00:00:03 ◼ ► Yeah, it's been a hell of a six months. Yeah, those have an anniversary. This is our bi-annual,
00:00:11 ◼ ► Twitter anniversary. Isn't bi-annual is one of those words, like bi-weekly, bi-monthly, those...
00:00:18 ◼ ► I never know. No, I think... Is it, is it, is it being twice or every other? I think it's one of those
00:00:24 ◼ ► literal holes in the English language where it means both. Like, bi-annual means like every six
00:00:31 ◼ ► months and it means every two years. Yeah, it's like you pick it up out of context. Yeah,
00:00:35 ◼ ► there's all sorts of funny entire books written about the oddities of the English language,
00:00:41 ◼ ► but that's, that's one that has to be considered a bug. But anyway, we're doing it six months. I
00:00:45 ◼ ► don't want to wait two years. Yeah, well, yeah, whatever we're going to call it may not be around
00:00:52 ◼ ► in two years. When, when last you were on in January, the wounds were fresh, Elon Musk. Well,
00:01:00 ◼ ► and we, I believe we spent the whole episode not calling him out by name. You, you're certainly
00:01:04 ◼ ► free to, to call him phony Stark or... Yeah, yeah. What was, what was Charles Foster Musk
00:01:12 ◼ ► I came up with this week I thought was pretty good. Well, I always thought the CF stood for,
00:01:16 ◼ ► stood for clusterfuck. Charles Foster. Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is right. This is a PG rated show.
00:01:28 ◼ ► No, not really. It's been a while since anybody's complained. I feel like what happened. The
00:01:33 ◼ ► profanity is pretty low. There was a, there was a thing. Yeah, yeah. And if it's in context,
00:01:38 ◼ ► it's fine. Well, but there was a, there was a thing. You know, what's funny is you get older.
00:01:45 ◼ ► Everything seems like it was just a couple of years ago and it's, it was probably like 10
00:02:02 ◼ ► truly friendly. And I think it speaks to my sort of weird, unique stature in the Apple world.
00:02:11 ◼ ► but that they had gotten just a handful, they said, of comments from people saying that they
00:02:16 ◼ ► were playing my podcast in their car and the kids were there and there were some curse words. And
00:02:20 ◼ ► that if I just need per episode, an explicit tag, and if I needed help figuring out the RSS syntax,
00:02:28 ◼ ► I was like, I got it. I know. And they were like, yeah, I thought you did, but I actually,
00:02:33 ◼ ► yeah. But anyway, how's it, how are you feeling about it? The wounds were fresh in January. Now
00:02:47 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that, I'm glad it's all behind us. I mean, it really is. And once we got
00:02:52 ◼ ► through the whole refund thing and everything, I mean, it's been a pretty serious hit to our
00:02:57 ◼ ► software income. Roughly about a third of our income just like disappeared. So that's something
00:03:04 ◼ ► that we're dealing with and it makes me nervous. To be honest, the thing that we love is in danger.
00:03:19 ◼ ► It's surprising how extreme it has gotten. But yeah, I concluded that original blog post
00:04:01 ◼ ► in the face of effectively 100% loss for his business in software, I would not 100 because
00:04:07 ◼ ► he's got the Pixel Pal's side app, but certainly large majority, right? Yeah. Again, I don't even
00:04:14 ◼ ► mean to laugh with you guys. You're talking about a third of icon factory software business
00:04:19 ◼ ► just zapped away. But part of you has to be thinking, well, the upside is at least he just
00:04:28 ◼ ► ripped the bandaid off and it was over and it was as tumultuous it was as bad as it is financially,
00:04:41 ◼ ► hanging over your head, if he hadn't done it six months ago, you'd still be thinking he'd do it
00:04:46 ◼ ► any moment. Right. Right. Let's just say he had waited another year or nine months or seven months.
00:04:56 ◼ ► What if he did it next month or something like that instead of at the end of last year?
00:05:00 ◼ ► This would not have been a very good six months to have been a Twitter developer, even if being
00:05:06 ◼ ► a Twitter app developer, we're still a thing, right? Well, look at the instability of the API,
00:05:18 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. And it just stops working. Right. And you have no idea why. And you have nobody you can
00:05:22 ◼ ► contact as why is it not working? And yeah, the thing that cracks me up is these people are paying
00:05:41 ◼ ► 10, 12, 15 years ago, I wrote my own little script that I run on my server is every five minutes,
00:05:47 ◼ ► it's a cron job. And the at daring fireball Twitter account gets posts and the script is
00:05:54 ◼ ► very simple. I shouldn't write any programs, frankly, but I enjoy it as a hobby. And the
00:06:00 ◼ ► script is very simple. It reads my RSS feed actually reads the JSON feed. But now I've,
00:06:06 ◼ ► but regardless, it's like RSS and every five minutes it says, Hey, are there any new articles?
00:06:12 ◼ ► Oh, here's one form it into a tweet, post the tweet and keep a log of all the ones that have
00:06:20 ◼ ► already been tweeted. So it doesn't tweet them again and then wait five minutes and check again.
00:06:26 ◼ ► And it I've, I've been playing with the script for months because I updated it a couple months ago to
00:06:40 ◼ ► But a couple of months ago, Twitter said, this is nothing to do the, the, the clients thing for
00:06:47 ◼ ► Twitter, Riffic and tweet bod and all the other Twitter, Twitter, Twitter clients like that you
00:06:52 ◼ ► use that was at the end of last year, that was six months ago, but in April, they just for people
00:06:58 ◼ ► writing bots and other type of tools, anything else that uses the Twitter API, they're like,
00:07:12 ◼ ► And lo and behold, my script stopped working and I didn't know what to do. And then a couple of
00:07:17 ◼ ► weeks later, I didn't do anything. It just started working again. Like they turned the API points back
00:07:23 ◼ ► on and, and there's some kind of free tier that I'd currently at. And the limit is like 50 tweets
00:07:30 ◼ ► a day and a 1500 total a month. Cause what 50 times 30 is 1500. Yeah. So it's like, yeah,
00:07:43 ◼ ► fireball history is, but it's gotta be like 10 posts or something like that. Not 50. So
00:07:50 ◼ ► it's no worries. And even if I did post 51 items in a day, it would just wait till next tomorrow.
00:07:56 ◼ ► It would be able to, some of them just wouldn't be posted when they're fresh regardless.
00:08:00 ◼ ► Well, and people would say, oh, it's a busy day on bar during fireball. I'm just going to go to the
00:08:04 ◼ ► website. Right. Right. You can just figure it out. But yeah. Yeah. If I post, once I get to around
00:08:09 ◼ ► 48, 49 posts, people might want to start checking on me. I'm a little worried about John, you know,
00:08:23 ◼ ► I didn't even know that this speaks to when, when, when my script stopped working in April,
00:08:27 ◼ ► I noticed right away and people told me this time it stopped working. I started getting it,
00:08:32 ◼ ► but I didn't even notice until like a week later and nobody sent me anything. Or if they did,
00:08:37 ◼ ► I didn't notice it. Cause maybe it was on Twitter, which I'm not, I'm still there. I haven't left
00:08:42 ◼ ► Twitter. I just check it far less frequently. Cause I, I check Mastodon first I'm using blue
00:08:49 ◼ ► sky. I'm using threads a lot. And Twitter is last on that list now. It just is. And it's not
00:08:54 ◼ ► a political protest. It's just what I find useful for my time. Anyway, I, I just want to finish this
00:09:04 ◼ ► story. I was like, well, what happened? Why did my script stop working now? I'm using their version
00:09:09 ◼ ► 1.1 API in my script. And they said that that was going away, but they said that was going away
00:09:15 ◼ ► months ago. But now when I log in, it says my free tier has access to these 1.1 endpoints and these
00:09:24 ◼ ► version 2.0 API endpoints. And in the 1.1 endpoints is sending a new tweet. So according
00:09:31 ◼ ► to their developer docs, it should still work, but I, it is. It's a mystery. It's a real mystery.
00:09:40 ◼ ► It's in the mystery since January 18th or whatever. I forget. It was the 18th or the 21st.
00:09:59 ◼ ► And it's actually funny that you can, there's nowhere, they have a blog. They have like
00:10:06 ◼ ► dev developer.twitter.com/blog. Their last post is October of 2022. So literally before he bought,
00:10:14 ◼ ► I guess he fired everybody who ran the developer blog. All the support people were the first to go.
00:10:24 ◼ ► Right. And so there's, turns out you do. My best, my working theory is that they've finally
00:10:37 ◼ ► which I don't think will be too much work, but you can't find a straight answer. And the funniest
00:10:42 ◼ ► part, the very funniest part is that when you go to the forums, cause that's one of the, when you
00:10:47 ◼ ► run into a problem like this, the first thing you want to do is find, is there, is, is it just me?
00:10:54 ◼ ► Lots of other people are getting hit by this. And the funniest part is that a bunch of them
00:10:58 ◼ ► are paying like tens of thousands of dollars. Exactly. Right. The people that are, that are like
00:11:05 ◼ ► in the, in the deep pockets, right. Have the same experience as the guys in the free tier,
00:11:19 ◼ ► it's people with their real names, not some anonymous script kitty or whatever you call
00:11:24 ◼ ► them anymore. These are just professionals looking for an answer who are saying my company pays
00:11:33 ◼ ► for API access? Because it's support systems and things like that. Companies found that Twitter
00:11:39 ◼ ► was a good way to do interactions with their customers. Right. And that's a big impact for
00:11:45 ◼ ► these people. Right. If that breaks and you can't reply to some customer and you're paying 42k a
00:11:51 ◼ ► month for that or 10k a month, there's a bunch of different tiers. So it's like, it's stupid.
00:11:57 ◼ ► It's just dumb all around. It is just incredibly dumb and just the arrogance is just off the
00:12:06 ◼ ► charts. I sent you a link. I mean, as we talked where we're what one, one week, I guess it was a
00:12:11 ◼ ► week ago tonight when he's just declared by Fiat that they'd be changing the name from Twitter to
00:12:17 ◼ ► X. It's been obviously not the smoothest renaming transition. I sent you a link where at their
00:12:29 ◼ ► Well, it's half disassembled. It's partially disassembled. It's like the service, right?
00:12:35 ◼ ► It's just hanging on. Yeah. So the old broken pieces, the old Twitter sign is half down. It
00:12:43 ◼ ► still says ER because while they were taking it down, the San Francisco police came to check if
00:12:50 ◼ ► they had a permit and of course they didn't. And so they said, well, then you got to stop. So they
00:13:01 ◼ ► Yeah. But not really. They have erected a giant X on top of the building. Now the old Twitter sign
00:13:12 ◼ ► was on the corner of the building. It used to be like a clock or something too, wasn't it?
00:13:25 ◼ ► Yeah. It was nice. Doug Bowman @Stop on Twitter, now he's on Threads. I forget what his title was,
00:13:38 ◼ ► I've known him for a long time, but he had a very nice thread on Threads talking about the sign and
00:13:44 ◼ ► because he led the design of it and how much care they put into it. And he was sad to see it taken
00:13:51 ◼ ► down. It really was that sign was something that they spent a lot of time trying to make right.
00:13:56 ◼ ► They wanted to do right by their brand, right by their company, but also right by the city of San
00:14:02 ◼ ► Francisco because it's, you know, 10th and Market is a big corner. Very, very busy part of San
00:14:08 ◼ ► Francisco if you've never seen it. Yeah. Very much so. If you've never been to San Francisco,
00:14:14 ◼ ► you almost can't miss it if you're downtown. Anyway, now they're putting a giant X on top
00:14:33 ◼ ► Yeah. You got to see it to believe it. You think, "Oh, this is just a flashing sign," right?
00:14:38 ◼ ► I would say they're using some kind of LED technology that heretofore has only been used in
00:14:53 ◼ ► Well, it looks like the type of lights that you would put to signal alien civilizations.
00:15:02 ◼ ► I wonder if you can see it from space. They have contact with the station to say, "Hey, guys,
00:15:09 ◼ ► can you see it?" Yeah. It is extremely bright, but it doesn't just turn on. It flashes like the
00:15:16 ◼ ► lights in a nightclub. I mean, like strobe lights for lack of—extremely bright. And what is directly
00:15:24 ◼ ► across the street from the sign? It is a high-rise apartment building, and somebody—the tweet I will
00:15:33 ◼ ► put in the show notes is somebody saying, "Oh my God, could you imagine living across the street
00:15:46 ◼ ► Right. The next tweet is the guy retweeting somebody who says, "Yeah, this is my life,"
00:16:24 ◼ ► even though the people who are, I think, look like the smart ones, but not out of protest,
00:16:28 ◼ ► but just out of, "Well, this isn't even worth my time," is that when you are logged in, the
00:16:40 ◼ ► it's not XBlue yet—Twitter Blue are at the top of all the replies, always. It's not like a secret,
00:16:50 ◼ ► that's like a reason that they want you to sign up for Blue. So, no matter what tweet you look at,
00:17:09 ◼ ► I mean, one of them… So, the only reason that the reply with the guy's video from his bedroom,
00:17:26 ◼ ► Right. But all the next replies in that thread are people saying, literally, "Can you imagine
00:17:33 ◼ ► living in a city and complaining about lights?" Like, "Ha ha," you know, like, "What idiots you
00:17:44 ◼ ► Yeah, no, anybody who's lived in a city looks at that and just says, "No, that's just obnoxious."
00:18:02 ◼ ► Like walking on the right side of the street, right? You can always tell people from out of
00:18:19 ◼ ► I don't know. What else? Before we—I mean, it's not worth spending too much time on this.
00:18:27 ◼ ► Talking to you yesterday. You should probably link to that in the show notes. But just for grins,
00:18:33 ◼ ► I went through and took their how to tweet document from their health center and changed
00:18:49 ◼ ► Yeah. It feels like every time you get to an X, you're supposed to fill it in with a funny word.
00:18:59 ◼ ► It was just—it's—step one, type your X up to 280 characters into the compose box at the top
00:19:08 ◼ ► of your home timeline or select X button in the navigation bar. You can include up to four photos,
00:19:18 ◼ ► Select the X button to post the X to your profile. It's like, what does that even mean?
00:19:29 ◼ ► just have one of those things where something cracks you up so tremendously that you remember
00:19:49 ◼ ► We were driving out on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia. People who live here know that
00:20:03 ◼ ► still the city of Philadelphia and the other side is the suburbs, a suburb called Balikinwid.
00:20:22 ◼ ► Taco Bell and Petco and retail strip mall type stuff, and Balikinwid side is all high-rise
00:20:35 ◼ ► and on the radio came on Adam Sandler's song "Piece of Shit Car," speaking of profanity.
00:20:44 ◼ ► But it was on the radio, and so, it's a very funny song. It is very, very funny. But because
00:20:54 ◼ ► But we thought it was so funny beeped that we thought that maybe even on his CD or wherever
00:21:27 ◼ ► version, whatever you call it, FM-friendly version. But there must be 100 beeps in the song.
00:21:36 ◼ ► - Yeah, yeah. We got beeped with the beep. - Yeah. But that's what your How to X edited
00:21:43 ◼ ► document. It's hilarious because you just imagine curse words in there. You can't help to.
00:21:48 ◼ ► - Well, the best part is at the very end, right, which is like, it has a standard share button,
00:21:56 ◼ ► right, which was the bird. And then the word next to it was tweet, right? And that button now is X.
00:22:13 ◼ ► - It was one of those things that I just looked at it and it was like, oh, man, it's going to take
00:22:20 ◼ ► them forever to update the site to not say Twitter or tweet. I mean, it's just all over the place.
00:22:27 ◼ ► So, I took this one page. I was thinking, yeah, I'm just going to poke around at it. And it took
00:22:33 ◼ ► me like 45 minutes to do this because it's just, it's like, I thought it was done. And they say,
00:22:38 ◼ ► oh, no, there's the footer. Oh, no, there's the header. Oh, there's a little icon next to the help
00:22:43 ◼ ► center. It took a long time and that's just one page and probably tens of thousands. And they're
00:22:49 ◼ ► all localized. So, are you going to localize X into Hungarian or whatever? It's like, yeah.
00:22:59 ◼ ► - Yeah, but that help document though is like the epicenter of the three, at least the three main
00:23:06 ◼ ► cases, Twitter as a service, tweet as a noun, the name for the post and tweet as a verb, the act of
00:23:16 ◼ ► creating a tweet. And so, all of those are repeated. That's what the whole document's about, using the
00:23:22 ◼ ► service Twitter to tweet tweets. And instead it's just using X to X Xs. - Yeah. The stupidity of it
00:23:33 ◼ ► is you start thinking about how many things in common language are both nouns and verbs in,
00:23:59 ◼ ► - Ah, somebody, it's escaping me at the moment. Xerox is obviously almost canonical. Google is
00:24:07 ◼ ► the modern version of Xerox. Super, super powerful. Somebody had in this week, somebody thought of
00:24:13 ◼ ► another, there was another good example, but that's enough. And Twitter had that and you kind of have
00:24:19 ◼ ► to luck into it and they really lucked into it. And again, it's one of the reasons I thought.
00:24:29 ◼ ► Again, I call it out. You call it out. You should. It's not bragging. It's not taking credit for
00:24:41 ◼ ► Twitter not only didn't have tweet as a verb or noun, they didn't have a bird logo. Their logo
00:25:17 ◼ ► that this is just not well thought through. And obviously, the fact that it took them a whole week
00:25:23 ◼ ► to get updated versions of the app out, the fact that even the website, they couldn't change right
00:25:28 ◼ ► away. But here's a question I saw. This didn't pop into my head until I saw somebody else bring
00:25:33 ◼ ► it up. But somebody else, and I think a couple of people had the observation, so I don't feel like
00:25:43 ◼ ► homepage, it's like a Twitter logo, an Instagram logo, a Facebook logo, right? If you have an F,
00:25:49 ◼ ► a camera, and a bird, you know what that means. It means, oh, this is our Twitter account,
00:26:15 ◼ ► that or dealing with it, like, oh, I guess we should do something about this once this name
00:26:20 ◼ ► change settles in and Twitter feels like it's not the name of the thing anymore. What percentage of
00:26:35 ◼ ► it took about a week to go through all the sites and find all the instances of Twitter,
00:26:41 ◼ ► the mentions of it in CSS, just all the CSS rules that said if this is the class Twitter,
00:26:47 ◼ ► then show the little icon, that kind of thing. And yeah, it was a fairly lengthy process. And if I'm
00:26:55 ◼ ► a corporation who used to rely on Twitter as a way to connect with customers, I'm just gonna go,
00:27:04 ◼ ► there's nothing there anymore, right? Because it goes back to this problem where you go, okay,
00:27:08 ◼ ► and you go look at, say you wanna look at Chalk & Berry or Icon Factory. The first thing you see is
00:27:17 ◼ ► X logo, blow it, sign into Twitter. And if I don't have a Twitter account, I can't just be curious
00:27:25 ◼ ► and say, who is this company? Who is this person? I think if I'm running things at a company like
00:27:32 ◼ ► that, and they've got no footprint for this kind of casual information, I'm just gonna remove it.
00:27:41 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah. And think about it from a branding perspective too. Like if you're in charge of
00:27:48 ◼ ► the brand for your, whether it's just a restaurant or a major company, but if you're in charge of
00:27:56 ◼ ► Pete: And you're concerned about the sort of rightward lurch and sort of the politics of
00:28:07 ◼ ► Twitter under Musk and the direction it's gone and the sort of people who are happy about his takeover
00:28:21 ◼ ► or wherever else you had it, I think you could get away with that heretofore because people just know
00:28:34 ◼ ► off your window and replacing it with the new X mark is a way, to me, is a way of saying,
00:28:46 ◼ ► Pete; Oh, no. Yeah, definitely. Pete; They said that, right? You gotta go through all this effort
00:28:49 ◼ ► and make a new X graphic or whatever and then they, oh, well, we're gonna change it again.
00:29:02 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah. I wonder though, I kind of suspect that he likes it enough that if they do change it,
00:29:10 ◼ ► it'll be like a sort of pay somebody to redraw it and it'll sort of look the same as it does
00:29:16 ◼ ► right now. The sort of, the one side is a hollow, thicker-legged X and the other's just a diagonal.
00:29:24 ◼ ► I mean, say what you want about him. He doesn't seem to alter or play with the brands of his other
00:29:31 ◼ ► companies on a whim, right? Like the Tesla badge on the cars hasn't changed, I don't think ever.
00:29:40 ◼ ► I don't think he's going to, but who knows? I don't know. I certainly don't want to bet any
00:29:55 ◼ ► Pete; Right. But I really do think that they're going to lose out on the co-branding. I mean,
00:30:01 ◼ ► again, it's so easy to take for granted because a brand like Twitter and the presence of Twitter
00:30:10 ◼ ► in society is a slow boil, right? But there really was when it got started. When you were first
00:30:17 ◼ ► writing the first version of Twitterrific for the iPhone in the, what was it, the summer,
00:30:23 ◼ ► the first summer, right? 2007. Yeah, because did you have a prototype at C4 or no? Not yet.
00:30:29 ◼ ► Pete; No, no. That's where I met Lucas Newman who tuned me into all the jailbreaking stuff.
00:30:37 ◼ ► Pete; And that's when I went and started working on a jailbreak version of Twitterrific.
00:30:52 ◼ ► Pete; And the brilliant thing that Apple did was make the iPhone SDK look like the Mac SDK and…
00:31:01 ◼ ► Pete; Right, right, right. You had like entire classes of like talking to the server that you
00:31:28 ◼ ► people like us saw the appeal of it. But there was not something that when you went on CNN
00:31:40 ◼ ► hell that means. They'd be like, "What the hell is that thing with the @ symbol after his name?"
00:31:43 ◼ ► It's not, that's not an email address. What is that? Nobody, I don't even think we had that yet,
00:31:47 ◼ ► right? We didn't even have, yeah, the whole @ username thing hadn't even been invented yet.
00:32:00 ◼ ► Chris Messina invented hashtags a couple years later, but none of that had been invented yet.
00:32:13 ◼ ► John Gruber and Craig Hockenberry are into," to a major cultural force and a mass market thing.
00:32:20 ◼ ► But like, of all the websites that had as much traffic as Twitter did circa 2007, and you know,
00:32:28 ◼ ► Facebook was very small back then. I think MySpace was still king of the social media at the time.
00:32:34 ◼ ► To get to the point where it's just ubiquitous, somebody told me I pronounced that word wrong,
00:32:47 ◼ ► F logo for Facebook and an Instagram logo. There are very, very few platforms that are in that
00:32:55 ◼ ► stature where just random businesses across the spectrum promote their presence on your platform.
00:33:03 ◼ ► There's only a handful, right? Snapchat's there to some degree, depending on the demographic,
00:33:10 ◼ ► Chris Messina; Well, one of the things that they did, that they stated when they redid the
00:33:18 ◼ ► Chris Messina; You know, the hell, they changed it with the Polaroid camera. It's like one of
00:33:37 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, it totally makes sense. And it's super, super popular. And they realized they
00:33:43 ◼ ► reached that. Twitter was there. And so many people have said it, Ben Thompson says it all
00:33:49 ◼ ► the time, that culturally, Twitter has always punched above its weight. They never figured
00:33:54 ◼ ► out a way to make a lot of money. But they certainly were extremely influential in terms
00:34:01 ◼ ► of driving the news narrative, a place for breaking news, a place where both the politicians
00:34:09 ◼ ► and actual officials participate. We had a President of the United States who effectively
00:34:16 ◼ ► ran his whole campaign on Twitter. It couldn't be more influential, even if it never became
00:34:24 ◼ ► the financial juggernaut that Facebook did. But in terms of its cultural impact was tremendous.
00:34:29 ◼ ► But there's no way, it really is flushed down the toilet with this name change. It really is.
00:34:45 ◼ ► ICON Factory, Bank of America, right? Whoever had their identity on Twitter. And I could have
00:34:55 ◼ ► envisioned, I pay 100 bucks to be 100 bucks a year to be Chalkenberry, right? That's my place.
00:35:04 ◼ ► If you want to know about me, I'm happy to pay that. And in the scheme of things, that's to
00:35:12 ◼ ► plant your flag on the internet. That's a valuable thing. And they could have done something with
00:35:19 ◼ ► that. And sure, Hot Boy 57, whatever it is, he's not going to pay 100 bucks a year for that. But
00:35:36 ◼ ► is a great idea. It really is. I mean, it's not a path to Facebook size, financial juggernaut hood,
00:35:47 ◼ ► but almost nothing is, right? I always compare the desire of just vague Wall Street investors who
00:35:58 ◼ ► want Twitter to be more like Facebook because Facebook is worth so much more money to the
00:36:03 ◼ ► people who wanted Apple to clone the Macintosh back in the 90s because Microsoft was so humongous.
00:36:08 ◼ ► Hey, Microsoft just licenses their operating system, so that's obviously the way to do it.
00:36:13 ◼ ► Whereas there was only ever going to be one Microsoft in that 80s to 90s rah rah era of the
00:36:21 ◼ ► PC. There was. And Apple had that cultural angle that Twitter has. Right, exactly. Twitter is to
00:36:28 ◼ ► Facebook. Yeah. And I don't, I actually, pre-Musk, I think you could draw the comparison. I don't
00:36:42 ◼ ► And it just shows how important the infusion of totally fresh leadership that Apple got when they
00:36:52 ◼ ► acquired Next and Jobs came in with his executives and took over compared to Twitter where a different
00:37:00 ◼ ► team came in and took over. Jobs came back and one of the first things he did was he learned
00:37:05 ◼ ► what everybody was doing. Yeah, exactly. He went, it's like, he was not afraid to ask questions and
00:37:11 ◼ ► he asked a lot of questions. He figured out what the hell was going on. Yeah. Well, and he was.
00:37:16 ◼ ► And then he's like, okay, we don't need the Newton anymore or whatever it was. Okay, done.
00:37:28 ◼ ► by Johnny Ive, by other people, by biographers, but Jobs came in and thought, well, look at the
00:37:44 ◼ ► he thought, I'm obviously going to have to fire the whole industrial design team because they're
00:37:49 ◼ ► obviously inept. But he didn't. What he did is he went and met with them, found a guy named Johnny
00:37:55 ◼ ► Ive. And found the things that they'd been noodling on that weren't getting authorized to ship and
00:38:06 ◼ ► realized that it was a gold mine of talent, not just one guy, Johnny Ive, but the whole team
00:38:11 ◼ ► that, wow, this is actually the industrial design team that this company needs. They just need to be
00:38:23 ◼ ► Yeah, and I'm sure that Twitter lost a lot of great people. I know a few, right? Really talented
00:38:30 ◼ ► developers who were just like, either let go or became totally disillusioned with the whole
00:38:36 ◼ ► clusterfuck. If I'd been there and not been laid off, I would have been out the door at first
00:38:47 ◼ ► I don't know what I would, I guess it depends what I wanted to do. Esther Crawford wrote an
00:38:53 ◼ ► essay I linked to on Daring Fireball this week. She was the, I forget her title, but like, it's
00:39:01 ◼ ► Yeah, but she was a design manager and her team effectively was proposing designs. And then I know
00:39:10 ◼ ► some of the people who were tasked with implementing them. And she's the one who infamously tweeted,
00:39:16 ◼ ► sort of was going with the flow and that sort of trying to have a team spirit and happily showing
00:39:23 ◼ ► how she was sleeping in a sleeping bag to pull an all-nighter to meet. All-nighters happen,
00:39:31 ◼ ► It's just, right. It's a good thing in some cases, right? It's like a lot of energy is…
00:39:37 ◼ ► Right. And sometimes you have deadlines that just can't be moved. I'm sure, like for example,
00:39:43 ◼ ► like even at Apple, I'm sure that there are some things in the run-up to WWDC that require
00:39:58 ◼ ► Right. There's going to be an iPhone event in September. There always is, unless there's a
00:40:04 ◼ ► pandemic and they have to move it to October. But there are going to be some aspects of iOS
00:40:16 ◼ ► And deadlines have to be met. But the deadlines that Musk was imposing were entirely just imposed
00:40:25 ◼ ► Impatience. Yeah. Whimsical impatience. But anyway, she tweeted, "Hey, sometimes you have
00:40:31 ◼ ► to pull an all-nighter." And I made fun of it on Daring Far. But she wrote a very nice essay
00:40:35 ◼ ► about her time there and why she stayed. And I can see the perspective. She was part of the people at
00:40:42 ◼ ► Twitter who… And she came as an acqui-hire from a startup, I forget what it was, but at a smaller
00:40:48 ◼ ► team where they obviously built something good enough for Twitter to buy. And when you're used
00:40:55 ◼ ► to a small team that makes something new at a fast speed and you end up in this organization
00:41:01 ◼ ► that pre-Musk had like sclerosis. There was a lot of dead weight. Yeah, there was a lot of dead
00:41:07 ◼ ► weight there. And the leadership, the company was ossified. They've shipped very few features
00:41:36 ◼ ► for the website. Not search feature where they were writing the code that actually searches,
00:41:47 ◼ ► And it seems like you start to second guess yourself and it's just like sometimes you just
00:42:00 ◼ ► So, when Musk came in and said, "Hey, we're going to shake things up. I'm going to let go of a lot
00:42:05 ◼ ► of people and we're going to move fast and make some changes." I can see if wanting to stay and
00:42:19 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, because I knew that he was going to try that. And like I wrote this
00:42:23 ◼ ► week, I'm not trying to cover… I was clearly wrong to be optimistic about Twitter. I mean,
00:42:37 ◼ ► But I do think that… Not that I was right, but that I was on the right trail, that it was…
00:42:45 ◼ ► His buying Twitter was good for Twitter-like things. It's the best thing that ever happened
00:42:56 ◼ ► I'm almost certain it would not. And I like Threads. I like Threads quite a bit. I like
00:43:00 ◼ ► Mastodon better. And it's still going to… Mastodon is still my first choice for brief dips
00:43:07 ◼ ► into social media. But I do like Threads and I appreciate… And I understand that the reasons
00:43:13 ◼ ► that I like Mastodon better than… I like it better than Threads is exactly why Threads is better
00:43:30 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, and like one thing, a big difference I notice and I'm sure you would notice and think
00:43:36 ◼ ► of is by choice, like when I open up Ivory, I get taken back exactly to where I was the last time
00:43:43 ◼ ► I used it, even if it was on another device, right? So, I can like be browsing Ivory on my iPad and
00:43:49 ◼ ► then I go on my phone and, oh, there I am in the same place in the same… You're looking at the
00:43:54 ◼ ► same thing at the same point in my timeline. Every time you go back to Threads, it sort of starts you
00:43:58 ◼ ► at the top again. I mean, if you leave for like a minute and come back, it'll be right where you
00:44:03 ◼ ► That's the problem with algorithmic timeline, right? It's like it's all generated on the fly
00:44:12 ◼ ► Well, they added the following timeline this week. But every time you go back after it pages
00:44:19 ◼ ► out of memory, it defaults you back to the algorithmic one. But that is… It's the right
00:44:25 ◼ ► thing for 100 million people. It's the wrong thing for the 1 million people like me, the 1%
00:44:31 ◼ ► who sort of prefer having deliberate control of my place in the timeline as opposed to just sort
00:44:37 ◼ ► of letting it all wash over you. But they know what they're doing. I mean, Instagram is still
00:44:42 ◼ ► super-duper popular. It's not a limitation of Threads. It's a deliberate choice that's optimized
00:45:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I find it a good way to back channel type of conversations, right? If somebody at Apple who
00:45:11 ◼ ► knows something about this throw a massive on and you just kind of ping them there. And if I don't
00:45:17 ◼ ► get a reply, fine, I don't get a reply. If I do, it's usually helpful. And I'll take that
00:45:24 ◼ ► information and forward it on to my followers kind of thing. So, it's kind of a… I'm really happy
00:45:31 ◼ ► that there are alternatives now, right? The fact that there's a marketplace of conversational
00:45:44 ◼ ► I think it's good. And Substack has their own thing. And it's obviously niche. But if you follow
00:46:06 ◼ ► can communicate with their readers in a Twitter like fashion in a tab in the Substack app. It's
00:46:12 ◼ ► nice. It's a great format. It doesn't… The fact that Twitter by way of its overwhelming
00:46:19 ◼ ► network effect advantage sort of took all the oxygen out of the idea. To me, the very best
00:46:27 ◼ ► thing to come out of this is the fact that it's not just federated in one federation like Mastodon
00:46:34 ◼ ► and Activitypub and whatever else you want to call that circle of federation. But it's even
00:46:40 ◼ ► more loosely federated, like you said, with Blue Sky, which is a different protocol with Threads,
00:46:46 ◼ ► with these Twitter-like things. It's just an idea, right? It's just, hey, and that core idea that
00:46:54 ◼ ► Jack Dorsey had back in 2006 or 2005, whenever he had the little sketch on his notepad, of just
00:47:00 ◼ ► a place where you could just post short text updates and people who choose to follow your
00:47:11 ◼ ► S-T-A-T period U.S. status. Right? And that's all it is. It's like, what's going on with me? And
00:47:18 ◼ ► that's still how I use these services. It's like, what's going on? In fact, that used to be the
00:47:39 ◼ ► I imagine that guy across the street from Twitter headquarters said the exact same thing.
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00:50:48 ◼ ► when it starts backing up, it freezes your machine or you notice it or it's things. It's just
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00:51:07 ◼ ► Pete: I've had a tab on one of my safari spaces for backblaze for probably the last nine months
00:51:18 ◼ ► because I need to go set this up. I mean, we do a backup of our server every night onto a Mac
00:51:24 ◼ ► Mini that sits right behind me, right behind my desk, and I'll worry about that Mac Mini,
00:51:48 ◼ ► You got to have multiple backups, right? It's like a time machine locally, then to another
00:51:53 ◼ ► machine, then to the cloud. Yeah. Before we started recording the show, I published a little
00:52:00 ◼ ► article on Daring Fireball about foldable phones. I didn't call them a jackass by name. I gave it to
00:52:06 ◼ ► the whole publication, but the gist of the article was if Apple doesn't soon ship a foldable phone,
00:52:20 ◼ ► I almost feel like I want to give them credit because for all the fear that we have that AI
00:52:26 ◼ ► is going to take over clickbait, it's like, no, no. Humans are still really good at it.
00:52:36 ◼ ► Who was it that made the observation that the percentage of people who want a foldable phone
00:52:41 ◼ ► and then the percentage of people who can afford that foldable phone, then the percentage of people
00:52:46 ◼ ► who can afford that foldable phone is going to break. It's too early. The tech's not there.
00:52:53 ◼ ► The dream is there. Do you have, I mean, as the technology currently stands, do you have any
00:53:00 ◼ ► desire for this whatsoever? Let's put aside the fact that by all accounts, Samsung's the best at
00:53:06 ◼ ► this. Google just shipped their first foldable pixels. And most of the reviews I see, the
00:53:11 ◼ ► consensus is that they're not as good as the Samsung ones. And part of the problem is they
00:53:16 ◼ ► always have like a gap, like at least the flip phones do, or I think they all do because if they
00:53:22 ◼ ► fold flat, the glass cracks. So they kind of need to form a wedge shape when closed as opposed to a
00:53:30 ◼ ► completely flat sandwich. Let's put that aside. All of them, including Samsung's, the best they
00:53:42 ◼ ► resistance. There's something to do with the hinge where they can waterproof the gaps, but they can't
00:53:47 ◼ ► dust proof the gaps for the hinge. And so they always say specifically, don't, don't take these
00:54:01 ◼ ► Right. Not taking it to the beach is kind of a bummer. I mean, cause they're, they're literally
00:54:07 ◼ ► like IPX8 rated and the way those ratings work, I forget what the numbers mean, but it's IP
00:54:15 ◼ ► means like this is it's the international standards body for dust and water resistance.
00:54:20 ◼ ► The first number is for particles like dust and the second one is for water. So the eight is like
00:54:26 ◼ ► a nice rating. I think, you know, like iPhones are IP68 and that's six for the dust and eight
00:54:33 ◼ ► for water resistance and Samsung's galaxy flagships are all IP68 too. That's sort of the
00:54:39 ◼ ► modern standard for dust and water resistance, but these foldables are IPX8 and the X just means
00:54:45 ◼ ► no dust resistance. Well, it's not so much that the dust resistance that would bug me. It's just
00:54:52 ◼ ► that these things are little fat boys, right? Like they're not going to fit in your pocket.
00:54:56 ◼ ► Right. If you're a woman and what's going on in the person might be better. It's like a compact
00:55:01 ◼ ► case. But I, for me personally, it's just, I don't want a thicker phone. No. And I don't want to have
00:55:09 ◼ ► to open it. And, and people are saying like these new Samsung just had their event this week with
00:55:13 ◼ ► the flip and fold five fold. Is there one that's like a book and the flip is the flip phone thing.
00:55:19 ◼ ► And people are saying that they've, they've spent a lot of time on the hinges and the hinges are
00:55:24 ◼ ► different, but now they're harder to open. I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem appeal. I like
00:55:29 ◼ ► to take my phone out, do something and put it back. I don't opening. It doesn't seem appealing.
00:55:33 ◼ ► Having the big screen of the book size ones and getting like an iPad or an iPad mini ish
00:55:41 ◼ ► total real estate. I see the appeal of it, but only if in the folded state, it's like as thick
00:55:47 ◼ ► as an iPhone is today. Right? Like if you had, if there was like a phone as maybe a little thicker
00:55:54 ◼ ► than an iPhone today, but that opened up to be double the size, talk to me then. But as it stands
00:56:02 ◼ ► now, the big ones, it's really is as thick as having two phones in your pocket. Like, yeah.
00:56:08 ◼ ► And you think about it, anybody with an Apple watch already has two screens, right? You already
00:56:14 ◼ ► have multiple screens and you don't have to unfold them. And sometimes I get my information without
00:56:20 ◼ ► pulling out my, the phone out of my pocket. In fact, if I go to the beach, which I do pretty
00:56:27 ◼ ► much every day, I just take my Apple watch because I can have my grocery list on it and I can have
00:56:32 ◼ ► some music on it and tell me what time it is. Or podcasts, Craig. Podcasts. I want you to have
00:56:39 ◼ ► your podcasts on your watch. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. My problem with podcasts is I can't,
00:56:52 ◼ ► No, me neither. And it's like, when I'm doing dishes and stuff, that's usually when my wife
00:56:57 ◼ ► and I are chatting about something and just sitting in front of the TV, I'm not going to
00:57:00 ◼ ► be listening to podcasts. So I just, it doesn't, yeah. Our friend Brent Simmons enjoys listening
00:57:07 ◼ ► to podcasts while he works and I don't know how he does it because I don't know. But for me,
00:57:12 ◼ ► it's either it's one way or the other where if I try listening to podcasts while I work,
00:57:17 ◼ ► either I get, it's like, wow, this is really good. And I realized I haven't done anything for 40
00:57:21 ◼ ► minutes or I I'm doing something and I realized I've just missed 40 minutes of this podcast. I'm
00:57:28 ◼ ► going to have to listen to it again. Yeah. It just ended. I missed sleep on during TV show.
00:57:34 ◼ ► What happened? Yeah. Really, if I were going to listen to a podcast, I would need it to be like,
00:57:40 ◼ ► like in a foreign language that I don't speak or like the Sims language. Like white noise,
00:57:47 ◼ ► that's just fake human voices, but it can't be real talking because I would be distracted.
00:57:52 ◼ ► That's why I love music. For me, working with music, it's there, but you can also tune it out.
00:58:07 ◼ ► Yeah. But I do listen. Yeah. But I don't really listen to the lyrics while I'm working. Right.
00:58:18 ◼ ► Amy is a big lyrics, listen, listener and the music she loves. She knows all the music and
00:58:22 ◼ ► she appreciates it like somebody appreciates poetry. And so many of her, she's a Tom Petty.
00:58:27 ◼ ► Yeah. Yes, exactly. Like it's, it's not just that she likes the way Tom Petty's music sounds.
00:58:33 ◼ ► She really, really deeply appreciates and always has since he was underrated as from that aspect.
00:58:39 ◼ ► But a lot of people, a lot of people heard the tune behind it. Dylan ask in terms of his poetry
00:58:46 ◼ ► and it's no surprise that Dylan was obviously a big fit Petty fan with the Wilbries and yeah.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Yeah. Oh my God. The great, the best tour that I never saw because I was too young was when
00:58:58 ◼ ► it was like a couple of years before the Wilbries Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers toured the country
00:59:17 ◼ ► Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as an opening band and then truly great musicians playing his backup
00:59:24 ◼ ► to Bob Dylan. Unbelievable. But anyway, I digress. But I don't listen to lyrics and music. I really
00:59:30 ◼ ► don't. I couldn't tell you. The only bad part of that show is a guy a couple of rows back from me
00:59:53 ◼ ► Oh yeah. $17 for a beer. Sure. That's a good deal. I don't even like baseball. I'm here for
00:59:58 ◼ ► the beer. Money left over, you can get a t-shirt. I'm here for the food. I'm here for the hot dogs.
01:00:07 ◼ ► I just don't see the foldable thing happening. I really don't. Or not soon. I think eventually,
01:00:14 ◼ ► I think it needs a total revolution in screen technology, battery technology to get it to a size.
01:00:21 ◼ ► It's the connector. The connector between the two things is a problem. It's like that hinge
01:00:30 ◼ ► with their Bluetooth chips. Basically having two phones that talk to each other over Bluetooth
01:00:38 ◼ ► connection that's super fast or something like that. It's going to be the typical Apple way,
01:00:45 ◼ ► doing something that they see could be useful, but not like everybody's thought about it,
01:01:02 ◼ ► Are you noodling on ideas for the headset? We might as well segue to it. Are you looking at
01:01:10 ◼ ► the SDK yet? I haven't. I honestly need to wear one before I can even start thinking about it.
01:01:27 ◼ ► "Oh, what I'm seeing in the simulator is going to be like when I'm wearing this thing on my head."
01:01:31 ◼ ► It might be. I may be wrong there, but it's like I didn't really get the iPhone until it was in
01:01:37 ◼ ► my hand. I really did not understand the iPhone until I did that swipe to unlock and then it was
01:01:43 ◼ ► like, "Oh, my God." Right. I spent six months extremely excited about the iPhone before.
01:02:18 ◼ ► I don't know yet. I don't know. Yeah, you have to use something to do. And the Macintosh was
01:02:27 ◼ ► or if you were just curious. I mean, and you and I remember very vividly, it actually was,
01:02:33 ◼ ► I would say, close to a decade from 1984 to maybe '93, '94, where there were still these diehards
01:02:42 ◼ ► who thought that a command line interface was the only way real computers would work and that a GUI
01:02:48 ◼ ► was for babies. I mean, you really can't believe how long into the GUI era that there were people,
01:02:56 ◼ ► mostly men, who really, really were going to die on that hill. But even if you were just curious
01:03:04 ◼ ► about it, if you were like, "Huh, that seems like an interesting way to do a computer," you really
01:03:09 ◼ ► had to use it before you would come up with an idea for writing software for the Macintosh.
01:03:13 ◼ ► Even if you thought, "I can't wait to try that. That seems really interesting to have two documents
01:03:18 ◼ ► open in these overlapping windows and you could just click between them." Boy, that would be,
01:03:56 ◼ ► Tim Cynova Another thing that concerns me about VisionOS is nobody's really talking about this.
01:04:01 ◼ ► It's going to be a tiny market, right? There aren't going to be a lot of people buying these
01:04:07 ◼ ► things initially. And from what I'm seeing, the development for this platform, it's, yeah, you can
01:04:15 ◼ ► leverage some of your knowledge about how UIKit or SwiftUI works, but it really is a new thing.
01:04:22 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, I'm going to take my Mac app and run it on the iPhone." No, you're not.
01:04:39 ◼ ► I think, and although this is one of the features they didn't let us experience a month ago, is the
01:04:45 ◼ ► just run all of macOS, you run an external display for your MacBook in a big window in front of you
01:04:53 ◼ ► in VisionOS. That, assuming that it works as well as they say it's going to work, and that it's
01:04:58 ◼ ► going to be like the equivalent of like a 4 to 5K virtual display in front of you, that is going to
01:05:05 ◼ ► be a killer. But the Mac developers have to do nothing. It's literally just a display. So,
01:05:11 ◼ ► literally, there is nothing to do. There's no, there's not even like a WWDC session, like, "Oh,
01:05:16 ◼ ► ways to optimize your Mac app for," no, it's just a virtual display for your Mac. So, like,
01:05:25 ◼ ► Pete Laskowski It's across the room. It's just not, it's going to, and with a good keyboard
01:05:30 ◼ ► and some other, I mean, you're not going to probably want to hold your hand up or even pinch
01:05:37 ◼ ► and, you know, move your wrist around all day. You're going to want to use some other kind of
01:05:44 ◼ ► Yeah. It makes me wonder whether there's a market for somebody like a third, because I don't think
01:05:49 ◼ ► Apple would do it, but it would be interesting to see if, and maybe somebody makes something like
01:05:53 ◼ ► this now. I just don't know about it, but like a portable track, keyboard and trackpad, that's one
01:06:00 ◼ ► piece. So, it's one thing to connect via Bluetooth to your Mac. And I don't know. I'm not quite sure
01:06:12 ◼ ► Tim Cynova Or maybe what travelers will do is just use their MacBook and open it up and use the
01:06:18 ◼ ► MacBook keyboard and trackpad, but not use the display even though it's open, which is kind of
01:06:24 ◼ ► weird. Right? I've only thought about this like in the last week or two. Like that's kind of weird.
01:06:30 ◼ ► Like, so imagine, all right, I go to next year's WWDC and I have a Vision Pro headset and I am in
01:06:37 ◼ ► my hotel room to write up my keynote thoughts for next year's WWDC. And I want to use the big virtual
01:06:47 ◼ ► Mac display through the headset. And the only keyboard I have is my MacBook Pro. Isn't it weird
01:06:54 ◼ ► to open my MacBook Pro and use that keyboard and trackpad while I'm looking at a display in the
01:07:04 ◼ ► There will have to be some sort of accessory there. The other it sucks case is being on an
01:07:09 ◼ ► airplane, right? You want something that you can put down on the tray table and not have to worry
01:07:16 ◼ ► Well, I think, see there, I think it's almost easier because then you could just open your
01:07:20 ◼ ► MacBook and not even open it 90 degrees, right? Just open it enough so that it's on and ignore
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01:11:47 ◼ ► Widgets in the past have been just sort of like screenshots of data, right? They've just been like
01:11:54 ◼ ► pictures of the state of your app, right? It's on the home screen. And interacting with those
01:12:01 ◼ ► meant tapping on and going to the app. And there wasn't really any kind of story there to stay just
01:12:07 ◼ ► on your lock screen or on your home screen. And now with the interactive widgets, they've done
01:12:13 ◼ ► something really clever. And it's it. I don't want to say this wasn't a hard thing to implement,
01:12:25 ◼ ► it's sort of like a zip archive of a HTML page, right? You lay out the page and you take a zip
01:12:34 ◼ ► file of it. And then later on the system decides, oh, I'm going to display this this widget and take
01:12:40 ◼ ► the zip file and unpack it and put it on the display. What they've done now is the ability to
01:12:54 ◼ ► lets your app do something, right? It can be anything. And in fact, the thing that I'm looking
01:13:00 ◼ ► at is in Trio, the ability to play radio stations, right? From the lock screen, you just see a button
01:13:07 ◼ ► for a station that you like, you tap on that button and starts playing the radio station,
01:13:12 ◼ ► right? I'm sure the music app will get a similar kind of treatment, starting stopping tracks
01:13:19 ◼ ► without having to open up the music app and dig through and find the player. I see a lot of
01:13:24 ◼ ► opportunities there for developers to make the widgets just come alive. And I think it's a great
01:13:30 ◼ ► little thing that they've done. The side effect of this, I think is even kind of probably better
01:13:36 ◼ ► in the long term is that it's going to, the way you do this is doing by something that's sort of
01:13:40 ◼ ► like a little shortcut, right? And it's going to expose a lot of developers to the shortcuts
01:13:45 ◼ ► technology. So like that button that's on your widget that he says, "Oh, play this radio station."
01:13:51 ◼ ► Well, I'm obviously going to write a shortcut that says, "Play this radio station," right? So
01:13:56 ◼ ► you can automate that. So like if I go into my focus mode or if I get home, it starts playing
01:14:10 ◼ ► powerful because it takes that interaction and makes it something that you can use throughout
01:14:17 ◼ ► your life, right? That's for me the most interesting thing. In fact, while we're talking
01:14:24 ◼ ► about VisionOS and all these other things, it's like interactions that fit into your life are
01:14:36 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, that's very interesting because that's an area like I was keenly interested in that part
01:14:44 ◼ ► of the keynote, but I haven't really played with widgets yet that much. Like most of my iOS 17 time
01:14:50 ◼ ► this summer has been on my iPad because I just recklessly throw betas on my iPad because it's
01:14:56 ◼ ► like I have a spare iPhone with the beta, but I don't use my spare iPhone that much. I don't put
01:15:02 ◼ ► the betas on my Mac because my Mac needs to be stable and consistent for work. Therefore, I just
01:15:09 ◼ ► put it beta on my iPad and I don't care. Like last week before the latest beta, there was one day
01:15:15 ◼ ► where I don't know what happened, but I felt that it was warm. I was like, "Huh, my iPad's really
01:15:19 ◼ ► warm. I guess I should turn it off," but I didn't, but it was charging. And then the next time I went
01:15:24 ◼ ► to it, it was dead. So, it was using energy so quickly that it died while it was plugged in.
01:15:29 ◼ ► John "Slick" Baum: You don't want that happening on your phone for sure. I kind of screwed myself
01:15:34 ◼ ► with the iPhone yearly purchase thing. It's like, "Oh, I got a new iPhone every year, but I have to
01:15:46 ◼ ► Pete I don't think that thing that happened to my iPad would have happened if the USB plug was
01:15:51 ◼ ► right into the iPad. It was connected to a magic keyboard and the plug was in the keyboard.
01:16:07 ◼ ► heretofore through iOS 16, while the widgets can present lots of information, and if you make a big
01:16:16 ◼ ► one like a calendar widget for Fantastic Cal or Apple's calendar or weather widgets, everybody's
01:16:22 ◼ ► got weather widgets, you can have an information, visually information-rich presentation, but the
01:16:30 ◼ ► whole widget is just a button to launch the app in terms of interactivity. So, no matter how big the
01:16:42 ◼ ► John Yeah, and I think it gets really interesting when you start thinking about standby,
01:16:56 ◼ ► right? Is having a clock and then next to it a button that starts a radio station, right?
01:17:03 ◼ ► John Listen to music while I'm going to bed and have that thing turn off after 30 minutes or
01:17:08 ◼ ► whatever. It's just, there are going to be a lot of interesting things that happen because of that
01:17:14 ◼ ► just, and it really is just two things, right? The only interactive points are a toggle switch
01:17:20 ◼ ► and a button, and the buttons can send some piece of information over to your app that says, "Oh,
01:17:40 ◼ ► that part of Apple's effort on this regard with widgets on the lock screen in particular,
01:18:04 ◼ ► John I wasn't sure if all existing, all iPhones eligible for iOS 17 have a screen that won't burn
01:18:26 ◼ ► sooner rather than later, all iPhones that run on iOS will have this feature. But if you're not
01:18:32 ◼ ► familiar, it's the feature where if it's connected to a MagSafe charger, and I think it has to be
01:18:37 ◼ ► MagSafe, and you put the phone horizontally, it, you get this new mode where you can have the time,
01:18:43 ◼ ► and like you said, like you can show a handful of, of widgets on the screen, and they can do
01:18:49 ◼ ► stuff now. And to me, it's almost like coming full circle where, like you even referenced it when we
01:18:56 ◼ ► were talking about the original iPhone, and when you first did slide to unlock. The original iPhone,
01:19:12 ◼ ► and you could, I think even the original iPhone did have a preference you could turn on to put a
01:19:32 ◼ ► and then just slide to unlock and boom, you're in. But like the whole phone in 2007, 2008 was sort of
01:19:56 ◼ ► and I think in the keynote in January 2007, they even called them widgets. They, I think they were
01:20:02 ◼ ► unsure whether they'd call them apps or widgets. As excited as we were about it, nobody really
01:20:07 ◼ ► thought, oh, this is going to grow to the point where somebody's main computer could be their
01:20:12 ◼ ► iPhone or only computer, right? And there's a lot of people, a lot of serious, like, business people
01:20:18 ◼ ► who do all of their computing on their phones. They really do because that's the nature of their work
01:20:24 ◼ ► and it does what they need. But with widgets, like lock screen widgets, and especially the way they're
01:20:30 ◼ ► evolving in iOS 17, it's sort of like Apple's taken us back to the point where some safe, private
01:20:38 ◼ ► sliver of what we do on our phones, you could do without unlocking it and going into the full
01:20:50 ◼ ► that I don't care if somebody starts a music station in Triode and my phone is locked. Yeah,
01:21:09 ◼ ► really cool about the standby is that it actually knows the MagSafe charger that it's hooked up to.
01:21:15 ◼ ► So, if you have one in your bedroom and you have one in your office and maybe you have one in the
01:21:20 ◼ ► kitchen, the other side benefit here is that nobody's gonna care what their battery level
01:21:27 ◼ ► is anymore because it's always gonna be charged. John Right, right, right. Because when you sit
01:21:37 ◼ ► I'm looking forward to it. I was just talking with my friends at Studio Neat who make some really
01:21:46 ◼ ► I gotta get a new Studio Neat because I've got to do the AirPods, the watch, and the phone now,
01:22:01 ◼ ► realized that MagSafe is more than a dumb puck was when using Apple's MagSafe cases, the indicator for
01:22:12 ◼ ► "Hey, you've got a MagSafe connection" is color coordinated with the case. So, if you put a purple
01:22:54 ◼ ► John There's – but you can think about it. Just off the top of your head, the sort of things you'd
01:23:18 ◼ ► Very interesting. I don't have tons of thoughts about iOS 17, but the one that really jumps out
01:23:25 ◼ ► to me on the iPad is the new AutoCorrect that they talked about being driven by some new AI,
01:23:38 ◼ ► Pete I'm looking forward to that if that's true because it can't get worse. I've told the
01:23:47 ◼ ► John So I've tinkered with it with a spare phone and it's similar, but on the iPad, even with
01:23:52 ◼ ► the Magic Keyboard where I'm typing on a hardware keyboard and normally I don't think, hey,
01:24:04 ◼ ► I've often said I'm sort of a crummy typist because I'm a slow thinker. And at some point
01:24:17 ◼ ► not a very high typing speed, but if I can type as fast as I think, that's fast enough.
01:24:23 ◼ ► But I'm finding myself like, oh, yeah, that's the big long word. Somehow I just started typing
01:24:29 ◼ ► "I am" and it's guessing I wanted impossible. That's exactly what I wanted. You just hit the
01:24:41 ◼ ► Like in TextEdit and things like that, it's gonna, yeah, I hope it's not in Xcode. I do not want
01:24:53 ◼ ► Jay Haynes You know what, though? All the other IDEs that have the copilot stuff, it's gonna get
01:24:59 ◼ ► there. You don't want the same auto completion in Xcode that you want anywhere else. But I think
01:25:06 ◼ ► there's existence proof in VS code with copilot integration that something like this is going to
01:25:15 ◼ ► be ubiquitous. There's that word again in code editors too, including Xcode eventually. It's
01:25:21 ◼ ► really good and really smart. And I can't think of one single way that it's worse. It is as good or
01:25:29 ◼ ► better than the old auto complete system in every way. And I think it's a lot better in a lot of
01:25:34 ◼ ► ways. It just really seems to narrow in on the one guess that makes the most sense contextually over
01:25:42 ◼ ► and over and over again. And if it is wrong, you lose nothing because you just keep typing the word
01:25:58 ◼ ► my thumb often hits the space bar in the middle of typing a word. And it splits the word and I end
01:26:07 ◼ ► Jay Haynes I could be underestimating how much it's doing the post typing the end of the word
01:26:15 ◼ ► correction. I guess that's the difference. What I'm impressed by is less auto correcting what you did
01:26:21 ◼ ► type and more all about the auto completion of what you're about to type. And I find that to be
01:26:30 ◼ ► way more satisfying. Like if you're typing the word impossible, because where are your eyes? I am.
01:26:38 ◼ ► You're looking at the blinking insertion point after the M. And when you see a light gray
01:26:45 ◼ ► possible, you know it's right. And then you just hit the space bar and you get the P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E
01:26:52 ◼ ► with just typing the space bar. It is auto complete is to me way better than auto correction,
01:27:03 ◼ ► Jay Haynes It's an aid. Yeah. My understanding of it is that it's doing the AI kind of thing.
01:27:09 ◼ ► Although Apple will never call it AI. It's machine learning. But it's basically working off
01:27:14 ◼ ► a corpus of information. So that if you say that's I am, that's not, that could be that's impulsive,
01:27:27 ◼ ► yeah, that's impossible. That's not impulsive. Right. So it's got more context, I think.
01:27:42 ◼ ► mechanism that they had, it's like, you make a spelling error once and you live with it the
01:27:47 ◼ ► rest of your life. I really do. And I'm, I wish I'd spent more time. I wish I wish I had more time
01:27:55 ◼ ► with the phone with iOS 17. But I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. And it is the same.
01:28:00 ◼ ► It's this completion. And I really do think it's to me the biggest, we're up to iOS 17th version
01:28:26 ◼ ► just in the keyboard domain. I can't say it's I can't say it's better than copy and paste. I
01:28:31 ◼ ► mean, that was that was pretty frustrating. God, that was nasty. Was it iOS 3 that we had to wait
01:28:38 ◼ ► for or was it 4? It was at least. It was a couple years, right. And then it was one of the things
01:28:44 ◼ ► he knew was coming. But I'm really sad. And it had to be right. And it and it's been right for
01:28:50 ◼ ► 15 years now or whatever. I'm really surprised, though. It wasn't. I'm not surprised it wasn't in
01:28:55 ◼ ► the first year. But I was very surprised that it wasn't in iOS or iPhone OS as we called it then.
01:29:07 ◼ ► And there was so much to be done, really. I mean, honestly, I mean, in between iOS 1 and 2 was the
01:29:16 ◼ ► whole, hey, App Store, which turned into kind of a big thing. You think? I'm trying to think,
01:29:25 ◼ ► was there anything else? I just highlight. I know. I mean, we could do I could probably do a whole
01:29:30 ◼ ► year worth of shows in the year ahead talking about new features. Just talking about the App
01:29:33 ◼ ► Store? Well, no, talking about iOS 17 features. Well, the recent 15-year anniversary of the App
01:29:40 ◼ ► Store. That's a big deal. Yeah. And here we are waiting for, we spend the whole week waiting to
01:29:47 ◼ ► figure out what Twitter is going to call their app, given the rule with two character or more
01:29:53 ◼ ► letter app names. I guarantee you, Apple has never had to deal with an editor's choice being removed.
01:30:01 ◼ ► That is just incredible. So, we're bringing the show full circle here as we close it down.
01:30:48 ◼ ► All right. Let me tell you what I got. I got in order and surprisingly not an ad at the top.
01:30:55 ◼ ► I can't believe that. Maybe Apple shut that off. I don't know. I've got XVPN, Xbox, Ibis Paint X,
01:31:04 ◼ ► Zender, X-E-N-D-E-R, Xtreme Motorbikes, then Xfinity. Speaking of X logos, I've been wondering,
01:31:23 ◼ ► social networking related to the letter X. And it's complicated because none of them really say
01:31:29 ◼ ► we own the letter X. It's more about like marks. Of all the companies that might be the most worried
01:31:35 ◼ ► about somebody using X as a logo mark, to me, it's not Meta and Microsoft. It's Comcast with Xfinity.
01:31:45 ◼ ► Well, the other thing I did the other day is I did a search at the US Patent and Trademark Office,
01:31:59 ◼ ► it's a popular thing. And the problem there again is because everybody uses it, it doesn't really
01:32:05 ◼ ► mean anything. Right? Twitter meant something. Twitter was a unique thing. Right? Like would
01:32:17 ◼ ► Now, here's what I see when I search for Twitter. I get a paid ad at the top. That's the blue app
01:32:23 ◼ ► for Facebook. And then the next is an app called Twitter with the X logo, still not renamed.
01:32:29 ◼ ► Third is Tweetbot for Twitter. So, let's see, is the editor's choice back? Nope, it is gone.
01:32:39 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, and the wording of it, it's just like it said, "We rely on Twitter to keep us,
01:32:45 ◼ ► to help us express our thoughts and keep up with the news. And with Twitter's Apple TV app,
01:32:51 ◼ ► our 2016 app of the year, we've also got a bigger window into current events and topical discussions
01:32:58 ◼ ► from breaking news, tweets, to live video feeds, and even Thursday Night Football. The benefits of
01:33:10 ◼ ► tweets and Twitter and bird with something X, and it just sounds that we're back to the Mad Libs.
01:33:31 ◼ ► because the editors choice, they don't give them out willy-nilly. They really do write them.
01:33:38 ◼ ► Well, famously, they hired a lot of people who used to be well known as writers at Macworld,
01:33:44 ◼ ► amongst other publications. A lot of people with professional writing backgrounds have been working
01:33:50 ◼ ► Yeah. And they do a great job. Apple, the App Store editorial team, whenever they ask you anything,
01:33:59 ◼ ► it's like, "Oh, we're thinking about doing a feature on X." It's like, "Oh, you've got all
01:34:02 ◼ ► my time." Right? Because I know you do the right thing. They do a great job with the input from
01:34:15 ◼ ► Not just when they're profiling my friends. I read them when they profile other developers,
01:34:20 ◼ ► too. And I've learned an awful lot of interesting stories about small development teams through the
01:34:26 ◼ ► profiles in the App Store. But if they didn't, if Apple ran this editorially in a very lazy fashion
01:35:08 ◼ ► But it's starting to reach a point where that entertainment value is just, it's like a dumb
01:35:16 ◼ ► thing can only stay interesting and funny for so long and then it's just going to be like,
01:35:23 ◼ ► Yeah. You know what? Everything like that has a shorter expiration date than you think. Remember
01:35:28 ◼ ► the Robert Morton Downey Jr.? Remember that guy? He was a talk show host in the '80s and he
01:35:35 ◼ ► literally smoked cigarettes while he was... And sort of invented the Jerry Springer style of like,
01:35:49 ◼ ► It was really tawdry. And it was like, "Boy, there are people like this. Oh, God. Look at him.
01:35:58 ◼ ► What is he doing?" And then it's like, "Oh, that's that show. Oh, yeah, I'm going to skip that."
01:36:03 ◼ ► I will put a note in the show notes. Hopefully, I'll find a clip on YouTube for you youngsters
01:36:07 ◼ ► who don't remember. But he came out of nowhere. It was an afternoon TV sensation. And then like
01:36:22 ◼ ► Yeah, the water's been awesome. It's like in the low 70s. Just, yeah, I'll probably go take a...
01:36:47 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, last week I was in Tucson, Arizona, where it was high temperatures for all the four
01:37:08 ◼ ► I don't know if it was Tucson or somewhere else in Arizona, but the hospital's burn unit was
01:37:14 ◼ ► filled up. It had no more beds because the normal number of regular burn victims, but then the rest
01:37:24 ◼ ► of the unit was filled up by people who'd fallen and been burned by the macadam or the pavement.
01:37:31 ◼ ► And that you could get like a third degree burn with 15 seconds of exposure or something like
01:37:39 ◼ ► Yeah. Anybody who has a dog in Tucson in those conditions, they put shoes on them, right?
01:37:47 ◼ ► Yeah. And if you've ever noticed the... I guess the hottest pavement I've ever experienced is in
01:37:56 ◼ ► Vegas, obviously very hot in the summertime. But they said that the surface temperature of
01:38:05 ◼ ► Well, I guess it doesn't matter what Fahrenheit Celsius, I don't know, 180, that's a burn.
01:38:20 ◼ ► things we never thought we'd see again. Anyway, 70 degrees sounds absolutely beautiful for the
01:38:38 ◼ ► Yeah. There will be a link in the show notes, including to Triode, which we've mentioned
01:38:48 ◼ ► Yeah. That's awesome. For people who don't... I don't know. Do we just say it? I think we
01:38:53 ◼ ► Well, it kind of obliquely, yeah. It's an internet radio app that's not scummy, no ads, no bullshit.
01:39:03 ◼ ► Just, you know, here's a stream, listen to it. What gets me through my work day every day.