Obviously, on the Mac, you really want to be using the menu bar a whole lot more than the various sort of popups just don't suit the MAC at all; it's kind of ironic I did a bunch of work to make panels on the Mac slide down from the top of the screen in the same way that you know sheets do on Mac OS Catalina and earlier only to have Apple change the way that the sheets work on big Sur right. So, there's stuff like that, and then there's in order to make file handling work properly on the Mac so you can just drag files in from anywhere and have them work; that means those need to be handled differently from the way that audio files are handled on iOS.

But I suspect a large part of the reason that people want to use Faité on the Mac isn't just because they prefer the Mac although many may also do that right, but also because people want to be able to start a project on the Mac and finish it on the iPad or vice versa, which means that I have to come up with something that works on both and hands off seamlessly between them. Right, this just keeps adding more and more work, which is why it's been over a year and there isn't a Mac version of Faité publicly available yet.

It sounds complicated; it is complicated. It is but I hope that it will be worth it when it's done and it feels like an actual Mac App instead of like a weird three levels of indirection inside stuck inside emulated window right. Well, for my last question, and this is the reason why I love Faité on iPad is because the Apple Pencil makes editing a podcast specifically for me just an awesome experience.

And you know there were some rumors that you know as these new M1 Maxs come out everyone says Big Sir, it basically looks like it's optimized for touch maybe touchscreen you know screens will be coming. Do you personally would you like to see a touchscreen Mac maybe one where you can utilize the Apple Pencil on it? So if someone enjoys editing podcast and Faité on their iPad like myself they can basically have the same experience on the Mac.

What do you think you would want to see, a touchscreen Mac? I'm not against it but it's not something that I'm personally looking forward to. That sounds more negative than I mean it; I'm just saying that uh I'm not sitting here going oh give me the touchscreen Macs. I'm very happy using a Mac with uh a mouse and a keyboard and a trackpad and I'm very happy using an iPad with touch and pencil.

I feel like each of those feels right for their particular environment if Apple do bring out touchcreen Max as well that's great we'll support it but if they don't it's not personally going to be something that I'll miss. Yeah, so we'll have to see. Yeah

Once I'm done recording a podcast like we're just about to finish this one I'm going sit on my sofa with my iPad Apple pencil and Faité and edit it over there and I don't know what Mac would fit as well in that position sitting on a sofa editing; I don't imagine a laptop. I don't think I'm going to bring an iMac on the sofa to do that.

It really feels like the iPad is meant for that Apple Pencil and kind of touch interface but can you find Ouija juice and Wui DJ.com that's W oji and Juice as in fruit juice on Twitter at wui spelled the same way.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host St Roz and we have a very special episode this week I actually have developer from wui juu who makes the incredible app farite for iPad canis has joined us this week canace thanks for joining us hello and thanks for inviting me on so canace the first thing I I have to say I just want to thank you personally because you've made one of my fav apps probably ever I've I've mentioned it many times on Apple Insider and other podcasts but I edit three to four podcasts a week and I do it all exclusively in farite on iPad and using frite on iPad with an apple pencil it is just an incredible experience it allows me to edit podcasts incredibly fast so first of all just want to say incredible job and thank you CIS for making farite it's amazing that's very kind of you to say I'm glad to hear you're finding it useful when we put apps out into the world they just kind of go off and live their own life so it's nice to hear that when people are actually using it and sort of hearing the stuff that they make with it oh absolutely and well first let me ask you this so the company's name is wui juu that's right I learned your name for the first time today right before we jumped on but where does that name come from wui juu so before I founded oui juice I used to work in the games industry many years ago I worked at a company with and also an unusual name of monkey foot Productions and while I was there we would be discussing you know new game ideas and uh we'd sort of be starting with sort of the game design the the game play rather than the graphics or the characters of the world and we would sort of know that we would want to do things like a protagonist with some kind of abilities special abilities Powers whatever that might be but we didn't because we hadn't decided what the the the world of the game was yet we didn't know if that would be magic or if it would be uh cybernetic enhancements or kind of more traditional superhero powers or whatever it would be so we would just refer to it as wui it was just the the magic stuff the special abilities whatever it is it's just it's wui we'll sort it out later love it I love it and so that's where that comes from is just it's sort of magic stuff and I guess it comes from the fact that when I was starting out I was inspired by companies like uh delicious monster and their Delicious Library and this is going back quite a ways now you know a good 15 years maybe and how they were doing things like using the webcam to scan the barcodes on books to scan them into your library and we kind of take that for granted now but it was pretty amazing back then sure and so that idea of taking the abilities of the computer or the phone or whatever it was and just adding a little bit of magic to things would be nice I love that I might enter that into my lexicon now just in Daily conversation the wui that's amazing before we jump into all the App Store conversation too again faite is just such an awesome app especially for podcasters what made you want to develop that one specifically what uh did you see a space in the market for something like faite or was it just a personal passion what made you do it so again this goes back to games oddly enough is the um weu Houston make games and may still do so at some point I I like making games um but it's kind of difficult to you know some very competitive space in the app store right I was working with somebody who was producing the music for one of our games and their Studio flooded so they were unable to work but they did have an iPad and that sort of set me to thinking about making iPad apps for producing audio and um we has made a variety of synthesizers and audio edit over the years around that time we brought out an app called Hawai which is more of a wave editor I kind of I compare it to fite sort of by saying if you think about an app like sketch or illustrator or a page layout app like uh oldest page maker back in the day or Quark yeah Quark Express that's the one I was trying to think of that's kind of what ferite is but for audio whereas Hawai is more like um photo shop for audio it's much more about the individual pixels rather than laying out projects only in this case it's the individual samples rather than pixels well hoga was created as a tool for us to be able to make sound effects for our games on the iPad without having to need a a studio mhm and it's been in the app store ever since but we heard from a lot of people trying to make podcasts or audio books or other longer form audio with it which it really wasn't designed for it was much more about intense editing of very short piece of audio for sound effects and so on where you know it might only be a few seconds long but it has many many layers and complex processing to sort of get it to sound just right so they were kind of struggling trying to use a tool designed for that to produce podcasts or you know other longer form audio eventually I got fed up of being able to not having a good answer for them and you know looking at things like Garage Band and sort of seeing that it had quite a limited recording duration and and and to even get yeah that's kind of where it came from is sort of fulfill that need that we were hearing from people about not having a good answer thought it was about time to make one well that's awesome I'm so glad you did so how long have you been publishing apps to the App Store especially paid apps uh since the outset we had an app in the app store on day one when it opened okay what was that uh that was a a remote control for keynote sort of like a a clicker if you like for keynote but it did other things as well you could view your slides and your presenters notes on the phone and you could use it as a sort of almost like a laser pointer you could tap the screen and it would highlight the matching spot up on the big screen if you see what I mean was that available before Apple's first party solution uh yes it was and so we got sherlocked and so that isn't on sale anymore that's interesting that we might come back to that later but I think I might have used that app actually cuz I remember that was something that would have you know it made sense from the outset oh my goodness we have this iPhone device would be great to use it as a remote and uh I remember there being an app early on not from Apple that that gave you that ability so man super interesting so since you've been in it from the beginning obviously the 30% commission rate that Apple has charged developers has been around since the beginning and developers felt you know there's all kinds of different feelings about it we had Paul kaasa from rogba on a couple months ago to discuss his feelings about it so my question to you is when you started obviously you've had apps in there since the beginning did that 30% cut did it make it difficult to kind of get started or to launch apps in the App Store and did you feel like it was a lot for a commission rate from the outset it's sort of hard to say partly because it was a long time ago um um sure sure it depends on how you look at it I mean it's a huge amount compared to credit card processing fees for example right and at the outset the App Store wasn't available in as many countries as it is today but at the same time it was also a lot smaller so on the one hand that meant there were less people but also there weren't as many competitors also because the phone itself was a lot more expensive I think people who had actually splashed out that much to buy an iPhone perhaps more likely to actually then spend a little bit more to make it do things beyond what it did out of the box which wasn't nearly as much as it does out of the box today right so it's such a different landscape now to what it was back then it's hard to make a a direct Apples to Apples comparison so recently I mean the the commission rate you know just changed and we'll get to that change shortly but so in the last few years how did the 30% commission feel to you as a developer the way I look at it is sort of in terms of value for money which is that they're taking this amount and it's a large amount MH as I say it's way more than credit card processing fees and the question is are delivering on that value and it varies sometimes I feel more like they are sometimes I feel more like they aren't um certainly there are times when it's extremely frustrating but there are also times when they come out with some new technology and we think oh that's great an obvious example is Swift which I love Swift not I know not every developer does but it's one of the best things that's happened to us it mixed feelings to say the least yeah mixed feelings is how I would sum it up certainly when you submit a minor update and it gets bounced back for some weird reason and you go are you sure and they go well they don't actually say anything at all but they just accept it silently as though nothing had happened and you're like I guess you weren't sure but you're not going to admit it and you kind of think I'm glad it's published now but imagine if Apple paid 30% of their revenue to one single supplier and that supplier just randomly held them up for two days for no good reason do you think Apple would put up with that no and and that's an interesting point because Apple has to work with some larger vendors such as like Amazon and it came out during the antitrust hearings here in the US that like Amazon Prime video was able to get you know 15% deal with Apple from the outset rather than the 30% that most developers like yourself have no option but to just accept it and so what how did that hit you when you heard or maybe you even knew about these before but knowing that there was kind of this double standard with some you know companies what did that make you feel like as a developer so if I was a competitor with Amazon um I would probably be a lot more annoyed because they would be getting an unfair advantage against me sure I'm not so on one hand I kind of you know it makes no difference directly to me how much Amazon does or doesn't pay on the other hand and it is frustrating because Apple have said oh we treat all developers the same and this kind of says that that's not true and so we know that Amazon can get better rates because of who they are because they are so huge and because they're so strategically important right and we also know that we aren't so that's the frustrating bit is knowing that we aren't in a position to negotiate with apple about anything whether that's about the the cut or whether it's about App Store rules or whatever else it might be a company like Amazon with that with its might can sort of push back on Apple in a way that small Indie developers can't so the announcement that just happened recently was Apple announced the small business program for developers meaning that if you earn less than a million dollars in a calendar year that they will you can apply there's an application process and you can apply to have your commission dropped down to 15% so only 15% gets paid to Apple and now you get 85 tell me just your initial thoughts did you ever think this would happen did you ever think Apple would drop to 15% and how did you feel when you heard about this so Apple did a thing a while back where they made the second year onwards of subscriptions dropped to 15% right so there was sort of that precedent but I was surprised yeah I always thought that if they were going to do something like this it would be more like the subscriptions for where there was some kind of catch maybe catch isn't quite the right word but you know you would have to somehow earn into it in the same way that you had to have at least a year of subscription or something that would trigger it rather than it just being from the outset right and I'm not quite sure what that would be in the case of you know non-subscription purchases but so I was a little surprised that it was as broad as it is uh I expected it to be sort of a much narrower group of people if they were going to do it at all of course I'm I'm glad that they are doing it as as Broly as they are well I just learned just before we jumped on as we jumped on that you're you're a oneman show I mean all the apps that come from wuji juu is is from your hands and so farite it's a oneman show and so what what does this mean for you I mean this is you know a lot of developers were really happy about it when it was announced well we don't know what the details are of application if it I mean I'm hoping it's going to be fairly straightforward and it's just to weed out people trying to do funny business like trying to split up their company into like three companies Each of which is under the limit or whatever it might be so assuming it is straightforward and that sounds great I'm looking forward to it if it turns out there are some weird catches we'll have to see what those are but yeah cuz there's just very little information available at the moment do you think the $1 million threshold is you know I've heard some some ratios and numbers that you know a far far majority of iOS developers and Mac OS developers are under this threshold something like 80 to 90% And so most developers will hopefully be able to apply and get this 15% and it's really just the big guys namely people like epic games and fortnite which is ironic because they were the ones making the biggest noise over the summer but do do you think that $1 million threshold is a good number for this program yeah I think it is um it's funny though CU it's kind of it's not the big guys so much as the medium to big guys because of course if you are Netflix or Amazon you can negotiate a special deal anyway and if you're a tiny developer then you're under the the the limit so it's the ones in between which is kind of odd really when you think about it right but yeah I I think that's that's quite a high threshold to me to a million dollars so I'm not surprised that the vast majority of developers do slide under that given that you apply for this program and you personally you get in and now you know you have down to 15% uh Commission in the App Store do you think that that's a reasonable deal long term that 15% going forward you know for the foreseeable future is a good split between Apple and developers uh it seems a lot more reasonable yeah I think that you know it's still steep compared to credit card terms uh sorry credit card processing fees right given what they do as long as the I think it goes back to what I was saying before about value for money which is the the bit that bothers a lot of developers I suspect is not so much the money but the combination of the money and how they're treated by Apple and so if you're paying 30% of your income to Apple that's a significant amount of money every year you know even if you only hire a single developer at a tech industry salary to be able to support that and all the overheads right that means at a minimum you're paying Apple tens of thousands a year so you kind of want good customer service from a company you're paying tens of thousands to every year right sure so I think that's the angle I would approach that from in terms of the 15% I think it's a a pretty good split you know if they're delivering on that sort of customer service end of thing right because I mean they are doing stuff Beyond just uh providing downloads you know they're taking care of things like like sales taxes in 100 different countries around the world and stuff like that right so it's more than just credit card processing that they're doing right at the same time they often like to say that they're they're bringing the customer to you and I'm not sure that's true I think that the customer is typing things into Google and that's sending them to right us but okay let me ask have you ever been featured or like editors pick apps in the App Store occasionally but uh I don't think it's ever happened in the UK so I don't think I've ever actually seen it I've sort of seen the fact that it has happened pop up on a monitoring site you know there's um sites that track the app store for you know and notify you of events like this but I've never actually seen it and it's usually been in countries that my apps aren't localized for which seems an odd Choice cuz you know fites available in about five different languages and then it gets featured in a country that doesn't speak those languages you know as its primary language so right that's odd um I'm not sure if it helps a huge amount in that situation uh a big feature in America or the UK might make a bigger end so you don't know if you've ever been featured in America I don't know if I have I can't remember off hand okay I mean again it's been 12 years I across that span I think may be in you know how they have different kinds of feature and some of them are a bit Focus feature where they say this is one article about one app and then they have um features that are more like uh a list of apps and it's just an icon and a short description I think it might have been featured in some of those lists I don't think it's been in a fullon you know focal focal point feature so for the most part there's not really been a time when Apple has helped get you a bunch of sales it seems like it doesn't feel like it no right how do you Market how do you try to reach new customers uh we don't really have a marketing budget right it's mostly just word of mouth and sort of trying to be friendly and approachable on Twitter when people have questions and yeah just making an app that people like using and like telling other people that they've been using right for sure so when I had Paul kosas on the show he makes you know rogba makes Audio Apps for the mac and he has the advantage of he can can sell those and you can download them outside of the Mac App Store and he has a majority of his apps not in the app store for your apps obviously on iOS you don't have that ability if you did have the option to allow customers to download and then install or side load the apps onto the iPad like if I wanted to buy ferite directly from your website um maybe you know obviously the the percentage would be less you're not paying Apple the App Store Commission is that something that you would choose to do if it was available I think it would depend on what the alternative was I mean in the case that you described there of selling it directly from the Ouija juice website I probably wouldn't but if it was more like they opened up to alternative app stores it would depend on what the alternative app store was like again that's partly because of dealing with things like sales taxes in hundreds of countries right it's a distraction that I don't want to have to you know spend a lot of time on so um and that gets quite complex because of there's uh there's vat tax laws across Europe and then the UK has left Europe and that makes things even more complex whereas if you have a digital storefront operated by someone else they're liable to you by law they have to handle that I would want to use somebody for that it might not be apple if there was a really good alternative if the only alternative was selling it from your web web site I would probably stick with apple okay interesting so as we round out here Big Sir is out M1 Apple silicon Macs are out I have one of my M1 MacBook Pros right here and very nice you tweeted recently because one of the big features of the M1 Max and Big Sir is that you can straight up download iOS apps iPhone or iPad apps and just run them on an M1 Mac with basically quote unquote No work from the developer it'll just run and the developer just has to choose to put it in the Mac App Store yeah and and you tweeted you're not going to see farite on there just yet because it's just not a good experience so I want don't you to tell us why not you know what was your experience if you tried it directly on one of those M1 Maxs or apple silicon Max and and what are you trying to do you hope to put it on the Mac and will it is it easy or is it actually a lot of work the short answer is yeah it's a lot of work um I've been working on a Mac version of fite on and off because I keep getting pulled off to work on things like adding new iPad features or updated versions of iOS or whatever but on and off for over a year now so it's a lot of work but it's work that makes the app belong on the Mac rather than just being there and in terms of what difference that makes if you've used a remote desktop app on the iPad and tried to control a Mac app using the iPad you know you can do it but it feels weird yes and it's just not right and it's exactly the same the other way around and I think a lot of developers intuitively know this because we often test our apps in the simulator on the Mac which if your listeners don't know it's part of xcode right as its name suggests it simulates an iOS device as a little window on your Mac right and so we've been trying this out for you know a decade or more and know just how weird it is trying to use iOS interfaces with uh A system that isn't designed for it right so it's partly just that in terms of the interface obviously one of the first things I tried last year when Catalyst was first out was just try recompiling it trying it out to see what it was like on a Mac uh using Catalyst and that's basically the experience you get with these kind of um arm MAAC emulating iOS H well at first it didn't work at all but eventually I got it working it's weird because it is just kind of like having a remote desktop into an iPad in a little window on your screen right and so that means that for example you can't just open an audio file from finder because everything is inside this sort of sandbox in a in a single window where what you want to do is just be able to you know drag in an MP3 yeah handling files needs to be completely Rewritten for the Mac version a lot of user face stuff needs to be Rewritten there's lots of stuff like um obviously on the Mac you really want to be using the menu bar a whole lot more the various sort of popups just don't suit the MAC at all it's kind of ironic I did a bunch of work to make panels on the Mac slide down from the top of the screen in the same way that you know sheets do on Mac OS Catalina and earlier only to have apple change the way that the sheets work on big S right so there's stuff like that and then there's in order to make file handling work properly on the Mac so you can just drag files in from anywhere and have them work that means that those need to be handled differently from the way that audio files are handled on iOS but I suspect a large part of the reason that people want to use fite on the Mac isn't just because they prefer the Mac although many may also do that right but also because people want to be able to start a project on the Mac and finish it on the the iPad or vice versa which means that I have to come up with something that works on both and hands off seamlessly between them right this just keeps adding more and more work which is why it's been you know over a year and there isn't a Mac version of forit publicly available yet it sounds complicated it is complicated it is but I hope that it will be worth it when it's done and it feels like an actual Mac App instead of like a weird three levels of indirection inside stuck inside emulated window right well for my last question and this is the reason why I love faite on iPad is because the apple pencil makes editing a podcast specifically for me just an awesome experience and you know there were some rumors that you know as these new M1 Maxs come out everyone says Big Sir it basically looks like it's optimized for touch maybe touchscreen you know screens will be coming do you personally would you like to see a touchscreen Mac maybe one where you can utilize the apple pencil on it so if someone enjoys editing podcast and ferite on their iPad like myself they can basically have the same experience on the Mac what do you think you would would you like touchscreen Max one day I'm not against it but it's not something that I'm personally looking forward to that sounds more negative than I mean it but I'm just saying that uh I'm not sitting here going oh give me the touchscreen Macs I'm very happy using a Mac with uh a mouse and a keyboard and a trackpad and I'm very happy using an iPad with touch and pencil I feel like each of those feels right for their particular environment if Apple do bring out touchcreen Max as well that's great we'll support it but if they don't it's not personally going to be something that I'll miss yeah so we'll have to see yeah and I think I agree because one of my favorite pastimes is once I'm done recording a podcast like we're just about to finish this one I'm going to go sit on my sofa with my iPad Apple pencil and fite and edit it over there and I don't know what Mac would fit as well in that position sitting on a sofa editing I don't imagine a laptop I don't think I'm going to bring an iMac on the sofa to do that it really feels like the iPad is is meant for that apple pencil and kind of touch interface but canace thank you so much for coming on the show talking about your experience um I'm going obviously plug farite a ton more but if there's anything that you would like to point people to from wui juice or from yourself what would you like people to go to follow to see uh you can find Ouija juice and wui dj.com that's W oji and Juice as in fruit juice on Twitter at wui spelled the same way yeah uh thank you uh it's been my pleasure absolutely and so listeners I'll put those links in show notes but interested in podcasting if you podcast if you just want to see an awesome app for podcasting I highly highly recommend faite on iPad I use it every week to edit three to four shows I absolutely love the app and so I'll put put a link directly in show notes to that app for iPad and it's on the iPhone too and I actually use it on both sometimes if I need to record something on the go or even you know plug a little microphone into my iPhone I will use farite to just kind of record it and I can even edit it right there it's just an incredible app so check that out and once again cice thank you so much for coming on the show thank youhello and welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host St Roz and we have a very special episode this week I actually have developer from wui juu who makes the incredible app farite for iPad canis has joined us this week canace thanks for joining us hello and thanks for inviting me on so canace the first thing I I have to say I just want to thank you personally because you've made one of my fav apps probably ever I've I've mentioned it many times on Apple Insider and other podcasts but I edit three to four podcasts a week and I do it all exclusively in farite on iPad and using frite on iPad with an apple pencil it is just an incredible experience it allows me to edit podcasts incredibly fast so first of all just want to say incredible job and thank you CIS for making farite it's amazing that's very kind of you to say I'm glad to hear you're finding it useful when we put apps out into the world they just kind of go off and live their own life so it's nice to hear that when people are actually using it and sort of hearing the stuff that they make with it oh absolutely and well first let me ask you this so the company's name is wui juu that's right I learned your name for the first time today right before we jumped on but where does that name come from wui juu so before I founded oui juice I used to work in the games industry many years ago I worked at a company with and also an unusual name of monkey foot Productions and while I was there we would be discussing you know new game ideas and uh we'd sort of be starting with sort of the game design the the game play rather than the graphics or the characters of the world and we would sort of know that we would want to do things like a protagonist with some kind of abilities special abilities Powers whatever that might be but we didn't because we hadn't decided what the the the world of the game was yet we didn't know if that would be magic or if it would be uh cybernetic enhancements or kind of more traditional superhero powers or whatever it would be so we would just refer to it as wui it was just the the magic stuff the special abilities whatever it is it's just it's wui we'll sort it out later love it I love it and so that's where that comes from is just it's sort of magic stuff and I guess it comes from the fact that when I was starting out I was inspired by companies like uh delicious monster and their Delicious Library and this is going back quite a ways now you know a good 15 years maybe and how they were doing things like using the webcam to scan the barcodes on books to scan them into your library and we kind of take that for granted now but it was pretty amazing back then sure and so that idea of taking the abilities of the computer or the phone or whatever it was and just adding a little bit of magic to things would be nice I love that I might enter that into my lexicon now just in Daily conversation the wui that's amazing before we jump into all the App Store conversation too again faite is just such an awesome app especially for podcasters what made you want to develop that one specifically what uh did you see a space in the market for something like faite or was it just a personal passion what made you do it so again this goes back to games oddly enough is the um weu Houston make games and may still do so at some point I I like making games um but it's kind of difficult to you know some very competitive space in the app store right I was working with somebody who was producing the music for one of our games and their Studio flooded so they were unable to work but they did have an iPad and that sort of set me to thinking about making iPad apps for producing audio and um we has made a variety of synthesizers and audio edit over the years around that time we brought out an app called Hawai which is more of a wave editor I kind of I compare it to fite sort of by saying if you think about an app like sketch or illustrator or a page layout app like uh oldest page maker back in the day or Quark yeah Quark Express that's the one I was trying to think of that's kind of what ferite is but for audio whereas Hawai is more like um photo shop for audio it's much more about the individual pixels rather than laying out projects only in this case it's the individual samples rather than pixels well hoga was created as a tool for us to be able to make sound effects for our games on the iPad without having to need a a studio mhm and it's been in the app store ever since but we heard from a lot of people trying to make podcasts or audio books or other longer form audio with it which it really wasn't designed for it was much more about intense editing of very short piece of audio for sound effects and so on where you know it might only be a few seconds long but it has many many layers and complex processing to sort of get it to sound just right so they were kind of struggling trying to use a tool designed for that to produce podcasts or you know other longer form audio eventually I got fed up of being able to not having a good answer for them and you know looking at things like Garage Band and sort of seeing that it had quite a limited recording duration and and and to even get yeah that's kind of where it came from is sort of fulfill that need that we were hearing from people about not having a good answer thought it was about time to make one well that's awesome I'm so glad you did so how long have you been publishing apps to the App Store especially paid apps uh since the outset we had an app in the app store on day one when it opened okay what was that uh that was a a remote control for keynote sort of like a a clicker if you like for keynote but it did other things as well you could view your slides and your presenters notes on the phone and you could use it as a sort of almost like a laser pointer you could tap the screen and it would highlight the matching spot up on the big screen if you see what I mean was that available before Apple's first party solution uh yes it was and so we got sherlocked and so that isn't on sale anymore that's interesting that we might come back to that later but I think I might have used that app actually cuz I remember that was something that would have you know it made sense from the outset oh my goodness we have this iPhone device would be great to use it as a remote and uh I remember there being an app early on not from Apple that that gave you that ability so man super interesting so since you've been in it from the beginning obviously the 30% commission rate that Apple has charged developers has been around since the beginning and developers felt you know there's all kinds of different feelings about it we had Paul kaasa from rogba on a couple months ago to discuss his feelings about it so my question to you is when you started obviously you've had apps in there since the beginning did that 30% cut did it make it difficult to kind of get started or to launch apps in the App Store and did you feel like it was a lot for a commission rate from the outset it's sort of hard to say partly because it was a long time ago um um sure sure it depends on how you look at it I mean it's a huge amount compared to credit card processing fees for example right and at the outset the App Store wasn't available in as many countries as it is today but at the same time it was also a lot smaller so on the one hand that meant there were less people but also there weren't as many competitors also because the phone itself was a lot more expensive I think people who had actually splashed out that much to buy an iPhone perhaps more likely to actually then spend a little bit more to make it do things beyond what it did out of the box which wasn't nearly as much as it does out of the box today right so it's such a different landscape now to what it was back then it's hard to make a a direct Apples to Apples comparison so recently I mean the the commission rate you know just changed and we'll get to that change shortly but so in the last few years how did the 30% commission feel to you as a developer the way I look at it is sort of in terms of value for money which is that they're taking this amount and it's a large amount MH as I say it's way more than credit card processing fees and the question is are delivering on that value and it varies sometimes I feel more like they are sometimes I feel more like they aren't um certainly there are times when it's extremely frustrating but there are also times when they come out with some new technology and we think oh that's great an obvious example is Swift which I love Swift not I know not every developer does but it's one of the best things that's happened to us it mixed feelings to say the least yeah mixed feelings is how I would sum it up certainly when you submit a minor update and it gets bounced back for some weird reason and you go are you sure and they go well they don't actually say anything at all but they just accept it silently as though nothing had happened and you're like I guess you weren't sure but you're not going to admit it and you kind of think I'm glad it's published now but imagine if Apple paid 30% of their revenue to one single supplier and that supplier just randomly held them up for two days for no good reason do you think Apple would put up with that no and and that's an interesting point because Apple has to work with some larger vendors such as like Amazon and it came out during the antitrust hearings here in the US that like Amazon Prime video was able to get you know 15% deal with Apple from the outset rather than the 30% that most developers like yourself have no option but to just accept it and so what how did that hit you when you heard or maybe you even knew about these before but knowing that there was kind of this double standard with some you know companies what did that make you feel like as a developer so if I was a competitor with Amazon um I would probably be a lot more annoyed because they would be getting an unfair advantage against me sure I'm not so on one hand I kind of you know it makes no difference directly to me how much Amazon does or doesn't pay on the other hand and it is frustrating because Apple have said oh we treat all developers the same and this kind of says that that's not true and so we know that Amazon can get better rates because of who they are because they are so huge and because they're so strategically important right and we also know that we aren't so that's the frustrating bit is knowing that we aren't in a position to negotiate with apple about anything whether that's about the the cut or whether it's about App Store rules or whatever else it might be a company like Amazon with that with its might can sort of push back on Apple in a way that small Indie developers can't so the announcement that just happened recently was Apple announced the small business program for developers meaning that if you earn less than a million dollars in a calendar year that they will you can apply there's an application process and you can apply to have your commission dropped down to 15% so only 15% gets paid to Apple and now you get 85 tell me just your initial thoughts did you ever think this would happen did you ever think Apple would drop to 15% and how did you feel when you heard about this so Apple did a thing a while back where they made the second year onwards of subscriptions dropped to 15% right so there was sort of that precedent but I was surprised yeah I always thought that if they were going to do something like this it would be more like the subscriptions for where there was some kind of catch maybe catch isn't quite the right word but you know you would have to somehow earn into it in the same way that you had to have at least a year of subscription or something that would trigger it rather than it just being from the outset right and I'm not quite sure what that would be in the case of you know non-subscription purchases but so I was a little surprised that it was as broad as it is uh I expected it to be sort of a much narrower group of people if they were going to do it at all of course I'm I'm glad that they are doing it as as Broly as they are well I just learned just before we jumped on as we jumped on that you're you're a oneman show I mean all the apps that come from wuji juu is is from your hands and so farite it's a oneman show and so what what does this mean for you I mean this is you know a lot of developers were really happy about it when it was announced well we don't know what the details are of application if it I mean I'm hoping it's going to be fairly straightforward and it's just to weed out people trying to do funny business like trying to split up their company into like three companies Each of which is under the limit or whatever it might be so assuming it is straightforward and that sounds great I'm looking forward to it if it turns out there are some weird catches we'll have to see what those are but yeah cuz there's just very little information available at the moment do you think the $1 million threshold is you know I've heard some some ratios and numbers that you know a far far majority of iOS developers and Mac OS developers are under this threshold something like 80 to 90% And so most developers will hopefully be able to apply and get this 15% and it's really just the big guys namely people like epic games and fortnite which is ironic because they were the ones making the biggest noise over the summer but do do you think that $1 million threshold is a good number for this program yeah I think it is um it's funny though CU it's kind of it's not the big guys so much as the medium to big guys because of course if you are Netflix or Amazon you can negotiate a special deal anyway and if you're a tiny developer then you're under the the the limit so it's the ones in between which is kind of odd really when you think about it right but yeah I I think that's that's quite a high threshold to me to a million dollars so I'm not surprised that the vast majority of developers do slide under that given that you apply for this program and you personally you get in and now you know you have down to 15% uh Commission in the App Store do you think that that's a reasonable deal long term that 15% going forward you know for the foreseeable future is a good split between Apple and developers uh it seems a lot more reasonable yeah I think that you know it's still steep compared to credit card terms uh sorry credit card processing fees right given what they do as long as the I think it goes back to what I was saying before about value for money which is the the bit that bothers a lot of developers I suspect is not so much the money but the combination of the money and how they're treated by Apple and so if you're paying 30% of your income to Apple that's a significant amount of money every year you know even if you only hire a single developer at a tech industry salary to be able to support that and all the overheads right that means at a minimum you're paying Apple tens of thousands a year so you kind of want good customer service from a company you're paying tens of thousands to every year right sure so I think that's the angle I would approach that from in terms of the 15% I think it's a a pretty good split you know if they're delivering on that sort of customer service end of thing right because I mean they are doing stuff Beyond just uh providing downloads you know they're taking care of things like like sales taxes in 100 different countries around the world and stuff like that right so it's more than just credit card processing that they're doing right at the same time they often like to say that they're they're bringing the customer to you and I'm not sure that's true I think that the customer is typing things into Google and that's sending them to right us but okay let me ask have you ever been featured or like editors pick apps in the App Store occasionally but uh I don't think it's ever happened in the UK so I don't think I've ever actually seen it I've sort of seen the fact that it has happened pop up on a monitoring site you know there's um sites that track the app store for you know and notify you of events like this but I've never actually seen it and it's usually been in countries that my apps aren't localized for which seems an odd Choice cuz you know fites available in about five different languages and then it gets featured in a country that doesn't speak those languages you know as its primary language so right that's odd um I'm not sure if it helps a huge amount in that situation uh a big feature in America or the UK might make a bigger end so you don't know if you've ever been featured in America I don't know if I have I can't remember off hand okay I mean again it's been 12 years I across that span I think may be in you know how they have different kinds of feature and some of them are a bit Focus feature where they say this is one article about one app and then they have um features that are more like uh a list of apps and it's just an icon and a short description I think it might have been featured in some of those lists I don't think it's been in a fullon you know focal focal point feature so for the most part there's not really been a time when Apple has helped get you a bunch of sales it seems like it doesn't feel like it no right how do you Market how do you try to reach new customers uh we don't really have a marketing budget right it's mostly just word of mouth and sort of trying to be friendly and approachable on Twitter when people have questions and yeah just making an app that people like using and like telling other people that they've been using right for sure so when I had Paul kosas on the show he makes you know rogba makes Audio Apps for the mac and he has the advantage of he can can sell those and you can download them outside of the Mac App Store and he has a majority of his apps not in the app store for your apps obviously on iOS you don't have that ability if you did have the option to allow customers to download and then install or side load the apps onto the iPad like if I wanted to buy ferite directly from your website um maybe you know obviously the the percentage would be less you're not paying Apple the App Store Commission is that something that you would choose to do if it was available I think it would depend on what the alternative was I mean in the case that you described there of selling it directly from the Ouija juice website I probably wouldn't but if it was more like they opened up to alternative app stores it would depend on what the alternative app store was like again that's partly because of dealing with things like sales taxes in hundreds of countries right it's a distraction that I don't want to have to you know spend a lot of time on so um and that gets quite complex because of there's uh there's vat tax laws across Europe and then the UK has left Europe and that makes things even more complex whereas if you have a digital storefront operated by someone else they're liable to you by law they have to handle that I would want to use somebody for that it might not be apple if there was a really good alternative if the only alternative was selling it from your web web site I would probably stick with apple okay interesting so as we round out here Big Sir is out M1 Apple silicon Macs are out I have one of my M1 MacBook Pros right here and very nice you tweeted recently because one of the big features of the M1 Max and Big Sir is that you can straight up download iOS apps iPhone or iPad apps and just run them on an M1 Mac with basically quote unquote No work from the developer it'll just run and the developer just has to choose to put it in the Mac App Store yeah and and you tweeted you're not going to see farite on there just yet because it's just not a good experience so I want don't you to tell us why not you know what was your experience if you tried it directly on one of those M1 Maxs or apple silicon Max and and what are you trying to do you hope to put it on the Mac and will it is it easy or is it actually a lot of work the short answer is yeah it's a lot of work um I've been working on a Mac version of fite on and off because I keep getting pulled off to work on things like adding new iPad features or updated versions of iOS or whatever but on and off for over a year now so it's a lot of work but it's work that makes the app belong on the Mac rather than just being there and in terms of what difference that makes if you've used a remote desktop app on the iPad and tried to control a Mac app using the iPad you know you can do it but it feels weird yes and it's just not right and it's exactly the same the other way around and I think a lot of developers intuitively know this because we often test our apps in the simulator on the Mac which if your listeners don't know it's part of xcode right as its name suggests it simulates an iOS device as a little window on your Mac right and so we've been trying this out for you know a decade or more and know just how weird it is trying to use iOS interfaces with uh A system that isn't designed for it right so it's partly just that in terms of the interface obviously one of the first things I tried last year when Catalyst was first out was just try recompiling it trying it out to see what it was like on a Mac uh using Catalyst and that's basically the experience you get with these kind of um arm MAAC emulating iOS H well at first it didn't work at all but eventually I got it working it's weird because it is just kind of like having a remote desktop into an iPad in a little window on your screen right and so that means that for example you can't just open an audio file from finder because everything is inside this sort of sandbox in a in a single window where what you want to do is just be able to you know drag in an MP3 yeah handling files needs to be completely Rewritten for the Mac version a lot of user face stuff needs to be Rewritten there's lots of stuff like um obviously on the Mac you really want to be using the menu bar a whole lot more the various sort of popups just don't suit the MAC at all it's kind of ironic I did a bunch of work to make panels on the Mac slide down from the top of the screen in the same way that you know sheets do on Mac OS Catalina and earlier only to have apple change the way that the sheets work on big S right so there's stuff like that and then there's in order to make file handling work properly on the Mac so you can just drag files in from anywhere and have them work that means that those need to be handled differently from the way that audio files are handled on iOS but I suspect a large part of the reason that people want to use fite on the Mac isn't just because they prefer the Mac although many may also do that right but also because people want to be able to start a project on the Mac and finish it on the the iPad or vice versa which means that I have to come up with something that works on both and hands off seamlessly between them right this just keeps adding more and more work which is why it's been you know over a year and there isn't a Mac version of forit publicly available yet it sounds complicated it is complicated it is but I hope that it will be worth it when it's done and it feels like an actual Mac App instead of like a weird three levels of indirection inside stuck inside emulated window right well for my last question and this is the reason why I love faite on iPad is because the apple pencil makes editing a podcast specifically for me just an awesome experience and you know there were some rumors that you know as these new M1 Maxs come out everyone says Big Sir it basically looks like it's optimized for touch maybe touchscreen you know screens will be coming do you personally would you like to see a touchscreen Mac maybe one where you can utilize the apple pencil on it so if someone enjoys editing podcast and ferite on their iPad like myself they can basically have the same experience on the Mac what do you think you would would you like touchscreen Max one day I'm not against it but it's not something that I'm personally looking forward to that sounds more negative than I mean it but I'm just saying that uh I'm not sitting here going oh give me the touchscreen Macs I'm very happy using a Mac with uh a mouse and a keyboard and a trackpad and I'm very happy using an iPad with touch and pencil I feel like each of those feels right for their particular environment if Apple do bring out touchcreen Max as well that's great we'll support it but if they don't it's not personally going to be something that I'll miss yeah so we'll have to see yeah and I think I agree because one of my favorite pastimes is once I'm done recording a podcast like we're just about to finish this one I'm going to go sit on my sofa with my iPad Apple pencil and fite and edit it over there and I don't know what Mac would fit as well in that position sitting on a sofa editing I don't imagine a laptop I don't think I'm going to bring an iMac on the sofa to do that it really feels like the iPad is is meant for that apple pencil and kind of touch interface but canace thank you so much for coming on the show talking about your experience um I'm going obviously plug farite a ton more but if there's anything that you would like to point people to from wui juice or from yourself what would you like people to go to follow to see uh you can find Ouija juice and wui dj.com that's W oji and Juice as in fruit juice on Twitter at wui spelled the same way yeah uh thank you uh it's been my pleasure absolutely and so listeners I'll put those links in show notes but interested in podcasting if you podcast if you just want to see an awesome app for podcasting I highly highly recommend faite on iPad I use it every week to edit three to four shows I absolutely love the app and so I'll put put a link directly in show notes to that app for iPad and it's on the iPhone too and I actually use it on both sometimes if I need to record something on the go or even you know plug a little microphone into my iPhone I will use farite to just kind of record it and I can even edit it right there it's just an incredible app so check that out and once again cice thank you so much for coming on the show thank you\n"