644: You Have to Invert

34:24And it definitely needs work, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I went, oh, you know, it's not that bad. I need to tweak it some, but I do think with the exception of my bottom search bar, everything else actually looks pretty good as is. And I think that's very much because I'm not using a lot of custom stuff all over the place. So I'm hopeful, and maybe I'm just ignorant, but I'm hopeful that it won't be too terribly bad. And I genuinely think, again, that this is going to end up in a real good spot come September. And if it isn't perfect, which it might not be, I think it'll be a heck of a lot better than it is now.

34:58All right, moving on with our show-o follow-up. Let's talk about Liquid Glass as a platform. I guess we already covered this, huh? No, we didn't. This is new items here. All right. Liquid Glass as a platform differentiator. And Dave Wood says, it has begun. Here's a Liquid Glass clone in Flutter. And we will put a link in the show notes. And if you're wondering what's Flutter, well, Flutter is an open source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled multi-platform applications from a single code base. This is a Google thing, right, if I'm not mistaken? It didn't take long. Like, again, if you want to make something as a platform differentiator, let's do this thing that is, like I said in the last episode, you know, a thing that is difficult for our competitors to do because they don't control the hardware software stack to the degree that Apple does, but you can bet people can try to copy it.

35:39So here you go. This is for making cross-platform apps. If you want to make one that has Liquid Glass everywhere, you could potentially use Flutter. And then Francisco Tomowski writes, so much for Liquid Glass being some sort of native differentiator that's going to be prohibitively difficult to copy on the web. To be clear, I don't think you should use this. It's bad enough that we're going to make native UIs look like smudged lipstick. I don't look forward to the entirety of the web looking that way too. And then this is, I guess, a component for React, which runs a lot of websites and some native stuff, called Fluid Glass, which you can use in your React projects.

36:11Get ready for liquid glass on the web. Once Apple starts a trend, everyone's going to follow it often poorly. All right. Let's talk about Tahoe specifically. And I'm happy to report, John Syracuse, that your dreams have come true. Whimsy is back, sort of. Well, you know, I just wanted to point out, like, this wasn't one of the big thrusts of the new design. It's like, everything's going to be whimsical. Not really. But in macOS, there's a couple of little areas where whimsy is still there or has been added in this case. This is a minimal nerd pointing out that the drag and drop folder animation in Tahoe is fun.

36:43When you drag something onto a folder in the finder, it opens up and then closes and accepts your stuff. It actually changes the icon for empty folders versus full folders, I believe, where the full ones have, like, visible paper in it and the empty ones don't. That's fun. That's cute. I like it and the colors on folders are nice. So I figured I would start with something nice about Tahoe. I thought you were supposed to do all the bad things first and then you end with the nice things so everyone feels better. You do the sandwich. This is a very thin bread on a very poop sandwich. Oh, wonderful.

37:10All right, well, let's talk about poop then. Let's move on to Squircle Jail. Yannick Long writes, yes, the radius of the squircle has changed. The default app icon size is now 64 by 64, which is nice with a corresponding radius of 16.5. here's the difference and they put a little image in their uh tweet or whatever it was uh maybe marco will make this chapter or maybe not we'll see but you can see that the edges are just ever so slightly different yeah they're more rounded than they were before they're pointier and it's surprisingly to me i actually noticed this like going back and forth between the os's the new squircle is a little bit more baby rounded than the old one was i think this is across all os's certainly it's true on mac os but i think it's you know the whole point of this design it's the same everywhere except for vision os um so there you go uh it doesn't look like they changed the squircle but they totally did all right and then uh in session 220 say hello to the new look of app icons we talk a little bit more about the change squircle quoting from that session for existing mac icons that are similarly shaped as our rounded rectangle they automatically get masked or extended to fit into the template while receiving the new material appearance without lifting a finger so this is pretty weird uh choice on their part uh so what it means is if you've got an existing squircle icon which they detect somehow because they said they will extend it into the area so it doesn't even have to be a perfect squircle just has to be roughly a squircle um but if you have a like a legit exact apple squircle like my hyperspace icon they will just cut off the edges to trim off those parts so it's less pointy and more rounded they won't put you in squircle jail they'll just trim off your edges but also apparently if you have an icon that has like a solid color with sharp edges they will apply a liquid glass effect to it so there's some images here showing like a box icon which is a blue squircle and white letters b-o-x and the new version applies a you know chops the corners makes them more rounded and then applies a the the glass effect of the layered icons on the on the background of the squircle so it's got highlights and fuzz and everything and also on the letters on the inside of it this is not an icon that has changed the same icon in the same app that existed yesterday you install tile all of a sudden the os changes your icon to look like this which i think is wild i was afraid that it was going to like start changing like my flying like hard drive spaceship on hyperspace but now it leaves it alone i don't think it's messing with anything it does add the specular highlight around my thing um but yeah that's that's weird it is a reason for even if you have a squircle mac os icon it's a reason for you to make a new one with the new design uh maybe we'll talk about that in a future show or later because there's a whole bunch having to do with icons um but just because so you have total control over it so the os doesn't like try to do something smart and apply a look to your icon because i don't think anybody wants that all right and then apparently you can jailbreak your squircle and so uh as simon stovering writes you can copy or paste a custom icon in the finder to break out of squircle jail or you can crack open the dot app package find the dot icns file and drag it onto the icon in the get info window and there's a video and instructions on on their website that you can check out again it will be in the show notes yeah so the squircle jail we're talking about again is when you have an icon that that tahoe thinks is not squircley enough and they say you're on to squircle jail so they take your icon of whatever shape it was they shrink it and they put it inside their own squircle that they apply to your icon and it looks awful because your icon is shrunken inside like this gray squircle depending on what's behind it because it's really a frosted glass thing jailbreaking is getting your icon out of that gray squircle that it put it in because it looks terrible like if you open your applications folder in tahoe you'll immediately notice oh i see all the icons that are now in squircle joe because they weren't sufficiently squircle shaped and what this is saying is if you want to if you want to get those icons out of the squircle and get them back to the way they were without you know the developer doing anything you can just use a custom icon in mac os you and mac os you can add a custom icon to essentially anything hard drives applications folders anything you want uh and there's instructions for doing that that will link this is an opportunity for someone to make a third-party app that does that there are multiple existing third-party apps that i can never remember the names of sorry uh that do this already because the problem with doing a custom icon is like well what about when the app auto updates or something now the icon is back to what it was before.

41:35So you have to have something sort of watching in the background, watching to see your apps get updated and reapplying the custom icon. I use, what do I use? I can never remember the name of this. I use one of those things to give me a custom BB edit icon. I don't remember the name of it. There's at least two apps that do it. And I think they have them both installed. But anyway, that is your squirgle jailbreak. Because when you upgrade to Tahoe, you're going to feel sad when you look in your dock and you see what was formerly an icon that you really liked shrunken and inside a gray squircle jail all right and then uh speaking of rounded corners from session 310 build an app kit app with the new design and they show a toolbar window compact toolbar window and title bar window yeah so this i was trying to figure this out as i was updating my mac apps i'm like well i see a lot of new mac apps on tahoe and a lot of things in the demos they have really rounded corners but my app doesn't have really rounded corners.

42:28What's the deal there? Here's the deal, at least in Tahoe Beta 1. The corner radius of windows in macOS changes depending on whether there's a toolbar visible in the window and how big the toolbar is. Three different corner radii. There's the regular one that we see on all windows right now in Sequoia. That's if you have no toolbar. Then there's the compact toolbar window, which has a slightly more rounded one. And then there's the full-size toolbar window that has a much more rounded one and yes when you hide and show the toolbar in a window it changes the corner radius of all the corners on the window have fun doing layout in that kind of environment but that is the truth sounds fun i am glad i am not a mac os developer like it's weird like as if they're going to go rounded corner everywhere shouldn't every window be like that but they're trying to do with the whole concentricity thing and having the corner radiuses match and it's just it's very upsetting to me uh and it's like i said it's a bit it's a big difference it's from the normal one at 16 point radius to the big one at 26 it's a big difference all right then we've got some chunky stoplights uh avi drissman writes mac os 26 has chunk window control buttons existing apps retain their small buttons when run on 26 this is gated on the sdk that you link when you lick them link the mac os 26 sdk you automatically get the chunk buttons i'm not sure that's right it might just be the matter of having a toolbar visible like i said before this i don't mind that much like apple has long since stopped being like you know religiously consistent about the size and position of window widgets let's say on mac os and i think that's fine it's not like people are confused by what they are it's the stoplight widgets if they're a slightly different size even for a while on itunes they were vertical do you remember that insanity uh like i i think this is just a um uh connected to the toolbar visibility which is weird but just so people are aware uh you're not seeing things your stoplight widgets are changing size all right uh this apparently continues evie drissman this is courtesy of ns title titled frame size of title bar buttons put that in the show notes if you fiddle with window control buttons this implementation is a good starting point for investigation yeah you could override these things and give you the big chunk buttons even if you don't have a toolbar and do other weird things uh whether you'll get that through the mac app store or not is questionable but you don't have to on the mac so hey john it's uh almost nine o 'clock do you know where your uh title bar is one of the side effects of the new design uh is that they've removed a lot of stuff there's not a lot of lines or dividing lines between things things that used to be shades of gray are now white uh a funny slash head smackingly upsetting consequence of that is if you make a window in the finder and you put that window into icon view and you just have one icon in it it looks like a rendering error you get a rounded rectangle that is white then you have the three stoplight buttons then you've got the icon and name of the folder which are left-aligned which we'll get to in a second and then you have the window content that's it when i look at this window i think i should be able to drag it from anywhere because it is an undifferentiated sea of white like it literally looks like the window has not finished drawing we'll put a link in this in the show notes it is unattractive uh and it is upsetting from a usability standpoint and i would never want to have to explain how to use a mac by saying oh just grab the title bar and that'd be like the title what what are you doing cool all right uh the menu bar is sort of kind of missing insofar as it is translucent where you know everything old is new again no it is not translucent it is not there i thought it was there no it is not there there is nothing if you look at the dead center of the middle of your screen you see your unadulterated desktop background There's nothing.

46:10Okay, yes. But there's still the bar in the upper left and all the little dinguses in the upper right. Oh, there's words. File, edit, blah, blah, blah. Those words are there, and so is the Apple logo. And on the right, your icons are there, but those icons are on top of your desktop background. There's no menu bar. There's no line. There is no background. There is no translucent thing. There is just words and icons on your desktop background. If, like John, you are incapable of adapting, then there are options. I'm just telling you what it is. It's like it's not the menu bar is the bar. That's why it's called a bar.

46:43There is no more bar because you said the bar is translucent. There is no translucent bar. There is no bar. I don't even know where to go from here. But nevertheless, if you wanted to go back to the way it was before, to yesteryear, you can use Glass Bar by Bart Reardon. We'll put a link in the show notes. It does not use this Glass Bar app does not use new glass material because it makes things look horrible. and there are rendering bugs when you do things like use swipe gestures to switch spaces or bring up mission control although that could just be a beta one problem uh this i'm sorry bart was writing all this and bart continues i'll have a new build soon and maybe i can tinker properly with glass effects and user settings yeah one problem with glass bar on these early versions i noticed is that uh when you click on a menu like file or edit it draws like a capsule around the menu that you've clicked on but with at least glass bar when you click on the menu if it's drawing that capsule you can't really see it because i don't know if it draws under the bar or something so it's not it's not exactly perfect but hey it's it's beta one and people just working on these utilities and the other one i want to mention is boring old menu bar from the big sur days back when they changed the menu bar in big sur and people didn't like it what if you want an opaque white menu bar boring old menu bar would do that for you i'm assuming if that app is still actively developed they'll also update it for the new os third-party opportunities for people who want an opaque menu bar and to be clear i don't it's fine i like i said it's the naked robotic menu bar.

47:59If you desperately want a opaque white menu bar, you can put a menu bar size white strip at the top of your desktop background. Done. You got it. Like, because it literally just shows your desktop background. There is no bar. So if you want a bar, just draw it in your desktop background. Cool. You can also do boring old menu bar from the big sir days. Again, we'll put a link in the show notes. We are late in the episode going to talk about some of our favorite things. and if I was using Tahoe for more than a minute, I'm sure this would be one of my favorite things, and this is left-aligned text in dialogues.

48:34I feel like Marco was the one of the three of us that complained the most about this, but he is right to complain or was right to complain in the past because for the last year or two, maybe even more than that. It was since Big Sur, right? I don't recall, but for the last several years, dialogue boxes had their text center aligned, which was barbaric. They went from landscape to portrait. and then also in the transition from landscape to portrait they centered the text which isn't ridiculous absolutely ridiculous and not just the title text all the text i mean you know this if you use a mac but you you may be wondering why it's weird and hard to read large amounts of text in these dialogues is because their portrait orientation and the text was centered so now it's left aligned which i'm very excited about unfortunately the icon is also left aligned and it looks awful yeah if only they could maybe like maybe they could make more room by moving the icon to the left of the text yeah they could just go back like here's the thing about text like when they were landscaped they weren't the width of your screen right you can just make a landscape oriented dialogue on mac os the optimal reading width for how long lines should be right and the answer is not two inches or whatever the hell the default is in in mac like mac screens are all wider than they are tall unless you have your thing rotated and portrait over it maybe that's what it should do if you have a portrait orientation screen your thing should i don't like just go back to the horizontal things like i'm glad they left aligned it is better the left line icons are terrible i am i was like am i just i had to see it for myself so i just centered the icon it looks so much better with the centered icon but yes margo is on the right path right path you know uh mac os dialogues look really good back when they were landscaping the icon was on the left but you know i guess this is better for future touch max because you make the buttons bigger by stacking them vertically and all that stuff so i'll let them have another few years of this at least they left the line to text and then additionally uh left line text and title bars this cannot stand this is awful this needs to be changed again it looks like a rendering error uh about the finder is a great like it just looks bad it's the title bar the window is on the left uh you could have something on the right if you want like a purple thing to make steve jobs happy for single window the moment but the title should be in the center of the title bar it doesn't look good i just not about tradition like i don't care like i'm not married to any particular thing about old classic mac os it just looks bad sure you're not like no but look at look at the two things i put in the show notes here and tell me that setting aside the awful icon which we'll get to a little bit tell me it doesn't look like there's an error in this window yeah it does look bad because everything else in the window is centered yeah and even in even in like other you know like the the dialogues or whatever where the text is left justified but the block of text is still centered in the window there's still like a visible center like the buttons are along a central axis the left aligned titles i don't like i don't even see how that's part of the design language it has nothing to do with anything except we're just running something that didn't have a problem don't like it hope they easy to change easy to fix i should really file a bug in it and by the way there's one thing i maybe petty feedbacks uh like the finder icon that i'm about to get to and actual bugs and just everything because like here's the thing they're like oh well you know file your bugs get them blah blah blah like oh they might change it in response to feedback but how are they going to hear that feedback if somebody thinks that the icons in dialogue should be centered they need like an official record of that so i'm putting these dinky little official records i hope they don't think i'm abusing the system to just say i don't like it put it back in the middle and they can ignore it or they can file it as a dupe and count it as a vote or whatever but i want there to be official communication to say i personally told apple that i don't like this they can ignore my feedback or they can count it up and see how many other people feel the same way as i do because they have to decide in the end which things should be tweaked what things should we change about the design how far should we tone back the transparency and how are they going to do that without data and so the feedbacks of the data so i'm doing i'm doing my part as i say in starship troopers i think Okay, so speaking of things that'll make John upset, let's talk Finder icons.

52:37And, you know, if you imagine the Finder icon and the way it exists today is there, at a glance, it looks like a happy face looking directly at you. You know, you're standing right in front of that face and the left-hand side is blue. The right-hand side is like a gray, if you will. And then if you look closer at the right-hand side, you realize, oh, that's actually another face in profile. And so it's kind of two faces in one. Well, since always, the Finder icon had the left-hand side as blue and the right-hand side is like a gray-ish. And apparently in Tahoe, Apple decided, eh, it's opposite day.

53:11And so the gray is on the left-hand side and the blue is on the right-hand side. And this I find a little unnerving, but I'm not that particularly offended by it. And I think I might be the only one because especially all the old Mac nerds are very upset. So, John, the king of all the old Mac nerds, tell us about it. I mean, this is not the original Finder round. This is the quote unquote new Finder icon. Rolled out, I believe, in Mac OS 7.6. Don't quote me on that. Anyway, yeah, it's new. It's not so much that I'm married to the old icon as that I think the new one is ugly. So they didn't just swap the colors.

53:45The thing that offends me the most about the new icon is the border. Like the fact that like the profile thing doesn't go edge to edge because that kind of kills the whole dividing line. Like you said, like the face on, face in profile, face head on. the border i hate the most that that's like it makes it ugly to me yeah um also they did change the shape of like the nose and the dividing line it's more straight than it was curved and i think that is a downgrade i don't think it looks friendly and is nice and the thing is as steven hackett pointed out because he you know as he says for kicks i ran the current finder icon through apple's new icon composer app and i think it looks pretty good with liquid glass even with the clear and tinted modes he just took the existing finder icon and liquid glassified it i think it fits in perfectly with their design aesthetic like it already looks like a round friendly thing with like panes of layer like it was already right there and they had to go and make it ugly so i literally filed a feedback that says the new finder icon is ugly change it and the two changes i suggested making were get rid of the border and uh swap the colors back no argument and michael flare up also put in uh his own take on it and then a friend of the show d griffin jones writes i created this icon in literally 15 minutes with pixelmator pro and apple's own icon composer apple could very easily keep the icon's historical appearance without compromising the liquid glass aesthetic by just flipping the color palette but that one's still ugly because it's got the border i think it's less ugly than the current one but yes i concur that the border does kind of ruin the whole effect speaking of icons let's talk about icons next to menu items.

55:16And for context, in Tahoe, pretty much every menu item, I mean, not literally everyone, but darn near every menu item, like looking at Finder as an example, has an icon next to it, which is a very big departure from most Mac apps up until now. So Stefan Habel writes, from the using icons in menus in Apple's human interface guidelines from 2005 to 2009, quote, if you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. Don't include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons or poorly designed ones can appear cluttered and be hard to read.

55:52Then in Apple's Hig today, quote, a menu item's label describes what it does and may include a symbol if it helps to clarify meaning. So I thought that I'd find a stronger statement in today's Hig saying you should put icons next to most of your menus. There's a WWDC session about it where they emphasize like don't put one next to every menu. Like if you have five copy options, maybe just put it next to the first one because they're all grouped together like they have these weird guidelines where they're trying to say where you should put icons but the upshot is what you just said casey way more menu items have icons next to the menu item name so like if you go into the file menu now it's like file open new open will have an icon next to it to the left of the o new will have an icon next to the left of the n icons and menus are everywhere and this is for platform university because my impression is that this is a more common practice on ios and ipad os and now it's going to be common on the mac the old guidelines saying don't do this because uh it can appear cluttered and hard to read i think that's kind of still true but i think what the key point is the uh if it includes too many icons in parentheses or poorly designed ones well now we have sf symbols and so you don't have to worry about your poorly designed icons junking up the menus for example like just use ours we made a bazillion of them surely you can find one and if you can't just leave it off so the guideline is not tahoe icons next to every single menu item but the the de facto rule seems to be tahoe icons next to a lot of menu items and i'm not sure where i fall down on it it's you know in some ways it's nice to have another differentiator to pick out the menu item you want so you don't have to read like it's the purpose of icons on the other hand they are kind of small and it does look kind of busy so i could go either way on this i'm actually debating whether i should icons to my menus not that i have that many of them because i'm like do i want to do that it mostly comes down to how hard is it to conditionalize this based on the os because you shouldn't have them the old os but you should have them in the new one so i'm still thinking about it but just fyi apple has done a pretty basically a 180 on icons next to menu items you have a lot more experience with this both in the past and the present but i think i like it yes i mean some sometimes it does add value they do what icons do make you not have to read yep all right uh Tahoe tabs contrast.

58:04Tell me about this, John. So I noticed this in Terminal because, hey, it's just a plain window, and I make tabs in them. The tabs, I think across all the OSs, basically don't look like tabs anymore. They look like a big capsule-shaped channel with a slightly brighter capsule-shaped thing for the active tab. And I noticed this when I was running it on my M1 MacBook Air, which doesn't have, let's say, the best screen. Certainly it's not Pro Display XDR quality. and when i opened terminal and opened a bunch of tabs i looked at it i realized this screen's color rendition is not good enough to differentiate between an active tab and an active tab the colors are so close to each other the screen just isn't good enough you see a lot of this on crappy pc screens where there'll be two colors like you know gray and a slightly lighter gray that will literally look like the same gray so you can't read the text right because the display is just not good enough it can't make that subtle especially at low brightness levels it can't it simply can't differentiate the two colors and i think that the m1 macbook air screen at whatever brightness i had it with whatever lighting was in the room could not differentiate active from an active tab i'm not saying hard to read i'm saying if you put money and said i'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which tab is active i would do no better than chance maybe it's because i'm old and my eyes are bad but honestly i was like wait is this broken i looked at my produce xdr i'm like oh no you can totally tell which one's active this is an os with insufficient contrast.

59:30I don't want to have to hit increase contrast so I can tell which tab is active. So I should probably file a bug. I think I did a file a bug on this one. And I said, basically, I have your computer. I put your OS on it. I can't see the active tab. I can see it fine in other OSes. I can see it fine on my Protosplay XDR. Up the contrast, please. The arrow cursor has also changed. Well, we skipped over the other item there. Oh, I'm sorry. The triple question mark. This is a chance for Marco to tell us what he thinks about Safari. Okay. Apple's designers have tried multiple times in recent years to...

1:00:07to dynamically color Safari's entire top bar, the buttons around it, and the row of tabs, to dynamically color them based on the content of the website. below them they are doing it again this is possibly the most extreme version of this attempt and what they have in beta one on of tahoe is the the entire top bar switches between light and dark depending on you know similar to the liquid glass discussion or depending on the color of whatever is the top most content of the website so this could be like if the website has like a top top black navigation strip and the rest of the page is white black is what wins because it's on top so the entire tab bar turns black all the tabs the url bar everything turns black when you switch tabs or navigate to a different page with a different color scheme the entire bar switches between black and white mode this to me look i'll be honest i don't know how they're getting away with this like i don't like that is the biggest example to me that says like they have no design filter whatsoever like the designers have taken over there is no editor there is no one in charge of product who has enough power to override basic usability problems that designers are creating if they ship this i will switch to chrome it's that bad i can't use it it is like using safari on my laptop on Tahoe.

1:01:38It's the most distracting, disorienting thing ever. If you ever navigate between web pages or switch between tabs, which I don't know, I think it's a pretty common thing in a web browser. So literally, that is a deal breaker for me. If that ships, I am off Safari. And it takes a lot for me to leave Safari, but that will do it. So the screenshot I put in the show notes is something I grabbed on my screen because I honestly, not joking, honestly was going to file this as a drawing error. Like, oh, there's lots of weird drawing errors in Tog. This is the first beta. I'm like, oh, this is a problem.

1:02:12It's not correctly drawing something. But no, this is not an error. This is what it's supposed to look like. If you guys can zoom in on that one. What happened is I was on the Apple developer site looking at a web page. That's ridiculous. Right? And I scrolled the page up a little bit. And then I looked into the toolbar. And the toolbar had this region of it that helps that it was kind of like that pinkish color. if you know anything about graphics cards you may be familiar with a particular like kind of like a magenta color that that indicates bad graphics things going on uh i don't know if they use it as like the color of like you know no color i don't know i don't know the history behind it but anyway it's kind of like reddish pinkish and like oh there's some kind of i can tell you i so it was mainly used it's it's like pure magenta f-f-o-o-o-f-f uh and the reason they would use that they would use that back you know i don't know what they do now but they would use that to indicate alpha transparency is any pixel that was that color the that bright pink would then be rendered in whatever the game engine was as transparent because they knew that color was so ugly you would never use it for real in a texture apple by the way for that same purpose uh use a like a beige believe it or not because you used to be able to set your desktop background to beige and then run a dvd and it would play on it anyway uh so i saw this pink in the toolbar and i screenshotted it for an error but then i looked a little closer and i saw wait a second i if you can look above the address bar in the screenshot can you read the text above there that says interface guideline fades out and then the rate can you see the text above that item two item seven item two or item seven that's part of the web page i scrolled the web page and i said i'm seeing the thing that i because marco was talking about when you first load the page like whatever's the top influences the bar but as you scroll a web page the web page's content goes up and behind the entire top bar in safari the tabs the address bar the toolbar everything and you see it through with a clarity that you can read text and it looks terrible and it's stupid and does not draw my attention to the content it looks like a mistake it looks like an error oh it's a mistake just make the toolbar opaque just make it opaque it's fine we'll still know it's it's very upsetting anyway there's that also they so with the new design language they have introduced two different what they call i believe they call them border edge effects something like that um and the idea and you'll see this all over ios you'll see that um you know as you scroll content in in an app that has like you know top or bottom bar uh they will they will fade and blur the very top edge of the content to try to obviously they they blur your content so you can focus more on your content so they they blur that top edge and there's a separate alternative rendering mode that they use and they give the example of a finder window that is a hard edge which is basically a bar that is solid and has a border and you when your content scrolls under it you no longer see it Like, say, a table view.

1:05:07When you scroll a table view, the table headers are opaque. And when you scroll the table, the content goes on. It's fine. It's just, I don't know. I don't know why we have to. I'm trying to describe a header, an opaque header. Yes. Right. And so they already have defined a style that fixes this problem the way we've always fixed this problem with a solid background and a border that controls go on. so we can read them like when you scroll a whole point of a scrollable region is you can only see the portion that is within the scrollable region and the rest of it is not and you can't see it but they're like but you know we do have more window here and i know there's stuff in that window like the address bar the back button the forward button the window control widgets all the the tabs but wouldn't it be great if you could see the web page through that and the answer is no it would not be great.

1:05:59Don't do that. It's bad. All right. The arrow cursor has also been updated. There are changes everywhere, John changes everywhere. Nathan meant. So Peno writes, this is the first time they've changed it since the retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS 10 itself, 24 years ago, dang. And basically they made the, I don't know, the point of the arrow a little chunkier, I would say. And the, the, the post part for lack of a better term, a little shorter. I don't know. How would you describe this, Mr. Artis? It's like in an illustrator program where you can say, how do you want, when the line changes direction, how do you want the end caps to be?

1:06:36And you can make them sharp or you can make them rounded. They made them all rounded. So the little tail is rounded. The little nubbins on the side of the arrow are rounded. The tip is less rounded than the other parts. But anyway, it's more rounded. It's more sort of friendly and rounded and baby looking. The hand cursor as well. We have gone from the Mickey Mouse hand with, or the Mickey Mouse glove with three vertical lines on it. which i i can take or leave the lines but i liked the general shape of the hand i even like the little indentation to let you know it's a glove and now it's like somebody just held up a hand and i don't love it yeah no the new one is ugly the new that this this is the case where the hand used to be more baby and now is more pointy and less organic looking and i'm just assuming they changed all the cursors i haven't looked at them all yet but when i first saw this hand cursor i because i was actually working on one of my apps and i wanted to show the hand cursor and i was like wait am i picking the wrong cursor what the hell is that nope that's what the hand looks like now not great but we'll live uh floating elements and compartmentalization tell me about this please john yeah we just talked about it a little bit but like you'll see it in finder windows as well and you'll see it in the sidebars and everything i talked about this last week uh they want controls to float over your content this is one of the big concepts if you watch wwc videos you can they think that basically take a window on mac os or anywhere really but take a window on mac os your content owns the whole window top to bottom left to right but of course you need to have controls so those controls float on top of your content and you may be thinking well if i have a sidebar what i don't want the sidebar covering my content shouldn't the content start where the sidebar ends but they're so married to this idea that rounded corner floating things are on top of your content that owns the whole window that they will go to ridiculous lengths to make this happen one of the things they do for instance is like say you have like a photo viewer uh and of course you you got on the Mac and you have a photo that fills the entire window.

1:08:26Be like, well, now I want to have a sidebar in my photo of you with a bunch of sidebar stuff in it. You're like, but I don't want the sidebar to cover the left two inches of my photo. Can't I just have the photos start where the sidebar ends? You can do that, but then you're not following through on Alan dies, really strongly felt belief that your content should be behind the sidebar. So they say, how about we do this for you? How about we do the equivalent of a scroll edge effect, but instead of just blurring the edge of your photo, what we'll do is we will mirror your photo. to the left under the sidebar and then blur the mirrored portion you see that sometimes when they take like a um uh you have a 16 by 9 window but you're watching a 4 by 3 video and they mirror and blur the edges of the 4 by 3 to fill out the 16 by 9 have you ever seen that uh yeah like that's that's essentially what they're doing with your content and it's really weird and distracting because you're like wait a second is there some portion of my photo that i can't see to the left The answer is no.

1:09:21It is just a blurred, flipped version of it. And its sole purpose is to make it look like your content goes all the way to the left edge. But it does not because that would be insanity. And so now you can see the little edge of your of your content around the top left and bottom of the sidebar. And also, of course, through the sidebar, because why wouldn't you want to see your mirrored, flipped, blurred content showing through your sidebar, making it less legible. And that continues up to toolbars. Toolbars look like a bunch of lozenges that are floating with huge drop shadows. on top of your content so in a finder window your content are like the fold the icons of your items or list view or whatever but you've got this toolbar with no dividing line with just a bunch of floating things on top of it and i believe it has the edge effect like marco said the hard edge effect in it and then the sidebar which is inset so you've got this border so it can show that it's floating they're so married to this and like i see some value of like content but then there's a control layer above it in a 3d space with shadows but their implementation of it sacrifices a lot of utility and readability for this metaphor that i feel like is not necessary like i don't think there was anything particularly wrong with the idea that is a toolbar on top a sidebar and left a bottom bar on the bottom and they framed your content but they were all in the same plane and your content didn't go under them but apple says no content goes under everything and so we all float down here.

1:10:44If that's a reference, I got nothing. Sure is. Of course it is. Mario Alberto Guzman writes, when you try to create user interfaces where you don't have distinct and hard separations for compartmentalization, you end up with weird junk like this. Notice how the horizontal scroll bar is above the now playing controls. This is, again, one of those things you just need to see to believe. I will tell you one more time, I think that this whole new design system in liquid glass i think it's going to work i really do but wow this is bad particularly that scroll bar is not good this is apple's music app by the way this is not a third-party app this apple's music app and they've decided that the controls should be on the bottom in a floating lozenge but of course if the content area scrolls horizontally where are you going to put the scroll bar they put it on top of it because they want to show the content going underneath the scrolling thing i bet they can fix this just by not ever allowing it to have a horizontal scroll bar but it is kind of a table view because that's how music works or just put the scroll bar below the lozenge right what's wrong with that maybe but like how would you manipulate that and would you have to leave like would it be on top of the lozenge they're very insistent that the controls float on top of everything so like but especially if it's one of those scroll thumbs that appears and disappears the apples made these problems themselves i want to see how they solve them but like they're the problems of their own invention like there was nothing wrong with the idea of an opaque toolbar or sidebar or bottom bar.

1:12:07Steve Trouton-Smith writes, Liquid Glass tells us to put a bunch of stuff in a glass layer above the app, but it doesn't tell us why. Why are the window traffic lights housed in the sidebar on macOS, for example, or on top of the sidebar on iPad, or in line with the window content for apps without a sidebar? It's very fickle. Yeah, so like I said, I think it's still clear. No one's confused about what the window widgets are, but layering wise it's not coherent at all like are they should they be floating on top or should they not be should they be part of the the window or should they be part of the sidebar like as someone pointed out it's almost like the closed widgets are saying hit this red button to close the sidebar because they're they're so clearly part of the sidebar unless they're not and they're in the window it's um yeah i don't think it's that confusing but like it's first of all it's i don't see the benefit in these in these five different modes like i said maybe the ipad should look different than the mac whatever like i allow it to do that but even within the mac i don't think the sidebar should be a thing that floats on top of stuff lots of people do alternate designs of like how about we just end the window there and have the sidebar come out of the window kind of like a drawer and a real throwback and people did mock-ups of that look pretty cool um but yeah like this i'm not going to say their idea of controls float on top of your content is a bad idea because it's not inherently bad but it causes a lot of problems for them that they have not shown that they have solutions for even in their own apps which is not encouraging yeah because it's again like these are all like you can make a design language that is full of transparency and shadows and edge-to-edge content and all but those are hard to design around and they haven't largely like they've just been like all right we're just gonna do this okay that's not a great design in every case it takes some work it takes some self-control it's going to take a lot of revision it takes redesigning apps that they haven't touched in forever so now guess what apple you have to go and touch those apps unless they're just going to be embarrassing if you don't and they don't seem to either agree or care because yes they will just be embarrassing it's beta one it's beta one i'll give them some time to update their apps but like you know it's it's going to be because as you get farther away from the beaten path of like the apps that apple ships you can just assume they're not going to get touched and they're just going to look how they look.

1:14:23Yeah. All right. I think we talked last week, at least briefly, about multiple clipboards and clipboard managers and things like that in macOS. And a friend of the show, Stephen Robles, writes, clipboard history is on an eight-hour cycle, so there's no way to keep the past 100 clippings like in PaceBot. After eight hours, a clipping is removed. And you can find more in one of Stephen's many videos, but specifically one about this. So we can check that out. Yeah. I mean, there's still definitely a place for third-party clipboard managers. I was forcing myself to use the Tahoe clipboard manager instead of installing Pacebot.

1:14:55And I was shocked. Maybe I shouldn't have been shocked that their eight hour cycle and the number of clippings they save is way too low for my use. Very often I would go in there and be like, that's it. That's all. Where did my, oh, eight hour cycle. I guess that was yesterday. My clipboard history and Pacebot, I forget what I have it set to. I think I have it maybe 500 or 1 ,000. Setting aside how much more efficient the keyboard shortcuts are for Pacebot. Again, I love that it is built in. And I will use it on everybody else's Mac once it gets activated. But I'm definitely still going to use PaySpot.

1:15:28But be aware, Apple. I mean, I'm assuming for privacy reasons, this is being very conservative for their implementation. It is simple. It is, as far as I know, unadjustable unless there's a plist thing. After eight hours, things are gone. And I think the list is like 20 to 50 items or something. It's very limited, which I think is reasonable. rosetta is the or i guess rosetta 2 strictly speaking is the mechanism by which you can run something compiled for intel on apple silicon and ars technical has an article about the future of rosetta and it reads in part mac os tahoe will be the last new mac os release to support any intel max all new releases starting with mac os 27 will require an apple silicon mac apple will provide additional security updates for tahoe until fall 2028 two years after it is replaced with mac os 27 apple is also planning changes to rosetta 2 the intel to arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the intel and apple silicon eras rosetta will continue to work as a general purpose app translation tool in both mac os 26 and mac os 27 but after mac os 27 rosetta will be paired back will only be available to a limited subset of apps specifically older games that rely on intel specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers well look at this apple giving more roadmaps this is like a three-year roadmap and unfortunately this roadmap news is not great what they're saying is so forget about intel max all right so they'll just they're into the dustbin of history right you have an apple silicon mac right but what if you still have some x86 executable somewhere on your mac and you don't you might not even know that it's x86 because it just runs so fine rosetta is beautiful and fast and transparent and apple silicon max are fast you probably don't even know that one of the apps that use every day is actually not natively compiled for apple silicon what they're saying is that after mac os 26 that game might not that game that app might not launch but not because they'll be removing rosetta from mac os it will still be there but it will only be for specific older games that use intel that the developer is never going to update but like is this some kind of like special lists that can you get your app on the list it's like i don't feel like updating my app i'm never gonna update it for apple silicon but people still like playing my game can i get on the the include list that says oh yeah rosetta will run with you like i don't actually i don't really understand the idea of sunsetting rosetta just leave it there leave it there forever for like is it that big or that cumbersome like do they think that removing rosetta is what it takes to get people to update for apple silicon look if people haven't updated their apps for apple silicon by now they're never going to do it any app so just leave rosetta there for those apps and like i don't know remove it 10 years from now or something it doesn't have to be there forever but this seems like a short horizon and again this affects apple silicon max does not affect intel max this is all about apple silicon max that are currently running things that are x86 i just thought of it today when i installed like a command line tool and i didn't want to build it so i just downloaded a binary because it was just one file right and i downloaded the the things they offered they offered an x86 download and an arm download and of course i'm on my intel mac pro so i downloaded the x86 download and i realized oh i have to remember that that one command line tool is x86 because in mac os 27 it will stop running now i have to go back and re-download the the arm version of it this seems really weird to me and the exception for game seems even weirder So we'll see if this changes before Mac OS 27, but be aware, this is a thing.

1:18:59A new thing is a new disk image format, ASIF or Apple Sparse Image Format. These files transfer more efficiently between hosts or disks because their intrinsic structure doesn't depend on the host file system's capabilities. The size of an ASIF file takes on the file system is proportional to the actual data stored in the disk image, which is pretty neat. and from the aforementioned Eclectic Light Company. There's a whole write-up about this. ASIF images are sparse files in APFS and are flagged as such. John, what is the sparse file? That's like if you wanted to make like a 100 gigabyte file, but you put one letter in it, it wouldn't take 100 gigs on disk.

1:19:38It would take one letter. But if you looked at the file size, it would be like, oh yeah, this is totally a 100 gig file. And if you cat the contents, it would show you 100 gigs of like zeros plus that one little letter you put in there. But in the file system, it's a sparse file. you don't need to populate all that empty space you just need to put in the data that's there sparse files are a very common feature in uh most file systems and apfs has it i think maybe hfs plus did too but i don't don't quote me on that but anyway yeah that's so the thing with disk images is always like oh i'm gonna make a file on disk that like when you double click it it mounts as a volume but you always start those things off if you make a new one they start as empty and one way to do it is okay you make a 500 meg disk image i put a 500 meg file on your disk but sparse files like you say well why don't we just make that take up no space because there's nothing in it yet uh and there are various approaches to doing that with like okay well this actually could be a directory with a bunch of little stripe files that are like parts of the disk so as you write data to disk we write more and more of those files and each one of those files is like 16 megs or something so it's a directory full of 16 meg files and as you fill the disk more 16 meg files fill up and there's been so many different disk image formats across the history of apple's os i just had an occasion to find some old ones because i was going some old wwc stuff and they were just images that would no longer mount on modern mac os without some uh you know downloading some command line tools to make it happen but there are so many of them and it's always like the question oh if i want to make a disc image what is it a read write disc image is a sparse bundle is it like i don't know which disc image format to use asif looks like it might solved that dilemma because based on howard oakley's testing here asif uh is the fastest disk image format it is the newest one uh and it also uses sparse files so it won't take up a lot of room so assuming this works well uh the answer to the question of what disk image format should i use if i only care about modern max and forward is asif i haven't tried it myself but i'm excited do we want to talk about performance specifically or do you just no it's just it's the best one You can follow the link and see the stats.

1:21:42It's not tremendously faster, but it's nice that you don't have to guess which one. Oh, you want this one for performance, this one for size, and this one for compatibility. I mean, I guess you still have the compatibility concern, but if you just want it for now forward, ASIF. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

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1:23:58uh ios 26 uh marco sincerely the only one really running it any other ui impressions you would like to share at this time oh it's buggy as hell i mean if that's if we were talking about talking about performance a second ago i know that was a different context but um this is on an iphone 16 pro the fastest iphone apple currently makes it's incredibly slow and incredibly buggy there's animation bugs everywhere there's rendering bugs everywhere all of the new apis for like tab bars and search searchable and all that other stuff super buggy like bad animations missing like bad geometry there's a lot of work to do here on one level it's developer beta one this is like hopefully the roughest build we will ever see of this os but it really has a lot of baking left to do fun and i don't know i don't know how apple's gonna do it in time i really don't like this was a huge undertaking.

1:24:56Allegedly, they've been working on this redesign across the systems for years. They could not have shipped it before this year. I don't even know that they could ship it this year, but they're going to. It's really rough. Every animation is janky and sluggish. None of them are smooth. None of them are fluid. It's not liquid glass. Nothing is running at 60 frames a second. Or yet alone 120, which is what they're supposed to run. Yeah, it's a very early rough build that being said regarding your actual question of the design one other big issue i keep running into besides the you know blurring and blobbing of everything is they have used the ellipsis slash meatball slash what they're now calling a more menu or a more button everywhere in ways in contexts that they don't necessarily need to.

1:25:53So there's two contexts that keep bugging me. One is in Safari. And I did learn you can change the Safari toolbar back to kind of an older version, but that has other kind of downsides to it. But in Safari, to add a new tab or close the current tab is now an additional tap than as was before in the default layout. You have to first tap the dot dot dot more menu, first tap that, then in the menu that pops up, you got to then tap the new tab or closed tab or whatever there, or the all tabs to go back to the tab view. So that's one. You can actually, which I learned when I complained and messed up about this, you can actually swipe up on the Safari address bar area, and that will get it into the all tabs view.

1:26:36But the problem is, you also swipe up in a very close region of that to change apps and go back to the home screen. And I have tried for the last few days, I've been trying to get myself used to that gesture to try to keep the new layout of Safari and just get used to pulling up to go to the all tabs view. And my hit rate is not good. I keep accidentally triggering the home gesture of the phone. That's not a good gesture. That is a terrible gesture. And yes, you can also swipe left and right on the address bar to switch tabs left and right, which I also didn't know. You didn't know that? I've been using that for years.

1:27:12When they first put the bar on the bottom, that's when they added that. Yeah, anyway, to rely on the up swipe gesture for going to the all tabs view, which is a very, very common action that I do, I don't love that. The new tab gesture or flow is also weird. In mail... Oh, wait, before you move on, you should point out that you can actually change it so you don't have to do that swipe. Yeah. And it will permanently put the... It'll basically put a little bar under the address bar that has the button for all tabs you just like it does now. So that's in settings. Yeah. If you go to the Safari settings, you can change the bottom toolbar to like bottom mode or something instead of compact mode or something like that.

1:27:51And it puts back basically the old bar, but everything's harder to hit because it's all pulled in more from the edges. So the toolbar items are all closer together. It's really important for you to see a little bit of your blurry web page around all the edges and also to have those bars block the bottom content on the web page. Right. And also, let's make all the tap targets for these very commonly used buttons smaller and move them a little bit from where they've been for years. Everything's got to be. That's another thing, by the way. These rounded corners everywhere make basically the safe area insets narrower because if you have rectilinear content, it's got to avoid that whole curve because otherwise the corner will be clipped.

1:28:26So everything has to move up and in from all sides. And that's why the tap targets are smaller. And by the way, of course, that whole rounded corner thing is floating with a margin around it. So there's less room. But just to be clear, what you were trying to do is get used to that gesture to use the new UI. You may eventually give up and go to settings and change it back to something that's closer to the old one but still has smaller tab targets. Yeah. So either way, your muscle memory is broken. And it's not fun for such a commonly used app. And then Mail, both Mail and Music, these are very commonly used apps for me.

1:28:58So in mail, many of the common actions that used to be buttons in the toolbar, including select, a very common action, that's now under the dot dot dot menu in the upper right. Now, what they did was collapse, you know, two or three buttons that used to be in the upper right into a dot dot dot menu. But why? What were they making room for? Nothing. What's up there now is nothing. A blurry version of your content, I believe. Yeah, and when you scroll down, it becomes like the blurry navigation bar. There's still room there for two or three more toolbar buttons in the upper right. So they broke the muscle memory.

1:29:39They added one more tap to a bunch of common actions. Why? To make room for what? Nothing. So also in the music app, when you go to like the album view or, you know, the album view music, usually there's a little icon in the upper right that tells you you know it's the plus if it isn't added to your library it's a check mark if it's downloaded those are useful things to know on your iphone when you might not be online all the time um and in the new music app that's gone that other button is just gone everything is now in the dot dot dot menu on that album view they did that to make room for nothing literally nothing is up there they just this is like where where alan dye's designs go the most wrong is burying things into menus and junk drawers of various sorts for no real benefit like it's just this is just minimalism for minimalism's sake it's like a minimalist desk where there's nothing on the desk so you can't actually get any work done because there's literally nothing on it if you want if you need a pen a pencil a mug it's all everything would be inside drawers tucked away so you can't see it because you want the desk to just have nothing on it and that's not useful right it's fun to look at but that's not how you design tools and the reality is all of these uis we're talking about these are tools like our phones are tools the apps that we use in them are tools they they have function and as much as apple's design talks about getting out of the way of your content.

1:31:10Well, what you're taking out of the way is functionality. So it has to be for a really good reason. Now, the best possible reason to take away the controls, you can see it when you're playing a video. You want to play a full screen video. Okay, have the controls fade out the way we've done since the iPhone 1. That's great. There's a huge reason for that. In that context, it makes sense. But in every other app, You got to make that decision. You can't apply the same design decree to everything of hide as many controls as possible. But that's what they're doing. They are hiding as much as they can in the name of, quote, content.

1:31:49But these devices are not just to view content. They are to interact with things. They are to make things. They are to perform functions. I feel like the dogma of minimalism in Apple design is a little too far. And Apple has always been further than ideal on that spectrum of normal tools that are visible to everything and ultra minimalist, totally unusable. Apple's always been closer to the totally unusable end of that spectrum. But they have taken an even bigger step in that direction. in the same way that like i think unedited johnny ive just made everything as thin as possible even at the expense of functionality i think unedited alan dye just hides everything behind menus modes and drawers of various sorts it's everything is hidden and it's not like it makes sense to hide behind a menu controls that literally cannot possibly fit any other way and ideally, you know, things that are not used that frequently.

1:32:54But that's not the case for these controls. There is room for the things they've taken away. They've taken them away and replaced them with nothing. But we didn't need that space to view a blurrier version of one mail title. We need that space because the reason we're in mail is to operate on our mail. And we need buttons to quickly operate on the mail. the icon that they got rid of in the music album view served a purpose and was also a button to change that purpose so if you wanted to download everything you could download everything with that one button now it's under a menu you want to see if this is in your library you gotta look you gotta check you wanna see if everything's downloaded you gotta scroll down and see are there little check marks next to every one of these songs in this album that's just loss of functionality and for what?

1:33:42nothing they literally replaced it with nothing they are decontenting the interface for superficial design screenshot reasons i guess but they're literally taking away functionality from our computers for what there has to be a good reason and they don't have one they're just doing it for minimalism's sake and that's bad design the sad thing is they had various times in their history and recent history pretty good solution to this like uh you know one of the things you're not saying is that like uh setting aside how hidden or revealed uh buttons are and how many functions you have to dig for there's also the question of and you kind of uh alluded to a little bit of like well which things are used frequently which are and which are obscure like this the people you know you archive messages all the time for me the main thing i do in my mail application is mark things as junk so it drives me bananas that and apple mail uh on the phone the the there's not a file of junk toolbar button visible at the top or whatever but anyway that you can as a designer application you can say these are probably the things people are going to do more frequently and these are things they're going to do less frequently and so if i have to bury something i'll bury the less frequent ones but the thing is uh you don't know what everybody wants so a good design would be we come up with what we think is a nice balance between beauty minimalism and the functions we think most people are going to use and then we allow the user to customize it because maybe if there's only room for one or two buttons at the top of their phone screen we can pick what we think that most people will want but if they don't like those one or two buttons they can customize it can you imagine a customizable toolbar where you could decide what appears in it in what order and you could arrange things into sections and you could decide whether you see icon or text or both they had that on mac os anyway and they could have something like that with the new design language across all their platforms a customizable configurable toolbar that they pick the defaults for and that if you don't like them and you want that little widget back in music you should be able to get it back and if you don't care about this stuff you just take whatever they give you fine it doesn't add any burden to the average user who's just going to take whatever interface apple wants but imagine if a they would make smarter choices about the defaults which by the way when they had configurable toolbars they It would often give you a whole default thing.

1:35:59So if you mess it up real bad, you can always just say, just go back to the default one that Apple said because I messed mine up. And B, that you can make it work exactly how you want because a really good tool is not just designed well out of the box, but also allows you to tune it for your purposes. If the main thing you do with your mail is archive or the main thing you do is file things into one of three folders or something, you could have buttons visible. Like you choose how to use that precious space at the top of the mail thing on your phone for the things that you do most frequently. and instead we get no options, no configurability and Apple's choices are hide everything away.

1:36:32It's like if you got into a new car and the steering wheel was shrunken and hidden inside the glove box. And for what reason? The steering wheel is out of your way. So when you want to steer, just open the glove box, lean over there and turn the little wheel. But isn't it great how the dashboard is so uncluttered when you get in the car? It's like, I have to steer. What do you think I opened the car for? I'm going to steer it. We've cleared away all this junk to make more space for your view of the road and the wall you're crashing into because you can't steer. Right. Right. And for the times when you need to steer, just go to the touchscreen, find the button that opens the glove box, reach in, find the little wheel and turn it.

1:37:04And that's when you want to make a turn. That's what you do. But the rest of the time, the steering wheel stays out of your way. Right. Like this, I feel like the design has gone too far. And I know this is like the constant Apple critique over time. They've gone too far for form over function. as I said at the beginning of the episode I think it's very important for Apple to keep updating their designs to look cool over time that's very important and as I said even if the only reason to do something is like to change the system theme is it looks cool that's a good enough reason they have to do that over time to stay cool and trendy and fresh and relevant I get that that is not mutually exclusive with usability and legibility of text and performance.

1:37:52You can have all of it. A good design is beautiful without having to turn on a bunch of accessibility options that you don't otherwise need. A good design has legible text without having to say, well, you've got to change it for this content, but it's going to fade and flash for this content. And a good design for a computer application gives you the controls you need right at hand for easy frequent access. This design that they have across the system can do all of those things. It is not incompatible with those goals. They just aren't doing it in a lot of cases. I do think that we need to keep pushing on this because we're not saying, revert the whole thing back, this sucks.

1:38:40We're not saying that. What we're saying is, okay, this is interesting. It looks pretty cool in some places. You've made some really bad decisions in other places. Let's revert those. and here's why that button you got rid of, you've actually made this worse. Here's why this super clear view on top of this text is not actually helpful and is actually causing problems. We have to tell them that. And as I said earlier too, I don't actually think most of this is going to change for this release cycle. I think most of what we see today is being released. Hopefully they'll fix most of the many animation and rendering bugs that are all across the systems, I hope, because there really are a lot and they're really bad but in the meantime design wise like we need to critique this because what they have done is a lot of cool stuff and a lot of bad stuff for no good reason and the bad stuff for no good reason for the most part is actually really easy to fix like one beta build they could fix a lot of these things yeah and maybe they will we'll see um this kind of reminds me of like you know i'm always following uh destiny and bungie and like uh in the gaming community it's if you think we complain about apple too much oh my like people who are ostensibly gamers and fans of games and game companies all they do online is complain about the companies and what they're doing and no matter what those companies do they're like you know you're not listening to us we're your players blah blah blah those game companies jump bungie in particular react so quickly to this kind of feedback it would make apple's head spin to give just one example i was thinking about it for buttons like you're like if you could just say like you took away all the buttons you put them in the dot dot menu like bring back one or two or let me pick what those one or two are do it in settings if you don't have a like imagine if instead apple said hey in the upcoming version of mail on ios 26 they said like three months ago we're thinking of uh having just a dot dot menu at the top and then people in the community complain they said that's bad why use the buttons that are up there don't put everything in a dot dot menu and then three weeks later apple said okay we've heard your feedback we're not going to put the three uh everything in the dot dot menu or we'll put the buttons back this is before the thing is released that happens to bungie all the time and people are so mad about it they're like oh bungie said they're going to take away you know take away one or two fragments from the prismatic warlock and we think they shouldn't do it they're talking about something's going to happen three months from now and they're mad because bungie told them they're going to do it and they complained about it and then bungie said like a week later yeah we're not doing that we're still going to take away some but we're not going to take away all the ones that we said before and then they're going to see what the feedback for that is and people are so mad at game companies because like they don't listen to us and they're so evil and i'm like imagine apple they don't tell us what they're gonna do when they do it it's obviously wrong and bad and we complain about it and we're just resigned to the fact that we're gonna have to use it until someone changes anyway follow up next week if they if or whatever they have the next build if they change this but uh yeah some some things are easy to change like this one hey don't put everything in the dot dot you have plenty of room put stuff up there some things are harder to change like a configurable toolbar system or settings or whatever some things may be impossible to change where if you want it to be glass and stuff shows through it's going to have to flash but we'll see how they do oh no the one control that i wanted to highlight from ios 26 which you know these controls are more or less the same everywhere for consistency but anyway uh sliders like when you have a volume slider or brightness slider not the ones in control center but like the slider control which has a essentially a track and then a thumb in the track that you move along the track that has looked many different ways over the course of the starting with mac os 10 even before that it's lots of different looks for that thing the look they have for it in the new design is so clearly touch focused because the thumb or whatever that you move in the track is very big by mac os standards it makes sense as a touch target that it would be roughly that big but it looks cumbersome and ugly i think on mac os but anyway setting that aside in ios uh like many of the controls throughout the new design when you grab the little thumb in the track it turns into liquid glass as and it becomes transparent um so you're like a dragon a water blob and then it becomes more solid slash frosty when you let go i think but anyway um what this means is that you can see in the track like the sort of like thermometer bar filling as you slide from like low brightness to high brightness some part of the track is filled with the blue color and some part of the track is not and as you slide the slider more of the track gets filled and nikki tonsky point tonsky points out i always imagine that it's the center of the thumb that points to the slider position turns out apple has a different idea so what he's saying is like that little thumb if you've been envisioning before it was made of water if you've been envisioning like okay wherever i drag this thumb on the slider the center of the thumb is where the setting is but if you do this on ios what you'll see if you move your finger out of the way because your finger would be covering this most of the time is that on when the slider is on the left the the blue bar is to the left of the thumb and when the slider is on the right the blue bar is to the right of the thumb only when the slider is dead in the middle is the blue bar in the middle of the thumb which is weird but a sort of natural consequence of the design they've chosen for how these sliders work and the fact that you can see through them i don't think it's a functional problem or an interface problem it's just weird well this is and this is like when you look at the actual like design of such a thing like metrics wise, this is how it has to work.

1:43:57Like otherwise, the track wouldn't fill the width. Like if the center of the scrubber was the value, then when you, like if it's at the far left, then the scrubber would be off the left edge of the track. Well, it's only the way it has to work with this scrubber because this scrubber is very wide. Like Mac OS scrubbers used to be very thin, so you didn't have to do that. So really what you basically need is, I need 50 % of the scrubber to be off the edge of the track. And with a narrow scrubber, you can easily do that. Or with a scrubber, like the Mac OS ones used to come to a point at the bottom.

1:44:30Like anyway, you just need half the scrubber to be off the track, but the scrubber is so wide that if half the scrubber was off the track, it would be like blocking the symbols on either side of the scrubber. All right. Anything else about iOS 26? Good deal. iPad OS 26. I freaking love it. It's not perfect. It's got problems. It's got lots of animation problems. It's got lots of rendering problems. I've had Backboard D crashes. I've had Springboard crashes. It's a mess, and I love it. Because for the first time, I really think that the iPad is starting to embrace what makes it good, which is to say, kind of a macOS Lite.

1:45:08And that may sound insulting. I don't mean it that way at all. I am loving it. I don't think I said this on the show last week, but I saw somewhere, somebody had tweeted at me, and I can't recall where it was or who it was. But if you're on iPad, particularly on an 11-inch iPad like I am, somewhere in settings, I think in accessibility, you can change, or maybe it's in display, you can change to the more space option for the display, which basically cranks up the resolution ever so slightly and makes a world of difference on how much real estate you have to work with. So if you're playing around with iOS 26, especially on a smaller iPad, I strongly suggest doing that.

1:45:47Additionally, we're going to talk about this maybe a little bit later, but Stage Manager might be good. I don't know what to make of this. And this is an initial gut reaction, but I flipped on stage manager earlier today. And I think it's not utter trash. And I'm really uncomfortable with that opinion, to be honest with you. But nevertheless, I am loving iPadOS 26. I am really looking forward to future betas when they get a lot of these rendering issues and springboard crashes and whatnot squared away. But absolutely loving it. And if you're someone who does not use your iPad as your primary computing device, then it's safe to upgrade.

1:46:28And honestly, even if you do use it as your primary computing device, it might be worth the upgrade because it's so good. But reading from John's prepared show notes, in front of the show, Steve Trouton Smith writes, if there's a limit to the number of open windows you can have on iPadOS 26, I haven't found it in the simulator yet. Expose just keeps on going. And then later, oh, it's 12. The limit is 12 on an M4 iPad. Further windows get pushed into the recent carousel instead, but they return to the saved window sized when you tap them. i mean i think 12 is pretty legit for a screen that is not terribly big sure it could be more but i think that's pretty reasonable yeah i feel like that is like what's making that limit uh how much i keep getting this wrong and i didn't look it up again but how much ram does the m4 ipad have i don't recall with a small start like look this when we'll get to this when we talk about the uh the press stuff but like talking about how ipads uh resource limits are why there was all these limitations on windowing like in some respects that makes sense and they can you know cite historical precedent and where the ipad came from and how it has less ram than max and still does and like it makes sense okay but on the other hand i don't know you guys remember take a guess at what the minimum ram for mac os 10 10.0 was oh gosh i don't even want to think about it one gig maybe 512 i don't even know casey got anything it was what let me see what year was This was like 2001.

1:47:56Oh, boy. I'm going to say, I forget what RAM was, but I'm going to say maybe like 256 megs. I think less than that. I think 64 megs. But gosh, that was so long ago. I don't know. I'm going by memory. I don't think I put it in the notes. It was 128, I think. Megabytes. Meg-a-bytes. Not one gigabyte. Not eight gigabytes. Not four gigabytes. Not 16 gigabytes. Not 512 megabytes. 128 megabytes. and that was a complete windowing operating system with no limit on the number of windows you could have and by the way it had a compositing window manager which was very new for the time and it was software driven because it wasn't gpu accelerated at that point and yeah it was slow and everything but the point is mac os 10 in 2001 and 10.0 on 128 meg machine did not limit the number of windows you had to have and they the resolution of screens then maybe they weren't as high as a as an m4 ipad but they weren't that low and you could have a huge number and i'm not saying that os was doing the same things as the ipad is but what i am saying is that if there are reasons for limitations for an m4 ipad pro in terms of number of windows i don't really accept ram or cpu performance to be one of them the m4 and that ipad is so much faster than every cpu and any mac for decades running mac os 10 and has more ram than almost all of them the only reason that makes sense to for limitations is oh it's a small screen and that would be too cluttered uh there were 12 inch 11 inch max that also didn't have window limits you could buy an 11 inch macbook air and mac os didn't suddenly say you can only have 12 windows right so they're i mean they've made a big step here but i think and it's letting you use them but i don't even know what he's talking about with the recents carousel like i i kind of understand why you might want to not open the floodgates and say unlimited windows because people can get themselves into real trouble and one of the things that makes the ipad not the mac is it is supposed to help people not get themselves into trouble so i kind of get it i don't really care that much about the 12 limit it seems reasonable to me i do have a little bit of pushback on anything having to say well it's because they don't uh use swap or because they don't have enough ram or because you know their like the m4 is just so much more powerful you put like 50 or 100 macs back in the quote-unquote heyday of early mac os 10 they wouldn't be able to touch an m4 so and now again i know they're not doing the same thing i know things are much fancier now i know they got liquid glass i know they've got all this other fancy stuff but it's just i hope they figure something out there because even though 12 seems like a lot and it's plenty for our first run i can imagine ipad power users wanting to have especially with stage manager which i'm not surprised that you like stage manager casey because my understanding again i haven't even used this just read about it my understanding that essentially with the new windowing system is a stage manager has sort of become spaces for ipad basically it's still got that sidebar situation on the left with like uh tilted thumbnails of the different spaces but you can hide that can't you well this is the thing and i i think this is probably user error i'm not necessarily saying that there's anything wrong with stage manager or the os or anything like that but it seems to be there sometimes and not either sometimes and i haven't cracked the code on when it shows up and when it hides again probably a casey issue but it's very very fickle and i don't and i don't understand it but yes on mac os you can just straight up hide it it's a setting i don't know what it is but anyway like what it means is that in stage manager you still have the full freedom of like rearranging the windows with the new window system and ipad os 26 it's just that now there are different sets of them that you can rotate between so it's kind of like spaces for right and i am a devout user of spaces on every platform.

1:51:34And so I was using the multitasking without a slide or gosh, I keep saying spaces and slide over. I was using the multitasking without stage manager for several days. And I do really, really like it. But I want I wanted to effectively have spaces, which is to say, you know, different virtual screens, if you will. And apparently, the only way to really get that in iPadOS is with stage manager. And so just like I said earlier today, I flipped it on. And initial impressions are. I like it. It does work well. It works way better than it did in prior versions of iPadOS, but it's still not clicked for me yet.

1:52:08And I'm hopeful that over time, I will understand a little better what the ins and outs of it are. But I think I'm going to stick with it, at least for now. One thing I will say is that I was a moderate user of SlideOver on iPadOS, everything but 26. This is where you can slide from the extreme right-hand side of the screen, left a little bit and you can put an app over there so it's kind of like hanging out on top of everything else but not you know not taking up too much space and i use this from time to time particularly for one password that was a really convenient place to use it or way to use it but it is dead in ipad os 26 no matter how you slice it slide over is gone and i know a lot of people are very unhappy about this yeah i'm pretty unhappy too because this is the the one feature of the pre-ios 26 sort of windowing stuff that I used a lot.

1:52:57And here's the thing, like it would fit in perfectly with their windowing system because slide over the way they used to do it is very limited. You got to go to three tap menu. You have to say, show this app and slide over. It goes to a specific spot. It gets a specific width, like it was very regimented before. But you can think of it as just like, this is just part of a window manager. I should be able to take literally any window of any size, bring it to any screen edge and do a thing that says, hey window i want you to hide just off screen over there and if i swipe in from the window edge in the area where you're hiding poke yourself back out and then when i swipe you back in hide yourself away that's slide over like you could do that orbit you could do that on the mac it's a little bit harder because you can't like swipe from the screen edge a little bit weird with the cursor like on the ipad you can literally go from like where the screen is not to where it is so i get this is more touch focus but like that's just a window management feature of hide a window off screen and have a gesture to make it come back on screen and then go back off screen any window any size any edge i'm not saying they should do that that's a lot right but it what i'm saying is it slide over still fits in with the like the other option the like it's like full screen apps and the other option is like you know this full screen app stage manager and like you know do whatever you want with windows it fits in with the most pro like power user one it also i I think fits in with the everything full screen because you can have everything full screen and still have a single thing very limited in slide over just like it was before.

1:54:25So it's kind of, I'm not quite sure why they got rid of it because it seems to fit with everything they've done. Like it's not like, well, they have this new system and slide over doesn't work at all. So I do hope they bring it back. I hope they bring it back somewhere. By the way, my main use case is full screen video that I'm watching, but social media timeline, if I'm watching some like reality a TV show they don't have to pay too much attention to. I get a two screen experience on my one screen by swiping over and having like a Mastodon timeline while full screen video plays. Yes, I'm blocking part of the video, but it's like some dumb reality show.

1:54:55So who cares? So here's hope and slide over makes a comeback. If not this year, then maybe next. All right. Testing liquid glass in the Apple developer site. There's a link about UI design requires compatibility. And it reads, if yes, the system runs the app using a compatibility mode for UI elements, the compatibility mode displays the app as it looks when built against previous versions of the SDKs. So even if you're running on iOS 26 with this on, your app looks like it was built for iOS 18, but it was built for 26 and is running on 26. If no, the system uses the UI design of the running os with no compatibility mode absence of the key or no is the default value for apps linking against the latest sdks warning temporarily use this key while reviewing and refining your apps ui for the design in the latest sdks i think they might have even announced like next year this thing will no longer be honored but yeah the reason they have to have this in here is because it's not just that your stuff looks different the metrics are different meaning things are different within height and it will just blow up your layouts if you have not if you don't didn't expect these buttons to be two pixels taller than they are and this thing to be inset by this amount like it will break your layouts if you're not careful and so they want to have a way i mean obviously existing apps don't have this problem if you just don't recompile it because they're linking against the old sdk which means they'll just look like they did and they'll look ugly and won't fit in with the os and hopefully they'll be updated but even if you want to use new features you're building against the new sdk you're using new features but you don't have time to relay out every single view in your app you can put this flag on to give yourself a little more breathing room until you can go in and as we uh not worst case scenario but as we expected when there's a big design change you have to revisit every single screen in your app to make sure it still looks okay and to look at to see if there's any place for improvement this is before you even did the stuff the market was talking about was like well maybe i need to redesign my app to fit in better with the os just with your old design the way it was is all the text still readable do all the controls still fit on the screen can i see all the stuff that i expected to see is the layout broken in some way uh this one key if you're a developer will save you from doing that work for a little bit longer yeah but ultimately like you're gonna have to do it i'm telling you like or never or never update your app again that's your other option right yeah like either way like you know and and you will start looking old very very quickly starting this fall so if you're if you're wondering right now should i redesign my app the answer is yes you definitely should redesign your app to to handle all this stuff the only question is how quickly can you do it so if it's going to take you a while this might help you out um but don't make it take too long yep and then steve troughton smith found something interesting uh he writes apple is now referring to the vision pro as vision pro 4k in all of its developer tools which suggests that there will be a new vision pro that's not 4k in the not too distant future interesting weird i mean like apple tv 4k makes sense because it went from hd 1080 to 4k as we've discussed many times in the past when going to the minutiae of vision pros displays 4k ish but there's two of them and does that mean it's 4k or is it 8k the thing this makes me think about is um you know as as uh steve points out very uh politically there will be a new vision pro that is not 4k will it be less than 4k yeah more than 4k i mean honestly it needs both like it needs there needs to be a cheaper vision pro it also desperately needs more resolution than what it has i wouldn't say desperately but your point is still fair that i think it needs to be there should definitely be one with more pixels but i'm i worry that less will take it outside the realm of not viability but like i do feel kind of like the what they shipped is like a minimum viable resolution so i know they need to make a cheaper one i really hope they don't do it by sacrificing resolution because it's like at a certain point the like the virtual mac thing stops being useful when you start taking away pixels like if you take away half or three quarters of the pixels i don't know well but like okay we we heard rumblings and rumors and supply chain estimates that the little 4k screens inside the vision pro the screens alone were like 1500 worth of cost in the vision pro um and i don't know i don't know what that is today but that that was one thing we heard one time who knows if that's real but regardless if it is or not like totally accurate that tells you those screens certainly are very expensive, possibly the most expensive components in the Vision Pro.

1:59:42Now, you look at something like, you know, the Quest series of headsets, they're much lower resolution, but that entire headset can sell for a few hundred bucks. So obviously, we're talking about a very different component price when you drop resolution. And if you want to make a cheaper Vision Pro, we can look at a lot of other ways to do it. Obviously, get rid of the stupid eye display on the outside that's going to save some cost get you know maybe change some of the materials to be you know simpler you know maybe more plastic which would save some weight and save some cost and be easier to work with people who were ember like people were disassembling the vision pro when it first came out and they had said like this is the most complex product ever produced for the consumer ish market like it's so cut like the manufacturing of it is so complicated Maybe they can simplify things by simplifying certain shapes or giving uncertain design details.

2:00:35Does the thing have to be curved in a certain way? Maybe not. So there's all sorts of ways that they can make a cheaper Vision Pro. But all of those might be very small savings relative to those damn little 4K postage stamps that are super expensive. So if they really want to cut this thing down in price and they really, really need to, if what it takes is to go down to a resolution class that is closer or equal to what the quest succeeds very well in having, okay, fine. Like there's lots of use cases for the Vision Pro that don't need like super high res everything. everything if what you're actually doing with it mostly is like watching movies or stuff like that then who cares like you can go much lower resolution for a lot of that stuff and it's mostly doable especially if that can cut the price down to like a thousand bucks so but but i think if you're going to have if you want to have the price down that low there's no way you do it without cutting the resolution right now I mean I don't know how much those screens cost I heard that they were switching from Sony to a different vendor i think maybe lg or samsung or somebody so sony is not known for its low price uh but you know the volumes are still not great so i don't know the thing i have probably it's like you know like the apple tv are you gonna go to 1080 no that's too that's like those those uh what are those glasses that you wear those uh like sunglass type things like that's like 1080 is too little i feel like but you know if that's like if the price really hasn't come down we'll see anyway i'm hoping that they're calling it 4k because the next one will be like 6k or something and i really hope they don't go below that but we shall see i for one am looking forward to the vision amateur all right thank you to our sponsors this week hellofresh and squarespace and thanks for our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join one of the perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're talking about how apple did press interviews for this WDC.

2:02:39They didn't do the talk show. They did a whole bunch of other interviews. We're going to talk about that, kind of what they said, why they did what they did, etc. That's going to be on Overtime this week. Thank you so much to everybody for listening. You can join if you want to hear Overtime at atp.fm slash join, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:02:59Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-G, Marco, R-M-E, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So, John, I did not follow directions because you were not explicit in your directions. I was very explicit.

2:04:06Sorry, I knew you were going to jump on me as soon as I said that out loud. Let me rephrase. You were not explicit in your written directions in the internal show notes. All it says is favorite things from WWDC 2025, of which I came up with a list of like 10 items. But then you reminded me that you had asked for N items. In my spoken directions. Yes. It should be easier to remember. And by the way, the reason it's plural is because there's three of us. So if we each bring one item, that would be three items. That is fair. John, would you like to go first? What is your favorite thing? No, I want you to go first because you did the most homework here.

2:04:42Oh, all right. Well, I mean, I was – So pick, you know, rank them. Pick your favorite one, then we'll go to Marco, then we'll go to me. All right. I think my favorite is Stage Manager – or not Stage Manager, excuse me, the new iPadOS stuff, including Stage Manager, as just discussed a moment ago. So, but since we already talked about that, I'm going to claim that is already covered. I got to tell you, I don't know if it's my favorite, but it does jump out at me amongst things that I've actually tried so far, because I have a list of things that I think I will really enjoy, but I haven't tried them yet.

2:05:12Amongst the things I've actually tried, one of the few things I've done with the new Vision OS is create a new persona. If you recall, the persona is how they represent you when you're on like a FaceTime call because your face has a huge freaking set of goggles in front of it. And the very first version was real bad and real deep in the uncanny valley. Then they revamped it and it got pretty good. I mean, if you're leaving aside the fact that Mike's beard prevents him from opening his mouth as he's talking, it was pretty good. And in Vision OS 26, they have redone it yet again. And I got on a call with Jason Snell a couple yesterday, yesterday, uh, for a little bit.

2:05:53And I got to tell you, these things look real good. We have very much come out of the uncanny Valley and we are back onto one of the peaks because they look incredible. So if you happen to be a person that either has a vision, a pro in your life or know someone with a vision pro ask them, you know, once they get the new OS or put the bait on, you know, or whatever, you know, set up a new persona and get on a FaceTime call with them. It is very surprising how good it looks. And one of the greatest advantages is the original personas, they were basically, they weren't literally flat, but they were kind of effectively flat.

2:06:27You only really looked at the top or excuse me, the front of your face, and they would have you look up a little bit and down a little bit. So they could kind of at least give the indication of you, for example, nodding or whatever the case may be. But now they capture or perhaps just process a lot more of your head. So you can actually look to the side and your entire head is there rather than it just kind of fading out like back to the future style. It's really, really good. And amongst these things I've experienced, that's probably my favorite so far. All right, I think we said you wanted Marco next and you'll finish up, is that right?

2:07:01Mm-hmm. All right, my favorites so far, transcription. The transcription API. Oh, good, have you played with it? Of course I have. It's the very first thing I did. Sorry, what I meant to say is have you reached conclusions so far, even tentative conclusions? Tentatively. I haven't tested it on a huge variety of input audio yet. But so far, the transcription API seems very fast and good enough. It's not as good as the biggest, most aggressive server-side models, but it runs on my phone for free really fast and it's very close to the quality of the best models in my testing so far so that's amazing and this will allow me to build some cool stuff it's not you know i'm not gonna be able to build everything perfectly doing it constantly because that would just be too much power um but i can do a lot with this i like a lot and i'm very very very happy about that.

2:08:06That's super exciting. Genuinely, I hope I don't sound sarcastic because that's really, really cool. I don't know if you saw, but John Voorhees did a write-up about it. And his son, I think it was Finn, forgive me if it wasn't Finn, but one of his sons put together an open source command line wrapper around the new APIs, Yap. And so you can play with that if you want. I haven't had the chance to play with this yet. One of the things I think all three of us want to do at some point is to provide um to provide transcripts for our episodes and there were two major reasons why at least i didn't want to yet uh number one it was a pain in the butt and took forever to do and number two nothing that i'm aware of does uh speaker definite or speaker differentiation whisper does it now oh does it okay i didn't realize descript or descript or however you pronounce it has also done it for a while but that's it's not as easy to hook into that as it is to whisper but i'm i'm in the the same camp that speaker recognition is like essential like it's like without that as you know i know we have there's a bunch of like uh fans have made really cool search sites that's like find the episode where somebody said blah but for an actual transcript you really need to know who's speaking so i've just been waiting patiently for that technology to get to the point where it's really reliable because i think as we've discussed the past episodes i think all of our voices are very distinct and computers should be able to tell us apart yeah obviously transcribing a show like this with where we have lots of uh proper nouns and weird programming terms may be challenging but i feel like we'll get there eventually but uh as of pre-wwdc i i feel like technology technology slash cost benefit analysis wasn't quite there but as marco points out well what if everyone just has it on their phone for free that really changes the equation it really does and also and i haven't i haven't yet gotten too much of a chance to play with the on-device llm either but from what from the little bit i have seen from sessions and from early reports from other people the on-device llm is also no joke it's really really good for a lot of things not of course not everything this is still a model that runs on your phone so it's not going to be as good as like the flagship models that run in giant data centers on these giant nvidia things but for it running on your phone locally offline for free, that's a lot of big advantages.

2:10:31And there's a lot you can do. I'd like to build on that just a teeny bit. I think most of the people listening to this show probably know exactly what you're talking about. But the thing of it is, is that if I wanted to do some trick, you know, LLM based stuff to do some processing and call sheet, that would require something that, you know, like an LLM. If I were to do that today, then what I would need to do is communicate something across the network and make a request to like chat gpt's api or something like that which has a non-zero cost and you spread that across all your users and that can really start to add up fast and additionally you're going across the network so it's not going to be as fast as it would be if it was on your device there's a lot of reasons why this becomes cumbersome to do today but by virtue of this speech framework for transcription stuff and then they're they're shoot, what's the name of the framework?

2:11:19The foundation framework? Foundation models. Thank you. By virtue of having that on device, that means that a lot of the reasons that I would have not to do this go away because of what Marco was just describing. It's effectively free. It's on the device. It doesn't require me to pay any more money. It doesn't require a network request, generally speaking. So a lot of the things that I felt kind of handcuffed me have now gone away. Now, in the case of CallSheet, I'm not sure if I'm ever going to use this. I'm noodling through a couple of ideas here and there. But the fact that this is possible, and to build on what Marco said again, my understanding is it's actually a pretty good system.

2:12:00You know, it's not perfect, like Marco said, but it's pretty robust. That is very exciting. And even if CallSheet doesn't use it very heavily, or even if Overcast doesn't use it very heavily, which that is not what Marco said. I'm just, you know, putting words in his mouth now. even if we don't there's a lot of we are not the ones that are leveraging it there's a lot of apps that will and that's really really exciting. Yeah and I think there's going to be like one of the really cool things they did was this generable macro where as the app developer you don't have to say please output valid JSON and then try to decode it.

2:12:36No they actually like they allow you to annotate your custom data structures in your app and you can describe what each field needs and means in the data structure and then you can say generate these as the output of whatever prompt you're giving it that was super slick so it like properly fills out your data structures based on how you're describing what what their different fields mean that's really cool and so i think what we're going to see is i think we're going to see a lot of apps using this for all sorts of stuff yeah i i think it's gonna be really exciting and i i have i go back and forth about my opinions on ai and llms and whatnot but this to me is almost entirely upside and i'm really looking forward to thinking about how i can leverage it and to see how others are leveraging it another example of this is and i don't know if i think i might have brought this up last week and i don't know if i'll be able to find the the tweet but uh ryan ashcraft i from uh food noms which i think sponsored once maybe back in the day, but it's certainly a great app, was using this to come up with an example icon for a food that you create or something like that.

2:13:48And that's so silly, but it's so nice. And it makes things just a touch better. And that's a great example of a little place that you might not even realize is using this new onboard LLM technology. And yet it'll make food noms just a touch better. And that's pretty great. All right. Anything else from you, Marco, at this particular moment we might come back around we'll see but uh all right john what is your one and only one john favorite yes i thought this would be a good after show just because i knew that most of the main show is going to be all these weird issues and things that we've learned about the os so let's pick our favorite things i didn't think this would be a big challenge for me but then when i thought about like oh i should come up with a favorite thing for myself it's not that i didn't like things at wwdc but there's no one thing that stands out a lot as my big favorite thing and there's a lot of stuff like when i've gone through all the sessions this is not a year this you know every developer is different but this is not a year where i see something like oh i wanted that api forever marco was in that camp this year with the transcription that happens you know like the last time i remember it happening is obviously not as important as the transcription thing marco's talking about but it was the uh uh rounded rectangle with uneven rounding on the corners from like two years ago so i could make switch glass with uh with uh corners that aren't rounded its screen edges which is the thing i wanted to do but i couldn't do unless i totally totally took over custom drawing and i didn't want to bother with them like oh apple will probably eventually do this and i did and i was so happy nothing like that for me this year everything that i've seen even when i think it's going to be something that i can use i try it and i just find the bugs in it and i find out it doesn't work for me and then i file the feedback so i just go back to my old code and and like i said all of my apps need to be updated i mean all of them like they were not not that they weren't shippable but i would never want any of my users to use my apps the way they looked uh recompiled with the new sdk on tahoe so i'm in there doing a lot of work and i do actually enjoy working on my apps and in some ways it's kind of fun to have a project because i'm not adding features i'm just sort of making sure they're all updated with the new design and look look reasonable at least um i guess if i had to pick in that work that i'm doing sort of you know my one favorite thing is like getting to work on all my apps and updating them because i am actually like finding issues and bugs that's another fun thing especially like in hyperspace which is an app that only ever shipped on one os because it requires mac os 15 that's the only os it has ever run on suddenly my app is running on two os's 15 and 26 and it just takes one more different version to find a bunch of little bugs that are like oh yeah i didn't notice that bug because it works fine in 15 but it actually was a bug in my code and now that i see it running on 26 it behaves a little bit differently and i can fix it so i'm actually improving my apps um but as you might imagine or might not have thought about but i certainly did the second i started hearing about this redesign i have an app called switch glass that puts a transparent glass thing with apps in it on your screen i'm gonna use the glass texture as one of the options it's already configurable with a bunch of deprecated constants that apple doesn't want me to use but i put in the pop-up menu because they look cool guess what there's a new item called glass although i am again tinged with strange disappointment if you watch the sessions you know okay there's two kinds of glass though there's the regular glass and there's the clear glass and clear glasses they have some mumbo jumbo where it's appropriate like they show it on like video player controls it's fine for clear glass to be video control player controls because it's totally illegible but whatever you can still see them they're huge but don't use it anywhere else because clear glass is super clear but i'm like all right well fine i'll put in an option on my pop menu for regular glass and clear glass but i think on mac os clear glass doesn't exist it's just glass you don't get to use the clear kind which is kind of disappointing so and i guess maybe the other random thing and like my one item is like i can't find a favorite there's no big standout but my other one is like swift 6.2 whichever you know swift is developed in the open if you want to follow it for the entire year you can you'll know exactly what's going to launch in uh wwc because it's developed in the open it's like literally open source you can download it but you don't get to use that in xcode until apple ships it and now 6.2 is available in xcode 6.2 has lots of features that make strict concurrency a lot nicer 6.2 fix some concurrency bugs that were in 6 and 6.1 which caused my code not to compile anymore but hey those were bugs in my code before that now i get to fix so yeah my like my one item is that there is no big big item for me but it's not because i'm sad about anything it's because this is not a year where there's something that's rocking my world from wwc it's mostly just i get to update all my apps which is fun to work in a new design and the language gets updated and yada yada i wish i was more enthusiastic about the look and feel tahoe like i said the best i can say about it is that using it it's not like the end of the world it's fine right it's just not my favorite i mean i've been through this before there's lots of versions of mac os 10 that were not my favorite looks wise and they come and go and get refined and changed.

2:18:47So right now I'm beta one. I'm not that big of a fan, but I'm actually surprised myself at how much of a non-event it is for me to be using literally every day this week, Tahoe, like basically all day. And it just seems normal to me. So I don't know. I've obviously not followed my own rules with my single favorite, but I really feel like my one thing is like, I can't pick a favorite. And it's not because WWC was bad. It's just because of where I am with my apps. That's it. Yeah, the revamp of strict concurrency or whatever, I am really amped about that. Because to oversimplify, and I'm probably going to get a couple of the technical facts wrong, but the general gist is it used to assume once you started using async await that, oh, everything in this app could be on any thread and on any actor.

2:19:38You'll never know where it's running. And so you have to super protect everything. And now there's a new default, which you can opt into for an older app that says, hey, just assume everything is running on the main thread and explicitly state when it isn't going to be. And again, I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but that's a general gist. And that should make adopting strict concurrency so much easier because I and I continued to kick that can down the road. And I am kind of glad I did. this is a case of the marco patented procrastination for the wind sort of situation where you know i i probably shouldn't have waited this long but hey man it's worked out great so uh that is on the list of things to do this summer is to properly embrace that that's not even the thing that i'm talking about though because i'm already on swift uh strict currency and actually that that mode isn't particularly useful to me it's all the other stuff of like hey strict concurrency used to complain about this because it couldn't figure out that it was actually safe but now it can and apple annotating all its apis because if i just wrote a swift six app in isolation with none of apple's apis it's pretty easy to do but you've got to use api you've got to use apis for the platform to actually make an app and those apis were some of them are written in the 90s like they're not not all properly annotated or if they are properly annotated they're annotated in a way that makes your life miserable because things are not like this is non-isolated and you can't change the fact that it's not isolated but you have to hop on to a different actor to do the thing that you want and it's just there's lots of places where you're like i really have to ug up my code here to make this work because this is there's no async await version of this it's a callback base the api the callback is non-isolated but i have to access data that's confined to either an actor or a main actor or one of my own actors and i can't even get at that data from the non-isolated thing without hopping actors but it has to do it synchronously but this is not an async function so i can't await it and it's just that stuff as apple updates its apis and as apple improves swift to be able to be smarter about figuring out when something is actually safe that's the thing that makes my life easier and again my hyperfresh is already swift six concurrency like it has been from day five maybe so it's not it's not a big deal for me but it did actually find bugs in my code by fixing bugs and swift concern concurrency that used to allow me to do things that were technically unsafe so thumbs up all around like dev tools like and the thing is i'm doing this on an intel mac i don't even get to see or use the new like lm things i think i should be able to use the chat gpt one but it wasn't working for me it might be a beta bug but i'm not even benefiting from all that stuff because it's arm only right just xcode with the new sdk and the you know the new version of swift and apple's updated apis uh that i've been enjoying doing development for the past weekend Beep beep beep.