Upgrade - 98: Accidental Comics Podcast 🤓

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

In celebration of World Emoji Day and Comic-Con, Jason and Myke discuss how we use emojis and why they’re a valuable addition to online dialogue, and then break down the best options for digital comic-book reading. Plus there’s a whole lot of follow-up and plenty of #askupgrade.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 98 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile and pingdom my name is mike hurley i am joined by the incomparable mr jason snell hi mike how's it going very good how are How are you? Good. Good. Warmed up. Ready to go. Ready for 98. Getting close. Getting close to 100 now. Gone. That's yep. Following up from last week, you found out a reason why your phone was pausing in the shower yeah it's uh the answer is uh apparently to a certain degree that if you turn off the ahoy telephone feature in the ios 10 beta it stops a lot of the extraneous audio pauses so something weird is going on there i heard from like five people who said that this was a solution i uh i turned off ahoy telephone and it solved it um i

also heard from a few people who are like irate like oh this is outrageous that's a key feature that you have to disconnect in order to get this other thing to work it's like yeah it's a beta that's how it works do choose it sucks to be a beta but that's the way it goes uh pick your poison would you like your audio to play continuously? Or would you like a Hoy telephone to work? If you want both don't use the beta. But anyway, I also heard from somebody who's on like a five S who said that this trick didn't work for him. Uh, so it may only be on certain hardware that this solves it. And there may be a different bug. There's bugs. It's beta there's bugs but anyway

uh if you are feeling the pain of having your audio pause randomly all the time turn off ahoy telephone in the ios 10 beta and see what happens was it triggering siri uh it's possible i i i don't know i i wonder if there's something going on there where, where, yeah, something in the sound subsystem is it's hearing something and it's pausing, but then it's not activating Siri. Like it's, it's maybe it gets to a point where it thinks it might activate and then it decides it isn't, but it's too late. It's already paused the audio, but who knows? There may be a very very specific if you know the audio subsystem of ios you know exactly where this is i'm sure that they're aware of it and that hopefully it

will be fixed in the next beta was i talking last week on this show uh yeah i was about not upgrading to the beta because of the canary? Yeah, that was this show. So I've had a bunch of people write in to tell me that Canary have updated their application and it is now fixed so it doesn't crash anymore on the iOS 10 beta. But I am, and I've had

a few people, especially that dastardly David Sparks send me messages telling me, oh it's fine, you should update, come over, the water's fine. I am holding off, and I'm quite proud of myself so far. I have no intention of installing

the iOS 10 beta on my phone right now. I'm going to wait until the next beta at least and see the next developer beta and see what the state of affairs is, but I really don't want to screw anything up. And it really is the canary which is making me think like this. The point where my phone is controlling security in my home and also going forward, my lights and stuff like that,

I'm less inclined to put beta software on it, which is probably why they'll never do a public beta for software on the Apple car. At the point where these things start to make real effect for security purposes and just for your general living arrangements, I feel like it's less than likely that you should be putting beta software on them. And that's kind of how I'm feeling right now. I think that's valid. I validate your opinion. It's a personal choice for everyone it

really is like uh if you're if you're in this business then you have some professional choices to make too but uh it it has to do yeah everybody's got a different little constellation of ios devices and uh apps they rely on and ways they use it in their lives and you make your decisions based on that and i think that's the right thing to do so i have my ipad here my ipad air 2 and it lets me send stickers to people right now i'm good with that and i'll see where the next baiters go before i make my decision but as of right now nothing you remember frank from last week who found pepperoni and pineapple pizza in a bar how could i forget frank uh he wrote in to let us know a

couple of things he had actually tried it before so he was already a fan of the pepperoni pineapple and also as i guess we both expected and i really applaud frank for owning up to this he was inebriated enough to take the left behind pizza and he says he has no regrets. No, he ate a slice of bar pizza. Yep. To you, sir, I congratulate you for having no regrets. That's what I say. But be careful, everyone. Don't eat random food that you find in bars.

The Upgrade Podcast does not endorse random bar food. Well, in bars, you know, there is, if it's on the bar, there are bowls of nuts and things that people eat on the bar and and pretzels i also don't endorse eating those though okay all right i just i i feel like it's a little bit different than if you walked you were in a restaurant and you found uh they hadn't cleared the table yet and somebody left and there was

some pizza on it and you just picked it up and ate it i i would be a little more i don't know why but i i feel like that would be more of a social transgression. I'm pretty sure that's what Frank did, though. I think that that pizza was just left from a previous picture. I guess I'm just saying some places actually do put out plates of food and things. But in this case, that was certainly something that somebody ordered and paid for and ate most of and just couldn't, even though they loved it, couldn't eat the last part of it. And anyway, cheers, Frank. I would struggle, though, if I saw slices of pepperoni pineapple pizza, I've got to say.

You remember many, many moons ago, we spoke about the fact that with the lightning to ethernet adapter, you could plug it into an iOS device and you could have an ethernet connection. It would connect to the internet in some kind of mystical, magical way. adapter you could plug it into an ios device and you could have an ethernet connection it would connect to the internet in some kind of mystical magical way so this was when apple uh introduced the lightning to usb3 adapter their new adapter it's the one that's got a lightning port on the female lightning port on the side of the female USB port. And instead of it just being a pass-through of lightning to USB, and that's so that you can power it.

And at the point that you can power it, you can do a lot of things with USB devices that require power. And Phil Schiller stood on stage and said, this will be great for podcasters. And this will be great for connecting your iPad Pro to Ethernet in your office, your secure Ethernet network. And that was funny because Ethernet has never been a supported officially thing. There's no UI for it or anything. But it does turn out that, yeah, if you attach a USB Ethernet adapter to that adapter and turn off all your Wi-Fi and everything, it works.

It works, at least if you're on a DHCP network where it's sort of the standard, like it'll assign you an IP address. Just like if you're on a Wi-Fi hotspot, it's the same approach, basically. Like, here's your IP address and go for it. But it was all just sort of like, in fact, the rumor is that somebody who worked at Apple said that, oh, no, it was ATP Tipster, I think, said that after Steve Jobs famously had that failure at a WWDC where he told everybody to turn off their Wi-Fi hotspots because the demo was failing, they couldn't get out to the Internet. That apparently, like, that day, engineering was told, put Ethernet support in iOS. That's an order.

So maybe that's where it came from. But there was no UI for it. It was all secret. But now when you plug it in, some random entry shows up in the settings app, which is empty right now. Yeah, in iOS 10 beta, if you plug in that Ethernet adapter,

what you get is a new setting, like right under the Wi-Fi setting item in the settings app that is an ethernet item and uh and then you tap on it and guess what you see nothing coming soon so i can't actually decide whether that is a uh a mistake and it's just supposed to remain invisible and that that's been there but they've been suppressing it like, no, no, no, don't even show it. It'll be there, but nobody wants to see it. Don't even show it. Or if there's going to be something there, which I think they should do, because one of the problems with the ethernet support and iOS, especially when it's unofficial

and not mentioned in a keynote on stage by Phil Schiller, was the fact that not every Ethernet network has the generic settings. Sometimes you have to put specific Ethernet settings in, which is why we have a network control panel on the Mac that you can go in and you can set up your Ethernet settings to be what they need to be. So it's an edge case, but I hope that they do it. And actually, I kind of hope that they do some and i actually i kind of hope that they do the uh uh some other you know esoteric network stuff while they're at it like maybe even the sequence of like what what network interfaces to use uh what order you know with the ipad pro i mean the idea is this is

a computer it's going to be you're going to do your work on it you might plug it in at your desk well if you're going to do that then maybe you should have those those features available so maybe we'll see that and i wanted to do a little bit of follow-up on Spotify. I was just thinking today whilst doing the washing up, we haven't heard of anything about the Apple Spotify problem, right? Like we spoke about it a few weeks ago that they were kind of loggerheads and Apple was holding up an update and spotify were claiming foul play and i thought i would go and check the app store and there hasn't been an update to the spotify app since the end of may so it looks like that that update is still being held but i haven't heard i don't know if you

have any further updates to this specific situation uh it seems like it's not been resolved yet between apple and spotify it seems like it's not been resolved yet between Apple and Spotify. Seems like it's still there. There's been some back and forth in the press. Apple has definitely said, you know, look, you're breaking the rules and we will expedite your approval if you stop breaking the rules, but we're not going to let you let you break the rules. And I think that's where it is right now. But whilst doing some searches today to tell you if there have been any updates that I've missed, I found some articles in the last couple of days that apparently Apple has made some proposals to the Copyright Royalty Board about how streaming royalties should be paid. So right now, this board called the CRB, the

Copyright Royalty Board, is working out a new kind of framework model for how royalties should be paid for streaming. And lots of companies have made proposals. Spotify has made a proposal. Pandora has made a proposal. A bunch of others, like about what they believe the royalty should look like. But Apple's proposed calculation

of the statutory royalty rate would hurt services that have free plans and some are claiming that this type of thing is a shot at spotify yeah well i think i think apple is not interested in protecting the free streaming business model right just not and i i think there's a i think if you're a company like Apple, and honestly, I think the music industry doesn't love it either. This idea that there's this free tier and, uh, and they pay, right. But, uh, the more you charge, the harder it is to get by on the free plan. And so, yeah, I'm not surprised at all that Apple is trying to, uh, make it harder for harder for uh competitors who offer a free tier to

keep offering it but again i mean apple of course apple should propose things in its self-interest now it doesn't mean that apple every company that's making a uh suggestion here every company that is going to this royalty board with their suggestions their proposals are doing the thing that makes the most sense for them right there i'm sure that spotify are coming to it and saying like oh you know this is our proposal and that proposal is probably really good for people that are doing free uh tiers right so i'm sure that their royalty things are, yeah, we'll pay royalties when people pay, but when they're free, I don't think we should have to pay.

And Apple's probably coming in and being like, everyone deserves to be paid, free or not. And this is just normal. It's just how business is done. But this was the only thing that I found as an update to this situation. And this could end up playing out quite interestingly if this royalty board does come out and say everybody deserves to be paid

free or not that is going to hurt companies like spotify because where's the money going to come from so that's something to keep an eye on the money comes from a calculation about how many uh how many free you convert to paid and whether it's worth it to do that, right? But the more you are paying for the streams and the plays, the harder that calculation is to maintain because your customer acquisition costs, as they would call it, rocket up. And that's bad. Whereas Apple, although Apple has a free tier too, but the way they structure it is you get a 90-day trial and then you have to pay or lose it.

And Spotify, you can stay on the free tier forever. And I think their goal is to convert those people over time. My daughter loves Spotify, although she's been listening to Apple Music more lately. I reminded her that we had Apple Music on family and that she got all of that stuff, and she's been doing that more. But she still likes Spotify. And I think Spotify's game plan there is that make my daughter a loyal Spotify user, and that when she gets to college, she'll probably have, I assume, a lot of, Spotify probably has this deal, like all students at this college have access to a cheap or free Spotify premium plan.

They do a lot of that kind of college marketing where there's a special deal. And then you get out of college and you own that person. They will pay you $10 a month for their entire life. I think that's basically their game plan. But you look at the cost. It's a great game plan. Make it indispensable. Right.

But if in eight or nine years of free listening or subsidized listening before you get to the point where they start paying you, how long does it take to get your money back? And are you still in business at that point? So I think that's the calculation you have to make. And any of those, it's always a gamble that you take. And that's the difference between having a free tier that's available forever versus with some revenue in it, or whether you just do what Apple does and say, we're closing the gate after 90 days.

All right, so that's it for follow-up this week. Should we take a break? Good idea. Today's show is brought to you by Pingdom. You can start monitoring your sites and servers today at pingdom.com slash upgrade. When you go there, you'll get a 14-day free trial. And when you enter the offer code upgrade at checkout, you get 20% off your first invoice. So dear listener, you may be asking yourself, Mike, why should I be using Pingdom to monitor my servers or websites? Well, dear listener, let me tell you. Pingdom detects, with their customers, over 400,000 web outages a day.

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to know when your site is down. Thank you so much to Pingdom for their support of this show. Yesterday was World Emoji Day. July the 17th. Breaking news, breaking news. World Emoji Day yesterday. So World Emoji emoji day it was created by

uh our friend friend of the show jeremy burge at emoji burge yep of course it was i was thinking to myself the other day i was like why why is july 17th world emoji day i was thinking i was like oh i wonder so i opened the uh emoji palette and i went to the calendar emoji and on iOS the calendar emoji is the 17th of July. You know the little calendar that's in the emoji? It's July 17th. That's the date on the emoji.

So that's the date picked for World Emoji Day. Interesting. Smart, right? I was like, why did he pick that random day? That's why, because the emoji is that date. Huh. That's weird. And why is it that date?

Is that because of iCal being introduced? Probably. A million years ago? It's an old Apple thing. Didn't it always say July 17th, like the old iCal logo? It's the day that iCal for the Mac was announced at Macworld Expo in 2002. There you go. So I'm actually going to put a link

to a Quora article. And Twitter previously showed July 15th, which was Twitter's launch date, but then changed it to March 21st. But that's why it's July 17th. There you go. Perfect. So there you go.

Now you know why. So it was yesterday and I was sent some swag by Jeremy. He sent me a t-shirt. Did you see my picture of me with my t-shirt? And I was looking at emojis that were made of me. Did you see that picture, Jason?

I did see that picture. I'm going to put that in the show notes in case people didn't see it. So I thought in the spirit of World Emoji Day, that today we could spend some time talking about emoji. What do you think? Let's do it. I'm always up to talk about emoji. So how often do you actually use emoji? What do you use it for and how frequently?

I use it all the time. This is the funny thing. People roll their eyes and are like, oh, emoji is stupid. But it's like, you know uh we all communicate with text i've i've given this rant before i think in person if not on a podcast we communicate on the internet in text and text is really bad at expressing things that we express as human beings and in interpersonal you know conversations one-on-one with people in groups. We have facial expressions and hand gestures and body language in general and tone of voice. And on the internet, it's text.

It's just text on Twitter and Slack, wherever it's text. Text, you lose a lot. And that's why people invented emoticons, right? Where they're using punctuation to create faces and stuff and and why we do markup or or markdown if you will the idea that you can separate things with asterisks or something to to show that there's you're supposed to emphasize those or all caps or whatever these are all ways to do that and emoji is is a great fit because it gives you a lexicon that is much larger than you can get with something like i mean because the emoticons got really complicated and i'd be like oh i don't even know how to make that like when when i first saw the um like the flipping table guy i was like i don't even know what that is yeah right because it was too i love the flipping

table guy but the flipping table guy was i feel, was the last gasp of the emoticon. Where, like, we can use text to make pictures. It's like, yeah, it's getting really complicated. You're using, like, non-Roman characters to make this thing that's kind of hard to read about what it is. And then there's emoji, which are these cute little cartoon items. And you can string them together, and you can tack them on the end of your phrases. cute little cartoon items and you can string them together and you can tack them on the end of your phrases and in slack you can comment on somebody's uh post with a with a it's like a feeling uh it's it's just i i think they're i think they're so powerful and so i use them all the time i use

them on twitter i use them in slack um and and it's for that reason that it gets across uh or at least it is a it gives you the ability to attempt to get across a little bit more about feelings that you wouldn't put in words. Because you probably wouldn't say, I love that thing you just wrote, right? We probably wouldn't say that, but you throw out a little heart. And it means that, but you didn't have to say it. Yeah, I love emoji. I mean, I was obviously an emoticon person. I used like all the MSN emoticons, which were kind of halfway between emoticons and emojis,

right? They were little characters, but they were kind of triggered by you typing in text. You know, you type in the colon and a bracket and you'd get a little smiley face that would be rendered as a little yellow smiley face that's when i started basically it was on my on my radar was that i was typing old school emoticons and they were being turned into emoji basically yeah oh what looks a lot like emoji yeah exactly i came to emoji on the iphone when you had to do that like weird hacky thing to like try and get a Japanese keyboard to install the emoji. Do you remember that?

That was the way you originally had to get it. So I've been using them for a long time, and I use them constantly because they are such a fantastic form of expression for me. I think you're able to say so much like, you know, so much of my conversation online is very short snippets of information, very short snippets of text. And quite frankly, a lot of the time, an emoji will do the job like a little thumbs up emoji is perfect. I send little heart emojis to people when they say nice things. You know, I send little Mike face nerd face emojis, you know, my own little emoji that I have, or that I've kind of commandeered, uh, cause it looks just like me. Um, I love all of that stuff and I love doing it. And I send mess in my messages, you know, I message, I send emojis

all day and Twitter. I send emoji all day. Um, also custom Slack emoji is amazing. So this is where you kind of start branching out a little bit. and the slacks that i'm involved in the custom emoji and slack really make it a lot of fun there's great ones in the incomparable slack and the relay slack and also in uh the slack for my ring post it's the ring post of the podcast i'm doing on the incomparable now about wrestling we have a public slack and we're adding lots of really great emoji to that as well. And I think that's so much fun, all of that stuff. And I know that the kind of the custom emoji stuff is kind of co-opting a little bit between little just stickers and emoji and emoticons, but it all kind of rolls together into just

a great way to visually express yourself in very simple ways and a lot of the time add in the personality and character that would be in your voice if somebody could hear you yeah the um slack's decision to not only embrace emoji with uh slack slack has done a lot to do do emoji right i wrote a piece on macworld about this a while ago. The fact that you can type a colon and then begin to type the name of an emoji and it auto fills it in. So great. Such a great feature. I use

that all the time. And then the ability to reply to comments, just like tag emoji on things people say is so great. But the custom emoji thing, it's that's that you know so jeremy who we we mentioned earlier who is on the he does emojipedia and he's on the unicode subcommittee for emoji um you know they're involved with deciding what the official emoji are and

that's why uh they're adding uh you know a dozen a year or whatever at this point they've added a bunch but now they're sort of like gonna it's like going into the hall of fame uh of the baseball hall of fame or any sports hall of fame there's a process now are you emoji worthy but uh it's it's it's slow moving and they need to appeal to everyone and uh one of the brilliant things that slack did is create this custom emoji feature and it yeah it it it influences the tone and personality of the slack you're in and it's great in fact i have to admit i find myself missing some of those custom emoji in the real world in the or not the real world but the outside of slack world because i have on more than one occasion on twitter replied to somebody uh who was on the incomparable slack with colon skeletor colon because i love the skeletor emoji which is like a picture of

skeletor or a hooded skeleton that i found on the internet and made an emoji out of and then we made a t-shirt out of it eventually i love it and it's just it's not anything that's going to be a real emoji but it doesn't matter because it's just, it's not anything that's going to be a real emoji, but it doesn't matter because it's fun. And it has some meaning. It has some specific meaning in the incomparable Slack. So, you know, it's great. All of it's great. So I was also wondering if you had any thoughts on emoji versus stickers. Because this is an interesting thing, right? Because these days, there are lots of stickers that are claiming to be emoji, you know, like the celebrity ones, for example, like Kim Moji. It might have been on Twitter where I was trying to put in an emoji and instead I got a bunch of stickers that looked like emoji. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's not what I want. I don't know. The stickers feel like lock-in to me. That's the problem I have with them. Emoji feels like this is a common picture language that we can share across platforms and across services. And the stickers feel like lock-in, feel like, oh, only on our special service do you get that. Then again, I just praised the custom emoji in Slack, so maybe it's fine. But it's not in my lexicon. And I know people love using stickers, so it's going to take some getting used to. And I could see it being something that people use. The problem with it is that you end up with that thing where you want to

react with that. You've mapped an emotion to that sticker and then you're somewhere else and you can't express it because it was a sticker on one service. And I don't like that part of it. The lines are starting to blur. Like you look look at twitter they just turned their emoji set into stickers so the image that i put up and it's in the show notes of me celebrating world emoji day is using their emoji sticker functionality and so it's getting a bit weird and it's still going to start to get weirder right with ios 10 messaging apps because they're stickers but everyone's going to call them emoji right they're going to be sold as emoji packs uh not sticker packs because that's the the naming that's the kind of the common name that we give to these things now i'm not sure the uh unicode subcommittee on emoji will

approve of that oh i'm sure they won't but it's it's too late right the the the horse is bolted um emoji is just the name for now a little picture, which illustrates something. The same as emoticon was the name for so long. I think emoji is just that. What do you think about the idea of platform vendors using emoji as an upgrade tool? I think Apple's starting to embrace that a little bit, right? Yeah, certainly. You kind of get your new emoji ready, and it's a great way to get people to update.

New emoji, and also Apple now is going to have a reason to update in iOS 10 with that emoji auto-suggest feature. Which is awesome. It is. I am still frustrated that Apple isn't letting you search for a specific emoji. Like, if you want the the german flag you can't like

search for it you have to look through a list of flags that are sorted in a very specific way and hope that you can choose the flag of germany and not of belgium uh and that's that it needs to be better like slack like slack i can do colon flag dash DE or GB or whatever I want, and I can get the flag that I want. And with the auto-suggest emoji thing, that's cool, but I don't think the only way you should be able to get an emoji is by remembering or guessing what word will trigger the auto-suggest of the emoji you want. But still, so I think there's more work for Apple

to do on that front. But that is in addition to supporting a bunch of new emoji, which they will almost certainly do in in iOS 10. And if not, it'll be in in, I think somewhere in there near Jeremy Berg wrote a blog post about this on emoji pedia. They will also have that auto that auto fill thing, which is almost like um you know encouragement to use more emoji but it also i think makes people who might not think in terms of emoji uh do better with emoji i i think you can overdo it like if anybody's seen carrie fisher's uh twitter feed uh you can if you over if you use emoji to communicate you're just making a rebus you're making a a puzzle for people you're not helping your communication.

You're hurting it. So I think you can overdo it. And I think that Apple's sort of emoji replacement thing could lead to that where things seem kind of baffling and harder to understand. I always like to use emoji as like seasoning in the message. Like, you know, here's a statement and now I'm conveying a feeling rather than it being like I'm literally going to replace every other word with an emoji representation. I don't, I don't, I'm not a fan of that.

So you're saying about searching for emoji. I want to recommend a tool for me on iOS that I use. I'm still using Gboard, the Google keyboard for iOS. I've been using it for like two months now

as my only keyboard. I'm very happy with it, actually. I find the autocomplete works better for iOS. I've been using it for like two months now as my only keyboard. I'm very happy with it, actually. I find the autocomplete works better for me. It does a better job of splitting up words when I accidentally hit N instead of space, which is one of my biggest frustrations in life. Google Keyboard does a better job of that. It also seems to be doing a better job of remembering words that I frequently say and people's names and stuff. and I assume that it's pulling some of that information from my Google account somewhere maybe I don't know or it's just doing a better job of just remembering but I'm very happy with the keyboard I like that I can do the one hand swipe typing which I do quite a lot

with my big phone so I'm happy about that I like that all that's built in but what it has a couple of great emoji features. It does the replacements. So as you're typing, if you type a word like sad or something, in the little suggestions bar, it has the emoji there.

So you can hit it. And then what you end up doing is you learn the words. So I know some of the words that will trigger those emojis so i just type those words in and it'll trigger them but also you when you hit the emoji bar it's a swipable thing like apples but it also has a search button search box so you can search and it does a couple of different ways of searching this i actually tested this with jeremy jeremy jeremy should probably be on this episode, but we met for coffee recently and I

was showing him Gboard and I was doing some searches and he was asking me to search for specific words to see if it was pulling from the actual Unicode standardized wording and naming for an emoji, which it was, but then Google are obviously putting their own words on those emojis as well so they can be uh search for so for example if you type the word but a peach comes up oh my now google's doing that all by themselves uh i love that i think that's fantastic i'm happy that they do that uh but there you go that happens the the peach pops up damn i was i was very uh i was very pleased to find that out that made me smile a lot there's some good stuff i took the chat jason jumped in there for the uh for the title suggestion the chat room making very everybody upset well i did i was

able to do that because i downloaded rocket for os 10 which i didn't even know existed and joe steel just linked to in the chat room which is an app that lets you have the colon shortcuts anywhere on the Mac instead of just in Slack. And that's a dangerous, dangerous thing. So that's another tool that I was going to suggest. I don't have this one installed. I don't really understand how this works. And I'm not sure if it's like looking at keystrokes. I don't really know how it's doing this. So I haven't looked into it enough to download it yet. But I've seen a lot of people talk really know how it's doing this. So I haven't looked into it enough to download it yet. But I've seen a lot of people talk about this and it looks pretty cool. Another one I just saw today, Emojipedia for OS X, is like an add-on for the dictionary.

So you can select an emoji and do the dictionary definition and it will give you the name of the emoji, tell you what the emoji is and sometimes that is needed oh interesting so there's a couple there's a few things in there the emoji dictionary there's a medium blog post that i'll put in that explains how it works and then tells you how you can go and get it from github so there are a few emoji tools for you if you're looking for some some tools for emoji and i also want to give a bit of breaking news. That's productivity right there, folks. Productivity tools. As part of World Emoji Day,

there was an award for the best new emoji of 2016. And the eye roll emoji has won that one. So what do you think of that, Jason? The eye roll emoji. Do you think that it's the best new emoji? It's beaten out the upside down smiley face, for example. Well, the upside down smiley face for example well the upside down smiley face is pretty good i thought that would have won to be honest because that is a that's

because we know joe steel joe steel's favorite emoji is the upside down smiley face but uh the eye rolling is a i use that i i have to admit i have to restrain myself sometimes from replying to tweets with just the eye roll emoji because that's mean but also true so i'll finish this off with asking you jason what what is or what are your favorite emoji oh um blue heart blue heart as i've established elsewhere i felt like the red heart was a little too forward yeah i agree i used to use the pink heart with the sparklies for the same reason go go as far as you can in that you know you gotta co-opt a heart of your own yeah exactly right um the i don't know skeletor emoji on slack is pretty great yeah but no but

no nobody else gets to gets to use that uh i like the uh I like the rainbow sometimes for happiness. I think that's a fun one. I like the winky guy and the smiley guy. The faces. Thumbs up is a good quick thumbs up thing. That was the first emoji autocorrect I created. I typed thumbs up and a thumb appears. It's great.

I think those are mine. What are yours? I have two key favorites. I like the heart inside of the box. In Slack, it's called heart decorations. There's a pink box with a heart inside of it because it doesn't look like any of the other hearts. And a lot of people don't even really know about this one.

I don't ever see anybody use it, so I use it um and also the nerd face because it looks just like me yeah it looks just like me and it makes me very happy so that's emoji everyone yeah um another piece of uh breaking news for the show we're all about breaking news today this is not emoji related uh ios 10 beta 3 just came out hey look at that well we'll we'll be able to see if there are any ethernet settings then i want to thank smile for also sponsoring this week's episode and let me talk to you about text expander today and it's funny actually to mention text expander because we were just talking about emoji and i have set up a couple of text expander shortcuts for. NNE will bring up the nerd emoji for me

and HHE will bring up the heart emoji. So they're there if I want them. So I can have my favorite emoji right at hand with TextExpander because with TextExpander, you never have to type that same email address, chunk of code, marketing copy, driving directions or Apple OS name more than once you know everybody uh i know now is uh doing replacements from os space x to mac os so that is a very useful thing another one

that i have used uh in the past week jason if i type in pokemon it puts the little accented e in for me very nice as well very nice uh this is the beauty of a life of text expander. You can store any text in a snippet, just create the shortcut for them. It could be just a couple of keystrokes, and then you'll be saving time every day. You can also harness the power of filling the blank snippets to easily customize common responses. You can have a big couple of paragraph email that you send to people more than once, and all you need to do is change a name, a one day or something in that email. You can fill out all the big text in there, just specify those two areas, and you can very easily change those two little pieces of information. It's super, super simple, and you'll be able to get everything sent out super quickly.

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Thank you so much to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Mr. Jason Snell, this has been in our top list for a long time, and Comic-Con is just around the corner, right? This is Comic-Con week, in fact, so it's perfect. It's perfectly timed, even though it was unintentional, because it's also, you know, it's... There's a lot of stuff happening in the background, but it's a little bit slower in terms of news and things like that, which we usually like to talk about. And, yeah, it's Comic-Con timecon time so why not let's talk about comics so um i have been in and out of comics over the years and i'm feeling like a draw to them i have these lovely devices that will would it very nicely uh let me read my comics right i'm going to assume i'll ask you

which devices you use in a little bit. And there are a couple that I'm interested in, and I want to get your opinions on them. I always love Spider-Man, and I would maybe like to read a couple of Spider-Man comics again. And also I'm interested in the upcoming Iron Man reboot,

which features a female 15-year-old black teenager instead of Tony Stark as Iron Man. What is going on here? Do you know, by the way, what is this change all about? Well, so Marvel has been experimenting in the last few years with this, the idea of taking their hero. I mean, this has happened for a while,

but they're doing it with some new characters now, where what if we took new characters and put them in the hero name, basically, an outfit in Powers. So the idea there is they did this a while ago with Tony Stark, actually, where he was drunk. And so Rhodey, his buddy, became Iron Man. But they've done that lately. Iron Man. And so, but they've done that lately.

There's a, there's a, they, they introduced Miles Morales as the, the, the new Spider-Man. They had a mysterious woman who has now been revealed. But anyway, as she picks up the hammer of Thor and becomes Thor and they have done the

Falcon became Captain America. And I think, you know, some of this is you'll, you'll find'll find one of the things they're doing, and they're doing this very specifically, is taking a lot of the characters that have only been inhabited or largely been inhabited by white men and putting people who are different races and putting women in some of those slots. And I think, you know, it's comics and it's intellectual property with a

market value. So the characters, you know, are always going to come back in some form because there's too much money for them not to, but I feel like they want to use the comics to play with alternate versions or additional versions of those characters to tell other stories. How many, you know, how many stories, There are new stories to tell with every character, but there are probably more new stories to tell if you can say, well, what if there was this variation? What if a 15-year-old Black teenager became Iron Man? Because she's an MIT genius like Tony Stark, and she's his biggest fan, and then she invents her own armor. And the dynamic, what would that be like? In fact, it's a lot like the dynamic that they have with

Spider-Man now, where due to many comic book continuity shenanigans, Miles Morales and Peter Parker are now in the same universe, which they weren't't before but it's led to this interesting case where there are two spider-men and the older spider-man peter parker has to you know who who so for so much history has always been the like the kid of superheroes he's now like a mentor to an actual like like 17 16 year old kid and that's a fun new set of stories to tell so marvel's just doing a lot of experimentation where they're where they're uh bringing in new characters and putting them in some of their old you know old clothing old intellectual property um and trying to tell some new stories and uh the new iron man story i believe is by my brian michael bendis who also is the guy who created

miles morales who is the new uh additional spider-man now the ultimate spider-man as they called him does it make sense yeah kind of i mean i like it's comics it doesn't make sense but still it can only make as much sense as the comic can make which isn't always a lot of sense i mean i get why marvel does this you know putting new characters into the old suits is a really kind of good way to get a bit of marketing push behind you but what i do like is they could put anyone into these but they choose to put different people right they choose to put women and people of different races and people of different backgrounds into these suits when really they could just put

another white guy in and it would still push sales right or it's still push pr maybe because they're changing i mean you change up the character and it's like oh they've changed the character or whenever they kill a character i'm saying it's like i like that they do push the envelope a little bit and trying to make change to these things you know also i think i um and this is an interesting trend i think comics has realized now that there is a uh there is a market of women who read comics that there have always been women who read comics but i think there are more now and they're more visible and that there's some realization that i think i comics publishers, part of what they're doing is saying, we want to reach a new generation of people and the new generation of readers, not the one that's people, you know, my age and just getting older every year, right? Because that's what happens.

And if your audience gets older every year, that's a sign that you're not picking up new, younger readers or viewers or whatever. that you're not picking up new younger readers or viewers or whatever. I think they say that that audience is more diverse and wants to see the reality of the world reflected in what the comics stories are being told. And so you're seeing a lot more of that. And is that because Marvel Comics is making a political statement? I think i would go with the fact that it's also about money and about serving new audiences who want to see these uh these characters reflect the world a little bit more than they do now and they're creating new intellectual property the fact is people are agitating and have been agitating for like a spider-man movie with miles morales and and i think in the long run that that is what's going to happen there the comics publishers are are owned by the the two mainstream comics publishers are owned by movie studios, essentially.

And so a lot of, they want the comics publishers to make money, but really what they want is the comics publishers to incubate new characters and stories that they can then use in movies. that they can then use in movies. And so I think part of what's going on with Marvel is that they're kind of investing for the next wave of Marvel movies five years from now, 10 years from now, and be able to use these characters in situations that have become more familiar. Because they're dealing with the legacy

of so many classic comic book superheroes are just white guys. And occasionally women. And the Falcon famously was added comic book superheroes are just white guys and and and occasionally um women and you know the falcon famously was added as the first black superhero in the 70s and the black panther and there's a movie um coming out with uh with black panther who appeared in the in the civil war movie you know it's all part of it's it's a business and i think they're trying to uh create some new raw material that they can use on screen as well. I think that's happening too.

So what apps should I be using if I want to read comics on my devices? Well, I think Comixology is still the best app for reading comics period it's a very good app unfortunately on ios it's a lot less good than it used to be and a lot less good than it is on android because they had to pull out the in-app purchase they didn't have to they pulled out the in-app purchase because comiXology was bought by Amazon and Amazon's policy is they're not sharing 30% of their sales with Apple. So like with Kindle books, you have to buy Comixology in a web browser. You have to buy your comics in a web browser and then they appear in your app. Although I would say if you are only using Marvel, only reading Marvel or DC comics, the Marvel app, the regular Marvel

comics app and the regular DC comics app are comiXology. It's called the white label, which basically means it's the comiXology app relabeled to look like a Marvel and DC app, but they behave the same way. And they actually use the same back end and since those are from publishers you can still buy in those because the publisher is happy to give 30 to apple or at least finds that acceptable because the publishers always have a middleman between them and the customer they don't sell direct really um but it didn't work for comiXology because they're a reseller so they're they're already the middleman and then apple also wants to be the middleman and that becomes a problem middleman also a good superhero name so uh so if you only read marvel or dc you can just use the marvel or dc app and buy your

comics that way and you're basically getting the comiXology reader and in fact your purchases will show up in comiXology too so that's a tip if you if you if you want to buy comics from marvel or dc you can use their the white label version of comiXology that they use to sell comics how peculiar yeah it is it is interesting and then i also use the marvel unlimited app which is uh which is great uh it's not well okay it's a great service it's a value. The app is still not great, but is getting better all the time, I guess I would say. And the service, because there you pay a monthly or annual fee. Pay the annual fee. It's like $60, $70, and you will read $60 worth of comics in a couple of days using Marvel Unlimited. It's a pretty great deal. So how does the service work? So when you subscribe, you basically... It's like Netflix, but only for Marvel Comics.

They have a huge library of old Marvel Comics going up to about six months ago. They trail it by about six months because they want the people who want to buy today's comics to pay them $3 or $4 for a comic. But after about six months, they show up on Marvel Unlimited and there's a huge back catalog. And so the story I always tell is that I was on a trip, a business trip, and I read a run of 30 issues of Daredevil by Mark Wade or 25 issues on my trip there there and back and then i did the calculation

of how much it would have cost for me to buy all those issues and it was like the cost of a marvel unlimited subscription for just those comics because comics aren't cheap even when they're older and discounted they're not cheap so marvel unlimited if you want to read marvel comics is a good deal unfortunately comiXology unlimited which they also have is not a good deal. Unfortunately, Comixology Unlimited, which they also have, is not a good deal, I have to say. It's kind of a sampler service. They put the first few issues of some comics, independent comics, not Marvel and DC comics, on there. But the goal seems to very much be like, they want you to pay for the service, but really what they're trying to get you to do is get into the comics with the first few issues and then buy a lot more comics. So it's not bad if you want to explore comics you wouldn't otherwise want to read. And it's not that expensive. I think it's

like five or six bucks a month. But you can't go through a whole run of a comic book series. It doesn't work like that. They won't give you issues one through 25. They'll give you issues one through four, and then they want you to buy the rest. So it's a less good deal. And DC has nothing. DC doesn't have an all-you-can-eat comic app at all, which is frustrating because I find myself curious. I was always a Marvel guy, but I find myself curious about some DC comics. But I'm not going to go buy $40 worth of something and hope that it's good. I like the ability with Marvel Unlimited to try something out and read a few issues and abandon it or just kind of go through and read them all. How many comics can you kind of download to the device with Marvel Unlimited?

Oh, the website says 12. 12 think is i think is the number yeah but do they do just single issues or can you get like whole trade collections in marvel i think they're all single issues on marvel unlimited i think that's how it's structured yeah i don't know why you can't just download any any amount you want like you're paying for it well uh it's a good question i think there's a piracy fear there or a or a i'm going to download a thousand a thousand issues and then cancel my subscription and now i've got them all locally i agree i think it's a little unreasonable it's a little bit like um you know amazon lets you download movies and tv from the amazon video app and it's and it's fine and you can download many

episodes and fill up your device so i think i think it probably should be more and they only have themselves to blame they can't say oh don't blame us we're just the service it's fine. And you can download many episodes and fill up your device. So I think it probably should be more. And they only have themselves to blame. They can't say, oh, don't blame us. We're just the service. It's the publisher who demands on this. They're the publisher. It's direct from them. They should probably do more than 12. Because I just feel like you'd go on a long plane journey and you'd have 12 issues and then you finish it and you want the 13th and there's nothing you can do. You take longer flights than I do. But yeah yeah it's true it's true i wish there were more but it is you can you can stash away a dozen issues to read on a plane and that's nice so for someone like me then who's maybe thinking about getting back in and i whenever i have read

comics i like to just go through one series or something, you would maybe suggest Marvel Unlimited as a good option for me. Yeah. If you're trying to get back into comics and you like Marvel comics, Marvel Unlimited is a great deal because I can tell you, and I will in a little bit, give you reading suggestions. And instead of saying, well, I mean, we just did this. We just did a comic book club episode of The Incomparable that'll come out in the next few weeks. And I bought three trade paperback editions of that comic. It's Astro City by Kurt Busiek. And each one of them is like 13 bucks. So, you know, $39 later, I bought three trades. And they're good. They're really good. I'm going to buy more. It's going to be real expensive, but because there are like 13 of them.

But here's the thing. If you get Marvel Unlimited, which you could even try monthly, or like I said, I think the year, the annual deal is a great deal for 69 bucks or whatever it is. I can tell you, read this and this and this and this and this. And you already paid your entry fee. And you just read them and there's no extra charge and if you don't like one you don't feel bad that you spent money on it because you didn't you just you know you're in the door at that point and there's something really freeing

about that and the way comic book storytelling really happens oftentimes is it's runs over over many issues or even across different books and you read one and then you want to read the next and then you want to read the next and marvel unlimited is really great at that because you're not making a financial transaction every time you want to read the next one you just read the next one so what's comiXology unlimited there comiXology unlimited is is is uh like i said earlier it's it's like marvel unlimited in the sense that you pay a subscription fee and you have access to a certain number you can you know they have a library of comics you can save them on your device to read later you don't have to be online to read them but and it's with independent publishers instead of marvel or dc it's the it's the other

it's the smaller comic book publishers but the difference is most of what's in their library seems to be first trades or the equivalent first five issues, six issues, four issues of a lot of different comics. And then also it seems like month by month they go, things disappear and then other things reappear, which is not really what happens in Marvel Unlimited. They just keep adding stuff every month. So every week, in fact. So Comixology Unlimited is a little different in that it's not for, it's for discovery. When I interviewed David Steinberger, who's the CEO at Comixology and is the head of comics for Amazon. And that's how he described it to me was it's a discovery service. And I can see how they got the independent publishers on

board with this service is they're probably not making any money on it but what they're doing is essentially giving away free just to the people who who pay for the service but once you're in the door free samples of their comics the first few issues but the ultimate goal of that service seems to be to get you to buy more comics like buy more comics directly like you want the rest of this story after the first four issues you know the the second trade is never available or the third trade is never available on comiXology Unlimited because the goal of the product is to get you to buy those it's a taste Marvel Unlimited I mean I I guess part of the goal is to get you so into a storyline that you you can't wait for six months for it to show up on Unlimited and you'll go and buy it.

But it's really to make money from people out of their immense back catalog that is not really being monetized properly, I think they would say. And now they're getting $70 a year from me to read old comics that I wasn't going to buy. Or probably wasn't going to buy. So that's, or probably wasn't going to buy. I'm sure they're trading some trade paperback sales, but a lot of their stuff, a lot of those old comics are just out of print. And, you know, the money is in hand for me for my subscription. All right. So give me some, give me some suggestions.

What should I check out? What should people be checking out? Let's see. So if you do Marvel Unlimited, I recommend, I've got some standard recommendations, which is Hawkeye. Which I've read. By Matt Fraction. Okay. The new Ms. Marvel.

Have you read that? No. Willa Wilson? No. It's very good. have you read that no willow wilson nope it's very very good uh it's ms marvel has been ms marvel was a character invented in the 70s hence the ms that was supposed to be like super cutting edge in 1975 uh named carol danvers who got promoted to be captain marvel now and captain marvel is actually a good comic too um but then they made a new Ms. Marvel who is a girl who lives in New Jersey named Kamala Khan.

Oh, yeah. I've heard about this. And those are fun. Those are a lot of fun. Okay. Immortal Iron Fist is another one that I really like. That's done by the same guy who did Hawkeye, right? Who did Hawkeye, yeah.

Yeah, it's the same creative team more or less that did Hawkeye. Okay. It's very good. It's very good. yeah, it's the same creative team more or less that did Hawkeye. It's very good. It's very good.

Um, I'm currently on Marvel unlimited reading a mini series. That's only about half on Marvel unlimited now, but it's coming out called worst X-Man ever. Okay. This sounds great. Like whatever it is, it sounds good. It is hilarious.

It is a, it is a story about a guy who turns out to be a mutant and has to go live with the X-Men, but his X-Men power is terrible and he basically can't use it, but he has to live with the X-Men and it's funny. And it's actually written by the singer in a band I like, but he also is a comic book writer now. It's kind of funny how that happened.

His name is Max Bemis from the band Say Anything, but he is a comic book nerd supreme. I am reading the vision which is a weird weird comic about the uh the red-skinned uh android synthezoid whatever he is who you may remember from the avengers and uh civil war uh and in this he's uh got a family and he's living in the suburbs and it's so strange it's's a very strange comic but it's very smart. That sounds weird. Yeah, it is. And if you're a Star Wars

fan, Mike, are you a Star Wars fan? A little bit? You know I'm a Star Wars fan. The new Star Wars comic is on there on Marvel Unlimited because Marvel publishes it and of course it's all owned by Disney. The new Star Wars comic is pretty good and there's a Darth Vader comic that's also quite good actually uh and is set after the uh first

star wars movie where vader is kind of in the dog house because he let the death star get destroyed and what he does and and like the missions that he's on it's pretty clever i like that one a lot too that they've gotten those are it used to be that all the tie-in comics were written by people who were, you know, they were doing it because it was work and they were getting paid, but they, it was workmanlike at best and they left their best work often for the stuff that they were, you know, creating themselves. These Marvel comics about Star Wars are written by great comics writers who love star Wars and are, and Marvel, you know, and Disney and Lucas, you know, whoever is paying them is paying them well to write really good comics about this world that they love.

And so they're cut above most, uh, tie in kind of comics. So that's, uh, that's what I'm writing on unlimited. And then the other stuff that I'm reading that is largely through Comixology that I recommend to you and to other people. Like I said, Astro City, which came out in the 90s and is really great. It's amazing.

If you're a long-time comic reader especially, it's great. It's an anthology series about a city full of superheroes and the people who live there. It's pretty great. I'm reading The Fuse, which is a sci-fi procedural, crime procedural, which is by Anthony Johnston, who appears on The Incomparable Network in several places. Very good.

That's a really good sci-fi. It's like space. It's a crime sci-fi. It's like space. It's crime procedural in space. It's like homicide life on the street in a space station. It's pretty great. I'm reading morning glories, which is just had its 50th issue came out. It is a mind blowing,

complicated, if you liked lost, but thought that the mysteries on lost were not weird and complicated enough, Morning Glories. I recommend it for that because that's what it is. I am reading Amazing Spider-Man because I love Spider-Man. And the current run of Amazing Spider-Man is pretty good. And if you go on Marvel Unlimited, you can read the old...

Matt Fraction has been writing that for a few years now, and it's all pretty good. I'm also reading Spider-Man without the adjective, and that's the Miles Morales book. It's the follow-on. It's the successor to Ultimate Spider-Man, which is my favorite comic of the last decade, probably, by Brian Michael Bendis. I'm reading Invincible, which is by Robert Kirkman, the guy who did The Walking Dead. But this is his superhero comic. It's one of my very favorite comics i've read a ton of invincible it is so great surprisingly brutal which you would expect if you'd read the walking dead uh but it is so good so good yeah uh invincible is great and i'm up i've i've yeah that one i've been reading lisa

schmeiser turned me on to that one it's really good it's a and because it's an independent comic it's set in its own little universe so there's all sorts of superheroes that you've never heard of before who are the friends of invincible and and it's uh dramatic things can happen because they don't have to tie it in with 80 other comic books and dramatic things do happen in invincible um i'm reading buffy the vampire slayer season 10 uh they uh followed on from the show which is my favorite tv show of all time with now what is it uh three seasons of what happened next to those characters uh supervised by joss whedon the creator of the show and he wrote the first season and a half or something like that. And so it's fun to revisit those characters

in something that feels like it's semi-official. The Wicked and the Divine is a great comic that is about gods being reincarnated as rock stars, basically. It's good. It's weird, but it's good. And Saga, which everybody recommends but is truly a weird great comic so that's it that's what i'm reading more or less if you had wondered why the show notes are so huge this week that is why this is why because i have got links for all

of them as i've been connect collecting whilst you've been talking so they were all in our show notes which will be in your podcast app of choice which may have crashed uh or possibly at relay.fm upgrade 98 they will all be there jason there are some excellent picks and suggestions in there which i'm gonna have to check out i think and got to look at a bunch of these because i'm very interested very interested so i'm gonna do that i was reading them all on um so i was reading astro city yesterday and i i will say one of the other reasons in addition to the fact that i really like the software keyboard and i like the size of the screen one of the reasons that i really love the 12.9 inch ipad Pro is that comics look so good on it.

They look so good. It is just full-sized. It's beautiful. They look beautiful on that giant iPad screen. And they look good on the... I mean, I used to read comics on the iPad Mini and I sort of have to zoom in a little and pan around. And on the regular 9.7 iPad, they look good. But on that 12.9, they look amazingly good.

So that's, I recommend that 12.9 they look amazingly good so that's i recommend the 12.9 ipad pro for if you've got one it's a pretty great comic experience i gotta say yes i've just been looking for like little pieces of entertainment to break up my day yeah you know and i've been watching more youtube videos and stuff for that reason uh but this could be a really interesting and fun alternative yeah 20 a 22 page comic is a pretty good i do that sometimes clockwise uh we do on wednesdays and that's the day that the new comics come out and there's usually a comic that i buy on wednesday and often that's what i do is i will i will record and edit clockwise and post it and then i will um i'll read a comic and maybe make some lunch, and then I go about the rest of my day.

And it's a nice little mental break in there. Hey, that's a good way to start your day. So aside from all this comic talk, I think it's time for some Ask Upgrade. All right, let's do it. Luke asked, how does Mike decide between saying Apple, Amazon, Google companies? So let's say Apple is and Apple are. This is your mid-Atlantic language processing center now. You're part British, part American wording.

So the way that we're taught this and the way that it's done in English, English, is that a company or an entity like that is a sum of its parts, not one single thing. So to my mind, the way that I think is correct in my head is saying that Apple have or they, because it's a company of people and those people did that thing right that's how it is in my head it's a plural um mass counting object um and it's the same reason that brits will say the army are attacking yeah which makes because army is a plural mass count object it means a collection of many things there's not an army it's the army and the army is a plural but as with many things these days americans bloody americans it's moving all over the map for me right now and whilst it makes the most sense to me to say in the plural i am finding myself saying it in the singular and i have to know i noticed this a

couple of weeks ago you said apple r yeah i noticed this so i'm doing this to you no well so this is a this is actually a long-standing problem in covering companies like this because um i think i do think this is moving i think companies being referred to as as uh they rather than it is something that's happening in american english at least i see it in technology because um we always struggled with that like on the the macworld copy desk this was certainly always the case. It's like Apple is an it. Apple is not a they. And so what you'd say is, you know, you'd say the people at Apple,

the executives at Apple, if you could do that, the programmers at Apple, the developers at Apple, then you get to use they. But if you're just like Apple, you know, when it introduced the iPad is what you have to say because that's the rule.

Now, I kind of am lax on that these days because I feel like there's the colloquialism. I think that's ugly. I kind of agree. It's more accurate, but I don't think it's how people talk. I think, you know oh did apple come out with something new i love it when they do that right that's people say that right i love it when it does that i love it when it does that right the robot that apple disgorges a block it's like yay it did it it came out with a new thing hooray all hail the robot no it's it's a it's a

they because it is so i think that's i think people do think of these companies as as they is more than more than it's so i i think usage is tracking the other way there but the proper usage would be that apple is a is a singular in american english but i i do i do feel like there's uh it's always telling when people's instincts for conversation and how people refer to things casually are pulling away from the standard because that probably means the standard won't last because nobody talks like that and at some point that'll be the end of whatever that thing is so i do think that's happening but we still say the army is attacking not the army are attacking

matthew asked how long do you think Tim Cook will remain the CEO of Apple? 10 years from now would take him to around the age of 65. Is it more likely that he would hold a high profile job like this past retirement age? So past those 10 years, or because of the high profile nature of the job, would it be more likely that he would retire early? profile nature of the job would it be more likely that he would retire early interesting question i don't really have an answer for it right like my my thinking is and it's such like a pish posh answer is for as long as it's right for him to be there that could be a year or it could be 20 years right like we have no idea for as long as apple is doing well and as long as the board and everybody that works at apple are happy that he is there then have him be there

like there shouldn't necessarily be a an age limit that times him out of being the ceo right well there's also lots of uh succession planning stuff which is like the here's uh at some point is there somebody who he feels is as he's getting up on there that there's very clearly somebody who's he's training to be the ceo that was the case with steve jobs is although they never talked about it until literally until steve jobs needed to be replaced on an interim basis and then replaced when he resigned as CEO. They didn't talk about it, but Tim Cook was the succession plan, right? And I'm sure they have a succession plan if something happened to Tim Cook today. I'm sure they've got something in place about what would happen next. But over time, as Tim Cook starts to think about how long

do I want to do this, He seems like a very driven guy. And I think he's driven by not only by the success of Apple and by his own personal drive to be a success, but also by the thoughts that they're sort of the stewards of Steve Jobs's legacy. I think that he's going to be there a while, like with Steve Jobs, unless something happens and he's not able to do the job anymore. But a time will come when he will probably, ideally, I think he would step into a role in 10 or 15 years where he's the chairman of the board or something like that, right? And there's a new CEO and that he's still around for a while on the board.

I think that is a way that a lot of businesses handle transitions like that. But I don't know. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I think there would have to be some Apple calamity, which given Apple's current position seems unlikely for something like that to happen. So I think at this point, my gut feeling is that he's going to be here for quite a while. So I think at this point, my gut feeling is that he's going to be here for quite a while. I mean, I assume that considering the history of the company, now that there are always succession plans in place.

I'm sure there are, but it would be there's the in an emergency succession plan versus the plan for the future, the timed succession plan kind of thing and that those change over time and all of that but i i think apple also i would say is not a company unless you're a dummy who writes for business insider or something like that apple is not a company that even as a shareholder you look at and say oh what they really could use is somebody from the outside to to reform what they're doing like Like the whole story of Apple, right down to the training at Apple University, right, is doing it the Apple way and that nobody does it like Apple. And as a result, I would also say, you're never going to replace the CEO of Apple

with somebody from the outside. It's never, never, never going to happen. It would take- Again. It would take a calamity well yeah not since well look how well look how yeah great it worked with gillam well gillamelia was from the inside no gillamelia was not michael spindler was from the inside gillamelia was not from the inside and of course john scully was not from the inside but i you know since jobs has returned i mean the whole success that they've had since jobs

returned um is all about apple recognizing that it does things its own way and everybody tries to emulate apple i think it's unlikely that somebody maybe it could be somebody who was like great at apple and then went and did their own thing and was great with that and then could be brought back that could be a scenario but i don't see see it. I feel like Apple, this is not a job where there's any sanity for like, oh, what if Tim Cook, what if the shareholders get angry at Apple's sales being flat and they replace Tim Cook? It's like, I don't know. I don't know if there is somebody to replace him. And there certainly is not a scenario I see where they're going to bring in just some other tech industry CEO and pop them in and say, you fix Apple.

I don't even see that as a reasonable possibility, certainly anytime soon. It would take a calamity for that to happen. Reid asked, I'd like to buy a 13-inch iPad Pro for university, but should I wait for a possible iPad Pro 2 this fall? I don't think there's going to be another iPad Pro of any size until March of next year but if you can wait until the september event has passed then you should just in case

well yeah if you can if you can hold out but if you're going off to university probably going off sooner than that yeah so if yes i mean if for any reason you can like maybe you have a laptop and you're going to use the laptop for a bit and you're good to wait until September, then do that. But I don't think you're going to have a problem from that. I don't think we're going to see one in September. But if you can wait, you should. But I think it's going to be March. That's my gut feeling, too, is that they'll get them on synced up and they'll probably get them synced up in the spring on the year anniversary of the 9.7.

the in the spring on the year anniversary of the 9.7 clive asked do you think that the new iphone will have a true tone display like the 9.7 inch ipad pro i really do think so i think that this is like the new retina yeah i um yeah why not i think they will put this across the line um eventually that they'll you know you're adding a sensor and you're adding some color management. A lot of it's happening in software other than that sensor. Um, so yeah, yeah, I think, I think it'll go everywhere over time and I would be surprised if the new iPhone didn't have it. It's possible if they're going to really differentiate the plus model from the regular model that, uh, it could only be in the plus model. But I would put money probably on it being on both models. Yeah. And Brent asked, how do you, how does Mike say, Jason, can you say this so as not to

spoil it? It's my former employer. In fact, at one point, ZDNet from Ziff Davis, originally ZDNet. How do you say ZDNetd net well because obviously i say the letter zed right i don't say yes you do uh but i would still say zd net because that's the name of the company okay so you would say zd net yeah because they're not called zd net they're it's true they're not that's a terrible name zd net zd net i mean let's be honest zd net is not is a that much better.

So the story is that it was Ziff Davis Publishing, and they published PC Magazine and Mac User Magazine and PC Computing and Computer Shopper, all these magazines from the 80s and the 90s that people may remember if you're old, like me. And it was an enthusiast publishing company originally, and they was, it was, uh, it was a, an enthusiast publishing company originally. And they had, uh, like a flying magazine and a photography magazine and other magazines like that.

And, uh, by the time I got there in the nineties, you know, Bill Ziff owned it. Davis was long since gone. Um, and Ziff Davis publishing was it, but, but Bill Ziff wanted to retire and his sons wanted to be venture capitalists. They did not want to be in the publishing business. At the time, as an employee of Ziff Davis, I was like, oh man. And today I look back and I'm like, smart gentlemen, get out of the media business, sell that thing off, take the money, invest in other things. Good job, boys. So when they left, they started Ziff Brothers Investments, I think, or Ziff Investments. And one of the conditions of the sale of Ziff

Davis Publishing was the ceasing, because people shortened it to Ziff. Everybody would just call it Ziff. I work at Ziff. And the Ziff family didn't want that. The Ziff family wanted their name back. And the Ziff brothers wanted it on their investment firm. And so one of the conditions of selling it was to change it to not have Ziff Davis in the name. So they became ZD Publishing and ZDNet, which they had already done.

They had already changed that to ZDNet from ZipNet, which is actually what it had been before. And that's why that name exists. And it's a terrible name, but it was meant as a bridge to exist from Zip Davis Publishing. Why any vestige of that remains almost 20 years later or more than 20 years later is beyond me because i i think it is also a terrible name there little history little old history pull up a chair everybody let me let old uncle jason tell you about publishing in the 90s when magazines were printed on dead trees good times jason tom would like to know are you going to comic-con so this is tom zahler who does the fantastic love and capes web comic and i saw him on a panel a few years ago at comic-con

but i'm here like i'm sitting in my chair and it's comic-con week i'm not going to comic-con comic-con is huge uh i love san diego but i don't love san diego during comic-con week it's it's uh thursday is not so bad friday is kind of bad and the weekend is kind of just complete disaster so i may gin up the courage to go back to comic-con at some point in the next few years although it's harder now for me to get a press pass, I think, than when I was the editor in chief of Macworld. That was a lot easier. And quite frankly, I went because I thought the tech angle of comics on the iPad, which we talked about earlier today, was a really interesting story right after the iPad came out. Now it's just kind of part of the conversation. It's like not,

there are not so many story angles for me for that anymore. um so maybe someday but not this year um last year we inaugurated the uh official uh snell vacation strategy of for for years i would walk around comic-con and think boy i love san diego this place would be really nice if all these people weren't here for comic-con and so last year lauren and i went for a couple of nights to San Diego. We stayed in the hotel right next to the convention center and we were there the week before Comic-Con, the weekend before Comic-Con. This year we're going and we're staying in the Gaslamp District right next to the convention center. And we're going the week after Comic-Con. Why does it have to be around Comic-Con?

Well, because it's the summer and we're taking the kids down to visit with uh with her parents and the kids stay there for another week and a half or so um so the timing it tends to be just during the summer and for a few a few years it was timed so that i could go to comic-con and now it's time so that we can go not to comic-con so it's the kind of un-comic-con experience so tom if you're hanging around for an extra week after comic-con experience so tom if you're hanging around for an extra week after comic-con in san diego i will be there but otherwise i will not be there and our last question this week you mentioned this a bunch uh what is the weather station that you use in your backyard this come from josh i've heard this from a lot of people um i'm using a station that i installed when my son was born and he is now 11. So it's the Davis Vantage Pro. Davis still makes a Vantage Pro 2.

It's really expensive. It lasts. I can say that, that after almost 12 years in my backyard, it still functions. And in fact, I've even upgraded a couple of things on it. So it functions better now in some ways.

I had to replace the little backup battery a couple of times, it. So it's, it functions better now in some ways. I had to replace the little backup battery a couple of times, but it's still working. There are lots of other options. One of these days I will try to do a survey of weather stations, but like Netatmo makes one that's a lot less expensive and you can tie them all into Weather Underground. And so there are a lot of other options out there. Davis is not particularly Mac-friendly. I'm using a piece of Mac software called WeatherCat that is compatible with a lot of different weather stations that are out there because it turns out a lot of these weather stations are not Mac-friendly. And WeatherCat isn't fantastic, but it's fine.

It's good. It lets me build my custom web page of uh my weather station and also upload my data to weather underground where i can see it in apps and stuff but uh but even something like the netatmo stuff which i think starts at like 150 bucks or something is uh is uh is gonna be good um and then you can add sensors and stuff to it whereas the the thing that i've got probably costs like eight or nine hundred dollars all right so i think that about wraps it up for this week it's 68 degrees uh fahrenheit right now mike i just uh little little weather information for you a little weather update good to know we're in the high 80s today 20 c it's 20 c so yeah cool we've had we have a cooling trend we're in a

heating trend it's not pleasant here right now. Yeah, it shouldn't be warmer in London than it is anywhere in the United States ever. It's 27 degrees Celsius right now. Well, at least one of us is having a summer. And it's going up to 32 degrees Celsius tomorrow.

So, old Mike will be seeing things when he's recording. Goodbye. With all the windows and doors closed. Turning into a So old Mike will be seeing things when he's recording. With all the windows and doors closed. Turning into a big blob of a man. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you want to find our show notes for this week, head on over to relay.fm. Thanks again to our sponsors as well.

The great folk over at Pingdom and Smile for helping support this episode. If you would like to find jason online head on over to sixcolors.com and he is at jay snell on twitter j s n e double l i am at imike i m y k e this show is part of relay fm if you enjoy this show and enjoy podcasts we have many more that you may enjoy go to relay.fm and you can find some for yourself today thank you so much for listening we We'll be back next time with episode number 99. Until then, say goodbye, Jason. Goodbye, everybody.