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Accidental Tech Podcast

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Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

37: A 3,000-Word Digression

01:49:36
Some light Mac Pro waffling and the red one. iOS 7.0.3's new crossfade animations in "Reduce Motion" mode. Little tidbits and windows into the life of John Siracusa buried in his OS X Mavericks review. Noodling John with random questions. Dragon Drop and Cocoapods don't su...

Accidental Tech Podcast

36: A Weird One

01:26:52
  • The John Siracusa Mavericks review is up!
  • Apple's event, the presenters' pacing and enthusiasm, Casey's bag of hearts, and yet another showing of the dots video.
  • The Retina MacBook Pro update.
  • The Mac Pro base price, CPU options, and speculation on SSD pricing.
  • The iPad Air, Retina iPad Mini, iPad 2 (LOL), and iPod Classic.
  • Apple's prod of free software.
  • John's high-level summary of Mavericks and recommendation on upgrading.
  • Listener homework: Read the review before next week's episode.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

35: Sea-Level Executives

01:22:16
  • Ebook-publishing woes and trying to coordinate a specific release date.
  • Apple hiring the CEO of Burberry to head their retail division, and the Louis Vuitton logo.
  • The challenges of retail leadership.
  • Touch ID impressions after a weekend of heavy use, and whether you should keep your phone secure for other people's benefit.
  • How Touch ID could be used in Macs, and whether ARM MacBooks would be worth the transition costs.
  • Speculation on next week's product announcements.
  • Where a potential 12" Retina MacBook Pro could fit in the lineup.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

34: Made The Dot Smaller

01:07:00
  • Siri expectations and unreliability in popular culture.
  • Can Apple ever dramatically improve their web services, and how much pressure do they feel to do so?
  • The sorry state of online payment processing before Stripe, and improving the current sorry state of money transfers (especially in the U.S.) with services such as Dwolla and Square Cash.
  • The Mavericks GM.
  • Drawbacks of a Readability-like model for paying podcast producers in Overcast, and Instacast's 2012 rejection for Flattr integration.
  • Different priorities for podcast playback and management.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

33: A 30-Minute Skip Button

01:12:43
When we expected the Mavericks GM (recorded two hours before this). Apparent new E5-1680 Mac Pro in Geekbench and what CPU tradeoffs to expect in the new Mac Pro. Speculating on the new Mac Pro's fan noise, rotating cable management, and intended desk location. FU on John'...

Accidental Tech Podcast

32: It Doesn’t Bother Me

01:43:15

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Accidental Tech Podcast

31: Swimming In 16 GB Gold

01:21:36

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Accidental Tech Podcast

30: Full Frontal Thumb

01:23:24

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29: Computerized Garden Gnome

01:37:39

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Accidental Tech Podcast

28: The Pit Of Irrelevance

01:37:49

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Accidental Tech Podcast

27: Overflow Gallery In The Bathroom

01:33:23
  • Querying Florida.
  • Photo storage follow-up: whether people even want long-term photo storage anymore, using web services as backups, and Ogg-encoded tinfoil hattery.
  • The Time Capsule's tough sell.
  • Casey's helpful fans.
  • IFTTT and Twitter.
  • The gold/"champagne" iPhone, not getting a larger iPhone this year, and the future of the Lightning connector.
  • The new TiVo.
  • After-show: John's ebook-testing setup, the awful Kindle Previewer, and technical ebook woes. (See also: Serenity Caldwell at Cingleton 2012.)
  • Plus, a very special after-after-show Neutral loosely about the M4.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

26: Three Phones Ago

01:43:23
Instapaper's web redesign beta. Rewriting a codebase from scratch. Understandable code and writing for maintainability. The balance between easy-to-write but unimpressive apps and implementing cutting-edge features that require messy hacks. The horrible mess of smartphone...

Accidental Tech Podcast

25: Thrustmaster Joystick

01:34:34
Marco's new-new-new app for aligning double-ender podcast tracks. Economic considerations and options for releasing an app that's extremely helpful to a very small number of people. Why Marco has been procrastinating from the big app by making small apps. Good app names as ...

Accidental Tech Podcast

24: Double Meta

01:40:13
  • Non-developers might want to skip the first 35 minutes: a technical discussion of FMDB, SQLite, and implementing your own generic "model" class. Plus: Casey finally gets to talk about .NET. (Note from Marco: The day after recording, I rewrote my model class to rely on KVC instead of runtime tricks and reflection. Please email Casey.)
  • The types of programmers who can and should write their own low-level classes.
  • Casey's app, Fast Text, and why he wrote it in 2010.
  • John's unfulfilled app idea and name.
  • Getting yourself moving on an iOS app.
  • Victory Lap for Ask Patents.
  • A 29-minute after-show extravaganza about lazy input sanitization and parameterization, extremely difficult games, eggs, and beaches.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

23: The X Or The X

01:17:32
  • FU: iSCSI and network Time Machine.
  • iFixit teardown of the new AirPort Extreme.
  • Apple's extended Developer Center downtime. (Note: we recorded this before we knew why it was down.)
  • _DavidSmith on Logic X's pricing and what this might indicate for future App Store upgrades.
  • Whether upgrade pricing is best for consumers, and the upgrade-pricing train.
  • iOS developers acting like the RIAA in 2002.
  • The complexity of modern software business models.
  • The Wal-Martization of app pricing and how Marble Madness formed the modern Marco.
  • Are Apple's policies really at fault for falling app prices?

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Accidental Tech Podcast

22: Full Brichter

01:32:52
Marco's new-new app, Bugshot, and some of its design decisions. Cutting features from 1.0 and trying to keep Bugshot from taking too much time. Bugshot gets the John Siracusa treatment. Exploring NAS options and initial impressions of the Synology DS1813+. Economics of Free...

Accidental Tech Podcast

21: The Transitive Property of Nerdiness

01:33:56

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Accidental Tech Podcast

20: A Box and a Strap

01:15:59

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Accidental Tech Podcast

19: Designed by App in Cal

01:28:26

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Accidental Tech Podcast

18: Aluminum-Colored Aluminum

01:14:31

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Accidental Tech Podcast

17: Can’t Innovate Anymore

01:12:27

Special early WWDC episode this week:

  • Reactions to the keynote.
  • New Mac Pro
  • Initial iOS 7 design impressions.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

16: John, We Don’t Play Games

01:43:43
Opening theme by Larry King (@laking). The case for a modernized AppKit in OS X 10.9 a la Chameleon/TwUI. The lack of official Apple Objective-C wrappers around old C APIs such as Keychain and Address Book. Springboard #10 SMOP Underscore Should Apple add type infer...

Accidental Tech Podcast

15: Cat, Modifier Cat

01:27:56

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Accidental Tech Podcast

14: Pouring Champagne Onto Rap Stars

01:32:29

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Accidental Tech Podcast

13: Animated Kale

01:27:55
Our theme song by Jonathan Mann -- follow his Song A Day on YouTube, and check out his site if you or your company would like a catchy, fun song. Thanks for the ATP theme song, Jonathan! Casey and Marco get deluged with to-do app recommendations. The difficulty in getting p...

Accidental Tech Podcast

12: Accidental Server Hardware

01:33:47
  • FU on Apple's tick-tock pattern.
  • Marco's PHP framework and sponsor-tracking web app, and why both exist.
  • Usability and security implications of passwordless login systems.
  • The Mac Mini's seemingly accidental success.
  • Podcasters who hate the word "podcast", its quality connotation, efforts to invent alternative names, and barriers to entry.
  • Brent Simmons' 30 Minutes To Sync proposal.
  • Building web services on Apple's infrastructure.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

11: A Particularly Exuberant Adolescence

01:19:17
  • The WWDC ticket lottery and potential solutions, or a merit system.
  • Why Marco sold Instapaper. (See also.)
  • Prospects for replacing Instapaper's income.
  • Speculating on today's app market.
  • The Magazine's app and Newsstand quality.
  • Motivation, development, and homework.
  • iOS 7's rumored visual overhaul and other speculation.
  • The transition away from Steve Jobs' influence.
  • What's left for iOS 7 to add?

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Accidental Tech Podcast

10: Gradual Ramp Up To Nothing

01:23:57
  • Laptops in school.
  • Getting a tech job with and without a college degree.
  • Running mail servers in today's spam environment.
  • Steve Jobs' unauthorized talking points.
  • The WWDC announcement and trying to get tickets.
  • Going to WWDC vs. a ticketless trip vs. watching the videos at home.
  • Apple's Q2 earnings and hints dropped during the call.
  • The tech industry's holding pattern with bored consumers.
  • Marco's mom buys her first smartphone, ignoring Marco's advice. Which one did she get?

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Accidental Tech Podcast

9: Fish Bicycle Scenario

01:05:02
  • Why are PC sales down?
  • Why and when people have bought new PCs in the past.
  • Forgoing or neglecting PCs today.
  • PCs in businesses.
  • Apple and IT departments.
  • Last decade's Tablet PCs.
  • The outlook for Windows 8 tablets in businesses.
  • What will change if Microsoft Office is released for iOS?
  • What AirPrint and black CD-Rs have in common.
  • Still using (and abusing) Jonathan Mann's awesome ending song. Follow him and check out his other songs on YouTube.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

8: Hold Me!

01:25:01

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