Upgrade - 5: Macworld Cosplay

Episode Date: October 14, 2014

This week Jason and Myke talk about Çingleton and the rise and fall of Mac conferences, the Mac App Store and the pains of App Review, the upcoming Apple event, the disappointment of long-running TV and Movie series and a new name for summoning your digital assistant.

Apple went and ruined everything, didn't they, with the Thursday event? I know. Everybody needs to listen to us because nobody's going to get their ATP until Saturday. Yeah. So they just need to listen to us instead. And then learn that they never need to listen to ATP again. Just put it lower than us in the priority list. That's what we're saying.

Listeners, choose your podcast. Choose wisely. We don't have the Jonathan Mann theme song. Yet. Yet. We don't need one. We have a Chris Breen original. This is true.

We got the Breen original. I've had a rash of people who have discovered Clockwise in the last couple weeks since we've been on Relay ask me if they can get a version of the theme song because they want to use it as like an alarm clock sound

or a ringtone or something. It needs a good alarm clock sound. And the beauty is Chris Breen posted all his theme songs at chrisbreen.com slash music. So you can actually, you can download it and use it as a ringtone if you really want to. Never set. But that's just kind of funny. Never set the alarm, your alarm to a podcast theme song that you enjoy. Because every time you listen to the show, you'll hate it immediately.

Mike, I still use one of the classic. We should save this for the show too, shouldn't we? I use one of the classic sounds as my alarm clock when I'm traveling, and I just did this when I woke up at 5 a.m. in Montreal. And I never change from xylophone because I despise xylophone. Oh, it's terrible. Now, the sound of waking up confused and knowing that you've got to get up on three hours sleep is...

I'm up! I'm up! I'm up! What? What? Oh, xylophone. Some of the newer ones are just horrible. They're so bad. Oh, Salaf. But I won't do another one now because it'll destroy that one too. So I guess somebody wants to gently be awakened by the clockwise theme, I Wish Them Well.

They're going to hate that music. Hello and welcome back to Upgrade on RelayFM. This is episode number five. Today's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Pilot and Dash. My name is Mike Hurley and I am joined by your host, Mr. Jason Snell. Hi Mike, how's it going? I am very well, sir. How are you? Pretty good. I'm getting over some jet lag because I was in Montreal, Quebec, Canada this weekend for the Singleton, the final, as it turns out, Singleton conference.

Got to see a lot of great people, stay up later than I normally do, get up earlier than I ever do for flights. Than I ever have. than I ever do for flights. Than I ever have. And have some, well, I got up, for my flight back, I had to get up at 5 a.m. Eastern, which is 2 a.m. Pacific. So last night I was kind of asleep. I told my wife at like 5.30, I said,

I'm kind of not functioning entirely properly. And she said, you don't say. But I had a good night's sleep. So I feel more awake now. Good, you'll break back in. How do you deal with jet lag do you do you do okay with it uh i i i have welcome to the jet lag podcast by the way everybody um i i uh i have some strategies uh what i did last night like staying up until i ended up staying up i think until about 9 30 last night which is not my bedtime by any means but is closer to it that like a reasonable west coast bedtime that's one of my strategies is the

first the first day you get there you just gotta force yourself to stay awake until you get to like as close as you can to normal bedtime and then ideally you know then you wake up the next morning and you're okay I don't take any you know take any pills or anything for it I just try to and I can't really sleep very well on planes so like when I go to when I go to England it's the same thing it's like it's that's always an overnight flight and what I try to do is I can doze on the plane maybe but when I get there which is inevitably like in the morning or midday, I just try to stay awake the whole day, even though I'm a zombie and then go to bed in the evening and force myself to keep going back to sleep if I wake up in the night. And that's it. And it works okay. The weird thing about jet lag, again, this is the jet lag podcast. Thanks for

joining us. For me, the weird thing is that wherever I am in the world, when it gets to my wake up time back home, that's when I get the wave of exhaustion that wherever I am in the world when it gets to my wake-up time back home that's when I get the wave of exhaustion that passes over me it's like my brain is trying to flip the wake-up switch even though I'm already awake and that leads to really weird that's when I feel like I just need to put my head down on the table and it'll be like two in the afternoon or something yeah I'm totally fine when I come over to the States because typically whenever I come to America, I'm coming for like an exciting reason,

you know, like WWDC or something. So the first day, like I can arrive having not really slept for like 20 hours and can go like all the way into the evening and then I get myself into a great routine. And then when I come home, I'm fine until typically the third night where i just do not sleep oh and the delayed reaction yeah yeah i don't know why it is i find that flying west is easier than flying east i think that's a thing

too flying west i have a much better time adapting this direction coming this way than going the other way. And having worked for many years on a company that had offices on the east and west coast, we all compared notes about it. And everybody seemed to agree. The only difference, the advantage of somebody flying, especially from the west coast to the east coast of the United States, is they would all take the red eye. And they'd be like, oh, you should just take the red eye. I have this whole system. It's like, yeah, when you don't live east, you can't take the red eye because then you get there and it's 6 a.m. and you have nowhere to go. You can't go to the hotel because they won't be ready for you

until like 2 in the afternoon. So what do you do? Now you're a zombie with bags standing in an airport airport somewhere or uh or on a street or in a starbucks or something and it's bad it that doesn't don't don't do that so but flying west i find is generally pretty good and yeah if you if you pile into that that you're excited to be coming to the u.s and why wouldn't you be um then yeah yeah, it's nice. So it was, going to computer conferences on the East Coast

is actually also helpful because those are shifted. Those are running on Pacific time, frankly, anyway. So it's not so bad. You can wake up late because everybody stays up late at those conferences.

Should we address some follow-up? Oh, I never thought you'd ask. What a relief. Yes, we have some follow-up. Oh, I never thought you'd ask. What a relief. Yes, we have some follow-up. Let's see. Last week we talked about... This is follow-up to follow-up. Last week we talked about Netflix

and two weeks ago we talked about Netflix. And listener Nick had a helpful email that he sent basically saying most deals that Netflix has for licensed content are flat fees. We talked about it being... I said we there to shield myself from this. I talked about the idea that every time you watched Orange is the New Black, you weren't watching some other movie and Netflix was saving money. And listener Nick says that's not true.

It's generally just like it would be for a cable channel that you're paying for a window in order to stream it, and they're not paying per stream. And so it's not like a Spotify scenario. So thank you to listener Nick. I still think the discussion and argument we had around original content holds up, though, because they may be paying for the rights. It makes the math even harder, right?

Yeah. But, you know know i guess over time netflix just want to not in theory i guess in 10 years time netflix would prefer to just not have to pay anybody because they have like 30 shows well that's a little extreme i mean hbo you know hbo licenses movies um so they make their own tv shows and some movies and then they license movies in the pay cable window so they're doing it but it's not like

you get HBO you know HBO is not seen as a purveyor of other people's stuff now it used to be now it's a purveyor of some movies and also a whole bunch of originals and Netflix I agree.

I think Netflix wants to go in that direction where part of this is Netflix being driven there. There was a time when more movie studios were amenable to putting their stuff on Netflix, their newer stuff. And they got worried because Netflix got so successful that I feel like Netflix is smart to have the strategy of, you know, we don't want to just be the old moldy catalog of old stuff. So we're going to be the

old moldy catalog of old stuff plus a whole bunch of originals. And that's not a bad product to say, you know, any old TV show you want and a whole bunch of movies that are like more than five years old and then all of this great stuff. I mean, that's not that different of a proposition than what hbo offers which is you know movies that have been out for a year and a half and our new stuff but what do people i mean because we don't have hbo here or uh how is hbo right h yes sure in the industry they call it hbo which i didn't even know and i think it's just ludicrous but they call it that they call they call that in fact the um the i think the short code they use for hbo um links is a pun on that too which nobody else is gonna get but yeah it's weird um that's what i think of that

we i know we don't we don't get it so i I don't really understand what the thinking is. But what do people subscribe to HBO for these days? Are they subscribing just for Game of Thrones and stuff? Or do they subscribe for the movies too? So I have never, ever been a pay cable person. And I have HBO now. And so I'm a sucker. And I do it for a few reasons. Game of Thrones is what got me in

the door. Um, and last year we canceled after Game of Thrones was over and this year we've kept it. Honestly, number one reason we've kept it is because I really liked John Oliver's show and I don't want to say goodbye to it. Um it um but and the other reason is that between on demand and hbo go we have access to the entire hbo catalog which means that i can watch old hbo stuff like um i still haven't seen the last half of the last season of the wire and we're watching that on on hbo go um i've never seen the last season yeah it's not great I got like an episode in and I kind of got a bit bored so my buddy Phil Michaels is a huge fan of The Wire

and also comes from a newspaper background and he was pointing out that The Wire usually is pretty good about like there are no good guys and bad guys everybody's got issues the bad guys that we would think of like the drug dealers and stuff have things that make you identify with them and you understand why why they're in the situation you're not they're not sugarcoating it but you understand that and

then they're the the good guys the cops and all that and you realize the system is broken and even if the cops have good intentions they're flawed people and all that and then the last season of the wire it's sort of like uh his parable for when he worked at the baltimore sun newspaper and it's literally like, some of these editors are saints, and they are doing God's work. And some of these corporate suits at the newspaper are monsters, and they're pure evil. And it's like that moment where you felt like he was grinding his axe, and all of the nuance of all the other parts of life that he had observed kind of fall away as he gets really angry about

the newspaper business. And it's very not like David Simon to do that. And as somebody in the media business, it's kind of hard to watch the total decay of a newspaper. I mean, it's hard to watch total decay of Baltimore and all the other seasons, but that one hits close to home in the sense that these suckers who are working these jobs. I know these people. I might be these people. And that's yeah. Yeah.

But it's so that's what that's why people subscribe to HBO. I think is it's like a sampler of movies. There's like movies that you forgot to rent. You never got around to renting that have come back around again. And you're like, oh, I'd like to see that. I mean, and we do that. We look on our DVR. We just kind of go through the HBO listings and pick movies, and then we've got them to watch.

And then the HBO Go has added that dimension of really being able to get the entire catalog of old HBO shows and watch it. And that's a good catalog. It's not entire, but it's pretty close. But it all started with just – it was Game of Thrones for me. But it all started with just, it was Game of Thrones for me. So I know people say that the last season of The Wire is the bad one. Because the rest of it is incredible. If you haven't seen The Wire, by the way, just commit to the first three episodes of season one.

Yeah, it's like reading a book. You can't just watch an episode. Literally, they stop and you're like, is that the end, I guess? Because it's one- I don't know any of these characters. I have no idea what's going on in their lives. You got to keep watching because it really is telling one story. It's like a book and they don't really care to give you a cliffhanger at the end of an episode. They're just like, all right, keep watching.

But it's great. It's similar in that I've never seen Godfather 3 because I came to the movies late and a friend of mine said, okay, watch one and two and pretend that the third one doesn't exist. And I've never seen it. Yeah. It's not that good. Exactly. It's not. It's not.

Yeah. I don't recommend people. I would never encourage somebody who hadn't seen The Godfather to watch the entire trilogy. I would say watch the first two movies and then you can stop there. The third one is there. movies and then you can stop there the third one is there and if you really find yourself wondering what happens to michael at the you know end of his life and who is this going to assassinate the pope whatever uh then there's a movie for you and you can stare at sofia coppola's bottom lip and wonder why she was cast because clearly she's not much of an actress she seems to be related to

the director in some way um yeah i don't recommend that so it's the same thing it's like you know except with a wire you have to go through the first four seasons and then you then you're teetering on the brink it's like should i really watch this last season yeah i'm you know and i haven't done it either we're very slowly grinding through it because it's like yeah it's not that great so he was very excited my friends were excited to be able to give me that piece of advice he He was like, oh, my God, you don't have to watch the last one. I feel like he felt like he had suffered for me. Yes.

Yes, and saved you. Well, he was introducing you. He was giving the go-ahead for two great movies, two of the greatest movies. Two of my very favorites. Also protecting you from the ill-advised late. There should be a word for that the ill-advised late uh late sequel you know like years and years after um like um what would be another example of this um oh i just had it and lost it there are other things like that where they go they go 20

years and then they say hey i've got my oh my, oh, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, right? That's a ill-advised late sequel. Like 20 years later, they say, oh, I know. Let's do another one of those. And everybody's like, yeah, I remember Indiana Jones. Let's do that. And then the movie comes out and you're like, oh, that was a mistake. I'm really hoping that the next Dumb and Dumber movie is not like that.

Because there's a Dumb and Dumber 2 happening right now, right? Oh, yeah. Dumbo movie is not like that because there's a Dumb and Dumber 2 happening right now right oh yeah well there was already an off-brand sequel that the studio made without any of the creative participants but now they're actually making a real a real one and you know sometimes those sometimes those come off although you know I love the X-Files and I never even watched that second X-Files movie that came out which I heard bad things about and the first one was not very good either but you know 10 years later they made another X-Files movie that came out, which I heard bad things about. And the first one was not very good either, but ten years later they made another X-Files movie, and even though I like the X-Files, I just never saw it, because I was like, do I really

want to experience that again? I love the idea of getting the old band back together, and yet in practice, a lot of more often than not, those are disastrous. You've never done the Godfather on the Incomparable, have you? No, it's on The Incomparable, have you? No, it's on the list, actually.

And Syracuse is in. So we just have to do it. It'll happen. It'll happen. It could just be you and him. It could just be him. It could just be screen-specific commentary of The Godfather by John Syracuse. No, that'll be good. Those are, you know, I actually have been holding those in reserve. There was a time

when they did that Goodfellas episode of 5x5 at the movies. I kept thinking that they were going to get to The Godfather and they haven't. And I would love to do that. I also Gruber, at Singleton, John Gruber was talking about Alien and I thought, you know, I should try to do an Alien episode at some point too.

So we'll get there. Because those are great movies. Those are fantastic movies. I would love to hear those episodes yeah that's good stuff well at least the first and second one wow so this is the jet lag and uh movie podcast now is it mike that's what i'm going for i'm pushing you in that direction this was my real plan all along it's an entire show about watching movies on airplanes. What else do we have in follow-up? Okay, in follow-up. That was, believe it or not,

follow-up item number one. But we only, fortunately, we only have two. The next follow-up item is, so a couple episodes ago, we talked about a certain feature involving Apple's

intelligent assistant technology where you can speak a key phrase and if it's plugged in and you have this feature turned on, it will activate. And we had fun with that a few weeks ago and tried to make people's iPhones that were plugged in and listening to the podcast do crazy stuff. And people thought it was funny slash annoying, but I felt we were like serving a good purpose that in in pointing out one of the key flaws of this thing is that it can be triggered by anyone including saying things that aren't even the key phrase uh where you're calling the intelligent assistant anyway last week we had a sponsor that had an offer code that was that key

phrase that i did that i made that happen and i wasn't aware of that and then you said it and and uh and you can actually hear me kind of um groaning in the background knowing that people were going to be upset by it and i was i have to i was very proud of it so i apologize it was really funny but also at the same time it definitely made some people angry um i i i and i think i i mean i i groaned slash laughed because i was like i knew what was going to come out of it but it was kind of funny and we don't want to be known as the podcast that that does terrible things to your iphone that would be not a great slogan hey guys here's a podcast you shouldn't listen to uh that's a bad idea um so you know some people mad we heard from

listener brian who said, the fun ended long ago and listener Joshua called us a name but then he apologized which was nice. Thank you, listener Joshua. And what we did on Twitter was ask for euphemisms for that phrase which cannot be said without triggering your iPhone

to do something crazy. And if we triggered the iPhone to do something crazy in this episode, I swear it's not on purpose. There are phrases you could come up with that sound close enough that you can trigger it, but we're trying not to do that. The problem is we still want to talk about this feature.

So we need some way to talk about it. People send us other phrases that they've seen. My girlfriend told me she was watching Desperate Housewives and it just wouldn't stop for the whole episode for some reason. I don't know what they were saying, but on that show, it just kept activating the intelligent assistant. Yes, indeed.

I've heard from several people every now and then somebody, I think Glenn Fleischman, every time he accidentally triggers it, he sends me the phrase that he used, which is kind of funny. he accidentally triggers it he sends me the phrase that he used which is kind of funny um but so so we were looking for um and if you've got uh other um if you're a listener and you've got other suggestions feel free to send them in but we've got a great list here that we can consider um uh there were a lot of ahoy as listener lloyd suggested ahoy telephone uh listener ted said ahoy there babbage machine uh Listener Daniel wants us to say, ahoy,

Susan. That's strange. That's a call to the Bionic podcast. That's a Bionic, yeah. Ahoy there. So a lot of good ahoys. I like ahoy telephone.

It's just so far out there. We had, okay, glass, YouTube, Rick Roll from listener David. That's pretty good. And many listeners just suggested we just say, okay, Google. Which is

just as bad, by the way. Which is ruining everybody who's listening on an Android phone. Sorry about that. You had it coming, quite frankly. You've been skating by as we've been saying that other thing. Listener TJ, who is a fan of the West Wing,

suggested we take a page out of josh's book and just shout donna i don't think anyone would understand that oh the west wing no you should watch oh mike gotta watch the west wing i don't know this is something i struggled with house of cards is i don't really understand american politics oh the west wing is the west wing has nothing to do with real American politics. Okay, great. The West Wing is like, they need a word for science fiction that is not,

there's no science involved, but it is, I guess fantasy is the word I'm looking for here. It is fantasy. It is a fantasy of how we wish the young, bright-eyed people in our government would be

and how idealistic they would be and how idealistic they would be and how, um, fundamentally good they would be. Uh, but it's great. Like the dialogue and the, it's a, that's a really fun show.

That's a, that's a lot of fun. Do we have time for another quick aside? Sure. We got, we have nothing but time. I may fall asleep in the middle, but go ahead.

Talking about American politics and TV shows. So, uh, when I was watching House of Cards, because we didn't understand what Kevin Spacey's job was. So he's the government whip, or he's chief government whip. Yeah, the majority whip. Majority whip, that's it.

And we didn't fully understand what that was. So we were, at the end. We were going into the second season. That was when it was on TV. And we Googled for what is Kevin Spacey's job, like Kevin Spacey's job in House of Cards. And we're given a spoiler. A spoiler. Yes.

Yeah. Yes. Really. That sucked. That really sucked. Yeah. He's a member of the House of Representatives, I think. Or is he a senator? I think he's a member of the House of Representatives, I think. Or is he a senator?

I think he's a member of the House of Representatives. And then he's just got a senior position in the party. I think that's how that goes. And then later he has a different job. But again, I got spoiled about that too. Yeah. Oh, in the OK Google vein, there's also Hey Cortana. Thanks.

Now we've ruined the two people who are listening on a Windows phone. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, listener Kyle. Listener Timer Koala Singh suggests G'day Koala. To which I would say if we could address every listener individually by name, that would be great. I would like to do that. But I think that technology is beyond us. Sorry, Steve.

See, now a listener named Steve is like like oh my god they did it and everybody else doesn't doesn't know we're talking to you roger that's right um uh a summons to she who shall not be named listener alexanne uh hello governor oh we're into the britishisms now hello governor that's a good one cheerio pip pip governor listener florian listener gabe listener scott had a good one which is from star trek 4 where scotty picks up the mouse of the mac and says hello computer mr benji going radio head with okay computer and listener carlos had a really good one which is hey pretty lady so do you have a do you have a a winner from this list uh i like hello computer and i also like ahoy telephone i i really like ahoy telephone uh because it it's i think it's the closest while still being far enough away.

Yes. Let's go over Ahoy Telephone. Okay, Ahoy Telephone. There it is. It's the official upgrade synonym, euphemism for Attention Apple Intelligent Agent. I would like to speak with you now. Perfect.

Anyway, so we'll try very hard not to say that thing again um but we can't guarantee it because it might just pop out but we're not going to try to troll your iphones purposefully if it happens it's an accident like if a if another device gets this feature or if the feature is upgraded we may use its product name like Sure. I don't think we'll ever do. But to put those two words together, we'll try our darndest not to do that anymore. Right. And the Upgrade podcast apologizes for any inconvenience caused. Sure.

With that, let's take a quick break to thank our first sponsor for this week's episode, and that is our friends at Dash. Dash is a super cool website that lets you quickly create real-time custom dashboards. So these dashboards are all created in the web browser, and they allow you to get a visual overview of important data for maybe your website, your business, or even your life. Dash allows you to pull in data from a variety of different sources around the web. They have dozens of pre-built widgets for services like AppFigures, Google Analytics, GitHub, Twitter, Chartbeat, Pingdom, and so many more. And if you want to start to get geeky on your own, you can

display your own custom data in Dash. They have an API that allows you to share data from Dropbox or the web and create custom widgets like graphs and line charts, etc. So Dash is a web app. And the great thing is that it allows you to pull in all of this data from different parts of the web. So maybe you want to have your like we I have set up a relay FM Dash, where I have our information from our Twitter account. So I see the app mentions coming in to the Twitter account. I also have our GitHub issues in there, so we can keep track of what's going on there. So for our changes to the site that we're making,

I have Google Analytics information sitting in there too. So I can see all in this really pretty dashboard interface how many people are on the site. I can take a look at traffic. Oh, I also have the iTunes podcast directory top charts in there as well. So I can see when upgrades shoots up the charts every week. I'm able to see that too. It's a really nice way of just being able to, all in the web browser, see a bunch of awesome information. It's a good sort of homepage. I leave it as a tab, so I can go in and just take a look at all that sort of stuff

all in one go. The pricing model for Dash is a lot like GitHub, if you've ever used it. So everyone gets unlimited public dashboards, so you can set up as many public dashboards as you like. And this data is shared live with the Dash community. But if you upgrade to their pro account for $10 per month, you also get unlimited private dashboards too. So these are just for you to see, and this may be where you put personal information or private information like Google Analytics stuff, for example. However, Dash is currently running an awesome limited time promotion for listeners of this show. If you sign up for a free account today at thedash.com, that's T-H-E-D-A-S-H.com,

you'll also get one private dashboard in addition to your free accounts, unlimited public dashboards dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash to Dash for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. That's thedash.com, because as we discovered, if you go to dash.com, you learn about soap. I mean, you can also learn about soap and then go to thedash.com. It's really kind of up to you how you want to do that. You could create your own dashboard that features measurements of soap. If that's something that you're really interested in, maybe you have a soap company. It's good, clean fun, Mike.

Get out. Ahoy, telephone. Oh, Jason, tell me about Singleton. Singleton? What would you like to know? Singleton. Well, I'm so sad that I didn't get to go. Me and Stephen were talking last week about, oh, we'll definitely

go to Singleton next year. Well, no, because Guy English has ruined it for everybody. Yeah, I mean, Guy and his compatriots have been doing this conference for, this is the fourth year

in montreal and the last three years at the nelegan hotel in the old town in montreal and i went the last three years i didn't go the first year and it's in the line of these indie mac you know theoretically they're developer conferences although honestly these are these are not the kind of conferences um somebody gave Somebody gave me some grief last year when I referred to these as developer conferences. It was Singleton and Ool. They're like, it's not really a developer conference. I think that person's conception of what a developer conference was is like you go there and learn about how to program things better. That's totally not what it's about.

It's meant to be more like an inspirational conference for people who are in the business of uh of apple who are in the business of apple software usually um and so a lot of programmers and designers and uh and you know other people too but it's really the it's the community of of apple people um and while there are big names there there are also lots of other fantastic people who i don't see very often but i follow on twitter or i exchange with uh you know tweets with um on a regular basis and uh and unlike wwdc where the scale is kind of totally insane and maybe you see somebody at a big loud party somewhere this is a couple hundred people so um it's and you know it's a you get there on friday afternoon and there's an opening session fr night where there are drinks and a speaker.

And then the next – in the next two days, there are presentations until early basically Sunday afternoon. And there's a dinner on Saturday night. And I think everybody goes to – there's a bar nearby. Everybody goes there. They kind of cordon off part of the bar and everybody is chatting. And then you come back for dinner. They've set up a really nice banquet in the hall. It's just – it's a really nice thing.

And there are other events like this. I mentioned Ool. Ool in Ireland is a great example of a similar kind of thing where there's, you know, these are being made by Apple nerds. And so they really care about like this is not a corporate mass produced kind of conference. Most of these conferences are just done by regular people who wanted to do a great conference. And the handouts are good and the badges are nice. XOXO is like this, too, where it's, you know, these are indie conferences for you know for people in these related communities and they're uh labors of love and i think that's the reason there won't

be another singleton is that it is a labor of love and i think the scott and luke and guy looked at their um the time they were putting in and said you know we don't need to do this again because it is i know it is just a huge amount of effort to do and the quality is fantastic but uh there's a reason that most of the like profitable big corporation conference events are you know in a generic hotel and have generic uh you know chairs and generic uh generic catering and all of these things is because they're focused on their profit margin in a way that these these people are doing it for as long as they can as a labor of love but at some point they can't do it anymore yeah i can't imagine as much money in this game i don't i i was telling my wife about it last

night and i said remember when right after we were married and i spent an entire summer writing a book or half a book about like running a server on a Mac, uh, which was really great to do in the, in the iOS or in the OS eight era. Oh, you know, like that's a really terrible server, but I wrote a book about it. Um, and I, I, what I said to her was, um, remember when I did that, when we calculated out how many hours I had spent writing half that book and compared it to the advance that we got and we never earned out of our advance. I would have been better off working at minimum wage somewhere, like working at McDonald's in terms of money. I would have earned more money than the time I put in. I think these conferences are like that. They may make some money for the conference people, but that isn't factoring in how much time they put into

it. And I think once you do that, you realize that, you know, I am sure that Guy and Scott and Luke could use their time in better ways in terms of profitability, in terms of supporting themselves. And also, let's just, these are an enormous amount of work to pull off at all. And so then you're exhausted and, you know, your productivity suffers for several months while it's going on and in the aftermath of it. And, you know, I love that they put themselves out there and made this amazing conference what it is, but I totally get why they would not want to do it again. Because unless you really, I'm sad that it's not going to happen, but I totally understand it because I really felt,

I'm sad that it's not going to happen but I totally understand it because I really felt you could tell how hard they worked on it When you go to these conferences, why are you going? I go to see the people that's number one and then the talks are

interesting and stimulating and make you think and you get perspectives uh that you might not stop and think if you're just kind of putting your head down and working on the stuff you're working on and that's why i said they're kind of inspirational and why i like them even though they're not if they were about code i wouldn't be interested because i'm not a programmer um and that kind of conference is good if i if I wanted to go like now that I'm doing six colors and I'm doing all this, all this coding, if there was like a, a conference locally that was learn how to do better CSS

and JavaScript, I'd be like, Oh, maybe I should go to that and learn something. But this is not, that's not what this is. This is inspirational. This is people talking about what it's like to think like a designer, to navigate business issues in this area, to think about interacting with Apple and what that is, and even big picture stuff like how we define our identities as professionals in this business, in this world. And I know that seems kind of fuzzy, but that can all be really inspirational, make you think about your own life and your own career choices and your own trajectory.

And a lot of the people at these conferences are people who are running their own businesses and, you know, or are working in relatively small businesses. And so, yeah, but, but so the content is good, but it's also just the people. I mean, when else do you end up in a place where, you know, you're there in a room with Marco Arment, John Gruber, Brent Simmons, he wasn't there this time, I think, but he's been there before, you know, Matt and Reese was there. I mean, Dan Morin was there, Serenity Caldwell, Rene Ritchie, Christina Warren, like on the media side. So it's like these designers, Jesse Char was there. Rich Siegel, who does BB Edit was there, Adam and Tanya Angst, John August. That was pretty awesome. I got to meet john august the screenwriter who

uh who follows me on twitter and i fall and it's i was blown away when when uh when i found that out and then i got to say hi to him and chat with him briefly and that was pretty cool so just a great um collection of people so part social and part inspirational i would say so i mean i've been to a couple of these types of things. Well, we met and talked for a while. I mean, I think we had a couple of hour-long chats at UL last year, and that's a very similar kind of thing. So I know you experienced it there.

Yeah, when I've heard people explain Singleton, it sounds very similar to the UL experience. I mean, UL was a no-brainer for me because it was an island um so it was easy for me to get to funnily enough wasn't that much cheaper than me going to something like xoxo because of the uh exchange rates so it's quite interesting the flights are cheaper but the overall experience it's overall experience ends up not being that much different. But I've been to XOXO as well. And I go to these sort of things for the same sort of reasons as you, really. I think for me, they're really important to network, as much as that can be a bad thing. But this is basically to build relationships with people that I would love to work with,

like yourself. And also, I learned this from the first time that I went to WWDC. It changed my career in this sort of industry because I got to meet so many people. And when you work with people and you work with them online in some manner, it does change the dynamic once you actually meet in person there is still that like once you have that in-person meeting totally it changes the way that you're able to work together in the future and i found it just so useful and also as well is i have so many friends that i do not get to see like i just don't get to see them and when we

when there are things like this i get to see as many people as I can, as many of my friends as possible in a very short space of time. Yeah, yeah. And meet new people. I mean, I invariably meet somebody who I know only from Twitter, who I'm like, oh, you're from the internet, right?

And it's nice. It's nice to do that. It's always good to hear, to see these people and coming together and not just being on the internet. It has value. And I am not one of those people who stays out until 2 a.m. in bars and does the drinking thing, which is definitely an aspect

that is somewhat problematic, I would say, of tech conference culture that people, you know, there's a certain amount of socializing that is done, you know, where people are staying out until five in the morning and drinking heavily. And I'm not a heavy drinker. I will enjoy a beer and some wine, but, you know, I'm, and at all, I was up until two, one morning, but like everybody was, and that was, I was using the jet lag in my favor there. But it didn't feel like it was, I mean, people weren't falling down or anything. It wasn't like everybody was drunk at 2 a.m.

It's just everybody was up at 2 a.m. and chatting. But, you know, as somebody who doesn't, who's not going to close down a bar somewhere, I find it completely valuable that people were in the lobby for all hours and and yeah and we went out you know out for meals with people and uh and for me to see also my um my colleagues uh dan and serenity both who live in the on the east coast and you know i don't get to see them on a regular basis anymore because we don't work together anymore and so they're not flying out for work things. So seeing them was really nice too. So now that Singleton's over, what conferences do you have your eye on?

Where can people get the Jason Snow experience in person? Well, so the guys who do Ool, Paul and Dermot, were at Singleton this year, and they were kind enough to invite me and Guy English to come back to Ool which is at the end of March of next year and that will be somewhere in Ireland at an undisclosed location

they haven't announced where it's going to be yet but it's not going to be in Dublin proper it's going to be out in the countryside somewhere like it was last year which is actually a huge amount of fun and beautiful. And that, I think we're going to do what we did last year, which is we're going to host a talk show basically in the evening, interviewing the speakers for the next day. And we learned a lot last time. I think it was good last time and it got better as it went along. And we were actually all kind of huddled up and talking about ways to make it better again next year and i love that conference if you're

somebody who can get to ireland uh fairly easily so especially if you're in in the uk or elsewhere in europe but even if you're on the east coast uh that is a beautiful conference and they they really they try to have an apple level attention to detail and like their, their, their, their product, uh, right down to like when you check in and what the badge is and what the box looks like. And my little avatar that I use on Twitter is an original illustration. They commissioned illustrations of all of the speakers at UL and made this illustrator made them. And then they printed them on cardstock and put them in the boxes of the individual speakers. It's crazy.

It's crazy. And they had that. They really sweat it. Like we were saying, these people who do these conferences, these indie conferences, really sweat the details. So I'll be at that one. That'll be great. I won't be at Macworld Expo, but I'll be at UL. Should we talk about that now?

Because we have it a little bit later in the show, but I suppose we should. So what's happening or what has happened? Uh, yeah, it's gone. Macworld expo. So IDG announced,

uh, today as we record this Tuesday, the 14th, that, um, Macworld expo is on hiatus and there will not be an event in 2015. I think I would probably put money on the fact that there'll be nothing that resembles what we think of as Macworld Expo or

even the last few years of Macworld iWorld again. That would be my gut feeling is that I don't see how they're going to do anything with this. They may spin out a conference or something and call it Macworld or iWorld or something like that. That might happen. And they're keeping their Mac IT conference, which they started a few years ago and ran in parallel with Macworld Expo. And so a lot of people didn't know about it, but there was a professional conference that you paid a lot of money to go to that ran piggybacked with Macworld Expo. And that's continuing. But Macworld Expo, as we know it, is over. And it's sad, but I got to say it's not surprising. After all of the other changes at IDG

this year, including so many of us leaving in September and the budgets being very different than they used to be, and Pat McGovern, the founder of IDG, who cared very much about the trade show presence, he passed away earlier this year. I think that had an effect on a lot of what's been going on at IDG now that there's a new board of directors in charge. So I'm not surprised at all by it when Paul Kent, who has been running it and done just a fantastic job running this event through incredible changes, losing Apple. None of that was his fault. He's been trying to make the best of it all along and make it the best event it could be in incredibly difficult circumstances, trying to make it, find ways to be relevant. But he told me a few days ago, like, can I, can I give you a call at 10 AM on the 14th?

And I was like, sure. And I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be the call where he says, I've just sent you an email with our statement and we're shutting it down. And that's essentially what I, what I got. i got so i i mean the writing was on the wall but uh what a year that that brand uh not a lot left of it now i still cannot believe that mac world continued at all after apple left like the fact that they did it for so many years is incredible well you know i i think the truth the sad thing is i think apple's presence there wasn't necessary um but like i think that show was really vibrant and i always thought the apple booth was not interesting at all i i just i never

thought the apple booth at macworld expo was interesting because it was just kind of, here's the, here's some Apple products. I mean, it was just not, and Apple was right. That's, that's kind of like the Apple store experience. It just, and everything else around it was the cool stuff of like every people that you couldn't see at your local Apple store. But what Apple did do in part on the, on the trade show floor was provide that anchor. Like Apple's here and everything else is swirling around Apple. But the Steve Jobs keynote thing was the other big thing. For a lot of people, Amac World Expo was always the Steve Jobs keynote.

And when Apple pulled out, they pulled out of doing a keynote too, which is understandable because they can call an event whenever they want. And, you know, they're going to have one later this week too. But for a lot of people, especially press covering the event, they would fly in, go to the Apple thing and then leave or maybe blast through the show floor on their way out. So for them, Macworld Expo was Apple's presence at it. And you saw that in the coverage of Macworld Expo. So I always think Apple's impact when it left, it didn't need to be that way. And I would actually argue that if Apple had kept doing its booth and not doing a keynote, I don't think it

would have changed the trajectory very much. Trade shows are kind of over. Big trade shows. And if you're a big company like IDG that's doing all these big trade shows, let me tell you, there are two ways to make money from a trade show. You get people to pay a lot of money for a conference badge and, or you get, you get vendors to pay a lot of money for booth space. And the booth thing is hard and getting harder, especially for consumer products. It's a little bit different if you're getting a whole bunch of enterprise technology buyers in a room somewhere, but that's a hard business to be in. And I think the conference was never going to be enough on its own. I think that the way that... And IDG World Expo was never our company. Macworld Magazine and website were always in a different part of IDG. So I don't know anything about their finances, honestly. But my impression is the way

they ran that business and the scale of that business, that they needed the trade show to be successful. That the conference on its own, it was never going to be, well, let's just not worry about the trade show and just do a great conference in San Francisco every year. It was never going to do it. And that's why I say maybe at some other scale, they might try to bring back a Macworld conference at some point. But I doubt it. I think the Mac IT thing is something that maybe they can take and do other things with. They're competing against Neil Tickton, who does the Mac Tech conference. And this puts them sort of right up against each other. But yeah it's too bad it's too bad but but um that's a tough business to be in that's just that's a brutal business trade shows in general i mean like we said conferences are a hard business to be in anyway um and then you throw in the trade show

part and it is amazing that they lasted as long as they did yeah because it felt like i guess i guess there was like part trade show, part fun time. Well, they were trying to make a Comic-Con. That's what they were really trying to do is make a Comic-Con. And the problem with that is they – I mean, I still think that that was a pretty good idea. But they just couldn't make it work. It's too bad because I feel like in technology enthusiasm, not just gaming,

like they do the E3 show in LA and that's a gaming show. I feel like in technology enthusiasm, there's something there. Like there could be an event that gets that or, or, or geek culture. There could be an event that, that hits that.

And you see it, uh, New York comic-con just finished and it actually was larger than San Diego comic-con. Um, just huge events celebrating geek pop culture. And technology stuff, I think, that still has resonance is in its part in the culture. And so, I don't know. Maybe if they ever bring, like, a Comic Con con they move wonder con to la if they ever brought a comic con back to san francisco i wonder if they should try to have some uh digital technology kind

of stuff in it too so that people because i do think there's some subculture that really ought to be served somehow by all of this and i look at the success of of comic book and you know comic book sci-fi uh culture conventions, and they are really successful. They are growing. And I think there is an event model that should work for this sort of thing. But what Macworld Expo was, was just not it, even though they tried. I think that was, I kept telling Paul Kent, be Comic-Con. But I don't think he could ever really get the support for it to be, you know, full out Comic-Con and maybe it wouldn't have worked monetarily. I think one of the things that makes – two of the things that make Comic-Con great are cosplay and huge announcements of big movies.

And I don't think you can have – I don't think that there is an either of those at something like Macworld. Well, I think it's too limited and your, and the company that's got all of the attention isn't there anymore, right? So if you did something that was sort of like more tech-focused, but it wasn't just Apple, it was broader, and you could have somebody from Google or Facebook or Microsoft,

you could have some speakers who actually might even announce things, you might be able to do it. Like I said, I think maybe as part of a larger thing i i'm i'm actually kind of half serious like if there was if san diego and new york comic-con don't need to get any bigger but if there was like the the cultures aren't that far off of each other i i wonder if you if you did something in the bay area and had uh and had that as an aspect of it i don't know i don't know there's there, but you're right. It's not like Marvel and DC, you know,

didn't come and make any announcements and that would be less interesting. And yeah, nobody's wearing a costume of an Apple II, although that would be something to see. We should have had more cosplay at Macworld Expo. That would have been great. If you think about it, when Apple was at Macworld, it was probably more

like comic-con in that aspect like people go to comic-con to watch marvel's whole h presentation like so maybe people were coming to see the steve jobs keynote like it was that idea and then it lost that yeah in the in the um it totally lost that that halo and like i said it took the oxygen out of the room because you know because then you knew the big mover in the space was focused on making big news there. And that gave it enough weight that drew people to it. In the chat room, a little real-time follow-up. I had a couple people ask about CES or NAB. And what I'd say is CES, despite the C in its name, is not a consumer show.

It's a trade show. It's a trade show. It's a trade show. It's a trade trade show. It is for, I mean, we all go as media people. Oh, I hate CES. I'm so glad not to have to ever go to it again. But it's the worst. But media people go.

But, you know, its primary purpose is for distributors of products to find what products to distribute. I mean, I think a regular person maybe now can get a badge, but it is not a show for regular people. It is not a celebration of culture or anything. It is like miles. I'm going to let my little tainted viewpoint here, miles and miles of knockoff, you know, knockoff tech products from companies you've never heard of that are desperately trying to get some sucker to say, yes, if you build this, I'll distribute

it in my Radio Shack stores. And I just, and then NAB, that's a pro show. That's a pro show. That is for people who are professionals who do this for a living, do video for a living. And that's a different thing. Macworld was a consumer show. That was what it was. And that's a challenge because pros come and say, I've got a reason to buy a $5,000 video camera.

And consumers are looking for an iPhone case. And the, you know, it's a lot harder to make your money back. If you're a software developer saying, buy my app, it's $2 and then buying a booth for $10,000 and finding a way for that to be profitable.

Right. We've still got some stuff that we want to cover today. I want to take a moment to thank our second sponsor for this week's episode. And that is our friends over at Pilot. They're back to sponsor another episode of Upgrade, and you should definitely know about them. Pilot is a design and development studio founded in 2009. They are known for creating fantastic products for startups and enterprise clients

across iPhone, iPad, and the web. With a team of 50 designers, developers, producers, and product directors in Berlin, London, and their head office in Poland, they are ready and waiting to help you on your next product and to bring it to life. Pilot can either help you build a great team around you that you can work with and interact with every day,

or if you want, they can set you up with a producer who can take care of all this stuff for you so you have one point of contact and that's who you deal with on a day-to-day basis. Pilot works with both clients from all around the web, small brands and big brands like Lonely Planet, Macmillan, or just, you know, small startups. It doesn't matter. No project is too big or too small. Some startups they've worked with have been backed by world-class investors and accepted into top accelerators such as Y Combinator. So you can see that the quality of Pilot's work can help companies shine even in the toughest and most competitive environments.

Pilot even make products of their own, like Tapes. Tapes is an awesome little Mac app that allows you to quickly and easily capture and share screencasts. of their own, like Tapes. Tapes is an awesome little Mac app that allows you to quickly and easily capture and share screencasts. And so if you want to go to their website, I believe it's usetapes.com. Yeah, usetapes.com. You'll see a little product that they've created themselves. You can see the kind of quality of item that they put out into the world. If you are looking for a first-class team of designers and developers who sweat the little details,

check out pilot.co. Thank you so much to Pilot for their continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. And we should specify, you can have more than one word in your name and still be a sponsor on Upgrade. Yeah.

Just not this week. And if you do want to sponsor Upgrade, which you definitely should be doing, go to relay.f not this week. And if you do want to sponsor Upgrade, which you definitely should be doing, go to relay.fm slash sponsor. It is, considering mine and Jason's recent decisions, it's incredibly important that you do this. We should talk about that in a future show, about the fact that you are about to be

just as unencumbered with a commute as I. Uh-huh. We should definitely do that. Yeah. But not today. Indeed. Okay. So, going back to Singleton for a moment.

Okay. I don't want to go back. It's a long way. It's a very long flight. Can we just stay here? Hop over. We can stay here. We can telecommute, I guess.

Hop over. We can stay here. We can telecommute, I guess. There was a talk that you covered. You're at the scene reporting live for Six Colors of Rich Siegel of Barebones Software. And he gave a presentation about leaving the Mac App Store. Yes, he did. Tell me a little bit about what happened happened what was the what was the talk framed around was this the subject of the talk and then how did that kind of play out in the room well rich so rich siegel has been doing bb edit for like 20 plus years and uh one of the things i love about him is that he is a really thoughtful guy. He does

not do a whole lot of yelling and stomping and he's really careful. And his presentation was about why BBEdit is leaving the App Store. And the way he framed it was, let me list all the reasons we're not leaving the app store. And then he gave about 20 minutes of all of the pain points of having a Mac, having an app in the Mac app store. And there are so many, and you people have heard a lot of them. I mean, there are complaints about, about, uh, Apple taking a 30% cut. Although Rich said, look, you know said, look, they're serving it. They're doing all the credit card transactions. They're handling all the taxes.

There are lots of things you get for that. And he says he actually thinks it's a pretty good deal. He's not a fan of the complete severing of the relationship between the developer and the customer, where they're Apple's customer. You don't even know who they are. There are marketing challenges, having to control when things drop in

the, in the, in the app store, um, and setting things ready to go. It can be difficult. Um, the submissions guidelines are problematic, you know, sandboxing your app. They, BBA has a bunch of command line tools that come along with it and they had to make that available as a separate download for Mac app store customers to download from their website and install because they couldn't put it in the install because it's not allowed and stuff like that where they have to they have to overhaul features their whole product yojimbo they basically had to pull out of the mac app store because they couldn't get the syncing to work with iCloud and they had to write their own syncing system and do it on

their own and and then there's the tool chain which is like all the issues with building apps and getting them to verify and be signed properly and there are bugs involving that but everything's got to be signed to be submitted to the mac app store and then you submit it and and he told the story about how after a week they checked because they realized they had not heard anything any either way from apple about the submission and they and uh it turned out that their um their submission had silently crashed the submission tool and so nothing happened like literally just nothing happened and apple was like oh yeah uh yeah you just killed the tool and so we lost that and so then they had to resubmit it and work with apple and make sure that it didn't crash apple's tools um so he listed all these things and what was really great about it is he said

um you know i mean it was clear as he was going that these are this is this accumulation of problems he said the problem is a lot of these things happen right at the most uh pressure-filled part of being a software developer which is what he likened it to Max-Q, which is that term when there's the most atmospheric stress on a flying vehicle. Like when I went to the space shuttle launch, I mean, there's a moment of Max-Q where, and it's not actually the fastest point because the higher up you go, the thinner the air is. There's that moment where you're going fast in thick atmosphere and that's like the biggest pressure point. And he said, look, Max Q for developers is when you're about to ship your product because

you've got to line up your PR and you've got to crush bugs and you're planning everything, communicating with your customers about the updates and the upgrade paths and all that stuff. And he said, the problem is so many of these things are at that point where we're already under pressure. And then he took a step back and this is one of the things are at that point at where we're all we're already under under pressure and then he took a step back and and this is one of the things i really like about about rich siegel he what he didn't say is so apple you know this is apple's fault apple ruined it for us we're out instead what he said is look we looked at the stress and saw what and bare bones is a very small company it's mostly rich and a few employees.

And what he said is, this is bad for my quality of life. Like, this is causing a lot of stress. It's causing a lot of working through the weekends. It's causing a lot of extra work and stress in my life for not enough benefit. And so in the end, the reason we're leaving the Mac app store is not because Apple is bad because Apple's screwed up all these things. Apple can do what it wants. It's like, it's not them. It's me. It's essentially what he said is we looked at it and said, it's not worth it for us. And I thought that was a good way to frame it because it doesn't come across as

we should be in there, but they blew it. And so now we're out of here. We're taking our ball and going home. It was very much like for us in our situation with our company, with our product, we did the calculation and he's speaking to a bunch of developers. And so I think underlying this is him saying to everybody else, you should consider whether it's worth it for you. And it might be, and he gave a few reasons why for certain apps, Mac App Store is probably worth it to stay. But for him personally, he did the math and it wasn't worth it. So I think what makes this interesting is that four years ago, we didn't really know how the Mac App Store was going to go. And I think a lot of Mac developers were really excited about the prospect that App Store, the GoGo iOS App Store was going to come to the Mac and apps are going to be huge. And I think we all thought that and it hasn't been as big a thing as I think we

expected it to be. And a lot of developers have found frustration with these issues of giving up control. And it's understandable why Apple might want them to give up control. But in the end, a lot of them, I think, have decided, or at least some of them have decided it's not worth giving up that control. So, you know, in the end, BBM is just going to go back to being sold on Bare Bones' website. And anybody who bought on the Mac App Store can pay an upgrade price that's the standard upgrade price to upgrade to the new version outside the App Store. app store. And, you know, and on the Mac app store, they'll keep selling you little utilities and games and all the stuff that continues to fill the app store and probably won't make much of a dent on that kind of momentum. But, you know, it, I definitely saw a lot of people nodding, right? So I know that there are frustrations here. And, you know, hopefully, Apple will address them rich definitely said, it's not like I'm saying I'll never be back. Things could change and it could be worth it again.

But right now, in the balance, it's not worth it. And, you know, what would make it worth it? I would say if the Mac App Store was incredibly successful at selling his app, that would make it more worth staying. So I think the implication here is also that his app, which is a higher priced professional app, you know, didn't really get a lot of benefit either from being in the Mac App Store. And so that is part of that equation, too. Clearly, this is an important developer, at least in our world, who's kind of putting their stake in the ground and saying, we just don't want to deal with this anymore. Do you think this is the sign of a bigger problem,

or do you think that this is something that is particular to bare bones? No, I mean, these problems exist. And I think Rich's point is it's not going to be enough of a problem for some, and it's going to be plenty of a problem for others. Rich's tools are complicated, and they use Unix integration, and therefore they're professional tools, and it's a bigger problem. But these are the same issues that iOS App Store developers deal with a lot of times that Apple's backend tools aren't very good. The problems in the tool chain, there are lots of rules in the app store that are frustrating and inconsistently applied that harm the product experience that, and again, there are two sides to that. Apple's also looking out for customers and saying, look, we don't think

we want to let you do this for good reasons sometimes. But the way that the rules often get applied can be really frustrating, where a feature can be perfectly fine, and then somebody else sees it and says, sorry, this feature isn't fine, even though it was already approved. Now, you know, we've decided that we're not going to approve it. So, you know, the App Store is a constant frustration for developers. And in most cases, it's worth it. I think Rich was saying Mac developers have the luxury of saying it's not worth it and taking their ball and going home. iOS developers don't have that luxury at all.

So what do you do? You hope that Apple changes its ways a little bit and fixes some of these issues. And I think Rich, I think people pay attention to these sorts of things. And I'm sure people at Apple know what he said. And maybe that'll affect some change and maybe it won't. And Rich, the way he gave his talk was really good because, you know, he didn't come out, it didn't come out as an attack. And it was really sort of just a pretty cold, like laying out of what the issues are and

saying for us, we couldn't make it work. So I think somebody from Apple could pick up the phone and talk to Rich about it. And they would be in a pretty good place because he wasn't, you know, kicking and screaming and taking his ball and going home as much as just saying, look, I just did the math and it doesn't work for us. And that allows somebody from Apple to come to him theoretically and say, we're sorry you feel that way. What can we learn from this experience that can make our products better? And I hope that happens. Our products for developers, I suppose. This is one of the

challenges is Apple has such finely crafted products for consumers. On the developer side, yeah, not so much. It's kind of more frustrating and a mess for developers. Do you feel that we just go around in circles with this, like especially the Mac App Store? Well, I would say it comes in cycles because the App Store is better than it was. I mean, they have improved a lot of stuff, but there's still stuff to improve.

So you get the waves of frustration. And some of this is, you is, after four years, Rich has written about App Store problems and iCloud problems for a while now. This is nothing new, but this is sort of the latest story. And they decided a long time ago to do this. I think he just decided that since he was speaking at Singleton, it would be a good opportunity to kind of go through their thought process about why they did it. speaking at Singleton, it would be a good opportunity to kind of go through their thought process about why they did it. You mentioned iOS a moment ago. I saw an interesting exchange between Paul Haddad from Tapbots and Russell Ivanovich from Shifty Jelly. Yes. Where Paul

was linking to your post and saying, you know, I wonder how many iOS devs would leave the app store if it was a practical choice, like if they could do it, basically, because they can't. Now, Russell, who obviously also develops for Android, and there's a conversation that continues, but I thought his response was interesting, was like everyone would like to, but nobody would. And his reasoning for saying this is that with Android, you can distribute your

applications on your own but nobody does it unless they have a clear reason which means they cannot be in the store right i mean my understanding is that the android uh that the google play store is not as difficult to navigate as the as the ios app store is the restrictions are less and the freedom for apps to do things is greater. So that's one reason why nobody does it. But I anticipate that it would be kind of like it is with the Mac app store now, which is lots of stuff would be in the iOS app store still because it's easy and normal people are not going to go outside it and flip that switch that says allow third party apps to be installed by other sources, right? Most people wouldn't do that if that was

there. But probably a market of more complicated things that really require full access would spring up, but it would never be the mainstream. I think that's probably true. So, you know, I think they're right. I know a lot of developers would love to try, but it would never be the main way that people got stuff. It would be for, you know, just like on the Mac App Store, there are some apps that just can't be in the Mac App Store and those are good apps. And so if you want them, you have to go outside. And so you do.

If you want to get like a hard drive cloning utility, like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, you don't think you can do those in the Mac App Store because they require full disk access and it breaks all the security protocols. So you go out and buy that on your own. But I think he's got a point that it might be a little different

because of the way Google Play filters versus the way Apple does. But yeah, it would be very hard to go out on your own. Russell carries on and he says he loves Google Play. One hour from submit to distribution. And I know people who've been waiting weeks for their updates to get through the Mac or to the iOS App Store. And you can distribute betas through the App Store to users as well, which is a really interesting thing to test your application at scale.

So Apple added that in iOS 8, and everybody was really excited because they bought TestFlight. And one of the fine print things is if you want to distribute it outside of your little core group to a larger beta group, it has to go through AppReview. They have to approve it your betas have to be approved by apple which is completely insane so yeah yeah there you have to get an application through review which could mean i guess means no critical bugs well i'm sorry but that's something that happens like you know it's know, that was a real surprise to see. And it's something that surprised me that they've not changed it since.

I can see why Apple are doing it because there will be people that take advantage of it. However, there are currently people that take advantage of some of the enterprise distribution stuff. So you kind of just have to embrace it because if you want developers to use these tools, you need to give them something where there's no option. Like if you want people within the ecosystem, if you want your developers to really do it, give it to them.

Otherwise, people are going to continue using Hockey app, which is great. I mean it's good because Hockey didn't go out of business. That was the concern is that it would just be it for them every time people say has apple sherlocked x usually sherlock is looks much more like the exception than the that proves the rule that um whenever apple does a feature it is a simple uh narrow feature and there are always rooms around the margins for the people who want more control and and yeah so hockey app is going to continue as long as long as apple's got things like you have to get approval to get a beta then hockey app's gonna have a place and uh yeah yeah so it's it's a funny it's a funny thing i i i find it apple's changing in a lot of where a lot

of ways in a lot of areas and and i think one of the is changing in a lot of where a lot of ways in a lot of areas and and i think one of the things that's going on here is a lot of people are hoping maybe this will be a way that apple will change and we'll just have to see um i'm not really encouraged by the fact that somebody made the decision that betas have to go through app review because that's just stupid that is stupid why that that murders that feature that feature is dead who will use that feature it's stupid it it to put your beta through app review what developer is going to want to sit on a beta while somebody looks at it plus app review is not even um is backed up by weeks already um and and that goes back to apple any significant change also needs to go for review.

Why would you do that? Why would you do it? Well, I think, and this is a scale problem with Apple. It's like, look, Apple, if you want to be complete control freaks and improve everything in your store because you really want that level of curation, great. Don't make your developers wait two weeks. Right? Do one or the other. And for a while, it hasn't been a problem. Right now, it a problem because of ios 8 being released that there was a there was a huge backup but um the so they should

probably hire more people to do app review one i think that would be a good idea and two asking developers to to put their beta apps through app review seems just ludicrous to me but oh well because we were all really excited the idea that you could associate 100 Apple IDs or whatever it was, 1,000 Apple IDs, I don't know, a decent number of Apple IDs, not device IDs, with your beta process and then send the betas out. And then the shoe dropped, which is, oh, and we need to approve your betas for that, which is too bad. Because, I mean, the other thing that's going on here if

people don't know is that uh an account can be associated with 100 udids to do betas and those are individual device ids which means like a few weeks ago when everybody got an iphone 6 all of their uh all their devices changed and you can only have 100 devices associated with your account for beta testing. And when you remove a slot, it stays there for a year. So it was really exciting when they said, look, forget that. Associate with Apple IDs instead. But the beta clearance thing is dumb.

So I don't know. Every time a new device comes out it's like it's it's terrible for for testers and developers because either either you've planned for it which means you can't have many testers in the first place or you've not planned for it and then you can't do any more testing because everybody buys new phones and yeah i mean it must be like a paranoid reaction to the idea of of um the beta approval must be like oh well then they can they can they're essentially selling it they're broadly making it available and we need to check and make sure that there is malware or something like that it's like you know it's a beta it's a beta it's not in the store it is being controlled by a

developer you know who the developer is they know they have a relationship with the developer is. They know, they have a relationship with the developer. They know they're getting a beta. I just, I don't see, so this is one of those areas where I'm disappointed to see that Apple hasn't changed. That is a prime level of paranoia

to suggest that we're going to check everybody's betas and approve them before launch. It just seems unnecessary to me. I don't see why, I don't see who needs to be protected there. They're all consenting adults. Should be fine.

Elephant in the room. There is an Apple event this week. Yes. As we speak, we're less than 48 hours from an Apple event. Fantastic that you're going. I am going. I got an was very that was a real question was are they gonna want to invite the guy who doesn't work at macworld to an apple event and they invited me which is very nice so i will be there i'm very pleased for you very pleased for us uh as well you can't come you were not invited I know. I try. But we can talk about it afterward on our show that's cleverly placed on Mondays usually so that we can be right before Apple events.

Although this is a Thursday event, so it's not so bad. Yeah. So we'll be discussing it on Monday. Yes. But you're going to be covering the event live for Six Colors, right? In some form, I will be covering it i will be there i will write things i will tweet things um i'm trying so we used live blog software at macworld we use cover live and it was part of a like a multi-thousand dollar contract to use them and most of the live blog

platforms are like that there used to be like a a free tier and then like a cheap tier. And now the way that the pricing works, essentially, if a whole bunch of people, if thousands of people are like, oh, Jason's still live blogging. We'll go there. I would get a bill for thousands and thousands of dollars, which I am not going to pay. And then they put me in prison. So that doesn't work. Don't go to prison for live blogging, Jason. I know.

No, live blogging is its own prison. I've been looking for open source live blogging software. There's not very much of it and it's not very good. So much live blogging software is just polluted with, I mean, nobody does live blogging anyway. So it's been polluted with all these other features of like, you know, Twitter streams and weather and scores and other stuff like that. I don't even know. It's a, it's a, it's not a very good market. So I found a, I found a thing that's a hosted service that's free, which just gives me the heebie-jeebies because I don't know who these people are. I don't know how they're making money. I don't know why they offer it. It seems to work. So I'm probably going to embed it on Six Colors and try to live blog from it.

But I'm going to make no guarantees that it'll actually work. And I may end up going back to just having a post that I update every now and then and post things on Twitter. Because I don't have a lot of faith in... I would really like something that is reasonably priced that I could pay for and feel like I'm paying for a service. Unfortunately, my choices now are this thing that's free or things that cost thousands of dollars. So I'm going to probably go with the thing that's free. Hope it doesn't crash.

Hope it doesn't, I don't know, inject really weird ads in the middle of the coverage or something. And we'll see. We'll see how it goes I'm just going to throw this out there a dedicated Twitter account and just embed that on the page I do have a dedicated Twitter account

can I just embed a stream from that and would it update automatically I bet it would I'll look into that Storify's got a live blog feature now that I was really excited about, and then I read that it's part of the Storify, you guessed it, enterprise level of service, and I'm not going to. Maybe someday.

I aspire to have the budget for the enterprise level account, but I don't. I'm sure you could just embed your Twitter stream on the page in some way. I did create a Six Colors live blog account. There you go. There you go. See? Just go with that. So I'm still experimenting with that.

And there is this live blog platform embed that did work. So I might do that. We'll see. We'll see. But people should go on the day of the event. Go visit sixcolors.com. I'll be there. I'll write some things about it during probably and then after i do love that gruber just sits there with his pencil and his field notes notebook and

writes things down and doesn't have to type um that and just gets to experience it and consider it um but i don't know i feel like i need to break this to you you don't have to do this you know that now right you don't you don't have to do this this You know that now, right? You don't have to do this. This is what I'm saying, is I could be like Gruber and just sit there with a notebook and a pencil as analog as possible and just ponder what it all means.

And I'm considering that as an option too, but I kind of, I don't know, I think I would kind of miss it if it went away. They are live streaming it apparently. So that takes the pressure off a little bit. I don't know what I'm going to do. Why would you do it? Surely your intentions are different to what they were at Macworld.

I type really fast, and so it's an advantage I have over people. And I do have an audience of people who remember that I do a live blog of Apple events, and so I could do it. And a lot of the things that I've been doing now are me asking the question, like, is this a thing I want to keep doing? And over time, I imagine that some of the things that I decided, yes, I do want to keep doing it. I'll be like, oh, nah, let's not do that. And this is the first one where I'm really, I really don't know whether the right thing to do is do a live blog as it happens,

just because why not? And people who will see Six Colors who might not otherwise know that it exists, but will find out, oh, Jason has a live blog and he's doing that on his site. I didn't know he had that site. Maybe there's some possibility there. If I do it, I'll let Dan Morin will dial in and do some color commentary, which would be nice because he's not going to be there and that's going to be sad. I don't know. So I'm still – it's still up in the air.

I may give it a try. I may get frustrated and decide I'm going to go all pencil. Or at the very least, I'll do some tweeting. But that might be the live blog. I can do it. But there's just that question of do I really want to play that game or not. It's hard to give that up, though. I mean, I've done them all for a long time, but it's also a lot of work,

and you do miss stuff because you're too busy typing and uploading pictures and stuff. Talking about playing games, predictions? Can I ask you for some predictions? What do you think that we're going to see? Well, the rumors are all out there that there's going to be new iPads and there's going to be a ship date or probably just shipping Yosemite. And then there'll probably be some new Macs that will be part of the Mac story as Yosemite and some new systems that are going to ship with Yosemite. The big rumor is are going to ship with Yosemite.

The big rumor is that there'll be a Retina iMac, which is very exciting. I'm interested to see what form that takes. That would be our first Retina Mac desktop. And as somebody who has thought about eventually getting a Retina display for my desk someday, i never really imagined it would be on imac but i listened to that and i think it's probably gonna be really expensive but um i'm looking forward to seeing what the what they do if they do a retina imac and then i'm hoping that maybe the mac mini will get bumped as well and uh but but we got a there was a story this week in Recode. John Pekowski put to bed the rumor that the much-rumored Retina MacBook Air would come at this event. That's not going to happen.

So, I mean, my predictions are that the rumors will probably be true because they usually are. And then I hope the Mac Mini gets a bump, although it's possible that won't happen until next year because Intel's in the middle of a chip transition right now. But I would really like to buy a Mac Mini gets a bump, although it's possible that won't happen until next year because Intel's in the middle of a chip transition right now. But I would really like to buy a Mac Mini, and I'm not going to buy the one that's two years old. So that's just me being selfish. New iPads, okay. What is in a new iPad? What are we going to see?

Are we just going to see the same form factors with, what, NFC in them? Touch ID? Well, Touch ID for sure. NFC is in the phones this year, so if it's like Touch ID, we would get that in the iPads next year. And I think there's a lot less need for Apple Pay.

Right now, the NFC stuff is just Apple Pay. So how many people are paying with their iPad for something? So something I've seen people say, and it's a reason, but I don't know if I buy it, which is that people could use them for point of sale terminals.

I don't know if that's enough of a reason to do it. I feel like it's... Oh, and they need the software and I don't know. Yeah, I feel like it's... Oh, and they need the software and I don't know. Yeah, I feel like that's not really a world that Apple necessarily needs to get into. I feel much more positive about the Touch ID stuff.

I think there's a great question about whether they go, you know, if there's an iPad Pro at some point, probably not at this event, and what happens with the mini. I love my iPad mini. The iPad, it'll be really interesting to see what they say about the iPad, because iPad sales have slowed. They're not growing anymore. And I think people are wondering, you know, what's the role that a tablet plays in people's lives now? Because you don't buy a new one every year or two. They have a longer life.

And we've got bigger phones now and we've got lighter laptops. And where does the tablet fit? And I think it would be interesting to see what Apple says about the iPad, just what the words are. Normally, I mean, there'll be an investor call, the analyst call the next week where we'll all read the tea leaves about what Tim Cook says there when they say, can you give me a little more color about the iPad? And he'll say, this is Tim. Yeah, we like the iPad. And that'll be, I just reenacted it for you. You don't need to listen to the call now. It's pretty good actually. But I want to see that, right? I want to see what they say because then if you're into Apple criminology, most of the criminology about Apple is stupid, but that kind of stuff

where it's like when, like when Tim Cook said, uh, wearables is an area of interest for us, right? It's like, they, they do table setting. They're going to talk about the iPad and try to put it in a, in a favorable light of like, here's what we think the iPad is going for. And maybe they'll just come out and say, Oh, the iPad is great. Everybody loves it. It's awesome. It keeps selling a lot. Here's some new ones. new ones goodbye uh but they may say they may have a take on like what role tablets play and why the ipad i mean it'll all be why the ipad is so great but they may have an interesting insight into their philosophy about what they're trying to do with this product line and that that could be really interesting so i would look for that because I feel like everybody's looking a little bit more for a raison d'etre for – there's some French for Montrealers.

Very fancy. Of the iPad and of tablets in general because there's been this hubbub about like tablets have not taken off like smartphones did, which is not surprising, but it's true. And so what do they say about the iPad? I would look for that. And so what do they say about the iPad? I would look for that. And as a Mac guy, I'm encouraged by, I want to see what they have to say about the Mac too,

because it's always nice when they do an event and there's Mac stuff at it. That doesn't happen that often. And this will be, we'll get that because we'll get Yosemite and we'll get some new Mac news. And we can take a bet about whether they boast about the thinness of the iMac, which is the most pointless statistic ever because you don't actually carry an iMac anywhere. So it doesn't really need to be that thin.

We can make it super thin on the edge, just the edge. Yeah. It's so thin it'll cut you. Don't move it. Just leave it there. Look how thin the keyboard is. And it's at Apple's campus this time. So that'll be kind of fun to go on Thursday morning to Apple's campus.

And I will report back, Mike. I'll report back to you about what's going on afterward. I'll give you a call maybe next Monday. And we'll break it all down then. But I'm looking forward to going. And I'm really glad that they invited me. Because I made no assumptions about that, but it'll be cool to be there even though I'm not at Macworld anymore.

Don't forget, listeners, we may be late by Monday, but we will have a guy who's touched the hardware. Don't forget that. That's what we get in Jason. Hands on. I hope so. Hands on with Jason Snell. They may say, oh, Jasonason we're glad you got here but

you can't go in the hands you have to just that's for real media people actually you can just stand outside the window just just through the window and you can you can breathe on the window if you like but right nothing more than that yeah last thing any reason for thursday do you think thursday seems like a strange day these days. It's quite late in the week. I don't know. I don't know. They may have been concerned about the people traveling over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, which was last weekend.

That's a real stretch, Jason. I know. I honestly don't know. And they're doing their corporate results the following week. So I don't know. I think they just – I don't get it. Maybe somebody had a – somebody's kid had a piano recital on the Tuesday, so they moved it to Thursday.

I really – I have no idea. This is where my Apple criminology falls in the tank is I have the faintest idea. Because with it being on campus, they could do it Monday at midnight. It doesn't make a difference. I hate to say it, but it's possible that Tim Cook or another senior executive had like a speaking engagement somewhere in China or Europe or something on the Tuesday. And they're like, God, we should do it that week. That's the perfect week, but we can't.

And they said, well, we could do it Thursday. It could be something that pedestrian, I have to say, where it's like, that's the day where we have no other encumbrances, but it's not Friday when nobody's paying attention. It's got to be Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and we can do it that Thursday. But I don't know. I don't know. Or maybe the Yosemite people were like, no, every day counts. Please give us till Thursday to ship the Golden Master number five maybe one sorry one very very last thing this will be the last thing now sure sure mike there's been a lot of uh public complaint about ios 8 recently and stability and things like that do you think apple will address

anything like this at all at the event or do they just pretend like nothing's happening it seems unlikely although they may. If they do it, it's going to be, oh, and this is the thing I think they will roll out, is I think they'll roll out Apple Pay because they said that was coming in October. Or they'll say they're rolling it out. And they'll say, oh, iOS 8 is great. People love it. Right? Because they'll always say, look how many people have downloaded it.

But they might say, and we've got a new version 8 ios 8.1 that will be coming out next week and it'll enable apple pay and it'll uh it'll also address some issues that our customers have had and aren't we great i mean they may do it like that that that would be a way to address the that there are some issues without dwelling on it and kind of spinning it positively by saying um you know, add Apple Pay, which is awesome, right? So it wouldn't surprise me if there's some announcement like that, but that's how they would phrase it. They're not going to apologize for bugs. That almost never happens. But I think that's a scenario where they might address iOS 8 by

talking about 8.1 and explaining that maybe it's got some fixes in it as well. I want to buy some things with Apple Pay. There's a whole show about that. Me telling you the story of me buying peanut butter with Apple Pay. I want to hear what the experience is like. Maybe next week. And I'll get my Kindle

in the next week or two too. Shine on Kindle dreamers. It's going to happen. It's going to be like John Syracuse talking about his TiVo. It's going to be Jason talking about his Kindle. Woo! Stay tuned. That show will happen.

It'll be episode 94 in two years. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion. Yes. If you want to catch the show notes for this week's episode of Upgrade, take yourself, point your web browser over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash five.

If you would like to stay tuned to Jason's incredible coverage or not upcoming over at sixcolors.com, then he has a little button there where you can press Apple event. It will take you straight to the dedicated Apple event page. He's so professional.

That's I'll teach. I got an email from our friend Federico who said, I'm going to do my Federico now. Jason, you need to have a page for the event on your site. I said, that's a good idea, Federico, and I

made a page. All hats off to Federico. There's also a Yosemite page there because I anticipate I will have lots of things to say about Yosemite too. So these are my experiments with when you build a site entirely yourself, you have that moment of like, oh, yeah, I should have a page for that. How do I do that? But it's there. So thanks to Federico for suggesting it. Guy's an entrepreneur.

He's always thinking. There's no off on his switch. He's just always on. And if you would like to catch Jason on Twitter, he is at jsnll, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our sponsors for this week, Dash and Pilot. I'm going to go and check those guys out.

We'll be back next time. Bye-bye. Ahoy, telephone!