#dan benjamin

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Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 4

Title: James Duncan Davidson & Digital Photography

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Special guest: James Duncan Davidson

Release date: 28 July 2007

Description: Special guest James Duncan Davidson joins us to talk about digital photography. JDD is a pro, and shares his experience as a professional photographer for WWDC and O’Reilly.

Dan Benjamin: So where are you right now, Duncan, what conference are you at this week?

James Duncan Davidson: I’m actually at two conferences simultaneously. Today, tomorrow, and the next day is the Ubuntu Live conference. And then, starting tomorrow and going for the rest of the week is the Open Source Convention.

Benjamin: And you’re covering these, you’re photographing them?

Davidson: Yeah, I’m shooting them both.

Benjamin: That’s what we’re here to talk about. Last week, John and I said we gotta get you on here.

Davidson: Oh, I know, and I heard that actually. I was listening to the podcast while I was riding the MAX, and I think I was going over the bridge right about that point, and it was a very freaky feeling to be volunteered to do something while you’re listening to yourself on public transit. But I’m down with it, it’s pretty cool.

John Gruber: For those of you who don’t know, we’re talking to James Duncan Davidson. James Duncan Davidson is right now primarily — is that your primary source of income, you’re a conference photographer? I mean, most of your time is spent on photography now.

Davidson: Yeah, this year will be the first year it’s crossed the 50 percent line.

Gruber: But your background is very, very varied, and you’ve done everything from Java to Ruby on Rails, a lot of programming stuff. You’ve written books on Cocoa programming.

Davidson: Yep.

Gruber: So you go to these tech conferences, but you could easily not just be attending them, you could be and in the past have actually spoken at them.

Davidson: Oh yeah, yeah.

Benjamin: You spoke at Rails conference last year, right?

Davidson: Yeah, and they actually wanted me to speak this year, but I didn’t think I could actually do the job of shooting, and the conference, and get the talk ready. And even more tricky, photographing myself speaking, I thought that might be a little hard.

Benjamin: With all those strobes flashing all over the place, that’s a full-time job just setting those up.

Davidson: The conferences really have turned into — I mean, when I’m at a conference, it’s more than a full-time job. Like today, you’re catching me, it all worked out where I can find a break, but it’s going to be a 14-hour day. But it’s precisely because I spoke at tech conferences for so long that O’Reilly first picked me up to do the photography. They had the theory, and I agreed with them at the time and still do, that since I knew most of the people in this environment and knew what was going on, I probably would have a decent enough eye for understanding what would be important to take pictures of and what wouldn’t be at a tech conference. And that’s how the professional photography career got started.

Benjamin: As far as actually learning to be a photographer, you don’t just show up at a conference and start taking pictures, and now all of a sudden O’Reilly is hiring you to shoot everything. It can’t work like that.

Davidson: No, no, I’ve been shooting pictures since I was six or seven years old. My grandmother taught me how, and I’ve been shooting ever since.

Benjamin: You don’t have any formal training or educational background in photography though?

Davidson: No. All my formal training was in architecture actually. So, lots of design work, but no specific classes in photography, just lots and lots of experience.

Benjamin: So you said you grandmother taught you, Duncan, what did you start — because when I was a little kid, maybe this is how you started, when I was a little kid, we took a little — I guess it was some construction paper, and we folded it up into a little box, we painted it black, and then you took a little pinhole, and you just poke a pinhole and this little piece of tinfoil — and I understand now it’s aluminum foil — which was taped to a cut-out piece in the front of a thing, and there was like a little flap, and you would open up the flap, and just on the back of this thing you had one of those — you remember the old style 35 mm or whatever, the little pocket cameras that you would give to kids that had the little plastic U-shaped film thing that would fit into the back of the camera.

Davidson: The 110 cassettes, yeah.

Benjamin: Exactly. And you would crank that with a quarter, and then you would open the front of the thing, count to three, and then close it, and your picture would come out. That’s actually still how I photograph today.

Davidson: For some people, that would be the purest expression of photography because you’re directly manipulating aperture and shutter and everything right there. But no, I didn’t learn with a pinhole camera. You actually have a better background than I do then.

Benjamin: Well, my whole experience pretty much ends there though.

Davidson: [laughs] My grandmother shot 35 mm film on Leicas and I quickly picked up a — I had my own little 110 camera, I had one of those disc cameras. You remember those?

Benjamin: Oh yeah, that was really — if you had one of those — wow.

Gruber: Yeah, they were crazy cool because they were such an odd form factor because they were, like, up vertical. They were so thin in terms of front to back.

Benjamin: Yeah. They had these teeny-tiny lenses on them because they had such a small negative.

Gruber: And they took such crap pictures.

Davidson: They did.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: I should —

Benjamin: What — oh, go ahead, John. That’s John Gruber, by the way.

Gruber: I was just going to mention, for everybody who doesn’t know, you’re listening to The Talk Show. I’m John Gruber. I’m here hosting the show with my friend Dan Benjamin. We have some sponsors to thank this week, I would like to thank them, that’s why this show is here. And first up, I’d like to mention 37signals.

Benjamin: Can you believe that? How did we get them?

Gruber: They’re sponsoring The Talk Show. They have a bunch of great web apps, they do great software. The one that I want to talk about is Ta-da Lists. You guys use Ta-da Lists? It’s sort of like the list feature from Basecamp, broken out into its own little app. It’s free, you just go there, you make like a to-do list. And the reason — I never used it, I checked it out, I used it, it’s pretty good. But all of a sudden now I use it every day because what they did — and it wouldn’t an episode of The Talk Show if we didn’t bring up iPhone. They have an iPhone-optimized version of Ta-da List. You go to tadalist.com, you sign up, you get your own username. So I have one, I share it with my wife, we do all of our shopping lists on Ta-da Lists now. You get the regular Ta-da List interface when you go to it in Safari or Firefox, your regular web browser on your computer, so we can share shopping lists. We just do one for each store we go to. Then I go to the store, take out my iPhone, go there, and I get an iPhone-optimized view of the website. It’s not a little thing I have to pinch down in Safari, it’s just perfect. Every time I buy something, you just tap it, click “done”, it’s off the list, and I never — I’m the most absent-minded person in the world. We live about two blocks from a Whole Foods here in Philadelphia. I will leave the house and my wife can say, “Don’t forget to buy soy milk.” And I will say, “Okay.” And I will go there and I will see, oh, look, a new kind of chips! And I’ll buy these chips, come home, and she’ll be like, “Where is the soy milk?” And I’ll be like, “Oh.” And she’s like, “That’s the whole reason you went.” Never happens anymore. So, Ta-da Lists from 37signals.

Benjamin: Saved the marriage, it sounds like.

Gruber: No, it just saved me extra trips back to the grocery store.

Davidson: So it saved you frustration.

Gruber: And it also makes me feel like my iPhone is useful.

Benjamin: That justifies the purchase, I think.

Gruber: Oh, absolutely.

Davidson: Of course.

Gruber: I think one of the big differences for me — I got started as a hobbyist photographer with an actual film 35 mm Rebel about eight years ago or so. And I think the bad habit that it drilled into my head is that every time I press the shutter button, it’s going to cost me 50–75 cents to get the film developed. So if you started with film, it costs some amount of money every time you press the shutter, and you get into habit of really pinching your shots, make every one count. Whereas with digital, it’s effectively free, I mean, you do have to go back afterwards and pick the ones that you want to keep and get rid of [the rest], but it’s really a little bit of your time to go through and get rid of the bad shots. And you get so much better results if you just shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot as opposed to wait-wait-wait-wait-wait-okay, there it is-shoot.

Davidson: Right. It’s cheap until you have to go buy a terabyte array because you’ve taken so many shots.

Benjamin: You had a whole post, probably about a year ago, where you were sort of — the dos and don’ts for conference speakers, and one of them was, get anti-reflective coating on your glasses if you wear glasses. If you don’t wear glasses, get some, because people who wear glasses are significantly more intelligent. A whole bunch of things. One of the things that you said, you were talking about — dress appropriately for your audience. If your audience is going to be in a suit, you probably need to wear a suit. If your audience is going to be in business casual or t-shirts or whatever, dress relative to them. But as a photographer of the event, working the event, do you have to adhere to that dress code as well?

Davidson: I do, I do.

Benjamin: So it’s possible we might see you in a three-piece suit with a bow tie?

Davidson: If I were photographing an event where everybody else is wearing a three-piece suit, yeah, I would have to do something about that.

Benjamin: Most of the time though you’re a t-shirt and jeans kind of a guy?

Davidson: Most of the time. Most of the conferences I shoot are geek conferences where most of the people are pretty relaxed in what they wear. I have been trending though towards neatening it up a little bit. Dark colors work well when you’re shooting in the dark because I don’t really want to pull a lot of attention to myself. The day I wore the bright screaming magenta shirt was not a good day. Just kidding, never did that.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Davidson: But, like, today I’m wearing black pants and a black short sleeve button-down shirt. It’s not a fancy shirt, it’s some Old Navy kind of shirt, but you know. It’s nice enough, right?

Benjamin: In a way though, don’t you want to wear some kind of a t-shirt or a shirt that’s going to grab attention?

Davidson: Actually, most of the time I just want to blend in and not have attention come my way. Nothing ruins a shot more than somebody seeing a camera and going, “Hey, there’s a camera!” and pointing right into it.

Benjamin: What do you think about — as far as speakers go — let’s say I’m speaking at Rails conference next year, which is a pretty casual conference. And we’ll see if Chad lets me come back, but it tends to be a casual conference, and some people are in polo style shirts, other people in t-shirts. Can I wear a t-shirt on stage, is that okay?

Davidson: You could, and it would really depend on what t-shirt. If you had a really nice cottony material t-shirt that was, you know, the American Eagle ones or the American Apparel ones — maybe. And you’re a skinny guy, you can get away with it.

Benjamin: Thank you. You know who’s doing some really cool t-shirts actually right now? And you know what, they’re a sponsor, insanelygreattees.com. If you’ve seen the Flickr photos of me with the old-school bomb on the shirt or the one with the binary tree, there’s a lot of cool things that they do. They came to us and said, “We want to —” I guess they see these pictures of me on Flickr, and John, don’t you have the bomb shirt?

Gruber: Of course I do. The system bomb.

Benjamin: Yeah, system bomb from old OS 7.

Gruber: That shirt is the bomb.

Davidson: I want that shirt.

Benjamin: We actually worked out a cool deal with them, since you want the shirt. There’s some kind of — I don’t know how this works, maybe you go to the site, John, or what do you do? There’s a coupon they have worked out for us. So if you buy two or more shirts, you get free domestic shipping. And if you happen to be stuck in some other country, then you get —

Gruber: And how do you apply this coupon? What’s the coupon code?

Benjamin: That’s a good question, but it expires at the end of July, so you better act now.

Gruber: So go to our website, thetalkshow.net, to see the coupon?

Benjamin: Yeah, we’ll have a link, we’ll put up a link.

Gruber: I like the way you worked that in, that was very smooth the way you segued. I’m going to have to practice that for next week’s show.

Benjamin: It will be less abrupt if you can work it in that way — but I was actually, the reason I was wondering is —

Gruber: I like the challenge of having to work in, before I say something about to thank a sponsor, to think of — no matter how obscure, some way to work it in. I’m going to do it, that’s a challenge.

Benjamin: There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, it’s a bit more technical photography type questions. Not really that technical because I’m still sort of starting out.

Davidson: You’ve still got the pinhole camera.

Benjamin: I finally moved up from the pinhole to the Canon Rebel Digital XTi. And it’s a great camera, I was definitely influenced by you and John and a few other people to go in the Canon direction, I’m happy I did it. So how come you wind up with these situations, very confusing to people who are just starting out, when they talk about a wide vs. a narrow aperture. You’ve actually got numbers going in the opposite direction that you would think, you think big and it’s actually small, and small is big. What is that and is there any kind of petition that I can be involved with or help support that would get them to straighten that out because it’s — I mean, I understand it philosophically but — we don’t need to keep that around anymore, do we?

Davidson: Oh hell yeah we do, it’s all about circles, it’s math. There’s a beautiful bit of math behind photography, and that number, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8 — you can always tell when somebody’s been taking lots of pictures because they can rattle that scale off. It’s all ratios, it’s ratios, dealing with pi and circles, and each next step, going from 1 to 1.4, from 1.4 to 2, from 2.0 to 2.8 — that’s doubling the amount of light you’re getting in.

Gruber: But it does throw people off, it is an unfortunate circumstance that the numbers worked out like that because you end up with the thing where, for example, a lens that the fastest it gets is 2.8 is significantly slower than a lens that goes to f/1.8. But if you look at the total scale of numbers, and you show it to just some guy shopping at Best Buy, well, that looks like it’s almost the same. Because it also goes up to like f/16. Or f/7, you’re shooting in sunlight.

Benjamin: Your natural inclination is, well, this one goes all the way up to 16!

Davidson: [laughs] Or 32.

Gruber: 2.8, 1.8, what’s the difference. But the difference is actually huge. An f/1.8 lens, you can actually shoot indoors in relatively low light and get some really nice results. And then f/2.8, you really need a significant amount of light indoors to get a shot.

Benjamin: Duncan, when you’re shooting at these conferences, are you mainly shooting with a zoom lens? Do you use prime lenses at all in your conference shooting? Are you using prime lenses at all, period? I’ll tell you why I ask, when I first started out, John’s suggestion to me was, get one of a couple of these different prime lenses. I think one was 50 mm, and he also recommended a 28 mm, which makes sense if you take into consideration the crop factor on a digital SLR, which you can maybe hopefully explain in your answer. But I recall that when I was talking to you about it, you said, “Yeah, prime lenses are really great, you may also want to consider getting a lens that does zoom, but you’re going to zoom way less than you think you’re going to zoom.” So, to my original question, what are you shooting with most of the time? Does it vary? What’s the deal with the crop factor? And what do you think about the whole prime lens thing?

Davidson: Well, let’s take this one step at a time. What I shoot with right now in conference situations, there’s three lenses I lean on, it’s the 24–70, the 70–200, and then the 300 mm prime. So it’s two zooms and a prime. And they’re all f/2.8 lenses so they’re all pretty fast and pretty capable. I’ve got faster lenses in terms of aperture, I’ve got several 1.4 lenses and several 2.0 lenses, but I find when I’m shooting the events, I actually need to keep my aperture around f/4. So I’ve got enough depth of field to work with somebody’s head. So I don’t have, like, a totally focused nose and totally blurred out back of their hair. The 300 mm prime is an amazing lens, it’s also really expensive.

Benjamin: Is that the one with the white chassis?

Davidson: That’s the white long tube that looks like it’s going to suck your soul out when you see it.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Davidson: That one is my all-time favorite right now. It may be a little bit a new toy syndrome, but it’s just so damn sharp. I use the 70–200 as a zoom, and I prefer it as a zoom in that range because for the shooting I do I can’t necessarily jump right up on stage and get into somebody’s face, but a lot of times that’ll get me close enough to get the shot I want, or I can crank around and get a wider shot that encompasses most of the stage, at 70 mm, at the distances I’m usually work at. And the same is true about going sort of wide angle. Now, one thing I’ve considered doing is swapping out the 24–70 wide with just a prime, like a 24–35 mm prime for doing wide. But that’s for the professional shooting and that’s not really going to translate well into the kinds of pictures you want to take. So let’s take another example. When I go out, when I go out hiking or I go out on the town, or I just go running around, I’ll take a 50 mm 1.4 fixed lens, and sometimes I’ll take a 135 f/2 lens. Because when you have a little bit of time to work a shot, when somebody’s not paying you and you have to get the shot immediately, you can always zoom with your feet, or most of the time you can zoom with your feet. And you have time and usually ability to get closer to things. I liked John’s comment last episode where — one rule of thumb about photography is that you can always get closer, and that will usually make the picture better. And I agree with that a lot. So when I’m out doing more casual shooting, I tend more towards the primes than the zooms. So the zooms for me are convenience factor when I’m in the work situation. But I love the image quality you get with a good prime. And the reason that it’s really nice to recommend primes to learning photographers like you is that it forces you to think about composition more than a zoom. Zooms, you can get lazy and you can think, oh, I’ll just zoom and get closer. And really you should think about where you are in relation to your subject. And then the other thing that’s nice is that you can get extremely good quality at a lower price. Zooms have all these elements and to get a really good quality zoom you put out big bucks. Whereas you can get really good quality prime lenses for fairly cheap, in comparison. So it’s kind of the best of all worlds for people who are learning and people who are just doing photography for the love of photography.

Gruber: All the major SLR companies, Pentax, Canon, Nikon, they all have a 50 mm prime lens that costs about $100, maybe even less. You can get the Canon f/1.8 for like $85. I think the Nikon is similarly priced. And it is, in my mind, the single biggest bargain in all of photography. I mean, because for $85 you can get a lens that is very fast, f/1.8, and optically is better than just about any zoom that any consumer would ever consider buying.

Davidson: Right. To match one of those primes typically you’d have to spend at least $1000 on a zoom.

Gruber: And I think it just never occurs to people because they think, “well, I want a zoom”, or they think, “for $85 how good is it?” But it really is a fantastic lens, it just happens to be the easiest lens to manufacture so that’s why the price is so low.

Benjamin: So if I was a new photographer, and I asked you this question when I was going through it, but I think it’s a — I want to hear both of your answers — a new photographer, starting out, they’re done with the point-and-shoot, they’re ready to go to a digital SLR, maybe they’re going with the Nikon D40 perhaps, or they’re going with the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. What lens should they be getting? Should they get the kit lens that comes with it, should they say “forget that, I want to get a prime lens”, and if so, what should they be getting?

Davidson: I waffle on this a little bit. I mean, to some degree, I would say go ahead and get the kit lens that comes with it because it’s a zoom, it’s a typically okay zoom, it’s not a great zoom, but if you’re outside in the daytime, it’ll work fine. And it’ll give you a few different focal lengths that go with the camera, and it’s usually about $100 added onto the price or maybe a bit more. But then I would also go ahead and just immediately jump in and get a 50. It’s the best $100 you can ever do for your photography, as John said. And then start looking wide or start looking tall if that’s the kind of thoughts that you’re having for your pictures. That would be my starting point. What about you, John?

Gruber: I think the same thing. I waffle on whether to advise people to get the kit lens or not, because it’s the same thing where I don’t really like — I can tell — I know far, far less about photography than you, but I can see the results when I just look at the pictures people take with them, especially indoors.

Davidson: Oh yeah, you can always see the kit lens, yeah.

Gruber: But like you said, it’s only $100. But, see, my thought is if you get it, you’re going to be tempted to use it when you should be using a prime lens, learning to be a better photographer. So I would just say, especially if you’ve already got a point-and-shoot that almost always has some kind of zoom on it, if you really want to say, I want to become an avid amateur, I would say get the body without the lens and get the $85 50 mm lens. And just use that even for just a month where you got the camera, it’s brand new, of course you’re going to use it because it’s your new toy, but just have that 50, make it be the only lens you bought with the camera and you’ll have to use it, and it’ll give better muscles, better photographer muscles.

Davidson: I can’t argue with that, that’s totally solid advice too.

Gruber: I just think the one thing that I’ve gotten better at in five or six years of amateur photography, the one thing if anything that I’ve gotten better at is framing. And I look back at some of my older pictures, and I just see people with heads cut off or just weird stuff in the framing, and I think, boy, I wish I would’ve taken a couple more shots of that scene from a different angle. And having a fixed lens that doesn’t zoom at all, it just makes you think about moving the camera. If you can zoom, you just think, well, I can zoom, and it gives you two things to think about. So just removing the idea, just having a lens that only does one focal length, it makes you think about moving the camera because there’s no other way to change the framing.

Davidson: Right. So I totally agree, if you’re wanting to get good at photography, definitely stick to primes. I think the one case where the zoom might be handy is when you go to Disneyland, and your wife wants to use the camera or your husband wants to use the camera, your significant other who’s not necessarily wanting to join you in this endeavor, and you can slap that on there for them and say, here you go, knock yourself out. They might be happy with that. But then again, maybe not. Maybe zooms are just overrated at that level.

Benjamin: It was just such a weird experience for me when I did put the 50 mm lens on there. As far as I can remember, at least in my entire adult life, all of the cameras I’ve had have always been able to zoom. And it’s the weirdest thing, having a very expensive, relatively speaking, a very expensive camera with a somewhat expensive lens on it, the 50 or the 28, and all it does is focus. I mean, I certainly understand that photos are much, much better than anything else I’ve ever taken, but it’s sort of weird, you almost feel like the camera isn’t doing something that you’re used to cameras doing if that makes sense. My whole life — oh yeah, I’ll just zoom in.

Gruber: And it’s just an unfortunate fact that it’s a big selling point. People buy cameras based on the zoom. I can’t tell you — as a guy who, like, my friends know that I’m a hobbyist photographer, I get asked questions “what camera I should buy” and sometimes they’ll ask me a question like, “Look, these are the two cameras I’m looking at, I’m leaning towards this one, but it’s only got a 10× zoom and the other one has 12×, do you think that’s all right?” And that’s just how they think. You’re just so, so thinking about the wrong factors. I don’t even know where to start.

Davidson: It’s kind of like the Korean cell phone manufacturers looking at the iPhone saying, “well, we’ve got all those features and more” and yet not getting it.

Gruber: Right, right. “We’ve got a camera, we’ve got a web browser. What more do you want?”

Davidson: Right. “We’ve got the feature list.” Yeah, it’s a total mind-bender when you have to really think about framing without zooming, and it’s actually hitting me again with this new camera that I’ve got. Different cameras have a different amount of crop that you see through the viewfinder. This is getting a little esoteric, but my 5D only showed about 96 or something percent of what actually hit the sensor. So you get used to, when you’re framing through the viewfinder that the resulting image is going to have a little bit of extra stuff around the edge that you didn’t see through the viewfinder. And this new 1D, it’s 100 percent. What you see through the viewfinder is exactly where that crop line is going to be when you see the image resulting, and I’m already having to reprogram my head a little bit to make sure that I have enough space around people. But framing is everything. And having this little experience today, just the last few days, but especially today, as I watch the photos come through the camera, it’s a mind-bender, again, so I can totally understand how not putting a zoom on would bend somebody’s head too. It’s a good way to bend it.

Gruber: So one last quick question about the new camera, the — what is it, 3D?

Davidson: 1D Mark III, yeah. Super badass.

Gruber: So one of the big differences, your previous work camera was the full-frame Canon, what’s it, the 5D?

Davidson: Yeah.

Gruber: And now you’ve gone back to a camera which has the smaller digital sensor. It just makes up for it in a bunch of different ways. But do you find that that throws you off a little bit in terms of your lens selection because now you’re having to deal with the crop factor again whereas all that time you spent with the 5D you weren’t?

Davidson: It’s tossed me a little bit off but not too much, and that’s because the crop factor is different. It’s a 1.3× crop factor vs. the 1.6× crop factor. They call it APS-H for some reason. And it turns out that the 1D has the biggest sensor that you can image in one pass off of current chip technology machines, or the chip imaging machines. Whereas the 5D sensor, they actually have to stitch in multiple exposures so the yield goes way down. But I haven’t found it to be such a problem, because it doesn’t shift my lenses around as much as the 1.6 multiplier does. So when I stick on my 78–200 lens, it’s not really affected too much. I basically have a slight bit of cropping to the image and that’s about it from what I expected before. So it’s not too bad. The place where it hurts me a little bit is on the wides, and that’s why I keep the — I mean, the 5D I’m going to keep for landscapes, and I’m also going to keep as my back-up camera and for doing the wide angle stuff because if you really want 24 mm or you really want 17 mm, you’ve got to have the full frame.

Gruber: And that’s like the one thing in all of the brand name wars in photography, that is the one thing that Canon has, is Canon is the only company with a full-frame DSLR.

Davidson: Right. There’s two big differences: one is the full frame, and the second is the sensitivity of the sensors. Canon really rocks when you get up into the ISO 800, 1600, 3200 ranges. Both Nikons and Canons are great at ISO 100, which is when you’re out shooting landscapes and whatnot. But the high ISO characteristics of the Canon is really, really awesome.

Benjamin: What do you think of the camera on the iPhone?

Davidson: It’s great for snapshots. [laughs] As a camera, it sucks. It records images and if what you’re wanting is to make sure that you remember an event or remember somebody or a place for yourself, it’s perfectly serviceable.

Gruber: Do you find that it has a really weird white balance? I get the greenish-blue tint to almost every picture I take with it. Almost.

Davidson: It’s got a wonky white balance, yes.

Gruber: I’ll bet that that’s software. I mean, I’m hoping that that gets adjusted in a software update. Because I would think that the white balance is controlled by software, that it’s not part of the camera chip. Maybe it is, I don’t know. And I see pictures on Flickr from iPhones and it’s just rampant, this sort of sickly green fluorescent tone to pictures.

Davidson: Seems like they really optimized it for taking pictures under fluorescent lights. But yeah, it’s a little weird. It also has a lot of bloom, so if you have a bright area, you get all the lighting of the area around the bright areas. But I’ve found it pretty good if you’re out in daylight. I’ve had a lot of fun with it, just taking snaps and uploading them.

Gruber: What do you think of where the button is? I can’t stand where the shutter button is.

Benjamin: Horrible.

Davidson: The whole soft button thing, yeah, I hate it. I’m not sure I hate it because it’s a soft button, but I hate the location of it, for sure.

Gruber: And I think the worst thing about it — maybe they were thinking, because it’s right above the home button, which is the physical button, and maybe they were thinking, well, we’ll put it above the home button so you can feel it, it’s right above there. But what I found is that I keep hitting the home button by accident, and then I leave the camera app and go back to the iPhone home screen.

Davidson: I do that all the time. I wish you just tapped the screen to take the picture.

Benjamin: Anywhere on the screen.

Davidson: Because if you tap the screen, it does nothing. So might as well do something with that click.

Gruber: That’s the best solution, that’s the easiest solution, the best thing I’ve heard.

Benjamin: Who do we have to tell to implement that?

Gruber: I don’t know, we need someone with a popular Mac weblog, or something.

Davidson: [laughs]

Benjamin: So speaking of weblogs, Duncan has a weblog, he’s got a website, redoing it again. You almost redo it as much as I do.

Davidson: Well, that’s because both of us enjoy the challenge of it.

Benjamin: So it’s duncandavidson.com, right?

Davidson: Yep.

Benjamin: That’s the main one or is that the blog now?

Davidson: That’s everything. I had the blog separate because I was running over on Typepad and I nixed that, and it’s all collapsed down. So if you go to blog.duncandavidson.com, I do the Daring Fireball trick and just send you to duncandavidson.com and that’s it.

Benjamin: So if I want to hire you for a wedding or bar mitzvah to come out and take some pictures, you’re not doing it, you’re not available?

Davidson: [laughs] I’ve not actually done a wedding, I’ve done lots of events, but no weddings so far. So I would be a little hesitant unless that was somebody I really knew so that we could work through that and be a little bit less of a “oh my god, I’m dealing with a client I don’t know”.

Benjamin: Well, we’ve got to wrap it up. I don’t know how I’m going to edit this down, John.

Gruber: I don’t know, that’s your problem. I am so — I have never been happier that we worked it out that you do the editing and I just show up for the show and talk. Because I think we’ve been talking for about three hours here.

Benjamin: It’s been three and a half hours, 3 hours 38 minutes.

Gruber: It’s great, we’ll have lots of footage for our eventual director’s cut, complete, uncut The Talk Show DVD.

Benjamin: Right.

Davidson: There’s some edits you can make. Thinking back, there’s a few places I can think that you can cut down, but still.

Benjamin: Pretty much wherever John is talking.

Gruber: I was going to say the same thing but about yours.

Benjamin: Right. So the three things I think people need to remember today: James Duncan Davidson, 37signals, Insanely Great Tees. That’s it. If you leave nothing else, just remember those three things. And 50 mm.

Gruber: 50 mm fixed prime lens.

Davidson: 50 mm. 24, 35, any of those. Just fixed, fixed, fixed. [somebody talks into a megaphone in the background]

Benjamin: What is that in the background?

Gruber: I think James is getting arrested.

Davidson: Yeah, that would be security coming by.

Benjamin: It’s very sort of NPR of us to have that stuff in the background.

Gruber: I’ll call a lawyer.

Davidson: Yeah, and I have to say, it’s a bit embarrassing that I’m speaking on my laptop microphone after John took so much grief over his.

Benjamin: No, he was speaking into a high-quality microphone, he just had it in the closet.

Davidson: Ahh.

Gruber: The weird thing is that I actually sounded worse with a better microphone because I apparently wasn’t close enough to it.

Benjamin: Yeah, spend a few hundred bucks on a mic and you actually degrade the quality of his sound. We’ll end. We’re pretty much done.

Davidson: I think so, but it was a lot of fun doing this, guys. [somebody still talks into a megaphone in the background]

Gruber: Yeah, it was great, thanks.

Benjamin: I’m just so entertained by that sound in the background.

Davidson: [laughs]

Benjamin: Maybe there’s a filter I can put over what we’re saying right now that’ll make it sound like that.

Davidson: Maybe so, or maybe you can sample it out and have it running through the entire podcast.

Benjamin: I think it was anyway.

Davidson: Well, I’m running away from it, so it’s well in the background now.

Benjamin: All right, guys, we’re done.

Gruber: Thanks.

Davidson: Thanks, man.

Benjamin: See you later.

Davidson: Ciao.

Benjamin: We don’t have to even hang up if we don’t want.

Davidson: [laughs]

[ttstranscripts]

Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 3

Title: Email, Spam Filtering, Digital Photography

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 17 July 2007

Description: We discuss John’s obsession with spam, and spam filtering techniques, and broach the subject of digital photography.

Dan Benjamin: You were obsessed with the iPhone, you got the iPhone, and now you’re obsessed with email on the iPhone, specifically we’re talking about spam. So somebody like you, you get a lot of spam. A lot of spam.

John Gruber: And you don’t?

Benjamin: I get a little bit. I don’t get — I mean, I guess the encoder may have helped because where I have publicized the email address, it’s been encoded, so it helped a little. But I mean, I still get a decent amount. Nowhere near what you get, I’m sure.

Gruber: I think I get around 500 or 600 spams a day.

Benjamin: A day? Oh my gosh.

Gruber: It depends. Somewhere between 300 and 600 typically.

Benjamin: I don’t get anywhere near that many. So what was your solution to handle this?

Gruber: Well, we should say what the problem is.

Benjamin: What is the problem?

Gruber: The problem is that for years I’ve relied on client-side spam filtering with C-Command’s SpamSieve, which is a Macintosh program, it integrates with every Macintosh email program that I know of.

Benjamin: The best, I think, easily the best client-side anti-spam application that exists for the Mac. They should be a sponsor of this show.

Gruber: Well, everybody should be a sponsor of this show. Who shouldn’t sponsor, who wouldn’t want to sponsor this show?

Benjamin: I can’t think of a single company that wouldn’t benefit from that. That’s kind of silly.

Gruber: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I can’t think of one either.

Benjamin: But of all of them right now, I think SpamSieve should be the number one guy on the phone. When we put this out there, the phone better ring. That’s all I have to say.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: But go on, go on. All Mac clients...

Gruber: For years I’ve managed it and it’s — how much spam I get hasn’t really been a problem because SpamSieve’s been running at somewhere around 99.8 or 99.9 percent accuracy for years for me, literally, I think since 2003 or something like that. But the problem is, because it’s client-side, the spam filtering happens, your client checks for mail, and before mail gets into your inbox, it passes it off to SpamSieve, and SpamSieve says “good”, “good”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”. So when you check mail with your iPhone, without any kind of server-side spam filtering, all the spam is still there in the inbox, which for me would literally be hundreds of spams a day. It would honestly make using the iPhone for checking my email impossible. So the obvious option would be to — if you wanted to just do the simplest thing possible — would be to just set up a computer with SpamSieve on it and have it check mail continuously, never go to sleep. That doesn’t really work for me because my only computer that I use is a laptop, which I take with me places, so it’s often sleeping. I do put it to sleep at night. In theory, I wouldn’t necessarily mind leaving it running all night, but when I’m actually taking the notebook with me, or I’m traveling, I’m in an airport, and it’s in my backpack — that’s not feasible. So I could set up an old computer here in my home office and have it set up to run SpamSieve continuously, but that seems wasteful to me to have an entire — my own computer set up just for — my own personal spam filtering computer.

Benjamin: So what are the other solutions? You came up with one, a free one, that’s actually kind of — I think it’s interesting, it’s a neat idea, but I think it’s just a cut above having your own dedicated Mac in a corner running SpamSieve all the time.

Gruber: Right. So what I’m doing is — what I’ve long done is set up my email so that all of the addresses I use are really forwarders to another account that’s using an address that I never publicize, never give anyone, just to have the flexibility that I could redirect the mail somewhere else before it goes to that mailbox, and then I just set a Reply-To: header so that the mail that I send looks like it’s coming from the forwarding address. So what I did is I changed all the email addresses I use to point to Gmail accounts and then back to — so it goes from a forwarder at my domain, the address I want at daringfireball.net, goes to Gmail. Gmail is set to automatically forward back to my real mailbox name at daringfireball.net. And a lot of people, a lot of the stuff I’ve read said Gmail spam filtering is pretty accurate, and my results after doing it for about a week is that, yeah, it’s really, really good. It catches at least 99 percent of all spam. And more importantly, it doesn’t catch false positives, it doesn’t flag good mail as spam. Funnily enough, the two messages that it did that I caught just by looking through the Gmail spam mailbox were from you.

Benjamin: [laughs] That’s great.

Gruber: But one thing you can do is you can upload your contacts, your address book, export it to a comma-separated value file, upload it to Gmail, and it will automatically whitelist anybody in your address book. Now, the downside of that is that one time only you can upload a file, it doesn’t automatically — there’s no way to sync it. But so far, after a week, it’s a very good solution.

Benjamin: Well, that’s actually — it’s a neat idea, I think it’s a great idea if you already have your email set up, if you’re already doing the forwarding thing. I have a few aliases that I use, but I try to limit that. So the company that I use for my email services is Webmail.us, they’re great, and I like having things hosted there just because if I decide to switch hosting companies or if I have multiple domains or whatever, it’s — and I think it’s like $10–12 a month for pretty much as many email addresses as you’d ever want. Yeah, I mean, you can get free email hosting, and you can do the Gmail thing, which I’ve tried, it just never really worked for me. I don’t like using a web application as my primary email client. I tried it, I couldn’t get used to it.

Gruber: But that’s the thing with Gmail, I actually don’t use it.

Benjamin: You’re just using the forwarding, purely forwarding. But for me, what I like — Webmail actually has a really, really good, in-built spam filtering process that’s very customizable, you can have it put it into a separate spam folder, you can have it preface the subject line with “spam”, there’s all kinds of things that you can do and it’s sort of built in. I still am using SpamSieve, but I turned on this spam filtering option for the times when I knew I’d be checking with the iPhone to see how it would do, and it’s actually done a really, really good job. But I mean, this is to me, I think the people who are in the job of doing spam filtering should be thrilled about the iPhone.

Gruber: Oh, definitely.

Benjamin: Because more than any device I think it necessitates the fact — now you have to have spam filtering. And I don’t really anticipate that Apple’s going to put spam filtering into the iPhone mail app. That doesn’t seem like their priority.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so either. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened. Obviously, the desktop mail client has junk filtering. But I’ve never been particularly impressed — and I only recently switched to Mail, so I can’t say that I really tested it extensively, but I have tried it.

Benjamin: It’s nowhere near as good as SpamSieve. It doesn’t even get close. It does okay for the most obvious spams, and it has a lot of incorrect positives where it tags things that aren’t —

Gruber: That’s what I always found was that even when — I think there’s an option to say, you know, “people in my” — I guess what the problem was, it was often catching — because I get a lot of email from readers who aren’t in my address book, and it would often catch — because I’ve tried using mail for IMAP before for some of my email, and I never thought that the built-in junk filtering in Mail was accurate enough. The one thing I really wish that the iPhone mail client supported that it doesn’t, is flagging.

Benjamin: Yeah. I saw that tweet and I commented on that. To me that was something that it didn’t occur to me until I was actually really using the iPhone for email, when I was spending more than just — I wonder if I got a new email, oh yeah, okay — but actually using it as a device to read and reply to email for more than a few minutes, that was the first thing that occurred to me. Because I flag email all the time that I want to — something I want to come back to, something I need to respond to, but I can’t get to it right now, or I need to investigate it before I can answer. And not having — that’s a huge, huge thing on the wish list right now. I think a lot of people have to be feeling that way.

Gruber: I love the idea of flagging because it’s one of those things where it’s like the 80/20 rule, where the simplest possible thing goes 80 percent of the way to solving what you need. Because you can always say, well, maybe you want some kind of full — you want labels, or tagging, or all sorts of stuff that you could do with messaging to say, this message is part of the project, I want to put tags on it, blah blah blah. Really though, just a simple flag, which is supported on a lot of IMAP clients, to say “This message is flagged”. At least from the iPhone’s perspective where you really can’t add a lot of stuff like tagging, and full labeling interface really wouldn’t fit in with the minimalist UI. Flagging really would. The way that you can mark a read message unread, there’s like a little hide/unhide details, and then there’s a thing you click that when you’ve read a message, you can mark it back to unread. Right there, I would love it if in addition to being able to mark it read, if you could mark it flagged. And when you hide that, you wouldn’t even have to see it. But the reason I need it, here’s typically — when I read email on the iPhone, there’s messages that I’m done with, that I can either respond to or just leave it marked as read because I don’t ever need to see it again, but then there’s a lot of times I’ll get messages where I can’t deal with it now because I’m on my iPhone. Because maybe I need to write a real reply, so it’s going to wait until I go back and I have my real keyboard and a real mail client. Maybe it’s because it’s something that requires me to do a lot of work on. Something I need to come back to. But I’ve already read it. So what I have to do now is mark it unread, so I know I’ll come back to it. But that’s sort of abusing unread.

Benjamin: So we need that. We’ve got to have that.

Gruber: Right, because I like to use unread to mean new.

Benjamin: Unread means “I haven’t seen this”. There’s one more topic I want to talk to you about. And I think the best way to bring it up is to completely change subjects and start talking about what you were doing in San Francisco that was weird. I liked it, I thought it was cool, but it was pretty weird. You would take your... [a noise is heard in the background] I don’t know if you guys can hear this, do you hear the thunder in the background here? [rain drums in the background]

Gruber: I thought that was your dog.

Benjamin: I don’t know if it’s going to come through on the mic, but I mean, it is crazy storming out here.

Gruber: Yeah, it did.

Benjamin: Another thing we need to do once we have a real website is we need to have a section for links, things that we talk about. [loud thunder in the background] Could you hear that?

Gruber: Yeah, I could.

Benjamin: So that I could, like, link the picture of what I’m seeing outside the window. It’s torrential, it’s like — Noah saw something almost like this. Anyway, so we’re in San Francisco and we’re hanging out, we go to these different places, and you’d pull this little camera out of your pocket, and you’d put it on top of your beer glass, and you’d have this weird look on your face, you’re sort of staring at whoever you’re trying to take a picture of, but you looked really creepy when you were doing it, and then the camera would kind of — I guess it would go into an autofocus sort of mode where it would try to gauge the right focus and everything, and it would flash the light repeatedly really, really fast, sort of blinding the person. And some of the pictures actually came out pretty good when you were doing that. But the reason I mention this, you’ve taken some really cool pictures with this new camera that you’re using, and it was sort of a disappointment to me to see you switch to this new camera after you’ve been using the Canon Digital Rebel for so long. Right after I get my Digital Rebel, you show up with this little — was it a Ricoh, is that how you say it?

Gruber: Right, a Ricoh — actually, I’m not 100 percent sure if it’s R[i]coh or R[ai]coh, I don’t know. I think it’s R[i]coh, I always say R[i]coh.

Benjamin: “Ricoh” like “vista”.

Gruber: Right. Ricoh GR Digital.

Benjamin: And it does an awesome job, and I’ll see one of these pictures, and I’m new to the digital SLR world, you’ve given me a lot of great advice about — you and James Duncan Davidson and a couple of other people guided me on lens purchases and stuff. So as soon as I go out, I get the camera, I get a couple cool lenses, now in my mind I’m thinking, okay, how do I take that kind of picture. So I’ll look at the picture, I’ll click the “More settings”, and I’ll learn, oh, this is the kind of lens he used, this is what the aperture was. And now you’re walking around with this Ricoh camera, which is irrelevant to what I’m doing. What’s up with that?

Gruber: Well, it’s a point-and-shoot, so the difference is that I can put it in my pocket as opposed to an SLR. But Ricoh is a Japanese company, I don’t know, are there any camera companies that aren’t Japanese? But they don’t really have a North American presence, they don’t officially have any kind of North American retail presence because they sort of see the North American market as being obsessed with things like how many megapixels and what length the zoom is on the lens, you know, people just go into Best Buy and pick the camera with the most megapixels and most zoom in the lens.

Benjamin: Didn’t you order this one from overseas too?

Gruber: Well, I didn’t get it overseas, I got it from a place called Popflash, which is a camera reseller. I guess they call themselves a camera broker where they sell cameras that aren’t officially sold in North America. There’s another place called Adorama in New York that sells the Ricoh GR or other Ricoh cameras. But the thing with the Ricoh, and people are always so surprised when they hear it, it’s $600, it’s a $600 point-and-shoot.

Benjamin: That’s essentially almost the same price as getting a Digital Rebel XTi body.

Gruber: Right, pretty much. And they say, well, how much zoom does it have? And the answer is none, it’s just a fixed length, 28 mm lens. And people are like, “Well, why would you spend $600 on a camera that doesn’t even have a zoom?” And it’s like, because a non-zoom, a prime lens has better... [a phone rings loudly] What the hell is that? Jesus.

Benjamin: That’s my iPhone. [laughs] Hold on.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: [on the phone] Hello?

Gruber: Patch ’em in!

Benjamin: [on the phone] What time do you guys close?

Gruber: Ask them if they want to sponsor a podcast.

Benjamin: [on the phone] All right, I’ll be there, thank you. [to Gruber] Hey, John, my glasses are ready.

Gruber: Excellent.

Benjamin: My new glasses. I’m very excited. All right, please continue with what you were saying. I’m not going to edit that out. No editing.

Gruber: Oh, why would you want to edit that.

Benjamin: Did you hear that ring? See, that’s one of the things I like about the iPhone, yeah, you can’t use any sound that you want for your ringer, but you can pick a really cool sound that will not only go through the entire house and be heard anywhere but would scare the crap out of you in the process.

Gruber: You use the old-fashioned phone ringer. I’ve kept mine on Marimba. Because I want people to know I have an iPhone.

Benjamin: [laughs] Right.

Gruber: Hey, do you do the thing where you assign different people their own custom ringtones?

Benjamin: Can you do that on the iPhone?

Gruber: Yeah, you just go into contacts and assign a ringtone.

Benjamin: Oh, I’m going to do that now.

Gruber: Or maybe you go into ringtones and assign to contact. I think you do it by going into the ringtones and you can say “Assign to contact”.

Benjamin: I’m going to do that. I haven’t done that, but I will do, and I’ll assign Marimba to you. So, continue.

Gruber: But anyway, learning everything there is to know about photography is an enormous amount of work, and I certainly only know a very, very small amount of it. But it’s another instance of the 80/20 rule where you can learn the 80 percent of the basics, the fundamentals of photography very, very — it’s all very simple. You really can learn it very quickly, and then the other 20 percent will take you forever, and it requires, like, an encyclopedia.

Benjamin: So you’re saying, you can go and drop $600, get a 28 mm point-and-shoot from overseas, put it on a beer glass in a pitch black restaurant, and take some good pictures?

Gruber: Well, one of the advantages to a fixed, a prime lens, a lens that doesn’t zoom, is that typically it has better optical quality. It’s sharper, it gets better color saturation, and often it’s faster, faster meaning that it works with less light.

Benjamin: You can still take a decent picture inside without a full sun.

Gruber: Right. I almost never shoot with a flash. Even to the point where I end up not being able to even get an exposure.

Benjamin: You’d rather not take a picture at all as opposed to taking one of those deer-in-the-headlights, washed out, ghoulish-looking flash pictures?

Gruber: Right, because really to take a good-looking flash picture you need a real flash, an expensive external flash that gets mounted on top of the camera, and you need to know how to do things like bounce it off the ceiling.

Benjamin: When I was speaking at Rails conference, there were all these strobes going off, flashing all over the ceiling, and afterwards I asked Duncan about it and he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s how I use the flash”, because he had this elaborate rig set up so that the flash never actually — it was always indirect light.

Gruber: So, like, Duncan with a very, very nice and very expensive equipment can take tremendously, just beautiful photographs that are actually lit by flash or partially lit by flash. But using the on-camera flash, even on an SLR, it’s almost always going to look bad. So I just try to do whatever I can not to. So resting the camera on something like a glass or resting it on the table, it’s just a way to keep — if there’s not enough light to take a long exposure, if the camera is going to — if you have to take a long exposure, if it’s going to be opened for a fifteenth of a second or a twentieth of a second, which is too long to hold the camera steady by hand, do something to stabilize the camera.

Benjamin: It was pretty weird. But it was neat, it was kind of neat. I mean, you looked really crazy when you were doing it, you’d look really suspicious when you were doing it. I mean, it’s all right, I’m just pointing that out.

Gruber: I don’t think it looks nearly as suspicious as if I tried doing it with an SLR-sized camera.

Benjamin: [laughs] Right. And for the record, you’ve given me a lot of advice about the lenses to get, and I have two of the same lenses that you have. A 50 mm one, a 28 mm, same two type lenses that you have. Another friend of mine has a 35 mm. I’ve seen his pictures, it’s taken some great pictures. Both of them are prime lenses, meaning they don’t zoom. And it’s great because in a way it forces you to rethink what you’re used to. Instead of just being able to zoom in on something or zoom back from something, you actually have to sometimes physically change your relationship to whatever you’re taking a picture of. So I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting where I’ll take a picture of something with a 50 mm then I’ll pop the other lens on without really changing where I am, and you’ll get a completely different kind of picture. It’s really cool. We could talk an entire show, I think, about just this.

Gruber: Here’s one simple, basic rule of thumb. And of course, there’s dozens of exceptions and there are scenarios where it doesn’t apply, but just as a basic rule of thumb for someone who’s learning to take pictures, just wants to take better pictures, is an amateur. The closer you are to what you’re trying to photograph, the better. So in terms of using a fixed lens, a prime lens that doesn’t have a zoom, you say, well, what if I want to make it bigger? Well, just get closer. And it’s almost always possible to get closer, especially if you’re shooting people. Obviously, if you’re at the zoo and you want to take a picture of a lion, yeah, there’s only so close you can get, and you want to have a nice long focal length lens, something with the zoom, or a 300 mm lens, or something like that. But for just shooting people in your house or shooting people you know and you go out to dinner or something like that, just get as close to them as you can to fill the frame with an interesting composition.

Benjamin: You sound good, John.

Gruber: Thanks. I got a new microphone.

Benjamin: What kind?

Gruber: Samson PS01.

Benjamin: All of our equipment is Samson stuff. Ira is responsible for that. He just sends stuff. “Oh, I got a new microphone, I’m going to send one out to you.”

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t understand how it happened, all of a sudden — I didn’t even ask for it, and he was nice enough to send me this as a sample.

Benjamin: You’ve got the USB one.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: And I’ve got one that — I don’t know all these terms, but it’s a regular microphone, and it plugs into a preamp, and I’ve got optical compression and all these boxes. Whereas yours is just plugged right into the USB port on your PowerBook. But it’s amazing how much better you sound. It’s a great mic that I actually started out — I did most of, maybe all but the last couple of Hivelogic podcasts with the mic that you’re using. It’s amazing how much better you sound through a good microphone.

Gruber: I don’t know what to say about that.

Benjamin: It’s true. You sound more like yourself. Like, when people —

Gruber: Dan, you’ve got to stop, you’re choking me up here.

Benjamin: Oh yeah. No, I mean, when people —

Gruber: Dan, stop.

Benjamin: — hear your voice. Just hear me out, when people hear your voice and you sound all tinny and crappy over your little crappy headset, people think it —

Gruber: [in a mock teary voice] Dan, this means so much to me.

Benjamin: Say what?

Gruber: This means so much to me.

Benjamin: Yeah, okay. I’ll edit that out. When they hear you over that little microphone, you sound so — everybody would email me and say, “Hey, Dan, new podcast sounds great, you sound great. WTF with Gruber?” Because the microphone was crap, you sounded like crap.

Gruber: Even on the first episode?

Benjamin: Especially.

Gruber: No, the second one was the one where I was recording on the PowerBook’s built-in mic. First one, I had a USB headset.

Benjamin: I don’t think there was a difference. I think they both sounded bad.

Gruber: Hm.

Benjamin: And people would literally write in and say, “He needs a new mic.”

Gruber: It’s like the podcasting equivalent of top-posting. Just poor form.

Benjamin: Using a bad mic.

Gruber: Right, right, right. It’s embarrassing. It’s like having dirt under your fingernails.

Benjamin: I was embarrassed. I’m embarrassed at the website now. But we’re going to get that fixed, we’re going to get that redesigned.

Gruber: We have top men on it right now.

Benjamin: Actually, we do. Actually, as of yesterday, the 11th, a new entity is in place on an issue.

Gruber: Top men. We get a lot of unsolicited suggestions.

Benjamin: Yeah we do.

Gruber: And that is very sweet and thank you to everybody who has sent in their own design suggestions for what it looks like. We definitely appreciate the sentiment.

Benjamin: We do.

Gruber: But top men are on the case. As for why it looks the way it does now, the question was do we wait until we have a good website to start recording and doing this show, or do we start recording.

Benjamin: Do we start recording or do we spend six months trying to make it look good, neither of us really being fantastic designers. So here’s the thing, we’ve got some interesting things from people. Like, more than one person I think has sent in music that we’re supposed to use, pictures, designs have come in. So it’s obvious to me that, number one, we obviously need some kind of a jingle, or an intro, or something.

Gruber: Nah, we don’t need a jingle.

Benjamin: We need a jingle, we need some kind of 1950s chewing gum jingle, I think.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: So if you want to send something in and it’s good — if you can get a barbershop quartet together and sing something, we will air that.

Gruber: We could definitely air the best submissions that people send in.

Benjamin: Yeah, send us stuff. Maybe that’s what we ought to do, we ought to say, if you have some ideas for a jingle, or music, or something — but don’t send us something that we could — if I can do it myself with my Casio keyboard in my basement, then don’t send it to me. If it’s genuinely good, if you play an instrument, or have an amazing voice, or something legitimate — send that. But if it’s something that I could do with a Casio keyboard, don’t send it. I don’t know how I could be more clear, John.

Gruber: All right. What’s your problem with Casio?

Benjamin: No, I like it, it’s good. Infinite time. So that’s it, we’ve got to wrap, we’ve already gone — you just messaged me “40m”. So I’m going to have to cut this again, but at least you didn’t curse. I just want to say for the record, why do people have to curse on their blogs? You curse on your blog, and now Craig Hockenberry who is, by the way, where has he been for the last 10 years on the blogosphere, because he’s awesome. Furbo, furbo.org, he now owes us for advertising, I think. But, amazing writing, he’s a great guy, he’s actually shorter than I am, which you would never know because he looks really tall in the pictures. But, amazing writer, really good writer. Now he’s cursing, now he has an adult blog, now I can’t link to it.

Gruber: But you link to me.

Benjamin: Well, I have no choice, I have to do something.

Gruber: Because we’re partners in the show.

Benjamin: You don’t realize when you start working with somebody, now all this crap you have to do to keep them as your friend. What’s the next show going to be about?

Gruber: I don’t know, we should do more on the camera stuff. I think we really gave it short shrift.

Benjamin: If we’re going to do that, we need to get Duncan on the show though.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s what we should do.

Benjamin: He’s not going to come on the show, he’s too busy, he’s in Portland, he’s in San Francisco, he’s all over — but he would be — I had him on the Hivelogic podcast, but it was more of an interview. He should just come on here and just talk.

Gruber: You know what, I had a good idea for someone else we should get on the show. I’m not going to say names because I don’t want to put him on the spot, put all this pressure right on somebody —

Benjamin: Why not? Come on.

Gruber: You know, there’s a lot of people who listen to this show. You’ll know who I’m talking about. I haven’t said this to you, but I’m just going to say one word to you, “Newton”.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, of course.

Gruber: You know who I’m talking about. Now, we get him on this show, and we’ll talk Newton, we’ll talk iPhone, we’ll talk about — and you know what the problem is going to be with getting him on the show. The problem is that he’s Canadian.

Benjamin: Oh, that’s right. I don’t know if we should have him on the show.

Gruber: I mean, that’s just...

Benjamin: What kind of show would we become if we had him on the show?

Gruber: Right. But we’ll see, maybe we can make it work. I think that’s what we should shoot for next week.

Benjamin: Will he need a passport in order to be on the show?

Gruber: I don’t know. I really don’t.

Benjamin: We’ll have to see. I don’t want it to be an interview, I want him and Duncan, anybody else we have — not an interview, it’s like they’re guests, they show up, they sit down in the studio, they talk. That’s it.

Gruber: Right, exactly.

Benjamin: I don’t want it to be anything like an interview. It’s not Larry King.

Gruber: No.

Benjamin: Well, then that’s it.

Gruber: All right, see you.

Benjamin: We’re done.

[ttstranscripts]

Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 5

Title: The English Language, Fonts, & Censoring

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 5 August 2007

Description: Is it “The iPhone” or just “iPhone”? Are Daring Fireball’s fonts too small? Is is rude to edit out profanity? Tune in and find out.

John Gruber: One of the things I want to try to hit with this, and so far it’s way too soon to be able to tell, but to have different types of episodes. And you won’t even know, if you’re a listener, from the listener’s perspective, you won’t quite know what you’re getting until you start listening and it’s like, oh, this is one of the episodes where Dan and John aren’t even talking about the news, what’s the new thing. So far it’s been dominated by iPhone because —

Dan Benjamin: You’re dropping the “the”.

Gruber: Dropping “the”?

Benjamin: Dropping “the”.

Gruber: What do you mean?

Benjamin: The iPhone. You missed it, you said “about iPhone”. I don’t know if I can do that.

Gruber: I don’t even think I like it. I’m not even going to say —

Benjamin: But you’re doing it now.

Gruber: When I think about it, I put the “the” in, but it just happens, I don’t know. In my iPhone fonts article, I proofread it and I went through and added the “the”s everywhere I saw it, and then I proofread it again from the top and caught like five more. I actually did a whole pass through the article to add articles before “iPhone”. And I thought, all right, that’s how I’m going to do it, that’s how I’ll be consistent, then I started reading the article and I kept catching more.

Benjamin: When people leave that off, we talked about this a little bit before, it feels wrong to me.

Gruber: It’s like I said though, it is weird though, it’s a weird thing because the name of the software platform, the environment, is the same as the product. It’s easy when you’re talking about Macs because you can say, look, I bought a new iMac and it’s got this gorgeous screen. Or if you’re having problems, you might say, you know, I was going to do it on my MacBook, but I can’t because the DVD drive on my MacBook is broken. So you’re always saying “my MacBook” or “the MacBook”, whatever, and then if you say like, hey, I’ve written a new app for Mac OS X, you never call it the Mac OS X.

Benjamin: No, it sounds really weird.

Gruber: So the product has a name, the hardware has a name like iMac or MacBook and the environment is called Mac OS X. But with iPhone it’s all the same thing. You have —

Benjamin: You just did it again, “with iPhone”.

Gruber: Right, I didn’t even think, I wasn’t even thinking about it.

Benjamin: But you just said you didn’t like it, but you did it.

Gruber: I know, but I do because to me it also means in addition to the little 4 inch by 2.5 inch hardware product, “I have a iPhone in my pocket”, “I bought an iPhone”, it’s also the environment, it’s this sort of platform, you’re writing web apps for iPhone. To me, you can always use the “the”, but it just comes out that way when you’re talking about it as a system, it makes sense to talk about it the same way you talk about Mac OS X and not use the articles.

Benjamin: Okay, maybe, but I would say a better comparison wouldn’t be Mac OS X, a better comparison would be Mac. Because I think of Mac as both a platform and a machine, a computer.

Gruber: Right, and people always say “a Mac” or “the Mac”.

Benjamin: If I said, I’m coming up with some new software for the Mac. This is Mac software, it’s software for the Mac. To me that implies whatever operating system the Mac is running.

Gruber: And whenever you hear somebody say something like “we’re Windows-only but we’re going to have a version for Mac soon”.

Benjamin: I don’t like that.

Gruber: It always to me sounds like you’re an idiot who doesn’t —

Benjamin: You don’t get it.

Gruber: You don’t get it, it’s going to suck. It’s only a half step up from the people who call Macs “Apples”. That’s like the sure sign that you just don’t get it. Like if you say —

Benjamin: “I really love my new Apple.”

Gruber: Right. “I was going to ask you what software you use for that but I remember you use Apple.”

Benjamin: “You use Apple so that won’t work.” You know what, somebody else did something really weird, a friend of theirs I guess does customer support for Apple, specifically they do technical support for the iPhone. And the person that I was talking to was saying, “Oh, I’d love to work for Mac, that would be so cool.”

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: There’s another thing that’s just — I have to talk to you about this, I already know what you’re going to say, but what do you feel when people from the UK, they’ll say something like — for example, here would be the American news headline, it would say, “Apple has released a game-changing device called the iPhone”. In the UK, they would say, “Apple have released”, “have”, H-A-V-E.

Gruber: Right, a company name is always treated as plural.

Benjamin: Bugs me more than anything else I’ve — I can deal with them adding an extra letter to “color” or whatever, spelling it whatever weird way, that’s fine, that’s a spelling difference.

Gruber: I tend to think that — I’m like the typical American who’s impressed by British accent, but I think as a writer and someone who cares about the details of English language usage to a degree far, far greater than most people, I think your typical Englishman speaks English far better than Americans.

Benjamin: I totally agree.

Gruber: I think they use better diction, I think they use better syntax, I think they have significantly better vocabularies on average.

Benjamin: I agree.

Gruber: I don’t know why this is. I don’t know if it has something to do with our culture, I don’t know why.

Benjamin: Like the poor guy who just got arrested in a bar fight in the UK speaks better than 90 percent of the college-educated Americans.

Gruber: Right, exactly. Just some average guy off the street can actually put together a sentence in a good way. And I also think that in the ways that their rules are different — I mean, the spelling rules to me, that’s just arbitrary.

Benjamin: It’s a same word, it’s a different kind of spelling.

Gruber: Right, but their other rules, the things that they do differently I think usually, I almost always agree with them. I actually do it on Daring Fireball is I put my commas and periods outside the quotes.

Benjamin: Always bugs me.

Gruber: But to me it makes sense. I know it bugs other people and I do get email about it occasionally, I know full well that it goes against the rules of American punctuation, but it always bugged me that it doesn’t really make sense. And in a programming language, of course — to me quotes are like strings in a programming language. And you quote exactly what it is you’re quoting and nothing more, and then if you’re going to follow it with a comma or a period, it goes outside unless the comma or period is actually part of the string that you’re quoting. And that’s exactly how in England, that’s how British people punctuate sentences.

Benjamin: Okay, you’re right and I prefer it, however, okay, but no, no. I agree with you, it is better, in this case the UK version or the British version is more correct in my mind. The punctuation should go outside of it. However, in America that’s incorrect, so I’m too scared to do it.

Gruber: See, it’s one of the things that I wanted to — it’s the sort of thing that I care about a lot. Probably 99 percent of Daring Fireball readers never even notice that I do that.

Benjamin: Oh, I notice.

Gruber: Well, that’s because you have a background in writing. You have actual training in writing and editing. And most of the people who do notice, 1 percent or 5 percent, whatever it is, who notice, probably think that I’m wrong, that maybe I don’t even know the rules. I get a lot of email like that, I used to, at least, especially when the site was new, in the first year I got a lot of email from people very politely saying — they quote the sentence and say, “The comma should go inside the quotes.” But it’s just a fun thing —

Benjamin: But what about the have/has thing?

Gruber: I can’t — to me, this whole thing is my long way of saying, yes, I almost always agree that the British way of doing things differently than Americans, I agree with. In that case, I can’t though.

Benjamin: Oh, thank you.

Gruber: Every time I hear it or read it, it’s just too —

Benjamin: I really thought the show was over for good. No, really, that was the most difficult five minutes of my life.

Gruber: I tend to think just, like, logistically. Like I said, if you really think about the rules for where you put the comma and period, to me —

Benjamin: You’re back on the comma/period thing.

Gruber: I think the British way clearly makes sense. The American rule is just arbitrary. It’s just something to remember, if you just want to say, which one makes more sense, it’s the English way. I think with this pluralizing company names or group names, to me in that case the American way makes more sense, and of course I’m biased. My biggest problem with it is that it just always sounds wrong to me. Even when I’m reading on a page, the sound of usage, that’s pretty much how I write, I don’t remember all the rules of grammar, I just know what sounds good. And the English way just sounds so wrong to me.

Benjamin: Nothing calls attention to somebody being from the UK more than that. And whenever I see that, it rubs me the wrong way. It’s crazy.

Gruber: It doesn’t make any sense to me either because to me a collection is a thing, and sure the collection is of multiple things, you can have a bag of marbles, but you’ve only got one bag.

Benjamin: Right.

Gruber: So yes, a company does consist of multiple employees, but a company also consists of multiple buildings, it consists of the products. A company is a weird entity, but it is ultimately an entity.

Benjamin: Who do we talk to over there to straighten this out?

Gruber: I don’t know, because if they fix that, if they could come around to our — if they could just budge on this one thing and learn from us, they would have a perfect language.

Benjamin: Overall a perfect language.

Gruber: They would beat American English in every single way.

Benjamin: A hundred percent. This is their Achilles heel.

Gruber: It’s, like, the one problem with the British language. I think if I were English, by the way, if I happened to have been born over there, I would probably be such an enormous snob about American usage. Instead of being about Macintosh and web nerdery, my website would just be about how stupid Americans talk.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: I do, I think I would be so — I would just be such a snob about it. Is this the show? Are we doing a show right now?

Benjamin: I am, I don’t know if you are.

Gruber: Who else should we thank, should we have sponsors to thank?

Benjamin: We should.

Gruber: This is The Talk Show. I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin. How are you?

Gruber: Good.

Benjamin: And we do have a sponsor, 37signals, an amazing — I don’t know how did we get — they came to us, really, I think. And they said that they’d love to sponsor this show.

Gruber: Well, I think they’re a smart company. Obviously, they’re very successful and I think they can tell that any company that doesn’t sponsor The Talk Show is probably going to suffer.

Benjamin: Do you remember back in the old days, did you ever use IRC, Internet Relay Chat?

Gruber: Long time ago.

Benjamin: There were so many things about it that were great at the time, but there were so many things that were annoying about it, and in these days, if anybody ever comes to me, like the people in the Ruby on Rails community, a lot of them use IRC, I won’t do it, and what I think, one of my favorite products that 37signals has created — I mean, I like Basecamp, I use it a lot, Highrise is very cool, we’ve talked about Ta-da List. One thing people I don’t think talk enough about is Campfire.

Gruber: It’s like instant messaging chat room in a webpage.

Benjamin: Yeah, it’s like everything good about IRC without all of the bad stuff about IRC. Everything that’s potentially good about instant message without most of the bad stuff. So for the people that don’t know what Campfire is, I’ll talk about it for a second.

Gruber: campfirehq.com.

Benjamin: Yes. Thank you. Basically, you go there, you create an account, you can even make a free account, and you can invite other people in, you can chat, everybody gets to see what everyone else types, and if you paste an image link, the image will actually appear in the chat, you can have little audio notifications — it’s chatting but it’s a web application and the amazing thing about this — like, to me, what makes Campfire indispensable is, one of the ways that we used it, whenever I’ve had to collaborate with people, especially people who aren’t maybe typically on an instant message client or don’t want to be because they get harassed too much or they’re too busy, they can jump into Campfire, they can participate in a group chat. The transcript gets saved so that later on you can go back and say, “Oh, remember when we made this decision in this chat to do it” — there it is, it’s archived, it’s saved. You can get back to it, you can review it. We’ve also used it in situations where we were doing server work or coordinating between a few different people, and we would actually talk about what we were doing to multiple servers at any given time, and instead of having three or four people on a conference call, especially if it’s early in the morning, you can type in, okay, this server is shut down, or this one is rebooted, or this one has been patched. And you keep track of it, and then if you’re pasting commands, you can actually show other people, this is the command that I typed, and they can cut and paste and run it on their server, that kind of thing. Genius application.

Gruber: Guess what.

Benjamin: What’s that?

Gruber: Guess what, it’s not campfirehq.com.

Benjamin: What are you talking about?

Gruber: It’s not, it’s basecamphq.com, but it’s campfirenow.com.

Benjamin: I’ll just edit all that out. campfirenow.

Gruber: campfirenow.com. It’s just one extra little thing that they do right. I remember seeing, I think it was a weblog post that Jason Fried wrote once on 37signals’s company weblog about their names for their domains, and it’s things like basecamphq.com and campfirenow.com and somebody asked — because you can’t get domains like campfire.com anymore.

Benjamin: No, of course.

Gruber: And his point was that people just Google for it anyway. If you just Google for “Campfire”, you get 37signals Campfire.

Benjamin: Right. It’s a great app and people just don’t talk — it’s almost a given that that app is out there.

Gruber: You know, the worst part about having 37signals as a sponsor is that I feel like I could just talk for half hour about their stuff.

Benjamin: Well, they’d love that. We could just do a show talking about that.

Gruber: But that seems gratuitous. But the other thing I love about Campfire is, to me, as an Ajax app, an app that you type, return, and the data shows up, and it’s not reloading the entire page, is that it’s, like, exactly the sort of thing that Ajax web apps are perfect for.

Benjamin: That’s what they should be used for.

Gruber: They’re not showing off. You never have to wait for the whole page to reload, but you type, return, and — bloop — it shows up on the thing just like you’d want it to.

Benjamin: It was funny, when I was waiting in line to buy the iPhone, there was a guy there, Charles, and he writes for iLounge and stuff like that. And we were all there in line and I said, “Are you on instant message?” And he said, “No, I’m only in Campfire now.” And you’d be surprised how many people have actually told me they’re not doing IRC, they’re not doing instant message. If they need to talk about a project, then they’ll go into that project’s Campfire and they’ll talk just about that. We should probably have something like that going on I think for the show.

Gruber: Yeah, probably.

Benjamin: We could go on the Campfire, we could tell — see, that’s the problem, I want this to be a live show.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: That’s the desire because then we could have more — people could call in or something. I don’t know how we’d work that out.

Gruber: I agree. That is the sort of the weird thing where — we’re very serious about this show, we’re going to do this every week, we’ve got sponsors, we’ve got top men working on a new website.

Benjamin: That’s right. We should talk about that, we should call those guys out.

Gruber: No, no, we’ve got to wait. Because what if it turns out that they do a crap job?

Benjamin: Yeah, what if it sucks and we ditch it, we have to go with somebody else, then it’s public.

Gruber: The other top men, yeah, it’s all top secret until it comes out.

Benjamin: Let’s just say, very high-end people on this. Everybody has heard of these people. We can say who it’s not.

Gruber: If you want.

Benjamin: It’s not Dan Cederholm.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: You would think, of course it would be him, it’s not him.

Gruber: You guys did Cork’d together.

Benjamin: That’s right. I’m sort of seen as his assistant.

Gruber: Yeah, it’s funny that you would mention him because I was just away for the weekend and I came back, and there was a couple of days worth of mail, and I got a letter from Dan Cederholm. And it was just real cryptic, but it just said, “You should’ve said something to me before you started something with Dan Benjamin. You’ll live to regret it. Cheers, Dan C.”

Benjamin: [laughs] Right, “cheers”.

Gruber: And I don’t even know what that means, it’s like, boy, that seems out of the blue but I mean, I don’t know.

Benjamin: He’s only like a train ride away from you. I’d be nervous. He’s tall. I mean, you’re tall, but I think he could take you.

Gruber: I’d be nervous? You’re the one who seems to be some sort of —

Benjamin: Fixated, he’s fixated. I think I’m typically seen as like, “Dan Cederholm did Cork’d, and I think Dan Benjamin helped.” I’m okay with it, it’s fine. Like I was his intern.

Gruber: [laughs] Well, big part of it though is just that what it looks like — the way that software works is less noticeable to people brand-wise than what it looks like. One of the things with Cork’d is you go there and as soon as the page finishes loading in your browser, you’re like, wow, this is something.

Benjamin: I mean, if I had designed it, I wouldn’t even have used it.

Gruber: It’s just one of the most distinctive — it’s one of those websites where you could see somebody on it from across the room and you’d know that they’re on Cork’d.

Benjamin: Yeah, that’s nice. It’s true. Same with Daring Fireball because the font is so small.

Gruber: No, the color of course.

Benjamin: The color combined with the incredibly small font.

Gruber: You think the font is small?

Benjamin: It’s 11-point Verdana, right?

Gruber: Right. 11px.

Benjamin: I love that font, I think it’s one of the all-time fonts, the best fonts around. I think it was better before anti-aliasing, to be honest.

Gruber: Yeah, I agree. Totally agree.

Benjamin: Maybe if we could just get you to write less, it would be — because after reading one of your articles, I’ll tell you what, my eyes hurt.

Gruber: And we can get — couple of points here. It makes it sound like I’ve been doing this site for so ridiculously long, but it’s true that — it seems to me like it’s still relatively new, but when I started it, anti-aliasing was not common in web browsers, even on the Mac.

Benjamin: Well, at least not at 11px.

Gruber: Right, I started the site in 2002, and I think I had more Mac OS 9 IE users than Mac OS X users at the time. It was like 50/50.

Benjamin: That was such a charming font though, you could just sit and look at — I remember just looking at websites and at that 11-pixel Verdana and thinking —

Gruber: It was the best screen font ever.

Benjamin: — the web is never going to get better than this.

Gruber: It’s true. You know, it’s funny because I think if I redesigned now, and I’ve been thinking about it lately —

Benjamin: Which to you just means moving your logo one pixel to the left, that qualifies as a complete redesign.

Gruber: Right, or changing the font, maybe I would change the font to 12-pixel Helvetica or maybe switch to ems or something like that, switch it from Verdana to Helvetica or something like that. Because a big part of the reason that I chose Verdana was specifically because I liked the way that 11px Verdana rendered before anti-aliasing. It was specific, it wasn’t just that I wanted Verdana, it was that I wanted 11px Verdana. Not 10px, which is way too small, and not 12px.

Benjamin: So isn’t it true then to say that you haven’t really changed with the times?

Gruber: Well, but 11px Verdana even with anti-aliasing is to me a very good-looking font. But the complaints that it’s too small are growing. I would say I’ve gotten more of them in the last year than I’ve gotten it any time since the first year. And so I probably will if not change to Helvetica, at least change the way that the size is spec’d. But I still think, even with anti-aliasing, that when Verdana gets over 11 pixels, it looks different. It has a different character to it.

Benjamin: What font would you use right now if you had to pick right now?

Gruber: If you were going to make me pick immediately, I would just stick with Verdana, I would not change.

Benjamin: You’d keep, you would stay with it.

Gruber: Right. But if I had six or seven weeks to play with it, I would first try switching to Helvetica.

Benjamin: Yeah, I had Helvetica for a while and I think it’s a nice font, I mean, obviously, people talk about how it’s one of the best fonts of all time. But you almost feel like you want to do more? Be a little more distinctive in your font choice somehow?

Gruber: But I still think that even with a brand new top-end display, compared to how many pixels per inch you get of resolution, it’s worse than the resolution of an 18-year-old ink jet printer. An ink jet printer from 1990 was still putting out like 300 dpi, and yeah, it was a little bit smudgy, so maybe you got effectively like 200 dpi, but a brand new Cinema Display only has like 117 pixels per inch. So it’s still an incredibly crude form for type, output device for typography. So the fonts that in print are far superior, the best fonts that you’d want for reading a long article, to me they still don’t render that well on screen. To me, the screen is not a place where you want to get fancy with typography. So picking something right down the middle of the road like Verdana, or Helvetica, or Georgia if you wanted a serif font, it’s — yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right there with 75 percent of all other websites, you’re not standing out because of your font choice but it’s almost — how can you on the web?

Benjamin: You make a good point. I can’t argue with you. I forget where I saw this, somebody was commenting about your recent fireball where you talk about fonts on the iPhone, the iPhone, and you say, Trebuchet, how can you have that as a font. But I think somebody had pointed out, or somebody was responding, or I read somewhere, they were saying, well, the reason why is because so many websites use that font.

Gruber: Yeah, but it’s garbage.

Benjamin: I agree, but that doesn’t mean —

Gruber: But the thing with websites, websites aren’t like PDF files or Word documents. If you open up a Word document and you don’t have —

Benjamin: So you’re saying it should just fall back and become Helvetica.

Gruber: Or substitute some other font. Because you can’t depend on — no matter how many sites specify Trebuchet specifically, they certainly — I don’t think anybody would assume that everybody has it, even if they list it first. I’ll bet if you look at most CSS files that specify Trebuchet, it also says like, “font-family: Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”. A web is not like a legal document, a Word document where if you don’t have the right font, everything gets screwed up and all the page breaks are wrong. That’s a big problem in the legal world because you submit a brief or something and you say “on page 87”, when somebody else opens your file, page 87 on your version has to be exactly the same, word for word, as page 87 on theirs, so you need to have the same font. So it makes sense that, for example, in the legal world everything is done in Times, or Times New Roman, 12 point. And when you’re writing screenplays in Hollywood, they still use Courier 12, everything is Courier 12, with the exact same leading, lines per inch. You could use Courier New instead of Courier because it’s exact same size, but they do this because that way if you get a screenplay that’s 130 pages, you know it’s about the same length of a movie as another 130-page script. Now, of course, some movies are all full of dialogue, and another movie might have page after page of action sequences or whatever but it’s a ball park estimate because every screenplay is in the exact same font, Courier 12, that two scripts that are about the same thickness in page count are about the same length in terms of how long the movie would be.

Benjamin: Listening to you talk, it actually sounds like you know what you’re talking about.

Gruber: Oh yeah, definitely. For screenplays?

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: That’s what I used to want to be, I just wanted to make movies.

Benjamin: Well, you still do, you just kind of gave up on that.

Gruber: I’ll get back to it when I’m ready.

Benjamin: Let’s talk really quickly about Knox for Mac. Did you get to try this out?

Gruber: Of course.

Benjamin: You didn’t try it, did you?

Gruber: Yeah, of course I did.

Benjamin: The secure encryption back-up thing. So, sponsor.

Gruber: They are a sponsor of The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Knox for Mac. This is spelled Knox like Fort Knox so knoxformac.com.

Gruber: You can check our website thetalksnow.net to get a link to check it out.

Benjamin: This is one of those pieces of software where I was very skeptical about it at first because it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting for a very long time, and whenever I see something that appears, for all intents and purposes, to be perfect, I’m immediately thinking it’s too good to be true.

Gruber: Describe it, give me the nutshell description of what Knox does.

Benjamin: Because you didn’t try it?

Gruber: No, I know exactly what it does, but let me see if you can describe it.

Benjamin: So this is really you’re testing me?

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: And it’s actually something I’ve been wanting for a while. So here’s what it is, you install this little application, and all you do is just drag it into the Applications folder, so that’s good, I was very concerned there was going to be an installer and it was going to do things I didn’t know what it was doing. It’s not like that. It’s just a single application and basically, what it does is it lets you create an unlimited number of what they call encrypted vaults. So it’s basically, it’s like an encrypted drive image, but instead of having it go through a whole bunch of hoops and Disk Utility to create your own kind of drive image, which you encrypt, and tweaking configurations and issues with getting the thing to mount or not — it just handles all of that. You just create a new vault, and basically, it acts like an expanding drive, it’s just like a folder, really. But whatever you put in there gets encrypted, and you can encrypt them in a whole lot of different ways, I think it uses AES 128, and you can use them for backups, they can be searched and indexed by Spotlight, or not, based on your preferences. Everything can be completely customized.

Gruber: And when you do let one of the volumes be Spotlight-searchable, it’s still only searchable when you have it open.

Benjamin: Exactly.

Gruber: Because it’s secure, so when you don’t have it open, which means it’s not mounted, it’s unavailable to Spotlight, and because the contents are encrypted. Now, what I like about it, and to me it’s like a little sign of Mac developers who get it, is that they leverage what Apple has done with the system to do as much as possible. And they just concentrate on making the user interface as convenient as possible. And that’s what it is, because you think like, well, why would I trust this software to encrypt my stuff with this serious encryption where if you don’t remember the passphrase, even the NSA is going to have a hard time, spend months and months and months trying to crack this open. You’re toast if you forget it, I mean, it’s serious encryption. It’s all based on Apple’s disk image encryption. What they’ve done, what Knox does is just makes disk images far, far more convenient than —

Benjamin: Right, it takes the hustle out of managing it.

Gruber: But you’ve got the peace of mind of knowing that the technical back-end is the stuff that’s been refined by Apple, it’s as reliable as using an Apple’s disk image because it is.

Benjamin: Did you try using it to re-format and encrypt a USB stick?

Gruber: No, because I lost my last USB stick, I had a great USB stick.

Benjamin: And now it’s lost and who knows what secrets were lost.

Gruber: No, I actually know what was on it.

Benjamin: That’s even worse.

Gruber: There was nothing on it, not a single file.

Benjamin: You’re lucky. Well, I actually did that, and you know what it does, it encrypts it, and it puts a copy of Knox on the stick so that when you — because I was thinking about it, okay, how am I going to — if I take this to another computer. Yeah, I know it’s formatted for a Mac, so it’s going to be usable by a Mac, but it actually puts Knox on there, so that when you go, you double-click it, it says, “You need to have Knox installed locally”, it copies it over locally, and then it lets you handle the drive and mount the drive. It’s just very cool, and everything is right — and I think we can —

Gruber: How much does it cost?

Benjamin: It’s $30, but I think we’re doing a $5 discount, aren’t we?

Gruber: That’s exactly it.

Benjamin: So if you go to the link on thetalkshow.net, you get 5 bucks off.

Gruber: It’s a great deal.

Benjamin: This is the kind of thing that you need to just go and get. This is one of those things, everybody should be using this.

Gruber: I think one of our recurring themes is going to be your aversion to profanity and my love of it. I love profanity.

Benjamin: I don’t — if you’ve met me in person and you’ve had a conversation with me, I’m — I’m not saying I’m perfect.

Gruber: You do swear in person, but in terms of anything that you’re actually publishing and you see as representing yourself, like, you would never allow a curse word to appear on Hivelogic.

Benjamin: Of course not, no.

Gruber: You don’t curse on the show.

Benjamin: Would never.

Gruber: You know, Duncan said [bleep] the last show.

Benjamin: Now I have to edit this podcast.

Gruber: Are you? Are you going to edit him?

Benjamin: Of course!

Gruber: I think it’s rude to edit somebody’s words. I don’t see why you have to edit.

Benjamin: May I go out on a limb and say, I think he said it and immediately regretted it and wished he could somehow go back in time and take it away. And I’m going to do him that courtesy.

Gruber: I don’t even think he knew. But how are you going to do it? What if it was a really good sentence and you’re going to embarrass him with a little beep?

Benjamin: Well, I could do it like that, or at the expense of the show I could cut the whole line.

Gruber: Have you ever heard Adam Sandler’s song “[bleep] Car”?

Benjamin: How many times are you going to make me edit this?

Gruber: But I’m just telling you the name of his song. I’m not swearing.

Benjamin: You could say “POS Car” like the T-shirt says.

Gruber: But that’s not the name of his song. Have you ever heard the song?

Benjamin: No.

Gruber: Now, the first time I heard it — I will not sing it.

Benjamin: I stopped listening to him when he did the Hanukkah song. That was too much.

Gruber: I would tell you this song is very funny, but the first time I heard it was on the radio, commercial radio, and I would say just about every verse of the song has some curse —

Benjamin: Profanity.

Gruber: Right, and the refrain is “piece of [bleep] car” and it’s over and over again.

Benjamin: It’s not like I’m offended, John, it’s just...

Gruber: All right, but here’s the thing, I heard this and it was beeped out, I would say at least four out of five verses of the song were beeped out. Even the “roses are red, violets are blue”, something something, like, you think the last line is where the curse word comes because that’s the joke — I mean, even the “roses are red” lines of the song had curse words. Every single line was — it was sung in the character of some down-on-his-luck guy with a junky car. I mean, it was just beep after beep after beep after beep. And I thought that was part of the song, I thought it was almost like a statement, I thought the recording from Sandler was beeped out because it was so funny that it was just beep after beep after beep.

Benjamin: That was part of the humor of the song.

Gruber: I thought so and then I found out, no, it wasn’t, it was that somebody actually went to the trouble of making a radio edit that was so overbeeped. You can’t imagine how profane the song is.

Benjamin: For the record, talking to you in general is like watching an episode of Deadwood. On every level that you want to interpret that sentence.

Gruber: [laughs] Right.

Benjamin: It’s true, I mean, anybody who’s ever talked to you, it’s both vulgar and insulting, profane and genius, all at the same time.

Gruber: Well, talk to you soon.

Benjamin: Yeah, that’s it, I mean, what else is there to say, it’s time.

Gruber: I don’t know. Thanks to 37signals.

Benjamin: Yeah. Knox, simple secure encryption.

[geniodiabolico]

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 22 2019 - Resilience Porn

In this episode, I play a song from Paul Melancon; I talk about my new house and studio; I discuss sentimentality about child stuff; I run down the various digitization projects in my life; I discuss Marie Kondo and the outrage about getting rid of books and getting rid of my own books; I talk about the corrosive nature of “resilience porn” and how it relates to software projects; why I listen to less of Dan Benjamin.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, January 22 2019

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[ttstranscripts]

Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 2

Title: iPhone Initial Impressions

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 3 July 2007

Description: We share our initial thoughts and impressions about our just-purchased iPhones.

Dan Benjamin: So this is a supplemental podcast to our regular weekly podcast just because we have to talk about our iPhones. So John, you got an iPhone, I guess.

John Gruber: Yeah, I did, I got one about 6:20 on Friday.

Benjamin: Yeah, I think you had a little bit of a shorter line than I did. How long did you wait?

Gruber: I got there around 11:30, and the line was about 50 or 60 deep, but I had a friend there and sort of [?] in line around space 45.

Benjamin: Nice. We had about — I heard the news say we had 300 people here in Orlando, in the Millenia Mall in Orlando. I think we had more like 400 or 500, I’m not sure. I got there at about 10:30 AM and probably got 70ish in line. How did the activation go for you?

Gruber: It went great for us, really. My wife and I, we each got an iPhone, we already had AT&T phones, but we were out of contract, we were month-to-month from a contract we had like 2.5 years ago. We have a family plan with plenty of minutes. No data plans because our phones were totally old, non-data phones. We upgraded, we just added two $20 iPhone data plans to our current account. It adds up to about — seems like no matter what you do, it adds up to about $60 a month per iPhone. I think we’re going to actually come out a little bit ahead of that. But AT&T’s family pricing seems like it’s fairly consistent, like, everybody with a reasonably recent family plan, it’s about $40 per phone per plan and $20 per iPhone.

Benjamin: Not outrageous, not too much more expensive.

Gruber: No. I don’t think so.

Benjamin: See, I have a family talk plan, I had a phone on this plan, AT&T customer, and activated it around when I got home sometime around 7:30–8 o’clock, and I was one of the people that saw the message that said, “You’ll get an email when you’re activated”, and I thought, what’s that? And just about midnight, when I had pretty much given up and said, all right, I’ll just let this thing sit here overnight, I got the email, clicked the link and it activated, but there are some other people I know who were not so lucky, and actually it took them even till the next day, and they had to take action and diligently call AT&T and Apple —

Gruber: Yes. It seems like the one and only really serious complaint about the iPhone is people whose activation was left in limbo, and it does seem like there are some people whose activations require — you have to call AT&T customer support and get them to fix it; otherwise, it’s never going to be activated.

Benjamin: Yeah, if you don’t take any action, you’re just not going to have an activation period, and how do you know if you’re the person who’s in that situation, you need to intervene vs. the person who’s really in a legitimate queue and you will get activated.

Gruber: Right, and it seems like a big problem because they’re selling so many iPhones that their customer service is just swamped. I mean, Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba wrote a thing on their weblog about his and — when he called them and spent like 45 minutes on hold and talked to them — more or less the problem was, for some people activation requires manual processing on AT&T’s end and whoever handled his just didn’t do the last step. There was like a final button, “Activate”, and they just never clicked it —

Benjamin: Wouldn’t it just kill you if you found out that literally a guy just forgot to click an OK button?

Gruber: I especially feel bad for the people who waited all day Friday because obviously if you’re that hepped up — I mean, even you, even you having to wait till midnight, that would’ve killed me. One of the big reasons that I did it, waited in line Friday, number one, I was afraid that they were going to sell out right away.

Benjamin: Totally.

Gruber: Well, that proved not to be the case. But I wanted to write something for Daring Fireball for the first day, just use it for a couple hours, drop a list of first impressions and notes and stuff like that and publish it, which I got to do. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that if I had to wait till midnight to activate.

Benjamin: No, because all you could’ve done would’ve been to slide the slider and dial 911.

Gruber: Right. And that’s also the other thing that sort of stinks, is that I don’t know if it was Apple or AT&T, but somebody led people to believe that even before activation is complete, at least if you go through the iTunes part of registering your phone and waiting for activation, everything else would be active, and that’s not the case. Until the AT&T sends the signal to the SIM card, the iPhone is literally a brick, the only thing you can do is call 911.

Benjamin: Right. So what do you think, you’ve got the iPhone, is it not the coolest thing that Apple’s ever made? Is it safe to just say that, to say it’s the best Apple product maybe all around?

Gruber: I don’t know, it’s got to be close. I really do think — I mean comparisons to original Macintosh are completely legitimate. Really, just in terms of moving the state of the art forward in terms of what people can expect. And I think it’s funny because I think The New York Times had a story today about the Korean and Japanese electronics companies’ reactions to the iPhone, and that when they first announced it back in January, they were like, “Ahh, big deal, that’s just silly Americans getting excited about this, we’ve had these advanced cell phones that do cool stuff for years.” I think what they were doing was looking at it in terms of like a checklist: email, web, video on the phone, music playback on the phone, check, check, check, check, check — our phones already do all this stuff. Whereas it’s not really what the iPhone does, it’s just the way that it works, the way that it’s just so seamless.

Benjamin: 100 percent of the success of the iPhone, I think, maybe not 100, but 90 percent is going to be not the features, but the implementation.

Gruber: Exactly.

Benjamin: The way that people interact with the thing.

Gruber: And I mean, for example, if you call web browsing a feature and you just say, “Well, my phone does it too”, you’re totally missing the point. By far and away, the best app on the iPhone is Safari. I probably would’ve paid just as much money and waited in line for an iPhone that only had the phone and Safari.

Benjamin: [laughs] I think that’s key to it, but I’ll tell you what, that’s more important I think to people like us, but what’s funny is — and I had told you this but I think it’s worth mentioning here — I had an eye doctor appointment today, and while I was in the waiting room waiting, brought the phone out to check email. Interestingly enough, it found their wireless network, and I jumped right on that, which is just the coolest thing in the world, and so one of the people came up to me who worked there, and she’s like, “Oh, is that the new phone?” “Yeah, yeah.” Immediately I had a crowd of about 10 people who wanted me to just demo it, and the thing that I saw, they had the biggest reaction to, the thing they thought was the coolest — they loved the virtual keyboard, which really surprised me because that’s something that I would’ve thought people would’ve right away said, “Oh, that won’t work”, but when they saw me two-thumb typing on it really fast, they all just kind of looked at each other, like, oh wow, that’s cool. But the thing that got the biggest reaction wasn’t the webpage, it was flicking the photos back and forth and zooming in on them and rotating. That is like — people, they loved that, that was like the coolest thing they’ve ever seen.

Gruber: Right. My son, a 3.5-year-old boy, he’s totally picked up on the phone, and that Photos interface is just so — the flicking, he loves it. I have a couple vacation trips, folders from iPhoto synced to it, I’ll just bring one up and he’ll just be, “Let me see Christmas pictures”, and I’ll just bring up Christmas pictures and I’ll hold the phone and he’ll flick through — because that’s really all you do, you just flick, it really is nice. And it’s so fast.

Benjamin: It’s so fast.

Gruber: I just can’t express how you never have to wait for anything on the iPhone.

Benjamin: There’s no waiting and I think that is something that Apple has really gotten right. Every single feature on that last phone that I had that ran the miniature version of Windows, everything was waiting. I think it’s the instantaneous responsiveness of the iPhone — everything that you want to do, whether it’s — yeah, if you’re on the EDGE network, which, by the way, is much faster than people were saying, not as fast as broadband, of course, but not slow, I don’t think — with that as an exception, everything is pretty much instantaneous.

Gruber: Yeah, exactly. And for example, comparing it to iPhoto on the Mac, I mean, iPhoto has gotten a lot faster over the years, but if you’re just going through pictures, just like, hey, bring up this one group in iPhoto and just go through the slideshow, it’s usually pretty fast, and it caches the next one, but if you go fast enough, a lot of times you’ll get the beach ball, and you’ll have to wait because you’ve gone ahead of where it goes. Of course, the iPhone doesn’t have to show the full — it’s only a 480-pixel wide screen, but whatever they’re doing to cache them, to make them smaller, whatever they’re doing, it just works, instantly. It never looks like a low-res version is loading and then it’s high-res — you just immediately flick and you get the version of the picture that’s as good as it can possibly look on this screen.

Benjamin: Right, it’s just there. And it makes you feel like you’re actually manipulating the picture itself or whatever it is you’re doing on the phone, you feel like when you touch it, you’re actually moving the thing around. And I think some people have some legitimate complaints about things that are missing, one of them — and we’ve talked about this and James Duncan Davidson has a great list, a lot of people have really good lists of things they like and things they feel are missing. People talk about copy and paste, but I think your point earlier today was like, you can see why it’s not there because how do you actually implement that with this type of user interface? It’s a hard problem.

Gruber: Here’s my thinking about that, the more I think about the lack of copy and paste and selectable text, is that maybe they have an idea of how they’ll do it, maybe they had it in previous — while they were developing it, you know, versions — I think Craig Hockenberry had a good point on his weblog post where he said, you’re probably wrong if you think that they didn’t build a bunch of different UIs for this and threw them away before they settled on this, even though it’s a 1.0 product. The thinking behind the whole UI, the metaphors — I think they probably experimented a lot, and I think with the cut, copy and paste and the lack of text selection and that they agreed upon this simple interface that doesn’t have it — it reminds me of the fact that the original Mac in 1984 didn’t have arrow keys on the keyboard, and the reason for that if you read Andy Hertzfeld’s book or his website folklore.org with a bunch of stories from the original Mac, the idea was that they didn’t — whether it was Jobs personally or the overall team agreed — but more or less the people who were pushing for the radical GUI interface — which was totally radical at the time — didn’t want arrow keys, because they wanted to force people to use the mouse, and they wanted to force application designers to design applications they made you use the mouse.

Benjamin: It was almost forcing a new kind of mentality.

Gruber: Right, so if they don’t have cut, copy and paste, it’s like an enforced — there’s a limitation in place that forces them to create an interface that lets you work without it. And of course, we’re running into the fact that they haven’t covered all the cases, and there’s so many little places where you’d like to be able to like, ah, if I could just cut that, copy that URL, and go to the other page in Safari, so I could paste it into this Twitter field, so I could paste a URL in there, it would be so nice. But overall, the fact that we miss cut, copy and paste — we miss it but you still get so much done without it, and the fact that it’s not there is like, it’s just a way to force them to make it as good as they can without it.

Benjamin: Right. Well, jumping ahead a little bit, I was talking to Mike Davidson, who a lot of people would know from Newsvine, and he and I, we were talking, and he was going through and saying, “Here’s some things that I miss, here’s some things that I really need”, and one of them that he was saying was, “A friend of mine took a picture of a person that was good that I wanted to use as a contact picture, and there was no easy way for him to get that to me. He could email it to me, but then how could I use that, the [photo] which I just received in the email on my phone, how can I use that as the contact picture for the person here?” And I said, “Well, that’s easy, when you get the email, you just drag it on your Mac, drag it into your contact in Address Book.” And he said, “Well, I don’t use Address Book, I don’t want to do that on my Mac. What I want to do is to be able to do that on the phone, and what I really want is a file system so that I can browse the file system, I can save things out of Safari or that people send me.” And I realized that in a way, the last thing — and I’m an old-school UNIX guy, so if anybody should want a file system, it should be me, right — but I actually don’t want a file system on my iPhone, or the fact is, I want there to be one, I just don’t want to know about it. And in a way cut, copy and paste would have solved that problem for him if he had been able to copy that image and paste it into his contact right there, that would’ve solved that. But in a way it’s like, I think one of the big arguments about Macs way back in the day, especially with, like, system 7 time period or even 8, was that some people felt they didn’t have enough control over the operating system of the computer. And on Windows you could tweak every single little thing, and on the Mac you couldn’t, and I think with OS X that’s kind of gone away because you can now do even more on a Mac than you can do on a PC from a technical level behind the scenes — people are going to flame me for saying that — but in any case, the last thing I want on my phone is a file system, or even access to it. What do you think about that, is that nuts?

Gruber: I think that everything that you think of, from a computer science perspective, what makes a computer computer, the file system, the idea of processes, it’s all sort of abstracted away on the iPhone and that’s clearly part of the overall design, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. So you never, as the user of the phone, never actually get to see the file system. You don’t quit or launch or close applications, you just go back to Home, click them. It’s still not clear to me using it, when they quit and when —

Benjamin: Do they quit? Do they ever quit?

Gruber: I don’t know, it seems like Safari sometimes quits, because when I go back to Safari and I click — say, I have three or four pages open in Safari, and I click the little button to let me list them, instead of showing me previews, they’re all blank. It remembers the URLs.

Benjamin: It’ll reload them, you’ll see them kind of coming back.

Gruber: But if you switch to one of them, you have to wait for it to refresh. Whereas if you do it right away, if you switch out of Safari and come back, they are all there and you just click on them and they’re already loaded. Whereas eventually it seems like Safari quits and when you switch back to it, relaunches, but it’s all abstracted away, you as the user never have to worry about that.

Benjamin: I’ll tell you what I think the philosophy — it’s one of those things where if you come into the iPhone looking for a small portable computer, you will not find that. But if you come to the iPhone looking for essentially — and I’ve heard somebody, I forget who it was, but somebody was calling it almost like it’s a satellite of the computer, or a portal to the computer. That’s a much better way to think of it. It allows you to sort of extend your computer, extend your desktop to this sort of portable device. I never really looked at my iPod as being like, that’s where my music lives. My music lives on my computer, and now I can take that music with me. And I think this is the same way you might think of it: my contacts, my calendar, my email, my browsing — that lives on the computer, but this is a way for me to take a lot of that and maybe even most of it with me wherever I go and be able to use it anytime. Is that fair?

Gruber: I think so, and I think it’s the single biggest philosophical difference from the Newton. I mean, to me the big problem, the core problem with the Newton back in the day was that the Newton was — and obviously some Newton people might disagree with me, this is obviously subjective — but my opinion is that the Newton was designed as a big new thing that completely replaced, ultimately would completely replace the need for a Mac. And whether it was egos, like, the Newton was developed after Jobs had left the company, and Sculley was running it, and the Mac was still seen as Jobs’s baby, and Sculley wanted something that was his Macintosh, his stamp on the industry. But anybody who actually used a Newton back in the day — Newton syncing was really bad, I forget the name of the app you used to sync, but it was like, almost nothing synced, the Mac didn’t even have standard address book and calendar apps at the time, so when you put events in the Newton, where did they go on your Mac? It was how you did downloads, if you wanted to add a new app to your Newton, you’d download it to your Mac and you’d fire up the Newton sync thingy and connect it with a serial cable and drag it over or whatever. It was really sort of a different universe, it was not really a satellite to your Mac, it was like something that, I think, ultimately if it had succeeded, would’ve replaced the Mac in Apple’s product line. And it was brilliant in so many ways, and so far ahead of its time. In so many ways it was just as far ahead of its time as the iPhone is. But the problem is that, it was so ambitious because it was meant to be a complete stand-alone all-by-itself thing whereas the iPhone is clearly meant as the satellite to your PC. And I think it’s more like the Palm Pilot, the original Palm Pilot, which was such a sensation in terms of its ambition in that regard. I think that’s why the Palm Pilot was so much more successful than the Newton because it was clearly a PC peripheral, not a PC replacement. That’s what I think.

Benjamin: I think you’re right. So we should probably take a second to say why, if there’s all kind of sound artifacts that people are hearing, why is that, John?

Gruber: Oh, I’m down at the shore. I’m on vacation for a couple days, and somebody forgot to pack my USB microphone.

Benjamin: So you’re talking into your MacBook.

Gruber: Yeah, this is just me talking — I don’t even have a MacBook, I’ve got an old, uh —

Benjamin: That’s right, a PowerBook.

Gruber: No, it’s an old Mac Portable from 1993.

Benjamin: Right. [laughs]

Gruber: It’s the size — I pack a suitcase and then I pack my Mac Portable, it’s about the same size.

Benjamin: I just have to say one more cool thing about the iPhone that happened today. My friend Ryan Irelan had called me, and he wanted to try out the conference call feature. So he conference-called, added in, which was so easy to do — I barely know how to use three-way calling on my regular home phone line, I’m almost sure how I use that. But on the iPhone it’s even easier and — so Ryan conferenced in Dan Cederholm, but Dan wasn’t there. So then Dan called back on Ryan’s other line, and Ryan then merged the two calls. And then you called me on my iPhone, and I said, “Hold on a minute, John”, only because I looked at the phone and there was this little “Merge calls” button that just showed up, and I clicked that, and now we were having a call with you, me, Ryan, and Dan, none of whom we had intentionally conference-called, just clicking this little “Merge calls” button.

Gruber: I didn’t even know that it would work that way where you and Ryan started the call, then Ryan conferenced in Dan, and you conferenced in me, so it’s not like one person has to be the person who does all of the adding new people.

Benjamin: And the sound quality, I thought, was great!

Gruber: It was phenomenal, I have to say. To me, the audio quality on the call so far ranges from amazing to at worse — ah, pretty good. But that call in particular, I thought the quality was outstanding.

Benjamin: Kind of amazing what they’ve been able to do. Even just the basic calling features, the way that things work — I didn’t even know if my old phone had a flash button or if I could use three-way calling. The other thing that’s certainly cool is visual voice mail and I think you said to me earlier today, the visual voice mail is so good that you don’t ever want anybody to call your regular home line again.

Gruber: No, I don’t, because to me the biggest pain is when you go somewhere and you come back and you’ve got five-six messages on your phone or whatever. Half of them are from people who then went ahead and emailed you or contacted you on AIM or called your cell phone or whatever, and they’re already out of date. Or if you go away for a couple of days and some of the calls aren’t even relevant anymore, and you still have to sit down and listen to them all and hit delete, blah blah blah, it’s awful. Half the time I just delete them all and assume that if any of them were important, they’ll just call me back.

Benjamin: This one — pick the call that you want to hear or the message you want to hear, tap it, listen to it, stop it, pause it, delete it — whatever you want to, right then. It was great.

Gruber: The two great apps on the iPhone are the phone app, which includes the call management, merging calls, that type of stuff and the voice mail — because the other cool thing about the voice mail is the way that when you want to set your greeting, you do it all on your iPhone, you don’t have to call into your account on AT&T and listen to a bunch of voice menus and click and record. You just click, there’s a big “Greeting” button at the top, you click “Greeting” and you can either choose between the default, which is to have the AT&T lady say, “This person you’ve called is not available, blah blah blah” or you say “Custom”. And when you say “Custom” then there’s a “Record” button. You hit “Record”, if you like it, you hit “Save” and that’s it. That’s your voice mail.

Benjamin: You can re-record it 10–20 times right there on your iPhone before it ever actually processes and uploads because you’re in control of that. Very, very cool stuff. And we were all talking earlier using the little headphones.

Gruber: Oh, I was actually on the phone itself. I’ve used the headphones, they’re great.

Benjamin: And the microphone is built right into the little plastic piece that you squeeze to control stopping or whatever and the funniest thing — Dan Cederholm said to me, he said, “Now people are going to think we’re all really crazy because now we’ll be just walking around with headphones on, white iPod headphones, talking.” And people are going to think we’re totally crazy because at least with the headsets that stick out of your ear, have the big flashing light on them —

Gruber: People are used to thinking that is somebody on the phone. Whereas this, you just look like an idiot with an iPod, talking to yourself. I should go back and say that iPod app is also a phenomenal app. The three apps — I should go back and say, there’s three absolutely, insanely good apps — the iPod app, the phone app, and Safari. I won’t list Mail in there yet, I think Mail needs a lot of help. You mentioned it, Duncan Davidson mentioned it, but to me the one thing that’s glaringly missing is a master inbox view where you get to see all new messages from all of your inboxes. Like on Apple Mail on Mac OS X, all of your inboxes, if you want to look at them one by one, they’re all within that one master inbox, but if you just click on that inbox, it shows you all of your incoming mail.

Benjamin: The fact that that’s missing, that kills me. It’s the one —

Gruber: We can fill up an hour with my complaints about the Mail app, and maybe we will later this week, I don’t really have time now.

Benjamin: Because this is just the supplementary podcast right now, this is not the podcast. My analogy was, if there was some kind of really big news item, we’d have to talk about it, and this is it, this isn’t our weekly podcast, this is a supplement.

Gruber: This is just a special edition. Hey, Jonas, you want to say hi to our podcast?

Jonas Gruber: [makes an indecipherable noise]

Gruber: This is our podcast, we’re talking to about 10 million people right now.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: You know, we’ve got so much good feedback from last week’s show, but there were a bunch of people griping about, and some people saying, “Hey, it’s great, sounded great, blah blah blah”, and then you get, I guess, the audiophiles who’ve complained about the audio quality, they’re really going to love my recorded in the PowerBook built-in microphone episode here.

Benjamin: I didn’t hear any complaints about the quality as much as the — some people would write in to say, maybe the pacing wasn’t good or whatever. So screw those people, I guess.

Gruber: Exactly. Lot of people complimenting us on the elaborate website design, too.

Benjamin: The website is actually — that is 100 percent me, that’s a really — I think we would make Tufte proud looking at that site because it’s only what’s actually needed.

Gruber: Right. No, I mean, you know — I think we’re probably going to have a nicer website at some point in the future. But I like the idea, and it’s very different from my typical way of working — we agreed to do this show more or less two weeks ago at WWDC. Craig Hockenberry, we were out having drinks after the Thursday night beer bash and Craig Hockenberry —

Benjamin: Incredibly tall.

Gruber: — more or less said what you’ve been saying to me for a while, which is, you and I should just do a little show every week. And I thought, you know, if it’s good enough for Craig Hockenberry, that’s good enough for me. And pretty much all we did, we said, okay, we’ll do it, we need a name, we took the most generic name we could think of, we spent an hour looking at domain names that were available. We clicked record, we recorded for 30 minutes, we needed a place to put it, we did the least we could possibly do and we put it up. Now, my typical way of working would’ve been to spend the next six months selecting a name and then, I don’t know, another eight or nine months going through about four or five different designs for the website and —

Benjamin: Each of which, the only noticeable difference in what you call the design is that the logo has shifted five pixels to the left or right.

Gruber: Right, right.

Benjamin: That’s a full redesign of Daring Fireball is that the logo is now five pixels to the right.

Gruber: Do you remember that time, the one time I redesigned daringfireball.net, I bugged you on AIM pretty much every 15 minutes for about two weeks.

Benjamin: Yeah, you’d say, “What will the ramifications of this redesign be?” and I would say, “How is this different from the other day?” You said, “I have a new Daring Fireball logo.” And I went to the site, and I thought, oh, maybe this is the bearskin rug t-shirt design up there, like, I don’t see anything different. “Dan, how can you not see it, there’s the whole new logo!” And I said, “What are you talking about?” Turns out, you had changed — instead of, like, “Mac nerd” it said “iPhone” or something, that was your redesign, under the logo, the logo text, the little 3-point text.

Gruber: But admittedly, that only took me about 30 seconds. But, you know. I’m kind of digging this “just click record for 30 minutes at a time and go”.

Benjamin: Well, hopefully the listeners will appreciate it too. We have a theme, we’re sticking to a theme.

Gruber: Yeah, definitely.

Benjamin: But you said you only had five — you gave me such a hard time, you said you only had five minutes, and now we’ve been talking for 30 minutes. This time we’re going to end it, because last time I had to try to figure out how to cut 10 minutes off. We’re trying to keep it to a 30-minute show, once a week. We did two times a week, that’s okay. But once a week, 30 minutes and I say we just end it. It’s almost 30 minutes, let’s just end it.

Gruber: All right, let’s do it again later this week.

Benjamin: We’re going to definitely do — and it will be a different topic though, it has to be something different. Maybe not even — because people are going to be sick of iPhones.

Gruber: That’s going to be old news by the end of the week.

Benjamin: Yeah, we’ll have to talk about something completely different. And so when do you come back from the shore, are you spending the 4th there?

Gruber: I don’t even know, nobody tells me. I’ll know it’s time to go when I wake up and my wife has our bags packed. I think later this week.

Benjamin: Well, good, have a great holiday.

Gruber: Yeah, you too.

[ttstranscripts]

Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 1

Title: All iPhone, All the Time

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 28 June 2007

Description: In this, our inaugural episode, we discuss the impending release of the iPhone, speculate about costs and service plans, waiting in line for a phone, and more.

John Gruber: That’s what you’re going to say.

Dan Benjamin: That’s what I’ll say when I start recording.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: Which I did.

Gruber: Right. All right. And who are you?

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin.

Gruber: I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: How are you doing?

Gruber: Doing all right.

Benjamin: Why don’t we start talking about the iPhone?

Gruber: The what?

Benjamin: The iPhone, that’s the big thing.

Gruber: Oh, right, right, right, it’s like the iPod phone.

Benjamin: It’s a phone that can play songs. I think it’s an MP3 player.

Gruber: Right. So...

Benjamin: Big question, I mean, are you getting one?

Gruber: Right, am I going to get one. I think we’ve got to get at least — I think the question is how many will we get. Do I need one for each pocket?

Benjamin: [laughs] So you’re getting one, I’m getting one. Are we sort of people that are — are we unusual, are we really going to be seeing the kinds of lines and people waiting like people saw for the PS3 and things like that?

Gruber: Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just not connected, I don’t even know how many people were waiting for PS3. I think it’s a very different crowd. I mean, certainly nothing I’ve ever been interested in — I can’t remember the last time that I was interested in something where I was worried would I be able to get it.

Benjamin: You’re actually thinking there’s a fair chance you’re not going to be able to even buy one of these things?

Gruber: Well, nobody really knows — how many are they going to have available on day one? I’ve heard the number three million bandied about. But that’s certainly isn’t definitive. That’s not a statement from AT&T or Apple. Nobody really knows. I don’t even know where I saw it.

Benjamin: Who said that, who actually said that to begin with? I thought Steve Jobs said three million.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so. The only number that Apple has said is that the vague idea that they think they’re going to sell 10 million total by the end of 2008, 18 months from now. So obviously, if they had three million of the first generation model available on day one, that would be huge. I think partially I’m biased — you’re probably in the same boat — where years of following Apple — whenever they come out with something that’s really, really anticipated, it’s hard to get immediately. It’s never widely available or seldom widely available on day one.

Benjamin: When I called up Cingular, the 888 number, the Cingular people told me even just in their stores they didn’t see any problem. Nobody who wanted a phone would have a problem getting one. When I called a local Cingular shop — AT&T I should be calling them, right — when I talked to the local people, they’re behind the curve on what they know. They don’t seem to have any information that’s up-to-date. I actually was telling them, I said, “Oh, so I hear that the basic iPhone plan is going to be $20 a month.” And they were, “Oh, where did you see that?” And I gave them the URL, they were like, “Well, I wrote it down, and when I go home, I’ll read about it.”

Gruber: “I’ll ask my manager.”

Benjamin: “I’ll ask my manager if we can get online tonight, if we’re allowed to read something on Apple.”

Gruber: You told me yesterday that they told you that as far as they knew yesterday, this was late yesterday, that they still thought that you’d have to activate your phone at the point of purchase. Go through a 10- or 15-minute activation process per sale.

Benjamin: Right, so it’s kind of a puzzle. My main question — and something I’ve heard other people who are under an AT&T/Cingular contract as I am — one of the concerns, I think, was what happens to the existing contract, do we need to pay some kind of a fee or a fine in order to get the iPhone, and the answer is no, definitively no. The thinking is, the only reason that you would ever need to pay anything would be if you were canceling your contract, which you’re not, you’re extending it when you get the iPhone. And the only other time where you’d be forced to pay some kind of amount above and beyond something normal, is if you’re under contract and you want to upgrade to a brand new phone, you’re not eligible to do that until your contract is up, then you don’t get the discount price on the phone. What you get is the full retail price, so you want to buy one of those Razors or something, and it’s like $39 if you’re not under contract. If you are, then it’s $500. So in case of the iPhone, we have to pay full price anyway, so the answer is a simple one. You’re buying the phone for full price anyway, and there is no fee, just the activation.

Gruber: Right, and just to be clear, what we’re saying, we’re not reporting that this is news that you’re going to have to go through that sort of hassle if you buy at the AT&T store. We’re just saying that the retail employees are so in the dark that that’s what they think. I mean, I don’t even think that’s possible. I think that the way this is — from everything I’ve read so far, it seems like you have to — the fact that none of it works without iTunes — if it’s tied to your iTunes account, how would it even possibly be activated in the store unless they’re going to —

Benjamin: It makes absolutely no sense. Unless they have a Mac sitting up there or a PC for you to go up to, sign in with your iTunes account, which of course everybody has memorized, and you’re going to log in and activate it right there, and of course that’s not a security risk for you.

Gruber: [laughs] Right, like a public iTunes machine.

Benjamin: It’s just some guy’s — the manager brought his PC from home for you to use. I mean, it’s ridiculous. So they just don’t know yet, and I’ve heard that they’re receiving their training on the iPhone today.

Gruber: Well, and I think the big problem is that from an Apple Store retail employee’s perspective, it’s certainly going to be a big day, probably the busiest single evening in the store’s history, but it’s going to be a very Apple-style process, it’s not going to be that different than December 23rd iPod shoppers, where they’re going to have those little portable credit card swipers, and they’re going to move people as fast as they can. It’s not just going to be one guy at a checkout. Whereas from an AT&T retail store employee’s perspective, this is like nothing they’ve ever seen before. There’s never been this sort of — 150–200 people trying to buy the exact same thing in three hours on Friday night.

Benjamin: And I think something else that we had talked about a little bit before is there’s a big difference not only in what I think those people are used to selling but in the actual process itself. AT&T/Cingular stores are really becoming much more of a retail outlet than usual, they’re very much — and I think you made the comparison that buying a cell phone sometimes is more like buying a car as far as the experience goes. When you go to the Apple Store, if you want a straightforward experience where you just go in and say, “I would like this”, they’ll go and get it for you and you’ll buy it.

Gruber: My comparison was that the average cell phone store employee comes across more like a car salesman, it’s more like a personality type.

Benjamin: It’s all about the upsell. “Oh, you need a charger with that, don’t you?” And I think there’s a huge difference in the mindset, and I think when you go to the Apple Store, they’re expecting you to just buy something, and maybe you need help, if not, no problem, if you do, come back. The idea I think is that the individual person would be able to activate their own phone. I think it scares the crap out of the average AT&T salesperson.

Gruber: It just sounds crazy.

Benjamin: You can’t do that.

Gruber: Right. Assuming it’ll work, and presumably it’s pretty well-tested, but obviously, the one thing they certainly — I mean, in theory, maybe you could test it somehow, but live practice is always different — is how is the system going to stand up when 1.5 million people are trying to do it at 8:15 PM EST, simultaneously.

Benjamin: That’s actually good because I can’t answer that question, that’s a perfect segue into something I can answer, or I can talk about. These reviews have come out, the Mossberg review and some of these other ones, where they essentially say the iPhone is phenomenal, the keyboard issue is a non-issue, I think was one of the quotes. And that’s really great, but they seem to —

Gruber: I think Mossberg had the best line about the keyboard, and he really sort of backed up the Jobs’s line that you have to give it a week. And Mossberg said that three days in, he was so frustrated by the keyboard he wanted to throw the iPod [sic] against the wall, and five days in, he had like a breakthrough and felt like he could type just as fast as he does on his Treo.

Benjamin: That says a lot because those Treo people are kind of freaky. Or Blackberry, or whatever they are.

Gruber: And I think I know where you’re heading, but on the keyboard point — my thing with the keyboard is that — I’m a touch typist, I type pretty fast on a regular computer keyboard, so anything other than that to me has always been incredibly frustrating, whether it’s trying to type on somebody’s Treo — anything that I can’t touch type on to me feels like I’m completely and utterly hamstrung. So the way I feel, of course the iPhone on screen keyboard is going to suck. What’s the best portable keyboard ever made? A Blackberry, a Treo, or something like that? To me, they suck too. Do you want it to suck really, really bad or just sort of bad? So I feel like that’s where Apple made a trade-off where the best they were going to possibly do anyway with the hardware keyboard was still going to be something that you had to peck on, they traded that off for, compared to a Treo or Blackberry form factor, a much larger screen, and compared to any kind of slider phone, something that’s much thinner. Although I guess the BlackJack is pretty thin, but that’s not a slider. There’s no slider phone that compares to that sort of thinness, pocketability.

Benjamin: Where I was actually going with this was, the one thing that everybody sort of unanimously is criticizing now is the AT&T EDGE network. People talk about how sort of horrible it is. I have a phone now that is on the EDGE network that I use for checking email and very occasionally browsing the web. If you’re used to things being instantaneous, then it is horribly slow. If the idea of getting something like an email on your phone is still a novelty, then you probably won’t mind it. But I think one thing that’s actually a discussion point is why do you suppose Apple’s decided to partner with AT&T, and then as a second question, why do you think that the iPhone is only ever necessarily going to work on AT&T’s network? I think I know the answer to both, but I’d like to hear what you think.

Gruber: I think the answer to why AT&T was simply — I don’t really think it came down to networking capabilities or who had the best network, I think it was that AT&T/Cingular at the time offered Apple the best deal, that Apple, I think, came in with the minimal amount of “here’s how much control we want”, and maybe they didn’t even get that much, but I think Apple certainly wanted as much control in terms of pricing, in terms of the plans, in terms of the features they’d be allowed to add on the phone without any interference — a couple of people from Cingular have said they didn’t even get to see the iPhone until after they agreed to it. So obviously, Apple had a lot of control in it, and I think, I forget who had it, but a couple of people said, obviously, they did talk to the other networks, they certainly talked to Verizon, and I think it just came down to control, how much control was AT&T willing to — say, “Okay, you can do your thing if we’ll be exclusive for the iPhone.”

Benjamin: I think you’re 100 percent right, I think at the end of the day it came down to the company that was the most willing to say, “Okay, Apple, do whatever you want, essentially, but just promise us that it would be just us.” But I actually think that there is something else behind the reason why the iPhone is slated to only be on AT&T for as long as it is. I think a big part of it is the business reason that you gave, but they have done so much — and I’m saying this coming from a background in the telecommunications industry and telecommunication billing systems — there’s so much that happens behind the scenes from the billing and the processing and all of that. The idea that Apple would go and write software that would handle all of that, essentially replacing all of the point of sales systems, all of the prepackaged software, and all of the companies that are building software that does this, and Apple has actually gone and written something that on the front end is basically iTunes that we’re going to interact with, and on the back end is something that’s going to plug into all of this really, really old, ancient, legacy C-like type systems, in other words, all the software that Cingular and AT&T have — there’s a lot of work involved, I think, behind the scenes, in making that process be as streamlined as it appears to be on those videos. I think that took probably many months to get right, and I think the idea of Apple trying to build the system that’s going to continue to work seamlessly with multiple carriers, that seems almost impossible.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that’s a good point that they needed to get somebody who they were — pick one, work out the best deal, but then commit to it for the long term because they built their own custom iPhone back end on top of the network, for the visual voicemail and a couple of other unique features, or at least especially the visual voicemail, I can’t think of anything else at the top of my head. It wouldn’t just work with another carrier.

Benjamin: So tell me, what are some of the things that we don’t know about the iPhone.

Gruber: The two that come to mind for me are the calendar app and the notes app because while Apple has revealed so much in the last week and a half with these videos that they’ve been unveiling, showing off, you know, detailed how to use your iPhone, how the stuff works, the how-to video doesn’t show the calendar app. And I don’t even think they’ve shown screenshots of the notes app. And the notes app was also definitely one of the apps that back in January, when they let a couple of people at Macworld play with the early pre-production models, wasn’t even an application, it was just a screenshot. You’d tap the icon, and I think David Pogue said there were couple of the apps that at the time were just — just a screenshot would show up on the phone. So what happens with the notes app? Like I said, I don’t really think keyboarding — it’s not like you’re really going to be a good typist on this thing anyway, it’s not like anybody’s going to take — I think — really extensive notes on it, but if you type a note, where does it go? How does it sync? What is it, a text file? Is it an RTF file? It’s a total mystery. And with the calendar stuff, how does the syncing work? If you sync calendars from your Mac on iCal to the iPhone, can you edit and move those dates around? Can you change events and then sync it again and it goes back to your Mac and it keeps track? What happens while after you’ve untethered your —

Benjamin: What’s the point of a view-only calendar on an iPhone? I want to be able to enter an event right there, sync it up.

Gruber: I mean, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to me like they’ve really said anything about that. And really, to me, the calendar stuff really sort of is this thing that really cries out for networking, somewhere to IMAP for email. You do most of your email on your desktop computer, and while you’re using your iPhone, you’re connecting via IMAP. The whole point of IMAP is that your inbox is going to be up-to-date wherever you go and look at it next. You sort of need the same thing for calendaring. But where would that shared calendar live? Obviously, I don’t think that’s going to be ready for any kind of official — here’s the official answer from Apple — it’s not going to be ready on Friday, but obviously, something like that is a much better way to deal with calendaring on a portable.

Benjamin: Absolutely.

Gruber: And it’s certainly one of those things, I think, people will criticize, people who are used to handhelds that connect to Exchange that already handles that sort of stuff.

Benjamin: Is the fact that it’s not going to do 3G — and I have used phones on AT&T 3G network, and they’re screaming fast, they’re really, really great. You could watch streaming TV on them, they’re really good. They don’t have much of a battery life but —

Gruber: I have to wonder because that’s one question nobody really seems to have a good answer for. It’s not like AT&T doesn’t have 3G networking, they do. I just read today —

Benjamin: It’s fast!

Gruber: — 160 markets that have phones, AT&T sells 3G data phones. So why isn’t the iPhone 3G? My only guess — I have two guesses: a) it’s about battery life, or b) it’s about widespread availability, that Apple wanted to have one device, just like the iPod. We’re going to ship the first time with one thing, or in this case there are two variations that are exactly the same except one has 4 GB and the other one has 8 GB of memory. But that’s obviously the single most insignificant — I mean, in terms of manufacturing, it’s a very insignificant detail.

Benjamin: So if they had built 3G capability into it, at least my understanding, which I could be wrong, but my understanding was that it can live happily on a 3G network, and if you step down to an EDGE network, it will jump on that.

Gruber: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe it’s battery, maybe it was cost. Battery might make sense. I don’t know. I mean, it must be something.

Benjamin: The battery lasted about an hour and a half on the 3G phone.

Gruber: And that to me is also, the battery angle, is the most surprisingly good news of the initial reviews from the newspapers this week. And even Apple’s announcement — what was it, about 10 days ago — when they said that battery life was higher than previously announced. Because I remember when the iPod [sic] was first announced back in January, there were so many of the initial people — there were two reactions: there were the people who said, “Oh my god, this is awesome, I cannot wait to get one.” That’s me, I was certainly there. Me and you were right there saying, “This is incredible, I cannot believe that they built this.”

And then there were the people who were saying, “They’re full of it. This is not going to work like they’re saying it is”, immediately began doubting it. And there were a whole bunch of people who said that it’s going to get about an hour of battery life, it’s going to get 90 minutes of battery life, it’s ridiculous that they built this thing, that with all these features and Wi-Fi it’s going to get so little battery life, and the battery is not replaceable, that it’s never going to get the battery life that Apple claimed — five hours or whatever they said. And so here they get closer to the release, and they say, guess what, by the way, eight hours. And the reviews more or less back it up, some of them said it ended up at seven, for music playback — 22–23 hours, nine hours of internet playback, I think, Walt Mossberg got, using the web and surfing Wi-Fi. And that’s with Wi-Fi on the whole time. The battery life is for real. Obviously, it’s not the sort of thing where you can use it for days at a time, but nothing with Wi-Fi is. In terms of its competitors, other phones that do even vaguely similar things, the battery life — iPhone blows it away. Blows everything else away.

Benjamin: So what are we really saying, are we saying go to the Apple Store, not the AT&T store to buy one, even though —

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a good — where do you go to buy one if you want to get one on day one? I think you and I both agree, go to an Apple Store if you live near one because I would say a) I think the retail staff is going to be better prepared for it, b) I refuse to believe that they’re not going to be at least as well stocked as Cingular stores, if not better. I just cannot believe that Apple Stores would not have more than Cingular stores, or at least as many.

Benjamin: Doesn’t seem possible that they wouldn’t have tremendously bigger volume going through those stores, and be able to move them faster.

Gruber: The big question is, is it worth gambling, if you really don’t want to wait in line for hours on Friday and spend the whole day in line, is it worth risking trying to swing by on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon and pick one up? Or do you think they’re going to be sold out?

Benjamin: Well, yeah, that’s the question, are they going to sell out, and everything I’ve heard says no. And that’s the thing for me is, I don’t need to have one Friday evening.

Gruber: But I want it over the weekend.

Benjamin: Yeah, if I could pick it up Sunday, that would be great. If I could get it Tuesday, that would be fine. The point for me is, I don’t want to be the guy that thinks, “Ah, there are not going to be any lines”, and then on Tuesday I try to pick one up, or even Sunday try to pick one up, and now I’m the guy that’s not going to get one until August.

Gruber: I’m going to guess it’s not going to be August, but I’m the guy who’s been waiting since the first week of January to get a Wii because I don’t feel like showing up anywhere on Saturday morning at 6 in the morning. So every time I go to Target, or every couple of weeks I look in Best Buy online to see if they have any, and still can’t get one. I don’t think it’s going to be like that, I think that worst case scenario, you may have to wait till July, but who knows. I don’t want to take a chance. I want an iPhone a lot more than I want a Wii.

Benjamin: So you’re going to wait?

Gruber: No, I think I’m going to go Friday. I still haven’t really decided though.

Benjamin: You’re going to wait in line on the curbside?

Gruber: I guess so, I don’t know. I’m hoping they’ll let you stay inside, it’s going to be hot. What are you going to do?

Benjamin: I’m going to wait outside the Apple Store.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that the malls around here, I think they’ll let you wait inside. I mean, I don’t see how they would keep you from waiting inside, really. Today, right now, it’s like 97 degrees with like a 100 percent humidity in Philadelphia. Waiting outside for six hours is —

Benjamin: That’s like a nice fall day in Orlando.

Gruber: [laughs] When was the last time you waited for something?

Benjamin: Ah, that’s a good question. I think I waited for tickets when I was in college.

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve waited in line, like a serious line, like got there hours before —

Benjamin: You’re not talking like at the local grocery store to buy milk or something.

Gruber: Right. I don’t think that I actually got in line hours before something went on sale since — I don’t know, must have been some concert back in college. 10–12 years ago.

Benjamin: So that says a lot, says a lot for Apple. I think there’s a lot of people in our situation who are sitting there thinking, yeah, I think I’m going to wait.

Gruber: Yeah, and I still don’t know — how many people do you really think are going to show up per store? I really don’t know what to expect. I’m not going to get there that early, I’m certainly not going to wake up early.

Benjamin: When are you going to get there?

Gruber: I’m thinking, like, 2. My thought is all you have to do is really get there ahead of the sort of people who aren’t taking off from work, the sort of people who are just going to leave work early on Friday. So I feel like if I get there around 2...

Benjamin: Probably safe. You’re thinking you just need to beat the people who are going to cut out early from work?

Gruber: Right. I figure a lot of people are going to start taking off work at 3 o’clock.

Benjamin: You don’t think there’ll be a lot of people saying, “Hey, it’s Friday, let’s do a half day.”

Gruber: Well, I don’t know.

Benjamin: I think if you want to be safe, John, you need to get there at 10.

Gruber: That isn’t going to happen.

Benjamin: I think that’s the only way to be safe.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s not going to — are you going to get there at 10?

Benjamin: Don’t know.

Gruber: See, I just can’t see doing it.

Benjamin: Get some breakfast on the way and —

Gruber: I feel like, get there at 10 and there’s like three guys with beards, neckbeards who — with folding chairs, sat up watching — I just can’t see getting in line with them. And if I get there at 2 and there’s 400 people in line, I would just go home and order it from apple.com.

Benjamin: And in that case you’ll have it in less than a week, probably. I think that’s probably the smart thing to do, we’re giving away all our ideas, but I think showing up there at about 2 o’clock when the store goes dark, seeing what the line is like, if there’s less than a hundred people in line, I say you wait. More than a hundred — get out of there.

Gruber: That’s what I think, look for about a hundred people.

Benjamin: And then do you go to the Cingular store down the road? Is that your fallback? Or is your fallback ordering online?

Gruber: I don’t know. My thought is that I’m so — unless I read something in the next day or two that really makes me think that AT&T is going to be prepared, really prepared for what’s going to happen, I’m just too afraid that you’d get there and even with like 20–30–40 people ahead of you in line in an AT&T store that it’s going to be a nightmare of 10 or 15 minutes per customer in terms of them not being prepared to just zip people in and out.

Benjamin: Personally, I think it’s going to be a nightmare at the AT&T store.

Gruber: Have you ever done Christmas shopping in an Apple retail store? Like, late, like, pick up an iPod around the 20th of December?

Benjamin: They set up special lines, and they get in and out really fast.

Gruber: It’s just fantastic if you’re buying anything that’s one of the big ticket items like any of the regular iPods, just give me the middle of the line iBook. You just hand the guy your credit card, he swipes it on a little handheld portable thing, asks for your email address, the receipt goes to your email address, they put a sticker on the box, and you walk out the door.

Benjamin: Done.

Gruber: Takes less time than it takes to walk into the corner grocery store and buy a bottle of iced tea.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: So I guess we’re about half hour into this thing, and we haven’t even —

Benjamin: Yeah, we’re wrapping up.

Gruber: We haven’t even said what it is.

Benjamin: We have a show.

Gruber: The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Yeah. The Talk Show dot net. Which you seem to like the dot net thing.

Gruber: Right. I’ve got the daringfireball.net.

Benjamin: So now we have thetalkshow.net.

Gruber: We’ve talked about this before. When I registered, people often asked me why is it daringfireball dot net instead of dot com. I actually own the dot com as well but don’t use it, and it’s just some sort of weird — I got on the internet in 1995 or 1994, and to me dot com means you’re selling stuff. I’ve since gotten past it, but for whatever reason I’ve always had a thing about using dot com as the generic domain name.

Benjamin: Well, and it works out because the dot com wasn’t available right now.

Gruber: Exactly. [laughs]

Benjamin: So this is perfect.

Gruber: I don’t think anything dot com is available anymore.

Benjamin: No. And this is a show that I’ve been telling you I wanted to do for a long time, since the very first podcast we’ve recorded, and it actually took us finally meeting in person in San Francisco a few weeks ago for me to finally convince you that it maybe wasn’t a horrible idea.

Gruber: Right, that’s very true.

Benjamin: And we have a sponsor.

Gruber: We do have a sponsor.

Benjamin: Would you like to tell us about the sponsor, John?

Gruber: No, I don’t even know who it is.

Benjamin: That’s not true.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: Our first sponsor, and hopefully not our only sponsor, so if you’re interested, thetalkshow.net for information on how to become a sponsor.

Gruber: What you need to do if you want to be a sponsor is call Dan very, very late at night, Eastern Standard Time, call around 11 or 12, maybe even 12:30 in the morning. Just call Dan Benjamin and tell him you want to sponsor this show.

Benjamin: So, PeepCode. This is a company that my friend Geoffrey Grosenbach, very well-known in the podcasting world — he’s done the Ruby on Rails podcast for quite a long time. He set up his company, PeepCode, where he’s basically doing screencasts, and you can learn — it’s basically like instruction that’s on demand, you go there, you pick the topic you’re interested in, a lot of it has to do with Rails, but it’s not specific only to Rails, and you go and you — very inexpensive to actually buy the screencast that you want — you watch it, and you actually learn something.

Gruber: Right, it’s sort of tapping into some sort of psychological thing where it’s just easier to learn things when you’re seeing it than just reading it. It’s literally almost as good as being there and looking over his shoulder while he shows you the app. And it terms of getting the general idea — oh, that’s what you do — it’s just, you get it, it’s just the most effective way to learn it.

Benjamin: It really is. I think one of the things that Geoffrey’s really done with PeepCode is he’s taking things that generally are more difficult to explain in just a blog post, things that aren’t necessarily “first do this, then do that”, but involve a lot more of concept and involve a lot more multiple concepts coming together, and something where you can say, if you see it, you can learn this in five minutes, but if you have to read about it, it’s going to take you two hours, and that’s what he does.

Gruber: I think “concept” is the key word, in terms of getting the concept across, that sort of format is better. It’s the same reason people go to WWDC. You go there, and it’s not like it replaces the Cocoa documentation, but when you go to a 45-minute session on some new technology, and the guy who actually is an expert at it, from Apple, is telling you in 45 minutes, here’s the most important things you need to know about Core Animation, you get the basic gist. You’re like, oh, I see, I understand what it’s about.

Benjamin: peepcode.com.

Gruber: Yeah.

Benjamin: Okay. So what’s next? I guess we try and go get some iPhones, and we’re going to talk about it.

Gruber: All right, I guess next week’s show we’ll record on our iPhones in a conference call.

Benjamin: Excellent.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: And by the way, we’re going to try and do this every week.

Gruber: Right, no, every week.

Benjamin: And you know, it turned out, John, to be more than — we’re trying to stick to half an hour, I’m going to have to cut 10 minutes — I told you I didn’t want to have to edit this thing. You did really good by not cursing very — at all.

Gruber: I think there were only two times where I wanted to curse.

Benjamin: Is that all?

Gruber: Two where I had to cut myself off.

Benjamin: All right. Well, hey, good talking to you, and good luck, hope you get the iPhone. I’ll be looking for some live twittering and picturing.

Gruber: I’ll call you from the line on Friday.

Benjamin: Not if I call you first.

Gruber: You know, why don’t you get two and just FedEx me one.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, okay. Done. Easy.

Gruber: All right. Thanks, Dan.

Benjamin: Thank you. Talk to you next time.

[undividedspace]

ROAD WORK from 5by5 - John Roderick in (guess what) a rambling weekly conversation with Dan Benjamin. Another podcast nerd deep cut. If you go for this (as obviously I do) then you are infected. Come join Undivided.Space, we need people like you!

[lootwijk]

Side-hustle

Merlin: You know. Work is work. That's why they call it work. Dan: I guess. Merlin: You can quote me on that. They should have me on Sidepreneur! I can sidepreneur! I got side-hustle! Dan: All you have is side-hustle! Merlin: All I need is side-hustle.

(This is not funny. Why is it funny? Oh, gosh darnit, just go n' look.)