00:00:14 ◼ ► And I think the lesson is that I should have you on more often than I have, and I'm trying
00:00:56 ◼ ► Well, I retired last summer, which, you know, great personal news, of course, as the rest
00:01:39 ◼ ► So in other words, and I somehow never had you on the show for that entire five-year period,
00:01:52 ◼ ► And you and I have obviously, well, and I know that we've remained close personal friends
00:01:58 ◼ ► But somehow, even though, despite that we've been in constant communication, I never even
00:02:50 ◼ ► I just drove past it, you know, a couple months ago en route to a family event in way at the
00:03:31 ◼ ► But that says, of the people still working in the trenches, as it were, I would have been
00:04:01 ◼ ► How did you, I don't know how the Brent Simmons, well, you surprised me because the Brent Simmons
00:04:14 ◼ ► I had to learn a lot in a hurry about what it was like to work in a corporate environment
00:04:58 ◼ ► And it's not unique to Audible, but I think at any of the various products at Amazon, you
00:05:19 ◼ ► Even still, I don't think, even if I'd been there in person more, I would have just walked
00:05:38 ◼ ► So there's people who aren't familiar, but I, and just knowing you over the years, your
00:05:47 ◼ ► So for the last two years, one of the projects I led, really my biggest thing was getting
00:06:02 ◼ ► It's simple and effective, but on a big team, especially with a lot of less experienced
00:06:10 ◼ ► So we went from about a quarter of that app by the time I left down to just a couple of
00:06:19 ◼ ► We had to rewrite that code in Swift, but a lot of it actually was unused and we didn't
00:06:34 ◼ ► That was like a huge thing where there had been like before your time at Audible, a sort
00:06:42 ◼ ► And I think, and this ties into that Mike Swanson essay we might talk about later in the show,
00:06:54 ◼ ► Where it's a team, they're working on a feature and somebody is like, well, you know what?
00:07:10 ◼ ► And, and then you, you get a battle tested, perhaps establish something that other people
00:07:16 ◼ ► can, maybe somebody can say, Hey, I used this before when I was working on something else
00:07:22 ◼ ► and it's good, or you can say, I know somebody who's using it, or I know the person who's
00:07:57 ◼ ► And then there was another framework that had a version of that, but just change everything
00:08:02 ◼ ► So it literally had two different identical, but for those prefixes, versions of FMDB and
00:08:19 ◼ ► It was great when you brought it in two years later, it needs to be updated for something.
00:08:24 ◼ ► And, and no one's even working on it anymore, but it's critical to these half dozen other
00:08:30 ◼ ► So do you think as much as you had to be introduced into an environment that already was large, I
00:08:42 ◼ ► Amazon was already humongous that you had to learn how to just sort of operate in a large
00:08:52 ◼ ► But do you think that you were able to bring the sort of, Hey, I'm used to very small teams
00:08:57 ◼ ► and some of the principles of a very small team could really help our large team by keeping
00:09:13 ◼ ► To simplify and keep simplifying and to remind every developer who wants to over complexify
00:09:20 ◼ ► things, which is almost every developer that they're going to have to look at that code
00:09:23 ◼ ► in six months or a year, but also their teammates and people they haven't even met yet.
00:09:27 ◼ ► Because they'll be hired in the future are going to have to look at that code and deal with it.
00:09:44 ◼ ► When I came in, the number of warnings was at a level where X could literally stop counting
00:10:29 ◼ ► I don't think you would have lasted five years there if you hadn't been able to do that,
00:10:43 ◼ ► And always insisting that we remember the humanity of our teammates and especially of our users.
00:11:02 ◼ ► In fact, that my people at Audible, in fact, if they're listening, hi, I hope you're doing
00:11:28 ◼ ► But if we're getting warnings for blank now and it would be a real pain in the ass to fix
00:11:33 ◼ ► it and they are just warnings and it builds and runs just fine and all of our test paths and
00:12:05 ◼ ► rules, but zero warnings is effectively the only policy that really works in the long run
00:12:18 ◼ ► And by a lot of people and by changing CAS, not that we had a lot of churn, but you do...
00:12:31 ◼ ► I was not an engineer, but I remember when I was at Bare Bones in 2000 to 2002 in that transition,
00:13:05 ◼ ► And the rule was builds, when you checked in a new change, it had to pass with no warning
00:13:12 ◼ ► You had to be compiled through two C compilers with no warnings, even though only one of them
00:13:25 ◼ ► And the answer is no, you're going to get a ton of warnings because the different C compilers
00:13:32 ◼ ► And then even when they switched, I think they were still compiling with the other compiler
00:13:42 ◼ ► And building without warnings all the way is how, when Apple announces something like, hey,
00:14:00 ◼ ► And you're going to have to use a different compiler in some way, or at least it's going
00:14:06 ◼ ► Having clean code from the old way is the most likely way to just have it, oh, I did just
00:14:17 ◼ ► Link code and less code too, and less complex code, stuff you can understand and change.
00:14:28 ◼ ► Well, one of the first things I realized that I'd never seen before in working in small places
00:14:44 ◼ ► So people lead projects, whether it's engineers or PMs or whatever, it goes on eventually on
00:15:17 ◼ ► Sometimes when you see a lot of churn in places, the question I ask myself now is, oh, who's
00:15:30 ◼ ► And that's not necessarily bad because it leads people to come up with good things and to work
00:15:37 ◼ ► The stuff you have to do to get a promotion is generally be good at your job and be good
00:15:50 ◼ ► Like anything, too much of everything in moderation and too much of a, hey, politics and being
00:16:01 ◼ ► good at the internal politics is the only way to get ahead here leads to corrodes the culture.
00:16:12 ◼ ► Was there any, like when I was much younger and I actually worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer
00:16:24 ◼ ► I don't even remember if I had the internet at the machine where I was doing graphic design
00:16:37 ◼ ► because you obviously have an interest in the news as well, is that when you worked at the
00:16:41 ◼ ► Philadelphia Inquirer, the building at the time, it was Philadelphia newspapers and they
00:16:46 ◼ ► owned both the Inquirer and the Daily News, two newspapers with two different newsrooms on
00:16:54 ◼ ► But when you came into, and it was a, they've since moved several times and it's the way the
00:17:00 ◼ ► But in the late 90s, they were still in their old glorious tower on North Broad Street here
00:17:05 ◼ ► in Philadelphia and you'd come into a beautiful art deco, probably I think built sometime in
00:17:17 ◼ ► And everybody, you'd just come in and you'd get an Inquirer and a Daily News and it was perfectly
00:17:22 ◼ ► acceptable to just sit at your desk, like maybe like get a cup of coffee and just read the
00:17:33 ◼ ► And I had never in my life up until that point had a job where it was just perfectly acceptable.
00:17:39 ◼ ► Like I had responsibilities, I had projects to do, but I could just sit there and read the
00:17:47 ◼ ► Like, and of course, but was it, so I'm wondering if like at Audible, there was sort of a, hey,
00:17:56 ◼ ► Like everybody's got headphones on, they're listening to podcasts and audio books and talking
00:18:13 ◼ ► I think there, there was certainly a culture of listening to audio books and using the app.
00:18:42 ◼ ► I'm just wondering with that though, I'm thinking, because my mind always goes to counter examples
00:18:48 ◼ ► and I'm wondering like, well, let's say you're working at a, at a dating app, but you're happily
00:19:15 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, there's, I can imagine things, but it's hard to be a diehard user of the app.
00:19:22 ◼ ► On the other hand, then my mind turns to, but what if you are running around behind the back
00:19:27 ◼ ► It's a perfect excuse to, to be getting notifications from a dating app on your phone all the time.
00:19:53 ◼ ► And they've got, it's just a fantastic utility for app developers to put into their app.
00:20:11 ◼ ► It's hard to figure out what actually happened in your app when your logs, errors, and performance
00:20:56 ◼ ► They've got all sorts of, they've got a video that you can watch and it will get you started
00:21:51 ◼ ► Well, one of the things I'm trying to do with the show more often is when people have major
00:22:19 ◼ ► Again, in the same way that I felt weird when you went to work at an Amazon subsidiary.
00:22:25 ◼ ► And I feel weird that a major new version of Net Newswire is out and I can't use it on my desktop Mac.
00:22:54 ◼ ► And you'll want to upgrade and you'll finally get to use Net Newswire 7.5 or whatever it is here.
00:23:29 ◼ ► I think if anybody at Apple who was into liquid glass looked at our apps, they'd say, yeah, he did a good job.
00:23:36 ◼ ► It's becoming more and more well-known at this point that it's particularly on the Mac.
00:23:43 ◼ ► But given what Tahoe 26 looks like and what apps updated for it are supposed to look like, I think Net Newswire 7 looks pretty much like if you guys went and spent, like, if you and Stuart or just Stuart in this case, whoever, went to Apple's, you know, on-campus third-party developer lab and spent a month there and kind of, not that Apple, you go there and Apple is like, you do it our way.
00:24:15 ◼ ► Like, this is what, this is like an example that Apple itself could hold up and say, yes, this is a great adoption of the new language.
00:24:28 ◼ ► I'm not running Tahoe on my main machine, but I've got it down here on my podcast machine, and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, yeah, this looks like Net Newswire.
00:24:36 ◼ ► I, before I upgraded here on this machine, I opened Net Newswire 6.2 on this machine, and while it's super familiar to me as an app I use every day, I have to admit that the 6.2 look does look out of place on Tahoe.
00:24:52 ◼ ► And that's why it's sort of, I know exactly, and I think that's what you're thinking, right?
00:25:06 ◼ ► And we also don't want to get so far behind where Apple's at, because then that just leads to me spending years or whatever just to try and make up for that, right?
00:25:16 ◼ ► And that's why we also did structured concurrency, I've been adopting eSyncAway, there's a whole lot of Swift stuff that we were way behind on.
00:25:24 ◼ ► Frankly, there's still more work like that to do, plenty of it, but we've got a lot of it done.
00:25:41 ◼ ► It's retired so that you can work on this, and it is effectively, I mean, I don't know, you know, there might be new apps from Brent Simmons to come, but effectively, at this point, it's pretty clear that Net Newswire, in particular, is the signature work of your career.
00:26:00 ◼ ► The Daring Fireball website is mine, and BBEdit is Rich Siegel's, and I might come out with a new thing.
00:26:12 ◼ ► I might have new things to come, but I'm, at this point, it's highly unlikely, you know, I have found the thing that is my signature life's work, and I think Net Newswire is that for you.
00:26:22 ◼ ► And A, it makes me happy because I really do love the app and use it, but I'm happy for you, and I sort of sense that contentment in you.
00:26:35 ◼ ► When I was able to get it back in 2018, I was already writing a new RSS reader, but getting the name Net Newswire back, even though I didn't have to have that name, I wanted it, and it just makes sense, and it feels right.
00:27:08 ◼ ► And that's why, it was after my time, but that's why I never, and again, I didn't, like, I didn't show up at Rich Siegel's door and holding a sign, but I was never a fan when they renamed BB Edit Light, the free version of BB Edit, to Text Wrangler.
00:27:26 ◼ ► And made it a separate, because it's not a bad name, and in fact, it became popular enough with people who were using it for free that there's still, like, I think there's still some preferences that you can, like, change the icon to the Text Wrangler icon.
00:27:41 ◼ ► It's, there's, I don't know, I could start writing exactly the same stuff that I write at a new website with a different name, like, if I could trick somebody into buying Daring Fireball,
00:27:54 ◼ ► and then I go and start whatever, whatever ball, and just write what I, what I was writing, it's still my writing, and that's the main thing, but it wouldn't be the same if it's not called Daring Fireball.
00:28:09 ◼ ► At a certain point, the name becomes part of your emotional bond to the app, or the product, or whatever, and so I'm happy for you.
00:28:19 ◼ ► And I'm, I think it's such an interesting way that Net Newswire has evolved, where, and this was part of your vision, that originally it was, this was, you were an indie developer who was trying to make a career out, support yourself with the app by selling it the traditional indie way.
00:28:38 ◼ ► And then it got big, and then you had, you mentioned the acquisition with Newsgator, and, and, and then, of course, we can't, we don't have to hash it out, but then you and I and Dave Wiskus made Vesper together, which was a commercial concern.
00:28:54 ◼ ► And then we tried to sell the Notes app, or we did sell it, but tried to make a go of it as a, hey, we could make this a business.
00:29:10 ◼ ► Well, but, you know, it's not that, but, you know, we've got friends who are still, there's Paul Kafasis and Rogue Amoeba, who've got their, all that.
00:29:18 ◼ ► It's not that you can't, you're not saying that you can't, I don't think you're saying that you can't make money selling apps.
00:29:23 ◼ ► Right, you mentioned Guts with Acorn and RetroBatch, BBEdit, which I've mentioned several times already.
00:29:29 ◼ ► I mean, there's already, you can do it, but it's, it's like you, I could just tell, and I know you well enough that you were like, yeah, I'm done trying that.
00:29:37 ◼ ► Like, you just don't, it's not that you don't think it can be done, or that you think you can't do it.
00:29:46 ◼ ► So, like, the second coming of NetNewsWire has been an open source, use it for free of charge product from, that's how you envisioned it.
00:30:01 ◼ ► That was your vision for Evergreen, and then getting the name back is, no, I definitely don't want to sell it.
00:30:11 ◼ ► I want, by the mid-2010s or whatever, it was clear that the social networks were leading down a very, very dark place.
00:30:19 ◼ ► And, like, RSS is still a thing, and it's not owned by billionaires who are trying to monetize outrage or whatever.
00:31:02 ◼ ► It is, I think, as I recall from the heyday of the first run of NetNewsWire, there's fewer options and settings.
00:31:12 ◼ ► And NetNewsWire was never a construct-your-own-RSS reader Lego kit where you could have totally different styles of presentation.
00:31:23 ◼ ► But it had more options in configurability because, like you said earlier, that's sort of the developer mindset where complexifying is good.
00:31:32 ◼ ► Because if we can support this style or that style, we could have both this style and that style's users' fans as users of the app.
00:31:42 ◼ ► And the second NetNewsWire is, to me, more opinionated, but in a very humble way where it just, you know, it is, would you still describe it as a mail-style NetNewsWire?
00:31:59 ◼ ► I mean, that's how I would describe it to somebody who's like, well, what's the, I use some other feed reader, what's the gist with NetNewsWire?
00:32:14 ◼ ► It's probably not for you because that's sort of the basic gist where there's, where you've got mailboxes on the far left in mail.
00:32:34 ◼ ► And so in a way that I could have multiple email accounts, I've got multiple feed accounts.
00:32:37 ◼ ► In a way that Mail lets you have some mailboxes that are just on your Mac, you can have an account on NetNewsWire for Mac that's, or a feed that's just on your Mac.
00:32:49 ◼ ► And then within a feed, there are articles, which are like messages in mail, and then you click on that list, and then you get the details of the article you're reading to the side.
00:33:01 ◼ ► Except that NetNewsWire is a lot faster and supports keyboard arrowing across all three columns with just the arrow keys, just like the old days.
00:33:12 ◼ ► In a way that when I, it still happens to me, even though those are two apps that I always have running on my Mac.
00:33:19 ◼ ► If I spend enough time in NetNewsWire, I'll go back to Mail, and I expect the arrow keys to work the way they do in NetNewsWire, and I'm mad all over again.
00:33:46 ◼ ► And it's like, if you have just so used to iOS, where you have to poke and tap on everything, and you think that Mac apps work the same way, and you've never...
00:33:56 ◼ ► I wonder, as people listening, it might be that you're like, wait, I can use the arrow keys to go between the columns, like the feeds and the articles in NetNewsWire?
00:34:07 ◼ ► And you can use the arrow key to go from the list of articles and arrow to the right to the article list view, so that space bar will scroll the article.
00:34:26 ◼ ► I do know how it works, but I just realized as I'm sitting here playing with it, talking to you, I'm like, oh, yeah, I don't do that.
00:34:47 ◼ ► And I was able to beta test that one, because I am running iOS 26 on my iPhone and iPad.
00:34:53 ◼ ► I had the sense as a beta tester that the iOS version was closer to shipping than the Mac version, but the Mac version is out and the iOS version is still test flight, but it's nearing completion, clearly.
00:35:16 ◼ ► And it may sound odd or counterintuitive, but iOS apps are just more complicated than Mac apps, at least for this kind of app.
00:35:51 ◼ ► There's just so many different things or so many whatever gestures and I don't know, just all kinds of stuff.
00:36:04 ◼ ► You said about the current version of NetNewsWire not having so many settings and customizable things as the original, which I, in my head, call NetNewsWire of yore.
00:36:14 ◼ ► So NetNewsWire of yore did in part because people would say, hey, if you had this, maybe I'd buy it, right?
00:36:33 ◼ ► But worse than that, I started seeing the kind of level of anxiety that a lot of settings would cause in people.
00:36:45 ◼ ► And then I'd hear from people who'd spend, like, hours trying to customize it to the way it ought to be.
00:36:57 ◼ ► I mean, it's not that there are no settings, but I definitely tried really hard to keep a lid on it just because I don't want to contribute to that anxiety any more than an app already needs to.
00:37:12 ◼ ► But I don't want to, in the rest of my, in the design decisions, just keep piling on anxiety on users.
00:37:22 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like the Einstein quote, everything should be as simple as possible, but not more so.
00:37:29 ◼ ► And that's sort of the art of having a vision behind an app is this is the job of actually designing and directing an app is to make those decisions and say, this is the way it's going.
00:37:44 ◼ ► And if everybody doesn't like it, well, you can't please all the people all the time anyway.
00:37:51 ◼ ► So rather than try and that's, that's sort of what the proliferation of preferences is in the pursuit of.
00:38:10 ◼ ► And I think that's one of those things that you that I think next time I have Rich Siegel on the show, he'll I'm sure admit to that.
00:38:30 ◼ ► But text editors in particular are really sort of an exception where you've kind of got to the baseline number of preferences that any programmers text editor has to support is pretty big.
00:38:50 ◼ ► I mean, you need a lot of that stuff and you don't know what any given developer needs.
00:39:15 ◼ ► And and then what do you is Net Newswire six still going to be available through the app store for users on old older hanging on to an old version of iOS?
00:39:26 ◼ ► I think that you can read download things that you've already downloaded, but I've not been in that position.
00:39:38 ◼ ► So it's not that huge of a worry for me for the Mac version, though, we do keep old versions around.
00:39:43 ◼ ► So if you're on Sequoia or even older, I think we have versions that run back to, I don't know, like 2000s era machines.
00:40:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I just wrote and I wrote about this on Daring Fireball recently where there was this.
00:40:05 ◼ ► So I knew and I talked about this privately, but there was this whole thing where StatCounter in particular was did not pick up on the fact that Safari on iOS had changed its user agent string to stop putting the version of iOS where it used to.
00:40:22 ◼ ► And StatCounter, which is a huge, huge analytics thing that zillions of websites have in and they've for years and years and years, as long as I can remember, StatCounter publishes things like, oh, what percentage of desktop computers run Windows?
00:40:49 ◼ ► Because they didn't pick up on the user agent string change in Safari on iOS 26, they were reporting this preposterously low number of iPhone users overall who had upgraded to iOS 26 and a whole bunch of websites picked up on it like, hey, everybody must really hate liquid glass because only 15% of iPhone users had upgraded.
00:41:10 ◼ ► And a whole bunch of developers, and a whole bunch of developers I know, and a common sense says that does not sound right to me at all, because it's usually by December and January, at least 60, 65, 70%, maybe higher somewhere around there.
00:41:25 ◼ ► And so like, like high 50% would be like, hey, it's a little low compared to previous years, but 15% is, it's almost impossible.
00:41:38 ◼ ► Like, it might be 15% of iPhone users are running new iPhones that come and only run iOS 26, or certainly close to 15%.
00:41:54 ◼ ► But I just catching up on it and looking at it and talking to developers who have analytics and version checking, it's still it is maybe a little slower than in previous years, but only because Apple's not forced, but automatic upgrades that which is what most users do.
00:42:13 ◼ ► And Apple steers most users when they set up a new phone, or if they have an old phone, and they upgrade the OS, and you have to go through that first run onboarding for a major new version of the OS, Apple tries to steer you with a big blue button that says, turn on auto updates.
00:42:32 ◼ ► And it's like, no, I'll do it manually is smaller text at the bottom, they steer people towards this.
00:42:41 ◼ ► And they get the new OS when Apple, when one night they go to bed and it and they wake up in the morning and their phone is now running iOS 26.
00:42:52 ◼ ► And Apple has been a little slower than in previous years of doing that than they've had, like, they've just last week or middle of January, so maybe a week and a half ago, started a second push after one in December, where they've clearly auto started pushing auto updates to more people than before.
00:43:18 ◼ ► But everything I've seen is that iOS 26 is going to be at around 80% of iPhones very soon if it's not there already.
00:43:47 ◼ ► But taste for iOS 26 and liquid glass aside, I think it was somewhat buggier than the last few years of releases in the .0 and even the .1 release.
00:44:03 ◼ ► And it is, the iPhone in particular, because the new iPhones are going to come out in September, the hardware, and the hardware is revision locked to that year's new OS.
00:44:21 ◼ ► They can make it so that you really have to go hunt into settings, software update to get it if you are on an old phone.
00:44:37 ◼ ► But if it's out on any of the phones, it has to be out, at least for all the phones that it eventually will be.
00:44:45 ◼ ► You know, and maybe that's sort of, again, whether you like liquid glass aside or not, I think it might be the nature of something that's significant system-wide.
00:44:54 ◼ ► That it would be pretty hard to ship an update like that and not have it be a little bit slower of a rollout if you want to keep as many people from being angry as possible.
00:45:11 ◼ ► But talk to me about, like, on the Mac, I think we're seeing fewer apps that are Tahoe only.
00:45:23 ◼ ► I mean, how much of it is just, it's okay because we can split it and build for the future.
00:45:28 ◼ ► And if you're still running Sequoia or anything older, the NetNewsWire 6.2 is there and it's great.
00:45:50 ◼ ► But to get to whatever is next, the next look for Apple, you kind of have to go through every stage of evolution, right?
00:46:12 ◼ ► But then we've just got more and more tech debt and then it would be even harder to do it the following year.
00:46:31 ◼ ► And so the more we get behind, the more tech debt we have, the more of all of that, just the harder it is to move forward.
00:46:40 ◼ ► And enough of that happened that I wanted to make sure we can get caught up and maybe even get ahead and do some new features one of these days.
00:46:48 ◼ ► I keep bringing up BBEdit, but it's hard for me because when I'm talking about one Mac app I've been using for a very long time, it's hard not to.
00:46:56 ◼ ► But somebody on the BBEdit Slack a couple months ago brought up, just mentioned that they'd – and I think it's somebody who's contributed code.
00:47:05 ◼ ► I forget who – I'm not trying to hide somebody's name, but it's somebody who's contributed to the code for Bare Bones, but had mentioned that they're not sure they can remember a time in the last 25 or 30 years where they weren't running a beta build of BBEdit.
00:47:22 ◼ ► And I was thinking, well, that's probably true for me too, and I'm trying to think about it.
00:47:29 ◼ ► It's not 100% of the days because there are times where I know that I wasn't because the release version of BBEdit comes out and whatever the next beta is doesn't come out to the internal beta testing team or the external beta testing team for weeks because maybe Rich is working on something major.
00:47:47 ◼ ► But I'm 100% certain that the majority of my work days for the last at least 30 years or 25 years at least, I've been using a beta build of BBEdit.
00:48:00 ◼ ► That's how cutting edge – and that's how stable BBEdit betas are, that you can actually rely on them.
00:48:06 ◼ ► I can count on like one hand the number of times where that beta came out and something didn't work and I had to revert to the shipping version.
00:48:21 ◼ ► I'm just on the beta train and I wish all of my non-beta software were as stable as NetNewsWire betas are.
00:48:38 ◼ ► But we've got it now where I think it's more stable than probably any iPhone version we've ever had.
00:48:43 ◼ ► So in terms of stability, there's a few bugs to fix, but stability, it's like I think we're down to just the few Apple crashes that we can't fix.
00:48:52 ◼ ► Yeah, and it seems – because it's built – the whole concept is around this open thing, RSS, and the various flavors of XML feeds and JSON feed now.
00:49:04 ◼ ► And the accounts like Feedbin, which is what I use, the advantage of it is that there is no incompatibility like for me.
00:49:13 ◼ ► Like it is – I keep saying I feel weird that I'm not running the latest version of NetNewsWire on my Mac that I work on.
00:49:20 ◼ ► But it's no hiccup to me that my iPhone is on the latest beta from like yesterday and my Mac is on the stable version from months ago because it's easy to keep it in sync.
00:49:35 ◼ ► So any kind of combination between, well, my iPad's on an old version, but my iPhone and Mac are on the version 7.
00:49:47 ◼ ► And so you kind of – it gives you a flexibility that you wouldn't have if it was like a document format compatibility thing, right?
00:49:56 ◼ ► Like I don't think it's – for example, there's a new version of Omni Outliner that came out, and I'm guessing there's probably – you probably don't want to be running the new version of Omni Outliner on your phone, but an older version on your Mac.
00:50:13 ◼ ► Oh, it might, or they might give you an option to use an older file format or something.
00:50:18 ◼ ► But I'll bet it was more – at the very least, it was more work on their end to support that in a way that NetNewsWire doesn't really have to worry about it.
00:50:26 ◼ ► Well, yeah, and you could use NetNewsWire on your Mac and some other feed reader on your iPhone.
00:50:45 ◼ ► So the one thing I want to talk about in particular – and I mentioned this when Jalkit was on the previous episode of the show, and I thought, well, why – and I mentioned you and Paul and Rogue Amoeba at the end.
00:50:59 ◼ ► And then that's what put the bee in my bonnet to – I should just have Brent on the next episode of the show – is the one thing about Tahoe in particular that to me is like at the bullseye of here's what's wrong with the whole UI is the –
00:51:29 ◼ ► And NetNewsWire 7 on Tahoe doesn't have icons for any of the menu items, including ones in the NetNewsWire menu.
00:51:46 ◼ ► And I talked about that with Jalkit, which is that that's – and that's a menu that's had icons on the Mac for many, many versions now.
00:51:56 ◼ ► This is where you go window, Move and Resize, and you can say like halves, left or right.
00:52:01 ◼ ► And the icon tells you, oh, if you go to the left, it'll make – the current window, it'll make it 50% of the display size anchored to the left of the screen.
00:52:15 ◼ ► And I mentioned with Jalkit last week, like an icon that would be super helpful going back 20, 30 years but wasn't there would be like in Preview or the Photos app when you go to Image Rotate Clockwise or Counter Clockwise.
00:52:34 ◼ ► But once you think about it, they should always have had icons because the icon tells somebody which way it's going to rotate way faster than thinking about the words clockwise or counterclockwise.
00:52:50 ◼ ► Well, that doesn't make sense either because are you talking about the top or the bottom?
00:52:56 ◼ ► I think that rotate – this is what I think is clockwise and counterclockwise are the terms that are the clearest.
00:53:05 ◼ ► But there are a significant number of people who those words don't work right for them.
00:53:20 ◼ ► My wife, Amy, she struggles – it's not she doesn't know her left from right, but she has to think about left and right for a second.
00:53:27 ◼ ► You know, if you say turn left, she has to think left instead of just knowing it, as opposed to if you say turn that way and point, she just goes that way.
00:53:37 ◼ ► And clockwise and counterclockwise, some people just have a problem with, and I think they tried to fix it some apps over the years by saying, oh, we'll say left or right.
00:53:48 ◼ ► And people would just think, well, I don't know, one of them is Command-R, and if it turns my image upside down, I'll just hit it two more times.
00:53:58 ◼ ► If I hit it three times, I'll get – I either have to hit it once or have to hit it three times, and I don't know, one way or the other.
00:54:03 ◼ ► But if you're looking at the menu item, the icon for rotate clockwise or counterclockwise makes it super crystal clear in the same way that the icon for move the window to the left does.
00:54:15 ◼ ► And that's the point that makes my head explode about putting icons for everything is when you only put icons next to the commands where it clarifies the command.
00:54:27 ◼ ► And I would say a good rule of thumb for that would be if you took the name of the command away, people could still guess what it does.
00:54:35 ◼ ► So if it says image and then there's an icon that shows a rectangle rotating this way and the next command down shows a rectangle with an arrow going the other way, I think almost everybody would be able to guess what those commands do without even putting the word rotate, let alone clockwise or counterclockwise.
00:55:00 ◼ ► But when you add an icon to every single command in every menu, then even the icons that add clarity just get lost in the visual noise, just completely lost.
00:55:15 ◼ ► I really and I really think it it just it's I'm not going to stop hammering it until hopefully iOS 20 or Mac OS 27 gets announced and they they reverse course on it.
00:55:31 ◼ ► This is one of those things I'm going to hammer on till the end of time because I'm so sure that it is a mistake.
00:55:37 ◼ ► And the only reason to stick with it is stubbornness, not because there's any defense for it.
00:56:12 ◼ ► And the other thing I didn't mention this with Jowkit, but the other thing, and it really annoys me about this because it's a change Apple made two or three years ago, I think maybe longer.
00:56:23 ◼ ► But this change that they made two or three years ago where they draw the system draws the menu command or the keyboard commands for a shortcut.
00:56:50 ◼ ► And it's – it makes me – it's still to this day, I don't know how many years now I've been living with it.
00:57:09 ◼ ► The thinking is somebody, Alan Dye or somebody in his circle who doesn't get the Mac and doesn't understand why this is a terrible idea, who's against the menu bar overall and is part of the movement that's made the menu bar less visually striking.
00:57:27 ◼ ► There was a scary moment for a while where it seemed like Apple might be moving towards hiding the menu bar by default on the Mac, which I think would be catastrophically bad.
00:57:37 ◼ ► And just making it less – somebody who thinks that this is all noise and that all these keyboard shortcuts are just noise.
00:57:44 ◼ ► So, maybe somebody even said, why don't we get rid of them and maybe only have them show up if you hold the command key down, right?
00:57:51 ◼ ► So, you pull the menu and you don't even see the shortcuts and you have to hold the command key down and then they show up so that those ugly shortcuts aren't listed in the menu items.
00:58:04 ◼ ► But something happened where somebody thinks that drawing them in black text like the menu commands or white text like the menu commands if you're in dark mode thinks that that looks bad, right?
00:58:16 ◼ ► It can't be that they think it's easier to read if they're gray because it's harder to read if it's gray.
00:58:27 ◼ ► It's actually useful information because, A, it teaches you if you keep going to the menu bar with your mouse
00:58:34 ◼ ► and pulling down to the same command, if you see it enough times, you might remember the shortcut and then start using the shortcut instead and feel like you're saving time.
00:58:44 ◼ ► But there's also, I think, a sort of implicit aspect to a menu command, which is that if not all menu items in an app get menu commands.
00:58:56 ◼ ► Net Newswire, I'm looking, actually has them for most commands, but that's because you don't have a lot of commands.
00:59:11 ◼ ► But if you look at an app, the ones that have commands are the ones that the developer is saying,
00:59:37 ◼ ► That's a visual, it's very subtle, it's not in your face, but it's a visual signal to the user,
00:59:43 ◼ ► hey, this is actually so important that it got a simple command, no option, no shift, no control, just command K shortcut.
01:00:03 ◼ ► And then to keep them grayed out, but then add the visual noise of these needless icons that nobody was asking for,
01:00:11 ◼ ► is extra crazy making, because you've already hidden the thing that's both traditional and expected and useful as grayed out text,
01:00:27 ◼ ► And as we've seen, completely inconsistent between different apps, even Apple apps, too.
01:00:36 ◼ ► Right, right, the articles that came out about it were comparing, like, the same exact command name,
01:00:42 ◼ ► like, in different apps, was using different icons, because it's so hard to come up with some of these things,
01:01:04 ◼ ► And our friend, Paul Kafasis, based on the code that you shared for, oh, here's how you can do this,
01:01:13 ◼ ► And by default, Rogue Amoeba's apps, updated for Tahoe, aren't going to draw menu icons for every menu item,
01:01:20 ◼ ► or menu items, period, other than, I guess, specific exceptions, like NetNewsWire with the move and resize.
01:01:34 ◼ ► My goal with that initial post, where I had a little bit of code to do this, was that, yeah, this is one of those places where Indies and open source developers can push back on Apple just by what they ship in their app.
01:01:47 ◼ ► To show, like, look, we all don't think this is so great, and it looks like our users agree with us.
01:02:08 ◼ ► But, you know, at this point, almost 20 years into the iOS era, being an Apple platform developer, there's always been an ebb and flow of whether the direction of the platform is being steered by Apple or being steered by third-party developers.
01:02:35 ◼ ► And sometimes it's all in on Apple because it's brand new, like when the iPhone first came out.
01:02:42 ◼ ► Well, of course, Apple led the way on how iPhone apps were going to work in 2007 in the jailbreak era in 2008 when the App Store first came out because they'd invented the whole thing.
01:02:58 ◼ ► And there was the era like in the 90s when the Mac was sort of languishing because Apple was busy trying to build these next generation successors, not the next version of the Mac, but something to succeed the Mac the way that the Mac did to the Apple II that never panned out.
01:03:21 ◼ ► System 7.5 was the current version of Mac OS for a ridiculous number of years in hindsight.
01:03:36 ◼ ► And as bad of a stretch as that was for Apple, it was actually a remarkably fun stretch for great software for Mac users.
01:04:00 ◼ ► So a modern equivalent of that would be pull-to-refresh, where I'm drawing a blank on his name, Tweety.
01:04:12 ◼ ► Lauren Brichter made this great Twitter client called Tweety and added an interaction on the phone where you pulled it.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Well, Lauren Brichter, who had worked at Apple before but was on his own, came up with it, and now it's everywhere.
01:04:30 ◼ ► Anywhere where you can refresh something, it's built into the system, it's built into the system list views, but it was invented in a third-party, one third-party app, and you can say who did it.
01:04:41 ◼ ► And I just mentioned that on Daring Fireball the other day when I was looking, I opened up the Stickies app for the first time in forever.
01:04:51 ◼ ► You double-click the title bar of the app, and the whole content, other than the top of the window, just rolls up into the top of the window, and you can see what's behind it.
01:05:02 ◼ ► And you can just leave the window as the bar, just the bar, and then just double-click it again, and it rolls back down.
01:05:17 ◼ ► And we had smaller screens at the time, so you could put fewer things side by side, but it was a way that you could, like, look underneath the app you were working on, just double-click, look underneath at the thing underneath.
01:05:32 ◼ ► And without moving the mouse cursor, you could just double-click again, and it would window shade down.
01:05:38 ◼ ► That's the difference between what replaced it with Mac OS X and minimizing to the dock, is you can double-click a window title bar on the Mac, if it has a title bar, to minimize it to the dock.
01:05:54 ◼ ► But if it minimized to the dock by double-clicking the title bar, maybe that's a setting.
01:06:06 ◼ ► And again, there were dozens of utilities like that and dozens of great apps that just sort of pushed the ball forward.
01:06:30 ◼ ► And it's like, in the way that Apple, when Apple came roaring back to life with Mac OS X and Steve Jobs in the 2000s, and it was like a large part of the appeal was like, hey, if you're going to be working in front of this computer all day long, you should think it looks really cool.
01:06:52 ◼ ► And if, you know, if it looks really, really cool, like this is actually one of the best designed user interfaces I've ever seen, and it sort of seems like it was pulled from a couple years in the future, and here it is on my Mac right now, all the better that it's something as stupidly nerdy as an FTP app.
01:07:21 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like that there are maybe younger people who don't remember Apple losing its way like they have, especially on the Mac in recent years, who sort of have a more deferential mindset that, well, who is an independent?
01:07:42 ◼ ► If they say put an icon next to every menu item, you should just put an icon next to every menu item and file a radar and flush that feedback right down the toilet.
01:07:54 ◼ ► Go waste five minutes of your life suggesting that Apple make it optional to have these icons and file a feedback and then see what happens, right?
01:08:33 ◼ ► I keep thinking, like, well, it's good that I use Tahoe somewhere, like on my podcast Mac.
01:08:43 ◼ ► Like, I'm looking at the Finder, and you go to the Go menu, and the first command is Back.
01:08:48 ◼ ► And I'm like, I swear to God, even though we're talking, literally talking about these icons, the back menu looks like a left-facing chevron.
01:09:26 ◼ ► So I guess what I'm hoping is for anybody out there listening, and just, I don't even think it's protest, per se.
01:09:33 ◼ ► I think it's standing up for principle that you don't have to go along with something that you know in your bones to be a bad idea just because Apple is doing it, right?
01:09:43 ◼ ► Like, if everybody at Apple started wearing overalls without a shirt underneath, you don't have to dress like that.
01:09:57 ◼ ► And if it is a protest, it's the best kind where you're giving your users a better experience.
01:10:05 ◼ ► And Apple, people at Apple who are using the apps that don't put the menu items next to, the icons next to every menu item, can get the hint that developers outside the company disagree with this, too.
01:10:32 ◼ ► It is, once again, our very good friends at, you guessed it, Squarespace, the all-in-one platform where you can build your own presence online.
01:10:43 ◼ ► I talk about Squarespace almost every episode because they are the longest-running and most common sponsor here on the talk show.
01:10:51 ◼ ► And they do, I swear, I keep thinking, well, someday the day is going to come where they take a hiatus, I guess.
01:10:59 ◼ ► But they don't because people who listen to the talk show keep signing up for Squarespace accounts.
01:11:06 ◼ ► Or what I believe to be the case, a lot of people who listen to the show are the go-to nerd in their little social circle, their friends, their family, whoever, and somebody comes to you, listener of the talk show, and needs a new website.
01:11:20 ◼ ► Or they have a problem with their existing website and you look at it and you're like, you're the one thinking you need a new website.
01:11:27 ◼ ► Send them to Squarespace and start them at Squarespace and instead of you building them a website or telling them to build a website or how to build a website or doing it, just send them to Squarespace and set them on their own.
01:11:40 ◼ ► And they will guide normal people in the same way that at some point in the past it was difficult, it was incomprehensible for normal people to make.
01:11:52 ◼ ► A poster for a birthday party on their own with different fonts and like a custom artwork or something like that.
01:12:03 ◼ ► Squarespace does that for websites, whole websites, including really not just basic stuff, but like really advanced stuff like commerce, selling your time, selling a product, anything like that.
01:12:24 ◼ ► And I'm telling you, normal people can figure it out on their own and integrate it into a website that they're building.
01:12:40 ◼ ► And if you don't want to use AI, you can keep using Squarespace the way you used to, drag and drop and WYSIWYG.
01:12:46 ◼ ► And if you do want to use AI, you could just issue commands to it and say things like, how do I add a store to my website where I sell T-shirts?
01:13:24 ◼ ► You get 30-day free trial to build the website, make it a totally real product, totally real experience.
01:14:08 ◼ ► It's really nicely done, interestingly done essay talking about RSS readers as male-like apps, right?
01:14:33 ◼ ► I mean, I've always been super sensitive to the ways my apps can cause anxiety in the users.
01:14:42 ◼ ► To do an entirely different model for Net Newswire, though, would be to change the app.
01:15:04 ◼ ► Things like Flipboard, not an RSS reader per se, but surely uses RSS in amongst other things
01:15:12 ◼ ► I'd like to see more in kind of regular dedicated RSS readers, more different UI models.
01:15:24 ◼ ► And I think it's different from, say, web browsers, where they're all at a certain fundamental.
01:15:35 ◼ ► But I have to admit that amongst the many apps that I would say, this is my go-to, my go-to text
01:15:40 ◼ ► editor, my go-to feed reader, but I could switch from Safari to Chrome, and it would be the
01:15:51 ◼ ► else, because there is sort of a basic fundamental sameness where you've got tabs across the top
01:15:59 ◼ ► And some of the most innovative stuff that happens is like when a browser every couple of
01:16:24 ◼ ► And you and I both have very good friends who use Arc from the browser company, which actually
01:16:33 ◼ ► But there's a sameness to browsers because it's the job of a browser is just to sort of render
01:16:52 ◼ ► Like Dave Weiner's, his work is always centered around those rivers, as he calls them, rivers of news, where he doesn't want columns and categories and breaking things down into sites.
01:17:06 ◼ ► He just wants, just here's a whole bunch of feeds, get all the articles from all the feeds, put them in chronological order and put them in a list and let me start scrolling.
01:17:16 ◼ ► And there's so, and even within that description, he's come up with so many different ways to present it.
01:17:24 ◼ ► And the people experimenting with different ways of presenting it don't need to boil the ocean by going to every single site that produces a popular feed and ask for, can you change your feed to support this?
01:17:39 ◼ ► You know, me who writes a website that produces a somewhat popular feed, I haven't changed any of my feeds since JSON feed came out and I created a new one for that.
01:18:03 ◼ ► So this essay on the phantom obligation, I feel like it's both about the user interface design and taking that off, but also sort of implicitly a diatribe against social media and the social media platforms, right?
01:18:24 ◼ ► So with the feed reader, the literally often in red, the red flag is the unred count, right?
01:18:33 ◼ ► And you've said multiple times on this episode that you don't feel good about the fact that by default it shows a number and therefore implies that you should take care of, get this number down to zero to make the red badge go away.
01:19:09 ◼ ► I guess John Syracuse tries to consume it that way, but it's the nature of it that you can't.
01:19:19 ◼ ► I mean, I use ivory and as I'm scrolling, it puts a little unred count at the upper right.
01:19:44 ◼ ► But to me, all of those platforms have more of a sense of obligation in the back of my head.
01:20:53 ◼ ► I publish a website where if something news breaking happens related to certain topics, I need to know about it.
01:21:02 ◼ ► Like when Alan Dye got poached by Meta, people were looking for me to write something about it.
01:21:12 ◼ ► But it often occurs to me like when I realized, hey, I just wasted a lot of time on Threads or Blue Sky or Mastodon or whatever.
01:21:33 ◼ ► And it often occurred to me like, somehow I stayed on top of the news before any of this shit existed.
01:21:41 ◼ ► You know, and you can say in hindsight, that era of the internet before the social media platforms, I guess, is shorter than the period after, you know, after Twitter.
01:21:58 ◼ ► But, you know, it was a different kind of work you had to do and maybe you'd have to go out and buy a couple newspapers every day or something like that.
01:22:08 ◼ ► But I think there was a sweet spot where, like, for example, I don't want to have a TV on.
01:22:24 ◼ ► But, like, A, I'm not going to get the news that I published on Daring Fireball from TV.
01:22:28 ◼ ► But even if I did, even if my main beat was national affairs, I would not be able to work with CNN or MS Now on 24-7 all day.
01:22:38 ◼ ► It just seems to me that there was a sweet spot in that heyday of the early 2000s when RSS came out and the internet was out.
01:23:00 ◼ ► It was like a sweet spot of this is the right, for me, the right amount of staying on top of news.
01:23:06 ◼ ► And social media is just inherently pulling your attention because it is optimized for engagement.
01:23:33 ◼ ► It was just tended to be a bit more thoughtful, a bit more deliberate, less trollish, for sure.
01:23:46 ◼ ► And I've really been mindfully, recent weeks, maybe months, but certainly weeks, feels like
01:23:54 ◼ ► something I've been more mindful about, specifically in the cold weather here, to link more to other
01:24:16 ◼ ► And there was a period where I think I kind of got away from that to some degree because I
01:24:21 ◼ ► could tell that Daring Fireball in, like, the Apple sphere was of outsized influence and
01:24:30 ◼ ► And I've always enjoyed being able to shine a light on a really good piece from somebody
01:24:47 ◼ ► And the link would break their website because it was hitting the database on every view.
01:24:51 ◼ ► And I took a perverse pride in that, and I never stopped, but I stopped with the conversations.
01:24:57 ◼ ► And I know, but the biggest reason was that the conversations were happening on Twitter.
01:25:04 ◼ ► And sometimes I'll go back and look at just a month of the monthly linked list archive from
01:25:17 ◼ ► And I see how many of my posts were social media size and were just sort of a very brief
01:25:51 ◼ ► And I'm so I'm just doing what I can myself to do it to lead by example and just do more
01:26:01 ◼ ► of it and answer back and have instead of trying to do it all in one big post split the same
01:26:15 ◼ ► And I kind of feel maybe it's wishful thinking, but I kind of feel I don't think it's ever
01:26:20 ◼ ► going to surge like it did when it was an explosion of people starting blogs in the early 2000s.
01:26:26 ◼ ► But I do think that more people are starting blogs or blogging on long dormant blogs than
01:26:54 ◼ ► The web can be our social network and it can be a better one than than the ones we've had.
01:27:27 ◼ ► I can actually see how their algorithm works sometimes and that they almost get me where
01:27:36 ◼ ► We're furious like I would be like about certain, let's say, Trump news or ice is kidnapped
01:27:46 ◼ ► But they know me that their algorithm is so goddamn good where they know that the thing
01:27:56 ◼ ► What they'll show me is somebody who's like really profoundly wrong about something about
01:28:12 ◼ ► And it's the one platform where I think I've started more replies and then just delete it.
01:28:43 ◼ ► It just kind of more just makes me sad that I can see that that's the way thread work threads
01:28:48 ◼ ► works, because I can also see that they're strategically charting out an identity that is very different
01:28:55 ◼ ► from Elon Musk's Twitter, which is where people go to see the things that make them actually
01:29:01 ◼ ► furiously angry about current events and screaming at each other and really being ugly and bad
01:29:08 ◼ ► And that threads is using their they're much better with the algorithms than anybody else.
01:29:17 ◼ ► But there it's somehow it seems it is nicer in a way, but it's more like arguing over petty
01:29:32 ◼ ► And I would never in a million years do it with Daring Fireball and responding to somebody
01:29:39 ◼ ► But even with Blue Sky, which I think is much better intentioned, and and I think they're
01:29:45 ◼ ► doing really interesting open stuff with the AT protocol and Mastodon, which is the more
01:30:50 ◼ ► But I, and again, there's sort of like a golden era of RSS and there's a golden era of more
01:30:56 ◼ ► people having personal blogs and actually spending time blogging that is never going to come back.
01:31:03 ◼ ► It, when it was the only way to express yourself to the entire internet, it, it got more people
01:31:15 ◼ ► Now that there are these zero or almost zero friction ways to do it on a, on Twitter or threads
01:31:24 ◼ ► But I do think it's coming back and I think, I think there's sort of a, an appreciation
01:31:30 ◼ ► for, Oh, this, this is a lasting and better way to sort of do this, you know, and that we
01:31:38 ◼ ► can have thoughts that aren't measured in hundreds of characters, but rather hundreds of words.
01:31:52 ◼ ► And that is the other thing that I've noticed is, and I really am just trying to, I went from,
01:32:04 ◼ ► And I'm just saying, you know, roughly winter, like November through now, just sort of trying
01:32:11 ◼ ► to force myself mindfully not to open any of those apps for longer stretches of the day.
01:32:24 ◼ ► When you don't rely on social media networks for staying, Hey, what if there is breaking news?
01:32:33 ◼ ► If you are, if you're at the top of your blue sky feed and something else happens, there's another
01:32:43 ◼ ► You are going to find out about it within minutes by staying at the top of your blue sky feed.
01:32:48 ◼ ► You'll find out about it even if you don't open blue sky though, and you'll find out about
01:32:56 ◼ ► If it's a new app that's come out or the stuff like about just the news that the clod bot got
01:33:04 ◼ ► renamed to molt bot because anthropic objected to the homonym and the name of Trent, you could
01:33:13 ◼ ► It's just that if you're on social media and you're checking frequently and you're at the
01:33:33 ◼ ► But it used to, I know that it used to, because I used to be on top of the news and the days
01:34:05 ◼ ► And if you just open blue sky, you'll be guaranteed of knowing if there's anything new.
01:34:09 ◼ ► And it's like, it kind of takes a bit of mindfulness and a deep breath to say, yeah, I can still
01:34:17 ◼ ► run a vaguely news oriented website without being on social media for long stretches of
01:34:39 ◼ ► Like writing a script that tells me exactly how many words I write each day and looking
01:34:58 ◼ ► But I know that I've been more productive than I have been in a while on Daring Fireball.
01:35:05 ◼ ► I think one of them is sort of being mindful about not just staying away from the bad social
01:35:11 ◼ ► media, Twitter or threads or whatever, the ones where there's a company trying to algorithmically
01:35:23 ◼ ► I can literally feel my productivity increasing and there's nothing that makes me feel better
01:35:35 ◼ ► And I just feel, and I, again, I don't, it's not like, yeah, and I sleep just fine feeling
01:35:54 ◼ ► Net Newswire and go to the Today smart feed and just look at the top, if something really
01:36:12 ◼ ► And it really does compete on the one thing that we all have the same amount of, which is
01:36:30 ◼ ► And what I learned is kind of all across corporate software, which is that it's not that there is
01:36:55 ◼ ► And there are some side effects of that, which Mike talks about, like all the little tips and
01:37:20 ◼ ► But also, there still is no replacement for somebody whose job is the vision of that app.
01:37:41 ◼ ► I don't know Mike Swanson, but now after reading this essay, I would really like to, because
01:37:59 ◼ ► He's talking about A-B testing, and I'll just quote from it here, regarding A-B testing.
01:38:06 ◼ ► At that point, the product stops being a finished artifact and starts behaving like a laboratory.
01:38:14 ◼ ► Once that mindset takes hold, it's very hard not to optimize for what moves fastest, even
01:38:26 ◼ ► When experimentation becomes the primary decision-making tool, a strong product division becomes optional.
01:38:33 ◼ ► Not because anyone argues against vision, but because you don't strictly need it anymore.
01:38:46 ◼ ► If a decision goes wrong, you can always point to the data and say, we followed the evidence.
01:38:50 ◼ ► Over time, this can change the role of a product team, where judgment slowly gives way to iteration,
01:38:58 ◼ ► The product still evolves, but it does so without a clear sense of direction, only a sense of momentum.
01:39:14 ◼ ► So one way that PMs are measured is, you know, they run these A-B tests, and then they pick the winner,
01:39:24 ◼ ► So if we've increased listening minutes, for instance, for Audible, by this much, that will mean this much revenue.
01:39:31 ◼ ► So that PM is now responsible, because of some tweak they made and tested, for X amount of additional revenue per year.
01:39:49 ◼ ► Oh, you brought in an extra $10 million, so therefore you're going to get a raise, or whatever.
01:40:00 ◼ ► And, like I said, be careful what you measure, because then all of a sudden it becomes that it's that then that's what you're optimizing for, right?
01:40:17 ◼ ► And that you can, you think, like, well, how can optimizing only and always for getting on base not lead to more runs?
01:40:34 ◼ ► I was a talk that I gave twice, I think, in 2009 and 2010 that I called the auteur theory of design, which I should, I've been thinking before I even read this that I should revisit.
01:40:48 ◼ ► But basically arguing that software needs or any endeavor needs what the movie industry figured out a century ago, that somebody has to be the director whose taste is the ultimate.
01:41:01 ◼ ► This is the way, when decisions have to be made, there's somebody with a vision for the final product who is going to make the call on which way it goes.
01:41:10 ◼ ► And ultimately, the quality of the product approaches the taste, the level of taste of the person who's directing.
01:41:19 ◼ ► And so a really good director with a really bad crew, poor amateur actors and a low budget and whatever, is going to pull that under-talented crew towards a better movie because that's the level of taste that they're pushing people to.
01:41:40 ◼ ► A director with terrible taste, but terrific actors and all the budget they could want in the world and a great cinematographer is going to pull the quality of the movies they make towards Drek because their taste is bad, no matter how good the talent is.
01:41:56 ◼ ► And I think what's changed, what this essay really hit for me is that what I was arguing about 15 years ago when I gave that talk was software development by committee, where there's just a whole committee and consensus guides the software forward.
01:42:13 ◼ ► But I think what's happened, and because of these things, and in the essay, Swanson really kind of lays out the how we got here, those things didn't exist 15 years ago.
01:42:24 ◼ ► The always-on software reporting analytics back, the way that software can get tooltips from the server coming back.
01:42:45 ◼ ► But what Swanson's talking about and where software's gone is something I didn't even consider 15 years ago, which is visionless.
01:42:57 ◼ ► Somebody sets the metrics, and the software just inexorably steers itself towards those metrics, right?
01:43:10 ◼ ► The only thing that really matters at Threads or Twitter or TikTok is how long people keep scrolling and how many things they view and how many things they hit play if they're videos.
01:43:27 ◼ ► When you subscribe to the Criterion channel, to name a prestige name, it's not about how many movies you're going to watch in a month.
01:43:37 ◼ ► Whereas what YouTube really cares about is how many frigging hours you spent watching YouTube videos.
01:43:50 ◼ ► When you think about it, that these things that we all use to some degree, there is no vision behind them.
01:44:02 ◼ ► Someone has an idea like, oh, what if we slightly change this feature or even add a new feature of some kind?
01:44:10 ◼ ► It's not subject to thinking about quality or UX or anything particularly, though designers and stuff are involved.
01:44:28 ◼ ► And I do kind of feel like ultimately, I know that I don't even think Swanson once mentions any company at all by name.
01:44:43 ◼ ► It's just that push notifications on iOS were one of those transformative moments that got us from circa 2010 to 2026.
01:44:54 ◼ ► But I do think that what he's talking about gets to the heart of Tim Cook's weakness as CEO of Apple and why I kind of am hoping that he's going to ride off into the sunset sooner rather than later.
01:45:12 ◼ ► And it's not the more common knock against him is that he's a bean counter who's only worried about money and how much money Apple's making.
01:45:28 ◼ ► And I know that they're super financially successful and he cares about the money, obviously.
01:45:37 ◼ ► He does understand at a fundamental level that what makes Apple different and special and makes them profitable isn't just what they can charge money for and what the margins are.
01:45:47 ◼ ► But I think the weakness is that Tim Cook's mindset and I think it's to his credit that he knows he's not a designer and doesn't have a design and never tries to impose one, right?
01:46:05 ◼ ► In a way that famously when they pushed Steve Jobs out in 1985, John Scully clearly seemed to have a chip on his shoulder in the then jobsless Apple that he hadn't made a platform like Jobs had and tried to do something he I don't think he was good at.
01:46:26 ◼ ► There's no reports I've ever seen from anybody anonymous or otherwise that that he puts his two cents into design decisions.
01:46:50 ◼ ► And if that's how he likes to make decisions, I think more and more decisions within the company end up in it.
01:47:00 ◼ ► It's not that he's trying to make Apple different, but if ultimately he's the CEO and he likes arguments that can be made with numbers behind them, then slowly but surely the company is going to steer itself towards this type of, oh, you can assign a number to it.
01:47:18 ◼ ► And I think the course correction that they need after 15 years of Tim Cook at the CEO is somebody who's more willing to go back to, I think, Steve Jobs.
01:47:34 ◼ ► It was somebody who's willing to make things based on the feel of it and the gut feeling and the no, you could just tell by looking at it.
01:47:46 ◼ ► Could Tim Cook have come into Apple in 1997 or whatever it was and executed the greatest corporate turnaround?
01:48:00 ◼ ► I think as rightfully proud as he is of his job as the CEO and his leadership skills, I think he would be the first to say that he couldn't have done it.
01:48:08 ◼ ► And he said when Jobs hired him as COO in that era that everybody was telling him, you're nuts for even going out there for a job interview, because what the hell is Apple going to do?
01:48:18 ◼ ► So if that was kind of a revolutionary era for Apple, my question is, why does the revolution have to stop?
01:48:30 ◼ ► Continuing to work so hard, despite what the numbers may say sometimes, to bring great stuff to people.
01:48:41 ◼ ► I don't think this little 15-minute segment of a podcast is going to encapsulate where this backseat software essay from Mike Swanson pinpoints what's wrong with Tim Cook as the long-term leader of Apple.
01:48:54 ◼ ► But I think close, it can encapsulate a lot of it, which is that if everything has a value in a number for the major decisions, it's going to make it's I think Tim Cook would swear up and down that he hasn't been overly cautious as leader.
01:49:12 ◼ ► But I think inevitably you become overly cautious when you always and only make your biggest decisions based on numbers, because it prevents you from ever making decisions based on things that can't be enumerated.
01:49:26 ◼ ► What there's a saying that Swanson uses in his essay, he attributes it, but it's not all things that count can be counted and not all the things that are counted count.
01:49:44 ◼ ► And again, I know I'm hammering this one point, but it's like, that's why to me it should be an absolute red flag that anybody even proposed that it was in a pre-WWDC proposal for Mac OS 26, that they would put stupid icons next to every goddamn menu item.
01:50:07 ◼ ► I do think I, and I, I think my record since his death shows it that I'm pretty cautious about pulling out these Steve Jobs would have never allowed this card, but I'm going to say that if somebody had shown that to Steve Jobs, he would have said, get this shit out of my face.
01:50:27 ◼ ► This is just an instant revulsion, but somehow it's, it not only didn't get shot down at the proposal stage, but shipped.
01:50:35 ◼ ► And here we are, and it's not because Tim Cook should be asserting that Tim Cook should be the person who is, whose taste says, oh, this is a terrible idea for the user interface standard for the next version of Mac OS.
01:50:54 ◼ ► But I think that in a company that is ruled by his mindset of being able to put numbers on things, a decision like that, which it also can't have a number on it, can just somehow run all the way from proposal to shipping.
01:51:22 ◼ ► And some of the risks and some of the revolutionary ideas are going to be things that count, but can't be counted.
01:51:29 ◼ ► And you've got to make your decision based on conviction that comes from something that can't be assigned a number.
01:51:39 ◼ ► And if the argument is going to be over which set of numbers to value, not that they should be numeric in the first place.
01:51:46 ◼ ► I think that's what's run its course at Apple and has gotten now to the point where it's sort of the tire got blown a while ago and now the rim is sparking on the road.
01:51:59 ◼ ► Like you can't bring up Tim Cook and his decision making without, you know, he was at the White House last Saturday and I just, as saddened as I am by the current state of UI, that stuff just makes me angry, sad, worried.
01:52:22 ◼ ► Maybe there's, I don't know what all, but like, man, I'm willing for him to seek his bliss elsewhere.
01:52:32 ◼ ► There's something different about, and somebody else, I mean, I could obviously do, we could, I could do a whole two hour podcast on that nature.
01:52:40 ◼ ► And I, from what I've been writing about it, that I'm not shying away from talking about it.
01:52:45 ◼ ► But I wrote back to a reader the other day in email, I forget where I disagreed with him, but fundamentally that I see a big difference between Cook's approach to Trump in the first Trump administration and the second one.
01:53:00 ◼ ► And I think it's fundamentally based on the fact that it's Trump and the administration that are so different.
01:53:08 ◼ ► It is, whichever side you are, even if God knows how it's possible that if you're listening to my podcast and you're all on board and think Trump's doing a good job.
01:53:18 ◼ ► I think even the people who think he's doing a good job as president the second time around would be among just as equally sure as the rest of us that this, this one is very different from the first one.
01:53:30 ◼ ► I remember in the first one, the one time I really thought Tim Cook and Apple went too far was when they, they had a dog and pony show at the, the Mac pro plant in Texas and Trump showed up and it's, and it was, they were assembling Mac pros there, but for the most part, they were very few Apple products, even to this day, right now in January, 2026 are assembled in the United States.
01:54:08 ◼ ► They're never going to get in the near term, not going to, but do whatever they can to decrease every reliance on China and the supply chain in China that they can.
01:54:17 ◼ ► I thought that was over the line because it was, I think it was effectively a Trump reelection commercial that got to be shot.
01:54:26 ◼ ► And an Apple manufacturing plant, which to me crossed the line of, Hey, we're staying out of politics and whoever's elected, we're going to work with.
01:54:34 ◼ ► Whereas just one year into Trump 2.0, I think we could all name several things that Tim Cook has participated in that are worse or more.
01:54:48 ◼ ► Hey, whatever you think in private, what really matters are your actions and your actions say you support this shit.
01:55:00 ◼ ► Yes, it came from him personally, not Apple and a lot of the other companies that came.
01:55:18 ◼ ► It's like, Oh, so it came from the guy who leads and runs the thing instead of the thing.
01:55:29 ◼ ► And I think that this, the movie premiere and my wife, you know, I know that it's bad when my wife is talking to me about it.
01:55:38 ◼ ► Because it's not that she does, not that she never reads my site, but she's just not an Apple nerd.
01:55:47 ◼ ► And because she honestly, and she's kept the right kind of skeptical about what she sees on social media.
01:55:52 ◼ ► And the crazy part is that it was on the very day that Alex Preddy was killed by the Border Patrol agents on the streets in broad daylight in Minnesota.
01:56:15 ◼ ► So, like, even if you're of the opinion that flying to Washington, D.C. and accepting the invitation to attend this movie screening in the White House,
01:56:26 ◼ ► even if you're of the opinion that that was okay for Tim Cook to agree to, which I wouldn't have, and I don't think you would agree you wouldn't have.
01:56:35 ◼ ► But even if you're okay with that, after the news broke and you realize, and I'll bet that Tim Cook was like, I hope they've canceled the movie screening because of this news.
01:56:50 ◼ ► But how do you not just politely decline and just say, you know what, you don't have to make a stink.
01:56:59 ◼ ► Like, no, I'm not going to go to a propaganda documentary premiere on the day that something like this happened.
01:57:15 ◼ ► Well, then, as you wrote about, too, his response later this week made it worse yet again.
01:57:25 ◼ ► But I do wonder, too, it's a separate issue from him running Apple, and I kind of feel like if it's true, and again, I don't even know if it's true.
01:57:35 ◼ ► And, you know, German's reported it, Financial Times reported it, that he might announce his retirement over the course of this year.
01:57:43 ◼ ► I've heard that within Apple that everybody is like, we don't know where this is coming from because nobody who knows him has heard this.
01:57:51 ◼ ► But I kind of feel like if it were to happen, especially while Trump remains in office, that if John Ternus takes over as CEO, it'd be to run Apple.
01:58:03 ◼ ► But that Tim Cook, as chairman of the board, would still be the person dealing with Trump, which might be for the best, right?
01:58:21 ◼ ► Whereas I kind of felt like he did a very good job of it, even when I was unhappy about it.
01:58:27 ◼ ► In the first Trump administration, in the second one, there's a, I don't think you're playing this the right way.
01:58:33 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like the proof of it was with the first one when Biden got elected in 2020 and became president.
01:58:39 ◼ ► And it wasn't like, oh, now Apple has to do this big about face and turn around, you know, like the way that Mehta and Zuckerberg did when Trump got elected.
01:58:51 ◼ ► I mean, literally, I think they said they were pro testosterone and we're going to change course on this.
01:59:01 ◼ ► And I think that's proof that they went through the first Trump administration correctly.
01:59:06 ◼ ► And they didn't really have to correct or change anything when Trump came back into office because they never went overzealously into the things that Trump was objecting to.
01:59:22 ◼ ► And long before it was talked about much, has had a very diverse staff across the company and has been very, very encouraging and open to people of all sexual orientations and all the stuff that is just sort of lashed out against when Trump got reelected.
01:59:43 ◼ ► And Apple didn't really have to backtrack on any of that, that they could say that their consistency over the years and lack of sort of being in the face of anybody about it, just sort of being quietly supportive of it.
01:59:55 ◼ ► But I kind of feel like what's happened since it's it's been such a tidal wave, such an unexpected just lashing out that is different than the Trump 1.0 administration.
02:00:06 ◼ ► I don't think Cook is equipped to deal with it, and I don't think he's dealt with it well.
02:00:11 ◼ ► And where I'm going with this is that if this keeps up for another three years and let's say that a Democrat gets elected in 2028 and certainly looking at the polling, you know, I don't think that's wishful thinking.
02:00:28 ◼ ► But if this keeps up for three years, I feel like Apple has a MAGA stink on it at this point or and certainly will if it keeps up for another three years like the last year.
02:00:42 ◼ ► And and I don't see how Tim Cook doesn't see that, that if his goal is, you know, to navigate what's best for the company.
02:00:48 ◼ ► And I think that's been his guiding light, not that he's actually pro-Trump or that that's steering.
02:01:01 ◼ ► And as he often says, what to be open to communication with everybody that he thinks that's what's best for Apple.
02:01:06 ◼ ► But at this point, it just seems very clearly that this is not in Apple's long term interest.
02:01:11 ◼ ► It certainly might be to keep to keep Apple off a rant on Truth Social and and to keep him from threatening a tariff that he never follows up on a week later.
02:01:24 ◼ ► But in terms of the long term reputation of the company, I kind of do feel like it's taking on a red slant.
02:02:05 ◼ ► Apple's navigated it better than most because I think they are trying to remain true to convictions that are contrary to those convictions as opposed.
02:02:24 ◼ ► And it's it's a very specific example that really certainly pertains to everything that the are as Tim Cook calls them the events in Minnesota.
02:02:32 ◼ ► But when the Justice Department demanded, that's their words, demanded that Apple pull the Ice Block app from the App Store and Apple was like, OK, we'll pull it.
02:02:44 ◼ ► I just think that's a moment not where they should have said literally fuck you and made a big public stink about it.
02:02:51 ◼ ► But I think just sort of quietly and assertively saying that that app is not violating any of the rules of the App Store and, you know, and is not advocating for violence against the Border Patrol agents.
02:03:09 ◼ ► And if the administration feels otherwise to tell us which laws it's breaking in, you know, and take us to court.
02:03:15 ◼ ► I think there's a very quiet way to avoid trying to keep it from turning into a bigger story in the news, but to stand their ground as opposed to, OK, you're the boss.
02:03:28 ◼ ► And here we are months later and the tensions and the public opinion about ICE and the purpose that the ICE Block app served, which is just to allow people to know where ICE and Border Patrol activity was near them anonymously in a way that was engineered to be inherently anonymous.
02:03:56 ◼ ► I think it was bad in general for any app, whatever the app, whatever the app could have been a new version of Flappy Birds, but that somehow that had a Trump style hairstyle.
02:04:17 ◼ ► But here it's in an app that was specifically about the most contentious and to me, outrageous political issue of the Trump administration.
02:04:28 ◼ ► The good people of Greenland may well disagree, but I'm going to call I'm going to call by it's let's say they're all up there and they all deserve outrage.
02:04:37 ◼ ► But I'm going to say that military style law enforcement officers roaming the streets of cities that the administration sees as filled with their political enemies is pretty much the top issue.
02:05:08 ◼ ► The lesson Trump took away from that is you asked Tim Apple to do something for you and he's going to do it.