96: The Windows of Siracusa County

I was thinking of closing some of my pro windows that I've opened for five years now. And then I thought better of him. I have upgraded my podcasting set up, but I have not yet posted about it on my site. Has it really happened to them, Casey?

The podcast set up upgrades in the woods and no one hears about it on your blog. I've spent $10 before tax to upgrade my podcasting set up. Hmm. I look at that be.

You will not guess, but I would love to hear you try. $10 for the Snickers bars. I'm guessing it's either software or okay, or I was going to guess like a giant blanket or something, but you still sound a little bit echo. So it's probably not that.

No, it's the blanket still on the wall. No air and keeps asking me to take it down. The chat room is getting in on it. It is not a spit filter, although I like that even better than pop filter.

The microphone that I'm using now has one built in. No, it is not gold audio table. No, it is not a heating pad. Yes, $10.

You can't get a gold audio cable for $10. Yeah, exactly. Gold cable start at $30. I will give you one better.

I will try to give this away. I purchased this $10 item from Apple. Can you purchase anything for $10 from Apple? That's not software?

Yeah, how about that? Yeah, I was going to say a thunderbolt to either of the doctor is like 19. Yeah, I mean, like you can't go into the Apple store by anything for less than at least 15. I succeeded in doing exactly that.

Hmm. I thought it was $10. And it was not software, you said. It is not software.

Was that it's actual like regular price or was it really put something on sale at the stores? What are they selling $10? Did you get a sim removal tool and somehow pay $10 for it? This is much more.

Screen protectors are 15. At least. This is much more entertaining than I thought it was going to be actually. This would become a topic.

It's like, what can you buy in an Apple store for $10? Wait a second. Is it a retail Apple store? Yes.

No, no, no retail. And the chat room, the chat room is figured it out. Oh, MagSafe adapter. Yep.

$10. Wow. Wow. I thought that would be $19 too.

I thought that would be a product sold in an Apple store. So is this so your laptop won't run out of battery power during the podcast or something? I used to use my work, high-resantic layer 2011 MacBook Pro, 15-inch MacBook Pro, but the fans constantly screamed no matter what I did. No matter what I did, they were always screaming.

And Marco was very gentle about basically telling me to shut up and deal and use a different computer. And so eventually, I had gotten Aaron a brand new MacBook Air. This was a few months ago. I got her a brand new MacBook Air and I started borrowing that in order to record.

Well, unbeknownst to Marco and John, I was doing this on battery power on Wi-Fi. Oh my god. If Dan Benjamin ever heard this, he will probably fly to Richmond and murder me. I'm so happy you never told us that.

You're welcome. That was the right call. Now, I'm still on Wi-Fi, but now at least I'm plugged into the wall. No, the Wi-Fi thing I'm less concerned about because I know you're a nerd.

I know you're set up, but I know you're probably right next to your router. I am indeed. And Wi-Fi is not as reliable as it used to be. Modern Wi-Fi is really not that bad if you're near the base station.

But the running on battery thing, that would stress me out like crazy. Even if I was 100% like I would always have that stress. Even if I had a fully charged eight-hour battery, it would still stress me out. And the macro carrier does last in eternity, but I kid you not.

Those times that I told you I needed to go because my battery was dying. That was not a lie. That's because the battery was dying. And real time follow up from me to me.

It was $10.52 with text. Oh my god. That's incredible. And I will also say that I walked in with my dad who happened to be in at the time and I was all smug and happy with myself because he has a 5S.

I have a 6. I was going to go in, use the Apple Store app. I was going to use Apple Pay within the app and walk out and not have to speak to anyone. Well, that would mean that you could actually find this adapter on a wall display where you could get it and someone didn't have to go into the back or whatever and get it for you.

So as it turns out, it was on the floor, although it was on the opposite side of the store from where I expected. If you're looking at any given Apple Store, any normal one, any other genius bars in the back, I thought it was to the right. It turns out it was to the left. And so I actually, the person had a cost to me in a happy way when I walked in because it was surprisingly empty.

And they directed me to the thing and I said, okay, I'll just pay for it with the app in a nice way. You can go away now. Well, then I go to open the Apple Store app and it hangs. So I think to myself, self, I'm a smart guy.

I know there are Ibeacons all over the place in this store. I wonder if having Bluetooth on is somehow confusing it. So I turned Bluetooth off. Force quit.

Nothing still hangs self. Maybe it realizes that the Apple Store Wi-Fi is nearby. You should kill the Wi-Fi and that'll do the trick. Well, then it doesn't even work after that.

Yeah, because I have 18T. No, but I'm saying it doesn't even know that you were in the Apple Store if it doesn't have one of those things. Ah, good point, actually. I didn't think about that.

That's a very fair point. So I, of course, got the app turned off the Wi-Fi started the app again. It did work. So fine.

So eventually I have to go over there to someone with my tail between my legs and say, hey, can I play for this please? Because I can't do it on my iPhone or by myself. And so then this nice person allows me to pay and I say to my dad not thinking really about what I was saying, oh, my Apple Pay Moment is ruined. And then the gentleman said, well, no, it's not.

You can Apple Pay right here. And then because I had the thought of Ibekans in my head, I thought, oh, and the thought of using Apple Pay and app, I thought, oh, well, I guess I don't have to turn Bluetooth on, aren't I? And I say that out loud. And then I realized the absurdity of what I just said because it's all NFC.

It's like how doctors make the worst patients. Yeah, seriously. That never makes the worst Apple Pay. And so that's the thing is that I said out loud.

That was my critical mistake saying it out loud. Oh, I should probably turn Bluetooth on, shouldn't I? And then I realized the absurdity of what I said. And he just sets his iPod touch on the counter.

And I realized what he means. And so I put my phone on top of his iPod touch, which sounds awkward, but it wasn't. And sure enough, everything worked no problem. Well, then it gets better because I start to walk away thinking, oh, he'll send me my receipt, no problem because they know what my credit card is and they'll send automatically.

I just said it's the exact same issue. And they go to walk away and then the guy says, oh, do you want your receipt? And I say, oh, yeah, can you email it to me? And whatever the email is on file.

And he looks and he's like, oh, I don't have an email on file. And at that point, it occurs to me. The whole free-conpointing Apple Pay is that I have the device, whatever, whatever ID. So it's a unique credit card number for the device.

Of course they don't have it because I've never used it there before. So basically, I should not be allowed in an Apple store on Supervices. The only way this could have gone worse is maybe if your credit card was declined and then you left the thing in the store. That's true, actually.

Or the payment didn't go through, but you didn't know it. So you started walking out and you get tackled by security. You're still flipping a $10 max, Avid, Avid. Exactly.

Anyway, do you want to start with some follow-up? We have so much follow-up. We have a lot. It's not a lot.

It says the king. All right, let's talk about a transmit, the app by panic. What happened with them, John? So they got their app rejected for, what was it, for like sending exporting files to iCloud or something we complained about in the past two shows.

And I think towards the end of our last show, bimoning the state of the app store and the various rejections, I said, both the worst and the best thing that could happen is that these people who have had their apps rejected get contacted by someone in Apple and they quietly work other differences and their apps are reinstated. And I said, that's the best thing that happened because, hey, we get the apps that we wanted. Those application developers get their apps onto the store just like they wanted. And it seems like everybody's happy, but it's the worst thing that can happen because this is what happens all the time.

Like, there's some problem. A bunch of people get their apps rejected or pulled from the store. There's lots of blog posts about it. We all complain.

Apple contacts them, quietly works it out with them and puts them back in. And then it's like, it just repeats itself. Like, we never get our Christ-a-tunity. We never get bad enough that something has to be done.

I can't say that's necessarily the case this time because sometimes the outcome is the app gets pulled. There's a whole bunch of people complain and Apple doesn't change its mind. An example of that from the early days would be like any ass emulators or main type things or all sorts of things that have been on the store briefly and immediately pulled because they don't have to do emulation or run code or stuff like that. Apple pretty much hasn't budgeted on that except for scripting engines and games and other little gray areas.

I think I mentioned I ran into the guidelines. But it doesn't always turn out positively. But this type of thing where they make them decisions, they linger, we have to make a bunch of noise, and then it gets worked out. That never makes anything get better.

We're not making progress. If we were making progress, the cycle wouldn't keep repeating itself. So that best worst thing that was going to happen did happen. And I just saw someone add to the notes that didn't just happen for transmit, also happened for drafts which got pulled for its extension.

And of course we talked about PCALC which got rejected and reinstated. So it's good in this case the apps that we want to see on the store actually get on the store eventually. It's bad in that it doesn't seem like Apple's making forward progress. The only hope I have is that under this new Apple regime where Tim Cook is less stubborn.

Tim Cook's Apple seems to me to be slightly less stubborn than Steve Jobs was. Is it because Tim Cook is less stubborn than Steve Jobs? Maybe I'm just projecting? I don't know.

But we already talked about how the engineering organization has made progress in doing things that previously they were quote unquote too stubborn to do. Whether that was a corporate directive or whatever but for years there were things we wanted to be in there that never going to let you use custom keyboards in iOS and they did. Extensions and all that other stuff. That is good forward progress.

And it could be. I'm hoping I'd hope maybe that some one high up in the organization is sent the word down to the app store needs to do less of this stuff. And maybe the next time this happens we'll have a better, faster response or maybe this won't happen again in the same way. I don't know.

I mean we'll just have to wait. But for some reason I find myself slightly more optimistic. Even though the best thing did happen, I find myself slightly out of the way that Tim Cook's going to be like, why do we keep seeing all these stories about this stuff? Why can't we get a rack together on that?

Because what is it that we're doing that's making us do these things and reversing ourselves? Obviously we're not even happy with our own decisions. Because it's not like they're reversing, I don't think, because of pressure. It's like inattention.

You know, the banal evil of inattention where it's like, is there something going on there? Does somebody reject something? Why don't we take a look at that? And by the time people take a look at it, they're like, oh, this is panic.

They're great. Why are we rejecting for this? This thing is just fine. You know, like they reverse because if the best minds in the company were put on it, they never would have rejected it in the first place.

They're rejected because of the whims of some individual reviewer or something. And that is a structural problem, the fact that that type of thing can happen and not be resolved without a long time passing. Anyway, so there you go. Well, and this is a little bit better.

A full on rejection is a little bit better than what some developers go through. Mark Christian wrote me a little while ago, a couple weeks ago, saying that he's one of the developers of the app, Dragon Drop, that's D-R-A-G-O-N-D-R-O-P, which I've mentioned a long time ago on the show. Anyway, he wrote in, he said, I have another idea, excuse me, another app in the store called Time Bar. When I tried to publish an update for Yosemite, the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable.

And I think that's because it kind of paints the menu bar as a progress meter. And the idea of the app, I guess, is to count down and tell you, like, get up or walk around or maybe, you know, the turkey's done or what to have you. Anyway, so that review decided that the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable. It violates the max menu bar and rejected me.

So he's stuck in limbo because it isn't kicked out of the store, but he can't update it. And that's an even worse place to be than a full on rejection, as far as I'm concerned. And get the hell out of here. But I mean, I guess maybe that's what panic had to deal with.

I don't know, I guess so. Maybe that is the same. You can always pull your own app, right? Yeah.

I mean, I just did so. Because you don't have to use the Mac App Store. You know, on iOS, if you have that, when iOS, like your product is just dead, like you will never be able to do that product again in that way. And so I feel less bad for Mac developers in this regard, just because there is another option there.

And it's not a bad option. Whereas the iOS option is like, well, you can put it on the studio store. That's like the iOS equivalent of like, you know, we can go live in the woods. There's nothing like that is not a business model.

And please, in case you disagree. I think that it's important to when we hear things like transmit and drafts getting their bad decisions reversed. You know, the reason why we were mad about this is not that we disagreed with the rule. I mean, some of us might have disagreed with the rule, but that's not the main reason why this is so destructive.

The main reason why it's so destructive is that we can't tell in advance what the rules will be. And Apple's refusal to document more of these rules. And again, part of that is just because they haven't decided it yet. And I recognize that's an issue.

But part of it also is like at the very top of the rules document, it says this is a living document and it's been pretty dead for a long time. Like, there's a lot of rules that are not on it. A lot of newer rules that have seemingly no intention of ever getting on to it. And it just seems like, you know, when Apple does things with many of the rules, it just seems like, well, that makes sense.

Like, it's common sense or you can see why they're doing it. Like, that's a sensible rule. It's not, you can't really argue too much with it or you at least see their point of view. And you can predict when you're developing an app like launcher.

I totally get that that was going to be rejected because they've had a longstanding rule against kind of these like, like home screen kind of like home screen within an app style of apps, launchers like that. Like they've had a lot of issues with those in the past. So there are certain rules that developers all know, like, okay, you know, this idea for an app before I even start building it. This will almost certainly get rejected.

So I shouldn't build it. The problem is when the rules start getting really capricious and unpredictable and unjustifiable, then developers start wasting time or actually shipping apps first and then they get rejected later, which they're really just put their customers in addition to wasting all the time of having that being built. You know, it's pretty bad when developers waste months on something that they're pretty sure is going to get approved. The worst part is that it's like Apple doesn't speak with one voice on any of these things.

I mean, again, the reversals are not because they change their mind, but just because the corporation as a whole believes that the panics app should be allowed. The people who are the individuals who are tasked by decision at that particular time said, no, so what I was thinking of is, you know, what if we had a, you know, if you have a questionable app or feature idea as part of your dev membership, by all, you get two or three of these, you know, instead of technical support and send it, you can say, ask Apple, I am playing a feature like this and you just describe it before you've written a line of code. Will this be allowed in the store and have a system whereby if they say, yes, it will be allowed in the store, but you have some reasonable hope that that answer is meaningful in any way. Well, that's hard though.

Barring a rule change. If you were to ask, you know, like the same type of people who came up with the decision now to say, transmit is loud in the store with that feature, right? When faced with this question, hey, there's a feature, say that same group of people, whoever they are, were faced with the same question before panics written a single line of code and said, we're thinking about this feature to transmit, it's going to do X, Y and Z, is that going to be allowed? Those same people hopefully could come up with the same answer six months ago.

Like I don't think that much has changed since then. And say, yeah, go ahead, build that or, you know, or just be able to ask them ahead of time. But the idea now is like, if I can get somebody in an app or you want to ask them, depending on who I get an app or view, the answer means nothing because if I get a different person on my app is reviewed and they don't share information, oh, yeah, I said that guy could do that feature and it's okay. Or like, even if the answer is we don't know yet and we have to like sort of regroup and have a big meeting and decide whether it's like, do that beforehand, like ideally do that before you even write the guidelines and put it in the guidelines.

But say something they never thought of, like, we never considered this because that can happen. We never even considered doing this in an application. We'll get back to you. And then you're kind of in a holding pattern, but at least you're not like either just guessing or like asking the best sources you do have and then them telling you probably yes, no, it was me nothing, right?

The idea that the company can't decide, can't speak with one voice on this. There is no one voice. And I know there's millions of app developers and everything one of them can be bugging Apple and saying, can I have this feature? But that's why I'm saying like, it would have to be a limited resource like technical support and synins because there's a cost associated with it and so on and so forth.

But this is, I think this is a system that could work if, again, Apple could get us actually other with app store stuff. And some of the things like, oh, you know, if a situation they didn't think of some of these things with like sending a file to Alkaw Drive, like people were baffled because like, Margaret has said, well, it's not because we didn't like the rule. In this case, like what rule? You know, the rule they were saying didn't even mention I-Cloud Drive.

And the second thing is everyone said, isn't that the whole point of I-Cloud Drive? Maybe we're misunderstanding what the one in my cloud drive was, but that's supposed to be able to send files that like, it's, it's a, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. And clearly, you know, the so-called living document hasn't been updated to reflect all these new things we've got. Like, there's no new clauses or anything in there for all these features that we got in iOS 8.

I'm still going to say that Apple's dealing with a server-side software and services is worse than this. But this is probably the app store, the iOS app store, I guess the Mac app store too, are there worse externally visible administrative problems in the company, I think? These kind of decisions are usually not like one random reviewer somewhere. Usually it gets escalated at least a couple of levels.

From my understanding, from what I'm kind of hearing rumblings of, this is a mid-level fight with an Apple. Like, it's a mid-level conflict between mid-level department. Well, there are always mid-level things, but like, when a mid-level thing, like, when stories start coming out and when people are writing blog posts, that becomes the message of the day is, Apple did something bad and we're angry about it. Eventually, there's mid-level fights, because I started to filter up to the higher levels, the higher levels of people go, what's going on down there with you guys?

I saw some stories about this thing, I was like, nobody likes bad press, nobody likes it, you know, and if it gets up to their level, then all of a sudden, you know, whoever it is, a more senior vice president goes down to mid-level people and says, you know, get your stuff together, what the hell are you guys doing? Work it out when your internal problems end up, you know, on the pages of, you know, tech news sites, we have a problem. And if that happens too many times, hopefully somebody really high up will be like, we have a structural problem here and we need to sort this out. Like, it seems like they did sort out and decided to do an engineering side, they made massive structural changes that have resulted in what we feel on the outside is positive change, right?

Right, and you can tell, like, you know, we, right now nothing is resolved, you know, with transmit getting approved, draft getting approved, this doesn't actually resolve anything yet. What will resolve this is if we stop hearing about things like this, where it's like, oh, surprise, there's this rule no one could have predicted and we're going to have to enforce it with some apps. Like, that's the problem here. So this, I hope that that that that upgrade that happened in engineering got them to increase collaboration and, you know, in Tim Cook's words, I hope they can apply that to this area, too, because clearly this is not like one rogue employee making bad decisions.

This is clearly an ongoing conflict within, you know, like the middle of these organizations that somebody has to resolve and it's not going to resolve itself at the levels. It's obviously there's some kind of back and forth going on here that's not good. We didn't even talk about this last time, but some we had a link in last week's show notes that was about that post where I think it was someone quoting from, either quoting from or like recalling what someone told them over the phone and the idea was that, again, I think this is hearsay, but like the launcher developer. Right.

It said that the App Store people said, we rejected your app because it's a high profile app and we figured by rejecting your app, you know, a lot of people will notice and it will get the message out to the rest of the developers that they shouldn't do things like you've done, like they were making an example of you. Like that's there. Someone supposedly articulated this philosophy of App Store of how we can communicate our policies. We don't write them into guidelines.

Instead, we pick a high profile app and make an example of it. So all the other application developers see its head on the on the on the pike and you know, not to go there anymore. What this developer did, which is a, it's amazing. Someone would say that out loud to a developer and be even if that's your secret strategy, it's a terrible secret strategy too.

Like that is not the correct way to communicate to your application developers. There are better ways. Yeah. That's what I called disgusting on my blog because it's like that is really, truly disgusting.

And yeah, so it was the developer of launcher. I think his name is correct. I mean, well, I look up in the show notes. And yeah, he was paraphrasing the conversation he had with like a reviewer called him in response to some of his inquiries, but that's what they do.

Like you inquire and then if you're lucky, you get like a random phone, this is what I said, as the agent's phone call. You get like a random phone call from somebody who usually you don't get a name or any way to like contact them again. This is a one way, one time phone call coming from like the main Apple switchboard number. Like you can't, there's nothing you can do about it.

And they're usually very terse. I've got a couple of these calls for various questions I've asked where she's ever run into and usually they're pretty terse because they know that there's a good chance they're going to be quoted and put on a blog somewhere. And so they conserve words and they're very non-committal with me to things they say. And occasionally you'll get somebody who is a little bit more helpful and he did.

And I think they were a little too helpful in explaining why they're doing some of these things. And that is true. I mean, we don't have any validation. We won't ever get any validation from Apple whether this is true or not.

I don't think he has any reason to lie about it. And even if he's exaggerating about it, it's even then it's still pretty terrible. And those people who call, those are mid-level people. That's not the person who spends six minutes with 10,000 apps a day.

That is a mid-level manager you're talking to. That's like through the approval review board or whatever they call it. That's where that phone call comes from. So anything they say usually is pretty credible as the current policy of app review.

I'm still here to say before I'm going to let the developer say that someone from Apple said, I'm just saying this is not a confirmed thing. No, but I'm saying I'm sure the nitty gritty details are probably suspects because people have bad memories. I don't know if you recorded the call, probably not. But the big picture, the general idea is probably right.

And if the person who called him said that, that is not the actions of just one little employee somewhere buried in Apple, that's the actions of a mid-level person. And that's substantial. So I'm all depressed now. So why don't you tell me about something that's really cool?

Absolutely. So we have something a little bit special this week. A song sponsor. This is a song instead of me doing a sponsor read.

It's not a fish song is it? No, it is way better than that. It is a Jonathan Manzahn. Oh, that is way better.

Yeah, see, we got it. We got it good one this time. This is for dash at the dash.com. Before I just play, I got to keep you a quick story.

So I met Scott O'Reilly from Dash at Singleton this year. He came up to me and said, hi, I'm the guy from Dash. And for the first 20 or 30 seconds of that conversation, I thought he was the guy who made the developer documentation app Dash, which is a documentation app that runs on the Mac. I was going to guess Mrs.

Dash. He was not salty. The first 20 or 30 seconds, I said some things that probably did not make any sense to him at all. Like, looking back on it, it was pretty embarrassing.

And the truly embarrassing thing is I never corrected it. Like, I never said, oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were that other guy. I just kind of realized it.

I just kind of rolled with it. So here I am during his ivory. I'm first going to apologize to him publicly because I still haven't told him that. So this is my coming out on that.

And second of all, he was such a nice guy that even if he thought what I was saying didn't quite make sense, he didn't let on at all. He just rolled with it. And as far as I can tell, I was not busted there. So if you knew, he was nice enough not to embarrass me.

And so anyway, he's a really nice guy. And so here it is, the Jonathan Man song for dash at the dash.com. We got damage dash, where you can easily create real time. Dashboards to show information.

There are dozens of pre-built widgets for services like app figures, Google analytics, get up. And don't forget Twitter, go to the dash.com. You don't need no credit card, go to the dash.com. Play with it because it is fun.

We got damage dash. You can also show custom doodle. It's got a great API to share from Dropbox or the web. Things like lion's shots, speedometer, tables, or use, eye to brain.

The pricing model is a lot like GitHub. All the public dashboards are free. $10 a month, unlimited private dashboards could be yours. So go to the dash.com.

They're currently running up promotion. If you sign up at the dash.com private dashboards, you'll be able to get one. Go to the dash.com. You don't need no credit card.

So go to the dash.com and play with it because it is fun. So thanks a lot to the dash.com. Go there and check out dash. It's pretty cool.

And the guy who runs this guy is really, really nice. Thanks a lot to dash. Go to the dash.com. All right.

So the whole of the internet has sent us a link with regard to crossy road, which I almost called crossybird. It was built by two Victorians, Andrew Sum, who's 24, and Matthew Hall, who's 39. And one of the other things they said that the game has generated enough for them to retire. Quote, seven figures is correct, one of them said.

So that answers the question as to whether or not they're making any money on this game. And it sounds like the answer is, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. To be fair, my original statement, when they were positioned at number five top free app, but number 200 top grossing, my original statement was that basically it was probably out of proportion, that they were not really making as much money as they probably should with that level of free downloads.

And then, of course, last week, after a couple of updates, changed it and dramatically improved their rank. So yeah, good job for them. What's interesting thing in the story is that who is this? So one of the developers who's saying is a quote, we always wanted to build a popular game, but we didn't think we could build a game that could generate money.

Everyone else in the industry will tell you that you need to squeeze people and they need to do this and that and get something behind a payball. So I'm not told that if you're not making Clash of Clans Clans Clans, you're doing it wrong. I felt very, very strongly that there were other ways of doing this. So they had the same doubts about like, can we make a game that isn't annoying, that monetizes in a nice way, they wanted to make a popular game, but they didn't think they could build a popular game that would actually generate money because they didn't want to do all the scummy things that all those free to play games do.

And so this is a feel good story because they made a great game, they did it the way they wanted with extremely gentle monetization. And they made a lot of money. And as Marco said, they could have made even more money. But once you're into enough money to retire, I think they're going to enjoy their retirement a lot more, having made a game that they're proud of rather than having even doubled the money, but just feeling bad about the way they got it because they seem like that kind of people.

And one of the developers said it took him, what did he say, six weeks to get all the characters by playing the game, like not paying any money. And he says other people have done it two weeks. So he made this game and they knew it was both possible and probably pretty darn fun to not pay a cent and play the game. And yet they're still in there making tons of money because half of it is make a really good game.

And the other half is make a really good game that happens to get some traction in the market. And you kind of need both of those, but making a really good game helps a lot. Yeah, definitely. And like I said, it is a happy story.

And that really doesn't make me feel good for not having paid anything. I still haven't paid anything for it because I just play with Black Sheep all the time. I want it in a gumball machine. Nice.

I should give somebody for it eventually. I don't know. And no one of my families paid for it. None of my kids have paid.

My wife has found out that when you get the trial thing where it shows you, hey, try out these three characters for a limited time, she tells me that when they offer them to you at the discounted price, that you can pay for them with the little coins that you get for free. So you don't have to put any actual money in it. And you can still quote unquote by the characters that are offered to you for trial, which is yet another way that they're not getting money from you. So you can really pick up these fake coins in the game and use the fake coins about the characters.

No real money ever passes to us at all. Yeah, they really surprising, but it shows that it can be done, which is which is really exciting. Tell us about your PlayStation 4 and DLNA support. Yeah, I was complaining about how crappy the PS4 is media center features are compared to the PS3.

That was kind of part of the fact that the PS4 was like, no, this is a game machine. It's not a media center like the Xbox one, like it's kind of a differentiator. So also probably a prioritization thing where like Sony was concentrating on making the best console or playing games hardware wise. And if that's your priority, you're going to put all the other stuff off.

Alberto Sendra sent a tweet that said the rumor is that DLNA support is coming in early 2015 and that the hold up was it was waiting for a final certification on a new DLNA spec. So that could have been an also another reason it was being delayed, but I'm glad you hear that it's coming. And Ben Wu was the first person to tweet at me. The story that Plex is coming to the PS4.

In fact, depending on what country you live in, it may already be out for the PS4. It's not out yet for the US because as Plex says on the link will put in the show notes, Sony has multiple business units to cover different regions. And each of the business units needs to approve the app. And so the approval processes don't all go in sync.

And I think Sony's probably occupied with things at this point. Anyway, we're waiting for them to approve the Plex app for the US store. And once that is available, I don't know if it's going to be free or pay or what. Since the mental processor and Plex is available for million other things anyway.

So multiple media related features are on their way for the PS4. And I'm happy about it. And we never found a compatible Bluetooth remote, did we? No one said when I asked and no one has sent me any tweets or anything.

Although a couple people have said their harmony remote works with it, if you want to buy harmony remote. Well, didn't world in the chat says apologies for recommending the harmony. Apparently it's limited a.k.a. No playback controls.

Other people have tweeted at me that like there, someone said, hey, I use my harmony with it. And I tweeted them which was the exact model that you have and didn't get a reply. I mean, there are, like I said, there are IR solutions where you can buy a little, you know, USB IR dongle or something and shove it in there. But almost get better views.

And I don't want that anyway. But yeah, no rumors of a media remote yet, but I'll get the media center features first, I guess. Fair enough. In the last episode, I think it was, certainly recently we talked about Twitter ad creepiness.

And this was spoken about kind of violently on a recent episode of connected on relay FM. And a little birdie told us that they had Twitter in their offices for a few hours in the last couple of weeks. And supposedly Twitter said they had over 20 million devices that opted into that creepy thing where the Twitter app will scan what other apps are on your device. So if you have the latest Twitter app version, you could have opted out of this.

Apparently I have never even run the official Twitter app in ages, but the little like cancel or X or whatever was so small that everyone literally just missed it. But apparently according to Twitter, according to this little birdie, it was done entirely to build up some new ad targeting capability they're rolling out next year. And with regards to what John was saying about, well, maybe Apple is going to do something about this, but either because Twitter is big or maybe they can't because Twitter is big. Well, apparently they're the number five globally ranked iOS app.

And so Apple is extremely aware of what Twitter is up to, all that from a little birdie. Aware, but then it's like, OK, so they're talking. They're like, you know, they're not going to just be like, well, you know, some middle person that's just going to pull the Twitter app. It sounds like these are going to be more higher level negotiations between the companies to discuss what their app is doing and to work out something.

And I'm hoping that's happening now. If it's not, then Apple is dropping the ball because they're just not paying attention, you know, or they see it happening and don't care and figure well with people who don't know. But I can't fathom the strategy. Like it's so this whole thing is just so at odds with everything else they do.

We just talked about the Apple pay stuff and how it's not sending you the information case you would like to share with the Apple stars is complete anonymity. And, you know, we don't collect your data. We won't let the NSA look at your messages, you know, all this, all this stuff. And then, but we'll let the Twitter app scan every app on your thing and report back for ad targeting like that.

It's crazy. And it's important to clarify too that it isn't just Twitter that does this. There are lots of other, there are ad packages out there, and it looks packages that many apps integrate that do the same kind of like super creepy scanning for all the apps you have installed thing. And that's why I think really, I think Apple should care about this problem because as I said last week, it does violate the perceived walls that exist between apps and iOS.

Like, I as a user assume that apps can't creep on each other, like that they can't look around and see everything else on your system. And they can't see your data. But even the list of apps you have installed, that can do things like probably pretty easily uniquely identify you within like maybe an IP range and so all these different things Apple's trying to do to reduce the ways they can uniquely identify you between app installs. Those are out the window or between apps from the same vendor.

Those are all out the window. All the other other data that's done with this stuff. Like, so, you know, Apple has done things in this area before that show that they care about this problem. I would say this is a similar facet to that problem of user privacy expectations and device tracking and uniqueness there.

And so I hope Apple is thinking about taking steps in the OS to make this technically impossible, or at least substantially more limited than how it is now. Anyway, also related to this, I said last week that in iOS 7 and forward, Mac addresses return as all zeros. The best QA engineer I've ever met, Nick Arnott, who knows how to break everything that I've right, also broke that statement. It points out that that's close, but it's actually zero two followed by all zeros.

So there's mostly zero. There's a single two in there. Thank you to Nick Arnott for finding a little bug as I said once again. Mostly zero's mean slightly non-zero.

Yeah, that's, I don't know what that's wrong. That's right. Sorry. I got nothing.

I haven't done one in a while, hey. All right. John, why don't you tell us about the Google Authenticator app that you are overjoyed with? Two groups of three.

So this is the Google Authenticator app that you run that gives you your little time-based two-factor authentication code. It's just got a set of a six-digit number that changes every, you know, 30 seconds or whatever the interval is. And so when you're logging with two-factor authentication, you put in your name, your password, and then it gives you a challenge, it says enter your code, then you take your trusted device, like your phone or whatever, and you read this number off of it. It's a six-digit number.

If you read this number off and type it in a lot of boxes, as you tend to do when you first enable it, it's not so bad after that, you'll find it annoying that you have to transcribe a six-digit number under mild time pressure. Although some iOS apps make it worse because I've just recently used an iOS app where it challenges you with the code. But if your Google Authenticator is on the same device, of course, then you have to do the double-tap home if it's in a multitasking switcher or single-tap home to go to the Google Authenticator app to get the number. Look at the number.

Now you have to memorize the number because you have to switch back to the other apps. You memorize the number, switch back to the other app, and when I would do that with this one app, I forget what it was. I would resume the other app and it would immediately take me back to the username and password screen. Away from the...

So then I was under time pressure based on how much time was left to enter on the iOS keyboard with no autocomplete. My username and password were pretty darn long and then entered that six-digit code. But my complaint to many, many shows ago, I don't remember when, was that Google Authenticator app presents a six-digit number and does not present it as two groups of three numbers. It just has a six-digit number all stuck together, which is crazy because it's like the USB connector and all these other things.

It's like, if your job is to make this application and if what this application does is display a six-digit number, what are you even thinking about? I say, how can I do my job? Well, thank you for, you know, your only job is to display a number. Your only job is to make a connector.

Like, what is it that makes you go to connector? What is it that makes it easy to look at and transcribe a three-digit number? You always break long numbers into groups. What do you think credit card numbers are broken up into groups of four?

Like, phone numbers. Like, you don't just put all the numbers together. Six is too many. So anyway, Alex Andrei Duhill tweeted at me that the new update to the Google Authenticator app has two groups of three numbers finally.

And then later in the day, Romaine, what is his last name? Moises-Cott? Is that the same as Moises-Truyun? But anyway, Romaine said that when I worked at Google last year, after listening to one of your podcasts, I filed a feature request for breaking out the digits in Google Authenticator iOS app.

Glad to see they finally paid out. So whether this was directly in relation to this feature request or not, I thank Romaine greatly for connecting the dots, connecting my complaining to an actual feature request inside Google. And then many months later, now finally, I get two groups of three numbers. That is fantastic.

So your life is complete. Everything is right in the world. Well, it's not going to suck up crazy. I know I know about these things a lot of proportion because people are posting a link to you at one job.org.

It's not kind of like you had one job, but just like, if you think at all about doing some simple job well, like you had to put on a big whiteboard. What are the things that contribute to me doing my job well? Like I'm a connector. What are the properties of a good connector versus bad?

Just think about it for a second, unless like the top five, like a family feud or whatever, you know, and for showing numbers, like there's not many things. Make sure the numbers are readable. Like it's just numbers. You don't have to worry about like zero or any other.

It's just all you've got is numbers and you don't have to pick anything else about it. It's already six digits. You know everything about it. They did stuff like make it flash red when it's about expire, like all subtle things like that, but nowhere do they think you know what six digits shut up altogether is kind of hard to transcribe or memorize or read easily.

The group should three. It'll be a lot easier. And it's not like people are unfamiliar with grouping. Anyway, it's done now.

I'm done complaining. I'm happy. And I will preemptively say once again, everyone thinks I should not be using a authenticator and I should be using whatever their favorite app is. I know about it.

We are also sponsored this week by Lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com slash ATP. Lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn with high quality, easy to follow video tutorials, instantly streamed thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design and more. Go to Lynda.com slash ATP to see for yourself. It's L-Y-N-D-A.com slash ATP.

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Anyway, my favorite thing about Lynda.com is their pricing. If something is paid per thing, I will almost certainly never use it. Like John mentioned earlier, developer technical support tickets as a limited resource for the developer program. I have never used a DTS ticket.

You get, I think it's two years. I think that's right, but I'm not sure. I've been a regular developer since 2008. I've never used a single one of those.

I'm always afraid that, oh, I'm burning something that's a very limited resource. So, with Lynda.com, you don't have to worry about it. If I watch this video for $x, am I'm going to get enough value out of it. It's a flat rate.

You can get unlimited access to their entire catalog for as long as you keep paying $25 a month. So, it's great. You can just watch whatever you want. You can jump in.

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There's just so much there. They have over 100,000 video tutorials. And again, $25 a month gets you unlimited access to the entire catalog. They have such a big range.

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Again, the internet expert very well covered. Anyway, Lynda.com is offering a seven day free trial to access all courses for free. Go to Lynda.com.com. That's L-Y-N-D-A.com.

You can cram in as many courses as possible to seven days. It might be a good use for this holiday break actually. If you're going to have any vacation around the holidays next week, you should definitely consider get a Lindo description for the week and just watch as much as you possibly can. Anyway, Lynda.com slash ATP for that free seven day trial.

L-Y-N-D-A.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Lynda.com for sponsoring once again. My Guiar in the chat room reminds me that if I'm doing the authentication code on iOS, I can just copy and paste the code rather than memorizing it. I'm so accustomed to only using the authenticator app to like enter it on my Mac or something.

And yes, I know I can use a copy, paste, synchronization, I can give me to check out one of those because that frustrates me a lot. Like when I have something on my iOS that I want to transfer to my Mac, I know there's a million utilities that do that synchronization, but I never quite get around to uploading one. But anyway, I know if you find a good one. I've always intended to set something like that up and just never actually do it.

But whatever happened to paste spot because that was amazing when it first came out. I don't even think it works anymore. Well, originally the problem they had was that you had to go launch paste spot in order to get it to copy because, like, remember, they were the ones I believe. Yeah, they did that silence.

Yeah, yeah. To try to keep running the background. But now that's not a problem anymore, I assume all the good ones out there just do it as a background thing. Well, you still can't.

No, you still are not running the background constantly unless you're playing audio. Like, I could build that into overcast. If you haven't been playing a podcast, it'll continuously sync your clipboard to something. But you can use it as an extension.

I was like, just flick out and go, you know, like, it seems like there's other ways to do it as a extension widget to watch Apple reject you. Yeah. So let's talk about hockey and I don't mean the sport. So Microsoft acquired Hockey app.

And that's weird, but kind of awesome. I really like the Microsoft that Azure has spawned from insofar as they're not the old guard where if it's not Windows, not Office, then get the crap out of here. It's the new, we're all things all people kind of Microsoft. And I'm not sure what the play is with regard to Hockey app, but I like the thinking there.

I like the idea and I think it's a really good idea that could fit in really well with their existing Azure mobile services offerings. So I really dig it in principle, but I was curious to hear what the two of you especially Marco thought about this. Can you explain it to me? Because I know Hockey app only because I've been on betas that use Hockey app to distribute the beta versions of their iOS apps to me.

But I don't understand what Microsoft would do with this. Do they distribute beta versions of Windows Phone apps? Does hockey already do that? I don't understand the synergy here at all.

But I confess that I just don't know what Hockey app does besides what I've used it for, which is installed betas in iOS. And to be clear, that's all I've used it for. But the way I'm theorizing this is that Microsoft is kind of quietly, especially with Azure specifically, trying to be kind of a one-stop shop for all the backend stuff with regards to mobile apps. So mobile services seems to do a really good job with, you know, hey, we'll give you a decent API to do some basic stuff.

Like I think that you can, they give you an API that'll make it really easy to do user accounts based off of Twitter or Facebook. They make, there's a bunch of other things that they've got in there. I haven't looked at it in a while. But my guess is they're trying to make it so that if you're writing, like let's say I thought about writing a shared grocery list app and I don't want any more recommendations of what to use, I've got it under control.

But in the same way John doesn't need any more recommendations about two-factor stuff. Well, anyway, I'd like to write that sort of app, but I need to have a way of doing user accounts. I need to have a database backend. I need to have some sort of web-based API.

And I would need to distribute beta builds. Well, three of these things I could do on Azure. And the beta builds I'll soon be able to do on Azure if that's what envelops Hockey app. So I'm assuming they're trying to be a one-stop shop for anything that isn't on the device that your mobile app would need in order to be successful.

But this is the type of play where that Apple doesn't play nice with anymore, which is if you're doing something that is like a platform function, like I want to write a compiler that lets you build iOS apps. Or I want to write something that lets you manage the assets for your application or build your interfaces. Or anything you have to do with the development stack. Apple wants to own the IDE.

They made their own compiler. They own all the tools. Verification tools, code signing tools. It's all Apple stuff.

And beta distribution, Apple Bot Test Lite. Not that Apple's going to go out of the way to break Hockey app now, because they didn't before anyway. And it's relying on technology so that Apple is making it. But if you're, I would not sign up to try to make a tool that supports the Apple ecosystem for developing applications.

Because I would just know that even if I'm allowed to live, my time is limited. Because either Apple will start making a free competitor to me, or they'll do something that breaks my thing without any pity because they'll be like, you should never make a man first place. Not intentionally, but it'll just happen. That is a very dangerous business to be in these days.

I guess some of the Microsoft was one of the care they get enough revenue to support this type of effort. I guess that's kind of part of the acquisition. It's like once Apple, well, test flights, well, Apple has decided what they're going to do about this because there was a third party utility that did this thing that Apple wasn't doing. So Apple could have dropped their own thing in.

How so they could have bought somebody when they buy somebody? Hockey app had to say, well, they bought somebody and it wasn't us. So now it's time to sell to whoever else wants to buy us. And I guess that's Microsoft.

Yeah, I mean, it's important to point out, hockey does other things beyond just the beta stuff. For instance, they have their crash reporting tool, they got a crash logs, they send it into the app and everything. And they also have obviously the cross platform stuff. So there is still some value, even if they can't develop beta's to Apple anymore, or they can't ship beta's to Apple's device anymore.

It's less value, certainly. And they are never going to be able to match what the new Apple test flight does because the Apple test flight completely does away with the annoying UD IDs and you just email address people and it lets them install your app and all their devices. Well, they have the advantage that they'll hopefully be able to be more reliable and responsive than Apple because. Right.

So right now, so as soon as Apple test flight came out, I canceled my hockey plan. I said, I'm never going to use this again because I don't need it for the crash reporting because the other thing is I use Crashlytics from a crash reporting. Crashlytics also has a beta shipping product. They also have analytics and Twitter bought them.

The crash reporting is in the exact same category. I want nice, symbolic, hated crash reports with all sorts of information. iOS doesn't provide it for me natively. I'll use Crashlytics.

That's exactly the type of tool that it's like something that Apple should do. There's a gap. If their party comes in to fill that gap, is able to succeed until and unless Apple either buys them by a competitor or does something else that makes it so, you know, so that everybody stops using them and uses whatever Apple has officially blessed. In theory, yes.

In practice, most of the time Apple does things like this, the Apple version sucks. That was the case with the crash reporter. You're right. The Apple version often does suck, but once the Apple version exists at all, then there's even greater chance that the way the third party is doing it will become less supported or break or whatever, because Apple then has a good story like, oh, we're sorry, we didn't mean to break that or whatever, but it's not really a high priority.

That's for us to make sure that Crashlytics keeps working because we do have our own offering and have you check it out and you can say, yeah, but your thing sucks. But theoretically, that's been the case for a long time. But in practice, like iTunes Connect has included Crashlytics since before Crashlytics has existed. Since all of these Crashlytics that came out, all have come out after Apple has included Crashlytics and iTunes Connect.

Originally, the iTunes Connect Crashlytics were delayed by a week and they were never suffocated. You had to down limit some of them yourself. And I think some of that has been approved since then, but it's still also, they have to abide by the system setting that says, do you want to send diagnostics to Apple and app developers? And if users say no to that, you won't get Crashlytics from the right to connect, but your app doesn't know about that setting.

You can't read that setting, even if you wanted to. And so your app bypasses that. The any Crash logger that you embed in the app like Crashlytics or Hockey, those will send regardless. So you're getting more data from more people faster.

You're just hoping with those type of tools that you are below the note. This feature is below the notice of Apple. Like Apple has bigger fish to fry. They're not going to worry about making it much better or crash reporting because they have something there and, you know, like on a priority list to really load down.

Eventually, you have to think they will get to it. And this is the history of Mac software. It's been some third party, makes something cool. And it seems like Apple will never do something like that or it's not interested in something like that.

Sometimes these little things get snapped up relatively quickly, like for the old timers out there. The clock in the menu bar was a third party application. And fairly quickly, I think it was maybe less than a year, maybe it was only a couple of years. But fairly quickly, Apple said, hey, the menu bar is a good idea.