675: Open, Retrieve, Expand, Load
22 Jan 2026Thoughts on Tahoe.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Snowpocalypse is coming for Casey
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Tier List: Automotive Logos 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- We’ll talk TCL/Sony next week!
- Top Dogs is coming
- “Cloud technology”?
- Clipboard hijacking
- Indonesia is not small
- MainStage is not new (via Mike Taffet et al)
- Apple’s Pro Apps Bundle still exists for education users (via Pekka Salonen)
- Pro apps free trials
- Prior art (via Karoline)
- The trials are full versions (via Ian Robinson)
- Monitors at CES
- DisplayPort alternate mode for USB-C
- What about color accuracy?
- ProMotion in Safari
- iOS:
Settings→Apps→Safari→Advanced→Feature Flags - Test
- iOS:
- Vision Pro does have Keynote
- Icons in Tahoe menus
- You don’t have bad aim; it’s Tahoe
- How to prevent Tahoe update nags
- Ask ATP:
- Post-show: John’s migration continues
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Fender’s first wireless headphones
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Chapters
- Bitter Blast
- ATP Tier List: Car Logos
- The Sony/TCL TV thing
- Coming soon: 3D dogs!
- Apple/Google “cloud technology”
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Clipboard spam from News
- Oops, Indonesia is massive
- MainStage
- Apple Creative Studio miscellany
- CES monitor follow-up
- Keynote on visionOS
- Sponsor: Zapier
- Tahoe complaints
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: Dye vs. Ive software design
- #askatp: Changes to touch-MBP UI?
- #askatp: Favorite macOS styles
- Ending theme
- John’s migration
Bitter Blast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I survived the bitter blast and now I believe we’re on to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the I don’t know blue mountain freeze
⏹️ ▶️ John These coffee flavors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what are we talking about? This is the the names that the Local weather station
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that plays in my coffee shop that I see many mornings gives to weather for the week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this past week it was cold. It got very cold. It is January that happens That was apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bitter blast like were weather Are weather events as heavily branded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past as they are now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but now that you’ve opened this can of worms, buckle up because I have thoughts about weather right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, to recap, and I’ve been through this many times, Virginia or Richmond anyway, I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generalize to Virginia, Richmond, if we get like three inches of snow in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day or so, the kids will be out of school for probably a day, right? So if they know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that three inches is due on a Tuesday, they’ll be out that Tuesday. Six plus inches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of snow, you’re looking at multiple days off of school, generally speaking, like anywhere between two and five days off of school.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As I sit here now on Wednesday evening, we are slated for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three inches of snow on Saturday, which is manageable for us, but a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little aggressive. On Sunday, we’re due for 24 inches. In total, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 30 inches of snow, which I don’t even know. I think it’s like three quarters of a meter or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. It’s ridiculous how much snow we’re going to be. It’s about three quarters of a meter of snow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And like I said to you- That is something. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not good. I said to Aaron just yesterday, you know what’s about to happen is that we’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the COVID we thought we were getting in 2020 where we don’t leave the house for two weeks and then we’ll leave again. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will be utterly screwed if Richmond gets a damn near a meter of snow and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s going to be awful, but no, I haven’t heard any branding for the snow that we’re getting to come back to your actual point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it hasn’t been branded, but we are getting so going to be getting so much snow and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was out running errands earlier today and everyone is driving like idiots because they’re all trying to go to the grocery store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and buy all the things. Aaron went to Costco during the like fancy lad hours or fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last in her case hours, you know, where, where you, if you have the, I think it’s the executive membership, which is not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money at all, you can go an hour earlier than the Plebs, and she was there this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning. And the store hadn’t officially opened for the regular folks, and she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said the line was all the way to the back of the store to check out. Like, it’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I mean, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes sense. Like, for a place like that, that doesn’t really have snow infrastructure, to be facing a giant storm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that is actually, you know, expected behavior and not that unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this would all happen if we were getting just the three inches of snow, but the 24 we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently slated for, that will ruin Richmond for at least a week, probably the better part of two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, that being said, oftentimes, like when it gets close, it’ll peter out and decide, oh, actually, I’m going to take a turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the north or the south, or, you know, something will happen on the way. But yeah, I’m screwed. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately lightly concerned about my presence on the podcast, not obviously tonight, but a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from tonight, because who knows? we may not have power for a week or so. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s going to be great. Jeez.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Oh, by the way. So first of all, yes, good luck, everybody getting through that. That’s that could be quite something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of our listeners. Totally separately, not even close to related.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You mentioned like she went during like the plebeian hours or whatever. That was before the plebeian hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was there. Anyway, I just watched. I just finished Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not going to say anything about it, except I really enjoyed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can recommend it. Oh, good deal. The less you know, the better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at you watching modern TV shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I’m feeling behind now. Aaron and I are cruising through the pit, which I like quite a lot. We’re almost,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re like three quarters of the way through season one. But look at you go. Very well done.
ATP Tier List: Car Logos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So before we continue we should talk to you and announce that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a new member special and we went back to our favorite trough. We went to the HP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier list and now we’re doing this time we did automotive logos. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tier lists I think are certainly most listeners favorite member special and honestly I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of mine too. And so this time we talked about various automotive logos and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John put together the list of logos. He very clearly announced on the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he did not do all of them. He’s well aware of it. You can see some of John’s preferences and the choices he made,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I still think it was a very, very fun episode and you should check it out. So John, if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never heard any of our member specials, how could you hear only the most recent one or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you just join to become a member. Go to adp.fm slash join and become a member. Get access to all of the member specials.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just download them all because you’re a computer nerd and then unsubscribe and listen to them at your leisure. or you can just say subscribe and listen to them
⏹️ ▶️ John as they come out. We have a lot of Tier List episodes, as Casey mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is probably the biggest one we’ve ever done in terms of the number of little tiles that we dragged
⏹️ ▶️ John up into the Tier List. And yet there are just so many possible logos, especially since we did historical
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. I tried to pick ones that I found interesting, acknowledging that there are many that I missed. The only one that I regret that I missed,
⏹️ ▶️ John I regret when people are like that, people are enthusiastic about Tier Lists, like, oh boy, automotive logos. I can’t wait to hear about the logo
⏹️ ▶️ John from this company. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John before they even started listening that we didn’t do that company at all. There’s just too many of them. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John one I regret not including is Kia because they really messed up their logo and I would have loved to trash them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, I think we would have, that would have been the fight. That would have been the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fight, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think they actually improved
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the Kia logo? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember the history, but I like the new one. Kia is not in this episode, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John are 91 other logos. We may do another automotive logo one some point in the future, no
⏹️ ▶️ John promises. Some people are asking us to do European car brands that we have never heard of, which might be fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, we’ve got this one, automotive logos, 91 in total, put into a tier list.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were ruthlessly efficient and we got the job done in record time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, this is my brave, bold stance, my hot take, the current Kia logo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s good. I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoa. Nope, it’s very bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, if you want more of that. I will also say, John did an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of work to prepare for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The number of logos was very high. The number of images he had to find and generate was very
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to justify with varying degrees of success.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like if this
⏹️ ▶️ John research was difficult, let’s just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my. I like, cause it, I mean, it took me hours to do the editing of just like inserting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the images and processing them that he had already generated. Like I had a fraction of the work he,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he must’ve had so much more. So thank you, John, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably working on this for like at least two straight days of work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. So we appreciate you, John. Thank you. hp.fm.
The Sony/TCL TV thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, so we’re not going to talk about the TCL Sony thing this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s a big news story. People want to hear what I have to say about that. We will talk about it next week. It is not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John time sensitive, I think, since nothing’s really happening until like 2027 and more news about it is breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John as we speak. So I think they’ll actually be, we’ll do a better job of it next week. So there’s that. But before
⏹️ ▶️ John we do that, I wanted to, my original plan was to give a brief mention here to John on Gruber’s
⏹️ ▶️ John article in which he links to the Sony TCL story and
⏹️ ▶️ John says at the end that Sony TVs haven’t been the Sony TVs of yore for a very
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. Basically he’s like, sad to see these news, but you know Sony hasn’t been that great in the TV business
⏹️ ▶️ John recently anyway. And I was incensed by this. It’s totally wrong. I demanded he publish a retraction
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was gonna rant about it on the show. But in between the time that I did that and then sat down to record, he’s published a retraction.
⏹️ ▶️ John So suffice it to say, Sony has been at the top of the best possible
⏹️ ▶️ John picture quality TV market for the past several years. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m interested in them. And that’s why most people are interested in this story. And Gruber was not aware of that because he’s just been using his LG
⏹️ ▶️ John TV and doesn’t care as much about picture quality. I don’t know. Anyway, he’s retracted it. Problem
⏹️ ▶️ John solved. Tune in next week for more on the TCL Sony story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote Gruber John Syracuse that tells me I need to run a retraction he even used an exclamation mark
⏹️ ▶️ John I did in my private
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey message to him my public one I did not use an exclamation point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, that’s incredible.
Coming soon: 3D dogs!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I wanted to call Marco’s attention to something. Marco, I don’t know if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even know where your Vision Pro is, but you might have to charge it because coming, oh shoot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t write down when, but coming sometime at the end of the month is a two-part, I believe, documentary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming on January 30th is a two-part docuseries called Top Dogs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which goes deep in behind the scenes in the, what is it, Greenwich dog show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some dog show that’s not on this continent. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s like Westminster over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there. The big one? No, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, is that the one? Uh, yeah, I guess it’s Westminster. Greenwich, Connecticut is on this continent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was probably a Greenwich over there first, though, if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to guess. Yes, there is. That’s where Greenwich Mean Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John comes from. Where the mean time is. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so mean. It’s so nasty that time. I mean, it’s not the one true time zone, am I right, Ding? Anyways, the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Marco, you might have to charge your Vision Pro and watch this docuseries on January 30th, which, uh, looks extremely cute if you’re a dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I gotta give them credit. They will probably get me to do that. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s point of order.
⏹️ ▶️ John This should have been in Vision Pro Corner in the topic section, moving on. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we have a Vision Pro Corner in the topics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right now? We do, you
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you invented it. Yeah, but then it went away. I know, but you can bring it back at any time you want, it’s just not really follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, dad. All right.
Apple/Google “cloud technology”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloud technology has been mentioned in Apple and Google’s joint statement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from Google’s blog, the quote, the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gemini models and cloud technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John According to Mark… We talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this last week and I highlighted the cloud technology, which again, Matt and Reese pointed out of like, what do they mean by
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud technology? We know they’re using the models, but what’s the cloud thing? Well, German has an answer this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So German writes, in a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are discussing hosting the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chatbot capabilities of Siri directly on Google servers, running powerful chips known as TPUs or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tensor processing units. The previously promised non chatbot update to Siri retaining the current interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is planned for iOS 26.4. The chatbot capabilities will likely come in June, coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to June at Apple’s worldwide developers conference.
⏹️ ▶️ John So German is essentially confirming what the only thing that made any sense was that I guess maybe Apple’s going to run
⏹️ ▶️ John their stuff on and Google’s data centers and on Google’s TPUs. That
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense, because if you’re going to do something at the scale of like all iPhone users, it’s kind of a big ask
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to deploy a bunch of M2 Ultras or whatever their M5 server chip is and deal with all that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas Google already has the infrastructure to serve the entire world on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it wants to serve. So I bet that deal will go through, but it’s interesting that Apple is, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s that they’re not announcing anything. This is just a rumor, but you know, Apple traditionally uses, you know, AWS,
⏹️ ▶️ John Azure, or all those other things or whatever, but I’m not sure how much Google Cloud stuff they’ve done. And making this part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Google deal to use their models definitely makes sense. Maybe they had a good deal on Google servers as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and this makes so much sense in like the big picture way, if you consider it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean that Apple will probably be hosting all of the largest models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple Intelligence in Google’s data centers, on Google’s tech and-
⏹️ ▶️ John Where they were designed to run, because Google made the models to run on their hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, not only that, I mean, and yeah, obviously they’re gonna be at least starting out running Gemini as the foundation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model and probably, honestly, if I had to guess, would probably stay there for the long term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, at this point, I don’t see Apple developing their own competitive foundation models that are gonna be worth using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if they ever do, that’s many, many years away. Like, think on the order of like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 20 years away. And if it ever happens, and it might just be that they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always use Gemini for the large model stuff. And if you’re going to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very large flagship level AI models, you’re not gonna run it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s chips because Apple’s chips aren’t designed for that. And the very, very largest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models, the hardware to run those is so specialized that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple not only isn’t going to make something competitive for it, but shouldn’t make something competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it because that’s fairly far out of their main areas of expertise. You’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest end servers from Nvidia type stuff, and also Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom stuff. That’s what this world mostly looks like. And so Google has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole stack, top to bottom, to serve, to develop these models, to host these models,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scale them. Apple is not gonna be competitive on that level for a long time, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. Where Apple, I think, might be competitive long-term is on-device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models. That makes a lot of sense. That is well within Apple’s expertise. You know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not so much in the cutting edge of AI these days, but I feel like they can get there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of reasonably in, you know, maybe five years. They can probably have their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on-device models being class-leading enough to actually use only their stuff. But for the big, like, world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge server models, I don’t think, not only are they not in that game now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either in the models or the hardware to serve them, but I don’t think they will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in that game. And you could probably argue like they probably maybe shouldn’t try a lot of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. So I think this is probably bigger than it seems. And I think this part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, where Siri just runs on Google servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s gonna just be the default of how this goes for the foreseeable future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also I think that’s probably the right move.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the chatbot thing only according to German’s rumor here. and I do think they’re still gonna wanna use private
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud compute, which depends on using Apple’s software and Apple’s hardware and all that other stuff. I think they’ll still do that
⏹️ ▶️ John with stuff that deals with your personal information and maybe just like general chat body stuff will go to this, kind of like they do
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular chat body stuff to go to chat GPT now, but we’ll see, still just rumors and it’s all,
⏹️ ▶️ John it remains to be seen how much Apple will even talk about this. I mean, the quote unquote joint statement
⏹️ ▶️ John that we read from was just published by Google and Apple’s not saying anything about it. Do you think Apple’s gonna even mention
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they’re using serverless in Google’s data centers, it probably just goes completely unsaid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I can’t imagine they would mention it. But also, I wouldn’t necessarily assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that private cloud compute, the way it was advertised, will be the situation forever. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything we saw at that initial Apple Intelligence presentation, how much of that has actually panned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and will ever pan out? It’s not 100%. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use private cloud compute now, and I’m assuming it works exactly like they announced. So that’s one of the things they actually did ship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can, but it’s in a very limited capacity, at a very limited scale. And if you look at everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that was announced during that Apple Intelligence presentation, I think a lot of that stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna get memory hold, and we’re just gonna move on like air power and pretend like it never happened, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality of what’s delivered might be different, because a lot of that stuff didn’t pan out. The assumption that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple will always run the models that use your personal info on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they already described as private cloud compute, Maybe, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not assume that’s a given. I think it can just as easily end up that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work out the technical details with Google to do something that is similarly private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Google’s hardware in Google’s data centers with Google’s models. I think that is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very likely outcome for this, either short-term or long-term. Because again, this is just, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale of hosting this kind of compute power and developing that kind of model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just not in Apple’s wheelhouse. And that’s not to say it never can be, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far Apple has not at all made the required effort to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get themselves in that position. So the Apple that we know today, it’s like, you know, Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point get better at lots of things that it’s not currently good at, but the Apple that we know today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not good enough in those areas to probably host this the way that we assumed that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be hosted with private cloud compute. I think private cloud compute is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be probably memory hold in the next few years. And if and when that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s that big of a problem or scandal or downside because I’m sure Apple would insist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on similar privacy expectations if they did move it to Google. I’m sure they would design the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing with Google. They would work with them to ensure all the same privacy and encryption and transparency. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure if they make this change, we would look at it and be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Yeah, that makes sense and it doesn’t matter.
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Clipboard spam from News
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made an offhanded comment slash rant about how I copied something out of Apple News
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a bunch of other stuff was appended on the side of it and I didn’t care for it and I assumed that that was…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Didn’t care for it is the understatement of the hour. Yes, fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. And I assumed it was Apple News if I’m not mistaken or perhaps the Wall Street Journal or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was copying from. Richard writes, I just sampled 10 different random news articles on Apple News, and they all had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the additional text added to the paste. This is definitely an Apple News app thing and not just a Wall Street Journal thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I see this happening more frequently in other apps. I’m in a doctoral program and often take notes by copying and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pasting from PDFs. Some just flat out don’t let you do that, or they add additional text. Does this have anything to do with how crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are being used to train AI? I don’t think it has anything to do with that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’ve been doing this since way before there was AI crawlers.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I kind of see the reason, you know, In some instances, you’re like, look, this is useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably want the citation anyway, so we’re saving you some work. But that assumption doesn’t hold in lots of other contexts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even when it does hold, like for research papers, it just annoys people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and then Chris S. writes, clipboard hijacking is an Apple thing. Try copy and pasting something from the transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the podcast app. Same thing happens. Cool. Vitor writes, regarding your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News complaint of it adding extra text to your copy, you were hesitant to blame Apple News itself, but I wouldn’t be. Apple Books has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done the exact same thing forever. Since the time it was still called iBooks. It is so annoying, I’ve made an Alfred workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to simply grab the text within the quotes, ignore everything else and put it back on my clipboard. Well done, I dig that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only on the Mac, as they would say, because iOS and iPadOS don’t let you do cool things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, indeed. All right, well.
Oops, Indonesia is massive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week, I think it was, we were talking about GROK. Oh, yes, it was last week. Being blocked in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indonesia and Malaysia. And somebody, one of us, maybe it was me, I don’t know. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. OK, there you go. It’s always John, right? John said offhandedly that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, Indonesia is not big or something along those lines?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I said Malaysia and Indonesia
⏹️ ▶️ John are blocking it, and small companies can easily block it. Small countries can easily block it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it would need to be corrected there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so many people have written that Indonesia’s population is about 285 million, and for a comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the US is about 340 million. I
⏹️ ▶️ John should have known that because I recently looked at one of those, like, projections of what the world population will be like
⏹️ ▶️ John in, like, 30 or 40 years, and Indonesia was, like, either number one or two. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, large population and growing
MainStage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, main stage is not new. Uh, we were not familiar with main stage when we were talking about the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creative, what is it called? The creative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John creator studio, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Creator studio. Thank you. Uh, pixel mature. Anyways, uh, main stage is part of the creator studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is not new. Uh, Mike Taffet amongst many others wrote in to say that it’s been in use,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly for stage related things for a long time. And there’s a story that Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appointed us to from mix online.com. This is in 2008. They talk about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails uses Mainstage during concerts, and it’s being powered by what,
⏹️ ▶️ John Two XSERVs. Oh, yeah. The perfect rack-mountable, stage-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple computer for your Nine Inch Nails show.
⏹️ ▶️ John who made that machine intended it for. That’s
Apple Creative Studio miscellany
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple’s standalone creative bundle. Pekka Salonen wrote that for education customers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Pro Apps bundle appears to still be alive. For 200 bucks, you get all five Pro Apps, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Compressor, and MainStage. It’s something to grab perhaps before John’s kids graduate. And there is a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if they’ll keep that around because they still sell those standalone and this is just the education bundle standalone. So maybe it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John going away, but yeah, there you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of Pro Apps, and in this case, free trials, Caroline writes, Final Cut and Logic Pro both had a three month trial versions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with all features unlocked. And Caroline heard it was even easy to get reset or to reset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those trials. Sadly, Apple has removed those now and Creator Studio’s trial period is only one month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John, you had asked, I guess how the three month free trial worked. Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because I was like, what do you mean a three month free trial of Final Cut Pro? The Mac App Store doesn’t give free trials for
⏹️ ▶️ John like paid up front apps. So how did they do it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Ian Robinson piped in to say the apps were full versions downloaded from the Apple website.
CES monitor follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to monitors at CES, tell me about connectivity, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked a lot about some monitors that were interesting as potentially, you know, useful
⏹️ ▶️ John to Mac users, even though they’re technically gaming monitors. And there are some caveats that I meant to
⏹️ ▶️ John discuss last time, last week when we discussed these. One is connectivity. I read
⏹️ ▶️ John off all the ports, like, oh, this has this port and that port with this data rate and so on and so forth. And we got some questions
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. And those questions were warranted, which is like, okay, but can I hook up my Mac laptop to
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Like, it’s great that it has a display port, you know, whatever version on it. It’s great that it has HDMI 2.1,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t have display port or HDMI ports on my laptop or my Mac. I have Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB-C and stuff. So can I drive them? Most of the monitors that you, most of these gaming monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the 5k ones, the 4k, the 6k ones that you’ll see with like Mac relevant DPIs
⏹️ ▶️ John do support display port alternate mode for their USB-C port connections if you look at the specs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I wouldn’t just assume that means, oh, that I can just plug in my Mac laptop with the USB-C cable and everything will
⏹️ ▶️ John work fine, especially for the monitors that are like 5 or 6K. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is just CES, these products are announced, some of them have prices, but they’re not available for purchase yet. I would suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have any interest in these monitors, wait to see a review where somebody plugs a Mac into it
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that, yes, it will behave correctly. The Mac OS doesn’t flip out about it, that it can drive it at its
⏹️ ▶️ John full resolution through the thing, because the last thing you want to do is get one of these monitors, save a bunch of money, it’s great performance, then you have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Thunderbolt to DisplayPort or HDMI dongle hanging off
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop. You wouldn’t like that. So wait for those reviews before you decide to buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, in the latest episode you went through the specs and prices of various non-Apple displays with the general conclusion being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can get studio display, physical and pixel dimensions with less money and more refresh rate and HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what kind of color accuracy in HDR mess would one get into of trying to use these with a Mac. Game consoles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask the user to look at a test picture to infer the HDR capability of the TV, which suggests that HDR capability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey info might not travel properly over EDID or extended display identification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data. With an Apple display, macOS knows the HDR headroom given the particular brightness setting and can let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lightroom Classic know so that Lightroom Classic can assume a hard clip in the display pipeline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not do tone mapping. How does HDR work with macOS on a non-Apple display? Where does tone mapping occur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with those displays? Are they like TVs in their default mode, tone mapping in the display, or like TVs in HGIG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, no display side tone mapping? No display side tone mapping. There we go, I can get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What does it take to get color accurate results for the display P3 color space with Apple and Adobe apps?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are all excellent questions, and another reason you should absolutely wait for to see a review of these monitors, because
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS works very well with Apple monitors. It works okay with non-Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors designed for Mac users, but these displays are, for the most part, not designed to be used
⏹️ ▶️ John with Macs or by Mac users at all. And so they have different priorities. And most of them
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough features where you, like the good thing they have going for them is, as gaming monitors, they’re very configurable and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of settings that you can tweak. But if you care very much about like
⏹️ ▶️ John accurate color, you’re probably better off shopping one of like those Asus monitors that’s made for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, creative professionals. They’re more expensive. They don’t have the high refresh rate. They probably don’t have the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight stuff on them, but their whole point is we will be color accurate. We either have
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers for them for macOS, so macOS knows about their color profiles and all their capabilities, or else we’ve tested them
⏹️ ▶️ John to work with Macs. Like I said, MSI, which was the vendor we were talking about a lot last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John does have a Mac focus monitor that advertises the fact that their color will exactly match the color
⏹️ ▶️ John on like the internal laptop displays when you’re doing color work. So those do exist, but that was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t actually talk about that particular model because it didn’t have as many features. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John all this to say is these are gaming monitors. They’re not monitors for people who care about color accuracy. So wait for the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if they can be repurposed for that purpose. But the panels
⏹️ ▶️ John that they use will surely be used in monitors aimed at creative professionals. And I can guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John those will cost less than the studio display too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to promotion, Justin Searles writes, recently, Marco was talking about how much he appreciated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 120 Hertz ProMotion displays, including in Safari. It’s probably the case that Safari renders page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scrolling at 120 Hertz, but I recently learned that rendering page contents is generally capped at 60 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless you dig into feature flags and disable it. This is true on iPhone, iPad Pro, and MacBook Pro. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link to a blog post that Justin has written, a very short one, and Justin continues, if you want Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to render page content at 120 Hertz, you need to, at least on iOS, you need to go into settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, Safari, advanced, and then feature flags. And then there’s a setting in there, prefer page rendering updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near 60 frames per second, which you need to turn off. You can test the difference at the very amusingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey named testufo.com, which will also be linked.
⏹️ ▶️ John By Blurbuster, if anyone has ever watched a review of a gaming monitor, you know about
⏹️ ▶️ John Blurbusters and the little alien.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for the record, yes, I was just talking about scrolling because that’s where I noticed it. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, in terms of like where I notice any high refresh screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above 60 hertz, it’s basically in two areas, it’s scrolling and it’s when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full screen animations come in. So like on the iPhone, you can, I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice iPhone or iPad promotion or not by like when you launch an app and the app zooms into place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you go to the home screen and zooms back out, any kind of big full screen animation, you notice it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what scrolling is, is a big full screen animation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think, and especially when it’s, when it tracks your touch, I feel like I notice it more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so in the case of like, you know, using the scroll wheel to scroll a webpage or using your finger to scroll stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a phone or an iPad, that I think is where high refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rates are the most noticeable to the most people, certainly including myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think this is like aimed at like somebody who’s trying to, you know, something in a webpage, like an entire like a
⏹️ ▶️ John WebGL view or like a game you’re playing in a web browser or something where even though you’re not scrolling essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole screen is changing constantly and you’re wondering why you’re not getting more than 60 frames per second on your 120 Hertz monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John this setting is why. I mean, you can just try it on the UFO. It’s really easy to test. Just go to your phone and go to the UFO thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see that like it overlays. I think it says something like mixed frame rates or something if you have the cap on. And when you turn the
⏹️ ▶️ John cap off, you can see, oh, the top one is 120 bottom arm is 60 and I can tell the difference.
Keynote on visionOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I apologize to you, John. I forgot that there was a little bit of Vision Pro corner here in follow-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so my bad. But way back when we were talking about how TIFF could make her holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slideshows, and one of us made a offhanded remark about how you can’t edit keynote files on the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. I forget why we said this, but we did. And Anonymous writes, you can edit keynote files on the Apple Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. Internally, it was a bit of a hero case, to use some terminology Marco won’t understand, in what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be done in the productivity space, and definitely has the most complicated UI of any of the first party apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was suggesting using Keynote to make the slideshow and I think you two were talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t do it in the Vision Pro focus key that’s not available, but apparently it is.
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Tahoe complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounds like, John, you might have a little bit of complaining to do with regards to Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, some people have a little bit of complaining to do. We’ll see how much
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have to do. This is a story from a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks ago. It kind of got pushed out by other news that was a little bit more timely, like the CES stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may have seen this going around the internet in early January,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people have been complaining about it for a while since Tahoe. The article that became very popular is Nikita
⏹️ ▶️ John Prokopov. Did I say that right? Prokopov?
⏹️ ▶️ John Prokopov, who I know as Niki Tonski on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John He had a post called, It’s Hard to Justify Tahoe Icons that goes through in
⏹️ ▶️ John very extensive detail the history of icons next to menu
⏹️ ▶️ John items on the Mac, the current recommendations for them and the current implementation of that
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe. There have been other articles on the same topic, including one that was eventually referenced
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Tonski’s article, which is by Jim Nielsen from December 7th.
⏹️ ▶️ John But essentially ever since Tahoe was shown, there was a lot of discussion around the Mac user
⏹️ ▶️ John interface nerd community about icons in menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bars or in menu items. Like we were talking about the pull down menus at the top of the screen. You go to the menu bar, you pull down like the file
⏹️ ▶️ John or edit menu any of those menus. And the recommendation in Tahoe is to put icons
⏹️ ▶️ John next to a bunch of menu items that previously did not have any icons. Uh, and a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are upset about it. I’m pretty sure Marco read this article because he commented.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yes. So why don’t you two begin? What are your, what are your thoughts on this topic? Because this, this was a very
⏹️ ▶️ John popular article for a couple of weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the article does a really good job of explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why having icons next to every single menu item as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a best practice or as a requirement. Why that falls apart. It’s one of those things that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in interface design, I’m sure lots of designers over time have thought, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds like a good idea, let’s try it. And then normally the feedback process would be, you try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you realize, oh, there’s a lot of cases in which this doesn’t work or this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making things worse or it’s causing confusion, or you have to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick some symbols that don’t really work because certain menu commands just don’t really work well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as little icons next to them, or there’s no obvious icon choice, and then maybe you might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different programmers at different times on different teams choosing different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons for the same or similar actions over time, or maybe you might have a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco menu items in a row that all kind of should maybe be the same icon or a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and then you’re like, what do you do that and and in a normal process, you know that those would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be tried or these failures would be done internally and then the review would happen and they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, hmm, this actually is not working. We’re not going to we’re going to change this this idea or we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to cancel this idea. That last part didn’t happen at Apple and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those mistakes, They just made them all and shipped it as Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you’re not wrong. For me, I’m not as bothered by this as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems everybody else is, which isn’t to say I disagree with any particular thing you’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or any particular thing on these sites. In fact, Nikita’s post in particular does a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thorough job, as you guys were saying, of chronicling exactly why this is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. They put up, you know, screenshots of the original Hig. I don’t even know if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was called the Hig at that point, but I presume it was. Um, talking about how you should absolutely not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the following and then a picture of Tahoe doing exactly that, which is really special. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not great, but I don’t find it as actively bothersome as I think basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone else does. So I don’t have too much to say on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than that I think it needs to be better. It needs to be better than it is. It seems that there’s a clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lack of consistency. It’s clear that the left hand and the right hand are not talking, which is a very Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Reading the article I got very mad and then after I moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to something else I stopped being mad. So it’s kind of whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. I’m sure John you feel very strongly that this is absolutely accurate accurate and terrible in every way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would love to hear you rant about it. But for me, it sucks, but what? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Well, and to be clear, before we let John explode, I’m with you, Casey, in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much it makes me angry. Like, Tahoe has a lot of little paper cuts for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like a lot about Tahoe. Icons and menus are one of those paper cuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not super high on the list. I think it’s kind of a microcosm of the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failings in general of the Allendie era of software. It’s like what happens when when this group
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people, principles, trends, whatever it is, whatever came together to form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tahoe. It’s like what happened here? You know, there’s a lot of failings to investigate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but like to me, like the menu icons again, like it’s not and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think these articles claim that that was like the worst thing about Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it shows a lack of care. Yeah, a lack of care and a lack of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Talent honestly like a lack of design talent and and a lack of respecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the platform that it’s on that It’s that it’s redesigning like you know I said I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of you know Brashly said a few months back that Alan died
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doged his way through Mac OS with Tahoe That is how it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like what it does do for the government they? They tore through a bunch of departments without really understanding them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They hastily and sloppily tore stuff apart and put in their own ideas without really, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole Chesterson fence thing, without really understanding why anything was there, certainly without respecting it, and while thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they knew everything. That’s Allen Dye’s team with Tahoe. They tore through the MAC and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messed a bunch of stuff up, a lot of times needlessly, to create something that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by goals and by people who don’t really seem to get the platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly don’t seem to respect the platform and seem to not have taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of care doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey mentioned the original Mac human interface guidelines. The one cited
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Toski article are from 1992. The originals are back in the 80s when the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was first introduced. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they were called the Apple human interface guidelines. I’m not sure if they ever went from user to
⏹️ ▶️ John human, but anyway, rest assured that human interface guidelines or Hig is a term from the classic Mac OS era.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing that people always cite is that the graphic that’s at the top of this thing is basically from the 1992 Hig saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put symbols next to menu items because, and they give reasoning for it. You know, they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here’s why, you know, they show, they say, don’t do this, do this instead. And here’s why the Hig always used to give good reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that ended, not in the on die era that ended way before that, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John were usually pretty good about giving justifications for things based on, you know, either research they had
⏹️ ▶️ John done themselves or research done by other people, or matters of taste that people could agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with. Now when Tahoe, I think not even before it came out, when it was, Tahoe was first
⏹️ ▶️ John revealed, I guess it was like a WWDC or whatever, and the menu, the icons were in the menu,
⏹️ ▶️ John next to the menu items. I commented on it then, and I don’t think my opinion on it has changed much
⏹️ ▶️ John since then. The Hard Justified
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe Icons article does a good job of really showing how
⏹️ ▶️ John poor the implementation is. Because setting aside, which I’ll get to in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John the wisdom of putting an icon next to menu items,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way that has been executed in Tahoe is just riddled with really
⏹️ ▶️ John basic rookie mistakes. Like it’s inconsistent, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t follow their own advice that they gave, just needlessly obfuscate
⏹️ ▶️ John things that would otherwise be clearer if there were no icons. They just, the icons themselves are scaled
⏹️ ▶️ John to a size where they’re so small that it’s difficult to tell what they are even on a retina display.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just did a bad job of executing it. But setting aside the execution,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to have in your particular application the perfect execution, and you don’t make all the mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple made, is this a good idea? I think what I said at the time about it when
⏹️ ▶️ John we first saw Tahoe was like, there is, there is actually some
⏹️ ▶️ John justification for having an icon be aid in the recognition of a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John item. So a tiny symbol that you could recognize without having to read the words of the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John item can help you find a, you know, a menu item more quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John than if you had to scan the words, right? really big menus with like
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that have huge menus like Photoshop wherever they go on for a long time. The whole point of icons
⏹️ ▶️ John is rather than asking you to read text maybe you can recognize a symbol. Now obviously that only works
⏹️ ▶️ John for if a couple things are true. First you kind of have to use the same symbol for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same commands so everyone needs to decide this is the symbol we’re gonna use for copy
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the symbol we’re gonna use for new this is the symbol we’re gonna use for export because if you don’t it really
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t help because like let me find the export command you’re scanning the little menu icons
⏹️ ▶️ John for what you think is the export icon which is like a box with an arrow coming up out of it but this one uses a box with an arrow going down
⏹️ ▶️ John to it or a different box with an arrow going sideways or like you’ve blown that if it’s not consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John across the OS it’s almost as if like when you go to like you know file open you’re looking for the word open
⏹️ ▶️ John but if some if different apps chose was a different word than open, it would really mess you up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’d be like open, retrieve, expand, load. Like, but just, how
⏹️ ▶️ John about everyone just agrees on open? The same exact thing applies to icons. You really
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a standard set of icons. Second thing is, the icons next to menu
⏹️ ▶️ John items, especially in 1992, were infeasible because the display resolution was 72 DPI.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just can’t draw anything next to a menu item that’s recognizable.
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can draw a very limited number of things that’s next to a menu item that is recognizable, that DPI.
⏹️ ▶️ John With the advent of retina, making symbols that are, you have more, the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem space is bigger. You could make more different symbols that are all recognizable because we have finer resolution on
⏹️ ▶️ John our displays. So just because they said in 1992, don’t put symbols next to menus,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a look at like that screenshot of the 72 DPI. What can you even do with that many pixels? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not much you can do, but now you can. So I think a lot of the reason that was against putting, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John icons next to menu items in the nineties, no longer holds. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being Apple in the Allendie era, they chose to make the icons next to menu items smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than they really needed to be because it looks nicer for them to be this size. And I agree, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does look nicer. Like if you look in the screenshot of like Open Recent, it’s got, I think it’s supposed to be a clock icon. God
⏹️ ▶️ John help us. A clock icon next to Open Recent, all right? Whatever. Like that open icon
⏹️ ▶️ John with the slanted arrow, or whatever, anyway. And you can see how the clock is kind of the same size
⏹️ ▶️ John as the capital O in open and it does look nice, but there’s actually more, you could make
⏹️ ▶️ John that icon bigger. Like there’s more room in the menu for the icon to be bigger. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have made it more recognizable and made the icons less look like blurry smudges, which is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John what a lot of them look like from reasonable like Mac using distances, but they didn’t because this looks nicer. So
⏹️ ▶️ John another black mark on them. Now, if you look in Apple’s actual guidelines, which we will link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John What they actually say, and again, I read this when the WDC, which is why I wasn’t so
⏹️ ▶️ John super mad about it then, is they say, you know, icons help people recognize common actions,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is just what I’m saying. Icons help you recognize things. Use the same icons as the system to represent actions such
⏹️ ▶️ John as copy, share, and delete, wherever they appear. For a list of icons that represent common actions, see standard
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, and they give a link to a list of standard icons you’re supposed to use for common commands. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John that list is very short. It’s like, it’s not, there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough common icons and even Apple doesn’t follow its own device. And then they go on, don’t display
⏹️ ▶️ John an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item. Not all menu
⏹️ ▶️ John items need an icon. I don’t know why everyone complaining about this hasn’t seen this guideline, but they’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants you to put an icon next to every menu item. They absolutely don’t. They say they don’t, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they also have some other advice. They give an example, like when you shouldn’t have any icons next to things like in the days of the week, None
⏹️ ▶️ John of those deserve icons. Although Casey would put them there because it looks fun. He would use emoji though. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they do another thing where it’s like, what is it? Use a single icon to introduce a group of similar items.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of adding individual icons for each action or reusing the same icon for all of them, establish a common theme with
⏹️ ▶️ John the symbol for the first item and rely on the menu item text to keep the remaining items distinct. So they give an example of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of copy things, copy symbol, copy name, copy image as, copy code. They’re all next to each other in the menu.
⏹️ ▶️ John only the first copy command has the copy icon and the rest of them have no icon. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with this advice, and I think that the problem that everyone is finding is like, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are not grokking or internalizing this advice because the advice
⏹️ ▶️ John requires the developer to make too many judgment calls. If they had just said every single
⏹️ ▶️ John menu item needs an icon, at least people would understand that. But they didn’t say that. They said not
⏹️ ▶️ John all menu items need an icon. So then you’re like, okay, which of my menu items need an
⏹️ ▶️ John icon and why? Because the directions say they help people recognize common options. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it should just be on common ones. Or like should it just be from that standard icon list? And then you
⏹️ ▶️ John end up with things like in this article where it’s just a hodgepodge of menu items. Some of them have icons, some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. Why do some of them have icons and why do some of them not have icons? Is it because the icons are more commonly
⏹️ ▶️ John used and it changes the indenting because of the way they implemented it? It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a poorly explained, like, what do they want? What do they want? They
⏹️ ▶️ John want people to recognize icons, but they make them too small. They don’t want that on every menu item, and they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to be repeated. But if they’re not repeated, then how can you find an item by its icon? You just have to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the one above it that’s similar to that and scroll down. And how is a developer supposed to decide
⏹️ ▶️ John which menu items should have icons? So I don’t think the idea of having
⏹️ ▶️ John icons in menus is an inherently bad idea. I think it can
⏹️ ▶️ John actually help. I mean, we have it right now, like the example everybody uses in all these articles, which is 100% true, is when
⏹️ ▶️ John you go into the little green, like a window widget menu on a Mac window
⏹️ ▶️ John title bar, and you get that little pop-up menu, and you see those little symbols, you’ll also
⏹️ ▶️ John see them in the window menu on some applications as well, like in the move and resize sub menu
⏹️ ▶️ John under window menu. Those icons do a better job of the words left, right, top, bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John top, left, top, right, bottom. I bet people never even read those words. I bet they just look at the symbols
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s enough pixels in those symbols that the symbols add clarity and make it faster for people
⏹️ ▶️ John to find things. I mean, those didn’t come into Hawaii. They’ve been there since, I’m looking at them right now in Sequoia, right? They didn’t come into
⏹️ ▶️ John Hawaii, right? But that proves the idea that icons next to menu items can be helpful
⏹️ ▶️ John for the reasons they describe. But someone somewhere decided they wanted to see a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more menus because they think it looks cool and they gave really no guidance
⏹️ ▶️ John to developers for how and when to deploy them. Their list of standard icons
⏹️ ▶️ John is too short and the result is, the result is this article. That you go through Mac OS, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s own applications and how they choose to use icons, and it does not help. Does it make
⏹️ ▶️ John things worse? It arguably makes things uglier. Sometimes it hurts the ability to scan
⏹️ ▶️ John down the menu because of the indenting changes in a few cases. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is just, you know, it’s an example of not the worst change in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John but every aspect of the execution is bad. And so in the end, it is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a net negative to Tahoe and Tahoe is worse. Tahoe’s menus are worse than the pre-Tahoe menus
⏹️ ▶️ John because they look noisier and uglier. And you learn to tune out the symbols for the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John outlined in this article because you cannot rely on them. They are not consistent across Apple’s apps, let alone third-party apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the result of this is a bunch of the indie developers we know all coming up with schemes to remove the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John from their own applications. So at least their icons can have clean menus, but that further
⏹️ ▶️ John increases the inconsistency because now some apps don’t have icons at all. It’s, yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, you know, apparently to Casey’s surprise, strongly against icons ever being in menu because
⏹️ ▶️ John the 1992 Higgs said they shouldn’t be. Absolutely not, things change, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I am for well thought out, well articulated guidelines in the human interface guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John that developers understand how to follow, that Apple follows itself, and that following them makes the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John better, and this fails on all those fronts. And one final item, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Colin M. Ford had a great toot about this. This is actually, I believe, from an iPad menu, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I know is a Nataho thing, but you know, same deal, icons, the menus. It is the writing direction sub-menu
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I think, an edit menu. This is incredible. Oh, a format menu. And writing direction is
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you, it’s a left to right or right to left language. And the writing direction is a menu with a submenu. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the submenu items are default, right to left, and left to right. The writing direction submenu
⏹️ ▶️ John itself uses an icon next to writing direction that has a left-facing arrow stacked on top of a right-facing arrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John The submenu choices, default, right to left, and left to right, all use exactly the same icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey left-facing arrow over a right-facing arrow,
⏹️ ▶️ John except the default menu item has a smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly, left facing arrow over a right facing arrow. Like it’s right there, people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right to left and left to right. The right to left arrow is an arrow that points from right to left.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the left to right arrow is an arrow that points, but they didn’t even do that. They use both arrows on every single menu
⏹️ ▶️ John item. This is a perfect example of icons not helping with recognition, not helping
⏹️ ▶️ John with clarity, with an extra bit of completely meaningless inconsistency with the default icon
⏹️ ▶️ John being smaller than the right to left or left to right ones. Just chef’s kiss, as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of these icons, as far as I can tell, I think all the ones I saw, they’re all part of Apple’s SF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Symbols library. This is a library of standard platform icons that Apple provides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers, and they use all over their own apps as well. I use them heavily in Overcast, like the whole playlist icon picker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are all SF Symbols. And it’s a great icon library, but I think, you know, one of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I occasionally have with SF Symbols, of course, everyone using it would have this problem, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you can’t quite find exactly what you want. So you kind of settle for one that’s already there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then, because like making your own entire symbol from scratch, that takes more work. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can find one that’s kind of close, sometimes you’re like, you know what, that’ll work. I’ll just use that. Well, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the task of putting icons on every single menu item in macOS, it seemed like they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add any SF symbols as part of this process. They were probably working in a hurry because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a lot of work to go through every single Apple menu item.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you don’t have to put an icon next to every single menu, but we won’t tell you which ones you do have to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, right. But anyway, it looks like part of the mediocre execution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is that they seem to, of course, like much of this redesign, seem to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in a bit of a rush. And they just picked whatever icon they could find in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SF Symbols that was close enough. And that’s how you get things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t talk to each other. So one team picked one icon for the same command as another team picked another icon. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. So you have, again, just kind of like a mediocre execution. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole idea of SF Symbols is unification. We’re gonna unify the way and standardize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way everything looks and works. And in some cases, in some contexts, that’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when you start applying these like blanket philosophies without looking at the results,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without looking at how the real world and real needs might conflict with that or might have non-ideal outcomes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get mediocrity. And that’s just everything about Tahoe’s liquid glass redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, there are certain contexts in which some of these things might work well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice, the way it was applied and maybe the way it will always need to be applied with macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just doesn’t have good, actual, practical outcomes. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing that a good design team and a good design process and a good feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process would try a bunch of stuff before it ships, of course. But there wasn’t a filter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it out before it got here. And I think this goes to like, Gruber’s talked a lot about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Allen Dye leaving Apple was not Apple’s choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are all celebrating it. But Allen Dye left Formetta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by all accounts on his own accord and Apple was caught by surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and presumably as a result maybe didn’t want him to leave or certainly wasn’t certainly was not asking him to leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means that all the other Apple senior leadership fully supported this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Craig Federighi fully supported this Tim Cook fully supported this I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if Craig Federighi supported it, I think that Allendie’s peers in the org chart their opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John is unknown. Tim Cook yes apparently thought it was fine because he’s the person anyone above
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Allendie apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jeff Williams clearly must have supported
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, sure. Anyone, anyone above him in the arc chart? But I have a I have an easy time believing some of Alan Dye’s
⏹️ ▶️ John peers in the arc charts were not happy about this, including potentially Craig Federig, who had to junk up
⏹️ ▶️ John all the OS’s he’s in charge of with designs that he didn’t agree with from Alan Dye. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I suspect that, you know, because you think like which of the top execs probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to be supportive of Alan Dye and this direction for this to ship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m thinking at minimum, Tim Cook, Jeff Williams, Craig Federighi, and Jaws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they all, because that’s marketing, soft, like they, I think they all would have had to at least be supportive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. So as we think about where this is going to go in the future, yeah, we have a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design leader, um, Steven, what’s his last name?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Lame? Something like that. Yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great. We have a new design leader. By everything we’ve heard, it sounds like Steven Lame is like a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person for the principles that we care about. But all those high executives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who allowed this and maybe even supported and maybe even liked this, they’re all still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there except Jeff Williams. So I don’t know how much is actually going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the system in place that got Allen Dye this power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and supported this and let all of this mediocrity ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still the system there for the most part. So I’m a little worried that we’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually see as much change as we want because all those other people, with the exception of Jeff Williams,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, my opinion of those people you listed is that Tim Cook always recuses himself from these conversations because he
⏹️ ▶️ John has no opinion whatsoever, which certainly doesn’t help. That Jeff Williams, if he was above Alan Dye
⏹️ ▶️ John in the org chart, probably supported it and he has bad taste, but he’s gone now. That Jaws
⏹️ ▶️ John may or may not have supported it, but I think Jaws will actually be reactive of too public opinion. And
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least, Jaws is aware that the people who care the most about user interface hate Tahoe with a passion. So I think Jaws
⏹️ ▶️ John will change his opinion if he did support it. And I think Craig was not super into it, but had to do it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of his job. That’s just a guess. I have no inside information. If anyone does have inside information about
⏹️ ▶️ John who at Apple loved what Alain Dai was doing and who hated it, please feel free to write us because I would love to know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the end result is, you know, this is what the company did. And so that’s that. And I do, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have heard from, that the new, you know, Steve Lemay being in charge that he is now particularly forceful and fighting for what he
⏹️ ▶️ John believes in according to one vaguely sourced story that I saw at some point. But, you know, fingers crossed, like
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly it’s better than Alan Dye still being there, which is a powerful person whose opinions that we disagree with
⏹️ ▶️ John and who makes bad decisions about UI. We’ll see if we can make better decisions in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of Tahoe and weird UI bits, Tahoe window resizing. Norbert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Heger writes, since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window or failing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 by 19 pixels located near the window corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window. But due
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it, about 75% is now lies outside the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window. So I was just messing with this with Safari on 26.2 and I, either this has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been fixed or I am just a unicorn that can hit it every time because looking at Norbert’s post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t doubt anything he said was accurate. And this was only written a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m like, I’m a CEC unicorn. So maybe I’m window, I’m a window sizing unicorn as
⏹️ ▶️ John You just do it in real, real slow motion, a pixel at a time. I, I’ve reproduced exactly what we’ve seen in this video. It’s the first thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to do is reproduce it to see if this is just like a weird situation or if it’s true. And I could reproduce exactly as shown.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just takes some very careful movement of the cursor. What is it getting to is like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John put like the tip of your arrow cursor in the
⏹️ ▶️ John corner of a window, like the window is white and your background is blue, like in this little animation, and you put the tip of
⏹️ ▶️ John your arrow cursor inside the white part on the corner, you expect to be able to resize it, but you can’t because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John now outside the region that allows you to click and resize. Because the region itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of focused around the corner of a square window, but the windows aren’t square anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it ends up in this perverse scenario where if you visually try to resize the window, you’ll essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John grab nothing. He’s got a cool animation of him trying to grab a rounded plate by grabbing the air next
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and knocking it over a little
⏹️ ▶️ John very good. That’s exactly what it, like look at the arc, he’s got little regions. I think he mapped it out essentially a pixel at a time using the cursor. Like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be quick to do this. You can do it as slow as you want, move your cursor one pixel at a time, you know, zoom in with the accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom if you need to have more precise control. It’s just bad. Like the resize region
⏹️ ▶️ John does not match the curve shape. It’s very bad. 75% of the region being outside the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s bad. Some of it has to be outside the window because you want to be able to grab like near the outside of the window, but too
⏹️ ▶️ John much is outside. And some people were like, I bet the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who work on Mac OS who hate Alan Dye intentionally did this implementation to make his design look bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey case. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is a pretty easy explanation of why this is like this. Well, first of all, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does highlight that if you want to do this design with the big rounded corners, which I think is a terrible idea, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John insist on doing it, you now face a challenge. And the challenge is,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, if I just move the region that you can click to resize a window, so it makes sense with
⏹️ ▶️ John the rounded corners, you may break third-party applications. You may break first-party applications because
⏹️ ▶️ John the window resize area is a place where the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John grabs your clicks for standard window management actions, not the OS, or the framework like AppKit or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that region is reserved for window resizing. But if you move that region up
⏹️ ▶️ John because the window curve, and now you have to like move that region up and farther into the content area,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be blocking content in someone’s app that you used to be able to click, but that you can no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John click because a click in that region now clicks on the content. Making changes
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, making I’ve decided that different regions of the window belong to like the framework
⏹️ ▶️ John for the window resizing. And you can see it happening on iPad, the same thing. Breaks
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. I have applications on my iPad that haven’t been updated for the iPadOS 26,
⏹️ ▶️ John where there are parts of the app that are under the regions that are now
⏹️ ▶️ John reserved for like window control stuff, if you’re in windowing mode on iPadOS. If they did this on macOS, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John have been in exactly the same situation, where there would have been some app where you can’t reach some control that’s in the lower
⏹️ ▶️ John right corner, because the window resize area has moved up to it. So I think they were faced, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem of their own creation. Hey, let’s super curve the corner on our windows to give less room for content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had to make a choice. Do we move the window resize region and break applications? Or do we leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it where it is and make window resizing more difficult? And they chose the second bad choice, which is to leave the window resizing area
⏹️ ▶️ John where it is and make windows harder to resize. And the benefit they get from that is they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John break as many applications. Yet another reason why Tahoe’s design choices are bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you really feel, John? Wow. All right. And then rounding out our triplet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Tahoe complaints, I wish I had something alliterative there. Uh, Tahoe wants you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to update, or I guess prior versions of the OS wants you to update to Tahoe periodically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or ask you to update periodically. And Rob Griffiths, who is the creator of MacOS Hints and is now at ManyTricks, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creator of Moom, Witch, and many other apps, uh, writes, I found a way to block the Tahoe update prompts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 90 day chunks anyway. Now, when I go to system settings, general software updates, I see this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a screenshot. Your Mac is running the latest software update allowed by your organization,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is Sequoia 15.7.3. The secret using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Macs in your organization, even if that quote unquote organization is one Mac on your desk. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major Mac OS updates for up to 90 days at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the max that the policy allows, which seems like exactly what I needed. Uh, however, Rob updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we sure we want to read this John? Cause I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. All right. All right. It’s from the
⏹️ ▶️ John article that we’re going to link.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, I don’t still, I don’t know if we should be calling attention to it, but anyway, based on some comments on my mastodon post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this only works due to a bug in Mac West 15.7.3. The 90 day period isn’t supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a rolling date, but 90 days from the release date. So it should have no impact, but it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I hope Apple doesn’t fix the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this great. I think I’ve complained about a few times in the show the day
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe 26.0 was released. I got a red badge with a one
⏹️ ▶️ John net on system settings on my Mac Saying hey, there’s a software update
⏹️ ▶️ John other people tell me that didn’t happen to them that 26.0 came out and that they You know software
⏹️ ▶️ John system settings didn’t have a badge and they weren’t bothered by it But as time has passed, more and more people
⏹️ ▶️ John are becoming increasingly bothered to update Tahoe. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve seen recently a big notification appear in the upper right hand corner of your Mac screen that’s a little bit taller than a normal notification
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, hey, did you know Tahoe’s out? And it wants you to update. Maybe system settings in your dock
⏹️ ▶️ John now has a red one and a badge on it because software update knows that Tahoe is available
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. This suggestion from Rob is a little bit involved, It involves running
⏹️ ▶️ John shell scripts to add special profiles and blah, blah, blah. And in my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to do it on every individual account on a Mac. So they all don’t see the badge because
⏹️ ▶️ John in my household, the badge has spread to all of the Macs and all of the accounts. But I hate that
⏹️ ▶️ John badge so much that I did it. I did, it’s a Git repository and then you do some little bit of manual
⏹️ ▶️ John tweaking. It’s a little bit tech nerdy, you read Rob’s posts. It’s not too hard to do. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit tedious, but it gives you a 90 day window when that badge will go away. And I asked, like, I did it, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the badge didn’t go away. Like, my software update said, you’re running the latest software allowed by your organization. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John great, that’s great. Why is the badge still there? The badge will eventually go away. Sometimes you need to log out and back
⏹️ ▶️ John in. Sometimes you need to check for update a couple times. Rest assured, the badge will eventually leave. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then Rob also suggests making an alias. Once you’ve installed the thing once, you can make an alias to sort of re-up it for another 90 days.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the next time a badge appears, you can just open Terminal and type no-taho, and it’ll return, and it will re-up it for another 90 days.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll still have to do that in every account. But I set up those aliases and I set up those things just so
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t be bothered to upgrade to Tahoe because I don’t plan to do that anytime soon. If ever,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are in the same camp, this is the blog post for you. Thank you, Rob Griffiths, for figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John this out. I hope Apple never does fix this bug. And if they do fix it, you know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve lived with it since 26.0 was out until this week, and now I have a blessed vacation. If 15.7.4 comes out and they
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this, I’ll be pretty surprised Cause normally at that point they’re just doing security
⏹️ ▶️ John updates, but you know, it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, at this point, what is, and I’m genuinely asking you, what is keeping you away from Tahoe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like obviously you have complaints, but what is it about Tahoe that’s enough to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not ready for me?
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I, well, it’s, there’s no, nothing drawing me to it and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco many things repelling me. So it’s just a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John easy balance. You know what I mean? Like I just, everything I, I, you know, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it every time I do software development for my apps, like I have to be using it. Like I’m using Xcode in Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s unavoidable. My apps are on Tahoe, they’re updated for Tahoe, fixing Tahoe specific bugs. It’s not like I’m not using Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I know what it’s like. I’m using it every single week for some period of
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Although often I remote desktop into the little, the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John on my big screen so I can get a little bit bigger screen, but I’m using it. But that experience has just
⏹️ ▶️ John led me to think like, I don’t want this on my main Mac. There are no features of it that make a
⏹️ ▶️ John big difference to me and there are many things about it that I dislike. So I might just
⏹️ ▶️ John skip it entirely and hope 27 fixes something, but we’ll see. I just take it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a day-by-day basis. I do that balancing act. Like for example, if there was some app that only ran on 26 that I desperately wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would update, you know what I mean? Like, there needs to be something pulling me to it. And right now there isn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a lot of things pushing me away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So no carrots, maybe a couple of sticks, but-
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#askatp: Dye vs. Ive software design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP because coincidentally, our Ask ATP tonight largely relates to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we just talked about. So Austin writes, was Alan Dye a better or worse steward of software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design than Johnny Ive? It’s a really good question. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I have a good answer for this. And it’s so hard to because we make assumptions about whose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault or whose design, you know, Who’s based on when Dai was there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when when I was there, but I mean, they crossed over for ways, didn’t they? So what if Johnny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, delegated to Alan Dai? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John think the only way we can answer this question is basically just roll up every bit of like the buck stops
⏹️ ▶️ John with the person at the head of UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was I’ve we’re just gonna we’re just gonna, you know, obviously not truthfully, but we’re just going to assign all blame
⏹️ ▶️ John and all credit to everything having to do with software design to the head of software design during the I’ve period and during the
⏹️ ▶️ John Dai period. As you noted, that’s not actually how the world works, but that’s how it works with the buck stops here thing. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may not have done the work, but in the end you were in charge of it. So it all falls on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, Alan Dye was Johnny Ives selected software chief or, you know, software design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chief. Like that was kind of like how that worked out from everything we’ve heard, like delegation wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Johnny Ive was the head of all design at Apple, he, by all accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively overworked. Now that was in many ways self-imposed. You know, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard stories of him like really diving in and getting it, like really having an opinion about all the little details. You know, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building Apple Park at the time. That was a massive undertaking for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also you know, in particular for Johnny Ive. He involved himself in lots of the design of that. They were doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, he was designing everything at Apple and even some things outside of Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John he already had a foot out the door at that And he’d already asked to leave and Tim Cook had convinced him to stay according to rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it was very clear that you know Johnny Ive was spread very thin at that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So while Johnny Ive was the one in charge of all design at Apple there I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much of a distinction between the Allen die era and the Johnny Ive era in terms of software design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think Allen die was kind of always that person, you know There’s there’s obviously some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions about like you know, how many filters these people have to go through on the way up the chain to get things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approved and get things at the door, you know, how much power they have, how many checks and balances different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs and departments have. That all changes over time and we don’t have a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insight into that except for occasional random things we hear, but I don’t think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really draw a distinction between these two because I think the Allen Dye era that we call it today day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just an extension of the Johnny Ivera, which both of which were extensions of Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook putting all design on Johnny because Tim Cook doesn’t understand design or computers or humanity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think following following the guideline that I sat down, I have no problem drawing distinction here. I’m blaming everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Allen in the Ivera and I’ve and everything the Allen Dyer on on die whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not to Marcos point there was overlap. I’m just saying, look, if you’re in charge of the buck stops with you
⏹️ ▶️ John and by that criteria, it’s easy for for me, die or worse, no contest. Even though I didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the stuff that Johnny Ives did with software, if you look at, well, like, what is Johnny Ives’ like signature,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like, signature achievement or project or whatever, I would say it was iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for all the complaints about iOS 7, comparing it to Alan Dye’s sort of crowning achievement, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is the 26 OSes, oh my God, iOS 7 was better than 26 OSes. Like, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ John all had complaints about iOS 7, and it went a little bit overboard, but the general design direction
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t terrible. And I think it was like a needed break from the style that came before it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it evolved into something pretty good. And it was better than 20s X OSs from day
⏹️ ▶️ John one. It was better thought out. It was better, there was more reasoning behind it. The mistakes that it made it pretty quickly fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, we don’t know if that’s gonna happen with 26s because it’s just been out for a year. But pretty much everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve did with software is not as bad as I think all the things Alan Dye
⏹️ ▶️ John has done in the era when he has been there and Johnny is not. To be clear, I don’t like what either one of them did with the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like, I’m not saying either one was good, but if I had to personally pick, it is I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think if we’re comparing, you know, if we take like the people’s names off of it, and if we compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big iOS 7 redesign to the big iOS 26 redesign, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 7 did have a lot of problems, but I think where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 7 was better is that it left a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room to tweak it into something that ended up being pretty good. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 26 OSs, I mean, maybe because they’re just brand new and it’s hard for us to see right now, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the changes that 26 made, it’s hard to look at them and find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good path out that isn’t just like going back to a different style entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the benefits aren’t as clear. Like iOS 7, like it was such a clear contrast we could see
⏹️ ▶️ John this is doing X, Y, and Z better than the other era. It does some things worse, but I see
⏹️ ▶️ John where it is an improvement. I see how it is a refreshing change. I see the areas where it is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the benefits for app development. I feel like iOS 7 really did make it easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John develop apps that conform to different screen sizes and that are flexible. And it did make app
⏹️ ▶️ John development easier in kind of the same way that SF Symbols did and sort of making Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John caliber design approachable to developers who weren’t artistic experts, you know what I mean? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know like, I’m sure someone’s listening to this and saying, you dummies, Alan Dye designed all of iOS 7. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the point here. I’m just saying, when I’ve was in charge, what did
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple put out? I’m not saying who did it. I don’t care if Alan Dye designed every single thing that was released under Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ive when he was in charge. I’m assigning names to eras when they were in charge. When Ive
⏹️ ▶️ John was in charge, the software Apple put out was better than the software put out when Dye was
⏹️ ▶️ John in charge. regardless of who is actually responsible for that software. Like who actually did the work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately, neither one of them really showed that much of a respect for UI
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was a good hardware designer mostly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, and I think- You can’t say that for Dai.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like that’s the whole original sin here. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set Apple off in a bad direction with software design was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a disregard or an ignorance of UI design as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate discipline from visual design, like graphic design. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John just one of those design people. You just know
⏹️ ▶️ John things, just do the software too, same thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, it’s like, yeah, like all doctors are the same, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, exactly, yeah. You have a doctor in philosophy, do the surgery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they can, they can, you know, I have a problem with my foot. They’re my podiatrist too, like who, they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the head of doctor. Just this one doctor, since they’re good at this one kind of doctoring, can obviously do all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinds of doctoring, right? Because it’s all the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s the Peter principle. Johnny Ive was promoted to his level of incompetence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I think that, like, that’s what I want to see change. And that’s what gives me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope with Stephen LeMay being elevated because it does sound, by all accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he is more of the traditional UI design kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of person. And we haven’t really had a lot of that in Apple’s software design leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really since Forstall left. It isn’t to say that they haven’t put in any good software software design since.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In particular, I think as iOS 7 kind of evolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and morphed, I think somewhere around the iOS 12 to 15 era,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it got pretty good. Like that was actually a really good era of iOS software design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mac, I think, has had a lot of problems for most of this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one of the things about iOS 7 is it didn’t touch the Mac, which was merciful. Like the Mac got sort of sideswiped
⏹️ ▶️ John by a bunch of iOS-isms as time went on, but iOS 7 when it landed did not also land with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. Whereas, you know, because again, like with the Mac, as we’ve talked about many times in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, Apple doesn’t really put the resources into the Mac that they put into iOS and there’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you can understand why, obviously. Like that’s an understandable reason why they would do that. So what tends to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen on the Mac is whatever they need to do for iOS, the Mac kind of gets a half-assed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version that doesn’t have as many resources. It’s being applied to a kind of a more complex,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more heavily legacy code base and software library and just a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface area in terms of like the needs it has to cover. Like on the Mac, it’s a huge surface area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way bigger than software UI has to cover on iOS. But because it is lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority in Apple, because it’s not as big of a business, it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer resources. So it ends up getting fewer resources at a lower priority to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is often more complicated UI problems. So as a result, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI redesigns in the modern Apple era tend to be half-assed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incomplete, and not that great. Again, also like those dynamics aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to change. The Mac is not going to get a ton of UI design resources from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if iOS needs them first. And iOS will always need them first.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it just needs to be divorced from the iOS release schedule. Like the whole idea of doing a 26 OS
⏹️ ▶️ John like and having it go across all the OSs with this big redesign, you’re dooming the Mac because as you said, it’s gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer resources. So if you have fewer resources on the Mac, the ideal thing would be, okay, the Mac gets updated half as
⏹️ ▶️ John much, a quarter as much, like just you don’t have the resources to do an update at the same interval you do
⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS update, which means you can’t do this coordinated, all of our platforms get updated to the new design at the
⏹️ ▶️ John same time. Setting aside the fact that always, even before all the 26 OSs and anything, any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of update the Mac would get was never designed to make the Mac better. It was just designed to make the Mac fit in with
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the iOS did like two years ago, back when it was delayed. So it needs to be not connected
⏹️ ▶️ John schedule-wise. It can’t be in sync with iOS. And also, the changes need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John designed to make the Mac better. And those two things haven’t been true in a while. It’s a real shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the whole idea that we need to unify everything about these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms not only I think is a bad idea for a lot of reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s misapplied in tons of ways, because they’re different platforms, they work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very differently, they’re used very differently in different contexts by different people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the idea that everything has to match between the platforms is, I mean look, the entire tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business has tried this in so many ways. The whole write ones from anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco principle, we’ve tried this so many times at so many levels and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s either incredibly difficult or doesn’t work every single time. And so the idea, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reality of the Mac is that it will always be second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority in Apple compared to iOS in terms of like software design resources and everything. It’s always going to be a lower priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s always going to be more complicated in terms of what it has to cover. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what leadership should consider doing is scaling back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the assumption that everything has to be done in unity with the Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that applies to lots of things. You know, on the software side, that’s a whole can of worms. But mainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the interface side, this is where many of the sins have happened. The Mac doesn’t need to match
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, iPadOS or iOS in every possible way. In fact, the Mac needs to match those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in very few ways, honestly, in terms of UI design. For Apple to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to push iOS really hard, which makes sense. That’s the competitive space. That’s their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big platform. Apple should aggressively push iOS forward. We can argue what forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means, but they should aggressively push iOS forward. The Mac is not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mac is a mature, stable platform that they don’t have or they don’t choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use the resources to aggressively push it forward. So they can either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sloppily push it forward, which is the path they’ve sometimes chosen here, or they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale back what they want the Mac to do in terms of motion every year. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what John’s saying, you can do fewer software updates. That’s one way to do that. Another way to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just don’t have the Mac try to match the UI or the trends or the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI modifications of iPadOS and iOS. Respect the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as its own thing that has different needs, different priorities, and a very different level of resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and properly allocate the tasks that you want the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do every year in terms of updates and everything with the resources that you’re going to give it so that it can be done well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if that means doing less than iOS, which it almost always will, that’s fine. We would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather have less done better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to keep everything in perfect unison for no good reason, honestly, and have it be a sloppy mess on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think even with a very small team with not many resources, maybe not even, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount they have now, maybe even less, if given something like a two to three year
⏹️ ▶️ John schedule, that small team could do amazing things to the Mac if freed
⏹️ ▶️ John from the onerous strategy tax of, oh, you know, by the way, we’re having this
⏹️ ▶️ John big effort with the 26 OSs and we all have to be on the same page here. Oh, we all have to add
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, we all have to do this. Those sort of Apple strategy taxes that are applied to the Mac, drag
⏹️ ▶️ John that team down so much. If you just gave like that exact team or even a smaller team
⏹️ ▶️ John a multi-year runway to do what they thought was best for the Mac without regard
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever hell everyone else was doing, that would be great. And he’s like, oh, they’re gonna bifurcate. It’ll be too whatever. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing, which I think this team would understand is that you just need a family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John in a line of products. They should all look like Apple products, but you don’t need them to look
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. Like it’s very easy and possible to have a family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John between Apple OSS without them walking in lockstep about the design, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They can be offset by years. Like at various times in the Mac iOS 10 iOS iPad iOS era, there has
⏹️ ▶️ John been that family resemblance despite not a single pixel being shared between any of those OSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all look like Apple OSS. They all looked roughly of the same era, but before the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of iOSification infection started to happen to Mac OS, they like
⏹️ ▶️ John they were able to be themselves and all still looked Apple-ish and were sort of on their
⏹️ ▶️ John own schedule, right? Like say someone designs their design, you know, iOS maybe is the leader
⏹️ ▶️ John and they come up with a new design look and the Mac, you know, is inspired by that and two years later, it sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of updates to get that look too. That’s fine, there’s still a family resemblance there. Or even the reverse, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac team working on a two year timeline comes up with a new look for Mac OS and then the iOS people look over and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s pretty cool, people seem to love it. maybe we should, for the next big iOS redesign, maybe we should think about that. That kind of cross-pollinization
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good way to have a family resemblance of the products. Or like interface ideas, the Mac comes
⏹️ ▶️ John up with some new interface idea and the iPad team looks at it and says, hey, that’s a good idea. I think in the next version of,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the next version of iPadOS, we can do that thing that they just did on MacOS because Mac users really seem to like it and we think it
⏹️ ▶️ John would work on iPad-sized screens. Like, that’s a healthy exchange of ideas. What is not
⏹️ ▶️ John healthy is, I’ve come up with Liquid Glass and all our OS’s need to take it whether they want it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I think every app should look like, should only have the features that the iOS version does. So take
⏹️ ▶️ John all the Mac versions, remove half their features, and now they look just like the iOS ones. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t everybody love it? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, all I’m saying is I don’t think it’s like, oh, there’s just not enough. The amount of resources
⏹️ ▶️ John that are on the Mac now are probably more than they were in the supposed heyday of Mac OS X, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Small teams can do amazing things if given reasonable schedules, and if not put upon by
⏹️ ▶️ John larger corporate strategy tax. And that’s something you’ve always heard from the teams at Apple. It’s like, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have time to do what they think they should do for their product because they have to implement the important feature of the year
⏹️ ▶️ John that is going across all the platforms.
#askatp: Changes to touch-MBP UI?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Armstrong writes, what, if any, impact do you think Allen Dye’s departure will have on the rumored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touchscreen MacBook Pro expected to release in Q3 or Q4 2026? Will having a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more orthodox head of design who actually understands UI UX result in a rethink of this project, or are those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decisions beyond Stephen LeMay’s control, and he’s just got to design the best fridge-toaster hybrid interface
⏹️ ▶️ John LAMBERTT That’s too late for that. For the touch, you know, touch-based Macs coming in 2026, that’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever’s going to be done for that touch is has been done. And you know, it’s nothing Steve Lemaie can do
⏹️ ▶️ John to really change that at this point, except for perhaps minor tweaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, I don’t think the liquid glass design is required for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch Mac books to be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just kind of, it is, it is neutral with respect to touch on the Mac, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, and as we talked about, when we talked about that rumor of touching the Mac, I think most to the value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of touch on the Mac is scrolling and panning and zooming. And using iPad apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and using iPad apps. But that’s what most people want touch on their laptops for usually is just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pinching to zoom on something on their screen or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like that. Dismissing a dialogue, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that kind of stuff is gonna work pretty well regardless. To make Mac OS really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch friendly beyond that level would require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively designing it into iPad OS. Like radical.
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wouldn’t want that because you’d be losing, like the Mac is the platform where you have precise pointing and lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of applications are only possible with precise pointing and they run on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, like the amount of radical redesigning on the Mac to be required to turn it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good like touch OS, the metrics, the sizing of every control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to change. The spacing of everything would have to change. The height, the thickness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the font sizes, like so much stuff would have to change. that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically, broadly destructive to the Mac. And I don’t, not only do I not think it’s a good idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also, again, we were just talking about like the resources the Mac has given. I don’t think Apple would invest that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the Mac to change that much for gains that I don’t think anybody’s really necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the answer to the question is Steve LeMay is not gonna have any real effect on the Touch Macs, unless there was some
⏹️ ▶️ John really terrible decision that Alan Dyer was insisting on that’s easy to undo. But, you know, we’ll never know if that’s
#askatp: Favorite macOS styles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Nate writes, what are your favorite Mac OS styles? Liquid Glass, the flat iOS 7 modern look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the glossy Lion Mavericks, end of an era vibe, early pinstripe, or even pre-OSX, 10, 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Easy peasy. I call myself, I call myself, you guys, I call myself. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, since I got my first MacBook around Mountain Lion slash Mavericks, I still have a soft spot for the glossy look. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going through Stephen Hackett’s incredible screenshot library, which I will try to remember to link in the show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I came to the Mac at Tiger or thereabouts. And so that does have a special place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my heart. But as I quickly scroll through the different releases, I think lion might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite because it was still kind of the old, by my standards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of fun Aqua E, but not as like clearly dated as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aqua. So I think lion might be my personal favorite. That being said, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, in a lot of ways, from a visual perspective, I kind of like Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. What? After all of that?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, aesthetics are a matter of taste. Like how it looks and how it works are two separate things.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally think it’s very ugly, but I can understand some people liking how it looks, despite the fact that it obscures the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John by putting blurry text underneath clear text and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other crap. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing, is that a lot of the functional aspects, I think, are trash. But I think aesthetically it looks fresh and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new and fresh and new is fun to me. But if I had to pick just one, I’d probably pick Lion. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you choose?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t have a strong opinion here. You know, when I look back, I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started using the Mac, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in Tiger. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just Mac, by the way. They asked about iOS as well. They’re like, what’s your favorite, favorite, well, I guess it is. What are your favorite Mac OS styles? But then they
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned the iOS 7 look. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I started, sorry, correction. I believe I started using it in Panther. I upgraded to Tiger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that same Power Mac G4 or PowerBook G4, excuse me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so like when I look at screenshots of Panther, it’s very nostalgic for me. It’s like, oh that was my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first Mac, like it was great. But of course it looks old by today’s standards. So, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize that. And to be clear also when I say that when I’m criticizing the 26
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesigns, I’m not saying that the previous redesign should just be brought back, you know, Just revert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and that’s that’s the best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they like we should move over time We should change over time and there are things about the 26 os’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do look nice I don’t think maybe any of them are on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are things about the other 26 os’s that look nice visually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not saying that like the old ones were better The old and or at least I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old ones are what we should go to which is definitely not the case But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like a lot of the old ones. I do have a lot of nostalgia for like the Panther and Tiger era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even just going like when I even just when I look back five or six years and you look back at like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like High Sierra or something like when you see these these kind of interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh yeah a lot of that is just what the Mac looks like with little tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time you know maybe a grading gets a little bit more solid or a pinstripe goes away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you you know, like spacing gets adjusted a little bit on some icons or like the icons change. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like a lot of these things, so I don’t really have a strong opinion on that. The, as for iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was designing for 26 all summer, when I would go back to my iOS 18 devices, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would look old. So I recognized like, okay, this new one does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look new and fresh. In some ways, I like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the 26 elements on iOS, But I think it’s, I think everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that involves a blur is a mistake. I think there’s a lot you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take from 26 that is good. That’s like some of the icon shapes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of the designs and of the buttons here and there, like they look cool. But every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time a blur is used, I think that’s a failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it does not hold up in practice. That’s like the way bars are handled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way scrolling content goes under them, the way buttons are handled when they are floated on top of content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anytime there’s a blur, it’s a failure. But setting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aside that, when I look at past iOSs, I mentioned earlier, I think there was a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good era from the iOS 12 to 15-ish era where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design was in a really good place. It was a very good evolution of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it was trying to be from iOS 7, but like better and evolved and refined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope to get back to that in the next few years. And I’m optimistic that I’m pretty sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple can do that realistically. I don’t know that they will, but they can. And I hope they
⏹️ ▶️ John John. So the only ones that I could say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I could pinpoint a particular look than say that OS
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of had its act together and was really good as a piece are two. One is my nostalgic
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite, which is System 7, which was the most important operating system release of my childhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think System 7, in hindsight, is not as coherent as it could
⏹️ ▶️ John have been because there was a lot of legacy of System 6 in it and the sort of upgrade from
⏹️ ▶️ John black and white to color that happened in System 6 came to fruition in System 7, but System 7 was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good. A little bit of a System 6 hangover, but I think it was pretty good. The Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 8 Copeland style, Aaron style,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Mac OS 8 through the end in nine, the sort of that platinum
⏹️ ▶️ John look. I don’t know which OS you want to pick up as they didn’t really change that much, but anywhere from like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the beginning with Mac OS 8 all the way till the end of classic Mac OS, that look was extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John coherent and consistent. I think that is probably the, my favorite sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, they got everything right. The folders, the window Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John the menus, the font choices, there were some bad font choices in there too, you used to be able to change the font to Mac OS, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could even do it in Mac OS X for a little while anyway. But like that look, that sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John platinum Mac OS 8 style, Copeland style look, that was very coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John and solid. So that’s probably my single favorite. If you look at the Mac OS X era and on,
⏹️ ▶️ John since I did reviews of all those in the early days, every one of those OS’s had something about it that I thought was awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John and something about it that I thought was worse than its predecessor. Like they would always mess something up. Look at my reviews. I spent 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ John doing these reviews. It’s not like there was ever a version of like, oh, 10.7 is the one that got everything right. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like every single one of those OSs is like, oh, this looks really good and this looks really clean and nice and
⏹️ ▶️ John they improved this, but look what they did over here. They made these icons works, the tabs look dumb, they changed the
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar icons again and they’re worse. Like there was never one where they got everything right. And it just got even,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it became a real sort of clown show somewhere actually around like the 10.7 ish era where
⏹️ ▶️ John they started to get the iOS stuff thrown in and it was like, what are they doing? Like they made these things cleaner and better
⏹️ ▶️ John and they refined these, but this other area they went off in a weirder direction. I mean, whether it’s the stitched leather
⏹️ ▶️ John on their applications or when they decided the sidebar should invade the toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John and that the legacy of that decision that has rippled through the history and we’re still dealing with up to today’s
⏹️ ▶️ John floating Tahoe one, there’s no OS in like the Mac OS X era
⏹️ ▶️ John that got everything, got its act together to the degree that Mac OS 8 and that
⏹️ ▶️ John look did, or even probably the System 7 era. Now that said, I did like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like around Yosemite, like 10.10, there was, that
⏹️ ▶️ John was probably one of the stronger looks before like Yosemite, Yosemite L-CAP,
⏹️ ▶️ John like basically just before the sidebar cut into the toolbar and really screwed up all of those good
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas, like a cyber cut into the toolbar in Big Sur basically, right before Big Sur,
⏹️ ▶️ John those few OSs mostly had their act together. I am a little bit disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, they drained the color out of the sidebar icons and like finder and stuff pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John early on, like I think 10.7, they did that. So if I had to sort of like design
⏹️ ▶️ John your own, like look for like a future Mac OS, take all the good ideas of the past, it would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let the title bar be the title bar, kick the sidebar out of there, clear distinction between UI and controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t make literally every single icon in the UI be a template image that’s monochrome. Like I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why they did that and I like a lot of it, but it really takes a lot of the fun out of it when that’s just like the way every
⏹️ ▶️ John single app is, right? I think it would have to be some kind of hybrid of all the different looks. So I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John only two clean wins are System 7 and the Mac OS 8 look, and then the Mac OS X era. There’s lots of OSs I liked
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of, but never, never since 10.0 has there been an OS where every single aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, I said, they finally got it all together, which has been fun. Like I enjoyed like the ride from 10.0 to like 10 point,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I stopped that in my reviews because that made it interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John to see like, oh, they’re refining, they’re changing, they’re doing this stuff. Oh, but in this area, they made it worse. And then the next OS, they would fix
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but then they would do something else. Tahoe is just bad. They made everything worse, right? So it’s not, Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John is its own special snowflake. So definitely not Tahoe, but yeah, I would say like, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John I think where things really started to go wrong is when the sidebar took a tool. Or not because that one mistake was so egregious,
⏹️ ▶️ John but because it’s emblematic of a thought process that shows a lack of care for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Delete.me, Squarespace, and Zapier. And thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the many perks of ATP membership is our weekly bonus topic called ATP Overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week on Overtime, we’re going to be talking about the first wireless headphones from Fender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and featuring many replaceable components. That’s kind of an interesting new take on it. We’re going to talk about that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime. So join us to listen, at.fm.com. Thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ 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 the podcast Why does
John’s migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you’re doing a migration of some sort?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I talked about on like a couple episodes ago about
⏹️ ▶️ John my migration of stuff to CloudFlare. It started out that I didn’t want to keep renewing SSL certificates, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John had CloudFlare be the SSL terminator for my existing websites on my shared hosting. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it turns out that they’re going to change the rules for SSL certificates, so you have to renew them even more. So it was great that I did that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the last time I updated you guys on it, it was like, OK, well, actually I’ve moved
⏹️ ▶️ John my hypercritical.co website entirely to CloudFlare instead of CloudFlare just being doing SSL termination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, I moved all the data there as well and it’s hosted in their equivalent of an S3 bucket with this little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John worker process in front of it. I think that’s where I left off. That’s, this is the migration I’m talking about, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, taking stuff that wasn’t on CloudFlare and putting it on CloudFlare kind of, but really it’s just, it is essentially a migration
⏹️ ▶️ John away from what I kept referring to as my crappy shared hosting plan. And I don’t, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to be mean to my crappy shared hosting plan. Cause it’s not actually crappy. Like I discussed using C
⏹️ ▶️ John panel with it. It, the company is named cheap, which is a name registrar that you can register names cheaply.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But honestly, they are really good implementation of what they are, which is like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, from an earlier time back when C panel was the interface of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do everything. You can host a website there. You can host a static website. You can have a CGI
⏹️ ▶️ John bin. You can have a shell account. You can have email addresses. You can register names, you can do SSL certificates. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they do everything for not a lot of money. There’s a reason I’ve been there. I meant to look up how long I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I’m pretty sure I’ve been there for a decade or more. But the downside is when I say
⏹️ ▶️ John shared hosting, it means that like, yeah, I have a shell account on a machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that is shared by other people. And there’s like one web server running like Apache or Nginx or whatever, that
⏹️ ▶️ John serves things out of multiple accounts, home directories. And that means like, I don’t have my own dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. It’s not, I think even Casey, you have like, don’t you have like a dedicated, well, you have a dedicated VM, I imagine. You have a dedicated VM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, it’s a Linode or Akamai Nanoed. So yes, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated VM, as far as I’m, my understanding anyway, but it’s the smallest, wimpiest, crappiest one they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer, which is five bucks a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, you’re, at the very least, you have some reserved amount of resources within your virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey machine that
⏹️ ▶️ John are yours. But, and obviously CloudFlare, it’s big thing is they, they have a CDN and they have all
⏹️ ▶️ John these network abilities to block bots and denial of service stacks and all that stuff. Shared hostings don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John that because this type of shared hosting account was from before that era. So that’s why I’ve been considering migrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve meant to migrate off of it for years, but it’s like, well, I just have everything there and it’s a lot of stuff and it’s built up over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years. So it’s a pain to move. So I was doing it in steps of like, I gotta do this SSL thing, because it’s untenable for me
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, I was paying for SSL certificates because that’s how old things were. So I want my SSL certificates for
⏹️ ▶️ John free. I don’t want to have to deal with them. So Cloudflare will do all the renewals. And then I’m like, well, I could move my site there. so
⏹️ ▶️ John I would type a critical that code there. But once I sort of started doing that, I’m like, well, now I
⏹️ ▶️ John have like some stuff at Namecheap and some stuff not. So I started looking at what I have over there. Like Namecheap also
⏹️ ▶️ John provides email for like all the domains and stuff. So all my hypercritical.co email was hosted there,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, incredibly cheaply. I had other domains that like, they technically have email boxes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would just forward them to my Gmail or whatever. But like, I have stuff there. So I was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also I was using Postmark. Is that the name of it? The same thing we use for ATP to send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the email sending API.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I could send mail from, because I still use Gmail, as a main Gmail email client.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can send email from Gmail so it legitimately looks like it’s from hypercritical.co.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you do that, Postmark will do that for you. It’ll set up the DKIM and SPF.
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of technical crap, but the point is I was paying Postmark to do that. And then the actual email account for hypercritical.co
⏹️ ▶️ John was the inbox was landing at Namecheap, and I was actually going through a mail route. It was a large
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of stuff. So I’m like, you know, let me see about fixing that. And maybe it’s because I
⏹️ ▶️ John was jealous of you two putting your Fastmail referral URLs in the show notes. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna put a Fastmail referral URL in the show notes. And yet, no, they are not sponsoring this episode. This is not a sponsor, but in a
⏹️ ▶️ John referral URL, if you sign up for Fastmail through my thing, I get a kickback, all right? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I moved my email to Fastmail. I got rid of my postmark stuff. I got rid of the name cheap stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop. You are no longer at Gmail? You’re not using Gmail for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John email? Or are you?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, of course I’m using Gmail. Never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna leave Gmail. Okay, so I’m sorry. I think I’m confused. So what is it FastMail? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so before I was using Postmark to be able to send email legitimately from
⏹️ ▶️ John hypercritical.co and my other domains
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from Gmail. Now I’m using FastMail to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. I see, so it’s replaced Postmark. Right, before when email arrived, it would land in my Namecheap,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the MX records would lead it through a mail route into my Namecheap account. Now, when email gets sent to hypercritical.co,
⏹️ ▶️ John it lands in Fastmail and then gets forwarded to Gmail. But you see what I’m saying? Like I’ve replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John Namecheap, MailRoute, and Postmark with
⏹️ ▶️ John Fastmail. And I tried it as like a sort of a trial basis. I tried it out and I tried all the
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I’m like, yep, it does everything everybody said it does. It was so easy to set up. It’s super fast. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hypercritical.co slash Fastmail. If you want to sign
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me a referral
⏹️ ▶️ John bonus. I signed up for three years of Fastmail. Love it. I eliminated three vendors
⏹️ ▶️ John and replaced them with one for less money. Big win. Nice. So now I’m looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s left at Namecheap at this point. Well, I have like my main family website there and a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of other miscellaneous crap. Cause again, Namecheap, like you can set up an arbitrary number of sites.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, you just got to get the domains and you just like, I had so much crap set up there. And the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I had running there is like a lot of Cron jobs. Yes, Cron jobs. And you can run through Cron
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was a shell account. And I had cron jobs, like things I’d written in Perl, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John just some kind of cron job that gathers some information about my life or business. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just been running for years and years, right? And some of those cron jobs would put things into the document route for one of my websites
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s hosted on Namecheap. One of the reasons I never left is like, what am I gonna do with all those cron jobs? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John am I gonna port those cron jobs somewhere else? And do I really wanna transfer all those files? Because I had like stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like my iWeb websites. Remember iWeb? You used to have that. Do you remember, is that before your time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, iWeb was like a GUI website builder that Apple made for several years
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could like make like photo albums and blogs and stuff and it would pull from your photo library. And we did that for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when my kids were young, we did like blogs of like, you know, Alex’s first birthday and Alex is three months
⏹️ ▶️ John old and our formal family portraits and like all those were like shoved into direct, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple used to host those. And then eventually I just like took the static files and hosted them on our website. I have a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John legacy of stuff. I go, I can move the files, but I don’t know what I wanna do about the cron job. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I started tackling that. I started taking the static files and moving them to another sort of static
⏹️ ▶️ John hosted website in Cloudflare being run out of R2. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did take the time to try to fix some of the iWeb stuff. That work is still in progress because I thought I had done everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then I tried to play one of the movies on my phone and it wouldn’t play. Like I got them to play on my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and Safari and Chrome because I had to like sort of re-encode them, but I couldn’t get them to play on my phone. I did
⏹️ ▶️ John try to, I did take a slight diversion into trying to open up my old iMovie projects
⏹️ ▶️ John because at a certain point, my iMovie projects no longer were imported by the new version of iMovie,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they got orphaned. So I was running iMovie in a VM. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John first I tried Lion, but that was the wrong version. By the way, I had to find an old version of iMovie or whatever, then I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John Snow Leopard and that’s the one that worked. But unfortunately, VMware does not provide
⏹️ ▶️ John video hardware acceleration for Snow Leopard. So when I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John render the video in iMovie, no errors were thrown, but you get a black square for the whole movie. So that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John great. So I’m still working on that. I mean, these are mini DV video, like as in a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cassettes from 2004, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ John still have the thing, but I have the.dv file. I have the raw.dv
⏹️ ▶️ John file, but I don’t want the raw file. I want my edit. I made these cute little edited things of the kids, right? Still working on
⏹️ ▶️ John have the thumbnail size ones that will play on the Mac, but not on the iPhone. But anyway, I ported those things over.
⏹️ ▶️ John I ended up writing some rewrite rules to make a lot of the iWeb magic that used to happen on Apple server
⏹️ ▶️ John happen on mine. There’s a bunch of broken images because they were hosted at me.com and they’re just not there
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore and I don’t have them, so I don’t know what they were, but you know, I worked on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the Cron jobs, I mean, it’s just, I don’t know, like a decade and a half of Perl
⏹️ ▶️ John scripts that do various things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is when I started thinking, all right, I don’t want to port
⏹️ ▶️ John like seven, eight, 10 Perl scripts to a language that will run in Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ John workers. Cloudflare surprisingly will not run Perl scripts.
⏹️ ▶️ John shocked. I said, you know, large language model technology was originally
⏹️ ▶️ John created for translating human languages, like translate French to English or whatever. Like that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John origin of that technology. That’s why they’re called transformer models or well, I mean, that’s why, but they were called transformer models and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were originally designed with an eye towards human language translation. They’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good at programming language translation too. So I said, you know what, chat GPT,
⏹️ ▶️ John Gemini, Claude, let me describe to you this Perl script. Can you translate
⏹️ ▶️ John this to JavaScript for me? Cause I don’t want to do it. I mean, it’s not complicated. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know JavaScript, but just like you have to go through every API and go, I’m using this per module. What is the node equivalent?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get that module? All there’s six choices for the node module. Which one should I use? Like, it’s just tedious and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to test it all. So I let the LLM have a crack at it. It did a pretty good job. Minor
⏹️ ▶️ John need to do. But like, I mean, it’s all code that I’m familiar with and each of the scripts
⏹️ ▶️ John is not more than, I don’t know, two or three pages of code or whatever. Mostly what they do is read some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of data sources and then write out a JSON file somewhere or whatever. So it’s not rocket science. which actually fits pretty well with Node,
⏹️ ▶️ John I ported all my Cron jobs to Node.js. Wow. And wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you know it, Cloudflare Worker has a place where you can run Cron jobs down to being able to paste
⏹️ ▶️ John in like the little five, you know, the five numbers at the front of Cron
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You just paste them in that format and it’s like, sure, we’ll run that job for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s pretty cool. That is cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I didn’t know that, that is very slick.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m like, okay, I’ve, you know, and the reason I never did that for years and years is like, who wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to rewrite that? but now I didn’t have to rewrite it. Something, you know, the LLM did it for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was feeling real good, and then I said, okay, but like, a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON files written out by my crime jobs are in the format understood by
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad application, Status Board. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wondering if that’s what this was all about. I should have said it quicker.
⏹️ ▶️ John For people who don’t know, Status Board was an application made by great Mac software developer, Panic,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you run it on the iPad and you basically get a series of boards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on each board, it’s basically just a grid that fills up the screen of an iPad. And you can drag
⏹️ ▶️ John out little rectangles on the grid and each one of the rectangles, you can say, I want you to show a graph
⏹️ ▶️ John by reading this JSON file or the CVS file. And they came up with their own format for the CVS and JSON
⏹️ ▶️ John files. And you can do line graphs and bar graphs and lists and dials and icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they used it in their office to show like, here’s our software projects, here’s who’s working on them, here’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going, here’s how many open issues there are, here’s the backlog in our customer service queue, that’s what Panic was using it for.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a great application in the Panic style. And if you’re listening to this, you’re like, so they made an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad app that’s basically a toy version of Grafana and Prometheus?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what they did. Why would you ever use that? Why wouldn’t you just use Graphite, Grafana, Prometheus, or any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other enterprise applications that do all this? Because I liked how the status board looked and because when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was originally using status board, I didn’t know about those programs. I know about them now, and now I don’t like them because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to use them for years at work. And yes, they’re open source and free, but hosting any of them is much
⏹️ ▶️ John more complicated. But here’s the thing, status bar was discontinued in 2018. Not recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every year since then, I’d be like, is this gonna be the year that status bar stops working? Because I have it on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John and only on my iPad. It is only an iPad app. It doesn’t even run on the phone, I believe. And it still
⏹️ ▶️ John runs in iPadOS 26, but barely. It’s like every
⏹️ ▶️ John day I’m like, oh, is this gonna, like it’s kind of like Candy Bar, which is a icon management application.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it was originally made by Icon Factory, but Panic had it for a while. And anyway, that’s been discontinued as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But recently I was able to convince Panic to release a version that will at least launch on modern
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS and I still use it with a warning dialogue on it. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s, those JSON files can put up my Cron chips. I’m looking at them in status bar, but it always bothered
⏹️ ▶️ John me that I can only look at them on my iPad, which means that in practice, I generally only tend to look at them before I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to bed. And then I find something that’s wrong, I gotta like leave my bed and go down and fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, you know, I’ve always wanted to make a web app version of status
⏹️ ▶️ John board. They would read the same JSON files and have the same UI, but it would be a web app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought, this is the perfect time to do something that I wanted to do for a while, which is to try out,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, those coding agents that actually do things for you. I use LLMs for coding all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I just paste things into a chat bot and see what they have to say. But there are other tools where you don’t do that, where you
⏹️ ▶️ John just say, here, you do it. You make the file, you rename things, you make the edits, you check into the Git
⏹️ ▶️ John repo, all that stuff. And so I decided to use Claude code. And I’ve never used it previously because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want that thing anywhere near my code. But this is an empty directory. There’s nothing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I wrote up a Claude.md file and I said, this is what status board is. It was this app by Panic. It
⏹️ ▶️ John reads these files in JSON format. Here’s a screenshot of the app from my iPad. See in that screenshot, there’s four graphs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here are the JSON files and URLs that you can download that derive those four graphs. Here’s Panic’s documentation of the JSON
⏹️ ▶️ John format. Here’s how the status board app works. I wrote basically a one page little book
⏹️ ▶️ John report slash software spec, reminding me of the good old days of me being a software developer on a team where you
⏹️ ▶️ John had to describe functionality to other people. I described it to Claude and I said, go for it, dude.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Claude churned for a while. And a few minutes later,
⏹️ ▶️ John I launched the application locally and I had Sassboard running on the web app. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is so freaking cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, was it perfect? No, it doesn’t really have any idea about UI. And it’s kind of like, anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re talking to a human thing, like I had some experience with having like, obviously new employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I’ve been a software manager, I’ve been a software team lead, I’ve had interns, but like interns
⏹️ ▶️ John and very new employees are very similar where if you give them instructions, but you don’t, certain things you leave unsaid because
⏹️ ▶️ John you assume they’ll know, but new employees and interns don’t always know those things. Same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud code. It didn’t really, if I didn’t say how or where some part of UI should
⏹️ ▶️ John be, it just picked someplace and it made bad choices. So I spent the next few rounds going
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth saying, that add button shouldn’t be over there. This should be centered. Why don’t you make a
⏹️ ▶️ John hamburger menu in the upper left and put these items in it. And bug fixing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of the things that I feel like a human wouldn’t have done is the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen to edit one of the tiles where you say like, this is the URL, these are the options, blah, blah, blah. It has a bunch of checkbox for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want me to show dots? How thick should the lines be? Crap like that. When
⏹️ ▶️ John you edited a tile, you could change those options and save and it’ll be fine. When you created a new tile,
⏹️ ▶️ John it ignored some of them. And a human wouldn’t make that mistake because a human would know, hey, that dialogue that is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the edit dialogue for a thing, you have to honor all the controls in it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Not just when you’re editing. Like when you create, it’s the same UI, create
⏹️ ▶️ John a new tile. Great, fill out this form. You gotta actually honor the stuff that I entered there. So a couple of things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John where I would go through the app and say, yeah, I don’t think a human would make that mistake. And I was like, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John All this entire thing is happening over the course of one morning. I woke up in the
⏹️ ▶️ John morning with an empty folder. By the time I ate lunch, I had status board running on the web to
⏹️ ▶️ John my satisfaction, reading all my old Jason files, which are now being generated by cloud flare. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is so freaking wild.
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazing. I’m totally amazing. All credit to, I’m not going to release this by the way, because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a hundred percent a ripoff of status board. I even called it status board.
⏹️ ▶️ John colors I use, I use the status board icon. It took me longer to extract the status
⏹️ ▶️ John board icon from the iPad app, from my, from my iPad and edit it
⏹️ ▶️ John into a transparent Mac style icon or whatever that I could put on my web app. That took
⏹️ ▶️ John me longer than it took to write the entire web app. For Claude, for Claude code to write the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John web app. Gracious. Now I do have to say that the next
⏹️ ▶️ John morning, when I woke up and woke my Mac from sleep, the entire directory
⏹️ ▶️ John containing my Git repo was gone. Oh, that’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know who to blame this on. Obviously it was still in Git, so cares. Like it was on GitHub, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled the repo back down. I didn’t lose any unsaved changes. Little bit scary.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just like the whole directory was gone. The only thing I could do was look in Dropbox, but unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t run Dropbox all the time. So when I launched Dropbox, it simply registered that the directory
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t there and then registered the deletion as happening at like 8.30 a.m. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not when the
⏹️ ▶️ John deletion actually happened, I think, because that’s just when I launched Dropbox, but I just did
⏹️ ▶️ John a Git pull. I could have restarted from Dropbox too, but I just did a Git pull and pulled the thing back down.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. And then since I had been using Cloud Code, and by the way, one of the reasons I stopped shortly
⏹️ ▶️ John after noon on the thing was I ran out of tokens with Cloud Code because I don’t have the fancy version where you pay a hundred bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I don’t have that many tokens to do things. So I ran out of tokens and I was like, I should stop tweaking this application,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. And in practice, I didn’t end up tweaking it all after that. But I was looking for other things to do with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had two other ideas. One, now that I had this cool status board app,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, there’s a board that I’ve wanted, and I wanted it recently because Marco has been changing up
⏹️ ▶️ John his little like end of the show pitch thing. You know, I don’t know. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John start your end of the show thing. How does it go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Squarespace, Delete.me,
⏹️ ▶️ John Zapier. Right, and recently, he’s been adding, recently as in the past several months, he’s been adding one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the features of, you know, Bobo’s overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ATP overtime, our
⏹️ ▶️ John weekly bonus topic. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This week in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you had recently, you have been trying to characterize the length of the overtime segment in your
⏹️ ▶️ John spiel and going, oh, it’s 15, 20 minutes. 15, 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause you’re just going by the seat of the pants feel. I’m like, you know what, this is a perfect. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, this is a perfect graph. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a perfect graph for me to put in status board. So I wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to do two things. One, I got to write a script in Node.js
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the data and write out JSON files. And two, I just paste those URLs into status
⏹️ ▶️ John born and go. So the script is really the thing. So I said, okay, Cloud Code, here you’re up again. Now this time I
⏹️ ▶️ John have existing Node scripts. Like I have actually written some scripts that aren’t Perl scripts that generate these JSON files. Some of the most,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the modern ones are written in Node already. So I already had a Node script that pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John got all the data I wanted, except it wasn’t getting overtime chapter links. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about overtime chapter links obviously they don’t come from the public version of the show because overtime is only in the members
⏹️ ▶️ John version so I needed the script to get the members version of the show and then I needed to know what the overtime segment was and
⏹️ ▶️ John the second thing is I Didn’t just want to know the length of all the overtime segments. I wanted to see like a
⏹️ ▶️ John X number of episodes rolling average, you know what I mean? But they don’t care what like the lifetime average of overtime as I just care It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the trending up is a training down. What is the what is the rolling average, right? so I took an existing node.js
⏹️ ▶️ John script and I I ripped out the functionality that didn’t need to be there, but left everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, “‘Claude Code, here’s the script. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John you to leave everything as is, all the scaffolding about its logging and monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ John of the PID file and how it connects to the database and how it does this and how it, you know, like leave all that, that’s all good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a comment in it that said, you add your new functionality here. What I want you to do is pull the members
⏹️ ▶️ John only version of the show using authenticated S3 style client to get the episode out,
⏹️ ▶️ John parse the chapters, find the one that begins with overtime, get the length, add the data to a file, and then every
⏹️ ▶️ John time you run, just see if there’s a new episode and add the data. And I want you to do two graphs, one
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows the overtime length of every episode, and two show an N episode rolling average.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it had real difficulty. It can make the entire status board in the morning, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was doing this and it was like, it was just not quite getting it. Like it was more complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly, especially when I said you got to run in the dev environment where you’re inside Docker and the passwords are all different
⏹️ ▶️ John and things are authenticated differently, but you also have to run in the production one where things are gonna be different still. And it just kept messing
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. I spent an entire day on this. And by the time I was done, it was working,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I could have done it way faster. So there’s two experiences there. One, it wrote in the entirety
⏹️ ▶️ John of status board in the morning. No way I could have done that that fast, mostly because I would have spent the whole time saying, what
⏹️ ▶️ John graph library should I use? Should I use
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey API directly? What should I do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have experience with the APIs that we’re using. But on this thing, a Node.js script that
⏹️ ▶️ John starts off 99% with code that I wrote, 100% with code that I wrote starting off, and then I just want you to add like 10%,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could have done it so much faster. And this is very much like the experience of having new employees or interns who are, yeah, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John just do something so much faster, but the whole point is you’re supposed to be, you’re mentoring somebody, you’re bringing them up to be from a junior
⏹️ ▶️ John developer to a more senior developer. So even though, yes, you could do it faster yourself, taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to write out a spec and explain how you want it to be done and having them try to do it and having
⏹️ ▶️ John them come back and say, no, you didn’t do X, Y, and Z and go back and forth. Like that process, when you’re doing with
⏹️ ▶️ John a human, you feel like you are helping a human along their path to become better. When you’re doing with an LLM, you feel like you’re just wasting
⏹️ ▶️ John your time. So two very different experiences. One was a huge time saver,
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing results. The other one was, I should have just done it myself because it would have been a lot faster, but hey, I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like I’m doing it as content for the show and experience with these models.
⏹️ ▶️ John Number three, one last one. This is all happening during this week, by the way. This is like three days
⏹️ ▶️ John this week. I said, you know what? There’s another project that I wanted to do for a while that I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John bothered doing because it’s just got a bunch of annoying busy work and like looking up what libraries to use and it just seems like too much
⏹️ ▶️ John of a pain. But now I’ve got a whole fresh days with the tokens.
⏹️ ▶️ John woke up in the morning, right? I’m gonna have a crack at it. and the
⏹️ ▶️ John project was passkeylogin to ATP.fm. Oh my God. Ooh.
⏹️ ▶️ John easy if our site wasn’t written in PHP, which is not the most modern language with the most
⏹️ ▶️ John modern access to the most modern libraries. Do those two things go together, PHP and passkeys, two things separated
⏹️ ▶️ John by decades, literal decades? That’s part of, like, I looked into it a bunch of times before, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could do this, but it just doesn’t seem fun, and I’m not sure I’m gonna pick the right library, and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of it’s like, oh, you gotta use the Zend framework. I’m like, I’m using the Marco framework, man. I’m not using
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they all wanted to plug into some kind of like, here’s what all the modern PHP stuff uses. I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. We don’t use composer. We don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a framework, like all these different.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all of like the guides for like, how do you do pass keys in PHP? It’s like, that’s not gonna work for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m like, you know what, Cloud Code, you’re up. So this is the first time I’m putting Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Code, not in an empty directory, not in a directory with a single file that I made, but I’m pointing it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the directory for like the repo that holds the code that Marco wrote that runs ADB.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing it in a Docker container, it’s all safe, it’s all carded off or whatever. And I have stern instructions, never
⏹️ ▶️ John ever to commit to git and all this other stuff. But the point is, it’s all in Docker using local
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, right? And it makes a run at it. I read a big document, I explained
⏹️ ▶️ John a great length, look, here’s the system we’ve got, right? Here’s how things work, here’s where our data is,
⏹️ ▶️ John here how, you know, you’re running inside Docker when you’re in dev, just FYI, and here’s where the things are, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I do the whole spec, talking to Cloud Code. I sick it on it, it goes, it says, great, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ready, go do it. I go to the page to try to create a patch key for my account, which luckily the page does load,
⏹️ ▶️ John creation of the patch key totally doesn’t work. I spend a little bit of time going back and forth with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the error, it’s not working. Like I’m not diving into the code at this point, I’m just saying like, let’s see what you can do, because Cloud Code
⏹️ ▶️ John can fix its own mistakes a lot of the time. But I was going back and forth for basically the entirety
⏹️ ▶️ John of a morning and just absolutely nothing worked. It was just error after error, after error, after error. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I had some lunch, came back, dove in myself to try to fix what it was doing. Together,
⏹️ ▶️ John we started making forward progress. I also started asking other LLMs like my chat GPT or my Gemini window so I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John burn flog tokens for things, you know, just sort of manually fix stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But by the end of the day, I eventually got it to work. And I do think this was actually probably net
⏹️ ▶️ John net a time saver. Maybe, I think if I had known what to do, I could have done it faster than Cloud Code, but the point is
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloud Code pointed me in the right direction by finding a good library and essentially, you know, how
⏹️ ▶️ John I integrate this library into the existing code in a way that is, doesn’t require massively restructuring stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just got so many things wrong that I just had to go in and be like, I’ll look up the documentation. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the arguments this function takes. I will fix it for you, like whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, atb.fm now supports pass keys. So if you don’t like the thing where it emails you a login link, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John add a password to your account, which I added myself ages ago, or you can also add a passkey to your account and you can log
⏹️ ▶️ John in with the passkey. And if I screwed up the passkey implementation, blame me and Claude, but effectively blame me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because I’m Claude’s boss.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m pretty sure everything works as expected. So if you want to use passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ John with adb.fm, you can do that now. Wow. Nothing is left on Namecheap. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have canceled my Namecheap renewal. Everything I had on Namecheap is gone. I am fully on Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This, this was a journey, John, that I was not prepared for.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was I had to just
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of snowballed all of a sudden. I just did a long rectus episode because as coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John Merlin also discovered or not discovered, but started using cloud code this week. Very coincidentally. He
⏹️ ▶️ John also did some status boardy thing. I would for a second. I thought, did you re-implement status board with cloud code? He didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he was, he was doing some status board related set, some stuff that is similar to status
⏹️ ▶️ John board, the upcoming record, every concept that it will tell you, but anyway, I’m not sure if this is an endorsement
⏹️ ▶️ John of Claude Code. You do have to pay for like the $20 a month plan at least to do what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s only good for like, I don’t know, less than a morning’s worth of tokens before you have to wait 12
⏹️ ▶️ John hours for them to refresh. But I’m taking the win. I think it did a really, it saved me a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John time porting my scripts. It did the status board thing way faster than I would have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other two projects, one was a real disaster and one was mixed. So, you know, all I can say
⏹️ ▶️ John is in five to 10 years, this stuff is just only going to get better. And I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already extremely useful. Oh, and by the way, for the overtime thing, I forgot to tell you, the
⏹️ ▶️ John average, all time average length of the overtime segment on our show, it’s quite highly variable. The average is 21.78
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes. The rolling eight episode average
⏹️ ▶️ John is 25.6 minutes. So for your future end of the show things, if you want to say it’s about 20 to 25 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you just wanna say it’s about 25 minutes, that will be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco accurate. If you ever want-
⏹️ ▶️ John About 25.6 minutes. If you ever want an updated stat, I can tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It rolls right off the tongue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about 20 minutes. But the problem is it’s highly variable. Like our longest one, I believe is like 45 or 46 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John and we have some that are like 15, so. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the reason I say 15 to 20 is like, I don’t want somebody to think they’re paying for 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of content and they see one that’s 15 and they’re disappointed. So I like to underplay. Well, then
⏹️ ▶️ John they see one that’s 45 and they’re also disappointed, so you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John variable, but anyway, I did actually want to know what the numbers are. I’ll put it in Slack, the graph,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see what they look like. Anyone could do this, really.