Equal Emphasis
Marco:
I'm a little freaked out because our server was just massively hammered with a huge load spike eight minutes ago and the load average went up to like 150 and I couldn't figure out looking at all the logs like what the hell's going on why is this all of a sudden very heavily loaded no clue why now we still have all of our listeners on the live stream we have over 1100 listeners on the live stream and the load is 0.5 so
Marco:
And I have no, I'm a little scared that I don't know why.
John:
Something updating the location database.
John:
It's like the Linux equivalent of photo analysis thing.
John:
I don't know about you two, but I feel overwhelmed with the amount of content.
John:
I know we've just seen at this point the keynote in the State of the Union, and that's all.
John:
But it seemed like there was more.
John:
Now, obviously, this is a big year.
John:
There's a lot of big, important announcements.
John:
But it just seemed like, even setting aside how important and momentous certain announcements were, there was just more content.
John:
And I have to think it's because the stuff was prerecorded.
John:
When you do things live, there is a certain amount of slack in terms of,
John:
I don't know, walking around the stage, gathering yourself for the next sentence you're going to say, certainly the transition between presenters walking off the stage and a new person walking on, that takes longer than a cut.
John:
Any kind of live demo has way more slack in it than a pre-recorded thing where everything is perfect down to the second.
John:
And I think, even though the keynote was not particularly long, it was like an hour and 50 minutes or something, they packed a lot of stuff in.
John:
I feel overwhelmed with the amount of
John:
Good, cool, new stuff, and I hope we manage to talk about it all.
John:
If we miss your favorite thing, don't worry.
John:
We'll keep talking about WWDC if history has been a guide for the next several weeks.
Marco:
Yeah, because usually in the summer, there's not a whole lot of news, especially as you get into July and August.
Marco:
There's not a whole lot of news, so we will have plenty of time to cover whatever we don't have time for this week.
Marco:
Although we do have more time than usual because we're not live for the first time in, what, three or four years?
Casey:
Yeah, I know, John, you're extremely relieved to be doing this at home, but I think I speak for Marco in saying that I'm pretty sad that we're not in front of all of our friends.
Casey:
Well, not all of our friends, but many of our friends in San Jose or San Francisco or what have you.
Casey:
But I'm glad that 1,200-ish of you are joining us right now and hopefully many, many more once this is released.
Casey:
I've got to say, as quick overall impressions, whew.
Casey:
That was a lot.
Casey:
But they gave us a chance to breathe.
Casey:
And without those demos, this was fast.
Casey:
I was trying to take notes as I was listening and trying to keep up with Twitter and different slacks.
Casey:
And it was just so much so, so fast, which ultimately is very, very good.
Casey:
And obviously, there's a lot to cover.
Casey:
I don't feel like I've properly processed any of it.
Casey:
I feel like I've processed less of it than when I'm there.
Casey:
Perhaps because all I do is talk about it all day long with everyone I can see.
Casey:
And what with me being at the beach with my family, I didn't talk about it all day long.
Casey:
I just watched the keynote, watched State of the Union and otherwise ignored it.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like my head is swimming and I don't know what to make of it one way or the other.
Marco:
Yeah, it's interesting.
Marco:
The format was so different this year, forced by COVID-19 and everything.
Marco:
And by the way, I really respect the intro by Tim Cook, where he sat down on a little stool behind the empty auditorium and kind of talked to the nation about what was going on.
Marco:
It was really well done.
Marco:
It was very tasteful.
Marco:
And I think Tim did a really good job of handling, like, this is a tricky time.
Marco:
This is tumultuous in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And so that was handled well, I thought.
Marco:
And then as for the format of the presentation itself, like being this kind of, I think pretty clearly pre-recorded, you know, kind of presentation is almost the wrong word for it, I guess.
Marco:
It was like basically a pre-recorded video introduction.
Marco:
It felt in some ways like a combination between like a cool demo and a more fun version of like a corporate training video almost.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't mean that in a bad way.
Marco:
I know that can be interpreted badly.
Marco:
I don't mean that in a bad way.
Marco:
It seemed very produced, but if you look back at recent years of Apple presentations, we've said in almost every presentation that over time, it has felt a little bit more artificial and a little bit higher budget than what they appear to be letting on with the...
Marco:
the like artifice of it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's hard to explain, but like the, the, the presentations that have been in person in auditoriums so far for the last few years have been increasingly corporate feeling and they've had more and more pre-produced video segments that they keep cutting to and everything.
Marco:
And so it has felt more almost like a commercial, uh,
Marco:
And I think this format change that they were forced to make this year is actually a positive thing in the sense that it actually kind of fully admits and embraces what it has been inching towards all along, which is pre-produced, very high budget, very high production value commercials, basically, but done in a slightly more down-to-earth way.
Marco:
And I think that better reflects the size of the company today.
Marco:
It better reflects the importance, the financial importance and the size of the community and everything.
Marco:
It kind of better reflects what the company is today rather than trying to keep this train going of this old presentation style that Steve Jobs used to do back when the world was very different.
Marco:
The company was a lot smaller.
Marco:
He was obviously still alive and still doing them.
Marco:
And until today, Apple was still trying to replicate that.
Marco:
And it was losing steam.
Marco:
The old format, I feel like, was losing steam over the last couple of years.
Marco:
I'm starting to feel really stale.
Marco:
And so there are parts of that that I miss with this new format.
Marco:
And they might go back to it.
Marco:
Once the virus is under control and they can have large gatherings, maybe they'll go back to the old format.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I feel like this new format is a more...
Marco:
honest and accurate representation of what they actually are today, as opposed to trying to continue on with the way it used to be of like, Hey, we're still the same old company run by these, you know, fun hippies.
Marco:
Hey, we're everyone's cool.
Marco:
Cause like that, that wasn't really accurate anymore.
John:
I don't know if I see that distinction you're pointing out.
John:
I mean, I understand what you're saying and I know why this format couldn't have as much of the spontaneity because it's not, you know, it's not live, right?
John:
But I don't see that big of a difference other than it being tightened up and, you know, all the ad libs being removed.
John:
Obviously, it feels less friendly and personable than having it live.
John:
But there are good presentations and bad ones when they're live.
John:
And I think there's nothing wrong with the format.
John:
I think just sometimes the chemistry doesn't sort of combine.
John:
Like what you really need for a good live keynote is the same thing you need for any good –
John:
People who are excited about the things they're announcing, the things they're announcing have to be really good.
John:
And to the degree that they're not and the presenters are feigning excessive enthusiasm, that can make it feel a little bit off.
John:
But this time around, setting aside the weird format of people filmed individually and then spliced together.
John:
For obvious reasons, they had a lot of good announcements.
John:
But I feel like this format necessarily tamped down on some of the enjoyment that we normally get.
John:
Like even Federighi only got in like one dad joke about the social distancing about the birds, right?
John:
He usually has nine of those.
John:
And they work well.
John:
And I think his personality comes through, you know, to the degree that any presenters are allowed to have their personality come through, whether it's in, you know, sort of their attitude or their cadence or the jokes that they manage to get into the presentations.
John:
I don't know what the filtering mechanism is for those jokes.
John:
Do they decide?
John:
Do someone else decide?
John:
But, like...
John:
I enjoy all of that.
John:
And I think where I agree with Marco is that I think this year is I think they did a really good job with this year's format, given the constraints.
John:
It didn't feel weird and awkward.
John:
Like we all know that they had to be filmed ahead of time.
John:
We all know they were all filmed separately.
John:
And if it wasn't that if that wasn't clear, they explained it in a little thing at the end that.
John:
explains all the precautions they took during filming but each one of the segments felt like that person could have been on stage modified for the obvious fact that there's not going to be any applause pauses and they're not going to make any stumbles and all the demos are going to be perfect because if they're not they just do them over again right so
John:
If anything, I think this format pulls, I mean, like you said, this pulls a little bit of the humanity out of it, but I don't think that's necessary.
John:
Like, I think you can just leave different takes in and leave a little bit of slack and let Craig make a few more dad jokes and we're back to the best they've ever been.
Marco:
It was actually very nice to not have any third-party demos on stage because those always drag so much.
Marco:
It seems like no one in the room wants those except Apple, apparently.
Marco:
They always go over like a lead balloon.
Marco:
Nobody actually wants those.
John:
but they did them they had demos of third-party apps just not done by third parties they showed office briefly they showed a lightroom they showed photoshop like that's how apple i think always wishes those demos go but once you invite an executive from another company you kind of have to let them talk a little bit about something or other and that's death
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So like this new format that didn't have any demos, I mean, I don't know if they, assuming they continue this format for a little while because the virus isn't going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately.
Marco:
So that, you know, I'm sure like whatever fall or winter releases they do, whatever events they do, I would say probably at least until next spring is most likely going to follow a similar format as this.
Marco:
And so when products get released, when, which is when they usually have like game demos and stuff like, Hey, look at the new iPhone or iPad, how fast it can run these games.
Marco:
Uh, I hope they consider not having the third party demos because this works so much better without them.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we've got a lot to go through.
Casey:
We should probably start and we're going to attempt, as I say, every year, we're going to attempt to do it chronologically and then we're going to fail miserably.
Casey:
And it started pretty much with iOS 14 and widgets and,
Casey:
Which I think the most interesting bombshell from that whole conversation, I don't think it even happened during the keynote, but rather during the State of the Union, where they said widgets are going to be SwiftUI only, which in retrospect, I'm not terribly surprised by, but I certainly did not expect whatsoever.
Casey:
And it makes sense.
Casey:
It seems to be because they can serialize and save off, you know, the state of the widget and then just kind of replay it later and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But I was very surprised to see that.
Casey:
That being said, the widgets looked pretty good.
Casey:
And you can put them on the home screen.
Casey:
You can do, what do they call them?
Casey:
Like smart widgets or something like that, or smart shelf.
Casey:
I forget what it was called, where you stack, smart stack, you stack a few of them on top of each other.
Casey:
And then the
Casey:
The OS and the device will just show the one it thinks is most relevant based on how important each individual widget thinks it is at that particular moment.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All this looked really, really good.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
There's nothing I can think of that I'm like, yes, finally, I can have this on my home screen.
Casey:
But I do think that this is one of the lowest hanging fruits that they could have picked, not from an engineering effort perspective, but from a, come on, guys, you really haven't done anything with Springboard in, what, 10 years?
Casey:
Can we do something?
Casey:
And they did something.
Casey:
And it looks good.
John:
Yeah, this has been a requested feature for years and years because the grid of icons was a great thing to start with.
John:
But if you had told someone in 2007 that we'd still have the grid of icons in 2020, you'd be like, really?
John:
Nothing different?
John:
It's like, well, folders.
John:
But really?
John:
The folders just look like the little, you know...
John:
widgets on the home screen you know pioneered by android used by lots of phones in various ways basically just can i have something more on my screen instead of just a grid of apps or a grid of folders and finally you can do that like they kept they kept creeping up on it putting these widgets in the little thing that's to the left right but now that you and the widgets are still there but now you can put them on your home screen and you can have them take up the same amount of room as four apps the same amount of room to this
John:
what eight apps right so they're either squares or they're big rectangles maybe they can be even taller yeah actually you can do a grid a four by four grid of 16 apps i think anyway hexagons coming next year so you can tessellate them yeah no that'll be just like the watch we'll just this giant scrolling cluster of frog eggs anyway um but yeah this is long overdue um and
John:
it will you know it and it's the biggest change to springboard in years right bigger i think even bigger than the folders this is going to change how people's home screens look and work uh because in those widgets you can add functionality that you don't have would normally have to go into an app to get uh i'm sure someone with more watch os experience like uh underscore would know better but looking at the api for this it looks a lot like
Marco:
uh the ui for stuff on the watch where you give like a timeline of you know information if it's the type of thing is that am i thinking of the watch or am i misremembering marco yeah that's basically how complications work where like you provide the timeline of what kind of data should be displayed at what time in the future like in you know to a certain range in the future and then it automatically displays it and so you don't have to and and often can't manually update it you know constantly
John:
Yeah, your app isn't running all the time.
John:
And, you know, it's basically like an energy efficient way to not have all these app running all the time, but still allow them to put content there.
John:
And obviously, that doesn't work for all things.
John:
Like, obviously, if you know, sometimes you don't know the future and can't put out timeline to that far.
John:
But anyway, it's a very flexible API to try to be power efficient.
John:
And, you know, and CPU efficient to not have apps constantly churning while still giving much more information and functionality directly on your home screen.
John:
um as part of this also uh you know further uh home screen changes they added the app library which is a better more or less a better way to organize your apps without organizing them so the spatial interface that we've had for ages where you arrange your home screen and have these little icons uh craig made a good point in the presentation it's like yeah
John:
most people arrange their first screen or maybe the first screen or two but after that it's just chaos right unless you're really obsessive or you have very few apps by screen five things are just a mess now i would say that part of the reason that's true is trying as we've mentioned on the show many times trying to organize your home screens is a nightmare it's a ui nightmare let's see previous episode where i described the experience in excruciating detail
John:
But it's terrible.
John:
It's a hot potato.
John:
There's no place to put things down.
John:
You accidentally drop things.
John:
Things scooch off the edge.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
You used to be able to arrange your home screen in the iTunes interface.
John:
Even that wasn't a great interface.
John:
I would kill for a Mac user interface.
John:
that lets you rearrange your home screen icons, just like a real Mac user interface.
John:
That's sort of non-destructive with save with an area off to the side where you can just chuck things to keep them in holding patterns.
John:
And with like multiple selection ranges and like, like just it's a, it's an app for arranging squares.
John:
Literally that's all it is.
John:
But yeah,
John:
a decent app for rearranging squares on a large screen with a mouse and keyboard.
John:
God, I would kill for that.
John:
If that existed, I think people's home screens would be better organized past the first screen or two.
John:
Widgets will kind of help with that, but all it will do is, you know, let people have even cooler first one or two or three screens.
John:
But by screen five, it's still going to be chaos.
John:
So Apple's solution is, you know what, you can just hide those screens.
John:
You can just say, I don't want to see screens five, six, and seven or whatever of my home screen's
John:
Just don't even put them in the little swipey thing.
John:
How will you get to those apps?
John:
Oh, the app library.
John:
It has them organized by recency and by category, and there's an alphabeticalist thing.
John:
This is above and beyond the search where you have to type stuff.
John:
This is like organized into bins or whatever.
John:
I feel like this is a slight abdication of Apple's responsibility to make it possible for human beings to actually organize their app icons.
John:
They're saying, you know what?
John:
give up because we're never going to make it easy so just hide those screens and it's like spatial organization for screens one two and three and then browser mode and automatic categorization for the rest and maybe that works fine maybe no one would ever carefully arrange five screens but honestly i find it frustrating to rearrange my screens one and two often i look at them i was recently speaking of the hey app which we're not today i was trying to find a place to put the hey app because i
John:
have an account and i'm in the free trial period and i wanted to try it out and i didn't want it to be buried 20 screens ago so it's like oh god how do i find a place for that in my screens one and two what thing do i move and what am i going to accidentally screw up when i move it that's just me rearranging the screens that craig says that people do arrange so i still think this is a problem but all that aside i'm very glad at this you know the biggest change to to springboard in maybe ever but certainly in the last several years so
John:
I endorse these changes.
John:
I just really do wish there was an easier way to arrange your home screens.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm really curious to see what these widgets look like for something like Overcast, actually, to put Marco on the spot, because my understanding is there's no way to interact with these widgets.
Casey:
And
Casey:
So presumably in the case of Overcast, you could just use like a now playing widget that's like a system level thing.
Casey:
But let's just for the sake of discussion say that that didn't exist.
Casey:
I don't think, Marco, there's any way for you to put like a play, pause, rewind, fast forward or anything like that in a widget, which could be extremely useful.
Casey:
I guess the next best thing you could do is put a list of podcasts to kind of hop into and play.
Casey:
Or no, but I guess that's still interactive too.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That kind of bums me out that there's no interactivity.
Casey:
It totally makes sense from an engineering perspective.
Casey:
But from a user perspective, I'd like to be able to lightly interact with some things.
Casey:
And I think I'd seen James Thompson say something about how the PCALC calculator widget wouldn't be possible for this exact same reason.
Casey:
And that's...
Casey:
It's fine, but it's a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
But on the grand scheme of things, I'm still really into this widget stuff.
Casey:
I think the app catalog, whatever app library thing sounds good too, because as Craig put it, jiggle mode is a little bit challenging to say the least, just like you were saying, John.
Casey:
So all in all, the new Springboard stuff looks real good.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's useful, as we alluded to earlier, it's useful to think of the new widgets more like watch complications than like miniature app interfaces.
Marco:
Because they are, I mean, again, this could change as we learn more about them and as we actually get time to play with them as developers and maybe changes happen over the summer.
Marco:
But it sure seems actually in many ways less functional than the previous widgets have been.
Marco:
And by the way, Overcast has a widget.
Marco:
No one uses it because it's not very useful, but I have a widget.
Marco:
It has a play pause button.
Marco:
Getting that to work was a crazy hack, but it has a play pause button, and it does show the next two or three upcoming podcasts and a play pause button, and that's it.
Marco:
But almost no one uses it because it's kind of awkward to use widgets in the previous versions of iOS.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
I honestly can't think of a good reason to have one in this new system for Overcast.
Marco:
I don't think it makes sense unless I would... Again, I could show the next upcoming podcast, but if I can't tell which one you tapped on, if you tap on it, then that's not of much use.
Marco:
So I'm probably just not going to have a widget in the new system, but I'm looking forward to what...
Marco:
other types of apps are able to do with them.
Marco:
I've never been a heavy widget user, but I would love to do things like have a weather widget showing on my home screen.
Marco:
There are certain things like weather that I just always want to be displayed.
Marco:
Maybe some of the examples they were showing, like showing your upcoming calendar events.
Marco:
That's stuff I would actually use.
Marco:
And so I'm looking forward to just having a new fun thing to play with.
Marco:
And yes, Android people, I know you did it first.
Marco:
Opera did it first, etc.
Marco:
I know, but...
John:
this is new to us so we're going to be super excited about it um and this is actually not the first android thing that is now going to be new to us that we'll get to more in a little while yeah i think that because these widgets are you know seem like they're not particularly interactive right now uh it doesn't mean they'll stay that way like when they were in the sort of today view it kind of made sense that they weren't wouldn't be constantly interactive because you don't even see them half the time they only sort of load on demand but if it's going to be on your home screen all the time
John:
obviously apple doesn't want you churning away and burning cpu so they're very conservative with the first implementation but it wouldn't surprise me with a few years from now that you can finally get essentially a now playing screen on the home screen with active play pause fast forward rewind controls and you know like a tiny miniature interface to overcast in the home screen does not seem unreasonable for me because it would only be running when the screen is turned on and when the screen is turned on and they're on their home screen
John:
it's not any different than if they uh the screen is turned on and they happen to be an overcast it's the same amount of cpu usage you know if you're like playing audio or something like that and speaking of that to show that they're not afraid of having things running on top of the home screen and other places picture in picture which you know was from the ipad now available on the phone so if you're watching some video and you want to go someplace else you can still see the video in a little floaty window just like you can on the ipad
John:
And if they're okay with a bunch of video showing, I think it should be okay with play, pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons in a widget.
John:
Neither one is going to kill your CPU exactly.
John:
So it's nice to see that coming over.
John:
That's sort of like something they had already implemented but didn't have on the phone because they're like, oh, the phone is so small.
John:
Would people want that?
John:
Answer, yes.
John:
Everybody wants that on their phone.
John:
Plus phones are pretty big these days.
Casey:
You know, one small thing about the widgets that I can't let go of, apparently, I think the old API is probably deprecated, right?
Casey:
And that's also a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
Like on my iPad and in Notification Center on my iPhone, I like using this app, Vidgets, V-I-D-G-E-T-S.
Casey:
And what that does is it's like an iStat menus for your phone or your iPad.
Casey:
And on the iPad, I actually have it on my home screen.
Casey:
And it's in for someone like me who has no empathy for the machine.
Casey:
Sorry, John.
Casey:
It actually is very convenient to know, like if I'm actively downloading something and is it actually going quickly?
Casey:
And that's not going to be possible anymore because that, you know, that refreshes itself like once a second.
Casey:
And for all the reasons that you just cited, you know, it's too computationally expensive, too energy expensive.
Casey:
That's not going to be possible anymore.
Casey:
And that's that's too bad.
Casey:
That being said, I understand why from an engineering perspective, and it makes perfect sense.
Casey:
And I do think that there are probably going to be some cool new widgets with new functionality.
Casey:
And I'm really anxious to see or excited to see how the auto ordering works on those stacks.
Casey:
But I should stop belaboring this widget thing.
Casey:
We should probably keep moving along.
Casey:
What was the next thing that they talked about?
Casey:
Translate, actually.
John:
the compact ui for siri and calls also yes the call one has been people wanted that since since multitasking was introduced it's like when a call comes in why does it take over my whole screen everything else that happens you can have a banner or you can have an alert you know like the the modern notification system on ios has existed for a long time and calls have just said no we are something special because i don't not sure if you know this but what you're actually holding is something we call a phone and when you get a call
John:
Since I'm a phone, it's the most important thing that I do, so I'm going to black out the whole screen, and nobody likes that.
John:
Other modern smartphones don't do that, and now the iPhone won't either.
John:
It actually shows as a notification.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
And same thing for Siri.
John:
You can now activate Siri and do things with it without it blanking over the whole screen.
John:
That may or may not actually make Siri any better.
John:
There's a separate section on Siri supposedly being better, but
Marco:
yay for catching up with modern practices in terms of notification ui yeah i'm so happy to see this yep as with many nerds who have been complaining about this for years like phone calls today are you know there are some special considerations for a call you know unlike many other notifications that we get it is a synchronous thing that this call is happening right now you need to answer it right now you can't just wait until later and go you know
Marco:
So there is some degree of special treatment that they need, and I'm sure there's probably some regulations too about how calls have to behave on certain phones in certain countries just from legacy or emergency reasons.
Marco:
But for the most part, this is a computer that you're using, and you don't want anything to be able to do a full-screen takeover that you didn't tell to happen.
Marco:
And that's what calls have done until now.
Marco:
And this also includes FaceTime calls and anything else that uses the system VoIP API.
Marco:
A full-screen takeover on your computer that is caused by someone else calling you that you have no control over...
Marco:
I mean, in many ways, it has been and can be used as a DDoS attempt for someone's device, but it does seem kind of ridiculous to think about why that would be the case these days.
Marco:
And so it is wonderful that Apple has finally recognized that and made this change to be like, all right, you know what?
Marco:
Phone calls are now demoted a little bit in the UI so that they don't black out the entire screen of your phone whenever some idiot calls you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Basecamp's entire company has always been remote, and their people are spread across the entire globe.
Marco:
They literally wrote the book on remote working back in 2013.
Marco:
So Basecamp is the perfect set of tools to collaborate remotely without distractions.
Marco:
If you're looking to monitor every move your employees make, Basecamp is not for you.
Marco:
That's not the kind of product they make.
Marco:
Basecamp is for smart managers who respect their employees.
Marco:
And they are, as we've seen recently, they are a very principled company with pretty nice principles.
Marco:
So you can get started with Basecamp in minutes without any training.
Marco:
It's built to be as simple and straightforward as possible to find exactly what you need.
Marco:
So go to Basecamp.com slash accidental today and you will get 10% off your first six months of Basecamp.
Marco:
Once again, Basecamp.com slash accidental to get 10% off your first six months of Basecamp.
Marco:
Basecamp is the all-in-one toolkit for working remotely.
Casey:
Translate.
Casey:
Translate looked really cool.
Casey:
I know that Google Translate is a thing.
Casey:
I know it's very good.
Casey:
I, as with everyone, haven't had the opportunity to use any sort of translation service for a while.
Casey:
But it looks really, really neat.
Casey:
The one thing I wish is that when you were doing the conversational mode, it seemed like it would be the perfect opportunity to put your phone in landscape and set it between you and the person.
Casey:
And I feel like the opposite person's
Casey:
UI should be flipped 180 degrees.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
Because right now you would have to do the like, you know, hold it up to your face and then hold it up to the other person's face.
Casey:
They could read the translated version of what you said was and then bring it back to your face.
Casey:
You can read what they said.
Casey:
It seems like such a good tabletop sort of mode where the UI is split in half and one person gets each half facing the correct way.
Casey:
But with that quibble aside, it looks really nice.
Casey:
And all the translation is happening on device now, which is also excellent.
John:
I wonder what they're using for the translation.
John:
Like, you know, we're all used to using Google Translate, and doing natural language translation is actually very tricky, and Google has spent a long time trying to make their translation better.
John:
Apple has it as a feature.
John:
Checkmark.
John:
Yeah, we've got translation.
John:
But how?
John:
How are they doing it?
John:
Presumably they're not using Google Translate.
John:
Have they developed it in-house?
John:
Do they license something?
John:
Is it as good as Google's engine?
John:
This is always the question with all these things.
John:
So I'm glad Apple has checked that box.
John:
I hope they continue to improve Translate.
John:
You just were talking about the Translate app.
John:
but translation is also built into safari uh strangely as far as i'm aware it's not built into messages right am i wrong about that i think that's correct yeah i believe it's only in the translate app and then separately in safari yeah so i mean it seems like a natural inclusion for a future version of messages so you can have a message conversation and just tap on the thing and say please translate this but we'll see but anyway it's good that apple is another catch-up uh in this area and surprisingly like for the safari thing
John:
that's one of the features i hear cited a lot it's also one of the reasons i go to chrome like i'm you know i use chrome for some things in safari for others but sometimes i'll be using you know one of the things i use safari for i'll be doing that and i'll land on a page that i need translated and it could just go translate.google.com and put in the url and blah blah but it's so much easier in chrome because it just prompts you and now it's that easy in safari too it's you know it's a reason a lot of people cite for using chrome and say oh chrome will translate stuff
John:
right and you say well you don't need chrome to translate it you can in safari just go and they don't want to hear it they're just like chrome just asked me if i want to translate it and i say yes so now safari does that too again caveats about the potential quality of the natural language translation which google has worked for years and years on and apple just getting started but i'm glad the future exists
Casey:
So messages, I am really excited about the changes coming to messages.
Casey:
It seems like they were very polarizing and there were a couple of like sticks in the mud that I saw fly by on Twitter that were not into it at all.
Casey:
But I love the idea that we're going to have threading.
Casey:
What were some of the other features that they added?
Casey:
Oh, pin conversations.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And putting little cute photos on your group messages.
John:
Both of those that pinned in the photos are great examples of features that are clearly responses to how people use messages.
John:
If you're a heavy messages user, inevitably you have certain message groups that are just...
John:
permanent one for your whole family one for a particular group of friends one for your parents like and if you're frequently using messages a busy day your parent group could get pushed down and you want to check in with your parents again at night and you got to scroll and find the parent group or try typing the names again or something like that
John:
having pin conversations and having cute little icons for your pin conversation groups lets you just say look i'm always going to want to talk to my immediate family my parent my in-laws my group of friends my you know soccer team whatever like just pick a set of those and pin them because you're always going to go back to them and then there's everything else and then the threading if you're in a big group conversation and people are communicating asynchronously uh sometimes you want to respond to something that was said a long time it's like the point of threading it's
John:
Sometimes you want to say, what are you actually responding to?
John:
What are you saying ha-ha to?
John:
What is that lull about?
John:
I need to know.
John:
So threads are a thing.
John:
They can have good implementations and bad.
John:
I think today we have enough experience, these type of interfaces, that you can strike a reasonable balance.
John:
We'll see what this balance is.
John:
Essentially, threading information will be there, but the messages will, of course, still appear linearly, and you can group them by threads.
John:
So I'm not sure about the UI, but
John:
it's kind of like translation.
John:
Any amount of threading is better than none.
John:
Uh, if people don't like it, just don't use it.
John:
And it generates to the non threading form.
John:
But I think people will like it and use it again, as evidence from using things like Slack, where people were very nervous when threading appeared, but now people use it in what I think is a pretty natural way.
John:
Like,
John:
There's not a lot of fretting about threads.
John:
People just sort of use them and understand them and appreciate them.
John:
They haven't overwhelmed Slack and made it unusable, nor do they go entirely unused.
John:
And I hope messages will turn out the same way.
Marco:
Yeah, I like seeing that Apple's really taking messages as seriously as it deserves.
Marco:
And there's also, which we'll get to in a little while, there's the new Messages app on the Mac, which is now built with Catalyst and has apparently feature parity with iOS, which is a first.
Marco:
And what I think about this is messages is incredibly highly used.
Marco:
Even the stats they gave, that kind of blew my mind.
Marco:
They said that there's a 40% increase in messages sent since last year and twice as many group messages.
Marco:
So that's kind of incredible for one year of growth on something that's a pretty mature platform.
Marco:
But messages are so big.
Marco:
So I see with Overcast, one of the analytics that I capture is when you do a share with the activity sheet...
Marco:
I say as an analytic, what type of shared destination did you use?
Marco:
So it's things like copy to clipboard, send to messages, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And send to messages destroys everything else.
Marco:
It is so much more, so far and above, well more used than any other kind of shared destination in the app.
Marco:
And when I designed the share panel, I was thinking people would be sharing social networks and everything.
Marco:
And they do, but it's nowhere close to messages.
Marco:
Like, not even close.
Marco:
I think we, as podcasters and public Twitter personalities, I think we might underestimate...
Marco:
How many people communicate with their friends and family only via messages and stuff as opposed to doing anything on the public social networks?
Marco:
Or they do so much more of it in messages than on public social networks.
Marco:
It's so big.
Marco:
And so for Apple to invest in it seriously and not to just let it languish and let it fall behind alternatives like WhatsApp and stuff like that is really important.
Marco:
And so I'm glad to see they're doing that here.
John:
Yeah, Apple has said in years past that message is the most used app on the entire phone.
John:
It's a phone, so it should have the phone message taking over.
John:
Really what it essentially is, is a messaging device.
John:
That's basically what people use their phone for.
John:
They don't use it for phone calls.
John:
They don't use it to browse the web or read Twitter.
John:
If you had to say to a first approximation, what are these devices for?
John:
Again, just go into public when you can someday again and look at what people are doing on their phone.
John:
Chances are good they're using messages.
John:
It is the most popular app by a lot.
John:
So, yeah, I always felt like their conservatism with the evolution of messages is very similar to the home screen, which obviously is not really an app, but everyone uses.
John:
You have no choice.
John:
It's there when you turn on your phone.
John:
You don't want to screw it up.
John:
And in the case of messages, it's a high volume service.
John:
And history has shown that making changes to it is a little bit fraught.
John:
Witness messages in the cloud, which was delayed on release and I think is still a little bit buggy.
John:
So you really don't want to mess it up, but you do have to kind of key up with the Joneses.
John:
So I think Apple is still lagging behind and is still not...
Casey:
not able to confidently make these kinds of changes every time they make one we're all nervous that it's going to screw up but it is important for them to keep trying so thumbs up on this change hopefully it doesn't hopefully it's stable and works well yeah the one change that i'm most excited for is threading because on some group text messages or group i messages i should say there are definitely times that i get a little lost especially if i'm coming back to something later so you know i have a
Casey:
a group thread or a group chat with a couple of other car nerd friends of mine, not you guys.
Casey:
And there's often times where one of us will come back, you know, not having seen the chat for a couple hours and the two remaining people will have been chatting for, you know, the last two hours and there'll be 50 messages there.
Casey:
And often I want to reply if it's me that's coming back to it.
Casey:
I want to reply to something that happened way back when, you know, way back when.
Casey:
And that's very hard to do without reestablishing a new context and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And so I'm really excited for threads.
Casey:
However, I just recently was trying to send a Twitter link to a group chat that was myself and just a couple other people.
Casey:
And so I went and I looked for the icon that was myself and one of the people in this group chat.
Casey:
It just so happened to be my brother-in-law.
Casey:
So I look for an icon that has like my brother-in-law and a little teeny blob, you know, and you'll have several circles for the group chats and the little teeny blob of his picture.
Casey:
And I just, you know, quickly went there, pasted and hit send.
Casey:
And then I realized I had sent to a different chat that was much wider, that had many more people than just him in it.
Casey:
He was in the other one, but I misfired on account of just looking for him and then immediately firing him.
Casey:
And it was not the sort of thing that I wanted to misfire to this larger group.
Casey:
And I'm not going to give any more details than that, but I felt real dumb and I really regretted it.
Casey:
So being able to have a special image for group chats that you can actually add in and specify is awesome.
Casey:
With all that said, though...
Casey:
The only problem here is that my particular brother-in-law is an Android user.
Casey:
And so I'm assuming that since we can't even rename group chats that are SMS or I guess MMS only, I'm assuming none of these features will be coming to the messages representation of group MMSs.
Casey:
And so I'm still screwed either way.
Marco:
I'm actually really curious what you sent him.
Marco:
The less you say about it, the more suspicious it becomes.
Marco:
Maybe I don't want to know.
Casey:
No, I'll tell you after the show.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I'm really excited for all the messages changes.
Casey:
I'm super-duper excited to hear that there's parody on macOS, Big Sur, spoiler alert, or Bug Sur, depending on who you ask.
Casey:
What an amazing typo.
Casey:
Oh, God, what a good typo.
Casey:
But anyway, I'm really excited for that.
Casey:
Trying to plow right along as quickly as possible.
Casey:
Maps got some updates, including cycling directions and EV routing.
Casey:
Two things I don't care about.
Casey:
Now, Marco, I know you are super excited about the EV routing changes, especially while you use CarPlay in your... Oh, sorry.
Casey:
Sorry.
John:
Tesla's already got EV routing that's customized to it, so he's not really missing out on that, but it is a continued shame that Tesla hasn't found a way to square that circle with CarPlay.
Marco:
Yeah, it's basically adding to apparently just BMWs and Fords so far, but more cars coming later.
Marco:
the ability to build in charging stops to your routes which is what tesla's map and in its cars have done since day one so it's nice you know i can tell you that's a wonderful feature um it is very nice it won't affect me at all but it is very nice and yeah man i it really stung we'll get to carplay in a second it really stung when craig said about carplay it's available on basically every new car
Marco:
I think Tesla might be the only remaining holdout of any major car brand now.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I can't think of any other car brand that does not offer CarPlay at all.
Marco:
I mean, hell, Porsche even offers it for their cars made in the 60s.
Marco:
We can't even get it on Tesla.
Marco:
And that is becoming increasingly a problem for Apple people who have Teslas.
Marco:
Whatever is causing them to not want to do that, I wish they would work it out.
Casey:
Moving right along, we can talk about the Home app and it's getting adaptive lighting, which is, I guess, sort of kind of a not really night shift, but for your physical lights instead of your computer and your other devices, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
The face recognition thing.
Casey:
So I think I blanked when that was coming across.
Casey:
So it won't alert when it sees somebody that it knows at your front door.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Yeah.
John:
It will alert and tell you who it is.
John:
This is like feature parity.
John:
A lot of these home features are sort of feature parity and APIs for things that are just expected from home automation.
John:
This is more catch-up stuff.
John:
Any sort of camera system probably has some kind of face recognition in a library, and this is HomeKit support for that.
John:
Activity zones specify the region of the camera's view that you're actually interested in.
John:
More catch-up features, but these are sort of necessary features
Marco:
uh stuff that uh you know to be a player in this game that you have to support so good on apple for catching up i'm i'm really curious to see how this works because like so i have some nest cameras and they're first of all their zone detection is garbage and their motion detection and everything they're like you know nest cameras seem unaware that the sun moves throughout the day and
Marco:
And as a result, shadows happen and shadows move across rooms very slowly throughout the day as well.
Marco:
And Nest's face recognition is also total garbage.
Marco:
So I'm really curious to see how this works out in practice with these products.
Marco:
This has been the kind of thing that companies have advertised for years, as John said.
Marco:
There used to even be apps for your Mac to let your Mac webcam do many of these same functionalities.
Marco:
They've never worked that well.
Marco:
So yeah, this is very much a wait and see for me.
Marco:
Certainly, this is the kind of thing like, you know, you'd expect Nest being Google owned to be good at that kind of stuff, and they're super not.
Marco:
So we will see.
Marco:
I hope it works out well.
Marco:
Also, I thought it was very entertaining that during this home segment, I'm pretty sure Casey's garage door opener Raspberry Pi was Sherlocked.
Casey:
You know, everyone has been saying that, but I have had a home bridge powered home kit front end for my Raspberry Pi garage door opener do hicker since, I don't know, like a week or so after I installed just the Raspberry Pi detection and the LED thing.
Casey:
So I'm not entirely clear what this is buying me other than more prominence and I guess maybe alerting if the garage door is left open.
Casey:
Is that the only new stuff?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It breezed by really fast.
Marco:
So it's a little hard to know yet.
Casey:
I think it is alerting, which coincidentally, I don't think I talk about this on the show, but I did set up a HomeKit automation that when it detects that everyone has left the house, it will then read the state of the garage door and
Casey:
And it will send me a push notification saying either, you know, you're good, the garage door is closed, or, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's open.
Casey:
And that's actually a fairly challenging thing to do because using the out-of-the-box shortcuts functionality, you can't send a push notification based on a HomeKit event.
Casey:
So what I'm actually doing is calling an API that I have on my server that's
Casey:
via HTTP, that's then basically just proxying that to Pushover, which is a really cool app that has its own front end to sending push notifications to your phone.
Casey:
So between Aaron and I, when the last of us leaves, HomeKit will check the state of the garage door, make an HTTP request to my server, which makes an HTTP request to Pushover.
Casey:
I guess I could skip that hop, but my API is way, way...
Casey:
It's the most Casey answer to this problem ever.
Casey:
But anyways, my API is so much simpler.
Casey:
And so it'll send a push notification to my phone, which is super cool.
Casey:
And I was very proud of figuring out a way to get around the limitation that you can't send yourself a push from a HomeKit automation.
Casey:
Anyway, it is super cool that they're getting a little bit more support for that sort of thing.
Casey:
Moving on, let's talk about CarPlay because it makes me so happy to hear you suffer.
Casey:
I mean, it makes me so happy.
Marco:
You jumped ahead.
Marco:
You skipped CarKey, the App Store, iPadOS, AirPods, watchOS, and privacy.
Marco:
Did I skip?
Marco:
I'm just going off the show notes, man.
John:
No, you're not following in the notes document.
John:
Marco, you don't know what's going on.
Marco:
No, I'm following Keynote Order.
John:
Well, okay, so we're...
John:
the document is taking precedence here because we're going to skip stuff in the keynote but if you have better notes you should you could have put them into the document okay we know your document knows better than apple what order things should be presented in no i'm just saying that the document is what case he's going off of and he can't see what you're looking at thank you john if you had put what you're looking at in the document then we could all see it it was broadcast to the world
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
We'll bicker about it later.
Casey:
We'll bicker about it later.
Casey:
But the next thing in the document is CarPlay.
John:
You can reorder it in the edit.
John:
You have ultimate power here, Marco.
Oh, no.
Casey:
The next thing in the document is CarPlay, and I guess there is some support for some new styles of app.
Casey:
I think they said basically fast food apps you can now put in CarPlay, which I'm not entirely clear why, but whatever.
John:
EV charging apps.
Casey:
EV charging.
Casey:
There were a couple others.
Marco:
Yeah, parking, EV charging, and, quote, quick food ordering, however that's defined.
Marco:
So, yeah, that's cool.
Casey:
They also did a demonstration of car—I don't know what the Apple marketing term is, but basically you can unlock your car with your phone.
Casey:
Car key.
Casey:
Car key?
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
John:
Does that use the U1 thing?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So the first version of it that's going on the 2021 BMW 5 Series does not use the U1.
Marco:
It seems to be using something much closer, maybe NFC-based, it seems, because you have to be very close to it.
Marco:
But then they said at the end, they said that in the future, future integrations will use the U1 so that you can keep your phone in your bag or in your pocket.
Marco:
and not place it directly against the door.
Marco:
So it does seem like it's probably NFC-based to start, and will be enhanced with the U1.
Marco:
Because what they need is, they don't want to use something like Bluetooth, because Bluetooth can have things like, first of all, it could be too long range, and there could be issues with, somebody could set up a Bluetooth repeater or something.
Marco:
So if you're in a restaurant, they could set up a repeater outside the window and unlock your car from further away than you actually are on drive-off.
Marco:
Well, the ultra-wideband in U1, it's immune to that.
Marco:
It can't have those kind of attacks.
Marco:
The way it works, it can detect that and rule those out.
Marco:
And so they need to use – I'm guessing what they're using is NFC for this first version because that is only close proximity and it's easier to enforce that way.
Marco:
Whereas once they have a better integration using the U1 chip, they can detect like, okay, this is in your pocket, so it's maybe 12 inches away from the receiver, but that's close enough.
Marco:
We'll let it unlock.
Marco:
But they didn't give a date for that.
Marco:
They just kind of said, like, soon.
Casey:
Safari, some pretty big changes to Safari.
Casey:
The thing, it made me so happy.
Casey:
And, oh, the schadenfreude was so strong.
Casey:
Just watching them discuss the privacy report feature.
Casey:
So this is a new thing where you can, on any website, I guess, you can go and look at what Safari thinks it's doing, the website is doing in terms of tracking you.
Casey:
And so there was an example, like a quick demo on stage or in the video or whatever, and they said, okay, let's see what's tracking us.
Casey:
And right there is DoubleClick and Google Analytics featured front and center, which was so amazing.
Casey:
But basically, this will let you see what is a website trying to do or how many different trackers there are.
Casey:
I guess not what they're doing with your information, but how many people are trying to slurp up your information.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think part of the reason, this is not a very earth-shattering idea, but I think part of the reason why websites can get away with slurping up all this data is because most people, even I as a developer and former web developer, I don't really have a good view for how much data is being sucked up every time I go to a website.
Casey:
And so I think making this more prominent is presumably going to have and hopefully going to have a tangible impact on
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This will hopefully make it much more obvious when all of these websites are doing things that are almost exclusively nefarious things.
Casey:
And so I am really, really looking forward to hopefully seeing changes across the web for the better because of this.
John:
Well, keep in mind, it's not just telling you where the trackers are.
John:
It's telling you which trackers it blocked.
John:
They have, you know, their intelligent tracking prevention is built into Safari.
John:
You're supposed to look at this and, A, be terrified that all these trackers are there, and, B, be thankful that Safari says, look at all these things I blocked for you.
John:
My intelligent tracking prevention system blocked X, Y, Z. You know, like, that's the pitch.
John:
So it is both sales pitch and knowledge.
John:
And it's good because if you were to look at this and just say, oh, here are all the trackers, your question would be, so what am I supposed to do about that?
John:
Like, I don't like it.
John:
What am I supposed to do about it?
John:
Now when you look at it, it will say...
John:
here's what Safari already did for you, and it will make you feel better.
John:
It may also change your opinion of the site that it had all these things that had to be blocked, but mostly I think it's building an understanding in the public, not so much what you're being tracked about, but the fact that Safari has features that prevent that, and that's why you should use Safari instead of Chrome or whatever, right?
John:
Whereas if Safari just does that behind the scenes, which it has been, maybe you don't appreciate that and it's not like a selling feature of Safari.
John:
Similar to this, another feature that lots of other browsers have that Safari now has, which is password compromise detection.
John:
Safari, through its keychain integration, will store passwords for various websites, and Apple will now be keeping track of these big
John:
metadata dumps to say we know that this many passwords were leaked from this website on this date and they'll just update that database and they'll be able to tell you by the way we saw that your email address and this password were compromised in this website so you should probably change it if you reuse your passwords it may be a little bit overwhelming to see
John:
oh, my God, I have to change my password on 20 websites because I use my dog's name as the password on all 20 of these websites.
John:
That can be overwhelming, and I don't know if it will make people just throw up their hands, but in theory, if you were using good, unique passwords for each website, when one gets compromised, you'll at least know that password is burned and maybe you should change your password.
John:
And I know from using, I guess, Firefox, maybe Edge, I don't know, some third-party browsers that are not Safari,
John:
On my Mac, I've gotten these notifications, mostly for websites that I haven't logged into since the early 2000s or even the 90s.
John:
But if I get a notification, I'll go over to it and change the password.
John:
It was probably a garbage password that I haven't used in a decade anyway, but it's good to know.
John:
Or I'll go over there and close the account.
John:
That's the other reminder.
John:
It's like, I still have an account on that website.
John:
Let me just delete that account.
John:
That's another solution to the problem.
John:
So I'm glad this has come to Safari because it's a useful feature, but I do worry about...
Marco:
regular people being overwhelmed when the one password they use on every website is compromised and they're like what do i do now well what can you do yeah that's also been a feature of one password as well um they like they have they check with like have i been pwned and there's various sources and do a similar warning
Marco:
Going back a minute, just before we leave the privacy warning thing, first of all, this is basically what the Ghostery plugin did back forever ago.
Marco:
It is really nice to see the list of trackers on websites that are being blocked because this is kind of a pattern that Apple has followed a lot to great success, I think.
Marco:
Where, you know, as Casey, you were saying a minute ago, that a lot of times your data is being tracked or leaked or creepily captured, and you have no idea.
Marco:
It's just happening behind the scenes in ways that aren't visible to you.
Marco:
And one consistent strategy Apple does in these kind of contexts is shine a light on it when it happens.
Marco:
And to, you know, either to just outright ban or block such behavior, or in cases where that's impractical or impossible...
Marco:
apple likes to reveal that behavior to you so that you can make decisions and you can be more in control and and that you know bad actors can be discovered and and you know shamed or controlled out of out of the bad behavior and so in this case like you know web trackers part of the reason why it's been such a big business forever is that and continues to be and look need to be is that pages can track all sorts of creepy crap using javascript in the background that you have no idea is even running
Marco:
So anything that shines a light on it and calls out exactly what it's doing, any sites or bad actors that care about how they look and that might hear from the users about what's going on, they'll be forced to consider better behavior.
Marco:
And even the ones that don't care, at least users who care themselves can be more in control, can see what's going on, can be more aware of what's happening, and can maybe take technical countermeasures on their end, like running a blocker or something like that on their end to control such things.
Marco:
So anytime Apple can shine a light on...
Marco:
creepy behavior and put control back in the user's hands, that's a very good thing.
Marco:
And that's exactly what they've done here.
Marco:
And in fact, there's also a thing later on that I don't think we'll get to separately, so I'll ruin it here, where they're doing the same thing in iOS 14.
Marco:
Whenever the camera or microphones are being recorded from, there's now a recording dot in the status bar.
Marco:
And that's great, because that's another thing that...
Marco:
They've had the permissions dialogue for, do you want this app to access the camera and microphone for a couple of years?
Marco:
But once you get permission, you didn't know when it was doing that.
Marco:
So for instance, an app like a social network that records pictures or videos, you would give it permission because obviously you need that to work.
Marco:
But do you want it to be turning on your microphone and your camera when you don't know it?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
So a very useful thing here to control some privacy potential leaks or violations is give people an indicator.
Marco:
Same thing with location access.
Marco:
It's always an indicator.
Marco:
So yeah, anything that Apple can do to shine a light on potential privacy invasions or risks and give users knowledge and control, that is always successful.
Marco:
And I'm glad to see that happening in more places.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
I feel a little bit like I'm in the matrix for this next item here.
John:
You guys both tell me what I'm misremembering.
John:
Let's talk about app clips for a second.
John:
I could swear, I'm assuming this was not a dream, this was reality, that this is a feature that Apple already had and already announced.
John:
What the heck am I remembering that it was so similar to this?
Casey:
Android had it.
Casey:
Yep, Android did this exact same thing.
John:
I have this distinct memory of an Apple keynote of them announcing essentially the exact same feature as app clips, but not by that name.
John:
you know i don't know i'm getting old anyway app clips is cool if if it already exists in an alternate universe uh an alternate version of the matrix and that's what i'm remembering and i'm sorry but uh it's a way for you to do a thing with an app that you don't have installed without the hassle of going i pulled up to a parking meter it says i have to download the whatever app oh i can use the qr code always taking me to a web page the web page has a button okay download an app store okay i'm on the app thing i'm downloading it okay i'm opening the app
John:
Okay, I'm launching it.
John:
It wants me to sign in.
John:
Okay, I have to create an account.
John:
All right, I've made the account.
John:
Okay, now I've launched the app.
John:
Now I'll scan the QR code again, and now I can pay for parking.
John:
Now I have to enter my credit card number.
John:
App Clips is trying to stop that from happening.
John:
If anyone has ever tried to use just that one example, a parking app, you don't know what the hell parking app this place is using.
John:
You don't care what parking app it's using.
John:
You just want to park your car.
John:
So they're trying to streamline that process, which is...
John:
pick your phone up and put it close to a thing or scan a thing or whatever, and just immediately say, we know what app this is supposed to be.
John:
We're not even going to bother downloading the whole app.
John:
We're just going to download this tiny portion of the app that you need to do your parking.
John:
And in Apple's perfect world, we'll integrate with Apple Pay and we'll integrate with sign with Apple.
John:
So you don't need to create an account and you don't need to enter a credit card number.
John:
And it's all secure through things that you trust Apple to do.
John:
And you didn't have to download an entire app.
John:
As one of our friends said in Slack when the segment came on, I'm going to delete a ton of parking applications.
John:
because you don't need to have the parking applicant you don't need like one parking app for every single thing and have to constantly be updating them and god knows what those things are doing just use the app clip it's 10 megabytes maximum size apple of course being apple has its own special qr code that's round because qr codes are for squares and it's got a little picture of a phone in the middle it looks a little bit like it looks a little bit like the maze from westworld which is somewhat disturbing but try not to think about that uh spoilers for westworld um i thought it looked kind of like the touch id thing
John:
yes it's yeah or yeah it's like it's like if your fingers were perfectly round uh but yeah and and uh and you you can get the full version of the app if you want unfortunately they can prompt you to get the full version of the apps i'm afraid that every single app clip all it's going to do is immediately prompt you for the full version of the app but i'm sure apple has some kind of countermeasures there um things that you do in the little app clip can be carried over to the full app so it doesn't just forget that you exist it knows what you did previously with it
John:
And of course, it's not just for parking.
John:
It's for any kind of thing where you don't care enough about the interaction to become a, quote, user of the app.
John:
You just want to do the thing.
John:
I love this feature in principle.
John:
In practice, given that we don't live in an all Apple world, I expect to still encounter lots and lots of things.
John:
that don't know about app clips you know we still encounter 30 pin connectors in hotels right so i'm not optimistic about app clips changing my life anytime soon but i want to live in that world even though it's probably going to be a long time coming
Marco:
I would love for this to be a success the way it was demoed.
Marco:
I hope that sometime in the next three years, I have that kind of interaction they demoed.
Marco:
But I think it will take about that long before it will happen.
Marco:
And I think it will also be far from universal for all those reasons.
Marco:
I had to use one of those parking apps a couple of weeks ago, and
Marco:
it you know and it was really like one of the biggest you know vendors of such parking meter things and the app is a horrendous mess because of course it is and it does it claims to support apple pay but the apple pay just kept failing for no specified reasons why i had to enter a credit card and everything and it was just it was just i had an account i had to sign in all this crap all again all to park at a parking meter that used to take quarters until a few weeks ago so
Marco:
I would go to the bank and get rolls of quarters every few months because it was just easier than dealing with all these crappy apps.
Marco:
But yeah, so in an ideal world, when everyone makes amazing apps that take advantage of all the Apple's latest technologies and they actually try to collect as little information from you as possible and they don't want you to create an account and they don't want to market to you and they actually just want things to go quickly, this will be great.
Marco:
I hope that world someday exists.
Marco:
Today it doesn't.
Casey:
There were a couple of interesting things said one in the state of the union and one, I believe in the keynote in the keynote, they basically said in so many words that a single entity like Yelp could make branded app clips for many, many, many, many different restaurants, which didn't they go through like this big, um, like, uh, what sort of movie for this, this big Exodus, they caused a big Exodus of like, uh,
Casey:
People and developers who just spit out a zillion copies of what are effectively the same app.
Casey:
Like several years ago, I thought they really cracked down on that.
Casey:
And now they're basically saying, hey, have fun, do that again.
Marco:
Well, I think the way they worded it, it sounded like they would let Yelp do it and possibly other partners.
Marco:
But it didn't sound like anybody would be able to vend multi-business clips.
Marco:
It sounded like it was only a thing that some people would get to do, like Yelp.
Casey:
That's not surprising.
Casey:
And the other thing that was said during the State of the Union, it was not mentioned during the keynote, but I thought it was a very clever solution to what could be an annoying problem, is that if I understood it correctly, all clips get what's called ephemeral notifications permissions.
Casey:
So when you use an app clip...
Casey:
you are automatically giving that app clip the ability to send you push notifications for eight hours.
Casey:
And then at the end of those eight hours, it's automatically revoked and it can't send you push notifications anymore, which I thought was really clever because something like a parking app, which I cannot agree with you more.
Casey:
I don't live in a very urban area, so I almost never run into this.
Casey:
But the couple of occasions I've gone to places that do use these things, it is the most frustrating thing in the world to have to download the app and do that whole dance that you described.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But anyways, if you have one of these parking apps and your time is about to expire, you're going to want to get a push notification saying, holy crap, go get your car.
Casey:
And so having these clips have this short-lived notification access I think is really smart.
Casey:
So you don't have like a Catalina slash Vista style, would you like to give this app permission to notify you at some point?
Casey:
It's just given implicitly.
Casey:
I do want to know.
Casey:
And I'm curious to hear, preferably via Twitter, because I don't need a thousand of these same emails.
Casey:
But for those who do use Android phones, have you seen slices or whatever the Android equivalent is?
Casey:
Have you seen that be used frequently?
Casey:
Or was that it was announced a couple of years ago?
Casey:
And did it just flash in the pan and then go away?
Casey:
I'm very curious if those actually took off, because that's basically our future in a nutshell.
Marco:
I was also thinking, too, I hope there's ways that other apps can use these for good use.
Marco:
I was thinking, because one thing App Clips does, not only is it useful in the real world, but it also says you can launch it from Safari, Messages, stuff like that.
Marco:
And so I was curious to see if maybe this could be something like, if I could use it as a share link previewer.
Marco:
So if Overcast could have a clip that could play any share link in a really nice way.
Marco:
But I guess that's...
Marco:
I suppose I'm supposed to use messages apps for that, right?
Marco:
Are those still a thing?
Marco:
I guess those are still a thing.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I'm interested to see beyond the obvious things of parking meters, what else can you do with this feature?
Marco:
Because it is pretty cool.
Marco:
And again, the parking meter industry might be very slow to adopt it.
Marco:
So I'm curious to see what more creative people can do with it.
John:
yeah and it's very general purpose like if you look at how it's done you make an app clip target it's as far as i can tell essentially arbitrary code within the limits of the available apis and space again 10 megabytes maximum size um the notification thing is great like you said casey because the whole point of this experience is not to have to have a million steps and so even just asking if it can do notifications is just one extra step you know that would make it more of a hassle um
John:
But I do worry about giving any kind of application implicit permission permission to give you notifications, even if it's only for eight hours, just because, you know, this it seems like this this potential for abuse in once, you know, again, Yelp, I don't want to pick on Yelp, but a lot of people have some complaints about them.
John:
Once they get in there, for that is eight hours, they're spamming you with things and making money by being able to spam you with notifications that you couldn't stop because I'm sure you can stop them if you turn them off somewhere, but people won't know how to do that.
John:
Anyway, I hope it all works out.
John:
It sounds like a good plan.
John:
It's a feature that the iPhone should have because Android's had it forever.
John:
And, you know, I hope we can live in a world where parking gets closer to the role of quarters, ease of use.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from the chat room, the handful of Android users that are in there are saying that slices is not a thing as far as they're aware.
Casey:
Not to say that it literally isn't a thing, but I mean by that is they don't see slices in the real world very often.
Casey:
Or if they do, it's used in some other context, like you were alluding to, Marco, that they weren't aware that it was a slice in the first place.
Casey:
Uh, moving on emoji search is apparently going to be a thing, at least on iPad, which is very exciting.
Casey:
I didn't see any demo of this.
Casey:
I don't think, I don't know if I just looked away in the half second that they showed it, but I'm excited that it's at least theoretically going to be a thing now because it should be.
John:
Yeah, I've got that info secondhand, too.
John:
Marco, do you remember it firsthand?
John:
Are we in the chat room?
John:
Are we making this up?
John:
Emoji search is there, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I haven't actually seen it yet.
Marco:
It's an iPhone only, not an iPad.
Marco:
Oh, let me see.
Marco:
I have it installed.
Marco:
By the way, this is I guess this is me admitting I've installed beta one on everything except my main computer.
Marco:
Your main computer?
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
So, bear with me here.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, here it is.
Marco:
Search emoji.
Marco:
Yep, it's here.
Marco:
On which device?
Marco:
On iPhone with iOS 14.
Casey:
But you put iOS 14 on your carry phone?
Casey:
Are you...
Marco:
do you hate yourself do you like being miserable vacation brain so here's here's the thing here's the thing yeah i'm at the beach for a while i called it right excuse for everything listen i'm at the beach so true
Marco:
Normally, when the beta one comes out, I am traveling because we're at WBDC and we have this busy week full of all this travel and lots of mobile use and it's critical that your phone works while you're traveling and everything.
Marco:
Right now, I'm just sitting here.
Marco:
I'm doing very little that requires my phone to work perfectly.
Marco:
And I wanted, first of all, Apple's been very aggressive in recent years about the public beta time, and I wanted to make sure that Overcast worked with the beta as soon as possible.
Marco:
The very first thing I did when the beta booted up earlier today was launch Overcast and start playing around and just make sure it all works.
Marco:
Because I know that in, you know, they said, quote, July is when the public betas will happen, including watchOS for the first time ever.
Marco:
So that could mean like two weeks from now.
Marco:
Like this could be really soon.
Marco:
Beta 2 could be the first public beta.
Marco:
so i really want to make sure that i have time on it before that happens so i can know whether there's going to be problems because no matter what people think people should do people will put beta the first public beta they will put that on their carry phones and they will run my app and if it breaks they will complain to me and make bad reviews as opposed to just saying oh it's the beta it's my fault right
Marco:
So I need to know that pretty soon.
Marco:
But yeah, it's mostly because I'm not traveling right now and I'm not going to travel for the foreseeable future because everything.
Marco:
So it made sense for me.
Marco:
Like I want to dive in head first.
Marco:
I want to get going on this.
Marco:
So might as well.
Marco:
So I put the beta on all of my devices that I don't necessarily need to function perfectly, which is everything except my iMac.
Marco:
So I have it on my 16 inch iPad Pro watch and phone.
John:
You mean like the Xcode beta is what you're talking about.
John:
I was getting confused when you're saying you installed an iOS beta on your Macs.
John:
Like, you just mean the Xcode, the SDK and everything, right?
Marco:
And I also, I'm trying to install Big Sur on my 16-inch.
Marco:
It actually hasn't completed yet, and I think it failed.
Marco:
I have to try it again.
John:
Equal accent on both syllables, I'm going to say.
John:
Big Sur?
John:
Big Sur.
John:
Big Sur.
John:
Not Big Sur, not Big Sur.
John:
Big Sur?
Casey:
Oh my God, please stop.
John:
Big Sur.
John:
when he uh someone in the presentation said fast company i thought the same thing he said it like the british would say top gear i said fast company top gear no it's fast company equal equal emphasis on both syllables top gear the way we say it in america anyway so so what is the what is the os supposed to be i think it's big sir i don't i'm not from there but that's how i would say you accented the sec you accented sir more than the big there big sir it's equal
John:
everything every time you said it it's not let me let me give you the two ways ready big sir that's accent on the first one big sir accent on the second one and big sir equal accent it's not drunk what is happening and how did i say it you said big sir big sir top gear
John:
We can't.
John:
We're not saying Big Sur on this program unless someone from California tells us that's how we're supposed to say it.
John:
This is how it sounds.
John:
We're not going to say Big Sur.
John:
We're going to say Big Sur.
John:
Us mispronouncing the name of macOS releases until someone from California tells us how we're supposed to say it is part of the experience of macOS releases.
Casey:
Did you know it's actually called Bondi Beach?
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
So Scribble gets pencil drag to select text.
John:
Wait, wait, wait.
John:
No, you've skipped over emoji search.
John:
We got off on this big tangent.
John:
Emoji search.
John:
I feel like there should be a business tell-all book to explain why it has taken so long to get an emoji search.
John:
this is a major institutional failing of apple as a company it's not a complicated feature everybody needs it how long have we all spent scrolling horizontally through that list trying to find the stupid emoji with the zipper on the mouth and there's a million yellow circles and you can't find it
John:
emoji search why did this take so long like not everyone is like casey who has memorized the entire grid of umpteen emoji knows exactly where it is we're all scrolling forever what happened i'm not it doesn't matter now we've got it now it's like all right fine but but what happened this should be a case study someone from harvard business school look into this
Marco:
You can totally ignore the butterfly keyboard error.
Marco:
Skip all that.
Marco:
We want to know why there was no emoji search.
John:
What happened with emoji search?
John:
It makes no sense.
Casey:
It's such an easy feature.
Casey:
Now, all kidding aside, is it not on iPad?
Casey:
Marco, do you have your iPad nearby?
Casey:
What is the situation on iPad?
John:
I think it's iPhone only according to the chat room, which is always right.
Casey:
Why?
John:
I mean, that'll be part of the case study, presumably.
Casey:
Seriously, Harvard Business School, let's get a report on that.
John:
As far as I can tell, there's a lot of stuff that's in iOS 14 that is not in iPadOS.
John:
And the explanation is like they didn't get around to doing it on iPadOS.
John:
In terms of prioritizing, you can imagine why they would prioritize iOS before it.
John:
And historically, there have been many times where a feature appears on iOS back when it was both on the iPhone and the iPad, only on the phone and on the iPad.
John:
Those priorities make some sense to me.
John:
Again, you know, emoji search should have been on both devices years ago.
John:
But I think there are similar limitations in some other features that are available on iOS 14 that are not yet available on iPadOS.
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm sure they'll catch up eventually.
Marco:
I can verify it is not on the iPad.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
I was just going to say I'm hearing conflicting reports about that, but if you're saying it's not there, then it's not there.
Marco:
I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if it popped in in a future beta, too.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that maybe it didn't make beta one.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
You did the, what is it?
Casey:
Control.
Casey:
How do I say it, John?
Casey:
Oh, God, I'm going to get in trouble.
Casey:
Command control space.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Not control command space.
Marco:
It's control delete.
Marco:
Command control.
Casey:
Anyway, did you try that three finger gesture, Marco, on the iPad?
Casey:
You didn't hit the little globe.
Casey:
You did control.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
I hit the little globe.
Marco:
Oh, face ID.
Marco:
Microphone's blocking it.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I'm going to hit.
Marco:
So let's see.
Marco:
Command space.
Marco:
Command space is regular.
John:
Command control space to bring up the special character thingy.
Marco:
Command control space.
Marco:
Special character thingy.
Marco:
There is no search box here.
Marco:
It is just a little hover over emoji blob.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Thank you for trying.
Casey:
Also in the bucket of real-time follow-up, Jason Snell, who knows a little bit about California, says that it is never Big Sur.
Casey:
It's Big Sur.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Equal emphasis.
John:
Big Sur.
John:
No.
John:
Equal.
John:
Equal emphasis on both.
John:
I would say the same way we say Top Gear, but you don't say it that way.
John:
We all say Top Gear because we watch the British show and that's ruined us for it.
Marco:
See, I'm not sure that I can trust the Californians, because they also all told us, including Jason, back in the Mojave times, that it was Mojave, not Mojave.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But then, like, half the year, everybody was saying Mojave, including some people from California.
Marco:
But they were doing it wrong.
Marco:
It is Mojave.
Marco:
He was right.
Marco:
But it seems like Californians can't even agree on their own pronunciations, because, like, other Californians were saying Mojave.
Marco:
Other Californians were saying Mojave.
John:
They're not California natives.
John:
They're transplants.
LAUGHTER
John:
oh my goodness moving on all right so we've got uh scribble which is what inkwell or whatever or what was the thing in newton that is transcriber from windows mobile oh my goodness from 2002 newton did it first speaking of opera yes it's yet more features of newton finding their way to the ipad which is great like you know it's taken a long enough but it's definitely great handwriting recognition came now you can use your apple pencil to enter text into text fields without tapping the little thing on the keyboard that comes up right
John:
um so that's great and also the the drawing uh turning your shapes into perfect shapes i remember that being demoed on the newton in 1990 mumble uh here it is on uh modern ims devices and it looks pretty good i'll have to try it in the notes app because the the achilles heels of all of all these kind of uh
John:
do handwriting and we'll recognize it and turn it into text and do drawings and we'll recognize it and turn it into shapes is like you want it to be flexible after that right so they did some demos like look i can i can uh swipe select text which is a new feature with the pencil and move it around because i know that it's text and stuff like that but you know they drew like a
John:
a pentagon and they drew in a line and you know that turned into a line with arrow ends what if you want to make that line with arrow and shorter how easy is that to do can i grab it is it a vector that i can shorten it do i erase it with an eraser tool and squish the two ends together like stuff like that tends to fall apart unless uh there's some there's considerable effort put into making it flexible so i hope that all works out um you know as as i imagine it might and isn't just like
Marco:
a sort of write once edit never interface but uh yeah i bet pencil users love this because there's nothing worse than having that software keyboard come up and pecking away at it with your pencil tip uh if you can just write into a text field that'll be awesome yeah i this is a great feature um i don't think i will personally use it because i'm not much of a hand writer but it's just really cool for even people like me for like the twice a year that we might want to use it and then for people who do kind of you know hand write natively and prefer that as as an input mechanism
Marco:
This is great for them because you can just handwrite everywhere and it just kind of works.
Marco:
I too, when you're describing the handwriting improvements and stuff, I was also hoping for a little bit more dynamic movement of what you wrote after you wrote it in the big handwriting views.
Marco:
Maybe that's somewhere they can go in the future.
Marco:
It seemed kind of like their main innovation here was in recognition and in the ability to select and move it as an image almost.
Marco:
but not to reflow the text or make the shape dynamic and stuff like that.
Marco:
So maybe we'll get that down the road.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm really excited to try this out.
Casey:
I agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
I don't see myself using it often, but I do think it's a really cool feature, especially for RSI.
Casey:
It might be nice, too, that you're not sitting there typing.
Casey:
You can be writing, which is super cool.
Casey:
I felt briefly bad for a friend of the show, Steve Trouton-Smith, because his new app, is it Pastel?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Uh, pastel has been Sherlocked, although he seemed actually fairly excited about it, which was good because if he's not sad that I'm not sad because there's a new system wide color picker on iPad and maybe, uh, iPhone, I'm not sure, but it's certainly on iPad.
Casey:
And that's basically what pastel does is try to be a system wide as much as it can, a system wide color picker.
John:
it's not just a new one this never existed before as far as i'm aware so this is a color picker yeah true yeah uh which is you know convenient to have for sharing colors between apps which is exactly what his app does so he was basically sherlocked but you know that happens like if you're going to make any kind of app that extends the system in any way chances are good that apple added sooner rather than later he ran into sooner it's very true he just released passed out like a few weeks ago so it's like oh that's tough but what can you do
Casey:
And then it's in here in the next spot in the notes, so we'll talk about it now.
Casey:
I don't think it was actually brought up until the State of the Union, but possibly my favorite feature from this entire day.
John:
That's why I put it in here, because I think it's a big feature for developers.
Casey:
And I say that with only a modicum of hyperbole.
Casey:
Local store kit testing.
Casey:
Praise be to the gods.
Casey:
My dreams have come true.
Casey:
I cannot believe it is happening.
Casey:
So what does this mean if you're not an iOS developer?
Casey:
So when you're writing iOS apps, in all likelihood, you're going to be doing some sort of subscription or in-app purchase or something like that.
Casey:
And those APIs are...
Casey:
or I find them to be challenging in a lot of ways and testing them particularly is very frustrating and it's always been frustrating.
Casey:
And when I started really doing this professionally in the, the IAP stuff professionally, it had gotten a lot better to test.
Casey:
Like I know Marco, you have probably war stories from now until the end of time to tell about this, but yeah,
Casey:
One way or another, what this allows you to do is, and they only showed it very briefly, but from what I can put together, you can basically approve or deny or change the state of a store kit, like an IAP purchase, when you're testing.
Casey:
So you can pretend like you're just buying this in-app purchase or perhaps a subscription, and then you can act as though you're Apple and say, no, the card was declined or...
Casey:
Yes, it went through or, you know, maybe the store is down entirely or something like that to help test all these scenarios, which is extremely hard to do today.
Casey:
I am genuinely incredibly excited for this.
Casey:
And if I'm incredibly excited for this, I've only been doing this for a couple of years.
Casey:
I cannot fathom how excited you are, Marco.
Marco:
Oh my god, yeah.
Marco:
It's funny, when you implement App Store payments, if you've ever implemented anything else, especially if you've ever used, as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, if you've ever used Stripe, Stripe is awesome for lots of reasons, in particular because when you're implementing their payments, they give you a whole bunch of different test accounts, test credit card numbers you can use and stuff like that, so you can test all sorts of different conditions.
Marco:
They have a whole testing environment.
Marco:
It's very, very nice and easy to use.
Marco:
The App Store payment system is not.
Marco:
And the nicest thing I can say about it is that it has been extremely painful to develop against over time, to test with.
Marco:
It's incredibly clunky and very hard to test certain conditions.
Marco:
A lot of the testing stack was buggy.
Marco:
A lot of the store kits cited on iOS, you'd have to have a whole dedicated device installed.
Marco:
just to be signed into a developer or just to be signed into a sandbox account because if you use your actual phone, it would screw it up so often in ways that like you'd be getting sandbox password pop-ups for the rest of eternity until you did a full restore.
Marco:
Like there were so many problems over time with testing an app purchase.
Marco:
And like, like our friend Brent Simmons wrote a good article a few days ago about like during the app store, brouhaha, basically saying like the originally when apps were either free or paid up front, it was super easy to collect money because from the app, you didn't have to do anything.
Marco:
You could set a flag in iTunes connect to say like, all right, my app costs five bucks.
Marco:
And it would handle it all for you.
Marco:
And as we move to the area of in-app purchase and the whole era of that being the primary way that developers collect money as opposed to a purchase up front, we lost all that simplicity.
Marco:
And implementing in-app purchase is way more complicated and very error-prone.
Marco:
As we moved into subscriptions in recent years, that's even more complicated and even more error-prone.
Marco:
And so the importance of testing has only gone up
Marco:
And so it really is nice to have something like this that is, I haven't had time to play with it yet, but it is most likely going to be a big improvement in testability for developing purchase flow and your in-app purchase handling and everything.
Marco:
And that was just so badly needed.
Marco:
And it will be so helpful to so many developers.
Marco:
So I'm very glad to see this.
Marco:
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John:
I think we have to go through the iPadOS, watchOS, and those other things fairly quickly to get to the big stuff because we're going kind of long here.
Casey:
Well, let's just blow by it.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Let's just blow by all that.
Casey:
I'm not even kidding.
Casey:
Let's just blow by it.
John:
I think we should mention stuff in iPad.
John:
I think we can get through them fast by just hitting these quick bullet points.
John:
You want me to do it?
John:
I can do it fast.
Casey:
Yeah, you go ahead and we'll see how long the two of us can wait before we interrupt you.
Casey:
Go ahead.
John:
you're gonna get to say anything if you want it to go fast you can't yeah here we go uh ipad os uh we just mentioned that there are some things that are in ios 14 that are not in the new ipad os it seems to lag behind a little bit but the the headlining features that were talked about are things that are unique to ipad os that basically try to enhance the interface in ways that make sense on a larger screen so they
John:
touted their new set of sidebars a lot of interfaces that used to be toolbars are graduating to full-fledged sidebars because why wouldn't they ipads are huge there's plenty of room for it it's more convenient um same thing with the uh top bars they're not calling it a menu bar but it has drop down menus on it kind of but it's also kind of a toolbar anyway the very menu like toolbars yeah
John:
features that previously I think we had talked about on some shows like, oh, I didn't even know in the files app you could change the list view because you had to swipe down from the top to get some kind of thing to get it.
John:
Now it's much more obvious as actual visual element on the screen that you can poke with your finger and guess what a drop down menu comes down from it and you can pick it.
John:
These are all worthwhile enhancements to make the interface more, I was going to say more Mac-like, but more flexible, more feature-rich.
John:
They also improved their version of Spotlight with the search thing that has better search results in it.
John:
it gets all the other features that we talked about from ios with that with the compact notifications and stuff scribble we already talked about which is their feature where you can write words into text boxes and things like that um yeah there's probably more ipad os but for the sake of time because we got to get to the big mac stuff uh quickly we'll move on from there uh watch os 7 um
John:
I feel like they'll probably be really good under the radar episode about this, which I would recommend listening to.
John:
So underscore can tell us all about it.
John:
But the short version is Swift UI complications.
John:
Complications used to be very limited in what you could do.
John:
Swift UI gives you a lot more flexibility and you can have more than one complication of each type, which if you're a complication fiend, like underscore is great news for him.
John:
Face sharing, which we had rumored for a while back, is if you make a really cool watch face with just the right set of complications, color-coded and matched and customized to look awesome on a particular face, you can share that with somebody.
John:
And if you share it with them and they don't have those apps installed, it'll prompt them to install it.
John:
i said during the keynote that the modular face which is like that digital time and then these two big places for complications the modular face with custom third-party swift ui driven complications is as close as we've gotten so far to third-party watch faces because third-party developers can control in a much more flexible way a larger portion of that screen the time is still just the time and you don't have much control over that but
John:
modular has big complications and if you can really use the full power of swift ui to fill that space that'll be something it's not you know marco's custom watch face that's like a big circle with weird tick marks around it and everything but it's progress in that direction
John:
Anything else I'm missing from WatchOS?
Marco:
It's making the existing restrictions a little bit nicer, but it does not fundamentally change almost any of the existing restrictions, with that one big exception to certain apps of, as you said, that an app can now vend multiple complications.
Marco:
Of the same type, of the same size classes.
Marco:
Yeah, because there's so many faces that have, as you said, they have that new round complication, that medium-sized circle, the infograph face has four of them or whatever, and so on.
Marco:
And before, an app could only say, all right, my complication for this size is this, and that's all you would get.
Marco:
And so it made it hard for apps like Underscore's Watchsmith, or apps that have really rich complication support like Carrot Weather,
Marco:
where you would maybe want to have like suppose you use carat weather you'd want to use like okay let me put the temperature in this circle and let me put the uv index in this circle and you couldn't do that before because carat weather could only say all right my complication for medium circle type is this and now that is lifted so apps that want to make rich complication or rich complicated experiences like watch myth or carat weather or things like that they can now do a lot more than they could do before so that's really great for them
Marco:
And using SwiftUI for complications is also very nice.
Marco:
It's probably using the exact same feature as the widget support that we talked about earlier, where it's this kind of pre-rendered SwiftUI archive view that it's minimal interaction, which is how complications have always been, and you have to give it this weird timeline of values to display so you're not constantly running.
Marco:
those most of those restrictions were already there and are still there so a lot of that on on watch os is not going to be a big deal where watch os had a lot more substantial advancement is in like customer facing features so that includes things like the new workout types the pretty major feature of sleep tracking the kind of cool feature my stream cut out during the first part of it so i missed some of it but the hand washing detection and guidance seemed pretty cool especially you know given the world today that i thought that was a pretty cool feature
Marco:
Um, I do have some questions about the workout support.
Marco:
So like, you know, so one of the workouts I do a lot is with a trainer and like we, and so Apple has like this, you can say there's like, you know, fitness breaking down into like the, the warmup and cool down, stretching, uh, core exercises, stuff like that.
Marco:
Well,
Marco:
What if you do a workout that has multiple things?
Marco:
What if you do a workout that begins with a warm-up stretch and then you do some core exercises and then you do some jogging or something and then you cool down with some stretches?
Marco:
Do you have to do four workouts to make that be counted properly?
Casey:
Yeah, so when I do some of the exercising that I do at home, a lot of times some of the stuff, like I do it against like an exercise video.
Casey:
And a lot of times one of the workout types is where you do half weightlifting and half HIIT, high-intensity interval training, I think is what it's called.
Casey:
Anyways, that's what I'll do is I will do one exercise and the watch.
Casey:
That's the weightlifting exercise.
Casey:
And then I'll stop that one.
Casey:
And then I'll do another second exercise that is the HIIT exercise.
Casey:
And it's very annoying.
Casey:
I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.
Casey:
But every time I have to handle it that way, I'm just like, man, why can't I just figure it out?
Casey:
Wouldn't that be nice?
Casey:
It can figure out dancing, apparently.
Casey:
It can figure out whether you're dancing with just your arms or your whole body or whatever.
Casey:
Figure this out too, man.
Casey:
Please.
John:
yeah the sleep tracking is uh another thing was or did sleep tracking already exist or has it been rumored so long that as another thing that i just remember is existing but didn't yeah it's it has been supported by third parties for a number of years now um but it was it was never supported by apple yeah so they've got that um and i think the current hardware basically supports it if you wear you said like if you're aware of my watch asleep
John:
When does it ever charge?
John:
You charge it when you're like taking a shower in the morning.
John:
And surprisingly, that is a viable pattern.
John:
There's go to bed reminders.
John:
Parents may think this is going to help their children go to bed.
John:
I really doubt it will.
John:
But for adults who want to brain hack themselves, the phone can try to wind things down for you and get you to go to sleep at a reasonable time.
John:
And hopefully the sleep tracking will let you know whether you're getting garbage sleep or not.
John:
Uh, rewinding for a second for the, the, uh, face sharing thing.
John:
Uh, one thing we missed was that, uh, Apple is going to curate a collection of faces.
John:
I think this is, you know, it's not, you know, third-party watch faces, but it's important because people get paralyzed by choice.
John:
You can have a lot of different watch faces as your starting point, and there's lots of different options for complications, and you may not really...
John:
want to sit there and mess with those things or know what complications are available and so by having this basically app store for faces all it is is a set of configurations and you you know the a bunch of humans will make these at apple that look good or tailored to particular activities like running or you know
John:
sleep tracking or you know weather nuts or whatever i don't know what they're going to have but anyway it's great because if you go there and you see a thing that you like with apple's integration you can say i just want that watch face and you'll get it on your thing and again if you don't have the apps that it needs it will prompt you to install them and so even though this feature seems a little bit silly i think it will actually benefit a lot of people's use of the watch because
John:
people tend to you know it's the tyranny of the defaults they just pick whatever default watch face they find appealing and maybe customize one or two things and i feel like that is probably a suboptimal experience for most people when they could having a they could have more different watch faces i'm not sure how many people know that you can you know switch the watch faces on the fly based on your activity and b have sort of expertly built watch faces by someone who knows how to make a an attractive informative watch face and then you can of course customize from there it's not like they're fixed but i think it's pretty neat
Marco:
Yeah, it's nice.
Marco:
I mean, this is obviously not custom watch faces, which is what many of us still want, and I certainly still want.
Marco:
This is an okay compromise for now to give people a little bit more variety and to make the current faces seem to last a little bit longer.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, we still want more.
Marco:
This does not remove the need for custom watch faces.
Marco:
It simply extends the time beyond which we might start complaining again.
John:
I'm going to skip the App Store privacy stuff for next week, if you guys don't mind, because I think it's not time-pressing, but we will talk about it next week.
John:
A brief section on AirPods, just because there are a few things that are relevant to the stuff we've discussed on the show before.
John:
One is their 3D audio support.
John:
I forget how they branded it, but basically... Spatial audio.
John:
Yeah, we talked about this in the context of binaural audio and the PlayStation 5.
John:
This is similar.
John:
You have two things in your ears, and...
John:
And software magic makes it sound like the sound is coming from different directions.
John:
Apple's version of this seems concentrating on and limited to what you'd imagine the sort of television and movie sound standards like Atmos and DTS and surround sound.
John:
It's not like the PlayStation thing where you want 5,000 sound sources because there's no real context.
John:
It's not gaming-focused is what I'm saying.
John:
It's for, hey, I'm watching a movie or TV show.
John:
I have my AirPods in.
John:
Can I give myself some rough simulation of what it might be like to be in surround sound?
John:
And that's what Apple's trying to do.
John:
They didn't mention anything about a head-related transfer function, so presumably they're using something generic.
John:
Because the AirPod Pros have accelerometers and gyroscopes and stuff in them, they can tell when you turn your head, so they can keep the audio sounding normal.
John:
Like, say you're in a movie theater, if we were in normal time, or in your house with surround sound.
John:
And you've got your speakers all going off because some movie has sound surrounding you.
John:
If you turn your head, the sound doesn't move.
John:
The speakers are in the same place in the theater, right?
John:
That's what surround sound is supposed to be like.
John:
If you hear a noise to your left and you turn to your left and the noise comes again, now you're facing it more and it sounds different.
John:
But if you have headphones in, if they didn't know when you turned your head, it would kill the illusion because you turn your head and now all of a sudden the sound turned with your head and that's not what's supposed to happen.
John:
So that's very clever and if it works well...
John:
This will be super cool.
John:
I can't wait to try this, except I, A, don't have AirPods Pro, and B, I don't like them because they go inside my little ear holes.
John:
So I really hope someday Apple makes a non-invasive, let's say, AirPod with these gyroscope features because I think this sounds neat.
John:
And then finally, automatic switching.
John:
This sounds like a dream as someone who uses AirPods with multiple devices all the time and is constantly going to control center to switch from one device to the other.
John:
Even though the switch is faster with the new version of the AirPods that I have and control center is not that far away, I would just like it to magically know what I mean.
John:
But I don't know how it's going to know.
John:
Like automatic switching, they describe it as, yeah, it's easy.
John:
It'll just switch from device to device.
John:
But how will it know?
John:
Like in practice, my phone and my iPad are both on my nightstand.
John:
How is it going to know?
John:
I guess it's whichever device I'm using.
John:
I have medium hopes for this feature.
John:
I really want it to work by figuring out which device I'm using and automatically connecting to it.
John:
But connecting is still not lightning fast.
John:
And if this thing starts getting it wrong, I'm going to be angry.
John:
But the surprising amount of AirPod news for a non-hardware-focused keynote.
Casey:
A couple of quick notes on that.
Casey:
First of all, I thought it was absolutely incredible that one of the things they said is that by some magic, they will detect when you – like let's say you're sitting in a chair and you're holding your iPad in front of you.
Casey:
If you twist slightly so that the iPad is to your left, by some magic, if I understood them right, they will detect that and change the profile of the sound coming into your AirPod Pros to reflect the fact that the screen is now a little bit left of center, which I thought was phenomenal.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
They even said if you're on a bus, they'll figure out, oh, the bus is turning.
John:
But don't shift the sound because you're in the bus and you're stationary.
John:
Like they're using GPS and other things.
John:
I mean, this is a use case.
Marco:
I don't think.
Marco:
No, I think it was all accelerometer based.
Marco:
The idea there was like it's not GPS or anything.
Marco:
It's saying like, you know, they had to distinguish between you're in a moving vehicle, which generates a certain type of accelerometer input, or you are actually physically moving the device.
Marco:
It's like basically velocity versus acceleration.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
John:
But the phone has a GPS in it.
John:
They're not using the phone's GPS at all to figure that out?
John:
Because I imagine they could.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
The AirPods don't exist in isolation.
John:
You're watching something on a phone or an iPad, but you might have GPS.
John:
Anyway.
Marco:
No, I'm pretty sure it's a combination of the gyroscope and the accelerometer.
Marco:
It lets them do that without GPS.
John:
yeah maybe um but anyway it's uh it's a use case that the playstation does not have to deal with because if you're using a playstation on a bus you are a rarity like it is not the nintendo switch right so uh interesting problem and interesting solution and i really hope they pulled it off because it'll be super cool if they did
Casey:
Another quick note, I genuinely thought that the automatic switching was there since the original AirPods.
Casey:
I am clearly wrong.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that I'm right.
Casey:
But I really thought somehow it got in my brain that that was automatic.
Casey:
And I feel much better now knowing that it never used to be automatic because it never worked for crap.
Casey:
And so now I understand why I made up the fact, John style, apparently I made up that feature and it never ever existed until just today.
Marco:
Well, for me, it has been slightly automatic sometimes between the phone and the watch.
Marco:
That's the only pairing that was kind of automatic.
Marco:
And the reason why might be a hint as to how they're doing this.
Marco:
Basically, you've got to figure how are they going to distinguish between which app it's using.
Marco:
Suppose if you are holding your iPhone and tapping out a message while you're sitting at your Mac and you don't want what you're playing on your Mac to all of a sudden pause and switch to your iPhone.
Marco:
There are ways they can do this with the way audio sessions work.
Marco:
So the way that whenever you as an app start playing audio back for whatever reason, somebody hits play or whatever, you start playing audio.
Marco:
To do that, you first make a call to AV Audio Session to activate your session.
Marco:
And then that, you know, configures the hardware and everything.
Marco:
And that's also the same place you tell the system whether, like, are you spoken word content?
Marco:
Should you play in the background or not?
Marco:
Et cetera.
Marco:
and then you start playing audio.
Marco:
So one thing they could do is merely use whoever last started the most recent audio session, whatever device started that, that's the current active device.
Marco:
So that is almost certainly how it's always worked between the phone and the watch.
Marco:
And so this could just be them extending that same logic to Macs and phones and iPads and everything, to all that automatic switching as well.
Marco:
So whatever... My guess, I haven't tried this yet, but whatever...
John:
device that you play audio from most recently that will be the device it switches to all right let's talk about big sir big sir oh you guys need practice did i did i just do it big sir it's not big sir it's big sir sir big you guys are very bad at this okay well just we can call it we can call it uh mac os bs there we go we can all agree on that
John:
Well, no, I don't think we can agree on that.
John:
All right.
John:
So let's start with before we get into the hardware side of this is just do the software.
John:
Mac OS Big Sur looks has a new look, which happens every couple of years in Mac OS.
John:
If you're new to the modern Mac operating system.
John:
they changed the look to varying degrees usually on a multi-year interval this is the biggest change in the look of mac os probably since they went unlickable and got rid of the pinstripes i feel like that is the only other comparable change maybe the biggest change that they've ever made to the look of uh the modern mac os uh and
John:
I tweeted when this was going on, this is kind of the Max iOS 7 moment.
John:
For people who don't remember, iOS 7 was when the previously very sort of 3D shiny photoreal UI of iOS switched to a very flat, minimalist interface when Johnny Ive took over the software team.
John:
uh and it was very extreme and very different from what came before it and very upsetting to some people and then in the years that followed iowa 7's look was pulled back from those extremes and made more moderate hopefully apple has learned from that but if you look at screenshots of big sur it looks it looks different uh it you're not going to confuse it for a catalina mac i think uh and it leans on
John:
Not just more minimalism, but even more transparency, even more compressing of elements.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Before I try to characterize it, because I'm going to just go look at the screenshots, Marco seemed the most upset about it, so I want to give him time to tell us why he hates the new look.
Marco:
I'm not sure whether I'm going to hate it yet, but it is... I have to live with it.
Marco:
That's another reason why I put it on my laptop, or I'm trying to put it on my laptop if it ever completes, because I do want to spend time with it before I say for sure that I hate it.
Marco:
But certainly on first look, I'm really hesitant.
Marco:
I'm skeptical about it, because...
Marco:
Frankly, I don't like Alan Dye's style as a UI designer.
Marco:
Alan Dye was also the designer of iOS 7.
Marco:
He's been the UI designer since Johnny Ive was put in charge of everything.
Marco:
And Johnny Ive left, Alan Dye didn't.
Marco:
He is still the designer there.
Marco:
And he has a habit of designing things like Johnny to look really good, but often at the expense of functionality.
Marco:
And so for a UI, that can be things like contrast features.
Marco:
legibility discoverability um you know having control look like controls things like that and a lot of times i think his style of design or at least i don't know if he's personally doing all this but like you know the the era of design under him um it really fails in those ways like it is it hides things like one of the things i hate is that in the um catalina version of the music app and this continues into the bs version in the catalina version um
Marco:
Um, they, it used to be that when you're playing a song, it would show you the time elapsed on one side of the now playing bar and it would show you the time remaining on the other side of the now playing bar.
Marco:
And it, and granted, you know, I, I listened to songs from bands where the duration of the song can vary a lot, maybe you could say.
Marco:
And so, so I, I am often looking at the time in a song and,
Marco:
And maybe they assume that everyone listens to pop music where every song is three minutes long and you don't need this anymore.
Marco:
But, you know, that's not true for everyone.
Marco:
And in the iOS version, or in the Catalina version of the music app, those time durations fade out when you're not hovering over it.
Marco:
So most of the time you look at it and it's just this big empty square showing title but no time.
Marco:
And you hover over it and the time appears.
Marco:
And the time is really tiny.
Marco:
These really little tiny times in the corner in the middle of this giant expanse of a window.
Marco:
And so it's hiding functionality.
Marco:
And he even said this in the video today about something about how the controls fade away so that you can focus on your content.
Marco:
And that's one of his critical design principles.
Marco:
And I hate this principle because it's so overused.
Marco:
It is junk drawer theory of design.
Marco:
It is just hide things and that is always better.
Marco:
But no, hiding things isn't always better.
Marco:
And in this case, in the case of my music app nitpick here with the time elapsed and time remaining labels,
Marco:
like you're on a mac you have space it's oh it was always there before for ever since the dawn of mp3 players and no one had a problem with that it's not like what are you gaining by hiding the time playing in the in a music app on a now playing screen that has tons of space you're not gaining anything you're just hiding it for the sake of minimalism for you know for its own sake and assuming that's better and now people who actually use that information or want to see that information it's now harder to get now you have to hover over it to see it and then it just vanishes for no reason
Marco:
And I'm afraid of that aesthetic expanding to the degree that it has expanded in Big Sur.
Marco:
It really does seem like that is now so dominant, so entrenched in their design philosophy and their actions.
Marco:
And macOS has been doing this slowly over time, things like scroll bars disappearing and stuff like that.
Marco:
We've been heading on this path for a little while, but...
Marco:
I worry that we've now gone really far in that direction, where now so much is hidden behind hover states and just hidden for the sake of being hidden.
Marco:
And it's now going to be, I think, even harder to tell.
Marco:
What is a control?
Marco:
What is active?
Marco:
When I saw, they showed a few screenshots and stuff of apps like Mail, where you have a big toolbar across the top with a whole bunch of buttons.
Marco:
and when i saw those it just looked like a visual mess to me like not having any more like structure to the icon bars having a lot of the color removed from them so it's just like here's a list of monochrome icons it made it harder for me to see and and it looked it was hard to even tell like what is a button what is clickable which of these icons are showing me status versus which are actually behaving as buttons and
Marco:
I worry that we've taken a really big step backwards here.
Marco:
But all that said, I do want to actually use it before I really judge it further.
Marco:
But right now, I don't feel good about it upon first glance.
John:
You can see where what the appeal is to a certain kind of designer to this type of interface.
John:
Right.
John:
So using SF symbols, the font, a bunch of vector drawings for a bunch of stuff, having configurable accent colors.
John:
So each app, if you choose to be in multicolor mode, can have its own highlights.
John:
Like if you're on the Mac now, you can choose like what your accent color is for your operating system.
John:
It defaults like bluish.
John:
You can also say multicolor in Big Sur, and that will let individual apps have a different accent color.
John:
So notes could be yellow and mail could be blue and so on, if you want that.
John:
But like the whole idea is you design the app and you specify this is a sidebar.
John:
This is the icon.
John:
This is the text.
John:
This is a toolbar.
John:
Here are the icons and that.
John:
A system like this allows all those things to be flexible.
John:
Accent color is flexible because they're all template images.
John:
They're scalable because they're vector because they all come from a font.
John:
You are sort of just telling me the what and the OS is determining the how.
John:
And that gives you as a designer a lot of flexibility to...
John:
change the way things look and to have the ui be more flexible than for example the hand-drawn pixel perfect you know old days of the old ios where it was very inflexible and almost like a an old game ui where it's just like a bunch of raster graphics and if the whole os changes look you have these other apps that were like
John:
made in the days before the os changes look and they didn't fit in this avoids that that said i agree with all the things that all the criticisms marco had about this ui and in fact many of them are not new many of them are the same exact criticisms we had for the first version of ios 7 not legible controls didn't look like controls uh you know low contrast stuff like that and in fact some of these complaints that i would add are the same ones that i had personally in 2007 for things like leopard leopard introduced a translucent menu bar
John:
I couldn't believe when Craig Federici said they're adding a translucent menu bar.
John:
It's on our Macs right now.
John:
If you're running Catalina, look at your menu bar.
John:
It is somewhat translucent.
John:
In Leopard, when this was first introduced in the betas, it was super translucent.
John:
It was practically like a sheet of glass, a sheet of frosted glass.
John:
They backed off of that.
John:
And when they shipped Leopard, it was less translucent.
John:
And there was like a P-list hack to override it to make it opaque again.
John:
And I had this big rant about it around the Leopard thing.
John:
Basically, the gist of it was that when Apple introduced translucency in Mac OS X, the idea was to use it for transient elements.
John:
So like when a sheet came down, it was translucent to show it was impermanent.
John:
Like you're going to address this dialogue and dismiss it.
John:
The transparency had a message, you know, this is, you know, permanent UI is solid, transient UI is translucent.
John:
That was the sort of thing they were going for.
John:
Then they made the menu bar translucent and the menu bar is, or was at the time, arguably the most permanent fixture on the entire screen.
John:
It could not be hidden unless an app was in full screen mode.
John:
I know that's not true now because you can automatically hide it.
John:
But anyway.
John:
The new menu bar in Big Sur is even more translucent than the one they chickened out of shipping in Leopard.
John:
And to the detriment, I think, of legibility and contrast.
John:
If you look at some of these screenshots...
John:
contrast is bad the legibility is bad it is difficult to tell what's a button the advantage of this design language is all the accessibility features that exist and i think people forget this if they don't realize that thing is there all those accessibility features are easier to implement because you can crank up the contrast and the size in a flexible way that doesn't break the ui because everything is sort of
John:
descriptive and simplified and vector and able to accommodate these things but i think it's still a failing of the design if most people would benefit from going to the accessibility options it's not to say going to accessibility options are bad but the default experience should try to hit the fat part of the bell curve of your customer base and i think this one does not i think it the
John:
It is not going to be obvious to people what buttons are.
John:
This text is going to be harder for people to read.
John:
And practically speaking, I don't care that much about what's behind my windows that I need it coming forward and impairing legibility.
John:
And Apple has struggled with this on the Mac for many, many years to strike the balance between
John:
Like in Yosemite, you know, it looks really cool when the sidebars are translucent.
John:
But of course, you're not actually getting any additional information.
John:
It's entirely an aesthetic choice.
John:
So if that impacts legibility at all at a non-zero percent, it's not a great tradeoff.
John:
Same thing with the menu bar.
John:
I like that my desktop background is back there, but I don't need to see the top centimeter of it through my menu bar if it impairs legibility.
John:
Like in the screenshots that show the if you have a desktop background, I guess it decides whether your menu bar is going to have white text or black text, depending on how much is showing through.
John:
Like that's how much of your desktop background shows through that.
John:
I think it inverts the text just to make it legible.
John:
It's not great.
John:
So I have serious concerns about this.
John:
It could be iOS 7 all over again where they go extreme in the beginning and then they tone it down.
John:
I feel like they should just learn from this.
John:
Like Marco said, hiding things, like the proxy icon for documents, by the way, maybe you don't know about this, but the little icon on the top of document windows that you can drag to do stuff with.
John:
that's hidden by default no one was discovering that thing when it was visible all the time and now you're going to hide it by default you could say okay well if no one was discovering it obviously it's not heavily used so why should it be in people's faces but it's a useful feature you should let people know that it's there more prominently instead of just completely hiding it uh you know the controls fading away when you don't need them how do people know if they are going to need them if they don't even recognize them as controls i'm also not a fan of that philosophy i don't think it fits the mac
John:
That said, aesthetically speaking, rounded corners on all the windows, the general idea of using more translucently, I'm mostly on board with the aesthetics, believe it or not, even the sort of the colors in the sidebar and stuff like that.
John:
I just feel like the usability, like the can I read what's on the screen?
John:
Can I identify things?
John:
Is it clear to me what they're going to do?
John:
you don't you no longer have the benefit of literal decades of use of a mac to understand what does a dialog look like what does a button look like because they've changed all those things so much in fact making them look more and more like ios that i think is going to be quite jarring some things that i think people haven't actually realized if they haven't gone through apple's web pages things like dialog boxes have changed like when you specify a dialog box programmatically for the most part you say i want a dialog here are the buttons here's the text on the buttons here's some main text here's some other text like
John:
You don't lay out those windows like alerts manually.
John:
You just specify that.
John:
So the OS has the flexibility to change them.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Have you two had looked at what alerts look like in Big Sur?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
It's hideous.
John:
I mean, they look like iOS alerts.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And that, to me, is one of the biggest examples of why I think this is kind of an iffy and possibly wrong design philosophy to take.
Marco:
Because one of the reasons why the new dialogues look so jarring and I think are a little bit worse is that they use centered text for everything because iOS uses centered text for its dialogues.
Marco:
Centered text might look good in ideal screenshots where the text is very short.
Marco:
As soon as you have multiple lines of centered text, it looks terrible and it's harder to read.
John:
Or you have a widow.
John:
I mean, it's like I'm reading suck.com all over again.
John:
Like, this is not aesthetically pleasing.
John:
The translucency is off the charts, and now you're going to add the ability to have, like, red text like iOS has on buttons.
John:
It is not an upgrade for these features.
John:
Like, the good thing is, you know, because they can change it once, they can change it back, but...
John:
they like like again the history cannot be you know like you may think most people have more experience with ios but people aren't presented with dialogue boxes constantly in ios that's just not the experience on the mac you see dialogue boxes all the time someone with experience on the mac has an expectation of what a dialogue box looks like what it does and where the controls are and this is breaking all of that for a layout that is also not aesthetically more pleasing so why do this at all it is a downgrade all around as far as the alerts are concerned yeah
Marco:
Well, and I think the why do it at all... Alan Dye answered that question, but I think it was a bad answer.
Marco:
You know, the way that this redesign was explained, for the most part, one word that came up constantly was consistency.
Marco:
And, you know, consistency with iOS is the... You know, whether he said it or not, that's certainly the implication.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
is this design being used because this is a great design for the Mac, or is this design being used because it makes it look more like iOS?
Marco:
I think he very clearly answered the latter is the case, but because it might not be a better design for the Mac, I think that's a crappy reason.
Marco:
And I see, you know, I could see an argument, as you said, secondly, like, you know, yeah, a lot of people use iOS.
Marco:
Yeah, you know what?
Marco:
A lot more people use iOS than macOS.
Marco:
That is true, but...
Marco:
The Mac can be made more usable by taking some iOS-isms, but the UI theme doesn't have to match necessarily, or it certainly doesn't have to match so closely.
Marco:
People are not idiots.
Marco:
They can understand that dialog boxes look different between platforms, and they can understand how to read two different dialog boxes.
Marco:
The level of matching there for the sake of matching is not necessary.
Marco:
If it happens to work out that you have a good design that is a great design on all the platforms, then cool, use it.
Marco:
But in this case, it seems like consistency has taken significantly higher priority than what's actually the best design for the Mac.
John:
or the best design for ios for that matter i don't think his dialogue boxes are good on ios either like that's the thing that burns me like they even changed you remember sheets this is an innovation of the original mac os 10 where when you have a document modal thing where it's a thing windows going to come on the screen and you can't interact anymore with that document window but you can use other documents an example would be a save dialogue
John:
In the old Mac, when you initiated, you know, hit command S to save, it would be app modal, and you couldn't do anything else in that app, or for that matter, on the entire system, until you dismissed that dialogue.
John:
But Mac OS X, you know, because it's a better, more modern multitasking operating system, introduced the idea that if you hit save on a document, a sheet will come out sort of of that document's window title bar, and that document will be like, oh, you can't do anything with this document until you decide to either save or cancel, right?
John:
But other document windows you could continue to interact with.
John:
And the sheet would just sit there attached to that one.
John:
And because it came out of the title bar, it was sort of physically attached to the window.
John:
And you understood, yeah, this window is busy doing a thing.
John:
They've changed how sheets look to make them look more like iOS app modal dialogues where it fades the background and it shows in the center of the window.
John:
I don't think that's an improvement in terms of me understanding that this is blocking the whole window, because there are lots of things that can present like that where they fade the content and show the window, and it's not clear to me it's associated with the document.
John:
But anyway, sheets weren't broken.
John:
They fixed it by making it quote-unquote consistent with iOS, but iOS doesn't have document-based apps.
John:
Yes, it has window modal or app modal dialogues, and that's how they present, but this consistency is not...
John:
And part of the motivation to this, and part of sort of the meta-hidden secret theme of this, if you look at all the different screenshots, is it's pretty clear to me now that touch-based Macs are coming.
John:
Yes.
John:
Because every control in here that has changed in some way is changed to make it not like, oh, everything is a touch control, but closer to being touch control.
John:
So the items in the drop-down menus are pushed a little bit farther apart.
John:
The toolbar items are spread a little bit from each other.
John:
These dialog boxes...
John:
have a configuration where the buttons are way bigger than they used to be.
John:
So big, in fact, that you can imagine poking them with your finger.
John:
It doesn't mean that macOS is going to be a touch-based OS because it's not, right?
John:
But the places where they changed it, like that's the thing about the macOS, like, oh, they'd have to change the whole UI to make it work with your finger.
John:
They don't.
John:
They just need it for your finger to be useful in the OS.
John:
You're never going to use macOS just with your finger because you'll never be able to find the tiny little controls in Final Cut Pro.
John:
Like, it's not going to happen, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You just need the fingers to be good for something.
John:
So the title bars got a little bit thicker.
John:
Look how big the title bars are in the Safari window, right?
John:
Look how big the buttons are.
John:
Why would they spread the menu items in a drop-down menu away from each other to the degree that they did?
John:
It's not like they suddenly introduced Macs with taller screens.
John:
Menus aren't getting any shorter, right?
John:
It's so that it is viable to drag a window with your finger, to dismiss a dialogue with your finger, to tap a menu in the menu bar and then tap a menu item with your finger, right?
John:
If that's not why they did this and touch Macs never come, I will not understand this change at all.
John:
But right now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying a lot of the spacing changes, which in general, the spacing changes on their own, I don't object to.
John:
A lot of them seem like a clear indication that touch base Macs are coming out.
John:
And, you know, I think that is a welcome change.
John:
It's just the aesthetics and the layout choices of a lot of the things they've changed do not seem like the right move.
John:
And somewhat related to that, a little more in an aesthetic front and in the consistency front, they've decided that now a good macOS app should have an icon that looks just like an iOS icon with a little squircle thing.
John:
Mac apps are allowed to have photorealistic things, apparently.
John:
on top of them and they can break the border of the squircle which ios apps can't that's their concession to macness but boy seeing that dock at the bottom with a big line of what for all the world look like ios icons with weird things floating over them was very strange uh in the past apple has had lots of different
John:
uh aesthetic policies let's say about what mac icons are going to look like and mac developers being the cats that they are have not have mostly refused to be herded like there's always whenever i look down at my doc over the umpteen years of using the mac after the mac os 10 transition there's always been a quite a motley collection of icons apple's icons tend to look consistent with each other and that changes over the years
John:
Then there's a bunch of ones that look like they're from two generations of the OS ago.
John:
Ones that look like they were revised in one generation ago.
John:
It's always going to be a Motley collection.
John:
I kind of applaud Apple for leading by example, showing consistent icons.
John:
They did that in the classic macOS era.
John:
In class of macOS, icons were supposed to be a diamond with a hand and a tool.
John:
And a lot of Mac apps followed that.
John:
There was some variation.
John:
Basically, diamond shape with some variations on top of it.
John:
There was a lot of consistency until, in classic Mac OS, people figured out, I can draw whatever the hell I want.
John:
I'm going to make a big alien's face with a tongue sticking out, and that's what they did, right?
John:
I think that will continue to happen.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
We know where this is all going.
John:
People are putting up these snarky slides like, oh, is Mac OS merging with iOS?
John:
I thought you said it wasn't, but it looks like they are.
John:
This is the whole subject for another show that we don't have time to get into now.
John:
But there is an eventual convergence of hardware and software platforms in the Apple world.
John:
We are edging closer towards it.
John:
There will always be specialization, just as there is today, between the iOS and iPadOS.
John:
They are specialized for their devices, and the macOS will continue to be specialized.
John:
But this is the next step in that direction.
John:
I just think, as Marco pointed out before, and as the famous page that I put in one of my old macOS 10 reviews pointed out,
John:
You don't need things to look literally exactly the same to understand what they are.
John:
The example from the Bruce Togazzini book was extensions in classic macro-esque puzzle piece icons.
John:
But there was like five different puzzle pieces.
John:
And no one looked at them and said, is that an extension?
John:
I can't tell because it's usually the puzzle piece with one little prong on one side and a hole on the other side.
John:
But this one is a whole different puzzle.
John:
it looks like a puzzle piece you can tell like it doesn't have to be literally the same puzzle piece for you to understand what it is ditto with buttons and dialogues and windows as long as they look buttony enough as long as you know it doesn't have to be literally exactly the same so to the degree that apple feels like it needs to do that for consistency and learnability i think they are they're over they're over compensating in that direction and i think
John:
I applaud the direction.
John:
I think there should be some kind of unification.
John:
It makes sense, especially in light of the hardware changes we're about to talk about, but I think they are taking it too far.
John:
They're taking it too literally right now, and I hope they back off a little.
Casey:
You know what's funny to me?
Casey:
I intellectually agree with everything you guys have said, that a lot of these choices seem ridiculous.
Casey:
It's emphasizing the wrong things.
Casey:
I think it looks really good, though.
Casey:
The only thing that I really am annoyed by, and I am unreasonably annoyed by this, and I don't know why...
Casey:
But when you pull down a menu in macOS right now, the menu itself is connected to the entry in the menu bar.
Casey:
So, you know, if you look at, say, Chrome and you look at the bookmarks menu, the word bookmarks is connected to the items that are below that word.
Casey:
And now there's a little gap between the menu item in the menu bar and the menu itself.
Casey:
And, oh my gosh, does this annoy me?
Casey:
I don't know why it annoys me so much, but it does.
John:
The menu has rounded corners on the top, and it is also slightly wider than the menu.
John:
These are all just aesthetic choices that are mostly silly or whatever, like the rounded corner things.
John:
I tweeted that I was happy that the screen image itself does not have rounded corners, but classic macOS used to have rounded corners in the upper right and upper left corners.
John:
They would just black out those pixels to make it look a little bit round.
John:
People still keep thinking that the future Macs will actually have rounded screens like the new iPads do, and maybe that's going to happen, but it's neither here nor there.
John:
But, yeah, I see your aesthetic objection to the disconnected venues and the rounded corners.
John:
I think it's fine.
John:
It's not that big of a deal.
John:
The one part that I got a kick out of is, of course, the dock in Big Sur looks a lot like, of course, the iPad OS dock.
John:
And it also happens to look like Switchglass.
John:
I mean, there's a reason Switchglass looks the way it does.
John:
But interestingly, Switchglass is going to fit in perfectly in Big Sur.
John:
And since my corner radiuses are adjustable, you can actually make it fit exactly if you want.
John:
oh look at you everyone buys switch glass it is perfectly made for big unfortunately my icon well my icon does fit in because it is an ios style squircle right with little symbols on it but it's a little bit more photo real and it's not exactly head-on so maybe someday i'll have to change the icon to fit in but maybe i won't you know what i mean i'll just be one of those motley icons that looks like it was made in previous eras because you know i intentionally made my icon look slightly different than the current style because i like the style my icon is it looks really cool and lickable and you know i might just keep it that way
John:
Anyway, you shouldn't really show the dock icon and switch glass anyway.
John:
You should disable it.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Overall, though, I do think that this looks good.
Casey:
From a behavioral standpoint, I think a lot, if not all, of the complaints that the two of you had are completely reasonable and will bear fruit in the sense that we will think that these are problems.
Casey:
But just looking at it with a couple of quibbles here and there, I think it looks good.
Casey:
And I can't tell you why, but I do find it...
Casey:
Just kind of unconsciously, subconsciously appealing, subconsciously appealing, that everything does look similar.
Casey:
I agree with what you said, that the Mac doesn't have to look like the iPad.
Casey:
And if the puzzle pieces all look like puzzle pieces, I'll understand what's going on.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I kind of feel like it is nice to have what appears at a glance anyway to be the approximately same design language across all these disparate devices.
Casey:
So it all just feels like a different version of the same tool.
Casey:
Like one of these screwdrivers is a Phillips, one is a straight, but they're still just screwdrivers.
Casey:
And I do like that having not used Big Sur yet, having not used iOS 14 yet.
Casey:
I do like it, and I think it looks very modern.
Casey:
As with all new UIs, it's made the Mac I'm sitting in front of, the software portion of the Mac I'm sitting in front of, look old and busted almost immediately.
Casey:
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
Casey:
I think that's a good thing.
Casey:
Marco, you haven't talked for a while, so I'd like to give you a chance to make any other final thoughts, but I think we should probably plow forward on the new look and start talking about some of the other features of Big Sur after, Marco, you have a chance.
Marco:
I'm going to have a lot of gripes about the theme.
Marco:
I'm glad John brought up Sheets being gone and being replaced with these weird blob overlays because I think that's a huge regression.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
what what i find concerning here is that the mac has has not had a great few years of software quality uh that we've had a lot of really like paper cut kind of issues with mac os and that's why many of us including us right here last week we're saying boy we just hope the mac os has has a quiet year of just stability improvements and you know like like a bug fix year not any kind of major new features and
Marco:
And instead, Apple did a system-wide redesign that will require all apps to be significantly redesigned.
Marco:
And so what this does is they have basically placed a huge burden of required work to keep up with the system on all Mac developers, including themselves.
Marco:
for anything like any kind of macOS-related software.
Marco:
Now, instead of working on quality, they and everyone else has to first work on this new theme.
Marco:
And then maybe if you have time left, then you can work on quality.
Marco:
And that's just the last thing that Mac developers and Apple, as the biggest Mac developer, that's the last thing they needed right now.
Marco:
The biggest thing they needed right now is like, please give us a year off so we can work on quality.
Marco:
And instead, they're doing a system-wide redesign.
Marco:
And if you look at what happened when iOS had the iOS 7 change, so many apps had to be redesigned from scratch to look at all correct and reasonable and good and competitive on that platform that we kind of had like two or three years of lost productivity in quality and features in iOS apps because so much effort had to be expended to just keep up with the new direction the system was taking and redesign to fit the new theme.
Marco:
And now we're going to have that same thing happen on the Mac where that really was not a thing that we could afford to do.
Marco:
Now, maybe this will all work out in the end.
Marco:
Maybe where we're going with the don't say ARM Macs and everything else and unification with iOS apps running on the Mac, that all could be a great endgame.
Marco:
But this just threw a massive cost and a ton of instability into an ecosystem that doesn't seem like it was ready to bear that cost.
John:
I get where you're coming from, but I think what I really wanted was no big changes to the plumbing.
John:
From the app developers' perspective, you're right.
John:
They're going to burn a lot of time on this, and that's a shame.
John:
But if you're doing a redesign on this on the surface level,
John:
What I care about is, like, does the, you know, DNS responder not crash?
John:
Does the Bluetooth stack work correctly?
John:
Does the USB peripherals not unmount my drives?
John:
Like, those are the things I care about, the plumbing of the OS.
John:
And so if this, like, if all the time they spend on this is mostly on sort of like, you know, obviously all the ARM stuff and Catalyst stuff, it's sort of like surface-level UI stuff, but the teams that work on, like,
John:
the you know like i said the the usb stack they spent the entire release not adding any new features and just making it work that's what i hope but my optimistic scenario is like this was a higher level in the stack big change and what what i was what i meant when we were saying like boy i hope this release is just like uh you know no new features type of thing is that under the covers you don't say you
John:
yeah we rewrote the entire windows server again and we have a new dns responder this time and the bluetooth stack is all new because that's the stuff that's burning me up it's not like uh changing the ui stuff in general ui stuff may be good maybe bad but it's not going to take down your entire system i just need it to work fundamentally at a hardware level so i still have hope that's the case maybe that's also screwed up too who knows they didn't talk about it in this release they certainly didn't say anything about time machine apfs enhancements but you know the week is young
John:
So I get where you're coming from, but I'm still holding out hope.
John:
And also in terms of burning up time with the look, that's part of, if you've been following Apple's APIs and using sourceless and stuff like that, yes, there are new APIs you have to adopt and stuff, but in general, I hope Mac apps will look better.
John:
reasonable ish with minimal changes like that's that's the beauty of their recent changes have been that if you follow them you don't have to redesign your entire app every time like that the big ios 7 transition is because people had pixel perfect hand-drawn raster uis and ios 7 threw that all in the garbage post ios 7 i think you know as the ios 7 evolved and the ui changed
John:
people haven't had to throw out everything.
John:
I think they've learned that lesson.
John:
So like I said, the bones of this thing, using vectors for stuff, being able to change things, like having the accessibility features be able to work well, easily increase contrast, easily increase size, have everything scaled to fit and everything.
John:
The bones are good.
John:
The individual aesthetic choices, I think a lot of them are bad.
John:
So I have some hope that we can recover for this.
John:
And honestly, I'm kind of a little bit with Casey in that like,
John:
As quote unquote bad as this might be for all the reasons I outline, I am excited about there being a new look.
John:
I'm always excited about that being a new look.
John:
It's cool to see the Mac change the way it looks.
John:
It's just we also need it to work well.
John:
So we'll get there.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
In the interest of having the show end before next week, I'd like to speed round the next few items.
Casey:
Messages, Maps, both Catalyst.
Casey:
We talked earlier about Messages supposedly getting either near feature parity or complete feature parity with iOS since it is Catalyst now.
Casey:
That's excellent.
Casey:
I'm very, very excited about that.
Casey:
Maps, nothing about that revved my engine in particular.
Casey:
But hey, the better Maps gets, the happier I am with it.
Casey:
Safari, we talked about the privacy report and password compromise detections.
Casey:
Translation will happen in Safari.
Casey:
Apparently, Safari extensions have been revamped, and you can even import them from Chrome or Firefox extensions.
John:
Is that true?
John:
That's a question mark.
Casey:
No, I heard them say something about – I don't remember the exact verbiage, but basically you can take a Chrome or Firefox extension and use it in Safari is what I thought I heard.
Marco:
heard this is they described it as the web extensions api and that and to quote bring over extensions built for other browsers and i made a note to look up what the heck that web extensions api is because it made it sound like there's some kind of standard api that i just don't know about but it wouldn't surprise me i don't know about any of this stuff yeah and in typical safari fashion you can limit it to individual websites and limit it by time there's all sorts of
John:
controls on it and you know it's the first time you use it it's it's all the the security controls you would expect chrome has similar ones but apple is bringing its twist to it so that's all good news yeah and and the new version of safari has uh fave icons and all the tabs which john gruber will love um and apparently everyone will love is the whole reason he got keyed into that story is because people were saying the number one reason for using chrome instead of safari was because you couldn't have little icons in the tabs it was just text in safari um
John:
presumably for again aesthetic reasons you know omitting the icons but we can't have all those weird colored icons they ruin the vibe of this cool gray at one time brush metal thing and people like the icons add information that lets me know what site it is you know so chrome had icons and safari didn't and safari has finally come around on that so that's all good news and of course safari is super fast
Marco:
Yeah, and to be clear, Safari did have icons in the tabs before, but it was added fairly recently, but it was off by default.
Marco:
Now it's on by default.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, big news.
Casey:
What did Tim say something about we're going deep into the Mac?
Casey:
We are getting...
Casey:
Apple Silicon.
Casey:
Not Silicon.
Casey:
Every time I get that wrong.
Casey:
I was trying not to say R-Max because they never said R-Max.
John:
But we're going to say it because that's what they are.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
We are getting Apple Silicon.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
We're getting Apple Silicon.
Casey:
We're getting R-Max.
Casey:
And apparently we're getting, or at least as far as we can tell, at first we're getting what is basically the same processor as in the iPad Pros.
Casey:
We're getting an A12Z.
John:
That's just the Pentium 4.
Marco:
Yeah, that's just for the dev kit.
Marco:
We'll see what actually ships.
John:
Yeah, so what they announced is they are making a family of SOCs, a family of system-on-a-chips for Macs, and that they didn't come right out and say this, but eventually through the accumulation of everything they said, they are ARM CPUs, surprise, just like they are on their iOS devices because they run the same binaries and the A12Z is the one they're testing with or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
uh and so the family of mac soc is let them letting you know that like they're not just making one of these chips there's going to be a family of them presumably from small to large from their weak lower powered thing to the higher power one they did not commit to say we're going to have chips that scale from our tiniest notebook all the way up to our mac pro they did not say that what they did say was that this would be a two-year long transition their first arm-based mac would ship before the end of this year if everything goes well and that they you know as as we
John:
said in the previous shows trying to consult people with intel max they will continue to make and sell and announce new intel based max because what do you think they're gonna do not sell max for two years that's what they're gonna do so they announced all that hopefully everyone who listens to the show is already prepared for that because that's how these transitions go no big surprises also if you listen to the show
John:
You would have heard our prediction be on the money about the developer transition kit, down to it being called DTK.
John:
It's a Mac Mini, and inside it is the equivalent of a Pentium 4, meaning it's a chip that probably will never ship in an ARM-based Mac.
John:
But it's what they've got handy right now.
John:
So they shoved an A12Z with 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gigabyte SSD and, quote, a complement of Mac I.O.
John:
ports.
John:
I don't know what that means.
Marco:
They later clarified what that means, by the way.
Marco:
It's two USB-C, two USB-A, and HDMI and Ethernet.
Marco:
I think that's it.
Marco:
And so, notably, absent is Thunderbolt, which, again, we talked about kind of why that might be, but that's a topic for another day.
Marco:
But basically, this does not have that.
Marco:
This only has USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI and Ethernet.
John:
And because it's an A12Z, you would imagine that it has similar IO capabilities to the iPad, which has the A12Z in it.
John:
So the iPad does not, to our knowledge, have Thunderbolt capability, and neither does this developer transition kit.
Marco:
Although, interestingly, I noticed that they said, you know, Craig said during the presentation that, you know, this computer that we've been running on is the developer transition kit.
Marco:
Did he actually say it was the DTK?
John:
They said it was ARM.
John:
There's lots of hand-waving about what are these demos running on.
John:
It was just clear that they're running on Apple Silicon.
John:
That was usually what they said.
Marco:
It was running on a 6K XDR, which is not drivable via USB-C.
Marco:
So I'm wondering what that was about.
Marco:
But yeah, I think you're right.
Marco:
I think there was a technicality that this was a Mac running Apple Silicon, but it was not the DTK.
John:
they were very careful i was watching because before they even announced the dtk i'm look i was looking for a mac mini on the desks and watch where all those cords watch where all those cords go from those cinema display those those pro display xdrs they go somewhere but you never see them attached to a computer yep so there's lots of clever staging in this in these uh in this supposed lab which is really obviously like a set or you know carefully arranged uh corner of the lab or even um
John:
So if you want one of these developer transition kits, you give Apple $500.
John:
They give you one of these things plus some exclusive access to private forums and stuff like that.
John:
And then you have to give it back to Apple.
John:
Just like the weird Pentium 4 cheese graters, you get a weird Mac mini case with iPad guts inside it with some weird IO ports, and then you give it back to Apple.
John:
This is only if you're one of the lucky few.
John:
There is a sign-up process.
John:
There are a limited number of these things going out.
John:
If you would like a developer transition kit, you put your name in the hat.
John:
You write a little paragraph of text telling Apple why you think you want this and what your app is that you're going to port to ARM.
John:
And then you wait to hear from them.
John:
And they're shipping this week.
John:
So I guess we'll all find out if we won the lottery.
John:
I say we because I put my hat in the ring.
John:
I have two Mac apps.
John:
And the reason I specified was that I want to talk about the process of porting them to ARM on my podcast.
John:
Marco, you also put your hat in the ring?
Marco:
I did, because I have Quitter, and Quitter really has to make sure it runs on day one.
Marco:
No, I'm just kidding.
Marco:
I put my name in the hat for Forecast, and I also mentioned Overcast, because Forecast, yes, I want to make sure Forecast, which uses this...
Marco:
You know, it uses the lame MP3 encoding library under the hood, and that's very time-critical and performance-critical, and it's this low-level thing that's this third-party library, so I want to make sure that works.
Marco:
And I also want to make sure that Overcast works correctly when it's run via the, like, download from the App Store thing that we'll talk about, I guess, sometime, because that's also, like, a pretty important thing, and that I want to make sure all the low-level audio code works well and is performant and everything else.
Marco:
So, yeah, so both things.
Marco:
But they seem to mostly care about Mac apps specifically, so I mainly made my little blurb about Forecast.
John:
Yeah, I really hope they have a lot of these.
John:
Like, it'll be a shame if they have really, really limited supply and most people don't get them.
John:
I hope they just have enough to go around.
John:
I mean, I understand the limitations, but, you know, anyway, shipping this week, so that's good.
John:
And I hope that if they, like, run out of them, maybe they can make more.
John:
If there's huge demand, they can make more and ship them out in the future, so...
John:
I'm more than willing to pay $500 to get this weird Mac Mini thing.
John:
Even I have to give it back.
John:
I don't know if they're going to have any credit.
John:
I haven't looked into the details.
John:
If you give it back, you get some kind of credit towards something or you just lose that $500 forever where they give you a special deal like they did on the Intel iMacs that you could buy after you return the Pentium 4 dev kits.
John:
um but anyway that's all straight up the middle more stuff straight up the middle uh universal binaries a binaries that have intel code and arm in them this is a you know this is part of apple's two branding it's called universal two why do you have to call it two just call it universal like the old universal binaries were so long ago no one will get it confused it'll be fine well and they're still universal it's like calling something more unique no it's just it's still universal i'm sure maybe it's a slightly different tech we'll see when we start taking apart the os and seeing what what exactly the executable format is um
John:
a lot of this is less relevant than it was before because apple introduced app thinning uh in recent years where when you download from one of their app stores they don't give you the whole universal binary they just give you the one that has the executable code for whatever machine you're on so it saves in size and you don't have to you know download an app that's twice as big which is nice although it really wouldn't be twice as big i don't think anyway
John:
um but that's that's what we expect from these type of transitions and there it is and the final one i will collect my points for being right about being able to run x86 code on your arm mac apple's gonna let you do it and they did a really amazing job you know what because they're really good at this they reuse the name rosetta but called it rosetta 2 for some reason
John:
And they do all the things, right?
John:
So can you run x86 apps unmodified on your ARM Mac?
John:
Yes, you can.
John:
What about plugins?
John:
Yes, you can.
John:
What about app extensions and drivers?
John:
If you use driver kit, you can even run those.
John:
Older drivers are not supported, but they went all the way out to making sure that you can run all the types of x86 things that are reasonable to run.
John:
They do what they call translation, not emulation, but translation, and they do it either at install time or on first launch for app packages that are bundled in the .app thing.
John:
Basically, they will write out to disk the ARM equivalent of the x86 code, so it doesn't have to do that on the fly.
John:
Uh, and you know, again, if they control the app store, they'll do it at install time.
John:
But if they don't, they'll just do it on first launch.
John:
There's also a dynamic translation available for things that are sort of just in time compiled, like, you know, the, the just in time compiler for JavaScript code in a web browser or something like that.
John:
They have all the things like Apple is really good at this.
John:
They've done it many times in the past and whatever team did it last time for the inhale transition, presumably all that expertise, institutional knowledge is still at Apple.
John:
And I have high hopes that this will be just as amazing, uh,
John:
There was lots of concern that, oh, well, you know, ARM CPUs aren't going to be that much faster than Intel, so can they even handle this?
John:
You know, will it be feasible to run x86 software?
John:
Part of the reason that I predicted last show that they would have this feature is because it running slightly slowly is way better than it not running at all.
John:
Lots of apps are not performance sensitive.
John:
You just need them to run.
John:
Apple wasn't satisfied with that in the demo.
John:
They're not like, oh, don't worry, you won't lose your software, your crap will run.
John:
They're like, look, we're going to run an x86 game unmodified.
John:
Which, granted, it wasn't the most demanding game, and they ran it at 1080.
John:
But it was a fairly recent game, it was Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which was from like 2018.
John:
uh and you know running it at low res fine uh but that's that was their demo of like not only can you run x86 software not only will like your your favorite like you know you'll be able to run scrivener before they do the the arm port and it will be fine and you won't even notice it'll be completely transparent to you right but you can run this game which it's not saying you could run any game games are gonna it's gonna be worse right but any literally any real-time 3d game being viable
John:
is a fairly amazing demonstration of either the power of whatever arm mac that they were running on that on or the cleverness of their translation but most likely both so i'm pretty excited about that and the other big theme software wise with integration with this arm stuff is talked last show about this being an opportunity to ditch old stuff to say well transitioning to arm you might not even call them macs and you can deprecate all your old apis you can ditch all the things
John:
It seems like all of their ditching has already happened, and instead they're saying, we're not taking away APIs.
John:
We're not breaking your crap unnecessarily.
John:
OpenGL is still there.
John:
Kernel extensions are still supported in Big Sur, not under Rosetta, but...
John:
But they are supporting basically anything that runs in Catalina, in theory, should continue to run in Big Sur.
John:
Now, will that hold after Big Sur?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But for now, they're trying to ease the transition by saying we're not going to break your crap completely unnecessarily.
John:
We already did all that.
John:
We already deprecated 32-bit.
John:
We already got all this stuff.
John:
OpenGL is still deprecated and will go away someday.
John:
But don't blame it on ARM.
John:
Like, ARM's not taking away your stuff.
John:
You know, again, the only exception are things like kernel extensions where they really can't do anything about that.
John:
But, you know, USB drivers with driver kit, app extensions, your apps, all that stuff will work.
John:
This is before we even get to, like, how hard is it to port your thing.
John:
they are bending over backwards to make sure that you don't buy your first ARM Mac and say, oh, what the hell am I going to run on it?
John:
And so I was very excited to see all that.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm extremely happy to give you your points.
Marco:
I was totally wrong.
Marco:
Like I said last show, I thought there wasn't going to be any emulation, and I thought anything that was currently deprecated, like OpenGL, would just be gone under ARM Macs.
Marco:
And I was wrong on both of those fronts by a lot.
Marco:
And that's a very good thing.
Marco:
I'm very, very glad that they've chosen here.
Marco:
There's a number of things we were worried about.
Marco:
Might they introduce more strict security?
Marco:
Maybe everything has to be App Store only, or it'll be a harder process to compile your own software or anything.
Marco:
Nope, no changes.
Marco:
It seems like there's actually no additional security restrictions in the OS for anything that any normal person would ever do for the ARM Macs compared to other Macs.
Marco:
Here's how Big Sur runs.
Marco:
Big Sur seems to be not any more strict than Catalina in most ways, and it runs the same way whether you're on Intel or Apple Silicon, whatever they're going to call that.
Marco:
And so that's fantastic news.
Marco:
It is worth noting, though, that the Rosetta layer, they were very clear in labeling it transitional in a number of points in both the Keynote and the State of the Union.
Marco:
So I would expect, just like the original Rosetta from PowerPC to Intel, I would expect this is going to last maybe three or four years and then be removed from the OS.
Marco:
So don't get too attached to anything that needs it, but it is nice for the transition.
Marco:
And then the other kind of big elephant in the room...
Marco:
is that Windows compatibility was never mentioned, including in the virtualization layer, because the virtualization layer can only run ARM hosts.
Marco:
It cannot create x86 hosts.
Marco:
Virtualization and Rosetta are separate things, and they are not to be combined.
Marco:
And the ability, of course, to boot into boot camp is probably totally gone as well, because I don't think anything is...
Marco:
is able to use Rosetta quite to that level, like running an entire OS level.
Marco:
So Rosetta is for apps, not OSes.
Marco:
So if your workflow depends on virtualizing or booting into Windows, you're going to have a problem.
Marco:
And I don't know, what is the status of, is there like an ARM port of Windows anymore, or does it matter?
John:
No, there totally is Windows for ARM.
John:
Like, here's the thing.
John:
They didn't mention anything about Windows, right?
John:
But they did, like, the stand-in for Windows was Linux.
John:
So they showed an ARM version of Linux running a virtualization.
John:
The virtualization, by the way, is like the same way you do virtualization on x86.
John:
Where you can take your x86 CPU that's in your Mac and you can run any other x86 operating system sharing the CPU.
John:
Same thing with ARM.
John:
Take another ARM operating system.
John:
They have their hypervisor and all this stuff that lets you take another operating system that runs on ARM and run it on the same thing that's running macOS and they share the resources and work it out.
John:
That's virtualization and that works on ARM.
John:
but that doesn't help you at all with x86 right so they showed that happening in linux they showed parallels running linux and people might be confused say oh well look at that they're running linux it does support x86 that was arm linux and linux is on every platform of course so of course there's an arm port of it which by the way i think i'll probably use that for server development like that looks awesome compared to trying to make sure that like php and everything installed properly with homebrew on mac os which changes and breaks every os release like
John:
that's that's been such a pain in my ass most of the time that i i'm actually very much looking forward to probably hopefully switching to that in the future you could be doing that today like they showed docker same same deal you could be doing that today with with uh you know vmware or whatever um but windows does exist for arm and there is no technical reason why boot camp can't exist to let your arm based mac boot into windows for arm which you may be sad about is like oh who the hell cares about windows for arm none of my games will run they're all x86 yada yada but
John:
I don't know what was preventing Windows from being demoed.
John:
I don't know why Boot Camp wasn't there.
John:
I continue to think that eventually Boot Camp will rise again as a way for you to boot Windows for ARM on your Mac.
John:
This is an interesting time.
John:
We've talked about this before.
John:
I'll take those out of that bit.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, you won't be wrong again.
John:
Feel free.
John:
I think you will be able to boot ARM Windows on these Macs eventually.
John:
Part of this is predicated on the idea of everyone more or less moving away from x86, partly because Intel's been having problems with their process, but also partly because this is just the way things have been going.
John:
It's a slow change, but I feel like we're going in that direction.
John:
We may halt, and the progression towards ARM Everywhere may just stop dead in its track and not get any farther, but over the past several years,
John:
There has been a steady drumbeat in that direction.
John:
Apple going full arm, although it makes sense for tons of other reasons, is another, I'm not going to say another nail in that coffin for Intel, because Intel is still making stuff.
John:
But, you know, it could happen.
John:
Now, there are a lot of concerns about...
John:
what is all my software going to run forget about my mac apps or whatever but i what if i don't want to virtualize arm linux what if i have a bunch of open source software for x86 what if i use some of that open source software for x86 in my apps and i need to like like lame in your library like how do i get that to build and everything apple itself is helping out on a bunch of open source projects by helping those projects figure out how to get their thing to build forearm on mac os like that's always the tricky bit about this like
John:
You know, when the Mac went Intel, it's like, oh, well, they'll have access to all this software because everyone runs Linux on Intel.
John:
And so I'll just be able to take any Linux open source project and build it for the Mac.
John:
It's like, no, it's a different compiler, different tool chain, different operating system.
John:
people had to do work to get insert name of your favorite open source thing to build on intel max they will have to do that same work get it to build on our max like just because linux was running on intel for years and years before the mac transition didn't really make it that much easier except for if there was like you know you know
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, AVX.
John:
They will translate from that to Neon or whatever the ARM, like SIMD engine thing is, right?
John:
Someone just needs to do the work to sort of hook all that stuff up.
John:
And so changing the source code, changing the make files, changing the compiler flags, all that good stuff.
John:
Apple is helping with that by having their engineers spend time on what they probably know from their experience with the App Store are the most frequently integrated open source projects.
John:
They've had a big slide with a bunch of them up that said, like, Blender, Boost, NGINX, FFmpeg, Electron, CMake, OpenCV, Node, Redis.
John:
You can look at the slide.
John:
And then they, I think at one point they highlighted certain ones are the ones that actually helped with.
John:
So this is like the list.
John:
This is like their to-do list.
John:
And then there are some things that actually started helping with, but all of this makes me hopeful that, yeah, there'll be a bumping transition.
John:
But by the time this two years is out,
John:
I will be able to build all the same stuff that I have built on my Mac.
John:
Right now I have built and installed my Mac.
John:
I compiled Perl from source and installed it.
John:
I compiled MySQL from source and installed it.
John:
I compiled Postgres from source and installed it.
John:
This is what I do, compile from source or whatever.
John:
The fact that I can do that is because during the transition, someone made sure that all this stuff built on Intel-based Macs.
John:
I hope someone, and someone maybe Apple, does all the same stuff for the ARM transition.
John:
If not, it's going to be sad because I don't want to run Linux and virtualization to get all my Unix-y stuff.
John:
Speaking of that, as far as I can tell, all the Unix-y stuff is still the same.
John:
macOS is still macOS.
John:
It's got the terminal.
John:
It's got the shell.
John:
It's all the same.
John:
There's no big news in that area.
John:
Thank God.
John:
yeah and i was heartened by this presentation it is a word of all the presenters and the sort of the meta message being that the mac is still the place where you do crap like run docker and install weird ass crap and like like that's what the max job is and by having demos that showed people doing that it made it clear that despite what alan dye may think the mac is still definitely very different from an ipad and an iphone
Casey:
Yeah, it's impressive to me.
Casey:
It seems like such an Apple move, as we discussed quite a bit last episode.
Casey:
It seems like such an Apple move to use this as a time to cut the fat and to just say, well, all that stuff that we've been trying to get rid of, it's dead.
Casey:
It's very dead.
Casey:
It's not just a little dead.
Casey:
It's real dead.
Casey:
And it seems that they did a very Microsoftian thing, which is to say almost everywhere they didn't get rid of anything.
Casey:
They tried their darndest to hold on to stuff, even stuff like OpenGL, right?
Casey:
That they've been saying for years is going away, and they still held on to it.
John:
And it is going away, just not this year.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I was extremely pleased to see the slide about how they're going to contribute to FFmpeg, among other things.
Casey:
I joke a lot about how much I use FFmpeg, and I use it way more than any normal human should.
Casey:
But that, to me, is a very good indicator of
Casey:
That they give a crap and they really don't want this stuff to break.
Casey:
And the only thing that chaps my behind to some degree about all this, other than the fact that I just bought this new laptop, but the only thing that really bums me out is…
Casey:
The Windows on Intel virtualization story seems to be non-existent.
Casey:
And one would assume that VMware or Parallels will stop up and do some sort of true-to-form emulation rather than hypervisor-powered virtualization.
Casey:
And it would presumably be very slow but workable.
Casey:
And I am basing all this on several-year-old information, but when I last was doing not iOS development for a job, when I was doing Windows development for a job, I really preferred using a Mac because macOS at the time, and I would assume that's still true today, but I don't know.
Casey:
macOS was a much better place to get my job done.
Casey:
Even despite the fact that I was doing most of my actual work in Visual Studio in a VM, even despite that, it was just everything around it was so much better on the Mac.
Casey:
And so what I did was I ran VMware Fusion all day, every working day.
Casey:
And that's where I did my work.
Casey:
And when it was Intel on Intel, it was reasonably speedy.
Casey:
I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was speedy enough.
Casey:
And I know that last I had heard, a lot of people in the workplace had to do this sort of thing because a lot of line of business apps or bespoke apps for particular companies – and this is, in my experience, this gets much worse the bigger the company is –
Casey:
A lot of these apps were Windows only and they weren't web apps necessarily.
Casey:
They were honest to goodness native apps where you had to run them on a Windows computer.
Casey:
And again, I am hopefully very out of touch.
Casey:
And hopefully all of these stupid apps and all of these different humongous companies have moved to be web apps now and they don't require like ActiveX and Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer or anything like that.
Casey:
But as of the last time I was in this world, running a VM was critical.
Casey:
It was absolutely critical.
Casey:
And not being able to run a Windows VM that can run all of the software that Intel Windows can run...
Casey:
That's a bit of a showstopper.
Casey:
And meanwhile, I keep hearing all this rumblings from people who do use Windows that it's gotten to be really good as a developer platform.
Casey:
And I can't speak to it one way or another because I haven't used Windows in years.
Casey:
And honestly, I don't have any particular interest in it.
Casey:
But I have understood it to be really, really a lot better now, quite a bit better now.
Casey:
And although I have no intention of going back to work and getting a Windows-based programming job, it still concerns me that not supporting Intel Windows could cut out a whole bunch of otherwise very enthusiastic Mac users.
Casey:
And I don't know, I'm talking out my butt, but it worries me a bit.
John:
No, you're right.
John:
You're right to be worried because as someone who ran actual emulation of x86 Windows on PowerPC, it is essentially too slow to be.
John:
You don't want to do it.
John:
You can do it to get by if you just need to run a particular app to do a thing, but you do not want to live in that all day.
John:
It's not...
John:
really that viable so we if it basically if windows does not also make a transition to arm sometime in the next decade or so the mac will have lost an important capability it will no longer be one machine that you can get to run uh you know mac stuff and windows stuff but it will have gained some other things that we'll get to in a second but before we go to what i think is the final section of this
John:
Uh, very surprising announcement related to our max.
John:
I just want to do a couple of moments of speculation about, so gathering the tea leaves of what they said today, what can we surmise about our max?
John:
Now, a lot of people are upset about them not saying anything about our max other than the first one we'll ship before the end of the year and it'll be to your transition, right?
Uh,
John:
uh the developer i would again tell everyone the developer transition kit ignore that no no arm mac will ever be like that uh that's just the developer transition kit all they said is they're making a family of socs and they love that it has good uh performance and power trade-offs and yada yada like all the stuff that we know but they did not get into any specifics including they did not get anything where they bragged about how fast the armacs are going to be there's a good reason for that
John:
What would they be bragging about?
John:
They're completely unannounced products?
John:
Just trust us that we have an ARM Mac and it's really good, but we can't tell you anything about it, right?
John:
You know, you shouldn't have expected them to come in to say anything more than they said, which was, it'll be a new level of performance.
John:
It's all sorts of vague things.
John:
But trust us here on Accidental Tech Podcast when we tell you that, especially in the laptop line, Apple's current ARM chips are already better in many regards than Intel's chips.
John:
Now, Intel's not standing still either, but...
John:
apple will be making our macs on a smaller process size and they'll be making chips that will probably beat anything that intel has on you know in the laptop class of machines what is apple going to do for the big machines they said a two-year transition they didn't say a two-year transition except for the mac pro which will never transition they didn't say that so presumably two years from now apple's going to have some answer for the mac pro so
John:
I would say, don't be sad that they didn't give you any benchmarks or anything because they didn't announce any hardware and they're not going to do that until it's ready.
John:
And the second thing is, like, Apple is essentially committing to do the thing.
John:
ARM for all Macs.
John:
And that leads me to the next point, which is in one of the slides they put up.
John:
They had a particular thing that caught my eye that said unified memory architecture, which is basically just a description of how every...
John:
apple a whatever system on a chip has worked uh you know it's a system on a chip there's some ram and that ram is used for both there's no dedicated vram like there's not not like on my macro right now i have a couple of video cards in there and those video cards have their own dedicated video memory that's on the cards themselves it's a different kind of memory it's addressed over a different bus it's right there on the card and then my mac has system memory which is separate from that
John:
Apple's iOS devices have always had a unified memory architecture where you just have one pool of RAM that started out really super small.
John:
It's gotten bigger over time.
John:
And that's used for everything.
John:
It's used for video RAM.
John:
It's used for the applications.
John:
It's a unified memory architecture.
John:
When we think about what I just said, that they're going to do a transition of all of their Macs.
John:
And they emphasized many, many times, we know what Macs are used for.
John:
We're making this family of system-on-it chips to be good at all the things that Macs are used for.
John:
They bragged about the fact that Final Cut Pro already works.
John:
They showed it running three streams of 4K video, which is not impressive in terms of what the Mac Pro can do in terms of simultaneous streams of 8K video at high bit depths, right?
John:
So...
John:
Apple is signing itself up for eventually making a Mac that can do what this Mac Pro can do, but runs an ARM CPU.
John:
And I've been sitting here trying to square that circle with a unified memory architecture because if you know how you can outfit this Mac Pro, you can put like two dual GPU cards in there, each of which has umpteen gigabytes of its own dedicated VRAM, right?
John:
And Apple has to ship two years from now a computer that can match that in terms of GPU horsepower with a quote-unquote unified memory architecture?
John:
I'm scratching my head and thinking, how is that going to work?
John:
Now, to assuage some fears in everything except for the super high-end use case, Apple's probably pretty okay.
John:
When they showed that Shadow of Tomb Raider demo on whatever they were running it on, but honestly, I think their current line, the A12Z probably could have done that, right?
John:
A unified architecture where it's a system on a chip, a single pool of memory and like an integrated GPU.
John:
That's how the the upcoming generation of consoles all work.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, the PlayStation five, the Xbox Xbox Series X. Right.
John:
If you look at those chips, they are essentially they have CPU and GPU all in one big package.
John:
Right.
John:
uh and you know a unified pool of ram for all that stuff and they're no slouches right so anything up to you know like if you had a laptop that could play ps5 games at 4k just like the ps5 can you'd be like that's pretty good graphics for a laptop right so right up to basically that limit you're fine but anyone who knows anything about game consoles is okay well game consoles are great but if you want to have real gaming horsepower of course you need a gaming pc and gaming pc is
John:
are always, except for maybe on launch day of a console, more powerful than consoles.
John:
Because in a gaming PC, you can buy a video card that costs more than the entire PlayStation 5, stick it inside your gaming PC, and have way more horsepower.
John:
Add to that the fact that the Mac Pro has like umpteen PCI slots, the whole point of this machine that it has PCI slots.
John:
What do you stick in those PCI slots if none of them can be filled with video cards?
John:
So my biggest hardware question that I'm looking forward to being answered in the next two years is how the hell do you replace PCI?
John:
the mac pro with an arm equivalent machine if you don't have support for discrete gpus does apple make its own discrete gpu do they continue to partner with amd and work that out there's many of these things technically possible but as far as we've ever seen from apple they have never made an arm system on its ship that has any support for external gpus like their entire architecture doesn't lend itself to that so
John:
Two parts to this.
John:
One, don't flip out about integrated GPU.
John:
It'll be great for everything if you're just happy with up to and including PS5 performance.
John:
But two, be on the lookout for some big changes here.
John:
Either they don't replace the Mac Pro or they're going to have some very impressive, very cool custom hardware that tries to match what today's Mac Pro can do with thousands of dollars worth of GPU and VRAM inside there.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a massive question.
Marco:
Because I, too, as soon as I said unified memory director, I'm like, oh, yeah, that is what iOS devices have.
Marco:
And that most likely precludes any other GPUs from being used.
Marco:
No discrete, no external.
Marco:
And, you know, they could add that, but they didn't announce that today.
Marco:
And it doesn't seem like the kind of thing they would do.
Yeah.
Marco:
At the same time, the Mac Pro, and they did say that they were planning on completing the transition in about two years.
Marco:
At the same time, the Mac Pro they announced last year, I think somebody even said as much explicitly that this is not something that they expected to be a one-off.
Marco:
When they unveiled the new Mac Pro last year, they expected this to be for the long haul.
Marco:
So I can't imagine they were expecting that to last, at the time, only three years at most.
Marco:
That is not the impression I got last year at all from talking to people for the Mac Pro.
Marco:
People at Apple.
Marco:
And so I have to imagine that there will be a story about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And really what they said today sounds like it's going to go arm by roughly two years from now.
Marco:
So there's going to be some kind of story where something that takes roughly that form factor and, you know, roughly that capability level is going to exist in the ARM world.
Marco:
And what form that takes, I have no idea.
Marco:
I think of the options you listed, John, I think the most likely that I can come up with is like maybe they have a second generation MPX module that has Apple GPUs on it.
John:
maybe as you said maybe they partner with ati to make some you think that's the most likely i think the most likely is that they have a system on a chip that has a huge number of cores and is super fast and it has wimpy integrated graphics and they just support discrete gpus like that's the they've never again they've never done that before there's no precedent for it but it is technically possible like right now my mac pro's cpu has a gpu inside it doesn't it like those zeons have like integrate intel's integrated graphics in them or am i crazy
Marco:
I think some of them do.
Marco:
I don't think the ones they use do.
John:
All right.
John:
But anyway, as we've seen on laptops, it's okay to have an integrated GPU on your CPU and also have a discrete GPU.
John:
That's a thing Apple does have experience with in the Intel world.
John:
What I'm saying is I don't expect them to make...
John:
maybe i'm wrong with this but i don't expect them to make a custom system on a chip that rips out all of the the internal gpu stuff right because so much is tied into that like just for the mac pro i think i expect them to make a system on a chip that's like the world's beefiest ipad thing with like you know 50 cores or whatever right and maybe some integrated gpu stuff that the computer just ignores and then just have support for plain old external gpus because there's no way around it like you can't if you look at what they do with those gpus
John:
there's a reason you can put four of them inside this computer.
John:
It's not just for the hell of it.
John:
And you can't fit those.
John:
There's no system on a chip that can fit the compute power that you can have in, you know, two of those dual GPU Vega 2 things.
John:
That's just never going to happen.
John:
And it would be pointless in a case this big because what are you filling all that space with?
John:
So...
John:
i am actually pretty excited to see what they're going to come up because remember it's not just competing with the mac pro today it's competing with where the mac pro is going to be in two years so they've got that work cut out for them at the high end like i have no problem what they're going to do in the middle well i mean it's the mac pro where it's going to be in two years very well might be where it is today
John:
No, but not for the GPUs.
John:
I think they are actually going to upgrade the GPUs.
John:
True.
John:
There will be new MPX modules that you can buy that will keep cranking things up.
John:
And they might even make a new afterburner card.
John:
We'll see.
John:
By the way, I looked this up before the show.
John:
I had mentioned that the consoles have a unified memory architecture.
John:
But I'm like, but wait a second.
John:
Doesn't the PS5 have like a slight bifurcation where it uses slow RAM and fast RAM?
John:
And I Googled for it intensely before the show and could not find it.
John:
M2 Mike in the chat reminds me.
John:
It's because it's not the PS5.
John:
It's the Xbox.
John:
For cost-saving reasons, the Xbox Series X has one pool of really fast RAM and one pool of slightly slower RAM.
John:
But that's neither here nor there.
John:
Basically, they don't have dedicated VRAM in this generation.
John:
They may have two different pools of slightly different speed RAM.
John:
But all this is to say that I have no problem believing that...
John:
the arm macs that come out like the arm macbook pros will trounce any of the current intel ones so don't worry about that now we don't know about the upcoming intel ones because they apple announced which is rare for them we will continue you know they could have not said this and i would have told you that it was going to be true anyway but they said we're going to make new intel macs uh and so i can totally see for example a redesigned iMac coming out as an intel mac and
John:
And then that same exact case in design being also the first ARM-based iMac.
John:
That would be super cool and perfectly fine with me.
John:
And same thing with the MacBook Pros.
John:
I think they will continue to evolve right up until someone rips out their guts and puts ARM guts inside them.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think also the GPU issue, keep in mind that Apple's been making processor designs for longer than they've been making GPU designs.
Marco:
maybe taking a little bit of extra time to really get the GPU side of things going might help them.
Marco:
So that's why I think it's probably wise to assume, not just for power efficiency reasons, but also for GPU sophistication reasons, that the first ARM Macs are likely to be the ones that use integrated GPUs, and the last ARM Macs are the ones that basically...
Marco:
The 16-inch, the iMac, at least the iMac Pro, and the Mac Pro, those are probably going to be the last ones that switch over to ARM because they need some kind of solution to high-end GPU stuff, whether it's Apple in-house or discrete GPU support, and maybe they need a bit more time to get that right.
Marco:
So I'm guessing first ARM Macs are the low-power laptops and maybe a low-end iMac that is integrated only.
John:
So getting back to what we were saying before, with Casey being said that the Mac will no longer be the machine where you can run Mac apps natively and run Windows apps natively and have the best of both worlds.
John:
We may be losing that if Windows doesn't follow Mac OS onto ARM.
John:
But even if Windows doesn't follow, we are gaining two things, which is now if you buy a Mac, it will be a computer that you can run x86 Mac apps on with translation, ARM Mac apps on.
John:
arm linux and or whatever right in virtualization and also apparently all ios and ipad apps unmodified this is amazing i don't know if we all saw that coming because if you had said that like think of it this way it's
John:
And we've always known this has been technically possible.
John:
We know that you can run those apps in x86.
John:
That's when you run Xcode in the simulator.
John:
It does that, right?
John:
But they wouldn't do that.
John:
Can you imagine a little iPhone app and a little window on your Mac?
John:
That would be weird.
John:
Apple, they just went and did it.
John:
And not only did they go and do it, but if you are an app developer and you submit an app to the App Store after whatever point, right?
Yeah.
John:
Apple will put that app into the Mac App Store for you unless you opt out.
John:
So say you submit your iPad app and you forget to opt out.
John:
Your iPad app appears in the Mac App Store.
John:
Say you submit an iPhone app and you forget to opt out.
John:
Your iPhone app will appear in the Mac App Store.
John:
The Mac App Store just gained potentially literally millions of applications.
John:
And I have no idea how this is going to shake out, but it is...
John:
probably the biggest most consequential uh announcement uh in the whole arm mac thing and it is i think throwing everyone for a loop because there are lots of good things that can happen there are lots of bad things that can happen but everybody is all in the mix now
Marco:
This is something I never would have seen coming.
Marco:
I thought for sure that Apple's answer to this was Catalyst, and that was it.
Marco:
And this basically opts everyone in by default to an automatic Catalyst-y version of your app existing on the Mac.
Marco:
And this is only on our Macs.
Marco:
This won't apply to Intel Macs, but it's only on our Macs.
Marco:
But still,
John:
yeah that's why they run on modified because they're built for arm like you you upload your binary or whatever to the to the app store for your iphone app and that exact iphone app they just download those bits onto your mac it's it's also an arm cpu and they just run it in a little freaking window with a weird menu bar and a bunch of other it's like what
John:
like for games and stuff it makes perfect sense but like the thing that kills me is like the iPhone apps like I can imagine them doing with iPad apps but I mean I guess you know go halfway go full but like but anyway what this means for Mac quote unquote Mac gaming is that is there an iOS game that you think is cool
John:
Run it on your Mac.
John:
Zoom it to full screen.
John:
Basically, like, you know, games don't have any sort of, you know, you'll say like game like UI.
John:
This is going to be amazing for basically any iOS game that you had enjoyed that you think you might also enjoy on your Mac.
John:
Just run it, whether it's a little like threes in a little window where you're swiping away or a full screen immersive app.
John:
I don't think there's going to be any big renaissance of Mac gaming, but I immediately thought of games as the type of application where you don't care that it looks nothing like the Mac because it's a game.
Marco:
Yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun, I think.
Marco:
And there are certain apps where it's unlikely to come over.
Marco:
So I can imagine things like big TV apps where they have rights issues.
Marco:
Oh, you can't display.
Marco:
We don't have the rights to show this video on a computer screen, but we do on a tablet.
Marco:
I'm sure they're all going to opt out.
Marco:
All those big company apps, they're all going to opt out.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
This is going to be really great for mostly indie apps, and I think you're right, games also.
Marco:
The fact that it's opted in by default and you have to manually opt out is great because most small developers won't have any reason to opt out, so they'll just do it, which is very different from the proposition for developing a Catalyst app was you have to go explicitly do this thing.
Marco:
Now, most of us, if there's any demand for our apps on the Mac at all, we should make Catalyst apps or actual Mac apps.
Marco:
But Catalyst apps will run on Intel Macs, and this automatic ARM port of iOS apps won't.
Marco:
So if you want to address the customer base, obviously...
Marco:
Having an Intel port is pretty important for a while, and Catalyst is the way to do that.
Marco:
But this is a really, really cool alternative and puts a really good stake in the ground for the future when our Macs are commonplace.
Marco:
And then we'll just have this massive software library available for most Macs out there.
John:
Yeah, and so the fear that people have is that this is like the ultimate version of shovelware.
John:
Like, developers didn't even need to do anything, and suddenly their apps are just swarming your computer if you want them to be.
John:
And they're not Mac-like in any way.
John:
Like, they tried to do a bunch of stuff.
John:
They're like, oh, if you change in dark mode, we'll support that because we support it on iOS.
John:
Like, that's cool.
John:
That works, right?
John:
And, oh, what if it has settings?
John:
Well, we'll generate this weird, ugly...
John:
Yeah.
John:
you can hit the share sheet and pull up an app extension from an iOS app.
John:
So there's that cool, I don't know if this is a Mac version too, but it just came to mind, that machine learning thing that lets you erase stuff from pictures.
John:
Who makes that?
John:
Does Pixelmator make that?
John:
Somebody makes a really cool iPad app that lets you intelligently erase stuff from pictures.
John:
And I always thought that was cool, and every time I have occasion to use it, I find myself on my Mac.
John:
Now I could just download the app on my Mac and use that share extension to do that to my photos in Mac Photos.
John:
Just like Rosetta, they did an amazing job of integrating this.
John:
But in the end, it's not a Mac app.
John:
It's not going to look like a Mac app.
John:
This is the thing where there has been zero work done.
John:
The person who made this app doesn't even know you're running it on a Mac.
John:
That brings up a question that I thought would be answered in the State of the Union, but still wasn't, is how the hell do you handle multi-touch?
John:
People might think, oh, well, if you have a trackpad, that solves the problem, doesn't it?
John:
Not really, because actual multi-touch lets you put multiple fingers on the screen in arbitrary locations, but you just have one pointer.
John:
so maybe for pinch to zoom and stuff you put you put the mouse cursor you know you put the mac cursor over the part that you want and then you do a pinch gesture on your thing and you're pinching at that location but what about actual multi-touch where you want to put multiple thing girls in arbitrary locations on an app i os apps and ipad os can support that because they're on touch screens eventually max might be on touch screens and that'll solve this problem but in the meantime what the hell do people do when they want to multi-touch
John:
the simulator in xcode has this weird thing where you hold down the option key with the cursor and it makes these two little ghost fingers and this there's a strange interface in the simulator to try to simulate multi-touch but it's not good i don't honestly don't know what will happen if you you know bring up like say fruit ninja or some other kind of thing that wants you to do like five finger swipe across fruit to cut it into five pieces how do you play that game with a trackpad or a mouse
John:
maybe you can't and maybe it's just like oh well don't use games like that maybe they're just hoping that touch max will come out before this is an issue i don't know what the deal is but it was really weird for them to not say anything about it they didn't demo it they didn't say anything about it so as far as we know on keynote day this is still a mystery
Casey:
Yeah, that's going to be really clunky if they take the same approach as a simulator.
Casey:
And this feels to me like one of those situations where most people at Apple just don't use traditional mice, not even the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
I have no facts to back that up, but it just feels like one of those situations where it's like, oh...
Casey:
Oh, yeah, people use mice, huh?
Casey:
Like actual mice that they drag across their tabletop and their desktop.
Casey:
Huh, I forgot about those.
Casey:
You know, it just seems like an afterthought.
Casey:
Now, who knows?
Casey:
Maybe it'll be something that they have thought about, I would hope.
Casey:
And maybe it'll be better than it is on the simulator, I would hope.
Casey:
But gosh, you're exactly right on the simulator.
Casey:
It's garbage.
John:
And like I said, if they use trackpads, that doesn't help.
John:
Like, trackpad is not a solution to multi-touch because you're not picking where in the UI to touch your fingers.
John:
but that's just not how it works you have one cursor on the screen that's in one location and yes then you can touch the trackpad with your multiple fingers and kind of sort of map them but like it's not that's not a solution right that is a one step better than just having a mouse maybe although honestly with the magic mouse with the swipey stuff on it it's not that big anyway this is a problem that they need to solve again obvious solution is touch base max which i think are coming but in the meantime what's the deal how is this going to work i guess we'll
John:
all just download and install the betas and find out for ourselves.
John:
But boy, this was a weird one.
John:
It has a lot of really important implications for the business of making apps for the Mac.
John:
That thing I alluded to earlier about the unification of the APIs and what's going to happen with AppKit and Catalyst and SwiftUI.
John:
We don't have time to get into that in this very long show already, but stay tuned for future episodes for more discussion of those topics.
Marco:
Yeah, we have so much more to say about all this stuff.
Casey:
We also have all of WWDC yet to go.
Casey:
I mean, this is a typical Monday where we got the keynote in the State of the Union, but I think all of the videos are dropping in one batch each morning.
Casey:
I could be wrong about that.
Casey:
It's okay if I'm wrong.
Casey:
But one way or another, there's going to be a bunch of new videos every single day for the next week or more.
Casey:
So yes, this is going to be a very busy summer for ATP in terms of talking about all this stuff.
Casey:
And it's probably going to be a very busy summer for all three of us for different reasons, working on leveraging all these new technologies.
Casey:
Before we go, I do think it is worth summing up very quickly kind of our thoughts.
Casey:
And I'd also be curious to hear each of your favorite thoughts.
Casey:
thing, feature, platform, whatever that you saw today.
Casey:
For me, I am extremely impressed.
Casey:
I'm very sad that I wasn't there in person.
Casey:
This seems like it would have been raucous if we were there.
Casey:
And that bums me out, not only for me, but especially for the Apple engineers that have worked so hard on this stuff.
Casey:
I feel like this one would have been incredible to see in person.
Casey:
And so I'm really sad about that.
Casey:
But overall, this is a very impressive showing.
Casey:
There's a lot here, so much here for us still to unpack.
Casey:
If I had to pick a favorite thing, there's so much.
Casey:
Actually, I'm really, really excited.
Casey:
As stupid as it may sound, I'm really excited about those messages improvements.
Casey:
I think that's going to be super awesome, and I'm really looking forward to trying that.
Casey:
We'll see how well it works in reality.
Casey:
I'm excited for messages to be on the Mac as a catalyst app and hopefully have the feature parody that they've basically hinted toward, if not said.
Casey:
Uh, but overall this, this was a really, really great day for Apple fans.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to the videos that are coming over the next week.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
I think this was the best crop of WWC announcements in a long time.
John:
And I say that having come off last year, which was the Mac Pro, which I really loved.
John:
There was so much good stuff in this presentation.
John:
I'm the most excited about our Macs just because I'm really excited about our CPUs and hardware and I'm excited about CPU transitions.
John:
Like, yes, I say this as someone who just bought a really expensive Intel Mac.
John:
I'm excited about our Macs.
John:
But honestly, everything on iOS 13 I saw, I'm like, that's good, that's good, that's good.
John:
This is all good stuff.
John:
The Big Sur stuff is slightly upsetting, but this is not my first rodeo.
John:
I'm hoping they can get it all sorted out.
John:
I've seen all this before.
John:
We all fretted over the leather stitching.
John:
We fretted over Yosemite's flattening.
John:
We fretted over the translucent menu bar when it was in Leopard.
John:
I think that'll get worked out.
John:
But...
John:
overall tons of exciting announcements i share your sadness that we didn't get to see this in person because this would have been i mean can you imagine the buzz among all of us like discussing these things in a big stew of people like there's just so much to be excited and or upset about so i think this was an amazing an amazing crop of wwc announcements one of the biggest ever uh and i thought the presentation was pretty good too so fingers crossed for the future
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
It's hard for me to pick.
Marco:
I'm happy to see that there is some progress happening on the Mac in some pretty big ways.
Marco:
Even though, as John said, some of that is cause for a little bit of worrying or some of the UI changes, as we mentioned, I think I probably don't like as much.
Marco:
But we will get through that.
Marco:
I am excited as an iOS developer.
Marco:
I'm very excited about
Marco:
that the APIs and the UI designs and everything, what is considered, quote, standard UI for iOS, is advancing pretty quickly and is advancing in a direction that makes it really toward the Mac and iPad unification.
Marco:
And while unification I think is kind of crappy for Mac users, for iOS developers, it's wonderful because we get to, you know, take our apps that we mostly write for iOS and just kind of make them happen on the other platforms fairly easily.
Marco:
So to see that kind of continue to march forward and to take significant strides is really good from the perspective of me as an iOS developer, not necessarily as a Mac user.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And I'm also really excited about something that we didn't even have time to talk about today, which is the new app privacy opt-in stuff and tracking opt-in and privacy disclosure stuff.
Marco:
I'm actually looking forward to that because developers like me who don't do creepy stuff with your data, I think that will benefit us.
Marco:
And I certainly, as a user, that's another way, as I said earlier, to shine a light on bad practices to kind of help tamp them down and inform people what's going on.
Marco:
That's a huge way to do that that hopefully will work really well, and we'll see how that actually works out in practice, especially in terms of enforcement.
Marco:
But I'm excited about a whole bunch of small stuff like that.
Marco:
And of course, I'm always a hardware nut, so I'm super excited about speculation about our Macs and what they might bring finally.
Marco:
But yeah, otherwise...
Marco:
As a developer, there's a lot here for me, which is good.
Marco:
That's what this is for.
Marco:
I'm very much looking forward to the developer side of it.
Marco:
The user side of it, I think, will end up being okay, but I do have the hesitations about the Mac theming stuff.
Marco:
Otherwise, that's it for me.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, ExpressVPN, Basecamp, and Mac Weldon.
Marco:
We will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
You know, I am excited about the arm transition, but I feel like it's all so nebulous right now that it doesn't even feel real.
Casey:
And I think as we start seeing hardware and we start seeing the DTKs end up in people's hands, I think I'll get more and more excited about it.
Casey:
And I also forgot to mention a moment ago that store kit debugging.
Casey:
I'm excited for that.
Yeah.
John:
the big thing about the arm stuff is we know that there are new macs they're going to be unlike anything we've seen before coming like it's one time we actually know like and we know in what way they're going to be different they're going to have a whole different cpu it's going to be system on its ships and it's just going to be like you know and again they're going to be better they're going to be faster they're going to have better battery life like apple wouldn't be doing it if they weren't better and of course they're newer just newer hardware is always better so that's that's what's exciting
John:
And they gave timelines, two year period, first Mac within this year.
John:
So, you know, things are looking super interesting for the future.
Casey:
To that end, do you read the statement that it'll be a two year transition to mean there will not be any Intel Mac sold in two years or any new Intel Mac sold in two years?
Casey:
Because that's the only interpretation that I can come up with.
Casey:
But did I misread that?
John:
Not sold.
John:
I think that at the end of two years, their entire product line will be available with ARM CPUs in it.
John:
Whether they continue to sell Intel ones, of course they will, because, you know, refurbs and maybe they'll keep a model around and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it's like, we finished the transition, so pick a product line.
John:
Small laptop, medium laptop, big laptop, iMac, desktop, mini.
John:
There'll be ARM versions of all of those.
John:
That's...
John:
that's what i presume the definition and obviously any company making announcements two years in advance like you know that's what their plan is we'll see how it works out you have to give them a little bit of leeway it's very difficult to plan something that's complicated two years in advance because lots of stuff can change totally unrelated to arm cpus that can you know change things but yeah i'm not gonna hold them down to the day right but giving two years is like this isn't gonna happen in six months and it's not even gonna happen in a year so
John:
And this should make people feel better about, like, their Intel Macs they just bought, Casey.
John:
Because, you know, like, even if, like, it'll be supported for a long time.
John:
Like, the real question is, when do they stop shipping a version of macOS that has Intel code in it?
John:
And that's going to be even longer than two years.
John:
So I think everyone will be fine.
John:
I wanted to ask Marco, because a lot of people are going to ask this, and After Show is a good place for you to chime in briefly.
John:
What does this do to your odds of creating a Catalyst version of Overcast?
Marco:
It certainly increases them.
Marco:
One thing that caught my eye in particular is the native split view support for three column mode.
Marco:
Because split view until now has been two column only.
Marco:
And so basically I've had to write my own split view for a number of occasions for a number of times.
Marco:
There's the significant challenge for UI unification and everything of old OS support.
Marco:
Right now, I still support iOS 12.
Marco:
This is the first year I've ever held on to the previous iOS version compatibility for any meaningful amount of time because I went 13 only very briefly last fall and it got me in a lot of trouble, basically.
Marco:
I angered a lot of people and I grossly underestimated how many...
Marco:
new installations I would lose by requiring only the latest OS, because there were still a lot of people on devices that couldn't run iOS 13, and iOS 13 was so buggy that a lot of people didn't adopt it very quickly, and I can't blame them.
Marco:
I actually recommended it.
Marco:
So the real question for me is, can I require 13 anytime soon, even?
Marco:
And then if I require 13, can I require 14?
Marco:
Because 13 and 14 have the same device compatibility, I think.
Marco:
So
Marco:
If I can require 14 sometime by midwinter, sometime during an early part of the year, or if I decide F it and I just require it anyway, then I will be much more inclined to do a big UI redesign this year that will make Catalyst not suck, that will use all this new stuff.
Marco:
I have other considerations too, like do I keep my custom font?
Marco:
Right now, every time I turn off my custom font on iOS, it looks like this isn't overcast anymore.
Marco:
I hear the same thing from a lot of friends and users.
Marco:
I love the custom font, but it's hard to...
Marco:
design and develop an app using your own custom font now that would look good with all this new UI paradigm.
Marco:
Certainly, I wouldn't want to use the custom font on the Mac.
Marco:
That would look weird, I think.
Marco:
I don't use the custom font on the watch.
Marco:
That looks weird.
Marco:
But do I use it on the iPad and the phone?
Marco:
There's issues that I have to work out
Marco:
And so ideally, if I was starting from scratch today, making a whole scratch app or at least a whole scratch UI redesign, I would probably not have a custom font at all.
Marco:
I'd use system font for everything.
Marco:
I would try to make it as system default as possible.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons why I would want to do that.
Marco:
But critical of which in this case is you would get so much of this cross-platform UI with very little effort.
Marco:
And right now, I don't have the situation.
Marco:
Right now, I have an extremely, surprisingly complicated, surprisingly custom UI that is specifically designed to work decently well on the phone, to kind of work on the iPad, and not at all to work on the Mac.
Marco:
And for lots of reasons, there is a lot of heft and cruft in that API, or in the UI that I have now.
Marco:
And so I've been meaning for a while to basically throw it away and start over and make something totally modern that would go from one to three columns and look good on the Mac and iPad and phone and everything.
Marco:
But that's going to be a lot of work.
Marco:
That will require a newer OS than I currently require, at least one.
Marco:
And ideally, I'd be using SwiftUI, maybe.
Marco:
So I have to learn that.
Marco:
And that's in flux still.
Marco:
So there's a whole bunch of stuff where a few years from now, I almost certainly want to be there.
Marco:
But the path to get from here to there might be very messy.
Marco:
And I am very hesitant to start down that path.
John:
I was mostly asking the idea that you would be demotivated from the work that you just described by the fact that you could just run the iPhone version or the iPad version right on your Mac without any changes.
Marco:
If that was not ARM only, if that also applied to Big Sur running on Intel, that would be a very tempting procrastination win to just be like, you know what, I'm just going to not ever do this because the reality is that's not going to result in a lot of great Mac apps, but Overcast doesn't need to be a great Mac app.
Marco:
Because it's complicating everything I just said, is that as much as I care about making Overcast this wonderful cross-platform, first-class Apple platform citizen, the reality is that it's mostly an iPhone app.
Marco:
Almost no one uses it on their iPads.
Marco:
No one uses the website.
Marco:
Effectively, no one.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It basically is an iPhone app, and I'm putting a lot more effort into other platform support than it probably actually warrants.
Marco:
That's not to say I'm not going to do it, because I want it.
Marco:
But ultimately, Overcast should be designed primarily and by far for the iPhone.
Marco:
And supporting any other platform is actually pretty strategically unimportant.
John:
Yeah, you get that modernization that you just described.
John:
Eventually, you'll have just a flexible UI that works on any screen size.
John:
It works on iOS, iPad, OS, and the Mac.
John:
And you can do that once and do it well, and you'll cover most of the bases.
John:
Because in the end, Overcast is mostly a self-contained thing.
John:
It doesn't need extensive menu bar structure and customizable toolbars and context menus like Overcast.
John:
the interface what the interface does is well represented by the actual interface and in the end people just want to listen to their podcasts and keep track of where they were across all the platforms and so in the meantime while you're working on this big change if people just run it on their arm mac the iphone version of their mac that's solving the problem for them which is i want to keep listening to that podcast i was listening to before and my podcasts are in overcast so that'll work out fine so i'm i'm looking forward to that i use the web ui occasionally for that but being able to just launch the iphone app and have it sync and everything is
John:
way better than manually finding the episode and doing all that business with the web UI.
John:
Oh, I think we have to add this.
John:
Hello, people who managed to make it this far into the podcast.
John:
Congratulations, the few, the proud who have made it to the end.
John:
Maybe you listened to this whole podcast that I should send a tweet and or email to the ATP guys to tell them they didn't realize that they changed the version number.
John:
Well, yes, we did.
John:
In fact, I saw it in the app screen when they first brought it up.
John:
This is Big Sur is not 10.16.
John:
It is 11.0.
John:
People haven't been keeping track of the naming.
John:
The Roman numeral 10 capital letter X left the Mac operating system a while ago, but they kept calling it 10.whatever.
John:
we made it up to 10.15 but there will be no 10.16 we're going to 11 and they can do that because it's just a version number uh it's no longer represented in the branded name of the thing so you don't have to change it to xi 11 roman or anything like that so that's cool but i bet it's going to break a bunch of people's version number checks in their code because that happens every time this happens so
John:
When you're porting to ARM and porting to Big Sur, don't forget, if you weren't already using all the correct macros for your version number check instead of doing something naughty, guess what?
John:
The number after the decimal point is not going to be greater than 15.
John:
In fact, it's going to be zero.
Look at the other number.
It's 11 now.
John:
also to save us from a lot of potential follow-up that people have probably already written uh and you already emailed before they got here then they're gonna email us a second time saying oh i'm sorry i didn't listen to the end now we have two emails thanks i know well that's that's i i enjoy when someone sends me a message and i know that they listen like 30 more seconds uh in this case if they listen three more if they listen three more hours they'll they'll learn that in fact we did all notice that change and i think that's cool honestly like
John:
when the number after the decimal point starts getting too big it gets unwieldy this is a perfect point to change to 11 some of the chats suggested that maybe 11.0 is just for the arm version no it's going to be for all of them i i say that based on no information but i am super confident and it is it is kind of like they maybe they should have considered making it 14 to match ios but you know that's no
John:
ios has the ios already has in the midst of its own numbering problem which is when you start to get into those high numbers it gets weird it's they mac always gets to go to 11.0 and then they got dot one and dot two they got this long runaway of smooth easy version numbers until they get up to 11.15 and then they have to change their mind again
Marco:
anyway so also to save us as i was saying from even more email we are very much aware that there's large things that we didn't cover yet such as like literally like right before we recorded people discovered there's this new or apple posted this new announcement about how later this summer they're going to have a thing where you can challenge app store rules during your review or something we saw that blow by we were like already recording so we'll look into that and once there's something to cover on the show we'll cover that at some point
Marco:
so there's a lot there's gonna be lots of stuff like that there's so much to say we're already three hours and there's gonna be so much more to say so we will we will get to it in later episodes don't worry about that wait i gotta save myself again because apparently the chat room is telling me the 11.0 is just a marketing number and the real version is 10.16 under the covers no wait what that was i assume that was a joke
John:
I really, I don't know.
John:
Well, we just saw the keynote, so we don't know.
John:
I don't have Big Sur installed, so I can't check.
John:
But I believe the About screen was showing me the real version of it, and I thought it was 11.0.
John:
Please don't email us.
John:
By the time you listen to this show, we will have found out by actually installing the beta OS, and we will have a follow-up next week.