The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I've got two things that I'm obsessed with this week.

00:00:02 ◼   ► I'm obsessed with Twitter and what they're doing with their API, and I remain obsessed

00:00:08 ◼   ► with the Retina MacBook Pro and what it means for software.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And I've coincidentally been working on both

00:00:15 ◼   ► of those things.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Dave You're a perfect guest, Craig Hockenberry,

00:00:19 ◼   ► for this week's show.

00:00:20 ◼   ► You've got Twitterrific, the Twitter client for every single platform that comes from

00:00:26 ◼   ► Apple and you're working on an upgrade to Xscope which is how would you

00:00:34 ◼   ► how would you pitch Xscope in a nut? It's a tool for developers and designers to

00:00:41 ◼   ► make sure everything that they see on screen is what they expect. It lets you

00:00:45 ◼   ► test and sample. I use the loop. The loop is what I use all the time and I know

00:00:52 ◼   ► there's other tools there's rulers you can snap things to guide you can make

00:00:55 ◼   ► things exactly, you know, but the loop is what I, and that's like a magnifying glass.

00:00:59 ◼   ► Yeah, the loop is probably one of my most used tools as well because, you know, the

00:01:05 ◼   ► designer or something gives you a Photoshop composition or something like that and, you

00:01:09 ◼   ► know, you got to make sure that this button is really, you know, five pixels over from

00:01:13 ◼   ► this line and that kind of thing.

00:01:16 ◼   ► What do you want to talk about first?

00:01:20 ◼   ► best to talk about Twitter. That's the thing that most people are concerned about these

00:01:27 ◼   ► days.

00:01:28 ◼   ► And you've had a lot to say. And I know, like, I thought it was notable because he called

00:01:32 ◼   ► it out. Our friend Lex Friedman over at Macworld had an article where he kind of went around

00:01:39 ◼   ► and talked to several Twitter client developers. But the thing that he called out, in particular,

00:01:45 ◼   ► upfront and I thought was notable was that he said a number of Twitter client developers

00:01:50 ◼   ► simply did not want to speak on the record because they feel relations are so frayed

00:01:56 ◼   ► between client developers and Twitter itself that they just don't even want to – they

00:02:00 ◼   ► just don't even want their name on the thing. Now you did speak though, right? Is that right?

00:02:04 ◼   ► Tim: Yeah. I was very carefully chosen words. The problem for me and for the company is

00:02:14 ◼   ► that we've had a good relationship with Twitter over the years. It's been a symbiotic relationship.

00:02:21 ◼   ► We've helped them in the very early days, things like coming up with the bird logo,

00:02:28 ◼   ► coming up with the name tweet. We have substantially contributed to their ecosystem. They've

00:02:36 ◼   ► given us a platform to make a product which we make money off of.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I would go further than that too though and I mean this sincerely not just because you're

00:02:45 ◼   ► here and I'm blowing smoke up your butt but that I really do feel though that with the

00:02:48 ◼   ► initial Twitterrific for iPhone you really well actually I think it probably goes back

00:02:56 ◼   ► to the one for the Mac actually because that was the first version of Twitterrific was

00:03:00 ◼   ► the Mac only client and I think that you really really simplified and focused on what a minimal

00:03:10 ◼   ► incoming stream of information from Twitter could be presented as.

00:03:15 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Which I think was very different than what you were getting at the time from twitter.com on the web.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And like you said, I definitely think that, certainly for you, but I would say you guys are emblematic of the client developer community as a whole, that it's been a symbiotic relationship.

00:03:34 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. And the API guidelines that they announced, what was it, last week, everybody's

00:03:46 ◼   ► going to be fine in the short term. Tweetbot, I've talked to Paul Haddad, and Tweetbot's

00:03:52 ◼   ► going to, they're fine, we're fine, in the short term. In fact, this is the thing that

00:03:58 ◼   ► I pointed out the last time. Nobody needs to worry about their favorite third-party

00:04:03 ◼   ► Twitter client for now. Keyword there is "for now." They've built a fence around us.

00:04:12 ◼   ► We can't grow beyond a certain amount. Luckily, that amount is fairly large right now. I think

00:04:21 ◼   ► that they thought very long and hard about how that fence should be constructed. But

00:04:29 ◼   ► regardless, there is a fence there now.

00:04:31 ◼   ► It's a very weird restriction. And the more I think about it, the more weird I find that,

00:04:38 ◼   ► because I can't think of any other platform where the platform owner—and again, I don't

00:04:45 ◼   ► want to be accused of hypocrisy for saying that Twitter shouldn't wield any control

00:04:49 ◼   ► over their thing, yet I accept that Apple wields significant control over the App Store.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And I don't think I'm being hypocritical about this, because I at least understand

00:04:59 ◼   ► Apple's motivations for the control that they wield. I don't understand what Twitter's

00:05:03 ◼   ► trying to do here. And with the limit, I guess on one, I guess the idea with the limit is

00:05:08 ◼   ► if they put a limit on it, no single client could ever grow so large that it would rival

00:05:14 ◼   ► Twitter itself.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Yeah, that, that to me is, it's, it's, the restrictions are based upon fear. They fear

00:05:25 ◼   ► something becoming—you know, right now, the third-party clients are a small percentage

00:05:29 ◼   ► of Twitter.

00:05:33 ◼   ► The average person goes and gets the Twitter-branded client.

00:05:39 ◼   ► They're happy with it.

00:05:40 ◼   ► Everything's great.

00:05:41 ◼   ► Or they use the website.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Again, that's fine as far as Twitter's concerned.

00:05:46 ◼   ► It's only the power users and the people who have been using Twitter a long time that

00:05:53 ◼   ► really even know that the third-party clients exist and why they want them.

00:05:58 ◼   ► But it's pretty clear to me that the promoted tweets are going to be a part of this

00:06:08 ◼   ► 1.1 API. They're going to be ads that start showing up in the timelines.

00:06:18 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure Twitter's fear is that that small percentage now could turn into a pretty

00:06:25 ◼   ► huge percentage if people start getting aggressive with the promoted tweets and people start

00:06:31 ◼   ► getting pissed off.

00:06:32 ◼   ► They're going to be, "I don't want this crap.

00:06:34 ◼   ► I'm going to go get a tweet bot or a Twitterrific."

00:06:40 ◼   ► My thought on that is that—and this to me would be a perfectly reasonable restriction.

00:06:44 ◼   ► To me, it would be if they said, "Look, we're going to have these promoted tweets," and

00:06:48 ◼   ► you have to show them.

00:06:50 ◼   ► Even if your Twitter client has a filter feature where you can put keywords in that filter

00:06:54 ◼   ► out tweets or you can – I know some clients have a blackout button where you can say,

00:07:01 ◼   ► "Oh, God, group is going on about a Yankees game.

00:07:03 ◼   ► Black them out for 12 hours," and then it doesn't show tweets from me for 12 hours.

00:07:07 ◼   ► Then all of a sudden, you wake up in the morning and my tweets are back.

00:07:10 ◼   ► You don't have to remember to turn it off.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Cool features like that.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Very useful.

00:07:13 ◼   ► However, but I would just say that the rule would be if it's a promoted tweet, if the

00:07:18 ◼   ► tweet comes in with this promoted tweet metadata, you have to show it regardless of, you know,

00:07:23 ◼   ► filters or features or stuff like that.

00:07:25 ◼   ► And to me, I know some people would still complain about that because you cannot please

00:07:29 ◼   ► – there's some people who really want to block ads, hell or high water.

00:07:33 ◼   ► But to me, it would be – but to me, that would be perfectly reasonable.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Eric Lander Yeah, well, the problem then is how far do

00:07:39 ◼   ► you go with those, you must do this.

00:07:41 ◼   ► I mean, what happens if cards come out?

00:07:43 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:45 ◼   ► And the cards are there.

00:07:46 ◼   ► That's a good problem.

00:07:47 ◼   ► Are there things with the partners, right?

00:07:48 ◼   ► And the partners, you know, some companies, you know, paid to have a card on Twitter, right?

00:07:54 ◼   ► They want you to see it.

00:07:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And I read that.

00:07:58 ◼   ► And then it's like, then it's like, "Oh, crap.

00:07:59 ◼   ► You know, I don't want to add cards.

00:08:00 ◼   ► You know, I don't really care about that."

00:08:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:08:03 ◼   ► Well, and that really gets to the heart of my fear about the future of Twitter because

00:08:07 ◼   ► I, one of the things I love about Twitter is because it's succinct and it forces everybody

00:08:12 ◼   ► to be succinct. To put it another way, it always feels like at least a bit of a chore

00:08:17 ◼   ► to read my email and it never feels like a chore to go through my Twitter.

00:08:21 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah.

00:08:21 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** And the busier I am or the longer it's been since I've checked, maybe the faster

00:08:25 ◼   ► I scroll and the more I'm skimming, but I'm at least looking at everything. And because

00:08:29 ◼   ► everything's there, that's what I worry about cards ruining because a card in there, all of

00:08:34 ◼   ► a sudden, like one tweet is the height of the screen. Like on the phone, at least.

00:08:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know what the user interaction is going to be there.

00:08:47 ◼   ► It's weird because it's taking that small, efficient piece of communication and blowing

00:08:58 ◼   ► it up, right?

00:09:00 ◼   ► And blowing it up has many different connotations, right?

00:09:03 ◼   ► Making it bigger, making it…

00:09:05 ◼   ► Well, and it's making a very, very, a very decided opinion about what the tweet should

00:09:14 ◼   ► look like.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Whereas I think that part of the reason Twitter has been such an innovative playground for

00:09:21 ◼   ► user interfaces is that there, it's really just been, look, it's 140 characters of text

00:09:28 ◼   ► and a name.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:30 ◼   ► And, and, and if you want, if you want the names avatar, you know, and

00:09:35 ◼   ► Do what you want with it.

00:09:37 ◼   ► So like for example, I mean all the mobile clients I'm aware of when they are aware

00:09:42 ◼   ► of the URL for like a twit pic or any of these picture hosting services, in the mobile, they

00:09:49 ◼   ► don't show the whole image by default because it would be too big.

00:09:53 ◼   ► I mean the screen is so small.

00:09:54 ◼   ► So they show a thumbnail and if you want to see it, you tap it and then it's another

00:09:58 ◼   ► view.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Like I just think on a mobile, boy, that's how cards should work is it should be something

00:10:04 ◼   ► It shouldn't be something that you put in the main timeline, but I think that's what

00:10:08 ◼   ► they want.

00:10:09 ◼   ► I'm not even sure.

00:10:10 ◼   ► Maybe by the letter of the law, that's what they're already demanding.

00:10:12 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Well, that's the big question right now,

00:10:15 ◼   ► is that they have the guidelines.

00:10:19 ◼   ► They've published guidelines, and they say that those are going to be requirements.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Well, there's obviously going to be some editing there.

00:10:28 ◼   ► They've been pretty open saying, "Well, okay, some of the stuff is we're still trying

00:10:33 ◼   ► to figure it out, or yeah, it wasn't worded quite right, or maybe this wording is oriented

00:10:39 ◼   ► towards people who are doing tweets in line on a website versus people that are doing

00:10:44 ◼   ► tweets in a native app.

00:10:48 ◼   ► There's obviously going to be a lot of work there on their end to turn those guidelines

00:10:54 ◼   ► into requirements.

00:10:56 ◼   ► And I think that a lot of those requirements are going to be about what they feel is important

00:11:02 ◼   ► in the timeline, regardless of what third-party clients think is important to be in the timeline.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Right. With the user limit, and I think I mentioned this last week with Michael Lobb,

00:11:15 ◼   ► but I just keep thinking about it, is that it's such a weird constraint to put on developers.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And like I said, I can't think of anybody else who's done it. And even Apple, who I

00:11:25 ◼   ► think most people would hold up, is the company that's most willing to stress its relationship

00:11:32 ◼   ► with developers in the name of maintaining its own control over its platform doesn't

00:11:37 ◼   ► place limits on how successful you can be.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And that includes – and you say, well, that's because they're taking 30 percent.

00:11:48 ◼   ► But that also includes free apps.

00:11:50 ◼   ► And here's to me a perfect example of that is the Amazon Kindle app, which is free download.

00:11:56 ◼   ► So Apple doesn't make any money.

00:11:57 ◼   ► If anything, Apple loses money because they're paying the bandwidth for the downloads of

00:12:02 ◼   ► the Kindle app. And the more people who download that to iPhones and iPads, the stronger the

00:12:09 ◼   ► Kindle rival to Apple's own iBooks platform gets, yet there's no limit. It's not like,

00:12:17 ◼   ► well, you can have 500,000 downloads and then you've got to come to us and we're going to

00:12:22 ◼   ► have to talk. If every single iPhone user downloads the Kindle app, that's okay.

00:12:28 ◼   ► That's, I think that's one of the things that makes me saddest about this new fence

00:12:35 ◼   ► that we're dealing with is that it, there's never going to be another great third party

00:12:41 ◼   ► Twitter app, right?

00:12:44 ◼   ► Twitterific, Tweetie, Tweetbot, that's it.

00:12:47 ◼   ► You're done, right?

00:12:49 ◼   ► There's, you know, some guy can sit down and say, "Okay, I'm going to write this

00:12:53 ◼   ► awesome Twitter app."

00:12:55 ◼   ► He's never going to sell more than 100,000 copies of it.

00:12:57 ◼   ► That's just the bottom line.

00:13:00 ◼   ► That's what Twitter wants.

00:13:01 ◼   ► And the economics of the app store and the competitive situation in terms of what you

00:13:05 ◼   ► can get away with pricing your app at, it's just not that much money.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And somebody out there is going to say, "Well, if you charge four bucks, it's $400,000."

00:13:14 ◼   ► But the bottom line is that $400,000 is not a lot of money because as you are well aware

00:13:19 ◼   ► and are a prime example of, even if you could get it all in a year, if you could write the

00:13:25 ◼   ► and get 100,000 users in a year, which probably isn't going to happen. It's an ongoing relationship

00:13:31 ◼   ► as you evolve with Twitter and keep the app going. I mean, you've been working on some version

00:13:35 ◼   ► of Twitterific since like 2006?

00:13:39 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Seven, I think was the first version. But yeah,

00:13:42 ◼   ► it's been a while. So it's long enough not to remember when you started.

00:13:45 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein** Right. So the cap, the cap multiplied by the

00:13:49 ◼   ► pricing of apps is, you know, even if you think that, hey, 400, $500,000 is a lot of money,

00:13:55 ◼   ► It's really not, and especially since it's really, really hard for one guy to do it alone.

00:13:59 ◼   ► So you're already fighting.

00:14:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, you know, for a top shelf iOS app, you're spending $100,000 to $200,000

00:14:07 ◼   ► to build an app.

00:14:08 ◼   ► I mean, don't forget Apple's 30% cut.

00:14:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:11 ◼   ► I mean, it gets sliced up very quickly.

00:14:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why I say, there's—and you're absolutely right about it being the UI playground,

00:14:20 ◼   ► right?

00:14:21 ◼   ► it very exciting to build Twitter clients. In fact, the new version that we're working

00:14:26 ◼   ► on now has got some really great innovations in it. Things that people are going to see

00:14:32 ◼   ► and go, "Oh, we need to put that in our app," just like pull the refresh. Lauren put that

00:14:39 ◼   ► in and it's like, "Oh," started showing up everywhere.

00:14:42 ◼   ► Now it's in the OS.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Yeah. It behaves a little bit differently in the OS, but the concept and everything

00:14:50 ◼   ► is still there. And it's a good idea, right? And that would not have existed without Tweedy.

00:14:59 ◼   ► I also think, and again, and this one may not be, I pulled a refresh, I really was,

00:15:05 ◼   ► like that, Lauren invented that. But like the first app I can remember that had infinite scroll

00:15:12 ◼   ► was Buzz's, it's not the bird house, it's bird feet.

00:15:17 ◼   ► - The bird feet, yeah.

00:15:21 ◼   ► - Where you got to the bottom and the assumption was,

00:15:24 ◼   ► hey, you've scrolled to the bottom,

00:15:25 ◼   ► why don't I just show you more tweets,

00:15:27 ◼   ► older tweets from the timeline you're in right now.

00:15:30 ◼   ► And it was, you know, it was like magic.

00:15:33 ◼   ► It was like, I don't have to hit a little button.

00:15:35 ◼   ► I just scrolled to the bottom, it bounced,

00:15:37 ◼   ► and then, hey, they just faded in, 50 more tweets.

00:15:40 ◼   ► That was a great client.

00:15:47 ◼   ► For every great Twitter third-party app that succeeded, there have been a lot of other

00:15:52 ◼   ► great ones that haven't.

00:15:55 ◼   ► It's been a really interesting five, six years of Twitter clients, and a lot has happened

00:16:08 ◼   ► over that time.

00:16:10 ◼   ► And that's, again, that's what makes me sad, right?

00:16:13 ◼   ► That's going to stop happening.

00:16:16 ◼   ► So here's a quote that Lex had from an unnamed developer, a developer who did not want to

00:16:22 ◼   ► be named.

00:16:23 ◼   ► And I do not believe to be you.

00:16:24 ◼   ► And I hope it's not you because it's not you.

00:16:25 ◼   ► No, no, I was, that was one of the points of saying things, you know, as an attributed

00:16:31 ◼   ► quote, right?

00:16:32 ◼   ► It's like people aren't going to be guessing, "Oh, that guy's an asshole."

00:16:36 ◼   ► I'll say that though, but one thing I've learned over the years is that whenever you read an article that quotes some people

00:16:41 ◼   ► But has did not want to be mentioned also

00:16:44 ◼   ► Double-check in your mind if it makes sense that one of the people quoted might have said okay that said off the record

00:16:51 ◼   ► Because they've already spoken to the reporter

00:16:53 ◼   ► So I'm not saying it's common

00:16:55 ◼   ► But I'm saying it's more common than you might think that somebody who is quoted by name will also then say okay

00:17:01 ◼   ► That's it for the record. Do you want me to say something off?

00:17:04 ◼   ► the record.

00:17:05 ◼   ► You want some juice, yeah.

00:17:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:08 ◼   ► So I just want to double check.

00:17:10 ◼   ► I don't want to put you on the spot here.

00:17:11 ◼   ► No, no.

00:17:12 ◼   ► That was not me.

00:17:13 ◼   ► I don't want to go forward on that.

00:17:14 ◼   ► But he pointed out that Twitter left the door open for developers by saying that once they

00:17:17 ◼   ► hit the user caps, it's not – they don't say – and this is part of what really annoys

00:17:22 ◼   ► me about that message is they don't say – I would almost rather them say, "That's

00:17:25 ◼   ► it.

00:17:26 ◼   ► You're done.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Hit the bricks," or something.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Like, it was so vague because it could have been anything.

00:17:30 ◼   ► But they more or less said, "Once you hit the user limit, then you've got to come

00:17:33 ◼   ► Come talk to us.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Whenever somebody's being vague like that,

00:17:36 ◼   ► it's their way of saying no.

00:17:38 ◼   ► They're afraid to say no.

00:17:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:41 ◼   ► Well, my other thought, though, is maybe--

00:17:43 ◼   ► That's my take on it, right?

00:17:44 ◼   ► It's like, that's not going to happen.

00:17:46 ◼   ► My other thought, though, is that all they want to do

00:17:48 ◼   ► is evaluate, are you a threat?

00:17:51 ◼   ► Is there a revenue share thing?

00:17:55 ◼   ► You know, because-- and again, I don't have a Twitter client,

00:17:58 ◼   ► so it's a lot easier for me to say this

00:18:00 ◼   ► than you, who have a popular Twitter client,

00:18:02 ◼   ► might think about it. But to me, it might make some sense that if you hit your user

00:18:07 ◼   ► cap and you talk to Twitter, that they might – if you're selling, let's say, a $4

00:18:13 ◼   ► Twitter client, that they might say, "Okay, we want 10% of each sale," henceforth. So

00:18:19 ◼   ► you would – your next 100,000 users would cost a couple thousand dollars in fees to

00:18:28 ◼   ► Twitter.

00:18:29 ◼   ► - John, that's not what Twitter wants.

00:18:31 ◼   ► - I know.

00:18:32 ◼   ► - They don't want money from us.

00:18:33 ◼   ► They want money from advertisers, right?

00:18:35 ◼   ► And advertisers don't like hearing,

00:18:38 ◼   ► well, okay, there's some people out there

00:18:40 ◼   ► that don't see your ad because they've paid money.

00:18:42 ◼   ► - Right.

00:18:44 ◼   ► - Right, they want to reach every eyeball.

00:18:47 ◼   ► They want to force their message upon you.

00:18:50 ◼   ► - Right.

00:18:51 ◼   ► - And that's what's gonna happen.

00:18:52 ◼   ► - Right, because that's, and I guess that's what

00:18:55 ◼   ► I keep banging my head up against,

00:18:57 ◼   ► is that there's all sorts of ways for Twitter

00:19:00 ◼   ► to monetize the whole thing and what they already have

00:19:03 ◼   ► in a nice way that's profitable,

00:19:05 ◼   ► but that there's very, very few ways

00:19:10 ◼   ► that they can monetize this whole thing

00:19:11 ◼   ► in a way where they become like

00:19:14 ◼   ► a hundred billion dollar valuation

00:19:17 ◼   ► standalone mega corporation.

00:19:19 ◼   ► - Another Google. - Another Google.

00:19:21 ◼   ► - Or Facebook or whatever.

00:19:23 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:19:26 ◼   ► I would bet, I don't know this to be a fact, but I would bet that there is a huge internal

00:19:33 ◼   ► debate at Twitter between the developers and the business people.

00:19:43 ◼   ► The developers see the value in that openness, in that letting the information flow.

00:19:50 ◼   ► And yeah, you could make some money off of that flow of information.

00:19:55 ◼   ► I mean, that's totally monetizable.

00:19:57 ◼   ► They see the benefits and the dangers, I think.

00:19:59 ◼   ► I think they see both sides,

00:20:01 ◼   ► that once you start closing this stuff off and say,

00:20:04 ◼   ► we don't need innovation from the outside

00:20:06 ◼   ► and stuff like that, that man, you can really get,

00:20:09 ◼   ► that's how you get blindsided by somebody else.

00:20:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and the suits, the business people,

00:20:17 ◼   ► look, that's the whole advertising

00:20:22 ◼   ► is a very predictable thing, right?

00:20:24 ◼   ► Business people like predictability.

00:20:28 ◼   ► It's a proven thing, right?

00:20:30 ◼   ► Look at Facebook has done it, Google's done it.

00:20:33 ◼   ► You have a popular channel, you can make money

00:20:37 ◼   ► off of the people that watch that channel.

00:20:41 ◼   ► So it's that simple.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Have I ever told you the story about how tweet came about,

00:20:48 ◼   ► the word tweet?

00:20:49 ◼   ► - I don't think you did.

00:20:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's...

00:20:53 ◼   ► The first version of Twitterific, which we—I basically built the first version of Twitterific

00:21:00 ◼   ► in a day, got it to a working state, enough functionality to show to a designer kind of

00:21:08 ◼   ► thing.

00:21:10 ◼   ► They loved it.

00:21:11 ◼   ► We all immediately started using it internally.

00:21:16 ◼   ► I then had a problem on the menus.

00:21:19 ◼   ► It's like I needed to come up with a noun

00:21:23 ◼   ► for what you were doing with these things.

00:21:25 ◼   ► - A noun or a verb?

00:21:27 ◼   ► - A noun, right?

00:21:28 ◼   ► Because you could select something in that timeline

00:21:32 ◼   ► and then what do you do with that selection?

00:21:34 ◼   ► That selection needed a name.

00:21:36 ◼   ► So I started calling them twits.

00:21:38 ◼   ► It was just like just top of the head kind of thing.

00:21:41 ◼   ► And it kind of stuck but nobody liked it.

00:21:46 ◼   ► Nobody at all.

00:21:47 ◼   ► It was just like, "Oh, God, that's kind of demeaning."

00:21:50 ◼   ► Well, because in US English, it's synonymous with a dimwit.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:21:58 ◼   ► And we had a very, again, back to the symbiotic relationship with Twitter.

00:22:05 ◼   ► No offense to Leo Laporte.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Well, yeah, that was another consideration, right?

00:22:12 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, Leo's already using Twit.

00:22:14 ◼   ► I don't want to go there.

00:22:16 ◼   ► So back to the symbiotic relationship with Twitter,

00:22:22 ◼   ► they were using this beta version of Twitter.

00:22:26 ◼   ► They loved it as much as we did.

00:22:28 ◼   ► It was pretty obvious having this thing on your desktop

00:22:31 ◼   ► was a good thing.

00:22:33 ◼   ► And they didn't like Twit either.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And they realized that there was a problem there.

00:22:38 ◼   ► And one of their API engineers, a guy named Blaine Cook,

00:22:44 ◼   ► He said, "David Lanham had done the bird icon."

00:22:48 ◼   ► We had the bird, everybody loved the bird, that was great.

00:22:53 ◼   ► He says, "You got the bird, why don't you call them tweets?"

00:22:56 ◼   ► I was like, "Ahh!"

00:22:59 ◼   ► Problem solved.

00:23:01 ◼   ► And in fact, the first version, I had to go through all the UI and change everything and

00:23:11 ◼   ► basically do a search and replace for Twit to Tweet, and we released it and it's like,

00:23:19 ◼   ► "Okay, they're going to be called tweets from now on."

00:23:22 ◼   ► In fact, the version 101, there were some tool tips that I had missed that, in fact,

00:23:27 ◼   ► in the release notes, it says, "Remove the remaining Twits."

00:23:32 ◼   ► And again, that was just, it's the perfect example of how a third party and Twitter can

00:23:40 ◼   ► work together to make something meaningful.

00:23:44 ◼   ► It's funny that the bird came first and yet tweet didn't jump out at you.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:50 ◼   ► In retrospect, it's like, "What were we thinking?"

00:23:52 ◼   ► I think it's because you were too close to it.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I think that once your guys get too close to something like that and the bird, you're

00:23:58 ◼   ► already comfortable with the bird.

00:23:59 ◼   ► You don't even see it.

00:24:01 ◼   ► And we'd seen tweet before we had the bird, right?

00:24:05 ◼   ► preceded the bird so it was like we're kind of locked in with twit and it was

00:24:09 ◼   ► You know again somebody with a little bit of distance from the project can make a better

00:24:14 ◼   ► Decision about it a lot of times than the people that are just right in there, and that's all they see

00:24:18 ◼   ► so

00:24:22 ◼   ► So what do you think you think?

00:24:24 ◼   ► You're thinking near term. We don't need to worry that it's not yeah

00:24:28 ◼   ► Yeah, the end the end is not not the but the end might be on there. Yeah tap bots

00:24:35 ◼   ► blog post title was perfect, right?

00:24:37 ◼   ► Don't panic.

00:24:39 ◼   ► There's no reason to panic.

00:24:42 ◼   ► But yeah, long term, don't expect there

00:24:45 ◼   ► to be Twitter clients.

00:24:47 ◼   ► And if you've got one, if you've

00:24:50 ◼   ► got a user token for Twitterific or for Tweetbot,

00:24:54 ◼   ► you're fine.

00:24:56 ◼   ► Don't go and delete it.

00:24:59 ◼   ► Don't go into your app settings on the Twitter homepage

00:25:03 ◼   ► and delete that because you're losing your place in line.

00:25:09 ◼   ► But as long as you've got the authentication token,

00:25:12 ◼   ► you can use that product as long as it exists.

00:25:16 ◼   ► And it is a different story for apps like Twitterific and

00:25:21 ◼   ► Tweetbot that are already successful and presumably

00:25:27 ◼   ► over the 100,000 limit, where you get double what you've

00:25:31 ◼   ► already got ahead of you before you run into the "you gotta come talk to us" you

00:25:37 ◼   ► know close yeah close the door come on in and close the door back to back to

00:25:42 ◼   ► the fence right the fence is a long ways away which is a big tap odds and whoever

00:25:46 ◼   ► else but the echo phone which is a big big difference from the poor guys out

00:25:50 ◼   ► there who just have this idea that's like sketched out on paper yeah that

00:25:56 ◼   ► they haven't that they know is an awesome idea but they haven't started

00:25:58 ◼   ► And now they're looking at that hard-core, hard-coded permanent limit of 100,000.

00:26:03 ◼   ► Yeah, hearing that they were shutting, that they were just going to take the, you know, build that fence.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Can you hear my dog barking there?

00:26:16 ◼   ► Ah, that's, ah, yes.

00:26:17 ◼   ► Okay.

00:26:20 ◼   ► We love dogs.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Sippy's first post kind of put the fear in our hearts that they were going to shut down

00:26:30 ◼   ► the API.

00:26:31 ◼   ► I think it was on the table.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was too.

00:26:40 ◼   ► We've been working on this new version of Twitterific for the last six months.

00:26:43 ◼   ► We were seriously thinking, "Okay, what are we going to do if they totally shut it down?

00:26:48 ◼   ► What's our exit plan here?"

00:26:52 ◼   ► So hearing that they're letting the established players stay around, that's great news for

00:26:59 ◼   ► us.

00:27:00 ◼   ► I'm sure the guys at Tapbots are thinking the same thing.

00:27:05 ◼   ► I think they're going to have a problem with the Mac client.

00:27:10 ◼   ► There aren't a lot of user tokens that they've accumulated from the beta of that.

00:27:16 ◼   ► How are they going to get more?

00:27:17 ◼   ► Have they said when that applies?

00:27:18 ◼   ► It applies when they do the switchover to the version 1.1 of the AP.

00:27:22 ◼   ► That's the date when the count starts.

00:27:26 ◼   ► I don't – that's one of the vague points.

00:27:29 ◼   ► I don't – I presume it's when they –

00:27:31 ◼   ► I think it's as of the announcement.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Oh.

00:27:35 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:37 ◼   ► I thought maybe it was as of the endpoint switchover to the 1.1 APIs.

00:27:42 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:27:43 ◼   ► It wasn't clear.

00:27:44 ◼   ► You had another one that wasn't clear in that message.

00:27:48 ◼   ► the tweetbot for the Mac may be the first client to run into this problem. In fact,

00:27:59 ◼   ► I suspect it will be. And again, that shows the problem. It's a great piece of software

00:28:08 ◼   ► that they're not going to be able to sell.

00:28:10 ◼   ► One of the ways I feel like Twitter could tweak this, and in a very Apple-like way,

00:28:15 ◼   ► in a way that Apple has not really made any major changes to the App Store.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Fundamentally, it is exactly what they announced it as, but that they've made a slew of minor

00:28:25 ◼   ► course adjustments here and there, you know, with the – oh, so for example, like one

00:28:30 ◼   ► perfect example that was real frustrating early on in the App Store was that whole rule

00:28:34 ◼   ► against duplicating built-in behavior.

00:28:36 ◼   ► And so they were saying, "What?

00:28:37 ◼   ► No calendar apps?"

00:28:39 ◼   ► Because the phone has a built-in calendar app?

00:28:42 ◼   ► know all of these guys have ideas for calendar UIs that are nothing like the

00:28:46 ◼   ► Apple one and the whole reason I do it is they're frustrated and then Apple

00:28:49 ◼   ► backed away from there and they were like that's like all right that never

00:28:51 ◼   ► happened you can put calendar apps in now they may not let you they still

00:28:55 ◼   ► don't let you switch the default calendar system wide you know and they

00:28:59 ◼   ► can't do famous like with Sparrow you can't set a default email client you

00:29:03 ◼   ► can't set Chrome as your default browser but at least you're allowed to put it in

00:29:06 ◼   ► which was a course correction so one way that I feel like Twitter could course

00:29:10 ◼   ► correct on this would be to raise that limit a little bit. Like 100,000.

00:29:13 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, loosen the reins.

00:29:15 ◼   ► **

00:29:17 ◼   ► **

00:29:17 ◼   ► And I know that for some people out there, it's like, "Man, 100,000 users in my app

00:29:22 ◼   ► would be fantastic."

00:29:23 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of things, you're selling $2 apps or something like that.

00:29:27 ◼   ► It is not that much.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And conversely, 100,000 users to Twitter is nothing.

00:29:33 ◼   ► John: Exactly.

00:29:34 ◼   ► That's like the number of signups in a day.

00:29:37 ◼   ► Steven: Right.

00:29:38 ◼   ► And so that's what I think is that trying to think this through logically and just in

00:29:42 ◼   ► the benefits of everybody, I do understand that Twitter doesn't want to let any individual

00:29:47 ◼   ► client grow so large that it could threaten, you know, like there was that

00:29:52 ◼   ► that thing last year where that one company bought a bunch of Twitter

00:29:54 ◼   ► clients that accounted for like 40% Twitter client usage and then they

00:29:58 ◼   ► started talking about, "Hey, we're gonna build our own Twitter-like service and

00:30:02 ◼   ► let all the users of our apps sign up for that too." I think I think that had a

00:30:07 ◼   ► lot to do with current policies. Yes, I really did. You know, I talked earlier

00:30:12 ◼   ► earlier about fear. That's when the fear began. It's like, Oh, crap. Come out, come along and

00:30:19 ◼   ► broadside us, you know, that's our exposure,

00:30:22 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin set set that number at a number that that was

00:30:27 ◼   ► is a feasible competitive threat to Twitter, which is a lot higher than 100,000. And you

00:30:31 ◼   ► could even codify it in the guidelines that it that the number is is all user tokens that

00:30:39 ◼   ► are owned by the same company. So that if one company went out and bought 10 clients

00:30:45 ◼   ► that each had 200,000 users, that the company's count would be a million. And then you got

00:30:52 ◼   ► to come talk to Twitter or something like that. But anyway, I feel like that's one thing

00:30:56 ◼   ► that they could do that could really keep the innovation flowing without threatening

00:31:02 ◼   ► Twitter itself.

00:31:04 ◼   ► I think there are a lot of things that they could do, right?

00:31:11 ◼   ► But they've chosen this path.

00:31:14 ◼   ► And you know, it's their network.

00:31:18 ◼   ► They built it.

00:31:19 ◼   ► It's their product.

00:31:20 ◼   ► It's their company.

00:31:21 ◼   ► You know, they can do whatever the hell they want with it.

00:31:24 ◼   ► I don't necessarily think what they're doing right now is in my best interest or in your

00:31:36 ◼   ► best interest, but it may be in their best interest.

00:31:41 ◼   ► And it's their prerogative to do that.

00:31:49 ◼   ► We've always played the game by their rules.

00:31:53 ◼   ► They specify the API.

00:31:54 ◼   ► They specify who gets access.

00:31:58 ◼   ► They specify how you're going to display stuff.

00:32:01 ◼   ► In that case, that's the same way

00:32:09 ◼   ► that it is with Apple and the App Store.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And that's where the parallel rings true.

00:32:15 ◼   ► Now, yeah, there are a lot of other things

00:32:20 ◼   ► where those two aren't the same.

00:32:23 ◼   ► But I don't know.

00:32:27 ◼   ► Bottom line--

00:32:27 ◼   ► It's going to be interesting to watch it play out.

00:32:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's going to be interesting to watch

00:32:31 ◼   ► it play out.

00:32:34 ◼   ► For me, the known entities right now are that Twitter clients

00:32:37 ◼   ► are by third party.

00:32:40 ◼   ► The things that show the timeline

00:32:42 ◼   ► on your mobile, your laptop, wherever,

00:32:47 ◼   ► are eventually going to die out.

00:32:51 ◼   ► On that happy note, let's take a break for our first sponsor

00:32:55 ◼   ► here.

00:32:56 ◼   ► I want to tell you about a great app, app/service, really,

00:33:01 ◼   ► called AppsFire.

00:33:03 ◼   ► They've sponsored the talk show long before--

00:33:06 ◼   ► well, not too long before earlier in the year,

00:33:08 ◼   ► but they're back.

00:33:10 ◼   ► Here's the bottom line.

00:33:11 ◼   ► The problem they're trying to solve

00:33:12 ◼   ► is that in Apple's App Store, it's really, really difficult

00:33:15 ◼   ► find the best apps. And everybody who does this, if you look at the top list, you know

00:33:22 ◼   ► that the top lists do not correspond to the best apps.

00:33:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:33:26 ◼   ► Right. I mean, everybody knows this, right?

00:33:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:29 ◼   ► And so in their notes...

00:33:30 ◼   ► Quality does not equal quality.

00:33:34 ◼   ► I think in their list, right now, they're saying of apps that don't show up in the top

00:33:38 ◼   ► rankings include the Mule Radio app, Instapaper, and Coda. Now, in what world should those

00:33:43 ◼   ► those apps not be in the top quality apps.

00:33:46 ◼   ► So that's what Appsfire does, is they've

00:33:48 ◼   ► built a great user experience to help users find apps.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Not just apps in general, but the best apps.

00:33:55 ◼   ► And what they've done is they've built a thing.

00:33:57 ◼   ► They have a thing that they call the App Score.

00:33:59 ◼   ► And they're equivalent in app terminology

00:34:02 ◼   ► to what Rotten Tomatoes does for movies.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And it's a daily rank of tens of dozens, I guess,

00:34:12 ◼   ► of quality parameters on apps all over the App Store

00:34:18 ◼   ► and from various review sites outside the App Store that

00:34:22 ◼   ► give rankings and they filter the stuffs

00:34:24 ◼   ► to get the low quality junk out there.

00:34:26 ◼   ► So even if something's popular, but if it's

00:34:28 ◼   ► getting poorly reviewed outside the App Store,

00:34:31 ◼   ► that's what the App Store can identify.

00:34:33 ◼   ► So you're not just-- the way that the App Store works

00:34:35 ◼   ► is like if you just pick your movies based on box scores.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Well, everybody went to see this movie,

00:34:40 ◼   ► so that's what I'll go see. As opposed to Rotten Tomatoes, which says, "Look, Robert

00:34:43 ◼   ► J. Ebert said this thing stunk. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone said that he fell asleep

00:34:47 ◼   ► during the movie. You don't want to see this movie."

00:34:50 ◼   ► Yeah. That's my contention all along, is that we need to know apps. There needs to

00:34:58 ◼   ► be something about that where trusted sources say this is a good app, not Johnny 6969 on

00:35:07 ◼   ► on the App Store, Sam.

00:35:09 ◼   ► How did you know--

00:35:10 ◼   ► This sucks.

00:35:11 ◼   ► How did you know my Apple ID?

00:35:13 ◼   ► I'm sorry, John.

00:35:15 ◼   ► It's out there.

00:35:16 ◼   ► I didn't mean to--

00:35:17 ◼   ► AppSpire, they surface the test apps.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Can you edit that out?

00:35:21 ◼   ► We'll take that out.

00:35:22 ◼   ► OK, go right out of there.

00:35:23 ◼   ► And they add in the rich data.

00:35:25 ◼   ► They add in the stuff like YouTube videos or Vimeo

00:35:28 ◼   ► and videos, screenshots, and stuff like that.

00:35:30 ◼   ► So you can check out the app.

00:35:31 ◼   ► You can see it for yourself.

00:35:34 ◼   ► You can personalize the app to see just the type of apps

00:35:37 ◼   ► you prefer. If all you want to see are games, you can just set it up so that it all you want to all

00:35:42 ◼   ► it's going to show you are the best games. And it's a free app. And it's universal. You get it

00:35:49 ◼   ► for the iPad, you get it for the iPhone. It is retina ready on both. Can't say enough good things

00:35:56 ◼   ► about this. So here's what you do. You can go to you got two options here. You can go to apps fire

00:36:02 ◼   ► dot com a p p s fire dot com

00:36:06 ◼   ► I or just go to the app store and search for apps fire

00:36:09 ◼   ► and it'll be the first hit you get right up there I just wrote that down

00:36:13 ◼   ► sounds like a good thing

00:36:16 ◼   ► really good

00:36:20 ◼   ► I here's another situation with the Twitter client the twin now this is a

00:36:23 ◼   ► little bit outside your wheelhouse

00:36:24 ◼   ► I is the way and it does seem like where the rubber is first hitting the road on

00:36:29 ◼   ► these changes

00:36:30 ◼   ► is with Twitter's interaction with other networks, right?

00:36:35 ◼   ► So first they yanked Instagram out

00:36:38 ◼   ► and everybody sort of raised an eyebrow.

00:36:41 ◼   ► In other words, what you could do with Instagram

00:36:43 ◼   ► is you could say, hey, plug in your Twitter credentials

00:36:46 ◼   ► and it will go through and say, look,

00:36:48 ◼   ► here's all of your people you know,

00:36:52 ◼   ► your friends on Twitter who are also on Instagram.

00:36:54 ◼   ► Do you wanna follow them?

00:36:55 ◼   ► And I have to say, I used that 'cause I don't use Facebook

00:36:59 ◼   ► so I couldn't use Facebook for that.

00:37:01 ◼   ► I did that when I, it made Instagram,

00:37:03 ◼   ► it maybe made the difference to me from at the beginning

00:37:06 ◼   ► of whether Instagram was something that stuck with me or not

00:37:08 ◼   ► because I found, you know, I don't know,

00:37:12 ◼   ► a dozen, two dozen friends.

00:37:15 ◼   ► - It bootstraps you.

00:37:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, and all of a sudden I'm seeing pictures

00:37:18 ◼   ► from people who I'm personal friends with in Instagram

00:37:21 ◼   ► and I didn't have to hunt through and take a guess

00:37:24 ◼   ► what their names are and stuff like that.

00:37:26 ◼   ► And the truth is, you just don't think,

00:37:29 ◼   ► You know, like, if you just start trying to do it from memory, you just forget.

00:37:33 ◼   ► I mean, I forgot good, like, with—and we can get to this later in the show and talk

00:37:37 ◼   ► about app.net a little bit—but, like, with trying to get started on app.net, it's like—I

00:37:42 ◼   ► mean, some of my very best friends, I just forgot to look for them.

00:37:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:46 ◼   ► Like, Paul Kofosits was like, "Hey, dude, why don't you follow me there?"

00:37:49 ◼   ► And it's like, he's one of my best friends.

00:37:51 ◼   ► And I was like, "Uh, I thought I was."

00:37:53 ◼   ► And I looked, and I'm like, "Oh."

00:37:54 ◼   ► I mean, because I just didn't know.

00:37:56 ◼   ► Whereas if I had like a thing that just said, "Hey, here's all of your friends from Twitter

00:38:00 ◼   ► who are on this service.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Do you want to follow them here too?"

00:38:02 ◼   ► And then follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, and they're all in.

00:38:07 ◼   ► So they yanked it from Instagram and everybody thought, "Well, we know that they and Facebook

00:38:12 ◼   ► hate each other and they're rivals and there's some bad blood because Facebook kind of crapped

00:38:16 ◼   ► all over Twitter a while ago with another similar type feature.

00:38:20 ◼   ► So let's just chalk this up.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Let's be optimistic and chalk it up to a Facebook/Twitter type thing.

00:38:27 ◼   ► But now yesterday when they did it to Tumblr, I mean, that's just like, to me it's like

00:38:33 ◼   ► beyond the pale because…

00:38:34 ◼   ► I don't understand it at all.

00:38:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:38 ◼   ► It's just, it's like, how is knowing who I follow a competitive advantage?

00:38:48 ◼   ► Well and the other thing…

00:38:49 ◼   ► I just don't get it.

00:38:50 ◼   ► Tumblr's response and I give them credit for it because I think that their public response to this was in very plain language

00:38:57 ◼   ► And and you know that I should actually quote it because it was so well said I thought it wasn't mealy-mouthed

00:39:03 ◼   ► It wasn't whiny but it was just we don't get it. I mean we're disappointed because

00:39:08 ◼   ► We're contributing to Twitter. We've made it easy for people who as they tumble to auto tweet their Tumblr

00:39:16 ◼   ► You know that hey, I've got a new thing here. They're adding content to Twitter. They're not just pulling

00:39:22 ◼   ► information in one direction from the Twitter

00:39:25 ◼   ► Quote-unquote. I hate the term social graph. I

00:39:29 ◼   ► Do hate to use it, but I think in this sense

00:39:32 ◼   ► It really there's it really is what what people are talking about this connection of who you know

00:39:37 ◼   ► but they were contributing like tweets tweet content is

00:39:43 ◼   ► Constantly streaming into Twitter from people using tumblr it is absolutely like you used the word before and I don't hesitate to use it

00:39:50 ◼   ► At all I thought it was a very healthy symbiotic relationship

00:39:54 ◼   ► Right where Twitter our tumblr is not a Twitter competitor at all right. It's to me

00:40:00 ◼   ► It's almost a picture a picture a dictionary example of what a symbiotic relationship was where tumblr users are writing content

00:40:09 ◼   ► that gets

00:40:11 ◼   ► tweeted when it's completed and then people see it on Twitter and click the URL and go to tumblr

00:40:17 ◼   ► I can only met I know what my refers look like and I know that I've said this before

00:40:22 ◼   ► My referral listings are turning in to more and more they're more and more useless because it's just they're all just they're all

00:40:30 ◼   ► Tico leaks it's all

00:40:32 ◼   ► Speaking of alternate monetization schemes. Would you pay to know where those TCO links came from? Oh, I would pay I would

00:40:39 ◼   ► I would –

00:40:40 ◼   ► Here's a check for $1,000.

00:40:41 ◼   ► You know?

00:40:42 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:40:44 ◼   ► It would be better than Google Analytics to me because they could do it in real time.

00:40:48 ◼   ► It would absolutely be interesting.

00:40:50 ◼   ► And if they could correlate that with – oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:40:57 ◼   ► There's a goldmine of information there.

00:40:58 ◼   ► It's actually – like I said, because I use Sean Inman's Mint and it's still great

00:41:03 ◼   ► for tracking other stuff too as a daily thing. I have Google Analytics hooked up, which is

00:41:12 ◼   ► interesting for other stuff. I had a potential sponsor the other day who just wanted to know.

00:41:16 ◼   ► He had an app that is just for people who live in Chicago. And he wanted to know, "I don't think

00:41:22 ◼   ► it's a great idea, but just wondering how many readers do you have in Chicago?" And I thought,

00:41:26 ◼   ► "I have no idea." Ends up 1.8% of Daring Fireball readers live in greater Chicago area. I had no

00:41:32 ◼   ► idea. Google Analytics gave me that and that's just really, really useful. I think the information

00:41:37 ◼   ► that Twitter could give me from the Tico links would be great. It would probably become my

00:41:43 ◼   ► go-to source for checking on how the site's doing on a daily basis.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Do you think advertisers are getting that information?

00:41:51 ◼   ► I don't know if they are yet.

00:41:52 ◼   ► I think that's going to be a part of the deal.

00:41:54 ◼   ► I don't know if they are yet, but there has to be. It has to be part of the deal. There's

00:41:59 ◼   ► There's no other reason why they even went the TCO route.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:42:04 ◼   ► I mean, there is a safety issue there, right?

00:42:08 ◼   ► They can shut down a malicious link.

00:42:10 ◼   ► But how many malicious links are there really?

00:42:16 ◼   ► I know you're not going to post a malicious link.

00:42:20 ◼   ► People know I'm not going to post a malicious link, other than maybe a Rick Roll.

00:42:24 ◼   ► But it really is about the analytics angle.

00:42:29 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely. And the analytics, it should be if they play their cards right. I mean,

00:42:34 ◼   ► they've got the winning hand. If they don't monetize the analytics from Tico right, then

00:42:40 ◼   ► it'll be like a case study in the future for how to botch an opportunity. It really will.

00:42:47 ◼   ► It's like new coke.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Right. You're sitting there with four aces in your hand, and everybody is starting to

00:42:55 ◼   ► bet. I mean, you can't lose unless you're an idiot.

00:42:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:59 ◼   ► So, yeah, I'd agree with that.

00:43:03 ◼   ► Here's the comment from Tumblr.

00:43:07 ◼   ► "To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users' ability to find Twitter friends on Tumblr.

00:43:12 ◼   ► Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting.

00:43:17 ◼   ► Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets,

00:43:21 ◼   ► and we eagerly enabled Twitter cards across 70 million blogs

00:43:25 ◼   ► and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter's first partners.

00:43:30 ◼   ► While we're delighted by the response to our integrations with Facebook and Gmail, we are

00:43:34 ◼   ► truly disappointed by Twitter's decision."

00:43:36 ◼   ► That's a great statement.

00:43:37 ◼   ► I have to – hats off to Tumblr for just calling it as they see it.

00:43:40 ◼   ► It's not angry?

00:43:41 ◼   ► And it's not angry?

00:43:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:43:43 ◼   ► Yeah, clear and concise.

00:43:44 ◼   ► Yeah, clear, concise, and honest.

00:43:45 ◼   ► And admitting, "Look, this is their call.

00:43:50 ◼   ► We're not going to pretend like this is some kind of mutual agreement."

00:43:53 ◼   ► They yanked it out on us.

00:43:54 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you know, it's not knowing what Twitter's thinking, right?

00:44:07 ◼   ► You mentioned Apple.

00:44:09 ◼   ► Apple has restrictions, but you can understand why those restrictions exist.

00:44:13 ◼   ► They're protecting Apple's own interests and they're predicting Apple's customers' interests.

00:44:20 ◼   ► That's the bottom line for 99 percent of what Apple does.

00:44:24 ◼   ► Twitter, I'm not – okay, other than the advertisers are more important to us than

00:44:31 ◼   ► the users of our network.

00:44:37 ◼   ► Other than that, I just don't get things like this.

00:44:41 ◼   ► I really don't.

00:44:43 ◼   ► So anyway, we've got app.net.

00:44:49 ◼   ► had some smart stuff there. I don't want to spend too long on it. And I don't want to

00:44:54 ◼   ► create the impression that by me having linked to it and helped them meet their fundraising

00:45:00 ◼   ► goal and talking about it, that I'm banking on app.net or I'm switching to app.net or

00:45:06 ◼   ► that I think that even if somebody is going to come up with a rival to platform, that

00:45:10 ◼   ► it is app.net. But I do think that they picked the right time to try something like this.

00:45:15 ◼   ► And the right approach right in the right approach

00:45:18 ◼   ► But you've been talking on on app.net about

00:45:23 ◼   ► some of the naming problems they have just obvious things like the fact that they don't have a

00:45:28 ◼   ► Word like tweet, which is both a noun and verb. Yeah, right what so there's no personality there

00:45:36 ◼   ► There's no personality. It's like it sounds like a Microsoft product right you post

00:45:42 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, you submit you you know, it's like it's just it's just there's no it's not a bad word

00:45:47 ◼   ► But it's got like you said no personality. It's it's yeah

00:45:51 ◼   ► It if you know if they expect to see wide up

00:45:55 ◼   ► Adoption for this thing. It's gotta have some personality. It's got to be

00:46:00 ◼   ► Non-threatening it's got to be

00:46:03 ◼   ► something that the average person can look at and

00:46:10 ◼   ► Understand where the value is

00:46:12 ◼   ► I think part of the problem right now is is is they're confusing infrastructure, which is app.net with

00:46:20 ◼   ► What people are going to be using which is?

00:46:23 ◼   ► the alpha the the clients that

00:46:26 ◼   ► just and

00:46:29 ◼   ► I can't can't get too upset about this. I mean how long is this thing existed?

00:46:39 ◼   ► Yeah, right a month and a half. It's early days. It's it's it's like, you know, it's like when Twitter was TW TTR

00:46:45 ◼   ► Yeah, all right

00:46:47 ◼   ► It's it's that it's it's a baby right? I'm not gonna be you know, dragging too much on a baby, but

00:46:53 ◼   ► If you give a baby a name that name sticks with them for the rest of their life

00:46:58 ◼   ► Right. It's important to come up with a

00:47:01 ◼   ► Good name a name you're happy with, you know, you're not gonna name fuzz bud or something like that

00:47:06 ◼   ► that, and then, "Oh, shit, he's 16, and we're still calling him Fuzzbutt."

00:47:10 ◼   ► When Jonas was born, Amy's legal name was still her. She had her maiden name as her

00:47:16 ◼   ► legal name. And so he was born, and his name on the sign in the booth in the box—they

00:47:25 ◼   ► put babies in a box, really. It just said, "Baby Boy McGow." And my dad did it.

00:47:32 ◼   ► That's kind of a good name.

00:47:34 ◼   ► It kind of had a good ring to it.

00:47:35 ◼   ► It almost stuck.

00:47:36 ◼   ► That's the thing.

00:47:37 ◼   ► That's why I bring this up, is that if we had gone another day or two, it might have

00:47:42 ◼   ► stuck.

00:47:43 ◼   ► Baby boy McGow.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And that's really my point of Dalton Caldwell and the other guys there, that spend a little

00:47:51 ◼   ► bit of time thinking about it now, because if you don't, you're going to regret it in

00:47:55 ◼   ► the future.

00:47:56 ◼   ► I guess another way to look at it in the big picture is you've got to start thinking product.

00:48:02 ◼   ► You can't just think infrastructure and technology, right?

00:48:05 ◼   ► And it's just getting down into Steve Jobs' territory, where the product has to drive

00:48:11 ◼   ► the technology, not the other way around.

00:48:14 ◼   ► This is right out of like the 1997 Jobs' interim CEO, what are we going to do?

00:48:23 ◼   ► At that point, he hadn't even done the radical, "Look, we're going to get rid of 37 of these

00:48:27 ◼   ► products and we're going to have four.

00:48:30 ◼   ► laptop, a consumer desktop, a pro laptop, and a pro desktop. And that's it. And that's how we're

00:48:34 ◼   ► going to get back into focus. It was before they even picked those things. But he just said,

00:48:38 ◼   ► I think it was in response, I forget if it was at WWDC. I think it was at WWDC when he took the

00:48:44 ◼   ► questions and answers. And somebody had asked about OpenDoc, which they said they were going

00:48:49 ◼   ► to kill. And he said, it does all sorts of clever stuff. And it's great technology. But it doesn't

00:48:56 ◼   ► fit. It doesn't matter if it's great technology sometimes. The vision has to drive the technology,

00:49:03 ◼   ► not the other way around. You can't say, "Well, we've got this good technology, so we have

00:49:07 ◼   ► to figure out a way to use it." That's what App.net has to do, is it's not enough to just

00:49:13 ◼   ► have the infrastructure. That alone is hard. I mean, and everybody who watched Twitter

00:49:18 ◼   ► grow from small to big and who still remembers the days of the fail well knows that that's

00:49:24 ◼   ► And who even knows if app.net's technology backend is actually would survive that time of growth

00:49:29 ◼   ► But let's just assume that it is that alone is not enough. That's not enough

00:49:33 ◼   ► It's got to be a product that makes sense as a cohesive whole from the outside not the inside

00:49:40 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it's it

00:49:42 ◼   ► It's interesting. We were one of the first people on

00:49:45 ◼   ► Twitter to actually think about product right because we were gonna

00:49:50 ◼   ► release this thing, right?

00:49:51 ◼   ► It was originally a free app,

00:49:54 ◼   ► but we're not gonna release something

00:49:56 ◼   ► that's not thought out, right?

00:49:58 ◼   ► And we had to go through that thought process, okay,

00:50:02 ◼   ► coming up with what this thing is gonna be.

00:50:07 ◼   ► And that's hard.

00:50:12 ◼   ► I mean, people, I think a lot of people

00:50:15 ◼   ► take that for granted.

00:50:17 ◼   ► It's like this whole Apple Samsung case, right?

00:50:21 ◼   ► The thing that's been most eye-opening for me

00:50:23 ◼   ► is how many frickin' prototypes they did of the iPhone,

00:50:26 ◼   ► and how varied they were.

00:50:30 ◼   ► - Well, and the better the idea,

00:50:31 ◼   ► the more obvious it seems afterwards.

00:50:33 ◼   ► - Exactly, exactly.

00:50:34 ◼   ► And the more you think it through,

00:50:37 ◼   ► the more you clarify it,

00:50:38 ◼   ► the more it becomes simple,

00:50:43 ◼   ► the more obvious it is.

00:50:45 ◼   ► It's really a weird thing.

00:50:46 ◼   ► It's like coming, you know.

00:50:50 ◼   ► And there's that moment when somebody says, "Why don't you name them tweets?"

00:50:54 ◼   ► Where it's just like, "Oh."

00:50:56 ◼   ► That's like the sky is open and clarity is achieved.

00:51:01 ◼   ► And you can't unsee it after that.

00:51:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:04 ◼   ► Right?

00:51:05 ◼   ► Once you heard that, you couldn't not call them tweets.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:10 ◼   ► And once you saw the iPhone…

00:51:14 ◼   ► I originally wasn't going to get an iPhone.

00:51:16 ◼   ► I watch the announcement and I think it's like, you know, I don't really want I

00:51:18 ◼   ► Had to don't want to carry email around in my pocket, you know, I'd get enough

00:51:23 ◼   ► I don't know. I'm not electronic interruptions in my day. Anyway, I don't kind of want that with me all the time

00:51:29 ◼   ► And then you know five minutes in the Apple Store playing with that first iPhone. It's like oh

00:51:35 ◼   ► Jesus this this is the future right? I

00:51:39 ◼   ► This is this is another this is the next 30 years of computing. I remember more

00:51:45 ◼   ► the glass cylinder that they were behind on the Macworld show floor.

00:51:50 ◼   ► Yeah. I love that picture that Duncan took.

00:51:52 ◼   ► Oh, that's true. You know, that's one of the—I think it honestly, I think not just for the

00:51:57 ◼   ► tech nerd world, I think it's one of the best photos that I've seen in the last decade.

00:52:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:03 ◼   ► I think—and I think that it'll—it should rightfully go down as like the iconic picture

00:52:09 ◼   ► of the decade, that decade in technology. Honestly.

00:52:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it's that it's that moment of clarity right now. Are you looking at that and just going that this is that they got abs

00:52:21 ◼   ► Absolutely everything right here, right? You know after using it for a month, you know, there were little niggles here and there but

00:52:28 ◼   ► 99.9% of that original iPhone was perfect. Yep

00:52:33 ◼   ► Have one right here on my hand at my desk batteries on I've got an original Mac up in the attic

00:52:40 ◼   ► I've got my original—

00:52:41 ◼   ► I will never sell that.

00:52:42 ◼   ► I've got my original iPhone right here.

00:52:45 ◼   ► I still turn it over in my hand every once in a while.

00:52:47 ◼   ► I still love it.

00:52:48 ◼   ► I do too.

00:52:49 ◼   ► I love it.

00:52:50 ◼   ► The metal back.

00:52:51 ◼   ► The metal back, it still hasn't been topped.

00:52:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:53 ◼   ► In fact, I'm holding it right now.

00:52:54 ◼   ► It's like holy crap.

00:52:57 ◼   ► This is—yeah.

00:53:01 ◼   ► Like the front face is not as good.

00:53:03 ◼   ► The front face is absolutely sort of a hack with the silver, the chrome around the bezel.

00:53:10 ◼   ► But from the back, man, that thing is perfect.

00:53:13 ◼   ► John: You can see why they did that chrome bezel, right?

00:53:17 ◼   ► They didn't have the technology to meet those two different materials, right?

00:53:24 ◼   ► They need something to tie them together.

00:53:25 ◼   ► Again, in hindsight, it's really easy to look at that and go, "Yeah, of course,

00:53:33 ◼   ► it's a and that you know how many iterations that it take them to come to that conclusion can only imagine I

00:53:40 ◼   ► Mean I'm gonna start wrapping things up. I want I still I do want to talk about retina stuff

00:53:47 ◼   ► but before we do while we're still on Twitter, I would like to talk about our second sponsor and

00:53:53 ◼   ► Fits right in it is a brand new app

00:53:55 ◼   ► Called tweet keeper

00:54:01 ◼   ► I just installed it. It does exactly what it says and I'm gonna tell you now don't interrupt me because I'm gonna tell you again

00:54:06 ◼   ► I see if you can predict who I've loaded up in here

00:54:09 ◼   ► Craig but what tweet keeper does it's an iPhone app that lets you easily save search and

00:54:16 ◼   ► Export tweets and it's not just for yours

00:54:18 ◼   ► You could just put in a username any username and it'll slurp down all the available tweets for that user

00:54:24 ◼   ► Now, why would you want to do that? It's because the Twitter API only lets you get 3200 tweets

00:54:28 ◼   ► So if I said "Chalk & Berry," it'll give me Craig Hockenberry's last 3,200 tweets.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Now, here's the thing.

00:54:36 ◼   ► A month from now, when Craig has posted a few hundred more, and I'm using TweetKeeper,

00:54:40 ◼   ► TweetKeeper, I just launch it every couple days, and it'll keep launching them.

00:54:43 ◼   ► And so a year from now, I'll have more than 3,200 of your tweets.

00:54:48 ◼   ► So it still can't go back beyond today's 3,200 tweet horizon.

00:54:52 ◼   ► But starting now, you can start saving tweets from the users whose tweets you want

00:54:58 ◼   ► to archive and it will just get them all starting from now, go back 3200 and then going forward

00:55:05 ◼   ► will keep them all. Let's you search them of course and search is real fast. I've already

00:55:09 ◼   ► loaded up a couple of accounts with all 3200 tweets searched for peanut found them. There's

00:55:15 ◼   ► a hint as to who I'm using it for. And you can export them. You can export them to JSON.

00:55:22 ◼   ► The raw JSON format it exports is exactly in the same format that Twitter gives you

00:55:27 ◼   ► over the API. You can export them in plain text. You can export them to a spreadsheet.

00:55:35 ◼   ► And then you can just email or open the tweets in another app. It works exactly as it says.

00:55:41 ◼   ► It is very, very fast. It even works with private accounts, which I haven't tried because

00:55:46 ◼   ► I don't have a private account. I presume you'd need a password for that. It's super

00:55:51 ◼   ► simple. So you want to save tweets. The sooner you start using it, the quicker you're going

00:55:56 ◼   ► to have a more complete archive of a user. Now, who do you think I'm saving in there?

00:56:02 ◼   ► Well, I haven't gotten to the peanut portion of Dad Boner yet, but I'm guessing it's Dad

00:56:09 ◼   ► Boner. Right. My friend Carl Wellzine out in Detroit,

00:56:14 ◼   ► who is the greatest, in my opinion. Grand Blanc.

00:56:17 ◼   ► Well, near Detroit. Yeah, okay. Detroit area.

00:56:23 ◼   ► A literary character, an anonymously written fictional character on Twitter who I believe

00:56:31 ◼   ► to be one of the great literary characters of the last 10 years, hilarious.

00:56:36 ◼   ► And you read him, you fall in love with him, but then you want to go back and read his

00:56:40 ◼   ► old ones.

00:56:41 ◼   ► Or a month from now, when he starts referencing something that happened a couple months ago,

00:56:45 ◼   ► you want to go back.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Well, guess what?

00:56:47 ◼   ► You're stuck in regular Twitter apps because you've only got the most recent ones.

00:56:50 ◼   ► If you use something like TweetKeeper, you've got them all.

00:56:53 ◼   ► You can go back, you can search, you can see the old stories.

00:56:57 ◼   ► And it's a great way to back up your own Twitter account past what Twitter would let you do.

00:57:01 ◼   ► So the sooner you put your own username in there, the longer you're going to have an

00:57:06 ◼   ► archive of your own tweets.

00:57:08 ◼   ► TweetKeeper is available in the App Store for an introductory price of just $1.99.

00:57:13 ◼   ► $1.99, get this great app.

00:57:15 ◼   ► It works, got a nice interface, super fast.

00:57:18 ◼   ► You can find out more at TweetKeeperApp.com or just search for "tweetkeeper" in the

00:57:24 ◼   ► App Store.

00:57:25 ◼   ► That's what I did, first thing that came up.

00:57:28 ◼   ► TweetKeeper, it's a great app.

00:57:31 ◼   ► Let's talk about retina stuff.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Let's just go through this.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:34 ◼   ► You and I started talking about it yesterday.

00:57:37 ◼   ► And this is really, really fascinating.

00:57:39 ◼   ► And developing Xscope puts you right – I mean, like, you could not be more –

00:57:44 ◼   ► I've looked at every single freaking pixel on that display.

00:57:47 ◼   ► You're neck deep in this stuff, and you're 6 foot 8.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:52 ◼   ► That's a lot of pixels.

00:57:55 ◼   ► Well, and the most interesting thing about it

00:57:57 ◼   ► is that prior to the Retina Mac, Xscope's job was showing--

00:58:04 ◼   ► helping you show pixels on screen,

00:58:06 ◼   ► whether it was aligning them or constraining them

00:58:10 ◼   ► or magnifying them.

00:58:11 ◼   ► But it's, here's the pixels on the screen.

00:58:13 ◼   ► We're going to show you them bigger.

00:58:16 ◼   ► the big change with retina is not like iOS where it's just four times more pixels. It

00:58:23 ◼   ► is variant, right? That's the thing that blows my mind and really it gives me headaches just

00:58:30 ◼   ► thinking about the math that's involved in the X-scope. Like, and so, Syracuse has covered this

00:58:37 ◼   ► stuff extensively and it's still mind-blowing is that everybody knows you get the MacBook retina,

00:58:43 ◼   ► you have five choices for resolution, and the middle one is the default, which is best

00:58:52 ◼   ► for retina, which is the only one where pixels are pixels.

00:58:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the one where you see two pixels for every one window point.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:04 ◼   ► A window point is a…

00:59:07 ◼   ► The old pixel.

00:59:08 ◼   ► In pre-retina, a window point is a pixel, and in the new world, a window point in Best

00:59:15 ◼   ► for Retina is four.

00:59:16 ◼   ► But there's two other dimensions in each way.

00:59:22 ◼   ► So when it simulates like the 1900 by 1200 something display, it is drawing off screen

00:59:31 ◼   ► to a pixel-doubled version of that.

00:59:34 ◼   ► and then scaling it down to the actual 28 by whatever.

00:59:42 ◼   ► So you're actually losing…

00:59:43 ◼   ► >> Twenty-eight eighty by fourteen four…

00:59:44 ◼   ► >> Right.

00:59:45 ◼   ► It's actually only showing you…

00:59:46 ◼   ► >> No, no, no.

00:59:47 ◼   ► Eighteen hundred.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Excuse me.

00:59:49 ◼   ► >> Right.

00:59:50 ◼   ► So it's actually only showing you two-thirds of the pixels.

00:59:51 ◼   ► But it looks okay because the pixels are so small.

00:59:54 ◼   ► It actually looks good.

00:59:55 ◼   ► >> You can't tell.

00:59:56 ◼   ► Yeah, you can't tell.

00:59:58 ◼   ► When you're on that more space setting, the retina image that's being created by Mac OS

01:00:07 ◼   ► 10 is twice of that size that you selected, and then it gets scaled down 66% to fit on

01:00:18 ◼   ► the display.

01:00:22 ◼   ► If you see something that's drawing a one-pixel line, it'll get a little bit fuzzy.

01:00:27 ◼   ► It gets a tiny little bit fuzzy, but you're far enough back that you can't tell.

01:00:33 ◼   ► That's one of the things that's interesting in the new version of XCO for me is that in

01:00:39 ◼   ► the loop, it draws a little grid so you can delineate each pixel easily.

01:00:45 ◼   ► I'm drawing that grid with one pixel, and it's just so fine.

01:00:50 ◼   ► It's like it's there, but it's not.

01:00:54 ◼   ► I can't tell that it's a pixel.

01:00:55 ◼   ► It's just like this...

01:00:56 ◼   ► Because in a hairline, it's like a piece, you know, sometimes you get a piece of hair on your laptop screen, you know

01:01:03 ◼   ► It's just that really thin

01:01:05 ◼   ► What it is in in regular?

01:01:08 ◼   ► UI design like if you and I were just working on a regular Mac app in and we're going retina with it

01:01:14 ◼   ► The the most the thinnest you typically would get though would be one point, right?

01:01:19 ◼   ► You wouldn't typically draw stuff in the UI at less than one point. Is that correct?

01:01:25 ◼   ► Yeah, that's it that so you just want to put a line you want to put a one you want to put a hairline

01:01:30 ◼   ► Between the source list and the content that's the app

01:01:33 ◼   ► We're making you're gonna draw that at one point and then write pre retina max

01:01:37 ◼   ► It'll register it'll draw as one pixel and on retina max. It'll draw as two pixels as two pixels, right?

01:01:42 ◼   ► So what you've done the thing that's interesting is that you can draw a half a point now on a retina display

01:01:48 ◼   ► You're drawing you're drawing half of one of those and that's that's where the math got complicated, right?

01:01:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Because, for example, the windows can only be positioned on full point boundaries, right?

01:02:04 ◼   ► But Xscope has got to measure stuff that's on those half-point boundaries.

01:02:08 ◼   ► So I'm positioning windows and then having to shift views around in those windows so

01:02:14 ◼   ► that they align on that right half-point position.

01:02:19 ◼   ► Now one of the reasons…

01:02:20 ◼   ► It was hard.

01:02:21 ◼   ► I'm sure it really is.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And you're not done yet.

01:02:25 ◼   ► do have a beta then I yeah I've got it and it works great and it's just makes

01:02:30 ◼   ► me more happy to just stare at the retina mac well have you noticed that

01:02:35 ◼   ► the one pixel shadow border on the windows on yours no I haven't no no no

01:02:44 ◼   ► I'm talking about just on a standard Mac OS 2 window yeah yeah yeah there's just

01:02:47 ◼   ► that one pixel that that kind of makes the window pop out a little bit yep

01:02:51 ◼   ► That's not there on the non-retina version.

01:02:55 ◼   ► No.

01:02:56 ◼   ► Apple, I mean, it's an amazing piece of engineering, right?

01:02:59 ◼   ► I've been reverse engineering this thing for the last month or so.

01:03:02 ◼   ► But they've taken advantage of it in some very subtle ways, like that.

01:03:05 ◼   ► Oh, it's, yeah.

01:03:07 ◼   ► Again, it's that one pixel can do some pretty amazing things to your UI.

01:03:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:03:15 ◼   ► It's used judiciously, right?

01:03:16 ◼   ► You know, you don't want to get carried away with it because then it's like nobody's

01:03:20 ◼   ► can be able to see what you're doing.

01:03:22 ◼   ► Well, the weirdest-- well, not weirdest, but the thing that blows me away and that really

01:03:26 ◼   ► is noticeable is that-- and you know this.

01:03:28 ◼   ► I mean, it's no surprise that you're the one-- the icon factory is the developer, co-developer

01:03:36 ◼   ► of-- are you guys Xscope entirely now?

01:03:39 ◼   ► I know it's--

01:03:40 ◼   ► No, it's a joint project still.

01:03:44 ◼   ► We've taken on Wolfgang Ante at Microsoft.

01:03:49 ◼   ► I'm doing the primary development on it now.

01:03:52 ◼   ► But it's no surprise that you guys are doing this because it's sort of one of those,

01:03:56 ◼   ► we're building this for ourselves because of course the name of the company is the Icon

01:03:59 ◼   ► Factory.

01:04:00 ◼   ► You guys still do tons of icon, you guys do artwork.

01:04:03 ◼   ► You do user interface artwork.

01:04:05 ◼   ► And so what you're building is a tool for people who sweat the pixels of beautiful,

01:04:10 ◼   ► beautiful icons and user interface elements and buttons and anything like that.

01:04:16 ◼   ► Or developers even.

01:04:19 ◼   ► gets a Photoshop comp and they've got to build a UI and, you know, they've got to measure color,

01:04:24 ◼   ► they've got to measure pixel distance, and, you know, there are a lot of uses for the app.

01:04:29 ◼   ► Steven: And that's what the app is for, is to… We're going to insanely insist that every single

01:04:35 ◼   ► pixel of this icon is perfect, but we need software, you know, we need special software

01:04:40 ◼   ► to actually magnify it and see it now. It's no surprise that you made it. With your hairlines,

01:04:46 ◼   ► for your guides and the new thing. It reminds me of, going back to my review of the MacBook

01:04:50 ◼   ► Retina Pro, whatever the hell it's called, when I got access to a 1200 DPI laser printer.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And I remember at Quark, we started making, just as a test, we started making hairlines.

01:05:01 ◼   ► We set them to a quarter of a point, a tenth of a point, and it was like a twentieth of a point.

01:05:07 ◼   ► And you could see it. You could see like a twentieth of a point hairline. And we're like,

01:05:11 ◼   ► like, "Oh my God, that's amazing." But then it was no good for like, you couldn't

01:05:16 ◼   ► reproduce it. You couldn't put a 20th of a hairline. You could see it on the output

01:05:21 ◼   ► you got out of the printer, but then if you tried to put it in newsprint, it was gone.

01:05:24 ◼   ► I mean, it was like, you can't.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. That's why I think the thing that Apple's done is smart. By default,

01:05:36 ◼   ► UIs on the retina display are using two pixels, right, which are easier to see.

01:05:41 ◼   ► You know, they took a lot of different approaches, and I think the current one that they that this is a perfect example

01:05:49 ◼   ► of where they learned a lot from iOS, right?

01:05:51 ◼   ► It's it's you know, they originally had

01:05:54 ◼   ► TIFF files which had different scale factors and them, you know, it's like because it they were thinking that okay

01:06:00 ◼   ► we can adjust the scaling to any value, right? If somebody wants to see their screen at 1.3

01:06:07 ◼   ► times, you know, we can have a slider and they'll do that. But in reality, people just

01:06:13 ◼   ► – they want to see the best they can see.

01:06:15 ◼   ► Right. The idea of – I think the older idea, the original idea for independence was about

01:06:20 ◼   ► switching from bitmaps to vector graphics, of doing like, you know, making it like PDF,

01:06:26 ◼   ► everything would be like PDF and where when you open up a PDF file and preview

01:06:31 ◼   ► you can get reasonable font rendering at 87 percent 113 percent 114 percent you

01:06:39 ◼   ► do it doesn't really matter because the fonts are all outline you know they're

01:06:43 ◼   ► all either open type or true type or post script or something like that so

01:06:47 ◼   ► they're going to scale and you know especially when you blow stuff up big if

01:06:51 ◼   ► you really want to zoom in and just say what I want to really look at this

01:06:55 ◼   ► capital R and just blow it up real big.

01:06:58 ◼   ► It's going to look great.

01:06:59 ◼   ► The problem is that it's not going to look pixel perfect when it's small.

01:07:02 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And that is the problem with people saying, "Oh, you know, well, why does the whole UI

01:07:08 ◼   ► even, you know, the graphics are in a vector format?"

01:07:11 ◼   ► Because they're unpredictable, right?

01:07:14 ◼   ► Sometimes you need to have that pixel precision in order to, you know, pull out some element

01:07:19 ◼   ► and the icon or to make sure something's aligned correctly.

01:07:23 ◼   ► It's sort of, it's like that colored status bar, right?

01:07:29 ◼   ► Designers like predictability.

01:07:31 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:31 ◼   ► And control.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And they need it.

01:07:35 ◼   ► And they need that.

01:07:36 ◼   ► They create great stuff because they have that control.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Start taking that control away from them.

01:07:41 ◼   ► And for fonts, it's a different thing, right?

01:07:44 ◼   ► the font designers have always worked with vectors.

01:07:49 ◼   ► They would then take some of that work

01:07:57 ◼   ► and make pixel-based versions of it, screen fonts.

01:08:01 ◼   ► Which, it's funny, screen fonts have been deprecated.

01:08:04 ◼   ► It's pretty clear that that pixel-level control

01:08:10 ◼   ► over a font is just something that's going

01:08:13 ◼   ► the way of the dodo bird. It doesn't make sense at these resolutions, really. No, no.

01:08:25 ◼   ► My only complaint with the Retina display is the form factor that it sits in. I love

01:08:32 ◼   ► my MacBook Air. Yeah, we just commiserated. We cried ourselves asleep over this on aim

01:08:37 ◼   ► yesterday. But yeah, I desperately want a retina machine, but I don't want it in a

01:08:43 ◼   ► 15-inch MacBook Pro. But I think that's what I'm going to have to do, because unless

01:08:49 ◼   ► Apple surprises us with maybe like a 13-inch MacBook Pro by the end of the year, I think

01:08:54 ◼   ► I'm just going to suck it up and buy the 15-inch and use it as my only machine.

01:08:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it's interesting to me that their first machine that they put the retina display in

01:09:05 ◼   ► was a 15, right? You'd think that as far as production yields and similarities with the

01:09:12 ◼   ► iPad's retina display, they would have gone with the smaller screen, right? The 11-inch

01:09:16 ◼   ► or the 13-inch.

01:09:17 ◼   ► Right. Or, well, not 11 because the only 11 is the Air and that's got these price points

01:09:23 ◼   ► that I don't think they can hit yet. And I don't think they want to.

01:09:25 ◼   ► Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

01:09:26 ◼   ► I'm not surprised. They're not going to do an 11-inch Pro. I don't think.

01:09:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:30 ◼   ► I think they're going to do 13 and 15.

01:09:31 ◼   ► No, no, no.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I'm a little disappointed maybe is the more the right word than surprised that they didn't

01:09:38 ◼   ► do the 13 and 15 at the same time.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And like you said, if they can do the 15 and get yields of these 15 inch screens, then

01:09:46 ◼   ► certainly they should be able to get the 13s too.

01:09:49 ◼   ► But I also do think though that it speaks to the 15 inch MacBook Pro as the defacto

01:09:56 ◼   ► king of the Macs.

01:09:58 ◼   ► Like it may not be the fastest, it's never going to be faster.

01:10:01 ◼   ► It's still not faster than the Mac Pros, even the jokey joke, you know, Syracuse, I hate

01:10:05 ◼   ► Mac Pros that they released at WWDC.

01:10:09 ◼   ► But of course not.

01:10:10 ◼   ► I mean, a Mac Pro is the size of my dorm room refrigerator.

01:10:15 ◼   ► I love my Mac Pro, man.

01:10:16 ◼   ► I've got two 30-inch displays hooked up to it.

01:10:18 ◼   ► I mean, it's like real estate city.

01:10:21 ◼   ► I'm just saying it's the king of the Macs in terms of being like the sweet spot between

01:10:25 ◼   ► what normal people buy versus what pros buy.

01:10:30 ◼   ► right there and you know that it kind of makes sense that it would be the first

01:10:34 ◼   ► one to get this amazing new technology. And I read a post by our friend Gus, Gus

01:10:41 ◼   ► Mueller and he was saying you know he's got the MacBook Pro with the retina

01:10:47 ◼   ► display and it's obviously doing acorn development on it and you know he's got

01:10:51 ◼   ► his MacBook or excuse me his Mac Pro sitting side by side just like me right

01:10:56 ◼   ► The Retina MacBook Pro is faster than my old Mac Pro. It's weird. It doesn't have as much screen real estate.

01:11:06 ◼   ► My Mac Pro doesn't need to be super fast. I'm not building the OS. I build times for half a minute or something.

01:11:16 ◼   ► Yeah, but you guys who use Xcode really still are. And I've mentioned this on a couple shows.

01:11:21 ◼   ► that's fewer and fewer for normal people,

01:11:23 ◼   ► or people who aren't, there's fewer and fewer tasks

01:11:26 ◼   ► that are CPU constrained.

01:11:28 ◼   ► I'm almost never CPU constrained,

01:11:30 ◼   ► except when Safari really gets bogged down

01:11:34 ◼   ► with a ton of tabs.

01:11:35 ◼   ► Sometimes Safari will chew up over 100% of my CPU

01:11:38 ◼   ► because I've got so much going on.

01:11:40 ◼   ► - You know what I wish Safari had?

01:11:42 ◼   ► A processor or a tab monitor, right?

01:11:44 ◼   ► So you could see which tabs were using the most CPU time.

01:11:48 ◼   ► - Or I wish that I could set a thing that says,

01:11:50 ◼   ► don't let tabs in the background have more than a 2% CPU.

01:11:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:11:55 ◼   ► - I wish that I could just set a nice setting

01:11:58 ◼   ► on anything except the front-most tab,

01:12:00 ◼   ► 'cause I don't do anything.

01:12:01 ◼   ► I don't use web apps that I want doing stuff

01:12:05 ◼   ► in the background.

01:12:06 ◼   ► I wouldn't care if it was iOS,

01:12:07 ◼   ► and it just shut background tabs off.

01:12:10 ◼   ► I don't care.

01:12:12 ◼   ► - The browser is an OS now, right?

01:12:14 ◼   ► We used to reboot our Macs.

01:12:15 ◼   ► Now we reboot our Safari.

01:12:17 ◼   ► - Safari's the number one reason why I feel like

01:12:20 ◼   ► need a new faster computer. But you guys who use Xcode, you realize there are CPU constraints.

01:12:25 ◼   ► You guys save time.

01:12:26 ◼   ► At times.

01:12:27 ◼   ► At times, yeah. There are times when you are significantly more productive with a faster

01:12:32 ◼   ► CPU. I mean, that's a fact.

01:12:34 ◼   ► Yes, that's correct. That's correct. Especially with the new version of Xcode is it likes

01:12:40 ◼   ► to use all those cores.

01:12:41 ◼   ► Yeah. Now, I've been thinking about this a lot.

01:12:43 ◼   ► And there are times when it does.

01:12:44 ◼   ► I've been thinking about it a lot. And I think you said the same thing where it's like we're

01:12:47 ◼   ► into this corner number we've seen the 15 inch MacBook Pro with a retina display and because

01:12:52 ◼   ► we've seen the retina display we'd never want to buy another Mac without a retina display again

01:12:56 ◼   ► but we don't want the 15 inch heavier portable hardware I would rather have like an iMac on my

01:13:04 ◼   ► desk or a Mac Pro with a cinema retina display something like that big standalone retina display

01:13:10 ◼   ► and I would like a little 11 inch retina air or a 13 inch retina air uh none of that exists and

01:13:16 ◼   ► And the way I say, I don't know what's going to come first, and I feel like Apple's pulled

01:13:20 ◼   ► in two different directions, where with the iMacs, it's just their screens are too big.

01:13:25 ◼   ► I mean, I think it's too expensive.

01:13:26 ◼   ► I don't think there's any feasible – I think they're just up against the tech where they

01:13:30 ◼   ► can't get 27-inch retina displays.

01:13:32 ◼   ► I think that's absolutely true.

01:13:33 ◼   ► I mean, look at what happened with the iPhone, right?

01:13:35 ◼   ► It's like we got a 320 by 480, the 640 by 960 screen, and that was feasible.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Right?

01:13:44 ◼   ► "Okay, it's feasible on the iPad, a much larger screen."

01:13:49 ◼   ► I think that was, again, back to the,

01:13:55 ◼   ► it's like why didn't they start with 13

01:13:56 ◼   ► and work their way up?

01:13:57 ◼   ► Well, I think you're right in that the 15

01:14:00 ◼   ► was the sweet spot, price-wise, machine-wise,

01:14:05 ◼   ► a lot of reason that they went there.

01:14:06 ◼   ► But I think they'll probably go down a little bit now

01:14:10 ◼   ► they do some retina 13, but those 27-inch screens in retina, they're gonna be awesome.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:14:18 ◼   ► But that's gonna be two, maybe three years from now.

01:14:22 ◼   ► I think so, yeah.

01:14:23 ◼   ► Or at least a full year out, at least.

01:14:26 ◼   ► And then on the other side with the Air, they obviously could, I mean, if they can do 15

01:14:31 ◼   ► inch, then they can do the smaller ones.

01:14:32 ◼   ► So they could have an 11-inch Air retina screen now.

01:14:36 ◼   ► But I think it's about the Air brand being tied to these very consumer-friendly price

01:14:42 ◼   ► points.

01:14:43 ◼   ► The 11-inch Air, it starts at $999, which is magic.

01:14:47 ◼   ► That's a number that Apple spent like a decade not really being that near with a laptop and

01:14:53 ◼   ► being able to say, "We've got a $999 laptop that…"

01:14:57 ◼   ► And unlike the white plastic – I think they were still called iBooks always, right?

01:15:05 ◼   ► which hit that – the first ones that hit that $999, but they were like decidedly less

01:15:10 ◼   ► cool.

01:15:11 ◼   ► The materials, right. The materials were –

01:15:12 ◼   ► Right. Whereas you look at the 11-inch air and it's in some ways more beautiful than

01:15:18 ◼   ► the Pros because it's so much thinner and lighter and has this cool teardrop thing and

01:15:22 ◼   ► it's just like you can really just hold it with a finger and a thumb. It actually

01:15:27 ◼   ► arguably is a better design than the more expensive Pros and I feel like that they're

01:15:32 ◼   ► It's a matter of just not of technology but of cost, that they're not going to retina-ize

01:15:37 ◼   ► the heirs until they can still keep it in these $999, $1100 price points.

01:15:46 ◼   ► What do you think is going to happen first, a retina iMac or retina air?

01:15:50 ◼   ► I think a retina air.

01:15:51 ◼   ► I think so too.

01:15:53 ◼   ► I think they'll be able to hit those price points first and maybe even do it and eat

01:15:57 ◼   ► a little bit of the margin for the first year but just get it out there to do it.

01:16:01 ◼   ► Yeah, but how many of them are they going to sell?

01:16:04 ◼   ► That thing's going to sell like hotcakes.

01:16:08 ◼   ► I skipped the upgrade when they added the Thunderbolt instead of the original DisplayPort

01:16:16 ◼   ► stuff.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Because the machine's fine for what I use it for.

01:16:20 ◼   ► I don't do my primary development on that machine.

01:16:22 ◼   ► But man, when that thing's got a retina display, I'm first in line.

01:16:27 ◼   ► It's a no-brainer upgrade for me.

01:16:30 ◼   ► It's interesting.

01:16:32 ◼   ► One of the hard things for Xscope was making sure that the retina display works alongside

01:16:37 ◼   ► a normal resolution display.

01:16:42 ◼   ► You're magnifying the screen on the retina display.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Well, you can drag that magnifier over onto another window, which is not retina.

01:16:50 ◼   ► So it's like you got a—there's a little bit of complication there as far as making

01:16:56 ◼   ► sure both the retina screen and the non-retina screen work together.

01:17:01 ◼   ► And that's the way things are going to be for the next couple of years, right?

01:17:04 ◼   ► Because nobody—

01:17:05 ◼   ► What happens when you drag a window—because I don't use multiple displays anymore—but

01:17:07 ◼   ► what happens when you drag a window half onto one and half on the other?

01:17:11 ◼   ► The half that it's most on gets the retina treatment.

01:17:16 ◼   ► Huh.

01:17:17 ◼   ► Or not, right?

01:17:18 ◼   ► If it's more than half onto the retina screen, it renders everything retina.

01:17:23 ◼   ► And then on the normal screen, it doesn't look quite right because it's the retina

01:17:29 ◼   ► graphics scaled down to the half size, basically.

01:17:35 ◼   ► Gotcha.

01:17:36 ◼   ► 50% reduction.

01:17:37 ◼   ► But again, with a tool like the loop, an Xscope, it's got to seamlessly switch between those

01:17:47 ◼   ► two environments. Same with the ruler and all the other stuff that Xscope does.

01:17:57 ◼   ► Who says you don't grow up and use your math classes?

01:18:00 ◼   ► Yeah, that's very true. In fact, it's funny. I've got a stack of paper here that's got

01:18:06 ◼   ► nothing but rectangles.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Well, you know, Samsung told me that it's all just rectangles. All just simple rectangles.

01:18:16 ◼   ► have square corners though. It's all very obvious. Did you guys design, did Icon Factory

01:18:24 ◼   ► design the new Microsoft logo? No. No. Square corners. The last thing we did for them were

01:18:33 ◼   ► the icons for Vista. Then they... I forgot that you guys did that. That was a big deal.

01:18:40 ◼   ► folder standing on their side, that was a long and involved design process.

01:18:47 ◼   ► Microsoft has gotten smart, right? They're doing a lot more of their design in-house.

01:18:55 ◼   ► They realize that design is a competitive tool.

01:19:02 ◼   ► You know what they own?

01:19:03 ◼   ► Kind of taken a play from Apple's playbook.

01:19:05 ◼   ► You know what? I joke there, but I don't mean this. I don't buy into the argument that round

01:19:13 ◼   ► wrecks are inherently better than square corners. I think there's room in design for all sorts

01:19:18 ◼   ► of stuff. I think that they're owning. I think Microsoft is owning square corners.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:25 ◼   ► And I think that's kind of a cool thing to own, that they've eked out a very distinctive

01:19:30 ◼   ► aesthetic. And it works.

01:19:33 ◼   ► It's consistent.

01:19:34 ◼   ► It works both as a screen UI and as a branding UI, this square corner rectangles and squares

01:19:43 ◼   ► thing.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I think it's a powerful visual brand, honestly.

01:19:47 ◼   ► I think that it's by far and away their best user interface branding ever.

01:19:54 ◼   ► The only other one that was good was the Windows 95 one, which they just ripped off from Next.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Yeah. The Windows 8, I think, looks great. To be honest, I have not used it.

01:20:05 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's not -- oh, Windows 8. Windows 8. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were saying

01:20:10 ◼   ► Windows 7.

01:20:11 ◼   ► Yeah, the X Metro UI.

01:20:13 ◼   ► I'm just going to keep calling it Metro. To hell with them.

01:20:16 ◼   ► That's a weird thing.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Because you know what? I'm so sick of --

01:20:19 ◼   ► Why didn't they think of that earlier?

01:20:21 ◼   ► I don't want to sit there and write "formerly known as Metro" or the Windows 8 style UI.

01:20:25 ◼   ► I'm just gonna call it Metro and that's their problem. You know what I mean? That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great it

01:20:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's consistent. It's I

01:20:35 ◼   ► Think that the biggest problem they're gonna have are the people who have been using Windows since Windows 95

01:20:43 ◼   ► Going oh my god. This is different. Yep

01:20:46 ◼   ► It's really different

01:20:49 ◼   ► It is so much riskier and it's going to make people so much angrier than if it was only

01:20:55 ◼   ► on the Windows RT for ARM on these tablet devices as Apple style. The equivalent of

01:21:03 ◼   ► the iPad to Apple. A new thing and it's, you know, it'll interrelate, you can sync it,

01:21:09 ◼   ► you can dock it, it'll talk to exchange and all this stuff. But if you just buy a Dell

01:21:13 ◼   ► shitbox PC and install the Windows on it.

01:21:17 ◼   ► It's going to look like your Windows desktop and have a start menu down there.

01:21:25 ◼   ► I say we wrap it up.

01:21:26 ◼   ► I think we've been on for a long time.

01:21:27 ◼   ► Craig Hockenberry, thank you for being here.

01:21:29 ◼   ► You're the best.