00:01:32 ◼ ► So I'm just going to preface that by explaining why you're talking about macOS so much.
00:02:03 ◼ ► I haven't even attempted that because I've seen Craig Hockenberry trying for many hours to get dev work done in a VM.
00:02:11 ◼ ► And apparently that doesn't work, like developing your app in Xcode and making builds and stuff.
00:02:18 ◼ ► So if you just want to poke around in the OS and you don't want to mess with your system, yeah, put it in a VM.
00:02:40 ◼ ► I understand the theory of how it's supposed to work with Apple configurator and stuff and just could not do it.
00:02:53 ◼ ► So I'm like, screw this, do it the quote unquote old fashioned way as of two years ago or whenever they introduced this, which is install the currently released version of the OS Sequoia onto the drive that you want to put Tahoe onto.
00:03:08 ◼ ► Boot into that new Sequoia install, make a new user, sign it into your developer Apple ID, which is not the same as my personal Apple ID.
00:03:16 ◼ ► Say you want beta updates and it will say, yes, you can have that because you have a developer account.
00:03:28 ◼ ► And then to add just the extra twist, whenever my Mac Pro boots Tahoe, it kernel panics on boot.
00:03:45 ◼ ► So not reassuring, but, you know, beta one one time, the very first time it kernel panicked on boot it.
00:03:54 ◼ ► I did it booted into Tahoe and it popped up a dialogue that says we've disabled all third party kernel extensions.
00:04:12 ◼ ► Beta's on my main iPhone, my iPad I never use, and my travel laptop, but not my main Mac.
00:04:44 ◼ ► On the iPhones, this is the one I'm encountering the most because it's my main primary iPhone.
00:04:57 ◼ ► And I've had to reboot it because it stopped being able to connect to my AirPods twice.
00:05:32 ◼ ► Like, in terms of, like, consuming WVDC content, I'm mostly still watching sessions, looking at documentation, doing some experiments, some test runs of, like, things like the transcription APIs and stuff like that.
00:05:42 ◼ ► So I'm not actually doing that much development work on the phone, and I'm certainly not doing that much design work yet.
00:05:47 ◼ ► However, and you'll hear me talking about this all summer, this is such a radical redesign.
00:05:53 ◼ ► I think it's going to trigger a redesign of almost every app, as we kind of predicted might be the case when a redesign was rumored for the system.
00:06:03 ◼ ► It is definitely going to be the case now that I see the redesign, and more importantly, now that I've used my old app on the new OS, it looks ridiculously old immediately.
00:06:15 ◼ ► So as soon as people start getting this OS, which for my users, it's already, like, 2% of the user base who have it, and it's only going to go up over the course of the summer.
00:06:26 ◼ ► As soon as people get used to this OS, every app that is not designed for it looks old.
00:06:32 ◼ ► It is like the transition to iOS 7 in that regard, that, like, as soon as iOS 7 launched, when you launched an app that was built for iOS 6 and earlier with the, you know, old style design, it just looked ancient.
00:06:49 ◼ ► So, for me, I have no regrets living on beta 1 from the start because I have to really get used to this language, like, this design language.
00:06:58 ◼ ► And I have to get used to, like, how things feel on the system, how apps should be designed on the system, how Apple's apps are designed, what people will be used to when they use this for a while and then come to my app.
00:07:18 ◼ ► So, even though my phone is hot and I keep having to reboot it to maintain basic functionality, I'm very, very happy I'm using the beta full-time because it's not a moment too soon that I'm learning this new design language and getting a good feel for it.
00:07:34 ◼ ► For me, I am running the beta on my iPad, which I use pretty much every evening as a couch computer.
00:07:48 ◼ ► I will not put it on my phone unless I get really desperate until at least public beta 1 because that seems to be when things are at least livable.
00:08:10 ◼ ► It made it really easy to install, incredibly easy to install, so easy that I don't even remember how I downloaded the thing, which, yes, I know my memory.
00:08:25 ◼ ► I don't think that's terribly useful unless, like John said, you're just kicking tires.
00:08:32 ◼ ► Was it just running, like, software update command line in the background or something?
00:08:35 ◼ ► But, I mean, I went from never having installed VirtualBuddy before to a booted VM with little to no effort in, like, five or ten minutes.
00:09:04 ◼ ► Well, what I wanted to do was use the new Swift Assist or, you know, the Copilot, if you will, stuff in Xcode.
00:09:18 ◼ ► And by the way, I believe it also requires you to be booted from an internal disk and not an external one.
00:09:25 ◼ ► Yeah, remember we talked about that, that Apple Intelligence wouldn't work at all if you were booted from an external disk.
00:09:29 ◼ ► And I think that extends, for whatever reason, to the, you know, AI, which doesn't make any sense to me.
00:09:43 ◼ ► But the other thing I'm curious to know is, if you did try that, did you have the same problem that Hockenberry had,
00:09:49 ◼ ► which is you can't figure out how to actually get your builds to work and sign correctly and be able to distribute to TestFlight?
00:09:59 ◼ ► If for that sort of work, I would likely just be doing that on my, what is this, Sequoia?
00:10:20 ◼ ► I was going to say, wait, how the heck are you going to do development on a Sequoia system for the new OSs?
00:10:32 ◼ ► Because in the Mac world, I can't really do development for Tahoe updates to my application without being booted into Tahoe.
00:10:45 ◼ ► It annoys me so much that Apple doesn't just finally, you know, figure out what needs to be done to essentially make a Mac OS simulator.
00:11:14 ◼ ► John tends to, at this point, since he doesn't have a real job anymore, do the overwhelming majority and the heavy lift on the show notes for each week.
00:11:31 ◼ ► Well, anyways, the point is, what you see in the episode, I put that together, but it's entirely based on what John has done.
00:11:37 ◼ ► And so, because John is the one that formulates these show notes that we're about to work this episode off of, it's going to be macOS heavy.
00:11:47 ◼ ► And you can also blame Apple, because if I didn't have so many things to say about macOS, there wouldn't be that much macOS stuff.
00:12:02 ◼ ► And something, I don't recall if we mentioned it on the show or not, but something that a lot of us, including Craig, were wondering was, hey, what happens when an app asks the system, what version are you?
00:12:18 ◼ ► And Guy writes, apps built before the iOS 26 SDK get 19.0 as a system version from Process Info.
00:12:36 ◼ ► Additionally, Howard Oakley writes, at what I thought was Electric Light Company, and I just today realized is Eclectic Light Company.
00:12:48 ◼ ► Anyway, Howard Oakley writes, when built against the macOS 15 SDK or earlier, Tahoe returns a version number of 16 for compatibility with previous numbering in all existing apps.
00:13:02 ◼ ► In scripted languages run within a shell environment, there's an environment variable to control the version number given.
00:13:25 ◼ ► So people were afraid that they were just going to not sync up the version numbers and just leave it as 19, which would be ridiculous.
00:13:31 ◼ ► They're doing the typical thing they do, which is it really does return 26, but you get one year of overlap to where your old things will get 19.
00:13:37 ◼ ► And I do like that they put in the stuff for, like, environment variables for the shell stuff on macOS.
00:13:42 ◼ ► That's going the extra mile for people who care, probably for their own purposes, because they probably have a bunch of shell scripts that have code that checks the version number.
00:13:57 ◼ ► Just like an hour and a half ago, my family got back from our little neighborhood pool, and we were all ravenously hungry.
00:14:09 ◼ ► And that is a major bummer, because HelloFresh makes it easy to fit quick home-cooked meals into your schedule every week by curating delicious recipes right to your door.
00:14:20 ◼ ► But you know what would have been even better is now, this summer, HelloFresh has made it even easier to enjoy delicious, healthy, and homemade quality meals with their new ready-made meals.
00:14:29 ◼ ► These heat-and-go HelloFresh meals are chef-crafted, flavorful dishes, ready in just three minutes, so you can dig in and do summer right.
00:14:37 ◼ ► Can you imagine how clutch that would have been to just parade several of these three minutes and then your ready meals through the microwave?
00:14:47 ◼ ► And the good news is, is I didn't entirely mess up, because HelloFresh sent me three different meals, and I'm going to call out just one of them.
00:14:59 ◼ ► This is one of those ones where you follow the recipe card, which is really simple and really straightforward, and oh, Nelly, this thing was delicious.
00:15:19 ◼ ► You can make your summer enjoyable and delicious by signing up for HelloFresh at HelloFresh.com slash ATP10FM and get 10 free meals with a free item for life.
00:15:36 ◼ ► HelloFresh.com slash ATP10FM, H-E-L-L-O-F-R-E-S-H.com slash ATP, then the numeral one, numeral zero FM.
00:16:08 ◼ ► I think we'll get to it when we talk about these items because they're very, they're very generic.
00:16:16 ◼ ► This, there is a WWDC session, which is very good, or excuse me, not a session, a, a thing that's not the HIG.
00:16:35 ◼ ► Liquid glass seeks to bring attention to the underlying content and overusing this material in multiple custom controls can provide a subpar user experience by distracting from that content.
00:16:47 ◼ ► And this is actually also discussed, uh, underscore David Smith has started a new, uh, design series.
00:16:54 ◼ ► Uh, and he's on his website talking about how he's adopting, uh, liquid glass and reached very similar conclusions by way of trial and error.
00:17:22 ◼ ► And by liquid glass showing through in a much more pronounced way than previous frosted glass thing that's showing through the content, like you can see more of the edges and contours.
00:17:34 ◼ ► So I can see how this sentence you could parse it and say, okay, it seeks to bring attention to the underlying content.
00:17:42 ◼ ► Setting aside the logic or the value of that, the next part of the sentences is that overusing this material and multiple custom controls can provide a subpar user experience by distracting from that content.
00:17:53 ◼ ► If it brings attention to the underlying content, if that's what you're saying, that we want to bring attention to underlying content by showing it through.
00:18:05 ◼ ► I think this is trying to what I think the sentence is trying to get at is this the thing that a lot of people are struggling with right now, which is what is the value and purpose of showing the content that is behind controls?
00:18:27 ◼ ► I'm finding a lot of people saying and putting posting various screenshots or whatever saying, look at this screenshot of this app, like the whole window.
00:18:34 ◼ ► And they say, the things that draw my eye the most are the floating toolbar controls, which we'll talk about later, and all the glassy controls.
00:18:49 ◼ ► So, I mean, there's lots of WWC sessions about this, and they build these sentences that try to say, here's what we're doing with glass.
00:19:02 ◼ ► They're always trying to say, by putting glassy controls, we're trying to draw attention to the content.
00:19:05 ◼ ► And I just don't – it doesn't draw my – does it draw your attention to the content?
00:19:15 ◼ ► Something that would draw my attention to the content would be if the controls were out of the way and not laying on top of the thing I'm trying to look at.
00:19:21 ◼ ► There is no way to show me a blurry version of my content that keeps text on top of it flashing between black and white and have me think, ooh, I'm seeing more of my content, and that's what I'm paying attention to.
00:19:33 ◼ ► Is it drawing your attention to the content, or is it drawing your attention to the control that's on top of your content?
00:19:53 ◼ ► It's very distracting, and I think the effect is not as smooth or responsive as they have advertised.
00:20:08 ◼ ► I wish they would just be honest about that because you can like a design, and you can put forward a design as a platform vendor because you think it looks cool.
00:20:19 ◼ ► That's a great reason, honestly, because that is what will get people to be excited about it and to want to upgrade their phones to the new OS as soon as they possibly can or buy new phones if they can't run it.
00:20:32 ◼ ► That being said, you know, to answer this specific question, whether Liquid Glass draws your eye to the content?
00:20:40 ◼ ► I'm not aware of much content where seeing an extremely blurry version of a region of it is as good as seeing an uninstructed version of it.
00:20:54 ◼ ► I mean, maybe it's drawing your attention to your fact that some part of your content is obscured.
00:21:02 ◼ ► But no, like what like the way most of the, you know, content extension under controls works is kind of like those TVs that light the wall behind them with colors that match what's on screen.
00:21:21 ◼ ► No, you're seeing some blurry light that is inspired by the colors of the picture, which is fine.
00:21:26 ◼ ► Yeah, but bias lighting is trying to help it so that your eyes don't have to adjust so much between very dark scenes and very light scenes.
00:21:46 ◼ ► The problem is if when you start saying like things like this lets your content shine through, which is the opposite of what it does.
00:21:54 ◼ ► I feel like you might start to actually believe that and that will cause you to misuse the design or to make poor design decisions that will actually make it much harder to see content or to to appreciate it or to to be able to reveal all of it.
00:22:11 ◼ ► And so, like right now, like the way the liquid glass performs right now, I think it makes no sense when you have uncontrolled scrolling colors going behind it.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Because what happens is, and this is something I noticed the very, very first day of using it.
00:22:30 ◼ ► What happens is, if you don't know what's going behind it and people can scroll stuff behind it, as you scroll between light and dark, I alluded to this earlier, eventually, if it's showing, if there's light stuff behind it, it'll make the text on top of the glass blob black.
00:22:46 ◼ ► OK. And then as you scroll, if what passes behind it crosses a certain darkness threshold, it will animate the text on the button into a dark appearance where the text is light to show up against the dark background.
00:22:59 ◼ ► So as you're scrolling content behind it, the button will alternate between light and dark.
00:23:06 ◼ ► And every time it does that, it animates, and it's a pretty jarring transition, and it lags behind the scrolling of the content behind it by a fraction of a second, but it's noticeable.
00:23:15 ◼ ► So what you see as you scroll content behind a liquid glass button is you see basically delayed flashing back and forth between light and dark of the button content.
00:24:04 ◼ ► Like, for instance, when they show the controls over a video that's playing, and those controls are made of glass.
00:24:10 ◼ ► If you have reasonable control over the content, and you kind of know that the content behind this will consistently be like either light or dark, and so it'll be fine.
00:24:26 ◼ ► But where you can't really responsibly use it is where you don't control the content, and it might frequently go between light and dark as people are using it.
00:24:41 ◼ ► And if they would just say, this is the coolest way a button can look, and use it in these contexts and not in these contexts, that's fine.
00:24:53 ◼ ► Like, they really have gone over the top of this because they think it looks cool, and it does look cool in certain contexts.
00:25:06 ◼ ► Yeah, but on this topic, I think I said this last week as well, I give them a wide latitude to define a new look for differentiation purposes.
00:25:14 ◼ ► That's a more boring way to say the same thing as you're saying, oh, they like it because it looks cool.
00:25:19 ◼ ► Differentiating their products so that someone knows when they're looking at an iPhone is actually an important thing that they should be doing.
00:25:26 ◼ ► Like, with phones looking more and more similar, mostly because everybody copied Apple's iOS 7 thing.
00:25:30 ◼ ► But anyway, like, it's important for every once in a while with Apple to make a big change just so when you see someone with a phone, you'll know it's an iPhone.
00:25:38 ◼ ► And it's getting harder because, like, the notch is getting smaller and phones all look the same from the back and the front and everyone's got cases on them.
00:26:02 ◼ ► The usability problems that come with this particular choice are harder for me to forgive them for.
00:26:11 ◼ ► And so and having, you know, having lived with macOS 26 for the past week, I will say that at least on macOS, it's not the end of the world using it.
00:26:22 ◼ ► Like, there are lots of things that I would pick apart if I was writing a review of it that have bad usability and are ugly and I don't like.
00:26:30 ◼ ► But when you're using it, it doesn't feel like, oh, I can't even use my computer anymore.
00:26:36 ◼ ► Like I said last week and, like, you just said now, it immediately makes all the old stuff look old.
00:26:43 ◼ ► It's just a shame that there are some minor things that we will now walk through, I suppose.
00:26:53 ◼ ► I would almost go so far as to say pretty much exclusively using this on iPad because I very rarely touch this VM.
00:27:02 ◼ ► And the flashing of, like, toolbars and stuff that Marco was describing is one of the bigger ones, for sure.
00:27:08 ◼ ► I could not agree with you, Marco, that that is very distracting, very disruptive, and just not dialed in yet.
00:27:13 ◼ ► And by the way, I don't think you can dial that in because you have to invert, otherwise it will become unreadable.
00:27:27 ◼ ► I think there's just no way around that other than what Marco said, which is, hey, don't let arbitrary content scroll behind floating glass stuff,
00:27:38 ◼ ► One thing they could try, I mean, I'm sure they did try this, but one of the things that makes that transition so jarring,
00:27:44 ◼ ► as I mentioned earlier, is that it actually happens shortly after the content under it changes.
00:27:48 ◼ ► If they actually did, like, a line by line, like, if you could, if it was, like, halfway through the button and the top half of the button was light,
00:28:03 ◼ ► I think it would be less jarring because, like, the way it pops in when you're scrolling quickly, that's very distracting.
00:28:10 ◼ ► I think it, like, crossfades now, and I think the crossfade actually softens it a little bit.
00:28:14 ◼ ► But anyway, like, just the whole problem is that it goes slower than the content, and that is jarring because it's, like, you're scrolling and then it pops, you know, into its own new version.
00:28:26 ◼ ► But that's, look, the computer industry, as mentioned last episode, has been trying to design transparent and translucent interfaces forever because they look cool in marketing shots.
00:28:46 ◼ ► But it can't work in all contexts, and I think what we are seeing is, like, you know, Apple tried to do this with Safari a few years ago, too.
00:29:09 ◼ ► Where Apple is using it now, I think it actually belongs in, like, 75% of the places they're actually using it.
00:29:15 ◼ ► And by the way, like, on that factor, we've talked about so many past shows, how much Apple has worked to make sort of translucent UI that works on arbitrary backgrounds.
00:29:30 ◼ ► In particular, if you look at, like, your current version of tvOS, the way the controls work on tvOS, on any background, pause any show with the Apple native player, any show on any frame, that, like, scrubber bar always looks legible and good.
00:29:50 ◼ ► There's no way you're seeing, like, the contours of letters or sharp edges between things.
00:30:07 ◼ ► Like, the current Apple TV interface does a translucent, let's say, controls on arbitrary background without looking bad and without flashing.
00:30:21 ◼ ► And also, to be clear, liquid glass, you know, people use this term to talk about multiple different things.
00:30:45 ◼ ► The way things blob together and blob apart when buttons are added and removed from groups.
00:30:52 ◼ ► That leads us right into the next item, which he said, it might be called liquid glass, but none of the liquid effects are present on macOS.
00:30:58 ◼ ► There's no merging or morphing, no meatballs, no squash and stretch of sidebars or slider knobs.
00:31:04 ◼ ► But still, like, you know, liquid glass is the term they're using for this specific style of button and all of its behaviors.
00:31:15 ◼ ► Now, you're right, like, the previous, kind of, you know, the outgoing administration here, there was a lot of use of heavily frosted, they called it material, but it was basically, you know, heavily frosted glass.
00:31:26 ◼ ► And that makes a lot, that takes care of a lot of these design challenges because of things like, you know, you have much more control over the background contrast and vibrance of the colors.
00:31:37 ◼ ► And so, you don't have to, like, dynamically invert the colors of the text to make it legible on top of that kind of material.
00:31:43 ◼ ► What I think they will probably end up doing, and I don't think this will make it for this, I think this is 26.
00:32:01 ◼ ► Because you don't need a ton of frosting to solve a lot of these problems very quickly.
00:32:07 ◼ ► So, I think that's what we're going to start seeing is, like, you know, milk glass or, you know, whatever they'll call it.
00:32:12 ◼ ► But, you know, just get a little bit of frosting in there, and you solve a lot of these problems.
00:32:17 ◼ ► But I think this is just going to be a really extreme year at first where, you know, we're going to see a lot of clear stuff.
00:32:23 ◼ ► And it's so weird that all the WWDC advertisement, like the 25 and the WWDC 25 logo, was super frosted.
00:32:37 ◼ ► For what it's worth, I really do think my initial reaction is still my reaction in that it needs to be dialed in.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And using, it's less so on the Mac because I'm not using the Mac, or I'm not using Tahoe that much.
00:33:21 ◼ ► And I hope and believe that over time, Apple will get a little bit of a better grip about it.
00:33:27 ◼ ► Like, I've got to imagine that Control Center, which I've only seen a handful of screenshots of.
00:33:41 ◼ ► Especially since, you know, I think that from all the guidance that I've seen on the couple of sessions I've been able to watch about this,
00:33:50 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure that was said on a few different occasions, that you should never put glass over glass.
00:34:03 ◼ ► Even if you have just like a photo behind it, you see too much of it through Control Center.
00:34:24 ◼ ► And it definitely needs work, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I went, oh, you know, it's not that bad.
00:34:33 ◼ ► But I do think with the exception of my bottom search bar, everything else actually looks pretty good as is.
00:34:39 ◼ ► And I think that's very much because I'm not using a lot of custom stuff all over the place.
00:34:48 ◼ ► And I genuinely think, again, that this is going to end up in a real good spot come September.
00:34:53 ◼ ► And if it isn't perfect, which it might not be, I think it'll be a heck of a lot better than it is now.
00:35:16 ◼ ► And if you're wondering what's Flutter, well, Flutter is an open source framework for building beautiful,
00:35:29 ◼ ► thing that is, like I said in the last episode, you know, a thing that is difficult for our
00:35:33 ◼ ► competitors to do because they don't control the hardware software stack to the degree that
00:35:41 ◼ ► If you want to make one that has Liquid Glass everywhere, you could potentially use Flutter.
00:36:02 ◼ ► And then this is, I guess, a component for React, which runs a lot of websites and some native
00:36:26 ◼ ► Well, you know, I just wanted to point out, like, this wasn't one of the big thrusts of
00:36:32 ◼ ► But in macOS, there's a couple of little areas where Whimsy is still there or has been added
00:36:38 ◼ ► There's a minimal nerd pointing out that the drag and drop folder animation in Tahoe is
00:36:42 ◼ ► When you drag something onto a folder in the Finder, it opens up and then closes and accepts
00:36:47 ◼ ► It actually changes the icon for empty folders versus full folders, I believe, where the full
00:37:19 ◼ ► The default app icon size is now 64 by 64, which is nice, with a corresponding radius of
00:37:52 ◼ ► But I think it's, you know, the whole point of this design, it's the same everywhere, except
00:38:07 ◼ ► Quoting from that session, for existing Mac icons that are similarly shaped as our rounded
00:38:11 ◼ ► rectangle, they automatically get masked or extended to fit into the template while receiving
00:38:22 ◼ ► So what it means is if you've got an existing squircle icon, which they detect somehow, because
00:38:34 ◼ ► But if you have a like a legit exact Apple squircle, like my hyperspace icon, they will just cut
00:38:47 ◼ ► They'll just trim off your edges, but also, apparently, if you have an icon that has like
00:38:56 ◼ ► So there's some images here showing like a box icon, which is a blue squircle and white
00:39:01 ◼ ► letters B-O-X, and the new version applies a, you know, chops the corners, makes them more
00:39:07 ◼ ► rounded, and then applies the glass effect of the layered icons on the background of the
00:39:12 ◼ ► So it's got highlights and fuzz and everything, and also on the letters on the inside of it.
00:39:18 ◼ ► The same icon and the same app that existed yesterday, you install tile, all of a sudden
00:39:26 ◼ ► I was afraid that it was going to like start changing like my flying like hard drive spaceship
00:39:40 ◼ ► It is a reason for even if you have a squircle Mac OS icon, it's a reason for you to make
00:39:47 ◼ ► Maybe we'll talk about that in a future show or later because there's a whole bunch having
00:40:05 ◼ ► And so as Simon Stauvering writes, you can copy or paste a custom icon in the finder to break
00:40:11 ◼ ► out of squircle jail, or you can crack open the .app package, find the .ICNS file and drag it onto
00:40:27 ◼ ► So the, the squircle jail we're talking about again is when you have an icon that, that Tahoe
00:40:41 ◼ ► And it looks awful because your icon is shrunken inside like this gray squircle, depending on
00:40:48 ◼ ► Jailbreaking is getting your icon out of that gray squircle that it put it in because it
00:40:54 ◼ ► Like if you open your applications folder in Tahoe, you'll immediately notice, Ooh, I see all
00:41:09 ◼ ► anything, you can just use a custom icon in macOS and macOS, you can add a custom icon to
00:41:26 ◼ ► Uh, they do this already because the problem with doing a custom icon is like, well, what about
00:41:35 ◼ ► So you have to have something sort of watching in the background, watching to see your apps
00:41:53 ◼ ► Cause when you upgrade to Tahoe, you're going to feel sad when you look in your doc and you
00:41:56 ◼ ► see what was formerly an icon that you really liked shrunken and inside a gray squirgle jail.
00:42:03 ◼ ► And then, uh, speaking of rounded corners from session 310, build an app kit app with the
00:42:09 ◼ ► new design and they show a toolbar window, compact toolbar window and title bar window.
00:42:29 ◼ ► At least in Tahoe beta one, the corner radius of windows in Mac OS changes depending on whether
00:42:37 ◼ ► there's a toolbar visible in the window and how big the toolbar is three different corner
00:42:47 ◼ ► That's if you have no toolbar, then there's the compact toolbar window, which has a slightly
00:42:56 ◼ ► And yes, when you hide and show the toolbar in a window, it changes the corner radius of
00:44:30 ◼ ► If you fiddle with window control buttons, this implementation is a good starting point
00:44:35 ◼ ► Yeah, you could override these things and give you the big chunk buttons, even if you don't
00:44:40 ◼ ► Whether you'll get that through the Mac App Store or not is questionable, but you don't
00:44:59 ◼ ► A funny slash head smackingly upsetting consequence of that is if you make a window in the finder
00:45:20 ◼ ► Then you've got the icon and name of the folder, which are left of line, which we'll get to in
00:45:27 ◼ ► When I look at this window, I think I should be able to drag it from anywhere because it
00:45:41 ◼ ► And I would never want to have to explain how to use a Mac by saying, oh, just grab the title
00:45:51 ◼ ► The menu bar is sort of kind of missing insofar as it is translucent where everything old
00:46:03 ◼ ► If you look at the dead center of the middle of your screen, you see your unadulterated desktop
00:46:50 ◼ ► But nevertheless, if you wanted to go back to the way it was before, to yesteryear, you
00:46:58 ◼ ► It does not use this Glass Bar app does not use new glass material because it makes things
00:47:03 ◼ ► And there are rendering bugs when you do things like use swipe gestures to switch spaces or
00:47:13 ◼ ► And Bart continues, I'll have a new build soon and maybe I can tinker properly with Glass
00:47:18 ◼ ► One problem with Glass Bar on these early versions I noticed is that when you click on a menu like
00:47:26 ◼ ► But with at least Glass Bar, when you click on the menu, if it's drawing that capsule, you
00:47:34 ◼ ► So it's not exactly perfect, but hey, it's beta one and people are just working on these
00:47:38 ◼ ► And the other one I want to mention is Boring Old Menu Bar from the Big Sur days back when
00:47:47 ◼ ► I'm assuming if that app is still actively developed, they'll also update it for the new
00:47:59 ◼ ► If you desperately want a opaque white menu bar, you can put a menu bar size white strip
00:48:26 ◼ ► And if I was using Tahoe for more than a minute, I'm sure this would be one of my favorite
00:48:34 ◼ ► I feel like Marco was the one of the three of us that complained the most about this, but
00:48:38 ◼ ► he is right to complain or was right to complain in the past because for the last year or two,
00:48:54 ◼ ► So, and then also in the transition from landscape to portrait, they centered the text, which is
00:49:04 ◼ ► I mean, you know this if you use a Mac, but you may be wondering why it's weird and hard
00:49:08 ◼ ► to read large amounts of text in these dialogues is because their portrait orientation and the
00:49:18 ◼ ► If only they could maybe like, maybe they could make more room by moving the icon to the left
00:49:31 ◼ ► You can just make a landscape-oriented dialogue on macOS the optimal reading width for how long
00:49:45 ◼ ► Like Mac screens are all wider than they are tall, unless you have your thing rotated in
00:49:51 ◼ ► If you have a portrait orientation screen, your thing should be, I don't, like, just go
00:50:08 ◼ ► You know, macOS dialogues look really good back when they were landscaping the icon ones
00:50:12 ◼ ► But, you know, I guess this is better for future touch Macs because you make the buttons bigger
00:50:56 ◼ ► No, but look at the two things I put in the show notes here and tell me that, setting aside
00:51:00 ◼ ► the awful icon, which we'll get to in a little bit, tell me it doesn't look like there's
00:51:27 ◼ ► It has nothing to do with anything except for just running something that didn't have a
00:51:35 ◼ ► By the way, there's one thing I haven't mentioned is I have been filing feedbacks, baby.
00:51:55 ◼ ► If somebody thinks that the icons in dialogue should be centered, they need, like, an official
00:52:06 ◼ ► Put it back in the middle and they can ignore it or they can file it as a dupe and count
00:52:11 ◼ ► But I want there to be official communication to say, I personally told Apple that I don't
00:52:16 ◼ ► They can ignore my feedback or they can count it up and see how many other people feel the
00:52:20 ◼ ► same way as I do because they have to decide in the end which things should be tweaked.
00:52:37 ◼ ► And, you know, if you imagine the finder icon and the way it exists today is there at a glance,
00:52:53 ◼ ► And then if you look closer to the right hand side, you realize, oh, that's actually another
00:52:59 ◼ ► Well, since always, the finder icon had the left hand side is blue and the right hand side
00:53:21 ◼ ► And I think I might be the only one because especially all the old Mac nerds are very upset.
00:53:49 ◼ ► Like the fact that like the profile thing doesn't go edge to edge because that kind of kills
00:54:10 ◼ ► And the thing is, as Stephen Hackett pointed out, because he, you know, as he says, for kicks,
00:54:17 ◼ ► And I think it looks pretty good with liquid glass, even with the clear and tinted modes.
00:54:38 ◼ ► And the two changes I suggested making were get rid of the border and swap the colors back.
00:54:49 ◼ ► And then a friend of the show, D. Griffin Jones, writes, I created this icon in literally 15 minutes
00:54:57 ◼ ► Apple could very easily keep the icon's historical appearance without compromising the liquid glass
00:55:16 ◼ ► And for context, in Tahoe, pretty much every menu item, I mean, not literally everyone,
00:55:22 ◼ ► but darn near every menu item, like looking at Finder as an example, has an icon next to
00:55:29 ◼ ► So Stefan Habel writes, from the using icons in menus in Apple's human interface guidelines
00:55:36 ◼ ► from 2005 to 2009, quote, if you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu
00:55:46 ◼ ► A menu that includes too many icons or poorly designed ones can appear cluttered and be hard
00:55:51 ◼ ► Then in Apple's Hig today, quote, a menu items label describes what it does may include a symbol
00:55:58 ◼ ► So I thought that I'd find a stronger statement in today's Hig saying you should put icons next
00:56:05 ◼ ► There's a WWDC session about it where they emphasize, like, don't put one next to every menu.
00:56:12 ◼ ► they're all grouped together like they have these weird guidelines where they're trying
00:56:22 ◼ ► So like if you go into the file menu now, it's like file, open, new, open will have an icon
00:56:32 ◼ ► And this is for platform uniformity because my impression is that this is a more common
00:56:41 ◼ ► The old guidelines saying don't do this because it can appear cluttered and hard to read.
00:56:49 ◼ ► But I think what the key point is the if it includes too many icons in parentheses or poorly
00:56:55 ◼ ► Well, now we have SF symbols and so you don't have to worry about your poorly designed icons
00:57:19 ◼ ► It's, you know, in some ways it's nice to have another differentiator to pick out the menu
00:58:05 ◼ ► So I noticed this in terminal because, hey, it's just a plain window and you make tabs in
00:58:14 ◼ ► They look like a big capsule shaped channel with a slightly brighter capsule shaped thing
00:58:21 ◼ ► And I noticed this when I was running it on my M1 MacBook Air, which doesn't have, let's
00:58:35 ◼ ► I realized this screen's color rendition is not good enough to differentiate between an
00:58:47 ◼ ► You see a lot of this on crappy PC screens where there'll be two colors like, you know,
00:58:51 ◼ ► gray and a slightly lighter gray that will literally look like the same gray so you can't read the
00:59:04 ◼ ► And I think that the M1 MacBook Air screen at whatever brightness I had it with whatever lighting
01:00:00 ◼ ► Apple's designers have tried multiple times in recent years to dynamically color Safari's entire top bar.
01:00:12 ◼ ► So, you know, the main top title bar, the buttons around it, and the row of tabs to dynamically color them based on the content of the website below them.
01:00:26 ◼ ► And what they have in beta one of Tahoe is the entire top bar switches between light and dark, depending on, you know, similar to the liquid glass discussion or depending on the color of whatever is the top most content of the website.
01:00:42 ◼ ► So this could be, like, if the website has, like, a top black navigation strip and the rest of the page is white, black is what wins because it's on top.
01:00:58 ◼ ► When you switch tabs or navigate to a different page with a different color scheme, the entire bar switches between black and white mode.
01:01:13 ◼ ► Like, I don't, like, that is the biggest example to me that says, like, they have no design filter whatsoever.
01:01:19 ◼ ► Like, the designers have taken over, there is no editor, there is no one in charge of product who has enough power to override basic usability problems that designers are creating.
01:01:34 ◼ ► It is, like, using Safari on my laptop on Tahoe, it's the most distracting, disorienting thing ever.
01:01:42 ◼ ► If you ever navigate between web pages or switch between tabs, which, I don't know, I think it's a pretty common thing in a web browser.
01:01:56 ◼ ► So, the screenshot I put in the show notes is something I grabbed on my screen because I, honestly, not joking, honestly was going to file this as a drawing error.
01:02:05 ◼ ► Like, oh, there's, you know, there's lots of weird drawing errors in Tog, because it's the first beta.
01:02:26 ◼ ► And then I looked into the toolbar, and the toolbar had this region of it that was, it helps that it was, like, kind of like that pinkish color.
01:02:32 ◼ ► If you know anything about graphics cards, you may be familiar with a particular, like, kind of, like, a magenta color that indicates bad graphics things going on.
01:02:53 ◼ ► And the reason they would use that, they would use that back, you know, I don't know what they do now, but they would use that to indicate alpha transparency.
01:02:59 ◼ ► Any pixel that was that color, that bright pink, would then be rendered in whatever the game engine was as transparent.
01:03:07 ◼ ► Because they knew that color was so ugly, you would never use it for real in a texture.
01:03:18 ◼ ► Because you used to be able to set your desktop background to beige and then run a DVD and it would play on it.
01:03:29 ◼ ► If you can look above the address bar in the screenshot, can you read the text above there?
01:03:44 ◼ ► I scrolled the web page and I said, I'm seeing the thing that I, because Marco was talking about when you first load the page, like, whatever's the top influences the bar.
01:03:52 ◼ ► But as you scroll a web page, the web page's content goes up and behind the entire top bar in Safari.
01:04:24 ◼ ► Also, they, so with the new design language, they have introduced two different, what they call, I believe they call them border edge effects, something like that.
01:04:31 ◼ ► And the idea, and you'll see this all over iOS, you'll see that, you know, as you scroll content in, in an app that has like, you know, a top or bottom bar, they will, they will fade and blur the very top edge of the content.
01:04:46 ◼ ► To try to, obviously they, they blur your content so you can focus more on your content.
01:04:49 ◼ ► So they, they blur that top edge and there's a separate alternative rendering mode that they use and they give the example of a finder window that is a hard edge, which is basically a bar that is solid and has a border.
01:05:15 ◼ ► It's just, I don't know, I don't know why we have, I'm trying to describe a header, an opaque header.
01:05:21 ◼ ► And so, and so they have like, they already have defined a style that fixes this problem the way we've always fixed this problem with a solid background and a border that controls go on so we can read them.
01:05:36 ◼ ► Like when you scroll, the whole point of a scrollable region is you can only see the portion that is within the scrollable region.
01:05:43 ◼ ► And the rest of it is not, and you can't see it, but they're like, but you know, we do have more window here.
01:05:48 ◼ ► And I know there's stuff in that window, like the address bar, the back button, the forward button, the window control widgets, all the tabs.
01:06:08 ◼ ► Nathan Mansoe-Penot writes, this is the first time they've changed it since the retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first macOS 10 itself, 24 years ago.
01:06:18 ◼ ► And basically they made the, I don't know, the point of the arrow a little chunkier, I would say, and the post part, for lack of a better term, a little shorter.
01:06:29 ◼ ► It's like in an illustrator program where you can say, how do you want, when the line changes direction, how do you want the end caps to be?
01:06:52 ◼ ► We have gone from the Mickey Mouse hand with, or the Mickey Mouse glove with three vertical lines on it, which I can take or leave the lines, but I liked the general shape of the hand.
01:07:08 ◼ ► And this is the case where the hand used to be more baby and now is more pointy and less organic looking.
01:07:17 ◼ ► I haven't looked at them all yet, but when I first saw this hand cursor, because I was actually working on one of my apps and I wanted to show the hand cursor and I was like, wait, am I picking the wrong cursor?
01:07:34 ◼ ► Yeah, we just talked about it a little bit, but like you'll see it in Finder windows as well and you'll see it in the sidebars and everything.
01:07:47 ◼ ► They basically take a window on Mac OS or anywhere, really, but take a window on Mac OS.
01:08:08 ◼ ► But they're so married to this idea that rounded corner floating things are on top of your content that owns the whole window that they will go to ridiculous lengths to make this happen.
01:08:26 ◼ ► You're like, well, now I want to have a sidebar in my photo viewer with a bunch of sidebar stuff in it.
01:08:37 ◼ ► But then you're not following through on Alan Dye's really strongly felt belief that your content should be behind the sidebar.
01:08:48 ◼ ► But instead of just blurring the edge of your photo, what we'll do is we will mirror your photo to the left under the sidebar and then blur the mirrored portion.
01:08:57 ◼ ► You see that sometimes when they take like a you have a 16 by 9 window, but you're watching a 4 by 3 video and they mirror and blur the edges of the 4 by 3 to fill out the 16 by 9.
01:09:23 ◼ ► And its sole purpose is to make it look like your content goes all the way to the left edge, but it does not because that would be insanity.
01:09:30 ◼ ► And so now you can see the little edge of your of your content around the top left and bottom of the sidebar.
01:09:37 ◼ ► And also, of course, through the sidebar, because why wouldn't you want to see your mirrored, flipped, blurred content showing through your sidebar, making it less legible?
01:09:46 ◼ ► Toolbars look like a bunch of lozenges that are floating with huge drop shadows on top of your content.
01:09:52 ◼ ► So in a finder window, your content are like the fold, the icons of your items or list view or whatever.
01:09:56 ◼ ► But you've got this toolbar with no dividing line with just a bunch of floating things on top of it.
01:10:11 ◼ ► And like I see some value of like content, but then there's a control layer above it in a 3D space with shadows.
01:10:19 ◼ ► But their implementation of it sacrifices a lot of utility and readability for this metaphor that I feel like is not necessary.
01:10:28 ◼ ► Like I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with the idea that is a toolbar on top, a sidebar and left, a bottom bar on the bottom.
01:10:34 ◼ ► And they framed your content, but they were all in the same plane and your content didn't go under them.
01:10:48 ◼ ► Mario Alberto Guzman writes, when you try to create user interfaces where you don't have distinct and hard separations for compartmentalization, you end up with weird junk like this.
01:11:26 ◼ ► But of course, if the content area scrolls horizontally, where are you going to put the scroll bar?
01:11:30 ◼ ► They put it on top of it because they want to show the content going underneath the scrolling thing.
01:12:01 ◼ ► Like, there was nothing wrong with the idea of a opaque toolbar or sidebar or bottom bar.
01:12:06 ◼ ► Steve Chatton-Smith writes, liquid glass tells us to put a bunch of stuff in a glass layer above the app, but it doesn't tell us why.
01:12:15 ◼ ► Why are the window traffic lights housed in the sidebar on macOS, for example, or on top of the sidebar on iPad, or in line with the window content for apps without a sidebar?
01:12:25 ◼ ► Yeah, so like I said, I think it's still clear what the, no one's confused about what the window widgets are, but layering wise, it's not coherent at all.
01:12:40 ◼ ► Like, as someone pointed out, it's almost like the closed widgets are saying, hit this red button to close the sidebar.
01:12:45 ◼ ► Because they're, they're so clearly part of the sidebar, unless they're not, and they're in the window.
01:12:50 ◼ ► It's, I'm, I don't think it's that confusing, but like, it's, first of all, it's, I don't see the benefit in these, in these five different modes.
01:13:02 ◼ ► But even within the Mac, I don't think the sidebar should be a thing that floats on top of stuff.
01:13:07 ◼ ► Lots of people would do alternate designs of like, how about we just end the window there and have the sidebar come out of the window kind of like a drawer and a real throwback.
01:13:16 ◼ ► But yeah, like this, I'm not going to say their idea of controls float on top of your content is a bad idea because it's not inherently bad, but it causes a lot of problems for them that they have not shown that they have solutions for, even in their own apps, which is not encouraging.
01:13:32 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's, again, like, these are all, like, you can make a design language that is full of transparency and shadows and edge-to-edge content and all that.
01:14:01 ◼ ► You have to go and touch those apps unless they're just going to be embarrassing if you don't.
01:14:14 ◼ ► But, like, you know, it's going to be because as you get farther away from the beaten path of, like, the apps that Apple ships, you can just assume they're not going to get touched and they're just going to look how they look.
01:14:24 ◼ ► I think we talked last week, at least briefly, about multiple clipboards and clipboard managers and things like that in macOS.
01:14:31 ◼ ► And a friend of the show, Stephen Robles, writes, clipboard history is on an eight-hour cycle.
01:14:42 ◼ ► And you can find more in one of Stephen's many videos, but specifically one about this.
01:14:48 ◼ ► I mean, there's still definitely a place for third-party clipboard managers having – I was forcing myself to use the Tahoe clipboard manager.
01:14:57 ◼ ► Maybe I shouldn't have been shocked that their eight-hour cycle and the number of clippings they save is way too low for my use.
01:15:21 ◼ ► And I will use it on – I'm just, you know, on everybody else's Mac once it gets activated.
01:15:28 ◼ ► But be aware, Apple – I mean, I'm assuming for privacy reasons this is being very conservative for their implementation.
01:15:45 ◼ ► Rosetta is the – or I guess Rosetta 2, strictly speaking – is the mechanism by which you can run something compiled for Intel on Apple Silicon.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And it reads, in part, macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs.
01:16:08 ◼ ► Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27.
01:16:14 ◼ ► Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel to ARM app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon Eras.
01:16:22 ◼ ► Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.
01:16:28 ◼ ► But after macOS 27, Rosetta will be paired back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps,
01:16:33 ◼ ► specifically older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.
01:17:04 ◼ ► You probably don't even know that one of the apps that you use every day is actually not natively compiled for Apple Silicon.
01:17:11 ◼ ► What they're saying is that after macOS 26, that game might not – that game, that app might not launch.
01:17:21 ◼ ► It will still be there, but it will only be for specific older games that use Intel that the developer is never going to update.
01:17:32 ◼ ► But, like, is this some kind of, like, special list that can you get your app on the list?
01:17:56 ◼ ► Like, do they think that removing Rosetta is what it takes to get people to update for Apple Silicon?
01:18:02 ◼ ► Look, if people haven't updated their apps for Apple Silicon by now, they're never going to do it.
01:18:06 ◼ ► So just leave Rosetta there for those apps and, like, I don't know, remove it 10 years from now or something.
01:18:25 ◼ ► I just thought of it today when I installed, like, a command line tool, and I didn't want to bother building it, so I just downloaded a binary because it was just one file, right?
01:18:37 ◼ ► And, of course, I'm on my Intel Mac Pro, so I downloaded the x86 download, and I realized, oh, I have to remember that that one command line tool is x86 because in macOS 27 it will stop running.
01:19:05 ◼ ► These files transfer more efficiently between hosts or disks because their intrinsic structure doesn't depend on the host file system's capabilities.
01:19:13 ◼ ► The size of an ASIF file takes on the file system is proportional to the actual data stored in the disk image, which is pretty neat.
01:19:22 ◼ ► And from the aforementioned Eclectic Light Company, there's a whole write-up about this.
01:19:32 ◼ ► That's like if you wanted to make like a 100-gigabyte file but you put one letter in it, it wouldn't take 100 gigs on disk.
01:19:39 ◼ ► But if you looked at the file size, it would be like, oh, yeah, this is totally a 100-gig file.
01:19:42 ◼ ► And if you cat the contents, it would show you 100 gigs of like zeros plus that one little letter you put in there.
01:20:02 ◼ ► But anyway, yeah, that's – so the thing with disk images is always like, oh, I'm going to make a file on disk that like when you double-click it, it mounts as a volume.
01:20:19 ◼ ► But sparse files, I just say, well, why don't we just make that take up no space because there's nothing in it yet.
01:20:23 ◼ ► And there are various approaches to doing that with like, okay, well, this is actually going to be a directory with a bunch of little stripe files that are like parts of the disk.
01:20:41 ◼ ► And there's been so many different disk image formats across the history of Apple's OSes.
01:20:47 ◼ ► I just had an occasion to find some old ones because I was getting some old WWDC stuff.
01:20:51 ◼ ► And they were disk images that would no longer mount on modern macOS without some, you know, downloading some command line tools to make it happen.
01:20:59 ◼ ► And it's always like the question, oh, if I want to make a disk image, is it a read-write disk image?
01:21:10 ◼ ► ASIF looks like it might solve that dilemma because based on Howard Oakley's testing here, ASIF is the fastest disk image format.
01:21:23 ◼ ► So assuming this works well, the answer to the question of what disk image format should I use if I only care about modern Macs and forward is ASIF.
01:21:42 ◼ ► It's not tremendously faster, but it's nice that like you don't have to guess which one.
01:21:46 ◼ ► Oh, you want this one for performance, this one for size, and this one for compatibility.
01:21:49 ◼ ► I mean, I guess you still have the compatibility concern, but you know, if you just want it for now forward, ASIF.
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01:24:24 ◼ ► All of the new APIs for like tab bars and searchable and all that other stuff, super buggy.
01:24:55 ◼ ► You know, allegedly they've been working on this redesign across the systems for years.
01:25:14 ◼ ► Nothing is running at 60 frames a second, like it's – or let alone 120, which is what they're supposed to run at.
01:25:25 ◼ ► That being said, regarding your actual question of the design, one other big issue I keep running into besides the, you know, blurring and blobbing of everything
01:25:38 ◼ ► is they have used the ellipsis slash meatball slash what they're now calling a more menu or a more button everywhere in ways – in contexts that they don't necessarily need to.
01:25:56 ◼ ► And I did learn that you can change the Safari toolbar back to kind of an older version, but that has other kind of downsides to it.
01:26:02 ◼ ► But in Safari, to add a new tab or close the current tab is now an additional tap as was before in the default layout.
01:26:17 ◼ ► Then in the menu that pops up, you've got to then tap the, you know, new tab or close tab or whatever there or the all tabs to go back to the tab view.
01:26:25 ◼ ► You can actually – which I learn when I complain a mess about this – you can actually swipe up on the Safari address bar area, and that will get it into the all tabs view.
01:26:36 ◼ ► But the problem is you also swipe up in a very close region of that to change apps and go back to the home screen.
01:26:45 ◼ ► I've been trying to get myself used to that gesture to try to keep the new layout of Safari and just get used to pulling up to go to the all tabs view.
01:27:04 ◼ ► And, yes, you can also swipe left and right on the address bar to switch tabs left and right, which I also didn't know.
01:27:16 ◼ ► Anyway, to rely on the up swipe gesture for going to the all tabs view, which is a very, very common action that I do, I don't love that.
01:27:36 ◼ ► And it will permanently put the – it'll basically put a little bar under the address bar that has the button for all tabs view just like it does now.
01:27:44 ◼ ► If you go to the Safari settings, you can change the bottom toolbar to, like, bottom mode or something instead of compact mode or something like that.
01:27:51 ◼ ► And it puts back basically the old bar, but it's actually – but everything's harder to hit because it's all pulled in more from the edges.
01:27:59 ◼ ► It's really important for you to see a little bit of your blurry web page around all the edges and also to have those bars block the bottom content on the web page.
01:28:07 ◼ ► And also, let's make all the tap targets for these very commonly used buttons smaller and move them a little bit from where they've been for years.
01:28:14 ◼ ► These rounded corners everywhere make basically the safe area insets narrower because if you have rectilinear content, it's got to avoid that whole curve because otherwise the corner will be clipped.
01:28:31 ◼ ► And by the way, of course, that whole rounded corner thing is floating with a margin around it.
01:28:36 ◼ ► But just to be clear, what you were trying to do is get used to that gesture to use the new UI.
01:28:41 ◼ ► You may eventually give up and go to settings and change it back to something that's closer to the old one but still has smaller tap targets.
01:28:57 ◼ ► So, in Mail, many of the common actions that used to be buttons in the toolbar, including select, a very common action, that's now under the dot, dot, dot menu in the upper right.
01:29:11 ◼ ► Now, what they did was collapse, you know, two or three buttons that used to be in the upper right into a dot, dot, dot menu.
01:29:47 ◼ ► So, also, in the music app, when you go to, like, the album view or, you know, the album view music, usually there's a little icon in the upper right that tells you, you know, it's the plus if it isn't added to your library.
01:30:01 ◼ ► Those are useful things to know on your iPhone when you might not be online all the time.
01:30:20 ◼ ► They just, this is, like, where Alan Dye's designs go the most wrong is burying things into menus and junk drawers of various sorts for no real benefit.
01:30:38 ◼ ► It's like a minimalist desk where there's nothing on the desk so you can't actually get any work done because there's literally nothing on it.
01:30:43 ◼ ► If you need a pen, a pencil, a mug, it's all, everything would be inside drawers tucked away so you can't see it because you want the desk to just have nothing on it.
01:31:05 ◼ ► And as much as Apple's design talks about getting out of the way of your content, well, what you're taking out of the way is functionality.
01:31:16 ◼ ► Now, the best possible reason to take away the controls, you can see it when you're playing a video.
01:31:38 ◼ ► You can't apply the same design decree to everything of hide as many controls as possible.
01:32:05 ◼ ► And Apple has always been further than ideal on that spectrum of normal tools that are visible to everything and ultra-minimalist, totally unusable.
01:32:24 ◼ ► In the same way that, like, I think unedited Johnny Ive just made everything as thin as possible, even at the expense of functionality,
01:32:31 ◼ ► I think unedited Alan Dye just hides everything behind menus, modes, and drawers of various sorts.
01:32:41 ◼ ► And it's not, like, it makes sense to hide behind a menu controls that literally cannot possibly fit any other way,
01:33:16 ◼ ► The icon that they got rid of in the music album view served a purpose and was also a button to change that purpose.
01:33:24 ◼ ► So if you wanted to download everything, you could download everything with that one button.
01:33:44 ◼ ► They are decontenting the interface for superficial design screenshot reasons, I guess.
01:34:07 ◼ ► The sad thing is they had at various times in their history, in recent history, pretty good solutions to this.
01:34:12 ◼ ► Like, you know, one of the things you're not saying is that, like, setting aside how hidden or revealed buttons are and how many functions you have to dig for.
01:34:21 ◼ ► There's also the question of, and you kind of alluded to a little bit of, like, well, which things are used frequently and which are obscure?
01:34:35 ◼ ► So it drives me bananas that an Apple mail on the phone, the tool, there's not a file of junk toolbar button visible at the top or whatever.
01:34:43 ◼ ► But anyway, that you can, as a designer application, you can say, these are probably the things people are going to do more frequently.
01:34:59 ◼ ► So a good design would be, we come up with what we think is a nice balance between beauty minimalism and the functions we think most people are going to use.
01:35:08 ◼ ► And then we allow the user to customize it because maybe if there's only room for one or two buttons at the top of their phone screen, we can pick what we think that most people will want.
01:35:19 ◼ ► Can you imagine a customizable toolbar where you could decide what appears in it in what order and you could arrange things into sections and you could decide whether you see icon or text or both?
01:35:28 ◼ ► They had that on macOS anyway, and they could have something like that with the new design language across all their platforms, a customizable, configurable toolbar that they pick the defaults for.
01:35:39 ◼ ► And that if you don't like them and you want that little widget back in music, you should be able to get it back.
01:35:47 ◼ ► It doesn't add any burden to the average user who's just going to take whatever interface Apple wants.
01:35:51 ◼ ► But imagine if, A, they would make smarter choices about the defaults, which, by the way, when they had configurable toolbars, they would often give you a whole default thing.
01:35:59 ◼ ► So if you mess it up real bad, you could always just say, just go back to the default one that Apple said because I messed mine up.
01:36:03 ◼ ► And B, that you can make it work exactly how you want because a really good tool is not just designed well out of the box, but also allows you to tune it for your purposes.
01:36:13 ◼ ► If the main thing you do with your mail is archive or the main thing you do is file things into one or three folders or something, you could have buttons visible.
01:36:20 ◼ ► Like, you choose how to use that precious space at the top of the mail thing on your phone for the things that you do most frequently.
01:36:26 ◼ ► And instead, we get no options, no configurability, and Apple's choices are hide everything away.
01:36:32 ◼ ► It's like if you got into a new car and the steering wheel was shrunken and hidden inside the glove box.
01:36:39 ◼ ► So when you want to steer, just open the glove box, lean over there, and turn the little wheel.
01:36:50 ◼ ► We've cleared away all this junk to make more space for your view of the road and the wall you're crashing into because you can't steer.
01:36:56 ◼ ► And for the times when you need to steer, just go to the touchscreen, find the button that opens the glove box, reach in, find the little wheel, and turn it.
01:37:22 ◼ ► As I said at the beginning of the episode, I think it's very important for Apple to keep updating their designs to look cool over time.
01:37:30 ◼ ► And as I said, even if the only reason to do something is like to change the system theme is it looks cool.
01:37:55 ◼ ► A good design is beautiful without having to turn on a bunch of accessibility options that you don't otherwise need.
01:38:02 ◼ ► A good design has legible text without having to say, well, you got to change it for this content, but it's going to fade and flash for this content.
01:38:11 ◼ ► And a good design for a computer application gives you the controls you need right at hand for easy, frequent access.
01:38:32 ◼ ► So I do think that we need to keep pushing on this because we're not saying revert the whole thing back.
01:38:53 ◼ ► Here's why this super clear view on top of this text is not actually helpful and is actually causing problems.
01:39:01 ◼ ► And as I said earlier, too, I don't actually think most of this is going to change for this release cycle.
01:39:08 ◼ ► Hopefully they'll fix most of the many animation and rendering bugs that are all across the systems.
01:39:19 ◼ ► But in the meantime, design wise, like we need to critique this because what they have done is a lot of cool stuff and a lot of bad stuff for no good reason.
01:39:30 ◼ ► And the bad stuff for no good reason, for the most part, is actually really easy to fix.
01:39:48 ◼ ► Oh, like people who are ostensibly gamers and fans of games and game companies, all they do online is complain about the companies and what they're doing.
01:39:57 ◼ ► And no matter what those companies do, they're like, you know, you're not listening to us.
01:40:02 ◼ ► Those game companies, Jump Bungie in particular, react so quickly to this kind of feedback.
01:40:11 ◼ ► Like you're like, if you could just say like you took away all the buttons, you put them in the dot dot menu, like bring back one or two or let me pick what those one or two are.
01:40:18 ◼ ► Do it in settings if you don't have a like imagine if instead Apple said, hey, in the upcoming version of Mail on iOS 26,
01:40:41 ◼ ► We're not going to put the three everything in the dot dot menu or we'll put the buttons back.
01:40:49 ◼ ► They're like, oh, Bungie said they're going to take away, you know, take away one or two fragments from Prismatic Warlock.
01:41:05 ◼ ► We're still going to take away some, but we're not going to take away all the ones that we said before.
01:41:10 ◼ ► And people are so mad at game companies because like they don't listen to us and they're so evil.
01:41:20 ◼ ► And we're just resigned to the fact that we're going to have to use it until someone changes.
01:41:22 ◼ ► Anyway, follow up next week if they if or whatever they have the next build if they change this.
01:41:32 ◼ ► Some things are harder to change, like a configurable toolbar system or settings or whatever.
01:41:36 ◼ ► Some things may be impossible to change where if you want it to be glass and stuff shows through, it's going to have to flash.
01:41:42 ◼ ► Oh, no, the one control that I wanted to highlight from iOS 26, which, you know, these controls are more or less the same everywhere for consistency.
01:41:50 ◼ ► But anyway, sliders, like when you have a volume slider or brightness slider, not the ones in control center, but like the slider control, which has a essentially a track and then a thumb in the track that you move along the track.
01:42:09 ◼ ► The look they have for it in the new design is so clearly touch focused because the thumb or whatever that you move in the track is very big by Mac OS standards.
01:42:19 ◼ ► It makes sense as a touch target that it would be roughly that big, but it looks cumbersome and ugly, I think, on Mac OS.
01:42:24 ◼ ► But anyway, setting that aside in iOS, like many of the controls throughout the new design, when you grab the little thumb in the track, it turns into liquid glass as in it becomes transparent.
01:42:35 ◼ ► So you're like a dragon, a water blob, and then it becomes more solid slash frosty when you let go, I think.
01:42:41 ◼ ► But anyway, what this means is that you can see in the track like the sort of like thermometer bar filling as you slide from like low brightness to high brightness.
01:42:51 ◼ ► Some part of the track is filled with the blue color and some part of the track is not.
01:42:57 ◼ ► And Nicky Tonski points out, I always imagine that it's the center of the thumb that points to the slider position.
01:43:06 ◼ ► So what he's saying is like that little thumb, if you've been envisioning before it was made of water, if you've been envisioning like, OK, wherever I drag this thumb on the slider, the center of the thumb is where the setting is.
01:43:16 ◼ ► But if you do this on iOS, what you'll see if you move your finger out of the way, because your finger would be covering this most of the time, is that when the slider is on the left, the blue bar is to the left of the thumb.
01:43:33 ◼ ► Only when the slider is dead in the middle is the blue bar in the middle of the thumb, which is weird, but a sort of natural consequence of the design they've chosen for how these sliders work and the fact that you can see through them.
01:43:48 ◼ ► Well, this is and this is like when you look at the actual like design of such a thing, like hat, like metrics wise, this is how it has to work.
01:44:00 ◼ ► Like if if the center of the scrubber was the value, then when you like if it's at the far left, then the scrubber would be off the left edge of the track.
01:44:12 ◼ ► Well, it's only the way it has to work with this scrubber because the scrubber is very wide, like the like macOS scrubbers used to be very thin.
01:44:20 ◼ ► So really what you basically need is I need 50 percent of the scrubber to be off the edge of the track.
01:44:32 ◼ ► But the scrubber is so wide that if half the scrubber was off the track, it would be like blocking the symbols on either side of the scrubber.
01:44:56 ◼ ► And I love it because for the first time, I really think that the iPad is starting to embrace what makes it good, which is to say kind of a macOS Lite.
01:45:13 ◼ ► I don't think I said this on the show last week, but I saw somewhere, somebody had tweeted at me, and I can't recall where it was or who it was.
01:45:20 ◼ ► But if you're on iPad, particularly on an 11-inch iPad like I am, somewhere in settings, I think in accessibility, you can change to the more space option for the display, which basically cranks up the resolution ever so slightly and makes a world of difference on how much real estate you have to work with.
01:45:40 ◼ ► So if you're playing around with iOS 26, especially on a smaller iPad, I strongly suggest doing that.
01:45:46 ◼ ► Additionally, we're going to talk about this maybe a little bit later, but Stage Manager might be good.
01:45:58 ◼ ► And this is an initial gut reaction, but I flipped on Stage Manager earlier today, and I think it's not utter trash, and I'm really uncomfortable with that opinion, to be honest with you.
01:46:13 ◼ ► I am really looking forward to future betas when they get a lot of these rendering issues and springboard crashes and whatnot squared away, but absolutely loving it.
01:46:21 ◼ ► And if you're someone who does not use your iPad as your primary computing device, then it's safe to upgrade.
01:46:28 ◼ ► And honestly, even if you do use it as your primary computing device, it might be worth the upgrade because it's so good.
01:46:34 ◼ ► But reading from John's Prepared Show Notes, in front of the show, Steve Trout and Smith writes,
01:46:39 ◼ ► if there's a limit to the number of open windows you can have on iPadOS 26, I haven't found it in the simulator yet.
01:46:52 ◼ ► Further windows get pushed into the Recents carousel instead, but they return to the saved window size when you tap them.
01:47:08 ◼ ► How much, I keep getting this wrong and I didn't look it up again, but how much RAM does the M4 iPad have?
01:47:14 ◼ ► Like, look, this, when, we'll get to this when we talk about the press stuff, but like,
01:47:21 ◼ ► talking about how iPad's resource limits or why there was all these limitations on windowing,
01:47:27 ◼ ► like, in some respects, that makes sense and they can, you know, cite historical precedent
01:47:37 ◼ ► But on the other hand, I don't know if you guys remember, take a guess at what the minimum RAM for Mac OS X 10.0 was.
01:48:16 ◼ ► Not one gigabyte, not eight gigabytes, not four gigabytes, not 16 gigabytes, not 512 megabytes, 128 megabytes.
01:48:23 ◼ ► And that was a complete windowing operating system with no limit on the number of windows you could have.
01:48:37 ◼ ► But the point is, Mac OS X in 2001, in 10.0, on 128 meg machine, did not limit the number of windows you had to have.
01:48:44 ◼ ► And the resolution of screens then, maybe they weren't as high as an M4 iPad, but they weren't that low.
01:48:53 ◼ ► But what I am saying is that if there are reasons for limitations for an M4 iPad Pro in terms of number of windows, I don't really accept RAM or CPU performance to be one of them.
01:49:07 ◼ ► The M4 in that iPad is so much faster than every CPU in any Mac for decades running Mac OS X and has more RAM than almost all of them.
01:49:27 ◼ ► You could buy an 11-inch MacBook Air and Mac OS didn't suddenly say you could only have 12 windows, right?
01:49:34 ◼ ► But I think, and it's letting you use them, but I don't even know what he's talking about with the recents carousel.
01:49:39 ◼ ► Like, I kind of understand why you might want to not open the floodgates and say unlimited windows because people can get themselves into real trouble.
01:49:47 ◼ ► And then one of the things that makes the iPad not the Mac is it is supposed to help people not get themselves into trouble.
01:49:56 ◼ ► I do have a little bit of pushback on anything having to say, well, it's because they don't use swap or because they don't have enough RAM or because, you know, their S, like the M4 is just so much more powerful.
01:50:09 ◼ ► You put, like, 50 or 100 Macs back in the quote-unquote heyday of early Mac OS X, they wouldn't be able to touch an M4.
01:50:21 ◼ ► I know they've got all this other fancy stuff, but it's just, I hope they figure something out there.
01:50:26 ◼ ► Because even though 12 seems like a lot and it's plenty for our first run, I can imagine iPad power users wanting to have, especially with Stage Manager, which I'm not surprised that you like Stage Manager, Casey, because my understanding,
01:50:40 ◼ ► My understanding that essentially with the new windowing system is that Stage Manager has sort of become spaces for iPad?
01:50:47 ◼ ► It's still got that sidebar situation on the left with, like, tilted thumbnails of the different spaces.
01:50:59 ◼ ► I'm not necessarily saying that there's anything wrong with Stage Manager or the OS or anything like that.
01:51:19 ◼ ► But anyway, what it means is that in Stage Manager, you still have the full freedom of, like, rearranging the windows with the new window system on iPad OS 26.
01:51:46 ◼ ► But I wanted to effectively have Spaces, which is to say, you know, different virtual screens, if you will.
01:52:08 ◼ ► And I'm hopeful that over time I will understand a little better what the ins and outs of it are.
01:52:16 ◼ ► One thing I will say is that I was a moderate user of slide over on iPad OS, everything but 26.
01:52:22 ◼ ► This is where you can slide from the extreme right-hand side of the screen, left a little bit.
01:52:29 ◼ ► So it's kind of like hanging out on top of everything else, but not, you know, not taking up too much space.
01:52:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm pretty unhappy too, because this is the one feature of the pre-iOS 26 sort of windowing stuff that I used a lot.
01:53:15 ◼ ► I should be able to take literally any window of any size, bring it to any screen edge, and do a thing that says, hey, window, I want you to hide just off screen over there.
01:53:25 ◼ ► And if I swipe in from the window edge in the area where you're hiding, poke yourself back out.
01:53:40 ◼ ► Like, on the iPad, you can literally go from, like, where the screen is not to where it is.
01:53:44 ◼ ► But, like, that's just a window management feature of hide a window off screen and have a gesture to make it come back on screen and then go back off screen.
01:54:03 ◼ ► The, like, it's, like, full screen apps and the other option is, like, you know, this full screen app, stage manager, and, like, you know, do whatever you want with Windows.
01:54:16 ◼ ► It also, I think, fits in with the everything full screen because you can have everything full screen and still have a single thing very limited in slide over just like it was before.
01:54:25 ◼ ► So it's kind of, I'm not quite sure why they got rid of it because it seems to fit with everything they've done.
01:54:36 ◼ ► By the way, my main use case is full screen video that I'm watching, but social media timeline, if I'm watching some, like, reality TV show that I don't have to pay too much attention to, I get a two screen experience.
01:54:46 ◼ ► On my one screen by swiping over and having, like, a Mastodon timeline while full screen video plays.
01:54:52 ◼ ► Yes, I'm blocking part of the video, but it's, like, some dumb reality show, so who cares?
01:55:11 ◼ ► And it reads, if, yes, the system runs the app using a compatibility mode for UI elements, the compatibility mode displays the app as it looks when built against previous versions of the SDKs.
01:55:22 ◼ ► So even if you're running on iOS 26 with this on, your app looks like it was built for iOS 18, but it was built for 26 and is running on 26.
01:55:38 ◼ ► Absence of the key or no is the default value for apps linking against the latest SDKs.
01:55:43 ◼ ► Temporarily use this key while reviewing and refining your app's UI for the design in the latest SDKs.
01:55:49 ◼ ► I think they might have even announced, like, next year this thing will no longer be honored.
01:55:53 ◼ ► But the reason they have to have this in here is because it's not just that your stuff looks different.
01:56:03 ◼ ► If you didn't expect these buttons to be two pixels tall than they are and this thing to be inset by this amount, like, it will break your layouts if you're not careful.
01:56:13 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, existing apps don't have this problem if you just don't recompile it because they're linking against the old SDK, which means they'll just look like they did.
01:56:22 ◼ ► But even if you want to use new features, you're building against the new SDK, you're using new features, but you don't have time to relay out every single view in your app.
01:56:30 ◼ ► You can put this flag on to give yourself a little more breathing room until you can go in and as we – not worst case scenario, but as we expected, when there's a big design change, you have to revisit every single screen in your app to make sure it still looks okay and to look at it to see if there's any place for improvement.
01:57:06 ◼ ► This one key, if you're a developer, will save you from doing that work for a little bit longer.
01:57:20 ◼ ► Yeah, like, either way, like, you know, and you will start looking old very, very quickly starting this fall.
01:57:46 ◼ ► He writes, Apple is now referring to the Vision Pro as Vision Pro 4K in all of its developer
01:57:53 ◼ ► tools, which suggests that there will be a new Vision Pro that's not 4K in the not-too-distant
01:58:03 ◼ ► As we've discussed many times in the past, when going to the minutia of Vision Pro's displays,
01:58:17 ◼ ► The thing that makes me think about, as Steve points out very politically, there will be
01:58:48 ◼ ► But I worry that less will take it outside the realm of, not viability, but, like, I do
01:59:01 ◼ ► I really hope they don't do it by sacrificing resolution because it's, like, at a certain
01:59:06 ◼ ► point, the, like, the virtual Mac thing stops being useful when you start taking away pixels.
01:59:14 ◼ ► Well, but, like, okay, we heard rumblings and rumors and supply chain estimates that the
01:59:33 ◼ ► But regardless if it is or not, like, totally accurate, that tells you those screens certainly
01:59:52 ◼ ► So, obviously, we're talking about a very different component price when you drop resolution.
01:59:57 ◼ ► And if you want to make a cheaper Vision Pro, we can look at a lot of other ways to do it.
02:00:06 ◼ ► Get, you know, maybe change some of the materials to be, you know, simpler, you know, maybe more
02:00:15 ◼ ► People who were, remember, like, people were disassembling the Vision Pro when it first came
02:00:19 ◼ ► out and they had said, like, this is the most complex product ever produced for the consumer-ish
02:00:29 ◼ ► Maybe they can simplify things by simplifying certain shapes or giving uncertain, you know,
02:00:42 ◼ ► But all of those might be very small savings relative to those damn little 4K postage stamps
02:00:51 ◼ ► So if they really want to cut this thing down in price and they really, really need to, if
02:00:58 ◼ ► what it takes is to go down to a resolution class that is closer or equal to what the quest
02:01:08 ◼ ► Like, there's lots of use cases for the Vision Pro that don't need, like, super high-res
02:01:15 ◼ ► If what you're actually doing with it mostly is, like, watching movies or stuff like that,
02:01:30 ◼ ► So, but I think if you're going to have, if you want to have the price down that low, there's
02:02:07 ◼ ► Anyway, I'm hoping that they're calling it 4K because the next one will be, like, 6K or
02:02:33 ◼ ► This week on Overtime, we're talking about how Apple did press interviews for this WDC.
02:02:42 ◼ ► We're going to talk about that, kind of what they said, why they did what they did, et cetera.
02:03:59 ◼ ► So, John, I, uh, I did not follow directions because you were not explicit in your directions.
02:04:12 ◼ ► In the internal show notes, all it says is favorite things from WWDC 2025, of which I came up with a list of like 10 items.
02:04:54 ◼ ► Um, but, uh, since we already talked about that, I'm going to, I'm going to claim that is already covered.
02:05:00 ◼ ► I got to tell you, I don't know if it's my favorite, but it does jump out at me amongst things that I've actually tried so far.
02:05:07 ◼ ► Cause I have a list of things that I think I will really enjoy, but I haven't tried them yet.
02:05:13 ◼ ► One of the few things I've done with vision with, uh, the new vision OS is create a new persona.
02:05:19 ◼ ► If you recall, uh, the persona is how they represent you when you're on like a FaceTime call, because your face has a huge freaking set of goggles in front of it.
02:05:36 ◼ ► I mean, if you're leaving aside the fact that Mike's, you know, beard prevents him from opening, opening his mouth as he's talking, it was pretty good.
02:05:46 ◼ ► And I got on a call with, uh, Jason Snell a couple of yesterday, yesterday, uh, for a little bit.
02:05:56 ◼ ► We have very much come out of the uncanny Valley and we are back onto one of the peaks because they look incredible.
02:06:02 ◼ ► So if you happen to be a person that either has a vision, a pro in your life or know someone with a vision pro ask them, you know, once they get the new OS or put the bait on, you know, or whatever, you know, set up a new persona and get on a FaceTime call with them.
02:06:19 ◼ ► And one of the greatest advantages is the original personas, uh, they, they were basically, they weren't literally flat, but they were kind of effectively flat.
02:06:27 ◼ ► You only really looked at the top or excuse me, the front of your face and they would have you look up a little bit and down a little bit.
02:06:33 ◼ ► So they could kind of at least give the indication of you, for example, nodding or whatever the case may be, but now they capture or per, or perhaps just process a lot more of your head.
02:06:43 ◼ ► So you can actually look to the side and your entire head is there rather than it just kind of fading out, like back to the future style.
02:07:13 ◼ ► What I meant to say is, have you reached conclusions so far, even tentative conclusions?
02:07:18 ◼ ► I haven't, I haven't tested it on a huge variety of input audio yet, but so far the transcription API seems very fast and good enough.
02:07:30 ◼ ► Like it's, it's not like as good as like the biggest, most aggressive server side models, but it runs on my phone for free really fast.
02:07:51 ◼ ► It's not, you know, I'm not gonna be able to build everything perfectly doing it constantly because that would just be too much power.
02:08:10 ◼ ► Um, I don't know if you saw, but John Voorhees did a write up about it and, uh, his son, I think it was Finn.
02:08:17 ◼ ► Forgive me if it wasn't Finn, but one of his sons, uh, put together, uh, uh, open source, uh, command line, uh, wrapper around the new APIs yap.
02:08:31 ◼ ► One of the things I think all three of us want to do at some point is to provide, um, to provide transcripts for our episodes.
02:08:48 ◼ ► And number two, nothing that I'm aware of does, uh, speaker definite or speaker differentiation.
02:08:56 ◼ ► Descript or descript or however you pronounce it has also done it for a while, but that's, it's not as easy to hook into that as it is to whisper.
02:09:08 ◼ ► Like it's like, without that as you know, I know we have, there's a bunch of like, uh, fans have made really cool search sites that like find the episode where somebody said blah.
02:09:19 ◼ ► So I've just been waiting patiently for that technology to get to the point where it's really reliable because I think as we've discussed in past episodes, I think all of our voices are very distinct and computers should be able to tell us apart.
02:09:30 ◼ ► So, uh, obviously transcribing a show like this with where we have lots of, uh, proper nouns and weird programming terms may be challenging, but I feel like we'll get there eventually.
02:09:40 ◼ ► But, uh, as of pre-WWDC, I, I feel like the technology, technology slash cost benefit analysis wasn't quite there, but as Marco points out, well, what if everyone just has it on their phone for free?
02:09:55 ◼ ► And also, and I haven't, I haven't yet gotten too much of a chance to play with the on-device LLM either, but from what, from the little bit I have seen from sessions and from early reports from other people, the on-device LLM is also no joke.
02:10:16 ◼ ► So it's not going to be as good as like the flagship models that run in giant data centers on these giant NVIDIA things, but for running on your phone locally, offline for free, that's a lot of big advantages and there's a lot you can do.
02:10:34 ◼ ► I think most of the people listening to this show probably know exactly what you're talking about.
02:10:37 ◼ ► But the thing of it is, is that if I wanted to do some trick, you know, LLM-based stuff, to do some processing and call sheet, that would require something that, you know, like an LLM.
02:10:48 ◼ ► If I were to do that today, then what I would need to do is communicate something across the network and make a request to like ChatGPT's API or something like that, which has a non-zero cost, and you spread that across all your users, and that can really start to add up fast.
02:11:04 ◼ ► And additionally, you're going across the network, so it's not going to be as fast as it would be if it was on your device.
02:11:12 ◼ ► But by virtue of this speech framework for transcription stuff, and then their, shoot, what's the name of the framework?
02:11:23 ◼ ► By virtue of having that on device, that means that a lot of the reasons that I would have not to do this go away because of what Marco was just describing.
02:11:51 ◼ ► But the fact that this is possible, and to build on what Marco said again, my understanding is it's actually a pretty good system.
02:12:05 ◼ ► And even if call sheet doesn't use it very heavily or even if overcast doesn't use it very heavily, which that is not what Marco said.
02:12:13 ◼ ► Even if we don't, there's a lot of – even if we are not the ones that are leveraging it, there's a lot of apps that will.
02:12:22 ◼ ► And I think there's going to be – like, one of the really cool things they did was this generable macro where, as the app developer, you don't have to say, like, please output valid JSON and then try to decode it.
02:12:36 ◼ ► No, they actually, like, they allow you to annotate, like, your custom data structures in your app.
02:12:48 ◼ ► And then you can say, generate these as the output of whatever prompt you're giving it.
02:12:54 ◼ ► So it, like, properly fills out your data structures based on how you're describing what their different fields mean.
02:13:02 ◼ ► And so I think what we're going to see is – I think we're going to see a lot of apps using this for all sorts of stuff.
02:13:21 ◼ ► And I'm really looking forward to thinking about how I can leverage it and to see how others are leveraging it.
02:13:28 ◼ ► Another example of this is – and I don't know if – I think I might have brought this up last week.
02:13:35 ◼ ► But Ryan Ashcraft from Foodnoms, which I think sponsored once maybe back in the day but is certainly a great app, was using this to, like, come up with an example icon for a food that you create or something like that.
02:13:53 ◼ ► And that's a great example of a little place that you might not even realize is using, you know, this new onboard LLM technology.
02:14:14 ◼ ► Yes, I thought this would be a good after show just because I knew that most of the main show was going to be all these weird issues and things that we've learned about the OS.
02:14:26 ◼ ► But then when I thought about it, like, oh, I should come up with a favorite thing for myself.
02:14:29 ◼ ► It's not that I didn't like things at WWDC, but there's no one thing that stands out a lot as my big favorite thing.
02:14:38 ◼ ► And there's a lot of stuff like when I've gone through all the sessions, this is not a year.
02:14:43 ◼ ► This, you know, every developer is different, but this is not a year where I see something like, oh, I wanted that API forever.
02:14:51 ◼ ► You know, like the last time I remember it happening is obviously not as important as the transcription thing Marco's talking about.
02:14:56 ◼ ► But it was the rounded rectangle with uneven rounding on the corners from like two years ago.
02:15:02 ◼ ► So I could make switch glass with corners that aren't rounded at screen edges, which is the thing I wanted to do.
02:15:08 ◼ ► But I couldn't do unless I totally took over custom drawing and I didn't want to bother with it.
02:15:16 ◼ ► Everything that I've seen, even when I think it's going to be something that I can use, I try it and I just find the bugs in it.
02:15:27 ◼ ► I mean, all of them, like they were not, not that they weren't shippable, but I would never want any of my users to use my apps the way they looked recompiled with the new SDK on Tahoe.
02:15:46 ◼ ► I'm just sort of making sure they're all updated with the new design and look, look reasonable, at least.
02:15:52 ◼ ► I guess if I had to pick in that work that I'm doing, sort of, you know, my one favorite thing is like getting to work on all my apps and updating them because I am actually like finding issues and bugs.
02:16:02 ◼ ► That's another fun thing, especially like in hyperspace, which is an app that only ever shipped on one OS because it requires Mac OS 15.
02:16:14 ◼ ► And it just takes one more different version to find a bunch of little bugs that are like, oh, yeah, I didn't notice that bug because it works fine in 15.
02:16:23 ◼ ► And now that I see it running on 26, it behaves a little bit differently and I can fix it.
02:16:28 ◼ ► But as you might imagine or might not have thought about, but I certainly did the second I started hearing about this redesign.
02:16:35 ◼ ► I have an app called Switch Glass that puts a transparent glass thing with apps in it on your screen.
02:16:42 ◼ ► It's already configurable with a bunch of deprecated constants that Apple doesn't want me to use, but I put in the pop-up menu because they look cool.
02:17:07 ◼ ► It's fine for clear glass to be video player controls because it's totally illegible, but whatever.
02:17:27 ◼ ► So, and I guess maybe the other random thing in there, like, my one item is, like, I can't find a favorite.
02:18:00 ◼ ► 6.2 fixed some concurrency bugs that were in 6 and 6.1, which caused my code not to compile anymore.
02:18:18 ◼ ► It's because this is not a year where there's something that's rocking my world from WWDC.
02:18:33 ◼ ► Like I said, the best I can say about it is that using it, it's not like the end of the world.
02:18:50 ◼ ► But I'm actually surprised myself at how much of a non-event it is for me to be using literally every day this week, Tahoe, like, basically all day.
02:19:05 ◼ ► I've obviously not followed my own rules with my single favorite, but I really feel like my one thing is, like, I can't pick a favorite.
02:19:16 ◼ ► Yeah, the revamp of strict concurrency or whatever, I am really amped about that because to oversimplify, and I'm probably going to get a couple of the technical facts wrong, but the general gist is it used to assume once you started using, like, async await that, oh, everything in this app could be on any thread and on any actor.
02:19:38 ◼ ► You'll never know where it's running, and so you have to super protect everything, and now there's a new default, which you can opt into for an older app that says, hey, just assume everything is running on the main thread and explicitly state when it isn't going to be.
02:19:53 ◼ ► And, again, I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but that's a general gist, and that should make adopting strict concurrency so much easier because I – and I've continued to kick that can down the road, and I am kind of glad I did.
02:20:06 ◼ ► This is a case of the Marco patented procrastination for the win sort of situation where, you know, I probably shouldn't have waited this long, but, hey, man, it's worked out great.
02:20:19 ◼ ► That's not even the thing that I'm talking about, though, because I'm already on strict concurrency, and actually that mode isn't particularly useful to me.
02:20:26 ◼ ► It's all the other stuff of, like, hey, strict concurrency used to complain about this because it couldn't figure out that it was actually safe, but now it can.
02:20:32 ◼ ► And Apple annotating all its APIs, because if I just wrote a Swift 6 app in isolation with none of Apple's APIs, it's pretty easy to do.
02:20:40 ◼ ► But you've got to use APIs for the platform to actually make an app, and those APIs were – some of them were written in the 90s.
02:20:49 ◼ ► Like, they're not all properly annotated, or if they are properly annotated, they're annotated in a way that makes your life miserable because things are not – like, this is non-isolated, and you can't change the fact that it's non-isolated, but you have to hop onto a different actor to do the thing that you want.
02:21:03 ◼ ► And it's just – there's lots of places where you're like, oh, I really have to ug up my code here to make this work because this is – there's no async await version of this.
02:21:14 ◼ ► The callback is non-isolated, but I have to access data that's confined to either an actor or a main actor or one of my own actors, and I can't even get that data from the non-isolated thing without hopping actors, but it has to do it synchronously.
02:21:25 ◼ ► But this is not an async function, so I can't await it, and it's just that stuff as Apple updates its APIs and as Apple improves Swift to be able – to be smarter about figuring out when something is actually safe.
02:21:45 ◼ ► So it's not a big deal for me, but it did actually find bugs in my code by fixing bugs in Swift concurrency that used to allow me to do things that were technically unsafe.