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428: ‘Michigan-Starred Fine Dining’, With Louie Mantia

 

00:00:00   Louie Mantia.

00:00:00   Am I saying it right?

00:00:02   Am I saying it right?

00:00:03   People are going to be in like a John Syracuse thing.

00:00:08   He's going to be mad at me just for the way I said that.

00:00:10   It's Mantia, but yeah, Louie Mantia, sure.

00:00:16   Yeah, the way I think of it is I know you're of Italian heritage, where Mantia comes from.

00:00:21   So just sort of guido it up a little.

00:00:24   Mantia.

00:00:25   There you go.

00:00:26   Then it sounds fine.

00:00:27   Yeah.

00:00:28   We were talking recently because you're doing something Philadelphia-related or something,

00:00:33   and we got talking about hoagies and sandwiches and Italian sandwiches.

00:00:37   And then you got mad at me about hoagies, like within a few minutes.

00:00:41   I do think as a Philadelphian, I do think, and I know Philadelphia is I think best known for

00:00:50   the cheesesteak, and I do like a good cheesesteak, but I feel like I told you privately, I'll say

00:00:56   the same thing here.

00:00:57   What's the guy's name?

00:00:58   Thanos, the guy from the Avengers?

00:00:59   Yeah, that's right.

00:01:01   Yes.

00:01:01   Yeah, yeah.

00:01:02   If a Philly sandwich were to be Thanos-ed out of existence with the snap of a finger, I

00:01:10   think the world would be a better place if the cheesesteak were vanished and the Philadelphia

00:01:14   hoagie, Italian hoagie remained.

00:01:17   I think it's the better day-to-day sandwich.

00:01:20   If I could only eat one for the rest of my life.

00:01:21   I mean, you're right about a day-to-day sandwich.

00:01:24   If we're talking about like a once-a-month sandwich, then maybe the cheesesteak.

00:01:28   It's a really different situation then.

00:01:29   In the same way that when Thanos snapped his fingers, a lot of people, heroes and people

00:01:35   that everybody loved, you missed some of the people who went away, but it's not that the

00:01:40   cheesesteak wouldn't be missed, but I do feel it's a better overall sandwich.

00:01:44   It does make me wonder.

00:01:45   It doesn't make me wonder.

00:01:46   That could have been the whole plot to the movie instead, that we could have just had just

00:01:50   half of the food, half of the cuisine went away instead.

00:01:53   That would be like the Mel Brooks sort of Spaceballs take on the Avengers.

00:01:57   Right, right, right.

00:01:58   Would be to have some kind of guy who's got really strong opinions about sandwiches.

00:02:02   That just eliminates half of sandwiches in the world?

00:02:05   Sure.

00:02:06   Why not?

00:02:06   Yeah.

00:02:06   We were also talking about the terminology of it.

00:02:11   This is where I think we were arguing as to whether hoagie is a Philadelphia regionalism.

00:02:17   Yeah.

00:02:18   Or, and you were saying, I believe in St. Louis that they call them hoagies or no?

00:02:23   Well, I don't know.

00:02:24   I just like, I just remember hearing that word all my life.

00:02:27   So I don't know if, I don't know if that ever, yeah, that was always a word I knew.

00:02:34   Yeah.

00:02:35   In America, people call it, this is a long Italian roll, hopefully Italian, with Italian lunch meats

00:02:42   and I like it with the Italian, like sharp provolone cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, oil.

00:02:49   Another one, we didn't even get into this, is the issue of mayonnaise on an Italian hoagie.

00:02:54   Oh, interesting.

00:02:56   I guess I've never felt like that was a necessary component of it.

00:03:00   I would say it's anti-Italian hoagie.

00:03:02   Yeah.

00:03:03   You need some moisture on an Italian hoagie, but that comes from the oil and vinegar.

00:03:07   Yeah.

00:03:08   Oil and vinegar, a million percent.

00:03:09   Yes.

00:03:10   Yeah.

00:03:10   I don't, yeah, I think mayonnaise, I don't think mayonnaise ruins it.

00:03:14   I just don't think it's what that sandwich is for.

00:03:16   Right.

00:03:17   It's in the same way that putting American cheese on it wouldn't ruin it.

00:03:21   It would, it would just be a different sandwich at that point.

00:03:23   Yeah.

00:03:23   It's just slightly, slightly off the taste profile.

00:03:26   But if you, I think a lot of the places that call them subs or submarine sandwiches default

00:03:31   to mayonnaise because it's not really.

00:03:33   And I think you got to it in chat, which is the basic thing is it's not a Philadelphia thing.

00:03:38   It's an Italian thing.

00:03:40   And that's true.

00:03:42   I just think you guys call them hoagies.

00:03:44   Right.

00:03:45   Like everywhere else might have this sandwich, but you guys are the ones that call it a hoagie.

00:03:51   Yeah.

00:03:51   Yeah.

00:03:52   So the term might be a little more Philadelphia-ish, but the Italian sandwich, which I've also,

00:03:58   and in Philly, a lot of people just call them instead of calling them a hoagie.

00:04:00   A lot of people, even here in Philly, will just call it an Italian sandwich.

00:04:04   And what they mean is an Italian hoagie.

00:04:06   What I don't understand is like what New York had, what was the, they called it like an Italian

00:04:11   grinder sandwich.

00:04:13   I don't know where that word came from.

00:04:14   Where did that word come from?

00:04:16   I don't understand that at all.

00:04:17   I don't understand it either.

00:04:19   And I've never really gotten a good sandwich, Italian sandwich in New York.

00:04:23   But whereas, and this is one of those, I'm sure, you know, New York is huge.

00:04:28   I'm sure somebody can do it.

00:04:30   You're sure it exists.

00:04:31   You just didn't have it.

00:04:32   But I'll tell you where I know you can get an excellent Italian sandwich is in Boston.

00:04:38   Boston has a big Italian community.

00:04:39   I think it's South Boston.

00:04:41   A friend of the show, Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba.

00:04:44   My son goes to college in Boston.

00:04:46   So we're visiting more than we used to.

00:04:49   And he knows a neighborhood place, but it's totally, it's like a weird little store that's

00:04:55   been there forever that bought the store.

00:04:57   It seems, this seems like the layout of the place.

00:05:00   It's sort of like half a deli where they make sandwiches and half sort of a bodega corner

00:05:06   store where you could just buy, you know, it's a corner.

00:05:08   That sounds great.

00:05:10   But it seems like what they did is they got so big and popular that they bought the store

00:05:14   next to them and knocked, not really a door, but just sort of an archway into the next.

00:05:20   So it's like, yeah, it feels like, wait, am I in the same, am I in the right store?

00:05:24   It's, it wasn't, it wasn't designed that way.

00:05:26   It was not intentionally this way.

00:05:28   But they make absolutely excellent Italian sandwiches, but I don't believe they call

00:05:32   them hoagies.

00:05:33   They just, why are we starting out with this?

00:05:35   I feel like, I don't know.

00:05:39   I'm, I'm already hungry.

00:05:40   It's only like 6am right now.

00:05:43   Okay.

00:05:43   All right.

00:05:45   All right.

00:05:46   Before we go any further, let me already take a break here and thank our first sponsor.

00:05:50   Just get it out of the way and we'll keep going.

00:05:52   Cause I feel like we get on a roll.

00:05:53   We're not going to, we're not going to have breaks.

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00:08:58   All right, before the main topic, I have another one.

00:09:00   Another, so we're easing into it.

00:09:02   I ask this periodically, and the results fascinate me.

00:09:06   I asked on Mastodon and Threads, this identical poll question yesterday.

00:09:13   I haven't publicized it yet, so it's not sometime before the show is recorded.

00:09:20   And when it comes out, I've already linked to it on Daring Fireball.

00:09:23   But here's the question.

00:09:25   On your phone, do you use, it's a poll, light mode, dark mode, switch by time of day, or switch willy-nilly?

00:09:39   I think it's switch by time of day.

00:09:41   I think that's the way that it works for me.

00:09:43   That's what you do personally?

00:09:45   I'm checking.

00:09:46   I'm checking right now, because I don't even know, I don't even think about it anymore.

00:09:49   What is this?

00:09:50   Yeah.

00:09:52   Yeah.

00:09:53   It's light until sunset.

00:09:55   Yeah, that's how it goes.

00:09:56   I mean, the icons don't change.

00:09:59   That's the big deal for me, though.

00:10:01   Right?

00:10:01   I don't switch to the dark mode icons, right?

00:10:05   I switch to dark mode for the UI, right?

00:10:07   Because I'm not trying to blind myself.

00:10:09   Personally, I just, I'm permanently light mode.

00:10:13   I use light mode 100% of the time.

00:10:15   Okay, I'm not trying to make any value a statement here, but is it an eyesight thing, or is it just like a classic thing?

00:10:22   So that's a super interesting question.

00:10:25   So I think I've talked, I know I've talked about this long ago, but I'm only 52, but in my 40s, which is a ridiculously young age, I had cataracts in both eyes.

00:10:36   So I've had cataract surgery in both eyes before I was out of my 40s.

00:10:39   And it is very unusual to have cataracts in your 40s.

00:10:44   But the other thing I learned with the first one, which was my left eye, is the younger you are when you develop a cataract, the faster it gets worse.

00:10:53   It gets worse very quickly the younger you are.

00:10:56   And 40 is preposterously young.

00:10:58   So I went from not really noticing I had anything wrong to my left eye was just blurry all the time, seemingly in a matter of months.

00:11:07   And it was so young that at first, my eye doctor was like, they didn't think about cataract and didn't like, you know, if they think cataract and they just sort of shine a light, they're like, oh, you've got a cataract.

00:11:16   Because it's just a cloudy lens.

00:11:18   The lens in your eye is cloudy.

00:11:20   But they weren't thinking that.

00:11:22   And so they were just sort of, you know how when you go to the eye doctor for glasses and they put the things that are like, click, and it's, is this better or worse?

00:11:28   And it's, it's a little better.

00:11:29   So then they go one more.

00:11:31   He just kept going more, more.

00:11:33   And it was like not getting any better, right?

00:11:35   No, I was like, I guess it's a little.

00:11:37   And he's, and then they were like, do you have diabetes?

00:11:39   And I'm like, I don't think so.

00:11:41   But it turned out I had a cataract, but it went very quickly.

00:11:44   And so I've had the surgery for both eyes.

00:11:46   But anyway, at one point when my second eye had the cataract, my first eye, I swear to God, this sounds terrible, but it's all better now.

00:11:54   Develop what's called a secondary cataract, which is.

00:11:58   Oh, fine.

00:11:59   So the cataract is cloudiness in the lens in your eye, but the lens sits in a sack that's sort of like a Ziploc sandwich bag.

00:12:08   This is how it's.

00:12:09   Right.

00:12:10   It's just like that.

00:12:11   Right.

00:12:11   It's, it's, so the lens is the more important part, but it sits in a sack in front of your eye.

00:12:17   The secondary cataract is that sometimes or often when you get the, the cataract is the, this is gross.

00:12:24   I've had it happen, but they take out the natural lens in your eye and put in an artificial lens in place.

00:12:32   And that's perfectly clear.

00:12:33   But a secondary cataract is when the sack develops a little bit of yellowing.

00:12:38   Right.

00:12:39   And that's, you don't need surgery for that.

00:12:41   They take care of that with a laser.

00:12:43   You just sit there.

00:12:44   It doesn't hurt.

00:12:44   They don't numb you.

00:12:45   You just sit there, keep your head still.

00:12:47   And it looks like a green light is flashing in your eyes and they go click, click, click, click, click, click.

00:12:52   And it's all better.

00:12:53   And then you, they're like, beforehand, they gave me a magazine to read with my other eye closed.

00:12:58   Said, can you read it?

00:12:59   And I was like, yeah, not really.

00:13:00   And then, then click, click, click, click, click.

00:13:02   And can you read it?

00:13:03   And I could read it clear as a bell.

00:13:05   It was, you know.

00:13:06   Wait, can you walk out, can you walk out of the surgery like fine?

00:13:09   No big deal.

00:13:10   There's cataract surgery.

00:13:11   I mean, there was recovery time.

00:13:12   No.

00:13:12   When you get the actual cataract surgery and they replace your lens, they put you under because it's, they actually cut your eye open and put a lens in there.

00:13:20   And you're kind of woozy coming out.

00:13:21   When they do the secondary cataract though, I swear to God, it's, it is five minutes in and out.

00:13:26   You just stare at a machine, green light flashes in your eye and it's all better.

00:13:30   But at one point I had a cataract in my right eye and a secondary cataract in my left eye.

00:13:36   And my, so for a bit of a stretch there, my combined vision was very bad.

00:13:41   And I had to get.

00:13:42   That sounds awful.

00:13:43   It was awful for a brief while.

00:13:45   It was really pretty bad.

00:13:46   Well, it's interesting.

00:13:47   It's interesting that you say all this because, so I had like my, my corneas like were deformed, I guess.

00:13:54   There's a weird, dumb thing, a reason that that happens and it's not important, but I also had surgery in both of my eyes, but it was like corneal crosslinking and they have to like open your cornea and stick some like steroids in there for it to chill out and get back to a normal side.

00:14:08   And I'm like, yeah, I mean, I'm like 37 now.

00:14:11   I'm like, could we, can we wait until later to do this sort of stuff?

00:14:15   Like, this is my job.

00:14:16   I actually need these more than anything.

00:14:18   And it just, yeah.

00:14:19   So trust me, I know.

00:14:21   And I get nervous about it because the other, it's a total side issue and it's far more significant and risky, but I've also had retinal detachments in both of my eyes.

00:14:30   This is fun.

00:14:30   You're just having eye problems all over the place.

00:14:33   Oh, all over the place, but not in recent years.

00:14:35   And currently with, with my glasses on, I see with both my eyes open 2020 with the glasses.

00:14:41   It's really great.

00:14:42   But when I had the cataract in the right eye and the secondary cataract in the left eye and I was waiting and it was like, I forget which one I had to get taken care of first.

00:14:50   And it was, I think right after COVID.

00:14:53   And so some of it was postponed.

00:14:55   Like I might've had it, the one procedure earlier, except it was like, ah, we're not doing these procedures for a couple months because of coming out of COVID.

00:15:04   And I think it was the first, I'm pretty sure it was like, I might be getting the year wrong, but I think it was the first year back at WWDC.

00:15:14   So this would be like 2022 or else it was 2019, the last year before WWDC.

00:15:21   I don't know which year it was, but I'm in the hotel lobby.

00:15:24   And at the time with both of these eye problems, I kind of had to get really close to a screen to read it.

00:15:29   And I was working on something for daring fireball.

00:15:32   And I don't know, I was like six inches away from my laptop screen typing.

00:15:37   And my friend, Matt and Reese saw me in the lobby and he thought I was like working super diligently because I was hunched over this computer.

00:15:46   Yeah, yeah.

00:15:46   And he's, ah, and I was like, hey, why did you say hi to me?

00:15:49   Because, ah, you looked like you were like super focused.

00:15:51   In the zone.

00:15:52   And I was like, oh, no, I can't, I can't read my screen unless I'm six inches away.

00:15:56   But here's where I'm going with all of this.

00:15:58   At that time, the cataract, it, because it's like cloudiness in the lens and the effect that you see is just sort of a general haziness.

00:16:09   Like in a sitcom, like a classic 80s, 90s sitcom when a character would have a dream sequence.

00:16:16   Yeah, yeah.

00:16:16   It's just very, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:18   Yeah, it's like a haziness.

00:16:20   Well, that's what the whole world looks like.

00:16:22   And you can start to notice it, like people really start to notice it when you're driving at night because a light source, like a stop sign or opposing headlights.

00:16:32   Right, just blurs the entire vision.

00:16:34   Yeah, they, any kind of light source really gets like these wild specular highlights.

00:16:40   But in the daytime, anything bright like that.

00:16:43   So looking at a light screen, a white background with black text, the white overwhelms the black and all you really see is white.

00:16:51   Right.

00:16:51   So at that time, dark mode was an enormous savior for me.

00:16:58   It meant the difference, not just that I preferred it.

00:17:01   It meant the difference of, oh, if I get close to the screen in dark mode, I can read.

00:17:05   It's just fine.

00:17:06   I didn't have to make text bigger.

00:17:08   But light mode, I literally couldn't read.

00:17:11   There was nothing I could do.

00:17:12   I could bump the font size up, up, up.

00:17:14   If I made it truly, truly ginormous on the phone, I guess I could kind of read it.

00:17:20   Wait, wait, wait.

00:17:21   So are you telling me that dark mode for you was like an accessibility feature only and that now that you've got like your 2020 vision, okay, you're like light mode only now?

00:17:31   I went back to white mode.

00:17:32   Incredible.

00:17:32   Because I just, and it's probably that I'm used to it.

00:17:37   But it's why, and I would have been okay if this had happened to me before dark mode became a system-wide thing on iOS and macOS because for that accessibility reason, both platforms had supported something.

00:17:54   It was like called reverse mode or something.

00:17:57   If you fire up like an iPhone from 2007 or a Mac from 15, 20 years ago, there's a feature in accessibility that reverses the screen.

00:18:06   But it makes everything look weird.

00:18:08   Like photographs look like x-rays.

00:18:10   Because everything.

00:18:11   Yeah, there's an invert mode at the time.

00:18:15   And now they call it classic invert.

00:18:17   In the modern version of invert, they intentionally don't invert content like photos, but they invert everything else, which is like better, but still like dark mode is like really what you're after in this situation.

00:18:34   Yeah.

00:18:34   So I would have been okay with invert before, but when this happened to me, dark mode was a thing.

00:18:40   So I didn't even feel like I was missing anything.

00:18:43   Like I was like, oh, there's a mode that just suits me.

00:18:45   And so it was great.

00:18:46   And there are a couple apps that I use in dark mode.

00:18:49   I have BBEdit for years and years now.

00:18:52   I used to go back and forth, but my text editor of choice, I have in dark mode.

00:18:56   And I just kind of like looking at code as light text on a black background.

00:19:03   And it just sort of feels worky to me to be.

00:19:08   That's a good point.

00:19:09   I feel like a bunch of pro apps were like actually doing dark mode way before like system stuff was right.

00:19:14   I mean, of course, final cut, just because you're working with with movie stuff was always like and stuff like aperture was like with that.

00:19:22   It was like a graphite like sort of appearance for a light room.

00:19:25   Kind of like a mid-tone.

00:19:25   And so, yeah, I mean, I can't even actually imagine.

00:19:29   Does GarageBand have a light made?

00:19:31   I don't think so.

00:19:32   Or is it permanently in dark mode?

00:19:34   I think it's permanently in dark mode.

00:19:35   Yeah.

00:19:35   So I don't know why, but the watch app has always been dark mode only.

00:19:41   Oh, that's right.

00:19:42   Yeah.

00:19:42   But the other thing I like about BB edit being, it's not quite black, like my color scheme, but it's almost black.

00:19:49   Any normal person would look at you.

00:19:51   You would look at it and instantly know that's just dark gray, but it's very dark gray.

00:19:55   But I like that the BB edit windows stick out with a bunch of windows tiled on top of it.

00:20:00   I can, I go, there's my BB edit back to work.

00:20:03   So it's not that I hate dark mode, but I just like it very selectively for certain apps.

00:20:08   Right.

00:20:08   Well, I mean, that's a, well, that's a good point because it's like there used to be, I get, we're getting an interesting thing here and I don't want to get there.

00:20:17   But like when 10, 15 years ago, I feel like apps were more visually distinct in not just like the background color, but just like the style overall.

00:20:25   So you could identify like what app was over on this side of the screen versus this side of the screen very easily based on what it looked like.

00:20:34   Right.

00:20:34   Whereas I think it's getting, it is increasingly getting harder to figure that out.

00:20:39   Yeah, I totally agree.

00:20:41   Just, and again, putting aside, we'll get back to this issue for the, a lot of this on the show.

00:20:46   I'm trying to save it off for some reason.

00:20:48   I don't know why.

00:20:49   But for example, and I made fun of it, the, the rich Corinthian leather of Apple calendar for a while, right?

00:20:57   That it, it had these leather accents, like it was a leather desk mat on an executive's desk.

00:21:03   And we can make fun of that particular style or, or the over the top.

00:21:09   I know everybody calls it skeuomorphism, but it's the skeuomorphic use of leather as a photorealistic leather or almost not even photorealistic,

00:21:19   but like hyper realistic leather.

00:21:21   Yeah.

00:21:22   It's an illustrative, like idealized version of this.

00:21:26   Yeah.

00:21:26   Right.

00:21:27   But it, say what you want about the, oh, I like the way that looks or I, I like the gimmick of the way it looks.

00:21:33   It undeniably made the calendar window instantly recognizable.

00:21:38   It was super distinct.

00:21:39   Yeah.

00:21:40   Right.

00:21:40   Yeah.

00:21:40   So for me, it's light mode all the time on the phone.

00:21:44   I, I would probably rather switch to dark mode 24 hours a day than do the switching at sundown because I find to me, and I think it's probably related to the fact that I'm older and, and I grew up at a time when all the, all there was, was light mode.

00:22:02   It was light mode.

00:22:02   Right.

00:22:03   Okay.

00:22:03   Well, here's like, I don't, I don't.

00:22:04   I have a question for you.

00:22:05   You, if you're, okay.

00:22:08   Sometimes you go to Walt Disney World, right?

00:22:10   It's a thing you do sometimes.

00:22:12   Like it, here's, this is where I always struggle.

00:22:15   This is where I end up being willy nilly because I have to switch between light and dark mode at a place like Disneyland because you're in darker environments.

00:22:23   If you're in the queue, I don't want to be the guy with a bright white phone.

00:22:26   Right.

00:22:27   So like, I got to go into dark mode.

00:22:28   First, you tell me you don't.

00:22:31   You're just like, you're the guy with the bright white phone.

00:22:34   I try to keep my phone in my pocket as much as I can while I'm there, but there's, you're in a long enough queue.

00:22:41   And you're there for an hour.

00:22:43   Yeah.

00:22:44   And if, if Amy and Jonas both have their phones out, then I'm like, well, now it's a free, it's free for all.

00:22:49   Right.

00:22:50   But no, I don't switch to dark mode.

00:22:51   I would just turn the brightness down.

00:22:53   Brightness down.

00:22:54   But I find that, I just find that when it switches automatically, I don't recognize the app anymore.

00:22:59   To me, Apple Mail doesn't look like Apple Mail.

00:23:03   Apple Mail is this white background app that has these, the white background to me is part of Apple Mail's visual identity.

00:23:10   So I don't.

00:23:11   Well, do they allow you, I know that some, some third party apps have settings that are like, do you want to follow the system or do you want to use light or dark?

00:23:21   But like none of Apple's own apps have that capability, right?

00:23:25   I mean, they're all technically capable of providing this, but none of them seem to do that.

00:23:29   I mean, I wonder if you would, I'm curious if you would intentionally select dark mode for any app that you use just for that app.

00:23:39   Well, like I said, I do it for BB edit, but for Apple's apps, would I change?

00:23:44   Probably not because I, let's see, the Apple apps I use the most are messages, I'm not necessarily in order, but messages, Safari, and Mail for sure.

00:23:57   And I wouldn't want to switch any of those.

00:24:00   I find it confusing with Safari.

00:24:02   There used to be a time where dark meant you're in private window mode.

00:24:09   That's, oh God, yeah, right.

00:24:10   And now it's like.

00:24:12   Now it's like the kind of the URL bar maybe changes its appearance a little bit or something you don't really know.

00:24:18   Yeah.

00:24:18   Yeah.

00:24:19   Okay, well, here's the thing.

00:24:21   So being in dark mode, because mine happens like automatically, it doesn't change if you're actively looking at it, right?

00:24:29   Even if it technically hits the time, it doesn't do it until like you turn off your phone or look away from it for a second and then it changes.

00:24:35   When, like, when it changes into dark mode, like for the rest of the evening or whatever, the thing that always killed me is in Safari, when a page loads, it loads white first before everything else.

00:24:49   So before a page even loads, I get like this really hot flash of like white right in my face before it decides, oh, like the website will maybe respect dark mode and have a dark mode appearance.

00:25:00   So it's just bright, like what is awful.

00:25:03   Yeah, and that brings me to the other, hey, how can you have to mention this, or I have to mention this, is that effectively, Daring Fireball has been a form of dark mode from its inception.

00:25:18   Yeah, okay.

00:25:19   So I wanted to actually talk to you about this, so I'm glad you brought it up.

00:25:22   Because, so, you've straddled this light mode, dark mode thing for a really long time by being medium mode the entire time, right?

00:25:31   You, like, by having the medium grayish sort of blue color that you have, like, you work both, like, you work well in both modes and no one cares.

00:25:40   No, no dark mode person is going to complain, no light mode person is going to complain, right?

00:25:44   But if you have a white website and you don't work in dark mode, you're like an asshole, right?

00:25:48   So, like, I mean, this is the same thing I do, like, with a bunch of my websites where it's like, I have, like, medium blue as my background for, like, Parakeet and Junior and whatever else.

00:25:58   And, like, my own personal website, I guess I have, is it's dark mode, for real.

00:26:02   But I guess light mode people, I don't know, often complain about the dark mode, whereas dark mode people often complain when, like, it's not supported for them.

00:26:12   Yes, they do.

00:26:13   It does seem like that's what they complain about.

00:26:16   And the web is another area where, again, I have my own personal opinion on the color of my site, which is I've been pretty consistent with those colors all along.

00:26:29   But I like that going to your blog is a very dark background with white text.

00:26:34   I like that when I go to Ars Technica, it's the same way.

00:26:38   I like that I wouldn't want your site to switch to light mode just because my system's in light mode.

00:26:45   Yeah.

00:26:45   And I would find that very strange if I went to your site, which I've been reading a lot lately because you've been writing about things I care a lot about and why I've invited you onto the show.

00:26:56   And I do a lot of reading after sundown.

00:26:59   I would find it very strange if your site reversed color just because it was after 8 o'clock at night.

00:27:04   Are you choosing when to read my blog based on time of day?

00:27:07   Are you always?

00:27:08   But I might.

00:27:10   It's a dark remote website, so I only read it after 9.

00:27:13   All right.

00:27:14   I want you to – do you want to guess the poll results?

00:27:18   I had 3,300 people on Mastodon respond and on threads 2,838, so about the same, but Mastodon was a little more popular.

00:27:30   The results were very close, not quite the same, but very close.

00:27:33   I have to imagine there's actually a fair amount of automatic people, but maybe that's just because I lean that way.

00:27:38   I feel like it's got to be half are those people, and I actually bet a bunch of people are like explicitly dark mode all the time.

00:27:44   Many light mode people?

00:27:46   Oh, God.

00:27:47   I'm scared to know this.

00:27:48   Nope.

00:27:49   I'm going to give you full credit here, Louis.

00:27:51   I think you guessed it.

00:27:52   Number one, switch by – switch willy-nilly only got 3% on both.

00:27:56   Yeah, no one does that.

00:27:57   Switch by time of day, which implied automatically – I forget if I was running short on characters that I didn't include the word automatically, but people know what I meant.

00:28:05   It was 51% on Mastodon, 49 on threads, so 50%.

00:28:11   Call it even, 50%.

00:28:13   Dark mode, 30%.

00:28:15   Right.

00:28:16   Light, 36 on threads, so call it 33% average, about one-third, and 12% and 16% on light mode only.

00:28:25   So I'm in a – all right.

00:28:27   So about half do the automatic thing, which I do think is the default now.

00:28:33   Yeah, that might be why that's – yeah.

00:28:35   About a third do dark mode all the time, and the remaining, you know, what, a sixth or so – a sixth or seventh.

00:28:49   So you're in – it's not nobody, but you are in the lowest or the smallest group, besides the weirdos that are just, like, apparently switching willy-nilly, which I don't know who those people are.

00:28:59   I mean, I knew that sometimes, but not all the time.

00:29:02   That's crazy.

00:29:03   I just thought it was interesting, and it does seem dark mode is more than a passing fad.

00:29:09   Well, that's definitely true, yeah.

00:29:11   All right.

00:29:13   Let's keep going on this topic, though.

00:29:16   You mentioned this before we segue into talking about the iOS 26 and liquid glass and everything, but I guess that this is changing this year for the first time.

00:29:26   Or did it change before where apps got dark mode icons in dark mode?

00:29:31   Did there?

00:29:33   I don't think – that didn't happen on Mac OS ever.

00:29:37   We didn't even have dark mode iPhones yet.

00:29:38   So dark mode app icons changing – I think that was in the previous version where they did that.

00:29:44   No.

00:29:44   I'm looking right now because I've got two phones here in front of me.

00:29:47   So my main phone on iOS 18, I just put it in dark mode, and none of the icons changed.

00:29:53   But I think it's a – I think it's a – oh, God.

00:29:55   I want to say it's a setting.

00:29:57   Like, in that weird, like, customized thing on the home screen.

00:30:01   I don't think it does.

00:30:05   I find that to be off – I find the app icon switching around to be very off-putting, and that's something, like, to me, it would be like – I don't know.

00:30:17   So that's, to me, the thing that you were talking about before, where it's, like, you don't recognize male if it's dark mode.

00:30:24   Like, I don't recognize icons the same way if they're inverted in color.

00:30:28   I just don't.

00:30:28   Like, they're just completely different apps at that point because the color composition of an app icon is, like, its entire identity.

00:30:35   And, like, yeah, I will probably, like, understand certain things, like, mail and messages maybe.

00:30:41   But it's – like, there is some cognitive dissonance that happens.

00:30:44   Like, when you see a mail envelope that's white on blue, and then you go to it being blue on black, like, both of these attributes changed.

00:30:54   And my brain isn't – oh, the background color is now the foreground object.

00:30:57   That makes sense in my head.

00:30:59   It doesn't.

00:30:59   So, like, I don't even really recognize these – like, these apps I use every day.

00:31:04   I just don't recognize them when they're in dark mode.

00:31:06   I really don't either.

00:31:08   So, for example, like, the Notes app.

00:31:10   Notes is – I should have mentioned Notes as one of the main Apple apps that I use all the time.

00:31:16   And the – in iOS 26, the icon changes what used to be – the icon represents a notepad of white-lined paper with a yellow – I don't know what you call that at the top – binding at the top.

00:31:31   Yeah, some binding, yeah.

00:31:31   And when you go to dark mode now, it becomes a black piece of paper.

00:31:36   Yeah.

00:31:36   Well, this has always been, like, the weird part about, like, notes in dark mode.

00:31:40   I mean, I remember when that happened, and then it was like, oh, what – that – is this black paper that we're writing on?

00:31:45   It suddenly stops making sense, right?

00:31:48   I mean, this is – it's funny because I think in that whole, like, era where everyone was, like, questioning, like, rich visual design and skeuomorphism, we were always making questions.

00:31:57   Like, we're like, hey, does this really make sense for it to be rich Corinthian leather?

00:32:00   It's – I don't know.

00:32:01   And it's like, no one – I don't want to say nobody.

00:32:04   But, like, when the black notes paper happened, I don't think anyone was like, hmm, yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

00:32:10   They were just like, well, that's what the icon has to be, so it is now, right?

00:32:12   I don't know.

00:32:13   It's like selective criticism, you know?

00:32:15   It's just like, we're going to complain about, like, the rich visual design, but not about this.

00:32:20   It's weird.

00:32:20   It's weird to have the black paper.

00:32:22   I think it's weird that the phone app changes from a green icon with a white phone, which is the main light mode icon, to a black icon with a green phone.

00:32:33   Yeah, that's what I was saying about mail.

00:32:35   It's the same thing.

00:32:36   I like –

00:32:37   Right.

00:32:37   It's not – like, if it kept a black – okay, here's – really what I think they should have done with, like, dark mode the whole time was make the background part of the icon darker, but retain some vibrancy of the original color of the thing.

00:32:52   If it was a dark green with, like, still, like, maybe, like, even a light green phone, right?

00:32:57   Like, reduce the contrast, reduce the white point on the whole thing, right?

00:33:00   But keep the vibrancy.

00:33:01   That would have made more sense because it would have kept all of this, like, information in your head.

00:33:05   It would have looked like you're just looking at a dimmer screen, right?

00:33:08   But no, here's my question.

00:33:10   Do dark mode people, like, when they have all these dark mode icons, or God forbid the people that do, like, tinted icons or whatever, are – like, do they fully just have some capability?

00:33:21   I don't – where they just instantly recognize this stuff?

00:33:23   Are they just, like, spatially organizing everything?

00:33:25   Yeah.

00:33:25   So they don't care?

00:33:26   Are they searching for all their apps?

00:33:28   Like, there's no way.

00:33:30   You can't tell me that they're just, like, instantly just, like, identifying all of these things.

00:33:34   I don't know.

00:33:34   I just feel – yeah, I feel like I'm particularly logo sensitive or logo – I – the way that people – humans naturally – every – almost everybody.

00:33:46   I know there's a condition that some people have where they can't.

00:33:50   But the way that almost all humans recognize others instantaneously by their face.

00:33:56   And that you can – and if you run into somebody who you haven't seen in 10 years and they've aged, you still –

00:34:03   Yeah, it's true.

00:34:03   You recognize them instantly.

00:34:05   You're like, wow.

00:34:05   And that's how I feel about logos.

00:34:08   And to me, icons for apps are logos.

00:34:11   That's one of the purposes that they serve.

00:34:13   And you do this, and to me, it doesn't look wholly unrelated.

00:34:18   But the first time I saw the dark mode app for phone, I thought it was, like – I thought it was, like, Google Voice or WhatsApp or something.

00:34:29   And I'm like, how did this get on my first home – get on my first home screen?

00:34:33   It starts conflating some of these things, right?

00:34:36   Because, like, okay, there are a bunch of apps that, like, just for better or worse, are just green backgrounds with white, like, chat bubbles on them.

00:34:44   Okay?

00:34:44   This exists, right?

00:34:45   There's a whole suite of these.

00:34:46   Yes, WhatsApp.

00:34:47   Yes, messages.

00:34:48   Yes, like, Line in Japan.

00:34:50   They're all like this, right?

00:34:51   And so – but when they get inverted, it's not that they – they're actually less different because they're all black, right?

00:34:59   And there's no difference in shade of green.

00:35:01   And then the foreground object all being green, you're just, like, looking at – they look like third-party apps now.

00:35:06   Like, all of them, including messages.

00:35:08   Like, it puts messages in with the others instead of being its own separate thing.

00:35:14   Yeah, I don't get it.

00:35:16   I don't get the thinking.

00:35:17   And I – like I said, I just don't recognize it instantly.

00:35:23   To me, a perfect example of this would be a can of Coca-Cola versus a can of Coke Zero.

00:35:31   Right, yeah.

00:35:33   And to me, what Apple is doing in iOS 26 is saying, oh, you're in dark mode?

00:35:38   Well, now regular – cans of regular Coke now are black cans.

00:35:42   Right.

00:35:43   They look like Coke Zero, right?

00:35:45   Right.

00:35:45   It's – well, actually, no, it's a good point.

00:35:47   Like, they're saying that that kind of difference now, right, is actually, like, something that we have to accept is an alternate version of this rather than being, like – like, actually, there was tons of apps, right, that were, like, black – like, even Apple's apps have a black background, right, before dark mode existed.

00:36:07   And those – those are weirdly, like, still safe, right?

00:36:11   Like, like, the watch app doesn't have a light mode icon, right?

00:36:14   Right.

00:36:15   So, there's, like, there's, like, voice memos doesn't have a light mode icon, right?

00:36:20   There's – wallet doesn't have a light mode icon.

00:36:23   Stocks doesn't have a light mode.

00:36:24   They're all dark mode, like, permanently, right?

00:36:27   So, yeah, I didn't know.

00:36:30   Yeah, you're right about the Coke Zero thing.

00:36:32   Like, they're saying it's now a black can of Coke.

00:36:34   Yeah.

00:36:35   Like, that's different.

00:36:36   And you're supposed to know that that's different than Coke Zero.

00:36:39   And you're like, how are you supposed to know?

00:36:40   Yeah.

00:36:41   And, again, you took my point that I was going to make, which is that in this scheme, it's not like the Coke Zero can changes either.

00:36:50   The Coke Zero can changes.

00:36:52   It stays the same.

00:36:53   Yeah, it stays the same.

00:36:54   So, now you have two icons that are more similar, even though they were totally different in the other mode.

00:36:58   Right.

00:36:59   Absolutely.

00:37:00   And so, you can see the polling.

00:37:02   And, again, I always – I guess I should always preface a poll that I do that I don't pretend that the people who follow me on social media are representative of the world at large.

00:37:14   But I bet –

00:37:15   But they're representative of Apple nerds.

00:37:17   And I'll bet it's representative – I'll bet the basic takeaway that dark mode is overall more popular than light mode.

00:37:25   Right.

00:37:25   You know, that lots of people use the automatic switching, so they use both.

00:37:29   And more people prefer dark mode all the time than prefer light mode all the time.

00:37:35   I'll bet it's true.

00:37:36   Maybe the percentages are different in the general population.

00:37:38   But I'll bet that's true.

00:37:40   But I do think then, therefore – and you just made the point that Apple – looking at Apple for examples of leadership, which I don't know if we should be doing for UI anymore.

00:37:53   Yeah.

00:37:54   But that they have some apps like Wallet and Watch, both – coincidentally, both on the same second home screen for me.

00:38:03   They both start with WA, but they have dark icons that don't – in light mode, too.

00:38:12   So when you switch to dark mode, their icons don't change.

00:38:14   So in some sense, from Apple's perspective, dark mode is more canonical now than light mode, that it's the one where if an app – like Watch is – Watch is the perfect example.

00:38:26   The interface doesn't get light no matter what you do.

00:38:29   Yeah, that one, that one, they were fully – actually, the icon and the app are both dark mode permanently.

00:38:35   Right.

00:38:35   Right.

00:38:36   But the icon for wallet doesn't change no matter what.

00:38:39   But when they show iOS 26 at WWDC, they show light mode either all the time or almost all the time.

00:38:50   I think if you go to Apple.com, that that's what they show you.

00:38:56   But it's certainly in the keynote, they make it seem like light mode is still the canonical one true lie.

00:39:03   Well, I think it is for icons.

00:39:05   I think light mode is the canonical icon color system.

00:39:09   Actually, they changed it, right?

00:39:10   Because last year it was light, and this year it's called default.

00:39:13   Do you see this?

00:39:15   Like, in the customized – in the customized, like, whole thing on, like, the – on the home screen, they renamed it from light to default.

00:39:22   Huh.

00:39:23   Which is interesting.

00:39:25   Like, they are saying that the light mode icons are the canonical versions.

00:39:29   But I think they want to believe that everyone's using light mode maybe because it – does it photograph better?

00:39:36   Does it just look better against, like, backgrounds?

00:39:39   Do you see, like, windows more easily?

00:39:41   Does dark mode just blend in with everything?

00:39:43   I don't know.

00:39:44   They show – they show tinted icons a lot.

00:39:48   They advertise tinted, like, stuff, clear icons a lot.

00:39:52   It's right at the top of the iOS 26.

00:39:55   They really love that.

00:39:56   They really want everyone to start using that for some reason.

00:39:59   It's like they got the memo that we all wanted to customize, and they were like, is this good?

00:40:05   And we're like –

00:40:06   I find that very strange, though, that Apple seems to be steering, pushing people towards using dark mode.

00:40:15   But yet, when they present their own interfaces, like in commercials and stuff, it's light mode by default.

00:40:22   And I don't know why that is.

00:40:23   There might be something more than just tradition that I'm not thinking of, but I was hoping maybe you could think of it.

00:40:29   I don't know.

00:40:31   I mean, if you're shooting an ad, I imagine that you want, like, bright things on the screen rather than dark things.

00:40:36   Those dark things are just going to catch all your reflections, right?

00:40:39   So, that's my only dumb guess.

00:40:42   So, I'm on apple.com slash iOS or OS slash iOS.

00:40:50   That's the URL to the iOS 26 preview page right now.

00:40:54   And I get at the top there's a tab bar where you could switch to macOS or iPadOS.

00:40:59   Here, I'll switch to iPad.

00:41:01   And as I scroll down the page, it's light mode.

00:41:03   I'm looking at every screenshot.

00:41:05   Light mode.

00:41:05   Then it's clear.

00:41:07   Then it looks like control center in light mode.

00:41:13   Icons that are clear.

00:41:14   Light mode.

00:41:15   Light mode.

00:41:16   They don't even show dark mode.

00:41:19   It's just all light mode.

00:41:21   And I've gone ahead and changed because I thought, I just thought right now as we're talking, wouldn't it be clever if Apple dynamically changed the web page depending on your mode?

00:41:32   On the time of day.

00:41:32   Yeah.

00:41:33   They could do it based on your mode.

00:41:34   They could also do it on time of day.

00:41:35   They could have that be a second.

00:41:36   Wait, wait.

00:41:37   Now I'm wondering, like, okay, John, what's the time on the clock on all of the screenshots?

00:41:42   It's still 941, right?

00:41:45   So if it's 941 AM, then automatic, it would show light mode, right?

00:41:50   Yeah.

00:41:50   Oh, yes.

00:41:51   So maybe, maybe.

00:41:53   They never say it's 941.

00:41:54   Maybe that's what they're saying.

00:41:55   Maybe they're saying technically auto is what's on.

00:41:58   It's not that they're against dark mode, but they want to keep 941.

00:42:01   Therefore, it has to be light mode.

00:42:03   Right.

00:42:03   Oh, no, they do say AM.

00:42:05   You're right, because I'm looking at the iPad when they show the AM, PM.

00:42:09   Yeah.

00:42:10   So maybe you're right that I guess there is.

00:42:12   It's technically auto.

00:42:13   They're, like, skirting by on a technicality.

00:42:16   Right.

00:42:17   And they are being consistent in the way that I'm going to argue for the most part.

00:42:21   They're no longer even pretending to be consistent in any way overall.

00:42:27   I don't know.

00:42:28   I thought it was a curiosity.

00:42:29   All right.

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00:43:04   Most clipboard managers become a dumping ground.

00:43:06   They save everything you copy, whether you want them to or not.

00:43:09   Quip solves this with two very powerful features.

00:43:13   One of them is that if you want, you can only copy on a specific shortcut.

00:43:18   So in other words, if you want, if you only want to copy to your Quip sometimes, you could set it to a custom shortcut like Shift-Command-C instead of Command-C.

00:43:29   And only when you use that does it go to Quip.

00:43:32   And your regular Command-C copies don't.

00:43:35   I think that's a pretty cool feature for people who don't want to copy everything to their clipboard manager.

00:43:40   But I do.

00:43:41   To me, that's the whole point of a clipboard manager is everything I've copied, I would like to have access to.

00:43:48   And they have that as a feature, too.

00:43:50   It's like a toggle.

00:43:51   So I have it set to always copy everything on my Mac.

00:43:54   Command-C, it goes right to Quip.

00:43:56   The other thing that it does, and I think it's the first one.

00:43:59   I've used a bunch of clipboard managers, a bunch over the years.

00:44:02   And one of the things that annoys me about a lot of them is that they limit how far back the clipboard history goes.

00:44:09   And I think that just sort of stems from 20, 25, 30 years ago or longer when memory was tighter, storage was tighter.

00:44:17   And people thought it was weird to have a utility that remembered everything you put on your clipboard.

00:44:23   And it said, I better only be like 100 or something like that.

00:44:25   Quip, you can set it to like only remember a week.

00:44:29   A month or forever.

00:44:31   And now the apps only come out for a month.

00:44:33   But that's what I would set it to is forever.

00:44:35   Because I would love to remember everything I copied from a year ago and just have it available in search.

00:44:40   And it doesn't get in any way to have that massive history because what you see when you invoke Quip is just your most recent copies in order, top to bottom.

00:44:50   It also includes something they call super shortcuts.

00:44:52   It's a lightweight but powerful text expansion engine that works anywhere.

00:44:57   You don't need extra cloud accounts or scripting or anything like that to do it.

00:45:02   You can just set up custom shortcuts that you want to remember and have them expand anywhere you type.

00:45:07   Quip intelligence is their feature to use secure on-device AI to keep your clipboard clean and useful.

00:45:15   It automatically filters out junk.

00:45:16   So if you have tracking links or if you copy something like a password, it uses AI to identify it and not keep that in your memory.

00:45:23   And you can turn on a feature to intelligently categorize your copies.

00:45:28   So you could have an intelligent feature that recognizes code snippets.

00:45:32   So when you copy programming code or HTML or CSS code, it'll automatically recognize that.

00:45:39   And then in the Quip interface, you could quick filter.

00:45:41   Just show me the code examples that I've copied recently, and it'll just filter to them.

00:45:45   It really works great.

00:45:47   It's a very, very clever feature for filtering the whole history.

00:45:50   Quip is private by design.

00:45:52   It does sync between devices, but everything, including AI, runs locally on your device.

00:45:58   And the sync only works via iCloud.

00:46:01   So the security and privacy of iCloud protects the syncing between your devices.

00:46:06   You don't need to...

00:46:07   There are no accounts to sign up for.

00:46:08   There are no ads, no data tracking.

00:46:10   It's all as secure as iCloud itself.

00:46:13   You can try Quip completely free for 14 days.

00:46:16   After that, you can buy it once or subscribe for an annual fee.

00:46:20   It is up to you.

00:46:21   I've been using it all week.

00:46:23   It is great, and it syncs over to the iPhone and iPad.

00:46:28   It uses a keyboard extension, so you have a custom keyboard for Quip in those apps.

00:46:32   So you can copy stuff on the Mac, go over to your iPhone, switch to the Quip keyboard, and paste any of the items that you've recently copied on your Mac right there on your phone.

00:46:41   Where do you go to find out more?

00:46:43   Go to BZGapps.com.

00:46:49   That's the developer.

00:46:50   BZGapps.com slash Quip.

00:46:53   BZGapps slash Quip.

00:46:56   Go check it out.

00:46:57   Great new app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

00:47:01   All right, I guess that brings us to the meat of the show, Louis, which is the OS.

00:47:06   I wish there was a better name for them.

00:47:08   I have been calling them the OS 26 apps.

00:47:11   OS 26.

00:47:11   Yeah, there's no word for collectively calling this release.

00:47:15   I've been calling it the 26 release of Apple.

00:47:20   I don't know what to do with everything.

00:47:21   That's weird.

00:47:22   I will say this.

00:47:25   And I just did an episode last week with Jason Snell, and we talked about the transparency and legibility of liquid glass specifically, not the UI of these systems overall or the liquid glass scheme overall, but just sort of the legibility and the sort of tweaking that we've obviously seen Apple do through the first four betas as we record.

00:47:54   And that tweaking was inevitable.

00:47:57   No matter how good a job Apple did or how polished it was come June, once they let it out in the world, this sort of change always needs a lot of tweaking in the beta period between June and September when these things ship.

00:48:11   Hold on.

00:48:15   Wait.

00:48:15   I want to question that premise for a second because I'm curious.

00:48:18   I'm curious.

00:48:18   I don't know how good your memory is about some of this stuff.

00:48:23   But if you go back to, I'm not questioning it.

00:48:26   I'm just curious.

00:48:27   Could the betas, some of that, some of what happens during the betas just kind of becomes nothing because it's not relevant after the release.

00:48:35   But if you think back to like Tiger era, did the UI change a lot during developer betas?

00:48:42   Yeah, no, not really.

00:48:44   I think I was.

00:48:45   There was.

00:48:46   Don't get me wrong.

00:48:47   Don't get me wrong.

00:48:47   When they initially announced Tiger, I don't know if you remember this, but I do vividly.

00:48:51   But they had like end caps on the menu bar, like the left side of the Apple logo and the right side with spotlight were like the full height, full like blue aqua caps.

00:49:03   Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:49:04   And it was like that.

00:49:04   It was so iconic.

00:49:06   And then that didn't ship.

00:49:07   They were like parentheses almost.

00:49:10   Right.

00:49:10   Yes, yes, yes.

00:49:11   Yeah.

00:49:11   Yeah.

00:49:11   And so it's so interestingly, like that sort of thing didn't happen.

00:49:15   And so that did happen during the beta phase.

00:49:18   But I don't know how much like beta like software Apple releases changed that much, like the UI changing much as it does today.

00:49:28   You're right, though, that now like it always seems to change a lot.

00:49:31   There's a lot of tweaking.

00:49:32   There's a lot of updating that could just because be because of the scale that Apple's at right now.

00:49:37   They have more people looking at it and more people scrutinizing about it.

00:49:40   I don't know.

00:49:41   Tiger.

00:49:42   I just for those who don't remember, I have pulled up my little note with it.

00:49:47   because I remember a lot of the older names better.

00:49:49   Yeah.

00:49:50   You asked how my memory is.

00:49:51   And I don't know.

00:49:51   I don't think it's just aging.

00:49:53   I think it's because when there's only been five versions of Mac OS X, it's easier to tell them apart.

00:50:01   And then when you get up to around 2015 and it's which one was El Capitan.

00:50:04   Yeah, if you're like Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, you're like, yeah, I know all of these.

00:50:08   I know the year they came out.

00:50:10   Right.

00:50:10   Yeah.

00:50:10   So Tiger was 10.4.

00:50:12   April came out in April 2005.

00:50:15   So about two years before the iPhone and four years after 10.0 came out.

00:50:22   And that's about five years after Aqua, which was unveiled with the Mac OS X public beta in 2000.

00:50:31   So it's like five years.

00:50:33   I'm going to count that for Aqua, even though it was a full year as a public beta.

00:50:38   Yeah, about five years in.

00:50:39   And it felt like Tiger was really where it got dialed in.

00:50:43   I think so, too.

00:50:44   You know, and probably peaked.

00:50:47   I have to, you know, agree with the masses.

00:50:49   I know it's the most popular release, I think, ever for multiple reasons.

00:50:55   Stability, the whole, hey, we're not adding features, even though they did actually add a bunch of features.

00:51:01   But Snow Leopard, 10.6, which came out in 2009.

00:51:04   But those years from 2005 to 2009 were very good years for the Mac.

00:51:10   You're totally, absolutely right.

00:51:13   That is exactly the time period where you said it right.

00:51:16   They dialed it in.

00:51:17   They were refining things.

00:51:19   They were really trying to.

00:51:20   And I think that's like, you're talking about, like, refining, like, the UI through the beta phase.

00:51:25   They were refining, like, the UI over years, right?

00:51:29   And that really was, like, fairly significant because it was, like, they were identifying all of the things where it was, like, was this too much?

00:51:36   Was this too little?

00:51:36   And they were, like, making those changes in yearly releases.

00:51:40   I would even stretch that heyday all the way to 2011, which is when Lion came out and maybe things started going haywire again.

00:51:48   But that's because Snow Leopard was the version from August 2009 until July 2011.

00:51:55   So there were two.

00:51:56   And those years are not a coincidence, right?

00:51:58   That those years when Apple and Steve Jobs and Apple's top talent, Scott Forstall, and the key designers and engineers who they picked to work on the iPhone and then the iPad.

00:52:16   Their collective attention was sort of off the Mac, right?

00:52:19   I mean, there's no question about it.

00:52:21   I mean, I don't even think it's really up for debate.

00:52:23   They were shifting off of the Mac into other things.

00:52:25   But in an odd, counterintuitive way, that was very good for the Mac platform because it was like, I would have to guess that's because some of those designers that were, like, they were the Mac designers stayed with that.

00:52:40   And you have other people that were worrying about, like, the phone and stuff.

00:52:43   Like, it broke off.

00:52:44   Like, some of those designers that were working only on, like, platform Mac stuff moved to iOS and moved to, like, that's the touch interface stuff.

00:52:52   But you have some of these people that were sticking around for this Mac stuff.

00:52:54   And those are the people who they had to care about the Mac because these other people weren't, right?

00:52:59   They were worried about iOS.

00:53:00   And so almost, like, in the separation of these two teams, right, you have, like, more clarity on both of these as distinct operating systems.

00:53:09   Whereas, like, now, like, ever since they've started to merge these, I don't want to say that they're trying to merge the actual operating systems, but merging the styles of these operating systems, I think that's when we end up with, like, holes in there where it's, like, what was good for one system is not necessarily good for another.

00:53:25   Yeah.

00:53:25   Right?

00:53:26   I mean, like, yeah.

00:53:28   And they've been very consistent.

00:53:30   I keep bringing it up.

00:53:32   What other people do, too, is sort of a very memorable moment.

00:53:36   I forget exactly which year, but around 2017, I think it was largely fueled.

00:53:45   I think people had the idea.

00:53:46   I think casual thinkers about these platforms often think, well, wait a minute.

00:53:51   If the iPad can go to an 11-inch screen and it has these apps like Safari and Mail and Notes and the Mac has 11-inch screens and has apps like Mail and Safari and Notes, shouldn't they just be one operating system, you know?

00:54:05   I mean, because we have so many real-life conspiracy theory nuts who are literally running the United States government at the moment.

00:54:15   But it's sort of the Apple nerd conspiracy nut thinking of, oh, Apple's going to get rid of the Mac and replace it with the iPad.

00:54:24   And they had that one commercial that was like, hey, what is a computer about showing a teenage girl who's just using her iPad for everything?

00:54:33   And the idea is that the iPad is something other than a computer.

00:54:37   That commercial always bothered me.

00:54:40   It is a computer.

00:54:41   It is a very different type of computer in a lot of ways, and I can totally see why some people like it better and why it might be forward-thinking in a lot of ways.

00:54:49   But it's still a computer, right?

00:54:51   It's like trying to say a microwave oven is not an oven.

00:54:55   Yeah, maybe those – I don't know.

00:54:57   Is the implication there – was the implication that, like, kids just aren't familiar with that word anymore, even though the iPad is technically a computer, that they just don't use that word anymore?

00:55:07   Yeah, that it's not cool.

00:55:09   Yeah, maybe.

00:55:09   What's a computer?

00:55:10   Like, I don't know.

00:55:11   I don't know.

00:55:12   And then Tim Cook had an interview somewhere, or maybe it wasn't even an interview, but he just – at some point, Tim Cook said in public that the iPad is our best expression of the future of computing.

00:55:26   People took that too literally as, oh, if Tim Cook says it's Apple's vision of the best expression of the future of computing, it means they're going to make all their computers work like the iPad.

00:55:38   And that's not how Tim Cook talks, right?

00:55:40   Like, if you had taken Tim Cook when he said that and five minutes later asked him a question about the Mac, he would say the Mac has never been stronger and it's never been – because that's – he's just so – he's a cheerleader.

00:55:52   Even though his demeanor is sort of taciturn, he's an endless cheerleader for whatever Apple product he's talking about.

00:56:01   And so you get him talking about the iPad, he's going to say, yes, it's the future of all computing.

00:56:06   Well, I mean, well, I would say that they're in a little bit of a tough spot regarding that sort of, like, projection of, like, how they see all these products because they will say that – they will say the nicest thing they can about any one of these products, right?

00:56:20   They're going to be like, well, the Mac is absolutely the best computer that you can buy.

00:56:24   They're going to say that the iPad is the best expression of computing that we see.

00:56:27   They're going to say, oh, well, the Vision OS is, like, how we see computing in the future, right?

00:56:31   They're going to say the truism, like, about whatever it is.

00:56:36   God bless him because Jaws is the one guy who will say – and he always says it like it's half a joke, but you kind of know he means it, and it plays into people's cynical thinking about Apple.

00:56:46   But I think when Joanna Stern was interviewing him and Craig at WWDC, I know he said it on my show in years past, but you get him talking about the differences between these platforms, and he'll say, you know, there's an easy solution to that.

00:56:58   Just buy a Mac and an iPad.

00:57:01   In some sense, yeah, duh, Apple wants you to buy a Mac and an iPad, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're conspiring to hold back elements.

00:57:09   I know that's what so many people think explains why Macs don't have touchscreens yet.

00:57:15   Look, I think everyone would be crazy if they really think that Apple has tried out touchscreen Macs.

00:57:21   Come on.

00:57:22   Let's see for a second.

00:57:23   This definitely happened, right?

00:57:25   They already know.

00:57:28   They tried this out.

00:57:29   They're looking into it.

00:57:30   They're always thinking about it.

00:57:32   And I don't think people who think that are really thinking through, well, who then is that fooling?

00:57:38   Do you really think there exists anybody who says, I think my computing needs would be fully met by a MacBook, fully, except I really want at least one bigger than a phone computer that I can touch?

00:57:52   Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

00:57:53   Well, I think I said this before, and I don't know.

00:57:57   Feel free to disagree with me.

00:57:59   But my thinking is people have room for two primary devices, right?

00:58:03   You can have your Mac and your phone, right?

00:58:06   And then you can sometimes use an iPad, right?

00:58:09   Or you can sometimes use a Vision Pro or whatever, right?

00:58:12   But you're not using three things in equal measure.

00:58:15   Nobody is doing that, right?

00:58:18   Or if you do, it's sort of like having two families.

00:58:22   You know what I mean?

00:58:23   I don't know.

00:58:24   You're like, don't get me wrong.

00:58:27   I think there's people that use their iPad a lot more when they're, like, relaxing versus, like, when they're working, right?

00:58:33   Like, they're working, so I'm on their Mac.

00:58:35   But if they're, like, on vacation, they're using their iPad, right?

00:58:38   I totally get that, like, that kind of person.

00:58:40   I get that, but I just don't think that, like, more devices – I don't know how many people are using a Mac in equal measure to their iPad.

00:58:49   I don't know who those people are.

00:58:50   Like, do you use your iPad a lot?

00:58:52   No.

00:58:53   And I'm not trying to throw it under the bus because I do like it for what it is, but I kind of –

00:59:01   And part of it, too, is my personal iPad.

00:59:05   I've got it right here.

00:59:06   I do read – I love it for when I'm on the podcast so that I can keep looking at you on the Mac and I don't overlap it.

00:59:12   But I use it for, like, the show notes and things so I can look off screen here.

00:59:16   But it is totally secondary to me.

00:59:19   And once I totally gave up on that, that it is only secondary, I felt like my productivity resurged.

00:59:27   I felt like the more I tried to do some of my work, like, maybe I'll work on my iPad until noon, and then afternoon is when I'll go downstairs to my office and work on my Mac.

00:59:37   I felt – I said this.

00:59:40   I was on Mike Hurley's Cortex show talking.

00:59:43   He interviewed me about how I work and how I do what I do.

00:59:46   And I'm a procrastinator by nature, and I felt the more I tried to use my iPad for work part of the day, the more it made my procrastination worse because there were so many things where I'd get to that.

01:00:01   Oh, I should post that to Daring Fireball, but I'd really like to do that.

01:00:04   It would be so much easier on my Mac than to do it here because I'd like to add a lot of links to this article.

01:00:11   I want to link a bunch of things, and switching back and forth from an editing view to the browser to copy the links and put them in is so much easier on a Mac.

01:00:18   I could arrange them side by side on my big display.

01:00:21   And so I found myself, like, instead of doing the thing on my iPad, I'd be, like, putting it into the Things app or some other to-do system.

01:00:31   You're preparing to do the thing for later.

01:00:34   Right, yeah, you're like, why are we always preparing all the time?

01:00:37   Just go, right?

01:00:38   I've said that on the interview with Mike, and it's been clarifying for me as a way to be more productive.

01:00:44   And the iPad, for me, and the tools I use, and the way I work, and the level of unthinking, I don't have to think about it, proficiency I have on the Mac, command tabbing between apps, command tilde-ing between two windows in the same app.

01:01:03   Wait, wait, wait, command tilde goes through apps?

01:01:07   I did not know that.

01:01:08   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:01:09   Open up multiple windows.

01:01:10   Are you fucking with me right now?

01:01:11   Are you totally serious?

01:01:12   No, it's been there for, like, 25 years.

01:01:16   Jesus Christ.

01:01:17   Although I think they got rid of the keyboard shortcut.

01:01:23   I think they don't have the menu item anymore.

01:01:24   It used to be a standard item in the window menu.

01:01:26   I see.

01:01:27   Oh, I see.

01:01:28   But you're saying it still works, but maybe it doesn't.

01:01:30   And shift, command tilde will go the opposite direction.

01:01:33   So if you have multiple windows open.

01:01:35   All right, I'm going to give this a try.

01:01:36   You command tilde through them, although it doesn't seem to work in Chrome.

01:01:42   Shocker.

01:01:43   So maybe they have something mapped up to that instead.

01:01:46   Yeah.

01:01:47   I don't know.

01:01:48   But I don't know.

01:01:50   But I just have things.

01:01:52   Well, it's second nature to you, right?

01:01:54   Like, using the Mac, you fully, like, understand and comprehend it, right?

01:01:58   Whereas, like, iPad, even though you're familiar with it, it's a little foreign to you because

01:02:03   it's not the way that you grew up.

01:02:04   But that's the thing.

01:02:05   I think some of this stuff is generational.

01:02:07   I think maybe that's why that, like, that ad about what is a computer, like, makes sense

01:02:11   for younger generations because younger generations who maybe never really used computers in the

01:02:16   way that we did, right?

01:02:18   They're using, like, iPads growing up and iPhones growing up, right?

01:02:22   And so that's their, like, thing that they're most proficient in.

01:02:25   Maybe they feel more comfortable in that.

01:02:27   But, I mean, almost every task, every task I can do way better on my Mac.

01:02:32   The only thing I can't do is, like, sketch.

01:02:33   If I'm trying to, like, draw something, I'm like, well, that's where I guess I need my Apple

01:02:37   Pencil, right?

01:02:38   So I'm not out here being, like, I need my Apple Pencil on my Mac.

01:02:42   I understand that's an iPad feature, right?

01:02:44   And I know, I'm glad you mentioned that because that would be the one thing I don't think anybody

01:02:49   would, I really don't think there's anybody who would say, I could do everything I want

01:02:52   to do on my Mac, but I really want a second device that I can touch the screen.

01:02:56   They might say that.

01:02:58   They might say that about Pencil, right?

01:03:00   That if you really do use the Pencil for illustration, they might say that.

01:03:03   But the form factor of every existing Mac would be terrible for the Pencil.

01:03:07   Yeah, right.

01:03:07   Don't even, yeah, foldable bullshit.

01:03:12   Do you remember, like, that era of, like, early tablet PCs, like, where it's, like, it

01:03:20   was a laptop, but it swiveled around and then folded down so the backside of the display

01:03:24   was against the keyboard?

01:03:25   And so you have this really chunky, like, computer that you were using a pen really

01:03:30   horribly with?

01:03:31   I mean.

01:03:31   And there were some that just folded all the way backwards.

01:03:34   Yes, right.

01:03:35   That's right.

01:03:36   The bottom of the tablet was an actual functional keyboard.

01:03:39   Although I think when you folded it that way, they turned the keyboard off so that you wouldn't

01:03:43   get key presses.

01:03:44   So you wouldn't get spurious inputs.

01:03:45   Right.

01:03:45   But imagine.

01:03:48   I'm not super fussy about keeping my devices clean, but I'm not going to lay my keyboard

01:03:52   upside down on a table.

01:03:53   Right, right, right.

01:03:55   Yes.

01:03:55   And we have what form factor would those people want?

01:03:57   And maybe they just don't.

01:03:58   I mean, I think, like, I don't think anyone's really asking for Apple Pencil on the Mac,

01:04:03   right?

01:04:04   Well, look, people think they are.

01:04:05   If someone at Apple figured out a decent way to do Apple Pencil on my Mac trackpad just

01:04:16   in that case, I might be intrigued, but I don't know how they're going to do it on my screen.

01:04:21   I don't need direct input, which is maybe why they won't do it.

01:04:24   That's what I feel like there is, like, tablet companies, their whole business model anyway.

01:04:28   Right.

01:04:29   I feel like a lot of those complaints are from people who haven't thought things through.

01:04:38   And it's fine.

01:04:39   Oh, yeah, sure, sure.

01:04:40   For people not to think things through.

01:04:41   But that's Apple's job to think things through.

01:04:44   Well, it's the same reason that every time you look at, like, oh, here's a concept version

01:04:48   of the iPhone or the concept version of a new MacBook, it's like, yeah, you just, you

01:04:53   drew something without consideration to, like, its actual use.

01:04:56   It's like, good job.

01:04:57   Like, I guess you made a pretty image, but it doesn't look like it actually would work in

01:05:02   practice.

01:05:02   It's easy to think about that stuff.

01:05:04   I will also say before we move on, but that part of my frustration trying to use the iPad

01:05:11   for work significantly was that the multitasking interface was so bad.

01:05:17   And so if I ever tried it again, I'd probably be happier with iPadOS 26 and forward going

01:05:24   forward.

01:05:24   Well, isn't that the one thing they keep changing every release?

01:05:27   They're like, okay, but this time really figured out multitasking.

01:05:30   No, no, no, no.

01:05:31   But really this time.

01:05:32   And, like, they even introduced, what was that feature that they added even to the Mac

01:05:37   where it, like, floats your window on the left?

01:05:39   Yeah, what was that?

01:05:41   I don't even know what that's called.

01:05:43   It's still there.

01:05:44   I try it out every once in a while.

01:05:46   I'm like, no, not really.

01:05:50   Actually, the dock is really good.

01:05:52   Well, this gets us, though, to, and I feel like the long journey that the iPad has been

01:05:58   on to get to the point of them doing the most obvious thing possible, which is where they've

01:06:04   landed with iOS 26.

01:06:05   And I think it's the single best, and I would say almost unambiguously good UI thing to come

01:06:13   out of the OS 26 endeavor.

01:06:16   And I will say, as another side note, now that we're six weeks after WWDC, I kind of

01:06:23   thought this when it was just a rumor before WWDC that they were going to renumber all the

01:06:27   OSs to next year, to 26.

01:06:29   And I thought, I think that's going to work.

01:06:32   I think once we get used to it, it's going to work.

01:06:35   And I do think so.

01:06:36   Six weeks in, as somebody whose job is to write about and talk about these things, it does make

01:06:43   it so much easier.

01:06:44   Talk about remembering, like, what the release was.

01:06:46   I mean, we were just talking about how you don't know what years it is.

01:06:49   And so it actually is really, it's a good touch point to actually know what year.

01:06:53   But okay, so are they going to do with phones too?

01:06:56   Is it going to be like iPhone 26?

01:06:58   No, I don't think so.

01:06:59   Really?

01:06:59   I'd be shocked if they did.

01:07:01   Because they don't want to emphasize, here's the thing, if you think about it, think this

01:07:07   through.

01:07:07   They don't want to emphasize the age of older hardware devices, right?

01:07:14   That they sell.

01:07:15   I don't.

01:07:16   Right, right.

01:07:16   They don't.

01:07:17   And that's one reason they don't number any of the other devices before iPhone.

01:07:21   It is.

01:07:22   I don't know.

01:07:22   Maybe they do have a plan to stop numbering iPhones.

01:07:26   Right.

01:07:27   Maybe in general, and start doing like the Mac thing or the mid-2026 in parentheses off

01:07:31   Yes, but they're not going to call it iPhone 26.

01:07:34   Because then next year when they're still selling, like the way that you can go in the store and

01:07:39   buy an iPhone 15 right now, they don't want to have you buying one that looks like the year

01:07:45   is old.

01:07:45   It's just the number that's old.

01:07:46   It doesn't work.

01:07:48   Whereas the software, they correctly expect people to keep updating automatically when the

01:07:55   automatic software updates.

01:07:56   So you're not left behind.

01:07:59   Like next year when iOS 27 comes out, your current iPhone won't be left behind.

01:08:03   You'll get iOS 27 too.

01:08:05   It's different.

01:08:06   It's one of those things that's different about software than hardware.

01:08:09   I do think it's weird that we're up to like iPhone 17 and they're just going to keep numbering

01:08:14   At some point, this numbering is going to start feeling really stupid.

01:08:18   I mean, like at some point, we're going to be like, all right, you know what?

01:08:21   Call it in.

01:08:22   We don't need this anymore.

01:08:23   And the other thing that I get confused about now, I always have, is that the numbers of

01:08:30   the iPhones don't correspond to the numbers of the Apple Silicon chips, right?

01:08:35   They're up to the A18 now or something.

01:08:39   I don't even know.

01:08:40   I don't know what those numbers are.

01:08:42   Right.

01:08:42   But they're so, but it's worse because they're so close.

01:08:45   Yeah.

01:08:46   Right.

01:08:46   Right.

01:08:47   Yeah.

01:08:47   I don't know.

01:08:48   I mean, they have been a little willy nilly with numbering phones before.

01:08:52   I mean, iPhone 3G to 3GS was like a very odd thing for them to do.

01:08:58   And then they went 4, 4S.

01:08:59   And they were doing like every other year, they had like the whole S scheme.

01:09:02   And I feel like, yeah, at some point, they're going to have to realize that like this entire

01:09:07   scheme is like not going to work well for the future.

01:09:10   And maybe that means that they put things in parentheticals, but I don't know.

01:09:13   But here's my question.

01:09:14   When you go to the Apple store and you see like 10 iPhones in front of you, and if they're all

01:09:17   just called iPhone, that's not very helpful either.

01:09:20   So like they need some distinguishing factor to be able to sell them as different products.

01:09:25   Yeah.

01:09:26   So I, because the iPhone is just weird and different.

01:09:29   They did have a system for those early years, the system, which they've never officially,

01:09:35   but you could just see that they followed it was if the iPhone looks the same as the one

01:09:43   the year before, no matter how significantly upgraded the internals might be, the name was

01:09:49   just add S.

01:09:50   So the iPhone 3GS looked exactly like a 3G.

01:09:54   And how do you do that though?

01:09:56   In a system where the last four releases almost looked the same.

01:09:59   Like most people's eyes, it would.

01:10:01   I mean, yeah.

01:10:02   How do you do it now though?

01:10:03   And you can't.

01:10:03   But that was because they also knew the roadmap.

01:10:06   Yeah.

01:10:07   Well, that's true.

01:10:08   That's true.

01:10:08   By the time they were deciding, okay, let's just call this third iPhone, the 3GS.

01:10:13   They knew that the next year was going to be the iPhone 4, which was like, whoa, this is

01:10:19   radical.

01:10:20   It's got a retina screen.

01:10:21   It's glass sandwich on front and back.

01:10:24   It's got the steel sides.

01:10:25   And by the time they named the 4S, they knew that the next year was the 5.

01:10:30   They knew that they were like, oh, we've got radical, easily, like totally distinctive,

01:10:37   looks not like a little new, but totally new hardware every two years.

01:10:42   And then that sort of broke down after the iPhone 6S.

01:10:47   Because the iPhone 7 looked, it really should have been like the 6S S.

01:10:51   Right, right, right.

01:10:52   Well, this is, yeah, this is where it became a problem.

01:10:54   And then we get to like where, like where they were like, hmm, 8, 9, 10 was like a really

01:10:59   difficult, weird situation.

01:11:00   Then like iPhone 9 just never existed.

01:11:02   No, never existed.

01:11:03   iPhone 10, like their justification for it was like, oh, it just jumped ahead in the future.

01:11:08   It's like, oh, okay, all right, sure.

01:11:11   It's very funny.

01:11:13   It really is that they just skipped 9 and the iPhone 8 looked like the 7, which looked like

01:11:19   the 6S, which looked like the 6, right?

01:11:21   Like the 6, 6S, 7, and 8.

01:11:23   There was a system, you're right, for a very short period of time where things, you could

01:11:29   logically understand like how that worked.

01:11:32   And it worked, you're right, because they had the roadmap.

01:11:34   But I think as soon as, maybe they just settled on what it's supposed to be.

01:11:39   I mean, like after we had the whole rounded phones, then they went back to basically, I

01:11:44   mean, what we have now is basically like with the iPhone 4 design, right?

01:11:48   That's, you can look back at this and see a direct line from that.

01:11:51   Yeah, yeah.

01:11:52   Glass sandwich front and back, steel or metal side, right?

01:11:57   And it used to be steel, and then it was aluminum, and now it's titanium, but, or aluminum

01:12:01   on the non-pro models.

01:12:02   But it's basically the back to the iPhone 4, 4S.

01:12:07   And we're getting distracted.

01:12:10   I feel like we're obviously avoiding talking about this.

01:12:13   I'm trying to hit the three-hour mark with you, John.

01:12:15   No, I want to, this is summertime.

01:12:18   We've got to take it easy.

01:12:19   Two hours are bust.

01:12:21   What did I joke with you the other day?

01:12:23   Oh, I asked you, I invited you to be on the show, and you said, your three-hour podcast.

01:12:27   And I pointed you to a Todd Vaziri tweet where he periodically updates the average length of

01:12:34   episodes of this podcast.

01:12:35   And I pointed out correctly, very few episodes have gone over three hours.

01:12:39   Yeah, it's, I don't know, 10 or something total.

01:12:41   Yeah, it's not that bad.

01:12:43   David Hanemeyer Hanson was on, there's a guy named Lex Fridman, not to be confused with

01:12:47   Lex Fridman, who's in the podcast circles of this, was on his podcast, and they talked

01:12:54   for over six hours.

01:12:55   Jesus.

01:12:56   All right, well, let's not do that.

01:12:58   No, I physically couldn't.

01:13:00   All right, you have been blogging about Liquid Glass and these OS26 OS updates, and you have

01:13:07   a lot of thoughts.

01:13:08   First, let's just, let's say this.

01:13:10   Here we are over, well over an hour into the show.

01:13:13   Let's talk about your personal background in this.

01:13:15   I assume a lot of people listening are familiar with your work, but they may not be, it's the

01:13:20   first time you've been on the show with me.

01:13:21   And I hate this line of thinking that people criticize the UI of Liquid Glass, and then the

01:13:30   people who want to defend it will say, well, who are you to criticize this interface?

01:13:36   What interfaces have you ever designed?

01:13:39   And I think this idea that to criticize a practice, you have to be a practitioner is

01:13:44   nonsense.

01:13:44   It can certainly help, but Roger Ebert himself was not a filmmaker.

01:13:49   He's, in my opinion, the most accomplished film critic of the 20th century into the 21st.

01:13:56   And if you wanted to argue as Pauline Kael or whoever else you think might have been one

01:14:00   of the top film critics, almost none of them were filmmakers themselves.

01:14:04   Now, Quentin Tarantino is a very good film critic and has very interesting taste in movies

01:14:10   and is himself a very renowned and accomplished filmmaker.

01:14:13   You can be, but you don't need to be.

01:14:16   But for anybody who feels that way, you are an accomplished both UI designer and icon artist.

01:14:23   I don't know what else.

01:14:25   You'd think, but I guess then I wonder, like, does that mean that people qualify me like in

01:14:30   that way?

01:14:30   They're like, oh, okay, well, this guy knows what he's talking about.

01:14:33   Now we'll definitely, no, they're going to like discredit it for some other reason.

01:14:36   But speak about your history in this field, like where you've worked and the things you've

01:14:40   worked on.

01:14:41   Yeah, so I mean, I guess I was just, I mean, when I was a kid, I was just doing a bunch

01:14:45   of like Mac customization things.

01:14:49   So I was starting to make icons on my own.

01:14:51   And I started making iPhone apps like in 2007 before 2008, before the App Store existed, right?

01:14:58   Before we had an SDK.

01:15:00   I mean, when jailbreak was the only option, right?

01:15:03   So like I was making iPhone icons then.

01:15:07   And I don't think there's many people who are still doing it from that time.

01:15:11   And I don't think there were many people at the time that were doing it anyway.

01:15:14   Kind of ever since I've been making iPhone apps.

01:15:17   I worked at Apple for only a year and a half, but I worked on iTunes, which I feel like is

01:15:24   a big deal at Apple.

01:15:25   But I don't know.

01:15:26   Like I was working on the shoulders of giants there.

01:15:29   I mean, iTunes was an established product.

01:15:32   I mean, what time I got to, what year was that?

01:15:34   Yeah, that was 2010 to 2011.

01:15:37   I mean, that was the timeframe we were talking about, about like that, that time period where

01:15:43   it was culminating, right?

01:15:45   And I mean, and I say this, I say this only because maybe people remember that period of

01:15:51   time.

01:15:52   But in 2011 there, that's when Steve died.

01:15:54   And so there was like, everything that kind of led up to that moment was fully Steve's control.

01:16:00   And then after that, it wasn't, right?

01:16:03   I'm not saying that everything went to shit immediately after he died.

01:16:06   I'm not making a comment about that.

01:16:07   But that's the period of time I was there was before that happened.

01:16:11   And you, for better or for worse, I would say most people probably agree it was largely

01:16:16   for better, lesser, for worse.

01:16:18   And we can disagree over where that line is.

01:16:21   But everything Apple produced was Steve approved.

01:16:23   Right.

01:16:25   I mean, at that time, yeah, either, either it was, either it was Steve approved or like

01:16:30   he had a lieutenant that was basically doing all of that kind of approval.

01:16:34   I mean, don't get me wrong.

01:16:34   Like Steve wasn't approving literally everything.

01:16:37   There was like, there were certain products and certain facets of features that like he wouldn't

01:16:42   necessarily bother to do.

01:16:44   I think he entirely entrusted like the GarageBand team to just build GarageBand without like

01:16:48   his intervention.

01:16:49   But, but there were certain products like Mail, iTunes, where he had like a ton of opinions

01:16:55   and insight and like vision for.

01:16:57   And I think he knew what those products, what he wanted them to be.

01:17:01   And so I think he was way more hands-on and yeah, was approving like, like visual design

01:17:06   for that product at that time.

01:17:09   Yeah.

01:17:09   And he's, he's a complex, he was a very complex person.

01:17:14   I met him twice.

01:17:15   I can't say I knew him well, but just studying his career, reading all the books and, and it's,

01:17:21   it's very obvious, but he's misunderstood in some ways where if your viewpoint of him is

01:17:26   only superficial, you, you think of him as a singular genius control freak who micromanaged

01:17:34   everything and then they're like every single icon, every toolbar icon inside every app went

01:17:40   before him and he scrutinized.

01:17:41   And that's a, it wasn't how it worked.

01:17:43   B was impossible.

01:17:45   There's, it was too much, even, even 15 years ago, the scope of Apple's work was too much

01:17:51   for any one person who, you know, from, he couldn't, he literally could not QA everything.

01:17:57   That's insane.

01:17:58   Right.

01:17:58   Right.

01:17:59   Like it was already too big, but I'm going to make a note and try to find it, but he spoke

01:18:03   about this and a lot of the things he spoke about, he said multiple times in slightly different

01:18:07   ways, but he was consistent about it.

01:18:09   But he said at one point that the reason you hire smart people isn't to tell them what to

01:18:15   do.

01:18:15   You hire smart people because they're smart and they will figure out what to do.

01:18:19   And so the idea wasn't that the people designing the apps he cared about most had to might, he

01:18:25   had to micromanage every single design decision they make.

01:18:27   The idea was he put you in charge of, put somebody in charge of iTunes or the iTunes interface.

01:18:35   And it's, it's the terminology inside Apple is directly responsible individual, the DRI.

01:18:41   And somebody is the DRI for this.

01:18:43   And whether Steve Jobs was personally like week to week looking at the changes or not, the DRI

01:18:51   knew Steve might at some point come and look at it and they would have to answer to his

01:18:55   questions and opinions on how it was.

01:18:57   And so whether he was looking at it, oh, we're going to do a major new version of GarageBand

01:19:01   or something like that.

01:19:02   And maybe he wasn't looking at it every week, but whoever was in charge of it and was looking

01:19:06   at it every week knew at any week, Steve might come in and look at it.

01:19:10   And so it needed to meet his standards.

01:19:12   So it was Steve approved, even if Steve not micromanaged, right?

01:19:16   Right.

01:19:16   Yeah, I think that's true.

01:19:17   Yeah.

01:19:18   And iTunes was certainly.

01:19:19   I mean, he's still putting, he's still putting it on stage.

01:19:21   He's still going up in front of it, talking about it.

01:19:23   So he's got to feel like confident about it.

01:19:25   I mean, I have to assume that's the case, but yeah.

01:19:27   But iTunes, I mean, definitely.

01:19:28   So including at iTunes, so you did what you did like an iTunes app icon, right?

01:19:33   Yeah.

01:19:34   Yeah.

01:19:34   I mean, actually, so my responsibility is in the group at the time.

01:19:37   So when I was hired, it was called consumer apps and I was working on a bunch of things.

01:19:42   There was like half the org was like iTunes, remote, trailers, Apple TV, that sort of stuff.

01:19:48   And the other half of the org was like, I like stuff.

01:19:53   So iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, DVD, like that sort of stuff.

01:19:58   And I was working on almost all of those things.

01:20:01   And iBooks kind of became part of the whole trailers, iTunes thing.

01:20:04   Like, if you think about like, it's just like the iTunes store kind of bubble.

01:20:09   And then there was like everything, the creation tools, right?

01:20:12   And so I was working on iPhoto visual design.

01:20:15   I was working on iMovie visual design.

01:20:16   That was for like Mac and iPad.

01:20:18   I was working on, yeah, the iTunes stuff.

01:20:20   And yeah, the iTunes app icon also.

01:20:23   Yeah.

01:20:24   But the one that everyone loves, right?

01:20:26   Yes, it is.

01:20:27   The one that everyone thought was the best.

01:20:28   Yeah.

01:20:31   I'm not just saying it because you're on the show, but I kind of think that's true.

01:20:35   That if anybody's been using iTunes for 20 some years, and you've got one icon with a blue glow.

01:20:43   I mean, if I'm the one giving the opinion, I think the one that was the best was the green music notes on the CD.

01:20:49   But I mean, you can't do that forever, right?

01:20:52   I mean, like, at some point, I mean, Steve was right.

01:20:55   You can't have the CD be there anymore.

01:20:56   It doesn't make any sense.

01:20:58   Right.

01:20:58   Yeah.

01:20:59   All right.

01:21:01   But that gets to it, right?

01:21:02   That was part of the motivation for changing the icon is, hey, we're not selling CD.

01:21:08   We're not ripping CDs anymore.

01:21:09   And you could if you had, you know, but they were moving away from putting the CD drives, the DVD drives in the computers.

01:21:17   CDs were not an important part of the music story, I think is like the way to put it.

01:21:23   Or the computing story.

01:21:25   Computing story.

01:21:26   It wasn't a part of Apple anymore.

01:21:27   I mean, they were just not doing that.

01:21:29   So, yeah, I mean, at the time, I guess that, yeah, we don't need that.

01:21:33   They managed that transition aggressively, which is what they do when they smell that the puck is going a different way.

01:21:41   They go there aggressively.

01:21:42   Compare and contrast with the game consoles that are still selling discs with games.

01:21:49   And I know that there are the same reason that there, in theory, would be reasons to still put a DVD drive in a MacBook.

01:22:00   Yeah.

01:22:01   You could play an old thing.

01:22:02   You could have everything.

01:22:03   Well, it's like, you know, I think they, Apple thought that they were like, what if we just don't have SD card slots in our MacBooks?

01:22:09   And then people were like, well, and then they were like, okay, all right, you guys are going to have those back.

01:22:12   It's just, I mean, like CDs, I don't think anyone was, like, demanding that.

01:22:16   And I don't think anyone who needs a CD or DVD drive cares that much about the fact that they have to have an external one.

01:22:23   Fine.

01:22:23   Who cares?

01:22:24   That's not a problem.

01:22:25   So.

01:22:26   I remember, it's been a while at this point, but I remember long, long after MacBooks got much thinner than would support it, that there were so many standard PC laptops that still had the VGA port, which was just super old.

01:22:43   Thick.

01:22:43   Yeah.

01:22:43   Super thick.

01:22:45   It literally is one of those ports so old that it came with the two screws on the side.

01:22:48   The screws on the side.

01:22:49   I know.

01:22:49   To hold it in place.

01:22:51   Right.

01:22:52   I would make fun of it occasionally when somebody would publish, some company would come out with a new laptop trying to be thin, but it was so thin that the VGA port looked ungodly weird because it was, like, almost somehow thicker than the laptop, which I know is impossible.

01:23:07   Right.

01:23:07   Yeah, yeah.

01:23:07   They're going to, yeah, if there's feet on the bottom of the laptop, then they're going to eat up some of that space with the VGA port.

01:23:13   They're going to, yeah, yeah, a million percent.

01:23:15   And then I would get email from people saying, oh, but I work at a big, large university and all of our projectors are still VGA input only, and you won't believe how often, like, a lecture's about to start and nobody has a working dongle.

01:23:28   But it's, like, the reason that some of that stuff goes away is because the product itself that you're using doesn't support it anymore.

01:23:35   Right.

01:23:36   If you don't have the VGA port on the laptop, suddenly you are going to have to upgrade the systems at the university, wherever you're like, but if you never have to.

01:23:43   But there was a logical consistency there where we see the whole world is moving away from CDs and DVDs and discs in general, and we're not going to put these drives on our laptops anymore.

01:23:54   And so why in the world would the iTunes icon be represented by musical notes in front of a disc?

01:24:01   It's a logical consistency.

01:24:03   It doesn't mean that the icon has to be realistic.

01:24:07   Like, I was never a fan of the next icons, which went to me, like, too photorealistic.

01:24:15   Like, they looked cool in a way because they were so, I don't know, 16-bit color or something.

01:24:22   Yeah, we're talking about, like, next workstation, right?

01:24:24   We're talking about those icons?

01:24:25   We're like, yeah.

01:24:26   Yeah, I mean, so I've been having a recent appreciation for those, though.

01:24:29   I'm not going to say I, like, strongly disagree with you on this, but they were interesting because you're right.

01:24:35   Like, they were so much more detailed than the stuff that kind of came before.

01:24:38   They were bigger.

01:24:40   I mean, the home icon had, like, bushes on it.

01:24:42   It was, like, weird, right?

01:24:44   And the folders were not just, like, a simple folder.

01:24:47   They were, like, these brown-bounded folders with a strap around it.

01:24:51   I mean, they were gratuitous.

01:24:53   They, like, they were gratuitous.

01:24:54   Million percent they were.

01:24:55   But I don't know, there's something really charming about it.

01:24:57   But I mean, at the time, like, when your computer, like, doesn't have so much visually going on.

01:25:04   I mean, I do think that icons carry the weight of, like, visual identity.

01:25:08   I mean, you mentioned that, like, icons are a kind of logo thing.

01:25:12   And I think that when you have a system where, like, most of what you're doing is, like, text-based stuff, icons basically define what the system looks like.

01:25:21   And I think Next, at the time, needed a different, like, approach to, like, how things would be so that people saw it and were, like, this is not what we were used to.

01:25:29   There needs to be, like, if I think, and I think that's what we see, like, when Aqua came out, like, after that.

01:25:34   I mean, we saw, like, Windows XP be very different from, like, Windows Classic in, like, 95, 98.

01:25:39   Like, they were intentionally designing, like, icon systems and Y that looked distinct so that you could tell the difference.

01:25:45   And that's the reason why that stuff happens, right?

01:25:47   Yeah.

01:25:48   Yeah, absolutely.

01:25:49   Yeah, I'm not going to say I didn't have a brief period where I was – I never owned a Next computer, but there was a time where I – I know that there was a time where I installed some series of system extensions on my Mac to give me Next-style Windows and Next-style icons.

01:26:05   And the Next-style Windows, I thought, looked cool longer than the Next-style icons.

01:26:11   Those – it's not that –

01:26:12   The black style bars?

01:26:13   I saw them as cool.

01:26:14   Yeah, it was not.

01:26:14   Yeah, with the 3D buttons and stuff.

01:26:17   Yeah.

01:26:17   But it was very Steve Jobs-ian.

01:26:20   It was, like, let's take these – the realism of these icons and the detail, like you said.

01:26:25   The folders were not, like – they were, like, super – they were more like those – I don't know what you call those.

01:26:32   They're, like, almost like a briefcase folder.

01:26:34   Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

01:26:36   Yeah, or, yeah, it's, like, either it had a strap or it had one of those kind of, like, strings that you, like, wrap around, like a legal binder sort of thing.

01:26:43   Yeah, like, to tie the folder together.

01:26:46   So that nothing could fall out the top of it.

01:26:48   Because that was important for computers to not drop files, right?

01:26:51   Right, and meanwhile, like, Windows and the standard classic macOS just had these super simple –

01:26:57   They were file folders.

01:26:58   They existed – exactly, yeah.

01:27:00   It's like a rectangle with a tab in the folder.

01:27:02   That all changed, right?

01:27:03   Like, with Aqua and Windows XP, I mean, then they had – they were starting to be more metaphorical with folders.

01:27:10   I mean, they were more literal before.

01:27:11   They were, like – they were literal file folders before.

01:27:14   And then they kind of became – I don't want to say abstract, but, yeah, metaphorical.

01:27:18   They were, like, this is a folder.

01:27:19   But no real folder exists with, like, pinstripes in, like, a translucent blue – I mean, now they're – I mean, we got clear files all the time now.

01:27:26   It started a little, though, with classic macOS, and I'm not quite sure if that – I think sort of happened after Jobs came back to the company, and I don't know how much influence he had on it.

01:27:37   But the way that once macOS 8 went all platinum, which was, like, the theme revolution in classic macOS, the icons were still blue, bluish-purple.

01:27:49   I mean –

01:27:50   Yeah, that bluish-purple, that indigo color.

01:27:52   That very Mac –

01:27:54   It is distinctively that color.

01:27:56   Right.

01:27:57   Yeah, that Mac is distinctively that color.

01:27:59   That's – well, you posted about the Finder icon that I made, and that was exactly what I was getting at.

01:28:04   Because, to me, the Finder icon should always be that, like, purplish-tinted blue, because that's what Mac is.

01:28:11   But, like, even the platinum, like, quantum foam wallpaper that existed at the time was that tinted color, right?

01:28:18   It was, like – it was that purple and that gray, that light gray.

01:28:22   That's what made Mac Mac at the time.

01:28:24   And so there was, like, on the classic macOS 9, macOS 8.5 era, the icons looked different than – and they looked more 3D than they did before.

01:28:35   But they were still that classic Mac blue-purple, which real-world folders typically aren't.

01:28:41   Yeah, you could go to a stationary store and find purple folders.

01:28:44   But, and at the same time, Windows, like, even Windows 95, which, you know, supposedly was, like, the big, oh, now the UI is good on Windows, too, had manila folders.

01:28:54   The most boring folder.

01:28:56   Yeah, the most typical ones.

01:28:58   Yes, yes.

01:28:59   You're right.

01:28:59   Like, so the macOS ones were a little bit metaphorical, but they were, like, what if they were normal but we made them?

01:29:05   Which is actually a very Apple way of approaching something, right?

01:29:08   Like, whereas I just think Windows is not like that, which is fine.

01:29:12   It's just a totally different – yeah.

01:29:13   Yeah, maybe this is a bad example.

01:29:16   But, like, during COVID, remember when Apple came out with their own face mask design?

01:29:20   Oh, that's right.

01:29:21   Of course.

01:29:22   Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

01:29:23   It didn't look like anybody else's.

01:29:25   It was theirs.

01:29:25   Right.

01:29:26   Actually, another classic example is the fucking pizza box at Cafe Max, right?

01:29:31   Oh, yeah.

01:29:31   It's like a circle, right?

01:29:32   It's like they could not tolerate having a normal fucking pizza box.

01:29:36   They had to go invent one for themselves, right?

01:29:39   Right, because somebody – it's a very Apple employee.

01:29:42   It doesn't matter where you are in Apple, but it's the sort of people who've always been drawn to work at Apple and I think sort of draws someone like me to write about and talk about Apple or for you to work on Apple platforms and design for them is you see something and it annoys you and then all of a sudden it becomes an obsession.

01:30:01   And somebody at Apple became annoyed by the way that pizza boxes have this fundamental problem where the middle of the pizza touches the top of the box and it kind of ruins the middle of the pizza.

01:30:13   And it's like nobody wants to eat a pizza where the whole middle part is sort of smooshed and stuck to the top of the box.

01:30:19   And even though we've all just generally accepted this, it was not tolerable for them, so they had to make it.

01:30:25   And somebody like Domino's put a pizza, like a little plastic table in the middle and it sort of solves it.

01:30:33   But somebody at Apple was like, no, no, we're going to design a box where this can't happen.

01:30:38   And it's only for them.

01:30:40   It's only – it's like you never see it outside of Apple.

01:30:43   It's the only time you see it.

01:30:43   Well, they don't run a chain of people.

01:30:45   Yeah, I mean, I'm not – yeah, well, like, I love they fucking – I love they fucking patented it.

01:30:50   Even if someone took that idea, is that just not better for the common good of the world?

01:30:56   Like, why do you have to own that?

01:30:57   You can let everyone have that.

01:30:59   This is a long shot, but do you watch – happen to watch The Bear on Hulu?

01:31:03   I do.

01:31:03   Yeah, I do.

01:31:04   I like that show.

01:31:05   Yes.

01:31:05   All right.

01:31:05   So the premise of The Bear, for anybody who doesn't watch, is there was a family-owned – again, back to sandwiches, a Chicago sandwich shop called – what's it called?

01:31:16   The Original Beef.

01:31:17   Yeah, The Original Beef.

01:31:19   And honestly, I've had Midwest beef sandwiches, and they're excellent.

01:31:23   They are amazing, amazing sandwiches in general.

01:31:26   And the ones that they made on the show looked really good, but it was like a lunch counter, hectic sandwich shop, family-owned.

01:31:34   And long story short, it's the whole saga of Four Seasons is that one of the – the prodigal son of the family became, like, a renowned chef who had worked, like, in the French laundry in New York for several years.

01:31:48   And he turns it into an ought-to-be-Michigan-starred fine-dining restaurant.

01:31:54   Did you say Michigan-starred?

01:31:55   Is that what you just said?

01:31:56   Just Michigan-star?

01:31:57   Michelin.

01:31:58   Michelin-starred.

01:31:59   That's right.

01:32:00   Michelin-starred.

01:32:00   Yeah, yeah.

01:32:01   Sorry.

01:32:02   Thank you, Louis.

01:32:03   I like the idea of a Michigan-starred restaurant, though.

01:32:06   I thought I didn't need that to be a thing.

01:32:08   Well, I started thinking about Chicago, and it's close to –

01:32:12   Yeah, go on, go on, go on.

01:32:13   Go on with your story, yes.

01:32:14   But in the premise of the show, it's fine dining, and they're struggling financially because it's so expensive, and the guy is trying to – I'm not spoiling anything, but he's trying to do this thing where instead of having a set menu every day, every day they come up with a new menu, or they have a series of 30 different menu items.

01:32:33   And every day they pick eight of them, and it's making the place.

01:32:36   But meanwhile, they're still running the sandwich operation out of the back of the restaurant.

01:32:40   That's right.

01:32:40   And it's killing it.

01:32:41   And in fact, it's more profitable than ever because they got rid of the eat-in dining, and it's takeout only.

01:32:48   They super optimized that part of the business, and it's running out of just the window.

01:32:52   Yeah, it's running out of a window with four guys, and they're doing killer business.

01:32:58   So wouldn't it be funny, although Apple stores –

01:33:01   Oh, yeah.

01:33:01   I hear where you're going with this.

01:33:02   I love this so much.

01:33:03   This is such a good idea, John.

01:33:05   Who in Cupertino fucking needs this?

01:33:07   They should be selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores.

01:33:10   Yeah.

01:33:11   And they would never do that.

01:33:13   No, but wouldn't that be amazing?

01:33:15   Why wouldn't they do that on some location?

01:33:17   That would just be a fun thing.

01:33:18   Well, it is interesting because this is the dumbest thing.

01:33:21   I can't believe we're talking about this.

01:33:23   Well, they have the Welcome Center, right?

01:33:25   And the Welcome Center has a cafe, right?

01:33:26   And people can go there, right?

01:33:28   So, like, technically, they're not – and they do have Cafe Max locations all over, right?

01:33:33   Like, all over their campuses around the world, they have a Cafe Max.

01:33:36   They are not – they are not not well-versed in running, like, this sort of operation.

01:33:41   They could do this if they wanted to.

01:33:43   Yep.

01:33:43   Takeout only.

01:33:44   I'm just going to say this.

01:33:47   Cafe Max pizzas, they're actually really good.

01:33:49   So that's one thing.

01:33:50   I really miss those.

01:33:51   I really miss them.

01:33:52   The first time I got to eat – I haven't eaten at Cafe Max many times, but the first time I had the opportunity to – and I forget who I was there with, but – and they were like, you can have anything you want.

01:34:00   We got to do this.

01:34:01   We got to do that.

01:34:01   I'm getting a pizza.

01:34:02   I've heard about it.

01:34:03   Right.

01:34:03   Every time.

01:34:04   I got the pizza, and it was excellent.

01:34:05   And it's – I'm a pizza – open-minded about pizza, right?

01:34:10   It's not an East Coast Italian-style pizza.

01:34:12   It is a very West Coast California-style pizza.

01:34:15   I also – I like Chicago deep dish-style pizza.

01:34:20   Yeah, but do you like St. Louis-style pizza?

01:34:22   This is where – yes.

01:34:23   I'm open-minded about pizza, yeah.

01:34:25   Okay, shut up, John.

01:34:26   I'll bet – but I'll bet that the best places in St. Louis – I'll bet the best places I would love, right?

01:34:32   Anything where you have some dough and tomato sauce and good cheese.

01:34:37   And some kind of cheese.

01:34:38   And made with care by somebody who's a real pain in the ass.

01:34:43   Right, right.

01:34:44   It's going to be tasty.

01:34:45   But the Cafe Max pizzas are a very good version of the California pizza.

01:34:50   And it is the kind of – and it's also, I think, very, very good, not coincidentally, for lunch.

01:34:56   Whereas, you know, like a Chicago deep dish pizza, if you eat that for lunch, you're taking a nap.

01:35:02   But you're in a food coma, yeah, a million percent.

01:35:04   Yeah.

01:35:04   I mean, that's the thing.

01:35:05   I mean, so many of the lunch things – I mean, you know, why are we talking about Cafe Max?

01:35:09   Because we want Apple to start selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores.

01:35:13   Yeah, I will say this.

01:35:14   None of the other things – at the time, and admittedly, this was like 12 or 13 years ago.

01:35:19   But, like, none of the other things at Cafe Max would I think they could sell outside of Apple.

01:35:23   I don't think they're good enough for that.

01:35:25   But, like, that, absolutely.

01:35:26   I think they could do it.

01:35:28   Here's my proposal.

01:35:31   Here's who I think maybe should run it.

01:35:33   Alan Dye.

01:35:35   Move.

01:35:37   God damn it, John.

01:35:40   He has the experience.

01:35:43   They call him – Tim calls him in, and he says, Alan, we've got a great opportunity for you.

01:35:50   We're expanding.

01:35:52   Yep.

01:35:55   And you can lead the operations for this entirely.

01:35:58   Yeah, exactly.

01:35:59   All right.

01:36:00   Let me take one last break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the episode.

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01:40:09   All right, I'm going to read to you from one of your recent blog posts.

01:40:15   This is July 18th.

01:40:16   A responsibility to the industry.

01:40:18   This is the opening.

01:40:21   Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power that he has, because he simply has no taste.

01:40:29   But what's worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly.

01:40:33   And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

01:40:39   If that sounds too dramatic, maybe the rest of this post won't be for you.

01:40:44   What do you really think, Louis?

01:40:47   Yeah, well, that.

01:40:49   Yeah, that's basically it, John.

01:40:52   I think, and you do go into the details, but I think as a bracing first paragraph, and I know that there's a tendency that some people like to shock and awe and clickbait, that's not what you're doing here.

01:41:07   You're saying what you really think.

01:41:08   Yes.

01:41:10   It's no secret, Alan Dye's background is not in UI design.

01:41:14   He's a graphic designer.

01:41:15   He came from managing brands like Levi's, and I forget who.

01:41:20   I always remember Levi's, because I used to wear Levi's jeans.

01:41:22   Yeah, Kate Spade, I think is in there, too.

01:41:24   Yeah, Kate Spade.

01:41:24   But like sort of a fashion clothing industry background, not designing the clothes, but designing the branding for those companies.

01:41:34   Yeah, I think.

01:41:35   I don't know.

01:41:35   Actually, weirdly, there is like very little information about him that you can find out of what happened.

01:41:43   Like I am desperately trying to find like portfolio pieces.

01:41:46   I want to see things that he's actually designed by himself without other people.

01:41:51   I want to know what like his actual, because all I have to go on right now is what is the org that he's in charge of, the things that they are shipping, right?

01:42:00   Like that's the only insight I have into what his taste is, because I don't know what it is other than this.

01:42:05   And I think that's where the whole discussion over liquid glass, quote unquote, is losing the forest for one semi-transparent tree.

01:42:18   Everybody's focusing on this see-through tree and, oh, the tree was very clear in the keynote.

01:42:24   And then in beta 3, the tree got frosted.

01:42:28   And now in beta 4, it's back to being clear.

01:42:31   It's not frosted.

01:42:31   But nobody's really looking at the forest.

01:42:35   You said earlier on the podcast, did other previous UI changes go through these sort of visible yin and yangs, back and forth, tweaking during the betas?

01:42:47   And like Mac OS Tiger in 2005, you said.

01:42:49   No, but those were minor revisions.

01:42:52   Like we talked about that being a sort of dialing in the look.

01:42:55   Aqua did, right?

01:42:56   Aqua went through dramatic changes from when Steve Jobs first unveiled it publicly.

01:43:02   I think at a Mac world, I think Mac world, San Francisco in 2000, until the year or 14 months or whatever it was of public beta until Mac OS 10.0, it went through a lot of changes.

01:43:16   And then it went through a lot of changes from 10.0 to 10.1, which only came out six or seven months later because 10.0 had a lot of problems.

01:43:25   That when you do something that's really, wow, everybody, even casual users notice, oh, this looks new.

01:43:34   You cannot miss it.

01:43:35   Yeah, absolutely true.

01:43:37   Yes.

01:43:37   I think that you inevitably get this sort of visible back and forth once it goes from something they were trying to keep secret until they unveiled it.

01:43:45   And then, okay, now we've unveiled it, but we need some time to get it ready to ship for the public.

01:43:51   It happened with iOS 7 and it's happening with liquid glass.

01:43:56   I think, though, that arguing about the transparency and the visual effects is losing.

01:44:02   It's important.

01:44:03   And I think it's emblematic of some of the things that Alan Dye personally and his team just don't get.

01:44:11   They clearly don't get or they wouldn't do it.

01:44:13   But I also think a lot of the stuff that we're seeing in iOS 26, they've been moving in this direction, but now they've taken a big step change.

01:44:21   But it has nothing to do with the style or how transparency or how frosted the thing is, but rather just a philosophical, complete lack of understanding of what UI design actually is.

01:44:33   I think this is the part that frustrates me about it.

01:44:36   It's like there was a period of time, I think, after I left Apple and I started my own company, and now I'm on version two of that.

01:44:44   I did Pacific Home and we had that weird phase where we had to go through.

01:44:47   Everyone was hiring us for iOS 6 style design that everyone now had to do iOS 7 design.

01:44:52   And that was a big deal too, right?

01:44:53   I mean, we had to do all that stuff.

01:44:55   But I think ever since I left Apple, I've always been a visual designer, right?

01:45:00   Like, I'm not just, I am capable of being a UI designer, but I would consider myself a visual designer.

01:45:06   I make the UI design look good.

01:45:09   I make it look like it makes sense.

01:45:11   Even if it, like, actually makes sense, I make sure it looks like it makes sense, right?

01:45:15   So I need to make sure that, like, the different parts of it are differentiated.

01:45:18   That, like, the title bar is distinct.

01:45:20   Like, visually, that needs to make sense.

01:45:23   So the parts of this modern liquid glass stuff that gets me, actually, yeah, isn't the material stuff.

01:45:28   For the most part, I have to say, like, I don't like the glass, like, appearance for, like, the dock.

01:45:34   I think that looks really good.

01:45:36   I think the command tab stuff looks really good.

01:45:38   I think glass notifications are totally fine.

01:45:41   But it's, like, this other stuff, like, this deeper stuff that has been true forever, right?

01:45:48   It's just, like, title bars, sidebars, status bars, like, toolbar items, right?

01:45:54   Like, these quintessential attributes of both iOS and macOS just getting this complete overhaul without, guess, yeah, that full comprehension of what these things are and what they're supposed to be.

01:46:07   I don't know if it comes from, like, a lack of understanding or just, like, a disregard for that understanding.

01:46:14   I don't know which one it is.

01:46:16   I think it's a lack of caring that stems from a disregard or a disregard that stems from not caring.

01:46:24   Yeah.

01:46:24   And not being fascinated by it.

01:46:26   And so let me tell you this.

01:46:28   A couple, some point after WWDC, so last five weeks or so, in talking about the unveil, I think it was right after WWDC.

01:46:37   I think it was in my week after Thoughts and Observations on WWDC.

01:46:42   I quoted from Alan Dye's keynote introduction of Liquid Glass and just a transcript of it.

01:46:51   And then I quoted from and linked to Steve Jobs' 2000 introduction of Aqua.

01:46:57   And it's like a night and day difference in the way they're speaking.

01:47:04   The thing I've been trying to figure out with regards to this is, like, there was a tonal shift between the old Apple and, like, new Apple.

01:47:11   Go ahead.

01:47:11   Go ahead.

01:47:12   Well, I couldn't find it because I was looking for something started Thoughts and Observations.

01:47:16   But it started – I titled it One Week Out, Some Brief Thoughts and Observations on WWDC.

01:47:21   And let's see here.

01:47:23   Let's see if I can quote a little bit from Alan Dye.

01:47:26   Software is at the heart and soul of our products.

01:47:28   It brings them to life, shapes their personality, and defines their purpose.

01:47:32   At Apple, we've always believed it's the deep integration of hardware and software that makes interacting with technology intuitive, beautiful, and a joy to use.

01:47:39   Blah, blah, blah.

01:47:40   Right?

01:47:41   What is he talking about there?

01:47:42   There is nothing.

01:47:44   It's nothing is what it is.

01:47:46   Like, it's the part that kind of – that really rubbed me the wrong way because it's like – I don't like the term corporate speak, but it is this sort of – it's gutless.

01:47:54   There's nothing in there.

01:47:55   You're just saying what sounds nice.

01:47:57   You're saying something that sounds like it's true, and you can do – you can show anything after saying that, and then you're like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense.

01:48:05   And it doesn't, right?

01:48:06   Yeah.

01:48:07   All right.

01:48:07   Here's what else he said.

01:48:08   Blah, blah, blah.

01:48:09   Today, we're excited to announce our broadest design update ever.

01:48:13   Our goal – here's what their goal – he says their goal.

01:48:15   Our goal is a beautiful new design that brings joy and delight to every user experience, one that's more personal, puts greater focus on your content, all while still feeling instantly familiar.

01:48:27   And now here's what Steve Jobs said in 2000 about Aqua.

01:48:30   The one more thing is we have been secretly for the last 18 months designing a completely new user interface, and that user interface builds on Apple's legacy.

01:48:39   And carries it into the next century.

01:48:41   And we call the new user interface Aqua because it's liquid.

01:48:45   One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.

01:48:49   There's the goal.

01:48:51   Yeah.

01:48:52   So good, you wanted to lick it.

01:48:53   Yeah, yeah.

01:48:53   It's just – the whole point was the appearance of it.

01:48:57   It was so fun that you just – yeah.

01:48:59   You wanted to interact with it in some way.

01:49:01   And then he starts – not by showing like a whole screenshot or something.

01:49:05   It just starts showing –

01:49:06   It was just a pill, right?

01:49:06   It's just individual elements.

01:49:08   Yeah, right, right, right.

01:49:10   And he just says, what does a button look like?

01:49:11   This is quoting.

01:49:12   Right.

01:49:12   And you spend months working on a button.

01:49:14   That's a button in Aqua.

01:49:16   That's him showing a slide button of just a regular oval capsule push button in Aqua.

01:49:21   This is what radio buttons look like.

01:49:24   Simple things.

01:49:25   This is what checkboxes look like.

01:49:27   This is what pop-up lists look like.

01:49:29   Again, you're starting to get the feel of this.

01:49:31   A little different.

01:49:32   This is what sliders can look like.

01:49:34   Now let me show you windows.

01:49:36   This is what the top of windows look like.

01:49:38   These three buttons look like a traffic signal, don't they?

01:49:41   Red means close the window.

01:49:43   Yellow means minimize the window.

01:49:44   And green means maximize the window.

01:49:47   Pretty simple.

01:49:48   And a tremendous fit and finish in this operating system.

01:49:51   As you roll over these things, you get those.

01:49:53   Remember, you used to roll over the red and you'd get a little X that would say, hey, here's

01:49:58   just to double emphasize, hey, when you click this one, it's going to close the window.

01:50:02   When you rolled over the green one, you got a plus because it was going to make it bigger.

01:50:06   Right?

01:50:06   It was.

01:50:07   And he explained it.

01:50:09   Yep.

01:50:10   And that was the goal.

01:50:12   Skipping ahead of Jobs' thing, which is all worth listening to.

01:50:15   I'll link to the video, I promise, in the show notes.

01:50:17   But if you haven't watched, even if you watched it five weeks ago,

01:50:20   when I wrote it, you should watch it.

01:50:21   It's always good for a rewatch.

01:50:23   Yeah.

01:50:23   And that was the goal of this user interface.

01:50:26   So here he's getting to it.

01:50:28   First goal to make it look like you wanted to lick it.

01:50:30   And then when he wraps this introduction up, he says, this is another goal.

01:50:34   This was the goal of this user interface.

01:50:36   To make it span the range so that people turning on their iMac for the first time were enchanted

01:50:41   with it.

01:50:42   And it was super easy to use.

01:50:44   And yet, our pro users also felt, my God, this takes me to places I never thought I could

01:50:49   get to.

01:50:50   And that's what we tried to do.

01:50:51   There it is.

01:50:53   We want to make something that makes new people who have never owned a computer and just bought

01:50:57   an iMac and it's their first computer feel like, hey, this is cool and I understand how

01:51:01   to use this.

01:51:01   And they wanted to make pro users feel like, wow, this is the best part.

01:51:05   Right.

01:51:05   Yeah.

01:51:06   Yeah.

01:51:07   I had a friend who recently ish, ex-Apple, he had been there doing design work for 15 plus

01:51:18   20 years.

01:51:18   I don't know.

01:51:19   But he left somewhat recently and he watched that.

01:51:23   And I guess he got to a part that I didn't quote because jobs keeps going on.

01:51:28   But he said, I knew this because he had been there, started at Apple while Steve Jobs was

01:51:33   still there.

01:51:34   I don't know if he ever, I honestly don't even know if he ever interacted with Steve Jobs

01:51:37   personally, but was there at the time.

01:51:39   And he knew this about Steve Jobs, that he could really get nerdy about UI.

01:51:43   But in that keynote introduction, Steve Jobs was talking at one point about the key window

01:51:49   and that this, here's how you can tell which window is the key window because it has input

01:51:54   focus because the red, yellow, and green were red, yellow, and green.

01:51:57   And a window in the background, which wasn't the key window because it was in the background,

01:52:01   they were grayed out.

01:52:02   And that it gave you this instant obvious, oh, the key window is glowy and colorful.

01:52:08   And at a glance, out of the corner of your eye, you could see which window is the one.

01:52:14   And he said, I forgot that Steve talked like that about using UI design lingo, like key

01:52:21   window and input focus and things like that.

01:52:24   And he said to me that he had meetings with Alan Dye's team in recent-ish years, and that

01:52:32   he'd used terms like that.

01:52:35   And he said, I never got like cut off, but there was always an underlying tone of shut up with

01:52:40   the UI nerd stuff.

01:52:41   That they didn't use terms like that.

01:52:44   And that when he would, when describing an idea, that their eyes would roll back in their head.

01:52:50   Here goes another one of these key window input focus guys again.

01:52:53   Meanwhile, though, they're the fucking team that shipped an iPad multi-window interface for

01:52:59   seven years where you couldn't tell which half of the screen.

01:53:02   You and I have talked about this before, this exact thing that like, I said it like years

01:53:08   ago, but it's like, we solved that problem like over a decade ago.

01:53:13   Why are we doing this right now where we are like backtracking on the things that we already

01:53:18   know to be true?

01:53:19   I mean, it doesn't really make any sense to me why it's hard to distinguish the inactive

01:53:23   window.

01:53:24   But this goes to exactly what we were talking about earlier too, where it's like even different

01:53:28   apps are distinguished from each other and the focus was determined.

01:53:32   Like we could identify all of these things.

01:53:34   The original Macintosh team had one bit color to work with black pixels and white pixels.

01:53:40   That's what we were talking about.

01:53:42   Yeah.

01:53:42   Wasn't even a grayscale screen.

01:53:44   Yep.

01:53:44   And they did things like they put pinstripes in horizontal pinstripes in the active windows

01:53:52   title bar and the background windows were just a white rectangle.

01:53:56   White, right.

01:53:57   And that I'm sure they've tinkered with all sorts of things.

01:54:01   You know, there's all sorts of ways Mac paint had paint bucket full of them where the paint

01:54:06   bucket didn't have colors because it was a one bit screen, but it had patterns and the patterns

01:54:11   could create different indications of grayness or something.

01:54:14   They could have made the active window title bar black with white text.

01:54:19   There's all sorts of ways they could have done.

01:54:20   They've done tons of different patterns, but that was the one that they did.

01:54:23   Yeah.

01:54:23   They settled on these stripes and it worked in a way where even with just black, you could

01:54:29   just do it.

01:54:29   But then as devices got things like color, it was like you could see it in the history

01:54:36   as the Mac OS interface evolved where user interface designers, it wasn't just we could

01:54:41   make, we can do cool things with color, which was part of it.

01:54:45   People love to make things look cool, but you could see that the user interface thinkers were

01:54:52   thinking, oh, we can solve a certain problem in a way we could never solve before.

01:54:58   Right.

01:54:58   Due to the display technology that we now have, we have more tools at our disposal to distinguish

01:55:05   like inactive windows and stuff like that.

01:55:07   So another one, a one that was really kind of ugly, it's undeniably ugly, but I don't

01:55:13   know what else they could have done is when the Mac interface was only black and white.

01:55:16   Let's say that a window or a dialog box is in a state where one of the buttons, you have

01:55:24   to fill in a certain text field.

01:55:26   It can't be empty or you can't go onward.

01:55:28   So the button, the OK button has to be disabled.

01:55:33   Well, how do you indicate a disabled button in black and white?

01:55:37   Well, they would use a 50% the sort of checkerboard pattern pixel by pixel to gray it out.

01:55:43   But when you only have one bit, that meant that by XORing every other pixel to make a

01:55:50   50% checkerboard pattern at the pixel level, the word OK or the word next or whatever it

01:55:56   was, you could kind of not read it because it was a font.

01:55:59   You couldn't pick gray.

01:56:01   Yep.

01:56:01   Yep.

01:56:02   And so having color, even just 256 colors or even 16 colors, which some Macs could run in

01:56:10   as a resolution, they could just render the button in gray instead of black and white,

01:56:15   make it gray and white to show, oh, this button is currently disabled.

01:56:19   They were solving a problem.

01:56:21   And you could, as a user, as the Mac interface evolved, I could see the joy.

01:56:26   I could experience it.

01:56:28   I really could of the user interface designers discovering how to solve these problems with

01:56:35   technology.

01:56:35   Yeah.

01:56:36   You were suddenly getting like a certain level of clarity that was always intended.

01:56:40   It was always understood that this was needed.

01:56:42   But then with the greater like technological capacity, you were seeing like the clarity

01:56:47   of that object, the way that it should be, the way that it could have been, right?

01:56:52   But the way that it is now, and now it's fully distinguished from other objects, right?

01:56:57   That makes this, that goes for buttons, that goes for checkboxes, that goes for like inactive

01:57:01   windows and active windows, that goes for everything.

01:57:03   I mean, like even what you said with like aqua, like aqua windows, the active ones have

01:57:08   the red, yellow, green as like fully opaque colors.

01:57:12   And then the inactive ones are like gray, you know, that they're a little translucent to white

01:57:16   sort of thing.

01:57:17   But, but it was also like the title bar got a little translucent, like in the inactive

01:57:22   window on the original light.

01:57:24   And that was like, by having these individual different tools, right?

01:57:27   It made it so that whatever the active window was, if there were buttons, if there were

01:57:31   checkboxes, they were blue.

01:57:32   But if the window became inactive, they all became a grayish tone so that you saw this entire

01:57:40   window is not the active window, not just by the title bar, but by all of the controls

01:57:45   within it.

01:57:45   And it's not that some macOS stuff still doesn't operate like this.

01:57:49   It does.

01:57:49   Like there are still things that like have that fundamental principle, but there's like these,

01:57:54   like, if we, if we consider like modern liquid glass things, they have like kind of a couple

01:57:59   appearances, right?

01:58:00   They have like the fully transparent, refracted, like fun version that they have the frosted

01:58:05   version when things are out of focus, but they use that frosted version sometime in other

01:58:11   contexts.

01:58:11   And they use the like super refracted one in other contexts so that in a way that difference

01:58:17   doesn't mean anything to the user.

01:58:19   They can't use it as an identifier of, oh, this is what that means inherently because

01:58:25   of its appearance.

01:58:26   They have to guess, oh, it's because they didn't want to put glass on glass.

01:58:30   So the under one has to be frosted.

01:58:31   The user isn't thinking about that, right?

01:58:34   I understand that that's like how the developer should be thinking about that, but that doesn't

01:58:37   make sense to the user to help them understand the user interface.

01:58:41   And that's the thing that always struck me as soon as I got engaged with the Mac and

01:58:47   the consistency and uniformity of this, of good Mac interfaces.

01:58:52   That's where it really, I was like, oh, this is something that fascinates me endlessly is

01:58:57   that a good UI designer to me is also a teacher where they are teaching the user how to understand

01:59:06   the system and that once you understand just something that sounds as simple as if the buttons

01:59:11   are gray, that means they're in a window or otherwise not active for a reason because the

01:59:17   window is not front most and you need to click on the window to make it front most.

01:59:20   And now they'll light up as color and the window you were in, the controls will go gray.

01:59:26   But the other thing that that, just that simple example gets to is it was the windows controls

01:59:34   or the, and the apps controls and buttons and toolbar buttons in the scroll bar within the

01:59:39   window that would gray out when the window became inactive, but the content of the window didn't

01:59:45   change at all.

01:59:46   So if you had two Photoshop documents open overlapping either side by side, the content, the picture

01:59:53   wouldn't go grayed out or, or dim or have a filter put over it.

01:59:59   The content stayed the same.

02:00:00   The apps interface would gray out because it was the app that was inactive.

02:00:05   The content hadn't changed, but that way you wouldn't want that because what if you have

02:00:09   in Photoshop, you have.

02:00:12   Yeah.

02:00:12   If you're comparing two things that you're trying to color pick from the other object, you need

02:00:15   to have them both in focus.

02:00:16   Not in focus.

02:00:17   Yeah.

02:00:18   Yeah.

02:00:18   Yeah.

02:00:18   Yeah.

02:00:18   Somebody says to you, an icon designer, here's the icon for go left and we need you to make

02:00:28   an icon for go in it, but it needs to match this.

02:00:30   So you, you're not changing the left one there.

02:00:32   Everybody's like, yeah, this icon's done.

02:00:34   And you've got this other way.

02:00:35   You certainly wouldn't want the content of the window to dim out because it's in the background.

02:00:39   It would make no sense.

02:00:40   You'd, you'd, you'd throw your computer against the wall.

02:00:42   Right.

02:00:43   And so the separation between the app interface and the content is essential to understanding

02:00:50   how to use the app.

02:00:52   Yeah.

02:00:52   And so this whole philosophy, which you have written about, but this whole philosophy of

02:00:58   we're going to make the app interface fade away to put your content forward is doing the

02:01:05   opposite.

02:01:05   It's the opposite.

02:01:07   It's not putting the content forward.

02:01:09   That's exactly what I said.

02:01:10   It's, it's this very funny thing where they've just, they're, they're saying this thing.

02:01:14   And I, and I think they really believe it.

02:01:16   I just want to say that.

02:01:17   I think when they say we're trying to put like content forward, I think that's what they

02:01:22   think they're doing.

02:01:22   And that's the problem.

02:01:23   Right.

02:01:24   And that is the problem.

02:01:25   There's like this fundamental misunderstanding of what this is supposed to be.

02:01:28   And I, and I, and I said this, that you need the distinct difference between the

02:01:33   UI and the content so that you don't mistake one for another, that like you see which, which

02:01:38   clarity, which things are tools and which things are not.

02:01:41   I mean, like, this is a stupid example, but if I'm designing UI, then I need the UI of the

02:01:46   actual app to look different from the content.

02:01:49   If I, if that starts to look the same, right.

02:01:50   And this is where Safari really gets me, John.

02:01:52   If the, in the new Safari on iOS specifically, but also on like macOS, but iOS specifically,

02:01:58   like when you scroll and it's got like that tiny, like little URL thing, it is like touch

02:02:03   fuzz.

02:02:04   It has this slight like glass appearance, but like on some websites that have their own buttons

02:02:11   in UI, which is not crazy to think about is unclear whether the buttons belong to the app

02:02:17   or belong to the website.

02:02:18   And this is so screwed up, John.

02:02:21   Like this should never be in question.

02:02:24   Like no one should be looking at the app, wondering whether the controls will do something

02:02:28   to the page or to the app or whatever.

02:02:30   Like they need to know what those things are.

02:02:33   Like you're right.

02:02:34   Like UI designers are teaching users how to use the interface and how to understand how to

02:02:39   understand it.

02:02:40   Yes.

02:02:40   And the clarity of an individual object in the separation of UI and content is critical to

02:02:46   that.

02:02:46   There used to be a term in, I don't think they use it anymore, but in the human interface

02:02:50   guidelines, not that Apple cares about that stuff.

02:02:52   That's for third-party developers, but like, but there used to be a term called perceived

02:02:55   stability.

02:02:56   And it's like by every app adhering to certain guidelines, right?

02:03:02   By every app having the same distinct UI elements, you have this perceived stability on the platform

02:03:09   that people understanding one app meant they understood another app, that they could understand

02:03:15   the entire system as a whole, right?

02:03:17   If everyone plays by this sort of thing, then everyone gets it.

02:03:20   The issue now is that like, we see like a new UI paradigm that throws out all of the things

02:03:26   that people were stabilized from, right?

02:03:28   Like I knew that the stoplight controls were in the title bar.

02:03:32   Now they're in the sidebar.

02:03:33   What does that mean?

02:03:34   Does that difference actually communicate like a fundamental difference on the way the window

02:03:40   works?

02:03:40   No, it doesn't, right?

02:03:42   So it is only a style decision.

02:03:44   And so the part that like, I guess frustrates me is that the visual designer that I am, like

02:03:52   those things were so critical.

02:03:54   And we scrutinized the trivial part of it, like in the iOS 6 era, being like, we didn't want

02:04:01   the rich Corinthian letter that was silly.

02:04:03   And now we're using visuals only for visual like reasons, like not to communicate the UI when

02:04:09   that was the entire purpose of like visually designing anything.

02:04:13   Right.

02:04:14   So, yeah.

02:04:15   I further think that in addition to being disrespectful to the content by blurring the distinction

02:04:23   between the UI 2.

02:04:23   Oh, that kills me.

02:04:24   Yes.

02:04:25   But I think it's profoundly disrespectful to the apps themselves because an empty app is

02:04:33   still a thing.

02:04:33   When you go to Photoshop or any app, right?

02:04:36   Photoshop or text edit or, and you hit command N and you have a brand new document that's empty

02:04:46   because you haven't made anything in it yet.

02:04:47   It is a thing.

02:04:49   It is an app.

02:04:50   It is somebody, some team of engineers and designers and managers have created this thing.

02:04:56   And the more powerful a tool it is, the more it is a thing that you should be able to identify

02:05:04   by looking at it.

02:05:06   And that it should explain to you what, if you're new to it, how and what you should start using

02:05:14   it and fill it in.

02:05:15   And this idea that all of these apps should, should sort of look the same and that a web

02:05:21   browser, like an empty Safari window should clearly look like a web browser because it should have

02:05:26   visible UI Chrome for the app that looks web browser-y like a field for typing URLs and search

02:05:32   terms and back and forward buttons.

02:05:35   It should obviously be a web browser before it's filled in.

02:05:39   You should definitely, everybody knows what a web browser does.

02:05:41   So when you look at an empty web browser, you should clearly know it's a web browser.

02:05:45   You should be able to know that each app is what it does because it should have that.

02:05:52   And it's, you talked about it multiple times.

02:05:54   And I know that the Corinthian leather as a specific one apps only theme was sort of over

02:06:00   the top, but it was better to, it was a better mistake to make or a better way to take things

02:06:05   to an extreme than this, where everything just looks like glass and it all goes away and the

02:06:13   buttons are shrink and, and go away as you scroll the content.

02:06:18   I think in hindsight, I know I was never happy about it, but in hindsight, I think it's a worse

02:06:24   and worse mistake and it probably does predate Alan Dye joining Apple, I think.

02:06:29   But I think that the getting rid of scroll bars is the canary.

02:06:36   I said, I said that exact thing.

02:06:38   I said like, it is a moment in time where they were just like, yeah, we don't need that anymore.

02:06:43   And it's, but, but, but, but, but, but that does communicate things.

02:06:46   It communicates three different things and without them, you don't have that.

02:06:50   Like it helps you, like, it actually has the interactive like element.

02:06:54   It shows you how much is left of the page and it shows you like your position in the page.

02:07:00   These are three distinct things that it does and not showing it requiring your input to just

02:07:06   to see that status.

02:07:07   It's like, so that's one of the things that I talked that I was trying to reference before,

02:07:13   like where the addition of color gave UI designers a new set of tools to use to convey understanding.

02:07:21   And some of it isn't just adding color or something technical like that, but just,

02:07:25   just the ideas from other companies.

02:07:28   So the original Mac scroll bars, the, the little thing in the middle of the scroll bar that shows

02:07:34   you your position is called the thumb.

02:07:36   That's the thumb and the scroll bar.

02:07:37   And for the original Mac in 1984 through somewhere in the nineties, I think in the Mac OS eight

02:07:46   era, the thumb on Mac OS was just a perfect square.

02:07:50   Right.

02:07:51   No matter what.

02:07:51   And it, so it didn't scale.

02:07:53   So if you opened a one page word processing or one page, well, one page didn't used to fit

02:08:02   on screen at the time.

02:08:03   Yeah.

02:08:03   Yeah.

02:08:03   Right.

02:08:03   So it's a one page word processing document, but you can only see about a half a page at

02:08:08   a time on your screen.

02:08:09   You still got a perfectly square thumb in the scroll bar.

02:08:13   Yeah.

02:08:13   And if the document was 250 pages, because it was, there was no visual difference.

02:08:18   It was still a square and the, I, I don't know if they were first, but I know the first platform

02:08:25   I remember with a dynamically sized thumb that was dynamically sized to represent the scale

02:08:34   of what's in the current viewport in the window proportional to the overall scrollable area

02:08:40   was next step next had that first, or at least the first one I remember, maybe some other

02:08:45   Unix E platform had that. And I remember when I saw a screenshot of it, it was like instantly,

02:08:51   it was like a light bulb went off. Oh, that's a bunch of, that's a brilliant idea because now

02:08:55   you've added an extra layer of information to the scroll bar. It tells you.

02:09:01   Without taking away anything. It didn't take, it didn't really, it didn't like you already

02:09:05   had that space reserved.

02:09:06   Right.

02:09:06   So it didn't really take away anything. It was totally fine.

02:09:09   And so, and, and for shorter documents, which are more common, it actually gave you a bigger

02:09:15   grabbable area to drag it up and down. So in some ways it was more usable. And in the worst

02:09:21   case of a, like, again, a 200 page thesis document, it also wouldn't shrink below a minimum size.

02:09:28   Right, right. There was always some, yeah, right. What's the point of it? It's like, at that point,

02:09:33   you're like, I already understand this is big. It's not really helping me to have it be like

02:09:37   actually representative.

02:09:38   Right. But so we'll keep it at the size that it, on the Mac, it always was. And then eventually

02:09:43   at some point in the Mac OS eight era, the Apple updated the standard scroll bars to have that

02:09:48   feature. And it was like, it was like a glass of ice water in hell. Well, maybe not hell,

02:09:53   but it was like a delicious treat to Mac users who didn't have that. And it was like, yeah,

02:09:59   like the state of the art for scroll bar design has moved forward because now it's added this

02:10:05   new dimension of showing by the size of the thumb, the scale of the document.

02:10:10   And it didn't matter. It's not about the look and feel of the UI system and the next step look and feel

02:10:18   their style of making things look grayscale in 3d or the Mac OS 8.5 or Mac OS nine platinum theme. And it

02:10:26   had blue thumbs by default, but if you changed your system color to orange, then the thumb would be orange

02:10:32   to match the same color as the menu bar selection or the tech selection. That's cool. But it didn't have to it.

02:10:39   The idea that the scroll bar would be proportional was separate from the look and feel. And that's a different

02:10:48   type of UI design. And you could be there are I know people who are extremely talented UI designers in that area who

02:10:56   never, ever, ever would admit, I'm not a good illustrator. I'm not good at Photoshop. They would

02:11:01   hand it off to somebody with the skills like you have to say, make this look good.

02:11:05   Yeah. I mean, and then that's why we've got the fun Haku ones, which had like the non moving pinstripes that

02:11:11   were masked inside. That was so, there was, there was no reason for that. Other than that, it was fucking

02:11:16   fun. And I think that's, that's, that's like the thing that like job said. It was like, it's like,

02:11:19   it makes you want to look at it. It's that, that's like a cute way of just saying you want to play with

02:11:25   it. It's just like, you want, and how many of us did that? I mean, we, to be fair, like, I'm doing

02:11:30   that with liquid glass. I know a lot of other people are too. Like for the visual component of this,

02:11:34   there is some like fun attributes like that, where you just like, you're just dragging around. You're

02:11:38   like, oh, that's so interesting. It's the same as like the genie effect. Yes. Technically, we need to

02:11:43   move the window to here. How do we do that in a fun, interesting, cute way? We can do that.

02:11:47   That's the visual interactive like thing on top of the good UI design that needs to exist from the

02:11:53   start. If you don't have that and you're only doing the visual part. One of my favorite purchases I've

02:11:59   ever made was, I was either a senior in college. I think it might've been right after I was a senior

02:12:04   in college, but it's like, I finally, I guess it was after I graduated and I was making some money

02:12:08   because I got a job and I got to buy like a home theater and I bought the biggest Sony TV that I

02:12:15   forget what size it was, but it was this Trinitron TV with, it was like a 36 inch Trinitron, but it was

02:12:21   huge. And oh my God, I lived on, at one point I moved to the fourth floor with Amy. It was the first

02:12:28   apartment. Amy and I got together and we had to move. It was like 10,000 pounds to move it up to the

02:12:34   fourth floor. But I got, I bought a Sony receiver and the receiver, I, I, you know, it wasn't the

02:12:41   highest end stuff, but I always loved Sony stuff, but I just love turning the volume dial. And it was

02:12:46   like this anodized aluminum that they had made concentric circles around the front face of it. And

02:12:52   you, it was kind of nice to rub your thumb across it. And it, even without turning the dial and the dial

02:12:58   had a nice feel to it when you turned the dial, but it felt good even just to touch the dial. That's the

02:13:04   sort of thing that Sony had. That's the sort of thing that Steve jobs admired about Sony as a

02:13:08   corporation. Like ultimately, yes, it was about how good the receiver made the audio sound and what specs

02:13:13   it had to drive speakers that were connected to it. But you know what, if you're going to make the thing

02:13:18   and you're going to sell it for a Sony level of pricing, the dials and the buttons should feel good

02:13:24   too. And so, yeah, if we have the capability to make the scroll bar thumb, do a weird animation

02:13:31   behind it as you drag it up and down. Yeah. We should do that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, I think

02:13:36   there's, so like you said, how like you good UI design is there to like teach users, like how to

02:13:42   understand like the UI of the app. I think that like there's like that level of visual design on top of

02:13:48   the good DUI design. The purpose of that is to make this stuff like approachable computers are a little

02:13:55   scary for a lot of people who are using this stuff for the first time. Anyone that's like using an

02:14:00   iPhone for the first time, there is like an intention or has to be an intention to make it fun and

02:14:05   approachable. It was like that. You were saying like that original, like aqua presentation, like he's

02:14:10   like, this is what a checkbox looks like. This is what a dropdown looks like. Like the first interaction

02:14:15   we had with iPhone was like slide to unlock and he did it twice because everyone was so into it.

02:14:20   There is like an important part of making things make sense, make them joyful. There's like delightful

02:14:25   thing because if you don't have that, then the entire system looks like something you don't want

02:14:31   to touch. Like, I don't want to touch that button. I don't want to interact with that because I don't

02:14:35   know what that's going to do. Right. The whole point of slide to unlock was just to make sure that if the

02:14:41   phone got activated in your pocket or when you're otherwise looking at it, that you didn't do anything

02:14:44   accidentally. That you weren't going to call someone or like do a destructive action.

02:14:48   It had nothing to do with any feature. If you listed every single feature the original iPhone

02:14:54   did, it wasn't even number 120. It was like an anti-feature just to make sure you didn't engage

02:15:02   any features accidentally. But they made it look so good and so fun and like you would want to. And

02:15:09   everybody I know who got an iPhone, the first night it was like we're all waiting for AT&T to

02:15:15   activate our phones anyway. We just sit there and like slide to unlock, slide to unlock. It was so

02:15:21   good. I will genuinely joyful. Yeah, I like it. It was nice. I will toss this out there because I

02:15:27   haven't mentioned it or written about it in a long time. But on macOS, one of the top tips I would advise

02:15:32   everybody to do if you haven't done it is in the appearance settings under show scroll bars. There's

02:15:39   an option to it. I think it defaults to when scrolling. So you only just like iOS, you only see scroll bars

02:15:47   when you scroll. Turn on always show scroll bars always scroll. But even when you do show scroll bars

02:15:54   always like for the last 10 years of macOS, they look so boring. They're so they do. They're so unhelpful and so

02:16:01   unfun. Nobody's sliding them for fun at all. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was like,

02:16:08   yeah, I mean, like when there's an interaction, like it's like there is a little bit of it that's

02:16:12   like wasting time. But I mean, there is like some element that like through repeated action, you also

02:16:17   you do understand what the thing does, right? Like by making the scroll bar like a little fun, you do

02:16:24   understand it a little bit better because you're using it a lot more. Right. And there was I remember

02:16:28   hearing this, like, I don't remember when I heard this, who I heard it from or whatever, but like

02:16:31   that things like solitaire, like on windows, which is like this quintessential, like original windows

02:16:39   app. Right. The purpose of it is like to get people comfortable with clicking and dragging.

02:16:43   Yeah. It's just, and I'm like, oh, that's so brilliant. That's so smart. Get something that

02:16:48   like just hooks people a little bit, but that, that teaches them how to drag and drop like an item,

02:16:53   because that is what they're going to be using a computer for. It's so smart. Yep. And I just think

02:16:59   it's, it's ultimately very sad. And I think fundamentally, that's what it really boils down

02:17:03   to is that Alan Dye and his team are full of designers who, even if you like the style of the

02:17:09   work they're producing and the way it looks and whether you think it looks cool, only think about

02:17:15   it that way. They do not think about user interface from that perspective of it doesn't really matter

02:17:21   exactly what it looks like. It's about the functionality and solving these problems.

02:17:25   Well, there should be a very clear indication of which tab is, is the active tab in a, yeah,

02:17:30   like that is the entire goal of tabs. Right. I mean, I think if you look at, I think, yeah. What

02:17:36   other purpose does it have? Like there's, there's so many of these elements like scattered around like

02:17:41   Mac OS and iOS now with liquid glass, where you're just like, this defeats the purpose of the actual

02:17:47   like object that this represents. Why would it, why would it look like this? Why would it behave like

02:17:52   this? There's no real reason. No, I like John. Okay. So I wanted to say this, but I don't, I don't know

02:17:57   how to say it, but I, in preparation for talking with you today, I installed like OS 26, iOS 26 on my

02:18:05   personal phone, like just like last night. And I was like, let's fucking go, man. Let's like,

02:18:11   let's give this a go because I've been living with it on my Mac since like beta one. Right. And it's

02:18:15   and, and I have to say almost, this is so weird. Almost all of my complaints are actually about

02:18:23   Mac OS and less about iOS. Oh, definitely. I think, I think that shows so much. I mean, I, and I'm the

02:18:30   opposite where I've been using it, not on my main iPhone, but my iPhone 15 from last year, which I'm

02:18:36   trying to use all the time in the house because it doesn't have a cell service, but I don't, if I

02:18:42   had, I just don't feel good enough about it. And there's a couple of apps that kind of crap out.

02:18:45   Oh yeah. I mean, million percent, like it's a bad idea to have your main phone, but I'm like,

02:18:49   what am I going to do? But when I look at it, it's so much more polished on iOS 26. It is. It's more

02:18:56   polished and it makes it like, I don't want to say it necessarily makes more sense, but it's definitely

02:19:00   more fluid. We get none of the liquid part of liquid glass on the Mac yet. No, ever. I don't

02:19:06   know where that is. They do things and I don't even know how it's possible, right? Because in a way it,

02:19:12   but it baffles me. For example, it always has. I understand that there are a hundred times more

02:19:17   iOS developers than Mac developers, probably more than a hundred times. And you know that when somebody

02:19:23   who's developed iOS apps for years makes their first Mac app, they're going to make what I consider

02:19:29   to be beginner mistakes. Yes. Oh God. Yes. It's just because they make, because they're not

02:19:36   familiar with the system. But the thing that gets me is they make certain mistakes where I don't

02:19:42   understand how it's possible because I know they at least use a Mac to make the iOS apps because the

02:19:47   only way to make an iOS app is to use a Mac and X code. And I know that X code gets blank, right?

02:19:53   Like X code. I don't know what the example, you know, there's a hundred of them, but whatever it is,

02:19:59   X code is a pretty good example of standard, good Apple Mac UI design. And I know that you've been

02:20:05   using it for years because you've been making iOS apps for years, but somehow you've been using X code

02:20:10   and not paying any attention whatsoever to the interface. Okay. So hear me out. I'm not saying

02:20:16   this is the cause, but I do wonder like over the years with the iOS application of a bunch of things

02:20:22   and with iOS becoming like a more dominant platform in everyone's hands, like there also have been

02:20:29   simultaneously like a decrease in Mac OS, like native apps that were good at solving like a particular

02:20:35   problem, like a really good tool. There still are great ones, but a lot of people use Safari as like

02:20:42   an interface for web apps that they use a lot more. I mean, some people's docs look like Finder Safari

02:20:49   trash and you're like, what to leave? I can't even imagine it, but that is how some people live.

02:20:54   Right. And cause they're, even their email is in a tab in Safari.

02:20:57   Yeah. I'm like over here, like using mail and some people are like, wait, what you can, there's a mail

02:21:01   app on iPhone. I'm like, Jesus. And it does make me wonder, I guess where I'm going with this is to

02:21:05   people just like that are making these apps, like for iOS that did come out of nowhere to make iOS

02:21:10   apps that never made Mac apps before. Are they the Safari web app people? And they're just not familiar

02:21:16   with like platform as a whole that they just like that for them. It's Finder Safari X code trash. Is

02:21:23   that the issue? I don't know, but it certainly seems like the people on Alan Dye's team who've defined

02:21:30   the Mac OS 26 interface are amongst those people. Like they must be using, they must be using Macs for

02:21:37   some of their job, but they're not paying attention to the why. For example, I know Snell and I talked

02:21:45   about this, but I'll mention it again, like the way that in Mac OS 26, that toolbar icons look like

02:21:51   they float above the windows and it makes no conceptual sense. It's not, oh, is it too clear? Can you read

02:21:59   it? Is it, do I like the glassy or whatever? It's the toolbar buttons by definition, by functionality

02:22:06   applied to the contents of the window. So they ought to, no matter what the application is of how you make

02:22:15   them look, it has to look like they're part of the window for it to make any sense. And if it looks like

02:22:21   they're above the windows, it makes no sense. There's no conceptual sense.

02:22:25   And I would say that, yeah, if you're going to have toolbar items that levitate like that

02:22:29   without even just a clear, without just a line, like it is unclear whether it's there, like a line

02:22:35   would add a lot that would make it so clear where the window was. But if the content area is blurring

02:22:42   with the navigation of the app, yeah, I don't know. How do you get to that point? How do you get to the

02:22:50   point where you disregard that stuff, where you think that stuff isn't important? I mean,

02:22:54   one of the things that I think any good designer, whatever kind of designer you are,

02:22:59   like the fundamental thing you have to do is like live life. You have to go out, you have to look

02:23:06   at things. This goes for artists too. You have to like see real life. You have to experience this stuff

02:23:11   to understand it, to then develop an opinion on it. Right? So if there exists designers who do not

02:23:19   use macOS, who do not live with it, who do not, they will never understand it. Right? And they will

02:23:24   consistently misinterpret it. And that goes for independent developers. That goes for like

02:23:29   developers that work at like big companies. That goes for the execs, Apple's big companies that they

02:23:32   themselves don't use like these products. That goes for like the people at Apple who maybe just don't

02:23:37   really use it that much other than to design apps. Right? And I'm like, how do you like the only way

02:23:44   that we get to this point, I think, is that those people just don't experience it anymore.

02:23:48   I, I guess it's like, you have to buy a pizza in a bad pizza box that's ruined, but in the middle,

02:23:56   you have to actually buy the pizza and have the bad pizza to want to be inspired to design a better

02:24:03   pizza box. And so there's a part of me, I mean, I think I said this, but like, okay, so I know that

02:24:08   I'm picking on Alan Dalawa. Like I know I am doing that, but he is the person that's the VP in charge of

02:24:13   this whole thing. And took it on as he introduced it. He's the face of it. Like whether or not like

02:24:18   he's directly responsible for everything is like, just, it doesn't matter. But like, but like, I want

02:24:23   to see him do basic things on Mac OS. I want to see him execute certain tasks that are like, that should

02:24:31   be easy. I want to see him do it. I want to see him like do it on, on iOS. I want to see him close a

02:24:36   Safari tab. Why is it more difficult now than it's ever been? Like, I want to see the process of like him

02:24:43   using it and like, then go back to older iOS or older Mac OS. And I don't know, I wanted to like

02:24:49   experience that stuff. So maybe he understands it or someone on that team. I don't know.

02:24:53   I had a briefing with Alan Dye with a couple other members of the media, like second or third year of

02:24:59   Apple watch. And I, he was talking about how great it was five of us and him. And I remember where it was,

02:25:10   it was in a, like a yoga studio in the fitness center at Apple park. So I guess it might've been

02:25:15   later than the second or third year because the Apple park was open. And I, I had a question cause

02:25:21   I think they tweaked it in that version of the new version of watch OS, but about the way that they

02:25:26   were rendering. When you look at an analog face with the hour hand and minute hand in the second hand

02:25:32   on Apple watch that they, there's a Z axis, even though watch OS has always been largely flat it and

02:25:41   all watch. I've never seen any watch, even like a $7 discount quartz watch that you'd buy in a discount

02:25:48   store. Every physical watch with analog hands, the hands are stacked in the same order where the hour

02:25:55   hand is on the bottom. The minute hand is on top of the hour hand. And if there's a second hand,

02:26:00   it's on top of the minute hand so that the hours, minutes, seconds going forward and Apple watch

02:26:08   renders, the hands always has in the same Z axis ordered. It's not perfectly flat. And they render a

02:26:14   sort of shadow around things so that you could see like when the minute hand is slightly overhanded,

02:26:21   like it's not quite the time where the minute hand perfectly overlaps the hour hand. It's like a minute

02:26:28   beforehand. There's a little bit of a shadow so you can tell them apart. And I had a question about the light

02:26:33   source for the shadow. And I was like, oh, finally, I get to ask Alan Dye about this. And he was like, oh, we render a

02:26:39   shadow. And I was like, oh, you never even looked. I was like, oh, I just instantly realized you'd never really even

02:26:45   looked at it that closely. Like somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn't. And I was like, oh, that's your job is what

02:26:53   you do. I just remember thinking at that very moment, it just suddenly came to me, oh, he doesn't do what I thought he did.

02:27:00   And so this is like this thing, I think maybe this must have happened after Steve died. And all the

02:27:08   execs like took on new responsibilities of what Steve used to do, right? Steve did used to approve

02:27:13   like all these individual things. We were talking about that earlier, right? Who does that now? I

02:27:18   don't know. It's not Tim. And it's not Federighi either. I don't know. Is it Alan Dye? I don't know.

02:27:23   Does Alan Dye look at some of this stuff? Sure. But who is it? And where is this coming from?

02:27:28   I don't know. And like, where does the direction come from? I don't know. Like the fact that we

02:27:33   actually don't know who that person is when it was very obviously Steve before, right? I mean,

02:27:39   like, why, why don't we know? I don't know either, but it touches upon, it was a talk I gave a couple

02:27:45   times, at least twice. I gave it at Macworld Expo, I think once. And it's, I think, Deconstruct down in

02:27:53   New Zealand, but maybe it was, I don't know, but over in Ireland, but I think it was Deconstruct in

02:27:59   New Zealand, like around 2010, that I called the auteur theory of design, which was using the French

02:28:06   use this term auteur, the author of a film to say that the director of a movie is the author of the

02:28:15   film. And that there is sort of traditionally, like the author of a novel is very clear. It's one person

02:28:20   who sits down and types out a novel. And sure, there's editors at the publisher who help polish

02:28:25   the manuscript. But nobody disputes that the author of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain, right? But there

02:28:33   wasn't this clear idea that the director of a movie is the one who gets a film by Steven Spielberg until

02:28:42   later, you know, because, well, there is a screenplay that somebody wrote like a novel, and that they did the

02:28:49   author of the screenplay, or authors, if it's a collaboration, wrote that. And every inch of the

02:28:56   footage of film was shot by a cinematographer with their hands on the camera. There are some directors

02:29:02   like Stanley Kubrick, who did most or a lot of the photography themselves. There's a lot of film

02:29:06   directors who've never touched the camera, right? And there's a film editor who takes the footage and

02:29:12   is responsible for cutting it into mise en scene. But that what and the actors are the ones who were there

02:29:18   speaking the lines and doing the action. And so what is the director? The director is the person who whose taste

02:29:25   the film rises to the performances of the actors, the look of the cinematography, the story and the dialogue

02:29:32   told in the screenplay, the way that it feels when it's edited together and the use of music and all of that.

02:29:40   The director, that is a breakthrough. And that software is like that, too. And that my thesis, and I think it's I still think it's

02:29:47   true, I should really want to read. I don't know if I'm gonna do a talk because I don't talk at conferences

02:29:51   anymore. But maybe it'll be a blog post or something. But to revisit that and look at the intervening years. But that my

02:29:57   conclusion was that the level of quality of the work of a company, whether it's hardware or software or something in

02:30:04   between eventually rises or falls to the level of taste of the person who's ultimately in charge of it and gets to say yes or no.

02:30:14   And I think we're seeing Apple's UI design, not the styling, which is a separate issue, but the quality of the semantic design of the user

02:30:27   interface sort of fall apart. Because like you said, I don't know that there is person, it's like trying to make a

02:30:34   movie without a director, right, right, that there is a screenplay, and there might be a very good person

02:30:39   writing the screenplay. And it's the most talented cinematographer is behind the camera. And there's a good film

02:30:44   editor, but there's no person whose role is director.

02:30:48   And so this, this is exactly right. Like this, I do believe this is all the same with software, I think there's a

02:30:57   bunch of people working on this that like, I think all of these people can collectively say,

02:31:02   this is their app, or this is their OS that they worked on that day that they are the author. I think

02:31:07   everyone isn't everyone who works on this stuff is entitled to say that they that they made it like

02:31:11   unequivocally. But there has to be right, like there's this person that like everyone's meeting

02:31:16   that vision. And I've used the word vision to describe this thing like directorial stuff,

02:31:20   there is someone's vision that they have. And like, when it meets that, that's when we're shipping.

02:31:24   And I think it was so clearly Steve, while Steve was there, like that was the person who that was,

02:31:31   because he would go on stage and talk about things in a way that like had a level of familiarity with

02:31:36   like, I don't just know this, because I like my team worked on it. I know it because I use it every

02:31:42   day. There was this whole thing where it was very clear, but like, I'm not knocking on Tim,

02:31:47   like Tim Cook is like a good CEO. But like, but like, I don't think that he's the person that like making

02:31:53   these decisions. It's not him that's like that he's not the tastemaker at the company. And so and I think

02:31:59   maybe like hardware wise, like the tastemaker was like Johnny I for a long time. And I think in the

02:32:05   collaboration with Steve, he defined what that was. I think that the installation of Alan Dye as the, you know,

02:32:12   UI person at the time made him basically the tastemaker. Like you said, we don't know who it

02:32:17   really is. But he's the person that's on the face of it. He's the person with the title, like, for all

02:32:21   intents and purposes, he's he's the guy. Right. But I guess my question that I've had is, why does he have

02:32:29   this job? Why is he the person that does it? Because I think you and I like, even if you don't think like

02:32:35   Wes Anderson makes the best movies, I think we have to agree, like, he is the definition of that

02:32:39   author, like he is million percent that kind of person, right? So like, you have this clear vision,

02:32:45   everyone is in service of that. And you see it in the people that like are the cinematographers,

02:32:50   you see it in the people that are the actors that he chooses, everyone there is like fully committed to

02:32:55   the vision. And I think that was true. When Steve was there that like everyone and I've talked with

02:33:00   like friends at Apple, like that have been there that used to work there people I used to work with,

02:33:05   everyone agrees about this. Everyone was happy to let go of like their own personal like idea of how

02:33:14   things should be in service of the vision that Steve generally had. Yes, we were still making all

02:33:19   these individual decisions. Yes, we were still deciding how but we were all like in the back of our

02:33:24   minds is like, what is the thing that we are guiding towards? And it was always like toward the vision

02:33:28   that Steve had. So like the thing? Yeah, go ahead. Well, there's the type of clothing you like to

02:33:34   wear. And I, you know, I like very boring clothes and lots of grays and basic colors and navy blue is

02:33:40   flashy for me. But if I were picking the clothes for a character in a Wes Anderson movie, I know what I'm

02:33:46   supposed to be. You know what that's supposed to be. You wouldn't necessarily be the best person to

02:33:51   fit the wardrobe. But like, but like you under but you but the person who does do wardrobe for Wes

02:33:56   know that probably doesn't themselves dress like a when Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson, right, but they pick

02:34:02   clothes for a Wes Anderson character, right? And they're happy to do it. Yeah, because they're happy to do it

02:34:07   because yes, we we've just got like very few like real auteurs like who have like vision in the world in a

02:34:15   bunch of them exist in film, a bunch of them exist in other mediums, where it is a collaborative thing that they

02:34:20   work on. I mean, a lot of artists are like painting and they're the only people they don't have to have other people

02:34:25   working to that vision, right? But software is the thing where it's like, we do need someone to have

02:34:32   good taste, good vision that everyone collectively trusts. It can't just be for Apple, because because

02:34:40   that team develops for the entire platform. They're developing for every developer that like is going

02:34:46   to be designing things. They're designing it to the standards that this team develops. So everyone that is

02:34:52   like making apps, they're like making like liquid glass UI, they're all doing this stuff. And it's

02:34:56   like, everyone collectively is placing an immense amount of trust in that person, whoever that is,

02:35:03   that team to develop the best things. And I just think like, some of these people who are developing

02:35:07   apps have been developing like macOS and iOS apps for longer than those people have, and maybe have a

02:35:13   idea for what their app is supposed to look like. I'm not saying abandon liquid glass. I'm not saying

02:35:18   not put it in there. But like, maybe you have a good idea about what it's supposed to be.

02:35:25   I really think it's fascinating that literally aqua and Steve Jobs's introduction of it was we're

02:35:31   calling it aqua because it's liquid, that there is a sort of full circle to this. And going with the

02:35:39   Wes Anderson art director, right? What colors are you going to suggest for the interior of an apartment

02:35:45   that the scene is set in? Well, there's a lot of colors Wes Anderson uses in his movies,

02:35:51   but they're within a very narrow palette of colors. You're not going to pick most colors.

02:35:55   And when you're designing the shot, you're making sure it's symmetrical. There's a bunch of like

02:36:00   very quintessential characteristics, right? Yeah. And maybe you don't, maybe you as a cinematographer

02:36:05   like weird Dutch angles and stuff too. You like a different situation. But you know what you're

02:36:10   doing for this system. And aqua was an extraordinarily opinionated UI system. And it wasn't really to my

02:36:19   taste personally. Right. It was a little too childish or maybe childish isn't right, but

02:36:25   Windows XP was childish. But then yes, yeah, right. And I turned my-

02:36:28   But it was opinionated. It had an idea.

02:36:30   In those early years, I used the graphite option instead of the red, yellow, green button and blues.

02:36:35   You're like, I don't want this for children. I'm trying to be a professional.

02:36:39   I did. I liked the graphite though. And I also think that the graphite was not spitefully designed.

02:36:46   I think that they took it, they made it look as good as they could.

02:36:50   No, I think so too. John, I am unsurprised and I think everyone else would be unsurprised to know

02:36:53   that you prefer graphite because your website is also that color because the Yankees color is

02:36:57   similar to that. You like this color gray, John. Like you just do.

02:37:02   At some point though, in the flattening era, I switched to the full color, red, yellow, green.

02:37:08   Uh-huh, uh-huh.

02:37:09   Because, because the graphite option in Mac OS X at some point in the last 10 plus years, 10-ish years,

02:37:15   became to me spitefully designed. Like, okay, sure, you lose red, yellow.

02:37:19   They had it because they feel like they had to have it.

02:37:21   Yeah. And it made everything look disabled instead of when you lose, you know.

02:37:25   Well, that goes, like when we were talking about like the tools available on the system to design

02:37:29   like different elements to communicate what those things are supposed to be. Like that thing you said

02:37:34   about going from like black and white checkerboard pixels to being gray. Like when we had more tool

02:37:39   to design buttons, you could design a button that looked active, disabled. You could design one that

02:37:43   looked inactive. It was an inactive, inactive, disabled. You could have this entire matrix of all of the

02:37:49   different states of a button and it was all super clear. When we reduce it down to just color,

02:37:55   it's like, it's just a rounded shape and it's got like a color or not a color, then it's, man,

02:38:01   that is so much harder to distinguish. And it does make it so that graphite, like as a, as a design

02:38:06   choice, then, well, then what's the difference between this and this button? It's, I don't know.

02:38:09   Yeah. Do we, Apple willfully took away things like depth from the toolkit of visual language that

02:38:17   could be used. But the thing is with Aqua in hindsight, I have a much, I feel much more affinity

02:38:23   for it in hindsight than I did extemporaneously at the time because I took for granted that it would

02:38:28   be a cohesive system overall. I, that was just table stakes for me. So of course it was a very cohesive

02:38:36   system of design. And now that, that Apple's UI design language is unsystematic in so many ways.

02:38:45   Yeah. Yeah. I look back at that and I think, well, at least Aqua was a wholly consistent within itself

02:38:52   system. Yeah. And even if you were the developer, let's say like Omnigroup who makes

02:38:58   pro apps like productivity apps for people who've outgrown things like text edit and that you need

02:39:07   something a little more serious. I think Aqua was a little too playful for Omni's brand, but Omni did

02:39:13   the right thing by saying, okay, but if this is the system design, we're going to embrace it

02:39:19   wholeheartedly and go all in on it, even if it's not really the right fit for our brand. And I think

02:39:24   that's why starting with tiger and into the lion and or leopard and snow leopard era, that 2004 to 2011

02:39:34   era, why it was such a golden age was that the playful consumer apps like iTunes could still be

02:39:42   playful and consumery, but the design language had evolved into a slightly more serious way where

02:39:50   serious pro apps could look even more serious and proie, right? Like I think that's final, the early

02:39:57   versions of final cut pro are some of the best looking pure UI design I've ever seen. And those

02:40:04   early versions of iMovie looked less pro, but they also looked sort of like, Hey, this is not like a

02:40:13   super casual app. Even if you're using iMovie to make your home movies, you're doing something kind of

02:40:19   serious, right? You're hooking up a firewire camera and you're importing all this video and you're

02:40:23   editing video. You're taking, you're, you're becoming a video editor. So it looked a little

02:40:28   more serious than, I don't know, the calculator app or something. I don't know, but the language of that

02:40:34   era of Apple design encompassed that range that Steve Jobs set out to cover from novice.

02:40:42   I think, yep, yep. I think that the style, the style of Aqua though was so adaptable and now it's

02:40:48   what made it work. And like those other products that you're talking about, those like productivity

02:40:52   tools or pro apps, they didn't ignore Aqua. They acknowledged Aqua. They understood what it was

02:40:58   trying to do. They adapted it to their product. Aperture was like entirely graphite. The UI was

02:41:05   graphite. The buttons were graphite. The window was graphite, right? I mean, there's some of those

02:41:11   things where it's like these, these kinds of apps, like even GarageBand was super playful, right? Now

02:41:16   like in comparison to like these other apps, GarageBand had like wood on the side of the, but it was just,

02:41:22   but it was like, but it like took away almost no screen real estate. Nobody cares. Like it's no big

02:41:27   deal, but it's, but it puts you in, it puts you in a mood. It puts, it puts a visual clarity on what

02:41:31   this app is versus what this other app is. But at no point that it looked like it was not part of the

02:41:36   same system. And I think it's because there was like a, there was a visual richness to Aqua that

02:41:43   was like, okay, so the system looks like this. So we, even if we have buttons that are rich Corinthian

02:41:49   leather, even if we have buttons that are wood, right? Even if we have these other materials,

02:41:53   they need to match this level of quality, right? Of this visual quality that this has. And it's like

02:41:59   this thing that everyone is working on this movie, right? Everyone sees what the direction is and

02:42:04   everyone's like, okay, so in the Aqua cinematic universe, there's actually more room for than

02:42:08   just Aqua, right? And that was true on iOS too, right? I mean, like early iOS stuff, like when it

02:42:15   was iPhone OS, right? iPhone OS had all of these different kinds of material qualities to it where

02:42:21   like any app could do whatever it wanted, especially because it was taking up the full screen at the

02:42:26   time, right? I mean, like you could do anything and it was not incongruous with the system, but

02:42:30   like as long as you acknowledged like what the system was trying to do, then you could play with

02:42:34   it a little bit. Can you do that with liquid glass? Because it feels to me that if it doesn't look

02:42:41   like liquid glass, then it looks wrong on the platform, right? There's no alternative quality.

02:42:46   There's no alternative material to use. It's not like you can suddenly use paper, but make it looks

02:42:51   like it belongs in the liquid glass cinematic universe. And that's why I'm so disappointed overall

02:42:56   with the big new UI. Like when it was, we didn't even know what it was supposed to look like, but

02:43:00   there were rumors for the last year that Apple's doing a big platforms spanning UI redesign and that

02:43:08   it's going to add some kind of texture and glass and something. And I was so hopeful that it would bring

02:43:15   back some of that era. Yeah. Some of that tactical quality, some of that richness. Yeah. And just the

02:43:23   fucking fun, right? Like the first voice recorder app that looked like an exquisitely rendered reel

02:43:30   to reel tape machine. Because what are you doing when you're recording a voice memo or a memo? Well,

02:43:37   the app, the phone just sits on a fucking table while you talk. You hit a record button and you're like,

02:43:44   I'm going to record this conversation, this meeting, and it's just sitting there on the table. And so

02:43:49   what's shown on screen? Well, at that point, at that point, because you know that you don't need

02:43:55   that screen in that moment, that's like the open door to like ornamentation and fun and silly.

02:44:00   Right. Yeah. That old voice recorded, the original voice recorder interface made me want to make voice

02:44:06   memos. It just made me want to use it to hit. You're talking, you're talking about the podcast app,

02:44:11   but the voice, the voice recorder had the VU meter, right? Oh, that's right. It was like,

02:44:15   I have the yellow screen with all the VU interface. Yes. But it made me want to listen to podcasts.

02:44:20   Right. Right. And it's, and it was so silly because it's like, you could swipe away the album art of the

02:44:24   whole thing and see the reel to reel actually working. And it was like, yeah, it's super cool. And it's

02:44:29   super fun. And it's, you know, what I think is a great example of this stuff is like,

02:44:33   is like iBooks, like the original iBooks on iPad was like, it was like trying to be a physical book,

02:44:40   which like is a little silly. Like when you think about it, but like, but like the page actually

02:44:45   moving with your finger, the UI existing on the page, you understood it. Like the skeuomorphism of

02:44:52   this made it fun. In addition to being like helpful thing for you to understand what it is that you're

02:44:57   looking at. Right. And when it was cool looking to turn pages, it made you want to read the book

02:45:02   and turn the pages. Right. Yeah. I really, I really think so. Yeah. And I do think I do. I've always

02:45:07   thought one of the worst. So most canards and idioms are, there's a lot of truth to them. I think one of

02:45:15   the worst is that you can't judge a book by the cover because I judge all books by the cover.

02:45:19   Yeah. That's what we're all doing. Yeah. And I'm not saying that there are, can't be a great book

02:45:24   with a bad cover and there can't be, there aren't books with very good covers that are bad books,

02:45:29   but there is a correlation between the quality of cover design and the quality of books.

02:45:33   It's like the chair that you put into it overall. It's not just the content of it. If you know that

02:45:40   the content is good, you better bet like you want that cover to be representative of the quality that

02:45:46   you put inside the book. And the most important thing in a book is the quality of the prose and the

02:45:51   meaning of it itself, of course, but a good book on printed on good paper with good typesetting in a

02:45:59   good typeface makes me want to read it even more. Yeah. And a book in a bad typeface printed on cheap

02:46:06   paper makes me want to read it less. So here's, so here's my, my, and the same is true for user

02:46:13   interfaces. Right. And so here's my question with that is if everyone skates toward this liquid glass

02:46:17   puck and everyone's app starts to look like this, we're all deciding that we're okay with our apps

02:46:24   looking like they're what Apple says they should look like. And it kind of removes a bunch of the

02:46:30   freedom, the capability that we once had to design apps. We're like relinquishing this control,

02:46:36   right. Of how this is supposed to look. And in doing so, all, every app like now looks the same,

02:46:42   right. Like they all look like they have the same like fundamental controls. If you're a third

02:46:47   party developer, do you do that? I've heard people talk about not implementing liquid glass,

02:46:52   which also seems like a bad idea. I don't know the right solution here because we're kind of in like

02:46:56   between two really tough situations. Like you can play it fun and different and not liquid glass,

02:47:03   but you really just like making it more difficult for yourself. But then again,

02:47:07   all the old apps that were not using Aqua that were using custom interfaces, we were all doing

02:47:12   the same thing then. We were like, well, by not using a real button, that means we have to make

02:47:16   our own states. We have to make all of the states and we have to design our own buttons. And it was

02:47:20   more difficult to do than just using stock UI. Right. Because you, there's all sorts of edge,

02:47:26   edge cases, edge cases that the stock UI handles that are hard to get right.

02:47:32   Yeah. And this is the thing, this is, I mean, of course, I mean, we, we, we, we could talk about

02:47:36   this part forever, but non-native apps on Mac OS that don't actually behave like they're native

02:47:42   apps. Even though you understand the thing, it's like for ages, like discord, like just kind of an

02:47:48   awful app all around. It's just like, I would use discord. And it's like, if you hover over the

02:47:52   window control, they didn't have that X minus like plus thing. And you're like, but that's what it's

02:47:58   supposed to be. So don't you notice that? How do you make the app without noticing?

02:48:03   That's what I was like. Yeah. And so when making apps, I feel like using what the system provides

02:48:08   for free is always, always quote, quote, a sound idea because you get inherited all of these decisions.

02:48:15   Right. But when you no longer trust that the decisions are being made in good taste, in good

02:48:21   conscience, like in, if you don't believe in it anymore, what do you do? And I think the lack of

02:48:28   material quality is like a real bummer. Like the fact that no one can make a button look like anything

02:48:33   else other than glass. Like what if your app just doesn't like jive with that? What if it's just not

02:48:39   what that app is supposed to look like? I keep wondering what does Final Cut Pro look like in this

02:48:44   world? I like, cause we talked about how that would acknowledge like the system and then design

02:48:49   something differently. I don't know. We haven't even talked about app icons, John.

02:48:53   We are running out of time though.

02:48:56   I just like the material stuff. It's like, how are we going to communicate everything with glass?

02:49:02   Why is like, why is it an eyedropper rubber part? Why is it glass? Why is it now glass? That

02:49:09   doesn't make any sense. Even, even though the other part of the eyedropper is supposed to be glass.

02:49:15   Yeah. It doesn't even look like glass in that context anymore. It doesn't look like it's supposed

02:49:20   to. Like developers are giving up this sort of control to Apple to decide what their apps are

02:49:25   supposed to look like. And I wonder on a brand level, so many companies are doing the same thing.

02:49:30   They're going to have to start looking at their apps being like, do we want to pivot our brand to

02:49:35   looking like this now? If you're black and Decker, do you want your app to look like it's

02:49:40   this fragile? You know, like that sort of element? I don't know. That doesn't make any sense to me.

02:49:44   You know, we were talking about like the tone of how Apple's talking about this stuff. And I think

02:49:48   it's an interesting difference because Steve used to be like, this is done just because it's cool.

02:49:52   Whereas like now it's, this is glass and yeah, maybe it is cool. But if every app starts using it as

02:49:59   their like app icons as their, as their like primary branding element, like they're, Apple's making

02:50:05   that decision for people. You know how they do this with like app icons? They're like, we're, this, this

02:50:11   developer did not update for the liquid glass aesthetic. However, we did it for you. Yeah. And it's actually

02:50:17   what ego does that have? Like it is implicated. Suddenly you're making decisions for these other

02:50:22   companies of what their logo should look like. What can you imagine other companies doing this for

02:50:28   Apple? No, no, no. We're going to make the Apple logo like this appearance. What? So I kind of feel

02:50:36   that way about the option to make clear icons, right? Yes. That same. Exactly. It's like the developer

02:50:42   didn't choose that. The designer didn't design. I mean, like we can design for it in hopes of it,

02:50:46   I totally get the light mode, dark mode and okay. Now we're going to have and recommend dark mode

02:50:52   icons, but the clear mode, like if the color is essential to your brand, it's right. It's suddenly

02:51:00   it just is, it's not like they're saying everyone should have an identifiable glitch. And I think

02:51:06   that's what I do all day, John. I draw iPhones for a living, right? I don't know how to, I don't think

02:51:12   every app can fit that model, right? It works for Apple's own apps. They can make the phone app,

02:51:17   just the fucking telephone glyph. Okay. But not everyone can make just the telephone glyph for

02:51:21   their own VoIP app. You have to make it distinct from Apple's. So you're going to have to decide not

02:51:27   just a different glyph, but a different metaphor or a different visual style. And it's, if you're also

02:51:31   limited by material, it's like the thing we were talking about. It's like, we have all these tools now

02:51:36   with the visual interface. We don't have to do just the black and white checkerboard anymore,

02:51:40   but now we're like, but now you have to do glass. And it's like, for app icons, I just don't see how

02:51:45   that makes sense. I don't either. And I, as a proprietor of a company like Parakeet that makes

02:51:52   app icons all the time, I'm just like, will all of our app icons just look like glass now?

02:51:56   I don't know. When someone comes to my entire portfolio just looks like glass now.

02:52:00   Do you think there's going to, when this ships in the fall and the updates come out and everybody's

02:52:06   whatever version 26.1 that Apple decides, okay, this is good to push to everybody. And remember,

02:52:12   26.0 in mid-September will go to everybody who gets an iPhone 17 on day one, right? You don't have an

02:52:19   option. So there will be millions of people who get this in September. Do you think there's going to be

02:52:25   a backlash? Is it going to be...

02:52:28   Well, they already put out public betas to the people who are at least...

02:52:31   Yeah, but there's...

02:52:32   No, I'm not saying it's the same. I'm saying like, it's another level, right, to get there. And it's

02:52:36   like, I do... I think some people won't notice. I'm going to be honest.

02:52:40   Of course, some people won't.

02:52:42   Some people don't notice.

02:52:42   There's going to be tons of people that won't notice a difference or that will, but they won't

02:52:45   be able to put their fingers on it. Like, I get that. There's people that don't use their

02:52:49   phone that much or that use it a lot, but don't look at that stuff. I get it.

02:52:53   I think there will be people who will are using the music app and won't understand why

02:52:58   they made the decisions that they did, right? I think they will be like, wait, where did

02:53:01   this go? We saw this happen with Photos. When they launched Photos last year, everyone

02:53:05   was so confused about it. Like, you got rid of the tab bar so you could put all this long

02:53:10   list of collections. I think there will be backlash, but I don't think anyone's going

02:53:14   to know. It's like this thing. I think, you know, like you brought up Todd Vaziri before.

02:53:19   Like he says this about, you know, when people say it's bad CGI, is it really that it's bad

02:53:24   CGI or is it just that like something else in the movie like was bad and you're directing

02:53:29   all of your attention on the visual thing you can see, right? If that same thing applies,

02:53:34   people might feel uncomfortable with this new version of the OS. They might look at it and

02:53:38   be like, it's the visual material. God damn it. That glass, it looks bad. And it's like,

02:53:42   maybe it's not that. Maybe it's the UI underlying the thing, but they just don't have the vocabulary

02:53:47   to know that that's what that is. They'll focus on the fact that in music,

02:53:51   I can't read the song that's playing. Right. And I think a lot of people already have been

02:53:55   doing that. And so I think that's indicative of how it will go publicly. But like, I think

02:53:59   like we've been talking about, I think the real issue is UI stuff. And I think especially UI stuff

02:54:05   on Mac OS. I don't know if Mac OS users, the diehard Mac OS users will really care. They will find

02:54:11   this like deeply upsetting, but like the people who casually use any of this stuff, they probably

02:54:15   won't even notice. Yeah. That's why it makes it so hard to predict whether there's going to be a

02:54:20   backlash. I'm surprised. I was very surprised. Personally, I use the photos app a lot. I mean,

02:54:24   photos is my main photo store and I take a lot of pictures and I don't love all the changes from last

02:54:29   year's photos, but I didn't feel, and I'm just literally, literally my job is to complain about

02:54:34   Apple UI and I didn't find photos app that bad. But I kind of grew over the year. I started trying to

02:54:42   listen to what people were saying. And like TikTok videos were very poor form. One minute of vertical

02:54:47   video was a very poor, but I eventually got it is that people did use the tab bar and they did want

02:54:54   the main tab to just show their photos. And now it didn't. And that they had all the stuff at the

02:54:59   bottom that they didn't want when they just wanted their photos. And I'd say, Oh yeah, that is kind of

02:55:04   a big change. And it was more of a backlash. So I, I, I kind of hope, I mean, I kind of hope that

02:55:11   there's like photos last year's photos times 10 knee jerk reaction to this and that it leads to change.

02:55:20   Am I saying, I think Alan Dye should be fired. I don't know. I don't know, but maybe, or maybe,

02:55:27   you know, again, like maybe, I don't know who's in charge. Maybe, I don't know. But maybe instead

02:55:32   of firing him, they start selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores and Alan Dye can run that

02:55:39   and do the graphic design on the boxes. Do the menus. I think Alan Dye could kill that with his Levi's

02:55:49   experience, right? I think it's the Kate Spade that'll really seal the deal. Like John, if there

02:55:56   is all of this, if there is a theoretical backlash, you know how Apple's doing this thing now where

02:56:01   like actually on iOS now, they're doing it with mail. They're doing it with photos, I think. And on

02:56:07   phone, they definitely did. They were like, here, try out this alternate UI. I don't know if you've

02:56:12   noticed this, but you open the phone app and it's like, we have this new unified UI. We put voicemails

02:56:16   and memos and whatever. And they do with mail. They're doing, they basically did that with all

02:56:21   of photos. And that's what, like, it was just forcibly, right? But they're doing this thing

02:56:24   where they're like, hey, you can try this other thing or go back to the old way or whatever.

02:56:28   And I, I think this is a very odd place for them to be in where they're going to start offering like

02:56:33   alternate UI for like basically every app. And you don't have to go to settings to do it into the app and

02:56:40   then scroll down and find it. It's right there in the upper right corner of the phone app in,

02:56:44   in what I'm guessing is called the filter button. It's like an upside down three line. Yeah. Yeah.

02:56:50   But you tap it and right at the top permanently, it doesn't go away is a big toggle between unified

02:56:55   and classic. Right. And it's like, how long are they going to put this up? And it's just like,

02:56:59   how long are they going to have that as an option? How long are they going to put it there? I don't

02:57:03   know, but they've been doing this with more and more apps. And it's like, maybe that allows people to

02:57:07   have the app that they want. I mean, I'm all for like general app customization. I feel like I got

02:57:12   to say that, but, but, but the original iPhone had the more tab and you could put whatever tab you

02:57:18   wanted in the tab bar. For some reason, we let go of this perfect solution for all of these problems.

02:57:25   If you had to make your own tab bar for literally every app, then no one would have been complaining

02:57:29   about the photos app because you could put whatever you wanted there. The issue wasn't that,

02:57:33   I can have pinned collections. The issue was like, Hey, actually I use the max view a lot.

02:57:37   Why can't that be a tab bar item? I just want quick access to it. That's all I'm asking. And I think

02:57:43   Apple's like fake solution to this is, Hey, have you considered making a shortcut for that? You can make

02:57:48   a shortcut to do anything. I'm like, yeah, technically I know, but that's a weird backdoor thing that requires

02:57:53   like a significant knowledge of like how to do this. You actually have to build UI for people

02:57:58   to like just quickly access this stuff. You could, it's one of my favorite features in app kit. It is

02:58:04   still there. It's still there in all good Mac apps, but you go to usually in the view menu, edit toolbar or

02:58:11   edit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the view menu, customized toolbar and it's a standard feature of

02:58:19   app kit. And it opens up a standard menu where you have a bunch of toolbar buttons and you can create a

02:58:26   minimal interface by taking out standard toolbar buttons. You can reorder them to put the ones

02:58:32   that it's sort of like the difference. I often use this analogy. It's the difference between designing

02:58:37   plastic toys through injection molding, where you're creating metal dyes and pouring hot plastic into a

02:58:44   metal dye to create your own custom toy or snapping together Lego bricks and building your own toys. And yes,

02:58:51   your Lego creations are not as refined as a custom toy that Hasbro is selling shrink wrapped in and bubble

02:58:59   packaged in a toy store, but it's yours, right? And you get to do it the way you want. And the toolbar in

02:59:07   app kit is like that. It's like a little bit of design your own interface for the, for these apps and the

02:59:13   original first few versions of iOS or iPhone OS, as you said, it was called at the time kind of had that

02:59:19   thinking with tab bars at the bottom with that more button, right? Yes. Where it's like, oh, if you use

02:59:25   different features in music, you can put them in the toolbar and put the hide the ones you use less

02:59:31   seldomly in the more button. Yeah. And Apple's just moved away from that. And you know, it's still there in

02:59:36   app kit, but Apple's making apps for the Mac that aren't app kit that don't have toolbars and don't

02:59:41   have any toolbar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all moving away from that. And it's, well, I think you

02:59:46   can, you can have that feature that customized toolbar if you have a good menu bar system, right? You still

02:59:51   need to be able to access all of the features of the app. And so maybe that part of the issue is that

02:59:56   like, if you no longer have the actual item represented anywhere else, then you can't just tuck it away

03:00:02   somewhere, right? You need to be able to make sure that you have it. So it's, it's kind of lazy when

03:00:06   an app doesn't have that customized toolbar feature, right? I think like, yeah, the thinking was, I think

03:00:13   very clearly that the people who add Apple and next before them who kind of came up with the customized

03:00:18   toolbar thing, I think, but that the professional UI designers at the company that tries to hold itself

03:00:25   as the best company for UI design overall since the dawn of graphical user interface computing want to

03:00:34   spread the enthusiasm for UI design that they have to users to let users customize their design within

03:00:43   constraints in a sensible way. Because when you understand how the system works and you know what

03:00:48   you want from the tools that you're using, you might want to change them. And we're going to give you

03:00:55   the power to do it in a easily understood, easily accessible, consistent way across applications.

03:01:00   Go to the view menu, go down to customize. That's why they gave you the tinted icons, John.

03:01:05   Right. You can personalize your own experience. I think they're taking the wrong, the wrong lesson.

03:01:10   I think they're taking the wrong lessons where they're letting you, they're kind of taking the

03:01:13   wrong lesson from that Steve Jobs quote that's off-cited and is a very good one that people make the

03:01:19   mistake of thinking design is only how it looks, but it's not only what design is. Design is how it

03:01:25   works. And it's really putting into the hands of users only the power to tweak how it looks,

03:01:30   which is cool. And if people really want clear icons on their home screen, more power to them.

03:01:35   And, but it's only giving them the customization for how it looks and not how it works. And the only

03:01:42   place where I see that spirit in Apple in recent years, and I do love it and think it shows that

03:01:48   it's alive and well at one place is the lock screen for iPhone and iPad.

03:01:53   Yeah. Yeah. They really let you put like widgets and like buttons and they're like, Hey, you know

03:01:57   what? We know that you want quick access to these things.

03:02:00   And the widgets have grown in the ability to be interactive in with new APIs. And so that's what

03:02:06   gives me hope. I don't think all hope is lost. I think that the flame is still burning there and

03:02:11   the lock screen and, and in iOS 26, it only gets better. I think it's, it both looks cool the way

03:02:18   that the time stretches. I think that just looks cool for the sake of being cool. I also think it's

03:02:23   more legible at a distance. It's one of the things I really miss from iOS 26. When I go back to my

03:02:28   daily phone on iOS 18, I'm like, Oh, the time looks stupid, all short and squat like that. But also it's

03:02:34   more functional where you were able to put the widget buttons in more places with more flexibility

03:02:38   and they can do more things. And that's the spirit of the toolbar and app kit, but it's only on the

03:02:44   lock screen, which to kind of take this full circle was the thing that was pointless in the original

03:02:49   iPhone. Yeah. It was like, it was like, actually don't interact with this, right? It's like, this is

03:02:54   the non-interactable. You can modify as a user, tweak the functionality of the lock screen more than

03:03:00   you can tweak the functionality of the actual system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have good news

03:03:06   for you, Louie. Yeah. We hit, we hit three hours. Yes. You did it. Oh, that's all I ever wanted,

03:03:12   John. I just love being among the group of what? The dozen people. I don't know. I'll make a list

03:03:17   of how many it is, but that's, that is, that is, this is the limits of, of, of time and space. We're

03:03:23   going to run out of recording space. Yeah. This was a lot of fun. Well, the reel-to-reel is running out.

03:03:28   Yes. The reel-to-reel is running out in my interface here. Louie Mantia, people can find,

03:03:33   oh, we didn't even mention Parakeet, right? Where you do consulting work designed by hire.

03:03:38   Make like funds and have like funds. Yeah.

03:03:40   And what's the URL for Parakeet? That's basically all I do.

03:03:43   Is Parakeet.co. That's it.

03:03:46   .co. They can, people can go there.

03:03:49   Yeah.

03:03:49   Your blog is at MN, wait.

03:03:53   Oh, you're so close. I love it. You got a bookmark, so you don't need to know the name

03:03:56   anymore. It's L-M-N-T dot me.

03:03:58   I know. I do. L-M-N-T.

03:03:59   Yeah. It's Louie Mantia, but without the vowels, because my name is full of vowels.

03:04:04   And in addition to your blog, you've got all sorts of fun stuff there, wallpapers, people,

03:04:10   I can't tell you how many times, because probably my, I switch wallpapers all the time, but you

03:04:15   know which one's my favorite.

03:04:16   I know it's the shining. That's why I had to redo it.

03:04:19   It's the shining carpet.

03:04:20   Yeah.

03:04:20   And I cannot tell you, not just how many times I'm somewhere and somebody sees my lock screen

03:04:26   and I'm on, I have your shining carpet wallpaper. And they don't just say, hey, is that your

03:04:31   shining wallpaper? They say, is that Louie's shining wallpaper?

03:04:34   And I say, oh yeah.

03:04:36   Yeah. Well, I'm glad that people can identify my version of it. That's great.

03:04:43   Yeah. So I've got a bunch of wallpapers and icons and I don't know, I guess that's the

03:04:47   customization at the moment that I can do. So that's the customization I love the most.

03:04:52   Well, I thank you for your three hours of time. And this was every-

03:04:57   Thank you for giving me three hours of time.

03:04:59   It's somehow fun to talk about a thing that you and I have both been frustrated about for

03:05:05   a long time.

03:05:06   Yeah. Well, it's fun. It's fun to talk about things that you're frustrated about, but I'm glad

03:05:10   that we value like these kind of same things from, it's not just nostalgia, is it?

03:05:15   No.

03:05:16   It's something else.

03:05:18   Yeah. It's something lasting, right? It's something that is going to be a craft and an art after

03:05:25   you and I are done.

03:05:26   And I feel like there's a certain wave that needs to crest here and that I hopefully is sort

03:05:34   of cresting with the OS 26s. Anyway, thank you, Louie.

03:05:38   Yep. Thank you so much.