Draw Your Own Slice of Pizza
I am back.
Where were you?
I was using HomePod minis.
Okay.
And I am back.
On big boys?
As long as they last.
Oh my gosh.
With big HomePods.
Just like the cheese graters.
Oh, my goodness.
How did this happen?
So last time I went to Westchester, there they were, two perfectly good full-size HomePods being used in a kitchen by nobody.
That poor house has just been gutted.
And so, you know, I'm like, you know, these are just sitting here rotting away with whatever electrical flaw is what eventually kills them, that capacitor or whatever that everybody says is bad or wrong or whatever.
No one's using them.
And I'm sure they're going to get replaced at some point in the next decade by Apple.
But until that happens, let me take them back.
So I brought them.
I have been using them.
And they are exactly as glorious and annoying as they always were.
And I'm so happy I made the switch.
Because while they are playing music, which you can eventually make them do most of the time.
Eventually.
They do sound incredible.
Can you tell me something?
And I need you to really and truly be honest.
Are they white or are they black?
They're white.
They happen to be white.
So here's the thing.
I'm so glad you answered that question.
I feel like Jack Ryan in Hunt for October about a crazy Ivan.
We should do that as a movie thing, by the way.
Anyway, I feel like your white HomePods are my white BMW.
Hear me out.
When my white BMW was working...
It was amazing.
It was only working for about a week every month, but for that one week, oh, it was good.
It was real good for that one week.
Your white HomePods, which by the way, just happened to you, those when they're working, I guess they're real good, aren't they?
And by the way, I chose the white because I know this is unpopular for a nerd like me to say that the black option is not the best option on something, but white HomePods look better than black HomePods.
They're not really white.
They're gray.
I mean, come on.
they're pretty close to i mean you know it's the outside is made of something that's kind of resembles cloth so you can't get it like super super white they're not white they're not even starlight they're light gray well and the black is definitely a dark gray yeah the black is very very dark gray but yeah anyway so the white looks better and so i chose them and i stand by that i'm i'm unashamed in in choosing the white home pods
My phone is temporarily white again, but I'll tell you what, some quick follow-up on last week's case discussion.
I briefly said last week I had tried the Peak Design, the Pitaka, and the Pitaka, I liked the way it felt, but I hated the way it looked.
The Peak Design was a little bit bulky, and I didn't like how little relative tackiness that the back kind of cloth-like surface had.
Well, I have been using the Peak Design case all week because I just like it.
It makes relatively little sense.
I can't really justify it over the other cases in any kind of subjective or objective, I guess.
Objective means it is more expensive than most of them.
It is thicker and it's less grippy.
However, it feels the nicest and it looks the nicest.
therefore i've been sticking with it and i kind of like it i kind of like the weird little square on the back it's kind of like a reverse pop socket instead like instead of having something that sticks out it's something it's like a hole that you can like put your finger on the inside of the hole to lift it out of your out of your pocket or whatever like it's it's nice i even i i just now uh or just yesterday i just ordered a couple other like mounts that go on the back just see what i could do with that oh here we go you're gonna put on your motorcycle
Yeah.
Yeah.
For, well, first I have to buy a motorcycle just for this case.
You know, I like the case so much.
I bought a motorcycle and then I bought the mount and the motorcycle happens to be white.
And I bought the mount that, that loops around that way.
And I'm going to start becoming a, um, what are those like people who like make GoPro like action videos on their vehicles?
Like what, what are those are, do we have a name for those like cloggers or something?
Oh, my gosh.
Yes, let's go with cloggers.
That's perfect.
So I'm going to become a clogger.
And it's all thanks to this case.
I tried that, Marco.
Not as easy as you think.
Yeah, there you go.
So anyway, turns out that's the case I'm going with for a while.
update on my creaky clear case i've got a this is the first clear case i've used for any pre-sold amount of time i've got quite a collection of crumbs and dust collecting visible all around if you look if you just circle all around like the top uh edge of the thing it is so gross i cannot wait to get this thing off one of my cases shipped i got a shipping notification i think
possibly it'll be here by next week's show.
But I'll keep you updated.
I cannot wait to get this thing off my phone.
You know, an alternative is to just not care about having a covered bottom.
And then there's zillions of cases you can try.
There's options too.
I mean, I picked two of them because they were expensive.
There's more than two options I could have picked.
I figure I'll like one of these two, but I'll let you know.
You can try the peak design.
It comes in grayish black and a weirdly light green color.
And that's it.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, if I needed a secure mount or something, I would probably pick that.
But the little square that you mentioned, like, oh, I can use it to pull my phone out of my pocket or whatever, I just don't want that to be there.
I feel like my fingers would find it and it would just be annoying.
You're right.
That is a thing.
And the little square, the very first day I used this case, I thought it felt a little sharp.
Now it doesn't feel sharp for me anymore.
Maybe it just sanded down my fingers.
I don't know.
Yeah.
What I like about the Peak Design, in addition to the fact that it looks nicest and feels nicest, the buttons also feel nicest.
The mute switch toggles a little deep, like the hole, the little recession to get to the mute switch is a little bit deep.
But the side buttons, you know, all the buttons are covered.
The side buttons feel great in this case, better than most cases.
And overall...
This case is the only iPhone case I have ever used from anybody except Apple where it felt like they went for the nice materials instead of the cheap materials.
And it is by far the nicest case I've ever seen, felt, or used that was not made of leather.
So for whatever that's worth, if you either want to go leather-free or if you just want something nice, it's really nice.
all right let's uh do some follow-up what is going on with shared photo libraries and what is shared with them john yeah last week i uh said some things about what wasn't shared in photos and i was wrong about a few of them uh i said that keywords favorites and location and stuff were not shared uh they are shared so those are attributes of the individual photos so keywords and i tested this with my little thing if you put a keyword on a photo it gets shared with the other person if you favorite it it shows up you know
We're talking about photos that are in the shared library.
You can do that stuff to them.
You can assign keywords, you can set their favorite status, you can add location information, and everybody sees that.
All the other stuff I talked about, the non-photo items remain unshared.
So you don't get albums, you don't get smart albums, you don't get slideshows, you don't get book projects, all that stuff.
Um, and also someone asked about this when I was having a discussion on, uh, about it on Twitter.
Uh, what about duplicates?
What if two people have the same photo, like maybe like a person airdropped the same identical photo to two different people at two different times and they both add it to the shared library?
What happens?
Um,
The answer, according to my experimentation using the Mac version of Photos Only and two different accounts that have the exact same file, I imported the file into both of their private libraries, and they're separate at that point.
And then I had both of them add that photo to the shared library, and you end up with two copies of that photo in the shared library.
Just two completely identical copies of the photo in the shared library.
I didn't edit them, so it's not like one of them was edited and one of them wasn't.
I just imported it into the individual things, then I had one person add it to the shared library, and then I had the second person add it to the shared library.
Still in beta.
Maybe they'll change that.
And interestingly, I was like, OK, well, maybe they do that for safety or like just to make sure photos don't squish other photos with edits or whatever.
But isn't there a dedupe feature that they've been talking about in iOS 16 and stuff?
they will find your duplicates for you, like built into the iOS 16 Photos thing.
I believe so.
If that exists in Mac Photos, I could not find it.
So it's kind of weird if that ends up being an iOS-only feature.
Obviously, there are tons and tons of ways to dedupe photos in your photo library with Mac applications.
Lots of third-party applications have been doing that for years.
But it's kind of weird that if they're bringing that as a first-party feature to the Photos app on the phone, that they don't also bring it to the Mac.
So I hope that...
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All right, the European Union has mandated that all phones in somewhere between 1 and 17,000 years will have USB-C on them, as was foretold.
Yeah, well, do we know?
I mean, the Europeologists here will tell us like, well, this actually, they didn't really mandate it yet.
Now it has to go to this committee.
Then it has to go to this board.
I bet there's something in the notes that has the answers to those questions.
Let me read from the notes.
i didn't know if we were going to make any initial opening remarks i guess not so here we go that's why you shouldn't have editorialized based on the uh based on the title item because notice what the title item says would you like to read the title item as written eu usbc mandate passes vote passes vote it does not so it's mandate as a noun right the usbc mandate what happened to it did it go into effect is it real is it whatever no but it passed a vote what the hell does passes a vote mean and here we get the text
I mean, look, hey, hands up.
Who wants us to pass?
Three of us.
One, two.
Good.
Okay, each has to vote.
That doesn't mean anything.
Well, it means something.
Anyway, go on.
All right.
On October 4th, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of new legislation that would eventually require all mobile phones sold in the EU to use a USB-C port for wired charging.
So clear.
Yeah.
But even once that happens, just you wait.
But even once that happens, companies like Apple will still effectively have a two-year grace period that's designed to ease the transition to a USB-C future.
This means the rules are likely to come into force by the end of 2024.
Devices already on the market won't need to be withdrawn.
So if Apple launches a lightning port iPhone ahead of the deadline, it can keep selling the phone.
Or what if they just kill the ports entirely?
They already did one.
Why not take the other?
yeah so 2024 is uh is a ways out if you know things go according to what they seem like they're going to go to that's plenty of time for apple to transition to your spc quote unquote on its own you know what i mean i love that it says like companies like apple too like this is all about apple like what other what other companies are left there's no company as tim cook will tell you there are no other companies like apple only apple would be stubborn enough to keep lighting for this long nice
I don't know how I feel about this.
So I'm going to steal from former guest Christina Warren, who tweeted about this, and I agree with her.
I would like USB-C on my phone for several reasons, which we can investigate if we care, but I would like USB-C on my phone.
Don't love that it will arrive there, if at all, because of a government mandate rather than either market forces or I don't know.
And I feel very like, oh, free market this, you know, no government.
And that's not how I feel about most things.
But in this particular case, I don't love how we're ending up on a position that I think I'm going to love.
I mean, it's going to end up there not because of this mandate, because if the 2024 date ends up being anything close to correct, Apple essentially has painted itself into a corner to transition regardless of this law because they keep making phones that can create these massive files like shooting the high resolution video with high frame rate.
And trying to get them off a phone is a nightmare.
And so they either have to upgrade Lightning to be much, much faster, which would be a big hassle.
I'm not even sure if it's possible.
Or they have to go to USB-C.
So there is a technical motivator that's going to make Apple make some kind of change, whether it's to USB-C or something else, just because it's plain ridiculous how long it would take to get video off of a phone that you can record at the highest quality.
It just takes too long.
It's too slow.
So...
That's that's my guess about why Apple will be transitioning.
I'm sure this mandate doesn't hurt the schedule, right?
It can only help it.
But given how long these things take effect and given how it's been not weakened, but like how they've been allowing people to ease the transition, give them a long time to do it, not having to withdraw existing products, which really helps them.
Like Apple could release it depending on the timing within 2024.
They could release their last lightning phone to be the 2024 phone.
and not have to worry about it until a 2025 phone.
That's how much time they have to do this, but I think they'll probably change before then.
David Schwab had some other ideas about things Apple could do to skirt this.
I think these are less likely than the straightforward thing, which is let us go to USB-C, but here they are.
He says, the EU law contains an exception for devices that only use wireless charging.
Assuming Apple really doesn't want to switch the iPhone from Lightning to USB-C, do you think they might just replace the Lightning cable with MagSafe charger in the EU and implement one of these as a legal workaround?
These are probably not increasingly silly, but some of them are silly.
Put a service only sticker or plug over the lighting port.
I don't see that happening.
No.
You know, it's kind of like the little like the diagnostic part on the watch.
Disable charging through the lighting port and software.
Right.
You could still have the lighting port and not USB-C as long as it doesn't charge through it.
Yeah.
Only for EU phones, right?
and the size of video files.
And for that matter, photo files.
Say you're taking, say you're shooting everything with 48 megapixel RAWs.
Each of those photos is 80 megabytes and you've got a one terabyte iPhone.
Try transferring that at lightning speeds, at the USB 2.0 speeds or whatever it is.
It's a little bit silly.
Their quote unquote pro phones need to be able to transfer data faster.
And at this point,
trying to make a new version of lightning that is faster seems very silly um in light of how much usbc is spread throughout the rest of apple's lines you know they did it on the ipad they're they're either going to do it on the phone or they're going to get rid of ports altogether but i don't see them like it's not it's not the eu that's forcing them to put out a non-lighting phone in 2025 it's just sanity
I want them to do it not because a government is forcing them to, but because it's the right thing to do.
And I think the rumors have been fairly consistent that starting with next year's iPhones that we are apparently going to USB-C.
And that's been consistent now for a number of years.
So I kind of put some weight behind it.
And I think Apple must have decided a couple years ago to make this change.
And changing over the iPhone in any kind of major component change is not a small deal.
They have to worry about, first of all, can we even get or create enough USB-C connectors to keep up with the iPhone's volume?
That's actually a real concern, something that's as high volume and as...
I guess high stakes as the iPhone is like because every single thing that an iPhone has or has to do has to be nearly 100 percent perfect nearly 100 percent of the time because they just sell so many of them.
And it's so important to the company that if they have a part that has like a 0.001 percent failure rate, that's too high.
They can't have that because that could cause a scandal that could have a big problem for the iPhone that year.
So they have to be so careful and they have to make sure they can create the volume and have the high yields and have the good reliability of all these different parts.
When you look at the iPhone as a product,
It's really amazing when you compare it to not only anything else that Apple makes, but anything else that anybody makes.
It's really amazing how rarely anything goes wrong with them.
Like how like manufacturing defect wise, like how often have you opened up a new iPhone and something's been broken and you've had to exchange it?
It's almost unheard of.
Like it happens so rarely compared to the number of them that they sell.
And so, again, they have to be super cautious.
So I'm sure there were reasons like that that led them to take this long to get here.
But I do think it looks like things are lining up that they will be getting here.
And I think, you know, part of the reason, as John said...
the transfer rates of having these giant video captures, they're, they're literally, they're marketing the pro phones and they're making these software features and hardware features to optimize for things like, like ProRes and, and raw photos and everything that generate these huge files that are comically slow to get off the phone.
That is one side of this.
But the reality is, and Apple knows this, most people with most iPhones will never do those things.
And so that doesn't necessarily need to be the reason.
That's a reason.
But I think the reason, the much bigger reason, is just that it's a pain in the butt to have two different phone chargers out there.
And when Apple went with Lightning, the Android world was not as unified as it is now.
now everything is usbc and it has been for a number of years now and it's spreading to all sorts of other devices that aren't even phones you know the laptops now all charge via usbc they can at least they don't have to but they can um and then you look at every like all hardware in the world
flashlights charge via usbc like the other i saw i got an ad on instagram for a power drill that charges via usbc which by the way well targeted ad um like everything is usbc now and the the very few things that aren't are every iphone and like our airpods cases or whatever it's like there's not much else left oh and the stupid apple don't forget my keyboard yeah keyboards yeah my trackpad but like my
the apple the apple battery case that isn't a case yeah whatever it's called but yeah but you know you look at the market and like everything else is usbc now it's a it's a very very different scenario now than it was when lightning was introduced you know when they had to decide to go from the dot connector to lightning again that was a very different world there wasn't this consensus there wasn't this one amazing universal standard
There was a bunch of miscellaneous crap and mostly micro USB, which sucked.
And this is a totally different ballgame now.
It's a different time with different needs.
And the right thing to do now, whether the EU gets around to mandating it for them or not, is to use USB-C for everything.
The rumors, again, suggest we're going there.
And I hope they're right because it is such a pain in the butt.
Like,
to have like a family of mixed devices of just like you know we need usbc for pretty much everything except our iphones like that's that's so annoying well and our apple watches again whole separate thing there um but the the world would be better off if they made the iphone usbc and i hope that's the reason they're doing it and not because of government pressure or and not because of only pros needing it no everyone needs it it'll benefit everyone
speaking of not having enough parts and stuff i seem to recall a story back when lightning first came out that the limiting factor on the phones they could manufacture was the ability to get that little the little lightning connectory thing because obviously apple was the only company in the entire world that needed that thing made and they needed a lot of them and they needed a lot of them fast and they needed to be up to apple standards of quality and everything and that was a problem but at this point getting quality usb-c connectors should not be a problem for apple
One would hope not.
But no, I mean, I haven't been traveling too much, but I've been traveling more than zero, which is more than I can say for the last couple of years.
And having everything USB-C is extremely convenient.
And yes, I did spend an absolutely hilarious amount of money on my travel MagSafe situation, but...
It would still be nice to know that if I needed to plug in, all I need is the cable that I can use for my laptop or the Switch or for any number of other things.
And that I don't need a bespoke cable just for my iPhone.
And yeah, I don't begrudge Apple for having gone Lightning.
I do kind of begrudge them for not having gone to USB-C sometime in the last year or two.
And I think that...
you know it would have been better a year or two ago the next best time is as soon as possible and and and i just the other day i had recorded the kids were doing like a little play for the two of us for aaron and me and i recorded it and i recorded it as like one ten minute you know i don't remember what my settings my phone are but i think it was a one ten minute 60 60 frames per second 4k video and it's something like three gigs i don't even remember how big it is but it's massive right and yeah getting that uh oh i'm sorry it's actually nine gigs nine gigs and
Getting that off of my phone via a cable was effectively impossible.
Like, yes, it is literally possible, but it was effectively impossible.
And so what I ended up doing was airdropping, which took a couple of tries and was not exactly reliable, but I eventually got it from my phone to my computer.
and I'm going to eventually put in Final Cut Pro and do things with it.
But it is not fun to get more than a minute of 4K 60 frames video off of your phone using a lightning cable.
I know you guys said this a minute ago, but it's so true.
And this is something that I ran into just in the last three days.
I cannot wait for USB-C to be a thing.
That being said...
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Apple went no ports at all or perhaps no ports on non-pro phones and ports on a pro phone.
And the reason I say that is what do they have to care about?
They have to care about developers who they don't really care about or people who have wired CarPlay.
And there are solutions like I use.
They're not great, but they work to change wired CarPlay into wireless CarPlay.
So do either of you guys see them going to a completely wireless world?
There was the rumor that the MagSafe puck, imagine a MagSafe puck as they exist now, but also with a thing in the middle of it that lets data be transferred, and that would be their solution.
Essentially, MagSafe, I don't know what number they're on, MagSafe 2, 3, I guess the numbers are on the laptops.
I believe they reset the timeline on that one.
Yeah, it's just, as we said previously, not MagSafe, but MagSafe.
Anyway,
um that was uh they had patents filings on that and everything but it's hard to tell whether that's just a thing they were considering for the mag safe puck and just didn't do or if it's a thing for the future it doesn't really solve the uh the carplay problem at all one of the problems it does solve is apple's ability to charge uh peripheral manufacturers money to sell things that's sort of made for iphone whatever uh i'm sure if any or actually does anybody make a mag safe puck besides apple
Yeah, well, sort of.
My travel thing that I keep talking about over and over again, there's three pieces.
There's a Qi charger that's about the shape of an AirPods case.
There's an Apple Watch charger.
And then there's a, honest to goodness, MagSafe, not a puck, but there's a MagSafe mat on, I think it's the rightmost, of the three different parts of this charger.
So yeah, it is...
Full-on, honest-to-goodness MagSafe, but it is not a first-party MagSafe puck, as far as I'm aware.
Well, and to be clear, I'm sure they make a decent amount of money with the licensing of everything, but have you ever seen anybody in the real world using officially licensed MFI stuff that didn't come with their phone?
Everyone just buys the knockoff crap from the drugstore on Amazon.
And I doubt they're getting any money from that, so I wonder if we might be overestimating the value of that.
No, I don't know.
I think there's a lot of it in there.
I mean, I think like all of the manufacturers that you see selling stuff on Apple Store, for example, like Belkin and stuff, they're a big manufacturer.
They send tons of stuff.
If you just do a random Google for any kind of like wire peripheral thing, the odds of you getting a Belkin match are high.
And I'm assuming everything Belkin does is on the up and up because, again, they're in Apple Store.
So they're probably, you know.
I don't know, like, it's someone's job to maximize MFI income, right?
And that person is not in charge of the whole company.
But that is a factor in weighing this.
And obviously, it's not going to stop them from going to USB-C.
Like, they did it on the iPad, right?
No more revenue from all those lightning cables that we were selling to iPad owners.
Like, in the end, they'll do the right thing from a technical perspective.
But it remains to be seen what Apple thinks is the right thing on the phone.
Because in the same way they removed the headphone port, although they removed that from the
iPad too.
But anyway, they may say on the phone, we need every ounce of space we can get.
It's not like we have room for plastic spacers in there.
So we got to get rid of the port and everything is going to be magnetic pucks from now on.
I hope they don't do that.
It seems like a much more straightforward and smarter thing to do to go with USB-C.
And in the end, I think...
the iPhone for all of Apple's, uh, sort of, uh, punctuated moments of daring, uh, tends to be a conservative product and, you know, change happens slowly.
So the iPhone 10 was a big change.
Uh, going retina was a big change.
The big iPhone six was a big change and, uh, going, you know, going from 30 pain to lightning was a big change.
And I think, you know, but those, those events happen, but in general, uh,
Apple's not keen to rock the boat on the idea that a phone is something that's a rectangle where you plug in a thing at the bottom to charge it.
So right now my money is still on a USB-C port where the lightning port was.
I don't know.
We'll see.
It is tempting.
Apple famously frequently overdoes their minimalism, especially in hardware.
And so I see why we would think that, oh, this is a big risk.
And I think it's a risk that they might do this, but I think it's a small risk because ultimately...
wired is in many ways, of course, it's in many ways simpler, but it's also in many ways better.
Wired charging, first of all, is way more efficient.
Now, we've already seen, like, I believe there's a feature in the 16.1 beta that came out yesterday or today that there's now an option to
Set your iPhone to charge when it has environmentally friendly energy generation in your area.
So if there's a time of day in your area where they use only solar or wind power or something, it can have your phone try to only charge during those times.
And that's the kind of feature that the reason they do that kind of feature is that it has a pretty massive environmental impact when you're talking about the number of iPhones that are out there.
If you can make them charge a little more efficiently or using certain resources instead of others, it's a small power draw, yeah.
But it's like millions and millions and millions of small power draws.
And so to go to wireless only...
would make almost everyone use an inefficient charging method on their iphone that loses a good percentage i mean what is what is the chi magsafe efficiency is probably something like 70 or 80 i think that's very optimistic yeah exactly i would guess that it's uh less than 50 much less
And especially if you have a case on your phone, then you're getting those coils further apart, and I bet it makes the efficiency worse.
So if they're going to put in all the effort environmentally to do other good things for energy conservation and smart energy usage and everything, it seems like a step backwards to require all of a sudden everyone to go chi or wireless only.
In addition to the fact that I hope that this rumor is not true or that this idea wouldn't happen.
I hope because...
I know from a developer's point of view, like the Apple Watch development situation, not being able to hardwire to it is just so inferior to the iPhone where I can just hardwire in.
So I really hope they don't do that.
Oh, agreed, agreed.
But yeah, I think there's lots of reasons for this why they probably wouldn't do it for any iPhone, let alone for all iPhones.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I don't want there to be an all wireless future, but I wouldn't put it past Apple one way or the other.
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They have everything I need from compute instances to specialty plans like GPU compute, high memory, dedicated CPU, stuff like that.
And they have all sorts of managed services now as well.
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And so it's really just a huge amount of value being created there.
And
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And that's why I went to them in the first place.
And that's one of the reasons why I've stayed there all this time because I run a lot of servers.
The money would really add up in any other place.
And Linode is by far the best value I found in the business.
So it's just it's amazing.
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So I have a couple of updates with regard to my weird Apple Watch band return.
John, not Syracusa, has a theory that I genuinely wish I could have confirmed or denied, but all this came in after I had completed my return.
John writes, here's why I think you were asked to bring your watch bundle to return the band.
The bundled band is not exactly the same as the retail version.
As you can see in pictures that John provided, which really you can just use your mind painting to figure this out, it has no barcode and no specifications about its color.
From the case, I can only tell that it's, in my case, a sports band.
On the other hand, the retail version has some more stickers for the model in the barcodes.
See another picture.
Again, we're not going to bother with the pictures in the show notes, partially for John's OPSEC.
But anyway...
I don't think this is the case.
I thought on, certainly on the exterior, you know how on the Apple Watch it's like a piece of paper that wraps the watch box in the band box?
Well, on that, it's not a piece of paper, but like a thin piece of cardboard.
Well, anyways, on that, it says what band is within.
Now, maybe the band wasn't specific, but I could swear it had a picture of the correct band on the outside.
I could swear it had the size on it and so on and so forth.
So I don't know.
Maybe John is right, but I'm skeptical.
But it's a plausible theory.
Now, from an anonymous Apple employee, they had the following to say with regard to the genius or retail person that I spoke to.
They were wrong.
We don't need the watch.
All we need is the serial number of the watch.
Here's what actually happens during a band swap.
Systematically, regardless of whether your watch is there or not, Apple is returning the whole thing and reselling it to you with a new band.
It's just that they've rejiggered the system to hide most of the exchange from us, as in the retail employees, and the customer.
The steps look like this.
One, the specialist chooses the item swap option on their Isaac, which is the handheld device they carry.
Two, the system asks for a watch serial number.
This can be scanned using the barcode from the box
Or it can be manually entered if the box isn't there.
We can also scan the original receipt.
Since every serial number is unique, that number allows us to pull up the original transaction.
Quick aside, I later asked this anonymous genius, hey, what if I had the W123456789 online order number?
And they weren't sure, but they said, yeah, I bet that would work.
All right, so back to the retail employee.
Step three, after we have retrieved the original transaction, the system asks for us to scan in the new band.
Four, if the new band is the same price as the old band, the transaction is pretty much finished except for the receipt, which is printed or emailed.
If the new band is a different price, the customer pays the difference or receives a refund for the difference, depending.
Easy peasy, lickety split.
So this is mostly what happened when I went back with the boxes and so on and so forth.
But the key here is that really all they need is a way to get the serial number.
And once they got that, then they're off to the races.
And that makes sense and kind of stands to reason based on what I saw.
But here's an anonymous Apple employee telling us exactly what the truth is.
Alright, so let's talk about something that is definitely brand new and definitely hasn't been talked to death over the last two months.
Let's talk about AI art.
And I feel like we should start right away by saying you should really consider listening to Cortex episode 133, The Ethics of AI Art.
I really love that show, but that was a really, really great episode in which a lot of the ins and outs of all this was discussed.
How do we want to approach this?
I guess we should maybe kind of do the quick summary of what do I mean by AI art.
John or Marco, jump in when you're ready.
But the general gist is there's been a lot of work put into various products, some open source, some not, that allow you to do many different things.
But one of the things they allow you to do is type a prompt.
a picture of the three hosts of the Accidental Tech podcast drawn as pixel art.
And these different products will use a whole bunch of machine learning and artificial intelligence to try to, figuratively speaking, draw whatever picture you've asked them to draw.
Some of them are better than others, and we're going to talk about that, I think, a little bit.
But it's very, very interesting.
And some of these products, I haven't played with all of them,
In fact, I've only played with one of them, but the one I played with, a lot of times it gave me straight up garbage, but occasionally it would come up with something reasonable.
And when it did, it was kind of mind shattering that I could ask a computer with plain text, like describe a phantom picture I had in my mind in plain text and have the computer basically come up with it.
It's really wild.
And so that's kind of what we're talking about here that, I don't know, John, I think you were most excited to talk about this.
How do you want to proceed?
Yeah.
We should list some of the ones that are out there if you want to try them.
We'll have these links in the show notes.
There's DALL-E, D-A-L-L hyphen E. It's a play on the Salvador DALL-E and WALL-E, the robot from the Pixar movie.
There's Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Google Imogen, a whole bunch of other ones, right?
One of them is available as like a standalone application that you can run on your ARM-based Mac.
What is that one called?
Stable Diffusion, I believe that's the one.
Right, but is it like Diffusion B or something?
It's Diffusion B. Yeah, we'll put a link to that.
That's the one I play with on my Mac as well.
A lot of the other ones have web interfaces.
I think Dolly used to be invitation only for a while, but now I think it's open to everybody.
So you can follow the links and try them out, and people post...
You know, the interesting things they come up with.
And the thing I want to talk about with this is, you know, it's been a topic of conversation because, I mean, first it went around like, I don't know, a year or two ago, whenever the first one of these started coming out as like a technical curiosity.
And it started to get mainstream enough that you'd see like articles about it and just regular sort of tech websites and other stuff like that.
And at a certain point, it started to be so mainstream that people were using it, not just as a technical curiosity, but they were using it to make a picture.
that they would then use i think there was some controversy because one person was actually writing i don't think it was an article about ai art but they or maybe it was they use the ai art to they talk about this in the cortex episode uh to make an image that they included with their article online rather than rather than paying an artist and people were mad like why didn't you pay an artist to do this and that sort of gets into the the i think the most interesting part of this debate is um given that people are working on this tech uh
What does it mean for the future of all things related to making pictures?
And by the way, there are movie ones now as well where you can ask it like someone, you know, you can ask it like a painting of an ice cream cone melting in the sun and it will do a video of, you know, a video of a painterly style ice cream cone melting in the sun.
Right.
So it's not just audio and not just still images.
And this stuff is developing so quickly.
It presents a lot of very thorny questions.
Obviously, if you are if your profession is drawing pictures for money and there's a program that lets people draw pictures by typing what they want to see in the picture, that probably doesn't make you feel good about your chosen profession.
There is the predictable sort of Luddite versus tech enthusiast battle there between saying, oh, a computer can never do what a human does.
Anytime there's any kind of technology that previously does something that could only be done by humans, there is this battle.
It's saying that the new way to do it is...
Solless and bad and evil and is going to corrupt the youth and so on and so forth.
And then the other people who are excited about the tech and just wanted to go forward.
And many times throughout history, there has been a technology that has caused entire professions and entire industries to basically disappear or shrink to the point or transform in a way that's, you know, not even recognizable.
Witness the entire industry surrounding technology.
Having horses pull things with people in them and the advent of the automobile.
It's not like we don't have horses.
It's not like people don't have jobs making saddles for horses and shooing horses and taking care of horses.
All those jobs still exist.
But boy, the industry looks a lot different than it did before the advent of the automobile.
A lot different.
And so this AIR thing brings all those issues up and the people are going around around that debate.
But I think one of the most interesting things, the interesting aspects of this debate is how these things work.
Like, how do you make a program where you type in words and it draws you pictures, right?
And like most sort of machine learning style models, they are, I don't know if trained is the right word, but they are given a set of images, right?
And, you know, and associated words and phrases and stuff to say to feed into the model so that they can do this.
Right.
So I don't know.
It's like millions and millions of images.
I'm not sure how they're tagged.
Maybe each one is just tagged with a caption or something like that.
And they grind that up into a big soup.
And, you know, that's a technical term.
And then when you say, you know, a picture of an ice cream cone, they give you a picture of an ice cream cone because they have enough images of enough things with enough of the words associated with it.
If they can synthesize a picture based on everything they've ever seen and the association of those words to the images to get you, you know, not just one, but multiple pictures of ice cream cones and, you know, trying various attempts at it.
And that raises a lot of interesting questions in particular.
What images were fed to this thing?
Most of the things that are done for, you know, universities or, you know, this is like sort of research type stuff.
And the first versions of these, there are lots of image sets that are used for research purposes that are presumably like millions and millions of correctly annotated images.
royalty-free images that have been used in lots of different computer vision studies for years and years, right?
But there are so many of these things and they're so popular and the new ones come up every day.
It's not entirely clear what's in all the image sets that they're using.
There was a story about this on Arstechnica.
I guess it actually is fairly recent.
Headline is, artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set.
What?
Someone who found private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 referenced in the LAION 5B image set.
because a lot of the ways they find images is like oh I'll just scrape the web and anything I find the web I'm sure is fine to use well no because there might be a doctor website that has poor security and has an image exposed to the web and a web scraper comes along and finds it and lo and behold your like medical images end up in a data set that is you know and to be clear it's not like isn't this also how my email address ends up on so many people's list oh you must have bought something from us nope I sure didn't
Well, I mean, it's like bad website security in that like there's a page that is protected, you know, security through obscurity.
Technically, if you know the URL, you can get to it, but there's no link to it.
So how could people find it?
Well, a lot of the web scraping things can find links that are not visible because they're hidden on a page or they do scraping techniques that allow them to find things by iterating on IDs or stuff like that.
And that's not great.
And on top of that, as we all know, if you are an artist who does any kind of art and puts it on the internet, you will find that art all over the place.
And you may think this is a show with three software developers.
That doesn't apply to us.
But we make a small amount of art.
You may have seen some of it and purchased some of it on our t-shirts.
And let me tell you, that very simple art that is on our t-shirts is all over the freaking web.
Not because we put it there, but it's everywhere, right?
If you put an image on the web, oh, when you go to the Cotton Bureau page and it shows you a picture of the shirt, there's that image on the web and a web scraper could find it because that page at Cotton Bureau totally unprotected.
So if a web scraper finds it, that image is probably in some image set somewhere, right?
It's probably in all these image sets.
Because, you know, it's the Wild West out there on the internet.
You can find the image, you can put it in.
So there are, you know, and obviously this is just a tiny, you know, we're doing t-shirt graphs, whatever.
Imagine you are an actual artist by profession and you do this artwork and maybe you have it on your website that shows your portfolio of all your great artwork that you're going to do.
And your artwork, probably also your name and the descriptions of that stuff gets shoved into one of these image sets to the point where, let's say you're a famous artist and you have a name that people know, you know, it says like,
uh, you know, picture of a toaster oven in the style of Ralph McQuarrie, right?
That knows who McQuarrie is based on the images they pulled as they're all over the freaking internet and his name is attached to all of them.
And it's going to show you a toaster oven drawn in his style.
I think he's dead now.
So it's not, but like tons of living artists, like you'll type something on these things that are like, that looks a lot like something I did once.
And you know why?
Because some of your artwork is probably fed into this machine and it's popping out.
And these people are like, well,
you know how can you do that are you allowed like well we're not really it's not really your art this was made by the ai it's an original work it's like yeah but it's an original work informed by work that i did and that doesn't seem like should i get some kind of royalty for this should it should you have my permission yeah does that count as a derivative work for copyright reasons
Yeah, or should you at least get my permission to include any of my artwork in there?
Or should you clean your data set to make sure that the images you have, you actually do have the rights to?
And that's almost impossible because you need millions of images to do this, or at least a very large number of images.
And having a human vet each one for copyright is just, you know, it's like everything that's true about the internet is true of these AI image things.
the the perfect world where you're like oh we have to make sure every one of the images that contributes to this to this input is free and clear and we know all the rights to it and that's impossible at scale like that's just not how the internet works we you know we can't even get all the movies and television shows made in the pre-internet era on streaming services because people can't figure out how to do the rights and that is a much smaller problem than millions of images and image sets um
So there's that whole debate and rattle about do artists deserve to get paid?
Um, you know, should, should they be allowed to do this?
Uh, is there some kind of royalty structure?
Should, should this stuff be removed?
Um, and I think the final interest of all the two more interesting things about this, uh, one is given that that's the way these things work, um,
Well, actually, before we move on to that, I should ask you too.
Do you have an opinion on the artists having their work sucked into the thing?
What do you think about the validity of the artists complaining in that scenario?
I think it's really still yet to be proven what our acceptable standards are for this.
So, you know, my...
My barometer for what is an unacceptable level of copying, just ethically, and there's legal definitions as well, which I think kind of comport with this.
But anyway, it's based on, to make a new work, are you pretty much lifting most of your stuff from the same source or the same very small number of sources?
Yeah.
then that's kind of over the line whereas if you are taking bits of inspiration from a diverse set of sources so that the resulting work doesn't look like just a straight-up clone of like one other person's work but it looks like okay maybe you were inspired in this way by this person and this way by this work and this way by this style you know but it all comes together into a more diverse soup of a product i think that's okay and so
You can look at these AI generators and say, well, if you ask for something that is in one particular person's style, that could result in something that is over the line.
Whereas if you just ask for an image of a slice of pepperoni pizza on a table, that's going to be probably drawing from so many different data points and input sources that I don't think if the texture on the pepperoni slice happens to look like the way you texture something in Photoshop once...
I think that's less of a concern.
But the problem is, you know, you can use these tools the way whatever the operator wants.
And if the operator says rip off this one person's work or their style, you're going to have a problem.
But I don't necessarily know that that's the fault of the technology.
That's the fault of the user.
Yeah, so assigning blame on on on this, you know, how is this different than, you know, other scenarios?
Assigning blame is always fun when it's a computer program, quote unquote, doing it.
But then the user is prompting it to do it.
And that kind of leads to the question that you usually end up out in these type of debates is, is this thing doing anything different than when people do?
If you ask a human artist to draw something and
They have a corpus of images they've seen through their entire life that contributes to the output, right?
You could say, well, if I give it to a person, they're going to do original work.
But the original work of an artist is necessarily informed by their entire life experience of seeing...
everything of seeing things in real life obviously but also of seeing other pictures and works of art inevitably and some people would say well this ai program what it's doing is absolutely no different than what a human does it has a series of inputs and that contributes to what it's going to make if you ask a human to give you a logo in the style of a saul bass logo they can probably do that because they know about those logos because they're very famous and he's a very famous logo designer and if you do that
Uh, he's not, I keep hearing dead people.
He's not going to rise from the grave and sue you, uh, because you can't sort of trademark a style.
If I tell you to draw something in the style of any living artist, you can do that.
And they can't say, Oh, it's illegal for you to do that.
Cause you just copied my style.
Now they may look down on you and say, you didn't come up with your own original style, but every style is a, you know, everything's a remix.
Every style is a, that we think of as new and novel is itself informed by all the other styles that came out.
before it so in one sense i agree that this program is doing something that if you squint it looks very similar to what people also do but that leads to the second question which is can this program
Not can it make anything new?
Can any of these programs make anything new?
But like if you sort of fast forward this, you do the whatever it is.
It's not an argument ad absurdum, no.
But if you just – it's an infinite timeline argument.
Of course it is.
Artists become the horse and buggy salesmen.
Right.
And they still exist and they're out there.
But boy, there are a lot fewer of them because these programs get so good that in the average working life of a person, nobody actually pays an artist to do anything.
We just type words into a program when we get an output.
Right.
If all the input to these programs are images made before these programs existed.
then how does that sustain itself?
Can you feed the output of these things back in as the input?
So forget about computers.
You've just got humans making art.
Humans make art, then new humans arrive and see the art made by the previous humans, and they in turn make quote-unquote new art that then the future humans see and it feeds back in, right?
So you can see how the people are kind of like programs in this scenario where they...
See existing art, they make quote unquote new art, and then that cycle repeats itself.
If you took the humans out of the equation, could the machines continue to do the same thing, taking as input all the art ever made by humans, and then going forward, taking as input all the art made by AI programs?
Or would they stagnate and feed in on themselves to everything was just a giant gray mush because, you know, mixing all the paint colors together?
Or would they be just as diverse as human artists?
And that, I think, makes me personally circle back to are they doing what people do?
And I think fundamentally they are not doing what people do.
Big strokes, it seems like they're doing.
Hey, they see pictures and they make new pictures.
That's exactly what people do.
But it's not like that's all these AI things.
And that's why, you know, general artificial intelligence or whatever you want to call it is so far away.
This even if this these programs were operating the exact same way that the center of our brains that makes pictures do and they're not.
But even if they were.
There's so much more to a human mind than the part that makes pictures based on word prompts.
And what these programs don't have and won't have for a long, long, long time is the life experience of a human.
All the sensory input they've ever had, all the emotions they experience.
the the way humans judge a picture whether it accomplishes the goal they set out from us the ability to set a goal for themselves that the ability to experience art and make it and feel what the art is meant to feel thus judging whether this art has achieved what you wanted it to achieve or inspiring you to do something else based on how something you saw made you feel none of these programs can do any of that and it necessarily makes their
The funnel through which they have to shove all of their creative efforts is so narrow.
They do not have the wealth of experiences of a human.
All they have is visual input and descriptions, which is such, you know, they don't have an experience of the art.
So the art that they make can only be informed by those tiny little things because they literally can't experience anything else.
No memory, no life, not memory in that sense, like no memories, no life experience, no sensory organs, no emotions, no thoughts, no awareness.
Like they're not artificial intelligence in that sense.
Do you need that to make a picture of a pizza slice on a table?
No.
but i think you need that to continue the cycle of creation of art with the quality level that we have come to expect from humans because as we make each new generation of humans they have new experiences their their life experiences and the art that they see and the things that they feel inform the things that they create and it is a rich tapestry as they say and it's great to be able to feed that into an ai and have it chomp that down but if you take the humans out of that equation and leave the ai as stupid as they are now
It would basically be like they were working from the same set of data forever and they would just grind it to a pulp and it would just be this incredible stagnation.
Not that I think this is going to happen because you can't stop humans from making things unless the machines kill us all Terminator style.
We don't have to worry about that.
But just as an academic exercise, I don't think AI art is a sustainable thing without human creativity as an important input.
It would be sad to think that the only purpose of human creativity in our work would be to feed into AIs to do most of the drudgery.
And then, you know, again, they'd be like the people who own horses now.
They're out there.
There's a lot of them, but not nearly as many as there were.
And I don't think we have any particular fear of that in our lifetime.
But that's kind of where I come down on this, setting aside the legalities and everything.
These programs are so dumb and so bad at what they do.
We're impressed.
You know, it's this analogy like seeing a rhinoceros dance.
You're impressed that it could do it.
But boy, the dancing isn't that great.
Right.
And they're never going to be.
adequate to sustain a creative timeline of works of art like humans until their experience of life is as rich as a human's experience life, in which point we have lots of other problems.
And we're not even close to that.
So don't worry about it.
Don't let the people who tell you that AI is going to take over and kill us all.
If you're listening to this now, that will not happen when you're alive.
So don't worry about it.
Kind of like self-driving cars.
Well, but I think there's actually some overlap there because I don't think that this is going to put artists out of business as a whole.
It's more like thinking about this is a new digital tool that can save a lot of busy work.
It's going to make certain types of art more accessible than they were before to more people.
And it's going to save a bunch of time on work that previously was more manual.
So if you think about it kind of like when digital art came around, when Photoshop and everything came around and digital drawing tools and things like that,
There was a whole industry before that of people who were doing a lot of this stuff by hand, photo retouching by hand, you know, painting and illustrating by hand.
And when you move to digital, a whole bunch of things got easier and things became much more easily possible that weren't easily possible before.
And so that did inevitably put out of work like sign painters and things like that, you know, to some degree.
But most people who were artists in some way embraced the new tools in some form and just became, you know, their job just became a little bit different.
But it didn't kill the art.
It just changed what was out there and what was available and how you had to use it and what was possible.
Yeah.
And a bunch of – again, a bunch of new people were able to do it who weren't able to do it before or maybe it was like a little bit too tedious before.
And now people were able to do things who like wouldn't have done the old tedious way but were willing to do the new digital way.
And so it just – it changes things.
And not everyone comes along on those transitions.
You know, every time technology gets better –
Certain jobs aren't necessary anymore, the horse analogy, and not every person who was keeping horses became an auto mechanic.
It doesn't work that way, but a lot of people do become auto mechanics when that demand rises up.
In this case, when digital art tools came around, a lot of people became digital artists.
Not everyone who was previously drawing stuff by hand, which, by the way, still exists and is fine, but not everyone who did that went to digital, but many people did and many new people started on digital.
And so art is a thing that's still a major thing in the world.
It's just different than it used to be.
I think these AI tools, using them and figuring out
how to make these text prompts, how to control them, what knobs and dials to adjust, how you word things, what you even think to create.
That's all art.
That's part of the process.
These are now just able to generate things much more quickly than a human can, but then humans are still directing them.
Humans are still tweaking them.
Humans are still deciding, okay, you know what?
Generate 100 pictures of this thing.
And I'm going to pick the one that I like out of this hundred and have you riff on that a little more.
And then go to that one.
Generate a hundred riffs on that one.
Okay, I'm going to pick these two.
Let's follow these through and do more with these.
That's art.
That's humans doing art with a different tool.
And it doesn't have to be entirely used for entire images, too.
As the tooling and as technology gets more mature and more established, these kind of tools can be used for things like, okay, you know what?
I'm drawing this thing on Photoshop.
I have a brick wall here.
Can you just put a brick texture on this wall that looks good that hasn't been used a million times by everyone else who's ever used Photoshop in their life?
And it can generate a brick texture.
Fine.
Or, hey, this car that's in the background of this photo, I don't want this car to be here.
Can you delete that in a way that's even smarter than Constant Aware fill and stuff like that?
Yeah.
As the AI tools get better, it adds a lot of capabilities for artists to eliminate busy work that used to exist or to do things in a nicer way than they used to be able to be done.
And so I see this really as a mixed bag.
There are, yes, some downsides, and some artists will be put out of work by this, but it also opens up so much potential for artists to use these tools individually.
The work that is going to be reduced by this is going to be stuff like the crappy client saying, hey, can you show me 50 different versions of my logo?
Maybe they can skip that step and move on to more interesting things.
And again, that's not going to take everyone along with them.
But I don't see these tools as a universal bad or a doomsday scenario for human-created artwork.
Quite the opposite.
It's just new tools for humans to use.
I think of the crappy state these things are now, like the relatively affirmative state.
I think now is the time that is the most rich for artists to potentially have legal action against them because it's very difficult to tell without sort of knowing, you know, I know this is not how they work, but imagine if you could ask one of them, okay, so you made an image for me.
Can you tell me what images contributed to this image that you made?
And again, that's not how that works.
They don't just take five images and smush them together, but like...
big picture-wise in the abstract, lots of millions of images of input and then output, right?
And sometimes I can imagine that these more primitive, very early versions of this produce a work where you could overlay an actual existing thing from its corpus on a section of it and say, okay, this is literally just lifted.
Like it's smushed and smoothed a little bit, but literally I drew this slice of pizza and you put it in the image and you rotated it and scaled it, right?
And that...
You know, that's a no go like you would get if you did that with if you did like a, you know, a cover of a magazine and you did it by like stealing the cover of a different magazine and just, you know, cropping out everything except for the slice of pizza, like draw your own slice of pizza.
Right.
um there is a line to be drawn there like oh i was doing a collage or whatever but that's what these legal cases are about and you know there's a whole other thing to be said about the the sad state of legal cases on songs that are identical but for artwork you could say oh i was doing a collage it's a derivative work so on and so forth versus i just straight uplifted this pizza slice from this other artist thing it didn't change it enough for it to be legally distinct um
As these things get better, there will be less of that, less chance of that happening, that it really will be all new, totally fresh work.
But part of that relies on a big sort of leveling up of these things in understanding literally anything.
What they understand now is so limited.
You could say, these things don't know what a slice of pizza is.
Well, they kind of do because of all the pictures of slices of pizza and the fact that they could say that triangle thing is probably the pizza slice because I have 100,000 examples of it, right?
Yeah.
i mean in all fairness like most of america doesn't know what a size of pizza is right exactly but they don't actually know they may be able to pick out the thing that corresponds to pizza from an image but they have no idea what pizza is uh you know could could they do something like draw heat lines coming off of pizza only because they have existing artwork that shows heat lines but they don't know pizza is hot they don't know what hot is they don't know what pizza is they don't know what food is like they're again they're they're uh they're so incredibly dumb
That even if they're synthesizing new images in the same way that our brains synthesize new images, our brains have so much other stuff that informs the thing that we're making, which is why you're saying, Marga, you need a human to guide this, because these things know nothing.
And so you can't even guide them to do things that require them to have literally any understanding of anything that they're doing, right?
You know, like, could you put more place settings at that table?
maybe if they have images that say place setting and there's different numbers of them and i could down but they don't know what a table is they don't know what a place setting is they don't know what people are that they sit at tables and like future versions of this will be better in that regard and then they will be much better tools because they have to have some kind of understanding in fact probably in very specialized areas they'll gain that understanding but
Getting computers to understand what a person is, what a table is, what a pizza is, how they relate to each other.
We've been working on that for decades and decades.
It's way harder than you think it is.
These things look like magic because they're like, why are we doing that?
It's like trying to make an airplane by making a thing that flaps its wings.
That's the wrong way to do it.
Even though that's how birds fly, it's stupid for us to try to make a mechanical bird.
Instead, how about we make a fixed-wing thing, and we put a lawnmower engine on it and a propeller, and that's a way better way to make an airplane, even though it has nothing to do with how birds fly, or a little bit to do with it, but it's not an ornithopter, right?
These are like that for image generation.
Wait, what?
Because...
because we can't make we can't make a thing that thinks yet but we can make some incredibly dumb thing that we feed enough of our intelligence into by saying here's a bunch of images here's descriptions of those words you know what words are well there now do that and we've got just enough to do this magical stuff but like as a tool trying to herd this towards something that you want is even harder than trying to hurt an artist towards what you want because at least you can tell the artists to make the logo bigger and if they don't do it it's because they think you're a jerk now because they don't understand what you mean
ornithopter a machine designed to achieve flight by means of flapping wings today i learned yeah same i knew i knew the word existed i could not in a million years have told you what exactly should know it from the 1994 movie dune where they all talk about let's get in the ornithopter and they get into these things that have wings that do not flap come on marco didn't see it neither did i please don't make me john please don't the new dune movie those wings flap baby
Now, the thing that really changed my opinion about this, well, I didn't have a strong opinion about it, but what really kind of blew my mind, I guess, is the three of us are in a Slack together, and another person in that Slack was saying, oh, and I'm heavily paraphrasing here, but, oh, I was looking at designing like an app icon or an image.
I forget exactly what it was.
And I knew a vague direction of where I wanted to go with it, but I didn't really know specifically what I wanted to do.
This wasn't the case, but let's say for the sake of discussion, they were trying to draw a settings icon, and they knew they wanted a gear.
But they didn't know, do I have a gear or several concentric gears?
Do I have a series of gears all touching each other on the outside?
What exactly...
what am i looking for here i just know i want something with gears and they said they they put basically app icon with gears in it or something along those lines into one of these projects and it spit out you know like 15 different options and this person like didn't really love any one of the options but they said that it did a really good job of kind of getting their creative juices flowing and saying okay now i have something to work with now i know kind of where i want to go with this and this is what you were alluding to earlier marco
I just think something like that, having this kind of fascinating tool in your tool belt is extremely cool.
And as someone who can barely draw a stick figure, I think being able, especially as these things get better, being able to, I don't know, like make my own app icon potentially or get close.
You know, not that I have any problems with the app icons I have.
I love them and I got them from a dear friend of mine.
But nevertheless, it would be neat if I was capable of even putting, like, a placeholder icon there that wasn't utter garbage.
And I just think having this tool available to more people, especially non-artists, I think that's neat.
And the thing that gives me pause about it is, well, what happens to artists?
In the same way that, you know, I worry about, like, GitHub Copilot or whatever it is, and I worry, well, what happens to us?
You know, what happens to developers?
Don't worry about that.
No.
i know but you get my point though one in the same way you know like copilot is basically fancy autocomplete and i think we can look like this is basically like fancy bucket fill fair well but the difference is whether not to go off on a tangent on copilot uh bucket fill to determine whether it has done its job adequately you look at it and go is it okay for what i want it to be fine
code not quite that easy because if we could look at code and figure and know whether it was doing what we intended it we wouldn't have to use copilot so copilot will generate some code does the code do what you wanted to do why don't you look at it and tell me that's turns out to be really really hard to do so i don't think uh we have because you know in the end you can use ai art things to full stop substitute for a thing that a person could do uh but copilot
you you need a human to look at that before you check it into the air traffic control system let's say like you know maybe for a game you can get away with it or something or non-information critical but a copilot has no idea what it's doing even more so than a person so we need people to look at it and to check that what same way that when you use autocomplete but john wouldn't your unit test catch any problem yeah if if you autocomplete and oh can it write my unit test for me
you wish maybe it probably can but are the unit tests right like in the same way when you do auto completing you think you're auto completing ns string but it auto completes what was the thing that used to do like ns set or whatever before xcode no it was it was much less common like like um ns scanner or something like that yeah whatever came first alphabetically if you don't notice that's what came out of autocomplete guess what your program's not going to work you always have to look at the code that is not like it's a help it's like you know content aware fill to really help you especially on programming interviews you should say can i use copilot great now i'm going to reverse this red black tree for you
uh but yeah you gotta you gotta check its work but for the ai things the checking of the work is much simpler you look at it and you decide am i happy with what it has made yeah yeah i just i i fear and feel for artists that you know maybe wouldn't be able to make a living as artists anymore but i agree with what you were saying that that's quite a ways in the future and we're nowhere near there yet and
Eventually, the only thing that's inevitable is change.
If you're a developer that's getting your job usurped by artificial intelligence, then you're going to have to find a new way to make money.
And same thing with an artist.
But I don't know.
My initial reaction was, get off my lawn.
This is barbaric.
We can't take from real and true artists.
But
I worry that as I get older, that's my natural reaction is to just yell, get off my lawn.
And so I'm trying very desperately to fight that.
And I think having this tool available, especially to people like me, who I have no artistic ability whatsoever, I think it's exciting and I think it's very fascinating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
uh content aware fill powered by this type of thing gets even better uh it's a tool that artists will use and the mundane tasks that artists do for example um the example from my childhood uh painting cells in disney animation like coloring in like the people's dresses and making the sky blue and the grass green and everything
That used to be a job where you would paint to fill those regions because how else are you going to make something filled with the color green if you don't fill it with the color green?
Computers made that real easy.
You just click the bucket tool and look, it just filled the whole area with green.
That put all the people who are painting those cells out of a job.
You're like, oh, they were just doing a mundane task.
That was incredibly skilled work.
It's only mundane for the computer to do it because very often the strengths of computers are the exact opposite of the strengths and weaknesses of humans.
a computer finds it really easy to fill a region especially if that region is correctly contained with a solid color whereas a human has to carefully control a brush and you know and so the you would say the person doing that work is incredibly skilled and the computer doing that work is as dumb as rocks and that often is the case but it doesn't change the fact that they're out of work because now the computer just does the fill on all that stuff and
Same thing for hand-drawn animation in the age of 3D animation.
Doing 3D animation is incredibly difficult.
They're incredibly skilled artists that do that.
They have to have all the skills of traditional artists on top of computer skills.
But if you are a 2D artist and you don't know how to use computers and don't care to learn, you've got a problem.
In fact, if you watch the Disney Plus, on Disney Plus, there's an ILM documentary.
What is it called?
I don't know.
Just go to Disney Plus and search for ILM.
And part of that documentary is seeing what the advent of computer technology did to Industrial Light and Magic, to the people who were there, like the model makers and the creature shop people or whatever.
Like, if technology comes slow enough, people die and retire, and then the new generation does the new tech.
But if it comes fast enough, people actually end up getting booted out of their jobs or have to learn new skills.
And that's just...
part of the world but i think mostly this stuff at the rate even at the rate it's developing people like oh it's going so fast by next week you'll be able to make a feature-length movie by just writing a phrase like no you won't because to get to casey's early or a later point um you like the fact that you don't have artistic skill but you can just ask this thing to make uh you know a picture and
Now I'm going to sort of show the counterpoint to my earlier point about it's easier to tell whether you're happy with the picture than to tell whether the code copilot generated does what you wanted it to do.
Part of making that decision, so let's say I have no artistic taste, but now I can just make it make the image for you.
if you have no artistic taste and no artistic skill, your ability to judge whether what it generated is good or not is also impaired.
Right there.
So like, you know, yes, being able to do it as one skill, but also having the taste to know this is the good icon with the gears versus this is the bad icon for the gears is itself an artistic skill.
And just because a computer made you 50 of them and you get to pick one, the picking of the one is the skill, which is why you need artists to use these tools, right?
Yeah.
i content aware phil is available on all our copies of photoshop and yet if we use photoshop we can't do what a great artist can do with photoshop because we're not great photoshop artists right and i think picking you know like look at anything anything that requires any kind of you know taste like even if you're presented with a thousand options if you don't know which one is actually better or the one you pick is not the one that the world thinks is good and you know for reasons that you don't you don't understand why it's not pleasing but you don't like any of them or the one you think is awesome everyone else thinks is ugly
Like there's there's always a place for that, because, again, the the things that are generating this have no awareness of anything.
They're just being led by us.
And so like any tool, the result is going to be heavily informed by the person using the tool, even if the using of the tool is just pointing to a grid of pictures and saying, I like that one.
And even if you repeat that process a thousand times, give me, give me 50 more, give me 50 more, give me 50 more and just keep pointing to the ones that you like.
If you have bad taste, you will end up with a bad icon at the end of it, no matter what.
There's not, no computer is going to save you.
So, uh, you know, and, and that gets back to like, what is it, what is it that makes good taste?
Like, can, is this, is this, are all the computers doing what we do?
Um, and I have to say that, you know, like most things in AI, the answer is no until they, until their experience of their existence is,
is something close to what our experience is, which would allow them to learn things and have memories and experience life the same way we do.
Something that doesn't do that will never be able to create or judge art in the same way that we do.
So we will always be a necessary ingredient in that stew.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP, and let's start with Philip, who writes, I recently got a MacBook, and I'm struggling to build a solid mental model for window management on macOS.
I've been using Linux with a tiling window manager, and things felt simpler.
I'm not trying to replicate this setup and want to learn the quote-unquote Mac way, but I can't seem to grok it.
I'm not sure which features I should be using between mission control, spaces, application switcher, hide, minimize, full screen with tiling, hot corners, etc.,
And I often end up with a lot of window clutter where I can't even seem to find the one window I need.
Can you refer to a primer on macOS window management?
How do you think about and organize your applications in Windows?
I've listened to the Windows of Syracuse County, but can't tell if John is messing about.
No, he was not messing about, which is why Marco and I still, five, six, seven years later, are gobsmacked by that episode.
I think that's episode 96, if I'm not mistaken.
that like half hour, 45 minute segment of ATP might to this day be my favorite part or favorite segment we've ever done on ATP because we didn't know it was coming.
And I don't want to speak for Marco, but I'm gonna speak for Marco and saying it was flabbergasting, like just stupefying the, the absolute bananas way in which John Syracuse manages his 7 trillion windows.
And yet what have you learned since then?
Nothing.
Have you amended your ways?
No, you have not.
No, because I'm not a monster that keeps 85 billion windows open.
You're just a little baby.
Right.
Exactly.
So getting to Philip's question, what is the Mac way to manage your Windows?
I think you two at this point are better equipped than me to answer this because I think the answer is just do a Windows people do.
Zoom everything to full screen because you have no freaking idea how to deal with Windows.
No.
No.
No, no, no, no.
the great thing about mac os window management is that mac os 10 started out trying to get people who used mac os 9 and earlier to like it i don't know about that i feel like it did the opposite i didn't say it succeeded it's i'm not sure it really even tried but i get what you're saying there was there was some acknowledgement that there was something that existed before the mac but it was a grudging acknowledgement yeah
Right.
So anyway, as it went on, it later took a larger role in trying to get Windows people to like it.
And then later on, it took a larger role in trying to get iOS people to like it.
And now it's in this weird mishmash where they're trying to move it forward with iOS and the iPad somehow.
And so the result of all of this...
is that there are a million different ways to manage Windows on macOS.
It basically ended up with this mishmash where it kind of supports all of these different things you might want to do.
So what I would recommend is basically play with different options and just see what works for you.
Now, I can tell you what I do, you know, because I was a Windows person until 2004-ish.
I began a two-year transition to Mac full-time at that point.
But anyway, what I do, first of all, you know, hide versus minimize.
You want to hide.
Command H is your new best friend.
As a new person on Mac, you're going to want all the keyboard shortcuts to make stuff easier.
And Command H is going to be one of the things you use the most up there with Command Q for quit.
I almost never hide Windows.
Almost.
Oh, no.
Well, anyway, it might be new to you, the fact that, you know, on the Mac, an app can have no windows but still be running.
So when you're done with an app, Command-Q.
If you want to close a window or tab, Command-W.
And then Command-H for hide.
These are things.
Other, you know, Windows has Alt-Tab.
We have Command-Tab.
It's in the same position on the keyboard, even.
We also have, since, you know, Alt-Tab and Windows go between different windows, you know, all...
individually on the Mac command tab goes through apps much to John's chagrin in certain cases the way it does this but it goes through apps and then command tilde the button right above the tab key on the US keyboard at least goes between different windows of the app you're currently in so again
These are kind of like, you know, training wheels and getting into Mac window management from other systems, most likely Windows.
So those, I think, are the main entry points.
And then, you know, whether you, like, maximize to full screen, like John just accused Casey of, which macOS makes kind of difficult, whether you even use full screen mode or just make Windows big.
that's up to you i on those things i i make windows big when they need to be but not when they don't i don't use full screen mode on anything because it sucks in many other ways um so and then you know spaces well that's virtual desktops every windowing system has that if you use spaces on in your previous systems you might need it here you might not it's up to you you could try it feel free no one's going to bother you um
The things like Mission Control or what used to be called Expose where you kind of like zoom all the windows out at once and do stuff with them.
I don't really do that.
I used to when it was Expose back in the early days.
I don't really do that now.
The one thing that I do a lot is the F11 to show desktop where you hit F11 or whatever the desktop key is on the Apple keyboard and it shoves all the windows out to the sides and exposes the desktop where I keep, yes, files I'm working on.
uh that's a whole thing i do it everyone does it who cares um so i oftentimes will like zoom all the windows out grab a file on the desktop hit f11 again to bring all the windows back in and then drop that file onto something i'm working on onto a window of an app or whatever
Marco, you're showing your keyboard preferences here because F11 isn't what you're describing.
It's volume down.
It is when you're using a non-Apple keyboard.
Yes, but for everyone else in the world that uses a Mac, it's volume down.
I understand what you're going for, but your preference for keyboards is coming through here.
Yeah, well, anyway.
So basically, that's the basics that I like to do.
But whether you use all this stuff like the mission control and all this stuff, it's really personal preference.
And again, because of the history of macOS and the jumbled design leadership it has had over time and the very different targets it has tried to attract people from over time...
It kind of offers all of these things.
And now we're even going to have stage manager if it ships in Ventura.
And that's that's its own whole other thing that, frankly, I don't think is working very well so far.
But that's that's its own thing.
Try it out.
See what works for you.
If you ask any two Mac users, you're going to get two different answers because there are so many methods.
And Mac users are largely, at least we used to be, power users.
And so everyone has their own certain workflows and quirks and habits and preferences.
And they're all going to be a little bit different because there are so many different ways to do it.
I don't think either of you is necessarily wrong, but I think you've gone directly into the deep end, and I think we need to back up a bit.
So coming from Windows, I have used Linux, but it's been a long time.
Coming from Windows, I think the most startling thing about using the Mac is what you had made brief mention of earlier, Marco, is that you can have an application that is running
even though it does not have not a single window open.
This is very different than Microsoft Windows, or at least the last I used it 10 years ago, where if you close the final window of Outlook for the sake of discussion, you're suddenly not going to get any new email.
Again, this may not be true anymore, it doesn't matter, but that's the way it used to be.
If you close the last Outlook window, you're not getting email anymore.
If you just close...
not even necessarily hide, close the last mail window, the mail app is still open.
And this isn't universally true, which has gotten even squishier over time.
But generally speaking, that's true.
If you close the last window, that does not necessarily mean that the app is quit.
The app could still be running.
And mail is a quintessential example of this.
Or Safari, if you don't have any tabs open, for example.
They're still running.
So what I would say, and I think what Marco got right, is get used to the keyboard, because the keyboard is your friend for doing windowing things on macOS.
You don't have to do it.
You don't have to touch the keyboard at all.
But it is your friend.
So...
When you're done looking at something, Command-W closes that thing, be it a tab or a window.
Generally speaking, you're not quitting the app, usually.
Even if you close the last window, you're just closing that window.
So as an example, if I'm looking at my mail using the standard Mac OS Mail app,
After I'm done reading and responding to mail, I command W. That closes mail, but it does not quit mail.
It leaves it running to get new mail if new mail comes in.
If I want to play ignorant and don't want to get new mail, then I command Q for quit.
And that will quit mail such that I don't receive new mail.
So the whole close versus quit thing, close being Command-W, quit being Command-Q, that is something to get used to.
And similarly, if you look at the stoplights in the upper left, the red stoplight is not quit, it is close.
So you are closing an entire window.
Maybe that is a window with a bunch of tabs in it, maybe it's just a single window like in mail, but you're closing it, you're not quitting it.
And there is an option buried somewhere in system preferences, I forget where, that you can have like little light bulbs that show under the app icon in the dock to indicate what is actually running, which is the things that have a little light bulb.
They aren't light bulbs anymore.
They used to be.
Whatever they are.
Now they're just dots.
You're right.
You're right.
But now I'm showing my age.
And also macOS lies about that.
It's way more complicated than anything.
yeah you're right you're right but i'm i'm trying to do a i'm trying to ease into the shallow end here yeah the problem the problem with what we're saying here is like like everything that casey just said has a bunch of asterisks on it now again through the course of like history and different goals and different efforts you're
right you're right overall like your overall theme is right but it is i think it's part of the reason like it's a little bit frustrating that the mac is is not as simple as it once was because there's been all these different like ideas and directions and then band-aids over bad designs like over time
I mean, but the thing is, like, what you're – first of all, Casey, you're going off on a tangent here, which is basically about process management versus window management, and I see how they're somewhat related.
Well, they're interrelated.
Kind of.
But, like, detecting the details that we know about for, like, you know –
I think I had a big paragraph on it in one of the Mac OS 10 reviews that basically you can have applications with no windows that are running applications of the windows that aren't running applications for the dot under the dock that aren't running applications without appearing in the dock that are running like every combination of things that you think shouldn't be possible are possible.
But that's just what we know from a technical perspective.
What's important is the user model, the mental model.
You're not supposed to know that an application in the doc that has a dot under it might not actually be running.
Because the OS is working to provide the illusion that if it's got a dot, it's running.
And it does everything it can to make that illusion true.
So for example, if the OS has quit an app,
but left the dot under it in the dock.
It did that because the app supports whatever the hell the thing is called, where when you click it again, behind the scenes, it relaunches it for you and lets it auto restore the state.
So to you, it just looks like it just brought that app to the front, which is what it would do if it was running, but it didn't, it actually relaunched it, right?
And by the same token, sometimes when you quit an app, the OS has the option to go, yeah, I'm not actually going to quit it.
I'm actually going to keep it running.
So if you quit an app and the dot disappears from it in the dock and then you click that icon in the dock again, you're like, wow, that launched really fast.
You know why?
Because the OS didn't freaking quit it.
And that only happens in cases where the application supports whatever API that Apple introduced in macOS 10.7.
You know, like, read my macOS 10 reviews to see all this insanity.
I'm not sure how much of it is still in play.
But the point is, those details don't matter.
Because if that happens behind the scenes...
It's meant to provide the illusion that the model is dot means running, no dot means not running.
And what does running mean versus not running mean?
Well, running means that if you bring it to the front, it looks like it did when you saw it before, like it preserves state in the window, it remembers your selection or whatever.
And for apps to support, to correctly support those APIs, that's what it's supposed to do.
So you shouldn't be able to tell that it's not running and it relaunched.
Because from your perspective, it looks exactly the same as if it already was running.
How successful are individual applications in those APIs in achieving that?
Debatable, right?
But that's the goal of those APIs.
So I think what people need to understand is what is the supposed mental model?
What is the abstraction?
How is the OS trying to tell me that it works?
And then there's all the cases where that abstraction falls apart.
It's like, oh, it's...
It kind of seems like that app wasn't running because even though it had the dot under it, when I clicked on it and I saw the window again, it didn't look like I last left it.
Why is that?
Oh, actually it relaunched and that app doesn't support state restoration for that one particular thing and blah, blah, blah.
It gets super complicated really fast.
But it's the same thing on iOS where we complain that people are going to the application switcher and flicking up what are essentially images of applications that haven't been running for three weeks, right?
Because they think they're quote unquote quitting the apps, right?
it provides the illusion that these are all the apps that are running but they're not all running like this just 500 pictures how could they all be running they're not it's just it's just literally an image of what that thing looked like the last time it was running right and so that's the illusion it's trying to provide but that illusion is not true and that only matters when you care about the technical nuances or when you become an obsessive you know force quitter because you think you're doing something and all you're really doing is removing a bunch of images which
which in itself may be a goal that you want to achieve.
So go for it.
But anyway, I don't want to get into that debate again.
So I think worrying about the nuances here are not as important as just getting what the supposed mental model is.
Because if you get the supposed mental model that you just described, Casey, then it's easier to explain the exceptions.
And unfortunately, as you both noted, one of the exceptions is there are a certain class of application that when you close their last window, they quit themselves.
how do i know what those applications are and why do they do that there's a rationale but really it's kind of like oh these are the exceptions and kind of here's why and it does it's not satisfying to hear the explanation but eventually you just learn the ones that do that i mean it makes some sense for like calculator because it's just got one window and when you close it it used to be a desk accessory what's a desk accessory we got to go into super old man mode to learn about that but like
there are reasons but mostly they're not super satisfying but there is a a mental consistency you can say well if it's just one window like why should i have to quit calculator when i close the last cat when i close calculator with the red button just make the whole calculator app quit and lo and behold it does and that makes sense to people and they understand it but that is an exception to the general mental model of when you close the last word window word doesn't quit
But then there was the whole thing where Apple wanted every app to quit every time you closed the last window because it wasn't running anymore.
So they made text edit to it.
They made preview do it.
And it drives me these bananas.
Right.
But you can have those discussions.
But I feel like those are all kind of like things that are exceptions from the norm.
But you do have to understand the norm first.
And that does tie into winter management a little bit.
And that you're like, where did my windows go?
Where did my application go?
Where does this doc do?
And stuff like that.
But, you know, at this point, as you both noted, since Mac users kind of do their own thing, like there are so many different options, someone out there uses every one of these features.
Probably no one uses all of them, but everybody uses their own little slice.
So if you were to remove one of those slices...
Some subset of people would be sad, which is kind of how you end up with the mishmash we have now, where there's every feature that they've ever thought of adding.
Actually, minus the old version of Spaces, which I know a lot of people liked, but then went away.
The one where it used to be like in a 2D grid.
Do you remember that?
I don't.
No.
Spaces used to be like up, down, left, right, instead of just being horizontal thing.
And the people who like that were probably sad when it went away.
but not to say that apple won't get rid of them eventually but for now part of the reason there's a million features is because someone somewhere uses all of them so uh when you're trying to to decide how you want to use windows keep in mind that if you are unlucky the way you decide to manage windows may go away in 10 years or something but hey that's technology for you that's true of any os on any system you know just think about what your car is gonna look like in 10 years so
Be aware of that.
But the question here of can you point to me like something I can read that tells me how I should do window management, that doesn't exist because there's too much diversity.
There are too many different ways to do it.
If I had to categorize the major ways, I would say there's one major one, which is people on laptops with small screens
They full screen things because the screen space is small and they use a three finger swipe on a trackpad because I think a lot of people find that pleasing to flick between them.
That is one absolutely very big major mode of operation.
Full screen, almost everything, swipe back and forth with three fingers.
I see tons of people doing it on laptops.
My children do it on laptops, and I did not train them to do it.
This is the thing that lots of people derive of their own accord, having seen the features.
I never showed them this.
I never explained these features.
They find them on their own, and they find them pleasing, and they say, that's how I'm going to do things.
So that's one.
another one the one that i'm familiar with is probably exceedingly rare at this point uh but it is the old school one where you have individual windows that you arrange yourself almost nobody does that but it is like the og version because old versions of mac os had no tools to do anything else there was there was there was no expose there was no dock there was no window snapping there was no nothing there wasn't wasn't even third-party tools that so that is a super og way to do it but the people who do that are all like me and we're all going to die and then
uh you know no one will know how to manage windows anymore uh and if there's a third way that i'm not thinking of i'm not sure what it would be but it's probably some probably more like what marco does because if you have a giant monitor like full screen stuff is just super dumb not that people don't do it but it's super super dumb because you cannot read lines of text that are that long uh and most web pages don't expand to that size anyway
web pages look hilarious when you maximize them on a big screen these days because now they're all designed for mobile even so it's like it's even worse than it used to be yeah so there there probably is some hybrid version in there uh my my quick tips would be so marco's thing of hiding the desktop i mentioned this on several shows i think it's the the annual time for me to bring this up again uh make a hot corner for show desktop
So then you can jam your cursor into the corner, grab a file from the desktop, jam your cursor into the corner again while still holding the file to have everything come back.
I find that faster than hitting whatever the hell the keyboard.
I literally don't even know the keyboard key that does this because I use the hot corners.
Show desktop hot corner.
Do not configure this on someone's computer that you don't use because they will inevitably accidentally hit that corner and have no idea what happened and they will yell at you.
But on your own computer where you understand how hot corners work, so awesome.
That's my one tip.
The other one, again, I'm not a keyboard person, hiding.
Hiding is your friend.
In almost every scenario, especially if you use my little Mac utility thing, but in almost every other scenario, if you option click away from a window, the window you were previously in will hide as you leave it.
That is a Mac convention from back in the day.
Lots of like, do an operation.
but hold down option as you leave the thing you're leaving or the app you're leaving or whatever will hide itself as you depart because you held down option that is a fast way to combine two operations which is i want to go someplace different and by the way the place where i was i want it to disappear i'm done with this guy
Yeah, it's not being closed.
It's not being quit.
You're just hiding it.
That concept of hiding windows, they're still open.
They're still there, but you just can't see them is essential.
And there's lots of ways to do that.
But for, again, maybe being an old school Mac user, using the option key to option click away from something is a big one.
And the final one I'll give you is
You can interact with windows when they are not the front most window.
That is more of a fancy advanced thing.
But if you want to play with that, especially if you're an actual window arranger, it can come in handy.
If you hold down the command key and grab a window in the background, you can move it and do stuff to it and not bring it to the front.
Usually you can also interact with it.
Like if a finder window is in the background, you want to collapse or expand a folder in a list view.
You can do that without bringing the window to the front by holding down the command key.
Obviously my...
My mode of using my Mac is one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard.
My hand that's on the keyboard is using modifiers like option and command and whatever.
When I click through things, it tends not to be hitting command H or stuff like that, but it could if I wanted to.
But like those are my tips to see if that way of operation works for you.
But if you're just looking for the path of least resistance and you have a laptop, try full screening everything in three three or swiping between it.
I think it's massively inefficient and it grinds my teeth every time I see somebody do it, but people love it.
So maybe you'll love it too.
Give it a try.
Philip, I'm so sorry for these piss poor answers.
And I was trying to give you an easy solution, an easy walkthrough, and I was interrupted and now I give up.
So let's move on.
Because you got too tight up in process management.
Oh my God.
Dan Lear writes, if you're all independent, I'm so mad at you.
You're all independent app developers now with no employer mandated processes or tools.
How do you plan and track your app work?
I used simple checklists for years and moved to GitHub issues, milestones, and PRs.
What works for you folks?
For me, GitHub issues, milestones, and PRs.
Good talk.
marco i have a notes document oh my god this is the most marco answer ever you're useless john no because like i i used to i i mean a while ago i i tried using fog bugs i tried using bugzilla a lot like i tried i mean over the years like i've done a few few things that like oh quote everyone does i never i never went to github issues because by the time that really was a thing i was just working for myself and for the most part and uh
And I just moved to text files.
I tried doing it in OmniFocus.
I tried doing it in Things.
I did it in Task Paper for a while, which is just kind of a fancy text file editor.
And now I just do it in Apple Notes.
And for my purposes, it's fine.
The limitation on how much I can get done and on how good my app can be and on what features I make and on what bugs I fix is not how I'm tracking them.
I have many other limitations that bottleneck all those factors, but my task management system is nowhere near the top of that list.
John?
Last show, it kind of reminds me of the question we talked about last show, and last show I said how I was relieved as an independent developer not to have to do
all of the many complicated things and systems having to do with issue tracking and branching and everything like that uh in my in my private uh life i don't have to do that so i don't and so my answer is i have a notes document literally it's literally in apple notes
It's a good system for one person.
I mean, I don't need anything more than that.
It's not even a big notes document.
No.
Mine is pretty short.
Mine is maybe 20, 30 lines.
I can tell a long time ago, I forget when exactly this was, but a long time ago, the Basecamp people, back when it was called 37Signals, made a blog post about how they deal with feature requests.
Forgive me if I'm mis-paraphrasing it, but the gist of it was basically,
We don't really keep track of them in a formal way because things that are really worth doing, you're going to just keep hearing about over and over again from people.
And so you won't need to be writing them down.
You'll just keep hearing it.
That's how I treat most feature requests and goals, like long-term goals for the app.
If something is worth doing, I don't have the time or the will, frankly, to do everything people ask for because some of what people ask for would be a terrible idea or isn't really possible to do well or things like that.
But things that are good ideas...
they keep coming up over and over again.
So yeah, I have some general goals and everything, but I don't need to be writing down every single little thing.
Bugs that happen, if it's like some obscure thing I can't get to right now, I'll write it down, sure.
But if it's something I can just fix now, I'll just fix it now.
For the most part, anything that I do that's like longer term planning than a month or two,
it doesn't end up panning out in a way that makes me go to those plans.
So, for instance, if I say right now, you know what?
Next spring, I want to redo the sync engine in CloudKit.
God, would I love to do that.
But anyway, maybe I might do it sooner than that.
But server stuff's going great, guys.
So, anyway, next spring, I want to do this.
Okay, well, what happens between now and next spring?
Well, we have six months of...
the environment that you're operating in changing.
You know, I had to spend a good amount of the last few days figuring out server-side crawling errors that end up being Cloudflare is blocking me in a lot of conditions.
And you know who hosts a bunch of websites behind their infrastructure?
Cloudflare.
Including, by the way, our website and my website.
Cool.
The entire landscape.
I just had to do in the beta channel, I had to do a feature where I'm kind of doing client-side crawling sometimes.
And if Cloudflare keeps giving me trouble with my crawling requests, then I'm going to have to implement client-side crawling for certain things.
And that is just a huge wrench in my plans.
right now like something is basically on fire that i have to go deal with that's going to take me a certain amount of time and then when i put that fire out maybe something else happens maybe apple releases a point to ios that breaks my audio handling and i have to do something different or maybe they release like a brand new home pod this fall that uses airplay 3 and i have to you know suddenly there's a pretty pretty big reason for me to like update something else to use that or maybe
You know, just something else might change between now and the spring when I plan to have this other milestone thing done.
Well, okay, so eventually, all these fires, eventually I've put them out and I'm ready to go look at my to-do list.
And I see this thing that I said I wanted to do for, you know, for the version that was going to come out by that point months ago.
Now, I don't even want to do that anymore because that whole idea was irrelevant and now they moved on to server kit and now I need to go run server kit or run Swift on the server or whatever.
So planning very far ahead for somebody like me who's just one person working on an app and kind of doing what I want to it and not doing what I don't want to it.
Any kind of very structured, longer-term planning tends to just not happen over time.
Or by the time the time comes that you have to do X, Y, Z, you look at it and you're like, this is what I wanted six months ago, but this doesn't make sense for me now, or my opinion is different, or my priorities are different, or the environment is different, or something.
So that's why it's a short notes document.
Let me just state for the record that while Marco has fully admitted he is unemployable and has for many years, apparently John is too.
I, for one, still believe in process and rules and things like that.
I can still have a job.
John and Marco are useless.
I believe in it, and I used it for years.
I mean, the last thing I used before I left my job was Jira.
Like, I know the tools.
Oh, God.
That's a bad thing.
I am very, very familiar with all the tools and the way it's done, but it is a relief to me not to have to use them.
Jira's.
I have to say it also helps that my apps are very small and simple.
It's a notes document.
The bugs go there when I have a bug report, and there are very few of those because it's not a complicated application.
My feature requests that people send me go into the notes document, and my own things that I want to do go into the notes document.
It's prioritized with the important stuff at the top.
That's my system.
It's a great system.
I hate this.
David Comey writes, given John is a new TV and clearly has a number of input sources connected, what advice beyond his past blog posts would he suggest in 2022 about settings for color, etc.?
In particular, we have an Apple TV 4K and are curious about the match content options in the late tvOS and what's best to be set or unset.
on both ends of the HDMI cable.
And this, to my eyes anyway, relates to a different question, but very similar from Jeff Nachbar, who writes, I'm interested in John's thoughts about color calibration, especially in light of his new TV.
Does he just play with color picture settings to find what he likes?
Does he believe in professional color calibration, the equipment to measure color accuracy in that whole world?
Does QD OLED differ from other technologies in terms of calibration needs?
Are they more accurate?
Tell us, John, what's the story?
So the answer was simpler back before I had my fancy new TV, because my old TV was standard definition, and there were available tools, even some of them on the App Store, that you could use to calibrate your standard definition.
Well, slow down.
It was 1080, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Okay, that's not standard.
You're right.
So it's not standard.
Sorry.
Non-4K, but SDR.
Yeah.
So a high-def SDR, not 4K.
Yeah.
God, I'm making it worse now.
Now I'm U2.
I'm making it worse.
Standard dynamic range, not high dynamic range.
And standard HD, not UHD.
Right, yes, that.
Not 4K TV.
Yes, that.
No, you have it.
The most important thing, I think, is that it wasn't HDR, right?
Because the calibration, you know, the THX tune-up calibration tool, which is so far out of date, I'm amazed if we run on modern devices, but it would let you calibrate your...
non-hdr television the 4k thing is less of an issue but like especially when you're doing color stuff like and it was more necessary back in the day because it wasn't as common as it is now to get a television that would have some kind of accurate color preset now
Filmmaker mode that we've talked about in the past, it's all cap.
Filmmaker mode is a thing that the industry agreed upon to have one preset on your television that tries to actually be accurate.
If your television has filmmaker mode, use it because that is the mode that is saying, don't mess with the picture, show it to the best of your ability the way it is supposed to be, right?
My problem with my new setup is I am unaware of any economically, of any inexpensive way to calibrate my fancy new TV.
I looked into this and, you know, there's Calman software and there's hardware devices you can buy.
And yes, you can use that to calibrate your fancy new TV.
But that equipment costs so much money.
It's priced for like professional calibrators.
Like I think it might cost more than my television to get all that stuff.
And it's like, no, no, thanks.
Right.
If you care about calibration that much, you can hire someone to do it.
But they're expensive, and I've never done that, so I have no idea how to find a good one.
But the good news is that if you buy a fancy-ish TV from, like, towards the higher end, most of them come with one or more presets that out of the box will be, you know, kind of like Apple's monitors are calibrated at the factory and out of the box have, you know, good calibration.
There will be one or two presets on your television that have pretty good calibration.
It's one of the tests that TV reviewers do.
They say, out of the box, here's how this television looked in terms of accuracy, right?
And some of them out of the box are really, really, really accurate.
They will then go on and professionally calibrate it with their thousands of dollars worth of tools.
And you can see the difference between the out of the box filmmaker mode calibration and what they did to correct the calibration.
It's better after they calibrate it, but the differences are often not perceptible, right?
Yeah.
Um, and so that, that lets you know that the best strategy is when you get your television, put it in filmmaker mode, or if you have a Sony television and they don't support filmmaker mode, put it in the custom preset.
I know the names are stupid, but at least on my television, there's a bunch of presets, all of which you want to avoid forever and ever because they screw with the picture.
The one you want is what they call custom.
And Jeff's question of like, do you just play with the settings until they look like you like?
No, do not do that because you have no way to know.
Like if you're not calibrating with like a known input source, it's not like you can put in your favorite movie and make adjustments until it looks pleasing to you because you don't know what that picture is supposed to look like.
What things are overexposed?
What things are underexposed?
What should I be able to see in the shadows?
How light should the entire image be?
You don't know the answers to that question because you have no source of reference.
You don't have a $30,000 reference monitor that you can compare it to with your eyeballs and you don't have any equipment that knows what it's supposed to look like.
That's what that calibration software and hardware does.
It knows this should look like that based on this input.
It generates signals and images and then it measures them and it dials it in so it looks like that.
In fact, a lot of televisions...
it's a shame that equipment is so expensive because most of the fancy new televisions have an auto calibration mode where if you hook up that very expensive equipment to a very expensive piece of software on your laptop you just basically push a button and it will calibrate itself over the course of a very long period of time you don't even need a you know a human calibrator to hand tweak everything and if you hire a human calibrator they will just probably use your television's auto calibration mode that works with the calman software and the whatever you know image thing they stick to your tv but
I mean, I'm not doing that because the equipment is too expensive and I'm also not even willing to pay for someone to calibrate because I don't know anyone reputable.
And if I was going to pay the amount of money that that would cost to do, I would want it to be someone who is reputable.
So my advice is you still make a mode or if you don't have it and you have a Sony television, use the custom preset.
Uh, and you're probably ahead of the game.
And then, you know, it within starting from there, if you really want to turn on motion smoothing or do other things that you find pleasing, feel free to screw up the picture in a way that you want.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Linode.
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
You can join atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
Tech podcast.
So long.
You didn't need to move on to the next segment.
You could have then just given us your, here's my simple answer to window management.
Now I'm dying to hear it because I don't think there is one.
No, no, because you're going to pick it apart like you did earlier.
No, it's a secret.
I didn't pick it apart.
I was trying to guide you back to the path.
But anyway, what is your solution to window management?
It seems like you know one.
No, I don't, really.
It's just you two were so interested in talking about the asterisks while not talking about them and telling about the history while not telling about the history.
We're totally muddying the waters for the person who is a self-professed novice.
And good on you, Philip, for saying, hey, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Somebody help me.
Apparently, us three knuckleheads are not the people to help you, but at least one of us was trying.
Okay, so here's the thing.
All snark aside, I think it's important.
I understand what you're saying about the process management thing.
And I understand that you're right, that yes, that is more what I was talking about is more about process than window.
But to me, coming from Windows, the operating system, that was a real like sea change to think of, oh, I can close the mail window and still receive email.
That was a very weird thing for me to grok.
And I think if you go way, way back, we brought this up.
So I've brought this up several times on the show.
Um, there was that conversation that Marco and I, that Marco and I had via Tumblr and I don't know, like late 2007, 2008, something like that, where he was publicly convincing me to get a Mac and I was publicly calling him a fan boy who has too much money.
And so, and look who was right about that one, but, uh, because it was, it was not me for the record, but anyways, um,
I think one of these things that I discovered as I was learning how to use my Polybook, my Polycarbonate MacBook, was, oh, I can close the mail window and I can still receive mail.
And that very wildly changed my mental model of how windows work.
Because just because a thing is closed...
doesn't by necessity mean it is not running.
And so I think that's an important thing to understand.
And similarly, for me, I don't really ever hide windows.
I'm not going to sit here.
I will snark and say, you're wrong.
But in all genuine, I don't actually think that that's wrong.
It's just not the way I do it.
Generally speaking, I will minimize, and maybe that's not the rightest answer, but that's what I do.
And if I don't minimize, I'll close.
So when I'm done with a mail window, I'll close it.
If I'm done with a browser window, I will either minimize it if it has tabs that I would like to remain open, or if I'm on the last tab, I'll just close it.
And I think it's, again, it's important to understand at least a little bit about the process behind this or the process management behind this.
And what I think Marco said at first, and John, you reiterated, and you're both incredibly right.
Everything I'm saying has like 85 trillion asterisks.
We're an asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger, triple dagger.
Like there's so many wells.
There's so many of those.
That you're absolutely right.
And as much as I gave you a hard time during the show, you are right.
But if we're just trying to give a broad overview of window management, I think we need a foundation from which to start.
And that's what I was trying to establish.
And so what I would say, other than understanding the difference between closing and quitting...
I personally almost never use the stoplight or whatever you call it in the upper left.
I will use it for minimizing, but when I close the window, I either command W or command Q. Sometimes I'll minimize with command M. Not always, but sometimes.
And Alt-Tab or Command... See, now I'm a Windows user again.
Command-Tab.
When you do that, not only can you Command-Tab just one time and see this list, but you can hit Tab again and again and again to keep going, which I think is on Windows as well.
And what I don't know, maybe it's on Windows now, but it wasn't, I don't think, at the time, is if you take your mouse...
and start wiggling your mouse through there, you can control, as long as you continue to hold command, you can mouse your way to the icon you want.
And you can Command-Tab over and over again, or Command-Shift-Tab to go backwards.
There's so much that you can do.
I'm snarking a little bit, but I mean it.
There's so much you can do with the keyboard in concert with the mouse.
And that's why I'm glad, John, you said that the way you use your Mac is your left or whatever, hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse.
Because I completely agree that that's how I use the Mac.
I also would completely agree with you that you should set up hot corners, which is in the oh-so-logical place in system preferences, desktop and screensaver.
And it's a little button at the bottom.
Where the hell is it in Ventura?
Nobody knows.
Use the search.
Nobody knows.
No, that's true.
I didn't even think about Ventura.
It makes no sense where it is right now, but you go into system preferences, desktop and screensaver, bottom right is hot corners.
The way I happen to have it set up is mission control in the upper left.
That's the thing where you see all of the different windows you have open.
So if I slam my mouse in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, I will see thumbnails of all my different windows.
Is it all Windows across all apps or all Windows in the current app?
All Windows across all apps.
It's Mission Control.
I forget what the other one is called.
There's a name for it, though.
Application Windows, maybe?
I forget.
I don't know.
But the idea is if I ever get lost in my own Windows situation, I just...
hurl my mouse into the upper left-hand corner, and suddenly I can see every single window that is currently open.
And I think that would be very helpful for Philip.
Now, maybe it's not the upper left, maybe it's upper right, lower left, doesn't matter.
But having a hot corner that is set to mission control so you can slam your mouse into the corner, whatever corner that may be, and see everything that's open, no matter how overlapped it was before, I think that's very useful and very powerful.
A quick tip on that.
Unfortunately, there's another asterisk, double dagger thing.
There are windows in macOS...
that appear not to have an owning application uh like maybe you'll get like a crash dialogue that gets popped up when you launch because bk agent has crashed again which is a thing that's happening to me i think has to do with ibook store um or they'll be like uh the window that is copying something in the finder and you don't know it's a finder window you just know you used to see a progress bar and you don't know where it is
If you lose a window... Oh, that's true.
That's true.
And you really just... I mean, it may be one of those windows that's hard to find the owning application, but maybe you just don't know the owning application.
You don't know that if you went to the finder, if you clicked on the finder in the dock and then click on the window menu, then you could find the copy.
If you just don't know that, that's when show me all the windows at the same time.
Because what you were... This is... The reason you'll be able to find that little finder progress bar window, even if you have no idea that the finder owns it, because you don't know what the hell the finder is because you came from Windows...
You do remember that it was skinny, that it was like a window that was not very wide and it was kind of like not very tall either, right?
It was a skinny little window.
You remember what it looked like.
And when you minimize the windows and shows all the windows, you'll be able to visually pick it out because there are very few other windows that are that shape.
like dimension wise it's not again it's not going to be like to scale exactly but like you'll be able to pick it out so that is one of that you know this may sound like hasty's telling you to do some fancy advanced user thing it's not this is actually a great i'm lost help me i can't find something press that it's like f3 on the keyboard or whatever the hell it is if you don't even have a hot corner just show me everything
Now, if you're like me, that button would show you a thing that would make both of these other people run away screaming.
But even for me, I can find the stupid little, you know, how is the, well, I know it's archive utility, but if I wanted to see the unzipping XIP of Xcode and I lost that window somehow and I forgot that it was archive utility, which is a green icon in your dock, even I can show all the windows at the same time and find out the little skinny window I'm looking for.
Right.
So I would put Mission Control on a hot corner.
I'm glad you reminded me because I don't do this on the keyboard.
But yes, F3 on an Apple keyboard by default is the same exact thing.
And we say F3 and it's like, how am I ever going to remember F3?
Look down at your Apple keyboard that came with your computer.
It looks like a bunch of little windows.
They put a little graphic on it.
This has changed over the years and sometimes they've changed the OS and it doesn't match your keys.
But if you have a modern Mac, the little pictures that they put over the function keys...
look like what they're supposed to be.
So the brightness keys have little sun pictures over them.
The F3 key has a bunch of little rectangles that are supposed to look like windows.
So you don't have to memorize this.
Just literally look down at your keyboard and look for the key that looks like it has a bunch of windows on it.
Yeah, the other thing I would say while we're still talking about hot corners, I forget which one of you said this.
I think it was John.
Put a desktop hot corner somewhere.
So to reiterate...
Let's say you're copying a file.
So you're in the finder.
You've clicked and dragged a file.
I don't care what file it is.
And you're like, ah, crap.
I don't know.
I just want this to appear on my desktop, but I don't have an easy way to get there or whatever the case may be.
Then you can drag your mouse all the way into whatever that hot corner may be.
For me, it's upper right.
It can be whatever.
Suddenly...
All of those windows disappear, sort of, kind of.
They're swept off to the side.
And now you've got a mostly clean view of your desktop where you can very easily just drop that file right on your desktop.
That is the same tip that I give every year.
I'll give it again.
If you grab, this combines both of our tips that you just said, Casey, if you grab a file and you want to drop it into a window in a particular application, and you're like, but it's not the desktop.
I've got the file, but now I want to go to a particular Safari window.
How do I do that?
Grab the file.
While you're still grabbing the file with your other hand that's on the keyboard, hit Command-Tab, and you can either Command-Tab over to Safari, or you can just drag your mouse with the file still in the cursor, right?
You can drag that onto Safari and hold it there for a second.
Safari will come to the front and then drag it onto the window within Safari that you want.
Because when you do that, all the Safari windows will come to the front.
And, you know, the moves like that that seem like they're complicated will become second nature once you realize that
Like you can do stuff in flight at the same time.
So like grab the file and then you have options.
You can invoke the command tab switcher while you've grabbed the file.
You can then drag the file over the application that you want until it highlights and then let go of the command key and the application will come to the front and then you can, you know, stuff like that seems like it's fancy.
But if you do it once or twice and it clicks with you, kind of like a three finger swiping, which seems like it's fancy, but so many people do it for the first time and that just burns into their brain and it becomes second nature.
So try it and see if you like it.
I would say that's one of the best things about switching to Mac is when you think, I wonder if this would work, and you just try something and it totally does work.
That's one of the greatest things.
When you first hit those moments, now that I have this thing under my mouse that I'm holding down, can I just move it over here and then show desktop and it won't lose it?
And sure enough, it's like, bam, oh my God, that just worked.
It just did it.
Like that's that's the kind of stuff that gets us all loving the Mac so much.
That's why we're all here, because it's full of little stuff like that.
And it's just wonderful.
That's also why it is difficult, rare, exhausting, exhilarating to be a good Mac app developer.
So even in my super dinky app, one of my apps is Switch Glass.
It just provides a little application switcher that shows icons for any applications.
I have a way to exclude applications if you don't want an application to ever appear in the switcher, right?
So there's a little exclude window that comes up and you add applications to the exclude window and they won't appear in the thing anymore.
But being a Mac user, my simple program that I'm trying to keep super simple, I'm like, all right, well, I've got a window on the screen that says exclude these apps.
I've got the app switcher sitting right over there.
And you have this sensation, which as a developer is both exhilarating and a syncing feeling, which is like,
I have to let people drag the applications from the app switcher palette into the exclude window, don't I?
Because it seems like it might work, right?
It seems like something that... Will that work?
And in the current version, it doesn't work.
But when I was doing 2.0, I had to admit to myself, that should probably work.
And so I had to make it work.
And you don't... If you're not a Mac user, sort of steeped in the history of the Mac or understanding that if someone thinks that it should probably work...
It should probably work.
Even if nobody's ever to do it.
The first person who says, I want to exclude an application, I don't want it.
Because the other way to do it is like you hit the plus button and then it opens an open save dialog and you have to navigate the open save dialog to find your application.
And you're like, the application is freaking running.
I see it there in the app switcher palette in this app.
Can I just drag it?
And the answer is in 2.0.
Yes, you can.
Because that's what a good Mac app does.
I mean, and people don't implement those because it's it's worked to implement that feature.
And like nobody's going to ever use it.
It's like it's a it's a silly frivolous feature.
But you can see the people who implemented the command tab switcher had all had those correct instincts.
And that's why if you think it will work with the command tab switcher or dragging in the finder expose, it probably will.
Yeah, and I want to reiterate what Marco said a minute ago, and the point you're making now, John, is that even if you think, no way that's going to work, just try it.
Just try it, because when it comes to just basic Mac and Finder and Windows within Mac functionality...
It oftentimes does work, which is bananas.
Something as silly as alt-tab, tab-tab-tab-tab.
Oh, I went too far.
I said alt-tab again, didn't I?
Darn it.
Command-tab, tab-tab-tab-tab.
Oh, I went too far.
Command-shift-tab.
Oh, yeah, that did work.
It's silly stuff like that that you've got to give it a shot.
But to me, I think the basics are understand when a window is closed.
It does not mean that the app is just gone forever.
Asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger.
Understanding that you have mission control that's F3 or assignable as a hot corner to kind of give you an escape hatch and get your bearings back.
You can use the desktop as another hot corner in order to just get you an easy dropping zone on your desktop.
You can start talking about a lot of other things like proxy icons, which are super useful and kind of sort of went away until recently.
There's a lot here.
There's a lot of depth here.
But for my money, I think understanding the basic keyboard shortcuts, Command-Q, Command-W...
I almost said alt again.
Command tab, command tilde, which Marco had talked about earlier.
I think understanding all of these basics will get you started down the path.
And then we can have a meaningful and useful conversation about what the dagger, double dagger, asterisk, double asterisk all are about.
But I think the bare minimum is what we were talking about so far in this after show.
And once you get that under your belt, then we can go into intermediary level and talk about proxy icons and things like that.
And then we can talk about advanced level where we start understanding the history behind why all this is the way it is.
yeah the what you were getting out there the fundamental thing that windows users have typically with is the fact that it's a hierarchy um it's not like there's just a big flat giant set of windows even though when you hit expose that's what you see uh there's a hierarchy there are applications and within each application there are windows and so you could draw a tree application a all the windows that are in application a application b all the windows that are application b that hierarchy exists all the time um
how that hierarchy exposes itself is kind of up to you but you could say i don't see that hierarchy what are you talking about well casey just explained one place that hierarchy works uh you can close all the windows in the application and the application is still running because all you've done is closed all the little things but the hierarchy still exists the application is still there you just trimmed off all the little you know if you would draw the graph you just deleted all the nodes that were sticking out of that application but you didn't delete the application node itself unless you quit the application right and
And that's relevant, you know, has to do with one of my little apps that I made.
The way the Mac used to work is if you clicked on a window anywhere on the Mac, it would bring that window to the front.
But it would also bring all the other windows that belong to that application to the front if it was in a different application.
So let's say you're in Chrome and you click on a finder window.
The old way the Mac used to work was it would bring all the finder windows to the front.
Of course, the one you clicked on will be in the front front.
But again, because it's a hierarchy, it would bring all the finder windows in front of all the other windows on the screen with the front most window being the one you clicked on.
Mac OS X changed that.
With the advent of Mac OS X, they made it.
If you're in Chrome and you click a finder window, the only thing that comes to the front is the finder window you clicked on.
Both of those modes have their uses, right?
Sometimes you do want all the finder windows to go to the front.
Sometimes you just want one window to come to the front.
Uh, and it really just kind of depends on what you're used to, but the Mac can do both even without my utility, which I'll get to and get everyone to buy in a second.
Um, the dock, when you click on a dock icon, all the windows come to the front.
So if I am in Chrome and I click on the finder icon on the dock,
All the finder windows come to the front.
Otherwise, if they didn't, how would it know which window to bring to the front?
I guess it could bring the front most one, but I'm saying like that's the dockers always work that way.
So Mac OS X does have a way to bring all the windows that belong to an application to the front.
And you should understand, hey, when I click on the dock icon, why is it behaved differently than when I click on a window?
because that's just the way they chose to do it you click on the icon all the windows from that application come to the front when you click an individual window just that window comes to the front you can change that behavior with various modifier keys or if you get my lovely little dinky utility called front and center front and center that app or it's on the mac app store you can choose what you want to happen what i want to happen because i'm old and cranky is when i click on a window i want all the windows to come to the front
But I also like the other way.
So front and center lets you choose.
You can configure it to say when I shift click a window, I just want that one window to the front or vice versa.
You can have shift click, bring all the windows or just one.
Like, you know, that policy decision is made on a per click basis, depending on whether you have the shift key down.
This is a feature I stole from drag thing and a bunch of other applications that did this way before me.
All those applications went away.
I could not live without them.
So I literally made another one.
Um,
but even without you know using my dinky little app understand that mac os itself has different ways for you to make those choices and sometimes make those choices for you and if you don't understand the hierarchy you'll be confused about like say you're looking at a chrome window and you want to like get something in a finder window and you go into the dock and you hit the little finder icon
And all of a sudden, 50 finder windows cover up all your Chrome windows.
You're like, I just wanted one finder window.
Why did that happen?
It happened because that's the way the dock works.
When you click on the little happy face finder icon, they all come to the front.
And if you don't want that to happen, don't click the dock icon.
Instead, click on the finder window that you want.
And then you get into, well, how do I find that finder window?
And is the corner of it poking out somewhere?
Is everything full screen?
It gets more complicated.
But understanding the hierarchy at least gives you a foundation to understand
the different moves that you can make and then you can choose what do you want those moves to be what do you want to happen when you click a window what do you want to happen when you click a dock icon or whatever again if you just want a single window you could right click the finder and you'll see a list of all the windows that are open in the finder and you could pick just the one you want and then just that one will come to the front so but that's you know you have to understand that that's a choice that you make and unfortunately for the dock you don't have the choice to change how it's configured clicking will always bring them all and right clicking will always bring the right click menu so on and so forth