652: You Have 24 Hours to Comply

31:25all right let's talk uh better news tahoe beta 5 apparently has improved the checkbox contrast so if you recall last episode i think it was last episode we talked about the dialogue that says right folder and trash the folder trash is currently in the trash uh and then there's a checkbox do not show this message again except you couldn't see the checkbox like i'm looking at it again knowing full well full well where it is and i can barely make it out well now in beta 5 looks a lot better. Yeah, we know beta 6 is out now. This is Screenshot from beta 5. I think it has retained its contrast in beta 6, but yes, they have fixed the completely invisible checkbox to being the little bit too low contrast checkbox that we all dreamed it could be.

32:09Well said. All right, with regard to the iOS betas, and specifically beta 6, reading from MacRumors, the lock screen clock has been updated with additional transparency allowing more of the background to peek through. the clock also has more of a 3d floating look which is in line with the rest of the liquid glass design i think this is notable we'll link to the mac rumor story where you can see these screenshots it's notable because i feel like the you know like oh you know they'll they'll roll something out and they'll tweak it during the betas the tweaking the the let's say the attempt to make things legible seems to have peaked depending on which part of which os you're looking at sometime in the past, because now a lot of the tweaks have been going in the other direction.

32:50So here's iOS beta six, making, for example, the gigantic clock on the lock screen, less legible. I don't think it's illegible. It's really big. You can still kind of read it, but it is less legible. So you're thinking, oh, they'll during the course of the beta, they'll fix things and it will just get better and better. No, sometimes because there was like the backlash of like, now it's not liquid enough. Now it's not glass enough. Right. And so we are, you know regardless of what changes before release people saying oh this is it it's not going to change for release i think it will change but i think now the changes the average of all the positive and negative changes this is going to average out to be like this is like we're just going you know we're pushing and shoving a little bit to the left a little bit to the right a little bit to the left a little bit to the right without any clear direction of like let's improve legibility everywhere so yeah it is what it is maybe we'll have to wait for like this is this is the big wild card i've heard lots of discussions about this online um how will people who don't listen to tech podcasts react to this again i you know everyone is citing rightly so i think the ios uh 18 photos thing everybody in the tech nerd circles knew about the photos app and ios 18 and we discussed it along with the rest of the features on ios 18 and it wasn't any more or less notable than any of the other changes but boy when it hit the the like the general public that was the thing that they cared about and noticed and so it's very difficult to predict how you know i don't want to say regular people how non-tech nerds how non-tech enthusiasts are going to react when this starts appearing on their devices especially if they're buying a new iphone this fall and it comes with this os and there's no option i'm going through this right now with my daughter because she's going to get a new phone for college but like oh you should wait until the 17s come out like it's so close just you know we'll get a 17 when they come out i have to have the discussion with i have to have the talk which is like you know if you get an iphone 17 you'll have no choice but to use ios 26 you can't put the older os let's just know what ios 26 is right you can't put the os that you're used to on it so do you want to get a 16 now or do you want to get a 17 later knowing that you have to use this keeping in mind there's no going back like you know eventually you're going to have to get a phone that probably event unless you use that phone for seven or ten years or however long this uh uh liquid glass hangover lasts like you're gonna you're gonna have to do it someday but yeah i'm i'm just this is like the the uh the thing that i am paying the most attention to with this os release is not so much like me using the os's or whatever but it is seeing what the public reaction partially because yes i'm having this this wonderful sliver of hope like maybe the the general public will hate it so much they'll actually fix it uh because obviously the feedback from developers and stuff has caused them to uh for the first few betas make things more legible and then say we did enough let's just you know and yeah i feel like this is the extent of you know how much can feedback from developers and podcasters and tech websites and people inside apple how much can that influence what apple's going to launch and we're at the limit of that now and somewhat rightfully so because at a certain point you're like look this is a the audience that is currently using the betas is not representative of the public we're committed to this design let's not let's not pre-declare it a failure and lose our courage let's ship what we have and see how it goes like i understand that ethos that's wrong like i disagree with it but like you can't you can't be in the mindset of like oh no a couple developers don't like it we need to really backpedal no ship your 1.0 and uh you know reap what you sell i i have a bit of a different take off so first of all you know the difference in legibility on the lock screen clock in betas five and six i can't use my clock anymore on my phone like so i have the always on screen but that when the always on screen is in like dim mode it just has a black background not just a dim version of the wallpaper in betas five and six you that you get a very translucent clock placed upon a black background so you basically have like almost total darkness and the clock see like the widgets are way brighter you can see all your widget content just fine and the clock is barely visible I hope they change this but that being said we are at the point now this OS is very likely to ship in a month or less like we are at the finish line it is probably going to ship within the first two weeks of September it is mid August like We are less than a month probably away from this OS shipping.

37:26We are probably, I would say, at most two or three betas away from the GM release. So what we have now, they're not going to be making major changes to this. John was right. The feedback from us, we had our time. We had a very narrow window to influence minor changes. They were never going to make major changes. That's not how Apple works. When they put out a design, they say, this is the direction we're going, period. As well, they should. Like I said, like that's the right attitude. You can't like do something and then get real scared and just reverse it all before the public sees it. Well, I mean that does presume I think a higher level of care and craft that we're seeing with this.

38:05I mean it presumes the design is good, which I disagree with. But, you know, like as a general philosophy, I would say that if you come up with a design, take your feedback, make your tweaks, but let the public see it. Like because again, we are not a representative audience. Correct. You know, there was no chance that after they showed this off in June, there was no chance of them saying, oh, never mind, we're not going to do liquid glass. Like, that wasn't going to happen. And there was no chance of major changes. They did do a few minor ones. Here we are in beta 6, and there are still a large number of animation bugs, which are concerning to me.

38:39There are still, like, there's still, like, you know, designs and components and animations and APIs that I try to use. and when i use them there's animation bugs and i'm like well if it ships like this i can't ship this yeah and you can't assume it's going to be fixed like you just can't that's the thing that if you're not a software developer you don't understand like you think like oh i'm working in a beta sdk and there's a bug but it'll be fine by release you can never make that assumption it's just not safe because what's going to happen if it's not you just wait until the last beta and it's not fixed now you got to rewrite your app in a scramble exactly so what we have like whatever we have today in beta 6 like chances are most of what you see is shipping like there's very little time to fix much else and the only things that will be likely to be fixed between now and shipping are like very small things or critical bugs like that's the stage we're at in this secondly i hate to tell you all out there who are you know like us old um but i think people are going to like this just fine i don't think there's going to be a big backlash against it the only thing that i suspected there'd be a big big backlash against is its performance it is much slower especially on older phones but even on like modern phones like the frame rates the animations are still not great they're still dropped frames they're still again they're still animation bugs but like it was very illuminating when my son installed the beta on his phone without asking me first whether he should do it when he installed the beta he likes it and young people tend to look at this and say that's really cool i like it's all clear it looks cool i think we're gonna see that approach that reaction from most people i think most people are gonna think it looks fresh and new and cool i don't think we're gonna see a big backlash about the design itself again performance probably or maybe but the design itself i think this is just gonna be people are going to say this is cool on the mac i think it might go a little bit worse than that um just because i think it's a significantly worse design on the mac um but on the iphone people are going to be fine and or they're even going to like it and i think we as nerds who who feel a little bit more ambivalent about it i think we need to prepare ourselves that we're gonna we are already and we're going to be in the minority in our opinions of this os compared to everyone else who's going to think it's cool um and i think that's you know what i'm trying to do as a developer here is just try to embrace the design and try to do a good job of adopting it for my app so you know one of the one of the ways i'm doing that is like my mini player redesign you know if you look at the overcast app and on ios ios 18 now like the part that looks the most out of place in my opinion the part that looks the oldest when you're used to 26 is those solid top and bottom bars and the navigation screens and you know the bottom bar being the mini player so of course i'm I'm redesigning the mini player to be a liquid glass blob design.

41:38But I can do things. It's within my control to adjust that blob and to figure out what I'm going to put on the blob and what I'm going to put behind the blob. So one thing I'm doing is I am not setting up the design in such a way that will scroll brightly colored artwork behind text in the blob. So in the mini player, the album artwork is on the left now. You know what else is on the left in the content behind it? All the other album artwork in the list. So when you're scrolling the list, making a bunch of images show behind the glass, it's only showing those images behind what's on top of the glass, an image.

42:18So the issues of having brightly colored images behind text on glass won't usually come up in Overcast. So there's ways that I can design, embrace this design. I'm not going to deny this design exists. I'm not going to pretend like I'm never going to use it because that will just set me behind because, again, I think people are overall going to like the design. So I'm embracing the design as best as I can while trying to do a good job to avoid its flaws and to minimize the impact of its flaws. That's the path that we need to take as developers and designers. This is what we're stuck with. Like this design, parts of it are really good.

42:59Parts of it are really bad. Parts of it are tricky to use or have big downsides. And we just have to work around those things because Apple's not going to change. This is the design that we're going to have. What you see now, this is going to ship effectively unchanged. So this is what we have for probably at least a few years. So might as well make the best we can of it. yeah i i think you're right that the average person is not going to be as upset with it as perhaps we are i i haven't put it on the beta yet or haven't put the beta on my carry phone yet but now that we're back from all of our summer travel it's probably going to happen sooner rather than later and i'm excited to have it on anything but my ipad but i'm also scared because i don't know if i really want to live with all the problems but when i say live with all the problems i'm mostly mean like crummy battery life, crummy performance, animation hitches, like you were talking about earlier.

43:52Um, so I, I, I think I expect that I'm going to largely like it and largely think that the contrast or the readability, you know, legibility is not what it should be, which is what everyone has been saying. I think I will echo everyone else. And, and from the rumblings I've heard from like friends of friends who have tried it and, you know, oftentimes, you know, with that, without permission, if you will, like Adam did, uh most everyone i understand to think it's pretty good to your point marco so i i don't think it's going to be as ruinous as perhaps we expect but i also think it will be a more vocal uh in in vociferous i think is what i'm looking for a response than than apple is expecting also just to be clear like what i said before was the tiny glimmer of hope that there would be a negative reaction i was not predicting anything and i might the example the photos app is a great example first of all like even if there was a negative reaction they wouldn't direct it at the new design because that's not a concept in their head really like it's not unless they watch the keynote and all that other stuff like it could just be some obscure corner of the uh some app that they changed like the photos app like what what a weird thing to latch on to with all the changes so you never know what people are going to be cranky about but no i i wish people would be angry about this i have a tiny sliver of hope that might happen but i'm not making that prediction um oh and uh oh i understand the chat room said marco if you want to make your numerals more legible uh change the clock style from glass to solid and see if that helps oh i will try that right now thank you all right let's talk smart tv interfaces damian shaw writes i'm an lg g4 owner so g is the line and four implies 2024 is that right it helped thank you that's right yeah there you go all right so marco is now resolved uh marco if you need to buzz off you we can take it we can take it from here.

45:39Your work here is done. No, anyway, so Damien Shaw writes, I'm an LG G4 owner, which means the G line from 2024. I love this TV, but your pain points about notifications and input switching are probably its two weakest points, and the G5 gets a little worse. You can turn off most notifications in the LG interface, but certainly not all. The best solution is to run all firmware updates and then disconnect it from the internet, assuming you're going to use Apple TV is a primary way to consume streaming services. On the LG G4, quote unquote, magic remote, which by the way, is what they call it. There is a single input switch button, but it does not switch input immediately.

46:14There may be a setting to do this, but I haven't investigated. Instead, it brings up a lower third menu that previews all the outputs on all the inputs. And you have to hit select on the one you want. Pressing the switch input will scroll your selection or you can use the arrow keys. on the lg g5 they have a new magic remote that has removed that button entirely i believe you can switch your remote to use the old magic remote but i couldn't quickly find confirmation that the old remotes work with the g5 yeah they uh the sony even the sony button that i described there's an input button uh and when you first hit it it brings up the menu but if you just keep hitting that same button it just rotates through the input so the days are gone when you could hit the button and the one hit of the button would change the input which honestly is probably a good thing because how many people accidentally hit the input button and then like their parents can't figure out how the tv works because they switched inputs accidentally bringing up the menu first i think is the right move but you should just be able to bounce on that same button to cycle through the inputs and just stop on the one that you want which is how the sony one works but anyway it seems like there's been backsliding since the c7 which is 2017 not 2027 yeah and like and part of why this this frustrates me is that whenever the like when when i use like the the ones i was originally complaining about the samsung tvs that have like their whole menu to switch inputs that you have to go through everything it's just so much slower than it used to be like like old tvs old you know five-year-old tvs you just put the push this input button then it switches within a few seconds smart smart stuff was a big downgrade in speed as you noted but i do think that given that they used web os on your c7 and they're still using web os with much faster processors it should actually be more responsive than your c7 and i don't know what the hell samsung's doing but i agree their interfaces are both ugly and slow yeah i just i like this is like it's an area of technology where like they're they're adding so much functionality like even though we don't always want it um but the basics are just getting so much more annoying and worse and slower and like less reliable harder to use like i don't know i feel like this i feel like that's like a tragedy of of the industry yeah i mean at least that makes me thankful for the apple tv because it does let you never have to look at your smart tv's interface except for the input switching which i mean so obviously i would promote the use of receiver which you don't want but still hdmi cc i still have it enabled because honestly i don't even know if i can enable it on my current modern setup i'm not an hdmi cc unicorn it occasionally does something wonky but most of the time it's pretty miraculous like if i just grab the my switch to pro controller and hit the little home button hold down the home button it wakes my switch up oh it turns on my receiver turns on my television changes the input to be the dedicated changes the input on my tv to be the dedicated input that the switch connects to because i don't have it going through the receiver for uh for input lag reasons and it amazed me the first time that worked i'm like hdmi cc you're actually doing what you're supposed to do unlike apple care one occasionally you know again things get wonky, but HDMI CAC can take you a long way to not having to hit the input button.

49:18Not all the way, but a long way. All right. Running your own mail server. I, in particular, was quite snarky about this last episode. And the user potato.zip writes, on episode 651, you mentioned that you should never run your own mail server. Apple offers running iCloud mail on a domain you own so you can have a customer address. How does this work? Does it require maintenance? Would you recommend it this is pretty different and i haven't done this myself but this is just pointing like mx records for your domain at apple right it's a little more than that is it yeah it goes through some apple interface but basically you my understanding because i haven't actually done this myself is that you buy a domain whatever you know your your cool domain name.com whatever but then you tell apple apple i want you to have to receive email for this thing and have an email account for me so i'll you know hook up to with my mail apps or whatever but my understanding is that apple runs the mail server for you apple receives the mail you send your mail through apple the only thing you bring to the party is the domain that you previously purchased and paid for that's my understanding of how it works um again haven't used it does it require maintenance i don't think so and the reason i haven't used it is the answer to the question would you recommend it absolutely not um i don't like how apple does mail i've had uh an an itools account a uh mobile me account a mac.com account and iCloud i've had apple email for as long as they've offered apple email and they just offer no visibility or control into what they're doing with your email and very often i've gotten supposedly gotten emails that apple has disappeared probably through some well-meaning spam filtering that i have no way to know i don't know that that happened i don't have a way to get them back i basically don't consider apple to be a reliable place for me personally to receive email given the volume of email i received and how important it is to what i do on the other hand i have tons of family members who have an apple email account and they think it's fine i also by the way think their spam filtering is terrible but anyway i don't recommend it because i don't think they do a good job of providing reliable emails no email service is perfect but i want some visibility into it i want i want it to be deterministic and i want like if i have to go in there and manually correct something i want to be able to do that Having no recourse and total silence and no ability to debug is not how I roll.

51:35So that's why I don't recommend it. But that's just me. What were you using for email if you're willing to share prior to Gmail? Because you have a Gmail account now and that's been the case, I think, since we met. But what were you doing before then? Mindspring, my ISP. My ISP from the dial-up days. Well, I actually used netcom. Netcom.com, I think. But anyway, Mindspring was my ISP. and they were, I think they were national ISP and they gave you an email address and I used that as my main email address for years because, uh, I don't know, I was younger and more foolish than I am now. I'm still foolish.

52:10I'm still using Gmail. I should be using my own domain, but anyway, it's a complicated topic. But, uh, but yeah, I was using MindSpring. I went straight from MindSpring to Gmail. All right. Uh, sticking with the same theme, Peter Polio writes, one solution for dealing with spam that I never ever hear discussed is using hide my email, the iCloud Plus feature. Yes, it requires a lot of upfront work, but I get maybe 20 spam emails a week now at most. I'm not trying to imply with what I'm about to say that Peter is wrong or anything like that, but I don't really understand how the hide my email feature decreases spam.

52:44Because the whole hide my email feature is that it gives a completely unintelligible email to the vendor that you're working with. And they can still email that address whenever they want, and it'll get forwarded to you. they just never get your real proper email address so does is peter just shutting down these prior um hide my email emails does you know do you know what i mean like that's the whole point like basically if there's a data breach and your email gets leaked your email is not your email it's some random number at apple whatever like it's gobbledygook like it's that's it's obfuscation they will auto generate you it's like those one-time use credit card numbers from back in the day remember those they will auto generate you an email address that you don't need to know or remember, but that Apple keeps track of.

53:27And if there's data breach at, you know, pets.com or whatever, and they leak all your email addresses, you just kill that email address. You just say like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that account. And I'm going to turn off that email address. So now that email address no longer even forwards to my regular one. So spammers who got it from the data dump, they can spam it all they want, because it doesn't deliver to me anymore. I don't like surprise, I don't like this feature either, because of the lack of visibility. And because I don't like not knowing the account name, like the email address associated with all these accounts i know apple takes care of it for you when you log in you have to do it but like what i have to log in from a non-apple device i have to go through through iCloud website to find like i don't like that disconnection it was hard enough for me going from like bespoke passwords to auto-generated passwords decades ago i'm not ready to go to you don't even know uh what the email address is that you sign into this thing with on the other hand my email address has been public for so long i get the maximum amount of possible spam so it's not really a concern for me Fair enough.

54:23Aye, aye, aye. All right. And then again, continuing with the same theme, Jason Diller writes, I've been running my own mail server for about 20 years. I would never dream of yelling at someone who didn't want to do it. But I do think the downsides and quote unquote horror show aspects get blown out of proportion sometimes. The worst thing about it nowadays is that you're suspicious by default if you're on any kind of cloud server or consumer ISP IP address. Deliverability can be a challenge, even if you do all the right things with DKIM and SPF. My outbound has been relayed through AWS for a few years now so I can ride on their reputation.

54:56I got blocked by Microsoft with no recourse before I made that change. All in all, it's not a huge amount of work day to day, but I've sunk a lot of hours in over those 20 years. I only do it because I get some enjoyment out of it. Perfectly reasonable to not want the hassle. So this was the mildest of the people telling us that actually running your own L server is easy. Lots of people say, I do it and it's fine. Stop scaring people away from it. It's not that bad. I just want to give you the other side of it. People who have been doing this for a while say that it is definitely a thing that you can do and they're fine with it.

55:27I do have to say that the volume of email we've gotten and the volume of things I've read online still heavily lean in favor of do not run your own mail server. But I just want to let you know the other side does exist. It can be done if you want to. So Lisa Oogre writes, in last episode's Overtime, you discussed post-quantum cryptography and noted that quantum computers capable of breaking today's cryptography don't currently exist. This is true, but that doesn't mean transitioning to PQC isn't urgent. It's widely believed that there are actors currently recording encrypted traffic with the intention of decrypting it once such quantum computers exist.

56:02I tried to go for the acronym and realized I couldn't. Using algorithms that have already been written despite not yet having hardware on which to run them. And so, John, what do we call this? It's called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, and I meant to mention it last week, and I didn't, and I was punished for it. It's also called Store Now, Decrypt Later, we'll link to the Wikipedia. page this is a well-known concept the idea is we got to save all this garbage data because it's garbage to us now but in the future we might be able to trivially decrypt it all so let's save it now this is kind of an interesting wager here because um it kind of assumes that quantum computers will be around in a time that will make it valuable to decrypt it so let's say just for sake of argument if a quantum computer capable of breaking today's encryption uh didn't exist until 500 years from now that stored data if it still exists will most be of interest to historians but if quantum computers come out two years from now it's of interest to a lot of people so yeah the many people are in today all the all the assumptions that like you know world governments are storing data other bad actors are storing data the tricky bit is which data do we store and how much of it and for how long because you can't like i don't even want to say this you can't record all the internet's traffic and save it forever right nsa um anyway we hope someone's not doing that uh but yeah they're definitely saving this data because you know it could end up being a gold mine if those quantum computers come online in a reasonable time frame yep sol sutherland writes pq3 was actually first brought to iowa 17.4 to improve encryption of iMessage chats i think we talked about this way back then we did okay uh february 21 of 2024 i message with pq3 the new state of the art in quantum secure messaging at scale this is from apple security blog um and that also mentions the same harvest now decrypt later thing brian jarvis writes what will compel network infrastructure manufacturers to adopt pqc the government nist the nsa and various other scary agencies have established an expectation that cloud service providers browser and os vendors network hardware manufacturers basically everyone up and down the tech stack that uses public key cryptography must get their collective butts in gear and adopt pqc gradually over the next decade this will impact the awarding of government contracts so there's a pretty hefty financial incentive to migrate even if the security argument doesn't compel you this also presupposes that we have a functional american government but that's neither i mean i'm assuming world government's doing the same thing it's kind of the same reason that network hardware everywhere supports ipv6 like we've been successful at making sure that the hardware stack supports it and we did get some feedback i didn't put in here of like mobile networks in particular since they have more control over the network and since most people don't care uh like your your uh your phone when using cellular data is probably using ipv6 to communicate instead of ipv4 it's just the more of the existing infrastructure sort of terrestrial intranet access still has a lot of ipv4 stuff in it so anyway um what we're talking about is like let's make sure this hardware can work with pqc because of the things we talked about in overtime that the packet sizes change and some hardware manufacturers made assumptions that will no longer be true that would cause their hardware to fail and so this is motivating them to say at least make sure your hardware can do this and so in that respect uh ipv6 um again let's see last episodes over time comparing this to the ipv6 transition ipv6 has essentially completely rolled out to pretty much everywhere in terms of does the hardware and software stack support it it doesn't mean that everyone's computer is now communicating over ipv6 on the internet doesn't mean that web servers still only exist on ipv4 including by the way as many people pointed out many of our own web servers atp.fm my personal website might not even be listening on an ipv6 address mostly because it's a complexity that i'm not a networking guru and it's a complexity that i don't want to uh take on unless i have to but sometimes if you're hosting your website elsewhere it's pretty easy to add support for it so maybe i'll get around to it eventually you need an ah record on your dns you do i i do think that's very clever if like multiplying it out by the number of bits but yeah it is not a record uh saver writes chrome has been shipping pqc and tls for a long time it's true that some tls specific hardware uh broke but these are not that common for consumer for the consumer internet this is mostly done in software for big sites here's a post about pqc from cloudflare in 2024 called the state of post quant of the post-quantum internet and in there They write, today, nearly 2 % of all TLS 1.3 connections established with Cloudflare are secured with post-quantum cryptography.

1:00:38We expect to see double-digit adoption by the end of 2024. Now back to Saber. They now say one-third of Cloudflare traffic is using PQC, and we'll put a link to a different blog post in the show notes. So there's some upside of a huge amount of traffic going through Cloudflare. When they decide to adopt PQC, they can have a large effect on the percentage of traffic that is using it. we are sponsored this episode by one password extended access management now if you're an it person and you have employees who bypass security to use their unapproved apps because they feel like they need those to do their jobs you are not alone this is very common for it people fortunately with one password extended access management security and productivity no longer have to be at odds with what your users want to do i personally have used one passwords regular you know person edition and the family edition for years now and it is rock solid i absolutely love it well of course they can cover your business too so trelica by one password inventories every app in use at your company then pre-populated app profiles assess sas risks letting you manage access optimize spend and enforce security requirements and best practices across every app your employees use you can manage shadow it securely onboard and off-board employees and meet compliance goals one password is iso 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's leading bug bounty, 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security.

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1:02:49let's talk about you going to war john syracuse what's going on i think this is something that every developer is doing for the 26 os's because apple changed you know the new design everywhere but also they changed uh their recommended icon style across all the os's including adding like supporting a clear variant in addition to the dark and light ones and tinted ones and yada yada um i've been battling this with my apps um when they do something like change the icon style you start realizing hey i don't have three apps like i have three apps in the app store i actually have five because i have two little dinky things that are not in the app store but they have icons so i'm messing with five icons at once i wanted to give a little bit of background on that and explain why uh it is difficult so um we'll put a link in the show notes to apple's wwc video uh and their documentation on their website about what app icons are supposed to look like and the wwc video is called create icons with icon composer icon composer is a new version of an icon creation app i think it existed or at least there were icon apps creation apps that existed before this from apple but here is the latest iteration and here's the thing about icon composer so it is an app that lets you make icons in the style that Apple wants you to make icons.

1:04:10but it doesn't it's not just like a bitmap editor. it has you make the icons out of vector shapes and attributes on them it's very limited what you end up getting out of it is it's like i don't know like a property list it's like kind of like an svg or whatever it's just like you get a text file from this and the text file says draw a circle here draw an oval there it should have this highlight from this thing it should be this the effects are on this this should have a gradient this is the starting color this is the ending color i don't know i haven't looked into the details of what language is whatever it's not SVG directly.

1:04:39It is very limited. It's like you can have shapes, you can apply styles to them. If you open the icon composer app, you will see like a layers palette essentially. And then for each layer, you can pick from a handful of properties and it just writes those properties in there. You put a value for this property. What's the exhibition? What's the Y position? What's the scale? Is this on off whatever? It just writes all those numbers, all those booleans, all those things into a structured text file. And that describes your icon. That describes all your icons you make one of those things icon composer and you can tweak it to say here's what i want the dark one to look like here's what i want the light one to look like here's what i want the clear one to look like but it's all from the same base text file this is very different than in the past where they would ask for differently sized bitmaps for their icons of you know it started off there was like 128 pixel icons in mac os 10 that's huge now we have like 1024 because it's like 512 at 2x maybe we wouldn't have 512 at 3x i forget but anyway the days of bitmap according to apple are over instead here's how we want icons to look and if you've seen the icons in any of the 26 os's you know what they look like it's kind of like a fuzzy liquidy glass kind of thing where it's like colored layers on top of each other and you can put regular graphics in there too you don't have to do everything as a bunch of vector things you can import bitmaps into the icon composer and put them in there but they want you to make everything out of vectors and outlines if you look at apple's own terrible icons especially on the mac in tahoe they're all made like this so this this is what this is what icons are going to look like when you you know i'm mostly spending my time on tahoe but the same is true on the phone on the ipad all the apps you know and love from apple the mail app safari system settings those are all made with this app in this style or if not with this app with with an app that puts output that's like this and again they are described as a text file and then on the fly generates the bitmaps that are displayed on the screen.

1:06:31This presents a bit of a problem, maybe for all apps, but certainly for me on the Mac, because as much as I despise this new icon style, and as much as I love my current icons, I do want my Mac apps to fit in on Tahoe. So I want them to have, quote unquote, Tahoe native icons. I could just draw different icons on Tahoe with bitmaps or whatever, but I'm going to use Icon Composer, like they say, you know, whatever. but i think the tahoe icons are hideous i don't want them to be on mac os versions before tahoe and in fact they wouldn't fit in in that context because in tahoe all the icons look like that in sequoia and earlier none of the icons look like that so i want to keep my old icons before tahoe and the new icon after tahoe and it kind of boggles my mind that one of the main points of apple's documentation or their videos wasn't here's how you can do this thing that we know people are going to want to do.

1:07:27I don't know if they just assume that people are leaving behind every old OS as soon as they do a Tahoe icon, or they're going to release a new version of the app that only runs on Tahoe or something. But it's like, guys, people support more than the latest version of OSes sometimes with their apps. Nobody wants their Tahoe icon showing up on earlier OSes because everybody knows they're hideous. And even if they weren't hideous, even if they looked awesome and we love them, they just don't fit in on the old OS. Like they fit in when all the icons around them look like this. So anyway, Apple didn't explain how to do that, but people quickly figured out if you just give the icon composer file the same file name minus the file name extension as your existing app icon, it does what you want.

1:08:07When you're on Tahoe, you get the icon composer thing, and on pre-Tahoe, it doesn't know anything about the icon composer thing, and you get the old icon. But then, of course, they broke that in beta 5, I believe, and all of a sudden all my apps started showing the tahoe icon everywhere and i'd burn basically an entire week going back and forth a mastodon with a bunch of people smarter than me figuring out how to restore that functionality turns out after much gnashing of teeth and custom build phases and other things like that eventually um who was it i think it was a bot slav uh slavic figured out how to do it first a very complicated way and then a simpler way all of it hinged on an undocumented flag that I guess they found by running strings on Apple's binary of like the, uh, the AC tool, uh, asset catalog compiler that, that compiles your asset catalog in your app.

1:08:55Apparently there's an option in there that will tell it don't like, like leave the icons alone for pre Tahoe OSs, but let Tahoe, anyway, this was very frustrating. I filed a bunch of feedbacks on it. So I filed a feedback that said, Hey, there should be a way to do this. Like there should be like a documented actual, like apple should say if you want to do this very common thing here's how we recommend doing it instead of all of us just trying to figure it out on our own right so that was one of my feedbacks the second feedback was it used to work in betas 1 2 3 and 4 it stopped working beta 5 so it's a regression so i did a second feedback depending on which might be more appealing if anyone ever looks at these which they probably won't um and then the final uh feedback i put in was another aspect of the, uh, the icon system in Tahoe is that, uh, we've mentioned this before, but if you have a non-Tahoe icon on Tahoe and that icon is not a Big Sur style squircle as in a rounded rectangle where if nothing breaks the frame of the rounded rectangle squircle thing, your icon will be put into squircle jail.

1:10:00It will be shrunken, shoved onto a gray squircle background, and your app will look terrible. It is punitive. And one of the earliest feedback I filed is get rid of SquircleJail. It's punitive. If developers don't update their icons, their punishment is that their icon doesn't fit in with the other icons. Don't punish them further by shrinking their icon by 80 % and putting it on a gray background. It looks terrible and it's super mean. I think they should just get rid of SquircleJail. All these feedback numbers will be in the show notes. Not that I think that will make any difference. So anyway, if SquircleJail actually ships, which it probably will because there are no one's ever going to look at my feedback uh if it's not if it hasn't just been a tool during the betas to scare developers into making tahoe icons which by the way would have been a good strategy but get rid of it for release but anyway if it ships i would expect to see more articles like this one that was on nine to five mac this week which is the title which is mac os tahoe put your icons your apps in icon jail here's how to fix it and that what they basically say is like here's a website you can go to mac os icons.com or whatever and find a squircle compatible icon for your app that's in squircle jail and then use the finder get info on the app and copy and paste the icon onto it that works fine until your app auto updates and then rewrites back the old icon and you're back in squircle jail but anyway um regardless of whether people like the new interface or not i don't think anybody is going to like seeing their app icons especially ones that are in the dock that they see all the time being shrunken and put in a gray rectangle like people like try explaining that to somebody for some reason my icon of this app i use every day now is like small and a gray thing can you fix that just like the amount of explanation that we're required or like explaining you can fix it but when the app updates it will unfix itself squircle jail is punitive to users it's punitive to developers i think it has served its purpose because they silently did squircle jail and scared everybody into making tahoe icons now they need to revert it but anyway i just wanted to link to all this stuff to let you benefit from the pain that i and others have been experiencing uh and to thank the people who figured out how to do this oh interestingly by the way um one of the ways that we figured out how to do this with a custom build phase seemed to work great i updated all five of my apps with this custom build phase so they were all compliant set out new test flights still actually didn't set out new flights planned to set out new test flights and found out that when i uploaded it to app store connect it said oh you're missing some icon resources rejected like i couldn't even upload to App Store Connect.

1:12:26They worked fine. Like I tested them going back and forth to the other Mac that's logged into my Apple ID all the time. They worked fine here. They worked. But App Store Connect thought they were missing icon resources. So it was like back to the drawing board. Even if you get something that works, you only know if it really works if you do a real archive build, sign it with developer ID, look at it on a Tahoe machine, look at it on a Sequoia machine, then also upload to App Store Connect and make sure it re-downloads and everything works fine and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I had to do like nine times for all of my apps.

1:12:57And now all of my apps, I think are compliant with the simpler system. Just wanted to let the world know that a, this is happening and be if icons look a little bit weird, especially in Tahoe, this is why Apple has kind of dropped the ball on this. And I want to say, I think the icon composer format and idea is actually kind of a good one. Maintaining 700 different icon resolutions and bitmaps is not efficient. And it's kind of annoying. I know iOS or I think iOS changed recently to be able to let just say let me just make one really big high-res icon it'll make all the other ones is that true uh yes yeah they didn't do it on the mac because who cares about the mac um but even that like you know having a sort of a definition file for icons if you plan to have i want to be able to make a clear one a light one a dark one if you want to be able to programmatically do that with a specific icon style that to be clear i do not like but i do respect that this format is a clever a solution to that problem so i'm not against icon composer or the tahoe icons against having an obvious built-in way to only have those icons on tahoe and forward and obviously this was the problem will solve itself in a few years when nobody cares about those old icons but i think what apple is trying to avoid is a repeat of the big sir thing where they said hey in big sir and from now on everyone should use squircle icons and everyone was like nah don't feel like it and they didn't some people did most people didn't uh and i think that's why squirgle jail exists which is like no seriously this time we demand that you make your icons look like our icons and if you do not you will be punished we you know this is the direction apple is going with their new os's and you know when apple tries to maintain compatibility with old os's they don't face the same issues that we do with their apps because most apple apps are built into the operating system so they don't need like the same code that's running on ios 18 to be running at like as the same bundle in the app store as what's going to run on ios 26 and same thing with you know the mac os equivalents and all the like they don't they don't need to worry about that like the team that writes apple mail they have their you know before 26 builds and they have their 26 builds and those are basically different apps or at least probably a different branch or whatever Yeah, the closest they get is Safari on the Mac because they do ship a version of the new Safari on the old OS.

1:15:15But I imagine that's just an entirely separate build. Probably. And so, you know, in areas that Apple does not face the same challenges or face them in the same way as developers, they generally really don't care how hard it is for us. Like, they really honestly – and it's not like a cynical or snobby way. they just kind of institutionally apple has never been amazing at dogfooding the developer experience like they don't really know like they don't really people in apple don't usually fully appreciate what developers need to do in certain ways or you know around certain problems because they just don't face those problems themselves and they don't care um or they are not important enough to them for them to care more and also once apple goes in a new direction whether that's a software update or a redesign or whatever else that's a one-way transition for apple as and this is this has been apple forever even back to steve jobs like as soon as they are on the new thing they don't care about the old thing at all and so for us to be like well we kind of do need to still care about you know the old os for a while like they're like we've moved on that's it like so this is this is the kind of area that tends to be underserved and apple's like tools and solutions and everything because they they just don't care the way the way we have to so this is an area where like yeah like you know when when i build my app like the ios app when i build it with the new icon and it runs on ios 18 it shows like a flattened rendering of the glass icon as the new app icon on ios 18 like and that's maybe i could hack around that the same way you're trying to here but like i'm just i'm not going to because it's just not worth it like there's only so much fighting i can do and the reality is for my app i know this is very different for the mac for my app i'm gonna probably be above 90 on ios 26 by december so it's it's only a problem for a few months for me and also all ios apps were already squircles like i know they changed the radius of the curve as we talked about but and also your particular the overcast icon does lend itself well to this style like you didn't have like a photorealistic like i mean my my switch glass icon which i love by the way is like by brad ellis is like a semi photorealistic like 3d clear piece of glass on an angle like it is not in a squircle it is not like it just it's it does not fit with the tahoe thing at all there's no like making a tahoe version of that and i love that icon so i don't want it to go away but your icon was already a squircle is a flat rendering that is not doesn't have like 3d shapes that are rotated or shaded and stuff like that you can make a tahoe version of your icon that doesn't look that different than the regular version whereas if i showed the tahoe icon of any of my apps on pre-tahoe it would stand out like a sore thumb because none of my apps look anything like that pre-tahoe yeah exactly but but again like this is an area where like i'm on the easy side because i'm on ios and apple you know they do everything with ios first and first priority and with the most effort and mac os gets table scraps and that's what's happening here on that front james thompson's apps or i think it was james thompson and somebody else um oh it's underscore i think uh some let's put it this way some ios developers went a little overboard with the custom icons casey went a little bit didn't go overboard he has some custom icons but like i think james thompson has like 50 icons or something i think maybe underscore was saying that widget smith has like 150 or something and they were saying that the build phase in xcode when just doing like dev builds of trying to build all the icon bitmaps from those icon composer description files that i just was taking a lot of time so they were trying to figure out ways basically like make like conditional build steps to say when you're doing a dev build don't build all the icons because it was taking like i think james thompson said it was taking like five minutes to just to do that phase of his build so that's another example like apple doesn't have that many custom icons they might be thinking who's gonna have more than one or two custom icons well you know yeah that's again it's another area where like no apple app has more than a couple of custom icon if any you know i think it's probably just like apple sports right isn't that probably the only one that has any so like who knows and who knows what's apple gets to use whatever weird system they want to use for they don't have to use the ones that we do right so like you know it when you face a problem in your app that apple doesn't really face much themselves it doesn't tend again doesn't tend to get great tooling support doesn't get a lot of attention from apple so i i think the pragmatic solution here is you kind of have to decide how much you're willing to fight on this how much is it worth and you know in my case as i said like with my you know showing my glass icon on i as on ios 18 i don't care it's not worth the fight i have so many other things to deal with that that's that's not something that's not a hill i'm gonna die on that's not something i'm gonna spend any time looking at because the glass icon like that's like people who are going to hold on to ios 18 because they hate liquid glass they're probably going to have a problem with it but that's not going to be that many people over time and it's i'm so much better spending the time continuing to move the app forward and not thinking too much about the past and that's exactly how apple thinks they move their stuff forward and they don't spend too much time thinking about or working on or enabling the past.

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1:22:49All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Daniel Liu writes, do you think the decreased information and interface density in liquid glass in macOS might make the interface potentially more touch-friendly? Setting aside the myriad problems with legibility, consistency, and liquid glasses brittleness, to use Snell's term, what do you think of the new macOS as being a step toward touch Macs? I have not used any of this on macOS, so I have nothing to contribute. John, what do you think? Well, first, I just want to defend Daniel's honor and say that even though you read a myriad of, he wrote correctly the myriad of problems without an of in there, because that's the way you should use that word.

1:23:24And Casey just inserted the of, because that's the way a lot of people say it. And anyway, setting aside the myriad problems. I believe that is correct. And that is what Daniel wrote. Anyway, I see where they're going with this. We all kind of had similar thoughts when they made the menu bar taller. Turns out that was just for the notch. But here's the thing. The notch making the menu bar taller, the setting that's in accessibility that does nothing in Tahoe. But anyway, there's a setting in accessibility, I believe, that says, do you want me to show the regular menu bar in macOS? Or do you want me to show the large menu bar?

1:23:54Again, I think it does nothing in Tahoe, but that doesn't mean it's always going to do nothing or do nothing in Sequoia. The lower information density and the larger controls in Liquid Glass and Mac OS and on iOS and on iPad OS, even though pretty clearly none of that was designed with the intention of making it easier to make touch Macs, in the end, it does put them one micro step farther down that road. Now, here's the thing. In a world of thoughtful interface design that acknowledges that there is a science to it and that things can be known and tested, an actual Mac interface designed for touch would do a lot more than Liquid Glass is doing.

1:24:40right um but i do think that every every step they take to sort of puff up the interface on the mac specifically sets them up for a future where they could enable touch without making too many changes and honestly like setting aside the retina transition apple has tried to hold the line on the mac in terms of like dpi and how big things are on the screen not for touch reasons not for like over the size of the tip of your finger because you know macs don't have touch but they've tried to make things kind of sort of stay the same size but if you there's lots of people posting historical uh images like here's how this graphic looked in mac os for the past 20 years or something online these days because of the liquid glass stuff if you look at some of those you even when they account for retina and like don't do the 1x 2x thing older versions of mac os especially when you go back to classic things were smaller because screens were smaller like physically like they had fewer inches like people had 13 inch crts not 32 inch lcds people were smaller the world was smaller yeah everything right so things have been getting bigger and i think i mean i think that's a good thing just because when you have so much screen real estate there's not as much reason to make everything as small as you possibly can you don't need a lot of nine and ten point text everywhere in the ui because you're on a nine inch monochrome screen you know what i mean um so even though i think you know liquid glass has probably set us backwards from touch in many other areas things getting a little bit bigger assuming it stays that way until you know if touch max ever come and assuming the liquid glass stuff stays and someone doesn't come in and undo all that it does bring us a tiny little bit closer but only accidentally I wouldn't read too much into the liquid glasses design being ported pretty closely to the Mac, like from the iPad.

1:26:36I think that's just because they don't really care as much about the Mac as the iOS devices, and they just brought the design straight over. And I think you can say, well, why would they make the Mac have these bigger elements? Well, one reason is to make touchscreen Macs. Another reason is it allows them to use basically the same design between iPad and macOS, which makes their own development of their own apps easier. That's probably the reason they did it. If you look at how much consideration has been put into this design for things like touch target sizing, legibility, pretty significant usability factors.

1:27:17It's very clear that there is no big grand master plan here. they made something that they thought looked cool. And usability was a pretty far secondary concern in that list. So, you know, the fact that they made things bigger, they're not thinking, ooh, now they're touchable. And in fact, in many cases, as I said, like in many cases, like the touch targets are actually way too small, even on the touch devices on their own native designs. So I don't think they're thinking that hard about it. I think it's, they wanted to make one unified design language across all their devices. and that makes their jobs easier and it gives them the brand unity that they've been wanting all these years that's why the Mac design got bigger.

1:28:00I don't think it's at all about touchscreen considerations and some future strategy. I think it's all about the pretty shallow reasons that we can see right now. Slime, what related to this one of the ideas floating around out there, because people always want to it's not a conspiracy theory, people want to they want to see intention where it may not actually exist that's why you get questions like well putting these chips in make cellular more possible they're doing this because they're planning for future touch max or whatever again i don't think they are planning for it but in the end controls being a little bigger does help in that direction but it's not the intention at all um a lot of people have been trying to play that game with the liquid glass uh design decision to put margins around and everything so all of marco's you know bottom and top bars they used to go edge to edge on the screen which meant from the edges of the screen you would move in from the literal edge of the screen by some margin and then you could have content now you've got to have empty margin where there's nothing beginning of capsule new margin inside the capsule and only then can you begin your toolbar button right so that's what you were saying marco that actually the touch targets in some cases get smaller even as the amount of room taken up by the interface element gets larger and people look at that and say yeah but assuming apple is all-knowing and all-powerful which is not true um there must be some reason they're making this terrible design decision of putting margins around everything and floating content floating controls over content harming legibility for no use of blah blah blah see past episodes there must be a reason they're doing this and the reason i've heard uh passed around a lot is well when the folding phone comes out and the screen wraps around and has a waterfall edge or whatever, not having, for example, bottom bars in iOS apps actually extend to the edges of the screen will help because that part of the edge of the screen might be wrapping around like a waterfall design or bending over a hinge or whatever, depending on how the app is oriented.

1:29:57And so the liquid glass design is forward looking for devices that have not yet been released, in particular, the folding devices. I don't think that's why they did it. Again, like the touch things, depending on what the folding device looks like, this design might help. But I don't think that's why they chose to do this design. I actually don't know why they chose to do this design, other than someone thought it looked good. I think it's a terrible idea, and I don't think it looks good. But here we are. But that is, I just want to put that out there, is if the folding phone comes out and Apple says, you were wondering why we screwed with your interfaces so much?

1:30:30Well, it was all because of the folding phone. Like, they're never going to say that. But it might be the case that when the folding phone comes out, the floating elements everywhere with margins around them that reduces the touch target size might make slightly more sense but i would say again probably only accidentally yeah like there there really was not a lot of consideration in a lot of parts of this design so i i don't again i don't think like john like i don't think there is like a grand plan here i think that's that's that's us projecting what we assume or hope might be the case there is no grand plan they made a design that looks cool and they they seem to slap it together, you know, kind of at the last minute in a pretty slapdash fashion.

1:31:11That's what we have. And it's going to look cool and we're going to live with it and it'll be fine. But there is no grand plan here. It's like when you're a kid and you think like that adults like know how everything works and are doing things for the reason and you become an adult and you go, oh, exactly. All right, moving on. Ian Anderson writes, it has been discussed in recent episodes that Tim Cook does not have, quote, good product sense, quote. As someone early in a tech career with ambitions to be a leader one day in what could be considered a product organization, what sorts of things should I start doing?

1:31:40What books should I be reading, et cetera, to cultivate good product sense now? So this depends a lot on what we mean by product. There's an entire discipline and profession called product management. I'm not an expert in that field. I read a good book on it by Marty Kagan called Inspired a little while ago. um i'll link that in the show notes um so that that's a great book if you are like a product manager director you know whatever to practice the actual like science and profession of product management um that's when i say tim cook is not a good product person or doesn't have good product sense i'm not really quite talking about that version of what that means i'm more talking about in the visionary, kind of like the Steve Jobs sense of having a really good instinct for the direction that they should go with product design, with what products to make, different choices while making them, different things to prioritize.

1:32:44And the profession of product management does have a lot of overlap with that. There is a lot of product management, the discipline that can help with that. but it's kind of like having good artistic talent or good musical talent like there's a lot of science behind it and a lot of practice that you can get into it to you know to make yourself better at it to educate yourself on the fundamentals and you know the sciences and you know music theory you know various like forms of art instruction and art theory like there there are there's there's educational paths you can and should take but there's also kind of like fundamental aptitudes or talents that can really help you be the next level.

1:33:27For a company like Apple, coming off of Steve Jobs' life, he was so good at that. And they were so well known for their products that just had such a knack for making great products pretty reliably with great attributes and great great combinations of things great spirit behind them and a lot of that was steve and a lot of the people under steve and you know he was also a great editor and a great director and you know a great collaborator you know and so he had more than just like the the science and discipline of product sensibility he was also just like a natural talent at identifying what makes great products and what should we do?

1:34:15What direction should we go? How should we tweak these little things to make this product a little bit cooler, a little bit more kind of must-have or more delightful? He was great at that. Tim Cook is none of that. Whatever you want to say about Tim Cook's pragmatism or operational expertise, he's really good at making money. He is none of that. He doesn't seem to get that. He doesn't seem to value that. He knows he's not that, but because he's so not that, he's not able to, I think, pick good people to serve those roles either. And good people who could serve those roles I don't think thrive in his organization.

1:34:54And so when I say he doesn't have product sense, what I'm talking about is that, kind of like the spirit, the natural or developed sense of like what makes cool, gotta have good products that fit with what people really want and can break into new areas and set new trends and everything. He has none of those sensibilities. Whatever product successes Apple has had in the Tim Cook era had nothing to do with him and probably happened despite him, not anything because of him. yeah the this question is about like how do i prepare myself for a leadership role one day in a tech career uh in a product organization and uh it really kind of depends on at what level do you aspire to operate right so if you aspire to be ceo as as margaret said the CEO level is different kettle of fish than being in charge of one product or being in charge of a set of products.

1:36:03Because when you are at the CEO level, you're thinking about things like, what should this company be doing? Are we in the right business? Should we pivot to video? Should we start making self-driving cars? Where's our next area of growth going to come from? And in many respects, like those are the things that Tim Cook has been very good at is like the sort of setting aside the fact that it's Apple, which, you know, it's difficult to do. And we'll get back to in a second. If you are the CEO of any really big company, one of your jobs is to sort of steer the ship to figure out what's next for Apple.

1:36:37How does Apple continue to succeed and yes, continue to grow and continue to make money? And Tim Cook has been pretty darn good at figuring out how to make Apple continue to grow and make money. Unfortunately, Apple as a company is basically defined because of the second Steve Jobs era as being a company that is successful because of its great products, not because Steve Jobs is a genius at figuring out where the next growth thing was going to come from. He wasn't like the whole things that Tim Cook has done with like services revenue and all the things that he's done with the financials and like that was not Steve Jobs' strength.

1:37:10He didn't do that. He didn't care about that. He had other people handling it. He would not have done as good a job as it as Tim Cook has. But when we think of Apple, A lot of us still have that image in our mind of the company that like Apple was successful because they made great products, which is not true of lots of really big companies. The bigger the company gets, the more it's like, well, is Exxon Mobil successful? It's not because of really great gasoline, right? There's all sorts of other reasons that make these giant corporations able to be big and grow and like strategic, boring corporate stuff that we don't know.

1:37:43or maybe some stuff having to do with science of where they find the oil or like geopolitics of how to get it. Like, but there's stuff like this. There's reasons they're big, but it's not like the reasons we loved Apple so much as like this one company found a way by just doing really good things that people like to become tremendously successful. And again, Tim Cook knows that's not his strength. And so he doesn't have the choice to do that. Like, it was like, we should learn and get better at it. No, it'd be better if he realizes what his strengths are. But as Marco said now you gotta have somebody do that and not being able to do it is one thing but if you also can't correctly pick people to do that for you or at the very least tell when you made a bad choice and change it up and tim cook has definitely been slow to do that and reticent to do that deferring a lot to other people and it hasn't worked out that well anyway getting back to ian's question here if you want to be ceo it's kind of like i mean there's not there's not a lot you end up reading business books like because if you try to say like how do i want to be a good ceo how do i know what products my company should make um just like in ui design there is a science to doing this like their business school exists people do case studies uh at the company level how do i know what products i should be making for which customers how do i know when i should decide that we should move away from this kind of customers to these other kind of customers you know or should i be making products or should I be selling services?

1:39:09Like there's tons of people doing, you know, PhD theses and business case studies and like on all these things. But all that, all of that science aspect of it, you'll see is not specific to anything. Like business school is not about the tech business or the farming business or the oil business. There is such a thing as generic business knowledge. And when you're steering a company at that level, that's what you have to learn. So if you aspire to be a CEO, you should probably have some knowledge of business and companies and economies and big picture things. If that doesn't interest you and you're like, I'm thinking more about how to make a really good version of iMovie.

1:39:46Like how do I make, I want to be in charge of our most important products and I want to make that product the best it can be. That's way smaller. And now you're thinking about like product design. How do I figure out this starts to get into UI design, but how do we figure out, should we be making a product for beginners or pros? What are the trade-offs there? If we do make it for pros, how do we figure out what pros need. Again, there is a science aspect to that of figuring out how do we identify customer needs? What is the state of the art of figuring out what customers exist, what they want, what they're not getting from competing products?

1:40:15How do we make a product that will excel? There's tons of science about that. There's also art to that. Steve Jobs, I think, understood or cared about none of the science of it. He was 100 % in his gut, on his gut feeling and we're lucky that his gut was right as much as it was but it wasn't always right the g4 cube wasn't the right move like lots of things that he didn't work out but his batting average was great and i think he had none of that other than like the school of hard knocks because he'd been in so many companies made so many products and so many mistakes he was all from the gut you can't rely on that don't assume that you will have the early success that steve jobs had that gave him the millions of dollars to be able to make multiple mistakes and to get his one of his mistakes acquired by his earlier mistake and like don't you're not going to have steve jobs's career so don't follow his lesson of i'm just going to be a really good kind of gut person and my instincts and taste will lead my company to great success look at all the ceos who think they're steve jobs and try to do that and fail so i would say decide what level you want to work at learn the science and sort of crap i'm probably using science wrong a lot of these things because again people say well like you know business is not really the same but anyway look at the things where they where they it is a scientific method you have an idea and you test it you try things out in the market you're like what is the state of the art in trying to determine what we know what we don't know and how to find out new information and you know all the all like the innovators dilemma and all these various advances and are thinking about how markets work learn about that science of it because don't assume that your gut instincts are going to be right as much as steve jobs but don't forget about the gut because if you just learn about like how to sell widgets or when to pivot your company from a b2b to a b2c to a sass or whatever you're going to be missing the essential heart of what you have to actually like like mark always says you have to if you're going to run apple you should really care about computers or phones or like whatever it is that you think apple's you should you should really super be into that tim cook probably is kind of into that he did work for compact but he wasn't into computers like steve jobs was i mean steve jobs was like no one was into computers when they were making the apple one he was just like he was a nerd he He was super into this.

1:42:18Not a lot of people were, but he was. He comes by his computer nerddom, honesty, Tim Cook. I'm not entirely sure. And I think that is an important aspect to like to have that passion and to be to have that sort of that gut and that love for the product helps you identify, you know, helps you know that people are going to love the iMac, even though lots of people are going to tell you it's dumb and ugly and I can't believe you're making this computer. Steve Jobs knew that it was going to work now because he focus tested it or did the science part of it because i don't think he even knew how to do that or cared about it at all but just because he trusted his gut and got lucky again don't follow that path you should probably actually understand the uh the logic and rationale behind the product decisions you are making otherwise you end up with liquid glass um but then also have a passion for it and have some kind of you know have some kind of opinion about it and and and taste that hopefully will guide you right and marco gave a book recommendation which is more than i have because i i never aspired to be in this part of any of the businesses that I worked for.

1:43:16So I don't know any like things that you should be reading, but that's, that's my advice for like how to view this, pick, find what level you're going to work at, figure out what sort of sciencey stuff applies there, learn it, but then also have a passion about it and bring your, bring yourself and your art to it. Also, nothing is better than experience in this area too. And you don't need to be a CEO of a tech company or a founder of a startup necessarily to get relevant product experience, get an app out there in front of customers. Yeah, you can fail all on your own. Yeah. But even something small, I mean, look, even something as simple as like a lawn mowing business in your town, like, you know, ask people, like figure out what people need and try to make a solution that fits it and get it out there.

1:44:02How much should I charge? What services should I offer? Right. Like pretty much every business offering that you might have from, you know, local services like that to a store to an app on you know in the app store or a web app like if you are putting something out there for customers you're going to face all these same dynamics you're going to have okay what do you make what problem are you trying to solve who is it for why would they choose your product over over other products or services what do they what are their needs and how much are you going to fit those needs how big is the market what can you charge for it you know how will they find your product how can you market it what's your you know go-to-market strategy whatever term you want to use like how are people going to find and then once you have something out there if you get any users whatsoever that's great first of all then second of all then you can start figuring okay well what do i where do i take it next what how am i how can i keep serving the customers i have how can i serve them better how can i get them maybe to give me more money or to use my product more or you know use it for more things like there's there's so much of this sensibility that is, it's great to read up and, you know, figure out a lot of the terminology and practices and science and theories behind it, but experience actually doing it with real products in front of real customers is way more useful and will serve you better.

1:45:20Well, that's where the science comes from. They have ideas and they test them in the market. They don't just guess. They think, well, this is a great idea. It will probably work. No, they try it and then they report it. And if it doesn't work, they put that in the paper and they say, we thought, you know, doing this would would increase sales a huge amount and it totally didn't and and they write it up like that's that's the nature of the science of it like people have all sorts of ideas like i think if we do this customers will love it like they go with their gut so like companies try things their successes and failures inform these case studies to say we studied a bunch of different people who had different strategies for tackling this particular problem here's what actually worked and actually didn't rather than just going by well these people did it this way and the company was got big therefore that must be great no let's look if they get did they get big because of that or despite that and yeah you do get the turns out stuff of what's his name uh blink dude of like lots of different kinds of ketchup or tomato sauce or whatever the examples are so you got to watch out for like a little bit of like seven habits highly effective people sort of junk science uh pop culture stuff or whatever but there is actually like you can tackle this as a thing that is knowable.

1:46:26But your own personal version of that is, well, maybe you're not going to study this. Maybe you're not part of the Harvard Business Review. But in your own personal business, you do your own little experiments and you'll find out what works and what doesn't pretty quickly. It'll be painful. And it's not as much easier to read about other people making the mistake. But you will make a bunch of your own mistakes and learn from them. Yeah. And that is how you will develop the sense is put something out there, iterate on it, fail, or you're ready to figure out what fails and what succeeds, and you will start developing these practices.

1:46:59And again, experience is better than any book, but there are also a couple of books you can read. Ideally, you do both. I mean, and reading about it will let you know, like, for example, if you have an idea, I think I'm going to do X, Y, and Z with my product. You can learn how to approach that. How do I try this out in a way that doesn't destroy the business if I'm wrong? You'll learn that in the book. You won't learn in the book whether you should add this button to your app, right? You'll learn that from experience. But what you will learn is, how do I tell whether this idea is good or not?

1:47:27How can I test whether it's working or not? How can I control for that when so many other things are changing at the same time? How can I make sure that I don't turn something that I don't intend to be a make or break decision for my business into, oh, it turned out that was a make or break decision for the business, right? Learn that from the book instead of the hard way, right? But the actual ideas of what you do, you won't see that in a book. because it's so specific to you, your business, your app, whatever problem you're solving, which hopefully is going to be unique enough that there aren't books written about it.

1:47:56I think just very quickly, it's worth adding that if product design specifically is something you're interested in, then you can learn a lot about what's good and what's not. Obviously, you have your own innate sense of what's good and what isn't, but you can learn a lot about why people think things are good or bad by listening, I guess, to shows like this. but I've got, I got to imagine there are other podcasts or perhaps, you know, YouTubers where they dissect the, um, like what, what makes a product good or bad. And, you know, as much as we poke fun at John for being hypercritical, I think one of the valuable things that I learned from listening to the hypercritical podcast was what does make a design good or bad.

1:48:37And if there's something to be criticized or complained about or what have you, is that, why is that? And when, And John has always, since I've paid attention to John, it's been like 15 years now, has always been very good as an example of distilling why that is. And you can get that from any number of places. And you could argue that pretty much everything in your life is a product of some sort. And so just thinking about what you do and do not like about things and why, and even better, hearing people who do this sort of thing or who are passionate about this sort of thing discuss why something is good, bad, or otherwise, I think is also really, really helpful.

1:49:15Yeah, just to go back to the example I kept using with the art and science of UI design. Step one is like caring enough about it to have opinions about I like this and I don't like that or whatever, and then trying to figure out why. But also understanding that there is like there's reasoning and rationale that other people have already considered that went into it. So just to give one example, the menu bar that's at the top of the Mac screen versus the menu bar that's inside Windows on Windows, Microsoft Windows. knowing which one you feel like you like better that's a good that's a start right but understanding the different trade-offs that those two designs make like that there was that there was thought behind them that there was testing on them and they said okay well the menu bar at the top of the screen it's farther away which is a minus but the target height is essentially infinite because you can slam the cursor on the top which is a plus but now let's test that idea do people slam their cursors against the top of the screen or do they very carefully target the file menu and they never let their pointer touch the top of the screen.

1:50:12We don't know without testing. Let's test that. Right. And the menu bar inside the windows, if you like that better, okay, it's closer to you and you know, where your cursor is likely to be. And you don't take up the spot on top of the screen all the time. So you have more screen real estate, understanding that there are like knowable, objective, measurable trade-offs between those two designs that were considered and weighed and then decide, okay, well, those weights, those weights are the opinion part, but the science part is like they didn't just guess like it feels better to me when there's a menu bar on top of screen or i just like it when the menu bar is inside the window like having that opinion is a start but you can't just stay there and be like oh i just like it because i like it and you're a dummy right there is like logic and reasoning behind the designs not saying one is necessarily better than the other but you have to understand the mechanisms and not just be like oh it's all it's all magic and it's just like oh it's a feeling in my gut and i'm right because I'm the CEO and got so many CEOs are like that.

1:51:09Don't be like, right. Like, like so many product designers like that. Like, like the world is knowable and understandable. It doesn't mean that you're going to come to a definitive opinion about what kind of menu bar is better, but it does mean you can understand the aspects of it that go into it and that, and that you can test them again, the idea of like it being an infinite target, you can say, well, it's an infinite target. I win the argument, right? It's like, well, did you test that? Do people treat it as an infinite? Do they get that benefit? Do they get that targeting benefit because they don't have to carefully decelerate the mouse cursor when it comes up to the file menu and they can just jam it up against the top of the screen that's something you should test instead of just assuming right that's that's the science of this stuff like that thinking of it that way thinking that there are knowable things that go into it that then you layer on top of your opinions and your how much do you value this versus yeah how much do you value screen space versus targetability versus locality versus whatever some of those things you can test too but in the end it always comes down to like valuating of like once you've think you've identified the aspects that you care about and understand the rationale behind them then you are free to assign weights that you think will make a good product and then you'll find out whether you're right or wrong when you put your translucent teal gumdrop shaped computer in front of the public and then you'll really find out do people like this or do they not turns out they did all right and then finally tonight keith heaton writes when using the duplicate photos function in apple photos on mac os i'm presented with four photos it wants to merge one is two megabytes the other three are one megabyte one is favorited the other three are not one is added to an album the other three are not one has the camera exif data and accurate creation date the other three do not how the heck do i audit these properly and pick and choose which attributes become the new singular master photo my library currently reports over 10 000 duplicates yes this duplicate processing in apple photos i think i talked about when it first rolled out it tries to save you some of this pain by giving you a button that says just merge these and it tries to essentially choose the quote-unquote best one but then combine all the metadata from all the other ones so by best it usually means the highest resolution or the largest or both but then it will try to do a union of the metadata from all the other ones but then if there are conflicts i'm not sure how it resolves them um you can manually choose to resolve this yourself by deleting the ones that you think are not duplicates the interface for this is not great in photos it tries to be simple and the second you don't want to just trust it it gets way more complicated to the point where as i've complained about in the past um when it sometimes identifies photos that are not actually duplicates like you took a burst photo and you can see these are two different photos like they're half smiling in this one and one eye is closed in this one these are not the same photo but they're close enough that that apple photos thinks they're duplicates there's no way to convince it that they're not duplicates You can't say these are not duplicates.

1:53:55You're wrong. Apple photos. No, instead you have to forever see that in the duplicate list and just remember to never merge those because they're two separate pictures or you just get frustrated and delete one of them that you like less. But anyway, um, unfortunately for Keith, the root problem here is that if you have 10 ,000 duplicates and a lot of them are like this, like that the human description of them all is like, it's difficult for a human to even figure out how to combine these. like what should be done, what is the right thing to do, how long does it take a human to figure out what the right thing to do is and then do it, if that's your situation, no computer program is going to help you because in the end, you've got a lot of human decisions to make, complicated human decisions.

1:54:42Now, the program could be nicer about giving you all the information that I assume Keith had to look up manually that we just read off these bullet points like the sizes, which one's favorited which one is in an album which one has accurate exit data like you've got to investigate that the program doesn't give you too much info but in the end you've just got a lot of different photos like assuming it's not a hot assuming it's not really really wrong you've got a library with a lot of duplicate photos and there's no sort of simple way to resolve that now if you just want to say you know let go and let apple if they gave you a big button that said closing my eyes i'm assuming what you're gonna do is right resolve all my duplicates when you're done it'll be like hey no more duplicates uh and then you just go la la la i'm not listening and not think about the ones that you might have deleted that you liked right uh those are basically choices you either manually drew a tremendous amount of work kind of you know this is uh i don't want to do a report you so again but like you you effed around and you found out you have photos like where did they come from how did they get there this is the situation you're in you can either resolve them all very quickly with little oversight and just not worry about what it did or you can resolve them manually with a tremendous amount of oversight and yes apple photos should do more to help you but there's no amount of program can help you that will uh absolve you of having to make these decisions if you care about these decisions which it seems like you do thanks to our sponsors this week Factor, 1Password, and Sentry and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on Overtime we're going to be talking about whether AI voice control is a threat to Apple's platforms so tune in atp.fm slash join if you weren't a member it's going to be fun and of course there's many other perks of membership lots of other exclusive content check it out.

1:56:36Thank you so much everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause 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

1:57:42Marco, do you have any updates on your AC? I've been dying to know. Hmm. Well, the updates are I spent a lot of money getting them to finally just install the stupid thermostats. They did not fix the problem. Surprise, surprise. They gave diagnostic codes. Surprise, surprise. Did you talk about that on the show already? I'm not sure. I think I did. You definitely talked about it privately. I don't know if you spoke about it on the show or not. You might want to give some background on the thermostats. I think you complained that they told you that I think your problem is these fancy thermostats you got and you didn't like that.

1:58:13But then what happened since then? So I had at various times three or four different AC repair companies out here over the course of this spring and summer trying to get them to just fix my stupid air conditioners already. And every single time somebody came out here, they would make a big sneak. Oh, they'd point to my Echo B thermostats. Oh, it's the thermostats. It's these smart thermostats. They die all the time. It's all it's always them. And I'm like, OK, I assure you, you know, and I would go through and I'd show them my phone. look there is no energy saving setting on right now like you know because and you can see you can understand why like they probably get a lot of service calls from people who install a nest or something and it goes into energy saving mode and the people say my air conditioning is broken and they call them out so like I understand why they would be sensitive to that but literally every like no everyone gave me so much crap about these thermostats and oh it must be those and then like they would call the manufacturer tech support like as they're looking at stuff and the manufacturer tech support would be like it's the thermostats and oh my god they worked for five years i guarantee you it's not the thermostats but okay and eventually i said you know what eff it i'm so tired of these people you know being like this Just put in the Mitsubishi thermostats.

1:59:26Like, I don't care. Like, it's fine. Give me a Wi-Fi thermostat from some other brand. I'll bridge it to home whatever if I have to. Fine. If that'll make you guys shut up and just work on my air conditioning ever, fine. So they did. So I got a repair person to finally put in the Mitsubishi thermostats. They've been in for a couple of weeks. We still don't have air conditioning. I'm sitting here in my office. It is thanks to the Yoling sensor on the wall. I can tell you it's 82 degrees in here. My forehead is wet. I think I've got that beat. probably um but yeah it is very hot in here um and uh and we still don't have air conditioning now it has been a pretty mild last couple of weeks like temperature wise here it's been you know we haven't really needed it most days so that's been fine but it is august there are still hot times um and august isn't over yet and september is also pretty hot so also this is our this is our heat in the winter for this house it's their heat pumps and also you paid a lot of money for air conditioning in your house it's supposed to work yes and it's only five years old and also um you know we have it's okay so there's also all this drama now that the refrigerant that our system uses is r410a there's you know every heat pump system has a refrigerant in it and over time they they find out like refrigerants tend to be pretty bad for the environment if they're vented into the atmosphere.

2:00:54And over time, we developed new ones that are less terrible for the environment. And then what happens eventually is usually states or the federal government will start restricting the old refrigerants from being used. And so if you have a system that uses the old refrigerant, you oftentimes after a while can't get it anymore or can't get parts or can't get it serviced anymore or can't get it recharged if there's any slow leaks over time. you know so that has now happened in new york for refrigerant i use for tonight in your five-year-old system yes my five-year-old system it could you can no longer buy new ones i think as of around now or this year um and they're going to phase out their refrigerant over the next x years and it's going to be harder and harder to get and harder and harder to get parts and replacements there's refrigerators too by the way i know it's right in the name but just fyi yeah so so you know the repair he's like you know if you want you can like get some extra there's two big outside condensers he's like you can get or compressors whatever you can get two replacement ones and just like store them somewhere right now like they're about to go out of stock forever put them with your keyboards right they're huge and i'm like okay you know tell me a price we'll talk about it well they're telling you to buy the entire unit the whole big thing with the fan yeah to to buy two extra ones to replace the hell the thing to store in the salt air maybe you get a hermetically sealed box right and well he he recommended that i keep them like on long islands though like yeah do not keep them by the sea shore because when you need them you open it up and it'll just be a chunk of rust yeah but i'm like okay what are we talking here numbers wise and what we are talking about if i wanted to keep a spare set of condensers 27 000 oh no That's not surprising.

2:02:41But what you do if these things ever go and you need to replace them is you buy the newer, more efficient ones that are available on the market now. Well, so the problem is when you change the refrigerant on the outside units, chances are you probably also have to change the inside air handlers. And if you're really unlucky, you might even have to run new refrigerant pipelines from the outside thing to the inside things. And so I asked him, I'm like, okay, in that scenario, what does that look like? and i don't even want to tell you the number he said it was substantially higher so i'm like oh my god what like did he get an explanation of why you would need new like lines and inside units for refrigerant change um well you know the every cyst every like you know pair of compressor and air handler they have their own specs like okay well you need you know this diameter of pipe and you need that you know it's like there's all they're all designed for each other they're They're designed to match each other.

2:03:40I believe they're designed for it. It surprises me that the refrigerant changes would be such a radical change that you can't use the existing lines and inside units because the diameter is wrong or they can't handle the pressure or something. Presumably, they know. But then again, they also said it was your thermostats. I know. Yeah. So now I'm out. Literally thousands of dollars in thermostats and thermostat labor. And now I'm being asked to spend another$27 ,000 maybe. I still don't have working air conditioning. I am not happy about the situation at all. Did you enjoy at least a moment of smugness when they put in the new thermostats and it didn't help?

2:04:12Yeah, seriously. I will enjoy that smugness once the system works. Right now, you're saving it? Right now, I've just spent thousands of dollars for uglier thermostats that don't work in HomeKit. Well, no, because once it works, they're going to say, see, it was a thermostats. I would have loved if it was a thermostats because that's a lot simpler and cheaper than everything else we now have to look at. but I'm just you know the next step is they're going to like you know flush out the whole system and put an all-new refrigerant of my apparently about to be illegal refrigerant like and I honestly I think that will fix it it's probably it's probably like based on all the you know research I've done they should do I mean I'm assuming they will do this but if they don't talk to them about it beforehand is they should be able to measure the amount of refrigerant that was in the system when they quote-unquote drain it because as you noted they shouldn't be just venting it to the atmosphere yeah they do yeah like like when they do it on your car and they you know refresh your air conditioner refrigerator or whatever when they collect it they know there should be x number of liters in the system or whatever yes and we got we got x minus 50 out so we know there's probably a leak somewhere right they should be able to tell when they extract the old refrigerant hey has this been leaking has this been leaking out of somewhere and hopefully they would find where it was leaking before they refilled it with fresh refrigerant because they're just going to keep leaking out or whatever but i feel like if they don't do that at least mention it before and hey you're going to measure it when you take it out and you know that like maybe they don't know the intended volume of the system because it's not written somewhere and they don't know how long the lines are or something but this would be a good thing to know if there is a refrigerant leak because that's what you need to fix of course yeah and so that's like like that's the next step it's just okay like please look at the refrigerant that is based on the symptoms and my chat gpt research and like it's like it sure seems like the ref like it's like so now now that we have thermostats now we can see the error codes and what's great about error codes is that you can look them up on the internet and so i've of course been seeing okay well the the upstairs reports one code the downstairs reports a different code okay so i searched both of those and the only and upstairs and downstairs seem to be demonstrating very similar symptoms and they have two different error codes and they they're two totally separate systems and when you look at like the chat gpt summary of what these error codes might mean or what might be causing them can you just look up the error codes the manual for your device please no i you can but like but but the code is like you know suction sensor one or whatever like you know it's not it's not like a you know a useful human thing and but in the explanations like why might that be happening and the explanation like the only overlap between those two venn diagrams of the explanation of those two codes is refrigerant issues and so it's like yeah that's probably right i probably had like you know like when the the earlier repair person over the spring worked on it i think they screwed it up they put in the wrong amount or whatever and it's been bad since all of the symptoms point to that so let's fix that and maybe by december maybe i'll have working air conditioning it's it's been it's been a really awful week for lots of other reasons that has not been one of them um but certainly once it continues to get hotter i'm going to get more grumpy about that yeah hasn't been a good uh past few months for me appliance wise too but on a much smaller scale i lost an air conditioner at the beginning of the summer and replaced it at significantly less money than you're talking about because i have window units lost my oven had to replace it lost my toaster had to replace i didn't actually replace the oven i fixed the oven i'll talk about in rectives but anyway yeah uh sometimes these things just go and i i think i've got another five years on my water heater and my uh my heating system in my house should have already broken so we're just out here with their fingers crossed in casey's house is filled with water so you know not it's not looking great can i interest you in 27 000 worth of condensers that you won't be able to refill in a few years right they're very compact don't take up a lot of room are very lightweight easy to deal with easy to store that's what and like i've you know i've been going back and forth with the questions like okay if we do this like you know they're like they're 300 pounds each and they're huge yeah how would you get them across the ferry yeah how yeah how would i where would i store them like they don't they're not going to fit in my garage on the other side like where i'd have to like get a storage unit just for them and then like hire some trucker to like go pick them up like you'd want it to be like temperature control and stuff because like yes have like delicate equipment like that in like just random temperatures and humidities it'll i mean it'll rust even if it's not by the seashore exactly so that yeah i i we we had a family discussion about what we should do about this and we all decided we're not going to buy the spares but um it's it's a very frustrating situation Beep beep beep.