00:00:08 ◼ ► It's one of those times where everybody I know on the East Coast has the exact same weather.
00:00:21 ◼ ► I went out to fill up a portable gas tank thing for my snowblower, and it's kind of surreal out there.
00:00:44 ◼ ► Well, relatively speaking, we get little snow in Philadelphia, and we haven't had more than six inches of snow, and I forget how many years they said, but it doesn't happen very often.
00:00:59 ◼ ► I mean, because we live right in the city, and it gets so quiet from when it snows, because there's no traffic, or almost no traffic, and the traffic that is there is just creeping by on a bed of snow.
00:01:11 ◼ ► And then I thought to myself, well, if I like it so much, why the hell do I live in a noisy city?
00:01:30 ◼ ► I'm worried that everybody who reads Staring Fireball is going to get sick of me complaining about macOS 26 Tahoe.
00:01:40 ◼ ► Maybe not too surprising, but the way that everybody's complaining about Tahoe right now, not just Accidental Tech Podcast is going off on it, that is partly inspired by these recent blog posts, like criticizing the icons and blah, blah, blah.
00:02:00 ◼ ► And I forget when Apple first started consistently doing, I guess it's been a long time, where the betas come out at WWDC in June for all of the operating systems.
00:02:12 ◼ ► And I feel like in the early years of that, there was a lot more, hey, I know it's a beta, so let's forgive glitches, but let's review it now.
00:02:28 ◼ ► And if you don't like it, call out what you like, like, hey, here's a really great thing to look forward to when this hits release later in the year, and here's some stuff that Apple should reconsider.
00:02:37 ◼ ► I've gotten away from that, and I feel like I got enough pushback from people at Apple that it's like, hey, it's unfair to review the beta that's in beta.
00:02:46 ◼ ► And I think, maybe it's just me, but I think that the betas have become more in flux in recent years.
00:02:53 ◼ ► Whereas what ships in the middle of June when WWDC hits isn't supposed to be what it's going to look like in September.
00:03:01 ◼ ► And it's all sort of, at least for me, I'm blaming myself, not Apple, not anybody else, but I'm blaming myself where it's like, well, then I don't want to give them a hard time over the summer because they're still working on it.
00:03:11 ◼ ► And then by the time the fall comes out, a lot of the complaints don't feel fresh anymore.
00:04:09 ◼ ► I don't want to, I'm not trying to take credit, but obviously if I make a good point and make it hard, it has carried some weight outside Apple.
00:04:18 ◼ ► And I think that's one of the ones where I got some pushback, like, hey, okay, we'll fix this.
00:04:26 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like with Tahoe in particular, there was a sense with Liquid Glass in general, hey, what they're showing us at June and what we could see right away, like on the iPhone, where it was the most polished and clearly was the device that Liquid Glass started on conceptually.
00:04:56 ◼ ► And a whole bunch of the animations they showed in the keynote weren't present in the initial betas.
00:05:02 ◼ ► They were, whether they were simulated for the keynote or just in private builds that weren't merged with the main build, whatever.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And to their credit, especially on iPhone, by 26.1 and 26.2, it really does look like what they promised us in June.
00:05:23 ◼ ► But I feel like with a lot of it, on all the OSs, it was like, well, this is clearly not finished, so let's give them a break.
00:05:29 ◼ ► And I think with Tahoe in particular, it was like, well, a lot of this, they can't possibly intend to ship like this.
00:05:50 ◼ ► I think I usually start using the new OS, like, in June, and then just never look back.
00:05:55 ◼ ► Sometimes it bites me, but for the most part, I just, I'm used to kind of like living through uncomfortable stretches of the OS.
00:06:07 ◼ ► I was just thinking about it, before you had even asked me to come on the show, I was thinking, how is Apple living with themselves over some of these things?
00:06:22 ◼ ► They're the kinds of things that Apple is supposed to care about that nobody else cares about.
00:06:34 ◼ ► You notice how, like, at the edges, the one at the first and the one at the last, often the name is not under the thing you've selected.
00:06:53 ◼ ► You will not see a release come out fast enough if somebody points out something that just looks like it was reckless or, you know, inconsiderate of the quality of the product.
00:07:09 ◼ ► I am, as I keep reiterating on Daring Fireball, I'm using Tahoe on my podcast Mac down here in my basement.
00:07:17 ◼ ► And my current plan is to ride out the whole year without upgrading on my work machine up in my office.
00:07:26 ◼ ► And I think it's a problem here on Tahoe 26 that when you command tab, in addition to the thing where the name does, yeah, the first one, like now that it's back to Google Chrome for me, because it doesn't fit centered under the icon.
00:07:40 ◼ ► It just, it's squished in, but off to the right and like halfway under, it's halfway under the next icon.
00:07:50 ◼ ► So yeah, you haven't been seeing that because you're not on it full time, but that has been there, I believe, since day one.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And so when Google Chrome is my leftmost icon, when it goes back to Mars edit, then it's nice because it fits.
00:08:13 ◼ ► I don't think that the highlighting, when you're R command tabbing and you're like command tab, tab, tab, because you want to go back like three apps that you most recently used.
00:08:38 ◼ ► And again, that's the whole point of the command tab switcher, is to switch to another specific app.
00:08:54 ◼ ► And whatever urge there is within Apple to have subtle UI elements and that this, clearly, I mean, this has been a decade plus, maybe longer in the making.
00:09:39 ◼ ► When every single other browser in the known universe just puts the fav icon in the tab.
00:09:45 ◼ ► And then I complained about that, and I kind of do take credit for getting that one fixed.
00:09:50 ◼ ► There was no good argument against putting the color icon of the website in the tab for that website.
00:09:58 ◼ ► Other than, oh, it looks a little cluttered, and we don't get to pick the colors, and CNN's icon may clash with Yahoo's icon or something.
00:10:12 ◼ ► And with the command tab switcher, any argument that like, hey, selection states should be a little subtle as opposed to being very vibrant.
00:10:20 ◼ ► Well, why would you want that in the command tab switcher, which is only up temporarily while you're holding down the keys for command tab, right?
00:10:31 ◼ ► It is the definition of a user interface element that is only up while you're using it, and then immediately goes away.
00:10:47 ◼ ► Well, anyway, I don't want to try to fit in the whole rant about this without taking a break.
00:10:58 ◼ ► This is a sponsor who was here a couple months ago, and they had such a good response that they are back.
00:11:24 ◼ ► The random slowdowns, the freezes you can't reproduce, the bugs that only show up once a real user hits them.
00:11:35 ◼ ► Errors, traces, replays, logs, actually connected so you can see what led to the issue without digging through five different dashboards.
00:11:50 ◼ ► It takes that full context, explains why the issue happened, and points to the code responsible, drafts a fix, and even flags if your PR is about to introduce a new problem.
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00:12:13 ◼ ► Sentry is used by millions of developers behind some of the biggest apps like Claude, Disney Plus, Duolingo, big apps with lots of users.
00:12:58 ◼ ► And I don't think – I feel like I've been hammering this point long enough that if there was widespread pushback –
00:13:04 ◼ ► because sometimes when I feel like I'm veering towards an extreme opinion on macOS 26 Tahoe,
00:13:09 ◼ ► which is that it's an unmitigated disaster and an embarrassment to Apple and that I'm really best avoiding it.
00:13:21 ◼ ► I mean, I'm getting a little from some who are like, hey, I upgraded back in September.
00:13:39 ◼ ► It's not corrupting your – it's not like they have file system bugs or something truly horrendous.
00:13:47 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like even – it's like the confirmation to me is that even the people who are – the readers who are politely, almost all, telling me,
00:14:00 ◼ ► The sentiment is exactly what you were saying earlier, Daniel, which is, yeah, fine is not the Apple way, right?
00:14:10 ◼ ► Like, how about the one that a couple of people wrote about the problem with – what was his name?
00:14:19 ◼ ► It looks like he started a new blog just to post this because it's the only post on his blog.
00:14:25 ◼ ► Norbert Heger – I hope I'm pronouncing that right because I believe he's German or something.
00:14:35 ◼ ► That one was interesting for me because I didn't notice it until I read the post, which is saying something.
00:14:42 ◼ ► In other words, it didn't affect me or it didn't affect me enough that I became aware of the problem.
00:14:59 ◼ ► I just – I guess I should stake out my position on Tahoe because you said it's an unmitigated disaster or you're leaning towards feeling that way.
00:15:22 ◼ ► It's like the Titanic sinking is an unmitigated disaster, but the Titanic showers being cold is just like a mitigated disaster.
00:15:40 ◼ ► And I was doing some errands and I was thinking, why am I not bothered more by the little things?
00:15:47 ◼ ► Basically, I think since I've – since my whole career working at Apple, working on my own stuff, I think I'm more dedicated to the pursuit of giving users a clean, flawless experience than I am insistent upon having that experience myself.
00:16:13 ◼ ► It's like they don't need to be wearing the fancy ballroom dress to appreciate the craft and the work that goes into it.
00:16:30 ◼ ► But I'm hearing – and I think it's a sign of my age that I know a fair number of people now who are retired from Apple because a lot of people, as it's kind of common sense, that people not much older than me are able to retire early if they spent their career at Apple because they were there for a long number of years.
00:17:05 ◼ ► And I think Tahoe, because it's very specific, it is this OS for the Mac, this version that has taken such a sharp turn.
00:17:19 ◼ ► I wrote the other day on Daring Fireball that I can't think of anything that makes me want to upgrade to Tahoe.
00:17:25 ◼ ► And there have been years past – I've been doing this a very long time – where there have been years where I almost never upgrade.
00:17:37 ◼ ► I usually wait until like the .1 update in October or November, shake out some bugs and upgrade then.
00:17:50 ◼ ► You know, some years it's a little buggier than others, but this one feels like this sharp turn.
00:17:55 ◼ ► But just concentrating on this, it really helps to clarify that an awful lot of things at Apple in recent years I think have been – like how can this ship?
00:18:09 ◼ ► How can they excuse it as this bubbles up the hierarchy to the executive level in the company?
00:18:13 ◼ ► And I think it really boils down to a bit of maybe almost unavoidable arrogance that comes from, well, this is still the best there is, right?
00:18:24 ◼ ► Like this – for whatever you want to say about some of the iPhone interface problems in liquid glass, it is still the best mobile operating system user interface, right?
00:18:46 ◼ ► And I could even see – and I'm sure there's listeners out there who are itching to jump in and interrupt us and say, no, no, no.
00:18:57 ◼ ► And I kind of agree and it was a post where I went back and I was looking at Stephen Hackett's collection of screenshots from every version of Mac OS X from the Mac OS X public beta in 2000 up through Tahoe.
00:19:10 ◼ ► And it's, man, the versions from around 10 years ago, like when Alan Dye first came in, they look so good and they don't look old.
00:19:26 ◼ ► They look like they could ship that interface today and it would look right at home as the Mac version of Apple's current design language right next to iOS 26 running on an iPhone.
00:19:48 ◼ ► It's a similar color palette, a similar overall aesthetic, but applied to a real serious work desktop graphical user interface.
00:20:09 ◼ ► It's real things like, hey, once Norbert Heger posted this, everybody's like, oh, that's why I can't resize windows.
00:20:31 ◼ ► So imagine like a beautiful like Oscars red carpet ballroom gown and then there's like a big long thread hanging off of the bottom or like a ripped piece of fabric that was like pasted on the bottom.
00:20:51 ◼ ► And as soon as it starts, I guess what I'm just to reiterate, I guess what bothers me is some of these problems should be driving people at Apple crazy that they're not fixed yet.
00:21:06 ◼ ► There's this other little issue I noticed where, oh, probably like about half of all of Apple's.
00:21:12 ◼ ► So you know how like sometimes there's an explanatory text under a radio button or a checkbox and it's usually aligned with the text of the radio button or the checkbox.
00:21:26 ◼ ► And if you start looking around on Tahoe, you'll see in like Apple's preference panes everywhere that the text is a little bit to the left because they made the checkbox or the radio button a little wider.
00:21:40 ◼ ► So this is one of these things where I was like, yeah, that's annoying, but actually you could probably fix that.
00:21:47 ◼ ► I mean, so the problem is they have to fix it in every app, but they could have somebody just be like, I'm the fixer.
00:21:54 ◼ ► Give me access to all the source code and give me two days and this will not be a problem.
00:21:59 ◼ ► I feel like there must be systemic issues that are preventing widespread perfectionism these days.
00:22:07 ◼ ► And as a developer, somebody who's trying to target the latest OS in as many ways as are sensible, I'm often looking to Apple for direction as to how to embrace the design.
00:22:24 ◼ ► I'm hoping with this new iWork suite coming out that we're going to get some direction because right now, looking on my Mac, Safari has adopted Liquid Glass.
00:22:46 ◼ ► I was looking at because I know TextEdit still has an old-fashioned settings dialog, not the new iOS style one.
00:23:17 ◼ ► But I was expecting to see Apple, like, just coming down with – because making such a major UI change, the way to beta test that internally is to change your own apps to adopt it.
00:23:30 ◼ ► That's how you figure out what design changes work and don't work, is to actually try to apply them to apps.
00:23:40 ◼ ► But there's a lot of, like, complex UI stuff that apps like Pages or Keynote have that Safari doesn't have.
00:23:51 ◼ ► So it's sort of adding to the overall incoherence of the OS that, for instance, even among Apple's own apps, TextEdit is an app that everybody uses.
00:24:11 ◼ ► And they're using this top-of-the-line OS that ships with two apps that everybody uses that don't adopt the same design language.
00:24:54 ◼ ► And so when they do something that I think is shameful, it sort of makes me feel ashamed.
00:25:17 ◼ ► It wasn't like, oh, there was a brief heyday for just a handful of years where inside Apple there was a real focus on user interface perfectionism.
00:25:30 ◼ ► And that doesn't mean every choice was perfect, which can't be, and that's totally subjective.
00:25:48 ◼ ► And if it was supposed to look like this, then it would look exactly like this to the pixel.
00:25:57 ◼ ► And I've heard, and you've heard, and some of the stories are public, that was really the way prototyping would work within Apple.
00:26:07 ◼ ► That if the design team was making mock-ups using Photoshop or some other just graphic tool and got approval maybe all the way up to Steve and was like, okay, this is what it should look like.
00:26:21 ◼ ► Then that's what it was supposed to look like to the pixel, and it was going to look like that to the pixel.
00:26:26 ◼ ► Or somebody, including Steve, is going to notice that this is one pixel – this whole sidebar is one pixel too low.
00:26:33 ◼ ► And that would rise to the level – I think that a fair criticism of Apple over the years is that sometimes fixing 50 little misaligned text boxes or divider bars, using your time to do that is time better spent than adding another user feature.
00:26:52 ◼ ► And that's a philosophy that many people in this world do not agree with because it leads to less features in the product.
00:27:13 ◼ ► That if your philosophy is fewer but better features, one way to achieve that is by striving for perfectionism in their presentation and implementation.
00:27:26 ◼ ► That anything that could be fast, anything that could be fast, anything that is slow, the bottlenecks are identified, and it is made fast.
00:27:39 ◼ ► Anytime there's a weird edge case that is like, hey, if you turn off the toolbar, it lets you make the window a lot smaller than it does when the toolbar is visible.
00:27:50 ◼ ► And when you make the window really small, this, that, the other thing breaks layout-wise.
00:27:55 ◼ ► Like, oh, yeah, I didn't really – nobody really tested whatever the app is with the toolbar off.
00:28:07 ◼ ► Let's either fix those layout bugs when you make the window too small when the toolbar is not visible, or let's make it so that the minimum window side is big enough that the – one way or the other, let's make it so that can't happen.
00:28:18 ◼ ► And reminding me – I've said this over the years to other developers who maybe they're asking for feedback about their UI.
00:28:30 ◼ ► You know, and that's an example of that is don't let them – because if you don't do anything about it, you can – in a Mac app, you could resize the window to be the size of a postage stamp.
00:28:45 ◼ ► So I always go by that idea that, similarly, don't let them set ugly colors on the UI, et cetera, et cetera.
00:29:14 ◼ ► It is making decisions and hopefully not making them arbitrarily but making them for good reason and with lots of debate and being able to defend them.
00:29:26 ◼ ► And there's just so many things in Tahoe that it just – it's like the – I think it was getting – the Mac interface was getting stretched thin over the – roughly the Apple Silicon era, which is sort of helped disguise the user interface decline because the hardware story suddenly got so much better where it was like, holy crap.
00:29:48 ◼ ► These machines, these machines, these laptops run forever, and they don't get hot, and the screens are better than ever.
00:30:02 ◼ ► And everything – it was another, at an engineering level, extremely, almost bizarrely seamless experience for users in terms of all the Intel not yet updated for Apple Silicon apps that you still had to use just took a little bit longer to launch at first and because of Rosetta.
00:30:25 ◼ ► But then actually, because Apple Silicon was so fast and Rosetta was such an efficient translation layer that unless you had a really high-end Intel Mac, your Apple Silicon Mac ran your Intel compiled apps faster than the Intel Mac you switched from, which is amazing.
00:30:42 ◼ ► And all of that just sort of helped keep our attention away from the slight decline in user interface attention to detail.
00:30:51 ◼ ► And then I feel like as thin as it was stretched, Tahoe bursted open, and now there's garbage all over the interface.
00:31:01 ◼ ► I think the last time I was on this show was very shortly after we both got our M1 MacBook Pros because I remember I was just elated.
00:31:23 ◼ ► And to your point about things like Rosetta working so well that it's possibly even better.
00:31:30 ◼ ► It's an example of its evidence that the people behind the product were asking themselves questions all along the way.
00:31:39 ◼ ► And then, well, this is annoying, but we're going to have to write a complete emulation layer for Intel apps.
00:31:47 ◼ ► Another company might say, no, we're just going to make them buy new versions of the apps.
00:31:58 ◼ ► And the fact that we were just elated by them represents the number of things they must have thought about, acknowledged the problem, and then fixed before it was even shipped.
00:32:11 ◼ ► And I'm going to switch to a little bit of hopefulness here because we're talking about how great of a hardware company Apple has shown itself to be, particularly in the last few years.
00:32:21 ◼ ► And I don't have to remind anybody listening to this show that we had the keyboard fiasco.
00:32:28 ◼ ► There was a time there where you could reasonably suspect Apple of having lost all of its Apple-ness with respect to hardware quality.
00:32:44 ◼ ► And especially, I'm optimistic, especially because of the change in leadership for design.
00:32:51 ◼ ► I can't imagine anybody at Apple being more embarrassed about the appearance of stuff in the OS than the leader of design.
00:33:08 ◼ ► And we don't still, you know, here we are six weeks or eight weeks after the big announcement that Alan Dye has been poached by Meta and took his inner circle with him.
00:33:19 ◼ ► And long-time user interface designer Steve LeMay is taking over the software design chief role at Apple.
00:33:28 ◼ ► And so many people still, even now that the news isn't so fresh, are still sending me notes that they're cautiously very optimistic because Steve LeMay is just exactly the right type of person.
00:33:43 ◼ ► The concern is whether anybody can write this ship and turn, maybe not turn it around 180 degrees, but it needs a significant course correction on, especially on macOS.
00:34:30 ◼ ► It's foundational to the identity of the company, and it's why almost everybody I know who works there went to work there, at least obviously on the software side.
00:34:39 ◼ ► And on the hardware side, it's because they make great hardware that looks good and runs well and that you go there to make good stuff.
00:34:57 ◼ ► Is their pride going to get in the way of changing some of these things back or come up with – not necessarily exactly the way they were, but oh, now when you select a menu item or a menu in the menu bar,
00:35:11 ◼ ► the actual highlight of the view menu when you click view is visible as opposed to almost invisible.
00:35:18 ◼ ► And the shape looks like a rectangle, not an oval because why in the world is – why in the world would you break that, right?
00:35:27 ◼ ► Where the idea, the graphical appearance of a selected menu in the Mac menu bar is a rectangle, which is the pulled down menu, with a rectangular selected tab at the top left, which is the name of the menu that you've opened, right?
00:35:46 ◼ ► And now it is an iconic appearance, and there are – I can think of other apps that if you need an icon that represents a menu, that's what it looks like.
00:35:56 ◼ ► It looks like a little rectangle with a tab that's highlighted at the top left corner, and you could make that icon very small, and everybody would know, oh, that's a menu.
00:36:06 ◼ ► So you could make a little 32-point icon that any user would recognize, oh, that little icon, that's a menu.
00:36:20 ◼ ► Well, part of my optimism about the next few years for Apple is, to your point about being willing to own the mistakes, actually, Alan Dye leaving is a perfect opportunity to sort of elide the shame.
00:36:36 ◼ ► It's like, well, we got a new design head in, and he just had some slight changes in mind for perfecting something that was already almost there.
00:36:47 ◼ ► You could say it in a way that was, like, complementary of the current team that implemented it, but also leaves room.
00:37:05 ◼ ► Let's say come June, and all of our dreams come true, and when they introduce macOS 27 in the keynote in June, that it has – I don't know what they're going to call it.
00:37:20 ◼ ► They're not going to call it all new because last year was all new, but improved user interface.
00:37:25 ◼ ► And as they start showing right away screenshots and movies of macOS 27 in action, everybody watching the keynote live is excited as they watch.
00:37:46 ◼ ► Which a lot of people were very upset about the year before in iOS 18 when they changed the sort of – the tabs at the bottom of the Photos app to sort of steer you away from just looking at your library all the time and to show you these smart groups of things like friends and pets and places and stuff like that.
00:38:12 ◼ ► I think it was Federighi himself or somebody who said, hey, we listened to you, we heard you, and in iOS 26, Photos has an improved layout that answers the question or solves the complaint that people had.
00:38:26 ◼ ► I think people – for whatever other complaints they have about liquid glass, I do think the Photos app responded to the widespread criticism.
00:38:39 ◼ ► I don't think they're going to get them all next year, but if they start getting some of them, it would be a sign – we'll quickly be disappointed at all the ones that they don't get to.
00:38:49 ◼ ► But if it's clear that they're responding to some of them, we'll be like, ah, thank God.
00:38:58 ◼ ► And I think they can do it in a way that does, without ever mentioning him, does sort of put the blame for all of it on the guy who left.
00:39:11 ◼ ► And I think my complaint about the lack of cohesiveness, that might be a place for them to focus.
00:39:17 ◼ ► Because when you make things more cohesive, it inherently means leaving one of the choices aside.
00:39:25 ◼ ► So there's going to be some – if you talk about the release, like we have this great new UI, there's some things about the old UI that might have even been better still, and we just want to unify it all.
00:39:38 ◼ ► When you're unifying something, you have to choose, do you want the oval selection on the menu or do you want the rectangle?
00:39:53 ◼ ► Maybe not with the menu bar, because obviously the menu bar is unified, but the way buttons behave from one app to another or the size of checkboxes, et cetera, et cetera.
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00:42:17 ◼ ► One of the things I wrote about recently, and I really felt like it was, if I do say so, a good point,
00:42:23 ◼ ► is combined with these growing rumors that John Ternus is internally to Apple, the intended successor to Tim Cook, is the CEO.
00:42:36 ◼ ► And it makes sense in a lot of ways, makes sense age-wise, that Ternus is only 51 or 52.
00:42:43 ◼ ► But relatively young, and it's, you probably feel the same way, but as somebody in his early 50s.
00:43:10 ◼ ► But there is the, and again, and who even knows, right, like just to name somebody, just Federighi, right?
00:43:17 ◼ ► And I think in some scenario, Federighi's got to be on a short list of people who could be, right?
00:43:24 ◼ ► If there was some kind of accident and a couple of other executives were, let's just say, let's be nice about it or optimistic and say they were hospitalized for a while and incapacitated, including Tim Cook.
00:43:38 ◼ ► You could certainly imagine a scenario where Craig Federighi would be the interim CEO, without question.
00:43:45 ◼ ► Maybe, though, Craig Federighi really does not want to go any higher than the head of software, that he's had conversations with Tim Cook, and Tim Cook has said, hey, what do you think?
00:44:07 ◼ ► If there is some kind of elbow-throwing rivalry within their senior executive ranks for who would take over when Tim Cook does retire, we wouldn't know it.
00:44:19 ◼ ► But at a basic level, it makes sense that it would be Ternus, in addition to his age, in addition to the fact that he is good and charismatic on stage or in keynotes that aren't on stages anymore in public, but also just the basic truth that what part of Apple is running the best for the last five to ten years?
00:45:03 ◼ ► And, you know, the most talked about commercials from Apple in recent years have been ones that were problematic, right?
00:45:16 ◼ ► The Apple intelligence commercial that they had to pull from YouTube because it wasn't actually going, the feature that it advertised wasn't going to ship in the year that it came out.
00:45:27 ◼ ► And software quality, again, like we're talking about Rosetta and other things, engineering quality of software might well be better than ever, right?
00:45:43 ◼ ► My uptime, I just looked at it because I'm writing, I'm working on my Apple report card for six colors.
00:46:07 ◼ ► And I haven't upgraded to 15.7.3 yet because I've got a bunch of stuff open that I don't want to close to restart the computer.
00:46:26 ◼ ► But the one thing at the company that it's hard to even think of something to complain about is hardware across the board.
00:46:36 ◼ ► You know, I'm thinking back to way, way, way back on the System 7, System 8 days of Mac OS, which is when I started working at Apple.
00:46:49 ◼ ► You reminded me of this by talking about Rosetta and maybe its relationship with hardware.
00:46:54 ◼ ► At that time, there were two competing engineering groups for what was the standard interface to the Mac.
00:47:03 ◼ ► In the sense that the PowerBook team, as opposed to the desktop iMac-type team, made its own software.
00:47:25 ◼ ► And they were like – for a while back then, Control Strip was only available on PowerBooks.
00:47:39 ◼ ► But I remember being at Apple at the time, people were furious that the PowerBook team was exerting its own taste on the OS, essentially.
00:48:00 ◼ ► I mean, it's really – it's pretty easy to compare now to the status items at the upper right corner of the Mac screen.
00:48:08 ◼ ► But essentially like that, but positioned at the bottom left of the screen in a kind of – almost like a zipper-like expanding bar.
00:48:23 ◼ ► But just leave the tab in the corner of the screen, and you could click on it again, and it would snap out.
00:48:28 ◼ ► I think you could click and drag if you wanted to make it so instead of being full width, you could make it partial width, and then there would be arrows at the sides to kind of go through the icons.
00:48:41 ◼ ► Those menu items in the top right of your Mac menu bar were not – A, because displays were so much smaller back then.
00:48:56 ◼ ► Because even back then, serious apps like QuarkXPress and Photoshop and FileMaker and BBEdit had a lot of menus.
00:49:19 ◼ ► But the control strip was an official sanctioned way to get those type of status icons in a strip.
00:49:28 ◼ ► And I think it was a more elegant solution than what we've been living with in Mac OS X for 20 years where we stick those icons in the menu bar because they're not really menus, right?
00:49:40 ◼ ► Like the menu should be for the commands of the system and the commands of the application.
00:49:46 ◼ ► It shouldn't be a place for many apps, and the control strip was a better place for that.
00:49:53 ◼ ► It just looked cool, but it was incredibly frustrating that it was only for PowerBooks.
00:50:07 ◼ ► Put it in perspective, I think it's possible that the reason it was only for PowerBooks was because the desktop team refused.
00:50:23 ◼ ► But there's some funny examples like that of things that just weaseled their way in because of a hardware decision, not a software decision.
00:50:43 ◼ ► But Phil Schiller told me a story once that he prototyped the first version of Control Strip using – what was the macro media tool that you could use to sort of prototype software?
00:51:00 ◼ ► But he was on an airplane on a PowerBook and was like mad and frustrated about not being able to get – I don't know what it would have been because Wi-Fi didn't exist yet.
00:51:25 ◼ ► But it was specifically because he was on a PowerBook and couldn't get access to some of these system controls.
00:51:44 ◼ ► But, I mean, it was infamous just reading about the company that the politics inside the company were bad.
00:51:54 ◼ ► And there wasn't – there's that famous cartoon of the org charts of Silicon Valley's biggest companies.
00:52:10 ◼ ► You can't really recommend that structure, the Steve Jobs executive leadership style in business school because it sort of hinges upon having a Steve Jobs intellect and level of taste and assertiveness and confidence and charisma and you name it.
00:52:30 ◼ ► You name all the things that were great about Steve Jobs and the person who does that to organize a major company like that kind of has to be all of them.
00:52:38 ◼ ► But it worked and it did solve – it solved that little fiefdom thing where desktop Macs had a different interface to those things and were missing a cool feature that was PowerBook only.
00:52:50 ◼ ► And it's just so spiteful because everybody – and I remember being at the college newspaper where, of course, we had all desktops.
00:52:57 ◼ ► I think we did have one PowerBook that was like so – because they were so expensive at the time.
00:53:05 ◼ ► So we had one PowerBook that like if a reporter was going to the student council meeting and wanted to take notes on the computer, they could sign it out and take it.
00:53:27 ◼ ► Well, I was thinking when you said that about the kind of like circle with one person around it, that kind of harkens back a little bit to me to the concern about attention to detail and perfectionism within Apple.
00:53:41 ◼ ► Because it strikes me that a company like Apple can thrive even with a relative lack of sort of top-down control management because everybody who works at the company has.
00:54:01 ◼ ► If you go into Apple with Apple taste, you don't need a manager's manager's manager telling you like how to make a control strip or whatever.
00:54:11 ◼ ► And I think a lot of times since I left Apple, people ask me, what are Apple interviews like?
00:54:17 ◼ ► And, well, there's no answer to that because every single group in every part of the company does it a little differently.
00:54:29 ◼ ► But it was like at Google, they have a top-down – like every interview will go like this.
00:54:35 ◼ ► And at Apple, I don't think they're – the only thing – granted, this was 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
00:54:42 ◼ ► But the only thing I had to do in preparation for interviewing a candidate for my first time was either watch or go to some kind of like seminar where they teach you how to not be discriminatory.
00:55:12 ◼ ► The other thing too – and this is where you really have to wonder – I have to wonder what the hell – how did this break down?
00:55:31 ◼ ► Like I said earlier, hey, should the grip strip on the control – or should the control strip buttons look three-dimensional or should they look flat?
00:55:41 ◼ ► They were – it was in the three-dimensional buttons looked like things – actual buttons you could press and go in.
00:55:46 ◼ ► But if somebody said, well, maybe these should look flat because the menu bar is still flat.
00:56:01 ◼ ► But once 3D was the choice, which you might disagree with, there was an agreement of what looks properly 3D.
00:56:12 ◼ ► And if there was like a gap between some of the buttons but not some of the other buttons in the control strip, everybody would see it.
00:56:19 ◼ ► And it would be like if you're the one working on it and you're showing it to me, you're like, I know there's a gap there.
00:56:33 ◼ ► Who cares if sometimes you're scrolling a sidebar in Tahoe and the search field content goes underneath it, rendering both the search field and the content underneath completely inscrutable?
00:56:47 ◼ ► Somehow something broke where you can point to this and say, well, here's a box where I can still click on it and I can type what I'm searching for, but I cannot read the letters I'm typing as I'm typing the search query because of this transparency and layering.
00:57:24 ◼ ► It just used to be, and that thinking permeated the whole indie Mac culture too, right?
00:57:37 ◼ ► I remember one time when I was at Bare Bones, probably towards the end, like in 2002, and we were working on Yojimbo, which is still around.
00:57:55 ◼ ► And in office, and I went down the hallway to our mutual friend, Jim Correa, who was at Bare Bones at the time, and I could tell that the sidebar was one pixel too low, one pixel.
00:58:11 ◼ ► You wouldn't understand the explanation completely, but it was Bare Bones' first Coco app, and Jim and its colleague Steve Kalkorf had thrown themselves and learned Coco, and they'd made this sort of use every aspect of Coco app.
00:58:24 ◼ ► And it was like, it's a subclass of something, and when you subclass it, it's going to go down.
00:58:29 ◼ ► And at the moment, and it was like, let's say it was a Wednesday afternoon, he was like, I don't think there's anything we can do about that.
00:58:39 ◼ ► And then the next morning, Jim called me in, and he was like, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and here, look.
00:58:53 ◼ ► And while he couldn't think of it, and it was only literally just one pixel, and it didn't look wrong.
00:59:02 ◼ ► But then once I, and Jim hadn't even noticed, but then once I pointed it out, he couldn't sleep until he fixed it.
00:59:12 ◼ ► And then you'd get to an app like, oh, Microsoft came out with a new version of Word, and it's not like that at all.
00:59:19 ◼ ► And that's why Mac users kind of held their nose to use Microsoft Office at the time, because it's like, this was the difference between Mac-like and un-Mac-like software.
00:59:36 ◼ ► And the attention to detail is the one thing that, no matter if you disagree, should this button be a rectangle or an oval?
01:00:06 ◼ ► And the key was you were considered to be doing a good job the more things you noticed and reported.
01:00:28 ◼ ► And what I've learned over the years since then is I'm pretty good about reporting bugs both to Apple and to other engineers, other developers of apps.
01:00:37 ◼ ► There are some people, some developers I don't report bugs to because they have demonstrated their lack of attention to detail by responding to my bug reports with like dismissive, well, who cares?
01:00:56 ◼ ► And other developers though, it's kind of like when you – like I know when I read Daring Fireball, I can feel good about reporting any typo or grammatical issue because I know you strive for perfection in that department.
01:01:12 ◼ ► And there are other people I have come to realize the last thing you want to do is report a typo to them.
01:01:19 ◼ ► I take it as a personal attack and it's like, okay, well, I was just trying to make you better.
01:01:26 ◼ ► And I think there's some people at Apple who are saying who cares if the pixels one stays off.
01:01:40 ◼ ► But one of the most interesting classes – and there's like this one thing I learned from it.
01:01:58 ◼ ► He had been a – maybe not the showrunner, but he was one of the writing people for ALF, which was a big hit.
01:02:12 ◼ ► And he'd worked on other things like PBS, like Masterpiece Theater, like real serious adult drama.
01:02:22 ◼ ► But the lesson that he learned – we would write – every week, it was a once-a-week class.
01:02:34 ◼ ► And then everybody before the class, there'd be copies that you could get of everybody else's.
01:02:47 ◼ ► And then there'd be a group discussion where we would critique each other's scenes because you were supposed to have read them before the class started.
01:03:22 ◼ ► But if anybody phrased it like you shouldn't have – you should have this character say more here.
01:03:38 ◼ ► But there are still people who, if you phrase your criticisms this way, right, that you focus on the work, they still take it personally, right?
01:03:53 ◼ ► Certainly if it's like a spelling mistake or, God forbid, I get somebody's – spell somebody's name wrong, which is like the worst.
01:04:06 ◼ ► I love feedback like that because nine times out of ten, if I reread the sentence, I'm like, oh, I do see that that's not – it's sort of confusing.
01:04:25 ◼ ► But – and the people like you who will frequently report typos, you don't preface it with, hey, sorry, but I think you spelled this word wrong.
01:04:34 ◼ ► But when I get like first-time reports from random readers, they're always very apologetic.
01:04:39 ◼ ► Hey, sorry, I think you spelled this word wrong or something like that or I think you're missing a punctuation mark here.
01:04:45 ◼ ► And it's very obvious that I'm missing a punctuation mark because the paragraph ends without a period, right?
01:05:04 ◼ ► And I do think that at Apple, it was – and the indies – the best indie software was all from people.
01:05:11 ◼ ► They might be annoyed that there's a bug to fix, but they're not annoyed at you for reporting it, right?
01:06:00 ◼ ► He's actually – and it's funny you mentioned Paul, but he's actually very good at pointing out ambiguous sentences to me.
01:06:06 ◼ ► Not just typos, which he will, but he's one of my top reporters of, hey, maybe you should rephrase this sentence just because it's not clear or could be read two different ways.
01:06:23 ◼ ► And then the other – the problem is it cascades because once it kind of gets out of control, like the way you achieve near pixel perfection in software is to get near pixel perfection in software and then try to stay there.
01:06:39 ◼ ► Like little – something changed, you upgrade to a new version of OS, and now this button is way too close to the bottom of the dialogue.
01:07:03 ◼ ► It's like, you know, like a wild dog ran through your house and tore up all the furniture and ripped open a trash bag.
01:07:12 ◼ ► That scene in Christmas Vacation where the dog goes nuts in the kitchen and tears everything apart.
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01:09:52 ◼ ► I want to circle back before I guess we can move on to something other than bitching about Tahoe.
01:09:58 ◼ ► But the other thing when I was talking about Ternus, and yeah, of course, he's the guy who they're talking about as the next CEO of the company because he runs hardware, and hardware's the best thing going on.
01:10:07 ◼ ► The other point I made on Daring Fireball, and I think it's really key, is that Apple's hardware designers are absolutely unafraid to keep things the same year after year if they don't have a better idea.
01:10:29 ◼ ► It should have a trackpad that is a very large part of the palm rest, but not the whole palm rest.
01:10:38 ◼ ► And every couple of years, there's a major redesign, and even the major redesigns, like from the Intel, the last era Intel MacBooks to the first redesigned Apple Silicon era ones, they don't look altogether new, right?
01:11:01 ◼ ► And then the M3 MacBook Air looks like the M2, and the M4 MacBook Air looks like the M3, which looks just like the M2, and maybe they tweak the colors.
01:11:09 ◼ ► But they have this confidence to keep things the same if they know that they're still the best.
01:11:22 ◼ ► I think, and I know it sounds like a harsh word, but I really do think Alan Dye is a fraud.
01:11:31 ◼ ► I actually don't know that he's a very good graphic designer at all, which is what he came from.
01:11:45 ◼ ► The politics of navigating a company like Apple and pleasing the people above him on the org chart.
01:11:51 ◼ ► And managing, to some degree, the enormous design talent in the ranks of the rank-and-file designers at Apple, who are still incredibly talented.
01:12:00 ◼ ► And that's why, overall, the design of Apple's software is still good overall, looking at the rest of the industry.
01:12:07 ◼ ► But there's a lack of confidence that comes from being a fraud, where you feel like you've got to keep new, even if new isn't better.
01:12:16 ◼ ► And I think if, like, over the last 10 years, the Mac OS interface had changed as little as the Mac hardware has changed over the same 10 years,
01:12:36 ◼ ► When you talk about that, it reminds me, people often compare Apple to Porsche for the way that, like, the, like, Roadster or whatever would look the same.
01:13:01 ◼ ► It was like, things have not changed in decades in a significant way, except for they, of course, get thinner.
01:13:07 ◼ ► And I actually was just remembering the touch bar is actually a really good metaphor or comparison for the control strip.
01:13:15 ◼ ► So, but that's the example of where Apple took a bold step, but then recognized that it was a mistake, and they pulled back.
01:13:29 ◼ ► Like, we should know by now whether a button should be rounded or square, what size it should be, whether it should look 3D or not, whether it should turn to glass when you click it.
01:13:41 ◼ ► Some of these things we should just know as facts, and they shouldn't be kind of like taste-based, I think.
01:13:53 ◼ ► The menu bar should still look like the menu bar did 10 years ago, where it doesn't have to be white, but it should be in light mode.
01:14:00 ◼ ► It should be a close to white menu bar with black text, and when you click it, a rectangle around the menu name is highlighted in a very vibrant way, and the rectangular menu drops down beneath it.
01:14:16 ◼ ► Like, and if it looked, it was a solved problem, leave it solved, and put your attention and your urge to mark your territory like a fucking dog on new stuff, right?
01:14:27 ◼ ► It's this, I think, a deep insecurity in Alan Dine and her team led them to want to put their mark on things that had come before them, and they've just, I really don't mean this in any hyperbolic way.
01:14:43 ◼ ► It's if they've vandalized it, they really have, and I really do think it's fundamentally a lack of confidence.
01:14:50 ◼ ► It's an unconfident designers who insist on new, because new, at least, you can say, well, you just, your complaint is just that you don't like new stuff, right?
01:15:10 ◼ ► It's a sophistry, I don't know if that's an adjective or not, but it's a way of debating that sort of avoids debating the actual point of, put aside whether it's new or old, is this a good design for this?
01:15:27 ◼ ► The shape of the windows, the way windows look, whether it is obvious at a glance, instantly, if you see four windows on screen at once, which one is the active window?
01:15:40 ◼ ► That is just part of using a computer, whether it's light mode or dark mode or Windows or Mac or a version of Linux or iPad with multiple windows open.
01:15:50 ◼ ► If there are multiple windows, and it is important because keyboard focus can only go to one place at a time, which one is my typing going to go to?
01:16:00 ◼ ► And instead of making it more obvious, and changes to it should be in the favor of making it more obvious in a way that looks cool, which one is front most, not less.
01:16:10 ◼ ► And they just keep making – it's like they're bleaching the whole OS and making it ever more inscrutable, which one is active.
01:16:20 ◼ ► I think – getting back to my optimism a little bit, I think what you're describing is a situation where there's probably like a collective sigh of relief among many people who worked for Alan Dye, whose ideas or priorities may have been suppressed over the past several years.
01:16:40 ◼ ► There's got to – under any leader, there are people who are suffering with disagreements with the leadership.
01:16:47 ◼ ► And I kind of envision now Apple's design department as having like – if it's a garden, like somebody has come in and raked all of the leaves out, and everything can grow now.
01:17:01 ◼ ► And that's my really kind of like rosy, rose glasses view of hopefully the next few years.
01:17:07 ◼ ► Not only is a leader who has been criticized gone, it's almost poetic that he went to one of Apple's biggest competitors slash enemies.
01:17:20 ◼ ► Not that they compete directly, but they kind of are starting to with the glasses, right?
01:17:25 ◼ ► Where Meta is perhaps more – if you name just the big five or six companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon – who else should we put in the list?
01:17:40 ◼ ► The one company amongst all of those that is making the sort of devices that Apple makes is Meta with the glasses and with the headsets and stuff like that.
01:17:52 ◼ ► Meta is the company where Tim Cook, in an interview when they asked him, hey, what would you have done if you were Mark Zuckerberg and you got into the – I think it was the Cambridge Analytica thing.
01:18:12 ◼ ► And there is a culture within Apple, certainly once you reach senior levels, that these are people, largely men but not all men.
01:18:19 ◼ ► Someone like Deirdre O'Brien has been at Apple her whole career, largest part of her career, that you get to that level and Apple is your career.
01:18:35 ◼ ► And it's – you could say, oh, that sounds like a cult and maybe it could, but it's really just more like a camaraderie, right?
01:18:46 ◼ ► It is extremely unusual for somebody at the senior vice president level at Apple to leave for another company.
01:18:58 ◼ ► Right, and just to name one, I'll bet Craig Federighi gets a lot of emails from recruiters looking for CEOs, right?
01:19:07 ◼ ► I'll bet if like you looked at like the last 20 years of Craig Federighi's email, how many times he's been offered serious job offers as the CEO of another tech company.
01:19:27 ◼ ► But of all the companies for someone to actually leave for to be meta, to me it just proves the point that Alan Dye never belonged at Apple in the first place.
01:19:35 ◼ ► What I was thinking as you were describing it is they are not business competitors as much as philosophical competitors.
01:19:43 ◼ ► Like if you look at the Venn diagram of overlapping philosophical beliefs with Apple, you can find some that are shared with Google and are shared with Microsoft.
01:20:10 ◼ ► But at the last AWS conference, a couple months ago, sometime like late 2025, Amazon had their big AWS conference.
01:20:18 ◼ ► And somebody from Apple came and spoke for like a 10 or 15 minute stint in the keynote.
01:20:25 ◼ ► The way that Apple, when they had onstage keynotes at WWDC, would bring in somebody from Intel or from Microsoft to talk about Office and the new APIs or whatever.
01:20:36 ◼ ► Here's Jerry Yang from Yahoo to talk about doing the weather app for the original iPhone or something like that.
01:20:42 ◼ ► And it was somebody from Apple who came to talk about how much the App Store uses AWS behind the scenes and how running Swift code on the server at AWS made something faster.
01:20:57 ◼ ► Like way faster and fixed a whole bunch of bugs because Swift is memory safe and all this and it just runs great on AWS.
01:21:04 ◼ ► So they were there to talk about some Apple technology like running Swift on the server, but it was at an AWS conference.
01:21:10 ◼ ► And you think, hey, when's the last time you saw someone from Apple speaking at somebody else's conference?
01:21:15 ◼ ► Well, there's some overlap with Amazon where they go, guess whose developer conference I don't think we're ever going to see an Apple person speak at.
01:21:25 ◼ ► I might soil my pants if I found somebody said, holy shit, somebody from Apple spoke at Meta Connect or whatever the hell the name of their developer conference is.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Whereas with the Amazon, it was like, oh, yeah, of course, it kind of makes sense that Apple is leaning on AWS for a lot of the server infrastructure for the App Store rather than building it out on her own.
01:21:48 ◼ ► Before we move on, the other one I really do want to talk about is the fucking icons in the menus.
01:22:00 ◼ ► The more I look at it, because the more I'm using Tahoe here while I'm complaining about it, the more angry.
01:22:09 ◼ ► This and the fact that like old versions of the Hig specifically said, hey, don't just add icons to every menu item that just looks disorganized and confusing and makes it hard to read the menu.
01:22:24 ◼ ► And then there's an updated one from, I don't know, 2004 with a totally different art style to match the look of the Mac at the time.
01:22:42 ◼ ► And something I think John Syracuse pointed out that even now, apparently, the guidance says not everything needs an icon.
01:22:53 ◼ ► But I'm looking right now at Safari and damn near every menu item has an icon, even to the point where they use a generic globe for all the like sites you visited that don't have a favicon.
01:23:10 ◼ ► I think that's always been the case for the history menu, though, because they do show the five fav icons for ones that do.
01:23:20 ◼ ► One of the best examples, and the Hig always said this, too, that if adding an icon can clarify the meaning, then, yes, add it.
01:23:31 ◼ ► And it really is that it's the lesson from the Incredibles movies from Pixar, where they outlaw being a superhero.
01:23:55 ◼ ► It's a rectangle with a little, you know, it looks like a tiny little text document because I guess you're reading text.
01:24:21 ◼ ► But he pointed out how if you go to two apps that have the same menu command from Apple, both from Apple, they use different icons.
01:24:28 ◼ ► Like it was maybe partially a rush job, but partially like, well, some of these commands, they're so abstract where it's like, how do you come up with that?
01:24:40 ◼ ► What would like, or I'm looking at Mars at it right now because I was looking up those blog posts.
01:24:45 ◼ ► So you've got in the view menu for which things you can view in a window, like title field, slug field, link field, keywords field.
01:25:27 ◼ ► And I bet you know this firsthand is a lot of times you go to a restaurant, they will have an icon to represent vegetarian dishes.
01:25:41 ◼ ► And you put it next to certain items on the menu, which have no animal products in the making of the meal.
01:25:55 ◼ ► But if every menu item on the menu has its own icon to represent that dish, then having one special icon to mark some of them for a very specific reason that is very important to some people, all of a sudden you can't see it.
01:26:14 ◼ ► And you've got to, like, run your finger down the page and kind of look for the icon that you're looking for.
01:26:18 ◼ ► In the window menu, move and resize, and this has been true for a couple versions, you can go and you can, like, it's a system-wide feature.
01:26:35 ◼ ► Well, those commands have had icons on macOS for a couple of years now because the icons show you exactly what the window will look like after you use it.
01:26:45 ◼ ► And it's actually better to use the icons for what you want to achieve than to read, right?
01:26:52 ◼ ► Another one that didn't have icons, but I think in hindsight should have, is to rotate a photo like in Preview or the Photos app.
01:27:09 ◼ ► So I am pretty good with clockwise and counterclockwise, but I still have to think for a second.
01:27:15 ◼ ► But there's a lot of people out there, and I live with two of them, who always get it wrong.
01:27:20 ◼ ► They just, if you say clockwise, you know, it's like a piece of buttered toast that always falls on the wrong side.
01:27:26 ◼ ► But the icon, which shows which way the rotate command works, is actually more clarifying than using the words clockwise or counterclockwise.
01:27:40 ◼ ► That would have been a good icon to put in macOS 20 years ago or two years ago or 10 years ago or whenever.
01:27:48 ◼ ► Now it's there in macOS Tahoe, but those icons are lost because all the other menu items have icons too, and they don't stand out.
01:27:58 ◼ ► Whereas if only rotate clockwise and rotate counterclockwise had icons, they would draw your attention, and you'd be like, oh, yeah, those are the two rotate commands.
01:28:16 ◼ ► I think that's a really good point, especially with the comparison to restaurant menus.
01:28:21 ◼ ► We don't often think of menus on computers as directly comparable to restaurant menus, but of course that's where it came from.
01:28:38 ◼ ► Right, and so if Apple was in charge of the restaurant menu, there would just be like a generic food icon for anything that nobody could come up with an icon for.
01:28:53 ◼ ► If you look in preview under the view menu, you got hide sidebar and thumbnails, which are about as similar an icon as you can get without being identical.
01:29:05 ◼ ► It shows a rounded rect with a visual sidebar with three dots representing the content.
01:29:23 ◼ ► I can see that the icons aren't exactly the same, but I would have to get closer to the screen to see what the difference is.
01:29:54 ◼ ► The magnifying glasses are so small that those little plus minus or a number one, whatever the hell is in zoom to fit is they're all you can't see them.
01:30:09 ◼ ► One of the things that was so great in Prokopov's, I think it was his, the other guy who wrote the really good post on this was icons and menus everywhere send help by Jim Nielsen.
01:30:18 ◼ ► So I forget if it was Jim Nielsen or Nikita Prokopov who wrote this, who just said, okay, take all the words out of the menus and just show the icons.
01:30:33 ◼ ► There would be no possible way to possibly navigate the menu bar in Tahoe by the icons alone if you took the words out.
01:31:03 ◼ ► Because a toolbar only has enough, you know, what's the most toolbar items an app usually has?
01:31:19 ◼ ► And because they're the most used commands, you can come up with icons that represent them.
01:31:27 ◼ ► Or you could use it text only because either way you can kind of remember or learn what they represent.
01:31:32 ◼ ► But when it's 50 different menu commands, you can't possibly memorize them by icon alone.
01:31:40 ◼ ► It is so frustrating that Apple of all companies shipped an OS with this as the design change.
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01:34:41 ◼ ► You had mentioned in a group chat that you and I are both in that you just like last week or Friday maybe added a feature to Mars edit that you said you never would have even tried if not for AI.
01:35:03 ◼ ► I wouldn't have even tried this without AI, but I did it with AI and it was kind of easy.
01:35:10 ◼ ► And I think I can explain it in a way that everybody, programmer or not, will be able to appreciate.
01:35:28 ◼ ► And one of the persnickety things about the API is that it can be hard to determine when a user types their password wrong, whether the error you get, or I should rephrase that.
01:35:45 ◼ ► There are errors you get from WordPress that mean either the user typed their password wrong, they're not authenticated, or they're trying to do something on the blog that their user's permissions don't allow.
01:36:09 ◼ ► So for years, I have had this little hack in there that says, if the error mess, because it gives you error message text.
01:36:20 ◼ ► So the code, the code doesn't change, but the error message does change based on the context.
01:36:33 ◼ ► Of course, no, no, implicit authentication sniffing, because I have to determine in the app, is the error I'm getting actually something I should put up a password prompt for?
01:36:47 ◼ ► Because you don't want to show a user a message that just says your password is wrong without giving them a field to put the right password in.
01:36:57 ◼ ► And you don't want to give a user repeatedly a password prompt when all, when they're already logged in, they've already been able to download posts.
01:37:05 ◼ ► And it turns out the only thing they can't do is like edit other people's posts or something like that.
01:37:15 ◼ ► A customer's, so getting back to the perfectionism thing, getting back to the no bug report is too trivial.
01:37:23 ◼ ► This person running in German, MarsEdit, got, reported a bug to me that every time they tried to edit a post, it asked for the password again.
01:37:37 ◼ ► And I finally realized it's this situation where I never see it myself because I have a workaround in English.
01:37:47 ◼ ► So then the question becomes, okay, so what I'm doing is I'm searching the strings for phrases that I think imply permission problem.
01:37:54 ◼ ► Like if the string says not allowed, I will, instead of putting up a password prompt, I'll just pass the string along to the user.
01:38:15 ◼ ► And so I'm thinking, well, I can't just say like, what does not allowed in German mean?
01:38:23 ◼ ► So what I used Claude, as it turns out, and ChatGPT in tandem, what I used it to do was to derive a list of error strings that WordPress returns in every language that WordPress supports.
01:38:49 ◼ ► So that you, if you know the English ones, you can map it to whatever other language there is.
01:39:00 ◼ ► Because you can envision how if you're on the German Mac, and MarsEdit gets an error back, and it says, you know, whatever in German, you can't edit posts.
01:39:08 ◼ ► I now, instead of looking for not allowed, I first translate it to English, and then look for not allowed.
01:39:39 ◼ ► So just at a high level, just to kind of, if people might be interested to hear, like, how did I approach this with AI?
01:39:45 ◼ ► So at first I realized, luckily, the XML RPC API in WordPress is pretty much dead, like it's not being developed anymore.
01:39:54 ◼ ► So with high confidence, I can predict that the error strings in that section of the product are not going to change.
01:40:04 ◼ ► So I point Claude at the source file for the XML RPC server on WordPress, and I just say, give me a list of all the unique error strings that are passed to the WordPress localization function.
01:40:18 ◼ ► So it gives me this list, whatever it is, it's like, you know, I don't know, 50 something, it's all these different error messages, like you are not allowed to upload, you are not allowed to da da da.
01:40:28 ◼ ► So then I ask it to, like, filter out ones that obviously don't have any permission-related context.
01:40:37 ◼ ► And then WordPress is localized online with an automatic, not automatic, WordPress.org-based custom, it's called GlotPress, I think.
01:41:04 ◼ ► So I figured out, with ChatGPT's help, how I could access the site programmatically, supplying an English string and getting back the localized string.
01:41:16 ◼ ► Oh, and somewhere in here, I also had to have it figure out for me what all of the international, like, language codes were for all of the pertinent languages.
01:41:25 ◼ ► And some of them, it had to, like, infer it because it wasn't, like, the language code listed wasn't the same way it was managed on the site.
01:41:33 ◼ ► Just to say, I got this list of language codes, 70 or 80 language codes, a bunch of English strings, and then I had it write a script that would go to the WordPress localization site with each of those strings, with each of those languages.
01:41:49 ◼ ► And it created a one megabyte text file that contained all the mappings of all of the strings.
01:41:57 ◼ ► And so then I had it write me some code in Swift that would just, like, let me say, okay, here's the English, give me the translation.
01:42:04 ◼ ► And then, kind of like a Jim Correa moment, I wasn't going to sleep at night if I knew that I was dedicating one megabyte of my app to supporting the rare case that somebody has a weird error in another language.
01:42:18 ◼ ► So, with more AI help, I managed to deduplicate their situations where, like, a lot of the phrases are translated the same in, like, Mexico and Spain and whatever.
01:42:31 ◼ ► Anyway, I ended up with this now, I think it's 16K or something small, something small enough that I'm, like, sold.
01:42:40 ◼ ► And that's when I committed the feature, I tested it, testing against a local WordPress install, I can change the language at will, it's working everywhere.
01:42:52 ◼ ► And there's no way in hell I would have even bitten off the first part of that challenge.
01:43:16 ◼ ► I would have probably figured out how to access the translations with a URL and a script and automate it.
01:44:11 ◼ ► And I just, I wanted to be able to tell him which two paragraphs it was in when I told him about the typo.
01:44:17 ◼ ► And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just click a button and have numbers for all the paragraphs in Safari?
01:44:33 ◼ ► Like, it was just a very simple prompt, like one sentence, like, write me a bookmarklet that would add a number to each paragraph.
01:44:42 ◼ ► And it did, and that's all I asked for, and it gave it to me, and it worked on the first time when I dragged the bookmarklet to Safari.
01:44:53 ◼ ► And the other weird thing is it just counts every P tag in HTML, and sometimes outside the article, like on Daring Fireball, the by John Gruber is a P tag.
01:45:42 ◼ ► But, you know, just – I never in a million years would have sat down to write that bookmarklet because I need paragraph numbers in Safari.
01:45:59 ◼ ► I had a working bookmarklet that I was using in Safari quicker than I just described it to you here on the podcast.
01:46:10 ◼ ► And that's the sort of thing that there are people like you, developers, who are actually using AI.
01:46:19 ◼ ► But I think my message here is for the people who are still somewhat skeptical that they could get anything out of it or that there's really something to it.
01:46:30 ◼ ► But you might want a bookmarklet in Safari or whatever, Chrome, whatever, that does a weird thing that you kind of want.
01:46:41 ◼ ► You're just making a bookmark that you can select that will add blank to every paragraph on a web page.
01:46:54 ◼ ► Like, a lot of people just say, I'm sure this isn't going to be easy, so I'm not going to try it.
01:47:15 ◼ ► Somebody is going to say, you know, we're ruining the planet, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
01:47:29 ◼ ► But like on the energy thing, it's like a chat GPT prompt on average takes the same amount of energy.
01:47:36 ◼ ► And I've seen this source – I mean, I can't verify the math, but it makes sense to me – that it takes about the same amount of energy as it does to watch eight seconds of video from Netflix.
01:47:46 ◼ ► I mean – and I've seen things like a lot of the energy was already spent to build the models, blah, blah, blah.
01:47:52 ◼ ► Are these people going to get in their car and drive to Walmart after they're done criticizing my use of electric power?
01:48:14 ◼ ► And I'm here for it because it is, you know, the whole like bicycle of the mind comparison of like a Mac.
01:48:23 ◼ ► The way that like a tool like a bicycle can make you more powerful than you ever could have been without the tool, that is what AI is doing for many of us.
01:48:49 ◼ ► And as somebody who is a generally like a humanist person, a lot of what I do, you know, the reason I report typos to you, the reason I make software that I think people will like is because I want other people to be more successful.
01:49:31 ◼ ► Everything that deserves a significant amount of hype and really is transformative is going to get overhyped, right?
01:49:44 ◼ ► But it really was groundbreaking like that, you know, an accountant who is still doing all of the work and paper in a green book and say to his colleague who is using Lotus, you know, the first spreadsheet.
01:50:29 ◼ ► Well, but somebody in the early PC era is using a spreadsheet and they're like, I don't see the difference.
01:50:38 ◼ ► I write them on paper and then type them in a calculator and I get a sum and it's like, okay, but, you know, you've got 500 transactions from a bunch of different states and I've got 500 transactions in my spreadsheet in a bunch of different states.
01:51:08 ◼ ► And AI can do things like that too, like where we've all become totally used over the last 40 years to the things like that scenario of, oh, yes, you update the Maryland sales tax once and the sum of 500 transactions, only 10 of which were from Maryland, updates, you know, you get a new sum of the total instantly.
01:51:33 ◼ ► But we're at this moment where there are things like your scenario with 70 different languages and WordPress to try to just add an ease of use, a nice, wouldn't it be nice if every single language that a MarsEdit user connected to WordPress is using got a sensible description of what the problem is for any language?
01:51:58 ◼ ► That is like the, you know, it's maybe not quite instantaneous, but for that task, it feels that might as well be instantaneous.
01:52:26 ◼ ► But for other people out there, this could be like a career changing, you know, like your accountant, the one who didn't get the spreadsheet, made a lot less money the next year.
01:53:00 ◼ ► I want to mention on the menu items in Tahoe that our mutual friends, both of them, including, we keep mentioning him, Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba and Brent Simmons with the latest updates, the Tahoe update to Net Newswire.
01:53:16 ◼ ► Brent figured out a way to not have those ugly fucking icons on every menu item and not only shipped a version of Net Newswire for Tahoe that does that and takes them out, but explained, of course, because he's Brent, exactly how.
01:53:38 ◼ ► I still need to write about both of them on Daring Fireball, but there was no way that after mentioning Paul for reporting typos and complaining about the menu icons in Tahoe that I couldn't mention that Paul spearheaded Rogue Amoeba shipping software updated for the Tahoe interface without icons on every goddamn menu item.
01:54:08 ◼ ► Well, in this particular case, it's because your long-running podcast with Manton Reese, Core Intuition, ended last year.
01:54:24 ◼ ► Well, we adopted – I know you know this, John, but we adopted the Apple versioning system.
01:54:51 ◼ ► But I actually think that's kind of an interesting way to semi-retire a podcast, right?
01:55:19 ◼ ► And it's a very interesting way to say, okay, we're not going to do once a week anymore, but we still – every once in a while, we want to talk to each other and do the Core Intuition thing about what's new in the Apple developer community.
01:55:33 ◼ ► And it is kind of a neat way as a fan of the show to be like, hey, it's not over-over, right?
01:55:39 ◼ ► It's like, okay, Letterman doesn't do his nightly talk show anymore, but he's got that thing on Netflix and once a year there's like five special episodes.
01:55:46 ◼ ► I think when we said it was over, I think we said something like, who knows what's going to happen, so don't delete us from your podcast feeds.
01:56:14 ◼ ► So there's Core Intuition, which they can listen to in wherever they're listening to the talk show right now, whatever podcast app you're using to, just search for Core Intuition.
01:56:28 ◼ ► Your software is at RedSweater.com, including MarsEdit, Black Ink, which you mentioned, your crossword app.
01:57:12 ◼ ► But I'm back there because, honestly, every one of these services has become the exclusive social networking choice for somebody – some of my favorite people online.
01:57:35 ◼ ► In some ways, it was better – it was ideal when Twitter was good overall and it was the one Twitter-like thing.
01:57:57 ◼ ► And in some ways, that's good because it's a healthier – well, if one of them goes bad, if Threads goes bad because Meta owns it, we're not all sunk because we haven't all just thrown all of our stuff into one place.
01:58:16 ◼ ► And you can't just go to Twitter to get everybody's Twitter-like musings that you're interested in.