ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Time boxing is such like a consultant speak thing to say.

00:00:03 ◼   ► - I don't even know what that means.

00:00:05 ◼   ► - It's doing a task,

00:00:06 ◼   ► but limiting it to a certain amount of time.

00:00:09 ◼   ► - But time is one dimensional,

00:00:11 ◼   ► boxing doesn't make sense.

00:00:13 ◼   ► - Well, the thought is,

00:00:14 ◼   ► oh, I don't know how long this task is gonna take me.

00:00:16 ◼   ► All right, well, we'll time box it for two hours

00:00:18 ◼   ► and see where you get.

00:00:19 ◼   ► - Maybe time bracketing?

00:00:20 ◼   ► I'm trying to think of something

00:00:22 ◼   ► that doesn't imply a second dimension.

00:00:25 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:27 ◼   ► - Only you would be pissed off

00:00:28 ◼   ► that time is one dimensional. - Time limiting?

00:00:29 ◼   ► There's probably regular English words that will work here.

00:00:35 ◼   ► So you did something at an interesting hour last night by the time we're recording, but

00:00:41 ◼   ► almost a week ago by the time most people hear this.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I released a new app for the first time in a long time.

00:00:47 ◼   ► How'd that go?

00:00:49 ◼   ► Really well, actually.

00:00:50 ◼   ► So, this was my few days project app that I discussed a couple episodes back, and the

00:00:57 ◼   ► is called Bugshot, and it is kind of like Skitch for iOS without sucking. So it's basically

00:01:04 ◼   ► it's a very, very simplified screenshot annotation app where you it just shows a list of all

00:01:10 ◼   ► your screenshots and your camera roll, and then you get to draw big orange arrows or

00:01:17 ◼   ► boxes on them to point out certain things in them and then email them or do something

00:01:21 ◼   ► with them. And that's literally all it is, boxes and arrows, orange on screenshots. And

00:01:28 ◼   ► the reason I created it is because it was just like a couple of weeks ago, I was like

00:01:37 ◼   ► in the back den playing with my kid and navigating through a podcast that was playing on a speaker

00:01:43 ◼   ► and I noticed yet another visual bug in Downcast while I was doing this because Downcast still

00:01:51 ◼   ► has a few issues on iOS 7.

00:01:53 ◼   ► It works, but there's a number of UI glitches.

00:01:57 ◼   ► And so I took a screenshot, and I always do.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Whenever I see a bug in an app, whether it's

00:02:04 ◼   ► mine or somebody else's, I always

00:02:06 ◼   ► take a screenshot with the intention of going,

00:02:08 ◼   ► and once I get back to my big computer,

00:02:11 ◼   ► emailing it or fixing it if it's my bug or something like that.

00:02:15 ◼   ► And usually I forget to do this.

00:02:19 ◼   ► And so what I end up with is I'll go through my camera roll

00:02:22 ◼   ► looking for something else and come across

00:02:24 ◼   ► all these screenshots of bugs that I have long since

00:02:26 ◼   ► forgotten about that are either out of date,

00:02:29 ◼   ► or I'll look at the screenshot and think,

00:02:32 ◼   ► why did I take the screenshot?

00:02:33 ◼   ► What's wrong with this?

00:02:34 ◼   ► I'll forget, and it won't be immediately obvious

00:02:37 ◼   ► upon looking at it.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Like, wait, why did I think this was a problem?

00:02:42 ◼   ► So this basically-- bug shot for me

00:02:46 ◼   ► was a way to both give screenshots a workflow,

00:02:51 ◼   ► to make an app that's dedicated for receiving them

00:02:54 ◼   ► and doing something with them immediately on the phone.

00:02:57 ◼   ► So it kind of gives me an excuse to remind myself,

00:02:59 ◼   ► oh, now that I have this app, especially now that I

00:03:01 ◼   ► made this app to do this, I won't just screenshot

00:03:04 ◼   ► and forget.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And also, the annotation part of it

00:03:07 ◼   ► is very handy to prevent the second problem, which

00:03:10 ◼   ► was forgetting why I took the screenshot or it not being

00:03:13 ◼   ► 100% obvious and having to describe to somebody

00:03:15 ◼   ► in an email or something exactly what part of it

00:03:17 ◼   ► you're talking about.

00:03:19 ◼   ► So that's what it is.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And there were a number of decisions

00:03:25 ◼   ► I made along the way.

00:03:27 ◼   ► Mainly, I knew this was not going

00:03:28 ◼   ► to be the app that carried me in business for the next five

00:03:32 ◼   ► years.

00:03:32 ◼   ► And so I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on it.

00:03:36 ◼   ► And almost every decision I made during development,

00:03:39 ◼   ► I had to balance against, OK, well, I could do x, y, or z.

00:03:43 ◼   ► or I could do this this way or this other way,

00:03:46 ◼   ► but that'll take a week, or that'll take too long,

00:03:49 ◼   ► or that'll have ongoing maintenance,

00:03:51 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:03:52 ◼   ► And I only want to spend a few days on this.

00:03:55 ◼   ► And of course, a few days became about a week,

00:03:56 ◼   ► but still, a week for an app really

00:03:59 ◼   ► isn't that bad relative to anything else.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Because even with this app, where its feature set is

00:04:07 ◼   ► relatively small and trivial, there's

00:04:10 ◼   ► There's still a lot of implementation to get right,

00:04:14 ◼   ► and a lot of decisions to make along the way,

00:04:16 ◼   ► and just a lot of work to do.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Screenshots, the icon, there's all sorts of stuff

00:04:22 ◼   ► that no matter how simple your app is,

00:04:24 ◼   ► if you want it to be high quality, even if it's simple,

00:04:27 ◼   ► you still have to do a whole bunch of stuff.

00:04:30 ◼   ► So there's probably a whole bunch of topics in here

00:04:33 ◼   ► we can talk about if you want,

00:04:35 ◼   ► but that would probably take too long.

00:04:37 ◼   ► I don't want to spend all day on this podcast.

00:04:40 ◼   ► So I don't know, what do you guys, what interests you here?

00:04:44 ◼   ► - I have complaints, do you want complaints?

00:04:46 ◼   ► - Absolutely. - Oh, as do I, as do I.

00:04:48 ◼   ► - I was hoping you'd have complaints.

00:04:49 ◼   ► - Do you wanna go first, Kasey, or you want me to go?

00:04:51 ◼   ► - I actually only have one in particular,

00:04:52 ◼   ► so I can go first and then leave you the floor

00:04:54 ◼   ► for the next 50 to 90 minutes.

00:04:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:58 ◼   ► But Marco was in town, as we talked about,

00:05:01 ◼   ► I think the last episode, he was in town

00:05:03 ◼   ► for a party that we threw, what was it, last weekend.

00:05:06 ◼   ► And so he showed me the app,

00:05:08 ◼   ► I think you had already sent it to the app store at that point, but it wasn't released,

00:05:12 ◼   ► of course.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

00:05:14 ◼   ► And I had seen, well, John and I both had seen a couple screenshots, but that was my

00:05:17 ◼   ► only exposure to it.

00:05:18 ◼   ► We barely talked about it.

00:05:20 ◼   ► And basically Marco handed me his phone and said, "All right, here you go."

00:05:23 ◼   ► So in using the app, I thought it was extremely intuitive.

00:05:26 ◼   ► I thought that the way in which you drew things was very reasonable and made a lot of sense.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I wasn't really clear how to delete something, so I just tried a couple things.

00:05:35 ◼   ► and the second thing I tried or third thing I tried was double tapping on an object and

00:05:39 ◼   ► sure enough there it went.

00:05:41 ◼   ► So I thought that was really nice.

00:05:42 ◼   ► There was no demo needed.

00:05:44 ◼   ► It was, I thought it was extremely intuitive.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I know you got some flack on Twitter about that, but it made sense to me.

00:05:49 ◼   ► The thing that I didn't like, however, is you took the easy route, which is probably

00:05:53 ◼   ► what I would have done, uh, with the boxes in that the touch target for any rectangles

00:06:00 ◼   ► or squares or whatever, what have you, they're the entirety of the rectangle, including the

00:06:05 ◼   ► inner part that's actually clear. So if you were to put an arrow or another box inside

00:06:10 ◼   ► the bigger box, that gets a little bit dodgy in terms of how you select what you want to

00:06:15 ◼   ► select. And that really annoyed me, even though I don't know why I would ever run into that.

00:06:20 ◼   ► Well, that and so today, I spent this morning while Adam was watching Sesame Street giving

00:06:26 ◼   ► me some time here, because my wife was out of town until this afternoon. So I spent this

00:06:31 ◼   ► morning during Sesame Street working on that hit testing and playing with different things.

00:06:38 ◼   ► And I'm going to change it for 101. I'm going to make it so that basically--see, the challenge

00:06:45 ◼   ► here--and I faced this challenge during development, too, and I decided to take the easy way out.

00:06:49 ◼   ► But the challenge I faced is, so obviously, you know, if you tap and hit a shape, you

00:06:56 ◼   ► know, like how did, basically what's the bounding box or what's the bounding path for what should

00:07:01 ◼   ► be considered hitting that shape. And the problem is the shapes can be all different

00:07:06 ◼   ► sizes. And this is a touch device so everything's imprecise. Like the input is imprecise. So

00:07:13 ◼   ► if you constantly miss what you're trying to hit, that's bad. But the way it was, especially

00:07:19 ◼   ► with boxes, if you drew a really big box, you couldn't draw anything inside of it then,

00:07:24 ◼   ► because any tap inside of it would be considered

00:07:26 ◼   ► dragging that box, even if the space inside of it

00:07:29 ◼   ► was really vast and empty.

00:07:31 ◼   ► So obviously there's some middle ground here.

00:07:34 ◼   ► So what I'm playing with now is basically

00:07:36 ◼   ► like if the shape is below a certain size,

00:07:39 ◼   ► just the whole thing is the bounding box.

00:07:41 ◼   ► And then if it's above a certain size,

00:07:44 ◼   ► then only its border plus a little bit of padding

00:07:47 ◼   ► on both sides of the border,

00:07:49 ◼   ► that represents the bounding path.

00:07:52 ◼   ► And similar thing with arrows,

00:07:53 ◼   ► where if the arrow is below a certain size now,

00:07:56 ◼   ► it's just going to be the whole bounding box of the arrow.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And then once it gets past-- I think

00:08:01 ◼   ► I decided about 80 by 80 would be the boundary,

00:08:04 ◼   ► that once it gets past that boundary,

00:08:06 ◼   ► then the arrow itself, its path is the touch area.

00:08:12 ◼   ► But it's all-- this is a great example of one of those things

00:08:16 ◼   ► where the app looks really simple,

00:08:19 ◼   ► but there's a lot of little tiny details

00:08:20 ◼   ► like that, where I had to make decisions and experiment

00:08:23 ◼   ► and everything else.

00:08:24 ◼   ► And that's why I have a feeling a lot of developers,

00:08:27 ◼   ► upon hearing that this took me about a week

00:08:28 ◼   ► to really do and submit, probably

00:08:31 ◼   ► would think a week is way too long for an app that's

00:08:34 ◼   ► this simple.

00:08:35 ◼   ► But really, there's so many little details like that.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And that's what takes all the time, really.

00:08:40 ◼   ► Like, you can make a really terrible app in two days.

00:08:44 ◼   ► That's like from new project to submitted in two days.

00:08:48 ◼   ► you can do that, but there's very little chance it's going to be good.

00:08:53 ◼   ► So what I really wanted to do was, I wanted it to be very, very simple, but also good.

00:09:00 ◼   ► So what was left on the cutting room floor—and John, I know I'm delaying your complaints—but

00:09:04 ◼   ► what was left on the cutting room floor that you wanted to get done that didn't, but

00:09:09 ◼   ► you did that as a conscious choice to get it out quickly?

00:09:16 ◼   ► I played with a few ideas.

00:09:17 ◼   ► One of them-- a smaller version of what I'm about to say.

00:09:20 ◼   ► So one of the things I was doing was some kind of state

00:09:24 ◼   ► of marking which screenshots you have dealt with already.

00:09:28 ◼   ► So anything that you would annotate,

00:09:31 ◼   ► obviously I'd have to save the annotations, which

00:09:33 ◼   ► is a whole can of worms right there of how do you save and

00:09:35 ◼   ► restore these things.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And then you have user data to deal with.

00:09:40 ◼   ► Then do you have an export?

00:09:41 ◼   ► Do you have to sync that?

00:09:42 ◼   ► That's a whole can of worms.

00:09:45 ◼   ► the way it is now, you draw your boxes and arrows,

00:09:48 ◼   ► and then you hit either Cancel or Done.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Basically, if you've shared it anywhere,

00:09:52 ◼   ► then there were changes to Done.

00:09:54 ◼   ► Either way, once you're out of that screen,

00:09:56 ◼   ► that information is lost.

00:09:58 ◼   ► It's not saved anywhere.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And so that was mostly for simplicity's sake and the time

00:10:05 ◼   ► constraints.

00:10:05 ◼   ► But also, I feel like this is temporary data anyway.

00:10:10 ◼   ► The whole point of this is annotate a screenshot

00:10:12 ◼   ► and then get rid of it.

00:10:13 ◼   ► Send it somewhere so that you can deal with it

00:10:16 ◼   ► in some other place.

00:10:17 ◼   ► And for me, it's just emailing it to myself usually.

00:10:20 ◼   ► But either way-- which I know is terrible,

00:10:22 ◼   ► but amazingly, emailing things to yourself

00:10:25 ◼   ► is the best solution to a very, very wide set of problems

00:10:28 ◼   ► that unfortunately we still haven't

00:10:29 ◼   ► solved in better ways yet.

00:10:31 ◼   ► But I'm sure everyone-- I bet even John Siracusa,

00:10:35 ◼   ► do you still email things to yourself in certain contexts?

00:10:39 ◼   ► I email things to myself all the time.

00:10:41 ◼   ► See?

00:10:41 ◼   ► Yep.

00:10:42 ◼   ► It is the solution to so many problems.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Yep.

00:10:46 ◼   ► Now what about AirDrop?

00:10:47 ◼   ► Because I know that they've made passing mention to AirDrop.

00:10:49 ◼   ► AirDrop does not work between iOS and Mac in 7.

00:10:53 ◼   ► So--

00:10:53 ◼   ► OK.

00:10:54 ◼   ► See, I haven't looked much into it yet.

00:10:55 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:10:56 ◼   ► So one of my most frequent things

00:10:57 ◼   ► is like I just took a picture of something

00:10:59 ◼   ► and I wanted to get it on my computer faster

00:11:00 ◼   ► than PhotoStream will do it.

00:11:02 ◼   ► I'll just email it to myself.

00:11:04 ◼   ► It's so many people do this.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Anyway, so saving data was one thing

00:11:08 ◼   ► that I kind of punted on and decided, well,

00:11:09 ◼   ► let's see if this thing really justifies

00:11:11 ◼   ► more time investment, maybe I will investigate doing that.

00:11:15 ◼   ► And then you have the issue of, OK, well, then

00:11:18 ◼   ► do you hide screenshots that you've dealt with?

00:11:20 ◼   ► Because you can't delete them.

00:11:21 ◼   ► As far as I know, there's no API to delete things

00:11:23 ◼   ► from the camera roll from an app, which is probably

00:11:25 ◼   ► for the better, honestly.

00:11:26 ◼   ► But either way, there's no API to delete things.

00:11:29 ◼   ► So I can't do that.

00:11:30 ◼   ► So I could hide them.

00:11:32 ◼   ► But then what if you want to annotate the same screenshot

00:11:35 ◼   ► twice?

00:11:35 ◼   ► Then you have to have some kind of UI for showing hidden items

00:11:39 ◼   ► or toggling the done state.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And so there's all sorts of little things like that,

00:11:43 ◼   ► like, well, if you do this, then you

00:11:45 ◼   ► have to add this, this, and this to make good.

00:11:47 ◼   ► And so it ends up saving data or marking things as dealt with

00:11:53 ◼   ► are both bigger topics that I didn't want to address yet.

00:11:56 ◼   ► And the other big thing, which a few people have requested,

00:12:00 ◼   ► is the text tool, being able to draw text on the photos.

00:12:04 ◼   ► And a lot of people have requested this.

00:12:08 ◼   ► Back in the days of using Sketch-- and it's still on the Mac,

00:12:11 ◼   ► I still do use the old version of Sketch on the Mac.

00:12:13 ◼   ► But obviously, text is very nice to have.

00:12:18 ◼   ► But the problem on iOS, basically, is implementation.

00:12:23 ◼   ► The way I would want to do it would

00:12:25 ◼   ► be that you are typing directly on the image.

00:12:29 ◼   ► Like, you pick a place, the keyboard comes up,

00:12:31 ◼   ► and you are typing directly onto the image in the big orange

00:12:34 ◼   ► font with the stroke, and exactly as it's

00:12:36 ◼   ► going to look WYSIWYG style, like you are typing directly

00:12:40 ◼   ► onto the image.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And doing that in iOS in a way that

00:12:43 ◼   ► doesn't suck for another reasons, doing that in iOS

00:12:47 ◼   ► is not easy.

00:12:48 ◼   ► And it's getting easier with every version,

00:12:50 ◼   ► but I still have to support 6 for this app,

00:12:52 ◼   ► because obviously 7's not out yet to the public.

00:12:54 ◼   ► I can't make an app through the app store

00:12:56 ◼   ► that requires iOS 7 today.

00:12:58 ◼   ► So I still have to do this in a compatible way anyway.

00:13:05 ◼   ► So doing text right on the image like that would have been at least another day of work,

00:13:10 ◼   ► probably a couple days to really get it right, because there's so many weird little things

00:13:15 ◼   ► with text input.

00:13:17 ◼   ► And I realized that, you know, when I would email these things, usually I would just,

00:13:24 ◼   ► whatever commentary I had that required text, I would usually just type it into the email.

00:13:29 ◼   ► You know, usually just the subject, just here's what I'm talking about with this arrow pointing

00:13:33 ◼   ► into this thing in the screenshot, if it even needed any text.

00:13:36 ◼   ► So I kind of figured that if most of the sharing targets of whatever you're going to do next

00:13:45 ◼   ► after you draw the arrow and box on the screenshot, if the next step in your workflow is going

00:13:50 ◼   ► to involve text input, which almost all of them do, then I kind of figured text was less

00:13:55 ◼   ► important for this app.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And so I wouldn't mind adding it at some point, but I don't think it's ever going to be worth

00:14:02 ◼   ► the time to really do it well.

00:14:03 ◼   ► and I don't want to do it badly.

00:14:05 ◼   ► - Right.

00:14:06 ◼   ► Now, to further delay Jon and make him even more grumbly,

00:14:09 ◼   ► why not iOS 7 only?

00:14:11 ◼   ► I mean, obviously, if you wanted to release it today--

00:14:13 ◼   ► - Well, I can't, that's the problem.

00:14:14 ◼   ► - Well, right, but why not hold it?

00:14:15 ◼   ► Why not wait?

00:14:16 ◼   ► - Well, because it's really useful right now.

00:14:18 ◼   ► As everyone's apps are breaking under iOS 7,

00:14:22 ◼   ► it's including Apple's and the OS itself.

00:14:25 ◼   ► It's very useful.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Like, that's one of the reasons why

00:14:28 ◼   ► I decided to make this app right now

00:14:30 ◼   ► is because I'm constantly finding UI glitches with 7,

00:14:33 ◼   ► whether it's in the OS or other people's apps running on 7,

00:14:36 ◼   ► there's so many problems.

00:14:38 ◼   ► Because so many things are different.

00:14:40 ◼   ► So many of the Apple apps are really rewritten

00:14:43 ◼   ► or have really kind of rough edges still.

00:14:47 ◼   ► So for this to be most effective for me

00:14:51 ◼   ► and I think for a lot of people, I really

00:14:53 ◼   ► had to get it out there now during the iOS 7 beta.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And so that's why it doesn't require iOS 7, basically,

00:14:58 ◼   ► because I can't.

00:15:00 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:15:01 ◼   ► All right, I'm sorry, John.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Please, take the floor.

00:15:04 ◼   ► All right, some of my complaints are things

00:15:06 ◼   ► that Marco had to omit.

00:15:08 ◼   ► And he already named a couple of them.

00:15:10 ◼   ► The one where you can't draw a box inside a box,

00:15:12 ◼   ► Casey got that one, and Marco--

00:15:13 ◼   ► Oh, that's fixed for 101.

00:15:14 ◼   ► There you go.

00:15:15 ◼   ► And I was thinking of saving the screenshots and the annotations

00:15:22 ◼   ► separately within the app's documents silo,

00:15:27 ◼   ► basically as a roundabout way to get the same thing you were

00:15:30 ◼   ► about where you'd have some sort of process whereby you went through the screenshots and

00:15:35 ◼   ► did something with them and then they would go someplace else and they would disappear

00:15:38 ◼   ► from the main list and saving the annotations and the shots separately would be so that

00:15:42 ◼   ► if you changed your mind later you hadn't, you know, that was my solution to unhiding

00:15:46 ◼   ► the screenshot that you don't see it on the main screenshot list anymore but you see it

00:15:50 ◼   ► in your ones that you've dealt with and when you see it there if you change your mind and

00:15:53 ◼   ► want to report a different thing you can add a different set of annotations to the same

00:15:55 ◼   ► same image. But anyway, you already talked about those. The ones you could do, although

00:16:00 ◼   ► you already put out 101 already. No, I haven't submitted yet. I'm working on it today.

00:16:04 ◼   ► See, that was one of the things I was trying to figure out. What version of this do I have?

00:16:07 ◼   ► And from the device, there's no way for me to tell inside your application, in iOS at

00:16:11 ◼   ► all, what version I'm using. Is there some way in settings? I looked. I didn't see any

00:16:16 ◼   ► way to get a version number out of it. But anyway, the toolbar buttons on top, I haven't

00:16:21 ◼   ► and used iOS 7 enough to know if this is accurate,

00:16:24 ◼   ► but they highlight on mouse down to use Mac problems.

00:16:28 ◼   ► Yes, I was actually just talking to John Gruber about that.

00:16:32 ◼   ► He complained about the same thing.

00:16:34 ◼   ► And so there's two problems.

00:16:37 ◼   ► One is that I did not implement a highlight state,

00:16:41 ◼   ► and so I'm going to do that in 101.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Basically, these controls are all mimicking iOS 7 style,

00:16:47 ◼   ► or totally ripping it off.

00:16:50 ◼   ► And so I am going to do that, the highlight state.

00:16:53 ◼   ► But I actually don't know.

00:16:55 ◼   ► I'd love to hear from users, or from listeners,

00:16:58 ◼   ► although I probably won't hear it in time

00:17:00 ◼   ► before I submit 101.

00:17:03 ◼   ► As far-- and this is a really nitpicky detail--

00:17:05 ◼   ► but as far as I can tell, I can't figure out

00:17:09 ◼   ► if there is a good way for a UI segmented control, which

00:17:12 ◼   ► is what this is.

00:17:13 ◼   ► This is a real segmented control, just using UI appearance

00:17:16 ◼   ► to customize the way it looks.

00:17:19 ◼   ► I can't figure out how, with UI Segmented Control,

00:17:22 ◼   ► to do the thing where if you tap down and then drag

00:17:26 ◼   ► your finger out and release, it doesn't trigger it.

00:17:30 ◼   ► This is really technical.

00:17:31 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:17:31 ◼   ► But I'm using the UI Control Event value changed mode here.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And I tried the Control Event touch up inside,

00:17:40 ◼   ► which is usually how you'd do that.

00:17:41 ◼   ► And that didn't work.

00:17:42 ◼   ► It still just fired upon touchdown.

00:17:45 ◼   ► So I don't really know how to do that.

00:17:48 ◼   ► I only spent like two minutes looking at it because it was right before the show.

00:17:52 ◼   ► So I'll look at that later.

00:17:53 ◼   ► But I might not be able to fix that easily.

00:17:55 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:17:56 ◼   ► That's debatable at this point whether it would be more expedient for you to go full

00:18:01 ◼   ► Briktor on it and just draw yourself around Rekt and do your own hit testing and like,

00:18:04 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

00:18:05 ◼   ► Well, that's definitely not worth it.

00:18:06 ◼   ► Definitely not.

00:18:07 ◼   ► Well, I mean, but like if you're trying to take segmented control and figure out how

00:18:11 ◼   ► to—like if there's no event forward or you're trying to figure out some way to

00:18:13 ◼   ► get it to do what you want, you could burn a lot of time trying to make the existing

00:18:16 ◼   ► control do what you want.

00:18:17 ◼   ► And if you had spent that same amount of time simply implementing your own really simple

00:18:22 ◼   ► control, it might end up being a washer, it might end up being faster.

00:18:25 ◼   ► It probably also depends if you're Lauren Briktor, because she has a little bit more

00:18:29 ◼   ► experience making her own widgets from scratch.

00:18:33 ◼   ► If I were Lauren Briktor, I would have written this entire UI in OpenGL and re-implemented

00:18:37 ◼   ► every part of UIKit in my own awesome, better way and spent six months making this app.

00:18:43 ◼   ► But unfortunately, I can't justify that amount of time, and I'm not Lauren Briktor, and so

00:18:47 ◼   ► so it would take me way longer than it would take him.

00:18:50 ◼   ► So unfortunately, that's not going to be an option.

00:18:53 ◼   ► But I would like to get that detail right about the tuck

00:18:56 ◼   ► shop and tuck downstate.

00:18:57 ◼   ► So iOS 7 doesn't do that then, right?

00:18:59 ◼   ► Because I was wondering, maybe this is how iOS 7 does it,

00:19:02 ◼   ► and you're just faithfully reproducing.

00:19:03 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:19:04 ◼   ► Gruber pointed out that on the notification center segment

00:19:07 ◼   ► of control, the all events or today,

00:19:09 ◼   ► like the thing on top notification center,

00:19:12 ◼   ► that behaves properly in what you guys are talking about.

00:19:15 ◼   ► And so, but again, I haven't had much time to look at it yet.

00:19:17 ◼   ► Probably right after we record the show, I will spend another 20 minutes on it and figure

00:19:20 ◼   ► out the solution.

00:19:21 ◼   ► But right now, I don't have it.

00:19:22 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's going to be easy or not.

00:19:25 ◼   ► So on the screenshot list, the highlight issue there is that there is no highlight.

00:19:30 ◼   ► It just zooms the image up, and there's no dimming it or doing any sort of highlight

00:19:35 ◼   ► to let you know that you let go of your finger, and the thing zooms up to full size, but there's

00:19:39 ◼   ► no highlight.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And that seems odd to me.

00:19:41 ◼   ► Oh, that's interesting.

00:19:42 ◼   ► That I can probably fix.

00:19:44 ◼   ► That's the collection view.

00:19:45 ◼   ► That's Apple's collection view, right?

00:19:47 ◼   ► Yeah, it is.

00:19:49 ◼   ► And this is actually the first time I've ever used a collection view.

00:19:52 ◼   ► So I don't know whether this is the responsibility of the view,

00:19:55 ◼   ► or more likely, it's probably the responsibility of the cell

00:19:58 ◼   ► to implement that.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So I will look at that.

00:20:00 ◼   ► Yeah, and the collection view was flaking out.

00:20:03 ◼   ► I can't tell-- I haven't been able to reproduce this one.

00:20:05 ◼   ► I should have screenshotted it, but I was like,

00:20:06 ◼   ► I'm sure I'll be able to reproduce this.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Let me screenshot it, but no.

00:20:09 ◼   ► So when you go into landscape, it changes the layout of the thing.

00:20:13 ◼   ► And then when you go back into portrait,

00:20:15 ◼   ► briefly it's two columns, and then it

00:20:16 ◼   ► goes back to three columns.

00:20:18 ◼   ► And it got stuck in two columns for me for a while.

00:20:21 ◼   ► But then I would just fiddle around with it some more.

00:20:23 ◼   ► Now I can't get it to get stuck.

00:20:24 ◼   ► But that's almost certainly a collection view

00:20:26 ◼   ► bug of some kind.

00:20:27 ◼   ► And probably not your bug, but I would

00:20:29 ◼   ► watch for it in your travels through the application.

00:20:31 ◼   ► One of the things I did that was actually

00:20:34 ◼   ► a surprising amount of the coding

00:20:36 ◼   ► and the getting things wrong and then figuring out

00:20:38 ◼   ► how to get things right was handling rotation.

00:20:42 ◼   ► Because I didn't want to-- so basically, the app only ever

00:20:48 ◼   ► presents screenshots full screen at 100% scale.

00:20:52 ◼   ► There is no zoom.

00:20:54 ◼   ► There is no panning or anything.

00:20:56 ◼   ► And this was all for simplicity and speed of dealing with it.

00:20:59 ◼   ► So the whole point of this app is

00:21:04 ◼   ► to get in and get out very quickly.

00:21:05 ◼   ► To do what you have to do.

00:21:06 ◼   ► Because just like any good workflow tool,

00:21:09 ◼   ► you don't want the tool to be slowing you down necessarily.

00:21:11 ◼   ► So the app, the collection, the list view,

00:21:16 ◼   ► does support rotation.

00:21:18 ◼   ► But the drawing view does not.

00:21:20 ◼   ► And so there's all sorts of weird complexity of like,

00:21:23 ◼   ► well, if you're in portrait orientation in the list

00:21:27 ◼   ► and you select a landscape screenshot,

00:21:29 ◼   ► then the whole app basically forces itself

00:21:31 ◼   ► to be in landscape mode during the editing.

00:21:33 ◼   ► So you've got to turn the phone on the side.

00:21:35 ◼   ► And then once you're done, it switches back to landscape

00:21:38 ◼   ► if it needs to.

00:21:38 ◼   ► There's all sorts of complexity like that,

00:21:42 ◼   ► or of implementation complexity to get around

00:21:46 ◼   ► the need for zooming and scaling, basically.

00:21:50 ◼   ► So there's a few things about that I'm not 100% happy with.

00:21:54 ◼   ► One thing I'm not happy with is how images appear

00:22:00 ◼   ► in their native orientation in the list.

00:22:03 ◼   ► And so if you have a mixture of portrait and landscape

00:22:06 ◼   ► screenshots in your camera roll, then the layout gets really inefficient and gappy and

00:22:13 ◼   ► it just kind of doesn't look good.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I'm playing with different options there.

00:22:17 ◼   ► I tried some of them during development and I just didn't like any other alternatives,

00:22:21 ◼   ► so here we are with this.

00:22:22 ◼   ► But you just rotate them all to portrait.

00:22:25 ◼   ► I tried that and there were, first of all, a lot of difficulties doing that well, but

00:22:32 ◼   ► It didn't really look great, and it didn't handle rotation that well.

00:22:38 ◼   ► I might revisit that at some point, but it was not good.

00:22:43 ◼   ► I thought that would be the answer, but it wasn't.

00:22:45 ◼   ► And my final complaint was that the one I gave you last week.

00:22:47 ◼   ► The first thing I thought of is, after I draw these little overlay things, particularly

00:22:51 ◼   ► arrows, can I manipulate them after the fact?

00:22:53 ◼   ► And you can move them, but you can't resize them or reorient them after the fact.

00:22:57 ◼   ► And I would expect anything that lets me draw a little rectangle gives me anchor points

00:23:01 ◼   ► in the four corners so I can resize the rectangle and anything that's major an arrow lets me

00:23:05 ◼   ► twist the arrow around and stretch it out to make it longer or shorter. I mean like

00:23:08 ◼   ► it, moving it pretty much solves the problem of like how do I make it an arrow precisely

00:23:15 ◼   ► point to something because if you start where I first tap with my fat finger that's not

00:23:19 ◼   ► very accurate but if you do it the other way where you start with the stem then as I drag

00:23:23 ◼   ► out to the thing I'm trying to point to my finger is covering it anyway. So there's no

00:23:27 ◼   ► good solution there. You have to get some after manipulation, and you allow moving after,

00:23:31 ◼   ► which allows you to reorient it. But basically, if the overlays were sort of persistently

00:23:37 ◼   ► vector shapes instead of being rasterized and just being able to be moved around.

00:23:42 ◼   ► Well, and they actually, in the code, they are, and the rectangles can be scaled if you

00:23:47 ◼   ► pinch them. The arrows cannot. I did not figure out that rectangle thing.

00:23:51 ◼   ► I spent a while trying to resize those rectangles, and all I'd ever do was move them. I guess

00:23:54 ◼   ► I guess maybe I'm pinching outside them.

00:23:56 ◼   ► You've got to start inside, I guess.

00:23:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And one of the problems is just on the iPhone,

00:24:01 ◼   ► there really isn't a whole lot of space

00:24:03 ◼   ► to do pinching and rotation gestures.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And it's really, really hard to do it

00:24:07 ◼   ► with any kind of precision on the iPhone.

00:24:08 ◼   ► On the iPad, of course, it's a different story.

00:24:10 ◼   ► But for me, I'm using this mostly on the phone.

00:24:11 ◼   ► And so whatever decisions you make

00:24:13 ◼   ► have to work well on the phone for this.

00:24:17 ◼   ► And so one big thing is I don't think-- well,

00:24:23 ◼   ► I tried very briefly in early development having pinch and rotate enabled on all shapes.

00:24:30 ◼   ► And it didn't work that well. It was just very hard, again, with precision. It was very

00:24:35 ◼   ► hard to do it, especially to accidentally or to avoid accidentally rotating something

00:24:41 ◼   ► when you're supposed to be pinching it. When you combine rotation and scaling simultaneously

00:24:46 ◼   ► in the same gesture, it kind of behaves weirdly and there's these weird edge cases you can

00:24:50 ◼   ► get. And so there were a number of things that just didn't feel good with having that

00:24:57 ◼   ► in place.

00:24:58 ◼   ► You probably have to go modal like those old apps where you tap the thing and that makes

00:25:02 ◼   ► the little anchor things appear. And then when you select one of the anchors, it's clear

00:25:06 ◼   ► if you are now in rotation or scaling mode.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:09 ◼   ► And like the hit areas, hit areas all increase. Like a full-fledged vector drawing app on

00:25:13 ◼   ► the iPhone would. But that also falls under the scope thing of like, okay, now you're

00:25:17 ◼   ► getting into, you know.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Well, and then every one of those things that you add, that needs UI. And a lot of times

00:25:23 ◼   ► that needs state, as you said. And so it adds so much complexity to using the app and to

00:25:27 ◼   ► building the app that it very, very quickly balloons in both scope of development and

00:25:34 ◼   ► also just different modes the app can be in and different ways it could slow people down

00:25:39 ◼   ► or confuse them.

00:25:40 ◼   ► But right after you sell the first 50,000 copies of this app, then you've got to get

00:25:43 ◼   ► it working on this feature list.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Okay. If I sell 50,000 copies, I would consider doing that, yes.

00:25:48 ◼   ► Right now I'm at something like a thousand I think so.

00:25:52 ◼   ► That's pretty impressive.

00:25:53 ◼   ► And actually I thought of one other complaint that I had when we were, when I was looking

00:25:57 ◼   ► at it last weekend.

00:25:58 ◼   ► I apparently am the only person on the planet that likes Shake to Undo because I went to

00:26:03 ◼   ► try that and complained about it.

00:26:05 ◼   ► I tried it too Casey.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Thank you John.

00:26:07 ◼   ► I complained about it and Marco definitely said in so many words you're insane for even

00:26:12 ◼   ► wanting that.

00:26:13 ◼   ► And I want to say underscore agreed with you but I don't recall.

00:26:16 ◼   ► So apologies underscore if I'm putting words in your mouth.

00:26:17 ◼   ► I think you're right.

00:26:18 ◼   ► I think we both agreed, again, apologies if this is wrong, David, but I think we both

00:26:22 ◼   ► agreed that shaking your phone is ridiculous and it should never do anything because it's

00:26:26 ◼   ► ridiculous.

00:26:27 ◼   ► It is ridiculous, but I did try it.

00:26:28 ◼   ► I do find myself trying it because I do want to undo it a lot of the times, and although

00:26:32 ◼   ► shaking is ridiculous, it's kind of the "you don't need a UI button for it, but

00:26:38 ◼   ► maybe it'll work," and sometimes it does, and it makes me feel good when it does, even

00:26:41 ◼   ► though I'm shaking my iPod.

00:26:43 ◼   ► Todd.

00:26:44 ◼   ► But all in all, it certainly is a really interesting exercise in doing a small app and, just like

00:26:53 ◼   ► you've been discussing this entire time, cutting out what you don't need.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Being able to spin an arrow or re-anchor an arrow I think would be nice, but to your point

00:27:02 ◼   ► a minute ago, if it's not done well, I'd rather not even have it.

00:27:07 ◼   ► And I've come to that conclusion, I think, after seeing Apple make that choice so many

00:27:10 ◼   ► times like copy paste early on in iOS for example.

00:27:15 ◼   ► So it certainly, I can't say I've had to use it yet because I'm not partly, because I'm

00:27:20 ◼   ► not running iOS 7, but it certainly made a lot of sense and I thought it was very intuitive

00:27:24 ◼   ► with almost no UI.

00:27:26 ◼   ► So I thought it was a job well done.

00:27:28 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:27:29 ◼   ► And you know another issue with adding these things, like you know even when I, in development

00:27:34 ◼   ► when I briefly had the text tool in the toolbar, that toolbar gets really crowded really quickly.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And right now, with the cancel button on one side,

00:27:42 ◼   ► the action button on the other,

00:27:43 ◼   ► and the two buttons in the middle,

00:27:44 ◼   ► on an iPhone in portrait orientation,

00:27:47 ◼   ► that tool bar is pretty much full already.

00:27:50 ◼   ► And so the question is,

00:27:51 ◼   ► like if I wanted to add like a color picker,

00:27:55 ◼   ► or additional tools, text,

00:27:57 ◼   ► or like somebody in the chat just suggested

00:28:00 ◼   ► like a redaction blur or blackout,

00:28:02 ◼   ► to like blackout sensitive information

00:28:04 ◼   ► that's in the screenshot, that's a good idea.

00:28:06 ◼   ► But like where's that gonna go in the interface?

00:28:08 ◼   ► And as soon as I go beyond one toolbar,

00:28:11 ◼   ► then the interface becomes a lot bigger and heavier.

00:28:13 ◼   ► Like, the whole point of this is to annotate screenshots

00:28:16 ◼   ► at 100%.

00:28:18 ◼   ► So there really isn't a whole lot of room

00:28:20 ◼   ► to crowd the screen with buttons and stuff.

00:28:22 ◼   ► And it's just like, that toolbar is already full,

00:28:26 ◼   ► so what do you do?

00:28:27 ◼   ► Right?

00:28:28 ◼   ► There's no-- again, there's no good option.

00:28:31 ◼   ► And so a lot of times the answer is just, well, you know what?

00:28:34 ◼   ► It's better to just keep it simple.

00:28:36 ◼   ► And yeah, and another reason why I didn't really

00:28:39 ◼   ► go for more tools is because I think an arrow in a box,

00:28:43 ◼   ► that's the essence of this kind of tool.

00:28:45 ◼   ► There are other more specialized things that might be nice.

00:28:48 ◼   ► Like, oh, maybe you want to draw a circle

00:28:50 ◼   ► or an actual rectangle that's not rounded corners.

00:28:53 ◼   ► Or hell, a triangle.

00:28:54 ◼   ► If you want to animate something with a big hollow triangle,

00:28:57 ◼   ► I'm sure somebody wants to do that.

00:28:59 ◼   ► And there are cases where more specialized tools would

00:29:03 ◼   ► be better.

00:29:04 ◼   ► But to have an app with all that stuff in it, it very quickly becomes Illustrator.

00:29:08 ◼   ► And that's a very different thing.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Like the show opening, I think it was the show opening last week that you threw in there.

00:29:15 ◼   ► The thing I suggested when we were talking about this after the last recording session

00:29:18 ◼   ► was that you could…you've got box and arrow.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Replace box and arrow with the ability to draw a free form with your hand and then an

00:29:28 ◼   ► item lets you just pick color and transparency.

00:29:30 ◼   ► Like a popover lets you pick color and transparency.

00:29:32 ◼   ► So then you've got redaction circles arrows, you know, you got my yellow highlighter that I want 50% transparent yellow

00:29:38 ◼   ► You know default like and then you just draw with your finger on things and yeah, you can't make a precise arrow

00:29:42 ◼   ► But you can circle things you can redact things you could square put squares around things

00:29:45 ◼   ► It produces a different result than

00:29:48 ◼   ► The type of thing you'll see from this where you get a nice rounded rectangle and a nice arrow pointing it and stuff

00:29:54 ◼   ► Maybe it's less precise as well, but you would have enough toolbar space for

00:29:59 ◼   ► For basically for that it would be like I guess just one toolbar button or maybe you could put two one for color and one

00:30:04 ◼   ► For transparency you can do them both on if you did a popover because there's no tool selection

00:30:09 ◼   ► the only tool you have is I guess maybe like

00:30:11 ◼   ► Brush size or something. But anyway, that would that would be a different way to go with this instead of

00:30:15 ◼   ► Vector art go with you know finger painting

00:30:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean yeah and certainly like, you know having like basically a pencil tool

00:30:22 ◼   ► Would cover a lot of that right like if you just if you just added a third tool and it was a pencil

00:30:27 ◼   ► that would definitely cover a lot of these cases.

00:30:29 ◼   ► But again, there's a whole lot of UI state that you have to add to that then.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Like, you know, once you draw the thing, then do you pick the color afterwards

00:30:39 ◼   ► or do you try to shove the color thing somewhere on the bar somehow

00:30:42 ◼   ► and invent space out of nothing?

00:30:44 ◼   ► And then the more things you add to the bar, even if you can make them fit,

00:30:47 ◼   ► then they necessarily have to be smaller each,

00:30:50 ◼   ► and so then it increases the chances of somebody hitting the wrong thing

00:30:53 ◼   ► and being frustrated or doing something they don't want to do or losing data.

00:30:56 ◼   ► I was saying replace the box and the arrow with the brush.

00:31:00 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:31:01 ◼   ► Two replacement things.

00:31:03 ◼   ► Just brush and color/transparent.

00:31:05 ◼   ► You'd still need some kind of overlay or dialogue

00:31:08 ◼   ► or something to pick the color and the transparency

00:31:10 ◼   ► because that's too much control to put in a toolbar.

00:31:12 ◼   ► But if that's the only thing in the toolbar,

00:31:14 ◼   ► you've got room for the one button to pick size

00:31:16 ◼   ► and the other button to pick color and transparency.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

00:31:22 ◼   ► Oh, and it's funny.

00:31:23 ◼   ► pan and scan in the chat just said

00:31:25 ◼   ► zoom would be a handy feature.

00:31:28 ◼   ► The problem with zoom is that it conflicts with gestures

00:31:31 ◼   ► for everything else.

00:31:32 ◼   ► So if you had pinks to zoom, for instance,

00:31:34 ◼   ► then you can no longer pinch on a rectangle to resize it.

00:31:38 ◼   ► It could be the first iOS app with a plus button

00:31:40 ◼   ► in the corner that you hit and it zooms by increments,

00:31:42 ◼   ► plus, plus, plus, plus.

00:31:43 ◼   ► That will give you the ratings.

00:31:45 ◼   ► That'll get you to the 88.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Honestly, I bet I'm not the first.

00:31:47 ◼   ► I know.

00:31:48 ◼   ► I'm sure you're not the first system out there that probably

00:31:51 ◼   ► uses a greater than or less than sign on a UI button

00:31:54 ◼   ► to do it, like zooming in and out.

00:31:57 ◼   ► All right, let's go to our first sponsor

00:31:59 ◼   ► before I forget to do sponsors this episode,

00:32:01 ◼   ► because we're a half hour in.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Our first sponsor is a new sponsor this week.

00:32:06 ◼   ► It's an iOS game called Mind Blitz.

00:32:09 ◼   ► Mind Blitz is a twist on the traditional memory matching

00:32:13 ◼   ► game, where you flip over cards and you

00:32:15 ◼   ► try to remember what card is where,

00:32:16 ◼   ► and then you try to pair them up with the matching cards.

00:32:20 ◼   ► It's like that with action puzzle elements.

00:32:23 ◼   ► So it's a beautifully designed game.

00:32:25 ◼   ► They have achievements, high scores,

00:32:27 ◼   ► power ups, penalty cards.

00:32:30 ◼   ► They have different gameplay modes.

00:32:31 ◼   ► There's a blitz mode and endless mode.

00:32:33 ◼   ► And this is really like a very deluxe,

00:32:36 ◼   ► fancy action version of that old memory card game.

00:32:39 ◼   ► In blitz mode, you flip over the cards

00:32:42 ◼   ► to match corresponding pairs,

00:32:43 ◼   ► and then you fill up this power meter

00:32:44 ◼   ► with every match you make,

00:32:46 ◼   ► and you get points and then you can redeem the points

00:32:48 ◼   ► for power up cards.

00:32:49 ◼   ► And then in endless mode, the player

00:32:51 ◼   ► competes for the fastest time without the worry

00:32:53 ◼   ► of the timer or penalty cards.

00:32:54 ◼   ► It's just fastest time to complete matches.

00:32:58 ◼   ► And it's like a more pure version of the memory game.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And it's beautifully designed.

00:33:03 ◼   ► I even had some suggestions for the developer.

00:33:06 ◼   ► The developer bought the sponsorship probably

00:33:09 ◼   ► like two or three months ago now.

00:33:10 ◼   ► It was pretty far, pretty long ago.

00:33:12 ◼   ► And I had a few suggestions for adjusting

00:33:15 ◼   ► some of the timings on some of the things.

00:33:17 ◼   ► And sure enough, he improved them, they're done,

00:33:22 ◼   ► and they're in the app.

00:33:24 ◼   ► And he's very responsive to suggestions,

00:33:26 ◼   ► but the app is just really, really solid.

00:33:28 ◼   ► I really enjoy playing it.

00:33:30 ◼   ► It's a universal app.

00:33:31 ◼   ► This is MindBlitz.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Universal app, just $2.00, $1.99 in the App Store.

00:33:36 ◼   ► So search the App Store for MindBlitz, two words,

00:33:39 ◼   ► or go to mindblitzapp.com/atp to find it.

00:33:43 ◼   ► You guys played this game, right?

00:33:45 ◼   ► Did it look like this before iOS 7 came out?

00:33:48 ◼   ► Yeah, that was always the style.

00:33:51 ◼   ► It is very iOS 7-y, right down to the icon, I think, too.

00:33:54 ◼   ► If you look at the icon, that would fit in with the new Johnny Ive color scheme for the

00:34:01 ◼   ► standard built-in icons.

00:34:02 ◼   ► Now, I play memory games like this with my daughter a lot, where you have to put the

00:34:06 ◼   ► physical cards on the ground and get them all set up, and I think we actually have an

00:34:10 ◼   ► odd number of them, so one of them ends up always not having a match, and setting up

00:34:13 ◼   ► the cards and cleaning them like you... yeah, I'm definitely ready to jack into cyberspace

00:34:20 ◼   ► and not have to...

00:34:21 ◼   ► What?

00:34:21 ◼   ► To not have to...

00:34:23 ◼   ► To what?

00:34:24 ◼   ► You know, what they used to say in the 90s, man, no more physical stuff, everything's gonna happen

00:34:28 ◼   ► on the interweb. So they didn't say interwebs back then. But anyway,

00:34:31 ◼   ► they definitely did say jacking into cyberspace. Yeah, it's nice not to have to clean up the cards,

00:34:35 ◼   ► is what I'm getting at. And for people who are playing this game by themselves, you don't have

00:34:41 ◼   ► to wait for the sound to finish playing to go for your next pair, so it's possible,

00:34:46 ◼   ► if you're fast, to have many more than two cards visible at a time. A little tip there

00:34:52 ◼   ► for people trying to hone their high scores, but I enjoyed it.

00:34:55 ◼   ► Actually, that was one of my suggestions to the developer was in the mechanics of when

00:35:01 ◼   ► you have more than two cards flipped over, like how you know whether a match has succeeded

00:35:06 ◼   ► or failed. And yeah, he's very responsive. Really, this game is a fantastic implementation.

00:35:12 ◼   ► It really is like a deluxe action card memory game. And it's bringing the best of the old

00:35:19 ◼   ► with John's cyberspace jacking. And it really is great.

00:35:23 ◼   ► My cyberspace jacking. It's like William Gibson's or something.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Oh, goodness. No, it really is a great game. And the thing that bothers me about this game,

00:35:31 ◼   ► though, which I know I shouldn't complain about sponsors, but it just proves to me how

00:35:34 ◼   ► crummy my memory is because I am terrible at this game and it's because I have the world's

00:35:40 ◼   ► worst memory.

00:35:41 ◼   ► Wait, John, how old is your kid that plays this game?

00:35:43 ◼   ► Oh, don't even go there.

00:35:44 ◼   ► Six years old.

00:35:45 ◼   ► But I'm pretty good at the game.

00:35:47 ◼   ► Maybe I've been honed from practicing on the rug with a six-year-old, but I think the thing

00:35:51 ◼   ► that really helps in this game is the really deep saturated colors they have.

00:35:54 ◼   ► A lot of times I'm matching by color, not even the symbols.

00:35:56 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:35:57 ◼   ► Yeah, that helps a lot.

00:35:58 ◼   ► I mean, there's so many nice little touches.

00:35:59 ◼   ► It really is a very polished game.

00:36:02 ◼   ► So all right, thanks a lot to MindBlitz.

00:36:04 ◼   ► Go to mindblitzapp.com/atp or search for MindBlitz,

00:36:09 ◼   ► two words, in the App Store.

00:36:10 ◼   ► $2, Universal App, great game.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

00:36:13 ◼   ► - All right, so another thing I wanted to ask you

00:36:15 ◼   ► about Marco, since apparently this is turning

00:36:17 ◼   ► into the Marco Show, you've been fiddling a lot

00:36:20 ◼   ► with network attached storage these days.

00:36:22 ◼   ► - It's pronounced Nas.

00:36:23 ◼   ► - Now, how is that different from the thing

00:36:26 ◼   ► you're putting in the M5?

00:36:27 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:28 ◼   ► - Oh, it doesn't need that, believe me.

00:36:29 ◼   ► - No, it does not.

00:36:30 ◼   ► No, it does not.

00:36:31 ◼   ► No, but tell me about what you—I know you were seeking different options if you were

00:36:36 ◼   ► talking—even when we were at WWDC, I remember being in line for Presidio once, and you were

00:36:40 ◼   ► talking about, "Should I go Drobo?

00:36:42 ◼   ► Should I go Synology?" or whatever it's called.

00:36:45 ◼   ► What did you end up concluding, and how's that going?

00:36:47 ◼   ► So I should disclose.

00:36:48 ◼   ► So basically, I decided through various research and Twitter mentions, I decided to go with

00:36:53 ◼   ► Synology.

00:36:54 ◼   ► Synology?

00:36:55 ◼   ► Did we ever decide what that is?

00:36:57 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:36:58 ◼   ► I don't think so.

00:36:59 ◼   ► - Well, I'm the sponsor of the show,

00:37:00 ◼   ► and then they can send you a pronunciation guide.

00:37:01 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:37:02 ◼   ► So anyway, I'm gonna say Sinology,

00:37:04 ◼   ► 'cause that's how I say it in my head.

00:37:05 ◼   ► So, until somebody corrects me, authoritatively.

00:37:09 ◼   ► All right, so anyway, I decided to get a Sinology,

00:37:12 ◼   ► and I ordered it from Amazon,

00:37:14 ◼   ► and it was like a Saturday night,

00:37:16 ◼   ► so it wasn't gonna ship for like another day and a half

00:37:19 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And between the time I ordered it

00:37:22 ◼   ► and when it was going to ship,

00:37:23 ◼   ► a representative from Sinology saw me

00:37:26 ◼   ► tweeting about this stuff and offered

00:37:27 ◼   ► to just send me the thing for free,

00:37:28 ◼   ► which is very, very nice of them.

00:37:30 ◼   ► And so I canceled my Amazon order,

00:37:31 ◼   ► and they very generously sent me the one

00:37:35 ◼   ► I was going to get for free, just so I could

00:37:37 ◼   ► have some experience with it.

00:37:39 ◼   ► And they aren't sponsoring the show,

00:37:40 ◼   ► but that was a very nice thing of them to do.

00:37:42 ◼   ► And so it's worth mentioning that.

00:37:43 ◼   ► It also obviously is required for probably sensible disclosure

00:37:48 ◼   ► reasons for me to tell you that.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Anyway, so I've had a lot of time with it.

00:37:55 ◼   ► And I still have a lot to do with it.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I haven't done that much just because I filled it up

00:38:01 ◼   ► with a whole bunch of one, two, and four terabyte hard drives

00:38:05 ◼   ► that I had lying around.

00:38:06 ◼   ► So it takes a pretty long time to alter anything

00:38:12 ◼   ► that involves 12 terabytes of raw storage.

00:38:16 ◼   ► But it's the kind of thing, oh, let me try this volume

00:38:20 ◼   ► and this other kind of structure.

00:38:21 ◼   ► All right, start.

00:38:22 ◼   ► And I'll come back midday tomorrow.

00:38:24 ◼   ► be done.

00:38:25 ◼   ► Now, let me interrupt you real quick.

00:38:27 ◼   ► I should have asked you to start off.

00:38:28 ◼   ► What problem or problems were you looking to solve by getting this device?

00:38:32 ◼   ► That's a very good question.

00:38:33 ◼   ► All right, so the main reason I wanted to get into network attack storage is that I've

00:38:40 ◼   ► always loved having internal hard drives in the Mac Pro, as we've talked about many

00:38:43 ◼   ► times before, just like John.

00:38:45 ◼   ► I love internal drives because what I really, really hate more than anything is a desk covered

00:38:51 ◼   ► in hard drive enclosures.

00:38:52 ◼   ► because hard drive enclosures are terrible.

00:38:54 ◼   ► They have usually either really bad cooling or no cooling.

00:38:59 ◼   ► So it results in either a tiny 40 millimeter rattly fan

00:39:04 ◼   ► on your desk all the time going and making too much noise,

00:39:07 ◼   ► or no cooling, and then the hard drive overheats and dies

00:39:09 ◼   ► in a year and a half.

00:39:10 ◼   ► Either way is bad.

00:39:12 ◼   ► And enclosures are kind of overpriced

00:39:16 ◼   ► if you get them empty.

00:39:17 ◼   ► And if you get them full, like directly from people

00:39:21 ◼   ► like Seagate and Western Digital,

00:39:23 ◼   ► then they usually have really kind of oddly cheap

00:39:26 ◼   ► construction and just kind of weird.

00:39:29 ◼   ► And it's very hard to get one that's not USB,

00:39:31 ◼   ► that's actually reasonably priced.

00:39:33 ◼   ► Like USB ones are always cheap,

00:39:34 ◼   ► but historically if you wanted to get good speed,

00:39:37 ◼   ► you'd have to go like Firewire 800

00:39:39 ◼   ► and those were very expensive.

00:39:41 ◼   ► These days you have Thunderbolt or USB 3 to choose from,

00:39:44 ◼   ► although at least USB 3 is finally good.

00:39:46 ◼   ► But anyway, I don't like little individual disk enclosures

00:39:50 ◼   ► and I don't like having to have them on my desk,

00:39:52 ◼   ► and having more wires and more things that make noise

00:39:55 ◼   ► right in front of me, and more power bricks,

00:39:57 ◼   ► and all this stuff.

00:39:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I was gonna say,

00:39:59 ◼   ► don't forget the stupid power adapters.

00:40:00 ◼   ► Because every single one of the drives

00:40:01 ◼   ► needs to have its own cheap little terrible power adapter

00:40:05 ◼   ► and brick that you need to,

00:40:06 ◼   ► like it's always like a brick

00:40:07 ◼   ► and then a cord hanging from it,

00:40:08 ◼   ► so you've got these bricks littering the floor

00:40:11 ◼   ► and you need to find someplace to put them.

00:40:12 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:40:13 ◼   ► - And the plugs, yeah, I just ordered a new drive enclosure

00:40:16 ◼   ► now that we're complaining about them.

00:40:18 ◼   ► - Wait, what'd you get?

00:40:19 ◼   ► I've been getting these ones from Other World Computing.

00:40:24 ◼   ► It's not—

00:40:25 ◼   ► The Mercury Elite Pro?

00:40:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:27 ◼   ► They're not my favorite, but they're not terrible.

00:40:30 ◼   ► They're kind of terrible.

00:40:32 ◼   ► I like their construction, but they're very expensive.

00:40:35 ◼   ► I don't like much about them, but I have had several of them, and unlike almost every other

00:40:39 ◼   ► conclusion I've gotten, the power bricks have not died.

00:40:42 ◼   ► So thumbs up on that.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Although they are big and bulky.

00:40:45 ◼   ► Yeah, because that's the big thing.

00:40:47 ◼   ► power brick is the weakest component in these things. And the power brick dies and then

00:40:50 ◼   ► you're just left with this useless thing. And no, I got it because I have spare drives

00:40:54 ◼   ► hanging around and I'm doing lots of Mavericks testing. And I'm like, you know, I bet I could

00:40:58 ◼   ► really use one more spare drives. And I have the mechanisms. I just have, I don't want

00:41:01 ◼   ► to keep like swapping them in and out of my Mac Pro and I need to be able to hook it up

00:41:04 ◼   ► to a laptop. So I just go, all right, let me just get one more enclosure. And I looked

00:41:08 ◼   ► around for like Thunderbolt enclosures, but it's like, no, I don't want to spend that

00:41:12 ◼   ► much money. Just so I bought another one.

00:41:14 ◼   ► Well, and the problem is Thunderbolt won't work on your Mac Pro.

00:41:17 ◼   ► It won't work on any of my computers that I would need to test on, yeah.

00:41:20 ◼   ► So I bought another one, but yeah, I'm in the same situation as Marco.

00:41:23 ◼   ► I like my internal drives, and I'm sure what he's leading to is that, you know, eventually

00:41:27 ◼   ► we're going to get computers, like, probably both going to get the Mac Pro, and if we do,

00:41:31 ◼   ► no internal storage there.

00:41:32 ◼   ► That's exactly it.

00:41:33 ◼   ► I mean, and it isn't just about that.

00:41:35 ◼   ► It's, you know, if you can move to a world where you don't need a whole bunch of internal

00:41:38 ◼   ► drives, then that enables you to switch to the new Mac Pro if you want to, or to switch

00:41:45 ◼   ► to a laptop full time, or to switch to an iMac without having a desk covered in hard

00:41:49 ◼   ► drive enclosures.

00:41:50 ◼   ► There's all sorts of benefits of simplifying your setup and adding flexibility to shifting

00:41:55 ◼   ► a lot of this stuff to a network attack storage box.

00:41:58 ◼   ► Also, just for physical reasons, I like not having that crap all over my desk.

00:42:03 ◼   ► A network attack, I can put anywhere in the house that has networking, and if you're willing

00:42:08 ◼   ► tolerate wireless, you can put it really anywhere. For me, I like things wired, but when I had

00:42:13 ◼   ► my house construction, I did run Cat5 wiring or Cat6 wiring to most of the rooms. So I

00:42:19 ◼   ► actually have mine in what's basically my server closet, which is just the closet in

00:42:24 ◼   ► my office that I had them install an outlet and two network ports in. So that's where

00:42:29 ◼   ► I keep the router and the printer and all the crap.

00:42:32 ◼   ► Are you worried about heat inside a closet?

00:42:35 ◼   ► I was worried. It is a very big closet. And so basically, my stress test was I filled

00:42:43 ◼   ► the Synology with eight disks and had it like restructure the array, rebuild the array by

00:42:49 ◼   ► replacing one of the disks. And then I closed the door and left in July for eight hours.

00:42:55 ◼   ► And then I came back and opened the door and it was like one degree hotter than the room

00:43:02 ◼   ► next to it. So it wasn't a meaningful problem, I don't think.

00:43:07 ◼   ► Anyway, and I still, because it's the closet that's like 10 feet from my chair, I still

00:43:13 ◼   ► go over there and walk in periodically to check the temperature to make sure it's not

00:43:16 ◼   ► getting too hot. But so far it never has. So I don't think it's going to be a problem.

00:43:20 ◼   ► Anyway, so my goal really here was, as I said, flexibility. And so I can get away from requiring

00:43:29 ◼   ► a big hard drive or requiring multiple big hard drives in my main computer

00:43:33 ◼   ► because obviously that world is ending in Macs.

00:43:38 ◼   ► The current Mac Pro is the only one that can do that and it's going away.

00:43:43 ◼   ► So even the Retina MacBook Pro doesn't even have two bays anymore.

00:43:48 ◼   ► Like the old ones you could replace the DVD-ROM drive with a second hard drive bay,

00:43:53 ◼   ► which I did for a while. You could do that.

00:43:55 ◼   ► The new ones you can't do that.

00:43:57 ◼   ► The iMac still has two bays.

00:43:58 ◼   ► It has an SSD bay and a big drive bay.

00:44:00 ◼   ► But I bet the days of that are fairly numbered.

00:44:04 ◼   ► I bet that goes away probably within three or four years.

00:44:07 ◼   ► So obviously, we're moving away from having

00:44:10 ◼   ► any kind of replaceable drives in Macs,

00:44:12 ◼   ► let alone multiple bays.

00:44:14 ◼   ► And again, also, if you have network storage,

00:44:19 ◼   ► then you can also do things like get an SSD

00:44:23 ◼   ► for your only drive on your main computer,

00:44:24 ◼   ► or get a computer where SSDs are the only option,

00:44:26 ◼   ► and not be too constrained by the size of the SSD.

00:44:29 ◼   ► So all these things, very, very good, very important.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And basically, it's adding some slight time and investment now

00:44:41 ◼   ► to add a lot of flexibility in the future.

00:44:44 ◼   ► So that's why I decided to do this.

00:44:47 ◼   ► I've done a few things with it.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I have Time Machine running to it.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Right now, I have the drives as one giant array

00:44:54 ◼   ► using their dynamic resizing thing, which

00:44:56 ◼   ► is kind of similar to what Drobos do, I think.

00:44:58 ◼   ► I've never owned a Drobo, so I don't know exactly.

00:45:00 ◼   ► But I'm pretty sure it's the same kind of thing, which

00:45:03 ◼   ► is it's like a software dynamic raid where they kind of

00:45:10 ◼   ► dynamically manage the storage for you.

00:45:11 ◼   ► I don't think you have any kind of direct block access to it,

00:45:13 ◼   ► so they can do that.

00:45:14 ◼   ► So you can pop out a small drive and add a bigger drive,

00:45:17 ◼   ► and it expands the array to have more space, stuff like that.

00:45:21 ◼   ► So I'm trying that now.

00:45:23 ◼   ► The only thing I don't like about that setup

00:45:25 ◼   ► is that it requires all eight disks

00:45:28 ◼   ► to be reading and writing whenever anything's accessed.

00:45:31 ◼   ► And so it's loud, and it's keeping all of them

00:45:35 ◼   ► spined up almost all the time.

00:45:37 ◼   ► And it's just inefficient.

00:45:39 ◼   ► It's kind of inelegant.

00:45:40 ◼   ► So I think what I'm going to do-- I still

00:45:42 ◼   ► have enough spare drives lying around that I can move stuff

00:45:45 ◼   ► around pretty easily.

00:45:45 ◼   ► So I'm going to probably break that array tomorrow

00:45:49 ◼   ► or the next day and split it up into one for my time machine,

00:45:53 ◼   ► one for Tiff's time machine, and one for our big archive.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And maybe that one's expandable, but the time machines

00:45:58 ◼   ► aren't, et cetera.

00:46:01 ◼   ► One big concern here was backup.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And so you guys both have-- do you both have backblaze?

00:46:08 ◼   ► No, I use CrashPlan.

00:46:09 ◼   ► I have both.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Really?

00:46:10 ◼   ► I have both.

00:46:12 ◼   ► OK.

00:46:13 ◼   ► Really, I'm curious.

00:46:15 ◼   ► What's your split there, John?

00:46:16 ◼   ► What do you use each of them for?

00:46:18 ◼   ► My computer's backblaze, my wife's, is CrashPlan.

00:46:22 ◼   ► And that's more redundancy, I assume?

00:46:24 ◼   ► Yeah, basically.

00:46:25 ◼   ► I got back plays years and years ago.

00:46:27 ◼   ► I don't even know if Crash Planet was around,

00:46:29 ◼   ► or at least I didn't know about it then.

00:46:31 ◼   ► And when it came time to get a backup thing for my wife's

00:46:33 ◼   ► thing, I'm like, you know what?

00:46:34 ◼   ► Why don't I get a different one?

00:46:36 ◼   ► Mostly because Crash Planet had been getting good reviews,

00:46:38 ◼   ► and I wanted to give it a try.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And I figured if it's way better, then I'll switch.

00:46:41 ◼   ► And it's basically been a wash.

00:46:42 ◼   ► Like, there's advantages and disadvantages to both.

00:46:45 ◼   ► So I just feel a little bit better

00:46:46 ◼   ► having two different ones.

00:46:47 ◼   ► And yeah, it would probably be cheaper for me

00:46:49 ◼   ► to consolidate on one.

00:46:50 ◼   ► But I like having the two different ones.

00:46:51 ◼   ► And her computer is all SSD, there's no spinning disks.

00:46:54 ◼   ► So any problems from like inefficiencies due to CrashPlan being Java or something, I assume

00:47:01 ◼   ► they're being masked by her full SSD setup.

00:47:05 ◼   ► And so I'm happy with that there, and I'm happy with this here, and so I'm sticking

00:47:08 ◼   ► with it for now.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, for me, I actually have both also, but CrashPlan I basically bought for

00:47:14 ◼   ► my mom's computer.

00:47:16 ◼   ► And one thing that's nice about it is that it emails you a weekly, I think, report of

00:47:22 ◼   ► your backup status.

00:47:23 ◼   ► So I can tell, like, if my mom's computer hasn't been backed up in two months, I can

00:47:28 ◼   ► tell, you know, I should probably fix that somehow next time I go see her, or call her

00:47:31 ◼   ► and tell her how to fix it.

00:47:34 ◼   ► So it's nice when you want to be updated on the status of things.

00:47:38 ◼   ► It is very nice for that.

00:47:40 ◼   ► But my problem with CrashPlan is that from my house, it's just extremely slow to upload.

00:47:46 ◼   ► I've seen so many people online talking about similar problems with CrashPlan in particular.

00:47:50 ◼   ► It seems like a pretty widespread issue that even though I have this massive upstream pipe,

00:47:55 ◼   ► they can only use like 2.1 megabits of it.

00:47:58 ◼   ► And I tried all their tips,

00:48:00 ◼   ► every, like all their things like turn off encryption or change this buffer size or change this limit,

00:48:05 ◼   ► none of them had any effect on that cap. And it just seems like it just depends on like

00:48:10 ◼   ► whatever CrashPlan node is nearest to you, you know, whatever you get assigned to, like it,

00:48:15 ◼   ► Some of them are just slow or overcrowded and some of them are and so I basically can't use crash plan myself

00:48:20 ◼   ► Yeah, every time I've looked into that it's come down to like, you know

00:48:23 ◼   ► It's like your distance from the data center that that you're transferring stuff and it's like geography where you are

00:48:29 ◼   ► What ISP you're on what the route is to the server you're eventually connecting to and so like it's hard

00:48:34 ◼   ► Some people said all that means you shouldn't get crash plan

00:48:36 ◼   ► But it may be crash plan the crash plan know that you're gonna connect it was way closer to you

00:48:41 ◼   ► It has better connection than the back plays when you won't know until you try it for me

00:48:44 ◼   ► It's about even for both of them. Neither one of them ever fills my connection just because it's big.

00:48:48 ◼   ► But I get better than two megabits on both of them. I get like six, seven-ish,

00:48:53 ◼   ► varies sometimes up to nine on Backblaze. Crash Plan may be a little bit slower,

00:48:58 ◼   ► but I don't watch them that closely because really it's not, like once you get caught up,

00:49:02 ◼   ► it doesn't run for more than, you know, 20 minutes every night.

00:49:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:49:06 ◼   ► You know, it's funny you say that you didn't get good speech with Crash Plan because a friend of mine had recommended

00:49:10 ◼   ► Carbonite and I tried that and it was going to take about seven years for all my data

00:49:15 ◼   ► to upload to Carbonite.

00:49:16 ◼   ► And then I tried CrashPlan and this was, when I did my first upload, I want to say it was

00:49:20 ◼   ► like a year, year and a half ago, maybe more than that.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And it pretty much maxed my line for like a day and a half or something like that.

00:49:27 ◼   ► Now it could be that they're using a data center in Ashburn, which is in Northern Virginia,

00:49:31 ◼   ► which is only a couple hours drive from where we are and that would be somewhat significant

00:49:36 ◼   ► for both of you guys.

00:49:38 ◼   ► That's complete speculation.

00:49:39 ◼   ► I have no idea if that's right or not, but I think, John, you nailed it when you said

00:49:43 ◼   ► it.

00:49:44 ◼   ► It was luck of the draw.

00:49:45 ◼   ► CrashPlan worked for me and had a really good upload speed, although they have a god-awful

00:49:49 ◼   ► user interface and it's all Java-based like you guys said, and I hate it.

00:49:52 ◼   ► But the upload speeds were good and everything else seems to work reasonably well.

00:49:57 ◼   ► I do like getting those updates, so that's how I landed on CrashPlan.

00:50:01 ◼   ► It was mostly about upload speed, which is funny that you said it was terrible for you.

00:50:04 ◼   ► I'm assuming Marco's getting to this because he's going to talk about how online services

00:50:09 ◼   ► view his NAS, whether it's eligible for backup or not, right?

00:50:13 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Because that's the thing. Backblaze, I've used Backblaze from my computer

00:50:18 ◼   ► and TIFF's computer for I think about three years now, something like that. And we have

00:50:23 ◼   ► like I think a total of about three terabytes backed up between the two computers to it.

00:50:28 ◼   ► And it's fine. I restored a couple of files from it here and there, and it works. So I

00:50:32 ◼   ► I like Backblaze a lot, but Backblaze does not

00:50:34 ◼   ► back up network drives.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Now, I've heard-- I haven't tried this yet,

00:50:38 ◼   ► and I think I might play with this.

00:50:40 ◼   ► I've heard that if you mount it over iSCSI,

00:50:45 ◼   ► that because iSCSI is kind of treated by the OS

00:50:48 ◼   ► as a locally-attached disk, apparently Backblaze

00:50:52 ◼   ► can't tell the difference.

00:50:53 ◼   ► But I haven't confirmed this yet.

00:50:54 ◼   ► And so anyway, apparently if you mount iSCSI drives,

00:50:58 ◼   ► it will back those up.

00:50:59 ◼   ► But--

00:50:59 ◼   ► Yeah, that was my question about you mentioned--

00:51:02 ◼   ► you're doing Time Machine to it.

00:51:04 ◼   ► Is that one of those things where they're like,

00:51:06 ◼   ► well, it's not officially supported by Apple,

00:51:08 ◼   ► but the NAS manufacturer figures out

00:51:10 ◼   ► how to make their thing work.

00:51:11 ◼   ► And every time there's an OS update,

00:51:12 ◼   ► you have to wait for the NAS thing to update to work with it?

00:51:15 ◼   ► Is that--

00:51:15 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:51:16 ◼   ► They certainly-- they have implemented in their software,

00:51:19 ◼   ► they have some kind of Time Machine server,

00:51:21 ◼   ► and it does work.

00:51:22 ◼   ► I don't know if Apple has documented this in any way.

00:51:26 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:51:27 ◼   ► Because like, NASes have been doing that since Time Machine

00:51:29 ◼   ► has existed.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And every time there's an update, everyone who has one of these things who isn't tech-savvy

00:51:34 ◼   ► is like, "Oh, my thing broke.

00:51:35 ◼   ► Why is it?"

00:51:36 ◼   ► I mean, you have to understand, they're making it work, and it's not a big deal, but it's

00:51:41 ◼   ► big enough deal that Apple's not being careful to make sure they don't break it every OS

00:51:44 ◼   ► update, especially major OS updates.

00:51:47 ◼   ► And so that's why I've been worried about a NAS, because direct-attached storage, particularly

00:51:53 ◼   ► like direct SATA storage, which is right in there, is the most problem-free way to do

00:51:58 ◼   ► time machine.

00:51:59 ◼   ► external firewire I find ever so slightly flakier than internal drive. My wife has firewire,

00:52:06 ◼   ► although with her system, who knows, it could be the Thunderbolt bridge and stuff like that.

00:52:10 ◼   ► I have a big firewire drive attached for her, occasional time machines.

00:52:15 ◼   ► Well, in theory, iSCSI would fix that problem. You'd still have to get the iSCSI initiator

00:52:20 ◼   ► to work on the new version of OS X.

00:52:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the thing. Then you're like, "Okay, well, it's fine. The time machine is

00:52:26 ◼   ► fine with it, but does the iSCSI driver work with Mavericks, for example? And how long

00:52:30 ◼   ► do you have to wait for them to update the iSCSI driver, and how reliable is that driver?

00:52:34 ◼   ► Those are the details. Or even stuff like—I guess SuperDuper doesn't care at all.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Well, one of us would be in a position to test that, John.

00:52:40 ◼   ► Yeah. You could download Mavericks, too, right?

00:52:43 ◼   ► I guess I could. I have all these drives sitting around.

00:52:46 ◼   ► Yeah. I suppose if you run with this setup for a while, and you're like, "Okay, well,

00:52:52 ◼   ► whatever they did, time machine works fine, and presumably you'll eventually upgrade

00:52:56 ◼   ► to Mavericks and you say, "Okay, well, time machine works fine and I can super-duper do

00:52:59 ◼   ► it and Crash Planner or whatever sees it and backs it up," then that'll be fine. I won't

00:53:04 ◼   ► be that scared to do it. But I wouldn't want to be the one to find out by buying the big

00:53:08 ◼   ► expensive NAS and then trying to get my backup regime to work with it.

00:53:12 ◼   ► Well, I figure I could always fall back on iSCSI. Let's say, I haven't even tested this,

00:53:18 ◼   ► let's say Mavericks comes out and it breaks the sinology time machine thing and sinology

00:53:22 ◼   ► doesn't fix it soon, which itself is unlikely, I think, because like one of the reasons why

00:53:26 ◼   ► I picked them is because they're very active in development. They have a lot of users.

00:53:32 ◼   ► They have a huge community of people who use and love these things. I have never seen a

00:53:36 ◼   ► storage product, and I've very rarely seen any computer products at all that had such

00:53:41 ◼   ► a universal acclaim as Synology and NASA. Like when I asked about them, everybody on

00:53:46 ◼   ► on Twitter love them. And there was zero reports of anything bad. I was shocked how positive

00:53:53 ◼   ► the response was. And they really are pretty on the ball with software updates. They're

00:53:59 ◼   ► working on a big update now. There's so much user-created software you can run on it. They

00:54:05 ◼   ► have a whole package store you can browse and stuff. It's pretty advanced, and it seems

00:54:10 ◼   ► like they're really on the ball. That's generally what you want. You don't want the manufacturer

00:54:15 ◼   ► that nobody's using for stuff like this.

00:54:17 ◼   ► Because that's, I think, more likely to be the one where

00:54:21 ◼   ► some OS update comes out, and it breaks something

00:54:23 ◼   ► that you relied on, and it's just never fixed.

00:54:26 ◼   ► Whereas if you're with the big dominant player,

00:54:29 ◼   ► or one of the big dominant players,

00:54:31 ◼   ► you're way more likely not to have those problems.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Or you're likely to have those problems be fixed sooner,

00:54:37 ◼   ► in most cases.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Do you know what the thing is running?

00:54:39 ◼   ► Is it like a free BSD thing in there?

00:54:41 ◼   ► It's some kind of Linux or BSD thing.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And it has an Intel Atom processor.

00:54:47 ◼   ► I believe it's x86-64, which I was pretty impressed by.

00:54:50 ◼   ► It's like a dual core 2 gigahertz.

00:54:52 ◼   ► I think it was 4 gigs of RAM.

00:54:53 ◼   ► It has pretty good hardware in it.

00:54:56 ◼   ► And one of the things I tried was if you want to,

00:55:00 ◼   ► you can directly install CrashPlan on it.

00:55:02 ◼   ► And so I tried that to see if that would be any better,

00:55:04 ◼   ► and it wasn't.

00:55:05 ◼   ► But the instructions are you SSH into it.

00:55:09 ◼   ► First you go enable SSH, then you SSH into it,

00:55:11 ◼   ► and you manually download this package with wget,

00:55:14 ◼   ► and everything.

00:55:15 ◼   ► And so you can do pretty much everything

00:55:18 ◼   ► you can do with a low-powered Linux box right on the thing.

00:55:22 ◼   ► So it was--

00:55:23 ◼   ► Does it have built-in stuff?

00:55:24 ◼   ► Does it have a DLNA server or anything?

00:55:25 ◼   ► It does, yeah.

00:55:26 ◼   ► And there's so many things.

00:55:27 ◼   ► I've barely scratched the surface.

00:55:29 ◼   ► It has DLNA.

00:55:31 ◼   ► It has iTunes sharing.

00:55:34 ◼   ► And again, I'm sure that's using some kind of undocumented

00:55:37 ◼   ► or unsupported API by Apple.

00:55:39 ◼   ► But it does have an iTunes share.

00:55:40 ◼   ► But I haven't even used any of this stuff yet.

00:55:42 ◼   ► I haven't had time to play with it all yet.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Because that's always the like once you go NAS, you're like well once I have a NAS

00:55:48 ◼   ► Why don't I just get a full flat like get a Mac Mini and hook up like a big rated attachment to it?

00:55:53 ◼   ► And then you know like right you could I mean there's there's no

00:55:56 ◼   ► one of the big reasons for me honestly was simplicity of devices and also cost because

00:56:01 ◼   ► This thing retails for like 1,100 bucks, and this is like their high-end. It was the the DS 1813 plus model

00:56:07 ◼   ► It's fairly new and it's eight bays

00:56:10 ◼   ► That there's a five bay version. That's significantly less

00:56:13 ◼   ► I think it's $900 or $800.

00:56:16 ◼   ► And then you can get-- basically,

00:56:17 ◼   ► the more bays you want, the more expensive it is.

00:56:21 ◼   ► But once you put together the cost of a Mac Mini,

00:56:26 ◼   ► even a low-end used one, Mac Minis

00:56:29 ◼   ► aren't that cheap because everybody has some kind of use

00:56:31 ◼   ► they have for one.

00:56:33 ◼   ► So you can't really buy a Mac Mini

00:56:35 ◼   ► for less than about $500.

00:56:36 ◼   ► That's any good at all.

00:56:38 ◼   ► And so you throw in a $500 or more Mac Mini.

00:56:42 ◼   ► Give it some kind of connection.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Once you add a big enclosure that has four to eight bays

00:56:49 ◼   ► in it, if you want it to be fast,

00:56:53 ◼   ► it's going to have to be probably Thunderbolt.

00:56:55 ◼   ► And so that's going to be really expensive.

00:56:57 ◼   ► If you don't care about it being fast that much,

00:56:59 ◼   ► you probably at least want it to be FireWire 800 or USB 3.

00:57:03 ◼   ► So you're still talking a lot of cost.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Then you have two things.

00:57:06 ◼   ► You have two power bricks.

00:57:07 ◼   ► You have two things heating up your closet.

00:57:09 ◼   ► And then you have like the cost savings really is pretty minimal at that point or it's or it's more expensive going that way. So

00:57:15 ◼   ► Like I looked at that stuff but like multi drive high-speed enclosures are really expensive

00:57:22 ◼   ► Yeah, you'd end up buying something like that anyway in the connecting a computer

00:57:25 ◼   ► But the true Greek way to do it which neither one of us that probably feels like we have time or inclination to do

00:57:31 ◼   ► Is you know get one of the free NAS things make your own ZFS NAS out of your own BSD box and a bunch of?

00:57:36 ◼   ► devices and ZFS is really cool.

00:57:38 ◼   ► And I'm a big fan of ZFS, and people wonder why I don't build my own, you know, an ass

00:57:43 ◼   ► out of ZFS.

00:57:44 ◼   ► But like, I would love for someone to make that product for me to buy, but I'm not gonna,

00:57:49 ◼   ► you know, spend time doing it.

00:57:50 ◼   ► I don't have that time to screw with my storage.

00:57:51 ◼   ► I want my storage to be bulletproof, problem-free, supported by a company, like this analogy

00:57:55 ◼   ► sounds like it is.

00:57:56 ◼   ► I prefer it to be from Apple, because then it's like all one big thing, and I would pay

00:58:01 ◼   ► whatever crazy, but they're not into making storage, so fine.

00:58:05 ◼   ► Well, yeah, honestly if Apple did make one of these I probably still wouldn't get theirs because it would be some kind of like side project

00:58:11 ◼   ► For them they didn't really care that much about and so it probably wouldn't be very good

00:58:14 ◼   ► But they like the X serve raid exactly. Yeah. Yeah, they did make something like this and it's they no longer make it for very good reasons

00:58:20 ◼   ► And also, you know one one big advantage that sinology has also over like build your own thing is that it's really quiet

00:58:28 ◼   ► Because it has these two giant. I think they're probably about 92 millimeter size fans

00:58:34 ◼   ► They're they're big slow powerful fans. So like and most of them they're they're very quiet like I

00:58:39 ◼   ► when I first got the thing I

00:58:42 ◼   ► just had it next to my computer like on a little end table here because I was I was still

00:58:46 ◼   ► Configuring it and still putting drives in and out and I figure out I'll set it up here and I'm moving into the closet like

00:58:51 ◼   ► In a couple days when it's all set up and I was shocked how quiet it was

00:58:55 ◼   ► The drives make all the noise the fans are almost inaudible like it was quieter than my Mac Pro

00:59:02 ◼   ► And the Mac Pro, despite a lot of people complaining about it, I think is a pretty quiet computer, especially given what's in it.

00:59:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it definitely is if you ever owned a G5 before then. It's way quieter.

00:59:12 ◼   ► Yeah, so it really is. I mean, the Synology basically is just an embedded computer with a bunch of bays and some custom software.

00:59:17 ◼   ► But it really is a very, very nice implementation of that.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And so once you throw in how nice it is, how flexible it is, how much it can do, and how

00:59:33 ◼   ► it's very cost-competitive with building your own, I don't think there's much reason

00:59:38 ◼   ► to build your own, honestly, unless you have very specialized needs that you can't get

00:59:41 ◼   ► with somebody else's thing.

00:59:42 ◼   ► One of my attractions to a NAS is that I wouldn't have to have it in the same room as the computer,

00:59:46 ◼   ► so then I probably didn't care how noisy it is.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Because you're right, I know how noisy a drive is, and even if you have a fanless

00:59:53 ◼   ► device which would not be very smart, yeah, the drives make noise.

00:59:56 ◼   ► So that's why I don't want to buy the new Apple router thing with the fan in it, because

01:00:00 ◼   ► I wouldn't buy the time capsule version.

01:00:02 ◼   ► It has a fan?

01:00:03 ◼   ► Yes, they all have fans.

01:00:04 ◼   ► I didn't know that.

01:00:05 ◼   ► The time capsule ones have fans, and even the ones without the time capsule, because

01:00:07 ◼   ► it's the same case.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:09 ◼   ► They just leave it empty, but yeah, they all have fans, so I don't know.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Oh, man.

01:00:13 ◼   ► I'm looking at it like, yeah.

01:00:14 ◼   ► Plus, it's like this weird vertical, ugly telephone booth thing, so.

01:00:18 ◼   ► I was thinking about buying that, because I'm having some range issues.

01:00:21 ◼   ► I've always had some range issues with the current one, which is in the aforementioned

01:00:25 ◼   ► closet.

01:00:26 ◼   ► the fan wouldn't bother me that much, but still that sucks that it has a fan. Although,

01:00:29 ◼   ► did you know the first generation Apple TV had a fan? Most people didn't know that.

01:00:35 ◼   ► But it was just really, really quiet most of the time.

01:00:37 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, it was like a Mac Mini, the first generation Apple TV.

01:00:41 ◼   ► Yeah, like a very, very low-spec one.

01:00:44 ◼   ► Yeah, that got super hot even with the fan.

01:00:46 ◼   ► Yes, it really did.

01:00:47 ◼   ► Wait, to go back a step, why wouldn't you just drop like an AirPort Express or another

01:00:52 ◼   ► the other airport extreme in a different part of the house,

01:00:54 ◼   ► if the house is all wired with cat six?

01:00:56 ◼   ► - Basically complexity and interference.

01:00:59 ◼   ► I had that set up in a couple of apartments

01:01:01 ◼   ► before I bought the house,

01:01:04 ◼   ► 'cause a lot of old apartments have very,

01:01:06 ◼   ► very severe range problems 'cause of what's in the walls,

01:01:08 ◼   ► 'cause it's so old and it's all like, you know,

01:01:10 ◼   ► metal sheeting and brick and stuff that is not

01:01:13 ◼   ► very radio friendly.

01:01:15 ◼   ► And so yeah, in two apartments I had like the airport

01:01:20 ◼   ► as the home base station, and then like a little

01:01:22 ◼   ► Airport Express, usually wired, like with a very long cable

01:01:27 ◼   ► from the base station.

01:01:28 ◼   ► And it never worked that well.

01:01:31 ◼   ► Like sometimes your devices would pick the wrong one,

01:01:35 ◼   ► and then the connection would just be really bad,

01:01:37 ◼   ► and they wouldn't switch to the other one,

01:01:38 ◼   ► even though it would have a better reception.

01:01:40 ◼   ► - Did you have it set up with like that fancy Apple--

01:01:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, WDS.

01:01:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:01:46 ◼   ► That didn't make a difference?

01:01:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, WDS is not just an Apple thing,

01:01:49 ◼   ► but Apple has, like if you use all Apple stuff,

01:01:51 ◼   ► it makes it a lot easier to use it.

01:01:53 ◼   ► - Right, right.

01:01:54 ◼   ► - And yeah, I tried that and it really didn't,

01:01:58 ◼   ► it didn't do much, it wasn't very good.

01:02:00 ◼   ► So like if that's your only option to get good range,

01:02:04 ◼   ► then you know, do what you gotta do.

01:02:06 ◼   ► But if there's any other alternative,

01:02:08 ◼   ► like if you can just buy a better router

01:02:09 ◼   ► and have better range from one router,

01:02:11 ◼   ► that's a better way to go, if that'll cover your area.

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01:02:45 ◼   ► So what does all that mean?

01:02:48 ◼   ► It's designed with your modern social lifestyle in mind.

01:02:50 ◼   ► FileTransporter is an enclosure, a drive enclosure,

01:02:53 ◼   ► with or without a drive.

01:02:54 ◼   ► You can supply your own.

01:02:55 ◼   ► You can buy one directly from them.

01:02:57 ◼   ► It's an enclosure that looks pretty cool with a network

01:03:00 ◼   ► port on the back.

01:03:01 ◼   ► So it is basically a NAS enclosure,

01:03:03 ◼   ► but with some special software that allows

01:03:05 ◼   ► you to do some special things.

01:03:06 ◼   ► So one thing is they integrate directly into Finder,

01:03:10 ◼   ► and very similar to how Dropbox integrates.

01:03:13 ◼   ► And you can use it in a similar way

01:03:15 ◼   ► that you would use Dropbox, where you have a special synced

01:03:19 ◼   ► folder, and you have Finder integration with right-click

01:03:22 ◼   ► links and sharing links and stuff like that.

01:03:24 ◼   ► But all this data is stored on that physical device

01:03:27 ◼   ► that you own, on that physical hard drive sitting in your house

01:03:30 ◼   ► somewhere, or your office.

01:03:32 ◼   ► And so it isn't sitting on someone else's servers.

01:03:35 ◼   ► It's huge security implications there, huge ownership

01:03:39 ◼   ► implications there.

01:03:41 ◼   ► And you can still-- if you have multiple transporter devices--

01:03:44 ◼   ► Let's say your friend has one, or you have one at home

01:03:47 ◼   ► and one at work.

01:03:48 ◼   ► You can selectively share files or folders

01:03:51 ◼   ► between any two transporters, or any number of transporters,

01:03:54 ◼   ► with only the people you select.

01:03:56 ◼   ► So it's nice and secure.

01:03:57 ◼   ► End-to-end encryption with all communication

01:03:59 ◼   ► that goes over the internet, so all the data

01:04:01 ◼   ► can be read by nobody in transit.

01:04:03 ◼   ► And if you have multiple transporters,

01:04:06 ◼   ► they will automatically sync these shared folders

01:04:08 ◼   ► to each other.

01:04:08 ◼   ► So you really get a lot of that Dropbox-like functionality,

01:04:11 ◼   ► a lot of that convenience of cloud storage,

01:04:14 ◼   ► without having to have your data be held by somebody else.

01:04:17 ◼   ► And not to mention that you can get a heck of a lot more space

01:04:20 ◼   ► on one of these things you can get from Dropbox way,

01:04:23 ◼   ► way cheaper.

01:04:24 ◼   ► So just to give you some idea before we get to the end,

01:04:26 ◼   ► and I have to tell you pricing anyway,

01:04:28 ◼   ► these things are really affordable.

01:04:29 ◼   ► So the empty enclosure, the empty transporter,

01:04:32 ◼   ► you supply any 2 and 1/2 inch hard drive, it's $200.

01:04:36 ◼   ► You can get a one terabyte drive built in for a total of $300

01:04:40 ◼   ► or two terabyte for $400.

01:04:42 ◼   ► And if you use our coupon code, code ATP in their store,

01:04:47 ◼   ► you can save 10%.

01:04:48 ◼   ► That's 40 bucks off the big one.

01:04:49 ◼   ► That's a big chunk of money.

01:04:51 ◼   ► So you can look at these things at filetransporter.com.

01:04:54 ◼   ► If you go to filetransporter.com/ATP,

01:04:56 ◼   ► they'll know you came from us.

01:04:58 ◼   ► That's filetransporter.com/ATP.

01:04:59 ◼   ► So what else does this do?

01:05:01 ◼   ► So you can have automatic offsite backup.

01:05:04 ◼   ► That's a huge use for this.

01:05:05 ◼   ► We were just talking about,

01:05:07 ◼   ► actually I need to revisit that topic

01:05:09 ◼   ► when we get back to the show.

01:05:11 ◼   ► just talking about how the heck do you back up

01:05:13 ◼   ► network attack storage.

01:05:14 ◼   ► With Transporter, there's a really great option

01:05:16 ◼   ► if you buy two of them.

01:05:18 ◼   ► You put one in your house and one in your office,

01:05:20 ◼   ► or your friend's house, or your parent's house,

01:05:22 ◼   ► or something maybe geographically far away.

01:05:25 ◼   ► Then you can have these things automatically back up

01:05:27 ◼   ► to each other all the time.

01:05:28 ◼   ► And so you have a constant off-site backup in real time.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And again, everything is encrypted end to end,

01:05:35 ◼   ► so it's really, really secure.

01:05:37 ◼   ► And it's also great for collaboration between people.

01:05:40 ◼   ► Let's say John and Casey have to send me their audio files

01:05:44 ◼   ► after every show we do.

01:05:45 ◼   ► If we were all using transporters,

01:05:47 ◼   ► which we're working on, but if we were all using transporters,

01:05:50 ◼   ► then we could just have this one shared folder,

01:05:53 ◼   ► and everyone could just drop their audio

01:05:54 ◼   ► in that shared folder.

01:05:55 ◼   ► And it just syncs everywhere using

01:05:57 ◼   ► direct traffic between our devices,

01:06:00 ◼   ► and nobody in the middle able to read the data,

01:06:02 ◼   ► including the NSA or anybody else.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And well, unless they've cracked the encryption,

01:06:07 ◼   ► I think it's unlikely.

01:06:08 ◼   ► This is pretty good encryption.

01:06:10 ◼   ► And so you can have this awesome collaboration

01:06:14 ◼   ► with very large files that would be

01:06:15 ◼   ► prohibitive on other services, or would be just really, really

01:06:19 ◼   ► expensive, or just not allowed.

01:06:21 ◼   ► It wouldn't fit.

01:06:22 ◼   ► It's a really great solution here for collaboration,

01:06:25 ◼   ► for sharing.

01:06:26 ◼   ► If you want to have one at your parents or one at your house,

01:06:29 ◼   ► then you can have a shared photo directory.

01:06:31 ◼   ► So you can take pictures or videos of the kids

01:06:33 ◼   ► and have your parents or grandparents see them.

01:06:35 ◼   ► There's all sorts of uses for this kind of thing.

01:06:38 ◼   ► Confidential documents.

01:06:40 ◼   ► There's just so many uses for having

01:06:42 ◼   ► your own personal physical ownership of a device that

01:06:46 ◼   ► is still easily accessible and shareable on the cloud.

01:06:50 ◼   ► So that's Transporter.

01:06:52 ◼   ► This is a really great product.

01:06:53 ◼   ► It's a really great idea.

01:06:56 ◼   ► Check these guys out.

01:06:57 ◼   ► Go to filetransporter.com/atp so they know you came from us.

01:07:01 ◼   ► It helps support the show and check out their product.

01:07:04 ◼   ► If you buy one, use coupon code ATP, all lowercase.

01:07:08 ◼   ► save 10% off their already very great prices.

01:07:11 ◼   ► And also, by the way, those prices, before I forget,

01:07:14 ◼   ► there is no monthly fee to use all these different internet

01:07:17 ◼   ► connected services.

01:07:17 ◼   ► So sharing services, they manage--

01:07:20 ◼   ► you don't have to have your own dynamic DNS

01:07:23 ◼   ► thing in the middle so that you can find your transporter.

01:07:25 ◼   ► They have a server that manages all this stuff for you.

01:07:27 ◼   ► They keep track of the IP for your device.

01:07:30 ◼   ► So everything just-- you don't have to worry about all that.

01:07:33 ◼   ► But there's no monthly fee for that.

01:07:34 ◼   ► If you just buy the device, lifetime access to the server

01:07:37 ◼   ► included. So go to filetransporter.com/ATP to learn more about this awesome device. There's

01:07:43 ◼   ► so much. This is their third sponsorship. Every one I've brought up different things.

01:07:47 ◼   ► So there's so much to talk about with this device. Really check this thing out. It's

01:07:52 ◼   ► a great device. A lot of uses and very unique. I don't know of anything else in the industry

01:07:57 ◼   ► that's like this. So check them out. Thanks a lot to Transporter for sponsoring the show.

01:08:02 ◼   ► Yeah, you know what it is? If you didn't want to go the nuclear option of like a Synology

01:08:06 ◼   ► or Synology, whatever we're calling it, or Drobo, but you still wanted a fairly, a really

01:08:11 ◼   ► cheap, but not bad cheap, good cheap, network attached storage that actually does more than

01:08:17 ◼   ► just sit there on your own network that you can never access from anywhere else. This

01:08:21 ◼   ► is your ultimate answer. And I've been using one that they sent me, which is very nice

01:08:25 ◼   ► to them, and I really, really like it. It really is really nice.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, and you know, I don't think it has to be, you know, this is one of the reasons

01:08:32 ◼   ► why I'm comfortable talking about this

01:08:34 ◼   ► in the middle of a NAS discussion.

01:08:36 ◼   ► I don't think it has to be mutually exclusive

01:08:38 ◼   ► between this and a NAS.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I think these are different use cases.

01:08:40 ◼   ► - No, that's true, you're right.

01:08:42 ◼   ► - You know, like, I think a lot of people

01:08:45 ◼   ► are going to be fine with one or the other,

01:08:46 ◼   ► but a lot of people could really use both.

01:08:48 ◼   ► You know, it really is about what's your use case here.

01:08:50 ◼   ► And the transporter does things that I don't think,

01:08:53 ◼   ► I don't know of any NAS that does similar things.

01:08:56 ◼   ► And it's all, you know, very integrated and everything.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And it really is a very unique device.

01:09:02 ◼   ► and very cool.

01:09:05 ◼   ► All right, so back to our NAS backup question.

01:09:09 ◼   ► I hope this isn't too boring, so I'm

01:09:11 ◼   ► going to go through it quickly.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Basically, Backblaze won't back up network attacks drives.

01:09:17 ◼   ► They might back up iSCSI.

01:09:18 ◼   ► I will know that eventually if I ever try iSCSI.

01:09:21 ◼   ► My fear with iSCSI is, as we said before,

01:09:24 ◼   ► I'm worried about what if the next version of OS X comes out.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And there's only, as far as I know, two major iSCSI initiators for it.

01:09:34 ◼   ► There's GlobalSan and Atto.

01:09:37 ◼   ► And the GlobalSan one's free.

01:09:38 ◼   ► Atto's 200 bucks, I think.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Dave Nainian of SuperDuper fame, which is an awesome app for cloning drives and backing

01:09:46 ◼   ► up, he strongly recommended the $200 Atto one.

01:09:50 ◼   ► He said it's significantly better and that he's seen a lot of people have trouble with

01:09:53 ◼   ► the GlobalSan one.

01:09:54 ◼   ► tried either of them yet, but he is pretty qualified

01:09:57 ◼   ► to know things like storage and people having trouble

01:10:00 ◼   ► from Macs using hard drives.

01:10:02 ◼   ► So the guy who makes SuperDuper knows that stuff pretty well.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I would imagine his support email alone

01:10:08 ◼   ► is a vast treasure trove of Mac storage related issues.

01:10:13 ◼   ► So I'm inclined to try the Ado one,

01:10:17 ◼   ► but then again, it's like, what happens

01:10:20 ◼   ► if an OS update breaks this?

01:10:22 ◼   ► Then you can't access your shares or your drives

01:10:23 ◼   ► your time machine. So I'm a little wary about that. You know, Windows, I believe for a long

01:10:30 ◼   ► time now, I think for a couple of versions, has supported iSCSI initiation just in Windows.

01:10:37 ◼   ► And I don't think we know why Apple doesn't do it in Mac OS X, except they just haven't

01:10:41 ◼   ► cared yet or haven't had time yet. I don't really know the reason. Maybe there's... I

01:10:46 ◼   ► assume there's no like weird patent issues or anything, but for whatever reason Apple

01:10:50 ◼   ► doesn't support it directly yet, so you have to have these third-party things. And obviously

01:10:53 ◼   ► These are probably kernel level extensions.

01:10:55 ◼   ► And that's kind of questionable.

01:10:57 ◼   ► I don't know, John, what do you think about that stuff?

01:11:00 ◼   ► I prefer to run no third party kernel extensions

01:11:04 ◼   ► if I can help it at all.

01:11:05 ◼   ► I mean, getting back to the old Mac Pro again,

01:11:07 ◼   ► that was the beauty of the thing.

01:11:09 ◼   ► That's why I would buy the biggest video card that could

01:11:12 ◼   ► come with, because I didn't want to buy an aftermarket video

01:11:14 ◼   ► card and have to deal with the video driver, because who

01:11:15 ◼   ► knows how that would flake out.

01:11:17 ◼   ► So I'm totally on board with the--

01:11:18 ◼   ► and I slowly weaned myself off every other one of the memory

01:11:22 ◼   ► resident hacking things, like the various application enhancer and symbol plugins and

01:11:27 ◼   ► stuff like that.

01:11:28 ◼   ► I'm just trying to get that stuff out.

01:11:29 ◼   ► So I'm really hesitant to bring in anything else like that, especially something for storage.

01:11:37 ◼   ► Maybe if it was officially supported by Apple.

01:11:39 ◼   ► That's even more like Fusion Drive.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Apple says, "Not really technically supported to make your own Fusion Drives," but it totally

01:11:45 ◼   ► is.

01:11:46 ◼   ► You can use the command line utilities.

01:11:47 ◼   ► on command line utilities, and yet I still feel wary that someone at Apple is not QAing

01:11:54 ◼   ► the setup that I've created with my external fusion drive because it's not part of their

01:11:57 ◼   ► QA automation and they're going to accidentally break it and not know it and I'm going to

01:12:00 ◼   ► be the poor sucker that finds out.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Right, exactly. So yeah, I'm not a big fan of the idea of iSCSI. It sounds like it would

01:12:09 ◼   ► be awesome in practice, not for a network share because only really one computer can

01:12:13 ◼   ► access it responsibly at a time. But certainly for each of our computers' time machines,

01:12:19 ◼   ► that would be perfect.

01:12:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not the technology. iSCSI is fine. It's the fact that Apple, you have

01:12:26 ◼   ► to install a third-party driver.

01:12:28 ◼   ► Right, it's a client issue. And yeah, I'm with you. It makes me very uncomfortable to

01:12:33 ◼   ► have to rely on or even have installed any third-party kernel extensions. I really would

01:12:38 ◼   ► prefer not to or to minimize them.

01:12:40 ◼   ► So I'm probably going to keep with the possibly hacked

01:12:45 ◼   ► network setup that they have, where they're just emulating

01:12:48 ◼   ► the Mac OS X slash time machine server or time capsule server

01:12:52 ◼   ► thing.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Because it works so far.

01:12:54 ◼   ► I'll see you in practice.

01:12:55 ◼   ► But yeah, I'll see.

01:12:58 ◼   ► So anyway, for backup, obviously backing up your time machine

01:13:01 ◼   ► drive to a cloud service is probably not necessary.

01:13:03 ◼   ► It might even be problematic because of its structure.

01:13:06 ◼   ► So I don't back that up to a cloud service.

01:13:08 ◼   ► But I should point out too, there was an article--

01:13:12 ◼   ► I don't know, it's probably out of date now.

01:13:14 ◼   ► I was trying to find it during the discussion

01:13:17 ◼   ► before the sponsorship.

01:13:19 ◼   ► There was an article somewhere-- I'd

01:13:21 ◼   ► love the link if anybody can find it-- that compared all

01:13:23 ◼   ► of the popular online backup services

01:13:26 ◼   ► and how they handle Mac file system metadata.

01:13:30 ◼   ► It was from the Arc guy, wasn't it?

01:13:31 ◼   ► Yes, because Arc won, basically.

01:13:33 ◼   ► But I can't find this right now.

01:13:35 ◼   ► If somebody finds it, I'll put the link in the show notes.

01:13:37 ◼   ► And I've been complaining about that for years.

01:13:39 ◼   ► I can first complain to Backblaze, then to CrashPlan.

01:13:43 ◼   ► It's pretty much trivial to create

01:13:45 ◼   ► a file with a bunch of Mac-specific metadata

01:13:47 ◼   ► and then back it up and then bring it back down and see

01:13:49 ◼   ► how much of it you've lost.

01:13:50 ◼   ► And in practice, mostly doesn't matter.

01:13:52 ◼   ► But it's like, after a certain number of years,

01:13:54 ◼   ► especially if you're pitching your product to Mac users,

01:13:58 ◼   ► you should pick up the ball.

01:14:00 ◼   ► And Backblaze, to its credit, has

01:14:01 ◼   ► gotten a lot better since the way it

01:14:03 ◼   ► started years and years ago.

01:14:05 ◼   ► But I think Arc is still the only one that's at 100%.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

01:14:11 ◼   ► Because Arc is like-- Backblaze and CrashPlan both have

01:14:14 ◼   ► these kind of Java heavy APIs.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Or I don't know if Backblaze actually is Java.

01:14:18 ◼   ► No, Backblaze is not Java.

01:14:19 ◼   ► It's not a good interface, though.

01:14:22 ◼   ► The settings pane I really don't care for for Backblaze.

01:14:25 ◼   ► It's better than the Java thing from CrashPlan,

01:14:28 ◼   ► but it's not great.

01:14:30 ◼   ► I've had some weird UI issues with it over time.

01:14:34 ◼   ► where it works and the data is backed up,

01:14:37 ◼   ► but sometimes the UI is a little confusing or clunky.

01:14:40 ◼   ► So not a huge fan of Backblaze's interface,

01:14:43 ◼   ► but Arc is like a real Mac app made

01:14:46 ◼   ► by a real Mac nerd who obviously is really

01:14:50 ◼   ► into getting it very Mac native and getting that right.

01:14:53 ◼   ► And so I really respect that.

01:14:59 ◼   ► And that's obviously one of the reasons

01:15:01 ◼   ► why he cares so much about getting all the Mac metadata right.

01:15:05 ◼   ► Anyway.

01:15:06 ◼   ► It's kind of like something that you could talk to Dave Naney about, because a lot of

01:15:09 ◼   ► the cases with the esoteric Mac metadata, it's not so much that either Backblazer Crash

01:15:13 ◼   ► Pan isn't doing it because of some technical reason.

01:15:16 ◼   ► A lot of times, it's like a policy decision.

01:15:17 ◼   ► It's like, "All right, well, this thing has ACLs, but it's mounted with the permissions

01:15:24 ◼   ► off type of thing."

01:15:25 ◼   ► You're not even sure what the right thing to do is.

01:15:27 ◼   ► UID should I attach to this if it's mounted with permissions off, but I see that there's

01:15:32 ◼   ► an ACL on it as well.

01:15:34 ◼   ► You don't even know what the right thing to do is.

01:15:37 ◼   ► What does this person want?

01:15:38 ◼   ► And when they restore it, the environment could be totally different and things could

01:15:42 ◼   ► have shifted.

01:15:45 ◼   ► It's not always clear what you should be doing.

01:15:47 ◼   ► So I think a lot of these bigger backup things are like, "Look, we can't even figure out

01:15:51 ◼   ► what to do with that thing.

01:15:53 ◼   ► So we're just going to drop it on the table and make sure that it works.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Ownership is an obvious one.

01:15:59 ◼   ► Say you back up something and you delete that account and someone else comes on an account

01:16:04 ◼   ► with the same UID.

01:16:05 ◼   ► You have to just forget about ownership.

01:16:07 ◼   ► It's like NFS.

01:16:08 ◼   ► Oh, well, your UIDs have to match or you need some sort of directory service or some sort

01:16:13 ◼   ► of configuration file to map your UID.

01:16:15 ◼   ► There's no real distributed identification, internet-wide identification, and UIDs are

01:16:20 ◼   ► so...

01:16:21 ◼   ► It's just a number.

01:16:22 ◼   ► It's not a good way.

01:16:23 ◼   ► So the policy decision surrounding

01:16:26 ◼   ► ownership or any other kind of metadata

01:16:28 ◼   ► associated with files is difficult.

01:16:29 ◼   ► And people just want it to work.

01:16:31 ◼   ► They just want their data back.

01:16:32 ◼   ► So you're like, oh, this didn't exactly preserve.

01:16:35 ◼   ► It's not exactly the way it was when I put it up.

01:16:38 ◼   ► What's the difference?

01:16:38 ◼   ► Well, if the ownership changed, you probably

01:16:40 ◼   ► don't care that much.

01:16:41 ◼   ► Unless one of the things was set UID root

01:16:43 ◼   ► and now your application won't run

01:16:44 ◼   ► because you tried to restore it.

01:16:46 ◼   ► God, file systems are terrible.

01:16:50 ◼   ► Naturally, you had to throw that in there.

01:16:52 ◼   ► It wouldn't be a complete discussion about storage

01:16:54 ◼   ► without a Syracuse file system complaint.

01:16:59 ◼   ► Anyway, so my backup solution for the NAS

01:17:03 ◼   ► is a time machine I don't back up to the cloud because

01:17:08 ◼   ► of issues.

01:17:09 ◼   ► And the network shares that I've created, right now I'm

01:17:13 ◼   ► using Arc on the Mac to back it up via the network mount

01:17:17 ◼   ► to Amazon Glacier.

01:17:19 ◼   ► And Glacier, for those unfamiliar,

01:17:20 ◼   ► is kind of like S3 in that it's an Amazon storage service

01:17:26 ◼   ► that you can access, just pay per use.

01:17:29 ◼   ► But it doesn't really work anything like S3.

01:17:32 ◼   ► It's made for long-term archival storage,

01:17:34 ◼   ► of stuff that you probably will never have to look at.

01:17:37 ◼   ► And if you do ever need to look at it,

01:17:40 ◼   ► you don't mind it being delayed by like five hours

01:17:42 ◼   ► to go retrieve it.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And so for online and backup, it makes a lot of sense

01:17:46 ◼   ► in a number of ways.

01:17:47 ◼   ► There's a few weird things about it that make it a little inconvenient.

01:17:50 ◼   ► But the great thing about it is that it's dirt cheap.

01:17:53 ◼   ► I believe it's a cent per gig per month, something like that.

01:17:57 ◼   ► So backing up a terabyte is like $10 a month.

01:17:59 ◼   ► It's something like that.

01:18:00 ◼   ► It's not as cheap as backblazing Crash Plan.

01:18:02 ◼   ► It isn't, you're right.

01:18:04 ◼   ► But it's way cheaper than S3, which I believe the base rate for S3 is still eight cents

01:18:09 ◼   ► a gig.

01:18:10 ◼   ► So it's like eight times cheaper or something like that.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why Arc was a nonstarter back when it came out, because it was the S3 backend.

01:18:15 ◼   ► I have like five terabytes up on these free online--

01:18:18 ◼   ► or at least not free-- these $5 a month online backups

01:18:20 ◼   ► or whatever it's at now.

01:18:21 ◼   ► And so, yeah, if I had to S3 that, that's too much for me.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:18:24 ◼   ► So-- and CrashPlan, the reason I tried it

01:18:27 ◼   ► is that CrashPlan does backup network stuff

01:18:30 ◼   ► if you tell it to.

01:18:31 ◼   ► And as far as I can tell, that doesn't

01:18:33 ◼   ► appear as though it's going to change anytime soon.

01:18:35 ◼   ► It seems like that actually is their official policy

01:18:37 ◼   ► to backup network stuff.

01:18:39 ◼   ► So Backblaze went through it.

01:18:41 ◼   ► CrashPlan so far will, if you can tolerate their slow up

01:18:45 ◼   ► if you have that problem from your connection.

01:18:47 ◼   ► And Arc will do it directly to S3 or Glacier,

01:18:51 ◼   ► which is awesome and very nicely integrated,

01:18:54 ◼   ► but has high storage cost per month

01:18:55 ◼   ► relative to their services.

01:18:56 ◼   ► So there's no perfect solution for most people.

01:19:02 ◼   ► For me, I'm using Glacier through Arc,

01:19:04 ◼   ► and it's going to end up being something like $10 or $15

01:19:08 ◼   ► a month for what I'm putting up there.

01:19:12 ◼   ► So I'll see.

01:19:14 ◼   ► That's what I'm doing so far.

01:19:15 ◼   ► It's worked.

01:19:16 ◼   ► I uploaded the whole set already of what's there so far.

01:19:19 ◼   ► And yeah, so far so good.

01:19:22 ◼   ► There's a number of other advantages to Arc as well.

01:19:24 ◼   ► We should really talk about this in more detail.

01:19:26 ◼   ► Well, honestly, we probably shouldn't talk about it

01:19:28 ◼   ► in more detail sometime.

01:19:29 ◼   ► But one of the cool things about Arc

01:19:30 ◼   ► is that it's storing data on Amazon S3 or Glacier, which

01:19:34 ◼   ► are these services that you kind of control because you sign up

01:19:39 ◼   ► for Amazon Web Services, and then it's your access keys

01:19:42 ◼   ► that it's using to access the stuff and to put it up there.

01:19:44 ◼   ► So you can always use any other S3 client or access method

01:19:49 ◼   ► and look at your data directly yourself without involving Arc.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And then the data format, they've

01:19:55 ◼   ► actually documented the data format.

01:19:58 ◼   ► And they even have this open source GitHub restore tool

01:20:02 ◼   ► so that you can always look and see how do you restore data.

01:20:05 ◼   ► So if Arc's maker, Haystack's offer,

01:20:08 ◼   ► if they ever go away or become dicks or something,

01:20:11 ◼   ► you can always go and just get your data off there.

01:20:14 ◼   ► and without being proprietary locked into someone else's

01:20:17 ◼   ► server.

01:20:17 ◼   ► So there's a number of cool things about it,

01:20:19 ◼   ► as long as you can swallow that much higher storage

01:20:22 ◼   ► cost than the other options, which

01:20:23 ◼   ► is admittedly a pretty big problem for a lot of data.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I think that's all I have on this topic so far.

01:20:32 ◼   ► What do you guys-- do you have anything to add?

01:20:35 ◼   ► This has been kind of the Marco show, unfortunately.

01:20:36 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Well, it happens.

01:20:39 ◼   ► I actually don't have any particular thing to add on that.

01:20:41 ◼   ► I mean, I'd love to get something like that,

01:20:43 ◼   ► But to be honest, my data storage needs just aren't that big.

01:20:47 ◼   ► I don't generate that much data.

01:20:48 ◼   ► We don't have a kid.

01:20:49 ◼   ► We don't have fancy cameras.

01:20:50 ◼   ► So for me, that's just not a need I have.

01:20:54 ◼   ► But John, I would assume you have at least a couple questions.

01:20:57 ◼   ► I mean, I still don't know what I'm going to do

01:21:00 ◼   ► when I get my fancy new Mac Pro.

01:21:02 ◼   ► I'm thinking about why do I have all this data.

01:21:04 ◼   ► The stupid dream that I've had since I had a Mac 128K

01:21:09 ◼   ► with a floppy drive has been every time I

01:21:11 ◼   ► get a new computer, you know, and storage space was going up so much. I'm like, "All

01:21:15 ◼   ► right, on this new computer, I'll be able to fit everything from my old computer plus

01:21:20 ◼   ► all the stuff I have that I had to take off my old computer because it didn't fit."

01:21:24 ◼   ► So that box of floppy disks next to it, or when I had a hard drive, I had to have a bunch

01:21:28 ◼   ► of stuff that I can't fit on the hard drive. But it's not that important. It's like old

01:21:31 ◼   ► stuff. I'm not really into it, but I have to put it on the side. But I'm like, "Boy,

01:21:33 ◼   ► when I get that next computer, I'll be able to have all my current stuff plus everything

01:21:37 ◼   ► from my entire lifetime back," because it's so small. Like, how big was the stuff that

01:21:41 ◼   ► was on my Mac 128K, how big was the stuff that was on my Mac Plus, you know?

01:21:44 ◼   ► And like, it's so tiny compared to, you know, it's like the hockey stick graph of the iPhone

01:21:48 ◼   ► sales.

01:21:49 ◼   ► Like, this new hard drive will hold everything I have now plus everything I've ever created

01:21:52 ◼   ► my entire life, right?

01:21:54 ◼   ► And that has never quite been the case.

01:21:56 ◼   ► So for example, like, I have an external one terabyte here just holding WWDC videos for

01:22:01 ◼   ► like the past three years, right, because I wanted to reference them when I'm writing

01:22:03 ◼   ► my review.

01:22:04 ◼   ► And I couldn't put them on my main drive because if I put them on my main drive, they'll start

01:22:07 ◼   ► go into my backup vortex and my main drive is ever so slightly bigger than my other backup

01:22:14 ◼   ► ones, and so I won't be able to make the super duper clone because I'd have to exclude, you

01:22:18 ◼   ► know, it's just easier to get them out of there, right?

01:22:22 ◼   ► I have stuff backed up on drives that are shut, like all my Apple videos, I'm like,

01:22:26 ◼   ► "Do I really need to see the videos from WWDC 2003?

01:22:30 ◼   ► Do I need those to be on my hard drive?"

01:22:31 ◼   ► No, I probably don't, so put them off.

01:22:33 ◼   ► And so I keep thinking that the next computer I'm going to get is like, "All right, I can

01:22:36 ◼   ► I can finally bring all that stuff in.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Come on guys, WWC 2003, it's your time to be on the hard drive again.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Just because it's convenient for me to get at that.

01:22:42 ◼   ► You know, like, sometimes I just want, I don't want to go rummaging through things and figuring

01:22:45 ◼   ► out what disk something was on.

01:22:47 ◼   ► I just want it all to be there, right?

01:22:50 ◼   ► And so maybe the NAS gives me that.

01:22:51 ◼   ► It's like, well, finally I can put like 12 terabytes.

01:22:53 ◼   ► Surely I can fit everything in there.

01:22:55 ◼   ► And then I won't feel guilty about having just gigs upon gigs upon gigs of Apple videos

01:22:59 ◼   ► and whatever else in there.

01:23:01 ◼   ► And I don't even forget about, I know that people who are like, have tons and tons of

01:23:04 ◼   ► both legal and illegal movies and stuff. I don't even do that. I have Blu-rays, DVDs.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I do not have digital versions of those. So I'm not even entering that area. I'm just

01:23:12 ◼   ► talking about my digital crap, which is like maybe, at this point, 100 gigs or so of photos,

01:23:18 ◼   ► plus probably more than that. I have more Apple video than I do pictures of my own children

01:23:24 ◼   ► at this point. Although maybe they'll cross over at some point. But the problem is WDC

01:23:29 ◼   ► 2013 is like 1080p video, and that stuff is big.

01:23:33 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you can download lower res, but still, it is--

01:23:36 ◼   ► even the lower res ones are like a gig per session

01:23:38 ◼   ► or something.

01:23:39 ◼   ► I almost considered downloading lower res,

01:23:40 ◼   ► and like, no, you'll regret it later

01:23:42 ◼   ► when you have your three-petabyte holographic cube.

01:23:45 ◼   ► You'll be like, damn it, I should download the 1080p.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Those things are nothing now compared

01:23:49 ◼   ► to my holographic cube.

01:23:51 ◼   ► Well, my rule is like, if it's something

01:23:53 ◼   ► that can be probably easily re-downloaded from somewhere

01:23:57 ◼   ► in the future, I don't need to even store it most of the time.

01:24:01 ◼   ► And if I do choose to store it, I don't really

01:24:02 ◼   ► that up to more than just like, you know, like the NAS has its own built-in raid level

01:24:08 ◼   ► to prevent against some of those failures and Time Machine is another level, but like,

01:24:12 ◼   ► you know, like I don't need to necessarily cloud back up WWDC videos.

01:24:15 ◼   ► Well, but the thing is I don't assume that I can re-download them and, you know, like

01:24:20 ◼   ► I assume they'll like go away and I won't be able to, like just look at their stupid

01:24:22 ◼   ► developer documentation URLs. Every single major release those things break. So I'm like,

01:24:26 ◼   ► oh, forget it. I'm never going to be able to get these videos again. I got to grab them

01:24:28 ◼   ► them now, and that's it. I'm never going to find them again.

01:24:34 ◼   ► For me, some of the stuff, like Apple has the Apple Keynote podcast feed. I think they

01:24:39 ◼   ► call it Apple Special Events or Apple Keynote, something like that. It's in the iTunes

01:24:42 ◼   ► store.

01:24:43 ◼   ► There's multiple feeds. There's the HD one, there's the 1080p one, which is not

01:24:46 ◼   ► confusing at all.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Right. And the 1080p one, in many cases, is just upscaled.

01:24:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

01:24:50 ◼   ► Anyway, so those, I save all of those, and I have those in long-term backup storage,

01:24:56 ◼   ► I do sometimes refer back to them, and it would suck not to have them.

01:25:00 ◼   ► For the same reason you have them. I'm sure you don't even have to ask. I know you have them.

01:25:04 ◼   ► I just looked at one in real media, a .rm file

01:25:08 ◼   ► today. I was just looking up the exact quote of like

01:25:12 ◼   ► WWC 1999 and I had it in .rm. It's also on YouTube.

01:25:16 ◼   ► But YouTube has made it more difficult to download. I tried to leach it from YouTube and the sync issues

01:25:20 ◼   ► were off, so I'm like, you know what, this real media file still plays and it's actually higher quality

01:25:24 ◼   ► than the YouTube one.

01:25:26 ◼   ► - But yeah, so stuff that's for historical reference

01:25:30 ◼   ► that I'm likely to look back on five or 10 years out

01:25:33 ◼   ► for some reason, that I'll keep, even if it's big videos.

01:25:36 ◼   ► But WWDC session videos, I very rarely find a reason

01:25:41 ◼   ► to look back more than one year on those,

01:25:43 ◼   ► and Apple still has those up from a year ago.

01:25:46 ◼   ► I think the first time I'm looking for something

01:25:50 ◼   ► from five years ago and can't find it,

01:25:52 ◼   ► then I'll start saving them.

01:25:54 ◼   ► I have a VHS tape of a WWDC thing, which I didn't go to.

01:25:59 ◼   ► It was before my time, but a friend of mine who has been going to Apple developer conferences

01:26:05 ◼   ► far longer than I have was cleaning out his basement.

01:26:07 ◼   ► He said, "Do you want this?"

01:26:08 ◼   ► I said, "You know what?

01:26:09 ◼   ► I think I do."

01:26:10 ◼   ► Do you still have a VHS tape player?

01:26:12 ◼   ► I do.

01:26:13 ◼   ► It's in the attic, but I haven't.

01:26:15 ◼   ► My Sony VCR that I bought when I got married still works.

01:26:19 ◼   ► That's awesome.

01:26:20 ◼   ► All right.

01:26:21 ◼   ► So is that it?

01:26:22 ◼   ► Anything else on that?

01:26:23 ◼   ► I think we should wrap it up before we talk about the two hours about VHS tapes and gigs

01:26:27 ◼   ► of videos.

01:26:28 ◼   ► I agree.

01:26:29 ◼   ► Alright, thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, MindBlitz App and FileTransporter.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:26:46 ◼   ► was accidental.

01:26:47 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't do any research.

01:26:52 ◼   ► Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental.

01:27:00 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

01:27:05 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:27:10 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:27:14 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:27:19 ◼   ► T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:27:26 ◼   ► It's accidental, accidental They didn't mean to, accidental, accidental

01:27:34 ◼   ► Tech podcast so long

01:27:38 ◼   ► Polygon Sandwich had a good line in the chat that I suppose she said that my kid should play Casey at letterpress

01:27:45 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:27:47 ◼   ► What a jerk.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Oh, getting back to the concentration game thing.

01:27:51 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:27:52 ◼   ► I didn't see that. Oh, that's funny.

01:27:54 ◼   ► I bet you I'd still lose.

01:27:56 ◼   ► We gotta make that happen, just to see.

01:27:58 ◼   ► No, don't. If you do, don't tell me.

01:28:00 ◼   ► 'Cause I—oh, god.

01:28:02 ◼   ► Sometimes she sees me playing and she says, "What are you spelling?"

01:28:04 ◼   ► Like, she's in Kindergarten, so she doesn't really know how to spell anything.

01:28:07 ◼   ► Oh, god.

01:28:08 ◼   ► You know, you should do—like, there's a lot to be said, Casey, for the technique that I have used very often in both this and Scrabble,

01:28:14 ◼   ► in Scrabble, which is, like, there's no time limit. Just start tapping letters. You don't

01:28:18 ◼   ► have to know if it's a word. Many times I'm surprised when I hit submit that the random

01:28:21 ◼   ► assortment of letters that I put up on the thing turns out to be a word.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Right, because there's no penalty for trying to submit a word.

01:28:27 ◼   ► Right. So I just sit there and I just try and try and try and, you know. It doesn't

01:28:33 ◼   ► work quite as well in letterpress as there's too many possibilities, but Scrabble works

01:28:37 ◼   ► really well because you just have the letters you have and the number of combinations is

01:28:41 ◼   ► actually quite small so yeah I just don't have the patience for that yeah

01:28:46 ◼   ► that's why you lose and lose and lose wah wah oh that's not the sound it makes

01:28:54 ◼   ► what what is the sound it makes that sort of phonetic spelling of a sound

01:28:59 ◼   ► sort of an onomatopoeia for the sand trombone should not have peas in it

01:29:03 ◼   ► there's no P at the end of a trombone sound oh it's sad wah wah would be a lot

01:29:09 ◼   ► closer. "Womp womp" sounds like you're banging something, like you're playing that

01:29:15 ◼   ► thing where the moles pop up from the arcade. What is that called?

01:29:18 ◼   ► "Wack-a-mole." There you go.

01:29:19 ◼   ► Oh, God. Only you would get this worked up about something so mundane.

01:29:22 ◼   ► I think I complained about it. I hate it. When I see—because it doesn't read right,

01:29:26 ◼   ► I read it and I'm like—for the longest time I didn't know what it meant, and I

01:29:29 ◼   ► bothered Googling it, and I'm like, "That does nothing like sad trombone noise."

01:29:33 ◼   ► "Whwh" would be way better. "Womwm" isn't good. "Womp?" It really looks like you're

01:29:40 ◼   ► hitting something. It makes no sense.

01:29:43 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:29:43 ◼   ► Do you disagree?

01:29:45 ◼   ► No, I don't know. I never really dug into the intricacies of whether my sad trombone

01:29:52 ◼   ► spelling was appropriate or not.

01:29:54 ◼   ► It's not yours. It's the Internet's. It's like the @ in front of the Twitter replies,

01:29:59 ◼   ► Which is so dumb, like @whatever.

01:30:01 ◼   ► I remember when that, whoever first invented that, I did not like it, and I mean, it's

01:30:07 ◼   ► not like I could fight against it, what could you do?

01:30:08 ◼   ► But you sort of could, because in 2007, in January, there was like 100 Twitter users

01:30:13 ◼   ► or whatever, but...

01:30:14 ◼   ► Uh, yay yay.

01:30:15 ◼   ► So to hopefully get us back on track in the thing that by definition doesn't have a track...

01:30:21 ◼   ► You think we're gonna get back on track after that?

01:30:23 ◼   ► No.

01:30:24 ◼   ► No, God no.

01:30:25 ◼   ► So what are we doing for titles?

01:30:26 ◼   ► We doing FullBricktor, we doing Jack Into Cyberspace?

01:30:28 ◼   ► I like Full Bricktor.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Jack in a Cyber Space is dumb.

01:30:31 ◼   ► It's hysterical, but I—

01:30:32 ◼   ► Because it's funny, and you said it.

01:30:33 ◼   ► That's why you think it's—

01:30:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I said it to be intentionally dumb.

01:30:36 ◼   ► Sure.

01:30:37 ◼   ► In any case, so I say Full Bricktor, and if we have a quorum on that, then that's good.

01:30:42 ◼   ► Now he'll listen to the show.

01:30:43 ◼   ► You put his name in the title, maybe he'll perk up.

01:30:45 ◼   ► Yeah, that's how we get him.

01:30:47 ◼   ► That's how we get him, yeah.

01:30:48 ◼   ► We're happy trolling him.

01:30:49 ◼   ► He'll listen to one episode.

01:30:50 ◼   ► I love how everyone tried to blame me for going on vacation.

01:30:55 ◼   ► Everyone totally missed the whom joke that Marky played.

01:30:57 ◼   ► There were a couple people that nailed it, but most people didn't.

01:30:59 ◼   ► All the replies that I saw, I guess I just only saw the ones that had mentioned me, they're

01:31:02 ◼   ► like, "Oh, it's you again."

01:31:03 ◼   ► No, he said whom.

01:31:04 ◼   ► It's clear who it is.

01:31:05 ◼   ► A lot of people thought Casey wrote that tweet, though, because of the whom.

01:31:10 ◼   ► Yeah, because you have not shared the credentials for that account with me, and I presume not

01:31:16 ◼   ► Jon either, so that's all you.

01:31:17 ◼   ► No, you're the only one that doesn't have it, Casey.

01:31:19 ◼   ► Jon and I both control it without you.

01:31:21 ◼   ► No, I do not put any tweet in that thing.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I disclaim all responsibility for tweets in that account.

01:31:26 ◼   ► I don't have the password.

01:31:28 ◼   ► I'll give it to you guys if you want.

01:31:29 ◼   ► I didn't think you cared.

01:31:30 ◼   ► I don't want it.

01:31:31 ◼   ► I don't want it.

01:31:32 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

01:31:33 ◼   ► Because I don't have enough.

01:31:34 ◼   ► My Twitter client situation is fraught enough as it is, and I don't need, like, multi-client

01:31:39 ◼   ► isn't handled that well by the ones that I use, and I don't want to add to my pile.

01:31:43 ◼   ► Then we'd have to then go into that stupid carrot initials ending every tweet so everyone

01:31:49 ◼   ► knows who it's from.

01:31:50 ◼   ► No, screw that.

01:31:51 ◼   ► We don't need to do the Paul and Storm thing where you do the bracket.

01:31:54 ◼   ► You don't know who Paul and Storm are.

01:31:55 ◼   ► I've heard of it.

01:31:56 ◼   ► See, this is my Dark Crystal moment for this week.

01:32:01 ◼   ► I'm cutting myself off, I'm not even giving you a chance, I'm just like, I've just decided

01:32:05 ◼   ► you don't know who that is.

01:32:06 ◼   ► You're right.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Yep.

01:32:08 ◼   ► I've heard those two words, or three words you can put in.

01:32:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I've heard those words in the English language.

01:32:13 ◼   ► As a unit.

01:32:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:15 ◼   ► And, goodnight.

01:32:16 ◼   ► Oh, I was Googling who the hell these people are.

01:32:20 ◼   ► Don't worry about it, don't worry about it, Casey.

01:32:22 ◼   ► Hey, Arlington, Virginia, that's relatively close to me.

01:32:24 ◼   ► There you go.

01:32:25 ◼   ► They have a joint Twitter account was the point and they do square bracket capital P

01:32:29 ◼   ► square bracket for Paul and S for Storm before each tweet as a system.

01:32:34 ◼   ► If we shared the credentials for that account I think part of the fun would be never signing

01:32:38 ◼   ► the tweets and everyone including each other could guess who the hell had posted them.

01:32:45 ◼   ► Although I don't know I suppose it would be pretty obvious because I'd use whom everywhere.

01:32:50 ◼   ► [ Audio