38: June is the New Christmas
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[Intro Music]
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From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode number 38.
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Today's show is brought to you by Lynda.com, where you can instantly stream thousands of courses
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created by industry experts, igloo, an internet you'll actually like, and SaneBox.
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Clean up your inbox and spend less time on email.
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My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined as always by the editor-in-chief of MacStories.net
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and the host of "Virtue" on Relay FM, Mr Federico Vittucci.
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Buona sera Myke.
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Hello sir, how are you?
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I'm doing well, how are you?
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Oh I'm feeling great, I can't wait for follow-up today.
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And I'm also joined by Mr Stephen Hackett,
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co-founder of Relay FM and editor-in-chief of 512pixels.net.
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Hello Stephen Hackett.
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Hey guys, how is everyone in Europe?
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Good, are you as excited about follow-up this week as I am?
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- Not so much because it's ridiculous.
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- It's not ridiculous?
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The best follow up ever?
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I'm so excited about it.
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Can we just do it?
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Can we just do it now?
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- We're gonna jump right into it
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to avoid the awkward bits we've had
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the last couple weeks.
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So as we have stated,
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or as really everyone on the internet has stated,
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this is the year that Myke was right
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about the iPhone 6 Plus.
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Couple weeks ago, or maybe, yeah,
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couple weeks ago you were talking about the Apple Watch
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and you said that you use your nose--
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- This was last week.
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- It feels like an eternity ago, Myke,
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because all we have gotten in our inboxes and on Twitter
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is how many people do this.
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- It's ridiculous.
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- It's been overwhelming.
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Everybody has been tweeting at me and, and, or us
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and has been, yeah, has been saying,
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"Yes, I use my nose to tap things."
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Some people said that they have been doing it
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since the show, some people said they were doing it
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before the show.
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Like if you just search Twitter for the hashtag
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Myke was right, you will see many people declaring over the last week about the
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nose tapping phenomenon to the point where it has even started to spread
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around the internet and I have collected a selection of links to further
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illustrate the nose tapping so it received follow out and I'm so happy
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that it was referred to as follow out in the ATP show notes episode 115 where
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Marco claims that I am right and that nose tapping is a thing that people
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should recognize. There is a Reddit thread which existed before this.
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Somebody created this thread about watch users. Have you used your nose to operate
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it when your hands are full? And then in that thread people mention the show and
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me. So we've got another another piece of source material here. And then also
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during the live well the in-person episode of the incomparable that they
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recorded that Jason recorded along with a bunch of other fine people like Mr.
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John Siracusa, Andy Enocho, Dan Moran, Serenity Caldwell and Tony
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Cinderella. I think I got everybody I hope I got everybody I tried to then get
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everybody. During the episode Jason is called out for tapping his watch with
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his nose. Wow. This is something that happens guys. Steven, what are we gonna do now?
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There's all these people like Myke. It's concerning in many ways, mostly for
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the future of the human race, but I have not done it and I have not found,
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and I had a time where I was like "oh I'm gonna do this but I don't want to do it
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so I can argue with Myke about it" like has not even entered my mind to try it
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And it may be that I don't walk as like part of a commute like Myke you were talking about last week
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You know you went out and you do a lot of walking in London much more than I do here in Memphis
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And you know maybe when you're on the go and you have a shopping bag or something you're on a city street or on a subway
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Maybe it makes more sense, and I just don't have that sort of thing because my commute is in my car and
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I'm not really fiddling with my watch when I drive
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So maybe that's part of it
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But even like around the house like I do it around the house all the time
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Wow, so Myke, can you explain is this something that you also do socially like in front of other people or together with people?
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You just stop your noses on the Apple watches. I have I've done it in public. I've done it with
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Close family and friends around. Oh, okay. So it's a it's a social thing
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Also, I mean it's when you say it's a social thing
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It makes it sound like it's things like I get a bunch of people together and we all tap our watches of our noses
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Or like tap each other's watches or something
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That's not something that that occurs but just in general. Yes. I you know, I'm not ashamed of it
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I do wonder Steven if you would have done it if we wouldn't have had this conversation
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Like I think that there's something buried like deep in the back of your brain now where you are adverse to nose tapping
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Because because we have had this conversation
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Maybe I mean so so around the house. You know I
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The other day I was I've been wearing it since last week
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And I was doing something actually on the watch and kind of like
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Scoop up my my youngest son who's seven months old kind of at the same time and like
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You guys talked a little about about it on
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Upgrade about like the state the watch is in right and for me. That's been not a big deal like if I'm doing something
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I just dropped my wrist I can just come back to it later because
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It's it's just not a big deal for me to like finish what I'm doing as I start to do something else
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now I will say that
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That I could see doing it like if an alarm is going off
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And I want to silence it if I'm cooking or something I haven't been in that situation with it yet
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But it's definitely not like a all the time type thing
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I think oh, I should notice that tap this and then I don't it just I don't know like I'm glad that you were right and
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Clearly like it is something that people do if you just look at all these links
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We've put in the show notes, but it hasn't come up for me yet
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Myke if people want to see all that stuff you just talked about where could they go in their internet browser?
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So just anywhere sane on the internet or because that's everybody's talking about nose tapping or you know you could also go to relay.fm
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/connected/38 and you will find
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primary source material for the nose tapping phenomenon of 2015
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That's correct. You can also go to the show notes calm which yes, that's that's true this time
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Yeah, that's a joke
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shownotes.com
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slash-38 should redirect to you. Yeah, it does it does
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Someone's together for us
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It's pretty amazing
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We own the show notes
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Like we should we should have a trademark or something about the show notes, you know
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So thank you to Ben Ben curtain BJ curtain on Twitter who registered the show notes
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Awesome. That's a pretty pretty awesome
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pretty awesome thing
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Since we're talking about Myke was right
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We should talk about how connected was wrong in fact that none of us apparently know anything about iTunes radio and more
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Disappointingly to me. I didn't look it up. We were talking ok bass
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K-base apparently iTunes radio is only available in the US and in Australia
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However, I tried googling this and tried to find it on Apple's website and I can't find it very clearly
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Listed anywhere that that's actually where iTunes radio is offered
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Maybe someone in the chat room or maybe one of you two can find that link, but I had trouble even verifying this
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But it seems I seem pretty sure that it's just in the US and Australia
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Because I think we said Canada and didn't know about Australia
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but I'm currently on apple.com slash au slash iTunes iTunes radio and
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And it's a page that exists.
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Definitely in Australia.
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There's a link to start listening, so we'll go with that.
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But it's definitely in Australia. Congratulations Australians!
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I don't know why... I mean I'm happy for you guys, I really am.
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Well they do get Koalas and iTunes Radio.
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So you know, it's my kind of country.
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That's a good point.
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Maybe those two things are linked. Somehow.
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Yeah, somehow.
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So last week we were speaking about Apple's quarterly results and spoke about iPad sales.
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And Dr. Drang broke our hearts.
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The father of all nerds.
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That's what I mean.
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When I say our I mean Federico.
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Wrote this piece about iPad sales and mentioned us and a couple other things.
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basically the gist of this thing is that the way that iPad quarterly result sales
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are normally reported it's a little hard to see kind of what's going on. I think
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that's fair you know looking at these charts like it his point makes sense to
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me clearly like the Apple one the cumulative iPad sales is like a really
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bogus number to pull out because cumulative numbers will always go up
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when you're talking about sales of products. But um he has some other points
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here and I want to know if you guys wanted to address any of these or just mention it and move on.
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No, well the main point I guess is that me and the other, I don't know how many millions of other
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people were all in denial about the iPad, you know, because we're moving from stage one to stage two
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of the model that the doctor mentions. So we're all in denial about the iPad, like we have this
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delusion about this computer, you know, functioning well for us, but turns out
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that it doesn't and it'll die soon. So that's the real point of the
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article I guess. I think if I'm to argue for Dr. Drang, I think his point is not
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that the iPad doesn't work for you so much as that it's not selling as well as it could.
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Well it does say that I was in denial. I think what he is referring to...
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anger about the ipad i'm not really angry about the ipad i really don't care
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i think that he is saying that you're in denial about the decline
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well there's nothing to be in denial about i mean it's selling less than before but it's
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still plenty i don't i'm not understanding what's so strange to to to understand about this honestly
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okay it's i don't know i don't want to have this argument again no i i don't want to have it with
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with you. I think whether it's right or not people think that you have a bias.
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But we all have our own biases and potentially the people that write these
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articles that refute your opinion have a bias towards the Mac.
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Or do you know what I mean? So it's it's it's kind of all a bit like like a
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like a war I guess. It shouldn't be a war. You don't need to do that because like war what is it good for Federico?
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It's a stupid war.
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It's absolutely nothing.
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There's nothing to be at war about.
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You like a Mac, I like an iPad, and Steven likes old Macs, and that's fine.
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And everybody gets what they want.
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I don't understand.
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Like, this is beyond the article on Dr. Drang's website.
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But there's people who actually get angry.
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I'm not the angry one.
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There's other people who get angry when you say that you do stuff on an iPad.
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And we've talked about this before many many times.
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Those people tend to be Mac users or PC users.
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And I don't understand why can't everybody just go on with their day and let other people,
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not just me, other people in general, like everybody uses the computer they want and
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in the end what matters is that you do good work or you manage to accomplish what you
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set out to accomplish with your computer.
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It doesn't matter what kind of computer you use.
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I don't understand, like, we need, the need to use financial results to make an argument,
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a bigger argument about the iPad.
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I think that's a useless waste of time to use financial results to make a statement
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about the iPad as a device and its need to exist.
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Like it's just numbers and it's still millions of money, you know?
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Yeah, because I guess thinking, I've been thinking about this a lot after our discussion
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this week, and I've been trying to think about things, like, I don't say I disagree with
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you, I don't agree with people that say it's dead, I don't really know where I sit on it,
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because I'm not an iPad user, so again, I try not to judge, but I see the things you
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do and I appreciate them.
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So I've been thinking about this a little bit, and I guess the thing that these numbers
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don't show is how many people are using the iPad, because...
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- I mean, okay, they might not be selling
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as many as they saw previously,
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but that doesn't mean there's less people buying them.
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And you can't really compare iPad and iPhone
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because contracts and subsidies.
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So, I mean, it would be really interesting,
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and it'd probably be useful for Apple to try and show,
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like if they do know, like,
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App Store sales or something from the iPad,
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like to show, like, see, people are using these devices
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'cause people are buying tons of apps on them.
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Do you know what I mean?
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Like that might help show that, yeah, okay,
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the numbers are going down just because less people
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are buying new ones, but that's okay because the people
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that bought four years ago,
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they're gonna buy again next year.
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Like, I don't know, I don't know.
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- Yeah, maybe they could use, you know, different numbers,
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but maybe they can't.
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Like, I don't know what's behind the numbers.
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Like, can they share usage numbers?
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Is that all right?
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Can they do that on an investor call?
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I don't know.
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- I know I've seen stuff like that before.
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always share stuff like that, don't they?
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They say like how many active,
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activated and active users they have,
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they usually share that information at IO.
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But that's weird for Apple to do,
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they don't share anything else,
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so maybe they don't want to share it on this one product.
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I don't know.
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But I just wanted to add that thought Federico,
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'cause I push you,
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but I don't want people to think that I disagree with you.
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- No, no, yeah, because we also got people saying that you--
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- People hate me.
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When Myke pushes me, it's because he wants me to think about stuff usually, and it makes
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for a good show.
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And I agree.
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So I'm not angry at Myke.
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I'm not angry actually at anybody in general.
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Like I don't have time to be angry.
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So it's just that I find curious to use one set of facts, in this case numbers, to make
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a statement about another topic, which is "does this type of computer need to exist?"
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it's two different things and you're trying to make a single argument and it doesn't really
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work. I don't know. I feel like we've talked about this enough and maybe we should move
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on and you use a mic, I use a iPad and the world is fine and we're fine and we love each
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It's true. That's all very true. Myke, I wanted to do some follow up. You guys spoke on upgrade
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about the unboxing experience for the Apple watch and in the show notes will
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be a link to a flickr album I unboxed the stainless steel one it sounds like
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from the description that this box and the the sport box are different yeah
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they are different yeah so it's like in a this is radio so we'll do a word
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picture kind of in a box it's on its side and a little mount so it's not laid
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out flat it's actually like it was actually like buckled around this thing
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the box is really heavy it's I agree with you guys it's a lot of packaging it
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feels very much like an unboxing an early iPod but uh we will uh we'll put
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that in the show notes and people can check it out it's really a really nice
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experience but it's you know clearly they're going for this like sort of
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luxury feel about things. I think one of the key differences between the sport
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and the steel is the sport box is a long thin box and that the watch is laid out
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flat but the steel it the band is wrapped around itself and it's enclosed
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in a circle and the box is square it's a cube right? Yeah. Yeah that's what I thought.
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And you can like club somebody with this box like it is heavy because luxury yeah, yeah because the
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The box that the watch itself is in is quite heavy, and then it's in a box
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And it was in a box just boxes on boxes on boxes
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Did you like the box you and you didn't really sound excited
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No, I mean, it's nice. It's just it was it was not what I was expecting like I
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I don't know what I was expecting.
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I wasn't thinking it'd be like an iPod,
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like a little clear acrylic case.
00:17:03
◼
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It was nicer than I was expecting.
00:17:05
◼
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And it was just more of it than I was expecting.
00:17:07
◼
►
But it's nice, I'm gonna keep it, and we'll go from there.
00:17:11
◼
►
- Awesome, we have a special guest on this week's episode.
00:17:15
◼
►
We're gonna be joined by Christina Warren in a moment
00:17:17
◼
►
to talk about all of the crazy stuff
00:17:21
◼
►
that is happening over at Microsoft.
00:17:23
◼
►
So we're gonna talk about some of the iOS apps
00:17:26
◼
►
Windows Phone stuff. But before we do that let me take a moment to thank our
00:17:30
◼
►
friends over at lynda.com. They are the online learning platform that have over
00:17:36
◼
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3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology
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and creative skills. To get yourself a free 10-day trial visit lynda.com
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that's lynda.com/connected. lynda.com is for people that want to solve
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problems, for people that are curious to advance a hobby that they've always
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wanted. It's people that want to just make things happen. Maybe you've always
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wanted to learn how to master Excel so you can be a king in the accounting room.
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be a queen in the boardroom. You can look at all of this stuff on
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Lynda.com and you can make yourself an absolute whiz kid in business, technology,
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it doesn't matter what it is, Lynda.com have got courses for all of it. Maybe you
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want to get started in development we talk about that a bunch on this show
00:18:25
◼
►
we're about to talk about it in a bit maybe you want to learn how to develop
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for the Windows platform maybe you want to learn how to develop Android apps or
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iOS apps maybe you want to learn Swift. lynda.com has courses on all of these
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from fundamentals to projects so you can learn how to build like say for example
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a to-do app you can build like a to-do app start to finish and it will show you
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how to do all of that and it has courses that you can watch the great videos you
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can watch them in your browser with their fantastic transcripts you can
00:18:51
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watch them on iOS and Android as well. But then they also have like resources
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and things that you can download and you can try them out for yourself so you can
00:18:58
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actually follow on whilst you're watching the course. These courses are
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taught by actual experts who are super passionate about teaching and that comes
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across in all of Lynda.com stuff as they try and make it as easy as possible for
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you to learn great new things. Your Lynda.com membership is going to give you
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unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics or for one flat rate. Whether
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you are looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby,
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or you just want to learn something new, go to lynda.com, that's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash
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connected and sign up right now for your free 10 day trial.
00:19:30
◼
►
Thank you so much to lynda.com for supporting this show and all of Relay FM.
00:19:35
◼
►
So we are joined now on connected by co-host of Rocket on Relay FM and senior tech editor
00:19:41
◼
►
at Mashable, Christina Warren.
00:19:43
◼
►
Hi Christina.
00:19:44
◼
►
Hey guys, how are you?
00:19:46
◼
►
So well, thank you so much for joining us.
00:19:49
◼
►
Happy to be here.
00:19:50
◼
►
about some interesting stuff today. We're gonna talk about Microsoft on the Apple Show.
00:19:56
◼
►
I know, well there's actually Microsoft-y news, it's interesting. There's Apple-y news
00:20:04
◼
►
coming out of Microsoft. It's a new world, you guys.
00:20:08
◼
►
So I guess now last week Microsoft had its Build Conference for those of us in the Apple
00:20:13
◼
►
camp. It's basically their WWDC. It's a time for them to have developers and their community
00:20:18
◼
►
in one place and kind of lay out the road map for what's going on. And it was really
00:20:23
◼
►
like how long was like two and a half hour keynote or something?
00:20:26
◼
►
It was a two and a half, it was a ridiculously long keynote. It was scheduled to be two hours
00:20:31
◼
►
and then it ended up going two and a half hours.
00:20:34
◼
►
That's right.
00:20:35
◼
►
How you end up, I mean, and they clearly had rehearsed how you miss schedule, how everybody
00:20:40
◼
►
ends up going long and you end up, I don't even know how that happens, but no, it was
00:20:45
◼
►
very long and unlike Apple who always kind of focuses on the more consumery bits during
00:20:51
◼
►
the WWDC keynote, so even though developers get excited about stuff like Swift and new
00:20:54
◼
►
Xcode features and new APIs, there's something for the regular people to kind of understand
00:21:01
◼
►
Microsoft had some of that.
00:21:02
◼
►
Unfortunately, they saved it basically for the very end or interspersed weird places
00:21:06
◼
►
in the middle and started up by talking about Docker which is totally fascinating and awesome
00:21:11
◼
►
but maybe not for everybody and then they got into all their cloud computing stuff and
00:21:14
◼
►
Azure cloud storage and different types of database technologies and really kind of going
00:21:22
◼
►
into the deep, deep nerdy woods.
00:21:26
◼
►
Point where me, who is interested in a lot of stuff, I'm bored.
00:21:29
◼
►
I'm like, "Okay, you guys, this is terrible," and waited until the very end to kind of get
00:21:34
◼
►
into the new features coming to Windows 10 and to talk about the HoloLens, which is kind
00:21:40
◼
►
of their augmented reality technology, which is actually really cool.
00:21:43
◼
►
Yeah, so I thought we could kind of focus on where Microsoft is sort of touching
00:21:49
◼
►
the the Apple world here. So as a lot of people know they've got Windows, they've
00:21:53
◼
►
got Windows now runs on the Xbox kind of, they run on tablets, and of course they
00:21:58
◼
►
run on phones with Windows Phone and that's seems to be sort of the, you know,
00:22:04
◼
►
kind of the run of the litter over at Microsoft. Windows Phone hasn't been a
00:22:07
◼
►
huge success in most places by many metrics. They have some interesting
00:22:11
◼
►
hardware you guys spoke about that on
00:22:13
◼
►
rocket with some of the camera stuff
00:22:14
◼
►
they're doing is pretty interesting but
00:22:15
◼
►
but kind of the core problem with
00:22:17
◼
►
Windows Phone is that there's not a lot
00:22:19
◼
►
of third-party applications for it which
00:22:22
◼
►
is a little bit chicken and egg right
00:22:24
◼
►
they they don't have any or you could
00:22:26
◼
►
say they don't have users because they
00:22:28
◼
►
don't have apps so they don't have apps
00:22:29
◼
►
because they don't have users and it
00:22:31
◼
►
seems like Microsoft is trying to break
00:22:34
◼
►
out of that cycle with some with some
00:22:35
◼
►
announcements that they made made last
00:22:38
◼
►
week so Christina what are they doing
00:22:39
◼
►
with iOS developers specifically? What have they kind of put on the table now?
00:22:45
◼
►
Well you summed up the exact problem they're facing really, really
00:22:49
◼
►
well, which is that they've been cranking away at this platform for,
00:22:54
◼
►
I guess, four years now. Close to five years actually with
00:22:58
◼
►
Windows, if you count Windows Phone 7. And Windows Phone 8 was 2012, I want to say.
00:23:08
◼
►
So it's been three years that they've been doing that.
00:23:11
◼
►
And they've had issues where they are trying to get developers on board and they just kind
00:23:16
◼
►
of can't do it.
00:23:18
◼
►
So what they're doing with iOS developers is they are basically saying, "Okay, we know
00:23:22
◼
►
that you're developing apps for iOS and we know that you like Cocoa, we know you like
00:23:25
◼
►
Objective-C, we know you like the Apple stuff.
00:23:29
◼
►
What if we made it easy for you to bring your apps over and basically port your iOS apps,
00:23:33
◼
►
your Objective-C stuff and get it to natively run in Windows?"
00:23:38
◼
►
So basically you can bring over your Xcode project and take all of your Objective-C files.
00:23:43
◼
►
You'll need to do some work to kind of package it correctly for, you know, in C# and to run
00:23:48
◼
►
on the Windows platform.
00:23:50
◼
►
But by and large, you know, it would be one of those things where it would kind of let
00:23:53
◼
►
you bring a lot of your coding, a lot of your UI stuff, even a lot of your backend kind
00:23:58
◼
►
of mechanics and translate it to be able to run on Windows.
00:24:01
◼
►
And one of the examples they pointed out was that Candy Crush Saga from King, the one that
00:24:07
◼
►
is in the Windows store is actually, in the Microsoft store, is a direct port of the iOS
00:24:14
◼
►
app where it's literally the iOS code.
00:24:17
◼
►
Maybe a few changes made that King pushes out updates to every so often.
00:24:22
◼
►
So King hasn't had to develop anything natively for Windows Phone.
00:24:28
◼
►
They are just able to take the iOS code that they've used and bring it back over.
00:24:32
◼
►
- Yeah, and I could see the draw for that, right?
00:24:37
◼
►
So instead of having to have a Windows phone developer,
00:24:41
◼
►
or probably honestly a team of developers working on it,
00:24:44
◼
►
Microsoft's basically offering,
00:24:45
◼
►
hey look, bring your iOS app, bring your front end,
00:24:48
◼
►
and you can recompile it and you can run.
00:24:52
◼
►
And to me, as sort of an old Mac user,
00:24:56
◼
►
I've heard this story before,
00:24:58
◼
►
but in the past you heard it from Apple,
00:25:00
◼
►
like hey guys Java like you know this whole like developed once run everywhere
00:25:05
◼
►
promise always kind of falls apart and it does do you think Microsoft has an
00:25:11
◼
►
opportunity to break that or are they doomed to the same same mistakes I think
00:25:15
◼
►
it depends on how they do it I mean I think that it's certainly there have been
00:25:18
◼
►
examples of people who have you know created kind of these hybrid platforms
00:25:22
◼
►
that sit on top of these translation layers that sit on top of native code
00:25:25
◼
►
bases and and convert things that I think have done well you know as a
00:25:29
◼
►
Xamarian, which is a company that actually does the inverse of this, where you can write
00:25:33
◼
►
in C# and build apps for Mac, iOS, Android, basically lets people do that.
00:25:41
◼
►
And that's fairly popular with people in the enterprise who maybe have a lot of C# expertise
00:25:45
◼
►
and they don't have the expertise in Objective-C or in Java and don't know all the specific
00:25:52
◼
►
coding standards for Android or iOS.
00:25:55
◼
►
That works pretty well and gets pretty good results.
00:25:57
◼
►
and they can be fairly close to what you would get if you were writing pure native code.
00:26:01
◼
►
I think the problem though is that always there are certain optimization challenges
00:26:05
◼
►
involved and certain things can convert very cleanly, certain things can't, but there are
00:26:09
◼
►
optimizations you can make there.
00:26:11
◼
►
The problem though is that it's not just about porting the app over, and I talk to a lot
00:26:15
◼
►
of developers about this, it's also about taking care of support issues and supporting
00:26:19
◼
►
customers and seeing if you want to maintain any differences in the look and feel.
00:26:25
◼
►
do you need to change this API or that API for a service that might not exist?
00:26:29
◼
►
This is more of an issue with Android, I think, ports coming over to Windows than it might
00:26:33
◼
►
be for Apple stuff.
00:26:34
◼
►
But for instance, Google services is something that a lot of Android developers use and rely
00:26:39
◼
►
on and that's what handles a lot of their location data, a lot of their in-app purchase
00:26:41
◼
►
stuff and a lot of other kind of tidbits.
00:26:45
◼
►
And that is a problem for Android developers who want to port their apps to Amazon's App
00:26:49
◼
►
Store, for instance, because that doesn't have Google services.
00:26:52
◼
►
And it also means that if you're bringing that code over to Windows, you're going to
00:26:55
◼
►
have to have something else to drop in its place.
00:26:57
◼
►
Now Microsoft has said they already have that.
00:27:00
◼
►
And if you're using mapping functionality and making calls to Google Maps, they will
00:27:05
◼
►
redirect those to Bing Maps or to Nokia here or whatever they're using.
00:27:09
◼
►
And the same is true for the in-app purchase things.
00:27:12
◼
►
And they can do the same thing with Apple.
00:27:14
◼
►
If somebody's making a call to a mapping component or a camera component, it can be cross-referenced
00:27:19
◼
►
with whatever Windows is doing.
00:27:21
◼
►
But there are, I'm with you, I don't know if this is going to be any different now on
00:27:27
◼
►
the short term, but I feel like there is potential because it is Microsoft, if they decide to
00:27:32
◼
►
take on as a company and as a strategy be more cross-platform and sort of approaching
00:27:37
◼
►
things in a more multifaceted way, they might be able to come up with a solution that maybe
00:27:44
◼
►
it's not as good as going pure native, but could be perfectly serviceable and perfectly
00:27:48
◼
►
usable for lots and lots of people.
00:27:50
◼
►
Right, you know in the past. I mean there's lots of stories about this of
00:27:55
◼
►
Microsoft going to developers and saying hey look you know what we will pay you to to bring your app over
00:28:00
◼
►
And that's gone on very recently even with people we know and and I wonder like it is
00:28:08
◼
►
That sort of approach has that not worked for them
00:28:12
◼
►
Or they are they still not getting what they can do because you look at the big names like everybody points at Instagram
00:28:17
◼
►
right that's kind of the
00:28:18
◼
►
example people use and I mean for me it might be a silly metric but that's one
00:28:23
◼
►
that I'm going to look at of like does Instagram show up like or does Snapchat
00:28:28
◼
►
show up? One of these really big social networks because that's what people want
00:28:31
◼
►
out of a mobile device and Microsoft just can't offer it. No and you're right I
00:28:36
◼
►
mean the problem is you know for instance Instagram is a great example
00:28:38
◼
►
Instagram actually is on Windows Phone but it doesn't have nearly the features
00:28:42
◼
►
that it has an Android or iOS. I mean and in fairness you know Instagram is still
00:28:47
◼
►
leading on iOS than it is on Android.
00:28:50
◼
►
And some of the third party, I've gotten much better with feature parity for the main app,
00:28:53
◼
►
but the layouts app and hyperlapse and some of the other things are not on Android at
00:29:00
◼
►
But they did come over to Windows Phone.
00:29:03
◼
►
I don't know what was involved with that, how much money Microsoft had to pay, what
00:29:07
◼
►
work they had to do to get them there.
00:29:09
◼
►
But they did come over.
00:29:10
◼
►
But the fact that the updates haven't kept up in pace I think indicates that they're
00:29:13
◼
►
not getting a huge amount of ROI from the Windows Phone codebase.
00:29:21
◼
►
There's another company I've talked to kind of on background who's told me they had a
00:29:26
◼
►
Windows Phone app, they haven't updated it since 2013.
00:29:29
◼
►
This is a really big social network and I said, "Does this change your plans at all?"
00:29:36
◼
►
And they said, "No, frankly it doesn't."
00:29:39
◼
►
is an interesting case because they used to have a number of third party unofficial clients
00:29:44
◼
►
for Windows Phone that you could use.
00:29:46
◼
►
Snapshot because it has pretty lousy security anyway, they're finally starting to kind of
00:29:50
◼
►
act more like adults, although they still act like children and realizing they have
00:29:54
◼
►
to start showing people money and having to take privacy issues seriously have now had
00:29:58
◼
►
a very hard official hard ban on unofficial third party apps anybody using their API.
00:30:05
◼
►
And so they are banning those apps from the store and if anybody uses them then their
00:30:09
◼
►
SnapChat account gets shut down.
00:30:13
◼
►
So it opens up an interesting question.
00:30:15
◼
►
Users obviously, when does a user really want a SnapChat client?
00:30:19
◼
►
It does open up an interesting place where it goes, "Okay, look SnapChat, we know you
00:30:23
◼
►
guys don't want to invest the time and effort in maintaining an app for our platform.
00:30:26
◼
►
We know that we don't have enough users to make a dent for you guys and it doesn't matter.
00:30:30
◼
►
But our users really want it and if we could show you that all you need to do is bring
00:30:34
◼
►
over your iOS or your Android code, you know, can we do it?
00:30:37
◼
►
And at that point, maybe Microsoft could even say,
00:30:38
◼
►
look, we can even help out with some of the support issues
00:30:41
◼
►
and we can help out with even some of the maintenance issues.
00:30:43
◼
►
I don't know how well that scales,
00:30:45
◼
►
but it might be a short-term solution
00:30:48
◼
►
for the problem of at least getting some of the apps
00:30:51
◼
►
that you need for parity on the platform.
00:30:54
◼
►
You know, having Candy Crush Saga is a good step
00:30:57
◼
►
when it comes to gaming.
00:30:58
◼
►
And that app does really well on Windows Phone,
00:31:00
◼
►
you know, King has said, but, you know,
00:31:01
◼
►
making sure that Snapchat is updated more frequently, making sure that you have apps
00:31:07
◼
►
such as Instagram is updated more frequently, making sure you have apps like Snapchat on.
00:31:14
◼
►
And maybe even talking to, I think this would be a lot harder and I don't know if it would
00:31:18
◼
►
even be possible, but talking to Periscope and the Meerkat guys and the Yik Yaks of the
00:31:23
◼
►
world, keeping abreast of what the next generation of users wants.
00:31:28
◼
►
And I think being proactive and reaching out to them and saying, "Hey, maybe you want
00:31:32
◼
►
to consider building this into your strategy as you evolve."
00:31:35
◼
►
I don't know if that'll work or not, but it's better than the current strategy, which is
00:31:39
◼
►
basically, "Hey, we'll bribe you.
00:31:41
◼
►
Come over to the platform."
00:31:42
◼
►
They're bribed.
00:31:43
◼
►
They come over to the platform.
00:31:44
◼
►
There's still no users.
00:31:45
◼
►
And at a certain point, it's like, "Well, the money was great.
00:31:48
◼
►
We tried, but we still aren't going to bother dedicating resources to building natively
00:31:51
◼
►
for this because it's not worth it for us to dedicate a team or even a couple of engineers
00:32:00
◼
►
So Christina, looking at this, seeing that these apps, these big apps that are just completely
00:32:05
◼
►
dodging and just missing Windows Phone, like by choice, does this indicate that Windows
00:32:10
◼
►
Phone is maybe dead as a platform?
00:32:12
◼
►
Are they going down the same road as BlackBerry?
00:32:14
◼
►
Microsoft isn't facing the same issues that BlackBerry is facing.
00:32:17
◼
►
They obviously are in a slightly better position than that, but one of the interesting things
00:32:21
◼
►
that they're doing is they're selling a lot of low-cost phones.
00:32:24
◼
►
The Lumia series has done really well in these emerging markets, so they kind of are going
00:32:27
◼
►
after the same base as the Android One initiative.
00:32:31
◼
►
Some of the sort of Android systems, some of them
00:32:34
◼
►
use official Google services, some of them
00:32:36
◼
►
don't from companies such as Xiaomi and Hisense and TCL.
00:32:40
◼
►
And they're doing really well in those markets.
00:32:43
◼
►
They can do things like carrier billing,
00:32:45
◼
►
which is really popular in markets where
00:32:46
◼
►
you don't have credit cards.
00:32:48
◼
►
And I think that there's a case to be made
00:32:50
◼
►
that if they could build critical mass in those markets--
00:32:53
◼
►
you look at the BRIC countries-- Brazil, India, Russia, China--
00:32:57
◼
►
They could build critical mass in any of those areas and so far it looks like they're doing
00:33:00
◼
►
the best in South America.
00:33:03
◼
►
That might be enough to maybe not save the platform but at least make it more viable.
00:33:10
◼
►
I kind of don't know what they do.
00:33:12
◼
►
You said is it a failure if they've done – Blackberry has done – right now it is a failure but
00:33:17
◼
►
I don't know how much longer – I don't know what they do.
00:33:21
◼
►
I don't know whether they quit and try to do something else because they can't not
00:33:25
◼
►
They have to do mobile.
00:33:26
◼
►
whether they quit and try to come up with another platform
00:33:28
◼
►
and maybe hope that the next wave of smart devices
00:33:32
◼
►
and smartphones in the next cycle,
00:33:34
◼
►
they'll be able to gain mind share that way,
00:33:36
◼
►
or if they have to continue plugging on,
00:33:38
◼
►
keeping on plugging on.
00:33:39
◼
►
And honestly, that kind of opens up
00:33:42
◼
►
one of the interesting side benefits of what they're doing,
00:33:44
◼
►
which also relates to the Mac and iOS,
00:33:47
◼
►
which is that Microsoft is being really bullish
00:33:49
◼
►
about bringing their own services and tools
00:33:54
◼
►
to Mac and to iPhone especially.
00:33:57
◼
►
So, they need to be on mobile, period.
00:33:59
◼
►
They can't quit their mobile strategy.
00:34:01
◼
►
And if they can't win by having people come
00:34:05
◼
►
to their platform, they can at least make sure
00:34:07
◼
►
that their core services, things like Office,
00:34:10
◼
►
are available where people actually are using mobile devices.
00:34:15
◼
►
- Right, we've talked about that even on this show
00:34:17
◼
►
that some of Microsoft apps like Outlook,
00:34:19
◼
►
yes, they purchased it.
00:34:21
◼
►
It's not built from the ground up in Microsoft,
00:34:24
◼
►
but it's a really nice contender on iOS.
00:34:27
◼
►
- It's a great app.
00:34:28
◼
►
- And Sunrise, the calendar app also.
00:34:31
◼
►
- Yeah, they bought Sunrise, which is a great one.
00:34:33
◼
►
And they've also, I have to even say Office 365,
00:34:37
◼
►
they've done a really good job with it on iOS.
00:34:40
◼
►
And they're showing off in future versions
00:34:43
◼
►
where if you add extensions and add add-on components
00:34:46
◼
►
to things like Excel and you do it on Windows,
00:34:49
◼
►
it'll also work on the Mac,
00:34:50
◼
►
it'll work on the web and it'll work on iOS.
00:34:54
◼
►
And so that becomes interesting as kind of an add on
00:34:56
◼
►
capability for real time editing and for collaboration stuff
00:34:59
◼
►
and for bringing in cloud and kind of server side components
00:35:02
◼
►
you know, it works with, you know,
00:35:03
◼
►
they're doing integrations with Dropbox.
00:35:04
◼
►
So you can open up, you know,
00:35:06
◼
►
your Dropbox files in Office 365 and open up, you know,
00:35:09
◼
►
if you're in Dropbox, open those, you know,
00:35:11
◼
►
edit documents in Office 365 directly from the Dropbox app.
00:35:14
◼
►
They're really trying to be more extensible
00:35:17
◼
►
and they're trying to be more places.
00:35:18
◼
►
And that's a good thing.
00:35:19
◼
►
that's something that they resisted doing for far too long.
00:35:22
◼
►
And as a result, Google, which in my opinion has a much,
00:35:25
◼
►
as a way inferior product, has kind of taken hold
00:35:28
◼
►
in the online creation space.
00:35:30
◼
►
Now my favorite for document editing
00:35:33
◼
►
and for collaboration stuff is actually a company
00:35:35
◼
►
called Quip, Q-U-I-P.
00:35:36
◼
►
I really like Quip and they have a great iOS app,
00:35:39
◼
►
fantastic iOS app actually,
00:35:41
◼
►
and a really good share extension and widget stuff too.
00:35:46
◼
►
- Do you know they also support Markdown, Christina?
00:35:48
◼
►
- Yes, they do.
00:35:49
◼
►
Yeah, I love that.
00:35:50
◼
►
Yeah, we just Quip as a replacement for Google Docs for a while and I just love the marketing
00:35:56
◼
►
Yeah, no, it's funny because the guy who's their CEO and their founder, he was the CTO
00:36:01
◼
►
of Facebook for a long, long time and he was one of the co-creators of Google Maps and
00:36:06
◼
►
several of the people on the Quip team are from the Google Docs team.
00:36:09
◼
►
They know what they're doing.
00:36:11
◼
►
Brett Taylor, he was one of the founders of FriendFeed and then he went to Facebook as
00:36:15
◼
►
their CTO and was there for a long time.
00:36:17
◼
►
And they know about collaboration and they know about what to do and they have really
00:36:24
◼
►
high core competency and their iOS app is great.
00:36:26
◼
►
And they build a great web app.
00:36:28
◼
►
It's not surprising to me that the first great web app was Google Maps, right?
00:36:32
◼
►
And that its co-creator is working on that project.
00:36:34
◼
►
But Microsoft Office is actually not bad either.
00:36:37
◼
►
I had to give a presentation a few weeks ago and I needed it to be in PowerPoint format.
00:36:41
◼
►
I couldn't use Keynote.
00:36:43
◼
►
And able to make edits in Office 365, I was using the Mac 2015 Office Beta and I was able
00:36:51
◼
►
to make edits on my iPad using the same theme, fonts, everything.
00:36:56
◼
►
And everything worked flawlessly and that was really great.
00:36:59
◼
►
So I mean at least they're improving in that direction.
00:37:03
◼
►
They might not be able to get people to apply their phones, but at least they can take their
00:37:06
◼
►
services and bring them with better parity to the Mac and iOS.
00:37:11
◼
►
So Christina, I wanted to ask you, is it possible for Apple to block this technology to prevent
00:37:16
◼
►
developers or Microsoft from executing this strategy of having iOS apps basically recompiled
00:37:22
◼
►
for Windows?
00:37:23
◼
►
Is it possible, do you think, for Apple?
00:37:26
◼
►
They could change fundamental aspects of their API enough that it would be annoying, but
00:37:31
◼
►
Because this isn't fundamentally that different from what Adobe Air was doing when it switched
00:37:35
◼
►
from being kind of like that weird containerization thing to being a runtime.
00:37:40
◼
►
And there have been companies like Appcelerator and like I said, Xamarian has been doing this
00:37:46
◼
►
sort of stuff in reverse.
00:37:47
◼
►
As long as Apple has these open APIs, it's one of those things, or not open, but these
00:37:51
◼
►
documented APIs, it's one of those things where you can kind of reverse engineer a compiler
00:37:57
◼
►
and kind of write a converter to convert stuff.
00:38:01
◼
►
They might restrict everything they release, but honestly, I don't think this hurts Apple
00:38:08
◼
►
for this to be a possibility.
00:38:09
◼
►
It's, you're still primarily writing code in Objective-C.
00:38:13
◼
►
A lot, a question I got a lot last week was,
00:38:16
◼
►
are they gonna do anything for Swift?
00:38:17
◼
►
Since Swift is obviously now the new hotness.
00:38:21
◼
►
And Microsoft has come forward and said, yes,
00:38:23
◼
►
we're working on a tool to bring Swift stuff over as well.
00:38:26
◼
►
Again, how well all of this is going to work,
00:38:28
◼
►
I don't really know.
00:38:29
◼
►
But you know, you consider, the idea isn't too crazy
00:38:32
◼
►
when you consider, you know,
00:38:33
◼
►
if you look at things like Mac Ruby,
00:38:35
◼
►
and you look at some of the various, you know,
00:38:37
◼
►
JavaScript to iOS, sorts of libraries and kind of the hybrid ways people code.
00:38:42
◼
►
It isn't terribly different from saying, "Okay, I code primarily in this way, but I'm using
00:38:48
◼
►
some of this other stuff and I'm kind of making a soup out of my mobile app."
00:38:53
◼
►
So I mean, I guess Apple can make it harder for them, but I don't know if there would
00:38:57
◼
►
be any reason that they would want to do that because it doesn't hurt them.
00:39:00
◼
►
I mean, still people are saying, "Our development platform of choice is Xcode and we will use
00:39:06
◼
►
studio by holding our nose.
00:39:08
◼
►
I mean, it looks pretty great for Apple, you know, from the company that, you know, just
00:39:13
◼
►
ten years ago, Ballmer was on stage screaming, "Sweaty developers, developers, developers,
00:39:17
◼
►
developers, developers," that now the company that arguably has some of the worst developer
00:39:22
◼
►
relations at least in terms of the transparency and stuff is where everybody wants to be.
00:39:27
◼
►
So, I don't know.
00:39:29
◼
►
You still need to buy a Mac to use that code.
00:39:32
◼
►
So at least they're going to buy a Mac.
00:39:34
◼
►
No, you still need to buy a Mac.
00:39:35
◼
►
And there have been toolkits for Windows for a long time, like tools like Appcelerator
00:39:40
◼
►
and Adobe Air, where you could kind of get around that and code for iOS.
00:39:44
◼
►
Again, Xamarian is one of those where you could kind of get around needing the Mac.
00:39:48
◼
►
But yeah, you're going to have to have your Xcode project file.
00:39:52
◼
►
This is certainly not one of those things that's trying to take away from Apple's market
00:39:57
◼
►
It's trying to say, "Look, we know you already have this code.
00:39:59
◼
►
Please bring it to us so that we can have more than 10,000 apps or however many they
00:40:05
◼
►
Christina, thank you so much for joining us. I know that I think I can speak for
00:40:10
◼
►
everyone that I feel like I have way more information than I did 20 minutes
00:40:14
◼
►
ago. Awesome. Which is what you're so great at and if people have enjoyed
00:40:18
◼
►
listening to Christina and you haven't yet checked out Rocket then you need to
00:40:22
◼
►
rectify that straight away because Rocket is genuinely one of my very
00:40:26
◼
►
favorite shows right now and I am very privileged I get to hear it for everybody
00:40:30
◼
►
else because I hope you guys help with the editing. So I love that we have Rocket on
00:40:36
◼
►
Relay FM and if people want to check it out they can go to relay.fm/rocket. But Christina,
00:40:41
◼
►
where else can people find you on the internet? So you can find me at Mashable where I write
00:40:46
◼
►
and do analysis and I also do videos. So mashable.com/people/Christina and I'm on Twitter, I'm @Film_Girl.
00:40:54
◼
►
And I do another podcast which is not on Relay FM but is also a lot of fun called Overtired
00:40:58
◼
►
that I do with Brett Terpstra where we basically, it's two geeks talking about the stuff that
00:41:03
◼
►
keeps us awake at night.
00:41:04
◼
►
And you can find that at esn.fm/overtired and we'll put links to everything that we've
00:41:09
◼
►
just spoken about in the show notes today.
00:41:11
◼
►
Christina Warren, thank you so much for joining us.
00:41:14
◼
►
Thank you guys, I appreciate it.
00:41:15
◼
►
Speak to you soon.
00:41:16
◼
►
Alright, talk soon.
00:41:17
◼
►
Right, we still have a bunch more that we want to talk about including Apple Watch Bands
00:41:22
◼
►
and finally maybe we'll finish the streaming music discussion that we started about 700
00:41:27
◼
►
But before we do that let me take a moment to thank our friends over at igloo, the internet
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you'll actually like for helping support this week's episode of connected.
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or a new MacBook.
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in with the way that you want it to look from a branding perspective, because you can change
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all the fonts and the colours and that kind of stuff, but you can actually customise the
00:42:16
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functionality to be for different groups.
00:42:18
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Say like the accounting team need the micro blogs but they don't need the document sharing,
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◼
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They can have that, so you can just take that function away.
00:42:25
◼
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But then maybe the invoicing team
00:42:28
◼
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need some other different type of functionality.
00:42:30
◼
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They need the document stuff, and they need micro blogs,
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and they want all that stuff, because they're
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a sociable bunch.
00:42:35
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Then you can give them all of that,
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and they can have all of that.
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It's really cool.
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You can pick and choose a different functionality
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that makes sense in different parts of your workplace.
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And I've mentioned some of this already, but with igloo,
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you can share files, coordinate calendars,
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provide status updates, and manage your projects
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all in one interface.
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Igloo is not just for your traditional stuffy intranet stuff like HR policies and expense
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forms, it's also letting you work better together with the people that are in your
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organisation.
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Igloo's most recent release, Viking, revolves around documents and how you interact with
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them, gather feedback and make changes.
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They've even added the ability to track who has read critical information to keep
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everyone on the same page.
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This makes sure that you're able to see if someone has read and acknowledged new policy
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documents, sign off on a legal agreement or confirm completion of training
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materials which can all be really important stuff in a company. If you're
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working with a legacy internet that looks like it was built in the 90s when
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right now igloosoftware.com/connected thank you so much to igloo for their
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continued support of this show and Relay FM.
00:43:51
◼
►
So yesterday Apple sort of announced, sort of just published a webpage called "Creating
00:43:58
◼
►
Bands for Apple Watch" and links to a couple PDFs.
00:44:01
◼
►
The interesting one is the "Brand Design Guidelines for Apple Watch".
00:44:09
◼
►
Do you guys look at this?
00:44:13
◼
►
It's interesting.
00:44:14
◼
►
I took a look at the specs for creating bands, just because I think those diagrams and images,
00:44:23
◼
►
like schematics, are fancy.
00:44:24
◼
►
I don't understand what's going on, but they're super nice.
00:44:28
◼
►
What I like about them, is I know that this is kind of the way that these things are designed,
00:44:32
◼
►
but it looks like somebody just sketched them on a piece of paper and scanned them.
00:44:36
◼
►
I know that that's kind of the point, but it still just made me smile.
00:44:40
◼
►
Yeah, it looks like a secret document out of China.
00:44:43
◼
►
Yeah. Did you know guys that in the UK even Apple calls them straps and not bands?
00:44:49
◼
►
It's on the website and everything.
00:44:52
◼
►
Yeah, because they're called watch straps. We don't call them watch bands in the UK. We call them watch straps.
00:44:57
◼
►
Well, we don't call them straps or bands in Italian either.
00:45:01
◼
►
Well, what did they say on the Apple website in Italy? What did they say on apple.com/it?
00:45:06
◼
►
Okay, so let's see if I have the same... because I never checked the Italian Apple website.
00:45:13
◼
►
There you go, see, you know they've got some sort of magical word.
00:45:15
◼
►
Let's see if my guess is correct.
00:45:18
◼
►
Well, yeah, duh.
00:45:25
◼
►
Yeah, yeah, of course.
00:45:26
◼
►
It's what we use in Italian.
00:45:28
◼
►
See, they think about everybody.
00:45:31
◼
►
There's a really nice copy on the Italian website.
00:45:34
◼
►
This is supposed to be in there.
00:45:36
◼
►
I like the style, yeah.
00:45:40
◼
►
Straps, huh?
00:45:41
◼
►
Yeah, I didn't know that.
00:45:42
◼
►
- I know that.
00:45:42
◼
►
- Grabs and bands.
00:45:44
◼
►
So Apple has a section in here about the lugs,
00:45:46
◼
►
which are the, if you have an Apple Watch
00:45:48
◼
►
or have played with one, the parts that slide
00:45:50
◼
►
into the case and sort of click in.
00:45:52
◼
►
So on the sport band, they're made of the same material
00:45:54
◼
►
as the band, but like on the leather buckles,
00:45:57
◼
►
it's stainless steel that sort of slides in.
00:46:00
◼
►
So talk about that.
00:46:01
◼
►
They have testing for the sort of metal
00:46:05
◼
►
and material you're using, and these tests
00:46:07
◼
►
are all like, by these standards,
00:46:11
◼
►
Which is nice they're not you know having their own tests. They're saying hey, you know you need to meet these
00:46:18
◼
►
and then of course they have the
00:46:20
◼
►
Images you were talking about Federico of these schematics
00:46:23
◼
►
so you can kind of see how the lugs go in how the thickness of everything and
00:46:29
◼
►
Interesting I think I think what has gotten a lot of the headlines and
00:46:33
◼
►
What I think is most interesting is some of the
00:46:39
◼
►
requirements that they've they put in here
00:46:41
◼
►
about different types of
00:46:44
◼
►
adjustments and
00:46:47
◼
►
That it should provide a snug a comfortable fit which is maybe the most hilarious thing ever written in a tech in a tech spec
00:46:54
◼
►
There's no battery stuff is one thing that they're saying right right, right
00:46:59
◼
►
You can't because in the in the past week we saw those
00:47:04
◼
►
third-party bands
00:47:07
◼
►
from companies who are trying to figure out a way to plug into the diagnostic port of the Apple watch and
00:47:13
◼
►
They are claiming that they can actually recharge the watch or something. Yeah, I think I saw a bunch of these projects
00:47:20
◼
►
Yeah, I've seen this stuff apparently so and I think this is the case like power can be put through that diagnostic port
00:47:30
◼
►
Sorekapis from Serenity on iMore today and she's kind of like
00:47:34
◼
►
Yes, probably for the best and like I hadn't really thought this before but it's like
00:47:37
◼
►
This thing is like battery powered and charging whilst in contact with your skin. Like that just seems like you would get burned
00:47:46
◼
►
Yeah, it seems like a bad idea in general to trust a third-party company to use a piece of hardware that Apple itself
00:47:55
◼
►
is not mentioning anywhere like I
00:47:58
◼
►
I think it would be super easy for Apple to cut off access to the diagnostic port via software.
00:48:03
◼
►
Like what if they release an update and you buy this third-party band that promises to
00:48:08
◼
►
like to charge your Apple watch and then suddenly there's a software update and
00:48:13
◼
►
your accessory is no longer recognized by whatever hack you're using to plug into that port.
00:48:18
◼
►
It's super hacky. I don't know.
00:48:21
◼
►
Yeah, and to your point Myke, I mean at least the stainless steel body,
00:48:26
◼
►
you know, putting on the charger at night and picking up in the morning, it's warm to the touch in the morning.
00:48:31
◼
►
It's not that it's hot, it's not that it's not comfortable, but it's noticeably warm.
00:48:34
◼
►
It's the only time my device ever feels warm is when I pick it up in the morning to put it on.
00:48:39
◼
►
That goes away quickly, but every morning I pick it up and it's like, "Is it warm again?"
00:48:43
◼
►
Yeah, that's by design. That's a feature to wake you up.
00:48:48
◼
►
Take a little hug.
00:48:48
◼
►
Hey buddy! Nice to see you today.
00:48:55
◼
►
Yeah, I went out town this past weekend and visited a friend for his birthday and kind of crashed on his couch
00:49:00
◼
►
And so I had my watch charging sort of in the corner of the room
00:49:03
◼
►
Like just on the floor like kind of behind my bag and actually got like a book out of my backpack
00:49:08
◼
►
So it had a hard surface cuz I was like it's not there's gonna catch the carpet on fire
00:49:12
◼
►
But like I want this thing to have a little airflow
00:49:14
◼
►
Definitely not what I was expecting from it
00:49:16
◼
►
So it's it's it's interesting clearly apples going to allow third-party bands
00:49:22
◼
►
My question to the two of you,
00:49:25
◼
►
like what do you guys wanna see out of a program like this?
00:49:28
◼
►
I at least feel like Apple's offerings are A,
00:49:31
◼
►
really varied, so you can go anything from like
00:49:34
◼
►
really nice stainless steel to the, you know,
00:49:37
◼
►
rubbery sports band, and I just,
00:49:39
◼
►
in Apple's lineup there are several options that I like.
00:49:44
◼
►
What are people looking for that Apple's not offering?
00:49:47
◼
►
- I want to see not traditional tech companies
00:49:51
◼
►
making third-party bands for the Apple Watch.
00:49:54
◼
►
I wanna see luxury brands making these bands
00:49:59
◼
►
for the Apple Watch.
00:50:00
◼
►
Like I wanna see, I don't know, Gucci.
00:50:02
◼
►
I wanna see, I'm struggling to think of brands that I know.
00:50:07
◼
►
- Louis Vuitton, Burberry. - Yes, that's enough.
00:50:10
◼
►
I want to see these people making bands
00:50:12
◼
►
for the Apple Watch.
00:50:13
◼
►
- They 100% will, right?
00:50:15
◼
►
Like they are definitely,
00:50:16
◼
►
this is definitely going to happen.
00:50:19
◼
►
If they're not stupid, they need to get on board.
00:50:21
◼
►
Like, if I were Gucci, and oh my god, that would be nice,
00:50:26
◼
►
but if I were Gucci, I would totally make an Apple Watch band.
00:50:31
◼
►
- I wanna see stuff like branded stuff.
00:50:34
◼
►
Like, you know, I think that that would be fun.
00:50:37
◼
►
Like, I'm not saying that I would want something like this,
00:50:40
◼
►
but it's the first thing that popped into my head,
00:50:42
◼
►
which would be like an Iron Man band, you know?
00:50:45
◼
►
Like, not stuff specifically like that,
00:50:48
◼
►
But, you know, like sports teams.
00:50:50
◼
►
They could be a sports team's bands.
00:50:52
◼
►
Like, you know, all of your favorite.
00:50:54
◼
►
You could get one with the Memphis Grizzlies colors
00:50:56
◼
►
on it, Steven.
00:50:59
◼
►
- Yeah, I think that that's, I agree with you Federico.
00:51:02
◼
►
I totally want to see the luxury brands,
00:51:03
◼
►
although I probably wouldn't go down that route.
00:51:05
◼
►
But this product is about like expression, you know?
00:51:09
◼
►
It's about fashion, it's about expression.
00:51:10
◼
►
So the idea that I'm really pleased that they're doing this,
00:51:13
◼
►
I didn't think they would do it yet.
00:51:15
◼
►
I thought it was gonna be a version two thing
00:51:16
◼
►
because they didn't announce it straight away. But I'm really pleased that they are.
00:51:20
◼
►
And the thing is, I agree with you Stephen, looking at what I see right now,
00:51:24
◼
►
I can't think of something that I'm looking for because there are still
00:51:28
◼
►
Apple Watch bands that I want to buy. But I think the key of it is with this stuff
00:51:34
◼
►
is you need to see what's available to know what you want. And the whole idea of
00:51:39
◼
►
a product like this in theory is offering choice. And if there's official
00:51:43
◼
►
choice that's coming via like an ordained program like them is it called
00:51:47
◼
►
made for Apple watch yes it is and there's no in here that just following
00:51:53
◼
►
these rules doesn't mean you can use that label so I mean it's like it is in
00:51:57
◼
►
the past where you have to apply to have that that blessing from Apple but I mean
00:52:02
◼
►
you probably get it if you get the lugs right because they will send the lugs to
00:52:05
◼
►
you yeah I don't know it's it's I mean hey I just skimmed it but it gets a
00:52:11
◼
►
little technical, a little legal. But I think it's really, I think it's really
00:52:16
◼
►
exciting. I like the idea of being able to go to my favorite fashion brand and
00:52:21
◼
►
buying like bands that match clothing that I own. You know, like but not like
00:52:29
◼
►
exactly but like aesthetically. Like I'm a big fan of Levi's. I have lots of Levi's
00:52:33
◼
►
jeans and Levi's shirts and I would like to see what Levi's could do for a watch
00:52:38
◼
►
band which would potentially match some of the clothes that I own or let's say
00:52:42
◼
►
that I buy a really fancy suit from from like Burberry or something it would be
00:52:48
◼
►
really nice if I could buy a matching watch band to go along with that suit
00:52:51
◼
►
that I wear. That kind of idea and it's genius it's just genius this is exactly
00:52:56
◼
►
the kind of thing that needed to do. What about like more accessible brands for
00:53:00
◼
►
like young people I'm thinking about like H&M department stores you know that
00:53:03
◼
►
kind of store yeah what if they get on board with the with the made for Apple
00:53:07
◼
►
watch program and they start making I don't know like bands that are 20 euros
00:53:12
◼
►
which I don't know what it's like in pounds. Yeah what if they're
00:53:17
◼
►
seasonal what are they what if they have like models for I mean men and women of
00:53:22
◼
►
course but also teens and maybe you know when even if you want to dress a little
00:53:26
◼
►
more fancy you know there's lots of potential here with like you said Myke
00:53:31
◼
►
with a with expression with personalization of the Apple watch I'm
00:53:35
◼
►
I'm trying, and it's kind of different because, I mean,
00:53:39
◼
►
there's people who kind of outfit their iPhones
00:53:42
◼
►
with all sorts of cases,
00:53:45
◼
►
but having that kind of personalization on a watch,
00:53:48
◼
►
it's so much different, you know,
00:53:51
◼
►
because you have, like,
00:53:52
◼
►
you don't have to use an iPhone case,
00:53:54
◼
►
but you have to use a band with your watch.
00:53:56
◼
►
- That's such a good point.
00:53:58
◼
►
That is a really interesting distinction, isn't it?
00:54:01
◼
►
- Yeah, I mean, I decided to use an iPhone case,
00:54:05
◼
►
like just last year.
00:54:06
◼
►
And even now on the 6 Plus, I don't keep a case.
00:54:10
◼
►
But on the watch, you cannot use a watch without a case.
00:54:12
◼
►
I mean, unless you kind of use your phone with a piece of tape
00:54:16
◼
►
around your wrist, which I'm sure cannot happen.
00:54:20
◼
►
I mean, you need a band.
00:54:21
◼
►
So because of this necessity and because Apple
00:54:25
◼
►
is allowing other companies to do officially approved bands,
00:54:30
◼
►
I think we'll see a lot of uptake by people.
00:54:33
◼
►
least I hope so. It feels like an inevitability to me like if there were
00:54:40
◼
►
3,000 third-party apps in the store for the watches launch it shows that there's
00:54:47
◼
►
excitement about the product. I know it those two things don't go hand in hand
00:54:50
◼
►
but it just feels like this is something that a couple of companies maybe will
00:54:56
◼
►
jump on and then once they do everyone else is gonna follow and as I expect I
00:55:01
◼
►
I thought this would happen at the release date but it hasn't yet.
00:55:07
◼
►
But I expect that there are already companies that had these documents a few weeks ago at
00:55:13
◼
►
least that Apple has contacted.
00:55:15
◼
►
Another point that I wanted to discuss is, you guys know that I used to work with an
00:55:22
◼
►
I used to sell things on eBay for other people.
00:55:25
◼
►
One of my clients was this local watch and jewelry store in Viterbo.
00:55:31
◼
►
Now, I don't work with this guy anymore, but he has this small local shop in Viterbo where
00:55:39
◼
►
he primarily sells watches and accessories. So I'm wondering, well, if pretty known companies
00:55:49
◼
►
in terms of watch market, brands like Citizen and Omega, you know, these people.
00:55:55
◼
►
If they do start making custom bands for the Apple Watch, will people like my friend Inviterbo
00:56:01
◼
►
who owns a small watch shop, will they start selling, not the Apple Watch, but you know,
00:56:07
◼
►
the bands to people?
00:56:08
◼
►
Because I've been thinking about the Apple Watch and smart watches in general.
00:56:12
◼
►
Like what does my friend in Viterbo with, you know, depends on the traditional watch
00:56:20
◼
►
Is he scared by smart watches and by Apple Watch?
00:56:23
◼
►
But what if these little business owners could find a way to kind of plug into the smart
00:56:29
◼
►
watch market and in this case in the Apple Watch market by still selling physical custom
00:56:34
◼
►
bands to people?
00:56:36
◼
►
It would be interesting to see if custom bands also expand beyond the Apple stores and websites
00:56:45
◼
►
and the big fashion boutiques and if you can buy them at a local store like my friend in
00:56:52
◼
►
Yeah, Federico, I can definitely see that happening.
00:56:55
◼
►
The sort of boutique industry of nicely done, maybe even artisanal locally sourced Apple
00:57:05
◼
►
Like I mean I say that joking but also not joking like
00:57:08
◼
►
You know you haven't seen that with the iPhone cases as much, but like you said this is a very personal thing a very
00:57:18
◼
►
Very different thing than the iPhone case and so I would imagine that it could be a really interesting
00:57:24
◼
►
Probably smaller than the iPhone case, but but interesting nonetheless a little market to keep an eye on
00:57:34
◼
►
I'm excited. I hope that it does. I mean these things probably is gonna take many months before we start seeing them in the in the wild
00:57:40
◼
►
But I'm excited to see more. I'm just happy that this is in
00:57:46
◼
►
And I hope that it's not too long before we start seeing some stuff at least
00:57:50
◼
►
I hope it's not too long before I get an Apple watch. Where are you in this process?
00:57:54
◼
►
20 days to go Myke. Okay. Yeah, if you've been charged yet
00:58:03
◼
►
No. No, because that usually means it's on the way, doesn't it?
00:58:07
◼
►
Yeah, I'm still waiting. I was hoping to see some kind of movement this week, but still nothing. Still 20 days. Still May 26.
00:58:17
◼
►
Remind me what one you got again.
00:58:19
◼
►
Sport Space Gray, Black Band, 42.
00:58:25
◼
►
Right, okay. So it's not one of the mythical models.
00:58:28
◼
►
No, it's the stupid one. It's the basic one that everybody got.
00:58:35
◼
►
Yeah, I'm sorry Federico. It will come, it will come.
00:58:41
◼
►
Should we take a break?
00:58:44
◼
►
Finally get to that music streaming stuff?
00:58:47
◼
►
This week's episode of Connected is also brought to you by SaneBox. Listen to this, let's see if it sounds like you.
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01:00:51
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So Myke and Steven, can we talk about music?
01:00:57
◼
►
So just today have you looked on Twitter and specifically on 9to5Mac?
01:01:04
◼
►
The link is in the show notes already.
01:01:06
◼
►
There's a rumor that basically some music industry people are saying that Apple still
01:01:12
◼
►
doesn't have a deal with the music labels and you know all these other music guys to announce a new
01:01:17
◼
►
streaming service by June but instead 9to5 max sources said there's going to be a music streaming
01:01:25
◼
►
announcement at WWDC it's gonna happen and there's going to be an international rollout by the end of
01:01:32
◼
►
June in oh yeah in a lot of countries so not just the US and not in ios 9 but in ios 8.4 and
01:01:42
◼
►
US and beyond. So hopefully that also means Italy even if traditionally were
01:01:49
◼
►
like a third world country in terms of Apple releases but fingers crossed.
01:01:54
◼
►
But I guess at the moment it could potentially be not everything just a
01:01:59
◼
►
bunch of stuff like they might not get everything done. I mean I think I read an
01:02:03
◼
►
article on the Verge about this too and they were like this is the same of
01:02:06
◼
►
iTunes radio though like they were getting the deals done in the 11th hour
01:02:10
◼
►
so it could be a similar thing, who knows. Yeah, but I mean it's a good sign that
01:02:16
◼
►
it's coming not with iOS 9 and that they mention more countries than just the
01:02:23
◼
►
US, so this time I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the the AdEQ gods to
01:02:32
◼
►
to to bless me with some new streaming service. You say that but the AdEQ gods might
01:02:38
◼
►
be in trouble with the federal government.
01:02:40
◼
►
Oh yes, because also from...
01:02:43
◼
►
This is Apple at their worst, like I hate this stuff.
01:02:46
◼
►
I'm telling you now what strategy Apple is using this time.
01:02:50
◼
►
But before, let me explain.
01:02:52
◼
►
So just yesterday there was a report on The Verge about Apple basically pushing the music
01:02:58
◼
►
labels to abandon basically the free version of Spotify where people can listen without
01:03:05
◼
►
paying a dime, and they're basically pushing the industry to leave Spotify and to embrace
01:03:12
◼
►
this new music streaming service they're making, and in general to never provide music again
01:03:18
◼
►
to people who offer streaming for free.
01:03:22
◼
►
And Apple has been down this road before with the Department of Justice in the US, with
01:03:28
◼
►
the iBooks trial.
01:03:30
◼
►
They have been found guilty and I think Apple is appealing the decision of course.
01:03:36
◼
►
And you know with the iBooks case there were dozens of really interesting emails from Apple
01:03:43
◼
►
executives about Amazon and book publishing companies and this time my theory is that
01:03:51
◼
►
they're using digital touch to communicate about this strategy.
01:03:55
◼
►
So everything expires and instead of leaving a trail in their email accounts, this is why
01:04:02
◼
►
they made Digital Touch.
01:04:05
◼
►
To send each other drawings or messages about "hey, we should call this guy at Sony, we
01:04:13
◼
►
should remember Universal about our little plans" and use Digital Touch because everything
01:04:22
◼
►
from the jokes, if this is really the case again, I mean Apple should know better at
01:04:28
◼
►
Especially because, you know, you read the articles and it's like, they have people
01:04:34
◼
►
from the Department of Justice in Apple because of these terrible illegal things that they're
01:04:42
◼
►
But yeah, if they are continuing to do this, it's like, what are you doing?
01:04:47
◼
►
I mean, it's big business, you know, big money flowing through the pipes, we don't
01:04:51
◼
►
what's going on. These are business people, they're rich, they can do whatever they want.
01:04:56
◼
►
And we're just here to read the verge. Until the Department of Justice comes knocking.
01:05:00
◼
►
Until Justice strikes his hammer on Apple. Anyway, so two weeks ago, three weeks ago,
01:05:08
◼
►
I think we talked about music streaming and I left a couple of points and you guys didn't want
01:05:16
◼
►
to talk about music again and I was sad and I told you I was sad and eventually you allowed me
01:05:21
◼
►
to talk about music again. So here we are. Wasn't that when you threatened to quit the show?
01:05:25
◼
►
No, I do that every day basically, but in one way or another. But no, I don't think I threatened to
01:05:35
◼
►
leave the show. Maybe I did, I can't remember. Let's be serious for a moment and talk about
01:05:43
◼
►
music streaming. I know that that's difficult for you too, especially for Steven, but we should do
01:05:48
◼
►
We should do this.
01:05:51
◼
►
If Apple is making a new music streaming service, and it is going to be available on a bunch
01:05:57
◼
►
of devices, of course, it is going to be on the iPhone, on the iPad, we can hope there's
01:06:03
◼
►
going to be some kind of Mac presence, whether it's a native app built into iTunes or maybe
01:06:08
◼
►
a web app, we don't know.
01:06:11
◼
►
And we can only assume that there's going to be versions of this new music service for
01:06:17
◼
►
the Apple Watch and the Apple TV. And I want to talk about the Apple Watch first.
01:06:21
◼
►
So I don't currently own an Apple Watch, as you guys and our listeners know, but I can
01:06:27
◼
►
make a few assumptions that I would like to discuss with Michael and Steven. These people
01:06:34
◼
►
are you, in this case. And yes, those are your names. So I was thinking, this is kind
01:06:41
◼
►
out one of those futuristic ideas and stuff that I think about in the shower or when I'm
01:06:47
◼
►
sleeping and then I wake up and I have these ideas.
01:06:51
◼
►
So wouldn't it be nice if like the Apple Watch has a heart rate sensor and it knows when
01:06:58
◼
►
you're running and it knows how much you're, you know, how much, how hard you're going
01:07:03
◼
►
in your exercise or workout routine.
01:07:06
◼
►
So it would be nice if there was a feature to recommend a specific playlist depending
01:07:12
◼
►
on the workout that you're doing.
01:07:15
◼
►
Because I remember last year when I kinda went crazy with this idea of having to walk
01:07:23
◼
►
a lot every day, so I borrowed a treadmill and I walked on a treadmill like one hour
01:07:31
◼
►
each day, which was unusual for me because I went from no walking, or you know, like
01:07:37
◼
►
5 minute walks, to 16 minute walks, which was kind of a big change.
01:07:41
◼
►
And I remember every time I start walking, and of course I listen to music or podcasts,
01:07:47
◼
►
but when I was listening to music, I was constantly fiddling with my Spotify playlists, because
01:07:53
◼
►
I didn't know, like, if I'm going fast, I usually want to listen to hip hop or maybe
01:07:59
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like Linkin Park or some kind of rock music that I like.
01:08:04
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And if I'm going slow, I can listen to some Oasis,
01:08:08
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I can switch playlist and kind of let the music flow
01:08:12
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differently depending on how fast I'm going.
01:08:16
◼
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And it'd be nice if the Apple Watch had this kind of access
01:08:19
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for when it comes to music.
01:08:22
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And it'd be kind of cool to have a feature that plugs
01:08:26
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into the heart rate sensor and kind of gives you the best music depending on your conditions.
01:08:33
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It's kind of crazy, but maybe it's doable. I don't know.
01:08:37
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I like the thought of that. I think that's quite nice. The idea that because the watch
01:08:42
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knows these pieces of information about you, and I know you spoke about this before, when
01:08:46
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you're working out and the device understanding your current fatigue state and stuff like
01:08:54
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that. It reminds me of, do you remember the Nike shoe thing in the jig?
01:09:01
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Yeah. And you'd press the button in the app and it would be on iTunes or
01:09:07
◼
►
on the iPod and it would play your power song. Oh yeah. Do you remember that?
01:09:11
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My wife was super into that. I mean she really, like music became a really big
01:09:16
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part of her running because of features like that. Your wife is a woman of good
01:09:22
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taste. It's true. I mean she married you. Now guys, we need to have a talk about lyrics.
01:09:33
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Music lyrics and Apple support for lyrics in their music apps and eventual possible
01:09:39
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plans for music streaming. So, I'm a big lyrics guy. Because English is not my native language
01:09:47
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and sometimes when I'm listening to music I can understand what's being said in a song.
01:09:53
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And so I always, at least a couple of times each day, when I'm listening to a song I Google
01:10:00
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And when I'm not Googling the lyrics of a song, I'm using Musixmatch, which is this
01:10:06
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excellent Italian company who made a series of apps for every device.
01:10:13
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There's Music Smash for the iPhone, for the iPad, for Android, Android Wear, there's Music
01:10:18
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Smash I think for the Apple Watch and it's so great because it integrates with the local
01:10:25
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music app on your device and it gives you real-time lyrics and you can sing along, you
01:10:32
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can decide to show just a couple of lines of text or you can show the entire text and
01:10:38
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And recently Music Smash teamed up with Spotify to have lyrics integration in Spotify for
01:10:48
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the desktop.
01:10:49
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And it's a fantastic integration because when you're in the Spotify app, you just have a
01:10:54
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lyrics icon, you click the icon and there's a lyrics overlay on these.
01:11:00
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You just get the lyrics in the Spotify app without going to a web browser or without
01:11:06
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opening another app.
01:11:07
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just there. And on Android, because of the Android intents, which is the intents are
01:11:17
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the extensions for Android, it's the extension framework on Android, MusicSmatch can show
01:11:23
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real-time lyrics on top of the Spotify album artwork. So this stuff is impossible on iOS,
01:11:32
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and they can do it on Android, which is so nice.
01:11:34
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And now I'm thinking, if Apple is doing a new music streaming service, are they going
01:11:40
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to finally be the music streaming service that cares about lyrics?
01:11:47
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Because I say this, because every streaming service that I tried, from Spotify to RDO
01:11:53
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to Google Music, Tidal, you know, the one from the rapper, they never have...
01:12:04
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lyrics integration. So I want to believe, I want to believe many things, but in this
01:12:10
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►
case I want to believe that Apple will be the company that will care about
01:12:14
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lyrics and that will try to find a way to swing its wallet around and
01:12:20
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pay whoever you need to pay to have officially licensed lyrics in your music
01:12:26
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►
streaming service. Now all this to say, I'm a huge music lyrics fan, I just like to
01:12:33
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►
read the words of the songs that I listen to and all these music streaming services don't care
01:12:39
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►
for this stuff. Music Smatch is nice, it's very nice, especially if you use Spotify on the desktop
01:12:46
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►
a lot, but I would like to see native integration or support for lyrics in the new Beats music,
01:12:54
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►
basically. And maybe it's because I'm Italian, because I need to understand lyrics, maybe it's
01:13:02
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not the same for you English people? I don't know.
01:13:08
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No, I am a huge lyrics person and only this weekend I used Music's Match inside of Spotify
01:13:17
◼
►
to show off my rapping skills for my girlfriend. True story. And it did really well. I was
01:13:26
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proving how well I knew a particular song by her checking off my skills whilst I was
01:13:34
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rapping and she was reading and it went very well for me.
01:13:39
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Yeah, I mean, I asked you to show me the Shazam app on the Apple Watch.
01:13:45
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It's really nice, but I really want to have lyrics in the app that I'm using to listen
01:13:52
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►
to music, you know?
01:13:54
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►
I mean, I know that you can use Shazam, and you can use SoundHound to have integration
01:14:00
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►
with Spotify, RDO, other services, but I just want lyrics alongside the song that I listen
01:14:09
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►
I don't want to switch between apps, I don't want to open Google, I just want the lyrics
01:14:14
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►
But Spotify is doing this, though, right?
01:14:16
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You're happy with what they're doing?
01:14:20
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So like when you say you want-
01:14:21
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On the desktop and on Android, it's very nice.
01:14:24
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►
It's not everywhere and you know it's not... they are relying... for as much as I love
01:14:31
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►
Music Smash it's still an external company whereas I think a music company
01:14:37
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that does the streaming should also find a way to do the lyrics part.
01:14:42
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►
It needs to be an integration not just you know teaming up with other people
01:14:47
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►
because what if Music Smash goes away? I mean I hope they don't but what if they
01:14:51
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►
do. You just lose the lyrics basically. I don't know. I don't want to go too deep into
01:14:57
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►
my fears and thoughts on this stuff. Moving on. Apple TV. If Apple is doing this new music
01:15:05
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►
streaming service for the new Apple TV, which is also supposedly coming in June with a new
01:15:13
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>> Everything is coming in June.
01:15:15
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>> Everything is coming.
01:15:16
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>> All the things.
01:15:17
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Yes, June is the new Christmas and what if, I mean, of course you will be able to listen
01:15:24
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►
to music on your TV because you already can.
01:15:29
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►
But again, I'm thinking about Spotify and I'm thinking about what Spotify did with Sony
01:15:35
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►
to have a Spotify app on PlayStation, which is really nice.
01:15:39
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►
I don't know, Myke, if you tried it on your PlayStation 4.
01:15:41
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No, I haven't, because you didn't even know it was there.
01:15:44
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Oh yeah, it's from a couple of months ago I think.
01:15:47
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►
You can listen to music, you can, you know, of course you can listen while you're playing
01:15:52
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►
games and you can have all your playlists, it's very nice.
01:15:56
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►
And there's been lots of rumors about Apple doing kind of this new version of the Apple
01:16:01
◼
►
TV that goes beyond channels to have apps, to have games on your big TV screen and to
01:16:08
◼
►
kind of the next logical step for the Apple TV to do more than just channels that somehow
01:16:15
◼
►
just show up randomly every day.
01:16:18
◼
►
There's a new channel on the Apple TV.
01:16:19
◼
►
So if there's a new Apple TV with a new remote, new interface, new apps, games, I think it
01:16:26
◼
►
will make sense for Apple to have Beats Music or whatever the name is.
01:16:31
◼
►
Maybe it's called Apple Stream.
01:16:32
◼
►
I don't know.
01:16:33
◼
►
They seem to be calling everything with Apple as a prefix these days.
01:16:37
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►
I think it'll be Apple Music.
01:16:39
◼
►
Apple Music.
01:16:40
◼
►
Yeah, just Apple Music.
01:16:43
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►
Apple Beats.
01:16:44
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►
I'll just go with Apple Core and just like, you know, really scrump.
01:16:51
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►
So I mean, you guys own an Apple TV.
01:16:55
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►
I think Steven does.
01:16:58
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►
Myke doesn't.
01:17:01
◼
►
My memory serves me right.
01:17:02
◼
►
Steven, do you listen to music on your TV?
01:17:05
◼
►
We do, actually a fair amount.
01:17:09
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►
We just do it through iTunes.
01:17:10
◼
►
But yeah, it's nice.
01:17:14
◼
►
It does the artwork and kind of flips around.
01:17:18
◼
►
And that's fun to see.
01:17:21
◼
►
Yeah, I like it to be better.
01:17:23
◼
►
I know that you can do things besides just iTunes on it.
01:17:27
◼
►
But I could see that being sort of a selling point for them.
01:17:32
◼
►
A lot of people, you know, my entertainment center is really simple, but even if you have
01:17:36
◼
►
something more complex, the TV is still a big part of it for audio.
01:17:39
◼
►
So I would like to see it be improved from what it is.
01:17:43
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►
But I could say that about anything about the Apple TV.
01:17:46
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►
So none of it's great.
01:17:48
◼
►
But yes, I do.
01:17:51
◼
►
I just want to see if it really launches internationally also in Italy or in Europe for that matter.
01:17:58
◼
►
You know, I don't know.
01:18:00
◼
►
I'm excited.
01:18:01
◼
►
Like I wanna see how Beats Music changes under Apple and how it's integrated into the music
01:18:09
◼
►
app or maybe iTunes.
01:18:10
◼
►
I'm also kinda scared they're gonna...
01:18:13
◼
►
I don't wanna say ruin it but maybe they're gonna forget about the best parts of Beats
01:18:19
◼
►
Music like the curation and like the editorial recommendations, that kind of stuff.
01:18:26
◼
►
Myke I know that there's something that annoys you in Beats Music.
01:18:28
◼
►
Man, Beats music is driving me crazy.
01:18:31
◼
►
So you're still using Beats music?
01:18:34
◼
►
I have one really annoying thing that has been... it's popped up but it's really gotten
01:18:40
◼
►
worse this week.
01:18:41
◼
►
So I have this weird thing, and I don't know if I'm the only one that this happens to,
01:18:45
◼
►
where I download music to the offline in Beats and it like cuts off like massive portions
01:18:52
◼
►
of the track, like it ends like a minute early.
01:18:56
◼
►
This happens with multiple albums.
01:18:58
◼
►
No, but it picks up random songs.
01:19:00
◼
►
Like the new Mumford & Sons album, it does it to two songs in a row.
01:19:04
◼
►
One of them ends a minute early and then one of them is only 20 seconds long.
01:19:08
◼
►
Like the next one.
01:19:09
◼
►
It's like "what are you doing?"
01:19:11
◼
►
Are those the good songs or the bad songs?
01:19:14
◼
►
I don't know man.
01:19:15
◼
►
Maybe it's a curation feature.
01:19:17
◼
►
Maybe it is.
01:19:18
◼
►
So I had this with Pharrell's album, I had this with Foo Fighters album.
01:19:23
◼
►
the ones I can remember and I've tried to go through their support team and the
01:19:26
◼
►
support teams like do this, do this, none of it works. The only way I was able to
01:19:31
◼
►
the Foo Fighters album is a song that I love called Congregation and which was
01:19:37
◼
►
what I was playing for you Federico earlier when I was showing you how Shazam
01:19:39
◼
►
worked and the song would cut off like 45 seconds before the actual end but the
01:19:46
◼
►
thing is like I know it cuts off because the song ends but the counter like the
01:19:50
◼
►
the time counter or whatever you call it that was accurate for when it cut off
01:19:55
◼
►
right so if the song was meant to be four minutes long it would show it's
01:19:59
◼
►
like three minutes and 20 seconds but at three minutes and 20 seconds the song
01:20:04
◼
►
ended but it wasn't the end of the song if I'm making sense like the app just
01:20:08
◼
►
didn't see that there was any more music that's terrible it's so annoying and and
01:20:13
◼
►
that that's happened to me a few times and when I had to restore my phone a
01:20:18
◼
►
a couple of weeks ago it fixed it for all of the previous albums but I'm not
01:20:22
◼
►
gonna do that again like I can delete the music I can set it to redownload
01:20:27
◼
►
again it always happens the only way I can get it to do it is like completely blasted in the
01:20:30
◼
►
Apple way. That's fine I mean this is from the company that to listen to it on
01:20:35
◼
►
the desktop you have to have flash installed so this is the other thing
01:20:39
◼
►
their web app is so horrific like it's so bad it's just so so bad like in all
01:20:47
◼
►
these apps including the iOS app right if I go to say my it go into the library
01:20:51
◼
►
click the Kings of Leon as an artist and just tap one of the songs it will start
01:20:56
◼
►
playing either that if I've got it in shuffle mode it would then just start
01:20:59
◼
►
playing every song that's by that artist or if it's in like regular mode it would
01:21:02
◼
►
just start going through them all if I do this on the web app it just starts
01:21:07
◼
►
playing random music it's a Kings of Leon song and then it'll play like an Arctic
01:21:13
◼
►
It's just playing my entire library.
01:21:17
◼
►
>> It's crazy.
01:21:19
◼
►
>> Oh, so I've actually started moving,
01:21:22
◼
►
at least when I'm listening on my computer,
01:21:24
◼
►
I've been using Spotify recently because they have an actual app.
01:21:28
◼
►
I mean, I have so many more.
01:21:31
◼
►
I have so many other problems with Spotify,
01:21:34
◼
►
but their app is pretty good.
01:21:37
◼
►
>> Like what?
01:21:37
◼
►
I'm curious, what problems?
01:21:40
◼
►
The fact that their playlists just cannot be sorted.
01:21:43
◼
►
- Okay, yeah, I don't use that, so I--
01:21:47
◼
►
- It just drives me insane, 'cause until recently,
01:21:49
◼
►
like all of your music would be in playlists, right?
01:21:52
◼
►
- Yes. - So I have all my music
01:21:53
◼
►
in playlists, and now they have like the songs, albums,
01:21:56
◼
►
artists thing, which they never had until recently,
01:21:59
◼
►
but now all my music's in playlists,
01:22:01
◼
►
and I don't wanna sit down for a day
01:22:02
◼
►
and like put it all into my library.
01:22:06
◼
►
Like, it's just annoying.
01:22:08
◼
►
annoy me. Everybody annoys me when it comes to music. There's just like no company that
01:22:13
◼
►
can do it right and as much as I want it I also know that Apple will not be that company
01:22:19
◼
►
Well, you're so pessimistic.
01:22:22
◼
►
Nobody has ever done it the way that I like it and it's because something about music
01:22:26
◼
►
and this is something that I'm very interested in just in general is that like fashion music
01:22:31
◼
►
is very polarizing and people have their very specific opinions and that even comes down
01:22:35
◼
►
to the services they use, hence why some people,
01:22:38
◼
►
Stephen, hoard iPods as a method of making sure
01:22:43
◼
►
he can always have his music.
01:22:44
◼
►
- I mean, I was gonna say, I've tried all those
01:22:46
◼
►
music streaming services and I revisit them
01:22:48
◼
►
from time to time and that's the problem.
01:22:50
◼
►
iTunes, for all of its problems, is still closest
01:22:54
◼
►
to how I think about music.
01:22:56
◼
►
And it's not even about I want my files on my disk.
01:23:00
◼
►
There's part of that, but a lot of it is
01:23:01
◼
►
the experience using the app is just garbage.
01:23:03
◼
►
and Apple can hopefully do better at that,
01:23:08
◼
►
but iTunes does not deserve a gold star
01:23:12
◼
►
for being easy to use.
01:23:13
◼
►
It's complex and on iOS it's downright confusing at times.
01:23:17
◼
►
Can they fix that and add a streaming service?
01:23:22
◼
►
That seems difficult.
01:23:24
◼
►
I'm not sold that Apple's gonna be
01:23:25
◼
►
like streaming service I use either.
01:23:28
◼
►
- Audio was so good and then that got bad.
01:23:31
◼
►
Like that was really good.
01:23:33
◼
►
I think as an app, before I tried out beats, I was really enjoying audio, I wanted to try out beats, I liked beats so I stuck with beats.
01:23:41
◼
►
And I've never gone back to audio because all I ever see about audio these days is people complaining about how bad audio has gotten.
01:23:48
◼
►
It's like, why do you do this? Is it radio? Is it audio or radio? Did anybody ever put that to bed?
01:23:53
◼
►
I think it's audio, yeah. It's a shame.
01:23:57
◼
►
We should talk, not today but in the future, this is gonna sound like a joke but it's not,
01:24:03
◼
►
we should talk about our music workflows and by that I mean how do we think of music?
01:24:09
◼
►
Like when you wake up and you know you want to listen to music, how is your brain...
01:24:15
◼
►
Like how do you think about music? Do you want to browse your library like by artist,
01:24:22
◼
►
by album, by year, do you use playlists, do you search, do you go to new releases, do
01:24:28
◼
►
you use the discovery feature of these streaming services?
01:24:34
◼
►
Talking to you guys and talking to people that listen to us, it seems clear to me that
01:24:40
◼
►
one's opinion on these streaming services is heavily influenced by how you think of
01:24:48
◼
►
Do you see music as you see in iTunes?
01:24:52
◼
►
Or do you want to see new stuff and then go from there?
01:24:56
◼
►
Do you search?
01:24:57
◼
►
Do you use playlists much like Myke?
01:24:59
◼
►
I think it would be an interesting discussion because we talked about different services.
01:25:04
◼
►
We talked about the features.
01:25:06
◼
►
We talked about the stuff that we don't like.
01:25:08
◼
►
We talked about the stuff that we like.
01:25:10
◼
►
And then we talked about Apple and what's coming and what's not coming.
01:25:13
◼
►
But we never really talked about how do we approach music.
01:25:18
◼
►
- Yeah, I think that that kind of conversation
01:25:22
◼
►
is definitely interesting and worth having,
01:25:23
◼
►
but I think it will tie really nicely in with
01:25:26
◼
►
if and when we see some more music stuff from Apple.
01:25:30
◼
►
So that might be nice post WWDC to talk about.
01:25:33
◼
►
You know, 'cause we may as well try and kill off
01:25:36
◼
►
some music streaming services now,
01:25:37
◼
►
'cause we've done all we can do to photo services, so.
01:25:41
◼
►
It's the next vertical for us in our acquisition business.
01:25:46
◼
►
- Yeah, something like that.
01:25:49
◼
►
- Well, you know, a coffee just appeared in front of me.
01:25:55
◼
►
- How did that happen?
01:25:57
◼
►
- Well, I have my secrets.
01:26:00
◼
►
- Did somebody bring it to you?
01:26:01
◼
►
- No, it just show up in my room.
01:26:05
◼
►
- Well, on that bombshell,
01:26:06
◼
►
I think that's about it for this week's episode of Connected.
01:26:09
◼
►
If you wanna find the show notes for this week's episode,
01:26:11
◼
►
you can check your app of choice but you can also go to relay.fm/connected/38. If you want
01:26:17
◼
►
to find us online there's a few ways to do that. You can hit me up on the Twitter if
01:26:22
◼
►
you would like to do so. I am @imike, I M Y K E. Federico is @vittici, V I T I C C I
01:26:28
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and Steven is @ismh. And you can find our writing and work online in many places if
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you would like Federico is at maxlories.net and Steven is at 512pixels.net. Thanks again
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to our sponsors this week, Linde, Igloo and SaneBox and we'll be back next time. Until
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then, say goodbye guys.
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Arrivederci.