MobileViews 585: 17 years of this podcast! Free Affinity creative suite. Azure DNS outage. Jon’s Discord bot

In this week's episode, Jon Westfall and I kicked things off by discussing "falling back" for Daylight Saving Time and reminiscing about dealing with dark mornings. We then moved on to some podcast milestones. I realized that MobileViews is about to turn 18, with the first episode dating back to November 26, 2008 . We also noted that Jon's 12th anniversary on the show is coming up in December. This got us talking about the early days of podcasting. I recalled listening to pioneers like Adam Curry (the "Podfather") and Adam Christiansen ("The Mac Cast") , and how I was amazed they could produce so much content solo . We contrasted that with today's landscape, which seems dominated by celebrity-hosted shows, and I made sure to thank Jon, as I'm certain the podcast would have ended years ago without him.

We discussed the recently released free Affinity all-in-one creative suite for MacOS, which both Jon and I had previously purchased, becoming a free all-in-one app on the Mac following its acquisition by Canva. We also chatted about the recent Microsoft Azure outage , which briefly gave me trouble accessing a file on OneDrive , and shared a laugh about how "it's always DNS". On the AI front, I shared a song I generated with Suno AI called "DNS Blues" and we discussed the news of an AI artist, Xenia Monet, debuting on the Billboard charts. Jon shared his own impressive AI project: in about 30 minutes, he used ChatGPT to build a Python-based Discord bot that can serve up Disney trivia, psychology questions, or bad jokes pulled from his 12-year spreadsheet archive.