Siri expectations and unreliability in popular culture. Can Apple ever dramatically improve their web services, and how much pressure do they feel to do so? The sorry state of online payment processing before Stripe , and improving the current sorry state of money transfers (especially in the U.S.) with services such as Dwolla and Square Cash . The Mavericks GM. Drawbacks of a Readability-like model for paying podcast producers in Overcast, and Instacast's 2012 rejection for Flattr integration ....
Oct 10, 2013•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 34
When we expected the Mavericks GM (recorded two hours before this ). Apparent new E5-1680 Mac Pro in Geekbench and what CPU tradeoffs to expect in the new Mac Pro. Speculating on the new Mac Pro's fan noise, rotating cable management, and intended desk location. FU on John's podcast-scrubber idea. (Spoiler: he knows about the vertical speed-scaling that's been in Apple's scrubber for years, and it's not what he wants.) Experimenting with new UI controls and behaviors: some end up being cool and ...
Oct 04, 2013•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 33
Casey's exclusive new iPhone 5S. Low stock levels of the gold 5S and Apple's potential motivations. How good the iPhone 5 (and therefore the 5C) still is today. John's review of iOS 7 . Locking your kitchen. Marco's upcoming podcast app, Overcast , as announced at XOXO 2013 , and why he preannounced it. The parallels between Portland and the Hofbräuhaus . John's logarithmic-scrubber idea. (and Marco's logarithmic calendar ) Dr. Drang on parallax . Post-show Neutral: the F80 M3/M4 specs . Sponsor...
Sep 27, 2013•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 32
Casey goes to an Apple Store. FU on SnappyCam , Synology and ZFS, and the likelihood of a new Mac filesystem . The 16/32/64 GB iPhone capacities may be overstaying their welcome. Each host's planned iPhone upgrades. How to get an iPhone on launch day. Long Island Lexus trim . Who's fabbing the A7? Intel ? Probably not . iOS 7 adoption stats so far from Mixpanel and _DavidSmith . Sponsored by: MailRoute : Hosted spam and virus protection for email. Use promo code ATP for 10% off for the life of y...
Sep 19, 2013•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 31
iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s . The possible Sherlocking of SnappyCam and the 5s' two-tone flash in practice. AnandTech's Touch ID hands-on video . Economics of iPhone cases. 64-bit in practice. Speculation on what the M7 does and its potential. White iOS devices. Apple secrecy. After-show: " non " vs. " hon " and the Micro-USB 3.0 connector . Sponsored by: Squarespace : Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use coupon code ATP9 for 20% off in September! MailRoute : Hosted spam and vir...
Sep 13, 2013•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 30
John's Mavericks review progress. iPhone event predictions. Design and security tradeoffs of a theoretical iPhone fingerprint lock. iPhone 5S colors . Will the 5C be the mainstream, best-selling model? Cell towers near rich people. The Apple TV shipment rumor . Tim Cook's "new product categories" statement earlier this year: What might that be that could plausibly come this fall "and into 2014"? Our Synology experiences and disk-layout strategies so far. The OmniKeyMaster Mac App Store saga . Mi...
Sep 06, 2013•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 29
Follow-up: Time Capsule vs. Siracusa . Casey was right! The state of Microsoft: How much was Ballmer's fault? Ben Thompson on Steve Ballmer . Microsoft's enterprise business. Should Microsoft pull an IBM and/or spin off its consumer business? What could Microsoft do to regain momentum and marketshare in phones and tablets? John on the Nintendo 2DS announcement . ( Side-by-side with 3DS, 3DS XL , the Kid Icarus: Uprising stand ). After-show: Jeff Atwood's CODE Keyboard , Truly-Ergonomic , and Mar...
Aug 30, 2013•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 28
Querying Florida. Photo storage follow-up: whether people even want long-term photo storage anymore, using web services as backups, and Ogg-encoded tinfoil hattery. The Time Capsule's tough sell. Casey's helpful fans . IFTTT and Twitter . The gold/"champagne" iPhone, not getting a larger iPhone this year, and the future of the Lightning connector. The new TiVo . After-show: John's ebook-testing setup, the awful Kindle Previewer , and technical ebook woes. (See also: Serenity Caldwell at Cingleto...
Aug 23, 2013•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 27
Instapaper's web redesign beta . Rewriting a codebase from scratch . Understandable code and writing for maintainability . The balance between easy-to-write but unimpressive apps and implementing cutting-edge features that require messy hacks. The horrible mess of smartphone photo management and backup . How much should Apple protect people from hardware failures or carelessness? (See also: John's old two-hard-drives article .) Technical and economic challenges of Apple automatically backing up ...
Aug 15, 2013•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 26
Marco's new-new-new app for aligning double-ender podcast tracks. Economic considerations and options for releasing an app that's extremely helpful to a very small number of people. Why Marco has been procrastinating from the big app by making small apps. Good app names as motivation. Desktop Twitter distraction and measuring desktop productivity with RescueTime . Casey's sales of Fast Text since last week's promotion, Marco's sales of Bugshot , and the potential economic upside of promotion for...
Aug 09, 2013•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 25
Non-developers might want to skip the first 35 minutes: a technical discussion of FMDB , SQLite, and implementing your own generic "model" class. Plus: Casey finally gets to talk about .NET. (Note from Marco: The day after recording, I rewrote my model class to rely on KVC instead of runtime tricks and reflection. Please email Casey.) The types of programmers who can and should write their own low-level classes. Casey's app, Fast Text , and why he wrote it in 2010. John's unfulfilled app idea an...
Aug 01, 2013•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 24
FU: iSCSI and network Time Machine. iFixit teardown of the new AirPort Extreme . Apple's extended Developer Center downtime. (Note: we recorded this before we knew why it was down.) _DavidSmith on Logic X's pricing and what this might indicate for future App Store upgrades. Whether upgrade pricing is best for consumers, and the upgrade-pricing train. iOS developers acting like the RIAA in 2002. The complexity of modern software business models. The Wal-Martization of app pricing and how Marble M...
Jul 25, 2013•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 23
Marco's new-new app, Bugshot , and some of its design decisions. Cutting features from 1.0 and trying to keep Bugshot from taking too much time. Bugshot gets the John Siracusa treatment. Exploring NAS options and initial impressions of the Synology DS1813+ . Economics of FreeNAS or Mac Mini alternatives. iSCSI on Macs: the free $89 globalSAN initiator and the $195 ATTO initiator , which comes recommended by storage expert Dave Nanian . NAS backup options, since Backblaze doesn't do network drive...
Jul 18, 2013•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 22
iWatch follow-up. Alex Eckermann on Bluetooth Low Energy and iWatch . Eric Welander's thoughts on Siri for iWatch . iWatch as a means of identity . How regular people use iOS devices, as witnessed by John. Multitasking-switcher implications in iOS 7. iCloud's priority within Apple. Dropbox Datastore API , including its JavaScript API . Does the Datastore API obviate the need for a web service? Nerd-targeted products. Sponsored by: Transporter : Private cloud storage. Use coupon code atp for 10% ...
Jul 12, 2013•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 21
Apple's Yves Saint Laurent hire and the difficulty in predicting an "iWatch". Technological Conservatism . Panic's Lightning-to-HDMI-cable discovery . Chris Harris on iOS 7 icons . "Free-to-play" games. Coding for practice, and learning new APIs or languages. Overly specialized apps. Glympse (Casey's road-trip-tracking app). Feed Wrangler by _DavidSmith as a Google Reader replacement that's compatible with Reeder for iPhone . Lex Friedman's RSS-sync roundup . ReadKit for Mac as a potential NetNe...
Jul 05, 2013•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 20
John's review progress and show-duration predictors. The WWDC 2013 intro video . ( Siri's WWDC 2012 intro ) Apple's " Making a Difference, One App at a Time " video. "Designed by Apple in California". "Jobs" (Ashton Kutcher) trailer . Why developers should (or shouldn't) require iOS 7 this fall. "The Transporter" series . iOS 7 Calendar app UI . Cool-looking vs. well-designed. Our iTunes reviews. "Better" and "worse" programming languages. Sponsored by: Audible : Download a free audiobook and st...
Jun 27, 2013•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 19
Casey's fans at WWDC. Mac Pro followup. ( John's halo-car post ) The Xbox 180. Revisiting the potential for a larger-screen iPhone after having seen iOS 7. Predicting iOS 7 adoption. Neven Mrgan on iOS 7's icon grid and a rebuttal . New Mac Pro appears in Geekbench parallelize.c / xargs parallel processing Sponsored by: Squarespace : The all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website. Use coupon code ATP6 for 10% off. An Event Apart : The design conference for people who make ...
Jun 20, 2013•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 18
Special early WWDC episode this week: Reactions to the keynote. New Mac Pro Initial iOS 7 design impressions. Sponsored by: Backblaze : Easy, unlimited online backup for just $5 per month. Windows Azure Mobile Services : Build a cloud-connected iOS app faster and easier.
Jun 11, 2013•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 17
Opening theme by Larry King ( @laking ). The case for a modernized AppKit in OS X 10.9 a la Chameleon / TwUI . The lack of official Apple Objective-C wrappers around old C APIs such as Keychain and Address Book. Springboard #10 SMOP Underscore Should Apple add type inference to Objective-C? Haswell Retina MacBook Pro predictions and the possibility of having only the integrated GPU in the 15". gfxCardStatus The only 15" with integrated-only GPU The first unibody 15" with high-res, matte LCD Hasw...
Jun 07, 2013•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 16
Why Marco sold The Magazine . Teasing apps before they're out, building hype, and Pit Pass . Tim Cook at AllThingsD . Cook's presence and speaking style. What Cook implicitly said about future Apple products. WWDC predictions for OS X. Sponsored by: Oxygene for Cocoa : Use coupon code ATP13 for 20% off. Soulver : The essential calculator-spreadsheet-notepad hybrid....
May 31, 2013•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 15
Marco visits Siracusa's house and the car-assaulting tree . Transcendental Money . Square Cash . B2W 120 on financial "safety nets" . Tumblr, Yahoo, and not screwing it up. Cloud hosting and moving up the stack. The modern game console's role. the Xbox One's hardware design , and the messy world of TV-connected boxes. Sponsored by: Squarespace : Use coupon code ATP5 for 10% off. Windows Azure Mobile Services : Get started today for free....
May 24, 2013•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 14
Our theme song by Jonathan Mann -- follow his Song A Day on YouTube , and check out his site if you or your company would like a catchy, fun song. Thanks for the ATP theme song, Jonathan! Casey and Marco get deluged with to-do app recommendations. The difficulty in getting people to change to a new app, but conversely, the potential success for slightly differentiated apps in an otherwise crowded market. Google I/O keynote reactions. Localizing apps to different languages. The sad state of iTune...
May 17, 2013•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 13
FU on Apple's tick-tock pattern . Marco's PHP framework and sponsor-tracking web app, and why both exist. Usability and security implications of passwordless login systems. The Mac Mini's seemingly accidental success. Podcasters who hate the word "podcast" , its quality connotation, efforts to invent alternative names , and barriers to entry. Brent Simmons' 30 Minutes To Sync proposal. Building web services on Apple's infrastructure. Sponsored by: Mac Mini Vault : Colocate or rent your own Mac M...
May 10, 2013•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 12
The WWDC ticket lottery and potential solutions , or a merit system . Why Marco sold Instapaper . ( See also .) Prospects for replacing Instapaper's income. Speculating on today's app market. The Magazine 's app and Newsstand quality. Motivation, development, and homework. iOS 7's rumored visual overhaul and other speculation. The transition away from Steve Jobs' influence. What's left for iOS 7 to add? Sponsored by Squarespace : Use discount code ATP5 at checkout for 10% off....
May 03, 2013•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 11
Laptops in school. Getting a tech job with and without a college degree. Running mail servers in today's spam environment. Steve Jobs' unauthorized talking points. The WWDC announcement and trying to get tickets. Going to WWDC vs. a ticketless trip vs. watching the videos at home. Apple's Q2 earnings and hints dropped during the call. The tech industry's holding pattern with bored consumers. Marco's mom buys her first smartphone, ignoring Marco's advice. Which one did she get? Sponsored by MailR...
Apr 26, 2013•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 10
Why are PC sales down? Why and when people have bought new PCs in the past. Forgoing or neglecting PCs today. PCs in businesses. Apple and IT departments. Last decade's Tablet PCs. The outlook for Windows 8 tablets in businesses. What will change if Microsoft Office is released for iOS? What AirPrint and black CD-Rs have in common. Still using (and abusing) Jonathan Mann's awesome ending song . Follow him and check out his other songs on YouTube. Sponsored by Squarespace : Use code ATP4 at check...
Apr 19, 2013•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 9
Giving Dave Morin the benefit of the doubt on that Vanity Fair trainwreck . Who Facebook Home is for and why Facebook made it. Whether Facebook, Amazon, Samsung, etc. could or should make their own OS or maintain completely diverged Android forks. Google forking WebKit , Chrome vs. Safari, and the fork's likely implications for Apple and web developers. Debug #11: Don Melton and Safari WebKit contributors by company Panic's new Status Board app (and IAP reaction ). We included Jonathan Mann's en...
Apr 12, 2013•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 8
Summly's acquisition by Yahoo, and what could have justified its price. ( Marco , WSJ ) The quality of speech recognition. Challenges of big tech companies such as Apple hiring and retaining great talent. Why iCloud sync works so badly for developers and whether it's fixable. Why developers shouldn't use iCloud even if it worked. Jonathan Mann's ATP Ending Theme Song and the More Bleeps version . Sponsored by Squarespace : Use code ATP3 at checkout for 10% off....
Mar 29, 2013•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 7
How Marco buys a TV (unlike how John does ). Regular people noticing and caring about high-DPI screens. The amazing Mac lineup that few care about. Which Mac would we tell people to buy? Marco revisits the Microsoft Store . The Surface Pro's uniqueness. Why GarageBand's adoption of Audiobus is so interesting. How exposed filesystems and iCloud's document model both fail users. Sponsored by Squarespace : Use code ATP3 at checkout for 10% off....
Mar 22, 2013•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 6
The upcoming Google Reader shutdown. The market for RSS today, and the way forward. Client-side vs. server-side feed crawling. Addressing excessive demand for WWDC and Google I/O tickets. Apple pessimism is at an all-time high, even in the mainstream. What could Apple do to turn the pessimism around? Apple and web services. The Apple TV's interesting new A5. Diversifying the iPhone line.
Mar 15, 2013•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 5
