00:00:00 ◼ ► I'm actually going to need you to wait a few minutes until I finish what I'm doing here. I'm doing something extremely important.
00:00:10 ◼ ► No, I'm entering the Virginia Tech football schedule for this fall. It's a very important business.
00:00:15 ◼ ► Where are you entering it? In my calendar. Anyway, we can get started. I don't know. I feel glum. I feel glum.
00:00:22 ◼ ► What, the traumatic brain injuries in a football game that you're into watching? Is that why you feel glum?
00:00:27 ◼ ► Is that why you feel glum? Wow. It's like that, is it? I'm not hitting them in the head.
00:00:37 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like you are. It seems like you're preparing to settle in for another season.
00:00:42 ◼ ► I'm weaning myself off of football by entering every single game that my home pods play into my calendar.
00:00:57 ◼ ► the NFL is particularly and uniquely terrible. And it just so happens that my favorite NFL football team is also terrible.
00:01:13 ◼ ► Right, yeah. Baby steps, baby steps, man. Not really. I don't smoke weed. I just listen to fish.
00:01:23 ◼ ► All right, we should probably get started with some follow up. And Blake Walsh wanted this.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Blake Walsh wanted us to know that we were not looking at the Windows logo on one of John's mice.
00:01:45 ◼ ► We were actually looking at the Microsoft logo because it is a perfect square rather than whatever you call that other object,
00:01:55 ◼ ► This is amazing. This is like, OK, this is not the Windows logo. That's the Microsoft logo.
00:02:02 ◼ ► You can obviously tell the difference because the Microsoft logo is basically straight.
00:02:38 ◼ ► And sometimes the feedback comes across deeply obnoxious, even if it really honestly wasn't meant that way.
00:03:00 ◼ ► And this was well done, well executed. I was happy to receive this. This was quite funny.
00:03:09 ◼ ► I'm just so happy that, like, obviously, you know, a company like Microsoft, when they change their logo,
00:03:16 ◼ ► And I can imagine, like, all the board meetings and design reviews and research surveys
00:03:37 ◼ ► Go through all that same process again, and then they come out with the exact same thing.
00:03:46 ◼ ► And I'm familiar with the Windows one from all that time I spent watching the Windows 10 installer run.
00:04:03 ◼ ► the Windows logo, it's like a wavy flag with these little pixelated squares coming off the end.
00:04:08 ◼ ► And that wavy flag is cut into four pieces, and the four pieces are different colors, right?
00:04:24 ◼ ► But that's what it is. Like, it's not -- yes, when you look at it, it is four squares stuck to each other, right?
00:04:29 ◼ ► But if you know the history of the logo, you're like, "Oh, I see how that's kind of a modern simplification and refinement of what I knew to be the Windows logo."
00:04:39 ◼ ► And then the Windows logo itself looks more like a window. You know, it's perspective skewed,
00:04:47 ◼ ► But anyway, you see it in Windows itself, surprise, when you're watching the installer and when you're logging in and stuff like that.
00:04:53 ◼ ► I actually don't think the logos are that bad. It is just very -- in the black and white version,
00:04:58 ◼ ► there's really not much to it. And you really need to have a little bit more character, I think, to pull off a monochrome logo.
00:05:08 ◼ ► And it looks good in color, it looks good in its original rainbow stripes, and it looks good in monochrome.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And also, you know, it's got a strong outline. This does not really have a strong outline.
00:05:18 ◼ ► If you didn't even know it was a company logo, you know, and you saw it on the mouse, you're like, "I think it would just be invisible."
00:05:24 ◼ ► The Windows logo does look more like a logo because it is perspective skewed, so I think that's not actually that bad.
00:05:30 ◼ ► But both of them require you to have sort of a cultural knowledge of the history of Microsoft and related stuff to get anything from it.
00:05:45 ◼ ► I mean, this is the cultural significance and, you know, American significance of the Apple, biblical significance of the Apple, and with the bite out of it and everything.
00:05:51 ◼ ► Like, it's all there in the logo, you don't need to know that it's Apple Computer and Steve Jobs worked on it, orchard, and all that other stuff.
00:06:05 ◼ ► And I certainly like the Windows logo better than the weird wavy flag Windows 95 one, which was very dated, even when it was new.
00:06:15 ◼ ► All right, Jon, tell us about how you get that darn Dropbox icon out of the Finder, if you please.
00:06:25 ◼ ► It's not like a preference in Dropbox anymore where it's like you disable Finder integration.
00:06:28 ◼ ► I had totally forgotten that there is an extensions preference pane because I'm not reviewing the OS anymore and I forget about these things.
00:06:37 ◼ ► There is one category called Finder, and if you go to the Finder extensions, I have a bunch listed here that are mostly just the Apple built-in ones.
00:06:49 ◼ ► Anyway, I have OneDrive, Dropbox, some Adobe thing, Expand Drive, iCloud Drive, and also Dropbox.
00:06:59 ◼ ► In fact, I unchecked every single box in the Finder extensions thing just to cover all my bases.
00:07:14 ◼ ► Can I just stop anything from extending anything to see if I can find out what this problem is?
00:07:19 ◼ ► I scrolled down the source list on the left-hand side and I clicked on Quick Look, which is also a thing in the Finder.
00:07:25 ◼ ► There are Quick Look plugins where you can select the file in the Finder, hit space bar, and it will preview it and you can have plugins that understand different file formats and everything.
00:07:32 ◼ ► And when I clicked on the Quick Look sidebar item in this preference pane, in the background, all my Finder windows instantly spawned toolbars.
00:08:51 ◼ ► One of them was called Pro Display XDR P3 1600 nits and one was like Apple Display P3 500 nits.
00:09:04 ◼ ► In the default Pro Display XDR P3 1600 nits one, it can display up to 1600 nits of HDR content,
00:09:13 ◼ ► The Mac OS UI renders in SDR with a maximum of 500 nits, and you can control that brightness
00:09:26 ◼ ► You can see this really well if you get the aerial screensaver, which is like the Apple TV,
00:09:35 ◼ ► Someone ported that to the Mac because all of those video URLs are publicly accessible.
00:09:41 ◼ ► The video files are public accessible URLs on Apple servers, so someone made a screensaver out of them.
00:09:48 ◼ ► So when you go to the screensaver preference pane, the whole rest of your screen is SDR,
00:09:55 ◼ ► But this little tiny window is HDR, showing you a preview of what the screensaver is going to look like.
00:10:15 ◼ ► It's like a movie interface, and everything squishes, and everything is composited in there,
00:10:34 ◼ ► It's my preferred screensaver if I'm not just going to put up family pictures or something like that.
00:10:42 ◼ ► So the SDR preset is there if you want to see, for people who want to see what content will look like on an SDR display, right?
00:10:49 ◼ ► So sometimes you want, like you're creating content that not everyone has an HDR television or monitor or whatever,
00:10:54 ◼ ► and you want to see what it's going to look like, so the SDR preset is tailored for that.
00:10:59 ◼ ► And this person suggested, unless you're doing that, unless you are trial running content to make sure it looks okay in SDR,
00:11:14 ◼ ► because you have the whole original idea of the screensaver, of like, let's make your screen do something that's going to keep it in motion and everything
00:11:28 ◼ ► And meanwhile, you're going to do something that requires, like, downloading hundreds of gigs of video
00:11:34 ◼ ► and then playing it, playing HDR video so that the screen actually uses more of its capacity while it's allegedly idling.
00:11:43 ◼ ► But it still keeps the thing in motion, so if you're worried about image retention or whatever,
00:11:48 ◼ ► it's not keeping the same image. It changes slowly, but, you know, enough that the image changes on the screen.
00:11:54 ◼ ► And it's only 33 gigs, by the way, I know, because I downloaded them all, because I have so much disk space.
00:11:58 ◼ ► This is going to be like when we talk about taping things, you realize, or we're going to talk about disk space.
00:12:14 ◼ ► It really annoys me when people don't understand disk with a C versus disk with a K when it comes to computer technology,
00:12:18 ◼ ► because you see it all the time and it's very consistent, but people, you know, I guess, are not that observant.
00:12:41 ◼ ► I was motivated to get it, even without actually trying it in person, because I'm like, "I'm never getting it this far.
00:12:52 ◼ ► Mostly because I heard it from a lot of people who are fans, and it has a higher refresh rate, like it does 1,000 samples per second,
00:13:04 ◼ ► It's a very high sampling rate for games, so you can do fast motion with the mouse and it can keep up with it,
00:13:12 ◼ ► And this is not like a high-end gaming mouse, it's like a low-end one, but it's got the same shape as my beloved old crappy MX300/Logitech USB wheel mouse thing.
00:13:39 ◼ ► The absurd thing, which is kind of explicable when you can explain it, but it still seems a little absurd, is...
00:13:47 ◼ ► Remember I installed the Logitech software that I was saying was really cool and managed all your devices and had settings and put it in the cloud and all that stuff?
00:13:54 ◼ ► Well, the gaming line of mice has its own software that is totally unrelated to the consumer side.
00:14:01 ◼ ► If you go to logitech.com and look at all the mice, you won't see a single gaming mouse.
00:14:08 ◼ ► They have all their gaming brand, but everything is black with RGB LEDs in it and everything.
00:14:24 ◼ ► People take out the one AA battery and sometimes people put in a lithium battery, which is lighter,
00:14:31 ◼ ► or they get one of those adapters that lets you use a AAA in a AA space just to save weight.
00:14:36 ◼ ► The new trend now is gaming mice with holes in them, like sort of cheese grater holes, like mesh plastics, to be just incredibly light.
00:14:46 ◼ ► Although I do wonder with the lightness thing, like if you watch people review gaming mice on YouTube or whatever,
00:14:51 ◼ ► they're all about weighing them on their little food scales to find out how many grams they are.
00:14:55 ◼ ► And yes, it takes less force to stop a mouse from moving in one direction and move it into another.
00:15:00 ◼ ► You know, like you can change direction more quickly with less effort with a lighter mouse.
00:15:06 ◼ ► But I question the assumption that being able to change direction with very little force is necessarily good,
00:15:17 ◼ ► Like a little bit of momentum in terms of when your mouse is headed in one direction and you try to slow it down and bring it in another direction to correct.
00:15:25 ◼ ► I'm not sure, like, just imagine you were doing with like an invisible mouse, a zero gram mouse.
00:15:34 ◼ ► Like I think a little bit of the momentum is good to smooth out the, you know, the twitching of your tendons.
00:15:43 ◼ ► That has the side effect of making it feel cheap because, you know, like stereo components and all sorts of other things, tungsten cylinders.
00:16:14 ◼ ► And it's got a little bit of the non-stick stuff, non-slip, non-slip, the slippery stuff around the sensor.
00:16:30 ◼ ► It comes with its own little dongle, the Lightspeed dongle, which looks exactly the same, but it's totally different.
00:16:34 ◼ ► It also comes with an extension cable to extend the dongle away from your interference having USB 3.0 peripherals.
00:16:43 ◼ ► It's like a very long, thin cord that you would snake from your computer and put it presumably like right in front of your laptop.
00:16:49 ◼ ► It's got like little feet on this little dongle thing that says, you know, it's like a USB extension cable but with little feet on it.
00:16:56 ◼ ► So it can be just like an inch from your thing so you're getting maximum signal strength on your wireless mouse.
00:17:05 ◼ ► But it's got two side buttons on the side and because it's shaped like my old mouse, there's no place for the side buttons to hide.
00:17:11 ◼ ► So I kind of feel them by my thumb because they're right on the flat side of the mouse and, you know, they can't, they're not perched up on the top of it or whatever.
00:17:24 ◼ ► It is better than my ancient mouse but not in the same league as any of the metal wheels.
00:17:34 ◼ ► You know, you can hear it and it, you know, there's no free spinning, there's no ratcheting, there's no different modes.
00:17:50 ◼ ► Because when you're zoomed in and sniping and you want to make fine adjustments with larger motions of your hands, you know what I mean?
00:17:58 ◼ ► I mean, it comes, it's such a prominent feature on the gaming mouse lines that you can configure up to like maybe five or six or seven different DPI levels and configure exactly what they are and then cycle through them and have like keys to swap to them.
00:18:12 ◼ ► Like when you hold down shift, it'll swap to one and then the other one will be the default and you can hit the button to cycle through them.
00:18:20 ◼ ► So and both of them, by the way, the original logitech option software installed like a local web server or something that I immediately disabled.
00:18:35 ◼ ► I used pacifist, which is a great program you should check out. It lets you open any dot pkg file on the Mac and see where what's inside it and probably will let you know where it's going to install them.
00:18:47 ◼ ► Are there any launch amens launch agents or launch demons files going into application support or files going into user local?
00:18:57 ◼ ► I looked inside of this one and had a bunch of drivers like force feedback wheels like it's their logitech gaming software period.
00:19:11 ◼ ► And oh, and by the way, this mouse, the drivers that come with it, there's like a menu bar icon, a logitech gaming menu bar icon.
00:19:17 ◼ ► I think if you quit that thing, all of that software that goes with the mouse just goes away.
00:19:26 ◼ ► And it feels different, like the logitech software that's controlling it has a bazillion settings and it feels different when you use it that way.
00:19:39 ◼ ► Like I don't mind when software like writes settings to the mouse and then you can quit it and the mouse kind of retains those settings.
00:19:46 ◼ ► Like there is memory on the mouse and it's also you can save them on the internet or whatever.
00:19:49 ◼ ► But in my brief experimentation, even when I write the settings to the mouse and when I quit the software, I think the acceleration curves are different because you can customize that too.
00:20:09 ◼ ► But it feels a little bit better with because I spent all that time tweaking the DPI settings and everything.
00:20:24 ◼ ► But that said, I think this mouse is closest to what I was looking for in terms of the shape.
00:20:39 ◼ ► And I'm kind of glad to have a gaming mouse because if I ever do any gaming like boot into windows and try playing Destiny once I get a better video card or whatever, I'll probably use this mouse.
00:20:50 ◼ ► Because the 1000 hertz polling stuff and all of the configuration options for this and presets for different games and everything, I like it.
00:21:01 ◼ ► But for my day to day stuff, I think I might be back to my current winner which is I think now still the Microsoft Precision mouse.
00:21:11 ◼ ► When I use the Precision mouse, it's like knobs in cars on toasters and stereo equipment.
00:21:20 ◼ ► I'm sitting in front of what I know to be objectively a very stupidly expensive computer.
00:21:24 ◼ ► And when the things I touch with my hands also feel expensive, I'm like, "Ah, I'm sitting in front of my expensive computer."
00:21:33 ◼ ► This feels kind of janky and lightweight and like I could crush it with my fingers because the plastic is so thin.
00:21:45 ◼ ► I mean, think if you buy like a car with a nice leather-wrapped steering wheel versus a car with a shiny plastic steering wheel with like plastic mold seams on it.
00:21:56 ◼ ► If you take and search your favorite car here, whether it's a luxury sedan or a sports car, and you slap on a steering wheel from like a 1984 Chevy base model, you know, it's not going to feel as good.
00:22:10 ◼ ► Even though the car is the same and has the same performance characteristics and the same ride and the same handling, it feels worse because the thing you're touching feels cheaper.
00:22:18 ◼ ► And that is definitely the experience of using the very light gaming mouse with my very heavy and expensive computer.
00:22:33 ◼ ► So anyway, I'm going to give this one a few more days just because for all these mice, I want to use them for multiple days, not just past judgment after a day of use.
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00:24:45 ◼ ► So I wanted to call your attention to a podcast by a friend of the show, Jonathan Mann, called "As It Happens, Song a Day."
00:25:04 ◼ ► And some of you also know that there's stuff that happens after that theme, which we've talked about on and off over the last several years.
00:25:10 ◼ ► Anyways, the episode that came out this week, I don't know what number it is, but we'll put a link in the show notes.
00:25:15 ◼ ► It's about the post WWDC episode from this past June, which includes tweets from me and I think Marco and John, if I'm not mistaken.
00:25:25 ◼ ► It certainly includes tweets from some of us. And it's a quick 15 minutes on the nose and I listened to it earlier and it's quite enjoyable.
00:25:35 ◼ ► Yeah, the whole process of writing songs to me as somebody who has never done anything even close to that seems like magic.
00:25:43 ◼ ► And I think one thing that Jonathan Mann shows is that you can get surprisingly good at that if that's what you do.
00:25:52 ◼ ► And that's what he does. He's been practicing by writing songs every day for, I mean how long has it been? Like 10 years or something? 9 years? Something like that?
00:26:05 ◼ ► And that's what this podcast does. It explains, it's him talking through and you can kind of see how these songs get made.
00:26:21 ◼ ► I can't imagine writing a song, much less a song a day for, what is that, 11 years? Good grief.
00:26:29 ◼ ► And more importantly, doing anything once per day. Like literally anything. Especially if it's something that requires some kind of effort.
00:26:39 ◼ ► I suppose you all brush your teeth every day, but that is a lot less work than coming up with a new song, words, music and recording it that has never existed before.
00:27:05 ◼ ► It's like the biggest thing that feels like something but isn't. Spoiler to all your Twitter protests out there, it's nothing.
00:27:11 ◼ ► But that takes nothing. Nothing at all. And yet doing that every day for 11 years would be nearly impossible.
00:27:18 ◼ ► As somebody in the chat room just said, "I'm not sure I poop every day." I think that's a pretty good summary.
00:27:30 ◼ ► Oh my word. All right, Jon, why don't you give us an update on Front & Center. You've been hot and heavy with the updates, my man. What's going on there?
00:27:36 ◼ ► Yeah, so first I'll start off by saying thanks to everybody who purchased Front & Center. I'm assuming it's only people who listened to the show because my experience has shown that no one who didn't listen to me explain at length what this thing does, understands what it does.
00:27:50 ◼ ► Which is not their fault. It is a weird program that's hard to explain. Half of the difficulty of releasing this is trying to explain to people who are looking at it what it does.
00:28:01 ◼ ► So that if they decide that they think they want it and they get it, they won't be surprised by what it does or doesn't do.
00:28:08 ◼ ► But anyway, I got a lot of press coverage on the first day from all my friends. It was nice. I thank all of them for that.
00:28:15 ◼ ► And as you would expect for an application like this, which is like I said, probably the most trivial application that could actually exist on the App Store and not get rejected.
00:28:22 ◼ ► That one day of coverage resulted in the vast majority of its sales. Again, thank you to everybody who bought it.
00:28:30 ◼ ► And then the sales dropped off to nothing. So my plan has always been, as I discussed, to eventually raise the price from $2.99 in my deterrence pricing strategy.
00:28:40 ◼ ► Mostly because I just don't... basically after sales dropped to zero, I don't want anyone accidentally buying it on an impulse and being disappointed.
00:28:48 ◼ ► Because it's difficult to explain and people don't read text on the internet or in the App Store. They just see the icon and see some screenshots and think they know what it does.
00:29:00 ◼ ► And then they get it and they're disappointed because it doesn't do what they want. So I want to keep those people away. I don't want people to buy it and be disappointed.
00:29:06 ◼ ► So I raised the price from $2.99 to $4.99 to keep away the riff raff. And don't worry, this is not affecting sales because they already dropped nothing. So it's not a big deal.
00:29:19 ◼ ► But still, it did much better than I thought. Obviously the press coverage helped Apple put it in their little top...
00:29:27 ◼ ► Or their editorial section where it's like games that we love right now on the Mac App Store. So I'm very thankful for that. I got to look at the sales graph to see the first day of coverage is like 99% of the sales or 95% of the sales.
00:29:41 ◼ ► Then the sales go down like a rocket. And then when Apple added it to the apps we love, a little tiny lump. Which I appreciate. I appreciate that lump, Apple. Thank you so much for that lump because it's better than zero.
00:29:52 ◼ ► But it just goes to show the Mac App Store is not a place where people visit every day. Whereas say Daring Fireball is a place that people visit every day. So if you're featured in Daring Fireball, you'll get way more sales than if you are featured on the Mac App Store in the Games We Love section.
00:30:11 ◼ ► Or on ATP for that matter because obviously us talking about it in the show really helped. And again, thank you to everyone who bought it.
00:30:25 ◼ ► Oh jeez, I never go there. I never have to sponsor the show. I can promote my stuff for free.
00:30:35 ◼ ► No, so last episode I had mentioned that I was having trouble with my iMac Pro for the first time ever.
00:30:44 ◼ ► And that I was getting noticeable fan noise when doing things that just heated up the CPU's a little bit.
00:30:52 ◼ ► And that I had spent most of the last two years using this computer never hearing any bit of the fan at all.
00:30:58 ◼ ► And I heard from a couple other people who had a similar problem or had heard of other people having a similar problem.
00:31:04 ◼ ► At the time I thought, let me just try blowing out the computer. I assume it's dust that's impeding the thermals.
00:31:09 ◼ ► And so I'll try blowing it out. So I brought it into the garage very carefully on my lap on the floor with an air compressor.
00:31:16 ◼ ► And tried blowing it out, first blowing out into the intake, into the exhaust so it would blow stuff out the intakes.
00:31:23 ◼ ► And nothing really came out of it. And then I tried blowing into the intakes themselves at various angles.
00:31:40 ◼ ► But obviously I can't really tell what came out of that. But it didn't seem like there was a lot of dust in there.
00:31:46 ◼ ► But I can tell you that before the cleaning, the idle temperature was about 10 degrees higher Celsius than after the cleaning.
00:31:56 ◼ ► I did a quick little benchmark running Cinebench and looking at the fan RPMs over time.
00:32:01 ◼ ► And the iMac Pro usually idles around 1100 RPM. That's when you basically can't hear the fan at all.
00:32:21 ◼ ► And the highest it ever got before the cleaning was about 2500. After the cleaning, the highest it got was 1500.
00:32:34 ◼ ► So I consider it a success even though it doesn't appear as though a lot of dust actually came out of it.
00:32:54 ◼ ► And it seems to be either back to normal or close enough to back to normal that I no longer notice it. So success.
00:33:11 ◼ ► Yeah, definitely. While I did solve the problem and while I do still love this computer,
00:33:20 ◼ ► Because I have no real access to the insides of this thing unless I do heavy disassembly,
00:33:33 ◼ ► But that moment alone is not enough to make me actually ditch my setup and buy a Mac Pro.
00:33:38 ◼ ► Yeah, the popular mechanics article was talking about this, was exactly how widely spaced the heat sink fans are
00:33:45 ◼ ► Obviously the holes in the front are big and we talked about them not having a dust screen because they want the fans to be able to run more smoothly and pull the air through.
00:33:54 ◼ ► Not difficult to get air through it, but then once the air gets into there, and I suspect this is what's going on inside your iMac,
00:34:00 ◼ ► if there are any kind of heat sink fins, the closer those fins are together, the more able they are to trap dust and get clogged up.
00:34:09 ◼ ► I don't know if they're like a centimeter apart, but they look like you could fit a pencil between them.
00:34:13 ◼ ► They're not like you'd expect heat sink fins to be, you know, sort of stacked close together.
00:34:17 ◼ ► That's not like the previous Mac Pro or the Power Mac G5, which had very closely spaced fins, which I often blew out with compressed air because they really did clog up.
00:34:26 ◼ ► So I'm glad you used the Apple and the 2010s and 2020s solution of compressed air to fix your computer.
00:34:33 ◼ ► Yeah, because normally if you're designing a heat sink, normally you want as many thin, very thinly spaced fins in the heat sink as possible,
00:34:44 ◼ ► so you can get as much surface area as possible for the air to blow over so it can cool as well as possible.
00:34:53 ◼ ► And I don't know how much dust plays into the engineering of these things, but clearly on the new Mac Pro, they thought of that.
00:35:01 ◼ ► So you have these very widely spaced fins on these heat sinks that you do give up some density of surface area,
00:35:14 ◼ ► Well, that's why I can't do this on the iMac, because the reason it works at all in the Mac Pro is they're like eight inches long, each fin, right?
00:35:22 ◼ ► So you can get away with having fewer, but there's not a lot of room back there on the iMac.
00:35:25 ◼ ► So just to get enough surface area to cool things, maybe they need to have them more closely spaced.
00:35:33 ◼ ► I don't actually recall what's inside that thing. But the point is, there's not a lot of space in there, so your options are limited.
00:35:38 ◼ ► They obviously did an amazing job on the cooling system, but it seems more vulnerable to dust.
00:35:43 ◼ ► We'll see how this Mac Pro does. And how old is your thing? Three years old now? A little over two.
00:35:50 ◼ ► I can say that I did blow out dust from my 2008 Mac Pro, but never from the CPUs. I was always just blowing it off of my third-party video card that had its own GPU cooler that just made this terrible dusty mess in there.
00:36:07 ◼ ► But it wasn't because there wasn't dust trapped in there. There's plenty of it. Like I said, the dust started to weld to the inside eventually.
00:36:13 ◼ ► You go to the attic and pull up my 2008 Mac Pro, you're like, "Oh, it looks dusty in there." And then you run your finger across it, and the dust doesn't move.
00:36:30 ◼ ► No, but I did send you a picture. I did refactor everything up there. I got rid of a lot of big boxes, rearranged stuff.
00:36:38 ◼ ► We're still working on the attic. There's a whole other side that is a gigantic mess. Looks like a bomb went off, but my side is looking pretty good lately.
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00:38:35 ◼ ► There's been a big brouhaha this week about iCloud backups, encryption, and Apple, and whether they really give a darn about privacy or not.
00:38:47 ◼ ► And as chief summarizer and chief, I will do my best to summarize. Gentlemen, please feel free to interrupt me if I go off the rails.
00:38:53 ◼ ► There was a Reuters article just a couple of days ago saying in summary that Apple had planned to do end-to-end encrypted backups.
00:39:05 ◼ ► And then either pre-flighted it with the FBI or somehow got wind of it. And the FBI unsurprisingly said, "Nuh-uh-uh-uh-uh, nope."
00:39:17 ◼ ► Now what does encrypted end-to-end mean? What that means is if there's a backup of your phone that resides on Apple's servers but is encrypted from the time it leaves your phone,
00:39:28 ◼ ► then, and I'm deeply oversimplifying to be clear, but anyways, if it's encrypted from the time it leaves your phone with keys that only you have,
00:39:36 ◼ ► then that means Apple would not be able to, say, crack that backup open and send your iMessages to the FBI.
00:39:43 ◼ ► Now obviously there's good and bad that comes of that. There's good in that that's hyper-private.
00:39:48 ◼ ► It's bad if you are a terrorist or do terrible things and should be investigated for doing those terrible things.
00:39:56 ◼ ► And there's a lot of different ways to look at this. There's a really good post on Stratechery this week, which I believe was the free post.
00:40:03 ◼ ► If it was, I will put it in the show notes. But one way or another, there's a lot of different ways to look at this.
00:40:09 ◼ ► But there was also a lot of debate as to whether or not Apple really acquiesced to the FBI or if that story at Reuters was all kind of wrong and backwards.
00:40:20 ◼ ► And there was a series of really good posts on Daring Fireball about this as well. Is that a reasonable summary?
00:40:26 ◼ ► Again, I know I've oversimplified, but I'm trying to do this in less than 16 hours. Does that sound about right?
00:40:32 ◼ ► Yeah, it's close. I feel like the reason I put all the Daring Fireball links in there is I think Grubber did a good job of trying to make sense of the various stories.
00:40:41 ◼ ► All of which could be true at the same time, but not really getting the whole picture. In particular, I think his most salient point was the idea that Apple would consider doing a thing but then go and ask the FBI what they think.
00:40:53 ◼ ► Not because Apple is saying that Apple wouldn't ask for permission, but because why bother? You know what the FBI's opinion is. You think the FBI's going to go, "Oh, no, you're good. Go ahead. Go do that."
00:41:05 ◼ ► You don't have to ask them to know. Law enforcement always wants access to this. There is no situation in which this topic would ever come up and their opinion would be different.
00:41:13 ◼ ► So the idea of Apple bringing this information to them for their opinion or approval is completely ridiculous. It doesn't change the fact that Apple knows their opinion.
00:41:23 ◼ ► The FBI probably expressed their opinion to Apple many, many times. That may have factored into Apple's decision.
00:41:29 ◼ ► Now the other articles that Guru put in here about interviews with Tim Cook, some of them from years ago, discussing this very thing, probably related to previous security blowups and FBI asking for access to people's phones or whatever.
00:41:44 ◼ ► And the suggestion was that we're thinking about doing end-to-end encryption for your backups, but one of the reasons—this is Apple speaking here, Tim Cook—one of the reasons I haven't been doing it is because—and Casey didn't mention this, and I think this is actually—this sounds like corporate BS, but it's actually probably a real thing—is that when people don't know their passwords and their data's gone and it's only in Apple's backups, if Apple couldn't give them their backups, people would be angry.
00:42:13 ◼ ► Even if, as Guru suggested, I'll just make it optional. Don't make it the default, but for people who care about security, let them enable it.
00:42:20 ◼ ► Everybody thinks they're not going to forget their password, right? "Oh, yeah, I want the maximum security." And then they forget their password, and then they want to get their data back, and they go to an Apple store and they say, "I don't remember my password. Can you just give me my data?"
00:42:34 ◼ ► And they'll be like, "Sorry, we can't. You turned on super-duper encryption." And the customers will be sad. Whether or not the customers are angry—some of them probably will be angry because people are people—but universally, they'll be sad.
00:42:45 ◼ ► "Oh, I've lost all of my data." And it's not really everything because things like photo that appear on the web aren't part of this, because if there's a web page where you can go to to view your photos and anybody can view them there, it's clear that Apple has the ability to decrypt them because they're showing them on a web page.
00:43:03 ◼ ► But for other stuff—for your contacts, for your text messages, for your notes, for anything that Apple has on their server, any kind of data in any of your iOS applications—if it really was end-to-end encrypted, it would be a customer service and user experience negative.
00:43:22 ◼ ► And only Apple knows the extent of that, because they know exactly how many times they end up with customers who don't remember their iCloud backup password and their phone fell on a lake and they want to get a new phone and they say, "Okay, where's all my data?"
00:43:34 ◼ ► They'll be like, "Oh, well, just log in with your Apple ID." And they're like, "Oh, I don't remember that."
00:43:37 ◼ ► Well, if Apple didn't have the ability to say, "No problem, because you've been doing iCloud backups, we can get your data back for you," if they didn't have the ability to do that, customers would be sad. So I'm not sure what the solution here is.
00:43:52 ◼ ► I think the whole government angle is mostly irrelevant, because we know what the government's—we know what law enforcement's position is, and we know what Apple's position in general is, and I think one of the reasons that Apple's position is not hardline-like encrypt the entire world is this customer service angle.
00:44:09 ◼ ► The other side of it is also Apple's probably sick of legally fighting with FBI over this, and that is definitely a factor, but I think to frame it as Apple sacrificing your security to appease the government is a simplification.
00:44:26 ◼ ► It is not factoring in, like I said, what sounds like corporate BS, but I think is a real thing, and the wildcard in this, and Gruber also posted about this, that Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, or at least if you use Google services, Google does offer end-to-end encrypted backups.
00:44:43 ◼ ► I'm sure the FBI hates that they do that too, but it's not as big a news story maybe because Apple's not involved or whatever, so I think eventually Apple will probably implement this somehow, some way, and at least give it as an option, but right now it hasn't been for years.
00:45:01 ◼ ► If you're in the security circles, this is not news, I think we talked about it on this show the last time we talked about the FBI thing, the San Bernardino shooter FBI thing or whatever, the fact that the phones and the device is all encrypted and locked away, but if you've been doing iCloud backup, those are also encrypted, but Apple has the key and can give them to you, and the stats and the latest things.
00:45:24 ◼ ► Apple does that thousands of times, like law enforcement asks for backups and Apple gives it to them because they have a warrant or whatever, they comply with the law because they have to.
00:45:33 ◼ ► If Apple couldn't comply because they were encrypted, then they couldn't comply, and that would be a different story, and that's what they're fighting over, but of the billions of Android phones, I'm not sure how many of them actually use Google services and use their backup services, so maybe it's a small portion.
00:45:48 ◼ ► But anyway, it's a complicated topic, and the right thing to do is probably to offer end-to-end encryption, but I kind of understand why Apple has been waffling for so many years to do so.
00:46:00 ◼ ► It's such a complicated topic and practice for so many reasons, and a lot of this goes back, we were talking maybe a month or two back about the complexity of Apple dealing with China and other big world governments where they have to sell products, or they don't necessarily have to, but they basically have to.
00:46:22 ◼ ► This has a lot of overlap with that, of like, we're dealing with not just Apple's technical abilities, but we're dealing with Apple having potentially large clashes with the countries in which they need to sell phones and their own country that they are based in, because encryption is really tricky with law enforcement.
00:46:44 ◼ ► There's lots of different encryption laws all over the world with what kind of encryption is even legal in different parts of the world, there's always going to be this friction between the reality of encryption and law enforcement, because as John said, law enforcement has a job to do, their job is to allegedly solve crimes most of the time, and that is most of the time what they do,
00:47:07 ◼ ► but they also have a culture of feeling entitled to everything, to any possible thing that might even lead to evidence, anything that might maybe contain a little bit of evidence, and they really, really feel entitled to look through your phone.
00:47:24 ◼ ► As encryption gets better, their ability to do that is going down over time, as various security gets better, as security holes get patched, and hopefully not too many more made, it's getting harder for them to access what they consider evidence they are entitled to.
00:47:41 ◼ ► And so of course, they're going to go to the public, they're going to make a stink in public, they're going to try to scare people, because throughout all of history, it's been a proven strategy that if you want people to give up their freedoms, scare them, and they will usually give them up more easily.
00:47:58 ◼ ► And so they make all these crazy threats in public about how, "Oh, you're enabling terrorists," and all this stuff, or helping drug dealers, and they drum up these big, hefty terms and labels and scary things to try to make a public case, try to convince lawmakers maybe to maybe change what the laws are.
00:48:18 ◼ ► None of this has anything to do with the tech, really, it's all political, and it's very hard for us as tech commentators to fully understand that world, and to be able to really say, "Oh, they should definitely do this," or "They should definitely not do this."
00:48:31 ◼ ► Most of it goes way above our heads, most of it is happening behind closed doors, or is part of more complicated strategies that we aren't really thinking of or knowledgeable about.
00:48:41 ◼ ► So it's so hard for us to say, "Yeah, they should definitely offer full encryption," because if they do offer full encryption, they are taking a very big risk that that will provoke the government into making full encryption illegal.
00:48:56 ◼ ► Because keep in mind also, the legislators are not only people who are incredibly financially bought off for the most part, and the law enforcement complex is a very big complex in this country, so they're a very powerful lobby.
00:49:15 ◼ ► It's also really bad politically to ever show yourself as being soft on crime at all, just like, again, another hack that works with people, it's like, you can't ever say as a politician that you're being a little bit soft on what criminals can do.
00:49:31 ◼ ► So the reality is, we're at a very, very dangerous point where we're very close to this kind of encryption becoming illegal, and to even the US, the country that allegedly has freedoms, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, even we are very, probably very close to outlawing this kind of encryption at all, and to requiring companies like Apple to build in backdoors for our law enforcement agencies so they can spy on brown people when they cross the border.
00:50:03 ◼ ► So I know that Apple usually has their head on straight with matters like this, even if they're doing things that we see as unpopular, or even when they're doing things that we see as capitulating unnecessarily to an oppressive government, whether it's somebody else's or ours.
00:50:21 ◼ ► But in the long run, in retrospect, we can look back on what they've done and usually we can say, okay, that was probably the right move at the time.
00:50:30 ◼ ► So I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to stuff like this, most of the time, that if they've made a decision that doesn't seem quite right to me, in this arena, in the area of like, dealing with big governments, basically,
00:50:53 ◼ ► And we can complain all we want about that, we should, because the reality is our freedoms are getting eroded at an alarming rate, but that's not really Apple's fault, and there are much bigger issues in our own society and government that need to be addressed.
00:51:08 ◼ ► That's where the real problem is, and if Apple is being forced to really toe a line here, it's probably not Apple's fault.
00:51:25 ◼ ► Fair, fair, fair. I don't know. Like you said, it's so tough and I'm so torn, and it turns out I was looking, the Stratechery piece is not free for this week, which is kind of too bad because it's a really, really good piece.
00:51:39 ◼ ► And the gist of it, without doing near as good a job as Ben did, is that, hey, there's many different ways to look at this, and there's compelling arguments on every side of it.
00:51:49 ◼ ► Like, I could make a compelling argument that nobody should be able to use encryption in case you are doing something naughty, because I'm not doing anything naughty.
00:52:00 ◼ ► Fine, fine, fine. You take my point. I can see reasons why one would desire for less encryption. I don't agree with them, but I can see the reasons why.
00:52:11 ◼ ► Terrible reasons, but yes. It's like Marco said, like he was saying, fear, but it's like appeal to emotion.
00:52:16 ◼ ► All the logical fallacies you can think of are things that motivate people to argue for dumb things like no encryption anywhere, right?
00:52:23 ◼ ► But I think Marco was really getting to the heart of it. It's like, it's doing something less than the absolute right thing as a long-term strategic play to prevent even worse things from happening.
00:52:35 ◼ ► Which unfortunately, in this country in particular, we're in a precarious situation. It's like, you should really be playing the long game a little bit and saying, I can't make a moment-to-moment decision of always doing the right thing, because it has a high chance of triggering a much worse calamity in the very near future.
00:52:52 ◼ ► In some respects, when/if our actual United States government was functioning in a reasonable way, each of the parties involved in any sort of governmental issue should be, and it's like the pro-workflow group in Apple, should be lobbying from their position.
00:53:14 ◼ ► Law enforcement should be doing everything they can to get every strap of evidence. That's their job. They should try as hard as they can within the bounds of the law.
00:53:24 ◼ ► They're always going to want more data. They're always going to want, like, that, but that is their interest. Like, that's what they're supposed to do.
00:53:30 ◼ ► There has to be a countervailing force, which is, okay, on the other hand, people have rights and they elect representatives to protect those rights.
00:53:37 ◼ ► So as strongly as law enforcement tries to get all the data and personal information from people, equally strongly, our laws and representatives should be protecting the rights of the people from the overreach of law enforcement.
00:53:49 ◼ ► That's how it's supposed to work. Like, two groups with different interests, like, you know, coming together, balancing each other, checking each other's power, right?
00:53:59 ◼ ► Right in this country right now, checking each other's power is not working quite the way it's supposed to, so we're in a dangerous situation where things could go downhill very fast.
00:54:09 ◼ ► And so in this situation, you know, and again, companies want to make as much money as they can, protect their data from the government, you know, like, be able to make a pitch like Apple saying, "We are the privacy company. We'll protect your data because that helps them sell more devices."
00:54:24 ◼ ► And, you know, whatever. Like, they have, Apple has interests as well. If Apple were to lobby as strong as possible for its interests, saying, "We are going to end encrypt the entire world and middle finger to the government,"
00:54:38 ◼ ► because the system of balances of the government itself is not in a healthy state right now, that could very easily tip things.
00:54:45 ◼ ► And so I feel like, you know, this is all more fear-mongering. "Oh, if Apple end encrypts, that means they'll outlaw encryption." I don't think that's true at all, right?
00:54:53 ◼ ► All I'm saying is that it's not a slam dunk to say, "Oh, it's obvious Apple should just, you know, say screw the government and encrypt everything immediately," right?
00:55:01 ◼ ► Because there are potential consequences to that. And it's worth at least considering them.
00:55:06 ◼ ► Now, I think my personal opinion is, yes, Apple should absolutely end encrypt everything. They should, the government will be mad, they should do it in a tactful way, they should have done it years ago, they shouldn't even be waiting.
00:55:16 ◼ ► Google already did it, Apple should have already done it. That's my personal opinion. But I do understand that every point when Apple had to make that decision, thinking about, even if it was years ago, right?
00:55:26 ◼ ► Thinking that, "Eh, like there's the customer service angle," and also, as one of the sources in the routers, I always say routers, wrote your story, said, they didn't want to poke the bear.
00:55:38 ◼ ► It's like, "We just got through this big fight with the government. We do have to deal with the government." That's the worst corporate slime. It's like, "Oh, well, so you're going to screw your customers because you want an easier relationship with the government so you can make more money."
00:55:49 ◼ ► That's mostly true, but there are other angles to that exact thing that I just said that are slightly more altruistic than the most cynical possible angle.
00:55:58 ◼ ► So in this case, I think Apple did make the wrong call many times over and continues to make the wrong call, but not by a huge amount, right?
00:56:07 ◼ ► So I grow tired of people who really believe that companies like this or whoever is in this kind of conflict with the government should always be taking the hardest of hardline positions.
00:56:20 ◼ ► If you are one micron off of the absolute hardline position, you're dead to me. That is a more reasonable position to take when the system that we're all sort of playing in, the game rules and the sort of balance of powers and structure of the game rules is such that that is a reasonable thing to do.
00:56:40 ◼ ► But we're not anywhere close to that right now, and hardline position in one or two areas can very quickly lead to worse things.
00:56:46 ◼ ► And again, I don't want to be fearmongering about that. I just think that's the thinking that is factored into Apple's decision to essentially do the wrong thing multiple times over by a small amount.
00:56:59 ◼ ► And that's before even getting into like, "Okay, well then Apple has to sell products." It has to.
00:57:03 ◼ ► Apple does sell products across the entire world, and everyone else has different encryption laws, and how do you deal with that?
00:57:08 ◼ ► It's complicated. It makes you not want to be the CEO of Apple, you know, setting aside having to stand next to Trump at a Mac Pro factory in just a depressing episode. Who put this topic in the notes?
00:57:22 ◼ ► Yeah, and I have much more a problem with that Mac Pro factory thing than I do, and the whole thing with the tariffs. It's one thing if Apple's trying to just make more money off of tariff BS.
00:57:36 ◼ ► Yeah, like I have absolutely zero respect for Tim Cook on those fronts. None whatsoever.
00:57:42 ◼ ► But when it comes to standing ground on things like privacy and encryption, he's doing a pretty good job.
00:57:49 ◼ ► And so when it comes to stuff like this, you know, I do have to give him the benefit of the doubt that, yeah, if it's about tariffs and ways that Apple can either cheat the tax system to make more money, even though, I know cheat is a loaded word because it's what all corporations do.
00:58:05 ◼ ► But if Apple can, you know, loophole the tax system to make more money or avoid tariffs that many other companies have to pay, like that's just slimy.
00:58:14 ◼ ► And I have zero respect for how much effort Tim Cook seems to be putting into things like that.
00:58:21 ◼ ► But privacy stuff is pretty solid, and I do give him credit for having a lot of credibility on that front.
00:58:29 ◼ ► They probably have their reasons for the decisions they make or don't make around encryption and privacy and the way it interacts with governments.
00:58:37 ◼ ► I would also say, like, you know, we're focusing a lot on the government angle here. Don't forget the customer service angle on this as well.
00:58:44 ◼ ► Because I think that's bigger than people realize. People do forget their passwords all the time and need Apple's help to get back into their stuff all the time.
00:58:53 ◼ ► And as we lock down security better with things like two-factor and end-to-end encryption, we do cut off avenues for people to have, like, a way out.
00:59:03 ◼ ► And we try to tell people, okay, here's some, you know, recovery codes or, you know, have iCloud recovery enabled for certain things, whatever.
00:59:10 ◼ ► But the reality is, we've heard from people who work in Apple stores all the time that, like, it's heartbreaking how many people come in and cannot get their data recovered
00:59:19 ◼ ► and lose their, you know, pictures of their children or whatever because they forgot a password and they're locked out of everything in a way that Apple can't help them recover it.
00:59:28 ◼ ► That happens all the time, every single day, probably in every Apple store in the world.
00:59:39 ◼ ► It wouldn't surprise me if that's a major factor in Apple decision-making in this area.
00:59:44 ◼ ► Just to leave them an out because if they didn't have that out, how many more people every day would have that horrible outcome?
00:59:54 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I actually finally got around to replacing my iPhone 11 Pro that, if you recall, I shattered within, like, 12 hours of receiving it.
01:00:02 ◼ ► And I was at the Genius Bar, was it Tuesday, I believe, and I was kind of listening to what was going on as I was waiting for a restore to go onto the phone and just generally killing time.
01:00:14 ◼ ► And I even spoke to the Genius I was working with. And, you know, the Genius I was working with, they had said that, "Oh, you know, this happens a lot."
01:00:22 ◼ ► Because I'd asked, you know, "Do you have to break hearts often?" And I forget. I don't think I phrased it in that way.
01:00:27 ◼ ► But basically, you know, "How often do you have to deal with people who have lost their photos forever?"
01:00:30 ◼ ► And the Genius said, "You know, it happens a lot, and it breaks my heart every time. And this is why I constantly tell people, you know, you gotta have backups, you gotta have backups."
01:00:39 ◼ ► And said the Genius. And, you know, as I'm watching the different discussions happen around me, it was clear that pretty much nobody that was there was excited to be there, which isn't really surprising.
01:00:52 ◼ ► But at least half, if not three-quarters of the people that I saw were dealing with potential data loss problems. And they were devastated because of it.
01:01:00 ◼ ► And I don't know, I didn't hear any, like, specific sob stories about wedding pictures or baby pictures or anything like that.
01:01:05 ◼ ► But it's not a hard thing to imagine. And, yeah, I think you're exactly right, Marco, that I would be stunned if Apple made this end-to-end encryption the default, if it happens at all.
01:01:17 ◼ ► I would be stunned if they made it the default for exactly that reason, for customer service reasons. Because, you know, that leaves all of the responsibility of the customer.
01:01:27 ◼ ► And when you're a company as big as Apple, I would wager that a lot of your customers are probably not as, I'm trying to find a word better than smart, responsible as they should be.
01:01:39 ◼ ► No, I mean, it isn't about intelligence. People screw up. No one's perfect. We screw up, too. Everyone screws up. And it's nice when you screw up really badly.
01:01:49 ◼ ► It's nice when somebody can come in and save your ass. And if you don't leave a way for that to happen, you're playing with fire.
01:01:58 ◼ ► And if you have security concerns, like even with Apple's stuff in its current state, just don't do iCloud backup. You can turn off iCloud backup and then your device will be your device and it will be the only place where your stuff is unless you backup locally to your computer, which you can still do in Catalina through the Finder and yada yada.
01:02:15 ◼ ► If you are super security conscious, Apple still does give you the tools to do what you want. But I think, you know, and speaking of customers being said, the Apple store has lost their stuff. The introduction of iCloud backups made that better, both because people had the ability to have their pictures someplace other than just on their phone, which was a failure mode before iCloud backup, or someone would be like, Oh, my phone broke. Well, where are my pictures? Well, can you get them off the phone? It's like, the broken phone? The phone in the bottom of the lake? Not really.
01:02:42 ◼ ► So introducing iCloud backup really helped with that, you know, because it would put them on a server. And for the people who did remember the password, you could just get them off the server. If you don't remember your passwords, Apple could still get them off the server because they had the ability to decrypt it because they had the key for it or whatever.
01:02:57 ◼ ► But if Apple really wants to make fewer said customers, we've talked about this a million times, more space for iCloud backups. I don't know how many people who was like, Oh, I don't want to enable iCloud backups because it'll fill up because I have too many photos or whatever. It's like, yeah, and I was like, well, just pay a couple bucks a month.
01:03:10 ◼ ► People don't want to pay for backup space. So fewer people do iCloud backups. Therefore, more people have the potential to lose data if they drop their phone in a lake because it isn't backed up, independent of remembering or forgetting your password.
01:03:23 ◼ ► But, you know, like I said, I think Apple absolutely should introduce end to end encryption for iCloud backups, if only as an option. And I think they will eventually. It's just a matter of time.
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01:05:05 ◼ ► You know, one of my favorite things to see in the show notes is something that I don't entirely understand but I know there's a good story. And the next line item in the show notes is as follows, "Xcode layout hell."
01:05:27 ◼ ► Yeah, this is a sort of companion to my, you know, just follow up item about how Front and Center was doing. So I have been in Xcode doing development. I've done 10 releases of Front and Center in the past 2 weeks which is too many.
01:05:43 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. The Mac App Store has not a lot of traffic going on. It's just things sail through. Although the very last update did take several days and then the very last update took like 48 hours to propagate to so it was really long.
01:05:55 ◼ ► Alright, so I always keep thinking like, "Oh, maybe they do, you know, the thing to do, lots of companies do this where like your first whatever, your first widget from the widget company comes through really fast to make you have a good impression of the company."
01:06:06 ◼ ► Right? Like they prioritize new customers on their first widget or whatever their thing is. So I was like, "Oh, well probably on your first submission to the App Store you jump to the front of the queue so you have a positive thing."
01:06:15 ◼ ► But then as I did my second and third I'm like, "Well, am I eventually going to get like throttled? Like am I going to get on a blacklist? This guy puts out a new release every day. Put him at the back of the queue."
01:06:25 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I think I praised it in the last episode. My review times have continued to be very good. Granted, my app is incredibly simple, right?
01:06:36 ◼ ► So it's not requiring lots of deep scholarship to figure out whether it should be approved or not. But the review times have been fast. Anyway, I put out ten releases. That's too many. Again, more rookie mistakes.
01:06:47 ◼ ► Hey, how about you just get it right before you put it out? I know. But like part of it is mindset. Having never put in anything on an App Store that's mediated by a company before, I'm in the mindset of like, "I'm a service-side developer. You can deploy five times a day."
01:07:01 ◼ ► I'm just used to the idea of sort of iterative development. And of course it can always be a little bit better. And as soon as you have an improvement, you put out that small improvement. Because why sit on that small improvement?
01:07:14 ◼ ► Well, the reason you sit on it is because App Review takes a long time. And if you spend your whole time waiting for App Review, you know. Anyway, I need to get in a different mindset for doing things for the App Store and just chill a little bit.
01:07:24 ◼ ► Work more on the thing before I release the first version and then maybe batch the updates in more ways. It's difficult because like the first one, there's a bunch of bug reports and things that are critical to get out and stuff like that.
01:07:35 ◼ ► But anyway, all this is to say I've been spending a lot of time in Xcode. And this is the first time I've actually sort of used Xcode and Anger to do anything real, under any kind of pressure.
01:07:46 ◼ ► Like, "Oh, there's a bug. I need to get it fixed and figure out..." and so on and so forth. And surprisingly, of all the new experiences of using sort of modern Xcode, where the last time I used it, Interface Builder was separate and then maybe the last time I used it before that, it was called Project Builder.
01:08:01 ◼ ► You know, there's the Swift stuff and we talked about that before, but like, of all the things I didn't think would drive me nuts, it is laying out the controls in my one stupid window, my dinky little application. It's like a couple of pop-up menus, labels, checkboxes and some text. Like, that's it.
01:08:19 ◼ ► And having played with Xcode before and played with Interface Builder and seen a million WWC things, like, "Ah, you just drag the controls out of the cool little palette and there's all sort of grids and snapping and it'll just put them into your view and you're good to go."
01:08:32 ◼ ► That has not been my experience of using Xcode. Like, the layout I want to achieve, I feel like I could achieve more easily in Photoshop or Illustrator than I can in Xcode.
01:08:45 ◼ ► Part of it is the lack of zoom, which I already complained about, because, you know, these little tiny retina pixels and there's no way to actually zoom in the Xcode Interface Builder thingy on the Mac. Apparently, in iOS you can zoom, but not on the Mac.
01:08:59 ◼ ► So I've been using the screen zoom, you know, sort of control mouse wheel or whatever, but that just makes the pixels a little chunky or whatever. But really, it's like, Apple has, I'm, you know, sifting through the rubble of every layout system that Apple has introduced over the past several years.
01:09:14 ◼ ► And they're all available at the same time and you can mix them together, which you should not do. So it took me a while to learn that lesson, like, do not mix springs and struts in Auto Layout because you'll drive yourself insane.
01:09:24 ◼ ► The idea of a WYSIWYG editor, "Hey, just put the controls where you want in the window," right? And then you run the application and your controls are all over the place. It's like, what's the point of WYSIWYG if the control is going to shoot off in some other direction?
01:09:37 ◼ ► Like, it's not there in the thing. Like, ugh, it's just driving me insane. And then, once I eventually resigned myself to say, "Look, stop trying to be fancy. The old ways are best. This window is not resizable. Pixel perfectly place every control and just never have it move."
01:09:52 ◼ ► Even doing that is driving me insane because like, "Oh, what if you want to add another control? Well, I'll just make the window taller and put the new control. Oh, when I do this thing, Auto Resize the subviews is on somewhere because it's dragging something down. I've got to hunt through the thing and turn off all the springs and struts and everything."
01:10:04 ◼ ► And then I'm in there trying to line stuff up. There are guides in Xcode, but there's also grid snapping and there's also guide snapping and there's also snapping to controls, trying to give you the proper spacing between things, trying to let you align the baselines of text, but then being off by like a half a point, right? Like one retina pixel.
01:10:21 ◼ ► And then I've got to go in there and put fractional numbers in the positions in the text fields, 10.5 instead of 10 because they're not lined up even though the guide snapping says they're going to be. It's like, "Oh my God, this should be so much easier."
01:10:34 ◼ ► Like this should be like a grid. It should be like snap, snap, snap, snap. Like everything should be just chunky, gigantic 16 by 16 point grids or whatever. You know, it should be impossible for things to be off by one pixel.
01:10:46 ◼ ► But not only is it not impossible, it's practically impossible not to have things off by one or two pixels. And I just want to do things like I want this to be the same distance as that. Like I wish I was in OmniGraph, I wish I was in Photoshop, I wish I was in Illustrator, I wish I was in any other application that lets me put things on a canvas and align them in some sane way other than this hell that is Xcode's interface building.
01:11:07 ◼ ► This is one window, one tiny little stand. Now granted, I'm terrible at this. I'm bad at this, I'm a beginner, I'm a novice, I don't know what I'm doing, I have fundamental misunderstandings of how things are supposed to work.
01:11:18 ◼ ► But I'm not entirely ignorant and I feel like the thing I'm trying to do, getting back to the Swift thing, easy things should be easy. What I'm doing is an easy thing. This is not a fancy program. It's got one stupid window with some controls in it.
01:11:30 ◼ ► It should be so easy to do the right thing and get a correctly laid out window there. There are places where you have to make decisions about subjective aesthetic decisions or whatever, but in general it should be impossible to have things like one pixel off misaligned because you sneezed when you were trying to move something.
01:11:46 ◼ ► So I am really struggling with that, struggling to the point where I've got Xscope, which by the way is an amazing application from Icon Factory that lets you sort of overlay on your screen rulers and guides and frames and all sorts of other things.
01:12:00 ◼ ► I'm there zoomed in with Xscope lining up every single thing by single retina pixels, making sure, okay, I'm going to send this to the App Store. Are all the frickin' colons lined up on my labels? Oh, that one moved the hairline, I gotta move it back.
01:12:13 ◼ ► Are the baselines all in a text line? Oh, this one's aligned, but that one's not. How is that possible? Are these things exactly this number of points away from each other? How many points is it supposed to be? I don't know, but when I drag it, I see the little guide and it snaps that, but sometimes it doesn't show the guide.
01:12:26 ◼ ► So when it doesn't show the guide, I have to measure the other gap and say if the guide was visible, it should be this far apart. So this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight retina pixels. Let me move it eight retina pixels down here.
01:12:35 ◼ ► Oh, you can't use the arrow keys for that because it doesn't do the half pixel. It's driving me insane. I don't know how anybody does any substantial application with Xcode interface building.
01:12:44 ◼ ► The answer is, of course, oh, you can just do it all in code and then you put the exact values in. Why are you bothering with a GUI builder? And I tried that approach for a few things.
01:12:51 ◼ ► Like I've tried a lot of things. A spoiler for the future, I'm already working on my next application and I'm using SwiftUI.
01:12:59 ◼ ► And so I tried doing it programmatically. I tried doing with Auto Layout. I tried doing with Springs and Struts, trying to do it with SwiftUI.
01:13:06 ◼ ► I'm sampling everything to see if anything is easier. But thus far, again, caveat, I'm bad at this. I'm a beginner. I don't know what I'm doing.
01:13:15 ◼ ► But it should be easier to do these simple things. And so my overall thing is I was surprised that this is the thing of all the things about making an app and App Store Review and Swift and all the APIs.
01:13:28 ◼ ► And of all the stuff, it is laying out the minuscule GUI in my tiny, trivial applications that's driving me up a wall. I'm so sorry.
01:13:47 ◼ ► No, it really, when it comes to using Apple's various layout systems to try to make correctly looking interfaces without that much effort, it actually doesn't get better.
01:14:03 ◼ ► Yeah, but it isn't about that even. Custom controls don't actually make it that much harder.
01:14:20 ◼ ► And therefore, or rather, they are designed by people who are most experts in them. And so it's very unintuitive to beginners, first of all, as you have found already.
01:14:29 ◼ ► But auto layout is extremely complicated. The interface for making auto layout constraints and dealing with them in Xcode is hilariously obtuse.
01:14:42 ◼ ► Don't even try to object to that. Like, I know how to use the GUI now. I know how to use it.
01:14:47 ◼ ► Auto layout itself is inscrutable. But the UI for doing it can be figured out. It's just not obvious.
01:14:55 ◼ ► Yeah, so there's all that, right? Then you also have the problems of, first of all, you have these many different systems that all have different behaviors.
01:15:03 ◼ ► So you have the old, you know, auto resizing mask springs and thrust system. Then you have auto layout.
01:15:09 ◼ ► Then now you're doing Swift UI, which is its own brand new thing, which is both completely different and also incredibly immature still.
01:15:15 ◼ ► So you have many different problems that you're juggling between these three different systems. None of them are great.
01:15:23 ◼ ► And people have such different opinions that, like, whatever I think or Casey thinks is probably going to be different than what you think, John.
01:15:31 ◼ ► Like, for me, I do everything in code for the most part. That's not great either. It just has downsides that I'm willing to tolerate more than the alternatives downsides.
01:15:42 ◼ ► Yeah, see, I feel like let me let me start by saying I've never done anything on the never written anything for the Mac.
01:15:55 ◼ ► But like vignette uses storyboards and I've survived. Like, it's fine. I use auto layout and it mostly works just fine.
01:16:06 ◼ ► And yeah, I mean, auto layout's weird, man. It really is. But I don't think it's entirely inscrutable, as with all things Apple lately.
01:16:16 ◼ ► Like, the documentation is hot garbage and it's very unapproachable. I don't think it's inscrutable, though.
01:16:23 ◼ ► And I agree that Interface Builder is very well, I keep I mean, obviously it's not Interface Builder anymore, but laying out an iOS app is very weird.
01:16:35 ◼ ► I wouldn't say it's hard necessarily, but it's very, very weird. And the way that IB does things is very unlike any other visual sort of designer I've used in the past.
01:16:47 ◼ ► And there are definitely times that things are are hard to understand or I get error messages that I can't really make heads or tails of like those things all do exist.
01:16:57 ◼ ► I'm not saying you're completely wrong or full of crap like your lived experience is factually your lived experience, but I don't I get the feeling up until what Marco said just a moment ago, I got the feeling that you're both saying that IB is hot garbage and is unusable.
01:17:11 ◼ ► And I don't think that's really the case. It's it's got its own set of trade offs. And Marco, I like what you said a moment ago about how you do everything in code, but that also does indeed have its own set of trade offs.
01:17:23 ◼ ► And that's fine. Like if that works for you, man, then stick to it. You don't need you don't need my permission to keep doing that. And you certainly don't need me guilting you into using IB.
01:17:32 ◼ ► For me, I like laying out these things visually, and it's easier for me to reason about it visually than to do it in code.
01:17:39 ◼ ► And I've also found that it, you know, IB is much easier to tolerate when you either have a extremely small team or a team of one.
01:17:49 ◼ ► And so, like when we were at work, when I was at work work, when I had an actual real job, I eventually got to the point that we were passing around some sort of trinket, I forget what it was, to kind of claim who was using the storyboard or the or whatever, you know, nib at the time, which is absolutely barbaric.
01:18:09 ◼ ► I mean, it was like using exclusive checkouts and Perforce way back in the day, which is also barbaric, if you ask me.
01:18:15 ◼ ► But that's what we needed to do. So yeah, I'm not saying interface builder is perfect. But I also don't think that it's a complete utter disaster, at least with iOS.
01:18:23 ◼ ► Again, I'm not trying to argue with you, Jon, about macOS. macOS may indeed be that bad of a disaster. But on iOS, it works for me. It's not perfect, but it works for me. I mean, it's not it's not completely worthless.
01:18:37 ◼ ► Yes, I completely agree with that. It is significantly harder to make a well-laid-out interface on the Mac than it is on iOS.
01:18:45 ◼ ► Because for lots of reasons, I mean, the Mac is just more complicated for like there's way more UI usually to a Mac app.
01:18:52 ◼ ► Like iOS apps tend to have significantly less UI. There are fewer standards that you're supposed to comply with on iOS.
01:18:58 ◼ ► Yeah, making a Mac app is or making a great Mac UI is significantly harder than a great iOS UI.
01:19:05 ◼ ► Or even just a reasonable looking Mac UI. Here's the thing about the Mac versus iOS. On the Mac, you have this giant blank canvas that is a window that can be any size, any shape, and you can put a billion things on them.
01:19:16 ◼ ► And you can put them anywhere. Like there's really no precedent for that in iOS, because in general, in iOS, you're, you know, first of all, usually full screen or half screen or quarter screen or whatever.
01:19:26 ◼ ► And you're using controls and things that essentially define bounding boxes for themselves. You've got a table view. A table view has rows. Within the row, maybe you have some freedom to lay things out, but there's like a thing on the right and a thing on the left and you can align them and you can have padding and that's about it.
01:19:41 ◼ ► And that is incredibly constrained compared to here's a gigantic gray window, throw these 900 controls on them. And that's what you really need the tool to help you.
01:19:50 ◼ ► All right. What should the margins be on this window? How far away should a label be from its pop up menu? How wide should the pop up menus be? How much space should there be between them? If you have to group them, how should you group them? Should you group them with white space or you group them with a bounding box?
01:20:01 ◼ ► If you make a bounding box, does everything get nested in that view or it should not be nested in the view? Once they're nested in multiple views, can you align things in, they're supposed to be aligned if you're in a good Mac design, things in these little gray boxes should be aligned with each other.
01:20:11 ◼ ► Like the label should all line up, but you can't actually align them with the tool because you can't command click or shift click items that are in different bounded views. So you could take them out of the views, but then every time you try to move them, they re-nest themselves into the views.
01:20:23 ◼ ► Like the tools are not helping and you really need help from the tools because you don't have help from the controls themselves. They're not things nested inside each other.
01:20:31 ◼ ► They don't tend to go from edge to edge and define sort of regions or whatever. I'm not saying that iOS design is easy because iOS has its own weird set of problems with device orientation changes and different sizes and things you can't control or whatever.
01:20:43 ◼ ► But in general, the controls on the Mac, it's like just a bunch of Legos and you just dump them out onto a carpet. It's like, make sense of that. And I guess that's where you really need the tools to help you.
01:20:52 ◼ ► And the tools aren't really fighting me, but they're not doing me any favors. That's why I'm using accessibility, the screen zoom and Xscope to get in there and zoom.
01:21:03 ◼ ► And again, I've heard that in storyboards and iOS, you can actually zoom in Xcode itself, which would really help when you're trying to get things lined up.
01:21:11 ◼ ► But even with that zoom, like I said with the grouping, that's a real thing that I'm doing because even in my SwiftUI app, I have other windows that I was starting to do in SwiftUI.
01:21:22 ◼ ► I was like, how the hell do you do regular controls in SwiftUI? And I was like, oh, I'll just do this one the old fashioned way.
01:21:29 ◼ ► So I have SwiftUI and a storyboard in this new application. And for the storyboard based view, I do actually have a bunch of controls that I decided to group with sort of, I don't know what they're called, but like these boxes,
01:21:39 ◼ ► these little sort of recessed darker gray regions that you're familiar with on the Mac. Like if you go into, I'm looking at it right now in system preferences in the extensions pane, there's a sort of source list on the left.
01:21:49 ◼ ► It's like a table view, a scrolling table view. On the right, there's a detail view. And that's sort of recessed in a little well.
01:21:56 ◼ ► And I wanted to group the controls in those boxes. But once you do that, you can't use the alignment tools in Xcode to align things across those boxes.
01:22:06 ◼ ► So you have to use a guide, but then when you put the guide in, how do you place the guide so that it is correctly positioned so that the thing you already know you snap to the right distance from the field?
01:22:17 ◼ ► Like how do you place the guide so that it is in place with the first set of items? Because you can put the guide and eyeball it, but then when you try to move the thing, you're like, oh, actually that guide is one pixel off where it's supposed to be because the thing just moved and it shouldn't have moved because it was already aligned.
01:22:37 ◼ ► I think in many ways, if it goes the way it's supposed to, according to plan, SwiftUI should really help this.
01:22:51 ◼ ► It should, in theory, provide more standard grouping, standard layouts for controls across the platforms, including the Mac.
01:23:01 ◼ ► That I think is what we're really lacking. As you mentioned, the controls basically doing a lot of this work themselves.
01:23:09 ◼ ► With SwiftUI, if it fulfills the promise, I think you should have significantly less of this work to do manually.
01:23:18 ◼ ► I'm not going to go into all the SwiftUI thing now, but if you go to my website, go to hypercritical.co, and look.
01:23:25 ◼ ► I keep updating. As I release new versions of front and center, I keep updating the screenshot on the website.
01:23:36 ◼ ► Or you can just launch front and center, which I know you're all running, and check the preferences.
01:23:43 ◼ ► Anyway, if you look at this and think about what Marco just said about SwiftUI, like that these controls come with canned metrics,
01:23:50 ◼ ► and that there's some cross-platform nature where it'll put the right control for the right thing.
01:23:55 ◼ ► There's nothing, as far as I'm aware, so far in SwiftUI that would help with a window like this.
01:24:02 ◼ ► Because this window, I think, is not perfect. It's not great. It's overwhelming because I have to have all this explanatory text.
01:24:09 ◼ ► That's the fault of my application. It's not the fault of Xcode. Me making an application is hard to explain, so I've got to be all wordy.
01:24:15 ◼ ► Anyway, set that aside. Just imagine it was two tabs, two pop-up menus, four checkboxes. Forget about all the other crap.
01:24:22 ◼ ► SwiftUI doesn't give you anything that will help you lay out these controls in a Mac-like way.
01:24:33 ◼ ► And the one I've chosen is partly, like this is part of the things in Mac, it's partly aesthetics.
01:24:39 ◼ ► It's partly artistry, which sounds highfalutin, but it's like there are tons of different ways to do it.
01:24:45 ◼ ► You are sort of expressing the personality of your application, and by extension yourself, in what you decide to do.
01:24:53 ◼ ► There is no generic, standard way to lay out these controls, because they're not just controls.
01:25:00 ◼ ► They have semantics in your application, so you have to sort of try to provide some kind of visual hierarchy that expresses the meaning of the controls to the user.
01:25:12 ◼ ► I don't think that, not only do I not think SwiftUI would help me lay out this dialogue, I don't think I could lay it out in this way with SwiftUI without a ton of work.
01:25:24 ◼ ► I'm using SwiftUI in my new app for what its strengths are. When you use SwiftUI, it's a lot like doing web development.
01:25:30 ◼ ► It feels more like that. It feels like using CSS, right? Right down to dot padding or whatever, and then alignments, and hstacks and vstacks.
01:25:40 ◼ ► It is very much like doing web work, where in the web in general you sort of define these regions and then you style them.
01:25:46 ◼ ► hstacks and vstacks and lists and text and whatever are like divs and all those other things, right?
01:25:58 ◼ ► But if I had to make a web page that looked like this dialogue, it would also be a little bit tricky, because things really are sort of lined up down to the pixel based on spacing and visual weight.
01:26:12 ◼ ► I'm not particularly happy with the result. It's too busy, I'm not sure about those lines, the spacing is a mess, but at this point I just don't ever want to touch it again, because anytime I touch anything, everything just cascades into this giant mess and everything's misaligned.
01:26:24 ◼ ► I'm terrified of this stupid thing. For example, the space of the interface and startup regions of checkboxes, I wanted them to be separate because they're kind of two separate things.
01:26:33 ◼ ► One of them is about hiding and showing icons, the other one is like, "What do I do when I startup?"
01:26:37 ◼ ► How much space should there be between those two sets of checkboxes? Does anybody know? I can tell you for a fact Xcode sure as hell doesn't know.
01:26:45 ◼ ► Because it does not give you any guides. If you want to have a space there, how much space do you want? You can choose it down to the retina pixel. How much space do you want?
01:26:54 ◼ ► God forbid you have multiple groups, because then they should all be spaced by the same amount. Can you do that in Xcode? Have fun zooming in and trying to make sure they're the same space.
01:27:02 ◼ ► The tools for laying out groups, this doesn't do it for you. You've got to do this yourself down to the pixel.
01:27:09 ◼ ► Again, with SwiftUI doing it, I spend a lot of time wandering through the preferences dialogues of every application on my Mac, third party and first party.
01:27:18 ◼ ► There is a huge variety out there. It's the expression of the personality of the application that comes through in the way they lay out their preferences.
01:27:30 ◼ ► Sometimes you can look at it by age. If you go through system preferences, you can date them by, "I remember when this was the way we used to do Mac UIs. This hasn't been touched in five years, this hasn't been touched in seven years."
01:27:41 ◼ ► You can really feel that if you're familiar with the way things are done. But then you're like, "How should I be doing it now?"
01:27:48 ◼ ► That's kind of like asking the question of, "What kind of songs should I be making now? What's good music now?"
01:27:55 ◼ ► It's like, "Well, that's up to you to do." There is no, "I just want to know how to make a song. How are people making songs today?"
01:28:02 ◼ ► The same thing with apps, right? I just feel like the tools should at least help you align your...
01:28:17 ◼ ► Logic doesn't make the song for you, but it makes it easy to have multiple tracks and cut and remove things from them and align them up.
01:28:26 ◼ ► I'm hoping I don't have much experience with Logic, but anyway, that's what you want the tool to do.
01:28:30 ◼ ► The tool's not making the song for you, but the tool is letting you know, "Can I make a one-second gap between these things, and can it always be one second?"
01:28:40 ◼ ► Yeah, because the tool has a way for you to do that. It's a little bit different in that there are standards for standard spacing of stuff.
01:28:47 ◼ ► For example, the distance that the label is from the checkbox. Xcode does that for me. I don't have to guess that, right?
01:28:52 ◼ ► The distance from the label to the left-side label. Xcode has a snap for that, but it has snaps all around there.
01:29:00 ◼ ► Because you can't zoom, like, "Am I aligned with the baseline of the text, or am I aligned with the bottom of the checkbox?"
01:29:04 ◼ ► They're about one pixel away from each other. Make sure you're aligned with the right one.
01:29:07 ◼ ► It's just very persnickety. All this is to say is that app development is hard. Surprise. The person who doesn't do app development finds it difficult.
01:29:17 ◼ ► Surprise. This is not a condemnation or anything other than just myself and my poor choices and not learning this stuff better before I started using it.
01:29:26 ◼ ► But yeah, app development is hard, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised, because the programming part? Programming for 20 mumble years, right?
01:29:37 ◼ ► Programming is just programming, right? Finding the right APIs and fighting with sandboxing and stuff like that is a little bit tricky, but in the end it's not much different than fighting with browser APIs and all the other stuff that I've done in my actual career.
01:29:51 ◼ ► Programming is programming, but gooey stuff and having to use tools and having to decide, "Do I want to do it programmatically? Do I want to use SwiftUI? Do I want to use Auto Layout? Do I want to use Spring
01:29:51 ◼ ► do I want to use SwiftUI? Do I want to use Auto Layout? Do I want to use Spring Construct? Do I want to throw up a webview?" People make all sorts of decisions in their applications for good or for ill.
01:30:05 ◼ ► Maybe I've gone over the deep end where I have the ability to do all of those things badly, and I'm taking a tour of all of them and just finding all the different ways they're all bad, or that I'm bad at them.
01:30:20 ◼ ► As usual, the hardest problems in computer science are choosing your GUI framework, fighting your tools, and visual design.
01:30:32 ◼ ► This is the great thing. I get a lot of having GUI apps and getting bug reports and not being able to actually communicate with your customers.
01:30:40 ◼ ► One of the bug reports I got was, "I click on the tab." There's the general tab and the exclude tab. It said, "I click on the tab and nothing happens."
01:30:47 ◼ ► They didn't even say that. "I click on the tab and it doesn't work." Or something like that. It was a very terse thing.
01:30:55 ◼ ► The thing is, that tab you control, first of all, it's inscrutable to be able to... I didn't even go into this, but it's very difficult to get that to work.
01:31:03 ◼ ► But that's a control. You just make that and you add tabs to it. I have zero amount of code. I'm not controlling that.
01:31:09 ◼ ► You can programmatically make that tab group and control it yourself, but I'm not. I'm using the widget from the little library in the interface builder.
01:31:17 ◼ ► It does that. I can change the animation to be on or off or whatever, but I've just left the default.
01:31:27 ◼ ► There's a checkbox to turn it off and there's a pop-up menu to pick what kind of animation you want, but I'm pretty sure that's just the default.
01:31:36 ◼ ► I assumed you did seek it out and add it because I can't recall ever seeing this crossfade. I'm sure it exists somewhere, but I cannot recall ever seeing this crossfade anywhere.
01:31:44 ◼ ► Yeah, but anyway, I'm not controlling that. So when they say, "Hey, I clicked on Exclude and it doesn't work," it's like, "But I didn't make that work. That's part of the control."
01:31:51 ◼ ► But the thing that drives me nuts about this with storyboards is, so you've got the window in the storyboard, right?
01:31:56 ◼ ► And then you've got the view, which is a second rectangle with a line coming from it in the storyboard view.
01:32:03 ◼ ► Then you've got another line from that view box to the tab control, which shows the two tabs.
01:32:08 ◼ ► And then you've got two lines coming from that, one for the contents of the left tab and one for the—
01:32:16 ◼ ► The thing that was driving me nuts is when I click from the left tab to the right tab, I don't want anything to move.
01:32:25 ◼ ► So you have to make the views so they exactly fit in the same size box so that when you switch from one tab to the other, the tabs don't move.
01:32:33 ◼ ► And the darker gray rectangle, the inset thing, also doesn't move when you change tabs.
01:32:43 ◼ ► What is it that's determining the size of these things? You can control them down to the pixel in Excode.
01:32:47 ◼ ► I had them down to the pixel matching, but then I started measuring them when I ran it.
01:32:51 ◼ ► I'm like, "Yeah, I have everything down to the pixel matching, but when I run it, it's like three pixels different."
01:32:58 ◼ ► And again, this is just ignorance on my part, but it's surprising to me that you would think, "Oh, see this window you see in this screenshot?
01:33:07 ◼ ► Nope, that is not what I see in Excode. What I see in Excode is this big giant sprawling thing in storyboards with lines between them,
01:33:13 ◼ ► and none of those boxes are the same size as the box you see on your screen right here.
01:33:17 ◼ ► It's non-obvious to a beginner, let's say. Easy things should be easy. In Excode, easy things are possible.
01:33:25 ◼ ► I think one of the bigger challenges also that you have here, which you were talking about earlier,
01:33:38 ◼ ► You're trying to make the right style, using the right spacing, using the right controls for things.
01:33:56 ◼ ► I feel like Mac enthusiasts like us have this idea in our head of what a Mac app should be, or what's a good Mac app, or what's a native Mac app style.
01:34:11 ◼ ► We know it when we hear it. We know when we hear a good song, we know when we hear a bad song, we know when we hear an old song, we know when we hear a new song.
01:34:26 ◼ ► we have this idea of the kind of things it should have, the kind of way it should look,
01:34:45 ◼ ► There's the secondary but significant problem of not only are the number of developers who make good quality Mac apps seemingly pretty small,
01:35:21 ◼ ► or just basically web apps that are wrapped in a UI or something that just throw away any concept of there possibly being a right way to do these things.
01:35:57 ◼ ► that there's just very few people left not only doing this, but who even will know how to do this.
01:36:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, there's Mac-like, which you mentioned that you don't have metrics for all this stuff,
01:36:25 ◼ ► But it would show you dialogues of like, "This is how far the OK button needs to be from the left,