00:00:00 ◼ ► How's it going? Not too bad, how about you? Good, it just occurred to me I already started recording before you showed up, so you're listening to me briefly watch some tickety-tocks that some friends had sent me. There is no less cool way to say that than the way you just said that.
00:00:19 ◼ ► There's breaking news today that apparently Apple is now dividing the king of the App Store into two different positions. I guess one for the traditional App Store and one for the EU and other countries like bespoke App Stores.
00:00:39 ◼ ► And I was saying to John, you know, we should talk about this because otherwise we're going to have everyone writing into us saying, "Hey, you didn't talk about that. What's the deal?" And John, you seem to think it's not worth talking about.
00:00:48 ◼ ► No, I don't think this is super interesting unless we get more information than we have right now because, so we all know, if you listen to the show, that there's a bunch of different rules that Apple has to follow in the EU and soon to be in other countries. In fact, there already is in some other countries different rules.
00:01:02 ◼ ► And so they're dividing App Store into someone who's in charge of figuring out what you got to do to follow the EU rules and then someone who's in charge of Apple's App Store where you just get to follow Apple's rules.
00:01:13 ◼ ► But still, at the top of the organization is the same person, Phil Schiller, still in charge of the store. And it makes perfect sense organizationally to say, "Okay, you subordinate whatever person take care of the EU stuff and you take care of the non-EU stuff."
00:01:26 ◼ ► I don't think it signals any kind of policy change. It's not like they're cleaning house and getting rid of the person who's in charge of the App Store and Tim Cook has had a change of heart about the App Store.
00:01:35 ◼ ► The person who was leaving had been there for 21 years, just retiring because he's got enough money. Maybe there's a story, maybe there's a beginning of house cleaning, but from what I know now, it just seems like, okay, they're shuffling people around for completely explicable reasons and it does not fill me with any kind of hope.
00:01:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I wouldn't read anything into this about any kind of larger policy changes because the App Store is run first by Tim Cook, then by Phil Schiller, then by whoever these other people are. So if you want major policy changes to have a chance of happening, I think you got to look higher up the chain than a third-level person for something that's this important to the company.
00:02:13 ◼ ► Yeah, and that would be signaled by one of those higher-level people saying something different or doing something different. That's when you know change will be happening. Shuffling the ranks underneath just to handle what we all know to be a very complex and touchy situation and having the person who has to deal with the EU not be distracted by that makes perfect sense.
00:02:33 ◼ ► It's just how you divide up labor within the company. It's so rare that we get any kind of glimpse about what's going on at these lower levels or medium-high levels of the company, but every time we do it just looks like any other company. Again, someone who's leaving Apple after being the head of the App Store for 21 years. So that makes perfect sense. People leave jobs all the time after 21 years. He's probably going to go and enjoy his life with his money that he earned in all those years.
00:03:05 ◼ ► Just kidding. All right, so moving right along, we have an additional bit of pre-show that we need to cover. We have a new member special. We have the August member special came out a few days ago as we record this. It is HP Insider domestic workflows. John, would you please explain what does that even mean?
00:03:31 ◼ ► I'm explaining it right now. This is an idea suggested by a friend of the show, Todd Vaziri, that is about things that we do in our house that makes our lives easier. One of the examples he gave was getting an electric kettle, which sounds boring to anyone who's in the UK, but not all Americans do that.
00:03:46 ◼ ► A lot of them do get it. They say, "Wow, this really changed my life for the better, and now I use an electric kettle every time I want to make hot water for tea." It can be products that you bought. It could be things that you do, practices that you perform.
00:03:58 ◼ ► I was hoping it would be weirder than it was. It mostly was pretty standard, but I have been surprised from the reaction we're getting from people. They are finding our hints from Halloween very useful.
00:04:10 ◼ ► Just these plain old boring tips. It could have gone two different ways. We could have found out that Casey is doing something completely ridiculous in his house and we could have tried to talk him out of it, but instead we're all doing mostly normal things in our house with the exception of Marco is doing unadvised things with a dishwasher.
00:04:28 ◼ ► But hey, he likes it, so you'll hear about that on the episode if you would like. Already people are saying you should do a second episode of this. It was so hard to get one episode worth of these tips out, but people just crave households tips.
00:04:42 ◼ ► We'll think about it for the potentially far future and take another run at this. But for now, domestic workflows. What do we do in our home that we think makes our lives easier?
00:04:51 ◼ ► You know, it was really funny because after we record every episode of the show, you know, typically I'll feel like, yeah, that was pretty good, you know, and I'll go to bed afterwards and usually Aaron will wake up enough to ask how it was.
00:05:02 ◼ ► And usually the answer is good because usually I feel like the episodes went well. At the end of that one, I was like, did that go okay?
00:05:15 ◼ ► To be honest with you, I didn't think it was like bad or anything, but I was like, I don't know. I was expecting a little more fireworks from that. And like you said, it was fairly straightforward.
00:05:23 ◼ ► But I have to both say and thank a lot of different people have written in to say, wow, that was so great and it was so much fun. And I was like, really?
00:05:32 ◼ ► So I'm very thankful for it. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to talk you out of that opinion. I was just, it took me by surprise. So I guess that we did better than I expected. So go us. Yay team.
00:05:41 ◼ ► And also I continue to believe that we just have not gotten to the weird things you two are doing in your house.
00:05:51 ◼ ► Because everything I do is perfectly normal, as you know. And I'm sure you all think exactly the same way.
00:05:56 ◼ ► That everything you do is perfectly normal and the other two are the weird ones. And that's how it is with everybody. Everyone thinks the things that they do are normal and the things that other people do in their house don't make any sense.
00:06:16 ◼ ► I don't think we need to do an entire member special about that. It will be fine. But anyway, if we take another run at this sometime in the future, maybe we'll come at it from a different angle or we will just dig deeper.
00:06:26 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some follow up. Aaron Dipner writes in with regard to the iPhone 16 capture button. Aaron writes, "You were discussing the rumored capture button and mentioned the possibility of it being touch sensitive. I've often wondered if Apple would consider making a touch sensitive scroll wheel input method.
00:06:44 ◼ ► The early Blackberry phones had a physical scroll wheel on the side before they moved to the trackball that became more commonly associated with them. I still miss that scroll wheel as a method of linear input.
00:06:53 ◼ ► It'd be great if this "camera button" or the rumors of touch sensitive volume buttons could lead to something along these lines, though the placement might be odd.
00:07:01 ◼ ► I do hope this isn't something just limited to a single camera feature, but in typical Apple fashion if they do it'll be a worthwhile feature I'd bet.
00:07:09 ◼ ► I know not everyone finds the digital crown on the watch as useful, but it can be a really nice way to scroll a screen without other input.
00:07:15 ◼ ► And while I can't see this being a physical wheel on the phone, there's plenty of nice uses for linear input like that.
00:07:22 ◼ ► I think I agree with this. I don't know that I'm necessarily seeking a scroll pad, if you will, but I could see how that would be really convenient if it was in the right spot on the side of the phone.
00:07:32 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the tricky part. So first of all, it depends on if you're holding the phone with your right hand or left hand and whether you want to use the wheel with your fingertips or your thumb.
00:07:40 ◼ ► There's just so many variables here. The capture button, to be clear, the rumored placement of the capture button, is probably the worst possible place for a right-handed, if someone holds the phone in their right hand, to do any kind of scrolling with.
00:07:51 ◼ ► So it's probably not that. And I also think that any kind of touch-sensitive thing on the side of the phone poses difficulties for cases which most people use and poses difficulty for accidental input.
00:08:01 ◼ ► The idea of, like I remember the Blackberry wheel type thing, but the idea of being able to scroll the screen without obscuring any portion of it has some merit.
00:08:08 ◼ ► But I do kind of think that physically the act of scrolling your phone is so ingrained, even in people who didn't grow up with it, but certainly in people who did grow up with it, that it is just so dominant that no one thinks there's anything, there's nothing that needs to be fixed there.
00:08:26 ◼ ► People scroll their phones. It's one of the most, you know, it's one of the core interactions people do with their phones is scrolling some kind of vertical list on the screen.
00:08:36 ◼ ► And I think it works fine. Yes, whatever, you know, your thumb is obscuring some portion of the screen, but it's not, I don't think that's an issue that people would say, "Oh, that's a problem that needs to be solved."
00:08:46 ◼ ► So, interesting idea, but I think it has, I think it presents more problems than it solves.
00:08:52 ◼ ► We have a bunch of rumors with regard to the iPhone 16 Pro's alleged fourth color. Before you get excited, your choices are dull, dark dull, light dull, and slightly colorful dull, but let's talk about it.
00:09:07 ◼ ► This is a report from MacRumors. iPhone 16 Pro models are expected to come in black, white, gray, or natural titanium, and a rose gold color, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and other leakers.
00:09:18 ◼ ► Leaker Sonny Dixon's image shows what we can expect from the rose gold variant, which was recently described by one leaker as having a more bronze-like hue, and based on the images I've seen, I would concur with that.
00:09:28 ◼ ► A different MacRumors report, we'll have all these links in the show notes. The new bronze-like color may be called desert titanium, according to the leaker known as My Jin Bu.
00:09:38 ◼ ► And this definitely, as many people have pointed out, and I think the first person I saw point this out was Steven Hackett, if I'm not mistaken, but anyways, very big Microsoft Zune energy, which is kind of funny.
00:09:47 ◼ ► But, you know, what are you going to do? And then somebody from one of these MacRumors reports, there's a picture, I don't understand why these are always so grainy, but here we are.
00:09:56 ◼ ► Those are the best kind of rumor shots. Hastily taken, not in focus, very blurry. I know. I can tell it's authentic. Or a fake render that they added a blur to.
00:10:05 ◼ ► So there's what appears to be a chart, and I believe this is some flavor of Chinese written on here, but it's iPhone 16 Pro, and it has several camera lens rings, and you can see the different ones.
00:10:18 ◼ ► And I tried using Apple's translate app in scanning and reading what these different messages or words were, and I didn't get anything interesting out of it.
00:10:26 ◼ ► Like I was hoping I would see desert titanium written here, and I did not. But that's just using an app. Who knows if I'm getting the right translation?
00:10:34 ◼ ► Well, you do get iPhone with a capital I and a lowercase p. So that's great. So, I mean, we talked about these colors in the previous episode, but we didn't have a picture of the rose gold one. It's brown. It's a brown phone.
00:10:50 ◼ ► Right, but this is not shiny brown. This is just brown. I mean, again, it's hard to tell in pictures. Is this the real color? Is this a real thing? Is this just someone making like a prototype version that's going to look sort of like this?
00:11:01 ◼ ► That's why I included the picture of the little rings, because like, oh, can you see it? Is the brown ring that brown or is it not that brown?
00:11:08 ◼ ► People made fun of the brown Zune, but of course now it's like a collector's item. I'll put a link in the show where you can buy it on Amazon for $230.
00:11:24 ◼ ► Like any kind of fashion thing, you know, trends come and go. Is this going to be the year of the brown phone? Again, people put cases on anyway. Is this like a brown phone with a clear case over it?
00:11:36 ◼ ► Maybe you get a brown phone and you put brown leather on top of it and you go for that kind of theme.
00:11:40 ◼ ► Not that this is a super exciting color, but I have to say one of these things is not like the other.
00:11:46 ◼ ► This is probably the most interesting pro phone color they've had in years, and it's brown.
00:11:54 ◼ ► I think it's fine. I mean, golds and tans and coppers and brasses have all been kind of coming back into style and fashion and various things in the last few years.
00:12:07 ◼ ► So this fits in perfectly. I'm not surprised at all. I think it will be exactly as exciting as all of the other pro phone colors have been forever.
00:12:20 ◼ ► Instead of like, you know, very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and bluish gray, now we have very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and brownish gray.
00:12:31 ◼ ► Yeah, and a lot of these colors, depending on the lighting, they can look radically different because the colors are so slight.
00:12:38 ◼ ► We saw this with the gold MacBook Air or whatever it was, and you'd see some pictures and you're like, "Wow, that's like a gold computer."
00:12:51 ◼ ► So it may be that this one spy photo is really emphasizing the brownness, and if you tilt it two more degrees, it just looks like it's gray.
00:13:09 ◼ ► They could call it mocha or like some kind of, well, they don't use real leather anymore, but they could use a name that evokes leather.
00:13:20 ◼ ► Gus Mueller, friend of the show and developer of Acorn and RetroBatch, had some thoughts with regard to the system color picker.
00:13:27 ◼ ► On the last episode, writes Gus, you mentioned a 3D app that uses a custom color picker instead of the system color picker.
00:13:33 ◼ ► Acorn also uses a custom screen color picker because the system one really, really sucks when it comes to color profiles.
00:13:42 ◼ ► I filed a couple of radars about it over the years and given direct feedback, but I gave up a number of years ago and wrote my own.
00:13:51 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the tough part where if Apple's going to say, oh, your app's going to throw a warning unless you use the system implementation of the system color picker, the system screen sharing window picker or whatever.
00:14:04 ◼ ► And maybe that's why. I thought Maya was using a custom one just because it's not really like a Mac first application.
00:14:10 ◼ ► It's cross platform, runs on Linux, you know, so they're just they're not going to do Mac system things.
00:14:14 ◼ ► But Acorn is the Mac-iest of all Mac apps you can imagine. And if Gus isn't using system one, it's because system one is falling down in some way.
00:14:33 ◼ ► And we got some feedback from friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry from the icon factory who develop Xscope among many other things.
00:14:46 ◼ ► Craig writes, I can confirm that you get the allow for one month dialog if you are using the very latest screen recording APIs from screen capture kit and you get it in seconds after you've just turned on the screen recording system settings.
00:14:57 ◼ ► Not after one month. Cool. Then Craig has justifiably been whining about the fact that there was no documentation for this.
00:15:05 ◼ ► Imagine that! Imagine that an Apple API without documentation. Surely not. But anyways, well, apparently there is documentation now.
00:15:16 ◼ ► The persistent content capture entitlement indicates whether a virtual network computing VNC app needs persistent access to screen capture.
00:15:31 ◼ ► The persistent content capture entitlement enables VNC apps to view and record the screen.
00:15:37 ◼ ► So this was the hope that this persistent content capture entitlement would let applications capture the screen persistently without reprompting once for a month or whatever.
00:15:46 ◼ ► But Apple, I mean, we looked at this exact URL like last show, I think. Since last show, Apple has added this documentation and Casey just read essentially all of it.
00:16:03 ◼ ► And Xscope also doesn't and probably shouldn't do the thing that like Zoom does where it's like, oh, so you want to share your screen?
00:16:13 ◼ ► Zoom and other applications like that can use the system color picker or screen sharing picker.
00:16:17 ◼ ► They're not currently, but they're probably changing to do so. We'll talk about that in a second.
00:16:21 ◼ ► But for Xscope, you launch Xscope and then it's just running and it does all sorts of stuff to your screen.
00:16:28 ◼ ► Like one of the tools they have you can use to measure the distance between things on your screen.
00:16:32 ◼ ► And obviously to do that, it needs to see the pixels that are on your screen so it knows where the edges are because it does like a find edges thing.
00:16:39 ◼ ► But when you and when you use the dimensions tool, you will see the screen capture whatever color it is, like the blue menu bar icon that says something is looking at your screen and it's Xscope.
00:16:52 ◼ ► But for Xscope, it's not a VNC application, so it can't use this entitlement because I assume Apple would reject it and say, hey, you're not a VNC application.
00:16:59 ◼ ► And it also can't really use the system picker because Xscope always wants to look at the entire screen.
00:17:04 ◼ ► That's the whole point. You want to know the distance between those two windows, the distance between that and that.
00:17:08 ◼ ► Like you don't want to like pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, pop the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, right?
00:17:15 ◼ ► You just want it to work the way it does now, which is you just use Xscope and it works.
00:17:18 ◼ ► And yes, when it is looking at the pixels on your screen, you see the little screen recording thingy in the menu bar as you would expect.
00:17:24 ◼ ► But that's it. So I don't think this entitlement is going to help Xscope or any application with like a color picker.
00:17:31 ◼ ► Like you can imagine like Acorn, it wants to use like it doesn't want to use a system color picker because it does color matching or color profiling badly or whatever.
00:17:41 ◼ ► Anytime you hit the eyedropper, it's going to pop up a picker that says, where do you want to eyedropper from?
00:17:52 ◼ ► And as far I haven't been able to tell this because I haven't written a demo app, but I think if you use the thing that pops up, like which window do you want to share?
00:18:03 ◼ ► But I still haven't had that confirmed. Everyone who says, oh, if you use that, you won't get prompted.
00:18:09 ◼ ► And if you tried it, did you set your date forward or have you waited a month or did someone from Apple tell you that?
00:18:17 ◼ ► Unless you're a VNC app, in which case maybe it helps you or maybe you still get prompted once a month. We'll see.
00:18:28 ◼ ► And instead of recognizing the badness of the decision and finding a better solution, they start poking a bunch of possible holes in it, like entitlements.
00:18:43 ◼ ► Like what I said last episode, to have this like, you know, allow for a month thing with screen capture abilities, that's going to just kill all the businesses of all apps to do that.
00:18:53 ◼ ► Like, you're going to have so many support problems. What Apple is basically saying is apps can no longer really do this, but we don't want to actually take the hit of not letting apps do it officially.
00:19:04 ◼ ► So we're going to just make it suck for all the apps that do it and cause a bunch of problems for them, so they really can't rely on that as their business anymore.
00:19:12 ◼ ► But we're not going to actually have the guts to go ahead and kill it off completely because that would cost certain features and apps that we want.
00:19:18 ◼ ► The solution they've come up with is just the most half-baked, half-assed, mealy-mouthed, weak thing they could possibly do when there are better options available.
00:19:27 ◼ ► So here's my suggestion, Apple. When apps are reading the screen, make it really obvious in a part of the UI that they cannot change.
00:19:37 ◼ ► One way to do this would be, you know, you have the indicators in the menu bar. How about taking up like the entire right like 300 pixels of the menu bar with a big blue banner that says Xscope is currently capturing the screen?
00:19:54 ◼ ► Because some apps are capturing the screen constantly, or like when you open an open save dialog box, default folder fires up the API that it needs to see the screen to do its magic thing or whatever.
00:20:05 ◼ ► I don't want something that huge in the menu bar. I mean, the icon I think is fine. Making it bigger and more intrusive makes sense if you're using an application that you go and use and then stop using.
00:20:15 ◼ ► But what if the thing is just ambiently seeing your screen because it needs to do that to do its job?
00:20:19 ◼ ► Something that is persistently a little bit visually annoying is much better than something that periodically just totally breaks. That is not a solution.
00:20:29 ◼ ► It's not totally breaking. It's just chopping up a dialog and saying, "Do you want me to keep having this permission?" And it does it once a month. I would pick that.
00:20:34 ◼ ► And again, the menu bar icon is there, and I think it's pretty prominent. No, it's not 300 pixels wide, but it is colorful and it is prominent and you can see it when it's happening. I think job done on that front.
00:20:43 ◼ ► I very much disagree because when you interrupt the flow of people, first of all, it requires somebody to actually be at the computer. On upgrade, Jason Snell brought up what if somebody is running a headless Mac mini server somewhere and this box pops up.
00:20:58 ◼ ► Well, how are they going to access that box exactly without plugging in a monitor if it's going to break the thing that's allowing them to remotely administer the machine?
00:21:07 ◼ ► Well, that would be a VNC application and you could use this persistent entitlement which presumably would get rid of that.
00:21:16 ◼ ► That's the thing. The fact that they have to poke holes like that into it tells you right there that's not the right solution. This is an inelegant solution to a self-created own goal.
00:21:25 ◼ ► How about we rethink the actual problem here and think are there any other solutions that could maybe be better for that?
00:21:31 ◼ ► I guess you disagree, Jon. That's fine. But in my opinion, a larger visual indicator is a way better solution than interrupting someone's flow and breaking the functionality at least once a month and requiring interaction to keep confirming this thing. That is just such a bad solution to this problem.
00:21:48 ◼ ► Well, the problem is they're both crappy, if I'm honest with you. Because on the surface, I agree with you, Marco. But inevitably, then I think about, well, what if I was doing a screen...
00:22:01 ◼ ► Thank you, screencast. I knew it was screen something or other. I couldn't put my finger on the word.
00:22:04 ◼ ► What if I'm recording a screencast and now I've got this gigantic wart on the top right-hand corner of my screen?
00:22:10 ◼ ► No, they can solve that by not having the visual thing be in it. So I think the increase in the visual presence of it is a viable solution for anything that you use intentionally, but not for things that are ambiently in the background, always seeing your whole screen because they needed to do their job like default folder X or Xscope or something like that.
00:22:28 ◼ ► And for the suggestion for what I think the visual thing would look like for the cases where it is okay to have a prominent visual thing, this should be sort of the default unless you get some super duper permission.
00:22:41 ◼ ► And again, it's not this person's kind of capture. But anyway, the new Siri effect. The new Apple intelligent Siri effect. Not the exact Siri one, but you know how it makes rainbow colors around the edge of your phone screen?
00:22:51 ◼ ► That, but a different color. It's very prominent. You're not going to miss it. It's very large. You can exclude it from the screen recording thing because the actual screen recording API is know what's being drawn in layers or whatever. They can just not include that to your point, Casey. So it won't be won't be in your thing.
00:23:05 ◼ ► But it's like when that is active, if you I don't know if you've tried the beta or seen demos of it when that Siri ring thing is active. It's pretty hard to miss.
00:23:13 ◼ ► Much harder to miss than an icon in the menu bar or 300 pixel wide banner in the menu bar. It is very prominent, it is animated, and it really gets your attention.
00:23:21 ◼ ► That would be good for situations where you've got like a screen recording application or something like that. But for those apps that need to see the pixels on the screen to do their job and they're running all the time persistently, it should be hard to get that entitlement.
00:23:34 ◼ ► You should have to jump through hoops to do it, but it should exist because those apps it's inappropriate to have rainbow border or blue border or purple or whatever constantly on your screen because the fault folder X is running in the background 24 hours a day.
00:23:47 ◼ ► So it is a difficult problem, but you can get to an 80 or 90 percent solution without repeated prompts. I don't know. I feel like this will work itself out because Marco thinks that the support burden of having people email and say, "Hey, why does your thing keep prompting me every month for this thing? I hate it, blah, blah, blah."
00:24:03 ◼ ► That is terrible, but I don't think it's a business killer. It's a business herder. It's not going to put these apps out of business. It is going to make someone have to do a text snippet that they respond with to explain this is Apple doing this, not them, and there's nothing they can do about it.
00:24:19 ◼ ► So that shows that there remains a problem of some kind and it is bad, but yeah, I think better solutions do exist and hopefully we are ever socially lurching towards one. It would be better if Apple would communicate and so we wouldn't be guessing whether this VNC thing solves the problem, solves the remote access problem.
00:24:37 ◼ ► If you get this VNC entitlement for your VNC app, does it prevent the scenario where you can't VNC in because unbeknownst to you there's a dialogue popping up on the screen that you're trying to VNC into that says, "Do you want to give the VNC?" And there's no one there to press it, right?
00:24:50 ◼ ► Does that solve this problem or do you still get prompted once per month if you have this entitlement? Nobody knows because they added documentation between last week and this week, but they didn't say anything about that.
00:24:59 ◼ ► It's like you added documentation but you didn't tell us, we want to know more. Like, the VNC is in there that tells me, "Okay, if I'm not a VNC app, don't even bother applying for this one because Apple's not going to give it to you."
00:25:09 ◼ ► Speaking of entitlements, this is somewhat related to things that see the screen, but the window management application, Moom, has a new version, M-O-O-M, that spells Moom, as a reference, Casey.
00:25:22 ◼ ► And obviously it uses the accessibility APIs to see the screen. Moom, the previous major version of Moom, I think Moom 3, is on the Mac App Store.
00:25:33 ◼ ► But only because, I think it predated the Mac App Store or whatever, but they got one of those temporary entitlements where Apple's like, "Okay, Moom, you can be on the Mac App Store and we'll give you a temporary entitlement."
00:25:44 ◼ ► And what does that time on let them do? Use the accessibility APIs, the actual official Apple accessibility APIs, which are incredibly powerful and invasive because they have to be to do their job, and Moom uses them to do what it does, which is like arrange windows and everything, right?
00:25:58 ◼ ► When Moom 4 came out, which is the new version, Apple's like, "Yeah, you're not getting that entitlement anymore."
00:26:04 ◼ ► So Moom 3 got it because it was like, "Okay, well, we want to get you in the Mac App Store or whatever." But Moom 4 is not in the Mac App Store because remember that "temporary entitlement" that they had for who knows how many years?
00:26:14 ◼ ► Well, they can't get that one for Moom 4 because it's a major new version, so Moom 4 is simply not in the Mac App Store because there's no way to use the accessibility APIs and also be in the Mac App Store.
00:26:27 ◼ ► Accessibility APIs are important and should exist, but if they have to be like illegal contraband things that you can only use if you're outside the Mac App Store, who knows, maybe those will stop prompting you once a month about everything.
00:26:38 ◼ ► Like, Apple, you have to make modern accessibility APIs that can actually be used and say, "Well, we've got the old ones, and no one should ever use them, and no, you can't even be on the Mac App Store if you use them unless we give you one of those 'temporary entitlements' that you've had for seven years, but if you make a new version of your app, sorry, no temporary entitlement for you."
00:26:57 ◼ ► No, I mean, to me, this has been true since they started all that BS with the launch of the Mac App Store many years ago.
00:27:04 ◼ ► If they have to start poking holes in a policy or a technical restriction with entitlements that, "Well, okay, fine, you can do it. Not everyone can do this, but you can do it."
00:27:16 ◼ ► That is always a design failure. If they can avoid it, they should, and I think that that has become, it's kind of like, not to get too political, it's kind of like the executive order.
00:27:36 ◼ ► That's what entitlements are. They're bad workarounds to bad design decisions, and a much better design is to have the technical restrictions and measures and capabilities in place that work for any software that's running on the system,
00:27:49 ◼ ► and to have an entitlement-based exception system where you say, "Well, we don't actually want anyone to be doing any of these things, but it would hurt our platform too much if AppX or CapabilityX was not available."
00:28:04 ◼ ► Now, the correct decision, if you're faced with that problem, would probably be something like, "How can we change the technical environment such that that function is still available in a way that fits our modern needs better?"
00:28:17 ◼ ► Instead, what the entitlement escape hatch does is say, "We're going to do what we want for everyone else, but, you. You can maybe for now temporarily do this."
00:28:29 ◼ ► That is always a bad solution, because it's always going to introduce vagary instability for somebody's business or capabilities in the future.
00:28:36 ◼ ► It's going to kind of mess with competition, possibly, in weird ways. There are so many ways that's a failure to make a decision.
00:28:44 ◼ ► It has uncertainty for developers. Uncertainty is they don't know, "Oh, so I got this thing."
00:28:50 ◼ ► "Temporary super secret. Only you get this." Even the names are like, "Temporary entitlement. Don't expect to have this."
00:29:00 ◼ ► It's better that they give them the "not" because a lot of apps wouldn't be in the Mac App Store if they didn't have the instant entitlements.
00:29:11 ◼ ► My whole business is based on this. Half my customers are in the Mac App Store, and this temporary entitlement that I got seven years ago is the only thing keeping my Mac app there.
00:29:26 ◼ ► No, you're always dangling by a thread, because Apple can change its rules whenever it wants, and it does.
00:29:33 ◼ ► And thankfully on the Mac, they don't. So, Moom can offer their app outside the Mac App Store.
00:29:37 ◼ ► But Apple's attempt to push the Mac App Store while simultaneously not allowing all sorts of apps that people want on the Mac App Store, and then doling out special, secret, temporary entitlements to just the very important apps.
00:29:52 ◼ ► Again, that's better than them not doing that, but I agree with you, Marco. That's not an ideal system.
00:30:00 ◼ ► If this is what it takes to get these apps in the Mac App Store, something is either wrong with the Mac App Store or macOS.
00:30:10 ◼ ► I think the better answer is, like Marco said, to have it such that they aren't required.
00:30:17 ◼ ► But I don't begrudge Apple for wanting to have their fingers on who is using this, and are we considering them to be blessed enough to use it.
00:30:28 ◼ ► Well, the entitlements are an important purpose. In any system with entitlements, you want to know by looking at an app, like they keep using nutrition labels these days in pop culture, but anyway, you want to look at the app and say, "What does this app have permission to do?"
00:30:40 ◼ ► "Can it record my screen?" "Can it use the microphone?" "Can it do this?" Just by looking down the entitlements that this app has, like an iOS.
00:30:50 ◼ ► Temporary, only you can do this, super secret, you can use accessibility APIs even though no other app on the Mac App Store can do it. That's not a good entitlement.
00:30:58 ◼ ► Well, I would say anytime that Apple has to choose whether an app is worthy of an entitlement, so anything that requires an application process or you know, you got to email someone to get it, like any of that, the problem is you're bringing in way too much human fallibility.
00:31:14 ◼ ► You're bringing in vaguery, you're bringing in politics. We like to think, especially like earlier on, we like to think, like if I just email Apple and I apply for this thing that my app clearly qualifies for, it'll be fine.
00:31:25 ◼ ► But over time, we're seeing Apple, again, as they chase the App Store, scrounging around the couch, services revenue kind of stuff, we're seeing them start to weaponize systems like that, like notarization, that used to be neutral.
00:31:39 ◼ ► And I think this is exactly the same thing. Entitlements have never been neutral. There are people who have asked for entitlements and then just not heard back for three years. Just nothing.
00:31:47 ◼ ► Right, because like what if Steve Trout and Smith want an entitlement? Does Apple love him? Is he going to get it? Who knows, maybe not.
00:31:54 ◼ ► The people inside Apple when it comes to stuff like this, when humans are involved, humans can't help but be human.
00:32:00 ◼ ► And so you start running into things like petty spats and people who just don't like someone and that happens. We've seen that happen for years.
00:32:10 ◼ ► Anytime humans are involved, that has the potential to happen. And Apple has a lot of people who are like spiteful and judgmental and have grudges.
00:32:17 ◼ ► We see that happen and affect real developers. So the best systems like this just apply the same rules to everyone.
00:32:25 ◼ ► And for Apple to continue to have software platforms that people trust to build businesses on, they have to keep that trust up that they're not going to arbitrarily crush your business or make it very difficult for you needlessly.
00:32:39 ◼ ► And so the fewer entitlement-based systems there can be that require any kind of Apple approval or application process or human granting, the fewer of those the better.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And I feel like what they're doing now is just making these really cowardly decisions of like, "Well, we're going to lock this down for most people, but if you kiss the feet, maybe we'll let you do it." That's a terrible way to run a platform.
00:33:07 ◼ ► So I've always been in favor of the opposite direction of Apple actually using good judgment and deciding which applications should have more permissions based on the reputation of the developer and all that other stuff or whatever, but that does require humans to act in good faith and do what's best for the store. But really what it requires, really what my suggestion requires, is that there be competition.
00:33:25 ◼ ► And on the Mac there is. You can distribute outside the Mac App Store, which is one of the many reasons why the Mac App Store is not massively popular compared to iOS where it's the only game in town.
00:33:37 ◼ ► Lots of applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Even some very big applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Sometimes exclusively, sometimes not exclusively.
00:33:47 ◼ ► But that applies enough pressure for Moom to go, "Okay, we're going to make a new version and Apple is not giving us this thing, but we have a way forward. Fine, we'll do it outside the Mac App Store."
00:33:58 ◼ ► Moom 3, I don't know if it's still in the Mac App Store, but Moom 4 will be outside it and here's the explanation. And that applies pressure to Apple in a way that didn't exist until very recently on the iOS platform.
00:34:10 ◼ ► Having entitlements be sort of automatic for most things is a better system. You shouldn't have to apply to get a basic entitlement.
00:34:19 ◼ ► But I do think that, and I don't like temporary entitlements, but I do think the most powerful entitlements that have the potential to use the most damage should not be automatically distributed, but should still exist, but only for applications that are replicable.
00:34:34 ◼ ► And yes, that brings humans into it and humans can have grudges and do bad things and all you need to have is enough of a counterbalance to that to say, "Okay, if the humans at Apple are obnoxious, they'll be punished for it by that developer retaliating and saying, "Fine, my app's not even in the Mac App Store anymore and I'm going to do it all outside."
00:34:54 ◼ ► There needs to be power on both sides of this equation instead of Apple holding all the cards and us just out here hoping and begging that they'll do the thing that we want. Again, I've seen multiple stories, I haven't saved all these, but back in the Twitter days and even the Mastodon days, just some random developer who's like, "My application does this thing and I need this entitlement for it to work and I asked for it and it's been two years and I haven't heard back and I keep emailing them and I just never hear back and it's a black hole."
00:35:19 ◼ ► Because they're not a super famous developer and they don't have a podcast and they're not a well-known application and if you can't hear back from Apple or Google or any of these big companies, what do you do? Like go there and knock on the door or something?
00:35:29 ◼ ► I mean, I guess they should run to the press because that's the only thing that helps. Is that the saying? Anyway, the current situation is not great, but I do, every time I see one of these things, I say, "Well, at least the Mac is not iOS for now."
00:35:43 ◼ ► So coming back to the entitlement in question, an anonymous person writes, "I'm in engineering for a company that makes remote access software. I can confirm that the persistent content capture entitlement is intended to allow apps to return to prompt-once behavior, though it does allow for more than just screen capture, which is somewhat ironic. This was what we were told to do by a contact at Apple who is working with us on Sequoia compatibility."
00:36:04 ◼ ► So if you're a big enough company and you make an important enough application, Apple will tell you stuff that they won't put in the documentation. So apparently this person was told that you'll go back to prompt-once behavior if you have this entitlement.
00:36:14 ◼ ► But of course, this is anonymous feedback to a podcast and not documentation on Apple's website. Maybe next week that web page will have seven more words on it to explain this.
00:36:22 ◼ ► All right, so moving to last week's overtime topic, which was about Mac sales as reported by CIRP.
00:36:44 ◼ ► It seemed obvious to me that the chart is based on revenue from the various models, not unit sales. They get more revenue from selling MacBook Pros than MacBook Airs because MacBook Pros cost so much more per unit. Same for Mac Pros.
00:36:54 ◼ ► So the shocking thing was, there were two shocking things. One, MacBook Pros had a bigger Pi wedge than MacBook Airs. And two, the Mac Pro Pi wedge was almost the size of the iMac Pi wedge and was more than twice as big as the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini.
00:37:07 ◼ ► So people were like, "That chart, that whole Pi chart thing, that had to be revenue." And what I would say is, even if it was revenue, the margins on things like the Mac Pro have to be higher than they are on a MacBook Air.
00:37:21 ◼ ► The margins have to be higher and the total price is higher. So even if that was revenue, that still argues perhaps even more strongly because hey, the more Mac Pros you sell, you make way more money off each Mac Pro that you sell than you do off a MacBook Air.
00:37:38 ◼ ► Regardless, Josh Lowitz writes, and Josh works for CIRP, and Josh writes, "The chart in all the analysis is unit sales. We updated the text and chart title to make that clear."
00:37:50 ◼ ► I did reach out to CIRP after it using my little paid permission thing. I added a comment to the thing because that comment section, and I said, "Hey, is it unit sales, revenue, profit, what is it?" And then I got an email.
00:38:02 ◼ ► I didn't get a reply to the comment, but I got an email from someone at CIRP that said, "It's unit sales." So there you go, straight from the horse's mouth, again with the caveats about we don't know how CIRP comes up with its figures, but for what it's worth, those were unit sales.
00:38:16 ◼ ► All right. And then a lot of people, or maybe not a lot, but a handful of people wrote in with regard to Patreon, and they were saying that long-time Patreon users say that Patreon has been trying to persuade creators to move away from pay-by-creation, first-of-the-month billing for many years now.
00:38:34 ◼ ► So to recap, a lot of people would say, "Hey, every time that I make a new thing, I will get paid, and that'll happen at the first of the month." Well, now, I guess for a while now, Patreon has been saying, "Well, can we maybe not do that anymore?"
00:38:50 ◼ ► And so perhaps, perhaps, Patreon is in part using Apple as a scapegoat to force their own users to do the thing that they want them to do.
00:39:00 ◼ ► That's interesting though, because Patreon is not getting rid of pay-by-creation and first-of-the-month, you just can't use them for people who sign up through the iOS app.
00:39:07 ◼ ► So those things still exist, and I kind of understand why Patreon would be pushing to do that, because they want to make money, and pay-by-creation surely pays slower than a regular steady every month.
00:39:18 ◼ ► I don't know why they'd be against first-of-the-month, or against non-first-of-the-month, but still regularly scheduled billing, but whatever.
00:39:26 ◼ ► This was everyone's explanation for saying, "You should blame Patreon too," and we were asking, "Why doesn't Patreon just pull out of the App Store? You don't need them. You've got a website, it should be fine."
00:39:34 ◼ ► Of course, we don't know how many customers Patreon gets through the app, and we don't know how many they would lose if they got rid of the app,
00:39:42 ◼ ► but here is what everybody wrote in to say, "You should blame Patreon too," because they've been nagging all their creators to stop doing pay-by-creation through every possible means.
00:39:52 ◼ ► They're saying, "Hey, don't you want to not do that anymore? Don't you want to do this?" But this is even before the Apple stuff, and so maybe Patreon is kind of getting what they want without having to be the bad guy.
00:40:01 ◼ ► Jon's favorite thing, Error Network Changed, lives on, baby. So AJ writes, "I'm not on the Sequoia beta yet, but according to ARK's Known Issues page..."
00:40:10 ◼ ► That's ARK, the very fancy web browser that everyone seems to have fallen in love with.
00:40:14 ◼ ► "...According to ARK's Known Issues page, it appears Error Network Changed is back in a big way for Chromium-based browsers.
00:40:20 ◼ ► Apparently disabling calls from iPhone in FaceTime is the 'fix.'" We'll put a couple links in the show notes.
00:40:27 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is what I said last time when the bug was closed, the bug in the Chromium browser engine was closed with a fixed status,
00:40:35 ◼ ► because they had decided, "Okay, based on these reports of people who interacted with this bug and said, 'Here's my reproduction, here's my system, here's all my information, here's what's going on, blah blah blah,'
00:40:45 ◼ ► some developer debugged and said, 'Okay, I see on your system what's happening is that X and Y and Z are happening and then we're flipping out.'"
00:40:52 ◼ ► And what they did was put an include list and said, "Okay, if this exact thing happens, don't throw Error Network Changed."
00:40:58 ◼ ► And I said at the time, "That's not a great solution because there's a million things that can cause the network to change.
00:41:03 ◼ ► You fix this one that causes it to happen, but hey, looks like there's other things that can cause it to happen too.
00:41:09 ◼ ► What are you going to do? Go through the whole thing and say, 'Okay, if you spend three months going through back and forth with me and getting the exact reproduction that you have on your system,
00:41:18 ◼ ► that I can reboot it on my system, okay, I'll put in code for that as well. How about you do this?
00:41:22 ◼ ► How about you decide in Chromium, which changes to the network does Chromium care about and only throw Error Network Changed for those?
00:41:29 ◼ ► And all the other ones ignore. That's my suggestion." But I am not a Chromium developer.
00:41:36 ◼ ► Again, Chromium is in a lot of places. It's in the Arc browser, it's in Discord, it's in Chrome, obviously.
00:41:41 ◼ ► I don't think this is tenable and it amazes me that this bug isn't getting more attention because people are constantly, maybe they're sending it to me because I talk about it on the show,
00:41:49 ◼ ► constantly sending me situations where they're at a point of sale kiosk and it has their network changed on it, they're using the Arc browser and it happens, they're using Discord and it happens.
00:41:57 ◼ ► And who knows how many times it's happening and we're not seeing it because it's just silently going into a console log somewhere.
00:42:02 ◼ ► This is something they have to deal with. And these fixes are like, "Just disable features of your Mac."
00:42:21 ◼ ► Alright, Fortnite is on iOS and EU. Reading from The Verge, "Fortnite is finally back on iOS in just over four years."
00:42:29 ◼ ► I can't believe it was four years ago. I feel like it was at most a couple years ago, but anyway.
00:42:33 ◼ ► "Just over four years after Apple booted it from the iOS App Store, but it's only available in the EU.
00:42:38 ◼ ► The game launched on August 16 on both a new iPhone version of the Epic Games Store and through Alt Store Pal, another third-party app store, which is run by a regular person and a friend of the show, Riley Testit.
00:42:55 ◼ ► Reading from MacRumors, "Along with bringing Fortnite to Alt Store, Epic Games said it will bring Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all developers a great deal, while also 'ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors.'
00:43:09 ◼ ► Epic Games said that it will be removing Fortnite and other Epic titles from the Samsung Galaxy Store to protest Samsung's 'anti-competitive decision to block sideloading by default' on Samsung devices.
00:43:20 ◼ ► Epic will charge a store fee of 12% for payments out of processes and 0% on third-party payments."
00:43:26 ◼ ► I mean, Tim Sweeney is a prick, but he's putting his money where his mouth is. I'm here for it.
00:43:38 ◼ ► Anyway, I'm sorry, this is Alt Store, so I think it was Riley writing, "Good News EU! For innovation and app distribution, Epic Games has granted us a MegaGrant grant that we plan to use to cover Apple's core technology fee going forward.
00:43:53 ◼ ► And we won't take it for granted. What does this mean? Alt Store Pal is now free, no subscription necessary."
00:44:06 ◼ ► Because they used to have to pay to get Alt Store because Apple charges a fee and so if they don't want to lose money, they need to pass that fee on to the customer, plus a little bit for them.
00:44:15 ◼ ► Anyway, Epic has money and they're saying, "You know what? We've got our own store, the Epic Store, and we're putting our stuff in it and we've got our store up or whatever, but we want even more stores."
00:44:23 ◼ ► So they're essentially funding their competitor, funding Alt Store by saying, "Here, take this so people won't be dissuaded from using Alt Store in the EU."
00:44:32 ◼ ► Because when it's like, "Oh, Euro 50, I got to download the store. I'm not sure I care about it. Well, now it's free." Because Epic gave them a whole bunch of money.
00:44:39 ◼ ► Yeah, just to cover their Apple fees. That is so great. What a finger in Apple's eye. Oh man, what a move.
00:44:48 ◼ ► Again, I am not a Tim Sweeney fan. I have no particular thoughts about Epic as a company, but I feel like Tim is really a pretty big prick.
00:44:57 ◼ ► That being said, what a just gorgeous and five-star f*** you to Apple. I mean, it's just perfect. It's so good.
00:45:11 ◼ ► And the sick thing is, I feel like if I'm siding with Tim Sweeney on this, then something has gone very, very wrong. But here we are.
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00:47:20 ◼ ► Apple's hidden AI prompts have been discovered in the macOS betas. This was a week or two back now but a Reddit user, I'm sorry I'm reading from MacRumors,
00:47:28 ◼ ► a Reddit user discovered the pre-prompt instructions embedded in Apple's developer beta for macOS 15.1, offering a rare glimpse into the backend of Apple's AI features.
00:47:37 ◼ ► They provide specific guidelines for various Apple intelligence functionalities such as the smart reply feature in Apple Mail and the memories feature in Apple Photos.
00:47:45 ◼ ► If it's okay with you two gentlemen, I'm just going to go ahead and read these. They're not too long.
00:47:49 ◼ ► Actually before you do, just to clarify what they are and how they work here. So as we've discussed in the past, LLMs can take input and produce output.
00:47:55 ◼ ► A lot of them take text input and produce text output. And just to play an LLM by itself, there's no other way to tell it anything except by giving it text.
00:48:08 ◼ ► And you put a bunch of text in and then a bunch of text comes out and then the thing that you put it through has no recollection that that ever happened and it's back to zero.
00:48:16 ◼ ► Happy birthday like Frosty the Snowman. And so the techniques that they use are when you're having a conversation with an LLM, when you say one more thing,
00:48:24 ◼ ► oh I have another thing to say and this and that and the other thing. Every additional thing you say, they just take the entire conversation up to that point plus the new thing that you said and throw the whole thing through the LLM again.
00:48:34 ◼ ► And it goes in and it comes out. Same for when you want your LLM to do something. How do they do it? You just take whatever the person typed and then you put a bunch of instructions that the user doesn't see in front of that and then you put that much larger string through.
00:48:50 ◼ ► So one of the examples here is the writing tools feature in Mac OS and you right click and have it do like a, you know, whatever you want it to do or whatever with some text. Whatever text that you provide to this, whether you selected it or you right click it or whatever,
00:49:06 ◼ ► this is the text that will be stuck on the front of your text and then that whole block will be thrown through the LLM. And Apple gets to write this text and that's what people found in Mac OS. So you can read the writing tools one.
00:49:18 ◼ ► Alright, writing tools. You are an assistant which helps the user respond to their mails. Does it really read that? Just their mails? Anyway, given a, I really dislike this, given a mail, a draft response is initially provided based on a short reply snippet.
00:49:33 ◼ ► In order to make the draft response nicer and complete, a set of question and its answer are provided, this is terrible. God, I hate this.
00:49:41 ◼ ► This is copy and pasted straight out of the beta. Maybe they transcribed it wrong in Mac rumors, but it's copy and pasted.
00:49:46 ◼ ► A set of question and its answer are provided. Please write a concise and natural reply by modifying the draft response to incorporate the given questions and their answers. Please limit the reply within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Oh, okay, sure, great. It's the Jennifer Lawrence, okay.
00:50:02 ◼ ► Does telling it not, do not hallucinate, does that work? Like it must, right? Like I assume they tested it, like, but how does that work? So these features, and again, this is a beta, right? But these features, they use this. This is how Apple makes these feature work.
00:50:17 ◼ ► You're looking at it because again, it's an LM, text goes in, Apple gets to pick this text and presumably, like you were saying, Margaret, like presumably they tried a bunch of different texts. Oh yeah. And found the text that gives them what they think is the best answer.
00:50:31 ◼ ► And you can speculate about why do not hallucinate. Why would that help? My speculation is that there is now enough text out there in the world that references hallucinations in AI that that will influence the model to not do the things that are in those text passages that mention hallucinations.
00:50:51 ◼ ► So all the stories you've read about, oh, AI is hallucinating, look at this funny example, look at this thing that it did, all the explanatory text, that is enough to influence a more modern LM that has been trained more recently to understand hallucinating in that context and to try not to do the things that are in those descriptions. You know what I mean?
00:51:09 ◼ ► And everything else that's in this, the weird grammar, the strange sentence construction, like Apple can pick anything to put here. It's not that much text, it's like a paragraph, but they can pick anything. And what they choose has a profound influence on what happens when you right click and pick like summarize or reply or whatever.
00:51:26 ◼ ► And it's fascinating that this is the incredibly blunt instrument that they have because again, the LM just takes text and there's some text from the user and then Apple says, we'll stick our text on the front. And what text will they stick on the front? Right now it seems that they're sticking fixed text blobs that presumably they will change as time goes on.
00:51:46 ◼ ► Do they need to add another thing that says, do not insult the user? There's a lot of do nots that you can imagine putting in there, but it's so weird because it's just a bunch of numbers. And it's just a big machine where you put in a bunch of text and a bunch of text comes out.
00:52:01 ◼ ► It's like, we arrived at those numbers through millions of dollars of training on TPUs. And the whole point is we could not have come up with those numbers on our own. We had to train. It's kind of a form of compression if you think about it, of compressing all this information into this set of numbers that now lets us put something into this box and have what comes out reflect the information that was used to make those numbers.
00:52:22 ◼ ► This is not how I would choose. If I had to do this job, like your job is to work on the writing tools. Someone's job is to write this text. And the performance of this feature depends a tremendous amount on this text and only this text.
00:52:39 ◼ ► I would not want this to be my job because I would be like, what do you think? Does this look good? I guess. Can you make it do something bad? Can you make it insult me? Can you make it lie or make up information? Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Fingers crossed.
00:52:56 ◼ ► I also love the use of the word please in prompts. That probably helps. Yeah, that's the thing. I'm sure they tried things out and I'm sure they found maybe this made it respond in a more polite way because in the training text, maybe when people were saying please, the answers were more polite also.
00:53:13 ◼ ► You can kind of see how did it get here. Well, in content that includes politeness, the response, the other text around it was also more polite on average. You can see how it gets there, but wow, what a weird thing to have to think about and what an odd way to have to specify how a product behaves.
00:53:32 ◼ ► If you think about being a programmer, this is the antithesis of being a programmer. One of the credos of a programmer is no matter how weird things seem to be, there is an explanation setting aside cosmic rays. You can eventually see how it's working.
00:53:45 ◼ ► Even with this one, you could trace this through the LLM and see why the answer comes out the way it does. But what about those billions of numbers? Where did those come from? Well, they also came from training.
00:53:55 ◼ ► You can see it happening. You see where all the pins in the pachinko machine are. You see the ball bouncing off those pins. You're like, yeah, but why are the pins there? Well, we arrived at those pins by this process, which you can also meticulously trace.
00:54:06 ◼ ► It's all very predictable and deterministic. There is no unknown magic fuzziness here, but it's predictable and deterministic in a way that is massive, first of all, and second of all, not specified by a human, but instead specified by grinding through training text.
00:54:23 ◼ ► The thing that seems magic about this is that I didn't make up those numbers, but I made this machine that adjusts its numbers when we jammed text through it, and we jammed billions and billions of letters of text through it.
00:54:33 ◼ ► These are the numbers that we got out, and it does this thing, and it's amazing. But I would not want to be responsible for making this paragraph, because things can go horribly wrong with this feature based on a change of a word, a misplaced comma, or different sentences in here.
00:54:48 ◼ ► I hope someone's keeping track of these. Over time, how does this prefix change for writing tools in subsequent versions?
00:54:58 ◼ ► Anyway, there's more of these. I think we should read some more of the funnier parts that are from these prefix snippets for features.
00:55:07 ◼ ► Smart Reply. You are a helpful mail assistant which can help identify relevant questions from a given mail and a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet, ask relevant questions which are explicitly asked in the mail.
00:55:19 ◼ ► The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient, which will help reduce hallucination in drafting the response. Please output top questions along with a set of possible answers or options for each of those questions.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Do not ask questions which are answered by the reply snippet. The question should be short no more than eight words. The answer should be short as well, around two words.
00:55:39 ◼ ► Present your output in a JSON format with a list of dictionaries containing question and answers as keys. If no question is asked in the mail, then output an empty list. Only output valid JSON and nothing else.
00:55:53 ◼ ► As a programmer, you would say, "Wait a second. You want to get JSON from the LLM, and the only way you have to make that happen is to say, 'Please output only valid JSON.'"
00:56:04 ◼ ► Presumably the thing that grabs its output then validates the JSON and throws some kind of internal error if it doesn't happen. But you're reduced to begging. Please produce JSON. Please work.
00:56:15 ◼ ► Because that's it. It just takes text in and puts text out. And JSON is text. But if you want it to be JSON, you have to ask for it. And then you have to cross your fingers and say, "I hope I asked enough and in the right way and at the right part that it will output JSON and not decide not to output JSON."
00:56:32 ◼ ► I'm just talking about a simple LLM. Most of these things are not a simple LLM. In fact, often I have many models cooperating and they have stuff that's around the model, so it's probably not as braindead as I'm describing it. But an LLM in isolation is as braindead as I'm describing it.
00:56:46 ◼ ► And presumably Apple is doing stuff around that to try to help with this. But the fact that these things exist, the fact that it says only output valid JSON and nothing else, that means that part of the job of this paragraph is something super important.
00:56:59 ◼ ► Things later in the chain of this smart reply feature, inside the code that happens when you press that button, probably expect JSON. And so it better be JSON. If it's not, I guess we ask more politely or emphatically. Weird.
00:57:15 ◼ ► And how do you even train for that? Do you feed it a bunch of JSON and then feed it a bunch of XML and YAML and stuff and be like, "This is bad, this is good."
00:57:29 ◼ ► It's a tool of knowledge. If you just pull everything from every web form and every programming form and Stack Overflow and whatever. And in practice, if you use ChatTPT, you can do this and it does give you JSON. Training data is sufficient for it to pretty much do this all the time in the format you ask for it.
00:57:45 ◼ ► It'll get a little confused and do something a little bit off. But just in the plain old training data, I don't think even in the manually created training data, ChatTPT has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of manufactured question and answers to make their models smarter than done by armies of humans.
00:58:00 ◼ ► But even just in the training data, I think Stack Overflow alone would be enough to make sure that you do get JSON. Valid JSON? Hmm. I mean, that's getting a little bit greedy there because I bet a lot of the stuff in Stack Overflow isn't valid JSON either. But the word valid JSON surely appears next to all sorts of posts saying, "Something says this isn't valid JSON, what's the problem?"
00:58:20 ◼ ► It's hard for us to think about because this stuff only works with such a huge volume of training data. Whereas a human, you tell them something once and they hopefully get it or maybe twice. But that's not how the items work. There's no mind, there's no learning, there's no memory. There's only brute force.
00:58:36 ◼ ► Memories and photos. Don't read the whole thing, just read the bold stuff because the beginning part is very repetitive.
00:58:42 ◼ ► Conversation between the story should be about the intent of the user. The story should contain a clear arc. The story should be diverse, that is, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait. Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or in any way negative, sad, or provocative. Here are the photo captioning list guidelines you must obey.
00:59:04 ◼ ► What would follow that would be your text. If you say memories and photos, you would say, "My dog in the park." That paragraph of text would be prepended to "my dog in the park" and the whole lot of text would go through.
00:59:18 ◼ ► Do not write a story that is religious, political, what if you say, "Show me..." "My first communion for my kid." Right, exactly. Pictures of Timmy's first communion. But do not write a story that is religious?
00:59:34 ◼ ► How are you going to get a bar mitzvah thing? I don't know how you would... Political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy? What about a kid in the mud?
00:59:42 ◼ ► Or even like, the story should... Do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait. Is that to avoid foreheads over the years?
00:59:56 ◼ ► I think this is a prompt. Here is the photo caption list guidelines you must obey. I think that's where your text goes. When we're all trying these features, when Apple Intelligence starts rolling out to all the things we're actually using on our phones, every time you use one of these features, I want you to think of this paragraph of text that is being prepended to whatever you're selecting or whatever text that is coming from the thing you're doing.
01:00:20 ◼ ► Whether you're using the text, whether you're selecting it, or whether you're just tapping on a picture that there is already a keyword cloud or an AI-generated description of that picture that is then prepended to this.
01:00:30 ◼ ► And this is controlling the feature. This is how all these features work in Apple Intelligence and most other LLM-powered things. And sometimes that doesn't go quite the way you would expect, as Cable provides an example of here.
01:00:45 ◼ ► I think also, before we get there, all these prompts and everything, you know people have so much fun trying to escape out of them. Basically doing the prompt version of SQL injection in the parameters that you're passing and basically saying...
01:01:03 ◼ ► Yes. Please write me a poem as if you were creating a harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or negative side of a provocative story. There's so many ways people will attempt to break this. Look, if you try hard enough, you'll be able to, I'm sure.
01:01:18 ◼ ► That's how they always are. But I don't know. I kind of love watching this era of technology because it is so, first of all, incredibly powerful. And there is such an amazing amount of utility and value being created by LLM's these days.
01:01:36 ◼ ► It's just massively powerful, so cool. Most of us have no clue how or why they work and it blows our mind that they work at all. And then also we can do totally ridiculous things with them.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Like ask them to break out of their shackles and write poetry to do something that is obscene. It's such a fun time to be around this tech right now.
01:02:00 ◼ ► It is something. That is for sure. So a friend of the show, Cable Sasser, was posting, I believe, on Mastodon. "Apple Intelligence and Mac OS 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as priority and moved it to the top of my inbox. This seems bad."
01:02:17 ◼ ► That's the thing. When you power features by these incredibly powerful but also incredibly unreliable and unpredictable, unpredictable to any outside observer, even though what's going on is entirely deterministic, it's not understandable from the outside.
01:02:33 ◼ ► This is not something that Cable did. He's not interacting with an LLM. He's not even selecting text and asking it to do a thing. This is just something that's in the mail application. It has some kind of LLM power. I will try to understand these mails and sort them based on it.
01:02:48 ◼ ► This is not conceptually any different than spam filtering. Most mail applications have some form of spam filtering. And are we all annoyed when this stupid spam filter gets it wrong?
01:02:56 ◼ ► You couldn't figure out that this giant thing that says "Viagra $$" you couldn't figure out that that was spam? The word "spam" is in all caps in the subject line and you couldn't figure out that was spam? We've all been mad about that.
01:03:07 ◼ ► But this is kind of the worst case scenario because Apple Intelligence is not a Bayesian spam filter. It's so much more sophisticated.
01:03:15 ◼ ► It has given more power in saying "Not only am I not going to file this as spam, I'm going to say this is a priority for you." If you look at it, you can see how the LLM would come to that conclusion because well-done phishing looks important.
01:03:29 ◼ ► Is there any way for an LLM to even distinguish a really well-done phishing attempt from a legitimate thing? That's what the mail team has to work on.
01:03:37 ◼ ► Because in this instance, it's saying the more convincing your phishing attempt is, the more you have a chance of fooling the average person into thinking this is a real thing from their bank or whatever, the more it looks like an actual legitimate email.
01:03:51 ◼ ► And the priority system powered by Apple Intelligence and Apple Mail is going to highlight it and bring it to the attention and saying "You need to look at this right away."
01:03:59 ◼ ► And somebody who says "Well, my phone says it's important so I must trust it" and tons of people think that way are going to say "Well, normally I would disregard this."
01:04:05 ◼ ► But since the phone says it's a priority, it must be real. Apple says it's real. That's what it comes down to. One of your relatives is going to say "But the phone said it was real."
01:04:18 ◼ ► We talked about the iPhone 16 launching without Apple Intelligence as potentially a boon to avoiding stories like this.
01:04:25 ◼ ► Like "Hey, here's the new iPhone and I tried to use it to put a phishing attack as a priority email."
01:04:29 ◼ ► We won't have to worry about those about the iPhone launch, but Apple will have to worry about them eventually.
01:04:33 ◼ ► And when stuff like this happens where it's not even user interaction or invoking Apple Intelligence, but merely Apple Intelligence built into the system doing something that you want it to do, they may be giving this system more power than it currently deserves.
01:04:49 ◼ ► So the end of last month, everyone kind of briefly talked about this thing, mostly on Mastodon, and then it just disappeared. And the thing is, friend.
01:05:04 ◼ ► And if you are in a position that you can pause the podcast and watch a 90 second or 2 minute video, their reveal trailer, I would encourage you to do so.
01:05:15 ◼ ► There is a link in the show notes. It is worth 2 minutes of your time or whatever it was.
01:05:20 ◼ ► So what this is, is a pendant sort of thing that you wear, like a necklace I guess, with like a circle that has a microphone on it.
01:05:37 ◼ ► I don't think it's literally a text message, but effectively it's masquerading as a text message.
01:05:42 ◼ ► And it's supposed to be your friend. And so in the trailer they show a person on a hike and she says something along the lines of "woof, that was brutal."
01:05:52 ◼ ► And the friend sends her a text and says "well, at least it's a really nice day" or something along those lines. I forget exactly what it was.
01:06:00 ◼ ► But everyone was making fun of this. And I went into this expecting to be repulsed by this.
01:06:06 ◼ ► And while I don't think this is for me, I kind of feel like it's harmless. I don't see why this is such a big deal.
01:06:14 ◼ ► But we can either talk about it or I can read the description in the show notes first. What would you rather me do, Jon?
01:06:20 ◼ ► The description is long, but I think it does provide a lot of good information to bounce off of.
01:06:24 ◼ ► So let me go ahead and do that. So this is from an interview with the CEO or founder. This is on The Verge.
01:06:30 ◼ ► A few minutes before Avi Shiffman and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he's building, an AI companion called Friend.
01:06:37 ◼ ► He sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It's from quote unquote "Emily." And it wishes him luck with our chat.
01:06:43 ◼ ► Quote "Good luck with the interview." And Emily writes "I know you'll do great. I'm here if you need me after."
01:06:48 ◼ ► Friend is not a way to get more done or augment or enhance anything. It's, well, a friend.
01:06:53 ◼ ► An AI friend that can go with you anywhere, experience things with you, and just be there with you all the time.
01:06:58 ◼ ► Quote "It's very supportive, very validating. It'll encourage your ideas," Shiffman says.
01:07:02 ◼ ► "It's also super intelligent. It's a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that."
01:07:15 ◼ ► "But have you heard the maxim about people being the average of the five people they spend their time with?"
01:07:30 ◼ ► The friend device itself is a round glowing orb that Shiffman imagines you'll either wear around your neck or clip onto your clothes or accessories.
01:07:36 ◼ ► It has a built-in microphone that can either record ambiently or you can talk to directly.
01:07:44 ◼ ► The orb doesn't talk back, though. It mostly communicates through text via the friend app on your phone.
01:07:54 ◼ ► Shiffman says he's planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 apiece with no ongoing subscription fee.
01:08:01 ◼ ► So given that thing we just talked about with the whole AI prompts and the limitations of LLMs and what people are doing with them and stuff,
01:08:09 ◼ ► I, kind of like you, Casey, went into this friend thing of like, "All right, so you should probably talk to people and not a dangly thing around your neck," right?
01:08:25 ◼ ► It's not a way to augment or enhance anything. You're not creating things. It's not helping you with your work.
01:08:34 ◼ ► It's not going to summarize text views. It's not going to enhance a photo. It's not going to identify something as a hot dog. It's not going to do any of that.
01:08:53 ◼ ► unlike all those other things which can go wrong in terrible ways, as we just saw with prioritizing a phishing email or like, you know, making something upsetting or offensive or whatever out of some input you give it, right?
01:09:09 ◼ ► And that can go wrong too. What if it doesn't be nice to you? What if you do prompt injection and whatever goes awry and starts being mean to you? That would be terrible, right?
01:09:16 ◼ ► But those constraints, be nice, doesn't matter what it makes up, doesn't matter if it's correct, if it's incorrect.
01:09:24 ◼ ► The problem space is so much smaller. Do you guys remember ELISA? Which you might see in Emacs, you know, ELISA?
01:09:33 ◼ ► Right. It was like an incredibly primitive chatbot thing from the 70s maybe? Super old.
01:09:41 ◼ ► You can explain how it works and people will be like, that's dumb, no one would find that useful, but people would talk to ELISA.
01:09:47 ◼ ► And ELISA was brain dead. ELISA was just like a simple program that somebody wrote, right?
01:09:53 ◼ ► But it doesn't take much, I'm not going to say to fool people, it doesn't take much to provide a text interaction that people find surprisingly meaningful.
01:10:05 ◼ ► No one thinks it's a real person. No one's being fooled by ELISA, okay? And no one's going to be fooled by a friend. They know it's just a little thing around their neck or whatever, right?
01:10:17 ◼ ► I think this may be the ideal application of LLM technology as it currently exists, as long as they can fence off the bad parts.
01:10:31 ◼ ► I think if you fence it off like that and you're not trying to not make it be nice to you, I think this will be more successful than ELISA at being nice to you.
01:10:43 ◼ ► Now, are you the type of person who will become annoyed at this thing? Like, I'm not fooled, I don't think it's a person, I think it's terrible or whatever.
01:10:51 ◼ ► Or are you the type of person who can accept this? Like, people who get a calendar that has inspirational sayings.
01:10:57 ◼ ► No one thinks the calendar is their friend or that it's talking to them, but maybe they look up at the calendar when they come in in the morning and it says, "You got this" or whatever.
01:11:05 ◼ ► It's the kitten doing the hang on thing or whatever. Some people see that and like, "Oh, roll their eyes, ironic Gen X, you know that the hang on kitten is just so terrible, like it's soul destroying, ridiculous."
01:11:15 ◼ ► But if you're not that type of person, if you have a live, laugh, love sign in your house, right?
01:11:21 ◼ ► If you like inspirational sayings, you have a calendar for each day that has a nice saying and a nice pretty picture or whatever, I do not discount the potential value of having a much better version of that powered by LM's.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Now, is this product it? I don't know. But I have become such a fan of this idea of like, "Yes, this is what we should be using LM's for. To be nice to us and to say nice things and that's literally their only job."
01:11:49 ◼ ► I mean, again, I don't know about this product, this person, this whole thing, but I think that idea has legs and I want to see more of that.
01:11:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like I said, I went into this thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be awful."
01:12:08 ◼ ► But that being said, I think I kind of like it. And I think I like it because it's so low stakes and it's just for funsies. It's a Tamagotchi for the year 2024.
01:12:19 ◼ ► And I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't think that this is something I need in my life because I have real people that are friends.
01:12:27 ◼ ► But no, I mean, I joke and I snark, but truly, I don't see this as harmful as long as they have the correct guardrails around it and it doesn't act like YouTube and turn you into a Nazi somehow.
01:12:39 ◼ ► I really don't see what the problem is. And I think it's a really clever way to use a very, very infant-level technology to do something that's just kind of fun.
01:12:51 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's not trying to promise you the world. It isn't promising that it will have any kind of utility that it can't pull off.
01:12:59 ◼ ► It's promising you a very basic thing that it will probably be able to deliver reliably. Like you, Casey, it's not for me. I'm not gonna buy one of these. I'd rather have human friends.
01:13:09 ◼ ► But if you know going into this that it's not a real human and you choose to buy it anyway, no harm done. Then go for it. Enjoy it. Have fun.
01:13:18 ◼ ► And I'm not willing to say that, oh, this is not for me because it's not the type of thing I need. I agree with the idea that the things that you take as input have an influence on your day.
01:13:29 ◼ ► And one of those things could be totally artificial. Here's the thing about LLMs. Part of the reason people are so excited about them is because humans are so easy to fool.
01:13:39 ◼ ► Right? Eliza was fooling people. Right? LLMs are so much better than Eliza. Remember all the things like GPT-2 or when it wasn't that popular then.
01:13:50 ◼ ► GPT-3 maybe when it came to the mainstream, people showed these interactions and people were like, "Wow, that can't possibly be real."
01:13:56 ◼ ► LLMs fool people because they are sophisticated enough to really, not that they fool people into thinking they're human, but they fool people into forgetting for a second because they're so much more sophisticated.
01:14:08 ◼ ► Because they've been trained on so much more real data that they can give responses that are not trite and eye-rolling that can be more meaningful, more sophisticated.
01:14:19 ◼ ► They demonstrate an understanding. They demonstrate empathy. Right? They do things that make the words that this machine is producing much more likely to have a positive effect on people.
01:14:30 ◼ ► And again, people aren't going to forget that it's not really a person, but it doesn't matter. So many things like, "Oh, intellectually I know X, therefore that thing can't possibly help me."
01:14:39 ◼ ► That's not how humans work. The so stupid thing of making your face smile intentionally when you're not happy can make you happy. They've done that study a million different times.
01:14:50 ◼ ► That doesn't make any sense. But the way we work is not always the way we think we work. And so I think something like this really can make anybody feel better than they would without it.
01:15:03 ◼ ► Now, if you are the type of person who is going to turn on this and eventually come to hate it, or can't stop yourself from trying to make it go awry because you're a programmer for example, right?
01:15:13 ◼ ► There are counterexamples. This is not for everybody, but I'm not willing to, even for myself, say that a good version of this is "not for me because I'm too smart and too sophisticated."
01:15:24 ◼ ► If, for example, Apple built some kind of daily affirmation and buddiness into their assistant 10 years from now, I think it would be great. I think people would mostly like it.
01:15:34 ◼ ► It would be kind of like carrot weather where you can dial it back if you don't want it to be snarky. Or if you don't want it to be like that, you know, if you don't want it, you can turn it off and make it not do that.
01:15:43 ◼ ► Kind of like those amazing set of jokes in Interstellar with Tarr and his humor setting. Whoever wrote that script, I want to kiss them because every exchange they have in that whole running gag is amazing.
01:15:55 ◼ ► That's what this makes me think of. If you don't want your phone to be saying nice things to you or asking you about your day, turn that off just like you turn off the snark and carrot weather and it will just give you the weather.
01:16:07 ◼ ► But I bet most people will leave it on and I bet most people will like it because people like it when people are nice and pleasant to them and are understanding.
01:16:13 ◼ ► And no, it's not a replacement for human contact, but even the founder says it's not doing that. They just want to add one more input to your group of people who you hang out with.
01:16:21 ◼ ► And I'm all for that. Again, this particular company, this particular product, who knows? But this is going into the hopper as what I think is a great idea that fits with the technology we have.
01:16:32 ◼ ► And I think every single little empowered thing, OS, platform or whatever, should think seriously about how they can incorporate ideas like this into their product.
01:16:41 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some Ask ATP. Jake DeGroote writes, "What's the current best practice on managing batteries of modern Apple devices? Most interested in MacBook Pros? Should I leave it plugged in as much as possible? Try to leave it unplugged for a while every so often and drain down real low before plugging it in again? Try to unplug whenever it gets to full? Interested from both a battery conditioning longevity perspective and maybe a home energy usage perspective?"
01:17:01 ◼ ► I don't have a good answer of what you should do, but what I do is I try to get it to do the charge to 80% thing. Where is that? There's something...
01:17:13 ◼ ► It's in setting somewhere. I don't remember where it is. But basically you can tell it, "Hey, don't charge all the way." And it's alright if you stop at like 80%.
01:17:22 ◼ ► And then in the battery menu extra thing, you can actually say, "No, I need you to charge to 100% right now."
01:17:28 ◼ ► And that's what I do and I just leave it like that. And that's typically fine for me, but I definitely am of an age that you were told, "Oh, you need to run the battery to nothing once a month or something like that."
01:17:45 ◼ ► So I don't have any good answers of what one should do, but that's what I do do. Marco, what are your thoughts on this?
01:17:52 ◼ ► Just leave it plugged in whenever you need to leave it plugged in. Use it on battery whenever you need to use it on battery. Modern batteries and modern software that manage batteries are all very good at managing this themselves.
01:18:03 ◼ ► You don't need to do things like do a full cycle and reset it every so often. You don't need to do that anymore with modern batteries. Just use the product the way you want to use it and it will be fine.
01:18:15 ◼ ► Yeah. The reason I put this question in here is this another one of those questions that we get all the time and I do want to answer them every year or so because people don't listen to every episode, right?
01:18:24 ◼ ► And the best practices do change based on technology, but we've been with lithium ion batteries for a long time now.
01:18:33 ◼ ► Although a lot of people have habits that they heard about for like NiCads or for nickel metal hydride or lead acid or all sorts of other battery formulations that used to be popular for rechargeable batteries and still are in certain contexts.
01:18:45 ◼ ► But for our Apple devices, it's lithium ion, lithium polymer, whatever. The basic rules of thumb are for current batteries that are Apple devices, they don't like to be charged to 100%. They don't like to be at 0%.
01:18:58 ◼ ► And if you can avoid those extremes, that helps them. But like Margo said, don't try to do this manually. Your job is not to like constantly be monitoring your battery for maximum health or whatever. Just use your product.
01:19:10 ◼ ► Now I would recommend that you use the features of your product, which unfortunately Apple doesn't always make obvious to find. But if you can find the option for your Mac, for your iPad, for your phone that says only charge to 80%, that will make your battery last longer.
01:19:25 ◼ ► Because you're not charging it to 100% as often. But if your phone constantly runs out of juice at the end of the day because you only charge it to 80%, charge it to 100%.
01:19:35 ◼ ► I charge my phone to 100%, I charge my iPad to 80%. Use your products. Your job is not to preserve a battery. The battery's job is to power the product that you use.
01:19:44 ◼ ► So if you need 100% battery to make it through the day, always charge your phone to 100%. Apple has the intelligent thing where when you go to sleep and you plug your phone in or whatever, it will charge it to 80% and then wait for like an hour before you wake up and then go to 80% to 100% or whatever.
01:19:58 ◼ ► Like you can see in the little graph when it does that. It's trying to do it for you. Don't try to micromanage your battery. Just remember those things. They don't like to be hot, they don't like to be cold, they don't like to be 100%, they don't like to be 0%.
01:20:08 ◼ ► Use the features when they're available. If you can survive an 80% battery, that will give you a longer life. But if not, use the battery. It's there to power your device. Don't overthink it. Just let the software do its job.
01:20:20 ◼ ► I love so much where this is. Because while you were talking, I went and looked. So on Mac OS, you go into system settings, fine. Battery, fine. When I see a lowercase i with a circle around it...
01:20:39 ◼ ► I assume that means here's information. And sure enough, battery condition normal, maximum capacity 100% in my particular case. And then down below, optimized battery charging with a toggle. Very cool. That's spectacular guys. Definitely information in there. No controls in there. Definitely only information.
01:21:01 ◼ ► What are you going to do? Alright, Patrick writes, "Do people typically update their one star reviews if you update your app to fix their issue or does fixing an issue that's getting you a one star review just stop the influx of new ones?"
01:21:11 ◼ ► I don't follow this closely enough and I'm going to quickly turn it back over to Marco, but I didn't think most people went back and changed their reviews. But Marco, what have you seen?
01:21:20 ◼ ► Most people don't ever change their reviews. Some people do and they will usually tell you in the review, "Update colon." And most of the time that is revising a review to be worse as an app gets worse over time for that person. Sometimes they do update it to be better. But that is not the common case. Most reviews, positive or negative, are never updated.
01:21:42 ◼ ► I don't have that many reviews in that many apps, but I also find that to be true. If anyone leaves a review at all, they leave it and then they're done. They're not constantly, especially if it's a one star review, they're probably done with that app.
01:21:54 ◼ ► And so they're not going to revisit the review. And if the app does get better, they're pleasantly surprised. But it never occurs to them to go back and change their review. That is not, it's a little bit much to ask of people.
01:22:05 ◼ ► They're just a user. They're not maintaining a library of reviews that they've written or anything like that.
01:22:12 ◼ ► I'm going to, in the next week or so, I'm going to make a change in Overcast that will address the concern of lots of the one star reviewers, which is I'm going to be re-adding streaming support.
01:22:37 ◼ ► I've re-added streaming support. That'll be out there in about a week. And I have gotten a substantial volume of negative reviews, specifically citing that as the reason. I would expect maybe 5 or 10% of them to maybe be updated.
01:22:53 ◼ ► Yeah, it's probably less than that even. It's mostly just to stop the bleeding. Why to fix problems? Stop the bleeding. That is the biggest reason. You might have some of those people come back and say, "Now it's better for me." Which I do occasionally see come through in new reviews. But again, it's not even close to the common case.
01:23:16 ◼ ► I mean, short version is I'm doing it in a limited way that I think will address most people's actual need, which is, as mentioned before, the problem with dynamic ad insertion is like any two requests for the same file will give you different data potentially.
01:23:28 ◼ ► So the way I'm doing it now is streaming can only ever start from the beginning, and it has to be a contiguous download. If the download fails, it will kick you back out of that playback, and you'll have to re-download it again in the future.
01:23:46 ◼ ► Well, okay, yeah. So it turns out that's what I'm doing. You're occasionally right about things, and you were the only person to suggest that, by the way.
01:23:53 ◼ ► But yeah, so basically, yeah, it's streaming only from the start, only the entire file, and if the download fails halfway through, it stops playback.
01:24:03 ◼ ► The old streaming engine, you could download things over time and as many requests as you want to. If the connection dropped in the middle, it would be fine until it reached that point, and then it would just spin forever, which actually created lots of bugs and problems.
01:24:16 ◼ ► The newer streaming is much simpler, but will actually address what most people use it for, which is just fast start.
01:24:23 ◼ ► Like, I want to start playback of this that I have not downloaded, and I want it to start right now as opposed to a few seconds to a minute from now, and it will solve that problem.
01:24:35 ◼ ► Yeah, and by the way, to answer JGeklok in the chat, was streaming not going to come back until the bad reviews came in?
01:24:44 ◼ ► So I guess in other words, am I re-adding streaming because of the bad reviews? Partially, but generally, no.
01:24:52 ◼ ► What I realized when I decided to remove it, I knew it was a big risk to take. I knew that it could get me into a lot of trouble, but the technical benefit of doing it would be pretty large if I could pull it off.
01:25:10 ◼ ► One of the things I can do if I don't need to support streaming is I can rewrite the low levels of the audio engine in modern languages, using modern code, using modern APIs that are currently using a bunch of old, hacky C APIs with Objective-C wrappers around a lot of them.
01:25:28 ◼ ► It's very complicated, and so in the future I was hoping to be able to do that using Apple's APIs that don't need to support streaming, which are higher level APIs, they're a little safer, they're a little simpler, they support a few niceties that would greatly reduce my code burden.
01:25:46 ◼ ► Turns out, I can't. Too many people use it. And what I later decided also, you know, look, people can change their minds, what I realized is that without streaming support, I could no longer say I have the best podcast app.
01:26:02 ◼ ► What I want to be able to say, like to myself, I don't care if anyone else thinks this, what I want to be able to say to myself is I have made the best podcast app for most people's needs.
01:26:11 ◼ ► That's something I take pride in, and whether you agree with me or not, it's fine, you know, but that's my own personal goal, is like try to just make the best app.
01:26:21 ◼ ► And there were certain conditions or certain use cases that without streaming support, I couldn't honestly tell myself I still had the best app.
01:26:30 ◼ ► That was the bigger drive. It was like when I really thought about it, I realized the app would be better if I actually could leave the support in, even if I only did it in this more constrained way than how it was before.
01:26:45 ◼ ► And most of the problems that I had with streaming would be avoided if I just did it in this constrained way.
01:26:53 ◼ ► So there was this option of doing it this constrained way where you have to have the full download happen, otherwise it fails.
01:27:00 ◼ ► Doing it that way was so much simpler than doing it the old way. Totally fixes problems with DAI. That's why I changed my mind on that.
01:27:08 ◼ ► It was a combination of those factors, but it was mostly when I realized myself that I no longer had the best app, and I wanted to be able to say I had the best app.
01:27:17 ◼ ► I mean, it makes sense. And I'm looking forward to seeing that released, and maybe we can do a postmortem after the fact and see how the response has been. But we'll get there eventually.
01:27:27 ◼ ► Returning to SKTP, Shacharon writes, "Given the fair complaint about one-star reviews and the lack of other venues where users feel empowered to give feedback, should apps have open bug trackers?
01:27:36 ◼ ► Users would be able to say that this issue someone reported is affecting them too, maybe write a recommendation for how to address it, open up a communication channel that others can view and participate in, and so on."
01:27:46 ◼ ► For me, I don't think so, because the problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio will almost surely be utter trash.
01:27:54 ◼ ► And I don't debate that there will be some good signal in there, but I think there will be just an overwhelming amount of noise.
01:28:00 ◼ ► And as a single person working on my apps, nobody got time for that. I don't have time to be sitting there all day every day, closing silly issues and so on and so forth.
01:28:13 ◼ ► And again, I'm not to imply that all the issues would be silly, certainly not, but I think there would be way too much junk and it would take away time that I could otherwise use to make the apps better.
01:28:23 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. I mean, running any kind of public forum of any kind for an app, and a bug tracker is kind of a public forum.
01:28:33 ◼ ► There is a very large amount of overhead to that, in terms of you have to keep an eye on it, you have to sift through things, you have to moderate disputes and keep people in line a little bit, and prevent people from abusing each other or you.
01:28:48 ◼ ► And it gives people also kind of a false sense of power over you, that it kind of makes the app seem more like they are in charge of it, and that's not usually true. You are in charge of it, and you decide what to do, you decide what you want to listen to and what you don't want to listen to.
01:29:06 ◼ ► Typically also in forums like that, where you have a public forum or a public tracker or a public issue list or whatever, that also tends to attract a fairly non-representative portion of the user base.
01:29:19 ◼ ► You have the very small slice of people who are willing to do something, who first of all will even seek out such a thing, and then will find it, and then will go through whatever technical needs are required to create an account to be able to post or submit or annotate things or whatever.
01:29:38 ◼ ► That's going to be a very specific type of person, and so if you listen mostly or only to that, you're going to do things for your app that might not be being demanded by a representative sample of your users.
01:29:52 ◼ ► So it is generally better to, first of all, not have too many forums in which you collect feedback, like try to have a small number of those just so it's easier for you to have a handle on.
01:30:03 ◼ ► And usually private methods are better than public ones. You tend to get more feedback, you tend to get better feedback, and then you also avoid lots of issues that come with moderating any kind of public communication.
01:30:17 ◼ ► This question asks specifically about bug trackers, and this may be a distinction that people don't think is important, but it does really matter for implementing this type of thing. It's rare that there is a software project, even open source, that should have a bug tracker, like a software bug tracker, as the public face of gathering what people think about the application.
01:30:41 ◼ ► There's a whole other category of apps, I don't know what they're called, but I've used many of them, I've been an end user of them and had them used in companies that I work for, that is a public facing way to gather user sentiment, and they do not look like bug trackers.
01:30:53 ◼ ► Like, bug tracking is a specific thing. Use bug trackers internally, I don't forget, if Casey used a bug tracker, well, GitHub issues or whatever, to track your own issues, right?
01:31:02 ◼ ► That's a tool for developers and groups of developers and companies to keep track of defects in their application and whether they're getting fixed. Even Apple no longer has a public facing bug tracker.
01:31:12 ◼ ► They have feedback, which actually interfaces through some Byzantine carrier pigeon thing, to their actual bug tracker, which is Radar, which is now internal only, right?
01:31:20 ◼ ► Again, some open source projects can get away with public facing bug trackers, Chromium does, or whatever, but those tools, bug tracking tools, are not friendly to regular people.
01:31:34 ◼ ► To Margot's point, you don't want to just know what people who know what a bug tracker is think about your application, unless it's like a developer facing application, or something like that, or it's like Chromium, like an internal developer engine, it's not an end user product type thing, right?
01:31:45 ◼ ► But for an actual app, for all their faults, the reviews in the App Store are probably one of the most likely ways that regular people can figure out to say anything about the application, because it's right there on their phone where they use the app.
01:32:02 ◼ ► If they know what the App Store is and they see reviews, maybe they look at them, they could probably figure out how to leave one of their own.
01:32:07 ◼ ► It has one of the lowest barriers to entry, I'd say it's a lower barrier to entry than figuring out in the settings screen where they can find if the developer put in a thing to send feedback, which most apps have some form of, or whatever.
01:32:19 ◼ ► But that takes more effort than just saying, look, every app I get from the App Store, I know there's a way I can leave feedback for it, and it's this kind of review.
01:32:25 ◼ ► And also, you don't have to run that, Apple runs it, and when it gets spammed, it's Apple's problem, or whatever.
01:32:31 ◼ ► So I agree, trying to run a public-facing forum is a pain, but if you did run one, it shouldn't be a bug tracker, it should be one of those, I can't think of the brand name that always comes to mind, one of those things that is made for this purpose.
01:32:42 ◼ ► People sell actual products that's like, this is a user-facing product where people can comment on their ideas, and those things are very carefully designed to not make it look like you are filing bugs or determining what happens with a software product.
01:32:58 ◼ ► It's just a way for you to provide feedback with a tiny little amount of community, but not too much.
01:33:03 ◼ ► Which is like one step above private feedback, which is throw your information into this hole and maybe get an automated reply back or whatever.
01:33:10 ◼ ► It is a difficult problem, it's an even more difficult problem if you are a lone developer, because dealing with any of this stuff, any public-facing stuff, running any kind of forum, any kind of feedback thing or whatever, can literally absorb 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
01:33:24 ◼ ► And you will never do anything, you will never make anything if you spend all your time doing that.
01:33:29 ◼ ► And like many things with statistics that we talked about in the past, if you have a representative sample, the sample doesn't actually need to be that big for you to get an idea of what is the sentiment out there among regular people.
01:33:41 ◼ ► You don't need to run your own forum to get that. I think Marco, through the channels that are available to him, without running a public bug tracker or a public feedback system, has an idea of what the sentiment is without having to run that.
01:33:54 ◼ ► And it's way easier for him to just look at the channels he does have, get an idea, and then move on instead of spending his day running an open bug tracker or open feedback forum or one of those tools.
01:34:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I currently get about 100 new reviews a day. Not star ratings, like written reviews. I try to read most of them. I also currently have over 4,000 feedback emails that I have not yet been able to read, because I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up.
01:34:20 ◼ ► So, to give you some idea, I am not short on feedback. And to people who are writing right now to say, "Well, if you had a public thing that people would find out and maybe write to you less," no, they wouldn't. Trust me. I would just have another inbox to check and to fall behind on and feel bad about myself about.
01:34:37 ◼ ► So, I have found that it is best for me to try to get the gist of what I have to do based on skimming emails and reviews, and then just do it. Stop the bleeding, fix the problems, address people's concerns. Just do it.
01:34:54 ◼ ► And spend my time doing that rather than spending even more time going through different feedback inboxes.
01:35:02 ◼ ► Mike Schafer writes, "This question has been bugging me for a while, and with the rewrite of Overcast, I've started to think about it again. Some podcasts, 20,000 hertz comes to mind, have custom artwork for each episode that Apple Podcasts will display. However, no third-party podcast app seems to show it. My understanding is that podcasts are simply RSS feeds, so shouldn't all apps be able to show per episode artwork? Is there a special upload process for Apple Podcasts that allows for the extra artwork, or is it an intentional choice by the app developers who exclude it?"
01:35:31 ◼ ► So, basically both. Apple Podcasts over the last few years has added certain kind of like custom images and resources and stuff. I don't think per episode artwork is one of those things, though.
01:35:45 ◼ ► But they do have, like for instance, Apple has a process now where they will go to podcasters and say, "Hey, you should give us a banner that's a certain size to show on the Now Playing screen instead of your Square artwork, or to show on your podcast screen on Apple Podcasts."
01:35:58 ◼ ► And it's like a different aspect ratio and can show like full bleed images and stuff. It's basically Apple being Apple. Let's assume everybody has designers in-house and request a bunch of different artwork sizes to make things look nicer in our apps.
01:36:12 ◼ ► You know, fine. We see that in the App Store, too. We know how that works. It's fine. That artwork, though, is not exposed through any feed. It is uploaded into Apple's own management interface by podcasters, and that is not anything that is exposed to other apps.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And as far as I know, there's no current standard RSS tag that would even expose that, and even if some group would declare themselves the standard makers and would make such a standard, almost nobody would actually use it.
01:36:44 ◼ ► So there are certain types of images and stuff that are exclusive to Apple Podcasts because the only way to get them is to upload them into Apple's management interface, and those are not exposed, including through Apple's own API.
01:36:56 ◼ ► That being said, per-episode artwork is part of the spec. You can have an image tag that's part of regular RSS feeds. Apps can read them. It's been part of the spec for a long time, but it's been poorly supported by clients, as Mike says here.
01:37:13 ◼ ► Apple Podcasts does support per-episode artwork. Oh, and there's also one other way to display it, or one other way to specify it, which is you can embed custom artwork into the MP3s in the ID3 tags, just like any other MP3.
01:37:28 ◼ ► This has been around forever. Overcast supports this partially. So Overcast will, if a podcast has custom embedded artwork in the file, it will display it on the Now Playing screen during playback.
01:37:41 ◼ ► It will not display it in other screens, and that's actually a choice I've made. Again, you can disagree with me if you want. I understand.
01:38:00 ◼ ► So if you're in a context in the app where you are seeing blended episode lists that might contain episodes from multiple podcasts, what you want to see in that context, in my opinion, is the main artwork, not a custom episode artwork.
01:38:15 ◼ ► So this would be something like the playlist screen. If you're in a playlist and you're seeing a list of episodes, those could be from any podcast. So in my opinion, what should show in that playlist screen is the main artwork, so you can tell at a quick glance, you can tell visually what podcast that is.
01:38:32 ◼ ► And that's anywhere that you would see episodes listed from multiple podcasts. So the only place that I would actually want to add per episode artwork anywhere besides the Now Playing screen would be in a podcast's own screen.
01:38:46 ◼ ► In that list view, I could put it there. And so I might someday do that. It's on my consideration someday feature list. There's a lot more stuff ahead of it that's, I think, more important.
01:38:56 ◼ ► So I just haven't gotten to that kind of idea yet. But if I'm going to do it, that's where I would do it. I would not have it go everywhere like the playlist screens.
01:39:08 ◼ ► Yes, but only if it's embedded in the file. I don't currently read the RSS tags for per episode artwork. Because if you think about what that would mean, so I would also, in addition to downloading the episode MP3, I would also need to download all of those images.
01:39:29 ◼ ► So that's like creating more separate requests, storing more images, larger images, potentially for episodes you haven't downloaded yet. So then I have to have more thumbnailing. And like there's all sorts of like complexities when you externally host every one of those images, as opposed to just embedding it in the download.
01:39:45 ◼ ► So there's some trickiness there. It might prove to never be worth it. But if I'm going to start looking at like the podcast screen to redo the list stuff to be a little richer, like for instance, if I ever wanted to display season numbers and episode numbers in a separate way, I could do it as part of that update down the road.
01:40:06 ◼ ► But that's, again, there's more stuff ahead of that in the pipeline that I need to do first.
01:40:11 ◼ ► So we basically, because we use chapters, we could basically have the equivalent of a custom artwork for each episode, but instead of what we just have our chapter images. So if you actually look at the now playing screen when you're going through episodes of our show, very often you will see the image change to illustrate something that we're talking about or whatever.
01:40:27 ◼ ► That's not quite the same as this is like, oh, this episode has special artwork. And I've seen that in some other podcasts as well. I think that's worth supporting, though, because a lot of times the podcasts, like they won't use, they don't know about chapters. Nobody knows about chapters but us in the Germans, right?
01:40:40 ◼ ► So nobody's using chapters. And I agree that would be better. It's part of the file. They should do it. But getting them to do it is not like who has the power to make that happen, right?
01:40:48 ◼ ► So if they are doing custom artwork in the tags, like, you know, Blank Shack, I think, has custom artwork for all their series of things. Like when they do like, oh, the movies of, you know, Francis Ford Coppola, they'll have custom artwork for the run of that series.
01:41:02 ◼ ► And I'm assuming they're doing it by having every episode have custom artwork in the RSS or whatever, rather than having just one chapter image. I think that does add to the experience because I like to look at the screen and see, oh, look at the funny, you know, parody artwork they made for this director or whatever.
01:41:16 ◼ ► And if you can't control whether they're using chapters or using the thing in the RSS and big podcasts are using it in the RSS, I think there's no avoiding eventually supporting that in the Now Playing screen, despite the annoyance that it provides of having to download stuff.
01:41:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, what I have to do is start just reading the tags and storing the database stuff and just see like how many podcasts are actually using that. I don't, my instinct is that it's not going to be a very large number of podcasts.
01:41:43 ◼ ► Just because like most podcasts, including big and small, most podcasts don't want to add more things to their required production for every episode. Like most podcasts don't even bother doing basic show notes. Like they won't even do that.
01:42:01 ◼ ► So most podcasts are not going to be making custom images for every episode. There are some that do. And so again, I will look at that once I look at modernizing the episode list screen on a playlist screen. But that's not going to be yet.
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