Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:08 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 98.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by TextExpander from Smile

00:00:16 ◼   ► and PingDum. My name is Myke Hurley, I am joined by the incomparable Mr. Jason Snell.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Hi Myke, how's it going? Very good, how are you? Good,

00:00:25 ◼   ► Good. Warmed up, ready to go. Ready for 98. Getting close. Getting close to 100 now.

00:00:30 ◼   ► - Gone. - Gone. That's, yep. Mm-hmm.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - Following up from last week, you found out a reason why your phone was pausing in the shower.

00:00:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's... The answer is, apparently, to a certain degree, that if you turn off

00:00:50 ◼   ► the Ahoy telephone feature in the iOS 10 beta, it stops a lot of the extraneous audio pauses.

00:00:56 ◼   ► So something weird is going on there. I heard from like five people who said that this was

00:01:01 ◼   ► a solution. I turned off Ahoy telephone and it solved it. I also heard from a few people who are

00:01:08 ◼   ► like irate, like, "Oh, this is outrageous. That's a key feature that you have to disconnect in order

00:01:12 ◼   ► to get this other thing to work." And it's like, "Yeah, it's a beta. That's how it works."

00:01:17 ◼   ► It sucks to be a beta, but that's the way it goes. Pick your poison. Would you like

00:01:24 ◼   ► your audio to play continuously, or would you like a Hoy telephone to work? If you want

00:01:28 ◼   ► both, don't use the beta. But anyway, I also heard from somebody who's on like a 5S who

00:01:35 ◼   ► said that this trick didn't work for him, so it may only be on certain hardware that

00:01:40 ◼   ► this solves it, and there may be a different bug. There's bugs! It's beta. There's bugs.

00:01:44 ◼   ► But anyway, if you are feeling the pain of having your audio pause randomly all the time,

00:01:52 ◼   ► turn off Ahoy!

00:01:53 ◼   ► Telephone in the iOS 10 beta and see what happens.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Was it triggering Siri?

00:02:01 ◼   ► It's possible.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:02:03 ◼   ► I wonder if there's something going on there where, yeah, something in the sound subsystem

00:02:08 ◼   ► is it's hearing something and it's pausing, but then it's not activating Siri.

00:02:14 ◼   ► it's it's maybe it gets to a point where it thinks it might activate and then it

00:02:18 ◼   ► decides it isn't but it's too late it's already paused the audio but who knows

00:02:21 ◼   ► there may be a very specific if you know the audio subsystem of iOS you know

00:02:27 ◼   ► exactly where this is I'm sure that they're aware of it that hopefully it

00:02:33 ◼   ► will be fixed in the next beta.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Was I talking last week on this show?

00:02:38 ◼   ► Yeah I was about not upgrading to the beta because of the Canary?

00:02:43 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, that was this show.

00:02:46 ◼   ► So I have had a bunch of people write in to tell me that Canary have updated their application

00:02:50 ◼   ► and it is now fixed, so it doesn't crash anymore on the iOS 10 beta.

00:02:56 ◼   ► But I am, and I've had a few people, especially that dastardly David Sparks, send me messages

00:03:03 ◼   ► telling me, "Oh, it's fine, you should update, you should, come over, the water's fine."

00:03:09 ◼   ► I am holding off and I'm quite proud of myself so far.

00:03:12 ◼   ► I have no intention of installing the iOS 10 beta on my phone right now.

00:03:18 ◼   ► I'm going to wait until the next beta at least and see the next developer beta and see kind

00:03:22 ◼   ► of what the state of affairs is.

00:03:24 ◼   ► But I really don't want to screw anything up.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And it really is the canary which is making me think like this.

00:03:31 ◼   ► The point where my phone is controlling security in my home and also going forward my lights

00:03:38 ◼   ► and stuff like that, I'm less inclined to put beta software on it, which is probably

00:03:43 ◼   ► why they'll never do a public beta for software in the Apple car. At the point where these

00:03:49 ◼   ► things start to make real effect for security purposes and just for your general living

00:03:54 ◼   ► arrangements, I feel like it's less than likely that you should be putting beta software

00:03:58 ◼   ► on them, and that's kind of how I'm feeling right now.

00:04:02 ◼   ► I think that's valid. I validate your opinion. It's a personal choice for everyone. It

00:04:07 ◼   ► really is like, if you're in this business, then you have some professional choices to

00:04:12 ◼   ► make too. But it has to do, yeah, everybody's got a different little constellation of iOS

00:04:19 ◼   ► devices and apps they rely on and ways they use it in their lives, and you make your decisions

00:04:24 ◼   ► based on that. And I think that's the right thing to do.

00:04:27 ◼   ► >> So I have my iPad here, my iPad Air 2, and it lets me send stickers to people. Right

00:04:32 ◼   ► now I'm good with that. And I'll see where the next betas go before I make my decision.

00:04:36 ◼   ► As of right now, nothing. You remember Frank from last week who found pepperoni and pineapple

00:04:40 ◼   ► pizza in a bar?

00:04:42 ◼   ► How could I forget, Frank?

00:04:44 ◼   ► He wrote in to let us know a couple of things. He had actually tried it before, so he was

00:04:48 ◼   ► already a fan of the pepperoni pineapple. And also, as I guess we both expected, and

00:04:54 ◼   ► I really applaud Frank for owning up to this, he was inebriated enough to take the left

00:05:00 ◼   ► behind pizza, and he says he has no regrets.

00:05:02 ◼   ► No, he ate a slice of bar pizza.

00:05:06 ◼   ► - Yup.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - To you, sir, I congratulate you for having no regrets.

00:05:10 ◼   ► That's what I say. - We salute you, Frank.

00:05:12 ◼   ► - But be careful, everyone.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Don't eat random food that you find in bars.

00:05:16 ◼   ► The Upgrade podcast does not endorse random bar food.

00:05:20 ◼   ► - Well, in bars, you know, there is,

00:05:22 ◼   ► if it's like on the bar, like, I mean,

00:05:24 ◼   ► there are bowls of nuts and things

00:05:25 ◼   ► that people eat on the bar, and pretzels

00:05:27 ◼   ► and things like that. - I also don't endorse

00:05:28 ◼   ► eating those, though. (laughs)

00:05:30 ◼   ► - Oh, okay, all right.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I just, I feel like it's a little bit different

00:05:33 ◼   ► than if you walked, you were in a restaurant

00:05:34 ◼   ► and you found they hadn't cleared the table yet and somebody left and there was some pizza

00:05:38 ◼   ► on it and you just picked it up and ate it. I would be a little more, I don't know why,

00:05:43 ◼   ► but I feel like that would be more of a social transgression. Like some places...

00:05:46 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that's what Frank did though. I think that that pizza was just left from

00:05:50 ◼   ► a previous patron.

00:05:51 ◼   ► Yeah. I guess I'm just saying some places actually do put out like plates of food and

00:05:54 ◼   ► things, but in this case, that was certainly something that somebody ordered and paid for

00:05:57 ◼   ► and ate most of and could just couldn't, even though they loved it, couldn't eat the last

00:06:03 ◼   ► part of it. And anyway, cheers Frank.

00:06:06 ◼   ► I would struggle though if I saw slices of pepperoni, pineapple pizza, I've got to say.

00:06:14 ◼   ► You remember many, many moons ago we spoke about the fact that with the lightning to

00:06:19 ◼   ► ethernet adapter you could plug it into an iOS device and you could have an ethernet

00:06:24 ◼   ► connection. It would connect to the internet in some kind of mystical, magical way.

00:06:28 ◼   ► So this was when Apple introduced the Lightning to USB 3 adapter, their new adapter. It's

00:06:37 ◼   ► the one that's got a Lightning port on the female Lightning port on the side of the female

00:06:44 ◼   ► USB port, and instead of it just being a pass-through of Lightning to USB, and that's so that you

00:06:50 ◼   ► can power it. And at the point that you can power it, you can do a lot of things with

00:06:54 ◼   ► USB devices that require power. And Phil Schiller stood on stage and said, "This will be great

00:06:58 ◼   ► for podcasters, and this will be great for connecting your iPad Pro to Ethernet in your

00:07:04 ◼   ► office, your secure Ethernet network. And that was funny because Ethernet has never

00:07:08 ◼   ► been a supported officially thing. There's no UI for it or anything. But it does turn

00:07:15 ◼   ► out that, yeah, if you attach a USB Ethernet adapter to that adapter and turn off all your

00:07:20 ◼   ► Wi-Fi and everything, it works. It works at least if you're on a DHCP network where it's

00:07:26 ◼   ► sort of the standard, like, it'll sign you an IP address, just like if you're on a Wi-Fi

00:07:31 ◼   ► hotspot, it's the same approach, basically, like, here's your IP address and go for it.

00:07:36 ◼   ► But it was all just sort of like, in fact, the rumor is that somebody who worked at Apple

00:07:42 ◼   ► said that, oh, it was ATP Tipster, I think, said that after Steve Jobs famously had that

00:07:49 ◼   ► failure at WWDC where he told everybody to turn off their Wi-Fi hotspots because the

00:07:54 ◼   ► demo was failing, they couldn't get out to the internet, that apparently like that day

00:07:58 ◼   ► engineering was told, "Put Ethernet support in iOS." That's an order. So maybe that's

00:08:05 ◼   ► where it came from. But there was no UI for it. It was all secret.

00:08:07 ◼   ► But now, when you plug it in, some random entry shows up in the settings app, which

00:08:13 ◼   ► is empty right now.

00:08:14 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. In iOS 10 Beta, if you plug in that Ethernet adapter, what you get is a new

00:08:21 ◼   ► setting like right under the wifi setting item in the settings app that is an ethernet

00:08:26 ◼   ► item and uh and then you tap on it and guess what you see nothing coming soon there's nothing

00:08:36 ◼   ► i can't actually decide whether that is a uh a mistake and it's just supposed to remain

00:08:41 ◼   ► invisible and that that's been there but they've been suppressing it like no no no don't even

00:08:45 ◼   ► show it it'll be there but nobody wants to see it don't even show it or if there's going

00:08:50 ◼   ► to be something there, which I think they should do because one of the problems with

00:08:53 ◼   ► the Ethernet support in iOS, especially when it's unofficial and not mentioned in a keynote

00:08:59 ◼   ► on stage by Phil Schiller, was the fact that not every Ethernet network has the generic

00:09:06 ◼   ► settings. Sometimes you have to put specific Ethernet settings in, which is why we have

00:09:12 ◼   ► a network control panel on the Mac that you can go in and you can set up your Ethernet

00:09:17 ◼   ► settings to be what they need to be. So it's an edge case, but I hope that they do it,

00:09:22 ◼   ► and I actually kind of hope that they do some other esoteric network stuff while they're

00:09:28 ◼   ► at it, like maybe even the sequence of what network interfaces to use, what order. With

00:09:34 ◼   ► the iPad Pro, the idea is this is a computer, you're going to do your work on it, you might

00:09:39 ◼   ► plug it in at your desk, well if you're going to do that, then maybe you should have those

00:09:43 ◼   ► features available. So maybe we'll see that.

00:09:45 ◼   ► And I wanted to do a little bit of follow up on Spotify.

00:09:48 ◼   ► I was just thinking today whilst doing the washing up,

00:09:52 ◼   ► we haven't heard of anything about the Apple Spotify problem, right?

00:09:56 ◼   ► Like we spoke about it a few weeks ago that they were kind of loggerheads

00:10:00 ◼   ► and Apple was holding up an update and Spotify were claiming foul play.

00:10:04 ◼   ► And I thought I would go and check the app store.

00:10:07 ◼   ► And there hasn't been an update to the Spotify app since the end of May.

00:10:12 ◼   ► So it looks like that that update is still being held, but I haven't heard, I don't know

00:10:16 ◼   ► if you have any further updates to this specific situation.

00:10:22 ◼   ► It seems like it's not been resolved yet between Apple and Spotify.

00:10:25 ◼   ► It seems like it's still there.

00:10:26 ◼   ► There's been some back and forth in the press.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Apple has definitely said, you know, "Look, you're breaking the rules and we will expedite

00:10:35 ◼   ► your approval if you stop breaking the rules, but we're not going to let you break the rules."

00:10:41 ◼   ► And I think that's where it is right now.

00:10:43 ◼   ► But whilst doing some searches today to tell you if there have been any updates that I've

00:10:47 ◼   ► missed, I found some articles in the last couple of days that apparently Apple has made

00:10:52 ◼   ► some proposals to the Copyright Royalty Board about how streaming royalties should be paid.

00:10:58 ◼   ► So right now this board called the CRB, the Copyright Royalty Board, is working out a

00:11:03 ◼   ► new kind of framework model for how royalties should be paid for streaming.

00:11:09 ◼   ► And lots of companies have made proposals. Spotify has made a proposal, Pandora's made

00:11:14 ◼   ► a proposal, a bunch of others, like about what they believe the royalty should look

00:11:18 ◼   ► like. But Apple's proposed calculation of the statutory royalty rate would hurt services

00:11:24 ◼   ► that have free plans. And some are claiming that this type of thing is a shot at Spotify.

00:11:29 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I think, I think Apple is not interested in protecting the free streaming

00:11:36 ◼   ► business model, right? Just not. And I think there's a, I think if you're a company like

00:11:43 ◼   ► Apple and honestly, I think the music industry doesn't love it either. This idea that there's

00:11:48 ◼   ► this free tier and, uh, and they pay, right. But, uh, the more you charge, the harder it

00:11:56 ◼   ► is to get by on the free plan. And so yeah, I'm not surprised at all that Apple is trying

00:12:01 ◼   ► to make it harder for competitors who offer a free tier to keep offering it. But again,

00:12:10 ◼   ► I mean, Apple, of course, Apple should propose things in its self-interest. Now that doesn't

00:12:15 ◼   ► mean that Apple gets to choose.

00:12:16 ◼   ► Yeah, every company that's making a suggestion here, every company that is going to this

00:12:22 ◼   ► royalty board with their suggestions, their proposals, are doing the thing that makes

00:12:27 ◼   ► the most sense for them.

00:12:29 ◼   ► I'm sure that Spotify are coming to it and saying like, "Oh, this is our proposal and

00:12:34 ◼   ► that proposal is probably really good for people that are doing free tiers."

00:12:43 ◼   ► So I'm sure that their royalty things are, "Yeah, we'll pay royalties when people pay,

00:12:46 ◼   ► when they're free, I don't think we should have to pay."

00:12:51 ◼   ► And Apple's probably coming in and being like, "Everyone deserves to be paid, free or not.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Ha ha ha ha."

00:12:56 ◼   ► And this is just normal.

00:12:57 ◼   ► This is how business is done.

00:12:59 ◼   ► But this was the only thing that I found as an update to this situation.

00:13:03 ◼   ► And this could end up playing out quite interestingly.

00:13:06 ◼   ► If this royalty board does come out and say, "Everybody deserves to be paid, free or not,"

00:13:11 ◼   ► that is going to hurt companies like Spotify because where's the money going to come from?

00:13:16 ◼   ► So, that's something to keep an eye on.

00:13:18 ◼   ► - The money comes from a calculation about how many free you convert to paid and whether

00:13:23 ◼   ► it's worth it to do that, right?

00:13:24 ◼   ► But the more you are paying for the streams and the plays, the harder that calculation

00:13:32 ◼   ► is to maintain because your customer acquisition costs, as they would call it, rocket up.

00:13:38 ◼   ► And that's bad.

00:13:41 ◼   ► Whereas, you know, Apple, although Apple, you know, Apple has a free tier too, but the

00:13:46 ◼   ► way they structure it is you get a 90-day trial and then you have to pay or lose it.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And Spotify, you can stay on the free tier forever. And I think their goal is to convert

00:13:59 ◼   ► those people over time. My daughter loves Spotify, although she's been listening to

00:14:03 ◼   ► Apple Music more lately. I reminded her that we had Apple Music on family and that she

00:14:10 ◼   ► got all of that stuff and she's been doing that more. But she still likes Spotify and

00:14:15 ◼   ► I think Spotify's game plan there is that become, you know, make my daughter a loyal

00:14:21 ◼   ► Spotify user and that when she gets to college she'll probably have, I assume, a lot of Spotify

00:14:28 ◼   ► probably has this deal like the, all students at this college have access to a cheap or

00:14:33 ◼   ► free Spotify premium plan. They do a lot of that kind of college marketing where there's

00:14:38 ◼   ► a special deal and then you get out of college and you own that person, they will pay you

00:14:43 ◼   ► $10 a month for their entire life. I think that's basically their game plan, but you

00:14:49 ◼   ► look at the cost.

00:14:50 ◼   ► It's a great game plan. Make it indispensable.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Right, but if in eight or nine years of free listening or subsidized listening before you

00:15:00 ◼   ► get to the point where they start paying you, how long does it take to get your money back

00:15:05 ◼   ► and are you still in business at that point? So I think that's the calculation you have

00:15:08 ◼   ► to make. And any of those, it's always a gamble that you take. And that's the difference between

00:15:13 ◼   ► having a free tier that's available forever versus a with, you know, some revenue in it

00:15:19 ◼   ► or whether you just do what Apple does and say, "We're closing the gate after 90 days."

00:15:23 ◼   ► All right. So that's it for follow-up this week. Should we take a break?

00:15:26 ◼   ► Good idea.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by Pingdom. You can start monitoring your sites and servers

00:15:32 ◼   ► today at pingdom.com/upgrade. When you go there, you'll get a 14 day free trial. And

00:15:38 ◼   ► when you enter the offer code upgrade at checkout, you get 20% off your first invoice. So dear

00:15:43 ◼   ► listener, you may be asking yourself, Myke, why should I be using Pingdom to monitor my

00:15:48 ◼   ► servers or websites? Well, dear listener, let me tell you, Pingdom detects with their

00:15:53 ◼   ► customers over 400,000 web outages a day. That is 13 million a month. They are seeing

00:16:00 ◼   ► stuff go down all the time and this is just with Pingdom's customers right so they're

00:16:04 ◼   ► there monitoring all these websites with their 70 global test servers they're emulating all

00:16:08 ◼   ► these visits they're seeing when they're up they're seeing when they're down. If Pingdom's

00:16:12 ◼   ► monitoring that imagine how many things break on the internet all the time you know as a

00:16:18 ◼   ► internet purveyor you see things down you go to a website the website's down and you're

00:16:22 ◼   ► like oh I really wanted to buy those pair of shoes and then you have to go to twitter

00:16:25 ◼   ► and tell the company and that's not great you don't want that as a person and if you

00:16:29 ◼   ► own that website, you really don't want to be in that situation. You don't want people

00:16:33 ◼   ► coming to you on Twitter and telling you that your website is down. This is why you need

00:16:36 ◼   ► Pingdom. Pingdom can monitor the whole stack. They can monitor the entire site, but also

00:16:40 ◼   ► specific functionality. E-commerce checkouts, logins, search functionality and loads more.

00:16:45 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if you have a website that's just like your resume or if you run an entire

00:16:51 ◼   ► infrastructure. You don't want people coming to your website and seeing that it's down.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Pingdom have plans for all types of sites you're gonna go there you're gonna

00:16:59 ◼   ► find a good plan that works for you to make sure that your site is up and

00:17:03 ◼   ► reliable when you need it to be. Pingdom will detect any outage immediately

00:17:08 ◼   ► you'll be alerted straight away so you can fix the error before the downtime

00:17:13 ◼   ► affects you. All Pingdom needs is the URL that you wish to monitor they'll take

00:17:17 ◼   ► care of the rest. Don't be caught out when someone wants to access your site

00:17:20 ◼   ► site, go to pingdom.com/upgrade for a 14-day free trial. Use the code upgrade to get 20%

00:17:27 ◼   ► off at checkout, and you'll be the first to know when your site is down. Thank you so

00:17:32 ◼   ► much to Pingdom for their support of this show.

00:17:35 ◼   ► Yesterday was World Emoji Day, July the 17th.

00:17:40 ◼   ► Breaking news, breaking news, World Emoji Day yesterday.

00:17:43 ◼   ► So World Emoji Day, it was created by our friend, friend of the show, Jeremy Burge at

00:17:48 ◼   ► Emoji PD.

00:17:49 ◼   ► Yep. Of course it was. I was thinking to myself the other day, I was

00:17:54 ◼   ► like, why, why is July 17th world emoji day? I was thinking to myself, I was like, Oh,

00:17:58 ◼   ► I wonder. So I opened the emoji palette and I went to the calendar emoji and on iOS, the

00:18:05 ◼   ► calendar emoji is the 17th of July. You know, the little, uh, the little calendar that's

00:18:13 ◼   ► in the emoji. It's July 17th. That's the date on the emoji. So that's the date picked for

00:18:17 ◼   ► World Emoji Day. Interesting. Smart, right? I was like, "Why did he pick that random day?"

00:18:23 ◼   ► That's why, because the emoji is that date. Huh. That's weird. And why is it that date? Is that

00:18:31 ◼   ► because of iCal being introduced? Probably. A million years ago? It's an old Apple thing.

00:18:36 ◼   ► Didn't it always say July 17th, like the old iCal logo? It's the day that iCal for the Mac was

00:18:45 ◼   ► announced at Macworld Expo in 2002.

00:18:48 ◼   ► There you go. So I'm actually going to put a link to a Quora article.

00:18:52 ◼   ► And Twitter previously showed July 15th, which was Twitter's launch date,

00:18:57 ◼   ► but then changed it to March 21st. But that's why

00:19:00 ◼   ► that's why it's July 17th. There you go, perfect.

00:19:03 ◼   ► So there you go. And there you know why. So it was yesterday

00:19:07 ◼   ► and I was sent some some schwag

00:19:11 ◼   ► by Jeremy. He sent me a t-shirt. Did you see my picture of me with my

00:19:14 ◼   ► my t-shirt and I was looking at emojis that were made of me. Did you see that picture,

00:19:19 ◼   ► Jason?

00:19:20 ◼   ► I did see that picture.

00:19:21 ◼   ► I'm going to put that in the show notes in case people didn't see it. So I thought, in

00:19:25 ◼   ► the spirit of World Emoji Day, that today we could spend some time talking about emoji.

00:19:32 ◼   ► What do you think?

00:19:34 ◼   ► Let's do it. I'm always up to talk about emoji.

00:19:36 ◼   ► So how often do you actually use emoji? Like, what do you use it for and how frequently?

00:19:40 ◼   ► I use it all the time. I mean, this is the funny thing. People roll their eyes and like,

00:19:44 ◼   ► emoji is stupid. But it's like, you know, it's, we all communicate with text. I've

00:19:48 ◼   ► given this rant before, I think in person, if not on a podcast, we communicate on the

00:19:52 ◼   ► internet in text and text is really bad at expressing things that we express as human

00:19:58 ◼   ► beings in interpersonal conversations, one-on-one with people in groups. We have facial expressions

00:20:05 ◼   ► and hand gestures and body language in general and tone of voice. And on the internet, it's

00:20:12 ◼   ► text. It's just text on Twitter and slack wherever it's text text. You lose a lot. And

00:20:19 ◼   ► that's why people invented emoticons right where they're using punctuation to create

00:20:23 ◼   ► faces and stuff and and why we do markup or or markdown if you will the idea that you

00:20:31 ◼   ► can separate things with asterisks or something to show that there's you're supposed to emphasize

00:20:36 ◼   ► those or all caps or whatever. These are all ways to do that. An emoji is a great fit because

00:20:43 ◼   ► it gives you a lexicon that is much larger than you can get with something like--because

00:20:49 ◼   ► the emoticons got really complicated and I'd be like, "Oh, I don't even know how to make

00:20:52 ◼   ► that." When I first saw the flipping table guy, I was like, "I don't even know what that

00:20:58 ◼   ► is." Right? Because it was too--I love the flipping table guy, but the flipping table

00:21:03 ◼   ► guy was, I feel like, was the last gasp of the emoticon, where like, "We can use text

00:21:08 ◼   ► to make pictures!" It's like, yeah! It's getting really complicated. You're using, like, non-Roman

00:21:13 ◼   ► characters to make this thing that's kind of hard to read about what it is. And then

00:21:18 ◼   ► there's emoji, which are these cute little cartoon items, and you can string them together,

00:21:23 ◼   ► and you can tack them on the end of your phrases, and in Slack you can comment on somebody's

00:21:28 ◼   ► with a feeling. I think they're so powerful. And so I use them all the time. I use them

00:21:36 ◼   ► on Twitter. I use them in Slack. And it's for that reason that it gets across, or at

00:21:43 ◼   ► least it gives you the ability to attempt to get across a little bit more about feelings

00:21:50 ◼   ► that you wouldn't put in words because you probably wouldn't say, "I love that thing

00:21:56 ◼   ► you just wrote, right? We probably wouldn't say that, but you throw out a little heart,

00:22:01 ◼   ► and it means that, but you didn't have to say it.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I love emoji. I mean, I was obviously an emoticon person. I used all the MSN emoticons,

00:22:13 ◼   ► which were kind of halfway between emoticons and emojis, right? They were little characters,

00:22:18 ◼   ► but they were kind of triggered by you typing in text. You know, you type in the cocoon

00:22:22 ◼   ► on a bracket and you'd get a little smiley face that would be rendered as a little yellow

00:22:27 ◼   ► smiley face.

00:22:28 ◼   ► That's when I started, basically it was on my radar, was that I was typing old school

00:22:33 ◼   ► emoticons and they were being turned into emoji, basically.

00:22:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Or what looks a lot like emoji.

00:22:39 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:22:40 ◼   ► And I came to emoji on the iPhone when you had to do that weird hacky thing to try and

00:22:45 ◼   ► get a Japanese keyboard to install the emoji.

00:22:47 ◼   ► Do you remember that?

00:22:48 ◼   ► That was the way you originally had to get it.

00:22:51 ◼   ► So I've been using them for a long time and I use them constantly because they are such

00:22:56 ◼   ► a fantastic form of expression for me.

00:23:00 ◼   ► I think you're able to say so much.

00:23:03 ◼   ► So much of my conversation online is very short snippets of information, very short

00:23:08 ◼   ► snippets of text and quite frankly a lot of the time an emoji will do the job.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Like a little thumbs up emoji is perfect.

00:23:15 ◼   ► I send little heart emojis to people when they say nice things.

00:23:19 ◼   ► I send little mic face, nerd face emojis, my own little emoji that I have,

00:23:23 ◼   ► or that I have kind of commandeered because it looks just like me.

00:23:27 ◼   ► I love all of that stuff and I love doing it.

00:23:30 ◼   ► And I send messages, iMessage, I send emojis all day,

00:23:34 ◼   ► and Twitter, I send emoji all day.

00:23:36 ◼   ► Also, custom Slack emoji is amazing.

00:23:40 ◼   ► So this is where you kind of start branching out a little bit.

00:23:43 ◼   ► And the Slacks that I'm involved in, the custom emoji in Slack

00:23:47 ◼   ► really make it a lot of fun.

00:23:48 ◼   ► There's great ones in the incomparable slack and the relay slack and also in

00:23:52 ◼   ► The slack for my ring post. It's a ring post of the podcast. I'm doing an incomparable now about wrestling. We have a

00:23:59 ◼   ► Public slack and we're adding lots of really great emoji to that as well. And I think that's so much fun all of that stuff

00:24:07 ◼   ► and I know that the kind of the custom emoji stuff is kind of co-opting a little bit between

00:24:13 ◼   ► little just stickers and emoji and emoticons, but it all kind of rolls together into just a great way to

00:24:21 ◼   ► visually express yourself in very simple ways and a lot of the time add in the

00:24:27 ◼   ► Personality and character that would be in your voice if somebody could hear you. Yeah the

00:24:32 ◼   ► Slack's decision to not only embrace emoji with

00:24:39 ◼   ► Slack has done a lot to do emoji right. I wrote a piece on Macworld about this a while

00:24:43 ◼   ► ago. The fact that you can type a colon and then begin to type the name of an emoji and

00:24:48 ◼   ► it autofills it in, so great. Such a great feature. I use that all the time. And then

00:24:55 ◼   ► the ability to reply to comments, just like tag emoji on things people say is so great.

00:25:03 ◼   ► But the custom emoji thing, it's that, you know, so Jeremy, who we mentioned earlier,

00:25:08 ◼   ► is on the... He does Emojipedia and he's on the Unicode subcommittee for emoji. You know,

00:25:14 ◼   ► they're involved with deciding what the official emoji are. And that's why they're adding,

00:25:19 ◼   ► you know, a dozen a year or whatever at this point. They've added a bunch, but now they're

00:25:23 ◼   ► sort of like, kind of... It's like going into the Hall of Fame, of the Baseball Hall of

00:25:27 ◼   ► Fame or any Sports Hall of Fame. There's a process now. Are you emoji worthy? But it's

00:25:34 ◼   ► slow moving and they need to appeal to everyone. And one of the brilliant things that Slack

00:25:40 ◼   ► did is create this custom emoji feature. And it influences the tone and personality of

00:25:47 ◼   ► the Slack you're in, and it's great. In fact, I have to admit, I find myself missing some

00:25:54 ◼   ► of those custom emoji in the real world, or not the real world, but the outside of Slack

00:25:58 ◼   ► world because I have on more than one occasion on Twitter replied to somebody who was on

00:26:04 ◼   ► the incomparable Slack with colon Skeletor colon because I love the Skeletor emoji which

00:26:12 ◼   ► is like a picture of Skeletor or a hooded skeleton that I found on the internet and

00:26:16 ◼   ► made an emoji out of and then we made a t-shirt out of it eventually. I love it and it's just

00:26:22 ◼   ► it's not anything that's going to be a real emoji but it doesn't matter because it's fun

00:26:25 ◼   ► and it has some meaning. It has some specific meaning in the incomparable slack. So, you

00:26:30 ◼   ► know, it's great. All of it's great.

00:26:33 ◼   ► So, I was also wondering if you had any thoughts on emoji versus stickers?

00:26:41 ◼   ► Because this is an interesting thing, right? Because these days, there are lots of stickers

00:26:47 ◼   ► that are claiming to be emoji, you know, like the celebrity ones, for example, like Kim

00:26:54 ◼   ► Moji.

00:26:55 ◼   ► just using where was I what app was I using was a Twitter it might have been

00:27:00 ◼   ► on Twitter where where I I was trying to put in an emoji and instead I got a a

00:27:07 ◼   ► bunch of stickers that looked like emoji I was like no no no no no no no no no

00:27:11 ◼   ► that's not what I want

00:27:13 ◼   ► I don't know the stickers stickers feel like lock into me that's the problem I

00:27:17 ◼   ► have with them is emoji feels like this is a common picture language that we can

00:27:22 ◼   ► share across platforms and across services, and the stickers feel like lock-in, feel like,

00:27:28 ◼   ► "Oh, only on our special service do you get that." Then again, I just praised the custom

00:27:33 ◼   ► emoji in Slack, so maybe it's fine. But it's not in my lexicon, and I know people love

00:27:40 ◼   ► using stickers, so it's gonna take some getting used to. And I could see it being something

00:27:44 ◼   ► that people use. The problem with it is that you end up with that thing where you wanna

00:27:49 ◼   ► react with that. You've mapped an emotion to that sticker and then you're somewhere

00:27:53 ◼   ► else and you can't express it because it was a sticker on one service. And I don't like

00:27:58 ◼   ► that part of it.

00:28:00 ◼   ► The lines are starting to blur. Like you look at Twitter, they just turned their emoji set

00:28:05 ◼   ► into stickers. So the image that I put up and it's in the show notes of me celebrating

00:28:10 ◼   ► World Emoji Day is using their emoji sticker functionality. And so it's getting a bit weird

00:28:16 ◼   ► and it's still gonna start to get weirder, right, with iOS 10 messaging apps because

00:28:19 ◼   ► they're stickers but everyone's gonna call them emoji, right? They're gonna be

00:28:23 ◼   ► sold as emoji packs, not sticker packs, because that's the the naming, that's the

00:28:28 ◼   ► kind of the common name that we give to these things now. I'm not sure the

00:28:33 ◼   ► Unicode subcommittee on emoji will approve of that. Oh, I'm sure they won't,

00:28:37 ◼   ► but it's it's too late, right? The the horse is bolted. Emoji is just the name

00:28:44 ◼   ► for now a little picture which illustrates something, the same as Emoticon was the name

00:28:50 ◼   ► for so long. I think emoji is just that. What do you think about the idea of platform vendors

00:28:56 ◼   ► using emoji as an upgrade tool? I think Apple's starting to embrace that a little bit, right?

00:29:02 ◼   ► Yeah, certainly.

00:29:03 ◼   ► You kind of get your new emoji ready and it's a great way to get people to update.

00:29:07 ◼   ► New emoji and also Apple now is going to have a reason to update in iOS 10 with that emoji

00:29:12 ◼   ► auto suggest feature.

00:29:14 ◼   ► which is awesome.

00:29:15 ◼   ► - It is, I am still frustrated that Apple

00:29:18 ◼   ► isn't letting you search for a specific emoji.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Like if you want the German flag,

00:29:28 ◼   ► you can't like search for it.

00:29:30 ◼   ► You have to look through a list of flags

00:29:31 ◼   ► that are sorted in a very specific way

00:29:34 ◼   ► and hope that you can choose the flag of Germany

00:29:37 ◼   ► and not of Belgium.

00:29:38 ◼   ► And that's, it needs to be better.

00:29:41 ◼   ► like Slack. Like Slack, I can do colon flag dash D-E or G-B or whatever I want, and I

00:29:47 ◼   ► can get the flag that I want. And with the auto-suggest emoji thing, that's cool, but

00:29:53 ◼   ► I don't think the only way you should be able to get an emoji is by remembering or guessing

00:29:58 ◼   ► what word will trigger the auto-suggest of the emoji you want. But still, so I think

00:30:05 ◼   ► there's more work for Apple to do on that front, but that is in addition to supporting

00:30:08 ◼   ► a bunch of new emoji, which they will almost certainly do in iOS 10, and if not, it'll

00:30:13 ◼   ► be in, I think somewhere in there now, Jeremy Berg wrote a blog post about this on Emojipedia.

00:30:19 ◼   ► They will also have that auto fill thing, which is almost like, you know, encouragement

00:30:25 ◼   ► to use more emoji, but it also, I think, makes people who might not think in terms of emoji

00:30:31 ◼   ► do better with emoji. I think you can overdo it, like if anybody's seen Carrie Fisher's

00:30:35 ◼   ► Twitter feed. If you use emoji to communicate, you're just making a rebus. You're making

00:30:41 ◼   ► a puzzle for people. You're not helping your communication. You're hurting it. So I think

00:30:47 ◼   ► you can overdo it. And I think that Apple's sort of emoji replacement thing could lead

00:30:50 ◼   ► to that, where things seem kind of baffling and harder to understand. I always like to

00:30:55 ◼   ► use emoji as like seasoning in the message. Like, you know, here's a statement and now

00:31:00 ◼   ► I'm conveying a feeling, rather than it being like I'm literally going to replace every

00:31:05 ◼   ► other word with an emoji representation. I don't, I don't, I'm not a fan of that.

00:31:10 ◼   ► So you're saying about searching for emoji. I want to recommend a tool for me on iOS that

00:31:16 ◼   ► I use. I'm still using Gboard, the Google keyboard for iOS.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah. Um, I've been using it for like two months now as my only keyboard. I'm very happy

00:31:25 ◼   ► with it actually. Uh, I find the autocomplete works better for me. Um, it does a better

00:31:30 ◼   ► job of splitting up words when I accidentally hit N instead of space, which is one of my

00:31:35 ◼   ► my biggest frustrations in life. Google keyboard does a better job of that. It also seems to

00:31:40 ◼   ► be doing a better job of remembering words that I frequently say in people's names and

00:31:45 ◼   ► stuff. And I assume that it's pulling some of that information from my Google account

00:31:49 ◼   ► somewhere maybe, I don't know. Or it's just doing a better job of just remembering. I'm

00:31:53 ◼   ► very happy with the keyboard. I like that I can do the one hand swipe typing, which

00:31:59 ◼   ► I do quite a lot with my big phone. So I'm happy about that. I like that all that's built

00:32:03 ◼   ► in but what it has a couple of great emoji features so you can it does the

00:32:08 ◼   ► replacements so as you're typing if you type the word like I don't know like sad

00:32:12 ◼   ► or something it will in the little suggestions bar it has the emoji there

00:32:17 ◼   ► so you can hit it and something then what you end up doing is you learn the

00:32:21 ◼   ► words right so I know some of the words that will trigger those emojis so I just

00:32:26 ◼   ► type those words in and it'll trigger them but also you when you hit the emoji

00:32:30 ◼   ► bar. It's a swipeable thing like Apple's but it also has a search box so you can search

00:32:36 ◼   ► and it does a couple of different ways of searching this. I actually tested this with

00:32:40 ◼   ► Jeremy. Jeremy should probably be on this episode but we met for coffee recently and

00:32:46 ◼   ► I was showing him Gboard and I was doing some searches and he was asking me to search for

00:32:50 ◼   ► specific words to see if it was pulling from the actual Unicode like standardised wording

00:32:58 ◼   ► and naming for an emoji which it was but then Google are obviously putting their own words

00:33:02 ◼   ► on those emojis as well so they can be searched for. So for example if you type the word butt

00:33:10 ◼   ► a peach comes up. Oh my. Now Google's doing that all by themselves. I love that. I think

00:33:17 ◼   ► that's fantastic. I'm happy that they do that. But there you go that happens. The peach pops

00:33:23 ◼   ► up. I was very pleased to find that out. That made me smile a lot. There's some

00:33:28 ◼   ► some good stuff. Jason jumped in there for the title suggestion in the chatroom, making

00:33:36 ◼   ► everybody upset.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Well, I was able to do that because I downloaded Rocket for OS X, which I didn't even know

00:33:41 ◼   ► existed in Joe Steele, just linked to in the chatroom, which is an app that lets you have

00:33:45 ◼   ► the colon shortcuts anywhere on the Mac instead of just in Slack, and that's a dangerous,

00:33:50 ◼   ► dangerous thing.

00:33:51 ◼   ► So that's another tool that I was going to suggest. I don't have this one installed.

00:33:56 ◼   ► I don't really understand how this works and I'm not sure if it's like looking at keystrokes.

00:34:01 ◼   ► I don't really know how it's doing this.

00:34:03 ◼   ► So I haven't looked into it enough to download it yet, but I've seen a lot of people talk

00:34:08 ◼   ► about this and it looks pretty cool.

00:34:10 ◼   ► Another one I just saw today, Emojipedia for OS X, is like an add-on for the dictionary.

00:34:17 ◼   ► So you can select an emoji and do the dictionary definition and it will give you the name of

00:34:24 ◼   ► the emoji, tell you what the emoji is, and sometimes that is needed.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Ah, interesting.

00:34:30 ◼   ► So there's a few things in there.

00:34:32 ◼   ► The emoji dictionary, there's a Medium blog post that I'll put in that explains how it

00:34:35 ◼   ► works and then tells you how you can go and get it from GitHub.

00:34:38 ◼   ► So there are a few emoji tools for you if you're looking for some tools for emoji.

00:34:42 ◼   ► And I also want to give a bit of breaking news.

00:34:45 ◼   ► That's productivity right there, folks.

00:34:47 ◼   ► Productivity tools.

00:34:48 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:34:49 ◼   ► As part of World Emoji Day, there was an award for the best new emoji of 2016, and the eye

00:34:53 ◼   ► eye roll emoji has won that one. So what do you think of that, Jason, the eye roll emoji?

00:34:59 ◼   ► Do you think that it's the best new emoji? It's beaten out the upside down smiley face,

00:35:03 ◼   ► for example?

00:35:04 ◼   ► Well, the upside down smiley face is pretty good.

00:35:07 ◼   ► I thought that would have won, to be honest, because that is a...

00:35:09 ◼   ► Oh, that's because we know Joe Steele. Joe Steele's favorite emoji is the upside down

00:35:13 ◼   ► smiley face. But the eye rolling is a-- I use that-- I have to admit, I have to restrain

00:35:19 ◼   ► myself sometimes from replying to tweets with just the eye roll emoji. Because that's mean,

00:35:26 ◼   ► but also true.

00:35:27 ◼   ► So I'll finish this off with asking you, Jason, what is or what are your favorite emoji?

00:35:33 ◼   ► Oh, um... blue heart.

00:35:36 ◼   ► Blue heart?

00:35:37 ◼   ► As I've established elsewhere, I felt like the red heart was a little too forward.

00:35:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree. I used to use the pink heart with the sparklies for the same reason. Go

00:35:46 ◼   ► as far as you can in that you know you got to co-opt a heart of your own. Yeah exactly right.

00:35:53 ◼   ► The I don't know Skeletor emoji on slack is pretty great yeah but nobody else gets to

00:36:01 ◼   ► gets to use that. I like the rainbow sometimes for like happiness like I think that's a fun one.

00:36:12 ◼   ► I like the, you know, I like the winky guy and the smiley guy, the faces.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Thumbs up is a good, quick thumbs up thing.

00:36:22 ◼   ► That was the first emoji autocorrect I created.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Just I typed thumbs up and a thumb appears. It's great.

00:36:28 ◼   ► Nice.

00:36:28 ◼   ► I think those are mine. What are yours?

00:36:30 ◼   ► Mine, I have two key favorites.

00:36:32 ◼   ► I like the heart inside of the box.

00:36:34 ◼   ► In Slack, it's called heart decorations.

00:36:36 ◼   ► There's a pink box of a heart inside of it.

00:36:38 ◼   ► Just because it doesn't look like any of the other hearts.

00:36:40 ◼   ► and a lot of people don't even really know about this one. I don't ever see anybody use

00:36:44 ◼   ► it, so I use it. And also the nerd face because it looks just like me.

00:36:49 ◼   ► That's you. Yeah.

00:36:50 ◼   ► It looks just like me and it makes me very happy.

00:36:54 ◼   ► So that's emoji, everyone.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Another piece of breaking news for the show. We're all about breaking news today.

00:37:00 ◼   ► Oh good.

00:37:01 ◼   ► This is not emoji related.

00:37:02 ◼   ► Oh.

00:37:03 ◼   ► iOS 10 Beta 3 just came out.

00:37:05 ◼   ► Hey, look at that. Well, we'll be able to see if there are any Ethernet settings then.

00:37:09 ◼   ► I want to thank Smile for also sponsoring this week's episode and let me talk to you

00:37:13 ◼   ► about TextExpander today.

00:37:15 ◼   ► And it's funny actually to mention TextExpander because we were just talking about emoji and

00:37:21 ◼   ► I have set up a couple of TextExpander shortcuts for emoji.

00:37:24 ◼   ► NNE will bring up the nerd emoji for me and HHE will bring up the heart emoji.

00:37:30 ◼   ► So they're there if I want them so I can have my favorite emoji right at hand with TextExpander

00:37:36 ◼   ► because with TextExpander you never have to type that same email address, chunk of code,

00:37:40 ◼   ► marketing copy, driving directions, or Apple OS name more than once. You know, everybody

00:37:45 ◼   ► that I know now is doing replacements from OS space X to Mac OS. So that is a very useful

00:37:54 ◼   ► thing. Another one that I have used in the past week, Jason, if I type in Pokemon, it

00:37:58 ◼   ► puts the little accented E in for me as well. This is the beauty of a life with TextExpander.

00:38:05 ◼   ► You can store any text in a snippet, just create the shortcut for them.

00:38:09 ◼   ► It can be just a couple of keystrokes and then you'll be saving time every day.

00:38:12 ◼   ► You can also harness the power of fill in the blank snippets to easily customise common

00:38:17 ◼   ► responses.

00:38:18 ◼   ► You can have a big couple of paragraph emails that you send to people more than once and

00:38:22 ◼   ► all you need to do is change a name, maybe one date or something in their email.

00:38:26 ◼   ► You can fill out all the big text in there, just specify those two areas and you can very

00:38:30 ◼   ► easily change those two little pieces of information.

00:38:34 ◼   ► super, super simple and you'll be able to get everything sent out super quickly.

00:38:38 ◼   ► And now you can share groups of snippets with others, expand your common knowledge

00:38:42 ◼   ► and keep them current together.

00:38:44 ◼   ► This is a new TextExpander feature.

00:38:47 ◼   ► TextExpander now includes apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows,

00:38:51 ◼   ► and you'll have those snippets on all of your devices all the time.

00:38:54 ◼   ► TextExpander subscriptions start at $40

00:38:56 ◼   ► per year and include all of the apps and the TextExpander sharing service

00:39:00 ◼   ► with discounts for registered TextExpander users.

00:39:03 ◼   ► Team subscriptions are now available and include organization focus, snippet and team management,

00:39:07 ◼   ► detailed access control, consolidated billing and much, much more.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Boost your productivity and learn more at Smilesoftware.com/upgrade.

00:39:15 ◼   ► Thank you so much to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:39:22 ◼   ► So Mr. Jason Snell, this has been in our top-up list for a long time and Comic-Con is just

00:39:28 ◼   ► around the corner, right?

00:39:30 ◼   ► This is Comic-Con week, in fact, so it's perfect.

00:39:32 ◼   ► It's perfectly timed, even though it was unintentional, because it's also, you know, it's, uh, there's

00:39:38 ◼   ► a lot of stuff happening in the background, but it's a little bit slower in terms of news

00:39:41 ◼   ► and things like that, which we usually like to talk about.

00:39:45 ◼   ► And yeah, it's Comic-Con time, so why not?

00:39:47 ◼   ► Let's talk about comics.

00:39:49 ◼   ► So I have been in and out of comics over the years, and I'm feeling like a draw's in.

00:39:57 ◼   ► I have these lovely devices that will very nicely let me read my comics.

00:40:02 ◼   ► Right, I'm going to assume.

00:40:03 ◼   ► I'll ask you which devices you use in a little bit.

00:40:06 ◼   ► And there are a couple that I'm interested in and I want to get your opinions on them.

00:40:09 ◼   ► I always love Spider-Man and I would maybe like to read a couple of Spider-Man comics

00:40:13 ◼   ► again.

00:40:14 ◼   ► And also I'm interested in the upcoming Iron Man reboot which features a female 15 year

00:40:21 ◼   ► old black teenager instead of Tony Stark as Iron Man.

00:40:25 ◼   ► What is going on here?

00:40:26 ◼   ► know, by the way? What is this change all about?

00:40:29 ◼   ► Well, so Marvel has been experimenting in the last few years with this, the idea of

00:40:36 ◼   ► taking their hero—I mean, this has happened for a while, but they're doing it with some

00:40:41 ◼   ► new characters now, where what if we took new characters and put them in the hero name,

00:40:49 ◼   ► basically, an outfit in power? So the idea there is—they did this a while ago with

00:40:54 ◼   ► Tony Stark actually where he was drunk. And so, Rhodey, his buddy, became Iron Man. And

00:41:01 ◼   ► so, but they've done that lately. There's a, they introduced Miles Morales as the new

00:41:09 ◼   ► Spider-Man. They had a mysterious woman who has now been revealed. But anyway, as she

00:41:15 ◼   ► picks up the hammer of Thor and becomes Thor. And they have done the Falcon became Captain

00:41:21 ◼   ► America. And I think, you know, some of this is, you'll find one of the things they're

00:41:26 ◼   ► doing and they're doing this very specifically is taking a lot of the characters that have

00:41:31 ◼   ► only been inhabited or largely been inhabited by white men and putting people who are different

00:41:38 ◼   ► races and putting women in some of those slots. And I think, you know, it's comics and it's

00:41:44 ◼   ► intellectual property with a market value. So the characters you know are always gonna

00:41:50 ◼   ► to come back in some form because there's too much money for them not to, but I feel

00:41:56 ◼   ► like they want to use the comics to play with alternate versions or additional versions

00:42:02 ◼   ► of those characters to tell other stories. How many, you know, how many stories? There

00:42:06 ◼   ► are new stories to tell with every character, but there are probably more new stories to

00:42:10 ◼   ► tell if you can say, "Well, what if there was this variation? What if a 15-year-old

00:42:16 ◼   ► black teenager became Iron Man because she's an MIT genius like Tony Stark and she's his

00:42:22 ◼   ► biggest fan and then she invents her own armor and, you know, what would the dynamic would

00:42:27 ◼   ► -- what would that be like? In fact, it's a lot like the dynamic that they have with

00:42:32 ◼   ► Spider-Man now where due to many comic book continuity shenanigans, Miles Morales and

00:42:39 ◼   ► Peter Parker are now in the same universe, which they weren't before. But it's led to

00:42:44 ◼   ► this interesting case where there are two Spider-Men and the older Spider-Man, Peter

00:42:48 ◼   ► Parker has to, you know, who for so much history has always been the kid of superheroes. He's

00:42:55 ◼   ► now like a mentor to an actual like 17, 16-year-old kid. And that's a fun new set of stories to

00:43:03 ◼   ► tell. So Marvel's just doing a lot of experimentation where they're bringing in new characters and

00:43:09 ◼   ► putting them in some of their old, you know, old clothing, old intellectual property, and

00:43:16 ◼   ► trying to tell some new stories. And the new Iron Man story, I believe, is by Brian Michael

00:43:21 ◼   ► Bendis, who also was the guy who created Miles Morales, who is the new additional Spider-Man

00:43:27 ◼   ► now, the ultimate Spider-Man, as they called him. Does that make sense?

00:43:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, kind of. I mean, I like that... - I mean, it's comics. It doesn't make sense,

00:43:35 ◼   ► but still. - Yeah, it can only make as much sense as the

00:43:37 ◼   ► comic can make which isn't always a lot of sense. I mean I get why Marvel does this you

00:43:41 ◼   ► know putting new characters into the old suits is a really kind of good way to get a bit

00:43:49 ◼   ► of marketing push behind you but what I do like is they could put anyone into these but

00:43:53 ◼   ► they choose to put different people right they choose to put women and people of different

00:43:58 ◼   ► races and people of different backgrounds into these suits when really they could just

00:44:02 ◼   ► put another white guy in and it would still push sales right or it still push PR.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Maybe. Because they've changed it. I mean you change up the character and it's like

00:44:10 ◼   ► "ooh they've changed the character" or "whenever they kill a character." I'm saying

00:44:14 ◼   ► it's like I like that they do push the envelope a little bit and trying to make

00:44:19 ◼   ► change to these things you know. Also I think I and this is an interesting trend

00:44:25 ◼   ► I think comics has realized now that there is a there is a market of women

00:44:32 ◼   ► read comics, that there have always been women who read comics, but I think there are more

00:44:37 ◼   ► now and they're more visible and that there's some realization that I think the comics publishers,

00:44:45 ◼   ► part of what they're doing is saying, "We want to reach a new generation of people and

00:44:49 ◼   ► the new generation of readers, not the one that's people my age and just getting older

00:44:55 ◼   ► every year," right? Because that's what happens and if your audience gets older every year,

00:44:59 ◼   ► a sign that you're not picking up new younger readers or viewers or whatever. I think they

00:45:06 ◼   ► say that that audience is more diverse and wants to see the reality of the world reflected

00:45:12 ◼   ► in what the comic stories are being told. And so you're seeing a lot more of that. And

00:45:17 ◼   ► is that because Marvel Comics is making a political statement? I think I would go with

00:45:23 ◼   ► the fact that it's also about money and about serving new audiences who want to see these

00:45:30 ◼   ► characters reflect the world a little bit more than they do now. And they're creating

00:45:34 ◼   ► new intellectual property. The fact is people are agitating and have been agitating for

00:45:37 ◼   ► like a Spider-Man movie with Miles Morales in it. And I think in the long run that that

00:45:41 ◼   ► is what's going to happen. The comics publishers are owned by, the two mainstream comics publishers

00:45:49 ◼   ► are owned by movie studios, essentially. And so, a lot of--they want the comics publishers

00:45:54 ◼   ► to make money, but really what they want is the comics publishers to incubate new characters

00:45:59 ◼   ► and stories that they can then use in movies. And so I think part of what's going on with

00:46:06 ◼   ► Marvel is that they're kind of investing for the next wave of Marvel movies five years

00:46:10 ◼   ► from now, ten years from now, and be able to use these characters in situations that

00:46:14 ◼   ► have become more familiar. Because they're dealing with the legacy of so many classic

00:46:19 ◼   ► comic book superheroes are just white guys and occasionally women. The Falcon famously

00:46:27 ◼   ► was added as the first black superhero in the 70s. And the Black Panther, and there's

00:46:31 ◼   ► a movie coming out with Black Panther who appeared in the Civil War movie. It's a business

00:46:39 ◼   ► and I think they're trying to create some new raw material that they can use on screen

00:46:45 ◼   ► as well. I think that's happening too.

00:46:49 ◼   ► So what apps should I be using if I want to read comics on my devices?

00:47:02 ◼   ► Well I think Comixology is still the best app for reading comics. Period. It's a very

00:47:08 ◼   ► good app. Unfortunately, on iOS, it's a lot less good than it used to be and a lot less

00:47:13 ◼   ► good than it is on Android because they had to pull out the in-app purchase. They didn't

00:47:20 ◼   ► have to. They pulled out the in-app purchase because Comixology was bought by Amazon, and

00:47:24 ◼   ► Amazon's policy is they're not sharing 30% of their sales with Apple. So like with Kindle

00:47:30 ◼   ► Books, you have to buy Comixology in a web browser. You have to buy your comics in a

00:47:34 ◼   ► web browser and then they appear in your in your app. Although I would say if you are

00:47:40 ◼   ► only using Marvel only reading Marvel or DC Comics the Marvel app the regular Marvel comics

00:47:48 ◼   ► app and the regular DC Comics app are Comixology. It's called the white label which basically

00:47:54 ◼   ► means it's the comic Comixology app relabeled to look like a Marvel and DC app but they

00:47:59 ◼   ► behave the same way and they actually use the same backend and since those are from

00:48:06 ◼   ► publishers you can still buy in those because the publisher is happy to give 30% to Apple

00:48:11 ◼   ► or at least finds that acceptable because the publishers always have a middleman between

00:48:15 ◼   ► them and the customer. They don't sell direct really, but it didn't work for Comixology

00:48:20 ◼   ► because they're a reseller so they're already the middleman and then Apple also wants to

00:48:24 ◼   ► be the middleman and that becomes a problem. Middleman also, a good superhero name. So

00:48:31 ◼   ► if you only read Marvel or DC you can just use the Marvel or DC app and buy your comics

00:48:35 ◼   ► that way and you're basically getting the Comixology reader and in fact your purchases

00:48:38 ◼   ► will show up in Comixology too. So that's a tip if you want to buy comics from Marvel

00:48:45 ◼   ► or DC you can use the white label version of Comixology that they use to sell comics.

00:48:50 ◼   ► peculiar. Yeah, it is interesting. And then I also use the Marvel Unlimited app, which

00:48:56 ◼   ► is great. It's a great service. It's a good value. The app is still not great, but is

00:49:06 ◼   ► getting better all the time, I guess I would say. And the service, because there you pay

00:49:11 ◼   ► a monthly or annual fee, pay the annual fee. It's like $60, $70, and you will read $60

00:49:19 ◼   ► worth of comics in a couple of days using Marvel Unlimited. It's a pretty great deal.

00:49:25 ◼   ► So how does the service work? So when you subscribe, you basically, it's like Netflix,

00:49:30 ◼   ► but only for Marvel Comics. They have a huge library of old Marvel Comics going up to about

00:49:36 ◼   ► six months ago. They trail it by about six months because they want the people who want

00:49:40 ◼   ► to buy today's comics to pay them $3 or $4 for a comic. But after about six months, they

00:49:47 ◼   ► show up on Marvel Unlimited and there's a huge back catalog. And so the story I always

00:49:52 ◼   ► tell is that I was on a trip, a business trip, and I read like a run of like 30 issues of

00:49:59 ◼   ► Daredevil by Mark Waid or 25 issues on my trip there and back. And then I did the calculation

00:50:06 ◼   ► of how much it would have cost for me to buy all those issues. And it was like the cost

00:50:10 ◼   ► of a Marvel Unlimited subscription for just those comics. Because comics aren't cheap.

00:50:15 ◼   ► when they're older and discounted, they're not cheap. So Marvel Unlimited, if you want

00:50:19 ◼   ► to read Marvel Comics, is a good deal. Unfortunately, Comixology Unlimited, which they also have,

00:50:24 ◼   ► is not a good deal, I have to say. It's kind of a sampler service. They put the first few

00:50:31 ◼   ► issues of some comics, independent comics, not Marvel and DC Comics, on there. But the

00:50:37 ◼   ► goal seems to very much be like, they want you to pay for the service, but really what

00:50:42 ◼   ► they're trying to get you to do is get into the comics with the first few issues and then

00:50:46 ◼   ► buy a lot more comics. So it's not bad if you want to explore comics you wouldn't otherwise

00:50:52 ◼   ► want to read. And it's not that expensive, I think it's like five or six bucks a month,

00:50:56 ◼   ► but it's not, you can't like go through a whole run of a comic book series. It doesn't

00:51:00 ◼   ► work like that. They won't give you issues one through twenty-five. They'll give you

00:51:04 ◼   ► issues one through four and then they want you to buy the rest. So it's a less good deal.

00:51:08 ◼   ► And DC has nothing. DC doesn't have an all-you-can-eat comic app at all, which is frustrating because

00:51:14 ◼   ► I find myself curious. I was always a Marvel guy, but I find myself curious about some

00:51:18 ◼   ► DC comics, and you know, but I'm not going to go buy $40 worth of something and hope

00:51:25 ◼   ► that it's good. There's, you know, I liked the ability with Marvel Unlimited to try something

00:51:31 ◼   ► out and read a few issues and abandon it or just kind of go through and read them all.

00:51:36 ◼   ► How many comics can you kind of download to the device with Marvel Unlimited?

00:51:41 ◼   ► Oh.

00:51:42 ◼   ► The website, oh, the website says 12.

00:51:45 ◼   ► 12 I think is, I think is the number, yeah.

00:51:48 ◼   ► But do they do just single issues or can you get like whole trade collections in Marvel

00:51:52 ◼   ► Unlimited?

00:51:53 ◼   ► I think they're all single issues on Marvel Unlimited.

00:51:54 ◼   ► I think that's how it's structured.

00:51:55 ◼   ► See, that's a shame.

00:51:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:57 ◼   ► I don't know why you can't just download any amount you want, like you're paying for it.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Well, it's a good question.

00:52:03 ◼   ► I think there's a piracy fear there or a, "I'm going to download a thousand issues and

00:52:08 ◼   ► then cancel my subscription, and now I've got them all locally." I agree. I think it's

00:52:12 ◼   ► a little unreasonable. It's a little bit like, you know, Amazon lets you download movies

00:52:17 ◼   ► and TV from the Amazon video app, and it's fine. And you can download many episodes and

00:52:22 ◼   ► fill up your device. So I think it probably should be more. And they only have themselves

00:52:26 ◼   ► to blame. They can't say, "Oh, don't blame us. We're just the service. It's the publisher

00:52:29 ◼   ► who demands on this. They're the publisher. It's direct from them. They should probably

00:52:32 ◼   ► do more than 12.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Because I just feel like, you know, you'd go on a long plane journey and you'd have

00:52:37 ◼   ► 12 issues and then you finish it and you want the 13th and there's nothing you can do.

00:52:40 ◼   ► You take longer flights than I do. But yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. I wish there were

00:52:46 ◼   ► more, but it is, you can, you can stash away a dozen issues to read on a plane and that's

00:52:52 ◼   ► nice.

00:52:53 ◼   ► So for someone like me then, who's maybe thinking about getting back in and I, whenever I have

00:52:58 ◼   ► read comics I like to just go through one series or something you would maybe suggest Marvel Unlimited

00:53:05 ◼   ► as a good option for me. Yeah if you're trying to get back into comics and you like Marvel

00:53:11 ◼   ► Comics, Marvel Unlimited is a great deal because I can tell you and I will in a little bit give you

00:53:16 ◼   ► reading suggestions and instead of saying well I mean we just did this we just did a comic book

00:53:21 ◼   ► club episode of The Incomparable that'll come out in the next few weeks and I bought three trade

00:53:27 ◼   ► paperback editions of that comic. It's "Astro City" by Kurt Busiek. And each one of them

00:53:34 ◼   ► is like 13 bucks. So, you know, $39 later, I bought three trades. And they're good. They're

00:53:40 ◼   ► really good. I'm going to buy more. It's going to be real expensive. But, because there are

00:53:45 ◼   ► like 13 of them. But here's the thing. If you get Marvel Unlimited, which you could

00:53:50 ◼   ► even try monthly, or like I said, I think the year, the annual deal is a great deal

00:53:54 ◼   ► for 69 bucks or whatever it is. I can tell you, "read this and this and this and this

00:54:00 ◼   ► and this," and you already paid your entry fee and you just read them and there's no

00:54:06 ◼   ► extra charge. And if you don't like one, you don't feel bad that you spent money on it

00:54:09 ◼   ► because you didn't. You just, you know, you're in the door at that point. And there's something

00:54:13 ◼   ► really freeing about that. And the way comic book storytelling really happens oftentimes

00:54:17 ◼   ► is it's runs over many issues or even across different books and you read one and then

00:54:22 ◼   ► want to read the next and then you want to read the next. And Marvel Unlimited is really

00:54:25 ◼   ► great at that because you're not making a financial transaction every time you want

00:54:28 ◼   ► to read the next one. You just read the next one.

00:54:31 ◼   ► So what's ComiXology Unlimited, though? ComiXology Unlimited is, like I said earlier,

00:54:38 ◼   ► it's like Marvel Unlimited in the sense that you pay a subscription fee and you have access

00:54:41 ◼   ► to a certain number. They have a library of comics. You can save them on your device to

00:54:48 ◼   ► read later. You don't have to be online to read them. And it's with independent publishers

00:54:52 ◼   ► instead of Marvel or DC. It's the smaller comic book publishers. But the difference

00:55:00 ◼   ► is most of what's in their library seems to be first trades or the equivalent first five

00:55:07 ◼   ► issues, six issues, four issues of a lot of different comics. And then also it seems like

00:55:12 ◼   ► month by month they go, things disappear and then other things reappear, which is not really

00:55:18 ◼   ► what happens in Marvel Unlimited, they just keep adding stuff every month. So, every week,

00:55:23 ◼   ► in fact. So, ComiXology Unlimited is a little different in that it's not for... it's for

00:55:29 ◼   ► discovery. When I interviewed David Steinberger, who's the CEO of ComiXology and is the head

00:55:32 ◼   ► of comics for Amazon, and that's how he described it to me was, it's a discovery service. And

00:55:39 ◼   ► I can see how they got the independent publishers on board with this service is they're probably

00:55:43 ◼   ► not making any money on it, but what they're doing is essentially giving away free just

00:55:49 ◼   ► to the people who pay for the service, but once you're in the door, free samples of their

00:55:55 ◼   ► comics, the first few issues. But the ultimate goal of that service seems to be to get you

00:55:59 ◼   ► to buy more comics. Like, buy more comics directly. Like, you want the rest of this

00:56:04 ◼   ► story after the first four issues? You know, the second trade is never available, or the

00:56:10 ◼   ► third trade is never available on Comixology Unlimited because the goal of the product

00:56:15 ◼   ► is to get you to buy those.

00:56:16 ◼   ► It's a taste.

00:56:18 ◼   ► Marvel Unlimited, I mean, I guess part of the goal is to get you so into a storyline

00:56:23 ◼   ► that you can't wait for six months for it to show up on Unlimited and you'll go and

00:56:27 ◼   ► buy it, but it's really to make money from people out of their immense back catalogue

00:56:34 ◼   ► that is not really being monetized properly, I think they would say. And, you know, now

00:56:39 ◼   ► getting $70 a year from me to read old comics that I wasn't going to buy. So that's a—or

00:56:45 ◼   ► probably wasn't going to buy. I'm sure they're trading some trade paperback sales, but a

00:56:50 ◼   ► lot of their stuff—a lot of those old comics are just out of print and, you know, the money

00:56:55 ◼   ► is in hand for me for my subscription.

00:56:58 ◼   ► All right, so give me some—give me some suggestions. What should I check out? What

00:57:04 ◼   ► should people be checking out?

00:57:08 ◼   ► Let's see. So, if you do Marvel Unlimited, I recommend—I've got some standard recommendations,

00:57:15 ◼   ► which is Hawkeye by Matt Fraction. The new Ms. Marvel. Have you read that? By Willow

00:57:22 ◼   ► Wilson? It's very good. Ms. Marvel was a character invented in the '70s, hence the Ms. that was

00:57:32 ◼   ► supposed to be like super cutting edge in 1975, named Carol Danvers who got promoted

00:57:37 ◼   ► to be Captain Marvel now. And Captain Marvel is actually a good comic too. But then they

00:57:42 ◼   ► made a new Ms. Marvel who is a girl who lives in New Jersey named Kamala Khan and uh...

00:57:48 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I've heard about this. And uh, those are fun. Those are a lot of fun.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Immortal Iron Fist is another one that I really like.

00:57:57 ◼   ► That's done by the same guy who did Hawkeye, right?

00:57:58 ◼   ► Who did Hawkeye, yeah. Yeah, it's the same creative team, more or less, that did Hawkeye.

00:58:03 ◼   ► It's very good. It's very good. I'm currently on Marvel Unlimited reading a miniseries that's

00:58:10 ◼   ► only about half on Marvel Unlimited now, but it's coming out called Worst X-Man Ever.

00:58:14 ◼   ► Okay, this sounds great. Like, whatever it is, it sounds great.

00:58:17 ◼   ► It is hilarious. It is a story about a guy who turns out to be a mutant and has to go

00:58:23 ◼   ► live with the X-Men, but his X-Men power is terrible and he basically can't use it, but

00:58:28 ◼   ► he has to live with the X-Men and it's funny and it's actually written by the singer in

00:58:33 ◼   ► a band I like but he also is a comic book writer now. It's kind of funny how that happened.

00:58:38 ◼   ► His name is Max Bemis from the band Say Anything but he is a comic book nerd supreme. I am

00:58:45 ◼   ► reading The Vision which is a weird weird comic about the red skinned android, synthesoid

00:58:54 ◼   ► whatever he is who you may remember from the Avengers and Civil War. And then this, he's

00:59:00 ◼   ► got a family and he's living in the suburbs and it's so strange. It's a very strange comic

00:59:04 ◼   ► but it's very, very smart.

00:59:06 ◼   ► - That sounds weird.

00:59:07 ◼   ► - Vision, yeah, it is. And if you're a Star Wars fan, Myke, are you a Star Wars fan? A

00:59:12 ◼   ► little bit?

00:59:13 ◼   ► - You know I'm a Star Wars fan.

00:59:14 ◼   ► - The new Star Wars comic is on there on Marvel Unlimited because Marvel publishes it and

00:59:21 ◼   ► of course that's all owned by Disney. The new Star Wars comic is pretty good and there's

00:59:25 ◼   ► a Darth Vader comic that's also quite good actually and is set after the first Star Wars

00:59:32 ◼   ► movie where Vader is kind of in the doghouse because he let the Death Star get destroyed

00:59:38 ◼   ► and what he does and like the missions that he's on. It's pretty clever. I like that one

00:59:43 ◼   ► a lot too. They've gotten those are it used to be that all the tie-in comics were written

00:59:47 ◼   ► by people who were, you know, they were doing it because it was work and they were getting

00:59:51 ◼   ► paid, but it was workman-like at best and they left their best work often for the stuff

00:59:58 ◼   ► that they were creating themselves. These Marvel comics about Star Wars are written

01:00:04 ◼   ► by great comics writers who love Star Wars and Marvel and Disney and Lucas, you know,

01:00:13 ◼   ► Whoever is paying them is paying them well to write really good comics about this world

01:00:17 ◼   ► that they love.

01:00:18 ◼   ► And so they're cut above most tie-in kind of comics.

01:00:22 ◼   ► So that's what I'm writing on Unlimited.

01:00:24 ◼   ► And then the other stuff that I'm reading that is largely through Comixology that I

01:00:28 ◼   ► recommend to you and to other people.

01:00:31 ◼   ► Like I said, Astro City, which came out in the '90s and is really great.

01:00:35 ◼   ► It's amazing if you're a long-time comic reader, especially.

01:00:40 ◼   ► It's great.

01:00:41 ◼   ► series about a city full of superheroes and the people who live there. It's pretty great.

01:00:47 ◼   ► I'm reading The Fuse, which is a sci-fi procedural, crime procedural, which is by

01:00:54 ◼   ► Antoni Johnston, who appears on The Incomparable Network in several places. Very good. That's a

01:01:02 ◼   ► really good sci-fi. It's like space. It's crime procedural in space. It's like homicide life on

01:01:07 ◼   ► on the street in a space station, it's pretty great. I'm reading Morning Glories, which

01:01:13 ◼   ► has just had its 50th issue came out. It is a mind-blowing, complicated, if you liked

01:01:20 ◼   ► Lost but thought that the mysteries on Lost were not weird and complicated enough, Morning

01:01:28 ◼   ► Glories. I recommend it for that because that's what it is. I am reading Amazing Spider-Man

01:01:34 ◼   ► because I love Spider-Man and the current run of Amazing Spider-Man is pretty good.

01:01:39 ◼   ► And if you go on Marvel Unlimited you can read the old, it's Matt Fraction has been

01:01:43 ◼   ► writing that for a few years now and it's all pretty good. I'm also reading Spider-Man

01:01:48 ◼   ► without the adjective and that's the Miles Morales book. It's the follow-on, it's the

01:01:52 ◼   ► successor to Ultimate Spider-Man which is my favorite comic of the last decade probably

01:01:58 ◼   ► by Brian Michael Bendis. I'm reading Invincible which is by Robert Kirkman, the guy who did

01:02:03 ◼   ► the Walking Dead, but this is his superhero comic. It's from Image.

01:02:05 ◼   ► It's one of my very favorite comics. I've read a ton of Invincible. It is surprisingly

01:02:11 ◼   ► brutal which you would expect if you'd read The Walking Dead, but it is so good. So good.

01:02:18 ◼   ► Yeah, Invincible is great. And I'm up, I've, yeah, that one I've been reading, Lisa Schmeiser

01:02:23 ◼   ► turned me on to that one. It's really good. It's a, and because it's an independent comic,

01:02:27 ◼   ► it's set in its own little universe, so there's all sorts of superheroes that you've never

01:02:30 ◼   ► heard of before who are the friends of invincible and and it's a dramatic

01:02:34 ◼   ► things can happen because they don't have to tie it in with 80 other comic

01:02:38 ◼   ► books and dramatic things do happen in invincible I'm reading Buffy the vampire

01:02:43 ◼   ► Slayer season 10 that they followed on from the show which is my favorite TV

01:02:49 ◼   ► show of all time with now what is it three seasons of what happened next to

01:02:55 ◼   ► those characters supervised by Joss Whedon the creator of the show and he

01:03:00 ◼   ► wrote the first season and a half or something like that and so it's fun to

01:03:06 ◼   ► revisit those characters in something that feels like it's semi-official.

01:03:11 ◼   ► The Wicked and the Divine is a great comic that is about gods being reincarnated

01:03:17 ◼   ► as rock stars basically. It's good. It's weird but it's good. And Saga which

01:03:25 ◼   ► which everybody recommends, but is truly a weird, great comic. So, that's it. That's

01:03:32 ◼   ► what I'm reading, more or less.

01:03:34 ◼   ► If you had wondered why the show notes were so huge this week, that is why.

01:03:38 ◼   ► This is why.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Because I have got links for all of them, as I've been collecting whilst you've been

01:03:44 ◼   ► talking.

01:03:45 ◼   ► That's good.

01:03:46 ◼   ► So they were all in our show notes, which will be in your podcast app of choice, which

01:03:49 ◼   ► may have crashed, or...

01:03:51 ◼   ► Possibly.

01:03:52 ◼   ► at relay.fm/upgrade/98.

01:03:55 ◼   ► They will all be there.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Jason, there are some excellent picks and suggestions

01:03:59 ◼   ► in there which I'm gonna have to check out, I think.

01:04:02 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to look at a bunch of these.

01:04:03 ◼   ► 'Cause I'm very interested, very interested.

01:04:07 ◼   ► So I'm gonna do that.

01:04:08 ◼   ► - I was reading them all on,

01:04:09 ◼   ► so I was reading Astro City yesterday

01:04:12 ◼   ► and I will say one of the other reasons

01:04:14 ◼   ► in addition to the fact that I really like

01:04:16 ◼   ► the software keyboard and I like the size of the screen,

01:04:19 ◼   ► one of the reasons that I really love

01:04:20 ◼   ► the 12.9 inch iPad Pro is that comics look so good on it. They look so good. It is just

01:04:27 ◼   ► full-sized. It's beautiful. They look beautiful on that giant iPad screen. They look good

01:04:34 ◼   ► on the – I mean, I used to read comics on the iPad mini, and I sort of have to zoom

01:04:38 ◼   ► in a little and pan around. And on the regular 9.7 iPad, they look good, but on that 12.9,

01:04:43 ◼   ► They look amazingly good.

01:04:45 ◼   ► So that's I recommend the 12.9 iPad Pro for if you've got one, it's a pretty great comic

01:04:52 ◼   ► experience.

01:04:53 ◼   ► I gotta say.

01:04:54 ◼   ► Yes, I've just been looking for like little pieces of entertainment to break up my day.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:59 ◼   ► You know, and I've been watching more YouTube videos and stuff for that reason.

01:05:04 ◼   ► But this could be a really interesting and fun alternative.

01:05:07 ◼   ► Yeah, 20 a 22 page comic is a pretty good.

01:05:11 ◼   ► I do that sometimes clockwise we do on Wednesdays and that's the day that the new comics come

01:05:15 ◼   ► out and there's usually a comic that I buy on Wednesday and often that's what I do is

01:05:19 ◼   ► I will I will record and edit clockwise and post it and then I will I'll read a comic

01:05:25 ◼   ► and maybe make some lunch and then I go about the rest of my day and it's a nice little

01:05:29 ◼   ► mental break in there.

01:05:30 ◼   ► Hey that's a good way to do it to start your day.

01:05:33 ◼   ► So aside from all this comic talk I think it's time for some Ask Upgrade.

01:05:38 ◼   ► All right let's do it.

01:05:40 ◼   ► Luke asked, "How does Myke decide between saying Apple, Amazon, Google companies?"

01:05:47 ◼   ► So let's say Apple is an Apple are.

01:05:51 ◼   ► This is your mid-Atlantic language processing center now.

01:05:55 ◼   ► You're part British, part American wording.

01:06:00 ◼   ► So the way that we're taught this and the way that it's done in English English is that

01:06:07 ◼   ► a company or an entity like that is a sum of its parts, not one single thing. So to

01:06:13 ◼   ► my mind, the way that I think is correct in my head is saying that Apple have or they

01:06:23 ◼   ► because it's a company of people and those people did that thing, right? That's how it

01:06:30 ◼   ► is in my head.

01:06:31 ◼   ► It's a plural mass counting object and it's the same reason that Brits will say the army are attacking

01:06:41 ◼   ► Yeah

01:06:43 ◼   ► Which because army is a plural mass count object. It means a collection of many things

01:06:49 ◼   ► There's not an army. It's the army and the army is a plural. Mm-hmm, but as of many things these days

01:06:58 ◼   ► Americans, bloody Americans.

01:07:00 ◼   ► - It's moving all over the map for me right now,

01:07:03 ◼   ► and whilst it makes the most sense to me

01:07:05 ◼   ► to say it in the plural,

01:07:06 ◼   ► I am finding myself saying it in the singular.

01:07:09 ◼   ► And I have to know, I noticed this a couple of weeks ago.

01:07:12 ◼   ► You said Apple R.

01:07:14 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:07:15 ◼   ► - I noticed this, so I'm doing this to you.

01:07:18 ◼   ► - No, well, so this is actually a long-standing problem

01:07:21 ◼   ► in covering companies like this,

01:07:23 ◼   ► because I think, I do think this is moving.

01:07:28 ◼   ► I think companies being referred to as "they" rather than "it" is something that's

01:07:33 ◼   ► happening in American English. At least I see it in technology because we always struggled

01:07:39 ◼   ► with that. Like on the Macworld copy desk, this was certainly always the case. It's

01:07:42 ◼   ► like, "Apple isn't it. Apple is not a they." And so what you'd say is, you know, you'd

01:07:49 ◼   ► say the people at Apple, the executives at Apple, if you could do that, the programmers

01:07:57 ◼   ► at Apple, the developers at Apple, then you get to use "they," but if you just like Apple,

01:08:03 ◼   ► you know, when it introduced the iPad is what you have to say, because that's the rule.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Now I kind of am lax on that these days because I feel like there's the colloquialism.

01:08:16 ◼   ► I think that's ugly.

01:08:18 ◼   ► I kind of agree. It's more accurate, but I don't think it's how people talk. I think,

01:08:24 ◼   ► know, "Oh, did Apple come out with something new? I love it when they do that," right?

01:08:29 ◼   ► People say that, right?

01:08:30 ◼   ► I love it when it does that.

01:08:31 ◼   ► I love it when it does that, right? The robot that is Apple disgorges a block. It's like,

01:08:37 ◼   ► "Yay, it did it! It came out with a new thing. Hooray! All hail the robot!" No, it's a "they"

01:08:44 ◼   ► because it is. So I think people do think of these companies as "they"s more than "its."

01:08:50 ◼   ► So I think usage is tracking the other way there, but the proper usage would be that

01:08:54 ◼   ► Apple is a singular in American English. But I do feel like there's... It's always telling

01:09:02 ◼   ► when people's instincts for conversation and how people refer to things casually are pulling

01:09:07 ◼   ► away from the standard, because that probably means the standard won't last because nobody

01:09:13 ◼   ► talks like that. And at some point, that'll be the end of whatever that thing is. So I

01:09:17 ◼   ► do think that's happening. But we still say the army is attacking, not the army are attacking.

01:09:23 ◼   ► Matthew asked, "How long do you think Tim Cook will remain the CEO of Apple? Ten years

01:09:28 ◼   ► from now would take him to around the age of 65. Is it more likely that he would hold

01:09:33 ◼   ► a high profile job like this past retirement age, so past those 10 years, or because of

01:09:39 ◼   ► the high profile nature of the job, would it be more likely that he would retire early?"

01:09:45 ◼   ► question, I don't really have an answer for it, right? My thinking is, and it's such like

01:09:50 ◼   ► a pish-posh answer, is for as long as it's right for him to be there, that could be a

01:09:59 ◼   ► year or it could be 20 years, right? Like, we have no idea. For as long as Apple is doing

01:10:04 ◼   ► well and as long as the board and everybody that works at Apple are happy that he is there,

01:10:10 ◼   ► then have him be there. Like there shouldn't necessarily be an age limit that times him

01:10:15 ◼   ► out of being the CEO.

01:10:16 ◼   ► Right. Well, there's also lots of succession planning stuff, which is like the here's

01:10:27 ◼   ► at some point is there somebody who he feels is as he's getting up on there that there's

01:10:32 ◼   ► very clearly somebody who's he's training to be the CEO. That was the case with Steve

01:10:37 ◼   ► Jobs is, although they never talked about it until, literally until Steve Jobs needed

01:10:41 ◼   ► to be replaced on an interim basis and then replaced when he resigned as CEO, they didn't

01:10:48 ◼   ► talk about it, but Tim Cook was the succession plan, right? And I'm sure they have a succession

01:10:51 ◼   ► plan if something happened to Tim Cook today. I'm sure they've got something in place about

01:10:57 ◼   ► what would happen next, but over time, as Tim Cook starts to think about how long do

01:11:03 ◼   ► I want to do this?" He seems like a very driven guy and I think he's driven by not only by

01:11:08 ◼   ► the success of Apple and by his own personal drive to be a success but also by the thoughts

01:11:15 ◼   ► that they're sort of the stewards of Steve Jobs' legacy. I think that he's going to be

01:11:19 ◼   ► there a while unless, like with Steve Jobs, unless something happens and he's not able

01:11:24 ◼   ► to do the job anymore. But a time will come when he will probably, ideally I think he

01:11:32 ◼   ► would step into a role in 10 or 15 years where he's the chairman of the board or something

01:11:37 ◼   ► like that, right? And there's a new CEO and that he's still around for a while on the

01:11:42 ◼   ► board. I think that is a way that a lot of businesses handle transitions like that. But

01:11:48 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I think there would have

01:11:52 ◼   ► to be some, you know, Apple calamity, which given Apple's current position seems unlikely

01:11:59 ◼   ► something like that to happen. So I think at this point my gut feeling is that he's

01:12:02 ◼   ► going to be here for quite a while.

01:12:04 ◼   ► I mean I assume that considering the history of the company now that there are always succession

01:12:12 ◼   ► plans in place.

01:12:13 ◼   ► I'm sure there are but there's the in an emergency succession plan versus the plan

01:12:20 ◼   ► for the future. The timed succession plan kind of thing and those change over time and

01:12:25 ◼   ► all of that. But I think Apple also, I would say, is not a company, unless you're a dummy

01:12:31 ◼   ► who writes for Business Insider or something like that, Apple is not a company that even

01:12:36 ◼   ► as a shareholder you look at and say, "Oh, what they really could use is somebody from

01:12:39 ◼   ► the outside to reform what they're doing." Like, the whole story of Apple, right down

01:12:45 ◼   ► to the training at Apple University, right, is doing it the Apple way and that nobody

01:12:50 ◼   ► does it like Apple. And as a result, I would also say, you're never going to replace the

01:12:57 ◼   ► CEO of Apple with somebody from the outside. It's never, never, never going to happen.

01:13:03 ◼   ► It would take…

01:13:04 ◼   ► Again.

01:13:05 ◼   ► It would take a calamity. Well, yeah, not… Well, look how great it worked with… Well,

01:13:13 ◼   ► Gil Amelio was from the inside. No, Gil Amelio was not. Michael Spindler was from the inside.

01:13:16 ◼   ► Emilio was not from the inside, and of course John Sculley was not from the inside. But

01:13:20 ◼   ► I, you know, since Jobs has returned, I mean, the whole success that they've had since

01:13:25 ◼   ► Jobs returned is all about Apple recognizing that it does things its own way, and everybody

01:13:31 ◼   ► tries to emulate Apple. I think it's unlikely that somebody, maybe it could be somebody

01:13:35 ◼   ► who was like great at Apple and then went and did their own thing and was great with

01:13:39 ◼   ► that, and then could be brought back. That could be a scenario, but I don't see it. I

01:13:43 ◼   ► feel like Apple, this is not a job where there's any sanity for like, "Oh, what if Tim Cook,

01:13:50 ◼   ► you know, what if the shareholders get angry at Apple's sales being flat and they replace

01:13:54 ◼   ► Tim Cook?" It's like, "I don't know. I don't know if there is somebody to replace him."

01:13:58 ◼   ► And there certainly is not a scenario I see where they're going to bring in just some

01:14:01 ◼   ► other tech industry CEO and pop them in and say, "You fix Apple." I just don't even see

01:14:07 ◼   ► that as a reasonable possibility, certainly anytime soon. It would take a calamity for

01:14:12 ◼   ► that to happen.

01:14:14 ◼   ► Reid asked, "I'd like to buy a 13-inch iPad Pro for university, but should I wait

01:14:18 ◼   ► for a possible iPad Pro 2 this fall?" I don't think there's going to be another iPad

01:14:23 ◼   ► Pro of any size until March of next year, but if you can wait until the September event

01:14:28 ◼   ► has passed, then you should. Just in case.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Well yeah, if you can hold out, but if you're going off to university, probably going off

01:14:36 ◼   ► sooner than that.

01:14:37 ◼   ► Yeah, so if for any reason you can, like maybe you have a laptop and you're going to use

01:14:42 ◼   ► a laptop for a bit and you're good to wait until September then do that but I

01:14:46 ◼   ► don't think you're gonna have a problem from that I don't think we're gonna see

01:14:50 ◼   ► one in September but if you can wait you should but I think it's gonna be March.

01:14:53 ◼   ► That's my gut feeling too is that they'll get they'll get them on synced

01:14:57 ◼   ► up and they'll probably get them synced up in the in the spring on the year

01:15:02 ◼   ► anniversary of the 9.7. Clive asked do you think that the new iPhone will have

01:15:07 ◼   ► a true tone display like the 9.7 inch iPad Pro. I really do think so. I think that this

01:15:13 ◼   ► is like the new retina.

01:15:15 ◼   ► Yeah, why not? I think they will put this across the line eventually. You're adding

01:15:21 ◼   ► a sensor and you're adding some color management. A lot of it's happening in software other

01:15:26 ◼   ► than that sensor. So yeah, I think it'll go everywhere over time. I would be surprised

01:15:35 ◼   ► if the new iPhone didn't have it. It's possible if they're gonna really differentiate the

01:15:39 ◼   ► plus model from the regular model that it could only be in the plus model but I would

01:15:44 ◼   ► put money probably on it being on both models, yeah.

01:15:50 ◼   ► E: And Brent asked, "How does Myke say…" Jason, can you say this so as not to spoil

01:15:56 ◼   ► it?

01:15:57 ◼   ► JE It's my former employer in fact at one point,

01:16:00 ◼   ► ZDNet from Ziff Davis originally, ZDNet. How do you say ZDNet?

01:16:04 ◼   ► Well, because obviously I say the letter Z, right? I don't say Z.

01:16:08 ◼   ► Yes, you do.

01:16:09 ◼   ► But I would still say ZDNet because that's the name of the company.

01:16:12 ◼   ► Okay, so you would say ZDNet.

01:16:14 ◼   ► Yeah, because they're not called ZDNet.

01:16:18 ◼   ► It's true, they're not. That's a terrible name. ZDNet. ZDNet.

01:16:22 ◼   ► I mean, let's be honest, ZDNet is not that much better.

01:16:26 ◼   ► So the story is that it was Ziff Davis Publishing and they published PC Magazine and Mac User

01:16:31 ◼   ► magazine and PC computing and Computer Shopper, all these magazines from the 80s and the 90s

01:16:37 ◼   ► that people may remember if you're old like me. And it was an enthusiast publishing company

01:16:45 ◼   ► originally and they had like a flying magazine and a photography magazine and other magazines

01:16:52 ◼   ► like that. And by the time I got there in the 90s, you know, Bill Ziff owned it. Davis

01:16:57 ◼   ► was long since gone and Ziff Davis Publishing was it. But Bill Ziff wanted to retire and

01:17:04 ◼   ► his sons wanted to be venture capitalists. They did not want to be in the publishing

01:17:09 ◼   ► business at the time as an employee of Ziff Davis I was like, "Oh man!" And today I

01:17:14 ◼   ► look back and I'm like, "Smart gentlemen, get out of the media business, sell that thing

01:17:19 ◼   ► off, take the money, invest in other things. Good job, boys!" So when they left, they

01:17:26 ◼   ► started Ziff Brothers Investments, I think, or Ziff Investments, and one of the conditions

01:17:33 ◼   ► of the sale of Ziff Davis Publishing was the ceasing—because people shortened it to Ziff.

01:17:42 ◼   ► Everybody would just call it Ziff. I work at Ziff. And the Ziff family didn't want

01:17:45 ◼   ► that. The Ziff family wanted their name back. The Ziff Brothers wanted it on their investment

01:17:50 ◼   ► firm. And so one of the conditions of selling it was to change it to not have Ziff Davis

01:17:57 ◼   ► in the name. So they became ZD Publishing and ZDNet, which they had already done. They

01:18:02 ◼   ► had already changed that to ZDNet from ZiffNet, which is actually what it had been before.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And that's why that name exists. And it's a terrible name, but it was meant as a bridge

01:18:13 ◼   ► to, um, you know, to exist from Ziff Davis publishing.

01:18:18 ◼   ► Why any vestige of that remains almost 20 years later or more than 20 years

01:18:24 ◼   ► later is beyond me, because I think it is also a terrible name.

01:18:27 ◼   ► There's a little history, a little old history.

01:18:31 ◼   ► Pull up a chair.

01:18:32 ◼   ► Everybody let me let old uncle Jason tell you about publishing in the nineties when

01:18:37 ◼   ► magazines were printed on dead trees.

01:18:40 ◼   ► Good times.

01:18:41 ◼   ► Jason.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Tom would like to know, are you going to Comic Con?

01:18:46 ◼   ► So this is Tom Zoller who does the Fantastic Love and Capes web comic and I saw him on

01:18:51 ◼   ► a panel a few years ago at Comic Con.

01:18:54 ◼   ► But I'm here, Myke, I'm sitting in my chair and it's Comic Con week.

01:18:58 ◼   ► I'm not going to Comic Con.

01:18:59 ◼   ► Comic Con is huge.

01:19:01 ◼   ► I love San Diego but I don't love San Diego during Comic Con week.

01:19:08 ◼   ► is not so bad, Friday is kind of bad, and the weekend is kind of just complete disaster.

01:19:13 ◼   ► So I may gin up the courage to go back to Comic-Con at some point in the next few years,

01:19:20 ◼   ► although it's harder now for me to get a press pass, I think, than when I was the editor-in-chief

01:19:25 ◼   ► of Macworld. That was a lot easier. And quite frankly, I went because I thought the tech

01:19:29 ◼   ► angle of comics on the iPad, which we talked about earlier today, was a really interesting

01:19:34 ◼   ► story right after the iPad came out. Now it's just kind of part of the conversation. It's

01:19:38 ◼   ► like not, there are not so many story angles for me for that anymore. So maybe someday,

01:19:45 ◼   ► but not this year. Last year, we inaugurated the official Snell vacation strategy of, for

01:19:54 ◼   ► years I would walk around Comic-Con and think, "Boy, I love San Diego. This place would

01:19:58 ◼   ► be really nice if all these people weren't here for Comic-Con." And so last year, Lauren

01:20:02 ◼   ► and I went for a couple of nights to San Diego. We stayed in the hotel right next to the convention

01:20:06 ◼   ► Center and we were there the week before Comic Con, the weekend before Comic Con. This year

01:20:11 ◼   ► we're going, and we're staying in the Gaslamp District right next to the Convention Center,

01:20:16 ◼   ► and we're going the week after Comic Con.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Why does it have to be around Comic Con?

01:20:22 ◼   ► Well, because it's the summer and we're taking the kids down to visit with her parents and

01:20:26 ◼   ► the kids stay there for another week and a half or so. So the timing tends to be just

01:20:31 ◼   ► during the summer, and for a few years it was timed so that I could go to Comic Con.

01:20:35 ◼   ► it's time so that we can go not to Comic-Con. So it's the kind of "un-Comic-Con"

01:20:40 ◼   ► experience. So Tom, if you're hanging around for an extra week after Comic-Con

01:20:44 ◼   ► in San Diego, I will be there, but otherwise I will not be there. And our

01:20:49 ◼   ► last question this week, you mentioned this a bunch, what is the weather station

01:20:53 ◼   ► that you use in your backyard? This come from Josh. I've heard this from a lot of

01:20:57 ◼   ► people. I'm using a station that I installed when my son was born and he is

01:21:02 ◼   ► now 11 so it's the Davis Vantage Pro Davis still makes a Vantage Pro 2 it's

01:21:09 ◼   ► really expensive it lasts I can say that that after almost 12 years in my backyard

01:21:16 ◼   ► it still functions and in fact I've even upgraded a couple of things on it so

01:21:21 ◼   ► it's it functions better now in some ways I had to replace the little backup

01:21:27 ◼   ► battery a couple of times but it's still working there are lots of other options

01:21:32 ◼   ► One of these days I will try to do a survey of weather stations, but like Netatmo makes

01:21:38 ◼   ► one that's a lot less expensive, and you can tie them all into weather underground, and

01:21:44 ◼   ► so there are a lot of other options out there. Davis is not particularly MAC friendly, I'm

01:21:49 ◼   ► using a piece of MAC software called WeatherCat that is compatible with a lot of different

01:21:54 ◼   ► weather stations that are out there, because it turns out a lot of these weather stations

01:21:56 ◼   ► are not Mac friendly. And WeatherCat isn't fantastic, but it's fine, it's good, it lets

01:22:01 ◼   ► me build my custom webpage of my weather station and also upload my data to Weather Underground

01:22:08 ◼   ► where I can see it in apps and stuff. But even something like the Netatmo stuff, which

01:22:12 ◼   ► I think starts at like $150 or something, is going to be good. And then you can add

01:22:19 ◼   ► sensors and stuff to it, whereas the thing that I've got probably costs like $800 or

01:22:25 ◼   ► Alright, so I think that about wraps it up for this week.

01:22:29 ◼   ► It's 68 degrees Fahrenheit right now, Myke. Just a little

01:22:33 ◼   ► weather information for you, a little weather update. Good to know. We're in the high 80s today.

01:22:37 ◼   ► It's 20C. It's 20C. So yeah, cool. We have a cooling trend.

01:22:41 ◼   ► We're in a heating trend. It's not pleasant here right now.

01:22:45 ◼   ► Yeah, it shouldn't be warmer in London than it is anywhere in the United States ever.

01:22:49 ◼   ► It's 27 degrees Celsius right now. Well, at least one of us

01:22:53 ◼   ► us is having a summer. And it's going up to 32 degrees Celsius tomorrow. So old Myke will

01:23:02 ◼   ► be seeing things when he's recording. Goodbye. With all the windows and doors closed. Turning

01:23:08 ◼   ► into a big blob of a man. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

01:23:13 ◼   ► If you want to find our show notes this week head on over to relay.fm/upgrade/98. Thanks

01:23:18 ◼   ► again to our sponsors as well, the great folk over at Pingdom and Smile for helping support

01:23:23 ◼   ► this episode. If you would like to find Jason online, head on over to SixColors.com and

01:23:28 ◼   ► he is @JSnell on Twitter, JSNEELL. I am @IMyke, I M Y K E. This show is part of Relay FM.

01:23:36 ◼   ► If you enjoy this show and enjoy podcasts, we have many more that you may enjoy. Go to

01:23:40 ◼   ► relay.fm and you can find some for yourself. Today, thank you so much for listening. We'll

01:23:45 ◼   ► be back next time with episode number 99. Until then, say goodbye, Jason.

01:23:48 ◼   ► Goodbye, everybody.

01:23:49 ◼   ► [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:23:53 ◼   ► [ Music ]