MacBreak Weekly 396 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It is time for MacBreak Weekly, the Office for the iPad is here, the Office for the iPad is here and what will Rene Ritchie, Andy Ihantko and Alex Lindsay say about that. We will also talk about the iPhone rumors is it bigger, is it better find out next on MacBreak Weekly.

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Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly Episode 396 recorded April 1^st 2014

Live from the International Friendship Satellite

Leo: MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Lynda.com. Learn what you want when you want with access to 2,400 online  high quality courses, all for one low monthly price. To try it free for seven days visit Lynda.com/macbreak (spells out the name Lynda.com/macbreak), and by Square Space the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and also ten percent off go to SquareSpace.com and use the offer code MacBreak. This is actually very exciting we have launched the Twit Friendship Satellite and now Twit can be seen in places without the Internet all around the world, in places where the Internet is blocked and I think our video engineer Alex Couple is prepared to, are you going to flip the switch?

Alex Couple: We actually have a live shot of the satellite.

Leo: Let us see it. Wow, that is exciting because it looks like Sandra Bullock is out there fixing it. (presenters laughing and talking over each other whilst the satellite is launched) What do I do, what do I do? Now in space.

Alex Couple: So. Whenever you are ready we can go ahead?

Alex Lindsay: Your producer is getting in the …….(noisy studio)

Alex: And now let us flip the switch, are we ready to use the satellite?

Leo: Let us begin our broadcast day coming to you live from the Twit International Friendship Satellite. Okay we can launch this.

Alex Couple: Flip the switch. Here we go. Now all of our broadcast days will come to you from the Satellite.

Leo: Look at that quality, take that, Internet! There, look at that picture, that is coming to you from space my friends. Welcome to MacBreak Weekly coming to you live from space.

Alex Lindsay: It is going into space.

 

Leo: We want to say hello to all our friends in North Korea, in Turkey, in Russia I think that the launch of the International Friendship Satellite is really significant advance for us here.

Alex: I think that the lower thirds have really improved a lot.

Leo: You think so. It is not really in cue with the Trident Castor and we had to use our own characters around there.

Alex:  It is a little high around there Circa 1982.

Andy Ihantko: I like that.

Leo: Yes here is Andy. It has got the wrong URL for us there. It’s alright we cannot fix it now because the guy who actually set those lower thirds for us is dead. (Laughter in the studio) that is him up there. His face fixing the satellite.

Rene Ritchie from Montreal, good to have you from imore.com

Rene Ritchie: Thank-you Leo.

Andy: Leo, are you opening a store it looks like you are opening a store?

Leo: Rene has got some serious Lego action did you put the Arkum Asylum? Oh wait a minute.

Rene: Right over here. I do not know whether you can see it over here I need to get  better lighting for it.

Leo: This looks like an episode of Damnation.  Hey we got a special Damnation tonite by the way Joe Walsh is going to be on this show tomorrow night, he is from the Eagles. He is a ham and he did the Damnations theme so I am hoping that we will put that episode of Damnation on the International Friendship Satellite as well. I think that is fairly important Why don’t you go because I am a little concerned that video engineer Alex Couple went running across studio is there something I should….. he is just checking things, the flux capacitor seems to be on the blitz right now. Do we have a shot of the signal processor, we are sending this stuff through, you would like this, did you see this?

Alex: I have not seen this until today, I did not realize that we had this all set up.

Leo: We are entering the twentieth century now. (Showing pictures) This is not a joke, and actually if you look at the wiring it spells something.

Alex: That is awesome.

Leo: Geek TV with the……..(laughing)

Leo: So the signal is going through that coiled wire and they have run a sixty hertz power cord across it, what else can you with their fans. The fan is good it generates a little bit of …..(did not complete the sentence)

Alex: This is awesome. It is a serious case of why did not I think of that. I sit there a lot of the time doing effects and after effects in other things and I could have just made a coil of wire to shape the things.

Leo: That is so good, thank-you Alex. Thanks for that, I charged him for that, what would this show look like in 1968?

Andy: For the scripts from the Phil Donoghue show send a self-addressed stamped envelope to MacBreak Weekly Episode 396.

Leo: Even Alex looks the part, thank-you Alex. Alex Couple you rock! Happy April Fool’s day everybody I am not good at April Fool’s joke because I get bit, I believe these things. I go around the Internet this time of the year and try to figure out is this true or is this not true. It is a particular problem in the Mac news industry, so much stuff is rumor and bizarre anyway.

Alex: It is my mother’s favorite holiday. Oh my gosh!

Leo: Is she the kind of person that puts salt in the sugar bowl? So that when you get up for breakfast you have ……..?

Alex: That was one of her many mornings.

Leo: Did she ever get to bed?

Alex: One of her favorite ones was changing all of our clocks to two hours earlier for school and then rushing us around and then finding that we were there too early.

Leo: That was so mean.

Alex: My dad actually wrecked his car on April 1^st many years ago and he called and she would not believe him. He said can you send some-one I am hanging upside down and she just laughed at him.

Leo: No, we can go clean now.

Andy: Which was the sister company that we were sponsoring?

Leo: Turitin. Alright (Satellite being launched) brought to you by Emerson TV the clearest and sharpest picture in America, RCA, hey Burke, are you there Burke. (So much talking and laughing in the studio)

Andy: I wonder if they will figure out what my little joke is today?

Leo: That is what I hate about April Fool’s Day.

Andy: It is supposed to be Sir Galahad but it is actually Sir Golay of the Round Table, let us do show I am sorry (A lot of talking and laughing over each other) Oh my God that looks like the Round Table, but that does not like it.

Leo: He is such a Wag, Alex Lindsay is also here from the Pixel Corps nice to see you.

Alex: Good to be here.

Leo: And, all the way here to the right, Mr. Rene Ritchie of imore.com Hi Rene.

Rene Ritchie: Hi Leo. How are you doing?

Leo: Arkum Asylum over your left shoulder over there.

Rene: Right over there I hope that they do not take over the entire asylum.

Leo: This is good he really looks like though that he is opening a store. I see that you have an Apple TV I would like to buy that.

Rene: It is the original one called Tiger going back to the Stone-Age.

Andy: The Rene home shopping network.

Rene: Everything must go.

Leo: Did you hack that Tiger or did it just run?

Rene: Oh yes it was shipped with the OS 10 version of Tiger which was the original operating system.

Leo: You are kidding, I did not know that. I guess I did know but I forgot it. When did Apple TV come out?

Rene: It was 2007, in 2006 it was shown off and then it shared the stage with the original iPhone demo at MacWorld.

Leo: Speaking of MacWorld, a lot people here in the studio I presume are from Mac World Expo, did you have fun was is a good week in San Francisco? Anybody here go to MacWorld, Rene Ritchie, thank-you the guy who came the farthest. How was MacWorld Expo this year?

Rene: It was great, there were a lot of MacBreak Weekly fans, a lot of Twit Fans and they all came up and they all extended you their best wishes and it was a fun show. It is a fan event as we discussed last week there is no Apple but there is CES and other shows and this is the only show where you can go and yell at the people who make your apps and your accessories a lot of people had a lot of fun doing that.

Leo: Yes it was a good time you all glad you came and are you going to be coming back next year? Oh there was not a resounding yes anyway we will work on it. Anyway we are glad you made the trip upto Burke’s Castle about an hour north of San Francisco. And you had to stick around we had a bit of rain I think we are going to have thunderstorms later. In the week this week something happened on Thursday, it was a pretty big deal Microsoft released Office for the iPad and I actually think that it is not bad I would love to hear what you guys think, I doubt that Alex Lindsay has played with it all?

Alex: No, I do not use Office anymore?

Leo: That is the problem, now it is too late.

Alex: I was not willing to commit, from the company’s perspective I was not willing to commit to the amount of money that I would have to spend on Office when I could just have Pages and Numbers. We have Excel for the heavy lifting so we do still do use that and for the really, really heavy lifting, but I have not liked Word since like 5.1.

Leo: I think that Macintosh users have always had a difficult relationship with Word because it came out first on the Mac right, but it was always a little bit odd, memory management was Microsoft’s brand memory management and it was little a strange. It did not operate quite alike a Mac program and yet it was a Mac, it was one of the first Mac Power Tools and as a matter of fact it sold very well. Microsoft Word for Office I should say considered to be one of their cash cows.

Alex: I think that it works fine, I think my complaints are the Excel and Power Point are just you know rustic, you know that when it comes to design I think that Excel ( Presenters talking over each  other)

Leo: Pages is prettier. Although the new Pages cannot even be compared to Word.

Alex: I do not like Pages I think that Pages looks fine but the problem is that it is heavy and you feel that you are moving through molasses so we tend to use Google Docs for a lot of that stuff, but when it comes to like if you are organizing something like a spreadsheet there is nothing like numbers, not, not if you want to run giant sheets of financials, but if you want to organize stuff of Excel for Numbers just leaves it in the dust.

Leo: Well he says that he does deep financial analysis, Front Office can I use Excel?

Alex: You can use Excel, 90 percent of people who use Excel are in bed and they are organizing spreadsheets and Numbers is just so much faster and then in addition to that Keynote, we work in the presentation world and no body who is serious about presentations uses, I mean lots of little business people use Power Point, but no-one who is serious about presentations use anything but Keynote,if they are going to use a presentation tool, it is so much more. If you look at that then that is fine but there is definitely a lot of people who are not going to use it.

Leo: Andy you were for a while were writing and doing everything on an iPad right?

Andy: Yes and it is pretty much my primary outside the office computer. I have got to say that I really prefer Word to Pages in the weeks that I have been using it only because I am not sure that I would say the same about the IOS 6 version of Pages because my compliant about Pages now is that with the IOS 7 make-over that they went so hard with the bleach and the scouring pad that I often orient cannot myself on the features that I am using right now like where I am on the page and stuff like that. It is not confusing but I kind of like the reassurance that the louder voice and interface in Word, and also there is a person who has written a bunch of books knowing how important it is to round trip a chapter of a Word document with Notes and its Tracks and all that stuff and make sure that all of that is intact that is another pick-win for Word. I think it is hard to think about how it is going to compete in a world where the iWork’s apps are free. But when you think of it as a free app to those who are already subscribed to Office 365 and therefore for people who are already invested in those tools boy is that a thing they work great and they are very, very native, they are easy to use and in the case of Word they deleted features they did not just trim it down to simply remove down the stuff that almost nobody would even consider using on a tablet. And if anything it makes an iPad mini that much more impressive and that much more useful than it was even a couple of months ago. With this iPad mini now why am I travelling with a Notebook, why am I even travelling with a larger sized iPad. I have not been using an iPad mini for iWorks stuff because when you make that really, really minimalist interface, and then scrunch it down then for me it is hard place to live for four, five, six hours to look at a whole day’s worth of work whilst I am travelling. But, Office on the iPad is easy, comfortable and the screen is not necessarily that much smaller than it needs to be so.

Leo: I do have to say that I do pay for Office, because well I guess I use it on a variety of platforms and it is a fairly good deal I pay 99 dollars a year, somebody has just said that you can get it for as little as 67 dollars a year on Amazon. And I have to say that when I looked at the last version of Office and go to a store and buy a box for 400 bucks that was a real stopper. It was hard for me to justify that. But to say hey you are going to pay 80 bucks a month you know.

Andy: And not only that Microsoft are saying that every time we enhance the Office World you get that for free and you are not going to have to buy the iPad product and you are not going to have to buy the Windows phone product that is all going to come for free.

Leo: That is a good deal and for the price I got five installed desk top versions and that means I have one on Windows and two on Mackintoshes, even though it is on Office 2011. And they do promise that they will update when the new Office comes out. And now they are saying you are going to have five tablet stalls, although CNET pointed out that nobody is paying any attention to that so Microsoft is saying yes we are not really counting your tablet stalls.

Alex: Nor does Apple.

Leo: Which does mean that there is a loop-hole, means that for instance I could give you my, I would never do this give you my Office 365 login and you could install it in your iPad and play with it. Correct me if I am wrong Rene if you install Word Excel and Power Point you can open and view documents that is right without anything?

Rene: Yes you can open them and view them and you could even present them if you want to show them off to your team or use them around the office. In order to edit them you will need the Office 365 subscription. I have an ADOBE creative cloud subscription and I like that way better than having the old model without having to decide every two years that this is the update that I get, and this was the update that I skip.

Leo: It is like having a slowly considerable blow out, just because my money is dribbling out of my wallet.(Presenters talking over each other) instead of flying out of my wallet. It ends up being the same probably.

Alex: Because none of us are saving all year.

Rene: I mean they did a much better job with the iPad apps than they did with their dismal iPhone apps. I was really happy. You never really know when you have been waiting a long time for something and built up a huge pent up demand and it might be episode one or it might be Indiana Jones four where you are so excited to get and you say it is not exactly what I wanted but this is really great program, the only problem they have is that they waited so long to get it to market and they seem to want people especially in business to not use an iPad especially as they could not get Office on it, and it turned out they stopped using Office if they wanted to use an iPad it gave iWork a ton of time  to catch up with Google Docs a fair amount to catch up. So the casual needs will have evaporated but still for those people in Enterprise who have the subscription now they can use it with the iPad if they wanton abandon.

Andy: That is the big deal. People tend to forget that Office think of Office as set of apps when actually it is a platform just as big as Windows and just as big as Mac and just as big as IOS, this is where they live and this is where all the documents are and their collaborative tools are if your office is standardized on Microsoft Office and it almost certainly is and the ability to match it to say that this 500 dollar iPad will essentially be an extension of your entire workspace in your office or your two thousand dollar laptop, that is a big win. It would have been nice if they had come out with this a couple of years ago and if they had come out with it a couple of years ago and it stank then I do not think that people would even be complaining about Microsoft’s fault and it does them fine like right now.

Leo: The new CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella introduced it on Thursday and people asked him afterwards why did it take so long? You know there are two schools of thought for this. One is that under Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates they were never going to release this for the iPad before they released it for Surface for their own hard-ware.  They felt that was a selling point for Surface if you had to use Office or else you would get a Microsoft tablet.

Alex: Right.

Leo: And the other school of thought was kind of what you said Andy, they had to get it right. Nadella said it was the latter, because we have obviously been working on this for a while, and the thing that we wanted to get right and this is very like Microsoft about the stuff that I am going to tell you was the combination of the app, the Enterprise Architecture, the developer APIs and them marry it with the device and what you would expect from the devices and is not just trivial things, let us port Word for Windows for a particular device. I think that they have succeeded here, it is really I think the touch first version of Word, the touch targets are a trifle small which is always a problem on Windows as well on touch but it is useable.

Rene: It is touch beta.

Leo: It does feels that way.

Rene: What is the interesting to me is that the Balmer story has a lot of credit, because Bill Gates and Steve Balmer were very platform first based, their platform was the PC and Nadella is a cloud services guy his platform is things like SharePoint,  things like One Drive and while you can store your documents on Office locally on your iPad, it is much more powerful than SharePoint range and some of the One Drive account and I think that he is sort of giving up that notion that you have to have that on every PC and desktop, and he is going in on where he wants Microsoft Services on every device and it is a different strategy but it could be really good one.

 Alex: I mean it could be down to the fact, I mean that he is giving up on the OS. But I think that they have a lot of great services that are not Microsoft Windows.

Leo: Azure, which is their cloud services was Windows azure because I have been renamed to Microsoft azure. You know it might be reading too much into it, but there are a lot of little signs that this is a new Microsoft and now Satya he is going to take it in that direction, Enterprise first, Cloud Platform first, it is no longer Windows first, I think that is very good thing to do.

Alex: I think that is a very smart thing to do.

Andy: I do not know that is necessarily because of the arrival of the new CEO a few months ago.

Leo: I think it is why the new CEO is there.

Andy: I think the reason why they brought up their new CEO from cloud services instead of through anything else, I really think that the missing link that installed this project was Office 365. I think that they had a long-range strategy of moving Office and decentralizing it by saying it is irrelevant to us for the one device where you are physically running this service we are going to make sure that everything works so closely together that you will want continue to use this service once that strategy crystallizes itself and I think that was the moment of inspiration that allowed them this and the rest seem to say Okay now we know how we are going to make Office for mobile. And also let us not overlook that Apple threw a massive grenade into everybody’s development schedule last year, last summer when they showed of IOS 7, where as we know so many developers who essentially had to go to the whiteboard essentially with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a dry eraser in the other hand and say Okay we have to totally redesign our app from the ground up because this is so totally different from what we have been developing for the past year that none of us doing what we are doing makes sense. I do not know how much earlier they could have released this, if not for IOS 7.

Leo: No and we know that a lot of the app developers had that pain point when IOS 7 came out.

Rene: I believe or I have heard that Microsoft as well. But the only thing to me is I cannot see a world where Apple could have put the OS 10 version of iWorks on the iPad and I think it was telling that Microsoft did not have a touch version of Office ready to go with this service.

Mobile has been hard for many companies, it has been really hard for Facebook, and it has been really hard for Microsoft but I think that the Office for the iPad shows that they are finally get all their documents not only with their own operating system but also with their own soft-ware and other services as well.

Leo: I thought that it is interesting too, and maybe I am reading way too much into this is when Nadella wanted to show it off this he said give me my iPad and normally I make a big point of that my iPad. Remember Bill Gates forbade his children to have iPods. He would not let his kids have Apple products in the house, this is a company, remember Steve Ballmer somebody was in the front row with an iPhone and he took it at a company orients meeting he took it from the guy and pretended to stamp on it. This is a company that did not welcome Apple products, and for Satya Nadella to say give me my iPad is a mistake and I do not think that it is in the accent. (Presenters talking over each other)

Andy: I think that they want to sell the service they do not really care about their platform strategy anymore. Also it makes perfect sense they would release this for, before IOS even before the Windows tablets. If you think about it is already very, very easy to get Microsoft Office on a 500 dollar tablet that runs a Microsoft operating system, because you can buy a 500 dollars Microsoft Windows 8 Tablet legit, so that maybe was not quite that much pressure and if they had been able to make an emphatic statement about how important the Windows metro interface is and here is how we are going to redesign all of our apps so they make more sense on mobile, God that would have been such a welcome shot of credibility for the platform that is now being built and allowed to grow and sort of take its time and it is a hobby for them right now, they are very proud of it and they are pleased with the numbers and they are going to have patient attitude, we do not want to release this until it is perfectly right, no , no…….

Leo: We had a guy on Sunday on TWIT because he was in town and he was installing Windows 7machines in a bank as they had XP and you know hundreds of seats of Window 7. He says that he has been doing that all over the country, .and any Windows 8 and he said no-one even says Windows 8. It just does not come up.

Alex: I have seen this kind of movement, this is the first time I have seen this kind of movement the first time that I have seen Microsoft might be actually going in the right direction, because Windows obviously I think had a fair amount historical momentum that is going to keep it going for another decade.

Leo: They have got a lot of users, a billion users.

Alex: Yes that is what I am saying that there is a historical momentum. There has got to be some-one in the background saying that you know our days of operating systems is over.

Leo: I think that they know and Satya Nadella was specifically brought in and I think even Balmer said that he says I am not the guy that is going to make the transition to services and devices system. We need somebody who can make that transition and that is who they brought in and it makes perfect sense. My only question is it like Windows phone you know like Microsoft? You know I think that the Windows phone is great, it has a beautiful operating system and it is nicely done, it was so late to the party it was probably dead on arrival because nobody is going to develop apps for it. I am wondering if the same problem here with touch operating systems, touch first locations and they are late to the game. I mean Office for the iPad is so late that most people would have worked around a solution for it and are not even going to look at it.

Andy: I think that the market they are playing to is Microsoft strongest market historically which is the: (I don’t care market). It sounds like that I am insulting people about Microsoft products but people just want something functional a computer and soft-ware is a practical functional piece of equipment that they use to get their work done. And if you simply say that they were in the market for any sort of a tablet at this point tell them that oh, by the way we know have product so that the apps, the data and SharePoint and Cloud Storage that is native to your Office solutions for your office are now working on this tablet fine. Oh but I was going to use iWorks but iWorks as iCloud and you can export it to something and then email it to yourself and then import to the other side, or you can just use this Office product, that will simply open the file where it is, edit it where it is and save where it is, so that is not being late to the game done as much as having something viable for people who just want something to work. I feel the same way about the Windows phone too, it was not even necessary that Microsoft have you know twenty percent market share by X day so long as they have a credible product that a certain amount of people are going to find easy to use. At least it will be there so that when they do need that emphatically mobile operating system to do something that no other operating system can do. It is there and these phones that Nokia are making are definitely scoring there.

Leo: Alright. Well there you go the Office for the iPad it is free to download and free to use as a reader only and if you have a friend with an Outlook login or a Microsoft Office 365 login you can borrow theirs and use that.

Andy: I do not mind seeing their Net Busters fan fiction.

Leo: Well that is the problem which is why Microsoft is not too worried about this loop-hole that is reporting in. If I gave you my login you would have all my documents and have access to my One Drive and that seems like a pretty dumb thing to do.

Alex: Well I think that is a great policy too of having people naturally figure out you know how far they want to share rather than having all these crazy ideas.

Leo: Bill Gates, put in not one not two but three different DRM copyright protections on Windows. He was famously paranoid. (Presenters talking over each other)

Rene: Keep away from my soft-ware.

Andy: All the way from the Ultra Basic to famous big splash saying, hey I know that you are copying out Ultra Basic on paper tape we are telling you that we need to get paid for this.

Leo: This is also new and you know what, it is scary but we are not going to do anything about it. That is a very different Microsoft. Incidentally also a very different Microsoft and perhaps another sticking point is Apple’s thirty percent, it turns out that Apple does recode and Apple does get thirty percent if you subscribe to Office 365 within the app, which you can do. Apple will get its thirty percent!

Alex: Cha Ching.

Leo: Cha Ching.

Rene: It is different from Walmart getting its fifty percent from the profits from everything sold in their stores. But Apple stores and digital goods are different and sometimes the thirty percent is all the margin that a service like Netflix and Amazon get, this at least needs to be sorted out.

Alex: I have to admit that the now that, I mean there is definitely high-end graphics that I still buy and install and everything else. Unless it cannot work inside the sandbox or a really big application I kind of look sideways at almost everything that is not in the app store. When you get a new computer you want to install everything, you know you have a hundred apps that you can install automatically you know I do not have to go through the gauntlet of upgrading. I think that hard might be a part of their calculation.

Andy: And also they have figured that very few people are going to be buying their first Office 365 subscription through this iPad app. I think that they are going to be getting it through mostly all of those people that have bought it and it is going to be value added.

Leo: Right. Yes it is not a lot of loss. One thing that I do like about this strategy and I know this was not in the Microsoft show, and I will throw this in with One Note now free for the Mackintosh with Office 365 with the iPad they are truly cross-platform. I mean that I can open my One Drive virtually on virtually any mobile or desk top operating system and I can open my Word document, edit them, round trip them 100 percent from Android and from IOS.

Alex: I think there is always this that they are ahead of Apple as far as iWorks goes in that area. Most of all we expect it to do that and we expect Google Docs to do that.

Leo: This is better than Google Docs although, today when I had to write something what did I open up? I had to open up a Google Doc document.

Andy: Google Docs is not as good as it is when you run it on an iPad. You realize how much you get by having a native app in a native user interface. It is as good as a schilo five apps get. God it will never be that responsive.

Leo: Speaking of which, by the way the first HTML app which came out this day ten years ago. Can you think of what that is?

Alex: It is Gmail.

Leo: Yes it was Gmail, ten years old. Harry McCracken wrote a fabulous article on how Gmail got written with some kind of behind the scenes stuff on his Times Tech.com. Let me just scroll down to that there it is the Gmail Story ten years ago today. But what I did not really think about but it is really true is that Paul Bucahist’s team really wrote the first web app that many of us had used. Even Hotmail and, Yahoo Mail, at the time, were really just web interfaces, they were not web apps.

Alex: Right.

Leo: This was an app.

Rene: Yes it was Ajax.

Leo: Yes Ajax was essentially created for Gmail.

Rene: Yes. Google Maps sticks out for me Leo. It was like the first experience that I had with web apps.

Leo: Pretty amazing. Gmail was the very first Harry confesses that he bought a Gmail app on eBay. Everybody wanted it and you could not get it. One of the things that he reveals is that when Gmail first launched it was running on a bunch of pennies and twos in a closet of Google because Google would not give them the resources they did not think that Gmail was big deal and that it was going to go on anywhere, so it was just a bunch of pennies and twos that they had lying around. Three hundred old Pentium computers that nobody at Google wanted and that is why it was such a limited Beta roll out. I remember getting an invite really early on and I still use Gmail. It still is the default email. Pretty much like what Google came out and you could tell if they were really hip when you asked them what search engine you use and they said Alta Vista and you said no, but if they said Google you said they are with it. Sam thing with Gmail, what if your email address is it Hotmail.com? No. Google Gmail.com? Oh!

Andy: One of my editors at Sun Times when he retired told me that by far his favorite line that I wrote in any tech piece is that if you have an AOL email address it is like showing up at a job interview with a clip on bow tie.

Leo: That is a very good line. Speaking of nerds we are going to take a break and when we come back Will Wheaton’s beautiful response at Comicon to a little girl who asked him how did handle being called a nerd as a kid?

And it is such a beautiful response I just want to play it in its entirety since we are all nerds here are we not? Yes we are.

Alex: Yes.

Leo: Our show brought to you today by Lynda.com. I will play the video in just a second, Lynda.com is a great place if you are nerd or want to be a nerd to learn soft-ware, business skills, creative skills, for personal or professional goals. With a Lynda.com subscription you get unlimited access to over 2400 courses in every aspect of technology. I almost say life I would not just say technology, but how to negotiate a deal, how to create a resume, you can see any of the videos they are high quality. I am not talking about You Tube stuff these are well done videos from Photography, Web Design, App Design, Business Strategies and if you want to record music and I know Jason Snell who does this in his free time has said that these are great videos, Logik Pro X and they will show you how to use it, Logica 10, Final Cut, Pro 10 to edit videos, Pages, KeyNotes, Numbers and the thing is there is always new videos. There will be an IOS Office maid minute now.

Alex: I like Lynda.com now from almost day one.

Leo: Every business should.

Alex: It is like 25 bucks a month. I have because when I am trying to figure something out I can go up there and, what is also great about it that you not only have all this training, you have nine hours training on PhotoShop, I do not want to watch nine hours training, I will break it all up and look up over there Oh I need to figure out this new tool in PhotoShop and I will find the five or eight minute clip inside of that and watch and you know it is going to be well produced, it is going to be well thought out.

Leo: I mean it is a science Chris Spreen has some great stuff there, Burt Monroy our PhotoShop guru has a weekly show that is free by the way on Lynda.com. If you go to Lynda(spells out the name) Lynda.com/macbreak you can see some of the shows from Chris and Burt do . All apps from beginner to intermediate and advanced and you can watch it on your computer your tablet your mobile device. You know another nice feature is that they have written transcripts, search for the stuff you want to learn and jump right to the part of it. There you go this is very, very, handy. What is also nice is that you also get this certificate of completion which you can put on your Linkedin Profile which is great for working professionals, and I think people now know that you now know how to use PhotoShop, you know how to edit in LightRoom and that kind of thing. It is only 25 dollars a month for access to the entire library, they have other plans for 37.50 a month and the premium plan so that you can see the exercise files and yes all of the layers of PhotoShop for instance and work alongside the instructor. Try Lynda.com right now, we are ready to give you a free seven day trial, a week to access every video on this site for seven days. This is (spells the name) Lynda.com/macbreak. Lynda.com there you see it Welcome to MacBreak Weekly and you can Chris and Burt’s courses and stuff. Get that free trial Lynda.com

I will just play the girl’s question from You Tube and Will Wheaton’s response from Comicon.

Clip from You Tube Video :

Girl (Speaker): When you were little boy why were you called a nerd?

Will Wheaton: When I was a little boy why I was called a nerd was because I did not want to do sports and I did like to read, I did like math or science and I thought that school wasn’t very cool. And it hurt a lot it is never okay when a person makes fun of you for something that you did not choose. I wish there was an easy to just not care, but the truth is that it hurts, people don’t understand and it bothers me that people do not understand when a person makes fun of you and when a person is cruel to you it has got nothing to do with you. It is not about what he said, it is not about what he did, it is not about love, it is them thinking bad of themselves, they feel sad they do not get positive attention from their parents, the do not feel smart and they do not understand things that you understand maybe they are pushing them to be a baseball player or an engineer or something but it is something they just do not want to do so they take that in all that  and that is what actually hurts. So when someone speaks to you like that I know that is hard but honestly the kind and best reaction is to forgive them and do not let them make you feel bad and……

And it absolutely gets better as you go along. I know that it is really hard at school and you are surrounded by the same people every day but there is 60,000 who are going through the exact same thing. (A lot of sound distortion in the background and a terrible echo)

Leo: That is a really nice statement. Let us put that on the wall and frame it kids.

Andy: I was there in fact.

Leo: Were you there? Oh man I did not know that.

Andy: I was there to introduce William Shatner.

Leo: What wait a minute Andy how did that go?

Andy: It is a long story, it went great and I have a Shatner story that is positive and highly wonderful. Basically they were flying me out to what was going to be an hour long interview of Stan Leigh and then he dropped out and they got Shatner and I said okay I do not know whether Mr. Shatner will want me to do an interview or just introduce him and get the hell of the stage. It was the first time that I had actually seen Will in like a convention sort of environment because you and I both met him like geek cruises and places like that, and yes he said exactly the right thing to a person who needed to hear it at exactly the right time, and there is very little that I could possibly add to that.

Leo: I was really impressed because it was the kind of situation where probably the quick lib answer would be the first thing that I would do and a lot of people would do and the fact that he sat back and actually answered it from his heart, I think it was really great. Really great you know.

Andy: The best part is the speaking of the value of the empathy that he talked about. I have seen people do these it gets better videos, and a lot them are not very good because they say when you know are being bullied think about in ten years’ time when you are curious, and you are smart and that person is going to be dumb and not have a good job and think about how much you are doing……no that is not what it is all about. Basically the core message is that unfortunately you are ten or eleven years old with very little experience in talking to people and so it is very hard for you to understand where peoples thoughts and even their full statements come from and does not mean that you have to necessarily say yes please, abuse me and shout horrible things at me every morning before I leave the house to go to school, but at least you understand that at least it has really nothing to do with you, and perhaps in ten years’ time you will be able to appreciate what they are talking about from a different perspective, new information about how the humans work.

Leo: Yes. It was a quite a deep thing he said. I thought it was quite good and totally like all of  us who are geeks. I prefer the word geeks better than the word nerds.

Alex: How about both. Geek editor.

Leo: You are a geek editor. (Presenters talking over each other)

Alex: Over football.

Leo: You also had guns but you also play football. Were you bullied at school?

Alex: No I was actually I was what Dexter is to…….bullies bully. If I saw a bully I think I saw that my dad would not be upset if bullied and bully, so the thing is that I was an angry little kid, I was angry little nerd and so was everything else when bullied some other kid you were fair game. And I was pretty rude.

Leo: Wow Alex the terminator Lindsay.

Alex: You take a bully by his neck pick him up and shake them really hard and bang them against the wall it clarifies his mind.

Leo: This is not a guy that feels empathy and pity.

Andy: I will understand if you do not want to answer this but do you have a collection of leather ties in your closet that you do not want your children to see?

Alex: No, no leather ties but I do have some thin ones, yes.

Rene: A Sat Nav.

Alex: Yes.

Leo: Okay.

Andy: A year-book custom bound with the type of tie that the book binder was not familiar with.

Alex: But I am so much nicer now.

Leo: Yes you do not want to cross Alex with you yelling through three walls and a couple of doors.

Alex: Yes a couple of doors. I can be a little strong at times, that is all I am prepared to say.

Leo: Yes, but you yelling, hey but I am no shrinking violet either. When you are angry it is for a good reason, it is not for a random reason. So Apple is, I do not know, but according to Japanese newspaper reports I always find a great source of information, Apple is definitely going to release a two screen sizes in September of the iPhone 6. Now I always use Rene Ritchie as the rumor validator or invalidator imore.com because you guys really get all the scoops. What is the status of this idea?

Rene: I have only heard about the only one large screen phone this year. I have no doubt that Apple is testing a variety of sizes because they test everything. Every time you hear like why Apple did not do this? The most common answer is that they spent a year in the lab and did not want like for xyz reasons. So I have no doubt that they are testing a wide variety of sizes, they might be even proto typing a wide variety of sizes, but I have still only heard of one regular size and one large size.

Leo: Min Chi Quoi who has been very consistent as a source, he is an analyst for KGI Securities says that Apple will not go bigger than five inches because of their

“unwavering” dedication idea to have having a one handed phone.

Rene: They are also a very good step-by-step company if you look and they have had the same screen size for a while, then they went retina, then they went 16 by 9. If they go bigger now they probably will not just go bigger, bigger all in one year, they might introduce a larger sized iPhone with a much higher resolution which will then enable them to then do a variety of 3-D devices years down the road but I do not think that they will do all of it in one year.

Andy: You also have to remember that Samsung can get away with doing a humungous sized phone because they basically make every phone there is and there is one maker of android phones amongst many and if Apple decides to make a humungous phone then that is going to be fifty percent of all the iPhone models available world-wide for an entire year. So I do not think that they would something quite like that. I do not want say ridiculous because I have used larger phones and they are nice but I do not think that they would do something like that would not appeal to just about everybody out there. They are just as concerned about smaller hands, smaller female hands as big male hands like this one.

Leo: Actually I am going to buy because I have been using the MOTO X which ergonomically as far as I am concerned a perfect sized, and you and I go through with playing with this HTC One, it is taller, it is bigger and it does not, I can hold it obviously, it does not feel quite as good in the hand. So there is something to be said for that. I use a Note Three, which is too big for their face, let alone your hand. I can tell the difference.

Alex: I think fundamentally one of the things that I have really been thinking about things with Apple part of when they are developing stuff I always feel like that they are not developing technology because they think that technology is important I think they are developing technology because they don’t think it not important. It should not be the middle of your life, it should not be Oh Cool, it should be how do I get this other stuff out of it, how cool is BCE, I have to think about it and I have to, and it is all in one hand. There is a fundamental approach to it. Technology should be in the background of it and not in the foreground of what you are doing.

Rene: There is a couple of interesting things to. One is that the physical size of the iPhone will eventually limit the 640 by 11 by 36 eventually limit the quality of the soft-ware that can be made for it. And there are people in the Third World who can only afford the one device, and people in North America and Europe only want to carry one device and there is a value in a primary computing platform that is a bigger phone. But one of my favorite moments at Mac World was the KeyNote when Ben Beharan was there and someone asked you know all these big phones are all selling so well and he said no, no they really are not. In Asian countries they are selling really well, in North America I think as journalists we kind of feel this instinct to believe but it is nice to have some-one put real numbers to it, they are selling dismally well. The iPhone still and I do not know whether this will be true this year but compared to last year it was selling far better than all of the big phones.

Leo: Even the Galaxy X4 which is a biggish phone.

Rene: Yes it would out sell and people were choosing IOS on a smaller screen over the bigger screen. It was the same thing when people choose and iPhone over AT&T or something else over Verizon, Apple can grow their addressable market by offering two screen sizes, like they do with every other device that they make. But there is no market pressure in North America where people are still happy with relatively small phones and things like the Note do really well in Asia but not really well here. But Apple does not want to be ahead of that curve, they are not ahead of the curve company, they are later upter company.

Andy: I do not know if there is an equivalency though you also have to factor end that if you want to buy an iPhone and there is only one company that makes it and you want have a phone that runs IOS you have to buy an iPhone brand phone. I have not looked at the distribution of the numbers but does that factor in all of the availability of all Android handsets everywhere?

Rene: No I think that is absolutely valid and that is actually where I drew the AT&T Verizon analogy is there will be for people who either cannot or they do not want a small phone and Apple is not serving their needs right now so : a) a bigger phone option will  let them be more inclusive of that and then when people choose we will see what the real numbers are like, how many people actually went to Verizon when the iPhone was available on imore.

Andy: And it is very significant that if you name like the 1,2,3 mostly influential and popular Android phones Sony Experia, the Samsung and the HTC One all  three of these companies their flagship version is a 4.8 or a 5 inch phone but they also make a mini version of it and that is more of a size of an iPhone.

Leo: iPhone is four inches, the rumors are that the 6 will be 4.7 inches or 5.5 inches. I think, let us eliminate 5.5 inches that is too big. It is gigantic. But the 4.7 I think that is the size of the Moto X, it is not outrageously big., Are there issues with resolution and not merely that they do not have enough resolution you have too many resolution does that make a problem?

Alex; I think that it might depend on the pixel density as well because you might get things that might match and possibly the iPads that you are trying to match. You could have something that is slightly bigger and it is even denser than the iPad. The problem is that the aspect ratio is ofcourse different and that is one of the challenges.

Rene: If they wanted to they could take an iPhone as it is right now and move it to five inches and it would have the exact same pixel density as the iPad Air. The iPad and the iPad mini right now have the same pixel density, the Air Pad is the lowest sorry 246 instead  of 326.

Leo: The same pixel density but not the same resolution.

Rene: No but they have more pixels but with your cutting screens it is just nice to have, it is efficient to build cut screen from the same density.

Leo: The iPods will be the same aspect ratio.

Rene: It will just be bigger but the problem is that is below 300 pixels and and you also hold phones closer also and that is not really more pixels and I really want more pixels at this point and if they went to something like1080p it would go up to 400 dpi or something like but it would give them a lot more future proofing if they ever did want to play with the size more. I mean yes that does cause pain to the developers Apple did that to them with the retina, and did that to them by 16 by 9 and I do not think that they would be afraid to do that again.

Andy: Historically Apple is not afraid of giving it to the developers right in the neck if they feel that it will bring benefit to the consumers. They almost feel  as though  to developers that gees you are lucky that we are allowing you play in this really, really nice valuable market space and make our product more valuable so that we can create the next generation of amazing applications. So just cancel……let your husband or your wife and kids go to Disney World for two weeks because I think that you are going to figure out a way to find out how this display works in moderation.

Leo: I just want to look up sales numbers to get some sense whether Behren was right or not and to go unchallenged on this? So they numbers that we have for 2013 is 20 million and this is in the US. 120 million smart phones sold, Apple is forty-five percent and it is the biggest share and Samsung 26 percent. Now some Samsung phones are smaller than some of the others but almost are bigger and LG bigger eight percent, GEC six percent, in total …….

Alex: What about Motorola?

Leo: Four percent in total Apple forty five percent, everybody else….

Alex: Forty four percent from 2013 you add those on as well. Of the next four combined that is 24 percent.

Leo: But it is not dwarfing the bigger phone sales.

Rene: But it is just Apple against everybody else and it gives you the idea that the pressure is not as high as everybody else. Some people come up saying that Apple has to do this.

Leo: They have the plurality and the lion’s share of the market by a long shot.

Rene: It seems to that they can keep the case smaller because of the phone gets bigger, if the sway gets bigger without the case, and it is getting bigger that is a huge win. The trouble with now is that they have the home button which takes up a lot of space and some companies like Samsung has made a smaller rectangular home button instead to save more space on the bottom. But Apple has got Touch ID buckled in now so it is not easy to do that kind of thing. It is one of those things that the decision they made in the past might influence where they can go in the future.

Leo: Yes.

Andy: I do not know if I would go as far as to say that Apple has to do anything. But at this point in September they do not release a large screen phone I think that they are making a very clear statement about where their priorities are, because I think that now 4.7 4.8 is actually normal sized phone now. And then we have talked about big phones now and we have talked about the Notebook Three, we have talked about that big Nokia Lumia 10/70 or something you that pop card size phone. It is I think that this is something that is going to catch up with them if they do not really get on this because there are some many people and I do not get this either who really live their lives through the phones now. I cannot tell you how many times I have spoken to somebody who said I am still limping along on a really, really old laptop because I really do not use my laptop as much as I did a couple of years ago because I can do all my banking on my phone, I do all my FaceBooking on my phone everything that I really need a computer for at least eight percent of it is now done through my phone and these are the sort of people who would really appreciate having a phone with a larger screen so long as it does not become stupid or ungainly.

Alex: As I mentioned I would like to see a marginally larger phone and  my issue again is like you were saying is I do ninety percent of my work on my phone and you know  it does feel a little small a times.

Leo: So you are really thinking about taking them on that HTC, is it too large?

Rene: There is a big incentive I mean Apple went….(Presenters talking over each other) Apple has zero percent market share in under 400 dollar phones and they have no interest in it. But they have a huge market share of over 400 dollar phones and that went from 65 percent to an 85 percent share but there is not much growth left there. Whatever growth is left there would probably require a bigger screen because that is where the premium Android handsets are selling. So if Apple wants to increase their share of the premium market and also put a little bit pain to companies like Samsung who is owning that market successfully now their going big makes a lot of sense. It is the only low hanging growth that they have left.

Leo: Yes that is a good point. Well that is the rumor and I think that we have pretty much debunked it. There are April Fool’s stories which I will ignore things like Apple buying the I FIX.IT it that is not true. We mentioned last week that I FIX IT went belly up basically. It would be nice of Apple bought I FIX IT.  You know Apple remembers the company that deleted negative forum posts I do not think that they are going to have anything to do with I FIX IT. We will call that an April Fool’s joke.

Alex: Hey click the back button on this, now if you look in the dock I put that little icon in there and now there is a story from Mac Rumors that…..It has a whole bunch of different stories but if you scroll down it kind of funny what I FIX IT did here…….

Leo: Scroll down on that one.

Alex: Yes scroll down on that one.

Leo: So if you go to I FIX IT.com “Working together it is finally here we are thrilled to announce that we are joining forces with Apple starting this summer. Apple the only tool you will need why fix it yourself when you can upgrade yes  no the most replaceable devices yet Apple now make devices to last long enough to make repairs to become irrelevant so instead Apple  I FIX IT has published a list of Apple’s most replaceable devices.

Andy: I feel like April Fool’s jokes they do not really get to how to do these things. We are now at the point where we are trying to get to  believe something that is not true as opposed to putting something silly and ridiculous out there that when you look back and realize that this was all a prank oh I cannot believe that I fell for that. When you look at some of these things and go no this is a professionally done site no sarcasm no humor or anything this is just a straight forward news announcement.

Leo: And there is the April Fool’s joke that is just basically an ad for products involved. Have you seen, you were involved with Virgin America weren’t you?

Alex: Long ago we did the original to fly campaign…..(Presenter talking over each other)

Leo: Here is Sir Richard Branston. Quote from AD “ I do believe that Virgin America has re-invented every aspect of flying. Every day Virgin Airline thinks of new ways for traveller to be much more controlled for their experience once they are on the air. And today I am excited to help announce out newest break through our partnership with a wonderful company Nest which allows guests to control their own personal climates at 35,000 feet.

From Nest: At Nest we focus……..

Leo: So basically this is an ad for Nest and Virgin America and I have got to admit that they put a little, skip ahead….. Tony Fidel and Richard Branson…. More from the ad I would just like to say that you feel like you are sitting in a tropical paradise or flying to New York you simply select Cancun afternoon…..

 (Laughs)

Video: Or if you run a little hot, like me, and desire a cooler ride, well that’s no problem. Just select Chicago polar vortex. Total Temperature control. A partnership between Virgin America and Nest.

Leo: So this is a new trend I think, in April Fool’s jokes, and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand it really is just an ad, right? And it’s a good ad for the two products, but there’s humor in it too, so I’m not sure I… I don’t know if I dislike it. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that kind of thing.

Alex: I think the best, the best April Fool’s ever was the… You remember the Sports illustrated one about the pitcher who wore a… one foot was in a boot, and he like meditated and didn’t own anything. And you just read through the whole thing and you were like, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe this!” And then you couldn’t believe you were so stupid.

Leo: How about the book, book IMac cover. I think that would be good, I’d buy that. They have them for the IPad and the IPhone, they’re quite nice, but I don’t know if I really need one for my IMac.

Andy: I still remember the time I wrote an April Fool’s article for the Boston Pierce society user group magazine, that explained that Apple was recalling, at the time of the Mac SC, they were recalling the original 128K macs, because, long story, but there were gasoline soaked rags that they left inside each and everyone one of them…

Leo: Oh dear.

Andy: … that would ignite by the electron gun firing backwards, and trying to erase all the names of people who had been fired from Apple since the first one had been made. And even then there were hundreds of people who believed it, and were calling Apple about recall instructions. It’s hard to, I think you have to go ridiculous now.

Leo: I wouldn’t mind this, this is called the selfie bot, it’s a camera equipped drone that hovers around you. Capturing the best selfie moments. (Laughs) People would buy this, I swear to god! The selfie bot. What’s nice about this parody is they get everybody in their classic selfie pose, the pose you’ve all seen a hundred times. Oh lord, the guy doing the heart symbol. Yeah. A cat!  A selfie with a cat! What a novel thought! Alright, enough of the selfie bot! You know what we didn’t see was a ton of Google, every year Google does a ton of those, right?

Andy: Well that last one was from Google.

Alex: I think they shot the whole wad on the Hoff.

Leo: The Hoff, Google Chrome for IOS, this is actually kind of nice Emoji translation. I actually thought this was real. Chrome for Mobile.

Chrome for Mobile: The way we communicate is changing. It’s getting faster, and we’re optimizing for the smaller screen and the written word just can’t keep up. Can a word smile? Can it roll its eyes, or say sorry, not sorry? People use emoji because it provides context. If somebody were able to just explicitly say, “Hey, I’m flirting with you.” or “Hey, I’m mocking you.” That would just make my life a lot more efficient. And that’s actually what emoji does. That’s why you’re on the chrome team, we’re excited to announce Google translate support for Emoji. With a click of a button, our translation interprets the context and tone of words. And distills them down into clear articulate meaningful symbols. Fancy Gentleman. Cutterug. Shy snowman.

Leo: Actually I want this! It turns every message into arribas.

Chrome for Mobile: We’ve looked at lots of users and how they express different things using emoji.

Leo: If somebody doesn’t do this, they’re missing the boat!

Chrome for Mobile: Which is the same part of our brain that uses facial recognition. So basically emoji is a language that everyone already knows. This is the next phase of the glue stick evolution and we want to provide this to all of our users. Our expert team already….

Andy: We’re already teaching our kids not to learn how to write long hand. Now we can basically teach them not how to type either by clicking on icons.

Alex: Stickers.

Chrome for Mobile: The chrome team is really excited about being able to translate the entire set into emoji.

Andy: I like that chair.

Leo: I know, I want that chair.

Chrome for Mobile: Ecommerce, Emojify. Medical journals, emojify. Subtitles, emojify. Software engineers have even started to code.

Leo: Okay, this is a pretty good one. Programming in emoji’s. Source equals google.jpeg.

Chrome for Mobile: … In these little symbols we call letters. Hear Google for giving 80% back to the user.

Leo: Emojify the internet. Available today on Android, IPhone, and IPad. I want that!

Alex: This is probably how the Chinese written language started, They’re like you know, we could just use pictures, and they started using pictures and somehow it went back to text.

Leo: Yeah! This is not an April fool’s joke, and I wanted to get your opinion because it comes from our very own news director, Mike Allegan writing in Cult of Mac, this week. Apple needs a social network, when Google announces something new, they can send people to Google plus to talk about it. When Facebook announces something new, there’s a place its users can talk about it. Apple has to send people to Twitter, Facebook, or Google plus. Apple should buy, says Mark, Yahoo! Yahoo’s market cap is 37 billion, chicken feed for Apple. Apple might get Marissa Myer, we talked about this on Sunday, and everybody said there is no way Marissa would stick around. But what if you, you know, okay this would be the crazy talk. Put Tim Cook back in operations, he’s very good at that, let Marissa become CEO of Apple.

Rene: She could redesign the Icon.

Leo: She could redesign the icon. Anyway, I mean Yahoo bought tumbler so they would have a social network, right?

Alex: Yeah, I think that, I can definitely see the plusses of doing that but culturally, I think the reason Apple doesn’t buy big companies is because of the culture clash, and they like to bring people in in small bits so they can be assimilated properly.

Andy: And when was the last time they bought something that had such a legacy of user interface that they didn’t grow themselves? So how long would it take them to totally refit all the yahoo services so that it looked like it was designed in Apples house style?

Leo: So we’re going to reject this out of hand right? It’s an interesting idea.

Andy: I don’t know. It’s, he makes interesting comment, that Apple doesn’t have an outlet for this sort of social conversation. He also makes a point I’ve been sort of thinking about, if not worrying about, is that there’s going to be a time when selling hardware at premium prices is no longer going to work out for them, and so they should have some ideas of what they’re going to be doing in 5 or 10 years. If they don’t have plans to simply create new hardware over and over again. But I just don’t see them… I don’t see them wanting to create a platform by which people can simply publish anything they want to the entire world. I see them creating a platform of take things of their thinking, and feeling that they can look at and creating, and share them with people they directly know.

Leo: Apparently this is not a joke. So,

Chad: So, no it’s not. The emoji thing that you wanted to bad. Go to any website…

Leo: Yeah, I have, I’m on chrome right now. I don’t want to sign in. Where should I go?

Chad: Just go to your account/ Leo Laporte. I think I’d be signed in.

Alex: Go to CNN.

Leo: What about twit?

Chad: TWiT doesn’t have a lot of text.

Leo: TWiT doesn’t have a lot of text, we need something with a lot of text.

Chad: Celestial waste of bandwidth.

Leo: CWOB, it’s going to take me to Ihnakto.com, but that’s fine, we can go through that here. Now I click that, now I’m on ihnakto.com.

Andy: No.

Leo: Wait a minute, where do I go, Andy? There we go Ihnakto.com

Chad: S you’re on this page right? So download a bit so you can get a hamburger menu, and then translate to emoji and then in a few seconds, it translates everything to emoji.

Leo: It works!! OMG!

Chad: Hey, take your photo.

Leo: What the mojo! Andy can write in emoji! There was a time when the people in Germany, no credit cards of roads and bridges… were in charge of. Oh I get it! This is great! Okay! I hope they leave that in!

Andy: You’ve got to shoot some screen shots!

Leo: Translate to emoji! Okay, you want a screen shot on that? I don’t know how you do screen shots on the one?

Chad: Down, volume, and lock!

Andy: No, no! I’ll get it, it’s okay!

Leo: I haven’t learned that yet! Here’s something that was not, I think this is sweet, not an April fool’s joke, comes from the Buster Dog Boy, YouTube account. This was taken a few years ago of our good friend, Mr. Steve Wozniak making a special delivery, a few years ago. Janet and Steve Wozniak came to our house, to play a prank on our kid Emma. Here they come. Woz came to hand off a new Mac. In a lot of ways it was like…Having Thomas Edison deliver you light bulbs. Here we go, finally the video.

Leo: This is typical of Woz, I can just see Woz do this.

Video: Is it okay? Yeah it’s fine, because I’m just going to be carrying it form the car anyway. We’ll get a little prefootage here. Today Steve.

Leo: Woz actually gave on the screen savers when we had Kevin Metnick come on the screen savers after his probation had expired, and he was able to use the internet for the first time. Woz came along and gave him a Mac Book and said, here Kevin this is yours, get on the internet for the first time. So Woz has a history of doing this kind of thing. So, this is kind of… I’m not sure, let’s skip ahead. He’s got the box, with the mac in it. He’s coming up the stoop. I should have cued this up, I’m sorry, before we started showing it. Do you think Emma knows who Steve Wozniak is? Well I didn’t see that but I heard a lot of talk about that. I think Emma knows who Wozniak is.

Video: Oh my gosh! I’ve got a free video from the Apple store, I just do this now and then. It’s a computer from someone here! Are you Emma?

Emma: Yeah!

Video: Oh okay!

Leo: She’s a little taken aback. All her friends are gathering. I guess she knows who Woz is.

Video: It’s some kind of graduation gift, I don’t know!

Leo: She’s speechless! Okay Woz, if you want to deliver a Mac to my door, you can!

Video: You were on Dancing With the Stars?

Leo: Oh that’s how she knows him! He was on Dancing with the Stars! Now we know how she knows who Woz is! “You’re on dancing with the Stars, I know you!”

Andy: You’re almost as big as a Kardashian!

Leo: Alright we’re going to take a break, when we come back… Really, it is! Remember him doing the fish, on dancing with the stars, or the worm, or whatever that is when you go on the floor. We’re going to take a break, come back with your pics of the week in just a second, on Macbreak Weekly. No April Fool’s picks, right?

Alex: Nope.

Leo: Alright. All real stuff, you can buy in stores. Our show today brought to you by squarepace.com. The best place to create your new website. The better web starts with your website. Squarespace is two things you want. It’s web hosting. The best hosting ever, we cannot, we try all the time to bring down squarespace sites and we cannot. And we’re very good at bringing sites to their knees, to crumbling sites. In fact, what we now do, when I mention a site on one of the shows and it just crashes hard. TV fool.com good example. Everytime I recommend them on the radio show, Bam! What I do now, is send them an email and say, you know, you should be on squarepace. You wouldn’t have this problem! But that’s one, but the other thing you get is also this great software on top of it. Which is always kept up to date, always kept secure, and you always get new features all the time, like new templates. 25 wonderful templates at sqaurespace.com. Click the get started button and you can see the templates you can choose from. These are designed by the best designers working on the web today. And also with the best technology. You can design with mobile responses, in fact, lets click on one, and this is the peak style. And they show you, by the way, some examples, actual sites using peak.

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Leo: No but they do it for you!

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Leo: So no matter what this will work all sites at sqaurespace.com will work on any size screen from an IPhone, a 4 inch screen, all the way up to an iMac, a 27 inch screen. And they look great. They also all have ecommerce built in, and even if you go with the 8 dollar a month plan which is their lowest cost plan, and actually a very affordable plan. You get ecommerce. So if you’re with a school fundraiser, of you want to do a cash wedding registry, or you’re a nonprofit, you can take donations on any Squarespace site, because ecommerce is integrated. It’s all part of Squarespace. Now if you want to sell, if you want to have a real store for $24 a month, unlimited products, physical, digital or service. Real time shipping built into the website. Label printing VIA ship station. Integrated accounting is built in. Inventory management. There’s an incredible developer platform if you are a CSS whiz. But you don’t have to be. You can do everything with point and click. Squarespace does it so you don’t have to become a web expert. You just do what you do. And with any annual plan, you get the custom domain name absolutely free. Visit squarespace.com. You don’t need a credit card, you don’t need an offer code to try it for two weeks, absolutely free. If you decide to buy, I do ask that you use our offer code MACBREAK, because they’ll know that you heard about it on Macbreak, which is good for us. And you will get 10% off, which is good for you. A better web starts with your website. And squarespace.com. Please use the offer code MACBREAK when you decide to buy. Time for our Picks of the week. Rene Ritchie, what do you have for us?

Rene: I’ve got something. It wasn’t officially at MacWorld, but I did find Brian Holmes from Pad and Quill wondering the floor, and he had just announced this brand new, believe it’s called the traveler case for the IPhone 5 and 5S, so Pad an Quill does a lot of, they originally did all those sort of mole skin covers.

Leo: Yeah, I bought one because of you, and I even gave a couple for Christmas because of you. I love mine!

Rene: And now they’ve been working with leather workers in Mexico, and they’ve done this hand stitched. If Indiana Jones had an iPhone case, this is what it is. It’s got parachute style stitching, its hand crafted leather. It’s got rooms for a couple cards in the bottom, it’s got this handy tab you can use to pull them up to easily access them, and pull them out. When you push them back down it lets the camera shine through. It’s got a 3M adhesive, and I’m being phone called while I…

Leo: Oh, don’t answer it, don’t answer it! Its Pad and Quill calling! My website shut down…

Rene: I won’t. It’s available now online. I can easily press the button, to send a call to voicemail, which I’ll do. And it’s just a very nice case. They wanted something easier to use. Some people didn’t like the fact that you had to open it, turn it around, and put the strap over it when you wanted to use it as a phone. So this one is faceless, but it’s still got that sort of old, I just love the idea of old world products, swathing newest, latest technology. So you have aluminum and glass on the phone, been then you have this leather and stitching on the back.

Leo: That’s a skew morphism I could live with, look at that. Beautiful, how much is that?

Rene: It’s on sale today. I don’t have the price in front of me.

Leo: 70 bucks. $69.99. It’s Padandquill.com, normally $80, they’re offering it to you, but it is a preorder, so shipping varies.

Rene: And again, if Indiana Jones had a case, this would be it. So if you like that look.

Leo: Oh I love that. That really looks beautiful. I like leather.

Rene: Yeah me too.

Leo: Tell them to make one for the…

Rene: It’s humanizing.

Leo: I shouldn’t say that out loud…HDC1. You know what’s neat is he talks about his dad, who was a world war II vet. He talks about his dad who carried a leather coin purse, they show it in the video. And how it was the inspiration for this, which I think is really neat. He does great stuff. Padandquill.com, and they have black or tan. I love how that wears.

Alex: Yeah.

Rene: It does. I have one of the bags that they made earlier, and it wears beautifully. He and his wife Carry are very specific about the people that they find to make their products. They’re made beautifully and they wear very well.

Leo: Maybe I should get a bag.

Alex: This is a very expensive pick for you, I’m going to be buying a lot of stuff.

Leo: You, Alex Lindsay? Oh I see, in the sense that you’re going to buy it. Because you’re not known for the inexpensive pick.

Alex: No. I don’t have an inexpensive pick!

Leo: Okay, it’s only half an Alex, Alex, what are you talking about?

Alex: I know exactly.

Leo: I know what you’re talking about, it’s going to be expensive for you.

Alex: For me, because I’m going to be like, oh I need one of those, and one of those.

Leo: Yeah, so what do you have for us?

Alex: So my pick, a little untraditional for a show like this.

Leo: Yes?

Alex: I’m actually picking the HDC1.

Leo: Oh, you are a bad, bad man!

Alex: So here’s the deal, I’m picking this for a specific reason, because I want to talk about something. The camera on this, it’s not that it’s a higher resolution, or anything else.

Leo: No, it’s only four megapixels.

Alex: It’s the most revolutionary phone that’s been put on a…so I got this a little before it was released, and got to play with it a little bit. And then I had to go to Africa without it, and then I realized how much I was missing it. So I went and bought it. So I paid for it myself.

Leo: Yeah, I bought one too, I’m on Verizon and I love this thing.

Alex: So the thing is this is the most revolutionary camera on a phone, the things you can do with it, the things you can add to it. And the thing is, this is to me, what I’m really buying is a camera that I can upload to G plus.

Leo: It’s the computation of photography. The future of photography, I believe.

Alex: And, its, this is, the reason I’m bringing it up on MacBreak, is specifically because this is the number one thing, people use their phone for, is taking pictures. Statistically.

Leo: And the iPhone has the number one camera on a phone.

Alex: But I think Apple is going to, this phone is the Apple needs to step up, and, you know think about duel lenses. Think about, there’s been lots of rumors that they’re looking at that already. And think about the stuff there is and anybody who’s been using the Lightro, the little box.

Leo: The Litghtro light, it only has two focal points, in fact I can show you.

Alex: All I’ve got to say is I took the Lightro to Africa instead of this, because I had to leave it behind and at the time, I couldn’t take it out of the country. And the Lightro, it was really a bummer. It was really like, because the thing is you’re going to want to take pictures, and not all the photos are going to work.

Leo: People are going to think this is an April fool’s joke.

Alex: This is not an April fool’s joke. I know this is the wrong day, I was trying to think of a really good April fool’s joke, but I bought one, so that would be really expensive.

Leo: Well you’re a camera buff, so I think that bears some weight if you say that.

Alex: I’m a camera buff. Well I’m taking pictures of my family, and my kids and I want… What I will say is, that the, they’re not all going to work, but this makes photography fun, because what happens is you end up taking photos, you take a lot of photos and then you’re playing them all the time on the phone.  You’re not playing with them on a computer, you’re not saying, “Oh when I go upload them, I’ll go work on them. “You’re sitting around in a line somewhere with your photos. It’s awesome. And it’s not an April Fool’s.

Leo: I’m doing a full review on it this afternoon on Before You Buy, but here’s a picture I just took at the beginning of the show. And I have to say the detail is quite good, I mean if you look at the grill. The thing is its 4 megapixels but its 2 micron, they’re high quality. And then you can do things like this, in the camera. I didn’t even know I could do this, Alex showed me. I can give him Alien eyes. But I’ve been very happy, I’ve been playing with this quite a bit. The low light performance is quite good because it’s 2 micron pixels. One thing you can do that’s different on this is you can now, they have manual settings for exposure, for F stop, but you can also say this is the max ISO that I want you to go. This is ISO 800, I’m running it turned down a little I think. Actually no, this is 2000, and you can see it’s quite grainy because it’s quite dark. But it’s stealing the flash that Apple did. The two color flash to do white balance in the flash. I’m not sure It’s as good as the iPhone 5S, that’s the gold standard.

Alex: But I just feel like there’s a lot of shots, and if you go up to my Gplus pages, there’s a couple of them I posted last week.

Leo: Have you posted some of them?

Alex: And there’s a lot of shots that I just find as a snap shot it’s whatever it is, but being able to have the nice short depth of field, being able to post it to your blog, being able to post it to whatever.

Leo: Here’s an example, here’s Chad picture that I then de… I just tapped one click in 3 seconds, it defocuses the background. You can do it the other way around, it defocuses Chad, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. It gives it a nice professional look. They do have stupid stuff like stickers. But because it knows the background, it can also do stuff to the background. In this is all in camera, which is kind of interesting. In phone, I should say.

Alex: But it’s the only one, now I’m not saying, I always have an Android phone of some sort that I’m testing and working on as well of my iPhone. But this is the only one I’m actually, it may become majority usage. I’m pretty attached to my iPhone, but...

Leo: You know what it’s good for, because it’s four megapixels, maybe you’re not going to make a poster on the wall with this, but because of what we do, it’s posting to social networks.

Alex: Posting to G plus, or Facebook, or whatever, this is a…

Leo: It’s a lot of fun.

Alex: It really just adds a whole lot of fun to it. I don’t know about that, all those little 3 D moves, or whatever. It is going to be the base of, for all those that work at the pixel corps or whatever, because you can animate pictures. You can draw on it. You can be a whole lot of this should be here, move it there.

Leo: That’s useful. So here’s John Slanina, foreground, and back ground in focus.

Alex: It’s a snapshot and then it’s a really fun photo. And it gives me the look that I’m often times looking for but I don’t want to carry around an SLR, and I can immediately upload it.

Leo: And you can add David Hassel.

Alex: Well there’s that! They really should have a David Hasselhop filter. You can replace him and move him around.

Leo: I’ve been happy with the pictures, I wasn’t so happy with last year’s HDC1. The pictures were not great, this is the same sensor, they’ve done some bad things, and they’ve taken out optical image stabilization. But I think that they have improved the over… I call it pleasingness. So they have added some text to the image. Taken some, I think, the pleasingness of the photo, which is something I now use when I’m reviewing camera phones, as opposed to technical specs.

Alex: Well and again, the issue is I just bring it up because I really think that… I’m really hoping that we see something from Apple that is competitive. They’re going to do something that not only has a great sensor, but being able to do this…

Leo: This is the future of photography. And you know Nokia has done it with the Lumina too. It’s pretty clear that that is where the things are going.

Rene: It’s interesting. Not to ruin Alex’s pick, but Nokia is doing a lot of amazing things with the glass. Apples doing amazing things with the image signal processor, but HDC1 and Samsung are doing great things with the software, and Google is doing fantastic things with auto awesome on the server. And if we could just get everybody to start doing more amazing things in all four of those areas. We’ll have some really good mobile cameras.

Leo: Right. And people point out, oh I can do that in Photoshop. Yes, you can! And there are apps…

Alex: It’s the fact that I’m standing in an airport in Ethiopia and I’m able to upload it. That’s what’s important to me.

Andy: The coolest thing is that the argument against phone cameras has always been that they always limit us to the tiny little lens, and the tiny little image sensor, and the things you can’t do with it. And now all these makes are saying, yes, it would be nice if we had a nice big lens and a nice big image sensor, but now because we have so much processing power, we can fake pretty much any optical feature, that you’ve got in this big honking camera, including automatically smoothing background noise and high ISOs. The iPhone, one of the reasons it does such a great job is it has so much time with the speed of the processor, to take several pictures, and then figure out which one should actually show people. It’s like the chef that makes a try of cookies, and only picks out the three that are perfect to put in the box to ship to people. And everyone thinks oh wow, it takes such great pictures. No, it takes some crappy pictures, which it never ever shows you, because it learned from that and took a much better picture a fraction of a second later.

Leo: That is one thing interesting about this camera, I don’t know if you’ve ever used it, it has 12 frames per second. And then at first, up to 99 shots, and then there’s a button comes up that says, ‘you want to take the best of those?’ I haven’t tried it, but that’s an interesting thought.

Alex: When you take the photo gazo, yeah the issue is you don’t get to shorten up the field anymore, because it’s doing different processing stuff. For me, I’m really attached to the, I’m afraid, I took a picture of my daughter walking through, and I like the photo so much that’s exactly what sold me.

Leo: You made an interesting point Andy. And I think a lot of this is possible because the processers in these phones have gotten so fast. Anon did a great article on the iPhone processor, saying it’s essentially, the A7 is essentially a desktop class processor, and very few apps take advantage of it.

Andy: Which is exactly what Apple was saying when they rolled it out. Was this is desktop class computing. And we’re not saying that just because it’s a form of processor, we’re saying that this is a desktop processor.

Leo: Well worth reading. This is a highly technical article, as Anon often does, but well worth reading if you’re interested in what the architecture of the A7 means. And the take aways are it is a desk class processor, and yet a lot of apps just don’t take advantage of it. It means that Apple can, over time, build in more functionality of the camera.

Alex: And I think one of the reasons a lot of processors of apps don’t take advantage of it, is it’s very hard to develop something that is that heavy for $99.99. So there is just not the market for the kind of engineering that’s required to make it worth the investment.

Rene: Remembering how long it use to take to save an HDR image on an IPhone, and now it’s so fast they just put it on all of them.

Leo: Isn’t that amazing? Andy, your pick of the week?

Andy: It is April Fool’s day, so this isn’t a trick, but I thought I’d pick a movie that was just, a documentary that was just realized today, it’s called Stripped, and it’s a documentary years in the making about comic strips. About the transition from the people who’ve been doing this for decades, who are watching newspaper markets, dry up. Including also the people who starting doing comic strips on web comics. And are now doing some of the most innovative, and popular work that’s out there. You look at the list of people who have been interviewed for this. Bill Watterson, was interviewed in depth for this thing and he liked this documentary so much when they showed him a cut that he said, “Would you be interesting in my drawing a posture for you?” And they said yes! We would be interested in Bill Watterson, who never gives interviews and we’ve seen one piece of artwork over the last 20 years. We would be interested in that. And so it’s a really, it’s a who’s who, where…

Leo: Oh, this is great.

Andy: They’ve got Charles Schultz widow. They’ve got Danielle Corsetto. They’ve got Carl Crushing, one of my favorites. Every single, this basically is a list of almost all of the comic strips in print, and online that I read every single morning. So it just got released today.

Leo: And they’re trying to get to number one on ITunes, so everybody should buy it!

Andy: Yes!

Leo: Today!

Andy: I have bought it. That is my reward at the end of the day today. To get to watch it. But I’ve spoken to people who’ve already seen it and they’re like, “Oh this is long time coming! And exactly what this industry needed.”

Leo: Alright. $15 to buy in high def. or 99 to rent. I’m going to buy it, because let’s make them number one, what do you say?

Rene: Buy it and gift it.

Leo: Well let’s not go crazy! Is that a request, would you like a copy?

Rene: No I bought it and I gifted it.

Leo: Oh you already did! Good for you! That’s awesome. Alright, I’m buying it right now, as we speak. It looks really good. And I’m a huge fan of Bill Watterson, so.

Andy: Again, they spent years flying out to pretty much everybody who had something to say. This this is almost like…sometimes you see these documentaries where it’s like thank god that they got to people and got these interviews before they get too old and they die, or before they move on to other things. I think this is going to be something we refer to back for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

Leo: I just bought it, and now I shall watch it. Today, Goat Simulator comes out! That’s my pick of the week. Everybody should go out and buy Goat simulator. Perhaps you saw the trailer, I thought, frankly, that it was an April fool’s joke. I didn’t believe it was real. But in fact, apparently you can buy it on Steam! And play, have we purchased yet? I thought we should play this on TWiT live at some point.

Bryan: You get points for licking things, and points for smashing things and…

Leo: You bought it? Good man! It’s only 10 bucks!

Bryan: Yeah! You can get a jet pack and go into Antigravity room.

Leo: I like the goat in a jet pack, I think that’s an idea whose time has come!

Bryan: It’s an interesting…it’s funny, the game developers I think, they’re supposed to, they’re like you get to be a goat, lots of bugs! Seriously! We’re not going to fix anything that’s not game breaking.

Leo: Full of bugs! People love that!

Bryan: And you get to be a goat!

Leo: People love glitches in a game! People who play Garys Maud would love this. This is basically Garys Maud with goats. Actually for all I know Garys Maud has goats.

Bryan: It mostly likely, actually was built on Garys maud, who knows.

Leo: It kind of feels like that doesn’t it.

Bryan: It could easily be.

Leo: My pick of the week. Goat-simulator.com, you have to have steam, I don’t know if it’ll work on a MAC, I better check. Steam on the mac is actually well worth getting. If you don’t have it, it really turns the mac into a great gaming platform. Ladies and gentlemen, we have concluded our broadcast today. The April fool’s joke is over, you may now go back to your work. Thank you Andy Ihnatko for joining us, from the Chicago Sun Times, and Ihnatko.com. Always a pleasure to see you, are you going to post some of those John Singer Sergeant pictures on your Flickr?

Andy: Yes! It’s one of my test pictures, and you will not believe the crazy amount of detail put into this. But it’s huge enough now, I’ve kind of got an ongoing project going, I’ve got to spend some more time in that gallery, and learn more about this sort of stuff. People keep asking me, “I’m in Boston for a couple days, what should I see?” And they’re surprised when I say, “go to the public library.” And they’re never, they’re never confused after they visit. They said, “Oh my god, I spent three hours there and zero dollars of my money and it was the best time ever.”

Leo: It’s kind of hard to believe, I’m looking at the ceiling and its…

Andy It was the late 1890s, and it really is the who’s who of whoever was an important artist or sculpture at that time got a commission. I just found out last week that Whistler was supposed to do a huge mural for the big study room, that’s why there’s  a big empty spot, it was supposed to be Columbus discovering America. And everybody else that was of any notability, even the doors, the front doors for this, were done by Daniel Chester French, the guy who did the Lincoln memorial. Because if you’re a hotshot, muralist or sculpture, you got a commission to do something for the Boston Public Library.

Leo: And if you go to flicker.com/andyi, there’s also squirrels.

Andy: Yes! Squirrels!

Leo: By the way, as we wrap things up I think we should go back to our international friendship satellite feed, because. An engineer just ran by! Quick get the astronaut, spit out the satellite dish. I want to thank Rene Ritchie, Imore.com. Always a pleasure Rene, thank you for being here. Thanks to Alex Lindsay, techsupport.com. Thank you for joining us. We do this show 11 AM pacific, Tuesdays. That’s 2 PM eastern time, and 1800 UTC, On TWiT.tv. Now back to the satellite, break time is over! Thank you everybody!