ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Happy new year and stuff.

00:00:01 ◼   ► And happy birthday, John Syracuse, of 40 years old.

00:00:04 ◼   ► How's it feel to be an old man, John?

00:00:06 ◼   ► It's not my birthday today.

00:00:07 ◼   ► It's the first time I've spoken to you since your birthday.

00:00:10 ◼   ► It's close enough.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Beginning of the year with a technicality.

00:00:12 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:00:15 ◼   ► So we have some follow up.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Let's talk about John's OS X app window layering policy.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I should have done a little bit of research

00:00:22 ◼   ► of this, but I'll have you do the real time research for me.

00:00:25 ◼   ► So in our discussion in like episode a couple episodes ago about windows and window

00:00:32 ◼   ► management stuff like that one of the things that didn't come up that probably should have

00:00:36 ◼   ► Was the OS 10 window layering policy now when you get OS 10 if you've only ever used OS 10

00:00:43 ◼   ► You probably just accept this as the way things work because it's sort of like how Windows works as in capital W Microsoft Windows

00:00:50 ◼   ► You got a bunch of windows on the screen

00:00:52 ◼   ► I mean, if you click on a window,

00:00:53 ◼   ► that window comes to the front

00:00:55 ◼   ► and it comes to the, and then you click another window

00:00:57 ◼   ► and that window comes to the front of the other ones.

00:00:58 ◼   ► And you know, it changes,

00:01:00 ◼   ► the window layering changes in that way.

00:01:02 ◼   ► On OS X, if you click on the dock icon,

00:01:04 ◼   ► all windows from that application come to the front.

00:01:07 ◼   ► All right, and this is,

00:01:08 ◼   ► again, if you've only ever used OS X,

00:01:10 ◼   ► you're like, yeah, so what?

00:01:11 ◼   ► That's just how everything works.

00:01:12 ◼   ► And there are menu commands for hide others.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And you can option click on something

00:01:17 ◼   ► to hide the previous thing to show the new thing.

00:01:19 ◼   ► And there's all sorts of shortcuts like that

00:01:21 ◼   ► that people know.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Basically plain old unadorned click just brings the window to the front and the the doc click brings all the windows the app to

00:01:28 ◼   ► Fund now back in the olden days if my memory serves correctly

00:01:32 ◼   ► When you clicked on the window all the windows belonging to that application came to the front

00:01:37 ◼   ► so it was sort of the opposite of the behavior in OS 10 where a

00:01:42 ◼   ► special click in this case a click on a doc icon brings them all to the front but a plain old regular click just brings the

00:01:47 ◼   ► particular window

00:01:49 ◼   ► Now since I am an old person as we've already established

00:01:52 ◼   ► And I come from the old school Mac world when OS X came out

00:01:57 ◼   ► I didn't like the fact that when I clicked a single window only that window came to the front and because my

00:02:02 ◼   ► Window arranging habits wouldn't have been built up over years and years of using a regular Mac and classic Mac OS

00:02:08 ◼   ► I was used to the idea of being able to pull all the windows of an application forward by

00:02:14 ◼   ► snagging a corner of one of the windows and then they would all come to the front and sort of be like a two-layer policy

00:02:18 ◼   ► where I'd snag a corner of visible window and then within all the windows of that application which are now visible pick one that I

00:02:23 ◼   ► Wanted because they'd be tiled according to you know, whatever

00:02:25 ◼   ► And so there's a whole bunch of utilities that came out for OS X

00:02:29 ◼   ► in the early days of OS X that lets you

00:02:32 ◼   ► switch this policy to make it so regular click brings all the windows to the front and a modifier click does the other behavior and

00:02:39 ◼   ► I've used lots of those utilities over the years. I think the one I'm using now is

00:02:43 ◼   ► is, I'm still using ASM, which was supposed to give you an application switcher menu,

00:02:48 ◼   ► which is like a classic Mac OS thing in the upper right corner of the screen.

00:02:51 ◼   ► I think that part doesn't work anymore, or even if it does, I have it disabled.

00:02:54 ◼   ► I just have the, you know, they call it classic window setting set to on.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And shift key is the suppression key.

00:03:02 ◼   ► So if I click any Safari window, all the Safari windows come to the front.

00:03:06 ◼   ► And if I click any terminal window, all the terminal windows come to the front.

00:03:10 ◼   ► But if I shift click a window, only that window comes to the front.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And I'm not saying one of these policies is the right one or the wrong one, because I

00:03:19 ◼   ► think both behaviors are useful.

00:03:20 ◼   ► It's just a question of which one do you think should be the default.

00:03:24 ◼   ► And the defaults don't really matter that much either.

00:03:26 ◼   ► I suppose I could have got used to just going down to the dock icon and clicking, but I

00:03:29 ◼   ► was just so used to arranging my windows and using them as these big click areas to do

00:03:34 ◼   ► stuff, that this is one of the few sort of classic Mac OS policies that I still haven't

00:03:39 ◼   ► given up. I guess it's probably like a little bit of a system hack to do this

00:03:44 ◼   ► window layering. It's not a really big system hack. I think drag_thing also

00:03:47 ◼   ► either had or still has this feature and there may be other utilities that do it

00:03:51 ◼   ► and it may be like a global plist thing. I don't even know what this thing is

00:03:54 ◼   ► doing whether it's a system hack or not. But anyway, if my window management

00:03:59 ◼   ► sounded strange to you and you've only ever used OS X, that may be a piece of

00:04:02 ◼   ► information you're missing. And I would imagine that both of you have never done

00:04:07 ◼   ► this or use any utilities like this and would probably drive you crazy if you clicked on

00:04:10 ◼   ► a single window and they all came to the front from that app.

00:04:13 ◼   ► Yep.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Yeah, you should try it.

00:04:15 ◼   ► It's actually kind of neat.

00:04:16 ◼   ► I mean, you obviously have to adjust your habits because you're not losing the ability

00:04:20 ◼   ► to do the other thing.

00:04:21 ◼   ► You just have to, you know, shift click or option click or whatever modifier click you

00:04:24 ◼   ► decide to make it.

00:04:25 ◼   ► But it does change the way things work and it makes, I think it makes the way I manage

00:04:30 ◼   ► windows a little bit more viable.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Like I think it's the correct default for the way I manage windows.

00:04:37 ◼   ► not the correct default for yours, but a lot of people have emailed and tweeted at me since

00:04:41 ◼   ► that show to say they were intrigued by my theories and would like to subscribe to my

00:04:47 ◼   ► newsletter and so are trying out different window maps.

00:04:52 ◼   ► And I didn't have a chance to respond to most of the people who sent in emails and tweets

00:04:56 ◼   ► saying they wanted to try it, but what I felt like telling them is if you're going to try

00:05:00 ◼   ► it you may not know this, but here's the setting that I have had on my Mac since the dawn of

00:05:04 ◼   ► OS X that you probably don't have, and I think it's probably essential to the way I work.

00:05:09 ◼   ► The other thing I saw a lot of requests for was a screenshot of your Mac.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And I'm assuming people wanted perhaps like an expose screenshot so they could see the

00:05:20 ◼   ► 11 gazillion windows that you have open.

00:05:23 ◼   ► And I don't want to necessarily formally request that because you would probably have to obscure

00:05:29 ◼   ► a bunch of things.

00:05:31 ◼   ► But should you decide that you would like to share that?

00:05:33 ◼   ► I'm sure the world at large would love to see it.

00:05:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, there were requests, but I can't,

00:05:37 ◼   ► I mean, I can't take screenshots of my screen

00:05:39 ◼   ► because all my stuff is on my screen

00:05:40 ◼   ► and I don't wanna go through blanking out the windows.

00:05:42 ◼   ► And in the end, it just looks like a bunch of windows.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Like there's nothing to see.

00:05:46 ◼   ► - To you, maybe.

00:05:47 ◼   ► - Right, to you, that's all it looks like.

00:05:49 ◼   ► - Then it's like, why don't you set a video, make a video?

00:05:51 ◼   ► It's like, well then again, in a video,

00:05:53 ◼   ► you'd be seeing all my stuff.

00:05:54 ◼   ► I don't show you all my stuff, all my email,

00:05:56 ◼   ► all my tabs that I have open and stuff like that.

00:05:59 ◼   ► But on the feedback,

00:06:00 ◼   ► I don't know how much you've been following the feedback,

00:06:02 ◼   ► but I tried to be vaguely scientific

00:06:04 ◼   ► with following the feedback.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And I have to say, of the feedback

00:06:07 ◼   ► that has come directly to me, mostly through tweets,

00:06:09 ◼   ► but also through email that's not to the list thing,

00:06:12 ◼   ► it has been overwhelmingly positive

00:06:15 ◼   ► in terms of people saying,

00:06:16 ◼   ► "Yes, that's exactly how I work."

00:06:17 ◼   ► All the old Mac users sent in those emails.

00:06:19 ◼   ► They said, "Yes, you're right, that's how I work too."

00:06:21 ◼   ► And then the curious people who are like,

00:06:23 ◼   ► "I'd never thought of working that way,

00:06:24 ◼   ► but it sounds interesting to me."

00:06:26 ◼   ► Very little negativity about it,

00:06:30 ◼   ► which is surprising considering how negative you two were.

00:06:32 ◼   ► And I keep coming back to the idea that,

00:06:34 ◼   ► how many windows was it in Safari?

00:06:37 ◼   ► 19 or something?

00:06:38 ◼   ► Like that was astronomical.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Like that I might as well have said 10,000.

00:06:43 ◼   ► But the reaction you guys had to,

00:06:45 ◼   ► 'cause 19 windows is just not that much.

00:06:47 ◼   ► And I thought, maybe I'm crazy, maybe 19 windows is a lot.

00:06:50 ◼   ► But then everyone's like, are you kidding me?

00:06:51 ◼   ► I have, always have tons of windows open.

00:06:54 ◼   ► It's like having a computer with like 32 gigs of RAM,

00:06:56 ◼   ► but you keep four windows open per app.

00:06:58 ◼   ► It's like, what?

00:06:59 ◼   ► Anyway, I don't wanna rehash the entire thing,

00:07:01 ◼   ► but it's probably better than whatever we have planned today.

00:07:04 ◼   ► - It's probably true.

00:07:05 ◼   ► - Maybe you've gotten different feedback than I have,

00:07:07 ◼   ► but I have been very surprised

00:07:09 ◼   ► that it has been overwhelmingly essentially on my side,

00:07:12 ◼   ► whether decisively on my side,

00:07:15 ◼   ► like, yes, that's exactly how I do things

00:07:16 ◼   ► and it's the one way you should do things,

00:07:17 ◼   ► or people saying, "That sounds interesting.

00:07:19 ◼   ► I'd like to try it."

00:07:20 ◼   ► - Okay, so the feedback I have seen,

00:07:22 ◼   ► the feedback I have seen, there has certainly been some,

00:07:25 ◼   ► and I shouldn't even say some,

00:07:26 ◼   ► a pretty decent amount of people saying,

00:07:29 ◼   ► yes, that's exactly what I do.

00:07:32 ◼   ► The John approach is exactly what I do.

00:07:36 ◼   ► But the overwhelming majority of feedback that I saw

00:07:40 ◼   ► was my goodness, that was hysterical.

00:07:43 ◼   ► That was my favorite episode of ATP so far.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So for all of you who said that, thank you.

00:07:47 ◼   ► That's very nice of you.

00:07:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, but you can't categorize that

00:07:49 ◼   ► because most of that was just like,

00:07:50 ◼   ► hey, I enjoy listening to the podcast,

00:07:51 ◼   ► which is like, great, thumbs up.

00:07:52 ◼   ► But it's not like they're not taking a side

00:07:55 ◼   ► position commenting on the substance of it. And yes, I did see a lot of it, but I didn't

00:07:58 ◼   ► categorize that. What I did was I favorited as a form of tracking. So all the ones that

00:08:03 ◼   ► were all the tweets that were sent to me about it. So if you go back through my favorites

00:08:05 ◼   ► and skip over the other stuff, it looks like it's not related. Like, I don't even know

00:08:08 ◼   ► if you can do this on stupid Twitter, but scroll back to like the week following the

00:08:12 ◼   ► show and just look at the huge amount of favorites that are in there that, and I favorited the

00:08:16 ◼   ► ones that were against as well. And you'll have a hard time finding a tweet anyway that

00:08:20 ◼   ► was against. And the email to the feedback forums we all saw on the email directly to

00:08:24 ◼   ► to me was basically 100% that people thought it was not crazy to have 19 windows open.

00:08:30 ◼   ► And by the way, I will add, and this is another thing that people seem to forget, like the

00:08:34 ◼   ► idea that I'm not closing windows, as I think I said on the show, as I think I actually

00:08:38 ◼   ► did in real time on the show when we were going through like, "Oh, I can close this

00:08:42 ◼   ► window now because I'm done researching like the date that these things are released or

00:08:45 ◼   ► whatever."

00:08:46 ◼   ► The windows close when I'm done with them.

00:08:47 ◼   ► It's not like I'm keeping them around like for the hell of it, right?

00:08:50 ◼   ► And so for example, I have two Safari windows open now.

00:08:53 ◼   ► Why do I have two Safari windows open?

00:08:54 ◼   ► Because I've been off work for like a week and I've been at home and everything is cleared

00:08:58 ◼   ► out.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And the only Safari windows open I have right now are stats windows that are sort of things

00:09:02 ◼   ► that I'm currently monitoring.

00:09:04 ◼   ► And even those will close when I'm not currently monitoring them anymore.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Like I'm still looking at the stats of my OS X review just to see as it slowly tails

00:09:11 ◼   ► off in the long tail how it's doing.

00:09:14 ◼   ► Anyway, and Chrome windows.

00:09:18 ◼   ► Two minimize, three non-minimize.

00:09:20 ◼   ► Minimize ones are, yeah.

00:09:22 ◼   ► Using, this is sort of like the Merlin man

00:09:25 ◼   ► using your inbox as a to-do list, which is a bad idea.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Using Safari Windows as a to-do list,

00:09:30 ◼   ► probably also a bad idea, but I think it works pretty well.

00:09:34 ◼   ► And the difference between your email inbox and Safari

00:09:37 ◼   ► is your email inbox is subject to anything

00:09:40 ◼   ► that anyone wants to send to you,

00:09:41 ◼   ► whereas your Safari Windows, you have to open yourself.

00:09:45 ◼   ► Oh, that was the other, before we get off this topic,

00:09:47 ◼   ► the other interesting thing,

00:09:48 ◼   ► Rupert did a post some time the week after saying

00:09:51 ◼   ► he'd had this tab open since October to remind him

00:09:53 ◼   ► to read his article and he finally got around to it

00:09:55 ◼   ► and then he posted a little link list thing

00:09:57 ◼   ► on Daring Fireball.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And then everyone jumped on him and said,

00:10:00 ◼   ► you're using the Syracuse window technique too.

00:10:02 ◼   ► 'Cause he essentially had this window thing open in a tab,

00:10:06 ◼   ► like I'll get around to it someday and he did.

00:10:08 ◼   ► And I bet he read it and he posted it

00:10:09 ◼   ► and I bet he closed that window.

00:10:11 ◼   ► - I can't do it.

00:10:15 ◼   ► I'm not gonna let myself get roped into this again.

00:10:18 ◼   ► So instead, I'm gonna move on to another piece of follow up unless Marco, you have something

00:10:21 ◼   ► to add.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Nope.

00:10:23 ◼   ► All right.

00:10:24 ◼   ► How do you add to that?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:10:26 ◼   ► So the next week's follow up we have, I brought up the question, I believe it was last episode.

00:10:31 ◼   ► Why would you run SSL on a site like caseylist.com that all it does is display content?

00:10:38 ◼   ► And many people wrote in with what in retrospect was a reasonably obvious answer that I certainly

00:10:44 ◼   ► didn't think of, which is you're, you could use SSL to prevent injection.

00:10:51 ◼   ► So say you're on an airplane and you're using one of the airplane wifi setups, they could

00:10:57 ◼   ► choose to inject ads into my website because they can't, there's no reason they couldn't.

00:11:04 ◼   ► Whereas if I was running SSL, there's nothing they could do to intercept that.

00:11:08 ◼   ► And there's also a bunch of like tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that go along with that.

00:11:12 ◼   ► But the most obvious one that I saw,

00:11:15 ◼   ► or the most reasonable one I saw,

00:11:16 ◼   ► was preventing like ad injection

00:11:19 ◼   ► or any other sort of man in the middle sort of scenario

00:11:22 ◼   ► with even something that's brochureware,

00:11:25 ◼   ► so to speak, like my site is.

00:11:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, what's even worse is some wireless carriers

00:11:30 ◼   ► are starting to inject ad tracking codes

00:11:32 ◼   ► or like actual ads into the pages themselves.

00:11:36 ◼   ► So it isn't just if you're on a plane occasionally,

00:11:38 ◼   ► it might just be like if you're an AT&T or Verizon customer.

00:11:41 ◼   ► Like we've seen certain things,

00:11:43 ◼   ► I don't know if they're widely deployed yet,

00:11:45 ◼   ► but we've seen reports of like them rolling out or testing

00:11:49 ◼   ► or like trying certain things with certain wireless carriers

00:11:51 ◼   ► like injecting ad tracking code into every HTML page

00:11:55 ◼   ► that's viewed over their data networks.

00:11:56 ◼   ► And that's really, really horrible on so many levels.

00:11:59 ◼   ► And so this could also help defend against that.

00:12:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not tinfoil hat.

00:12:04 ◼   ► Like people send us screenshots that I didn't know

00:12:06 ◼   ► 'cause I don't travel a lot,

00:12:07 ◼   ► but like that airline wifi,

00:12:09 ◼   ► like when you're on the plane, puts a, you know,

00:12:11 ◼   ► Southwest banner over every single page that you're on.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Like this is not speculative.

00:12:16 ◼   ► This is apparently a thing that happens

00:12:18 ◼   ► and not in like a secret kind of like Verizon secretly

00:12:20 ◼   ► putting in an HTTP header or a cookie or something

00:12:22 ◼   ► as in a giant banner for like, in case you didn't realize

00:12:25 ◼   ► that you're on a Southwest flight right now.

00:12:27 ◼   ► Terrible, super terrible.

00:12:29 ◼   ► The idea that if you use SSL, that no one can,

00:12:32 ◼   ► you know, one can see the traffic or man in the middle

00:12:35 ◼   ► you again with lots of unpatched, perhaps unknown vulnerabilities out there, I'm not

00:12:40 ◼   ► sure how secure that is, but I can tell you that in the corporate world it is not uncommon

00:12:47 ◼   ► for corporations to either do this and not tell anybody or do it and tell everybody or

00:12:53 ◼   ► try to do it until the employees revolt depending on what kind of company you're in, to basically

00:12:57 ◼   ► man in the middle every single employee of the company by putting in an SSL proxy, making

00:13:03 ◼   ► every computer in the company trusts the certificate and they're basically man in the middle

00:13:07 ◼   ► in all your SSL traffic.

00:13:09 ◼   ► So you can't do online banking from home unless you're okay with the IT department

00:13:15 ◼   ► at your work knowing all of your passwords and everything.

00:13:17 ◼   ► So SSL is not a panacea.

00:13:21 ◼   ► Excellent.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And then a final note which may bleed from follow up into an actual topic.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Marco, you have reverted to your normal comfortable ways and you hate new things again.

00:13:33 ◼   ► Can you tell us about that?

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00:16:22 ◼   ► So Marco, tell us about why you hate new things again,

00:16:25 ◼   ► other than that being your natural state.

00:16:28 ◼   ► - So last week, I discussed that I had tried

00:16:32 ◼   ► a new programming language, sort of.

00:16:34 ◼   ► I had written the beginnings of a feed crawler

00:16:38 ◼   ► to replace overcast PHP feed crawler or to augment it.

00:16:42 ◼   ► I had written the beginnings of that in Node.

00:16:45 ◼   ► And I already knew enough JavaScript to get by,

00:16:48 ◼   ► so it wasn't entirely learning a new language,

00:16:50 ◼   ► but it was at least in a new context

00:16:51 ◼   ► using a new platform and stuff like that.

00:16:55 ◼   ► And first I'm certainly using JavaScript

00:16:57 ◼   ► outside of the browser.

00:16:58 ◼   ► I've been trying to make it work, really until today.

00:17:02 ◼   ► And this afternoon, I think I finally am giving up now.

00:17:05 ◼   ► The problem I was trying to solve, as I mentioned last week,

00:17:07 ◼   ► so I won't go too far into it,

00:17:09 ◼   ► is that Overcast's feed crawlers basically have to pull

00:17:14 ◼   ► about 250,000 feeds now.

00:17:16 ◼   ► And I like to pull them no less than once an hour each.

00:17:21 ◼   ► and the ones that are popular,

00:17:22 ◼   ► I like to pull every few minutes.

00:17:24 ◼   ► So we're talking about probably, I don't know,

00:17:26 ◼   ► a million feeds an hour, something like that,

00:17:28 ◼   ► or more than that maybe.

00:17:30 ◼   ► So it's a good number of feed fetches per hour.

00:17:34 ◼   ► And right now, I use 240 PHP processes

00:17:39 ◼   ► that are pulling things off of the Beanstalk queue.

00:17:41 ◼   ► It takes tons of CPU power, it takes tons of RAM.

00:17:45 ◼   ► And this is obviously not made for this,

00:17:47 ◼   ► whereas the node event loop kind of model

00:17:50 ◼   ► is way better suited for this kind of like

00:17:53 ◼   ► large parallel crawling of network things

00:17:56 ◼   ► and then occasionally doing some work on them.

00:17:57 ◼   ► Like it's way better for that.

00:17:59 ◼   ► It's so much better suited for that.

00:18:01 ◼   ► Anyway, so I tried Node and I've been playing with it

00:18:04 ◼   ► for the last week or so and I just can't get it

00:18:08 ◼   ► to work properly.

00:18:09 ◼   ► I have the crawler functioning perfectly fine

00:18:13 ◼   ► but I keep hitting either weird limits

00:18:15 ◼   ► that cause weird performance issues

00:18:17 ◼   ► or the more common problem is memory leaks

00:18:19 ◼   ► and that's the one that I've been able to solve

00:18:22 ◼   ► all the performance problems, all the weird little edge cases

00:18:24 ◼   ► all the weird exceptions thrown from odd places

00:18:27 ◼   ► that I can't quite figure out where they're coming from,

00:18:30 ◼   ► fixed all that, I still can't fix the memory leaks.

00:18:33 ◼   ► And so I could just post the script online

00:18:36 ◼   ► and ask people, "Hey, fix the memory leak for me."

00:18:39 ◼   ► But ultimately I don't want to depend on a platform

00:18:43 ◼   ► that seems so weird and hacky.

00:18:46 ◼   ► And what I found, last week I mentioned how

00:18:49 ◼   ► I didn't foresee myself rewriting the whole backend

00:18:52 ◼   ► or wanting to make a whole web app in Node

00:18:54 ◼   ► just because of the nature of web apps.

00:18:56 ◼   ► You make a database request and then you make a couple more

00:18:59 ◼   ► and then you put things together.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Doing all that in a pure asynchronous framework

00:19:05 ◼   ► is really clumsy and it leads to all sorts of spaghetti code

00:19:08 ◼   ► and callback hell and everything like that.

00:19:10 ◼   ► And so I, and not only that,

00:19:12 ◼   ► but I just don't like JavaScript.

00:19:13 ◼   ► I really don't respect it as a language.

00:19:15 ◼   ► I really don't like its crazy object system.

00:19:18 ◼   ► there's a whole lot about JavaScript

00:19:19 ◼   ► that I really don't like.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Granted, this is a little early for me

00:19:22 ◼   ► to judge a whole language like this,

00:19:24 ◼   ► but it certainly seems like Node and JavaScript,

00:19:28 ◼   ► that combo is really just as hacky as PHP in many ways.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And it seems like I'm taking a step sideways

00:19:36 ◼   ► rather than a step forward.

00:19:38 ◼   ► And I don't have a lot of faith in this combo

00:19:41 ◼   ► for the future of my programming needs and career.

00:19:46 ◼   ► So instead, tonight I started trying Go,

00:19:51 ◼   ► and I'm gonna see how that goes.

00:19:52 ◼   ► I literally have, I've written like 10 lines of code

00:19:54 ◼   ► in it so far, I haven't had a chance to do any more.

00:19:56 ◼   ► So maybe ask me next week how that's going, but,

00:19:59 ◼   ► and the reason I'm picking Go right now to try next,

00:20:03 ◼   ► it seems like the kind of thing that I would enjoy

00:20:07 ◼   ► based on their philosophies,

00:20:08 ◼   ► some of the decisions they've made.

00:20:10 ◼   ► I mean, obviously the language looks really weird to me

00:20:11 ◼   ► 'cause it doesn't use C-style syntax for everything,

00:20:13 ◼   ► and you know, this is the first non-C syntax language

00:20:16 ◼   ► that I'm learning in a very, very long time.

00:20:18 ◼   ► I used to say that if I had to pick a new language today,

00:20:21 ◼   ► it would be Python.

00:20:23 ◼   ► And looking around the landscape today,

00:20:25 ◼   ► I think that would still be a reasonable choice,

00:20:28 ◼   ► but there's no question that Python is aging.

00:20:31 ◼   ► And there's all these new languages that are coming out

00:20:34 ◼   ► that do things differently,

00:20:35 ◼   ► that are more advanced in certain ways.

00:20:38 ◼   ► And I feel like I learn new languages so infrequently,

00:20:42 ◼   ► and the way I do it is I prefer to like really deeply master

00:20:46 ◼   ► a very small number of them,

00:20:47 ◼   ► rather than try a whole bunch of them

00:20:49 ◼   ► and have some familiarity with all of them.

00:20:51 ◼   ► Because of that, I'm afraid that Python

00:20:53 ◼   ► will fall out of favor sooner by possibly

00:20:57 ◼   ► as much as a decade than compared to something like Go,

00:21:01 ◼   ► or Node, or Rust, or any of these newer languages.

00:21:04 ◼   ► I could go that route, and I might still go that route,

00:21:07 ◼   ► I don't know, we'll see where this experiment ends.

00:21:09 ◼   ► But I think what I'm doing right now,

00:21:11 ◼   ► making this thing that has to crawl

00:21:12 ◼   ► a whole bunch of feeds in parallel,

00:21:13 ◼   ► and then read stuff out of the database

00:21:15 ◼   ► to know what to crawl and then write stuff

00:21:17 ◼   ► into some kind of queue to hand it off

00:21:19 ◼   ► to the rest of the app to do the rest of the processing,

00:21:21 ◼   ► I'm getting a pretty good feel.

00:21:24 ◼   ► I think this might be a good task to try

00:21:26 ◼   ► in three or four different languages

00:21:28 ◼   ► and just get some idea of what the language is like to use

00:21:33 ◼   ► on this kind of scale and how appropriate is it

00:21:35 ◼   ► for this kind of task.

00:21:36 ◼   ► Right now I'm gonna try this in Go.

00:21:38 ◼   ► I don't know if this is gonna be the last language

00:21:39 ◼   ► I use for this task.

00:21:40 ◼   ► I hope it is.

00:21:41 ◼   ► I like the way Go keeps the language itself

00:21:45 ◼   ► seemingly fairly simple.

00:21:47 ◼   ► It doesn't have things like generics

00:21:49 ◼   ► and a whole bunch of new things like that,

00:21:52 ◼   ► all these meta-programming type features.

00:21:54 ◼   ► It doesn't seem to have all those things.

00:21:56 ◼   ► I like that a lot.

00:21:57 ◼   ► I really prefer a language that can fit in my head

00:22:00 ◼   ► and a language that is as easy to read as it is to write.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And it seems like a lot of the new languages these days

00:22:08 ◼   ► are throwing that balance a little more

00:22:10 ◼   ► towards the other directions.

00:22:10 ◼   ► They're making all these really, really crazy

00:22:14 ◼   ► little features, little exceptions, little conveniences

00:22:16 ◼   ► to make the code look really cool when you're writing it

00:22:19 ◼   ► or to make it make for good conference slides

00:22:22 ◼   ► or a good Hello World example where like,

00:22:24 ◼   ► look at what you can do in these two lines of code

00:22:28 ◼   ► and it's all really dense and concise

00:22:29 ◼   ► and does cool things and abstract away

00:22:31 ◼   ► what's actually happening below the scenes.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And I don't like that style because it makes it very hard

00:22:36 ◼   ► to both learn and maintain that code.

00:22:40 ◼   ► That's not a style.

00:22:42 ◼   ► That's abstraction, that's programming.

00:22:44 ◼   ► I mean, why not just use toggle switches

00:22:46 ◼   ► then you'll know what's going on.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Why not push the electrons from the source

00:22:50 ◼   ► to the drain and the transistors?

00:22:51 ◼   ► I mean, like I kind of understand what you're getting at

00:22:54 ◼   ► in terms of constructs that may look unfamiliar,

00:22:57 ◼   ► but it's not like, it's not a choice of styles

00:22:59 ◼   ► of like crane technique and drunken monkey technique.

00:23:01 ◼   ► It's like, these are the languages that are trying to have,

00:23:06 ◼   ► You know, ways to express more with less typing.

00:23:11 ◼   ► And the general argument in favor of that is history has more or less shown that the

00:23:17 ◼   ► number of bugs per line of code written doesn't change too much.

00:23:21 ◼   ► So the only way to get fewer bugs is to reduce the number of lines of code you need to write

00:23:26 ◼   ► to solve a hidden problem.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Obviously you can go to extremes there where you're compressing things down to the point

00:23:32 ◼   ► where it's not understandable.

00:23:33 ◼   ► But I don't think Swift like Swift is not a good example of that

00:23:37 ◼   ► I don't think anything in the language makes it like this one line is incomprehensible

00:23:41 ◼   ► I think the the problem areas of Swift are more like the problem areas of C++ with like templates generics and

00:23:47 ◼   ► operator overloading

00:23:49 ◼   ► Giving you the ability to make incomprehensible

00:23:51 ◼   ► Mumbo jumbo, but that's the opposite

00:23:54 ◼   ► That's where there's more typing not less like when you when you see some giant declaration with a million generic types

00:24:00 ◼   ► And then you can't make heads or tails of it that is not concise that is verbose

00:24:04 ◼   ► And that's why you have problems figuring out what the hell's going on because you got to parse eight million tokens to figure it out

00:24:09 ◼   ► Whereas go not letting you do that type of thing you're never gonna see a crazy prototype like that. You know or even like

00:24:15 ◼   ► block syntax or

00:24:17 ◼   ► Pointers to functions and syntax and see where you have to like sort of be the compiler in your head and parse stuff out

00:24:22 ◼   ► Make the language simpler you won't see that and that that's something that you know for example JavaScript has that going for it

00:24:27 ◼   ► There's not much you can type in JavaScript

00:24:30 ◼   ► that is too complicated to look at

00:24:32 ◼   ► where you won't even understand programmer intent.

00:24:34 ◼   ► You may be surprised by what it actually does

00:24:36 ◼   ► because of weirdness, but you will get the intent

00:24:38 ◼   ► of the line of code, whereas in C++ and Swift

00:24:42 ◼   ► and a lot of other languages,

00:24:43 ◼   ► sometimes you can't even figure out what the intent is

00:24:45 ◼   ► without sort of parsing and lexing it yourself

00:24:48 ◼   ► in your head to figure out what it does.

00:24:50 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:24:51 ◼   ► Well, and also, I like to be able to look at some code

00:24:54 ◼   ► that I'm reading and be able to roughly tell what it does

00:24:58 ◼   ► without having to jump around to too much other code.

00:25:00 ◼   ► And so if you have some crazy library

00:25:03 ◼   ► or some crazy standard,

00:25:04 ◼   ► you know like a lot of these new language features

00:25:06 ◼   ► that a lot of the more crazy dynamic-ish languages offer,

00:25:11 ◼   ► they're a lot like C macros,

00:25:12 ◼   ► where it's like you could define your own,

00:25:15 ◼   ► and you know same thing with operator loading

00:25:16 ◼   ► and generics, you could define like your own meta language

00:25:20 ◼   ► on top of this language for your own code.

00:25:22 ◼   ► And so if you're reading someone else's code written in this language, or you're

00:25:26 ◼   ► reading code you wrote a year ago in this language when you were being a little too

00:25:29 ◼   ► clever, it can be really hard to figure out what's going on or what causes certain behavior

00:25:33 ◼   ► you're seeing.

00:25:34 ◼   ► That's one of the reasons I don't like Rails, and one of the reasons I avoided back

00:25:37 ◼   ► forever ago why David and I decided to write Tumblr and PHP instead of Rails, was because

00:25:42 ◼   ► it had a lot of the mix-ins, a lot of the behavior caused by things that are hard to

00:25:47 ◼   ► find.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And I'm sure it isn't like that anymore, I don't know.

00:25:52 ◼   ► I literally looked at it once in 2006 for about a month.

00:25:56 ◼   ► So take all that with a grain of salt.

00:25:58 ◼   ► But generally I don't like having all that magic

00:26:02 ◼   ► that's hard to find and hard to follow

00:26:04 ◼   ► when you're reading the code

00:26:05 ◼   ► or when you're debugging the code.

00:26:06 ◼   ► That's why I like languages like C and like Objective-C

00:26:09 ◼   ► because most of that magic is not possible

00:26:13 ◼   ► or at least is very, very rarely used.

00:26:15 ◼   ► - Well, C, you said it in C, it's macros.

00:26:17 ◼   ► Macros make that a nightmare.

00:26:18 ◼   ► And looking at someone, I mean, to give a great example,

00:26:21 ◼   ► try looking at the Perl source code, not like, you know, Perl code, but the C program that

00:26:26 ◼   ► is the Perl compiler and, you know, executable.

00:26:30 ◼   ► It is so filled with macros, it is almost nonsensical.

00:26:33 ◼   ► And macro, people don't like macros with good reason, but if you take macros and take away

00:26:38 ◼   ► all of the evil sort of text processing crap about them, what falls out is Lisp, and people

00:26:43 ◼   ► love Lisp.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And that, this means, you know, when you say that if you look at a program, it looks like,

00:26:47 ◼   ► you know, some meta program you can't figure out, that's why people love Lisp, that you

00:26:50 ◼   ► you essentially define a language

00:26:52 ◼   ► to solve your specific problem

00:26:53 ◼   ► and then use that language to write your program in.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And so that's the whole idea of Lisp is that you will,

00:27:00 ◼   ► there is no syntax to speak of,

00:27:02 ◼   ► it's just, you know,

00:27:03 ◼   ► fingernail clippings all the way down,

00:27:05 ◼   ► and then you just sort of define your own vocabulary.

00:27:09 ◼   ► And if someone else was to look at that,

00:27:11 ◼   ► yes, they would have to say,

00:27:11 ◼   ► "I don't know what this does."

00:27:12 ◼   ► I mean, that's true of looking at any program.

00:27:14 ◼   ► It's kind of weird hearing you say that

00:27:15 ◼   ► because you're working with like vast libraries

00:27:18 ◼   ► millions of lines of code that you a didn't write and B usually don't even have access

00:27:22 ◼   ► to the source code too. And that's the majority of the code in your program. Like an overcast.

00:27:25 ◼   ► You know what I mean? The problem I have is that Marco, all I'm hearing you say is I want

00:27:31 ◼   ► to remain a C programmer for life. And that's okay if that's what you want to do. But like

00:27:37 ◼   ► you grumbling about generics, which I know is just like an off the cuff example, but

00:27:42 ◼   ► you grumbling about generics is nails on a chalkboard to me because I love generics.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Nobody loves generics, Casey.

00:27:50 ◼   ► I do.

00:27:51 ◼   ► And now I'm coming at this from C# where it's very…

00:27:59 ◼   ► Generics came to C# at a time when everything was extremely strongly typed.

00:28:04 ◼   ► Type inference wasn't a thing.

00:28:06 ◼   ► And you had to cast everything all the time.

00:28:11 ◼   ► And it was the most annoying thing in the world.

00:28:14 ◼   ► And to me, generics are being extremely deliberate about what you're trying to accomplish.

00:28:21 ◼   ► And I just, when you say, when you say that, oh, you don't, you don't feel like all the

00:28:27 ◼   ► code is where you expect it to be and you have to jump around in different files to

00:28:31 ◼   ► find it all.

00:28:32 ◼   ► All I'm hearing you say is I want to be a procedural C programmer for the rest of my

00:28:35 ◼   ► life and that's okay.

00:28:38 ◼   ► But gosh, that's so limiting, and I hope that that's,

00:28:41 ◼   ► I hope that's not what you mean,

00:28:43 ◼   ► even if that's what I'm hearing you say.

00:28:45 ◼   ► - No, I mean, that isn't what I mean.

00:28:47 ◼   ► However, you know, like the languages I know,

00:28:49 ◼   ► I've either, either they work this way

00:28:51 ◼   ► or I've been able to make them work this way.

00:28:53 ◼   ► What I, my goal is ease of reading the code

00:28:57 ◼   ► and simplicity, keeping things small, reducing cleverness.

00:29:02 ◼   ► I am not a very clever programmer.

00:29:05 ◼   ► I program things in pretty straightforward ways usually.

00:29:08 ◼   ► all of the increase of cleverness that is infecting modern language design,

00:29:14 ◼   ► it makes things look cool up front, but it makes it really hard to use over time,

00:29:19 ◼   ► or with a team, or when maintaining code, or when using third-party code.

00:29:24 ◼   ► It gets very, very difficult.

00:29:26 ◼   ► I feel like a lot of this is complexity for its own sake, or solving the wrong problems.

00:29:31 ◼   ► Well, but your problem here is not a language problem.

00:29:34 ◼   ► It's kind of a library problem.

00:29:36 ◼   ► It's mostly an implementation problem

00:29:39 ◼   ► because it's like you have a well-defined problem to solve.

00:29:41 ◼   ► I don't think the language matters at all.

00:29:42 ◼   ► All that matters is the libraries

00:29:44 ◼   ► and the sort of stability of the implementation

00:29:46 ◼   ► of that language and can it handle

00:29:48 ◼   ► because you're doing things at a fairly large scale

00:29:50 ◼   ► and you've got something that works,

00:29:51 ◼   ► but it's kind of around the creaky edges

00:29:53 ◼   ► of what PHP can handle and it's not particularly efficient

00:29:57 ◼   ► as you saw when you did the Node implementation.

00:29:59 ◼   ► It could be more efficient, but the Node is young

00:30:00 ◼   ► and it's flaky and has its own issues

00:30:02 ◼   ► And so what you're looking for is something that will work with less flakiness than Node

00:30:11 ◼   ► had, fewer resources than PHP did.

00:30:14 ◼   ► And so I think Go is a reasonable thing to be looking at.

00:30:16 ◼   ► And as I said on Twitter, and I wasn't actually joking, if you want to do this in Perl with

00:30:20 ◼   ► any event, which is a wrap around tons of event libraries, you could use any event wrap

00:30:25 ◼   ► around the libev library.

00:30:30 ◼   ► I think this would be fairly straightforward.

00:30:32 ◼   ► And so would your Perl solution use fewer resources than the PHP one?

00:30:39 ◼   ► Probably because it would use a real event library written in C.

00:30:42 ◼   ► Would it have fewer bugs than the Node one?

00:30:44 ◼   ► Probably because that library and that CPAN module are all way more mature than the Node

00:30:48 ◼   ► implementation of it.

00:30:50 ◼   ► But Go would definitely be faster.

00:30:52 ◼   ► But when you do it in Go, you're left with, "Okay, well, am I going to use an existing

00:30:57 ◼   ► event library?

00:30:58 ◼   ► Am I going to sort of write my own event library?"

00:30:59 ◼   ► because once you're sort of writing your own event library

00:31:01 ◼   ► and go, if you're not going to use libevent or libv or something

00:31:05 ◼   ► like that, then that's immediately worse.

00:31:08 ◼   ► It doesn't matter how good the language is.

00:31:10 ◼   ► No, don't try to re-implement your own event library

00:31:14 ◼   ► or directly with system calls into it.

00:31:16 ◼   ► Like someone did that already.

00:31:17 ◼   ► What you just want is a language that

00:31:19 ◼   ► exposes one of these mature libraries that

00:31:21 ◼   ► works really well in a way that's not buggy,

00:31:23 ◼   ► doesn't leak memory, that's fairly performative.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And so I would obviously try Perl first,

00:31:28 ◼   ► because I know there's a bunch of event library wrappers.

00:31:30 ◼   ► In fact, there's a wrapper that wraps

00:31:31 ◼   ► pretty much any event library called any event.

00:31:34 ◼   ► And so you could go through like,

00:31:35 ◼   ► let me try seven different event libraries

00:31:37 ◼   ► with the same Perl program.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And if they all suck, you're like, well, that didn't work.

00:31:40 ◼   ► You know, 'cause I haven't done event-driven programming

00:31:43 ◼   ► in Perl, anything more than like a trivial thing.

00:31:46 ◼   ► So I can't tell you whether it will actually work,

00:31:47 ◼   ► but I can tell you that it's old enough

00:31:49 ◼   ► and been around long enough that there's a million wrappers

00:31:51 ◼   ► for event libraries.

00:31:52 ◼   ► And maybe that would just help you narrow down

00:31:53 ◼   ► which event library you wanna use.

00:31:54 ◼   ► And then you could just write against that one in C,

00:31:56 ◼   ► which you already also talked about.

00:31:57 ◼   ► hey, let me go to libevent,

00:31:59 ◼   ► let me write it directly against it and see.

00:32:01 ◼   ► But I've also heard that libevent

00:32:03 ◼   ► is not the best event library if you're looking to do that.

00:32:05 ◼   ► So what Lauren Burchard was just saying

00:32:06 ◼   ► that he wrote an Objective-C wrap around libev

00:32:10 ◼   ► to do something similar.

00:32:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:32:12 ◼   ► - I think that's what it's gonna come down to

00:32:14 ◼   ► is either the language has something like this built in,

00:32:17 ◼   ► a couple of people mentioned Erlang or whatever,

00:32:18 ◼   ► like has some sort of parallelization event loop type

00:32:21 ◼   ► of making efficient use of CPU

00:32:24 ◼   ► when a lot of things are gonna be in IO wait,

00:32:27 ◼   ► either has that built into the language

00:32:29 ◼   ► or it has a really good stable wrapper

00:32:30 ◼   ► around one of the other low-level libraries

00:32:32 ◼   ► that does this for you.

00:32:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I mean, and it should be,

00:32:37 ◼   ► in case the implication here was not clear,

00:32:40 ◼   ► I'm not just looking for a solution to this one problem.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I'm also looking for a long-term replacement

00:32:46 ◼   ► to PHP in my toolkit.

00:32:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I don't think this is a great example for that,

00:32:52 ◼   ► because say you find something

00:32:54 ◼   ► that does a really good job on this,

00:32:55 ◼   ► it still doesn't say, okay,

00:32:56 ◼   ► now I'm going to write all of the stuff I used to write in PHP, I'm going to write in

00:32:59 ◼   ► Go. I don't think you would do that, but I think Co could be an appropriate choice for

00:33:03 ◼   ► this provided you get the event stuff nailed down. And by the same token, were you to get

00:33:08 ◼   ► a handy little solution to this in Perl with any event or something, doesn't mean you would

00:33:13 ◼   ► say, okay, now I'm going to rewrite all those PHP agents in Perl because that would, well,

00:33:17 ◼   ► I think it would still be a big upgrade, but anyway, you're probably not going to do it.

00:33:21 ◼   ► Well, in addition to Perl having many of the same problems that I just cited with PHP and

00:33:25 ◼   ► Python, it just would feel like a sideways step.

00:33:30 ◼   ► - I know, but I was suggesting it justice

00:33:32 ◼   ► because you were at the point now where you're like,

00:33:34 ◼   ► look, I wanna solve this problem without using

00:33:36 ◼   ► 240 PHP processes that are inefficient

00:33:38 ◼   ► and use a lot of resources.

00:33:39 ◼   ► It's like an economic, it's like a single purpose problem,

00:33:41 ◼   ► like I have a problem, there's actual impact

00:33:43 ◼   ► to me implementing this better.

00:33:45 ◼   ► Node looked like it was gonna do it,

00:33:46 ◼   ► but it's a little flaky, try a few other things.

00:33:49 ◼   ► This could be one of the other things you try.

00:33:51 ◼   ► - The reason I'm able to do the things I do,

00:33:53 ◼   ► The reason I'm able as one person to run a web service with a few hundred thousand

00:33:58 ◼   ► users and an iOS app and be able to keep up with them semi-okay is because I don't spend

00:34:05 ◼   ► a lot of time experimenting with new languages and new systems and making things just for

00:34:10 ◼   ► fun.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Most of what I do is to serve the things I'm working on.

00:34:14 ◼   ► And so I don't want to go on an expedition trying to learn a bunch of new languages to

00:34:19 ◼   ► try to pick the best one for just this one task.

00:34:22 ◼   ► I want to be able to leverage this, to use this,

00:34:24 ◼   ► to basically build up my toolkit

00:34:26 ◼   ► and modernize this one very ancient part of it.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Because I know that PHP is,

00:34:31 ◼   ► look, I could keep using it for a long time,

00:34:34 ◼   ► it's gonna be around for a long time,

00:34:36 ◼   ► but I do keep running into things that it's bad at.

00:34:39 ◼   ► And I recognize that, as I said last episode,

00:34:43 ◼   ► I really don't have a lot of faith

00:34:45 ◼   ► in the quality of the direction it's going.

00:34:48 ◼   ► And there are lots of other languages

00:34:49 ◼   ► that I should be considering.

00:34:51 ◼   ► I actually heard from Russell Ivanovich, I forget how you say his last name, I tried

00:34:57 ◼   ► to remember it and tried to learn it and I forgot, I'm sorry Russell.

00:35:00 ◼   ► He's one of the guys in Shifty Jelly, one of my competitors in the podcast app space,

00:35:03 ◼   ► they make Pocket Casts, and he's the nicest guy in the world and he told me privately,

00:35:08 ◼   ► they crawl what sounded like a pretty impressive number with a pretty impressively low amount

00:35:13 ◼   ► of hardware and they do it all in Java.

00:35:16 ◼   ► I don't know anything about Java in the modern day, the last time I used Java was in Computer

00:35:20 ◼   ► Science 101 back in 2001.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Maybe people told me that I should be looking at C# for this.

00:35:28 ◼   ► And Casey, I'm curious to know what you think about that.

00:35:30 ◼   ► But there are lots of other languages I could be looking at right now.

00:35:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:35:34 ◼   ► Casey, if you were faced with this problem, what would you do?

00:35:38 ◼   ► I think the first thing I'd do is I would try to write it in Node.

00:35:45 ◼   ► And I thought you had said on Twitter that the issue that you're having with Node is

00:35:51 ◼   ► that getting the process to start again is where everything's going wrong.

00:35:58 ◼   ► Like the set timeout is what's breaking.

00:36:01 ◼   ► Is that, well, the set timeout is eventually leading to memory leaks.

00:36:04 ◼   ► Is that a fair statement?

00:36:05 ◼   ► Oh, it's immediately leading to memory leaks.

00:36:08 ◼   ► It's like every set timeout is, for some reason it seems to be that it's capturing the scope

00:36:13 ◼   ► of its calling scope and it's like retaining

00:36:16 ◼   ► its calling scope even though it's just like,

00:36:19 ◼   ► it's just calling a function.

00:36:21 ◼   ► Like it's not, it's like I don't see why it needs

00:36:23 ◼   ► to retain anything that's in the calling scope,

00:36:25 ◼   ► but for some reason it is.

00:36:26 ◼   ► And if you search around for node set timeout

00:36:30 ◼   ► or set interval memory leaks, you see a bunch

00:36:33 ◼   ► of other people hitting problems like this

00:36:35 ◼   ► and some of the fixes look like bugs to me.

00:36:39 ◼   ► Some of them are like, well if you set,

00:36:41 ◼   ► If you just call setTimeout, then you'll get a leak,

00:36:44 ◼   ► but if you assign it to a variable,

00:36:45 ◼   ► say var t equals setTimeout, then it doesn't leak.

00:36:49 ◼   ► There's a bunch of weird stuff going on

00:36:51 ◼   ► with the way this captures things.

00:36:53 ◼   ► Either it's a bug, or it doesn't make any sense, or both.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Either way, that is a big problem for me.

00:36:59 ◼   ► I don't wanna have to keep fighting issues like that

00:37:01 ◼   ► in a language I'm gonna invest much time into.

00:37:04 ◼   ► Also, again, what I said before is,

00:37:06 ◼   ► I don't like JavaScript, and I don't foresee

00:37:10 ◼   ► this being my long-term replacement for PHP,

00:37:12 ◼   ► so it feels like I'm kind of wasting time

00:37:14 ◼   ► doing a whole bunch in it.

00:37:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think the reason I brought that up is

00:37:19 ◼   ► if the only issue you're having with Node

00:37:22 ◼   ► boils down to just tickling that Node process

00:37:25 ◼   ► and getting it to do its thing,

00:37:26 ◼   ► then couldn't you fire that from PHP

00:37:28 ◼   ► and have Node do the crawling?

00:37:30 ◼   ► - Well, no, the whole idea here,

00:37:33 ◼   ► and when I asked on Twitter, am I doing this wrong,

00:37:37 ◼   ► or does setTimeout just not work without leaking memory?

00:37:40 ◼   ► and I got a bunch of responses from node programmers.

00:37:44 ◼   ► None of them use it.

00:37:46 ◼   ► All of them trigger recurring scheduled events

00:37:50 ◼   ► with external cron tasks that call into the node

00:37:53 ◼   ► with a web request or something.

00:37:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's basically what I'm trying to do.

00:37:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, or they use things like,

00:37:58 ◼   ► there's something called I think Node-Cron

00:37:59 ◼   ► or something like that, but if you look at the source,

00:38:01 ◼   ► it's using setTimeout internally,

00:38:03 ◼   ► so that's basically the only option.

00:38:06 ◼   ► All I need to do is I need to crawl,

00:38:10 ◼   ► for all these feeds, each of them has a TTL

00:38:12 ◼   ► that I calculate.

00:38:13 ◼   ► I calculate when the next one should run

00:38:16 ◼   ► and I say call me again with this ID in this many seconds.

00:38:21 ◼   ► That's it, that's all I have to do.

00:38:22 ◼   ► So they shouldn't be nesting, they're not stacking up.

00:38:26 ◼   ► I verified that, it's not like they're not being cleared

00:38:31 ◼   ► and so making more and more calls per second,

00:38:34 ◼   ► it's not doing that.

00:38:35 ◼   ► It's just something about the memory capture.

00:38:37 ◼   ► But again, that's honestly, I'm sure a Node expert

00:38:42 ◼   ► could look at this and possibly fix it.

00:38:44 ◼   ► It's more that I don't wanna keep investing in a language

00:38:47 ◼   ► that is clashing with me on such a fundamental level

00:38:50 ◼   ► and that I don't feel is serving my long-term goals.

00:38:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I really wanna defend Node

00:38:56 ◼   ► because I've not done a overwhelming amount

00:39:00 ◼   ► of Node programming, but the programming I've done in Node,

00:39:03 ◼   ► I really like.

00:39:04 ◼   ► I want to defend JavaScript because

00:39:07 ◼   ► although it is full of landmines and pitfalls

00:39:11 ◼   ► and bottomless pits,

00:39:12 ◼   ► it is actually to me anyway, fairly fun to write.

00:39:15 ◼   ► But if I were in your shoes,

00:39:18 ◼   ► I'd probably be coming to a similar conclusion.

00:39:22 ◼   ► And it certainly sounds to be

00:39:23 ◼   ► a pragmatic conclusion regardless.

00:39:26 ◼   ► To go back and answer your question,

00:39:27 ◼   ► well, what about like C#?

00:39:29 ◼   ► Well, that's challenging

00:39:32 ◼   ► because the right way to do it,

00:39:35 ◼   ► if you're gonna do it in C#,

00:39:36 ◼   ► is to run ASP.NET, IAS, the whole Microsoft stack.

00:39:41 ◼   ► And I know, right, and you have no interest in that.

00:39:44 ◼   ► And honestly, if I were in your shoes,

00:39:46 ◼   ► I wouldn't have any interest in that.

00:39:48 ◼   ► And you know what?

00:39:49 ◼   ► When I was doing for fun programming in my own time

00:39:51 ◼   ► that I was going to have to pay for,

00:39:55 ◼   ► did I use C# and ASP.NET?

00:39:57 ◼   ► Hell no, I didn't, because I didn't wanna stand all that up.

00:39:59 ◼   ► I didn't want to have to worry about all that.

00:40:02 ◼   ► So C# as a language, actually, I think would,

00:40:05 ◼   ► I think you would like C# a lot to be honest,

00:40:08 ◼   ► but the problem is you've got all the periphery to deal with

00:40:11 ◼   ► that I don't think you would enjoy.

00:40:13 ◼   ► Now, of course, you could take the approach of,

00:40:15 ◼   ► well, let me look into Xamarin/Mono,

00:40:17 ◼   ► and that might work.

00:40:20 ◼   ► To be honest, I'm now outside of my comfort zone

00:40:22 ◼   ► because I work in the Microsoft stack.

00:40:24 ◼   ► So I don't really know a lot about the Xamarin and Mono,

00:40:29 ◼   ► the way that would be deployed, but it's worth looking into.

00:40:33 ◼   ► I don't think C# is going anywhere anytime soon.

00:40:37 ◼   ► I don't know enough about Go to be able to say,

00:40:39 ◼   ► yes, that sounds like an excellent choice

00:40:41 ◼   ► of something that has long-term viability.

00:40:43 ◼   ► I think Node is certainly very trendy right now

00:40:47 ◼   ► in the same way that Python and Ruby have been in the past.

00:40:50 ◼   ► But to your point earlier,

00:40:52 ◼   ► are Python and Ruby going to remain trendy?

00:40:55 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:40:56 ◼   ► And is Node going to remain trendy?

00:40:59 ◼   ► know and although it seems a little weird to me to throw node out entirely because of set timeout

00:41:05 ◼   ► i can also understand how that's the straw that's breaking the camel's back so if i were your shoes

00:41:11 ◼   ► i honestly don't know what i would do i guess i would try go and see how it worked um but geez

00:41:17 ◼   ► it's a tough it's a tough call i'm not sure what the right answer is i was gonna say i think

00:41:21 ◼   ► tangling both of these things up with each other finding a new language to replace php that's going

00:41:25 ◼   ► gonna be worth your while long term and solving the specific problem is over

00:41:28 ◼   ► complicating it. I think those are two things that you should do and I don't

00:41:32 ◼   ► think they need to be combined. It's something, it's it'll be nice if you

00:41:35 ◼   ► combine them. I can understand the desire like oh if I could get them you know two

00:41:37 ◼   ► birds with one stone but the the needs are so different. I mean like on the one

00:41:42 ◼   ► hand for example the best bet for a new language for you to learn that you're

00:41:46 ◼   ► gonna have to use later is probably at this point Swift and not because you're

00:41:49 ◼   ► gonna use your place PHP but because Apple's gonna make you use it too.

00:41:53 ◼   ► Well, and I might learn that also but but because Swift is not open source

00:41:57 ◼   ► there's nothing about Swift that can go on a server yet and and so I

00:42:01 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to maintain these two languages like yeah, I know you still need something to replace PHP

00:42:07 ◼   ► But yeah, exactly like it's like Swift put that aside

00:42:09 ◼   ► You're probably gonna need to do that maybe look into it to see if it helps you here

00:42:13 ◼   ► Maybe does maybe doesn't probably won't then you got the problem of what do I need to replace PHP?

00:42:17 ◼   ► And then you've got the problem is what do I do short term to make this crawler take fewer resources?

00:42:21 ◼   ► Well, I would also point out, I tweet shared this last week during the break, last episode

00:42:29 ◼   ► of Core Intuition was really good, I'll have to look up the number, I'll put it in the

00:42:32 ◼   ► show notes, where Daniel Jowkut and Manton Reese were talking about Swift and like, how

00:42:38 ◼   ► safe is it to use Swift today?

00:42:41 ◼   ► Or how safe is it to invest a whole lot of time in Swift today?

00:42:46 ◼   ► And they rightly pointed out, like, we don't actually,

00:42:49 ◼   ► like Swift is not a sure thing yet.

00:42:51 ◼   ► It is a thing that is out there

00:42:53 ◼   ► that Apple has put out there.

00:42:54 ◼   ► They've also put out things like garbage collection

00:42:57 ◼   ► in Objective-C, things like the Java bridge

00:43:00 ◼   ► back forever ago, that ended up being axed

00:43:03 ◼   ► only a few years down the road

00:43:04 ◼   ► 'cause they just weren't working out.

00:43:06 ◼   ► We don't know if Swift is actually gonna be here

00:43:07 ◼   ► for the long term and actually be the eventual replacement

00:43:10 ◼   ► for Objective-C yet.

00:43:11 ◼   ► All we know is that it seems like that's the goal right now.

00:43:14 ◼   ► But this is not the first time

00:43:16 ◼   ► something like that has come around.

00:43:18 ◼   ► Apple's certainly in a better position now

00:43:19 ◼   ► than they were when the other alternatives came around,

00:43:21 ◼   ► but it is not a guarantee that Swift will be the next thing

00:43:26 ◼   ► for Objective-C programmers.

00:43:29 ◼   ► All this is is we're trying something now,

00:43:32 ◼   ► and I would point out we seem to be

00:43:34 ◼   ► in a somewhat turbulent time at Apple.

00:43:36 ◼   ► In addition, I mean, God, looking at how strained

00:43:41 ◼   ► their engineering resources are,

00:43:43 ◼   ► it does seem like a terrible time

00:43:44 ◼   ► to have introduced you to language.

00:43:46 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:43:47 ◼   ► Like just for them, like not even just for us.

00:43:49 ◼   ► I mean, we'll deal with it, whatever they do, but--

00:43:52 ◼   ► - But I do think Swift is much stronger of a,

00:43:56 ◼   ► if you had to bet on one of them,

00:43:57 ◼   ► you just named a whole bunch of them.

00:43:58 ◼   ► The Java Bridge, Java Bridge was done

00:44:00 ◼   ► from a position of weakness,

00:44:01 ◼   ► 'cause it was like maybe people only use

00:44:02 ◼   ► these crazy square brackets.

00:44:03 ◼   ► That is a super weak position,

00:44:04 ◼   ► and they were just trying to get people

00:44:05 ◼   ► to develop for the rest.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Garbage Collection was always kind of half-heartedly pushed.

00:44:10 ◼   ► It was like, "We're making Garbage Collection,

00:44:12 ◼   ► and maybe we'll dog food it here and you should make your apps work with it."

00:44:17 ◼   ► But then they couldn't even convince all Apple internal library people to use it for their

00:44:21 ◼   ► libraries and make them garbage collection safe.

00:44:24 ◼   ► It was never like…

00:44:26 ◼   ► The amount of publicity and the push behind and the specific team behind Swift is like

00:44:33 ◼   ► their team that has proven that they can get things done within Apple having changed their

00:44:38 ◼   ► whole compiler infrastructure over several years.

00:44:41 ◼   ► It was in a keynote, but you know, it was also in the keynote.

00:44:44 ◼   ► We're going to the standards bodies starting tomorrow, and we're going to make

00:44:49 ◼   ► FaceTime an open industry standard.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Yeah, but that was Stitch Steve Jobs saying random things on stage and people

00:44:58 ◼   ► going crazy behind the scenes.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Like this, this is of all of the sort of major technology based things.

00:45:05 ◼   ► I would say this is even stronger than like, by the way, you should build your

00:45:09 ◼   ► OS X apps using Project Builder.

00:45:11 ◼   ► Like this was more emphatic than Project Builder

00:45:14 ◼   ► 'cause it took them a while to get,

00:45:15 ◼   ► in fact, I think it basically took them

00:45:17 ◼   ► until they had the X code name to say,

00:45:20 ◼   ► no, this is it, this is, you know,

00:45:22 ◼   ► we're telling you like we are completely taking over

00:45:25 ◼   ► the compiler infrastructure,

00:45:26 ◼   ► which they were from the beginning anyway,

00:45:27 ◼   ► but they were kind of timid about, you know,

00:45:28 ◼   ► especially coming off the whole

00:45:30 ◼   ► code warrior thing and everything.

00:45:32 ◼   ► My recollection anyway,

00:45:33 ◼   ► is that they were externally not shoving it in your face

00:45:37 ◼   ► that by the way, if you're gonna develop

00:45:38 ◼   ► applications for our platform, you're going to use our IDE and our compilers, because

00:45:43 ◼   ► they were in a transition period there and eventually said, no, you're going to use our

00:45:45 ◼   ► stuff.

00:45:46 ◼   ► And to emphasize that, it's called Xcode now instead of Project Builder, and you're just

00:45:49 ◼   ► going to have to deal with it.

00:45:51 ◼   ► Swift was very bold and very strongly backed in.

00:45:55 ◼   ► I would say that the thing you should be wary about using it now is they've said they're

00:46:00 ◼   ► going to just constantly break the syntax and there could be all sorts of weird things

00:46:04 ◼   ► having to do with source code compatibility.

00:46:06 ◼   ► the tools are very immature right now and the performance of the compiler sucks and

00:46:10 ◼   ► all this other stuff.

00:46:11 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of reasons to stay away from it, but like this is just so much

00:46:14 ◼   ► stronger than the other things you've listed.

00:46:16 ◼   ► So even though those things have happened in the past and you had to be like, the problem

00:46:20 ◼   ► with Swift is the opportunity cost of not doing it seems much higher.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Like you could sort of say, all right, well, they're still supporting Objective-C, right?

00:46:27 ◼   ► So I don't have to do this Java thing.

00:46:28 ◼   ► We'll see how that shakes out.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And the garbage collection is like, well, I'll wait to see what happens.

00:46:32 ◼   ► You can do it with Swift too.

00:46:33 ◼   ► Let me wait to see what Apple actually implements in Swift.

00:46:36 ◼   ► But even as soon as Apple implements its first Swift only library or something, even then,

00:46:42 ◼   ► I still think you could potentially say, "All right, I'm all in on Swift," and they could

00:46:45 ◼   ► still change their mind.

00:46:46 ◼   ► So I think we have probably three years to be sure, but I think the degree of confidence

00:46:51 ◼   ► in Swift being a thing, whether it's good or not, the fact that Apple is going to stick

00:46:55 ◼   ► to it, it's pretty high at this point.

00:46:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And plus, I don't know Apple's history with like MetroWorks and CodeWarrior and stuff

00:47:02 ◼   ► like that.

00:47:03 ◼   ► I came way later than that.

00:47:04 ◼   ► Certainly, it seems like a lot of the moves they've been making over the last five to

00:47:09 ◼   ► 10 years, probably five-ish years, have been to set the things in motion to get Swift to

00:47:15 ◼   ► be a thing, you know, to work on LVM, to work on Clang, to work on all of these things that

00:47:22 ◼   ► make up the Swift toolchain.

00:47:24 ◼   ► It seems like a very deliberate multi-year process to get to where we are today.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And yeah, Apple will throw things away on a whim if they so desire, but geez, it seems

00:47:32 ◼   ► Seems like that's a lot of work to be thrown away just for fun.

00:47:36 ◼   ► And of course they have the big problem that they throw it away.

00:47:39 ◼   ► They just say, "Okay, well back to Objective-C.

00:47:42 ◼   ► Retreat to safety."

00:47:43 ◼   ► They need, as I've said many times, they need something.

00:47:48 ◼   ► You can't just stick with Objective-C forever.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Swift too soon, should they retreat and then advance again in a couple years in the future?

00:47:55 ◼   ► I think they're already behind and they need something like Swift.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And if it's not Swift, this will be a huge mistake for them because they will have wasted

00:48:00 ◼   ► years and tons of resources attempting the Swift transition and if it fails it's like

00:48:05 ◼   ► "uh, uh, what do we do now? C# I guess? I don't know." They have a problem.

00:48:10 ◼   ► We are also sponsored this week by Fracture. Remember Fracture? They print photos directly

00:48:14 ◼   ► on glass in vivid color. Go to fractureme.com. F-R-A-C-T-U-R-E-M-E dot com. I have Fracture's

00:48:23 ◼   ► hanging all over my office. They are awesome prints. I like them a lot. Other people have

00:48:28 ◼   ► compliment to them whenever they've seen them.

00:48:30 ◼   ► They're fantastic.

00:48:31 ◼   ► So they print photos directly on glass and then you can hang them up directly.

00:48:35 ◼   ► You don't have to frame them.

00:48:36 ◼   ► They are their own frame basically.

00:48:38 ◼   ► It's really, really nice.

00:48:39 ◼   ► The price I started at just $15 for a 5x5 inch print and I use that size.

00:48:44 ◼   ► I have a little row above my window in my office here.

00:48:47 ◼   ► I have a little row or the little square prints and I use them to print app icons of the apps

00:48:52 ◼   ► I've done.

00:48:53 ◼   ► It's kind of like this nice physical,

00:48:56 ◼   ► almost like a trophy row of like,

00:48:57 ◼   ► here's the things I've made.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Because in our world, you know,

00:49:00 ◼   ► you don't get a lot of like physical recognition

00:49:01 ◼   ► of things you make in software.

00:49:03 ◼   ► I really like that and people have,

00:49:05 ◼   ► people have taken that idea and ran with it.

00:49:06 ◼   ► I've heard of a lot of other people who are doing that too.

00:49:08 ◼   ► You can do that.

00:49:09 ◼   ► You can also print photos.

00:49:10 ◼   ► I have a couple of photos printed on the other wall

00:49:12 ◼   ► over here.

00:49:13 ◼   ► I have like, looks like it's probably like an 11 by 17 size.

00:49:16 ◼   ► It's a nice size.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Anyway, every fracture is handmade, checked for quality

00:49:21 ◼   ► by their small team in Gainesville, Florida.

00:49:23 ◼   ► It is the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way

00:49:26 ◼   ► to display your favorite photo.

00:49:28 ◼   ► I can attest to that also.

00:49:30 ◼   ► You would think a big slab of glass would be heavy,

00:49:32 ◼   ► but the glass layer is actually very thin on the front,

00:49:36 ◼   ► and behind it is a little bit of,

00:49:37 ◼   ► it's almost like a foam board kind of thing

00:49:40 ◼   ► so you can mount a hanger or something.

00:49:42 ◼   ► So it actually isn't unsafely heavy.

00:49:46 ◼   ► 'Cause I was also afraid, how big do I want a piece of glass

00:49:49 ◼   ► hanging out of my wall?

00:49:50 ◼   ► but it's nice, it's a very nice weight balance.

00:49:52 ◼   ► It does not seem crazy to hang this on your wall.

00:49:55 ◼   ► They also have desk stands, it's really great.

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00:50:00 ◼   ► by using coupon code ATP.

00:50:03 ◼   ► That'll also let them know that you came from our show

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00:50:13 ◼   ► These are great, everything you need is in the box.

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00:50:17 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

00:50:20 ◼   ► - All right, any other thoughts on your adventure

00:50:24 ◼   ► into the wilderness that scares you?

00:50:26 ◼   ► - I mean, this will probably be an ongoing topic.

00:50:28 ◼   ► I mean, heck, maybe 2015 will be the year

00:50:30 ◼   ► of me learning too many programming languages

00:50:32 ◼   ► or just switching to Java.

00:50:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:35 ◼   ► - I doubt it'll be you switching to Java, but I'm with you.

00:50:37 ◼   ► - Probably not, but you never know.

00:50:39 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:50:40 ◼   ► All right, I would like to, time permitting,

00:50:42 ◼   ► talk about your new iPad, but before we do that,

00:50:46 ◼   ► Jon, why don't you tell us about some survey

00:50:48 ◼   ► that's been going on lately?

00:50:50 ◼   ► I didn't get the survey because I don't have any apps in any of the app stores, I assume.

00:50:54 ◼   ► I don't know if it was sent to everybody, but a lot of people got a survey from Apple

00:50:58 ◼   ► asking them questions about the app store, and people have been tweeting little pictures

00:51:02 ◼   ► of it.

00:51:03 ◼   ► I want to talk about the survey in general, but one specific part of the survey screenshotted

00:51:08 ◼   ► and sent to us by Joe Seger.

00:51:11 ◼   ► This is a question from Apple Survey.

00:51:13 ◼   ► It says, "Which are the top three most effective marketing channels in driving downloads of

00:51:17 ◼   ► your apps on the app store?"

00:51:19 ◼   ► So this is asking people, how do you

00:51:21 ◼   ► get people to download apps in the App Store?

00:51:22 ◼   ► There's tons of choices, not just one.

00:51:24 ◼   ► And there's a little red arrow in this picture

00:51:26 ◼   ► that shows the second choice in the list.

00:51:28 ◼   ► The first choice is in-app messaging.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And the other choice is like email, PR, community,

00:51:33 ◼   ► social media, television, print, all different ways

00:51:35 ◼   ► that you get people to come and download your app.

00:51:37 ◼   ► The second choice is push notifications.

00:51:41 ◼   ► And so this is great, because you're like, all right,

00:51:45 ◼   ► is this a trap?

00:51:46 ◼   ► Are they trying to send it to people?

00:51:48 ◼   ► And then if you check push notifications,

00:51:50 ◼   ► everybody checks push notifications,

00:51:51 ◼   ► gets a little email from Apple and says,

00:51:53 ◼   ► "You've indicated that the most effective marketing channel

00:51:55 ◼   ► "is push notifications.

00:51:56 ◼   ► "You may not be aware, but section 5.6 says

00:51:58 ◼   ► "that you can't use push notifications

00:52:00 ◼   ► "for marketing purposes and blah, blah, blah."

00:52:01 ◼   ► Or did the person who wrote this question have no idea

00:52:05 ◼   ► that that rule exists and is merely reflecting the reality

00:52:08 ◼   ► that push notifications are a common marketing channel

00:52:12 ◼   ► or some combination thereof?

00:52:13 ◼   ► Like, it's baffling to me.

00:52:16 ◼   ► talk about one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

00:52:18 ◼   ► You can't tell from the question whether it's, you know,

00:52:21 ◼   ► another situation where some department

00:52:23 ◼   ► doesn't understand another department.

00:52:25 ◼   ► Or it's, maybe they just like, want to just be honest

00:52:29 ◼   ► and just see how many people will check that as their answer.

00:52:32 ◼   ► I don't know, it confuses me greatly.

00:52:34 ◼   ► But Marco, did you get this survey?

00:52:36 ◼   ► - I did, and I honestly, I didn't even,

00:52:39 ◼   ► if that was in mine, I didn't even notice it.

00:52:41 ◼   ► I just blew right past it probably.

00:52:44 ◼   ► I honestly, I mean, it's pretty clear from so many things

00:52:48 ◼   ► that it seems like the only person at Apple

00:52:52 ◼   ► who even thinks that rule exists, maybe,

00:52:55 ◼   ► is the person who wrote that document,

00:52:57 ◼   ► which might have been Steve Jobs,

00:52:58 ◼   ► so he's not even there anymore.

00:52:59 ◼   ► I don't think, I mean, the rule against push notification

00:53:02 ◼   ► spam is sadly such a joke that I wish it was,

00:53:07 ◼   ► I mean, we'll go over this a million times,

00:53:10 ◼   ► I wish it was enforced, I really do.

00:53:11 ◼   ► I think everybody would be better off, especially Apple and its customers, would be better off

00:53:17 ◼   ► if that rule was enforced because the App Store and iOS is turning into such a spammy

00:53:22 ◼   ► flea market of garbage.

00:53:25 ◼   ► And it's annoying.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Your phone is full of ads now.

00:53:29 ◼   ► This is completely the opposite of what I think Apple would want to encourage and would

00:53:34 ◼   ► tolerate.

00:53:35 ◼   ► But now your phone is full of ads because of this, primarily because of this one rule

00:53:40 ◼   ► being flagrantly ignored.

00:53:42 ◼   ► It is literally a way to push ads to your phone

00:53:45 ◼   ► whenever somebody feels like it with no penalties.

00:53:48 ◼   ► Now, how often do you get these sorts of ads?

00:53:51 ◼   ► And I'm asking honestly, because I get this once a month,

00:53:55 ◼   ► maybe?

00:53:55 ◼   ► I do not receive these that often.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Now, they infuriate me when I do get them.

00:53:59 ◼   ► But it doesn't happen that often.

00:54:00 ◼   ► Does it happen that often for you?

00:54:02 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:54:02 ◼   ► It doesn't happen that often to a lot of nerds like us,

00:54:04 ◼   ► because we usually either don't use the kind of apps that show

00:54:08 ◼   ► them most often or we turn them off. But that is not representative of the population at

00:54:14 ◼   ► large. Like if you see, we talked about this before, like if you see like normal people

00:54:16 ◼   ► using their iOS devices and you know, have somebody, have like you know a family member

00:54:22 ◼   ► who uses an iOS device, have them show you their notification screen if they're willing

00:54:25 ◼   ► and see what's there. You'll see. They are extremely common in brand, big brand apps

00:54:33 ◼   ► and games, free to play games. You know, it's so, so common.

00:54:38 ◼   ► So speaking of common, this survey here, is this the first survey about the App Store

00:54:42 ◼   ► you've ever received, Marco?

00:54:43 ◼   ► Yes, and I got six of them.

00:54:46 ◼   ► And so this seems from the outside, looking again, just seeing the stories about this,

00:54:51 ◼   ► this is like a response from someone inside Apple to all of like the bad press that the

00:54:56 ◼   ► App Store has been getting lately with this current cycle of rejections and people complaining

00:55:01 ◼   ► and so on and so forth.

00:55:02 ◼   ► So I disagree entirely.

00:55:04 ◼   ► You think it's just a was that's what I was gonna ask is like, is this something they

00:55:06 ◼   ► do every year?

00:55:07 ◼   ► - No. - Why now?

00:55:09 ◼   ► - I think it's something that the App Store marketing team

00:55:12 ◼   ► decided to do on their own, basically.

00:55:14 ◼   ► I don't think this has anything to do

00:55:16 ◼   ► with the developer policies.

00:55:19 ◼   ► I don't think, you know, like we all posted on Twitter

00:55:21 ◼   ► like what we said in the final question,

00:55:23 ◼   ► because like is there any other feedback

00:55:24 ◼   ► you'd like to give Apple?

00:55:25 ◼   ► So of course, you know, all of us developers

00:55:27 ◼   ► unloaded on them with like,

00:55:28 ◼   ► well here's all the ways the App Store sucks.

00:55:29 ◼   ► And I don't think this is going anywhere.

00:55:33 ◼   ► I think this is going into a giant black hole

00:55:36 ◼   ► and I think the marketing team--

00:55:37 ◼   ► - I'm gonna ask him what's gonna happen from it.

00:55:38 ◼   ► I'm saying, why send the survey now?

00:55:41 ◼   ► Why send this survey now?

00:55:42 ◼   ► Is it just a complete coincidence

00:55:44 ◼   ► or is it because this is part of some like,

00:55:46 ◼   ► well, we're getting a lot of press,

00:55:47 ◼   ► so first thing we need to know is like, where do we stand?

00:55:49 ◼   ► Is it just a bunch of cranky people or whatever?

00:55:51 ◼   ► Let's just gather information.

00:55:52 ◼   ► Send out a big survey that just covers all bases

00:55:54 ◼   ► and let's just send it to everybody

00:55:56 ◼   ► and see what we get back.

00:55:57 ◼   ► Because just looking at a bunch of news stories

00:55:59 ◼   ► of cranky developers doesn't tell you anything

00:56:00 ◼   ► because there's thousands and thousands of developers

00:56:02 ◼   ► and like five of them are angry.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And so they're just gathering information.

00:56:05 ◼   ► Not like they're gonna take this information

00:56:07 ◼   ► and do anything with it, but I think this is a first,

00:56:08 ◼   ► it seems to me, this is a first step

00:56:10 ◼   ► and let's see where we really are.

00:56:12 ◼   ► Because I can imagine inside Apple,

00:56:14 ◼   ► the argument is, and always is,

00:56:16 ◼   ► that's just a bunch of cranky people,

00:56:18 ◼   ► that's just a website that doesn't like us,

00:56:19 ◼   ► that's just someone going for page rates.

00:56:21 ◼   ► It's not actually a big deal.

00:56:22 ◼   ► We have hundreds of thousands of developers,

00:56:24 ◼   ► 99.99% of them love us and think we're awesome

00:56:26 ◼   ► and the app store is awesome and everything is great.

00:56:29 ◼   ► This is what I can imagine VP saying.

00:56:30 ◼   ► And we just have to manage these squeaky wheels

00:56:33 ◼   ► with good PR and stuff like that.

00:56:34 ◼   ► but realistically speaking, everybody loves us.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Our developer sat is awesome.

00:56:38 ◼   ► And just like, that's what they tell it.

00:56:40 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:56:41 ◼   ► And for all we know that could be true.

00:56:42 ◼   ► So the first step that someone could say is,

00:56:45 ◼   ► that's what you keep telling me,

00:56:46 ◼   ► but I don't like reading stories.

00:56:47 ◼   ► So step one, prove to me that's the case.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Survey all the developers, send back this thing.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Let's see what the survey results say.

00:56:53 ◼   ► And if they say like 99% love us and 1% hate us,

00:56:56 ◼   ► then I'll believe you.

00:56:58 ◼   ► But if not, then we'll have further discussions.

00:57:01 ◼   ► - I would believe that might be the case

00:57:04 ◼   ► if I didn't go through the survey.

00:57:06 ◼   ► But having gone through the survey,

00:57:08 ◼   ► it is pretty clear that this was written

00:57:10 ◼   ► by marketing people, not developer relations.

00:57:15 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:57:15 ◼   ► - And so, you did it, right, Casey?

00:57:18 ◼   ► - I don't remember if I got it,

00:57:19 ◼   ► but I certainly saw the survey,

00:57:21 ◼   ► 'cause we have certainly seen pretty much

00:57:25 ◼   ► the entirety of the survey.

00:57:26 ◼   ► I thought it was only two or three pages, right?

00:57:27 ◼   ► - No, it was long.

00:57:28 ◼   ► It was probably 20 screens, yeah.

00:57:30 ◼   ► - Oh, then maybe I clearly have not seen it then,

00:57:33 ◼   ► but the pieces I saw just reeked of me,

00:57:36 ◼   ► reeked to me of marketing speak.

00:57:39 ◼   ► And I agree with you, Marco,

00:57:41 ◼   ► that this was marketing acting on its own,

00:57:43 ◼   ► just trying to figure out what the state of the world was.

00:57:45 ◼   ► I don't think this is any big conspiracy

00:57:47 ◼   ► or anything like that.

00:57:48 ◼   ► - Was that, so give me an example of some of the questions.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Were all the questions basically like,

00:57:52 ◼   ► how do you market your app?

00:57:54 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:57:54 ◼   ► - And how can we help you market your app better, basically?

00:57:57 ◼   ► - Basically, yeah.

00:57:58 ◼   ► Like it was not, I mean, I could be wrong,

00:58:01 ◼   ► but it really did seem like this was like

00:58:05 ◼   ► some App Store marketing team doing their own research

00:58:08 ◼   ► for their own department and it was not,

00:58:10 ◼   ► it didn't seem representative of the developer program

00:58:12 ◼   ► as a whole or the App Store as a whole

00:58:14 ◼   ► carrying what developers thought about the App Store

00:58:16 ◼   ► and it really did seem like it was what it said

00:58:20 ◼   ► and nothing more than that which is

00:58:21 ◼   ► a survey about how you market your apps.

00:58:23 ◼   ► Like that really seemed like that was it.

00:58:26 ◼   ► Was there anything in there about like findability

00:58:29 ◼   ► in the search and stuff like that?

00:58:31 ◼   ► - Very little.

00:58:32 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah.

00:58:33 ◼   ► A lot of it gets overshadowed, you're right,

00:58:34 ◼   ► by like the people posting the free response thing

00:58:38 ◼   ► where you get to type whatever you want

00:58:39 ◼   ► and everyone just dumping a pile of turds

00:58:41 ◼   ► on the Apple store stuff and not the other questions.

00:58:45 ◼   ► So if it's just the marketing department,

00:58:47 ◼   ► like I still question,

00:58:49 ◼   ► it's not like every individual department

00:58:51 ◼   ► can decide to email every single developer

00:58:53 ◼   ► whenever they feel like it,

00:58:54 ◼   ► or like a lots of, enough developers that, you know,

00:58:57 ◼   ► it seemed like all the big names got this, right?

00:59:01 ◼   ► That seems like something that is not,

00:59:04 ◼   ► that you need a higher level okay about.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And maybe it was just the marketing department

00:59:09 ◼   ► initiating this thing, but why would you give the okay?

00:59:11 ◼   ► For like, I'm sure every department wants to do this.

00:59:13 ◼   ► I'm sure, you know, everyone would love to email

00:59:15 ◼   ► all developers and ask them questions

00:59:16 ◼   ► about whatever their thing, developer relations

00:59:19 ◼   ► or the development tools team or the frameworks team

00:59:22 ◼   ► and send a how you like in this framework

00:59:24 ◼   ► that we just made, fill out the survey, but you can't.

00:59:26 ◼   ► Everyone can't email every single developer.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And Schiller's organization, I guess,

00:59:30 ◼   ► got the go ahead to send a 20 page thing

00:59:33 ◼   ► that's mostly about how you market your apps.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:59:36 ◼   ► - Well, Schiller's organization

00:59:37 ◼   ► is the developer organization.

00:59:39 ◼   ► - But it's also marketing, right?

00:59:40 ◼   ► - The entire developer relations division at Apple

00:59:42 ◼   ► is under marketing, which is under Schiller,

00:59:45 ◼   ► which is part of the problem, honestly.

00:59:47 ◼   ► - But that's getting back to what I'm saying.

00:59:48 ◼   ► If you said this is just marketing

00:59:50 ◼   ► and not developer relations,

00:59:52 ◼   ► but it was all in the same department,

00:59:53 ◼   ► maybe the questions were just bad.

00:59:54 ◼   ► Maybe you felt like the questions should have been asking

00:59:56 ◼   ► you more about the stuff that you wrote about

00:59:58 ◼   ► in the summary thing at the end,

01:00:00 ◼   ► instead of just asking you how you advertise

01:00:03 ◼   ► your applications to people.

01:00:05 ◼   ► Was there questions about like,

01:00:06 ◼   ► how do you deal with the reviews on the site?

01:00:08 ◼   ► You should just post a full survey

01:00:09 ◼   ► so we can all look at the questions.

01:00:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'll go back.

01:00:12 ◼   ► I think I got like five or six of these links

01:00:14 ◼   ► and I didn't even check to see like what emails

01:00:16 ◼   ► they were going to,

01:00:17 ◼   ► but maybe I'll go back and screenshot every page.

01:00:19 ◼   ► But it's excessively boring.

01:00:21 ◼   ► Like it's really, it's extremely dull

01:00:24 ◼   ► and it is really mostly a marketing survey.

01:00:28 ◼   ► I don't think the purpose of this was what you're saying.

01:00:31 ◼   ► However, there was something interesting I think

01:00:36 ◼   ► posted a few days ago on December 30th

01:00:39 ◼   ► to the developer news feeds.

01:00:40 ◼   ► Here, I'm pasting the link in the chat here.

01:00:41 ◼   ► You gotta look at this.

01:00:43 ◼   ► I don't know if you guys caught this.

01:00:45 ◼   ► I was away on vacation so I didn't blog about it yet

01:00:49 ◼   ► but which might be the point.

01:00:51 ◼   ► If you look at this, so this is a quick thing,

01:00:54 ◼   ► I'll just read it, it's pretty short.

01:00:55 ◼   ► It's a quick thing posted to the Apple developer news feed,

01:00:58 ◼   ► posted on December 30th, titled,

01:01:00 ◼   ► "Getting Help with App Reviews and Rejections."

01:01:04 ◼   ► So here's the entire text of it.

01:01:06 ◼   ► iTunes Connect is now available after the holiday shutdown.

01:01:08 ◼   ► Please remember, if you need to appeal an app rejection

01:01:11 ◼   ► or request that the review of your app be extradited,

01:01:13 ◼   ► the fastest way to get help is to contact

01:01:15 ◼   ► the app review team through the Contact Us form.

01:01:18 ◼   ► To view app rejection details and ask for clarification,

01:01:20 ◼   ► Visit Resolution Center in iTunes Connect.

01:01:22 ◼   ► We look forward to seeing the innovative new app

01:01:24 ◼   ► you'll create in 2015.

01:01:26 ◼   ► - We look forward to seeing them and maybe rejecting them.

01:01:29 ◼   ► - Right, so this I think is much more interesting

01:01:33 ◼   ► than the marketing survey.

01:01:35 ◼   ► What do you think this angle is?

01:01:39 ◼   ► I mean, I think this is hilarious.

01:01:40 ◼   ► And so I think this might be, I mean, obviously,

01:01:44 ◼   ► you have to read a lot through the tea leaves here.

01:01:47 ◼   ► It might be a thinly veiled threat,

01:01:49 ◼   ► But if you read it as if it's a threat, it kind of works.

01:01:54 ◼   ► - It says the fastest way though.

01:01:56 ◼   ► It doesn't say running to the press never helps anything

01:02:00 ◼   ► or whatever the phrase was.

01:02:01 ◼   ► And then the guidelines thing,

01:02:03 ◼   ► it is not as passive aggressive or as aggressive aggressive

01:02:05 ◼   ► as those things were.

01:02:07 ◼   ► It reads more like a reminder to like,

01:02:09 ◼   ► if there are developers out there

01:02:10 ◼   ► who don't know about the resolution center, I don't know.

01:02:12 ◼   ► - It's very easy to read this as a threat,

01:02:14 ◼   ► but I think this might,

01:02:16 ◼   ► and maybe this is just me being optimistic

01:02:18 ◼   ► about this kind of stuff.

01:02:19 ◼   ► I think this might be the kind of implied mea culpa

01:02:24 ◼   ► on some of the recent rejection crap.

01:02:25 ◼   ► I think this might be like,

01:02:27 ◼   ► hey guys, don't worry, we're getting this under control.

01:02:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:02:32 ◼   ► Maybe again, maybe that's unreasonably optimistic.

01:02:34 ◼   ► What do you think?

01:02:35 ◼   ► - I read it the same way that this is them saying,

01:02:39 ◼   ► all right, all right, all right, everyone relax,

01:02:42 ◼   ► everyone relax, just let us know.

01:02:45 ◼   ► We'll fix you up, it'll be okay.

01:02:48 ◼   ► But man, does it frustrate me that

01:02:52 ◼   ► Apple's so institutionally crotchety maybe?

01:02:55 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:02:56 ◼   ► Like why can't they just say,

01:02:57 ◼   ► "Hey guys, we've seen that there's been

01:03:01 ◼   ► some questionable choices on our part,

01:03:04 ◼   ► we're gonna fix it."

01:03:05 ◼   ► Like, is that so terrible?

01:03:06 ◼   ► Is being vulnerable really that bad?

01:03:11 ◼   ► I know it'll never happen, but.

01:03:13 ◼   ► - Step one, admit no wrongdoing.

01:03:15 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:03:16 ◼   ► I mean, that's not Apple's MO.

01:03:18 ◼   ► They have admitted wrongdoing before.

01:03:20 ◼   ► Even when they think they aren't wrong, like Antennagate,

01:03:22 ◼   ► everyone gets a free bumper,

01:03:23 ◼   ► even though we think it's not a problem or whatever.

01:03:26 ◼   ► But in general, this specific part of Apple, App Review,

01:03:30 ◼   ► does not admit wrongdoing.

01:03:32 ◼   ► In the whole, we'll reject your app,

01:03:35 ◼   ► and then you'll make a big fuss about it,

01:03:37 ◼   ► and then we'll accept it.

01:03:38 ◼   ► And then that cycle happens,

01:03:40 ◼   ► and there's never a part where Apple comes out

01:03:42 ◼   ► and sort of bears its soul and says,

01:03:46 ◼   ► "We've thought about this and we've..."

01:03:48 ◼   ► The admission of wrongdoing, I guess,

01:03:51 ◼   ► is okay, now your app is back in the store,

01:03:53 ◼   ► but it's like, this isn't a systemic problem.

01:03:56 ◼   ► This is a one-off case that just didn't happen to go right.

01:03:58 ◼   ► And it being in the press has nothing to do

01:04:00 ◼   ► with it getting fixed.

01:04:01 ◼   ► It's just one of those things that happens

01:04:03 ◼   ► and oh well, it got fixed and don't worry about it.

01:04:05 ◼   ► And it just happens repeatedly over and over again.

01:04:06 ◼   ► And there's never any sort of public acknowledgement

01:04:09 ◼   ► that this might be a thing and not just like,

01:04:11 ◼   ► "Well, those things just happen sometimes."

01:04:13 ◼   ► And that's what frustrates people so much

01:04:15 ◼   ► that that part of the organization is A,

01:04:17 ◼   ► so different than individual Apple employees,

01:04:19 ◼   ► which as we all know are human beings

01:04:21 ◼   ► and are actually forthcoming.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And B, it's not like the larger corporation

01:04:25 ◼   ► in terms of when they make design mistakes

01:04:27 ◼   ► or when they have large scale problems

01:04:31 ◼   ► like the labor difficulties in China,

01:04:34 ◼   ► the diversity within the organization,

01:04:35 ◼   ► things that Apple has fallen on its face about,

01:04:38 ◼   ► and they come back and say,

01:04:40 ◼   ► "We're not doing well enough on diversity."

01:04:42 ◼   ► Where Greenpeace yelled at them

01:04:43 ◼   ► and they thought it was unfair that they got yelled at,

01:04:44 ◼   ► but you know, we are gonna make that stuff better.

01:04:46 ◼   ► Before we were worse at it, now we're better.

01:04:47 ◼   ► Labor practices, we're gonna try to be more transparent.

01:04:50 ◼   ► We're gonna do it, you know,

01:04:51 ◼   ► all those are situations where Apple did something wrong

01:04:53 ◼   ► and it's publicly trying to do it better

01:04:55 ◼   ► by admitting that the past was bad,

01:04:57 ◼   ► the present is bad, and they're trying to get better.

01:04:59 ◼   ► But there's never anything like that

01:05:00 ◼   ► having to do with App Store review, at least not public.

01:05:02 ◼   ► - No, well, 'cause again, this is all under Schiller.

01:05:04 ◼   ► I mean, if you think about the kind of public persona

01:05:08 ◼   ► Schiller shows. I mean I don't know anything about the guy, you know, non-publicly, but

01:05:12 ◼   ► what he shows publicly, he is kind of like this, you know, terse, quiet guy who doesn't

01:05:18 ◼   ► appear to be ever having any fun. I mean even like, even in his presentation in the last

01:05:23 ◼   ► few years, is it just me or does he just kind of seem angry? Like it's, it doesn't,

01:05:29 ◼   ► you don't get, like if you look at this person knowing he's the one in charge of

01:05:32 ◼   ► this organization and knowing that he does have a lot of direct involvement with some

01:05:35 ◼   ► these decisions, it's no wonder that the attitude we get

01:05:39 ◼   ► is just a brick wall with occasional terse-ness coming out

01:05:42 ◼   ► and not really openness or friendliness,

01:05:45 ◼   ► because that appears to be the public persona

01:05:46 ◼   ► Phil Schiller shows.

01:05:48 ◼   ► - That's not Tim Cook at all though.

01:05:50 ◼   ► - No. - Like Tim Cook's persona,

01:05:51 ◼   ► and I think Tim Cook's persona has been infecting more

01:05:54 ◼   ► and more of the sort of higher level, entire corporation,

01:05:57 ◼   ► Apple stuff, it's just that this is a corner

01:05:58 ◼   ► of the corporation, so the entire corporation is diversity,

01:06:02 ◼   ► labor practices, finances, you know, the environment, that is big picture stuff, human resources,

01:06:09 ◼   ► like charity, all that stuff, that is big, big picture. Hopefully that will be filtering

01:06:15 ◼   ► down to the smaller thing. And of course, like the, you know, the whole management reshuffle

01:06:19 ◼   ► and collaboration is more important and unifying things under Johnny Ive, but it just that

01:06:24 ◼   ► that influence and that tone seems not to have made a Tapper view yet.

01:06:27 ◼   ► - No, I mean, I honestly, as long as Phil Schiller

01:06:31 ◼   ► is in charge of the division that App Review was under,

01:06:34 ◼   ► I don't foresee any major changes in this area.

01:06:37 ◼   ► Because I really do think it goes to him,

01:06:39 ◼   ► and I think he's the one who is in control to fix this,

01:06:44 ◼   ► and seems to believe that the way they're doing it

01:06:46 ◼   ► is the correct way to do it.

01:06:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

01:06:51 ◼   ► Part of the reason that we all love Apple

01:06:52 ◼   ► is because everything is so secretive and interesting,

01:06:56 ◼   ► and you never know what's going to come next.

01:06:58 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:06:58 ◼   ► I feel like holding onto that apple

01:07:01 ◼   ► is perhaps not the right approach anymore.

01:07:04 ◼   ► They're not the underdog.

01:07:06 ◼   ► They're not the apple they once were,

01:07:09 ◼   ► and they're bigger than they once were.

01:07:10 ◼   ► And it's probably unfair for me to prescribe

01:07:13 ◼   ► what Apple should do from my chair here, the other coast,

01:07:17 ◼   ► but I'm not going to let that stop me.

01:07:20 ◼   ► It just seems like, can't we get a little more feedback?

01:07:23 ◼   ► And all I keep reflecting on,

01:07:24 ◼   ► and I'm not the first person to realize this,

01:07:26 ◼   ► is that when we all left WWDC this year,

01:07:29 ◼   ► we were all so amped up and so excited and so reinvigorated.

01:07:33 ◼   ► And then I feel like six months later, we're all grumpy again.

01:07:37 ◼   ► Maybe it's just because we are all grumpy people in general.

01:07:40 ◼   ► But I don't think so.

01:07:41 ◼   ► I think we really were excited about all this stuff

01:07:43 ◼   ► and how open they seem to be becoming

01:07:46 ◼   ► and how they seem to be listening to us.

01:07:49 ◼   ► And now, six months later, it's like, oh, we're

01:07:53 ◼   ► back in this same dull grind that we're always in.

01:07:57 ◼   ► And that's just not a fun place to be, it's just not.

01:08:01 ◼   ► And part of the reason that we're all so attracted

01:08:03 ◼   ► to this environment and attracted to writing apps

01:08:06 ◼   ► for this platform is because it's fun.

01:08:09 ◼   ► And God, are they working hard to suck the fun out of it.

01:08:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, I feel right now about Apple development

01:08:15 ◼   ► the way Phil Schiller sounds on stage

01:08:17 ◼   ► at the most recent keynotes.

01:08:19 ◼   ► - Completely unamused and bored.

01:08:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, just kind of going through the motions,

01:08:23 ◼   ► kind of almost angry.

01:08:26 ◼   ► The mood has shifted from the Craig Federighi

01:08:29 ◼   ► that we saw at WBCC showing us all the cool,

01:08:32 ◼   ► new technical stuff to the marketing hammer being dropped

01:08:37 ◼   ► and saying, "Nope, this is how things should be.

01:08:39 ◼   ► "This is not how things should be, period."

01:08:41 ◼   ► And back to old school.

01:08:42 ◼   ► I mean, look, Phil is old school Apple.

01:08:44 ◼   ► He was under jobs, he's been there for a very long time.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Like, he is, he represents that attitude at Apple.

01:08:50 ◼   ► and you look at the leadership,

01:08:52 ◼   ► Ben Thompson talked a lot about this,

01:08:53 ◼   ► a lot of the other leadership has changed.

01:08:55 ◼   ► He's one of the oldest SVPs there now,

01:08:57 ◼   ► or longest running at least.

01:08:58 ◼   ► And I really do think this is how this department is run,

01:09:03 ◼   ► this is how he thinks is the right way to do it, clearly,

01:09:07 ◼   ► otherwise he wouldn't be doing it this way.

01:09:08 ◼   ► I mean, he has enough power in the company,

01:09:09 ◼   ► he could change it if he wanted to,

01:09:10 ◼   ► so we know that this is how they think

01:09:12 ◼   ► they should be running the company,

01:09:13 ◼   ► or this division rather.

01:09:15 ◼   ► So obviously, this goes to Phil, this is all under Phil.

01:09:20 ◼   ► Phil is the guy who's responsible for this being this way

01:09:22 ◼   ► and the guy who could change it if he wanted to,

01:09:24 ◼   ► but he doesn't want to.

01:09:26 ◼   ► And maybe this, look, it seems to be working okay.

01:09:28 ◼   ► Again, like, you know, as you said,

01:09:29 ◼   ► who are we to say what they should do?

01:09:31 ◼   ► Obviously they're doing something right.

01:09:33 ◼   ► But certainly it's not right for developers.

01:09:36 ◼   ► It is right for Apple, probably, maybe.

01:09:38 ◼   ► Long-term it's questionable,

01:09:40 ◼   ► but it is right for them for now.

01:09:42 ◼   ► It benefits their users in certain ways, but not others.

01:09:45 ◼   ► But you know, overall it's probably a benefit.

01:09:47 ◼   ► But yeah, you're right.

01:09:48 ◼   ► I mean, the overall attitude is pretty negative

01:09:51 ◼   ► and it's pretty stifling.

01:09:52 ◼   ► And I think that ultimately is what is gonna cause

01:09:57 ◼   ► possible long-term problems for Apple.

01:09:59 ◼   ► They really do depend on developers

01:10:02 ◼   ► to push the boundaries forward with their platforms.

01:10:05 ◼   ► And not just the phone, but especially the iPad,

01:10:08 ◼   ► and probably also in the future, the watch.

01:10:11 ◼   ► They need us to make reasons

01:10:14 ◼   ► for people to buy these things.

01:10:15 ◼   ► The phone is an easy success

01:10:17 ◼   ► because it's a really good smartphone

01:10:19 ◼   ► and everybody buys a smartphone.

01:10:20 ◼   ► They're subsidized in so much of the world.

01:10:22 ◼   ► Everyone has decided they need one.

01:10:24 ◼   ► I mean, smartphones are this magical business

01:10:26 ◼   ► where everyone buys them

01:10:27 ◼   ► because they just provide so much utility

01:10:30 ◼   ► and everyone is willing to spend whatever it takes

01:10:33 ◼   ► as long as they can,

01:10:34 ◼   ► which is a lot of people these days

01:10:36 ◼   ► 'cause they're so cheap.

01:10:37 ◼   ► They're willing to do it because smartphones are just,

01:10:40 ◼   ► so they're ubiquitous.

01:10:41 ◼   ► So the question isn't do I buy a smartphone?

01:10:44 ◼   ► The question is which smartphone do I buy?

01:10:46 ◼   ► and so they can compete well there.

01:10:47 ◼   ► If you look at the iPad, the iPad is like, it's optional.

01:10:51 ◼   ► It's an accessory for most people.

01:10:52 ◼   ► It's a luxury, it's an extravagance, it's a fun device.

01:10:57 ◼   ► It is usually not your primary computer,

01:10:59 ◼   ► and usually most people don't say, I need to have an iPad,

01:11:02 ◼   ► it's only a question of which, or rather,

01:11:04 ◼   ► I need to have a tablet, it's only a question

01:11:06 ◼   ► of which one do I buy.

01:11:07 ◼   ► No, it's just an extra.

01:11:09 ◼   ► The watch is gonna be that same thing.

01:11:11 ◼   ► Most people, I don't think, wear watches,

01:11:13 ◼   ► and certainly the ones who do wear watches today,

01:11:16 ◼   ► I don't think it's an obvious thing to say,

01:11:17 ◼   ► well, I have to get a smartwatch.

01:11:19 ◼   ► Like, I think the watch is gonna have

01:11:21 ◼   ► the exact same challenge that the iPad has

01:11:23 ◼   ► of it's going to have to justify its purchase.

01:11:25 ◼   ► It is coming from zero.

01:11:27 ◼   ► It is not gonna be like a phone

01:11:28 ◼   ► where they just have to pull people into the store

01:11:31 ◼   ► who are already buying their phone anyway.

01:11:33 ◼   ► The watch is gonna be like,

01:11:35 ◼   ► you have to tell me why I want this.

01:11:37 ◼   ► And so much of that rests on what developers do,

01:11:40 ◼   ► what apps are out there.

01:11:42 ◼   ► so many people end up buying these devices

01:11:45 ◼   ► because of one or a very small number of specific apps

01:11:49 ◼   ► that run on them.

01:11:50 ◼   ► And if developers keep getting marginalized

01:11:53 ◼   ► and restricted too severely,

01:11:56 ◼   ► it's very hard for us to push those platforms forward.

01:11:59 ◼   ► It's very, and it becomes less likely

01:12:02 ◼   ► that the next big thing is gonna be on iOS.

01:12:05 ◼   ► And how does that help Apple?

01:12:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I agree.

01:12:08 ◼   ► And I think perhaps the most obvious

01:12:10 ◼   ► and specific example of this is watching everyone's reactions to WatchKit.

01:12:18 ◼   ► And a lot of popular developers, and I wish I could think of a specific person,

01:12:22 ◼   ► but I can't off the top of my head, but a lot of big developers have said,

01:12:25 ◼   ► "Yeah, it looks cool, but yeah, I'm going to wait and see how this shakes out

01:12:30 ◼   ► before I do anything real." And that is a different reaction than I remember

01:12:35 ◼   ► ever having seen before. Like when the iPad came out, if nothing else,

01:12:40 ◼   ► everyone said, "Holy crap, I'm going to make an iPad app

01:12:43 ◼   ► "so I can be a part of the gold rush."

01:12:45 ◼   ► Where now, I'm hearing a lot of really popular developers

01:12:49 ◼   ► say, "Well, we'll see how it goes."

01:12:52 ◼   ► And that's not where Apple wants to be.

01:12:55 ◼   ► - Right, and like what Apple has shown this fall

01:12:58 ◼   ► with all the iOS hate stuff and all the crazy rejections,

01:13:00 ◼   ► racing forward to be first to market

01:13:03 ◼   ► is not necessarily a good idea.

01:13:05 ◼   ► And that's, I think that feeds into this.

01:13:08 ◼   ► And now we're seeing WatchKit,

01:13:10 ◼   ► We know it's gonna be a new device.

01:13:11 ◼   ► It's very restrictive with what you can do upfront.

01:13:15 ◼   ► There are gonna be more capabilities added over time,

01:13:16 ◼   ► but all the crazy policies and rejections

01:13:19 ◼   ► that we've seen for iOS so far,

01:13:23 ◼   ► the watch is gonna have its own set of those.

01:13:24 ◼   ► It's gonna reset from zero.

01:13:26 ◼   ► It's gonna have an entirely new set

01:13:28 ◼   ► of weird decisions Apple has to make,

01:13:31 ◼   ► many of which the developer community will disagree with

01:13:34 ◼   ► and bloggers will get angry about.

01:13:36 ◼   ► We're gonna start over.

01:13:37 ◼   ► We're starting from scratch here.

01:13:38 ◼   ► And all the same people who caused all this stuff

01:13:40 ◼   ► with iOS rejection so far this fall,

01:13:43 ◼   ► they're all still making the decisions,

01:13:45 ◼   ► they're all still making the calls.

01:13:46 ◼   ► And so the same system's in place,

01:13:48 ◼   ► it's gonna have the same problems with this new platform.

01:13:51 ◼   ► The only question is, will the watch sell enough?

01:13:53 ◼   ► And so, we're all here because A,

01:13:58 ◼   ► most iOS developers, if not all iOS developers,

01:14:01 ◼   ► use iOS devices themselves.

01:14:04 ◼   ► These are the devices we choose to have.

01:14:05 ◼   ► So that makes us already right there

01:14:08 ◼   ► encouraged to develop for them.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And then secondarily, although it's a matter

01:14:12 ◼   ► more for your big company, there's so many of them out there

01:14:15 ◼   ► they sell so ridiculously well that it's just a good

01:14:19 ◼   ► business idea to target them in many cases,

01:14:21 ◼   ► or in most cases.

01:14:22 ◼   ► The watch we don't know yet.

01:14:24 ◼   ► The watch, we don't know if developers are gonna end up

01:14:27 ◼   ► loving them, or if it's gonna end up being like

01:14:29 ◼   ► what a lot of us say about the iPad, which is like,

01:14:31 ◼   ► "Eh, I don't really use it that much ever, you know,

01:14:33 ◼   ► "ever since the big phones came out or whatever."

01:14:35 ◼   ► We also don't know if they're gonna sell very well.

01:14:37 ◼   ► That's a big question mark right now.

01:14:39 ◼   ► They might sell like crazy.

01:14:41 ◼   ► They might be blockbusters,

01:14:42 ◼   ► and we might be looking back at this episode in six months

01:14:45 ◼   ► and laughing at how pessimistic we might have been

01:14:49 ◼   ► or how much we might have underestimated

01:14:50 ◼   ► how much they would sell.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Or they just might not sell that well for a while, if ever,

01:14:55 ◼   ► and we don't know.

01:14:57 ◼   ► And because of the attitude

01:15:01 ◼   ► that they have shown developers,

01:15:03 ◼   ► I mean, since the beginning of the App Store, really,

01:15:06 ◼   ► that's not a new thing,

01:15:06 ◼   ► especially because of the recent mood among the community

01:15:10 ◼   ► of all of this chilling effect coming

01:15:13 ◼   ► from all these rejections,

01:15:15 ◼   ► I think that makes us even less excited

01:15:18 ◼   ► to jump into this unknown, this big question mark.

01:15:21 ◼   ► So again, this is why I'm saying,

01:15:24 ◼   ► the timing of these things is terrible.

01:15:26 ◼   ► The timing of all these really frivolous

01:15:28 ◼   ► or weird capricious rejections is just awful

01:15:32 ◼   ► because this is when Apple needs all the enthusiasm

01:15:35 ◼   ► that they earned this past summer.

01:15:39 ◼   ► They need that enthusiasm now for all of us

01:15:41 ◼   ► to start building cool stuff for the watch

01:15:44 ◼   ► to increase the chances of them selling lots of watches.

01:15:47 ◼   ► And instead, they've totally burned so much of that

01:15:50 ◼   ► with these rejections, and again, for what?

01:15:53 ◼   ► For what was the benefit there?

01:15:56 ◼   ► - Well, when I think of what the pointy head boss

01:15:57 ◼   ► would say to all that, they would say,

01:15:59 ◼   ► "It's just these weird indie developer blogger things

01:16:02 ◼   ► "that are angry at us.

01:16:04 ◼   ► "Starbucks is gonna have a watch app.

01:16:05 ◼   ► Weight Watchers will have one, Nike will have one,

01:16:08 ◼   ► JetBlue will have one.

01:16:10 ◼   ► They just go through all these big name brands

01:16:11 ◼   ► and like, "Oh, my relationships

01:16:13 ◼   ► with those other C-level executives is awesome

01:16:15 ◼   ► and we drive our Lamborghinis down to the golf course

01:16:17 ◼   ► and have golf all the time.

01:16:17 ◼   ► They're totally making watch kit apps.

01:16:19 ◼   ► Who cares if the bunch of these hipster people in Portland

01:16:23 ◼   ► aren't gonna make a watch app right away?

01:16:24 ◼   ► They'll make one after the other apps are out.

01:16:26 ◼   ► We don't care as long as we can say

01:16:27 ◼   ► that there's a Walmart app on our watch

01:16:29 ◼   ► and that's all that matters.

01:16:30 ◼   ► I mean, you go past a Starbucks,

01:16:31 ◼   ► it'll bleep a little thing that'll give you a discount

01:16:34 ◼   ► and you can get a coffee.

01:16:35 ◼   ► Like that's the point you heard, boss, like dystopian scenario, the idea that, you know,

01:16:39 ◼   ► the people, the things that we care about, you know, argument would be like, yeah, but

01:16:43 ◼   ► these little guys tend to make the most interesting things.

01:16:46 ◼   ► You're not going to get a really super innovative app coming out of Starbucks or anything for

01:16:49 ◼   ► your watch.

01:16:50 ◼   ► We agree that Starbucks has to be there, right?

01:16:52 ◼   ► You need that on your watch.

01:16:53 ◼   ► You need like, you need a Twitter app, you need to whatever, like whatever.

01:16:56 ◼   ► You need the big names, but you also need this other community.

01:16:59 ◼   ► And from their perspective, it might be, well, the other community is annoying and they bother

01:17:02 ◼   ► and they say mean things on websites about us.

01:17:04 ◼   ► And Starbucks never does that.

01:17:06 ◼   ► And we're gonna have them and you better get on board.

01:17:08 ◼   ► And if you don't wanna have your app there on day one,

01:17:10 ◼   ► a million people writing applications,

01:17:13 ◼   ► all those people who make all those clone free to play

01:17:15 ◼   ► or rip off applications,

01:17:16 ◼   ► they're all gonna be at the watch on day one

01:17:18 ◼   ► 'cause that's their whole freaking business.

01:17:19 ◼   ► They make a million clone copyright violating apps

01:17:23 ◼   ► until they get pulled from the store

01:17:24 ◼   ► and it's just the shotgun approach

01:17:26 ◼   ► and they're all gonna be all over the watch.

01:17:27 ◼   ► So we're gonna have huge numbers

01:17:29 ◼   ► that we can put up on slides and we show a big pie chart.

01:17:31 ◼   ► look how many apps the watch has already, you know,

01:17:33 ◼   ► because every app is created equal

01:17:35 ◼   ► when it comes to stats on slides, right?

01:17:37 ◼   ► And we have all these big names,

01:17:39 ◼   ► and let's put up the logos

01:17:40 ◼   ► of a bunch of Fortune 500 companies.

01:17:42 ◼   ► And the fact that Panic isn't on there

01:17:43 ◼   ► because Panic was afraid about putting a watch thing

01:17:46 ◼   ► 'cause they wanted to take a wait and see attitude,

01:17:47 ◼   ► nobody in the audience cares,

01:17:49 ◼   ► and we at Apple don't care, and if you care, boo hoo.

01:17:51 ◼   ► - That's true, however, it's only a matter of time

01:17:56 ◼   ► before the next Instagram, or the next Dodge,

01:18:00 ◼   ► the next Crossy Road isn't on iOS.

01:18:03 ◼   ► - I know, that's the argument we would make,

01:18:04 ◼   ► is like, if you're expecting,

01:18:06 ◼   ► you don't know where the next innovation's coming from,

01:18:08 ◼   ► and it's probably not gonna come from Fortune 500 company,

01:18:10 ◼   ► it's probably gonna come from one of these little random,

01:18:12 ◼   ► that you never know where it's gonna come from.

01:18:14 ◼   ► Somebody you've never even heard of.

01:18:15 ◼   ► Who heard of the guy who made Flappy Bird?

01:18:17 ◼   ► Who heard of the people who made Crossy Road

01:18:19 ◼   ► until they made, you know, like, that's argument for,

01:18:22 ◼   ► I'm not saying this is Apple's attitude,

01:18:23 ◼   ► I'm saying these are the two endpoints on this continuum.

01:18:27 ◼   ► And I don't know which endpoint is which.

01:18:28 ◼   ► for all we know Apple is totally on board

01:18:30 ◼   ► with what we're saying.

01:18:31 ◼   ► They're like, you've got to, you know,

01:18:32 ◼   ► and they're having this internal debate.

01:18:33 ◼   ► Or there's somebody in power at Apple

01:18:35 ◼   ► who's on the pointy haired boss side or whatever.

01:18:37 ◼   ► We're like, again, with an information vacuum,

01:18:39 ◼   ► you can, if you're in a bad mood,

01:18:40 ◼   ► you imagine that pointy haired boss side.

01:18:42 ◼   ► And if you're a good mood,

01:18:43 ◼   ► you imagine all the good people at Apple

01:18:44 ◼   ► fighting the good fight and just

01:18:46 ◼   ► haven't quite gotten their acts together yet.

01:18:48 ◼   ► - Right, and as a quick little side note,

01:18:50 ◼   ► I'm really curious to see what happens

01:18:52 ◼   ► with WatchKit and games.

01:18:54 ◼   ► Because WatchKit is really not designed for games,

01:18:58 ◼   ► pretty clearly.

01:19:00 ◼   ► And so when they do the native SDK,

01:19:01 ◼   ► which they say later next year,

01:19:03 ◼   ► which people have been assuming that means WBC next year,

01:19:08 ◼   ► I actually think that might be too early.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I would guess next winter,

01:19:12 ◼   ► just like a year from this year's watch kit,

01:19:15 ◼   ► which came out in November,

01:19:16 ◼   ► I'm guessing maybe next November we get that.

01:19:20 ◼   ► And next spring, like spring 2016,

01:19:24 ◼   ► new watches come out that can use it.

01:19:26 ◼   ► So anyway, that's just a guess.

01:19:28 ◼   ► But we don't know yet, like,

01:19:31 ◼   ► it sure looks like all of Watch Kit so far

01:19:34 ◼   ► was designed not only to not enable games,

01:19:36 ◼   ► but policy-wise to prohibit most of them.

01:19:39 ◼   ► - Well, but it'll have the most important gaming feature.

01:19:41 ◼   ► The most important gaming feature of the watch

01:19:43 ◼   ► is to tell you when gems are 50% off for the next one.

01:19:46 ◼   ► - That's unfortunately, God, that is true.

01:19:49 ◼   ► - That is the most important gaming feature of the watch,

01:19:51 ◼   ► and it will be supported,

01:19:53 ◼   ► because that is the one thing you're able to do,

01:19:54 ◼   ► is send up a little notification with a button

01:19:56 ◼   ► and then you press the mix, you know,

01:19:58 ◼   ► and that's all they care about.

01:19:59 ◼   ► - God, games today are terrible.

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01:22:31 ◼   ► - So to end on a potentially happier note, I hope,

01:22:35 ◼   ► last week we had made mention of you having new thoughts

01:22:38 ◼   ► on the iPad and then we genuinely just didn't get a chance

01:22:42 ◼   ► to talk about it.

01:22:43 ◼   ► So would you like to talk about your new thoughts

01:22:46 ◼   ► on your new iPad?

01:22:48 ◼   ► Do you want me to talk this whole episode?

01:22:49 ◼   ► I mean, I can, but I feel kind of bad

01:22:51 ◼   ► monopolizing the whole show.

01:22:52 ◼   ► - Whatever, nothing else is going on.

01:22:53 ◼   ► - I'll interrupt you and tell you

01:22:55 ◼   ► why you're wrong about it, so go ahead.

01:22:56 ◼   ► - Perfect, okay.

01:22:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:59 ◼   ► I would ask nothing less.

01:23:00 ◼   ► All right, so I was very impressed

01:23:05 ◼   ► with the iPad Air 2's spec upgrade this year.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And we bought one as a gift for a family member,

01:23:12 ◼   ► and as I was playing with them in the store,

01:23:16 ◼   ► I was really, really won over by it.

01:23:18 ◼   ► because so for the last couple,

01:23:19 ◼   ► the last full size iPad I bought was the iPad 3.

01:23:22 ◼   ► I skipped the 4 and the Air 1.

01:23:24 ◼   ► And I bought both iPad minis,

01:23:29 ◼   ► the first terrible one and then the first Retina one.

01:23:33 ◼   ► The iPad 3 and the two iPad minis made me hate the iPad

01:23:38 ◼   ► because the iPad 3 was, I love the Retina screen so much,

01:23:43 ◼   ► but it was so heavy.

01:23:47 ◼   ► It also had weird performance characteristics

01:23:49 ◼   ► because it had boosted the GPUs

01:23:53 ◼   ► to deal with the extra pixels,

01:23:54 ◼   ► but it didn't boost the CPUs.

01:23:56 ◼   ► So any kind of CPU-bound graphics operation

01:23:59 ◼   ► or process was very slow on them.

01:24:03 ◼   ► So it was very weird for that.

01:24:04 ◼   ► It was also, the iPad 3 ran warm,

01:24:07 ◼   ► and it was a whole thing.

01:24:09 ◼   ► - I still use mine every day and love it, go on.

01:24:10 ◼   ► - Perfect, okay.

01:24:12 ◼   ► iPad Mini 1 comes out.

01:24:14 ◼   ► It instantly ruined the iPad 3 for me

01:24:16 ◼   ► because it's so much smaller and lighter.

01:24:19 ◼   ► It makes the iPad 3 seem like this giant boat.

01:24:22 ◼   ► It's such a massive difference.

01:24:24 ◼   ► But the screen on the iPad Mini 1 is so terrible

01:24:27 ◼   ► 'cause it's non-retina.

01:24:28 ◼   ► It was just a miserable experience.

01:24:31 ◼   ► I would look at that and I would say,

01:24:34 ◼   ► man, this is the great form factor.

01:24:36 ◼   ► I love this form factor, I think,

01:24:37 ◼   ► but man, this screen is so bad.

01:24:39 ◼   ► And then I'd try to look at something on my iPad 3

01:24:42 ◼   ► and it was so big and heavy.

01:24:45 ◼   ► So it was like the worst of both worlds.

01:24:47 ◼   ► I thought the Retina Mini would solve this problem.

01:24:49 ◼   ► - It does.

01:24:50 ◼   ► - For you.

01:24:51 ◼   ► But you don't even call it that,

01:24:53 ◼   ► you call it the Retina Pad Mini, right?

01:24:54 ◼   ► - That's right.

01:24:55 ◼   ► - Right, so, sorry Steven.

01:24:58 ◼   ► I thought that would do it.

01:24:59 ◼   ► And what I found instead was that

01:25:02 ◼   ► the Retina Mini had two main issues for me.

01:25:05 ◼   ► Number one is that the screen is not as good

01:25:07 ◼   ► as the Air One screen, which Tiff has.

01:25:09 ◼   ► It is a lower end device in some ways.

01:25:13 ◼   ► and there are small ways, but it is noticeable

01:25:16 ◼   ► and the screen, the color isn't as good

01:25:19 ◼   ► and you can really tell.

01:25:20 ◼   ► The second thing is that all the people

01:25:23 ◼   ► who went through the progression of full size iPad

01:25:25 ◼   ► to iPad mini and then to a new phone this year

01:25:29 ◼   ► and a lot of them are saying, oh, I haven't touched iPad

01:25:32 ◼   ► since I got my iPhone 6 or 6 Plus

01:25:34 ◼   ► or something similar to that.

01:25:36 ◼   ► The iPad is never gonna be always with you

01:25:39 ◼   ► unless you have really giant pockets year round

01:25:42 ◼   ► but that's unlikely for most people or a purse maybe.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Even then, I know a lot of people with purses,

01:25:47 ◼   ► none of them carry an iPad in all the time.

01:25:50 ◼   ► The iPad is always gonna be a secondary device.

01:25:53 ◼   ► It's never gonna be always in your pocket

01:25:54 ◼   ► the way a phone is.

01:25:56 ◼   ► The things an iPad is better at,

01:25:58 ◼   ► or the things that I enjoy more on the iPad,

01:26:01 ◼   ► all need the full-size screen.

01:26:04 ◼   ► They all need the 9.7 inch screen,

01:26:06 ◼   ► or at least they're better on it.

01:26:08 ◼   ► What I found, so what I found having,

01:26:11 ◼   ► when I finally got the mini that had a decent enough screen,

01:26:14 ◼   ► what I found is that the things I would do on an iPad,

01:26:18 ◼   ► I wasn't enjoying them as much.

01:26:19 ◼   ► They weren't as good,

01:26:20 ◼   ► they weren't as much better than on the phone

01:26:23 ◼   ► because they all benefited from having larger screens.

01:26:27 ◼   ► And so this smaller one,

01:26:29 ◼   ► even though it was the same resolution,

01:26:31 ◼   ► it just wasn't as good,

01:26:33 ◼   ► it wasn't as much better than the phone.

01:26:34 ◼   ► The difference between the iPad and the phone got smaller,

01:26:37 ◼   ► at least the enjoyment of it for me.

01:26:40 ◼   ► Again, this is all for me.

01:26:41 ◼   ► This is all very much an opinion, not a fact piece here.

01:26:44 ◼   ► So, please bear with me.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Anyway, so this year I was so wowed by the iPad Air 2

01:26:51 ◼   ► in so many ways, most notably the size and weight,

01:26:56 ◼   ► but also just the screen is really, really nice.

01:26:59 ◼   ► It's, you know, they did some new stuff

01:27:00 ◼   ► with how the pixels are glued on or whatever,

01:27:02 ◼   ► and it's really, really nice.

01:27:04 ◼   ► The anti-reflective coating is minor, but also nice.

01:27:06 ◼   ► The speed is insane because it has that triple core chip

01:27:09 ◼   ► and the two gigs of RAM, so it's like,