0 that was sort of challenging that we had to keep putting off
00:38:18 ◼ ► was just coming up with the right pricing model for it. And this is something that we had been
00:38:23 ◼ ► thinking about for a long time and had done a lot of research about it. And it was clear that
00:38:33 ◼ ► the market for a prosumer email client was there, but it was also clear that a very specific type of
00:38:42 ◼ ► person that was going to be willing to pay for something like that. And so we had to really
00:38:47 ◼ ► figure out something that was going to work for the business, but also for the product. And part
00:38:51 ◼ ► of it is kind of why we waited to have a larger 1.0 than otherwise most apps would have done.
00:39:00 ◼ ► So the pricing is a subscription license. It is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. And for launch,
00:39:10 ◼ ► we are currently offering 40% off the annual plan. So that's $29.99 for the first year.
00:39:17 ◼ ► This is something where we tried to price it as aggressively as we could and as affordably as we
00:39:26 ◼ ► could, given the mission that we have in mind and the target user persona that we have in mind.
00:39:32 ◼ ► And this is very difficult for productivity software in general to get the pricing right.
00:39:37 ◼ ► And it's also really difficult as a maker to get it right. As a guy who works on an email client
00:39:44 ◼ ► and has been working on it for years, I want this thing to be as popular as possible. I want as many
00:39:49 ◼ ► people as possible out there to be able to use the app and enjoy it. But I also can't do that
00:39:56 ◼ ► unless I either have a giant VC war chest, which we don't. I'm entirely self-funded. I've invested
00:40:04 ◼ ► a lot of my personal savings into getting this off the ground or I have charged real money for it.
00:40:18 ◼ ► the professional and semi-professional users. The folks that are just really light personal users,
00:40:25 ◼ ► like, "Oh, I get some occasional Amazon receipts and stuff like that," there's other great options
00:40:31 ◼ ► out there. There's Apple Mail. I worked on it for a long time. I think it's a great app. It's
00:40:36 ◼ ► a great app for the average user. It does everything that a lot of people need. And I think
00:40:44 ◼ ► we did a lot of research and a lot of thinking and a lot of analysis behind this. So we wound up
00:40:52 ◼ ► where we think is something that is a middle ground and a market that can work for the company.
00:41:10 ◼ ► Eric Michael Rhodes I know exactly who you're talking about. You're talking about superhuman,
00:41:17 ◼ ► for something that's a really high-end option. And a lot of people swear by that. And then you've
00:41:22 ◼ ► got a lot of stuff that's free or close to free. Gmail itself is free, though not the workspace
00:41:28 ◼ ► addresses. The workspace addresses obviously cost money. And so this is really a little bit about
00:41:37 ◼ ► I love the pricing. I think you nailed it. It feels right to me. And I know that the whole idea of
00:41:42 ◼ ► subscription pricing is still and perhaps always will be. It is electric to some people. And I know
00:41:50 ◼ ► my podcast has listened by enough people that there's some number of them out there listening
00:41:55 ◼ ► to us who are like, "Why not give me a lifetime purchase price? I hate subscriptions. Why don't
00:42:03 ◼ ► Right. And I completely understand that. And I think that ultimately boils down to how you're
00:42:09 ◼ ► using the product. And we did a lot of research behind this before ultimately deciding on the
00:42:14 ◼ ► pricing that we have. And I think if we had priced it with a little lower, with a one-time option,
00:42:21 ◼ ► certainly more people would have come in the door. There's no doubt of that. But it was also really
00:42:27 ◼ ► clear to us that we would not be able to aggressively continue to grow and build the product
00:42:34 ◼ ► without at least hitting this, which we very much believe is the sweet spot for our company going
00:42:40 ◼ ► forward. So I get it. And I think that the folks that aren't interested in that, I think that's
00:42:45 ◼ ► completely reasonable. And if you're using it for personal use, I don't think that's necessarily...
00:42:52 ◼ ► I think there's a lot of other options out there if it's just for personal use. But for people that
00:42:56 ◼ ► are doing it professionally, what we found is that most people that are like, "I'm doing multiple
00:43:02 ◼ ► hours of email a day. Email is my job. Half my day's work is just responding to email." For that
00:43:10 ◼ ► user persona, it's a drop in the bucket for them. So it's really hard because you can't build stuff
00:43:17 ◼ ► that hits everybody's use cases. And we thought about having multiple plans, like free and
00:43:24 ◼ ► pro version. And we definitely thought very hard about that. Maybe someday that's something we
00:43:34 ◼ ► >> What's the demo policy? So if you're a new user, you're a listener, you're intrigued already,
00:43:45 ◼ ► >> Yeah, we try to make this super seamless for people. So you can download it, and there's a
00:43:50 ◼ ► 14-day free trial. The trial doesn't ask for a credit card. There's no account creation, nothing.
00:43:55 ◼ ► You just download the app and you just press start trial. That's it. So you can download it and just
00:44:00 ◼ ► evaluate it and see if it's a fit for you. After the 14 days are up, you can either subscribe or
00:44:07 ◼ ► you can go back to Gmail. It's a very simple model. The app doesn't really have any kind of
00:44:13 ◼ ► data lock-in. It uses the Gmail API. Sort of the ethos of the app is to very faithfully replicate
00:44:20 ◼ ► your Gmail account. So everything you do is synced right back to the server. So none of your data is
00:44:26 ◼ ► orphaned in the app if it doesn't work for you at the end of the 14 days. But yeah, we wanted
00:44:31 ◼ ► it to have something that's super low friction. And there's been a little confusion around some
00:44:38 ◼ ► of that, but overall I think people are pretty happy that they can try it without having to
00:44:43 ◼ ► enter their credit card and start the subscription that automatically renews unless you go and cancel
00:44:49 ◼ ► that. We didn't really want to have that kind of pattern. >> Right. We've already delineated some
00:44:54 ◼ ► of the ways that writing an email client, especially a serious professional email client,
00:44:59 ◼ ► is high stakes, lots of work, very complicated, and high pressure because it's very important.
00:45:05 ◼ ► But we can list some upsides. And one of the upsides is that you can use a new client for
00:45:12 ◼ ► 14 days. And if you don't like it or choose not to buy, you just stop using it and your email is
00:45:17 ◼ ► just there. You don't have 14 days worth of email that's locked into MimeStream and now
00:45:24 ◼ ► I don't really want to buy it now. I've got to export 14 days of email. No, you just stop using
00:45:29 ◼ ► it, go back to whatever you were using before. You can keep Apple Mail and Gmail running while
00:45:34 ◼ ► you're using MimeStream and everything syncs and is up to date. So it's actually one of the areas
00:45:39 ◼ ► where an email client is actually a pretty fun thing to work on because you can do a demo period
00:45:44 ◼ ► with no lock in, like you said, no lock in at all. >> Right. Yeah. And a lot of people do run
00:45:49 ◼ ► multiple clients simultaneously. I mean, certainly right now everyone's doing it on iOS because
00:45:54 ◼ ► there's no MimeStream iOS yet. So obviously you got to use something else on that platform.
00:45:59 ◼ ► There's a lot of great options out there for folks. But yeah, I think that is also one of the
00:46:05 ◼ ► beauties of email that you can also use multiple tools. There's some folks that will jump into
00:46:10 ◼ ► Apple Mail because it's got some stuff that we don't have yet and they'll jump back to us to do
00:46:15 ◼ ► other things. You can really mix and match and you can't do that with a lot of other tools, but email
00:46:21 ◼ ► is definitely one of those areas where you can very easily mix and match features. >> I want to
00:46:28 ◼ ► steer some of my efforts at Daring Fireball over the next year or two years as like a theme I want
00:46:34 ◼ ► to recur is to sort of gently push my subscription resistant readers into accepting that this is sort
00:46:43 ◼ ► of where indie software has to go. And I say has to, of course there are exceptions, right? There's
00:46:50 ◼ ► some long standing apps like BB Edit, which is not subscription and just you pay for upgrades when
00:46:55 ◼ ► there's a new Datto release and other apps are experimenting. There's two or three that popped
00:47:01 ◼ ► to mind. I think Sketch still does it. I know Agenda, which is sort of a cross between a to do
00:47:08 ◼ ► app and a notes app and a calendaring app. I know Panix, excellent text editor/ IDE, Nova does it,
00:47:19 ◼ ► where you pay for a subscription and if you stop paying your subscription, you keep the features
00:47:27 ◼ ► you've already had. And when they launch new features, you just don't get those features.
00:47:34 ◼ ► Even though your app is updating to the latest version, those features are locked because your
00:47:39 ◼ ► account subs and then if you resubscribe, then you get those features, which is a very interesting way
00:47:45 ◼ ► to do it, but also to me, sounds like an enormous amount of engineering work and internal factoring
00:47:54 ◼ ► work to keep, you know, well, these, all these features are only for people. It's complicated.
00:48:02 ◼ ► I appreciate that they do it and I know it makes some people happy, but it's a lot of work. And
00:48:07 ◼ ► then every single minute the developer team spends on gating those features to when people were
00:48:14 ◼ ► subscribed, every single minute they spend in line of code they write to do that is a line of code in
00:48:20 ◼ ► a minute they're not spending on just working on the app. Right. And I think there's something
00:48:26 ◼ ► there and I completely understand why a lot of people like that model, the paid upgrades model.
00:48:33 ◼ ► There are a few minor issues with it, notably on the app store. It's not especially easy to do that.
00:48:40 ◼ ► So, MindStream iOS is a no brainer for us in the future. It's not going to be a Mac only app forever,
00:48:46 ◼ ► right? So we wanted to have a pricing model that was going to work as we grew and expanded. And
00:48:52 ◼ ► we thought, why offer something that we're not going to be able to offer in the future?
00:48:58 ◼ ► It's just going to make some folks unhappy that we're switching on them. Let's start with the
00:49:03 ◼ ► model that we can definitely stick with over the long run. Because that's one thing. It's one thing
00:49:08 ◼ ► if someone is unhappy about it now, but they haven't paid us, the company, anything yet.
00:49:14 ◼ ► They've just used a free beta. So I get it. But if they've paid for a previous version and then
00:49:19 ◼ ► we switch the licensing model on them in the future, that's where things get a little messier
00:49:30 ◼ ► assuming that I continue to be able to have this model available for me. And I get that.
00:49:39 ◼ ► So we decided on this. There's also a little bit of the technology mix that came into play.
00:49:45 ◼ ► MimeStream is written with a mix of SwiftUI and AppKit. And SwiftUI is under some pretty heavy
00:50:10 ◼ ► MimeStream to continue working correctly. In some cases, there have been some updates that were
00:50:17 ◼ ► like completely brutal for the app. Like it would, there was a bug or I think in macOS 12.3,
00:50:24 ◼ ► you could open up a compose window, type in a bunch of text, hit send, and it would seem
00:50:30 ◼ ► like the message was sent. In your sent, the message had the text there, but then what was
00:50:35 ◼ ► actually sent was blank. And it's like a horrible bug that it was just, it's a complicated list of
00:50:50 ◼ ► Now it wasn't necessarily like an API boundary change. It wasn't like Apple just changed the API.
00:50:55 ◼ ► They've got an API contract, but API contracts don't mean that the exact behavior of everything
00:51:02 ◼ ► and the exact ordering of operations remain consistent. It's just an API contract. It's
00:51:08 ◼ ► not a behavioral contract. And so there's an important distinction there. And bugs happen.
00:51:14 ◼ ► Bugs happen. Now, I'm not saying this doesn't happen to apps that were written with more mature
00:51:19 ◼ ► technologies like Objective-C and AppKit. If you're an app that's written purely with that,
00:51:25 ◼ ► sure, this happens. I'm not saying it doesn't. But my experience was that this happened more
00:51:31 ◼ ► frequently with the more modern technology stack that we were using. So that was an issue for us.
00:51:38 ◼ ► Another issue was also the Gmail API and just being able to keep up with that. So while the
00:51:47 ◼ ► API contract is not changing, there were definitely behavioral changes that seemed to be happening
00:51:54 ◼ ► from time to time. And what really clinched the deal for us was in February, I woke up at like
00:52:01 ◼ ► 6 a.m. to just a flood of messages in the support inbox. And there was a very, very subtle error
00:52:10 ◼ ► code change that had happened in the Gmail API. And basically, it made the app immediately crash
00:52:16 ◼ ► on launch. And this was just in February. And there was no way to even get the update out.
00:52:22 ◼ ► So we had to send an email blast to everyone and say, "Hey, please manually install this update."
00:52:26 ◼ ► And so that was, we've had a few other problems similar to that in the past, but crash on launch
00:52:34 ◼ ► in a loop was especially bad. That was a really unfortunate case. That sort of nudged us further
00:52:41 ◼ ► towards, "We're an app that's dependent on another company's API. I can't make a lifetime promise
00:52:49 ◼ ► that this experience is going to work because it's not my API. It's not my promise to make.
00:52:56 ◼ ► It's Google's API." I fully understand that there is a risk whenever you build a company
00:53:02 ◼ ► that is dependent upon another company's API. There's no explicit contract between us and
00:53:13 ◼ ► Disaster if they don't. Well, I think first and foremost on people's minds would be Google
00:53:19 ◼ ► Reader, which was canceled. So the advantage you have is Google got rid. It's not that Google just
00:53:24 ◼ ► eliminated Google Reader's APIs and said, "You have to just come to the website." They just said,
00:53:29 ◼ ► "We're getting rid of Google Reader." I don't think there's any chance that Google is going to
00:53:33 ◼ ► ever get rid of Gmail. I don't see how they could. I mean, it's as nonsensical as the idea that get
00:53:38 ◼ ► rid of Google search. Would they get rid of the API? Hmm. I mean, I know so many enterprise SaaS
00:53:46 ◼ ► tools that also integrate with the API that I think it would be a little bit of a disaster
00:53:51 ◼ ► for them if they ever, like an ecosystem disaster, if they ever got rid of it. The larger risk that I
00:53:57 ◼ ► could see is that maybe they could start to charge for it or have other applications like that where
00:54:02 ◼ ► now we'd have to pay for every single call that we make. And the Gmail API is free for us to use.
00:54:07 ◼ ► However, we still have to sort of treat it as a limited resource. Okay. So as a project,
00:54:14 ◼ ► we get 1 billion API queries per day. So we can't just let that all go to waste. So over time,
00:54:28 ◼ ► "That number is trending up. The number of API queries per day is trending up. We need to do
00:54:32 ◼ ► some work to reduce the number of queries that we're making and make things more efficient."
00:54:37 ◼ ► Hmm. So we've done that several times. Actually, I'm embarrassed to say the night before launch,
00:54:43 ◼ ► I made an additional last minute change to try and reduce the number of queries based to make sure
00:54:50 ◼ ► that we don't trip that 1 billion limit that we have from Google. Now, they do have a process
00:54:57 ◼ ► in place to request more quota. It's not that they don't. It's just that I've already gone through
00:55:02 ◼ ► that a few times and they haven't granted it yet. So they say that they will, but since it hasn't
00:55:14 ◼ ► because I'm crying. All right. All right. Let me take another break here and thank our good friends
00:55:20 ◼ ► at Trade Coffee. I can say that quite literally this entire podcast is fueled by Trade Coffee. I
00:55:26 ◼ ► just had a whole pot of it before we started recording. Trade Coffee, I love this company.
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00:56:02 ◼ ► year at this point. I've never had a bad bag of coffee from them, but you get the coffee and then
00:56:07 ◼ ► you get an email a week later and it's like, "How'd you like that coffee?" And you can give it a
00:56:11 ◼ ► rating. And then they use that to sort, "Oh, this one got five stars. This one didn't. Give them
00:56:17 ◼ ► more coffee like this." And now they've got my taste profile dialed in. The last six months of
00:56:24 ◼ ► my Trade Coffee have been even more enjoyable than the first. And I like the first, but the algorithm
00:56:29 ◼ ► really works. And it's roasted fresh to order. Fresh coffee is better coffee, according to my
00:56:36 ◼ ► notes here from them. I'm telling you right now, coffee is like produce. It goes bad. It really
00:56:42 ◼ ► does. You can't see it, but when you buy stuff on the shelf at a supermarket and it's whole beans
00:56:47 ◼ ► and it's been sitting there even for just like a month, it is way different than coffee that was
00:56:52 ◼ ► roasted three or four days ago, which is what you get from Trade Coffee. Fresh roasted coffee,
00:56:57 ◼ ► they seal it up, put it in a bag, mail it to you, and it's at your door, ding dong delivery.
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00:57:31 ◼ ► podcast a free bag of coffee with any subscription. Just go to www.drinktrade.com/thetalkshow.
00:57:39 ◼ ► That's www.drinktrade.com/thetalkshow. Get a free bag of coffee with any subscription purchase.
00:57:46 ◼ ► My thanks to www.drinktrade.com/thetalkshow. All right, before we move on to Mac stuff,
00:57:53 ◼ ► which is really, I don't want to let go. When you first said, "Okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going
00:57:59 ◼ ► to get serious. I'm going to go full time. I'm going to make this client." When did you zero in on
00:58:05 ◼ ► Gmail? What if I made a Gmail-specific client for 1.0 as sort of the differentiating feature?
00:58:12 ◼ ► That's a great question. So, ultimately, I think it was another thing that just wasn't my initial
00:58:19 ◼ ► intention to do that. I initially wanted to do something that was like a little bit of a
00:58:25 ◼ ► reinvention of the email experience. So, initially, I was thinking about doing something that sort of
00:58:31 ◼ ► mashed together email and chat into one thing and sort of lets you sort of seamlessly move between
00:58:38 ◼ ► like long-form and short-form communication. Because to some degree, it's like we use two
00:58:44 ◼ ► different services, two different apps, two different ways of typing to each other. And
00:58:49 ◼ ► one is just very short messages and the expectation is a quick response and one is a longer message.
00:59:00 ◼ ► showing friends and other people that I knew were kind of like email geeks about this. And everyone's
00:59:05 ◼ ► like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. But can you just make an email client that syncs quickly
00:59:11 ◼ ► and works well with Gmail search?" And I was like, "What? No." It came to mind that like,
00:59:18 ◼ ► it reminded me of that Henry Ford quote. If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have
00:59:23 ◼ ► said faster horses. I was trying to show people cars and people were telling me, "I don't want
00:59:30 ◼ ► your car. I want a faster horse." And so for a while, I dismissed it. But ultimately, I just
00:59:36 ◼ ► kept hearing that over and over again. And I realized I can't ignore this. And so that really
00:59:42 ◼ ► is actually kind of the key thesis behind MimeStream. It doesn't try to reinvent email.
00:59:49 ◼ ► It tries to do email really, really well. And that's what we're going to continue to try to do.
00:59:56 ◼ ► There's a lot of services out there that I think do try to reinvent email. Hey, for instance,
01:00:02 ◼ ► is a really great example of that. And they've done a fantastic job of that. And I applaud that.
01:00:12 ◼ ► But there's also a lot of people out there that just don't want that to change. They don't want
01:00:18 ◼ ► their core email workflow to change. They just kind of want to get through it just a little bit
01:00:23 ◼ ► faster and a little bit smoother. And I happen to think and hope that there's a large pool of
01:00:30 ◼ ► like-minded users out there that have that same sort of desire and wish. And that's the audience
01:00:36 ◼ ► that we're building for. MimeStream 1.0 finally does include some stuff that's a little bit
01:00:42 ◼ ► MimeStream specific. We have this new profiles feature that allows you to group multiple accounts
01:00:48 ◼ ► together, sort of treat them as different sets. And that's something that is a little bit unique
01:00:54 ◼ ► on the Mac, at least, to MimeStream. But by and large, we try to be a really faithful to Gmail's
01:01:04 ◼ ► kind of feature set and just faithfully merge the power of macOS with the power of Gmail.
01:01:11 ◼ ► How do you find the Gmail API? It exposes a lot of functionality. There are some pros and cons to it.
01:01:18 ◼ ► There's definitely some things that you would be surprised to hear that IMAP does better. But
01:01:25 ◼ ► on the whole, we were able to deliver a lot of other features. Like we're able to support
01:01:34 ◼ ► labels on a very first-class basis with all their colors. You can change their visibility settings.
01:01:39 ◼ ► You can make them visible or not visible in the message list, visible or not visible in the
01:01:43 ◼ ► sidebar. You can apply multiple labels to one message. You can create server-side filters in
01:01:49 ◼ ► MimeStream. Those sync right back to Gmail and that will categorize and tag your messages as
01:01:54 ◼ ► they come in. And we can get access to the message category so you can have those same promotions,
01:02:01 ◼ ► social updates, forums, tabs for your inbox that you have in the Gmail web UI. You can have that
01:02:07 ◼ ► in a real Mac app. It gives us access to things like the Gmail aliases that you use. And there's
01:02:16 ◼ ► a subtle distinction between using Gmail aliases and setting it up just as a different address in
01:02:23 ◼ ► another IMAP client. There is a subtle difference there in that using the real Gmail alias is a
01:02:29 ◼ ► little bit better for deliverability. Because if you have your address set up and it's going through
01:02:35 ◼ ► the actual SMTP server of the domain that you're sending from, you can have de-KIM signing and
01:02:42 ◼ ► basically have better deliverability of that message compared to just sending it through
01:02:47 ◼ ► the Gmail SMTP server. But that's one other example of a way that we try to integrate it
01:02:53 ◼ ► a little bit better into the ecosystem. It gave us access to the Google APIs as a whole,
01:02:58 ◼ ► gave us access to things like when you're writing a message back and forth with people you're
01:03:04 ◼ ► communicating with, we can automatically fetch their public Google profile photo and show that.
01:03:10 ◼ ► So you don't have to set that up in contacts and have your own photo for people who are
01:03:15 ◼ ► automatically fetching them. If you get a calendar invite, we have the little banner that allows you
01:03:20 ◼ ► to do a one click, like just "Yes, accept." And it doesn't open up a browser tab. It doesn't take you
01:03:26 ◼ ► out of context. You just click "Accept" and you're done. And so there's a lot of niceties that have
01:03:32 ◼ ► come through the Gmail API and the other broader Google APIs as a whole. The main downside to it
01:03:39 ◼ ► is that for high volumes of requests, it is not very efficient for high volumes of requests.
01:03:49 ◼ ► So MimeStream is a limited-cash client partially due to that restriction. So it's not like a lot
01:03:57 ◼ ► of other clients that basically download a full copy of your entire account and store every single
01:04:04 ◼ ► message locally. If you're looking for full offline access right now, you got to use something
01:04:10 ◼ ► else right now. And so that's the one part that's a little tricky for us. We've already been exploring
01:04:16 ◼ ► using both IMAP and the Gmail API in harmony to basically have the best of both worlds in
01:04:25 ◼ ► these few edge cases where one works better than the other. And that's something we are
01:04:31 ◼ ► definitely going to be doing in the future, especially as we start to branch out of just
01:04:40 ◼ ► It's one of those things that as the whole world has transitioned, and I know that calling
01:04:47 ◼ ► everything the cloud is sort of a marketing term. I mean, it's just servers and clients. But
01:04:52 ◼ ► as cloud computing has become more robust and the default for more people, especially younger
01:04:59 ◼ ► people or people who spend their "desktop" time really just using web apps, everything by
01:05:07 ◼ ► definition is in the cloud. Or at least it doesn't make any sense if you're using Gmail by typing
01:05:15 ◼ ► "gmail.com" in your browser, you don't expect to have your entire Gmail archive stored locally.
01:05:22 ◼ ► You'd be furious. You'd be like, "Why in the world would you do that?" But that's how Apple
01:05:28 ◼ ► Mail works. Like Apple Mail, you sign up with a new IMAP account and it downloads all of your
01:05:34 ◼ ► mail and there's a local copy of everything that's kept in sync. And I don't know, at some point it
01:05:39 ◼ ► was like, "Well, of course, 20-some years." I guess Apple Mail really goes back before Mac OS 10 to
01:05:46 ◼ ► Next. It's derived from the Next mail client. So, I don't know, there might be code in there that
01:05:53 ◼ ► goes back to 1989. I don't know, but it's close. And it makes sense. There's some uses. It made
01:06:03 ◼ ► sense at the time that you'd want all your mail downloaded. I think today, no. And especially with
01:06:09 ◼ ► Gmail, or maybe optionally, if you're saying that you might make that an optional feature. I mean,
01:06:14 ◼ ► it certainly wouldn't hurt to have it. But I think most people would be surprised to learn that their
01:06:19 ◼ ► Mac downloads all of their mail. Yeah. And I think there's definitely valid use cases for it, for
01:06:26 ◼ ► having a full copy of everything that you can use truly offline. And I think that was more important
01:06:32 ◼ ► 10 years ago than it is now. Even these days, if you're getting on a plane, most people just tend
01:06:38 ◼ ► to just, if they're trying to actually do email, they're just going to pay for the eight bucks for
01:06:42 ◼ ► Wi-Fi or whatever, and just be able to send and receive emails. MindStream does support offline
01:06:48 ◼ ► use. You can send messages, you can read, file, and all of that. Every single thing that you do,
01:06:54 ◼ ► it writes it to a journal. And then when you come back online, it will replay all of those actions
01:07:00 ◼ ► to the server. But if you try to scroll to really old messages from 10 years ago, and it's not
01:07:07 ◼ ► already cached by our adaptive caching system, if that's not already there, you can't fetch it
01:07:13 ◼ ► when you're offline. And we sort of thought that would be the right middle ground between the two
01:07:18 ◼ ► of still letting you do stuff offline if you just happen to be on a plane and you just want to
01:07:25 ◼ ► respond just a few emails or just read some and you don't want to pay for the Wi-Fi, sure,
01:07:29 ◼ ► you can do some things offline and it'll just continue to work right as soon as you come back
01:07:35 ◼ ► online. But in the future, we've gotten a few requests for full offline mirroring. I wouldn't
01:07:41 ◼ ► say it's a lot. I get it. I just find that, like you said, even on an airplane, which is like the
01:07:49 ◼ ► sort of canonical example of I need offline access to blank, it's just less of a problem than it ever
01:07:55 ◼ ► was before. And it's, I don't know, it's been a while, it was pre-COVID the last time I was on a
01:08:00 ◼ ► cruise ship. Cruise ships are probably the last bastion of really terrible Wi-Fi that, you know,
01:08:06 ◼ ► but it's sort of the point like, hey, how about I get offline for a week and sail the Caribbean or
01:08:11 ◼ ► whatever. All right, let me take one last break here. Thank our third and final sponsor. And then
01:08:16 ◼ ► I want to talk Mac stuff. And our third sponsor of the day is our good friends at Memberful.
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01:10:47 ◼ ► So to me, the most distinguishing feature of MimeStream or I would say even more than the
01:10:53 ◼ ► Gmail specific focus is the fact that it is a terrific Mac app, first foremost only really at
01:10:59 ◼ ► this point. And that's. I'm going to say depressing in some ways, I don't I don't think I think the
01:11:08 ◼ ► Mac is as a platform is in a very strange position. I don't. The Mac is thriving. Mac sales are up
01:11:14 ◼ ► the highest they've ever been. There are more active Mac users than there have ever been.
01:11:20 ◼ ► I would say Mac hardware is the best it's ever been. It's incredible. It's and their commitment
01:11:27 ◼ ► to Apple Silicon is just amazing. No company would ever do something like this if they weren't
01:11:31 ◼ ► committed to it for the long haul. I think we're going to see some exciting pro hardware
01:11:37 ◼ ► announcements at WWDC in a couple of weeks. I I think I don't know it's going to go on sale.
01:11:52 ◼ ► All that good news as a Mac user who wants to see a bright future, we see few I see fewer and fewer
01:12:02 ◼ ► truly first class new Mac apps being created and. I worry about I can foresee a future where
01:12:12 ◼ ► true what I think of as a true Mac app is is dying out and the but Mac OS and Mac hardware thrives as
01:12:20 ◼ ► just as a client for doing stuff on the web and using catalyst style apps and stuff like that.
01:12:28 ◼ ► You know, again, I don't want to get into a whole well, although we could talk about it and see if
01:12:32 ◼ ► you considered catalyst or why you chose app kit. Yeah, it's a it's a good question. I think why the
01:12:39 ◼ ► Mac is something that I've heard a lot of people ask. I think a lot of companies that are looking
01:12:44 ◼ ► to build even truly native apps for Apple's platforms tend to start with iOS just because
01:12:49 ◼ ► the user base is much, much larger. And I definitely thought about that in the early days.
01:12:55 ◼ ► I was like, do I make this an iOS app first or do I make a Mac app first? I've got to pick one
01:12:59 ◼ ► platform first. Ultimately, I chose the Mac because even though it's the much smaller platform in
01:13:07 ◼ ► terms of user base, because that's the platform where I thought that we could make the biggest
01:13:12 ◼ ► difference. And there's already Gmail iOS on iOS. So if you really are deep in the Gmail ecosystem,
01:13:22 ◼ ► you can use the first party Gmail app to get some of those extra features if that's what you're
01:13:28 ◼ ► looking for. And that didn't exist on Mac OS. There's no official Gmail map for Mac OS. So
01:13:35 ◼ ► we thought, okay, that's a that's a process for us. The other thing that really struck me was that
01:13:40 ◼ ► I knew it was ultimately going to be targeted towards kind of the prosumer user base rather
01:13:48 ◼ ► than just like the lightweight personal users. And if you are actively doing like an hour or two
01:13:55 ◼ ► hours of email a day, like I can't imagine doing all my email just on my phone. I mean, I do some,
01:14:04 ◼ ► for sure. I've read everything. I'd say I read more email on my phone than I read on my Mac.
01:14:09 ◼ ► But I tend to respond through the Mac most of the time just because I got my keyboard, right? The
01:14:16 ◼ ► real physical keyboard just makes the whole thing a lot easier. And I can drag and drop files in,
01:14:22 ◼ ► drag and take screenshots and do all that like nerdy stuff that I need to do to put together
01:14:28 ◼ ► nice responses. And so I tend to write mostly on the Mac. And people that I've talked to also tend
01:14:34 ◼ ► to agree that if you're doing serious volume of email, like if you're doing any sales, if you're
01:14:40 ◼ ► a founder, manager, real estate agent, these sorts of roles where you're communicating with people a
01:14:45 ◼ ► lot that just doing it on a laptop is just a much better form factor than pecking away on a phone
01:14:49 ◼ ► keyboard. Not to say that people don't do email on the phone. People do way more email on the phone
01:14:55 ◼ ► than they do on the Mac. It's just the volume of emails sent for that. That's where we decided to
01:15:04 ◼ ► focus on the Mac first. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to just kind of liking the Mac as a platform
01:15:11 ◼ ► myself too. It's kind of where my heart is a little bit to some degree. I really love the
01:15:19 ◼ ► platform. I think it's the best OS out there. I really enjoy doing things on the Mac. And I just
01:15:26 ◼ ► really like Mac apps, like native, tight Mac apps. They're just something I just love. I just love
01:15:32 ◼ ► using them. And so I decided also to mix in a little bit of that personal emotion into it as
01:15:38 ◼ ► well. It wasn't just completely a strict business decision. But I think looking back at it, I still
01:15:44 ◼ ► feel like it was the right move. I feel like it was a missing feature set. If we had launched on
01:15:50 ◼ ► iOS first, then MimeStream would be competing against Gmail iOS. And while there are a lot
01:15:57 ◼ ► of people that want MimeStream iOS to replace Gmail iOS on their phone, I think it's less of a
01:16:05 ◼ ► distinctive difference. And it's just such a huge market and people just have such deep, steep
01:16:13 ◼ ► expectations of what they're getting out of productivity software that I just wanted to pick
01:16:19 ◼ ► an area where I felt like we could actually have a really kind of unique selling point.
01:16:25 ◼ ► I get what you're saying. And I think if you took somebody and somehow did like a Truman
01:16:31 ◼ ► show style experiment and put somebody in a world where they had no access to any computing device
01:16:37 ◼ ► other than an iPhone and never knew what it was like to use a laptop of any kind. And all they
01:16:42 ◼ ► have is an iPhone and that's all they've ever learned. And they know email and they can do
01:16:46 ◼ ► email and they can get think that they're very efficient on email on their phone because it's
01:16:51 ◼ ► all they've ever known. That's different than somebody who, you know, in the real world where
01:16:56 ◼ ► somebody knows just how efficient you can be with a real keyboard on your fingers and an OS. And
01:17:03 ◼ ► again, not to throw the iPad under the bus, but an OS where you can look at things side by side
01:17:09 ◼ ► easily and command tab switching is very fast and drag and drop just is always available.
01:17:21 ◼ ► like when you're like, oh, I was, I took a long weekend and I'm coming at Memorial day, like now,
01:17:27 ◼ ► and I'm coming back in Tuesday and I've got 157 new emails in my inbox. What's the fastest way
01:17:33 ◼ ► to go through it? You, nobody's going to say the phone is the fastest way. Like whatever your
01:17:38 ◼ ► fastest, most efficient you've ever been at email has been, I can almost guarantee it. It's been on
01:17:45 ◼ ► some kind of desktop OS, whether it is in a browser app like Gmail, if you're a superpower
01:17:51 ◼ ► user of all their little shortcuts and stuff or whatever, it's probably a desktop OS. And I think
01:17:57 ◼ ► for a pro tool optimizing for that is a great, is the way to start where you're trying to take that
01:18:02 ◼ ► to the highest level it's ever been like, oh, however efficient you've ever been in the past,
01:18:07 ◼ ► try MimeStream, you'll be even more efficient. Right, right. And I think it's obviously designed
01:18:13 ◼ ► for people that need to send and respond to a lot of email. And so that's where just starting on the
01:18:18 ◼ ► Mac, just, it just made sense. So there's, there's also the open question of why Mac native
01:18:29 ◼ ► which would have enabled us to ship on windows as well at the same time. And I wouldn't lie if I,
01:18:37 ◼ ► I'd be lying if I said, I didn't think about it in the beginning, but that was, there's just two
01:18:42 ◼ ► reasons I didn't really even seriously consider that. One, that was just not where my heart was
01:18:46 ◼ ► in terms of making a product, right? I wanted to build a Mac app because that's, that's what I
01:18:53 ◼ ► enjoy using. And there's a whole list of reasons why I enjoy using it, right? So, so much lighter,
01:18:58 ◼ ► so much more integrated in the OS, but there's also just something nice about it fitting into
01:19:04 ◼ ► the platform and feeling like it's a part of the platform that I really like. And two, I felt like
01:19:09 ◼ ► if we just made something that was effectively a web app, just packaged up into Electron,
01:19:16 ◼ ► it almost was like, what would be the point of doing that? Like, why would you then not just
01:19:22 ◼ ► go use the Gmail web UI? Like what would be the sort of core essence of that product that to me
01:19:30 ◼ ► would then require us going in, in more of the like reinvent email direction. Like, Hey,
01:19:36 ◼ ► like Hey did it right. Like, like, like Hey, and trying to like reinvent some of the workflows
01:19:41 ◼ ► around there. And we're really trying to not disturb people's workflows too much. We're trying
01:19:46 ◼ ► to do them really, really well. So we're at the opposite end of the spectrum from something like,
01:19:49 ◼ ► Hey, I spent a whole year when Hey came out, I moved my public address. The one that's now
01:19:55 ◼ ► commented during fireball.net again, and is back to being backed by Gmail. And I'm using
01:20:01 ◼ ► a Mime stream now for it. But I spent a whole year where I switched to Gruber at Hey.com. But I used
01:20:08 ◼ ► Hey for a whole year for that. And I there were parts I liked, I loved their screener feature,
01:20:13 ◼ ► where I could screen out so much PR, which I don't want in the label to spam because it's not spam.
01:20:19 ◼ ► But I don't, I don't want to ever hear from these people again. And it was great. But the the
01:20:23 ◼ ► ultimate and their iOS app was okay. But the deal breaker for me was the Mac. And I just could not
01:20:30 ◼ ► abide using either the web interface or their electron wrapper for their app, which is as good
01:20:35 ◼ ► as it can be for that. And if I needed to use Windows, like I would be all over Hey, I would if
01:20:42 ◼ ► I wanted to access my personal email from a Windows machine while I worked on it or something like
01:20:47 ◼ ► that. It's it's terrific for that. But it's because my brain and my personal habits are so deeply
01:20:55 ◼ ► ingrained with Mac OS and app kit idioms, like services, menu items and drag and drop and just
01:21:03 ◼ ► having things work the way I expect a Mac app to work without thinking right like I'm so ingrained
01:21:09 ◼ ► in it that I know the way a Mac app should work. And so like, part of my excitement with Mime
01:21:14 ◼ ► Stream this week and getting back into it is every time I'd guess like, well, what if I control click
01:21:19 ◼ ► on this and get the contextual Oh, yep, there's something Oh, look at this cool feature, filter
01:21:24 ◼ ► messages like this. Oh, what does that do? Oh, wait, here's a powerful filtering UI where I can
01:21:31 ◼ ► pick which fields based on the email I just picked. I want to filter all the emails that are sent
01:21:37 ◼ ► to this address because it's a mailing list. And what do I want to do with it? I want to add,
01:21:41 ◼ ► boom 123 actions, take it out of the inbox. Market is red and done. Oh, and yes, do I want to apply
01:21:48 ◼ ► it to all of the messages already there? Yes, boom, done. They're out of my inbox. Boy, that
01:21:54 ◼ ► was easy. And it was exactly what I expected as a Mac user control click, filter messages like this,
01:22:00 ◼ ► boom, and go and fast, fast, fast in ways that to me, web apps never are. And again, I'm not putting
01:22:07 ◼ ► that I am putting them down, I guess, but I understand, but I understand the upside of it,
01:22:13 ◼ ► right? I understand the fact that I could sit down at any computer in the world and go to hey.com and
01:22:17 ◼ ► get my hey email in a familiar interface. I don't need a Mac for that. And that is an advantage.
01:22:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it depends on the user. I think obviously, hey is a really amazing product with
01:22:33 ◼ ► a lot of really clever ideas in there. And I think if you're the kind of user that can get your head
01:22:38 ◼ ► around all of those, then I think it's a great option. My stream is just totally at the opposite
01:22:43 ◼ ► end of the spectrum from that of just trying to be as familiar as possible. Like we follow
01:22:49 ◼ ► all of the macOS human interface guidelines, like pretty much we try to follow it to a T, to
01:22:56 ◼ ► whatever extent is possible. And the upside to that has been, it's really easy for people to find
01:23:03 ◼ ► their bearings. Like they open the app and they're like, oh, this, I know how to use this. This
01:23:07 ◼ ► reminds me of the apps I've also used from Apple. This reminds me of messages. This reminds me of
01:23:14 ◼ ► notes. This reminds me of mail. There's a lot of familiarity here. It just follows the patterns
01:23:18 ◼ ► that Apple has published. And so actually we've got basically no help articles even yet. We're
01:23:24 ◼ ► just like very early in our process, but we actually have not found that to actually really
01:23:29 ◼ ► be a problem. Very few people write in asking how to do something. And that's just because it just,
01:23:37 ◼ ► it matches what you would expect if you've used other apps that are part of the system.
01:23:47 ◼ ► that consistency is an advantage for users. And that once you've learned how to use, I mean,
01:23:54 ◼ ► back in the day, once you learned how to use MacPaint and MacWrite, and then you tried MacDraw,
01:23:59 ◼ ► you were like, oh, this is the, all these things that should be the same are exactly the same,
01:24:04 ◼ ► except now I'm doing vector drawings. And the only things that are different are the things specific
01:24:09 ◼ ► to the domain of the app itself. And the thing that I think gets so overlooked in the modern
01:24:17 ◼ ► world, where that's sort of fallen by the wayside and with so many developers and with web apps not
01:24:23 ◼ ► having any one true, hey, and again, we can argue about how much Apple's own stuff follows the human
01:24:31 ◼ ► interface guidelines, but there is, but there are, it's so much more like language, like
01:24:39 ◼ ► English grammar or any language where, yes, the HIG is like a grammar guide or a dictionary,
01:24:44 ◼ ► and you can refer to it and look up like, oh, how am I, how far, if I have three buttons in a
01:24:49 ◼ ► dialogue, how am I supposed to space them ostensibly? But for the most part, you learn it
01:24:55 ◼ ► like a language and human brains pick up on idioms in the same way that they pick up on grammar,
01:25:03 ◼ ► and the same way you pick up on social cues, like, and if you go, if you join a new organization and
01:25:10 ◼ ► you're, it's the first time you go to a meeting and you're, it's all unfamiliar, you pick up on,
01:25:17 ◼ ► oh, I see what people do and now is, this is how they behave here, this is when people speak up or
01:25:23 ◼ ► whatever, and then two or three meetings of the club or group or whatever it is in, you intuit
01:25:29 ◼ ► how it's supposed to go. And that's how great Mac software works, is even if you're not a developer
01:25:36 ◼ ► or designer who's making it, you're just a user, your brain absorbs those things and then you don't
01:25:43 ◼ ► have to think about it and you really do gain an intuition as to how an app like MimeStream works
01:25:49 ◼ ► without reading a help guide or watching a five minute, here's how to get started video.
01:25:55 ◼ ► Right, right. And I think, I think that's one of the key benefits of making something that is
01:25:59 ◼ ► really deeply platform native. It's just that users have a really easy time getting up and
01:26:04 ◼ ► running. You know where to expect if you want a specific setting, probably where to look for it.
01:26:10 ◼ ► If you want to do a specific action, if you want a specific keyboard shortcut, probably what it is.
01:26:15 ◼ ► And so there's a lot of just that consistency that pays a lot of dividends in terms of getting up to
01:26:20 ◼ ► speed with the app. So you mentioned that it is a mix of AppKit and SwiftUI. And I know for our
01:26:26 ◼ ► non-developer listeners, it's a little confusing. SwiftUI is a framework and it's cross platform all
01:26:33 ◼ ► the way to the watch even. And if you're doing SwiftUI, you absolutely are using the Swift
01:26:38 ◼ ► programming language. But if you're using the Swift programming language, you might be writing
01:26:43 ◼ ► SwiftUI, you might be writing AppKit on the Mac or on iOS, you might be writing UIKit, right? Which
01:26:49 ◼ ► are the three main frameworks, ways of organizing an app. Is MimeStream all Swift or is it a mix of
01:26:59 ◼ ► Swift and Objective-C or? It is like 99.9% Swift. Just in a few minor cases where Objective-C was a
01:27:08 ◼ ► slightly better fit, we fell back there. But the vast majority of the code, at least we've written,
01:27:13 ◼ ► is all in Swift. In terms of the SwiftUI, Swift split, there are bits and pieces of the main
01:27:20 ◼ ► window that are SwiftUI. We've got those profile switchers, parts of the sidebar, parts of the
01:27:27 ◼ ► cells. They're all in SwiftUI. The settings window is all SwiftUI. And there's other parts of the
01:27:33 ◼ ► application that we're switching over to. Ultimately, we're going to be moving completely
01:27:38 ◼ ► to SwiftUI. And we've started development on MimeStream iOS, although that's still some time
01:27:45 ◼ ► away. It's still in very, very early stages. MimeStream iOS is SwiftUI through and through.
01:27:51 ◼ ► And while I'm not sure that we would be unifying the entire front-end stack for the first release,
01:27:59 ◼ ► at least for the iOS side, I think it's mature enough that we would be going all in on that
01:28:04 ◼ ► for iOS. And that's very clearly the future of development on Apple's platforms. And that's also
01:28:10 ◼ ► clearly the future of MimeStream. That answer seems so pragmatic, which it does not surprise
01:28:18 ◼ ► me. To me, you're a very interesting person. You were inside Apple. And so that gives you a sense
01:28:25 ◼ ► of where Apple is going. And you said, though, you got into this project with MimeStream with
01:28:36 ◼ ► for the long run. And so that's interesting, which you do have the advantage of starting,
01:28:59 ◼ ► And eventually any successful app will run into this problem. It's just like human beings, right?
01:29:05 ◼ ► You either die young, which is tragic, or you get old and your body starts falling apart, right? I
01:29:10 ◼ ► mean, either your app doesn't make it, or eventually you've got technical debt that you've got to take
01:29:17 ◼ ► care of because your app is old and successful, right? I mean, I have friends who work at Adobe
01:29:22 ◼ ► and on Photoshop, and they laugh sometimes at some of this stuff. But it helps. I mean,
01:29:28 ◼ ► one of the—just a side note, but back in the day when RAM was starved on Macs and PCs, like,
01:29:38 ◼ ► say, 1991, 1992, and Photoshop is like 2.0, they had their own, effectively, virtual memory system.
01:29:45 ◼ ► They called it a scratch disk, but you could plug in an external hard drive and say, "Use that hard
01:29:49 ◼ ► drive as scratch for Photoshop," because there was nowhere near enough RAM. And of course, that code
01:29:55 ◼ ► wasn't used anymore. But then they wanted to make Photoshop for iOS, where RAM is limited. And
01:30:01 ◼ ► they're like, "Hey, we've still got a really good virtual memory system in our code base. We haven't
01:30:06 ◼ ► used it for decades." But there it is. And it was like, "Oh, this is really fast now because iPads
01:30:13 ◼ ► have really fast SSDs. This is remarkable." There it was. But that's what happens when an app is
01:30:26 ◼ ► multiple different ways to do the same thing, and they can often be used as alternatives in
01:30:36 ◼ ► Mindstream does have the advantage of being relatively fresh. 2019, so it's all Swift from
01:30:44 ◼ ► the ground up, which has been amazing. Love Swift. It's been just amazing to develop in.
01:30:50 ◼ ► SwiftUI was sort of... When did it come out? For Mac OS Catalina, which would have been 2019 as well?
01:31:02 ◼ ► Right. And so by that point, I had already built up the main window UI with AppKit. And SwiftUI,
01:31:09 ◼ ► while 1.0 was a very solid release actually, it felt like a little bit of a stretch to try and
01:31:17 ◼ ► switch a Mac app completely over at that time. It's clear to me that Apple's priorities with
01:31:23 ◼ ► SwiftUI have been to make it really great for iOS apps first, and then Mac OS apps is sort of the
01:31:29 ◼ ► thing that they're getting to as the framework evolves and matures. And it has come a long way
01:31:46 ◼ ► Interesting. There's a lot of places where you're going to need to fall back to the legacy
01:31:50 ◼ ► frameworks like UIKit and AppKit, and SwiftUI makes that super easy to do. You can mix and
01:31:56 ◼ ► match. I mean, we've got code that takes SwiftUI, wraps it up in AppKit, and then takes that AppKit,
01:32:02 ◼ ► and then wraps it back in SwiftUI. You can bounce back and forth, and you can do some pretty crazy
01:32:07 ◼ ► things, and it all works super, super well. So my hat's off to that team. They have made incremental
01:32:14 ◼ ► adoption really easy and really straightforward. It sounds like Apple is taking similar approaches,
01:32:20 ◼ ► I know, from people who've been poking around at the internals of the new Final Cut Pro and Logic
01:32:26 ◼ ► Pro for iPad. Now, it wouldn't be AppKit because it's iPad, but it's a mix of UIKit and SwiftUI.
01:32:32 ◼ ► But it seems like a lot more SwiftUI than you might think, or one might think, if you still
01:32:38 ◼ ► think SwiftUI is not ready for prime time. But as an interesting sign of where Apple itself is going
01:32:45 ◼ ► pragmatically to ship best of breed iPad apps right now, it seems like they're leaning on
01:32:57 ◼ ► SwiftUI is the best way to build an app nowadays. Or to build a new app, right? They kind of
01:33:03 ◼ ► emphasized that. They're not asking people to rewrite like they did with Cocoa 25 years ago.
01:33:10 ◼ ► I think it was a little bit of a paradigm shift, but now I just really enjoy writing SwiftUI now
01:33:19 ◼ ► compared to writing AppKit. There's an entire class of bugs that a declarative UI framework
01:33:26 ◼ ► just automatically takes care of for you, and it's just so nice. Now, obviously, there's a lot of
01:33:32 ◼ ► walls that you run up against that I think as the framework matures, they'll continue to work out
01:33:39 ◼ ► some of those more difficult corner cases. But there's always a great fallback path that has
01:33:45 ◼ ► been great for us so far. Yeah, what I hear, and again, I can't speak from firsthand. I don't
01:33:50 ◼ ► write code or much anymore. But when UIKit first came out in 2008 in the App Store, UIKit was very,
01:34:00 ◼ ► very familiar to AppKit developers because it was like a subset of AppKit and a modernization of
01:34:07 ◼ ► certain things in AppKit. And the frustration I heard from my developer friends was just when
01:34:12 ◼ ► they'd run into those places in UIKit that didn't exist yet, and AppKit had stuff. And they're like,
01:34:19 ◼ ► "Oh my God, this would be so easy in AppKit because AppKit has this built in." And UIKit didn't have
01:34:24 ◼ ► it yet. But conceptually, they got it. Whereas SwiftUI is just this declarative framework concept
01:34:31 ◼ ► is just like pulling it inside out of how you do it conceptually. And so it's not like a subset.
01:34:40 ◼ ► It's just a different way of thinking and doing things. And I hear it from everybody. You just
01:34:44 ◼ ► said it where it's like you run into these areas where something is hard or difficult or even not
01:34:49 ◼ ► possible in SwiftUI, and it would be elsewhere, and you're frustrated. But every single developer,
01:34:53 ◼ ► everyone I think I know who's really kind of dove into SwiftUI, even though they have complaints
01:34:59 ◼ ► and they run into those limits and it's still evolving, they're like, "I can't imagine going
01:35:03 ◼ ► back." Yeah, I mean, there's no question. It's the future of development on most platforms.
01:35:11 ◼ ► Even on the Mac. You can create some really nice SwiftUI apps on the Mac. And there's a subtle
01:35:16 ◼ ► distinction between a SwiftUI for iOS running on Catalyst versus a SwiftUI app running directly as
01:35:24 ◼ ► a true Mac app. But when you have SwiftUI running as a true Mac app, you can't tell the difference.
01:35:30 ◼ ► Everything feels completely right. So I think they've done a great job with that. And I'm
01:35:36 ◼ ► really looking forward to this WWDC and the further improvements that I'm sure we're all
01:35:40 ◼ ► going to be seeing. Yep, I agree too. I don't have anything else for you. Is there anything else you
01:35:46 ◼ ► want to call out? Anything you want to mention that I didn't ask you about? Or is that about
01:35:51 ◼ ► wrap it up? I think that about wraps it up. I'm hoping to really see people give MimeStream a shot
01:35:59 ◼ ► and see if it works for their use case. And I'm really looking forward to being able to
01:36:07 ◼ ► continue to develop that. And for us, this is very much the start of what we think is going to be a
01:36:16 ◼ ► long-term journey. And I think that there's a market out there for users that need something
01:36:24 ◼ ► like MimeStream. And I'm really looking forward to fulfilling our mission. I'm optimistic, honestly.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And it's not just because you're here and you're kind enough to give your time to the show.
01:36:34 ◼ ► But I think, A, the Mac isn't going anywhere. I do think there's a place. I think even though
01:36:41 ◼ ► we're seeing fewer and fewer new first-class Mac apps, I still think they're important and they
01:36:47 ◼ ► stand out. And there's a lot of Mac users who really want them. And email not only isn't going
01:36:56 ◼ ► anywhere. Email, I think, is having a renaissance. I think that just look at my world of independent
01:37:04 ◼ ► publishing and how blogging is the thing that's dying out. And it's paid newsletters that are
01:37:11 ◼ ► where the growth is and people are moving to. And it's because people love email. And email,
01:37:18 ◼ ► you get a newsletter in your email and you just hit space, space, space, and you read it. And
01:37:25 ◼ ► there's no pop-ups covering that goddamn text of the thing. You don't need ad blockers. It's just
01:37:31 ◼ ► there. And it's a wonderful reading experience. People love their email. And so it's not going
01:37:38 ◼ ► anywhere. If anything, it's to me having a resurgence. And people are realizing after a
01:37:46 ◼ ► decade-long dalliance of moving everything towards these walled garden social networks like Facebook
01:37:54 ◼ ► and stuff that there's something advantageous to having it just be wide open. So I couldn't be
01:38:00 ◼ ► happier. And I'll just say this. The other thing that's great about MimeStream 1.0 is that the
01:38:04 ◼ ► pitch is so specific. If you use Gmail and you care about great native Mac software, MimeStream,
01:38:14 ◼ ► try it. You're crazy if you don't at least try it. And if you don't use Gmail, not yet. It's on the
01:38:21 ◼ ► road. You're saying your roadmap is a... What I'm hearing is, yes, iOS, iPad, it's on your list,
01:38:27 ◼ ► your work. You've got some sort of nascent project working on it. Supporting IMAP in addition to Gmail
01:38:34 ◼ ► is on your list? It's on our list. I think we have to see what order we're going to do things. And
01:38:40 ◼ ► it's clear that a lot more users are asking for iOS first than IMAP. And I think that maps to...
01:38:47 ◼ ► We're starting to see even more of that with the folks that are with our switch to a paid model.
01:38:53 ◼ ► The folks that are using the app are kind of all in on Gmail rather than sort of using it for a
01:38:59 ◼ ► mix of accounts. And so for that user base, iOS first, I think is what makes sense. But ultimately
01:39:06 ◼ ► in the long term, we definitely want to branch out to other protocols, other services. IMAP,
01:39:13 ◼ ► I think is a no brainer at some point in the future. We're really interested in Jmap support
01:39:18 ◼ ► as well. We didn't talk about that, but yeah, that's a new protocol that's sort of being driven
01:39:24 ◼ ► by Fastmail, a fantastic company with some really brilliant people. And that's meant to be like a
01:39:30 ◼ ► replacement for some of the more legacy internet protocols like IMAP and other protocols that are
01:39:36 ◼ ► used for calendaring and et cetera. It's under very active development in the IETF. And we've
01:39:42 ◼ ► kind of been somewhat involved in that process as well. So that's an area we're really looking
01:39:47 ◼ ► forward to continuing to look at. But yeah, for the short term, iOS is what we have our sites on.
01:39:54 ◼ ► We just, we got to focus on one thing at a time. Yeah. The J and Jmap is for JSON and JSON is,
01:39:59 ◼ ► makes developers happy in a way that XML does not make developers happy. And IMAP is pre XML. I
01:40:07 ◼ ► don't even know what the hell IMAP is. I mean, the other big thing with Jmap is that it's sort of like
01:40:13 ◼ ► kind of over HTTP, which makes it really easy to do a lot of things compared to IMAP, which is a
01:40:20 ◼ ► very stateful protocol and it is difficult to implement correctly. So lots of stuff on the
01:40:26 ◼ ► to-do list, but lots and lots of very, very, truly, I'll just say it again, it's just a
01:40:32 ◼ ► splendid 1.0 release really that feels like a 2.0. It feels like years of work and it really,
01:40:43 ◼ ► if you're listening to this and you're a Gmail user and you've used a Mac, you're nuts if you
01:40:47 ◼ ► don't try MimeStream, you really are. You've got to at least try it. Neil, thank you for your time.
01:40:52 ◼ ► Good luck. I want to, I can't wait to have you back on when the iPhone app ships. I won't ask
01:40:57 ◼ ► you for a date. Oh, it's going to be some time. If you're listening, it's not in the next six months.
01:41:03 ◼ ► Let's say that we're taking it seriously. There's no point in shipping it unless it's really,
01:41:08 ◼ ► really fricking awesome. Well, when it does arrive, it's going to be awesome. Yeah. Well,
01:41:22 ◼ ► idiomatically UI wise, it's, you know, you've got to re not in place. You've got a really juicy
01:41:29 ◼ ► opportunity, right? But the core functionality of it works reasonably well, but it's just,
01:41:35 ◼ ► it's very out of place on iOS. Very much so. Anyway, I may thank our sponsors, all of them,
01:41:40 ◼ ► rocket money, go to rocket money.com/the talk show and track all of your subscriptions and
01:41:52 ◼ ► delivered fresh to your house and memberful where you can monetize your passion with membership.
01:41:56 ◼ ► Thanks. And MimeStream, what's the URL? MimeStream.com. That's right. M I M E S T R E A M. Oh,
01:42:05 ◼ ► bonus question. Bonus question. I can't believe I forgot. How come MimeStream is not in the app
01:42:10 ◼ ► store? The main reason is that we wanted to offer company licensing for groups and with subscriptions,
01:42:27 ◼ ► subscriptions. And by the time we did that, we were just like, Hey, it makes sense to just do
01:42:32 ◼ ► this for everyone. It allows us to bring it out at a slightly lower price point. It gives us a little
01:42:37 ◼ ► bit more control over some of the billing issues, et cetera, that people would encounter. MimeStream
01:42:43 ◼ ► also has like a few minor pieces of functionality that wouldn't be possible if it were an app store
01:42:49 ◼ ► app. Like you can set it to be the default email client. And for instance, that's an API that's off
01:42:56 ◼ ► limits to app store apps. So there's some really minor cases like that. Can you petition for an
01:43:03 ◼ ► entitlement for that? That's been on my list. I think I've submitted some feedback for that in
01:43:08 ◼ ► the past, but it's on my list to sort of push for that a little bit further. Obviously when we have