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We share our Apple Vision Pro pre-order war stories, accessories too, influencer demos of Apple's new headset, we discuss the AI-loaded Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Google's new 'Circle to Search,' and personal tech goes back iLife and iDVD.Watch on YouTube!Subscribe and watch our weekly episodes plus bonus clips at: youtube.com/@primarytechshowSponsored by:Rogue Amoeba: Audio Hijack is simply the best way to record audio on your Mac. Through the end of January, get $20 off Audio Hijack or any Rogue Amoeba bundle when you visit: macaudio.com/primarytech and use the promo code: PRIMARYTECHSupport the showJoin our member community and get an ad-free versions of the show, plus exclusive bonus episodes every week! Subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts or here: primarytech.memberful.com/joinReach out:@stephenrobles on Threads@stephenrobles on XStephen on Mastodon@jasonaten on Threads@JasonAten on XJason on MastodonWe would also appreciate a 5-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts and SpotifyPodcast artwork with help from Basic Apple Guy.Those interested in sponsoring the show can reach out to us at: podcast@primarytech.fmLinks from the showApple Vision Pro AccessoriesVision Pro Influencer Photos - Parker Ortolani Apple Vision Pro hands-on, again, for the first time - The VergeA Survey of Popular Apps Currently Compatible With Apple Vision Pro - MacStoriesEverything Announced at Samsung Unpacked: S24 Phones, Galaxy AI and One Surprise Reveal - CNETThe Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra comes with a higher price and loads of AI - The VergeGoogle introduces 'Circle to Search,' a new way to search from anywhere on Android using gestures | TechCrunchApple to Developers: Show Me the Money | Inc.comDistributing apps in the U.S. that provide an external purchase link - Support - Apple Developerxacwhite Apple Park MerchThe Apple Store Time Machine (00:00) - Intro (03:10) - Apple Vision Pro Pre-Orders (16:00) -  Vision Pro Accessories (24:52) - Influencer Demos (38:36) - VisionOS Launch Apps (42:03) - Sponsor: Audio Hijack (44:45) - Galaxy S24 (55:19) - Google Circle (Lens) (57:49) - Apple Gets Their Cut (01:05:09) - Follow-Up: Apple Merch (01:08:51) - iLife and First Macs ★ Support this podcast ★

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996. At the time, most people had a digital camera, like the Canon Elph that was released that year and maybe a digital video camera and probably a computer and about 16% of Americans had a cell phone at the time. Some had a voice recorder, a Diskman, some in the audio world had a four track machine. Many had CD players and maybe even a laser disk player.  But all of this was changing. Small, cheap microprocessors were leading to more and more digital products. The MP3 was starting to trickle around after being patented in the US that year. Netflix would be founded the next year, as DVDs started to spring up around the world. Ricoh, Polaroid, Sony, and most other electronics makers released digital video cameras. There were early e-readers, personal digital assistants, and even research into digital video recorders that could record your favorite shows so you could watch them when you wanted. In other words we were just waking up to a new, digital lifestyle. But the industries were fragmented.  Jobs and the team continued the work begun under Gil Amelio to reduce the number of products down from 350 to about a dozen. They made products that were pretty and functional and revitalized Apple. But there was a strategy that had been coming together in their minds and it centered around digital media and the digital lifestyle. We take this for granted today, but mostly because Apple made it ubiquitous.  Apple saw the iMac as the centerpiece for a whole new strategy. But all this new type of media and the massive files needed a fast bus to carry all those bits. That had been created back in 1986 and slowly improved on one the next few years in the form of IEEE 1394, or Firewire. Apple started it - Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, and others helped bring it to device they made. Firewire could connect 63 peripherals at 100 megabits, later increased to 200 and then 400 before increasing to 3200. Plenty fast enough to transfer those videos, songs, and whatever else we wanted. iMovie was the first of the applications that fit into the digital hub strategy. It was originally released in 1999 for the iMac DV, the first iMac to come with built-in firewire. I'd worked on Avid and SGI machines dedicated to video editing at the time but this was the first time I felt like I was actually able to edit video. It was simple, could import video straight from the camera, allow me to drag clips into a timeline and then add some rudimentary effects. Simple, clean, and with a product that looked cool. And here's the thing, within a year Apple made it free. One catch. You needed a Mac. This whole Digital Hub Strategy idea was coming together. Now as Steve Jobs would point out in a presentation about the Digital Hub Strategy at Macworld 2001, up to that point, personal computers had mainly been about productivity. Automating first the tasks of scientists, then with the advent of the spreadsheet and databases, moving into automating business and personal functions. A common theme in this podcast is that what drives computing is productivity, telemetry, and quality of life. The telemetry gains came with connecting humanity through the rise of the internet in the later 1990s. But these new digital devices were what was going to improve our quality of life. And for anyone that could get their hands on an iMac they were now doing so. But it still felt like a little bit of a closed ecosystem.  Apple released a tool for making DVDs in 2001 for the Mac G4, which came with a SuperDrive, or Apple's version of an optical drive that could read and write CDs and DVDs. iDVD gave us the ability to add menus, slideshows (later easily imported as Keynote presentations when that was released in 2003), images as backgrounds, and more. Now we could take those videos we made and make DVDs that we could pop into our DVD player and watch. Families all over the world could make their vacation look a little less like a bunch of kids fighting and a lot more like bliss. And for anyone that needed more, Apple had DVD Studio Pro - which many a film studio used to make the menus for movies for years. They knew video was going to be a thing because going back to the 90s, Jobs had tried to get Adobe to release Premiere for the iMac. But they'd turned him down, something he'd never forget. Instead, Jobs was able to sway Randy Ubillos to bring a product that a Macromedia board member had convinced him to work on called Key Grip, which they'd renamed to Final Cut. Apple acquired the source code and development team and released it as Final Cut Pro in 1999. And iMovie for the consumer and Final Cut Pro for the professional turned out to be a home run. But another piece of the puzzle was coming together at about the same time. Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid, and Dave Heller built a tool called SoundJam in 1998. They had worked on the failed Copeland project to build a new OS at Apple and afterwards, Robbin made a great old tool (that we might need again with the way extensions are going) called Conflict Catcher while Kincaid worked on the drivers for a MP3 player called the Diamond Rio. He saw these cool new MP3 things and tools like Winamp, which had been released in 1997, so decided to meet back up with Robbin for a new tool, which they called SoundJam and sold for $50.  Just so happens that I've never met anyone at Apple that didn't love music. Going back to Jobs and Wozniak. So of course they would want to do something in digital music. So in 2000, Apple acquired SoundJam and the team immediately got to work stripping out features that were unnecessary. They wanted a simple aesthetic. iMovie-esque, brushed metal, easy to use. That product was released in 2001 as iTunes. iTunes didn't change the way we consumed music.That revolution was already underway.  And that team didn't just add brushed metal to the rest of the operating system. It had begun with QuickTime in 1991 but it was iTunes through SoundJam that had sparked brushed metal.  SoundJam gave the Mac music visualizers as well. You know, those visuals on the screen that were generated by sound waves from music we were listening to. And while we didn't know it yet, would be the end of software coming in physical boxes. But something else big. There was another device coming in the digital hub strategy. iTunes became the de facto tool used to manage what songs would go on the iPod, released in 2001 as well. That's worthy of its own episode which we'll do soon.  You see, another aspect about SoundJam is that users could rip music off of CDs and into MP3s. The deep engineering work done to get the codec into the system survives here and there in the form of codecs accessible using APIs in the OS. And when combined with spotlight to find music it all became more powerful to build playlists, embed metadata, and listen more insightfully to growing music libraries. But Apple didn't want to just allow people to rip, find, sort, and listen to music. They also wanted to enable users to create music. So in 2002, Apple also acquired a company called Emagic. Emagic would become Logic Pro and Gerhard Lengeling would in 2004 release a much simpler audio engineering tool called Garage Band.  Digital video and video cameras were one thing. But cheap digital point and shoot cameras were everwhere all of a sudden. iPhoto was the next tool in the strategy, dropping in 2002 Here, we got a tool that could import all those photos from our cameras into a single library. Now called Photos, Apple gave us a taste of the machine learning to come by automatically finding faces in photos so we could easily make albums. Special services popped up to print books of our favorite photos. At the time most cameras had their own software to manage photos that had been developed as an after-thought. iPhoto was easy, worked with most cameras, and was very much not an after-thought.  Keynote came in 2003, making it easy to drop photos into a presentation and maybe even iDVD. Anyone who has seen a Steve Jobs presentation understands why Keynote had to happen and if you look at the difference between many a Power Point and Keynote presentation it makes sense why it's in a way a bridge between the making work better and doing so in ways we made home better.  That was the same year that Apple released the iTunes Music Store. This seemed like the final step in a move to get songs onto devices. Here, Jobs worked with music company executives to be able to sell music through iTunes - a strategy that would evolve over time to include podcasts, which the moves effectively created, news, and even apps - as explored on the episode on the App Store. And ushering in an era of creative single-purpose apps that drove down the cost and made so much functionality approachable for so many.  iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie were made to live together in a consumer ecosystem. So in 2003, Apple reached that point in the digital hub strategy where they were able to take our digital life and wrap them up in a pretty bow. They called that product iLife - which was more a bundle of these services, along with iDVD and Garage Band. Now these apps are free but at the time the bundle would set you back a nice, easy, approachable $49.  All this content creation from the consumer to the prosumer to the professional workgroup meant we needed more and more storage. According to the codec, we could be running at hundreds of megabytes per second of content. So Apple licensed the StorNext File System in 2004 to rescue a company called ADIC and release a 64-bit clustered file system over fibre channel. Suddenly all that new high end creative content could be shared in larger and larger environments. We could finally have someone cutting a movie in Final Cut then hand it off to someone else to cut without unplugging a firewire drive to do it. Professional workflows in a pure-Apple ecosystem were a thing.  Now you just needed a way to distribute all this content. So iWeb in 2004, which allowed us to build websites quickly and bring all this creative content in. Sites could be hosted on MobileMe or files uploaded to a web host via FTP. Apple had dabbled in web services since the 80s with AppleLink then eWorld then iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe, the culmination of the evolutions of these services now referred to as iCloud.  And iCloud now syncs documents and more. Pages came in 2005, Numbers came in 2007, and they were bundled with Keynote to become Apple iWork, allowing for a competitor of sorts to Microsoft Office. Later made free and ported to iOS as well. iCloud is a half-hearted attempt at keeping these synchronized between all of our devices.  Apple had been attacking the creative space from the bottom with the tools in iLife but at the top as well. Competing with tools like Avid's Media Composer, which had been around for the Mac going back to 1989, Apple bundled the professional video products into a single suite called Final Cut Studio. Here, Final Cut Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Color (obtained when Apple acquired SiliconColor and renamed it from FinalTouch), Compressor, Cinema Tools, and Qmaster for distributing the processing power for the above tools came in one big old box. iMovie and Garage Band for the consumer market and Final Cut Studio and Logic for the prosumer to professional market. And suddenly I was running around the world deploying Xsan's into video shops, corporate taking head editing studios, and ad agencies Another place where this happened was with photos. Aperture was released in 2005 and  offered the professional photographer tools to manage their large collection of images. And that represented the final pieces of the strategy. It continued to evolve and get better over the years. But this was one of the last aspects of the Digital Hub Strategy.  Because there was a new strategy underway. That's the year Apple began the development of the iPhone. And this represents a shift in the strategy. Released in 2007, then followed up with the first iPad in 2010, we saw a shift from the growth of new products in the digital hub strategy to migrating them to the mobile platforms, making them stand-alone apps that could be sold on App Stores, integrated with iCloud, and killing off those that appealed to more specific needs in higher-end creative environments, like Aperture, which went ended in 2014, and integrating some into other products, like Color becoming a part of Final Cut Pro. But the income from those products has now been eclipsed by mobile devices. Because when we see the returns from one strategy begin to crest - you know, like when the entire creative industry loves you, it's time to move to another, bolder strategy. And that mobile strategy opened our eyes to always online (or frequently online) synchronization between products and integration with products, like we get with Handoff and other technologies today.  In 2009 Apple acquired a company called Lala, which would later be added to iCloud - but the impact to the Digital Hub Strategy was that it paved the way for iTunes Match, a  cloud service that allowed for syncing music from a local library to other Apple devices. It was a subscription and more of a stop-gap for moving people to a subscription to license music than a lasting stand-alone product. And other acquisitions would come over time and get woven in, such as Redmatia, Beats, and Swell.  Steve Jobs said exactly what Apple was going to do in 2001. In one of the most impressive implementations of a strategy, Apple had slowly introduced quality products that tactically ushered in a digital lifestyle since the late 90s and over the next few years. iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iLife, and in a sign of the changing times - iPod, iPhone, iCloud. To signal the end of that era because it was by then ubiquitous. - then came the iPad. And the professional apps won over the creative industries. Until the strategy had been played out and Apple began laying the groundwork for the next strategy in 2005.  That mobile revolution was built in part on the creative influences of Apple. Tools that came after, like Instagram, made it even easier to take great photos, connect with friends in a way iWeb couldn't - because we got to the point where “there's an app for that”. And as the tools weren't needed, Apple cancelled some one-by-one, or even let Adobe Premiere eclipse Final Cut in many ways. Because you know, sales of the iMac DV were enough to warrant building the product on the Apple platform and eventually Adobe decided to do that. Apple built many of these because there was a need and there weren't great alternatives. Once there were great alternatives, Apple let those limited quantities of software engineers go work on other things they needed done. Like building frameworks to enable a new generation of engineers to build amazing tools for the platform! I've always considered the release of the iPad to be the end of era where Apple was introducing more and more software. From the increased services on the server platform to tools that do anything and everything. But 2010 is just when we could notice what Jobs was doing. In fact, looking at it, we can easily see that the strategy shifted about 5 years before that. Because Apple was busy ushering in the next revolution in computing.  So think about this. Take an Apple, a Microsoft, or a Google. The developers of nearly every single operating system we use today. What changes did they put in place 5 years ago that are just coming to fruition today. While the product lifecycles are annual releases now, that doesn't mean that when they have billions of devices out there that the strategies don't unfold much, much slower. You see, by peering into the evolutions over the past few years, we can see where they're taking computing in the next few years. Who did they acquire? What products will they release? What gaps does that create? How can we take those gaps and build products that get in front of them? This is where magic happens. Not when we're too early like a General Magic was. But when we're right on time. Unless we help set strategy upstream. Or, is it all chaos and not in the least bit predictable? Feel free to send me your thoughts! And thank you…

Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. He co-founded NeXT Computers and took Pixar public. He then returned to Apple as the interim CEO in 1997 at a salary of $1 per year. Some of the early accomplishments on his watch were started before he got there. But turning the company back around was squarely on him and his team.  By the end of 1997, Apple moved to a build-to-order manufacturing powered by an online store built on WebObjects, the NeXT application server. They killed off a number of models, simplifying the lineup of products and also killed the clone deals, ending licensing of the operating system to other vendors who were at times building sub-par products. And they were busy. You could feel the frenetic pace.  They were busy at work weaving the raw components from NeXT into an operating system that would be called Mac OS X. They announced a partnership that would see Microsoft invest $150 million into Apple to settle patent disputes but that Microsoft would get Internet Explorer bundled on the Mac and give a commitment to release Office for the Mac again. By then, Apple had $1.2 billion in cash reserves again, but armed with a streamlined company that was ready to move forward - but 1998 was a bottoming out of sorts, with Apple only doing just shy of $6 billion in revenue. To move forward, they took a little lesson from the past and released a new all-in-one computer. One that put the color back into that Apple logo. Or rather removed all the colors but Aqua blue from it.  The return of Steve Jobs invigorated many, such as Johnny Ive who is reported to have had a resignation in his back pocket when he met Jobs. Their collaboration led to a number of innovations, with a furious pace starting with the iMac. The first iMacs were shaped like gumdrops and the color of candy as well. The original Bondi blue had commercials showing all the cords in a typical PC setup and then the new iMac, “as unPC as you can get.” The iMac was supposed to be to get on the Internet. But the ensuing upgrades allowed for far more than that.  The iMac put style back into Apple and even computers. Subsequent releases came in candy colors like Lime, Strawberry, Blueberry, Grape, Tangerine, and later on Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power. The G3 chipset bled out into other more professional products like a blue and white G3 tower, which featured a slightly faster processor than the beige tower G3, but a much cooler look - and very easy to get into compared to any other machine on the market at the time. And the Clamshell laptops used the same design language. Playful, colorful, but mostly as fast as their traditional PowerBook counterparts.  But the team had their eye on a new strategy entirely. Yes, people wanted to get online - but these computers could do so much more. Apple wanted to make the Mac the Digital Hub for content. This centered around a technology that had been codeveloped from Apple, Sony, Panasonic, and others called IEEE 1394. But that was kinda' boring so we just called it Firewire. Begun in 1986 and originally started by Apple, Firewire had become a port that was on most digital cameras at the time. USB wasn't fast enough to load and unload a lot of newer content like audio and video from cameras to computers. But I can clearly remember that by the year 1999 we were all living as Jobs put it in a “new emerging digital lifestyle.”  This led to a number of releases from Apple. One was iMovie. Apple included it with the new iMac DV model for free. That model dumped the fan (which Jobs never liked even going back to the early days of Apple) as well as FireWire and the ability to add an AirPort card. Oh, and they released an AirPort base station in 1999 to help people get online easily. It is still one of the simplest router and wi-fi devices I've ever used. And was sleek with the new Graphite design language that would take Apple through for years on their professional devices. iMovie was a single place to load all those digital videos and turn them into something else. And there was another format on the rise, MP3. Most everyone I've ever known at Apple love music. It's in the DNA of the company, going back to Wozniak and Jobs and their love of musicians like Bob Dylan in the 1970s. The rise of the transistor radio and then the cassette and Walkman had opened our eyes to the democratization of what we could listen to as humans. But the MP3 format, which had been around since 1993, was on the rise. People were ripping and trading songs and Apple looked at a tool called Audion and another called SoundJam and decided that rather than Sherlock (or build that into the OS) that they would buy SoundJam in 2000. The new software, which they called iTunes, allowed users to rip and burn CDs easily. Apple then added iPhoto, iWeb, and iDVD. For photos, creating web sites, and making DVDs respectively. The digital hub was coming together. But there was another very important part of that whole digital hub strategy. Now that we had music on our computers we needed something more portable to listen to that music on. There were MP3 players like the Diamond Rio out there, and there had been going back to the waning days of the Digital Equipment Research Lab - but they were either clunky or had poor design or just crappy and cheap. And mostly only held an album or two. I remember walking down that isle at Fry's about once every other month waiting and hoping. But nothing good ever came.  That is, until Jobs and the Apple hardware engineering lead Job Rubinstein found Tony Fadell. He had been at General Magic, you know, the company that ushered in mobility as an industry. And he'd built Windows CE mobile devices for Philips in the Velo and Nino. But when we got him working with Jobs, Rubinstein, and Johnny Ive on the industrial design front, we got one of the most iconic devices ever made: the iPod.  And the iPod wasn't all that different on the inside from a Newton. Blasphemy I know. It sported a pair of ARM chips and Ive harkened back to simpler times when he based the design on a transistor radio. Attention to detail and the lack thereof in the Sony Diskman propelled Apple to sell more than 400 million  iPods to this day. By the time the iPod was released in 2001, Apple revenues had jumped to just shy of $8 billion but dropped back down to $5.3. But everything was about to change. And part of that was that the iPod design language was about to leak out to the rest of the products with white iBooks, white Mac Minis, and other white devices as a design language of sorts.  To sell all those iDevices, Apple embarked on a strategy that seemed crazy at the time. They opened retail stores. They hired Ron Johnson and opened two stores in 2001. They would grow to over 500 stores, and hit a billion in sales within three years. Johnson had been the VP of merchandising at Target and with the teams at Apple came up with the idea of taking payment without cash registers (after all you have an internet connected device you want to sell people) and the Genius Bar.  And generations of devices came that led people back into the stores. The G4 came along - as did faster RAM. And while Apple was updating the classic Mac operating system, they were also hard at work preparing NeXT to go across the full line of computers. They had been working the bugs out in Rhapsody and then Mac OS X Server, but the client OS, Codenamed Kodiak, went into beta in 2000 and then was released as a dual-boot option in Cheetah, in 2001. And thus began a long line of big cats, going to Puma then Jaguar in 2002, Panther in 2003, Tiger in 2005, Leopard in 2007, Snow Leopard in 2009, Lion in 2011, Mountain Lion in 2012 before moving to the new naming scheme that uses famous places in California.  Mac OS X finally provided a ground-up, modern, object-oriented operating system. They built the Aqua interface on top of it. Beautiful, modern, sleek. Even the backgrounds! The iMac would go from a gumdrop to a sleek flat panel on a metal stand, like a sunflower. Jobs and Ive are both named on the patents for this as well as many of the other inventions that came along in support of the rapid device rollouts of the day.  Jaguar, or 10.2, would turn out to be a big update. They added Address Book, iChat - now called Messages, and after nearly two decades replaced the 8-bit Happy Mac with a grey Apple logo in 2002. Yet another sign they were no longer just a computer company. Some of these needed a server and storage so Apple released the Xserve in 2002 and the Xserve RAID in 2003. The pro devices also started to transition from the grey graphite look to brushed metal, which we still use today.  Many wanted to step beyond just listening to music. There were expensive tools for creating music, like ProTools. And don't get me wrong, you get what you pay for. It's awesome. But democratizing the creation of media meant Apple wanted a piece of software to create digital audio - and released Garage Band in 2004. For this they again turned to an acquisition, EMagic, which had a tool called Logic Audio. I still use Logic to cut my podcasts. But with Garage Band they stripped it down to the essentials and released a tool that proved wildly popular, providing an on-ramp for many into the audio engineering space.  Not every project worked out. Apple had ups and downs in revenue and sales in the early part of the millennium. The G4 Cube was released in 2000 and while it is hailed as one of the greatest designs by industrial designers it was discontinued in 2001 due to low sales. But Steve Jobs had been hard at work on something new. Those iPods that were becoming the cash cow at Apple and changing the world, turning people into white earbud-clad zombies spinning those click wheels were about to get an easier way to put media into iTunes and so on the device.  The iTunes Store was released in 2003. Here, Jobs parlayed the success at Apple along with his own brand to twist the arms of executives from the big 5 record labels to finally allow digital music to be sold online. Each song was a dollar. Suddenly it was cheap enough that the music trading apps just couldn't keep up. Today it seems like everyone just pays a streaming subscription but for a time, it gave a shot in the arm to music companies and gave us all this new-found expectation that we would always be able to have music that we wanted to hear on-demand.  Apple revenue was back up to $8.25 billion in 2004. But Apple was just getting started. The next seven years would see that revenue climb from to $13.9 billion in 2005, $19.3 in 2006, $24 billion in 2007, $32.4 in 2008, $42.9 in 2009, $65.2 in 2010, and a staggering $108.2 in 2011. After working with the PowerPC chipset, Apple transitioned new computers to Intel chips in 2005 and 2006. Keep in mind that most people used desktops at the time and just wanted fast. And it was the era where the Mac was really open source friendly so having the ability to load in the best the Linux and Unix worlds had to offer for software inside projects or on servers was made all the easier. But Intel could produce chips faster and were moving faster. That Intel transition also helped with what we call the “App Gap” where applications written for Windows could be virtualized for the Mac. This helped the Mac get much more adoption in businesses. Again, the pace was frenetic. People had been almost begging Apple to release a phone for years. The Windows Mobile devices, the Blackberry, the flip phones, even the Palm Treo. They were all crap in Jobs' mind. Even the Rockr that had iTunes in it was crap. So Apple released the iPhone in 2007 in a now-iconic  Jobs presentation. The early version didn't have apps, but it was instantly one of the more saught-after gadgets. And in an era where people paid $100 to $200 for phones it changed the way we thought of the devices. In fact, the push notifications and app culture and always on fulfilled the General Magic dream that the Newton never could and truly moved us all into an always-on i (or Internet) culture. The Apple TV was also released in 2007. I can still remember people talking about Apple releasing a television at the time. The same way they talk about Apple releasing a car. It wasn't a television though, it was a small whitish box that resembled a Mac Mini - just with a different media-browsing type of Finder. Now it's effectively an app to bootstrap the media apps on a Mac.  It had been a blistering 10 years. We didn't even get into Pages, FaceTime, They weren't done just yet. The iPad was released in 2010. By then, Apple revenues exceeded those of Microsoft. The return and the comeback was truly complete.  Similar technology used to build the Apple online store was also used to develop the iTunes Store and then the App Store in 2008. Here, rather than go to a site you might not trust and download an installer file with crazy levels of permissions. One place where it's still a work in progress to this day was iTools, released in 2000 and rebranded to .Mac or dot Mac in 2008, and now called MobileMe. Apple's vision to sync all of our data between our myriad of devices wirelessly was a work in progress and never met the lofty goals set out. Some services, like Find My iPhone, work great. Others notsomuch. Jobs famously fired the team lead at one point. And while it's better than it was it's still not where it needs to be.  Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 at 56 years old. His first act at Apple changed the world, ushering in first the personal computing revolution and then the graphical interface revolution. He left an Apple that meant something. He returned to a demoralized Apple and brought digital media, portable music players, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple TV, the iMac, the online music store, the online App Store, and so much more. The world had changed in that time, so he left, well, one more thing. You see, when they started, privacy and security wasn't much of a thing. Keep in mind, computers didn't have hard drives. The early days of the Internet after his return was a fairly save I or Internet world. But by the time he passed away there there were some troubling trends. The data on our phones and computers could weave together nearly every bit of our life to an outsider. Not only could this lead to identity theft but with the growing advertising networks and machine learning capabilities, the consequences of privacy breaches on Apple products could be profound as a society. He left an ethos behind to build great products but not at the expense of those who buy them. One his successor Tim Cook has maintained.  On the outside it may seem like the daunting 10 plus years of product releases has slowed. We still have the Macbook, the iMac, a tower, a mini, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV. We now have HomeKit, a HomePod, new models of all those devices, Apple silicon, and some new headphones - but more importantly we've had to retreat a bit internally and direct some of those product development cycles to privacy, protecting users, shoring up the security model. Managing a vast portfolio of products in the largest company in the world means doing those things isn't always altruistic. Big companies can mean big law suits when things go wrong. These will come up as we cover the history of the individual devices in greater detail. The history of computing is full of stories of great innovators. Very few took a second act. Few, if any, had as impactful a first act as either that Steve Jobs had. It wasn't just him in any of these. There are countless people from software developers to support representatives to product marketing gurus to the people that write the documentation. It was all of them, working with inspiring leadership and world class products that helped as much as any other organization in the history of computing, to shape the digital world we live in today. 

It's a new year and Apple is pulling out all the stops at Macworld 2001 San Francisco. This Stevenote has it all: "configurizable" hardware, "fierce" software, professional-grade bake-offs—oh, and don't forget the power & sex(?!). Tune in as we give ourselves new nicknames and discuss Apple's next iMac moment with the announcement of the Titanium PowerBook G4, iTunes, iDVD, and more. === Hot Cocoa iMovie, The Next Revolution In Higher Education? Another ATI-like PR Blunder nVIDIA GeForce2 MX video cards announced for the Mac Apple Offers US$200 Instant Rebates On iMac DV+ & iMac DV SE Outgoing Clinton White House Staff protest the incoming Bush Administration Trogdor, the burninator first appeared on January 13th, 2001 h/t to Morty Ortega for the link Macworld San Francisco: January 9, 2001 Video Link NotesKey Link Apple's history with the SuperDrive name for it's drives Comparison of the TiBook G4 next to the 2015 MacBook Air on Macworld iTunes 1.0 Web Page Apple.com iDVD 1.0 Web Page on Apple.com Recommendations: Matt Phantasy Star Online

Starring:k_katsumi, sonson_twit 1. 今年初めてのお買い物サウンドバー． 2. YOASOBI・・・米津玄師・・・曲の構成が新しいと思うんだ 3. Scratchでゲームを作り，そのBGMは，Gragebandで作曲する子供たち． 4. トランプが残したSNSの絶望． 5. 言論の偏り． 6. SNSのコントロールは，言論の統制か？ 7. 行き着くところは，教育なんだけど・・・・・． 8. SNSの功罪，フィルターバブルはそこにあるか？ 9. 技術は，SNSの負債を返せるだろうか？ 10. 薬事法，学会，言論の自由． 11. プログラミングニュータイプ． 14. AppleがiMovie, iDVD, Gragebandで伝えたかったもの． 15. 20年前に友達の結婚式のために・・・DVDを作って気づいたもの． 16. Scratchの公開サーバとベーマガ． 17. 音楽の授業とiPad． 18. SwitchBotのビジュアライザを作ったよ https://github.com/sonsongithub/SBMeter 19. 電力，二酸化炭素，湿度・・・・ 20. スマートメーターとWi-SUN 21. 50Aも電気いるか？ 29. おうちハック 30. 電気工事士の資格はお得か？ 31. コンセントを改造したい・・・・． 22. Wi-SUNモジュール https://www.tessera.co.jp/rl7023stick-d_ips.html 23. もう高くなってしまった https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00I3XJ9LM/ 24. ネタトモ 二酸化炭素センサ https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00FFS73GG/ 25. Neture remo E https://nature.global/jp/nature-remo-e-lite 26. Scratch・・・Hypercardの話をしたかった・・・・． 27. Haskellから学ぶ関数型言語 28. Swiftから学ぶ関数型言語

Hoy os contamos cómo el Mac se convirtió en el centro de convergencia de todo el contenido multimedia, para disfrutarlo pero también para gestionarlo o crearlo.  iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, Final Cut o Logic eran piezas de un puzzle, al igual que iTunes y su complemento como dispositivo que revolucionó la industria: el iPod. Descubre nuestras ofertas para oyentes: "Concurrencia en iOS con Swift" en Udemy por $20,99/20,99€. "Swift de lado servidor con Vapor" en Udemy por $69,99/69,99€. "Desarrollo Seguro en iOS con Swift" en Udemy por $124,99/124,99€. "Aprendiendo Swift 5.2" en Udemy por $74,99/74,99€. Apple Coding Academy Suscríbete a Apple Coding en nuestro Patreon. Canal de Telegram de Swift. Acceso al canal. --------------- Consigue las camisetas oficiales de Apple Coding con los logos de Swift y Apple Coding. Logo Apple Coding (negra, logo blanco) Logo Swift (negra, logo blanco) Logo Swift (blanco, logo color original Swift) Logo Apple Coding (blanco, logo negro) --------------- Sigue nuestro canal en Youtube en: Canal de Youtube de Apple Coding Tema musical: "For the Win" de "Two Steps from Hell", compuesto por Thomas Bergensen. Usado con permisos de fair use. Escúchalo en Apple Music o Spotify.

Ep.19 - Why is Your Podcast Still Not Being Found? Tim and Kyle introduce you to the new SEO for podcasting called Podcast Discovery Optimization (PDO) and why it matters to how your podcast is found. Episode at a Glance: We celebrate our second year of doing Virginia Podcaster's Association (VAPODA) meetups at Germanna Community College -- it's a great place to find out what real podcast newbies are struggling with! The Virginia Podcaster's Association (VAPODA) is a great place to find out what real podcast newbies are struggling with We explore what happened when we looked up a new podcaster's podcast using Pocket Cast (Hint: We discover that different podcasts can have the same name!) "Conversating" becomes the Word of the Day We throw friend of the show Mathew Passy a whole lot of love! What did we learn? Welcome to Podcast Discovery Optimization (PDO) This is the "what does my website look like on other browsers?" song. Followed by the "what does my website look like on other phones?" B-side sleeper hit. Now, it's "what does my podcast look like on all apps?"... or even the better question: "IS my podcast in all the apps?" You have to look up your podcast because you can't fix what you don't know! We thought a podcast name needed to be unique. Nope! Turns out you can have the EXACT SAME NAME in Apple Podcasts (iTunes)! We didn't know that was possible We find out that not all podcasting statistics are created equal and not all hosts let you know where your listeners are coming from. We know that not all hosts use IAB Standards but when you mix downloads with streaming with listens we can see why newbies get confused. New Podcasting Terms: Which is your favorite? Podcast Reliability Engineering (PRE) Podcast Search Optimization (PSO) Podcast Visualization Optimization (PVO) Podcast Discovery Optimization (PDO) PDO Recommendations for Podcasters: 1. Stay away from a podcast with the same name because it's hard to find your podcast next to the others already 2. Don't confuse your audience by being similar 3. The answer to your show's name is in your content if you're looking for it 4. Massage your message by making your name stand out from the static 5. Search your own podcast on all the apps -- Yup! All of them! 6. Do the work now, save the struggle for other fights not related to having to keep telling people which podcast is yours 7. Go through all the apps and see if you're on your favorite apps 8. If it gets crazy, get someone to help you with Podcast Discovery Optimization (PDO) if you're not showing up (like Mathew Passy - The Podcast Consultant) Industry Predictions: Read our growing list of podcast industry predictions for 2020! Industry Quotes: "Apple has always been about empowering people to build great things. From iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garageband, Apple has always been at the center of technology and liberal arts. It’s now time for Apple to simplify the podcast creation experience." -- Bradley Chambers, 9to5mac.com Special Thanks to Friend-of-the-Show Mathew Passy! If you need some serious help with your podcast, Mathew is the guy to call. Find him on the Interwebs here: The Podcast Consultant Podcast Me Anything Causepods Visit our Sponsors! Learn a new career at Germanna Community College Workforce in Fredericksburg, VA Gagglepod - Life's too short for Bad Podcasts Virginia Podcasters Association (VAPODA) Meetups provide free podcast education every month! Audience Challenge: TODO: Way-Back Music TODO: Prediction Music Visit the Podwrecked Lighthouse: Email Us: podwrecked AT GMAIL DOT com All our Show Notes: podwrecked.com All our Episodes: podwrecked.libsyn.com Podwrecked is a Gagglepod production. Learn more at gagglepod.com.

Eric Zayne is a soul infused pop-rock musician and record producer who blends electronics to create a sound that is edgy and unique. After fleeing to Canada from the Congo as a child, Zayne started his career at 13 by playing in multiple bands in Montreal. His first major gig was a five-year tour across Asia where he played keyboards, guitar and sang in a funk band. He is now in Los Angeles, getting ready to release a new album after his breakout hits, “Maneater”, "Spin the World” and winning the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in 2015.  And we get to debut songs from teh new album...you will hear it first on Music FridayLive! Our second guest,  Jayson Won, Executive Creative Director & COO, World Arts,  is a professional drummer who branched out into the business side of music, forming his own label, a creative agency 1K Studios, which helped launch the first DVD releases for MGM, Disney, Polygram, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount and developed the graphic and design concepts for iDVD and iTunes Originals. His latest adventure, World Arts, offers a platform for bands, artists, fans and the music industry to come together in new and mutually beneficial ways.   ...and a wonderful surprise, joining us at the top of the hour is Buika, a global phenomenon who fuses African, Spanish, Western music into hypnotic beats and songs.  She will be playing to a sold-out Disney Hall in L:A Saturday and we get to talk with her Friday morning. And we talk to Kawehi, who will stop by before her performance tonight at the Hotel Cafe.  

This class will cover the higher end features of iMovie including the advanced tools, exporting settings, and other saving options. This class will also go over iDVD, where we will include everything from adding videos and changing themes to creating chapter markers and switching music.

RBC Ups Apple Target to 425-Dollars / Gleacher, Barclays, and UBS All Up Apple Targets / Unaffiliated Analysts Beat the Pros on Apple 1Q FY2011 / IDC: iPad Drives Tablet Growth Up 45-Percent Between 2QCY2010 and 3QCY2010 / Ovum Says Android Tablets to Eclipse iOS Tablets by One-Percentage Point in 2015 / iPodNN says iOS Appears to Have Retaken Mobile OS Lead from Android / Apple Insider Says Apple Beats Nokia in Mobile Phones by Revenue / Gruber Says No Retina Display for Second-Gen iPad / DigiTimes Has Unnamed Parts People Saying iPad 2 WILL Sport Super High Resolution Screen / Apple Issues Second beta of iOS 4.3 (And Nixes 4 and 5-Fingered Gestures for Final Release) / Latest iOS beta Indicates Auto-Lock Feature for iPad / More Hints at Social Services in Latest iOS beta / Apple Issues Software Updates for iDVD and Some Recent-Model MacBook Airs / AT&T Cell Plans Look Poised to Be More Restrictive (and Expensive) / Dell Announces Event on 8 February between 7 February Sptint Event and 9 February HPalm Event / HP Files for ‘HP Touchpad’ Trademark Protection / Starbucks Expands Pay-By-Phone Program / Systemgraph v. Papadimitriadis: Greek TragiComedy

Apple Opens Mac App Store with Over 1,000 Apps / Mac OS X 10.6.6 Centered On Mac App Store with Few Other Inclusions / Mac OS X 10.6.6 Fixes One Security Issue for Snow Leopard Machines Only / Macworld UK Eyes Savings on Apple-Made Software in Mac App Store / The Loop Note a Lack of iDVD and iWeb in Mac App Store / Apple Updates iWork 09 / TUAW Breaks Down Apparent Price Ranges in Mac App Store / Silicon Alley Insider Looks at the Likely Evolution of Pricing on the Mac App Store / SAI Looks at How Mac App Store Could Lead to More Macs Sold / Computerworld Examines Concerns Some Developers Have Over Mac App Store / Apple Insider Hears Tell of Three-Week Vacation Blackout at Apple Retail / A T and T Drops 8GB iPhone 3GS to 49-Dollars with Two-Year Contract / Bloomberg Says Apple Courted Blackstone Exec for CFO (Apple Denies It) / Bloomberg Says Blackstone Approach Could Mean Apple has an Appetite for Acquisition / Windows President Bashes Apple Devices at CES Address / Ballmer Address to CES Almost Completely Ignores Tablets

Gastheer Maarten Hendrikx, @maartenhendrikx op Twitter. Panel Stefaan Lesage, @stefaanlesage op Twitter, of via de Devia website. Marco Frissen, @mfrissen op Twitter, of via zijn website. Jan Seurinck, @janseurinck op Twitter, of via zijn website. Davy Buntinx, @dirtyjos op Twitter, of via zijn website. Gast Harold Kuepers, @haroldkuepers op Twitter, of via zijn website. Onderwerpen We beginnen deze aflevering met triest nieuws: Sony stopt met het maken van Walkmans! (Sony Retires the cassette walkmans after 30 years). Sinds 1979 zijn er maar liefst 220 miljoen van gemaakt. Het grote nieuws deze week was de aankondiging van nieuwe Apple producten. In aflevering 30 maakten we al voorzichtig wat voorspellingen, nu kijken we terug en geven we onze mening over wat er zoal uitgekomen is: iLife 11 met daarin iPhoto 11, iMovie 11 en Garageband 11. iWeb en iDVD zijn naar de achtergrond gezet. De voorbeschouwing van Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Zal dit de laatste kat zijn? De Macbook Air. Een hebbeding of echt een laptop die je moet hebben? En niet te vergeten Facetime voor de Mac. Jan heeft er zelfs speciaal OS X Snow Leopard voor gekocht. Elk panellid geeft zijn top en flop van de afgelopen product introductie. Tips Davy heeft Airdropper ontdekt. Een dienst waarmee je veilig bestanden van iemand kan ontvangen in je dropbox, zelfs al heeft deze geen account. Stefaan speelt tegenwoordig Runes of Magic. Een MMORPG a la World of Warcraft. Jan heeft eindelijk Natter werkend gekregen. Natter zou de "missing link" tussen Facebook en Twitter conversaties moeten zijn. Harold vind de Jabra Cruiser carkit best goed werken. Geen gedoe met docking kabels. Marco vind Summify de bom. Summify maakt gebruik van je social netwerk om nieuwsberichten te rangschikken. Als 2e tip komt er nog het bijzondere Littlecosm. Een Massively Multiplayer Twitter client. Het spel verloopt aan de hand van je tweets. Nog niet beschikbaar, de ontwikkelaar hoopt een eerste versie eind dit jaar online te krijgen. Feedback Het Tech45-team apprecieert alle feedback die ingestuurd wordt. Heb je dus opmerkingen, reacties of suggesties, laat dan een commentaar hieronder achter. Via twitter kan natuurlijk ook @tech45cast. Ook audio-reacties in .mp3-formaat zijn altijd welkom. Items voor de volgende aflevering kunnen gemarkeerd worden in Delicious met de tag 'tech45'. Vergeet ook niet dat je 'live' kan komen meepraten via live.tech45.eu op dinsdag 2 november vanaf 21u30. Deze aflevering van de podcast kan je downloaden via deze link, rechtstreeks beluisteren via de onderstaande player, of gewoon gratis abonneren via iTunes.

This episode entitled ‘Use what you got!’ explores a great way to use our Mac bundled software, in the shape of iDVD, to create fantastic branded slidshow templates for your clients. capture : create : inspire http://www.rossdeanphotography.com

A short and simple tutorial on how to create a new iDVD project. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to add a movie to your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to add a picture slideshow to your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to choose a theme your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to add transitions to an iDVD slideshow. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to set the encoding quality for your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on what Best Performance does to your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on what High Quality does to your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on what Professional Quality does to your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to edit the menu title of your dvd. Sponsored by: www.youtube.com/user/thepeachify

A short and simple tutorial on how to set the duration of a movie in a drop zone. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

A short and simple tutorial on how to add or hide drop zones. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

A short and simple tutorial on how to add transitions to menu buttons. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

A short and simple tutorial on how to change the image displayed on a menu button. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

A short and simple tutorial on how to change the background image of an iDVD menu. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

A short and simple tutorial on how to add a movie to your DVD. Sponsored by www.myspace.com/morethanenufband

Das Handy wird 25 Jahre alt; Updates zu iDVD, iMovie und Xsan; Opera 9.5; Mellel 2.5

Voici comme prévu la suite de iDVD qui mettra l'accent sur la customisation des menus, l'utilisation des sous-menus, le diaporama, et la finalisation du projet. A vos galettes.

La suite logique du montage vidéo est la création d'un DVD avec des menus animés. Voici la première partie du tutoriel iDVD (version 08).

Premier épisode d’une série de 4 vidéos qui vont couvrir la découverte et la réalisation d’un projet vidéo utilisant iMovie®, Garageband® puis iDVD®. Dans ce premier épisode, je vous propose de découvrir iMovie’08, de la capture au montage (transitions, titres, sonorisation partielle). Silence.....Action!

This episode is the second in a series about the current state of filmmaking education, specifically certain concepts which are already a part of the filmmaking landscape, but which are not on the map of most schools.I'm using Mike Jones' Filmmaking Manifesto as the model for measuring how well schools are keeping current with evolving trends in the real world. Specifically, I'm using the school I'm attending, Center for Digital Imagining Arts at Boson University as a stand in for every school.Check out Mike's blog, Digital Basin, for lots information about a wide range of topics regarding the production filmmaking world. You should check out the Manifesto on his site, since I'm not going through it in as much detail as him. He also has a number of mp3 files of presentations he's made on subjects covered in the Manifesto.Finally, check out the comment he left following the previous podcast.Production note: I'm aware that there is a distinct difference between my introductory section commenting on the last episode and the remainder of the podcast covering the three points below.4-Multi-platform scalable delivery5-Ownership of end to end process6-Software Agnosticism and independent skillsObviously I recorded them at different times using different devices, different locations. A professional, or even someone relatively knowledge about in audio post production would be able to reconcile the tool and hide, or at least equalize the different sounds. That's not me, not right now. I don't even have the time to rerecord this and post it in time, so I'm settling for the fact that you can at least hear what I'm saying.I make a few passing comments regarding Danny Kaye, Kahlil Gibran and The Prophet in order to make a point or two, Doesn't that combination make you even a little curious?

Crunch TimeI've been really busy editing stories to meet a deadline so I've got a short episode this time.Just an update on the editing process - things that can go wrong and ways to cope with stress, or not, you can decide if I'm coping well.We're going to use iDVD for final output so I've listed all the steps for exporting from FCP and creating a finished DVD in iDVD.Next week I'll give you the highlights from the final critique.

Download Episode 01 (Enhanced AAC)TheSwitchersPodcast is a show where we (hosts Bob & Erik) interview "Switchers".In TheSwitchersPodcast Episode 1 we interview Switcher Erik. Erik will also be the host of TheSwitchersPodcast.A "Switcher" is a former "Windows user" that got bored of this platform and now only uses the Apple OS and hardware.Unfortunately for people who live outside The Netherlands, the TheSwitchersPodcast is in Dutch.Inhoud van Episode 01:- PodSafe Music van: Natives of the new Dawn - People podcast- Intro host Bob- Eerste ervaringen / stabiliteit- Overzetten van de oude bestanden vanaf de PC (migreren)- Apple iLife 2005iTunesVideoFoto's (Ken Burns)iDVDiMoviePodcast Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2- Nieuwe iMacPre installed Plug & Play Gebruikers interface Spotlight Exposé- Uiterlijk iMac in de woonkamer Foto 1 Foto 2 Foto 3 Foto 4 Foto 5 Aansluitingen Blue Tooth (stroomverbruik) Mighty Mouse Self Servicing- Peer-to-Peer Kaza Acquisition- Microsoft Office 2004 ComptabiliteitFeedback naar: theswitcherspodcast@wanadoo.nlOf laat een bericht achter op onze weblog: theswitcherspodcast.blogspot.comPodSafe music van: music.podshow.com

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I remember the last time we did a paid upgrade, we had a feature done for almost a year before we actually shipped it because we knew it’s such a huge feature that will bring in new customers and make it easier for them to understand why they have to pay again. 2.5 years ago, we switched to a subscription-based business model. And this is also switching company development culture that you suddenly have to ship updates or features more often. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, everyone. And joined today by Marcus Mueller Sihoffer of Mind Node. 00:00:50 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on the podcast and greetings from Vienna Austria. 00:00:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’re in Vienna, and this is a city that’s known for, let’s say it’s classical music history. Mozart is a certainly a name that springs to mind. Is that something you ever took advantage of? 00:01:05 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, when I was still a student, I really like to go to the opera, of course they had those really cheap standing room tickets back then. I think they still have it, sorry, but nowadays, yeah, I have kids now and well the business, so I hardly ever find time for that, unfortunately. 00:01:22 - Speaker 2: Well, Wulfstaller is about to head off to university, so that’s gonna be lots of room in your life for opera after that, huh? 00:01:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. I just need to make the 1.5 hour trip downtown to go see it. So that’s my other thorn in my side. 00:01:39 - Speaker 2: Well, before we dive in here, just a quick housekeeping announcement. The Muse team, together with a friend of ours named Arun, have put together a little website. It’s at infinite canvas.tools, and I’d like you all to check it out. The idea here is to kind of give some definition to this category. We talked with Steve of TL Draw a few episodes back about Infinite canvases and I guess we were inspired enough by that. We felt like that a standalone site that helped define the category better would be worthwhile to all of us. And indeed, Marcus, this is an interesting tie in with your history a little bit, which is, I believe you worked on a project of that exact name some years ago. 00:02:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. Back when I was still at university, I did a student project. And later on, it’s also turned into my final thesis, in fact, where I created an app that was called Infinite Canos and it was highly inspired by a comic book or graphical novel by Scott McCloud. Scott did two interesting books about comics. One more general book describing what comics are. And a second book describing how he would reinvent comics for the new digital age. The book was also called Reinventing Comics. And in one of the later chapters, he described the concept of infinite canvas as a tool or method to bring graphic novels to the digital space, in fact. And as part of my studies, I created an app that allowed you to put graphics on an infinite canvas more or less. And then put a navigation area on top of that. So that allowed comic artists to create interactive comics that they could lay out and then present in a that place to to their readers. And unless other kind of student project, this project actually found some comic artists who created their own comics and their own graphic novels of that it was kind of cool. 00:03:39 - Speaker 3: That’s really interesting, so it’s not just an infinite canvas, which I think of as A very general just giant space, but there’s a specific navigation format or navigation structure that was built into it as well. Am I understanding that right? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when we considered that at first, what we wanted to do, we had concerns that if you just provided an infinite comes to the readers that they would have problems navigating these cameras. And so we came up with navigation layer on top of that that allowed to predefine a certain path you could take around this canvas. And you have to compare it to a typical comic, which is laid out on a piece of paper, and then if you bring that to the infinite canvas or to a canvas that’s infinite, you can lay out the panels all over the place you would like to do. For example, there were comics that were just side scrollers or comics that took in all different directions. Unfortunately, many of those projects are no longer around because back then I used a chalet for the viewer part and Chalet is more or less separateated and. And later ported it to Adobe Flash and that’s also unfortunately not really available. 00:04:49 - Speaker 3: It’s the never ending story of technology, I think. 00:04:53 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s true, yeah. But if you like, you can still go to infinite canvas.com and see how the app actually looked like, but I fear most of the projects are probably no longer available. 00:05:04 - Speaker 2: Marcus here, the CEO and founder of Mind Node, which I think of as the quintessential or most canonical mind mapping app. It’s been app of the day, it’s been around the app store for a pretty long while. I think of it as a well respected tool for thought from before that term was sort of popular or experienced the modern resurgence that it has. But before we get to talking about my Node, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your history, maybe what happened in between the time of that student project and thinking about comic infinite canvases and the creation of the business you’re working on today. 00:05:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, let me go a little bit further down my history. I have a major in computer science, and back then the computer science curriculum was very, very general in Vienna. There we had many courses in mathematics, computer algorithms, computer graphics and stuff like that. And going into the study, I was never really sure what I really want to do. My vision was, oh, I just wanted to do something with computers because I like games, so computers are the things I wanted to do. And having this exposure to all those different parts of computer science allowed me also to experience human interaction design. And this is something I was never really interested in before, but throughout my studies, I kind of always had those intersections with that. And I also had, what’s kind of interesting, I had a course on next step. Which kind of showed me a new way to use a computer, which was kind of different from the Windows side, I only knew. So with the exposure of having experienced the next step computer and then also my the growing interest in human interaction, I started considering getting a Mac, and this was the time when Steve Jobs announced the iMac G4, which was this kind of cool looking computer that looked like a stand, which I have still somewhere in my office. 00:07:01 - Speaker 2: Is that the cube? 00:07:03 - Speaker 1: No, the tube was before that, that was the T4 tube. It was the 2nd generation iMac, that’s where you had this kind of round stand and then you had the flat panel the hinges come out of that. 00:07:15 - Speaker 3: Oh, that’s right. Yeah, that was a beautiful machine. 00:07:17 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it kind of looks very similar, or at least the hinges look very similar to the studio display if you get the one with the moving, where you can move the display up and down. So yeah, back then I really had nobody around me that used the Mac, so it was kind of jumping into cold waters. But if you think about decisions you made in your lifetime, that was definitely one of the better decisions I made and it was just one of those feelings that I follow that, wow, that’s probably. Yeah, that’s just a feeling in there, but if I do that, it feels great. And this is when I kind of left the Apple platforms. This was also the time where the iLife apps were really popular. If you think of iTunes, iMovie, IDVD and IAB, for example, they were great focused apps that did one job really well, and for the, they were designed for this one use case. And this was kind of influential on me. And then there was a second part, it was very influential, and that was the upcoming of ID Mac developers. If you think back, there was delicious library or Net Newswire. So, after I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to continue to do, but having those people show what is possible, creating your own small Mac software studio, that’s kind of something that really inspired me to try to do the same thing. 00:08:40 - Speaker 2: So the MMA G4 was introduced, what year do you remember? 00:08:44 - Speaker 1: 20 years ago. 00:08:45 - Speaker 3: Wow, that long, yeah. 00:08:46 - Speaker 2: And then how long between sort of that device, seeing these indie apps, falling in love with the Apple platform, and the founding of what would be the company that would make my Node. 00:08:58 - Speaker 1: I wrote the first one of mine to note in 2007, so it’s now 15 years since I started the project. 00:09:07 - Speaker 2: Wow. And, yeah, give us the elevator pitch. What is my note? I’ve already perhaps tipped it off a little bit, talking about mind mapping. 00:09:16 - Speaker 1: The awesome thing about MO is that I didn’t create the app because I thought, oh, cool, mind mapping app would be a good idea, but I was kind of stuck in the infinite chemist project we talked earlier because I had this big picture of few idea that, OK, I have this app. It’s kind of popular in this niche area. But let’s try to bring this to a more. Broader audience. Just imagine having an infinite canvas where you can show your presentation, that’s something that’s was unique at the time and I thought, oh, that could have potential, but as it’s always with great ideas, you have too many of those and you don’t have a clear vision on what you really want to do in the end. So after coding for a while, designing for a while, I was kind of bummed out. And looked into techniques that would allow me to bring back this focus, bring back or allow me to really discover what I really wanted to do. Did a little bit of research and discovered mind mapping and well, I’m a computer engineer. I like coding. So the first thing you do when you come across a new concept, you want to do it yourself. So I want really great apps back then, mostly ports from Windows, I decided, oh, let’s look what Apple is doing with the I work apps, what all these other indie developers do. Just try to do a tool that does one job really good. And I started a prototyping phase. I decided, OK, let’s try it for one month, see how it turns out, and then I can still decide if I want to go back. To infinite canvas or if I want to resume it I know. 00:10:51 - Speaker 3: It’s really interesting. I feel like that’s where Almost all good products have that same kind of a route, where they’re solving a very specific problem. It’s not just building neat software, but you are building neat software to actually help you think better, to help you do something better. It had a very specific purpose for you. Sounds like that gave a lot of Vision and direction for you early on. 00:11:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I always feel that the best features in Myno or and other apps are the features that the developer itself uses. So if you develop a feature just because a customer wants to use that, you will never create a great feature, you will create a decent feature. But if you really are the user and the customer of the app, then you really are behind the feature. You understand how the feature works. You just don’t have some description of how the feature should look. Or behave, you actually lift the feature, you know all the ins and outs, you really know in what edge cases you can run and and those are often the features that turn out really great and awesome. 00:11:59 - Speaker 2: And originally this would have been for Mac because the iPad didn’t exist. Am I right about that? 00:12:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the iPhone might have been announced by the time I started creating my Node, but I think that was way before the SDK. So I started initially on the Mac. This is also where I had the most experience. And even after SKN was announced, it was kind of, ah, I did some experiments, but it was kind of hard to create something with an expanding or infinite canvas to the iPhone because the API wasn’t really designed that way. So I started with doing. The Mac version first and then later try to bring that to the iPhone platform and then also to the iPad. 00:12:41 - Speaker 2: And I first saw it on iPad, and I think this was circa would have been more like 2017 or something when we were doing tablet research back at in and Switch, but one of the things I was struck by was how just beautiful and good the iPad hardware was, particularly when paired with the pencil, which was relatively new at the time, and I went looking for really good quality iPad apps, and I was just shocked how few of them there were. So many were just iPhone ports, in many cases they were scaled up or, you know, just like in a letterbox thing. And so, from my perspective, it felt like an app that just could have been born on the iPad, it was made for iPad, but maybe that also to me is the connection in my mind between a tablet is such a great device for open-ended ideation, which indeed is what mind mapping is. You can sit back on your sofa, you can take it to the coffee shop, something like that. So it’s interesting to hear that that was a very latecomer to this product. 00:13:42 - Speaker 1: So when we decided to do the iPad app, it was just a 1 to 1 part of the iPhone app. We actually, when we released our iPad app, I still had no access to a real iPad back in the days because they were only released in the US and not. In Austria, even had one of our customers send me one of the first iPads so I could actually try and use the app on the iPad. But you always have to keep in mind an iPad app also has to be a good iPhone app because you can always resize the app itself to be as small as an iPhone on an iPhone device. So that’s all I think the real big. Challenge of doing a great app for all free Apple platforms or major Apple platforms that you always have to keep in mind the app could be launched or could be a size like an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac. And I think iPad and Mac are starting to converge a little bit, especially now with iPad S16, but you still have to keep those tiny iPhone screen in mind. 00:14:42 - Speaker 3: I’m really curious to hear how difficult it was to make that jump to iPhone, and then eventually to iPad, cause as I recall, the Mac APIs kind of in the late 2000s versus the iOS SDK were pretty dramatically different, and then they’ve kind of congealed lately and merged together in a lot of ways, but at the time, Pretty separate. Is that just a huge effort and what were some of the risks or thoughts in your mind as you Expanded into new devices. 00:15:15 - Speaker 1: Creating the first iPhone version had several challenges looking back. Definitely very restrictive hardware and uh a really a huge problem of fitting everything into memory and the app getting killed if you use too much memory was always a kind of an issue, especially if you look at the technical side, we tried to use internal layers back in the time. And those had really issues with fitting in a memory and if you imagine how a very graphic intensive apps like my not has to do it, we have to use very large layers to draw all of our branches. So that was a really challenge. Another challenge was actually text because back then, the iPhone only had simple text, so there were attributed strings are similar. So then we ported my the iPhone, we actually had to define a new and custom file format that didn’t use our extensive use of attributed strings and had to tone down the file format a little bit. And the first problem, what was really a problem was getting the data from the Mac to the iPhone. Back then, Apple still used iTunes to sync everything over. And that wasn’t really a good way uh to transfer files. So we had our own app socket kind of ad hoc connection between the iPhone and the iPad, which was kind of like it didn’t really support things so you had to transfer the document over. And in this process, the file was converted to a minor version of the file for much more or less. And then customers had to move it back to the iPhone or the iPad. It’s got a lot easier when Apple introduced the iCloud, but that was, I can’t remember when this was announced I think in the 2nd year or 3rd year of the iPad or. 00:17:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s really interesting that you’ve weathered all of these changes, both introduction and new hardware, new APIs, yeah, even it almost like, I can’t even remember it in some ways, I’ve maybe I purged the memories from my mind, but yeah, this tethering your phone to your computer was a thing you needed to do for all kinds of stuff that was just part of daily life, and it wasn’t even that long ago, it was like 10 years ago. But now the over the air stuff and the sync via the internet and so on, it’s just what we expect and we’ve grown used to. 00:17:35 - Speaker 3: One of my favorite things to forget is the hardware limitations of those very early phones and iPads. It’s just amazing that anything was ever written for them in some ways. I think the first iPad had enough memory for like Basically 4 uncompressed screenshots before you got killed, or just something ridiculous in terms of the lack of memory that your application could use before it got the hammer. 00:18:03 - Speaker 1: I think in the initial iPhone version of Minor you could only create 90 nodes or so before the app was killed by the system because it took too much memory pressure. 00:18:14 - Speaker 3: What’s that quote? 32 kilobytes is enough of memory for anyone. There’s some famous quote that I’m forgetting. 00:18:22 - Speaker 2: I feel like it was 640K is enough for anyone attributed to Bill Gates, but that may also be a misattribution, but yeah, for sure it’s. Go back and look at what kinds of limitations, you know, you look at the hardware for 80s arcade games, for example, and it’s just, it’s really marveling how little resources they were able to do pretty comprehensive pieces of software and. 00:18:49 - Speaker 1: But I have to say it wasn’t all bad for us because in the end, we really had to do a very performant iPhone version, which was very optimized for the memory pressures and the performance of the chips back then. And we later ported the core of this back to the Mac and this really brought us a lot of improvements for the Mac version. So it’s not all bad if you look back. 00:19:12 - Speaker 2: So fast forwarding to today, and I know it seems to be this pretty successful app on the App Store, and indeed you are not only one of these indie Mac developers that you were inspired by, but indeed you have a whole indie company that is behind it. So tell us a little about that. How many people are on your team and how do you all work? 00:19:31 - Speaker 1: I currently have 8 employees and 4 freelancers on the team, and I grew the company really, really slowly in the last couple of years. I probably added on a new employee a year or so, so we only saw a very slow growth and that’s kind of also what helped me a lot to learn on the go how to actually run a company because coming from an engineering background. I never really learned how to manage people, grow a company, do all the business stuff. So having a company that slowly grow every year, always a little bit, that really helped me to better serve the role of the developer and the role of actually running the business. 00:20:14 - Speaker 2: What’s your split these days? Do you have uh much coding on the core app at all? Have you become a pure manager as a result of your team? 00:20:24 - Speaker 1: I think none of my code actually goes into the shipping version nowadays, and this was really, really, really hard to letting go of that. So if you talk about my earliest team members, they will tell you that I always looked over their shoulders and reviewed every line of code they committed on GitHub and So, uh, it was a really hard time letting go of the code, but nowadays, um, my focus has shifted. So what I do from time to time is write some prototypes, prototype one feature or I even have several features that are called Marcus features that are in the app that nobody else uses, but only I. But otherwise, I try to keep up with all the technologies, so I try to learn SwiftDI and I also, you know, have vapor back and vapor is a service that Swift a framework which we use for business intelligence software and I try to use my coding for those non-critical areas nowadays. 00:21:23 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a good approach. It reminds me of the old ransom repose blog. I’ll have to dig up a link or something, but he is speaking about kind of the transition to engineering management and basically frames it as, once you move into this kind of management or leadership, you should not code. And also you have to code. And the way he resolves that is actually kind of what you described there, which is if you don’t code, you lose touch with the technology, you can’t command the respect of engineers, you can’t really make good decisions and understand what’s happening because you’re just out of touch. But on the other hand, owning stuff that goes into production when you have a bigger duty, a bigger responsibility to the people and the company. is actually sort of irresponsible from the perspective of you’re taking on too many conflicting responsibilities and so in that sense, yeah, prototyping or a little bit of pair programming or helping write some tests or that sort of thing is a good way to stay in touch, but also not be in a position where you are the person who is really bearing the responsibility for something that customers are depending on. So our topic today is the business of apps, and of course app is short for application and really refers to any kind of piece of user facing software. Certainly there are web apps and that has their own set of business dynamics, B2BASS, and so forth. But today we’re really talking about selling apps through an app store, and particularly while there are many app stores in the world now, the granddaddy of all of them, and still the biggest and most important and the best place to build a business is the Apple App Store in Marcushia. Wonderful person to speak about that, having over a decade of experience of selling through that. Adam Wulf, I know your time and your various entrepreneurial ventures, as well as other apps you’ve worked on, like Fantastical, you’ve had plenty of contact with that. I’m a relative newcomer here, having gotten into it just for the muse venture, so I’ll probably have less to say, but I’m looking forward to listening to the experienced voices we brought to the table here. So maybe as a starting place, we could talk about just what is the app store? What do you get from a business perspective when you put things there and what are your options about how to make money. 00:23:42 - Speaker 1: When I started selling my No, I actually started selling it through our website. So the app store only came later. So I remember that before the app store, you really had to think about how do you protect my app from piracy, how do I create a license codes, how do I invoice people? Initially, I tried to do it myself, but very quickly switched to an app service that was called K Kai. And uh I also learned that some license codes that are too long are also not really good, so I had a lot of learning effects back then. So the app store definitely takes away all this burden of having to think about how you protect your app and how you unlock certain features of the app. If you stay with a very basic app store or business model, so if you go with a paid upfront app, you basically don’t have to do anything to sell your app on the store. Apple takes care of everything. 00:24:42 - Speaker 3: I think one of the other really important things is just the huge customer base that Apple brings to the table as well, that getting shelf space in Almart is very difficult, but they have lots of traffic, but getting shelf space on the app store is very easy, and they have lots of traffic. And so just having that immediate visibility can be a really important first step as well. I think that’s what’s particularly impressive about especially the early apps and early Mac apps, was the Mac App Store didn’t show up until significantly later compared to the iOS app store, and so you had to build that customer base on your own from your own website. What were some of the things that you did to bring in those initial customers? 00:25:32 - Speaker 1: What I initially did was post the app on certain forums, for example, on developer forums where I had my initial beta version. And we ask those developers there to provide me feedback on that. And also very helpful back then was a site on Apple.com/ downloads where they promoted first party software and I had the luck that Apple already promoted our first free version, which we later turned into a premium version half a year later or so. And this premium version was again featured by Apple on this website, so this definitely helped a lot. What we also did was send out press releases, contact press directly, but it’s very different, especially in the beginning of the app store where there weren’t a lot of apps available on the app store, so basically every new app received the full attention of the press and the customer. 00:26:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s certainly a very different story today that where the huge, huge number of apps means that you really do have to do something to stand out. Certainly Apple does do a certain degree of curating their winners, featuring apps and editor’s choice and app of the day and things like that. He’s been lucky enough to be the recipient of some of those. I get the feeling that my note is a perpetual favorite, so I’m guessing that helps a lot with getting you surfaced, and then once you’re in the productivity charts. I just took a peek and see you’re pretty high up on the productivity charts, and then people go and just kind of scroll through that, and probably it’s more likely to pop up when you search for mind mapping than anything else. So, all of those combination of things means that it’s a distribution channel, that is to say that shelf at Walmart, you mentioned there, Wulf, the virtual shelf, in this case, the app store can be very, very good if you can do a good job of playing the game. 00:27:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think nowadays just releasing the app on the app store is not enough. But if you try to find a connection with Apple, try to find somebody inside Apple who can pitch it. This is exceptionally helpful. So I always recommend contact the evangelists, contact your local app store managers, let them know what you’re doing. And I think in our case, it really helped a lot that we always try to feature that Apple was very interested at the moment. For example, when we first started, Quick look was very new and we had a Quick look extension right away and we continued this trend with one of the first company who supported iCloud and We try to always be there when Apple announces a new technology. For example, we try to have a really good support for stage manager this year on iPad OS, and this really helps if you try to communicate with Apple, you show them what you’re doing, and if you’re doing something that makes Apple and the platform stand out, then this is a good reason for Apple to feature you and list you in all those categories they have. 00:28:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a great point. We’ve, well, I would say we’ve experienced that mostly in the sense that we speak to our contact at Apple and they basically say which of these new APIs are you supporting and more often than not, the vast majority of them are things that just don’t really make sense for the type of app we have and or don’t match up super well with the roadmap of things we think our customers want, but on a few occasions we have tried to hook in with those things in a timely fashion, and then that potentially puts you in a position to be part of their story, part of their launch story, and that’s the cycle, I think, for a platform. A platform is as good as its developers, if a platform is exciting new features built into it, but there’s no apps that exercise them, then people aren’t gonna care. This actually is a trick. Now I’m almost diverting back into our recent episode. On platforms here, but I feel Nintendo has done a very good job with this where they always have their first party apps like Mario and Zelda and so on, and these will be the ones that often showcase the brand new motion control or whatever the new gadget or gimme or API is that they’re putting in their platform, they could count on these first party apps to use those really well and show them really well, but I think Apple obviously does. do a bit of that, but I think they’ve also been very good at engaging their developers on those new features, and it’s precisely that, that’s kind of the bargain, which is if you can show up with a good implementation of something related to the new platform feature, then not the promise, but the possibility there is that then you’ll make it into their marketing materials about that, and obviously they are a very, very powerful marketing machine. 00:30:03 - Speaker 1: That’s true. If we look at our funnel, we always see that the App Store is really the strongest part of that, and even App Store search is a huge part of bringing customers to our App Store page. So whatever we try outside the App Store, nothing comes close to what the app store itself can offer to a developer. 00:30:23 - Speaker 2: Now when it comes to the payment side, you talked about the challenge of setting up your own payphone infrastructure and license keys and so on, and there’s certainly a fair bit of complexity to set that up and implement it well using store kit in your app, but as you said, so much is handled, currency conversions and you don’t need to really deal much with even certain kinds of customer service things. They’re sort of a go-between for basically everything payment related. But that also does mean you need to use one of their payment options, one of their models, let’s say payment models. I think you’ve been around that you’ve seen the full evolution. You mentioned starting with the free app. Tell me how that went, you know, in those early days, you could pay, but it was kind of a one-time upfront fee. I believe nowadays you’re on a subscription. What are all the different options there and what’s been your journey going through all those? 00:31:18 - Speaker 1: So we basically started with the free app through our website, but when we launched on the App Store, we had actually 3 different versions on the different app stores. On the Mac App Store launch, we had a free version and the paid version because there weren’t really a possibility to have trials. So customers wanted to use the, or try the version for the purchase. And this was a real problem, or is it still a real problem if you want to follow the paid up front. Purchase model. And there is a second really big advantage in my opinion, if you choose the paid upfront version that you can’t ask for a paid upgrades. So if you want to ship a paid upgrades after 2 or 3 years, you don’t have a lot of options. You can still probably choose. An option where you have an inner purchase for the existing app or you can switch to a new entry in the app store, a new SQU, but uh if you really do the switch, you lose a lot of listings and Ato categories. And the worst thing is, and we, we tried it, so we have experience of that customers no longer find the old app. So they think, oh, you removed the old app and I can no longer install it. You just have this new app and I have to pay again and this kind of triggers a lot of Not so nice to read customer feedbacks on the app store itself and also in our support inbox. 00:32:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like payment is one of the things that’s most likely to be a really emotional topic. Yeah, you’re reminding me of, I feel like this was a really common pattern, and I see it a lot less these days, but you would have sort of a light and a main version or a main and a pro version. I think I did this once for just a little side project game thing where the light version had the first N levels, and they had pretty specific, you know, rules about you. Upsell too hard, but we would just essentially say, you know, this is the 1st 10 levels if you want more, you can get the other one, and then that was free, and then there was a paid one, I can’t remember it was like $5 or something, and that was all the levels and that was the solution for that. And then similarly, the paid upgrades, as you mentioned, I think Things still does this and does pretty well with That which is they’re on things 3 or whatever it is, and at some point that was announced and was a paid upgrade and things too disappeared from the app store and you have to go through that process. But exactly as you said, there’s all kinds of ways in which that’s disruptive for your customers and confusing and way, why do I have to pay again and so on. Although that actually is just channeling, I think, a very traditional model for software, Microsoft Office or Photoshop back in the day or that sort of thing. It was just normal. They would come out with major new revisions every year or two and then at some point you would need to be on the latest version, probably just to open files from your colleagues and or because you want new features and so then you pay again and I always saw those as being kind of a Basically, a software subscription, as long as you were using the app, but at least there you can decide on your own timeline a little bit when to buy the new version, so there’s pros and cons relative to subscriptions, but the reality is ongoing software development has to be paid for one way or another, and paid upgrades are certainly a way to do it, but just not well supported in the app store. 00:34:38 - Speaker 1: It might sound a little bit strange, but we still get complaints from customers that our 7 year old version which we continued 7 years ago, no longer works on Ventura and M1 Max, so, yeah. 00:34:50 - Speaker 3: It’s amazing. I almost feel like the very early app store. It just encouraged to race to the bottom on pricing, where apps would go cheaper and cheaper or free just to get those users, and like you said, it’s the one time purchase and there was no upgrade path, and so then users got used to, oh, I’m gonna pay 299 for an app I can use for the next 10 years, perfect, and that’s just not sustainable, and so then Migrating a 299 purchase from 10 years ago into a subscription. It’s such a difficult transition for the customer, and a difficult transition for the developer to Bring those customers in. Onto the bus and onto the wagon. How did you manage that communication as you changed your business models and as you increased? There’s obviously gonna be unhappy people, but did you take any Extra efforts or extra communication to bring customers with you on that journey, or what was that like to go from no options to suddenly now we have in-app purchase and trials and all sorts of things? 00:36:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we definitely had our share of trying to find a good working business model on the App Store coming from a paid version, then doing another paid version as a paid upgrade kind of where we just lowered the price a little bit and launch a week or two, then we try to move to a free app with uh free in a purchase to unlock a trial version and then in a purchase to unlock the pro features. And now we only 2.5 years ago, we switched to a subscription-based business models. And I think a lot of customers don’t want to hear that, but every change we made, we always had the same amount of complaints and always people were angry. Either way, we tried it, they were always angry and I always had a feeling, if I do the subscription switch now, I can get it behind me and I can no longer have to think about. This part of running the business again, having to explain why they have to pay now again. It’s obvious that with the subscription, I ask them every month or every year that they have to pay again, but that’s part of the business model and that’s part of what people understand. But I think a lot of uh customers or potential customers don’t realize what a paid upgrade is and this concept never really Came from the Mac, where it was a very prominent business model to the app store as Apple also never supported it, and there were always these workarounds. So for me, one of the more important learnings was every switch is painful and it’s always hard to communicate it to customers. But in the end, after having done the subscriptions, which I kind of feel relieved that this part of running the business behind me. And I fully understand that a sun switch or subscription is something that can annoy a lot of customers. I think if an app I daily use suddenly asks me to have a $10 subscription month for so I’m also feeling angry, to be honest, as a customer. So we really have to be careful on how you communicate this and how you transition customers over from the, I call it legacy old version to the new uh subscription model. 00:38:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one thing that really stands out to me is just the risk of the upgrade model versus the risk of the subscription model for the business, because if you spend a year or a year and a half building an update, And you have an upgrade model, then 90% of your revenue is gonna come from that update, and you need a giant slice, a giant pile of money on upgrade day. And if that doesn’t come, then the past year and a half was a really painful experience. But then with subscriptions, it suddenly smooths all that out and you have a much more predictable revenue stream, which then makes new features and customer support, you know, actually a lot easier because it’s Just a more consistent and safe developer environment compared to the risk that was taken on with an upgrade path. 00:39:14 - Speaker 1: I remember the last time we did a paid upgrade, we had a feature done that the customers really wanted to have, and we had it done for almost a year before we actually shipped it because we knew we have to delay this feature for the next paid upgrade because it’s such a huge feature that will bring in new customers and make it easier for them to understand why they have to pay again. But sitting on a feature for such a long time is also kind of frustrating. And this is also kind of a a switching company development culture that you suddenly have to switch over to shipping updates or features more often and it also allows you to have Incremental feature releases where you say, oh, let’s try if this feature is something that our user base is interested in, don’t fully implement it. Try to work with uh MVP that’s good enough and then later build it out based on customer feedback. 00:40:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one thing that gets lost for the customers they’ll see the, oh, you’re not offering upgrades anymore, and now it’s a subscription. Oh, I’m never gonna get upgraded software and I just have to pay you all the time. That stinks. When the reality is, they’re getting those upgrades so much sooner than they would have and so much more consistently than they would have. I think the story of subscriptions is sometimes lost in the trees compared to what it actually provides for the customer. 00:40:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you asked me before about how we communicate subscriptions or the subscription switch to our customers, and I think that’s a really hard thing to communicate because you know in advance that the customers won’t be happy about the switch, because you are also a customer for other apps and you don’t like that, as I mentioned before, but you really have to think about how can I make this easier for the customer? How can I communicate to him that Feature development or simply adopting the app for a new Apple release simply takes time. And what we try to do, and I was kind of happy with our end result is we try to provide existing customers with um basically cheaper version to upgrade to the subscriptions. We had different trial lengths for the introductory offer of 6 months or 12 months. Then we shipped a very large free last free update to our existing customer base who used the paid upfront version together with the subscription. And we also try to communicate it very early. So we told them 2 months before, hey, we are going to switch to subscription. You will get the same features that we are planning to ship to our new subscription customers at the same time for this last release. So they had some positive connection with our switch to subscription because they also got a new feature at the same time. And I would say it kind of worked but we still, of course, got our share of not so positive feedback. 00:42:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that’s inevitable, but that empathy for the customer. I think really goes a long way when you, you know, understand there are people just like us, and have those same visceral reactions to change, but being able to empathize with them and understand. And explain, here’s our motivation, we want to do right by you, here’s me trying to do right by you, and here’s the new world we’re moving into. We would love for you to join us. It’s a very difficult conversation to have with customers, I think, but when done right and when done with the right motivation, I think it really does make a difference for the number of customers that will continue on that journey with you. 00:42:57 - Speaker 2: Now I assume, Marcus, that you’re doing a freemium model where you can basically try the app initially with some kind of limits and then choose to sign up for a subscription, is that right? 00:43:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. What we actually did is we moved our premium version we had before where we only allowed a few documents to actually version where you could also make tiny or minor changes to documents themselves. So when you download the free version of Minno, you can create new documents, can Add basic content and it also covers really all your basic brainstorming needs. But we unlock uh more premium features, for example, our new editable outline behind a subscription now that we have to plans a monthly and a yearly subscription. 00:43:46 - Speaker 2: And was the freemium something you experimented with, because there is the approach and actually someone we worked with in the past who has some subscription apps told me about a bunch of pricing experiments he’d done and discovered that for one of his better selling apps, just putting the paywall literally the moment you run the app was actually by far the best thing. the moment someone downloads it, they have their intention for what specific problem the app is going to solve for them. They’re gonna hit the button. One thing that’s also good, I guess about the App Store is that subscriptions are something you can cancel easily through the settings page and you have confidence in that. And so you just say, yeah, OK, I want this, I want to try it. So what was your thinking on? Giving those, yeah, the free capability sounds like somewhat extensive, free capabilities versus more immediate paywall. 00:44:38 - Speaker 1: It’s kind of interesting that you mentioned this because I’ve read about the same thing recently. We are currently in the process of reviewing our entire onboarding workflow. And when we first envisioned it for our subscription, I always had the feeling I wanted to get the customer from our tutorial directly into the app and experience how powerful mind mapping is, how they can start putting all their ideas and collecting all their ideas to have some positive impact on them before I actually forced them to see the purchasing screen. We’re still reviewing if we might want to change that in the future, because the app store has the problem when you only see that the app is basically free, you can download it for free. But there is no good communication. What the real business model behind an app is before they actually launch the app. There is a small section on the app store page where you can see label in a purchases and all the subscriptions, but hardly any user scrolls down. I think most users just look at the screenshots, the first text before the fold, and then they click on download. 00:45:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s a real flaw in the App Store page. Obviously, they’re inheriting the legacy of history, which was in our purchases were originally a tiny add-on and then subscriptions came from there, but that becomes the main way that at least serious professional or serious productivity software is sold, then it needs to be more front and center, and yeah, that leads to angry reviews and things because people feel surprised or tricked or something like that. So, yeah, it’s really tricky. 00:46:15 - Speaker 1: And then imagine back in the day, it was not called get how it’s called now, but it was called Free and you clicked on the button that said free. And then you kind of realized as soon as you launched the app, the app wasn’t free. There is an inner purchase behind that. So I’m really glad Apple changed it a few years ago. So as you can see, Apple is thankfully listening to some of the feedback we developers provide. And when it comes to subscription, I’m definitely seeing that this is a model that Apple very highly recommends and makes constant changes and improvements to how subscriptions work and how we as a developer can profit from them, but also make it easier for our customers to work with subscription. For example, last year they added a way to allow you as a developer show a cancellation dialogue from inside the app to cancel the subscription. So there are some great improvements there as well. 00:47:06 - Speaker 3: Speaking of feedback from developers, I remember very early in the App Store life, customers could add a review, but then there was no way for the developer to reach back out to that person, to reply to that person. So yes, Apple brings you a lot of, you know, customer visibility, but then they don’t necessarily want you talking to those customers. So what were some of the challenges there in terms of just, you know, dealing with those reviews and I’m sure I I brought some very sad memories back to you just now. 00:47:39 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that. That was kind of frustrating if you have a customer writing a review, and I think like a lot of customers also don’t write reviews because they want to review that, but uh several customers also wrote reviews to get support, so they thought, oh, that’s a great way to reach a developer, and they were never aware of that developers had no way to actually contact them again, so. That was definitely one of the more frustrating things about the app store in the beginning, but thankfully Apple changed that. And we also try to respond to, if not all, at least most of the reviews, but I have to be honest, I’m not really sure how many customers get the feedback or understand that we responded, so we get unfortunately not a lot of feedback from those. 00:48:28 - Speaker 2: One thing I’ll note, and again I’m coming from the world of web software and seeing both the pros and cons, but also just the differences of selling through the app store, and one striking thing is that it’s clear that Apple or other app store creators are in the same boat, I would imagine are really inserting themselves. Between you and your customer. And for example, anonymity that I can download an app and use it and the developer really doesn’t know that much about me, and even something like sign in with Apple offers you these abilities to obscure your email address or not share it at all. And one of the things we chose to do on Muse and sometimes actually does give us bad reviews, but we require you sign in with an email when you start using the app, which is totally standard in the web world, people don’t bat an eye. You wanna try a new service? Yeah, sure, you sign up with an email, that’s just a normal thing. And we like that because it allows us to have a direct connection with our customers, which is important for support, it’s important if we need to proactively notify them about a specific thing that’s affecting them, and in general, we just think that owning the customer relationship is good for our business, but that is going against the grain a bit in the app world, where the expectation is sort of anonymity because of the platform provider being this third party go-between. 00:49:48 - Speaker 1: I can totally understand that and we recently considered doing something similar just to have a way to contact a customer that their trial is running out. So we currently don’t really have a way to contact the customer to let them know, oh, you are currently on our free trial. The free trial expires in 2 days. We would love to have you as a customer, but if you’re not really happy, here’s the link to cancel the subscription with Apple. This is something that we sadly can’t do at the moment, but I think it would really help us to have a better understanding with our customers. 00:50:21 - Speaker 3: In some ways it makes me think that you have 2 customers, you have the customers that use my node, and then you have Apple, and you have to keep both of them happy to some degree. Have there ever been times where you’ve needed to kind of pick one over the other, or they’ve competed a little bit in terms of attention or features or direction that you needed to take my node, or has it been a fairly benevolent relationship with both of those? 00:50:49 - Speaker 1: I think they did a really good job trying to balance this in the past. There were not a lot of cases in the past where, for example, we had to remove a certain feature because the platform vendor wasn’t able to continue to support it, talking about sandboxing another pain topic of the Mac App Store back in the day. But overall, I think we try to find a good balance and If, as you mentioned Apple, it’s always better to not get into the way of Apple when it comes to certain features. For example, if you know that this might be a feature that might not pass a peer review, we personally try to stay away from this feature just to be on the safe side because having a pain to go through rejection after rejection is probably not worth it. Mhm. Which is kind of unfortunate to be honest, because it means that some features will never actually be considered to be explored by us and features that our customers will never experience. 00:51:51 - Speaker 2: I’ve seen that, yeah, sort of counterpoint, I guess, to the app review process, which, you know, is sort of a controversial topic in some ways. There’s a lot of ways that it does protect the quality of the app store and create trust with the end customers, which is good for all the legitimate businesses that are running there, but on the other hand, it does create a lot of frustration and slowdown, which happily has gotten better over the years. At this point of experimentation is a really good one that Yeah, I hadn’t thought about like features on an individual app, but because I know folks have talked about whole apps that they had ideas for that they thought actually could be really valuable, but as they thought it through, they’re like, no, there’s 20 ways that’s gonna run into this app review gauntlet. I just don’t want to deal with that. I’m just not even gonna create it. 00:52:38 - Speaker 1: And even if it passes a review, you never know if it will pass the next app review or the one coming after and we had similar issues with our business model where Apple was certain at some point of the opinion, oh, you can’t use a free in a purchase to unlock a trial that’s not supported by us. And then we had to go through the app review board and show them other examples of apps doing just that. And it’s just always lost time and lost resources you could have spent otherwise. 00:53:07 - Speaker 2: Mhm. Another major difference I noted coming from the wild west of the web, is that experimenting with pricing is way harder to do within the App Store world. Even the process of getting a price, whether it’s in an out purchase or a subscription reviewed is a whole journey, and then if you want to test out a couple of different price points with an AB or an ABC test, if you want to test out something like the freemium model, something where you say, OK, you know our current setup, you get 100 cards in the free version, and then you can buy the starter plan. What if we make it so that you can have a lower limit. On the free version, but the entry price is a little lower. Or what if we make the free version a little more generous but make the entry price a little bit higher? What fits people better? And I think my past experience as a business owner is you’ve got to experiment. If you can’t try different things, you’re never going to land on the right answer, and I think pricing is a really important thing to get right, but trying to experiment with that, it’s possible, but it really is an act of contortion. 00:54:08 - Speaker 1: Um, that’s right, yeah. But I think when it comes to subscription, Apple tried to make this a little bit easier. For example, I think only with a subscription you can set a price based on the region you are. I think that’s not possible for any purchases. And there’s also some new features that Apple added to store it and the App store itself. For example, you can now finally provide offer codes for your customers to unlock a certain promotional offer which weren’t. Available until, I think they only added it 3 years ago. So this is always when I think of business model. I look at what is Apple currently doing, and they are doing a lot of things when it comes to subscription, making things easier for developers to experiment with pricing in this area and also adding new features. They haven’t added new features to other parts of the store kit framework, I think in like forever. And all the new features always land on the subscription site, which has also, I have to be honest, some disadvantage because actually implementing subscription in an app really takes a lot of time. So we at least spent 4 months just trying to find a good implementation of subscription, finding a good way to sync our subscription across platforms, which is only possible since 2 years now, but that was before we made the switch. So Store kit is not the easiest framework to work with, to be honest. 00:55:36 - Speaker 3: Mhm. Which is surprising because it’s so, you know, indispensable to both Apple and every developer. You’d think that there would be a nicer environment to work in there. 00:55:47 - Speaker 1: That’s true, but subscriptions are also not easy. They add a lot of things to consider, a lot of edge cases, a lot of things when it comes to churning or. The customer needs some approval from somebody else, from a parent, for example, to get the subscription running and stuff like that. So we have a lot of states in our app in which a subscriber can be and covering all of those correctly, definitely takes some time and it’s not easy. 00:56:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like even Understanding what the options are isn’t easy, let alone then implementing those options in the app. 00:56:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also the UI and Aster connect is really complicated when it comes to managing subscription. Have you ever tried to increase the subscription price and to how many screens you have to go through and how many little dials you can turn, that’s really not the easiest UI. 00:56:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right, and you also end up with a lot of canonical information only in this web interface, which Apple is great at building many things, but web interfaces are not one of them, you know, it’s slow, there’s lots of unreliability, and in general it’s just kind of confusing to navigate. Things move around all the time, and yeah, for those screens, it’s just very often, oh, I thought it was on the features, subscription, manage, but it’s actually under App store payments thing and you’re looking for the exact right checkbox and going through these flows. I did a lot of the setup for the last time we did a major revision to our pricing last year I did a lot of the just kind of grunt work of essentially typing it all in. And in addition to being really easy to do wrong, it’s incredibly high stakes because once you type it in, you cannot change it. And in fact, even the identifiers, the unique identifiers, which have to be unique to the entire app store, not just your own app, for each. Subscription code. Once you type it in, you cannot change it and you cannot delete it and you can never use it again. So if you don’t type it in right the first time, you know, so yeah, very harrowing. I think I messed one up one time and we had to basically change our naming scheme for the subscription codes. 00:57:56 - Speaker 3: I’m embarrassed to say on a very old app of mine, I made a misspelling in one of those identifiers, and so it just haunts me because it sits there mocking me in the App Store connect. 01 letter wrong. 00:58:11 - Speaker 2: And then on the implementation side with Storitt, it’s also tricky because you’ve got this concept of, I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the exact technical architecture. I’m sure you both understand it better than me, but there’s something where there’s an on-device validation of this receipt, that’s the kind of, yeah, anti-piracy stuff you’re talking about, Marcus, and then there’s the Apple servers for managing, yeah, payments of subscriptions and things, and then you can optionally, but it’s recommended, have your own back end. That does some of this, and so there’s a three-way data exchange between Apple servers, your servers, and the app on device app, and then as you mentioned, the user might have multiple devices and obviously the subscription can and should be shared across them, so it gets confusing quick. 00:58:57 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s true, yeah. As I mentioned before, uh, store is definitely not the easiest framework, and web service and Apple is also a topic, so you have this back and call that you can do to the app store servers where you can validate a receipt. And in the past we had several times where this kind of failed and we had issues with that, so not really fun if your payment flow is not really working the way it should be. But I can always have to come back to this one comment. It’s getting actually better, so Apple is improving things and also when it comes to services and running services, so I always try to be more on the positive side and try to forget how it happened previously and what was in the past. 00:59:42 - Speaker 3: It’s really striking to me how much of app development has nothing to do with the app’s development sometimes where the Features are certainly an important part of building an app, but, you know, there’s all the payment flow which we just talked about, but then you’ve mentioned that a lot of your traffic comes from, a lot of your customers come from app store search. Have you done a lot with the App Store product page and experimenting with screenshots or with descriptions or with the tags or anything like that, or is it just a one and done, we put it up there and Apple take the wheel? 01:00:21 - Speaker 1: We did a lot of optimizing the descriptions, also the title of the app itself and also the tags, because in App Store search, those are the three more important parts on how an app is listed in the search ranking. Um there we did a lot of changes and I hopefully we landed on something that’s working quite well at the moment. But what we recently tried to use search as on the App Store, and there we were looking really at everything, we kind of realized that our sales page inside the app is probably not the best performing sales page, so we are currently focusing on improving that and that’s also a lot of work, to be honest, just having to think about what else you have to do there and how you present the sales page. 01:01:10 - Speaker 2: By sales page, you probably are referring to what on our team we usually call paywall, so this is some kind of dialogue that pops up and basically says, you know, hey, if you buy this thing or you upgrade, then you can get these features. 01:01:24 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah, I just called sales pitch. I’m not sure if there’s an official name for that. You’re a business person, right? 01:01:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough. Well, I’m also reminded of in addition to this idea that so much of building an app is not what you think of as building the app, building features and creating value for the end user and solving their problems, but as all these meta things that go around it that are necessary and in fact critical like getting that paywall right, making sure your app presents well in the app store, all those things are so important if your business is gonna survive and ultimately if, yeah, people are gonna find. the app and use it and want it and pay for it in the first place in order to get actual value from it. But so much of that is outside the realm of maybe what we got in to do this for, and there’s a parallel on, I think the company side as well, you know, at some point after I started my entrepreneurial journey, found myself, my day absorbed with employment contracts and filing taxes and, you know, twiddling admin interfaces and some SAS tool that I use. I said, was this my dream? This is the thing I wanted to do. But yeah, it’s just part of it, it’s the reality. 01:02:32 - Speaker 3: It really takes me back to the beginning of the conversation when we were talking about how important it is. For a coder turned manager to stay coding and to stay, you know, involved in the product somehow, even if you might not be writing features every day, but to still find that thing that brought you there in the first place, and to still find that original motivation and that original excitement in the product. I think for me it’s certainly the code, it’s certainly some of the elegance around that, or the data structures, it’s the piece that I enjoy, but for others, I think it’s the team or the cohort of people that you’ve built that are Going on this journey with you. What is that for you, Marcus, that You know, you’ve been doing this now for Gosh, at least 14 years, maybe longer than that. What’s been that thread for you that’s really tied this together, that’s been exciting? 01:03:21 - Speaker 1: There were always those ups and downs where I wasn’t sure what my job really is. Should I do more coding? Should I be more involved with the vision of the company? And I think 1 or 2 years ago, I kind of realized. I had lost the vision on why I actually wanted to do this app, and then I took a l

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