catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

503: Draw Your Own Slice of Pizza

AI-generated art, the EU USB-C mandate, and we all definitely agree on macOS window-management techniques.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
  • Kolide: A cross-platform endpoint security solution for teams that value privacy and transparency.

Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Pre-show: HomePods and cases
  2. Follow-up: Shared photo libraries
  3. Sponsor: Kolide
  4. EU USB-C mandate
  5. Sponsor: Linode
  6. Follow-up: Watch band-only returns
  7. AI-generated art
  8. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  9. #askatp: macOS window management
  10. #askatp: Indie-dev work-trackers
  11. #askatp: TV picture modes, calibration
  12. Ending theme
  13. Post-show

Pre-show: HomePods and cases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am back. Where were you? I was using HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minis. Okay. And I am back. On big boys?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As long as they last. Oh my gosh. With big HomePods. Like the cheese graters.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness, how did this happen?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So last time I went to Westchester, there they were, two perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good full-size HomePods being used in a kitchen by nobody.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That poor house has just been gutted. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, I’m like, you know, these are just sitting here, rotting away, with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever electrical flaw is what eventually kills them, that capacitor or whatever that everybody says is bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wrong or whatever. No one’s using them. And I’m sure they’re gonna get replaced at some point in the next decade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple, but until that happens, let me take them back. So I brought them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have been using them, and they are exactly as glorious and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying as they always were, and I’m so happy I made the switch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because while they are playing music, which you can eventually make them do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, eventually, they do sound incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me something, and I need you to really and truly be honest, are they white or are they black? They’re white, they happen to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white. So here’s the thing, I’m so glad you answered that question. I feel like Jack Ryan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Humphrey October about a crazy Ivan. We should do that as a movie thing, by the way. Anyway, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like your white HomePods are my white BMW, hear me out. When my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white BMW was working, it was amazing. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was only working for about a week every month, but for that one week, oh, it was good. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real good for that one week. Your white HomePods, which by the way, it just happened to you, those when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey working, I guess they’re real good, aren’t they?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and by the way, I chose the white because I know, I know this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is unpopular for a nerd like me to say that the black option is not the best option on something, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco white HomePods look better than black HomePods. They’re not really white, they’re gray, I mean, come on. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty close to, I mean, you know, the outside is made of something that kind of resembles cloth,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can’t get it like super, super white. They’re not white, they’re not even starlight, they’re light gray. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the black is definitely a dark gray.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, the black is very, very dark gray.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, anyway, so the white looks better. And so I chose them and I stand by that. I’m unashamed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in choosing the white HomePods. I also actually, so my phone is temporarily white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, but I’ll tell you what, some quick follow up on last week’s case discussion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said, I briefly said last week, I had tried the Peak Design, the Pitaka, and the Pitaka, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I liked the way it felt, but it didn’t, I hated the way it looked. The Peak Design was a little bit bulky

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t like how little relative tackiness that the back cloth-like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface had. Well, I have been using the Peak Design case all week

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I just like it. And it makes relatively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little sense. I can’t really justify it over the other cases in any kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subjective, or objective, I guess. Objective means it is more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive than most of them. It is thicker and it’s less grippy. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels the nicest and it looks the nicest. Therefore I’ve been sticking with it and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of like it. I kind of like the weird little square on the back. It’s kind of like a reverse pop socket. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like, is it having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that sticks out? It’s something, it’s like a hole that you can like put your finger on the inside of the hole to lift it out of your, out of your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket or whatever. Like it’s, it’s nice. I even, I, I just now, uh, or just yesterday I just ordered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of their like mounts that go on the back. Just see what I could do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, here we go. You’re gonna put it on your motorcycle?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. Well, first I have to buy a motorcycle, just for this case, you know. I like the case so much, I bought a motorcycle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey As you do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I bought the mount, and the motorcycle happens to be white. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bought the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount that loops around that way. And I’m gonna start becoming a… What are those,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, people who make GoPro action videos on their vehicles? Do we have a name for those? Like, cloggers or something?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my gosh, yes. Let’s go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with cloggers. That’s perfect. So I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco become a clogger.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, this it’s all it’s and it’s all thanks to this case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried that Marco not as easy as you think Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway turns out that’s the case. I’m going with for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay update on my creaky clear case I’ve got a this is the first clear case I’ve used for any pre-sold

⏹️ ▶️ John amount of time I’ve got quite a collection of crumbs and dust Collecting and

⏹️ ▶️ John visible all around if you look if you just circle all around like the top edge

⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing. It is so gross. I cannot wait to get this thing off. One of my cases shipped. I got a shipping notification.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think possibly it’ll be here by next week’s show, but I’ll keep you updated. I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ John wait to get this thing off my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, an alternative is just is to just not care about having a covered bottom, and then there’s zillions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of cases you can try.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s plenty of options too. I mean, I picked two of them because they were expensive. There’s more than two options I could have

⏹️ ▶️ John picked. I figure I’ll like one of these two, but I’ll let you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can try the Peak Design. It It comes in grayish black and a weirdly light green

⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, obviously if I needed a secure mount or something, I would probably pick that, but the little square

⏹️ ▶️ John that you mentioned, like, oh, I can use it to pull my phone out of my pocket or whatever, I just, I don’t want that to be there. I feel like my

⏹️ ▶️ John fingers would find it and it would just be annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right, that is a thing. And the little square, the very first day I used this case, I thought it felt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little sharp. Now it doesn’t feel sharp to me anymore. Maybe it just sanded down my fingers, I don’t know. But what I like about the Peak Design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco addition to the fact that it looks nicest and feels nicest, the buttons also feel nicest.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The mute switch toggle is a little deep, like the hole, the little recession to get to the mute switch is a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deep, but the side buttons, you know, all the buttons are covered, the side buttons feel great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this case, better than most cases. And overall, this case is the only, it’s the only iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case I have ever used from anybody except Apple where it felt like they went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the nice materials instead of the cheap materials. And it is by far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nicest case I’ve ever seen, felt, or used that was not made of leather. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever that’s worth, if you either want to go leather-free or if you just want something nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just it’s really nice.

Follow-up: Shared photo libraries

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. What is going on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with shared photo libraries and what is shared with them, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Last week I said some things about what wasn’t shared in photos and I was wrong about a

⏹️ ▶️ John few of them. I said that keywords, favorites, and location stuff were not shared.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are shared. So those are attributes of the individual photos. So keywords, and I tested this with my little

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. If you put a keyword on a photo, it gets shared with the other person. If you favorite it, it shows up. that we’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about photos that are in the shared library. You can do that stuff to them. You can assign keywords, you can set their favorite

⏹️ ▶️ John status, you can add location information, and everybody sees that. All the other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about, the non-photo items remain unshared. So you don’t get albums, you don’t get smart albums,

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get slideshows, you don’t get book projects, all that stuff. And also, someone asked about this when I

⏹️ ▶️ John was having a discussion about it on Twitter. What about duplicates? What if

⏹️ ▶️ John two people have the same photo, maybe like a person airdropped the same identical

⏹️ ▶️ John photo to two different people at two different times, and they both add it to the shared library,

⏹️ ▶️ John what happens? The answer, and according to my experimentation using the Mac version of Photos Only

⏹️ ▶️ John and two different accounts that have the exact same file, I imported the file into both of their private

⏹️ ▶️ John libraries, and they’re separate at that point, and then I had both of them add that photo to the

⏹️ ▶️ John shared library, and you end up with two copies of that photo in the shared library. Just two completely

⏹️ ▶️ John identical copies of the photo in the shared library. I didn’t edit them, so it’s not like one of them was edited and one of them wasn’t. I just imported it into

⏹️ ▶️ John the individual things, then I had one person add it to the shared library, and then I had the second person add it to the shared library.

⏹️ ▶️ John Still in beta, maybe they’ll change that. And interestingly, I was like, okay, well, maybe they do that for safety or

⏹️ ▶️ John just to make sure photos don’t squish other photos for the edits or whatever. But isn’t there a dedup feature that they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been talking about in iOS 16 and stuff? They will find your duplicates for you, like built

⏹️ ▶️ John into the iOS 16 photos thing? I believe so. If that exists in Mac photos, I

⏹️ ▶️ John could not find it. So it’s kind of weird if that ends up being an iOS only feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are obviously there are tons and tons of ways to dedupe photos in your photo library with Mac applications. Lots of third party

⏹️ ▶️ John applications have been doing that for years, but it’s kind of weird that if they’re bringing that as a first party feature to

⏹️ ▶️ John the photos app on the phone, that they don’t also bring it to the Mac. So I hope that appears in a

⏹️ ▶️ John future beta or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by collide. It admins often feel like they have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose between their commitment to cybersecurity and their duty to protect their employees privacy. Naturally, of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to safeguard company data against hacks and breaches. But you also don’t want to turn your workplace into 1984.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Traditional MDMs give the IT team complete access and control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over company devices to a fault because since employees are inevitably going to use their work laptops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some personal activities, those tools can saddle you with surveillance capabilities over personal stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never wanted access to, like photos or browser history. Before you know it, your end users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are complaining about all the security agents slowing down their laptops, developers are frustrated by the lack of autonomy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people start secretly working on their personal devices just to get things done. In that case, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loses. So it’s easy to fall into these traps of top-down security. But this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the only option. collide is an endpoint security solution built around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest security. Their philosophy is that employees aren’t your biggest security risk, they’re your biggest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allies. Your relationship with them should be based on transparency and informed consent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco collide works by notifying your employees of security issues via slack, educating them on why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are important, and giving them step by step instructions on how to resolve them themselves. For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and security teams collide provides the right level of visibility for Mac, Windows and Linux devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it addresses high risk issues that can’t be solved through brute force or automation. And your end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users can see exactly why and how every piece of data is being collected by a collides

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user privacy center and their open source code base. You can meet your security

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goals without compromising your values. Visit collide.com slash ATP to find out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you follow that link, they’ll hook you up with a goodie bag just for activating a free trial. That’s collide. K-O-L-I-D-E.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Collide.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to to collide for sponsoring our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show.

EU USB-C mandate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the European Union has mandated that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all phones in somewhere between 1 and 17,000 years will have USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on them, as was foretold. Yeah, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we know? I mean, the Europeologists here will tell us, like, well, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, they didn’t really mandate it yet. Now it has to go to this committee, then it has to go to this board, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it has to— I

⏹️ ▶️ John bet there’s something in the notes that has the answers to those questions. Let me read from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the notes. I didn’t know if we were going to make any initial opening remarks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess not. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John here we go.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you shouldn’t have editorialized based on the, uh, based on the title item. Because notice

⏹️ ▶️ John what the title item says. Would you like to read the title item as written?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU USB-C mandate passes vote. Passes

⏹️ ▶️ John vote. It does not. So it’s mandate as a noun, right? The USB-C mandate.

⏹️ ▶️ John What happened to it? Did it go into effect? Is it real? Is it whatever? No, but it passed a vote. What the hell does passes a

⏹️ ▶️ John vote mean? And here we get the text.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, hey, hands up. Who wants us to pass? Three of us. One, two. Good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Okay, he just passed a vote.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean anything. Oh, it means something. Anyway, go on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. On October 4th, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of new legislation that would eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey require all mobile phones sold in the EU to use a USB-C port for wired charging.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The EU’s new rules are yet to be formally approved. Although they’ve they’ve been given the thumbs up by the bloc’s parliament,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the common charger legislation still needs to be signed off by the council of the EU and published

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the EU official journal. It would then enter into force 20 days later. So clear.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But even once that happens, just you wait, but even once that happens,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey companies like Apple will still effectively have a two year grace period that’s designed to ease the transition to a USBC future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This means the rules are likely to come into force by the end of 2024. Devices already on the market

⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t need to be withdrawn. So if Apple launches a lightning port iPhone ahead of the deadline, it can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep selling the phone. Or what if they just kill the ports entirely? They already did one, why not take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so 2024 is a ways out if things go according to what they seem like they’re gonna go to. That’s plenty

⏹️ ▶️ John of time for Apple to transition to USB-C quote unquote on its own.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? I love that it says like companies like Apple too. Like this is all about Apple. what other what other companies are left?

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no company as Tim Cook will tell you there are no other companies like Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Only Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John would be stubborn enough to keep lighting for this long. Nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how I feel about this. So I’m gonna steal from former guest Christina Warren, who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted about this and I agree with her. I would like USBC on my phone for several reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we can investigate if we care, but I would like USBC on my phone. I don’t love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it will arrive there, if at all, because of a government mandate rather than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either market forces or I don’t know. I feel very like, oh, free market this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, no government. And that’s not how I feel about most things. But in this particular case, I don’t love how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re ending up on a position that I think I’m going to love.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s gonna it’s gonna end up there, not because of this mandate, because if the 2024 date ends up being anything close

⏹️ ▶️ John to correct, Apple essentially has painted itself into a corner to transition

⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of this law, because they keep making phones that can create these massive

⏹️ ▶️ John files like shooting the you know high resolution video with high frame rate and Trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to get them off a phone is a nightmare And so they either have to upgrade lightning to be much much

⏹️ ▶️ John faster, which would be a big pass I’m not even sure if it’s possible or they have to go to USB C So there is a technical

⏹️ ▶️ John motivator that’s going to make Apple make some kind of change whether it’s to USB C or something

⏹️ ▶️ John else just because it’s, it’s just plain ridiculous how long it would take to get video

⏹️ ▶️ John off of a phone, you know, that you can record at the highest quality, it just takes too long, it’s too

⏹️ ▶️ John slow. So that’s, that’s my guess about why Apple will be transitioning.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure this mandate doesn’t hurt the schedule, right? It can only help

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But given how long these things take effect, and given how it’s been not weakened, but like, how they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been allowing people to ease the transition, give them a long time to do it, not having to withdraw existing products, which really

⏹️ ▶️ John helps them like Apple could release it depending on the timing within 2024. They can release their last

⏹️ ▶️ John lightning phone to be the 2024 phone, right and not have to worry about it

⏹️ ▶️ John until the 2025 phone, right? That’s how much time they have to do this. But I think they’ll probably change before

⏹️ ▶️ John then. David Schwab had some other ideas about things that will could do to skirt this. I think these are less

⏹️ ▶️ John likely than the straightforward thing, which is that it’s go to usbc. But here they are. He says the EU contains an exception

⏹️ ▶️ John for devices that only use wireless charging. Assuming Apple really doesn’t want to switch the out of form of lightning to USB-C, do

⏹️ ▶️ John you think they might just replace the lightning cable with MagSafe charger in the EU and implement one of these as a legal workaround?

⏹️ ▶️ John These are probably not increasingly silly, but some of them are silly. Put a service-only sticker or

⏹️ ▶️ John plug over the lightning port? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey see that happening.

⏹️ ▶️ John No. It’s kind of like the little, like the diagnostic part on the watch. Disable charging through the lightning port in

⏹️ ▶️ John software?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, you could still have the lightning port and not USB-C, as long as it doesn’t charge through it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John only for EU phones, right? Ship an EU phone without a lighting port, just like the US phone doesn’t have a SIM tray.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they put a plastic spacer in there. And he says, I think EU regulators may have

⏹️ ▶️ John underestimated how much Apple hates being forced to modify their designs to satisfy regional laws. But I really don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going to force Apple to do it. I think that the march of progress of storage size and

⏹️ ▶️ John the size of video files, and for that matter, photo files. Say you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John shooting everything with 48 megapixel RAWs, each of those photos is 80 megabytes and you got a one terabyte iPhone, try

⏹️ ▶️ John transferring that at lightning speeds, at the USB 2.0 speeds or whatever it is, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John little bit silly. They’re quote unquote pro phones need to be able to transfer data faster. And at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make a new version of lightning that is faster seems very silly in light

⏹️ ▶️ John of how much USB-C is spread throughout the rest of Apple’s lines. You know, they did it on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re either gonna do it on the phone or they’re gonna get rid of ports altogether, but I don’t see them. Like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John the EU that’s forcing them to put out a non-lighting phone in 2025, it’s just sanity. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want them to do it not because a government is forcing them to, but because it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right thing to do. And I think they, you know, the rumors have been fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistent that starting with next year’s iPhones that we are apparently going to USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s been consistent now for a number of years. And so I kind of put some weight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it. And I think, you know, Apple must have decided a couple of years ago, like, you know, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this change. And changing over the iPhone in any kind of major component

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change is not a small deal. They have to worry about like, first of all, can we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even get or create enough USB-C connectors to keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with the iPhone’s volume? Like that’s actually a real concern that, you know, something that’s as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high volume and as, I guess high stakes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iPhone is like, because every single thing that an iPhone has or has to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be nearly 100% perfect, nearly 100% of the time, because they just sell so many of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so important to the company that if they have a part that has like a 0.001% failure rate,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s too high. They can’t have that because that could cause a scandal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could have a big problem for the iPhone that year. Like, you know, so they have to be so careful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have to make sure they can create the volume and have the high yields and have the good reliability of all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different parts. You know, when you look at the iPhone as a product,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really amazing when you compare it to not only anything else that Apple makes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anything else that anybody makes. It’s really amazing how rarely anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes wrong with them. Like how, like manufacturing defect wise, like how often

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have you opened up a new iPhone and something’s been broken and you’ve had to exchange it. It’s almost unheard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, like it happens so rarely compared to the number of them that they sell. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, they have to be super cautious. So I’m sure there were reasons like that that led them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take this long to get here. But I do think it looks like things are lining up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they will be getting here. And I think, you know, part of the reason, as John said, the transfer rates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having these giant video captures, they’re literally, they’re marketing the pro phones and they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these software features and hardware features to optimize for things like ProRes and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAW photos and everything that generate these huge files that are comically slow to get off the phone. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one side of this, but the reality is, and Apple knows this, most people with most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones will never do those things. And so, that doesn’t necessarily need to be the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. That’s a reason. But I think the reason, the much bigger reason,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just that it’s a pain in the butt to have two different phone chargers out there. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple went with Lightning, the Android world was not as unified as it is now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, everything is USB-C, and it has been for a number of years now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s spreading to all sorts of other devices that aren’t even phones. You know, the laptops now all charge via

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C. They can, at least. They don’t have to, but they can. And then you look at every like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all hardware in the world Flashlights charge via USB C like the other I saw

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got an ad on Instagram for a power drill that charges via USB C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which by the way well targeted at? like everything is USB C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and the the very few things that aren’t are every iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Like our air pods cases or whatever. It’s like there’s not much else left

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, and the stupid Apple watch. Don’t forget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John keyboard. Yeah, keyboards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey My

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid keyboard. The Apple battery case that isn’t a case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, right. Whatever it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, but you look at the market and like everything else is USB-C now. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very different scenario now than it was when lightning was introduced. You know, when they had to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide to go from the dot connectors to lightning, again, that was a very different world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There wasn’t this consensus. There wasn’t this one amazing universal standard. There was a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of miscellaneous crap and mostly micro USB which sucked. And this is a totally different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballgame now. It’s a different time with different needs and the right thing to do now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether the EU gets around to mandating it for them or not, is to use USB-C for everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rumors again suggest we’re going there and I hope they’re right because it is such a pain in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco butt to have a family of mixed devices of just like, you know what, we need USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for pretty much everything except our iPhones. Like that’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and our Apple Watches again, whole separate thing there. But the world would be better off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they made the iPhone USB-C. And I hope that’s the reason they’re doing it and not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of government pressure or not because of only pros needing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, everyone needs it. It’ll benefit everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of not having enough parts and stuff, I seem to recall a story back when Lightning First came out the limiting factor

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phones they could manufacture was the ability to get that little the little lightning connectory thing

⏹️ ▶️ John because obviously Apple was the only company in the entire world that needed that thing made and they needed a lot of them and they needed

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them fast and they needed to be up to Apple standards of quality and everything and that was a problem

⏹️ ▶️ John uh but at this point getting quality USB-C connectors should not be a problem for Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One would hope not but no I mean I haven’t been traveling too much but I’ve been traveling more than zero, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than I can say for the last couple of years. And having everything USB-C is extremely convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, I did spend an absolutely hilarious amount of money on my travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe situation, but it would still be nice to know that if I needed to plug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, all I need is the cable that I can use for my laptop or the Switch or for any number of other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. And that I don’t need a bespoke cable just for my iPhone. And yeah, I don’t begrudge Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for having gone lightning, I do kind of begrudge them for not having gone to USBC sometime in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last year or two. And I think that, you know, it would have been better a year or two ago. The next best time is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as possible. And I just the other day, I had recorded, the kids were doing like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little play for the two of us, for Aaron and me. And I recorded it and I recorded it as like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one 10 minute, you know, I don’t remember what my settings on my phone are, but I think it was a one 10 minute, 60 frames per second,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K video. And it’s something like three gigs. I don’t even remember how big it is, but it’s massive, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, getting that, uh, oh, I’m sorry. It’s actually nine gigs, nine gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Getting that off of my phone via cable was effectively impossible. Like, yes, it is. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is literally possible, but it was effectively impossible. And so what I ended up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing was airdropping, which took a couple of tries and was not exactly reliable, but I eventually got it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my phone to my computer and I’m going to eventually, you know, put it in a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final Cut Pro and do things with it, but it is not fun to get, you know, more than a minute

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 4K 60 frames video off of your phone using a lightning cable. It’s just, I know you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys said this a minute ago, but it’s so true. And this is something that I ran into just in the last three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. I cannot wait for USB-C to be a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple went no ports at all or perhaps no ports on non-pro phones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ports on a pro phone. And the reason I say that is, what do they have to care about? They have to care about developers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who they don’t really care about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who have wired CarPlay. And there are solutions like I use, they’re not great, but they work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to change wired CarPlay into wireless CarPlay. So do either of you guys see them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to a completely wireless world?

⏹️ ▶️ John There was that, uh, the rumor that like the magsafe puck, like imagine a magsafe puck as they exist now, but also

⏹️ ▶️ John with like a thing in the middle of it that lets data be

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey transferred and that would be their solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John Essentially like magsafe, I don’t know what number they’re on. Magsafe two, three, I guess the numbers are on the laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I believe

⏹️ ▶️ John they reset the timeline on that one. Yeah, it’s just, it’s, you know, as we said,

⏹️ ▶️ John not magsafe, but magsafe anyway. That was, uh, they had patents filings on that and everything, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell whether that’s just a thing they were considering for the magsafe puck and just didn’t do, or or if it’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John for the future. It doesn’t really solve the CarPlay problem at all. One of the problems it does solve is

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ability to charge peripheral manufacturers money to sell things that

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of made for iPhone, whatever. I’m sure of any, or actually, does anybody make a MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ John puck besides Apple? Like the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey actual puck?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, sort of. My travel thing that I keep talking about over and over again, that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there’s three pieces. There’s a Qi charger that’s about the shape of an AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, there’s an Apple Watch charger, and then there’s a honest to goodness MagSafe,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a puck, but there’s a MagSafe mat on I think it’s the right most of the three different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parts of this charger. So yeah, it is full on honest to goodness MagSafe, but it is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a first party MagSafe puck, as far as I’m aware.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be clear, I’m sure they make a decent amount of money with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco licensing of everything, but have you ever seen anybody in the real world

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using like officially licensed MFI stuff that didn’t come with their phone? Everyone just buys the knockoff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap from the drugstore on Amazon. And I doubt they’re getting any money from that. So I wonder if we might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be overestimating the value of that. I think there’s a lot of it in

⏹️ ▶️ John there. I mean, I think like all of the manufacturers that you see selling stuff on Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John store, for example, like Belkin and stuff, they’re a big manufacturer. They send tons of stuff. If you just do a random Google for

⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of like wire peripheral thing, the odds of you getting a Belkin match are high.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m assuming everything Belkin does is on the up and up because again, they’re an Apple store. So they’re probably, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like it’s someone’s job to maximize MFI income, right? And that person is not in charge

⏹️ ▶️ John of the whole company, but that is a factor in weighing this. And obviously it’s not gonna stop them from going

⏹️ ▶️ John to USBC. I like, they did it on the iPad, right? No more revenue from all those lightning cables that we were selling

⏹️ ▶️ John to iPad owners. Like they’ll, in the end, they’ll do the right thing from a technical perspective, but it remains to be seen

⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple thinks is the right thing on the phone, because in the same way they removed the headphone port,

⏹️ ▶️ John although they removed that from the iPad too, but anyway, they may say, oh, on the phone, we need every ounce of space

⏹️ ▶️ John we can get. It’s not like we have room for plastic spacers in there. So we gotta get rid of the port and everything is going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John magnetic pucks from now on. I hope they don’t do that. It seems like a much more straightforward and smarter thing to do,

⏹️ ▶️ John to go with USB-C. And in the end, I think the iPhone, for all of Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of punctuated moments of daring tends to be a conservative

⏹️ ▶️ John product. And, you know, change happens slowly. So the iPhone 10 was a big change,

⏹️ ▶️ John going Retina was a big change, the big iPhone 6 was a big change, and going

⏹️ ▶️ John from 30-pane to lightning was a big change, I think, you know, but those events happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, Apple’s not keen to rock the boat on the idea that a phone is something

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a rectangle where you plug in a thing at the bottom to charge it. So, right now my money is still

⏹️ ▶️ John on a USB-C port where the lightning port was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, we’ll see. It is tempting, you know, Apple famously, frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overdoes their minimalism, especially in hardware. And so, I see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why we would think that, you know, oh, this is a big risk. And I think it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk that they might do this, but I think it’s a small risk, because ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wired is in many ways, of course, it’s in many ways simpler, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also in many ways better. Wired charging, first of all, is way more efficient. Now, we’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen, I believe there’s a feature on the 16.1 beta that came out yesterday or today, that there’s now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option to set your iPhone to charge when it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco environmentally-friendly energy generation in your area. So if there’s like a time of day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your area where they use only solar or wind power or something, it can have your phone like try to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only charge during those times. And you know, that’s the kind of feature that, the reason they do that kind of feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it has a pretty massive environmental impact when you’re talking about the number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPhones that are out there. If you can make them charge a little more efficiently or using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain resources instead of others, it’s a small power draw, yeah. But it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco millions and millions and millions of small power draws. And so to go to wireless

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only would make almost everyone use an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inefficient charging method on their iPhone that loses a good percentage. I mean, what is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Qi MagSafe efficiencies? Probably something like 70 or 80%. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s very optimistic. Yeah, exactly. I would guess that it’s less than 50%, much less. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially if you have a case on your phone, then you’re getting those coils further apart, and I bet it makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the efficiency worse. So if they’re gonna put all the effort environmentally to do other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good things for like energy conservation and smart energy usage and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like a step backwards to require all of a sudden everyone to go cheer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wireless only. In addition to the fact that at first, I just, I hope that this rumor is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco true or that this idea wouldn’t happen. I hope because I know from a developer’s point of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco view, like the Apple Watch development situation, not being able to hardwire to it is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so inferior to the iPhone where I can just hardwire in. So I really hope they don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, agreed, agreed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I think there’s lots of reasons for this why they probably wouldn’t do it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any iPhone, let alone for all iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t want there to be an all wireless future, But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t put it past Apple, one way or the other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visit linode.com slash ATP. Look if you need to run servers and you know if you listen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this show I think you’re disproportionately likely, which is probably why they advertise with us, you probably have needed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run a server at some point or need to run one now and Linode is by far my favorite place to do that. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco run so many servers in my career and I’m actually trying to run fewer of them but for some reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that I need to keep adding more. But I am I am so happy with Linode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a customer, they have everything I need from compute instances to specialty plans like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU compute, high memory dedicated CPU, stuff like that. And they have all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed services now as well. So in addition to things I’ve used for a while, like load balancing and managed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backups, they also now have block storage, object storage like s3, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed database services now launching and so it’s really a huge amount of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco value being created there. and they really don’t charge much for their offerings. They are an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco value, and I have not found a better value in the business. And that’s why I went to them in the first place,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve stayed there all this time, because I run a lot of servers, the money would really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add up in any other place, and Linode is by far the best value I’ve found in the business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just amazing. I’ve got amazing support, amazing control panel, they have a full API if you need it, all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of capabilities that I don’t even understand, because I don’t need to, but it’s a fantastic host. So see for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Linode.com slash ATP, and let them make your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your cloud computing fast, simple and affordable. So you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, Linode.com slash ATP, create a free account there you get 100 bucks in credit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode.com slash ATP, new free accounts there get $100 in credit. Thank you so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Linode for being an awesome host and for running all my servers. And of course for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show.

Follow-up: Watch band-only returns

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I have a couple of updates with regard to my weird Apple Watch band return. John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not Syracusa, has a theory that I genuinely wish I could have confirmed or denied,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all this came in after I had completed my return. John writes, here’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you were asked to bring your watch bundle to return the band. The bundled band is not exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same as the retail version. As you can see in pictures that John provided, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really you can just use your mind painting to figure this out, it has no barcode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and no specifications about its color. From the case, I can only tell that it’s, in my case, a sports band.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the other hand, the retail version has some more stickers for the model in the barcode. See another picture. Again, we’re not going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bother with the pictures in the show notes, partially for John’s opsec. But anyway, I don’t think this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the case. I thought on, certainly on the exterior, you know how on the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch it’s like a piece of paper that wraps the watch box and the band box. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that, it’s not a piece of paper, but like a thin piece of cardboard. Well, anyways, on that, it says what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey band is within. Now, maybe the band wasn’t specific, but I could swear it had a picture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the correct band on the outside. I could swear it had like the size on it and so on and so forth. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Maybe John is right, but I’m skeptical, but it’s a plausible theory. Now, from an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anonymous Apple Watch employee, or an Apple Watch employee, from an anonymous Apple employee, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the following to say with regard to the genius or retail person that I spoke to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were wrong. We don’t need the watch. All we need is the serial number of the watch. Here’s what actually happens during a band

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swap. Systematically, regardless of whether your watch is there or not, Apple is returning the whole thing and reselling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to you with a new band. It’s just that they’ve rejiggered the system to hide most of the exchange from us,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as in the retail employees, and the customer. The steps look like this. The specialist chooses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the item swap option on their ISIC, which is the handheld device they carry. Two, the system asks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a watch serial number. This can be scanned using the barcode from the box, or it can be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey manually entered if the box isn’t there. We can also scan the original receipt. Since every serial number is unique,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that number allows us to pull up the original transaction. Quick aside, I later asked this anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genius, hey, what if I had the, you know, W123456789 online order number,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they weren’t sure, but they said, yeah, you know, I bet that would work. All right, so back to the retail employee.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Step three, after we have retrieved the original transaction, the system asks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us to scan in the new band. Four, if the new band is the same price as the old band, the transaction is pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey finished, except for the receipt, which is printed or emailed. If the new band is a different price, the customer pays the difference

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or receives a refund for the difference depending. Easy peasy, lickety split. So this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly what happened when I went back with the boxes and so on and so forth. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the key here is that really all they need is a way to get the serial number. And once

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they got that, then they’re off to the races. And that makes sense and kind of stands to reason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on what I saw, but here’s an anonymous Apple employee telling us exactly what the truth is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

AI-generated art

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s talk about something that is definitely brand new and definitely hasn’t been talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to death over the last two months. Let’s talk about AI art. And I feel like we should start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right away by saying, uh, you should really consider listening to Cortex episode 133,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ethics of AI art. Um, that was a real, I really love that show, but that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really, really great episode in which a lot of the ins and outs of all this was discussed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, how, how do we want to approach this? I guess we should maybe kind of do the quick summary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what do I mean by AI art. John or Marco, jump in when you’re ready. But the general gist is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s been a lot of work put into various products, some open source, some not, that allow you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do many different things. One of the things they allow you to do is type a prompt, type

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a picture of the three hosts of the Accidental Tech podcast drawn as pixel art. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these different products will use a whole bunch of machine learning and artificial intelligence

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to, figuratively speaking, draw whatever picture you’ve asked them to draw.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of them are better than others, and we’re going to talk about that, I think, a little bit. But it’s very, very interesting. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of these products, I haven’t played with all of them. In fact, I’ve only played with one of them. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one I played with, a lot of times it gave me straight up garbage. But occasionally, it would come up with something reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when it did, it was kind of mind shattering that I could ask a computer with plain text, like describe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phantom picture I had in my mind in plain text, and have the computer basically come up with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It’s really wild. And so that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, John, I think you were most excited to talk about this. How do you want to proceed?

⏹️ ▶️ John We should list some of the ones that are out there. They want to try them. We’ll have these links in the show notes. There’s Dali, D-A-L-L

⏹️ ▶️ John hyphen E. It’s a play on the Salvador Dali and Wally, the robot from the

⏹️ ▶️ John Pixar movie. There’s Stable Diffusion, Mid Journey, Google Imogen, a

⏹️ ▶️ John whole bunch of other ones, right? One of them is available as like a standalone application that you can run

⏹️ ▶️ John on your ARM-based Mac. What is that one called?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stable Diffusion, I believe that’s the one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but is it like Diffusion B or something? It’s Diffusion B. Yeah, we’ll put a link to that. That’s the one I play with on

⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac as well. A lot of the other ones have web interfaces. I think Dolly used to be invitation only for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ John but now I think it’s open to everybody. So you can follow the links and try them out, and people post

⏹️ ▶️ John the interesting things they come up with. And the thing I wanted to talk about with this is, it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ John a topic of conversation because, I mean, first it went around like, I don’t know, a year or two ago, whenever the

⏹️ ▶️ John first one of these started coming out as like a technical curiosity, and it started to get mainstream enough that you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John see like articles about it and just regular sort of tech websites and other stuff like that. And at

⏹️ ▶️ John a certain point, it started to be so mainstream that people were using it, not

⏹️ ▶️ John just as a technical curiosity, but they were using it to make a picture that they would then use. I think there was some controversy

⏹️ ▶️ John because one person was actually writing. I don’t think it was an article about AI art, but they, or maybe it was. They used

⏹️ ▶️ John AI art to, they talk about this in the Cortex episode, to make an image that they included

⏹️ ▶️ John with their article online. Rather than paying an artist, and people were mad, like why didn’t you pay an

⏹️ ▶️ John artist to do this? And that sort of gets into the, I think the most interesting part of this debate is,

⏹️ ▶️ John given that people are working on this tech, What does it mean for the future

⏹️ ▶️ John of all things related to making pictures? And by the way, there are movie ones now as well, where you can ask

⏹️ ▶️ John it like someone, you know, you can ask it like, um, a painting of an ice cream cone melting in

⏹️ ▶️ John the sun, and it will do a video of, you know, a video of a painterly style ice cream cone melting in the sun.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So it’s not just a audio and that are not just a still images. And this stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ John developing so quickly. It presents a lot of very

⏹️ ▶️ John thorny questions. Obviously, if your profession

⏹️ ▶️ John is drawing pictures for money and there’s a program that lets people draw pictures by typing

⏹️ ▶️ John what they wanna see in the picture, that probably doesn’t make you feel good about your chosen profession.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is the predictable sort of Luddite versus tech enthusiast

⏹️ ▶️ John battle there between saying, oh, a computer can never do what a human does.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, like the, the, anytime there’s any kind of technology that previously

⏹️ ▶️ John does something that could only be done by humans, there is this battle saying that the new way to do it is

⏹️ ▶️ John soulless and bad and evil, and it’s going to corrupt the youth and so on and so forth. Uh, and then the other

⏹️ ▶️ John people who were excited about the tech and just wanted to go forward, uh, and many times throughout history, there has been a technology

⏹️ ▶️ John that has caused entire professions and entire industries to. Basically disappear or shrink

⏹️ ▶️ John to the point or transform in a way that’s, you know, not even recognizable, witnessed the entire industry surrounding

⏹️ ▶️ John having horses pull things with people in them, and the advent of the automobile. It’s not like we don’t have horses. It’s not like people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have jobs making saddles for horses and shooing horses and taking care of horses. All those jobs still exist. But

⏹️ ▶️ John boy, that industry looks a lot different than it did before the advent of the automobile. A lot different. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so this AIR thing brings all those issues up, and the people are going around and around that debate. But I

⏹️ ▶️ John think one of the most interesting things, the interesting aspects of this debate is

⏹️ ▶️ John how these things work. Like, how do you make a program where you type in words and it draws you pictures, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John like most sort of machine learning style models, they are, I don’t know if trained

⏹️ ▶️ John is the right word, but they are given a set of images

⏹️ ▶️ John and associated words and phrases and stuff to say, to feed into the model so

⏹️ ▶️ John that they can do this, right? So I don’t know. It’s like millions and millions of images. I’m not sure how they’re tagged.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe each one is just tagged with a caption or something like that. And they grind that up into a big soup. And,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the technical term.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you say, you know, a picture of an ice cream cone, they give you a picture of an ice cream cone because they have enough images

⏹️ ▶️ John of enough things with enough of the words associated with it. If they can synthesize a picture

⏹️ ▶️ John based on everything they’ve ever seen and the association of those words to the images to get you,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not just one, but multiple pictures of ice cream cones and, you know, trying various attempts at it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that raises a lot of interesting questions, in particular, what

⏹️ ▶️ John images were fed to this thing? Most of the things that are

⏹️ ▶️ John done for universities or this is like sort of research type stuff. And the first versions

⏹️ ▶️ John of these, there are lots of image sets that are used for research purposes

⏹️ ▶️ John that are presumably like millions and millions of correctly annotated,

⏹️ ▶️ John royalty-free images that have been used in lots of different computer vision studies for years and years, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But there are so many of these things and they’re so popular and the new ones come every day.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not entirely clear what’s in all the image sets that they’re using. So there was a story about this on Ars Technica.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess actually is fairly recent headline is artists finds private medical record photos in popular

⏹️ ▶️ John AI training data set. So this is someone who found private

⏹️ ▶️ John medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 referenced in the LA ION 5B image set. Right? Whoops.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because a lot of the ways they find images is like, oh, I’ll just scrape the web. And anything I find the web, I’m sure is

⏹️ ▶️ John fine to use. Well, no, because there might be a doctor website that has poor security and has an image exposed to the

⏹️ ▶️ John web and a web scraper comes along and finds it. And lo and behold, your like medical images end up

⏹️ ▶️ John in a data set that is, you know, and to be clear,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not like-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t this also how my email address ends up on so many people’s lists? Oh, you must have bought something from us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a note, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s like bad website security in that like there’s a page that is protected, you know, security

⏹️ ▶️ John through obscurity. Technically, if you know the URL, you can get to it, but there’s no link to it. So how could people find it? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the web scraping things can find links that are not visible because they’re hidden on a page or they do scraping

⏹️ ▶️ John techniques that allow them to find things by iterating on IDs or stuff like that. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not great. And on top of that, there, you know, as we all know, if you are an artist who,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John does any kind of art and puts it on the internet, you will find that art all over the place.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you may think this is a show with three software developers that doesn’t apply to us, but

⏹️ ▶️ John we make a small amount of art. You may have seen some of it and purchased some of it on our t-shirts. And let me tell

⏹️ ▶️ John you, that very simple art that is on our t-shirts is all over the freaking web. Not because we put it there,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s everywhere, right? If you put an image on the web, oh, when you go to the Cotton Bureau page

⏹️ ▶️ John and it shows you a picture of the shirt, there’s that image on the web. And a web scraper could find it because that page at Cotton Bureau,

⏹️ ▶️ John totally unprotected. So if a web scraper finds it, that image is probably in some image set somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s probably in all these image sets, because it’s the wild west out there on the internet. You can find the image,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can put it in. So there are, and obviously this is just a tiny, we’re doing T-shirt graphs, whatever. Imagine you

⏹️ ▶️ John are an actual artist by profession, and you do this artwork, and maybe you have it on your website

⏹️ ▶️ John that shows your portfolio of all your great artwork that you’re gonna do, and your artwork, probably also your

⏹️ ▶️ John name, and the descriptions of that stuff, gets shoved into one of these image sets to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say you’re a famous artist and you have a name that people know, you know, it says like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John picture of a toaster oven in the style of Ralph McQuarrie. Right? That

⏹️ ▶️ John knows who McQuarrie is based on the images they pulled as they’re all over the freaking internet and his name is attached to all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s gonna show you a toaster oven drawn in his style. I think he’s dead now, so it’s not, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John tons of living artists, like you’ll type something on one of these things Like that looks a lot like something

⏹️ ▶️ John I did once. And you know why? Because some of your artwork is probably fed into this machine

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s popping out and these people like, well, you know, how can you do that? Are you allowed? And like, well, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not really it’s not really your art. This was made by the A.I. It’s an original work. It’s like, yeah, but it’s an original

⏹️ ▶️ John work informed by work that I did. And that doesn’t seem like should I get some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John royalty for this? Should you should you have my permission? Does that count as a derivative work for copyright reasons? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John or should you at least get my permission to include any of my work in there? Or should you clean your data set to make sure that the

⏹️ ▶️ John images you have, you actually do have the rights to? And that’s almost impossible because you need millions of images to do

⏹️ ▶️ John this, or at least a very large number of images. And having a human vet each one for copyright is just, you know…

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like everything that’s true about the internet is true of these AI image things. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John the perfect world where you’re like, Oh, we have to make sure every one of the images that contributes to this input

⏹️ ▶️ John is free and clear, and we know all the rights to it, and that’s impossible at scale. Like, that’s just not how the internet

⏹️ ▶️ John works. We can’t even get all the movies and television shows made in the pre-internet or on streaming services

⏹️ ▶️ John because people can’t figure out how to do the rights. And that is a much smaller problem than millions of images and image sets.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s that whole debate and rat hole about, do artists deserve to get

⏹️ ▶️ John paid? Should they be allowed to do this? Is there some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John royalty structure? Should this stuff be removed? And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ John final interest of all the two more interesting things about this. One is

⏹️ ▶️ John given that that’s the way these things work. Well, actually, before we run to that, I should ask you,

⏹️ ▶️ John too, do you have an opinion on the on the the artists having their work sucked into the thing? Like, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John what do you think about about the validity of the artist complaining in that

⏹️ ▶️ John scenario?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s really still yet to be proven. Like what are acceptable standards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are for this? So, you know, my barometer for like, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an unacceptable level of copying, you know, just ethically, and there’s legal definitions as well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think kind of comport with this, but anyway, is it’s based on like, are you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a new work, are you pretty much lifting most of your stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the same source or the same very small number of sources? then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of over the line. Whereas if you are taking bits of inspiration from a diverse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of sources, so that the resulting work doesn’t look like just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight up clone of one other person’s work, but it looks like, okay, maybe you were inspired in this way by this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco person, and this way by this work, and this way by this style, you know, but it all comes together into a more diverse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco soup of a product, I think that’s okay. And so you can look at these AI generators and say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you know, if you ask for, you know, something that that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one particular person’s style, that could result in something that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the line. Whereas if you just ask for an image of a, you know, slice of pepperoni pizza

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a table like that’s going to be probably drawing from so many different data points and input

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sources that I don’t think if the texture on the pepperoni slice happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look like the way you texture something in Photoshop once, I I think that’s less of a concern. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is, you can use these tools the way, whatever the operator

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants. And if the operator says, rip off this one person’s work or their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco style, you’re going to have a problem. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s the fault

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the technology. That’s the fault of the user.

⏹️ ▶️ John So assigning blame on this, how is this different than

⏹️ ▶️ John other scenarios? Signing blame is always fun when it’s a computer program, quote unquote, doing it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John then the user is prompting it to do it. And that kind of leads to the question that you

⏹️ ▶️ John usually end up at in these type of debates is, is this thing doing anything different than when people do?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you ask a human artist to draw something, they have a corpus of images they’ve seen through

⏹️ ▶️ John their entire life that contributes to the output, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You could say, well, if I give it to a person, they’re going to do original work. the original work of an artist is necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ John informed by their entire life experience of seeing everything, of seeing things in real life,

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, but also of seeing other pictures and works of art, inevitably. And some

⏹️ ▶️ John people would say, well, this AI program, what it’s doing is absolutely no different than what a human does. It has a series

⏹️ ▶️ John of inputs, and that contributes to what it’s going to make. If you ask a human to

⏹️ ▶️ John give you a logo in the style of a Saul Bass logo, they can probably do that because they know about those logos because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John very famous, and he’s a very famous logo designer. And if you do that, he’s not, I keep hearing dead deal. He’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna rise from the grave and sue you because you can’t sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John trademark a style. If I tell you to draw something in the style of any living artist,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that. And they can’t say, oh, it’s illegal for you to do that because you just copied my style. Now they may look down on you and say, you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John come up with your own original style, but every style is a, you know, everything’s a remix. Every style

⏹️ ▶️ John is a, that we think of as new and novel is itself informed by all the other styles came

⏹️ ▶️ John before it. So in one sense I agree that this program is doing

⏹️ ▶️ John something that if you squint it looks very similar to what people

⏹️ ▶️ John also do. But that leads to the second question which is can this program…

⏹️ ▶️ John not can it make anything new, can any of these programs make anything new, but like if you

⏹️ ▶️ John if you sort of fast-forward this you do the whatever it is it’s not a argument ad absurdum

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but if you just, it’s an infinite timeline argument. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So say,

⏹️ ▶️ John say, uh, the artists become the horse and buggy salesmen, right. And they still exist

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re out there, but boy, there are a lot fewer of them because these AI programs get so good that in the, in the

⏹️ ▶️ John average working life of a person, nobody actually pays an artist to do anything. We just type words into

⏹️ ▶️ John a program when we get an output, right? If all the input to these programs

⏹️ ▶️ John are images made before these programs existed, then how does that sustain

⏹️ ▶️ John itself? Can you feed the output of these things back in as the input? So forget about computers. You’ve just got humans

⏹️ ▶️ John making art. Humans make art, then new humans arrive and see the art made by the previous humans, and they in turn

⏹️ ▶️ John make quote unquote new art that then the future humans see and it feeds back in, right? So you can see how the people are kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like programs in this scenario where they, they see existing art, they make quote unquote new art,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then that cycle repeats itself. If you took the humans out of the equation, could the machines

⏹️ ▶️ John continue to do the same thing, taking as input all the art ever made by humans, and then going

⏹️ ▶️ John forward, taking as input all the art made by AI programs? Or would they would they stagnate

⏹️ ▶️ John and feed in on themselves to everything was just a giant gray mush because like, you know, mixing all the paint colors

⏹️ ▶️ John together? Or would they be just as diverse as as human artists? And that I think makes me personally

⏹️ ▶️ John circle back to are they doing what people do? And I think fundamentally they are not doing

⏹️ ▶️ John what people do. Big strokes it seems like they’re doing hey they see pictures and they make new pictures that’s exactly what

⏹️ ▶️ John people do but it’s not like that’s all these AI things and that’s why you know general

⏹️ ▶️ John artificial intelligence or whatever you want to call it is so far away this even if this these programs

⏹️ ▶️ John were operating the exact same way that the center of our brains that makes pictures do and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not. But even if they were, there’s so much more to a human mind

⏹️ ▶️ John than the part that makes pictures based on word prompts. And what these programs don’t have,

⏹️ ▶️ John and won’t have for a long, long, long time, is the life experience of

⏹️ ▶️ John a human. All the sensory input they’ve ever had, all the emotions they experience, the way

⏹️ ▶️ John humans judge a picture, whether it accomplishes the goal they set out from this, the ability to set a goal for

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves, that the ability to experience art and make it and feel what the art is meant to feel,

⏹️ ▶️ John thus judging whether this art has achieved what you wanted it to achieve or inspiring you to do something else based on

⏹️ ▶️ John how something you saw made you feel, none of these programs can do any of that. And it necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ John makes their the the funnel through which they have to shove all of their

⏹️ ▶️ John creative efforts so narrow. They do not have the wealth of experiences of a human. All they

⏹️ ▶️ John have is visual input and descriptions of just such, you know, they don’t have an experience of the art.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the art that they make can only be informed by those tiny little things because they literally

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t experience anything else. They have no memory, no life, not memory in that sense, like

⏹️ ▶️ John no memories, no life experience, no sensory organs, no emotions, no thoughts,

⏹️ ▶️ John no awareness. Like they’re not artificial intelligence in that sense. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ John need that to make a picture of a pizza slice on a table? No, but I think you need

⏹️ ▶️ John that to continue the cycle of creation of art

⏹️ ▶️ John with the quality level that we have come to expect from humans. Because as we make each new generation of humans, they have

⏹️ ▶️ John new experiences, their life experiences and the art that they see and the things that they feel and form the things

⏹️ ▶️ John that they create. And it is a rich tapestry, as they say. And it’s great to be able to feed that into an

⏹️ ▶️ John AI and have it chomp that down. But if you take the humans out of that equation and leave the AI as stupid as they

⏹️ ▶️ John are now, It would basically be like they were working from the same set of data forever and

⏹️ ▶️ John they would just grind it to a pulp and it would just be this incredible stagnation. Not that I think this is going to happen because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t stop humans from making things unless the machines kill us all Terminator style. We don’t have to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ John that. But just as an academic exercise, I don’t think AI art

⏹️ ▶️ John is a sustainable thing without human creativity as an important input. It would be

⏹️ ▶️ John sad to think that the only purpose of human creativity in artwork would be to to feed into A. I. S. Do most of the drudgery. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then again, they’d be like the people who own horses. Now they’re out there. There’s a lot of them, but not nearly

⏹️ ▶️ John as many as there were on. I don’t think we have any particular fear of that in our lifetime, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of where I come down on this, setting aside the legalities and everything. These programs

⏹️ ▶️ John are so dumb and so bad at what they do. We’re impressed. You know, it’s this little

⏹️ ▶️ John analogy, like seeing a rhinoceros dance. You’re impressed that it could do it. But boy, the dancing isn’t that great, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re never going to be adequate to sustain a creative

⏹️ ▶️ John timeline of works of art, like humans, until their experience of life is as

⏹️ ▶️ John rich as a human’s experience of life, in which point we have lots of other problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not even close to that, so don’t worry about it. Don’t let the people who tell you that AI is going to take over and kill us all. If

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re listening to this now, that will not happen when you’re alive, so don’t worry about it. Kind of like self-driving cars.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think there’s actually some overlap there, you know, because I don’t think that this is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put artists, you know, out of business as a whole.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more like thinking about this is a new digital tool that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can save a lot of busy work. It’s going to make certain types of art more accessible than they were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before to more people. and it’s going to save a bunch of time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on work that previously was more manual. So if you think about it, kind of like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital art came around, when Photoshop and everything came around, and digital drawing tools and things like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a whole industry before that of people who were doing a lot of this stuff by hand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photo retouching by hand, painting and illustrating by hand. And when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you moved to digital, a whole bunch of things got easier. And things became much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more easily possible that weren’t easily possible before. And so that did inevitably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put out of work like sign painters and things like that, you know, to some degree. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people who were artists in some way embraced the new tools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some form and just became, you know, their job just became a little bit different. But it didn’t kill

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the art. It just changed what was out there and what was available and how you had to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and what was possible. And a bunch of new people were able to do it who weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do it before, or maybe it was like a little bit too tedious before, and now people were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do things who like wouldn’t have done the old tedious way, but were willing to do the new digital way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it just, it changes things. And not everyone comes along on those transitions. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, every time technology gets better, certain jobs aren’t necessary anymore, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the horse analogy. And not every person who was keeping horses became an auto mechanic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that it’s just it’s that doesn’t work that way. But a lot of people, you know, a lot of people do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco become auto mechanics when when that demand rises up. In this case, you know, when digital art tools came around,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people became digital artists. They were not everyone who was previously drawing stuff by hand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which by the way, still exists, and it’s fine. But like not everyone who did that went to digital,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but many people did and many new people started on digital. And so art is a thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, that’s still still a major thing in the world. It’s just different than it used to be. I think these AI tools,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using them and figuring out how to make these text prompts, how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to control them, what knobs and dials to adjust, how you word things, what you even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think to create, that’s all art. That’s part of the process.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are now just able to generate things much more quickly than a human can,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then humans are still directing them, humans are still tweaking them, humans are still deciding, deciding,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, you know what, generate 100 pictures of this thing, and I’m going to pick the one that I like out of this 100,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have you riff on that a little more. And then go to that one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generate 100 riffs on that one. Okay, I’m going to pick these two, let’s follow these through and do more with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these. That’s art. That’s humans doing art with a different tool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it doesn’t have to be entirely used for entire images, too. the tooling and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology gets more, you know, more mature and more established, these kind of tools can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be used for things like, okay, you know what, I’m drawing this thing in Photoshop, I have a brick wall here, can you just put a brick texture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this wall that looks good, that hasn’t been used a million times by everyone else has ever used Photoshop in their life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it can generate a brick texture fine, you know, or Hey, you know, this car that’s in the background of this photo, I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this car to be here, can you delete that in a way that’s even smarter than constant aware, Phil and stuff like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the AI tools get better it adds a lot of capabilities for artists to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eliminate busy work that used to exist or to do things in a nicer way than they used to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be done and so I see this really as a mixed bag you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know there are yes some downsides and some artists will be put out of work by this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also opens up so much potential for artists to use these tools the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work that is going to be reduced by this is going to be stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crappy client saying, Hey, can you show me 50 different versions of this of my of my logo? You know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they can skip that step and move move on to more interesting things. And again, that’s that’s not going to take everyone along with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. But I don’t see these tools as like a universal bad or like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doomsday scenario for human created artwork. Quite the opposite. It’s just new tools for humans to use.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think of the crappy state these things are now, like the relatively primitive state. I think now is

⏹️ ▶️ John the time that is the most rich for artists to potentially have legal action against

⏹️ ▶️ John them because it’s very difficult to tell without sort of knowing, you know, I know this is not how they work,

⏹️ ▶️ John but imagine if you could ask one of them, okay, so you made an image for me. Can you tell me what images contributed

⏹️ ▶️ John to this image that you made? And again, that’s not how that works. They don’t just take five images and smush them together, but like big

⏹️ ▶️ John picture wise in the abstract, lots of millions of images input and then output, right? And sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine that these more primitive, very early versions of this produce

⏹️ ▶️ John a work where you could overlay an actual existing thing from its corpus on a section of it and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, this is literally just lifted. Like it’s smushed and smoothed a little bit, but literally like I drew this

⏹️ ▶️ John slice of pizza and you put it in the image and you rotated it and scaled it, right? And that,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s a no-go. Like you would get, if you did that with, If you did like a

⏹️ ▶️ John cover of a magazine and you did it by like stealing the cover of a different magazine and just

⏹️ ▶️ John cropping out everything except for the slice of pizza, like draw your own slice of pizza, right? There is a

⏹️ ▶️ John line to be drawn there like, oh, I was doing a collage or whatever, but that’s what these legal cases are about. And there’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John other thing to be said about the sad state of legal cases on songs that are identical. But for artwork,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could say, oh, I was doing a collage, it’s a derivative work, so on and so forth, versus I just straight up lifted this pizza

⏹️ ▶️ John slice from this other artist thing. It didn’t change it enough for it to be legally distinct. As these

⏹️ ▶️ John things get better, there will be less of that, less chance of that happening, that it really will be

⏹️ ▶️ John all new, totally fresh work. But part of that relies on a big sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John leveling up of these things in understanding literally anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they understand now is so limited. You could say, these things don’t know what a slice of pizza is. Well, they kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John do because of all the pictures of slices of pizza and the fact that they could say that triangle thing probably the pizza slice

⏹️ ▶️ John because I have 100,000 examples of it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, like most of America doesn’t know what a slice of pizza

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is, right? Exactly. But they don’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ John know that they may be able to pick out the thing that corresponds to pizza from an image,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they have no idea what pizza is. You know, could they do something like

⏹️ ▶️ John draw heat lines coming off of pizza only because they have existing artwork that shows heat lines, but they don’t know pizza is

⏹️ ▶️ John hot. They don’t know what hot is. They don’t know what pizza is. They don’t want food is like they’re again. They’re they’re they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John so incredibly dumb that even if they’re synthesizing new images in the

⏹️ ▶️ John same way that our brains synthesize new images, our brains have so much other stuff that informs the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re making, which is why you’re saying, Margot, you need a human to guide this, because these things know nothing. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even guide them to do things that require them to have literally any understanding of anything

⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re doing, right? You know, like, could you put more place settings at that table?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe if they have images that say place setting and there’s different numbers of them and I get down, but they don’t know what a table They don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John a place setting is. They don’t know what people are or that they sit at tables and like Future versions of this

⏹️ ▶️ John will be better in that regard and then they will be much better tools because they have to have some

⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of understanding in fact probably in very specialized areas. They’ll gain that understanding but

⏹️ ▶️ John Getting computers to understand what a person is what a table is what a pizza is how they relate to each other We’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ John working on that for decades and decades. It’s way harder than you think it is These things look like magic because

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like why are we doing that? It’s like trying to make an airplane by making a thing that flaps its wings. That’s the wrong way to do it

⏹️ ▶️ John Even though that’s how birds fly. It’s stupid for us to try to make a mechanical bird instead

⏹️ ▶️ John How about we make a fixed wing thing and we put a lawnmower engine on it and a propeller and that’s a way

⏹️ ▶️ John better way To make an airplane even though it has nothing to do with how birds fly or a little bit to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John it But they don’t it’s not an ornithopter, right? These are like that for image generation You know what

⏹️ ▶️ John because because we can’t make we can’t make a thing that thinks yet that, but we can

⏹️ ▶️ John make some incredibly dumb thing that we feed enough of our intelligence into by saying here’s a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of images, here’s descriptions of those words, you know what words are? Well, there. Now do that. And we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got just enough to do this magical stuff, but like as a tool, trying to herd this towards

⏹️ ▶️ John something that you want is even harder than trying to herd an artist towards what you want, because at least you can tell the artist to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the logo bigger and if they don’t do it, it’s because they think you’re a jerk, not because they don’t understand what you mean.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ornithopter a machine designed to achieve flight by means of flapping wings today. I learned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah same I knew I knew the word existed I could not in a million years have told you what exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John should know it from the 1994 movie Dune where they all talk about Let’s get in the ornithopter and they get into these things that have wings that do not

⏹️ ▶️ John flap

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco didn’t see it

⏹️ ▶️ John Please don’t make me John. Please don’t the new Dune movie those wings flap, baby

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Hi. Now, the thing that really changed my opinion about this, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t have a strong opinion about it, but what really kind of blew my mind, I guess, is the three of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us are in a Slack together and another person in that Slack was saying, oh, and I’m heavily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey paraphrasing here, but, oh, I was looking at designing like an app icon or an image, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what it was. And I knew a vague direction of where I wanted to go with it, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really know specifically what I wanted to do. wasn’t the case, but like, let’s say for the sake of discussion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were trying to draw a settings icon and they knew they wanted a gear, but they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t know, do I have a gear or like several concentric gears? Do I have a series of gears all touching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey each other on the outside? Like, you know, what, what exactly, what am I looking for here? I just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I want something with gears. And they said they, they put basically app icon with gears in it or something along those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines into one of these projects. And it spit out, you know, like 15 different options.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this person like didn’t really love any one of the options, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said that it did a really good job of kind of getting their creative juices flowing and saying, okay, now I have something to work with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I know kind of where I want to go with this. And this is what you were alluding to earlier, Marco. I just think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, having this kind of fascinating tool in your tool belt is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And, and as someone who can barely draw a stick figure, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being able, especially as these things get better, being able to, I don’t know, like make my own

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app icon potentially or get close. You know, not that I have any problems with the app icons

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have. I love them and I got them from a dear friend of mine, but nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be neat if I was capable of even putting like a placeholder icon there that wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey utter garbage. And I just think having this tool available to more people,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially non-artists, I think that’s neat. And the thing that gives me pause about it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, well, happens to artists in the same way that you know I worry about like GitHub copilot or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is and and I worry well what happens to us you know what happens to developers don’t worry about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know but you get my point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the same way like copilot is basically fancy auto complete and I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can look like this is basically like fancy bucket fill

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fair

⏹️ ▶️ John well but the difference is whether not to go off on a tangent on copilot uh bucket fill

⏹️ ▶️ John to determine whether it has done done its job adequately, you look at it and go, is it okay for what I want it to be?

⏹️ ▶️ John Fine. Code, not quite that easy.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because if we could

⏹️ ▶️ John look at code and figure and know whether it was doing what we intended it, we wouldn’t have to use Copilot. So Copilot

⏹️ ▶️ John will generate some code. Does the code do what you want it to do? Why don’t you look at it and tell me?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s turns out to be really, really hard to do. So I don’t think we have,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, in the end you can use AIR things to full stop substitute for

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that a person could do. But CoPilot, you need a human

⏹️ ▶️ John to look at that before you check it into the air traffic control system. Let’s say,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe for a game, you can get away with it or something or a non-information critical, but CoPilot

⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea what it’s doing, even more so than a person. So we need people to look at it and to check

⏹️ ▶️ John that what, same way with when you use autocomplete.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, wouldn’t your unit test catch any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John problem? Yeah, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John autocomplete and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco instead of- Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John can it write my unit test for me?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ John wish. Maybe. It probably can. But are the unit tests right? In the same way when you do auto completing, you think you’re auto

⏹️ ▶️ John completing NS string, but it auto completes. What was the thing that you used to do, like NS set or whatever before Xcode?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much less common, like NS scanner or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever came first alphabetically. If you don’t notice that’s what came out of auto complete, guess what? Your program’s not going to work. You always

⏹️ ▶️ John have to look at the code that is doing it. It’s a help. It’s like content-aware fill to really help you,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially on programming interviews. You should say, can I use Copilot? Great. now I’m going to reverse this red black tree for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, you got to check its work. But for the AI things, the checking of the work

⏹️ ▶️ John is much simpler. You look at it and you decide, am I happy with what it has made?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, I just, I fear and feel for artists that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe wouldn’t be able to make a living as artists anymore. But I agree with what you were saying, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s quite a ways in the future, and we’re nowhere near there yet. And eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing that’s inevitable change, you know, if, if you’re a developer that’s getting your job

⏹️ ▶️ Casey usurped by artificial intelligence, then you’re going to have to find a new way to make money and same thing with an artist, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. My initial, my initial reaction was, you know, get off my lawn. This is barbaric.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we can’t take from, from real and true artists, but I worry that as I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey older, that’s my natural reaction is to, is to just yell, get off my lawn. And so I’m trying very desperately to fight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And I think having this tool available, especially to people like me, who I I have no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey artistic ability whatsoever. I think it’s exciting, and I think it’s very fascinating.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the problem with having, well, first of all, just to address what you said there, like I totally agree with Marco that this is

⏹️ ▶️ John yet another tool that will be used by artists. Like Content-Aware fill is the best example. They didn’t use AI to

⏹️ ▶️ John advertise that because it wasn’t in fat at the time, but, and it works slightly differently, but

⏹️ ▶️ John Content-Aware fill powered by this type of thing gets even better. It’s a tool that artists will use. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John mundane tasks that artists do, for example, a good example from my childhood,

⏹️ ▶️ John painting cells in Disney animation, like coloring in like the people’s dresses and making the sky blue and

⏹️ ▶️ John the grass green and everything, that used to be a job where you would paint to fill those regions

⏹️ ▶️ John because how else are you gonna make something filled with the color green if you don’t fill it with the color green? Computers made

⏹️ ▶️ John that real easy. You just click the bucket tool and look, it just filled the whole area with green. That put all the people who

⏹️ ▶️ John were painting those cells out of a job. You’re like, oh, they were just doing a mundane test. That was incredibly skilled

⏹️ ▶️ John work. It’s only mundane for the computer to do it because very often the strengths of computers

⏹️ ▶️ John are the exact opposite of the strengths and weaknesses of humans. A computer finds it really easy to fill a region,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if that region is correctly contained with a solid color. Whereas a human has to carefully

⏹️ ▶️ John control a brush. And so you would say the person doing that work is incredibly skilled and the

⏹️ ▶️ John computer doing that work is as dumb as rocks. And that often is the case. But it doesn’t change the fact that they’re out of work because

⏹️ ▶️ John now the computer just does the fill on all that stuff. And same thing for hand-drawn animation in the age of 3D animation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Doing 3D animation is incredibly difficult. They’re incredibly skilled artists that do that. They have to have all the skills of traditional

⏹️ ▶️ John artists on top of computer skills. But if you are a 2D artist and you don’t know how to use computers

⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t care to learn, you’ve got a problem. In fact, if you watch the Disney Plus, on Disney Plus there’s an ILM

⏹️ ▶️ John documentary. What is it called? I don’t know. Just go to Disney Plus and search for ILM.

⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that documentary is seeing what the advent of computer technology did to industrial light and magic, to the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who were there, like the model makers and the creature shop people or whatever. Like if technology

⏹️ ▶️ John comes slow enough, people die and retire. And then the new generation does new tech. But if it comes fast enough,

⏹️ ▶️ John people actually end up getting booted out of their jobs or have to learn new skills. And that’s just part of the world. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly this stuff at the rate, even at the rate it’s developing, people think, oh, it’s going so fast by next

⏹️ ▶️ John week, you’ll be able to make a feature length movie by just writing a phrase like, no, you won’t. Because to get to Casey’s earlier

⏹️ ▶️ John or later point, you’d like the fact that you don’t have artistic skill, but you can just ask this thing to make

⏹️ ▶️ John a picture. Now I’m gonna sort of show the

⏹️ ▶️ John counterpoint to my earlier point about it’s easier to tell whether you’re happy with the picture than to tell whether the

⏹️ ▶️ John code copilot generated does what you wanted it to do. Part of making that decision,

⏹️ ▶️ John so let’s say I have no artistic taste, but now I can just make the image for you. If you have no artistic

⏹️ ▶️ John taste and no artistic skill, your ability to judge whether what it generated is good or not is also impaired.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, yes, being able to do it is one skill, but also having the taste to know

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the good icon with the gears versus this is the bad icon for the gears is itself an artistic skill.

⏹️ ▶️ John And just because a computer made you 50 of them and you get to pick one, the picking of the one is the skill, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ John you need artists to use these tools, right? Content-Aware Fill is available on all our copies of Photoshop.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yet if we use Photoshop, we can’t do what a great artist can do with Photoshop because we’re not great Photoshop artists, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think picking, you know, like, look at anything, anything that requires any kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John taste, like, even if you’re presented with a thousand options, if you don’t know which one is actually better, or the

⏹️ ▶️ John one you pick is not the one that the world thinks is good. And, you know, for reasons that you don’t, you don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John why it’s not pleasing, but you don’t like any of them, or the one you think is awesome, everyone else thinks is ugly. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s, there’s always a place for that, because, again, the, the things that that are generating this

⏹️ ▶️ John have no awareness of anything. They’re just being led by us. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John like any tool, the result is going to be heavily informed by

⏹️ ▶️ John the person using the tool, even if the quote, using of the tool is just pointing to a grid of pictures and

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, I like that one. And even if you repeat that process a thousand times, give me 50 more, give me 50 more, give me 50 more,

⏹️ ▶️ John and just keep pointing to the ones that you like. If you have bad taste, you will end up with a bad icon at the end

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, no matter what.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no computer that’s going to save you. And that gets back to what is it that makes

⏹️ ▶️ John good taste? Are the computers doing what we do?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to say that, like most things in AI, the answer is no until their

⏹️ ▶️ John experience of their existence is something close to what our experience is, which would

⏹️ ▶️ John allow them to learn things and have memories and experience

⏹️ ▶️ John life the same way we do. Something that doesn’t do that will never be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John create or judge art in the same way that we do, so we will always be a necessary ingredient

⏹️ ▶️ John in that stew.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace, the all in one platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for building your brand and growing your business online. With Squarespace, you can stand out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a beautiful website, engage with your audience wherever you need to, and sell whatever you want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell your products, your content, even your time. Squarespace makes it super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to make all kinds of websites from very simple, you know, basic informational sites,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way up to full blown storefront hosting. support it all. You can sell your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco products on an online store, whether you sell physical or digital products, Squarespace has all the tools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to sell online. You can add email campaigns to your customer, collect email

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscribers, convert them into loyal customers, start with an email template and customize it by applying your brand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingredients like your site colors or your logo, you have built-in analytics measuring the impact of every email

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent. All this comes with SEO tools so that your website or online store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a suite of integrated features, useful guides to help maximize prominence among search results, everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to run a business analytics, member areas, if you want to sell member content, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much is available at Squarespace. And it is all backed by amazing support, amazing infrastructure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t have to deal with, you get you get to do whatever it is you do with your business,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your hobby, or whatever your pleasure is for making your site, you get to focus on that and let Squarespace handle all of the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of boring and tedious hosting and maintenance kind of stuff. So see for yourself at Squarespace.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to start a free trial. When you’re ready to sign up and launch your site

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace.com slash ATP to start that free trial and use offer code ATP at launch to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco save 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.

#askatp: macOS window management

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And let’s start with Philip, who writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recently got a MacBook and I’m struggling to build a solid mental model for window management on Mac OS. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Linux with a tiling window manager and things felt simpler. I’m not trying to replicate this setup and want to learn the quote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquote Mac way, but I can’t seem to grok it. I’m not sure which features I should be using

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between mission control spaces, application switcher, hide, minimize, full screen with tiling, hot corners, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I often end up with a lot of window clutter where I can’t even seem to find the one window I need. Can you refer to a primer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on macOS window management? How do you think about and organize your applications and windows? I’ve listened to the windows of Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey County, but can’t tell if John is messing about. No, he was not messing about, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I still, five, six, seven years later are gobsmacked by that episode. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode 96, if I’m not mistaken. That like half hour, 45 minute segment of ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might to this day be my favorite part our favorite segment we’ve ever done on ATP because we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know it was coming. And I don’t want to speak for Marco, but I’m gonna speak for Marco in saying it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey flabbergasting, like just stupefying the absolute bananas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way in which John Siracusa manages his 7 trillion windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yet what have you learned since then?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Nothing. Have you amended your

⏹️ ▶️ John ways? No, you have not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I’m not a monster that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John keeps 85 billion windows open. No, no, you’re just a little baby. Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John So getting to Philip’s question, what is the Mac way to manage your Windows? I think you two at

⏹️ ▶️ John this point are better equipped than me to answer this because I think the answer is just do a Windows people do. Zoom everything to full screen

⏹️ ▶️ John because you have no freaking idea how to deal with Windows. No.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. No. No. So the great thing about Mac OS window management is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS 10 started out trying to get people who used Mac OS 9 and earlier to like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know about that. I feel like it did the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco opposite of that. I didn’t say it

⏹️ ▶️ John succeeded. I’m not sure it really even tried, but I get what you’re saying. There was some acknowledgement that there was something that

⏹️ ▶️ John existed before the Mac, but it was a grudging acknowledgement.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So anyway, as it went on, it later took a larger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco role in trying to get Windows people to like it. And then later on, it took

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a larger role in trying to get iOS people to like it. And now it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this weird mishmash where they’re trying to move it forward with iOS the iPad somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so the result of all this is that there are a million different ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage Windows on Mac OS. It basically ended up with this mishmash where it kind of supports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these different things you might want to do. So what I would recommend is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically play with different options and just see what works for you. Now I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell you what I do, you know, because I was a Windows person until 2004-ish

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I began a two year transition to Mac full time at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that point. But anyway, what I do, first of all, hide versus minimize.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to hide. Command H is your new best friend. As a new person on Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna want all the keyboard shortcuts to make this stuff easier, and Command H is gonna be one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things you use the most. Up there with Command Q for quit. I almost never hide Windows, almost never. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. Anyway, it might be new to you, the fact that on the Mac, An app can have no windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still be running. So when you’re done with an app, Command Q. If you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco close a window or tab, Command W. And then Command H for hide. These are things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other, you know, Windows has Alt Tab, we have Command Tab. It’s in the same position on the keyboard even.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also have, since, you know, Alt Tab on Windows goes between different windows, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, all individually, on the Mac, Command Tab goes through apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Much to John’s chagrin in certain cases the way it does this, but it goes through apps and then command tilde,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the button right above the tab key on the US keyboard, at least goes between different windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app you’re currently in. So again, these are kind of like, you know, training wheels and getting into Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco window management from other systems, most likely windows. So that those I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the main entry points. And then you know, whether you like maximize the full

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, like john just accused Casey of which Mac OS makes kind of difficult, whether you even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use full screen mode or just make Windows big. That’s up to you. I, on those things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make Windows big when they need to be but not when they don’t. I don’t use full screen mode on anything because it sucks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many other ways. So, and then, you know, spaces, well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s virtual desktops. Every windowing system has that. If you use spaces in your previous systems, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might need it here, you might not. It’s up to you. You could try it, feel free, no one’s gonna bother you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The things like Mission Control, or what used to be called Expose, where you kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom all the windows out at once and do stuff with them. I don’t really do that. I used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to when it was Expose back in the early days. I don’t really do that now. The one thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do a lot is the F11 to show Desktop, where you hit F11 or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Desktop key is on the Apple keyboard. keyboard, and it shoves all the windows out to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sides and exposes the desktop where I keep, yes, files I’m working on. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole thing. I do it. Everyone does it. Who cares? So I oftentimes will like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom all the windows out, grab a file on the desktop, hit F11 again to bring all the windows back in,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then drop that file onto something I’m working on, onto a window of an app or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’re showing your keyboard preferences here because F11 isn’t what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey describing. It’s volume down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is when you’re using a non-Apple keyboard. Yes, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone else in the world that uses a Mac, it’s volume down. I understand what you’re going for, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your preference for keyboards is coming through here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, anyway. So, yeah. So, basically, that’s the kind of like the basics that I like to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But whether you use all this stuff like the, you know, mission control and all this stuff, It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really personal preference and again, because of the history of Mac OS and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumbled design leadership it has had over time and the very different targets it has tried to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attract people from over time, it kind of offers all of these things. And now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re even going to have Stage Manager if it ships in Ventura and that’s its own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole other thing that frankly I don’t think is working very well so far. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s its own thing. Try it out. if you ask any two Mac users, you’re going to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different answers, because there are so many methods and Mac users are largely, at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we used to be power users. And so everyone has their own, you know, certain workflows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and quirks and habits and preferences, and they’re all going to be a little bit different because there are so many different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I don’t think either of you is necessarily wrong, but I think you’ve gone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly into the deep end. and I think we need to back up a bit. So coming from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows, I have used Linux, but it’s been, woof, it’s been a long time. Coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Windows, I think the most startling thing about using the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what you had made brief mention of earlier, Marco, is that you can have an application that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is running even though it does not have not a single window open.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is very different than Microsoft Windows, or at least the last I used it 10 years ago, where if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you close the final window of Outlook for the sake of discussion, you’re suddenly not gonna get any new email.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, this may not be true anymore, it doesn’t matter, but that’s the way it used to be. If you close the last Outlook window, you’re not getting email anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you just close, not even necessarily hide, close the last mail

⏹️ ▶️ Casey window, the mail app is still open. And this isn’t universally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey true, which has gotten even squishier over time, but generally speaking, that’s true. If you close the last window, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not necessarily mean that the app is quit. The app could still be running, and mail is a quintessential example

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, or Safari if you don’t have any tabs open, for example. They’re still running.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I would say, and I think what Marco got right, is get used to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard because the keyboard is your friend for doing windowing things on macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to touch the keyboard at all, but it is your friend. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re done looking at something, Command-W closes that thing, be it a tab or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a window. Generally speaking, you’re not quitting the app usually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you close the last window, you’re just closing that window. So as an example, if I’m looking at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mail using the standard macOS Mail app, after I’m done reading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and responding to mail, I command W. That closes mail, but it does not quit mail.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It leaves it running to get new mail if new mail comes in. If I wanna play ignorant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and don’t want to get new mail, then I command Q for quit. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will quit mail such that I don’t receive new mail. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole close versus quit thing. Close being Command W, quit being Command Q.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is something to get used to. And similarly, if you look at the stop lights in the upper left, the red stop light is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quit. It is close. So you are closing an entire window. That maybe that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a window with a bunch of tabs in it. Maybe it’s just a single window like in mail, but you’re closing it. You’re not quitting it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there is an option buried somewhere and system preferences, I forget where, that you can have little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey light bulbs that show under the app icon in the dock to indicate what is actually running,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the thing to have a light bulb.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They aren’t light bulbs anymore. They used to be. Whatever they are. Now they’re just dots.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re right. You’re right. But now I’m showing my age.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And also, Mac OS lies about that. It’s way more complicated than you think it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. You’re right. But I’m trying to ease into the shallow end here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem with what we’re saying here is everything that Casey has just said has a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisks on it now, again, through the course of history and different goals and different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey efforts. You’re right. But you’re right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall. Your overall theme is right. But I think it’s part of the reason, it’s a little bit frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Mac is not as simple as it once was, because there’s been all these different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas and directions, and then band-aids over bad designs over time.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, first of all, Casey, you’re going off on a tangent here, which is basically about process management versus

⏹️ ▶️ John window management. and I see how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’re somewhat related. They’re interrelated.

⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of, but like the technical details that we know about for like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think I had a big paragraph on it in one of my Mac OS X interviews that basically you can have

⏹️ ▶️ John applications with no windows that are running, applications with windows that aren’t running, applications with a dot under it in the dock that aren’t running,

⏹️ ▶️ John applications without appearing in the dock that are running. Like every combination of things that you think shouldn’t be possible

⏹️ ▶️ John are possible, but that’s just what we know from a technical perspective. What’s important is the user

⏹️ ▶️ John model, the mental model. you’re not supposed to know that an application in the dock that has a dot under it might

⏹️ ▶️ John not actually be running. Because the OS is working to provide the illusion that if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got a dot, it’s running. And it does everything it can to make that illusion true. So for

⏹️ ▶️ John example, if the OS has quit an app, but left the dot under it in the dock, it did that because

⏹️ ▶️ John the app supports whatever the hell the thing is called. But when you click it again, behind the scenes

⏹️ ▶️ John it relaunches it for you and lets it auto restore the state. So to you, it just looks like it just brought

⏹️ ▶️ John that app to the front, which is what it would do if it was running, but it didn’t, it actually relaunched it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And by the same token, sometimes when you quit an app, the OS has the option to go, yeah, I’m not actually

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna quit it. I’m actually gonna keep it running. So if you quit an app and the dot disappears from running the dock, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you click that icon of the dock again, you’re like, wow, that launched really fast. You know why? Because the OS didn’t freaking quit

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that only happens in cases where the application supports whatever API that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple had introduced in Mac OS 10.7.1, Like read my Mac OS X reviews to see all this insanity.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how much of it is still in play, but the point is those details don’t matter because if that happens

⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes, it’s meant to provide the illusion that the model is dot means

⏹️ ▶️ John running, no dot means not running. And what does running mean versus not running mean? Well, running means that

⏹️ ▶️ John if you bring it to the front, it looks like it did when you saw it before, like it preserves state in the window, it remembers your

⏹️ ▶️ John selection or whatever. And for apps to support, to correctly support those APIs, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you shouldn’t be able to tell that it’s not running and it relaunched because

⏹️ ▶️ John from your perspective, it looks exactly the same as if it already was running. How successful are individual

⏹️ ▶️ John applications to those APIs and achieving that? Debatable, right? But that’s the goal of those APIs. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John think what people need to understand is what is the supposed mental model? What is the abstraction?

⏹️ ▶️ John How is the OS trying to tell me that it works? And then there’s all the cases where that abstraction falls

⏹️ ▶️ John apart. It’s like, oh, it’s, you know, it’s kind of seems like that app wasn’t running because even though it had

⏹️ ▶️ John the dot under it, when I clicked on it and I saw the window again, it didn’t look like I last left it. Why is that? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John actually it relaunched and that app doesn’t support state restoration for that one particular thing and blah, blah, blah. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it gets super complicated really fast. But it’s the same thing on iOS where we complain that people are,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, going to the application switch and flicking up what are essentially images of applications that haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John been running for three weeks,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Because I think they’re quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote quitting the apps, right? It provides the illusion that these are all the apps that are running,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not all running. Like this 500 pictures, how could they all be running? They’re not. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John literally an image of what that thing looked like the last time it was running. And so that’s the illusion it’s trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to provide, but that illusion is not true and that only matters when you care about the technical

⏹️ ▶️ John nuances or when you become an obsessive force quitter because you think you’re doing something where all you’re really doing is removing a

⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of images, which in itself may be a goal that you want to achieve, so go for it, but I don’t want to get into that debate again.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, so I think worrying about the nuances here are not as important

⏹️ ▶️ John as just getting what the supposed mental model is. Because if you get the supposed mental model that you just described, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s easy to easier to explain the exceptions. And unfortunately, as you both noted,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the exceptions is there are a certain class of application that when you close their last window, they

⏹️ ▶️ John quit themselves. How do I know what those applications are? And why do they do that? There’s a rationale.

⏹️ ▶️ John But really, it’s kind of like, oh, these are the exceptions and kind of here’s why. And it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not satisfying to hear the explanation. But eventually, you just learn the ones that do that. I mean, it makes some sense

⏹️ ▶️ John for like calculator because it’s just got one window and when you close it, it used to be a desk accessory. What’s a desk

⏹️ ▶️ John accessory? We got to go into super old man mode to learn about that. But like, there are reasons, but

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly they’re not super satisfying. But there is a mental consistency,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can say, well, If it’s just one window, like why should I have to quit calculator when I close the last cat when I close calculator

⏹️ ▶️ John with the Red button just make the whole calculator app quit and lo and behold it does and that makes sense to people and

⏹️ ▶️ John they understand it But that is an exception to the general mental model of when you close the last word window word doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John quit But then there was the whole thing where Apple wanted every app to quit every time you close the last window because it wasn’t running Anymore, so they

⏹️ ▶️ John made text that it do it. They made preview do it and it drives me bananas, right? But you can have those discussions, but I feel like those

⏹️ ▶️ John are all kind of like things that are exceptions from the norm, but you do have to understand the norm

⏹️ ▶️ John first. And that does tie into window management a little bit and that you’re like, where’d my windows go? Where’d my

⏹️ ▶️ John application go? Where does this doc do? And stuff like that. But, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, as you both noted, since Mac users kind of do their own thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John like there are so many different options, someone out there uses every one of these features. Probably no

⏹️ ▶️ John one uses all of them, but everybody uses their own little slice. So if you were to remove one of those slices,

⏹️ ▶️ John some subset of people would be sad, which is kind of how you end up with the mishmash we have now, where there’s every feature that they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever thought of adding. Actually, minus the old version of spaces, which I know a lot of people liked, but then went away.

⏹️ ▶️ John The one where it used to be like in a 2D grid. Do you remember that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, no.

⏹️ ▶️ John Spaces used to be like up, down, left, right, instead of just being horizontal thing. And the people who like that were probably sad

⏹️ ▶️ John when it went away. But not to say that Apple won’t get rid of them eventually, but for now, part of the reason there’s a million features

⏹️ ▶️ John is because someone somewhere uses all of them. So when you’re trying to decide how you want to use

⏹️ ▶️ John Windows, keep in mind that if you are unlucky, the way

⏹️ ▶️ John you decide to manage Windows may go away in 10 years or something. But hey, that’s technology for you. That’s true of any

⏹️ ▶️ John OS on any system, just think about what your car’s gonna look like in 10 years. So

⏹️ ▶️ John be aware of that. But the question here of can you give me, point to me like something I can read that

⏹️ ▶️ John tells me how I should do window management, that doesn’t exist because there’s too much diversity. there are too many different ways to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. If I had to categorize the major ways, I would say there’s one

⏹️ ▶️ John major one, which is people on laptops with small screens, they full screen things because the screen space is small,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they use a three finger swipe on a trackpad, because I think a lot of people find that pleasing, to flick between them.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is one absolutely very big major mode of operation. Full

⏹️ ▶️ John screen, almost everything, swipe back and forth with three fingers. I see tons of people doing it on laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ John My children do it on laptops, and I did not train them to do it. This is the thing that lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ John derive of their own accord, having seen the features. I never showed them this, I never explained these features.

⏹️ ▶️ John They find them on their own and they find them pleasing and they say, that’s how I’m gonna do things. So that’s one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Another one, the one that I’m familiar with is probably exceedingly rare at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is the old school one where you have individual windows that you arrange yourself. Almost nobody does that, but it is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the OG version because old versions of macOS had no tools to do anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was no expose, there was no dock, there was no window snapping, there was no nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ John There wasn’t even third party tools. So that is a super OG way to do it, but the people who do that

⏹️ ▶️ John are old like me and we’re all gonna die and then no one will know how to manage windows anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if there’s a third way that I’m not thinking of, I’m not sure what it would be, but it’s probably more

⏹️ ▶️ John like what Marco does because if you have a giant monitor, like full-screen stuff is just super dumb. Not that people don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s super, super dumb because you cannot read lines of text that are that long.

⏹️ ▶️ John And most web pages don’t expand to that size anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Web pages look hilarious when you maximize them on a big screen these days, because now they’re all designed for mobile even,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s even worse than it used to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John so there probably is some hybrid version in there. My quick tips would be, so

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s thing of hiding the desktop, I mentioned this on several shows, I think it’s the annual time for me to bring this up again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Make a hot corner for show desktop. So then you can jam your cursor into the corner, grab a file from the desktop,

⏹️ ▶️ John jam your cursor into the corner again while still holding the file to have everything come back. I find that faster than hitting whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell the keyboard key. I literally don’t even know the keyboard key that does this because I use the hot corners. Show

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop hot corner. Do not configure this on someone’s computer that you don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ John because they will inevitably accidentally hit that corner and have no idea what happened and they will yell at you. But on your

⏹️ ▶️ John own computer where you understand how hot corners work, so awesome. That’s my one tip. The other

⏹️ ▶️ John one, again, I’m not a keyboard person. Hiding, hiding is your friend. In almost

⏹️ ▶️ John every scenario, especially if you use my little Mac utility thing, but in almost every other scenario,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you option click away from a window, the window you were previously in will hide as you leave it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is a Mac convention from back in the day. Lots of like, do an operation, but hold down option.

⏹️ ▶️ John As you leave, the thing you’re leaving or the app you’re leaving or whatever will hide itself as you depart

⏹️ ▶️ John because you held down option. That is a fast way to combine two operations, which is I want to go

⏹️ ▶️ John someplace different. And by the way, the place where I was, I want it to disappear. I’m done with this guy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not being closed. It’s not being quit. You’re just hiding it. That concept

⏹️ ▶️ John of hiding windows, they’re still open, they’re still there, but you just can’t see them is essential.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s lots of ways to do that. But for again, maybe being an old school Mac user, using the option key to

⏹️ ▶️ John option click away from something is a big one. And the final one I’ll give you is, you can interact with windows when they

⏹️ ▶️ John are not the front most window. That is more of a fancy advanced thing, but if you want to play with that,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re an actual window arranger, it can come in handy. If you hold down the command key and grab a window

⏹️ ▶️ John in the background, you can move it and do stuff to it and not bring it to the front. Usually you can also interact

⏹️ ▶️ John with it. Like if a Finder window’s in the background, you want to collapse or expand a folder in a list view, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do that without bringing the window to the front by holding down the command key. Obviously my mode

⏹️ ▶️ John of using my Mac is one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard. My hand that’s on the keyboard is using modifiers

⏹️ ▶️ John like option and command and whatever, when I click through things, it tends not to be hitting command

⏹️ ▶️ John H or stuff like that, but it could if I wanted to, but like those are my tips to see if that way of operation

⏹️ ▶️ John works for you. But if you’re just looking for the path of least resistance and you have a laptop, try

⏹️ ▶️ John full screening everything in 3D printing or swiping between it. I think it’s massively inefficient and it grinds my teeth every time I see

⏹️ ▶️ John somebody do it, but people love it. So maybe you’ll love it too, give it a try.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Philip, I’m so sorry for these piss poor answers. And I was trying to give you an easy solution

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an easy walkthrough and I was interrupted and now I give up. So let’s move on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because you got too tied up in the process management.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, I would…

#askatp: Indie-dev work-trackers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dan Lear writes, if you’re all independent, I’m so mad at you. You’re all independent app developers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now with no employer mandated processes or tools. How do you plan and track your app work? I use simple checklists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for years and move to GitHub issues, milestones and PRs. What works for you folks? For me, GitHub issues, milestones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and PRs. Good talk. Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a notes document.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, this is the most Marco answer ever. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco useless, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because I used to, I mean, a while ago, I tried using FogBugs. I tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Bugzilla. I mean, over the years I’ve done a few things that like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, quote everyone does. I never went to GitHub issues because by the time that really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a thing, I was just working for myself for the most part and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just moved to like, you know, text files or I tried doing it in OmniFocus, I tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it in Things, I did it in Task Paper for a while, which is just kind of a fancy text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file editor, and now I just do it in Apple Notes. And for my purposes, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. The limitation on how much I can get done and on how good my app can be and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what features I make and what bugs I fix is not how I’m tracking them. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have many other limitations that bottleneck all those factors. But my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco task management system is nowhere near the top of that list.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Last show, it kind of reminds me of the question we talked about last show. And last show, I said how I was relieved

⏹️ ▶️ John as an independent developer not to have to do all of the many complicated

⏹️ ▶️ John things and systems having to do with issue tracking and branching and everything like that. In my private

⏹️ ▶️ John life, I don’t have to do that, so I don’t. And so my answer is, I have a notes document.

⏹️ ▶️ John Literally, it’s literally in Apple Notes. It’s a good system for one person.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like I don’t need anything more than that. It’s not even a big notes document.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine is pretty short. Mine’s like, yeah, maybe 20, 30 lines. Like, cause I can tell, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time ago, I forget where exactly or when exactly this was, but a long time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, the Basecamp people, back when it was called 37 Signals, made a blog post about how they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with feature requests. Forgive me if I’m mis-paraphrasing it, but the gist of it was basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really like keep track of them in a formal way because things that are really worth doing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna just keep hearing about over and over again from people. And so you won’t need to be writing them down. you’ll just keep hearing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how I treat most feature requests and goals, like long-term goals for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. If something is worth doing, like I don’t have the time or the will, frankly, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do everything people ask for because some of what people ask for would be a terrible idea or isn’t really possible to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well or things like that. But like things that are good ideas, they keep coming up over and over again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I have some general goals and everything, but I don’t need to be writing down every single little thing. Bugs that happen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s like some obscure thing I can’t get to right now, I’ll write it down, sure. But if it’s something I can just fix now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just fix it now. For the most part, anything that I do that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer term planning than a month or two, it doesn’t end up panning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in a way that makes me go to those plans. So for instance, like if I say right now, you know what, next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spring, I wanna redo the sync engine in CloudKit. God, would I love to do that. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I might do it sooner than that. but, because server stuff’s going great, guys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, next spring, I wanna do this. Okay, well, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens between now and next spring? Well, we have six months of the environment

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re operating in changing. I had to spend a good amount of the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco few days figuring out server-side crawling errors that end up being cloud

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flare is blocking me in a lot of conditions. And you know who hosts a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco websites behind their infrastructure, Cloudflare. Including, by the way, our website and my website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, the entire landscape. I just had to do in the beta channel, I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a feature where I’m kind of doing client-side crawling sometimes. And if Cloudflare

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeps giving me trouble with my crawling requests, then I’m gonna have to implement client-side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawling for certain things. And that is just a huge wrench in my plans. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, something is basically on fire that I have to go deal with. That’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take me a certain amount of time. And then when I put that fire out, maybe something else happens. Maybe Apple releases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a point of update to iOS that breaks my audio handling and I have to do something different. Or maybe they release

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brand new HomePod this fall that uses AirPlay 3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have to, suddenly there’s a pretty big reason for me to update something else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use that. or, you know, just something else might change between now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the spring when I plan to have this other milestone thing done. Well, okay, so eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these fires, eventually I’ve put them out and I’m ready to go look at my to-do list and I see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing that I said I wanted to do for the version that was gonna come out by that point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago, now I don’t even wanna do that anymore because that whole idea

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was irrelevant and now they moved on to Server Kit and now I need to go run ServerKit or run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift on the server or whatever. So planning very far ahead for somebody like me who’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just one person working on an app and kind of doing what I want to it and not doing what I don’t want to it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of very structured longer term planning tends to just not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen over time. Or by the time the time comes that you have to do XYZ,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at it and you’re like, this actually, this is what I wanted six months ago, but this doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense for me now or my opinion is different, or my priorities are different, or the environment is different, or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why it’s a short notes document.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me just state for the record that while Marco has fully admitted he is unemployable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has for many years, apparently John is too. I, for one, still believe in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey process and rules and things like that. I can still have a job. John and Marco are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey useless.

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe in it and I used it for years. I mean, the last thing I used before I left my job was JIRA. Like I know

⏹️ ▶️ John the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tools. I’m very familiar.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very, very familiar with all the tools and the way it’s done, but it is a relief to me

⏹️ ▶️ John not to have to use them. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think, and I have to say, it

⏹️ ▶️ John also helps that my apps are very small and simple. So there’s like, it’s a notes document.

⏹️ ▶️ John The bugs go there when I have a bug report and there are very few of those cause it’s not a complicated application. My

⏹️ ▶️ John feature requests that people send me go into the notes document and my own things that I wanted to go into the notes document and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s prioritized with the important stuff at the top. That’s my system. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey great. It’s a great system.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate this.

#askatp: TV picture modes, calibration

⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Komei writes, given John is a new TV and clearly has a number of input sources connected, what advice beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey his past blog posts would he suggest in 2022 about settings for color, etc.? In particular,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have an Apple TV 4K and are curious about the match content options in the late

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV OS and what’s best to be set or unset on both ends of the HDMI cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this, to my eyes anyway, relates to a different question, but very similar, from Jeff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nockbar, who writes, I’m interested in John’s thoughts about color calibration, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in light of his new TV. Does he just play with color picture settings to find what he likes? Does he believe in professional color

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calibration, the equipment to measure color accuracy in that whole world? Does QD OLED differ from other technologies

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of calibration needs? Are they more accurate? Tell us, John, what’s the story?

⏹️ ▶️ John So the answer was simpler back before I had my fancy new TV, because my old TV was standard

⏹️ ▶️ John definition and there were available tools, even some of them on the App Store that you could use to calibrate

⏹️ ▶️ John your standard definition.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so it was 1080, wasn’t it? Yeah. Not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John standard.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right. So it’s not standard. Sorry. Non 4K, but SDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So high def XDR, SDR, not 4K. God, I’m making it worse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John now. Now I’m YouTube. I’m making it

⏹️ ▶️ John worse. Standard dynamic range, not high dynamic range and standard HD,

⏹️ ▶️ John not UHD.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. A non 4K TV. Yes, that. But you have

⏹️ ▶️ John like the most important thing I think is that it wasn’t HDR right because they’re their calibration

⏹️ ▶️ John They have a THX tune-up calibration tool, which is so far out of date I’m amazingly run on modern devices,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it would let you calibrate your Non-HDR television

⏹️ ▶️ John the 4k thing is less of an issue but like especially when you’re doing color stuff like and it was more necessary

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day because because it wasn’t as common as it is now to get

⏹️ ▶️ John a television that would have some kind of accurate color preset. Now, filmmaker

⏹️ ▶️ John mode, we’ve talked about in the past, it’s all capped. Filmmaker mode is a thing that the industry agreed upon

⏹️ ▶️ John to have one preset on your television that tries to actually be accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ John If your television has filmmaker mode, use it, because that is the mode that is saying, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mess with the picture, show it to the best of your ability the way it is supposed to be, right? My

⏹️ ▶️ John problem with my new setup is I am unaware of any inexpensive

⏹️ ▶️ John way to calibrate my fancy new TV. I looked into this and there’s CalMAN software

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s hardware devices you can buy. And yes, you can use that to calibrate your fancy new TV,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that equipment costs so much money. It’s priced for professional calibrators. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it might cost more than my television to get all that stuff. And it’s like, no, no thanks. If you care

⏹️ ▶️ John about calibration that much, you can hire someone to do it, but they’re expensive and I’ve never done that, so I have no idea how

⏹️ ▶️ John to find a good one. But the good news is that if you buy a fancy-ish TV from like

⏹️ ▶️ John towards the higher end, most of them come with one or more presets that

⏹️ ▶️ John out of the box will be, kind of like Apple’s monitors are calibrated at the factory and out of the box have good calibration.

⏹️ ▶️ John There will be one or two presets on your television that have pretty good calibration.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one of the tests that the TV reviewers do. They say out of the box, here’s how this television

⏹️ ▶️ John looked in terms of accuracy, right? And some of them out of the box are really, really, really accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ John Then they will then go on and professionally calibrate it with their thousands of dollars worth of tools. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John can see the difference between the out of the box filmmaker mode calibration and what they did to correct the calibration.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better after they calibrate it, but the differences are often not perceptible, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so that lets you know that the best strategy is when you get your television, put it in filmmaker

⏹️ ▶️ John mode, or if you have a Sony television and they don’t support filmmaker mode, put it in the custom preset. I know

⏹️ ▶️ John the names are stupid, but at least on my television, there’s a bunch of presets, all of which you want to avoid forever and ever, because they

⏹️ ▶️ John screw with the picture. The one you want is what they call custom.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Jeff’s question of like, do you just play with the settings until they look what you like? No, do

⏹️ ▶️ John not do that, because you have no way to know. Like if you’re not calibrating with like a known input source, it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John you can put in your favorite movie and make adjustments until it looks pleasing to you because you don’t know what that

⏹️ ▶️ John picture is supposed to look like. What things are overexposed? What things are underexposed? What should I be able to see in

⏹️ ▶️ John the shadows? How light should the entire image be? You don’t know the answers to that question because you have no source of reference.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have a $30,000 reference monitor that you can compare it to with your eyeballs and you don’t have any equipment that knows what it’s supposed to look like.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what that calibration software and hardware does. It knows this should look like that based on

⏹️ ▶️ John this input. It generates signals and images and then it measures them and it dials it in so it looks like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, a lot of televisions, it’s a shame that equipment is so expensive because most of the fancy new televisions have

⏹️ ▶️ John an auto calibration mode where if you hook up that very expensive equipment to a very expensive piece of software on your laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ John you just basically push a button and it will calibrate itself over the course of a very long period of time.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even need a human calibrator to hand tweak everything. And if you hire a human calibrator, they will

⏹️ ▶️ John just probably use your television’s auto calibration mode that works with the CalMAN software and the

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever image thing they stick to your TV. But I mean, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that because the equipment is too expensive and I’m also not even willing to pay for someone to calibrate because I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone reputable. And if I was gonna pay the amount of money that that would cost to do, I would want it to be

⏹️ ▶️ John someone who is reputable. So my advice is use filmmaker mode, or if you don’t have it and you have a Sony television,

⏹️ ▶️ John use the custom preset and you’re probably ahead of the game. And then, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John within starting from there, If you really want to turn on motion smoothing or do other

⏹️ ▶️ John things that you find pleasing, feel free to screw up the picture in a way that you want.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pfft.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ha ha ha. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join atp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. We will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

⏹️ ▶️ John And if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, check

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast so long.

Post-show

⏹️ ▶️ John Rather than your ripoff after Showcasey, you should tell us the simple way to manage your windows

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac because you’re all annoyed, but you control the pace of the show. You didn’t need to move on to the next segment.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could have then just given us your, here’s my simple answer to window management. Now I’m dying to hear it because

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there is one. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, because you’re gonna pick it apart like you did earlier. No, it’s a secret.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t pick it up. I was trying to guide you back to the path. But anyway, what is your solution

⏹️ ▶️ John to window management? It seems like you know one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t really. It’s just you two were so interested in talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the asterisks while not talking about them and telling about the history while not telling about the history. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally muddying the waters for the person who is a self-professed novice. And good on you, Philip, for saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Somebody help me. Apparently, us three knuckleheads are not the people to help you, but at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of us was trying. Okay, so here’s the thing. All snark aside. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s important. I understand what you’re saying about the process management thing. And I understand that you’re right, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that is more, what I was talking about is more about process than window. But to me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming from Windows, the operating system, that was a real like sea change

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think of, oh, I can close the mail window and still receive email. That was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very weird thing for me to grok. And I think if you go way, way back, we brought this up, so I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought this up several times on the show. There was that conversation that Marco and I had via

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tumblr in, I don’t know, like late 2007, 2008, something like that, where he was publicly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey convincing me to get a Mac and I was publicly calling him a fanboy who has too much money.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And look who was right about that one, because it was not me for the record. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one of these things that I discovered as I was learning how to use my Polybook,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my polycarbonate Macbook, was, oh, I can close the mail

⏹️ ▶️ Casey window and I can still receive mail. And that very wildly changed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mental model of how windows work. Because just because a thing is closed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t by necessity mean it is not running. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s an important thing to understand. And similarly for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really ever hide windows. I’m not going to sit here. I will snark and say you’re wrong. But in all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuine, I don’t actually think that that’s wrong. is not the way I do it. Generally speaking, I will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey minimize, and maybe that’s not the rightest answer, but that’s what I do. And if I don’t minimize, I’ll close.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I’m done with a mail window, I’ll close it. If I’m done with a browser window, I will either

⏹️ ▶️ Casey minimize it if it has tabs that I would like to remain open, or if I’m on the last tab, I’ll just close

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I think it’s, again, it’s important to understand at least a little bit about the process behind this, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the process management behind this. And what I think Marco said at first, and John, you reiterated, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re both incredibly right. Everything I’m saying has like 85 trillion asterisks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re in asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger, triple dagger. Like there’s so many, wells,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wah, mm, uh. There’s so many of those that you’re absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And as much as I’m giving you, or I gave you a hard time during the show, like you are right. But if we’re just trying to give a broad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey overview of window management, I think we need a foundation from which to start, and that’s what I was trying to establish. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I would say, other than understanding the difference between closing and quitting,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally almost never use the stoplight or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever you call it in the upper left. I will use it for minimizing, but when I close

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a window, I either command W or command Q. Sometimes I’ll minimize with command

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M, not always, but sometimes. And alt tab or command, I see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m a Windows user again, command tab. When you do that, not only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you command tab just one time and see this list, but you can hit tab again and again and again to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep going, which I think is on Windows as well. What I don’t know, maybe it’s on Windows now, but it wasn’t, I don’t think at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, is if you take your mouse and start wiggling your mouse through there, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey control as long as you’ll continue to hold command, you can mouse your way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the icon you want, and you can command tab over and over again or command shift tab to go backwards.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s so much that you can do. I’m snarking a little bit, but I mean it. There’s so much you can do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the keyboard in concert with the mouse. And that’s why I’m glad, John, you said that the way you use your Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your left or whatever hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse, because I completely agree that that’s how I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the Mac. I also would completely agree with you that you should set

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up Hot Corners, which is in the oh-so-logical place in system preferences, desktop and screensaver.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s a little button at the bottom. What the hell is it in Ventura? Nobody knows, use the search. Nobody knows. No, that’s true,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t even think about Ventura. It makes no sense where it is right now, but you go into system preferences, desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and screensaver, bottom right is hot corners. The way I happen to have it set up is mission

⏹️ ▶️ Casey control in the upper left. That’s the thing where you see all of the different windows you have open.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if I slam my mouse in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, I will see like, kind of sort of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thumbnails of all my different windows. Is

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all windows across all apps or all windows in the current app? All windows across all apps. to Mission Control.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what the other one’s called. There’s a name for it, though. Application Windows, maybe? I forget. I don’t know. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea is if I ever get lost in my own Windows situation, I just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurl my mouse into the upper left-hand corner, and suddenly I can see every single window that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is currently open. And I think that would be very helpful for Philip. Now, maybe it’s not the upper left. Maybe it’s upper right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lower left doesn’t matter. But having a hot corner that is set to Mission Control so you can slam your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse into the corner, whatever corner that may be and see everything that’s open, no matter how overlapped it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before. I think that’s very useful and very powerful.

⏹️ ▶️ John Quick tip on that, unfortunately, as an asterisk double dagger things, there are windows in Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John OS that appear not to have an owning application. Like maybe you’ll get like

⏹️ ▶️ John a crash dialogue that gets popped up when you launch because BK agent has crashed again, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that’s happening to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it has

⏹️ ▶️ John to do with iBook store. Or there’ll be like the window that is copying something

⏹️ ▶️ John in the finder and you don’t know it’s a Finder window, you just know you used to see a progress bar and you don’t know where it is. If you lose a window.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s true, that’s true. And you really just, I mean, it may be that one of those windows

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s hard to find the owning application, or maybe you just don’t know the owning application. You don’t know that if you went to the Finder, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John clicked on the Finder in the dock and then click on the window menu, that you could find the copy. If you just don’t know that, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John when show me all the windows at the same time. Because what you were, this is, the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be able to find that little Finder progress bar window, even if you have no idea that the Finder owns it, because you don’t know what the hell the finder

⏹️ ▶️ John is because you came from windows. You do remember that it was skinny, that it was like

⏹️ ▶️ John a window that was not very wide and it was kind of like not very tall

⏹️ ▶️ John either, right? It was a skinny little window. You remember what it looked like. And when you minimize the windows and shows

⏹️ ▶️ John all the windows you’ll be able to visually pick it out because there are very few other windows that are that shape, like

⏹️ ▶️ John dimension wise. It’s not, again, it’s not gonna be like to scale exactly but like you’ll be able to pick it out. So that

⏹️ ▶️ John is one of that, you know, This may sound like Hasey’s telling you to do some fancy advanced user thing. It’s not, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a great, I’m lost, help me, I can’t find something. Press the, and it’s like F3 on the

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard or whatever the hell it is. If you don’t know, you’re not a hot corner. Just show me everything. Now, if you’re like me, that

⏹️ ▶️ John button would show you a thing that would make both of these other people run away screaming.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even for me, I can find the stupid little, you know, how is the, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s archive utility, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if I

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to see the unzipping XIP of Xcode, and I lost that window somehow and I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ John that it was archive utility, which is a green icon in your dock, even I can show all the windows

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time and to find out the little skinny window I’m looking for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so I would put mission control on a hot corner. I’m glad you reminded me because I don’t do this on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, but yes, F3 on an Apple keyboard by default is the same exact thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we say F3 and it’s like, how am I ever gonna remember F3? Look down at your Apple keyboard that came with your computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a bunch of little windows. They put a little graphic on it. This has changed over the years, and sometimes they’ve changed the

⏹️ ▶️ John OS and it doesn’t match your keys. But if you have a modern Mac, the little pictures that they put over the function keys

⏹️ ▶️ John look like what they’re supposed to be. So the brightness keys have little sun pictures over them. The F3 key has a bunch of little rectangles

⏹️ ▶️ John that are supposed to look like windows. So you don’t have to memorize this. Just literally look down at your keyboard and look for the key that

⏹️ ▶️ John looks like it has a bunch of windows on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the other thing I would say while we’re still talking about hot corners, I forget which one of you said this, I think it was John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a desktop hot corner somewhere. So to reiterate, let’s say you’re copying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a file. So you’re in the Finder, you’ve clicked and dragged a file. I don’t care what file it is. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re like, oh, crap. I don’t know. I just want this to appear on my desktop, but I don’t have an easy way to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get there, or whatever the case may be. Then you can drag your mouse all the way into whatever that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hot corner may be. For me, it’s upper right. It can be whatever. Suddenly, all of those windows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappear, sort of, kind of. They’re swept off to the side, and now you’ve got a mostly clean view of your desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can very easily just drop that file right on your desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is the same tip that I give every year. I’ll give it again. If you grab, this combines to both

⏹️ ▶️ John of our tips that you just said, Casey, if you grab a file and you want to drop it into a window in a particular

⏹️ ▶️ John application, and you’re like, but it’s not the desktop. I’ve got the file, but now I want to go to a particular Safari window.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do I do that? Grab the file. While you’re still grabbing the file with your other hand that’s on the keyboard, hit

⏹️ ▶️ John Command Tab, and you can either Command Tab over to the Safari, or you can just drag your mouse with the file

⏹️ ▶️ John still in the cursor, right? You can drag that onto Safari and hold it there for a second. Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John will come to the front and then drag it onto the window within Safari that you want because when you do that, all the Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John windows will come to the front. And you know, the moves like that, it seemed like they’re complicated, will become second

⏹️ ▶️ John nature once you realize that, like you can do stuff in flight at the same time. So like

⏹️ ▶️ John grab the file and then you have options. You can invoke the command tab switcher while you’ve grabbed the file.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can then drag the file over the application that you want until it highlights and then let go of the command

⏹️ ▶️ John key and the application will come to the front and then you can, you know, stuff like that seems like it’s fancy,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if you do it once or twice and it clicks with you, kind of like a three finger swiping, which seems like it’s fancy, but so many people do it for the first

⏹️ ▶️ John time and that just burns into their brain and it becomes second nature. So try it and see if you like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually, I would say that that’s one of the most, one of the best things about switching to Mac is like when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, I wonder if this would work, and you just try something and it totally does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the greatest things. Like when you first hit those moments, like now that I have this thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under my mouse that I’m holding down, can I just move it over here and then show desktop and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t lose it? And sure enough, it’s like, bam, oh my God, that just worked. It just did it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of stuff that gets us all loving the Mac so much. That’s why we’re all here, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s full of little stuff like that. And it’s just wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also why it is difficult, rare, exhausting, exhilarating to

⏹️ ▶️ John be a good Mac app developer. So even in my super dinky app, one of my apps is Switch Glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just provides a little application switcher that shows icons for running applications. I have a way to exclude applications

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want an application to ever appear in the switcher, right? So there’s a little exclude window that comes up and you add

⏹️ ▶️ John applications to the exclude window and they won’t appear in the thing anymore. But being a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John user, my simple program that I’m trying to keep super simple, I’m like, all right, well, I’ve got a window on the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John that says exclude these apps. I’ve got the app switcher sitting right over there and you have this

⏹️ ▶️ John sensation, which as a developer is both exhilarating and a sinking feeling, which is like, I have to let people

⏹️ ▶️ John drag the applications from the app switcher palette into the exclude window, don’t I? Because it seems like it might work,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It seems like something that, will that work? And in the current version, it doesn’t work. But when

⏹️ ▶️ John I was doing 2.0, I had to admit to myself, that should probably work. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John had to make it work. And you don’t, if you’re not a Mac user, sort of steeped in the history of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John or like understanding that like, if someone thinks that it should probably work, it should probably

⏹️ ▶️ John work. Even if nobody’s ever to do it, the first person who says, I wanna exclude an application, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want it, because the other way to do it is like, you hit the plus button and then it opens an open save dialogue and you have to navigate

⏹️ ▶️ John the open save dialogue to find your application. And you’re like, the application is freaking running. I see it there in the

⏹️ ▶️ John app switcher palette in this app. Can I just drag it? And the answer is in 2.0, yes, you can. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what a good Mac app does. I mean, and people don’t implement those because it’s worked template feature

⏹️ ▶️ John and like nobody’s gonna ever use it. It’s like, it’s a silly frivolous feature, but you can see the

⏹️ ▶️ John people who implemented the command tab switcher had all had those correct instincts. And that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ John if you think it will work with the command tab switcher or dragging in the Finder X-Mosaic, it probably will.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I wanna reiterate what Marco said a minute ago. And the point you’re making now, John, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that even if you think no way that’s gonna work,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just try it just try it because when it comes to just basic Mac and finder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your Windows within Mac functionality It oftentimes does work which is banana

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something as silly as alt tab tab tab tab. Oh, I went too far All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, and I said all tab again didn’t I could turn it command tab tab tab tab tab tab. Oh, I went too far

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Command shift tab. Oh, yeah, that did work You know, it’s it’s silly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff like that that you got to give it a shot But to me, I think the basics are understand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when a window is closed. It does not mean that the app is just gone forever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger. Understanding that you have mission control, that’s F3

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or assignable as a hot corner, to kind of give you an escape hatch and get you back, get your bearings back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can use the desktop as another hot corner in order to just get you an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy dropping zone on your desktop. You can start talking about a lot of other things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like proxy icons, which are super useful and kind of sort of went away until recently. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot here. There’s a lot of depth here. But for my money, I think understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the basic keyboard shortcuts, Command Q, Command W, almost said Alt

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, Command Tab, Command Tilde, which Marco had talked about earlier. I think understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these basics will get you started down the path. And then we can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a meaningful and useful conversation about what the dagger double dagger asterisk double asterisk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all are about. But I think the bare minimum is, is what we were talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far in this after show. And once you get that under your belt, then we can go into intermediary level

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and talk about proxy icons and things like that. And then we can talk about advanced level, we start understanding the history behind why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this is the way it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the one you were getting at the fundamental thing that Windows users have to agree with is the fact that it’s a hierarchy.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there’s just a big, flat, giant set of windows, even though when you hit expose, that’s what you see.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a hierarchy, there are applications. And within each application, there are windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you could draw a tree application a all the windows that are an application, a application be all the windows that are application

⏹️ ▶️ John be that hierarchy exists all the time. How that hierarchy exposes itself

⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of up to you. But you could say I don’t see the hierarchy, What are you talking about? Well, Casey just explained one place that hierarchy works.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can close all the windows in the application and the application is still running. Cause all you’ve done is closed all the little things, but the hierarchy still

⏹️ ▶️ John exists. The application is still there. You just trimmed off all the little, you know, if you were to draw the graph, you just deleted all the nodes

⏹️ ▶️ John that were sticking out of that application, but you didn’t delete the application node itself unless you quit the application, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s relevant, you know, has to do with one of my little apps that I made. The way the Mac used to work

⏹️ ▶️ John is if you clicked on a window anywhere on the Mac, it would bring that window to the

⏹️ ▶️ John front, but it would also bring all the other windows that belong to that application to the front if

⏹️ ▶️ John it was in a different application. So let’s say you’re in Chrome and you click on a Finder window, the old way the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John used to work was it would bring all the Finder windows to the front. Of course, the one you clicked on will be in the front front,

⏹️ ▶️ John but again, because it’s a hierarchy, it would bring all the Finder windows in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of all the other windows on the screen with the front most window being the one you clicked on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS X changed that, but they have under Mac OS X, they made it, if you’re in Chrome and you click a Finder window,

⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing that comes to the front is the Finder window you clicked on. Both of those modes have their uses,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Sometimes you do want all the Finder windows to come to the front. Sometimes you just want one window to come to the front.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it really just kind of depends on what you’re used to, but the Mac can do both, even without my utility, which I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John get to and get everyone to buy in a second. The dock, when you click on a dock

⏹️ ▶️ John icon, all the windows come to the front. So if I am in Chrome and I click on the Finder icon on the dock,

⏹️ ▶️ John all the Finder windows come to the front. Otherwise, if they didn’t, how would it know which window to bring to the front? I guess it could bring the

⏹️ ▶️ John front most of them, but I’m saying like, the dock has always worked that way. So Mac OS X does have a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to bring all the windows that belong to an application to the front and you should understand, hey, when I click on the dock

⏹️ ▶️ John icon, why is it behave differently than when I click on a window? Because that’s just the way they chose to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You click on the dock icon, all the windows from that application come to the front. When you click on an individual window, just that window comes to the

⏹️ ▶️ John front. you can change that behavior with various modifier keys. Or if you get my lovely little

⏹️ ▶️ John dinky utility called front and center, front and center.app or it’s on the Mac App Store, you can choose what you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to happen. What I want to happen because I’m old and cranky is when I click on a window, I want all

⏹️ ▶️ John the windows to come to the front. But I also like the other way. So front and center lets you choose.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can configure it to say when I shift click a window, I just want that one window to come to the front or vice

⏹️ ▶️ John versa. You can have shift click bring all the windows or just one. you know, that policy decision is made on a per

⏹️ ▶️ John click basis, depending on whether you have the shift key down. And this is a feature I stole from drag thing and a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John other applications that did this way before me, all those applications went away, I could not live without them. So I literally

⏹️ ▶️ John made another run. But even without, you know, using my dinky little app, understand

⏹️ ▶️ John that Mac OS itself has different ways for you to make those choices, or sometimes make those choices

⏹️ ▶️ John for you. And if you don’t understand the hierarchy, you’ll be confused about like, say, you’re looking at a Chrome window and you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to like get something in a finder window and you go down to the dock and you hit the little finder icon and all of a sudden 50 finder

⏹️ ▶️ John windows cover up all your chroma and he’s like, I want it. I just wanted one finder window. Why did that happen? It

⏹️ ▶️ John happened because that’s the way the dock works. When you click on the little happy face finder icon, they all come

⏹️ ▶️ John to the front. And if you don’t want that to happen, don’t click the dock icon. Instead, click on the finder window that you want. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, then you get into well, how about how do I find that finder window? And is the corner of it poking out somewhere?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is everything full screen? Like it gets more complicated, but understanding the hierarchy at least gives you a

⏹️ ▶️ John foundation to understand the different moves that you can make. And then you can choose,

⏹️ ▶️ John what do you want those moves to be? What do you want to happen when you click a window? What do you want to happen when you click a dock icon or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if you just want a single window, you could right click the finder and you’ll see a list of all the windows that are open in the finder and you could

⏹️ ▶️ John pick just the one you want and then just that one will come to the front. So, but that’s, you know, you have to understand that that’s a choice

⏹️ ▶️ John that you make. And unfortunately with the dock, you don’t have the choice to change how it’s configured. Clicking

⏹️ ▶️ John will always bring them all and right clicking will always bring the right click menu, so on and so forth.