# #06: Sanitize It

**Source:** Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2019-07-12  
**Duration:** 45m 28s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://pod.pinballmap.com/2019/07/11/06-sanitize-it/

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## Analysis

Scott and Ryan discuss the Pinball Map app's 5.0.0 release (14 months of development with React Native), a major redesign that eliminates regional switching and improves responsiveness. They cover infrastructure upgrades funded by Patreon, collaboration with developer Beth who landed a new job at Walmart Labs, merchandise (stickers and hand sanitizer branded with the Pinball Map logo), and statistics showing 6,529 locations and 22,065 machines in the database.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Pinball Map app version 5.0.0 took 14 months of development from scratch using React Native — _Scott and Ryan discussing the app release on their podcast_
- [HIGH] The app is now regionless with one seamless map instead of requiring users to switch regions — _Scott describing app features_
- [HIGH] Beth, the lead developer, was recruited to a new job at Walmart Labs (via consulting agency) because of her visible React Native work on the Pinball Map repo — _Beth's direct statement in podcast interview_
- [HIGH] The Pinball Map database contains 6,529 locations with 22,065 pinball machines — _Statistics stated by Scott during 'Statistics' segment_
- [MEDIUM] Mapbox directly addressed and fixed their pricing complaints made on the podcast by restructuring their pricing to match Google Maps — _Scott's claim that Mapbox responded to podcast feedback and reduced prices_
- [HIGH] The podcast sent out 7,725 emails announcing the app release and got 600+ views on the demo video — _Statistics provided by Ryan_
- [HIGH] The app infrastructure was upgraded from 512MB to 1GB RAM using Patreon funding — _Scott discussing server resource decisions_
- [MEDIUM] A couple hundred new locations have been added since the app release — _Ryan's estimate without firm tracking_

### Notable Quotes

> "This is purely manufactured. This is a script at this point, although I did change some of the stats that we'll go over."
> — **Scott or Ryan**, Opening segment
> _Meta-commentary on recording difficulties; shows the podcast had to re-record the episode three times_

> "The repo that Scott so appropriately named PBM React Native, screams React Native in the title, so it's pretty easy for recruiters to find."
> — **Beth**, Beth's interview segment
> _Explains how open-source work directly led to her new job opportunity_

> "I mean this is just two people after hours, like after work, when they can find time on weekends, building something over the course of a year."
> — **Ryan**, Discussion of app development
> _Celebrates the open-source effort and personal sacrifice of contributors_

> "I would like it so I could just see pinball machines, not red dots where pinballs are."
> — **Clark (4-year-old)**, App review segment
> _User feedback suggesting dynamic machine markers instead of static red dots_

> "You see like smaller websites everywhere have weird developer versions of the maps or the maps just don't work at all."
> — **Ryan**, Discussion of Google Maps pricing impact
> _References earlier podcast coverage of Google Maps API pricing changes affecting web developers_

> "We bought our way out of trouble with the enhanced usage and new footprint of usage."
> — **Scott**, Infrastructure discussion
> _Describes pragmatic approach to handling increased load by upgrading server resources_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Pinball Map | product | A website and mobile app that catalogs pinball machine locations worldwide; version 5.0.0 released in June with major redesign |
| Scott | person | Co-host of 'Mappin' Around' podcast; works on Pinball Map infrastructure and design |
| Ryan | person | Co-host of 'Mappin' Around' podcast; runs Pinball Map location submissions and community engagement |
| Beth | person | Lead React Native developer for Pinball Map 5.0.0 redesign; recently hired by Walmart Labs consulting agency for React Native role |
| NES Jumpman | person | Pinball Map Patreon supporter and personal friend of Scott; created stickers for Pinball Map hand sanitizer branded merchandise |
| Clark | person | 4-year-old child who provided user feedback on Pinball Map app design |
| Mapbox | company | Map tile provider; restructured pricing and reduced costs after podcast criticism |
| Google Maps | product | Map API service; podcasters discussed pricing policy changes and worked around it using free app tile layer |
| React Native | product | Cross-platform mobile development framework used to build Pinball Map 5.0.0 |
| Heroku | company | Cloud platform hosting Pinball Map infrastructure; podcasters upgraded from free tier and increased RAM allocation |
| AWS | company | Cloud services provider; Scott now works at AWS and exploring migrating Pinball Map infrastructure from Heroku |
| Walmart Labs | company | Company that hired Beth through a consulting agency for React Native development role |
| Hugo | product | Static site generator (Go language) used to re-host Pinball Map blog on friend Elijah's server |
| Patreon | product | Crowdfunding platform; Pinball Map has 48 supporters whose monthly donations fund server upgrades |
| Elijah | person | Friend who provides server hosting for Pinball Map blog (powered by Hugo) |
| PHP List | product | Free and open-source mailing list service used by Pinball Map for email campaigns |
| Slim's Cocktail Bar and Restaurant | venue | Example location listed in Pinball Map database where machines are available |
| Fixin' 2 | venue | Example location listed in Pinball Map database where machines are available |
| Forest Park | location | Geographic area shown in Pinball Map app walkthrough demo |
| Willamette River | location | River shown on Pinball Map app; mentioned in context of Portland, Oregon location where Ryan works |

### Signals

- **[product_launch]** Pinball Map 5.0.0 released after 14 months of development with complete redesign, migration to React Native, and removal of regional switching (confidence: high) — Scott and Ryan discuss release timeline, development effort, and architectural changes. App uses React Native for unified iOS/Android codebase.
- **[content_signal]** Podcast credited with breaking news about Google Maps API pricing policy changes affecting web developers (confidence: high) — Ryan: 'this podcast is famous across the entire world for having broken the fact that Google Maps' new price policy is going to have a huge impact on the internet as we know it'
- **[personnel_signal]** Beth, Pinball Map's lead React Native developer, hired by Walmart Labs for React Native role after visibility from open-source contribution (confidence: high) — Beth: 'I'm nearly certain that this app is what landed me this job...it came to the attention of the consulting agency that I'm going through at this point with Walmart Labs'
- **[technology_signal]** Scott working at AWS and exploring migration of Pinball Map infrastructure from Heroku to AWS for additional flexibility (confidence: medium) — Scott: 'I think the next generation of all this stuff is going to be purely on AWS just to get additional flexibility, plus I work there now'
- **[market_signal]** Mapbox restructured pricing and reduced costs in response to podcast criticism, making pricing table match Google Maps approach (confidence: medium) — Scott: 'they basically addressed everything we complained about...they changed their pricing scheme to match the Google Maps one. They actually reduced the price so it's cheaper now'
- **[community_signal]** Pinball Map now lists 6,529 locations with 22,065 machines; couple hundred new locations added since app release, especially from Canada and Europe (confidence: high) — Statistics: '6,529 locations with pinball machines. And at those locations there's 22,065 machines.' Ryan notes regional expansion enabled by regionless app design.
- **[business_signal]** 48 Patreon supporters funding infrastructure upgrades; $500 additional monthly RAM upgrade enabled by community funding (confidence: high) — Scott: 'We have a Patreon and 48 generous backers donating every month to us...We've used the generous Patreon money to double our RAM'
- **[design_innovation]** New app uses unified cross-platform codebase instead of separate iOS/Android designs; map-first interface instead of text-based navigation (confidence: high) — Ryan: 'The last one was good, it was very functional, but it was ultimately just a bunch of text that you touch...This is a big, gorgeous map that you can get some text context'
- **[manufacturing_signal]** Branded merchandise in development: reflective silver stickers and hand sanitizer bottles with Pinball Map logo stickers (confidence: medium) — NES Jumpman created stickers for hand sanitizer bottles. Scott designed sticker graphics with reflective silver dots. Merchandise planned for Patreon supporters.
- **[content_signal]** App announcement email sent to 7,725 users generated 600+ views on walkthrough video; strong engagement indicating community interest (confidence: high) — Scott: 'In that email was a link to a YouTube video I made doing like a walkthrough of the app...the stat is that there's over 600 views of that video'
- **[regulatory_signal]** Pinball Map navigated around Google Maps API pricing constraints by using app map tiles layer which has zero cost (confidence: high) — Scott: 'the fact that their map tiles are totally free as long as they're through an app...the price column all says zero...surprise, the app doesn't care'
- **[supply_chain_signal]** App infrastructure upgraded from 512MB to 1024MB RAM on Heroku to handle increased traffic from 5.0.0 release (confidence: high) — Scott: 'we were running on...512 megs of RAM. With a Ruby app...we've doubled that' using Patreon funding

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## Transcript

 Hi Scott. Hi Ryan, how do you do? Good. How do you do? Uh, pretty good. Pretty good. Alright, anyway, I was just being polite. Um, the, I can't see you, right? I hope not. I mean, I don't have a piece of electrical tape over my webcam, but I'm trying to fix that. Anyway. I don't have one over mine right now either, because it was like gooping up my camera. So yeah, I'll state it then. I cannot see you. And as some people might know or not know, that we're in different cities as we record this. Portland, Oregon. Los Angeles, California. And so sometimes we have some technical troubles recording these because of a host of different issues. And this is actually basically the third time we've recorded this episode. So we're gonna, we're gonna be great at it then since we've done this so many times. We're gonna be really efficient We're just going to get the job done just in case it screws up again. And we... Another thing to keep in mind is because this is the third time we've done it, we've said essentially everything we're about to say to each other two times already. So any spontaneity or any of that stuff is purely manufactured. Purely manufactured. This is a script at this point, although I did change some of the stats that we'll go over. Oh, good. Okay. That just wouldn't make sense to have you pretend to guess stats. Here we go. What's new today? A couple things. Let's start with the website and then we'll get into the big news. One, I redesigned the homepage of the website, which is not that big of a deal, but there it is. It's a little bit of a redesign. I think it's a big deal. It looks great. I mean, you know, some people have full-time jobs doing stuff like that, and you just did it on a lark. Yeah, I did do it on a lark. And I use more Flexbox. If any CSS people out here, Flexbox is kind of a cool thing. It makes it easy to make little containers and columns and stuff. Oh, another little news is that we... This is news from today, actually. After we released the app, the blog that we have got too many hits and we're on like a Heroku free tier and it got taken down. We used up our allotment for the month. So we decided to re-host it and today we just re-hosted it and I redesigned it while we're doing that. Did you know that, Scott? I knew that. I knew that. I thought there was a little extra bit to the story. Like, it looks similar to another blog, maybe? No. You don't have to name names. No, that was the podcast blog. Oh, right. I happened to be adding a location and it was for an arcade somewhere and it used the same WordPress theme that we use on our podcast. So, that was another thing I just... but that's easy. Top viewer just questions each other. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I did not know that. And I did hear about the blog getting taken down from a lot of people looking at it. Yeah. Hey, man, I gotta speak my mind. I'm sorry. Okay. I mean, you know, maybe subscribe to it with whatever news feeder you have. Then you'll know right away when it's updated. And we don't have to throttle you. Yeah. How about that? How about that? How about that, people that I'd like to look at the blog? Do some work. Yeah, do some work. Set up some automated processes to regularly check up on it. The new blog is hosted on our friend Elijah's server. It's powered by Hugo, which is like a Go language blogging platform for static websites. And I believe was Hurley's real name on the TV show Lost. Indeed it was. Next item is we released the version 5.0.0. Of the Pinball Map app. And that came out I think on the 19th or so of June, something like that. And that's a huge update. Let's talk about it for a couple minutes. It took us 14 months of development. We started from scratch. The development was led by Beth, who's been on the podcast a number of times at this point. And I designed it and Scott did that. The API work, it uses React Native. It's like a whole brand redesign, complete redesign, complete rewrite. It's a lot faster. It has no regions that the users can see. So it's just one big map and they don't have to figure out what region they're in and switch to that region and wait for that to load. It's all just one big seamless map. Represents a big change. We're really happy with it. Let's see, we had a lot of beta testing, 40 people beta tested it. These included our Patreon supporters and our administrators. That was really cool. We did that for about a month and a half. They not only caught some bugs, they also told us how they use the app because we use them in big urban areas, LA and Portland where there's machines all over the place, but somebody I think this is cool because it looks like I think it looks like a real app. The last one was good, it was very functional, but it was ultimately just a bunch of text that you touch and then if you touch a few extra buttons you'd see something on a map. This is a big, gorgeous map that you can get some text context as a secondary operation. I think it looks like new apps look from what I can tell. Yeah, I agree with that. So I think it's a big improvement. And our last app had two totally different designs. The iOS app and the Android app looked different and had different functionality, which was not cool and just kind of a hassle to develop. Now that we have one code base and one design, it makes things a lot more streamlined and easy. The main developer of this app, Beth, react native expert, pinball enthusiast, friend who we chat with every day, basically. She has been on the show a few times and she is back on the show talking about her experience developing this app. Take it away, all of us. Anyway, sorry Beth, there were new things in your life? Yeah, I have a new job. I started on Monday. And you're working on React Native, the same tooling that brought us all the new Pinball Map application? Yeah, actually I'm nearly certain that this app is what landed me this job. The repo that Scott so appropriately named PBM React Native, screams React Native in the title, so it's pretty easy for recruiters to find. It was such an active repository with stuff going on that it came to the attention of the consulting agency that I'm going through at this point with Walmart Labs. And that's before the app was even out, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. What a, um, like, uh, great story? I don't know how, what words to use here. The first word that comes to mind is proud and then happy. But like, what a, what a cool open source story, you know? You don't, a lot of people are way too busy and understandably way too busy to go home from their job and work on something that isn't their job on the computer. But Beth has done that and because of that now has a super cool new job. Like that's how it should be. You're right I think. Yeah. Right? This is a very low key celebration of what's just occurred. I think we're still doing what's new in our live section and we got ahead of ourselves. Sure, sure. But I do, I do, and I don't want to get too heavy here, but I do want to call out for those people who are listening that have not made a phone app before. I mean this is just two people after hours, like after work, when they can find time on weekends, building something over the course of a year. And that isn't like, I mean, Ryan and Beth were continuously contributing code here. And you can actually go look at all of that work right now. I mean that's kind of cool. It's like, uh, like you've painted a beautiful portrait. And every brush stroke is replayable and yeah you can see what's underneath. I think that's kind of cool. I am once again feeling weird to use this word but proud of both of you for what you have accomplished in this short period of time. When we released the update, we got a lot of activity, you know, people, a lot more people using the map, a lot of different types of requests like geocoding requests. And in the past episodes of this podcast Scott has talked in detail about staying under like our memory usage in on our Heroku tier using these like n plus one Enhancements not enhancements Uh what the term efficiencies I don know We removed n plus one queries We removed them, but I like this there Well, sorry, they were looking things up hundreds more times than we needed them to look things up Yeah, well what ended up happening was now that we had a different bunch of requirements We started going over our memory usage and Scott do you want to talk about how we resolved those issues this time? Sure, we used a time-honored tradition wherein software is not running at peak efficiency so in order to help software run at peak efficiency you open up your wallet, take out a credit card, I feel bad saying it and any DevOps person will feel a familiar tinge of, I don't know, I guess it depends on what kind of DevOps person you are. I wanted to say frustration or anger, maybe resentment. You know, we were running on, was it 256 megs? No. 512. 512. 512 megs of RAM. With a Ruby app. With a Ruby app. Yeah. Yeah, which is, that's a Ruby on Rails app, which is expensive to run. So we've doubled that. We've used the generous Patreon money to double our RAM and do something interesting with To be honest with you, the Hirokoos stuff is super cool and very easy to use. I think the next generation of all this stuff is going to be purely on AWS just to get additional flexibility, plus I work there now so I feel like … You seem to know more about that now since you've worked there. Yeah, my abilities on the ecosphere have increased and I would like to explore that some more. We bought our way out of trouble with the enhanced usage and new footprint of usage. Like the app touches different parts of the system now. And those are kind of expensive to run. Yeah, so on that note, let's thank our patrons because we wouldn't have been able to upgrade without them. We have a Patreon and 48 generous backers donating every month to us. We're putting that money to good use. I think the server is really speedy right now and we're totally in the clear memory-wise and I hope the users recognize this and see that it's pretty fast. So on that note, let's thank our Patreon backers, all the new ones since the last time we thanked You don't have the list anymore. No, I don't have the list. Sorry. I'd love to do the names, but I don't have the list. Well, what if I said the name for you to say? Does that work? No. Okay, that doesn't work. Can I... how about this? I'm gonna say five names. Okay. And if those five names are on the list, you check them off? Okay. First names only. Go ahead. Do it. You got it. Thank you, Mike. Thank you Matt! Thank you Brian! Yes, yes, there's a Matt in front. Thanks John! Maybe, maybe you should just do the real names, or else it's not fair. That was close though. Yeah, I mean, come on. Thank you Robert, Matthew, Oyvind, Adam, Mark, Gene, Kenna, Rob, Jake, Thank you, Tired Old Dog. Thank you, Ben. Jacob. Thanks Bob. Thanks Les. Thank you Spencer, and Rich, and Rodney, and Landon, and thank you NES Jumpman. Thanks Brian and Derek. Thanks Chris and Nate. Thanks Jason and Christopher. Thanks Ronald and Christian. Thank you Jared and thank you Bill. Thanks everyone. Scott, I consider you a man of ideas. Oh wow. Yeah. Lots of times you come up with good ideas, you know, sometimes you just throw them out there for other people to take advantage of and this is actually a case where that happened. You had an idea a few episodes ago where you mentioned that we should make pinball map Hand sanitizers. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it was, I don't know, maybe you should take it away. We, yeah. Well, sure. I'll talk on that for a minute if you don't mind. I don't. Yeah, you know, everyone's got ideas. Sometimes you hear someone else's idea and you think, hey, that's a good idea. We had that experience and it's a guy that I know personally who has had many great ideas over the years and he heard it on the podcast. He thought this is something that should happen. I'm going to help make this happen. So NES Jumpman, previously mentioned Pinball Mat Patreon, a personal friend of mine, we went to computer school together. He taught me everything I know about recursion, which isn't much, but he taught it to me. And he already thought, hey, this should happen. So what he did, which I think is pretty amazing, he took our classic pinball map logo, the decorative purple one, and printed out, I don't know, what is it, like a hundred, couple hundred? Yeah, a nice little stack. It's a nice stack. Anyway, he printed out hundreds of these little tiny, what, like one and a half inch by an inch, half inch? At most. Anyway, it's a great size and they're just big enough to fit on a hand sanitizer bottle. So now we have the means, if we can get some blank hand sanitizers to brand them with a sticker and I don't know, what, give them to people with gross hands? Give them to, I don't know who. Yeah, anytime you see someone with gross hands, you just hand them one. Yeah, here you go, friend. Here you go, new friend. Um, the thing he did with the stickers that I thought was even more clever, if you notice, half of them have the logo printed horizontally, the other half have the logo printed vertically. So they can be stuck in two different ways. Yeah, it's brilliant. And he gave us each a prototype. So we have one working one. So yeah, I was thinking we'd, we'd, I definitely want to make some. This is like a, I don't think I would have made them otherwise. It was a great idea, but it just simmered there. And now that we have the stickers, it's, you know, one more step and we're done. Yeah, that's what this guy does. He makes things happen. So thanks NES Jump Man. Yeah, thank you. That was awesome. You know, there's something else about the app that I think we forgot to talk about, which I find kind of interesting. What's that? So, this podcast is famous across the entire world for having broken the fact that Google Maps' new price Ryan Policky is going to have a huge impact on the internet as we know it. Yeah. Right? I don't think people were really considering that before we got on the microphones and talked about it, but now it has come true. So, what has come true? You see like smaller websites everywhere have weird developer versions of the maps or the maps just don't work at all. When we loaded up the new app, we ran into some map issues as well and we were able to get out of those using a kind of weird arrangement that Google has. At least I find it weird. Do you find that weird? Yeah, the fact that their map tiles are totally free as long as they're through an app. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like that's worth calling out to people who aren't, you know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is another topic we've talked about a lot is that the pricing pages on any of these map tile providers are really unclear. They're not just, they're not made for average people that are hopping in and making a map here and there. And the pricing page, there is a price. They list a price for different amounts of usage of their map tiles through an app. And on those different amounts of usage, you know, 500,000 views, a million views, etc., the price is zero listed for each one of those. So they went through the trouble of making a table showing these different tiers of usage, Yeti), John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Kanyo Klyce, Beto's Pinball Podcast, Kanyo Klyce, Beto's Pinball Podcast, Kanyo Klyce, Beto's Pinball Podcast, This is a production of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, LLC. Thanks for watching Interesting little because we spent so much time on the podcast talking about having to get on our own map server Yeah Surprise the app doesn care Yeah it doesn care on the app which is great It totally saved us actually. But this is, I'm going to all jam through this, but this is on that note. In a previous episode, we talked about in our, in our process of finding a good solution that wasn't Google Maps, we used one service called Mapbox. We found that we didn't like it because that was also expensive. We didn't realize beforehand it was expensive because their pricing table used a different metric for measuring what a map view was. They would tout themselves as a good option if you're transitioning out of Google Maps, use Mapbox, here's our pricing. Fun fact, Wally would like to give us ayes to be block expectations because she doesn't happen to have been block commentator on all her podcasts. hecho minagado How about proverbs? They almost just like did everything we said. Everything we complained about they addressed basically. And they changed their pricing scheme to match the Google Maps one. They actually reduced the price so it's cheaper now. Yeah, kind of interesting. I was pretty fascinated by that. The new pricing scheme they came out with, they tried to make it more like a one-to-one comparison. And it really did seem like they took our feedback Yeah, because we did give them feedback directly also, not just through the podcast. Maybe they should give us a box of 200 hand sanitizer bottles with hand sanitizer sanitizer in it and donuts every Friday. They should give us that. It just seems like they're listening to everything else. I thought I would stretch. That's my stretch goal. Uh, let's, you know, we've talked a lot about using the app. So now let's hear a review of the app by our youngest Pinball Map app user, Clark. What's your name? Clark. Clark. And how old are you? Four. Four. Do you use the new Pinball Map app? Yeah. Okay. So what I need you to do is press this little picture of a pinball. What do you see? Uh, words and a pinball on the top. Okay. That's right, it says Pinball Map and it's loading right now. Okay, what's loading? Uh, this picture behind it is loading. I got a fresh install of it and it appears to be kind of frozen right now. There we go. Oh, there we go. We're in. Okay, so what do you see now? Now I see letters and a big square and two different colors. Okay, yeah. What do you think about the colors? Do you like the colors? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Don't you remember blue is my favorite color and there's a blue one. Yeah, very good. All right, well, let's for this, let's just skip logging in a password. Can you click, touch the little thing that says skip this? There you go. Now wait, wait, before you just say it, your instinct here was to say allow. You were going to hit that button? I was. That's what you want to do? All right, it's popped up asking him if he wants to allow location services while we're using the app. I see a bunch of dots and a map. That's right, so this is the pinball map. Do you see that blue dot? That's where we are. That's our house. And do you see those red dots? Do you know what those are? Those are other locations where we scented them. I was saying that. Oh sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. I was saying where other people live and pinballs are in where other people live, silly. Oh so you think this is a map of pinball machines in people's houses? Yeah. Okay. Well some people have tried to send us that information. We've declined it. Alright, well what else do you see on here? Well, let me ask you another question. So you see where your house is, you see all these red dots where pinball machines are. How does that make you feel? It makes me feel sad because I want to live there. You want to live where the red dots are? Yeah. In such luminary places like Slim's Cocktail Bar and Restaurant and the Fixin' 2? Yeah. Okay. Oh, let's see, now you're touching the dots. What do you see when you touch the dots? Words. Words, yeah. There's a lot of words in a map. I guess you've kind of cut to the heart of the matter. Oh! You've just discovered the slide to the right tray. Try that again. Oh, now you're going left. What else do you see on the screen here that's interesting to you? Hmm, I see a tree. Well, yeah, now you're over in Forest Park. Let's head back to St. John's. What about these pictures on the bottom? Any of those jump out to you? Yeah, that looks like a river. Yeah. It's all blue. That's right. You're right. That's the Willamette River. That's what mom is cleaning up, right? Yeah. Okay. What about the words on the screen? Like this picture down here, what does that look like to you? It looks like a person head and a heart and a spyglass and some paper and dots. That's right, you nailed it. Now if I click this one up here that says filter, there's a lot of words on this one, right? Yep. But now if I press that one, it goes back. Whoa, you know how to use the back button, very good. What about the one in the upper left? What does that do? List, oh. What does all this mean? Not sure. Not sure what that means. Okay. Not sure what this means. Well this one, you see, you hit filter and now if I hit this button it lets me pick a different machine. Like which one do you want? Which machine would you prefer to be playing? Uh, oh no. Whew, you almost clicked Aerosmith. Uh, good job, Agent 777. Let's go back. Oh, you filtered by location and, I'm sorry, you filtered by machine. durant Midway gave some thought to the idea to find a way to play suits in the drama industry. We're like right at that, this tree over here, not trying to bat a tree. So give me, can you summarize your thoughts on what you're seeing here? Like do you like the application? I do. So can you do that now with what I just said? Oh you just, you want to hear yourself talking already? Yeah. Well I mean is there anything else you'd like to share about what you've seen? Anything that you think could be improved? Just turn that on because I really want that. Well, sure, I mean we can hear ourselves in a second. But before we're done, I'm just, it's important to get good constructive feedback on these sort of things. So I'm wondering, as a four year old, is there anything about the, about the experience, the user experience that you think could be improved? Yeah. Like would you, any features that you think are missing? Anything you'd like it to do? I would like it so I could just see pinball machines, not red dots where pinball are. Whoa, did you just say that rather than just red dots you'd like some visualization of what machines are at the locations? Like maybe a little picture of one of the machines there? Clark, I don't know that we've ever gotten feedback like that. That's great feedback. dynamic uh... markers that show what the machines are genius okay thanks buddy anything else you want to say to everybody uh... I love you okay thanks bye that's my son thank you clark That was actually, let's talk about Clark and his feedback. That was, uh, that was really a neat idea he had about the red dots. Those are some red dots that I designed. I don't mind that he doesn't love them, but we could have some sort of other like dynamic image in there, right? Yeah, I mean I think from and I don't want to speak for you and Beth I'm speculating but I'm guessing from a code standpoint it's not super hard to have those be dynamic based on like the first machine that's there or something but what I think would be hard would be to have an image that you can actually see you know what I mean like yeah the dots are so small what are you gonna have a tiny little Adams family thing you're not gonna be able to tell what it is yeah I don't know. We could do a prototype in dev. God, I'm criticizing my son's ideas. He's four years old. This is like a new low for me. Now it's time for some statistics. Statistics! Alright, we always like to start with like our overview. We are, the map is listing 6,529 locations with pinball machines. And at those locations there's 22,065 machines. At my new job, there was a meeting where I had to introduce myself to the whole team and blah blah blah. And I said, you know, I said all my work history and I said, and you know, I help run a website that's kind of the site of record for pinball machines. There like you know thousands of locations and tens of thousands of machines listed I So we sent out an email to 7725 people that said hey we put out a new app Scott would Would you guess how many of those people had, and these are all our users, mind you, how many of those users had typed in their email incorrectly? And I'm talking about like the at part, so it would be like at gmail.con. Got it. How many of those? Yeah. What's the user count again? 7,000 what? 7,725. 7,725. And you have to confirm your account before you can use your account, right? Yeah, so these are people that obviously failed to confirm their account. They're just in our system as users that failed. I didn't check to see. Got it. Got it. Okay, okay. I'm just trying to think of like, I'm trying to eliminate active users. Seven, I'm in 25. How many people typoed their email and then presumably got it right the second time or I'm gonna say I'm gonna go pretty high I think I'm gonna say 130 mm-hmm too high too high too high but okay I'm glad to hear that is it 25 15 15 yeah okay all right good I'm glad yeah yeah it's not too bad and I should probably and I did go in and fix all their stuff so wait you fixed it yeah I just I just go in and you know cuz the the the typos they make are really obvious So I just go into our user system, change the N to an M, and then I resend them a confirmation message. Okay. You know, it might not always turn into anything, but if they get that message, they might be like, oh yeah, I remember signing up for this and not getting a confirmation message. If you're one of the 15 and you're hearing this podcast, get in touch. Let us know what your experience was like. You were sitting at home and all of a sudden you got an email from the website that you tried to get into. This is an official list now. It's not just reading directly from the database every time an email goes out? Uh, yeah, I exported it. I exported the users on a certain date, imported into PHP list, which is a free and open source mailing list service that I installed. Okay, I gotta go. I'm hoping that this is around 25. I'll stick with 25. Yeah, 22. 22, okay, good. I know, I was expecting a couple hundred, honestly. Yeah, I just feel like we're a pretty innocuous site, right? Like, we never try to sell anything. Except ourselves. So, what do you, you kind of want to hear from us, right? If you're using it? I'm projecting. Yeah, I think, and I, it's the only mass email we've ever sent out in 10 years, and so I think people probably look at this and it's like, hey, this is, this is actually cool news. They're not just wasting our time. Right. Well, that's good. In that email was a link to a YouTube video I made doing like a walkthrough of the app, a demo. The stat is that there's over 600 views of that video. I mean are you- I love these videos. I never get tired of the videos because I can just picture you in your kitchen whispering into your microphone doing the walkthrough for the video with like Loving care. I don't think people realize how much you care and like put effort into these things. I appreciate it is what I'm trying to say. That's cool that that came through. Now that the app is regionless and you can see locations anywhere in regions or out of regions, we've been getting a lot more submissions for locations, new locations. So I don't have like a firm stat here because I kind of lost that narrative there. I was keeping track but I lost it. But there's been a couple hundred new locations added since the app came out. A lot in Canada, Europe, and various places. That's great. I mean that was kind of the hope all along, right? With the region list thing is now you don't have to have a region to put it in. We don't have to make like an entire state just so you can put two pinball machines in. Yeah. Submit them and they get added and it's crazy there's just so many places out there with pinball machines they never they never stop coming the submissions are like at least three-quarters of the content of my email are people submitting things well yeah don't ever stop don't ever stop don't you ever stop don't ever stop other news stickers we made stickers I have a sticker on my car they're good They're good stickers. I believe that they're light reflective. Yeah. I made a graphic where it says pinball map with the letters spelled out in the dots. And the dots are silver in the stickers. It's like reflective silver. It's really cool. Nice. Those sound like they'd be really smart to put on a bicycle. Yep. On your helmet, on your bar, and they're small. They're like, I don't know, four and a half inches wide by three quarters of an inch tall. Good footprint. Yeah. Put them on your water bottle. Yeah? Yeah. And then throw your water bottle in front of a car to see the light shine through it? Yeah, it'd be amazing. Like it would be reflecting everywhere as the water bottle spins around. It'd be cool So we'll probably we'll put those up. We'll put up stickers and eventually hand sanitizers on the website and Well, I also want to give those away to our patreon supporters as a token of our appreciation Don't you want to do that too? I would like I wouldn't mind doing that. Yeah, I just we got to get those together Yeah, get them out there. Yeah, well at least can you imagine like the scene with the like The proud person showing up at a weekly at some bar and like pulling out this pinball map hand sanitizer and like dramatically squeezing into their hands and sanitizing those hands. Yeah, and then maybe standing and holding it up and being like, anybody want some? And then like 10 people flock over and that person is just a savior just gooping it out on the other hand. Yeah. The entire tournament walks out of that bar without exchanging cold germs to each other. Just once, like the first weekly that's ever happened where everybody leaves just as healthy as they came in. Maybe healthier. Yeah, maybe healthier. Anti-bacteria. Last segment is the tip of the day and we received a lot of questions from people about the app. We tried to make it as intuitive as possible, but it was a very radical change design-wise from our last run. Some people had a couple questions on how to do things, and we have answers. These are the two most common questions we got. One is, how do I search for a machine? Because if you're on the app and you click the search bar, in that thing you're searching But you don't search for machines there, instead, in the upper right corner, you'll see the word filter. If you click filter, you'll see a number of filter options, one of which is machine. Click there and select a machine, say, Creature from the Black Lagoon, you select that machine, Then you go back to the map. Then all the locations visible on the map will be filtered to only show places with Creature from the Black Lagoon. You could do a search at that point for a geographic location and it will only show places with that machine. So that's how you search for a particular machine. Second is in the upper left of the map it says list. If you click the word list, it shows you a list of the locations that are currently on the map. I think people are a little confused here and there, a few people that they're like, why isn't the list showing my location that I own? And the answer is that the map that you're looking at isn't showing your location. You're looking at a different city or your location is just outside the current map extent. So if you zoom out the map a little bit or pan over to your city, then that list will show, it'll list your location. So it's basically, it's always reflective of what the map is showing. It's just a different way to view what the contents of the map are. You got red dots or you got a list. Those are the two tips of the day. Yeah, if you have any more questions, please send them our way. If you have suggestions for the app, send them our way. We have a, we're keeping a big list of the suggestions, everything anyone's told us we have a list of, and a lot of those are good suggestions that we're implementing. We're working on an update right now that has a bunch of new stuff to it and should be out actually pretty soon, probably in a couple weeks. It has been a pleasure talking to you for the third time to do a podcast. You know, people make jokes about podcasts, how they're everywhere, most people have a podcast, but it's actually really hard work. It's hard to get it right. You got levels to deal with, computer processing to process. Editing. It's just, it's a lot. Yeah. Thanks for listening and keep playing pinball. Yeah, keep on playing it. Pinball, that is. www.youtube.com

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-06-06 | Item ID: 934ada3e-06a0-44bd-ae4b-6cca774f4c80*