644: You Have to Invert
19 Jun 2025Impressions of iOS 26, macOS Tahoe, iPadOS 26, and Liquid Glass after a week of using the first developer betas. Surprisingly, we have thoughts.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: G4 Doorbell Pro
- What betas are we running?
- 𝑥OS 26 & Version Numbers
- iOS Apps built against old SDKs get
19.0; new ones get26.0(via Gui Rambo)ProcessInfo/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersionCompat.plist
- Tahoe returns
16when reqiured for compatibility and26otherwise (via Howard Oakley)SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1=16nullorSYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=0=26
- iOS Apps built against old SDKs get
- Liquid Glass
- Adopting Liquid Glass
- Not present in macOS? (via Steve Troughton-Smith)
- Liquid Glass clone in Flutter (via Dave Wood)
- Fluid Glass in React (via Francisco Tolmasky)
- macOS Tahoe
- Whimsy returns! (via Minimal Nerd)
- Squircle Jail
- Squircle ∆ (via Yannic Lung)
- Say Hello to the New Look of App Icons
- Squircle Jailbreak! (via Simon B Støvring)
- Speaking of rounded corners…
- Chonky stoplights
- macOS 26 window control buttons are no longer smol (via Avi Drissman)
-[NSTitledFrame sizeOfTitlebarButtons]
- Missing title bars
- Missing menu bar fixes
- Alignment
- Finder icon controversy
- Stephen tried Icon Composer with solid results
- Michael Flarup
- D. Griffin Jones
- Icons next to menu items
- Previously in the HIG (via Stefan Habel)
- Today in the HIG
- Tabs contrast
- Safari contrast
- Arrow cursor has been updated
- Floating elements & compartmentalization
- Clipboard history
- Future of Rosetta
- New disk image format:
ASIF
- iOS 26
- UI impressions
- New slider thumbs reveal new info (via Niki Tonsky)
- iPadOS 26
- Open window limits (via Steve Troughton-Smith)
- Slideover is 💀
- UI impressions
- Testing Liquid Glass
- Vision Pro 4K? (via Steve Troughton-Smith)
- Post-show: WWDC Favorites
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple snubbed Gruber, so who got the nod?
Sponsored by:
- Hello Fresh: America’s #1 Meal Kit
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
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Chapters
- Not a pre-show
- Beta life
- What version are you?
- Sponsor: HelloFresh
- Liquid Glass in use
- macOS Tahoe
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iOS 26
- iPadOS 26
- Design adoption
- Vision Pro “4K”?
- Ending theme
- WWDC favorites
Not a pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ John I could do my preface in the pre show if you don’t have anything. No, that’s not fun. That’s not fun. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. The preface is written right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Well, I think it could be fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You and I have different definitions of fun. I think unless you have some sort of bombshell that you’re trying to drop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was deferring to both of you. Hey, have you got a pre show? You came up with nothing. I’ve got something at least. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like, isn’t it administrative? That’s not a pre show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I have a, I have a pre show that Marco may end up dropping on the floor and and may end up being just for the bootleg.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it administrative? No. No. No. No.
Beta life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you had a question to start the main part of the show. What’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously, there’s a lot of follow up on this show. And I realized assembling this that the
⏹️ ▶️ John follow up, at least from my part, is heavily influenced by which of the new operating systems announced at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC that I personally have been using. So I thought I would start by saying what I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John and asking you to what you’ve been using. It’s only been a week since WWDC. They revved all the new OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the betas are out. I, slumluck painfully installed a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS Tahoe on a couple of different Macs. How did you do that? It’s, I don’t know why they
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so hard and it just gets worse with Apple Silicon. But anyway, that griping aside, I installed Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve been updating all of my apps for Tahoe. They all require lots of updates. So I’ve just been, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially booting my Mac into Tahoe and staying there most of the time. And I have a second Mac that’s also booted into Tahoe. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I’ve just been a lot of Tahoe stuff. I have not even installed, looked at, or touched any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the other OSs. So I’m just going to preface that by explaining why you’re talking about Mac OS so much. All
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been doing is using Tahoe for the past week. What have you two been doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on before we go there. How did you go about installing it? Because the, I have installed Tahoe and I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead of myself now, but I’ve only done it in a VM. I haven’t put it on hardware, which honestly is kind of crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because a lot of things are gated behind being on real hardware. But what did you do for your 1800
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installs that you’ve done across your 900 Macs? Yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the VM approach, lots of people are suggesting that. Oh, just install it on VM. It’s real easy. I haven’t even attempted that
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve seen Craig Hockenberry trying for many hours to get dev work
⏹️ ▶️ John Done in a VM and apparently that doesn’t work like, you know Developing your app and Xcode and making
⏹️ ▶️ John builds and stuff and that’s what I need to do in Tahoe So if you just want to poke around in the OS and you don’t want to mess
⏹️ ▶️ John with your system Yeah, put it in a VM. That’s probably I’m assuming it’s straightforward. I’ve literally never done it
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get an IPSW from the Apple developer site for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon Macs only, but I’m like, well great, I am installing it on an Apple Silicon Mac, why don’t I get this IPSW?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I could not make it work. I understand the theory of how it’s supposed to work with Apple Configurator
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, and just could not do it. I got the thing into DFU mode, had the two different Macs connected,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, never successfully did it. I started to do what I thought would be successful, and it just failed
⏹️ ▶️ John every time. So I’m like, screw this, do it the quote unquote old-fashioned way as of two years ago, or whenever they introduced this,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, install the currently released
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the OS, Sequoia, onto the drive that you want to put Tahoe onto.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boot into that new Sequoia install, make a new user, sign it into your developer Apple ID, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as my personal Apple ID, go to software updates, say you want beta updates, and it will say, yes, you can have that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a developer account, and then do software update from system settings, with
⏹️ ▶️ John it set to look for betas, it will find a beta, it will install the beta, and there you go. And then to add just the
⏹️ ▶️ John extra twist, whenever my Mac Pro boots Tahoe, it kernel panics on boot.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, cool. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, press any key to continue, and you press any key, and most of the time, then it boots up successfully.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it will kernel panic again, and then you press any key to continue, and then it boots up successfully. So not reassuring, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, beta one. One time, the very first time it kernel panicked on boot,
⏹️ ▶️ John it said, press any key to continue, I did, it booted into Tahoe, and it popped up a dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John that says we’ve disabled all third party kernel extensions. Like dude, this is a fresh install of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John No third party kernel extensions in this Tahoe desk. But I was like, whatever Tahoe, it’s beta
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So anyway, that’s what I did and that’s how I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, what are you running?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betas on my main iPhone, my iPad I never use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my travel laptop, but not my main Mac. I’ll start with the one I use the least, my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed it and haven’t opened it since. on the travel laptop Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been fine. I have, I mean, I don’t use this computer very heavily. It’s been fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, on that Mac. I think the design on the Mac could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use some. We’ll get to it in the pop, don’t worry. But yeah, so, uh, it’s, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the iPhones, this is the one I’m encountering the most. Cause it’s my, my main primary iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been mostly okay. I have had to reboot the phone because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cell modem stopped working twice and I’ve had to reboot it because it stopped being able to connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my air pods twice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s four reboots in a week and a half or a week and a day or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So not amazing. It’s very hot a lot of the time. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like you know quote force quit a lot of apps to keep it under control. I have started carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my little ice, you know, Peltier based fan charger. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you regretting this or still no? Still no. Because you’re doing dev
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work? Just barely, but the main, I mean, mostly I’m still watching sessions. Like in terms of like consuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WVC content, I’m mostly still watching sessions, looking at documentation, doing some experiments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some test runs of like things like the transcription APIs and stuff like that. So I’m not actually doing that much development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on the phone and I’m certainly not doing that much design work yet, however, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll hear me talking about this all summer, this is such a radical redesign, I think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to trigger a redesign of almost every app. As we kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco predicted might be the case when a redesign was rumored for the system, it is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be the case now that I see the redesign, and more importantly now that I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my old app on the new OS, it looks ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old immediately. So as soon as people start getting this OS, which for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users it’s already like 2% of the user base who have it, and it’s only going to go up over the course of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer. As soon as people get used to this OS, every app that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not designed for it looks old. It is like the transition to iOS 7 in that regard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That like as soon as iOS 7 launched, when you launched an app that was built for iOS 6 and earlier with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old style design, it just looked ancient. how this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s not quite as stark as that but it’s very very close so for me I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regrets living on beta 1 from the start because I have to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get used to this language like this design language and I have to I have to get used to like how things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel on the system how apps should be designed on system how Apple’s apps are designed what people will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to when they use this for a while and then come to my app because if my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app continues its current design, it will feel old by mid-September.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s gonna be very, very quick. So even though my phone is hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I keep having to reboot it to maintain basic functionality, I’m very, very happy I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am using the beta full-time because it’s not a moment too soon that I’m learning this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new design language and getting a good feel for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I am running the beta on my iPad, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use pretty much every evening as a couch computer. And I’m gonna talk about that in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future in this episode, but I’m running it on the iPad. I will not put it on my phone unless I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get really desperate until at least public beta one, because that seems to be when things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are at least livable. Obviously we’ll see what happens this year, but that tends to be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did put it in a VM. I put Tahoe in a VM on my computer, as I mentioned earlier. I did this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Virtual Buddy, which is by front of the show, Guy Rambeau. It’s open source, it’s free. It made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really easy to install, incredibly easy to install. So easy that I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember how I downloaded the thing, which yes, I know my memory, ha ha. But I think it was just basically I selected, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a 26 beta please, and then it went and grabbed it and installed it and so on and so forth. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s terribly useful unless like John said, you’re just kicking tires.
⏹️ ▶️ John From the virtual buddy app gave you the option to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yep, I’m pretty sure to. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just running like software update
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey command line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the background or something? I guess, I don’t know. But I mean, I went from never having installed Virtual Buddy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before to a booted VM with little to no effort in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or 10 minutes. And I didn’t go via any released version of the software. Like I just said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make me a Tahoe VM and magic happened. So Guy is incredibly good at what he does. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not surprising to me whatsoever. But if you want to just kick tires, that is my recommended approach.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s all you were doing with that Tahoe install? You just want to poke around and see what it’s like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what I wanted to do was use the new Swift Assist or the copilot, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff in Xcode. But not only does that require Apple Silicon, but it requires hardware. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can’t do that in the VM, which is a real bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I believe it also requires you to be booted from an internal disk and not an external one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? Yeah, remember we talked about that, that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t work at all if you were booted from an external disk. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John extends for whatever reason to the AI, which doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me. Because if you configure it to use chat GPT, what does it care? I just saw a toot
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. Don’t quote me on that. I may be wrong, but it’s something to look into. But the other thing I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John curious to know is, if you did try that, did you have the same problem that Hockenberry had, which is you can’t figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to actually get your builds to work and sign correctly and be able to distribute to TestFlight from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I never went that far. I don’t plan to go that far. If for that sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work, I would likely just be doing that on my, um, what is the Sequoia almost at Sonoma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my Sequoia Mac and just build against new APIs. Um, but yeah, I mean, I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also put it on my vision pro for what it’s worth. Uh, again, we’ll talk about that in the future in this episode, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but short, short of that, the new personas are tremendous. Uh, they really do live up to the hype.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, wait, how the heck are you going to do development on a Sequoia system for the
⏹️ ▶️ John new OSS? But then I realized, oh, well your, your OS runs in the phone, not on your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because in the Mac world, I can’t really do development for Tahoe updates to my application
⏹️ ▶️ John without being booted into Tahoe. That sucks. Unfortunately, there’s still no Mac simulator. There totally should
⏹️ ▶️ John be. They have this whole virtualization framework. And it annoys me so much that Apple doesn’t just finally
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what needs to be done to essentially make a Mac OS simulator. Because that’s what we all want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one way or another, so iPad, yes. Phone, no. Vision, yes. Mac-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that’s it, right? I’m not forgetting anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right, well, so- Oh, no TV, no TV OS. Yeah, none
⏹️ ▶️ John of us have done TV stuff, and it looks like that update is not great or not that interesting anyway. But anyway, that’s where we’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from as we dive into this week’s follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one final addendum on what John just said, which he had pretty much said already. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tends to, at this point, since he doesn’t have a real job anymore, do the overwhelming majority and the heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lift on the show notes for each week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that when I had a job too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s not as if it’s a new thing. But it’s allowed now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mark, when I permitted now. You allowed it before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. Well, anyways, the point is what you see in the episode, I put that together,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s entirely based on what John has done. And so because John is the one that formulates these show notes that we’re about to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this episode off of, it’s gonna be Mac OS heavy. And if you don’t like that for some reason, blame John. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you do like that, blame John.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can also blame Apple, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have so many things to say about Mac OS, there wouldn’t be that much Mac OS stuff, just saying.
What version are you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s start off with something a little more generic. And speaking of Guy Rambeau, let’s talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about OS 26 and version numbers. And something I don’t recall if we’ve mentioned it on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show or not, but something that a lot of us including Craig were wondering was, hey, what happens when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app asks the system, what version are you? And is it going to say 19
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iOS 19 or is it going to say 26? And Guy writes, apps built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the iOS 26 SDK get 19.0 as a system version from Process Info.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once built with the iOS 26 SDK, the version then becomes 26.0. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is powered by the file system library core services core version compat.plist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Howard Oakley writes, at what I thought was Electric Light Company, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just today realized is Eclectic Light Company. I don’t know how I made that mistake, but here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are. Anyway, Howard Oakley writes, when When built against the Mac OS 15 SDK or earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tahoe returns a version number of 16 for compatibility with previous numbering and all existing apps. When
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built against Mac OS 26 SDK, it returns 26 for forward compatibility. In scripted languages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run within a shell environment, there’s an environment variable to control the version number given. Set system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore version underscore compat equals one, and Tahoe returns 16. Leave that variable unset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or set it to zero, and it returns 26. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John the same approach that Mac OS used when they went to 11, it was 10.15 and then it was 11, but it also returned 10.16
⏹️ ▶️ John in certain circumstances. So people were afraid that they were just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John not sync up the version numbers and just leave it as 19, which would be ridiculous. And they didn’t do that. They’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the typical thing they do, which is it really does return 26, but you get one year of overlap to where your old things will get 19.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do like that they put in the stuff for like environment variables for the shell stuff on Mac OS that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going the extra mile for people who can’t, probably for their own purposes because they probably have a bunch of shell scripts that
⏹️ ▶️ John have code that checks the version number. So good job on Apple with the versions.
Sponsor: HelloFresh
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Liquid Glass in use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk liquid glass. Do we want to do, before we jump into what you’ve put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes, John, do we want to do like a quick recap of where we stand on how all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John looks? I think we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to it when we talk about these items because they’re very generic. It will lead us to that conversation, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s start with adopting liquid glass. There is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC session, which is very good, or excuse me, not a session, a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not the HIG, it’s just a page on the website. But anyways, it reads on this page, avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overusing liquid glass effects. If you apply liquid glass effects to a custom control, do so sparingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Liquid glass seeks to bring attention to the underlying content and overusing this material in multiple custom controls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can provide a subpar user experience by distracting from that content. Limit these effects to the most important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functional elements in your app. And this is actually also discussed, underscore David Smith has started a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new design series. I forget what he called it, but anyways, something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s on his website talking about how he’s adopting liquid glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reached very similar conclusions by way of trial and error. So that tracks.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So I quoted this thing in here because I’m, I’m not going to say it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John coherent. I’m going to say it’s coherence is not clear to me. Let me read that key sentence again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Liquid glass seeks to bring attention to the underlying content. Alright, on some level this makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, because there’s something behind it, and by liquid glass showing through in a much more
⏹️ ▶️ John pronounced way than previous frosted glass things, it’s showing through the content, like you can see more of the edges and contours,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is more strongly showing through the content. So I can see how this sentence, you could parse it and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, it seeks to bring attention to the underlying content. I’m setting
⏹️ ▶️ John aside the logic or the value of that. The next part of the sentence is that overusing this
⏹️ ▶️ John material and multiple custom controls can provide a subpar user experience by distracting from that content. Now wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second. If it brings attention to the underlying content, if that’s what you’re saying, that we want to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring attention to underlying content by showing it through, but if you do it too much, it will distract
⏹️ ▶️ John from that content. I think this is trying to what I think the sentence is trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get at is this, the the thing that a lot of people are struggling with right now, which is what is the value
⏹️ ▶️ John and purpose of showing the content that is behind controls?
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, as we’ll talk about, sometimes it makes the controls hard to see, but setting aside what it does to the controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it draw attention to the content? I’m finding a lot of people saying, and putting posts in various screenshots or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, look at this screenshot of this app, like the whole window, and they say, the things that draw
⏹️ ▶️ John my eye the most are the floating toolbar controls, which we’ll talk about later, and all the glassy
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. They’re not saying their eye is drawn to the content. It’s totally drawn to the shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John glass thing and the things that are floating above. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of W3C sessions about this and they build these sentences that try to say, here’s what we’re doing with glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John But from my perspective, I don’t think it is doing what they think it’s doing. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always trying to say, by putting glassy controls, we’re trying to draw attention to the content. And I just don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t draw my, Does it draw your attention to the content? It draws my attention to the ugly controls and it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make me look at the content. Something that would draw my attention to the content would be if the controls were
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the way and not laying on top of the thing I’m trying to look at. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way to show me a blurry version of my content that keeps text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of it, flashing between black and white and have me think, ooh, I’m seeing more of my content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s what I’m paying attention to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it drawing your attention to the content or is it drawing your attention to the control that’s on top of your content?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, look, this, let’s cut through all the BS. Apple likes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its design because it looks cool. That’s it, just be honest, I hope. Well, right, but it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool in certain contexts. It’s completely unreadable in others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very distracting, and I think the effect is not as smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or responsive as they have advertised. But look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why they’re doing this. they think it looks cool and it looks fresh and different. I wish they would just be honest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that because you can like a design and you can put forward the design as a platform vendor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you think it looks cool. That’s a good enough reason. And that’s a great reason, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is what will get people to be excited about it and to want to upgrade their phones to the new OS as soon as they possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can or buy new phones if they can’t run it. Just looking cool is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough reason. Uh, that being said, you know, to answer this specific question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether liquid glass draws your eye to the content, no, it definitely does not. I’m not aware of much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content where seeing a extremely blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of a region of it is as good as seeing an unobstructed version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. That’s not how most content
⏹️ ▶️ John works. I mean, maybe it’s drawing your attention to the fact that some part of your content is obscured. That’s what they’re drawing their
⏹️ ▶️ John attention to. Hey, there’s some of your content that you can’t really see that well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, like what, like the way most of the, you know, content extension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under controls works is kind of like those TVs that light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wall behind them with colors that match what’s on screen. Oh, bias lighting is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but it’s it’s like that. It’s like, well, are you seeing more of the picture? No, you’re seeing some blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light that is inspired by the colors of the picture, which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but bias lighting is trying to help it so that your eyes don’t have to adjust so much between very dark scenes
⏹️ ▶️ John and very Light scenes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that aside. No, it’s doing it because it looks cool And that’s the thing and like that’s fine. If that’s your reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just be honest You can say we put forth this amazing design because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it looks really cool That’s good enough. Like be honest and the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if when you when you start saying like Things like this lets your content shine through which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite of what it does I feel like you might start to actually believe that and that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause you to Misuse the design or to make poor design decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will actually make it much harder to see content or to it to appreciate it or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to reveal all of it and so Like right now like the way the liquid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glass performs right now. I Think it makes no sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have uncontrolled Scrolling colors going behind it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what happens is and this is something I noticed a very very first day of using it It’s very distracting what happens is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t know what’s going behind it and people can scroll stuff behind it as You scroll between light and dark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I alluded this earlier Eventually if it’s if it’s showing if there’s light stuff behind it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll make the text on top of the on top of the glass blob black Okay, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you scroll if what passes behind it crosses a certain darkness threshold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will animate the text on the button into a dark appearance where the text is light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show up against the dark background. So as you’re scrolling content behind it, the button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will alternate between light and dark and every time it does that it animates and it’s a pretty jarring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition and it lags behind the scrolling of the content behind it by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fraction of a second but it’s noticeable. So what you see as you scroll content behind a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liquid glass button is you see basically delayed flashing back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forth between light and dark of the button content this is incredibly distracting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so this is where it’s actually doing the opposite of what they’re saying it is not letting your content shine through it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grabbing your attention because it is flashing at you in a pretty jarring way
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at the language right here I will say they did put the word seeks
⏹️ ▶️ John to bring attention to the underlying content fails, but it seeks to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so the way to use it, I’m not saying it’s, it’s a total design failure. What I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am saying is it shouldn’t be used with arbitrary, with arbitrary content scrolling behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s almost entirely how they’re using it. So there are ways to use it. Like for instance, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they show the controls over a video, it’s playing and those controls are made of glass in that context, that’ll work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. If you, if you have reasonable control over the content and you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that the content behind this will consistently be like either light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or dark and so it’ll be fine, it won’t be doing that transition over and over again then that’s fine too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But where you can’t really responsibly use it is where you don’t control the content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it might frequently go between light and dark as people are using it and then it’s just a distraction. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that this can’t be used well it’s that in some cases it’s not being used well but it can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they would just say this is the coolest way a button can look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And use it in these contexts and not in these contexts. That’s fine. So I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be a learning process. Like they really have gone over the top of this because they think it looks cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does look cool in certain contexts. So there are uses for it. They just have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reign it in a little bit with exactly how and where they’re using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but on this topic, I think I said this last week as well. I give them a wide latitude to define
⏹️ ▶️ John a new look for differentiation purposes. That’s a more boring way
⏹️ ▶️ John of your, to say the same thing as you’re saying, oh, they like it because it looks cool. Differentiating their products so that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone knows when they’re looking at an iPhone is actually an important thing that they should be doing. Like with phones looking
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more similar, mostly because everybody copied Apple’s iOS 7 thing. But anyway, like it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John for everyone’s in a while with Apple to make a big change just so when you see someone with the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll know it’s an iPhone. And it’s getting harder because like the notch is getting smaller and phones all look
⏹️ ▶️ John the same from the back and the front and everyone’s got cases on them. How can I tell it’s an iPhone? So I give them a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of leeway. I understand that’s an important thing for them to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I also understand that they think this looks good. I don’t personally agree with them that much,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever, it’s subjective. You know, it’s an aesthetic thing. You either like to look or you don’t. The usability
⏹️ ▶️ John problems that come with this particular choice are harder for me to forgive them for,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is balanced by those other things. And so, and having, you know, having lived with
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, uh, 26 for the past week, I will say that at
⏹️ ▶️ John least on Mac OS, it’s not the end of the world using it. Like there are lots of things that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John pick apart if I was writing a review of it that are, that have bad usability and are ugly. And I don’t like, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John I can go through the list of them, but when you’re using it, it doesn’t feel like, Oh, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even use my computer anymore. It’s terrible. You get used to it real fast. Like I said last week. And like you just said, now it
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately makes all the old stuff look old. Like it does all the things a redesign has to in that way. It’s just a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are some minor things that we will now walk through, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, for what it’s worth, again, I’m primarily using this on iPad. I would almost go so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as to say pretty much exclusively using this on iPad because I very rarely touch this VM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I definitely agree that it’s got problems. And the flashing of like toolbars and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco was describing is one of the bigger ones, for sure. I could not agree with you, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that is very distracting, very disruptive, and just not dialed in yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I don’t think you can dial that in because you have to invert, otherwise it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John become unreadable. You can’t have black text on a clear button with a black background behind
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You have to invert. So what does dialing in even constitute? I think there’s just no way around
⏹️ ▶️ John that other than what Marco said, which is, hey, don’t let arbitrary content scroll behind floating glass stuff, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna happen based on the Apple’s own apps that they’ve designed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing they could try, I mean I’m sure they did try this, but one of the things that makes that transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so jarring, as I mentioned earlier, is that it actually happens shortly after the content under it changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they actually did a line by line, like if you could, if it was halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the button and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John top half of the button was light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if they actually did it so it perfectly matched the content. Would that help or be even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse? I think it would be less jarring Because the way it pops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John scrolling quickly, that’s very distracting. I think it crossfades now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the crossfade actually softens it a little bit. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole problem is that it goes slower than the content. And that is jarring, because it’s like, you’re scrolling and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it pops into its own new version. So I think that could be made better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they really want to do that. But that’s, look, the computer industry, as mentioned last episode, has been trying to design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent and translucent interfaces forever because they look cool in marketing shots. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really difficult to design with that in a UI because of problems like this. It’s not that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t ever work or can work in no context. It can work in lots of contexts. I know it does look cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it can’t work in all contexts. And I think what we are seeing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple tried to do this with Safari a few years ago too. Safari on the Mac, by the way, I think is unusable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, because now the tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bar- We’ll get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ll get to it. Anyways, but like this, having a translucent button design, Again, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can work. It will work in lots of ways. Where Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it now, I think it actually belongs in like 75% of the places they’re actually using
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, like on that factor, we’ve talked about so many past shows, how much Apple has worked to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of translucent UI that works on arbitrary backgrounds. I think that they basically reached
⏹️ ▶️ John the pinnacle of usability in the previous OSs. In particular, if you look at like your
⏹️ ▶️ John current version of tvOS, the way the controls work on tvOS, on any background, pause any show
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Apple native player, any show on any frame, that like scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ John bar always looks legible and good because it is extremely frosted,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, extremely frosted, extremely smeared. There’s no way you’re seeing like the contours
⏹️ ▶️ John of letters or sharp edges between things, they just smear it. And they have the ability to do that in lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of places in the OS. That look, I mean, you could argue It’s not really transparent. It’s just kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John accepting colors from the background. But I think they basically cracked this problem. Like current Apple TV interface
⏹️ ▶️ John does a translucent, let’s say, controls on arbitrary background without looking bad
⏹️ ▶️ John and without flashing. But it’s not liquid glass. So, and it’s not the new look. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also to be clear, liquid glass, people use this term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about multiple different things. Some people, many people using this term we’re talking about the entire UI redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not how Apple’s using that term. Apple using the term specifically about the very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco material buttons. The part we’re talking about now. Yes, but also there’s other aspects to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liquid glass. There’s like the motion, the way things blob together and blob apart when buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are added and removed from groups.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Steve Troutman Smith has a little tidbit on that, by the way, that leads us right into the next item, which he said, it might be called
⏹️ ▶️ John liquid glass, but none of the liquid effects are present on macOS. There’s no merging or morphing, no meatballs,
⏹️ ▶️ John no squash and stretch of sidebars or slider knobs on Mac OS, it’s just glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But still like, you know, liquid glass is the term they’re using for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific style of button and all of its behaviors. Now, you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the previous, that kind of, you know, the outgoing administration here, there was a lot of use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of heavily frosted, they called it material, but it was basically, you know, heavily frosted glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that takes care of a lot of these design challenges because of things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have much more control over the background contrast and vibrance of the colors. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you don’t have to like dynamically invert the colors of the text to make it legible on top of that kind of material.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I think they will probably end up doing, and I don’t think this will make it for this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is 26. Like I think iOS 26, the design is effectively locked. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to go back on most of this. But I think in future OS is I think they will start to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more frosting of the glass because you don’t need a ton of frosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve a lot of these problems very quickly. So I think that’s what we’re going to start seeing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, milk glass or we know whatever. Wow, but you know, just get get a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of frosting in there and you solve a lot of these problems. But I think this is just going to be a really extreme year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first where you know we’re going see a lot of clear stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so weird that all the WBC advertisement, like the 25 and the WBC 25 logo was super
⏹️ ▶️ John frosted. All that class was so frosted, but in the last not so frosted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but I feel like we got sidetracked. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I know. For what it’s worth, I really do think my initial reaction is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my reaction in that it needs to be dialed in and whether or not it can be we’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussed, we don’t need to rehash. But I really do think it looks really good and using it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less so on the Mac because I’m not using the Mac or I’m not using Tahoe that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when I go from my iPad even to my phone running 18, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older. And this is what Marco had said. It doesn’t feel as new and as fresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really do like the general idea that they’re going for. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs to be tweaked. The legibility ain’t stellar. But But I really do think this looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good. And I hope and believe that over time, Apple will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of a better grip about it. Like I’ve got to imagine that Control Center, which I’ve only seen a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshots of, but Control Center on iOS is a disaster. And I have to imagine that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not the final form of Control Center. You know, I have to believe that they’re gonna tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that quite a bit, especially since, you know, I think that from all the guidance that I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the couple of sessions I’ve been able to watch about this, they say never put glass over glass. I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that was said on a few different occasions, that you should never put glass over glass. And Control Center is glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of glass on top of glass on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John top of glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it depends on what’s in the background. But the main problem with Control Center is that it’s a little bit too transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you have just a photo behind it, you see too much of it through Control Center, so they need to dial that in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I really think we’re going to end up in a good spot. I really, truly do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it may suck a lot for iOS developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have run a call sheet in the simulator in 26, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it definitely needs work, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that I went, ugh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not that bad. I need to tweak it some, but I do think with the exception of my bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search bar, everything else actually looks pretty good as is. And I think that’s very much because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not using a lot of custom stuff all over the place. So I’m hopeful, and maybe I’m just ignorant, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopeful that it won’t be too terribly bad. And I genuinely think, again, that this is going to end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in a real good spot come September. And if it isn’t perfect, which it might not be, I think it’ll be a heck of a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than it is now. All right, moving on with our show-o follow-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s talk about Liquid Glass as a platform. Oh, I guess we already covered this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John huh? No, we didn’t. This is the new items here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Liquid Glass as a platform differentiator. And Dave Wood says, it has begun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s a liquid glass clone in Flutter. And we will put a link in the show notes. And if you’re wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s Flutter, well, Flutter is an open source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base. This is a Google thing, right, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mistaken? It
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t take long. Like, again, if you want to make something as a platform differentiator, let’s do this thing that is, like I said in
⏹️ ▶️ John the last episode, you know, a thing that is difficult for our competitors to do because they don’t control the hardware software
⏹️ ▶️ John stack to the degree that Apple does. But you can bet people can try to copy it. So here you go. This is for making cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. So if you want to make one that has liquid glass everywhere, you could potentially use Flutter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Francisco Tomalski writes, so much for liquid glass being some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of native differentiator that’s going to be prohibitively difficult to copy on the web. To be clear, I don’t think you should use this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s bad enough that we’re going to make native UIs look like smudged lipstick. I don’t look forward to the entirety of the web looking that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. And then this is, I guess, a component for React, which runs a lot of websites and some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native stuff, called Fluid Glass, which you can use in your React projects.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get ready for liquid glass on the web. Once Apple starts a trend, everyone’s going to follow
macOS Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about Tahoe specifically. And I’m happy to report John Syracuse, so that your dreams have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come true. Whimsy is back,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of. Well, you know, I just wanted to point out, like this wasn’t one of the one of the big thrusts of the new design is like everything’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be whimsical. Not really. But in Mac OS, there’s a couple of areas where whimsy is
⏹️ ▶️ John still there or has been added in this case. This is a minimal nerd pointing out that the drag and drop folder
⏹️ ▶️ John animation in Tahoe is fun when you drag something onto a folder in the finder, it opens up and then closes and
⏹️ ▶️ John accepts your stuff. It actually changes the icon for empty folders versus full folders, I believe, where the full
⏹️ ▶️ John ones have a visible paper and the empty ones don’t. That’s fun. That’s cute. I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the colors on folders are nice. So I figured I would start with something nice about Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you were supposed to do all the bad things first and then you end with the nice things so everyone feels
⏹️ ▶️ John better. You do the sandwich. This is a very thin bread on a very stout poop sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, let’s talk about poop then. Let’s move on to Squircle Jail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long writes, yes, the radius of the squircle has changed. The default app icon size is now 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by 64, which is nice, with a corresponding radius of 16.5. Here’s the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they put a little image in their tweet or whatever it was. Maybe Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will make this chapter, or maybe not. We’ll see. But you can see that the edges are just ever so slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re more rounded than they were before. They’re pointier. And surprisingly to me, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John noticed this. like going back and forth between the OSs, the new Squircle is a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John baby rounded than the old one was. I think this is across all OSs. Certainly it’s true on MacOS, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of this design is the same everywhere, except for Vision OS. So there you go. It doesn’t look like they changed
⏹️ ▶️ John the Squircle, but they totally did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then in session 220, say hello to the new look of app icons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talk a little bit more about the changed Squircle. Quoting from that session, for existing Mac icons that are similarly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shaped as our rounded rectangle, They automatically get masked or extended to fit into the template
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while receiving the new material appearance without lifting a finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is pretty weird choice on their part. So what it means is if you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John an existing squircle icon, which they detect somehow because they said they will
⏹️ ▶️ John extend it into the area. So it doesn’t even have to be a perfect squircle, just has to be roughly a squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but if you have a, like a legit exact Apple squircle, like my hyperspace icon, They will just
⏹️ ▶️ John cut off the edges to trim off those parts. So it’s less pointy and more rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John They won’t put you in squircle jail. They’ll just trim off your edges, but also Apparently if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an icon that has like a solid color with sharp edges, they will apply a liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass effect to it So there’s some images here showing like a box icon Which is a blue squircle
⏹️ ▶️ John and white letters B O X and the new version applies a you know It chops the corners
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them more rounded and then applies a the the glass effect of the layered icons on
⏹️ ▶️ John the on the background Of the squircle so it’s got highlights and fuzz and everything and also on the letters on the inside of it
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not an icon that has changed the same icon in the same app that existed yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ John You install tile all of a sudden the OS changes your icon to look like this, which I think is wild I was
⏹️ ▶️ John afraid that it was gonna like start changing like my flying like hard drive spaceship on hyperspace, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John it leaves it alone I don’t think it’s messing with anything. It does add the specular highlight around my thing
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s that’s weird. It is a reason for even if you have a squircle Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS icon It’s a reason for you to make a new one with the new design Maybe we’ll talk about that in
⏹️ ▶️ John a future show or later because there’s a whole bunch to happen to do with icons But just because so you have
⏹️ ▶️ John total control over it So the OS doesn’t like try to do something smart and apply a look to your icon
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t think anybody wants that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then apparently you can jailbreak your Squircle. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Simon Stavring writes, you can copy or paste a custom icon in the Finder to break out of Squircle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jail. Or you can crack open the.app package, find the.icns file, and drag it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto the icon in the Get Info window. And there’s video and instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their website that you can check out. Again, it will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the squircle jail we’re talking about again is when you have an icon that that Tahoe thinks is not
⏹️ ▶️ John squircle enough And they say you’re on to squircle jail So they take your icon of whatever shape it was They shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they put it inside Their own squircle that they apply to your icon and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John awful because your icon is shrunken Inside like this gray squircle depending on what’s behind it. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John a frosted glass thing Jailbreaking is getting your icon out of that gray squircle that it
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in because it looks terrible. Like if you open your applications folder in Tahoe, you’ll immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John notice, Oh, I see all the icons that are now in squircle Joe, because they weren’t sufficiently squircle shaped.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what this is saying is if you want to, if you want to get those icons out of the squircle and get them back to the way they were
⏹️ ▶️ John without, you know, the developer doing anything, you can just use a custom icon in Mac OS, you and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, you can add a custom icons, essentially anything, hard drives, applications, folders, anything you want. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s instructions for doing that that will link this is an opportunity for or someone to make a third party app that does that. There are multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John existing third party apps that I can never remember the names of, sorry. They do this already, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with doing a custom icon is like, well, what about when the app auto updates or something? Now the icon is back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the, what it was before. So you have to have something sort of watching in the background, watching to see your apps get updated and
⏹️ ▶️ John reapplying the custom icon. I use, what do I use? I can never remember the name of this. I use
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things to give me a custom BB edit icon. I don’t remember the name of it. There’s at least two apps that do it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have them both installed. But anyway, that is your squirrel jailbreak. Because when you upgrade to Tahoe, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna feel sad when you look in your dock and you see what was formerly an icon that you really liked, shrunken and inside
⏹️ ▶️ John a gray squirrel jail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then speaking of rounded corners from session 310,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build an AppKit app with the new design. And they show a toolbar window, compact toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window and title bar window.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this, I was trying to figure this out as I was updating my Mac apps. I’m like, well, I see a lot of new
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac apps on Tahoe and a lot of things in the demos, they have really rounded corners, but
⏹️ ▶️ John my app doesn’t have really rounded corners. What’s the deal there? Here’s the deal, at least in Tahoe beta one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The corner radius of windows in Mac OS changes depending on
⏹️ ▶️ John whether there’s a toolbar visible in the window and how big the toolbar is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three different corner radii. There’s the regular one that we see on all windows right now in Sequoia.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s if you have no toolbar. Then there’s the compact toolbar window, which has a slightly more rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And then there’s the full-size toolbar window that has a much more rounded one. And yes, when you hide
⏹️ ▶️ John and show the toolbar in a window, it changes the corner radius of all the corners on the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have fun doing layout in that kind of environment, but that is the truth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds fun. I am glad I am not a Mac OS developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s weird. Like, as if they’re gonna go rounded corner everywhere, shouldn’t every window be like that? But they’re trying to do with the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John concentricity thing and having the corner radiuses match. And it’s just, it’s very upsetting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like I said, it’s a big difference. It’s from the normal one at 16 point radius to the big one at 26. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then we’ve got some chonky stoplights. Avi Drissman writes, Mac OS 26 has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chonk window control buttons. Existing apps retain their small buttons when run on 26.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is gated on the SDK that you link. When you link the Mac OS 26 SDK, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey automatically get the chonk buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s right. It might just be the matter of having the toolbar visible, like I said before. This, I don’t mind
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. Like Apple has long since stopped being like, you know, religiously consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John about the size and position of window widgets, let’s say on Mac OS. And I think that’s fine. It’s not like people are confused by
⏹️ ▶️ John what they are. It’s the stoplight widgets, if they’re a slightly different size. Even for a while on iTunes, they were vertical.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember that insanity? Like, I think this is just a,
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to the toolbar visibility, which is weird, But just so people are aware, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not seeing things, your stoplight widgets are changing size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. This apparently continues Evie Drissmann. This is courtesy of NS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey titled frame, size of title bar buttons. Put that in the show notes. If you fiddle with window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control buttons, this implementation is a good starting point for investigation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you could override these things and give you the big chunk buttons, even if you don’t have a toolbar and do other weird things,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you’ll get that through the Mac App Store or not is questionable, but you don’t have to on the Mac, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey John, it’s almost nine o’clock. Do you know where your title bar is?
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the side effects of the new design is that they’ve removed a lot of stuff. There’s not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John lines or dividing lines between things, things that used to be shades of gray are now white.
⏹️ ▶️ John A funny slash head smackingly upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ John consequence of that is if you make a window in the Finder and you put that window into icon view
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just have one icon in it, It looks like a rendering error. You get a rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle that is white, then you have the three stoplight buttons, then you’ve got the icon
⏹️ ▶️ John and name of the folder, which are left aligned, which we’ll get to in a second, and then you have the window content. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. When I look at this window, I think I should be able to drag it from anywhere because it is an undifferentiated
⏹️ ▶️ John sea of white. Like it literally looks like the window has not finished drawing. We’ll put a link in this in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is unattractive, and it is upsetting from a usability standpoint, and I would never want to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to explain how to use a Mac by saying, oh, just grab the title bar. And they’d be like the title, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you doing? Cool. All right. The menu bar is sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of missing in so far as it is translucent where everything old is new again.
⏹️ ▶️ John not translucent. It is not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John it was there. No, it is not there. There is nothing. If you look at the dead center,
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle of your screen, you see your unadulterated desktop background. There’s nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, yes. but there’s still the bar in the upper left and all the little dinguses in the upper right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s words, file, edit, blah, blah, blah. Those words are there and so is the Apple logo. And
⏹️ ▶️ John right, your icons are there, but those icons are on top of your desktop background.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s no menu bar. There is no line.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no background. There is no translucent thing. There is just words
⏹️ ▶️ John and icons on your desktop background.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If like John, you are incapable of adapting, then there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John options. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just telling you what it is. Like it’s not the menu bar is the bar. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s why it’s called a bar. There is no more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bar because you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey said the bar
⏹️ ▶️ John is translucent. There is no translucent bar. There is no bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from here, but nevertheless, if you wanted to go back to the way it was before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to yesteryear, you can use Glassbar by Bart Reardon. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does not use this Glassbar app, does not use new glass material because it makes things look horrible. And there are rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bugs when you do things like use swipe gestures to switch spaces or bring up mission control. Although that could just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a beta one problem. I’m sorry, Bart was writing all this and Bart continues. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a new build soon and maybe I can tinker properly with GlassFX and user settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one problem with GlassBar on these early versions I noticed is that when you click on a menu like file or edit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it draws like a capsule around the menu that you’ve clicked on. But with at least GlassBar, when you click on the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu, if it’s drawing that capsule, you can’t really see it because I don’t know if it draws under the bar
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So it’s not exactly perfect, but hey, it’s beta one and people just working on these utilities. And the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to mention is boring old menu bar from the big Sur days, back when they changed the menu bar in big Sur and people didn’t like it. What if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want an opaque white menu bar? Boring old menu bar would do that for you. I’m assuming if that app is still
⏹️ ▶️ John actively developed, they’ll also update it for the new OS. Third party opportunities for people who want an opaque
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar. And to be clear, I don’t, it’s fine. I, like I said, it’s the Naked Robotic Menu Bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you desperately want a opaque white menu bar, you can put a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar size white strip at the top of your desktop background, done. You got it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it literally just shows your desktop background. There is no bar. So if you want a bar, just draw it on your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. You can also do boring old menu bar from the big Surdays. Again, we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. We are late in the episode going to talk about some of our favorite things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I was using Tahoe for more than a minute, I’m sure this would be one of my favorite things. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left aligned text in dialogues. I feel like Marco was the one of the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us that complained the most about this, but he is right to complain or was right to complain in the past because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the last year or two, maybe even more
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it was since Big Sur, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the last several years, dialogue boxes had their texts center aligned, which was barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ John landscape to portrait. So, and then also in the transition from landscape to portrait,
⏹️ ▶️ John they centered the text, which isn’t ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And not just the title text, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John text. I mean, you know this if you use a Mac, but you may be wondering why it’s weird and hard to read large amounts of text
⏹️ ▶️ John in these dialogues is because their portrait orientation and the text was centered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now it’s left aligned, which I’m very excited about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, the icon is also left aligned and it looks awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if only they could maybe like, maybe they could make more room by moving the icon to the left of the text.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they can just go back. Like, here’s the thing about text. Like when they were landscape, they
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t the width of your screen, right? you can just make a landscape oriented dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac OS the optimal reading width for how long lines
⏹️ ▶️ John should be. And the answer is not two inches or whatever the hell the default is in Mac. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac screens are all wider than they are tall unless you have your thing rotated in portrait or whatever. Maybe that’s what it should do. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a portrait orientation screen, your thing should be, I don’t, like just go back to the horizontal things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m glad they left aligned it, it’s better. The left aligned icons are terrible. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, am I just, I had to see it for myself. So I just centered the icon. It looks so much better with the centered icon, but yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was going the right path. You know, Mac OS dialogs look really good back when they were landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John and the icon was on the left, but, you know, I guess this is better for future touch Macs because you make
⏹️ ▶️ John the buttons bigger by stacking them vertically and all that stuff. So I’ll let them have another few years of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least they left aligned the text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally, left aligned text and title bars.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is awful. This needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be changed. Again, it looks like a rendering error. About the finder is a great, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just looks bad. It’s the title bar. The window widgets are on the left.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have something on the right if you want, like a purple thing to make Steve Jobs happy for single window mode, but the title
⏹️ ▶️ John should be in the center of the title bar. It doesn’t look good. It’s not about tradition. Like, I don’t care. I’m not married
⏹️ ▶️ John to any particular thing about old classic Mac OS. It just looks
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you’re not. Like, no, but look at the two things I put in the show notes here and tell me that setting aside the
⏹️ ▶️ John awful icon which we’ll get to in a little bit Tell me it doesn’t look like there’s an error in this window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad because everything else in the window is centered
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and Even in even in like other, you know, like the the dialogues or whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ John where the text is left justified But the block of text is still centered in the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still like a visible center it like the buttons are along a central axis The
⏹️ ▶️ John left align titles. I don’t like I don’t even see how that’s part of the design language which has nothing to do with anything
⏹️ ▶️ John except for just ruining something that didn’t have a problem. Don’t like it. Easy to change,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to fix. I should really file a bug in it. And by the way, there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned is I have been filing feedbacks, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Petty feedbacks,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the finder icon that I’m about to get to and actual bugs and just everything because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing, they’re like, oh, well, you know, file your bugs, get them, blah, blah, blah. Like, oh, they might change it in response to feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John But how are they gonna hear that feedback? If somebody thinks that the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John in dialogue should be centered, they need like an official record of that, so I’m putting these dinky little official records,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they don’t think I’m abusing the system to just say, I don’t like it, put it back in the middle and they can ignore it or they can
⏹️ ▶️ John file it as a dupe and count it as a vote or whatever, but I want there to be official communication to say I personally
⏹️ ▶️ John told Apple that I don’t like this, they can ignore my feedback or they can count it up and see how many other people
⏹️ ▶️ John feel the same way as I do because they have to decide in the end which things should be tweaked, what things should we change about the design,
⏹️ ▶️ John how far should we tone back the transparency, and how are they going to do that without data, and so the feedbacks of the data.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m doing my part, as they say in Starship Troopers, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so speaking of things that’ll make John upset, let’s talk finder icons. And if you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the finder icon, and the way it exists today is at a glance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like a happy face looking directly at you. You’re standing right in front of that face. And the left-hand side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is blue. The right-hand side is like a gray, if you will. And then if you look closer at the right-hand side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, that’s actually another face in profile. And so it’s kind of two faces in one. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since always, the Finder icon had the left-hand side as blue, and the right-hand side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like a grayish. And apparently in Tahoe, Apple decided, eh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposite day. And so the gray is on the left-hand side, and the blue is on the right-hand side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this I find a little unnerving, but I’m not that particularly offended by it. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might be the only one, because especially all the old Mac nerds are very upset. So John, the king of all the old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerds, tell us about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is not the original Finder, and this is the quote unquote new Finder icon. Rolled out, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS 7.6. Don’t quote me on that. Anyway, yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John new. It’s not so much that I’m married to the old icon as that I think the new one is ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they didn’t just swap the colors. The thing that offends me the most about the new icon is the border.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the fact that like the profile thing doesn’t go edge to edge, because that kind of kills the whole dividing line. like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, I like the face on, face in profile, face head on, the border I hate the most. That,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it makes it ugly to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, they did change the shape of like the nose and the dividing line, it’s more straight than it was curved, and I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a downgrade. I don’t think it looks as friendly and as nice. And the thing is, as Steven Hackett pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out, because he, you know, as he says, for kicks, I ran the current Finder icon through Apple’s new icon composer app, and I think it looks pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good with liquid glass, even with the clear and tinted modes. He just took the existing Finder icon and liquid glassified it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it fits in perfectly with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco aesthetic. Like it already looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a round friendly thing with like panes of layer, like it was already right there and
⏹️ ▶️ John they had to go and make it ugly. So I literally follow the feedback that says the new Finder icon is ugly, change it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the two changes I suggested making were get rid of the border and
⏹️ ▶️ John swap the colors back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument. And Michael Flair also put in his own take on it. And then a friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D Griffin Jones writes, I created this icon in literally 15 minutes with Pixelmator Pro and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own icon composer. Apple could very easily keep the icon’s historical appearance without compromising the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey liquid glass aesthetic by just flipping the color palette. But that one’s still ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got the border.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s less ugly than the current one, but yes, I concur that the border does kind of ruin the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole effect. Speaking of icons, let’s talk about icons next to menu items. And for context,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Tahoe, pretty much every menu item, I mean, not literally everyone, but darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near every menu item, like looking at Finder as an example, has an icon next to it, which is a very big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey departure from most Mac apps up until now. So Stefan Hebel writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Using Icons in Menus in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 2005 to 2009, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. include them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons or poorly designed ones can appear cluttered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be hard to read. Then in Apple’s Hig today, quote, a menu items label describes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it does may include a symbol if it helps to clarify meaning.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I thought I’d find a stronger statement in today’s Hig saying you should put icons
⏹️ ▶️ John next to most of your menus. There’s a WWDC session about it where they emphasize like don’t put one next to every menu. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have five copy options, maybe just put it next to the first one because they’re all grouped together. Like they have these weird
⏹️ ▶️ John Guidelines where they’re trying to say where you should put icons, but the upshot is what you just said Casey Way more menu
⏹️ ▶️ John items have icons next to the menu item name So like if you go into the file menu now It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John file open new Open will have an icon next to it to the left of the O new will have an icon next to the left
⏹️ ▶️ John of the N icons and menus are everywhere and this is for platform you never already
⏹️ ▶️ John because my Impression is that this is a more common practice on iOS and iPad OS and
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s going to be common on the Mac the old guidelines Saying don’t do this
⏹️ ▶️ John because it can appear cluttered and hard to read I think that’s kind of still true But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John what the key point is the if it includes too many icons in parentheses or poorly designed
⏹️ ▶️ John ones Well now we have SF symbols And so you don’t have to worry about your poorly designed icons junking
⏹️ ▶️ John up the menus for example Like just use ours. We made a bazillion of them. Surely you can find one and if you can’t just leave it off
⏹️ ▶️ John so the guideline is not Tahoe icons next to every single menu item, but the the the
⏹️ ▶️ John de facto rule seems to be Tahoe icons next to a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of menu items. And I’m not sure where I fall down on it. It’s, you know, in some ways, it’s nice to have another
⏹️ ▶️ John differentiator to pick out the menu item you want. So you don’t have to read like it’s the purpose of icons. On the other
⏹️ ▶️ John hand, they are kind of small, and it does look kind of busy. So I could go either way on this. I’m actually debating
⏹️ ▶️ John whether I should add icons to my menus, not that I have that many of them. Because I’m like, do I want to do that? And Mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John just comes down to how hard is it to conditionalize this based on the OS because you shouldn’t have them in the old OS but you should
⏹️ ▶️ John have them in the new one. So I’m still thinking about it, but just FYI, Apple has done a pretty, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a 180 on icons next to menu items.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have a lot more experience with this both in the past and the present, but I think I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, sometimes it does add value. They do what icons do, make you not have to read. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Tahoe tabs contrast. Tell me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I noticed this in terminal because hey, it’s just a plain window and I make tabs in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The tabs, I think across all the OSs, basically don’t look like tabs anymore. They look like a big capsule-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John channel with a slightly brighter capsule-shaped thing for the active tab.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I noticed this when I was running it on my M1 MacBook Air, which doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have, let’s say, the best screen. Certainly it’s not Pro Display XDR quality. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I opened Terminal and opened a bunch of tabs, I looked at it, I realized, This screen’s
⏹️ ▶️ John color rendition is not good enough to differentiate between an active
⏹️ ▶️ John tab and an inactive tab. The colors are so close to each other, the screen just isn’t good enough. You
⏹️ ▶️ John see a lot of this on crappy PC screens where there’ll be two colors, like, you know, gray and a slightly lighter
⏹️ ▶️ John gray, that will literally look like the same gray, so you can’t read the text, right? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ John display is just not good enough. It can’t make that subtle difference, especially at low brightness levels. It simply
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t differentiate the two colors. And I think that the M1 MacBook Air screen, at whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness I had it, with whatever lighting was in the room, could not differentiate active from an
⏹️ ▶️ John inactive tab. I’m not saying hard to read. I’m saying if you put money inside, I’ll give you $100
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can tell me which tab is active, I would do no better than chance. Maybe it’s because I’m old and my eyes are bad, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, wait, is this broken? I looked at my Pro Display XDR, I’m like, oh no, you can totally tell which one’s active. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is an OS with insufficient contrast. I don’t wanna have to increase contrast so I can tell which tab is active. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I should probably file a bug. I think it did a file a bug in this one. And I said, basically, I have your computer. I put your OS
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. I can’t see the active tab. I can see it fine in other OS’s. I can see it fine on my Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Up the contrast, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The arrow cursor has also changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we skipped over the other item there, which
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey might- Oh, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John The triple question mark. This is a chance for Marco to tell us what he thinks about Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Apple’s designers have tried multiple times in recent years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dynamically color Safari’s entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top bar, so the main top title bar, the buttons around it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the row of tabs, to dynamically color them based on the content of the website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below them. They are doing it again. This is possibly the most extreme version of this attempt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they have in beta one of Tahoe is the entire top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar switches between light and dark depending on, you know, similar to liquid glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussion or depending on the color of whatever is the top most content of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the website. So this could be like if the website has like a top black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigation strip and the rest of the page is white, black is what wins because it’s on top. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire tab bar turns black. All the tabs, the URL bar, everything turns black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you switch tabs or navigate to a different page with a different color scheme,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire bar switches between black and white mode. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, look, I’ll be honest, I don’t know how they’re getting away with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the biggest example to me that says they have no design filter whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The designers have taken over, there is no editor, there is no one in charge of product who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has enough power to override basic usability problems that designers are creating. If they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship this, I will switch to Chrome. It’s that bad. I can’t use it. It is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Safari on my laptop on Tahoe. It’s the most distracting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disorienting thing ever. If you ever navigate between web pages or switch between tabs, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think it’s a pretty common thing in a web browser. So literally, that is a deal breaker for me. If that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ships, I am off Safari. And it takes a lot for me to leave Safari, but that will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the screenshot I put in the show notes is something I grabbed on my screen because I honestly, not joking,
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly was going to file this as a drawing error. Like, oh, there’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of weird drawing errors in TOG because it’s first beta. I’m like, oh, this is a problem. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not correctly drawing something, but no, this is not an error. This is what it’s supposed to look like. If you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John can zoom in on that one. What happened is I was on the Apple developer site looking at a webpage. That’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I scrolled
⏹️ ▶️ John the page up a little bit. And then I looked into the toolbar, and the toolbar had
⏹️ ▶️ John this region of it that was showing, it helps that it was like, kind of like that pinkish color. If you know anything about graphics cards, you may be familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with a particular, like kind of like a magenta color that indicates bad graphics things going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. I don’t know if they use it as like the color of like, you know, no color. I don’t know. I don’t know the history behind
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but anyway, it was kind of like reddish pinkish, and like, oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of. I can tell you, so it was mainly used, It’s like pure magenta FF OO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FF. And the reason they would use that they would use that back, you know, I don’t know what they do now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would use that to indicate alpha transparency. Any pixel that was that color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bright pink would then be rendered in whatever the game engine was as transparent because they knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that color was so ugly. You would never use it for real in a
⏹️ ▶️ John texture. Apple, by the way, for that same purpose, use a like a beige,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you used to be able to set your desktop background to beige and then run a DVD and it would play on it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I saw this pink in the toolbar and I screenshotted it for an error, but then I looked a little closer and I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw, wait a second, if you can look above the address bar in the screenshot, can you read the text
⏹️ ▶️ John above there that says interface guideline fades out and then the, can you see the text above
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that? Item two, item seven? Item
⏹️ ▶️ John two or item seven, that’s part of the webpage. I scrolled the webpage and I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m seeing the thing that I, because Marco was talking about when you first load the page like whatever’s at the top influences the bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as you scroll a webpage, the webpage’s content goes up and behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire top bar in Safari, the tabs, the address bar, the toolbar, everything. And you see
⏹️ ▶️ John it through with a clarity that you can read text. And it looks terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s stupid and does not draw my attention to the content. It looks like a mistake, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like an error. Oh, it’s a mistake. Just make the toolbar opaque. Just make
⏹️ ▶️ John it opaque. It’s fine. We’ll still know it’s, ugh, it’s very upsetting. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, so with the new design language, they have introduced two different, what they call, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they call them border edge effects, something like that. And the idea, and you’ll see this all over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, you’ll see that as you scroll content in an app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a top or bottom bar, they will fade and blur the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top edge of the content. Obviously, they blur your content so you can focus more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your content. So they blur that top edge. And there’s a separate alternative rendering mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they use, and they give the example of a finder window that is a hard edge, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bar that is solid and has a
⏹️ ▶️ John border. And when your content scrolls under it, you no longer see it. Like say, a table view.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you scroll a table view, the table headers are opaque. And when you scroll the table,
⏹️ ▶️ John the content goes on. It’s fine, it’s just, I don’t know why we have to, I’m trying to describe a header,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah. Yes. Right, and so they have, like, they already have defined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a style that fixes this problem the way we’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed this problem, with a solid background and a border that controls go on so we can read
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you scroll, the whole point of a scrollable region is you can only see the portion that is
⏹️ ▶️ John within the scrollable region and the rest of it is not, and you can’t see it, but they’re like, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do have more window here. And I know there’s stuff in that window, like the address bar, the back button, the forward
⏹️ ▶️ John button, the window control widgets, all the tabs, but wouldn’t it be great if you could see the webpage through
⏹️ ▶️ John that? And the answer is no, it would not be great. Don’t do that, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the arrow cursor has also been updated. There are changes everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, changes everywhere. Nathan Minsoe Penneaux writes, this is the first time they’ve changed it since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS X itself, 24 years ago, dang.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And basically they made the, I don’t know, the point of the arrow a little chunkier, I would say, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the post part, for lack of a better term, a little shorter. I don’t know, how would you describe this, Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like in an illustrator program where you can say, how do you want, when the line
⏹️ ▶️ John changes direction, how do you want the end caps to be? And you can make them sharp or you can make them rounded. they made them all rounded.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the little tail is rounded, the little nubbins on the side of the arrow are rounded, the tip is less rounded than the other
⏹️ ▶️ John parts. But anyway, it’s more rounded. It’s more sort of friendly and rounded and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The hand cursor as well. We have gone from the Mickey Mouse hand or the Mickey Mouse glove with three vertical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines on it, which I can take or leave the lines, but I liked the general shape of the hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I even liked the little indentation to let you know it’s a glove. And now it’s like somebody just held up a hand
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t love it. Yeah, no, the new one is ugly. This is the case where the hand used to
⏹️ ▶️ John be more baby and now is more pointy and less organic looking. And I’m just assuming they changed all
⏹️ ▶️ John the cursors. I haven’t looked at them all yet, but when I first saw this hand cursor, because I was
⏹️ ▶️ John actually working on one of my apps and I wanted to show the hand cursor and I was like, wait, am I picking the wrong cursor?
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell is that? Nope, that’s what the hand looks like now. Not great, but we’ll live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Floating elements and compartmentalization. Tell me about this, please, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we just talked about it a little bit, like you’ll see it in Finder windows as well, and you’ll see it in the sidebars and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about this last week. They want controls to float over your content. This is one of the big concepts
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch the WWDC videos. They think that basically take a window on Mac OS, or anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John really, but take a window on Mac OS. Your content owns the whole window, top to bottom, left to right. But of course you need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. So those controls float on top of your content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may be thinking, well, if I have a sidebar, I don’t want the sidebar covering my content. shouldn’t the content
⏹️ ▶️ John start where the sidebar ends? But they’re so married to this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that rounded corner floating things are on top of your content that owns the whole window that they will go
⏹️ ▶️ John to ridiculous lengths to make this happen. One of the things they do, for instance, is like say you have
⏹️ ▶️ John like a photo viewer and of course you’re on the Mac and you have a photo that fills the entire window.
⏹️ ▶️ John Be like, well, now I want to have a sidebar in my photo viewer with a bunch of sidebar stuff in it. You’re like, but I don’t want the sidebar to cover
⏹️ ▶️ John the left two inches of my photo. Can’t I just have the photos start where the sidebar ends, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, but then you’re not following through on Allen Dye’s really strongly felt belief that your content
⏹️ ▶️ John should be behind the sidebar. So they say, how about we do this for you? How about we do
⏹️ ▶️ John the equivalent of a scroll edge effect, but instead of just blurring the edge of your photo, what we’ll do is we will mirror
⏹️ ▶️ John your photo to the left under the sidebar and then blur the mirrored portion.
⏹️ ▶️ John You see that sometimes when they take like a, you have a 16 by
⏹️ ▶️ John nine window, but you’re watching a four by three video and they mirror and blur the edges of the four by three
⏹️ ▶️ John to fill out the 16 by nine. Have you ever seen that? Yeah. Like that’s essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re doing with your content. And it’s really weird and distracting because you’re like, wait a second, is there some
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of my photo that I can’t see? To the left, the answer is no. It is just a blurred flipped version of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And its sole purpose is to make it look like your content goes all the way to the left edge,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does not because that would be insanity. And so now you can see the little edge
⏹️ ▶️ John of your content around the top left and bottom of the sidebar, and also of course through
⏹️ ▶️ John the sidebar, because why wouldn’t you want to see your mirrored, flipped, blurred content showing through your sidebar, making it less
⏹️ ▶️ John legible. And that continues up to toolbars. Toolbars look like a bunch of lozenges that are floating
⏹️ ▶️ John with huge drop shadows on top of your content. So in a Finder window, your content are like the
⏹️ ▶️ John icons of your items or list view or whatever, but you’ve got this toolbar with no dividing line, with just a bunch of floating
⏹️ ▶️ John things on top of it. And I believe it has the edge effect, like Marco said, the hard edge effect in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the sidebar, which is inset. So you’ve got this border, so it can show that it’s floating. They’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John married to this. And like, I see some value
⏹️ ▶️ John of like content, but then there’s a control layer above it in a 3D space with shadows, but their
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation of it sacrifices a lot of utility and readability for this
⏹️ ▶️ John metaphor that I feel like is not necessary. Like I don’t think there was anything particularly wrong with the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a toolbar on top, a sidebar on left, a bottom bar on the bottom, and they framed your content,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they were all in the same plane and your content didn’t go under them. But Apple says, no, content goes under everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we all float down here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If that’s a reference, I got nothing. Sure is. Of course it is. Mario Alberto Guzman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, when you try to create user interfaces where you don’t have distinct and hard separations for compartmentalization,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you end up with weird junk like this. Notice how the horizontal scroll bar is above the now playing controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is again one of those things you just need to see to believe. I will tell you one more time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that this whole new design system in Liquid Glass, I think it’s gonna work. I really do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But wow, this is bad. Particularly that scroll bar is not
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s music app, by the way. This is not a third-party app. This is Apple’s music app and they’ve decided that the controls should be on
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom in a floating lozenge. but of course, if the content area scrolls horizontally, where are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the scroll bar? They put it on top of it because they want to show the content going underneath the scrolling thing. I bet they can
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this just by not ever allowing it to have a horizontal scroll bar, but it is kind of a table view because that’s how music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or just put the scroll bar below the lozenge, right? What’s wrong with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, but like, how would you manipulate that? And would you have to leave, like, would it be on top of the lozenge? They’re very
⏹️ ▶️ John insistent that the controls float on top of everything. So like, especially if it’s one of those scroll thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John that appears and disappears. Apple’s made these problems themselves. I want to see how they solve them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’re problems of their own invention. Like there was nothing wrong with the idea of a opaque toolbar or
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebar or bottom bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Chotton Smith writes, liquid glass tells us to put a bunch of stuff in a glass layer above the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it doesn’t tell us why. Why are the window traffic lights housed in the sidebar on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, or on top of the sidebar on iPad, or in line with the window content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for apps without a sidebar. It’s very fickle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so like I said, I think it’s still clear, no one’s confused about what the window widgets are, but layering
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, it’s not coherent at all. Like, should they be floating on top or should they not be? Should they
⏹️ ▶️ John be part of the window or should they be part of the sidebar? Like, as someone pointed out, it’s almost like the close
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets are saying, hit this red button to close the sidebar because they’re so clearly part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the sidebar unless they’re not and they’re in the window. It’s, I don’t think it’s that confusing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s, first of all, it’s, I don’t see the benefit in these five different modes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I say, maybe the iPad should look different than the Mac, whatever. Like I allow it to do that. But even within the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the sidebar should be a thing that floats on top of stuff. Lots of people would do alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John designs of like, how about we just end the window there and have the sidebar come out of the window kind of like a drawer and a real
⏹️ ▶️ John throwback. And people did mock-ups of that, it looked pretty cool. But yeah, like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say their idea of controls flood on top of your content is a bad idea because it’s not inherently
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but it causes a lot of problems for them that they have not shown that they have solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John for, even in their own apps, which is not encouraging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because it’s, again, like these are all, like you can make a design language that is full of transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and shadows and edge to edge content and all that, but those are hard to design around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they haven’t, largely. Like they’ve just been like, all right, we’re just gonna do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, that’s not a great design in every case. It takes some work, it takes some self-control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gonna take a lot of revision.
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes redesigning apps that they haven’t touched in forever. So now guess what, Apple? You have to go and touch those
⏹️ ▶️ John apps unless they’re just gonna be embarrassing if you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they don’t seem to either agree or care. Because yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John embarrassing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s beta one. It’s beta one. I’ll give them some time to update their apps. But like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be, because as you get farther away from the beaten path like the apps that Apple ships, you can just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna get touched and they’re just gonna look how they look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, I think we talked last week, at least briefly, about multiple clipboards and clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey managers and things like that in macOS. And a friend of the show, Steven Robles, writes, clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history is on an eight-hour cycle, so there’s no way to keep the past 100 clippings like in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Payspot. After eight hours, a clipping is removed. And you can find more in one of Steven’s many videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but specifically one about this. So we can check
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I mean, there’s still definitely a place for third party clipboard managers having you I was forcing myself to use the Tahoe clipboard manager
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of installing pastebot Uh, and I was shocked So maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked that
⏹️ ▶️ John their eight hour cycle and the number of clippings They save is way too low for my use very
⏹️ ▶️ John often. I would go in there and be like, that’s it That’s all where did my oh eight hour cycle? I guess that was yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ John My clipboard history and pay I forget what I have it set to I think I have it maybe 500 or a thousand and
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside how much more efficient the keyboard shortcuts are for Payspot, like again, I love that it is built
⏹️ ▶️ John in and I will use it on everybody else’s Mac once it gets activated, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m definitely still gonna use Payspot, but be aware Apple, I mean, I’m assuming for privacy reasons, is being very conservative
⏹️ ▶️ John for their implementation. It is simple, it is as far as I know, unadjustable, unless there’s a P-list thing. After eight hours,
⏹️ ▶️ John things are gone and I think the list is like 20 to 50 items or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very limited, which I think is reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rosetta is the, or I guess Rosetta 2, strictly speaking, is the mechanism by which you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run something compiled for Intel on Apple Silicon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ars Technica has an article about the future of Rosetta. And it reads, in part, macOS Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey require an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after it is replaced with Mac OS 27. Apple’s also planning changes to Rosetta 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Intel to ARM app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general purpose app translation tool in both Mac OS 26 and Mac OS 27.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But after Mac OS 27, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically older games that rely on Intel specific libraries, but are no longer being actively maintained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by their developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at this, Apple giving more roadmaps. This is like a three-year roadmap, and unfortunately this roadmap news
⏹️ ▶️ John is not great. What they’re saying is, so forget about Intel Macs, all right, so they’ll just, they’re into the dustbin of history,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You have an Apple Silicon Mac, right? But what if you still have some x86
⏹️ ▶️ John executable somewhere on your Mac? And you don’t even, you might not even know that it’s x86, because it just runs so fine, Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ John is beautiful and fast and transparent, and Apple Silicon Macs are fast. You probably don’t even know that one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that you use every day is actually not natively compiled for Apple Silicon. What they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying is that after Mac OS 26, that game might not, that game, that
⏹️ ▶️ John app might not launch, but not because they’ll be removing Rosetta from Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will still be there, but it will only be for specific
⏹️ ▶️ John older games that use Intel that the developer’s never gonna update. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this some kind of like special list that can you get your app on a list? It’s like, I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like updating my app. I’m never gonna update it for Apple Silicon, but people still like playing my game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get on the include list that says, oh yeah, Rosetta will run with you? Like, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, I don’t really understand the idea of sunsetting Rosetta. Just leave it there. Leave it there
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. Like, is it that big or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that cumbersome?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, do they think that removing Rosetta is what it takes to get people to update for Apple Silicon?
⏹️ ▶️ John Look, if people haven’t updated their apps for Apple Silicon by now, they’re never gonna do it. Any app. So just leave Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ John there for those apps and like, I don’t know, remove it 10 years from now or something. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be there forever, but this seems like a short horizon. And again, this affects
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon Macs. It does not affect Intel Macs. This is all about Apple Silicon Macs that are currently running
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are x86. I just thought of it today when I installed like a command line tool and I didn’t want to bother building it. So I just downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John a binary because it was just one file, right? And I downloaded the things they offered. They offered
⏹️ ▶️ John a x86 download. And an arm download and across them on my Intel Mac Pro. So I downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John the x86 download and I realized, oh, I have to remember that that one command line tool
⏹️ ▶️ John is x86 because in Mac OS 27, it will stop running. Now I have to go back
⏹️ ▶️ John and re-download the arm version of it. This seems really weird to me. And the exception for game
⏹️ ▶️ John seems even weirder. So we’ll see if this changes before Mac OS 27, but be aware, this is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A new thing is a new disk image format, ASIF or Apple Sparse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Image Format. These files transfer more efficiently between hosts or disks because their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intrinsic structure doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities. The size of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ASIF file takes on in the file system is proportional to the actual data stored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the disk image, which is pretty neat. And from the aforementioned Eclectic Light Company,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a whole write-up about this. ASIF images are sparse files in APFS and are flagged as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such. John, what is a sparse file?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like if you wanted to make like a hundred gigabyte but you put one letter in it, it wouldn’t take 100 gigs on disk, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would take one letter. But if you looked at the file size, it’d be like, oh yeah, this is totally 100 gig file. But if you counted
⏹️ ▶️ John the contents, it would show you 100 gigs of like zeros plus that one little letter you put in there. But in the file system,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a sparse file. You don’t need to populate all that empty space. You just need to put in the data that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Sparse files are very common feature in most file systems and APFS has it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe HFS Plus did too, but don’t quote me on that. But anyway, yeah, that’s… So the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with disk images is always like, oh, I’m gonna make a file on disk that like, when you double click it, it mounts as
⏹️ ▶️ John a volume. But you always start those things off if you make a new one, they start as empty. And one way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it is, okay, you make a 500 meg disk image, I put a 500 meg file on your disk, but sparse files, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, why don’t we just make that take up no space because there’s nothing in it yet. And there are various approaches
⏹️ ▶️ John to doing that with like, okay, well, this actually could be a directory with a bunch of little Stripe files
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like parts of the disk. So as you write data to the disk, we write more and more of those files and each one of those files is like 16
⏹️ ▶️ John megs or something. So it’s a directory full of 16 meg files. And as you fill the disk, more 16 meg files fill
⏹️ ▶️ John up. And there’s been so many different disk image formats across the history
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s OS. I just had an occasion to find some old ones because I was getting some old WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and they were just images that would no longer mount on modern Mac OS without some, you know, downloading some command
⏹️ ▶️ John line tools to make it happen. But there are so many of them and it’s always like the question,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, if I wanna make a disk image, what should I, is it a read-write disk image? Is it a sparse bundle?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it like, I don’t know which disk image format to use. ASIF looks like it might solve that
⏹️ ▶️ John dilemma because based on Howard Oakley’s testing here, ASIF is the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John disk image format. It is the newest one and it also uses sparse files so it won’t take
⏹️ ▶️ John up a lot of room. So assuming this works well, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the question of what disk image format should I use if I only care about modern Macs and forward is ASIF.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to talk about performance specifically or do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just, the- No, it’s just, it’s the best one.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can look at the, you can follow the link and see the stats on it. It’s not tremendously faster, but it’s nice that like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to guess which one. Oh, you want this one for performance, this one for size and this one for compatibility. I mean, I guess you still
⏹️ ▶️ John have the compatibility concern, But you know, if you just want it for now forward, ASF.
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iOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I was 26, uh, Marcos and you’re the only one really running it. Any other UI impressions you would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to share at this time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s buggy as hell. I mean, if that’s, if we were just talking about talking about performance a second ago, I know that was a different context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but, um, This is on an iPhone 16 pro. The fastest iPhone Apple currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes. It’s incredibly slow and incredibly buggy. There’s animation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs everywhere. There’s rendering bugs everywhere. All of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new APIs for like tab bars and searchable and all that other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Super buggy. Like bad animations, missing, like bad geometry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of work to do here. On one level it’s developer beta one. This is like hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the roughest build we will ever see of this OS. But it really has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of baking left to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know, I don’t know how Apple’s going to do it in time. I really don’t. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge undertaking you know allegedly they’ve been working on this redesign across the systems for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could not have shipped it before this year. I don’t even know that they can ship it this year, but they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We it’s really rough every animation is janky and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sluggish none of them are smooth none of them are fluid It’s not liquid glass nothing is running at 60 frames
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second like it’s or do you get alone 120? Which is what they’re supposed to run?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a very early, rough build. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, regarding your actual question of the design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one other big issue I keep running into, besides the, you know, blurring and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blobbing of everything, is they have used the ellipsis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash meatball slash what they’re now calling a more menu, or a more button, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere. in ways, in context that they don’t necessarily need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s two contexts that keep bugging me. One is in Safari and I did learn you can change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Safari toolbar back to kind of an older version but that has other kind of downsides to it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Safari to add a new tab or close the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tab is now an additional tap as was before in the default layout. You have to first tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dot dot dot more menu, First tap that, then in the menu that pops up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta then tap the, you know, new tab or closed tab or whatever there. Or the all tabs to go back to the tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view. So that’s one. You can actually, which I learned when I completed Maths Learning about this, you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swipe up on the Safari address bar area, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will get it into the all tabs view. But the problem is, you also swipe up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very closed region of that to change apps and go back to the home screen. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tried for the last few days. I’ve been trying to get myself used to that gesture to you know to try to keep the the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout of Safari and just get used to pulling up to go to the all tabs view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my hit rate is not good. I keep accidentally triggering the home gesture of the of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a good gesture. It’s like that is a terrible chest and yes, you can also swipe left and right on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the address bar to switch tabs left and right, which I also didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you didn’t know that I’ve been now for years. Yeah, well when they first put the
⏹️ ▶️ John bar on the bottom. That’s when they added that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway to rely on the up swipe gesture for going to the all tabs view, which is a very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common action that I do. I don’t love that the new tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gesture or flow is also weird in
⏹️ ▶️ John mail. Oh, I before you before you move on you should point out that you can actually change it. So you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that swipe. Yeah, and it will permanently put the it’ll basically put a little bar under the address bar that
⏹️ ▶️ John has the button for all tabs you just like it does now. So that that’s in settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you go to the Safari settings, you can change the bottom toolbar to like, you know, bottom mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something instead of compact mode or something like that. And it puts back basically the old bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s actually but everything’s harder to hit because it’s all pulled in more from the edges. So the toolbar items are all closer together.
⏹️ ▶️ John really important for you to see a little bit of your blurry web page around all the edges and also to have those bars block
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom content on the web page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And also let’s make all the tap targets for these very commonly to use buttons smaller and move them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit from where they’ve been for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s got to be. That’s another thing, by the way, these rounded corners everywhere make the basically the
⏹️ ▶️ John safe area insets narrower because if you have rectilinear content, it’s got to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole curve because otherwise the corner will be clipped. So everything has to move up and in
⏹️ ▶️ John from all sides. And that’s why the top targets are smaller. And by the way, of course, that whole rounded corner thing is floating
⏹️ ▶️ John with a margin around it. So there’s less room, but just just to be clear, what you were trying to do is get used to that gesture
⏹️ ▶️ John with to use the new UI, you may eventually give up and go to settings and change it back to something that’s closer to the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but still has smaller tab targets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So either way, your muscle memory is broken. And it’s it’s not fun for such a commonly used app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then mail, both mail and music, I can you know, these are very commonly used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for me. So in mail, many of the common actions that used to be buttons in the toolbar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including select a very common action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s now under the dot menu in the upper right now what they did was collapse you know two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or three buttons that used to be in the upper right into a dot menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but why what were they making room for nothing what’s up there now
⏹️ ▶️ John is nothing a blurry version of your content I believe yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s and when you scroll down it becomes like the blurry navigation bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s There’s still room there for two or three more toolbar buttons in the upper right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they broke the muscle memory, they added one more tap to a bunch of common actions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? To make room for what? Nothing. So also in the music app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you go to the album view, or the album view music, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a little icon in the upper right that tells you, it’s the plus if it isn’t added to your library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a checkmark if it’s downloaded. Those are useful things to know on your iPhone when you might not be online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And in the new music app, that’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That other button is just gone. Everything is now in the dot dot dot menu on that album view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did that to make room for nothing. Literally nothing is up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there! This is like where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alan Dye’s designs go the most wrong is burying things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into menus and junk drawers of various sorts for no real benefit. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just minimalism for minimalism’s sake.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a minimalist desk where there’s nothing on the desk so you can’t actually get any work done because there’s literally nothing on it. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John need a pen, a pencil, a mug, everything would be inside the drawers tucked away so you can’t see it because you want the
⏹️ ▶️ John desk to just have nothing on it. And that’s not useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fun to look at, but that’s not how you design tools. And the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, all of these UIs we’re talking about, these are tools. Like our phones are tools, the apps that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use on them are tools. They have function. And as much as Apple’s design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talks about getting out of the way of your content, well, what you’re taking out of the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is functionality. So it has to be for a really good reason. Now, the best possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to take away the controls, You can see it when you’re playing a video. You wanna play a full screen video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, have the controls fade out the way we’ve done since the iPhone 1. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, there’s a huge reason for that. In that context, it makes sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every other app, you gotta make that decision. You can’t apply the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design decree to everything of hide as many controls as possible. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing. They are hiding as much as they can in the name of quote content. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these devices are not just to view content. They are to interact with things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are to make things. They are to perform functions. I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dogma of minimalism in Apple design is a little too far. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has always been further than ideal on that spectrum of normal tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are visible to everything and ultra minimalist, totally unusable. Apple’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to the totally unusable of that spectrum. But they have taken an even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger step in that direction. In the same way that like I think unedited Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just made everything as thin as possible even at the expense of functionality, I think unedited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alan Dye just hides everything behind menus, modes, and drawers of various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts. Everything is hidden. And it’s not like… it makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hide behind a menu you controls that literally cannot possibly fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other way and ideally you know things that are not used that frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not the case for these controls that like they there is room for the things they’ve taken away they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken them away and replace them with nothing but we don’t we didn’t need that space to view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blurrier version of one mail title we need that space because the reason we’re in mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to operate on our mail and we need buttons to quickly operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the mail. The icon that they got rid of in the music album view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco served a purpose and was also a button to change that purpose. So if you wanted to download everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could download everything with that one button. Now it’s under a menu. You wanna see if this is in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library? You gotta look, you gotta check. You wanna see if everything’s downloaded? You gotta scroll down and see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are there little check marks next to every one of these songs in this album? That’s just loss of functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for what? Nothing. They literally replaced it with nothing. They are decontenting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interface for superficial design screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, I guess, but they’re literally taking away functionality from our computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For what? There has to be a good reason, and they don’t have one. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doing it for minimalism’s sake, and that’s bad design.
⏹️ ▶️ John The sad thing is they had, at various times in their history, in recent history, pretty good solutions to this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one of the things you’re not saying is that like, setting aside how hidden or revealed
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons are and how many functions you have to dig for, there’s also the question of, and you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John alluded to it a little bit, of like, well, which things are used frequently and which are obscure? Like, people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you archive messages all the time. For me, the main thing I do in my mail application is mark
⏹️ ▶️ John things as junk. So it drives me bananas that in Apple Mail on the phone, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a file a junk toolbar button visible at the top or whatever. But anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, as a designer application, you can say, these are probably the things people are gonna do more frequently. And these are the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they’re gonna do less frequently. And so if I have to bury something, I’ll bury the less frequent ones. But the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you don’t know what everybody wants. So a good design would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John we come up with what we think is a nice balance between beauty, minimalism, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John functions we think most people are gonna use. and then we allow the user to customize it because maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s only room for one or two buttons at the top of their phone screen, we can pick what we think that most
⏹️ ▶️ John people will want, but if they don’t like those one or two buttons, they can customize it. Can you imagine a customizable toolbar where
⏹️ ▶️ John you could decide what appears in it in what order and you could arrange things into sections and you could decide whether you should use the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon or text or both? They had that on macOS anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they could have something like that with the new design language across all their platforms. A customizable configurable
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar that they pick the defaults for and that if you don’t like them and you want that little widget back in
⏹️ ▶️ John music, you should be able to get it back. And if you don’t care about this stuff, you just take whatever they give you, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t add any burden to the average user who’s just gonna take whatever interface Apple wants. But imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if, A, they would make smarter choices about the defaults, which by the way, when they had configurable toolbars, they would often give you a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole default thing. So if you mess it up real bad, you could always just say, just go back to the default one that Apple said because I messed
⏹️ ▶️ John mine up. And B, that you can make it work exactly how you want because a really good tool is
⏹️ ▶️ John not just designed well out of the box, but also allows you to tune it for your purposes. If the main
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you do with your mail is archive or the main thing you do is file things into one of three folders or
⏹️ ▶️ John something, you could have buttons visible. Like you choose how to use that precious space at the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the mail thing on your phone for the things that you do most frequently. And instead we get
⏹️ ▶️ John no options, no configurability and Apple’s choices are hide everything away. It’s like if you got into a new car and the steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel was shrunken and hidden inside the glove box. Right, and for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what reason?
⏹️ ▶️ John But see, the steering wheel is out of your way. So when you want to steer, just open the glove box, lean over there and turn the little wheel. But isn’t it great how
⏹️ ▶️ John the dashboard is so uncluttered when you get in the car? It’s like, I have to steer. What do you think I opened the car for?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to steer it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve cleared away all this junk to make more space for your view of the road and the wall you’re crashing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into, because you can’t steer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and for the times when you need to steer, just go to the touch screen, find the button
⏹️ ▶️ John that opens the glove box, reach in, find the little wheel and turn it. And that’s when you want to make a turn. what you do, but the rest of the time the
⏹️ ▶️ John steering wheel stays out of your way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like this, they, I feel like the design, design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has, has gone too far, and I know this is like the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant Apple critique over time. They’ve gone too far for form over function.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I said at the beginning of the episode, I think it’s very important for Apple to keep updating their designs to look cool over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very important. And as I said, Even if the only reason to do something is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to change the system theme is it looks cool, that’s a good enough reason. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that over time to stay cool and trendy and fresh and relevant. I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not mutually exclusive with usability and legibility of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text and performance and like you can do all you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have all that. A good design is beautiful without having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to turn on a bunch of accessibility options that you don’t otherwise need. A good design has legible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text without having to say well you got to change it for this content but it’s gonna fade and flash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this content and a good design for a computer application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives you the controls you need right at hand for easy frequent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access. This design that they have across the system can do all of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not incompatible with those goals. They just aren’t doing it in a lot of cases. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think that we need to keep pushing on this because we’re not saying revert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole thing back, this sucks. We’re not saying that. What we’re saying is, okay this is interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks pretty cool in some places, you’ve made some really bad decisions in other places, let’s revert those and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why this, here’s why that button you got rid of, you’ve actually made this worse. Here’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this super clear view on top of this text is not actually helpful and is actually causing problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to tell them that. And as I said earlier too, I don’t actually think most of this is going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this release cycle. I think most of what we see today is being released. Hopefully they’ll fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the many animation and rendering bugs that are all across the systems, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope, because there really are a lot and they’re really bad. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the meantime, design wise, like we need to critique this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they have done is a lot of cool stuff and a lot of bad stuff for no good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the bad stuff for no good reason for the most part is actually really easy to fix. Like in one beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build, they could fix a lot of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and maybe they will say, but this kind of reminds me of like, you know, I’m always is following Destiny and Bungie.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like in the gaming community, it’s if you think we complain about Apple too much, oh my,
⏹️ ▶️ John like people who are ostensibly gamers and fans of games and game companies, all they
⏹️ ▶️ John do online is complain about the companies and what they’re doing. And no matter what those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John do, they’re like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not listening to us, we’re your players, blah, blah, blah. Those game companies, Jump, Bungie in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John react so quickly to this kind of feedback, it would make Apple’s head spin. To
⏹️ ▶️ John give just one example, thinking about it for buttons. Like you’re like, if you could just say, like you took away all the buttons, you put them
⏹️ ▶️ John in the dot dot menu, like bring back one or two, or let me pick what those one or two are, do it in settings if you don’t have a good, like
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if instead Apple said, hey, in the upcoming version of Mail on iOS 26, they said like
⏹️ ▶️ John three months ago, we’re thinking of having just a dot dot menu at the top. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then people in the community complain, they said, that’s bad, why use the buttons that are up there? Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put everything in a dot dot menu. And then three weeks later, Apple said, okay, we’ve heard your feedback, we’re not gonna put
⏹️ ▶️ John the three, everything in the dot dot menu, or we’ll put the buttons back. This is before the thing is released. That happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to Bungie all the time. And people are so mad about it, they’re like, oh, Bungie said they’re gonna take away, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John take away one or two fragments from the Prismatic Warlock, and we think they shouldn’t do it. They’re talking about something that’s gonna happen three
⏹️ ▶️ John months from now. And they’re mad because Bungie told them they’re gonna do it, and they complained about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then Bungie said like a week later, yeah, we’re not doing that. We’re still gonna take away some, but we’re not gonna take away all the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John we said before. And then they’re gonna see what the feedback for that is. and people are so mad at game companies because like they don’t listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to us and they’re so evil. And I’m like, imagine Apple. They don’t tell us what they’re going to do. When they do it, it’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong and bad. And we complain about it and we’re just resigned to the fact that we’re going to have to use it until someone changes. Anyway, follow
⏹️ ▶️ John up next week if they, if or whatever they have the next build, if they change this. But yeah, some, some
⏹️ ▶️ John things are easy to change. Like this one, hey, don’t put everything in the dot dot. You got plenty of room, put stuff up there. Some things are harder to change, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a configurable toolbar system or settings or whatever. Some things may be impossible to change, where if you want it to be glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff shows through, It’s gonna have to flash, but we’ll see how they do. Oh, and the one
⏹️ ▶️ John control that I wanted to highlight from iOS 26, which, you know, these controls are more or less the same everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John for consistency, but anyway. Sliders, like when you have a volume slider or a brightness slider,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the ones in Control Center, but like the slider control, which has essentially a track and then
⏹️ ▶️ John a thumb in the track that you move along the track. That has looked many different ways over the course
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, starting with Mac OS X, even before that. It has lots of different looks for that thing. The look they have
⏹️ ▶️ John for it in the new design is so clearly touch focused because the thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that you move in the track is very big by macOS standards. It makes sense as a touch target
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would be roughly that big, but it looks cumbersome and ugly I think on macOS. But anyway, setting that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS, like many of the controls throughout the new design, when you grab the little thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John in the track, it turns into liquid glass as in it becomes transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re like a dragon a water blob, but then it becomes more solid slash frosty when you let go I think but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John What this means is that you can see in the track like the sort of like thermometer bar
⏹️ ▶️ John filling as you slide from like low brightness to high brightness some part of the track is filled with the blue color and some
⏹️ ▶️ John part of The track is not and as you slide the slider more of the track gets filled And Nikki
⏹️ ▶️ John Tonski point Tonski points out I always imagine that it’s the center of the thumb that points to the
⏹️ ▶️ John slider Position turns out Apple’s a different idea. So what he’s saying? It’s like that little thumb if you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John envisioning before it was made of water if you’ve been envisioning like, okay Wherever I drag this thumb on the slider
⏹️ ▶️ John the center of the thumb is where the setting is But if you do this on iOS what you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John if you move your finger out of the way because your finger would be covering this most of the time is that
⏹️ ▶️ John When the slider is on the left The the blue bar is to the left
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thumb and when the slider is on the right the blue bar is to the right of the thumb. Only when the slider is dead in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John is the blue bar in the middle of the thumb, which is weird, but a sort of natural consequence
⏹️ ▶️ John of the design they’ve chosen for how these sliders work and the fact that you can see through them. I don’t think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John functional problem or an interface problem. It’s just weird. Well this is and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like when you look at the actual like design of such a thing like hat like metrics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise, this is how it has to work. Like otherwise the track wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill the width like if if the center of the scrubber was the value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when you like if it’s not the far left then the scrubber would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the left edge of the track
⏹️ ▶️ John well it’s only the way it has to work it with this scrubber because this scrubber is very wide if like the
⏹️ ▶️ John like Mac OS scrubbers used to be very thin so you didn’t have to do that so really what you basically need is I need
⏹️ ▶️ John 50% of the scrubber to be off the edge of the track and with a narrow scrubber you can easily do that or with the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Mac OS ones used to to come to a point at the bottom. Like anyway, you just need half the scrubber to be off the track, but the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ John is so wide that if half the scrubber was off the track, it would be like blocking the symbols on either side of the scrubber.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else about iOS 26? Good deal.
iPadOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPadOS 26. Um, I freaking love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not perfect. It’s got problems. It’s got lots of animation problems. It’s got lots of rendering problems. I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backboard D crashes. I’ve had springboard crashes. It’s a mess. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it because for the first time, I really think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad is starting to embrace what makes it good, which is to say kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a Mac OS lite. And that may sound insulting. I don’t mean it that way at all. I am loving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I don’t think I said this on the show last week, but I saw somewhere, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had tweeted at me and I can’t recall where it was or who it was, but if you’re on iPad, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an 11 inch iPad like I am, somewhere in settings, I think in accessibility, you can change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe it’s in display, you can change to the more space option for the display, which basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cranks up the resolution ever so slightly and makes a world of difference on how much real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey estate you have to work with. So if you’re playing around with iOS 26, especially on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a smaller iPad, I strongly suggest doing that. Uh, additionally, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slide or it’s not slide over, excuse me. Uh, we’re going to talk about this maybe a little bit later, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stage manager might be good. I don’t, I don’t know what to make of this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m, this is an initial gut reaction, but I flipped on stage manager earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it’s not utter trash. and I’m really uncomfortable with that opinion, to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I am loving iPadOS 26. I am really looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to future betas when they get a lot of these rendering issues and springboard crashes and whatnot squared away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but absolutely loving it. And if you’re someone who does not use your iPad as your primary computing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, then it’s safe to upgrade. And honestly, even if you do use it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your primary computing device, it might be worth the upgrade because it’s so good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from John’s prepared show notes, a friend of the show, Steve Troutman Smith writes, if there’s a limit to the number of open windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can have on iPadOS 26, I haven’t found it in the simulator yet. Expose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just keeps on going. And then later, oh, it’s 12. The limit is 12 on an M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. Further windows get pushed into the recents carousel instead, but they returned at the saved window size when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tap them. I mean, I think 12 is pretty legit for a screen that is not terribly big. Sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be more, but I think that’s pretty reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like that is like, what’s making that limit? How much, I keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ John this wrong and I didn’t look it up again, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how much RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t recall. With the
⏹️ ▶️ John small start, like, look, this, when we’ll get to this when we talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ John press stuff, but like, talking about how iPads resource limits or why
⏹️ ▶️ John there was all these limitations on windowing, like in some respects that makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can, you know, cite historical precedent and where the iPad came from and how it has less RAM than Macs and
⏹️ ▶️ John still does. And like, it makes sense, okay? But on the other hand, I don’t know if you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys remember, take a guess at what the minimum RAM for Mac OS X 10.0 was. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gosh, I don’t even wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about it. One gig, maybe 512, I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Okay, so you got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything? It was what, let me see, what year was this? It was like 2000? 2001. Oh boy. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna say, I forget what RAM was, but I’m gonna say maybe like 256 megs. I think less than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think 64 megs, but I, gosh, that was so long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m going by memory. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it in the notes. It was 128, I think. I,
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes, not one gigabyte, not eight gigabytes, not four gigabytes, not 16 gigabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 512 megabytes, 128 megabytes. And that was a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John windowing operating system with no limit on the number of windows you could have. And by the way, it had a compositing window
⏹️ ▶️ John manager, which was very new for the time. and it was software driven because it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco GPU accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point. And yeah, it was slow and everything, but the point is Mac OS 10 in 2001 and 10.0 on 128 meg machine did not limit
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of windows you had to have. And the resolution of screens then, maybe they weren’t as high as an M4 iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they weren’t that low and you could have a huge number. And I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that OS was doing the same things as the iPad is. But what I am saying is that if
⏹️ ▶️ John there are reasons for limitations for an M4 iPad Pro in terms of number of windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really accept RAM or CPU performance to be
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them. The M4 and that iPad is so much faster than every CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John in any Mac for decades running Mac OS X and has more RAM than almost all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only reason that makes sense for limitations is, oh, it’s a small screen and that would be too cluttered. There
⏹️ ▶️ John were 12 inch, 11 inch Macs that also didn’t have window limits. You could buy an 11 inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and Mac OS didn’t suddenly say you can only have 12 windows, right? So they’re, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve made a big step here, but I think, and it’s letting you use them, but I don’t even know what he’s talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Recents Carousel. Like I kind of understand why you might want to not
⏹️ ▶️ John open the floodgates and say unlimited windows, because people can get themselves into real trouble. And then one of the things that makes the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John not the Mac is it is supposed to help people not get themselves into trouble. So I kind of get it. I don’t really care that much about the 12 limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems reasonable to me. I do have a little bit of pushback on anything having to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well it’s because they don’t use swap or because they don’t have enough RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John or because, you know, they’re S, like the M4 is just so much more powerful. You put like 50
⏹️ ▶️ John or 100 Macs back in the quote unquote heyday of early Mac OS X, they wouldn’t be able to touch an M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and again, I know they’re not doing the same thing. I know things are much fancier now. I know they’ve got liquid glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know they’ve got all this other fancy stuff, but it’s just, I hope they figure something out
⏹️ ▶️ John there because even though 12 seems like a lot and it’s plenty for our first run.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine iPad power users wanting to have, especially with stage manager, which I’m not surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John that you like stage manager, Casey, because my understanding, again, I haven’t even used this, just read about it. My understanding that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new windowing system is that stage manager has sort of become spaces for iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still got that sidebar situation on the left with like tilted thumbnails of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different spaces. But you can hide that, can’t you? Well, this is the thing, And I think this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user error. I’m not necessarily saying that there’s anything wrong with Stage Manager or the OS or anything like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems to be there sometimes and not be there sometimes. And I haven’t cracked the code on when it shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and when it hides. Again, probably a Casey issue, but it’s very, very fickle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But yes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John on macOS you can just straight up hide it. It’s a setting. I don’t know what it is. But anyway, like what it means is that in Stage Manager, you still
⏹️ ▶️ John have the full freedom of like rearranging the Windows with the new Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco system and iPadOS 26,
⏹️ ▶️ John is just that now there are different sets of them that you can rotate between. So it’s kind of like spaces for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am a devout user of spaces on every platform. And so I was using the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without slide, or gosh, I keep saying spaces and slide over. I was using the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without Stage Manager for several days. I do really, really like it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to effectively have spaces, which is to say, you know, different virtual screens, if you will. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently the only way to really get that in iPadOS is with Stage Manager. And so just like I said earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I flipped it on. And initial impressions are, I like it, it does work well. It works way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than it did in prior versions of iPadOS, but it’s still not clicked for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. And I’m hopeful that over time, I will understand a little better what the ins and outs of it are. But I think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna stick with it, at least for now. One thing I will say is that I was a moderate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user of SlideOver on iPadOS, everything, but 26, this is where you can slide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the extreme right-hand side of the screen, left a little bit, and you can put an app over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s kind of like hanging out on top of everything else, but not taking up too much space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I use this from time to time, particularly for 1Password. That was a really convenient place to use it or way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it. But it is dead in iPadOS 26, no matter how you slice it. Slide over is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know a lot of people are very unhappy about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m pretty unhappy too, because this is the one feature of the pre-iOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of windowing stuff that I used a lot. And here’s the thing, like it would fit in perfectly with
⏹️ ▶️ John their windowing system, because SlideOver, the way they used to do it is very limited. You gotta go to the three tab menu, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, show this app in SlideOver, it goes to a specific spot, it gets a specific width, like it was very
⏹️ ▶️ John regimented before. But you can think of it as just like, this is just part of a window manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should be able to take literally any window of any size, bring it to any screen
⏹️ ▶️ John edge and do a thing that says, hey window, I want you to hide just off screen over there. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John I swipe in from the window edge in the area where you’re hiding, poke yourself back out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when I swipe you back in, hide yourself away. That’s slide over. Like you could do that on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. It’s a little bit harder because you can’t like swipe from the screen edge. A little bit weird with the cursor. Like on the iPad, you can literally
⏹️ ▶️ John go from like where the screen is not to where it is. So I get this is a more touch focus, but like that’s just a window
⏹️ ▶️ John management feature of hide a window off screen and have a gesture to make it come back
⏹️ ▶️ John on screen and then go back off screen. Any window, any size, any edge. I’m not saying they should do that, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, right? But what I’m saying is that SlideOver still fits in with
⏹️ ▶️ John the other option, it’s like full screen apps and the other option is like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John full screen app, Stage Manager, and do whatever you want with Windows. It fits in with the
⏹️ ▶️ John most pro power user one. It also, I think, fits
⏹️ ▶️ John in with the Everything Fullscreen. Because you can have everything fullscreen and still have a single
⏹️ ▶️ John thing very limited in slideover just like it was before. So it’s kind of… I’m not quite sure why they
⏹️ ▶️ John got rid of it. Because it seems to fit with everything they’ve done. Like, it’s not like, well, they have this new system
⏹️ ▶️ John and slideover doesn’t work at all. So I do hope they bring it back. I hope they bring it back somewhere. By the way, my main use case is
⏹️ ▶️ John fullscreen video that I’m watching. But social media timeline, if I’m watching some, like, reality TV show that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay too much attention to, I get a two screen experience on my one screen by swiping over
⏹️ ▶️ John and having like a mastodon timeline While full screen video plays. Yes, I’m blocking part of the video, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like some dumb reality show. So who cares? So here’s hoping SlideOver makes a comeback, if
⏹️ ▶️ John not this year, then maybe next.
Design adoption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, testing Liquid Glass. In the Apple developer site,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a link about UI design requires compatibility. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it reads, if yes, the system runs the app using a compatibility mode for UI elements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The compatibility mode displays the app as it looks when built against previous versions of the SDKs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you’re running on iOS 26, with this on, your app looks like it was built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iOS 18, but it was built for 26 and is running on 26.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If no, the system uses the UI design of the running OS with no compatibility mode. Absence of the key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or no is the default value for apps leaking against the latest SDKs. Warning, temporarily use this key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while reviewing and refining your app’s UI for the design in the latest SDKs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might’ve even announced like next year, this thing will no longer be honored, but the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to have this in here is because it’s not just that your stuff looks different, the metrics are different,
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning things are different width and height, and it will just blow up your layouts. If you didn’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John these buttons to be two pixels taller than they are, and this thing to be inset by this amount, like it will break your layouts if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not careful. And so they wanna have a way, I mean, obviously existing apps don’t have this problem if you just don’t recompile
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because they’re linking against the old SDK, which means they’ll just look like they did, and they’ll look ugly and won’t fit in with the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John and hopefully they’ll be updated. But even if you wanna use new features, you’re building against the new SDK, you’re using new features,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t have time to relay out every single view in your app, you can put this flag
⏹️ ▶️ John on to give yourself a little more breathing room until you can go in and as we,
⏹️ ▶️ John not worst case scenario, but as we expected, when there’s a big design change, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John revisit every single screen in your app to make sure it still looks okay and to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at it to see if there’s any place for improvement this is before you even did the stuff that Marko was talking about, was like, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to redesign my app to fit in better with the OS, just with your old design, the way it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the text still readable? Do all the controls still fit on the screen? Can I see all the stuff that I
⏹️ ▶️ John expected to see? Is the layout broken in some way? This one
⏹️ ▶️ John key, if you’re a developer, will save you from doing that work for a little bit longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately, you’re gonna have to do it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you. Or never update your app again. That’s the other option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, either way, and you will start looking old very, very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting this fall. So if you’re wondering right now, should I redesign my app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer is yes, you definitely should redesign your app to handle all this stuff. The only question is, how quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you do it? So if it’s going to take you a while, This might help you out, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t make it take too long.
Vision Pro “4K”?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Steve John Smith found something interesting. He writes, Apple is now referring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Vision Pro as Vision Pro 4K in all of its developer tools, which suggests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there will be a new Vision Pro that’s not 4K in the not too distant future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interesting. Weird, I mean, like Apple TV 4K makes sense because it went from HD 1080 to 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we’ve discussed many times in the past when going to the minutia of Vision Pro’s displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re 4K-ish, but there’s two of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John does that mean it’s 4K or is it 8K? The thing that makes me think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, as Steve points out very politically,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be a new Vision Pro that is not 4K. Will it be less than 4K or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco more than 4K?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, honestly, it needs both. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John needs, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to be a cheaper Vision Pro it also desperately needs more resolution than what it has.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say desperately, but your point is still fair that I think it needs
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there should definitely be one with more pixels, but I worry that less will take
⏹️ ▶️ John it outside the realm of, not viability, but like, I do feel kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John what they shipped is like a minimum viable resolution. So I know they need to make a cheaper one. I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they don’t do it by sacrificing resolution because it’s like, at a certain point, the like the virtual Mac thing
⏹️ ▶️ John stops being useful when you start taking away pixels. Like if you take away half or three
⏹️ ▶️ John of the pixels, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but like, okay, we heard rumblings and rumors and supply chain estimates that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little 4K screens inside the Vision Pro, the screens alone were like $1,500 worth of cost in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro. And I don’t know what that is today, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was one thing we heard one time. Who knows if that’s real. But regardless if it is or not like totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate, That tells you those screens certainly are very expensive, possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most expensive components in the Vision Pro. Now, you look at something like, you know, the Quest series of headsets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re much lower resolution, but that entire headset can sell for a few hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks. So obviously we’re talking about a very different component price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you drop resolution. And if you wanna make a cheaper Vision Pro, we can look at a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to do it. Obviously get rid of the stupid eye display on the outside. That’s gonna save some cost. get, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe change some of the materials to be, you know, simpler, you know, maybe more plastic, which would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save some weight and save some costs and be easier to work with people who were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amber, like people were disassembling the vision pro when it first came out and they had said like, this is the most complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product ever produced for the consumer ish market. Like it’s so like the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is so complicated. Maybe they can simplify things by simplifying certain shapes or giving uncertain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design details. Does this thing have to be curved in a certain way? Maybe not, you know, so there’s, there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways that they can make a cheaper Vision Pro. But all of those might be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small savings relative to those damn little 4K postage stamps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are super expensive. So if they really want to cut this thing down in price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they really, really need to, if what it takes is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go down to a resolution class that is closer or equal to what the Quest succeeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well in having, okay, fine. Like there’s lots of use cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Vision Pro that don’t need like super high-res
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. If what you’re actually doing with it mostly is like watching movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or stuff like that, then who cares? Like you can go much lower resolution for a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and it’s mostly doable, especially if that can cut the price down to like a thousand bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but I think if you’re going to have, if you want to have the price down that low,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way you do it without cutting the resolution right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know how much those screens cost. I heard that they were switching from Sony to a different vendor, I think maybe LG or Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John or somebody. So Sony is not known for its low price, but you know, the volumes are still not great. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, the thing I have a problem with is like, you know, like the Apple TV. Are you going to go to 1080? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s too, that’s like those, what are those glasses that you wear? those like sunglass type things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s like 1080 is too little, I feel like. But you know, if that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the price really hasn’t come down, we’ll see. Anyway, I’m hoping that they’re calling it 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John because the next one will be like 6K or something. And I really hope they don’t go below that, but we shall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I for one am looking forward to the Vision Amateur.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, HelloFresh and Squarespace. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Apple did press interviews for this WBC. You know, they didn’t do the talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, they did a whole bunch of other interviews, we’re gonna talk about that, kinda what they said, why they did what they did, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s gonna be on Overtime this week. Thank you so much to everybody for listening. You can join if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna hear Overtime at ATP.fm slash join and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
WWDC favorites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, I, uh, I did not follow directions because you were not explicit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry. I knew you were going to jump on me as soon as I said that out loud. Let me rephrase. You were not explicit in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey written directions in the internal show notes. All it says is favorite things from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC 2025 of which I came up with a list of like 10 items. But then you reminded me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you had asked for an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in my spoken direction. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it should have should be
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the reason it’s plural is because there’s three of us. So if we each bring one item, that would be three.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is fair. John, would you like to go first? What is your favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to go first. Because you did you did the most homework
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, all right. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John was so pick a pick, you know, rank, pick, pick your favorite one, then we’ll go to Marco. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I think my favorite is stage manager, not stage manager, excuse me, the new iPad OS stuff, including stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manager is just discussed a moment ago. But since we already talked about that, I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to claim that as already covered. I got to tell you, I don’t know if it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite, but it does jump out at me amongst things that I’ve actually tried so far. Because I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list of things that I think I will really enjoy, but I haven’t tried them yet. Amongst the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve actually tried, one of the few things I’ve done with the new VisionOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is create a new persona. If you recall, the persona is how they represent you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re on like a FaceTime call, because your face has a huge freaking set of goggles in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the very first version was real bad and real deep in the uncanny Valley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then they revamped it and it got pretty good. I mean, if you’re leaving aside the fact that Mike’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, beard prevents him from opening, opening his mouth as he’s talking, it was pretty good. And in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, in vision west 26, they have redone it yet again. And I got on a call with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell a couple of yesterday, yesterday, uh, for a little bit and I got to tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things look real good. We have very much come out of the uncanny valley and we are back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto one of the peaks because they look incredible. So if you happen to be a person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that either has a Vision Pro in your life or knows someone with a Vision Pro, ask them, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once they get the new OS or put the beta on, you know, or whatever, you know, set up a new persona and get on a FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call with them. It is very surprising how good it looks. And one of the greatest advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, the original personas, they were basically, they weren’t literally flat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they were kind of effectively flat. You only really looked at the top or excuse me, the front of your face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they would have you look up a little bit and down a little bit. So they could kind of at least give the indication of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, for example, nodding or whatever the case may be. But now they capture or perhaps just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process a lot more of your head. So you can actually look to the side and your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire head is there rather than it just kind of fading out like Back to the Future style. It’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. And amongst these things I’ve experienced, that’s probably my favorite so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we said you wanted Marco next and you’ll finish up. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, my favorites so far, transcription.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey API. Oh, good. Have you played with it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course I have. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey very first thing I did. Sorry. What I meant to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say is, have you reached conclusions so far, even tentative conclusions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, tentatively, I haven’t tested it on a huge variety of input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio yet, but so far the transcription API seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very fast and good enough. Like it’s not like as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like the biggest, most aggressive server side models, but it runs on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free really fast. And it’s very close to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quality of the best models in my testing so far. So that’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this will allow me to build some cool stuff. It’s not, you know, I’m not gonna be able to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything perfectly doing it constantly because that would just be too much power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can do a lot with this. I like a lot and I’m very, very happy about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feeney That’s super exciting. Genuinely, I hope I don’t sound sarcastic because that’s really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if you saw, but John Voorhees did write up about it. And his son, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was Finn, forgive me if it wasn’t Finn, but one of his sons put together an open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source command line wrapper around the new APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yap. And so you can play with that if you want. I haven’t had the chance to play with this yet. One of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think all three of us want to do at some point is to provide transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for our episodes. And there were two major reasons why,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least I didn’t want to yet. Number one, it was a pain in the butt and took forever to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And number two, nothing that I’m aware of does a speaker definition or speaker differentiation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Whisper does it now. Oh, does it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn’t realize that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Descript or Descript or however you pronounce it has also done it for a while, but that’s, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as easy to hook into that as it is to whisper. But I’m, I’m in the same camp that speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John recognition is like essential. Like, without that, I know we have this bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, fans have made really cool search sites to find the episode where somebody said blah. But for an
⏹️ ▶️ John actual transcript, you really need to know who’s speaking. So I’ve just been waiting patiently for that technology
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the point where it’s really reliable. Because I think, as we’ve discussed in past episodes, I think all of our
⏹️ ▶️ John voices are very distinct, and computers should be able to tell us apart. Obviously, transcribing a show
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, where we have lots of proper nouns and weird programming
⏹️ ▶️ John terms may be challenging, but I feel like we’ll get there eventually. But, uh, as of
⏹️ ▶️ John pre WWDC, I’ve, I feel like technology technology slash cost benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John analysis wasn’t quite there, but as Marco points out, well, what if everyone just has it on their phone for free, that really changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really does. And also, and I haven’t, I haven’t yet gotten too much of a chance to play with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on-device LLM either, but from what, from the little bit I have seen from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sessions and from early reports from other people. The on-device LLM is also no joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really, really good for a lot of things. Not, of course, not everything. This is still a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model that runs on your phone. So it’s not gonna be as good as like the flagship models that run in giant data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco centers on these giant Nvidia things. But for running on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally, offline, for free, that’s a lot of big advantages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a lot you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to build on that just a teeny bit. I think most of the people listening to this show probably know exactly what you’re talking about, but here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the thing of it is, is that if I wanted to do some trick, you know, LLM based stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do some processing and call sheet, would that would require something that, you know, like an LLM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were to do that today, then what I would need to do is communicate something across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the network and make a request to like chat, GPTs API, or something like that, which has a nonzero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost and you spread that across all your users and that can really start to add up fast. And additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going across the network. So it’s not going to be as fast as it would be if it was on your device. There’s a lot of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why this becomes cumbersome to do today. But by virtue of this speech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey framework for transcription stuff, and then their, their, um, shoot, what’s the name of the framework there? The, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the foundation framework or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John foundation model framework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Uh, by virtue of having that on device, that means that a lot of the reasons that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have not to do this go away because of what Marco was just describing. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s effectively free. It’s on the device. You know, it doesn’t require me to pay any more money. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey require a network request, generally speaking. So a lot of the things that I felt kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handcuffed me have now gone away. Now, in the case of CallSheet, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this. I’m noodling through a couple of ideas here and there. But the fact that this is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to build on what Marco said again, And my understanding is it’s actually a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. You know, it’s not perfect like Marco said, but it’s pretty robust. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very exciting. And even if CallSheet doesn’t use it very heavily, or even if Overcast doesn’t use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very heavily, which that is not what Marco said, I’m just putting words in his mouth now. Even if we don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot of, even if we are not the ones that are leveraging it, there’s a lot of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will, and that’s really, really exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think there’s going to be, like one of the really cool things they did was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this generable macro, where as the app developer, you don’t have to say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please output valid JSON, and then try to decode it. No, they actually like, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow you to annotate like your custom data structures in your app, and you can describe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what each field needs and means in the data structure, and then you can say, generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these as the output of whatever prompt you’re giving it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it like properly fills out your data structures based on how you’re describing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what their different fields mean. That’s really cool. And so I think what we’re going to see is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re going to see a lot of apps using this for all sorts of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think it’s going to be really exciting. And I go back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about my opinions on AI and LLMs and whatnot, but this to me is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost entirely upside. And I’m really looking forward to thinking about how I can leverage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and to see how others are leveraging it. Another example of this is, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I think I might’ve brought this up last week, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the tweet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Ashcraft from Food Noms, which I think sponsored once maybe back in the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s certainly a great app, was using this to like come up with an example icon for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey food that you create or something like that. And that’s so silly, but it’s so nice and it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things just a touch better. And that’s a great example of a little place that you might not even realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is using, you know, this new onboard LLM technology and yet it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make food noms just a touch better. And that’s pretty great. All right. Anything else from you, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this particular moment? We might come back around we’ll see but uh all right john what is your one and only one
⏹️ ▶️ John yes i thought this would be a good after show just because i knew that most of the main show was going to be all these
⏹️ ▶️ John weird issues and things that we’ve learned about the os so let’s pick our favorite things i didn’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a big challenge for me but then when i thought about like oh i should come up with a favorite thing for myself it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that i didn’t like things at wwdc but there’s no one thing that stands out a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John as my big favorite thing and And there’s a lot of stuff, like when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve gone through all the sessions, this is not a year, this, you know, every developer is different, but this is not a year where I see
⏹️ ▶️ John something like, oh, I wanted that API forever. Marco was in that camp this year. With the transcription that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the last time I remember it happening is obviously not as important as the transcription thing Marco’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, but it was the rounded rectangle with uneven rounding on the corners from like two
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. So I could make switch glass with corners that aren’t rounded at screen edges,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the thing I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do unless I totally took over custom drawing and I didn’t want to bother with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, Apple will probably eventually do this. And they did, and I was so happy. Nothing like that for me this year. Everything that I’ve seen,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when I think it’s gonna be something that I can use, I try it and I just find the bugs in it and I find out it doesn’t work for me
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I file the feedbacks and I just go back to my old code. And like I said, all of my apps need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John updated. I mean, all of them, like they were not, not that they weren’t shippable, but I would never want any
⏹️ ▶️ John of my users to use my apps the way they looked recompiled with the new SDK
⏹️ ▶️ John on Tahoe. So I’m in there doing a lot of work and I do actually enjoy working on my apps. And in some
⏹️ ▶️ John ways it’s kind of fun to have a project because I’m not adding features. I’m just sort of making sure they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John updated with the new design and look reasonable at least. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess if I had to pick in that work that I’m doing, sort of, you know, my one favorite thing is like
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to work on all my apps and updating them because I am actually like finding issues and bugs. That’s another fun thing, especially like in
⏹️ ▶️ John hyperspace, which is an app that only ever shipped on one OS because it requires Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 15. That’s the only OS it has ever run on. Suddenly my app is running on two OS’s, 15 and 26.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it just takes one more different version to find a bunch of little bugs that are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, I didn’t notice that bug because it works fine in 15, but it actually was a bug in my code. And now that I see
⏹️ ▶️ John it running on 26, it behaves a little bit differently and I can fix it. So I’m actually improving my apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as you might imagine, or might not have thought about, but I certainly did the second I started hearing about this redesign. I have an app
⏹️ ▶️ John called Switch Glass that puts a transparent glass thing with apps in it on your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna use the glass texture as one of the options. It’s already configurable with a bunch of deprecated constants
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple doesn’t want me to use, but I put in the pop-up menu because they look cool. Guess what? There’s a new item called
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass. Although I am, again, tinged with strange disappointment.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you watch the sessions, you know, okay, there’s two kinds of glass, though. There’s the regular glass and there’s the clear glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Clear Glass is, they have some mumbo-jumbo where it’s appropriate. Like, they show it on like video player
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. It’s fine for Clear Glass to be a video player controls because it’s totally illegible, but whatever. You can still see them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re huge. But don’t use it anywhere else because Clear Glass is super clear. But I’m like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John well fine. I’ll put it in an option in my pop-up menu for regular glass and Clear Glass. But I think on
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS, Clear Glass doesn’t exist. It’s just glass. You don’t get to use the clear kind, which is kind of disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and I guess maybe the other random thing, And like my one item is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t find a favorite. There’s no big standout. But my other one is like Swift 6.2, which I’ve, you know, Swift is developed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the open. If you want to follow it for the entire year, you can. You’ll know exactly what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch in WWDC because it’s developed in the open. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John literally open source. You can download it, but you don’t get to use that in Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John until Apple ships it. And now 6.2 is available in Xcode. 6.2 has lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John features that make strict concurrency a lot nicer. 6.2 fixed some concurrency bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John that were in 6 and 6.1, which caused my code not to compile anymore, but hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John those were bugs in my code before that now I get to fix. So yeah, my
⏹️ ▶️ John one item is that there is no big item for me, but it’s not because I’m sad about anything, it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a year where there’s something that’s rocking my world from W3C. It’s mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ John I get to update all my apps, which is fun to work in a new design, and the language gets updated and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I was more enthusiastic about the look and feel of Tahoe. Like I said, the best I can say about it is that using
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s not like the end of the world. It’s fine. Right. It’s just not my favorite. I mean, I’ve been through this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of versions of Mac OS X that were not my favorite looks wise, and they come and
⏹️ ▶️ John go and get refined and changed. So right now I’m beta one, not that big of a fan,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I I’m actually surprised myself at how. Not how and
⏹️ ▶️ John how much of a non event it is for me to be using literally every day of this week, Tahoe, like basically
⏹️ ▶️ John all day. And it just seems normal to me. So I don’t know. I’ve obviously not followed my
⏹️ ▶️ John own rules with my single favorite, but I really feel like my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one thing is like, I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t pick a favorite. And it’s not because W2C was bad. It’s just because of where I am with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The, uh, the revamp of Swift concurrency or strict concurrency or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really amped about that because, uh, to oversimplify and I’m probably to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of the technical facts wrong, but the general gist is it used to assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once you started using like async await that, oh, everything in this app is, could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on any thread and on any actor, you’ll never know where it’s running. And so you have to super protect everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now there’s a new default, which you can opt into for an older app that says, Hey, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume everything is running on the main thread and explicitly state when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it isn’t going to be. And again, I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but that’s a general gist and that should make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adopting strict concurrency so much easier because I, and I’ve continued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kick that can down the road and I am kind of glad I did. This is a case of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Marco patented procrastination for the win sort of situation where, you know, I probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have waited this long, but hey man, it’s worked out great. So that is on the list of things to do this summer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to properly embrace that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not even the thing that I’m talking about though, because I’m already on swift of strict
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey concurrency,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually that mode isn’t particularly useful to me. It’s all the other stuff of like, hey, strict concurrency
⏹️ ▶️ John used to complain about this because it couldn’t figure out that it was actually safe, but now it can, and Apple annotating
⏹️ ▶️ John all its APIs, because if I just wrote a Swift 6 app in isolation with none of Apple’s APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty easy to do. But you’ve got to use APIs for the platform to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually make an app, and those APIs, some of them are written in the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not all properly annotated, or if they are properly annotated, they’re annotated in a way that makes your life miserable
⏹️ ▶️ John because things are not, like this is not isolated and you can’t change the fact that it’s not isolated, but you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John hop onto a different actor to do the thing that you want. And it’s just, there’s lots of places where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, oh, I really have to ug up my code here to make this work because this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, there’s no async await version of this. It’s a callback based API. The callback is not isolated,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have to access data that’s confined to either an actor or a main actor or one of my own actors. and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even get at that data from the non-isolated thing without hopping actors, but it has to do it synchronously, but this is not an
⏹️ ▶️ John async function, so I can’t await it, and it’s just that stuff. As Apple updates its APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and as Apple improves Swift to be able to be smarter about figuring out when something is actually safe,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing that makes my life easier. And again, my hyperfaces are already Swift 6 concurrency. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John has been from day five, maybe. So it’s not a big deal for me, but it did actually find
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs in my code by fixing bugs in Swift concurrency that used to allow me to do things that were technically
⏹️ ▶️ John unsafe. So thumbs up all around, like DevTools. And the thing is, I’m doing this on an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. I don’t even get to see or use the new like LLM things. I think I should be able to use the chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but it wasn’t working for me. It might be a beta bug, but I’m not even benefiting from all that stuff because it’s ARM only,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Just Xcode with the new SDK and
⏹️ ▶️ John the new version of Swift and Apple’s updated APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been enjoying doing development for the past week.