In short
Accidental Tech Podcast Episode 675: Open, Retrieve, Expand, Load
Episode Overview In Episode 675 of the Accidental Tech Podcast, titled *Open, Retrieve, Expand, Load*, the hosts dive into a range of technology topics, including Apple’s software design, the implications of upcoming weather events, and personal updates on various projects. The discussion weaves through humor, technical insights, and the nostalgia for past software iterations.
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Key Topics Discussed
- Pre-show Banter
- Weather Predictions: Casey discusses an impending snowstorm in Richmond, Virginia, humorously reflecting on local snow preparedness and the absurdity of weather branding.
- Netflix Series Recommendation: Casey briefly mentions enjoying the Apple TV show *Pluribus*.
- ATP Member's Special
- New member special about *Automotive Logos* was introduced, indicating the popularity and fun of tier lists among listeners.
- Follow-up Topics
- TCL/Sony TV Discussion: A promise for an in-depth conversation in the following week.
- Cloud Technology: Notable mentions include Google and Apple’s joint statement on integrating AI technologies, especially in Siri’s chatbot capabilities.
- Clipboard Hijacking: Discussion about clipboard issues on Apple devices and how it’s a common user complaint.
- Indonesia’s Population: A humorous correction regarding Indonesia not being a small country.
- MainStage Availability: Clarification that MainStage is not a new product.
- Apple's Pro Apps Bundle: Updates on educational offers still being available.
- CES Monitor Innovations: Insights on monitor connectivity and color accuracy.
- macOS Window Management: Discussion on window management tools and challenges in macOS Tahoe.
- Ask ATP Segment
- Software Design Opinions: Debate on whether Alan Dye was a better steward of design than Jony Ive, with opinions leaning towards Dye's era being worse due to design oversights in the macOS Tahoe update.
- Favorite macOS Styles: Discussion around different macOS aesthetics, with nostalgia for styles from System 7 and Mac OS 8.
- Personal Projects
- John’s Migration to Cloudflare: Transitioning his web hosting from Namecheap to Cloudflare and Fastmail, along with porting scripts and cron jobs to Node.js.
- Using Claude and Passkeys: Experimentation with using Claude Code for programming tasks, specifically for creating a web app to mirror the functionality of the now-discontinued status board app by Panic.
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Key Takeaways
- Weather and Community: The hosts’ banter illustrates the lighthearted nature of discussing impending weather and community reactions.
- Software Design Critiques: There’s a strong sentiment that the current state of macOS design is lacking, with calls for better adherence to established design principles.
- Technological Adaptation: John’s experience with migrating to modern coding solutions illustrates the potential and challenges of leveraging AI and cloud technologies in personal projects.
- Nostalgia in Software: The discussion around favorite macOS styles showcases the emotional connections users have with software design over the years.
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Important Links & References
- [ATP Member's Special: Automotive Logos](https://atp.fm/join)
- [Joint Statement by Google and Apple on AI](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/)
- [Cloudflare Workers Documentation](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/)
- [Fastmail Referral Link](https://hypercritical.co/fastmail)
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Conclusion Episode 675 of the Accidental Tech Podcast encapsulates a broad spectrum of discussions—from local weather anecdotes to in-depth critiques of software design and personal tech projects. The engaging dialogue highlights the hosts' expertise and offers listeners a blend of humor and critical insights into the tech world.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOImpending Snowstorm in Richmond
0:45 to 3:16
The hosts share their experience and concerns regarding an upcoming snowstorm.
“So, if they know that three inches is due on a Tuesday, they'll be out that Tuesday.”
Watching Modern TV Shows
3:16 to 3:56
Discussion about the latest TV shows the hosts have been watching.
“Oh, by the way, so first of all, yes, good luck, everybody, getting through that.”
Discussion on TCL and Sony TVs
4:51 to 7:18
The hosts discuss the recent news regarding TCL and Sony TVs and a retraction from John Gruber.
“nerd and then unsubscribe and listen to them at your leisure.”
Apple and Google Partnership Rumors
7:18 to 14:02
The hosts delve into rumors about Apple using Google’s cloud technology for Siri.
“Basically saying, sad to see these news, but you know, Sony hasn't been that great in the TV business recently anyway.”
Apple's Cloud Computing Strategy
14:02 to 16:48
Discussing the potential future of Apple's private cloud compute and its collaboration with Google.
“Because everything we saw at that initial Apple intelligence presentation, how much of that has actually panned out and will ever pan out?”
Clipboard Hijacking in Apple News
18:56 to 20:08
Discussing the issues of clipboard hijacking in Apple News and other apps.
“Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.”
Indonesia's Population and Technology Blocks
20:08 to 21:27
Exploring the significance of Indonesia's population in the context of tech blocks.
“writes, clipboard hijacking is an Apple thing.”
Apple's Creative Bundle and Free Trials
21:27 to 22:37
Discussing Apple's Pro Apps bundle and the changes in free trial offerings.
“We were not familiar with main stage when we were talking about the creative, what is it called?”
Gaming Monitors and Connectivity
22:37 to 24:49
Debating the connectivity options and usability of gaming monitors with Macs.
“And speaking of pro apps and in this case, free trials, Caroline writes Final Cut and Logic Pro both had a three month trial versions with all features unlocked.”
Color Accuracy in Non-Apple Displays
24:49 to 27:21
Discussing color accuracy and HDR capabilities of non-Apple monitors when used with Macs.
“But what kind of color accuracy and HDR mess would one get into if trying to use these with a Mac?”
Show all 43 chapters
ProMotion and Safari's Refresh Rate
27:21 to 28:00
Examining Safari's handling of refresh rates and ProMotion displays.
“appreciated 120 hertz ProMotion displays, including in Safari.”
High Refresh Rate Benefits
28:00 to 29:40
Discover how high refresh rates enhance scrolling and animations on devices.
“You can test the difference at the very amusingly named testufo.com, which will also be linked.”
Editing Keynote on Vision Pro
29:40 to 30:20
Learn about the capability to edit Keynote files on the Apple Vision Pro.
“I forgot that there was a little bit of Vision Pro corner here in follow-up, so my bad.”
Controversy Over Tahoe Icons
32:00 to 38:20
Explore the debate surrounding the introduction of icons in the Tahoe menus.
“Thank you to Zapier for sponsoring our show.”
Execution Errors in Tahoe Design
38:20 to 42:01
Analyze the design flaws in Tahoe's implementation of menu icons and their history.
“the platform, certainly don't seem to respect the platform and seem to not have taken a lot of care doing it.”
The Evolution of Menu Icons
42:01 to 44:21
Discover how the evolution of display technology affects icon usage in menus.
“It'd be like open, retrieve, expand, load.”
Apple's Icon Guidelines and Issues
44:24 to 46:44
Explore Apple's icon guidelines and the confusion surrounding their implementation.
“It's like, it's not, there's not enough common icons and even Apple doesn't follow its own device.”
The Case Against Current Menu Icons
46:45 to 49:19
Analyze the drawbacks of the current icon system in macOS menus.
“But someone somewhere disguided, they wanted to see a lot more menus because they think it looks cool.”
SF Symbols and Icon Inconsistencies
49:20 to 52:00
Discuss the inconsistencies in using SF Symbols across macOS applications.
“All of these icons, as far as I can tell, I think all the ones I saw, they're all part of Apple's SF Symbols library.”
Leadership Changes and Their Impact
52:01 to 56:00
Examine the implications of leadership changes on Apple's design philosophy.
“So one team picked one icon for the same command as another team picked another icon.”
Discussion on UI Challenges in macOS Tahoe
56:00 to 1:01:00
Explore the difficulties and design choices around window resizing in macOS Tahoe.
“Like, certainly it's better than Allendeye still being there, which is a powerful person whose opinions that we disagree with and who makes bad decisions about UI.”
Blocking macOS Update Prompts
1:01:00 to 1:04:20
Learn how to block update prompts in macOS Tahoe and why it matters.
“And then rounding out our triplet of Tahoe complaints.”
Comparing Design Stewardship: Alan Dye vs. Jony Ive
1:08:10 to 1:10:01
Debate the impact of Alan Dye and Jony Ive on Apple's software design.
“Let's do some Ask ATP because coincidentally, our Ask ATP tonight largely relates to what we just talked about.”
Design Leadership: Ive vs. Dye
1:10:01 to 1:12:19
The discussion explores the design philosophies and impacts of Johnny Ive and Alan Dye on Apple software.
“and Tim Cook had convinced him to stay, according to rumors.”
iOS 7 vs. iOS 26: A Comparative Analysis
1:12:20 to 1:14:28
A comparison of the design elements and user experiences of iOS 7 and iOS 26.
“Yeah, I think if we're comparing, if we take the people's names off of it, and if we compare the big iOS 7 redesign to the big iOS 26 redesign, I agree.”
The Mac's Design Challenges
1:14:29 to 1:17:28
An exploration of the unique design challenges faced by Mac software compared to iOS.
“And we haven't really had a lot of that in Apple's software design leadership really since Forstall left.”
Rethinking UI Strategy for the Mac
1:17:29 to 1:21:10
Suggestions for how to better allocate resources and design efforts for Mac OS.
“And I think the whole idea that we need to unify everything about these platforms, not only I think is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, and I think it's misapplied in tons of ways because they're different platforms.”
The Future of Touchscreen Macs
1:21:11 to 1:24:00
Discussing the implications of design leadership changes on upcoming touchscreen MacBook Pros.
“Those sort of Apple strategy taxes that are applied to the Mac drag that team down so much.”
Impact of Alan Dye's Departure on Touch Macs
1:24:00 to 1:25:18
Discussion on how the departure of a key designer may affect future MacBook design choices.
“some of you've always heard from teams at Apple.”
The Viability of Touch Features on MacBooks
1:25:18 to 1:26:40
Exploration of the practicality and user demand for touch functionality on Mac devices.
“But what most people want touch on their laptops for usually is just pinching to zoom on something on their screen or something like that.”
Favorite macOS Styles and Aesthetic Preferences
1:26:40 to 1:27:41
Panelists share their favorite macOS designs and personal aesthetic tastes.
“Finally, Nate writes, what are your favorite macOS styles?”
Nostalgia and Critique of macOS Evolution
1:27:41 to 1:31:29
Discussion on nostalgia for older macOS versions and critiques of modern design choices.
“And I upgraded to Tiger on that same PowerBook G4.”
Migrating to Cloudflare: The Journey Begins
1:38:01 to 1:40:39
Learn about the speaker's transition from shared hosting to Cloudflare and the challenges involved.
Streamlining Email Services with Fastmail
1:40:40 to 1:42:58
Discover how the speaker consolidated their email services from multiple vendors into Fastmail.
Managing Legacy Content: Cron Jobs and iWeb
1:42:59 to 1:44:48
Explore the speaker's approach to handling old cron jobs and legacy website content during the migration.
Translating Perl Scripts to Node.js with AI
1:44:49 to 1:47:39
Learn how AI tools helped the speaker convert legacy Perl scripts into Node.js for modern use.
“I was like, first I tried like, first I tried Lion, but that was the wrong version.”
Reimagining Status Board: From iPad App to Web Application
1:47:40 to 1:50:38
Discover the speaker's project to recreate the discontinued Status Board app as a web application.
Building a Web App with AI Assistance
1:50:39 to 1:52:04
See how the speaker utilized AI coding agents to build a web app version of Status Board.
Creating a Web App with Cloud Code
1:52:04 to 1:54:44
Learn how the speaker built a web app using Claude and faced challenges in UI design.
Navigating File Issues with Git and Dropbox
1:54:44 to 1:55:55
Discover how the speaker handled unexpected loss of files while using Git and Dropbox.
Challenges with Node.js Scripts and Cloud Code
1:55:55 to 2:00:07
Explore the speaker's experience using Node.js scripts for data analysis and their difficulties with Cloud Code.
“Marco, start your end of the show thing.”
Implementing Passkey Login for ATP.fm
2:00:07 to 2:03:48
Follow the journey of adding passkey login functionality to ATP.fm and the hurdles faced.
“This is all happening during this week, by the way, this is like three days this week.”
Analyzing Overtime Segment Lengths
2:03:48 to 2:05:56
Learn about the variability in the length of overtime segments and its implications for the show.
“So if you want to use passkeys with ATB.fm, you can do that now.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I survived the bitter blast. and now I believe we're on to the I don't know, Blue Mountain Freeze Are these coffee flavors? What are we talking about? This is the names that the local weather station that plays in my coffee shop that I see many mornings gives to weather for the week So this past week it was cold It got very cold It is January, that happens That was apparently the bitter blast Were weather events as heavily branded in the past as they are now? I don't know, but now that you've opened this can of worms, buckle up, because I have thoughts about weather right now. So, to recap, and I've been through this many times, Virginia, or Richmond anyway, I shouldn't generalize to Virginia.
0:44Richmond, if we get like three inches of snow in a day or so, the kids will be out of school for probably a day, right? So, if they know that three inches is due on a Tuesday, they'll be out that Tuesday. Six plus inches of snow, you're looking at multiple days off of school, generally speaking, like anywhere between two and five days off of school, right? As I sit here now on Wednesday evening, we are slated for three inches of snow on Saturday, which is manageable for us, but a little aggressive. On Sunday, we're due for 24 inches. In total, that is 30 inches of snow, which I don't even know.
1:24that's, I think it's like three quarters of a meter or something like that. Uh, it's, it's ridiculous how much snow we're going to be. Yeah. It's about three quarters of a meter of snow. And like I said to you, that's, that's not good. I said to Aaron just yesterday, you know, what's about to happen is that we're going to get the COVID we thought we were getting in 2020, where we don't leave the house for two weeks and then we'll leave again because we will be utterly screwed if Richmond gets a damn near a meter of snow and it's going to be awful. But no, Well, I haven't heard any branding for the snow that we're getting to come back to your actual point.
1:56It hasn't been branded, but we are going to be getting so much snow. And I was out running errands earlier today and everyone is driving like idiots because they're all trying to go to the grocery store and buy all the things. Erin went to Costco during the like fancy lad hours or fancy lass in her case hours, you know, where if you have the, I think it's the executive membership, which is not that much money at all. You can go an hour earlier than the plebs. and she was there this morning. And the store hadn't officially opened for the regular folks. And she said the line was all the way to the back of the store to check out.
2:29Like, it's ridiculous. I mean, but that makes sense. Like, for a place like that that doesn't really have snow infrastructure to be facing a giant storm, like, that is actually, you know, expected behavior and not that unreasonable. I mean, this would all happen if we were getting just the three inches of snow. But the 24 we're currently slated for, that will ruin Richmond for at least a week, probably the better part of two weeks. Now, that being said, oftentimes, like when it gets close, it'll peter out and decide, oh, actually, I'm going to take a turn to the north or the south or, you know, something will happen on the way.
3:02But, yeah, I'm screwed. I am legitimately lightly concerned about my presence on the podcast. Not obviously tonight, but a week from tonight, because who knows? We may not have power for a week or so. I don't know. It's going to be great. Jeez. Oh, by the way, so first of all, yes, good luck, everybody, getting through that. That could be quite something for a lot of our listeners. Totally separately, not even close to related. You mentioned she went during the plebeian hours or whatever. No, it was before the plebeian hours that she was there. Anyway, I just finished Pluribus on Apple TV. It's really good.
3:37I haven't seen it yet. I'm not going to say anything about it, except I really enjoyed it, and I can recommend it. Oh, good deal. The less you know, the better. Look at you watching modern TV shows. I know. I'm feeling behind now. Aaron and I are cruising through the pit, which I like quite a lot. We're like three-quarters of the way through season one. But look at you go. Very well done. Thank you. So before we continue, we should talk to you and announce that there is a new member special. And we went back to our favorite trough. We went to the HP tier list. And now we're doing, this time we did automotive logos.
4:11logos so uh the tier lists i think are certainly most listeners favorite member special and honestly i think they're kind of mine too um and so this time we talked about various automotive logos and john put together the list of logos he very clearly did announced on the episode that he did not do all of them he's well aware of it you can see some of john's preferences and the choices he made but i still think it was a very very fun episode uh and you should check it out so john if you've never heard any of our member specials, how could you hear only the most recent one or maybe older ones? You just join to become a member.
4:47Go to adp.fm slash join and become a member, get access to all of the member specials. You can just download them all because you're a computer nerd and then unsubscribe and listen to them at your leisure. Or you just say subscribe and listen to them as they come out. We have a lot of tier list episodes, as Casey mentioned. This is probably the biggest one we've ever done in terms of the number of little tiles that we dragged up into the tier list uh and yet there are just so many possible logos especially since we did historical ones i tried to pick ones that i found interesting acknowledging that there are many that i missed the only one that i regret that i missed oh i i regret when people are like that people are into the eyes about tier lists like oh boy automotive logos i can't wait to hear about the logo from this company and i know before they even started listening that we didn't do that company at all there's just there's just too many of them um but the one i regret not including is kia because they really messed up their logo and i would have loved to trash them oh no i think we would have that would have been the fight that would have been the biggest fight you think they actually improved the kia logo i don't remember the history but i like the new one kia is not uh kia is not in this episode but there are 91 other logos uh we may do another automotive logo one some point in the future uh no promises some people are asking us to do european car brands that we have never heard of which might be fun uh but anyway we've got this one automotive logos 91 in total put into a tier list we we were ruthlessly efficient and we got the job done in record time.
6:04You know, this is my brave, bold stance and my hot take. The current Kia logo, I think it's good. I like it. Whoa. Nope, it's very bad. Alright, if you want more of that. I will also say John did an incredible amount of work to prepare for this. That is true. The number of logos was very high. The number of images he had to find and generate was very high. And try to justify with varying degrees of success. Yeah. Like, this was The research was difficult, let's just say. Oh, my. Because it took me hours to do the editing of just inserting all the images and processing them that he had already generated.
6:43I had a fraction of the work. He must have had so much more. So thank you, John, for probably working on this for at least two straight days of work. It was a lot. So we appreciate you, John. Thank you. HP.fm slash join. All right. So we're not going to talk about the TCL Sony thing this week. I know it's a big news story. People want to hear what I have to say about that. We will talk about it next week. It is not particularly time sensitive, I think, since nothing's really happening until like 2027 and more news about it is breaking as we speak. So I think they'll actually be it will do a better job of it next week.
7:19So there's that. But before we do that, I wanted to my original plan was to give a brief mention here to John Gruber's article in which he links to the Sony TCL story and says at the end that Sony TVs haven't been the Sony TVs of yore for a very long time. Basically saying, sad to see these news, but you know, Sony hasn't been that great in the TV business recently anyway. And I was incensed by this. It's totally wrong. I demanded he publish a retraction and I was going to rant about it on the show. But in between the time that i did that and then sat down to record he's published a retraction so suffice it to say sony has been at the top of the best possible picture quality tv market for the past several years uh and that's why that's why i'm interested in them and that's why all these people are interested in this story and gruber was not aware of that because he's just been using his lg tv and doesn't care as much about picture quality i don't know anyway he's retracted it uh problem solved tune in next week for more on the tcl sony uh story quote gruber john saracusa tells me i need to run a retraction he even used an exclamation mark i did in my private message to him in my public one i did not use an exclamation point oh man that's incredible all right i wanted to call marco's attention to something marco i don't know if you even know where your vision pro is but you might have to charge it because coming oh shoot i didn't write down when, but coming sometime at the end of the month is a two-part, I believe, documentary coming on January 30th is a two-part docuseries called Top Dogs, which goes deep behind the scenes in the, was it Greenwich dog show?
8:59Some dog show that's not on this continent. I think it's like Westminster over there. The big one? Oh, is that the one? Yeah, I guess it's Westminster. Greenwich, Connecticut is on this continent. There was probably a Greenwich over there first, though, if I had to guess. Yes, there is. That's where Greenwich Mean Time comes from. Where the mean time is. It's so mean. It's so nasty that time. I mean, it's not the one true time zone. Am I right? Ding. Anyways, the point is, Marco, you might have to charge your Vision Pro and watch this docuseries on January 30th, which looks extremely cute if you're a dog person.
9:26All right. I got to give them credit. They will probably get me to do that. Yes. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. Point of order. This should have been in Vision Pro Corner in the topic section. Moving on. Wow. Do we have a Vision Pro Corner in the topics right now? We do. You made it. You invented it. Yeah, but then it went away. I know, but you can bring it back at any time you want. It's just not really follow-up. Sorry, Dad. All right. Cloud technology has been mentioned in Apple and Google's joint statement. Reading from Google's blog, quote, the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology.
9:59We talked about this last week, and I highlighted the cloud technology, which, again, Manton Reese pointed out. What do they mean by cloud technology? We know they're using the models, but what's the cloud thing? Well, Gurman has an answer this week. Right. So, Gurman writes, In a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are discussing hosting the chatbot capabilities of Siri directly on Google servers, running powerful chips known as TPUs, or tensor processing units. The previously promised non-chatbot update to Siri retaining the current interface is planned for iOS 26.4. The chatbot capabilities will likely come in June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.
10:33So, German is essentially confirming the only thing that made any sense was that, I guess, maybe Apple's going to run their stuff in Google's data center. and on google's tpus uh that makes sense because if they're if you're going to do something at the scale of like all iphone users it's kind of a big ask for apple to deploy a bunch of m2 ultras or whatever their m5 server chip is and deal with all that uh whereas google already has the infrastructure to serve the entire world on whatever it wants to serve so i bet that deal will go through but it's interesting that apple is uh well i guess they're not announcing anything this is just a rumor but uh you know apple traditionally uses you know aws azure all those other things or whatever, but I'm not sure how much Google Cloud stuff they've done.
11:14Making this part of the Google deal to use their models definitely makes sense. Maybe they had a good deal on Google's servers as well. This makes so much sense in the big picture way. If you consider it to mean that Apple will probably be hosting all of the largest models for Apple intelligence in Google's data centers. On Google's tech. Where they were designed to run, because Google made the models to run on their hardware. Well, and not only that, I mean, and yeah, obviously they're going to be at least starting out running Gemini as the foundation model and probably, honestly, if I had to guess, would probably stay there for the long term.
11:51I don't – at this point, I don't see Apple developing their own competitive foundation models that are going to be worth using. I think if they ever do, that's many, many years away. Like think on the order of like 10 or 20 years away and if it ever happens. And it might just be that they just always use Gemini for the large model stuff. And if you're going to run the very large flagship level AI models, you're not going to run it on Apple's chips because Apple's chips aren't designed for that. And the very, very largest models, the hardware to run those is so specialized that Apple not only isn't going to make something competitive for it, but shouldn't make something competitive for it because that's fairly far out of their main areas of expertise.
12:37You're looking at the highest end servers from NVIDIA type stuff and also Google's custom stuff. That's what this world mostly looks like. And so Google has the whole stack top to bottom to serve, to develop these models, to host these models, like to scale them. Apple is not going to be competitive on that level for a long time, if ever. Where Apple, I think, might be competitive long term is on device models. That makes a lot of sense. That is well within Apple's expertise. You know, maybe not so much in the cutting edge of AI these days. but I feel like they can get there you know kind of reasonably in you know maybe five years they can probably have their own on device models being class leading enough to actually use only their stuff but for the big like world knowledge server models I don't think not only are they not in that game now either in the models or the hardware to serve them but I don't think they will ever be in that game and you could probably argue like they probably maybe shouldn't try a lot of those things so I think this this is probably bigger than it seems and i think it's going and i think this part of it where they just siri just runs on google servers i think that's going to just be the the default of how this goes for the foreseeable future and also i think that's probably the right move this is the chatbot uh thing only according to german's rumor here and i do think they're still going to want to use private cloud compute which depends on using apple software and apple hardware and all other stuff i think they'll still do that with stuff that deals with your personal information and maybe just like general chat body stuff will go to this kind of like they do the regular chat body stuff to go to chat gpt now but uh we'll see still just rumors and it's all it remains to be seen how much apple will even talk about this i mean the joint the quote-unquote joint statement that we read from was just published by google and apple's not saying anything about it do you think apple's going to even mention whether they're using servers in google's data centers it probably just goes completely unsaid oh yeah i can't imagine they would mention it um but also So I wouldn't necessarily assume that private cloud compute, the way it was advertised, will be the situation forever.
14:47Because everything we saw at that initial Apple intelligence presentation, how much of that has actually panned out and will ever pan out? It's not 100%. But you can use private cloud compute now, and I'm assuming it works exactly like they announced. So that's one of the things they actually did ship. You can, but it's in a very limited capacity at a very limited scale. and if you look at everything else that was announced during that Apple intelligence presentation, I think a lot of that stuff is going to get memory hold and we're just going to move on like air power and pretend like it never happened and the reality of what's delivered might be different because a lot of that stuff didn't pan out.
15:21The assumption that Apple will always run the models that use your personal info on what they already described as private cloud compute, maybe, but I would not assume that's a given. I think it can just as easily end up that they work out the technical details with Google to do something that is similarly private on Google's hardware in Google's data centers with Google's models. I think that is a very, very likely outcome for this, either short term or long term. Because, again, this scale of hosting this kind of compute power and developing that kind of model is just not in Apple's wheelhouse.
16:00And that's not to say it never can be, but so far Apple has not at all made the required effort to get themselves in that position. So the Apple that we know today, it's like Apple could at some point get better at lots of things that it's not currently good at. But the Apple that we know today is not good enough in those areas to probably host this the way that we assume that it would be hosted with private cloud compute. I think private cloud compute is going to be probably memory hold in the next few years. And if and when that happens, I don't think that's that big of a problem or scandal or downside because I'm sure Apple would insist on similar privacy expectations if they did move it to Google.
16:45I'm sure they would design the whole thing with Google. They would work with them to ensure all the same privacy and encryption and transparency. I'm sure if they make this change, we would look at it and be like, yeah, that makes sense, and it doesn't matter.
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19:02I made an offhanded comment slash rant about how I copied something out of Apple News, and a bunch of other stuff was appended on the side of it, and I didn't care for it. And I assumed that that was didn't care for it is the understatement of the hour yes fair enough uh and i assumed it was apple news if i'm not mistaken or perhaps the wall street journal or whatever i was copying from uh richard writes i just sampled 10 different random news articles on apple news and they all had the additional text added to the paste this is definitely an apple news app thing and not just a wall street journal thing however i see this happening more frequently in other apps i'm in a doctoral program and often take notes by copying and pasting from pdfs some just flat out don't let you do that or they add additional text does this have anything to do with how crawlers being used to train uh how train ai i don't think it has anything to do with that i know they've been doing this since way before there was ai crawlers it's just it's just a thing some i like i kind of see the reason you know in some instances you're like look this is useful you you probably want the citation anyway so we're saving you some work but that assumption doesn't hold in lots of other contexts and even when it does hold like for research papers just annoys people.
20:07Yep. And then Chris S. writes, clipboard hijacking is an Apple thing. Try copy and pasting something from the transcript in the podcast app. Same thing happens. Cool. Vitor writes, regarding your Apple News complaint of it adding extra text to your copy, you were hesitant to blame Apple News itself, but I wouldn't be. Apple Books has done the exact same thing forever. Since the time, it was still called iBooks. It is so annoying, I've made an Alfred workflow to simply grab the text within the quotes, ignore everything else, and put it back on my clipboard. Well done. I dig that. Only on the Mac, as they would say, because iOS and iPadOS don't let you do cool things.
20:37Indeed, John, indeed. All right. Last week, I think it was, we were talking about Grok. Oh, yes, it was last week. Being blocked in Indonesia and Malaysia. And somebody, one of us, maybe it was me, I don't know. It was me. Okay, there you go. It's always John, right? John said offhandedly that, what, Indonesia is not big or something along those lines? Yeah, I said Malaysia and Indonesia are blocking it and small companies can easily block it. Small countries can easily block it. but I need to be corrected there. Right. So many people have written that Indonesia's population is about 285 million.
21:10And for comparison, the U S is about 340 million. I should have known that because I recently looked at one of those like projections of what the world population will be like in like 30 or 40 years. And Indonesia was like either number one or two. So yeah, large population and growing real fast. Main stage is not new. We were not familiar with main stage when we were talking about the creative, what is it called? The creative. creator studio, right? Creator studio. Thank you. Uh, pixel mature. Anyways, uh, main stage is part of the creator studio and it is not new. Uh, Mike Taffet amongst many others wrote in to say that it's been in use, particularly for stage related things for a long time.
21:48And there's a story that Mike appointed us to from mix online.com. Uh, this is in 2008. They talk about how, uh, Trent Reznor and nine inch nails uses main stage during concerts. And it's being powered by what John? Two X serves. Oh, yeah. The perfect rack-mountable stage-based Apple computer for your nine-inch nails show. Exactly what the people who made that machine intended it for. That's amazing. Exactly. All right. Apple's standalone creative bundle. Pekka Salonin wrote that for education customers, the Pro Apps bundle appears to still be alive. For$200, you get all five Pro Apps, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Mainstage.
22:25It's something to grab perhaps before John's kids graduate. And there is a link in the show notes. I wonder if they'll keep that around because they still sell those standalone and this is just the education bundle standalone. So maybe it's not even going away, but yeah, there you have it. And speaking of pro apps and in this case, free trials, Caroline writes Final Cut and Logic Pro both had a three month trial versions with all features unlocked. And Caroline heard it was even easy to get reset or to reset those trials. Sadly, Apple has removed those now and Creator Studio's trial period is only one month.
22:54And then, John, you had asked, I guess, how the three month free trial worked. Can you tell me about this? Yeah, because I was like, what do you mean a three-month free trial of Final Cut Pro? The Mac App Store doesn't give free trials for paid upfront apps, so how did they do it? And then Ian Robinson piped in to say the apps were full versions downloaded from the Apple website. There you go. There you go. All right, with regard to monitors at CES, tell me about connectivity, John. Yeah, we talked a lot about some monitors that were interesting as potentially useful to Mac users, even though they're technically gaming monitors.
23:25uh and there are some caveats that i meant to uh discuss uh last time last week when we discussed these one is connectivity but i read off all the ports like oh this has this port and that port with this data rate and so on and so forth and we got some questions about this and those questions were warranted which is like okay but can i hook up my mac laptop to it like it's great that it has a display port uh you know whatever version on it it's great that it has hdmi 2.1 but i don't have display port or hdmi ports on my laptop or my mac i have thunderbolt and usbc and stuff so can i drive them most of the monitors that you most of these gaming monitors like the 5k ones the 4k the 6k ones that you'll see with like mac relevant dpis do support display port alternate mode for their usbc port connections if you look at the specs but i wouldn't just assume that means oh that i can just plug in my mac laptop with the usbc cable and everything will work fine especially for the monitors that are like five or six K.
24:20So, I mean, and this is just see, yes, these products are announced. Some of them have prices, but they're not available for purchase yet. I would suggest that if you have any interest in these monitors, wait to see a review where somebody plugs a Mac into it to see that, yes, it will behave correctly. The Mac OS doesn't flip out about it, that it can drive it at its full resolution through the thing. Because the last thing you want to do is get one of these monitors, save a bunch of money. It's great performance. Then you have to get like a, you know, Thunderbolt to DisplayPort or HDMI dongle hanging off your laptop.
24:47You wouldn't like that. So wait for those reviews before you decide to buy one. Anonymous writes, in the latest episode, you went through the specs and prices of various non-Apple displays, with the general conclusion being that you can get studio display, physical and pixel dimensions with less money and more refresh rate and HDR. But what kind of color accuracy and HDR mess would one get into if trying to use these with a Mac? Game consoles asked the user to look at a test picture to infer the HDR capability of the TV. which suggests that HDR capability info might not travel properly over EDID, or extended display identification data.
25:19With an Apple display, macOS knows the HDR headroom, given the particular brightness setting, and can let Lightroom Classic know, so that Lightroom Classic can assume a hard clip in the display pipeline, not do tone mapping. How does HDR work with macOS and a non-Apple display? Where does tone mapping occur with those displays? Are they like TVs in their default mode, tone mapping in the display, or like TVs in HGIG mode, no display side tone mapping? No, display side tone mapping. There we go. I can get there. What does it take to get color accurate results for the display P3 color space with Apple and Adobe apps?
25:50These are all excellent questions. And another reason you should absolutely wait to see a review of these monitors because macOS works very well with Apple monitors. It works okay with non-Apple monitors designed for Mac users, but these displays are for the most part not designed to be used with Macs or by Mac users at all. And so they have different priorities. And most of them have enough features where you like the good thing they have going for them is as gaming monitors, they're very configurable and they have lots of settings that you can tweak. But if you care very much about like accurate color, you're probably better off shopping one of like those Asus monitors that's made for like, you know, creative professionals.
26:27They're more expensive. They don't have the high refresh rate. They probably don't have the dynamic backlight stuff on them. but their whole point is we will be color accurate uh we either have drivers for them for mac os so mac os knows about their color profiles and all their capabilities or else we've tested them to work with macs like i said um msi which was the vendor we were talking about a lot last episode does have a mac focus monitor that advertises the fact that their color will exactly match the color on like the internal laptop displays when you're doing color work so those do exist but that was we didn't actually talk about that particular model because it was uh it didn't have as many features.
27:01So anyway, all this to say is these are gaming monitors. They're not monitors for people who care about color accuracy. So wait for the reviews to see if they can be repurposed for that purpose. But the panels that they use will surely be used in monitors aimed at creative professionals. And I can guarantee those will cost less than the studio display too. With regard to ProMotion, Justin Searles writes, recently Marco was talking about how much he appreciated 120 hertz ProMotion displays, including in Safari. It's probably the case that Safari renders page scrolling at 120 hertz, but I recently learned that rendering page contents is generally capped at 60 hertz unless you dig into feature flags and disable it.
Read the full transcript
27:39This is true on iPhone, iPad Pro, and MacBook Pro. There's a link to a blog post that Justin has written, a very short one, and Justin continues, if you want Safari to render page content at 120 hertz, you need to, at least on iOS, you need to go into Settings, Apps, Safari, Advanced, and then Feature Flags, and then there's a setting in there, prefer page rendering updates near 60 frames per second, which you need to turn off. You can test the difference at the very amusingly named testufo.com, which will also be linked. It's by Blurbusters. If anyone has ever watched a review of a gaming monitor, you know about Blurbusters and the little alien.
28:13And for the record, yes, I was just talking about scrolling because that's where I notice it. I think that is in terms of where I notice any high refresh screen above 60 hertz. It's basically in two areas. It's scrolling and it's when full screen animations come in. So like on the iPhone, you can, I immediately notice iPhone or iPad promotion or not by like when you launch an app and the app zooms into place or you go to the home screen and zooms back out. Any kind of big full screen animation, you notice it. That's what scrolling is, is a big full screen animation, really. So I think, and especially when it's, when it tracks your touch, I feel like I notice it more.
28:53And so in the case of using the scroll wheel to scroll a web page or using your finger to scroll stuff on a phone or an iPad, that I think is where high refresh rates are the most noticeable to the most people, certainly including myself. well i think this is like aimed at like somebody who's trying to you know something in a web page like an entire like a web gl view or like a game you're playing in a web browser or something where even though you're not scrolling essentially the whole screen is changing constantly and you're wondering why you're not getting more than 60 frames per second on your 120 hertz monitor this setting is why you i mean you can just try it on the ufo it's really easy to test just go to your phone and go to the ufo thing and you'll see that like it overlays i think it says something like mixed frame rates or something if you have the cap on and when you turn the cap off you can say, oh, the top one is 120 and the bottom one is 60 and I can tell the difference.
29:39And I apologize to you, John. I forgot that there was a little bit of Vision Pro corner here in follow-up, so my bad. But way back when we were talking about how Tiff could make her holiday slideshows and one of us made an offhanded remark about how you can't edit keynote files on the Vision Pro. I forget why we said this, but we did. And Anonymous writes, you can edit keynote files on the Apple Vision Pro. Internally, it was a bit of a hero case, to use some terminology Marco won't understand in what can be done in the productivity space and definitely has the most complicated UI of any of the first party apps.
30:10Yeah I was suggesting using Keynote to make the slideshow and I think you two were talking about how you can't do it in the Vision Pro because Keynote's not available but apparently it is. We are sponsored this episode by Zapier. Now AI is everywhere now. I personally I love AI. I love using AI. I love it all day. You know it's not the best tool for every job, but it's the best tool for a lot of jobs. It's fantastic. But the thing is, we're kind of held back in a few ways with AI. And one of the ways is it isn't integrated or available with everything that we use. There's so much more it could do if it had good integrations, good tooling, good access.
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32:05It sounds like, John, you might have a little bit of complaining to do with regards to Tahoe. I mean, some people have a little bit of complaining to do. We'll see how much I have to do. This is a story from a couple weeks ago. So it kind of got pushed out by other news that was a little bit more timely, like the CES stuff. You may have seen this going around the Internet in early January, but people have been complaining about it for a while since Tahoe. The article that became very popular is Nikita Prokopov. Did I say that way? Prokopov? Prokopov. Prokopov, who I know as Nikitonski on Mastodon.
32:42um he had to post called it's hard to justify tahoe icons that goes through in uh very extensive detail uh the history of icons uh next to menu items on the mac uh the current recommendations for them and the current implementation of that in tahoe uh there have been other articles on the same topic including one that was essentially referenced by uh the tonsky's article which is by Jim Nielsen from December 7th. But essentially, ever since Tahoe was shown, there was a lot of discussion around the Mac user interface nerd community about menu icons and menu bars or in menu items. Like we're talking about the pull down menus at the top of the screen.
33:23You go to the menu bar, you pull down like the file or edit menu or any of those menus. And the recommendation in Tahoe is to put icons next to a bunch of menu items that previously did not have any icons. And a lot of people are upset about it. And I'm pretty sure Marco read this article because he commented on it. Oh, yes. So why don't you two begin? What are your thoughts on this topic? Because this was a very popular article for a couple weeks. I think the article does a really good job of explaining why having icons next to every single menu item as a best practice or as a requirement, why that falls apart.
34:03It's one of those things that I think in interface design, I'm sure lots of designers over time have thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Let's try it. And then normally the feedback process would be you try it and you realize, oh, there's a lot of cases in which this doesn't work or this is making things worse or it's causing confusion or you have to really pick some symbols that don't really work because certain menu commands just don't really work well as little icons next to them or like there's no obvious icon choice. and then maybe you might have different programmers at different times on different teams choosing different icons for the same or similar actions over time or maybe you might have a whole bunch of menu items in a row that all kind of should maybe be the same icon or a similar one and then you're like, what do you do that?
34:55In a normal process, those would be tried or these failures would be done internally and then the review would happen and they would be like, hmm, this actually is not working. We're going to change this idea or we're going to cancel this idea. That last part didn't happen at Apple and all of those mistakes, they just made them all and shipped it as Tahoe. I mean, you're not wrong. For me, I'm not as bothered by this as it seems everybody else is, which isn't to say I disagree with any particular thing you've said or any particular thing on these sites. In fact, Nikita's post in particular does a very thorough job, as you guys were saying, of chronicling exactly why this is wrong.
35:42They put up screenshots of the original Hig. I don't even know if it was called the Hig at that point, but I presume it was. Talking about how you should absolutely not do the following. And then a picture of Tahoe doing exactly that, which is really special. it's not great but I don't find it as actively bothersome as I think basically everyone else does so I don't have too much to say on this other than that I think it needs to be better it needs to be better than it is it seems that there's a clear lack of consistency it's clear that the left hand and the right hand are not talking which is a very Apple thing reading the article I got very mad and then after I moved on to something else I stopped being matters.
36:25So it's kind of whatever, man. I'm sure, John, you feel very strongly that this is absolutely accurate and terrible in every way. And I would love to hear you rant about it. But for me, it sucks. But what? Whatever. Well, and to be clear, before we let John explode, I'm with you, Casey, in terms of how much it makes me angry. Like Tahoe has a lot of little paper cuts for me. I don't like a lot about Tahoe. Icons and menus are one of those paper cuts but it's not super high in the list it's just i think it's it's kind of a microcosm of the design failings in general of the alan dye era of software it's like what happens when when this group of you know people principles trends whatever it is whatever came together to form tahoe it's like what happened here you know there's a lot of failings to investigate but but like to me like the menu icons again like it's not and i don't i don't think these articles claimed that that was like the worst thing about tahoe it's just it shows a lack of care yeah a lack of care and a lack of talent honestly like a lack of design talent and and a lack of respecting the platform that it's on and that it's that it's redesigning like you know i i said i i kind of you know brashly said a few months back that uh alan died doged his way through mac os with tahoe that is how it feels like you know like what did doge do for the government they tore through a bunch of departments without really understanding them they hastily and sloppily tore stuff apart and put in their own ideas without really you know the whole chesters and fence thing like without really understanding why anything was there certainly without respecting it and while thinking they knew everything that's alan dye's team with tahoe they tore through the mac and they messed a bunch of stuff up a lot of times needlessly to create something that you know by by by goals and by people that don't really seem to get the platform, certainly don't seem to respect the platform and seem to not have taken a lot of care doing it.
38:28Casey mentioned the original Mac human interface guidelines. The ones cited in a Tonski article from 1992, the originals are back in the 80s when the Mac was first introduced. I think they were called the Apple human interface guidelines. I'm not sure if they ever went from user to human, but anyway, rest assured that human interface guidelines or hig is a term from the classic mac os era um and the thing people always cite is that the graphic that's at the top of this thing is basically from the 1992 hig saying don't put symbols next to menu items because uh and they give reasoning for it you know they say here's why you know they show they say don't do this do this instead and here's why the hig always used to give good reasons for things that ended uh not in the allen die era that ended way before that but they were usually pretty good about giving justifications for things based on you know either the research they had done themselves or research done by other people or matters of taste that were uh you know people could agree with now when tahoe i think not even before it came out when when it was tahoe was first revealed i guess it was like a wwc or whatever and the menu the icons were in the menu next to the menu items i commented on it then and i don't think my opinion on it has changed much since then um the the the hard justify tahoe icons article does a good job of really showing how poor the implementation is because setting aside, which I'll get to in a little bit, the, the, the wisdom of putting an icon next to menu items, uh, the way that has been executed in Tahoe is just riddled with really basic rookie mistakes.
40:07Like it's inconsistent. It's, you know, the, the, they don't follow their own advice that they gave, uh just it needlessly obfuscate things that would otherwise be clearer if there were no icons they just the icons themselves are scaled to a size where they're so small that it's difficult to tell what they are even on a retina display it they just did a bad job of executing it but but setting aside the execution if you were to have in your particular application the perfect execution, you don't make all the mistakes that Apple made. Is this a good idea? I think what I said at the time about it when we first saw Tahoe was like, there is actually some justification for having an icon be aid in the recognition of a menu item.
40:56So a tiny symbol that you could recognize without having to read the words of the menu item can help you find a menu item more quickly than if you had to scan the words, right? Especially in really big menus with like applications that have huge menus like Photoshop, wherever they go on for a long time. The whole point of icons is rather than asking you to read text, maybe you can recognize a symbol. Now, obviously that only works for if a couple of things are true. First, you kind of have to use the same symbol for the same commands. So everyone needs to decide this is the symbol we're going to use for copy.
41:32This is the symbol we're going to use for new. This is the symbol we're going to use for export. because if you don't, it really doesn't help. Because like, let me find the export command. You're scanning the little menu icons for what you think is the export icon, which is like a box with an arrow coming up out of it. But this one uses a box with an arrow going down to it or a different box with an arrow going sideways. Or like, you've blown that if it's not consistent across the OS. It's almost as if like, when you go to like, you know, file open, you're looking for the word open. But if some, if different apps chose a different word than open, it would really mess you up.
42:04It'd be like open, retrieve, expand, load. Like, but just how about everyone just agrees on open it? The same exact thing applies to icons. You really have to have a standard set of icons. Second thing is the icons next to menu items, especially 1992 were infeasible because the display resolution was 72 dpi. You just can't draw anything next to a menu item that's recognizable, or you can draw a very limited number of things that's next to a menu item that is recognizable that dpi with the advent of retina making symbols that are you you have more the problem space is bigger you could make more different symbols that are all recognizable because we have finer resolution on our displays so just because they said in 1992 don't put symbols next to menus take a look at like that screenshot of the 72 dpi what can you even do with that many pixels there's not much you can do but now you can so i think a lot of the reason that was against putting uh you know icons next to menu items in the 90s no longer holds but you know apple being apple in the alan dye era they chose to make the icons next to menu items smaller than they really needed to be because it looks nicer for them to be this size and i agree it does look nicer like if you look in the screenshot of like open recent it's got i think it's supposed to be a clock icon god help a clock icon next to open recent all right whatever like that open icon with the slanted arrow or whatever anyway um and you can see how the clock is kind of the same size as the capital o and open and it does look nice but there's actually more you could make that icon bigger like there's more room in the menu for the icon to be bigger so they could have made it more recognizable and made the icons less look like blurry smudges which is kind of what a lot of them look like from reasonable like mac using distances but they didn't because this looks nicer so another black mark on them now if you look in apple's actual guidelines which we will link in the show notes what they actually say and again i read this when the wdc which is why i wasn't so super mad about it then is they say you know icons help people recognize common actions which is just what i'm saying icons help you recognize things use the same icons as the system to represent action such as copy share and delete wherever they appear for a list of icons that represent common actions see standard icons and they give a link to a list of standard icons you're supposed to use for common commands.
44:23Unfortunately, that list is very short. It's like, it's not, there's not enough common icons and even Apple doesn't follow its own device. And then they go on, don't display an icon if you can't find one that clearly represents the menu item. Not all menu items need an icon. I don't know why everyone complaining about this hasn't seen this guideline, but they're like, oh, Apple wants you to put an icon next to every menu item they absolutely don't they say they don't okay uh and they also have some other advice they give an example like when you shouldn't have any icons next to things like days of the week none of those deserve icons although casey would put them there because it looks fun he would use emoji though um wow and then they and then they do another uh thing where it's like uh what is it use a single icon to introduce a group of similar items instead of adding individual icons for each action or reusing the same icon for all of them establish a common theme with the symbol for the first item and rely on the menu item text to keep the remaining items distinct so they give an example of a bunch of copy things copy symbol copy name copy image as copy code they're all next to each other in the menu only the first copy command has the copy icon and the rest of them have no icon so the problem with this advice and i think that the problem is everyone is finding is like first of all people are not grokking or internalizing this advice because the advice requires the developer to make too many judgment calls if they had just said every single menu item needs an icon at least people would understand that but they didn't say that they said not all menu items need an icon so then you're like okay which of my menu items need an icon and why because the directions say they help people recognize common actions so it should just be on common ones or like should it just be from that standard icon list like and then you end up with things like in this article where it's just a hodgepodge of menu items some of them have icons some of them don't why do some of them have icons and why do the some of them not have icons is it because the one icons are more commonly used and it changes the indenting because of the way they implemented it it's just a poorly explained like what do they want what what do they want they want people to recognize icons but they make them too small they don't want that one every menu item and they don't want them to be repeated but if they're not repeated then how can you find an item by its icon you just have to look at the one above it that's similar to that and scroll down and how is a developer supposed to decide which menu items should have icons so i i don't think the idea of having icons in menus is is an inherently bad idea i think it can actually help i mean we have it right now like the example everybody uses in all these articles which is 100 true is when you go into the little green like a window widget menu uh on a mac window title bar and you get that little pop-up menu uh and you see those little symbols you'll also see them in the window menu on some applications as well like in the move and resize sub menu under under the window menu those icons do a better job of the words left right top bottom top left top right bottom like i bet people never even read those words i bet they just look at the symbols because there's enough pixels in those symbols that the symbols add clarity and make it faster for people to find things i mean those didn't those didn't come into how they've been there since i'm looking at them right now in sequoia right they didn't come in top right But that proves the idea that icons next to menu items can be helpful for the reasons they describe.
47:42But someone somewhere disguided, they wanted to see a lot more menus because they think it looks cool. And they gave really no guidance to developers for how and when to deploy them. Their list of standard icons is too short. And the result is the result is this article that you go through macOS, look at Apple's own applications and how they choose to use icons. And it does not help. does it make things worse it arguably makes things uglier sometimes it hurts the ability to scan down the menu because of the indenting changes in a few cases but in general i think this is just a you know it's an example of not the worst change in the world but every aspect of the execution is bad and so in the end it is essentially a net negative to tahoe and tahoe is worse tahoe's menus are worse than the pre-tahoe menus because they look noisier and uglier and that you learn to tune out the symbols for the reasons outlined in this article because you cannot rely on them they are not consistent across apple's apps let alone third-party apps and the result of this is a bunch of the indie developers we know all coming up with schemes to remove the icons from their own applications so at least their icons can have clean menus but that further increases increases the inconsistency because now some apps don't have icons at all it's yeah so i'm not for you know apparently to casey's surprise strongly against icons ever being in menu because the 1992 higgs said they shouldn't be absolutely not things change right but i am for well thought out well articulated guidelines in the human interface guidelines that developers understand how to follow that apple follows itself and that following them makes the os better and this fails on all those fronts and one one final item which colin m ford had a great toot about this this is actually i believe from an ipad menu um which i know is an a tahoe thing but you know same deal icons the menus it is the writing direction submenu of i think an edit menu this is incredible oh the format menu uh and writing directions like if it's a left to right or right to left language and the the writing direction is a menu with a submenu and the semi items are default right to left and left to right uh the writing direction submenu itself uses an icon next to writing direction that has a left-facing arrow stacked on top of a right-facing arrow the submenu choices default right to left and left to right all use exactly the same icon a left-facing arrow over a right-facing arrow except the default menu item has a smaller slightly left-facing arrow over a right-facing arrow like it's right there people right to left and left to right the right to left arrow is an arrow that points from right to left and the left to right arrows and arrow the points but they didn't even do that they use both arrows on every single menu item this is a perfect example of icons not helping with recognition, not helping with clarity, with an extra bit of completely meaningless inconsistency with the default icon being smaller than the right-to-left or left-to-right ones.
50:37Just chef's kiss, as they say. All of these icons, as far as I can tell, I think all the ones I saw, they're all part of Apple's SF Symbols library. This is a library of standard platform icons that Apple provides developers, and they use all over their own apps as well. I use them heavily in Overcast, like the whole playlist icon picker. Those are all SF Symbols. and it's a great icon library, but I think, you know, one of the problems that I occasionally have with SF symbols, of course, everyone using it would have this problem, is sometimes you can't quite find exactly what you want. So you kind of settle for one that's already there because then, because like making your own entire symbol from scratch, that takes more work.
51:15And if you can find one that's kind of close, sometimes you're like, you know what, that'll work. I'll just use that. Well, it seems like the task of putting icons on every single menu item in macOS, it seemed like they didn't add any SF symbols as part of this process. They were probably working in a hurry because they had a lot of work to go through every single Apple menu item. Again, you don't have to put an icon next to every single menu, but we won't tell you which ones you do have to put it next. But anyway, it looks like part of the mediocre execution here is that they seem to, of course, much of this redesign, seem to be doing it in a bit of a rush, and they just picked whatever icon they could find in SF Symbols that was close enough.
51:58And that's how you get things like this. And they didn't talk to each other. So one team picked one icon for the same command as another team picked another icon. Right, exactly. So you have, again, just kind of like a mediocre execution. And the whole idea of SF Symbols is unification. We're going to unify the way and standardize the way everything looks and works. And in some cases, in some contexts, that's a good idea. but when you start applying these like blanket philosophies without looking at the results without looking at how the real world and real needs might conflict with that or might have non-ideal outcomes you get mediocrity and that's just everything about tahoe's liquid glass redesign is like there are certain contexts in which some of these things might work well but in practice the way it was applied and maybe the way it will always need to be applied with mac os it just doesn't have good actual practical outcomes and that's the kind of thing that a good design team and a good design process and a good feedback process would try a bunch of stuff before it ships of course but there wasn't a filter to get it out before it got here and i think this goes to like you know gruber's talked a lot about this how alan dye leaving apple was not apple's choice we know we are all celebrating it but but alan dye left for meta by all accounts on his own accord and apple was caught by surprise and presumably as a result maybe didn't want him to leave or certainly wasn't certainly was not asking him to leave which means that all the other apple senior leadership fully supported this craig federighi fully supported this tim cook fully supported this i'm not sure if craig federighi supported it i think that uh that allendei's peers in the org chart their opinion is unknown tim cook yes apparently thought it was fine because he's the person anyone above allendei apparently jeff williams clearly must have supported it too yeah sure anyone anyone above him in the org chart but i have a i have an easy time believing some of allendei's peers in the org charts were not happy about this including potentially craig who had to uh junk up all the os he's in charge of with designs that he didn't agree with from allandai i don't know if that's true but it's plausible that it could be i i suspect that you know because you think like which of the top execs probably had to be supportive of allandai and this direction for this to ship i'm thinking at minimum tim cook jeff williams craig federighi and jaws i think they all because that's marketing soft like they i think they all would have had to at least be supportive of this so as we think about where this is going to go in the future Yeah, we have a new design leader.
54:38Stephen, what's his last name? LeMay? Yeah, Stephen LeMay. So that's great. We have a new design leader. By everything we've heard, it sounds like Stephen LeMay is a great person for the principles that we care about. But all those high executives who allowed this and maybe even supported and maybe even liked this, they're all still there except Jeff Williams. So I don't know how much is actually going to change because the system in place that got Alan Dye this power and supported this and let all of this mediocrity ship is still the system there for the most part. So I'm a little worried that we're not going to actually see as much change as we want because all those other people, with the exception of Jeff Williams, are still there.
55:25Well, my opinion of those people you listed is that Tim Cook always recuses himself from these conversations because he has no opinion whatsoever, which certainly doesn't help. That Jeff Williams, if he was above Alan Dye in the org chart, probably supported it and he has bad taste, but he's gone now. That Jaws may or may not have supported it, but I think Jaws will actually be reactive to public opinion. And at the very least, Jaws is aware that the people who care the most about user interface hate Tahoe with a passion. So I think Jaws will change his opinion if he did support it. and i think craig was not super into it but had to do it because it's part of his job that's just a guess i have no inside information if anyone does have inside information about who at apple loved what i was doing and who hated it please feel free to write us because i would love to know but i mean the end result is you know this is what the company did and so that's that and i do and you know i have heard from that the new you know steve lemay being in charge that he is not particularly forceful and fighting for what he believes in according to one vaguely sourced story that I saw at some point.
56:21But, you know, fingers crossed. Like, certainly it's better than Allendeye still being there, which is a powerful person whose opinions that we disagree with and who makes bad decisions about UI. We'll see if we can make better decisions in the future. All right. Speaking of Tahoe and weird UI bits, Tahoe window resizing. Norbert Heger writes, Since upgrading to Mac OS Tahoe, I've noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn't respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 by 19 pixels located near the window corner.
56:55If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62 % of that area would lie inside the window. But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it, about 75%, now lies outside the window. So I was just messing with this with Safari on 26.2, and either this has been fixed, or I am just a unicorn that can hit it every time. Because looking at Norbert's post, I don't doubt anything he said was accurate and this was only written a couple of weeks ago but I don't know maybe I'm like I'm a cec unicorn so maybe I'm window I'm a window sizing unicorn as well if you just do it real real slow motion a pixel at a time I I've reproduced exactly what we've seen in this video it's the first thing I tried to do is reproduce it to see if this is just like a weird situation or if it's true and I could reproduce exactly as shown it just takes some very careful movement of the cursor what this is getting to is like if you put like the the tip of your arrow cursor in the the corner of a window like the window is whiter than your background is blue like in this little animation and you put the tip of your arrow cursor inside the white part on the corner you expect to be able to resize it but you can't because you're now outside the region that allows you to click and resize because the region itself is sort of focused around the corner of a square window but the windows aren't square anymore so it ends up in this perverse scenario where if you visually try to resize the window you'll essentially grab nothing he's got a cool animation of him trying to grab a rounded plate by grabbing the air next to it and it was very good that's exactly what it like look at the article he's got little regions i think he mapped it out essentially a pixel at a time using the cursor like you don't need to be quick to do this you can do it as slow as you want move your cursor one pixel at a time you know zoom in with the accessibility zoom if you need to have more precise control um it's just it's just bad does not match the curve shape it's it's very bad 75 of the region being outside the window that's bad some of it has to be outside the window because you want to be able to grab like near the outside of the window but too much is outside um and and some people were like i bet i bet the people you know who work on mac os who hate alan die intentionally did this implementation to make his design look bad i don't think that's the case i think that this this is a pretty easy explanation of why this is like this well first of all it does highlight that if you want to do this design with the big round and corners, which I think is a terrible idea, but if you insist on doing it, you now face a challenge.
59:12And the challenge is... okay if i just move the region that you can click to resize a window so it makes sense with the rounded corners you may break third-party applications you may break first-party applications because the window resize area is a place where the os grabs your clicks for standard window management actions not the os but the the framework like app kit or whatever that region is reserved for window resizing but if you move that region up because the window curve and now you have to like move that region up and farther into the content area you may be blocking content in someone's app that you used to be able to click, but that you can no longer click because a click in that region now clicks on the content.
59:55Making changes like this, I've decided that different regions of the window belong to like the framework for the window resizing. And you can see it happening on iPad, the same thing, breaks applications. I have applications on my iPad that haven't been updated for the iPad OS 26, where there are parts of the app that are under the regions that are now reserved for like window control stuff if you're in wondering mode on iPadOS. If they did this on macOS, they would have been in exactly the same situation where there would have been some app where you can't reach some control that's in the lower right corner because the window resize area has moved up to it.
1:00:31So I think they were faced, you know, a problem of their own creation. Hey, let's super curve the corner on our windows to give less room for content. And they had to make a choice. Do we move the window resize region and break applications or do we leave it where it is and make window resizing more difficult? And they chose the second bad choice, which is to leave the window resizing area where it is and make windows harder to resize. And the benefit they get from that is they won't break as many applications. Yet another reason why Tahoe's design choices are bad. How do you really feel, John?
1:01:02All right. And then rounding out our triplet of Tahoe complaints. I wish I had something alliterative there. Tahoe wants you to update, or I guess prior versions of the OS, wants you to update to Tahoe periodically or ask you to update periodically. And Rob Griffiths, who is the creator of macOS Hints and is now at ManyTricks, the creator of Moom, Witch, and many other apps, writes, I found a way to block the Tahoe update prompts in 90-day chunks anyway. Now when I go to system settings, general software updates, I see this. And there's a screenshot. Your Mac is running the latest software update allowed by your organization, which is Sequoia 15.7.3.
1:01:38The secret, using device management profiles, which will let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that quote-unquote organization is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time, the max that the policy allows, which seems like exactly what I needed. However, Rob updates. Are we sure we want to read this, John? Because I don't. Yeah. All right. All right. It's from the article that we're going to link. All right. I don't know if we should be calling attention to it. But anyway, based on some comments on my Mastodon post, this only works due to a bug in macOS 15.7.3.
1:02:11The 90-day period isn't supposed to be a rolling date, but 90 days from the release date. So it should have no impact, but it does. So I hope Apple doesn't fix the bug. Yeah. So this is great. I, as I think I've complained about a few times in the show, the day Tahoe 26.0 was released, I got a red badge with a one on system settings on my Mac saying, Hey, there's a software update. Other people tell me that didn't happen to them. The 26.0 came out and the, they, you know, software system settings didn't have a badge and they weren't bothered by it. But as time has passed, more and more people are becoming increasingly bothered to update Taho.
1:02:53Maybe you've seen recently a big notification appear in the upright-hand corner of your Mac screen that's a little bit taller than a normal notification that says, hey, did you know Taho's out? And it wants you to update. Maybe system settings in your dock now has a red one and a badge on it because software update knows that Taho is available to you. This suggestion from Rob is a little bit involved. that involves running shell scripts to add special profiles and blah blah blah and in my experience you have to do it on every individual account on a mac so they all don't see the badge because in my household the badge has spread to all of the macs and all the accounts but i hate that badge so much that i did it i did it's a git repository and you do some little bit of manual tweet manual tweaking it's a little bit tech nerdy you read rob's post it's not too hard to do it is a little bit tedious but it gives you a 90 day window when the badge will go away and i asked like i did it and then the badge didn't go away like my software update said you're running the latest software allowed by your organization i'm like great that's great why is the badge still there the badge will eventually go away sometimes you need to log out and back in sometimes you need to check for update a couple times we're just assured the badge will eventually leave and then rob also suggests making an alias once you've installed the thing once you can make an alias to sort of re-up it for another 90 days so the next time a badge appears you can just open terminal and type no Tahoe and it return and it will re-up it for another 90 days.
1:04:12Still have to do that in every account. But I set up those aliases and I set up those things just so I won't be bothered to upgrade to Tahoe because I don't plan to do that anytime soon. If ever, if you are in the same camp, this is the blog post for you. Thank you, Rob Griffiths, for figuring this out. I hope Apple never does fix this bug. And if they do fix it, you know, I mean, I've lived with it since 26.0 was out until this week. And now I have a blessed vacation. And if 15.7.4 comes out and they fix this, I'll be pretty surprised because normally at that point they're just doing security updates.
1:04:44But, you know, it is what it is. So, John, at this point, what is – and I'm genuinely asking you, what is keeping you away from Tahoe? Like obviously you have complaints, but what is it about Tahoe that's enough to say it's not ready for me? Well, it's – there's nothing drawing me to it and many things repelling me. So it's just a pretty easy balance. You know what I mean? like i just everything i i you know i the thing is i use it every time i do software development for my apps like i have to be using it like i'm using xcode in tahoe like it's unavoidable my apps are on tahoe they're updated for tahoe i'm fixing tahoe specific bugs it's not like i'm not using tahoe like i know what it's like i'm using i'm using it every single week for some period of time although often i um remote desktop into the little uh the the macbook air on my big screen so I can get a little bit bigger screen, but I'm using it.
1:05:34But that experience has just led me to think like, I don't want this on my main Mac. There are no features of it that make a big difference to me. And there are many things about it that I dislike. So I might just skip it entirely and hope 27 fixes something. But we'll see. I just take it on a day-by-day basis. I do that balancing act. Like for example, if there was some app that only ran on 26 that I desperately wanted, I would update. You know what I mean? Like there needs to be something pulling me to it. and right now there isn't and there's a lot of things pushing me away. So no carrots, maybe a couple of sticks.
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1:08:13Let's do some Ask ATP because coincidentally, our Ask ATP tonight largely relates to what we just talked about. So Austin writes, was Alan Dye a better or worse steward of software design than Johnny Ive? It's a really good question. I don't know if I have a good answer for this. And it's so hard too, because we make assumptions about whose fault or whose design, you know, was whose based on when Dye was there and when Ive was there. But I mean, they crossed over for ways, didn't they? So what if Johnny, you know, delegated to Alan Dye? I mean, I think the only way we can answer this question is basically uh just roll up every bit of like the buck stops with the person at the head of ui design so when it was i've we're just gonna we're just gonna you know obviously not truthfully but we're just going to assign all blame and all credit to everything having to do with software design to the head of software design during the i've period and during the die period as you noted that's not actually how the world works but that's how it works with the the buck stops here thing you know you may not have done the work but in the end you were in charge of it so it all falls on you.
1:09:15You know, Alan Dye was Johnny Ives selected software chief or, you know, software design chief. Like that was kind of like how that worked out from everything we've heard, like delegation wise. When Johnny Ives was the head of all design at Apple, he, by all accounts, was massively overworked. Now that was in many ways self-imposed. You know, we've heard stories of him like really diving in and getting it, like really having an opinion about all the little details. They were building Apple Park at the time. That was a massive undertaking for everybody, but also in particular for Johnny Ive. He involved himself in lots of the design of that.
1:09:53He was designing everything at Apple and even some things outside of Apple. And he already had a foot out the door at that point too, and he'd already asked to leave, and Tim Cook had convinced him to stay, according to rumors. Yeah, but it was very clear that Johnny Ive was spread very thin at that time. so while johnny ive was the one in charge of all design at apple there i don't think there's that much of a distinction between the alan dye era and the johnny ive era in terms of software design because i think alan dye was kind of always that person you know there's there's obviously some questions about like you know how many filters these people have to go through on the way up the chain to get things approved and get things out the door um you know how much power they have of how many checks and balances different needs and departments have.
1:10:36That all changes over time, and we don't have a great insight into that except for occasional random things we hear. But I don't think we can really draw a distinction between these two because I think the Alan Dye era that we call it today is just an extension of the Johnny Ive era, both of which were extensions of Tim Cook putting all design on Johnny because Tim Cook doesn't understand design or computers or humanity. well i think following following the guideline that i set down i have no problem drawing distinction here i'm i'm blaming everything in the island in the ive era and i have and everything the island era on on die uh whether or not to marco's point there was overlap i'm just saying look if you're in charge the buck stops with you and by that criteria it's easy for me die era worse no no contest even though i didn't like a lot of the stuff that johnny i've did with software if you look at well like what is johnny ive's like signature uh sort of like signature achievement or project or whatever i would say was ios 7 and for all the complaints about ios 7 uh comparing it to alan dye's sort of crowning achievement which is the 26 os's oh my god ios 7 was better than 26 os it's like yeah you know we had we all had complaints about ios 7 and it went a little bit overboard but the general design direction wasn't terrible and i think it was like a needed break from the style that came before it and it evolved into something pretty good and it was better than 26 os's from day one it was better thought out it was better there was more reasoning behind it the mistakes that it made it pretty quickly fixed granted we don't know if that's going to happen with 26's because it's just been out for a year um but pretty much everything else i've did with software is not as bad as i think all the things alan dye has done in the era when he has been there and johnny has not to be clear i don't like what either one of them did with the software i don't like i'm not saying either one was good but if i had to personally pick it is Ive was better than Die.
1:12:26Yeah, I think if we're comparing, if we take the people's names off of it, and if we compare the big iOS 7 redesign to the big iOS 26 redesign, I agree. iOS 7 did have a lot of problems. But I think where iOS 7 was better is that it left a lot more room to tweak it into something that ended up being pretty good. whereas the 26 os is i mean maybe because they're just brand new and it's hard for us to see right now but like a lot of the changes that 26 made it's hard to look at them and find a good path out that isn't just like going back to a different style entirely yeah and the benefits aren't as clear like ios 7 like it was such a clear contrast and we could see this is doing x y and z better than the other era it does some things worse but i see where it is an improvement i see how it is a refreshing change i see the areas where it is better i see the benefits for app development i feel like ios 7 really did make it easier to develop apps that conform to different screen sizes and that are flexible and it did make app development easier in kind of the same way that sf symbols did and sort of making apple caliber design approachable to developers who weren't artistic experts you know what i mean and i know like i'm sure someone's listening to saying you dummies alan dye designed all of ios 7 like that's not that's not the point here i'm just saying when i was in charge what did apple put out i'm not saying who did it i don't care if alan dye designed every single thing on that was released under johnny i've when he was in charge i'm just i'm assigning names to eras when they were in charge when i was in charge the software apple put out was better than the software put out put out when die was in charge regardless of who is actually responsible for that software yeah like who actually did the work yeah but ultimately neither one of them really showed that much no of a respect for ui design but i was a good hardware designer mostly yeah and i think you can't say that for die right like that's that's the whole the whole you know original sin here what set apple off in a bad direction with software design was basically a disregard or an ignorance of ui design as a separate discipline from visual design like graphic design yeah just one of those design people they you just know design things just do the software too same thing right right it's like yeah like all doctors are the same right exactly yeah you have a doctor in philosophy do the surgery yeah they can they they can you know i have a problem with my foot they can they're my podiatrist too like who they they're just the head of doctor just this one doctor since they're good at this one kind of doctoring can obviously do all kinds of doctoring right because it's all the same yeah it's the peter principle johnny ive was promoted to his level of incompetence right and and i think that like that's what i want to see change and that's what i what gives me hope with steven lemay being elevated because it does sound by by all accounts that that he is more of the traditional UI design kind of person.
1:15:28And we haven't really had a lot of that in Apple's software design leadership really since Forstall left. It isn't to say that they haven't put in any good software design since. In particular, I think as iOS 7 kind of evolved and morphed, I think somewhere around the iOS 12 to 15 era, it got pretty good. That was actually a really good era of iOS software design. The Mac, I think, has had a lot of problems for most of this time. Yeah, one of the things about iOS 7 is it didn't touch the Mac, which was merciful. Like, the Mac got sort of sideswiped by a bunch of iOS-isms as time went on, but iOS 7, when it landed, did not also land with a thud on the Mac.
1:16:08Right, exactly. Whereas, because, you know, because again, like, with the Mac, as we've talked about many times in the show, Apple doesn't really put the resources into the Mac that they put into iOS, and you can understand why, obviously. That's an understandable reason why they would do that. So what tends to happen on the Mac is whatever they need to do for iOS, the Mac kind of gets a half-assed version that doesn't have as many resources. It's being applied to kind of a more complex, more heavily legacy code base and software library and just a larger surface area in terms of like the needs it has to cover.
1:16:42Like on the Mac, it's a huge surface area, way bigger than software UI has to cover on iOS. but because it is lower priority in Apple because it's not as big of a business it gets fewer resources so it ends up getting fewer resources at a lower priority to solve what is often more complicated UI problems so as a result Mac UI redesigns in the modern Apple era tend to be half-assed incomplete and not that great again also like those dynamics aren't going to change the mac is not going to get a ton of ui design resources from apple if ios needs them first and ios will always need them first that's why it just needs to be divorced from the the ios release schedule like the whole idea of doing a 26 os like and having it go across all the os's with this big redesign you're dooming the mac because as you said it's going to get fewer resources so if you have your resources on the mac the ideal thing would be okay the mac gets updated half as much a quarter as much like just you don't have the resources to do an update at the same interval you do the ios update which means you can't do this coordinated all of our platforms get updated to the new design at the same time setting aside the fact that always even before all the 26 os's and anything any kind of update the mac would get was never designed to make the mac better it was just designed to make the mac fit in with whatever the ios did like two years ago back when it was delayed like so it needs to be not connected schedule wise it doesn't it can't be in sync with ios and also the changes need to be designed to make the mac better and And those two things haven't been true in a while.
1:18:15It's a real shame. And I think the whole idea that we need to unify everything about these platforms, not only I think is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, and I think it's misapplied in tons of ways because they're different platforms. They work very differently. They're used very differently in different contexts by different people. so I think the idea that everything has to match between all the platforms is I mean look the entire tech business has tried this in so many ways like the whole right ones run anywhere principle like we've tried this so many times at so many levels and it's either incredibly difficult or doesn't work every single time and so the idea so I think the reality of the Mac is that it will always be second priority in Apple compared to iOS in terms of software design resources and everything.
1:19:07It's always going to be a lower priority. It's always going to be more complicated in terms of what it has to cover. So I think what leadership should consider doing is scaling back the assumption that everything has to be done in unity with the Mac. And that applies to lots of things. On the software side, that's a whole can of worms. But mainly on the interface side, this is where many of the sins have happened. the Mac doesn't need to match iPad, iPadOS or iOS in every possible way. In fact, the Mac needs to match those in very few ways, honestly, in terms of UI design. For Apple to continue to push iOS really hard, which makes sense, that's the competitive space, that's their big platform, Apple should aggressively push iOS forward.
1:19:56We can argue what forward means, but they should aggressively push iOS forward. The Mac is not that. The Mac is a mature, stable platform that they don't have or they don't choose to use the resources to aggressively push it forward. So they can either sloppily push it forward, which is the path they've sometimes chosen here, or they can scale back what they want the Mac to do in terms of motion every year. And so what John's saying, you know, you can do fewer software updates. That's one way to do that another way to do that is just don't have the mac try to match the ui or the trends or the latest you know ui modifications of ipad os and ios have like respect the mac as its own thing that has different needs different priorities and a very different level of resources and properly allocate the the you know the tasks that you want the mac to do every year in terms of updates and everything with the resources that you're going to give it so that it can be done well.
1:20:55And if that means doing less than iOS, which it almost always will, that's fine. We would rather have less done better than try to keep everything in perfect unison for no good reason, honestly, and have it be a sloppy mess in the back. And by the way, I think even with a very small team with not many resources, maybe not even, maybe the amount they have now, maybe even less, if given something like a two to three year schedule, that small team could do amazing things to the Mac if freed from the onerous strategy tax of, oh, you know, by the way, we're having this big effort with the 26 OSs and we all have to be on the same page here.
1:21:35Oh, we all have to add AI. We all have to do this. Those sort of Apple strategy taxes that are applied to the Mac drag that team down so much. If you just gave like that exact team or even a smaller team a multi-year runway to do what they thought was best for the Mac without regard to whatever hell everyone else was doing, that would be great. And he's like, oh, they're going to bifurcate. It'll be too whatever. No, the other thing, which I think this team would understand is that you just need a family resemblance in a line of products. They should all look like Apple products, but you don't need them to look the same.
1:22:09Like it's very easy and possible to have a family resemblance between Apple OSs without them walking in lockstep about the design right they can be offset by years like at various times in mac os 10 ios ipad os era there has been that family resemblance despite not a single pixel being shared between any of those os's they all look like apple os's they all looked roughly of the same era but before the sort of iosification infection started to happen to mac os they like they were able to be themselves and all still looked apple-ish and were sort of on their own schedule right like say someone designs that decides their design you know ios maybe is the leader and they come up with a new design look and the mac you know is inspired by that and two years later it sort of updates to get that look too that's fine there's still a family resemblance there or even the reverse let's say that the mac team working on a two-year timeline comes up with a new look for mac os and then the ios people look over and say that's pretty cool people seem to love it maybe we should for the next big ios redesign maybe we should think about that that kind of cross-pollinization is a good way to have a family resemblance of the products or like interface ideas the mac comes up with some new interface idea and the ipad team looks at it and says hey that's a good idea i think in the next version of maybe the next version of ipad os we can do that thing that they just did on mac os because mac users really seem to like it we think it would work on ipad size screens like that's a healthy exchange of ideas what is not healthy is i've come up with liquid glass and all our ss need to take it whether they want it or not or i think every app should look like uh you should only have the features that the ios version does so take all the mac versions remove half their features and now they look just like the ios ones isn't that great doesn't everybody love it no so anyway i i'm saying is i don't think it's like oh there's just not enough the amount of resources that are on the mac now are probably more than they were in the supposed heyday of mac os 10 right small teams can do amazing things if given reasonable schedules and if not put upon by a larger corporate strategy tax and that's some of you've always heard from teams at Apple.
1:24:08It's like they don't have time to do what they think they should do for their product because they have to implement the important feature of the year that is going across all the platforms. Tom Armstrong writes, What, if any, impact do you think Alan Dye's departure will have on the rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro expected to release in Q3 or Q4 2026? Well, having a more orthodox head of design who actually understands UI UX result in a rethink of this project, or are those decisions beyond Stephen LeMay's control, and he's just got to design the best fridge toaster hybrid interface that he can.
1:24:38It's too late for that. For the touch-based Macs coming in 2026, that's done. Whatever's going to be done for that touch has been done. And it's nothing Steve LeMay can do to really change that at this point, except for perhaps minor tweaks. And by the way, I don't think the liquid glass design is required for touch MacBooks to be a thing. It doesn't help. It doesn't hurt. It is neutral with respect to touch on the Mac, I believe. Yeah, and as we talked about when we talked about that rumor of touch on the Mac, I think most of the value of touch on the Mac is scrolling and panning and zooming.
1:25:16And using iPad apps. Yeah, and using iPad apps. But what most people want touch on their laptops for usually is just pinching to zoom on something on their screen or something like that. Dismissing a dialogue, whatever. Yeah, I think that kind of stuff is going to work pretty well regardless. this like to make mac os really touch friendly other like beyond that level would require effectively designing it into ipad os like radical and you wouldn't want that because you'd be you'd be losing like the mac is the platform where you have precise pointing and lots of applications are only possible with precise pointing and they run the mac exactly like the the amount of radical redesigning on on the mac to be required to turn it into a really good like touch os the metrics the sizing of every control would have to change.
1:26:00The spacing of everything would have to change. The height, the thickness, even the font size, so much stuff would have to change. That would be radically, broadly destructive to the Mac. Not only do I not think it's a good idea, but I also, again, we were just talking about the resources the Mac has given. I don't think Apple would invest that much into the Mac to change that much for gains that I don't think anybody's really necessarily asking for. Yeah. So the answer to the question is Steve LeMay is not going to have any real effect on the Touch Macs, unless there was some really terrible decision that Alan Dyer was insisting on that's easy to undo.
1:26:36But, you know, we'll never know if that's the case. Finally, Nate writes, what are your favorite macOS styles? Liquid glass, the flat iOS 7 modern look, the glossy Lion Mavericks, end-of-an-era vibe, early pinstripe, or even pre-OS X 10. Wow. Easy peasy. I call myself. I call myself, you guys, I call myself. For me, since I got my first MacBook around mountain lion slash mavericks i still have a soft spot for the glossy look and i was going through stephen hackett's incredible screenshot library which i will try to remember to link in the show notes and i think i came to the mac at tiger or thereabouts and so that does have a special place in my heart but as i quickly scroll through the different releases i think lion might be my favorite because it was still kind of the old by my standards kind of fun aqua e but not as like clearly dated as aqua so i think lion might be my personal favorite that being said i actually in a lot of ways from a visual perspective i kind of like i really do what i after all of that you know aesthetics are a matter of taste like they're how it looks and how it works are two separate things exactly thank you i personally think it's very ugly but i can understand some people liking how it looks despite the fact that it obscures the ui by putting blurry text underneath clear text and all that that's the thing is that a lot of the functional aspects i think are trash but i think aesthetically it looks fresh and new and fresh and new is fun to me um but if i had to pick just one i'd probably pick lion uh marco what what would you choose honestly i don't have a strong opinion here um you know when i look back i also started using the mac um i believe in tiger mac by the way they asked about ios as well what's your favorite favorite well i guess it is what are your favorite mac os styles but then they mentioned the ios 7 look so anyway go on um yeah so i started Sorry, Christian, I believe I started using it in Panther.
1:28:26And I upgraded to Tiger on that same PowerBook G4. But yeah, so when I look at screenshots of Panther, it's very nostalgic for me. It's like, oh, that was my first Mac. It was great. But of course, it looks old by today's standards. So I recognize that. And to be clear also, when I'm criticizing the 26th redesigns, I'm not saying that the previous redesign should just be brought back, you know, just revert back. And that's the best thing. No, like we should move over time. We should change over time. And there are things about the 26 OS that do look nice. I don't think maybe any of them are on the Mac.
1:29:05But there are things about the other 26 OS that look nice visually. So I'm not saying that like the old ones were better. Or at least I'm not saying the old ones are what we should go to, which is definitely not the case. but I do like a lot of the old ones I do have a lot of nostalgia for the Panther and Tiger era and even just when I look back five or six years you look back at High Sierra when you see these kind of interfaces a lot of that is just what the Mac looks like with little tweaks over time, maybe a grading gets a little bit more solid or a pinstripe goes away or Or spacing gets adjusted a little bit on some icons or the icons change.
1:29:54I like a lot of these things, so I don't really have a strong opinion on that. As for iOS, when I was designing for 26 all summer, when I would go back to my iOS 18 devices, it would look old. So I recognized, okay, this new one does look new and fresh. in some ways i like some of the 26 elements on ios but i think it i think everything that involves a blur is a mistake like i think there's a lot you can take from 26 that is good that's like some of like you know the icon shapes and some of the designs and of the buttons here and there like they look cool um but every single time a blur is used i think that's a failure and it does not hold up in practice.
1:30:44That's like the way bars are handled, the way scrolling content goes under them, the way buttons are handled when they are floated on top of content. Anytime there's a blur, it's a failure. But, setting aside that, when I look at past iOSs, I mentioned earlier, I think there was a really good era from the iOS 12 to 15-ish era where the design was in a really good place. It was a very good evolution of what it was trying to be from iOS 7, but better and evolved and refined. And I hope to get back to that in the next few years. And I'm optimistic that I'm pretty sure, I think Apple can do that realistically.
1:31:26I don't know that they will, but they can, and I hope they do. John, so the only ones that I could say, that I could pinpoint a particular look than say that OS sort of had its act together and was really good as a piece are two. One is my nostalgic favorite, which is System 7, which was the most important operating system release of my childhood. I think System 7, in hindsight, is not as coherent as it could have been because there was a lot of the legacy of System 6 in it and the sort of upgrade from black and white to color that happened in System 6 came to fruition in System 7. But System 7 was pretty good.
1:32:07It had a little bit of a system six hangover, but I think it was pretty good. Um, the Mac OS eight Copeland style, Aaron style, uh, you know, Mac OS eight through, uh, the end in nine, the, the, the sort of that platinum look, I don't know which OS you want to pick out because they didn't really change that much, but anywhere from like, you know, the beginning with Mac OS eight, all the way till the end of classic Mac OS, that look was extremely coherent and consistent. I think that is probably the, my favorite sort of, you know, they got everything right. The folders, the, the window Chrome, the menus, the, the font choices.
1:32:45There were some bad font choices in there too. You used to be able to change the font to Mac OS. So you can even do it Mac OS 10 for a little while anyway. Um, but like that, that look, that sort of platinum Mac OS eight style Copeland style look that was very coherent and solid. So that's probably my single favorite. it if you look at the mac os 10 error and on since i did reviews of all those in the early days every one of those os's had something about that i thought was awesome and something about it that i thought was worse than its predecessor like they would always mess something look at my reviews i spent 15 years doing these reviews it's not like there was ever a version like oh 10.7 is the one i got everything right nope like every single one of those os's is like oh this looks really good and this looks really clean and nice and they improved this but look what they did over here they made these icons works the tabs look dumb they changed the toolbar icons again and they're worse like there was never one where they got everything right and it just got even like it became a real sort of clown show somewhere actually around like the 10.7 ish era it was like where they started to get the ios stuff thrown in it was like what are they doing like they made these things cleaner and better and they refined these but this other area they went off in a weird new direction i mean whether it's the stitched leather on their applications or when they decided the sidebar should invade the toolbar and that the legacy of that decision that has rippled through the history and we're still dealing with up to today's floating tahoe one there's no os in like the the mac os 10 era that got everything got its act together to the degree that mac os 8 and that look did or even probably the system 7 era now that said i did like like around yosemite like 1010 there was that was probably one of the stronger looks before like it may be yosemite yosemite el cap like basically just before the sidebar cut into the toolbar and really screwed up all those good ideas like the sidebar cut into the toolbar and uh in big sir basically right before big sir those past those few os's mostly had their act together i am a little bit disappointed that like they drained the color out of the sidebar icons and like finder and stuff pretty early on like i think 10.7 they did that so if i had to sort of like design your own like look for like a future mac os take all the good ideas of the past it would be like let the title ball be the title bar kick the sidebar out of there clear distinction between ui and controls don't make literally every single icon in the ui be a template image that's monochrome like i understand why they did that and i i like a lot of it but it really takes a lot of the fun out of it when that's just like the way every single app is right i i think it would have to be some kind of hybrid of all the different looks so i think the only two clean wins are system 7 and the mac os 8 look and then the mac os 10 era there's lots of os's i liked parts of but never never since 10.0 has there been an os where every single aspect of it i said they finally got it all together which has been fun like i enjoyed like the ride from 10.0 to like 10 point whatever i stopped at in my reviews um because that made it interesting to see like oh they're refining they're changing they're doing this stuff oh but in this area they made it worse and then the next xos they would fix that but then they would do something else tahoe is just bad they made everything worse right so it's that tahoe is its own special snowflake so definitely not tahoe but yeah i would say like probably i think uh where things really started to go wrong is when the sidebar took the toolbar not because that one mistake was so egregious but because it's emblematic of a thought process that uh shows a lack of care for good ui all right thank you to our sponsors this episode, DeleteMe, Squarespace, and Zapier.
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1:37:11And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. John, you're doing a migration of some sort? yeah so i talked about on like a couple episodes ago about um my migration of stuff to cloudflare it started out that i was i didn't want to keep renewing ssl certificates so i had cloudflare be the ssl terminator for my existing websites on my shared hosting and then it turns out that they're going to change the rules for ssl certificates you have to renew them even more so it was great that i did that and then i think the last time i updated uh you guys on it it was like okay well actually i've moved my hypercritical.co website entirely to cloudflare instead of clav for just doing ssl termination actually i moved all the data there as well and it's hosted in their equivalent of an s3 bucket with this little tiny worker process in front of it i think that's where i left off that's this is the migration i'm talking about which is like you know taking stuff that wasn't on cloudflare and putting it on cloudflare kind of but really it's just it is essentially a migration away from what i kept referring to as my crappy shared hosting plan and i don't i don't mean to be mean to my crappy shared hosting plan because it's not actually crappy like i discussed using cpanel with it the company is name cheap which is a name registrar that you can register names cheaply right but honestly they are really good implementation of what they are which is like a you know and from an earlier time back when cpanel was the interface of the day they do everything you can host a website there you can host a static website you can have a cgi bin you can have a shell account you can have email addresses you can register names you can do ssl certificates like they do everything for not a lot of money there's a reason i've been there i meant to look up how long i've been there i'm pretty sure i've been there for a decade or more um but the downside is when i say shared hosting it means that like yeah i have a shell account on a machine that is shared by other people and there's like one web server running like apache and nginx or nginx or whatever that serves things out of multiple accounts home directories and that means like i don't have my own dedicated stuff it's not even i think even casey you have like don't you have like a dedicated well you have dedicated vm i imagine you have a dedicated vm for your websites yeah well it's a linode or akamai nanode so yes it's a dedicated vm as far as i'm my understanding anyway but it's the smallest wimpiest crappiest one they offer which is five bucks a month yeah so i mean you're at the very least you have some reserved amount of resources within your virtual machine that are that are yours but um and obviously cloud flary it's big thing is they they have a cdn and they have this all these network abilities to block bots and denial of service attacks and all this stuff not shared hostings don't have that because this type of shared hosting account was from before that era so that's why i've been considering migrate i've meant to migrate off of it for years but it's like well i just have everything there and it's a lot of stuff and it's built up over the years so it's a pain to move so i was doing it in steps of like i gotta do this ssl thing because it's untenable for me to you know i was paying for ssl certificates because that's how old things were so i want my ssl certificates for free i don't want to have to deal with them so cloudfire will do all the renewals and then i'm like well i could move my site there so hypercritical.co there but once i sort of started doing that i'm like well now i have like some stuff at namecheap and some stuff not so i started looking at what i have over there like namecheap also provides email for like all the domains and stuff so all my hypercritical.co email was hosted there again incredibly cheaply um i had other domains that like they technically have email boxes but i would just forward them to my gmail or whatever but like i i have stuff there so i was like you know and also i was using postmark uh is that the name of it the same thing we use for atp to send yeah the email sending api yeah uh so i could send mail from because i still use gmail as my main gmail email client so i can send email from gmail so it legitimately looks like it's from hypercritical.co and you do that postmark will do that for you it'll you set up the dkim and spf like anyways a bunch of technical crap but the point is i was paying postmark to do that and then the actual email account for crowbarco was the inbox was landing at namecheap and i was actually going through mail route it was a large bunch of stuff so i'm like you know let me see about fixing that and maybe it's because i was jealous of you two putting your fast mail referral urls in the show notes so now i'm gonna put a fast mail referral urls in the show notes and yet no they are not sponsoring this episode this is not a sponsor but in a referral url if you sign up for fastmail through my thing i get a kickback all right but anyway i moved my email to fastmail i got rid of my postmark stuff i got rid of the name cheap stuff stop you are no longer at gmail you're not using gmail for your email of course i'm never gonna leave gmail okay so i'm sorry i think i'm confused so what is it fastmail right so before i was using postmark to be able to send email legitimately from hypercritical.co and my other domains from gmail now i'm using fastmail to do this i see so it's replaced post right before when email arrived it would land in my name cheap like the mx records would lead it through mail route into my name cheap account now when email gets sent to hypercritical.co it lands in fastmail and that gets forwarded to gmail but you see what i'm saying like i've replaced name cheap mail route and uh post postmark with fastmail and i tried it as like a sort of a trial basis i tried it out and i tried all the stuff i'm like yep it does everything everybody said it does it was so easy to set up it's super fast it's great hypercritical.co slash fastmail if you want to sign up and give me a referral bonus i signed up i signed up for three years of fastmail love it i eliminated three vendors and replaced them with one for less money big win nice so now i'm looking at what's left at namecheap at this point well i have like my main family website there and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap because again name cheap like you can set up an arbitrary number of sites just you just got to get the domains and you just like i had so much crap set up there and the other thing i had running there was like a lot of cron jobs yes cron jobs and you can run through cron because it was a shell account um and i had cron jobs like things i'd written in pearl right they just some kind of cron job that gathers some information about my life or business and i've just been running for years and years right and some of those cron jobs would put things into the document route for one of my websites that's hosted on namecheap and one of the reasons i never left is like what am i gonna do with all those cron jobs like am i gonna port those cron jobs somewhere else and do i really want to transfer all those files because i had like stuff like my iweb websites remember iweb yeah yeah do you remember that before your time anyway iweb was like a gooey website builder that apple made for several years where you could like make like photo albums and blogs and stuff and it would pull from your photo library and we did that for years like when my kids were young we did like blogs of like you know alex's first birthday and alex is three months old and our formal family portraits and like all those were like shoved into direct because apple used to host those and then eventually i just like took the static files and hosted them on my website i have a whole legacy of stuff like well i can move the files but i don't know what i want to do about the cron job so i started tackling that i started taking the static files and moving them to another sort of static hosted website in cloudflare being run out of r2 um i did take the time to try to fix some of the iWeb stuff that work is still in progress because i thought i had done everything but then i tried to play one of the movies on my phone and it wouldn't play like i got them to play on my mac and safari and chrome because i had to like sort of re-encode them but i couldn't get them to play on my phone i did try to i took i did take a slight diversion into uh trying to open up my old iMovie projects because at a certain point my iMovie projects no longer were imported by the new version of iMovie, like they got orphaned.
1:45:10So I was running iMovie in a VM. I was like, first I tried like, first I tried Lion, but that was the wrong version. By the way, I had to find an old version of iMovie or whatever. Then I tried Snow Leopard and that's the one that worked. But unfortunately, VMware does not provide video hardware acceleration for Snow Leopard. So when I tried to render the video in iMovie, no errors were thrown, but you get a black square for the whole movie. So that's not great. Um, so I'm still working on that. I mean, these are mini DV video, like as in on a mini DV cassettes from 2004. Right. I still still have the, still have the thing, but I have the.dv file.
1:45:48I have the raw.dv file, but I don't want the raw file. I want my edit. I made these cute little edited things of the kids, right? I'm still working on that. So I have the thumbnail size ones that will play on the Mac, but not on the iPhone. But anyway, I ported those things over. I ended up writing some rewrite rules to make a lot of the iWeb magic that used to happen on Apple server happen on mine. There's a bunch of broken images because they were hosted at me.com and they're just not there anymore. And I don't have them, so I don't know what they were. But, you know, I worked on that. And then the cron jobs, I mean, it's just, I don't know, like a decade and a half of Perl scripts that do various things.
1:46:25um and you know this is when i started thinking all right i don't want to port like seven eight ten pearl scripts to a language that will run in cloudfire workers cloudfire surprisingly will not run pearl scripts no shocked but i said you know uh large language model technology was originally uh created for translating human languages like translate french to english or whatever like that's the origin of that technology that's why they're called transformer models or well that's why but they are called transformer models and they were originally designed with an eye towards human language translation they're actually pretty good at programming language translation too so i said you know what uh chat gpt gemini claude let me describe to you this perl script can you translate this to javascript for me because i don't want to do it it i mean it's not complicated i know javascript but just like you have to go through every api i'm using this pro module what is the node equivalent can i get that module oh there's six choices for the node module which one should i like it's just tedious and then you got to test it all so i let the lm have a crack at it it did a pretty good job minor fix-ups i need to do but like i mean it's it's all code that i'm familiar with and each of the scripts is not more than i don't know two or three pages of code or whatever mostly what they do is read some kind of data sources and then write out a json file somewhere or whatever so it's not rocket science is it actually fits pretty well with node i ported all my cron jobs to uh node.js wow and wouldn't you know it cloudflare worker has a place where you can run cron jobs down to being able to paste in like the little five you know the five numbers at the front of jobs right you just paste them in that format and it's like sure we'll run that job for you that's pretty cool that is cool i didn't know that that is very slick so so i'm like okay i've i've you know and the reason i never did that year for years and years it's like who wants to rewrite that but now i didn't have to rewrite it something you know that the lm did it for me and i was feeling real good and then i said okay but like the a lot of the json files written out by my crime jobs are in the format uh understood by the ipad application status board i was wondering if that's what this was all about i should have said it quicker for people who don't know status board was an application made by great max software developer panic where they uh you run it on the ipad and you basically get a series of boards and on each board it's basically just a grid that fills up the screen of an ipad and you can drag out little rectangles on the grid and each one of the rectangles you can say i want you to show a graph by reading this json file or the cvs file and they came up with their own format for the cvs and json files and you can do line graphs and bar graphs and lists and dials and icons and they used it in their office to show like here's our software projects here's working who's working on them here's how they're going here's how many open issues there are here's the backlog in our customer service queue that's what panic was using it for this is a great application in the panic style and if you're listening to this you're like so they made an ipad app that's basically a toy version of grafana and prometheus yeah that's what they did why would you ever use that why wouldn't you just use graphite grafana prometheus or any of the other enterprise applications that do all this because i liked how status board looked and because when i was originally using status board i didn't know about those programs i know about them now and now i don't like them because i had to use them for years at work and yes they're open source and free but hosting any of them is much more complicated but here's the thing status board was discontinued in 2018 not recently it's not it's it and every year since then i've been like is this going to be the year that status board stops working because i have it on my ipad and only on my app it is only an ipad app it doesn't even run on the phone i believe and it still runs in ipad os 26 but barely it's like every day i'm like oh is this gonna like it's kind of like candy bar which is a icon management application i believe it was originally made by icon factory but panic had it for a while and anyway that's been discontinued as well but uh recently i was able to convince panic to uh release a version that will at least launch on modern mac os and i still use it with this is a warning dialogue on it but anyway um so i like that's those json files put out my cron chips i'm looking at them in status board but it always bothered me that i can only look at them on my ipad which means that in practice i generally only tend to look at them when i'm before i'm going to bed and then i find something that's wrong i gotta like leave my bed and go down and fix it i was like you know i've always wanted to make a web app version of status board they would read the same json files and have the same ui but it would be a web app oh my and i thought this is the perfect time to do something that i wanted to do for a while which is to try out uh you know those coding agents that actually do things for you i use lms for coding all the time but i just paste things into a chatbot and see what they have to say but there are other tools where you don't do that where you just say here you do it you make the file you rename things you make the edits you check into the git repo all that stuff and so i tried decided to use claude code and i've never used it previously because i don't want that thing anywhere near my code but this is an empty directory there's nothing in it and so i wrote up a claude.md file and i said this is what status board is it was this app by panic uh it reads these files in json format here's a screenshot of the app from my ipad see in that screenshot there's four graphs here are the json files and urls that you can download that derive those four graphs here's panic's documentation of the json format here's how the status board app works i wrote basically a one page a little book report slash software spec reminding me of the good old days of me being a software developer on a team where you had to describe functionality to other people i described it to claude and i said go for it dude uh and claude churned for a while and a few minutes later uh i i launched the application locally and i had sas board running the web app that's incredible oh my god that is so freaking cool and the thing is was it perfect no it doesn't really have any idea about ui and it's kind of like anytime you're talking to a human thing like i had some experience with having like uh obviously new employees when i i've been a software manager i've been a software team lead i've had interns but like interns and very new employees are very similar where if you give them instructions but you don't certain things you leave unsaid because you assume they'll know but uh new employees and interns don't always know those things same thing with cloud code it didn't really if i didn't say how or where some part of ui should be it just picked someplace and it made bad choices so i spent uh the next you know few rounds going back and forth saying that add button shouldn't be over there this should be centered why don't you make a hamburger menu in the upper left and put these items in it um and bug fixing like one of the things that i feel like a human wouldn't have done is uh to the the screen to edit one of the tiles where you say like this is the url these are the options blah blah it has a bunch of checkbox for like you know do you want me to show dots how thick should the lines be crap like that uh when you edited a tile you could change those options and save and it'll be fine when you created a new tile it ignored some of them and a human wouldn't make that mistake because a human would know hey that dialogue that is like the edit dialogue for for a thing you have to honor all the controls in it all the time not just when you're editing like when you create it you know it's the same ui create a new tile great fill out this form you got to actually honor the stuff that i enter there so a couple things like that where i would go through the app and say yeah i don't think a human would make that mistake and was like anyway um all this this entire thing is happening over the course of one morning i woke up in the morning with an empty folder by the time i ate lunch i had status board running on the web to my satisfaction reading all my old json files which are now being generated by cloud flare things that is so freaking wild amazing i'm totally amazing all credit to i'm not going to release this by the way because it's it's 100 a ripoff of status board i even called it status board like i use the colors i use i use the status board icon it took me longer to extract the status board icon from the ipad app from my from my ipad and edit it into a transparent mac style icon or whatever that i could put on my web app that took me longer than it took to write the entire web app for claude code to write the entire web app gracious uh now i do have to say that the next morning when i woke up and woke my mac from sleep the entire directory containing my git repo was gone oh that's fun i don't know who to blame this on obviously it was still in git so cares like was on github i just pulled the repo back down i didn't lose any unshaced changes a little bit scary i'm just like the whole directory was gone the only thing i could do was look in dropbox but unfortunately i don't run dropbox all the time so when i launched dropbox it simply registered that the directory wasn't there and then registered the deletion is happening at like 8 30 a.m that's not when the deletion actually happened i think because that's just when i launched dropbox but anyway i just i just did a git pull i could have restored it from dropbox too but i just did a git pull and pulled the thing back down right um and then since i had been using cloud code and by the way one of the reasons i stopped shortly afternoon um on the thing was i ran out of tokens with cloud code because i don't have the fancy version where you pay 100 bucks or whatever um i don't have that many tokens to do things so i ran out of tokens and i was like i should stop tweaking this application it's fine and in practice i didn't end up tweaking it all after that but i was looking for other things to do with this so i had two other ideas one now that i had this cool status board app it's like well there's a board that i've wanted and i wanted it recently because marco has been uh changing up his little like end of the show pitch thing.
1:56:08You know, I don't know. Marco, start your end of the show thing. How does it go? Thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode. Squarespace, delete me, and Zapier. Right. And recently, he's been adding, recently as in the past several months, he's been adding one of the features of, you know, blah, blah, is overtime. ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Right. This week on overtime. Yeah. You had recently, you have been trying to characterize the length of the overtime segment in your spiel and going, oh, it's 15, 20 minutes. 15, 20 minutes or so. say because you're just going by the seat of the pants feel i'm like you know what this is a perfect that's my entire life john yeah this is a perfect graph this is a perfect graph for me to put in status board so i wanted to first i do two things one i got to write a script in node.js to uh to get the data and write out json files and two i just paste those urls in status board and go so the script is really the thing so i said okay cloud code here you're up again now this time i have existing node scripts like i have actually written some scripts that aren't perl scripts that generate these json files some of the most they're all the modern ones are written in node already so i already had a node script that pretty much got all the data i wanted except it wasn't getting overtime chapter links and the thing about overtime chapter links is obviously they don't come from the public version of the show because overtime is only in the members version so i needed the script to get the members version of the show and then i needed it to know what the overtime segment was and the second thing is i didn't just want to know the length of all the overtime segments i wanted to see like a x number of episodes rolling average you know what i mean because i don't care what like the lifetime average of overtime is i just care it's like is it trending up is it trending down what is the what is the rolling average right so i took an existing node.js script and i ripped out the functionality that didn't need to be there but left everything else and i said So cloud code here's the script i want you to leave everything as is all the scaffolding about its logging and monitoring of the pid file and how it connects to the database and how it does this and how you know like leave all that that's all good put a comment in it said you add your new functionality here what i want you to do is pull the members only uh version of the show using authenticated s3 style client to get the episode out parse the chapters find the one that begins with overtime get the length add the data to a file and then every time you run just see if there's a new episode and add the data and i want you to do two graphs one that shows the overtime length of every episode and to uh show an end episode rolling average uh and it had real difficulty it can make the entire status board in the morning but it was doing this and it was like it was just not quite getting it like it was more complicated surprisingly especially when i said you got to run on the dev environment where you're inside docker and the passwords are all different and things are authenticated differently but you also have to run on the production one where things going to be different still and it it just kept messing it up i spent an entire day on this and And by the time I was done, it was working, but I could have done it way faster.
1:59:03So there's two experiences there. One, it wrote in the entirety of status board in the morning. No way I could have done that that fast, mostly because I would have spent the whole time saying, what graph library should I use? Should I use the canvas API directly? What should I do? Like, I don't have experience with the APIs it was using. But on this thing, a Node.js script that is starts off 99 % with code that I wrote, 100 % with code that I wrote starting off. And then I just want you to add like 10%. I could have done it so much faster. And this is very much like the experience of having new employees or interns where, yeah, you could just do something so much faster.
1:59:32But the whole point is you're supposed to be you're mentoring somebody. You're bringing them up to be from a junior developer to a more senior developer. So even though, yes, you could do it faster yourself, taking the time to write out a spec and explain how you want it to be done and having them try to do it and having them come back and say, no, you didn't do X, Y and Z and go back and forth like that process. When you're doing with a human, you feel like you are helping a human along their path to become better. When you're doing with an LLM, you feel like you're just wasting your time. So two very different experiences.
1:59:59One was a huge time, time saver, amazing results. The other one was I should have just done it myself because it would have been a lot faster, but Hey, I felt like I, you know, I'm doing it as content for the show and experience with these models. Number three, one last one. This is all happening during this week, by the way, this is like three days this week. I said, you know what? There's another project that I wanted to do for a while that I've never bothered doing. Cause it's just got a bunch of annoying, busy work and like looking up what libraries use and it just seems like too much of a pain but now i've got a whole fresh days with the tokens you know woke up in the morning right i'm gonna have have a crack at it and the project was passkey login to atp.fm oh my god which would be easy if our site wasn't written in php which is not the most modern language with the most modern access to the most modern libraries do those two things go together php and pass keys two things separated by decades literal decades that's part of like i looked into it a bunch of times before i'm like i could do this but it just it just doesn't seem fun and i'm not sure i'm going to pick the right library and a lot of days like oh you got to use the zend framework i'm like i'm using the marco framework man i'm not using whatever thing like they all wanted to plug into some kind of like here's what all the modern php stuff uses i don't have any of that i don't want any we don't use composer we don't use a framework like all these like so all like the guides for like how do you do pass keys in php it's like that's not going to work for me but i'm like you know what cloud code you're up so this is the first time i'm putting cloud code not in an empty directory not in a directory with a single file that i made but i'm pointing it to the directory for like the the repo that holds the code that marco wrote that runs adp.fm i'm doing it in a docker container it's all safe it's all cardened off or whatever and i have stern instructions never ever to commit to git and you know all this other stuff but the point is it's all it's all in docker using local everything right and it makes a run at it i read a big document i explained a great length look look here's the system we've got all right here's how things work here's where our data is here how you know you're running inside docker when you're in dev just fyi and here's where the things are and i do the whole spec talking to cloud code i stick it on it it goes it says great it's ready go do it i go to the page to try to create a passkey for my account which luckily the page does load creation of the cast patch key totally doesn't work i spend a little bit of time going back and forth with like here's the error it's not working like i'm not diving into the code at this point i'm just saying like let's see what you can do because cloud code can fix its own mistakes a lot of the time but i was going back and forth for basically the entirety of a morning and just absolutely nothing worked it was just error after error after error after error so i had some lunch came back dove in myself to try to fix what it was doing together we started making forward progress I also started asking other LLMs like my chat GPT or my Gemini window.
2:02:51So I wouldn't burn flawed tokens for things, you know, just sort of manually fix stuff. But by the end of the day, I eventually got it to work. And I do think this was actually probably net net a time saver. Maybe. I think if I had known what to do, I could have done it faster than Cloud Code. But the point is Cloud Code pointed me in the right direction by finding a good library. And essentially, you know, how how I integrate this library into the existing code in a way that is doesn't require massively restructuring stuff but it just got so many things wrong that i just had to go in and be like i'll look up the documentation that's not the arguments this function takes i will fix it for you like whatever um but yeah uh atp.fm now supports pass keys so if you don't like the thing where it emails you a login link you can add a password to your account which i added myself ages ago or you can also add a pass key to your account and you can log in with the pass key and if i screwed up the pass key implementation blame me and claude but effectively on Claude's boss.
2:03:44But I'm pretty sure everything works as expected. So if you want to use passkeys with ATB.fm, you can do that now. Wow. Nothing is left on Namecheap. I have canceled my Namecheap renewal. Everything I had on Namecheap is gone. I am fully on Cloudflare and Fastmail. This was a journey, John, that I was not prepared for. Neither was I. It just kind of snowballed all of a sudden. I just did a long Rectifs episode because as coincidentally, Merlin also discovered, or not discovered, but started using Claude Code this week. Very coincidentally, he also did some status board-y thing. For a second, I thought, did you re-implement status board with Claude Code?
2:04:19He didn't, but he was doing some status board-related, some stuff that is similar to status board. The upcoming rectum stuff will tell you. But anyway, I'm not sure if this is an endorsement of Claude Code. You do have to pay for like the$20 a month plan at least to do what I did. That's only good for like, I don't know, less than a morning's worth of tokens before you have to wait 12 hours for them to refresh. but I'm, I'm taking the win. I think it did a really, it saved me a lot of time porting my scripts. It did the status board thing way faster than I would have. And the other two projects, one was a real disaster and one was mixed.
2:04:54So, you know, I, all I can say is in five to 10 years, this stuff is just only going to get better. And I think it's already extremely useful. Oh, and by the way, for the overtime thing, I've got to tell you, uh, the average all time average length of the overtime segment on our show, it's quite highly variable. the average is 21.78 minutes um the rolling eight episode average is 25.6 minutes so for your future end of the show things if you want to say it's about 20 to 25 minutes or if you just want to say it's about 25 minutes that will be accurate about 25.6 minutes if you ever want an updated stat i can tell you it rolls right off the tongue it's about 20 minutes but the problem is it's highly variable like our longest one i believe is like 45 or 46 minutes and we have some that are like 15 so yeah like the reason i say 15 to 20 is like i don't want to i don't want somebody to think they're paying for 20 minutes of content and they see one that's 15 and they're disappointed so i like i like to underplay but then they see one that's 45 and they're also disappointed so you know it's highly variable but anyway i want i did actually want to know what the numbers are i'll send i'll put in slack the graph so you can see what they look like but anyone could do this really Beep beep beep.
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