I'd like to know what others think about other podcasts he's listed (especially, http://www.coreint.org and http://developingperspective.com). I was never a B&A fan, but enjoyed technical episodes of Hypercritical (those about programming languages, time machine, file systems, etc.) immensely (even though they were inaccurate at times, but John would address those in the next episodes and all of us would be wiser). Do you recommend these podcasts, or any other podcasts like those I mentioned from Hypercritical? Thanks.
+1 for Core Intuition and Developing Perspectives. Identical Cousins is a bit of a "meh", to my ears. Haven't listened to any of the others (giving debug and CMD+SPACE a try now).
Haven't listened to any of those, but scanning through the topics they are too iOSy, Mac newsy for me. The echo chamber of Mac news is too big for me right now to add another podcast.
On the other hand, I couldn't say for sure why I was listening to B&A. Maybe because Marco is a person with many hats & interests and the podcast wasn't focused only on Mac news?
Funny to see this, since I just recently thought about unsubscribing from B&A in Downcast. The thought would have never crossed my mind a few months ago, but Marco's right.
Episodes started veering into niche discussions specific to iOS developers (see the episode on in-app vs. iOS-level settings). Occasionally Marco and Dan would discuss the mobile market but their opinions are established after >100 episodes, so we never saw any surprises there. The overall effect, though, was a show that felt "ready."
I'm one of the people that emailed or tweeted at Marco whenever I disagreed with him, but I'll miss this show. B&A started two years ago when I was just wrapping my head around Python, and I really enjoyed hearing people geek out about development (and coffee and cars and...) during a time when I was just realizing that an engineer's life doesn't mean writing some terrible language alone in a cubicle.
Thanks to these guys for the good run. Siracusa will have to fly the geek banner a bit higher now.
Ironically, I actually just started listening to Build and Analyze a few episodes ago, because I was like "wow, this is lots of great details about iOS app development and design!"
started veering into niche discussions specific to iOS developers
These discussions are exactly why I started listening to B&A in the first place.
I didn't really care for endless rehashing about how 'there's no tablet market, only an iPad market' and so on and so forth.
The coffee and cars stuff was interesting as was the specific discussions on being an iOS developer.
Would have been nice to have some more photography discussion as well as I got the feeling that both Dan Benjamin and Marco Arment really geek out on photography.
It seems that with the success of The Magazine there's more than ever to talk about on B&A, but I'm guessing he's wanting to do something closer to what Gruber is doing: rotate authors through as co-hosts every week and have them discuss their articles and the latest Apple news. And I suppose this format is incompatible with the current way the show is structured with Dan.
I definitely understand the feeling that the podcast has become stale. I still enjoy it very much, but topics have had to become more and more specific lately and as such I feel the show runs the risk of losing its "timeless" quality. However, I do hope that Marco considers staying with 5by5 when he does decide what he wants to do next. Mule Radio is great too but I really love the dynamic that Dan brings to all of his podcasts.
Marco's post lists some iOS, Mac (dev & news) podcasts, but I'm not aware of any good "replacement" of John Siracusa's one. While he's not always right--is any of us?--I really enjoy the depth he likes to go into the subjects he picks. So, question is: does anyone know any similar podcasts to Hypercritical?
Pretty much my sole use for Yahoo Pipes these days is filtering out any mentions of "episode" or "podcast" from tech RSS feeds. Why does anyone spend 30+ minutes listening to a) recaps of a previous episode, b) padding and filler, just to get c) the bad delivery of a central idea that takes 4x as long as reading it?
If these things had the production values or compelling continuous narratives of something like This American Life, I could see the point. But every time I listen to one, it's a blog post plus inane comments section, being read out by people with voices for typing. Such a waste of time when there is a sea of quality radio out there.
Some people commute, and find listening to podcasts is a better use of their time than listening to music. Some, like me, gain value from some episodes of some podcasts - for me, B&A wasn't one of them, but the early (1-20) and mid (40-50) episodes of Hypercritical[1] (by John Siracusa) were really educating. I learned a lot from those episodes.
However I don't like it when they talk about next Apple event or iPhone, or endless discussions about app.net/twitter/... and wish Hypercritical was a more technical show (after weeks, the last episode in Intel chips was a bit satisfactory, so I hope they put twitter/iPhone discussions to rest).
I listen to ~ 40 hours of podcasts per week, so I'm probably on the opposite end of the spectrum from you.
If you don't understand the appeal of listening to audio podcasts, I don't think there's anything I could say to convince you otherwise. The experience is exactly how you describe it, so I don't think you're missing anything.
I find myself similarly confused whenever someone posts a link here to some video and there's a raft of comments complaining about how video is so inefficient, and how people should just post everything as transcripts.
While my comment was a bit flip and I'm not saying it was a money based, I do think there may be a bit of truth to it. Arment makes it clear he is still going to podcast, so clearly he thinks that it is the format of Build & Analyze that was growing stale, not his voice/ideas or the medium. If the problem didn't lay in the format, he could easy just make the necessary adjustments within the current podcast and avoid having to rebuild an audience. Considering the format of B&A is essentially the 5by5 standard, I imagine he is going to be jumping ship (in a much less controversial way) and wouldn't be surprised if he emulates Gruber. Or make something called The Podcast and have it be an offshoot of The Magazine.
'Build and Analyze' has not become 'stale and repetitive' in my opinion and I will miss the show. From my own blogging experience, however, I understand that Marco wants to end his successful show on a high note. Being the host of a weekly podcast show is quite a burden and his other projects (in a wider sense, i.e. Instapaper, The Magazine, wife and child etc.) are probably challenging enough. In addition, the show has probably become less important from a marketing perspective. Anyway, thanks a lot to Dan and Marco for many great episodes! :)
I understand his decision though, show was becoming a bit redundant, he did point out a lot of good stuff throughout the way. Less shows for me to watch on 5by5 now, this one and Grubber where the most interesting ones IMO.
Bitey, the fake serial killer? Super-Omar jumping out of the window? "The Dickensian aspect"?
The middle seasons of The Wire were about the city of Baltimore. The first season was an excellent long-form procedural.
By the last season, Simon seems intent on retrofitting a structure of "each season is about one failed institution" --- the police, the working class, then politics, then schools. For the last season, Simon chose the news media, a subject dear to his heart. But whether newspapers just make for boring TV (see _The Newsroom_ for more evidence) or the story arcs from the last seasons just brought too much baggage, the season was unbalanced and disconnected. Each season involved some degree of suspension of disbelief, but by the last season The Wire was trying to do so much that it was impossible to ignore how silly the whole serial killer plot really was.
Actually, Omar jumping out of the window to escape an ambush was something that one of the real-life guys he was based on (Donnie Andrews) actually did. The only thing that was made up about that was in the show they had him jump out of the fourth floor because they felt that people wouldn't believe it if they showed him doing what Donnie actually did - jumping out of a sixth floor window and limping away.
