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The Talk Show

82: ‘We're Allowed to Make Stuff Up; It's a Podcast’ With Dan Frommer

 

00:00:00   Well, I enjoyed the first new show on the new network.

00:00:04   Did you notice any difference?

00:00:06   No, not at all.

00:00:07   The RSS worked and sounded good.

00:00:11   A couple of people--

00:00:12   It was funny.

00:00:14   Put a little extra effort into it.

00:00:16   It seems like it went pretty well in terms

00:00:20   of all the stuff that was supposed

00:00:22   to forward getting forwarded.

00:00:25   The RSS feed redirects.

00:00:27   And it's just crazy though, because it's like there's like four different redirects. There's like feeds dot mule

00:00:34   Radio dot net slash the talk show is really a C name

00:00:38   Is that feed burner now feed

00:00:42   Press. Okay. Feed press is like the new indie

00:00:46   Totally indie version of feed burner. I should probably get on that. I'm still using feed burner. I still don't know though. It's like

00:00:55   Mike I'm torn because they do seem to have some good analytics, but on the other hand I always like just controlling my feed

00:01:03   Totally and they you know and their defeat press seems like the best option for something like this by far

00:01:08   And you know you could there's like a you you know they have an API so you can always do a manual rebuild say hey

00:01:15   look, I you know I made an edit to my last entry rebuild the feed so that you have the

00:01:19   Current version of everything you know I don't know I might

00:01:25   Seems like they do a decent job estimating subscribers, which is the big thing

00:01:28   Right. Yeah, and that's and I think you're on SoundCloud as well. Yeah. Yeah

00:01:34   That's why I signed up there because they're the only ones who even try to tell you how many times it's been played

00:01:40   Yes, I don't know how they are

00:01:42   Determining, you know, what counts as a play. This was like the old YouTube question of

00:01:47   2006 like right how much of the video do they actually watch?

00:01:53   And I actually owe the listeners a correction on that.

00:01:57   I was at the Moltz last week, I said SoundCloud was free.

00:02:01   And they do have a free tier, but for like unlimited downloads, it's not free.

00:02:07   It's $30 a month, I think, which is what I have now for this show.

00:02:13   But compared to what I would pay to host the audio on S3, which I think

00:02:20   would probably be around two or three grand a month.

00:02:23   It is free, right?

00:02:24   When you're comparing two or three grand

00:02:26   for hosting on S3 versus $30 a month for SoundCloud,

00:02:30   all right, that's free, you know, with an asterisk.

00:02:35   - Yeah, it's crazy that S3 gets expensive.

00:02:39   It doesn't really scale that well

00:02:40   in terms of pricing for media.

00:02:43   - No, not yet.

00:02:45   - Like video, I mean, I can't even imagine

00:02:47   what a popular video download would cost.

00:02:51   - Yeah, 'cause I would think video would have to be

00:02:53   at least an order of magnitude bigger than audio.

00:02:58   - Right.

00:03:00   All of which just makes YouTube's infrastructure

00:03:03   more impressive when you think about it.

00:03:05   - Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:06   Yeah, 'cause my show, this show is usually

00:03:09   around 70 megabytes, 60, 70, 80 megabytes

00:03:14   depending on how far past the hour mark we blow.

00:03:18   - The one hour, you mean the two hour mark?

00:03:22   - Yeah, two hours, you know,

00:03:23   you're still, I think it's usually under,

00:03:25   still under, I think it's like 50 megabytes

00:03:28   for about an hour, and then,

00:03:29   with the audio compression settings we use.

00:03:34   And so, you know, somewhere between 50 and 100

00:03:36   for an hour plus show.

00:03:39   - My first big story at Forbes when I was there was trying,

00:03:43   and this was early 2006, trying to guess

00:03:48   how much YouTube's bandwidth bill was based on their,

00:03:53   and this is YouTube pre-Google acquisition,

00:03:57   they're a venture-funded company,

00:03:59   and back then there were very few options

00:04:01   for hosting video, so they were using

00:04:04   these content delivery networks,

00:04:06   and I think the one they were using was Limelight.

00:04:09   The big one is Akamai, which is,

00:04:11   actually they're both public companies now,

00:04:13   but and they refuse to talk to me, they wouldn't tell me.

00:04:18   And so I just use kind of publicly available data

00:04:22   of how many hours of video they streamed a day,

00:04:27   the kind of rate, going rate for video streaming or video,

00:04:32   they actually did not stream,

00:04:34   it was a progressive download,

00:04:36   which was cheaper than streaming

00:04:38   because back then to stream,

00:04:40   you had to have some Adobe license.

00:04:42   And then yeah, and I made a guess,

00:04:46   and I guessed that it was a million dollars a month.

00:04:50   An educated guess based on interviews

00:04:53   with all these experts and that kind of stuff.

00:04:55   And we published this article and people went crazy.

00:04:59   It was just a huge, it got a lot of attention

00:05:02   because I think the Digg headline was something,

00:05:05   this was when Digg was massive,

00:05:07   it was like YouTube burning up cash,

00:05:10   spending a million dollars a month on,

00:05:13   of their VC money on bandwidth.

00:05:15   And the first thing I heard of back,

00:05:20   kind of through like a second degree grapevine

00:05:24   was that I was kind of off by 10x,

00:05:28   which is kind of not ideal.

00:05:30   It was very clear that it was an estimate

00:05:33   and you never wanna be off by that much.

00:05:36   So, a million dollars a month would have been a lot

00:05:40   back then especially, this was before the era

00:05:42   of the $50 million VC round.

00:05:45   - So which way were you off though?

00:05:47   You were off high?

00:05:48   - I was high, yeah.

00:05:49   - So they were running YouTube pre-Google,

00:05:52   they were running it for $100,000, roughly a month?

00:05:55   - Maybe, something like that.

00:05:57   But then-- - That's impressive.

00:05:59   - Yeah, yeah, well it was much smaller then.

00:06:01   But then I think I saw an interview more recently

00:06:04   with one of the founders where they said

00:06:07   that it cost almost a million dollars a month

00:06:09   in the early days.

00:06:10   So I don't know, I don't really know.

00:06:12   I mean, someone has the bill somewhere, so we know.

00:06:16   But then if you looked at Limelight's financials,

00:06:18   there was no way that YouTube was that big of there

00:06:22   'cause they were not a huge company at that point.

00:06:25   There was no way that YouTube was generating

00:06:26   like a third of their revenue or whatever it was.

00:06:28   So anyway, it was like one of the first business tech stories

00:06:33   I did where we kind of played the wire,

00:06:37   the follow the money game.

00:06:38   and it was a lot of fun.

00:06:40   It was a really fun story, it got a lot of attention.

00:06:43   I hope it was more accurate than it was,

00:06:45   and I actually don't even know how accurate it was,

00:06:48   'cause people from YouTube just would never comment

00:06:51   or give a suggestion either way, but it was fun.

00:06:56   - Yeah, it's a fun, like, modern equivalent

00:06:58   of how many jelly beans are in the jar type of question.

00:07:01   - Totally, yeah.

00:07:02   And back then, now video delivery is a lot cheaper, I think,

00:07:06   And video is bigger too 'cause it's HD,

00:07:10   but it's, you know,

00:07:13   and I'm sure there are quite a lot of companies

00:07:15   with billion dollar AWS bills.

00:07:18   - Oh, it's gotta be.

00:07:19   - Yeah.

00:07:20   - Well, Google, I wonder what,

00:07:21   you know, a good question now is what is Google paying

00:07:24   for bandwidth for YouTube a month?

00:07:26   - I wonder because I think that a lot,

00:07:30   and this is where now I'm making stuff up

00:07:32   'cause I don't actually know,

00:07:33   but I think a lot of their bandwidth is on a peering basis.

00:07:38   So they don't have to pay actual cash.

00:07:40   They just kind of plug in to the other ISP

00:07:43   and they, I don't know, great question.

00:07:46   Probably, I'm not sure.

00:07:48   - It must be.

00:07:49   And yeah, you might be right

00:07:51   that Google is in such a unique situation

00:07:53   that they don't pay for bandwidth like normal companies do.

00:07:56   - Yeah, and there were always all these murmurs

00:07:58   that like Google was buying up all kinds of dark fiber

00:08:03   and I would not be surprised if they have

00:08:05   the most advanced network infrastructure of any company

00:08:10   that's not like a straight up telecom company.

00:08:15   So I don't know.

00:08:17   Now I'm just making stuff up.

00:08:18   Which is, you know, that's commentary, right?

00:08:23   That's how.

00:08:24   - Yeah, we're allowed to make stuff up.

00:08:25   It's just a podcast.

00:08:28   I wonder too, like for user submitted videos to YouTube, they still have the 10 minute

00:08:35   limit, right? I don't know. I haven't uploaded a video to YouTube in a long time. I know

00:08:43   that for stuff that there's like a commercial partnership, I mean when some people can host

00:08:49   their whole movie on YouTube. Right. But that's not just like guy signs up for YouTube account

00:08:54   and uploads an hour video.

00:08:56   Like the 10 minute thing is still a real limit.

00:09:00   But I'm not quite sure when--

00:09:01   - I think so because you still see videos chopped

00:09:05   into multiple parts when they're clearly not partner videos

00:09:09   like some rip of a Apple keynote or something like that.

00:09:14   A lot of them are still chunked up.

00:09:17   I don't know though, good question.

00:09:22   making web videos is one of those things that every like two or three weeks I'm

00:09:26   like oh man I wish I was making cool videos and then that's the end of that

00:09:31   but someday maybe I don't know yeah I don't know the podcast audio thing you

00:09:40   know again we talked about I talked about it last week but it's it's it's

00:09:44   weird I don't know but SoundCloud is cool and you're right that they do just

00:09:48   to circle back five minutes that they seem to do more work trying to figure

00:09:52   out how many downloads you have than anybody else.

00:09:55   And it isn't just, okay, you started a download.

00:09:59   - Right, well, we think, you know.

00:10:03   But it's important because a podcast

00:10:06   is delivered many different ways.

00:10:08   I'm sure some people are actually listening to it

00:10:10   via the actual SoundCloud player, but a lot of people,

00:10:14   probably most people are just pulling the file

00:10:18   through either iTunes or the iOS podcast app

00:10:22   or any other pod catching type thing.

00:10:24   So that's where--

00:10:25   Well, and the other thing too is it gets to be like RSS too,

00:10:28   because podcast is RSS.

00:10:30   But the same way with RSS feeders,

00:10:34   the numbers don't equate to people.

00:10:36   Because let's say you signed up in Apple's podcast app,

00:10:39   and you have a subscription to the show,

00:10:41   and now you're using Castro or something else that's new.

00:10:47   People don't unsubscribe from the other one.

00:10:50   So you might be copying it twice.

00:10:52   you might be downloading it once in iTunes on your Mac

00:10:54   where you don't even listen to it.

00:10:55   And then once in Castro on your iPhone,

00:10:58   you're just one person, you're only gonna listen once,

00:11:00   but you might have two or even three copies of it.

00:11:03   - Yeah, and I often listen to this show

00:11:07   on three or four different devices

00:11:09   throughout the course of the show.

00:11:11   So who knows what?

00:11:13   Well, it's better for everyone

00:11:15   if all of those count as a place.

00:11:18   - No, but yeah, I mean, I'm not complaining about it.

00:11:21   I'm just only pointing out that it's a very hard thing to put a number on and it always has been I mean even the

00:11:26   Nielsen numbers for TV they were

00:11:28   Nonsense, you know, oh, I mean have you ever been part of the arbitron radio survey where you actually have like a paper book?

00:11:35   And you're supposed to fill in what you're listening to on the radio. No, I think I heard that when I was like 12

00:11:40   It's like oh yeah fine for five bucks, I'll write down the radio

00:11:47   Right shows that I'm not listening to all right. That is actually how radio ratings. I don't know if they're still

00:11:52   Computed that way, but they might be I think I think it's a little more digital now, but it's still

00:11:57   They're still I believe I was talking to someone about this somewhat recently

00:12:03   I don't remember if it was radio or TV though, but it's still based on I think it's I think we were talking about TV

00:12:08   Nielsen I think it's still based on like, you know Nielsen households that have

00:12:14   Some sort of equipment or yeah now it's it's at some point in the 80s or 90s

00:12:18   They switched to equipment, but it know when I was a kid in like the 70s

00:12:24   I remember reading that it was like Nielsen. It was a log book that yeah, the family would do it and that it

00:12:29   Not that there was it back in those days not that there was a lot of inappropriate stuff on but that people would

00:12:36   Because you had to self-report it people would write

00:12:39   Wouldn't write the trashy stuff that they watched that they were embarrassed and they'd say oh

00:12:43   "Oh, I watched the MacNeil-Lanier report on PBS."

00:12:46   - Right, yeah.

00:12:48   - When in fact--

00:12:49   - I watched Rick Steves all night.

00:12:50   That's all I was watching.

00:12:51   - When in fact they were watching, you know,

00:12:52   Brady Bunch reruns or something.

00:12:54   - Yeah.

00:12:55   - Let's take a break.

00:12:55   I'm gonna thank the first sponsor.

00:12:58   This is great.

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00:15:55   Last month out in San Francisco and I was out there for the build conference

00:15:58   If you can do it if you're listening right now, you're going to WWDC

00:16:02   You should quick order one right now. See if you can get it before you before you get out there

00:16:06   I can't believe that's a week away. I

00:16:08   Cannot either a week from we're recording on Memorial Day. This is Monday the 26th of May

00:16:14   So literally one week from today. It'll be

00:16:17   Keynote will be over right? It'll be one one o'clock Pacific as we speak

00:16:24   week. So we will be cracking open the health book app and pricking our fingertips and measuring

00:16:31   our blood, doing a blood test on the, no I don't know. I use an app called Ida. Ida?

00:16:40   Ida? I don't know how to pronounce it. I-T-A. IOS app and it lets you make little checklists

00:16:48   and you can sit, you know, probably dozens of apps that make checklists but I have one

00:16:53   like packing for a conference and then when I'm done and then I just uncheck

00:16:57   them all and then the next conference I can do it again. Last year like a dumbass

00:17:01   I did not bring an old iPhone to the WDC and so I had to sit there and

00:17:08   think well I did there's no way you have to be a crazy person to install the

00:17:12   first beta of iOS on your daily use iPhone especially when you're like away

00:17:20   from home away from you know you're on your phone all day it's insane and

00:17:25   especially when it's iOS 7 exactly well exactly when it's a major release like

00:17:30   that right so I never others I don't know why but it so I've added a

00:17:33   checklist to my car and that you know all year long every time I go to

00:17:36   anywhere else any kind of business trip I get the spare iPhone for iOS beta

00:17:40   check thing and I just check it off because I know I don't want it but then

00:17:44   when I pack for for next week I'll I'll bring my nice iPhone 5 I guess I ran out

00:17:50   and bought a iPod touch for that and then there were so many people last year

00:17:56   who went to the one that I guess it's closed now the Apple store on Market

00:18:00   Street in San Francisco yeah I think they're remaking it right right they're

00:18:04   moving up to where Levi's used to be a Union Square I'm not sure if they're

00:18:08   done with that yet that I don't have no idea but anyway the one that's right up

00:18:11   there on Market Street a couple blocks from Moscone I don't know if they sold

00:18:15   out or they came close to but there was like a just you know 40 50 60 people

00:18:21   from WWDC going in to buy the the super cheap owed 199 iPod touch that's awesome

00:18:29   the one that doesn't even it doesn't even have a camera yep that's when I got

00:18:33   right took it back like a week later when I realized that there was no need

00:18:39   to have an iPod touch but but you took it back running the iOS beta yeah well I

00:18:45   - Oh, I wiped it, I don't know what it wipes to.

00:18:47   - It wipes back to the iOS beta.

00:18:50   - Oh well.

00:18:51   (laughs)

00:18:51   I'm sure they, yeah, I wonder what they do with that.

00:18:53   - They can figure it out.

00:18:55   I'm sure Apple can figure it out.

00:18:56   - Yeah.

00:18:57   - Yeah, I can't help but think we're gonna get betas

00:19:04   of all that stuff next week.

00:19:06   - Yeah, so I'm wondering, the big question I have,

00:19:09   and I'm thinking about writing about this tonight

00:19:12   or tomorrow is how drastically different the new OS X

00:19:17   is gonna seem.

00:19:19   Like just thinking about how when iOS 7 came out,

00:19:24   people freaked out.

00:19:26   And obviously not the Mac nerd types,

00:19:28   but a lot of other people did.

00:19:32   And I wonder if changing someone's Mac that drastically

00:19:36   would also cause people to freak out.

00:19:39   And so I wonder how different it'll be.

00:19:42   Theoretically, they would change a lot of the Mac OS stuff

00:19:48   to more closely resemble iOS 7 or whatever iOS 8

00:19:53   is going to look and feel like, but I don't know.

00:19:56   - Yeah, I do not know what to expect

00:20:00   and my spidey sense is failing me.

00:20:04   I mean, clearly it's gonna change to some degree

00:20:06   cosmetically, but just how radically, I don't know.

00:20:09   - Yeah, and also the idea of running this now

00:20:15   almost four year old MacBook Air with a new software

00:20:20   running it also seems strange because OS X has really

00:20:25   not changed that much visually since then.

00:20:29   They've added a lot of stuff that I don't use,

00:20:31   like the launcher and all that kind of stuff,

00:20:33   but I don't remember a different feeling Mac OS.

00:20:38   - Right, yeah, I think that when they,

00:20:43   I forget which version number it was,

00:20:45   might have been 10.6, maybe it was 10.5,

00:20:48   but one of them, when they got rid of

00:20:50   the separate metal windows and just said,

00:20:53   all the windows just have one appearance,

00:20:55   and it's this gray, you know what I mean?

00:20:59   There's not gonna be two types of windows anymore.

00:21:00   We're gonna-- - Yeah, it's simple.

00:21:01   - That was Leopard, right?

00:21:02   Yeah, it was probably 10.5 and then 10.6 was Snow Leopard.

00:21:06   Yeah, so 10.5 was the one where they made it look...

00:21:10   And it certainly looked different than what came before it

00:21:13   because I got rid of a lot of the candy colored stuff.

00:21:16   But it was like a gentle flattening.

00:21:20   It wasn't a radical flattening.

00:21:22   - Right. - It was, this is the sort of...

00:21:24   And I think that's what a lot of people were expecting

00:21:27   with iOS 7, was that kind of flattening.

00:21:31   And a perfect example of that, if you can,

00:21:33   anybody wants to look it up,

00:21:34   just look up the screenshots from last year's WWDC app.

00:21:39   - Ah yes, I remember this.

00:21:42   And everyone was like, oh,

00:21:45   this is what iOS 7 is gonna look like.

00:21:47   - Yeah, and I even saw on Twitter,

00:21:48   Mark Gurman from 9to5Mac the other day was writing,

00:21:51   'cause he had written about it, you know,

00:21:53   that hey, this is what iOS 7's going to look like.

00:21:56   And he still thinks it did,

00:21:57   that it was a clue as to what iOS 7 looked like.

00:22:00   And I would say no, it was a step in that direction,

00:22:04   but like a half step as opposed to the actual iOS 7,

00:22:07   which was like--

00:22:08   - Holy shit. - Yeah, holy shit.

00:22:10   - That was my, you know, and a lot of people's reaction

00:22:12   when that video came out, just showing all the new graphics

00:22:17   and all that kind of stuff.

00:22:20   - Right, and I've said this before

00:22:22   over the last couple of weeks on this show,

00:22:23   like, flat is overused in talking about these interfaces

00:22:28   used in talking about these interfaces. But there's no other word to say it. In a lot

00:22:34   of the ways in iOS 7 on the iPhone and iPad, it is flatter. There's a lot less 3D treatments

00:22:43   between elements. That when something scrolls underneath a navigation bar, there's no shadow

00:22:48   there. It's just a one-pixel line. I just don't see how the Mac can get away with that

00:22:54   that much flatness when you have by definition

00:22:56   these overlapping windows.

00:22:59   - Yes, yeah.

00:23:00   By the way, I love, this is like,

00:23:03   as someone who learned web design in the mid 90s

00:23:06   and didn't really learn much since then,

00:23:09   no 3D or gradient modeling or any of that kind of stuff,

00:23:13   I love flat design 'cause it's all I've ever known.

00:23:16   So I'm actually a competent designer again.

00:23:19   But, and I'm already nervous about

00:23:23   when it's gonna start getting more technical again.

00:23:26   - And textured, yeah.

00:23:27   - Yeah, we still have an original iPad running,

00:23:31   well, I guess it's iOS 5 now,

00:23:35   and I use it every few weeks and it's super weird.

00:23:38   - Yeah, I think it's weirder.

00:23:40   - In many ways great, but in also many ways,

00:23:42   I'm very used to iOS 7 now and I really like it.

00:23:45   There are some annoyances,

00:23:48   but that's probably never not gonna be the case,

00:23:50   but I really like the way it feels.

00:23:52   - Yeah, I think that it's for all the,

00:23:56   I'm gonna botch this, what's the German term,

00:23:58   Sturmendrong?

00:23:59   - Yes, something like that.

00:24:03   - Well, you guys know what I'm talking about.

00:24:04   Well, for all of the consternation that iOS 7 caused

00:24:07   and as vocal as some of its critics are

00:24:11   about the plainness of its visual style,

00:24:13   in hindsight, when I go back and fire up

00:24:15   one of those devices from my stack of old iPhones

00:24:18   and look at iOS 6 or look at an old original iPad

00:24:23   that has to be running iOS 5 or whatever the last version

00:24:28   that it supports is.

00:24:29   It looks so much older.

00:24:31   It just looks way more than,

00:24:34   it's hard to believe that until like eight months ago,

00:24:37   that was what everybody was using.

00:24:39   It really feels like it's just the distant past,

00:24:45   visual style-wise.

00:24:47   - Yeah, and I don't see that changing.

00:24:50   I mean, they might perhaps make some tweaks.

00:24:52   Like there are some of the iOS 7 icons

00:24:56   that just don't really make sense.

00:24:58   Like I think Game Center and then maybe also

00:25:04   the Newsstand one which is hiding all the apps in there.

00:25:08   I don't know what's gonna happen with Newsstand.

00:25:10   They might just vaporize, but.

00:25:12   - Yeah, maybe with Newsstand it's actually appropriate

00:25:14   because I feel like they don't know what to do

00:25:16   with Newsstand and so an icon that sort of doesn't really know what it is either, kind

00:25:20   of it, not to be a jerk, but it kind of fits. Whereas Game Center, yeah, I don't know. I

00:25:26   kind of feel like they punted on it. It's attractive to me, but it doesn't say Game

00:25:31   Center.

00:25:32   No, it says balls.

00:25:33   Yeah, it just says like, I don't know, it just looks like something, you know, we don't

00:25:38   have an icon yet, but we want to start giving beta builds out. So, you know, it could be

00:25:41   any app. It could be any app at all. It could be a photo app, a notes app, could be a game.

00:25:48   We'll just put this placeholder icon here. I'm excited about it though. I do think, in

00:25:54   a big part, I think it's really cool. Here we are one week out from WWDC. We have no

00:25:59   idea what this Mac OS X thing is going to look like. And as a long time Mac guy, as

00:26:06   someone who really got drawn into the whole

00:26:09   following Apple closely, specifically,

00:26:12   and only because of the Mac.

00:26:14   I think it's pretty awesome that here we are in 2014

00:26:16   and the most exciting thing we have coming up next week

00:26:18   is a Mac interface overhaul.

00:26:22   - Oh yeah, yeah, I'm pumped.

00:26:23   I remember when I switched from six to seven on the Mac

00:26:28   and that was crazy, 'cause that was the first one

00:26:32   where the folders were colored in.

00:26:34   Six was, system six was traced outlines,

00:26:39   and then seven had the beginning of that

00:26:43   kind of 3D folder look, and that was just--

00:26:46   - Yeah, six supported color on certain models,

00:26:49   but it was, you know what's funny?

00:26:50   It was a very flat color, because remember like,

00:26:52   the, when they, yeah, it was very, very flat.

00:26:57   I think it still had a black and white Apple logo, though.

00:27:00   I think the color Apple logo didn't come in,

00:27:02   You know for the menu bar until system 7 but but everything was flat

00:27:07   You know the wind even though you had color the windows were still drawn just blue not grayscale black and white

00:27:12   it was just black pickles pixels and white pixels for the windows and and

00:27:17   Open and save dialogues and everything and then 7 had like the scroll bar had a gradient to it

00:27:24   Yeah, yeah, I know the folders the window title bar had a gradient

00:27:29   - Yeah. - Sort of thing.

00:27:30   And it was clearly an evolution of the System 6 look.

00:27:35   They just kind of colored in certain parts,

00:27:37   but they didn't color in much.

00:27:38   I think it was sort of,

00:27:40   I wouldn't call that an exciting overhaul though.

00:27:43   To me going from six to seven, it was a huge change,

00:27:45   but the interface wasn't really that hugely changed.

00:27:48   - I also think that it slowed down our old Mac so much.

00:27:52   - Yeah, that was the thing I remember

00:27:56   is that System 7 really slowed down your computer.

00:28:00   - Yeah, I don't remember, I think that was,

00:28:02   I think we had a LC running 6,

00:28:04   or maybe a plus or something, I don't know.

00:28:08   - Yeah, 'cause people used to,

00:28:10   people used to complain

00:28:13   about the old original open and save dialog boxes, a lot,

00:28:19   because they were modal and they were kind of ugly.

00:28:23   And it was System 7 actually originally didn't fix that.

00:28:26   I forget when the nav services open

00:28:29   and save dialog boxes came about,

00:28:30   which were a little bit more modernized UI wise.

00:28:33   But the thing about the old open and save dialog boxes

00:28:36   was that if you knew the keyboard commands,

00:28:38   the command up arrow and down arrow,

00:28:41   and you knew that you could type ahead

00:28:43   to match items in a list, right?

00:28:45   Like to match, if it's a list of people's last names,

00:28:49   I could just type fr and get fromer.

00:28:52   you could really fly through those dialog boxes

00:28:55   because when you'd hit command up to go up a level

00:28:58   in the hierarchy and down, down, down, command down,

00:29:00   command down, it would update instantly.

00:29:03   It was like you could, if you knew the incantation

00:29:06   and knew your way around that,

00:29:07   you weren't using the mouse, you were using the keyboard,

00:29:09   you could kind of zip around your hard disk

00:29:12   at the similar pace as to somebody who was an expert

00:29:15   on like a command line system.

00:29:17   And then when system seven came out,

00:29:20   just seemed like everything got slowed down

00:29:21   and you'd hit command up and you'd get the watch cursor

00:29:24   for a little bit.

00:29:26   Just little, all sorts of little things really slowed down.

00:29:28   - And that was the thing that I hated

00:29:30   about visiting friends houses with PCs

00:29:33   was that even though Windows was pretty awful,

00:29:36   it felt so fast versus System 7.

00:29:39   And I wonder if maybe that's the kind of thing

00:29:41   that the new Mac OS, will it be a 10 or are we at 11?

00:29:46   - No, it'll be 10.10.

00:29:50   I wonder if that's the kind of thing that a flatter, simpler UI could actually achieve.

00:29:54   Like, hey, P.S., we made your computer faster.

00:29:57   I don't know.

00:29:59   Maybe not.

00:30:00   Yeah, I don't know.

00:30:01   I feel like we've gotten to the point where even the cheapest Mac can render.

00:30:05   Pretty quickly.

00:30:06   Yeah.

00:30:07   And especially if they're going to go in a less exuberant style.

00:30:10   Like there's certain things in the transparency in iOS that maybe they're pushing the limits

00:30:14   on -- not even maybe.

00:30:15   They kind of are pushing the limits on some of the iOS devices that support it.

00:30:20   True.

00:30:21   And the parallax and stuff like that.

00:30:23   Like they didn't have good frame rate on some of those effects.

00:30:27   And it's gotten better with 7.1, but they were pushing.

00:30:30   But any Mac, you know, even the cheapest Mac mini, which hasn't even been updated in 600

00:30:36   days or something like that, can just chew that stuff up.

00:30:40   I mean, the days when a Mac can't render,

00:30:43   Windows dropping down and stuff like that,

00:30:45   menus dropping down quickly, I think we're past that.

00:30:50   - Yeah, I think so too, with SSDs and all that.

00:30:53   - Yeah, and that's definitely a big change.

00:30:56   - I think it's kind of cool though that we,

00:31:00   hopefully that's the reason that it's kind of cool

00:31:03   that we haven't seen any major leaks yet

00:31:06   about what's going on.

00:31:09   That could just mean that there's nothing worth knowing.

00:31:12   I don't know if that's true. - Yeah, I don't know.

00:31:13   - But I think it's kinda cool.

00:31:17   - Yeah, and I'd be curious.

00:31:18   The leaks often come closer to the event.

00:31:22   - Right, yeah, especially when they're software leaks.

00:31:24   The hardware leaks kind of have been coming too early

00:31:29   'cause of the supply chain stuff.

00:31:31   But when it's stuff that never left Cupertino to begin with,

00:31:35   that typically is like the night before.

00:31:38   Like wasn't last year, didn't someone nine to five

00:31:42   or someone else have all the icons

00:31:45   either the night before or the morning of?

00:31:47   - Yeah, but I think that they had it

00:31:49   as recreations somehow.

00:31:52   - Right, yeah, someone had like dictated to them

00:31:54   and then they drew them.

00:31:56   - And they did really good.

00:31:58   I think they even joked about it with Mark Gurman.

00:31:59   It was like a police sketch where the,

00:32:02   and it's like a dead ringer.

00:32:05   It's like, holy hell, that's the guy.

00:32:07   You know, they like they like police sketched the icons and they did a really good job and it was

00:32:12   And they nailed it and there was so many people of course because the icons are probably it's either the first thing you see and

00:32:20   be they are were kind of radically simplified and

00:32:25   There were so many people who are like no way is Apple gonna do icons that right like that

00:32:31   - That was awesome.

00:32:33   Yeah, and then you gotta wonder,

00:32:34   for the apps that have the same app in OS X and iOS,

00:32:39   do they have the same icons now?

00:32:43   Like does Safari get this new icon the same as iOS

00:32:48   or is it still Mac has their own icon set?

00:32:51   - Right, and are they going to do a thing

00:32:53   like give Mac icons an official shape, like a circle?

00:32:57   - Oh yeah, interesting.

00:32:59   - They've done a lot of circles,

00:33:01   like the iBooks is new and has a circle

00:33:03   and App Store's been a circle.

00:33:05   - Though the iWork numbers and that kind of stuff

00:33:10   are still freeform shapes.

00:33:13   - Yeah, arbitrary shapes, I don't know.

00:33:15   - Yeah.

00:33:16   - I don't know, I feel like,

00:33:17   well, I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised,

00:33:21   but I feel like there's so much,

00:33:24   I mean, there's, what, there's gotta be 30 years of history

00:33:27   of Mac icons taking whatever shape they want.

00:33:31   Whereas iOS always had, you're gonna make it

00:33:35   a little round cornered square.

00:33:37   - Right, that's true.

00:33:39   Yeah, I used to make Mac icons.

00:33:41   That was a weird hobby in like high school, I think,

00:33:46   with ResEdit, just kind of goofing around.

00:33:50   'Cause there was, I forgot which,

00:33:52   maybe it was eight or eight, five,

00:33:55   had kind of these 3D folders.

00:33:57   and I would draw the icons of apps.

00:34:01   Back then, I wouldn't keep my apps in the apps folder,

00:34:04   I would just keep them in their own folders

00:34:07   in Macintosh HD, so there was the QuarkXPress folder.

00:34:11   And so I made a special Quark icon for that folder.

00:34:15   Actually, I think Quark had a good icon.

00:34:17   Some of them had awful icons.

00:34:18   - Yeah, I remember customizing icons, though.

00:34:20   Same thing.

00:34:21   You'd either go in and actually be an idiot

00:34:25   and go in and edit the actual resource in the application,

00:34:29   or you would make your own icon

00:34:31   and then copy and paste it in the finder's get info.

00:34:34   - Yeah. - And then you could

00:34:35   just delete it and it would go back

00:34:36   to the regular icon for the app.

00:34:38   - Right, and then some of them I even made aliases,

00:34:40   and I think an alias could even maybe have its own icon.

00:34:43   - Yeah, yeah, I think it could.

00:34:45   Yeah, I think I'm almost sure you could,

00:34:47   which was crazy and confusing.

00:34:50   - Right, well, yeah, anyone who would sit down

00:34:53   my computer wouldn't have no idea how to use it.

00:34:55   But did you ever, do you remember when,

00:34:58   I don't remember which Mac OS, maybe it was 8.5 or 8,

00:35:03   which had, it shipped with maybe one or two themes,

00:35:08   and then there was the idea that there would be

00:35:10   more themes coming, but then they just never came?

00:35:13   - Yeah, that was, I think it was system, or Mac OS 8.

00:35:20   They didn't expect when they stopped calling it system aid and right the first version of Mac OS 8 and

00:35:25   Sir, Syracuse is listening to this show right now and his head is exploding because he can't just jump in and correct us and tell

00:35:34   us exactly what I think it was 8.0 and it was called the

00:35:38   Appearance manager. Yes, and the appearance manager was a control panel and it had a list of themes and there was platinum

00:35:47   Which was the default look?

00:35:50   Gizmo which was the one that was like a

00:35:52   kids theme look like something from like Nickelodeon and I think it was called techno which was sort of the

00:36:00   I

00:36:02   don't know looked like something from

00:36:04   That would have been art directed for like

00:36:07   Like a Terminator movie or something like that like a sci-fi movie where they have you know a custom theme for the GUI that the compute

00:36:15   You know that the characters are using now. Did you know about the?

00:36:19   leaked unofficial fourth theme though?

00:36:24   - No, I don't-- - There was the drawing board.

00:36:28   - Oh, of course, yes.

00:36:29   - That was awesome. - Of course I knew that.

00:36:31   - I love that.

00:36:32   I wish I could run that now.

00:36:33   If OS 10.10 was drawing board, I would take that.

00:36:37   - Right, drawing board made it look

00:36:39   like an architectural sketch.

00:36:41   Like the windows were made out of paper

00:36:43   and that the buttons and everything were sketched in

00:36:47   by an architect.

00:36:48   And it even shipped with an architect handwriting font.

00:36:51   I forget the name of the font.

00:36:52   - Yeah, I don't remember.

00:36:53   - It set the system font to that.

00:36:55   So like your menus and your window titles

00:36:57   were in that architect handwriting font.

00:37:00   But that never shipped to customers.

00:37:03   It shipped as like developer betas.

00:37:06   So like, you know, people who were in the developer program

00:37:08   got those themes so that you could make sure

00:37:10   your app looked good in gizmo and techno.

00:37:13   You're right that the architectural one

00:37:15   was the one that actually was like,

00:37:16   Maybe, maybe I would use that.

00:37:18   - I mean, it was totally, it felt like playing

00:37:21   one of those old SimCity games where it was like

00:37:24   back in the, or maybe, I don't know,

00:37:26   one of those Sim games where it was like the expansion set.

00:37:29   - Yeah.

00:37:30   - And, you know, just was never as fun as the main SimCity.

00:37:33   But it was cool.

00:37:34   I think I ran it for a couple months.

00:37:36   - I'm not looking this up.

00:37:38   I'm going from memory here.

00:37:39   I'm trusting my memory, which is dangerous.

00:37:41   But my recollection though is that this,

00:37:45   Mac OS 8 didn't come out until after the next acquisition.

00:37:49   And the next team had come in,

00:37:50   and Steve Jobs was the interim CEO,

00:37:52   and Avi Tavenian was the CTO, or whatever his title was.

00:37:56   And while most of their efforts were focused

00:37:59   on getting this next step, Mac OS, Carbon,

00:38:04   next generation OS that they kinda had to start in '96

00:38:10   and build it, and they were hoping to ship it in a year,

00:38:12   and they wound up not even shipping it until 2001 or whenever.

00:38:16   They were four or five years out from it.

00:38:18   But in the meantime, they had to keep the company running.

00:38:20   And so that team took over,

00:38:22   or at least overseeing the last few years of Mac OS evolutions.

00:38:27   Mac OS 8, 8.1, 8.5, and 9, I guess, was the last one.

00:38:32   8.6.2.

00:38:34   Right, and they were ready to ship it with these themes.

00:38:36   And Steve Jobs was like, "What is this bullshit? Get it out. Get it all out.

00:38:40   It ships with platinum.

00:38:42   That's what it looks like.

00:38:43   And so it shipped with an appearance manager,

00:38:47   and it would say theme, and there was one choice.

00:38:50   So they ripped the themes out.

00:38:52   The alternate themes were ripped out at the last minute,

00:38:54   but they couldn't rewrite all the software.

00:38:56   So it was this interface that looked like

00:38:58   it was meant to have a list of themes, and it did,

00:39:01   but there was only one to choose from.

00:39:02   - Yeah, it was hilarious.

00:39:05   And was that when you could change the colors

00:39:09   to match the different iMac colors as well,

00:39:11   like tangerine and lime and that kind of stuff?

00:39:15   Or was that later?

00:39:16   I don't remember.

00:39:17   - I think that was later because they didn't come out

00:39:18   until, '98 was the original iMac,

00:39:21   and then '99 was when the colored ones came out.

00:39:23   But then they did, yeah, they had like,

00:39:26   I forget if the software could tell

00:39:28   what color your iMac was though and default to it.

00:39:31   But yeah, you could pick like highlight colors

00:39:34   that matched your candy colored iMac.

00:39:38   Now you can't do any of that stuff.

00:39:39   That's probably okay.

00:39:40   - Yeah, well, I don't know.

00:39:42   Is there anything?

00:39:43   I've gotten old and crotched-y, so I don't--

00:39:45   - I don't know, I don't look either.

00:39:46   Maybe there is.

00:39:48   - I wonder whether there's still something like that,

00:39:50   'cause there used to be something in the early days

00:39:52   of Mac OS X where you could switch the theme.

00:39:55   It was from Sanity. - Right, yeah.

00:39:57   Oh yeah, hey, look at that appearance.

00:39:59   You can go, oh, guess, these are many different options here.

00:40:03   You can pick blue or graphite.

00:40:05   (laughing)

00:40:07   and then you can change the highlight color.

00:40:09   But yeah, blue or gray are your choices now.

00:40:13   That's all right.

00:40:13   Maybe, yeah, and this is obviously now

00:40:18   just fan fiction almost,

00:40:22   but I wonder if the Mac hardware

00:40:26   will ever kind of more closely reflect the iOS hardware,

00:40:31   like the 5C type plastic,

00:40:33   like the return of the iBook or something like that.

00:40:36   I was testing out that new Microsoft Surface this week,

00:40:41   and it reminded me just how old the MacBook Air design is.

00:40:46   I mean, it's now six years old, almost,

00:40:51   the current MacBook Air.

00:40:53   So it's funny 'cause Microsoft's like,

00:40:55   "Hey, look, this thing is lighter than a MacBook Air."

00:40:59   But I'm like, "Yeah, that MacBook Air is six years old, man."

00:41:02   - Yeah, and it looks, to me,

00:41:04   the part that really kind of looks a little dated is the the bezel around the

00:41:09   screen right is right so they over yeah you've got like this inch thick frame

00:41:14   around this screen and that the only part that is black glass or plastic I

00:41:18   guess it's not glass but you know shiny black screen is the screen whereas on

00:41:24   the MacBook Pros they've got this much to me much more modern look which looks

00:41:31   like it matches the phone, it matches the iPad, it matches the iMac, which goes edge

00:41:37   to edge now, matches the current displays, where the whole front surface is black glass

00:41:47   or black shiny screen material. And then not all of it is actually screen pixels, but it's

00:41:52   just surrounded by, you know, black screen.

00:41:56   - It strikes me as a kind of thing that they've learned

00:41:58   so much since then with the iPhone and with the other Macs

00:42:03   that there's a lot of improvements they could make

00:42:06   if they were redesigning the laptop from scratch today.

00:42:11   - Yeah, my guess though is that they're waiting

00:42:15   for retina errors to update that.

00:42:19   Because they just came out last month

00:42:21   with new MacBook Airs.

00:42:24   - Yeah, I don't think they're gonna--

00:42:25   And their latest CPU kit from Intel and et cetera, et cetera.

00:42:30   But it's what we call in the business a speed bump update,

00:42:38   not a major update.

00:42:39   But given that it just came out last month,

00:42:41   I can't imagine they're gonna go retina soon.

00:42:43   And I can't, therefore I think that when they do go retina,

00:42:46   they'll get the modern look where the whole front,

00:42:49   when you open it up, is black.

00:42:51   - Yeah, unless they introduce that as a new line,

00:42:55   which they kind of did with the retina pro

00:42:58   because they kept the older pro around.

00:43:02   Who knows, now this is silly.

00:43:04   - Well, that's the sort of thing, that's a good ques,

00:43:07   I mean, if they did it with the pros, they could do it.

00:43:10   They could. - They could do whatever

00:43:10   they want, right?

00:43:11   - But I kind of think they wouldn't

00:43:13   because it seems to me that that sort of bifurcation

00:43:17   of the product line, you can do it with a device that's pro

00:43:22   and you kind of can't with the air

00:43:24   because the air is just sort of the default. The air is you walk

00:43:27   in the Apple Store and they say, How can I help you? And you say,

00:43:30   I want to get a laptop. They're gonna you know, the odds are

00:43:34   pretty good. You're coming out with a 13 inch MacBook Air.

00:43:37   Yeah. Because it's just the default. It's the one that's the

00:43:40   cheap, it's cheaper, you know, and and I know that the pros

00:43:44   have gotten it's crazy. If you remember how much powerbooks

00:43:47   used to cost back in the day. It's crazy that you can get a 13

00:43:51   MacBook Pro with a retina display for $1,299, I think the starting price is,

00:43:55   which is crazy, but $999 is a lot less than $1,299. You know, you're talking 25%

00:44:02   less. Yeah. More than 25%, right? Yeah, and when you add $100 for tax or

00:44:07   whatever, it's, you know, you know, and it's that there's, you know, there's, it's

00:44:13   just one of those, all those, every time you go up a digit, it's a magic price.

00:44:17   Like 999 is a lot less than $1,000 in people's minds

00:44:23   Yeah

00:44:27   In real life it's a dollar. A penny if you charge the 99 cent, but it just feels it just feels like it's cheaper

00:44:35   So are you shipping a new Vesper by WWC this year?

00:44:41   It could be any day

00:44:44   Because I remember that's when you launched last year, right? Yeah, I would if if we were approved I would tell you right now

00:44:50   but we're not but it should be

00:44:52   Knock on wood if everything goes through it should be before WWDC should be well before WDC last year was it was pretty tight

00:45:00   And this but is not the sync update or maybe you shouldn't tell me what it is

00:45:05   I'll tell you don't tell anybody else though. All right, it is the sync update. Oh, wow. Okay

00:45:12   While we were let me take another break before we keep going

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00:47:58   stuff. My thanks to lynda.com. So you mentioned your Surface Pro review or first look. This

00:48:07   is not a review. Well, let's take a step back though. So since last you were on the talk

00:48:12   show, you've picked up a new gig. You're now I don't know, forget your title, but you're

00:48:17   like the new technology columnist at Quartz.

00:48:20   - Yes, this started a week ago.

00:48:23   I'm the tech editor at Quartz,

00:48:25   which means I'll be writing several posts a week,

00:48:30   probably one a day, maybe a little more than that,

00:48:32   maybe less depending on the news flow.

00:48:35   And then also building out a team of journalists

00:48:39   around the world actually.

00:48:40   That's one of the really cool things about Quartz,

00:48:42   which I guess I should explain what Quartz is.

00:48:46   It's a relatively new business news site

00:48:49   owned by the Atlantic that started in 2012.

00:48:54   And their whole thing is that it is what,

00:48:58   they sat down and they said,

00:49:00   if you were starting a business news site in 2012,

00:49:03   what would it be?

00:49:04   Well, it would be designed first for phones and tablets

00:49:09   and less for a desktop computer because--

00:49:12   (coughing)

00:49:13   - Talk show during fireball.

00:49:15   I'm sorry, keep going, Dan.

00:49:19   'Cause that's where people will be reading it.

00:49:21   It'll be global because people fly around a lot

00:49:24   and real business leaders are thinking about

00:49:26   what's going on in Asia just as much as

00:49:29   what's going on at home.

00:49:31   And it'll have new forms of advertising

00:49:37   and they've never really, I've never seen

00:49:40   in the history of the site any standard banner ads

00:49:43   on the site.

00:49:43   They do these special custom kind of big ads

00:49:47   that work for a mobile site and for a desktop site.

00:49:52   So it's really cool.

00:49:53   The staff is pretty small.

00:49:55   It's really smart people there.

00:49:58   The editor in chief is this guy, Kevin Delaney,

00:50:00   who was at the Wall Street Journal for a long time

00:50:02   and was one of their leading tech journalists there.

00:50:06   So I was not looking for a job.

00:50:08   I mean, I've been working on my startup, City Notes,

00:50:12   for a long time now,

00:50:13   and we're gonna be shipping a brand new app

00:50:16   in the next few months that could be a big thing someday.

00:50:20   But when the existing tech editor from Quartz left recently

00:50:26   for the Wall Street Journal, I emailed Kevin and said,

00:50:29   "Hey man, let's get together and talk."

00:50:31   Because I've long been a huge fan of the site.

00:50:34   I think they do really cool stuff.

00:50:36   One of the really interesting things there

00:50:39   is that they have a team of engineers

00:50:41   that sits in the newsroom and work with journalists

00:50:44   and our journalists themselves and make little apps

00:50:48   and interactive stories and tools for the newsroom

00:50:52   to either do reporting or to tell stories.

00:50:56   Like we have a chart building tool that, you know,

00:51:01   was made by one of the courts engineers

00:51:05   for the courts newsroom.

00:51:06   So it's really cool.

00:51:07   It's kind of, you know,

00:51:09   if you were taking all the elements of a news organization

00:51:12   and creating them from scratch in this era.

00:51:17   It's a really good representation of that.

00:51:18   So I'm really excited to join the team.

00:51:21   I have not been writing much lately, so I'm quite rusty,

00:51:25   but I posted a few things last week

00:51:27   and hope you'll all follow me there.

00:51:30   It's a very simple URL designed for the mobile era.

00:51:34   It's qz.com, the element courts, I believe.

00:51:39   Is that there?

00:51:41   Is that the--

00:51:42   - That's where I was.

00:51:42   - It's been a while since the periodic table,

00:51:45   but it's really cool.

00:51:47   I'm really happy to be there.

00:51:49   I'll be covering the same stuff that I did

00:51:52   on my old site SplatF, which is Apple, Microsoft, Google,

00:51:57   kind of big tech, mobile.

00:51:59   And I'll hopefully get to do some travel as well,

00:52:03   looking up cool stories around the world

00:52:06   that most desk-bound tech sites aren't really talking about.

00:52:11   aren't really touching.

00:52:12   - They do.

00:52:13   Quartz has been interesting to me ever since it debuted.

00:52:16   And it's cooler for me that somebody who I know like you

00:52:21   is gonna be writing there.

00:52:22   But they've always had good stuff.

00:52:23   They've always had an interesting design

00:52:25   where it doesn't really look like anybody else's stuff.

00:52:28   They were really early to me on that, the infinite scroll,

00:52:34   where when you get to the end of an article

00:52:37   and instead of a bottom of the page,

00:52:38   they just sort of algorithmically predict,

00:52:41   well, this might be something else you're interested in.

00:52:44   You can close the window if you want,

00:52:45   but if you wanna keep scrolling down,

00:52:47   here's another article.

00:52:48   - Yeah, and that's for better or worse.

00:52:50   I think it works really great on mobile

00:52:53   when, hey, if you're still connected to the network,

00:52:57   here's something else to read.

00:52:59   Sometimes with a computer, it's a little frustrating

00:53:02   'cause you wanna share the previous story that you'd read

00:53:05   and then all of a sudden you're at the next one.

00:53:07   But they've written, again, they have engineers

00:53:10   in the newsroom, so they're making changes in real time

00:53:13   as they decide whether something's working or not.

00:53:16   - Well, that reminds me of Adrian Holovaty.

00:53:19   Do you know Adrian Holovaty?

00:53:20   He was like-- - I know the name.

00:53:22   - Co-creator of the Django Python framework

00:53:25   and a bunch of other stuff, he's from Chicago.

00:53:27   But he's been on, I mean, longer than anybody,

00:53:30   and maybe even close to a decade,

00:53:31   but at least from like 2006, 2007,

00:53:34   on programming as journalism.

00:53:38   Now that the output device for so much journalism

00:53:46   is a computer, that it's not a piece of paper with ink on it

00:53:49   and it's not a TV screen getting something broadcast

00:53:54   to millions of people identically,

00:53:55   that it's this device that can compute,

00:53:58   that it's almost criminal not to take advantage of it.

00:54:01   that you can't just hire, or not can't,

00:54:04   but that the way to take advantage of it

00:54:06   is not just to hire programmers to build you a CMS

00:54:10   and then they go away and you just sit there

00:54:12   and type text into it and paste pictures into it,

00:54:16   but that they're a full-time part of the team.

00:54:18   In the same way that a TV studio, a TV news

00:54:22   is always gonna have cameramen,

00:54:23   that a website should always have programmers.

00:54:26   - Yeah. - And that you wouldn't,

00:54:27   the same way that you wouldn't get rid of cameramen

00:54:29   at a TV station, you wouldn't just have them come in

00:54:32   at the beginning and set the cameras up in the studio

00:54:35   and say, here's the angles they should be at.

00:54:36   Now you're on your own, just hit this button

00:54:39   when you want the camera to record.

00:54:41   You wouldn't want it, you don't want to dismiss

00:54:43   the programmers after they've built the system.

00:54:45   - No, and I think like having worked in a few newsrooms now,

00:54:49   in many organizations, there tends to be

00:54:52   a combative relationship between product

00:54:54   and the journalists because sure,

00:54:59   every CMS has flaws.

00:55:00   So if you're just sitting around

00:55:02   and ragging on this crappy CMS,

00:55:05   you're probably not thinking the nicest thoughts

00:55:09   about the people who made it for you.

00:55:11   And often are trashing them.

00:55:14   Whereas if they're sitting next to you

00:55:15   and you are working on stuff together,

00:55:19   it's a really cool opportunity.

00:55:21   It's also made me personally realize

00:55:24   that I need to learn to code too.

00:55:28   I've been programming websites since the mid 90s.

00:55:31   So I've known HTML and later CSS since it was a thing,

00:55:36   but I never took the dive into kind of more advanced stuff.

00:55:42   And now I realize, especially the last six months

00:55:46   working with my friend, Mark Dorison on City Notes,

00:55:50   kind of feeling like a helpless loser,

00:55:52   not being able to help out with building our iOS stuff.

00:55:56   So I know it's gonna take a lot of time,

00:55:59   and it's kind of corny, but in this era,

00:56:02   it feels like coding skills are almost like freedom.

00:56:06   So that's one of the things I'm gonna spend

00:56:09   some of my spare time on now.

00:56:12   I've already started actually.

00:56:13   - I don't wanna abuse the metaphor,

00:56:15   but I'll compare it to camera work again,

00:56:18   where there was a time when it was so comp,

00:56:22   in the film days when you had so much going on

00:56:24   just to take pictures where not many people

00:56:26   learned to take photographs.

00:56:28   But now everybody has cameras with them all the time.

00:56:31   And not that everybody is going to be a pro photographer,

00:56:34   and not that you are going to become a top notch developer,

00:56:37   but it's like you should have-- maybe everybody should

00:56:40   have a basic fluency in it.

00:56:42   Be able to write a little code.

00:56:43   And everybody should learn a little bit

00:56:45   so you can take a decent picture.

00:56:47   Like maybe--

00:56:47   Especially-- oh, yeah.

00:56:49   Well, you're out.

00:56:50   You're a journalist.

00:56:51   You see something.

00:56:52   You should be able to get as good a photograph

00:56:54   as your iPhone is capable of taking.

00:56:57   - I think also the mobile era has a lot to do with it,

00:57:01   at least for me, because back in the day,

00:57:04   I would buy, oh boy, I bought student edition of,

00:57:09   what was it, Code Warrior?

00:57:10   What was the old, and I tried learning that.

00:57:13   I bought books like Learn C on the Macintosh.

00:57:15   - MetroWorks.

00:57:17   - Yeah, right.

00:57:18   And it never took, I never got past Hello World,

00:57:21   in part because I'd sit there at my desk and think,

00:57:25   well, if I could make a Mac app, what would I make?

00:57:28   I'm not gonna make like an email client

00:57:30   or something like that.

00:57:31   So, and then the web came out,

00:57:33   so I just kind of started goofing around on the web.

00:57:36   But now in the iPhone era,

00:57:38   like I have an unlimited list of cool apps

00:57:41   that I would wanna make.

00:57:42   And so one of the things that has kind of stuck with me

00:57:47   over the last week is I've been starting

00:57:50   to learn JavaScript, just kind of getting my feet wet,

00:57:54   is it's strange and unfortunate that there is no

00:57:58   kind of iPad native programming environment.

00:58:01   And maybe I'm totally missing it,

00:58:03   but I've never heard of one that has any traction

00:58:06   or has any acclaim.

00:58:08   And so I'm like starting with these programming lessons

00:58:13   and I have to sit at my computer at a desk.

00:58:16   It feels weird in this, okay.

00:58:19   Yeah, I don't know about that.

00:58:20   C-O-D-E-A. Definitely worth checking out.

00:58:24   OK, cool.

00:58:25   I forget the one.

00:58:26   This wouldn't be good for you.

00:58:27   It's more for kids.

00:58:28   There's a great one for kids that Jonas has on his iPad.

00:58:31   Oh, cool.

00:58:32   It's less code and a little bit more visual.

00:58:35   Codea is probably the one worth checking out.

00:58:38   People who are out there, send us Twitter.

00:58:41   Hit us up on Twitter.

00:58:43   Yeah, FromDome on Twitter is my Twitter handle.

00:58:46   Let me know what I should be doing.

00:58:48   All right.

00:58:49   - Yeah, that's a good question.

00:58:50   - Any noob tips.

00:58:51   But you know, and this is one of the things

00:58:53   like I cover during the day is the post PC shift,

00:58:58   like I did an article this week at Quartz

00:59:01   about tablet sales are actually on pace

00:59:05   to match PC sales this year, or at least come very close.

00:59:09   And by next year, far surpass them.

00:59:12   But you still can't make a tablet app on a tablet.

00:59:16   - Yeah.

00:59:16   Well, and that's the problem that CODEA ran into,

00:59:19   is that they ran into-- it's out, you get it,

00:59:22   but they've run into a lot of hassle with the App Store

00:59:25   in terms of--

00:59:27   Oh, like the interpreting code or something like that?

00:59:30   Well, I think that they're using JavaScript.

00:59:33   So there's a rule that you're not

00:59:35   supposed to include a third party interpreter.

00:59:38   But if you want to have interpreted code,

00:59:40   you could use WebKit's JavaScript and have at it.

00:59:43   But you can't-- they wanted to have it where you could maybe

00:59:46   like save your sample project and then I could download your sample project and

00:59:51   run it in Kodiya but then all of a sudden that runs afoul of the hey are

00:59:55   you distributing apps right yeah like you make a game in Kodiya and then you

01:00:00   send me the game thing and now I can open it in my copy of Kodiya and I have

01:00:04   a new game running and I didn't get it through the App Store and so that was

01:00:09   like they so I forget all the crazy hoops they have to jump through but it's

01:00:13   It's all worse for the overall experience,

01:00:17   for the benefit of Apple's control overall app distribution.

01:00:22   - And there are constraints,

01:00:25   like typing in stuff on an iPad is kind of annoying still,

01:00:29   and I get it, but it'd be cool if either Apple

01:00:33   or a third party were to come out

01:00:34   with a fairly sophisticated yet iPad designed coding app.

01:00:39   yet

01:00:41   iPad designed coding environment. Yep. Well remember remember I'll do it right remember when we were kids

01:00:47   And we would get magazines with programs in them, right? It would be yeah, you know, here's a program that you know

01:00:54   Here's a simple one. I mean, this is stupid

01:00:55   You could write this in ten lines or you know, three lines of basic, you know, but you know enter your weight on earth

01:01:02   Here's what you weigh on the moon and here's what you would weigh on Jupiter and then you would type it into your you know

01:01:07   your Apple 2 or your TI 99 for a basic and then you'd save it and then you type run the name of the program and

01:01:15   It would run but to duplicate these programs

01:01:17   they were printed in magazines and you'd sit the magazine next to the computer and type them in and

01:01:22   That's how I learned of a lot of HTML actually from the net magazine. It's teaching me like tables and that kind of stuff

01:01:29   you know and it's crazy that when when now that we've invented things like the internet and copy and paste and

01:01:35   downloading and stuff like that, that that's sort of how you have to use Kodiya because

01:01:39   they don't want you to distribute things that you just tap and open and run. And so you're

01:01:46   stuck retyping all this stuff. It's, you know, but anyway, it's worth checking out.

01:01:50   Yep. Yeah. And I remember actually, I think Google made some sort of very simple Android,

01:01:56   you know, like almost drag and drop programming tool, but I don't think it took off and they

01:02:02   probably shut it down.

01:02:03   what that's an interesting point because Android doesn't have the iron-fisted

01:02:09   control over executing code that by design not like it's you know right

01:02:15   this is a weakness this is a difference of opinion you know so you know you

01:02:21   could buy a Nexus and you know stock app you know this is the stock Google

01:02:25   Android device a Nexus whatever the latest phone is and you can go into

01:02:29   settings and say allow, you know, applications from third

01:02:33   parties. And then it'll say, sure, this is, you know, could

01:02:36   open up to security problems, you say, Don't worry, I know

01:02:38   what I'm doing. And then you can install apps from anywhere. And

01:02:42   you, you know, with no developer signing and stuff like that, you

01:02:45   can just install apps on your device. So there's an

01:02:50   opportunity there where they could have something like a sort

01:02:53   of next generation hypercard, right? I mean, that's, that's

01:02:56   what everybody always comes back to is they come back to

01:02:58   hypercard because hypercard and the reason people keep coming

01:03:02   back to hypercard is that hypercard when people you know,

01:03:07   if if if I don't know what the percentage of people who can

01:03:12   program is let's just ballpark and say 5% of people if they

01:03:16   want to can program like an objective see apps probably

01:03:19   lower than that. I would say less than one. Yeah, let's say

01:03:22   all right, let's be more realistic 25% let's say 1% of

01:03:26   people have that that aptitude and it's a combination of ability and desire

01:03:33   because it's so hard and complicated you just can't make yourself do it unless

01:03:37   you're driven to do it and absolutely you know hyper card was a thing where

01:03:43   way more maybe five percent of people who looked at hyper card and had ideas

01:03:48   for a little thing they could program or you know if you click a button this

01:03:52   happens and you could click this button and then you'd have a list of things

01:03:55   that you could drag and drop to rearrange, that there was way more people

01:04:00   who could just look at it, get it, and not in terms of intelligence, I think

01:04:06   entirely, although part of it is clearly intelligence, but it's also that

01:04:11   level of obsession where if it was so much easier to do it and you didn't have

01:04:18   to commit so much and learn at such a low level, you'd be willing to do it.

01:04:23   You'd be willing to try you know a little less abstract

01:04:26   It's not you know a text editor with gibberish in it it. There's a lot more visual

01:04:32   aspects they just removed a lot of friction and

01:04:36   It just and the lack of friction would encourage more people to try it in the same way that digital photography

01:04:42   You know

01:04:44   Ultimately the best pictures we take are they any better than the best pictures that were taken 50

01:04:49   60 years ago no, but way more pictures are being taken period because there's so much less friction

01:04:56   you just turn on these simple devices and

01:04:58   Exposure is computed automatically

01:05:01   you know the the aperture is computed automatically and

01:05:06   It's friction is removed

01:05:09   And so people do it and that's what hyper card was hyper card was like a point-and-shoot camera for programming

01:05:15   And there's yeah, well, let's get that for iOS

01:05:18   So if Phil Schiller if you're listening, I'll help you out with this. We'll

01:05:22   We'll do it

01:05:24   Yeah

01:05:24   I think and I think people you know if people have tried stuff like that and I think sometimes people maybe get caught up because

01:05:30   They want to boil the ocean all at once and they think well, let's not just do iOS

01:05:33   Let's do iOS and Android and let's have run in web browser too so that anybody you could open it

01:05:38   I say start simple and maybe you know do that down but get do it and have it just run on the iPad

01:05:43   Right and then worry about worry about

01:05:47   Other things next get it running on the iPad and then expand to the iPhone and then think about Android and then you know

01:05:54   But get it running one place at first

01:05:56   anyway, I think Google has an opportunity there to do something Apple couldn't because Google could build a thing like that and

01:06:03   not worry about

01:06:05   The distribution of these you know the in hyper card parlance the stacks right you hyper card was the app and it ran stacks

01:06:13   Whatever you want to call them, but you know that you they could allow people to distribute these things to other Android users

01:06:19   And not they don't care if you're not going through the Play Store anymore

01:06:22   Totally yeah, and I think they started to try it, but then they I don't know what happened with that weird

01:06:30   Thing that they made maybe it was just too simple. I remember

01:06:34   I think it was a typical Google thing where somebody you know some three people built the thing and there was never really anything behind

01:06:39   and they were like, well, ship it, who cares?

01:06:42   And then nobody ever even remembers it anymore.

01:06:45   - Yeah, and the Mac kind of has that with Automator,

01:06:48   but that's, well, not really,

01:06:50   that's not even close to HyperCard,

01:06:52   but I remember in the early Automator days,

01:06:55   actually my friend ran a site called Automator World,

01:06:59   which was a community of Automator recipes

01:07:04   or whatever they were called, and that was pretty cool.

01:07:06   Automator is cool and AppleScript still remains,

01:07:10   it's alive and well, but it's not thriving.

01:07:13   - Right, no, not at all.

01:07:15   - But there's little signs of health for it.

01:07:19   Like for example, I mean,

01:07:20   the biggest sign of health for AppleScript to me is

01:07:24   that when the new versions of iWork apps came out,

01:07:28   the new pages, numbers and keynote

01:07:33   with this unified file format across iOS and the web

01:07:38   and the Mac apps.

01:07:39   And they took out all these features that were in the Mac

01:07:42   were gone because they solidified the whole platform

01:07:47   on this common denominator of features.

01:07:51   AppleScript was gone.

01:07:52   But in the months since, they've brought it back.

01:07:55   I don't think that they've brought entirely back,

01:07:57   but it's mostly back.

01:07:58   That most of the things you could do in AppleScript

01:08:00   those apps before you can do again. You know it clearly wasn't enough of a priority to

01:08:06   be there in their initial release but it's enough of a priority that they got to it with

01:08:11   before before the end of the year. Yeah that's good. Do you buy into the concept of multi

01:08:18   view you know two apps two up apps on iOS or because I've been playing with that surface.

01:08:28   hold that let me do the third sponsor. Okay, let's combine that with that for iOS combined

01:08:33   with the surface. Okay, great. Third sponsor final sponsor of the show. Great, great company.

01:08:40   Harry's. What does Harry's provide? They provide men's shaving goods. So the team behind Harvey's

01:08:49   is there. I think one of the founders is one of the guys from Warby Parker, the eyeglass

01:08:55   also a sponsor of the show. Same basic idea though, where Warby Parker's thing was why

01:09:00   in the world are prescription eyeglasses so crazy expensive. The team with Harry's is

01:09:06   like why does it cost so much to buy razor blades to shave? Why is this stuff so crazy

01:09:10   expensive? Well, it doesn't have to be. So what they've done is they've gone right to

01:09:16   the source. They even make their own razor blades. They purchased a 93-year-old German

01:09:23   factory that makes precision engineered German engineered razor blades so they're making their

01:09:30   own blades they're not just like white labeling something that they're buying you know from some

01:09:35   abandoned factory or something they're making brand new blades brand new razors to hold them

01:09:40   really cool stylish stuff really good equipment and it gets shipped right to your door they focus

01:09:49   on providing men with a great shaving experience for a fraction of the price of the big name

01:09:54   competitors had. At least half the price of other brand name razor blades. Better product

01:10:00   design, less but better. None of these fancy, you know, no fake chrome and stuff like that,

01:10:05   plastic stuff. You just go take a look at their stuff and you'll see what I mean. It's

01:10:10   classic design, not like the fake good design like you see from the Gillette or the other

01:10:16   companies like that. Easy convenience. You don't have to go to a drugstore where all

01:10:20   the shaving stuff is blocked behind the cabinet because people shoplift it or something like

01:10:24   that. You just order online and it shows up at your door. So you don't have to go out.

01:10:29   I don't want to go out buying stuff like that. Really good. They've sent me a kit when they

01:10:34   first signed on as a sponsor and I've used it. Great stuff. It's good shaving cream,

01:10:40   razor blades great stuff so what do you do how do you take advantage of this

01:10:45   well they have a promo code talk show ta LK SH o W that's the promo code and

01:10:54   here's the offer use that promo code and you save five bucks off your first

01:10:59   purchase now the prices are already low just go to Harry's calm harr y s.com use

01:11:06   Use that promo code and then five bucks off your first purchase and it was already great

01:11:11   prices.

01:11:12   Go there, check it out.

01:11:13   They have a $15 kit that gives you a handle, three sets of blades and shave cream.

01:11:20   That's a great deal.

01:11:21   It's everything you need to get started.

01:11:23   15 bucks.

01:11:25   And they even have a custom engraving option if you want to get your initials on the razor

01:11:28   or if you want to give it as a gift.

01:11:30   Father's Day is coming up.

01:11:31   God, it seems like a no brainer.

01:11:34   So my thanks to Harry's.

01:11:35   Go to harrys.com and remember the promo code talk show.

01:11:39   No the, just talk show.

01:11:41   So my thanks to them.

01:11:44   - The other Harry's guy, the non Warby Parker guy,

01:11:49   is an old friend of mine.

01:11:50   - Oh really?

01:11:51   - Yeah, his wife married me.

01:11:54   Not married me, she officiated our wedding.

01:11:56   - There is a big difference.

01:12:00   - There is a big difference, yeah.

01:12:01   He was there too, it was cool.

01:12:02   - Well, that's actually, you know,

01:12:04   That's not like, hey, I met him the one time.

01:12:06   That's actually like the guy was there

01:12:07   for an important person in your life.

01:12:10   - Yeah, no, he's a good guy.

01:12:11   That's a really neat company that is

01:12:15   smartly vertically integrated, much like Warby Parker

01:12:20   and a massive industry full of a bunch of clowns.

01:12:24   So I hope they do really well.

01:12:26   - I love all these stories of people

01:12:29   who are getting into hardware of any kind.

01:12:31   - Oh yeah.

01:12:32   And and I feel like there's so many opportunity

01:12:35   You know, we are our whole generation

01:12:37   We were all digital for so long and the web was such an eye-opener and we all built websites and spent

01:12:42   You know first decade two decades of our professional careers shipping ones and zeros and it was awesome

01:12:48   And I still you know, everything I do is still mostly ones and zeros right vespers digital

01:12:53   Daring fireballs digital even the show is digital

01:12:58   Although not entirely and I'll get back to that

01:13:02   But I just love these people who are taking the same sort of,

01:13:07   let's just stay lean and mean and vertically integrated

01:13:11   and not have the waste of like a Proctor and Gamble

01:13:14   gazillion headcount conglomerate behind it.

01:13:19   - Yeah, let's take this thing and let's just do it right.

01:13:24   Let's start without all the baggage and do it right.

01:13:28   and ultimately it ends up being cheaper for the consumer

01:13:33   and in many cases better.

01:13:35   - I feel like it's like something

01:13:37   that nobody really imagined,

01:13:39   but like to me going down the consumer aisles

01:13:43   and like a drug store or like a Target

01:13:46   if you're in the like shopping for deodorant

01:13:48   or toothpaste or shaving cream or something like that,

01:13:51   like 40 or 50 years ago,

01:13:53   it would look like something out of science fiction,

01:13:55   like the way that when you go to buy Crest,

01:13:57   you have to choose between literally like 12 or 15 kinds of crest.

01:14:02   You know, that used to, you know,

01:14:04   used to be you'd switch between crest and Colgate, right.

01:14:07   And they were the rivals and then like they've,

01:14:09   they've gotten into this race to take up shelf space and the only way they'll

01:14:13   get the shelf space is if they have a bunch of varieties.

01:14:16   So they have like 20 each other own aisle at this point. Yeah.

01:14:19   20 different kinds of crest to choose from or, or ed shaving gel. There's,

01:14:24   there's 17 kinds of it. And like, I mean,

01:14:27   I don't know which one to get. I mean, I'm not an expert on it

01:14:29   Like I like these startups that are you know, it's like here look here's good shave cream. Here it is. Yeah Harry's

01:14:35   Yeah, there's one flavor. Yeah, here it is and it's good. Here it is it and that's it

01:14:40   Yeah, I love it

01:14:44   Anyway, I mean it I know they're a sponsor

01:14:47   I am literally getting paid to tell you to go check them out

01:14:49   But I mean it there it's it's what I love about the show and doing this and getting these sponsors like this

01:14:54   is that to me they're doing fascinating and great work.

01:14:57   - But that's actually, and not to plug your show,

01:15:00   but that's part of doing that right

01:15:03   is actually being in the right place

01:15:05   to promote your company.

01:15:07   Procter & Gamble, to my knowledge,

01:15:10   is not sponsoring tech podcasts,

01:15:13   but if you wanted to reach the types of people

01:15:16   that load up Amazon and drop 100 bucks on nonsense,

01:15:19   that would be a good place to start.

01:15:22   - Okay, tablets.

01:15:25   - Yes.

01:15:26   - So you were at the Surface announcement?

01:15:30   - Yeah, it was very strange.

01:15:32   It was like one of the first emails I got

01:15:34   to my new Quartz address was,

01:15:35   "Hey, do you wanna come to this Surface thing next week?"

01:15:38   And I said, "Yeah, sure."

01:15:40   And I didn't even know what it was.

01:15:42   I thought, I had no idea.

01:15:44   I didn't realize it was the unveiling of a new Surface.

01:15:48   I didn't realize that.

01:15:49   - 'Cause you're not as tuned into that world

01:15:51   as you are the Apple world where--

01:15:53   - No, right.

01:15:54   - And they're not on that regular schedule

01:15:56   that Apple has, right?

01:15:57   - Yeah, and it's in New York, and it's Tuesday, I don't know.

01:16:01   So I just wasn't expecting that.

01:16:03   And then I showed up and they're like,

01:16:04   "Here's the new Surface, and here's one to take with you."

01:16:08   And it was interesting.

01:16:10   - So they did give you one to take with you?

01:16:13   - Yeah, I have one, it's in my desk at the office.

01:16:16   I don't have it here in front of me, but it was,

01:16:20   And Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft was there.

01:16:24   He kicked off the event.

01:16:26   And what he said sounded good actually, which was,

01:16:30   I had seen Balmer and Gates speak a few times

01:16:33   at various things.

01:16:34   And it always seemed like a lot of puffed up

01:16:37   kind of corporate speak.

01:16:39   And Satya actually sounded more human.

01:16:42   And what he said was smart,

01:16:45   that they're making these devices

01:16:46   and that every single product has to fit

01:16:49   into their cloud strategy and all this stuff.

01:16:52   And then the guy who came on and kind of demoed

01:16:55   the hardware was kind of a bozo

01:16:56   and they were making all these really stupid jokes

01:17:00   about Joanna Stern, the new Wall Street Journal reviewer.

01:17:04   I don't know if you watched the video.

01:17:05   It was just really awkward and not funny at all.

01:17:08   - I didn't watch the video,

01:17:10   but I was following along on Twitter

01:17:13   and I got the gist that they were referencing Joanna a lot.

01:17:18   - Yeah, and it was kind of funny the first time,

01:17:20   but then they did it like four more times.

01:17:23   Can you imagine like, you know,

01:17:25   Phil Schiller stopping an Apple keynote four times

01:17:29   to rib Walt Mossberg about something?

01:17:32   - Right, or me, right, what if he did it to me, right?

01:17:35   - Hey, John, remember that post you wrote?

01:17:37   - Right.

01:17:37   - And maybe once, it's kind of funny.

01:17:39   - Well, and I guess it's because Joanna,

01:17:42   she was just on the show a couple months ago,

01:17:45   but talking about these issues with tablets

01:17:47   laptops and kin tablets. It was right after she had done I'm

01:17:50   sure this is why they referenced her is that she's done. She's

01:17:53   been on this beat for a couple of years now of, you know,

01:17:57   what's the ideal form factor for like a one and a half one to two

01:18:01   pound portable computer that you're going to do real work on?

01:18:04   Is it a tablet? If so, how do you put it in a lab? How do you

01:18:07   get a keyboard? How do you type fast? If it's not if it's a

01:18:09   laptop, you know, does it have a touchscreen? What what where's

01:18:12   this going? She's written a lot about it. And she's done. I it's

01:18:16   fantastic work reviewing a wide variety of stuff.

01:18:19   So I'm sure that's why--

01:18:21   - Yeah, I think she came from reviewing laptops.

01:18:24   So she has probably, if not the best,

01:18:27   one of the best kind of histories in her brain

01:18:31   of the evolution of these devices.

01:18:33   So it makes sense that they would reference her

01:18:36   during a keynote, I suppose once.

01:18:38   But then, I don't know, it was very--

01:18:42   - Weird.

01:18:43   - I think I tweeted something like,

01:18:44   "Microsoft, you're still so Microsoft,"

01:18:46   or something like that.

01:18:47   - Right, and she was there.

01:18:48   - She was there in the front row,

01:18:49   and she was curious why she was in the front row,

01:18:53   and then she found out why.

01:18:54   It's 'cause she was part of the play.

01:18:57   - She went to take a regular seat in the middle,

01:18:59   and they're like, "No, no, no."

01:19:00   - Yeah, right.

01:19:01   - Down in front, Joanna.

01:19:02   - Yeah, so some of the stuff they did

01:19:04   was actually kind of funny.

01:19:05   They made a kind of self-deprecating comment

01:19:09   about how everybody in the audience

01:19:10   was typing on a MacBook Air,

01:19:13   But then, I don't know, then I kind of dragged along

01:19:18   and then I grabbed my Surface and got out of there.

01:19:21   - Yeah, that's funny.

01:19:24   That's like an interesting,

01:19:25   and I definitely noticed that they made a joke

01:19:29   about the fact that the MacBook Air is like stock issue

01:19:34   for mid, I don't know what we call this decade, the 10s.

01:19:39   In the 10s, tech journalists have MacBook Airs.

01:19:42   It's just ridiculous what percentage.

01:19:47   And most of my press events are Apple events,

01:19:50   but even at like Build, when I was at Build,

01:19:52   in the press room, not everybody,

01:19:55   and clearly there's a lot of Windows devices

01:19:56   in the Build press room,

01:19:58   but there was a crazy amount of MacBook Airs too.

01:20:01   - Crazy, yeah.

01:20:02   And at this thing, it was pretty much all Macs.

01:20:04   I rarely see Windows PCs in my life,

01:20:10   which is kind of funny, but good life, I guess.

01:20:13   - The thing to remember is that journalists,

01:20:16   most of them are on a tight deadline.

01:20:19   They've got to file, if they're there today

01:20:22   to cover the Microsoft Surface event,

01:20:24   they've got to have something ready to go

01:20:27   pretty soon after the end.

01:20:29   And a lot of people now, most sites now,

01:20:31   they're taking photos and they're putting photos in,

01:20:33   and it's more than just typing in a text area field

01:20:37   and hitting a button.

01:20:37   There's a CMS production system,

01:20:40   And you kind of need your--

01:20:42   I don't test that many devices, but a lot of people do.

01:20:48   But in terms of actually doing the work of covering the event,

01:20:51   you want your go-to trustee, this is my main thing.

01:20:55   And it's got all the apps I need to get into the CMS

01:20:59   to format this the way I want it formatted,

01:21:03   to get the photos into where the photos go in the CMS

01:21:06   so I can put them in the article and all this.

01:21:08   And for most of the people working today,

01:21:10   it's a MacBook Air.

01:21:12   - Totally, and especially if you're carrying it around,

01:21:15   the Air is an amazing portable computer.

01:21:20   So then, Microsoft's argument seems to be

01:21:25   that a tablet with a keyboard is better than a laptop.

01:21:31   Because, and then they have different,

01:21:35   One was that it's lighter than a MacBook Air,

01:21:38   which I don't, when you put that big keyboard thing

01:21:42   on there, I don't think it's lighter.

01:21:44   I don't know.

01:21:45   - Well, their comparison, and this is, to me,

01:21:48   everybody called this out, is that their weight comparison

01:21:51   was the uncovered surface compared to the MacBook Air,

01:21:56   which has an attached cover.

01:21:58   And if--

01:21:59   - The 13-inch, six-year-old MacBook Air,

01:22:03   versus the brand new uncovered 12 inch surface.

01:22:08   - Well, the fact that the design is six years old,

01:22:10   doesn't, that's fair game.

01:22:14   - Oh yeah, I mean, it's still shipping, so.

01:22:16   - Right, and they just came out with new ones last month.

01:22:18   - Right. - That's fair game, but,

01:22:20   it just doesn't seem like a fair comparison to say,

01:22:25   here's this device where a big part of it

01:22:28   is that we've built this great cover with a keyboard

01:22:31   and a great, much improved over last year's trackpad.

01:22:34   And then when we compare it to this device

01:22:36   that has a built-in keyboard and trackpad,

01:22:37   we're not gonna put the cover on

01:22:39   when we talk about the weight.

01:22:41   - Right, yeah, so that's, I mean,

01:22:43   and that's also the kind of thing like,

01:22:44   okay, but in your backpack with a few other things,

01:22:47   there's really, in use, I will say,

01:22:49   there's no noticeable difference in, you know,

01:22:53   how light one of those things feels next to the other one.

01:22:56   And that's not even really the point.

01:22:58   Like weight is not really the deciding factor in this.

01:23:02   It's is this better for,

01:23:05   and I guess they're straight up just going after people

01:23:08   who are using this for work.

01:23:10   Like if you're the kind of person

01:23:12   who is doing work on a laptop,

01:23:14   which is really the only thing I use my laptop now for

01:23:17   is straight up work,

01:23:19   is a tablet with a keyboard better.

01:23:21   And it's still, to me, it just felt off.

01:23:25   And I haven't used it much and I really should use it more.

01:23:28   but the idea of balancing this heavy screen

01:23:32   and with this lighter keyboard

01:23:34   that's kind of attached to it, but not very rigid

01:23:38   just seems very awkward.

01:23:40   I just, I would always rather have a laptop.

01:23:44   And then, you know, for the stuff that I use

01:23:46   a touch tablet for, have a separate tablet that is,

01:23:51   you know, really designed for that.

01:23:54   and hardware and software and size

01:23:58   and all that sort of stuff.

01:23:59   - For weight to really matter,

01:24:01   it has to be like a next level.

01:24:05   I mean, it's all a little arbitrary,

01:24:07   but it's gotta be like,

01:24:09   hey, this is actually like a game changer.

01:24:11   And an example I'll bring up is the MacBook Air.

01:24:15   - Totally.

01:24:16   - Where a year ago when it was the iPad 3 and then the 4,

01:24:20   and these were the,

01:24:21   the Retina iPad still had the full bezel around the whole size.

01:24:25   It doesn't matter.

01:24:26   They were the same weight, the three and the four.

01:24:28   Versus the first generation iPad Mini, it was like, "Wow, this one has...

01:24:35   It's a lot faster and has a beautiful retina to screen, but man, it's so much heavier than

01:24:40   the Mini, which doesn't have a retina screen and it's using year-old system on a chip,

01:24:47   but man, is it light."

01:24:48   And it just seemed like a real easy, easier decision.

01:24:53   You want to go lightweight and easier to carry around or do you want to go beautiful screen,

01:24:58   little bit heavier.

01:24:59   Whereas this year with the Air, it was so much lighter.

01:25:02   Like everybody who was at the original press event, you know, last October for the iPad,

01:25:09   everybody was like, "Geez, I don't know how to decide which one of these to get now because

01:25:13   the Air is so much lighter."

01:25:15   The whole reason I wanted a Mini in the first place

01:25:17   was it was easy to hold in one hand,

01:25:19   but this is easy to hold in one hand.

01:25:21   'Cause it was so much lighter than what it came before.

01:25:23   The Surface Pro is not like that.

01:25:25   The Surface Pro is over a pound.

01:25:26   So it's, you know, it's not heavy.

01:25:29   - And it's thick, it's not, it's not, and that's fine.

01:25:33   I mean, it's, you know, I guess it's thinner than a laptop

01:25:37   and maybe a little lighter than one,

01:25:39   but it's not the difference between,

01:25:41   to me the best example is still actually

01:25:44   the MacBook Air versus my old plastic MacBook,

01:25:48   which was so heavy that I dreaded carrying it around.

01:25:51   Whereas the minute I got the 13-inch MacBook Air,

01:25:55   it was the first computer I'd ever owned

01:25:57   that I'm happy just to take anywhere.

01:25:59   It never is annoying to carry it around.

01:26:02   And there were other benefits too,

01:26:04   like the battery life and that kind of stuff.

01:26:06   But this, so the surface is not like that.

01:26:10   And I don't know, again, I should use it more

01:26:14   and I'm not a Windows guy,

01:26:15   so the OS is kind of foreign to me still.

01:26:19   Although I did pop open Twitter

01:26:22   and Internet Explorer side by side,

01:26:25   and that was actually pretty cool.

01:26:26   Like I would totally--

01:26:27   - So how does, what is the interface

01:26:29   for putting two apps side by side

01:26:32   instead of taking over the full screen?

01:26:35   - I'm sure there is a way to do it

01:26:37   that is the actual way to do it,

01:26:39   but in my case it was poke around

01:26:41   until it happened by accident.

01:26:44   It's some secret gesture like swiping in from one of the sides or something like that, which,

01:26:48   again, I'm sure there's an actual right way to do it.

01:26:51   I just haven't figured that out yet.

01:26:53   So...

01:26:54   See, that's my...

01:26:55   And you asked, and I wrote about this this week, is that I'm not opposed to it.

01:27:00   I got some pushback, but I wrote something.

01:27:03   I was like, "To put it in Randzian terms, to steal Michael Lop's Twitter schtick, you

01:27:09   I want to run two apps side by side on my iPad and I hear I want

01:27:15   The iPad to become more complicated

01:27:18   Right, and that doesn't mean that I think that they shouldn't do it or that they're not going to do it

01:27:23   But all I want to shine a light on is that if they do it no matter how clever it is

01:27:29   It will therefore make the iPad more complicated than it was before maybe justly so maybe it's a good decision

01:27:36   You know when when when the iPhone couldn't copy and paste when you couldn't select text and copy and paste

01:27:42   Adding

01:27:44   That made the iPhone more complicated and I think everybody would agree

01:27:50   It was complication for the better. Yes, it's more complicated, but it's better now because it's just so essential

01:27:57   Maybe Apple will come up with something for side-by-side apps that we'll look at the same way and it'll work for everybody

01:28:03   But to me, I think about it as a UI designer and I can't think of anything that really is

01:28:08   Approachable that most people would use it to me

01:28:15   the only things I can think of are something where you double tap the home button to go into the multitasking thing and then

01:28:22   drag

01:28:24   drag those little window versions that you see in the

01:28:28   Multitasking somehow drag two of them together and they yeah, and I just thought of that too independently. So maybe we're onto something there

01:28:34   Yeah, but I would I'm gonna go out in a limb and say it's only gonna work for apps that explicitly support it because it's a

01:28:41   New yeah

01:28:41   Half the screen is gonna be a new

01:28:43   Pick and what if it's an app that you ran a long time ago the other one that you want on there, right?

01:28:48   And it's not up to find it, right?

01:28:50   How are they gonna tell you how are they gonna suggest to you that this app is you can select it?

01:28:56   - Ah, yeah.

01:28:57   - You know, I don't know.

01:28:57   Turn the other ones black and white, I don't know.

01:29:00   Have them bounce.

01:29:01   It's a complicated, complex question, UI design wise.

01:29:05   - I mean, it's kind of like how you join phone calls

01:29:09   that are in session.

01:29:10   - Yeah.

01:29:10   - You can either put one on hold, start another one,

01:29:13   and then join the two of those,

01:29:15   or you can put one on hold and create a new one

01:29:18   and then join them.

01:29:19   But it's not that simple because that's just kind of

01:29:22   audio running in the background, whereas this is--

01:29:25   If it takes three or four taps to get two of them together,

01:29:29   you don't wanna have it completely undone

01:29:31   by just hitting the home button once to do something else.

01:29:34   Right?

01:29:35   If you've set this up and it's taken three or four taps

01:29:38   and you've got your Twitter client running next to Safari.

01:29:41   And oh, I gotta check--

01:29:43   - Which is like my ideal like living room setup.

01:29:46   - Right, but I quick wanna check my email

01:29:49   because there's a thing I wanna copy and paste

01:29:51   from the email to put into Safari

01:29:53   and then you hit the home button.

01:29:54   You don't wanna have to rebuild that Twitter thing.

01:29:57   You wanna be able to somehow go back to it.

01:29:59   And I don't know what that is

01:30:00   because the only thing you can go back to

01:30:02   in iOS as we know it is an app.

01:30:05   - Right, and on the surface, if I recall correctly,

01:30:08   the way that that works is that it basically starts

01:30:10   a third window and you can then decide

01:30:13   where that third window goes, if anywhere.

01:30:16   I don't have it in front of me,

01:30:17   so maybe that's a false memory,

01:30:19   but that's what it seemed like.

01:30:21   So, I know Mark Gurman said they're working on it,

01:30:24   although he did not say that they're doing it for sure.

01:30:27   It seems to me like he doesn't even have that much stuff

01:30:30   this year in terms of what's for sure

01:30:32   other than like the health book thing.

01:30:34   - Yeah.

01:30:35   - So I wouldn't be surprised.

01:30:36   I wouldn't like to bet on that.

01:30:37   I wouldn't bet on seeing that next week.

01:30:40   - Right, yeah, I mean, I would like it if it were elegant.

01:30:43   Twitter on the iPad is the same with column

01:30:51   That it should be on a phone and then it's taking up the rest of the screen

01:30:55   So it'd be really cool to have Twitter as like a side

01:30:58   bar while I'm you know, whatever using Safari or

01:31:02   Email or anything like that

01:31:05   But as you say they'll have to do it in a way that that is elegant and makes sense

01:31:09   Otherwise they're messing with their clean OS

01:31:13   other thing that they would be messing with and

01:31:16   Gurman acknowledged this in his report where he's like I don't even I don't know and there's no word on whether it would be for

01:31:21   The full-size iPad air only or for the iPad mini too

01:31:24   But the thing is is just in terms of the physical just physical size

01:31:28   Half of the iPad mini screen is not a lot of screen

01:31:31   Yeah, but in terms of pixels, it's the same as an air, isn't it? No, I don't know. Yeah

01:31:38   Yeah in terms of pixels is the same but now you're talking about a lot a very small physical space and yet date

01:31:45   The the OS is exactly the same pixel for pixel is exactly the same between the two

01:31:50   There's nothing you can do on the one on the air that you can't do on the other just because it's bigger

01:31:54   Everything is the pixel for pixel the same right? I can't help

01:31:57   I think that if you're gonna split it in half, it may not work out as well

01:32:01   Yeah, that would be an interesting thing to do some some mock-ups of I mean and that was the most compelling thing to me about

01:32:07   That surface is wow. This is what a 12-inch touchscreen feels like this is kind of cool

01:32:13   Like I could see a big iPad,

01:32:17   but that was kind of the angle of my piece about this was,

01:32:19   hey, I could actually see a big iPad being useful.

01:32:21   Like my kind of dream setup now would be a big iPad

01:32:26   that I don't really take places.

01:32:28   And then a big iPhone that kind of replaces my small iPad.

01:32:32   But now I'm just fantasy designing Apple hardware,

01:32:37   which is not something that I'm probably supposed

01:32:41   to be doing.

01:32:42   But I'm excited for it though. I mean just in terms of if it does come out, I can't help

01:32:47   but think that the only, if it is going to come out, that they've got something really

01:32:51   thoughtfully designed. Because I don't think they're under any market pressure to do it.

01:32:55   No. Right? So Microsoft has been banging the drum for this sort of not technical multitasking,

01:33:03   not computer science two processes running on the same operating system at the same time,

01:33:09   But visual multitasking, two things on screen at the same time.

01:33:14   Twitter and a YouTube video or your email and a web browser on screen at the same time.

01:33:21   Yeah, or for my work, a web browser and Excel or something like that.

01:33:25   So I could get data and spreadsheet it at the same time.

01:33:29   Right, and it certainly hasn't.

01:33:30   Microsoft having gotten to it first two years ago, I guess, or a year and a half ago,

01:33:35   hasn't really helped them make a dent, put a dent in the tablet market. So it's not like Apple's

01:33:40   under market pressure to do so in the same way that they seem to be under market pressure to

01:33:47   come out with a bigger iPhone. Right. And that is, you know, that there are people who are buying

01:33:53   other brand phones because they want a bigger phone. You know, how big of that market, you know,

01:33:59   how many people there are you could argue about,

01:34:01   but it's inarguable that it's a number worth caring about.

01:34:06   - Totally, yeah.

01:34:07   - Whereas I don't see that

01:34:09   for this multitasking on tablets.

01:34:10   To me, they're not gonna do it

01:34:13   unless they have something clever.

01:34:14   So I'm excited because if they show it,

01:34:16   I feel like we're gonna see something pretty interesting.

01:34:20   - Yeah, I hope so.

01:34:21   And one of the things I was thinking about then is,

01:34:24   and as you mentioned,

01:34:26   Microsoft has not caught any traction with tablets

01:34:31   or phones.

01:34:32   I wonder if they should make a laptop

01:34:35   or is that too competitive with all their partners?

01:34:39   - I don't know how is it.

01:34:41   To me, they've already broken the seal.

01:34:43   - I think they kind of have, haven't they?

01:34:44   - But see, here's the thing I think though,

01:34:46   and this is what I took away from the coverage last week

01:34:49   and your piece in particular is that to me,

01:34:53   Seems like what they were saying at last week's event is that they think this is the future of the laptop right a tablet

01:35:00   That attached, you know, you know, the screen part is a tablet and the keyboard part to detaches

01:35:07   yeah, and it's a cover and

01:35:09   To me that's why they kept bringing up the MacBook Air or not Mac

01:35:14   Yeah MacBook Air not the iPad that they weren't talking about iPads

01:35:17   Really they were talking about the MacBook Air that they're saying if you want to do work

01:35:21   This is the form factor, you know and like the way I put it is that they're saying this tablet form factor

01:35:27   Isn't just for iOS type devices media

01:35:30   Simplified well and not just media stuff but simplified one thing at a time a

01:35:35   Simple system that anybody can kind of get the gist of you know, you you tap an app

01:35:41   You're in the app you tap home you go back to your apps and that's it

01:35:44   They're saying this form factor is useful for more complicated systems like Windows

01:35:51   Or you know in theory now Microsoft isn't saying it but in theory that they're there they're by implication

01:35:57   They're saying that Apple is wrong

01:36:00   Not to be doing a Mac OS device in this form factor. Yeah, and that this is your next laptop. It's this

01:36:07   Tablet right that Apple Apple's stance is that the form factors are tied to the complexities of the systems

01:36:15   That the simple tablet form factor is meant for the simple iOS

01:36:21   interface and that the more complicated MacBook form factor with the attached

01:36:27   keyboard and a trackpad and this layer of abstraction between the trackpad and

01:36:32   the pointer on screen is inherently suited to the more complex OS Mac OS.

01:36:37   Yeah. And Microsoft is saying that I you know that to me is what I took away from

01:36:41   it is they're saying no this form factor is the future of portable computing for

01:36:46   any level of complexity. Yeah and then well the trick the trouble I had with

01:36:50   that was that the minute they got into anything

01:36:53   rather complicated,

01:36:55   immediately the stylus came out and the keyboard.

01:36:57   So is that better than just a keyboard

01:37:02   that's not a touchscreen?

01:37:05   I suppose for some applications it is,

01:37:08   like you linked to the people drawing on it

01:37:11   and that kind of stuff.

01:37:12   I don't know if that's better

01:37:16   than a purpose designed drawing tablet,

01:37:20   like one of the Wacom, Wacom, whatever they're called.

01:37:23   - Yeah, long term though,

01:37:24   what I've always thought about with that,

01:37:26   and yeah, Wacom and I forget who else,

01:37:28   and apparently the Surface is really good for this.

01:37:32   I think it's Gabe, the Penny Arcade guy who's the artist,

01:37:35   who's been using one for a while,

01:37:36   and he has got the Surface Pro 3 right away

01:37:39   and says it's really good for precision drawing

01:37:43   in a way that the iPad screens are not precise like that.

01:37:48   But there's nothing that stops Apple

01:37:50   from eventually making an iPad that has a screen

01:37:53   that is that precise.

01:37:55   And I don't think they'll ever ship with a stylus,

01:37:58   but they could make one

01:38:00   that you could get a third party stylus

01:38:02   that would have professional level precision.

01:38:05   - Yeah, I actually bought a Kickstarter stylus

01:38:08   that was the most precise iPad stylus I've seen so far.

01:38:13   Very small tip.

01:38:15   And it's all right,

01:38:16   but I just don't really have any use for it.

01:38:18   I never use it, but--

01:38:20   - Syntec, is that the other one?

01:38:23   It's like a, I think the Pixar people use.

01:38:26   - I don't remember.

01:38:27   Oh, cool.

01:38:28   Yeah, so that's, I don't know.

01:38:30   I'm not sold on that.

01:38:33   I'm not sold.

01:38:34   And I'm sure there, my guess is that this will be

01:38:39   the most successful tablet PC ever made

01:38:43   because that's basically saying that more than 20 people

01:38:47   but when I think about writing a lot

01:38:52   or building a document in a spreadsheet program

01:38:57   or doing graphic manipulation,

01:39:01   I'm still much happier with a keyboard

01:39:04   and a real trackpad than what they're shipping.

01:39:09   That's not to say that they can't keep improving it,

01:39:12   but it just like that,

01:39:14   that keyboard still feels like a cheapo add-on keyboard

01:39:18   relative to the real rigid kind of bottom half

01:39:23   of a good laptop.

01:39:25   - Let me just stop right here

01:39:26   and cut off all the people

01:39:27   who are probably already halfway through emailing me.

01:39:30   Cintiq, C-I-N-T-I-Q is,

01:39:35   it's a line of touchscreen tablets from Wacom.

01:39:40   - Oh, cool.

01:39:41   That's that that's that's what I was thinking of but that's why you thought Wacom. It's Wacom's line of touchscreen tablets

01:39:48   Do you think they would do that Apple would do a touchscreen?

01:39:51   Mac OS device whether it's a

01:39:55   Macbook thing with no

01:39:57   Yeah, I really think no. I think we're I think we're more likely to see a laptop

01:40:03   iOS device than

01:40:06   Touchscreen Mac, huh? Interesting. I just you know what though? Well, I

01:40:11   I don't think that they'll announce the hardware next week, but that's something to keep an eye on when they show us Mac OS 10.10 is look at what

01:40:20   Ah, the chips?

01:40:21   Well, no, look at how big the screen the elements are on screen

01:40:25   Are they spaced in such a way that they look like they're amenable to big fat fingers?

01:40:30   Ah, interesting. Yeah, because

01:40:32   Mac OS as we know it is totally, totally horrible for fingers

01:40:36   Like just the simplest thing like the red yellow green buttons in the windows for yeah closing not gonna happen

01:40:44   Well, they're so close to each other you'd know nothing on iOS is ever that close to each other because you're they're all right next

01:40:50   I mean

01:40:51   I'm looking at a Safari window right now and the close button the minimize button and the back button are all

01:40:57   You know within all of those three buttons are all within the target area of one button. That's the size of my fingertip, right?

01:41:04   Yeah, and the menu the little icons in the menu bar, you know with the

01:41:09   Sound and the Wi-Fi and that kind of stuff. None of that would really be right and

01:41:14   Combine it. Yeah combine it with the file menu like the top window in Safari on my Mac right now

01:41:20   The the close button is right under the file menu

01:41:23   So there's actually three touch targets for touch targets that are all within you know

01:41:29   - With drastically different consequences.

01:41:32   - Right, right.

01:41:33   - Open and do, oh, I didn't mean to close that whole app.

01:41:36   Yeah.

01:41:37   - Right, it would be a recipe in frustration

01:41:39   if they just turned on touch.

01:41:41   They'd have to resize everything and it would just be,

01:41:45   I'm not saying it's impossible,

01:41:46   but you'll be able to tell just by looking at iOS 8

01:41:49   if it's designed with future touch in mind.

01:41:53   - Yeah, that's interesting.

01:41:54   And if they were to ever converge them into one,

01:41:59   whether it's fully the same operating system

01:42:02   or at least the same look and feel,

01:42:05   that's where we would start to see the cues there.

01:42:09   I thought you were gonna say,

01:42:10   look and see if it'll run on non-Intel ARM chips.

01:42:15   - Well, we wouldn't be able to know that.

01:42:17   - Yeah, they're not gonna mention that.

01:42:19   - I will eat my hat if they don't have a version

01:42:21   of Mac OS X running on ARM chips,

01:42:24   probably in the same freaking lab where they used to have.

01:42:27   That's how Tim Cook's MacBook Air lasts all the way to Taiwan or whatever.

01:42:32   Right. They'd be nuts not to have it compile, especially now. I bet.

01:42:36   And maybe they couldn't do it. In fact, I was thinking about it.

01:42:40   Maybe they couldn't do it until the arm went 64 bit with the last year's

01:42:45   devices because Mac OS 10 had already gone 64 bit and there was no way they

01:42:50   could keep 64 bit Mac OS 10 running on 32 bit arm chips.

01:42:55   But now that they have 64-bit ARM chips,

01:42:57   if they don't already have it running,

01:42:59   they're full steam ahead making it running.

01:43:01   - It's on.

01:43:02   - But we won't know that because in the same way

01:43:04   that we never knew that iOS 7 was gonna be 64-bit

01:43:09   until they shipped those devices,

01:43:12   till they announced the iPhone 5S,

01:43:13   because the versions, the betas they shipped

01:43:16   starting at WWDC last year and all summer long,

01:43:19   they just shipped 32-bit betas.

01:43:21   And they never--

01:43:22   - And nor did we know that there would be

01:43:23   an Intel version of macOS.

01:43:25   - Right.

01:43:26   - Versus the old PowerPC chips.

01:43:28   - Right, 'cause they just never distributed

01:43:30   outside their internal lab.

01:43:32   Hey, so speaking, I mentioned before about the fact

01:43:34   that everything's mostly ones and zeros,

01:43:36   but I do have a physical thing to announce,

01:43:39   which is the live version of the talk show.

01:43:41   I said this in the last episode.

01:43:43   - Whoa.

01:43:44   - I would have ticket information.

01:43:45   I've done this--

01:43:46   - Oh, okay.

01:43:48   I thought this show was live and then we had an audience.

01:43:52   - Oh, God, no, I would never do that.

01:43:54   - Oh cool, you launched a new podcasting suite.

01:43:57   Nice, man.

01:43:58   - No, it's a live event next week in San Francisco.

01:44:02   Tuesday, six to nine p.m. at Mezzanine,

01:44:06   which is right there on, what's it, Mint Square,

01:44:10   or whatever the hell it's called.

01:44:11   I don't know.

01:44:12   Well, the address will be on the website.

01:44:14   Here is where you go.

01:44:15   This is the announcement for ticket information.

01:44:17   Selling the tickets on a new system from my friend

01:44:22   Paul Campbell, the guy behind the Wool Conference, Tito. So you go to ti.to, super short domain

01:44:29   name, ti.to/daringfireball. And right now, as soon as--if you're listening to this, you

01:44:36   can go and you'll see a link to the talk show live from WWDC and you can buy tickets. It's

01:44:44   going to be a limited space. We sold out pretty quickly last year, same facility. I think

01:44:50   have at least 350 tickets, maybe more, but probably 350 to start.

01:44:56   So if you're hearing this now, you should go and check it out if you want to come.

01:45:01   And anybody can go.

01:45:02   You don't have to be a WWDC attendee.

01:45:03   I think most people this year don't have badges.

01:45:06   Yeah.

01:45:07   Do you?

01:45:08   It's complicated.

01:45:09   Okay.

01:45:10   Don't ask.

01:45:11   I have been told that I will have a press badge for the keynote.

01:45:18   And I don't have a paid attendee badge.

01:45:21   - Okay, got it.

01:45:22   - But we'll see.

01:45:23   - I'm gonna scalp some tickets to this thing now

01:45:25   'cause it's gonna sell out by the time anyone--

01:45:27   - Are you going?

01:45:28   You're gonna be in San Francisco?

01:45:29   - No, I'm actually gonna be in Seattle that day

01:45:31   because Quartz is having a conference there.

01:45:34   - Monday and Tuesday?

01:45:36   - Monday, and then I'm actually spending Tuesday in Seattle

01:45:40   and then coming back.

01:45:41   I should have gone to San Francisco from Seattle.

01:45:46   But I've been to the one that you did two years ago

01:45:48   and it was super fun, it was really great.

01:45:50   - Last year's was better at-- - Cable Sasser, right?

01:45:52   - Yeah, two years ago it was Cable Sasser

01:45:54   and last year I had Guy English.

01:45:56   Better facility, we're at the same place

01:45:58   we were last year, Mezzanine.

01:45:59   More seats, better acoustics, it's a really great place.

01:46:05   It's gonna be an open bar, everybody, you know,

01:46:08   you can enjoy any adult beverage of your choice.

01:46:11   Top shelf liquor, we're gonna have great sponsors.

01:46:15   Although I think the bar sponsorship is still open, so anybody who wants to sponsor it,

01:46:20   I'll be promoting this on Daring Fireball this week, should get in touch with me through

01:46:25   the usual channels on the website.

01:46:29   So we're still looking for a sponsor for the bar.

01:46:32   And special guests, special guests this year at this live show.

01:46:37   This is amazing.

01:46:38   I don't know how it's going to work, but I'm going to have the whole ATP crew.

01:46:44   Arment, John Siracusa and Casey Liss. Oh yeah yeah Casey Liss all three of them

01:46:57   will be joining me on stage at the beginning of the show for the nerd the

01:47:01   nerd part we're gonna talk about the day before his news at WWDC and then and

01:47:06   then my pal Scott Simpson's gonna come on and and lighten it up a little bit

01:47:10   And musical guest dr. Dre musical drink musical guest dr. Dre everybody will get a free pair of Beats headphones. Yeah

01:47:18   Cool. Well, that sounds fun. I'm bummed. I'm missing it but Tito ti.to

01:47:24   Slash during fireball and if you're in Seattle come to the courts

01:47:30   69 Tuesday in San Francisco

01:47:36   So there will be that that'll be the show part come out tomorrow

01:47:39   So you'll have one week in advance to make your make your get your tickets

01:47:43   Anything else no, that's good. It feels like a Memorial Day. Yeah. Happy Memorial Day to you happy

01:47:51   Congratulations on the new gig always good to see you writing more. I'm excited

01:47:56   I've kind of have had a lot of thoughts in my head over the last six months that have been too

01:48:02   Kind of busy lazy to express so now I have to do it and you know, can I just say a big picture?

01:48:07   I've been doing this for a while during fireball and even the talk show

01:48:11   I

01:48:11   Am more excited about what's going on in all this stuff that we talked about this year than I've been in a long time because I

01:48:18   Feel like I don't know. I feel like there's a lot a lot of turning points. I

01:48:22   Agree, I had less the last I would say the second half of last year

01:48:27   I was super bored.

01:48:28   Like I just did not really,

01:48:30   I was almost offended by kind of how little progress

01:48:34   was going on, but I don't know what,

01:48:36   maybe it's just the spring after an awful winter,

01:48:41   but I'm really, I'm excited.

01:48:43   I think there's a lot of,

01:48:45   and I hope I'm not disappointed by what ends up

01:48:48   coming out of it, but I think that Apple in particular

01:48:51   and other companies, Google and Microsoft and Amazon

01:48:54   and even Facebook and Twitter are in a position

01:48:57   to really do some cool stuff now.

01:48:59   So I hope they don't disappoint.

01:49:02   - I compare it to 2007 when the iPad,

01:49:05   our iPhone first came out and nobody,

01:49:07   we knew it was awesome.

01:49:08   It's a little different 'cause there's not one device

01:49:10   that to me has centered our attention.

01:49:13   But it was like, we just didn't know where it was gonna go.

01:49:17   It was clearly going somewhere new

01:49:19   but we couldn't tell where.

01:49:21   And I kinda have that feeling--

01:49:21   - Right, we knew there was a phone coming

01:49:23   but we didn't know how drastically new it was gonna be.

01:49:27   - I feel that way with the interface stuff for Mac OS X,

01:49:30   I feel that way with the health monitoring stuff

01:49:33   that everybody says is coming to iOS.

01:49:35   So it's coming and it feels like it's cool ideas,

01:49:38   but I can't tell where it's going.

01:49:40   And so I feel like it's a very exciting time

01:49:42   to be writing about and talking about this stuff.

01:49:45   - Me too.

01:49:46   - Yeah, all right, well thank you, Dan.

01:49:48   - Yeah, thank you.

01:49:49   - QZ.com.

01:49:50   - QZ and @fromdome on Twitter

01:49:52   where you can sound off and tell me I'm a moron.

01:49:55   - Right, what do we ask people?

01:49:56   We want them to send us their, oh, programming on,

01:49:59   if you have any ideas for--

01:50:00   - We had nuke tips for early coding.

01:50:03   - Yeah, like hypercard type stuff like Kodiya

01:50:06   and stuff like that, like ways that you can

01:50:07   teach yourself programming on iOS.

01:50:10   - Awesome, thank you everyone.

01:50:11   - Yeah.

01:50:12   - Thanks, John.

01:50:13   - I'm hitting stop.