650: Whatever It Takes to Get the Laundry Folded
28 Jul 2025AppleCare One, the OS 26 public betas, and tensions between art and usability in interface design.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: Casey’s french-fry problem
- Follow-up:
- D. Griffin Jones takes one for the team
- Casey’s struggles with
iperf3- Tutorial
iperf3 -t 60 -c {ip} -P 4 -i 10 -R
- John’s new toaster and
E01(via J-P Teti & John F.) - Chemical vs. physical sunscreen (via Prodan Statev)
- Apple security for unreleased devices
- Low-cost Apple laptop (via Jason Anthony Guy)
- Ed: Please don’t give Apple ideas like this. 🫣
- Getting customer support from Apple (via Patch)
- Apple support app → Chat
- Any retail store on Apple Maps →
...→Message
- CloudFlare & AI crawlers
- Thoughts from Thomas Schoffelen
- Thoughts from Aaron Zinck
- Thoughts from Anonymous
- The 𝓍26 public betas are out
- Tahoe beta 4
- Contrast will decrease until morale improves
- News summaries are back, baby! 😬
- Apple and interfaces
- Tog in Interface (1992)
- Tog on Software Design (1995)
- Apple’s Aqua introduction, Macworld San Francisco, 2000
- AppleCare One
- Dan Moren’s take
- The Verge
- Fees & deductibles
- FAQ (scroll way down)
- Post-show: John has an addendum to his earlier topic
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Frame of preference, an incredible exploration of the Mac’s settings by Marcin Wichary in concert with Mihai Parparita of the Infinite Mac Project
Sponsored by:
- Members like you! Become a member for ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Hi, Declan!
- Us in Vision Pro 🖼️
- 10 GbE from Synology
- Toaster E01
- Chemical vs. mineral sunscreens
- Apple security for unreleased stuff
- MacBook (with Special Offers)
- AirPods update
- Cloudflare and AI crawlers
- OS 26 public betas 🖼️
- Apple Intelligence news summaries
- ATP Membership
- Apple and interfaces
- AppleCare One
- Ending theme
- Apple and interfaces (reprise)
Hi, Declan!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When Declan was really little, I'm saying like two-ish years old,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron typically would bring him to what I like to call baby gym. It was a place called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Romp and Roll, where you would bring your infant or your toddler and you would do like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not gymnastics, but like they would run around and play and sing songs and do games and whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She did this with him constantly. I went on Sundays with Declan and we would go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the morning and do a romp and roll together. We would have lunch together. And this gave Aaron some time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not be mom and be Aaron. And one of the times that I went to this barbecue place with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan, who was like two or three at the time, I had gotten myself some french fries. And I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what? I'll let him try French fry because what's it going to hurt if he tries it just once? And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was early on in dad life when I didn't realize that much like with a dog, if you try something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just once with a child, especially of that age, it's not just once, baby. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan's going to demand french fries every time for the rest of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it's like trying heroin just once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And so I learned my lesson. But fast forward to earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, and for reasons unknown, Declan has decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he would like to listen to at least a little bit of ATP tonight. And so I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that through the wall behind me, he and his sister are, and maybe Aaron, are listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. And he was very excited to find the delay between when he hears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me laughing through the wall and when I'm laughing on the live broadcast. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I don't know what to do with myself because I love that he's there interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but I don't know if this is a french fry situation. Well, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regret the monsters that I've created or if this is nothing but a healthy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So say hi to the rest of the family, you two, because apparently for at least a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes, they're here as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi, the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ John family. Sorry about the heroin joke. Don't you assume that your amazingly powerful dad uncoolness
⏹️ ▶️ John will repel him eventually?
⏹️ ▶️ John combined three-way dad uncoolness, because we have a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here. How old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is he now? Declan is 10. He is close to 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John One or two more years and he will not be able to tolerate how uncool we all are as daddy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, Michaela, she is seven and a half now. And so I think I am still at least slightly cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the most part. Of course, some of the oh, dad's so uncool will bleed from him to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John her at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yes, by our powers combined, the three of us can repel any child. I'm quite sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John is Declan interested in computer stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not in the way that you mean, I don't think. He's become more and more interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in futzing about with his phone. Like earlier today, another example of the French fry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. We have, both of them have older iPhones that don't have cellular service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've mentioned this many times in the past, but they use them as a noisemaker when they sleep. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also can text only Aaron and myself because we have parental controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it's called, screen time and all that set up in such a way that they can only text us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But earlier today, we relented and now they are allowed to text each other via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their respective email addresses, which are used only for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don't know if this is another French fry situation where all of a sudden I have created a monster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two monsters really, where they will start texting each other. It is the second they're both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awake. Now, granted, we have times that I don't think they can use the messages app until like seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the morning or something like that. But who knows what monsters we've created. But I'm enjoying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I joke, I'm enjoying this surprising amount of interest in what dad does for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey living because usually it's, you know, oh, he click and he collacks on the keyboard and yaps into the microphone from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time. And that's mostly accurate, if I'm honest.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it'll stop you from having such a potty mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's the thing. Yeah. Now I got to really watch myself, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first topic today is how to bypass screen time protection. He doesn't need us for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's probably true.
Us in Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-up. And we, I think it was John quipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode. Do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who is currently wearing a Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, it was Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wasn't Marco? See, the one time I
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite of what you think. It's so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So, anyway, so Marco quipped, do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who's currently wearing a Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro? And I think both John and I simultaneously said no. Well, it turns out, friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, Deep Griffin Jones is and was that person. So make that one, right, Steve Griffin-Jones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's a great device to wear while doing chores so you can have a floating video while you fold laundry or play pause media with soapy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dish hands, which is an interesting take that I hadn't considered. And I think I kind of like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see like watching a show or something while you're washing dishes or something with the floating window, but it's a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can just use AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, I really thought, like, I wasn't doing that as a joke. I really thought it would be literally zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently, it's at least one. And that amazes me, but you know, everyone's got their
⏹️ ▶️ John own things that work for them. Whatever it takes to get the laundry folded and the dishes
⏹️ ▶️ John washed. But couldn't, I mean, couldn't he literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just put his phone with the speaker on the counter and do the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? There's lots of other options. We'll put in a link to his toot.
⏹️ ▶️ John He posted like a screenshot so you can see what he's experiencing, which is a floating
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP window that's playing audio while he does dishes with the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John on. So, you know, well, again, whatever it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the thought technology that was new to me was what DeGriffin Jones said about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can play pause by just, you know, picking up your hands and pinching, which, even if you're grabbing the stalk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an AirPod, as I can attest, apparently water damage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is a safer approach, leaving aside the fact that you have a $3,500 thing on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face right above a pile of water. But we'll ignore that.
10 GbE from Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last episode, I had scared Marco by saying, Oh, I just rejiggered my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desk. And as it turns out, there was later an issue with Marco's recording, which, with respect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought was hilarious. And I'm very happy it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco wasn't me. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it's going to be my turn this time. But, anyways, I had briefly mentioned that part of the reason I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this TS5 Plus was because I wanted the 10-gigabit Ethernet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's part of the TS5, specifically the Plus model. And I had done, as of last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, which was just a couple of days ago as we sit here, I had done some performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testing using Samba and using a command line app called iperf3. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had noticed that I was not getting anywhere near full 10 gigabits a second. And we had some theories,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think, knowing what little we knew at the time, were reasonable theories. Marco had said, Hey, you're not going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much data off of a spinning disk, especially a 7200 RPM spinning disk, which is completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. Marco or John, one of you, I don't know which one. I don't even know who is the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don't know who to guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It was like four days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, oh, I know, man, but a lot has happened since then. I've been busy. But one of you said that, oh, it could be CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems, or excuse me. Yeah, I think one of you did say CPU problems, and that's what it was. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have since found a tutorial which was probably pointed to me by someone, but I lost who that somebody was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We'll put a link in the show notes, but suffice to say, this tutorial talks about how, yes, iPerf3 is often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU-bound, and the easy fix for this is to just multithread it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they provide some examples of how you can do that. I did that, and I forgot to capture a screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at one point, I was definitely getting like nine and change gigabits per second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfers. So that is what I wanted to see. That makes me very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy, and I can consider this issue solved for now.
Toaster E01
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, speaking of things that Marco and I are just deeply concerned about, what's going on with your toaster?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned I had an error code last episode and called support and they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it's working now, so don't worry about it. A couple other people wrote in with info about the same error code. JP Teddy writes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the same toaster as you and I've owned it for five or six years. I see the E01 code about twice a year. I
⏹️ ▶️ John unplug it and plug it back in five minutes later. In all other respects, the toaster works flawlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never bother to check the manual or call Brevo because it doesn't bother me enough, but maybe I will next
⏹️ ▶️ John time it happens. So that's not great. Seems like it's common enough that another person had the problem. John
⏹️ ▶️ John F. wrote in to say, I get the E01 on my toaster oven maybe once every one to two months. It
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much always occurs when using another kitchen appliance on the same circuit, most frequently my espresso machine. For that appliance,
⏹️ ▶️ John the toaster freaks out just at the moment I turn off the pump after pulling a shot. I presume the toaster is hypersensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John to disruptions in power, either from brief voltage shifts or possibly noise introduced from the appliances. My toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John is newer than John's original, but predates the revised plug design. That sounds even more like mine
⏹️ ▶️ John because I was using the stovetop at the time and I wasn't using the toaster at all. It was just sitting there, but maybe it's the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John are more sophisticated and it's cranky about voltage fluctuations. Unfortunately, unlike things like television
⏹️ ▶️ John or a computer, I don't particularly feel comfortable hooking up my toaster to like a UPS or
⏹️ ▶️ John something to smooth out the voltage because that is probably ill-advised and I don't have room for it anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John at least I have some anecdotal evidence that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John voltage fluctuations in my ancient crappy house with a too small power panel may be to blame.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we'll see. I will up probably like wait a year and I'll tell you how many times during that year did I see E01
⏹️ ▶️ John plug and unplug it. So we have one report of once or twice a year and one report of
⏹️ ▶️ John once every one to two months. I hope I am in the once or twice a year category, but we'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be really funny to get a toaster UPS. To supply enough power, it would have to be a pretty beefy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's not a thing you should do. I mean, you can, like, you can get UPSs that are rated for, you know, 1500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts or whatever, you know, like whatever it would be. Like you can, you can totally do that. And it would be, you know, as long as it's rated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that much current, it would be fine. But those just tend to be really big UPSs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where would you even put it on your counter? I have to put it in the garage or something, like through the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, get one of those whole house UPSs. Or yeah, the whole electrical system in my house needs to be updated,
⏹️ ▶️ John but hopefully that will be somebody else's problem when we sell this house. But for now, I'm just going to cruise by on what we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any intention on relocating before both kids are graduated from college?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any intentions before both of you are retired?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be clear, you're never allowed to retire because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say, he kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, here I'm trying to take the happy path, but Marco's not wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think that I can handle replacing either of you, really. So you two are stuck with me forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate to break it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John many ways, John. Don't worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got one whole kid to put through college and one-fourth of a kid
⏹️ ▶️ John to put through college. I'm not going anywhere. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So you heard it here first. John has already got one leg out the door. He's only got four years left. We need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a Tim Cook style succession planning. Oh,
Chemical vs. mineral sunscreens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need to talk about sunscreen and Marco's new thought technology with regard to sunscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, can you summarize for me what your discovery or assertion was last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to chemical versus physical sunscreen, and then we'll talk about the feedback we got?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I quickly gone through the difference between chemical and physical and mineral sunscreen, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had summarized it basically as saying chemical sunscreens have chemicals that absorb into your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skin and they absorb UV rays, whereas mineral sunscreens use like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine metallic dust to reflect the sunlight off of the top of your skin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's what I had said, which apparently is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Prodan Stetev writes, or points us to an academic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey research paper, Improving Patient Communication on Sunscreen Choice, Updating Mechanistic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Misconceptions. And I don't know, was this John? Was this from Prodan or was this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the academic paper?
⏹️ ▶️ John is from all from the linked article. The linked
⏹️ ▶️ John actually a letter to the editor of some journal, but we'll put a link in the show notes to this letter to the
⏹️ ▶️ John editor from like five different authors. The main point is that this letter cites
⏹️ ▶️ John academic papers, which are all linked from the document with the weird DOI.org thing. So if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see all the papers that are backing this, it's not just a crank writing in saying they have an idea. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John someone citing a bunch of studies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Thank you for the clarification. So from that letter, many assume that chemical sunscreens absorb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UV light and convert the energy to heat, while physical sunscreens, such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflect and scatter UV light. However, this mechanism is at best a historic artifact from when physical sunscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particle sizes were quite large. Though such non-micronized and non-nanoparticulate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical sunscreens may have had a greater proportion of its protective mechanism from reflection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and scatter in the past, these formulations have largely been abandoned for more commercially viable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options with the advent of micronization. I think I got that right, micronization technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Furthermore, even micro-sized physical sunscreen formulations have been increasingly replaced by nanoparticle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey formulations. It is important for dermatologists to recognize that the primary mechanism of action for modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical sunscreen agents is the very same protective mechanism of chemical sunscreens, absorption of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UV light. It was recently found that modern particulate-sized physical zinc oxide and titanium oxide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflected less than 5% of incoming UV light on average. Rather than relying on reflection and scatter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the overwhelming majority of the attributable protective effect of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by UV light absorption, which excites electrons from the valence band to the higher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey energy conductance band. This energy is later primarily dissipated as heat in a manner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey analogous to chemical sunscreen UV light absorption.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another one of those things that's like was probably true at one point, but technology marches
⏹️ ▶️ John on and it sounds like they're making the stuff, like the metal oxides and stuff, smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John and smaller in the sunscreen because that makes for a better product. Like it's smoother and we have the technology to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it smaller. And apparently, once you make them that small, probably given the wavelength of UV light or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's been a bunch of new studies that have shown actually it's not really reflecting that much anymore. It's mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, its effect is because of this absorption effect. And there's a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of papers about that, and the papers seem somewhat contentious. So this may be sort of the cutting edge of research. Although this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is a letter from 2023, but just to clarify from last week, apparently it's not as cut
⏹️ ▶️ John and dried as it used to be. And, you know, technology marches on.
Apple security for unreleased stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Apple security for unreleased devices and the suing of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Prosser because of the leak of the liquid metal design scheme, an anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person writes: Apple employees with pre-release iPhone hardware can, or could when I was there, expense an Apple-approved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gun safe to store the phone in, and then they are required to store the device in such a safe when not carrying it. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a relaxation of the older rules requiring you to be accompanied by a, quote, physical security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expert, quote, from Apple while taking unreleased hardware out of Apple secure areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe two of them, two of the experts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of love the idea that your phone would have a bodyguard. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. Yeah, they're not guarding you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get run over by a car. They don't care. They're just guarding the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What they'll do is they'll let you get run over by the car and then snatch up the phone as quickly as possible.
MacBook (with Special Offers)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. With regard to the low-cost Apple laptops, Jason Anthony Guy writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think I want to read this because I know at least a handful of people from Apple listen to this program and I don't want to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them ideas. All right, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Anthony Guy writes: Here's one more option for cost savings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for good measure, the screensaver coming soon. Apple MacBook, perenn, fall 2025, comma,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with ads per n, with a $150 option to remove them. If you're not familiar with this whole shtick,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kindle's Amazon Kindles are sold as a version with ads or a version without
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they don't come with ads, Casey. They come with special offers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I am so special
⏹️ ▶️ John offers. Yeah. So, this is a funny joke. Like, we didn't mention it in how can they take money out of laptops?
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn't mention it for two main reasons, I feel like. One is that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we say this every time we talk about the potential of Apple doing ads and stuff. Currently,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's not how Apple makes its money. So, we're not saying that Apple is like wonderful and magnanimous. It's just
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn't, they're not incentivized to do that because that's not a big income stream for
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Yes, they have at various times done ads and they still do have like search ads and everything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the majority of their money comes from other things. Even though they don't break down the services revenue, the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that we did see the breakdown, like during court cases, did not lead us to believe that ads are a massive portion of that. But, two,
⏹️ ▶️ John and perhaps more importantly, when Apple has done ads, they're so bad at it. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John just really bad at it. Like, are they bad at it because institutionally they kind of like don't want to do ads?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they bad at it because people who are really good at doing ads wouldn't go to work at Apple? I don't know the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they're not good at ads. And so, it's not really a fear
⏹️ ▶️ John for me that that's going to be their go-to strategy to extract money to
⏹️ ▶️ John produce a low-cost laptop. I hope it's because they also would be repelled by the
⏹️ ▶️ John tastelessness of it. I do see a lot of complaints in the Windows world about the prevalence of ads within
⏹️ ▶️ John the Windows interface. And yes, we complain about Apple advertising its stuff to us all over its own things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I see like a Geico ad in system settings, that's a whole other line that has been
⏹️ ▶️ John crossed. So, I, you know, this is a joke and I get it, ha, but I also think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is not really into ads as a main revenue stream, and they're really bad at it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those things I hope will combine to make this continue to be just a joke and not a reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree that there is a line between what they do now with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promoting Apple Music, Apple Pay, you know, all the like all the different things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that's a different section. But I'm saying, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John still, it's all in the Apple family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but like, but in the settings and as like, you know, splash modal screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their own apps, like the music app, like they do heavily have advertisements for their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upsells in those apps. And they're very, you know, they work like any other ad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't think we can call them anything but ads when they, when they have like, you know, the badge on the settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and you go in and it's like, you should add Apple Care today, you know, or like the full screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modal and music saying you should really subscribe to Apple Music. Like, those are just ads for Apple stuffs. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're definitely ads. There's no getting around it. There is a line between that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Geico ad in settings, but I think you might think that line is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger gap than I do. I don't think that's that far from what they already do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the difference is they have to sell the ad to Geico. They don't have to sell it to Apple. Apple just gets that ad for free. You know what I mean? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the ad sales,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole mechanism of selling ads, right? That Apple, I mean, when you sell ads, just look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the people who are the best in the world about selling ads. It really helps to have a lot of information to sell those ads against
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can target them. And Apple currently doesn't have that information and doesn't seem to want to collect it. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they're bad at selling ads and they're also bad at serving ads. Like where they do sell ads, like the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John search ads, they sell those, but like that's nothing compared to like selling ads for
⏹️ ▶️ John app installs through Facebook or whatever. It's just so much less sophisticated. So, you know, this, that's where you get
⏹️ ▶️ John into their, they're bad at it. Like, I don't think they have the expertise or knowledge on how to sell ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not so much about presenting them. They can put ads wherever they want. I'm sure someone is willing to put them, but to
⏹️ ▶️ John put them there, you got to sell them first. That's.
AirPods update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so continuing my AirPods, not saga, that's a bit dramatic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AirPods story, a few people had written in saying, hey, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to do either an online chat or, you know, talk to them on the phone. And I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand how you could get to this Phantom online chat. Well, Patch writes in, you can always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk to Apple Support without going through any kind of menu or tree by using their iMessage business account. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. Well, how do you get that? Patch writes, if you type a message there within two or three minutes, they'll connect you with a customer service person. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds awesome. Well, how do you do that? Well, Patch says, it looks like there are two main ways to get to this chat function. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first is the Apple Support app on iOS or iPadOS. The chat option there takes you to iMessage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The second way is if you do a search for any Apple store using Apple Maps specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the three-dot menu, there's an option to message them, which pulls you to an iMessage chat both on iOS and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS. This is incredibly useful. So thank you, Patch. You get plus one internet points for the
⏹️ ▶️ John I've run across that chat thing several times, but it's not entirely above where to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I guess if you're going down one of those avenues, like if you're looking for a store, only with the Apple Maps app, or
⏹️ ▶️ John if you're in the support app, supposedly it will land in your face. But it's good to know how to get there directly.
Cloudflare and AI crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Cloudflare and AI crawlers, Thomas Schofflin writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recently started using Cloudflare for one of my projects now that over half of the many gigabytes of bandwidth used for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images each month is from AI crawlers. I definitely don't want to do something to limit user access to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the website and the user-contributed content, but I had to take action to prevent our CDN bill from being hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of dollars higher each month than it was a year ago. Cloudflare's AI bot detection and blocking has been a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey massive help in that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is something that sort of went unsaid. Like, why would Cloudflare even have a thing to block AI crawlers?
⏹️ ▶️ John What's the issue they're trying to solve? What concern do website owners have? Why are they trying to block AI
⏹️ ▶️ John crawlers? So that's our bad. We should have mentioned that. But the underlying assumption was you'd want to block AI crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ John because AI crawlers are badly behaved and are costing people money. And so here's
⏹️ ▶️ John yet more evidence of that. So this is like the small version of like, I've got a small website
⏹️ ▶️ John and they're costing me hundreds of dollars, which for my small website is significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Aaron Zink writes, I'm a consultant who works with many large organizations and government websites. We've seen unprecedented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels of bot crawling across all of our sites. These are aggressive bots that bring our sites to their knees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey despite us using caching. Any site that has dynamic functionality is particularly vulnerable to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem because there are nearly infinite combinations of parameters and settings that users can choose. So caching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is little to no benefit when a bot decides to go deep exploring every possible combination. Some of the bots we've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been seeing have been extremely tricky to identify. In these cases, Cloudflare has been our most effective tool by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far. Their proprietary heuristics have been the only things that have enabled us to keep our sites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online. The real bad guy here, in my opinion, is not Cloudflare, but the aggressive AI companies who are sending DDoS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels of traffic don't honor robots.txt files and make it nearly impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to identify and block them selectively. I want to reiterate again, the recent traffic levels have been truly historic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Anonymous writes, when I worked at GitHub, one of the biggest technical challenges we had was the explosive growth of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI crawlers against the site. Over the course of about six months, we saw traffic increase by about 40% due to AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scrapers. This has regularly threatened to take the site down. Intuitively, you'd think it would be a few companies doing this sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scraping, but it's effectively every AI startup plus everyone that wants to sell data sets to them. Detecting AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crawlers is incredibly difficult. They source traffic from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, and they are generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart enough to avoid being blocked with approaches like the JA3 or JA4 signatures. John, what the heck does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to look it up, but it was on the Cloudflare side, in fact, we'll link to the definition. It's fingerprints that help you profile specific
⏹️ ▶️ John SSL/slash TLS clients across different destinations, IPs, ports, and X509 certificates. I mean, that doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John really tell you much, but anyway, it's a way to try to identify bots, even if they
⏹️ ▶️ John don't all come from the same IP address or whatever. I'm not quite sure how it works, but that's why we'll link to
⏹️ ▶️ John the website if you want to look it up. But the point is, those techniques don't work with the diversity
⏹️ ▶️ John of sources that the AI crawlers are using, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Anonymous, they're buying proxy services from companies like IP Royal, Bright Data, et cetera. These companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source the traffic from real residential IP addresses. Sometimes they're paying end users to install what is effectively malware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes it's sketchier than that. Because of this, the AI crawlers, in many cases, do look like legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user traffic. Cloudflare has a huge advantage over most smaller players like GitHub, precisely because so much of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traffic goes through them. They can afford to invest compute resources and brainpower into identifying and tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John This has been the story for a while now, and I was glad to hear some explanation. First of all, characterizing GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ John as a small player lets you know the scale of this problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John that first person with their personal website or whatever down to like GitHub, it's like we're just a small player.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need Cloudflare to help out. But it's something that we're not used to because you're like, well, what's the big deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John People have been crawling the web since the advent of the web. Why is this such a problem with the AI things? And
⏹️ ▶️ John according to this anonymous person at GitHub, part of it is basically the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty rapidly after the advent of Google, it extinguished all the other big search engines.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you just had the Google bot crawling the web. There is no such monopoly
⏹️ ▶️ John in AI, and it's every AI startup. It's all the big AI companies. And like this
⏹️ ▶️ John anonymous person said, all the companies that want to sell data sets to any of those companies. It's just this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's the web at scale, but imagine if there was 100 Googles crawling and that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's, it's in their interest as the crawlers to crawl as much as fast as possible to get the biggest data set
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the most money, so on and so forth, multiplied by 100 of those things. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who runs a website that is worth crawling is seeing a huge burden
⏹️ ▶️ John from these AI crawlers. They don't care about robot set text, which maybe arguably maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don't. ZeroSetex is entirely advisory. It's like, please don't crawl me. You can just ignore it and crawl anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're costing people money and they're taking down sites because they don't care how fast they go and they're not throttled.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is all just a side effect of a new influx of
⏹️ ▶️ John venture capital money in an industry that is exploding where the incentives are to grow
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as possible and no one cares how much damage it's doing to the websites that they're constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to crawl. So yeah, that's why blocking AI bots specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John is a feature that people who run websites would want and see past discussion. Last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode's discussion about the difficult situation that puts us all in
⏹️ ▶️ John if one company has the ability to control that spigot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we're seeing here is like, yes, there are reasons why Cloudflare is useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to website owners right now. That doesn't mean this isn't a really problematic situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much centralized power in one company over that much of the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can just change the way things work on a whim. And so, you know, while there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be decent reasons behind some of this stuff, it doesn't actually fix the problem. Like the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still that most smaller companies and DIY projects and things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just won't be able to crawl pages on the web anymore before too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that's not a great place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because if you're running a site, you need your site to stay up and not have your bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John bill double because of non-human traffic that's not giving you anything. So that's your main
⏹️ ▶️ John concern. And the email that you're getting from 20 people with their dinky websites is so much
⏹️ ▶️ John lower level of concern for you just keeping your stuff online. So you can see where
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like things are on fire here. And also, as with so many things with AI, this leads to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of thoughts about sustainability. It's like, can the web withstand
⏹️ ▶️ John an arbitrary number of AI crawlers constantly crawling? Like it's kind of like email
⏹️ ▶️ John and spam. Like how sustainable is it when, you know, 10% of email is spam, 50%,
⏹️ ▶️ John 90%, 99%. How many 9% of email can be spammed before the email system falls down? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we've kind of run that experiment and it's got the percentage of spam has got frighteningly high. Well, what percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of traffic on the web can be AI crawlers before it becomes economically
⏹️ ▶️ John unfeasible to run websites because you're not actually running them for humans. You're just running them for
⏹️ ▶️ John AI crawlers that are extracting value from your site and never sending anything back. And this is just another version of
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, you know, well, they're taking my content and not sending any people to my site. And I don't want to give them rights to my
⏹️ ▶️ John content. It's another sustainability thing of like, how are we going to work this out? We need a system where people
⏹️ ▶️ John are still incentivized to make things and publish them
⏹️ ▶️ John because if not, all those AI crawlers are going to run out of stuff to crawl. Like they, you know, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John the goose lays the golden egg. Once you eat the goose, you've got a problem.
OS 26 public betas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, public service announcement. As of, I believe, today as we record this, the 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey betas, the iOS 26, iPadOS 26, et cetera, are all out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available. You can go to beta.apple.com if you want to go on that crazy ride.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it's worth, I am still not running anything on my carry phone. I heard the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the radar where you were encouraging people to do that, and I largely agree with you, but we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of pieces of travel coming up that I really do not want to mess with having a beta on my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know professionally is a little questionable, but personally, I think is a very sound decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don't know, Marco, if you would recommend for non-developers to put the beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their phones, but now would be the time to try to wave people off if that's the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what you're doing with signing up for the beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any year, what you're signing up for is some stuff that works now might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. And stepping back from the beta is possible, but it requires basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reformat of your phone and you can't just migrate everything back from your current installation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. So going back from a beta is such a high pain in the butt for most people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you have a second device, you're probably not going, you're not probably not going back. It's probably like a one-way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco door for you. So it's not advisable if you don't have a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. What qualifies as a really good reason, that's kind of up for interpretation. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was saying under the radar is like anybody who's a developer or a designer responsible for the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an app on iOS should definitely have the beta installed on their carry phone now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there is a lot that you kind of have to live with with the new design to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel for how your app should be designed. And that, of course, assumes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new design is a fixed target, which it is not. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not a great beta season, but it is one that if you have any tolerance for beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, you should get in it now if you aren't already in it, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very illuminating, especially, again, if you are a developer, it is very helpful. And the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people use it, the more problems that will be found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the more noise will be made about them. And if we have any chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple standing off some of the rough edges or fixing some of the bugs, we're going to need as many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible. It's simple as that. I will say, you know, as betas go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are now on beta 4. In most years, beta 4 is a reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stable time to jump in. That is true this year, but beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4 is more like a beta 2 or a beta 3 of most years. They are behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in quality. You do still have weird bugs all over the place in apps. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do still have significant rendering and animation glitches all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the UI, all over the system. Now, stuff does actually end up working most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm no longer having to do things like reboot my phone to connect my AirPods or force
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quit apps in the middle of typing a text message because the keyboard crashes. That has been mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed in the recent two betas. So the really big bugs are gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there's tons of visual glitches all over the place. And that's not even counting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design itself being pretty controversial and rough in a lot of places. But there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still tons of animation bugs, tons of little glitches, occasional layout bugs that do require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to be force created or something, but at least you can generally not lose data most of the time anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's rough. Performance-wise, battery life isn't too bad anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it still chugs. You still have a lot of dropped frames. You have a lot of glitchy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dropped animations. Frankly, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how Apple is going to land this plane by early September.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's going to be a really rough release in terms of just a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of mostly tiny bugs everywhere, especially animation and layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. So if you can tolerate that and you want to see the new design and you want to experience it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump in. You're probably not going to lose data or things like that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those times are past us, probably. But it is rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, and I'm saying it's chugging along. It's slow. It drops frames. I have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 16 Pro. So if you have an older device that you were going to maybe think about testing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this on, I would maybe think again. And I think, and I'll say it now. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prediction for the fall, people around our circles are saying, like, users are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate this design or it's going to be really controversial. I think we're not going to hear too much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that from non-nerds. What we will hear about is how incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow it is. If you recall, that was one of the big criticisms of iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 7 is, I put this on my iPhone and now it is much slower. This is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those years. Literally, if we're already in beta 4 and their current fastest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone available can't run the animation smoothly, you know we're in for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rough time in that front. So keep that in mind as well. It will probably be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you are really curious about the new design everywhere or if you are responsible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software design of an iOS app, you really should jump in now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. John, tell me about Tahoe Beta 4 specifically, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just a couple of quick hits from this before we go into our first topic, which is tied to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John When Beta 4 came out, the only beta still I'm running is macOS, but I'm running it a lot to test my apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. Waiting, oh, so patiently for Apple to fix some of the bugs, one of which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a showstopper for me, which actually has been fixed, but it isn't out in Beta 4 yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, just wandering through the OS because I'm living in it. And one of the things that you do when
⏹️ ▶️ John you're living in the OS and booting from your internal to your external drive and stuff is you're changing the startup disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I happened upon the startup disk screen and system settings and
⏹️ ▶️ John was struck by the fact that I'm not sure if it's a backslide from beta 4, although
⏹️ ▶️ John some things are, especially in iOS and other betas that I'm not running. But I was struck by the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that this system settings screen seems to be part of some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of contest within Apple to figure out how low contrast can we make something
⏹️ ▶️ John while it's still technically selected. So it shows two disks, a Tahoe disk and then my other disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're huge. They're really big. They're like 64 by 64 icons, maybe even bigger, with a big
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle. This text on it, it was a big rectangle around it. And the selected one has a background
⏹️ ▶️ John and the non-selected one does not. But man, is that background hard to see? So I posted it on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John After I posted it, I did some investigation to see just how
⏹️ ▶️ John slight is the highlight in that rounded rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John So here's the thing. The rounded rectile highlight, which is big, it's like one inch by two inches on
⏹️ ▶️ John your screen. It's big. Okay. This is not a subtle highlight. It's a big rectangle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a darker rim and a body color to it. And then, of course, there's the window background.
⏹️ ▶️ John The background of the selection is 1.6% darker than the window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's not enough. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I love that you did this research and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey math. This is one of those moments that you being independent is such a perk for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean that genuinely. How did you come to this conclusion? I'm not arguing. I'm genuinely wondering, how did you determine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? What was the process to figure this out?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so I took the screenshot in Tahoe. So I figure whatever they're doing with the screenshot, I'm going to trust the color values. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I just pulled it up in Photoshop and then just got the RGB values. So the RGB values are
⏹️ ▶️ John 0 to 255 for the R, the G, and the B, the red, the green, and the blue. It's a gray color. So the red,
⏹️ ▶️ John the green, the blue are all equal values. The background is 251, and the selection is 247.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So there's a difference
⏹️ ▶️ John of 4, which is about 1.57%. The rim is 3.5% darker.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the only reason a lot of people can see the rounded rectangle is because the rim is 3.5%
⏹️ ▶️ John darker. This is one of those, you know, I put on a mastodon both as a joke and not as a joke. Many
⏹️ ▶️ John people said, I cannot see the selection on my screen because my screen is a crappy quality, you know, older
⏹️ ▶️ John display or something like that. It's ridiculous. Now, here's the thing. Startup disk system setting
⏹️ ▶️ John in Sequoia also doesn't have a lot of contrast, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John still twice what Tahoe is. So on Sequoia, it's 3.1% for the body and 7%
⏹️ ▶️ John for the rim. It was already bad. So I'm not saying like Tahoe made this mistake or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why I find this baffling is because as far as I can tell, it's not like they redesigned the startup disk system setting in
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe. Just something about Tahoe came by and sideswiped the
⏹️ ▶️ John already bad startup disk thing to make the contrast half as much
⏹️ ▶️ John as it used to be. And when I posted this on Mastodon, many people said until I read your text,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't know what you were talking about because I couldn't see a selection at all. It's, I mean, again, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a increased contrast option and accessibility, but this is a perfect example of like, well, it's an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of two things. One, that this, it needs to be higher contrast even when that setting's not turned on because it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it's ridiculous, right? Even on a really high quality screen. And two, what Marco just said.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think anyone has time to worry about the contrast of the highlight in the startup system setting when they're trying to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS to just work and have the animations run at the right speed? This is Mac OS. They don't
⏹️ ▶️ John care that much about it anyway. So I'm really concerned that stuff like this is just forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about this being fixed or changed or improved in any way before this thing releases because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have so much bigger fish to fry. So this is just a little thing, but I just thought I'd point it out because I just sounded
⏹️ ▶️ John absurd. I encourage you to look at the images that we will link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and see for yourself if on your screen you can see that it's a highlight. You're going in knowing one of them is highlighted and
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them is not. I'm telling you that that's the case. And still you may not be able to see it depending on your monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's amazing. And so what has probably happened here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Mac APIs and the iOS APIs, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of semantic color values. So not every color is specified. Okay, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R, this, G, this, B, this. Most colors in the UI, especially in Apple's apps presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are specified by colors like background one, background two, like that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, you know, light background, lighter background.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have the thing on iOS? The constants on macOS are called primary, secondary, tertiary,
⏹️ ▶️ John and quatrantary. Like they use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do have those as well. Yeah. And so that's, and that's kind of, that's, that's like the newer Swift UI way of doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, like, you know, the colors are not specified on everything by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color value. They're specified semantically in a lot of things. So what Apple has done with the redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is changed a lot of what those colors mean. So they can change that like in one place in some system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definition of that. And then all the other apps that compile against that will have their colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed. And what John was just saying is like, they're not going to have time to go through every single place those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are used and see like, is this still legible? Is this still usable? Does this still even look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Or does it look a rendering error?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I mean, what they could do is perhaps say, hey, does primary on top of secondary,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that readable? Like, is the delta between prime? Because think of it, like the contest thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there was a contest to do this, given just plain RGB values, integer RGB values,
⏹️ ▶️ John let's set aside floating point, the only way you can win this contest is by having a difference of one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you could have 251 and 252. If you can't do fractions, that's as close
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can get. RGB 251, 251, 251, and then 252. It's one
⏹️ ▶️ John away, unless you go into floating point values. And I guess you could do opacity tricks, which is floating point as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. But like you're really getting up to like, seriously, it's either the same color or it's not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's, you know, how close can we get to the same color without it being the same color? And if you have two constants, whether it's the primary,
⏹️ ▶️ John secondary, tertiary, or like window background, lighter, lightest, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John sequence of constant names that you have, the distance between one constant name and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John that you expect to be next to each other should probably be discernible. So there should be some kind of like acceptance
⏹️ ▶️ John test to say, hey, if you're going through the US and changing all these colors, make sure you change them in a way that two
⏹️ ▶️ John colors, the two of the colors aren't like literally the same when they're supposed to be used on top of each other. This is all setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John whether the fact that the startup system setting uses these colors at all, because for all we know, the person who programmed
⏹️ ▶️ John this 55 years ago just did RGB values because they felt like it or just did opacity,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a black with an opacity of 0.001. Like who knows what the code does?
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be anything. Again, this is not a highly trafficked, highly revised area of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep in mind, like the scale of what we're dealing with here. You know, when iOS 7 was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released, I mean, that was 100 years ago. Everything was less. Everything was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller. There were fewer platforms. There were fewer apps on those platforms. The apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves had less code and fewer screens and fewer features and less UI. It was a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time ago. Now, the number of possible areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that changing these system constants and metrics and things, the number of errors those affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is huge now. There's so much surface area to test and to revise and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix. And that's why I was saying a couple months ago when there were rumors of a big redesign coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's why I was saying it's a really big deal because it touches everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we're going to see for a year, maybe at least, maybe two years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're going to keep finding little edges of the UIs or screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps. Oh, that button is now an ellipsis because the text is being cut off because the metrics changed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, oh, this button over here that used to be like, you know, a contrast button that you could see, now it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray on gray on gray because those colors changed. We're going to have a year or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that across not only the OS's and Apple's apps, but then across third-party apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because when third-party apps compile against the new API, there is a flag that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can opt out of the entire new design. You can put it in your info plist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think a lot of apps are going to do that for a while. But if you want any of the new design, you have to take all of the new design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so as soon as you want any of the new design, all of these little subtle constants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and metrics in the APIs will change across your entire app. And so you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go through every single screen and retest everything and fix it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that's not going to mess up your iOS 18 and earlier compatibility as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you're still maintaining that compatibility. So the workload for both Apple and its apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for third-party developers is massive. And you just can't do this in a summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate to go here, but I kind of feel like the design team is doging through the system here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just ripping stuff out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rushing to change things that have huge effects that they either don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully appreciate or maybe are just disregarding. But the reality is, whatever their reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are thinking behind it, it takes a lot of time to adapt the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the changes they're making. And I think it takes way more time than they have. So that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think it's just going to be a year of UI bugs everywhere across everyone's apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of the contrast, one of the changes that I had to do to Switch Glass, I have a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in my appearance setting that lets you pick where the palettes are on the screen. And it shows a little rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John that's supposed to represent your screen with radio buttons and the cardinal directions, top, bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John left, right, upper, right, upper left, so on and so forth. And it shows a desktop background. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it's hard to believe for such an old school Mac user, but the idea of having a
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop background image and then putting a radio button on top of that image, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like you should always be able to see the radio button because radio buttons are circle and they have an outline
⏹️ ▶️ John and inside them is a dot. Like how could a radio button not be visible?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like they used to be opaque, right? It was an opaque circle. So I don't care what the background
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I don't care what desktop background you have. When I put a radio button control on top of your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John background image, you should still be able to see the radio button, right? And that was true right up to Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you put a Tahoe radio button on top of lots of different kinds of desktop backgrounds, it is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John invisible, basically like this highlight color that you see here. So I had to literally draw a circle,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I'm drawing a custom drawing of a opaque circle around the radio button when it's not selected
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, here's the radio button, because Apple's own controls are not visible on
⏹️ ▶️ John many different, even just like solid color backgrounds. Forget about cold patterns and stuff like that. That's the type of
⏹️ ▶️ John attention that needs to be done to every single screen to say, are the controls still visible? You mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it again with a button. I bet there's a lot of screens that are going to come up even during the setup process. People are going to be like, how do I keep
⏹️ ▶️ John going in this process? Is that word a button? It's kind of like iOS 7 all over again. Only instead of not drawing the borders
⏹️ ▶️ John around the buttons, they're trying to draw the borders around the buttons. They're just so low contrast, you can't see them.
Apple Intelligence news summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and in our final piece of follow-up for tonight, Apple Intelligence news summaries are back, baby, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big red disclaimer that reads: Summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines. Verify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information. Reading from Ars Technica: Apple Intelligence notification summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for news apps are back in Tahoe Beta 4. Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications. Those for news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and entertainment apps, for communication and social apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps based on what you currently have installed in your device. Apple disabled news notification summaries as part of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iOS 18.3 update in January. Incorrect summaries circulating on social media prompted news organizations to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complain to Apple, particularly after one summary said that Luigi Mangioni, the alleged murderer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died by suicide. He had not and has not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this screen is interesting because that red text that you read says summarization may change the meaning of original headlines,
⏹️ ▶️ John verify information. That only appears on the news and entertainment one. The
⏹️ ▶️ John communication and soko, social, all other apps don't have that warning. So this is, you know, again, when Apple just
⏹️ ▶️ John disabled this feature because people were complaining, you know, it's like, as
⏹️ ▶️ John I said at the time, the reason they disabled it is because they can't fix it. Like there's no way to make an LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn't make mistakes when trying to summarize stuff because that's just the nature of the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John as it currently exists. It's not an unsolvable problem. It's just that Apple has not solved it. And I believe nobody has
⏹️ ▶️ John solved it. So unless they come up with a breakthrough, they're just going to have errors. And Apple's solution
⏹️ ▶️ John was disable it, wait a little while, and turn it back on. Still doesn't work all the time, but if we
⏹️ ▶️ John put a big red warning on it, like our hands are clean, done and done. Anyway, at least they give you the option
⏹️ ▶️ John and the red, they pulled out the red text. The red text is there and it says verify information. So we'll summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John it for you, but don't believe what we say. You got to click through to check. And so I think that kind of nullifies
⏹️ ▶️ John the usefulness of the summary. But I saw a gruber say online, he said, well, it doesn't matter because if I see anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks weird, I'll always click through on it to figure it out. The tricky bit is sometimes incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ John information doesn't look weird. Sometimes it just looks fine, like the result of a sporting event. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John one team wins, maybe another team wins. Maybe it's a lopsided contest and you're like, really? They won? But if it was closely
⏹️ ▶️ John contested and they say team A won when really team B won and it was a close game, are you going to click through on that
⏹️ ▶️ John because it looks weird to you? No, you'd be like, hey, team A won, but you're wrong. They didn't. It was incorrectly summarized. Verify
⏹️ ▶️ John information or just disable news summaries.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ John We are brought to you this week by our members. If you are not a
⏹️ ▶️ John member, we're here to tell you about ATP membership. What is it? And why should you get it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And can you get that information without going to our website and reading a bunch of text on our fact? Yes, you can. Here we are to tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John My pitch for membership is that it makes the show better. If you like the
⏹️ ▶️ John show, you'll like the show better if you're a member. First of all, you don't have to hear any
⏹️ ▶️ John ads. So if you were a member, you wouldn't be hearing this right now. You certainly won't hear any other ads. If you want to hear the ads, you can because
⏹️ ▶️ John some people like them, but you don't have to hear them. So you get an ad-free version of the show. Second, you get ATP overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is in every single episode, there's another topic that we talk about that's usually pretty good and
⏹️ ▶️ John juicy that you don't get to hear if you're not a member. If you want to hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote bootleg version of the show, which is the unedited feed with all of our cursing and mistakes or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that includes everything and that's published like the second we stop recording, you can also get
⏹️ ▶️ John access to that. Also, we do once a month roughly bonus episodes where we talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about all sorts of stuff. We have maybe 30 of those bonus episodes up and every month we make another one. So you get access
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the bonus episodes if you are a member. And then finally, when we have our merch sales, you get 15%
⏹️ ▶️ John off during those time limited sales. So that's what I think makes the show better. And that's my pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John for membership. How did I do?
⏹️ ▶️ John well. Is that a good ad?
⏹️ ▶️ John came in under time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was this the first ad you've ever done? I think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not really an ad because I'm just trying to tell people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pay for the show that I'm on. It counts. It's his first ad read. So congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes. No, I did a BB-ed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad read back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is pretty. And it was only like 90 seconds, too. This is pretty impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John My angle on it, just behind the curtain, my angle on it is to tell people what they're getting. We always try to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell people what they're getting. I think Casey did a pretty good job on a recent episode. Like, here's what you get with membership, but he forgot overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, that's my pitch. It makes the show, if you like the show, you will like it better with membership. Yes, and you pay money
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. Did I make that clear? You pay for it, right? You can either pay monthly or annually.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you like the show a lot and it's a big part of your life and you can fit us into your entertainment budget,
⏹️ ▶️ John the show will get better. It's not just you pay us like because you feel like it and you're like being nice to us or whatever and you're supporting the
⏹️ ▶️ John show, which you are, but like whatever, the show will be better. That's the reason why I pay for all the
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts I pay for. Yes, I want to support the shows, but also the shows become better when you don't have to hear ads,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get access to episodes sooner, when you get the bonus episodes. That's why I pay for things. That's the pitch. Membership.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's good. You'll like it more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you like us, it will give you more of us and better of us. Done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And less of not us, right? No, it's very true. And, you know, I can't say enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good things about all the members that we have been lucky enough to amass over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it really is what makes this show possible. I mean, it's no secret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ads have been down, particularly in podcasts for a long time. In fact, I just listened to Backstage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the Relay Members podcast earlier today, and they were lamenting the same problem and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying much of the same thing that if it wasn't for their members, Relay would be in a bad spot. And I can tell you for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainty, if it wasn't for the members of ATP, ATP may or may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even be a thing anymore if it wasn't for members. And so it really, truly helps make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this show happen. That's not just lip service. It really, really does. And we can't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say enough good things for how much we appreciate any of you who have signed up. And it makes a tremendous difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one thing that John didn't mention this time is that, hey, what if you're not in a position to pay us?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't even remember what we charge, but pay us whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about eight bucks a month. I think it's like 88 bucks a year or something like that. If you're not in a position to pay that money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can also ask for a gift. And John slaved over, let me reboot that. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent a lot of time working on how to make gift memberships possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can do that on the website. And it's very, very easy and very straightforward. So you can ask for a gift for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a birthday or a holiday or something like that. And you can be gifted ATP membership. So really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and truly, I really think John's hit the nail on the head. It makes it better for you. And it honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes it better for us too. So everyone wins.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the end of the year, I do the thing where I like thank the patrons, which I'm not going to do now. You'll get to your time at the end of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, and this is not like thanking the members, but just to let everyone know, members make the show possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you're not a member, you should also be thankful to the members because they're helping, you know, subsidize
⏹️ ▶️ John the show that you're listening to. Lots of times all this new podcast that I'm not a member of because I only listen to an episode every once in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that show has members that are making it possible. And I'm thankful to those members. So if, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, when I pitched the patron thing at the beginning of the year, everyone's got to decide, like, what is their entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John budget? How much do I even like this show? You know, how much can I afford? And it's a balance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone has to make that decision for themselves. But like part of the thing that makes patrons possible, whatever is some people like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the show fine. It's okay. But also I have a huge amount of money. So this is nothing to me. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is my favorite part of every single week. And even though I don't have a lot of money, it's worth it
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to pay, you know, $8 a month for this show. Everyone's got to make that decision themselves. So I'm not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, just if you, if you can't pay for it, the show is still free. It's fine. But if you can pay for it, we thank you because you're
⏹️ ▶️ John making the show possible for us to make and for everyone else to listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself. So thanks to members who are not hearing this, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you are hearing this, it is the members who keep this show going in addition to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very crappy ad market. And it is the success of the member program that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has allowed us to keep our ads reasonably high quality. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there's a lot more ads to be had in the podcast space if we basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do dynamic ad insertion and stick in radio style ads for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap kind of weird car dealerships in your area and stuff like that and do like creepy targeting. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do that, but thanks to membership, we don't need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And thanks to membership, we are able to be a little picky about who we advertise for. So if there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some sponsor that like we're like, I don't really want to shill for that on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't have to. We can say no to that. And that's all thanks to members because we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little bit of headroom there to afford to say no to stuff that we don't feel good about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so podcast listeners out there, I'm one of you. And I never have once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, you know what I think the world needs? More podcast ads. And whenever a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show is offered in an ad-free version, I will almost always splurge for it because I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't love listening to podcast ads over and over and over again in the middle of all my shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we try to make them as good as we can, but at the end of the day, they're still ads. If you also are not super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy about podcast ads, we are giving you that option and it's a great option. You get all that other stuff. You get more of us. You get better of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us and all that other fun stuff. Plus cheaper t-shirts. So definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check it out. atp.fm slash join is where you get that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to repeat the call to action three times marco and do it verbatim please
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that's atp.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way to get this deal is to go to atp.fm slash join that's atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John i think you did it
⏹️ ▶️ John four times nope that's it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wrong sorry make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good that's a make good that's a make good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if you just go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah we don't hide it
Apple and interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some topics. And apparently, John, you want to take us on a tour of Apple and interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I've been thinking about this since we've been talking about all the liquid metal stuff. And it's kind of like the thing with the AI crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ John causing large bandwidth or whatever, something like sort of goes unsaid. But I think it's worth saying because not everybody has
⏹️ ▶️ John the same context for these discussions. Certainly, they don't have the old man historic context that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have. But I do feel like as time passes on, like
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason we're in this situation with liquid glass and everything is because
⏹️ ▶️ John institutional knowledge and historic knowledge just goes by the wayside. So I want to just give like a brief refresher
⏹️ ▶️ John on some of the foundational things that are being left
⏹️ ▶️ John by the wayside as we continue in this modern age. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that trying to make interfaces for computers so
⏹️ ▶️ John people can use them, there is a science aspect to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple at various times has been at the forefront of that science.
⏹️ ▶️ John We'll put a link in the notes to a couple of books from Bruce Tognazzini, who was a user interface
⏹️ ▶️ John expert who worked at Apple many, many years ago and was very influential in the field.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tog on interface and TOG on software design. Tog is short for Tognezzini's last name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Talks about the science of interface design. You've probably heard of some of the science things if you're kind of an old
⏹️ ▶️ John school Mac user, like Fitz Law, which is like, okay, well, with graphical user interfaces, we have pointing devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John The user has to put the pointing device on a target to, you know, click on it or do a thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So that whole task of targeting, how easy is it for people to get a pointing device
⏹️ ▶️ John onto a target when using a mouse or whatever? And you can imagine similar things for using your finger on
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen and stuff like that. And they, you know, use science, say, okay, well, that turns out to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John function of the size of the target, the distance from you are, like the, how does the
⏹️ ▶️ John interface work? Is it one to one? Does it have an acceleration curve? You can do science, come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas, test them, run experiments, and try to determine more efficient, more useful,
⏹️ ▶️ John easier to understand interfaces. Apple, and especially in the early days around the
⏹️ ▶️ John era, the early days of the Mac, a lot of the things both in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and subsequently following on from the initial Mac OS to the later ones were informed
⏹️ ▶️ John by this scientific progress. And this also includes user testing, saying we have an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John for an interface, but does it make the computer easy to use? Do people understand it? Some of the ideas that
⏹️ ▶️ John are in the original Mac are like, let's make a standardized interface so you learn how to use a scroll bar. You can reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John that knowledge. Every app has a standard scroll bar. Every app has a standard window with a title bar and a close
⏹️ ▶️ John box so that when you learn one app, it's the same everywhere. This was a revolutionary idea in user
⏹️ ▶️ John interface design from the previous days when every application just did whatever the heck it wanted interface-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Mac was like, every Mac app has Mac windows and Mac scroll bars and Mac buttons and
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac radio buttons and Mac checkboxes, standard controls, right? It sounds boring now, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this was in advance and it was, you know, it's an idea and it was tested and
⏹️ ▶️ John it has rationale behind it to make the interface easy to use. So that's the science aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of user interfaces. There's another aspect of making good user interfaces, which is the art of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple's Aqua introduction, which I don't have a video of because maybe they didn't give that on the W2C
⏹️ ▶️ John disks. But anyways, Macworld's, or not WDC, Macworld San Francisco 2000. We'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John video of it. The quality is terrible, but I don't have a better one. I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The quality is so bad. I watched it earlier today, and I don't think I'd ever seen it before because I was not in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world in 2000. I will briefly sidetrack us and say that a direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote from Jobs during this presentation is he says, menus are semi-transparent too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except for the text. And I was just like, oh, really now? It just made me think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all the liquid glass discourse of these days and how that relates all the way back to 2000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, I wish there was a higher quality one, but I think the Aqua introduction, this was the first time that the Aqua
⏹️ ▶️ John user interface was revealed to the public. And it was quite shocking coming from the classic macOS interface, which was nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ John this at all. That shows some of the art because there's lots of things that are in Aqua
⏹️ ▶️ John that are there not for scientifically backed user interface
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, but because they want to evoke an emotional response. As
⏹️ ▶️ John Job said in the keynote, one of the design goals was that when you see the interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to lick it. There's not a usability angle on that. That's part of the art of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You want to make it attractive, fun, cool looking. And that is an important part
⏹️ ▶️ John of interface design because there's a YouTube channel I watch
⏹️ ▶️ John that it's a food channel. I forget what the name of it is, but they always talk about the different aspects of
⏹️ ▶️ John taste of like, I forget what it is, like sweet, sour, bitter, umami.
⏹️ ▶️ John What am I forgetting? Whatever. A whole bunch of the salty. There you go. Thank you. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then he always adds, I think, an unfortunately named, but an important thing, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the human factor, which is like, how does the food look? What memories do you have of your childhood
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? And you think, well, that's not an aspect of taste, but it is. It's such a big part of the food experience. Yes, there's all the
⏹️ ▶️ John taste factors that go into a food, but there's always the human element. In any interface design,
⏹️ ▶️ John making something cool or lickable or attractive or like makes it feel
⏹️ ▶️ John fun or makes you want to use it and want to touch it and want to manipulate it. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John an art to it. And so ideally, any good computer
⏹️ ▶️ John interface has ideas that are founded in science that we found to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a good way to let people use a computer, that it makes them be able to be successful, makes them make
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer errors, makes it understandable, makes it easier to use, makes it powerful so they can do the things they want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do without lots of effort. And also the art of interface design that makes it attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes you want to play with it and makes you excited about using it and makes it feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John a pleasant place to be and does not cause anxiety and like a million different things, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole science aspect of interfaces sometimes feels to me entirely forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John by everybody, not just Apple, not just people who work in the industry, by users,
⏹️ ▶️ John by journalists, by everybody has like forgetting the idea that there even is an aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of user interface design that can be founded in science. You can test
⏹️ ▶️ John things and see if they make the interfaces better, and you can have ideas about how you might make the interface
⏹️ ▶️ John better that are founded in reason. Maybe if we have standard scroll bars everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John that once someone learns how that scroll bar works, they'll be able to scroll in every application
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of having to relearn it. That's an idea, and then they can test that idea. And the idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's reasoning behind it. There's logic behind it. Let's have an idea for improving the interface founded
⏹️ ▶️ John in some kind of logic that seems like it should make sense. And let's test that idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can't remember the last time I've seen anything like that anywhere having anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with interfaces across this entire industry for like decades. All I ever see is the art and
⏹️ ▶️ John debate about the art and whether the art is good or bad or whether they like how it looks and whether they don't like how it's, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think it's cool? Do you not think it's cool? And the art part is important, but it's not the only part
⏹️ ▶️ John of interface design. So if you're listening to this and you've never heard anything about this, you don't know anything about the science
⏹️ ▶️ John of user interface design or it sounds boring or whatever, I encourage you to either buy or find
⏹️ ▶️ John an e-book or PDF download or whatever of these very old, like they're thrown in the 90s, this TOG on interface and TOG on
⏹️ ▶️ John software design, and just read them. Is it relevant to today's things? Not really, but it will give you the mindset of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I think about interface design if I want to use logic and reason to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with ideas that I think will make the interface better and then test those ideas? Because that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John so incredibly absent. All the debates about the liquid, I keep saying liquid metal. I know I do. All the
⏹️ ▶️ John liquid glass interface stuff. Many people say, oh, it's misguided.
⏹️ ▶️ John The foundations are wrong, so on and so forth. The reasons they give for it, as Marco has said on past shows, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons they give don't make any sense and are basically BS because they don't, they're not logical. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they say that it does, it doesn't do. And even if it did do it, it doesn't make any logical sense
⏹️ ▶️ John why that would make the interface better. It's like it's a tautological thing. We wanted to do this. Therefore, we wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Therefore, it's good. Like they don't even attempt to say how, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just anyway. So I just feel like that's entirely missing. And then part of it is, you know, so when Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John came back, he was so heavily into the art and he didn't like all these nerd eggheads doing the science part
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. You know, he changed the balance for sure. And I feel like it has only accelerated to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point where now Alan Di, who apparently comes from like a Markom background, which is marketing communication,
⏹️ ▶️ John like and print design, doesn't even have a background in user interface design. But I assure
⏹️ ▶️ John you, user interface design still is a field of study, at least in the academic
⏹️ ▶️ John world, where people try to make, you know, interfaces more usable to people by using
⏹️ ▶️ John reason and testing things and not just, you know, having a whim and deciding I want, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, stitched leather because I think it's cool and it reminds me of the seat backs on my private jet or whatever the heck
⏹️ ▶️ John the story behind that was. Like, again, that's an important part of it, but there has to be a balance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like the balance is way, way, way, way, way too far in the direction
⏹️ ▶️ John of the art and emotion side, which again is an important factor, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John can't be the only factor. And if you're on way on the art side and you make an interface that
⏹️ ▶️ John people don't find appealing, now you've got a real problem because it's not usable. It's not useful. It's like
⏹️ ▶️ John you're making the interface worse and people don't even think it's cool looking. So hopefully lots of people will think Liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass looks real cool because I think in many aspects, the usability of it has
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten worse and the supposed foundations of its design don't make
⏹️ ▶️ John any sense and surely weren't tested in any way because we're using the interfaces and finding
⏹️ ▶️ John all these obvious problems and they don't care and they're they're not fixable because the design itself is fundamentally
⏹️ ▶️ John just flawed. And it's not the end of the world. Like I agree with what Marco said, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use it. It's mostly if I said this since the beginning, since I've been using Tahoe, like I don't particularly like it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see that it is doing dumb things for dumb reasons, but in the end, you mostly get along.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it doesn't stop you from using your Mac. It's not some kind of fundamental change that like, now I can't even use
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac or whatever. The accessibility options there are there turned on. I just don't find the art appealing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they made the interface worse. And what I'm craving is a return of
⏹️ ▶️ John a better balance between the science of interface design and the art of interface design.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, you know, this has been an industry trend for everybody for ages. And
⏹️ ▶️ John within Apple, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's like epidemic proportions
⏹️ ▶️ John of too much art, not enough science.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don't even, I don't even know if the really, really high ups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even know that this is a science or respect it as one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or have any people who work at Apple whose degree is in user interface design who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, like, and I'm sure, I mean, I hope some of those people are still there, but it's very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are not the ones making the big decisions anymore. And that's a shame because you're right. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a knowable and known field. This is a studied field, a rigorous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studied, like, real discipline.
⏹️ ▶️ John And evolving. Like, I'm not saying it's stuck in stone. You advance it. You try to come up with new ideas using new
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. Like, it should always be advancing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it seems like they don't respect it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless they're just, I mean, either they're really bad at it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don't even know this is a thing that they should be respecting. And I'm thinking the latter is more likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of it is the hangover from Jobs because he eventually had such a disdain for that thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John he would have an idea in his head about something that he thinks is really cool. And they would say there's some aspect of it that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John good for usability. And it was like, don't be a naysayer. Like he really intentionally pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in the other direction, which is, you know, I have good taste. Don't
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me about the stupid science stuff. That's how you get boring interfaces. Like platinum was boring. Aqua is exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John See how I fixed Apple by doing this? And in many respects, he was right that the pendulum had swung too far the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he's such a forceful person and was such a powerful leader in Apple for so long
⏹️ ▶️ John and so influential. And the company was so successful that I think he was very able
⏹️ ▶️ John to drive out the power and influence of the science-based user intern
⏹️ ▶️ John within Apple. And then when he left, everyone's like, well, we should just keep doing what Jobs is doing because he's great and we're great and everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just continued after he was gone. And I think now the company is reaping
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-benefits, reaping what they sowed. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully expunged all people who know how to make better user interfaces in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for artists. And now sometimes when the art goes wrong, there's nothing left.
AppleCare One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. A couple of days ago, yesterday, maybe, I think it was, as we record this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple announced services, services, services. And this one is Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One. Excuse me, reading from Apple's announcement. Apple today on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 23rd unveiled Apple Care One, a new way for customers to cover multiple Apple products with one simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan. For just $19.99 per month, customers can protect up to three products in one plan with the option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add more at any time for $5.99 per month for each device. Devices must be less than four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years old, and headphones must be less than one year old. Only devices in the customer's Apple account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be covered under Apple Care One. Starting tomorrow, customers in the U.S. can sign up for Apple Care One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, or by visiting their nearest Apple store. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Care One includes all of the benefits that come with Apple Care Plus, including unlimited repairs for accidents like drops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and spills, 24-7 priority support, quick and convenient Apple-certified service, and battery coverage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Care One also expands theft and loss protection beyond iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to also cover iPad and Apple Watch. Fees and deductibles apply. Apple Care One pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the same regardless of the products that are covered, meaning a customer can enroll their phone, iPad, and Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and save up to $11 a month over enrolling in separate Apple Care Plus plans for each device. Additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey items can be added for $5.99 per month each. With Apple Care One, customers can now add products they already own that are up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to four years old if they are in good condition. To verify good condition, products may be required to undergo a diagnostic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check using a customer's iPhone or iPad or at an Apple store prior to being added to the plan. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provides customers with more opportunities to protect their devices even beyond the current 60-day window to purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Care Plus. The Verge writes that Apple Care One is a good deal, but not for everyone. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Care One lets you protect up to three devices for $19.99 per month. Apple claims that customers can save $11 per month by enrolling in a phone watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pad in Apple Care One compared to paying for three individual Apple Care Plus plans for those devices. But that's not true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the board for all of its models. For example, the monthly cost for iPhone coverage with Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus starts at $9.99 for the cheapest and oldest eligible models, whereas the iPad and Apple Watch start at $4.99
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and $2.99 respectively, totaling $17.97 per month. In this case, Apple Care One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a slightly worse deal than buying the plans a la carte. Where the new service shines is if you own some of Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most expensive products, like the iPhone 16 Pro, the Apple Vision Pro, and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip. Paying for a monthly Apple Care Plus plan for each of these three would cost $47.47
⏹️ ▶️ Casey total per month. That's almost $50, according to a list of prices Apple PR manager Anna Mitchell shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with The Verge. Apple Care One, on the other hand, would still be $19.99 for any mix of three products, Mitchell confirmed, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is obviously the better deal by a huge margin. What's important to keep in mind is that just like Apple Care Plus, with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Care One, you still have to pay deductibles and fees for each and every repair, and those costs vary depending on the device as well as the type of repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need. How much you can expect to pay, which is in addition to your monthly Apple Care fee, is listed on Apple's website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we will link to a couple of things with regard to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the service fees and the deductibles tells you like Casey had to pay $29 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AirPods thing. You'll
⏹️ ▶️ John see on this thing. Hey, if you get any kind of Apple Care plus AirPods thing, you're going to pay $29. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find out what that is for your product. And then we'll link to the main Apple Care page,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has the plans of the prices, which will become relevant in a moment. A couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John selected fact items here from Apple's Apple Care page. Can I add my family's devices to
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple Care One plan? That was one of my biggest questions because a lot of like the, you know, what is it called? iCloud. What is the
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud? Apple One? Apple One. Thank you. Apple One. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a family thing where you can get everyone in on it. But as for Apple Care One, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple Care One plans cover devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'll have a little bit more on that with my personal experience in a second. But if you're thinking of like, oh, I'm just going to put
⏹️ ▶️ John my whole family's devices under one Apple Care One plan, it only counts if they're
⏹️ ▶️ John on the whatever account you buy it through, your Apple ID, I keep saying Apple ID, your Apple account,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's only for devices that also use that same Apple account. And then how do you buy it? It's
⏹️ ▶️ John actually kind of tricky. They have an answer in the back which says, oh, it's just easy. You can do it
⏹️ ▶️ John online or through your app or through your device or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sure they will push it more harshly, but like an easiest way to do it is just go to your phone, go to settings, general, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John there's a warranty and repair thing and you'll see the come on at the top of the page. So for once, Apple's advertising of
⏹️ ▶️ John features that helps you to find things. I did that on my phone and it brought up
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice little, after I said, yes, I want to try upgrading my plan, brought up a nice little thing that says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John given these devices, and I think it just picks three random devices or maybe it picks like the most attractive random devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it says, you can save up to $17.98 per month when you protect John's iPhone 16 Pro, Tina's
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 15 Pro, and John's iPad Pro M4. Luckily, I named my devices so you can tell what they all are.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, hey, almost $18 a month in saving. It's saying right there, if you upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to this instead of what you currently have, you will save money. And I did
⏹️ ▶️ John that upgrade coverage thing, and then it just told me it couldn't process my request because the thing is slammed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It took me all day to get through. All day, it's just been totally down. Like it brings you to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Pay prompt. You double tap, you do face thing. It says processing. And then it says, oh, I couldn't do it. Sorry. But
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it did let me do it. And that led me to the plan prices
⏹️ ▶️ John page because after you do this, after you see the little come on, it says you can save $18 a month. Do you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this? Yeah, I do want to. I do want to save $18 a month. So I did it. And fine, you're done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then after you've done that, so now I'm paying $19.99 a month for these three devices and I'm saving $18 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can add more devices to this Apple Care One plan for, what was it, $5.99
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that's right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the question is, if I add this device to my Apple Care One, is it
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper or is it more expensive? So for example, with the Apple Watch, that's $2.99 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I add it to the plan, it becomes $5.99 a month. And nowhere in the interface did they say, are you sure you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to add that device? Because you'd be paying more. No, they don't tell you that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to go to the AppleCare.com, apple.com slash AppleCare,
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll down to the plans section, click on the thing that you have, like Mac or iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John or display or whatever, and then click on all model pricing and then look for the
⏹️ ▶️ John model that you have and it will tell you what the monthly and annual fees are. It gets more complicated because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if you're not paying month by month? What if you paid for two years in advance and you're paying annually? The annual prices are way cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John than the monthly ones in some cases. So you have to do a little bit of math in your head and figure out how many
⏹️ ▶️ John of my devices should I add to my Apple Care One plan so that
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not losing money. Like I want, I'm only added if I'm going to save money. And that was a little bit tedious.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don't make that easy. It's nice that on the very first come on, they will say, do this. And this is how much you'll save for
⏹️ ▶️ John these three devices. So I just took their advice. I said, great, those three devices, I will save that much money.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe you. Good. But the other devices I added, I only added devices where after
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked up the pricing and everything, I determined that it would be cheaper to add the device than to leave it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to leave a bunch of devices on their existing plans, either because they're on multi-year plans that are
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper or because they're monthly plans that are less than $5.99. Like a Mac mini is $3.49
⏹️ ▶️ John a month. You should not add that at $5.99 a month because when you do add it, it cancels your old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Care and it refunds you any fees that anything for like the remainder of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time that you aren't going to use or whatever. And by the way, I think it refunds it to you as an Apple gift card, which is kind of janky, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll end up spending it. So I did that. And then like for the family thing, one of the devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that I put on after looking up the price, it was a MacBook Air 13-inch, which its monthly fee is $6.99.
⏹️ ▶️ John My son's M2 MacBook Air is out of warranty. This is one of the good things about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Care One. It's been out of warranty for like years now, right? As long as it's less than
⏹️ ▶️ John four years old, you can put it back on warranty, which I don't think you think you should ever be able to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think it's like, like they said, a 60-day window. Normally after your Apple Care expires, you can put it back into Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Care. Now you have four years to decide to put that into Apple Care. And I didn't mean for my son's Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air to expire. I just bought like the two-year thing and just let it expire because I forgot about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I want it to be back on Apple Care and $5.99 is cheaper than $6.99.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I put it back on and it worked and it did that and it put it back on. And then I saw some orange
⏹️ ▶️ John text underneath it that says this device will be removed. Like on like my warranty screen where it says, here's all
⏹️ ▶️ John your Apple Care One devices. And it said, this device will be removed. I'm like, why? Why will it be removed? And I kept tapping into it
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And eventually I realized it's that rule that we said before. Apple Care One
⏹️ ▶️ John only applies to devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what I had to do was go to my son's MacBook Air, make an account for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John sign into my Apple ID on that account, and that makes it happy because now it thinks it's
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote my MacBook Air. I mean, I did pay for it and technically, you know, I do own it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that's your way around the family thing. That works great for Macs where I can make a second account and sign in with a different
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. Doesn't work so great for phones because if your kid's got a phone, you're not going to sign into
⏹️ ▶️ John your Apple ID on your kid's phone probably. Maybe you can sign in with your Apple ID in the store or something and find some workaround,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I wouldn't want to risk it too much there. So that's my advice is look into Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ John One. Anyone who's listening to this who has any Apple Care on anything, especially if you have expensive devices, like they said
⏹️ ▶️ John in that Verge article or whatever, if you have something with Pro in the name or some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of expensive Mac, you'll probably save money. You can add your kids'
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, especially if they're Macs, if you have an account on it signed into your Apple ID. But just be careful that you do the math
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the links we'll put in here to figure out whether you're actually saving money or not. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was very disappointed to learn that, like, for what I don't think I could get month
⏹️ ▶️ John to month. Or anyway, I didn't get month to month for my ProDisplay XDR. I wish I did. It has been
⏹️ ▶️ John out of warranty for a while now. And I fear I see underscore having the big red line on his
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR that he keeps making appointments at the Apple store about. And then as soon as the appointment comes up,
⏹️ ▶️ John the red line goes away. So he cancels it. I fear every day that my XDR will have a problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't want to get a smaller monitor, but I would never buy this big monitor again. But I can't put it
⏹️ ▶️ John like they're more than four years old. My 2019 Mac Pro and my XDR that I bought at the same time, they're both
⏹️ ▶️ John more than four years old. They are ineligible to be added to an Apple Care One plan. So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John just sitting here with my fingers crossed. And the other thing is my wife's studio display, it's less
⏹️ ▶️ John than four years old, but it doesn't show up anywhere in the UI for me to add it to the plan. So I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the deal with that is. Maybe I did add her Mac Mini or sorry, her Mac Studio, but I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John see the monitor. I don't know if that's bundled with it or something because I bought them together. But anyway, that's my advice. Check out Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ John One. You will probably save some money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our members for being our exclusive sponsors today. You can join us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm slash join to become a member. One of the perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. It is more of us every week, exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for members. If you want to hear this week's overtime, you can go and join as a member. And this week's overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an amazing exploration of the Mac control panel through this amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's one of the best web apps I've ever seen. It's really quite something. We're going to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in the after show and kind of all the joy around exploring the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac control panel. That's this week's overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how it ties into what I was just talking about with the interface design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Yes. There is a lot of relevant tie-ins there. So we will talk about that and more. atb.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join to hear all that thank you everybody and 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. 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 KC Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
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⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Apple and interfaces (reprise)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you have a correction or an addition to an earlier topic?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my bad. I should put more detailed notes for myself. When I was talking about Apple and interfaces and the science and our
⏹️ ▶️ John dire interface, one other point that I wanted to make about the Aqua introduction, which again, I encourage everybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John either wasn't alive then or has just never seen it
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch that video because it is a trip. When they introduce Aqua, they
⏹️ ▶️ John talk a little bit about some of their reasoning behind things, but also in their human interface
⏹️ ▶️ John guidelines of the day, they talk more about it. Maybe I'll find a link to that and shove it in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can probably find it somewhere. And actually, it might be difficult. You might have to go archive.org or something. Anyway, an
⏹️ ▶️ John example of a combination of art and science
⏹️ ▶️ John with some kind of rationale behind it, which may or may not have worked out. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's an example of something with a rationale that makes some kind of sense. Aqua has transparency in it. That was one of
⏹️ ▶️ John its innovative features. There's transparency in the interface, which was new for macOS and new for
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop OSs to the degree that Aqua did it. It was a compositing window manager that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John have like soft shadows that are transparent laid on top of stuff. The title bars of windows that
⏹️ ▶️ John are inactive are transparent. Pull-down menus are transparent, stuff like that. And part of Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch about, hey, why are these things in the OS transparent
⏹️ ▶️ John and these things not, had a logic behind it. Sheets,
⏹️ ▶️ John which were an innovation in macOS X, they still exist. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John basically little dialogues that are attached to Windows. So for example, if you have a document window and you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to save it, back in the old days in classic macOS, they would throw up an app modal dialogue,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means a save dialogue would come up and say, where do you want to save this document? And that would block the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John app. Even if you had five documents open on a big screen, because you were saving one of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn't say, before I decide where to save this, let me go over to this other document. It was like, nope, this document is app
⏹️ ▶️ John modal. It means this entire app is currently in the mode that's saying, you are now saving. Pick a directory
⏹️ ▶️ John to save this document and give it a file name, right? Totally block. You could go to other apps and use them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this dialog will block the entire app. The innovation of sheets was it would be attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to the document window. And yeah, that window is blocked until you decide to save or hit cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but other document windows are fine. And so the sheet sort of came out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the, with an animation, sort of like vertically, sort of came out of the document window
⏹️ ▶️ John towards you and then curled down to let you know unambiguously, this sheet
⏹️ ▶️ John is attached to this window. First of all, it's within the bounds of this window, but also you saw it come
⏹️ ▶️ John out of this window. It is clearly like a necktie for this window. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John is document modal, right? And why is the sheet transparent? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it's temporary. Same thing with pull-down menus from the menu bar. They appear briefly
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of something else, and they're transparent, not because it looks cool, not to
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight your content, but because in the original Aqua interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John transparent meant temporary. It meant I'm going on top of stuff briefly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then I'm going away. I'm pulling down a menu, but when I'm done, it will go away. They
⏹️ ▶️ John violated that sometimes. Certain things were transparent that weren't temporary, like the dock, which was there all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. Similarly, and they use it for other things like the title bar
⏹️ ▶️ John of an active window was opaque, but title bars of background windows were transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things they learned after they released it was you can't read the titles of background
⏹️ ▶️ John windows because they're all transparent and the titles overlay each other. So
⏹️ ▶️ John back, right? But I do want to highlight like the combination of art and science here
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying we think transparent stuff looks cool. It's a cornerstone of our lickable user interface. That's part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the art of this. It is very appealing to people. People are dazzled by it. It's great, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when and where should we use transparency? Let's come up with some kind of rationale.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that rationale of temporary interface elements that briefly appear and then go away,
⏹️ ▶️ John those should be transparent to highlight their transient nature, whereas more permanent
⏹️ ▶️ John things are opaque. And yes, they violated that in a few areas here or there. But that's an example of combining
⏹️ ▶️ John those two things, of coming up with something that you think is cool, but then deciding how and where to deploy
⏹️ ▶️ John it with some kind of rationale that makes some kind of sense. And yes, they should have user tested the
⏹️ ▶️ John transparent and active window title bars and realized that it makes it so you can't read the title
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann bars of
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows because they all jumble up. I think I did a screenshot of that in my original macOS X review, right? So they weren't infallible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aqua is not perfect. I complained about, you know, I arguably made an entire career complaining about the usability
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with Aqua, right? But I, you know, it's, it's such a, even Aqua,
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the things everyone hated about it and all the things I complained about, it is such a contrast in that they
⏹️ ▶️ John at least try to explain why they were doing things. And when you hear the explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ John you go, all right, that makes sense. And then still, you get to then try it and see how it works out. And they probably should have
⏹️ ▶️ John done more user testing. But anyway, that was a point I meant to make earlier and I didn't. So I shoved it in the after show.