33 min read

04: Firefox Quantum

We're back with Episode 4 of the Coffee & Code Cast and this week we're following up on Mike's Remarkable Tablet, a quick followup in our conversation previously on what happened to Windows 9. We also talk about the recently released Firefox Quantum, and Apple's delayed Apple HomePod.
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04: Firefox Quantum
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 Yeah, so as you were gone, you know, I went down there with some friends and of Christina's and mostly had mostly co-workers and You know that the the margarita's go down easily there You were sending me some text messages Some interesting text messages that night over there. Well, I think I think I sent you one and you know I Figured I got the hint I forgot how to use my phone at some point. I don't know. Huh? (laughing) Yeah, we did that ourselves one time when we were down there. It's been a few years now. We went down there for a little happy hour. I remember correctly, it resulted in, your now wife having to come down and pick you up. Well, she joined us first. I mean, you have to come in and have a cup. Well, I mean, I think the story was that a couple hours in, I called her and I think I had ridden my bike from my previous job down there. And it wasn't feeling the ability to ride the bike home. So I called her to join us and she was like, why the fuck are you calling me at two hours after you've been there? She's like, you've already eaten, you've already, you know, you're probably already to go. Why would I come join you? (laughs) - It was a nice gesture. The real ask was like, I need a ride home, but I can't just ask for that. So you should join us. - Exactly, right? And apparently she picked up on a little speech slurring that was going on. And so she was like, oh, now I understand the real reason. I thought we were doing great. [MUSIC PLAYING] [Music] Coffee code cast episode four buddy. Let's kick it off. Hey, we made it for episodes about that our growing fan base Yeah, we're picking up users that's right It's good to be back. It's been a little while. It's been what couple weeks probably since we did this last time Yeah, I think the last episode we published was on the 31st so it's been a while So welcome back Good to be here Who was gonna ask you this when you were in the office who watched your dogs while you were gone? Because that was you were gone for a while anyway, and then you kind of had some unexpected Additional time. So did you have them kennel? There what happened there? No, they stayed at the house. They stayed at the apartment. I Have been in San Francisco for about 50 days now probably and My my dogs have been there more than I have I've only been there for probably 20 fish And so my dogs have a very nice apartment in Mission Bay. Nice that I get to stay and visit. I get to come and visit whenever I want. It's pretty sweet deal man. They were. And that's pretty nice of you to give them a San Francisco pad. Well, they're good dogs usually. One of them is the other one's a little fucker, but you know, still love them too. We did have we did have some people we Lauren being the, the network or she has found some, found a couple in the apartment that, you know, could come in and take care of them while we were gone. So that was very nice. Oh, sweet. Yeah. Is this, are we in the, airing for airing of grievances section yet? What does that mean? I didn't even know the section. I don't know if it is either, but maybe it needs to, it needs to happen right now. All right. Well, I mean, letter loose if you got it. That'll be a good thing to bring people in. Now that I posted it on Facebook and it's on Twitter and people are just joining the rant. We need to we need to hear a rant. So yeah, let her let her rip man. Yeah, you know, we're getting into holiday season anyway And I think Festivus is coming up soon here. I don't remember exactly The time frame, but they have the airing of grievances from my sign felt people out there, you know Ah, so you're not a sign felt guy. I wasn't aware of it. Oh Oh my gosh, man. Yeah It's a real thing If you're is from sign fell My green, oh, here's the deal, man. Here's the deal. So I have the pixel two. We talked about that before. I love the phone I actually talked to somebody that has the 2xL and he hasn't had any of the problems that Have been purported with this thing. He showed it to me. It looks really really cool. Very good. Very nice No, the whole grievance is that Google Said that they announced when the phone came out that they would Buy back other phones, right? Like you'd get $150 back for, I don't know I don't know. You could get a few hundred bucks back if you had the six X or six P, yeah, the six P, get some money for the five X. So that's trading kind of an upgrade program, yeah. Yeah, they had trading program. And so I'm waiting for my kit to arrive and I don't see my kit, you know, and they're supposed to send me a return box for this thing. I had the phones wiped and ready to go and put back in the original box, no kit. And it's getting close to it. It's been a month probably almost, and that's, there's a 30 day cap on that. So I went out to Google tech support, which is just a thrill. If you haven't done that before, I'd recommend you don't check it out. And yeah, as it turns out, I filled out a form for a trade-in, but somehow it wasn't tied to my order. And so they won't honor the trade-in because it has to be tied to the order. You can't... And not only does it have to be tied to the order, you have to specify during checkout that you're, you know, checking out a kit and a new phone. So I don't know what form I found. I think I just found a separate form. I went out and I was on project five, gave me a link to say, hey, trade in your phone. And I did that, but it didn't have anything to do with ordering. So I thought, you know, I'll just order the phone. And naturally, because I have two of these five X's in my account currently, they're going to be deactivated, then those will be eligible for trade-in. But no, because I didn't do it at the same time of purchase, there is no kit coming. And there will be no trade-ins happening either. So I was very upset. That's pretty interesting, considering the last episode you were talking about how their support is very helpful and useful and forgiving, whereas it sounds like maybe their sales department is not. Maybe I was, maybe I was still drunk on that episode, or I could have been mistaken for Amazon, because Amazon has great support. Maybe. Yeah. Well, you know, you can get an app, you can't get an Amazon phone anymore. Yeah. No, that's too bad. Is it though, I don't know. >> The Thears of Thing, they have, they've been very proactive. The project five team has at least. So there was at any time, there was an outage, there were some things they miscalculated my data usage. They'll give out little refunds and do things like that, which is very nice. But, you know, so like the automated stuff is fine, but then you've got this, this is a big deal. And the guy even told me he was escalating the requests. And this is a very common problem. and this isn't just a small segment of the nexus folks this is happening too. There's a lot of people out there that are having this issue as well. It's very confusing how the trade and what's supposed to work. - Huh, well, I've been debating a little bit with myself here often on about upgrading, whether I want to upgrade to either, excuse me, the iPhone, what the hell do we have? Eight or 10? - Time, yeah. - Well, there's another one too, right? There's the eight, I think as well. eight, eight plus 10, I don't know what are they all? - Something like that. I did get to see in the office, we have some people that have the iPhone 10, so I was able to get my hands on that. And it is pretty slick, I gotta admit, it's really tall, almost uncomfortably tall. It's the same kind of width as the iPhone 7, but they've added a ton of height because they've gotten really, really top and bottom bezel. So, but it feels a little bit strange. It's a slightly heavier feeling it's glass. So yeah, I mean, it was pretty cool to see it, pretty cool to try it. It's a little bit of a learning curve just because they've removed some of the gestures as I've gotten rid of the home button, but overall it seems pretty slick. I had a chance to check it out in 18T store last week and it's nice. The plus, the 8 plus is massive. I had our time with the 8 plus, the 10 was great. I actually was listening to another show. I think it was yesterday of the day before and they kind of made a good point that this, the 10 and I think the 8 has wireless charging as well but this generation of phones feels like the more logical kickoff point that they should have removed the headphone jack and the reasoning for that is because now you can in addition to being wirelessly charging, you can also plug in the dongle to plug in your headphones. So you couldn't do that before without an additional dongle. You would have to have a dongle that would do power in your headphone jacks. So they're like, this makes sense now. This is a logical step at this point to have removed that port. And you know, in the history of Apple, they've been very, very good at that. They removed the ports kind of at a very logical time in the evolution of the hardware. And he was like this this feels like the logical time they could they should have done that not the previous generation Which I thought that was an interesting point and I'm in I totally agree. It's a good point. I agree also I don't have a headphone jack on the pixel - they remove those and You know, I don't usually charge my phone. I don't have that problem yet. The battery life's been very good. I charge it in the You know overnight and then it's good all day But I could see how that'd be a problem and it would be very nice if they just introduced the wireless charging Cool the pixel 2 doesn't have wireless charging. I thought it did for some reason. Oh does it. I don't know Maybe I'm missing out on I have no idea It's not my that's not my space. No, it does not it does not that's they're pulling the same thing with Apple It's gonna be the release I get to buy the pixel 3 for $900 and get wireless charging maybe next time All right, well, let's get into some follow-up should we follow up? Well, you got the remarkable tablet in your hand. You've used it now for about a week, little a little bit more a week. So tell me about it, what do you think? What are your thoughts? This is a fun, fun digital tablet. I'm having a lot of fun with the remarkable so far. It's, it gets a good review from me. It looks like it uses the E-ink technology, so it kind of looks like a larger like an oversized Kindle. It's probably the best way to describe it. It's an oversized Kindle. It kind of resembles a pad of paper. Let me take a look at it. I have a pad of paper right here in terms of the dimensions. Yeah, yeah. A little smaller than a normal pad of paper. But pretty darn it. Yeah, I would say they're very similar in size just using it, you know, the brief time I did in the office there. It's very nice. It has three buttons on the front, a power button on the top, kind of a power-sleeve button, so you can actually just sleet snooze it if you want to save battery and you're not taking notes right now. Yeah, there's the main screen. When you get into the main screen, it has a few different organization categories. It'll break it down into notebooks, documents, and eBooks. And so it supports PDF and ePub files at this point. More to come later, but that's the initial release. has two support for those two files. And so if you have ePubs that are not digital rights managed like I Amazon eBooks or if you find tutorials that might your may or may not exist online on how to convert those eBooks, you can do that and put those on your remarkable tablet. And I have some digital subscriptions to some magazines. So I threw some of those on there. I could download those, put them on. And I'm very impressed. I've been taking notes on it all week. I'm taking better notes. I'm a better note taker now than I was before because what happened is that I like the moleskin example. When I have my single moleskin, I'm taking all kinds of different notes and I don't have a really good organization system for it. So maybe for example, my team stand up every day. That might happen in the morning, every morning, but then I'm taking notes for other meetings and taking personal notes or whatever to do lists. So my previous days notes might be a page or two or three back and I'm not exactly sure where it is. And it's kind of hard to keep it together. Well, if this, I just have a standup notebook. And I have a few pages in there and I'm able to put today's date right where I left off. So I'm able to go back at a glance and see what happened yesterday, what we talk about yesterday. And I can go back a screen and see what happened last week. It's very nice for continuity. So I'm able to keep everything relevant in one space and I create as many notebooks as I want. - Given your stand-ups, I would imagine your stand-up notebook is about full by now, right? - It's getting full. We have a new thing in Agile. I don't know for you, Techies, I would like to hear how your company's handle this, but we have a very new state of the art, Agile methodology called the sit-down stand-up, takes about 45 to 60 minutes every day. And it's very slow. It's kind of like passing the yarn at Thanksgiving or something like that. Everybody gets the share until they're done and we get to come back to people and-- Yeah, you should implement some kind of game that you guys can play while you're sitting around the couch. Is there just to keep everybody interested? Yeah, that's the first problem. It's at our very plush lounge couches that we have in the area. That doesn't get people motivated to get the hell out of there. It's a little different. Maybe I just need to get some boards with some nails and make people stand on them barefoot or something. that'll get us out of there in about five minutes. - So as far as the remarkable, the writing experience, I felt was really, really good. There was just a touch of delay, which I think you're gonna have with any kind of writing surface like that. As far as the accuracy and the precision that the pen for that thing has, it was pretty solid. I felt even on a pretty narrow line, to rule a paper that it presents on the screen, you were able to write in those lines pretty easily without any kind of weirdness occurring. The question that I was kind of wondering as you filled out the page, the device itself has a little bit of thickness to it. I don't know, maybe half an inch thick or something like that. - If not even maybe. - It's probably closer to a little between a quarter and a half. - Three or eight. - I don't know. - So as your hand kind of bleeds off to the edge of the screen or the bottom of the screen, does that feel a little bit strange? because the idea of this product is to kind of be as close to paper as possible and of course paper is pretty much completely flat on the surface, whereas obviously this could not emulate that. So as curious as to how once you get to the right side of the page or the bottom of the page, how that feels or works. Yep. I tried that and it's very good. It goes right to the edge. It doesn't do any funky screen rendering compression weird stuff where it's, you know, it goes to the edge. It's a hot edge. Oh, the term is, but it's great. But in terms of feel, you know, like your hand hanging off kind of a quarter inch cliff, you know, does that feel a little bit strange or? No, no, not really. I think of it just like a regular no pad. If it's a brand new no pad, you're going to have some thickness, maybe not as much as the remarkable does, but certainly some thickness. And it doesn't feel any different than using a padded face. That's fair, I guess. Yeah. If you're using your mull skin, then yeah, you're going to have a little bit of a drop off there as well. the edge. Yeah. Yeah, so this device we covered it before, but it's a very robust and primitive, I would say device. It isn't an all-in-one. It isn't an iPad with apps that you download, at least not yet. It's a digital notepad that takes notes and a reader so you can read those notes and read your documents that you have in those formats I mentioned. And that's it. It doesn't really do a whole lot else. It has, but it has a very nice pallet of pen and pencil and highlighters and different thicknesses and tips so you can customize that however you want. One thing I would love is that when I'm reading some of my magazines, I can take notes on the magazine so I can underline, I can circle things, I can highlight, which is really interactive. That experience to me is what makes it so special because before I wanted the physical copy to to the right notes, it's just how I capture things is, you know, even just reading, reading the news, I want to be able to scribble on something and now I can do that. That's pretty cool. And you were mentioning too, you can change kind of what kind of paper you're using, all right? So you could switch to graph paper, line to paper or probably no paper. You can have drum sure. Many templates can go blank or line, college rule, Cornell note style. Yes, they have many, many templates. were even exploring ways to do your own custom templates. So if you have a certain format you like, you can do that. That would be cool. I kind of think to myself, I have a mull skin. I don't really use anymore because I use software to do this now, but I had a mull skin that would do recipes. So it has kind of a recipe template built into it. So you know, stuff like that that they could kind of cater to, you know, particular formats like that would be pretty cool. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. It's fun. The battery life could be improved. And I've seen some updates already that it's going to be a software thing they push that can improve the update. The battery life. I got through a day with it pretty easily, but I had it yesterday at the coffee shop. So I had charged at the day before. Use that some that evening, whatever you then took at the coffee shop. And I think by the end of the afternoon there, I was down to 20% or something. You would think being eEink, it shouldn't be that battery heavy. I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe they probably have a beefier processor in there than your Kindle or something, I'm sure. I don't think it was hurried. I think that it's a good V1. It's a good first product. I do see the holes there in the areas for improvement. And I imagine that they probably had to sacrifice some features just to get the thing out without much more delay. But it wasn't a half-ass product either. I think it was ready for the mainstream. Definitely looking forward though to some improvements. One thing that because it is very natural experience, one thing that I found myself wanting to do, I had a pencil. I was using a pencil on there, which is a cool effect as well because it looks like a pencil. But anyway, I wanted to erase it. And so I flipped the pen over, the stylus over and tried to to erase and no dice, it doesn't work. And so you have to go into the navigation and select the eraser and then erase the thing. - Yep, I had thought that actually when I was looking at it, I kind of was thinking that was a pretty big missed opportunity. You know, it is. It's something that's very natural. I think a lot of people that would want to try to do that. And then, you know, it's just a little more work. There's multiple steps now to erase. - Yep. So that could be improved. Now there's some other things that could be improved too. The buttons, the left-right buttons are elevated somewhat off the no pad on the front. - These are the ones that are at the bottom. - Yeah, and they're meant from navigation. The middle one goes as a home button like the iPhone home that you're left and right for previous next in the notebook. - You know what happens? - The more I think about that, those buttons being at the bottom, that's kind of a poor design decision. It's been there's been some interference. I've not a lot but a couple times I've been writing something at the bottom of the page and bump it and then it switches the page. Yep. Also in sleep mode when you tap the power button to put it in sleep. When I push that into the I got the little felt or the wool sleeve for the thing, which is a very nice sleeve actually. I really like it. It's a little gray wool sleeve with a liner. But I had some other documents in there because that's what I was carrying around the other day. So the coffee shop, I had some real paper in there and it was a little squeezed for space. When I was trying to put the no pad in there, it bumped the button and it took it out of sleep. So that could be the another reason why the battery life is diminished is that I could have had it in there awake the whole time and not known for a couple hours or something. Sure. Maybe it goes to sleep after 15 minutes. I don't really know. The other little gotcha there too is the bright there is no brightness setting that I could find on the device anywhere So what you see is what you get there is no Adjustment which like I was on the airplane taking notes and reading some stuff and there is no backlight So that could be a future enhancement of backlight would be very nice Yeah, is there any kind of such thing as as Brightness person you know on an e ink display. I don't think there is such a thing I mean you could definitely backlight it yeah, but I don't think there's such a thing as brightness No, that's just it. That's what I'm saying is I think I think I would have liked to have a backlight or something because it's just It's it's difficult. Yeah, I had the light on in the plane. It was dim. It was a night flight to the lights were off I had my light on it was fine with them the lady next to me kept moving her head and blocking blocking my damn view Get out the way I'll leave it at that. It's a great product right now. I'm very happy very pleased. It was worth the wait But good folks that remarkable that did a very nice job with this one and I can't wait to see what comes out in future releases if I've no doubt it's gonna be a radically different and enhanced product in in another few months in a year even as they keep building that out Well, let's move on to another piece of follow-up that I I think this was from episode number one if I'm not mistaken, but oh What happened to Windows 9? This was something that you kind of brought up on on a side I think we were talking about the iPhone 10 at the time and you kind of had inquired about why do people skip nine in general? And then we kind of went on attention about was there a Windows 9? Well, no. There was not. That's right. And yeah, it was exactly as we explained. They wanted coming off Windows 8, which wasn't the most popular change in the world. they wanted to make it appear that it's a major update. So they just went ahead and skipped overnight and went directly to 10 and made it appear that it's a larger update than maybe it really was. Interesting. Yeah, so I think the other thing that was the major difference too that they wanted to signify such a major rapid change as that Windows 10 was the first one that was the UI basically flowed across all devices. I think that was the other major change that they wanted to kind of really differentiate 10 from eight in that way. So the phone, the tablet. Yep, yep, exactly. Bringing the, what do they call that Metro design? I think they call it to all the devices. Yes. Continent. And all their applications, they kind of had everything, everything doing the same type of thing, which was good, I think. Yeah, we'll have to go from, we'll skip our ninth episode and we'll go right to 10. It'll be a big one. We should do that just as a gag. Yeah, let's do it. I think it's I think it's done. We'll get a major upgrade from nine to 10 of the coffee code cast. Yeah, and on that note, I didn't really say anything at the show opening, but just want to let anybody out there that listens to that. We will be back and more of a routine fashion here at the publishing heads and personal events going on at home. I had to take care. Unfortunately, death in the family. and that sort of thing. And so I was gone for a chunk of time there for a week and a half. But the plan is to still be published in content, pushing shows twice a week. And we're going to get back on the saddle here with this one and get it going again. And I think we even have some ideas of how we could maybe have a little backup just in case. Something like that happens again. One of us can't be around. Then we'll have a little bit of filler that we can pop in there to keep people's interest peaked. Are you talking about the best of show? Oh, I think we need a couple more for that to happen. (laughing) At least one or two for the highlight reel, okay? - Okay, you know. (laughing) - I wanna give Simon something good to listen to. He's a listener. He was a listener. - A loyal fan. - A loyal fan. If we had shirts to give away, he'd be the first one to get a shirt, but we don't have any shirts, so. Maybe some swag. - Yeah, we don't have a swag yet, we'll have to get some swag and we can send it to our friend Simon down there. The old Starbucks. He says, he's a Starbucks guy. We could work a trade with him, maybe, maybe trade some swag for some coffee beans down there. - Hey, there you go. - It's a coffee code cast as you've told before. (laughs) - What else we got on, going on here, man? We were about 30 minutes into this, right? - Well, we got Firefox Quantum was released. - Woo! - A couple days ago, boy. - So, yeah, I was a Firefox user once upon a time before Chrome came out and kind of dominated the browser market I was a huge Firefox guy. They were the first browser that really kind of adopted plugins and had a really good suite of debug tools. - They were the best at debugging before Chrome. That was the standard. You weren't doing that in IE, that's right. - Yeah, sure. (laughs) - Yeah, IE8 or 7. Or whatever the hell, 6, maybe. - Oh, that's a dirty word. Don't talk about IE6 on the go. (laughs) as a, do the CSS and styling the JavaScript nightmares that we had on IE 6. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you knew this because this was actually maybe when you were out of the business for a while, but there was actually a time where businesses were implementing what they called an IE tax. Have you heard of this? No. Go. So because of the, because of the time that you had to devote to coding specifically for IE 6 and 7 specifically. If you were using one of those browsers, 'cause I think back in the day, even at the Nebraska Medical Center, we put a banner at the top that said, "Hey, you're using a dated browser, update your shit." - We were less elegant about that. - Yeah, you remember doing that? So instead of that, what people started to do is if you were an E-com, they would actually apply an additional tax to you. That was called the IE tax. So if you're using, if they detected that you were using I-6 or 7, you would get an additional tax to check out to pay for the additional development time that was required to-- which I thought was a pretty brilliant move, but we moved on from that. But it was an interesting move to recoup. Because at the time, people were spending 50% of their time developing specifically for those browsers, because you had to put in tons of hacks and tons of specific styles for I-6 and 7 because they didn't adhere to standards. So it was a valid reason to do it. It was just an interesting way to implement. - Well, yeah, it was a clever idea. I didn't know they were doing that. And sadly, they probably didn't even come close to recuperating their costs with that either 'cause that was such a pain. - And that's all. So anyway, Firefox Quantum was released. Supposed to be a huge speed increase from Firefox and even Chrome, they claim. It's supposed to also be a battery life saver. It's supposed to be way better on battery life. It's supposed to be multi-threaded. It's supposed to have its own garbage cleanup. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went ahead and installed this. I gave it a run for a couple days on both my desktop and my mobile, so I tied both devices to it. And as far as the mobile goes, I was actually pretty impressed. The mobile experience was really, really good. I really enjoyed the read feature. So Safari for those people that are on an iPhone, already have this, you know, you can pull up any web page, click one button, and it reformats it to a reading function. So it's, you know, yeah, exactly. So it's a good font to read, good size, you know, removes all the distraction and that sort of thing. And I actually really enjoy that about the Firefox Quantum. However, on the desktop, it was a bit of a different experience. It does have the reading mode there, but what I was starting to see was incredible memory spikes on my machine. And so I run a pretty beefy laptop for programming purposes. And there was a point running Firefox where it was consuming-- gosh, I don't know-- almost 40% of the memory in my machine that was available. And so I had to kill it. And I chalked that up to it maybe being just kind of a memory leak one time. Restarted it up, ran some things for a while, maybe 30 minutes. and there again, it was back up to using 40%, 50% of my memory on my machine. So at that point, I was just kind of like, you know, I can't let this continue. I can't let this run this way. It's my machine's just like on fire at this point. So I shut it down and I haven't used it really since. I've used it on the mobile off and on, but not on the desktop. So well, I appreciate the tip on mobile. I'm gonna try it out because I had a similar shitty experience on desktop. I downloaded it, I got really giddy thinking, I go to Firefox Quantum now and I just found the load time for me was slower. I don't know. I tried it a few different times. I don't think the load was anything impressive on the desktop for me and yeah, I didn't check the memory but my overall experience, I just wasn't pleased. I thought Chrome was still the better desktop browser in my limited-- Yep. --unscientific experiment over there for a few days. Yeah, I can't claim mine was totally scientific. However, I will say that I did measure the memory levels between Chrome and Firefox, and although Chrome is consuming a pretty substantial amount of memory, more in fact than I even realized Firefox definitely is doing far more. Wow. Yeah, Chrome. If you can't take a lot of memory, each tab, you get a lot of tabs going, then you got the Hangouts thing at the bottom and all these other, you know, pretty much, that you need to have eight gigs and run Chroma. - Yeah, I mean, just to give it a fair comparison right now, I mean, when I look at the Chrome task, it's maybe using what do we got? Perhaps a thousand megabytes, so I guess I'd be a gig. Yeah, so and then I look at the screenshot that's at the bottom of our show notes of the one that I sent to you of when I was testing with Firefox and that thing's using two and a half gig, at least just for that one process, probably almost three when you count all of the different processes that it's running. I am. Yeah. So I was a little less impressed with that. I'm hoping that maybe in some subsequent updates, though, fix a little bit of that, a little more. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Kyle, I'm running 21 in the threads processes, 21 chrome items, units of work, 1.7 gigs, 1.8 gigs, almost two gigs of RAM. got a lot going on in there. It's not too bad. Oh, one quick pause here. Somebody just rang my doorbell. Let's check my ring here and see who the hell it is. Just use your Amazon. You have your Amazon key. Mailman can come in. It is a package and it is a delivery. So I do not have the key. And so I cannot let them in. But all right. Good to know. I don't have to run down my four flights of stairs and answer the door. Yeah, so Firefox Quattim, you know, I was very excited like you were. I was kind of giddy. I tried, you know, I wanted to install it and I wanted to really, really like it because, you know, like back in the day, kind of when we were working together, that was the browser of choice. And that's what you used to do everything and I was kind of hoping that they were back in the game and doing some cool shit, but unfortunately it looks like it's not. At least for me, it's not ready for primetime. Not yet. Well, I'm going to try it out on my mobile and see what happens. Yeah, I enjoy the mobile. The mobile seems pretty snappy. I love the reading mode, actually. It integrates natively with pocket which I use to store read for later items. So that's pretty sweet. So yeah, I've been pretty happy in migrating everything from Chrome, or not migrating, copying everything from Chrome, including even some some passwords and so forth Was a breeze. That was no problem at all. So yeah, similarly. I had last pass I used that on chrome and I was able to get the plug in for Firefox and get that set up very quickly So that was nice that helped me get into some stuff That was that was probably the more positive experience I had with it Did you run through their desktop migration of your content from chrome to Firefox so all your bookmarks and that sort of thing? No, I wasn't that confident in it yet. I don't want to give it over. You don't want to give up your data? I don't want to turn it over to the Firefox, to the Maws. In our show notes and the links, I would recommend take a look at the Mozilla article that talks about quantum and the underlying development they did because I don't have a great experience on desktop right now, but what they did is really impressive in terms of how they are handling parallelism and rendering in the browser. They've done some really cool things there to speed up the rendering engine, the DOM. There's Stylo is their CSS engine. Can I just throw engine on the end of the - ILO. - ILO. Quantum CSS, quantum renderer. It's a really great, it's a very great article. The greatest, no, it's not like Trump over here. It's the greatest. (laughing) - It's tremendous. - Biggest. - Next up we got the Apple HomePod, which was just-- - The hell is that? - What the hell is that? Apple makes HomePod? HomePod, HomePod is Apple's response to the Google Home and the Amazon Alexa devices. So this would be working with Siri. So this is kind of Apple's foray into the smart assistant world, other than just on the phone. But also that if you have multiple of these devices that they can, they're aware of each other and they'll adjust the sound kind of to the space and to make a better sound environment between devices. So if they bounce certain sounds off of each other and they return in certain patterns, they'll kind of adjust the way that it sends the sound out to provide a really, really beautiful soundscape in the room. That's playing it, anyway. So yeah, they announced these things. I think it was at WWDC and claimed that they would be available in December in a recent report, many reports actually. and I believe it came directly from Apple is that they're going to be delayed until early 2018, which to me, it isn't really surprising. You didn't really hear anything about these things other than at WDC and what they did show there was really, really kind of vague. It was a lot of like video material. It wasn't like they had one on the stage that they were interacting with heavily or something like that. So I think they have a lot to do with these devices. Not only that, but I think they're here again, like we talked about in the previous podcast is they're incredibly behind. They're bringing something to the market that Amazon already dominates and Google is playing in and another player in the space is Sonos. I don't know what they're trying to prove with this. I mean, I know they're just trying to get something into the space and use their Siri platform, but it's too little too late, I think. - We'll see. I haven't been following it, but who knows? I given some of my critiques of the other Apple stuff, I would like to see what happens here. - Yeah, I think if they can, I don't know, I just don't feel that, you know, given the openness of Amazon and Google to bring other platforms onto their services, you know, I don't know that I feel that this home pod is gonna be a great success. They're gonna pimp their Apple music. So for people that are in the Amazon, sorry, the Apple ecosystem, this is probably gonna be a pretty solid product for them, but anybody else that wants to play in multiple environments, I don't feel how, I don't see if they're going to compete. I do feel like a company that had recently, in my opinion, been really, really down, which is Sonos, who I own many Sonos products. I actually love Sonos. I really, really love Sonos. For a while there, I was kind of wondering if that company was going to die on the vine a little bit. They really weren't producing any new products. They weren't announcing anything new at all. No software updates. and then suddenly they come out with Amazon integrated speaker. So they have an Alexa integrated speaker. You can hook your Amazon Alexa up, even if you have just like the little puck device, the Echo Dot, it can control your Sonos devices. So they've announced that they're gonna integrate with AirPlay 2. They've announced that they're gonna integrate with the Google platform, whatever the hell that's called. So they're doing a lot of cool things, and I think that's the right move. just make your make your platform kind of all inclusive and whatever you want to use on it use on it because really what their deal is they're a good speaker company right they're not they're not going to create these personal assistants so I think it's pretty brilliant to them to integrate with all of them. It's a beautiful sounding speaker. I've listened to the small one, whatever that is, the what is it the play? Play one. Yeah. But and then well I've listened to a few different ones because you have you have some stuff your place that's a little different but My experience has been very, very good. And I've thought more and more lately about going down that road, especially with the Alexa integration out now. It's a compelling product to look at. And it sounds beautiful in a small little footprint. Yep. And the missing component was Spotify. So what you can, you can control currently. Well, they're doing a couple things. Number one, you can control Sonos directly from apps now. You used to have to use the Sonos controller app. So it was very particular to Sonos. They control everything. But now you can actually from your Spotify, you can pick speakers almost like as if you were picking a way to cast it to some other device. So you just say, it'll see all the different speakers that you have in your room by name. So I could say, oh, send this to my living room speaker or send it to my kitchen speaker or something to that effect. So they've implemented that with Spotify. Pandora just announced the same thing. I think they just released that and they're integrating with many other services. So and then on the other side of it with the Alexa devices, you can currently control Amazon. I think it's the Amazon music service and I think one other but Spotify is coming soon. I think within probably before the end of the year. So they're doing really cool things. I think they're doing all the right moves. So I hope that pays dividends for them. But again, I don't feel the Apple product is going to make any kind of splash in the market. I feel like maybe Apple nerds are going to get it, but I don't. Yeah, I just don't see their play here. To be continued next year. I did have a note on Apple since we're on the topic for those of you out there that are streaming now, Ditch and Cable and doing streaming services. They're having a pretty cool promotion with Direct TV now going on this holiday season. I don't know when they expires, but go to Direct TV now. They were giving out Roku sticks for free. They have a new package. If you buy four months of their basic Direct TV now service for 35 bucks a month, then you get a free Apple TV 4K. Wow. That's not a bad price. And the direct TV now, what does that include? Is that a kind of a base like almost like as a satellite? Or is it a completely different package? Yeah, it's all streaming channels. They have different packages, but yeah, you can get 60 plus live channels for 35 bucks a month. There's no annual contract. There's an, you know, it's an app on Apple TV. This is app. It's just an app for you don't need the box. It's a little different than their satellite service. It's all streaming channels. Wow. That's amazing. I, you know, I'm glad that the cable companies are finally moving that direction. It's about it's about time. Yeah, they don't have much of a choice. Now they have to do it. Otherwise, they're going to be out of business. that are buys moving over that way. So the catch is that I think you buy an annual, not really a catch, it's a great deal because the Apple TV 4K is gonna be or run you what 150 bucks or something, 180 bucks. And so I think you have to pay for their basic package for a year and there was some kind of deal where that was gonna cost you about 89.95 plus tax or something. for the less than the price, less than the cost of an Apple TV 4K, you can get yourself a streaming, you know, direct TV now, streaming service. Yeah, that's pretty good deal. We'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah. So if you are interested in that, you can go ahead and grab a link to get to that. Yep. I've been looking at getting the Apple TV. I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat, I can't determine whether I want to go with that or just go with the Amazon Fire TV devices. devices. I really love the one. We have the first Amazon Fire TV stick. That's what we use in our bedroom. And aside from it being a little sluggish just because it's dated hardware at this point, it's been a really great device and I actually really love their interface and what they're doing with the product. Whereas Apple, again, they're that walled garden and you know, I don't know, it just that starts to bother me more and more and more. Yeah, unfortunately, but I know they do do some apps. They're supposed to be getting Amazon Prime. Oh, really? Let it out. There was rumored to come out in October and that was a, that did not happen. Well, it was announced. It was an agreement between Apple and Amazon that, that Amazon would start selling the Apple TV and that Apple would start putting the, the app on their devices. But, right, neither has happened. I'm kind of disappointed. Yeah, no, I'm talking about a leak that came came out after that. There was some leak that this developer or somebody had said, "Oh, yeah. They finally have it done. It's been done for a while." And this is the release date that came and went last month. I'm very disappointed. That would make things very, my streaming on the Apple TV very complete if I had the Amazon Prime video app. Yeah. And I think I would be much more willing to jump onto the Amazon, or sorry, the Apple TV if it had the Amazon Prime app, but that's a huge, that's a huge missing component and it kind of keeps me away from it. Whereas the Amazon TV has everything. I mean, there's nothing missing. Yeah. So the only thing that is missing, well, I guess that's not true. So if you buy into the Apple ecosystem like I do and you have HomeKit, the Apple TV acts as a HomeKit hub. So from my phone currently as long as I'm at home on my Wi-Fi network, I can use all my home kit enabled devices. However, once I leave the house, I can no longer interact with them. And so the Apple TV also access a internet-connected home kit hub. So that way I can actually interact with them even remotely. So that's another advantage. But the Apple TV provides that the Amazon TV cannot compete with, but I don't know how much of a huge thing that is for me or not. I'm still on the fence. Totally. Alright that's our episode today of Coffee and Code Cast. Contact us on Twitter. Shows Twitter is @CoffeeCodeCast. Mike's Twitter is @crackmanlikepragmaik. I'm a. Hey, crackman Mike. Kyle @KyleP Johnson. Ask us a question @#askthramec. Our email is coffeecodecast@gmail.com. Our temporary website is http coffeecodecast.libsynlibsyn.com. You can subscribe on SoundClouds, Stitcher, Play Music, iTunes, and Tune in. Rate us like us, share us, and leave us a comment. Thanks for listening. [Music]