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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

30: Full Frontal Thumb

01:23:24

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Accidental Tech Podcast

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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Accidental Tech Podcast

7: The Forecast For iCloud

01:34:50

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Accidental Tech Podcast

6: Live Like Other People

01:41:50
  • How Marco buys a TV (unlike how John does).
  • Regular people noticing and caring about high-DPI screens.
  • The amazing Mac lineup that few care about.
  • Which Mac would we tell people to buy?
  • Marco revisits the Microsoft Store.
  • The Surface Pro's uniqueness.
  • Why GarageBand's adoption of Audiobus is so interesting.
  • How exposed filesystems and iCloud's document model both fail users.

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Accidental Tech Podcast

5: Negativity, Skepticism, and Doubt

01:25:31
  • The upcoming Google Reader shutdown.
  • The market for RSS today, and the way forward.
  • Client-side vs. server-side feed crawling.
  • Addressing excessive demand for WWDC and Google I/O tickets.
  • Apple pessimism is at an all-time high, even in the mainstream.
  • What could Apple do to turn the pessimism around?
  • Apple and web services.
  • The Apple TV's interesting new A5.
  • Diversifying the iPhone line.

Accidental Tech Podcast

4: The Bridges

01:18:47
  • The role of the Mac Pro today.
  • How Apple might manage the launch of a bigger iPhone.
  • App design and auto-layout if the iPhone moves to multiple sizes and resolutions.
  • Visual Studio's learning curve vs. Xcode and Interface Builder.
  • The future of Objective C and the challenge of migrating a platform's API to a new language.

Accidental Tech Podcast

3: Conditions Led To Freecell

58:49
  • The Nifty MiniDrive
  • The challenges of small-camera design
  • Sony RX1 and Sony's camera-business revival
  • Apple in the gaming market and the evolution of casual gaming
  • Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the first time anyone has mentioned FreeCell in 2013
  • The bad old days of Game Boys, lead-acid "portable" computers, and mouse-pointer trails
  • iOS' refusal to let you pick default browser, email client, calendar app, etc.
  • Mini-web-browsers inside of iOS apps
  • How iOS could adopt Contracts or Intents, and the problems that might arise

Accidental Tech Podcast

2: The 7th Guest

57:17

The PS4 announcement, the Xbox 1, old LAN gaming, Transport Tycoon, early CD-ROM adventure games, dumping old games onto iOS, dial-up modems, and the annoyance of gaming occasionally on a modern console.

Accidental Tech Podcast

1: iPhone Plus

14:35

Speculation on what a bigger iPhone's screen might be and why.