699: Not the Correct Squircle
07 Jul 2026Someone got us started on app icons again.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey’s oops
- Follow-up:
- Casey may have fixed his notification problem!
- Mac-“Arsed” Mac App skill (via Bart Reardon)
- RAMAgeddon
- Feel free to donate to St. Jude any of the money you may have saved by buying early! (via Jonathan)
- Will Apple rethink unified memory given these prices? (via ShutterAperture)
- Steam Machine difficulties
- Interview on YouTube (Timestamp link to 12m48s)
- Collusion! Well, maybe.
- Would a gold Mac mini be cheaper than a spec with tons of RAM? Awax did math
We’reFable is so back, baby- Siri AI
- No web browsing for you!
- Apple removed the waitlist workaround in macOS β2
- Determining what model is used (via Gui Rambo)
- Revamped icons by Parakeet
- Apple adds paste protection to Terminal
- Xcode 𝑥OS 27 &
DerivedData- DevCleaner (App Store link)
- Post-show: Casey is jealous of Marco
- Goose
- Big Modern!
- Casey likes Savenger, Good2B, and Torero
- Nugs
- Micro Tyvek Wallet
- Micro Soft Shell Wallet
- Studio Neat
- Casey’s fan
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Should Apple create a handheld gaming platform?
![Marco’s [REDACTED] Reminders App](https://cdn.atp.fm/images/20260702-reminder.png?v1){kind=link}
Sponsored by:
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Discovering our keyboards
- Missed spousal messages
- Mac-arsed AI evaluator
- More on the RAM shortage
- Sponsor: ZocDoc
- Fable is back (already)
- Siri AI updates
- Sponsor trade: Parakeet
- Our icons
- Switchglass (old icon) 🖼️
- Switchglass (new icon) 🖼️
- Front and Center (old icon) 🖼️
- Front and Center (new icon) 🖼️
- Callsheet (Casey’s icon) 🖼️
- Callsheet (old icon) 🖼️
- Callsheet (new icon) 🖼️
- Overcast (old icon) 🖼️
- Overcast (new icon) 🖼️
- Reminder (Marco’s icon) 🖼️
- Reminder (new icon) 🖼️
- The new icon family 🖼️
- Terminal paste-malware detection 🖼️
- Delete Derived Data
- Ending theme
- A Goose excursion 🖼️
Discovering our keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have monthly FaceTime calls with a handful of good friends, one of whom is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our good friend underscore. And once a month we'll get on FaceTime for like an hour or two and just chit-chat and catch up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I was talking to underscore the other day, I was mousing around for a moment and I noticed my magic trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is my mouse of choice, was sliding a little bit on my desk. And so what I do is I turn off the trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I pick it up, I flip it over, and the four little like feet or whatever they're called, the little rubberized things that it rests on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just rub on them for a second with your hand or with your finger and gets all the gook off. And then you put it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back down, everything's good for another like few weeks, what have you. I turned it off, I rubbed the bottom and I went to turn it back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, and the little nubbin that I used to turn the thing back on isn't there anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, it shore off. So the little power slider, because it's a slider, right? Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like on the keyboards, the little nubbin for the slider fell off when it was in the off position.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it metal like on the keyboards?
⏹️ ▶️ John How does it fall off? Isn't it like trapped in there? Isn't it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You would think, but I i have it on my i have it between my fingers right now, and it is itty bitty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should send it to Dr. Drang to do like a forensic forensic analysis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, does it look like it broke? Like, is there a fracture? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it like shore off. Like, is you're so powerfully turning it on and off. You know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John John. Your fingernail works out. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But so that was very annoying and frustrating. But I have good news. I have then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used that as an excuse to upgrade my lightning magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and keyboard to not only a USB-C magic trackpad and keyboard, but the black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C trackpad and keyboard. So I am living a great, grandiose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black life. I've got my BlackBook Pro over here with my black keyboard and my black mouse, and I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loving life. Just call me MKBHD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be clear, I think almost every nerd wants that excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the perfectly fine Lightning version of these peripherals with the much more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John And here I am with a giant supply of Microsoft precision mouses,
⏹️ ▶️ John all which have a micro USB port on the front. Oh, no. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's not desirable at all. I do have a couple of quick lamentations, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got my Fancy Pants magic keyboard, right? My black magic keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it looks so good. It reminds me of the iMac Pro one, which I loved and would actually probably still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be using if it wasn't for the case that it wasn't for the problem that it doesn't have Touch ID, that the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro one doesn't, or excuse me, iMac Pro one doesn't. And so I, what kind of animal lives without Touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, gentlemen? Anyway, I got this new keyboard. However, there's a difference from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my old lightning version of the keyboard. And that difference is, if I look at the lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, other than being blinded by how bright it is, because the keys are all white or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the control key in the bottom left-hand corner spans roughly two-thirds of the width
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the shift key above it, right? So in the bottom left corner, there's basically every Mac keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control, option, and command. And so I don't know when this started, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of years started control-clicking to right-click. I know that you don't have to do that. I know there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million other ways to do that, including two finger taps and so on and so forth. I could set the trackpad to click in the bottom right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that's how I could do it. I'm aware. Whatever reason, I don't know why. I started doing control-click like I'm a damn 80s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac user, right, John? And that's how I've done it. Now, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac in the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right. For a
⏹️ ▶️ John while, there wasn't a control key.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. That joke fell flat in every level. But nevertheless, uh the new keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the option key and the command keys were both shrunken ever so slightly. And instead of the control key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being the lower left-hand key on the keyboard, this stupid globe and effing key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey command and then option, excuse me, and then control, then option, then command. And so now every time I go to freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right-click, instead I'm function-clicking, which does nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is this the mini
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard without a keypad? Is that the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this, and that's the other thing. That was the other lamentation I wanted to talk about. I had to get the one with the numeric keypad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I don't really use the numeric keypad that often, but I'm not going to do any stupid half-height up-down arrows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have to get the numeric keypad to get the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco full height
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up-down arrows. And so I'm rocking this numeric keypad like my dad used in Lotus 123
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it to type in numbers, but I didn't realize that they have the FN key down by the control.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, which, as you noted, does not have a Touch ID key, but it has normal control keys
⏹️ ▶️ John in the corner. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean, I guess I could just keep using this, but we'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the grand scheme of things, at least I have my beloved functional peripherals now.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sent a link to it. We'll put this link
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell? when oh so when they curve the corners too, because it's all curvy around the things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the last one was curved as well. I don't know if it's identically curved, but it looks at a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it was just when they integrated Touch ID, they made those couple of tweaks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my wife's keyboard, she has an extended keyboard and it has Touch ID, but I don't think they did that to the core. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll have to find, I should start searching eBay for my wife's keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, now that I'm looking at it, if you look at this image, I was not intending for this topic to go on this long, but here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's, If you go to the shop, if you go to the store, so here, I'll paste this link in. So this is the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one without Touch ID, and there is no F and key in the bottom left.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Right, but my wife has one with Touch ID with no F and key in the bottom left, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they put the F and key in like the home end block.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. What is the current one doing? Is that a menu? I don't know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. Press it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I did and nothing happened. That's why I'm so confused. Although I'm doing this in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one's a forward delete, but then what's the one? What's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to the left of home? What the heck?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That's what I'm wondering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Menu key or something? It looks like a menu. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, it is a right click it's so i'm So now if I'm in mail, it's right clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on first responder. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you don't have to hit
⏹️ ▶️ John control-click anymore. You can just hit the key next to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. If you are looking to like replace a click on the mouse, it has to be for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on the left hand side of the keyboard. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is for if you're just navigating from the keyboard. I guess. To bring up a context menu,
⏹️ ▶️ John though? I think there was a time where in in the default setting, you couldn't pop up a context menu from the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you had like the full keyboard access thing on or whatever. So maybe that's the role that key fills. But I might just disable
⏹️ ▶️ John that key in the keyboard if I had a key like this because the key next to the delete key often gets hit accidentally and I don't want it popping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, that's very weird. And it only works. So I was trying it on Visual Studio Code, which is what's right in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my face in, you know, tiled with Chrome because that's where both our external and internal show notes are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then when I went to mail, if I'm looking at my list of messages and I have one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selected, whichever one is currently selected, if I hit this little menu button, sure enough, the context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey menu comes up with open, send again, reply, reply, all, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Today I learned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have breaking news. My keyboard also has a menu button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Have you ever hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? I've never hit it in my life. I just tried it. So this, I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on between the right side, alt and control. So on the, you know, it's a Windows keyboard. So on the left side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alt and control, there's the Windows key between them. On the right side, between Alt and Control, there's a menu button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just tried, like, you know, if you, if you have something in the UI selected and you hit the menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button, it does bring up the context menu for that item, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never knew was a thing people did with the keyboard.
Missed spousal messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, that is that. So let's start with some follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have possibly good news. So I lamented, and then Marco joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in with me about how I wasn't receiving tap taps on my watch from Aaron's notifications and Aaron's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications specifically. And Marco and I were casting about for potential causes for this. And we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about maybe focus modes. We were talking about any number of other things. And a lot of the suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got, I didn't actually get that many suggestions via like Mastodon or anything. But most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them were things I had at least considered or had looked at in the past. But a couple of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn't any one particular person, but a couple of them had me poking around, like based on the things I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, poking around in Aaron's contact again, which I thought I'd done recently, but seemingly not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you look at a particular contact in iOS in the contacts app, and maybe this works on macOS, I don't know, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm looking at my phone right now. I noticed that for ringtone, I had a specific sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Aaron, which is you're the best around from the Karate Kid soundtrack because of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although my phone hasn't run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone hasn't rung aloud in like 10 plus years, but that's neither here nor there. And then I have a special vibration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for her, which we had talked about, and I had emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco bypass on. That's a lot of good stuff I've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done. It's early too. Anyways, below the ringtone section, though, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a text tone section. Would you like to guess what text tone I had set for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin some way, somehow? I bet I did it. I don't know why I would have or when I did it, but would you like to guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the option was that I selected? Silent. None, exactly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently I had explicitly told the system, do not vibrate when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron texts me. I don't know what on God's green earth would have possessed me to set
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you, did you ever not have the silent switch on your phone? Like, was there a time where you didn't just get
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing out of the box, turn that switch on, and never touch it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, pretty much, if you mean the physical switch, I always immediately set it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silent mode and never look back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I can imagine, like, if there was even just a moment when you didn't have that set and you're constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John getting texted from your wife and your phone's making noise, you're like, oh, how do I fix this? And you go into the contact and
⏹️ ▶️ John silent and now it solves the problem because she's the one who's texting you the most. And then you just forgot about it years for years later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that would be a very casey thing to do without, without question.
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Like, does it never, because I thought your thing was like, it seems like you don't get notifications, but it's not
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred percent of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So what it was, the behavior in summary was that when it was a private conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just Aaron and me, I wouldn't get a tap tap. I wouldn't get any vibration notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still get like pop-ups on my Mac and it would still show up on the lock screen, so on and so forth. Uh, But when we were in group
⏹️ ▶️ Casey texts, you know, so you know, a handful of people together, uh, then her stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would poke through based on my focus mode settings, which is what I wanted. It just wasn't in our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey private conversations. So in summary, Marco, this may or may not help you. But if you go into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tiff's contact and go down and look at the special settings for both vibration,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ringtone and text tone, perhaps you screwed yours up too. Now, I did immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test it and it did seem to tap my wrist when she sent that text. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in just going about my day yesterday, which is when I fixed it, or thought I had anyway, going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about my day, it seemed like I was missing them again, but I was oftentimes in the midst of using a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different device. And I know that Apple tries to be intelligent about, oh, he's sitting at his Mac. You don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to tap his phone, his watch, his iPad, et cetera. You can just show the notification on his Mac. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still assume it's fixed, but I'm not entirely sure. It at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked briefly. I can tell you that much. But I'm not sure if I can declare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolute victory yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's not, that's not whatever your theory was about the text tone being set to none.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could have been a problem, but it is not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann All right. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, for a while, in order to try to alleviate this problem, a couple of years ago, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set Tiff to have a custom text tone called vibration rapid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is aggressive. It's it's basically like, you know, five short, strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vibrations. And like, you can't, it sounds like there's, you know, like a nuclear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alert going off on your phone. Like it's, if it's like sitting on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a desk or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um But that, that's the ones like, you can't possibly miss that. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it seems like, again, when you are wearing an Apple watch, it seems like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco override, like the Apple watch, its presence on your wrist tells the phone, don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother vibrating the user. I got this. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsible for tapping. Now, there are other vibration settings on the watch. Like there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a setting that's been around forever called Prominent Haptic, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where it will, before it does like the, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haptic it was going to do, if it's going to do like the tap tap, it'll first do a big, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one second long buzz, then tap tap. And I used to do that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't, I don't have it set currently, but I used to do that because like I always liked wearing the stainless steel watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the vibration motor just wasn't that strong to have it be a very strong feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the heavier stainless steel case. And so that was kind of required to feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost anything reliably on the Apple watch. Also, those early taptic engines were also just, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less reliable and they would fail and like get weaker and die over time. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that's not the problem I have with TIFF is not that setting because I have it set to text on vibration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rapid. Although maybe maybe the Apple Watch doesn't, because the Apple Watch doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that same pattern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe it like doesn't, it doesn't even have that entry. So maybe that's it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you the way I have temporarily at least worked around this problem is what I speculated about last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time during the show, I just did it, which is on Mac OS, you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is probably true on iOS too, but I changed the notifications for messages on Mac OS to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be persistent in the corner rather than momentary. So that way, like if there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a message that comes in on the Mac, you know, if the little notification bubble in the upper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right corner, you know, normally it would show up for whatever it is, five seconds and then disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with the persistent setting, it stays there until you dismiss it. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann is how I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calendar notifications, reminder notifications. Like I, this is how I configure the most important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And so now messages works that way too. And that is at least helping work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, please reach out to Marco and me if you do have any other suggestions.
Mac-arsed AI evaluator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we got some feedback from Bart Reardon, who created a MacArst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac App skill. Ars is such a funny word. I know it's common in the Queen's English, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so funny to me. Anyway, Bart writes: the HP Dev MacAst Mac Apps member special is now available as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skill, so your LLM vibe-coded apps can also be MacArst. Putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my money where my mouth is, says Bart, is my own Mac AST or ARST
⏹️ ▶️ Casey survey says mostly. And the agent apparently came back with a score of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 23 out of 36. Uh, where there's a whole breakdown that we can link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to in the show notes of the results it found. But I thought that this was very funny that Bart turned it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on himself and came up with, yeah, it's all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some of the findings were reasonable. Like, I looked at the skill a little bit. Like, I'm assuming they just asked it to like summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John the member special, transcribe the member special, summarize it, turn it into a skill, blah, blah, blah. So, I'm sure stuff is lost in
⏹️ ▶️ John translation. And as I said when we talked about this member special last week, it's not like we covered the entire topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just did the best we could. But anyway, some of the things that it called out is that you can't copy and paste a container ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John IP, or image reference. That's the idea of like if there's something in your app that can be selected and you hit copy and there's anything
⏹️ ▶️ John remotely sensible that you can do with it, you should support it. Then it found some drag and drop stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and some other random things. So, interesting. If you want to try it out, we'll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes. Again, skills are just directories for all text files in a particular format, so they're very portable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can just look at them with your own eyeballs and read them yourself, even if you're not using an LLM.
More on the RAM shortage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Ramageddon, Jonathan writes: Listening to ATP the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of months helped me decide to upgrade my MacBook Pro before RAM and disk prices went up. That effectively saved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me $1,500, so I'm going to be making a donation to St. Jude in September. This is the way. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the way, my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the new innovation. Instead
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Marco offset, it's like, hey, did you save some money by buying Macs at the right time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Take that difference and send us. And you don't have to wait to September. I mean, it's fine if you want to wait to September because that's when we do
⏹️ ▶️ John the campaign for it. but you can donate anytime during the year. So just FYI, but great job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So whenever, Jonathan, you make that donation for you, since you were the first to come up with this new thought technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please send me an email, figure out a way to send me an email, reach out, and I'll send you a couple stickers just for Jonathan because they were the inventor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this new thought technology. Shutter Aperture writes, with the skyrocketing cost of memory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think Apple will revisit their unified memory strategy and offer a model with less built-in memory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with the ability to add more RAM later?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think, yeah, I don't see this as a thing because their whole shtick, and a lot of the innovation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple Silicon is the unified memory. I get where Shutter Aperture is coming from, but I don't see this as
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, as we said on the earlier program when we talked about this, it would still be unified if it was expandable. The unified
⏹️ ▶️ John adjective in the description is saying that there is not a separate pool of VRAM and regular
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. It is one unified pool of memory that is used by both the GPU and the CPU. So that is what makes it unified.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have unified memory and have it be expandable, but Apple won't do that just because the other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get from their current memory thing is you get very short physical distance between the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, GPU, and the RAM. Like it's right on the same package with it or very close to it on some of the other models.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can do that with expandable RAM too, but it's closer still if you can get, you know, right next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John um It's soldered on, so in theory, it's more reliable and potentially you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John higher speeds for less money because the the interfaces for doing high speed that are
⏹️ ▶️ John expandable, you know. But anyway, the main problem is, of course, Apple doesn't have a lot, physically
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't have a lot of room in any of its computers currently for expandable memory. Obviously, in the laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything's tight. And you're like, well, you know, it can be done. Look at the framework laptop. They do it. It's like, yeah, but look how much room they dedicate to
⏹️ ▶️ John their expandable memory and then try to find that room in Apple's laptops. It's rough. And even in things like the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, uh there's, you know, they have the removable modules and stuff. You could probably fit it in there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I feel like Apple has just moved on from that. And the idea that that would help with
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM crisis, like, oh, buy less, buy less RAM now and then add more later.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess so. But like by the time RAM prices go down to the point where you'd actually
⏹️ ▶️ John save money or, you know, it's like an installment plan. Like you can just buy your thing on one of those buy now,
⏹️ ▶️ John pay later or like take out a loan or something and have all your RAM from day one versus paying for half
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM and then a year later paying for more. Now, I'm not against expandable memory. I think it's great, but I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has shown that they are not willing to do that. And I don't think they would say, well, this will really help our customers
⏹️ ▶️ John because then they could buy cheaper computers from us and then expand them with possibly third-party RAM later. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John as you're saying that sentence, you think, is this a thing that seems attractive to Apple? I don't think it does seem attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. I agree that it is attractive to tech nerds and the general public, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but so long ago now, I can barely remember when we all used to recommend buying Macs with the minimum memory and then expanding
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Those were the days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and even then, like a lot of the appeal of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socketed RAM, modular hard drives, a lot of the appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple's Macs supporting those was not necessarily about, well, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to extend the life of this down the road. It was, I don't want to pay Apple's prices up front. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to immediately go get like, you know, Crucial RAM or you know, some third party SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or hard drive and pop it in like on day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I tried that once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had that go for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, all all my old Macs, before they really locked it down, pretty much all my old Macs had third-party RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John in it and it was fine for the reason Marco said, because Apple always charged insane prices for RAM. And so I would
⏹️ ▶️ John just get third party RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I Like my first couple Apple laptops, I had my own hard drives in them too, because they were it was cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get you know, your own little 2.5-inch hard drive and put it in there than it was to pay Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prices for that too. Apple's never going to care that much about that market. And to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be clear, I do think it's a shame that you can't upgrade things down the road. That does hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers in a bunch of ways. But it hurts customers in ways that, as John was just saying, it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hurt Apple. So they're not going to care. But also, just kind of broadly, Apple is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very patient company. They're not going to change their plans based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what they perceive as short-term pain. You know, we don't really know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's too early to say how long is this skyrocketing cost of memory and storage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long is this going to last? Is it going to be one year? Is it going to be three years? Is it going to be 10 years?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't really know. Apple probably has better insight into it than we do because they're connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the supply chain a lot more. But if it's only going to be like a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this is going to be really skyrocketing and then supply will catch up to demand, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be patient enough to wait that out. They're not going to change their entire architecture plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on pain for a few years. They take a longer time horizon than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jay Peters at The Verge writes, in an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026. We'll put a link to the video in this article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. Gamers Nexus asks, were you able to lock in contracts from memory with the suppliers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly, or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops? Valve's Pierre-Loup Graffis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey responded, look, there's no contracts. There's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month or something and they say, you can't buy that many. And it's yes or no. Or excuse me, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can buy that many and it's yes or no. And if we say no, they never talk to us again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. Because they have all the power. Like right now, if you are the manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a resource that is scarce and very high demand and it's very difficult to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for new competitors to come online, yeah, you can dictate terms. This is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we were talking last episode, how Apple used to be able to dictate terms to suppliers because they were like such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a powerful buyer with so much volume and they could basically do, they could get the suppliers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do whatever they wanted. Now it's, it's a reverse situation. Now the suppliers are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what's in short supply. They have all the power and they can dictate whatever they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their customers and their customers have to either accept their terms or not have memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It's really not, it's not great, Bob. All right. And then with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the three big companies that make RAM, Luke James at Tom's Hardware writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron were sued on June 25th in the U.S. District Court for the Northern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accused the three memory makers of illegally coordinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 700% over four years. The complaint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argues that the three companies used a coordinated shift toward high bandwidth memory, or HBM, the stacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DRAM that feeds AI accelerators, as a cover to curtail production of older DDR3 and DDR4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modules. That contraction in commodity DRAM, the plaintiffs argue, pushed prices to record highs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while no rival could step in. Building a new DRAM fab costs tens of billions and takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, leaving the incumbents free to cut output without fear of being undercut. Samsung and SK Hynix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing once before, with the latter paying $185
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million fine in April of 2005. So 21 years ago now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Crime pays, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John paying that $185 million fine was dwarfed by the profits they reaped from this. So I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John know the merits of this case. Obviously, we do know that there is a non-nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation. If there's suddenly a new customer with like essentially unlimited money buying up all the supply, that
⏹️ ▶️ John of course would cause prices to go up. But the fact that two of these companies have pled guilty to price
⏹️ ▶️ John fixing before makes you think maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entirely without merit. So we'll see how this case
⏹️ ▶️ John Either way, I don't feel like the case will make RAM prices go down. And even if they lose, apparently they'll pay
⏹️ ▶️ John a fine that is just, you know, a piddling fee compared to the profits they reap. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it's worth keeping an eye on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the reality is like what has probably happened here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not like, you know, people getting together in a smoke filled room and saying, let's cut everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's probably not that. It's probably you have a very small number of companies that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were faced with exactly the same incentive, which is, hey, all this H.B.M. that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being demanded by the A.I. players that like this is we can make a bunch of money on H.B.M.,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let's make as much of that as we can to sell these people. And, oh, those old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fabs over there doing the, you know, the cheap commodity RAM, maybe we can decommission those so that way we can have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources towards HBM. Like that's probably what happened here. It probably was not collusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, you know, to do this ridiculous, nefarious thing. Like, no, they were just moving their capacity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what was making them the most money. Of course they were. Anybody would.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why they'll argue in court, I'm sure. But the fact that they pled guilty before means probably someone had a recording of the smoke-filled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they said, let's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John prices together.
⏹️ ▶️ John you settle, maybe, or you plead out or something. Like, pleading guilty is like, you got us dead
⏹️ ▶️ John to right. So we'll see how this goes. Hopefully they didn't record the meeting
⏹️ ▶️ John stringer bell style where they colluded. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, that was 22 years ago. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there's probably like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of the people who were in that smoke filled room back then are even still in their positions or even still alive? You don't even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. It's probably a different group of leaders right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. John, can you set the context for this next line item, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Marco musing last episode. We were talking about hey, the feedback that someone sent
⏹️ ▶️ John in. Hey, you can get a Mac Mini with eight terabytes of SSD. And I was thinking about a Mac Mini. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I get some kind of like cheap, small Mac to tide me over until I can buy the Mac that I really want? And I was like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can't do that because I need an 8 terabyte SSD and the Mac Mini doesn't come with them. But apparently it does. And so I priced it out and it was like fifty four hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks. And Marco was musing, like, if they made the entire Mac Mini out of gold,
⏹️ ▶️ John would it would it be the same price?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I say, like, would would the stock, like, you know, 256, 16 gig model be cheaper with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gold case than than John with an eight terabyte SSD. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So AWAX wrote in to say with an open bottom and an estimated thickness of one and a half millimeters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a solid gold case for the Mac Mini would be 1.17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kilograms. That's one full kilogram more than the aluminum case, which would be only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, gold is heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This would cost $115,000 at current market prices in raw material alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, gold is less rigid than aluminum, so this would be a rather bendy case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, let's say there are multiple reasons why you don't tend to make gold-cased electronics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except that one time. Right. Yes. Gold is quite heavy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, it is not a structurally strong material either. But yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost of 115… Yeah, gold is a little expensive right now. I don't know if you've been following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that market since the current president's term. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gold is gold is gold is always expensive and it's even more expensive now. So maybe a couple years ago, that would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco merely $50,000. bananas, But still a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little more money than than the eight terabyte SSD.
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Fable is back (already)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, your long national nightmare is over. Fable is back, baby. Hayden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Field at the Verge writes: after weeks of negotiating with the Trump administration, Anthropic is finally going to be able to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Claude Fable 5 back online. And this was future tense when it was written. It is now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing. Anthropic wrote, We have received notice that the Department of Commerce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5, and Mythos 5 will be restoring access on July 1, which, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record, this was yesterday. Anthropic also said it would re-enable access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry soon, but with no set timeline. Ashley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bellinger at Ars Technica writes, after weeks of testing, Fable 5 is no longer vulnerable to a bypassing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey method discovered by Amazon researchers that identified several software vulnerabilities and triggered the export curbs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That bypass method is currently blocked in over 99% of the cases, Anthropic said. However, tightening safeguards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came with a trade-off that may cause some benign prompts to be blocked, quote, during routine coding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and debugging tasks, quote, the company acknowledged. The company also said, working closely with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the government, we trained an improved safety classifier that targets and blocks the behavior described in the report.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Users will be notified if a request to Fable 5 is blocked and the request will instead be sent to Opus
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this uh highlights something that someone sent us feedback when I was saying, you know, the guard rails is
⏹️ ▶️ John you know essentially writing sentence to an LM asking it not to do stuff. And they're saying, well, no, they use they use whole
⏹️ ▶️ John separate models, like this classifier model that's trying to determine like the other, some other model will look at the input
⏹️ ▶️ John or output and determine if it's dangerous or whatever. But of course, those other separate models are also trained
⏹️ ▶️ John by feeding them words. And so it's all, it's, you know, it's turtles all the way down.
⏹️ ▶️ John um Yeah, that's a change they made. Fable used to just like silently fall back to be to using
⏹️ ▶️ John a weaker model, but now it will tell you, hey, the thing you sent me looks like it might be bad. So we're
⏹️ ▶️ John using our uh our weaker model, Opus 4.8 instead. And so at least you'll know when that's happening to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But uh yeah whatever whatever happened behind the scenes allowed this to go forward. Although I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I got an email about this too. And like what they're doing with Fable, if you have like
⏹️ ▶️ John a monthly subscription to uh uh Anthropic or whatever, again, current
⏹️ ▶️ John and former sponsor of the show, um they say, oh, Fable's included in your subscription until
⏹️ ▶️ John July 7th. And then after that, I guess it's like pay per token for Fable. Like it's not
⏹️ ▶️ John part of your subscription. So I don't know what they'll do with this model after the July 7th thing. When I was using it, I was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, because you have the $20 a month plan, you get to use Fable and, you know, it burns through your tokens
⏹️ ▶️ John real fast, but at least you have access to it. So I wonder if after July 7th, I just won't even have access to it at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't have anything to do with Fable, but I'm glad that it's back. Oh, and I cut out all the parts of the story where Anthrop is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, while we were banned, the other models could do all the same things that had all the same problems. But Whatever. We're not complaining.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, on the plans and pricing, expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to change every two weeks. Like, it's that's what's going to happen, if not faster. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying, I believe two episodes ago, I said, like, oh, don't worry. I'm sure Fable will be back within the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three months. It took a week. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann or whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it took almost no time. You know, this stuff is going to be changing and shifting constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as with all Frontier AI development. So, yeah, maybe by July 7th,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which as we record is five days away, maybe they'll bring it behind a higher paywall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or make it pay per token only or whatever. But then literally five days later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be different. They might change the plan again. Certainly in the long run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will just be one of the models in the picker for you know, for the next couple of years. And you know, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure in the long run, every plan will have access to it. They just need more capacity or whatever or more guardrails.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the guardrail front, I do think it's kind of kind of a farce that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, okay, well, this model, this is too good at doing dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. So if you ask to do something dangerous, we're going to direct you to a dumber model. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, imagine like, you know, you're, you go to like, you know, some expert, like an expert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bomb maker. It's like, help me make a bomb. And the guy's like, listen, I can't help you make a bomb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am too good at making bombs. Go to Bob down the hall. He kind of sucks at it. You have him do it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it's a ridiculous concept that this is, what kind of safety are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we giving here? And how safe is that really? It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. I think they are doing what the government asked them to do because that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way to get this back, not because it is the right solution to this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they already had these guardrails in it. It's just that the bypass was like, oh, we found a way around your guardrail, so
⏹️ ▶️ John make your guardrails better. Like, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of Fable, it is the guardrailed version of Mythos. So they were already doing this. And like I said, they were doing it silently.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would just drop you down silently, but at least they'll tell you now. Obviously, the main problem with these
⏹️ ▶️ John coding agents and these quote-unquote dangerous things is it's a very symmetrical double-edged
⏹️ ▶️ John sword because if you're writing a program, you want these things to find security problems
⏹️ ▶️ John in your own program so you can fix them. And that is indistinguishable from find a security
⏹️ ▶️ John problem in this program that I didn't write so I can break into it. It's the same. It's literally the same exact thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it's like, look, do you want us to make our software better or do you want us to be ignorant of the flaws?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like these models won't find an exploit in someone else's system, but they also won't find the flaws in your own code.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we just trying to mightily to maintain the status quo, which is just never going to work. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all very silly and we'll see how it develops. Like I understand why people are trying to do it. I'm not advocating for like, let's just
⏹️ ▶️ John do a free for all and allow the you know, people, script kiddies, to find flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in anything by typing a two sentence prompt. Like I understand the potential danger, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's, I don't see how this is tenable long term. Like we want to use these things to find security
⏹️ ▶️ John problems in our own programs. It's the only way they're ever going to get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also like this is such a short term, um, delay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, because suppose Anthropic had really great model research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and training to develop this one really special, I guess maybe these two really special models that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really good at finding software vulnerabilities. And suppose that no one else in Frontier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI development was doing this at all or as well as they were. Those are pretty big assumptions. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose that is the case. That is maybe some of their narrative, that only they have developed this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology that gets really good at finding security vulnerabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's not their narrative. They constantly keep saying the GPT-5.5 and 5.6 can do exactly the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that's not fair that
⏹️ ▶️ John they're banned and the other one isn't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So obviously the reality is other models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either already are this good or are about to be this good. And some of those models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be run by, say, Elon Musk or China. And they're not going to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a crap about what the government export regulations or whatever are. And they're not going to put any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guardrails on it. So the idea that we are somehow avoiding this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security apocalypse of bugs being found and exploited en masse by controlling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one or maybe these two models, it's a fantasy. In a very short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, everyone who wants this kind of power is going to have it if they don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already. So in a very short amount of time, all of the fears of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs being exploited en masse, that's going to happen, whether this one particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dust up settles one way or the other. We're all going to have to face this probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year or next year at the latest, we are going to see a wave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of exploits and we are going to have to be very aggressive at patching them and updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. This is what I was saying a few months back of like, this is a really bad time to be holding on to an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old OS. You know, if if you if you're like, you know, if you have like an old device that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are, you know, trying to extend the life of that can't get the newest OSs, or if you are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you never wanted to use Tahoe, so you're sticking with the old, you know, like this is a very bad time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally for security to be refusing to run software updates basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as quickly as they come out. And that's going to just be the case for a few years. And no amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of guardrails and no amount of government intervention is going to prevent that because the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the government and the guardrails don't control every company. They don't control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every model and they don't control every user.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And just to be clear, like the whole point of the Mythos thing is that they want to give that access to mythos to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, designated security people so that they can fix like the flaws and the important things. So like, here's the unconstrained
⏹️ ▶️ John one to the people we trust. Please use our unconstrained model to fix all the bugs before we
⏹️ ▶️ John release the constrained one to the world. Like that was the strategy. But as Marco points out, like that's, that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes some kind of sense as a way to move forward. Like we don't want to stop the the good guys from fixing the the
⏹️ ▶️ John problems, but we don't want the the bad guys to have the the tools. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a fantasy world that they're the only player that does this. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they're doing what they can. Like I give them some credit for trying, but the the system around this is like chaotic
⏹️ ▶️ John and haphazard and uh very silly and probably not motivated by anything except
⏹️ ▶️ John for just power and bribery and personal grudges.
Siri AI updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on, let's talk Siri AI, where Marcus Mendez at 9to5Mac writes, the change in iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 27 beta 2 makes it more clear how Siri AI should handle requests involving accessing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content behind a URL. A new section in Siri AI's system prompt now says, quote, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot access, let me back up a half step. So, what this means is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's this big long prompt that you don't get to see and you don't get to modify that the system provides to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AI thing, model. There's what I was looking for, to kind of give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the lay of the land, what it's supposed to do, right? And I've seen this and it's like probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or ten pages of typewritten text long, if you will. Well, anyways, this is a new clause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that instruction that you don't get to modify as a user. So it says, you cannot access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content behind a URL. When a user provides a URL and asks you to summarize, read, or extract information from it, inform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them you cannot access web pages. Do not offer follow-up suggestions or workarounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John This feels like it's the Dan Morin clause. Remember, he was looking for like a Wikipedia page with himself
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and found a page and says there's no Wikipedia page for you. He said, totally is it this URL? And Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI was like, I can't access that URL. Can you read it to me? Tell me what it says.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so now this is like, do not offer follow-up suggestions Do not ask the URL. You can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it can say like, hey, I'm not allowed to access URLs, but you can't say, why don't you read it to me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that is bad. But I mean, this really shows what Apple is trying to do with Siri AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John An LLM that can't access URLs is significantly constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John in both good and bad ways. Presumably, this prevents all sorts of exploits and attacks or whatever, but also makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it vastly less powerful than the other, you know, normal, unconstrained LLMs that will gladly
⏹️ ▶️ John fetch the contents of a URL. I get most of my, In my coding things, all the time I'm telling it,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's the documentation on the web, look at this documentation. Don't trust your guesses about what things do,
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. Um, And Siri AI is like, I won't even look at the URL.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have my world knowledge thing, which hopefully is somewhat up to date. And I've got all my other stuff, but I will not
⏹️ ▶️ John go to an arbitrary URL, read it, and do anything with it. So yeah, that's rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then additionally, the workaround that people were using to get through the Siri AI waitlist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently that's not going to work anymore or isn't working anymore. Tim Hardwick and Mac Rumors writes, Apple appears to have closed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the loophole that let Mac users skip the Siri AI waitlist in the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many users who are running the second developer beta of Mac OS 27 are finding that the line skipping command does not work for them. Users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who enabled Siri AI this way in the original beta are also reporting that they've been kicked back to the waitlist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after updating whoopsie. Some users are suggesting alternative methods involving submitting Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback to accelerate approval, but the claims remain anecdotal. For what it's worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I signed up on my iPad and it only took, I don't know, like two or three days to get through the waitlist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like this wasn't particularly egregious. And I don't think that's, you know, because anyone at Apple is paying attention to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who I am or what I'm doing or anything like that. Like I think I'm just another number in the bucket to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it only took me like 48 to 72 hours or something like that. So it's not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also got in within, I think, about five or six days of joining the wait list and it's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn't, it wasn't that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, uh, Guy Rambo friend of the show, writes, uh, John was wondering if there's any way to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which model Siri was using for each answer that he was asking to determine why one answer was less accurate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or detailed than another. I'm pretty sure that if you export the Apple intelligence report that's available in system settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will include the model that served each request as part of the metadata. So that's cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Didn't know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I had my first, um, hey, Siri is good now moment. Uh, The other day, I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, you know, in the middle. Hold on, Siri just woke up on my phone. Wow. Good timing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should have notched out those frequencies in your voice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I was looking for information in an email that I you know, I didn't know what the heck it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. And I, I forget, I forget the exact prompt I used, but it was something like, hey, what was that? You know, what, What was the thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was looking for? And you know, one of those forms. And it you know, took about four or five seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then found it. I was like, okay, great. That That's awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, maybe maybe we're on the right track now. So that's, it's promising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually had a similar experience. um, A Friend of the show, Lex Friedman, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turned himself, I think at one point in his life, he was a software developer and then wasn't and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is becoming a software developer again. And he's made an app called GNOME, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy, which is very similar to Friend of the Show Jelly's gift-wrapped app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It lets you you know, curate a list of gifts and you know, copy and paste them in places very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lex was kind enough to send me a code for it. So I didn't have to pay him the five or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight bucks, whatever it was, which is not egregious by any means, but he was nice enough to offer before I even asked. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took him up on it. Well, anyways, this happened, I don't know, a while ago that he had sent this code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was trying to look for it. And I thought, oh, wait a second. I wonder if I could ask Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sure enough, I said, you know, Lex Friedman with an E gave me a code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an app, you know, a month or two back. Can you find that code? And I'll be darned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it came up with exactly the message I was looking for. And I was doing this in like the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, clickety clacky typey interface to Siri. And it had a little link I could click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go in messages to that message, which not only did that work, but it worked quickly because I know going back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in time in messages is often fraught with peril, but it actually worked lickety split. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very impressed. So I had a very similar moment.
Sponsor trade: Parakeet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we're going to do something a little different today. We were offered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by our friends at Parakeet, and we'll talk about who they are in just a moment. We were offered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a little trade sort of scenario where our friends at Parakeet would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make some app icons for us in trade for talking about and critiquing those icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show. And so let me tell you about Parakeet, and then we're going to go through. Each of the three of us have had one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or more icons rejiggered, reimagined, redone by Parakeet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we're going to discuss them. So let me tell you the stuff that I really need to tell you up front. First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, if you are interested in doing icons or that sort of thing, you should absolutely check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out our friends at Parakeet. The reason we took this as a kind of spawn con sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because they are friends of ours and we know these folks. Like, Marco, you have had them do icons for you in the past, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in fact, Parakeet is a partnership between Louis Mantilla and Luca Graffera. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Louis Mantilla was actually one of the original duo who made the original Overcast icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I've worked with Louis before, you know, through all that. And in fact, the other part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duo was Brad Ellis, who I believe made the Switch Class icon, right, right, John? That's true. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is you know old friends here. And so I've worked with Louis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot over the years. He's just a pro. And what I especially love is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Louis is opinionated. So when you go to Louis with an app icon idea, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don't usually have like the most complete ideas. I'm always like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, maybe involve some of this. And maybe I was thinking a little bit of that. And, you know, here's kind of what the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And, you know, I go to Louis with a cloudy mess of vague directions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he comes back with, okay, you should pick one of these things. Let's focus on this part of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is the right color for this. Like, and he, and he's right. Like every day, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he, you know, gives those kind of opinions and directions, like he's right. And it makes the product better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes the artwork better. It makes the icon, the logo, the focus. It makes it all better. And it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go beyond the icon. Like, obviously, you know, these are just designers. They're really good at lots of parts of software design. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only do you get an icon, but you get direction that you can use throughout the app. So if you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help with like, hey, you know, what kind of color scheme should I be using throughout the app? Or maybe what kind of themes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that's all part of their skill set. I like working with them for lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. It isn't just draw me a pretty icon. But that being said, their icons are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they're really good at drawing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can strongly recommend working with them. This is a sponsorship in the sense that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traded work for this read. There's no money going back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's a form of payment we don't normally take. And like Carter
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a thing that we do often, but it's specifically because it is these specific people and this
⏹️ ▶️ John specific company why we took this deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because we think it'll be fun to actually, because we also haven't shown each other the icons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet that they made. So we figured it would be fun, fun for the show to reveal our icons to each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other and comment on them live. And as part of the read, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can actually critique them. Like we're not, you know, we didn't promise to only be positive about them. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just so happens I'm pretty positive about mine, to be honest. But we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn't promise that we would only say good things. So that part of the show is just going to be like actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show content about these icons. But this part is, yeah, we like Parakeet a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we think you should go visit them to get your icons done. Because this summer, everyone's doing new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons for their apps, for the new OSs, because you kind of have to. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are incredibly talented at not only any, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the icon design is of the time, they're very good at it. Like they adapt their skills over time. They're very good at it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say they are really exceptional at handling liquid glass icons, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new 27 capabilities, but they help you also backport it to the 26 capabilities. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they cover all those bases from the technical side. They give you the icon composer file and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's all native stuff like that. And they're really good for this moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in developers' lives where we just need to keep adding new icons to our apps because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeps changing what it means to be an app icon. And it's really good to have somebody like Parakeet on your side to help you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. And they do a really good job. All right. So anyway, if you want to hire Parakeet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your app icons, and I strongly recommend that you do. They can't pay me to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in icons or money, but I strongly recommend that you hire them because they are professionals and they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good at their job. And they're better than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John As evidenced by the fact that you did hire them. Yeah. Icon, which you're very happy with before they ever did the sponsorship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, look, you know that if I can do something myself, I probably will to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault. I know that I do not make good app icons. You've seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my work when I make app icons myself. It's not good. And, you know, I hire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few people to help me with my apps, but this is one of them, if not often the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only one, because they're, again, they're really good and I strongly recommend this. anyway, it's Parakeet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is Louis Mantia and Luca Grafera. Their website is parakeet.co.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So P-A-R-A-K-E-E-T dot C-O, parakeet.co.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go there. They are very good at what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were talking with them about doing this. It's like, do you want just like a normal ad read or do you just want to just to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John your icons? And i said, no, you should just talk about the icons. I'm like, we're gonna critique them, you know, like we're not like, as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, I'm like, are you sure you want that? like, oh, yeah, no, sure, go for it. Like, they were very, like, very
⏹️ ▶️ John open to this. There was no, you know, they they chose to take this route. And so they're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get what they paid for with icons. They're going to get it all right.
Our icons
⏹️ ▶️ John so let's talk about our actual icons. And we're doing this, we're trying to like reveal them to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other in real time. So there will be various pauses when we upload our icons to the ATP website. So we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John have URLs that we can put in the show notes so you can see them too. But I'm going to start with some
⏹️ ▶️ John images that I already uploaded because when I, I've engaged with other companies to do icons
⏹️ ▶️ John for my apps before, and I always try to preface my engagement
⏹️ ▶️ John with these various designers by saying, I apologize in advance for what
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying like he just has like vague ideas or whatever. And it's like, I may have vague
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas, but I have very definite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surprising no one listening to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John show. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it's just, it's like, it's the, it's the curse. It's like my old hypercritical blog post. It's like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John I may not be able to do it, but I know what's wrong with the thing you did. Like, I know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don't like about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Right. And that is, it's, it's like, well, then what should I do? It's like, I don't know, but I know it's not that. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's terrible. So I, I've started, I wrote a big document for all the icons I was getting proposed. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got two icons instead of one, consider it a finder's fee since I kind of uh, initiated this whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, And this is the, in the document I put this uh, thing, which is this lots of pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of this on the internet uh, and signs in windows and images of it or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John um, and maybe it was a real thing that somebody did, but like some design, the story behind it or the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anecdote is some design bureau put this in their window as a price list for design services. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John said, for $100, I design everything, I being like the designer, right? For $200,
⏹️ ▶️ John I design and you watch. For $300, I design and you advise. 500, I design and you help.
⏹️ ▶️ John 800, you design and I help. 1300, you design, I advise. 2100. you
⏹️ ▶️ John design, I watch. And then for $3,400, you design everything. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea here is like, look, you're hiring a designer, but it seems like you just want to do all this yourself. So like, why am I
⏹️ ▶️ John even here? Am I just here to like be your like Photoshop monkey and just do whatever you say?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I sent this and I said, I'm going to try to avoid this, but be aware this might be what this feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like because I like every single thing you send, I don't have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John formulating an opinion about very specific aspects of it. And that can be very frustrating. And as I always say, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, this has to be a, as we would say in the biz, Casey, time boxed
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not going to go on forever. We can't like, let's iterate until you're happy with your icon. Like, that's ridiculous. That doesn't make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. There's a certain reasonable amount of time, whether you're paying in ATP sponsorship slots
⏹️ ▶️ John or you're paying in actual money. It's not like, this is not a 10 year long commitment to
⏹️ ▶️ John make an icon for you. Right. So I said, it's perfectly fine if we go through a reasonable amount of time and
⏹️ ▶️ John we end up with an icon that I, we don't end up with an icon that I like. That's still, that is still services rendered.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's how you have to think about design services. Don't think like, well, I pay for this. I should have the icon of my dreams. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like they're not going to spend a year on your thing. And if you can't find something that you like in a year,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, you don't own them forever because you paid for one icon. That said, they're
⏹️ ▶️ John really good at what they do. And I did not have any problem finding icons that I like, but I just wanted to throw that out there. So
Switchglass (old icon)
⏹️ ▶️ John Let's start with Switch Glass. Uh, It's my application switcher icon. Yeah. Here is the old icon
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. Uh, Brad Ellis made for me, which I love. I told Brad exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what I wanted, and he made the he tore the image out of my head and made that. And yes, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John an iteration. There was an iteration process going back and forth, you know, many iterations or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like I'm just so extremely happy with the icon he made. I'm like, this is what I was picturing
⏹️ ▶️ John in my head. So why am I bothering getting a new icon? Well, if you look at this icon and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened in Tahoe, this icon does not fly in Tahoe. Tahoe requires all
⏹️ ▶️ John icons to fit within a rounded rectangle, rounded edge square that we
⏹️ ▶️ John call a squircle. And if your icon does not conform exactly to that outline,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe takes your icon, shrinks it by like 70%, and shoves it in the middle of a gray squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it looks awful. And you may be thinking, looks like your icon already has a squircle in it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's not the, you know, the correct squircle. It is, it is, the bounds of it are broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's supposed to look like a clear, it's on an angle, first of all, which the real squircle isn't. And the bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John of the squircle are broken by the various shapes. It basically looks like a like a, I don't know,
⏹️ ▶️ John half a centimeter thick piece of lickable glass with a circle, diamond, and square
⏹️ ▶️ John floating over it. And my idea is the circle, diamond, and square kind of represent the icons you're switching among. It doesn't really make sense. It's just the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon that I wanted. I got it. I love it. And Tao comes and says, screw your icon. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John as I recently said when I was commenting on Rogue Amoeba's post about Squirkle Jail, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the gray squircle they stick your icon in. And if it breaks the bounds, I think this is the worst thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has ever done design-wise to developers and definitely the worst thing they have ever done to icons, forcing
⏹️ ▶️ John icons into this. I think if Apple wants all icons to be in the squircle shape, as they tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to promote in Big Sur, macOS Big Sur, then they should lead by example and people
⏹️ ▶️ John should you know, adopt it because they think it's the best thing to do. When they transitioned from bitmapped
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, like you know, very pixelated style in classic macOS to more photorealistic larger icons
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS 10, they didn't mandate it. They just led by example and everyone said, yeah, we want to do that because it's awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everybody transitioned. Everyone didn't transition to squircles after Big Sur because some
⏹️ ▶️ John people were like, it's fine. And I guess, you know, we'll update if it works with our design. But if it doesn't work for our design,
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll just stick with our old design. Like take Rogue Amoeba. They had a Squirkle, but they had like a microphone over it and the microphone just
⏹️ ▶️ John like poked out of the edge a little bit. And that goes into squircle jail now. But in Big Surve, they just kept their old icon
⏹️ ▶️ John because it still looked good. and It still looked like it fit in. Anyway, I hate this decision that Apple did, but it puts me in a
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult situation, which is, first of all, as we've discussed in past episodes, I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John Brad Ellis's icon to live as long as possible because I love it. And so I found a way painfully
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so that when my app is on Mac OS 15 and earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see Brad Ellis' icon. And when it's on macOS 26, I had made my own
⏹️ ▶️ John awful, terrible liquid glass icon that I hate. um
⏹️ ▶️ John But with the advent of 27 and, you know, 15 getting farther in the rearview mirror,
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew I was going to need new icons because if I'm going to eventually upgrade to 27, which in theory will happen if I ever get a new damn Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't want to look at my awful Tahoe icon that I made. I want a nice icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John um And so that was the challenge. And it's a difficult challenge for a designer, which is like, I love my current
⏹️ ▶️ John icon. The only reason I'm leaving it is because Apple is forcing me and I hate the
⏹️ ▶️ John new icon style. Like I hate Tahoe icon style. So now go make an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John that I love in a style that I hate while like abandoning an icon that I love behind
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So incredible challenge. And this is, this is what you hire a designer for. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I honestly had to say, like my proposal for this was like, love the old icon, hate Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know what to do, man. What do we got? I'm like, I said, I always say, I just, I'm open
⏹️ ▶️ John to almost any idea. Like, throw it out there. And what I said in most of my design engagements
⏹️ ▶️ John for icons, I'm like, let's just start with like napping sketches, just like scribbles with
⏹️ ▶️ John a pencil on a napkin, because I need to see a thousand of them to know even what direction to
⏹️ ▶️ John go. And here's the problem when you work with really talented designers. They're so
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Luca and Louie, who both worked on this, they are so good and so fast that they're like throwaway
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil sketch would take me like seven days. And they like, I'm in an iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation with them and then I'm like, what about X, Y, and Z? And then they reply like two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John later with the thing I just typed. And then I'm typing my response. I'm like, well, what if you did X, Y, and Z? And while
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm typing that, they have sent another revision of it. Like, I don't know I honestly don't
⏹️ ▶️ John know physically speaking what they're doing on their computers to make this happen. And no, they're
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann These are
⏹️ ▶️ John all hand. These are all handmade icons. They were so fast and
⏹️ ▶️ John like high quality, very fast work coming out with like iterations. And we went through so many iterations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I asked them, as I always do, like, can I have all like the raw materials in the iterations? And they said, yes, like as long as I don't like
⏹️ ▶️ John use them or show them to the world. I just love seeing the process. So anyway, I didn't know where we were going to go
⏹️ ▶️ John with this. If you look at my icon, my crappy Tahoe version of this was just make it
⏹️ ▶️ John a white squircle and put a circle and a diamond and a square and they're
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's the current Tahoe icon. If you have my, I have Switch glass and Tahoe and I hate it and it's
⏹️ ▶️ John And they come up with a bunch of different variations. First of all, they did a head on one. They're like, hey, dummy, if you do a head-on one,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's how a professional would do it. And it's like, oh, that's, that's a million times better. And like, and that was within the
⏹️ ▶️ John first five minutes. Like, okay, we're going to start on your icon. What do you think of this? I'm like, I was like, you just like, great,
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. Just spend like, cause I spent way longer doing my terrible icon than they did making, like, here's how
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have done this if you had any clue what you're doing. But I was like, but is that the best thing? I was like, right
⏹️ ▶️ John away, I'm like, oh, thank God. Because like, no matter how the rest of this goes, at the very least, that
⏹️ ▶️ John icon is already better than my existing icon and good enough for me to use. And then, of course, I had them tweak
⏹️ ▶️ John that a thousand ways to Sunday to try different variations. Most of my ideas were bad as usual, but like they're so fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John um like, what else can we do? Like, come up with anything. They came up with all sorts of wild ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ John um I drew the um menu bar icon for my app is my app doesn't even show in the dock
⏹️ ▶️ John by default. So you only see the menu bar icon and the menu bar icon is a squircle with the diamond
⏹️ ▶️ John from the middle of the uh the app icon in there. There's alternate menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John icons as well, most people just use the default. I'm like, maybe we could just concentrate on the diamond so we could just do a diamond
⏹️ ▶️ John in a squircle because the diamond doesn't break the bounds. And we did a bunch of experiments with that. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John Louie came up with the winner. Or maybe it was Luca. I don't know who did it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a collaboration. They're both doing this, but in the messages thread, I was mostly talking with Louis.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the innovation here was, can we get the whole like a diamond
⏹️ ▶️ John in a squircle thing, which again is the menu bar icon, while also getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the old icon? So now I have to upload something and Marco will edit this out.
Switchglass (new icon)
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, and here is uh after many, many, many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John revisions and iterations, here is the icon that I'm using. Now, you might look at this and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's one of those things, like, oh, that's not such a great idea. That's obvious. I could have thought of that. But A, you didn't, and
⏹️ ▶️ John neither did I. And B, it is brilliant in ways that are not entirely obvious. Now, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a beautifully rendered icon. It just looks really good. I could never have made this in a million years,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? um What it is, is it looks like you took my old icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John rotated it so it's a diamond, and put it on a squircle background. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, haven't you just put yourself into squircle, Jay? I was like, no, this is this is essentially my diamond icon because we had lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of icons that just had a diamond in the middle, but now the squircle is the diamond. Because if you take the squircle and you rotate it 45 degrees,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like a diamond shape, but it also has the floaty things on it, breaking the bounds of the thing. Such
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea. Such like an amazing, like, you know, cut the Gordian knot. Like, oh, so you want a diamond,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you also want your old icon. How about your old icon is a diamond? and And it's not metal anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're translucent. And so there are some constraints I put on my design, which was, and I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John one helped. And maybe my users will not appreciate this, but I was pretty adamant about this. I do not care
⏹️ ▶️ John how my icon looks on Tahoe. Tahoe's dead to me. I don't i don't care how it looks on Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason this is relevant is because, as we've stated before, these dot .icon files, this format that Apple came up with,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a bunch of resources and a recipe. So it's like bitmaps, vector images,
⏹️ ▶️ John layers and recipes and effects. That's what it is. And these icons are assembled on the fly
⏹️ ▶️ John by the operating system. It doesn't burn out bitmaps of them. It's like I take your ingredients, I assemble
⏹️ ▶️ John them, I composite them, I apply your layer effects, and then I, you know, eventually it renders a bitmap that keeps in memory
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere or whatever, right? The 26, Tahoe's effects are different
⏹️ ▶️ John than 27's effects. They're just different, even for the same things. And also, 27
⏹️ ▶️ John has effects that 26 doesn't support. And 26 won't even read the .icon files from 27,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes everything complicated. So I said, I don't care how it looks in 26. Don't worry about making an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks okay in 26 and looks okay in 27. Just concentrate on making one that looks really good in 27
⏹️ ▶️ John because I'm hoping, and maybe I'm wrong with this, but I'm hoping that they're not going to change the rendering of these icons
⏹️ ▶️ John every single year. It's just the Tahoe was a terrible mistake and they're fixing it. And the 27 rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John will stay and maybe they'll only add to it. But they changed how these things render. So the icon you're seeing, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bitmap made with the 27 rendering system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn't look as good in 26, but I don't care. That was, hopefully that freed them up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, we made a million variants of this. And by the way, one of the reasons they use these recipes for them is
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can have the different icon themes, which is separate from the system theme. Your system theme is light or dark on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and other operating systems. But there's a separate on macOS icon theme and on iOS and everything as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the icon theme can be default, which is what you're looking at here. And there's dark, which is a dark icon
⏹️ ▶️ John theme, which you can have regardless of what the system theme is. And then there's clear, which sucks all
⏹️ ▶️ John the color and life out of your icon and makes it clear. And then there's clear tinted, which is like clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John but with a color tint to it. And the reason it can do that is because it just takes the ingredients, the layers and the effects,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it composites them. And then, you know, for clear, it sucks all the color out of it. And for dark, it makes them darker
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. And you can tweak the .icon file lets you tweak, oh, this change. In dark mode, use this specular
⏹️ ▶️ John value, but in default mode, use this. Like you can change it like that. But I I'm pretty sure you can't have totally
⏹️ ▶️ John different icons in dark and light. Maybe there's a hack to do that with like visibility or something. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that's icon themes. But we'd made so many variations of this that
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to also have, well, I didn't want to also have, like by the time we were done, I'm like, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ John spent all that time figuring out how to do this icon. And I think you ended up making
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good dark version of it. Did I just upload the same one again twice? No, there it is. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there was lurking in the various iterations this icon, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as that icon, but with a dark background. And I thought it was a little bit too dark for the default mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can't have two entirely separate icons, I think, for light and dark mode. No, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. Can you? Yeah, you like you can you can make the entire like groups, like in the in icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco composer, you can have an entire group toggle on or off. You know you can you can have totally separate layers and assets for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different color schemes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the dark mode that Parakeet did actually looks fits in better with dark mode because they
⏹️ ▶️ John did like an inverted thing where like the shapes are light and the thing is dark or whatever. So I do like their dark icon theme
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, but I also like this icon. So what I ended up doing was in the about
⏹️ ▶️ John box for Switch Glass, if you're in dark mode, you see this icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you see the other icon in light mode. And I think I also made it. I don't think I've finished it yet, but I'll probably also make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that if you click the icon, it will switch to the old Brad Ellis one as well, because I just still just love that icon. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that Switch Glass solved an incredibly difficult problem in an icon that just looks amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John and I'm very happy with. And you'll be glad you don't get to see the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 10 or 20 versions of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann the same
⏹️ ▶️ John icon that we went through before we arrived at this. But so I just say, I'm very picky and they were very nice
⏹️ ▶️ John to work with. And they solve, they solve this design problem very neatly. Um,
Front and Center (old icon)
⏹️ ▶️ John The Next app, which hopefully this won't take as long. Sorry, I'm going on about this. Next one is front and center. Front and center,
⏹️ ▶️ John I made the icon for because it did not require me to actually draw anything. My idea for the front
⏹️ ▶️ John and center icon, by the uh, you know, to remind everyone, front and center is the app that I have that restores the window layering
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior from classic Mac OS, where when you click on a window that belongs to a different app, it will not just bring that window to
⏹️ ▶️ John the front, it will bring all the windows that belong to the app to the front. That's how classic Mac OS worked. I'm very used to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted Mac OS 10 to work like that. And for years, I ran DragThing, which did that for me. There
⏹️ ▶️ John were other Mac utilities that did that, but DragThing got discontinued. And I said, you know, this is my very first Mac app, so
⏹️ ▶️ John trivial. Once a friend showed me how to do it and work together to make this map. Anyway, that's all
⏹️ ▶️ John front and center does. It makes it so that when you click a window in another app, all the windows will come to the front. And you can toggle the mode
⏹️ ▶️ John so you go back to the, what I call the modern mode, which is the default mode for macOS. But I keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it in classic mode most of the time. And so the icon for front and center, I decided was going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John three square platinum windows, like classic macOS style, macOS 8 style,
⏹️ ▶️ John Copeland style, if you will, windows that say front and center. The back window says front,
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle window says and in the title bar, and the front window says center in the title bar. And these are pixel for pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John exact incarnations taken from screenshots from Mac emulators. So I didn't have to draw any
⏹️ ▶️ John of this. This is what macOS 8 windows look like. I'm kind of surprised Apple let me have this icon because
⏹️ ▶️ John technically every pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John was drawn by Apple, not me. But they don't care. It was too long ago. It's in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John And having a pixel exact icon in Mac OS 10 doesn't really fit because it scales and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John gets blurry. So I made basically like all the different sizes of this icon so all
⏹️ ▶️ John the edges are sharp square pixels, like none of them are scaled. In the pre
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe days, in the days before the dot .icon format, you had like dot .icns resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John which said, give me your 16 by 16, your 32 by 32, by 64 by 64. There's a bunch of separate sizes, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John would put separate bitmaps for all of them. And as someone was pointing out on Mastodon recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually have custom versions for 16 by 16 and 32 by 32 that don't look like the big icon
⏹️ ▶️ John because that was the idea with icons was like, if your icon, they used to be 32 by 32 max,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like if your icon at 16 by 16 or 8 by 8 is unreadable when you try to scale
⏹️ ▶️ John it, draw a different icon at that size. And so my tiny icon just has one window and my really
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny icon just has like the title bar stripes. All that dies with .icon
⏹️ ▶️ John because .icon does not let you do that. You can't have separate, totally different icons
⏹️ ▶️ John for different sizes. It's like ingredients and a recipe and that's it. And so I'm sad that that's
⏹️ ▶️ John dying with front and center. But I desperately need a new icon because these cascaded overlapping
⏹️ ▶️ John windows do not fit in a squircle. And if you just stick them in the squircle, they look blurry and awful. And once again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I made my own Tahoe icon, which was three overlapping windows and it looked terrible. And so I threw
⏹️ ▶️ John up my hands and said, save me, Parakeet, do something here. And my guidance on this was less
⏹️ ▶️ John exacting than switch glass. I was like, I don't know, layered, it's layer about layering windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the themes here is like classic Mac OS. I wanted to evoke classic macOS in some way and I want to evoke
⏹️ ▶️ John window layering in some way because that's what the app does. Go with that. And so again, within
⏹️ ▶️ John 30 seconds, was like, here's your app icon, but done by professionals. Like, yep, nope, that's already better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three layered Windows. And we went back and forth on this for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if we tried, we tried, maybe thought of a couple other things, but didn't really implement them. But yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John so clear that layered Windows was the right approach. And how many iterations are there on layered Windows? And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there's a surprising amount. And we ended up coming up with this icon, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll paste in a second.
Front and Center (new icon)
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, layered Windows. This icon is an interesting case study because, well, the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I, that I threw in here was like, you know, in classic macOS, my favorite desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John picture, the desktop background wallpaper, as I say, in current parlance, because Windows won that war,
⏹️ ▶️ John was a particular shade of like purplish blue, just a solid color. It was one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the default choices in various versions of Mac OS. And I always And also like in classic
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS, the progress bars were this color and the folders were not exactly this color,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the progress bars and the folders are also kind of like a bluish purplish type of thing. And so that always reminds me of classic
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS. And so their idea was, let's
⏹️ ▶️ John do like a like a liquid glass style classic macOS window. So the front most window
⏹️ ▶️ John has the close box and the zoom box and the the window shade box. Oh, this is so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And the stripes
⏹️ ▶️ John from a liquid glass, from a classic macOS window, but it's rendered in liquid glass. Now, here's the thing about this icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike the switch glass icon, where you can make that switch glass icon the size of a billboard and it just looks gorgeous
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to lick it. This one, as you make it bigger and bigger, you say, those window controls
⏹️ ▶️ John are pretty rudimentary, like not particularly detailed. And believe me, at various points, I said, can we make those window
⏹️ ▶️ John controls more detailed and more like they look like in classic macOS? And we went through several
⏹️ ▶️ John iterations of that and it was all a bad idea because the thing about icons is you're not
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at them at 1024 by 1024. You're always looking at them at icon sizes. And this is true of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch Glass icon too. Even though it looks gorgeous at big sizes, much of the design of the Switch Glass icon
⏹️ ▶️ John was because I would scale it down to like 32 by 32 and say, I can't, I can't see it. It doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John read right. Like I don't see the shapes. It's not working, blah, blah, blah. You have to look at icons at normal icon
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes. How is it going to look in an actual Finder window? How is it going to look in a list view view? How is it going to look on a dock with a sane dock
⏹️ ▶️ John size? No one wants to look at your gorgeous icon. They're not going to make it huge. So their first
⏹️ ▶️ John instinct was correct, which is we really have to simplify these window controls because it'll be hard to even see them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be like the stage makeup version of window controls. Like it needs to be kind of like cartoonish
⏹️ ▶️ John and simplified and Fisher-Price. And even though it doesn't look amazing when it's 1024 by 1024, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that. Otherwise, it looks like a muddy mess when it gets at icon sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I'm really happy with this icon because like the other one, this went through so many iterations
⏹️ ▶️ John of me shrinking it down and shrinking it down. And Like at various points, I had finder windows open with
⏹️ ▶️ John 10 app icons, just 10 apps all, I would just build them all in Xcode, right? 10, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John apps all lined up and I'd just be scaling them in the icon view slider and thing. And then I had them, I had them all
⏹️ ▶️ John on the dock and I would scale the dock and I would look at them and it was like, it was like the 31 shades of blue
⏹️ ▶️ John thing from Google, only human-powered and not metrics driven. It's just me staring at them of like, which
⏹️ ▶️ John of these 10 versions that look exactly the same to the casual observer is the best one? Uh, And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was probably tedious for them. but, uh, And it was difficult for me too. But like eventually I uh, circled
⏹️ ▶️ John on this one. So now I have icons. And same deal. I don't care how it looks in Tahoe. It looks bad in Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't care how it looks in Tahoe. I told them that. Don't blame them because my icons look weird in Tahoe. That's on me. I said, I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John care how it looks in Tahoe. It looks fine in Tahoe. It looks like an icon. But like, as you make bigger in Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the effects aren't quite as good or whatever. Anyway, so the final thing I'll say about this is
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't, I'm not going to use these icons until I can build with Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John 27. I could, in theory, build an Xcode 26. Like Parakeet
⏹️ ▶️ John gave me 26 version of these icons because, again, the 20 xcode 26 refuses
⏹️ ▶️ John to read .icon files from 27 if they use any of the new features. So I can't
⏹️ ▶️ John ship these exact ones in 26. uh And I could just, you know, again, they gave me ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John work in 26 by removing the 27 only features and stuff. But I don't want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'm not actually going to deploy these icons until I can do my first build with xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 which usually happens like the week they go GM or whatever. So my apps will continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John have hideous icons in 26 because they're my own drone ones. And I will also get the maximum amount of time where
⏹️ ▶️ John the people on macOS 15 and earlier see the old icons that I liked. Because I did like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even though I didn't really draw my icon with the layered windows, I did like it. So I'm maximizing that time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though I love these icons, they will not be on my apps until I can build with Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John 27. But when that does happen, I'll be very happy. I will update my website. And like I said, I will probably add
⏹️ ▶️ John Easter eggs so that you can like click on the icons in the app somewhere to see my old versions because
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do love my old versions. It's not Parakeet's faults that I love. My old versions got taken away. It's Apple's fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'm mad at Apple for doing this to me. But I am
⏹️ ▶️ John to have beautiful icons made by professional designers that I'm really happy with. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are really good. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing what they're good at. It turns out it works well. All right, so.
Callsheet (Casey’s icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, obviously, I had asked them to look at Call Sheet. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, the original call sheet icon is what I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to take a look at. And basically, what that was, was a clapperboard like you would see at a film set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a magnifying glass over it. And I will put a link in the show notes to Jelly's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write up that he did a couple of years ago now about the uh, the, the evolution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the icon. And you can see the truly piss poor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version that I was using that I had drawn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it's drawing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, That I had drawn as like my first internal cut at it. And then Jelly took it and made it look
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, This is a special skill, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being this bad at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned like the things that AI couldn't make with that, whatever French band that I can't pronounce because it's so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I don't think an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI could have come up with something this bad. no
⏹️ ▶️ John truly terrible. I don't i don't know i don't know how you did it. How did you come up with red?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the color Yeah, the color selection. Why? I don't know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John And red on blue. It's like, you know, when you put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on blue, it does like the
⏹️ ▶️ John effect. Like, it makes your eyes really…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my favorite thing about this is that the magnifying glass circle is not centered on the icon. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it's not that. It doesn't look
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally off-center. No, it's just far enough off to annoy you. It's far enough off to look like a mistake,
⏹️ ▶️ John He tried to get as many tangents as he could into one icon. He's got the little corners of it touching him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Edward, this is unfair
⏹️ ▶️ John we're critiquing Casey's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it gets worse. It gets better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse. This shows how important an icon designer is. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you zoom in by whatever means you choose on the icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. There's outlines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's an outline of the original magnifying glass. I don't know how I accomplished that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You couldn't be bothered to clean it up. I didn't even realize Jelly and I were having a FaceTime call.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It's all the attention to
⏹️ ▶️ John detail that Casey brings to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon is like, yeah, there's some leftover stuff there, whatever. I think my favorite thing about this also is like, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the blog post, the rectangle graphic that you put behind it is also like random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors that do not go with the colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jelly's deliberate choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. We were on a FaceTime call like a week or two ago, as I was talking about earlier in the show, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed out to me, Did you ever notice there's a second magnifying glass? I was like, what are you talking about? Look in the upper left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner. There's the, oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed by like, you know, the magic wand tool in Photoshop to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this layer and trick it down, but you missed all the little anti-aliased edges. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's unfair to the magic wand tool. magic
⏹️ ▶️ John tool would not do this.
Callsheet (old icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orders for Louie and Luca were: hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like the way that Jelly ended up with the icon. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the way it looks, but I feel like at this point, it's looking a little bit dated. That's not Jelly's fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's just, you know, tastes and whatnot have moved on. So I'd love, you know, a refreshed, a spic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey span version, if you will, of of that icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John your, Did your instructions include anything having to do with like make it liquid glassy,
⏹️ ▶️ John like make it fit in with liquid glass? Like, what was your stance on that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could look up, I'd have to find the conversation, but I could look up what I told them. But it was, I believe in, in summary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, yeah, you know, modernize it. I think it makes sense to do something liquid glassy, particularly around the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnifying glass and the icon. But you are, one of the things I said to them, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some other people they may have spoken with recently, is you are the professionals. I'm going to give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some thoughts, but do what you think is best because I remember being on the other side of the table as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consultant, which I don't know, John, if you ever did consulting during your career, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I did plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Okay. It is abso effing lutely infuriating when a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company hires you to bring your expert advice and expertise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to them. And then all they do is bicker with you about the things you tell them to do. And obviously some bickering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is normal and you go back and forth. That's a good relationship, et cetera. But oftentimes I would come into some other company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be like, hey, I'm here to do X, Y, and Z. And they say, And they would say to me, great, but you need to do it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly this way, in exactly this order, or else we're going to be very upset and tell your boss. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's not a relationship. That's not constructive. So what I said to them was, hey, this is the sort of thing I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking about. For example, I really like that Jelly had text on the icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely do. I think it's It's really fun to have these little like nods to different movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and different things. And like the joke that he made, which we talked about just a week or two ago about the search for blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey December with Kay Celess as the director. I think that was hilarious, but, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's a very busy icon by my instruction, but it's a very busy icon. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe we can simplify it. And so Louie and Luca took a look at it, and here's what they came
Callsheet (new icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I absolutely love it. I think it looks great. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically a modernized, simplified, liquid glassified version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call sheet icon. I don't know when I'm going to deploy it, but it is my intention to make this the default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon. I intend to leave the existing icons because there's a zillion icons in there that you can choose between.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jelly had done various versions of the clapperboard. Then my friend Stee, I'll put a link to his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write-up about the icons that he had done. All of those are going to stay, but this will become the default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we went back and forth a fair bit about you know, what do we do with regard to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, jokey versions of the icon. And one of the things I said to them was, you know, like I said a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, I like the text, but that's not a hill I'm looking to die on. But one hill I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am looking to die on is I don't want to lose sight of having, at the very least,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pride icon and a trans, like a trans icon. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, we absolutely agree. And they came up with cuts for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both pride and the trans version of it as well, which I'll put links to that in the show notes also.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that these also look absolutely great. And they keep with the spirit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I'm trying to accomplish, but in a more subtle way. Now, I would like to hear what you guys have to think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but before or have to say about it, but before I do, I will tell you that I opened these in Icon Composer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the mechanism by which you mash together all the different things that John described. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are one, two, three, four, six different portions of different, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know what these are called, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann objects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that grew. or not. There are more than six groups. There's like seven or eight groups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John There's layers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess layers. Yeah, that's probably a good word for it. But the highlights in the magnifying glass,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are six individual highlights to make it look just so. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the sort of thing you get from a professional designer. And, you know, Louie and Luca really took the time to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look good. And about the only thing that we bickered is too strong a word, but bickered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about was their original cut had the two like rivets that are that make up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pivot points for the clap the clappy part of the clapperboard. Originally, they had them kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top one in particular was kind of hanging off the corner a little bit. or That's the way it looked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, it can't be hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John off the corner outline because then you'll get in squirrel jail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so it wasn't literally off the corner, but it was like positioned in a slightly funky way. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was probably because I don't I don't have a copy of that icon in front of me right now, but I think it was because it was perhaps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm doing a poor job describing it, but physically, that's where it would have been if this was a real clapperboard. And we worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit on like bringing it in and we decided, you know what, it makes more sense to have the rivets where they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are now, such that it fits the icon better, even if physically it isn't perfect. But working with them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a pleasure. uh I like to think I was pretty easy on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if anything, they deferred to me more than they should have because I was like, what do you think of this? I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John open to your ideas. Throw
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuff out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don't take what I say as gospel just because I give you i give you a suggestion. Like they would just implement it in two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I would see it was a bad idea. like but But like that's the process. I needed to see it. But like, I was totally
⏹️ ▶️ John open to anything that, I mean, the entire design of my archive, I did not think of at all. It was entirely from
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So, uh, So yeah, I definitely am open to their ideas. The only difference is like when they show me
⏹️ ▶️ John something, I immediately know what I don't like about it. And that is difficult to hear if you're not, you know, if you're
⏹️ ▶️ John not, if you're not a professional and you just take it personally or whatever, but they don't at all. Like, so they're just, you know, you don't like that? Fine, I'll change
⏹️ ▶️ John it this way. You don't like that? Fine, I'll change it this way. And that can go on for a while if, if no one has any good ideas, which is why I'm always
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, please, please throw anything you got, throw it at me because I have no problem. I have no problem judging
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Just, you know, put it out there. But yeah, it does, you know, it can be tiring to hear that
⏹️ ▶️ John every single thing you do, oh, you found something else wrong with this. It makes you think you're never going to be happy. And I try to emphasize
⏹️ ▶️ John like, already, like with their first iteration, like, already I would take this icon. It's done. Like, you know, it's better than what I have. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John already we've succeeded. Everything else is gravy. But yeah, I will iterate for a while to try to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John get it polished up the way I want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I think my executive summary of the call sheet icon is, what if you took Jelly's icon, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love, and what if you made that, but what if like Apple, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this case, former Apple designers came through and made that look more Apple-y in a good way?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that's where it landed. So I'm all ears on what you two have to say about it. Or if you don't have much to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, we can move on to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think this is a great icon. I mean, I like the previous one as well. But the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I think if you had to criticize the previous one, the biggest critique would be, it's just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a lot going on. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John very, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very busy. And we did, by the way, we did a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco special where we critiqued our home screen icons, which included Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey's apps because they're
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iOS apps. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to hear us critique Marco and Casey's old icons, there is a member special for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But I think this is a great evolution. Like, I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a common tragedy when icons are redesigned to throw away all the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personality and just have some kind of simple, you know, blob or swoosh or whatever. This is not what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here at all. You know, this, this keeps pretty much all of the personality minus the text,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which, and again, I think, I think the text, it was a cool reference. It was also very busy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn't you know no one's reading that at icon size anyway. And so this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great direction for it to go in. I even have the maybe slightly hot take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think you can use the Rainbow Pride icon as the main icon because it isn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true, actually. I had a similar thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it depends on how you want to brand it because one of the concerns for all of our icons, I imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that we have mentally, at least in our own minds, like a an idea of our branding as expressed
⏹️ ▶️ John by our icon. And your default icon, despite having variations, does express your branding.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I look at the pride version as icon. I'm like, oh, that's the pride version of Casey's icon. But when I look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John default version, I'm like, oh, that's Kalshi. Yeah, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I also kind of like, I like the idea of someone going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and making the choice to use the pride icon in a pride way, not in a like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm not trying to punish them.
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don't use your default icon either, by the way. Like, that's part of what makes it fun is that because your icon lends itself
⏹️ ▶️ John so well to variations, it allows personalization. And I agree. I think the Pride one looks great, just color scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It looks amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you like that color scheme, you just pick it. I personally use the Apple Six Colors one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And they did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a, I'm not going to put in the show notes, but they did make a version of that as well. And so that will be an.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please put that in because it's what I choose. But it allows you,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of custom icons. They allow you to express yourself. But your default ones does say call shit to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess, I guess you're right, though, like, you know, making, like having the pride one be like a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, it makes it more special than if it just was what the icon always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's a better way to put it. Yeah, that's exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there's lots more. Like there's, I don't know if there's an official website, but like here's the pride flag. Here's the trans
⏹️ ▶️ John pride flag. Here's the lesbian pride flag. There is There's like more color combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John than you might expect. So you could check that out and add more variations if you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's true. And also something that I believe Marco said a moment ago was that when I came to them and I said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, what I'm asking for, I guess, is just a modernized version of the current clapperboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon. But really, you know, go to town, do whatever you think is best. If you have some wild ass idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you want to try, go for it. Let's let's see what happens. And it was interesting because Louis and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lucas said to me, you know, while that would be fun and all, you don't want to give up on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I feel gross saying this, but the brand recognition of the clapperboard. And you don't want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throw that away, which is what Marco, I think, was saying a moment ago. Like, let's not throw that and put that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside. Let's embrace it and just modernize it and make it simpler. And they did look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at keeping some text on there. And the three of us quickly concluded, nah, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just got to take it off entirely. And the colors on the clapperboard can be one of those sort of, if you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, sort of situations. And I think that's for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here's my critique of the icon. First, I'm jealous of you because you have what I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John any of my icons had, which is if you want to use the new refraction effect in the 27
⏹️ ▶️ John OSs, you need to have something behind the thing to refract.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah, yeah. Otherwise, it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything. And so like, look at the Apple Maps icon in iOS 27. They put a little clear refracti
⏹️ ▶️ John thing around it because the background is like whatever, like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever Apple's map tiles are with like the green grass and the roads or whatever. And that gives you something to refract.
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Man, we tried with my icons, but like because of the, again, because of the branding coherence and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying to maintain the branding, it's difficult to get something. I don't, I just don't have a bunch of like
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp lines with colors contrasting against each other. Guess what you have, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You've got a little top of your icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a bunch of stripes or lines. So you can go to town on the refract, and you have a magnifying glass. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John already in your icon. So I'm jealous that your your actual icon branding fits so
⏹️ ▶️ John well with 27. But I will say that like this icon is another example of like stage makeup. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the like the specular highlight effect and the like the chromatic
⏹️ ▶️ John effect and everything around the magnifying glass are way overdone at giant sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then shrink it down to normal icon size and you're like, oh, it looks great. That's what you have to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. Just as my advice to anyone out there, because if you if you engage a professional designer, they'll do
⏹️ ▶️ John what you tell them to do. Don't tell them to do like, you know, my instinct looking at this big icon was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it has to look amazing at 1024. doesn't doesn't matter what it looks like at 10. No one's ever going to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it that size. You're never even going to look at it at that size. Your icon has to look good at icon sizes. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John a designer will do what you pay them to do and they'll, you know, they'll do what you ask, but you can ask
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that are wrong and bad. Hopefully they'll try to dissuade you from that and say, I suggest you not do this. But in
⏹️ ▶️ John the end, you know, the client, the client gets what they want. You want the client to be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So whatever they're happy with. But my advice to you is you should do what Casey has done here. Or I don't know. Maybe the highlights
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't bother him. But like, I think this looks just so like stage makeup, like so overdone at massive
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes, but it looks perfect at icon sizes. And especially for an iOS app, there's
⏹️ ▶️ John not even a way really in like the home screen to zoom your icons to 1024, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's always going to be icon sized. And the icon size, this looks great. I think they did a great job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. All right, Marco, what you got?
Overcast (old icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I also took kind of a double-dip approach here. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, listen, if you're going to, if you want to do the overcast icon refresh, that'd be great. But I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to do my new reminder app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey's really making your self-made icon for the reminder app look good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Anyway, but first, they did do overcast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here, this is the link here. So what I asked for with Overcast is basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little tweak for iOS 27. Again, I've had Louis look at the icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time a lot. you know louis done all the tweaks or most of the tweaks over time in in the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 12, 11 years, 12 years that Overcast has been a thing. And he's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been dying to have me change the outline color, I think. um
Overcast (new icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try this. Not only does this new icon for Overcast, which I think I'm going to use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like 90% sure I'm going to go with it. Not only does it have like perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates for the 27 glass refraction looks and everything, like impeccably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. But he has changed the outline color of the tower circle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from black to a dark blue. And blue goes really well with orange.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, I think I love it. It's the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first day he showed me, I hated it. And I'm like, this is going to need some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it was just, you know, I've been looking at the same color scheme of white, orange, black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 12 years or whatever. Then Now I'm like, hmm, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. I think this little tweak of shifting that circle from black to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark blue, I think it really gives a level of freshness to the icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I really appreciate. And every, And this is like, again, like when you work with a good designer, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will come up with suggestions and ideas that you would not have. Uh, and you, again, you don't have to say yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don't say yes to all of them, but I thought this was a really cool new direction. Um, So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I think, is great. I'm going to live with it for a little while on my devices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like how I like it over the next few weeks. But I think this is awesome. And I think I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to go with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this this original design, like the whole shape of this, this was Brad Ellis and Louie?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Louie and Brad at their previous Pacific Helm company like years years and years and years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um And then over time, I've had both Brad and Louie at different times tweak it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for different needs. Like, you know, like when the Apple Watch uh became a thing, you know, a couple years into Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um you know, I had Brad help me with that. Later on, I had Louie help me with uh with with an update for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, little tweaks here and there. um Last year's 26 icon, the first looking glass icon, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Louie. He literally just unsolicited, sent me one. He was just like, here, here, I tried this. I made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is perfect. Can I use this? He's like, yeah, go ahead. I'm like, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. So yeah, so it's been, it's been, you know, Louie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Louie and Brad, you know, over the years. And now, you know, Louie and Luca, I've,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I've, you know, work with them through this text message, you know, through this iMessage chat that we've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, which, by the way, working through iMessage is such a delight when you're doing that, like going back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forth with, oh, here's an image here, and you paste links here and there. And it's so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than like going through emails or Zoom meetings, like, you know, months apart or weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made Google Docs, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I did through iMessage as well, but I also made Google Docs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, of course you did. But anyway, yeah, working with Louie and Luca for this has been a pleasure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yes, the overcast icon, that was the kind of the easier one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me let me critique let me critique the overcast icon before I move
⏹️ ▶️ John um so first you are in the same situation as me and that you don't have um refracting
⏹️ ▶️ John things over changing colors. Like all of your all of your content is not over anything else that
⏹️ ▶️ John intersects it in a way that the refraction would take effect. So you get the benefit, like especially, this is an example of like at
⏹️ ▶️ John 1024, this looks gorgeous with like the the specular highlights on the bottom of the little rings
⏹️ ▶️ John and the chromatic shadows. These are all effects that I know from Icon Composer, but like uh, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John a Call Sheet and unlike my front and center icon, the bigger you make this one, the more the details look amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John and definitely look more liquid glassy. But the plain fact is you don't have a Casey situation. You don't
⏹️ ▶️ John have a shape that goes over the top of another shape that intersects that you can refract. So if refraction
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually turned on in any of these shapes, you would never be able to tell, even at 1024, which is, it's not a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think the, I was going to say like this, this, the, the bones of this icon, like the, the original design
⏹️ ▶️ John of circle, radio tower, signals, orange, like it's so strong and it's so, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John well-branded that like, you know, who cares about stupid, you know, refraction
⏹️ ▶️ John effect in the 27 OSs, who knows if it will even be there in 28. So you're wise to keep things the way they are. For the blue
⏹️ ▶️ John and the circle, I don't mind it. When, you know, when I saw it, I noted that it was blue, but I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that works Cause as you noted, it's like, you know, the whole cliche of like teal and orange or whatever, complementary
⏹️ ▶️ John colors is attracted together. It does change the branding a little bit, but it also changes it from
⏹️ ▶️ John more of like a Halloween tiger thing with black and orange to be more like complementary
⏹️ ▶️ John colors, more artistic. My one criticism of this icon is that I want to have gone through 87
⏹️ ▶️ John iterations trying to make the bottoms of the radio waves read better at small sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I mean, maybe, you know, maybe that can be done. Honestly, I don't, when I when you actually see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on device, you don't, you don't have any problem
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm looking at it shrunken down and big sizes looks amazing, right? Shrunken down, comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the current icon, the the circle part of it is not the part that stands out, like the blue versus black.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's not the thing I notice. The thing I notice is at the bottom of the little uh things fade a little bit, but that's me.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh You know, I have my opinions and and honestly, like I said, with a vast majority of my opinions,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I don't like this about this. Change it to be that way. And they would do it. And then I would look at it and say, nope, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. So that could be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. I actually did a few of those back and forth with, with the next icon where I was like, can you try like this? And oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're right. Yeah, but that's that's the process. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John need to, like, you need to see it. I mean, maybe they already know cause they've either already seen it or have more experience. They know it's going to
⏹️ ▶️ John suck. But as the client, you have to say, I need, show me it with this thing like that. And then you have to be honest
⏹️ ▶️ John with yourself and say, just because I asked for it, like, oh, you gave me the thing that I wanted. I'm happy with it, right? I mean, I did it with all my
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. It's like, ask for, ask to see the variation, see the variation, and then judge it honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann make
⏹️ ▶️ John it better or not? Or do you like it worse? And most of my changes made things worse. But you have to, if you're honest about that, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John you'll end up with an icon at the end that you like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And with Overcast, I wanted to be really careful because not only does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you know, Overcast has been around for such a long time, the icon, like, I think they pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much got it right the first time. You know, there have been tweaked, you know, little tweaks over time, but they've been really minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks. And so I didn't want to change the Overcast branding because everyone loves it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it's great.
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't need to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the users love it. like So it doesn't need to be like a whole new, you know, like the way Instagram changes their icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically you know a few years in and everyone hated it. Like it doesn't need that level of refresh. It just needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like little tweaks to move forward over time with system conventions and minor fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. But anyway. All right. So.
Reminder (Marco’s icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh Next, I'm like, all right, now i need I need an icon for my new reminder app. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally a name for the app. uh I don't think I want to reveal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yet. But I went into this, I gave them a very broad brief. I'm like, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, uh it's you know it's an app that's very, it has a very basic UI. it's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a reminders database front end that's simplified, focused on people
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. I've been waiting for you to accidentally blur out the name of the app. Keep going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People who snooze a lot. And if it's not reminding them constantly, like every day, like if you dismiss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alert for reminder and it never reminds you again, like that thing will never get done. You know, it's an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for forgetful people and for ADHD and you know, people whose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brains work like mine, which is we need a lot of gentle reminding all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time about tasks and we procrastinate and put them off a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most days I am snoozing at least five different things that are alerting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me every single day. I'm like, I'll do it tomorrow. Do it tomorrow. Do it tomorrow. Of course. Kick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the can down the road. That would have been a good name. Anyway, kick the can. That'll be my backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name in case I run into any trademark problems. Anyway, I gave them the brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I'm like, all right, I developed this app on the flight on the way to my Hawaii Big Island
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family vacation. And I loved visiting like the big island. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the lava flows coming off of the, you know, all the volcanoes that kind of form the island in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's all these like dark brown and black like lava flows of different, you know, all these like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rocky, beautiful landscapes. I loved visiting Kona coffee farms. You know, I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up like, you know, what, what is the, the volcano that the Kona farms are on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, what's the shape of it? Maybe I can involve that shape. And I went back and forth, like before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we even had this thing, I was going back and forth with AI brainstorming of like, what kind of concepts can I work in here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of my favorite ones was like a sunrise because every day is a fresh start. Like, that sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I love that. And so I'm like, all right, what about a sunrise over the volcano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Kona Coffee grows on? And I even briefly, I'm like, oh, what about my old peace icon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a sunrise? Which I forget whether Louis or Brad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it, but it was one of their icons back in the day. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, maybe I can involve the peace sunrise with this volcano, maybe with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee. And I'm like, okay, so I gave i gave this all to to louis and Luca.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Louis, you know, very opinionated, but also very diplomatic. And he was like, listen, this is a lot of concepts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like too many things to work in. Let's pare it down. You can keep the name,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can keep the volcano, but you probably don't want that name with a volcano. It doesn't really work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's like, OK, OK, OK. And with the sunrise, I had a million, a million different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas. The problem with all of those ideas, first I was like, all right, what about a coffee leaf?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like a coffee, because I visited a coffee plantation. What about like a like a coffee leaf cluster with the coffee cherry?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that's just, it looks like a holly. It doesn't look distinct. It's a Christmas app, yeah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What about the Kona volcano? I forget, it's Mount, I forget which mountain it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn't really have a distinct shape because volcanoes don't look like cartoon volcanoes. They look like mountains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it doesn't really have like a very visually iconic shape. You know, sunrises,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure, they're fine, but you know, there's not that much distinct about that. All the different other metaphors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of the things that I considered was a forget-me-not flower. I thought, Oh, that's great. Forget-me-nots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a beautiful shape. Well, that's used for like Alzheimer's and dementia organizations. It's not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a happy association. So I'm like, okay, I probably shouldn't use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like there was, there were all these different metaphors and ideas that I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that just, I, that I just was hitting walls with. I couldn't get anywhere with any of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally, you know, within, within, you know, a day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Louis and Luca came up with, hey, what about a lighthouse? Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let's talk. So i also I also told them, by the way, I'm like, I'm using this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, this dark red as my tint color in the UI, and I want to keep it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't want to be talked out of the dark red. And they're like, all right, we can work with that, you know.
Reminder (new icon)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, this is the icon that they came up with, and this was through some iteration. The reason a lighthouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is a fun metaphor is that the whole role, yeah, I was saying, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just constantly reminds you of things so you don't forget. It's like a basically like a beacon. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly, hey, hey, don't forget this. Don't forget this, don't forget this. And that's that's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a lighthouse does. Like, you know, the way the lights swivel around, you get like the periodic. And this was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when I was going back and forth with AI, it was giving me all these different metaphors of like waves and things like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's just, it was so hard to come up with anything that wasn't already taken in the productivity space. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighthouse is better than all the AI generated ideas. And that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all Louie and Luca. And I was like, oh, actually, I love that also because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love Fire Island and I would love a way to represent Fire Island. And Fire Island has an iconic lighthouse on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I showed the picture and actually, I didn't realize Luca grew up on Long Island and they've been to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighthouse. So this actually is styled somewhat evocative of the Fire Island Lighthouse with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stripe. like That's kind of how it looks.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's interesting that you couldn't get talked out of your dark red, but it's like, what if we just go with the Fire Island Lighthouse kind of rusty
⏹️ ▶️ John maroon? be like, nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the dark red, i I like the dark red a lot. First of all, I think it looks great in the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And second of all, I like the idea of retaking red because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red in reminders means overdue. And if you work the way I work, you always have just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall of red statuses in reminders. And I like the idea of like, you know I'm going to take that back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm going to make the whole app red, black and white, and just make it like this new dark, cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red and, you know, F your overdue red. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we went back and forth a few times. And you know, at one point, I was like, oh, can you make the lighthouse bigger? And I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I recognize I just told designers make the logo bigger, but it actually was the right move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that case. And they also had the idea of what if we tie in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visual identity to overcast icon also. And that's why it has the circle with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tower in the middle with something coming out of the tower, you know, horizontally. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just works so well. And this shape, it goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, all the different color modes, like the monochrome icon modes, the dark mode, like they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nailed this. And I wouldn't have had any part of this concept without working with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, a huge part of their value. Not only are they really great artists, but they're really good at coming up with branding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and concepts too. Like, and, And they drew, and like I was saying earlier, like the speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iteration. Like I was on my couch one night with my laptop and they were just cranking out. How about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How about this? And like, I couldn't believe how quickly they were generating really good icons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then at the once we decided the direction to go, they're like, okay, we're going to draw this up for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what were you just doing? Like, they're, they're like, in their minds, probably their rough drafts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are their napkin sketches. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And they were like amazing. Like, I was like, I thought that was the final icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because even even their rough drafts, like their, whatever they were like, you know, crapping out with no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time were amazing. But then, you know, of course, you know, then the final one has all the nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specular highlights and, and you know, it is more refined. But I couldn't have been more happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And I, and I showed it to a few people. And everyone I showed it to was like, oh yeah, that's it. Nailed it. Like, love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I gave them a very difficult problem in the sense that I really didn't know what I was looking for. And I gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them way too many things to pick from. And they guided me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly into something that was simpler and nicer and a better logo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think will help it stand out more in a sea of check marks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm just so glad that it's not list items and check marks on this icon. Because that's just,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's an impossibility. I mean, you could have asked for that and they would have done it for you if that's what you wanted, but it's like, man, you think it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a crowded, it's a crowded icon field if you're going to do check marks or line items. No matter how you abstract them, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how you think you're stylizing them or being clever, it's like, wow, there's a lot of icons with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be clear on that point, though, like, like one, one thing that Louis pointed out during the process, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was saying, like, please don't make it look like a check mark because everything else is a check mark. And he was like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people are only going to have like one of these types of apps installed. Like, you're not really, the users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't really care if it looks like a checkmark or not because they aren't seeing a wall of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkmark apps on their devices. Like in the app store, you might see a whole bunch of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean, look, let's be honest, like app store search is not something that was ever great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its current form where it's just filled with ad slots and you know they're only going to turn that up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organic discovery on the app store is effectively dead. Competition and just a flood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps made it pretty bad for a while. But with search ads and then increasing the search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad load and increasing the search ad size, Apple has destroyed organic discovery in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store. So no one is going to find this app by just searching for apps like ADHD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reminders or whatever. No one is going to find it that way. It's going to all have to be paid marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or social or referral marketing. So I know better than to think than to presume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the App Store is going to do anything for me for this because they won't. All they'll do is take more of my money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, hey, Turnus, prove me wrong. I would love for this direction to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think it's horrendous. But I also know the reality of the world. Apple makes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of money from app store search ads, and I don't think they're going to want to turn that off. They're not even going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that will turn it down. They're going to only crank it up over time because every single, this is the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of service revenue. Every single time that there's a bit of a soft quarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the horizon, they're going to want to crank whatever knobs they can crank to push those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers up. And when you already have an ad system in place, you can say, oh, what if we just add more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads? What if we just crank up the ad load a little bit? Like, that's always a knob that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting right there. So tempting to press when you need a little bit of a boost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we know they're going to do that over time. So anyway, but Louis was good to point out, like, the sea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check marks is not as bad of a thing to avoid as I was assuming it is, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking of it as a big grid of apps on the app store. It's all check marks, but no one ever sees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And no one's going to see my app in that anyway. What people see this is on their home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens. Like that's, so that matters a lot more than whatever everyone else is doing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said, I'm really glad it's not a check mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you'll see the Apple Reminders app, though, like the line item. So at the very least, if you differentiate your icon from
⏹️ ▶️ John the reminders app icon, it helps it stand out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John people can hide or delete that one, but like I'm not sure everybody does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And my like draft icon looked a lot like the reminders icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, yeah, very, very pleased with how this icon turned out. And working with Louis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Luca was just delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So here's my critique. I think the circle branding is a really good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wouldn't have thought of that for the reminders icon. I think the lighthouse is a great idea. I'm kind of amazed
⏹️ ▶️ John that the lighthouse icon doesn't have any 27 refraction effects. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, it's light and it's like a reflecting lens and surely we could do something with that. But I can see why in this design,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's not really a place for that to be here. And it would just kind of muddy things up a little bit and it would like mess with
⏹️ ▶️ John your branding because the only things the light intersects with is a circular ring and you don't want to like refract that because that messes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the circle. And then the inside part, which I think would just look muddy or whatever. uh I would
⏹️ ▶️ John have 100% gone with the rusty brownish or more maroonish
⏹️ ▶️ John colors of the actual fire and Lighthouse, which I know has been repainted several times. And I don't i honestly don't even
⏹️ ▶️ John know exactly what color it is now. but It's black and white. Put a link to the Wikipedia page where you can see a picture of it
⏹️ ▶️ John from some time in the past. the The roof of the building has always been kind of maroon. And then the lighthouse itself has kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of been brownish, but there's a little bit of a reddish tint, especially at sunset. I totally would have done that with the color of this
⏹️ ▶️ John because I'm so nostalgic for the fire island lighthouse but branding wise it makes more sense to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the color from the ring. And since you love this dark red color, this is the icon you wanted. And that's what you got. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John The blue, I would have definitely iterated 30 times in that blue Cause I got
⏹️ ▶️ John how many how many backgrounds that we have for like shades of gray for my stupid icon? I just would have gone around
⏹️ ▶️ John forever in that blue. It's kind of a sky blue, but maybe more of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a baby blue or like a, there's some flower that's this color blue that I don't know the name
⏹️ ▶️ John of. like, And so that I probably would have chosen a different color,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does go well with the red. Yeah, overall, like the the idea of this and
⏹️ ▶️ John how much better it stands out from the other icons. And the thing I like the most about it is the um,
⏹️ ▶️ John the expansion of the light. Like you're, you know, a cartoon representation of a lighthouse, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John let's make the light rays look like they're a cone going outwards, right? Cause that's kind of like what,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you were talking about the the idea behind the app and everything, the idea of a conical-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John light illuminating things and alerting and saying, you've got stuff to do, that is expressed by
⏹️ ▶️ John the, by the, like I'm holding my arms out now as I talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is expressed by like
⏹️ ▶️ John the spreading cone of light. And I also particularly like the white square coming right at you,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, yes, you. Yes. You have things to do. Light coming right into
⏹️ ▶️ John your face. So yeah, good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went back and forth a few times with them, you know, like tweaking the shapes a little bit here and there. And, you know, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never, there was never any friction going back and forth with them on stuff. Like they're, you know, they're professionals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, And so it wasn't, there was none of that kind of like, that like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult artist dynamic, you know, like there's none of that like attitude. It was just like, okay, yeah, let's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try that. And then we try, oh yeah, that's actually better. You know, it was great. There was even, you know, at one point I said, hey, let's try it without the circle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just being the lighthouse, you know, full, full size of the icon. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whipped it together like, oh yeah, actually, now that you show us that, you're right. That is worse. Go back to the circle. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was lots of iteration like that. And it was all very pleasant and very nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this looks great. And I think my favorite part of it, as silly as it sounds, might be the the circle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey branding that to tie it in with Overcast. I really think that's a clever idea that I don't think I would have come up with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I love now that I see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And and like when you see these icons you know, near each other, It just, they just look right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. Like they just, They look really good together.
The new icon family
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one of the uh to wrap us up, one of the things that I said in my like proposals for icons
⏹️ ▶️ John that I always say in all my proposals for the icons, which is going to sound wrong or possibly rude, but it's how
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about the process, is that the icon should be better than the app. Oh, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, like you know, whatever you think your app does and how great you think it is or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you always want an icon that looks like, wow, that looks like it's an icon for an even better app than yours. That is the sign
⏹️ ▶️ John of a good icon, where the icon is better than the app, where you're like, the app is good and I like it and all, but man,
⏹️ ▶️ John that icon makes it seem like this is going to be the best app in the universe. And it's like, well, don't you want, you don't want them to do that because they're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be disappointed because your app is not as good as the icon. I'm like, no, that's what I want out of an icon. I want the icon to elevate
⏹️ ▶️ John the app. Like, that's, that's why I tell people like, oh, I don't want to spend all this money. Cause if you, if you actually pay and don't have a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John where you give sponsorship slots for your icons like we do, if you actually pay for your icons like I did for, you know, hyperspace, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, you're like, oh, that seems like so much money. It's not. It is the best money you will spend on your app. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone, you know, you have to have your app. Obviously, you have has to serve a need and be useful and blah, blah, blah. You're like, oh, should I hire
⏹️ ▶️ John a designer to to change all the screens on my app? By all means, if you can, do that. But if you only have a very
⏹️ ▶️ John limited amount of money, spend it on the icon. Icon is so important.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so many apps I know of, I'm like, that app, that app's okay, but the icon makes it seem
⏹️ ▶️ John so much better than it actually is. So that's what I tell everybody with my things. I want your icon to be better than my app,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not hard because my apps aren't that complicated and amazing. But that is the goal of the icons. And the second thing I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John say is, and this is the sign of a successful engagement with a designer of any kind, is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I guess, you know, it has to fulfill the, uh, the, the needs of the thing you're designing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But in the end, also the client has to be happy. And I think looking at all of our icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my icons are the best. And you know why? Because they're my icons and they're what I wanted. I better think that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That's the whole point of this. It doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John mean my icons actually are better. It's like, oh yeah, I should be happier with my icon than I am with yours because those are
⏹️ ▶️ John your icons and you ask them. And I hope you feel the same way that your icons are better than mine. And that is the sign of a successful
⏹️ ▶️ John engagement of the designer. You should come away happy. You should be like, I cannot believe how great this is. And I look at my icons
⏹️ ▶️ John and your icons. I'm like, oh, I got the best icons clearly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep. now they they are really great. And I apologize for this lasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as it did, but the conversation is really about the icons, not about the two of them. But if you're interested,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Louie and Luca over at parakeet.co, not .com, .co. check them out. They're
Terminal paste-malware detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's move on. And Apple has done something kind of interesting. And Tim Hardwick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at MacRumors reports, in macOS Tahoe 26.4, Apple introduced a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new security pop-up that warns Mac users when they paste a command into the terminal app that could be harmful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has now published a support document explaining why the pop-up warning appears. That support document and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this MacRumors article will both be linked in the show notes. The support document is called, If Your Mac Blocks a Terminal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Command, Paste or Script. This alert appears if you don't regularly use Terminal and you copied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the command from somewhere like a website, chat agent, or messaging or email app. Scammers use these channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to instruct people to paste malicious commands into terminal to harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. This alert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helps make sure that you aren't tricked into running a command that you didn't expect. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting that they say specifically, if you don't regularly use Terminal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that's doing a lot of work in a good way there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when I first saw this feature come up, I'm like, oh no, Cause I copy and paste stuff into Terminal all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this going to be another annoyance where it's like constantly in my face warning me about things? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have never seen this dialogue box. And I've pasted a lot of things into the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John on Tahoe Cause even though I'm not running on my main Mac, I do dev work on it or whatever. So however they calibrated
⏹️ ▶️ John that to like decide, should we annoy you with this or not? I think they did a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has basically never bothered me. And it also makes me think, okay, well, then how, how, is this actually saving me from
⏹️ ▶️ John any? of this? Is this, Is this security feature actually useful if it's like, oh, I don't, I don't want to bother people who
⏹️ ▶️ John use a terminal a lot? I think one of the other things they use to determine whether they should bother you with
⏹️ ▶️ John these dialogues is whether or not you have the dev tools installed, like whether you have Xcode installed as another signal in their
⏹️ ▶️ John formula for, should I warn you about this or not? But I guess the thought is like the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who, I don't know if this is true, but the thinking is the people who are the most vulnerable, the people who don't regularly use a terminal,
⏹️ ▶️ John who don't have dev tools installed. The reality is we are all equally vulnerable to getting
⏹️ ▶️ John screwed by this. How many times have all of us pasted in curl, pipe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a curl URL, pipe bash because some website told us to, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly ill-advised. But I think the reason we all do it is like we make a
⏹️ ▶️ John microsecond judgment of the trustworthiness of some website and the potential consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John of deleting our entire home directory. And we just roll the dice and figure, look, if this website
⏹️ ▶️ John really was malicious and someone had replaced this install script with a script that
⏹️ ▶️ John exfiltrates all of my data, I probably would have heard about it by now. So I'm just going to roll the dice and do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That's a terrible way to live. We shouldn't do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John avoid running a curl pipe bash, I avoid it like the plague. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to admit, sometimes I just do it. And so this is what it's trying to save you from.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So the actual dialogue reads as follows. Possible malware paste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blocked. Your Mac has not been harmed. Scammers often encourage pasting text into terminal to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. These instructions are commonly offered via websites, chat agents, apps, files,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a phone call. Then you get two options, paste anyway or don't paste.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like that they try to tell you like maybe you're talking to someone on the phone right now. Maybe you're having a chat with them. Are they telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John to paste a bunch of stuff in your terminal? Beware. They try to phrase it in a nice way. I would probably be
⏹️ ▶️ John more hyperbolic to be like, uh danger. Be careful. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what he just, did someone tell you to do this? Because you can't say, make sure you know what the command
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing because nobody, like, if you don't use the terminal, you don't know what the command is doing. It's just, it's just giving you a hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John a microsecond of pause to say, maybe think about this again. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John just click the default button and say paste anyway, yada, yada. And obviously the scammers will explicitly direct you. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer may say this, but don't worry. go Like social engineering in the end wins no matter what. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the social engineers know what they're facing and they will instruct you that this is a normal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and it's just your computer trying to be safe. But rest assured that what I'm telling you to do is safe because I'm your friend. So please do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That's how social engineering works. Nothing can save everybody. But I think this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John useful feature to add. Yeah, this is very smart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If your Mac shows a malware detected paste blocked or malicious script
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blocked alert, these alerts appear if macOS detects a command or script that contains known malware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blocks it. And so uh the difference here is it's the dialogue says your copy and paste was blocked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it contains malware. This action did not harm your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that's the real key to this is like they're obviously keeping a database of something, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever, regular expressions that match commands. You know, it's a cat and mouse game. But uh once they find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, hey, this website has been, you know, compromised and their,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, curl URL pipe bash thing now contains malware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully they can quickly add that to the database. And then if you go and paste it, let's say, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, eight hours or 24 hours after the malware is detected, your Mac will say, I'm not even going to give you the option.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know for a fact this thing has been compromised. Like whether it is a compromised legitimate website or like an obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John malware website with a URL that looks like a legitimate one, but isn't because they have a domain name with like a typo in it
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. This is where the real protection comes in, which is every single thing you paste into terminal, they're looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John and comparing about their list of known malware that I hope they're keeping up to date. So I think this is a great feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's actually, there was a story that came out just today about the Opera
⏹️ ▶️ John web browser adding this feature, like specifically just in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web browser itself. And this is This is like the multiple layers of protection, like
⏹️ ▶️ John adding it to terminal, shouldn't this be OS wide? Should it be per app? Every little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of this helps. Any place where there is an app or an operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system or some sort of subsystem where it's in a position to potentially keep track
⏹️ ▶️ John of a list of known bad things and check them for them, you know, this is a great use of our comparatively infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John resources. Like, oh, I don't want something looking at my pasteboard every time I paste them. It's like, it's two microseconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John The amount of grief it will save you by catching you from installing malware is
⏹️ ▶️ John So I heartily endorse this feature, both for the reason I said earlier, that I've never had to be bothered by it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the other reason, which is if I ever do do something stupid, I have some chance that the macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to save me from it.
Delete Derived Data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk about Xcode 27. And John, you've made a discovery with regard to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was watching WWDC sessions, I think where I saw it first, a couple people mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it was like the group labs or this Q&A, that Xcode 27 adds a menu command
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something that we Apple platform developers have been doing manually for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years, which is deleting the derived data folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John When Xcode does stuff and builds your app and everything, it has a folder
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know where it is. It's like a library application support Xcode or library developer Xcode. Somewhere in your library directory,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a directory called derived data that Xcode fills with, I would assume, intermediary
⏹️ ▶️ John products of building or anyway, it's like it says data derived from the stuff that you're doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes when you're using Xcode, like your build starts failing or your app won't launch
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can't figure out why. And the folk wisdom is, oh, just delete the contents of your
⏹️ ▶️ John derived data folder and then just rebuild. And for year, since, you know, for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years, Xcode has had a command, you know, command shift K. I don't know what the actual command is, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it, delete build products or something? There's like a menu command and a keyboard shortcut that says clean
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, clean, clean build products or something like that. You're like, why would if it has that command, why don't you just use that
⏹️ ▶️ John command? Well, experience has shown that sometimes you hit command shift K and
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit command B or command R to build or run and it still fails. And that's why everybody says,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, command shift K isn't enough. You have to go to the terminal, type R minus RF,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, the path to your derived data folder. Don't make any typos. Don't like very carefully. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there's apps that do it. It's like the dev cleaner app that will delete your derived data folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so in Xcode 27, Apple essentially relented and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know everyone is deleting their derived data folders. So we're going to put a menu command in addition to the
⏹️ ▶️ John existing command shift K command, a new command that I forget what it's called, like delete drive data or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, because we know you're doing it anyway. And rather than you manually typing an RM command or
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging a thing to the folder or whatever, why don't you just let us do it safely? And this
⏹️ ▶️ John was a topic of conversation and commentary, sort of like off
⏹️ ▶️ John script commentary, many of the group labs and stuff, where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John folks talked about the feature. And this kind of reminds me of
⏹️ ▶️ John the sync now button or whatever in messages on macOS, where like if you have iMessage syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the cloud, messages, I believe was the first app Apple has made in ages where they
⏹️ ▶️ John added a button that when you click it, it does the syncing, like sync now. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was the whole idea behind syncing and the lack of those buttons is, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should never have to manually control this or monitor it or deal with it. We will just sync what needs to be synced when it needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be synced and you shouldn't have to worry about it at all. But in reality, there are situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where you're like, come on, when is it going to sync? And it's trying to do what it thinks the right thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do is saving your battery or waiting until later or doesn't know there's data to dink. You're like, I just wish I had a button
⏹️ ▶️ John that would say, just sync stuff now. And so that one app added one. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John some ways, it's an admission of defeat. We tried to make a completely transparent system where you would never have to
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about when things sync and things would just always be in sync everywhere. But obviously we failed
⏹️ ▶️ John because no system can be that perfect and we're not, our systems aren't even good enough that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John ever wants it to sync now. People do want it to sync now sometimes. And so we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John add a button. Now, what does that button do? Is it like the elevator door close button where it just makes us feel better
⏹️ ▶️ John by disabling itself after we click it for a while and then re-enabling? It's like, yeah, we did the sync totally when in reality, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John just a timer and it's faking us out. Like the door close elevator button, if it makes people feel better,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's still kind of doing its job, even if it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John close the close the doors on the elevator. So I do still have suspicions about the sync button, but I'm pretty sure it does something because
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it occasionally. And when I click it, it does sync and maybe I'm being fooled. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John delete derived data. Is it the elevator door close button? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John giving up on the notion that like we know there's something wrong with Xcode sometimes and the
⏹️ ▶️ John only solution is delete derived data? And we wish that wasn't the case, but sometimes it is the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the theory presented by Apple people, which I think is the actual truth,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have some problem in Xcode that's causing your thing not to build or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and deleting derived data fixes it, that's very often a sign
⏹️ ▶️ John that something is screwed up about your project. Usually you have some dependency
⏹️ ▶️ John haven't expressed the dependency that exists between some submodules such that when you run a parallel
⏹️ ▶️ John build, if you get lucky and thing that depends on the other thing happens to go first, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you depend on goes first and then the thing that depends on it goes second, everything's great and it works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But because builds happen in parallel and you can't guarantee timing, sometimes when you build it, the thing that depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on it gets built after the thing that depends on it. And it's never going to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that's because you haven't correctly expressed the dependency in your project and you've
⏹️ ▶️ John just been coasting on luck. So yeah, deleting derived data does quote unquote fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but the problem is in your project. And so I think this is an even more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John sign where Apple's saying, even though this probably isn't our fault most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's probably your fault. We still know that there are lots of people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to delete the contents of their derived data folder as a regular course of doing stuff. And even though it's kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, like I'm sure that's why this feature hasn't been added for years, A, every once in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might be the right thing to do. And even if it is wrong, shouldn't we just make our app helpful to
⏹️ ▶️ John our users? Even though we know most of the time it's because their project is screwed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, I think, is one of the most hopeful signs from Apple Software Design
⏹️ ▶️ John Department that I've seen in years, right up there with the sync button and messages, where they are
⏹️ ▶️ John willingly giving us a feature, even when you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem is not their fault, just to try to make their app more useful
⏹️ ▶️ John and feel better to customers. I think the next iteration of this is, hey, please find all the dependency problems in our program
⏹️ ▶️ John that are causing this to happen, but you know, one step at a time. So I give delete derived data a thumbs up,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it's probably still highlighting a problem in our projects.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I think this is great. I do this dance constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you? That's my question to you too. Do you two delete derived data constantly?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn't have said constantly. It's frequent enough that it annoys me every time I do it because then I have to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I typically can get by with what I need by doing what is a command shift K or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about earlier that is you know, a clean build folder. But occasionally, I shouldn't have said constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Occasionally, I don't know, maybe once or twice a month, I'll have to go in there and just toss everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in derived data and start anew.
⏹️ ▶️ John You Marco, do you delete derived data? Almost never.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not even like, this is a thing, like I've used the app DevCleaner, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun app. It's like a little app for the Mac that basically helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you clear out and find huge storage usage from Xcode, especially for iOS developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's been a number of needs of this over the years, and DevCleaner always keeps up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, Xcode added features that they haven't Sherlock DevCleaner, but Xcode itself now has like that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can look at the installed components and delete stuff from there. So they've taken some lessons from DevCleaner by incorporating
⏹️ ▶️ John some of those, but DevCleaner still goes a little bit farther.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, DevCleaner is great. I can recommend it. But yeah, this basically integrates, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that functionality into Xcode. But yeah, I almost never do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very rare for me to have a problem that is not solved by either cleaning the build folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or quitting and restarting Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my main use of delete derived data is with betas because my luck with betas
⏹️ ▶️ John building my apps is terrible. As I said last, the first beta of Golden Gate could not even debug my apps. Beta
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 of Xcode can. I don't know what the problem was. I don't care. But when things are buggy and broken in
⏹️ ▶️ John betas of Xcode on beta OSs, delete derived data is my friend. But I'm pretty sure I've
⏹️ ▶️ John literally never done delete derived data on a non-beta Xcode on
⏹️ ▶️ John a beta OS. Like in the release versions of stuff, I've pretty much never had to do it. I do use DevCleaner,
⏹️ ▶️ John so maybe I'm cleaning it out as a matter of course, because DevCleaner actually will remind you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you haven't run DevCleaner a while. Maybe you should run it. It's a nice app. But I don't have all the weird iOS SDKs
⏹️ ▶️ John and simulators installed. Like that's where it builds up. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John have a simulator for iOS 12 in here. Do you still need that? Probably not. That'll save you some
⏹️ ▶️ John disk space. But yeah, I don't expect to use this command, but I really like what it says
⏹️ ▶️ John about the pragmatic nature of Apple's software decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope we see more things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Parakeet and ZocDoc. And thanks to our members who support us directly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about should Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a handheld gaming platform? Good question. You'll hear us talk about it in Overtime if you join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armen, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-Ira. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
A Goose excursion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, Casey, I'm going to see Goose in a few hours. What should I know? You've seen them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more recently than I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think there's anything. I know you're snarking. I don't think there's anything to know. I will say that if you haven't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listened to the new album, you should do so. Of course I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, so what I've been told in my household is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the music of my bands that I like is more tolerable when it's their studio recordings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than when it's their live recordings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the day I was told that, I immediately started playing in the car the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album, which I, it's Big Modern, right? That's the new album?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, yes. I'm trying to. It's very yellow. Um, Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So that, and I believe that was immediately regretted by the other members of the family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yes, I do like the new album a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So um, I would, I would check that out again, like listen to it on the way down or something. Um, My personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorites, if you're listening, uh, you know, for those of you who are perhaps not as familiar with Goose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoy Savenger, I think I'm pronouncing that right. It's the third track on the album. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very inspired by 80s, but not straight 80s, if that makes any sense. Like it's got some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that vibe from the 80s, but it's not like, oh, this could have been recorded 40 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago or whatever. Good to be, they often do a very extended and very good jam on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, one of my favorite jams of the year so far is a Good to Be from, I think, Florida,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe? I'd have to look it up. And Torero, which I did hear in Virginia Beach and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also excellent. So those are my three favorites off the new album. No, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what you expect. Like when we went, it was great when we went in October. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's obviously a little bit newer and different material. When I went a few weeks ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we talked about it on the show, but we were in the general admission section, which very glad I tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very glad to never do that again because I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco old. I'm too old for that now, KZ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am way too old for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I always buy seats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep. And uh, suffice to say that Marco is returning to Virginia to go uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me to see Fish. see fish, cheesy peasy. He would, He would have loved that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next year, we'll see Fish together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need one more year of goose before you're ready for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. Uh, But anyway, but uh, we, we worked together. uh, We actually were on the phone with each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other trying to figure out which one of us had the better seats. And it turned out that I almost got the Marco seats from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, uh, when we saw them in Richmond, which is to say the very front row of the seated section, but behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the lunatics in general admission. So, uh, no, I'm, I'm very much looking forward to you going.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Depending on what I'm doing this evening, Um, I might be able to actually sit down and watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because, again, as we've talked about numerous times, I won't belabor this, but uh, if you go to nugs.net,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can pay for a subscription and you can uh, actually watch live broadcasts of many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bands, including, but not limited to, Goose. Um, and so, uh, I will hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to see some of that show tonight. And certainly within 48 hours of it being done, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and I can go and either grab it from Nugs or you know, grab it from Bandcamp or whatever. So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much looking forward to it. To the degree you can share, what is the transit scenario to get you there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you training the whole way?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I'm I'm literally taking, I'm taking a ferry in like an hour to uh, ferry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the to the mainland, John, um and then uh just driving for you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah driving two hours to New Jersey.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's the mainland, New Jersey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is this is this an
⏹️ ▶️ John outdoor it's like a I don't know, the venue, is it an outdoor thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh I don't, actually, I wanted to look that up before I left. It's PNC Arts Center. I forgot. I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indoor. Oh, no, it's outdoor. Yeah, well, bring bring your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Oh, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, it does start at seven, so it's I'm not going to need that much sunscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John The sun's still out at seven. Maybe you don't need it, but like, yeah, I wonder if it's going to be because it's it's hot, hot today. At least up here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's what that's why the reason I was going to look up the venue before I left is like, do I wear, do I bring pants? If it's going to be like a big indoor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air-conditioned thing, maybe I'd bring pants. But no, I'm bringing shorts. It's It's a shorts kind of venue. And this time I'm not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have my pocket in my front shorts pocket. Your wallet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you get your replacement wallet yet or is it still coming?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sure did. I got my new. I should link to it in the show notes. Dream of the 90s is still alive,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have a wallet chain. I don't think that was ever your style,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, maybe it could be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slim fold, That's it. It's the Slim Fold wallet. Yeah, I will link to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the one I got, the micro Tyvek, but otherwise the Micro Softshell is what I've been using
⏹️ ▶️ John Tyvek? Your wallet is made of house wrap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the Tyvek just is even lighter weight, but here the Softshell is like the more normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking one. I like this because it still allows me to carry like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash, which I don't use a lot of cash during the rest of the year, but on Fire Island, a lot of things here use
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you go to Europe, you like to give hundreds of dollars to the pickpockets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, you have to support the local economy. That's what you're doing. Anyway, these wallets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great because they weigh nothing. And I think this is originally from Dan Provost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Studio Neat. I think I heard about it from him first. This is a fantastic, kind of minimal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very lightweight wallet. I very much enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What color is yours?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I actually did, I got myself the orange one of the Microsoft shell also, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure, like, I think it's a limited edition, so I wanted to get that. But the Tyvek one I'm using currently is the reddish one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a brief step to Goose, because that's all I ever talk about these days. I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I follow them on Instagram and they had, I either posted or reposted that, I believe it was PNC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the PNC Center had said, because of the heat, you can bring, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was up to two water bottles for a sum total of a gallon of
⏹️ ▶️ John It's going to be big lines in the bathroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? I don't know what it is. in sensible units. It's probably a few liters, but like a lot of water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can come with you in order to survive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, especially because like, I mean, look, not only is it a concert, it's a jam band concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there's a good deal of drug use going on, and many of those drugs make you very thirsty. So I think that's probably very
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, it's going to go on for a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were you, I really would bring at least one large water bottle. I mean, double check my math on this, but I would bring a large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water bottle because it is going to be toasty for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you ever seen the, I saw somebody the other day here at the beach with one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like around the neck personal, I guess, air conditioners or fans?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes. It's like a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep. A little neck
⏹️ ▶️ John air conditioner. Yeah. Does that do anything? Oh, they do, but they're like the ones that cool you
⏹️ ▶️ John also tend to be heavy because they have to be powerful and they need batteries. And so it's like, it's a trade-off. Like, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want a heavy thing on your shoulders and around your neck in exchange for the cooling? I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looked like something that was really not worth the size and bulk. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, maybe they, maybe it's one of those like secret gadget hacks that you just, that work really well and no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one really talks about it. But it did not look that way. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just need someone else. You just need your assistant to hold it
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing at your neck
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John just spritz some water on it, you know, whatever it takes to stay cool. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it's worth, Aaron got me for Christmas, I think it was, kind of as a gag gift, but kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of not. It's a fan that has two belt clips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. Just hear me out. Hear me out. It has two belt clips on it. One of which is facing like the U of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the belt clip is facing upward and the U of the belt clip, the other one is facing downward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can fan your feet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, hold on. So on either side of the fan, there's, you know, there's a clip. And the idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you clip one side to your shorts or whatever, and the other side gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clipped to your shirt. So what this does is it blasts air up your back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Huh. I probably look like a complete freaking moron on the one or two times I've ever used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but it is delightful because you're getting cold air blown right up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your back or perhaps your front if you wanted to put it there or whatever. But it is incredible the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes. Even if it's just blowing warm air, the fact that the air is moving really, really helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you mount it upside down and blow air into your pants?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You probably could. Yeah. I don't see any reason why not. um you i will see if I can dig up a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the show notes. No promises. But uh that actually works far better than you would think it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. that's and And I feel like too. Like, yes, you probably do look ridiculous, but when it's that hot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fashion is out the window. Like, right? Shorts are already a pretty significant fashion compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do what you got to do when it's when it gets that hot. It's like, all right, you know, and and also, like, especially in this context, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a jam band concert, you're not going to be the least fashionable person in any row. Don't worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I think I did find, I don't have it next to me, but I'm pretty sure I found it for the show notes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just linked it in the chat room as well. So you can check that out. Again, I'm probably not doing the world's greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job describing it, but you can sort of kind of get the gist as you look at all these different pictures. Actually, one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is shown as like having it around the neck, which I don't recommend. But you can see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's, if you look at like the fourth image, they show three different wearing styles. And the one I'm talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about is basically having your shirt tuck into it so that you're blowing air up your shirt. It's actually really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the picture of the guy holding the delivery box. Unimaginable cooling effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look how happy he is. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John So much fun. Look how happy he is to have this photoshopped onto him.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah. And I like the fake Photoshop sweat on the left-hand side of this image as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also, he's dripping sweat, but his shirt looks pretty dry. Yep. Ah, Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, have fun tonight. I'm very, very jealous. Hopefully, you get a really good set list and have at least a couple