Wow! That’s a lot of show notes.
One thing that I found funny, not because I want to point and laugh, but because I bet we can all relate… about 23m45 into the episode, David said: “They switched to a subscription model about a year ago.”
Now, you shouldn’t hold people on a podcast, who are talking mostly extemporaneously, to the same level of exactness you’d expect from a blog post. Sometimes you’re thinking on the spot and you either can’t remember the name of something (all the while knowing that everyone listening is yelling at their podcast app going “HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW / REMEMBER THIS?!”
Anyway, Deliveries switched to a subscription on September 30, 2020, which was about 3½ months ago.
Now, to be fair:
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The folks at JuneCloud (the developers) did talk about it a little while beforehand, so it’s been something we heard about, even before it happened.
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Have you been able to keep good track of time since COVID-19 hit? If so, good for you, but I sure haven’t. The first week of January felt like it was about 4 months long. So, as I said, I’m not making fun, I’m like “Yeah, I know, it feels that way to me too.”
Some day we’ll look back on this and… well, probably not talk about it much, hopefully.
Two
Around the 1hr19m mark, David is talking about wanting to use Fitness+ at the same time as his wife, and Stephen rightly says “Apple is so bad at people who have families.”
He goes on to mention photo sharing which is something John Siracusa has mentioned before too.
Here’s the latest evidence of this that I still can’t get over: in the Home app, it is:
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Very easy to manage two separate homes
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Impossible to have two adults share equal responsibility for a home.
The Home app insists that only one person can add accessories or people or otherwise manage the home.
Förtunately it’s not as if a large portion of our society is built around two adult people joining together and living together for a long time. Who could even imagine such a thing?!?
I just don’t get why Apple is so bad at this. The younger programmers and developers may be single, but surely some of the management-level folks are married. Maybe everyone’s spouses just leave all the tech stuff to their spouse who works at Apple, I guess.
No! Count me in!
I would not say I “despise” web apps but I prefer native apps.
Funny thing: In the 90s and early 2000s, as a tech journalist, I thought Apple users were being precious with their hatred of “ports” and their insistence on native Mac apps.
But now I get it. Native apps behave in a certain consistent, predictable way. Web apps are likely to do any damn thing.
OTOH, Outlook for Web is on a par with Outlook for Mac — possibly because Outlook for Mac isn’t very native.
I think there’s a hierarchy for Apple users (from best to worst):
- Native app on an Apple platform
- Cross-platform app on an Apple platform (Electron, etc.)
- Web app
- Windows app
There are exceptions to this ranking, of course. For instance Airtable’s native iPad app is worse than just running their web app in Safari.
When Jeff is praising web apps in this episode, I think he’s largely doing so in comparison to Windows-only apps. As janky as some web apps are, they’re generally a smoother experience than having to use Boot Camp/Parallels/Remote Desktop to get access to a Windows app.
This is so true. Last night I tried to create a new database with the AirTable iPad app and it was not a good experience at all. I had to use their web app to get it done.
On the subject of keyboard switching, I don’t have a Logitech but my Keychron K2 similarly supports 3 different bluetooth connections and having that option is amazing. If you plug in with the USB cable as well you can switch between four devices and it’s smoother than the traditional KVM switches.
I wish my Logitech trackball could do the same. There’s a newer version that supports being paired to two computers via Bluetooth (I think) but I can’t bring yet another input device into the house.
Yes, that’s what I meant. On my PC at work, some of the most elegant services that I use have a web app, whereas many native Windows apps have poor interfaces. Even better, having a web app means that I can use my PC, my Mac, or my iPad to use the web app.
In a perfect world, there would be elegant native apps on every platform that conform to the style of the platform. But since we rarely see that, letting companies simply create a single good web app that users can access on any platform is a fine alternative.
-Jeff
I completely enjoyed the content of this episode. Multiple topics that left me wanting just a bit more info in a good way.
Only complaint, and this may be just me, if that the audio seemed to be sped up here and there. On 2 different devices while listening, it seems like audio was running at 1 1/4x speed. I adjusted speed settings on my iPad and my iPhone ending up on 1x and it still happened. If this was intentional… please stop it. I realize some folks speak at different volume and speed levels. Adjusting the volume makes sense. Tweaking the speed probably helps keep the timeline to the 90 minute average for the show. I do appreciate not having a 2 hour podcast.
Most podcasts I subscribe to are between 15-45 minutes. There are only 3 podcasts that are over an hour (MPU being one of them) that I make the time for.
Again this could be a ME problem but I haven’t noticed it on any other Podcasts so far. Did anyone else notice this?
Could it be that I just speak too quickly? That is a common trait for former high school and college debaters! I’m glad that you enjoyed the content.
-Jeff
It was your voice and David’s (sometimes) that were affected during the show. Steven’s voice sounded normal to me. Maybe lawyer speak just caught me off guard?
I really enjoyed the discussion!