My friend and frequent podcast co-host, Don Melton, has recently updated his excellent scripts for transcoding video on the Mac. He cares about every pixel and every bit, and wants the very best results possible. Based on the feedback to date, so do a lot of other people. If you're one of them, here's the intro from the latest version, fresh from GitHub:

Go read the whole thing, and if you're into transcoding, give them a shot.

Source: Don Melton

Debug is a casual, conversational interview show featuring the best developers in the business about the amazing apps they make and why and how they make them. On this episode Don Melton, former Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, and Nitin Ganatra, former Director of iOS Apps at Apple, talk about presenting to Steve Jobs, web vs. native, implementing gestures, the importance of affordances, and more.

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Show notes

• Debug 11: Don Melton and Safari
• Debug 39: Nitin Ganatra episode I: System 7 to Carbon
• Debug 40: Nitin Ganatra episode II: OS X to iOS
• Debug 41: Nitin Ganatra episode III: iPhone to iPad
• Debug 16.1: David Gelphman on Apple, Core Graphics, and AirPrint

Guests

• Don Melton
• Nitin Ganatra

Hosts

• Guy English of Kicking Bear
• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

Transcript

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Don Melton: I've opened a bottle of 2011 Old Vine Zin Gnarly Head and I'm going to town on it right now.

Guy: Is it from a boxed on?

Don: No, it is not from a box. I'm not an animal.

Guy: Speaking of box, I opened up a brand new box of Black Box Merlot. That's what all the drinking from. I am an animal, I guess.

Nitin Ganatra: I guess you're supposed to be drinking Serena. I mean this is so off topic.

Don: I don't blame the box because I can't fit the fucking boxes in my wine coolers. I have a couple of wine refrigerators. I'm a serious alcoholic.

Guy: I have one of those too. I'm an ignorant and watch this, I'm about to prove it. Are you supposed to put red wine in a wine refrigerator?

Don: You're not supposed to put it in the normal temperature at wine refrigerator's command, but I have one that's turned up to the normal temperature for white wines. The other one which I turn much farther down because I like a little bit of coolness on the red wines especially during the summer here because there's nothing worse than having a wine turn on you. My wife and I keep some of our reds very, very slightly chilled.

Nitin: I love that this is drinking with Don and...

Guy: That's what we were talking about today, right? I thought...

Don: I thought it was all about wine.

Nitin: Nasty, sure.

[laughter]

Guy: Now, tell us about your yacht problems.

[laughter]

Nitin: Yeah.

[laughter]

Don: No, no. You know what? My first boss at Sun Microsystems had his own racing yacht, more of a sloop really. We used to take it out for team meetings on the Bay in San Francisco. I actually leaned how to boat that way. I said, "Well, this is pretty cool. You know, what's it like having a boat?" He said, "Imagine wearing the finest Armani suit, standing in a cold shower, and shredding $100 bills."

[laughter]

Don: "That's what it's like." So no boats, another house.

[crosstalk and laughter]

Rene Ritchie: Firm no boat rule.

Don: Another house is better enough. No fucking boat.

Nitin: [laughs] "No fucking boat" should be a T-shirt. I know.

[laughter]

Don: I know. Have you seen that Internet man with the cat that's wearing the suit, sitting at the table?

Nitin: Yeah.

Don: I should buy a boat.

Rene: It reminds me of "The Usual Suspects."

Don: That's so not me.

Rene: No fucking coke on that boat.

[laughter]

Don: Yes. You know, for some various reason, I watched "The Usual Suspects" again, because I've seen it like 50 times, a couple of weeks ago. I noticed somebody in there who's in the cast that I never noticed before. Did you know Clark Gregg is in that movie?

Rene: I did not.

Don: Yeah. He plays the doctor. I've seen that damn movie like 25-30 times and never noticed that.

Guy: Who is Clark Gregg? I'm sorry.

Nitin: He's Agent Coulson in all of the Marvel movies.

Guy: OK.

Nitin: He's been a director. He's actually in way more places than you would think he would be.

Rene: He's multi-talented.

Nitin: Yeah. He's one of those guys. He's so unassuming looking that you just don't notice, and turns out he's in it.

Rene: He never really used an iPhone, but he's done pretty well for himself.

[laughter]

Guy: I suppose. Yeah.

Don: Did we, unfortunately, start to show already our [indecipherable 0:04:49] ?

[crosstalk]

Nitin: I don't know.

[laughter and crosstalk]

Don: I certainly hope not, because I don't want anything...

Rene: I'm going to edit it in the whine stuff at the top, and then I'll go to the show.

Guy: Whining about your house?

[crosstalk]

Don: Yeah. Whining about my house. You know that horseshit.

[crosstalk]

Guy: I hear you.

[laughter]

Don: Which is, again, why I'm drinking wine this time of the day. But, of course, as a lesson I learned from a friend of mine at Adobe years go, when I went into his office early the morning, we were at a big bug run, and I was trying to describe...I was on the Illustrator team, but he was the lead engineer on Photoshop.

I was on loan to try to help them make a deadline. I went in to talk about a bug. He looked a little bleary-eyed.

I was talking about the bug, and he was nodding and stuff. He opened up the drawer to his desk, and he pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He gestured [indecipherable 0:05:43] with it, and then he said, "Shot?" I said, "You know, Mark, it's like 9:30 AM in the morning." He goes, "I don't drink by the clock."

[laughter]

Don: I've always tried to live my life by that piece of advice. Don't drink by the clock.

Nitin: It's very healthy.

[crosstalk]

Guy: That's right. It is.

Rene: I thought we would get halfway into native versus Web apps before you guy started drinking.

[laughter]

Nitin: I'm feeling like I need to catch up over here. I've been accelerating right now, because it sounds like Don is ahead of me.

[laughter]

Don: I'm already half in the bag, Nitin.

[crosstalk]

Nitin: Maybe I should slow down.

Don: Nitin is on Merlot, and I'm drinking Zinfandel like an animal.

[crosstalk]

Rene: Then again, you guys are supposed to be on Cirò by now. It's 10.10. It's a thing of the past.

Don: Yeah, yeah.

Nitin: Yeah.

Rene: That's a wine [indecipherable 0:06:34] .

Don: Nitin, do you remember all the actual wine code names with the actual cat code names with the actual release numbers? Because I, thankfully, have forgotten all of that now.

Nitin: Oh God, no!

[laughter]

Nitin: I'm sure I don't. Let's see. I'm even trying to figure out now which one was Merlot. Was Merlot tiger?

[laughter]

Don: Huh?

Nitin: I think Merlot might have been tiger?

Don: It might have been a tiger.

Nitin: Yeah. Gosh, I don't...

[crosstalk]

Nitin: There we go.

Don: Rene just popped into Skype...

[crosstalk]

Rene: Tiger power PC was Merlot.

Don: Yeah.

Nitin: OK.

Don: Mountain lion was Zinfandel. Mountain lion was the last one I worked on, but I left before it shipped.

[crosstalk]

Nitin: OK. You know what I'm doing right now?

Don: What?

Nitin: I saw the notification show up on the side, you know, the link that Rene just sent, and now I'm clicking around like a moron trough the Skype UI, trying to figure out how to get to the...

[crosstalk]

Rene: No, they hid it. It's the latest version hides comments.

Nitin: It's ridiculous.

[crosstalk]

Don: The worst thing, Nitin, is that every time you initiate a voice call, you have to go in and figure out how to show the goddamn chat section again. You cannot make that sticky. It's like they keep redesigning the UI to piss you off.

[laughter]

Don: Like I told you before the show started, my sister screams at me sometimes, "Goddamn this free software."

[laughter]

Don: She says I have to keep it in perspective.

Nitin: It's funny. We've been working in the computer industry for so long. I kind of feel like we've been through so many years of working with GUIs and things like that that, at this point, you should be able to figure out any GUI, and you should be able to figure out any app, and things like that. You just run across these apps that are just baffling. On the one hand, I feel like, "Oh my God."

Don: Like Microsoft Word or something? [laughs]

Nitin: [laughs] Yeah, baffling like Word. It's these esoteric apps like Word. But, on the one hand, I feel embarrassed like, "God. Well, if I can't figure this out, what..." Somehow my mom can figure out Skype, and I can't figure out the UI.

But, on the other hand, I'm almost a little bit proud of the fact that I sort of feel like I've kept a little bit of the normal personness that helps kind of guide whether a UI is usable or not.

Don: Yeah. I know exactly what you mean, because a couple of weeks ago, and then it happened to me today, as you all know from the email I sent this morning dealing with freaking Ikea and people who can't do math, I had to scan something in on the Mac. This is the Mac. This is the operating system that we worked on together. I had to use the scanning UI.

Rene: You poor bastard.

Don: You poor bastard is exactly right. It is the worst goddamn user interface ever.

[laughter and crosstalk]

Nitin: You talked about "In preview"? The menu...

[crosstalk]

Don: No. Well, yeah. How the hell do you...? You either go into "System preferences," and you go to the printer icon, and you click "Scan," and you say "Open scanner," or you to go Image Capture and do it that way. Either one of them are just the same path to death. I mean, it's just the worst god damn UI to try to figure out what it's doing...

[crosstalk]

Nitin: You know what though?

Don: It's been like that for years. What's worse is if you ever try to do something like this on this on Windows or worse you had Linux -- oh, shit -- then OS 10 is like a breeze.

Nitin: I was going to say was the only thing that's worse to me, I'm now used to the UI within Preview, if you go on the file menu, kind of close to the bottom, there's the bring up the scanning UI menu item there. At this point, it's sort of like living to a dump. I'm kind of used to it.

Don: [laughs]

Nitin: The problem I have is, that UI is just fantastic compared to any and all printing and scanning UI that's been developed by printer and scanner manufacturers. If you want to see just trash, that's almost the definition of it. If we're recording, please no disrespect to anybody who's developing printing and scanning software...

[crosstalk]

Don: But seriously get your head examined. That's what you're saying. [laughs]

Nitin: Yeah, it's awful. I mean, it's so bad. It looks like it still uses Quick Draw to this day. I never see non anti-alias text until I'm going, ironically, into printing and scanning software.

Don: [laughs] It's like a flashback to your carbon days, right? [laughs]

Nitin: Exactly.

Don: You were swallowing Merlot right then, weren't you? [laughs]

Nitin: I literary actually was going. [laughs] How did you know that?

Don: It's the power of technology. Were you in the exec review when I think it was -- I can't remember whether it was Forstall or Josh -- somebody lost in some exec review, and we were talking about, I think it was AirPrint when we were first trying to do it on iOS and dealing with the printer manufacturers and stuff. The execs were just incredulous about things that were basically impossible because these people were so entrenched in doing it the stupid way.

Nitin: I remember that.

Rene: The printer people?

Don: Oh, yeah. It's just awful.

Rene: [laughs] Someone just flipped out of the industry-wide stupidity.

Don: One of the reasons that printing at iOS, which is still not great, but one of the reasons I think it's actually better -- well, certainly simpler -- than it was 10, you can't scan with any device. There's no solving for that. One of the reasons it's a little bit better is they spent so much effort to work around those things. God, people were not happy when they found out there is limitations and things like that.

Guy: We had David Gelphman on the show a while ago. He...

[crosstalk]

Don: Oh, God. [laughs] What did he say about this?

Guy: The same but he's not as colorful as you.

[laughter]

Guy: At least, publicly. [laughs]

Don: Nitin knows this in meetings. I was actually not the most colorful person in the room depending on the meeting. Although, I was usually second or third -- it's usually second or third -- but not always the most colorful in terms of obscene and things like that.

Nitin: I think that's probably smart, right?

[laughter]

Nitin: You don't want to be the most colorful. You kind of want to sneak in behind your Forstalls and your...

[crosstalk]

Rene: Anyone with an S or C in their title.

Nitin: You're kind of going out on a limb if you're the most colorful unless you really know where everybody stands in the room. It's probably better to be a little more subdued and let people who can take the luxury of being that colorful to take that luxury.

Rene: That's true. Yeah.

Don: Rightfully so. I've been in plenty of meetings...

[crosstalk]

Nitin: I was just going to say that that's the thing is, a lot of times, the most colorful person in the room is right. They're absolutely right. They're talking to somebody else who is, maybe not necessarily defending even something they've developed, but they're just sort of describing how the world works. It could be the printing and scanning ecosystem.

The poor schlub who has to sit there and describe all the limitations around printing and scanning, and why HP wants things this way and Brother wants things that way. The Scott or somebody in their position, they don't care. They're just going off on the person, on the messenger, right? They're kind of shooting the messenger in a way, but they're absolutely right. It's just not something that the messenger can do much about that.

Don: It's not certainly productive, but it's certainly fun to watch if it's not you. [laughs]

Nitin: Yes. That's the other part. Part of it is you're thinking, "Thank God, I'm not defending or describing the printing ecosystem to Forstall or anything like that."

Don: By the way, this is something that I was actually going to reminisce with you about today, which is the whole concept of meetings at Apple. I don't think a lot of people on the outside realize what these are like. We used to complain all the time about boring meetings. Seriously, most of the time what you really wanted was a boring meeting because that means you didn't get shit on because it was boring.

The interesting meetings, what you never wanted to be was the focus of an interesting meeting for exactly this reason. That was just not a lot of fun. How many times did you demo for Steve and things just didn't quite work out exactly as planned?

Nitin: Oh, OK. Let me see.

[laughter]

Nitin: I imagine you did the same, exact thing, right? Was when you know you're demoing for Steve, you run through it. You rehearse that technology to the hilt to the point where you know all of the limitations. You want to be so prepped and so ready.

Often times when you're demoing something, I mean, it's shitty, pre-release software so it's going to be buggy. You're really just trying to get the point across of either progress is being made or...

Don: It's something you would never give to end customers.

Nitin: Exactly. Let's see. I think I can count on one hand certainly and probably on three fingers the number of times that I had demoed just run into a problem that I didn't anticipate or that I didn't know about. What I always found anyway -- and I'd love to hear what you thought about this too -- was if I was demoing something and if I knew that there were just to fall off a cliff here, please don't tap that button because it's all fucked up. It's just never going to work.

Most of the time, the other thing that would happen is Steve would allow you to demo something to him for about three seconds before he snatched the mouse or snatched the phone out of your hand and started dicking around with it himself. So, after the first one or two times that that happens, first and foremost, Greg Christie taught me this one, is do not fight him. Don't try to fight him and get the mouse back.

Don: No, no. It's like I wrote in my retrospective on Steve, and remembering Steve, if he wanted to drive the demo machine, then by God, you let him fucking drive.

Nitin: Exactly.

Don: Jesus, that was the kiss of death. Scott explained that to me years ago.

Nitin: OK, yeah. I always knew that that could potentially happen, so you build that into your preparation as well. OK, there are all the things that I really want to get across in this demo, and there are all the things that I think he really cares about, and then there are the cliffs. That, if you hit this button or if you rotate on this view, or if you do something else, it's just going to be all fucked up. If we can't, during the scramble to get things working well enough to be demo-able, if we can't get these things fixed, them at the very least I want to know about them. I want to know about them so they're not a surprise to me when I walk into that group.

Don: Oh, yeah.

Nitin: At the very least, if I know about it, and if it's not a surprise to me, then I can speak to it and I can at least let Scott, and Steve, and Phil, or anybody else who is in the room, let them know that we're on it and we know what we're demoing here. We know the limitations of what we are showing you, we are not just waltzing in with a half-baked piece of crap and saying "Oh well, maybe it works." Oh, look at that, we ran into this problem, right?

I want to know all of the things that are going to go wrong. So really, when I am thinking about it, it must have been three. I can't imagine, I don't think it was more than three times where I ran into a problem, and I didn't know that it was a problem before walking in.

Maybe that's just because we were demoing things on iPhone, we were demoing things from so early on that I think not even Steve had an expectation that things were going to be working well. So I was able to, at least, I could talk around the fact that, yeah, if you're looking at this address book review, please don't hit edit to bring up the edit the photo you like, because that's just all broken right now.

Don: Well, you know what we did? We cheated sometimes, we would disconnect things, UI elements so they didn't work. It was like a busy box for toddlers, just poke at it and it doesn't do anything, because not doing anything was better than a crashing, because that leaves a sour taste.

The big thing, I've experienced several times where software crashed, you have to prep for it and you have to warn them that that's going to happen. Whatever you did, you never made excuses for it or blame anybody else.

Nitin: Yep.

Don: You just got your ass handed to you if you were going to do that. I watched somebody make that mistake one time, and you know how when you're in a room, and it's really super awkward, somebody has said something stupid? This was much worse than that, much worse. I do not recommend it.

No, I had, I think it was only like you say, one or two times where something happened and my people didn't warn me about it, or I didn't know that that could happen. I've certainly had other things where we've had misbehaviors, or we had the rare crash, but I knew those things were possibilities going in.

My people learned that one thing that I disliked most of all as a manager, and that was to be surprised. I just fucking hated surprises. Not only that kind, but all kinds. I always told people, if you're going to commit to doing something, I'm going to hold you accountable to that. But if you're not going to make it, do not tell me at the last minute. You better warn me ahead of time, because I do not like surprises, because first what's happened is Scott's going to hand me my head on a platter, and then I'm going to go looking for yours.

That's another reason why that was so rare. But the other thing you said was preparation. I look at others, and this was up and down the line, by the way. Preparation for things at Apple, Scott was probably the most prepared person I ever met in my life. Remember his briefing books before the Monday morning meetings, and how much? It's like I wrote that blog post a couple years ago, about after retiring, how Sunday night is a work night for everybody at Apple.

Nitin: Right.

Don: Because it's the exec meeting the next day. So, you had your phone out there and you are sitting in front of your computer. It didn't matter if your favorite show was on.

This was especially worse after the Sopranos ended, because for a while there, you could count on the hour that the Sopranos was on, that Scott wouldn't but you, because he was watching the Sopranos, and that was your reprieve. You could go to the bathroom, you could have a conversation with your family, whatever.

Scott was a late night kind of guy. He was not a morning guy at all, he was a late-night guy. You were basically on until two o'clock in the morning. How many times were you fielding emails from him at 1:30 or 2:00?

Nitin: Actually, that's the interesting thing. The emails that I got, and maybe we can piece together the way Scott actually worked on Sunday from this. I remember, my emails from Scott started about 11 AM on Sunday. If they didn't start at 11 on Sunday, then I always felt, he must be doing something fun today. Or there must be some family get-together or something like that.

Don: Oh, really? Because I used to get the stuff from Bertrand early Sunday morning, and I didn't start getting the stuff from Scott. It was random through the day. But he would always panic at the last minute.

I think part of the reason why I got the last minute things, probably that happened to Henri, Kim and I, because we reported to him directly. He just took an extra special joy in squeezing us. I don't know, and so he would usually, once he was going through Kim's status that she prepared, he would usually hit.

My line managers would hear it from him in the morning and I would get CCed on it, but I didn't get the direct stuff from Scott until usually late at night.

Guy: Isn't that a bit screwed up, talking to the people that report to you?

Don: No, no, I did the same thing. He would always CC me.

Nitin: It's funny, though.

Don: Somebody had written something in the status report or whatever.

Guy: Yeah, it lands on his desk. I guess that makes sense.

Don: Yeah, that's perfect. I never took offense of that at all, and certainly my managers, I certainly hope they never took offense when I would send something, because I wanted the answer right away, because I had somebody beating me with a hammer. I wanted the answer right away, so I would do the same thing.

Nitin: I think that that's another thing that's the difference. That was something that I definitely noticed when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and brought the new, next management along with him.

Before, Apple as a corporation was very hierarchal. VPs would talk to directors, directors would talk to managers and managers would talk to other managers that are may be employees. It wasn't until, this is what I noticed, it wasn't until Avie and Bertrand and Scott Forstall, and Steve, the new management team came in, that you would just get email directly from Avie. If Avie had a question, he was asking your directly. Or if Bertrand had some suggestions on how to implement something, he was just stopping right into your office.

Before the next buyout, it was a rare thing. At the very least, for me, maybe this is where I was in my career. Actually, I did hear this from other people too, that the old VPs, they didn't just turn up in people's offices. In fact, I remember...

Don: No, they were pretty absent. Darren Adler has told me about this many times, and so has John Norochi.

Nitin: Exactly, yeah.

Don: For me, he was insanely useful about learning about the old and the new Apple, because I was familiar with the old Apple as a customer and a developer at other companies, but I didn't start working for the company until 2001, four years after NeXT acquired Apple. John was tremendously useful to me in learning about that. He said the same thing, that it was like night and day.

I was talking to Bertrand about this. I don't know, we were sitting around, prepping for some, whether it was MacWorld or a dev conference. You know how you sit backstage and you're prepping for the show and we're just bullshitting?

I was asking him about the...which is a stupid thing to do with Bertrand, because you lean into something accidentally if you're not careful doing that. But he was a pretty nice guy. I was asking him about that, and he said "It's basically that way because everybody that's at NeXT still thinks of the company as being 50 people."

Nitin: Yep.

Don: They still, the entire mindset of everybody in the management chain was, this was a startup. So, it was very flat that way, in terms of communication was very flat that way. That was quite a bit unlike the old Apple, it was much more compartmentalized, I would say.

Nitin: I definitely remember, in field Apple, being terrified when...One late night, I was working with another engineer. We were trying to bring up the System 7 software on a brand-new piece of hardware that was being brought up. This VP kept showing up in my office every 45 minutes. "Is it working, does it boot yet? Does it boot? Can you get to the Finder? Where is it now?"

Don: Christ.

Nitin: And it was just, oh my God, what do I say? Then I look back at that years later when I go from answering some emails from Avie to talking with Bertrand about specifics around how something should be implemented, and just noticed that huge, huge difference.

You're right, I had heard the same thing from other people as well. The whole management chain, they still felt and thought of it as this very small company, where these communication barriers just don't exist. I think that was actually a very good thing. I mean, it's a little terrifying at times, when you get an email from somebody way up the food chain.

The first couple of times you get those emails, you're like, "Oh, my God! I must not be doing my job right."

[laughter]

Nitin: Or I must be a huge screw up or something is going wrong, but after a while you get used to it. Actually, I appreciated that. It opens communication...

[crosstalk]

Don: It's a real time saver. It creates a lot of clarity, and it actually makes you feel more connected to your management, which is a very, very good thing.

The problem they're having with it now, because I've talked about it...Somebody has been writing about this, in "New York Times," about Apple University. I saw some article fly by on "Hacker News" the other day. I usually don't click on those things because they just irritate me.

One thing we learned about after the fact is that, other than the United States Army, Apple is the world's largest functional organization. Apple doesn't have divisions. Beats may be the first one it ever has. I don't know how that's going to work.

[crosstalk]

Rene: There's this orphaned FileMaker somewhere.

Don: Yes, the orphaned FileMaker. That was a half-division, half something else, but...

Nitin: There was Claire's back in the day, too, right? I think you're talking about modern Apple, post-Steve Jobs Apple.

Don: Yes, modern Apple, post-Steve Jobs Apple. The entire company was run as if it was still NeXT, because that's the way Steve liked it. It's so ingrained in the culture now, they teach everybody that.

Part of Apple University is oddly spreading the Steve vision for how to make the company that he felt most comfortable with. You could argue that that's not necessarily the most efficient way to do it. It certainly goes against every business principles you've ever heard of, but it sure as hell has worked well for him!

Nitin: I have to say I wonder about that though. On the one hand, there's the organization, and there is the structure, and the lines of communication that Steve created, just the environment that he created and worked in. Obviously, there are great successes from that.

The other half of that is Steve himself. I wonder, can you really build an organization like that and have this collapsed hierarchy in some ways, not have these divisions, and have this very functional organization without having somebody a lot like Steve in the middle of it?

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Tim Cook to know whether he thrives in an organization like that, but I'm curious and I wonder, can you actually build an organization like that without a leader who complements that structure?

Don: It requires a leader like that, who believes in that thing. You have to remember that for the last...how long has Tim worked there? It's 15 years now. He learned at the altar of Steve how to do those things and how to manage for Steve in Steve's absence.

A lot of people forget that. There were two fairly lengthy occasions where Steve was just not there and Tim was running the company. The other senior and executive VPs were doing their thing and everything happened really well. iPad basically happened when Steve was away, right?

Nitin: Yes.

Don: Steve said, "We're doing the iPad," and then he was off to...where was it, to get the liver transplant?

Nitin: Was that Tennessee?

Don: I think it was Tennessee. He was gone for months and months. It was Steve's vision to do the iPad, but the actual execution of it was all of us going about and doing a lot of the details ourselves. After that happened, Apple would never talk about that that's the way it had happened, on the outside.

After that happened, I wasn't worried about the company if Steve disappeared. I didn't expect and was very saddened by what happened a few years after that, but I knew that he company could function without him being their 24/7.

By the way, when you hear the so called apocryphal stories about Tim Cook coming to work at the wee hours and staying late, it's not just some PR person, telling you stories to make you think that Apple executives work really hard like that. They really do that. These people are nuts. They are there all the time.

I know that for Bertrand, certainly when he was there, you would never know what time of the day or night you would get an email from that man.

Nitin: He didn't really make it a secret, either. I don't think he slept more than three or four hours a night. He was pretty open about that. [laughs]

Don: Neither did Steve.

Nitin: It's funny. Now, when I look at executives at other companies, and I have no idea, really...because of where I come from and where I've done a lot of my learning, just looking at these executives, and looking at how hard they work, and how they're always on and always answering emails and always working, I only assume the same thing about other companies. I really don't know that.

Don, I completely agree. It's amazing, the number of emails...you've gotten these, too, right? You've got an email forwarded to you that's not to you, it's from Scott, but it's a forward from Steve and it's just coming at this crazy hour. You just know that there's this fire hose of emails that are just going out at 2:45 in the morning, and there are VPs or executive VPs who are scrambling to get answers.

That was just week after week, month after month over the years.

Guy: What would the people that reported to you guys tell us about reporting to you guys? Like the stories you were telling about your friends...

[crosstalk]

Don: That was wonderful, Guy!

Nitin: That we were the best managers they ever had.

[laughter]

Guy: OK. Problem solved.

[laughter]

Don: I have no idea what I told my folks. You found yourself doing this. If you forwarded something to one of your people at one o'clock in the morning and they didn't reply promptly, you got a little annoyed at them, a very tiny bit.

I told people, I explained to them. I've said this, Rene, I think it was last year we did when we were talking about hiring and stuff.

Rene: Yes, team building on Vector.

Don: At team building, I told new managers, when someone came into my office and said they wanted to be a manager, we're going to set them up to do that, I said, "How did you sleep last night?" They said, "Oh, fairly well." I said, "Good! Because that's the last one you're going to get, the last good night's sleep you're gonna get."

You know Ritchie, it's like that. It's a stressful job, there's a lot of responsibility, and you always have to be on. It's not that it's not fun, it's not that it's not fulfilling. It's not that you don't get to work around all these brilliant people, the bad side effect is they're all workaholic, psychotic brilliant people.

I've also tried to explain to people by using the analogy because they asked, "What's it like being around Steve, and Avie, Bertrand, Scott, Phil, and Tim?" I said, "You know, it's a lot like working in a nuclear power plant, but you don't get a suit, one of those protective suits. It's a lot of radiation and you either learn to survive it or you just die."

They are not mean people, they are not spiteful people, they're not trying to trip you up. They're just very intense and things emanate from them.

Nitin: They're intense, they're looking for the answers. You have the answer and you cannot get the answer to them soon enough. [laughs]

Don: [laughs] That is the best description to that I think I've ever heard. That is just so true. That's exactly it, what he said.

[laughter]

Nitin: The other thing was that when I would send these emails out to my managers...One of the things that I loved the most about managers that I think very highly of was there was this balance between shielding me from the bullshit as much as they could, or shielding me from whatever interference is happening, as much as they can, while at the same time informing me and letting me know what's going on and helping me, giving me all the information I needed to do as good a job as I can.

When these emails would come down...and Scott's looking for the answer. He needs the answer and it's 11 o'clock at night or whatever, and he needs the answer right now. If I can get that answer myself without going crazy, without making myself nuts, and if it means that I cannot bug one of my mangers in the process, I'll do that.

It's only in those cases. For me, I felt like it was not last resort, really, it was second resort, whatever that means. If I can get the answer myself, I'm going to do it and just shield my team and let them have a good night's sleep. If don't get that answer, or for whatever reason I just don't have that information, then I have to pass it down and find out that way.

Don: Yes. Sometimes it's like a roll of the dice. You get the email from your boss, from Scott, you would say something, "I'm not quite sure about this, and then you would reply or forward, include Scott so he would get a reply, and you would send it to one of your people. The death was if that person didn't reply until the morning. Then that person has a black eye and you've just made them look bad in front of your boss, right?

Nitin: Right.

Don: That's what I try to explain to people. It's very subtle. It's not required of you, but let's be honest, it's expected.

Nitin: Right.

Don: That's what you have to do. Still to this day, people ask me why I retired.

Nitin: [laughs] Really?

Don: There comes a time when I could actually enjoy Sunday evening in a whole new other way. You've done this. By the way, I'm sure, Nitin, you've been on vacation and taken your laptop, or taken your phone or taken your Pad. I don't know how many managers I've talked to or had really long conversations in email or on the phone, only to find out later on that they were in another fucking country.

Nitin: Yes. Oh, my God! Yeah, absolutely. To me, anyway, that's when it started to feel a little dysfunctional. It was when...

Don: A little?

[laughter]

Nitin: I'm on vacation, I've got my laptop, I'm going to have Internet access all the time, and I'm probably going to check my email four times a day. That's on vacation.

Don: Slacker! Four times?

Nitin: I know, exactly. If I went to Hawaii, I wasn't going to bring it to the beach, but you're right.

Don: But that's what you do!

[crosstalk]

Nitin: There were times when it felt like...It really did feel like...You say slacker and I know you're joking, but I think you're probably also a little serious.

[laughter]

Nitin: You do feel like a slacker if you only checked it four times. If you let an email go from your boss and you let that email languish for three and a half hours before you got around to answering it, "Oh, my God! Why am I here?"

Don: Yes, exactly. I couldn't do that. I had to do something right away. I said in the article I wrote for "The Loop Magazine," when Steve asked you a question and you didn't ramble or whatever you did, you didn't make up an answer...if you didn't know you said that you didn't know, and more importantly, you told him when you would have an answer.

Sometimes, when you would get these emails, what you would do is, you had to be blunt and say, "I don't know. Here's what I'm doing to get you that answer and when I expect it," you said as your kids were begging you to go out and see this nice sight in France, or wherever the hell you were at. I mean, that's just what you did.

I sometimes have young people come up to me today and ask me about being successful in this business. Part of it is just dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. I thank God I listened to my wife when I took the job at Apple.

The other thing is you have to realize to really be successful to a sin. It's kind of a Faustian bargain you make, being aware you work. If you're not willing to pay that price, it's not going to come to you. I hate to say that. You have to ask yourself, "Is that really the way you want to live your life?" It's not like I recommend it, either. You have to think long and hard about that.

I know I've read a lot of studies on how this is a stupid way for the tech industry to function, and that's certainly true. This happens all over, and it's not just the tech industry. I think in the tech industry, it's like on steroids, just because of the nature of communication and what we tend to do.

Damn, there is no way you can cruise through a job at Apple Incorporated. That just does not happen for anybody I've ever seen.

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Nitin: When you were saying, "I don't know and when I will have an answer for you," for me, that was a turning point in when it became a lot more comfortable for me to interact with Steve and with other executives as well.

Don: Did you learn to do that? [laughs]

Nitin: I learned to do that? The first thing, the first step in that education of learning how to deal with someone like Steve Jobs is, "Oh, my God! I need to know everything. Holy shit! This demo needs to go flawless!" That's your first thought.

If you ask anybody who's rubbing two brain cells together, that's what they're going to strive for. They want this demo to be as perfect as every demo that Steve's ever given. If it's not, then he's going to rip your head off. Then the world comes crashing down around you.

When I got to the point where I understood that I could say, "I don't know, but I will have an answer for you by x," or "I don't know, but let me get that information for you and I'll have it back to you by this," and just knowing that that was a satisfactory answer in a limited set of circumstances, that became a kind of relief.

It was just that I don't have to know everything, I don't have to have all the answers right now. That doesn't mean that I can let up on the rehearsals that I do. That doesn't mean that I can't know every fucking bug that's in this busted piece of software that I'm going to show my CEO. That doesn't mean that I can't slack off on preparation or on understanding or things like that. It's just acknowledging that there is...

Don: What it means you can actually swallow your food now.

[laughter]

Nitin: Right. That I can get a couple hours of sleep at night.

Don: What it does is it puts off the inevitable stroke.

[laughter]

Nitin: It doesn't eliminate it. It just puts it off like you said.

Don: Yeah. Exactly.

Nitin: For me, anyway, that was a big turning point was when I realized...In some ways, it was calibrating with the executives and understanding where was the bar.

How much should I have to know and how much did I have to have off the top of my head, as opposed to, "I can go and get the answers, and that's OK." Part of it, probably, was just meeting with Steve enough, or meeting with Avie or any of these other execs enough that, hopefully, there is a little bit of trust built up on their side too, if you're not a bozo enough times.

Don: You got over that initial set of flinching that you did, right?

Nitin: Yes.

[laughter]

Nitin: Or you can hide the flinching pretty well. [laughs]

Don: You can hide the flinching. It was really good for you because you got to see the older Apple and you got to see the new Apple. You worked for Scott before he became a director, right?

Nitin: Exactly.

Don: I started working for him, it must have been one month after he got promoted. So it wasn't that far off that.

Guy: Did you guys ever work together, because you did Mail?

Don: We crossed paths an enormous number of times, sure.

Guy: I figured.

Nitin: One of the first times that I really remember working with you and with your team, Don, was when we were adding HTML composition to mail.app, right?

Don: Yeah.

Nitin: Just working through that. It's one of those things that, it sounds so easy. If you have [laughs] something...

Don: Were you working for Bruce then?

Nitin: No, actually I never worked for Bruce. I was managing the mail team.

Don: Yeah, you were [indecipherable 0:54:12] .

Nitin: Yeah, I was managing the mail team. At that point, I was working for Henri, who was, I believe, a peer of Bruce's.

Don: OK, right.

Nitin: I think that's how it worked out. Yeah, we put in HTML support. It's my understanding that was the first time, of course, that we added just the ability to edit a Web page, which is effectively what you're doing in email when you're composing using HTML. That was the first time that I got to work with a lot of the really great people on your team.

Don: That was a very good collaboration. I thought that worked out really well. Weren't you guys using the old HTML display?

Nitin: Oh, God.

Don: Yeah. [laughs] Oh, God, is a great way to describe that. Not to disparage that, but that's all that they had back then, right?

Nitin: Right.

Don: Was HTML display left over from NeXT or was that done from the acquisition? Even Bruce didn't know that.

Nitin: [laughs] That's a really good question. If Bruce didn't know that, then I feel a little more comfortable, because I managed mail after Bruce did.

[laughter]

Nitin: Before Bruce did again I guess. Anyway, I thought that it was...I don't remember if it originated at NeXT or if it was something newly developed at Apple after the acquisition. I don't think it was after the acquisition.

Don: I don't think so. But it was, very kindly, a big ball of snot.

Rene: Is that the one where it's the text view and you could feed it HTML? Is that what you're talking about?

Don: Yeah, that's essentially what it is. Basically, what somebody did...It is really a marvelous hack in a way. The text view in NeXT step is basically an RTFU, right?

Nitin: Yeah.

Don: It's a Rich Text view. Basically, somebody said, "Well, it's RTF. We have styling and whatever. We'll just overload it and make that HTML." That's not really the way it works at all.

[laughter]

Don: But they actually made this sort of work. You could do HTML3 sort of with this stuff. That's basically what they were doing early on before we went in there and started Safari and WebKit. That's what they were using. That was still better than the old...there was another HTML framework that was used for the original help system.

Nitin: Oh, shit.

Don: That was carbon-based. That was actually even worse.

Nitin: I don't remember what that was, but I remember when we talked about getting our act together as far as HTML rendering goes, that was just a non-starter from the beginning. That was so '90s...

Don: [laughs] Oh, yeah.

Nitin: ...the carbon-based one. I mean it was clear. Even the people who didn't...

Don: For all the fan boys out there wondering if I'm talking about Cyberdog, it was not Cyberdog-based. I get so many questions about, "Did you use any of Cyberdog?" No, Cyberdog was long dead by that time before any of these two frameworks were available.

Nitin: Wait a minute, Don. I'm sorry. I'm just putting this together. Are you the piece of shit who killed Cyberdog?

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Well, technically. No, no. Somebody else popped a cap in its ass before I ever got there. It took me several years to do it, believe it or not, but I killed HTML display. Bruce had wanted to kill it for so long because it was still used. I forget in what damn product. We couldn't seem to get off of that crack pipe, but I think it finally...

Nitin: Was it Sherlock?

Don: It was still in the system. No, it wasn't Sherlock. It was something. I'm the guy who also popped a cap in the ass of Sherlock, too, so we can talk about that later on.

[laughter]

Don: HML was still technically in the system because...I forget for what app but it was still in Tiger. Believe it or not, it was still a framework in Tiger. I think it died after Tiger. I'm not sure. You know Bruce before I showed up. He's the one who hired Ben Holler.

Ben Holler had tried to create a Web browser based on HTML display? Do you remember that? Charlotte was the code name for that project. Charlotte's Web.

Nitin: Yeah, I know Ben, and I remember [laughs] HTML display. I did not know that that was a project that was going. [laughs]

Guy: Wow.

Don: Scott decided that that was not worth pursuing, so that's why he hired me. When did you get disclosed, by the way, on Safari and WebKit? Because in the beginning it was only Scott's direct staff and Bertrand and Avie that knew about it. I actually don't know that Steve knew about it when I was hired. See, he didn't know who the hell I was until probably six months later.

Nitin: You know what's funny? I don't think I was disclosed until relatively late. I don't remember exactly when unfortunately.

Don: Were you working for Henri back then on IB or...

Nitin: I was working for Henri. Actually, well, when I started managing the mail team I reported directly to Scott. That lasted about seven or eight months. Just a few months later, I was managing the mail team and the address book team. Henri took over and was my manager as well, so I think he was doing AppKit, IB, and then mail and address book and syncing as well. Sync services.

Guy: He's phoning it in. [laughs]

Nitin: Oh, my God. Yeah.

Don: Slugging them.

Nitin: [laughs] Exactly.

Don: Let me tell you. Henri Lamiraux never phoned anything in.

Guy: [laughs]

Nitin: No. No, not at all. [laughs]

Don: Talk about your workaholic.

Nitin: To this day, I don't know how he did it, but somehow he managed the sync services team, which at the time just managing the sync services team seemed to me like beyond full-time job.

Don: Oh, yeah. [laughs] totally.

Nitin: I'm sure you remember this, Don. At the time every VP and their uncle had a syncing algorithm that they thought was just the bee's knees.

Don: Oh, Christ.

Nitin: And here they come with, "Here's how you need to think about synching and here's how you need to think about reconciling changes from two different sources." Remember the triangle problem?

Don: Henri, bless him, he had the patience of Job to stand there and listen and nod and be polite.

Nitin: He's a better man than I am, for sure.

Don: I had everybody and their brother telling me how a web engine should work, so I get a lot of practice of the same kind of horse-shit too.

[laughter]

Don: In fact, I talked to Henri about that one time in a meeting. [laughs] We were kicking back, relaxing, so, "You know, this is a nice meeting because nobody is telling us how to do our jobs in this meeting." It was basically just me and him.

Nitin: That's funny. I can't tell you how many people told me how phone apps should work and how an embedded system should work for modern smartphones as well. Literally, I was told in meetings, "You have no idea how embedded systems work."

The sad thing is, they were right.

[laughter]

Don: But it's not like they knew, either.

Nitin: Right. They knew how embedded systems worked 10 years prior, but they have no idea how they should work.

Don: We hired a big VP who supposedly knew how embedded systems work, Zackman. He was a nice guy, but he didn't work it out.

Nitin: I imagine it's an awful lot like politics or maybe like the NFL, where everybody knows how you should do your job better than you know. But they're not the ones who are...

Don: [laughs] I just realized, we're making Apple sound like a totally horrible place to work.

[laughter]

Don: It really wasn't quite like that, because people would run away screaming. But I never were one to [indecipherable 1:03:25] .

Guy: The funny thing is, I think we had a topic and no...

Don: We did?

Guy: I don't know, I thought so...

[crosstalk]

Guy: This is way better, just randomly... [laughs]

Rene: Nitin wanted to talk about gestures versus buttons for navigation.

Nitin: Did I? No, this is way more fun. This is great.

Guy: [laughs]

Rene: And Don mentioned WebKit versus UIkit.

Don: The thing is, that whole conversation is a non-conversation because people are always going to be surprised by...You guys were there at NSNorth, when I went off on that rant in my keynote?

When people ask me, "Should it be WebKit or [indecipherable 1:04:09] ," I would say, "What the fuck is the matter with you? You're asking the wrong question." It's such a stupid thing, use what's appropriate for the time in the right area.

I hate it when people decide, "I really like chocolate, so I want to smear chocolate on everything!"

Nitin: [laughs]

Guy: I've done that.

[laughter]

Rene: He's doing it right now.

Don: So it's a really stupid thing. At Apple, we try -- we didn't always succeed -- to be a little more thoughtful about these kind of things. Use the appropriate technology for the time and what's expected.

Why would you want to cut yourself off for something? People always ask me whether I'm excited about Firefox OS and Chrome OS -- that's a bunch of people who like chocolate right there.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: They're trying to make everything one flavor, and that's so goddamn stupid. Then I hear about last year, the Facebook app, they decided they had a really slow app and they decided the problem was that it was all HTML-based.

Then they rewrote their app. Hopefully, what they've learned after that is they just had a lot of really shitty code. It doesn't matter what it was written in.

If you re-factor and rewrite it, you're going to improve it. It has nothing to do with HTML. Also, people don't understand always what things are good at. If you're going for speed, if you're going for touching the hardware in very subtle, little gestures and effects, and you want to be in the cutting-edge, why the fuck aren't you writing in native?

But if you're going to render a whole bunch of content that you didn't have when you shipped your app or doesn't exist locally or can change dynamically like crazy, or you want to deal with all these complicated secure transactions, why the hell aren't you using the web engine for that part?

The fuck is the matter with you?

Nitin: [laughs] For me, internally, one of the apps that I never understood why it was developed as this native app and it was just staying on the native app route was Radar.

Don: You and me both.

[laughter]

Nitin: It was especially around the time when [indecipherable 1:06:58] , they had a new Radar update every other week, it seemed. Or maybe even every week. There was a new Radar that you had to download and install, and you get this big honking app, it's this 10 megabyte whatever-the-fuck-app.

Don: Guess what? It's a dynamic interface to a big database. Why the fuck weren't they doing that in the web? Then we would have other apps that I could never understand why they were web-based. I was flattered by this, but does everybody realize that the Dictionary app is WebKit?

Nitin: Really?

Don: Yeah. The fuck is that WebKit?

[laughter]

Don: There's no real compelling reason to me.

[laughter]

Don: It's not a native app, that's all the WebView.

Nitin: That's part of what our jobs were, Don, was...In a place like Apple -- and I'm sure that it's true with a lot of high-tech companies -- there are these groups of domain experts and there are these people, let's take the security team.

If you go and talk to them, they will let you know all of the dangerous things that are happening and all of the risks that we're taking with the UI as we have it designed today. If you go to the domain expert for something like security, and if they have their druthers, they would put up fucking alerts everywhere.

Don: [laughs]

Nitin: There were all kinds of authorizations and all kinds of bells and whistles that show you that what you're looking at is a native-hosted or a secured user interface, so that if you're typing in your password, by golly, that's the place you should type in your password, and everything is going to be OK for you.

The same is true with internationals, right?

Don: Oh yeah. I was there one time with Scott Forstall, he tore somebody on the security team, I forget what poor bastard it was, he tore him a new asshole for proposals of that kind. I don't think they ever let the security team talk directly to Scott after that.

Nitin: I think that's the problem, to be truthful. No disrespect at all to anybody on the security team.

Don: They knew what the hell they were doing.

Nitin: But I refer to them, to my own managers as the security Vulcans, because you knew that going into a meeting with the security team, you're going to get back this completely skewed view of technology and how users should interact with a given product. What you need to do, what our job, you, me, Scott, people who are actually tasked with building a product that people might want to pay money for was teasing out the most important aspects of what they were prescribing, and ignoring everything else. Or deferring or pushing back on other things, and looking for a better way to create an experience that was still appealing to users and, at the same time, was still very secure and very stable.

Don: Right. Go ahead.

Rene: The most secure thing is just never turn on your phone, right?

Don: Exactly.

Rene: Moving forward from that.

Don: You want people to use their devices. This was a great lesson in user interface approach that I found from all of these Apple executives, even Bertrand who wouldn't tout his own UI cred. He would always say that wasn't his forte, but he was a big believer...And certainly Scott was, Scott was a genius at this kind of stuff. We need to do the right thing for the users so they don't have to think about it. What's the path that we can go down, where they never even have to know about this.

Rene: Right.

Don: That was always a very, very hard thing in terms of security. To the security team's credit, we're making fun of them a little bit there, but ever time they started to really get this. I mean, they started to really understand this kind of thing and they were trying to do the right thing. It's like a lot of others, it took a while to move people in the right direction that way. I will say, believe it or not, the thing that helped the most was actually doing the iPhone. The reason it helped the most, and Steve mandated this, is I found had to be so damn simple. Mac OS X just owes a huge debt of gratitude for usability to iOS, because we would pioneer things on iOS, trying to make them as simple as possible.

In OS X we go "Oh thank God, let's do it that way here on the desktop and see if that works, let's see if people will buy that, too." Now that Federighi is in charge, I think they're trying to take an even more hold in charge of both, not just because he's in charge, but because he's in charge of both. They're trying to take an even more holistic approach to this. That's why I think the unveilings in June at WWDC were just so stunning to people, in terms of "Oh God, of course that's the way it should work." That's the path of least resistance, and I'm safe, and I get my pony.

But what people on the outside don't realize is how goddamn hard that is to do. I mean, there are just legions of people in offices with very hard walls, bashing their heads into them constantly trying to figure this out. It is really damn hard to do.

This is also why you can understand Apple's irritation and chagrin when companies like Samsung come around and just Xerox what they're doing. If you really want to piss somebody off, that's a good way to do it.

Rene, you wrote a piece, was it this morning? "Samsung Unveils the iPhone 5."

Rene: Yeah, the Galaxy Alpha.

Don: Yeah, you really want to irritate somebody at Apple, bring things like that up. Anyway, sorry I went on a rant.

Nitin: No, no, that was great. I completely agree, and that's the problem is that...Let's see, there are a couple things I wanted to say. One of them was, that was one of the things that I loved about working with Scott, or working for Scott, by default, if you go into a UI review with Scott, he is going to be pushing the UI team and pushing on engineering to come up with the most sensible, what we call "default defaults." Before you ever did anything to interact with an app, what are the default behaviors that it is going to use that you could change?

If you find your way into settings and you dick around a little bit, you could find your way into settings and change it to your liking, but really, what are most normal people going to do? Scott had an amazing ability to zero in on those things. To clear away, if he detected that there was too much configuration, or too much assistance or wizards or whatever the fuck that were thrown up into user's faces.

Don: Never propose a wizard to Scott, that was a bad idea.

Nitin: Those were just bad words. If you say those words within Apple, especially in those UI reviews. You were effectively giving up, you were just giving up on configuration, an app, or configuring some behavior or whatever. So Scott, it was great because, I forget where it was. There was some website, it may have even been Grouper or something like that, where they were talking about Picasso and the 10 illustrations of a bull. You start with the most detailed one, at the very beginning, and you end, the 10th illustration is like four strokes.

But if you look at it, you know it's a bull. Scott had this ability, maybe he wouldn't get you to the 10th illustration. He was always going to take the HI team and engineering to the eighth illustration, or seventh illustration. So you could always get to the 10th, but you were going to skip ahead a significant amount.

Don: Scott was never going to let you be sloppy.

Nitin: No.

Don: Or do something stupid like that. I mean, that's one of the reasons that, it's another reason that made him a great boss, like you say, is that focus. Because this is the first step in making an experience delightful. Because, if you can make it so that you don't notice that you're having an experience, in a way, you don't notice the other things, then the little things that you can do, the little curly Qs, the little effects, those just magnify how pleasant it is to use your device, right?

Nitin: Right.

Don: Because you never had to worry about the other horse shit.

Nitin: Right.

Don: And this was not something that's easy. I mean, it was very, very hard to do, folks.

Nitin: It's a real talent, it takes real talent.

Don: And iteration, it takes a lot of tries.

Nitin: Yes, exactly, that's true. Talent and perspiration, a lot of hard work certainly. But you know, it also takes working with a group of people who value the same thing. If you appreciate the fact that we're all trying to get to that 10th illustration, we're all trying to get there and that's something that we all value. Here's a guy that can take you from the first one or the zeroth one, to seven, oh my God that's a beautiful thing. Now you can iterate, and test, and iterate, and develop from the seventh illustration to get to that 10th. At the same time, that's one of the things that for me, anyway. But I think I can speak for a lot of people who really value what makes Apple a special place. That's what so infuriating about a Samsung is they're going to take that 10th thing, and of course, you can express a bull in four swipes.

Don: It's obvious, that's why it can't be patented.

Nitin: It's only obvious when you see somebody else fucking do it, but it's certainly not obvious.

Don: We drug their ass across broken glass for the last year.

Nitin: Yeah, exactly. Then it's obvious how auto registration in FaceTime and iMessage should work. I mean, these are the things that people kill themselves on, to get these things to work well, or the fallback between iMessage and SMS, things like that.

Rene: Exactly. Great examples.

Nitin: If you describe these things to people, these are just mundane. Why would anybody bother? Make every user on the planet go through these four screens and enter this horse shit, and now you've got a roughly equivalent experience. No, that's not good enough. That's not good enough, and that's the beautiful thing about what we've done in the past, that understanding that that's not good enough. All right, I'll shut up.

Guy: Yeah. So, how do you guys really feel?

Don: I almost wanted to mute myself so you didn't hear my "amen, preach it" kind of stuff there. That also made it a lot of fun working there. I remember when Nick and I were talking about what torment it was some days. When you could actually see something in the end that was like that, you would go, "Damn, we're good. We're doing the right thing." It's also sometimes when people, like I was ranting, I don't know if it is part of the show or whatever. I was ranting about using the scanning software in OS X. When something is bad, we're our own worst critics. We just hate it when we don't quite make it, or we miss something obvious. It's really hard.

On the other thing, I was giving the security team a hard time. These are folks that really matured as a group, in understanding this concept, along with having this tremendous domain knowledge, and continuing to grow that on what's safe. I think by the time I left, they were some of the people recommending "Let's not go over the top here, and do something stupid." That's what made me really proud of being a part of that, being a part of the group of people. Just marvelous people, too. There were days when you wanted to take a few of them and slam them against the wall.

Nitin: That means they're doing their job.

Don: Yeah, they're doing their job. But look at how marvelous it tastes, at the end, on your plate after it's cooked. Try not to think about all those intestines that have to be wrapped around the raw meat to make the sausage, and you had to have your hands in all of that for a while there. It makes it much more pleasant.

That's why you keep doing it. It's really like a drug, really is like a drug.

Nitin: Yeah. Well, and also, so we described some of the bad things, or some of the low points around not really having time to yourself on a vacation, or just knowing that your Sundays, especially your Sunday evenings are just going to be burned answering emails, fetching information, and things like that.

For me, some of the best, some of the high points, some of the stuff that kept me going was the fact that day to day, or week to week, everybody gets new builds. Right? I mean, there's new work that's going on, and there's new features, new functionality creeping into the build as the development process continues.

Because we did have such a flat hierarchy, and it was understood that you could go to anybody and talk to anyone, that was just part of the culture, if something was really, really cool, I could go into someone's office and say, "Wow, this animation that you put in here" for whatever the hell it was, "that's just really awesome."

It felt like every single day, you get a new toy, and the new toy is getting better and better over time. To be sure, there are places where it's just busted, and maybe it deletes really important data, although honestly that didn't...

Don: Like your home directory?

Nitin: Maybe your home directory. That only happened a few times on iTunes.

Don: No, no, iTunes was deleting entire hard drives. It was Safari that was deleting home directories.

Rene: It was your second home directory.

Don: Thank you, Rene. That's very subtle.

But yeah, no, no, Nitin, you're totally right. There were several technologies that were brought up, and I wanted to go up -- you remember migration assistant?

Nitin: Yeah.

Don: When they created that thing? When somebody brought that up and demoed it in a meeting, I was seriously torn between just running up and giving that person a hug. All the shit that you had to do as an employee there...because you have to remember, we constantly updated our systems.

I mean, it was just...I used to joke you would go into the office, get there at like 9:00 in the morning. This was in the day when you could do a net install. Before net install, you had to run down to building one, find Dave or somebody else, and get your set of disks.

Rene: Find Dave.

Don: Yeah, find Dave.

Rene: Just one guy called Dave.

Don: Dave with the disks.

Nitin: I know who Don is talking about.

Don: Dave Carvalho, right?

[crosstalk]

Don: Second floor, Dave Carvalho. Get your set of disks and install yourself, and go have a cup of coffee while your machine thrashes putting on the new OS. You did this every fucking day.

Rene: Oh, you must've loved iCloud Restore when it came around.

Don: I left right around when that came up. But Nitin, remember Purple Restore?

Nitin: Oh yeah. Oh absolutely, that was...

Don: You might have used that program once or twice.

Nitin: Once or twice, or maybe every day.

Don: Constantly?

Nitin: Constantly, even when you're on vacation. The first thing you need to figure out -- for me anyway -- first thing I need to figure out is, can I run Purple Restore over VPN. Because I know I'm going to be away from the office. I want to be able to download and install new builds.

To be clear, this is while I'm on vacation.

Don: To be able to run net install and Purple Restore over VPN. Everything was just peaches and cream, the world was perfect if you could do that.

Nitin: It was so much fun. Honestly, other than the people...for me, the people is far and away what I miss the most. But what I also miss quite a bit, and we've been able to thankfully replicate a little bit of that...

Don: I have a dead iMac next to me. Who I really miss is on-site. Nitin knows who I mean. Your Mac dies, you're in the middle of working. You walk down to building three, first floor. You walk in from the interior, you walk in, you made the hard...

Rene: You find Dave?

Don: No, different person. You walk into building three, make a hard right. There's the poor bastard sitting on-site, in that shitty room. As long as I was there, that was always a shitty looking room. The Dutch door there? You remember the Dutch door there?

Nitin: Oh yeah.

Don: "Oh, my machine has died." They just made it all better.

Nitin: I remember that there was a woman who worked in that room for years and years and years. God, I wish I remember her name, because she...

Rene: It was Dave.

[laughter]

Nitin: Her name was probably Dave. Let's just go with Dave. But I would joke with Scott Hertz about the fact that for whatever reason, he would go down to on-site -- he would have some problem with his laptop, and he would go to on-site.

Don: Scott was always breaking shit.

Nitin: He would just get these scowls from Dave, this woman. She was just never happy to see him. I was like, "Really? Are we talking about the same person?" Whenever I go down there, she's like Johnny on the spot, happy to work, get this thing working. Just going above and beyond every single time I went down there.

So, one time, I actually followed him down. He was like, "OK, my hard drive blew up. Let's go down and talk to Dave and see what she says." Sure enough, we go in, and Scott starts talking to her. This is the first time I've ever seen her give someone the stink eye. She's just giving Scott stink eye like I've never seen before.

Don: What the hell is she doing to Scott? Scott, he's a teddy bear. He's a hyper teddy bear...what?

Nitin: There's got to be a smell that he gives off. I don't know.

Rene: Maybe that was the third time he had been down there that day.

Nitin: But then I swear, I swear, I poked my head around the corner and I just waved to Dave and was like, "Hi, how is it going? Can we get this fixed?" Like night and day, her attitude and everything changed. She hated Hertz is what I'm trying to say, is Dave hated Hertz. It was just a funny thing.

Don: The on-site people, they were saints. It's like, remember, it must've been three years into the iPhone before we actually finally got a real Home Depot, remember, up on the third floor?

Nitin: Yeah. With [indecipherable 1:29:31] .

Don: That's what the room was called. It was called "Home Depot," and god, I loved that. Because you could just go in, and you got all your new stuff, your prototypes. If something was dead there in iOS land, a lot of times that's where you went.

Nitin: Yeah, but the software, updating it every day...

Don: That was building two, not building three. That was third floor, building two.

Nitin: Yes, for any of you historians out there.

Don: Anybody sitting with a map of the campus, on-site, first floor, building three. Home Depot, third floor, building two.

Guy: Don't be creepy.

Don: For all I know, they're still there.

Guy: Everybody is called Dave, but here's exactly where to find them.

Don: I said Dave because I didn't want to name drop her, but Carvalho actually is crazy enough to listen to this. He knew I was talking about him. Not at on-site, at...

Guy: It's my new thing.

Don: Anybody is called Dave.

Guy: At Apple is just Dave.

Nitin: It's better than Bob, right?

Don: Remember we had the joke for a while that we were going to give Scott a moratorium on hiring people named Chris? We had so goddamn many people named, was it Chris, or was it Scott? I can't remember. We had so many people named Chris.

Nitin: Yeah. God, I remember that. I don't remember if it was Scott, or was it Chris though? The only Chris that comes to mind is one of your early hires, Chris.

Don: Oh, C-Blue? Chris Blumenberg?

Nitin: Yeah, exactly.

Don: No, he just left for Uber. Rene, was it Uber?

Rene: It might've been yeah.

Nitin: We need Rene to send [indecipherable 1:31:09] .

Don: Rene was so thoughtful on Twitter. He tweeted this after I told him, direct message, and he didn't give the attribution or the context of what it was about...

Rene: Or the name.

Don: Or the name, or whatever it was about. But he tells me that on a DM one morning, because Rene and I talk on Twitter a lot on DMs, what people don't realize. He said, "Hey, did you know Chris Blumenberg went over to Uber?" There was a beat, and I immediately typed, "Oh my god, I hope it's not driving a cab."

[laughter]

Don: That was just the first thing that came to mind. I don't know why.

You know, I hired C-Blue right out of build, where he had started I guess as an intern.

Nitin: That's right.

Don: So, my group was his first job as a real boy, being a real engineer, you get to do real software engineering. A lot of people don't realize the magnificent work he did in the beginning. I mean, we wouldn't have Java in Safari in the beginning, or plugins actually working, if it hadn't been for Chris Blumenberg. He did a lot of that on his own, figuring it out.

Nitin: Wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm sorry, so you're saying if Blumenberg, if it wasn't for Blumenberg's work, we wouldn't have Java in Safari?

Rene: I wasn't going to say anything.

Nitin: I want to make sure...

Don: It mattered back in 2001.

Nitin: When the Terminators from the future come back, they know who to kill.

Don: Well, they'll probably kill him for some other reasons. But no, it mattered a lot in the beginning, because if you couldn't run that...Do you know how much shit I got from banks about fucking Java and various whack-ass plugins, and how much I tormented Chris about getting all these little things working? It mattered back then.

I was talking about, I was the guy who popped a cap in the ass of Sherlock. There was nothing that would make me happier than to kill Java and plugins, certainly. Or Flash, for Christ's sake. But you have to be real.

That's why, you know, I don't know if you saw the tweet a couple weeks ago. I tweeted a link from a Microsoft blog about them, Microsoft having to basically proof Safari's user agent string on mobile.

Nitin: I did see that.

Don: I said something like, "Wow, just wow," and I put the link. I said, "I guess my evil plan to take over the world worked. I don't know how to feel about that." And I forgot...

Nitin: So when you tweeted that, I thought maybe they would use WebKit, but instead...

Don: Yeah. I forgot when I tweeted that, all my tweets get copied into Facebook. And one of my Facebook friends is Dean Hachamovitch. He read that and he commented on it, and I forget what he said. Dean is just, he took it the right way, that meant I wasn't gloating or anything else, and that I was conflicted about it.

He's just a guy with a lot of class.

Rene: But you're totally paying for drinks next time.

Don: Yeah, I'm totally paying for drinks. But Dean is a great guy. Microsoft is having to do what we had to do back then is you have to be practical about what's possible. Dean didn't write that blog post. I thought they were just a tad whiny at the end, but. That's what you have to do. If that's the new Microsoft, maybe they're getting it.

Nitin: It's pragmatic, right?

Don: Yeah, it's pragmatic. It's a much more pragmatic approach.

Rene: That was definitely...oh, go ahead.

Don: In the early days, I was so afraid any day I was going to get fired anyway. I really didn't care if the technical solution to the problem came from Beelzebub. I was going to use it. Because we had nothing back then. The Mac was like...I remember when Brian Croll started at Apple, he's also ex-Easel. He knew he had such a daunting job ahead of him.

Our market share, the numbers, he would do slides every year. Phil would force him to do slides of the top 100 and stuff. Our market share numbers were not good. They were basically headed into the toilet. So you did what you had to do.

I know in the first iteration of the iPhone, nobody believed we could do a mobile phone, or that we could play in that world. We did some things where we had to make some decisions about compromise and compatibility and stuff. You do what you have to do.

Of course, Apple doesn't have to do any of that shit now. Thank god.

Nitin: Yeah, now Apple is the 800 pound gorilla, right? Other people have to do things to accommodate for Apple's behavior. But you're right, back then 10 years ago, or even longer, it was very different. Apple had to try to fit into a world, fit into the Microsoft-defined world, rather than defining it.

Rene: You had to license Active Sync, right?

Don: Yeah, we had to do that. Actually you know, dealing with Microsoft is dealing with the many-headed hydra. It depends on who you get. Maybe the teeth aren't so sharp on that one. The Active Sync folks were actually quite pleasant.

Nitin: Oh yeah, no. I mean, that was one of the easiest things to integrate for us too on iOS. That was very, relatively smooth. I've got to say, even the Exchange Active Sync, the mobile side of the protocol, it made a lot of sense. It was one of those things where you look at it and you're like, "Well, why doesn't the rest of the world work like this?" Specifically iMap, the iMap protocol, why doesn't it work more like EAS?

Don: IMap is a piece of shit.

Guy: Or Gmail.

Nitin: IMap is insane.

Don: No, Active Sync was a good...and they were good for supporting and stuff like that. We found that to be true -- it's like when the Office 360 folks came around, doing the web stuff, and we're trying to make sure that they could run on mobile and stuff like that, they were real reasonable people.

You know, not everybody at Microsoft was like that. The Office people were a little trying.

Rene: They came around. Only took an ECU.

Quick break so I can tell you about Drobo, smart storage to protect what matters. If you've ever had to set up and configure RAID arrays, it is not for the faint of heart, and it is not for people who are busy and don't have a lot of time, but just need something that works, that's what Drobo is for. It is a storage appliance. It is the Apple-fication of a RAID array.

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All right, so I want to make sure we get to this if Nitin wanted to talk about it. Nitin, that was, you mentioned something about gestures versus buttons in discussions around implementation and how to provide good experiences.

Don: Oh yeah, please, Nitin, talk about that. I'd like to hear that.

Nitin: Oh sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure how much I have to talk about, but yeah, let's get started. I've got my glass of wine in front of me.

Don: That would be your third glass of wine, right?

Nitin: To be clear, for the record, for my kids who'll be listening to this in the future, I'm on my third glass of wine right now.

Don: Good man.

Nitin: At the time, we...now this is 2005 at this point, right? We understood that we had this great touch technology that was developed initially by FingerWorks, this company that Apple had purchased at the time. We knew that we had this great technology, and we had the ability to not only detect swipes and presses, but really, it was two dimensional presses as well, and two dimensional swipes.

Well, actually, am I getting my dimensions right? It's actually three dimensional swipes, and three dimensional presses. In other words, actually being able to actually figure out how hard a press was, or how hard a swipe was. Or what was the stroke that was being performed? Was it consistently pressed for the duration of the stroke, or was it pressed hard early on and then tailed off into...

Don: By the way, this wasn't actual pressure sensitive technology. Part of this was how much surface, or how many points were activated. That's how you could tell how strong something was.

Rene: It wasn't a digitizer.

Don: It was very clever to know...it was almost like coverage area, right, Nitin?

Nitin: Yes, exactly. It was coverage area.

Rene: It sees your fingers that aren't on the screen and it's tuned so that only when you're actually touching the screen it detects it right?

Nitin: Right, exactly.

Rene: It's basically a magnetic field that it figures out.

Don: Right, but it can figure out your touch, how much surface area is on there. It can't really detect pressure per se.

Nitin: Right, it's a pressure thing.

Don: You can interpolate pressure. If you press your finger down, your finger gets effectively bigger on the device, right?

Nitin: Exactly, based on the understood fleshiness of fingers, [laughs] you could infer from that how much pressure was actually applied.

Rene: Actually UIEvent has it in there. I think it's public now but at one point, it was private because I know [indecipherable 1:43:42] using it internally at Pixar to do exactly pressure-sensitive drawings and stuff.

Don: Didn't they do that a few years ago, made that public API, the information public?

Rene: At one point, it was private.

Don: Maybe for the stylist people.

Rene: You needed to do KVO to get it. Anyway, sorry, I keep [indecipherable 1:44:00] .

[crosstalk]

Nitin: This is all lovely. I love hearing this.

Don: The long and the short of it is that we have this new toy. We have this fucking, awesome toy that we could play with. We have this technology that we had never gotten, that we never had a chance to play with.

We understood that we had the screen that it was not only a very large screen compared to phones at the time but the entire screen, you could receive touch input from the entire screen.

From very early on, there were some gestures where they sort of deemed intuitively obvious. Things like pinch to zoom, zooming in and zooming out on a photo.

To me, this is the most interesting part, is where is that border between intuitive and now you're going to put up a goddamn user manual as the first experience.

Guy: I was going to say don't necessarily say "obvious" when you're talking to Samsung.

Nitin: Yes. Well, exactly, exactly.

Guy: It's only obvious once you've done it, right?

Nitin: [laughs] By the way, you'll notice that...

Guy: Discoverable.

Nitin: In the UIs where you can pinch to zoom, there is still even to this day a double-tap to zoom on that point. What I'm trying to say [laughs] is in 2005 we had so many of the discussions that came many years later that I got to see on the outside world where there was this discussion around how natural really are these gestures.

Just because you can perform them with a finger or you can perform them with your thumb doesn't mean that you would necessarily think to be able to perform with your thumb or with a finger. That was really the distinction that we drew.

What are the things that you might think are actually things that you can do? What are the things that a user has the best chances of being able to glean just from their own past experience and interacting with things just in the natural world that we could take advantage of and make it so that they can get some delightful experience on the iPhone?

Rene: It's that debate between direct manipulation of which there are a few and abstract gestures of which there are many but aren't anywhere nearly discoverable.

Don: I really remember this discussion a couple years later when [indecipherable 1:46:48] was proposing the app switching gesture and how we were going back and forth on how the hell that would work and whether people would discover it. That was like the whole original argument on steroids because that was such a really hard problem to struggle with.

Guy: I'm so happy about that app because I was going to try to find a way to do it. I [laughs] wrote a piece ages ago when that just came out complaining that that was a poor move.

Nitin: Are you talking about four-finger gestures on iPad?

Guy: Yeah, if you do the five-finger pinch to switch and the four-finger swipe to switch between apps. I'm thinking about the iPad specifically. It limits what iPad apps can do with the number of touches that they've got, right?

Nitin: Well, you would swipe your way from Fruit Ninja into Mailbox.

Guy: Yeah. I can imagine games really easily where four fingers swiping across the screen is not a weird thing or a five-finger pinch.

Don: You've hit the second stage of this set of problems, not just the stuff that Nitin was talking about. The big problem on touch interfaces is actually the limited palette you have.

Guy: Sure.

Don: It's almost literally a palette, and it's figuratively a palette. That's a real problem. You were in the trenches much more so than I in the beginning. Were a lot of these same discussions going on back then in 2005? Because I only heard some of these.

Nitin: Absolutely. I mean, there were so many...Right away, just like if you sat down with a touch device today and were tasked with coming up with all of the different things that you could do to manipulate the workings of the phone, or manipulate the content that you're viewing on a phone, we were doing that back then and coming up with the laundry list of here are all the different things that we can do and here are they ways that you can manipulate things or interact with the device to better view your comment, or manipulate it or what have you.

Forgive me for using these terms like manipulate and content. I fucking hate these words.

Guy: [laughs]

Nitin: I feel like it's...

[crosstalk]

Don: It's cool. I've heard them so often discussions at work that yeah, I just didn't even notice that.

Guy: [laughs] You need to use something, right? Sounds douchey, but whatever.

Nitin: Exactly, exactly. Please, bear with me here. Really, with every single one of these discussions, it always came back to discoverability. Because a lot of the gestures, if not almost every single gesture, needs to have some aspect of discoverability. Really, because of that, it really mean that these gestures had to be...What's the term?

[crosstalk]

Nitin: Accelerators, right? They had to be accelerators for other well-known, well-understood ways to manipulate the UI. In other words, they had to be the mini-button, like hitting CommandQ to quit an app as opposed to going to the file menu or the app menu and selecting command key...

[crosstalk]

Don: Yeah, but it's a very slippery slope with that when you pass that bit. Sometimes you can't even do some of those things on a touch device without using a gesture -- which is why for example slide to unlock, one of the reasons I think Steve went down the path of skeuomorphism. If you make it looks like something that's physically touchable, it makes it much easier for you to intuit maybe I should grab that thing that looks like it's indented...

[crosstalk]

Don: ....slide it with my finger, plus we're putting out in huge, fucking letters, "slide to unlock" there. Because if you look at the original iPhone from 2007 when it debuted to now, I mean, what do you have now? You have a greater than sign and slide to unlock, and this animation that highlights the letters going left to right.

Nitin: It waits a second if you have [indecipherable 1:51:43] . It doesn't even give you that for a few seconds.

Don: Yeah, exactly. Back then, what we were doing was we were trying to put road signs up and everything, and give you visual cues on where to actually place your fingers. Which is why, also, people complained in the early versions of the iPhone, for [indecipherable 1:52:09] or other things, that we didn't have ways to do things like easily delete messages, or do this or that. There wasn't a gesture. We just didn't know whether people would get that whole swipe to delete thing.

Nitin: Exactly, exactly. Well, and bless you, Don, for bringing this up, because...

[crosstalk]

Don: People thought we were fucking idiots.

Nitin: Right. To me, I understand that there's this big push away from skeuomorphism. I agree that in some cases, skeuomorphism just got out of hand. If you look at Game Center UI, you're like, "I don't even know what the fuck that is. It's just this blend of real-world items with virtual computing center guidance and I can't make heads or tails of it."

One other thing is Steve Jobs has had for photorealistic rendering since he bought Pixar...

[crosstalk]

Don: That's basically the reason. Right there, in a nutshell, it was buying Pixar. Thank you very much.

Nitin: He's had a thing for photorealism for a long time. Some of that is because computer graphics and interacting with GUIs has been so far away from photorealism for so long. He saw that as the Mecca that we needed to pursue.

Anyway, to your point, Don. This is a very important thing. We are now the benefactors of understanding how touch displays work and how they should. Like you said, Don, what does "Slide to unlock actually mean"?

If you didn't see a big gray thing that looked like a fucking button in rails, literally...

Don: Yes, exactly.

Nitin: ...that allowed to unlock your screen, would you today understand that a "greater than" arrow next to the word "slide to unlock" with glimmering animation that demonstrates you should move from left to right actually means slide to unlock? I really doubt it.

Don: In my mind, there is no way that if we had debuted the iOS 7 UI in 2005...that's a big fail. If we had debuted the iOS 7 functionality for apps, like the version of Mail back then, nobody would have fucking figured out how to use it, or the version of Safari with its very subtle "is my finger at the bottom of the page?" Everybody figures that out now. It would have just been maddening back then.

Rene: There is some element of evolution. For example, originally you solve one-handed ease of use just by having a small screen. As screens get bigger as you introduce tablets, you can't reach across the screens. Software has to do it.

You start getting things like consistent back and forward gestures and things like on iOS 8 with messages, where you tap and hold to send a message or to take a selfie. It just evolves along with the...as you wanted to do more and more things, you have to evolve the way that those things get done.

Don: That's an issue you pointed out. My particular team got actually really involved in the iPad timeframe because, a typical Apple, we were trying to do too many things at once. We temporarily took over doing some of the apps, actually some of Nitin's apps for the team. We tried to do it cooperatively, but everybody was just too many irons in the fire and not sleeping enough.

I remember when my team started tackling the iPad UIs, this was a terrible problem. It was like this embarrassment of Ritchie's, almost all this space. We didn't want to do what Steve Jobs would retroactively complain about.

With other people, about taking a iPhone, a phone app, and scaling it up to a big screen...we knew from the beginning that that was a stupid thing to do. Which things do you get elaborate on and which new gestures do you introduce? How far do you go? You can make things larger now, but is that a good thing?

Then, you also have to think of this as in a whole ecosystem, "If we do this for this particular app on the iPad device, what does that mean for the other device?"

Rene: You throw "whether" out of the window, first. Then you move on.

Don: Some things were easier, but the hard things were...and we threw the phone app out, we don't have the phone app either. Mail and Calendar, especially right away, were real challenges to not screw them up. The temptation is to do something completely different because you can.

Guy: I would imagine that you could put the OS X mail look to list detail. What's it called? Master-Detail view? Like the three pane approach. You could probably see that working on the iPad.

Rene: We prototyped it!

Nitin: Yes, exactly. We definitely looked at those types of things. I think I mentioned this in the last podcast that I did that very early on, actually Steve was a big proponent of just blowing up the existing iPad or iPhone UI and just not scaling it out.

Don: Even though, later on, he retroactively said that that was a stupid idea.

Nitin: Exactly.

Don: He did that about shit all the time. It was like about iPads themselves, about big screen devices. You remember before we brought the iPad out, he pooh-poohed the idea!

Nitin: Yes.

Don: Steve was constantly doing it.

Guy: It's just funny. I just love the idea of Nitin sitting in his office with the prototype iPad and hearing Steve, "Just shit I love the idea of iPad" He's, "Mm...I stayed up all night!"

[laughter]

Nitin: Thankfully, we actually never demoed blown iPhone UIs to him.

[crosstalk]

Nitin: Long before we ever got to that point, we were already arguing that, "No. We can't do that. This is not going to be a working UI." You don't even have to look at it, on a tablet or Vector. Just imagine the current iPhone address book UI blown up to iPad size.

[crosstalk]

Don: It would be awful!

Nitin: It's terrible. Nobody wants that.

Don: Scott Forstall would never allow us...Greg Christie would never allow us to get that far. He had more sense than that. The one device that was actually easy to do...Greg surprised me about this. I remember the first happening where we talked about this embracing it, it was the iPad mini.

The reason why it made it easy to go to mini is because we had already done Retina. Essentially, the iPad mini was the original iPad just scaled out. It was the easiest goddamn product to do in one way.

What people don't realize in the outside is how fast we did it. You remember that, Nitin?

Nitin: Sure.

Don: That was less than nine months from inception to execution, I swear to God.

Nitin: On the mini?

Don: On the mini. That was the fastest we ever did a product.

Nitin: I think I was out by the time the mini was even released.

Don: What year did you leave?

Nitin: January 2012.

Don: That was a month before I left, because I left in February 2012. We had already started the mini by then, before the time I left. I know you were disclosed on it, for Christ's sake!

[laughter]

Don: Right down the hall, I was talking to you about it.

Nitin: We didn't ship it, we weren't anywhere near...

Don: We shipped it in fall of 2012.

Rene: It was announced in October.

Don: But the conversation, I remember being in Scott's lab. I swear to God, it was end of November when we're first talking about it. I was, "Really?" That was a whole different problem, right? What you had to do then was validate whether your old UI on non-Retina machines would work scaled down 20 percent.

Rene: Was that on 63 PPI?

Nitin: That was what I remember about the iPad mini, was actually trying to figure out all of the points where we knew in the UI that your touch area was not that big. We were already on the hairy edge of having a big enough touch UI.

Those were the first things that we need to look at for something like a mini, because now they're going to be, like you said, 20 percent smaller. Can you still hit those things? As an example, things like scrubbing within the music app or video?

It's understood within Apple, those are areas where there's very little tolerance for having a much smaller touch target. Can we actually handle those appropriately on a physically smaller display?

Don: They did a stunningly good job.

Nitin: Yeah, I own a mini. [laughs]

Guy: I actually didn't think it was going to work, when it got announced or when [indecipherable 2:02:29] start it. That seems like it's weird.

Don: If there's one thing Apple demonstrated over the years, they know how to do transitions -- hardware transitions, software transitions, any stuff like that. There is no company that is more agile in the tech business than Apple that way.

Rene: And agile at scale, which is amazing.

Don: The only thing that Apple still sucks at -- and they're getting better much faster than I thought they would -- there was a real nabob of negativity about this, was services. They're doing much better on services, scaling up faster than I thought they would.

Nitin: Are they?

Don: I think so. You can't believe how bad it was, I had a front-row seat for the MobileMe...

Rene: MobileMe flamethrower.

Nitin: [laughs]

Don: The failure. It wasn't my fault, I was actually trying to make those assholes successful.

[laughter]

Don: They were shitting all over my apps, I was taking the eye on that. The poor bastards, and Steve really took it to them in a hard way. Those days are behind Apple, they're doing much better.

You were talking about Apple being the 800-pound-gorilla, they are not even a gorilla in this space. They're more like a monkey, but they're a very strong monkey now.

[laughter]

Don: They're actually moving into the ape phase right now, they're evolving. They're doing much better this way.

Guy: Monkey with a whole lot of heart.

Don: It's much better. Think about everything in the whole ecosystem that Apple does better than, say, Amazon or Google.

Guy: Focus?

Don: Focus is one of them. That's why people will be disappointed in some ways with the announcements this fall, because they won't get 50 things. They'll get two.

Guy: People always get overly excited about what's coming down the pipeline.

Rene: There's nothing like expectational debt to make you suffer from anticipointment.

Guy: Anticipointment?

Don: What the fuck does that mean?

Rene: An American word. I heard it on a talk show, it's got to be real.

Nitin: American? How dare you!

[laughter]

Nitin: I should get [indecipherable 2:05:09] some time.

Don: I could talk about Apple all day. I was hoping we would break Nitin's previous record.

Rene: Next time, we'll do a follow-up.

Don: By the way, I was so glad you did that six-hour shake. It really is six hours that you talked.

Nitin: [laughs]

Don: I thought I talked a lot.

[laughter]

Guy: You guys are both giant windbags.

Rene: [laughs]

Don: I know we're going to wrap-up because of other time restrictions, but I will gladly get half in the bag with Mr. Ganatra again and go another round.

Guy: Maybe we got a new show, half the day, [indecipherable 2:05:52] Nitin Ganatra.

[laughter and crosstalk]

Don: [indecipherable 2:05:55] with Nitin Ganatra.

[laughter]

Don: I know Nitin hasn't exhausted stories. He's got a lot more stories than that.

Rene: [laughs] Because you gave him some, probably.

Nitin: We both have lots of stories, maybe too many stories. [laughs]

Don: Maybe too many stories! I know we're both willing to comment ad nauseam about the state of Apple today and the industries. Maybe some crazy people would be entertained by that, I don't know.

Rene: "To be continued," is what you're saying?

Nitin: Don, before we wrap up, I want to thank you publicly. This may be wine-induced, but not really.

[laughter]

Nitin: I want to thank you for giving the company that I love a credible web strategy and a web story.

Don: Thank you much.

Nitin: Initially, very early on, when I first found out about Alexander, it scared the shit out of me.

Don: You know the original name? [laughs]

Nitin: It was one of these things that worried me and I was, "Oh, my God!" I was stuck in the 90s mindset at the time, that, "Oh, my God! If we develop our own web browser, what the fuck? We're not going to have IE, we're not going to have anything. Now we're stuck with goddamn OmniWeb."

Don: [laughs] Since [indecipherable 2:07:18] Ken Case who, by the way, is a really nice man if you ever meet him.

Guy: He's a good guy.

Nitin: OmniWeb, it was a solid browser, but it was not IE.

Guy: Everybody takes your point.

Don: It was essentially built on something that was very similar to HTML display.

Nitin: Yeah. [laughs]

Don: Which, by the way, we came out. Ken is not a stupid guy, he just chucked that shit right away. He was one of the first people to attempt to embed WebKit.

Nitin: I remember that.

Don: Ken is a saint.

Thank you very much. I just wanted to tell you that until I listened to your podcast -- and I was thinking about getting them in the novelization format -- I didn't realize how goddamn long you had been at Apple, and that you had come up through one of my favorite routes.

I love people who come up this way. I didn't realize you came up from DTS like Darin. Darin Adler worked for me, I was one of his biggest fanboys back in the days when...

The fact that you have all that rich history and you've contributed so many different projects at Apple, that's just marvelous.

You knucklehead.

Rene: This is getting way too friendly, we've got to get to the part of [indecipherable 2:08:49] .

Guy: I love you two.

Don: It's only partially wine-induced, because I'm in a lot more wine than this cheap Zinfandel to do that.

Rene: Don, while you are wine-induced, where can people find you, if they want to hear more of these great stories?

Don: Not that I've written anything lately, but donmelton.com where you read some of my past exploits. Or talk to me on @donmelton on twitter. Just about anybody who says anything to me, I'll reply because I'm a whore.

[laughter]

Rene: Nitin, you're at Jawbone now?

Nitin: I am at Jawbone, and the best way to reach me, still, is @nitinganatra on twitter.

Don: As I would do. [laughs]

Nitin: That's right. Don, if you want to go get a beer sometime and talk about MobileMe stories, I'd love to.

[laughter]

Nitin: Because I'm doing something that I'm not comfortable sharing in a podcast, I would love to chat with you about them. [laughs]

Rene: I'm booking a ticket now.

Guy: You can always just stop recording.

Don: It's not like there's a huge distance between us, either.

Nitin: Exactly. I don't know about your [indecipherable 2:09:54] , your other house or anything.

Don: There you go. [laughs]

Nitin: Sorry, you may have to edit that.

[laughter]

Rene: It's the third house I'm editing out.

Nitin: [laughs]

Rene: Thank you so much, guys.

Guy: Thanks, guys. That was a blast.

Rene: I want to once again thank Drobo for sponsoring Debug. If you go to www.drobostore.com and use offer code Debug50, you can save 50 bucks off the purchase of any Drobo, including the new Drobo Generation 3.

Up to four drives, one or two drives redundancy, power failure protection, everything you need to keep the stuff that you want and need safe. Thanks, Drobo.

Feedback

Question, comment, recommendation, or something you want us to follow up on for the next show?

Email us at debug@mobilenations.com or leave a comment below.

Vector is Mobile Nations' cross-site, cross-platform analysis podcast where we talk about the biggest stories and issues in tech with the smartest people in the industry. On this week's episode, Don Melton and Guy English join Rene to get super geeky about 4K TV (aka UHD or 2160p), HEVC (aka H.265), VP8, and the future of televisions, physical and digital media, and transcoding.

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Show notes

• Vector 22: How to rip and transcode video for the best quality possible
• 4K resolution
• Ultra-high definition television
• High efficiency video codec (H.265)
• VP8
• Why Ultra HD 4K TVs are still stupid
• Active 3D vs. passive 3D: What's better?
• Netflix Internet Connection Speed Recommendations (Unfortunately, it doesn’t include their requirements for “Ultra HD.” That’s actually 12.6 Megabits per second.)
• 4K, HDMI, and Deep Color

Guests

• Don Melton of donmelton.com
• Guy English of Kickingbear

Hosts

• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

Feedback

Yell at us on Twitter or leave a comment below!

Back in November, the legendary Don Melton sat down with me to record Vector 22: transcoding video, all about getting the best-possible results for personal use. Don was kind enough to formalize some scripts to help move media from Blu-Ray/DVD to MP4 format, namely, "transcode video file" and "detect crop". Well, Don's now updated both to version 2.0:

• Transcode Video
• Detect Crop

If you have any questions on them, please refer back to the original podcast and show notes. (If you need extra help, we'll be posting some how-tos in the near future.)

Our names are Don, Matt, Guy, and Rene. This is the Princess Bride. Prepare for podcast! Inconceivably, this is the one where we give you our words as Spaniards that we talk all about Rob Reiner’s classic storybook story. (Only not left handed.)

What made it so memorable, how did they get away with making it at all, who’s left, unemployed, in Greenland, and what happens when it goes to 50? (Yes, to 50!) Find out!

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• Subscribe via iTunes
• Download Directly
• Follow on Twitter

Show notes

• The Princess Bride on iTunes
• The Princess Bride on iBooks
• The Princess Bride on Kindle
• The Princess Bride on Blu-Ray

Panel

• Don Melton of Don Melton
• Matt Drance of Apple Outsider
• Guy English of Kickingbear
• Rene Ritchie of iMore

Feedback

Yell at us via the Twitter accounts above. Loudly.

Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, returns for a special follow-up episode with Guy and Rene to discuss the newly announced Google Blink and Mozilla/Samsung Servo HTML rendering engines, and to tell us what us which new bear he's trying to get dancing.

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Show notes

• Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
• Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine
• Úll conference

Guests

• Don Melton of donmelton.com

Hosts

• Guy English of Kicking Bear
• Rene Ritchie of iMore.com

Transcript

Rene Ritchie: The world needs to calm the fuck down a bit, I think. Sorry. [laughs]

Guy English: Alright, this is Guy English.

Rene: This is Rene Ritchie, and welcome to debug. Today we are revisiting Don Melton because the minute after we let him go the last time Google announced Blink, Samsung and Mozilla announced Servo, and the entire world went topsy-turvy. Is that fair Don?

Don Melton: Yeah, to talk about Blink first. By the way, I don't normal comment on Apple's current efforts, policies, and things like that but since Webkit is an open source project, I'll keep my comments narrowed to that. I was surprised it was that particular day from the announcement, but this was not unexpected. Something like Blink, well the name was unexpected, "Blink," who the hell came up with that?

I've really been expecting them to fork for a while. I figured they would fork after we announced Webkit2, so it's not unexpected. They're allowed to fork, Webkit is open source. Essentially, I did the same with KHML AND KGS almost 12 years ago.

It's not that big a deal. To get to it, everybody needs to chill the fuck out, to use the f-bomb again. It doesn't mean the death of Webkit, or the ascendency of Blink, or anything else like that. Some things just got easier and some things got harder for both projects and both teams. I get real annoyed at the press because Blink isn't suddenly more streamlined, since it's left the quote unquote crusty old Webkit.

I can guarantee you code is being jettison from Webkit2, maybe even more so than from Blink, but who knows? It's not that big a deal.

Guy: Do you think that the stated goal was to jettison a bunch of platform support that they don't need and try to clean things up a little bit?

Don: I think that's the stated goal, but in a way it's really about control.

Guy: OK, yeah.

Don: I mean all forks are about control. Doing a big cooperative project like that there's always body checking. [laughs] Especially when you have big companies and big personalities, but it's not really that big a deal. The thing is when you're in the web browser or web content engine business you know everybody after awhile.

I mean I've worked on... well depending on how you count three of these systems, and I know a lot of people, and there's nobody that I don't want to talk to. I mean, I still talk to folks from time to time. I still talk to Brandon Ike on occasion. Mike Shafer even though he's over at Facebook now. I talk to Dean Hasimovich at Microsoft every once in awhile. Hell, he's a Facebook friend.

These things are complicated and I don't want to project something onto the situation that was not there. I don't think anybody is particularly panicked or all that upset on either side. You have to remember that the projects are still more alike than they're different now and they probably will be for awhile.

Rene: Was it a reasonable fear that you know people would wake up and it would be IE 6 all over again and you would have to add special exemptions for Blink, and different code for Chrome, and the web would go back to having isolated islands? I think that was the panic response when the announcement came out.

Don: There's been a panic for awhile about the whole Webkit mono culture thing, and it may be the only good thing that comes out of this in the short term is it calms those people down because you've got two of these things now. I think that was some concern, but let's see what happens. It's too early. Anybody that claims to know what's going to happen here is full if shit. Including me.

[laughter]

Don: The other the thing to keep in mind is that like I said the press that I read about this was really annoying me because you know it's all the, "It's great for Google, it's bad for Apple," kind of thing, and that's kind of horseshit. It cuts both ways. Google is not going to have the crew that started Webkit.

They don't have Maciej Stachowiak, David Hyatt or Darin Adler, that are still working on Webkit. They don't have Adele Peterson, Sam Weinig or Jeff Garret. Those are kinds of things that they miss, too. They don't have the other resources. Apple's not going to have, obviously, some of their people and some of the other things, but it's not death. It's OK.

Guy: You feel it got spun into being a massive corporate kind of battle...

Don: Yeah, it's not really that big a deal. It's big corporations, and I think when you work on Webkit, you try to ignore that as much as possible. If you talk to some of the Webkit and Blink people, probably, dealing with W3C and other organization's more of a hassle that that, that's always been a headache over the years.

Rene: You're basically telling the kids that mommy and daddy won't live together anymore, but everything's still going to be OK?

Don: The thing is they're still going to have to live together. If you think that if Apple does a security patch in a piece of code that it needs to be shared, fixes some bug. You don't think Google is not going to go over and figure out what the div is patch and put that in. They're going to have to do that kind of work. They're going to have to work together and talk to each other still for that kind of thing, and it goes both ways.

If Google comes up with something in a piece of shared code they used to have, and Apple thinks that would be useful, the Apple guys...It's not just the Apple guys. There are lots of other people besides Apple working on Webkit, and there are other people besides Google working on Blink. Maybe, this is something that doesn't completely last.

There have been times when projects have forked and they've come back together. Who knows. One of the more interesting announcements was Servo. I wasn't quite expecting that.

Rene: Apparently, from the rumors at least, that was deliberately done right in front of Blink just to get out ahead of them. It was interesting.

Don: [laughs] If [indecipherable 7:55] , I would have done that...

[laughter]

Don: ...to get everybody distracted. They needed some press there. It's a...

[crosstalk]

Guy: What do we know about Servo? It's a whole new thing.

Don: Nothing. It that they're wanting to go out and rewrite their engine, and use the new language that they've been working on for several years called Rust to rewrite the engine. They're not rewriting everything in Rust. They're rewriting the core. They're essentially rewriting large parts of Gecko in Rust.

I don't think they're rewriting everything. I think it would probably be crazy to rewrite everything. I'm not sure. One of the reasons they said they needed to use Rust was for performance. I'm not quite buying that because C++ seems to have been working fine for Webkit and the LLVM Teams for years. I'm not buying that.

Guy: The other one was they said security, too, right?

Don: Yeah. I don't know why the language really...You can write secure code in COBOL.

Guy: [laughs] I think it has affordances that makes it easier to avoid buffer overruns and the basic stuff.

Don: That kind of stuff, yeah. We investigated things like that at Apple. You have to be very careful with that, because you can also introduce tremendous performance penalties if you try to do it in a generalized way in places where you don't actually need it. You want to focus on where the real problems are, so you have to be careful with that.

Rewriting an engine from scratch is not always wise. When we started Safari in Webkit, I didn't want to rewrite the engine from scratch. I knew that they would fire me before I was able to get something done. That's why I used something off the shelf. We eventually rewrote it. People don't realize is that WebKit has being rewritten multiple times. It's always rewritten, refactored, [laughs] and redone.

It's a subtle thing that the WebKit team has always been doing. That's why it's so up-to-date and cool, because it's always being reengineered. But it's done in small chunks, carefully.

Guy: I does seem a little foolhardy to just publicly say that you're going to be writing an engine with a new language. It's biting off a lot to chew.

Don: Props to them for having the stones to do it, if they can pull it off.

Rene: Yeah. I think the Samsung angle is really interesting here too, because they do Android, but they used to do Bada, now they're doing Tizen on the side. They have the Android browser, and the Chrome browser, but now they're doing Servo on the side.

Don: Samsung, I cannot figure out. It seems to me that there's somebody with a magic eight ball over there, just rotating it and trying to figure out technology choices, at least for software. Software, I can't figure out what the hell they're doing.

Guy: Yeah, I don't understand them at all. They're making money, so [indecipherable 11:32] , but I still don't understand what their thinking is.

Don: In the mobile space, it's basically the two people making money on hardware are Apple, who makes the most, and then Samsung, and nobody else [laughs] makes really any money these days to speak of. Hey, maybe they're up to something...

Guy: So did Gecko need it? Sorry, go ahead.

Don: I'm sorry, maybe they'll pull this off, who knows. Best of luck to them. I know some of the people over there working on that. They're good people, they're smart people.

Guy: That's certainly an interesting direction to go in, rather than just grabbing off-the-shelf stuff, trying to actually roll your own. It's an interesting play for them.

Don: Yeah. Being a Web engine geek, I'm sure I'll download it, try to compile it, and stuff like that, like I do occasionally when the fit hits me for other things and see what's happening. You know running WebKit nightlies and stuff, I've done that for years to keep appraised of what's going on, and to nag people I know about some bug or something else that I've had.

I do that for lots of other projects, just hobbies, but it goes back to having the superpowers. As a geek, you can do that stuff. I do not recommend this for other people. [laughs]

Guy: The nightlies aren't for everybody?

Don: No, WebKit nightlies are very, very stable, but I don't recommend them for everybody. I think a lot of people who run them are actually not the developers. The code developers there are website developers, content developers, who run the nightlies. I think that's actually a really good thing, because that's especially who you want feedback from.

Guy: Yeah, good valid testing.

Don: You need to listen to those people.

Guy: Is that true for Servo? Is this Servo public at all yet or is it just a name?

Don: I have no idea, I haven't looked yet. I'm waiting until I see something on Hacker News, and like, "Oh, OK. I'll go..."

Guy: Yeah, exactly. It seem like...

Don: That's what everybody does, right?

[laughter]

Don: Anyway, the sure thing is, everybody calm down about WebKit and Blink and let the teams do their jobs, Servo is interesting, and best of luck with that.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Yeah, they're all going to work. There's not a...

Guy: I don't think we're going to get back to the time where the Web is so bifurcated between totally different engines. I don't think it's in anybody's best interesting.

Don: It's not the engines we should be worrying about with the Web. It's co-opting the Web in other ways, it's what we should be worrying about. If governments take over essential services and technologies, that's when you worry, because governments always know what they're doing. That's the kind of crap I worry about.

But this...these little pissing contests between engines and other stuff like that, or supposed pissing contests, because there's not really that kind of thing going on. For example, I know some of the people in the Blink team. Some of those guys, I hired, either at Netscape, at least one at Apple, one over there. These are nice people. They're not jerks...

Guy: Yeah. I don't think this needs to be a consumer level conflict, necessarily. It's just the way the code is going, and it makes sense to split it down the middle and go in different directions.

Don: Yeah, we'll see what they come up with, and yeah, whatever.

[crosstalk]

Guy: I love that this is the big news and you're just bored by it.

Don: No. As you said, that was several weeks ago. But my attention [laughs] span is very short, anyway.

Guy: It should be, because it's certainly not now.

Don: The thing to do is that a year from now I have a retrospective and, say, we still don't know [indecipherable 16:38] .

Guy: Yeah, and even a year from now, I can't see, anything huge. Like what? Like and extra [indecipherable 16:48] .

Don: I think a year from now...I think the projects are still going to be very similar. It's not that big a deal.

Guy: It seems like a huge codebase and it would take a long time to go in a radically different direction. Not only that, but the goal is to render everything the same anyway, so from a user's perspective, I don't see this being such a big deal.

Don: No, from the user's perspective it could be an improvement because of competition. Look at what happened when we came out with WebKit and Safari. I talked about this during my talk at Google, how we made Safari fast. We started the second browser war, it was a performance war. That was just better for everybody.

Guy: Yeah. When you're building this, you're making decisions. You're like, "This is the way we're going to go," and any one of those decisions might have gone either way. With WebKit and Blink, you get a bit of an A/B test. You can try different approaches.

Don: Right, and there's competition among teams. There certainly always has been. Remember the ACID test, the silly ACID test, that even Hicks says that they're silly. There's competitions between all the different browser teams to try to get the best scores on that. Some of that was just nonsensical, but in other ways, it improved everybody's engine. It's a shame that there's not going to be an Opera engine anymore.

Guy: Yeah, I forgot about that fellow. Poor Opera, man. What happened there? They decided to go with Blink?

Rene: Ice and Blink.

Guy: Well, they've decided to go with Chromium. What I get is they're really choosing is Chromium because they needed a GUI because they were not only letting go of members of the core team, they were letting go of members of UI team and stuff like that. They needed a project that was a browser too.

They'll naturally follow the Blink path rather than the straight WebKit path because they need GUI. I mean, Apple does not open source Safari.

Guy: That's a shame. I know they had weird, spotty support at times, but I like having that sort of biodiversity.

Don: Oh yeah. You know I'm a browser geek, so I have every browser ever made. I usually have...Let me go into Launchpad here. On my top row in Launchpad, I've got Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera right up there.

Then I got VMware, so I can run, not VMware, VirtualBox, so I can run multiple versions of Internet Explorer. I got a simulator around here somewhere, so I can run the older versions of stuff just when I get nostalgic.

Guy: You have some browser cred is what you're trying to say.

Don: That's like being a browser fanboy, that doesn't mean cred. But a lot of content developers have that same thing. I've had that for years for testing purposes and stuff.

Guy: You mentioned breifly, but you were in Dublin for the Úll conference recently. You've got to talk about making Safari faster.

Don: Actually, it's pronounced "ul." Not "yul," "ul." I got dope slapped for that a couple of times at Úll conference. It was the best conference ever. Let me tell you, it was fantastic. The hosts, Paul Campbell and Dermot Daly, are just wonderful people.

They put together this conference that's not only wonderful for all the speakers but wonderful for all the attendees. If I was a sponsor of the conference, I think for the sponsors too. It was fantastic to go to Dublin, I'd never been to Dublin, and to meet all those wonderful people and listen to just some amazing folks.

I met Matt Gemmell and his silky smooth Scottish voice. I told Matt that I wish I could bottle that voice and take it back to America. I got to meet Gruber finally in person, he's hysterical, along with my old friend Michael Lopp, and Horace Dediu, and Michael Johnson, Dr. Wave, from Pixar. I got to have dinner with them and Neven Mrgan.

Guy: Neven's great too.

Don: Horace is a brilliant man. We were in the...I think it was one of the breaks in the afternoon. In this session, we were all in this pub. I think it was one of the pub sessions that was sponsored by either Dropbox or Github.

We're standing there next to the bar interfering with other people's ability to get Guinness [indecipherable 22:31] . Horace would say things and would talk about the industry and say, "Anyway, that's my theory. What do you think Don?" I was getting the point, and I was just joking with him and I was saying, "Damn it, Horace! You're right once again." At least in my opinion, he is a brilliant guy.

Of course, Michael Johnson, he's got so many stories from Pixar. He and I had probably, between the two of us, some of the best Steve Jobs stories there. We actually were to of the people, as we were both joking, we were two of the people who, Steve actually knew our names which was a good thing and a bad thing.

[laughter]

Don: Other people there, Jamiee Newberry from Black Pixel, she was great. Charles Perry, a guy I never heard of from the company called Leaf Hut Software. He did this talk on accessibility. Oh my God, It's the best talk on accessibility I've ever heard.

Guy: Yeah, I think that's an overlooked technology at times. I'd like more attention payed to that.

Don: Of course, Jim Dalrymple was there. He talked about, I think in his podcast last week, about his "panel discussion" he had with Dave Wiskus and Kyle Neath which was not a panel discussion at all. It was a performance.

They went out and set Dave and Kyle and one of the other people, I forget who it was, were introduced by, I think it was Durment, sat on these stools as if they were going to do a panel discussion. Then they said, "Here's Jim Dalrymple," and he walks out with a guitar. The panel was actually a band.

They did 12 cover tunes, all the original songs of course which are in my iTunes playlist, I don't know about your...classic kind of rock, Led Zep, AC/DC, Nirvana, and stuff like that. It was great stuff. Then an original composition by Jim, that was fantastic.

Guy: Sounds like it was a blast.

Don: Yeah, the people there were great. I got to meet the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He's hysterical. I had to practice pronouncing his name, spelled N-A-O-I-S-E. I guess it's pronounced "Neesha." My new friend, Oisín Hurley, he was one of the sponsors and his buddy, Barry Scott, from Converser. Oisín's name is spelled O-I-S-I-N. Gaelic, it's hard.

[laughter]

Guy: It's not even a word. It's not a name? It's not even a word.

Don: What you learn to do is you have another Guinness. Let me tell you, if you go to Dublin, if you go to Ireland, you need to have a Guinness because when I went to Dublin and I drank my first Guinness, and not my only Guinness let me tell you, it made every Guinness I've had in the States taste like piss. You know what they say, "It doesn't travel well," and they're right.

My wife went with me. We went to St. James's Gate Brewery for the tour which was fantastic and had one each poured for us up in the Gravity Bar up on the, I don't know, seventh or eighth story, where you can overlook Dublin, fantastic view. It was like this marvelous beer milkshake. Oh, my God!

Guy: [laughs] That sounds great. I got to go there. I'll try to go next year.

[crosstalk]

Guy: Don't worry. They'll put in a good word for you.

[laughter]

Don: Paul Derman! I love you guys. No, seriously, they're really fantastic.

Guy: You gave a talk about speeding up Safari. Do you want us the gist of it?

Don: It was a bit of history about how we made Safari fast. One of my jokes in the talk was, we made it fast by making it slow first. [laughs] Fortunately too slow. Why I wanted to do the talk is I wanted to delve into a bit of history, and inside baseball for people, because they seemed to enjoy that, and things that they may not have heard, that nobody had ever heard, as far as I know, outside of the fruit company.

Outside of my little sessions, I would do at Apple in my department...The new people in the department would sometimes say, "Gramps, tell us a story. Something about back when you and Al Gore invented the Internet."

Guy: You'd sit around the campfire in the office?

Don: Yeah, pretty much. Around the couches and stuff like that. I would tell stories, usually with Darin Adler hanging around too because Derin's got...Hell, he's got even more stories than I do in a way because he was back at Apple back in the late '80s and early '90s. He and I would have dueling bullshit going on sometimes. That was a lot of fun.

We, as you well know from talking to me, he and I could both talk for hours, so a lot of fun. The new folks would actually listen and were semi-respectful. Hopefully, they'll learn something from those talks. I'm hoping they make a lot of stories of their own now. That's what they're doing.

Guy: I'm sure that's happening. It's the way things go, right?

Don: Yeah.

Guy: What was the gist? What's the take away from your talk?

Don: Well, the gist was that...What the hell? I had my speech laying here. I'll just get out my notes. The gist of it was, I asked, at the end after I told the background story was, "What do you want to learn from this?" It's real simple principles that a lot of people know is you set the bar high and performance. You don't optimize ahead of time. You measure first.

This is something people always do wrong. You focus on the bottlenecks, and you just lather, rinse, repeat that. You make sure over time you add metrics. You never ever regress, ever, never. Did I say never? You never ever...

Guy: I think that's the big one.

Don: The other one is you make it your religion. Dante's sixth, not the seventh, circle of hell, it's good to be precise, has a place for people who invent their own religion. I'll probably be there right next to L. Ron Hubbard one day.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I told a thing at the conference. I said, "Some teams out there like to have a performance month at the end of their projects." After they have an 18-month project and they have a performance month where they focus on performance before they ship, and we used to joke on the Safari team, we have perform months too, 12 times a year.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Either you make it your religion, and you get serious about it, or you're not really focused on performance.

Guy: Yeah. When I worked on games, obviously performance is an issue, and so often, before some big milestone, there would just be a giant push to try to get everything performing well. It just felt like exactly the wrong thing to be doing. We should be more conscientiously keeping the frame rates up and keeping the times down.

Don: Yeah. [indecipherable 31:29] all the time.

Guy: Throughout the entire process.

Don: Yeah, yeah, that's what we learned. That's what the object lesson from the...The joke I made, it's how did we make Safari fast, well we made it really slow first. It was my fault. We took our eye off the ball. I was so focused in the beginning of the project, just getting that bear to dance that I was unaware that it was shuffling across stage, not dancing. We fixed that.

Guy: OK. [laughs] One interesting thing about Web engines is that the content isn't under your control.

Don: Oh. Interesting is not that's the word that I used for that.

[laughter]

Guy: What's your word, Don?

Don: That's like the Chinese [indecipherable 32:18] we live in interesting times.

Guy: [laughs] Exactly. What's your word? You can be as impolite as you like.

Don: O God, that would take more that the [indecipherable 32:33] .

Guy: [laughs] It's difficult to make something perform when you don't control the input, or you have no hope of controlling the input at all.

Don: Right. You have to realize that you have to approach a Web engine the way you would approach a operating system. It's almost as complex. Very, very close. People will do crazy-ass things with your APIs. You have to keep that in mind. That's why, when I said Webkit nightlies, I'm always delighted when I hear content developers are out there using it. I was like, "Yes! Yes! Please do that!"

Because if you notice something stupid in terms of capabilities, breakage, or, more importantly, performance on your site, we always encourage a lot of the big JavaScript framework folks, "Please use the WebKit nightlies, and tell us if you notice something going south right away," because one, we'll fix it, and two, we'll figure out a way to turn that into a test, another metric, because a lot of those systems are so complex they're very hard to test.

Guy: Was that something new that you...When you were at Netscape, did you guys do a bunch of tests all the time? Did you have a test suite and did you do the time test suite, the similar stuff that you do in Safari?

Don: It was not as rigorous back then as I'm sure the Mozilla team is doing now. They're much more rigorous now. Because after WebKit debuted and Safari really shot up there in terms of performance compared to other browsers and people were publishing stats on that, the Mozilla team had their "come to Jesus" moment and they really got serious about performance, too.

They adopted a lot of the same techniques and they developed other things. Especially the Mozilla conformance test, they're open-source, so everybody uses those. Some of the ones that we have, they use, because they're open-source. They do that now, but back in the old days, we didn't really have criteria before shipment, we didn't have policies during development that prevented regressions. We were not as focused on that.

Guy: How does that work at a mechanical level? There's a check-in, then there's an automated test that runs, and if the timing is slower, then the check-in is just rejected, somebody gets an angry email, or what?

Don: It's usually an angry email and then a club. [laughs] In the beginning, what I was talking about, my talk, when we discovered the sloth and stuff, we didn't have the automated test on Safari in the beginning. We had a testing harness that Ken Kocienda wrote, God bless him, and that we were able to use.

But it was very hard to get consistent results from it, because you're testing the network, the IO, and other things. Believe it or not, I was one of the few people on the team who could actually run the damn test and get consistent results. I used to aggravate the engineers.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Being able to do that calls for this anal retentive psychosis.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: That's just perfect for me. In another life, I was a QA engineer. I run the tests, and if I detected we were slower, I closed the tree. That was the beginning of my policy, that policy that I pulled out of my hiney. Boy, talk about making yourself popular on your team doing that!

Guy: [laughs] Let's say you'd literally lock down any other commit until the speed was up?

Don: The engineers, at first, were like, "Why are you locking everybody out?" I was like, "Prove to me that it was just one check-in that's the failure. Unless we know what the problem is, I don't want anybody adding to the noise. I don't want to give up any gains." Why would you give up a gain? Never regress.

The thing is, with a no regressions policy...By the way, the engineers balked at first, but they very quickly, to their credit, the team, totally got it. They're carrying on in my place now. It's jihad now over there. They totally get it. The thing that we found out from the no regressions policy is, even if you're not focused on performance and you're just checking, making check-ins on other things, but you never regress performance, dumb luck...

Guy: [laughs]

Don: ...will make you faster. Entropy will make you faster. You're going to get gains not even trying. Why would you ever regress? That's crazy. Don't give up ground on good fortune. You're winning the lottery there. Maybe one percent, but one percent is one percent. If you could measure it and repeat it, well, ka-ching!

That's money in the bank. You certainly never want to give up gains on hard work. That's just crazy.

Guy: How do you balance that with...Let's say there's a certain CSS feature that you need to implement, but...

Don: That's a story in my talk right there. That's a great example. When Dave Hyatt, the brilliant Dave Hyatt, shortly after he joined the team, we noticed that...He noticed because he's much smarter than the rest of us, and he was the first person on the team that really allowed us to actually spank KHTML, because I had the rest of the engineers focused on making everything around the engine actually work until they got enough domain knowledge to go in and actually change things.

But Dave had been working on Web engines at Mozilla for a while, so he had the experience. He came in and, first things he started on, because he joined the project a year in, was that KHTML was really awful at DOM whitespace handling at the time. This would mean you would get an incorrect DOM being created, and it was causing all sorts of compatibility problems.

Dave worked on this huge patch for over a week, and we really needed this correctness improvement. He told me he was working on this and I thought it was a great idea. He came to me and said, "OK, the patch is ready." I said, "OK, what's the performance impact? How did you test?"

We put it on the scope, and it was eight percent slower. [laughs] I was like, "We really need this feature, Dave, but you can't check it in." [laughs] He was like, "But it's doing so much more work!" because it was doing a lot more measurements and stuff like that, and, "It has more features."

I would hear that thing from people over the years, and I was like, "Nope. Find a way to make it faster." He grumbled at first, but he went away for a few days and he came back with another version of it that was one percent faster than what was in the tree. He made a nine-percent improvement and posted on the line. Not only do we get the new feature, but we get a one-percent performance improvement.

That's what you do. You never regress. When I hear about people that are, "Well, it's doing all this extra stuff..." Now, you have to be very, very careful about what your metrics are, what your benchmarks are, upfront.

Guy: I was just going to ask that.

Don: Yeah. You don't want to bite yourself in the ass later on. Engineers have learned showing me demos of little things that they're working on at that time, not just showing me something that's really performing because it's not using real data or not connecting over the network, not a simulation, because if they show me the real thing after that and it's slower, that, I don't like it. Don't show me that's not going to be the real behavior, because that's going to make me angry.

Guy: [laughs] Yeah, I think that's a good point about the metrics. If you're not measuring the right thing, then this Middle Ages fervor to meet the metrics is just going to end up being misguided. I think that's probably the key is trying to dissect and figure out exactly what you want to measure and what you want to stick to.

Don: It's really hard. It took us a while the get the hang of that on Safari and Webkit, it really did. We had too many simplistic metrics in the beginning. These benchmarks are really hard, especially when you're dealing with live content, and making this stuff consistent. You have to deal with static pages, and then you have to simulate live connections, in other ways, it's maddening. But there are smart people working on this, much smarter than I am.

Guy: So there's hope. [laughs]

Don: Yeah, there's hope. The thing that I interjected in the process was anal retentiveness and a willingness to be an asshole, because that's what you have to be. If you're going to lead a project, you have to say, "No, we're going to do this and you have to be willing to be unpopular."

It's tough work, but in the end the engineers work is much harder. They were the ones doing the real heavy lifting. I just got to sit back and be a jerk.

Guy: [laughs] Cash a paycheck.

Don: Yeah, I'm sure they had a [indecipherable 43:59] . Obviously, I did more than that.

Guy: Of course, yeah.You haven't been writing. Last time we chatted, you said you were going to be writing, but you've been typing instead.

Don: Well, two things happen. One was the Úll conference. When I first wrote my talk, which was supposed to be for...25 minutes talk, and I wrote a 4,000-plus-word outline, and I just tried to stand and record myself and do the outline. I hit over 90 minutes and I went, "Oh, God! I'll have to stop and cut this," so I cut, cut, cut.

I was actually cutting until the night before Dublin again. [laughs] I cut some more stuff out there to try to fit in into 25 minutes. I was focused on that, and I just exhausted myself in terms of writing with that. But the other thing that happened was our family member, our dog, our little girl, a Labrador retriever, Penny, passed away.

When I say, "passed away," what that means is we had to make a decision, and life was not very pleasant for a while.

Guy: Yeah, that's tough. I've been there myself.

Don: Yeah. I just walked off the end of something, and just didn't want to anything for a while. But I had to get my stuff together and do something for Úll and focus on that. When I got back, [laughs] unfortunately I had to deal with the fact that we had a plumbing disaster in our house, water everywhere, and ruined carpeting, and walls with holes in them, and stuff like that, so I was...

Guy: Oh, that stinks.

Don: Yeah, literally. It did stink.

[laughter]

Don: Plus, we're having to get carpet pads replaced this week and some other stuff done, so we had to do that. The other thing is, I started writing again, but it was not on my website. It was code, stupidly. I don't know why. I just got a hair up my ass and started writing some code.

Guy: You're going to tell us what it is?

Don: Oh, yeah.

Guy: [laughs] You don't have to.

Don: No, no, no. It's fine. I'll probably put it on my git hub project page after a friend or two of mine looks at it and tells me, "Well, this isn't embarrassing, and won't ruin your career, or your street cred."

Guy: [laughs]

Don: But just to explain, it's not a big thing. I'm not trying to sell this. It's just a little utility. I feel embarrassed that it took me a week to write that damn thing. But I haven't been coding, especially...This is written in Objective-C. I hadn't written in Objective-C in a long time. People probably think I write iPhone apps every other day, or something like that. I just don't do that. I'm too lazy for that.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I stopped my development of Objective-C and Cocoa geekiness when John Sullivan joined the Safari project, because he was so brilliant at it.

Guy: Yeah, that's the thing about being a manager. It's that you stop doing your trade and you start doing a new trade, which is managing people, which is a very different thing.

Don: Yeah. There are managers who can code and still code, but I didn't want to be the kind of manager, because there was so many things I had to deal with on, at first Safari, and WebKit, and then all the other projects I was managing, and then be the asshole that blunders into the tree, stomping around and ruining it for the developers.

As a manager, what part of your job is, as I always say, you stand at the backend of the elephant and you let it shit on you so it doesn't shit on your team. You deal with all that stuff, and you make your...

Guy: [laughs] That's graphic.

Don: Yeah, it's graphic, but it gets the point across. When I would have people in my department who wanted to be managers, who wanted to move into that role, I always gave them the talk, at first, to frighten them. I gave them the "shit's in," I like to call it, which is "Here's the good news. Glad you want to be a manager. Here's what it's really like. That's the poop in-between the layers of tasty bread. Yeah, I think you can do it, be on your way." Anyway, enough fecal humor.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: In this little project, basically, I just had a piece of software that was annoying me for a trivial reason and I decided to do my best at rewriting it. I'm a encoding geek. I like to encode video and audio and test it out, play with stuff. Before the podcast started today, Rene and I were talking about encoding a little bit. I was boring him about it.

Rene: Not boring me at all.

Don: [laughs]

Guy: Do you like the math side of it?

Don: No, not at all. In fact, one of the problems with doing this project was, I forgot...When I started writing it, I was like, "Oh, shit! They told me there was not going to be any math!" No. At least in this code, I like dealing with the whole system, but in terms of encoding itself, I like getting good video quality and good audio quality with the minimum amount of work, and time, and size, and figuring out what the tradeoffs are there.

I've gotten very good at that as a hobby over the years. Trust me, folks, this is something that you'd never want to do. By the way, I always say there's three tiers to consuming video and audio. What I always advise people when they see what I'm doing, "Oh, could I do that?" I always say, "Well, you could, but really, what you should do is, you should go to iTunes Store, or Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or something, and stream stuff and not worry about this crap.

Or if you have Blu-rays or DVDs, what you should do is, you should use a tool like MakeMKV, rip them, and play them back that way. Only an idiot like myself reencodes the Blu-rays and DVDs they have." In fact, as we're having this podcast, I've got a batch script with the Handbreak command line app that's been running for weeks now. Actually, since I was away at Úll, re-encoding my close to 300 titles of Blu-rays, in the background, because I want to see what the results of that are.

Guy: It's a bit of dedication.

Don: No, it's not dedication. This is insanity.

[laughter]

Don: Normal people should not do things like this. It takes a lot of disk space and time, but I'm retired, I'm patient. Anyway, I do this encoding stuff and you have to test it. I'm a command line geek. I obviously like GUI's and stuff. I spend, I swear, the...

There's a few apps I spend most of my time at. There are, Terminal, VBedit, Safari, mail. things like that, but Terminal I spend a lot of time in. Not to disparage my friend [indecipherable 52:31] who's in charge of the finder. I do well, too.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I spend a lot of time in Terminal. I test stuff with Nplayer. The Nplayer command line utility. It's really good and because you can pass all sorts of different options to it and things like that.

It tends to decode h264 more consistently than actually VLC does or something like that. It has other problems, but anyway there's Nplayer on a Mac can actually put up a window and have it show you video and stuff like that.

It does annoying things, like they put up this beautiful video window and then the bottom corners of the window have turds in them, like white turds. When you go full screen there are these white turds in the corner. It's like, guys how hard is it not to put these white turds in the corner of the window?

Guy: Weird, it's what? Just part of the window chrome?

Don: It's the way they're rendering the open GL later, that they created, into the window. They're screwing up the mask or something.

Guy: That's weird, OK. Don: I'm looking at the code and it's hard to figure out. I thought at first about just going in and debugging it and running a patch. I hate running patched versions of things because then you have to keep running the patch when there are updates, running the patch and stuff like that.

I went, "Well there's this project out there called Inplayer OS10, and Inplayer OS10 Extended, Inplayer X. I think I'll actually all embed Inplayer, how do they do that? I bet I could do that, and write a littler wrapper for that."

Because I didn't like the way that they operated either, you can't operate them from the command line, and they do other annoying things even though they are nice pieces of software. I thought, "How the hell hard was that?" That's hubris and ignorance, once again. It twisted my arm and I'm such a sissy when they gang up on me, and so I just started typing. I had to relearn coco and objective c and stuff. I had this little app, its only about 600 to 750 lines of code. It's a command line app, which wraps Inplayer and dynamically becomes a coco app, which is fun.

Guy: Well that's a bit of a trick, right? Because you got to...?

Don: Yeah, because Nibs is for sissy's, and I'm doing all sorts of things I really didn't use before, core animation, OpenGL, Local event monitoring for the sense, nstask, nsconnections, because I've got to run Inplayer in another process and communicate with it. Having to use grand central dispatch and blocks, you know all the new toys the kids like.

Threaded connections and threaded rendering, full screen shenanigans with nsview and stuff like that. I actually asked a question on Twitter the other night because I got stuck, I got some good help from a friend of mine. It's fun and it works. It took me a while to reverse engineer Inplayer even though I have the source code in front of me. It's huge, it's old, and it's kind of corrupt, but it does work. To their credit it does work very well.

Don: It's almost done, I've got to do a few other things and make the code not look like it sucks and then I'll put it on my git hub page, and I thought, "You know, what I really need is a better player app," and so I may have convinced myself to actually write a real coco application that's a media player.

Guy: That could be good.

Don: Quicktime Player's full screen mode annoys the hell out of me, because it uses Mountain Lion full screen mode. I hate that.

Guy: Yeah, that used to be an awesome app, Quicktime 7. The current Quicktime player basically seems like a wraparound QT kit, effectively, which is fine, but...

Don: It actually is a nice GUI and I'm glad that they did something that a lot of people don't do with apps, they just sliced off an enormous number of features. The problem was, they sliced off the features and they didn't put them anywhere. [laughs] You have to have both apps around. If you're going to take features out, you have to make sure people have a way to do those things. That was a problem.

It was a nicely designed app, but I don't like the full screen mode. I've never liked the Mountain Lion full screen mode due to the slow ass switch. I want something instantaneous. It doesn't play very many formats. It's really good for MP4s and certain kind of AVIs, but if you have other things you can't play them with it.

Rene: Like MKV, it's just not...

Don: It just doesn't work, you need VLC, or one of the in player wrappers for that.

Rene: VLC is ugly. I don't like VLC either.

Don: The issue with VLC is it's got the iTunes disease. It's become everything. Now that works for iTunes. iTunes, especially the new interface in iTunes, people have laid a lot of hate on the iTunes team for I think is actually great.

Guy: It's definitely an improvement over the old one.

Don: It's definitely an improvement. It's simplifying the app without actually simplifying it. Which I think is a great thing. What I meant with the iTunes disease was a joke we used to make every once in a while, you keep putting features into it. VLC has too many features right now. I'm a maniac about, before I release any code or release anything, what I always go, "What features can I cut out of it? What don't we need?"

Even before I released my little piddle-y Magneto, my site generator? I cut features out of it. Not that it has a lot of features right now, but I thought, "Why am I doing that?"

Rene: Features that you weren't using yourself?

Don: No, they could be done another way, and one that I wasn't using myself, so why would I want that in there? They were pretty minor features, as an example. There are features in Safari that I've tried for years to cut out. I can't do anything about it now. Look at the preferences in Safari, I think you could probably take about half of those preferences out of there.

Guy: Yeah, that's a good focus.

Don: A really smart man, Darren Adler, taught me something years ago. He was talking about assessing features, assessing preferences, deciding on how to do a preference, and the thing to do when you're arguing back and forth about something. He said, "OK, it's a preference. But which is the default? If you're going to have a preference, you have to have a default setting."

You decide on what the default setting is, and then you get rid of the preference, because you decided on the default, and you never ship that. That's the whole point. Make decisions. Limitations are clarity, they're features too. That's really an Apple approach. Back in the old days at Netscape we used to joke, "How many preferences does Netscape Navigator have? All of them."

You could get really lost inside that preferences dialogue back in the old days. To the team's credit, with Firefox they've vastly improved that, but it's still pretty complicated.

Guy: I think not only is it good for the user, a giant preferences box is confusing, but it's good for the team and the software itself because it's just fewer places for things to go wrong, really. There's fewer pathways to disaster.

Don: Exactly. Exactly. Less stuff to test. Less things to confuse people. I know I've been responsible for features that I thought at the time were really good ideas and they turned out to be not popular or confused people about something else that you wanted people to use. I think Apple is one of the best companies out there doing software and hardware for keeping things simple and keeping the focus right. We still didn't do everything great.

That's why I really applied the iTunes team and the idea of trying to focus things down. That's very hard to do. It takes courage to do that and possible annoy people.

Guy: Especially with such a high visibility app, right?

Don: Yeah. I think they did a really good job walking that line. I use it. I find it's fine. It still has way too much stuff in it but they're doing a much better job of hiding it.

Guy: Hiding it without it being totally inaccessible, tucked away maybe more than hiding.

Don: Yes. Very, very hard to do.

Guy: You're working on an iTunes killer?

Don: No, no. When I say media player I'm considering writing something basically a video player, something that's very simple and straightforward, and something that could sit alongside QuickTime player to be pretty and to play other formats. MPlayer X has the potential to do that but it seems to be maintained sporadically, and there are certain design decisions in there that are just maddening to me.

Guy: I would like that because a lot of that stuff just seems janky to me. A lot of it seems like it came from the Linux world and got a Mac paint job.

Don: Right. Literally it did because it's got MPlayer which started out as the Linux movie player. What was his name? I don't know if I can even pronounce his name, [indecipherable 64:33] . I don't know where he's from. The guy who did the original MPlayer OSX project back in the turn of the previous decade. That's essentially what he was doing is he was putting a Mac wrap around MPlayer.

You can do that and you can do it the right way. You can basically hide the fact that that actually exists and make it look like a real McIntosh application. I think [indecipherable 65:12] , the guy who does MPlayer X, made a good stab at that, but there are certain behaviors and other things that still don't very well.

Then we have VLC whose interface looks like VLC. It's a good app, though. Anyway, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it.

Guy: I'd encourage you to do so.

Don: I'll probably come to my senses.

Guy: [laughs] Please don't. Stay crazy.

Don: The worst thing about doing it, though, is then I'd have to maintain it. [indecipherable 66:01] because he has a real job and he's doing that on the side. I don't have a real job. I'd really have to maintain it. That's the worst thing about putting stuff out there is maintaining it. I don't want to just throw something over the wall.

Guy: You could. You just toss it out and have somebody else pick it up and run with it.

Don: Oh yeah, but I've got way too huge an ego. I put these pretenses on about being a humble guy but I'm just as much of an asshole as everybody else out there about that stuff. When I've worked on other open source projects I've obviously tried not to do that, back when I briefly worked on Lame, the MP3 encoder. I tried to play nice with that community and it worked pretty well back there. Thankfully, they've rewritten all my code by now. I had to stop contributing to it when I went to work for Apple.

Guy: I hadn't realized you'd been involved with Lame.

Don: Yeah. I didn't do any of the really hard stuff. I did the easy shit. Early on somebody had added the ability to do ID3 tag support, ID3 version tag support, and the world had moved on to ID3 version two, which was, in a way, an over-engineered, wacky...

Guy: Yeah, it's a nightmare.

Don: Yeah, it's a nightmare, but it was what everybody was using. I hated running a tagger after I would encode something so I started doing a hack and it just got out of hand. I developed it into a set of patches and asked the team if they wanted to use that and they accepted it in the tree. Robert eventually rewrote all of my stuff, thank God.

Guy: Would you say that that's how a lot of open source contributions happen? There's two things. We were just talking about Google and Apple and their splitting and forking and they've got full time employees working on stuff.

Don: Yeah, that's actually very rare.

Guy: I was going to say, most open source is just random people getting annoyed with something and fixing it.

Don: Yeah, it's scratching an itch.

Guy: Was that true for Webkit at any point or is that more of a professional?

Don: I think that's true for some of the people who joined the team from the open source world. They went in because there was something they wanted to do and it got out of hand and became a career because it was scratching an itch.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I've hired plenty of people like that, just amazing engineers, that way. The projects that I've contributed to, which are very few, sometimes they started out that way, or this program that wrote this last week. It's like, "Oh, damn it, I want it to work this way. Not that way," and I did something really stupid. I wrote a completely separate program, rather than develop a patch for what was there, which is the height of ego-maniacal stupidity.

Guy: I don't know. I'm looking forward to it. [laughs]

Don: We'll see. I've got to make sure I don't have any bugs. I ran into a hideous big last night. There's this protocol in MPlayer, that I think was developed by originally one of the OS 10 contributors for communicating with a gooey app, and I supposed it was a good idea in its day, but it's really hideous. It sends the host app through an NS connection that you create.

Guy: Yeah. You mentioned that. That seemed odd to me.

Don: Yeah. It sends you the height, and width, and the aspect ratio. It sends you the aspect ratio as an integer.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Which is just completely useless, so I had to come up with...Yeah, so all the arguments are integers, so it's completely nuts. It defines some functions that can be called. Start, render, and stop, which are supposed to be called in that order. Of course, except when they're not called in that order by Mplayer as it's running in the background. I had a crash error last night, I discovered, when it was calling stop before it ever called start.

Guy: I hate that kind of stuff. [laughs]

Don: That's classic communication protocol stuff.

Guy: Yeah, that's the worst.

Don: It would do that for every AVI file I would flow through it. I'd stupidly been testing it the whole week with MP4s and MKVs and stuff like that. I hadn't run an AVI file with xbit in it, and it was like, "Here's I'll stop before I start."

Guy: Why? It's weird that AVI is different. Is there a command stream in an AVI file, or something?

Don: I have no idea. This is why I'm such an idiot to do something like this, because a lot of those kinds of internals, I never really pay attention to. I'm more concerned with [indecipherable 71:41] . I actually enjoy writing all the pluming. It was just a boat load of fun figuring out how to run something as a separate task. I had set over code before, and talked to my engineers before, but I never actually sat there in an editor and wrote all the stuff, or put the distributive object type connection and stuff like that, done it myself, it was a lot of fun.

You know, I had other code to look at, some of which was very nice examples, and some of which was like "Ahh!"

Guy: [laughs] Yeah, distributive objects are cool, but crazy.

Don: Yeah, crazy. It's just a pseudo-distributive object. Basically what you do is you create an object locally, and say it has this protocol, and then you register via connection of this name. The crazy thing was it usually worked the first time I did it. I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd done something wrong.

That actually turned out to be one of the most straightforward parts of it. It was like the renderer. I spent all this meticulous time not even testing the open GL code, but just writing it and code reviewing. I ran it and I didn't get anything rendered at first. I went "Oh well...it's too hard".

Guy: It's open GL. That's...it never happens. It never works the first time. It doesn't do that.

Don: But the open GL code was perfectly fine. It rendered perfectly. I had passed the wrong parameter to one other function down the line, and that was the entire reason why it didn't work.

Guy: I don't know about you, but I never am more nervous about my code then when I run it and it works perfectly. Every time, like if I type it and it works, I'm like "Whoa, something is screwed up here, something really bad is happening."

Don: [laughs] Yeah, some of the more trivial things that didn't work that threw me...like, I ran into every noob's screwjob with NS notification center. I've got two threads running in the app, and I stupidly tried to notify the other thread with notification center, forgetting that that doesn't work at all. I was getting called back on the same thread.

Why does it work that way? That's because that's the way it's designed to work that way. That's a feature, not a bug. I go, "Oh, shit. What's the best way to communicate with another thread?" I gave it a quick iMessage to my old buddy and former engineer Ricky Adams, and I said, suggestions? He said "GCD is your friend", I went "oh yeah". A little asynch dispatch call took care of that painful swelling, and all was well.

Guy: Yeah. I'm pretty sure you got a contact list that can help you with a lot of these problems.

Don: [laughs] It's like crib notes during a test.

Rene: Or a lifeline during a game show.

Guy: It works, come on. Exactly

Don: Yeah exactly, lifelines that's what it is. Rene, that is perfect. I got a lot of lifelines, and they're all brilliant people, a lot smarter than I am. I'm sure they could have written everything I've written in like a day. [indecipherable 75:03] They probably wouldn't have wanted to write this. Who the hell would? We'll see what comes next, but I've got to get back to my website writing.

Guy: Yeah, please do.

Don: What I'm going to do is probably take this 4,000 plus pages of notes that I wrote for that talk, and turn some of those into blog posts. I just get so tired of repeating and rehearsing the talk that I don't want to look at the material. I actually told you...

Guy: Just read it into Siri. Have her dictate the posts for you.

Don: [laughs] A question for you. How often do you guys actually use Siri?

Rene: A lot.

Don: Wow. I'm impressed.

Guy: Yeah, seldomly. I use it for setting timers and alarms and shit that it can't fuck up.

Rene: I dictate posts while I am driving so I don't forget the hook that I had when I thought about it.

Don: Apple loves people like you Rene.

Rene: [laughs]

Don: I always think whenever I use it and it just works perfectly, and it does what I want, I think to myself why don't I use this more often?

Guy: Right, yeah.

Rene: Yeah, then it screws you.

Don: Occasionally it will get confused, but usually that's an amusing interlude...

Guy: One thing I do find cool about Siri is yeah, it's an amusing interlude. If I'm telling it to remind me or something and it gets it wrong, at least when the reminder comes up, there is enough phonetic information there that I know what it's talking about.

Rene: Yes.

Guy: Maybe it screws up the name and it says "Rave" rather than "Dave", and it's like OK, fine I know what it's talking about.

Rene: It's much faster UI to enter reminders, and calendar events, and anything that's touch based.

Don: Oh yeah, yeah. Doing it with Siri is much easier than typing it in on a phone. My friend [indecipherable 77:15] , he is the person probably most responsible for the keyboard interface for the phone, I still prefer talking to Siri for doing long things like that, rather than typing.

Guy: Really?

Don: I'm all thumbs, literally. I can actually type very fast on my Mac compared to some people on the phone or the iPad. I do type very fast. In fact, typing is probably the most useful thing I learned in high school. I swear, it's the thing...Not the math, not even English lit., it's typing, learning to type. I still hit the Cupertino's all the time and it drives me crazy.

But I never turn it off, because it also saves me more times than it screws me up. Yeah, because my spelling is atrocious. What I would write would look like Middle English. Spell checking.

Guy: Yeah. Spelling is over. Computers can do that now. Yeah.

Rene: I think I said this before, but I have a godson who is four years old and can't write, but he uses Siri to send me text messages, which is awesome.

Don: See, that's what it's perfect for. That was like Charles was saying at Úll. Charles Perry, saying at Úll, you don't realize it but there are sight impaired people out there who can use a phone right now to see. There are apps out there that exist that they can hold up to take a picture with a camera, and they can tell them the colors of what's in their room, or their garden.

Guy: That's so cool. I'm really fascinated by this kind of stuff. I think there's...so the way that the accessibility software works is that you basically describe the functionality, or the...I don't know, how would you describe it, Don? You don't describe the layout, it's not about the visuals or anything. It's about what the content represents.

Don: Right, and you have to realize that iOS, like MacOS is one of the most advanced operating systems out there for providing accessibility support, because most of the stuff you just get for free. You don't have to do anything, but there are parts, like the stuff you're talking about, Guy, that you do. But I'm not an expert on this.

Guy: No, no. Neither am I, but it totally fascinates me, and I love the idea that if you set everything up correctly in your iOS or Mac App, there can be a totally different interface to your application, put on top of it via the accessibility stuff.

It just so happens that voice over is the one that works, but the way the content is described when it works out, can work in so many different ways. It blows my mind, fascinates me.

Don: Charles had this video that he played during his talk, of Stevie Wonder talking. This was before Steve Jobs passed away, I believe it was the Spring when it was known he was very sick. It was from Stevie Wonder, one of his sessions, and he got up in front of the crowd after his set and asked people to pray for Steve Jobs, because he talked about how much he loved his iPhone. He said "Here, I finally have a device where I can do everything you can do."

Guy: Wow.

Don: It was very powerful and moving. That's why I loved Charles' talk, because it was just intellectually precise and then it was emotionally moving, which is both the best speaking coming from being trained as a Minister, and the best writing there is, you want to be able to ever do. When you think about it, it's not just prose. I always want to impress upon people when they create software.

You don't need to just make software that makes sense, that's well designed. You need, if you want, your software to be used you need to make software that delights people.

Guy: I agree.

Don: That tugs at them, right? That gives them a reason to use it even when they don't need to use it. That's the best stuff in the world. If you can do something like that, man that's...you know, I've had glimmers of being able to do that over the years and that's the kind of thing that always gets you back to writing.

Guy: Well I think that people feel that they should be playing all the time. That software should be a toy. That it's to be enjoyed.

Don: Yes, and that's the right way to approach it. That's what you want. You want people to play and get a shitload of useful things done. Even if that play is in a game itself. Gaming isn't just frivolity.

Guy: Well that's why I never really found the animations frivolous in OS standards.

Don: Exactly. Well, the...

[crosstalk]

Guy: OK, there's some of the animations.

Don: I just have this quirk in my personality I just don't like the full screen transition. And, I know the guy who wrote it. He's a friend of mine, but it just always bugs me. They're not frivolous.

Guy: Right. Yeah, it could bug you but it's not frivolous, like you know why it's there, right? It's for...

Don: Right.

Guy: Not you. It's just...

Don: Oh, no, it's not for me. In fact, the reason why the full screen animations transition there's a very good reason. It's to give people context for what's happening.

Guy: Exactly.

Don: The way people try to solve their problem before is what they would do is they would, the first time you went into full screen they'd put up a dialogue and say "Do you realize we're going to full screen now?" and it was like, "What the hell?"

I like instantaneous full screen but that's because I'm a geek working at a command line. That's what I like. The reason why it's done that way on OS 10, it's brilliants because people go "Oh, I can see my other desktops sliding away. I can see this other thing coming in." There was a lot of work put into that.

Guy: Right. It is quite slow. Yeah sure, it's quite slow but I think it's the right speed that people see what's happening.

Don: Yes. Yes.

Guy: Like they're thinking during that process, "Oh my desktop is going away, and here's my new thing coming in." For me, it's like just do it, just get it out of my way and just do it. That's fine. But, I can understand why it's so of laborious in that way.

Don: Let me ask you two, the first time you used OS 10, you didn't get the light and the animations. When I was trying to think of what I was going to do at easel as it was auguring into the desert floor dying. I borrowed that G3 iMac from Andy Hertsvel, and I was playing with OS 10, the thing that got me going back there even though I didn't have a lot of apps there.

I had like Terminal and Text Edit and something else. Whatever was in that first version of Cheetah. I would go down to the dock and I would minimize and expand Windows, and just watch that kind of thing happen. Drag stuff around, and I thought, "Man this is so cool."

Guy: I love that. At that time I was writing video games, and just the graphic stack on OS 10 just seemed, to me, to be the way of the future. To steal a phrase. Draw everything into a backing store and then blit it to the screen with a Windows Server.

Don: It's a video game approach. That was the great thing about it, right Guy?

Guy: It felt like that. Like put everything in a texture. It wasn't in that earlier version, but I could see the way it was going to be. Everything is fully buffered, just draw into the buffer and then throw a bunch of textures around the screen. Awesome.

Don: By the way, it's very mature doing that stuff now. I was really stunned and delighted when I was writing this little app about all of the wonderful stuff in there, like the first time I created a CG, or core animation texture cache. It was like totally easy.

You just attach a layer to a view. You say to the view, "Set once, layer, set layer," and it automatically re-sizes and moves around. Everything is taken care of for you magically.

Guy: It's so good, it's so good.

Don: It's like one of those Japanese toilets that wipes your butt and it's just so good. It's like an art.

Guy: [laughs] I don't know if I would have said that.

Don: Well that's OK, it's me being fecal again. This is the first time I've actually written something in Ark. It's like, "Oh my God," I'm never going back.

Guy: Yeah.

Don: It's like retain release, screw that. Before I do release, I have to put the scope on this and see if I actually am leaking anything and do some other measurements. Performance is really good, but you can have really good performance because you're leaking the world.

You can use Ark badly and having multiple threads and stuff like that, you have to be careful with. Syntactically, and the clarity, and the code, and everything else you're doing, I'll never go back from that. But, I still like the original name for Ark that we had.

Guy: Oh yeah, it was ARR.

Don: Yeah. ARR. Because we were walking...

[crosstalk]

Guy: Yeah, you were telling me that [laughs] .

Don: Yeah. Automatic Retain Release. ARR. But the marketing guys got a hold of it then it became Ark. Damn it. Because you can write C, because that's what objective C is with this weird syntax from small talk. You can write C like it's Ruby or Python.

It's just so easy. You have to take a few precautions, like this stunt where you have a command line app that becomes another application, I have to have my main function, I have to wrap that in an at-auto release pool, little thing there. You have to remember to do that on your thread entry.

Guy: Yeah, it's whatever.

Don: It's not that it's not a nice attempt. An at-auto release pool, the great thing about it is even if you're not using Ark, those directives will do all the other old stupid nonsense for you, anyway.

Guy: Yeah. There's a bunch of good stuff to consider. It still hurts my brain looking at, just calling eloquent on something, then not releasing it someplace later. I just still trip over that mentally, but I'm just being an idiot.

Don: It took me about a half an hour, and then there was no looking back. [laughs]

Guy: My main product that I work on is not Ark yet, but I'm working on a bunch of other stuff that is Ark. I'm slowly getting...

Don: You know what's not Ark yet, but will be hopefully this summer is XCode itself.

Guy: I sadly believe that. You know what, XCode was GC. It was garbage collected.

Don: Right. Because XCode always was the big [indecipherable 89:51] dog food thing. You got to respect the XCode team for that.

Guy: Oh, totally, yeah. It gets a lot of hate that it doesn't deserve, I think.

Don: Although, I was cursing it this week. The online documentation thing is fantastic. XCode is the best environment to work in, even though I'm not using it now. I'll explain why. To work in, compared to everything else that is out there, like if you're developing Android apps now, XCode is so much better than what the Android folks have.

The documentation viewer is so damn slow when you type into that little search field. Oh, I just want to strangle somebody. It's the indexing. I don't know what's going on there with indexing but it just makes me nuts. I can actually go into Safari, type what I want into a Duck-Duck-Go window, what I want, even saying site: developer.apple.com, and hit return and get results faster than I can sometimes looking at the documentation.

Guy: That is exactly what I do.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: But without the Duck-Duck-Go. [laughs] I should try that out a bit more. But like the documents windows...

Don: It's not built into Safari, but I try to reduce my surface area as much as possible with Google.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: No, not to dispirit. It's just privacy and other concerns.

Guy: Yeah. That's not a bad idea.

Don: I don't recommend that for everybody.

Guy: Go ahead.

Don: I said I don't recommend that for everybody. I also don't recommend the stunt that I'm doing now to develop the whole app. I am actually not writing in XCode, I am writing in VBedit.

Guy: That's pretty old school.

Don: Yeah. Well, I'm 56 year old, so there is nothing I do that's not old school.

Guy: Come on. You're still hip with the kids.

[laughter]

Don: Yes, that new lingo. Sometimes I try to talk like the pseudo-hip person just to annoy my 22 year old son, especially when his homies come over. They were over the other night.

Guy: [laughs] You swear far more than anybody that age, so don't worry about it. You're rocking.

Don: Anyways, I like to embarrass him. Getting back to VBedit and the way I was writing this, it's basically VBedit and a make file. It's all like one file because I'm heinous. What I'll do once I'm done is then I'll break it up into separate source files and probably stick it in to XCode just to make sure everything else runs. Also, so I can do some automated tests. It's nothing for me just to whip out a text file, do a make file in like five seconds, and boom you're good to go, right?

Guy: Yeah.

Don: This is crazy, but when you start a project and it's really small, doing it in a single source file is actually very useful because it makes it much easier to search and replace, and do everything else, and understand the context of what you have. Once you get to a thousand lines, well you're screwed.

Guy: Yeah. I had to help fix a project like that. It was like a game from the jailbreak world that we ported to run on the first iOS SDK. It was one giant file.

Don: How many lines?

Guy: Oh God, more than a thousand. It got out of hand, but it was just the guy having fun and just hacking on it, and it turned into a product. Wow, that was a bit of a pain in the ass.

Don: I'm sure that program was still shorter than the original NetgetURL function in Netscape Navigator Four, still shorter.

Guy: [laughs] I bet.

Don: Sorry, I interrupted you.

Guy: No, no, no. I was going to say that, yeah, I can see that joy of just having one file, and just typing in a bunch of stuff and having it work. That's how we got into programming, right?

Don: Exactly. It's like writing a script, right? But don't listen to the old crazy man.

Guy: Yeah, do not do this, but I can see the appeal.

[laughter]

Don: For me that was useful because I can scroll...it's funny, I can scroll it up and down in my head. I don't know about you, Guy, but after years of programming, when you're not in front of the terminal, you can scroll you're code up and down right in front of your eyes. Make the edits, and stuff like that.

Guy: Yeah, I can see the structure.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: I just know where stuff is.

Don: Yeah, that's creepy. You describe this to other people and they just think that you're some kind of serial killer. It takes the same capabilities to do that.

Guy: I don't know, I've been watching a lot of "Dexter" recently. I don't want to get...

Don: Oh, really? God, I'm like two seasons behind now.

Guy: I just started. I'm like in the middle of the second season.

Don: Oh really? Oh. I got to say, the first season of "Dexter" was one of my favorite...

Guy: It was brilliant. It was brilliant.

Don: ...episodes of television. Just terrible, in a way when you think about it, the morality of rooting for a serial killer.

Guy: It's horrible. [laughs]

Don: What they do to your head, it's like, "I can't..."

Guy: It's Soprano's morality.

Don: Yeah, exactly. It's like the Soprano's. I love that kind of stuff.

Guy: Yeah, I'm enjoying it.

Don: I don't know why I'm encoding all this stuff, because I got so much stuff queued up that I still haven't watched. I probably got a year's worth of TV and movies that I still need to watch.

Guy: [laughs] It's your affectation, and it's just what you got to do. What do you do? You encode. That's it.

Don: Yeah...I want to see if I can get the best possible thing at one time. I was talking to Rene before the broadcast started about getting stuff from iTunes, and Rene's saying, "Well it's still not Blu-Ray quality".

Rene: Yeah, we did that. One of our recordings we did in 4K and we're playing around with trying to get it online right now.

Don: I just think that's insane that it's 4K. Wow, I'm impressed, 4K.

Rene: Well we'll be impressed if it works. We'll see.

Don: At those bit rates you're never going to get Blu-Ray quality.

Guy: Yeah.

Don: But you can get something that is reasonable that 99 percent of people can see on their HDTV sitting across the room at five megabits, 1080 P. That is what iTunes, most of their 1080 P video is. The odd thing is, they're 720 P video, it's four megabits.

You go, "Hmm, wait a minute, I'm watching 720 P and it's four megabits, and the 1080 P is only 20 to 25 percent larger, in terms of number of bits and bit rate? How the hell does that work when the actual viewing area is two and a half times?"

It's the weirdities of our eyes and resolutions and stretching things that actually pulls it off.

Guy: I was watching "Zero Dark Thirty" over iTunes, and in that helicopter assault scene, it's awful. It's like blocky, it's like mpeg city. I was distracted to the point of just being angry.

Rene: I saw the movie, and that whole scene was poorly shot in terms of the darkness. They could have shot it all through infrared and made it much more legible to the viewer.

Guy: Oh yeah? OK.

Don: Not to dive too deep on encoding problems. There's a few problems that encoders run into. H264 converting, you run into, and that's the blockiness. There's also the thing where you can get a lot of blockiness where you have very subtle color change.

Guy: Yeah, because it doesn't' capture it, right?

Don: Make yourself sad and watch a couple of animated films on iTunes and you'll see some large, very tapered surfaces which seem to have some stair-step effect. The way to fix that is simply more bits. That's the only way you're going to get around that problem.

That's the problem that a lot of people make the mistake at. The big thing these days, a lot of people are really hot for, obviously doing things like, I don't know if you're familiar with X264. That's the encoder I'm using built into [indecipherable 99:28] .

They have a mode CRF, Constant Rate Factor, which you give it a quality setting and then it goes and does stuff, and you basically get a variable bit rate encode. This sounds like a wonderful idea. Except that to use the same quality setting on every movie, if you're going to take Blu-Rays, or DVDs as source bits, you're going to have to set it to such a high quality setting that, on occasion, you'll have output that is larger than your input.

Believe it or not, the way Apple is doing it, by doing essentially a fixed bit rate, is actually a better way to go with getting consistent quality, because really noisy stuff is going to look noisy anyway. If it's complex, the original was noisy, the encoded version was noisy, and for things that are very still, animations, or very quiet movies, you want a lot of bits in that stuff because your eyes will notice the details.

You can't use a lower quality setting, a lower bit rate. What I've developed is a way to do, believe it or not, single pass and codes with X264. They get a lot of the same benefits as CRF, and it's through a very simple little option that you pass to X264. It's called Rate Tolerance Equals Infinite.

You get a fixed bit rate, single pass encode that behaves like a CRF encode. It looks a lot like what iTunes is doing. It occasionally runs into some of the same quality oops', but not nearly as many.

Guy: That's cool.

Don: I can record a Blu-Ray on average in real time on my iMac that way.

Guy: That's pretty impressive.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: That is interesting.

Don: If you ever want to waste another two hours talking about encoding, boy can I bore you, because I've done a lot of things.

Rene: It's a date.

Don: Yeah, it's a date.

Guy: Perfect.

[cuts off]

Feedback

Yell at us via the Twitter accounts above (or the same names on ADN). Loudly.

Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, talks to Guy and Rene about assembler on the Apple II, open-sourcing Mozilla, building Nautilus, creating WebKit and the Safari browser, teaching bears to dance, and cleaning cusses from code bases.

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Show notes

• Bitsplitting Podcast Episode 1: Guy English
• Code Rush documentary
• Nautilus file manager
• WebKit.org
• Safari
• Keeping Safari a secret
• Safari is released to the world
• Why I retired from Apple
• Regarding fake projects and loyalty tests

Guests

• Don Melton of donmelton.com

Hosts

• Guy English of Kicking Bear
• Rene Ritchie of iMore.com

Transcript

Don Melton: Will this be Debug number 11?

Rene Ritchie: Yes.

Don: Wow, that's great because then Debug goes to 11.

Rene: Correct.

[laughter]

Don: Wish we had show tunes.

Rene: I'm Rene Ritchie and joining me is my co-host Guy English. How are you, Guy?

Guy English: Great. Thanks.

Rene: We are absolutely thrilled to have with us today Don Melton, formerly of Apple, and whom you may know from projects like WebKit and Safari. How are you Don?

Don: Itchin' absolutely.

Rene: We are literally using your work as we engage in this conversation.

Don: Yeah, that's both flattering and frightening.

Rene: How did you get started with coding? How did you get into this business?

Don: It's funny I started thinking about that again the other day when I was listening to Guy appearing on Daniel Jalkut's new podcast Bitsplitting and you were talking about your first computer being an Apple II. I thought that was funny because of the timeline you were talking about. Just out of curiosity how old were you then?

Guy: I was about seven to eight then.

Don: OK. What year was that? That was around...

Guy: Eighty one, eighty two.

Don: Yeah. So I got in at the same time with the same computer Apple II Plus. Of course, a slight difference in age. I was 24 at the time. But it was kind of funny, learned on that. But see, my background, I was already at the age of 24. I was going to school to become a minister. Really long story.

Guy: Really? Wow.

Don: I was working almost full time. I was working about three-quarter time at the "Orange Country Register," which is the big newspaper in Orange County, California.

That's where I was putting myself through school. I was a commercial artist there. Graphics artist, that's my background in journalism. I've had a really weird life and strange jobs and things like that.

Anyway, I was getting bored and disillusioned with the whole religion thing. I wasn't sure I was going finish my degree, and I thought, I really need to get something here to hang on to. I thought, I'm going to finish this year of college and decide what I'm going to do, and I got to get more into this graphics thing that I already am. I thought, "Well, computer graphics! That's the way of the future. I got to learn how computer graphics."

So I decided to get a computer and teach myself some of that computer graphics stuff.

Guy: That's very forward looking for the time, because computer graphics at the time were like 80x20 or 80x40 screens.

Don: That's probably the only time in my life I've ever been forward thinking. That's about as organized as I ever get, in a way.

So I borrowed this enormous amount money from my dad, and I bought an Apple II with the whole set-up. Two of those clanky-ass disk drives and...

Guy: With the machine-gun noise when they would start to...?

Don: Yeah. Thank God I didn't have a pet at the time, because it would just traumatize the pet.

You know, 48K of RAM, it was huge. I got this whole set-up and everything. I had it for a week, and then I realized I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I couldn't do anything that I sort of imagined that I could do with this thing. I was really disappointed.

I didn't want to go back to my dad and, you know, "Remember that five grand you lent me? Oops!"

So, it languished in my room at this house I was sharing with three other guys off-campus at college for six months. I mean, I played video games and stuff with it and do a few other small things. I got really good at Nasir Gebelli's "Space Eggs"? You guys remember that?

Guy: I do yes, that was fun.

Don: Until I got sick one three day weekend. I forget if it was Labor Day or Memorial Day or something like that. I was just sick enough that my roommates didn't want to have anything to do with me so I was banished to my bedroom.

I was just well enough to be bored out of my mind and because I never throw anything away. My room is filled with all kinds of crap; I had all the manuals and everything else with the Apple II laying out there on the desk.

In those days they actually, when you bought a computer they...

Guy: They told you how it worked.

Don: Yes they showed you how it worked and it was this nice little bound book, everybody that had an Apple II remembers this, introduction to Apple Soft Basic. I thought, Saturday morning, what the hell I'll just open up the book and start going through it. By the end of the day I was a basic programmer, I could do that.

I didn't know you couldn't learn it in a day.

[laughter]

Don: It was a lot of fun I actually I stayed up late that night and Sunday morning I skipped chapel and I was typing away like crazy at the Apple II. I bombed one of my programs into the machine language monitor, you remember that right? It's like what are all these numbers with letters in them.

I had to take a little break there and learn hexadecimal and conversions and stuff like that and went you can dissemble a code. Then because it was a three day weekend, by the end of the day Monday, I had started teaching myself machine language programming. I was writing basic programs with data statements and writing machine code, hand code it on a piece of paper once I figured out how the instructions worked.

I shove them into the data statements and I call them and then hook them up via the Ampersand Vector that I had noticed that you could do in the back of one of the appendices of the manuals and I was calling out.

I didn't know you couldn't do that, you couldn't learn things like that I just...

Guy: You went on a three day fever fuelled vision quest? Came out an assembly programmer?

Don: Because you've probably seen on my site that one of the things I define myself as being is a tinkerer. I love to tinker with things and I was just curious and I kept tinkering and I kept tinkering. I finally got where the programs I was writing were semi-useful, at least to me and they didn't crash all the time.

Then I started learning, I can't remember whether it was Forth next or Pascal and then I was learning C. Which C on an Apple II computer was just a real pain in the ass. It's the eight bit processor.

Guy: What was the compiler for C on the Apple II?

Don: I cannot remember this was, I think it was Astexy, no it wasn't Astexy I forget what it was called.

Guy: But it was commercial there was no...

Don: Yes it was commercial. I wasn't into the hacking crowd yet because I didn't know enough people who did that.

Anyway, several months later I ran into one of my friends who was going to City College. He was actually taking programming course and this whole time that I'm working around like this on my computer in my bedroom and at home and stuff like that. I had no illusions, I'm not professional I don't really know what the hell I'm doing.

Anyway, I talked to him I'd say hey how's the course going, because I'd love to be able to have time to do that. He was in the second year and he said "this is like really tough, I'm really struggling here." I said "can you show me one of your books, I'd love to see one of these things." He was showing me some of his exercises and I started looking at it and realizing that the man could not write a four loop to save his life.

This stuff was just incredibly simple or at least simple to me by then because I'd taught myself this stuff. It was after that, meeting him at lunch and looking through the thing and realizing this, I went maybe there's something in this for me. I got really, really interested in it and just went deep and that was the start of it all.

Then became a real fan-boy, because I had the Apple II, and when the Mac came out I went...what's the name of the store. It was right in downtown Costa Mesa. They were demoing a Macintosh, and I wrote the last 200 dollars in my checking account as a down payment on a Mac when it came out.

Guy: So you got straight into the Mac, right?

Don: Right into the Mac, when it first came out. I had no idea how I was going to make the payments on the Mac.

Guy: Just a leap of faith.

Don: Yeah, Just a leap of faith.

Guy: Now, programming the Mac is lot different than programming an Apple II-style thing, because of the way the event loop and all that works. Was that a big leap?

Don: Yes.

Guy: You have to invert your thinking a little bit.

Don: Yeah, especially when you learn like me. I don't have any classic training at all in data structures or algorithms and things like that.

But it was very useful, in the sense, the way that I learned, because you learn early on, especially when you're learning to write assembly code and everything else, you understand what a pointer is. You understand how things work in memory.

Whether you've been formally or classically-trained in data structures, you understand what these things are. Believe it or not, when the Mac first came out, the only programming environment on it was BASIC. It was Microsoft...that was the only thing I could get.

I was doing the same dumbass thing, which...DATA statements. Doing 68K assembly language programming that way, until the Consolair Assembler became available, and then Consolair C, and then I was off to the races. I still have my day job as the graphics artist at the Orange County Register, and I was not getting paid to be a programmer or anything. My first job, paid programming job.

Do you guys remember, well obviously, MacWrite, everybody remembers MacWrite, don't you? There was this add-on that was sold by Chrichton Development called MacSpell Plus, and the guy who was the primary developer on it was a friend of mine in the Orange County hacker crowd, Christo Rossi. He wound up later on working at Apple and other places.

I guess he had gotten a tiff with Chrichton Development and walked off with the source code to the thing. Lo and behold, a new version of MacWrite comes out, and the way MacSpell Plus worked, I think that's what it was called, was it dynamically patched MacWrite, which is grotesque.

But everybody did that, back in those days. A friend of mine who was basically admin project manager over there, that I knew from school of all things, not through the hacking crowd, asked me if I could figure out how to fix it, and save their bacon.

I went, well, I don't know, bring it over, and I watched what it did, dropped it into MacsBug, and thought, OK, the big problem here is this one section. Insert a few no-ops and a branch, and that kind of stuff, and patch the binaries.

Guy: Straight-up binaries patching.

Don: Yeah, well they didn't have the source code, so I took their old binary and I patched it for them. So, that's the way that I came from, programming. The crowd that I hung around with in Orange County was, that was the crowd that started the Mouse Hole. A bulletin board for hackers back then, trading wares.

Also out of that, sprang up MacTutor. I remember the old MacTutor magazine, and I started writing for them, MacTutor. I'd written two or three articles, and I decided after almost eight years at the Orange County Register, which is the longest I'd ever had a job until I worked for Apple years later, was I've got to get out of Southern California.

I've got to get to Mecca, which was up north. I've got to find a job up there, and I didn't have any...sure I'd patch the binary of MacSpell Plus. I didn't have any [indecipherable 0:14:35] , so I couldn't get a job as a programmer up here in Silicon Valley, but I came up to be their computer graphics specialist at the San Jose Mercury News.

While I was standing around at some conference, I don't know what it was, and Andy Herzfeld was speaking, and I was a real fan-boy. I would later, strangely, work with Andy Herzfeld, but I was just standing in a crowd and I forget what dumbass question I asked him, but there was a guy standing behind me who tapped me on the shoulder and heard me ask.

Lo and behold, it was a guy I had known since I was 15 years old, I had no idea he was in the area. He was trying to break into the business as well, and we had an epiphany. Let's start a company. You know entrepreneurs.

Because I was a graphic artist, I really designed these business cards, back in the days when business cards mattered, that were kind of eye-catching and my friend Mike who now works at Google, the whole world is connected in a way when you think about it. Pin the things up on various boards around the Bay Area, and Tops. Does anybody remember Tops File Sharing?

Guy: You know I'd heard of it, but during this period, I was more into the PC stuff.

Don: Oh, you traitor!

Guy: Yeah, I know, I know, I'm sorry. [laughs]

Don: I did that myself later. Some recruiter for Tops saw it, and went...oh, we need some warm bodies, these guys look like they might do it, and I went in for the interview with Gary [indecipherable 0:16:29] , the guy who was one of the founders of Tops.

Guy: Just for the audience, it's basically NFS for Macs.

Don: It was like Apple File Sharing that wasn't Apple File Sharing, or NFS. And he had read my MacTutor articles and used one of the techniques in Tops. So, I was in. That was my first job when I got out of the newspaper business.

Guy: Was it natural, or did it...I imagine you still do, enjoy illustration and drawing.

Don: That's funny somebody asked me that the other day and I can't remember when the last time I drew anything other than that little avatar you see at my face...

[crosstalk]

Don: ...online. People go, "What you don't draw anymore"?

You don't realize I started drawing when I was four years old. My parents had discovered that I could draw at that age, and they were amazingly nurturing of it. Again, it was one of those things where it was a rainy day, and I'm bored they gave me a pencil finally instead of crayons, thinking that I might just not poke my eye out with it and some paper.

I sat down and I started drawing things that were on the table in front of me. They discovered when I was around four or five that I could just draw whatever I could see. It was just something that I could do and later on when I started going to school, I think it was in the first grade. I never went to kindergarten. I can't remember why, but I never went to kindergarten.

I remember we got some class project. You're supposed to draw something. I sat down, I just drew, and looked around at the other kids, and they were struggling. It was some stupid thing, it was like a pumpkin and other stuff.

These kids couldn't make a circle and I realized that I had a super power. It's like one of the X-men! Of course, it still didn't mean that people didn't beat the crap out of me and take my lunch money and stuff like that.

Guy: But you could at least draw the perp.

Don: Yeah, I could do the police sketch. Years later, I would wind up doing some things like that.

Guy: Oh, really.

Don: I just really got into it. When my brother figured out that, I could draw. His plan for my life was to draw comics. He drew me into the whole world of comics, and then that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. A comic book or comic strip artist and then draw, draw, draw every day. Then I got a job in the underground comics back in the '70s.

Guy: Back in the '70s, if you're going to do underground comics that's a pretty good time for it.

Don: Yeah, and I the stupidest thing, this is my acute business acumen. I stepped away from comics just about the time the entire thing heated up and everybody became bazillionaires. I'm just always great at that, just picking the wrong time to change.

[crosstalk]

Guy: I'm going to go with technology over comics.

Don: I don't know Avi Arad, I knew that guy when he was that dumpy snotty nosed kid standing under the stairs at the San Diego Comic-Con.

Guy: Oh, really? Wow.

Don: I can't remember whether I was at the second or third, I didn't make it to the first Comic-Con, but I remember working my ass off all summer to save money, early summer, to go to the third Comic-Con.

This was back when it was in the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. I think this was the first time it was at the El Cortez Hotel, and I remember going down a few weeks before to Shelldorff's Comic Book store out near the ocean front, and going in the back of the store and collating programs with the other schleps off of a mimeograph machine or something like that.

Comics, comics that was the whole thing, but in the early '80s that changed for me.

Guy: Did you get sort of an endorphin rush from illustrating or drawing? Did you start getting it from programming instead?

Don: Yeah, in a way it's the same kind of thing, because it's a different kind of tinkering but it's also something that ego maniacal people like myself have. You're able to create and control entire worlds. With drawing you're creating the characters. You're basically God, right. You're saying what they look like, how they behave, what they say.

With a computer, that's a very similar thing. It's the addiction and the ability to control your environment when you can't really control your real environment. That's why a lot you meet a lot of creative people who are just complete spazzes, but they can do all these other things because that's where their focus is. It is very addictive. I say on my website now, I'm a recovering programmer.

Guy: Yeah, I love that description.

Don: I'm sure I'll fall off the wagon again. I go to the meetings and I haven't programmed in...

Guy: You got you 30 day chip?

Don: Yeah, 30 day chip and stuff like that.

Guy: Why are you recovering? What are you trying to recover from? An all consuming, constantly running virtual machine in your head or what?

Don: No, the thing is, I was very fortunate to make some career changes in my life and they seemed to work out very well. I like the idea of change. In fact, the idea that I worked at Apple for over 10 years is mind boggling to me in retrospect, because I have the attention span of that four year old kid.

I have the ability to focus very, very deeply but I also I see something, oh, bright and shiny, I got to go play with that.

To me, it's not required of me to do the same thing my whole life. Also I know that I can do it. It's like drawing. I know that I can draw. OK I solved that problem. Let's move on and try the next thing. Why wouldn't you do that? You only get so many years at this. I've burned through 56 of them so far. I've got to be a little more judicious about this.

The thing is that I know what I can and cannot do, and while I was never the world's greatest artist, I was never the world's greatest programmer either. I was good enough to do what I did, but I'm also not the super creative inventive type that's going to come up with the next app or this or that or whatever.

Especially after working at Apple for 10 years, I was around so many smart people. You've got to understand, my goal was to hire people smarter than me, which was not that hard but these people are just brilliant.

When you've got people like Darin Adler and Kinka Shinden, Richard Williamson, Machi Stilloviach, Dave Hyatt, Adele Peterson and people like that working for you. You've got geniuses.

Then you have to look at my management chain. When I started at Apple, I worked for Scott Forstall, who worked for Patron Serlay, who worked for Aveta Veinion, who worked for Steve Jobs, right.

Guy: Right, an all-star stack going on.

Don: Yeah, and those guys are just the crème of the crop. You had to bring you A game every day. There was sometimes I thought, boy they're going to find out I'm a nitwit and I'm just gone. Later on, I found out everybody except the most delusional person out there has days like that. When you're around that kind of people, it's kind of daunting.

The other thing I wrote a few weeks ago when I talked about why I retired from Apple. I was just tired. Not burn out. People online assumed I meant I was burnt out. No, I know what burnt out is, I was not burned out.

Guy: Yeah, just time to move on.

Guy: You were done it sounded like.

Don: Yeah, I was done. Stick a fork in it. Go do something else. You have to understand that I'm an incredibly lazy man.

Guy: Some of the best programmers are.

Don: Yeah that's probably...

Guy: Hopefully, I don't mean that in a negative way.

Don: They get the machine to do it for them, right.

Guy: Looking at the stuff that you've worked on, I think a common thread is that you sort of try to enable creativity. I don't know if you've made these choices intentionally or not. You've worked on Director, Illustrator, vendering engines for the web.

Don: Mm-hmm.

Guy: Is that something you're conscious of or something you're drawn to, or is that just happened stance?

Don: Probably the later, happen stance. I didn't end up working on a lot of tools that were creative tools, and that was because of my background as an artist. One of the attractions I had when I left Tops and what was then Sun Microsystems, because they did acquire Tops, to go work for Macromind, it was called then before it was called...

[crosstalk]

Guy: Oh, right! I forgot...

[crosstalk]

Don: That was when it was in the old building on the corner of Fourth and Townsend. That was a great building by the way. It was a four-story building, we found out later on, we wondered why the floors sloped in the building, and you couldn't put a pencil on your desk without it rolling off.

We found out the floors sloped because it was a slaughterhouse at the turn of the century, and the floors were sloped to drain the blood off into the catch pan.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: We thought, "Isn't that the perfect environment to program in"? The history is so rich it's bleeding you out there. I went there because I wanted to do something that was not low-level file sharing stuff. Although I do love networking and stuff like that, that's a lot of fun.

I wanted to work on something creative, then when I went to Macromedia to work on Illustrator, which was like coming full circle for me, because I had used Illustrator, when I was a professional illustrator. To be able to meet the original creator, someone I had respect for was fantastic. In a way, it's kind of like that, but it's also dumb luck.

Like I said my life plan a lot of it has been, oh, bright and shiny I'll go over there for a while. I wound up at Netscape, not because I was trying to go and do something marvelous with the web. I was out of a job. I got laid off from Adobe, and this other place I ended up working at in between. I thought Netscape was doing something interesting and they were doing a lot of hiring, so I went there. Dumb luck.

Guy: Was that your first introduction to working on web stuff?

Don: Yes, well it wasn't my first introduction to the web, I had a little bit of that at Adobe, but certainly working on web stuff it was.

Guy: On the engine.

Don: I planned to write about the story on the blog in a few weeks, but that's where I got my nickname and met a lot of fantastic people. I got to be in a documentary there.

Guy: You were there when Netscape open source navigator, which was a huge deal. Like you said, there's a documentary about it. Was it as crazy as a documentary makes it look?

Don: Oh no, not at all! It was much crazier than that. Before we started the recording session, just to tell the audience here, I asked Rene and Guy, "Do you bleep me? Is it OK if I drop a few F bombs or something else here?"

Guy: Everybody here is a sailor.

Don: Exactly. One of the ways I got my particular assignment for the open sourcing of Mozilla was my familiarity with, you might say, colorful metaphors. They had decided...We were just getting crushed by Microsoft and Netscape, obviously...and Driesen just pulled out of his ass this Hail Mary idea of open sourcing Navigator, and then we realized "oh God, we've got to do this."

I was a manager there and I was on the mailing list that night as we were discussing how the hell we are going do this, and what some of the tasks were.

One of the things that came up was, "Oh God, we've got to clean up the source code if we're going to open source it." Somebody might've said shit or hell or damn. I was like, "What, are you kidding?" We had one source file that used the word "fuck" repeatedly as sort of a line separator between sections of the source. It was the engineers' way to comment on what he thought of the code.

And they said, "Well, we've got to correct the source and search for those seven dirty words. You know, George Carlin's seven dirty words. Find those and we'll be good." I was like, "What, are you kidding me? What about..." and I rattle off thirty in the email.

The entire management team was on the mailing list, and Driesen was reading it too, my boss and everybody else. This was Netscape, and I wasn't spanked for that. It was like, "Oh yeah, Gramps is right. You're in charge! Don, your job is to sanitize the source.

They say, 'Only Nixon could go to China.'" Cleaning up the source, and obviously shepherding the Mac version through. And cleaning up the source was really hard, it actually turned out to be easier to get rid of the F bombs than getting rid of all the things that were proprietary code. That was just maddening.

Guy: I remember a scene in the movie where somebody just ends up calling Steve and getting an OK to ship something that was basically Apple's.

Don: I was in the room at the time! So, that was nuts, with days, if not hours to go.

Guy: It was a pretty short time span between when the decision was made to open source it and when it actually went open-source, right?

Don: It was less than three months. Driesen made the call in the first week of January, and then March 31st, three-three-one day, that's what we had to hit. It was like, "Couldn't you have made it June?"

Guy: You just picked a date, right? And everything had to happen?

Don: Yeah, we did it. Up until the time, that was probably one of the most fun things I've ever done, I made friendships that I still have this day...great people. It was fantastic being there and being part of that, and saying you got to change the world.

Which is one of the reasons when I got the opportunity to go to Apple, and they wanted me to do a web browser again, that was one of the reasons I did it. The idea of being able to do something crazy, if it's really, truly nutty, and sometimes even hopeless, I was like "Whoa, I'm in! That sounds fun." That's one of the reasons I did it.

Guy: Let's put pause on that Safari project for a little bit, because in the middle there you did something kind of crazy and kind of fun. You tried to do Nautilus, which is a file browser for Linux. With Andy Herzfeld, who you spoke about earlier, that's why I want to bring up.

Don: Well, to get to how I got there to Eazel, Andy Herzfeld and Bart Decrem's company, they were the two cool founders there...I started at Netscape in 1996. I just missed the IPO, so I was not a "Bazillionaires" there like everyone else. That's what we called them, "Bazillionaires." AOL had acquired Netscape by that time, and AOL was very slowly but methodically running the company into the ground, and worse, the soul of the company into the ground.

Guy: As they do.

Don: I was getting really tired of it because I'd been there for a while, four years, because I earned my sabbatical. I went on my sabbatical, this was fall of 2000, I was gone for six weeks on vacation and I came back and I just had to stick a fork in my leg every day to go to work. I was just not enjoying myself. The fun that we had from doing navigator in the early days, of open sourcing Mozilla; AOL wasn't behind it the right way.

One of my engineers had just dropped out and left about the same time I took my sabbatical. He went off to do the startup of, I didn't know what the name of it was, but one day he sort of called me out of the blue and said, "Gramps, we need some help over here. We need some managers who know what they're doing over here." and I was like, "Well, what the hell are you calling me for." He said, "No, you could this." I had gotten into Linux at the time because I was really disappointed with where Mac was going.

Guy: This was 1997-ish?

Don: No, it was 2000.

Guy: OS X still wasn't out.

Don: OS X still wasn't out and although by this time Scott Forstall had convinced [indecipherable 0:38:27] Burtron and Steve to do Carbon, nobody had it and nobody knew about it at the time. I didn't know that was going to be the way forward. While I liked YellowBox, which was the Cocoa machine, and I love Cocoa, I told, when I was at Netscape, the Apple guys, "What, are you out of your mind? Am I going to rewrite a million lines of code on Navigator and move it onto this new OS? That's not going to happen."

So I was really disillusioned and although the Bonding Mac's had just come out and the "Think Different." campaign had come out, a lot of us old guys from the old world didn't think much of that. We thought it was kind of...this is kind of stupid in retrospect, which shows you what excellent judgment I have about marketing...I just thought, "Wow, this is desperate. This is not good."

Guy: In all fairness, Mac OS 8 and OS 9 were not compelling for anybody who knew their stuff.

Don: It was not the next big thing. I knew that the other operating system efforts had failed, because everyone talked to those people. So, I'd gotten into Linux and I liked the environment, but the desktop was still crap.

I went over and interviewed at Eazel and what their goal was to remake and make money from the desktop on Linux. I actually didn't pay much attention to the business plan because I just wanted out. I thought it was the coolest thing that I got to interview with Andy Herzfeld and he was like one of my idols. Just a total teddy bear, probably one of the most fun interviews I'd done in my life.

The other guy I got to interview with who was going to be my boss, the hiring manager, Bud Tribble. Good God! He was the guy who ran the original Mac software team back in the early 80s. He's a super-genius as well, a medical doctor, and an exceptionally good bass player, too, by the way, when he gets to play.

I got to interview with Darren Addler. I was going to be his boss, and I was also one of Darren's fan boys. I've got to tell you, of all the interviews I've done over the years, that was the one I probably sweated the most and worried about the most. Darren was one of the fiercest damn interviewers; I still give him grief about that to this day.

Guy: Really? Technically or just?...

Don: You have to know Darren. Darren was doing a really good job. He was trying to find out, "Do I really want this person as my boss? What does this person know about management?" Up until that time I'd been a manager at a couple of different companies by then, engineering manager, but nobody had really grilled me on it like Darren had, and he was good; which I would leverage later on certainly to interview other people over the years at Apple.

He was a real tough interviewer and I was nervous about that because Darren was the guy who started the "Blue Meanies" back at Apple in the early 90s. He went on to some fame at General Magic with Andy. He's a really good guy.

I took the job at Eazel and they were already pretty far along. Well, not far along enough with Nautilus. A lot of the big decisions had been made but they just couldn't seem to get the damn thing done, so I came in as the director of client engineering, my first job with that title, Engineering Director.

Bud had to go worry about investors and all kinds of other things, and he told me "Your job is to get this thing done." We didn't have enough engineering management talent, so I had like twenty-five people reporting directly to me. If you ever want to go nuts as a manager, you do that.

But they turned out to be some of the most fantastic people in the world. Not only Darren, but Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Pavil Shisler. Ken Kocienda was there, too. Ken didn't report to me, he eventually became the other server-side director of engineering, I directed client and Ken and I became really good friends. When I did wind up going to Apple later on, after we went completely toes up at Eazel, I knew who I was going to fill my team with. A lot of those guys.

Guy: Eazel seems like one of those companies that had a lot of stars packed in all at the same time.

Don: Brian Croll was also there, he was the head of marketing. Brian also went to Apple, he's the head of OS X marketing and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. I went there because it was going to be fun and all these smart people were there, and it was not Netscape. I just wanted to do something different. Even though it was a fool's errand, we got Nautilus out on time, and then a day and a half later we laid off half the company.

It was one of the worst things ever. We're going up towards the deadline for bringing Nautilus out and working these enormously long days. I get to work early in the morning and Ken Kocienda meets me outside and is like, "Oh, the shit's hit the fan." and I'm like, "What?" "We have no money. The funding didn't come through."

So we went inside and the entire board was inside, in the board room we had, and they wanted to talk to us and said, "We've come up for a plan to keep going." The entire board, and my boss, all the executives were going to basically not pay themselves.

I'm thinking to myself because I had a mortgage right then, it's like, "Will Ken and I get paid," just as a little aside there, "if you do this?" They said, "Yeah, but we're only going to do this if you guys stay here." I said, "Well, thanks for thinking of us like that. I'm not sure if your priorities are completely right."

They said, "We're going to have to lay people off." and I go, "Oh, crap. Well, who were you thinking about?" and they show us a list of people and I went, "OK, we'll do it if you keep paying us but one more qualification, you've got to let us pick who's on the list, because these are the wrong people on the list." Ken and I did one of the worst jobs you'll ever do as a manager.

Guy: I've had to do that, it's horrible.

Don: We went to this dive bar Japanese restaurant place in downtown Mountain View, it had the worst damn tea. We sat there, and writing on a napkin we figured out who was going to live or die, and then we had to get Nautilus done.

I remember the night we were trying to get done, it was after midnight, it was like one o'clock in the morning, and Ken and I are managing the bug reports sitting in this room and this young kid, one of the QA engineers, runs in the room and says, "I've found it, I've found the last bug that was holding us up. We can run the build now because John's got a fix." Ken says, "That's great!" Kid runs out, shuts the door, and Ken slams his head on the desk. That's one of the guys we were going to lay off. So, that sucked. If you ever get a chance, don't ever do that.

So, I was out of a job and we were still trying to save the company. We were trying to sell it to RedHat and do all sorts of other whacky things. I knew I had to find some place to work because I knew my wife wouldn't want me lounging around all summer, kind of like what I do now.

I started trying to look around at what was out there. I remember we were focused on gnome because Nautilus was a gnome file manager. I started looking at KDE and I was playing with KDE, and I got re-exposed because before I went to Eazel I had been kind of a KDE guy, and I got re-exposed to Conqueror. I thought, "Yeah, they did a pretty good job here while we weren't paying attention."

Guy: Which was their file manager, sort of Windows-style where it was based on a lot of web technology?

Don: Exactly, and it was using KHTML and kJS, as core commands. I looked into it a little later on. I thought, "That's pretty good, but there's no money in KDE, I got to find something to make the..."

Guy: Got to pay rent.

Don: Yeah, I got to pay rent. Just then Mac OS X Cheetah had come out, and Andy Herzfeld sat across the isle from me and I said, "Andy, what do you think of Mac OS X? Did you play with the developer preview? Because I really hadn't played with it." and he said, "No, but Don, if you're interested in it, do you want to borrow a machine?" I didn't really have a Mac, anymore, and Andy lent me one of his G3 towers to run Cheetah on.

Guy: One of the blue ones?

Don: No...

Guy: Oh, one of the beige?

Don: No, it was either blue or right when they went to the first ones with the grey. Anyway, Andy's the most generous guy in the world, a wonderful person. He lent me one of those and I was using Cheetah at the very last developer preview when I started playing with it, and I went "Wow, they did a really good job here. It's slower than shit, but..." It was really good and I thought, "This could be something. I would like to work on this."

I'd become a real expert on the old operating system, basically system 7 era. Working at Tops doing system software, I had my own hand-annotated dis-assemblies of parts of the ROM. You had to do that back in those days, and this was something completely different, and I was excited by something new.

I didn't really want to go back to classic Mac-style program. I went over and talked to Bud and I said, "Bud, you obviously still know people over there." Because Next had acquired Apple, that's what we had all deemed what had happened. Even when I was at Apple, that's what we had called what had happened.

I said, "Can you get me a gig?" The funny thing is, going back to your thinking, Guy, is Bud thought I'd want to do the creative stuff. So, he got me an interview with the iPhoto team, which strangely enough, was being run by my old friend Glenn Reid from Adobe. It was a pretty easy interview and stuff like that.

As much as I like Glenn and stuff, there were some tells about the organization and stuff like that. I didn't want to work on iPhoto. I wanted to work on the core. The interview was pretty good. I went back and told Bud, "I'd really like to work in Systems Software," He's said, "Well that's funny because somebody over there wants to talk to you, apparently." I went, "Oh really? What the hell do they want to talk to me about?"

So I went over like a week later and that was when I met Scott Forstall, yeah.

Guy: Not a bad person to meet.

Don: Yeah. I was not aware, at the time, that he was the man behind Carbon but I found that out talking to him. It was a really funny interviewer. I went...

Guy: Actually have to overlook quite a bit is that like one of the old Next guys is one of the people that pushed for Carbon to be in there.

Don: Yeah, which is totally crazy. But that's the great thing about Scott. I mean, he's just totally the world's most pragmatic guy.

Guy: Right.

Don: He got it. He gets it. That's part of his genius. So we did an interviewer with him and I had to sign a non-disclosure to do the interview, which is like no big deal. But we are sitting in his office, Scott's interviewing me, and he's asking me questions, kind of probing. Like, if we wanted to do this how would you?

I'm like, "You want me to do a web browser?" He was like, "Hold that thought." Runs out of the room, gets his admin. They bring in another NDA.

[laughter]

Don: Go through the whole rigamarole, signing, witnessing the NDA, stuff like that. His administrative assistant leaves the room. We watch her leave the room. Shut the door. Scott turns to me and says yes.

[laughter]

Don: Then, I talked to him about how we'd do a Web browser and how they would do a Web browser. They just thought it was nutty, right?

Guy: It did seem crazy at the time. When the project was announced, it seemed to come out of left field.

Don: Yeah, we surprised a lot of people especially like I said, we punk'd a lot a people with what we'd use. It was in that original interview with Scott that when he asked me, "How would you do it?" I was just full of piss and vinegar that day I guess and I thought, well, I'd base it on Konqueror. He was like, "Really? And not Mozilla?"

I was mostly doing it to be snarky and silly and stupid, but that's what we wound up....I told him why at the time, but that's eventually what we wound up doing. After I looked at every technology there was early on, that's what we decided to do.

Guy: I want to get into that a little bit, because I think that's one of the four big software choices that Apple has made that's really paid off for them. First, is using NeXTSTEP for Mac OS. The Quartz compositing over the display postscript -- I think that was a huge, huge move even though it was as slow as hell, KHTML, and using Cocoa and [indecipherable 0:54:33] for iOS is the fourth one.

Honestly, maybe you were just trying to be wacky in that interview, but choosing Konqueror as the basis for Safari and WebKit is a huge decision. What drove you? Because you'd worked on Navigator. You'd worked on NeXTSTEP. Nautilus didn't use Konqueror. What was the impetus behind it?

Don: Here I am. I'll tell you some of this and I'm going to ruin yet another blog post that I have in draft, but I did promise people a story. The impetus? You have to remember what Mozilla was like at the time. It was huge. It was several million lines of code.

Now, WebKit is that size now, kind of amusing me, but that was an enormous amount of code. It was code at that time written in a style that was very obtuse. The Gecko rendering engine. I think it was Ken Kocienda made a joke that it had this object model that had objects to represent all the bits almost that was really, really complicated and slow.

One of the early goals of the project was not only to build a web browser, be able to use the technology that we use elsewhere. Which was one of the things that Apple couldn't do with Internet Explorer for the Mac. You couldn't take the engine out.

In the interview process and of course on the job, I met Bertrand Serlet who was Scott's boss at the time. I knew that Bertrand wasn't going to let several mean lines of code into Mac OS X. It wasn't that big at the time almost. I had to come up with something lighter-weight than that. So that was one thing.

The other is it was not exactly a star at performance either at the time. It was pretty slow. There were also some very subtle issues thinking about it in a kind of Machiavellian way. I knew that we were going to have to do this project quietly.

Let's be blunt and secret. Nobody could know about this. I am going to go off and do this for a year or 18 months. I'm going to come out -- ta da. We based this all on Gecko and we forked it. We would just get -- flayed -- by that because the Mozilla community was so huge.

If I based it on a smaller project that nobody knew about, smaller community. To be perfectly honest, the hangers-on were less rabid. I had a chance of pulling that off politically. It was actually harder to do with Mozilla that way.

Getting back to the size of the code. There was a really important thing, with the size of the code, was getting the engineers to wrap their heads around it.

Ken's the first engineer on the team, but he started that same day as I did at Apple. Technically I did not hire him. I made sure he was on my team when he got hired. Richard Williamson was the first guy that hired him a month after we started.

I had to get these guys to wrap their heads around a code base. I knew from working on Gecko myself, you just don't go into that lightly. I mean it's a monster. I had to get something that they could grok. That was another reason.

It turns out the code at the time certainly was much more...shall we say hackable than Mozilla and Gecko was. It was much more pliable and it was simpler. I wasn't fooling myself. It was not complete. It was not as standards compliant. It didn't render everything as well. It was not as accurate, but it was a good basis.

That's one of the reasons I did it, so I picked that. When I say I picked it, I didn't like -- Don comes down from the mountain -- and says.

I stood around. Actually, Richard had the office across the hall from me and Ken had the one next to me on the same side. I think we were actually standing in Richard's office at the time because we had some things on his whiteboard.

I said we got to do this. We got to pick one of the solutions we've been investigating. I said I got to go tell Scott, and Bertrand, and Javie what we're going to do here. We're going to lay out the plan. I said this is what I want to do. Are you guys in? Do you buy this? They were like yes.

I was not going to pick this without those two saying yes we're going to do this. I certainly wasn't going to go that way without approval from my management chain.

That goes back to another thing. I say in my blog, by the way, credit where credit's due, that I started the project. Technically when you look at it, Scott Forstall started the project. You can argue everyone at that management chain, Scott, Bertrand, Steve they all started the project...

Guy: Sure.

Don: ...but I was the one...

Rene: You drove it.

Don: Yeah, I drove it, and drove it like a vicious psycho crazy person at the time.

Guy: I was going to say, one year between picking Konqueror, one year and 18 months, and shipping Safari 1. That's a lot of work. Safari was quite a bit ahead of Konqueror when it did ship, in my recollection.

Don: Yeah. We had fixed in all...I'll go into some of the things we'd fixed, especially the performance aspect of what we changed, in my talk. Here, he works his plug into the conversation at the Úll Conference next month, where I talk. My talk, 25 minutes of gramps talking about how we made Safari fast.

One of the things we did were some speed improvements to KHTML and KJS, but also some correctness improvements, and things like that.

Guy: One of the things you keep hearing about the Safari project is that you have performance-based tests. If a commit makes something slower, then it gets yanked.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: Was that your doing?

Don: Yes.

Guy: I can imagine, when a deadline is looming, you may be tempted to let that slide a bit.

Don: I never did. There were times when I was the most hated person on my team for that. This is actually the point of my talk next month, it's that that is the key. You can never go backwards. That's the Safari secret. That's become the culture. If I have a legacy with Apple, it's that would be a big thing there you never...

Guy: Sometimes before.

Don: Yeah. And you have to turn it into a religion.

Guy: Yeah, it really has to be the one thing you won't [indecipherable 1:02:59] . I think you have to pick one thing that you will not sacrifice and you've got to stick to it. Otherwise, everything can get turned into a mush.

Don: Yeah. It was a hard thing to do, because like I said it doesn't make you well liked with your own team, and not everybody will understand the process at first, but it's not an issue anymore, because the entire team became...

Guy: Now it's part of the culture, aren't that right?

Don: Yeah, it's like a jihad.

Guy: The other interesting thing about Safari is that you are one of the very few teams in Apple that open-source in a pretty big and loud way. I suppose just using Konqueror means that you had to be, right?

Don: Yeah, because it was LGPL.

Guy: Was that a hard sell to management?

Don: Yeah. In a way, the hard sell was not the initial one, because we were also considering resource for open-source. But the hard sell was becoming truly open-source. In other words, when we first came out, we were just throwing tarballs over the wall periodically. We didn't have a [indecipherable 1:04:23] people think of the way WebKit is run right now, it's a very high-visibility, very, very open and, we hope, transparent system, but it wasn't like that the beginning.

Who we have to thank for pushing to do it that way is Maciej Stachowiak and David Hyatt. They were the ones really pressing Darren and I. Darren, of course, was for it. I went to Scott and Scott approved. Bertrand was the one who made the call and allowed us to do that. Part of it is because Apple did have, certainly, a history with open-source. It was much easier to do with Apple than it would be at other companies.

Guy: Really? I think people would be surprised to hear that, because Apple is so well known for being very secretive and closed, despite the fact that they do actually have a lot of open-source.

Don: A lot of open-source. Look at Clang, look at LLVM, look at Darwin. There is a huge history of that there. That's how we could get away with that. Was everybody happy about that? Not always, but not everybody was happy about the engine choice that I took the credit/blame on with KHTML and KJS.

You have to remember, when it first came out, Safari was really not very compatible with the Web, partly because its brand-new engine WebKit brand-new engine and it was not IE.

It had some of the same problems that Firefox had when it first came out and the new engine. Worse, because it was so obscure, which is why the User-Agent string, which is probably the lasting thing that's still in the code that I did that's in there, why it's crafted that way to be as compatible as possible.

But, for a while, there were some, not my management chain, not the team, but there were some, and well-meaning people, I don't dislike them for doing this, they were trying to do the right thing, but they would second-guess me, like, "Oh, we should work with," something more compatible...

Guy: There's always going to be some kind of bias no matter what you...

Don: Right. And then, later on, we did the iPhone. Richard went off to start the Mobile Safari team -- Richard Williamson should be credited for starting that project. [indecipherable 1:07:19] and others wanted to do that. When that came out, it was very clear that we could not have used Gecko at the time, because it was just too huge for the platform.

WebKit was the perfect choice, KHTML and KJS, and I was a genius again. Then, when Google decided to do Chrome, then I was a knucklehead again, because it was open-source and they could walk off with it. You get a real thick skin in this business. The whole time, you stay the course. As I told my team over the years, "Your plan, our plan, is to take over the world."

Rene: What was it like for you, looking...I was using a lot of mobile devices back then, and there was WAP browser, there was Pocket IE, there was Blazer on Palm, and none of them could really show you the Web. You really seem to have a goal of actually making the mobile Web useful.

Don: In retrospect, you can see that was the goal. At the time, when Richard went off to do the project and to do this, we were just trying to get the bear to dance. We were just trying to get it on the device and get it working and have an experience that would fit on that size of a screen.

I think the innovations at his team came up with where the way you navigate, working in the other gestures, the way pages rendered. Some people hated it at the time, but it was the way that we could get the performance out of it, the...

Guy: The tiled?

Don: The tiled stuff, the other subtle things with the way the chrome...and I use the word chrome generically. I hate that Google picked that name for their browser, because for a decade I've been using the word chrome just to describe the box that's around the web content. That's forever screwed now.

Guy: Jerks.

Don: Yeah, you've got to go lower case "c", chrome.

Guy: They've co-opted it.

Don: It was what I told Mike Pinkerton and Ben Goodger, "Well, way to go to screw up our vocabulary." That was great. That just drew you in. And getting the gesture stuff right, they did a fantastic job with that. While Richard was responsible for the front end and did the initial version, obviously, of getting WebKit to work on there, because they had to do some other stuff, we eventually folded all that back into the main Safari projects. By the time I left Apple, I was responsible for that.

Guy: It was interesting because some people had tried to do proxy browsers where they'd render everything on their servers and then push it down to you as an image. And some people just prioritized the content so the entire interface would lock up while it tried to render things. But mobile Safari always seemed to want to retain that immediacy and the liveliness of the web.

Don: Oh yeah, and that was the total goal. Steve was very clear that that's what we had to do. That's what he wanted. There were a couple of glorious hacks that Richard's team did that enabled part of that. We had stuff going both ways that we folded back into desktop Safari for some of that responsiveness.

I am so glad people were...it was great to see people delighted by it and being able to browse and do things on a device that small. I think mobile Safari where my favorite environment to use it is actually not the phone, it's on an iPad. I just love that way. It's just buttery smooth. That's what I love about it.

You're talking about the proxy thing. My friends over at Danger -- I think it was Danger -- tried that experiment first. Was it Danger?

Guy: Danger did it. Rem did it. Opera did it.

Don: I think it was Danger or Opera who did it first. I went and looked at it, and I was not impressed. Well, I was impressed with...it was a great hack. But you really couldn't get a true rendering of the page because you're trying to execute JavaScript remotely. That's not where the Web is going when more and more JavaScript was being pushed to the client.

I looked at that and was like, "Well, that's not going to scale. That's not going to last." Then it was a couple of years ago Amazon brought out...they touted their...

Guy: Silk.

Don: Silk, thank you. Talk about silky smooth. They talked about a Silk browser. There were lots of smart people at Amazon. I thought, "Whoa, they've figured it out." I had my guys go out. We bought a couple of the devices just to check it out. I went, "Nope. Still not there yet. Still does not work."

Guy: You reminded me. Do you remember those Internet accelerators that they used to try to sell, because dialog was so slow.

Don: Oh, yeah.

Guy: It seems like it's filling slack in the market, that this is a problem that the natural evolution of technology will solve for you more quickly than you will gain any acceleration in the market share.

I remember at both the iPhone event and the iPad event, Internet communicator and a better web browser, it was such a cornerstone of Apple's pitch for these devices that I can't imagine it being anything other than a core part of the experience.

Don: Yeah, the whole responsiveness. If we ever had a hang in any part of the phone, that was total anathema. We had to fix that. In the early testing, we were told to pay very, very close attention to this.

We were worried about not only Safari, but other applications. When you've got a lot of data in them, would they slow down manipulating that data? This was a problem, actually, in Safari. If you had an enormous number of bookmarks or an enormous number of items in history, Safari would start to get slow. We worked really hard to fix those kinds of problems.

Rene: Yeah, that's a weird kind of problem that you don't necessarily think about. A giant history is not the thing that you're thinking about making fast when you've got a whole web browser to port over.

Don: The axes of...the things you have to worry about with performance in a Web browser are so vast, it's staggering. Getting back to the Amazon Silk thing, I said they didn't solve that problem. They came closer to solving that problem than anybody else had. But I think the correct solution is faster web browsers and smarter caching.

You don't have to get...to a certain extent that's what Silk is, is smarter caching, and server-side caching and trying to leverage things like AWS and stuff like that. We're getting pretty damn fast right now. One of the other legacies at Apple was starting the second browser war, a different kind of browser war, which was the performance war.

I like to think that the Safari team was one of the reasons that Mozilla really got serious about performance. They did a really good job getting serious about performance. Firefox has improved tremendously over the years that way. I know when Dean Hachamovitch took over the IE team at Microsoft, he was also really serious about it. And certainly the Chrome guys are nuts about that, too.

We're all racing against each other. I think that's fantastic for end users. It made all of us better. It made certainly the experience with JavaScript, which is where the web was going, much better.

Rene: I was going to ask, so is that where most of the gains have been had, and is that the future of performance enhancements for the Web?

Don: It's kind of hard to quantify that. It's like, most at what time? In the early development of Safari, Richard Williamson made a huge gain just by making Safari 30 percent faster by speeding up text rendering. But that's when it was slower than crap, so you could do things like that then. Ken Kocienda made a big performance boom in Network [indecipherable 1:16:25] . Certainly [indecipherable 1:16:28] and Darren were the first to tackle speeding up KJS and going down that route. Geoff Garen and his team are in charge of that now over at Apple. Certainly there are going to be gains that way in JavaScript. But I think there are...

Rene: You need to look at the whole stack.

Don: Yeah, you have to look at the whole stack. You have to measure. That's the key thing about winning the performance war. Darin Adler had a great expression. He said he's got a 100 percent record of guessing where the next performance bottle is. He's always been wrong.

[laughter]

Don: Which is not actually true. He's not always been wrong. That's the thing, is you don't make assumptions that way. You go out and measure. So I actually have no idea what that is. Also, the nature of Web browsing has changed over time.

I think it should continue to change. I'd like to see it move from...you know, Web browser interfaces from a document based world -- and we've had that forever -- to something that's a little more subtle than that. Right now I think Web browsers have too much crap...

Rene: Too much chrome sort of thing?

Don: Yeah, too much chrome, too much stuff. You're slowly seeing the evolution away from URLs, which I think is a great thing. Obviously the plumbing, I don't ever want that to change. But the fact that people have to type things in like that is just...why do we do that? It's 2013. Or why do we have all these other little doodads like reload buttons, and stop buttons, and things like that? It should be...

Guy: More human?

Don: Yeah. It should be more obvious. Explicit back and forward buttons are a little odd, too. That's why I love the world of gestures and doing things like that. But I am out of the game. Try as I might, I try to stop doing this stuff.

Guy: It's interesting to me that if anyone had told me at the height of Windows and IE 6 that we'd all be walking around with little net boxes in our pockets, and WebKit would be arguably the most popular...not even arguably anymore, the most popular browser in the world. Then you have Safari, Chrome. Palm based an entire OS on WebKit. Blackberry is using Torch WebKit now. It's almost ubiquitous. That's a remarkable sea change from just a decade ago.

Don: Yeah. I was joking with [indecipherable 1:19:19] , before he left Apple. I told him...the joke...you know, Pinky and the Brain, our job is to take over the world. That was the goal. I didn't think we'd actually do it, and we kind of did that.

Rene: Now what?

Don: Yeah, now what? It was kind of stunning to me. I think back to that day and sitting in Scott Forstall's office trying to figure out how we're going to do that, starting a little snowball rolling.

And what's happened? There are people that are much better at this stuff than me. After 10 years they need their time with their hand on the wheel, and they'll be better at it than I ever was, leading that effort.

I left this stuff in Darin Adler's hands, to run Safari and WebKit, the greatest guy in the world to do that. He's got people like [indecipherable 1:20:27] working for him, worrying about that stuff. They're all geniuses. Lots of other people working for him, too, worrying about that stuff.

I still, obviously, talk to them from time to time. If I see something that's stupid, I'm not going to drop a note or call them or whatever. It's like the recovering programmer thing. It's like a recovering Web geek thing. I fall off the wagon every once in a while.

I have lunch with Darin every once in a while, and we talk in vague terms about how things are going. I'm actually much more concerned about people. Darin's not going to tell me what the next project is or anything else like that. I never would want him to do that, or anyone else there. I don't want to know that stuff.

For what we can talk about in the WebKit at [indecipherable 1:21:20] , because that is open source. Like, where is this going? Are we thinking about this? I still do it from time to time, but I don't know whether they even listen to me or not.

Guy: I want to ask you about WebGL.

Don: God.

Guy: Does that scare the crap out of you or what?

Don: Well it scares the crap out of me in the sense that of making it safe. Does it scare the crap out of me for changing the nature of the web?

Guy: Oh, yeah, no I don't mean that.

Don: No, no.

Guy: I mean keeping it safe.

Don: Yeah, keeping it safe. I mean that's sort of one reason it's not turned on by default in Safari. It's like there are certain cases where you could do that. I don't get to say anymore because I'm not there. But until the parts of the hardware where the operating system that interpret OpenGL are a little bit more stable and can't crash or corrupt your machine or block around memory here and there, I think let's be careful with that.

I mean, it's kind of far more dangerous right now then JavaScript is, in a way. We figured out how to tame that beast. As soon as we tame GL, I think we can turn it on by default. Other browsers do turn it on by default.

Guy: Yeah, that seems crazy to me.

Don: So I'm like, I don't want to do that.

Guy: Like you really need like a hardened stack. From the drive all the way up.

Don: Yes, it's from the driver all the way up that's exactly what you need. It's a lot harder than people think it is to do that. Look, you know that day is coming that will happen, and I think that will be great. The key thing with that is to, you know it's like what people thought about with SPG, that's not going to replace HTML and CSS and stuff like that. That would be stupid to do so, why would you do that.

Guy: It's just nice, another tool in the kit basically.

Don: Exactly. It's a way to augment things. I mean you never want to walk too far away from HTML because we haven't completely solved them. But accessibility to the content of HTML has been a problem that smart people have been working on solving for years. If you start rendering text inside canvas blocks, which we also helped enable in Apple, that was a hack that Richard Williamson came up with by the way, that image element implemented the first time. If you do that inside of web GEO content you know you have to be really careful, you have to make this stuff accessible, researchable and everything else like that so let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Guy: Right, yeah.

Don: I would like to move on from that world because you've got to remember I've been involved with web browsers since 1996 and that's kind of long enough for anybody. What I'd like to do is I'd like to learn how to write, it's so incredibly hard to do that well and...

Guy: You're doing a great job so far.

Don: I think part of that is just the subject matter. I'm probably the first guy to break the first rule of fruit club, I talked about fruit club and that's what's drawing readers in. I'd like to be able to compel people to read my stuff when I don't put the word Apple or WebKit or Safari or something else in there like that.

In this last post I did, I think day before yesterday, I...

Rene: It was a good one. I liked it.

Don: Oh, thank you. Well, I had watched that. That was like me being the angry old guy. "You kids get off my lawn." I really have to watch that that I don't do that to often. But I intentionally, when I first wrote that, I had...What was the title? Regarding fake projects and loyalty tests at Apple.

Rene: I loved it.

Don: Then I struck at Apple off the title. The headline wrapped much better with that because it was like, no, just put that up, because that was certainly going to be more SEO friendly to do that. But I could give a rats ass about being SEO friendly or all that other stuff, and things like that.

Rene: I don't think you have to worry about that.

Don: No. So what surprised me, when I first started the blog, was the response I get. I was basically writing the thing for my friends on App.net, Twitter, and Facebook and here and there. I thought they'd find it was funny, right? I had no idea I'd get the response I got. It was like stunning to me.

Also, I must say, that for the most part 99 percent of people online have been very polite and very nice. I've made some new friends that way. Rene, I ran into you that way. I'd never actually talked to you in person, guy. I've admired your stuff for a while.

Rene: Thanks. That's very kind.

Don: I'm glad of the impact for those reasons. I got to meet and talk to people like Jim Dalrymple who I had read for years.

Rene: Yeah.

Don: You know Jim's yep, nope.

Rene: Yeah.

Don: When I was at Apple, even though I was director, I was clued into everything that we were doing. I'd check LoopInsight to find out what we were actually doing.

[laughter]

Don: I told Jim...I was talking to him on the phone. I said, "Boy, if I ever found out one of my people was a source of yours I would have fired them on the spot for leaking that." But, of course, that's not how Jim does it. That's not how [indecipherable 1:28:15] does it. That's not how any of the smart people do it. They do it using a technique I pointed out in that last blog post. It's like, you watch, you learn, and you slick what makes sense.

Rene: Well, a lot of time the individual rumors are kind of pointless, right?

Don: Yeah, they're. Like the ones going on now are just...

Rene: Yeah.

Don: You put the visual aid, you might be me rolling my eyes.

[laughter]

Don: It's stupid. I get real tired of that.

But what I'd like to learn, in terms of writing thing, is how to be more productive. Like, the out put. Rene your output is just...God, how do you do that and stay sane? I mean, write to that...

Exactly what you spoke about with trying and you spoke about with Guy and you spoke about with coding, is I have the stuff in my head. This is my current medium for getting it out of my head and putting it on a shelf somewhere. The blogging is the shelf that I'm using.

Rene: Absolutely. I have like 5 different things that I keep wanting to write up just I can't go anywhere with it.

Don: In my Open GL sucks.

[laughter]

Don: You've got to do something. If I wasn't such a lazy person, I think would do it. I'm sure preparing for the Ull conference I'll wait until the last minute before I write up my whole piece. I'm particularly going to try to perform in blog post, as if it was a blog post.

Rene: A dramatic reading.

Don: A dramatic reading of a blog post. That was good.

Rene: I was happy to...

[crosstalk]

Don: Yeah, I met Paul Campbell on Monday. He's a super nice guy.

Rene: Yeah.

Don: What they are trying to do, it'll be a lot of fun. He had nice things to say about you guys, because I told him I was going to be on your show.

Rene: So where can we find you on the web?

Don: Oh...

Rene: You know about the web right?

Don: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said one time, somebody else who...do something really cool. I said, "Yeah, I'm telling you, this web thing is going to catch on."

[laughter]

Don: Just DonMilton.com. That's the blog. I tried to hide it but, you know.

Rene: Lot's of good stuff there, right? I actually enjoyed your [indecipherable 1:30:39] post here.

Don: Oh, right. I did the old man ranting thing again but...

Guy: I like it, I like it. Gosh, it works for you.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: On Twitter your @donmilton?

Don: Yeah, Don Milton. You can just about pick any damn service out there and I've tried to make myself obscure with the whole Don Milton thing.

[laughter]

Don: The same thing happened at App.net. So I hang out on Twitter and App.net quite a bit. Recently it was, myself being sick and my dog being sick, I haven't done as much of that. But I'll probably do that a little bit more.

Guy: You're both on the mend now, right, I understand from your post.

Don: Yeah, she's on the mend right now. We don't know when she will take her next turn. She'll be 16 in June so everyday that we have her...

Guy: Is a gift.

Don: ...is a gift. My wife and I are her long term care insurance plan right now. We are just around to pay back. I'm just around to pay back the enormous debt I owe to her for helping me keep my sanity. She was with me the entire time I was at Apple. There's nothing better than coming home from work and having someone at the door who is glad to see you, which was not always my wife and son.

[laughter]

Don: You know my dogs were, "Wow, dad's home. Does he have anything to eat?" Sit in the floor. You touch your dogs, and all the stress of your life just...

Rene: Evaporates.

Don: ...fades. It's magical how they do that. So now's my turn to take care of her.

Guy: That's great. Well, we wish them all well. And your whole family.

Don: Thanks. And it was great talking to you guys today.

Guy: Yeah, I had a blast. Thank you so much. Again, I could just keep talking forever, but we'll do it some other time.

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