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Under the Radar

239: Overcast Redesign

 

00:00:00   Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Mark Orment.

00:00:05   And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:09   So we can start off this episode with some congratulations are in order. You shipped

00:00:14   update 2022.2.

00:00:18   I'm really good at version numbers these days.

00:00:19   The version numbers are the best, but the result of the content of that update is amazing.

00:00:24   So this is the final, the overcast, redesign part one update that we've talked about bits

00:00:31   and pieces of over the last couple of weeks, but it's finally out. And congratulations.

00:00:36   It's super cool. And it seems like the response to it has been super positive. So that's awesome

00:00:40   to see it out in the world and to see it so well received.

00:00:43   Thank you. Yeah, I'm ridiculously relieved. I was so nervous to ship this, you know, because

00:00:49   part of it was just it's a huge change and it wasn't just a re-skinning. There's a lot

00:00:53   of under the hood changes. There's a lot of small and big feature changes as well. So

00:00:59   it's a pretty large update. It's the largest single update I've done in a pretty long time

00:01:03   and possibly ever. And so it was a really big deal for me. And I was nervous, you know,

00:01:10   because I'd been running it only myself for a while. I've been working on it since around

00:01:15   Thanksgiving. So it was running only me for a while. And then eventually about a month

00:01:21   ago or so, I started a semi-public beta. So I'm linking a couple thousand people on the

00:01:27   beta and then people reporting issues and giving feedback mostly in my beta Slack channel,

00:01:33   which is public if anybody wants to join. But it was still very nerve-wracking for me

00:01:39   to ship it from the maybe thousand people who were in the beta to my entire user base,

00:01:45   which is much more than that. And so it was nerve-wracking in a lot of ways. And I was

00:01:51   doing the whole thing where I was telling press people ahead of time, all right, it's

00:01:53   going to be released on this date. Here's the Test Flight link. You can join it and

00:01:56   see the preview if you want. I'm happy to answer any questions. You know, the whole

00:01:59   press circuit. And it did get a lot of press. But I didn't know if it was going to be positive

00:02:03   or not. Then it gets out to the whole public and now it's out to the whole user base. And

00:02:07   certainly the reaction from the beta group was very positive. The reaction from the press

00:02:12   was very positive. The reaction from the overall user base percentage-wise is very positive.

00:02:20   But of course, I'm getting many messages on Twitter and email from people who don't like

00:02:24   it just because it's still a small percentage, but it's a small percentage of a bigger number.

00:02:29   And so I'm still hearing from a lot of individual people who don't like certain parts of it.

00:02:34   But I've had a lot of really interesting takeaways from this process. I mean, it's not only,

00:02:40   you know, obviously sitting on something for, what has it been, five months or whatever

00:02:44   it's been. It's a lot of time to bulk up or to batch up changes and release them all

00:02:49   at once. There's issues with that. But for the most part, most of those things have gone

00:02:54   pretty well. You know, the number of bugs has been pretty low. The weirdness on servers

00:02:58   hasn't really happened that I was fearing. But a lot about the design is, it was very,

00:03:05   I felt very confident in this design. I think it looks great and I'm very happy with it.

00:03:10   But it also kind of felt like my admitting to the world or presenting myself to the world

00:03:17   as a semi-designer. And we talked about this before, like being developers first. And my

00:03:25   design skills were pretty bad when I was first putting apps out. And I've slowly worked

00:03:32   on that over time. And I think now my design skills are decent. I wouldn't say I'm a

00:03:37   great designer, but I think now I've reached the point where I am decent at it. And I've

00:03:42   reached the point where I no longer think I need to involve other designers in most

00:03:46   of my app design decisions. And I think it turned out really well. And I think I'm

00:03:52   also taking it in a direction where I'm trying to make everything much more modern,

00:03:58   much more colorful, trying to appeal more to non-nerds. And when you look at apps that

00:04:06   non-nerds use, like this is kind of how this, the genesis of this new design idea was that

00:04:12   my wife, Tiff, and I were on a vacation right before Thanksgiving. And she was showing me

00:04:16   an app. And I don't even know, I think I might have been Pinterest or something.

00:04:19   But she was showing me an app that had these big pills for navigation between sections.

00:04:23   And she's like, "Look, this is how modern apps look. Like this is how like cool modern

00:04:28   apps that young people are using, this is how they look." And I was like, "Huh."

00:04:32   And I've been wanting to do custom colors and custom icons on playlists for a while.

00:04:36   And I didn't quite have an idea in my head of like how would that look. And when I saw

00:04:41   the pill shape, I'm like, "You know, I think that would actually work really well."

00:04:47   And so like that night, I whipped together like, you know, a quick version of it in Overcast,

00:04:52   and you know, a very basic version. And I ran it in the simulator. And I'm like, "That

00:04:57   looks amazing." I put it on my phone, and I showed Tiff the next day at lunch. And she's

00:05:01   like, "Yeah, that's great. Go that direction." And so that kind of the genesis of this. I

00:05:08   mean, there were a lot of other aspects of it too. I mean, I don't know how much time

00:05:10   you want to get into it here, but there were…

00:05:12   We got 30 minutes.

00:05:13   That's true. You know, there are all sorts of aspects of, you know, things I've wanted

00:05:16   to do for a while. You know, the font was one of those things. We talked before about

00:05:22   how I was giving up my custom font for the system font. But San Francisco as a base font

00:05:27   is a little boring. And that was always the criticism levied against it, you know, in

00:05:30   my app was like, "Hey, the old font had more personality. This font is too boring."

00:05:35   But I wanted all the benefits of the system fonts. And so I switched it to SF Rounded.

00:05:40   And then about halfway through the design process, I enabled the alternate glyphs for

00:05:44   four, six, and nine digits, which has instead of the little curly ends on the six and nine,

00:05:51   it does straight ends. And on the four, it like opens up the top instead of being a closed

00:05:55   pointy top. And I think those changes really push it over the edge because that adds a

00:06:01   lot of personality. Not to mention that I think it looks better, and I think it's

00:06:04   more legible at small sizes, and I have a lot of small text in the app for things like

00:06:08   time stamps. So that's why I went that direction on that. But I think I was able to get a lot

00:06:12   of personality out of SF Rounded that I wasn't getting from regular San Francisco. And then

00:06:18   that made up the personality gap that I was seeking. And so this all kind of came together

00:06:21   with like using SF symbols for the icons everywhere, using SF Rounded with the alternative glyphs

00:06:26   for that. Like all of this came together to be really nice. And I'm very, very happy

00:06:31   with how it turned out. And so far, the reactions, you know, in, you know, press and reviews

00:06:37   and everything have all been pretty good. I mean, the only the only negativity I've

00:06:42   gotten was a combination of people who don't like change at all, which frankly, I, you

00:06:48   know, I know I'm never going to win that that fight. But frankly, I understand that.

00:06:53   Because whenever you change anything that's been I mean, look, this design has been mostly

00:06:57   unchanged since Overcast 1.0 in 2014. I mean, I designed that basically for iOS seven. And,

00:07:05   you know, the world has moved on quite a bit since then, in terms of what you know, how

00:07:08   apps should be designed now. But so you know, so I had no choice but to change it if I wanted

00:07:13   the app to not look old. So I so you know, I was going to change it to something but,

00:07:18   you know, a lot of a lot of people are understandably just change change averse and tired of change

00:07:24   for the sake of change because so much in the tech world changes all the time, oftentimes

00:07:29   just for the sake of change and not making things actually better, or sometimes actually

00:07:33   making things worse for people. So you know, there's some fatigue there, which I understand.

00:07:38   And there's a combination of that. And also, like, I added this big new recent section

00:07:43   on the home screen. And a lot of people didn't want to spend the space on that. And there

00:07:48   was a way to hide it. But I kind of buried it, I couldn't find a good place to put it.

00:07:52   And so I put it in a not a very good place. And so I actually yesterday I shipped an update

00:07:58   that adds two more ways to hide the recent section in places that are that people are

00:08:01   much more likely to look for it. And so I think that'll help a little bit, you know,

00:08:06   with that resistance. But the other weird thing is that this this is kind of funny,

00:08:11   I think, but but it's something that's that's worth considering when you're looking

00:08:15   at redesigning your app. One of the things that people are really tired of, especially

00:08:19   nerds is like space inefficient layouts, layouts that have very low information density, where

00:08:26   you have to do much more scrolling or swiping to get to the stuff that you could otherwise

00:08:29   before fit on one screen. Now, a lot of the the negative reaction to the design was you

00:08:35   made everything bigger. And actually, playlists, podcasts and episode cells are all the exact

00:08:44   same heights as the previous design. And like on my market org post, I actually showed side

00:08:49   by side screenshots. And you can see it clear as day like they didn't get taller. But

00:08:53   because they now have this pill shape on the playlist, and it looks bigger, it looks more

00:08:59   tangible, because it's now it's this object, you know, and it's more colorful, and there's

00:09:03   an icon. And so it's actually the same total height, including the margins, the same total

00:09:07   height as it was before, and you can fit the same number of playlists on screen as you

00:09:11   could before. But because it looks different, people think it is taller, and they think

00:09:17   it's less information dense. And so that's been an interesting side effect. And I don't

00:09:22   really know what to do about that exactly, except, I guess, just give people time. I

00:09:26   mean, those who have written in I've responded with, you know, this little text painter template,

00:09:30   basically, like, you know, actually here, you know, these are actually the same height,

00:09:33   but thanks for the feedback, you know, and, and I don't know how much that's gonna

00:09:37   do. But otherwise, you know, with those exceptions of like, you know, a little bit of negative

00:09:41   feedback on those aspects. Otherwise, it's been very, very positive. And I'm just glad

00:09:46   to have it out there. And I'm not, you know, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm not done

00:09:50   redesigning the app. There's still lots of areas in the app that have old screens that

00:09:54   I want to redesign. But I wanted to get this out there. This is part one. And yeah, so

00:09:58   far, it's been going great.

00:09:59   Yeah, I mean, a year. Yeah, it's like, it's the outside for a as big of a redesign as

00:10:06   it was, the results that you've got sounds overwhelmingly positive that you're never

00:10:10   going to please everybody, there's always going to be people who are just don't like

00:10:13   change because they don't like change. And that's fair enough. And that's just the reality.

00:10:17   But you can't keep a design for, you know, a decade, half a decade, a decade, just because

00:10:22   some people don't like change. But what I particularly like about this update is in

00:10:26   many ways, like I've been using it since you started the beta test. And it feels very much

00:10:32   like it wasn't like you just took the old design and threw it away, and tried to come

00:10:37   up with something new for newness sake, it feels very much more like you. It's like the

00:10:42   sort of the old allegory of the university campus that doesn't put in sidewalks, but

00:10:47   just for a year or two, let's people walk around, and then finds where people actually

00:10:50   go and build the sidewalks there. This feels very much like an app like a redesign that

00:10:55   is based in after whatever, you know, six years, whatever it is, of people using this

00:11:01   app, you found the places where there was these tensions or these inefficiencies or

00:11:08   things that were frustrating. And you've rounded those off and made them better. Like, for

00:11:12   me, the in the playlist, the main playlist list is now so much even I love that it's

00:11:19   so much more sort of scannable, because I can use different colors and different glyphs

00:11:23   for each of my playlists, it makes it really easy without really having to pay attention

00:11:27   to find what I'm looking for. Whereas the other one, it was just a word. And that is

00:11:34   an efficiency that has made it so much clearer. And then the recent section, personally, I

00:11:40   love it for the same reason I love your widget, is like 90% of the time that I'm using Overcast,

00:11:47   what do I want to do? I'd either listen to the last thing I was listening to, or I want

00:11:52   to listen to the most recent episode that was published in my subscription list that

00:11:57   either I'm going to resume where I was doing or, oh, it's, you know, it's the new episode

00:12:01   of ATP came out, let me listen to it. And you've made those operations, I can either

00:12:07   do it from the widget or now in the app itself. It's like, that's the number one thing that

00:12:11   I do is now super easy to do. And it feels like that sort of that rounding off of things

00:12:16   just makes this redesign feel very, like it feels like it's a natural improvement in

00:12:21   growth rather than a redesign that just is like, we've come up with this whole new paradigm

00:12:25   for how you're going to listen to, you know, listen to playlists, we're going to put them

00:12:29   into a chronological timeline feed, and then we're going to algorithmically read, you know,

00:12:33   read, it's like you haven't tried to reinvent it, you've just made it better. And so, you

00:12:37   know, put me into the category of I love the redesign, I think it's good. And I think there's

00:12:42   definitely going to be a, you know, a gradual period where people have to adapt to it. But

00:12:46   overall, because I think it's coming from that place of improving the most common operations,

00:12:51   it's such a huge win, sort of in the long haul.

00:12:55   John

00:12:58   Part of this was also, you know, it was a pretty significant feature update in certain

00:13:01   areas. And, you know, a lot of those were things that like the Marcus played button.

00:13:06   This has dogged me for eight years, like since 1.0 came out almost eight years ago. People

00:13:15   have been asking, how do you mark an episode as played without playing it? A lot of people,

00:13:18   myself included, were like, well, I don't know, just delete it. Like I just figured

00:13:21   deleting was enough. But a lot of people really want the distinction of, I don't want to just

00:13:29   delete this, I want to show up as played in the list. And I don't want to and people want

00:13:34   that so badly that they would often open it up, scan to the end, let it hit the end. And

00:13:41   that's how they would mark it as played. And they would often do this to many episodes

00:13:45   at once, like if they wanted to, like, you know, fix up, you know, their set, their status

00:13:48   of a whole season of something or whatever. And so, you know, integrating Marcus played

00:13:52   as like a very high level feature, like it's prominent in the interface, gets its own button

00:13:57   next to the delete button, you know, that kind of thing. That was a pretty large change.

00:14:02   But I had eight years of support email and tweets saying, how do I mark something as

00:14:08   played? I really need this feature or I can't figure out. Like people were often confused,

00:14:11   like the idea of the feature not even being there didn't enter their mind. So they weren't

00:14:16   saying, can you please add this? They were saying, where, how do you do this? Where is

00:14:19   this? It was so obvious to them this had to be there. And so for eight years, it wasn't.

00:14:24   And so adding that was a big thing on the playlist screen, you know, having I have the

00:14:28   ability to manually drag them around to reorder them. That's something that people have been

00:14:33   showing me over over the last few years, like they've been just hacking it by by putting

00:14:36   like, you know, 12345, like prefixing all their titles in there. Or and even the idea

00:14:41   of icons, people would would like start their titles with an emoji, you know, because I

00:14:46   didn't, I didn't offer icon support until now. And, and so there were all sorts of hacks

00:14:50   people were doing to try to make it work the way they wanted to. And what my goal here

00:14:55   was ultimately like, first of all, let's get let's get rid of the need to do most of those

00:14:59   hacks and make this easier for people. And second of all, try to make it even more flexible

00:15:04   to accommodate even more preferences and patterns that people want to do that aren't the way

00:15:11   I use it. So that's why you know, playlists became much more flexible, the Marcus played

00:15:15   thing, reorderable, pinable podcasts, which I have paid no podcasts in my list, but everyone's

00:15:21   everyone has asked for so long, I want to be able to reorder podcasts on the on the

00:15:25   on the main screen. And reordering podcasts when the list is dynamic, is a little tricky.

00:15:30   That's why so now I have like a pinned option, and then you can reorder the pinned ones.

00:15:34   So you know, there's like a way to accommodate what people want to do without introducing

00:15:37   weird edge cases and stuff like that. So this is very much an update of like, let me let

00:15:41   me address the most requested features over years and years and years of feedback and

00:15:46   try to accommodate people who are who use it in a way that's not what I had in mind,

00:15:51   but who are still trying to use the app for you know, for something else. Anyway, we are

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00:17:32   Yeah, and I think what you're doing here is naturally going to get that kind of feedback

00:17:37   because when you're, you know, with Marcus played, for so long, the app has been optimized

00:17:43   for like 10% of its users, the people who are like, oh, just delete it. And that's what

00:17:48   they think. And now you're switching it around so that rather than catering to the 10%, you're

00:17:53   catering to the 90%. And so people are going to be like, blah, blah, you know, I liked

00:17:57   it because you were doing what they thought about it before. And so like, why did you

00:18:03   add this button and take up this valuable screen real estate? And it's the realization

00:18:06   that's like, well, it's much more important for your app and its longevity and its utility

00:18:11   if the 90% of people who are reaching out to you or telling you are being confused and

00:18:17   not telling you, which is even worse. It's way better for you to be taking care of them

00:18:22   in a way that, you know, it's just better overall for the longevity of the app. And

00:18:27   I feel like waiting and sort of getting too stuck on old things just because, you know,

00:18:33   some people like it, you end up with the, you know, with an app that doesn't have a

00:18:38   sense of, I don't know, a sense of life, a sense of improvement, a sense of evolution.

00:18:43   And that's kind of, yeah, it's something I've gotten stuck on many times where I get, you

00:18:48   get that negative feedback and you're like, oh, it's, hmm, did I do the wrong thing? And

00:18:52   it's like, as long as you're coming from a place of more people, you know, it's definitely

00:18:55   more people have been complaining, more people are being confused. In my case, I've started

00:18:59   adding analytics into my apps. One of the big things for it is that I can understand

00:19:04   where the pain points are, where the problems are, where people are confused. And then I

00:19:08   make a change and the confusion goes away. Like, that's a huge win. And I feel like you've

00:19:13   done a lot of that in this update, which is just very, you know, very cool. And I think

00:19:17   in the long term, and if you think about the new user to Overcast, their experience is

00:19:22   going to be so much better as a result.

00:19:24   Yeah, and that's, that's, that's the thing, really. It's, you know, like, I know that

00:19:28   it's, it's hard because when, when I change something, and when I get feedback, like what

00:19:34   I've gotten over the last couple of days from people who are not happy about it because

00:19:37   it changed, or maybe it makes their use case slightly different, or maybe, you know, I

00:19:41   try not to make anything worse for people. But, you know, certainly like I had like,

00:19:45   you know, the Marcus played button, I, I moved a button on that episode toolbar. I moved

00:19:50   the like, playlist membership kind of button, you know, add to queue, you know, stuff like

00:19:54   that. I moved that from spot number four to spot number two out of the five. I've heard

00:20:00   from a lot of people who, who say, you know, this breaks my muscle memory, where, you know,

00:20:04   now I have to move over here. Or they, they say, where did you put this? They didn't even

00:20:07   bother looking under the, the now, you know, ellipsis menu. And I understand that, like,

00:20:13   I don't break muscle memory lightly. But in this case, I was thinking of like, all right,

00:20:18   well, I have these two actions now, Marcus played and delete, that both effectively delete

00:20:23   the podcast just with different semantic, you know, results. But these should be next

00:20:28   to each other, because these are two very similar actions. And so I need them both to

00:20:33   be to be an extra shot. So I figure out now that the right side of this split is those

00:20:37   two buttons. That's how you get rid of a podcast. And then the left side is acting on that podcast

00:20:42   without getting rid of it. So that's the share button, and the Add to Playlist button. And

00:20:47   I also put the star in that menu, because I kind of replaced where the star was in the

00:20:50   toolbar. And so really, the only thing that got worse here was starring, because starring

00:20:55   is now two taps instead of one from that from that location. But something did move. Now,

00:21:00   I'm hearing from a lot of people who are upset about the move, but I think that's going to

00:21:04   be a short term pain, I think give, you know, in two weeks, I think I'm gonna stop hearing

00:21:07   about it, because everyone will be used to the new location. So I have to think like

00:21:11   long term here, this temporary negative feedback about that move is going to be gone in a matter

00:21:17   of weeks, probably, or at least mostly gone. Whereas conceptually, the app will be cleaner

00:21:22   and simpler for everyone and for new users, especially forever after this. So it's better

00:21:27   to prioritize for the long term, like what's that what's right here, even if in the short

00:21:32   term, people are going to be a little bit upset, I moved something, you know, but eventually

00:21:36   that will solve itself. I mean, you know, as I as I look forward, and I want to tackle

00:21:40   the now playing screen next. And one of the things I want to do with the now playing screen

00:21:45   is get rid of the horizontally swiping cards and shift the what is now in cards, which

00:21:49   is the effects panel, the info, the show notes panel on the chapter panel. I want to move

00:21:53   those to slide up sheets that slide up from the bottom. Because that's the more modern

00:21:58   design that makes more sense. That'll solve some discoverability issues I've had with

00:22:00   this design. And that and there's lots of other reasons to do it as well. But I know

00:22:06   that's, that's a major change. And that will break people's muscle memory. And I

00:22:10   could do something, you know, in the short term, I could do something temporary, like

00:22:13   I could maybe, you know, if they swipe to the right, you know, to bring up the effects

00:22:17   panel, I can intercept the swipe and slide up, I think, from the bottom. That's kind

00:22:20   of crappy. I mean, it's not that's not a great solution. The better solution is just

00:22:24   leave it pure and let them you know, let them learn the new thing. But that will cause short

00:22:28   term pain. And I will hear from a lot of people about that when I do that. But again, the

00:22:33   result long term will be well, they're gonna get used to this, and it'll be fine. And

00:22:38   then it'll be better. I mean, and if you look like overcast over its eight years has

00:22:43   had something like four or five major changes to the now playing screen, including structural

00:22:50   changes like whether it's a sheet where it comes from what you know, whether it's

00:22:55   whether it's a card overlapping the thing below it, where the different panels come

00:22:58   from what they what form they take, like, that's actually changed a lot over time,

00:23:01   just not recently. And right now, no one complains about my now playing screen having changed

00:23:05   because the last time it changed was like, probably three years ago. Maybe maybe even

00:23:09   more. So yeah, it's been Yeah, and so, you know, when I do that, you know, the change

00:23:15   is going to hurt in the short term with a lot of those people. But in the long term,

00:23:19   if I'm making something that's better, that's less complicated, that's less confusing,

00:23:23   more usable, and has and then gives me room to add more features, which I want to do there,

00:23:28   then I think I think people will be be okay with it, you know, after a short term.

00:23:32   Yeah. And I think optimizing for the, like, for the typical user, for the new user, for

00:23:40   the person who's not an overcast expert, I think has a lot of value. Because like,

00:23:45   ultimately, that's how you can grow your business. And then you can make the app have

00:23:49   a wider and better audience and take better advantage of the every new download you get.

00:23:56   Your goal is to turn that into someone who's using the app all the time, who isn't confused,

00:23:59   who isn't bouncing off and saying, I don't get it, I'll just use apples or whatever,

00:24:04   like optimizing in some ways for those users, I think just makes a lot of sense. And increasingly,

00:24:07   I feel that being too stuck into those, yeah, it's like that you're gonna you're gonna

00:24:13   like me with muscle memory is you'll build a new muscle memory that you know, this happens

00:24:17   almost every year with something in iOS, when they change, they make a change from iOS 14

00:24:21   to 15. They just move some things around, they change the way some operations work.

00:24:25   And we just adapt and there's like two or three days where you're like, huh, what

00:24:29   do I do? And then Oh, now it's now now I have new muscle memory. Like that's just

00:24:33   the nature of muscle memory. It isn't this permanent thing that is completely inflexible.

00:24:38   It's just inconvenient for a few days. And as long as it's like if you change, you're

00:24:42   sort of changing a feature in such a way that the old thing is completely gone and doesn't

00:24:46   exist. Fair enough. That's sort of a bigger deal. But if you just moved it around, don't

00:24:50   do that lightly. But do do it when it makes it better. And when it makes the common case

00:24:55   more obvious and more accessible, makes, you know, he seems like an overall huge win to

00:24:59   me.

00:25:00   Yeah, yeah. I mean, overall, I'm, I'm very, I'm very confident in this. Like, you know,

00:25:05   I knew there was going to be some pushback from people who would not like, you know,

00:25:08   mostly just change, and maybe who wouldn't like my particular choices. I knew that was

00:25:12   going to happen. But I'm so confident that this is better, that I'm willing to push

00:25:17   forward with it. And that's that's that can be a dangerous feeling. You know, you

00:25:20   have to be pretty sure you're right. If you're wrong, that's that's a pretty bad

00:25:25   feeling. But but I think in this case, I think I'm right. And I think the the the press

00:25:30   coverage had kind of helped validate that for me because like, well, here's a bunch

00:25:33   of people who are, you know, professionals in this area who see tons of apps who review

00:25:37   tons of apps, and they all thought it was pretty good. So all right, I think I think

00:25:40   I'm on the right track here. But, you know, it's it's been getting through the first

00:25:45   couple of weeks of feedback is certainly a little bit challenging sometimes. But overall,

00:25:48   it's been great. And I'm very, very happy with it.

00:25:50   No, and you should be because I think the reality too, is you're benefiting from a you

00:25:55   like, like you, you think about overcast all the time, you probably go to sleep thinking

00:25:59   about it, you wake up thinking about it, you dream about it, if you're anything like,

00:26:02   yeah, it can take over your mind, like you think a lot about this, you have deep opinions

00:26:06   about it, you basing those opinions on, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of pieces

00:26:12   of feedback that you've received, and we've kind of jumbled together and aggregated in

00:26:16   your mind. And so when you make a choice, you're making you're not making it lightly,

00:26:20   you're not making it it's not, it's very easy to have an opinion online, it's much

00:26:24   harder to collect and gather feedback over the course of, you know, almost a decade,

00:26:29   and being sort of a true expert, and then having an expert opinion and understand that,

00:26:33   like that gives you a lot more justification and validation that you're not doing, you

00:26:37   know, being silly here. And you can make your certainly not to say you can't make mistakes,

00:26:40   but it's much more likely that you're doing something that is coming from that place of

00:26:45   expertise rather than someone who's just grumpy that something changed.

00:26:49   Yeah, and that's it. And that's, that's what gives me the confidence to know that

00:26:53   some of these decisions are right, even though, you know, I might get a temporary blowback

00:26:57   by changing something in a way that makes it worse for somebody for a few weeks, you

00:27:01   know, that like, I know, in my heart, I know that like, yeah, I've this what this person

00:27:06   is saying, like, you know, some, so many people who who don't use things like Marcus played,

00:27:11   they're, they're like, why do you give that its own button? And I'm like, trust me,

00:27:16   eight years of messages telling me this needs to be its own button. And a lot of people

00:27:20   who are, you know, they're like, Oh, why don't you hide it behind a gesture? Trust

00:27:23   me, I know from other previous experiences, that anything that is only available via gesture

00:27:28   will never be found by so many people, you know, and there's just all sorts of principles

00:27:31   like that, that like, like, yes, I what you're what you're saying is a decent idea. However,

00:27:37   I have thought of that, or I have tried that, or I have this other information to say, this

00:27:41   is why I don't want to do that. Or this is why that wouldn't work as well for a lot

00:27:44   of people as you might expect. You know, again, that's something that, you know, basically

00:27:47   only the app owner can really know. But yeah, so I am, I am so tired. I'm glad this is

00:27:58   out. I'm glad that the bug fixes are mostly pretty limited in what's necessary. I did

00:28:04   have to do a ridiculous thing yesterday to fix some voiceover shortcomings. But that'll

00:28:09   be a story for another time, I think, because I had to basically write my own UI action

00:28:13   wrapper. Okay, because there are so many areas in the API, where like, you want something

00:28:19   similar to UI action, but it's not quite the same subclass. And UI action, hopefully does

00:28:23   not expose its callback in the public API. So if you create a UI action, you cannot use

00:28:31   that to like create anything else from it. So I had to do things like, you know, there's,

00:28:36   UI alert action, which is different from UI action, which is different from UI accessibility

00:28:41   custom action, not to mention all the stuff and notifications, everything. There's so

00:28:45   many places in the API where you need something that's like an action, but is not a UI action

00:28:49   class. And so I had to create like the superclass that it's just called FC action. It just has

00:28:54   regular, you know, callback that is public API. And you know, a basic style, you know,

00:29:00   destructive cancel or not. And then, you know, title, icon, all that stuff. And then that

00:29:04   class can generate a menu, an action, a UI accessibility, actually, whatever it needs

00:29:09   to do. But finally, I have that all figured out. You know, that's, again, one of those

00:29:13   little things like, oh, voiceover has a weird menu here. How do you fix that? Well, there

00:29:16   goes a day, you know, because the API is really weird about this. But otherwise, other than

00:29:21   that kind of stuff, it's been it's been great. And I'm very happy it's done. So thank you,

00:29:26   everybody, for all of your support. Thank you, Dave, for your support in this and your

00:29:29   feedback during the process. Thank you to my beta group for all their feedback in the

00:29:33   process. It's been it's been great.

00:29:35   Jared Ranerel, Jr. Great. And you should feel good about it. Now you should go, you know,

00:29:40   the benefit from the fact that you live in a beach town. Just, you know, go walk out,

00:29:44   sit on the beach, look at the waves, take a rest. You've earned it.

00:29:47   David Schanzer It's 30 degrees. Thank you, everybody, for

00:29:49   listening. Talk to you in two weeks. Bye.

00:29:52   [