ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► You guys are failing.

00:00:02 ◼   ► I see something about transporter in the FU.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Do we want to talk about that or do we not care?

00:00:08 ◼   ► That's a worthy follow-up.

00:00:09 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Because it's quick.

00:00:11 ◼   ► I forget.

00:00:12 ◼   ► We were talking about transporter.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Maybe it was during an ad on a past show mentioning the lights, and I think it was Mark who was

00:00:18 ◼   ► saying that lights, the blue LED lights are annoying on devices and this has a big blue

00:00:22 ◼   ► light.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Well, you can apparently turn the lights off on a transporter.

00:00:26 ◼   ► So if you are one of those people who doesn't like lights on your electronics, and you get

00:00:30 ◼   ► a transporter, apparently you can dim and turn off the lights.

00:00:33 ◼   ► I don't think the lights are that bad, but then again, mine is also in the basement,

00:00:36 ◼   ► so there you go.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Speaking of retina, man, John, that thing in your review, we were supposed to talk about

00:00:43 ◼   ► your review, how you found that the default wallpaper is exactly 2x the current 27-inch

00:00:50 ◼   ► cinema display's resolution.

00:00:52 ◼   ► Yeah, quite a coincidence.

00:00:53 ◼   ► That's painful, man. That's so painful.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Because now you look, all the pieces are in place.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I was treating it like this, all the pieces are in place to have a retina desktop display,

00:01:05 ◼   ► except having the display. The computer is now supported, Thunderbolt 2 is fast enough,

00:01:10 ◼   ► the GPUs are insanely fast and all these new models.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And there's clearly a differentiation here, whereas assuming it would need to be a Thunderbolt 2,

00:01:19 ◼   ► the new MacBook Air still can't do it. They don't have Thunderbolt 2, right?

00:01:24 ◼   ► That's right, isn't it? I think so. The only computers Apple has announced with

00:01:28 ◼   ► Thunderbolt 2 are the new Retina MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro.

00:01:33 ◼   ► So it would be interesting, and it would certainly... I've decided now,

00:01:38 ◼   ► looking at what's being released, unless the benchmarks show some kind of massive

00:01:43 ◼   ► gains in an application I actually use on the new Mac Pros, I think I'm going to wait

00:01:48 ◼   ► and not buy a new Mac Pro until there is a Retina desktop display.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Because I'm just not going to see enough of a gain from

00:01:56 ◼   ► just the CPU side alone, just the storage side alone.

00:02:00 ◼   ► I already have a good CPU, a good SSD, but what I really want is that display.

00:02:05 ◼   ► And until it exists, I think I'm just going to hold off.

00:02:08 ◼   ► That's going to be great claim chowder. I'm looking forward to that.

00:02:10 ◼   ► We'll see how well his Resolve holds, especially when I get mine and talk about how awesome it is.

00:02:15 ◼   ► Well, the thing is, what's it really going to get me if I get it before then?

00:02:22 ◼   ► It makes sense.

00:02:23 ◼   ► We're just questioning your ability to act rationally.

00:02:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I might not.

00:02:27 ◼   ► That's certainly a valid question.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And you might be right.

00:02:30 ◼   ► This might be being played back at some point later and laughing at me.

00:02:38 ◼   ► I think if you already have a 2010 Mac Pro, there's not a major reason to upgrade for

00:02:45 ◼   ► just the CPU performance.

00:02:47 ◼   ► We'll have to see how quickly applications take advantage of those GPUs.

00:02:53 ◼   ► That could really make a big difference.

00:02:55 ◼   ► I don't expect that most of the apps that I use will really do much with that, but we'll

00:03:00 ◼   ► see.

00:03:01 ◼   ► I could be wrong about that.

00:03:02 ◼   ► Your Mac Pro might probably actually be better for games than the new expensive one that

00:03:05 ◼   ► I'm going to buy because I could take out the video card that you have and buy an aftermarket

00:03:08 ◼   ► card and, you know, so it's got fine CPU, fast SSD, and then I would put in the fastest

00:03:14 ◼   ► gaming card available.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:17 ◼   ► And that might have better gaming performance than the obscenely expensive Mac Pro, but

00:03:20 ◼   ► it wouldn't be black and cylinder-shaped and have one fan, so, you know.

00:03:24 ◼   ► And do you see that red one that's in the charity auction for Product Red?

00:03:28 ◼   ► It's kind of neat, but I'm, like, I don't know if I like that color too much.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I'd rather have a black one.

00:03:33 ◼   ► See, I like it a lot.

00:03:35 ◼   ► My reason for hesitating on bidding on that auction is that I don't know what the specs

00:03:40 ◼   ► of the Mac Pro are.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Wait, wait, wait.

00:03:43 ◼   ► The thing starts at what, 40 grand?

00:03:45 ◼   ► And the reason you're not bidding is because you're not clear what the insides are?

00:03:48 ◼   ► I think that it says estimated range, 40 to 60 grand.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Does that mean that the first bid has to be 40 grand, or does that mean that's just what

00:03:56 ◼   ► they expected to go for?

00:03:58 ◼   ► I've never been that serious about an auction of this capacity to even know the answer to

00:04:03 ◼   ► that question.

00:04:04 ◼   ► know either. But if I can put in a bid for like $3,000, yeah, maybe I'll do it.

00:04:09 ◼   ► It's not entirely crazy because items like this, one-of-a-kind blah blah blah, would

00:04:14 ◼   ► probably retain their resale value. So even if you spent an obscene amount of money on

00:04:18 ◼   ► this, you could, in theory, get that money back even after the computer is obsolete,

00:04:23 ◼   ► simply selling it as a one-of-a-kind Mac Pro blah blah blah, officially sanctioned. It's

00:04:29 ◼   ► not like an aftermarket mod or something, so it should retain some value.

00:04:31 ◼   ► That's the other thing.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Right after the Mac Pro comes out,

00:04:34 ◼   ► is ColorWare or one of these companies

00:04:36 ◼   ► going to start an anodizing service that just lets anybody

00:04:39 ◼   ► do this for like $1,000?

00:04:41 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

00:04:41 ◼   ► But the big problem with this is they don't tell you

00:04:43 ◼   ► the specs of the Mac Pro.

00:04:44 ◼   ► And so if I would actually win this thing

00:04:47 ◼   ► for a reasonable price, I would at least

00:04:49 ◼   ► want to know what CPU does it have?

00:04:52 ◼   ► Because that's something you can't change.

00:04:54 ◼   ► GPUs I care less about.

00:04:56 ◼   ► But does it have the base model CPU?

00:04:58 ◼   ► If so, that's kind of crappy for that price.

00:05:01 ◼   ► But if it has the 12 core, that's actually worse for single-threaded tasks than the 8

00:05:06 ◼   ► core.

00:05:07 ◼   ► So I wouldn't really want that either.

00:05:09 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:05:10 ◼   ► This is all probably a ridiculously moot discussion, because I don't think I can get it for $3,000.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Goodness.

00:05:16 ◼   ► I do want to talk about this review.

00:05:18 ◼   ► We don't have any other FU, do we?

00:05:20 ◼   ► Oh, what about 7.03 and John's motion sickness?

00:05:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:25 ◼   ► We should talk about this last week, but no room.

00:05:28 ◼   ► But I installed the 7.03 update.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I knew what it was going to bring, and for people who don't know, the 7.03 update changes

00:05:36 ◼   ► it so that if you go into the accessibility preferences and turn on reduce motion, it

00:05:41 ◼   ► doesn't just remove the parallax effect on the home screen and the parallax effect on

00:05:45 ◼   ► the pop-up dialogue boxes.

00:05:47 ◼   ► It also removes the zooming animation when you launch applications and when you go back

00:05:52 ◼   ► to Springboard, and it replaces that animation with a crossfade.

00:05:57 ◼   ► I always had to reduce motion on from the second I installed iOS 7 because I can't stand the parallax thing

00:06:02 ◼   ► The worst thing about the parallax thing is my chosen

00:06:05 ◼   ► Lock-screen image a picture of my dog

00:06:08 ◼   ► My ex-dog. He's still a dog anyway died several years ago

00:06:11 ◼   ► But yeah

00:06:12 ◼   ► That's my lock screen image because it's like a tiebreaker between like my two kids and my wife everything so just go with the dog

00:06:18 ◼   ► When you have parallax on it has to zoom the image zoom in you know like so we can do the parallax thing

00:06:26 ◼   ► but there's not enough background. It's a very tight close-up of my dog's face.

00:06:29 ◼   ► There's not enough background around it. And when I turn Parallax on, it zooms the image

00:06:34 ◼   ► too much and like chops off his little doggy nose on the side of the screen. So that's no good.

00:06:37 ◼   ► So I can't have that. So I definitely don't. And I don't like the Parallax at all. I don't like

00:06:42 ◼   ► the effect. I don't like the little dialogs jiggling around when I move my thing.

00:06:45 ◼   ► And so I got this thing. I'm like, "All right, well, whatever. I just, you know,

00:06:48 ◼   ► 7.03 update. I'll get it." And I knew it was going to eliminate the zooming thing with the crosshair.

00:06:54 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, maybe it'll make my thing feel faster," right?

00:06:57 ◼   ► Now, the first thing is I'm not even sure that the duration of the animation is any

00:07:03 ◼   ► shorter.

00:07:04 ◼   ► I haven't actually timed it, but feeling-wise, there's still an animation.

00:07:08 ◼   ► There's still a crossfade.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Is it less time than the zoom animation?

00:07:13 ◼   ► Maybe it's the same amount of time.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:15 ◼   ► You know, people keep asking me about that.

00:07:17 ◼   ► I see them asking you about it, too.

00:07:20 ◼   ► I haven't tested it.

00:07:21 ◼   ► I really don't want to test it.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Just somebody with two iPhone 5Ss, point one at the other one, take a slow-mo video and

00:07:30 ◼   ► test it both ways.

00:07:31 ◼   ► I'm curious to know the answer, but not so curious that I would actually do that.

00:07:35 ◼   ► Yes, but the point is it doesn't feel instantaneous.

00:07:40 ◼   ► But the second thing is I found that I missed the zooming, because the zooming, for all

00:07:45 ◼   ► of its slight motion sickness-inducing feeling—and by the way, I had that very early on until

00:07:50 ◼   ► I just learned where to look.

00:07:51 ◼   ► It was only because it was unexpected, and now I knew how it was going to work.

00:07:55 ◼   ► That zooming animation was the thing that made iOS 7 feel like iOS 7 to me.

00:08:04 ◼   ► And it was fun, and it was interesting, and it made me feel like, "Hey, I'm using iOS

00:08:07 ◼   ► 7."

00:08:08 ◼   ► That's what I associated with the experience.

00:08:11 ◼   ► That and the weird icons, I guess, whatever, and the dialogues and stuff.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And when it was gone, I missed it.

00:08:17 ◼   ► And in its place, I didn't get, "Okay, well, I missed the animation, but it's so much faster."

00:08:21 ◼   ► I got kind of boring, maybe slightly faster,

00:08:24 ◼   ► but I can't even tell.

00:08:26 ◼   ► I don't like the crossfade.

00:08:27 ◼   ► And so now I wish there was a way

00:08:29 ◼   ► to turn the zooming back on, but keep the parallax off.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And this is like, you know, this way lies madness,

00:08:35 ◼   ► where it's like, okay, well we had an option

00:08:37 ◼   ► to reduce motion, but now some people want this part

00:08:39 ◼   ► of the motion is okay, but this part of the,

00:08:40 ◼   ► like, this is kind of an unappley kind of thing to do,

00:08:44 ◼   ► where you release something, like this is our statement,

00:08:46 ◼   ► this is our product, but then you have to put in some option

00:08:48 ◼   ► to turn some stuff off because there are some legitimate

00:08:50 ◼   ► issues with it, and then you start tweaking that option, and it's just like, it would

00:08:54 ◼   ► be better if you could come up with one interface that everybody likes and nobody has a problem

00:08:57 ◼   ► with, kind of like the original iOS, where there weren't these motion sickness problems,

00:09:00 ◼   ► there weren't options to turn off zooming or whatever the effects were when you go back

00:09:04 ◼   ► and forth to Springboard.

00:09:05 ◼   ► They nailed it better with that, whereas iOS 7 seems to have more rough edges and they're

00:09:09 ◼   ► like trying to figure out the balance of, "Okay, well, we'll have a switch to turn it

00:09:13 ◼   ► off and we'll have this thing to adjust that," and I'm not in favor of them adding 8,000

00:09:17 ◼   ► options to pick which parts of the motion you like.

00:09:20 ◼   ► I like the Parallax, but I don't like it on dialog boxes.

00:09:22 ◼   ► I just like it on the lock screen, or I want to disable it on the lock screen, or I want

00:09:24 ◼   ► to…

00:09:25 ◼   ► You can't do that, right?

00:09:26 ◼   ► They have to just go with one thing.

00:09:27 ◼   ► So in the end, the messing it with my wallpaper and the stupid jiggly Parallax annoys me more

00:09:33 ◼   ► than I miss the zooming.

00:09:35 ◼   ► But I really, really do miss the zooming.

00:09:37 ◼   ► In fact, if I could pick myself, I would say keep the zooming and make it twice to three

00:09:41 ◼   ► times as fast.

00:09:43 ◼   ► And that would make me happy.

00:09:44 ◼   ► When I say twice to three times fast, I just mean reduce the duration.

00:09:46 ◼   ► It doesn't mean I need a higher performance phone to do that.

00:09:49 ◼   ► it really make you happy? Well, you know, happier. So that surprised me about 7.03.

00:09:56 ◼   ► How did you guys feel about it? Did you upgrade to 7.03? And did you have reduced motion on,

00:10:02 ◼   ► either one of you? No, I'm not an animal.

00:10:04 ◼   ► I did have it on in 7.02 and earlier. I had it on just because I just didn't care about

00:10:10 ◼   ► the parallax. And there was a weird bug with the parallax where if you launched an app

00:10:16 ◼   ► in a certain orientation and then you like tilted the phone back a bit, closed the app,

00:10:21 ◼   ► goes back to springboard. For a split second it would show the old position of the parallax

00:10:25 ◼   ► and then update to the new one. So you'd see like one wrong frame and then it would jump

00:10:29 ◼   ► to the next one. That's just a stupid implementation bug.

00:10:32 ◼   ► I'd see that as well. And I don't like seeing graphics move that I don't think should be

00:10:38 ◼   ► moving. Like the dialogue boxes and stuff. It's not a convincing... The 3D effect is

00:10:42 ◼   ► not convincing because the background and the foreground, there's no actual parallax.

00:10:46 ◼   ► trying to fake it with shifting the background around, but to me it just looks like they're

00:10:50 ◼   ► shifting the background because that is what they're doing. It looks flat to me. In the

00:10:53 ◼   ► videos they show, "Hey, it looks kind of like the icons are floating above the screen, but

00:10:57 ◼   ► the illusion is not maintained for me." So all it is is basically making graphics, like

00:11:02 ◼   ► untethering them from the pixel grid where I think they should be pinned down for no

00:11:06 ◼   ► great effect, versus the zooming animation, which I think really does provide kind of

00:11:09 ◼   ► like a sense of space of where you are and sort of going with the different layers and

00:11:14 ◼   ► stuff, more so than any of the other layering things. I think the zooming in and out from

00:11:17 ◼   ► applications totally works to provide you with a three-dimensional sense of space of

00:11:21 ◼   ► where things are on the phone. And I miss it when it's gone. I have intentionally not

00:11:25 ◼   ► upgraded my iPad because of that. It's my last, the last bastion of zooming.

00:11:30 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:11:31 ◼   ► Wow. Well, I did see somebody, I don't remember who it was, with 703 and the crossfade enabled.

00:11:40 ◼   ► And the very first time I saw that person return to the home screen from an app, I thought,

00:11:45 ◼   ► "Oh, God, that's terrible."

00:11:46 ◼   ► And I completely agree with you that that zoom does give you a sense of place, and I

00:11:51 ◼   ► think it's kind of important to the whole layered approach to iOS 7.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And I should say we had some real-time follow-up from a very reliable source that says the

00:12:01 ◼   ► speed, the animation speed, duration, as you were saying, is no different for the crossfade,

00:12:06 ◼   ► and no different in 7.03.

00:12:08 ◼   ► And the zoom was fun.

00:12:10 ◼   ► I did hear from a few people that it is different on the iPhone 4 and 4S, because the slower

00:12:17 ◼   ► devices--a lot of people who had those devices told me on Twitter when I asked if it was

00:12:22 ◼   ► faster, that it's faster on those. But I can't really--that sounds like maybe a coincidence

00:12:28 ◼   ► or maybe a placebo, but I don't know. I mean, I'm with Jon. I had reduced motion turn on

00:12:35 ◼   ► just to avoid the parallax, which I think will go down

00:12:38 ◼   ► as iOS 7's pinstripes.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And as soon as the crossfade became a thing,

00:12:45 ◼   ► I turned parallax back on, because I

00:12:48 ◼   ► can't stand the crossfades.

00:12:49 ◼   ► They're so bad.

00:12:51 ◼   ► These are two very extreme positions.

00:12:54 ◼   ► It's as if on Mac OS X, as if you minimize the window--

00:12:58 ◼   ► every time you minimized or hit an application,

00:13:01 ◼   ► it would do the big slow genie effect.

00:13:03 ◼   ► It's like that.

00:13:04 ◼   ► if that was the only option, either that or no animations at all.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And, you know, the reality is the best thing is something in the middle here.

00:13:12 ◼   ► And it's just going to take Apple, you know, maybe a release

00:13:16 ◼   ► or two before they kind of tone down the new cool thing that they learn how to do.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Right. And I should say, John, that even though

00:13:24 ◼   ► I do quite like, well I shouldn't say I quite like the parallax, but I don't mind

00:13:28 ◼   ► the parallax except that my lock screen image

00:13:32 ◼   ► because I don't have children, as Aaron is my wife.

00:13:36 ◼   ► And I took that photo-- it was actually the very first photo

00:13:38 ◼   ► I took with my 3GS.

00:13:40 ◼   ► And thus, it is way too small to be parallaxified,

00:13:44 ◼   ► or whatever you want to call it.

00:13:45 ◼   ► And I always constantly see a black bar

00:13:47 ◼   ► at the top of the screen, which drives me up a wall.

00:13:50 ◼   ► No, no, you can't have that.

00:13:51 ◼   ► You've got to get rid of that.

00:13:53 ◼   ► Oh, it's terrible.

00:13:53 ◼   ► It is terrible.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And I haven't had a chance to find a picture that works

00:13:58 ◼   ► better as a lock screen image.

00:13:59 ◼   ► But that does drive me bonkers.

00:14:01 ◼   ► you know she lives with you

00:14:03 ◼   ► i know

00:14:04 ◼   ► i know another picture

00:14:05 ◼   ► i'm so close to doing like you know content aware phil to extend the

00:14:09 ◼   ► background of this picture of my dog so that i don't have a problem like

00:14:12 ◼   ► everything i get to have photoshop i'd make it happen here right because i

00:14:16 ◼   ► tried recropping it several different ways and realizes that you know you

00:14:19 ◼   ► can't

00:14:19 ◼   ► it's just not going to work you can't stretch it out there's not enough

00:14:22 ◼   ► background

00:14:23 ◼   ► and i and of course i use a black background springboard so there's no

00:14:27 ◼   ► parallax from springboard but the dialogue boxes all have it and i i hate

00:14:30 ◼   ► 8-signal toggle box would shift a couple of pixels if I move my hand. Stay still. I'm

00:14:35 ◼   ► trying to tap you.

00:14:36 ◼   ► Was the dog photo taken at any location that you can get back to?

00:14:39 ◼   ► Oh, no. It was a rental house in Southampton from many years ago, taking a picture of it,

00:14:45 ◼   ► putting his little head down on the grey wood deck. So, content-aware Phil could have a

00:14:50 ◼   ► shot on stretching it out. I might try that, but we'll see.

00:14:56 ◼   ► Anything else on 703?

00:14:58 ◼   ► Was there anything else about 703?

00:14:59 ◼   ► No, that was it. Just the crossfades.

00:15:02 ◼   ► - Alright, just wanted to make sure. - They're pretty bad.

00:15:04 ◼   ► So, speaking of Farhamptons, that's Long Island, is that right?

00:15:08 ◼   ► - Yes, Casey. - Okay, just wanted to make sure.

00:15:11 ◼   ► There's a point to that question. What is the significance of Levittown?

00:15:16 ◼   ► To you, particularly.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Oh, that's where my parents grew up. Both of them.

00:15:20 ◼   ► Okay, because I'm... I don't have the link handy.

00:15:23 ◼   ► Or I don't have the page number handy. I don't think I'm looking through my notes.

00:15:27 ◼   ► But I noticed in the map screenshot, you had Levittown and you had something else. I don't

00:15:32 ◼   ► recall what the other thing was. And I was wondering, because I feel like all these screenshots

00:15:36 ◼   ► had little tidbits and windows into the life of John Syracuse. And so was that address

00:15:43 ◼   ► the address where either mom or dad grew up, or both of them?

00:15:46 ◼   ► Yeah, that was the address of my mother's parents. They don't live there anymore. So

00:15:50 ◼   ► So none of the information in the review is useful to you.

00:15:55 ◼   ► In fact, when my grandparents moved out of that house, a developer bought it and within

00:16:00 ◼   ► weeks just totally ripped it to shreds and made a new house out of it.

00:16:05 ◼   ► Because that house was an original Levitt house.

00:16:08 ◼   ► You can look up the history of Levittown.

00:16:09 ◼   ► You want to maybe read David Halberstam's The 50s, which is a nice book for learning

00:16:15 ◼   ► about this stuff.

00:16:16 ◼   ► Very light.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Not like the power broker.

00:16:18 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:16:19 ◼   ► It was an original Levitt house that my grandfather extended, but for the most part, my grandparents

00:16:25 ◼   ► lived there their whole lives and hadn't changed.

00:16:28 ◼   ► It looked like a grandmother's house and a grandfather's house.

00:16:31 ◼   ► They had changed it, but they changed it when they had kids, right?

00:16:34 ◼   ► So I guess it's just unsaleable.

00:16:36 ◼   ► So when they moved out and the house was sold, you can't sell somebody a grandfather's house

00:16:42 ◼   ► and they just ripped it to shreds.

00:16:43 ◼   ► So I'm glad my brother and I took a bazillion pictures of the inside and outside of it before

00:16:48 ◼   ► that happened. So yeah, if you were to go to that address in my review, what you would see is a house

00:16:52 ◼   ► that looks absolutely nothing like the house my mother grew up in.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Fair enough. And then what's

00:16:58 ◼   ► MacArthur, Lane, and Smith something? That's the house that I grew up in for the most part.

00:17:02 ◼   ► I mean, there was a couple—I lived in three houses.

00:17:05 ◼   ► I was born in one and spent many years in another house and then moved to that one.

00:17:08 ◼   ► That's where I was in high school and everything. And again, we sold that house, you know,

00:17:12 ◼   ► my parents sold the house a while ago.

00:17:13 ◼   ► I haven't lived there for many years. The people who bought the house cut down all of the trees in the yard,

00:17:18 ◼   ► which is terrible, and I think actually against the law,

00:17:21 ◼   ► but apparently they were not prosecuted, and so now the house looks gross and all the trees are cut down.

00:17:26 ◼   ► And I have no idea what they did to the inside, but I'm sure that's gross too.

00:17:29 ◼   ► Now is there enough information in this review

00:17:32 ◼   ► to steal your identity or get a credit card under your name or maybe get an Apple ID password reset?

00:17:38 ◼   ► I don't think so because like I said,

00:17:40 ◼   ► These two houses and this map thing, no one related to me has lived in for many, many,

00:17:45 ◼   ► many years, and they don't look anything like they did when I lived there.

00:17:47 ◼   ► So it's useless to you.

00:17:50 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:17:51 ◼   ► There were a couple other tidbits about the review, like an IM that you had presumably

00:17:56 ◼   ► sent to yourself or had Tina send to you, which I wanted to ask about the contents of

00:18:01 ◼   ► that IM, which I have written down here somewhere.

00:18:04 ◼   ► I'm assuming it's some book or popular media reference I didn't get.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Where was that?

00:18:09 ◼   ► Oh, something about Iceman... I don't know, that was something else.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Oh, something about a raccoon being released safely or something along those lines?

00:18:19 ◼   ► That's what happens when people don't read their entire Twitter timelines. That's from my actual life.

00:18:24 ◼   ► What? I read every one of your tweets, John. I have no recollection of this.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Oh, you don't remember what I tweeted when I found the raccoon sleeping in the bottom of my garbage can?

00:18:33 ◼   ► No, but I heard someone else tell that exact same story just today, actually, at work,

00:18:38 ◼   ► which is kind of funny.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Yeah, no, in the bottom of one of our garbage cans, it looked like a young raccoon had gone

00:18:44 ◼   ► in there and I guess couldn't get out, and of course they're nocturnal, so he went

00:18:47 ◼   ► to sleep. So we're going to put the garbage in the garbage can, and then you put it in

00:18:50 ◼   ► the bag and you see a little raccoon sleeping down there. So I had to take the raccoon in

00:18:55 ◼   ► the garbage can to the woods, wake him up, and release him into the woods.

00:19:00 ◼   ► That's very kind of you.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Yeah, well, what else am I going to do?

00:19:03 ◼   ► I don't know. Have him get dumped into the garbage truck if you're a terrible human

00:19:07 ◼   ► being.

00:19:08 ◼   ► I might have done that.

00:19:10 ◼   ► I really don't like raccoons.

00:19:13 ◼   ► I used to love them when I was a kid.

00:19:14 ◼   ► Now I realize they're just disease-filled disgusting animals.

00:19:17 ◼   ► But don't email me.

00:19:19 ◼   ► The other thing, so the last thing that I spied on your screenshots was "Iceman wants

00:19:26 ◼   ► to use your passwords," which is what I was stumbling over a moment ago.

00:19:30 ◼   ► Is that supposed to be some other reference that I didn't catch, or is that just you

00:19:34 ◼   ► trying to be funny?

00:19:35 ◼   ► Marco, save Casey here and redeem yourself.

00:19:38 ◼   ► What?

00:19:39 ◼   ► Icemen?

00:19:40 ◼   ► Nothing?

00:19:41 ◼   ► I'm looking at—hold on.

00:19:42 ◼   ► I'm on page five, the iCloud Keychain page, approximately halfway down the page.

00:19:47 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:19:48 ◼   ► There's no way I'm going to get this.

00:19:49 ◼   ► Well, and I mean, my first thought, which I'm grabbing from the chat, my first thought

00:19:53 ◼   ► was Top Gun, but that's not right, right?

00:19:57 ◼   ► It's Icemen, not Iceman.

00:20:00 ◼   ► There was only one Iceman.

00:20:01 ◼   ► You guys are failing.

00:20:03 ◼   ► See, that's why I didn't think that was the case.

00:20:06 ◼   ► So what is it, and will I even understand what it is this is a reference to?

00:20:11 ◼   ► You will.

00:20:12 ◼   ► Okay.

00:20:13 ◼   ► So make me feel stupid.

00:20:15 ◼   ► The best one I have is in the AirPlay menu option thingy.

00:20:21 ◼   ► You can see that that's the name of the volume, because you can see the hard drive in the

00:20:24 ◼   ► upper right corner of the screen.

00:20:27 ◼   ► What's the name of the OS, Casey?

00:20:29 ◼   ► Mavericks.

00:20:30 ◼   ► Oh.

00:20:31 ◼   ► So I get it.

00:20:32 ◼   ► plural of Iceman. Aha! I get it. That actually is kind of funny and I'm kind of annoyed now.

00:20:37 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:20:38 ◼   ► That's, I mean, even if you make a Top Gun joke in the review, it's too obvious. And

00:20:42 ◼   ► I also made an explicit Top Gun joke two releases ago, you know, so I can't go there again.

00:20:48 ◼   ► But yeah, it's Mavericks, and the character in the movie is Maverick. And there's more

00:20:51 ◼   ► than one of them, so if you had Iceman, you know, more than one of them, like, you don't

00:20:56 ◼   ► want to be on the nose. You want to get a little something for people's brains to be

00:20:59 ◼   ► tickled or just confuse you.

00:21:01 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Apparently I fall in the confused category.

00:21:04 ◼   ► This is like six feet behind the nose and around the corner.

00:21:07 ◼   ► A lot of people got it, let me tell you guys. Not to make you feel bad or anything, but

00:21:12 ◼   ► a lot of—this is like the most obvious thing people write in. They're like, "Hey, like

00:21:16 ◼   ► the whatever about your review." This is the one that was most recognized by people

00:21:21 ◼   ► reading the review.

00:21:23 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:21:25 ◼   ► "D.G." he says in the chat. "This is a fun game. Listen to Marco and Casey tortuously

00:21:29 ◼   ► try to decipher John's references. That's the last I had, everyone, so I'll stop putting

00:21:34 ◼   ► us through this awkward pain.

00:21:36 ◼   ► Well this week is sponsored in part by a wonderful return sponsor who would actually get all

00:21:41 ◼   ► these inside jokes, which I didn't get. Casey, you barely got... I don't even know if John

00:21:48 ◼   ► gets them. It's Igloo Software. Igloo is an internet you'll actually like. Go to IglooSoftware.com/ATP

00:21:56 ◼   ► that igloo knows that we sent you. And of course that will mean they will keep buying

00:22:01 ◼   ► sponsorships, which is always good for us.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Now, most people don't really like their intranets because most intranets are terrible.

00:22:09 ◼   ► I know you guys, do you both have experience with SharePoint? I know Casey does.

00:22:13 ◼   ► Yes, everyone has to use SharePoint and it's not good.

00:22:17 ◼   ► I've never heard a single good thing about SharePoint. Have you? Is there a single good

00:22:21 ◼   ► thing to say about it other than like Microsoft something?

00:22:24 ◼   ► is, but I don't want to go there. I mean, it can be used well, it just never, ever,

00:22:29 ◼   ► ever is. And in fact, the last project I did with SharePoint was an instance of it being

00:22:32 ◼   ► used well, but that's the only one I've ever, ever, ever seen.

00:22:35 ◼   ► That's, yeah, and that's saying a lot. I mean, because it's pretty widely used,

00:22:39 ◼   ► and it's almost always hated by everyone who uses it. So, with Igloo, you can make

00:22:46 ◼   ► an internet that your company and your employees and you will actually like using. You can

00:22:52 ◼   ► You can share content quickly with built-in apps.

00:22:54 ◼   ► They have blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums,

00:22:57 ◼   ► Twitter-like micro-blogs, Wikis, and more.

00:23:00 ◼   ► Everything on Igloo is social.

00:23:02 ◼   ► You can comment on any type of content.

00:23:04 ◼   ► You can @mention your coworkers.

00:23:06 ◼   ► You can follow any content for updates.

00:23:08 ◼   ► And you can use tags to group things around the way you work.

00:23:11 ◼   ► You can add on also sub-rooms, like mini Igloos,

00:23:14 ◼   ► for each of your teams to work in.

00:23:16 ◼   ► It's very easy to use.

00:23:17 ◼   ► The whole thing is drag and drop.

00:23:19 ◼   ► It features responsive design and uses beautiful fonts

00:23:22 ◼   ► typekit. You know, most intranets, if I can go off script here for a second, most intranets

00:23:27 ◼   ► are designed 15 years earlier by a programmer, and it shows. And there's nothing modern about

00:23:34 ◼   ► them. They might even require IE5 to work properly or God knows what. Igloo is all modern,

00:23:40 ◼   ► beautiful, well-designed, and tech-friendly. It's free to use with up to 10 people, and

00:23:46 ◼   ► When you grow, it's only $12 a person per month.

00:23:50 ◼   ► And this will pass almost any enterprise checklist.

00:23:52 ◼   ► It has enterprise-grade security.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Everything is private, secure, and made for businesses.

00:23:58 ◼   ► And you can start using it right away.

00:24:00 ◼   ► If nothing else, just go to the website,

00:24:02 ◼   ► see their genuinely funny videos about the service,

00:24:04 ◼   ► and it's really great.

00:24:06 ◼   ► So go to igloosoftware.com/atp to start building your igloo.

00:24:10 ◼   ► Free to use up to 10 people.

00:24:12 ◼   ► That's pretty great.

00:24:13 ◼   ► igloosoftware.com/atp.

00:24:15 ◼   ► Thank you very much.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Now, Marco, did you do your homework?

00:24:19 ◼   ► Let's start there.

00:24:20 ◼   ► You did read the review, if I'm not mistaken.

00:24:21 ◼   ► I did.

00:24:22 ◼   ► I'm very proud of you.

00:24:24 ◼   ► This might be the first time that you've ever done your homework.

00:24:26 ◼   ► It is, definitely.

00:24:29 ◼   ► Would you like to start with any questions?

00:24:30 ◼   ► I have a handful of questions that are kind of all spastic and all over the place, but

00:24:34 ◼   ► if you had any you would like to ask, can we start there?

00:24:39 ◼   ► I actually don't, and here's why, and I mean this as a compliment.

00:24:44 ◼   ► The review, when I got done with it, it was like I had just finished a big meal.

00:24:48 ◼   ► And it's like, "Alright, I'm satisfied."

00:24:51 ◼   ► If you just ate a big meal at a restaurant and it was pretty good, and the chef comes

00:24:55 ◼   ► over afterwards and is like, "Do you have any questions about what you just ate?"

00:24:58 ◼   ► I'm like, "Actually, no.

00:24:59 ◼   ► No, I don't.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I'm quite happy, thank you."

00:25:01 ◼   ► So that's how I feel about this review.

00:25:03 ◼   ► It was really good.

00:25:04 ◼   ► I liked reading it, and I'm satisfied.

00:25:07 ◼   ► You know, I actually feel mostly the same way, and I feverishly reread the review this

00:25:14 ◼   ► evening right before we recorded, in part so I could generate some questions and maybe

00:25:20 ◼   ► in one or two instances fabricate some questions, because the first time I read it I felt the

00:25:24 ◼   ► same way.

00:25:25 ◼   ► I was like, "I'm good."

00:25:28 ◼   ► Everything was excellent, just as I expected, and I will be sure to tip the waiter.

00:25:32 ◼   ► But yeah, it ended up really well.

00:25:35 ◼   ► So John, any observations before I start noodling you with random questions?

00:25:39 ◼   ► You should start noodling me and then I will riff as needed.

00:25:43 ◼   ► That's kind of what I think.

00:25:44 ◼   ► Is that supposed to be needling?

00:25:45 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:25:46 ◼   ► Noodling sounds funnier.

00:25:47 ◼   ► Well, we were talking about food, so now you've got food on my brain.

00:25:49 ◼   ► The mental image of noodling is definitely funnier.

00:25:51 ◼   ► It's like something like a limp, floppy noodle.

00:25:54 ◼   ► This is going nowhere good, gentlemen.

00:25:56 ◼   ► All right, let me start with a really simple question actually, which is less about the

00:25:59 ◼   ► review and more about Mavericks.

00:26:00 ◼   ► Do either of you guys find yourself using finder tabs?

00:26:03 ◼   ► Wait, you've installed Mavericks?

00:26:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I'm running at work too.

00:26:07 ◼   ► Oh, you're crazy.

00:26:08 ◼   ► No, it's fine.

00:26:09 ◼   ► I mean, I'd say the only reason I don't do it at home is because of the stupid VPN that

00:26:13 ◼   ► I'm forced to use that is not yet compatible with Mavericks.

00:26:15 ◼   ► I was going to actually install it today, but I wanted to wait until after this show

00:26:18 ◼   ► was recorded just in case something went really horribly wrong.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Amazingly smooth install, because normally I have to futz with all my installed stuff.

00:26:26 ◼   ► I didn't have to touch anything in user local, as far as I can tell it all worked.

00:26:28 ◼   ► The only bump I had was that my subversion repositories, you know, they bumped up my

00:26:33 ◼   ► subversion up to 1.7, and so I had to upgrade those. But that's one command that it tells

00:26:37 ◼   ► you when it finds out that I upgraded it, and so far that's it.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Oh, I'm surprised.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Actually, I have it on my laptop, and I was doing some work on my laptop earlier today

00:26:44 ◼   ► for a while, and it was perfectly fine. I had Homebrew and CocoaPods doing stuff, and

00:26:52 ◼   ► PHP on the command line doing stuff, and yeah, it all works just fine.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Wait, we might have talked about this, but you've embraced CocoaPods now?

00:26:59 ◼   ► I have, yeah. When I open sourced FC model, whenever that was, like a month and a half,

00:27:05 ◼   ► two months ago, whenever that was, a bunch of people requested it in pod form. And so

00:27:11 ◼   ► I decided to install and start learning how to use CocoaPods. And yeah, turns out it's

00:27:15 ◼   ► good. Who knew?

00:27:16 ◼   ► >> Who knew? No, when I wrote an iPad app early this year at work, and we had another

00:27:25 ◼   ► guy coming in to help us out, and he told me, "Oh, you have to use CocoaPods, it's the best thing ever."

00:27:30 ◼   ► And I was kind of like, "Mm-hmm." And as it turns out, it really is that good.

00:27:35 ◼   ► So anyway, I digress.

00:27:40 ◼   ► Because the thing is, programmers always, like every week, there's a new tool

00:27:40 ◼   ► that programmers are telling other programmers, "Oh, you've got to use this. This is so great."

00:27:45 ◼   ► And they usually fizzle out and die because they aren't that useful or necessary or mature.

00:27:50 ◼   ► CocoaPods, I wouldn't necessarily call it mature, but it's close enough, it works very

00:27:55 ◼   ► well, and it serves a very good purpose that nothing else really serves this well, if at

00:27:59 ◼   ► all.

00:28:01 ◼   ► So it works fine for me.

00:28:03 ◼   ► It is pretty poorly documented, and for a while the XC workspaces it would generate

00:28:09 ◼   ► were not that great and had different warnings and stuff, but if you update to the newest

00:28:14 ◼   ► CocoaPods, which there is no update command, you have to just run the gem install thing

00:28:20 ◼   ► again, then that fixes those things.

00:28:22 ◼   ► So I'm happy with it now.

00:28:25 ◼   ► There was definitely a learning curve

00:28:27 ◼   ► to just getting it installed and set up properly,

00:28:28 ◼   ► but their site is OK at telling you how to do that.

00:28:32 ◼   ► And once you get it set up, it's pretty awesome.

00:28:34 ◼   ► Good deal.

00:28:36 ◼   ► So we got sidetracked.

00:28:38 ◼   ► So Marco, you've barely used Mavericks-- whatever.

00:28:42 ◼   ► You've barely used Mavericks.

00:28:43 ◼   ► John, are you using Finder tabs?

00:28:46 ◼   ► No.

00:28:46 ◼   ► I mean, I don't use the browser mode.

00:28:48 ◼   ► finder, very rarely use it. Occasionally I use it when I'm literally browsing, like I'm

00:28:53 ◼   ► trying to find something in some Samba share somewhere. And I just make one new browser

00:29:00 ◼   ► window, use it and discard it. All my other windows don't have the sidebar. I mean, occasionally

00:29:05 ◼   ► when I do browsing type activities, maybe it will come up, but for the most part I don't

00:29:09 ◼   ► do browsing type activities. I have like the five windows that have my stuff in them open,

00:29:13 ◼   ► usually in list view, and with the little folders turned down

00:29:16 ◼   ► that I access frequently.

00:29:18 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:29:19 ◼   ► I don't spend a lot of time browsing the file system

00:29:22 ◼   ► with a browser.

00:29:22 ◼   ► And most of it is because if I do anything with the browser,

00:29:25 ◼   ► I am potentially screwing up what little spatial state

00:29:30 ◼   ► that the Finder deigns to actually remember for me.

00:29:34 ◼   ► And I don't want to take that risk.

00:29:36 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter.

00:29:37 ◼   ► Even me avoiding it, mixing that stuff together

00:29:40 ◼   ► and screwing up all my state information,

00:29:42 ◼   ► It still just forgets every two or three days.

00:29:45 ◼   ► Like my applications window, which

00:29:46 ◼   ► I never open because it's Quicksilver.

00:29:48 ◼   ► But occasionally, I open it up to look around in there

00:29:50 ◼   ► or maybe to drag something in or to zip up something

00:29:54 ◼   ► before I install a new version.

00:29:57 ◼   ► And that's one of the few windows

00:29:59 ◼   ► that I have viewed by icon with pretty big icons

00:30:01 ◼   ► because they're nice looking.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And I have it all arranged by name.

00:30:05 ◼   ► And at least once a month, it will forget entirely about that.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And we'll use a different view.

00:30:10 ◼   ► We'll change the sort order.

00:30:11 ◼   ► it'll have a sidebar when it shouldn't, it'll be in the wrong position on the screen,

00:30:14 ◼   ► it'll be the wrong size. Now we'll have to hit Command-J, and I will see the little check box

00:30:18 ◼   ► that says, "Oh, we show an icon mode," is checked, even though it has totally changed all my view

00:30:23 ◼   ► options, and I'll set it back to the right thing. I mean, maybe it's a bad installer overriding the

00:30:27 ◼   ► DS store file or whatever, you know, it's just, it has no respect for the work I put into it,

00:30:32 ◼   ► so I tried to avoid the Finder. I tried to avoid the Finder as much as possible, because what's the

00:30:35 ◼   ► point? Like, this is a section of the review that I didn't write, that I started writing, and I said,

00:30:40 ◼   ► "You know what? Stop. Stop writing this. It's not your..." Because I could just write about

00:30:44 ◼   ► this forever. I was going to write in the finder section, go on a big digression about

00:30:50 ◼   ► this whole topic, trying to give an analogy to the people who... Because people don't

00:30:53 ◼   ► understand this whole thing, and they think it's stupid, but it's not. And I put in that

00:30:57 ◼   ► one little sentence to that effect in the review, and that's all that remains of what

00:31:00 ◼   ► could have been a 3,000 word digression that everyone would have been pissed about.

00:31:06 ◼   ► How would you feel if once a month you picked up your phone and all the icons in Springboard

00:31:11 ◼   ► were all over the place?

00:31:13 ◼   ► Would you go back and rearrange them to the way you wanted them again?

00:31:17 ◼   ► After that happens three times, two times, or maybe even just once, wouldn't you just

00:31:20 ◼   ► give up and go, "Oh, well, forget it.

00:31:21 ◼   ► I guess I'll just search for everything, or I'll just try to have them sort alphabetically

00:31:25 ◼   ► and hope that they stay that way."

00:31:28 ◼   ► Then you just accept that.

00:31:29 ◼   ► If someone said, "No, no, the little Springboard icons, they should remember where they are

00:31:33 ◼   ► so you could arrange them."

00:31:34 ◼   ► Who's going to arrange all their little icons?

00:31:35 ◼   ► It's so stupid.

00:31:36 ◼   ► There's too many applications anyway.

00:31:39 ◼   ► No one is going to arrange all their stuff like that.

00:31:41 ◼   ► Just accept that you use search or they're alphabetical.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And that's the state of the Finder,

00:31:45 ◼   ► that it doesn't respect any work you

00:31:47 ◼   ► do to get things arranged the way you want them,

00:31:49 ◼   ► to have this window off to the left in this view, in this size

00:31:52 ◼   ► in this scroll position, in this selection state,

00:31:54 ◼   ► and to have that window over there and to do this.

00:31:56 ◼   ► No one's going to do that because you know any of the work

00:31:58 ◼   ► that you put in.

00:31:59 ◼   ► It may help you for this session right here.

00:32:01 ◼   ► But tomorrow or next week or whatever, it'll be changed.

00:32:04 ◼   ► And you open that window, and it'll

00:32:05 ◼   ► be in the wrong spot, and it'll have a sidebar, and it won't respect the view options that

00:32:09 ◼   ► you picked or the solid order that you picked or whatever. And so people give up, and they're

00:32:12 ◼   ► just like, "Oh, I guess I can't do that." And you hear all the same arguments like,

00:32:16 ◼   ► "Well, there's too many files. That works when you have five files, but it doesn't work

00:32:19 ◼   ► when you have a thousand." That's like saying, "Well, I have too many applications." Even

00:32:22 ◼   ► people with a bazillion applications with screen-cell folders—and we've all seen those

00:32:26 ◼   ► people, right? The people who used to hit the 11-page limit on Springboard. Even those

00:32:30 ◼   ► people, screen one at the very least, or even like, you know, they'll arrange screen one.

00:32:35 ◼   ► And then after that, it's just, you know, folder land and it's just a big mess, right?

00:32:38 ◼   ► But even they will arrange screen one. And even if you don't arrange screen one, I'll

00:32:41 ◼   ► go ahead and know, it's all just a, I'll see a folder, I always use search. Even those

00:32:44 ◼   ► people I feel like would carefully pick the four items that are in their little dock,

00:32:48 ◼   ► you know, the fix thing or whatever. Like, there's always something in your life that

00:32:53 ◼   ► benefits from you putting it the way you want it and knowing where everything is using,

00:32:58 ◼   ► you know, spatial recognition of what size is it, what color is it, what position is

00:33:02 ◼   ► it on the screen. When I put it there, it stays there, I know where it is, I can orient

00:33:05 ◼   ► myself to it, and those are the few common things you do. And no matter how many files

00:33:09 ◼   ► we get, no matter how many applications we get, no matter how big hard drives we get,

00:33:12 ◼   ► there's always going to be some working set of things that you would benefit from if you

00:33:16 ◼   ► could arrange them just so and have them where you want them. And that I continue to rail

00:33:22 ◼   ► against and I wish people at Apple understood that. Clearly someone does, because Springboard

00:33:25 ◼   ► just relentlessly spatial in terms of arranging things. And if you've ever had this happen,

00:33:30 ◼   ► and I have with an iOS bug where Springboard does go nuts and everything gets all scrambled,

00:33:34 ◼   ► it is crazy making. Everybody hates that. That's how I feel about the Finder half the

00:33:38 ◼   ► time when using the Finder in OS X. So yeah, not really in tabs.

00:33:43 ◼   ► Wow. That was all that for "No, not really. I don't use Finder tabs." John, this is why

00:33:49 ◼   ► we love you. And it's not because I don't like tabs. I

00:33:51 ◼   ► love tabs. I use my browser like crazy. It's because I know if I mess with any of that

00:33:55 ◼   ► browser stuff, I'm going to be screwing my own tiny little toehold that I have on the

00:34:00 ◼   ► spatial state in the Finder. It's not because I hate the browser stuff. If I could just

00:34:03 ◼   ► have separate browser windows and non-browser windows, I would use the browser way more,

00:34:07 ◼   ► and I would love the tabs there.

00:34:09 ◼   ► Do you think it's a little bit lesser priority of making that stuff that reliable on Mac

00:34:15 ◼   ► rather than iOS? Because on iOS, Springboard is the only way to launch apps, and it is

00:34:21 ◼   ► by far the most common way for power users and the programmers who work on iOS to launch

00:34:27 ◼   ► their apps.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Springboard, or Spotlight exists, but on iOS it's certainly a little bit clumsy to use

00:34:34 ◼   ► over just swiping two over to find the page and tapping an icon.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Whereas on the Mac, I suspect that most programmers who work on OS X and most power users who

00:34:47 ◼   ► would be most irritated by this kind of stuff probably don't open Finder windows very frequently

00:34:52 ◼   ► to navigate to their applications or to the files they want.

00:34:54 ◼   ► They probably are using things like Launch Bar or Quicksilver or at least Spotlight to

00:34:59 ◼   ► do quick keyboard-based launching and finding of things much more often.

00:35:03 ◼   ► So do you think maybe it's just not as much of a pain point?

00:35:06 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it's not that it's not much of a pain point.

00:35:09 ◼   ► It's just that the design of the OS X Finder precludes them doing this.

00:35:15 ◼   ► It's not like it's like, oh, if they just fix the bugs, it would be fine.

00:35:17 ◼   ► It's just designed not to work that way, because it's not clear when you're rearranging something

00:35:24 ◼   ► what effect what you're rearranging has.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Because if you have a browser window and you browse through stuff and you make changes

00:35:30 ◼   ► as you go, what are you making changes to?

00:35:33 ◼   ► It's the difference between window as a device that you peer through to see the contents

00:35:38 ◼   ► of your file system and window as the spatial manifestation of a particular directory on

00:35:43 ◼   ► disk.

00:35:44 ◼   ► combine those. Once you can change a window from one to the other, what happens when you

00:35:48 ◼   ► transform? Does suddenly the spatial state of the window suddenly apply itself to the

00:35:52 ◼   ► folder when you transform it to get rid of the sidebar and reverse? There's no sensible

00:35:56 ◼   ► way to do it. So there's nothing they can do short of actually separating those two

00:36:00 ◼   ► views. And the non-user-friendliness of the Finder is tied to the non-user-friendliness

00:36:06 ◼   ► of the file system. So this also doesn't solve that problem, like the fact that there's a

00:36:10 ◼   ► bazillion files and they're all over the place and people don't know what to do with them.

00:36:14 ◼   ► It's the reason iOS is so successful, because it gets rid of that.

00:36:18 ◼   ► People can't handle the file system.

00:36:19 ◼   ► They can't even handle open/save dialog boxes.

00:36:21 ◼   ► They just simply cannot handle it.

00:36:23 ◼   ► So we need to get that away from them.

00:36:24 ◼   ► And Springboard is a great solution to that problem, especially in the context of handheld

00:36:29 ◼   ► devices.

00:36:30 ◼   ► Maybe it doesn't apply entirely to the Mac, although they did add Launchpad and everything

00:36:33 ◼   ► like that.

00:36:34 ◼   ► But the problems of the file system are not going to go away if you suddenly make the

00:36:40 ◼   ► finder spatial.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Now, because the finder was spatial for years and people still couldn't handle it.

00:36:44 ◼   ► for the average person. But for the few people who could, it really did let you manage your

00:36:48 ◼   ► stuff in a nicer manner. And we've got many more interesting advanced technologies, like

00:36:53 ◼   ► you said, Spotlight, Quicksilver, all that good stuff, plus tons of really good in-application

00:36:58 ◼   ► management of stuff like the sidebars and the source lists and the various applications

00:37:01 ◼   ► that give you a view of your stuff without showing you a view of your disk. That's all

00:37:07 ◼   ► good stuff. It's all thumbs up. But the Finder is not what it could be. And I don't think

00:37:12 ◼   ► it's because it's not a priority.

00:37:16 ◼   ► I guess it is kind of not a priority, because they're like, "Well, it doesn't work

00:37:19 ◼   ► that well, and we don't have a real strong philosophy for it, and we're trying to satisfy

00:37:22 ◼   ► everybody and end up satisfying nobody."

00:37:24 ◼   ► But really, in the grand scheme of things, a finder is way less important than it used

00:37:27 ◼   ► to be, and that is true.

00:37:28 ◼   ► So let's just add tabs.

00:37:31 ◼   ► Why not?

00:37:32 ◼   ► Well, the funny thing is, the reason I brought this up two hours ago was because I was just

00:37:37 ◼   ► I was just wondering after having reread your review why it was I was still opening like

00:37:43 ◼   ► two or three Finder windows in order to drag things between folders, directories, whatever,

00:37:49 ◼   ► when I'd completely forgotten that tabs were even a thing in Mavericks.

00:37:53 ◼   ► Well, you want to see the source and the destination at the same time.

00:37:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's a very fair point, but to be honest, I would probably do just as well

00:38:02 ◼   ► by getting one tab with the source, the other tab with the destination, and that would be

00:38:05 ◼   ► sufficient.

00:38:06 ◼   ► And that's why I actually really like, this is a completely unsponsored plug.

00:38:11 ◼   ► I really like the app Dragon Drop, which is like the animal dragon drop,

00:38:16 ◼   ► but it's a pun for drag and drop.

00:38:18 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:38:21 ◼   ► Uh, did you know there's a really funny joke in his review about Icemen?

00:38:24 ◼   ► Uh, anyway, so the point is this little app, you jiggle your mouse and a little,

00:38:32 ◼   ► uh, like a tool tip sort of, and it's not a tool tip.

00:38:35 ◼   ► It's like a little, I don't know what you call it, but it's a little thing, a little

00:38:38 ◼   ► window that pops up.

00:38:39 ◼   ► And you can drop something that you had in your, that you were dragging onto this little

00:38:44 ◼   ► window that is on top of all other windows.

00:38:47 ◼   ► And then you can go about your business, do whatever you need to do, and then drag away

00:38:51 ◼   ► from the drag and drop window onto whatever you want to put it on.

00:38:55 ◼   ► So the use case being, you have one finder window, you find the file you want, you pick

00:38:59 ◼   ► it up, you jiggle your mouse, you drop it on the drag and drop window, go to that same

00:39:03 ◼   ► original Finder window and go to wherever you want this file to be and then bring the

00:39:10 ◼   ► file from the drag and drop window back into that original Finder window which is now pointing

00:39:14 ◼   ► to the new destination.

00:39:15 ◼   ► That was a terrible way of describing it, but the point I'm driving at is there are

00:39:18 ◼   ► other options other than just tabs that I use constantly, but yet just today I found

00:39:24 ◼   ► myself somehow deciding to open two or three Finder windows to do this when I really should

00:39:29 ◼   ► have just embraced Finder tabs.

00:39:31 ◼   ► Yeah, so that drag and drop thing is the shelf from Next Step.

00:39:35 ◼   ► So everything old is new again.

00:39:38 ◼   ► Having that intermediary placed to keep things.

00:39:41 ◼   ► It's a reasonable idea, but at a certain point, you can't have every—they ditched it because

00:39:45 ◼   ► they were trying to simplify the interface.

00:39:48 ◼   ► The Next Dock was more complicated than the original Apple Dock, and the shelf goes away.

00:39:55 ◼   ► But yeah, there's lots of replacement-type things to say, to let you split up an operation

00:40:00 ◼   ► into two pieces. Here's the things that I found, and then hang it over here, and you

00:40:05 ◼   ► know. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I know a lot of people who would always have—the

00:40:11 ◼   ► way they use the OS X Finder is they would have—all they would ever have is two browser

00:40:15 ◼   ► windows. One on top, one on bottom, one on left, one on right, and they would just sort

00:40:19 ◼   ► of arrange them. And I bet they got pissed every time those windows rearranged themselves

00:40:22 ◼   ► or resized themselves. Anyway, and they use it kind of like Transmit, the Panic! FTP app.

00:40:27 ◼   ► The left side would be source, and the right side

00:40:30 ◼   ► would be destination.

00:40:30 ◼   ► And that's how they move files.

00:40:31 ◼   ► They would navigate with the browser thing in one place,

00:40:33 ◼   ► navigate with the other thing, and then move the files

00:40:35 ◼   ► crosswise like that.

00:40:37 ◼   ► And that's one way to operate, albeit inefficient,

00:40:39 ◼   ► because the Finder was not helping.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Because what they really wanted was basically

00:40:41 ◼   ► transmit with a big arrow in between.

00:40:43 ◼   ► And so they could navigate, navigate arrow one direction

00:40:45 ◼   ► or the other, select, and then do arrows.

00:40:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:50 ◼   ► So anything else on Finder Tams?

00:40:53 ◼   ► I feel like we've already been on this for a while.

00:40:56 ◼   ► OK, let's see.

00:40:57 ◼   ► What else did I—oh, I wanted to make an observation perhaps more than have a question,

00:41:02 ◼   ► which is there were a couple of spots where you threw in these just extremely passionate

00:41:09 ◼   ► like one-liners.

00:41:10 ◼   ► And you made mention of one earlier, which was—I guess it was about Finder, where you

00:41:17 ◼   ► said some people don't care about this distinction between browser and whatever the other kind

00:41:21 ◼   ► of Finder window is.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Or think it's academic and not important.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Well, right.

00:41:25 ◼   ► And well, they think it's academic and not important.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Next sentence, they are wrong.

00:41:29 ◼   ► And there was another instance, what was it about?

00:41:33 ◼   ► I wrote down eternal vigilance.

00:41:34 ◼   ► Oh, it was Notification Center, about whether you want people around you to be able to see

00:41:40 ◼   ► who's IMing you or who's tweeting at you or whatever the case may be.

00:41:43 ◼   ► And so you could choose to have, in the case of email or IM, you could have kind of the

00:41:48 ◼   ► details hidden on Notification Center, but that is less useful if you're the only one

00:41:55 ◼   ► looking at the computer. And so you made this one-off about how you have to—the penalty

00:41:59 ◼   ► for this is you have to be eternally vigilant as to who is within eyeshot of your machine.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And again, I don't think there's much of a question here, but I just loved those little

00:42:09 ◼   ► one-liners where it was completely clear exactly what you felt, and if any of us disagree,

00:42:16 ◼   ► well, we are just completely wrong, and that's the end of the damn meeting.

00:42:19 ◼   ► The academic thing is like that's part of a broader point where people fall into the

00:42:23 ◼   ► the trap where if they don't understand or can't

00:42:27 ◼   ► see the benefit of something, therefore there is no benefit.

00:42:30 ◼   ► And in anything where someone is a creator

00:42:34 ◼   ► and someone is consuming it, the assumption

00:42:38 ◼   ► is that the creator has more knowledge about the domain.

00:42:41 ◼   ► Like you don't have to understand

00:42:43 ◼   ► what makes a good song to appreciate a good song, right?

00:42:47 ◼   ► But you also can't say-- if someone describes

00:42:51 ◼   ► some musical concept, you'll be like, "I don't understand it. That's not important to a good

00:42:55 ◼   ► song." You don't know what makes a good song. It's not your job. You don't have to know what makes a

00:42:58 ◼   ► good song. All you have to know is how to enjoy a song. Do I like the song? Do I not like it? And

00:43:02 ◼   ► you leave it to the people creating it to figure out what is it that makes a good song. All that

00:43:05 ◼   ► music theory stuff, you may not understand music theory at all. You may not understand how anything

00:43:10 ◼   ► about music works, but someone has to, and it's their job to understand this stuff. So all this

00:43:15 ◼   ► academic stuff, you don't have to understand it. You don't have to even buy that it works.

00:43:19 ◼   ► Tons of things that people love about Apple products have a foundation in complicated

00:43:25 ◼   ► things that users don't understand, but the user sure as heck feels the result of it.

00:43:28 ◼   ► And so that's what I hate the argument about like, you know, this spatial, like you try to

00:43:31 ◼   ► explain the concepts behind things that make for, you know, usable, pleasing, efficient user

00:43:37 ◼   ► interfaces, and people's eyes glaze over. Like, and they say, well, that is obviously not an

00:43:42 ◼   ► important part of user experience. That's not, you know, just because you don't understand doesn't

00:43:47 ◼   ► it's not part of it. And the thing is, they shouldn't have to understand it. So my goal,

00:43:50 ◼   ► I'm kind of talking to Apple always with these things. Like, yes, I want to tell people about

00:43:54 ◼   ► the philosophies underlying these things that I think would be a good idea or whatever.

00:43:59 ◼   ► But it shouldn't be their job to understand it. And it's not, I don't, nothing hinges on

00:44:03 ◼   ► convincing them. So that's at this point, I'm not like, I'm done trying to convince the end users

00:44:07 ◼   ► that this would make a good interface. And the best bet I have is try to convince someone who

00:44:12 ◼   ► has the power to make an interface. And the thing is, a lot of software developers have read what

00:44:16 ◼   ► I've talked about on this topic and tried to incorporate some of those things into their designs

00:44:20 ◼   ► with very little success, I might add. And I would say Apple itself

00:44:24 ◼   ► is one of the few companies that has incorporated against Springboard and the whole iOS user

00:44:29 ◼   ► interface. The comfort and the stability and the sort of approachableness that people feel

00:44:36 ◼   ► with that little grid of icons that you can move around and swipe from one screen to the other,

00:44:39 ◼   ► that is like the ultimate victory of all of these concepts that everyone thought were stupid and

00:44:44 ◼   ► and their eyes glazed everywhere. So yeah, that got a one-off because, like I said, that is the

00:44:48 ◼   ► big honking section of the review that every time I write a review, I stop myself from writing more

00:44:52 ◼   ► or less because I feel like I've covered it. But it's still totally there, and I wasn't interested

00:44:56 ◼   ► in engaging on it. And the other one, the eternal vigilance thing, that's, again, even more true of

00:45:02 ◼   ► iOS. Because you know what it's like in iOS, people who are nerds listening to this podcast,

00:45:08 ◼   ► How often do we go into preferences and go on patrol in the notifications thing and the

00:45:14 ◼   ► location settings? You know what I mean? You're allowed notification. You're allowed to have

00:45:18 ◼   ► banners. You're allowed to make sounds. You're not allowed. You install an application and you

00:45:23 ◼   ► go in there and adjust this thing. You're not allowed to push notifications. All these things

00:45:27 ◼   ► are great, but if you want to have a nice experience and not just be overwhelmed by

00:45:31 ◼   ► beeping things and things popping in your face, the price is you have to spend some time in the

00:45:36 ◼   ► the notification minds throwing the toggle switches left and right and just deciding

00:45:40 ◼   ► what you want. And OS X has exactly the same thing. Notification Center, which I love,

00:45:44 ◼   ► it also means that if I don't pay attention and I install five new applications, they'll

00:45:50 ◼   ► be throwing stuff up and they'll be filling my Notification Center sidebar and they'll

00:45:53 ◼   ► be doing all this stuff and I've got to go in there and say, "Oh yeah, nope, not you,

00:45:56 ◼   ► no banners, no sounds, no this," you know, all that stuff. And if you don't do that,

00:46:00 ◼   ► you will eventually be overwhelmed and you'll be like, "iOS sucks, everything's always

00:46:03 ◼   ► beeping in my face.

00:46:04 ◼   ► Like, well, they give all the application developers these things, and they give the

00:46:07 ◼   ► users control in a way that Apple usually doesn't.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Like, Apple usually isn't in the business of giving you a gigantic wall of toggle switches,

00:46:16 ◼   ► but in the case of notifications, they do.

00:46:17 ◼   ► And I think it's probably the only way you can do it, because only the user can decide

00:46:22 ◼   ► what's important enough to them to, you know, beep in their face, and how annoying is a

00:46:26 ◼   ► dialog box versus a sound versus a banner versus something appearing in a sidebar.

00:46:30 ◼   ► So that was the point of that one.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Yeah, and I really do love them and in in I think part of the reason I enjoy them so much is because I

00:46:38 ◼   ► Tend to waffle. I don't know if in hedge

00:46:41 ◼   ► I don't know if anyone happens to have noticed this and I love when you just come out and it's just

00:46:45 ◼   ► That's the way it is like it or not. And and I just really enjoy it Marco. Do you want to tell us about something else?

00:46:52 ◼   ► That's awesome. I would love to it is yet another repeat sponsor because we have the best sponsors it is in fact

00:46:58 ◼   ► oxygen by RAM objects

00:47:01 ◼   ► and it's spelled Oxygen with an E on the end,

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00:47:07 ◼   ► So, if you write applications for different platforms,

00:47:10 ◼   ► including the Mac, iOS, Android, Windows,

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00:47:44 ◼   ► the .NET framework on Windows, Casey,

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00:48:05 ◼   ► Oxygen is based on object Pascal. Do you guys know Pascal? I never learned it.

00:48:10 ◼   ► I spent like a week or two learning it at some point. Actually, it might have been in

00:48:14 ◼   ► computer camp, and we can do a whole deep dive into the psychosis behind that. But I

00:48:20 ◼   ► believe it was in computer camp that I very briefly learned Pascal.

00:48:23 ◼   ► I went to band camp, and I thought that was the nerdiest thing ever, but I think you just

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00:48:28 ◼   ► I never used Pascal.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Actually, I think I may have written a couple pages of Pascal back when you programmed the

00:48:34 ◼   ► Mac in Pascal.

00:48:35 ◼   ► That's a long time ago, but didn't do anything useful with it.

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00:49:24 ◼   ► O-X-Y-G-E-N-E. And by the way, if you use discount code ATP13 for the ATP, the year

00:49:32 ◼   ► of 2013, that's 20% off all RemObjects products, Oxygen or otherwise. So thanks a lot to RemObjects

00:49:41 ◼   ► and Oxygen for sponsoring the show.

00:49:45 ◼   ► So that's actually a somewhat prescient segue into what I was going to ask next, which is

00:49:53 ◼   ► A lot of the review, John, I would say is relatively high level and approachable for

00:50:00 ◼   ► just about anyone, even non-developers.

00:50:03 ◼   ► And then the next thing I know, I'm looking at hex dumps of file, extended file attributes

00:50:09 ◼   ► or whatever they're called.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And my question to you is, at what point do you decide you're going too deep into the

00:50:16 ◼   ► nerdery and pull yourself back out?

00:50:20 ◼   ► Is there any sort of decision-making process or decision tree, or is it just you do enough

00:50:24 ◼   ► to get your point across and that's that?

00:50:27 ◼   ► So there are so many things in any release that I could write about.

00:50:29 ◼   ► This is the eternal struggle with any of these reviews, and this is why I continue to resist

00:50:33 ◼   ► the description of "comprehensive," because, you know, you've gone to WWDC.

00:50:38 ◼   ► There are so many topics that I could go into, topics that I am interested in.

00:50:42 ◼   ► In dev tools alone, I could spend a million years just on Xcode and Clang and LLVM and

00:50:48 ◼   ► the things they do to the language every year. And some years I have done that. I did that

00:50:52 ◼   ► when they did GCD. But then I didn't do it when they were doing properties in dot syntax.

00:50:58 ◼   ► So there's just too much to cover. And I have to decide which one of these things really

00:51:06 ◼   ► makes a difference.

00:51:07 ◼   ► And sometimes I sneak stuff into OS reviews that really has nothing to do with the OS,

00:51:10 ◼   ► but I think is important for the platform. This is more of a state of the platform type

00:51:13 ◼   ► review and using the release of an OS as a point to talk about it. But even within the OS, I just

00:51:19 ◼   ► have to leave stuff out, right? And I try to pick some features that I think are either important,

00:51:24 ◼   ► or could be important to users, or highlight something about Apple's design philosophy.

00:51:29 ◼   ► And so a lot of things get dropped on the cutting room floor. But tags, you know,

00:51:34 ◼   ► tags fits all the criteria. It's a feature that Apple touted all the time. It's a feature

00:51:39 ◼   ► that builds on technologies that they added over many, many years, and that I've been following

00:51:43 ◼   ► closely. So this is like a breadcrumb trail of how do we get where we are today? And you go all

00:51:49 ◼   ► the way back to the metadata stuff and file name extensions, and then finally getting extended

00:51:53 ◼   ► attributes, and then Spotlight leveraging that. And then now finally we're at a point where we

00:51:59 ◼   ► can do tag. And there's been so many third-party applications that leverage this exact same

00:52:02 ◼   ► infrastructure to do similar things with the tags. And now it's a built-in feature of the OS.

00:52:07 ◼   ► And the reason I went deep on it is because I'm talking about the implementation, and I don't have

00:52:15 ◼   ► to re-explain the implementation of first principles, because if you've been following

00:52:18 ◼   ► along, and I could link back to, remember when we talked about extended attributes, remember when we

00:52:22 ◼   ► talked about Spotlight, it builds on, it's like any kind of school course, you build on the

00:52:28 ◼   ► information that you learned in the previous semester to learn the new things, you don't

00:52:30 ◼   ► have to go back over it again. And in particular, when it comes to tags, it's scary to see like

00:52:37 ◼   ► like hex dumps and stuff like that, but I explained it to a level that I thought anybody

00:52:40 ◼   ► reading could understand. I had to explain exactly, "Okay, well, this number in hex is

00:52:47 ◼   ► this and therefore that number and blah, blah, blah." And understanding the history of tags

00:52:52 ◼   ► and the particular implementation explains why it works the way it does. Why are there

00:52:56 ◼   ► only seven colors? Why can I have repeat colors with different names? And all these weird

00:53:02 ◼   ► behaviors that if you were to just test them, it works in a strange way. Sometimes this

00:53:06 ◼   ► This file had this name and this machine, but when I brought the tag over here, the

00:53:08 ◼   ► color was different, but the tag name was the same, and when I did a search, all these

00:53:12 ◼   ► things that would be inexplicable.

00:53:14 ◼   ► Once you understand the implementation, it's not that complicated.

00:53:17 ◼   ► Once you understand the implementation, you're like, "Oh, now I know why they only have seven

00:53:20 ◼   ► colors, and now I know why the names change like that, and now I know why it's sort of

00:53:25 ◼   ► backward compatible with labels, because I know how labels work, so now I understand

00:53:28 ◼   ► why they can't have all the labels, because labels only have this one bit field, and so

00:53:32 ◼   ► it has to pick, and they chose to pick the last tag that you applied, but you can still

00:53:35 ◼   ► have the other tag sister over here, and why are they in a big XML blob because they do

00:53:39 ◼   ► property lists, which is a big thing in Mac OS X, and they put it in one big blob so

00:53:42 ◼   ► Spotlike can index it as a symbol.

00:53:45 ◼   ► It all comes together.

00:53:47 ◼   ► The details of that implementation help you understand why the features work the way it

00:53:50 ◼   ► does, and I tried to get into the trade-offs of, "What if they had done it this way?

00:53:54 ◼   ► They would be more pure than they would have this drawback.

00:53:56 ◼   ► Well, they did it this way.

00:53:57 ◼   ► What happens if you change the name of a tag and you've got 10,000 files in your disk like

00:54:01 ◼   ► that?

00:54:02 ◼   ► Well, you're going to see a progress dialog.

00:54:03 ◼   ► of gross. And you could have different tags with different names and different machines,

00:54:06 ◼   ► and if that disk isn't online, when you change the name, when you bring it back in mind,

00:54:09 ◼   ► things aren't going to match. And in some sense, it's revealing the ugliness of the

00:54:13 ◼   ► implementation, but I think it explains how the feature works better than trying to

00:54:17 ◼   ► truth table it out and saying, "When you click here and do this and do that, this happens. When

00:54:20 ◼   ► you click here and this and that..." Because I think tags do have enough weird edge cases

00:54:25 ◼   ► that if people just started clicking around, they wouldn't understand why they work the way they do.

00:54:28 ◼   ► And this is the type of section that I'm going to be linking people back to for years to come

00:54:32 ◼   ► and already is getting people like, "Tags did this strange thing. I don't understand why."

00:54:37 ◼   ► Just link to the section. Once you read through it, you say, "Okay, well, now I know what happened

00:54:41 ◼   ► when I did that, and now I completely understand why it behaved in this particular way."

00:54:45 ◼   ► And you feel like going all the way down to hex is a reasonable amount of depth for a normal human

00:54:54 ◼   ► being to understand? Yeah, because I feel like I walk through it a step at a time. Here's the

00:54:58 ◼   ► contents of the thing, and here's what it looks like. And linking back, if you don't know what

00:55:02 ◼   ► a property list is? I link you to the documentation that says that Apple's property lists are

00:55:07 ◼   ► what we use in Mac OS X to store this kind of data. I think anyone can understand property

00:55:11 ◼   ► lists. You don't have to know the intimate details of it, but you read the documentation

00:55:14 ◼   ► like, "Oh, this is a nice way to store semi-structured simple data with strings and numbers and stuff."

00:55:20 ◼   ► Apple uses it a lot, and there are different structures, so it makes sense that they would

00:55:23 ◼   ► use that to store it. Then you come back to the review and continue reading. And extended

00:55:26 ◼   ► attributes, go read about what the heck those are and come back here. "Oh, they just made

00:55:28 ◼   ► new extended attribute and they gave it a name, and here it is. It may take somebody

00:55:33 ◼   ► who doesn't know anything about it a while to go back through the other stuff, but anybody

00:55:36 ◼   ► who has been following along should breeze through it.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Yeah, actually, part of the reason why it took me longer this year to read it than last

00:55:42 ◼   ► year is because I followed some of those links and got lost on things like the Wikipedia

00:55:46 ◼   ► page about Unix demons and things like that.

00:55:50 ◼   ► Yeah, that's mostly there. I'll just use the word demon with the A before the E, and just

00:55:55 ◼   ► assume everybody knows what it means. I don't want to explain what that is. But if you don't,

00:55:58 ◼   ► the Wikipedia page explains what they are, and you could come back fairly quickly unless

00:56:02 ◼   ► you know, you're like, "Oh, well this is interesting." But you already knew what

00:56:05 ◼   ► they were, I'm assuming, and just went there out of academic curiosity and then got lost.

00:56:09 ◼   ► But I'm trying to just bring everybody along.

00:56:11 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** Even if I already know what a demon is, I will follow that link just to

00:56:15 ◼   ► see, "You know what? I bet there's something about this that I don't know." And sure,

00:56:18 ◼   ► if there was lots there, I didn't know. So it was definitely worth it.

00:56:22 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah. I mean, sometimes you don't need to know everything about it.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Like in that particular link, I'm just trying to make sure everyone is following along,

00:56:27 ◼   ► and so I don't have to explain what a demon is, because that's cumbersome.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Like I want to assume that there's some common shared knowledge here, but if I can help someone

00:56:36 ◼   ► out by going "Oh, I didn't know that was the word for that and why it's spelled funny like

00:56:40 ◼   ► that, but now when I read this Wikipedia page it explains what these things are and why

00:56:43 ◼   ► they have a funny name, and now I can come back and continue."

00:56:48 ◼   ► But in other cases, like I'm trying to add additional color through what I link, where

00:56:54 ◼   ► I'll link to it and it's not the obvious link, it's a link that makes a statement about the

00:56:57 ◼   ► word or phrase that adds, usually it's just adding a little bit of extra opinion about

00:57:01 ◼   ► how I feel about something or whatever.

00:57:03 ◼   ► And you don't have to follow that link if you already know what the thing is, but you

00:57:07 ◼   ► will get more information, even if you just mouse over the links.

00:57:09 ◼   ► Because you're like, "Oh, I think I know where that leads," and you mouse over and you go,

00:57:12 ◼   ► "Yeah, but the link's there," because you kind of know what my opinion on it is going

00:57:15 ◼   ► to be, but maybe you don't know when you click through it.

00:57:16 ◼   ► So it is, I guess back to the linking thing, some people find it tiring if you do that

00:57:21 ◼   ► and just want to read.

00:57:22 ◼   ► So you could read straight through if you understand every term, you don't need to,

00:57:24 ◼   ► but links do add stuff.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Maybe it's like a replay value in a game.

00:57:29 ◼   ► You can get repeat reading value out of going back to sections and following the links.

00:57:34 ◼   ► Going back a sec to the tags implementation details, one reason I actually really enjoyed

00:57:40 ◼   ► that section is because when I see a feature like tags, I rely a lot on the file system

00:57:48 ◼   ► for organization.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And I know that might seem like an obvious statement, but I rely more than most people

00:57:54 ◼   ► do in that I tend to not use things like everything bucket apps or apps that maintain their own

00:58:00 ◼   ► organizational database like Aperture and then the file system is kind of haphazard

00:58:05 ◼   ► or hidden from you. I avoid that kind of thing and I really just use the file system as a

00:58:10 ◼   ► major organizational point. Much like our friend Dr. Drang, I really believe in doing

00:58:15 ◼   ► things that way. And one of the reasons is because it is very resilient to both data

00:58:23 ◼   ► problems and software problems, like for example failed disks,

00:58:27 ◼   ► like you can pull a directory tree off a backup and it doesn't matter

00:58:31 ◼   ► if the backup was from some service or medium or software that didn't

00:58:35 ◼   ► support certain Mac extended attribute implementations or anything like that.

00:58:39 ◼   ► And it also ages very well in that if I

00:58:43 ◼   ► change software I use, like if I change my text editor, I don't have to

00:58:47 ◼   ► change the directory structure with which I store text files. Like

00:58:51 ◼   ► everything is more independent from each other, and so on.

00:58:55 ◼   ► And so I find that the more I can do just file system

00:59:02 ◼   ► management of things, the generally happier and easier

00:59:05 ◼   ► and more resilient my setup is.

00:59:07 ◼   ► And so when I see a new feature added like tags,

00:59:11 ◼   ► before I think about using it, I have to ask myself, OK,

00:59:14 ◼   ► how is this going to fit into long-term organization

00:59:18 ◼   ► on the disk?

00:59:19 ◼   ► Because if there was just some central system database file that maintained all the tag relationships,

00:59:25 ◼   ► or if it was baked into some kind of allocation table in the file system,

00:59:30 ◼   ► something like that where it's not just in the file or next to the file,

00:59:35 ◼   ► that would be a lot less resilient. Because then if you copy a directory to a backup drive,

00:59:41 ◼   ► or if your backup software doesn't know where that thing is to find that data,

00:59:46 ◼   ► find that data. Then if you restore from that, or if you copy that into a new machine, or

00:59:51 ◼   ► you're moving it to your laptop to work on it for a trip or something, that stuff doesn't

00:59:55 ◼   ► come with it, and that sucks. And so it was really good to know with your file system

00:59:59 ◼   ► stuff that it is implemented in such a way that it will be fairly resilient, and it will

01:00:06 ◼   ► be fairly portable, and fairly aging friendly at least. Not aging proof, but aging friendly,

01:00:14 ◼   ► long as the tools in question support extended attributes.

01:00:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, we've had like six years or seven years—how long has it been since 10.4?

01:00:24 ◼   ► For all the tools to get up to speed on, "Hey, extended attributes are a thing."

01:00:29 ◼   ► And Apple implements so many things through extended attributes.

01:00:31 ◼   ► Like, all of Time Machine relies on them just to work at all, right?

01:00:34 ◼   ► They're used for access control lists, which is a pretty deeply woven part of the provision

01:00:39 ◼   ► system of the operating system.

01:00:41 ◼   ► And like I said in the review, for years and years, they've taken things that aren't even

01:00:45 ◼   ► in extended attributes and exposed them through extended attributes.

01:00:48 ◼   ► So applications have kind of a unified interface to data that's not really the same.

01:00:51 ◼   ► So any application that does anything, especially a backup application, they don't have to be

01:00:57 ◼   ► like, "Oh, I've got to be up and getting different tags.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Oh, I've got to be..."

01:01:00 ◼   ► No, you've had seven years just to get on the page of extended attributes are a thing,

01:01:04 ◼   ► copy them when you copy stuff.

01:01:06 ◼   ► And anything Apple implements on top of extended attributes, which is why I was always in favor

01:01:09 ◼   ► of arbitrarily extensible metadata, because there are so many things you can do with it.

01:01:14 ◼   ► All your tools need to do is understand that those things exist and just copy them all.

01:01:20 ◼   ► And that's all you need to do.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And still, there are tools that don't do it that way, but you can rest assured that any

01:01:24 ◼   ► tool that works with extended attributes in any form will also work with TAS, because

01:01:28 ◼   ► that's all they are.

01:01:29 ◼   ► And the implementation is like...

01:01:31 ◼   ► And not only that, everything's in there about them.

01:01:33 ◼   ► The stupid number for the color from 1988 with the labels, and the string with the name.

01:01:38 ◼   ► So there's not even a central registry for that.

01:01:41 ◼   ► If you copy the file and you copy the extended attributes with it like any good, even the

01:01:44 ◼   ► command line CP does that at this point on OS X, you will have your tags.

01:01:49 ◼   ► So yeah, that is as reassuring as any other thing that's implemented on top of extended

01:01:54 ◼   ► attributes in OS X.

01:01:56 ◼   ► And you know, I have to say that if I were to pick a favorite section of the review,

01:02:02 ◼   ► this one might have been it.

01:02:03 ◼   ► Not because I'm particularly enamored with tags, but because I loved that you could trace

01:02:09 ◼   ► today's situation all the way back almost 30 years to 1988 and see that decisions made

01:02:16 ◼   ► then have a demonstrable effect on the decisions that were made today.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Maybe that's the nerdy side of me coming out, but I just thought it was so cool to

01:02:30 ◼   ► be able to trace what happens in 2013 all the way back to 1988.

01:02:36 ◼   ► And I do think you handled it well.

01:02:37 ◼   ► I'm grilling you not because I disagreed, but because I thought it was a very interesting

01:02:41 ◼   ► point to talk about.

01:02:43 ◼   ► All right, what else did I have here?

01:02:47 ◼   ► Well, actually, I think one of the things we do need to talk about, and I'm just going

01:02:52 ◼   ► to go ahead and kick back while you talk about this, is how was publishing all the different

01:02:58 ◼   ► e-books?

01:02:59 ◼   ► It was pretty smooth this year compared to last year.

01:03:02 ◼   ► Like I was really nervous about doing iBooks because this is the first time I've ever published

01:03:04 ◼   ► anything on iBooks.

01:03:06 ◼   ► Last year and the year before that, I had generated an EPUB version, and that EPUB was,

01:03:11 ◼   ► I always try to say, an iBooks-compatible EPUB, because people didn't know what EPUB

01:03:14 ◼   ► is.

01:03:15 ◼   ► And it's like, I'm making a file that you can load in the iBooks application.

01:03:18 ◼   ► And I've done that for years, so it's not like the creation of the file was a problem

01:03:23 ◼   ► any more than it always is trying to deal with these Ebook readers that don't render

01:03:27 ◼   ► things nicely.

01:03:28 ◼   ► So I had the file, which was a question of going through the submission process, and

01:03:32 ◼   ► I had heard that the submission process could be days or weeks to get to the iBook store,

01:03:36 ◼   ► and that's not going to work for me when I don't even know the release date and I need

01:03:39 ◼   ► a quick turnaround.

01:03:40 ◼   ► So I have friends who hooked me up with people at the iBook store who said they could expedite

01:03:47 ◼   ► my submission.

01:03:49 ◼   ► Kind of like the expedited review, you can get a one-time type thing.

01:03:51 ◼   ► I don't know if it's a one-time type thing, but I only publish one thing every year anyway.

01:03:54 ◼   ► So it was fine.

01:03:55 ◼   ► It was fine. And they were all lined up like, "Oh yeah, we'll get it up in 12 to 24 hours."

01:04:00 ◼   ► So that was all set to go.

01:04:03 ◼   ► And dealing with the tools we talked about in the last show, it wasn't the greatest experience.

01:04:07 ◼   ► The tools are kind of creaky.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Not a lot of hand-holding in terms of if this is the first time you're doing it,

01:04:12 ◼   ► are you sure everything's all set? Are you sure when you click this button it's going to do what you think?

01:04:16 ◼   ► Are you sure after you click this button you will have the ability to modify X, Y, and Z without screwing stuff up?

01:04:21 ◼   ► and you know, just learn those through experience.

01:04:23 ◼   ► I've updated all the ebooks so many times at this point.

01:04:27 ◼   ► Like, if you're listening to this and you have,

01:04:29 ◼   ► you bought either the Kindle book or the iBooks book,

01:04:32 ◼   ► both of them have been updated.

01:04:34 ◼   ► I don't know how the hell to get updates

01:04:35 ◼   ► from the Amazon store.

01:04:37 ◼   ► I think they have to send you an email

01:04:38 ◼   ► to tell you it's been updated,

01:04:39 ◼   ► you have to do some crazy thing.

01:04:40 ◼   ► I have no idea, so.

01:04:41 ◼   ► But rest assured that the book has been updated.

01:04:43 ◼   ► And if you can figure out how to get the updated version

01:04:45 ◼   ► from Amazon onto your Kindle device, good on you.

01:04:48 ◼   ► You'll get a nicer version with Typos fix and everything.

01:04:50 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure you have to actually just delete the current one off your device, lose

01:04:54 ◼   ► any highlights and notes you've made in it, and just re-download it.

01:04:58 ◼   ► I think that will get you the newest version.

01:05:00 ◼   ► In past years, that wouldn't even work.

01:05:02 ◼   ► In past years, when you deleted it and re-downloaded it, they would give you whatever version you

01:05:05 ◼   ► purchased.

01:05:06 ◼   ► The only way to do it was to wait for an email with some magic link or something.

01:05:09 ◼   ► It may have gotten better.

01:05:10 ◼   ► But iBooks, like any other store thing, within iBooks is a little updates tab.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, this book has been updated."

01:05:17 ◼   ► You tap the Update button, and you get the new version.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And I think it preserves everything for you.

01:05:21 ◼   ► I didn't try it if it preserves your notes and highlights.

01:05:23 ◼   ► Do iBooks updates have release notes?

01:05:25 ◼   ► They do.

01:05:26 ◼   ► I discovered that at 17 updates in when I saw, hey,

01:05:28 ◼   ► this guy, these have updates, and they got to write something.

01:05:31 ◼   ► And then I found the little tiny--

01:05:34 ◼   ► the places they let you type these things into the iTunes

01:05:36 ◼   ► producer thing, it's like a box that's

01:05:38 ◼   ► literally the size of two postage stamps,

01:05:40 ◼   ► like two actual postage stamps.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And that proportion, more like a square than a rectangle.

01:05:45 ◼   ► like paste your tiny text in here. Like seriously, in this gigantic window, I get two postage

01:05:50 ◼   ► stamps in a tiny little font that is too small. It shouldn't even be anti-Yellows. It's like,

01:05:54 ◼   ► you know, eight-point text or something. Yeah. Without spelling correction, I think, because

01:05:58 ◼   ► that doesn't do the little red squiggles. It's crazy. Maybe it does do the red squiggles,

01:06:02 ◼   ► and I just didn't catch it. But I put spelling errors in those boxes many times. Luckily,

01:06:06 ◼   ► I type everything in BB Edit and caught it before I paste it in. But anyway,

01:06:11 ◼   ► Getting the book up there, it was so fast.

01:06:13 ◼   ► So the first submission, you know, I was talking to my contact at Apple, and they're like,

01:06:18 ◼   ► "Okay, I've submitted it," and he wanted me to give him some information about it.

01:06:20 ◼   ► I gave him some information, and then I saw the book on the store.

01:06:22 ◼   ► I'm like, "All right, this is awesome.

01:06:23 ◼   ► It's, you know, it's up.

01:06:24 ◼   ► Boom.

01:06:24 ◼   ► It's there."

01:06:25 ◼   ► It was, you know, it was there so quickly.

01:06:28 ◼   ► And then he sent an email back and said, "Actually, I wanted this other piece of information,

01:06:32 ◼   ► not the one that you sent me."

01:06:33 ◼   ► So he didn't even expedite it.

01:06:34 ◼   ► It just went up that fast just because, like, because, I don't know, it was a lull, and

01:06:37 ◼   ► not a lot of people were submitting iBooks or whatever.

01:06:39 ◼   ► So maybe I just got lucky.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And the same thing with the updates.

01:06:42 ◼   ► I would update the book and it would get updated within hours.

01:06:45 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Is this normal?

01:06:46 ◼   ► Is this automated or is a person doing this?"

01:06:48 ◼   ► And they're like, "It usually takes a few hours."

01:06:50 ◼   ► So I'm very happy with how responsive, you know, even apparently without the special

01:06:55 ◼   ► treatment that I was trying to get, putting stuff up in the iBook store was.

01:07:00 ◼   ► You know, it's faster than the Amazon store.

01:07:01 ◼   ► And there were humans involved, so if it ever did go slow, I had a human being I could talk

01:07:04 ◼   ► to and say, "Hey, it's going slow.

01:07:06 ◼   ► Can I get it faster?"

01:07:07 ◼   ► After getting the first book up, it wasn't a problem.

01:07:13 ◼   ► I didn't care if it took a day for the typo-correction versions to go up or whatever.

01:07:19 ◼   ► The iBooks Reader and the Kindle Reader, but the iBooks Reader more so, continue to frustrate

01:07:24 ◼   ► me.

01:07:25 ◼   ► They have to paginate stuff, right?

01:07:26 ◼   ► And it's fine if it's just text, but when you have big images, the iBooks Reader tries

01:07:30 ◼   ► to obviously not have images spanning pages, where you see the top of an image and then

01:07:34 ◼   ► you flip to the next page and you see the bottom of the image, that's bad. But the only possible way to do that is to move images around.

01:07:39 ◼   ► Because depending on what your screen size is and what your text size is, which can be adjusted by the user so you can't even control that, you know,

01:07:46 ◼   ► where the images land changes. So the iBooks application kind of sort of has to move stuff around.

01:07:53 ◼   ► And when it moves stuff around, like, it makes things that are ugly. It moves images away from the text that refers to them.

01:08:00 ◼   ► them, floating images are the worst because it has to decide is there enough room to even

01:08:05 ◼   ► float this. Sometimes it thinks, "I have enough room to float this image to the right," and

01:08:10 ◼   ► it's got like three characters worth of space on the left side. So a three-letter word fits

01:08:15 ◼   ► there, followed by a two-letter word, and then there's a huge vertical swath of space,

01:08:19 ◼   ► and then the five-letter word is underneath the image. And that is terribly ugly. And

01:08:22 ◼   ► it's like, "Why don't you fix the formatting in your book?" It totally doesn't look like

01:08:25 ◼   ► that in any other version. It would be nice if iBooks decided there's not enough room

01:08:30 ◼   ► for me to float this image. I should just center it and not allow any text on either

01:08:34 ◼   ► side of it.

01:08:35 ◼   ► And so I'm constantly doing that little dance that you do. Marco's familiar with the dance

01:08:40 ◼   ► where you have a stack of Kindles and iOS devices on my desk. Maybe not as big as Marco's

01:08:45 ◼   ► stack, but big enough to be annoying. And you load the book on every million one of

01:08:49 ◼   ► these things and you page through it. And believe me, it takes forever to page through

01:08:53 ◼   ► this thing on even an iOS device, let alone an E in Kindle.

01:08:57 ◼   ► It just takes forever to page through.

01:08:58 ◼   ► You just page through to making sure, does it look sane?

01:09:00 ◼   ► Does it look readable?

01:09:01 ◼   ► Can people read the text?

01:09:02 ◼   ► Because at a certain point, you have to give up on, like, well, on this device and this

01:09:05 ◼   ► font size, it does this weird formatting thing.

01:09:07 ◼   ► But what can you do?

01:09:10 ◼   ► But for the most part, everything went smoothly.

01:09:12 ◼   ► The iPad bug on Amazon didn't happen as soon as it went up on the Amazon store.

01:09:17 ◼   ► People were able to put it on their iPad.

01:09:19 ◼   ► Did I mention this in the past show?

01:09:20 ◼   ► surprising thing to me has been almost all the sales have shifted over to iBooks.

01:09:25 ◼   ► The total number of sales is similar to what it was last year, roundabout for the eBooks.

01:09:30 ◼   ► But last year there was no iBooks version, and of course everything was on Amazon.

01:09:34 ◼   ► This year almost everybody bought the iBooks version, and a tiny pool of people bought

01:09:38 ◼   ► the Kindle version.

01:09:39 ◼   ► So I guess that kind of makes sense because it's built into the OS, and Apple nerds are

01:09:43 ◼   ► going to be the people reading this, and they might like iBooks or whatever.

01:09:47 ◼   ► But I always buy all of them.

01:09:49 ◼   ► And the iBooks version is nicer than the Kindle version because I was able to use uncompressed

01:09:53 ◼   ► pings there, but I couldn't in the Amazon version because of the stupid delivery fee

01:09:56 ◼   ► thing.

01:09:57 ◼   ► So as I explained in my post, but how many of the people who bought the eBook read my

01:10:02 ◼   ► blog post about it?

01:10:04 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I was surprised at how massively dominant iBooks was in terms of the sales.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And thumbs up.

01:10:11 ◼   ► I'm perfectly happy with that if people were happy with what they got.

01:10:15 ◼   ► That's actually really interesting, because it'd be one thing if you were never that popular

01:10:20 ◼   ► on Kindles.

01:10:21 ◼   ► We could try to explain that away.

01:10:22 ◼   ► But to have a big difference between last year and this year, that's something interesting,

01:10:26 ◼   ► I think.

01:10:27 ◼   ► Like I said, I can kind of understand it, but don't you get the impression?

01:10:31 ◼   ► I know I buy most of my ebooks on the Kindle store.

01:10:34 ◼   ► When I buy a book, the default is I will buy the Kindle book from Amazon.

01:10:38 ◼   ► That's how I read anything that's not maybe like a technical book that has lots of charts

01:10:43 ◼   ► or something, I wouldn't do that, or like a comic book, I might buy a paper version

01:10:46 ◼   ► or read in ComiXology or something. But yeah, I always thought, "Oh, Kindle is the dominant

01:10:52 ◼   ► thing, and then Apple's over there with the iBook store." But I guess if you're

01:10:55 ◼   ► writing a review of the Apple operating system, people are all ready to buy that in iBooks

01:11:00 ◼   ► form.

01:11:01 ◼   ► I guess. And maybe part of it is because Kindle—the good Kindles are the grayscale e-ink ones,

01:11:10 ◼   ► you know, the tablet Kindles are kind of crappy. That's an understatement, I think. And so

01:11:16 ◼   ► like, something like this where it's full of nice color images and links and things,

01:11:21 ◼   ► like you're going to want to have this on a full-featured reading device. Like, the

01:11:25 ◼   ► E-ink Kindles are not going to be good for the color images. They're not going to be

01:11:29 ◼   ► good for following those links, because even though they have browsers, they're terrible

01:11:31 ◼   ► and slow. And so the best device to read this on is a computer or a tablet. And so it makes

01:11:39 ◼   ► sense that most of the people who are interested in reading this kind of thing, if they have

01:11:44 ◼   ► to pick a color tablet device to read this on, are way more likely to pick an iPad than,

01:11:49 ◼   ► say, a Kindle Fire, which is a total piece of garbage.

01:11:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and like I said, I still like the web version better, but for the eBook versions,

01:11:56 ◼   ► despite the fact that the Kindle version has compressed JPEGs, massively compressed JPEGs,

01:12:00 ◼   ► as opposed to uncompressed pings that are in the iBooks one, the Kindle Reader app

01:12:04 ◼   ► has a built-in browser, and the iBooks app doesn't. So I think it's nicer if you're

01:12:08 ◼   ► a lot of links to do the Kindle one, because then at least you don't have to keep leaving

01:12:12 ◼   ► the app and coming back, because when you tap a link, it'll open in the in-app browser,

01:12:15 ◼   ► you know, like Instapaper or any other app with an in-app browser. That is better, you

01:12:20 ◼   ► know. So, I mean, there were enough options for everybody. Everyone could get what they

01:12:24 ◼   ► want. And the option that I'm surprised more people don't pick, I guess they're afraid

01:12:27 ◼   ► of subscriptions, is the, you know, the Ars Premier subscription, which costs exactly

01:12:30 ◼   ► the same amount as buying the book, but you get all the versions of the book. You get

01:12:34 ◼   ► The web version with no ads on a single page if you wanted.

01:12:37 ◼   ► You get the multi-page web version if that's what you want.

01:12:39 ◼   ► You get the ebook and the Kindle version and also a PDF version, which is not nice and

01:12:44 ◼   ► I don't make, but anyway, some people like PDFs for their libraries or whatever.

01:12:49 ◼   ► And I guess it's all because people don't want to have to remember to unsubscribe or

01:12:53 ◼   ► to cancel their subscription immediately or whatever it is you have to do.

01:12:56 ◼   ► It's just a simpler transaction for them to just hit buy inside iBooks.

01:13:01 ◼   ► So we provide the options, people pick what they want.

01:13:05 ◼   ► - First of all, I am an R's Premier subscriber

01:13:08 ◼   ► because I subscribed like three years ago

01:13:10 ◼   ► for your review then, and I have just forgotten

01:13:13 ◼   ► to unsubscribe every year.

01:13:15 ◼   ► - You also get to read the R site all year

01:13:16 ◼   ► with no ads on it, so.

01:13:18 ◼   ► - Usually I'm not logged in 'cause I forget

01:13:19 ◼   ► that I even have it, and then when it renews,

01:13:21 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, I gotta go cancel that sometime.

01:13:23 ◼   ► - You should log in. - And I feel bad

01:13:24 ◼   ► 'cause I like R's, and then, yeah, and then, yeah.

01:13:26 ◼   ► - 'Cause it remembers your login really well

01:13:28 ◼   ► unlike many other sites.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Like I can't remember the last time I logged into ours.

01:13:31 ◼   ► I don't think there's any kind of time out.

01:13:32 ◼   ► So on all my browsers and all my machines, ours has no ads on it.

01:13:36 ◼   ► One more point to make on this before we leave the e-reader topic.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Over the years with both Instapaper and with the magazine, I have spent a lot of time and

01:13:48 ◼   ► effort trying to make things work really well on Kindle.

01:13:54 ◼   ► Trying to make things look as well as they can, trying to get the layouts and fonts exactly

01:13:58 ◼   ► right and the markup exactly right and everything, the navigation with the

01:14:02 ◼   ► periodical navigation, all that stuff, trying to get all that stuff exactly right for

01:14:06 ◼   ► Eint Kindles. And I think almost none of it was worth it. For whatever reason,

01:14:14 ◼   ► I don't really have a great theory on this, there are a lot of people who use

01:14:20 ◼   ► Kindles, but any kind of difference in quality, like of the Kindle experience,

01:14:27 ◼   ► just never seemed appreciated by almost anybody, let alone enough people to make it worth the

01:14:34 ◼   ► pretty incredible amount of effort that it was over the years.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And maybe that's just because so many things about reading on a Kindle content-wise are

01:14:46 ◼   ► mediocre. Like so many e-books are half-assed and have one weird font set for the whole

01:14:52 ◼   ► for the whole thing, even your E in Kindle will be set with the regular

01:14:56 ◼   ► Cecilia font, like one book will be totally set in the

01:15:00 ◼   ► Sans-Serif font in a weird size and justified, somehow. And there's

01:15:04 ◼   ► no way for you to change that. Or books will have like OCR errors

01:15:08 ◼   ► from when they were scanned from paper and nobody ever fixes them because nobody's looking and nobody

01:15:12 ◼   ► cares. So because there's so many, and don't even get me started on

01:15:16 ◼   ► periodicals on the Kindle which are just really, really half-assed.

01:15:20 ◼   ► And so, so many content experiences on these devices are like, you know, 60% quality or

01:15:28 ◼   ► so that maybe people who use Kindles just don't expect any better and maybe don't

01:15:34 ◼   ► even notice when it is better because the whole experience as a whole is so mediocre,

01:15:39 ◼   ► you know, full of things like bad formatting and, you know, weird little shortcomings and

01:15:44 ◼   ► errors.

01:15:46 ◼   ► And that might also have something to do with the whole thing about market share and browser share being so different between iOS and Android.

01:15:51 ◼   ► Where Android devices, a lot of those are these purpose-made tablets that are sold as video playing devices or reading devices.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Something that's not intended to be a general purpose computing device.

01:16:07 ◼   ► And so maybe people who own those don't go looking for things like this to read on them, or don't go looking for web magazines or web safe for later services.

01:16:14 ◼   ► they're getting these things to just read books, and they don't even consider doing

01:16:17 ◼   ► stuff like this with them. So one of those is probably the case.

01:16:21 ◼   ► Yeah, they do notice a little bit. Like I said, what I'm trying to do when I look at

01:16:25 ◼   ► on the yin kindles is make sure it's okay. Like, I know it's never going to be great.

01:16:30 ◼   ► I just want to make sure it's okay. And last year, I think, was the year where, when it's

01:16:34 ◼   ► not okay, I did find out, because that was the year everyone was buying on a Kindle because

01:16:37 ◼   ► there was no iBooks version, and it didn't look right on what was then new that Kindle

01:16:43 ◼   ► touch, the one with the stupid well where your finger goes down to intersect the IR

01:16:47 ◼   ► beams or whatever the hell that thing was, right?

01:16:49 ◼   ► And I don't have one of those, and no one should have one of those.

01:16:51 ◼   ► But anyway, some people have one of those, and they said, "Hey, when I bring your book

01:16:54 ◼   ► up on it, the text is like crazy small, and it's all messed up, and it's like unreadable,

01:16:58 ◼   ► and no matter what I do, if you adjust the size, even if I adjust the size to max, it

01:17:01 ◼   ► looks too small."

01:17:02 ◼   ► And I had screwed something up with the fonts.

01:17:05 ◼   ► But when I opened it in the simulator and said, "Set device to Kindle touch," it looked

01:17:10 ◼   ► fine, but in the actual hardware device, it didn't.

01:17:12 ◼   ► So if you screw it up bad enough, you hear from it.

01:17:15 ◼   ► And I remember in that case, I had to make my best guess as to what I had screwed up

01:17:19 ◼   ► with the fonts.

01:17:20 ◼   ► Because again, if you look at the markup of this book, it's disgusting.

01:17:24 ◼   ► All sorts of hacks in there.

01:17:26 ◼   ► Some of them probably aren't even necessary anymore.

01:17:28 ◼   ► I think I have P style equals text indent none, an inline style in every single paragraph.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I think you still need that for the Kindle 3 and maybe even the Kindle 4.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:38 ◼   ► And so crap like that, if anyone looked at it like, "What are you, crazy?

01:17:40 ◼   ► You don't know how to make markup."

01:17:41 ◼   ► I'm not putting that there for my health.

01:17:43 ◼   ► That was because three years ago, I

01:17:45 ◼   ► had to do that to get it to look right on the Kindle 2.

01:17:48 ◼   ► And I just leave all that crap in there.

01:17:50 ◼   ► So now it's just a pile of hacks on top of a pile of hacks.

01:17:53 ◼   ► And the particular arrangement of pile of hacks

01:17:57 ◼   ► screwed up the font on that Kindle Touch.

01:17:59 ◼   ► So I had to guess what the solution was, bundle up a book,

01:18:04 ◼   ► email it to Scott McNulty, who has every Kindle

01:18:07 ◼   ► in the universe, and say, can you load this on your Kindle

01:18:09 ◼   ► and take a picture of it to show me what it looks like?

01:18:11 ◼   ► various font sizes so I can say, "Okay, I approved that, I think that's good," and then

01:18:15 ◼   ► ship it up.

01:18:16 ◼   ► Actually, you know what? Before I forget, now that I no longer have Instapaper or the

01:18:21 ◼   ► magazine and my next app is a podcast app, I've actually been looking to get rid of my

01:18:26 ◼   ► collection of all the Kindles. Do you want it? I'll just send it to you for free, because

01:18:30 ◼   ► you can actually use it.

01:18:31 ◼   ► My wife will not like you sending more electronics to the house.

01:18:35 ◼   ► You can make a Kindle museum, a museum of mediocre reading devices. I'm sending it to

01:18:40 ◼   ► you. That's it. You can refuse it if you want, but I'm mailing it to you.

01:18:43 ◼   ► Well, I was thinking, we did give our son one of our old Kindles, because having Kindles

01:18:48 ◼   ► for kids is actually kind of good, because I like buying e-books. I think it's more convenient

01:18:52 ◼   ► than paper books, and they have so many paper books, so buying my son books and giving him

01:18:55 ◼   ► his own Kindle to read on is pretty good. So if you want to send me some of your old

01:19:00 ◼   ► ones, I'll just give them to my kids and let them read on them. You should save some. By

01:19:04 ◼   ► the time Adam is old enough, we'll have hollow Kindles, and you won't want these crap to

01:19:08 ◼   ► Thanks, man.

01:19:09 ◼   ► The only one I want to save is the Paperwhite, because that's the only one that we actually

01:19:13 ◼   ► use.

01:19:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the actual good one.

01:19:15 ◼   ► But yeah, if you have crappy Kindles you want to get rid of.

01:19:16 ◼   ► I have all the old ones, everything before the Paperwhite.

01:19:19 ◼   ► I have one of each model, and you're going to have them soon.

01:19:22 ◼   ► Don't send me the Kindle one, because nobody wants that.

01:19:24 ◼   ► It's so funny how bad the Kindle one is.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Actually, it's kind of like that.

01:19:28 ◼   ► I'll put that next to my Q-Cat up in the attic.

01:19:31 ◼   ► Wow.

01:19:32 ◼   ► You actually have and kept a Q-Cat.

01:19:34 ◼   ► It came free with Wired magazine.

01:19:36 ◼   ► And I'm like, oh, this is so-- it's shaped like a freaking cat.

01:19:39 ◼   ► Of course I'm going to keep it.

01:19:40 ◼   ► That is-- of course, I can't find it.

01:19:42 ◼   ► I'm sure it's up there somewhere.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Oh, that's great.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but I haven't.

01:19:45 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:19:46 ◼   ► So before we move on from this topic and end the show,

01:19:51 ◼   ► I want to get in-- ask you guys two questions.

01:19:55 ◼   ► Well, actually, one, I'll talk about appearance.

01:19:57 ◼   ► Maybe I'll do that next week.

01:19:59 ◼   ► But since we're short on time, I mentioned last week

01:20:02 ◼   ► where I didn't really talk about the review,

01:20:04 ◼   ► that there was some overriding theme that I was trying to weave throughout the review,

01:20:08 ◼   ► and that whether or not you got the pop culture references that I was using to build it, the

01:20:13 ◼   ► theme should have worked on its own.

01:20:15 ◼   ► Did I succeed?

01:20:16 ◼   ► Did you see a theme running through this?

01:20:18 ◼   ► And if so, what do you think it was?

01:20:19 ◼   ► Power saving.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Well, I mean, that's true in terms of the features, but I'm thinking more like, again,

01:20:26 ◼   ► touchy feely, like, what kind of OS is this?

01:20:31 ◼   ► Where does it fall in the hierarchy of OS releases?

01:20:33 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:20:35 ◼   ► - I think so, I mean, you explicitly state that,

01:20:38 ◼   ► you know, you kind of give an idea of the theme

01:20:41 ◼   ► that you want me to say that you weaved.

01:20:45 ◼   ► I think it depends a lot on your opinion of Mavericks.

01:20:49 ◼   ► Like, as a user, like, once you're using it,

01:20:52 ◼   ► it depends on what you think of the things they changed,

01:20:54 ◼   ► whether it makes a big difference for your hardware

01:20:58 ◼   ► and for your usage, and what you think of the direction

01:21:03 ◼   ► of the direction they're going.

01:21:05 ◼   ► And so I think that your theme is spot on of,

01:21:08 ◼   ► like, this shows some interesting things

01:21:11 ◼   ► for the direction that they're going

01:21:13 ◼   ► with some of this stuff.

01:21:15 ◼   ► And it wasn't necessarily the obvious direction

01:21:18 ◼   ► they were going a year ago or two years ago.

01:21:21 ◼   ► And so that you did very well.

01:21:25 ◼   ► I'm not sure I picked up on the specifics of a ton of places

01:21:29 ◼   ► you think they are going, besides some big things like shifting towards.

01:21:37 ◼   ► One thing that I think is very obvious for me with this is Mavericks is really a laptop

01:21:44 ◼   ► OS that happens to run on desktops if you want it to.

01:21:48 ◼   ► And it is really, it is getting more iOS-like, but not in the interface.

01:21:59 ◼   ► stuff like Launchpad I think is half-assed and kind of stupid.

01:22:03 ◼   ► But the interface is actually getting

01:22:07 ◼   ► mostly back to being Mac-like again.

01:22:11 ◼   ► Maybe that's until they try a radical redesign, who knows.

01:22:15 ◼   ► But a lot of the, and Lion started this too,

01:22:19 ◼   ► but a lot of the power saving stuff, a lot of the app nap,

01:22:23 ◼   ► the sandboxing and just putting more restrictions on apps in order to

01:22:27 ◼   ► better stuff for the user, whether it's security, whether it's power-related, or managing

01:22:32 ◼   ► unsaved data, stuff like that. I think we're going to see a lot more

01:22:37 ◼   ► of that, and a lot more stuff aimed at laptop

01:22:42 ◼   ► specifically. But just a lot more restrictions that

01:22:47 ◼   ► won't necessarily hinder power users, for the most part. But will

01:22:52 ◼   ► keep making life harder for developers temporarily to get long-term, better situations going

01:22:58 ◼   ► on this platform that they didn't have the luxury of starting from scratch like they

01:23:02 ◼   ► did with iOS?

01:23:03 ◼   ► You basically got it.

01:23:05 ◼   ► I spell it out in the conclusion.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Like I said, it's the intro and the conclusion is where I'm going.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And then the last paragraph, more or less, and the very last line.

01:23:12 ◼   ► Like I said in the last note, this is a weird time in the life of the Mac because the direction

01:23:19 ◼   ► was going in has been sort of like a big stop science pop there. Stop with that. Don't

01:23:24 ◼   ► do that anymore. And they scraped out a lot of that stuff, but left a lot of the other

01:23:30 ◼   ► things kind of in limbo. It's an OS that is unsure of itself. It is not bold, confident,

01:23:41 ◼   ► even to the degree that Lion was. Lion was more bold and confident, like, "Yeah, we're

01:23:44 ◼   ► going to have everything wooden and felt, and it's going to look like iOS." And like,

01:23:48 ◼   ► "I don't care what you're doing with that or this book, it's a book now, it's got a

01:23:51 ◼   ► bookmark, deal with it!"

01:23:53 ◼   ► You could say it was misguided or going in the wrong direction, but it was certainly

01:23:56 ◼   ► more confident and bold about what it was doing.

01:23:59 ◼   ► And Mavericks is like, "I don't know, maybe I'm not so sure about what we're doing here,

01:24:04 ◼   ► I guess?"

01:24:06 ◼   ► The power saving stuff is like, yeah, definitely they're going to emphasize power saving and

01:24:09 ◼   ► do that stuff, and that's fine, but what is the Mac platform becoming?

01:24:14 ◼   ► What is the direction for the Mac?

01:24:17 ◼   ► And aside from the obvious stuff of like, get more efficient, get faster, better battery

01:24:21 ◼   ► life, what does it mean to be a Mac?

01:24:24 ◼   ► What is the future of this platform?

01:24:25 ◼   ► And Mavericks is not a bold statement in any particular direction other than that direction

01:24:33 ◼   ► we were going in before, we're not doing that anymore.

01:24:36 ◼   ► But we don't have time to undo all that stuff either.

01:24:39 ◼   ► So some of it's still going to be there, but we put this stuff in.

01:24:43 ◼   ► We don't want to do that.

01:24:44 ◼   ► We just didn't have time to clean up.

01:24:45 ◼   ► But don't look over there.

01:24:46 ◼   ► It's kind of a gross...

01:24:47 ◼   ► still friggin' felt. Like, you know, it's still, the stuff is still there, right? I

01:24:50 ◼   ► mean, I guess on iOS, there's a little tiny bit of that of like iBooks stealing the wooden

01:24:55 ◼   ► shelves. For the most part, iOS was like iOS 7, you know. Boom, here it is, it's iOS 7,

01:24:59 ◼   ► this is where we're going, everyone clear, everyone get in line, you know, all aboard

01:25:03 ◼   ► the iOS 7 train. And Mavericks is not like that at all. And the energy saving stuff,

01:25:06 ◼   ► I think I should have emphasized this more. I think I did, I mean, I spelled it out, I

01:25:11 ◼   ► think I might have used italics, maybe not. Like, Apple said this themselves, and it's

01:25:15 ◼   ► It's really important.

01:25:16 ◼   ► I think it bears out in the usage of it.

01:25:19 ◼   ► You said it's like a laptop OS, which is true in the sense that they're focusing on PowerSight,

01:25:23 ◼   ► which only really matters when you have a battery.

01:25:29 ◼   ► It's not just energy saving.

01:25:31 ◼   ► It's increased energy efficiency and increased responsiveness, and they go hand in hand.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Responsiveness means stop your Mac from doing crap that is not responding to you, the user,

01:25:40 ◼   ► right now, which usually means stop your Mac from doing all sorts of stuff that it was

01:25:44 ◼   ► doing before.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Any time, like running DTrace or the old SC usage,

01:25:50 ◼   ► I think it's still in there, or DTruss or FS usage,

01:25:54 ◼   ► or all these tools on the Mac that you can use

01:25:55 ◼   ► to see what the hell your system is doing,

01:25:57 ◼   ► it's doing tons of stuff all the time.

01:25:59 ◼   ► The Mac is doing so many things,

01:26:01 ◼   ► like this is why it's so amazing that iOS even works,

01:26:04 ◼   ► because iOS is not doing these things.

01:26:05 ◼   ► It would destroy your battery.

01:26:07 ◼   ► And so they're trying to bring it into,

01:26:08 ◼   ► like, stop, Macs, I know you have all this,

01:26:10 ◼   ► they just have too much memory, too much computing power,

01:26:13 ◼   ► too much hard disk space.

01:26:14 ◼   ► and they were doing tons of stuff in the background,

01:26:16 ◼   ► just trying to rein it in.

01:26:16 ◼   ► And even if you don't have a laptop,

01:26:19 ◼   ► like I don't use laptops, right,

01:26:20 ◼   ► maybe this is psychological,

01:26:23 ◼   ► this happens after every OS update,

01:26:25 ◼   ► but I feel like I more or less should have this gauged

01:26:28 ◼   ► after going through so many OS updates.

01:26:30 ◼   ► People say, oh, it feels snappier

01:26:32 ◼   ► because you just did a fresh install

01:26:33 ◼   ► and all your caches are clean,

01:26:34 ◼   ► or maybe things are defragmented,

01:26:37 ◼   ► or things haven't started to slow, whatever.

01:26:39 ◼   ► All these psychological effects

01:26:41 ◼   ► of making you think the new OS is faster.

01:26:44 ◼   ► But even accounting for that fact,

01:26:47 ◼   ► I truly believe that my desktop Mac Pro at work

01:26:51 ◼   ► feels snappier after an upgrade to Mavericks.

01:26:54 ◼   ► More so than it always feels snappier

01:26:56 ◼   ► after you do an OS upgrade.

01:26:58 ◼   ► In a lasting way that, yeah, you eventually get used to it

01:27:01 ◼   ► and you don't notice it anymore,

01:27:02 ◼   ► but it's because the thing, my machine is doing less crap.

01:27:06 ◼   ► And even if this comes down to my machine

01:27:08 ◼   ► is not being destroyed by Spotlight and Time Machine

01:27:11 ◼   ► to such a degree, you know, like totally,

01:27:13 ◼   ► this is the way to kill a Mac, like just swamp it with IO,

01:27:15 ◼   ► because, I mean, again, only one freaking process

01:27:18 ◼   ► can have a lock on the catalog file at a time

01:27:20 ◼   ► because of stupid HMS Plus,

01:27:21 ◼   ► so those 12 cores are not doing you any good, you know.

01:27:24 ◼   ► Contention for IO can make your Mac feel slow,

01:27:26 ◼   ► almost more so than anything else,

01:27:28 ◼   ► although low memory eventually becomes swamp with IO

01:27:31 ◼   ► because of swapping and everything,

01:27:32 ◼   ► but the memory compression combined

01:27:34 ◼   ► with the lower priority of everything else,

01:27:35 ◼   ► combined with just less crap going on in the background

01:27:37 ◼   ► and more things that'll be like, oh, I was gonna run,

01:27:40 ◼   ► but let me hold off, let me wait until an idle period."

01:27:43 ◼   ► That goes a long way, even on a desktop Mac.

01:27:46 ◼   ► And so I would encourage people who are like,

01:27:48 ◼   ► "Well, I don't have laptops, I don't care about Mavericks."

01:27:50 ◼   ► You should care, not because of energy saving,

01:27:53 ◼   ► but because of the responsiveness angle

01:27:54 ◼   ► that goes hand in hand.

01:27:56 ◼   ► And I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.

01:27:57 ◼   ► It's not like it's magically all super-duper responsive now,

01:28:00 ◼   ► but they're finally going in that direction to say,

01:28:03 ◼   ► to make a better experience,

01:28:05 ◼   ► we have to do like what iOS did and say,

01:28:07 ◼   ► we really need to respond to the user.

01:28:09 ◼   ► We've got all this power, too much power, and we've gotten lazy and just said, "Oh,

01:28:13 ◼   ► well, we've got so much power, we can have…"

01:28:14 ◼   ► Because they just added things one after the other.

01:28:16 ◼   ► Like, first, Spotlight was like, "Oh, now this thing is going to run, and then we're

01:28:19 ◼   ► going to have Time Machine, and that's another thing that's going to run in the background,

01:28:21 ◼   ► and we're going to have all these other things."

01:28:22 ◼   ► And if you just look at the CPU usage of some stupid thing pulling in your menu bar, so

01:28:27 ◼   ► many things are so wasteful.

01:28:28 ◼   ► Adobe.

01:28:29 ◼   ► Yeah, just torturing your machine.

01:28:33 ◼   ► This is something I missed in my review that I added an updated version.

01:28:36 ◼   ► the stupid time machine, like the little turny clock icon, doesn't turn anymore. As I said,

01:28:42 ◼   ► it's not worth giving CPU cycles, waking up the CPU with 30 times a second to spin that

01:28:47 ◼   ► stupid thing when it's spinning, because time machine backups can take a long time. Just

01:28:52 ◼   ► this relentless desire to say, "Stop the computer from doing crap that does not help the user."

01:29:00 ◼   ► That is a good new direction, and I think this is the first toe dip in that direction.

01:29:05 ◼   ► But overall, the OS is definitely in a transitional period.

01:29:10 ◼   ► And the last line of the review, you met me at a very strange time in my life.

01:29:13 ◼   ► I think this is a strange time in the life of the Mac, because think of what's going

01:29:16 ◼   ► on.

01:29:17 ◼   ► I mean, it has been strange for the past few years, but this is even more strange.

01:29:20 ◼   ► It seemed like, "Oh, the Mac is irrelevant.

01:29:22 ◼   ► iOS is awesome."

01:29:23 ◼   ► And then it was like, "Oh no, the Mac's relevant.

01:29:25 ◼   ► Back to the Mac."

01:29:26 ◼   ► And then the Mac's going to become relevant by looking just like iOS.

01:29:28 ◼   ► We're going to do the same thing there.

01:29:30 ◼   ► And then we were like, "No, that's not great," or whatever.

01:29:32 ◼   ► and then it's kind of like, yeah, you're right,

01:29:34 ◼   ► that's not great.

01:29:35 ◼   ► And now it's just kind of like, all right, here I am.

01:29:38 ◼   ► I stripped off a lot of that wood stuff.

01:29:40 ◼   ► We're gonna do some efficiency stuff,

01:29:41 ◼   ► but I'm not quite sure what's going on there.

01:29:44 ◼   ► And again, compared to iOS 7,

01:29:45 ◼   ► we're just so bold and fresh and confident

01:29:48 ◼   ► in what it was doing.

01:29:49 ◼   ► So that's the theme I was trying to weave

01:29:51 ◼   ► throughout the review.

01:29:53 ◼   ► And I think people feel that,

01:29:55 ◼   ► even if they just feel it as kind of a vague disinterest

01:29:57 ◼   ► in the Mac platform,

01:29:58 ◼   ► it's because Mavericks doesn't come out of the gate

01:30:01 ◼   ► with some--

01:30:02 ◼   ► I mean, a lot of it comes down to aesthetics.

01:30:04 ◼   ► It doesn't come out the gate with some bold new look

01:30:06 ◼   ► and some new ideas about how you interact with the Mac.

01:30:09 ◼   ► Like, what if the dock is gone, and all windows are full screen,

01:30:13 ◼   ► or we have a tiling window manager, all sorts of crazy things you can imagine.

01:30:17 ◼   ► No more menu bar.

01:30:18 ◼   ► You know, like, not I'm saying any of these things are good ideas.

01:30:21 ◼   ► But if it did any of those things, people would set up and take notice.

01:30:24 ◼   ► It does not.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Like, this is not Mac OS 11.

01:30:26 ◼   ► It's Mac OS X, and it's like Mac OS X Tepid Edition,

01:30:30 ◼   ► in terms of what it's willing to throw in the user's face.

01:30:34 ◼   ► But underneath it all are some good ideas about efficiency and responsiveness that hint

01:30:41 ◼   ► at what a new direction for the Mac could be, but we're not there yet.

01:30:45 ◼   ► And again, probably because of time constraints.

01:30:46 ◼   ► So we'll circle back here next year around a similar time, I assume, and see if the next

01:30:52 ◼   ► release is that bold new direction that builds on what Mavericks is kind of only hinting

01:30:58 ◼   ► at.

01:30:59 ◼   ► One other thing, too, is that I really think that some of this transition notion is because

01:31:07 ◼   ► Apple has always had--and this is true of both Mac OS and iOS, but especially on Mac

01:31:13 ◼   ► OS--they've always had this weird dichotomy of trying to appeal to power users, because

01:31:20 ◼   ► they are power users and they respect us and they have a lot of power user fans, you know?

01:31:25 ◼   ► appeal to power users and be the pro OS, the pro platform,

01:31:30 ◼   ► while also having all these opinions and being so strongly

01:31:36 ◼   ► controlling about ease of user experience and simplicity and hiding implementation details from people.

01:31:40 ◼   ► We've seen Apple go a little too far in the ease direction sometimes,

01:31:46 ◼   ► and then they pull it back.

01:31:50 ◼   ► And you look at some of the big headlining features of Mavericks, some of the fine air enhancement stuff like that, they really are for power users.

01:31:57 ◼   ► The multi-monitor stuff, that's all. Do you think anyone would have predicted they would have been improving multi-monitor stuff as much as they did just last year or the year before?

01:32:09 ◼   ► Like with Lion, when Lion brought in Fullscreen and everyone's like, "Oh, well, now we have Linen. We're just stuck with Linen on our second screen forever."

01:32:16 ◼   ► no one would have predicted at that time that the same company just two years later would dramatically improve multi-monitor and make it so much better.

01:32:26 ◼   ► And I think, and was it Mountain Lion that introduced mission control or whatever that new thing was? Anyway, you know, Apple's always had this weird dichotomy between power users and hiding things for ease of use.

01:32:41 ◼   ► use. And part of the transition that I think you're getting at is just them fighting that

01:32:47 ◼   ► battle that they've been fighting for a long time. And they just keep moving forward and

01:32:52 ◼   ► making it more locked down for ease of use, but also better for power users. And they're

01:32:58 ◼   ► one-upping themselves in that battle as time goes on. And I don't know if they can ever

01:33:02 ◼   ► win that battle. It's just a hard problem.

01:33:05 ◼   ► This is kind of like a do-over, because they're going to head off, I think, in the same direction.

01:33:11 ◼   ► But Lion and Mountain Lion are sort of an embodiment of misunderstanding what's good

01:33:16 ◼   ► about iOS.

01:33:18 ◼   ► They kind of understood at a broad level, iOS is good and popular because it's simple,

01:33:23 ◼   ► and it gets crap out of your way that you don't want to deal with.

01:33:27 ◼   ► And I talked a lot about this in the Lion and Mountain Lion review, especially in the

01:33:30 ◼   ► Lion review.

01:33:31 ◼   ► Things that we all take for granted, that if you think about it, it's like, "Well, why

01:33:34 ◼   ► why should I even have to bother with that at all?

01:33:36 ◼   ► And iOS is the perfect example of,

01:33:38 ◼   ► look how easy it is to buy and install an app.

01:33:40 ◼   ► Why isn't it that easy on the Mac?

01:33:41 ◼   ► Well, because of X, Y, and Z and blah, blah, blah.

01:33:44 ◼   ► But does it have to be,

01:33:45 ◼   ► well, I've been a computer user so long, I need to.

01:33:46 ◼   ► It's kind of like, power users do want power,

01:33:49 ◼   ► and they'll get addicted to Stockholm syndrome.

01:33:51 ◼   ► They get addicted to things that are terrible.

01:33:53 ◼   ► If you had asked a Mac user way back before any of your time

01:33:56 ◼   ► used to be able to choose how much RAM

01:33:58 ◼   ► an application would allocate to itself.

01:33:59 ◼   ► You can get info on it, find it.

01:34:01 ◼   ► There was a little box, and it said two little boxes

01:34:03 ◼   ► could put in a recommended and a maximum size or whatever.

01:34:06 ◼   ► What a support nightmare that must have been for programmers.

01:34:09 ◼   ► Support used to be like, "Oh, you have to give it more memory if you're going to open

01:34:11 ◼   ► files this big." You would decide how much RAM it could use. And obviously, from a modern

01:34:17 ◼   ► perspective, you're like, "Why would I ever have to do that?" It's like having to go out

01:34:20 ◼   ► and crank your car to start it or something. But if you would ask the power user, "Oh,

01:34:25 ◼   ► I need to have that control because I need to tell exactly how much this application

01:34:28 ◼   ► needs to happen. They love the knobs and they get addicted to that stuff. It takes a while

01:34:33 ◼   ► to get away from that. Sometimes it takes a clean blink, like iOS, and say, "All that

01:34:36 ◼   ► crap that you thought was essential? Actually, it's not." See how much more pleasant it is

01:34:41 ◼   ► to use this thing?

01:34:43 ◼   ► But line to mountain lion, we're like, "Okay, iOS. People like that. That's good. That's

01:34:47 ◼   ► simple. What we need to do is make them act like iOS." They made it like iOS in the wrong

01:34:52 ◼   ► ways. What they should have been doing is what Morrill Mavericks is doing. All that

01:34:58 ◼   ► sandboxing stuff and all of the simplifications of getting rid of like, "Wouldn't it be nice if

01:35:04 ◼   ► you knew where all the files were and the system could manage them?" and the sandbox containers for

01:35:10 ◼   ► things and you didn't have all these applications just doing random crap to your system and

01:35:13 ◼   ► patching things and running in the background and eating CPU cycles. But it wasn't the Wild

01:35:18 ◼   ► West anymore. That's one aspect of it. The other one was like, "Well, interface simplification,

01:35:23 ◼   ► Azure's book should be like a book and it's familiar and it's just one simple screen."

01:35:27 ◼   ► that was the wrong direction. The simplifications are not in the visual and interface. The

01:35:32 ◼   ► simplifications are in, think of the parts of the system that are like busy work that you don't need

01:35:38 ◼   ► to be doing, or that are inefficient or that cause chaos. Like the Wild West nature of the internals

01:35:43 ◼   ► of all these things running rampant all over your system and making a fragile system. Get rid of

01:35:48 ◼   ► that, but still give the features that make the Mac the Mac. And so I think this is a reset of

01:35:55 ◼   ► they went off in pursuit of the aesthetic look and feel and simplification in terms of the visual,

01:36:00 ◼   ► and they're resetting now and saying actually true, you know, true luxury, simplicity, whatever,

01:36:05 ◼   ► from these terrible advertisements that they had, that the true simplicity is getting rid of ugly

01:36:11 ◼   ► details, but not getting rid of features, as you know, as much as they still did a little bit of

01:36:16 ◼   ► that with, you know, Witness the iWork applications and stuff, but try to provide the same functionality,

01:36:22 ◼   ► but make it so there are fewer moving parts

01:36:24 ◼   ► and fewer crap that you don't care about

01:36:26 ◼   ► that you have to deal with.

01:36:27 ◼   ► And they're far from that goal now,

01:36:28 ◼   ► because it's kind of like a rewind and reset.

01:36:30 ◼   ► And I hope that when they move

01:36:31 ◼   ► in the new direction towards simplicity,

01:36:33 ◼   ► it will not be towards just playing iOS dress up,

01:36:37 ◼   ► like I said in the review a few times,

01:36:40 ◼   ► and more towards appreciating what it is

01:36:43 ◼   ► that iOS has fewer hassles.

01:36:45 ◼   ► So get rid of the hassles in macOS,

01:36:48 ◼   ► don't just try to make it like iOS.

01:36:49 ◼   ► Because iOS and macOS have different sets of hassles.

01:36:52 ◼   ► there are hassles on the Mac.

01:36:53 ◼   ► Get rid of those hassles, add new features without their own set of hassles behind them,

01:37:00 ◼   ► and go forward in that direction.

01:37:01 ◼   ► So I hope that's where they're going.

01:37:02 ◼   ► I mean, like I said in the last show, I almost hesitate to call this transitional because

01:37:06 ◼   ► you're like, "Well, I know what it's transitioning from, but we don't quite know what it's transitioning

01:37:10 ◼   ► to."

01:37:11 ◼   ► So it's more, it's kind of like a, you know, a pause, reset, regroup kind of thing.

01:37:15 ◼   ► All right.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Let's wrap it up this week, because we are running long on time, and we want to preserve

01:37:21 ◼   ► everyone's ability to download this episode over cellular. So thanks a lot to our two

01:37:25 ◼   ► sponsors this week, Igloo Software and Oxygen by RemObjects, and we will see you next week.

01:37:31 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

01:37:41 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:37:43 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:37:44 ◼   ► John didn't do any research.

01:37:46 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:37:49 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental.

01:37:51 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:37:52 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:37:53 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:37:54 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:37:59 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

01:38:05 ◼   ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-T, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A, it's accidental.

01:38:24 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental.

01:38:29 ◼   ► Tech, widecast, so long.

01:38:34 ◼   ► You know, what is the name of that rule that whatever you search for, it will eventually

01:38:39 ◼   ► degenerate into porn?

01:38:40 ◼   ► You know what I'm talking about?

01:38:41 ◼   ► No, that's not the rule.

01:38:42 ◼   ► You're trying to think of rule 34, and the rule 34, I believe, is if it exists, there's

01:38:46 ◼   ► porn for it.

01:38:47 ◼   ► Okay, that's—

01:38:48 ◼   ► Slightly different than what you're saying.

01:38:49 ◼   ► That's what I'm thinking of.

01:38:50 ◼   ► Well, I feel like there's a rule for anything that you participate in, particularly podcasts,

01:38:55 ◼   ► which is if you talk long enough, it will eventually end up with you bitching about

01:39:00 ◼   ► HFS+.

01:39:01 ◼   ► You know, you just gotta fix the things that annoy me, and then I move on to the next thing

01:39:06 ◼   ► that annoys me.

01:39:07 ◼   ► Like, I don't complain about cooperative multitasking or protected memory anymore.

01:39:12 ◼   ► They got those!

01:39:14 ◼   ► Progress.

01:39:15 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, there's always something else.

01:39:18 ◼   ► Did you guys find any Easter eggs?

01:39:20 ◼   ► No.

01:39:21 ◼   ► There were Easter eggs?

01:39:23 ◼   ► Marco said he was clicking all the links.

01:39:25 ◼   ► Not all of them.

01:39:26 ◼   ► No, I didn't.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I was not very diligent about clicking links.

01:39:29 ◼   ► I always have Easter eggs in there.

01:39:30 ◼   ► I mean, that's hard to find.

01:39:31 ◼   ► It's a web page, you know.

01:39:32 ◼   ► But I was surprised by the number of—I keep making them less obvious, and sometimes I

01:39:37 ◼   ► think like no one will find these, but you know, if you put the review up and then 50

01:39:41 ◼   ► people email you and say that the Easter eggs they found.

01:39:43 ◼   ► What are we talking, like hyperlink periods and stuff like that?

01:39:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's the level of thing.

01:39:49 ◼   ► You're along the right track.

01:39:50 ◼   ► You know, crap like that.

01:39:51 ◼   ► But I mean, just references.

01:39:52 ◼   ► Like, a lot of them are right in your face, like, you know, the image stuff.

01:39:56 ◼   ► Iceman is one of them.

01:39:57 ◼   ► It's one of the most obvious, like I said, one of the most—

01:39:59 ◼   ► in your face. Seriously, I use it like nine times. It was the name of my volume. I got to think of

01:40:03 ◼   ► what to call these things. And so you could just glance over that and like, "Oh, I guess he calls

01:40:08 ◼   ► his hard drives Iceman," whatever. But if you think about it for a second, if you've seen Top Gun,

01:40:13 ◼   ► you're like, "Oh, I get it, whatever." That's the most obvious one. Everything has something like

01:40:16 ◼   ► that. A lot of people, like in the contacts screenshot, a lot of people are sending me

01:40:20 ◼   ► stuff about that. They're the same contacts from last year, and I think from the year before. And

01:40:24 ◼   ► the reason is because iCloud, in my test account, every year I don't have to make new fake contacts

01:40:29 ◼   ► because I made them one year, and they're in iCloud now.

01:40:31 ◼   ► So every time I install a new OS and load up

01:40:33 ◼   ► one of my test accounts, they're all my contacts.

01:40:35 ◼   ► So it's the same joke over and over again.

01:40:37 ◼   ► That's convenient.

01:40:38 ◼   ► It's new to some people.

01:40:39 ◼   ► They're like, oh, that contacts thing, how many people

01:40:41 ◼   ► caught that reference?

01:40:42 ◼   ► And nobody-- I mean, go look at the contacts screenshot.

01:40:45 ◼   ► You have no idea what that crap is, right?

01:40:47 ◼   ► But for the seven people who know what it is,

01:40:48 ◼   ► it's entertaining.

01:40:49 ◼   ► And six of those people are seeing it for the first time,

01:40:51 ◼   ► because they didn't read my review last year

01:40:53 ◼   ► and the year before that.

01:40:54 ◼   ► And they get a little like, oh, that's cute.

01:40:55 ◼   ► Although I screwed up the joke this year.

01:40:57 ◼   ► did it better last year.

01:40:58 ◼   ► But…

01:40:59 ◼   ► I don't think I got the joke.

01:41:00 ◼   ► I know I'm not surprised.

01:41:01 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a reference to a movie you haven't seen, so, you know, whatever.

01:41:03 ◼   ► But like, you don't need to know.

01:41:06 ◼   ► That's what Contacts looks like.

01:41:08 ◼   ► That's what you need to get out of that screenshot.

01:41:10 ◼   ► The caption, none of you guys know what the caption is either, do you?

01:41:13 ◼   ► I think, what do you call it?

01:41:14 ◼   ► Merlin posted the caption to his blog, so I think he understood the reference.

01:41:18 ◼   ► See the caption under the Contacts thing?

01:41:20 ◼   ► Cucumbers with cottage cheese?

01:41:22 ◼   ► Nothing on that one?

01:41:23 ◼   ► Nope.

01:41:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:41:25 ◼   ► You've seen that show.

01:41:26 ◼   ► that episode.

01:41:28 ◼   ► Which show?

01:41:29 ◼   ► I got nothing.

01:41:31 ◼   ► I can't reveal them all to you.

01:41:36 ◼   ► Dudex in the chatroom wants to know what's better than HFS Plus.

01:41:40 ◼   ► And I'll see you guys later!

01:41:42 ◼   ► CFS, BTRFS, NTFS, basically any file system created in the last 20 years.

01:41:49 ◼   ► FAT16.

01:41:50 ◼   ► Not created in the last 20 years.

01:41:54 ◼   ► Alright, anything else going on?

01:41:58 ◼   ► Oh, one more thing on the ebooks production.

01:42:00 ◼   ► I wimped out and I have some copyrighted material and I think it's fair use, but I have some

01:42:04 ◼   ► copyrighted material linked in this review and I wimped out of putting that into either

01:42:09 ◼   ► of the ebooks because I just dreaded getting rejected from the iBook store because it contains

01:42:13 ◼   ► copyrighted material.

01:42:14 ◼   ► I'm not going to have a nuanced conversation about fair use when I need to get my book

01:42:18 ◼   ► up.

01:42:19 ◼   ► So I did not include that in the ebook versions, only in the web version because I was afraid.

01:42:24 ◼   ► I have nothing constructive to add about that.

01:42:26 ◼   ► - Neither do I.

01:42:27 ◼   ► It's that I agree that basically,

01:42:29 ◼   ► if you ever reach a point where you are trying

01:42:32 ◼   ► to argue fair use with somebody,

01:42:33 ◼   ► and you've already lost-- - Yeah, right.

01:42:34 ◼   ► So it's just like, it's so much easier to just remove it.

01:42:36 ◼   ► And it's on the web, if anyone says,

01:42:38 ◼   ► like it's because of the delay.

01:42:40 ◼   ► I won't get complaints on the web, 'cause no one cares.

01:42:41 ◼   ► But if I did get a complaint on the web,

01:42:42 ◼   ► two seconds later, I can remove it.

01:42:44 ◼   ► Boom, fixed.

01:42:45 ◼   ► But with the books, it's like, no.

01:42:47 ◼   ► So, I kinda disappointed him, because I would want,

01:42:49 ◼   ► you know, like, oh, if you buy the e-book,

01:42:51 ◼   ► you get the full experience.

01:42:51 ◼   ► But this is like another one of those things

01:42:53 ◼   ► no one's going to find this anyway. I think everyone, obviously everyone who found it

01:42:57 ◼   ► was finding it on the web.

01:42:59 ◼   ► Oh, I do have one question I should have asked during the show. It's very simple. Are you

01:43:02 ◼   ► going to do this again next year?

01:43:03 ◼   ► I don't know. I didn't think I was going to do it this year, but I ended up doing it.

01:43:08 ◼   ► Every year you've got something terrible about it. This one was the long, drawn-out, you think,

01:43:11 ◼   ► "Oh, great fall! I was so happy at WWC. I'd have all this time to write." But then at

01:43:14 ◼   ► a certain point, it's like, "All right, I'm ready." It's always something. Announce the

01:43:19 ◼   ► I was so long done and then I was just updating it.

01:43:22 ◼   ► It's nothing more joyless than having to revisit a review that you...

01:43:26 ◼   ► I finished writing on September 1st.

01:43:28 ◼   ► Repeatedly revisit it to revise. Change, revise, change.

01:43:31 ◼   ► That is so terrible.

01:43:32 ◼   ► Writing it for the first time can be kind of fun.

01:43:35 ◼   ► You know, hard work, but kind of fun.

01:43:37 ◼   ► But revising is just not fun at all.

01:43:39 ◼   ► So, I don't know.

01:43:41 ◼   ► The thing that makes me keep doing these things is...

01:43:45 ◼   ► I think about, well, if I don't do it,

01:43:47 ◼   ► do it, they're going to have someone else do it.

01:43:49 ◼   ► And I don't want someone else to do it.

01:43:51 ◼   ► They're like, no, you're not doing it right.

01:43:53 ◼   ► If I did it, I would have done this.

01:43:54 ◼   ► I don't want to be sitting there like armchair quarterbacking

01:43:56 ◼   ► whoever does the reviews of saying, well,

01:43:58 ◼   ► if I did a review-- and especially

01:44:00 ◼   ► if they're going to do some crazy ass iOS 7 style thing,

01:44:04 ◼   ► how can I resist?

01:44:04 ◼   ► So in some ways, the 10th major release

01:44:08 ◼   ► is a nice round stopping point, kind

01:44:10 ◼   ► of like episode 100 of "Hypercritical,"

01:44:11 ◼   ► even though it was only on 98 of them.

01:44:13 ◼   ► It's because the number is 100.

01:44:14 ◼   ► So the 10th major release is a nice thing.

01:44:16 ◼   ► On the other hand, 10/10 is also a round thing, and if they ever did 11—I don't know.

01:44:20 ◼   ► I'm going to have to stop at some point.

01:44:22 ◼   ► Maybe they'll just get worse and worse until no one reads them anymore.

01:44:28 ◼   ► Is that a good strategy?

01:44:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, because imagine, like, who the hell would want this job of trying to fill

01:44:34 ◼   ► these shoes?

01:44:35 ◼   ► That is true.

01:44:36 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

01:44:37 ◼   ► They put up—I mean, you don't have to fill the shoes.

01:44:41 ◼   ► That's the whole thing about it.

01:44:42 ◼   ► People think that these reviews get so widely read because they're so good, but at this

01:44:45 ◼   ► point they get so widely read because they're in Ars Technica.

01:44:49 ◼   ► I don't think that's true.

01:44:51 ◼   ► I don't either.

01:44:52 ◼   ► The publication has a reputation, and at this point people don't even look at the byline,

01:44:56 ◼   ► and they have no idea who I am.

01:44:59 ◼   ► I bet that's not even close to true.

01:45:01 ◼   ► I bet that you bring a lot of people to Ars Technica for this review that are coming to

01:45:07 ◼   ► it because it's your review.

01:45:09 ◼   ► I brought a lot of people to Ars Technica.

01:45:11 ◼   ► A lot of the people who work for Ars Technica now said, "Oh, I first came reading some

01:45:14 ◼   ► OS X review years ago. But I think at this point, the Ars Technica, the publication,

01:45:19 ◼   ► has a good enough reputation on its own that people trust it and will read it. The reason

01:45:26 ◼   ► that these three reviews get so much traffic is because the site's traffic has grown so

01:45:30 ◼   ► much. Like back in the day, we got—

01:45:32 ◼   ► That's completely wrong.

01:45:33 ◼   ► Yeah, you are so wrong.

01:45:34 ◼   ► Do you know—last year when I did my parody review of your review, I told you, that was

01:45:38 ◼   ► by far the number one page view article on my site for all of last year. And I had a

01:45:45 ◼   ► lot of big hits last year, and that beat them all.

01:45:48 ◼   ► But I know the actual traffic numbers for ours, which I'm not going to say on the

01:45:51 ◼   ► air, but I know the actual traffic numbers. So I can compare apples to apples. And ours,

01:45:55 ◼   ► as a site, its traffic has grown tremendously over the past several years, and it's to

01:45:59 ◼   ► the credit of all the people who write for the publication. And I've just been kind

01:46:03 ◼   ► of along for the ride. You know what I mean?

01:46:05 ◼   ► All I notice is I make a very long review too.

01:46:09 ◼   ► I think I said in the line review it was the most popular article on ours for the year.

01:46:15 ◼   ► But I think it was also the longest, so it's hard to tell.

01:46:17 ◼   ► This year, less traffic than last year.

01:46:21 ◼   ► I don't know if it's just because of the month it came out in or whatever.

01:46:24 ◼   ► But maybe that's what will happen.

01:46:27 ◼   ► Maybe it'll just fade away and people won't care enough about the Mac platform to be reading

01:46:30 ◼   ► these reviews.

01:46:31 ◼   ► Or maybe there won't be that interesting stuff.

01:46:33 ◼   ► This review was shorter than last year, and I think it's because there's less stuff to

01:46:35 ◼   ► talk about.

01:46:36 ◼   ► So, like, I'm thinking of Endgame, kind of like Cable's talk at XOXO, which I finally

01:46:41 ◼   ► watch.

01:46:42 ◼   ► Like, how does this end?

01:46:43 ◼   ► What does the end look like?

01:46:45 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:46:46 ◼   ► I mean, the things like Fade Away, Sellout—I have nothing to sell, so I can't sell out.

01:46:53 ◼   ► Or just Stop.

01:46:54 ◼   ► That's my other thing.

01:46:55 ◼   ► So I'll stop eventually, but the worst time to ask me is after I've just finished one,

01:46:59 ◼   ► because after I finish, I totally feel like I'm never doing that again.

01:47:02 ◼   ► Did I tell you the conversation I had with my really good friend Brian the day that your

01:47:07 ◼   ► review came out? Maybe I told Marco. I told one of you. But for the live listeners, my

01:47:13 ◼   ► very good friend Brian, who's a pretty big nerd, although he doesn't do this sort of

01:47:16 ◼   ► thing professionally, he sends me an IM the day the review comes out and he says, "Wait,

01:47:22 ◼   ► wait, wait. Is one of the dudes on your podcast John Syracuse?" I was like, "Yeah." "Oh,

01:47:27 ◼   ► "Oh, well he is all over the internet today.

01:47:30 ◼   ► I never realized he was the review guy."

01:47:32 ◼   ► See, that's what I said.

01:47:34 ◼   ► People don't know that, you know, they don't look at the bylines.

01:47:37 ◼   ► It's just the Ars Technica review.

01:47:38 ◼   ► Well, okay, well, hold on.

01:47:39 ◼   ► They may not look at the byline, but when a new OS X comes out, they know to go to Ars

01:47:47 ◼   ► Technica and find your review.

01:47:50 ◼   ► People used to be really into when new iPods came out, too, but you see how that ends up.

01:47:54 ◼   ► Well, okay, yes.

01:47:55 ◼   ► eventually does die, John, but I think you're being way too humble.

01:48:01 ◼   ► Are you saying that you are like the iPod classic?

01:48:03 ◼   ► Yeah, well, what happens is that the thing that I have to offer that's actually of distinct

01:48:08 ◼   ► value becomes of less and less interest, because as time goes on, there are plenty of people

01:48:12 ◼   ► like at this point, when I was first writing them, nobody even knew what the hell OS X

01:48:15 ◼   ► was, so I was the winner because I was the only one writing about it. So I was the best

01:48:19 ◼   ► writer about it. But now, you know, Apple and the Mac get so much covered by so many

01:48:23 ◼   ► actual professional people that, you know, I can't offer what they offer in terms of,

01:48:31 ◼   ► you know, a general purpose review of the operating system. All I've got left of value

01:48:35 ◼   ► is I'm the guy who's been there all along. I started with the Mac in 1984. I know all

01:48:41 ◼   ► these details. I have all the historical context. I've been deep into every single release.

01:48:44 ◼   ► This is not the first time I'm reviewing an operating system. I can give you historical

01:48:48 ◼   ► context with maybe knowing which areas to go into technical depth because there's plenty

01:48:52 ◼   ► people who go into the same depth that I do, plenty of people who can find more features

01:48:56 ◼   ► than I do and have opinions about them or whatever. All I've got to offer is, you know,

01:49:00 ◼   ► old people. Old people eventually don't have, you know, looks or strength or, you know,

01:49:06 ◼   ► vigor. They just have wisdom. And, you know, eventually people are like, "Yeah, wisdom

01:49:09 ◼   ► is great and all, but I'm going to, you know, go look at these young people frolicking on

01:49:13 ◼   ► the beach because it's much more interesting." So, as time goes on, I will have my wisdom.

01:49:19 ◼   ► I will continue to offer it and that may not be enough to sustain interest in these types

01:49:24 ◼   ► of things.

01:49:25 ◼   ► So maybe, like I do with Hypercritical, try to bail before things go downhill, before

01:49:29 ◼   ► I jump the shark, or just continue to do it until no one pays attention anymore.

01:49:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:49:33 ◼   ► [ Silence ]