MacBreak Weekly 388 (Transcript)
Leo LaPorte: It’s time for MacBreak Weekly. We’ll be talking about new iWatch rumors, the 30th of Macintosh and a beautiful movie Apple just made. You can do it too for a few million bucks; plus a lot more. Stay Tuned! – MacBreak Weekly is next.
Net Casts you love, from people you trust. This is TWIT! Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by CacheFly at cachefly.com. This MacBreak Weekly Episode 388 recorded February 4th, 2014.
Policing the Karmic
Balance
MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by SquareSpace, the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free 2 week trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code MACBREAK2. And by Fresh Books, a simple cloud accounting solution that helps thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners save time billing and get paid faster. Try it free for 30 days at getfreshbooks.com. You’ll join over 5 million users running their business with ease. And by 99 Designs, the world’s largest graphic design marketplace. 99 designs connects businesses seeking quality affordable designs with a community of more than 270 thousand graphic designers. Visit 99designs.com/mbw to receive a free power pack upgrade valued at 99 bucks. Ladies and Gentlemen welcome once again to MS-DOS Show where we cover the latest from Microsoft with it’s guaranteed certificate of authenticity. I’m Leo LaPorte and no this is MacBreak Weekly and we will not be giving you any MS-DOS news. Although as we go to press so to speak Microsoft has finally announced after 6 months talent search that “all along we had him right here in our midst” A new CEO of Microsoft, the 3rd in 30 years is Satya Nadella coming over from the business and enterprise and cloud group. He will be assisted by Bill Gates who is stepping down as Chairman of Microsoft to become a visionary. Either that or it is, you know…bye, bye. John Thompson who headed the executive search will assume the role as the new chairman of the board. Both Gates and Ballmer will keep their seat on the board at Microsoft. For more information please visit your local library. No, for more information we did a breaking news special on TNT this morning. A really good special with contributions from Ed Bot, Paul Thurrott and many others so some really good analysis, that is in the TNT Feed, Twit.tv/tnt. It will be soon anyway if you’re watching live. We’re also going to put it in the TWIT specials feed because it really was some breaking news. Meanwhile we’re back to Apple and we’ve got a massive panel here starting with left to right. On the left it’s Rene Ritchie of iMore.com in his brand new set. Thank you for being on TWIT, this week you were great.
Rene Ritchie: Thanks for having me. I’m still in progress of building it out but I’m getting there. The shelves are only filled up to what you can see on camera right now.
Leo: You’ve got 2 iceos there over your left shoulder. Both the stuffed one from Throwboy and it looks like a bobble head iceo.
Rene: That’s the one that came out of Hong Kong, that sketchy place in Hong Kong, it was Steve Jobs ninja. The ninja action figure where you had to take the mask off after you unboxed it.
Leo: That was shut down almost right away wasn’t it?
Rene: Yes.
Leo: I’m impressed, very few people have that. Welcome Rene. Also here, back from his travels; it’s so nice to have Alex Lindsay of the pixel corps here.
Alex Lindsay: It’s good to be back.
Leo: Make sure you watch Alex’s interview on Triangulation this week. It was really fun. An hour that you talk about stuff that we don’t normally get to talk about. So welcome. He was assembling something that arrived just moments ago.
Alex: I’m not going to show it now.
Leo: Presumably your Pic. We’ll save that for later. Hey, also here from the Big Nerd Ranch (I’m not insulting him, that’s actually where he’s from.) The Big Nerd Ranch, Aaron Hillegass always great to have you. What brings you here?
Aaron Hillegass: Leo I’m just visiting for the App World conference in down town San Francisco.
Leo: Really! Is it iOS App World or is it all Apps.
Aaron: It’s all Apps.
Leo: Because you do teach Android development?
Aaron: We do Android and we do iOS. We also do HTML Java script stuff.
Leo: That’s very smart.
Aaron: We just shipped the new objective cbook, the 2nd edition.
Leo: Awesome.
Aaron: So you should get that for beginners.
Leo: I just started the old one, so now I can…
Aaron: A new iOS book will be out in another month.
Leo: It’s nice to have you. I have lots of questions for you. Including about the Mac Pro and development and all that but first lets introduce Andy Ihnatko from Chicago Sun Times. Rounding it out. Who is that? That looks like Steve McQueen with a rather large gun!
Andy Ihnatko: Steve McQueen basically making very person think; maybe I should have a gun if I looked that nice. Boy is he cool. Even dying young he makes look cool.
Leo: Yes.
Andy: It’s almost unfair.
Leo: Great to have you all. Since we mentioned Steve McQueen a great actor who passed away we should probably nod to; many consider our greatest actor of his year anyway, Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away at the age of 46 this week. Very sad to lose him, he was just incredible and a wonderful actor. So it’d be appropriate to mention him. I don’t know if he used a Mac.
Alex: Incredible actor.
Leo: Such a loss, he was so young. He is –beautiful. That’s him in doubt where he played the priest. It was one of his best performances but what wasn’t one of his best performances?
Andy: Magnolia.
Leo: And then he kind of reprieves that a little bit in The Master which is one of his most recent films. Go ahead Andy.
Andy: And also Truman
Leo: Yes everybody loves Capote.
Andy: I’m sorry, Capote, especially when you’re throwing some guy the challenge of here’s a very iconic classic looking guy who had a very – lived his life in such an effective way – now are you just going to do the voice and do the hand gestures or are you really going to make him into a real character? He blew me away in Magnolia – but that’s a movie where I said ok I’m now going to add a new name into the list of actors of which I’m a colossal fan.
Leo: Lester Bangs in Almost Famous from – when you start going down his list he made a lot of movies in his short career. I started going down the list, they were all brilliant. I saw him on Broadway in A long Day’s Journey into Night. It was wrenching. You could go out of the theater just drained. And somebody said of him that was why he didn’t like doing live theater because he did that every night and it was just very, very, draining. He was a brilliant guy, great loss, of course it was a drug overdose and that’s what is really sad, it was unnecessary. In happier news Apple posted a manual work around for mail problems in Mavericks!
Alex: I haven’t updated yet.
Leo: Let me ask more to the point – iOS7 really seems like a bug fest. 7.1 – well nobody who’s been playing with 7.1 can talk about it unless you’re FDA. Are we getting close?
Andy: New Beta today.
Leo: New beta today, this is 7?
Rene: 5 I think or 6.
Leo: So how many do they typically do before they release it?
Rene: 4-8.
Leo: So they’re in the ball park. Beta 5 just came out today.
Rene: They pushed on iOS 7.0.5 but that was only to Smart Phones outside North America and it really only addresses 1 small issues – a really important issue in China which is an important market, but it didn’t give the bug fixes which we so desperately need globally.
Leo: Do you Aaron when you are thinking about writing software, do you take specific versions of iOS or any operating system into account and programmer and bugs?
Aaron: Yes and especially backwards compatibility. A client will come to us and say this has to run on this version of iOS and we have to make sure that it always works backwards because including all the bugs. That’s the most painful thing to write lots and lots of code just to compensate for something you know has already been fixed.
Leo: Ask Microsoft, that’s all they do with Windows. They’re quite famous for it. There is all kinds of code in Windows, specifically for an individual piece of software, to make sure it works with Windows.
Aaron: That’s exactly right.
Leo: The amount of stuff you have to do to support legacies! Which is one of the reasons Apple kills, it’s very quick to kill older products.
Aaron: Much quicker than most companies. It’s a wonderful thing, being able to…
Leo: It’s good for you, it might not be so good for the guy who bought an iPad and suddenly finds he can’t use it anymore even though it’s 3 years old.
Aaron: But Apple makes it really easy to upgrade these days.
Alex: It seems that it must help the developers a lot to know that the vast majority of users are upgrading quickly.
Aaron: That’s exactly right. When a client comes to us and says we have to support this version of iOS I can go back and look at the pie chart – how many people I’ve already upgraded to the latest and it’s a huge number, especially on iOS. They don’t upgrade as quickly on Mac.
Andy: That’s a particularly big deal when Apple introduces a new feature for the operating system that has to be supported by developers. It must be a lot easier to make that sales point – that hey I’m going to support this because it will immediately be drifting down into the majority of devices that are out there.
Aaron: That’s exactly right, expecially when they roll out a big feature like Passbook or something and the client says this is all based around the passbook API, there’s no point in even talking about anything before that.
Leo: Speaking of Passbook, Healthbook is on the way apparently according to rumors. This would be something iOS 8 would have and it makes a lot of sense. We heard earlier this week that according to the New York Times that – actually it was an interesting story. New York Times had that main stream story but they got it from a blog. There is a lawyer who spent some time parsing the FDA’s public calendar and pays attention to all of that stuff. Mark A McAndrew, he’s a partner with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, was browsing the public calendars and noticed this, the week of December 9th. High level Apple executives, including Bud Tribble vice president of software; meeting with high level senior FDA directors in December to discuss it said “mobile medical applications. You can tie that into this rumor about Healthbook which would kind of be like Passbook for Health. That would be the kind of thing – now the FDA weighs in if an App makes health recommendation. So if an App says “slow down you’re going too fast, got to make the” – If they do that then you have to get the FDA’s approval. And it’s probably prudent given how the FDA has pretty much shut down 23 and me for not getting FDA approval on their genetic testing, that Apple would do that. I was talking with Dr. Mom about this and she’s a physician, and also knows a little bit about FDA process; she said they don’t have this kind of meeting unless you have something to show them. This is not exploratory, hey we’re thinking of doing this, what would you say? Well maybe Apple could have that kind of meeting, but more likely they were actually going…
Alex: There’d be no reason to bother them, you can have consultants and other people tell you how to get almost to the goal line. It’s a matter of once you get over it, making sure you get – that you’re in that communication loop.
Aaron: I have a theory that we should start a rumor based on. Apple is looking for new consumer devices; I’m thinking a toilet based on – the iToilet. It could make health recommendations like “hey Aaron, maybe you should be eating more leafy green vegetables”.
Leo: More roughage Aaron! You’re killing me here! We mock that but that would probably be a better metric of health than just something on your wrist. Another joke you can’t make – the iPotty.
Andy: I was going through the list that was maybe sort of ok and thought I’ll just pass.
Leo: I don’t know, ever since I bought that fancy toilet –
Alex: Wouldn’t it be great to have that fancy toilet be controlled by your iPhone though?
Leo: You’re the guy that made me buy that fancy toilet!
Alex: I have a fancy toilet too.
Leo: Alex
Alex: - you know what they call that? They just call it the toilet.
Leo: It’s a toto washlet 500.
Aaron: You have a very clean fanny I imagine.
Andy: I have a fancy toilet too for a possible title.
Leo: Actually it’s not as thorough as I’d hoped. I don’t want to talk about this. Alex wagered –
Andy: Who wants to start all over again? This is MacBreak Weekly, our panel today…
Alex: I was just going to start talking about meat but I feel like I should stay away from that.
Leo: Afterwards lets you and me…
Aaron: Andy’s headphones just rushed off stage.
Leo: The other thing that might be meeting with the FDA is a watch and this is I think one thing that’s pretty clear is that the Healthbook is just a total rumor, the washrag is just a total rumor but as we get closer and closer to something happening it does make sense that if they have a watch for instance that monitors health, does the job own up have to get FDA approval? I doubt it.
Alex: I think it depends on what they’re claiming.
Leo: How much information that they give you, recommendations or –
Rene: The iPad used to be a rumor, the iPhone used to be a rumor –
Leo: Yes good point.
Aaron: You can also imagine something like iBeacon work with this as well, like places in the park.
Leo: Yes, Look around you, if nobody at the table has an iBeacon then you’re the iBeacon. That’s one of the things we learned about iOS and Apple devices, every iPhone since the 4S, every iPad is an iBeacon, it’s capable of beaconing as well.
Rene: Everything with Bluetooth 4.0.
Alex: And there are a lot of things that you can measure pretty carefully once you start looking at the vibrations and movement. So for instance you could have a wrist watch or something that when you’re working out is keeping track of all your reps. It can keep track of all of those things as you’re going and just automatically put those into your documents and so on. I think we’re just barely scraping the surface of what is possible. When I walk into the gym now there are all these pieces of equipment I don’t know how to use, so I don’t use them. I’m very basic. I eventually get around to trying a new one every once in a while. What if I was able to walk up and the iBeacon was able to show me how to use it, video shows up on my iPhone and then it keeps track of all of my reps and all those things. But having that biometric connection – and then you look at people with health issues, you could have something that’s paying attention and this is why you talk to the FDA. You have someone that has a heart condition and it’s paying attention to your heart rate. If your heart rate changes dramatically or something it sends an alert, at least to alert you if not everybody.
Andy: Even something as simple as if you have somebody who is a high risk sort of person, you could simply say please send an alert if there is an unusual disruption in the level of activity in this person, because you can watch some of those movements from hour to hour, day by day and realize it is very unusual for there to be no motion off this device from 2pm to 5pm in the afternoon. Which is not an automatic 911 call but it can be ok please contact this person and just have them call the device to see what’s going on.
Aaron: Especially with the aging population.
Leo: Fred Wilson who is a Venture capitalist principle of Union Square Ventures and has invested in a lot of the companies that we now consider stalwarts of Silica Valley, is very excited about the idea. He said that, “We’ve been looking at this sector for a while, one of the things that has kept us from making an investments is the sense that all this data capture is soon going to happen in the phone itself. Once that happens things could change pretty rapidly. The key he says will be APIs. My question is, is Apple going to give it’s users or developers more importantly an open API to send their health and fitness data to 3rd parties they authorize.
Rene: They do it with the M7 already. The M7 wasn’t proprietary to Apple Fitbit can tie into it and Nike can tie into it. These reports are really awesome, blood monitoring and hydration level monitoring are fantastic but I think also it’s important to set the expectation that the original iPhone and iPad were great but the iPad era and the iPhone 4 were fantastic and whatever we’re going to get soon is not going to be as cool as it’s going to be when Apple actually gets all these technology implemented.
Andy: I think it’s going to be primarily motion sensor based when we see these things come out in actual products. The other thing is that when it comes to making a better camera that’s something that is accessible to absolutely everybody, when it comes to finger print authentication it’s once again a problem that everybody faces and everybody wants to solve. There are a great many people for whom they don’t necessarily care – they would never use the health features of a phone that wouldn’t really affect them at all. It seems that when I’ve been reading these more specific reports, I keep asking myself what are the different way in which Apple could want to make this feature happen. The first way is that there is a health enthusiast market that hasn’t been tapped into yet and we’re going to make a phone that is specifically pitched to – that would be the best phone to have if you are a health enthusiast. The 2nd way which is we feel as though we can make this into an advantage for an aspirational purchase where people who feel as though they really should be exercising more and moving more, of these 2 phones that I’m sort of half and half on, this one will help me keep a healthier lifestyle. But as I was thinking this through this morning I think the 3rd one is really the truth of the matter. I do feel that this is one area in which Apple feels as though they can help them improve the world by improving health and that this is a simple and elegant thing they could put into one of the most popular hand held devices and most popular devices in the world. I really don’ think there is so much creating a new market or trying to create a strategic advantage, I really do think that inside Apple they really do feel this is something every device can be doing that would really improve people’s lives. We can do it so are going to do it.
Rene: It’s like Tax Books were 2 years ago – the whole Tax Book and iBook movement.
Leo: Apple really didn’t reinvent textbooks; that’s been a flop I would say.
Rene: It’s aspirational inside Apple, they believe deeply in –
Andy: I don’t believe that – we’re all assuming that this is going forward – if Apple makes iOS8 into a very health centric operating system, or at least the most aggressively health forward mobile operating system on the planet, I don’t think that they would label it a failure if 3 years from now they find out that only 18% of users are actually - They’re going to say that Wow 18% of the people who were not going to be exercising before and now exercising and we consider that a win.
Aaron: I think it’s going to be more than just motion. I think we’re going to see a lot of medical monitoring devices that have Bluetooth in them and that’s how we’ll monitor blood glucose levels.
Leo: You don’t want to watch pricking your finger every 5 minutes. Fred also talks about, in the context of API’s, he said I envisioned a future where at my Doctor’s office there is a button that says authorize with health book, and I push a button and that stuff that is from Health Book in my phone goes right into the Doctor – or my gym’s mobile app, my health insurer’s web app, a host of other places, that’s the privacy concern of some people. They don’t want their health insurers to get that information.
Alex: Something that starts off as a feature turns into a requirement. You look at what is happening now with the requirement now where they’re talking about forcing cars to talk to each other. First it was like this would be a cool technology now they’re talking about requiring all the cars which means that you’ll never be able to speed again.
Leo: No more fender benders.
Alex: No more fender benders but it takes all the – of course everyone – when that actually happens I think everyone is going to want an automated car because it’ll be no fun to drive any more so like why bother?
Leo: So here we are talking about iOS 8. The healthbook rumor implies that iOS 8 as a whole will be health focused and wellness and sensor focused.
Rene: As much as the last one was passbook focused I think the healthbook name was not chosen randomly.
Leo: Again I don’t want to be the negative one here but Apple does this all the time. Passbook never lived up to its promise.
Andy: I think of this more as CBS hiring David Letterman for the 11:30 slot where they can say if you’re on the outside –
Leo: Not for everyone.
Andy: No what I mean by that is that ok great they got Letterman and he’s 1130 but still Jay Leno is kicking his butt every single night. That was a bad mistake but no they had - CBS said absolutely nothing going on at 11:30 and now they have a hugely profitable show and they’ve had it for the past 20-30 years, so the fact that passbook has not revolutionized all point of sale payments across the entire globe, that doesn’t label it a failure. Now they have an infrastructure and a feature that they didn’t they didn’t have before that to my thinking is one of the best ways to do a feature. Where if you don’t use it, ignore it, it stays out of your way, it never complicates anything but the time – as soon as your local market which is probably the independent market not the huge chain decides to put in a few iPad terminals and now you can pay with your passbook and suddenly your phone becomes 20% more awesome instantly. So the fact that they have it there and that it works is enough of a win for Apple to keep going with it.
Leo: By the way Apple is not the only one looking at this. Google is working on a contact lens that will test your blood sugar in your tears and give diabetics a reading that apparently is accurate from the contacts. I would hate to see Apple – Apple does such, these closed universe things – the key, I think Fred is right is API because if you have inner operability and a google contact lens can talk to healthbook and talk to your phone more power to them. I guess Google would probably favor Android.
Alex: Google has a tendency to start with Android and then move to iOS –
Leo: Google often does it the other way around. iOS stuff is the best out there.
Rene: This stuff needs data and you’d think that Apples going to want to collect data and they’re going to need to have those API in points coming to it and going out of it.
Leo: Who is the data company? Google, they built their company around data.
Rene: They’ll give core location to Google Maps on iOS.
Leo: I would hope that they would bury the hatchet. Because it’s good for everybody, it could save lives.
Rene: They’re going to keep swinging the hatchet Leo but they’ll do business while they’re swinging it.
Leo: Do it for the children Apple.
Alex: I think that what is interesting is also across the board we’ve been talking about the measured life for a long time and we’re about to see I think, an incredible explosion over the next literally 24-36 months where suddenly it’s your location with iBeacon, it’s your health with these different bits and pieces but this is going to be a whole different level of measurement related to what you’re doing.
Leo: The irony of this of course is Google did something like this, they had a google health product which they killed, Microsoft health vault is really the dominant one right now and does in fact interoperate with a lot of stuff. This might be another case where just as with tablets Microsoft has been there for years and then all of a sudden Apple steps in and makes it consumer friendly and takes it over. These are Apps and devices that work today with HealthVault and it’s a broad range of stuff including the not just the fitbit but CVS Pharmacy, import your lab test results, American Diabetes Association, personal health record – there is a lot of stuff here. This is all compatible with HealthVault right now.
Andy: That’s sort of a signature thing, I was just thinking about it this morning when I was doing my dishes believe it or not that this is the thing that people overlook about Microsoft. Specifically not the CEO, I don’t just wash dishes and think about Microsoft in a little bubble with a heart and Bill Gates in it was over my head – I just want to make that clear. But this is what Microsoft sees it’s role as, they are the company that keeps the lights on, this is the company that keeps the clean water coming to the house, they really make all of their reputation on fundamental services that people don’t particularly care about but absolutely need. The services don’t really call attention to themselves until they stop working. Windows is like that, Microsoft office is like that, the infrastructure things we were just talking about are also like that, so that becomes part of the conversation, we talk about Microsoft, Google and Apple and what they do best and whether somebody is lagging behind because they’ve never been able to make a good phone or not.
Rene: There is also this thing at Apple where there has to be bad versions of a product on the market, they have to be able to identify the problem, the computer has to suck for them to want to make a Mac and the Trio and the Blackberry has to not be - it has to make Steve Jobs really angry when he wants to make an iPhone and to this day it’s absolutely true, if they can’t identify problems in a market that they think they can make substantial difference to and it’s a large enough market they are not going to enter it which is why they’re never really early in any market.
Andy: So anytime they talk about their own products or develop their own product they usually talk about pain points and the friction points in other existing technologies. They rarely come up with something that we’ve never seen before. So their inspiration usually comes from looking at something else out there, not wanting to build another one of those but seeing an opportunity in the failures or the for lack of a better word, vision, in these other devices.
Leo: Chad has been doing this I guess for a while. This is an app called My Fitness Pal that – of course it’s always the Fit ones who are keeping track of how many calories they ate. Yeah nice Chad, I see that, you’re doing very, very, well. What is this, this is an app you’ve used for how long?
Chad: I’ve been using this since the beginning of the year. Since day 1 of 2014.
Leo: You know what I love is you’ve got this news feed…Chad has logged in for 30 days in a row, Chad has burned 241 calories, Chad has logged in for 25 days in a row. Why can’t you be more like Chad?
Chad: Because I don’t have any friends on my fitness evaluation.
Leo: If you had friends they would appear there too. Look at all the things it works with!
Chad: You guys are talking about the quantified self and I feel like I’m living in it right now because my scale talks to my fitness pal, my fitbit talks to my fitness pal, and you can use all sorts of stuff to plug into it. One of the things that I love is if you go – I believe there is a thing called progress or underneath –
Leo: I see the graphs.
Chad: Yes one more up.
Leo: One more up – oh look 94% progress. You know what that is? That’s the heavy cream you had in your coffee.
Chad: Well I’ve only eaten 1 thing today which was coffee so –
Leo: Let’s go to yesterday.
Chad: Yes if you go to yesterday…
Leo: Carbs is blue, protein is green, fat is red.
Chad: I’ve been trying to keto things so over in the corner right below the other arrow there is a lot of lines. Click that. That’ll break down everything I’ve eaten today in terms of sodium, protein, carbohydrates, absolutely everything.
Leo: How hard is this to enter stuff into? That’s one of the problems I have with all of these – I used to use loose it for a long time. Tracking what you eat is the single best thing by the way. You don’t even have to have to have a goal because as soon as you see “that bagel just killed me”, just tracking it works. How easy is this to use?
Chad: This has been the easiest one. The 1 issue that this app has is that it doesn’t have a restaurant tracker so normally – Loose it would say, hey you’re next to Taco Bell…
Leo: It’s always Wendy’s that they have, fast food stuff, Taco Bell, I don’t understand that.
Chad: This one doesn’t have eat more fast food frankly…Oh it would be a lot easier if I were having some fast food right now than this plate of broccoli. This one all you do is search and the search has been really, really good so you just type it up, now what you’re looking for…
Leo: Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich.
Chad: Exactly, I’ve eaten that one frequently.
Leo: Create new food, meals, so the more you use it the easier it gets.
Chad: Absolutely because I know if I go to Chipotle, the meal I’ve already created with the lettuce and everything I get…
Leo: Every time I get into tracking I always find that I eat simpler food because I don’t want to track it. Look at like the pre process of it and I’m like I don’t want to eat that, I’ll just eat rice today. A cup of rice.
Chad. Gin and Tonics only 92 calories. Really Gin and Tonics only 92 caleries. I should drink it a lot more.
Andy: I try to type in twizzler but it keeps auto correcting to carrot stick. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to eat a carrot stick.
Leo: This is called My fitness pal. This is one of a large number of utilities like this, but this is the most clear I’ve seen.
Chad: I’ve actually had a couple people recommend it. I just downloaded it a couple weeks ago and I haven’t actually started it.
Leo: We’re looking on the iPad, so it’s and iPad and iPhone, Android and web. It’s on everything.
Chad: This information has been invaluable in trying to truly look into what I’ve been doing and you can go online and change your settings to what you’ve been doing so when I started Keto the app was like whoa you’re going crazy with fat and protein. Then you just go online and change the numbers around and it goes oh you’re doing great, keep it up you need more protein in your diet .
Leo: It works with the Y things, works with the fitbit, works with the up, run keeper, runtastic, pretty much everything that people use. That’s nice.
Chad: And this one doesn’t - like Loose It will charge you for connecting other things this one does not. That’s really nice.
Leo: They had one of these espresso bikes at the gym and then they stopped paying for the subscription.
Chad: That’s always a little annoying.
Leo: Oh well that’s another story. Yeah it’s nice if you don’t have to pay for everything.
Chad: But I can’t - like this information that Apple might get into a health book. It makes me think about switching from Android, if it’s something that can be better, if its FDA approved, if it can give me more granular information than any other device because they’ve gotten an FDA approval. That is something that is very interesting to me.
Leo: Well Chad I like that you’re doing it and you’re a young guy so starting out it’s a lot easier than if you start latter. So I like to see that you’re doing that. Alright I’m going to have to down load that my iFitness pal. The problem I have with the watch is that there is only a few things it can measure. It’s a pedometer; it’s not going to measure blood gas or insulin or sugar levels. There are some things it just can’t do quite yet.
Andy: Every time we talk about the ability to get things like blood sugar, get things like blood pressure, blood chemistry a lot of times we are talking about technologies that are kind of invasive to begin with even if it’s a micro needle patch technology it’s still something that’s going to irritate your skin if you are wearing it on your wrist 24/7 so we are going to have to look at and it’s not even necessarily true. There are technologies that will get it from tears, from sweat, but tears mean you do still have to wear something in your eyes. Sweat means you have to be in a situation where you know, you are generating actual sweat. I mean here is my watch on a cold winter’s day and there is just not a whole lot happening there. Not that it would have to be slick with stuff, but the problem with health apps is - I mean there is a reason why, if I want to show you my fitbit I can’t because it fell off. I put it some place in the house, it’s somewhere and then there are days where I couldn’t use it because it has this filly little charger that is not nearby and they couldn’t get it working. If you create this wonderful easy to demo suite of hardware and software for health and fitness but make it so that it is just 8% too difficult to charge this thing or that it is just a little bit inaccurate especially that one day where you really want to know what your fitness level is. Or it stops working just momentarily this is what happens. This is the reason why I haven’t really looked really hard to find that fitbit. Again I’m sure it’s here somewhere I didn’t throw it out. I didn’t give it to someone to put it on a raccoon.
Aaron: I have a drawer full of those devices all of them. That’s why it’s understandable I’m not sure there are a lot of people who would switch phone platforms, specifically for the health features of a phone unless they were already active like people active exercisers and active nutrition people.
Rene: I mean there is a lot of value. Andy mentioned the 20% increase in value. A good friend of mine works in a hospital and she has to do rounds and she leaves her phone in her desk now and just wears her pebble with her and that sends all her notifications to her watch and she’s found that it’s just transformative in forms of where she can go and what she can and not just have to carry a phone. Think about carrying a phone with you now sounds so easy but for her not having to carry a phone was the big thing. And if it does health for some people, notifications for some people, iBeacon stuff, commerce for other people you start getting enough features that someone will find something that they like.
Andy: What’s so great about all these strategies we are talking about that are being discussed on the sites is that Apple doesn’t have to clobber everything all at once. They can just create this infrastructure and have one nice feature with that motion sensor inside the existing iPhones is leveraged a lot more aggressively and the data that it’s producing is surfaced a lot more easily to the consumer. So it does maybe one or two little things first and then with the next release it’s now doing four or five interesting things. So Apple could take a couple or three years to make the iPhone and iOS into the single most important finessed based mobile device out there. They don’t have to kill it with the first release they can just do one little feature and just make that so nicely done that people will sort of emotionally invest in it and use that one little feature every single day and then maybe a year from now they will spend 50$ for a little watch and they are so attached to the infrastructure that they will remember to charge it each and every day. So Apple I am sure they have a long plan for this. I’m sure it’s going to be more interesting 3 years from now than it will be this year or next year.
Leo: Looking forward to it and it sure is achieving the stature of more than rumor even though all we have is rumors at this point. One hopes we will hear more. That’s how it starts. That’s an excellent point that’s how the iPhone started to. We are going to take a break come back with more. Aaron Hillegass is here from Big Nerd Ranch. Learn how to program. They’ve got books they also have horses. You can go live on the ranch. Learn how to rope, how to wrangle, how to create four wild lopes. He also is a very nicely cowboyed fellow. I like the big hat. That’s nice, where do you get those?
Aaron: This one’s actually made for me, it’s a guy his name is Jack and he has a company called Jack’s Built.
Andy: You have a man that makes your hats?
Aaron: He sends you a pattern that you put on your head and it figures out the shape of your head and you send it back to him and then he cuts a hat custom for you.
Leo: Jack’s Built.
Alex: Is it all kinds of hats, or just cowboy hats?
Aaron: Just cowboy hats.
Leo: Nothing wrong with a cowboy hat and you know all you have to do if you want to look like Ferella on the Grammys is punch up the top and it will look exactly the same as Ferella’s maybe cut the brim off. Thank you for being here Aaron, of course or regulars Rene Richie from iMore.com, Alex Lindsey from pixelcorps.com who is going to be more of a regular it sounds like.
Alex: Yes
Leo: I’m happy about that, Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times. Did you watch the supper bowl? Did you see the Squarespace add on Supper Bowl?
Alex: I did.
Leo: I think it’s so - you know you’re kind of rooting for - they are one of our sponsors and in fact we’re about to do an ad for them and you feel like “wow those are our guys”. It was an interesting ad. Here let me play a little bit of it for you. What am I hearing? I’m hearing something else. I don’t want that, just to make this a little bit more intelligible… It’s all the internet means at once. So that’ll help you. There is a baby, your funny words here, that sign has, this person is - There’s an iStock photo, Abe Lincoln, girl in a bikini, band guy, I don’t know what the nuclear guy is. Oh he is a virus, Epic fail. I think that is kind of fun. It gets your attention. I don’t know what people think Squarespace is when they see that, so let me feel you in. That was the “we’ve got your attention portion” and people get the words Squarespace in their mind. Now when they are listening then they go “oh I heard about that thing” and I can tell them what it is. It’s hosting, plus the best contact management system to give you a really good place to put your next website whether it’s a blog, portfolio, if you’re an artist or a photographer, maybe your e-commerce site. Couldn’t be easier to create a site with Squarespace you don’t need to know any code but if you’ve been to Big Nerd Ranch and you know CSS and html and you’re ready to do it, they have a developer platform with a beautiful editor that’s got syntax, color code syntax and all that. The design templates that you start with are stunning. The best way to find out about squarespace is to go to squarespace.com you can all go there at once. It doesn’t matter you can’t bring a squarespace site down. Oh look there’s the ad. There’s the link for the ad right beyond that. And you will see a big get started button. Click that get started button and you will - Well I’ll do it right now, I’ll show you. Interesting, something is going on. I move the mouse and the parallax is - That is slick. They know CSS. You click get started and it will show you all the templates. I’m sorry Alex what were you going to say?
Alex: I was going to say there was an ad for the supper bowl for someone that does on-line stuff and I went to their website and it was down.
Leo: Yes Maserati - so the first time they ever run an ad in the supper bowl for the new ride maserati ghibli or whatever it’s called and their site is down.
Alex: Alex and Annie I think was the one that went down. It was nothing.
Leo: What is Alex and Annie by the way?
Alex: They make like bangles or something for like your wrists.
Leo: I saw those ads like a hundred times and I still don’t know what they are.
Alex: I don’t know but what was interesting though I went to their site and I don’t know what they are, but I still don’t know what they are because their site was down during the supper bowl because they weren’t on squarespace. It’s like if you are going to spend four and a half million dollars on a supper bowl add you should at least make sure your site is up.
Leo: Alex and Annie, Maserati, may I introduce you to Squarespace? You cannot bring a squarespace site down. I don’t care if you buy a supper bowl commercial, and by the way they could have just done a cheap square space site it’s free for the first two weeks, made that the site used up all the bandwidth and then moved on if they wanted to. Square space is so great if you decide that you want to stay they have some amazing pricing. You are going to get the best hosting in the world, these great templates, easily customizable you don’t need to know any code, every site is unique on squarespace.com. They don’t look cookie cutter, they have 24/7 support from New York City if you want. You know the problem is the support guys their accents are pretty strong. “Yeah what do you want.” I’m just kidding, that’s a joke. “Hey if you have a problem with your website I can help you.” They are really nice guys and they really do care a lot about you. Squarespace has a great webinars page were you can learn about how to use squarespace.
Alex: And the price is incredible to, and the support
Leo: That’s what I’m talking about.
Alex: If something goes wrong and you need you get a quick response and they show you how to fix it. The thing is also when you are trying to edit, when you have a company and you’re trying to - Our stuff is all squarespace and one of the great things is that anybody can edit the website that you give logins to. It’s not like I have to call a coder to design a new page I can simply just have it - Have somebody go in there and fix things.
Leo: Yeah I love it. Price is right to, when you buy an annual plan as low as 8 dollars a month. For that you get your domain name free. Now I think a lot of people are going to go with the middle plan, the professional plan because it’s unlimited everything. Not only can you not bring the site down but even if you had an ad in the supper bowl and a million people went and saw your site it wouldn’t cost you more. You have unlimited bandwidth, unlimited pages, unlimited galleries, unlimited blogs, unlimited storage, e-commerce for up to 20 products so you can even test their e-commerce platform for 16 dollars a month. You want the full e-commerce platform its just 24 dollars a month. I’m telling you shop around there’s nothing like it and that includes unlimited products, digital physical services, real time carrier shipping information populated right on your page. Label printing via ship station, integrated accounting from 0. This is just fabulous. They will help you with taxes. They will help you with inventory. 24 dollars a month and they don’t take a cut. You’ve got to love them. Squarespace.com. Visit them if you decide - first thing to do is just get started and you can get the full run of the place you don’t need to give them a credit card. Put your stuff in there and you can import all your interesting content. If you decide you want to buy though I would ask you one thing just use the offer code MACBREAK2 for Feb. Don’t write the number 2. And you will get 10% off which is a great deal if you get the annual plan. Squarespace.com use our offer code MACBREAK2. We love them. Maserati and Alex and Annie you’d think, you buy four and a half million dollars for a supper bowl 30 second add. You ever thought about a Big Nerd Ranch add on the supper bowl?
Aaron: Oh yeah, definitely.
Leo: Well you know coding is all the rage now.
Aaron: It is everybody wants to be a coder these days.
Leo: An hour of code must have helped your business.
Aaron: Yeah. I mean all the awareness about coding and the importance of controlling computers instead of letting them control you, is good for us.
Leo: Yeah. Apple did not have an ad on the supper bowl. But they released at the same time as the supper bowl, a really kind of gorgeous video which was shot by Ridley Scotts son. Ridley Scott did the original 1984.
Alex: You look at the behind the scenes Ridley Scott was in some of the behind the scenes footage. So Ridley Scott was definitely involved.
Leo: Oh I see. Here is the 90 sec version of the ad. First of all the fact that they shot on an iPhone is kind of mind boggling.
Aaron: 36 hours.
Leo: Yes, all in one day. Alex, how do they do that? How can you get an iPhone to look that good?
Alex: Managing exposure, they've got if you look behind the scenes the definitely used a lot of great rigs and while they were shot on the IPhone it’s not like they were hand held. They are using Jibs and mobies?
Leo: You can see the motion of it like in the earlier shot when you were going up the elevator things like that.
Alex: The behind the scenes is as interesting as the Ad you know because you’re really seeing….
Leo: Well let’s look at behind the scenes. What the ad is and you’ve all probably seen it by now is kind of people using Apple products not just the Mac but the IPad and IPhone in real life to do a lot of amazing things. Behind the scenes Apple Ad, let’s see if I can find the behind the scenes video for the 30th anniversary and for our audience that’s a lot more interesting than the ad. So 10 countries 15 locations I day wait a minute January 24th, they did it a week ago.
Alex: Yeah
Leo: That’s impressive too
Alex: Yeah absolutely
Leo: Alright, so that’s Ridley Scott's son directing it from a control center? He had photographers. Obviously he didn't go to 36 countries in one day. Wait a minute look at that rig, holy cow. It’s a full…this is ridiculous. It’s a movie sized dolly
Alex: You can see where they have a HDMI of the camera
Leo: OH so they’re not recording on the camera
Alex: oh no they could be recording on the camera they probably did for this but they had a video tap so you can go back to him so he can see what’s coming out of the video tap because you’re not recording that because what the video tap has is the interface, you saw that earlier
Leo: oh so you don’t want that
Alex: It’s just doing a screen mirror so that he can see what they are shooting.
Leo: Got it. Woah! That gimble is something.
Andy: That’s unfortunate.
Leo: Because you want it Andy? Is that why it’s unfortunate?
Andy: I don’t know. If they had not shown this and they had simply said this is all shot and produced on a IPhone that would have been great but now it’s like oh if I have 80 thousand dollars’ worth of gear plugged into this and crews worldwide I can shoot nifty videos with my phone.
Rene: One day Andy, if you gave yourself a month you wouldn’t need the gimble.
Leo: The point is that the video is still IPhone video, so I give them credit for that.
Andy: Again it’s cool it’s just that it feel vaguely like when they do those extreme home makeovers where they said “well rather than simply raising $180000 to buy you a much better house and maybe $50000 to get you medical equipment we’re going to basically do 80 times the work to do something extremely flashy that gets the exact same results”.
Leo: I like this guy in the crane, hold on. He must feel a little silly
Andy: If God could achieve 1/3 of what we could accomplish then he would consider himself a very lucky man.
Leo: Well that shots just a guy in an elevator holding an IPhone.
Alex: Well you’re basically treating it like any other camera. You’re not treating it like a steady cam.
Andy: I’m trying not to be cynical it’s just that ok..
Leo: We’ve seen this rig before; it’s kind of a cool little rig and not too expensive. Who makes that?
Alex: I think it’s steadycam itself
Leo: It’s just a little counter weight basically that you mount the iPhone to that helps you hold it more steadily. That’s Ridley Scott himself there. Wait a minute is than an IPhone it looked like an android phone. We’ve got a ringer! Look at that, that is so cool. Your right the behind the scene is much more interesting. Wow. That little arm, is that the company that does the boom arms we’ve talked about before. That’s pretty cool because it looks like a sound boom but only at the end they’ve got a -
Alex: It looks like a K-tech.
Leo: K-tech that’s the company. That’s kind of cool, but see you could do that
Alex: It’s just a boom yeah but you could totally do that.
Leo: It’s steel. The tool company but that must just be a sticker. I don’t think Steel makes… Very nice.
Alex: I want that control room.
Leo: Yeah that’s made on a sound stage it looks like
Andy: You can’t fight in here this is the war room!
Leo. Really nice to watch behind the scenes I think that’s really, really, cool.
Andy: It really is cool all I’m saying is think I want to fine tune my comments earlier, it’s a fine commercial. I just think a lot of people I think would have found it more inspirational if they had stuck to a budget of no more than 100 dollars’ worth of accessories for any one camera that’s being operated. Because the IPhone can shoot video that is amazing, that is your applying the correct technique and the correct storytelling to something it’s almost doesn’t matter that you’re shooting it on a phone, especially a phone that’s this good at video.
Leo: Yeah. Well as Dendrite said in our chartroom “Here’s all the things you can’t do with your IPhone.”
Rene: It’s factored by time, if you don’t have a lot of time you got to spend a lot of money, if you have more time you don’t have to spend as much money. That’s how I look at it. I was a little disappointed just like Andy was but then I remembered 36 hours is not a bad job.
Leo: You know you could do all. The difference between the quality of the footage you get with that versus a stick that you taped an IPhone to is 1%. You could get 90% of the way with just crap lying around the house.
Alex: With a couple hundred dollars of additions, if you spent no more than you spent on the IPhone that’s like $800 or whatever. You could get a bunch of little rigs that you could shoot some pretty incredible bit width.
Andy: What I would love to see is like a Top Gear Style challenge where you get 3 or 4 directors and each one has a budget of no more than $200 for additional hardware and $5000 for extra personnel whether you want to hire a lighting person, a sound person, a effects person, an editor and try to produce the nicest 4 ½ minute movie that you can possibly make. I think the results would be so impressive. I think the results would be as impressive as the video we just saw.
Rene: Then at the end the state comes in and shoots it professionally.
Leo: Apple of course has this website that’s associated with the 30 years of the Macintosh and they do have a page in greater detail on the making including the video we just saw and images of the setups and how they did it and where they did it and all that stuff. It’s kind of cool. Reminds me a little bit of Rick Smolens Day in the life projects, he did a day in the life of the internet.
Andy: It’s especially cool when you give somebody a deadline like that which is to say don’t take two months to think about it, two months to plan it then a month to shoot it. Here’s the day, on this day you’re going to go shoot something and send me whatever you have. That’s exciting stuff.
Leo: There’s one other point I’m going make here because you can see in this shot, not only are they shooting with an IPhone but because the command center was on LA, the cinematographer is hooked up via Facetime to LA to get feedback. You can see he’s listening to this phone that’s being held in front of him and Scott is there on the phone
Andy: I wouldn’t have done that I would have attached that phone to the other phone.
Leo: Next time call Alex and he’ll set it up for you
Alex: Because we’ve done some of those Facetimes where we did that. We’ve done the camera chat but it hasn’t been with an IPhone it’s just been with a regular camera. What we do is attach the IPhone to the camera to the hotshot mount or cold shoot mount then you have a little rig above it then you can talk about it.
Leo: One of the problems about this of course is that the director is seeing the shot but not exactly the shot. The director is seeing.. maybe he does, I guess he does
Alex: He can upload it almost immediately, he’s got some interface over the top of it but otherwise he’s seeing what their shooting.
Andy: Now Alex would it be important for them to have a director that is looking at these shots live when you have something this complicated and this widespread or with a project like this would it be easier for him to simply say here is the story board ,here’s the shot I want you to get.
Alex: The bottom line he’s going to get a lot more of what he wants and the iteration rate will be faster so any time you’re doing production whether its visual effects or video or whatever you’re never going to get the shot you want your going to get the shot that you ran out of time and that’s what you ended up with and so you know 20% of it is really technical 40% of it is knowing what you want and 40% of it is the number of iterations that you’re going to get before you get it so that increases the iteration by having the Facetime and the real time feedback.
Leo: Let’s not leave out the fact that Angus Wall was the editor. He hired 21 other editors to go through all the footage. 70 hours were shot, they say 15 cinematographers and 10 locations but what they don’t mention is that those 15 cinematographers shot 70 hours on 100 IPhones. So there’s a lot of footage.
Alex: So there’s probably a multi-million dollar production.
Andy: That’s the only thing I want to say about it that people might get the mistaken message that how Apple made that movie on the iPhone is something you could do with any phone or any $100 drug store camera on the market if you had all this technical support or all these extra doodads on it.
Leo: You know what’s hysterical? Even Jake Scott and the Cloud Ad agency couldn’t get any Mac Pro’s for their control room, it’s all iMacs. This was the opportunity to show off the MacBook Pro at work but no.
Andy: I had breakfast this morning with a developer who’s given a February ship date whose phone has not been out of his hand since midnight February 1st expecting a confirmation. If every desk there had a Mac Pro they’d be saying Oh guess five people got screwed out of a delivery of a Mac Pro so you could shoot your little cartoon video.
Leo: I take it back.
Rene: One of my friends got an email today from Apple just reminding him that his delivery date is in February. He got all excited when he saw it and it just said We’re reminding you it’s going to ship in February and we’ll tell you when, closer to the date.
Leo: Apparently they didn’t use MacPro’s for the video but used MacPro’s for the scoring. There is a MacPro in one of the images and it looks like their doing the scoring. That’s another studio entirely. 86 Macs were used in production and one of them a MacPro.
Andy: And they still can’t fix the Mac safe connector on the new Macs. I’m being facetious. They solve the problems they want to solve don’t they?
Leo: It must be a fun project to work on though. Lee Cloud the creative director. By the way the same team that did, same company no I’m sorry the same Lee Cloud was the ad agency creative director at Chiat/Day in 84 commercial and Lee Cloud comes back to do this with not Ridley Scott who directed it but his son although as is obviously the case Ridley is there. Boy this is really cool.
Alex: I think one of the things is obviously this is part of an ongoing push that were going to see probably all year made with an IPhone or IPad. One of the things that distinguishes the IOS from all the Android applications that it is more of a you know, the Kindle specifically is much more of a consumption device and what their trying to get people past is that the IPad and the IPhone are not just consumption devices their creation devices and if you want to create something then we’d like to have you join our crew and think about that when you’re buying your tablet or buying your phone. I think that is definitely something that they are going to keep on aggressively pushing. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a great case I think there are a lot of great creation apps on the Android platform but I think specifically Apple is eying the Kindle which is a - I think Amazon would tell you it’s a consumption device. It’s really attacking like If you’re going to buy it, all you want to do is consume, consume, consume, the Kindle is good for you but if you want to create stuff - and I think they are trying to inspire people and even if they never do, like a lot of us buy Gym memberships and never go work out but they might think that someday I might want to make my movies and do whatever. I think you could argue that people who are wanting to do that kind of stuff with their devices may spend more money
Aaron: And made by Mac as well, I mean after you get it all together it’s nice to edit it on a mac so it’s a whole suite of buying the whole ecosystem.
Rene: What’s nice is that their telling the story again and for a while they had stopped doing that and as much as was, it just works before, now their hitting we believe and they keep doing these technology alone is not enough, and the more they do that the better.
Leo: Although I got to say there are other phones that have optical image stabilities, 4K video. They need to tell their story.
Andy: Their doing a much better job of it because I don’t think the IPhone has the best camera on the market today but in terms of I’ve taken a very good picture, what are the apps and what the services I can use to do something really, really, great with it. I still want that to be on a IOS device as opposed to an Android device or Windows phone device. If there was an App with I could take pictures with the Lumia 1020 then put it into the IPhone for IOS with just one tap that would be ideal.
Leo: Visiting Apple.com/30-years that’s their 30 year site. You can see the making of the commercial and there’s a wonderful Mac timeline as well
Aaron: They are getting good at these micro sites.
Leo: This is nicely done, I’ve got to say. A lot of CSS.
Alex: Earning their money
Andy: Have we ever seen Apple so interested in its own past before?
Leo: Never, Remember Steve Jobs very specifically said, no we don't look backwards we're not going to celebrate the 25th anniversary.
Andy: Let's ship those boxes and boxes of crap of old stuff to a university because we don't want them cluttering up here. I think that is a good think, because that is part of what makes apple so great is its history. It's not a newcomer trying to that's trying to feel its way out, or trying to do things, going from product to product to product, when you look back on 30 years, it's sort of like when you look back on performance artist. Being in a kiddie pool covering yourself with gravy and then lighting a Tahitian flag on fire. You don't get it, but when you see the 30 years’ worth of work you did before that you see a continuum and a sense a purpose, it makes the IPhone 5s, not just the IPhone 5s, but the residue of 30 years’ worth of thinking behind the relationship behind humans and technology.
Alex: One of the things I think is really interesting is when you look at the years on the ap0ple store is they were really pretty good at picking out the classic macs of that year. :It's fun to see that
Alex: A lot of us will talk about the 8500, you know the Power Mac 8500, which was just the, you know, a classic, the one I think that would be missing there is the 840AV if anyone remembers the 840AV.
Leo: Although, they do have oddly enough the, is it the Mac T.V., the Apple T.V., there was the 20th anniversary Macintosh that didn't sell
Alex: You know .....
Leo: There it is the Macintosh TV. I don't even remember that. Robin and Rand Miller who of course did mist. Really this is fun, the Macintosh TV, not to be confused with today’s apple TV, the first mac with built in television capabilities
Alex: Yeah I had it, I almost bought one. It was just like the timing cause it oh I was just like I could just replace my TV with it. It had a tuner with it.
Leo: Wow I do not remember that. I thought I owned every Mac there was.
Rene: Not the Pippen
Leo: It was the only black Macintosh desktop, until the introduction of the Mac Pro. So I have one of the two Mac black desktops. Really fun to, there is Hans Zimmer.
Rene: Gourgus site.
Leo: Yeah. One of the original buggies.
Alex: Nice webpage, very nice webpage.
Leo: I like to pick the least important thing Hans Zimmer ever did don't you, as his credit.
Andy: Well you know when Raul Julia died, his screen credit, was Raul Julia star of Mortal Combat 2 ( Laughing)
Leo: This is neat, it's fun to go through these old macs and look at them. All the things people have done with them. This is beautifully done, museum quality.
Leo: Alright we are going to take a break. We come back for more we will talk about ibeacons. It was used at the superbowl, don't know how it worked but maybe somebody knows. Leo: Apple had a great quarter, we did talk about that last week. EGGHHHHH Aaron: Didn't help Denver find the end zone Andy: The one sports joke I can make. Leo: I am watching the superbowl, and I completely forgot that my arch nemesis, Paul Allen, owns the Seahawks. One more reason not to like them. So I am up there taking the Vince Lombardi trophy. Congratulations Seahawks, as Richard Sherman said the 49'ers are the 2nd best team in the NFL not the 3rd. Macbreak weekly brought to you by Freshbooks today, I know sports ball no interest, the simple cloud accounting solution that helps thousands entrepreneur's and small business owners save time doing invoices, billing, get paid faster, even keep track of expenses, track your time as well. Freshbooks it's a simple cloud accounting solution that makes it possible for you to do your work and get the accounting done. It was always the thing I didn't want to do. Send out those invoices at the end of the month. This is when I was working in Canada, so I had to invoice people in dollars, Canadian and dollars and US. It was crazy, Freshbooks handled it all. Multiple currencies, invoices went out, there was even a pay them now button on the invoice that made it very easy for my clients to pay me. I just love Freshbooks. I want you to try it free for 30 days, if you go to getfreshbooks. com ., you can do everything on freshbooks site, enjoy, really get a sense of it, and do it for this billing cycle. I think you will immediately see the value of Freshbooks. It's very affordable. Cloud based solution, I wonder if 5 million users are running their business on Freshbooks. Get Freshbooks .com here is the delicious part, freshbook is offering MacBreak weekly listeners a birthday cake. If you sign up for freshbooks the free trial, when they ask you how did you hear about us, say MacBreak Weekly, you will be in the drawing for a daily birthday cake. Could be your birthday tomorrow even though it's not. Get freshbooks .com make sure tell them you heard it on MacBreak weekly and you can try it free for 30 days and get in the drawing. By the way a very good cake.
Alex: It's tasty, we've gotten one.
Leo: Excellent, yeah that was just a weird quinkadink, I hope.
Alex: It was
Leo: You didn't rig the contest or anything like that?
Alex: No, in fact we weren't sure if we were allowed to have it, you know. So we call them and they said it was totally random and it years ago.
Leo: Good review I thought from Dave Girard, in ours tech
Alex: Very long Leo: Very Long, well that is what Ours Tech is famous for. Of the brand new MacPro. we are starting to see reviews as people finally get them. What a lot of people have pointed out is that the MacPro is an incredible deal.
Alex: Yeah
Leo: And that is something that's not obvious, when you see a computer that starts at over $3,000, umm they reviewed, he reviewed, $6,500 version with the 8 core xenon, and 32 gb ram, dual fire pro d 700's, he upgraded the cards, he said you could not buy and fire pro 700's, 2 of them, for that price. Certainly the processor alone is $2000.
Alex: Right
Leo: So the price, He says Apple is really giving you a deal. If you need this stuff, it's a good deal. Now if you don't need it, it's stupid.
Rene: Or you’re buying it anyway Leo: you’re doing it cause you just, you just love how beautiful it is.
Aaron: Now as a programmer what's interesting about this review is that he compares it with the iMac and unless the software is optimized for the situation there is not point
Leo: No Point
Aaron: So apple is sending a clear message to developers that it is time to start thinking multi-threaded, so that you can use all cores at the same time, and also start thinking about open CL, which is the library we use to talk to the GPU, to general purpose computing.
Leo: Right Aaron :If you’re not really working GPU at all the cores there is no point.
Leo: It's not going to be faster compiling even, because you get plenty of speed on an iMac. He points out that the fire pro w9000, which is very similar to the d700 that Apple is selling, retails on Newegg for $3 ,400, one of them. Alex: Right Leo :So he says apple charges
Aaron: That's a lot of power
Leo :$600 for the upgrade to dual d700's. So it really, so in fact if you do need it you should be upgrading to the d700 for $600. Because dual d700 are better than dual d500's.
Alex: I say go all in
Leo: Go all in. He points out that the processer he got, the 8 way processer is $2,749. Its unbelievable.
Aaron: What I love about this computer is how quite it is.
Alex: Yeah it's silent Leo: Oh you have one
Aaron: No I don't own one myself yet. This February just starting.
Leo: I don't know why I forget
Alex: Cause you love it so much
Leo: I forget to bring it in. I forget to bring it Alex wants to play with it. I'll run home today, and pick it up for you. He does say you can get 3rd party ram upgrades and that's probably a good idea. Do make sure if you get ram that it's made for a MacPro, for instance
Alex: And one of the things
Leo: Don't even mess with it. It has a temperature sensor in it that talks to the fan.
Alex: ....
Leo: You know if you get the wrong one your fan will be at full speed the whole time
Alex: One of the things that we did. We had to do a lot of research back in the day. One of the things that we found is that a lot errata, the difference between a computer that is really stable and computer that is a little wonky, turns out to be the ram.
Leo: Yeah Yeah
Alex: You know we used to do a lot of testing, um, we had to deal with a lot of video, a coiup0le million clips, 750 ,000 objects for a movie I was working on and we had a lot of crashing. You know, it turned out that once we cleaned up the entire ram and tested it all heavily everything got stable again. Definitely, because of that I just generally buy, I know that Apple's ram tends to be stable. It's really built for this and I tend not to get 3rd party ram anymore.
Rene: You’re paying for the peace of mind .
Leo: 450 Watt power supply, now that's bigger than most pc's but still not massive.
Aaron: For a little computer like that it's big, when it's working it burns 330watts.
Alex: Yeah
Leo: As you say it's dead silent
Aaron: Dead silent
Leo: The hard drive, the spinning hard drive I have hooked up to it is louder then it. It's annoying.
Aaron: Do you feel the heat coming out of the top?
Leo: Yeah, not heat exactly. Balmy Air
Alex: I’m just wondering if I can replace my space heater with it .
{Multiple Talking}
Leo :Nothing I can do and I'm playing, ah you know bio-shock infinite full quality in everything, great frame rates it's not ....
Alex: I've been doing a bunch of re-compressions from, what I would love to test it on, I’ve got about ,shot about 20hrs of footage last week that we have to convert to apple pro-rese Aaron: your able to dry your hair at the same time
Alex: That's awesome
Andy: I'm more concerned about --- infiltration. It’s a source of radiant heat. If you have a cat, it will basically come and look like one of those Egyptian Coptic jars, get just get it's body stuck in the tube
Leo: A cat would love it .
Andy: Mini Sauna
Leo: Or you even a small rodent of any kind. Squirrels
Rene: Rodents of unusual size .
Leo: It does apparently, for those who are wondering, support windows, but windows 8 only, because windows 7 does not have support usb 3, the drivers are pretty flaky. He says you should really, you’re going to have to use windows 8, he says also the and driver apple, installs with boot camp, has crossfire enabled so it uses both gpu's for gaming.
Alex: Right
Leo: Awesome. I'm going to have to put windows 8 on it and let you know. I've been avoiding it, it feels like sullying, it's like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
Andy :This is probably, maybe it’s, stop talked to talk about the 30 anniversary of the Mac, this really is a lot like the first mac in so many ways, cool radical design, but also it's kind of scarce right now. The people who want them are willfully ignoring the fact that this is not the most practical computer to own in 2014. Everybody who does not have one wants to know to know somebody who has one so they can see it and try it, I’m really getting a 1984 vibe off the entire MacPro conversation .
Leo: He Says at first glance the new MacPro seems like a finger in the eye of demanding creative professionals, but after actually using this system I am convinced this is a very successfully workstation design that can be a great template for future version. As you say apple has designed should appeal to video customers, the company has done a good job of reaffirming its commitment to that user base, great of course for graphic customers as well. But now comes the time for tough love, those video users likely make up the majority of apple's media pro base but are they also disparition represented as the only people who use MacPro's. Apple has changed Final Cut Pro to leverage dual gpu's and created a powerful dual gpu workstation to push a narrative that says that gpu is the future of computing. It’s clear how this machine wants to be review, plug it in hit play on your 4-k final cut footage and go wow this is amazing, which is actually what you and I would do. But he says You know I pay for these machines and use them for work, he is a 3d designer not a video guy. That does not fit neatly into the narrative that apple would like to weave. In 3d rendering CPU is still king. Is that True?
Alex: Well, It depends. When you’re working in 3d the cpu for the final render is still king. When you are actually doing your previews and looking at things then the gpu is still very important for being able to watch your playbacks before you hit render. So yes and NO
Leo: So we won't frequently tap the second GPU and all visual effects, productions quality renderers, vray, arnold, mantra, rendraman, cinema 4d, etc. etc. are cpu bound, and there developers are not being swayed by the talk of GPU everything.
Alex: That's true. You know in videos done a lot work with some of their rendering. But that did not go the way they wanted it to go. I have big GPU in my older Mac. specifically because I want to be able to look at stuff, and compositing software that we developed was completely GPU
Leo: Right
Alex: Driven, So it is very valuable as far as real time interaction. I think he is a little over stated but the CPU as far as the final render definitely makes a difference.
Leo: He also points out that say over the four year life of this computer it's going to be absolutely essential that I can upgrade the GPU and of course that's not possible. As far as we know Alex: Maybe, the problem is he said it's absolute essential, I don't need the gpu but will need to be able to upgrade it.
Leo: No the single GPU
Alex: Oh Ok
LEO: Ahh he says. as for the phantom 2nd CPU how am I supposed to make up for the power loss in the single socket downgrade. I think he means GPU. Oh now I get it. There is two CPU sockets. Anyway worth reading if you’re thinking about it and you’re a pro, he some qualms but I think in general as with almost everyone that has played with the MacPro. This is an amazing machine but not for everyone.
Alex: I think we are going to have to see how quickly Adobe is able to get after effects and premier and abbot taking full advantage of it.
Leo: Right
Alex: Advantage is if you’re a final cut user, and then we'll probably see some upgrades with cinema 40 that work heavily and move they tend to move very quickly. We will see maxon move forward very quickly to kind of push that forward as well.
Andy :It seems like the persons for them it makes the most sense is developers. Leo: Really? It doesn't does it
Aaron :No it's a nice machine for a developer.
Leo: well yeah if you can afford it
Aaron: I mean you can drive bigger screen which is more pixels, which is more.
Leo: Always big screens are good
Aaron: A lot of cores so you can be compiling a lot files at the same time.
Leo: Most CC ... will use as many cores as you have
Aaron: Yes x code will take care of that for you. It's a great developer machine once again, it's quite. Till one of the kids puts something on top and stops all the air flow and it melts down. It's going to be a perfect machine.
Alex: We had a production box catch fire last week, it was awesome.
Leo: What
Alex: Right in the middle of production. suddenly it's smoking somewhere. so yeah, ventilation is important it turns out.
Leo: Apple had a 13 .1 billion dollar quarter the 5th highest of all time fortune puts this into perspective. They say they had a bigger quarter then most oil companies by and order of 2 and Wall Street still downgraded the stock by 8%
Rene: Companies’ that have .... control over fossil fuel resources, limited fossil fuel resources.
Leo: Yeah only oil and gas companies make that kind of money. They haven't seen 10 billion kind of quarter since 2011, but Apple stock fell 8$, that Phillip Belmere-Dewitt who has always been a great writer about apple stuff
Rene: They had a great piece from Ben Thompson to who was looking at the transition in market share from apple to Samsung and apple as we have talked about before has 0% share in the under $400 .00 market but there share of the over $400 .00 market went from I think 45 to 65% quarter after quarter and that represent a lot of money for apple. There average selling price per iPhone, I think has gone up, I think 30-60 dollars and Samsung has gone down because there is a lot more pressure on the low end market especially now leno how is entering it. Then there is on the high end market.
Leo: iBeacon rolled at the MetLife for the superbowl as you in fact walked around Manhattan, your phone would say hey over there is the big toboggan why don’t you try it for a ride, or if you’re walking through the park, say hotdogs here, get your hotdogs here, whatever I don't know. Major league baseball is planning to do the same thing for opening day. Yes we are tailing opening day. Pitchers and catchers report next month, so get ready. The league is looking to have 20 parks outfitted with 100 iBeacons at the end of March, Boston, Milwaukee, San Diego, The Dodgers, The Giants, among the teams that will have iBeacons installed.
Alex: I think we should put iBeacons all through the TWIT brick house
Leo: We can put iBeacons up
Alex: Let’s do it
Rene: Here is where OMG Chad writes the MacWeekly Blog
Leo: What would we do, here is where Leo passed out after his New Year's eve party.
Andy: Can you still smell the aroma, this is where Ozzy pooped yesterday.
Alex: we have been actually been talking about taking like two or three blocks by two or three blocks in Petaluma and putting a whole bunch of them all over the place as R&D.
Leo: Sclobal was going to do that, Sclobal was going to do kind of a gorilla IBeaconing
Alex: Right, I think what is possible with iBeacon is mind boggling. I mean just, you we talk about like what we want to do with our shipping cases you know cause we are constantly, as you have seen there are lots of pelican cases downstairs
Leo: I have seen them
Alex: Keeping track of what all the hardware is and everything else, what I think is going to be possible is our gear telling our case that it is going into the as you put it into the case. The gear ..
Leo: I am in the case now
Alex: As the cases leave ,they are telling us this case with this gear is going in and when you take it out on the other end it tells you that it's been taken out and when it’s been put back in the case. When you look at the gear it can tell you what case it should go back into. when you have all these localized chips, you know these little chips, and we were playing with doing with active RFID, but it wasn't a format that really worked. Having something that is really standardized on this is really exciting .things around, of course there are a lot of things they can send you coupons, but there is also how do I find my seat, anyone who has been to these stadiums, should I go into this entrance, or should I go somewhere else.
Leo: Well that's what's interesting
Alex :How do I get to my seat. All those things are things that GPS cannot help you with, or where is the nearest restroom. You know which way is he nearest restroom.
Leo: So this is what Major League baseball is saying which I think is very interesting. they are not trying to make money but are trying to improve the fan experience .
Alex: Right
Leo: They say we are taking a longer range view, time is more valuable than money, so major league baseball wants to make the fan experience as efficient as possible. so looking to eliminate time wasters like waiting in line at will call window, getting to your seats, it shows you, looking for your seats, and it will show you how to get there. Gives you offers, every 10th visit gives you offers. This is the New York Mets, this is an app called at the Ballpark. Which I think is already out. I like that.
Andy: They will be able to guide the police to exactly the seat of the person with child support payments due.
Leo: There are so many applications for this technology .There is a drunk here. You can download At The Ballpark, MLB .com/attheballpark for iPhone right now and be ready come opening day.
Alex: PNC Park is one of them it looks like it
Leo: Is it?
Alex: Is the coolest park in Pittsburgh. To be able to fill it up all the time when you have a team that never wins except this year
Leo :That's saying something
Alex :You, takes some work, but when you think about this also as a parent, imagine being able to get to a point where you lose your kid at the park and they have their iPhone with them, or an iBeacon on them, and I have lost my son at a baseball park, at PNC Park actually,
Leo: Children should have iBeacons stitched to the nape of their neck.
Alex: Exactly, but imagine it being able to get to the point 5 years down the road you run an alert and it literally won't let the doors, the automatic doors open because they are nearby or they are right there in front of it. All of these things, it’s a pretty
Leo: Where can I buy iBeacons and how cheap are they?
Alex: They are down to a couple dollars each. we have been doing some research on them.: I will get some for twit
Aaron: There are also some diabolical things you can do with them, if you think about casinos, at casinos you have your customer loyalty card, you have your phone in your pocket and it keeps track. Usually Alex comes in he loses about two hundred bucks and then he goes home
Alex :Let’s make sure he gets drinks first
Aaron: Exactly or we will wait till he is up and then send him a coupon for the jewelry shop at the exit and make a ton of money on the real estate. so just manipulating your
Andy: So these are a hundred bucks. These are the things that concern me the most about that technology, I think maybe we are going to create a generation of people that are aware that perhaps I should switch off my phone and leave it off until I’m back into a trusted environment, because the first time a casino does something creepy, the first time a baseball park or mall does something creepy like saying hi Andy, I remember that you were looking at this camera when you were in a best buy 40 miles away and now that you’re in this other mall, do you realize the price that price is 20% less. I'm like ok I am going to take out my pentalobe screwdriver take apart my iPhone and disconnect the battery manually.
Alex: One of the things that is going to be important for apple is to give us granular control over what kind of notifications we are getting based on that iBeacon
Andy: Turn it off not notifications on who gets this information. I need to be able to cut off that master switch at the source, it's not that it gives everybody can get access to it but I can control what I hear about it. I am saying that if I want to pass through this mall like a ghost I should be able to do that.
Leo: Reminds of the day when I was at PacBell park waiting to get in while they scraped the webvan logo's off the back of the seats. This is a company Estamos that makes iBeacons these are more visible, they are a larger, and they are $33 .00 each, a pack of 3 are $99 .00. So here is an example of a retail implementation, as john approaches the entrance, the violet beacon positioned in the window sends a personalized message, engaging him hello John, get in here we've got a special offer for you today, John is, John is headed towards his favorite retail store, he has the stores mobile app on his smart phone, that is kind of the key here
Rene: You wanted the digital version of the guy outside Vegas trying to offer you tickets.
Lou: Yeah Flick Flick, jeans are on sale today. John sees some great jeans thanks to another beacon located to another product he can immediately receive more information and special offer. He then walks over to the shirts as he approaches the t-shirt section of the store, the yellow beacon sends a new message to john's phone with a recommendation for a new purchase.
Andy: John now wonders why hi battery is down to 20% he fully charged it in the car .
Leo: John decides to buy both the items and uses the stores mobile app to finalize the purchase and as he walks out the door the light blue beacon trigger a thank you message with shipping information. The items you purchased will be shipped today and delivered to your home address. Which I already know because I know everything.
Rene: See you Thursday at 4pm based on previous behavior.
Andy: I wonder if this company gets it though because they have just created the most sterile consumer experience
Leo: That's about right
Andy: I don't interact with anybody, I don't need to ask for anybody's opinion. Even if you aren't like in the level of I leave the house and don't buy on amazon is because sometimes I want that sort of interactive consumer experience. Even if that doesn't matter to you, I am thinking ok so not a single clerk had to come and help me. If your store is doing a lot of business with this, that means your store is probably hiring fewer people, so why does this yellow shirt cost exactly the same as it does in the store next to me where they have a full staff, where they have people who will ask me am I being helped ...
Alex: People like me, I don’t want to talk to anybody when I walk into the store. I want to look at something, I really don't
Andy: But that is what I am saying. If the shirt in the fully staffed store cost $30 .00 it should cost $25 .00 in the store that has maybe 2 people on staff whose job is only there to troubleshoot the iBeacon system
Alex: I would actually pay more if people just left me alone, this incessant coming up to me all the time asking me how I am doing. I just, I don't, I just want to go and get my stuff. I don't care
Andy: There is definitely a balance to that, but again I was just buying at Home Depot this morning and it actually pleased me that I wasn’t being accosted, unpacking boxes ,there were people doing their job, but they saw that I seemed to be walking around looking for something and the first thing they said can I help you find something .
Alex: I want them to say can I help you find something. The issue is, that I want my iPhone to do that. I don't need them to do that, I want to be able to walk in and it goes, I don't necessarily need a coupon but what I want to do is walk in and say what are you looking for and I go shirts, and it says go right, go forward, you know whatever
Andy: As long as you control the experience, if they set it up, or the even if the defaults in the apps are set up so that I have been conditioned over the past 2 or 3 years that when my phone buzzes in my pocket or makes that trolling sound it's probably a text message or probably something important, but now I’m starting to ignore text messages because my phone is keeping me alert, did you know that we have this new flavor red vines that actually beef vanilla flavored.
Alex :As with all other marketing. All of the marketing and all of the other point of purchasing and everything else, I used to work at Sony music. I worked with point of purchase a lot, for bands mostly music and stuff like that. We used to call it was Karmic Balance
Andy: Karmic Balance
Alex: Yes Karmic Balance was are you providing something that’s great versus what you’re asking them to do. As long as your Karmic Balance was positive people would be fine with it, if it became negative then you are going to reduce, so a lot of people don't understand that. They understand what they need out of it. I want to get people to buy more, but they don’t understand if not producing a use, if there not making it, making the experience better, then you’re actually going to dull peoples connections. I think people, there is a lot of opportunity here, and I think if the Karmic Balance is good with the iBeacon, there is an incredible number of things that can be done, but I think Andy is very aware if the Karmic Balance is negative I think all the things Andy is talking about.
Aaron: You think Apple is going to police the Karmic Balance?
Alex: I think that they will. I think much more. I think iBeacon is a huge opportunity for Apple, and Apple will definitely bust the knuckles if they feel like the people are getting overwhelmed by the information absolutely.
Andy: Apple is the one company that I would trust to have the master kill switch right in settings, iBeacons Ignore. That solves the entire the entire problem. I love these features where if you don't want any part of it you flip a switch or by default it simply doesn't bother you, until you see a sign that says, oh by the way we use iBeacon if you download this app it will make your shopping experience better, if I then have to actively make that choice and make that vote, then that’s a totally different story.
Alex: I think it's going to be huge for big department stores, Safeway. I want, where is the coffee, and then it just tells me which row, which aisle on, because that's what I keep on asking people for and I don't want to ask them, I just want to look at my iPhone and have it tell me where the gin is so I can make my gin and tonic for 92 calories.
Andy: I just don't want people to lose jobs over this and that's
Alex: They definitely will
Andy: I don’t want that to happen. I think that's too expensive if now the workforce has been decimated and the people are still there now have to do about eight different jobs, instead of specializing on one or two. I feel as though the trend is to streamline operations so much that your staffs are basically treated like meatbots.
Alex: I think the issue, it's not that your staff is treated like meatbots, I think that the issue is if you are in a job that you think is mindless don't worry you won't be in it for much longer. I think you have to be as an American you have to be very focused on how to move up the food chain and stay ahead of a computer because you should not. If you think you’re going to be working at the gap and managing peoples orders or McDonalds, McDonalds has had almost self-run McDonalds for 20 years they have been experimenting with that. All we need is for the minimum wage to go up a little bit further, and ib kits to work a little bit better and they will reduce their staff by half. That math is something that all of these guys are, ever bodies is working on. It happens everywhere, Just having these computers, I’m working on this big thing, for my g+ post about, and employment is definitely something I am thinking about a lot, it's just that technology is going to keep disrupting, where employment is, it doesn't mean it goes away, it just means it is moving around and people have to pay attention to it, especially when you’re at the top of the heap. Which is the United States; good financial perspective.
Leo: Couple of quick stories Adobe has just released a critical update for flash, for windows and mac addressing a zero-day vulnerability. I am sure we will cover that more in security now in just a few minutes.
Alex: When do we get to get rid of flash?
Leo: I wish we could just get rid of it now. Steve was so right and I think we are close. I am looking at reports from Mac roomers and boy genius about ios 7 .1 the beta 5 that just came out today, not only what’s new, they are noting the build number is only slightly higher than the previous beta build number. They think, and I am thinking they are right, that it means we are probably getting close to a release date. Boy genius was saying March, but now they are saying in the coming weeks. Could be sooner than that, get ready something much needed in the 7 .1 is getting close.
Rene: I just got the new version of hype, the new version of hype, I forget which version number it is, but it is the html 5 interactive dynamic tool from tumult, it's fantastic, everything I used to do on flash I can easily do on that now and it has no exploits.
Leo: Yes let's replace it with HTML 5 please.
Rene: It's responsive now too and that was the last thing I was waiting for was the responsive design stuff.
Leo: Have you played with paper yet?
Aaron: Love paper
Leo: I feel sorry for 53, there is a bit of a dispute of course paper is the Facebook app and 53 is a beautiful drawing app that's been one of the top apps on the iPad
Alex: I have to admit it was confusing when I saw paper coming out on Facebook, did Facebook buy paper?
Leo: No,
Alex: So they filed for trademark the same day that Facebook put it out. You might of thought about that earlier. I might have done that a couple of years ago.
Rene: What's funny though is the different reaction when people using, Facebook using paper got an entirely different reaction the king trying to stop other apps from using candy.
Leo: People love paper by 53, they are not so fond of Facebook. anyway
Andy: Also again, remember that Mr. Jobs got away with that to when they said of course we are going to call this the iPhone so no one else has that, yeah we are still going to call it the iPhone I’m sure.
Alex: Facebook is a really big company
Andy: We will hold a pen over our checkbook in one hand and a knife in the other and see ......deal with
Alex: the advantage with the iPhone the advantage is 53 is not that big of a company compared to Facebook and this can all be solved probably with a big check.
Aaron: Facebook is serious so I can't talk about most of our clients but Facebook has graciously given us permission to talk about them. This year we trained 750 of their engineers on mobile programming, both iOS and Android. They are serious about mobile, and they are a dream to work with, they pay their bills instantly. This sort of thing you see they brought on like Mike Matas ,
Leo: Did he come over?
Aaron: Lauren Brikter, he has been working with Facebook on this, not with us.
Leo: So this is it, it is an of course it is iPhone app, but it runs on actually quite beautifully on an iPad.
Alex: Incredible interface
Leo: I think in many ways, first of all it’s a very future, very future looking interface, its' just beautiful. What you get is the screen is divided into halves .The top half is the table of contents, you can have Facebook of course and that will be your traditional Facebook feed in the bottom half you can scroll through that, but you can also have headlines because you have contents sources
Alex: It's a frontal assault on flip board.
Leo: Oh this is better than flip board, it's gorgeous. So let's say I'm following sports on this, see how quickly that rolled through all the stories. I can scroll through all the stories, I can scroll through a story, when I see a story I want I tap it, if I want to read more I scroll up in it. So this is a really elegant way, of course I can like it because it's still Facebook, comment on it, I can share it, that hasn't gone away. What's interesting is, this is more than flip board, because it is also obviously intended to be the way you read Facebook, Facebook plus. It starts off with your Facebook newsfeed and if you scroll down, you now get access to the stuff you would get in the Facebook app, including and by the way your code generator, which is hidden in settings, so if you are using Facebook for a second factor authentication Facebook app. As far as I can tell it really has all the functionality. You can turn off push notifications.
Alex: Here is one of the things that I think Facebook is doing really right here is that they have created a
Leo: You can post from it and they encourage you to post a beautiful image, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Alex: They created, basically I think they created replacement for their Facebook app.
Leo: That's clearly what this is
Alex: But what they didn't do, and this is what Apple made the mistake with final cut 10 and a lot of other things. they didn't make this the update for the Facebook app, what they did is they created a whole other thing that everyone is going to start using and people are going decide they do not want to use their Facebook app anymore, and that is fine with the, but they didn't force everybody into an update, they just said, some people really just like there Facebook app, and letting people see this is a lot better and choose that, and what your no seeing is the big upset that you would see if they tried to just changed the interface of the Facebook app.
Aaron: I think we are going to see Facebook apps for different users. Especially people who live on high latent sea, low bandwidth network, third world, we are going to see versions that use less bandwidth. One of the things I love is when you have an image when you rotate it will show you
Leo: Not on all images .... it's hard to know when it's going to do that. That's the only thing, you see it's kind of doing this motion thing and you can move stuff around.
Alex: It's an incredible app.
Leo: It is state of the art in IOS
Aaron: One of the things I love about it is it teaches you as you go, as you get, as you get .. oh by the way if you want to know you can do this
Leo: They need to do that because much like windows 8 there is a lot of scrolling stuff, that not very discoverable.
Aaron: New Indium’s, definitely, exciting indium’s, but things they had to tell you about, and they do it gradually it's not like it's one splash screen at the beginning where you are supposed to learn the whole thing, it's as you get comfortable with something, you say oh by the way there is something else you can do
Andy: Although I have to admit I got into it so quickly it kept telling me something like, and then it wants me to go do something and I was reading the article, I don't want to do that.
Leo: By the way I have been using it long enough that I don't get any more tutorials ,it goes away after a while, so that is good news. I really think they have done a nice job here, this is a beautiful app, and you can I have very easily added content categories. These are the ones I have put in here but they have many more. I just added LOL which is going to give me humorous stuff. Dimly lit meals for one.
Aaron: I am interested to see how they allow other people, like flip board to publish to it, like in categories.
Leo: When you go to these categories you do see that they have partners, so if for instance you look at the news category. You’re going to get the partners including the Huffington post, the verge, mashable
Aaron: Like that ;s good but with Filip bard anybody can do it at this point
Leo: Well they haven’t got that yet, these are partners, and you are not able to add your own. It's not clear, for instance I would love TWIT to be one of these and TECH anyway but it's not there
Alex: I still think that's an advantage that filpboard has to some degree
Leo: It's more open but Facebook historically never really cared about anyone else.
Andy: Speaking of new indium’s, this just underscores an ongoing thing where individual work on operating system level user interfaces is not as important anymore because it seems like every major app that gets released doesn't go with an IOS or even and android interface. they create something brand new that is suited to the app they want to make. That more importantly can make consistent interface on both platforms now.
Leo: Yeah right, so I can take a picture, I can post, so this camera stuff, if I take this picture is this IOS or is this Facebook, it's got Instagram filters.
Aaron: iOS filters
Leo: These are the iOS filters, it's got enhanced, those are iOS also, the cropping, the rotation all that stuff, it's just using the camera app then to do that. Really quite nicely done I think.
Andy: Is it a good thing or a bad thing when a company comes up with an app and you think you’re sure this was developed by Facebook it's too good.
Rene: There ream is phenomenal
Leo: It's definitely a good thing, Facebook was looking ...
Andy: Comparing to the web interface which to me is just way to cluttered, way too confusing and you almost think it tricks you into publishing things and sharing things you don't want to share because it's just so muddled. When you see this same company produced an app like this you wonder if that is actually part of the marketing strategy to trick the web users and sort of bring in the mobile users Leo: right
Aaron: Facebook for a long time was sort of the poster child for HTML 5 and Java script and universal applications and it hasn’t' been so long since they actually devoted themselves to doing native versions of the Facebook app, and I think this is the natural fruit that is bearing
Leo: Well it's worth the download anyway, you just search for paper by Facebook I guess
Rene: what is really interesting is they used their new origami tool to prototype all of this and if you go to the trouble of making a tool like that it is probably not the only app you’re going to make with it.
Leo: Interesting, Interesting
Leo: Let’s Take a break, when we come back your picks of the week. Aaron Hillegass is here from bignerdranch ,Alex Lindsay from the Pixalcorp, Rene Ritchie imore .com, from the Chicago sun times Andy Ihnatko. Our show today brought to you by 99designs .com, designs is everything, when you look at an app like that Facebook app compared to the old Facebook app you can see design is what makes it usable, is what makes it great. Just because you’re a programmer, or a chef or you have a business doesn't mean you’re good a design, stop doing your own design folks. Unless you’re a designer leave it to the Pros. That's where 99designs can really help. there are more than a quarter of a million graphic designers waiting for you to post a contest that is what they call it on 99designs. You say what you want to do, do you want to do a t-shirt or stationary, do you want to design a new website or mobile app, you want a new logo. You post the contest on 99designs .com it cost you nothing to do that, the designers submit ideas, you can work with the designers to refine them, pick the one that you want, and then pay the price as low as $199 .00. it is fantastic, and when you visit 99designs.com / mbw you will get $99 .00 power pack of services absolutely free, a power pack gives you more designer time and attention. 99desgins will bold and highlight and feature your design project, in the 99design marketplace, that means more designers will notice, you will get about twice as many designs. It's all for free if you go 99designs .com /mbw if you’re a great chef have a great menu, if you’re a great programmer your app could have great design too. To many people think they can do it themselves, get some help 278 ,433 designers await you at 99designs .com. Make sure you go to 99designs .com/mbw to get that power pack of savings.
Leo: time for our pick of the week, I'm going to give a little credit. I’ll start does anybody have an iPhone here
Aaron: Yeah
Leo: So I’m going to have you do this.
Aaron: let me get it out of my pocket
Leo: Alex is busy so you can all follow along at home. There have been complaints about the fingerprint recognition on the iPhone, in particular fingerprint fade, where after a period of time you lose it. Now Steve Gibson our security guy had a very interesting thing and I think you should all try this at home. Turns out you can over train the fingerprint reader, as it stands right now when you train it for a finger, you tap it five times and it will slowly add to the pattern and then finally it will say had enough. Steve says you could go one hundreds of times and the more readings you give the more accurate the fingerprint reading will be, but apple quite reasonably decided we are going to limit this to say five or eight nodes and that will be enough. It turns out you can over trains it, on your iPhone right now. If you go to the interface where is says I want to train it for touch, what do they call it one touch, or whatever.
Rene: Touch ID
Leo: you do this Rene see if it works for you, you go into the settings for touch id which list all your touch ID's, now if you tap one and start doing readings it will add nodes, nobodies got an iPhone right here .
Rene: I'm doing it right here
Leo: It will add nodes and it will do it as long as you want. Steve says he has done it literally bunches and bunches of times, and this has solved it. Now Steve discovered this but I guess others have now picked up on it, overtraining your touch ID. I'm glad others have heard about it, did they give Steve, yes they did, thank you Alice,
Rene: That's us
Leo: Oh that's you well there you go. Yay thank you. Figures you would give us credit. So that is my tip if you want touch ID to me much more accurate, by the way you can have five different fingers with touch ID, I have an incoming phone call, unfortunately all my devices ring, no stopping them, I don't know what that is, somebody somewhere else. If you have, you can still have all five of your fingerprints and just over train each one. There is plenty of space. So very interesting tip I don't know why no one figured that out, but if you want to know more Alice has done a great job of summarizing at imore .com and a lot of credit to Steve Gibson who is you know kind of a nutty guy. He figured it out, he says I am not happy, how am I going to do this. You pick your fingerprint and you just keep tapping. Apple has never said anything about this, maybe they will Rene Ritchie what do you have for us.
Rene: So there is developer name Jerrod Sinclair, he is a very thoughtful developer, he post a lot of really good comments when new apps come out about how do interaction, how they do design. He's got a couple well known apps for app .net including whisper, which is a messaging app, and repost which is just a general app .net client. He has just put out a new RSS client called, I put it in the chat room and now the name escapes me, unread. Exactly, unread, and RSS reader and he didn't like the almost male got apps style of RSS readers, he preferred a leisurely, human approach. So he has basically built on that is more like a traditional reading experience. He recommends you prune your RSS feeds, get rid of the stuff you don't read that often, it's not designed for rapid triage of RSS, but really sit down and read through the great stuff you subscribe to.
Leo: Very Cool
Rene: He does fantastic designs
Leo: iPhone only
Rene: I believe it is iPhone only now, he is a one man crew, so I am guessing he wants to do a really good job on the first one and then expand from there.
Leo: $2 .99 ever since google killed reader, a lot of people have been thinking what an RSS reader would look like
Rene: this uses, you can put in your feed wrangler account or your feedley account and download all our RSS, that's the nice thing about the post google world is that there is a bunch of different services and you can basically go from app to app until you find the one you really like
Leo: Yes, Alex has assembled his tip of the week and when I say assembled I mean assembled. So this is probably the kind of thing that ad for apple. You have attached giant lens. Wow so that is an optical zoom lens, it's fairly long it's about 5 inches long, it goes on your iPhone. You need a special case I presume
Alex: This case is adjustable so it will, this one specifically will work on any iPhone, you can get ones, and I can try to give you the brand for this but this is essentially a Chinese manufacturer, figured out how to do this
Leo: So there are a lot of these
Alex: There is a lot of them you can go to amazon .com they range from $18 .00 t0 $50 .00 there all pretty much the same.
Leo: 18 and 15 that’s not too bad
Alex: 18 and 52 Dollars
Leo: so get the $18 .00 one
Alex: Well I think they have different, this is what makes it different, is how it is attaching to the phone. I wanted to have one that would fit on my android phone and my iPhone and you know different phones
Leo: It looks a little bit like a light sabre handle.
Alex: It does, and we saw this we were shooting at a location and we saw someone using this and it worked remarkable well and I thought to myself I need to get one of these.
Leo: Let me see it, let's show it on the handheld. So if I go to the camera app
Andy: Is that plastic or machined metal
Alex: Aluminum
Leo: Ok, let me put this somewhere, and you turn.
Alex: It really wants to zoom further out, that's just the, yeah there you go.
Leo: Tough because I need to give you an angle that you can read it at.
Alex :it's quite a
Leo: What would you say the focal length is?
Alex: You know I don't know, it literally just showed up and I wanted to show it. This little ultra like that everything kind of works, I think if I did it again I would get one of the ones, it's not tightened enough yet.
Leo: It would adjust
Alex: I think that I would probably get one that is the case. Part of why I want to do this, I know this will sound crazy, cause a lot of things I do sound crazy, but for Rene this is for you, the reason I got was the adjustable thinking, it is to see if I could retro fit it onto c ...
Leo: inaudible
Alex: My number one reason for it was to play around with attaching lens to our webcams and so forth.
Leo: Wow
Alex: So it happens to work on the iPhone as well, which is why it's a good pick for MacBreak as well.
Leo: We will put a link in the show notes, but if you search for it on amazon for magnifier aluminum camera telephoto you'll find it
Alex: There is lots of different manufactures selling them, but it's just one Chinese manufacturer selling it at this point.
Leo: It says 12 xs which is quite a bit, that like
Alex: Yeah, and one of the cool things is it has a mount, a quarter 20 mount on the lens so you can actually hang it off
Leo: You can put it on a tripod
Alex: Yes a tripod on the lens and the iPhone hangs from it, but I would get one with the case. I got one that was general purpose for other reasons, I am not totally sure that was the right way to go.
Leo: Twenty five bucks for the one we just saw. Aaron got anything you would like to share with us. I know you have a new book; we should share that, a very good book for beginners.
Aaron: The beginning book is objective c the big nerd ranch guide, anyone can read it, it moves quickly, but doesn't assume very much at all. I think you would like it a lot. That is really the prequel to our ios programming book or our cocoa programming book, and the 4th edition of the ios book has already gone to the printers and it should be in your local bookstores within two weeks.
Leo: or you could just go to bignerdranch .com and you could find it all there pilgrim
Aaron: We do training; we just opened a new training site near Monterey, Sylmar
Leo: Sylmar is beautiful
Aaron: It's beautiful; I am headed down there as soon as I leave here
Leo: that is where Ted used to be.
Aaron: We still teach in Atlanta and Amsterdam, so there should be somewhere you can get to easily Alex: I have to say, I’ve read the books and taken the class, and they are bar non the best classes
Leo: That's right you did it
Alex: If you want to learn how to program, if you have decided you have seen all the code .org stuff and you've decided you wanted to learn how to write files.
Leo: This is the thing to do.
Aaron: We do corporate training to. So we send instructors to company sites, just like Facebook, there valuation has gone up by 80 billion since we started teaching them, and I take full credit for that.
Leo: Achieved nirvana, and by the way if you get on Christmas list they send out the best cookies every year.
Alex: We should get you guys to come and do another on here.
Aaron: Yes that would be fun
Alex: We will talk about that, get a schedule and do it our little studio over there.
Leo: Your pick is marked
Aaron: Every once in a while you come across a utility that does just one thing and does it so beautifully, and I really wanted to bring attention to this one. So marked down is a markup language where you can say this is headline, this is a paragraph text and this is a code sample, and then this tool renders it into a beautiful readable style. It is not an editor, it just takes what written in whatever editor you use, and every time you save it, it re-renders it so you can see what it looks like.
Leo: That's neat
Aaron: Very, Very elegant.
Leo: It's on the Mac app store it is $3 .99
Aaron: Totally worth it
Leo: MARKED2 is apparently on its way.
Aaron: On its way
Rene: By Bret Terpster who is awesome
Leo: Of course I know Bret
Rene: He does so many things EnvyAlt, so many projects
Leo: Neat, Andy Ihnatko your pick of the week
Andy: Mine is sort of a variation on a pick that Alex made about a year ago or something, 123d Catch, that awesome iPhone app where you take a series of photos of an object from all angles and then upload it to a server that will then send back a 3d model of the thing, which is lovely and wonderful. The difficulty of the app is that you need to have the actually, you need to have the app and you need to be taking pictures with your phone. However in this, in the time since that recommendation, or at least the time since I looked at that recommendation. It is now a fully online tool, so if you go to 123dapp .com you can simply take pictures with whatever camera you have or whatever camera you want to use and then when you get back home upload them to 123d .com and it will build a model. So over the weekend I went to visit the concord museum that has this wonderful exhibit of Daniel Chester French, sculptures and bronzes, he's probably most famous for this piece right here which is the figure from the Lincoln Memorial and I really wasn't even explicitly thinking I will capture this for 3d, it's just how often do you get a chance to photograph the Lincoln Memorial from the back and from the top. Unless you’re a bird or a maintence worker at the Lincoln Memorial, so I was just taking lots, and lots of pictures and then when I got back I had been so obsessive about it, I wondered if 123d app could do anything cool with, and wasn't really expecting very much, but here is
Leo: so you weren't even planning on doing a 3d render
Andy: So here is the 3d model
Leo: How long before google puts this into auto awesome. Wow
Andy: It is just absolutely
Leo: Why does Adobe give this away
(Inaudible)
Andy: It is just
Leo: They make money on these tools.
Alex: This is all based on I believe, this is based realvis, which a company they bought, a French company they bought, and this is when I started doing photogrammetry, we were using realvis, which was very manual, and this was, I think from an auto desk perspective this is still kind of a work in progress and what one of the things that is good for them is it is all processed on the server they are able to constantly make it better. Get better at it and I think a lot of people, I think auto desk has very long view of this, of printing needs. You can now export that using there software and you can print a little version of Abraham Lincoln.
Leo: Oh no you didn't, That's what I'm talking about, even better it's made out of delicious chocolate, you can bite his head off.
Andy :What did you print that on a makerbot?
Andy: Actually on a printer bot simple, so this is like a $500 .00 3d printer and it wasn't even like, I’m not very good at 3d printing, I was just using default settings, so I could now try this again, slice the model again in thinner slices and have another go at it, but even as a gee, I wonder what happens if I tell the website app to spit out and STL file and gee I wonder if I just drop it into the printer bot. Just three short hours later I have myself copy of a little gadget, a version of something
Alex: You could send something like that to shape ways and get it sent back to you in metal.
Andy: Inside the app itself, I don't know if I will be able to get at it, inside the app itself it has tools for now that you have this model, not only can you can heal it, you can edit it. There was a whole bunch of mess that was underneath this model that I had to sort of trim away to something like that. Also it will simply if you don't have a 3d printer, do you want it made out of metal, do you want it made out of plastic ,there is even for simpler shapes then this, I don't think be able to rearview mirror this. There is even a tool that will cut it, slice it into slices of cardboard and give you a PDF of if you want to make this out of cardboard here are the templates for it and they are all numbered so you simply stack them in order and even just the visual representation of what the Ab looks like as corrugated cardboard. That in itself is cool enough that I would like to print it in nice size and hang it someplace in my study.
Leo: You didn't even plan this. Now if you do plan they do say about 20 pictures in small increments all the way around your subject.
Andy: There is a technique apparently, my thought would be I bet I must take like 130 to 140 pictures. It's like no there is sort of a sweet spot, we don't want to have to little, too few or too many. It’s more like being, having an awareness of what are the voids inside this shape, and how are you going to make sure you capture within that void. Again really all I did was basically walked around this statue and took pictures at 15 degree increments and then again without even too much of a plan, saying oh I want a picture from the back, oh I want a picture from top, oh I want picture from this angle too. Apparently that was enough to get this. There are a couple .. You can see like on his shoulder there, there is like, there is the surface, there is the actual surface shape, and then there is the imagery that it is actually painting on to it that makes it look so good. It's sort of messed up, I sort of didn't capture enough visual information there for it to get that but it still got the shape alright. Once again it's not like, the model that the printer needed for this, this took me all of maybe ten seconds to output. I didn't have to heal something, and I had to adjust something, it was just literally ok I don't want that base, so I will use this built in tool to simply say please shave it off from here on out and then spit out a file.
Leo: Amazing, we are in the future ladies and gentlemen
Andy: I officially declare this to be the future.
Leo: They have it, it's free but they also have a ten dollar a month premium version, so this. This is a fremium play.
Alex: This was using the predecessor to the ios version of this same software and I was on the beach
Leo: This looks big
Alex: Took a picture, that's a rock it's about 1/2 the size of me. What’s great about this is, it's not like a little scanner, I just took a couple photos of this, actually what it's doing is jumping from photo to photo in the animation of what I actually took but its, photo fly is what it was called back quite some time ago
Leo: It's 123d
Alex: It's 123d, it's the same underlying software
Leo: Is it really just panorama stitching software
Alex: Oh no, no, No what it is doing is calculating the position, the first thing it does is it calculates the position of all the cameras, so I need to know exactly where the cameras are to the millimeter and how they relate to each other, then it's looking for overlapping details
Leo: You can get that by reverse engineering it's from the photos
Alex: Basically it's saying I am going to look at a bunch of details, so what your trying to do when you’re taking photos you want enough overlapping imagery so that the camera can see the same point from a couple different cameras, when it triangulates that position it can figure out where the cameras are, and once it has the cameras positions it then re-maps all the, it now can figure out in 3d space where all that stuff exist, and so it is the future. I've been doing photogrammetry since the 90's and back then I take photos and build models from scratch and for me it's always like magic.
Andy: I was expecting kind of crap from this but it came out so well and now it really the take away from this for the people listening is that, don't necessarily run out and use this piece of software, but if you are ever traveling and see a nice sculpture or nice object put that in the back of your mind that if I simply methodically take 20 or 30 pictures of it from multiple angles it's possible when I get home or a day from now or a year from now I can toss this into an app and have a 3d model of this thing that I really want to be able to explore later on.
Alex: As a warning though do when you’re by yourself, your wife will be very annoyed
Leo: Sara Lane is in there example shots. I shot that during IPad today
Alex: That's great
Leo: Yeah so you can have Sara's head on your desk if you would like
Andy: Not sure I want a 3d model of my head ( Inaudible)
Leo: Hey thank you Andy Ihnatko Chicago Sun Times always a pleasure. Mr.. Aaron Hillegass what else do you want to plug, you bignerdranch .com
Aaron: We consult to, we will write code for you. Leo: oh you should talk to him, Alex Lindsey Pixelcorp soon to be opening
Alex: Opening this month, Reopening this month, so follow me on twitter and g plus and I will post the opening.
Leo: Rene Ritchie Imore .com thank you for being here. Thanks to everybody for joining us, we do this show 11am pt 2pm et, 1900 utc every Tuesday on TWIT .TV if you can't watch live don't worry about it we got on demand audio and video after the fact at Twit .TV/mbw or where ever finer net casts are stored and offered free of charge do not pay for this show, do not, because I don't get any money if you pay for it, someone else does. Does anyone charging for this show, maybe that's not ok. Hey thanks for joining us. I don't know why I brought that up, it's not like I know somebodies doing that, It's free.
Alex: It would bum you out if found out
Leo: It should be free, our fine sponsors pay for it so you don't have to. Thanks for joining us, we will see you next time. Now get back to work because break time is over!
