Upgrade - 189: Obsolescence Isn’t What It Used to Be

Episode Date: April 16, 2018

Special Guest Merlin Mann joins Jason to discuss the weather, old speakers, Apple's latest TV acquisition, the long slow fade of 32-bit Mac apps, and the arrival of a new version of his favorite iOS writing app.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 189 for april 16 2018 i am jason snell and i am not usually the person who reads this part but mike hurley is on assignment he's in the united states for the atlanta pen show and you can check out that special live episode of the pen addict this episode by the way brought to you by fresh books pingdom and p calc and my special co-host for this episode uh returning triumphantly is mr merlin man hi merlin hey buddy how's it going thanks for having me on it's pretty good pretty good thanks for thanks for joining me i really appreciate you coming on uh my podcast because mike abandoned me have a pretty busy day today nah yeah yeah well listen nobody cares about any of that it's important that we

get to snell talk oh yes we have a question this week for snell talk this is from uh listener mahir listener mahir would like to ask jason how's the weather today? Good question. Excellent question. I like this a lot. I'm so glad Mike's not here. I picked this one up myself. So it was a really nice sunny day, really nice spring day yesterday. Today, clouds are rolling in, wind's picking up. It's going to rain later.

For you too, because we share the weather, you and I. Well, thank you to the listener here. This is a trick question because it also gives me the chance to say thank you to Jason, who gave me much help in picking out. I've been envious of your weather setup for a long time. Well, not your weather that you get, but envious of your weather monitoring panopticon for a long time. That's right. And you were very helpful to me.

I have a very small robot that floats around in my backyard measuring things. I'm very wet. I'm very wet again. And so you were very instrumental and it was actually a challenge on another show I do to do something about the weather.

And you really were very helpful. And now I have a weather station and I can, without looking outside, I can find out like how foggy it is. It's really nice. Yeah, it's cool. I like it too. I'm always fascinated by the weather and I keep remembering remembering it's going to be a sad day when my

weather station finally dies but like i installed it when my son it was my during my paternity leave when my son was born and you know he's about to go into high school so that thing's been out there a long time and it's still it still works which is which is pretty great and um and i'm glad so i'm welcome to the world of the weather stations you you um you got a it's come a long way since 2004 it really has the prices of the prices have come down and i mean the thing that i always want to say to people this is why i sought you out as my rabbi is that you do have to be careful read very carefully and in my case i had two bullets that really I needed to hit. You know,

one of them was that like a lot of them that you get, they're really a weather monitor where it just goes to an ugly screen in your house. So I, I wanted one that would be able to connect to the internet and be, would be compatible with the weather underground network and uh it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to set up but you just set it up once and it goes and now i can see my weather from anywhere it's the best yeah the weather underground is the big thing when i when

i got mine um first off i mine came with a really ugly console which we still have um the nice thing about it is that that's got like a little um interface plug that used to go to your pc parallel port or whatever that used to be the only way right and then your pc would run the software and one of the nice things that's allowed me to keep using this 2004 vintage weather station is that um they that company still uses that same technology for their console and everything and they released a few years ago they released a an ip module that's basically like an ethernet port and so now that's plugged into to the console and the console receives the data from the weather station

and just sends it down the my home network to the internet and that's great like that solves so many problems but because back in the day it was all about just being on the computer and now these lower cost weather stations i mean some of them are just monitors and they'll give you a little screen that you can look at um but some of them you know if you get the ones that are kind of wi-fi enabled or they've got a little little uh smart home base station or something they'll talk to the internet and they'll either you know work with like software that you can install on your Mac if you want to do it that way. But most of them will go to a cloud service and a lot of them will go to Weather Underground. At which point, you know, you're in their little network of personal weather stations and they generate a page for your station that sits there.

And, you know, you don't have to build your own page like I had to do back in the day. They've got a personal weather station page. And that you're giving you're giving back to the community a little bit it's nice i mean you're you're helping people to i mean one nice thing i just sent you the very ugly monitor that i bought for this that i can't believe my wife lets me have in the house but but one thing that's nice is you get this nice kind of like arsenal of of tools like between general weather underground plus dark sky plus this plus i gotta say ifttt uh it's it's really super handy so i can do stuff like say hey you know let me know if the temperature tonight is going to drop at my station's going

to drop below like uh i think i said arbitrarily something like 64 degrees but like tell me if it's going to be cool enough that i might want to turn the heat on before bed you know and we'll just leave it on all the time but um i i realize this is weather nerd stuff but i did want the opportunity to publicly thank you for that i'm actually really really enjoying it i am glad i'm glad you are and of course i'm happy to help people with their weather station needs because i'm apparently that guy um i had i had a thing oh i should also mention i have a thing called bit bar which is this like open source utility you can search for it i think it was designed by a guy who wanted to track like bitcoin prices but um but it's actually brilliant and i think it's a little more power here and i think he reminds i think he realized that it had wider application and so he revised it to be a

little more broad and you you can i'll put a link in the show notes to it but bit bar is cool because it's um it'll put anything in your menu bar like literally it'll put anything in your menu bar that you can kind of like it's a little bit like like like the late belated uh status bar or status um the you know the panic app that doesn't work that's killing me right now well that was like pretty this is like it puts it in your mac menu bar so it's basically like but you can put anything there so he built he wrote it for like bitcoin prices but um it's it just uses you can use like command line to put anything in your menu bar and so i now have my current temperature for my weather station in my mac menu bar which is which is cool because it's literally my weather station software has a um i could probably query

like the api for weather underground but my weather station has a file it generates every two minutes that's literally like just the temperature and all the script does is say hey love that file put that in the menu bar and that's all it does um there's some emoji that pop up for like if it's raining or whatever and it actually has a little thing in parentheses that's like the temperature diff between now and this time yesterday which is can be very useful where it's like whoa it's way colder today like that's that's i like that stuff you also market marketed me a little bit here because you put in one simple line of text and i've already ordered something oh no oh my god i need you biometric time maybe tell people about this this is so nerdy and cool

so i have for a long time we used to have those um the first they were slim devices and then they were logitech squeeze boxes the music players and that was our before sonos that was kind of how we did digital music in our house and i love those things and then logitech bought them and ruined them because that's what Logitech does. But I kept one around because it's got a plug-in for a custom clock, and so we had this place in the living room right above the TV

that showed the current time and the current temperature based on the weather station. It was really cool. And it's gotten to the point now where those things are all kind of dying, but we still have a couple that work um but the uh i don't use them for music anymore they're literally they just sit there turned off with

the clock showing because because it's something that we use and i talked to my wife about it and she's like oh yeah i look at that all the time and i bought i bought a little sensor to stick outside and a couple little like plastic things that you can just look at to see the outside temperature. It's not the same. They don't have the same application. And it was big, like the text. You could sit on the couch and you could see the time and the temperature. And then I was up at Twit the other week.

Well, this actually, a few months ago, I was up there doing screensavers with Leo Laporte. And right behind their set for screensavers, they've got a whole bunch of junk like screens and little gadgets and stuff. And they had this little box that's showing the time. And it's these little white squares in a grid. If you're old enough, if you're as old as we are, you'll remember this. It looks kind of like the display on the Goodyear blimp. Yeah, that's right. Because it's a grid.

I had a model Goodyear blimp when I was a kid. And you could color in the things and slide them in and then turn it on and it would make totally add that because you know kids want to run the scoreboard on the side of a blimp we're just down in san jose we saw the good your blimp it was just there it's just there hanging out it's very blocky but look at all the stuff that this thing does and it's super bright and part of it's part of it's capable of being a color and it seems to be designed as a like a desk clock and it's got buttons on it. So you can have a bunch of different plugins that show different kinds of data.

And you can have them rotate, or you can have an interface. And I think there's a music player aspect, and it'll connect to Bluetooth. There's a bunch of other stuff that it does. But I just saw it as a screen. And I was really worried when I was up at Twit that this was some, like, Arduino or Raspberry Pi project that involves soldering. Because let me tell you,

I'm not interested in projects that involve soldering. That's where I draw the line. If hot metal, molten metal is involved, I am out. I'm out of there. I can't do that.

So I'm up there a couple weeks ago and I say to Leo, what is this thing? Because I finally remembered to ask because i i just had it in the back of my mind like oh i i wonder if that is a solution to my problem and i i'm girding myself for the well there will be soldering kind of moment and he

says oh yeah it's the thing uh it's the limetric time it's uh yeah you can just buy it on online he's it's a little expensive though and i thought to thought to myself, oh, geez, I'm going to go there and I'm going to find that it's the perfect solution. It's going to cost $700. And it's $200. It's not cheap. He's right. But at the same time, like, I thought about it and I was like, no, but this is literally the answer to this thing. I have Google searched so many different things to find something that will do what I need.

so many different things to find something that will do what i need i've looked at so many different things that say they're connected displays that turned out to be like um something you put out outside of walmart which is like no no that's overkill for my living room those costco open clothes yeah yeah something it's a scoreboard for a baseball park it's like it's too much so i i did what what you may have just done which is while i was standing there prepping the show that we were about to record for twit i just bought it and and i had to build an app um which like literally is just loading again another text file it's like a little json formatted file on my on my server that shows the temp and the time it took me about half an hour to figure that out and that's it the squeeze box got pulled out the limetric time is now where

it used to be it's brighter um the display is lower resolution but um but it's so big and bright it's really easy to read and all it is doing is saying like 222 61 degrees that's all it's all it's doing and it totally does it so that was a fun little project and also um uh weather related so there you go it's a fun gadget if it was not sitting up above my tv i might actually play with some of the other plugins and stuff but for now it's like that's that's that's all i want is i want a really bright display that shows the time and the current temperature from my own weather station and i don't know any other but you find out how your bitcoin is doing probably i could i certainly could in fact there's the limetric website shows you all sorts of interesting

things you can do with all the metric time um many of which are completely ludicrous i like the one with the uh the big exclamation point that says gas leak that's that's my favorite too is in case you don't notice that there's a gas leak your clock will show say gas leak on it so that it's useful so we should probably thank listener me here very much for the question and and if people have questions for you jason uh what do they do they go onto the twitter and they use the hashtag yeah and it can be about anything even the weather even the weather it's true we have um we have much more to talk about actually uh but uh we have a little bit of follow-up but i made you blow 20 minutes on weather yep i love it it's great the cat's away the mice are playing that's just how it is uh let's talk about

some follow-up first which is old speakers i have that we just put this in right before the show started old speakers because i was telling you about this verge story, um, from Heimgartenberg. That is, it's a funny story, um, which is my airplay speakers have become obsolete because their app hasn't been updated in four years. Subhead mistakes were made. And the idea is basically he's got these airplay speakers that are on his wifi network. And he says, I can never change my wifi network's name or password ever again or my speakers will stop working because the only way to set their settings is to use an app and the app is 32 bit so it doesn't run anymore amazing right it is and i think this is a problem we're going to start seeing more and

more of i mean i already feel this pain with iot stuff i mean because just coming into the whole internet of things environment i mean it's generous to call it the wild west when you get into things like is it arduino is that what it's called i think so i don't know it doesn't involve soldering don't ask me no soldering no soldering allowed hey how comfortable are you with linux uh you get that stuff you get that you get the soldering of computers is what linux is computer soldering yeah i mean i haven't gone that far but it does kind of frustrate me a little bit that some stuff you know obviously for various apple reasons doesn't work with home kit home kit is not on the mac yet you know there's frustrating things about that but there's also just this idea that i i suspect

that one reason people are reluctant to get into this, privacy stuff aside, very important, very much understand the privacy concerns, but also just the fact that there's not, it's sort of like, I don't even remember what the other one's called anymore, Blu-ray versus HD DVD. Right. I found one of those the other day.

I was like, oh, look, it's my HD DVD that I can't play anywhere. Betamax versus VHS. That really has not shaken out, except in this case, there's at least three or four big players. And in the case, there was that one dingus that Google bought out that was like the be-all, do-all meta hub, and then they just kind of discontinued support for that. And that can be real frustrating.

You're not going to, I mean, what if you went out and invested something along the lines of a Sonos system, and then all of a sudden they just lost interest in updating the app? I mean, now you're kind of stuck and mike and i've talked about this but it's like i i really don't like the idea that um my my purchase of a thermostat two years ago suddenly will dictate all future like purchases i have to make for my home because i it turns out that i have fallen into a uh you know a waltz garden without my knowledge and now i'm stuck inside it.

This case is interesting. Somebody pointed out by the way, and, and tweeted at Neela Patel from the verge that the good news is that these knock speakers, even though their, their, their app is 32 bits,

so you can't run it anymore. You could maybe find an old phone somebody's got, but they also run a, an un apparently unpassworded uh web server in them so if you can find their ip address on your local network you can just go there and change the settings there which that's the good news the bad news is yes your speakers have been running an unsecured uh web server for the entire time that you've had them so you know but i'm the guy i'm the guy with the uh ipod hiFi, so what do I know?

I still got some old jam boxes kicking around that we actually don't use too much now that we listen on. I mean, we do some Bluetooth speakering, but most of it is with speakers that are capable of other things as well. And I was really amazed. I just fired a couple of these up the other day and charged them, and they still work. I have not had luck running the Jawbone app to do the full update. That's being a little bulky for me. And the truth is, you have to be a pretty canny Googler. I don't think they make those speakers anymore. They're all in on the, what are they called? Like little Fitbit style dingus. I forget what it's called, but that's what Jawbone is all in on now yes right so you do have to do a little bit of canny googling just even find the app that you need and then once you run the app it runs in your menu bar it wants to

be on all the time and then when you click on my devices it actually takes you to a web page on the web that then i guess is handshaking somehow with the app on your mac and and of course now i have because i have a macbook i had numerous dongles just to get to even that point so it becomes hard to trace exactly what you need to do to get your speakers up to date yeah this and this is the thing that um smart tech is cool but you are putting yourself at risk of being obsolete for for computer reasons instead like again the ipod hi-fi yeah it's got a dock connector on top and that's dead and it was charging by a firewire so it was dead actually even before the dock connector was out it was really incompatible but it's got

the it's got the three and a half inch plug which is not yet incompatible with my computer so that's good it's savage but it works i saw somebody over the weekend saying something along the lines of oh this is my life now i just had to reboot a light switch yeah oh i i did a um i did a light bulb firmware update at one point and that was like well this is so it's come to this you gotta make sure they're all on make sure they're all talking about my little metric time clock thingy i mean the the difference between that and the squeeze box is the squeeze box ran some server software which while um while branded by logitech the way that slim devices put it together originally it's an open source project and it runs in pearl so theoretically if you maintain this squeeze box hardware um you might have to write some stuff yourself or you might like lose features they used to support

more streaming services and all of those apis died and there's nobody there to update them from a corporation that can make a deal so they all kind of died i mean there's stuff that died but the core server is in pearl it just runs and it runs fine and that's my fear with the limetric time stuff is like i have to kind of go to their app and and although i can make an app on their website and i can point it at it all it's doing is calling my server i do have this moment where i realize if that company goes out of business unless they're very very nice in relocating the intellectual property somewhere that thing will just die and there's nothing i can do about it and that's just i it it bugs me but at the same time that's the trade-off is like

so much of what we have now you are making a trade-off for privacy or you're making a trade-off of inconvenience or being in a walled garden or you're taking a risk whether it's something like this or it's a kickstarter project you're taking a risk like i hope they don't die and don't get bought by somebody who kills all the products which is what happened when logitech bought slim devices so you know you're you're making gambles all over the place so obsolescence isn't what it used to be that's what i'm really saying here obsolescence 2.0 yeah yeah that's right now now about to be replaced with 3.0 beta of obsolescence but i don't know old speakers those the casey lisa's dad's old uh record player probably still is fine that's all

i'm saying those all those records still sound so warm yeah they do they do it's the ritual marlon it's the warming ritual uh we have a lot to talk about on this show and we're just getting started so let me tell you about our first sponsor how do sponsors work on upgrade marlin i don't know jason why don't you tell me about something you like i you know i do a lot of freelance work i i need people to pay me money for things and i'm always wondering what do i do I'm sitting here with my invoice in my hand. What am I going to do? Am I going to Microsoft Word? I'm going to pull up a template?

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you can't say well actually three days ago you opened that email so give me my money but you know it's a tool in the arsenal because in the end, you can do what you love, but you got to get paid. You got to pay the rent. You got to buy food. And that is something that FreshBooks helps you do. If you're not using FreshBooks yet, guess what? Try it.

Try it now. You can try it for 30 days for free because you're an upgrade listener. You don't have to give them your credit card or anything. Just go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade enter upgrade in the how did you hear about us section that lets them know that you heard about it here thank you fresh books for supporting upgrade for up to 192 hours just great sponsor in some ways it's a shame that they frame it as invoicing because the invoicing part is, you know, just computers do that. But the way that they provide you those payment gateways, that changes everything.

You know, you're not out there waiting for a check like a sucker. I mean, people can just pay. If they want to use a credit card, they can do that. It makes it so easy. Very nice. This is a segment we do, if you're not familiar with the upgrade program, Merlin, called Upstream. Upstream. familiar with the upgrade program merlin uh called upstream upstream it's a it's a it's a new new ish segment where we talk about uh about the you know apple is we talk about apple a lot and apple is making this foray into this video streaming services it's going to have its own

service next year sometime probably um that's the that's the story now and there's a lot of action going on there now you know i talk about this with tim goodman from the hollywood reporter on tv talk machine a podcast i do with him on fridays but mike and i try to talk about it from the kind of bringing it to the tech podcast world and talking about it in that in that context and what apple's up to and last week apple was up to something because they made a deal with i guess the estate of isaac asimov to get the rights to a tv show about uh based on the foundation books which have basically never been adapted a bunch of people have tried and failed but this is now set up with a production company they and david goyer and josh friedman are the creatives behind it and so apple i guess didn't

make the deal with the asthma of estate apple made the deal with a production company that had already made that deal but it's like a whole chain of of deals i hope they use fresh books um that let them do this thing and it's fascinating because uh foundation i read this and like foundation was a very important early science fiction work it's been incredibly influential but if you go back and read them and i did a couple years ago for the incomparable what you find is it's not really written for i would say a modern audience it's it's asimov was an ideas guy and he was brimming with ideas he was not really a characters guy or a plot guy. Like, those are not.

So, you read the books and you're like, it's almost as if Gene Roddenberry dropped down, like, the Bible for Star Trek, but no episodes, and then walked away. Or, like, two episodes, like a couple pilot episodes, and that was it. this foundation thing might be a good idea because it puts the responsibility of kind of creating the details of the story, the characters, and the plot lines in the hands of the creative TV people using Asimov's work as kind of just the base. Instead of having like a whole bunch of well-loved characters, everybody knows them. They know what they look like. They know what they're supposed to do. They know exactly what the plot is, sort of game of thrones was like up until they ran out of books um and so like i think this may be better like it's it's still a gamble because

everything is a gamble but i think this might be better i don't know if you've read foundation or not but i haven't but but i read your article a very good article about it on Six Colors, and I think I agree with you. It's, you know, it's, first of all, if Tim, for whatever reason, can ever not make it onto the podcast and you need somebody to sit in and have red wine, please have me. Okay. Because I love that show. All right. The Times of Confusion, Platinum TV. So much television out there.

I'm so interested. I feel like you, me, and Joe Steele could just do a show about this stuff because I am finding it increasingly very interesting, not specifically with regard to Apple and Foundation, but just the way that stuff like Netflix. I talked about this on some show. I want to say Back to Work recently. One of the many podcasts that you're on. But I was talking about how, for one thing, oh, no it's with the systematic with brett terpstra and i was thinking how you know it's in the same way that i think people don't think of themselves as computer users and apple users as much as they used to we do still think about about ourselves as consumers of content and you know in an age where you can get netflix on almost any kind of device like if it's got a light up screen yep like you can pretty much

get netflix on it and i i feel like that's sneaking in. Everybody gets that Netflix is a big deal. We have that experience. We had this experience yesterday. We turned on Netflix. Guess what? Lost in space. Rated PG. I can watch it with my kid. I had no idea this was coming. Here's this thing on there. And I don't know. I mean, I know this is just a quickie for upstream, but like, can you update me? And I see now me, I understand the TV landscape flawlessly,lessly but but i thought you might want to explain to your listeners where do you think apple is going with the addition of stuff like this do you think they're gonna get more into i mean this is interesting because there are people who've read these books and love them i know they're very influential but it's not the same kind of

nostalgia reboot update idea that you see with a lot of things. And what you're describing here, this can be heavily modernized for a current world. I mean, do you think, I don't know, I'm just curious what you think about how this fits in. I consume a ton of Hulu, a ton of Netflix, giant amounts of YouTube. I'm still struggling to understand where the Apple TV offering is going to fit into my world. And I know you've talked about it, but as you get more pieces to that puzzle, where do you see it fitting into the, if not today's ecosystem, the emerging ecosystem of streaming services? I think the reason this is the platinum age and the reason there's too

much TV is because it's a land rush because everybody's realizing that um the digital revolution means that you don't need access to a cable system in order to get your content out there and to build a business and actually disney's really excited about it because um because they they released their new streaming service espn plus which is like a five dollar a month or six dollar a month uh streaming service and they talked again as they've talked for a while now about this idea that they want to become increasingly direct to consumer company and you know eliminating the middleman and saying basically you pay disney and disney gives you content and they like that right they they like just yes give give us the cash and we'll give you your star wars shows and we'll give you your marvel shows and we'll give you uh espn you know we'll give you some hurling and rugby and things the second

division soccer on uh on espn plus and uh you know they they are able to do that now because they've got uh you just use the internet for streaming and apple wants to be in that conversation i think that's that's a big part of this is i think it's unrealistic to think that in five years or 10 years um there are going to be dozens and dozens of ten dollar a month video streaming services all of which are paying top shelf creators to do 20 shows a year of uh you know 20 series of 12 or 10 episodes a year for billions of dollars like it's not sustainable i think it makes this feel a little bit like the pets.com era where like oh yeah we know it's a loss leader to deliver this giant cat food for you know for free or for five dollars or whatever but i think there's going to be a crash where um where the people who are

working in television now a lot of i think a lot of the jobs will go away eventually because i think in the end it won't be sustainable to the degree it is now i don't know how brutal a crash it will be but i think there will be one and this is when i talk to people and they're like another streaming service i don't want to spend another ten dollars a month for another streaming service and i mean first off they're not mandatory like it was just like if you heard about a great show on hbo and you weren't paying for hbo you could grouse about it but you know there was a solution which is you could pay for hbo and get it or you just don't and you don't and those are kind of

your choices um but i do think that in the long run we won't be paying for 15 different streaming services stuff's going to get bundled together um and you're you know you're going to be sort of cutting the cord eventually everybody is going to not be thinking of television as like paying for cable tv it's all going to be streaming services amazon's aggressively bundling services together inside of prime video already stuff like that's going to continue happening um where you can buy services inside of other services or you can buy bundles and you know apple wants it on all that apple wants something exclusive i think that will probably only run on their stuff i think they want that that's key that's key so you feel like you're

this will run probably on apple tv you don't think this is something you'll get on a roku i don't think it is i think that that's that would be really interesting if that happened but it would be contrary to all of apple's strategy up to now. I mean, I think the only reason Apple Music's on Android is because Beats was on Android, and so they decided to keep it around. But I think ultimately the reason Apple's spending this money is primarily to attach people to Apple's platforms. And Apple wants to be in the game, and Apple wants to be considered, and Apple wants to be one of those big players and help set the set the scene here and they want to be ultimately they want to be one of the last ones left standing when when the music stops like because there will be a reckoning and apple has the money to be a player i think that's what you see with a lot of this stuff is who's got the money

to ante up for this this game because it's a high stakes game and if you aren't paying top-notch creators and getting great content and you know the story is that jeff bezos told the people at amazon he wants the next game of thrones he doesn't want like little quirky comedies that win golden globe awards as much as i liked mozart in the jungle which just got canceled um it was not going to be a worldwide phenomenon and and that's the shifting to a blockbuster uh uh approach to it like i want that game of thrones i want that blockbuster i think that's all part of this which is people want the huge hits the must watches uh because they want to be indispensable because there will come a time when there are so many different services that people

are going to be forced to choose which ones they're going to stay with and that's going to probably kill you know not necessarily kill the niche players that are kind of like you know like something like acorn that's just like british tv and other european tv and other commonwealth tv or like um like i for for people younger than us um crunchy roll exactly right i see crunchy roll show up on on roku or apple tv or whatever and it's just i don't think about it but um my daughter's friends watch tons of anime on there and those i think have a real chance to succeed although they might also get kind of bought and sucked into a bigger player but like the big players who are like the game they're playing is prestige television scripted like how many of those can make it like we there was a time when

there was literally just hbo and showtime and now we have kind of this increasing number of people playing that game and netflix has taken it to a whole you know even higher level and you can do that for a while but in the end i don't think i don't think the world is going to accept 10 of those or whatever. So I think there will be a reckoning at some point. But Apple wants to be in the game. Apple wants to be talked about. And I think Apple really does want something to break through where everybody's like, oh, my God, I need that Ron Moore sci-fi show. Or I need amazing stories.

Or I need the Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon drama that is a buzzworthy drama or whatever show breaks through or shows break through because that's good for them. Because then they're like, well, yeah, you can only watch that on your iPhone or your iPad or your Apple TV. The only thing that, I guess I got a lot of thoughts about this

and I know we're still early in the show, but it feels like they're doing a play like with Amazon Prime in some ways. It seems like they're doing a play like with amazon prime in some ways it seems like they're maybe skating where the puck was it feels like they're doing a little bit of an hbo play where they they want the the prestige it's just that hbo can run on a lot of different things the thing that i find um concerning again we haven't seen much there's nothing to look at yet to to evaluate this but it just feels like that venn diagram gets pretty tight of people who have apple products and would want this particular

thing they're closing off a lot of the markets is a little bit like the days when you you know steve initially didn't want ipods to work with windows you know that that kind of thing i i agree that the like if they wanted the streaming service to be the most successful it could be as a streaming service you'd want it everywhere right i'm not sure that apple as a company is investing in a streaming service because they want to have a successful streaming service business right like maybe they do maybe they've completely changed their approach and the services line in their budget is about like anything it could be literally anything you could think of as a service it doesn't have to be tied to apple's hardware

or platforms in any other way but i have a hard time believing that i i think in the end they see it as a means to an end which is getting people in their ecosystem and not just making uh whatever ten dollars a month off of somebody who's using a Roku box. But I could be wrong. I mean, that would be a very different thing for them. It contributes to developing and growing. I hate when people use that verb that way. But basically trying to get more of a halo effect. The idea is like, you love your iPhone, now check out these other things. Yeah, yeah. And maybe a little bit of like, oh, that's a really buzzworthy show, but you got to have an Apple device to watch it, or you have to wait. And that they want that kind of like the star trek

show sort of with cbs a little bit yeah well i mean that's uh that with cbs they're really just trying to build a business i i think the the smart thing because that makes star trek fans really angry about the fact that in the u.s it's netflix everywhere else but the u.s and canada but star trek fans in the u.s are really grumpy that that show got on uh cbs all access and not on something else it was basically you need to pay for this one show and that's like nobody nobody particularly loves using that app yeah well yeah so the funny thing about it is though that was i think from a business perspective as far as i can tell a great success for them because they got a lot of people to sign up for cbs all access their

streaming service and they're trying to build that service and they got names and they got people to advertise to and some of them maybe stayed as subscribers and some of them will come back next time and uh and they did it all with a show that net the netflix purchase basically paid for so everything was about building a future business and making a profit on it and uh it was an investment for them and they could have it would have been easier for them to take a bigger profit and be on netflix everywhere in the world but in the u.s they're like yeah but we want to build our own we want to have our own thing and cbs doesn't do it the way other companies do it but they do have a strategy and they have been very successful as a business there are a lot of stories about how you know there's rumors about viacom and cbs

coming back together because they used to be together and they got split apart and the funny thing about the story is that 10 years ago when they got split apart cbs was viewed as this legacy business that it was like good luck les moonvis head of cbs with your legacy network business whereas the cable tv business was viewed as this like that was the shining growth opportunity and now when when the owner or like majority shareholder of both is trying to get them both together again sherry redstone the perception is like cbs doesn't want to touch viacom because cbs has actually been very profitable and successful and Viacom is seen as being troubled. That's one of my favorite running observations from Tim on TV Talk Machine

is just that idea of like, hey, CBS, you know, you may not make it into the power rankings too often, but like keep doing what you're doing. It's not for me, but like it's working. It's a successful business. And that's the thing about Star Trek is like Star Trek fans are grumpy about it being on that show being on CBS All Access, but it was a good business move like it was a really smart business move i think the real question is do they have the budget and do they have i know they've got some ambition but do they have the budget to build that thing into something that people keep as a subscription year round and they have like three or four original shows on it now so so i i keep thinking and as a star trek fan i will admit that this is also uh some some wish casting happening here but i keep thinking, and as a Star Trek fan, I will admit that this is also some wish casting happening here, but I keep thinking, you own Star Trek, you have a streaming service, why are you not developing multiple Star Trek shows now? you could you could run with and get people to subscribe but instead they've got like they've

got the star trek thing and they've got like the good wife spinoff and they've got a they have a comedy show and i think there's another drama that's coming and it's just kind of scattershot now so that's the question for cbs is not that it wasn't a bad move it's that like what's your big plan here is it to just are they are they hoping to get a lot of uh i mean isn't there isn't it fair to say that their demo tends to skew a little older uh well on network but i think on on on streaming there there it's a much younger audience they said but times of confusion it is a wacky time i have one other upstream thing i wanted to mention which is something that also came up on tv talk machine which is fan tv which is a really great app it used to be fanhattan it's a place where you could go and like find out

like where's that movie where's that tv show where's it available with streaming services is it on is it for rent or for sale at itunes or amazon is it on cable where is it and it died it's already well and truly dead i think it died today i think today is the day of death of fan tv um and it got bought by tivo or or maybe rovio which became tivo and it just got sucked into the maw of that intellectual property whirlwind and uh is gone so a lot of people were asking like well what app should i use or web service should i use to track my shows whether it's like what show should i watch now or whether it's can i stream this in this place or in that place and i have a few recommendations for people like i i heard from a bunch of people last week about this that just watch.com is great that uh there's tracked.tv t-r-a-k-t, tvtime.com, and there are apps for most of these things, too.

Somebody recommended Can I Stream It?, which is literally canistream.it. Although, last time I used it, it was not reliable for me. It was saying things were not streamable that were. Can I Stream It? was the first one I knew of for doing that, but it's been pretty undependable. Just Watch has something i like a lot which is once you go in and get your account set up you get to basically pick which of the streaming services you want uh which makes it a lot easier to go in and find stuff so you could say like well you know i'd be willing to buy it from here but not from there and then when you

bring in something like what's it called movie like i know this is movies not tv but movies anywhere have you talked about that much here? We talked about it a little bit. I mean, boy, it's such a fascinating time right now. When you get your stuff, where does that exist? Where can you get it? Where does it live? Siri on Apple TV helps with that an okay amount. It doesn't gobble up all of the apps.

But that's the trick, right? It's like, are the apps willing to put themselves in the search? My TiVo,ivo honestly and this is why they bought fan tv i think my tivo does a great job my tivo actually has a pretty good job of knowing what streaming based on the streaming services it supports anyway it can say oh i could get i could get seinfeld reruns from any of these places and it'll say this show's current season is on cbs but the past season's on hulu and it'll show you all the episodes and the ones that are on hulu will play on hulu and the ones that are on cbs you can record on cbs and it does it that way for

everything which is pretty tv times tv times cool too i i don't use the website much but i do use it on my phone um that really wants to be like i guess like all of these it really wants to be kind of a maybe along the lines of letterbox for movies it wants to be a social network it wants to be something where you're sharing it with people and there's they're they're you know seeing your reviews and stuff but tv time's pretty good i just loaded up with all the shows especially ones that aren't like like wins doctor who come back on and stuff like that all the shows and all the great shows they're all in there yeah i also just want to mention this is strictly germane, but if you don't know about this, listeners, Flixable is very, very good. It's not for tracking, but it does one thing very well, and that is it is a website that shows you basically sorted by date when stuff got added to Netflix.

So if, like me, you've ever struggled to figure out what's new, you know there is new stuff, but in their infinite scrolling scrolling interface the infinite carousel of hell uh flexible is really great they have a tab for movies a tab for tv it's a great way to just pop in every week or two and say oh did i miss anything like here's this spate of like you know indian subcontinent sitcoms that they've added or whatever but you'll also see there's wild wild country here's stuff that was recently added to keep you from losing your mind as a netflix uh user try flexible f-l-i-x-a-b-l-e.com i have some other topics for us to talk about but let me say uh some words about our next sponsor this is pingdom pingdom awesome people at pingdom and why are they awesome because they keep websites online They keep the sites you love and your sites from crashing or from crashing too long. Like, get somebody on it immediately.

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saying yeah i broke the site but it's about to go back up and then it was fine again but you got to know that because yeah the last thing you want the best move the best move is you hear about it it gets fixed and nobody noticed like nobody had time to send you that email saying i think your website is down is it just me or is it down you're like nope we got to back up it's not even down you were just seeing things that's that is great i have done that every now and then where it's like is your site down and i'll reply no it's up just go it's fine what are you talking about i don't have any idea what you mean because it works for me we got to back up as quickly as possible all you have to do with pingdom is just give them your url and uh that's it they

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It happens. Some news we should talk about. I did a dumb thing just because I thought it would be funny and it kind of turned into a bigger thing. It starts with this story, though that apple put a time bomb in the latest version of mac os oh it's kind of weird 10 13 4 came out a couple weeks ago but they put a time bomb in for like thursday the 12th at midnight local time and after that point if you launched an app that was a 32-bit app this is in high sierra and yeah so high sierra only the latest version of high sierra 10 13 4 so such a catchy set of numbers that is um it will put up a little box that says basically this is an old app

email the developer shame them uh which you shouldn't do you should you should check on your developer's uh website and see if they've already made a statement about it and then if they haven't you could send them a very nice i imagine that's what most people do they probably go and check they probably do yeah it says this app is not optimized for your mac it needs to be updated by its developer again it's not you it's them uh to improve compatibility also by the way 32-bit apple apps don't get this warning because apple does not want you to contact them about their apps that are not being updated um and this is this is now there's a lot of panic that can happen here and it doesn't need to happen in fact i was kind of talking marco down via sending text messages

to casey when they were doing atp last week about this because it had just sort of broken right before and i'd written my article about it that um even though so apple has said in the past this is not news that in a future version of mac os 32-bit apps won't run anymore they have said that but a key thing infinite time scale exactly right on an infinite time scale well we're no software is going to run on an infinite time scale except the unix it will be around forever but what they said at wwdc last year was in uh the next version of mac os so the one that comes out this fall um 32 bit apps well let's see high sierra they said the one that's out now will be the last version of mac os to run 32-bit apps without compromise

and i checked on this because there's some nuance here because the implication from that is they will run but there will be an unstated compromise and i i asked around and i can say that's that i was told yes that interpretation is exactly right this falls mac os updates not going to not run them but there will be an unstated compromise that who knows what that is it could be an annoying dialogue box even more annoying than this one it could be that you have to like by default they don't run and you have to reboot and do something and set something in order for it to run and then apple can say haha you don't get this awesome feature at 100 or at all because you're in the wrong mode there's lots of complexity there that might make you not want to run them but they they're not

going to be completely shut out this fall but you know next fall probably is my guess right maybe not maybe not but but probably which means this is like an 18 month warning this is a gentle transition it's it but it's definitely one it's a classic it's a classic warning shot from apple i mean apple watchers will over time realize that when apple issues this kind of, well, you guess you could call it a warning, but definitely a heads up. Make your way toward the exits. Make your way toward the exits. We're not saying that you have to run. There's plenty of time, but you will need to make your way toward the exits. I don't know if it's because of this particular computer I'm on, because I'm an old man and I'm very reluctant to update. My MacBook, adorable, has high Sierra, but I'm just running Sierra.

So, so when you look at, so you can do this by going to system information and then going to the application section, subsection and hardware and see which ones are available. I'm seeing a lot, a whole lot of stuff, including a lot of surprising Apple apps.

Oh yeah. There's a lot. That's, that's why Apple why apple i mean and and to be fair apple's got the home field advantage here app apple can keep those 32-bit apps around as long as they want and keep them running or they can they can only update them to 64-bit when they release the version that you know that that only runs 64-bit like they don't they they're their own time table right they they but for example do you feel that that only runs 64-bit like they don't they they're their own time table right

they they but for example do you feel confident that we'll still be able to for example run firmware password utility they'll probably give that a little uh i i think not i think uh i think i think not well that that's well that brings to old hardware and stuff like that is part of this story right because it's not just old software it's old hardware um stuff like that is part of this story, right? Because it's not just old software, it's old hardware. Like I did. So the dumb thing that I did, because I thought it would be funny is I, when I realized that Apple's apps didn't generate the warning, I filed a bug because they always say file a radar.

I filed a radar for QuickTime Player 7 saying, oh, QuickTime Player 7 isn't 64 bit. So you should do that. saying oh quicktime player 7 isn't third isn't 64-bit so uh you should do that and uh that was closed with prejudice as we're not going to do that it's like all right fair so then i wrote another bug report which was oh quicktime player 10 doesn't have all these features that are in quicktime player 7 and since quicktime player 7 is going away you should probably put them in quicktime player 10 check and mate right i'm waiting for that to be closed it hasn't been closed yet i'm sure it will or or or closed as

a duplicate because people have been complaining about this it's the reason quicktime player 7 which is ancient still runs and it's still kicking around is because just this weekend i used it to put a an audio soundtrack on top of a video that I had that was a different soundtrack. And then we did an incomparable commentary track about Star Wars. And I have a Star Wars MP4, and I have this WAV file of our commentary. You did two versions.

Yeah, because there's the special editions, which we didn't watch. And then basically in QuickTime, I just add the audio track in and then export it out as an mp4 and boom i've got an mp4 with the new audio track and it was you know this is why we we keep it around but um apple's quicktime apis never really got updated for 64-bit quicktime player 10 doesn't apparently really use the old quicktime at all it's just kind of quicktime in name only or for the most part um greg pack the uh comic book writer and also uh sometime filmmaker uh tweeted at me like oh does this mean final cut uh seven is finally gonna die and i was like yeah actually yeah it does

that's for all the people who are holding out and it doesn't mean it's gonna stop working but it means that if you update to the version after the version that comes this fall it may not run anymore at all what about the old garage band you think the old garage oh yeah garage band is garage band six or whatever that's 32 bit that'll stop running but so here's the thing it's not like if you're really committed to old software you can keep your old computer with your old software and not update and you can still use it and it's okay the problem is that like if you are fully dedicated to the final cut pro 7 lifestyle and you still edit all your movies on it and it's okay the problem is that like if you are fully dedicated to the final cut pro 7 lifestyle and you still edit all your movies on it and you don't care like you can keep buying computers that run it up to the point where apple releases an os that doesn't support it at which point you

have to just keep using your old computer forever and that's that's where the incompatibility incompatibility really hurts you is oh i live you know now i can i can use final cut 7 you use it for several years and you're like oh it's fine and then you and then your computer breaks you're like oh i guess i need a new mac oh because because it won't and that's i mean this is life right i mean software doesn't last forever os's always get updated and break old software this is just a more dramatic kind of large scale example of it but this stuff happens it's just if it's something that you love that is going away it's it's hard so it's not again you can make your way to the exit slowly but they're you know this is apple just continuing to push things along

i do wonder about that without compromise though i do wonder if like by default they won't run and there'll be like some whizzy new feature that uh they introduced this fall that uh will just not work in that mode and you know so that's the question is like how painful will that compromise be if you're still running 32-bit apps? Oh, the DVD player, by the way. DVD player is 32-bit. Unclear whether Apple's going to update that or just say, you know, run a virtual machine of Lion to get that. So many Gruber's title case service that I run. So many of the old Ecamm utilities.

Yeah, well, they're all QuickTime. They can't go to 64-bit as long as they're based on QuickTime. What's going to really suck, though, is this is also another pretty good example of as many warnings as they give to people. If there is a day where they just cut the cord, think about the terrible mixture of, let's say you're somebody who is using a Mac

with these old apps, and maybe you're not reading the trades. It's just going to be one day they're going to open it up and be like what happened to my mac right right because that moment where it's well i think this is part of the compromises story though it's like this fall that'll happen is my theory i think that's maybe the most likely thing is this fall you remember when they introduced gatekeeper and suddenly that app you downloaded from some shady place on the internet and you double clicked it and goes whoa you downloaded this from some weird place and by default i won't let you run it but you can go to the system preferences and change it so that i'll let you run it fine live dangerously right

well i think i think maybe it'll be something like that where you open it up and be like okay i can't run 32-bit apps in this mode because this is super awesome mode of mac os you know monterey bay otter and then you're but you can go in and turn it to less awesome mode and reboot and everything will be kind of drab and gray but you can run your old apps and as a user you'll be like oh hmm okay i do that. And so if you do that, then maybe the next year when you update again and it says, sorry, super awesome mode is the only mode now. And you can't run 32 bit apps. You'll be, you'll be a little less surprised. I think you still might be grumpy about it and you may be surprised, but I feel like this, that, that actually is one of the values in doing the with compromises step. Is it like's like no no no we're serious this is going to

go away like puts it in your face this is like this is it puts it in your face once the next step will be to get it like where you're gonna have to start changing settings to run it and then the final step is it doesn't run i don't know it's gonna frustrate people it is it's a performance issue is that the idea i think i think that's part of it i think like metal doesn't metal is a 64-bit thing like they want to it's performance to a degree but i think it's also just like maintenance like it will it will be easier when they can just say everything in the system runs 64-bit clean we don't have to translate we don't have to you know there's nothing we have to do all the old crud goes away all that 32-bit code and that includes like quick time it's like it's gone right 32-bit quick time gone uh i imagine

that that's less maintenance work and that the system will be will be better for it as a you know as a gestalt as a as an overall system right you're ripping out the legacy stuff the problem is when you rip out the legacy stuff you take stuff people are using with it and i mean you could argue that that's one of the reasons windows was so bad for so long is that microsoft's customers did not let them rip anything out ever i mean it was very hard much harder than this this might need to run on like a set top box in vietnam like that we need to keep this yeah exactly right and so the uh you know this is going to be Apple's good at transitions and this is a actually kind of a long and kind one

I'm not saying that people who are angry about it can be angry about it because if you if you're losing your favorite app it makes sense I will point out um for a while now it's been legal to run mac os in a virtual machine and as ridiculous as it is if you have an app that you absolutely have to run and it's a 32-bit app you could probably make a virtual machine of high sierra or sierra or el capitan or yosemite or you know or anything that's covered by that license in vmware or parallels and keep it around and it will run and it's legal to do that with old operating system versions and that may be to do that with old operating system versions and that may be one way that people keep some of this stuff alive i wouldn't recommend

using final cut final cut pro 7 in emulation right auntie sue is not going to do that to keep her favorite solitaire game going well that and that's that's that's where the real bummer is going to happen where now auntie sue may just keep her old um old computer like but there's that day when the computer breaks that mac pro she's been waiting for exactly right finally she says i've been using this g5 for 15 years and now i'm going to upgrade to the turbocharger solitaire and then there's the thing that mike and i have been talking about for a while now which is there's also the rumors it's the elephant the because last week was all of the parables um like the the elephant in the room here is what's

the future of the mac because there's like going to 64-bit and there's the rumors about leaving intel behind and there's this question of like what do they do uh with uh is there are they going to do something like the uh the rumor about marzipan where it's like ios apps that also run on the mac the all these things are swirling around because I have those moments where I think, I don't know, old 32-bit Mac software may not be the only thing we're going to be asked to leave behind on this platform in the next few years. I don't know. At some point, if you leave everything behind, there's nothing left. It's a platform transition and not just a software transition inside a platform. But Apple may test us on that one. so anyway 32-bit apps check it out you can find out what apps you're running that are 32-bit um first off if you're running 10 13 4 it will tell you now

that we're now that we're past april 12th it will tell you the first time you launch it only the first time i dropped in uh dropped in a little link to this uh i mean most most people might probably know how to do this but os 10 daily has a real quick little how-to on using your little apple menu and finding where you can locate about this mac click on system report click on applications and one of the columns is intel 64-bit and it says yes or no you can even sort it sort it and then look at all the nos all the adobe apps my adobe air upd Oh, no. I know. I found some files. I had a welcome to Lion, or getting started with Lion app. Oh, wow.

Deep down in a really weird folder somewhere. I sent Stephen Hackett, because I know he likes really old Mac things, a link to that. It was just, yeah, I had welcome to know it was welcome to leopard wow welcome to tiger and also a macbook pro user's guide for a macbook pro that included an apple remote a dvi to vga adapter and a cd drive so that's like great that how long has that been in my mini migrations of my my mac nobody needs those ports anymore no no it's not that not that important um i wanted to i i wanted to talk to you because you're on this podcast and i want you to explain something because there was news about how a new version of the app drafts is coming out

drafts there's drafts five and they've got a drafts pro uh and you know i love drafts that's the wrong kind of drafts. That's funny. That's a good one. You get a ding for that. That's good. First pick in the draft, I'll pick the app drafts. We all get so heartbroken.

So I want to ask you about this, because I have heard people extol the virtues of drafts. And I have to admit, I think I've never really gotten it. Yeah. And I'm somebody who writes things on my iPad and my iPhone. I write articles on my iPad. I do all sorts of stuff on ios and i know people rave about this and now with this new version coming out i i thought i'm gonna have somebody on who can probably talk to me about like why you know why

this app works and you know does it change your approach to putting text into an iOS device? Yeah, I just dropped in a link to a podcast I did with Greg Pierce and visiting with Renee Ritchie to talk about drafts. But, you know, everybody has such a different approach and a different mindset for how we use our various devices. And there's a pattern that I fell into on, starting obviously with my phone, that's been a very interesting pattern for me. So, first of all, I mean,

one of the things that's a little bit perplexing about drafts is that when you open it up, it's just kind of like a big text field. It's blank. And you're like, hmm. It's very blank. And there aren't a lot of buttons to click. It's not really clear what you're supposed to do next.

And I think someone could be forgiven for thinking it's just like a little, that it really stops at being a diminished version of notes. Like you just type stuff in and I guess that goes somewhere. The quick version is that under the hood, drafts can do a lot of stuff to your text. That could be text transformations, that could be sending it to someplace else. In the current version, it's not at the level of something like workflow. But so the new version will do a lot of really, really interesting stuff. But rather than get too deep into that, listen to that podcast if you want to hear more. And I think Greg's

going to be talking about this a lot in the coming week as the app comes out. But I can just tell you why it works for me. Not that it should work for everybody, but there's, I don't know, kind of a funny thing I discovered about myself once I started using this app. You know, ordinarily in the past, if I wanted to send somebody a message, a text message, I'd go to the message app and start typing.

If I wanted to type an email, I'd hit C, you know, and compose a new message in Gmail. There are other kinds of things you'd think to put on the calendar. The first powerful thing that drafts does is it can be a starting point for pretty much any kind of text. So I keep that in my little doc, click it, start typing. And then like a common usage for me in the early days was I've always had a particular fetish for being able to send email without seeing the incoming email. So for a long time for me, it's been a holy grail to not have to open an email app just to send an email.

Because if I'm not in the email, I'm perhaps well known or notorious for this idea that you shouldn't be doing email all the time. You should be checking your email at times when you make time to do something about it. I still really believe that. I don't have any email notifications on, but I do need to send email sometimes. So just as one example, I have a little functionality in there where I type something. I type, you know, lunch downtown next week. I type two spaces. I type a little bit of text. Hey, Jason, do you want to have lunch at da-da-da-da next week? Love, Merlin. And this candy little script knows that in this context for this command, take that first line of text and drafts.

That's going to be the subject line of an email. Anything after that line is the body of the email. And so basically, I can take my time to type in this little window, type the things I need to say, hit a button, and then it basically pops open a new mail where I can drop in know drop in the person's name etc etc etc so on the on the the first thing was that became very useful to me because there's lots of times where i i want a quick way like uh something i've seen dan morin suffer from that you suffered from anytime you do stuff in his cms back in the day you would learn not to type long things in a text area because you just couldn't

trust it the browser might crash you lose your work i'm sure i imagine you ran into that in the past trying to be a cowboy don't write in the cms and don't write it in the cms no so the the simple way that i found it very useful is uh that was a real neat way for me to know that whenever i needed even if even if i i knew exactly where it needed to go, I would often start there. I had the same interface every time I was dealing with text. This is not for everybody, but this is for me. I didn't want to necessarily open the email app. I didn't want to open the message app. If it's an important thing, I want to look at it. I want to see if there's any red lines under it telling me it's misspelled. I'm going to look at it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I did that for a pretty good long time. A lot of times what I would just do is one of my scripts takes the first line of the drafts file and anything after it. And so basically it takes

the first line and creates a new text file on Dropbox with a date stamp on it. This becomes a great way for things to get from the ephemeral world. I use drafts fairly ephemerally. Many people use it for much more than that. I use it as a place to start text, and then I often send it somewhere else. And then I can go into Envy Alt, TextMate, or Editorial on iOS and do, you know, other stuff with it. Okay, so that itself is pretty useful. I don't know if that's enough to make people want to buy it, but just that first pattern of always starting your text in this similar kind of area, it makes you careful about what you're doing and prevents mistakes. But then I noticed a fascinating thing start to

happen that I would not have noticed if I always went to the supposed destination app to do it. So I discovered that a lot of times something started as an idea and then I started moving my fingers and something happened. And once I was open to the idea that the text could go anywhere and I had to think about where it went next, a funny thing happened. I realized that a lot of times I'd start to write something that I thought was going to be a text message. Yes. In drafts. And I go, you know what? This is probably better as an email. I changed my mode of thinking and now I'm writing an email in there instead of a text message. Other times you're about to write somebody a really snarky email

and you go, oh, you know what? This would be better to just be a mean subtweet. Maybe I should do that instead. It should be really be an angry blog post denouncing this person. But then there's other ones too, where like how often have you started to like basically complain to somebody about something or request something from them, and you end up rubber ducking a little bit. And by typing, you start to realize the answer to your own problem. So you could go into drafts and start writing a long, mean email about this problem that somebody's caused for you.

And as you're typing and rubber ducking, you suddenly go, oh, you know what? This actually could just be something that goes to a to-do list, something I can take care of myself. And then maybe sometimes, how about this? Let's really pop the stack. Maybe you realize as you're about to communicate with somebody, you realize, you know what? I'm really talking to myself and that's okay. This actually needs to go into a diary or this needs to go into some kind of a running file. You see where I'm going with this. Once you open yourself up to that idea, I think an interesting kind of philosophical change in

writing can happen, which is that you say, it doesn't matter where this will end up. Really, it can start, it always should start in drafts. And once I'm done typing the thing that I like, then I decide what to do with it and where it goes. And so that's been really powerful for me. And it's not even getting into the redonkulous number of things that you can do with this. You can send it to Fantastical, where it'll be parsed for natural language. You can, as I say, send it to Dropbox. You could append or prepend to a list somewhere.

And that's all available. You just kind of slide over to this little menu, and you can send stuff anywhere you want it to be. And yes, you can send it straight to an email app. You can send it to messages. You can send it to wherever you want it to go. There's a rich collection of these things that people put together in a directory where you can find stuff that'll work for you,

all the way down to things like markdown transformations, HTML previews, all that kind of stuff is in there. And the language is too sophisticated for me to do from scratch, but easy enough for me to change to do the kinds of things I want to do. So for me, drafts is where all tech starts. I like the idea. That's the part that I really get, which is, um, instead it's a, it's a real shift, right? Because we think in terms of least, okay, we, I think, and I think a lot of us have been trained to think in terms of apps on our Macs and especially on our iOS devices, which is not, I need to write something. It's, I need to open notes for this kind of, what kind of text is this? Then I'll put it in notes.

What kind of text is this? I'll put it in reminders. What kind of text is this? Gmail. This one goes to Fantastical. This one goes to Google Docs. This one goes to BBEdit, right? Like in the end, I have all of this overhead that is classifying what I think I'm going

to do and pick the right tool for the job yeah it's almost like what app what app wants me to use it right now right right and what you're saying is if you kind of let go of that and just say i'm going to start it in drafts that doesn't preclude you from finishing it somewhere else but it means that you don't actually have to do that overhead before you start typey typing. That's you put it very well. And I guess one part I should mention, because it's so important, is that it's meant it kind of wants to be ephemeral, but have a good memory. So you start typing in one of these. And first of all, these are all

these can all be synced. I think I was doing it through Dropbox. I don't even remember. But now I mean, in the latest version, it just works great with iCloud. So on all of my devices, all my iOS devices, Drafts is running. As soon as I start typing, it's basically creating a new file, a new buffer. It just goes into the cloud. And at any time, you can go back. You can do a search for any string to find what you're looking for. The new version includes stuff like tags and flagging, if you like that sort of stuff. But what you're describing here is like, let's say I get distracted and go somewhere else. Well, I don't have to go save it out of a browser window. It's already saved in there. And I can search all that stuff very easily. Another nice new thing, not new thing,

but a nice feature is you can select the amount of time before it automatically creates a new blank page, saving your old one, right? So you might want to set that to five minutes. You might want to set that to one minute, where you're like, I'll be working on this to move around on the phone, come back, copy, paste, do whatever. It's got a great extension where you can create a new file or a pen and prepend using iOS extensions, which is hugely useful when you're making show notes or something like that. But then there's a new thing he's added called, I think it's called focus mode, which is just always leave my last note up uh until i say otherwise so yeah it's very it really can be

adjusted to however you like to work but all it really requires is all it requires is the vast change in thinking that says i'm not going to think about the app till i'm done figuring out what i have to say all right thank you for that you know know, and the guy works hard and it's a good app and I want to support him. These are the kinds of apps that have made my life good. And again, I'm not trying, I don't mean this as a sales job, so much as to say like, you know, philosophically,

if there are apps that mean the world to you, you know, get out there and support them because that's what it takes for them to stay alive. That's true. I'm all for people, you know, charging for their work and I would pay for this every year. No, no sweat.

All right. I will check out version five. I'll put links in the show notes to their blog posts about what they're doing. Uh, you ready for some ask upgrade? Oh, I certainly am. Wait,

what's the sound for that? Is that choo choo choo? There's some lasers that happened, but they're warming up now because we have a sponsor before that. And I have to admit, this is a breaking news in what may be a first for upgrade we have a follow-up from a sponsor james thompson the maker of pcalc he wrote down here the makers of pcalc well james and saskia are tla systems and they make pcalc the scientific calculator it's the scottish we i doubt that

saskia approved this text anyway the makers of pcalc the scientific calculator you's the scottish we i doubt that sasuke approved this text anyway the makers of pcalc the scientific calculator you didn't even know you needed would like us to point out that the reverse polish notation does not in fact involve any form of sausages despite what i said two weeks ago so just putting it out there it does not you don't actually turn around and eat a sausage and that's not what reverse polish notation is i still don't know what it's very seems very misleading let me go on because this this is basically this ad is going to explain why i'm wrong rpn is actually an alternative way of calculating where you enter the numbers first followed by the operator so six enter seven multiply would give you the ultimate answer

of 42 was popularized by hewlett packard with their desktop calculators in the 70s and 80s and caught on especially with scientists and engineers. So now you know, but you don't have to use RPN with pCalc. Of course, that's just one of the many options that let you customize it exactly as you wish. Our friend Dr. Drang has a nice post about how he built his own, like you can build your own interface. There's an editing mode where you can move and resize the buttons, replace the ones you don't use. So you can literally like make pCalc's calculator. It's got a bunch of layouts built in, but you can customize all of them.

You can change all of them. It's crazy. And if you bought a new iPad, you may be shocked to know the iPad doesn't come with a calculator at all. It seems like the kind of thing they'd want to include. Seems weird, yeah. But you can get pCalc. There's a light version that's free.

Contains no invasive adverts, as they say in Scotland, or analytics, as they also say in Scotland, whatsoever. And if you like it, you can upgrade to the full version and unlock all of the other features. pCalc is available on every single apple platform not kidding not kidding although james it's not yet capable okay let me let me phrase it this way you got it got on home pod you can get it on apple tv at wwdc when they announced that you can do home pod apps i am telling you the first home pod app that will exist will be tell why don't you tell me that math problem by james thompson but it is on it is on apple watch it is on apple tv if you need to do some calculations on your television and if they ever release those ar glasses p calc will certainly be there with a giant augmented calculator in your face on day one search the app store for p calc

or go to p calc.com slash upgrade for more details and if you're going to find james he has sweet p calc pins that he will be giving away he's a very nice man and i will also say sunday sunday at the studio monster trucks driving around in the about screen no overpass no underpass golden. Golden bananas. Golden bananas. I use PCALC. They didn't tell us to say this. I use PCALC every weekday afternoon because my daughter is 10 and she's learning some kind of monkey balls, banana pants

math that I don't understand. She does factor rainbows. She does all these things. I don't understand what the hell she's doing. I don't know how to quote unquote help her. But what I do know is when it is time to figure out some wackadoo division thing where she draws a rainbow in a grid, I will open PCALC and I will check the math for myself in my head to make sure that I did it right. So thank you to James.

Is it the new math? Oh, God. It's so confusing. I don't understand it either. There was a whole thing that both my kids did where it's like now, you know, cluster the numbers or something. And I'm like, what? Is that a new thing? Oh, yeah. You could make a part of the number family or the number story you're like you're just saying nouns like it doesn't mean anything what does that mean

all nestled together and they love each other when i was your age when i was your age we just had to memorize things watch out marlin lasers lasers time listener matt says in the context of marzipan and apple leaving intel could apps contain both arm and x86 instructions uh could apps that contain both be feasible x86 instructions run by emulation on arm but an imac slash mac pro you know contain both arm and x86 for native performance he says we could call them fusion apps. And what I'll say to Matt is, we had these, actually, the last time. They're called fat binaries. We had them for the Intel PowerPC transition.

And yes, I would imagine if we're going through a processor transition, one of the things that Apple will let people do is compile their apps for both processor architectures inside the bundle now that said they have done some interesting things with app thinning on the app store so it's possible that on the app store what you'll do is you'll upload both the binaries and based on what architecture your computer is running only that one will download, right? That may be the modern version of the fat binaries that you upload all the binaries to the app store, and then only the right one comes down. But Fusion Apps, we called it fat binaries back in the day, and it worked fine. Like,

they were a little bit bigger. They were fat. Not to shame them, but they were larger because they contained two executables inside. But the bottom line was, you just double-click. When I was younger, I was often criticized for my love of curvy apps. Yeah, well, you know. I love my curvy apps. Back in the day, when we were kids, you could have the regular app or the Husky app. That was your other choice. They had a whole section for us at Sears.

Yeah, absolutely. With the tough skins and the eager animals. I'm glad you explained that to listener Matt because i i recognize those all as as english strings that was the thing oh that i remember oh sure yeah but this is a x86 arm there's a lot of confusion going on it's times of confusion that's what made oh it's absolutely platinum age that's why when you were talking about the 32-bit stuff i was remembering back when was it not rosetta what was it called where you could have an old version that would run not an emulation but like all the microsoft apps hadn't been

updated do you remember these times well so there were a couple there was rosetta which was the code translation where it took a power pc app that didn't have an intel version and ran it on an intel processor there was the blue box or whatever they call it classic which is when they were you were running an os9 app inside os10 and basically in the background hidden away there was a copy of os9 running um but it would unless you made it it wouldn't show it to you it would just show the app and that app behaved completely differently from all the other apps because it was running in in os9 in this emu not an emulation layer but it was like a virtual machine kind of layer where it was running a virtual copy of os9 inside os10 it

was super on the computer power of that time that's mental yeah yeah it worked okay but again i think it shows you that apple's track record of sort of bending over backwards to smooth a transition as much as possible while not being afraid to make them like if they follow that that rule book then we could probably guess about how they're going to do it for any future transitions they're going to do they're pretty good at it historically um but not afraid to make them but but pretty good at taking all the steps and building incompatibility and they took they took kaleidoscope away i was that's true i was thinking about um how microsoft's doing their own version of windows 10

and it's the same thing they've got a code translation engine for x86 apps they run slow but they run it's like yeah that's how you have to do that as opposed to the old version of windows rt that they tried where it was like yeah it doesn't don't even try now they actually try it's good um listener matthew wrote in to say do you think if apple do decide to use their a series chips in the macbook they would enable cellular connectivity for mac something like an apple sim built in and lte bands so the idea that maybe one of the things you could pick up if you leave intel behind is uh is cellular max and i don't think these things are prime are particularly connected i felt for a while now like the big problem to doing cellular connectivity on the mac is that the mac os needs

to be updated to be smart enough to like control who uses the network connection when you're in a cellular mode like add in a thing like i use trip mode and they could do something like trip mode although it's a little bit fiddly where like literally you say when i'm on cellular this app doesn't get to use the network because it's photos and it's gonna kill my that's what's kept me from getting all in on it is it's a little like little a little bit like little snitch yeah where there's a lot of breaking in time yeah it gets in your face for a while when you're when you're configuring it so now if apple could do that i think that's i think that's more likely the thing is apple really evangelizing developers and saying we're going to do cellular max and by default your your apps aren't going to

aren't going to be able to use the cell network and you're going to have to opt in with these very particular things in order for us not to kill the data allowances of all of our users i think that's what they need to do like a listener marco i uh it seems it does seem on the one hand crazy to me that they can't do that especially after you've had a cellular ipad you know it's hard to look back it seems crazy they can do it they just have not ever prioritized it for whatever reason i think it's strange but they just haven't done it do you think part of its battery concerns uh it could be it could be the battery is part of it um although the you

know mac batteries are way bigger than than like phone batteries um they because they use they use more power um i don't know i it's it's i i've heard people say that they thought it was licensing issues although well i mean just because it seems to stand to reason from a logical standpoint that you're most likely to use lte when you're not plugged in. It's when you're somewhere that's not your house or somewhere that has Wi-Fi. It's true. Although sometimes, I mean, I use, now that I've got LTE in my iPad, I use it in my Starbucks and they've got Wi-Fi, but it's terrible and I just don't bother anymore. I just. I think what blows me away is going and staying at a hotel or going anywhere with that terrible, you know, free Wi-Fi,

unprotected Wi-Fi. And the first thing I do when I'm doing the cost benefit of it, even if it's free is, is just do a speed test. And last time we did that, when we were in Los Angeles, it was mind boggling. I mean, it was something like 10 times faster to use LTE over the wifi. It was crazy. Listener Wayne wrote in to say, couldn't the creatives that Apple has hired so that they can observe them building products for the pro team be the ones who edit all of their TV shows? I don't think that's how that works.

I don't think that's a good idea. Yeah, I think there's like in the lab. I think maybe, yeah, could Apple ask for access, full access to the professionals who are editing their shows but the way it works is apple is giving money to a production company and the production company is handing them a finished show that's happening in korea it's not a yeah it's not a thing where there's in the middle there's a there's some some people over

at apple who are editing those shows for them and i think that that you know maybe they could get access to those things those people of all the things where we get frustrated with Apple, one of the ones that I find, and I'm not, I am not pining for a Mac Pro, like as much as some of my friends are. I'd love to see it just to know that Apple's still in the game. But of all of the things, that's the one that sticks out the most to me of like, really? Like, you can't see how people would want a really, really tricked out desktop machine and a really, really tricked out desktop machine and a really, really tricked out, um, laptop. That's the one where like that just, there's got to be something strategic behind why they

are not doing, especially the kind of MacBook pro that I'd like to have. Yeah. I don't know. Um, strange, strange. I think they're doing, you know, I don't know. They, they have, I, I've had a couple a couple people ask this is not technically an ask up great question but i've had a bunch of people say uh it's sort of like the bigger conspiracy theory which is that could it be that the reason that the mac development has been so sluggish for the last

few years is that everything apple is doing is for this transitional platform where they're going to switch everybody over and it's like we don't even want to make a new mac over here because in three years you're going to be buying this new thing that's not quite a mac and that's this has become the apple version of q anon where like there's this one thing that explains everything except it doesn't really make any sense yeah and my answer is yes it is possible in fact we know it is certain that there are people i, I don't even have to go as far as secret. I think the answer is yes, Apple has retasked a lot of its people to work on an ARM-based platform. It's iOS and the iPad and the iPhone. And that's what is happening there. You don't need a big conspiracy could there be people pulled off who are working on getting mac os on arm ready to go or building kind of a proof of proofs of concept of future mac hardware

that is kind of hybridized isn't or is running you know running an arm uh you know arm laptop but running a version of mac os or a hybrid of mac os and ios yeah i think it's entirely possible i i don't know if that is you know the those people getting pulled off is the reason why your particular bugaboo about what apple is doing is actually happening i that that seems less likely but it's it's possible it's i mean i'm sure they're working on skunk skunk works projects some of which we will never see and some of which will be the mac we're using in in two years i'm sure both of those things listener cory wrote in to say i want to ask upgrade when we might hear more from a podcast tutorial segment i would love your input and my answer there is keep watching the skies cory

mike and i are currently planning i'm going to pre promote it now it's springtime mike and i are currently planning the summer of fun oh wow the summer of fun is returning the upgrade summer of fun it is returning for a new season of fun in the summer fun fun fun takes planning there's a bunch of things going so mike's getting married this summer and going on his honeymoon and that means that there are huge gaps in the upgrade schedule while he's getting married and on his honeymoon and then not to mention the fact that i'm going to europe with my family for a family vacation that ends that culminates in us going to london and being at mike's wedding so

we have we have a whole mess of a summer schedule the summer schedule being a mess is what causes the upgrade summer of fun because it forces us to pre-record some stuff and come up with some evergreen topics and some special episodes like when we drafted old max that one time that was part of the summer of fun so podcast tutorials right in your wheel so i think we're going to do a podcasting episode as part of the summer of fun so uh you know i can't tell you when but i think it will be during the summer of fun so stay tuned for that cory um this is a great question uh listener richard asked what's your ratio of compliments uh to moaners for upgrade do you get a lot of haters and i'm going to say the same thing that i think marco talks about

on atp a lot which is you know podcasts it's a lot harder to be a hater of a podcast because you have to put in a huge time investment and it's harder to just drive by. You get them because it's the internet, but it's a lot harder. And I would say most of the feedback we get is very nice. People are helpful. They tell us things that we don't know. They tell us things that we do know. They give us nice compliments. They have a criticism about something.

do know they give us nice compliments they have a criticism about something but i'd say they all not all mostly seem so invested in the podcast that they're trying to help or they're trying to provide constructive criticism and i don't mind the constructive stuff and i you know people are people and they have everybody's got their weird take on it but what i really don't like is the people who are not invested they don't know who you are they don't know why you're doing what you're doing there's no context like the guy who was um complaining to me about uh my silly post about quick time i had a lot of issues with player 10 or quick time player 7 where it was like you you don't understand the context of this but you know why not just do a drive-by unloading on somebody else on the internet? And podcasts, it's harder to do that. And that is one of the things that makes podcasts great.

One thing I try to always keep in mind, and I'm not just saying this for clapping, but it's really nice that people listen. And there's something special about podcasts in that people get a very strong relationship. If they end up liking it and listening often, you feel like you have a relationship with that person. And sometimes what one might say to somebody else, it feels like you know them well enough that they would know the tone that you mean to strike.

So I think a lot of times it's just because people are very, very involved and they feel strongly about the topics that you're talking about. I mean, the only request that I would make is like, let's at least try and misunderstand each other in thoughtful ways. only request that I would make is like, let's, let's at least try and misunderstand each other in, in thoughtful ways. Like, let's, let's try and assume that, that, that neither, neither of us is deliberately trying to be a bad human being. And if we both agree to that, then you can have a dialogue with people, but you know, it's just people I'm the same way. There's all kinds of times where I almost say kind of silly things to people because I assume they'll know who I am and

will get my tone based on the fact that I've listened to hundreds of hours of their podcast when in fact i would just come off i would come off as a loon yeah that that is we talked about that um after mike went to podcon and i went to see the flop house live uh where and you were there too uh at the flop house and and um it was that is something that is that was a really good conversation you guys had. Thank you. That was very good. The asymmetry of the relationship between an audience and somebody who's making the thing. And it does lead to some weird moments where it's like, I know your voice. I know your anecdotes. Sometimes people know the anecdotes way better than I do.

They're like, oh, it's like that time. Usually. It's like that time in January of 2016 when you had a problem with your car. I can't believe you didn't mention that summer job you had like what how do you even know that it's like well you mentioned on upgrade episode 28 and like oh my god right so so that's the challenges but i've seen it from both sides so it's the the example i gave uh the other day in a slack somewhere was was you know i can meet dan mccoy and i could say hi dan uh i like your cat archie who i've never met but i've seen you post your pictures on the instagram of archie and he's

great and i'm sorry about your old cat who died that was very sad we were all very sad for you and and it's like yeah i could do that that's super weird but the fact is i do know the name of dan's cat and i have seen this cat pictures on instagram we were my daughter and I were hanging out this morning and I got a notification at 9am on my phone that Griffin McElroy's birthday is in two days. And I experienced that on so many levels because my first thought was, oh, and my daughter and I were like, oh, we should send him something with clowns or a mobile phone and like some kind of in-joke. We should send him a birthday present. And then I was like, you know, we probably shouldn't send him a birthday present. And I probably should not have his know, we probably shouldn't send him a birthday present. And I probably should not have his birthday on my phone.

What is wrong with me? Why do I need to know his birthday? Now I feel like a creep. Well, and that's the thing. I think that's, if you're a listener, you have to kind of strike that, that like they don't know you, but you know them. And be, you know, walk softly and be be careful and then if you are on the other side of it which i occasionally am and it blows me away that i am that fortunate enough to have people who

like come up to you and tell you they like the stuff that you do because that is a super oh please do that i love a wonderful thing right it's incumbent on us and responsible for us to understand that there's asymmetry and that we are in their ears and that they know all these things about us and that it isn't it it's unusual in terms of like how our brains are wired but it's nice and normal and that and and um i'm really bad at taking compliments i'm terrible at it it makes me want to go you are you are it makes me want to run away and i have gotten much better at being able to say it because the truth is i it is very kind when people say nice things about you but you have to remember like you don't know them but they know you and i i feel like if all of us just know understand what the what the what the

relationship is and that like you said these are people who are everybody here is a good person and we're having a good time uh then then it all works out fine but it is it's a little bit strange let's let's be excellent to each other and that but that's why i also like like being on the other side of it because that was like in short succession i got both sides of that of being being you know going up to the people who are on a podcast that i listen to all the time and know all the details about and can say oh it's like that time like at that moment where elliot calen tweeted about how he was with his kid at train town in sonoma and i replied back

and i was like hey all he did was show a picture of of of an object at train town and i was like hey it's train town and i wrote him again and i said i'm sorry i am now twitter stalking you it's just that we used to take our kids to train town i didn't mean to like out your location where the you know the helicopters are coming now to get you that's not what i was trying to do there but i had that moment like did i cross the line he was very nice he was like no no it's a great place for kids we're up here visiting um you know my wife's family and i didn't respond i know your wife's name is danielle and her parents are from sonoma county a little too creepy so you brought sammy there yeah that's

right you bought your son whose name is sammy uh yeah yeah so anyway it's a funny world we live in um i got one more uh ask upgrade we're gonna go out on this one it's listener andy who said hey mike who's not here are you planning on covering the facebook testimony uh anywhere within the quiver of your podcast it would be interesting to hear yours and or snell's that's me he used my last name uh extended take and andy uh we haven't covered it here i don't know if we will given the timing of all of this but i recommend the download podcast to you, which I do every week. And it posts on Thursday afternoon, specific time. And we recorded on Thursday

morning, specific time. It's at relay FM slash download, and it's covering the news of the week across all sorts of tech topics. And we have covered Facebook there like three out of the last four weeks because it's all Facebook all the time. So if you want to hear it and I'm in there, I will endorse that podcast because first of all, the format for it is great. I mean, you do a medium deep dive on two topics with really, really good guests. You get such smart, there's that one like industry

analyst woman you have on, I forget her name. Right, Natalie Jarvie from the Hollywood Reporter. That's what I'm thinking of. Streaming analyst, right? And of course you get Lisa. Lisa's a regular on there. Lisa Schmeiser is on there all the time, yeah. Yeah, it's a really good show. High thank you marlin all the great shows all the great shows well marlin thank you so much for being on upgrade oh thanks for having me on it's always a pleasure it was it was so fun and we have like there's so much more we could have talked

about i know we could have gone on and on and on we didn't talk about apple leaks we'll have to do that next time dark sky says it's going to start drizzling soon at my house yeah that's right that's right see we brought it all the way back around to the weather. It's, yeah, it's looking rainy out there. Thanks to listener Mihir again for having us talk about the weather. Now that we're, now that our cruel anti-weather overlord, Mike Hurley, is out of the, out of the room, we can talk about the weather on a podcast. This is what people tune in for.

That's right. Thank you also to our sponsors, books pingdom and p calc and of course you can find me on twitter at jay snell you can find merlin on twitter at hot dogs ladies and of course merlin is the host of reconcilable differences on this very podcast network and i'm the host of a lot of podcasts on this very podcast network too too. It's John Syracuse's show, but he lets me come on. It's nice. Which one of us was the bad cop today, Merlin? Was it me?

Was it you? Am I in the barrel? See, on this show, I think we're both the good cop on here. I think we are, because as we just said about five minutes ago, the important thing is that just to act like everybody is the good cop. Yeah, man, we're all just people. Everybody's a good cop. Yeah, exactly right.

Well, thanks to everybody out there for listening to this episode of upgrade michael back next week to chastise me about all the ways that i ruined upgrade this week but i don't care it's foggy out say goodbye merlin man goodbye mike what