The Talk Show With John Gruber

Topics include the ongoing World Cup and the sport of soccer, Google Glass, mockups of devices in rumor reports, Amazon's Fire Phone, the New York Times's profile of Tim Cook last week, Apple's growth, and the agonizingly slow death of Blackberry. Lastly, Paul brings up a devilishly tricky question regarding whether Apple will support a particular new addition to the Emoji specification.

Special guest Guy English. Topics center on WWDC 2014, particularly how XPC — interapplication communication — is playing a fundamental but largely behind-the-scenes role in many of the new features for iOS and OS X. The new much-improved WebKit API (which brings third-party apps the faster Nitro JavaScript engine), third-party keyboards, Sharing menu extensions, and Notification Center widgets — all these things are built on XPC. Other topics include Apple TV, Swift, and the apparent happiness not just of third-party developers, but Apple employees, too.

Recorded in front of a live audience of 500 people on Tuesday, 2 June 2014 at Mezzanine in San Francisco. John Gruber is joined by the ATP trio — Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa — to discuss the news from WWDC: OS X 10.10 Yosemite, iOS 8, Swift, and more. Then, Scott Simpson joins the show to discuss theme songs and the future of higher education. No nudity or violence, but the second half of the show does have some explicit language.

Special guest Dan Frommer. Topics include Dan’s new gig as senior tech editor at Quartz, tablets as a form factor for full-featured PCs (and the now-aging design of the MacBook Air), WWDC rumors, the rumored iOS-style redesign of Mac OS X, previous Mac OS visual designs, and more — including ticket information for next week’s live WWDC show in San Francisco.

Special guest John Moltz joins the show for a discussion regarding Apple's still-only-rumored acquisition of Beats, WWDC rumors, the ringer switch on the iPhone, the ZTE Open C Firefox OS phone (spoiler: it's a turd), and the transition of The Talk Show from Mule Radio to its new home here at Daring Fireball.