Eventually Converge on Correctness
It's WWDC season, kind of.
And since WWDC is coming up.
What?
Soon-ish, right?
I would like to file a request slash bug report.
I was trying to get my Windows organized.
And we've talked about this in the past.
I am a devout Spaces person.
And last I recall talking about it, I think neither of you enjoy Spaces.
This is the virtual desktop thing.
But I really like it.
It helps me stay organized.
It works for me.
And what was happening was I'd opened several apps and they were strewn across like three or four different spaces instead of doing my beloved tiling setup that I do every week when we record the show.
So I like to have Skype or now Zoom in the upper left.
I like to have Chrome in the upper right.
I like to have Textual for IRC in the lower left and Visual Studio Code for note taking as in the show notes.
on the bottom right and i was getting just apps everywhere and that is the one time that spaces really gets on my nerves is when i just wanted everything to open in one shot in one place and it was strewn everywhere and it's very frustrating and i know that there are ways like i think uh uh was it uh keyboard my stroke can automate some of this if i really wanted to i probably could write apple script to do it but i haven't gotten to the point of doing that yet or maybe shortcuts soon
But that is the moment that I hate spaces.
Now, my bug report, however, is only tangentially related.
And I think I've complained about this before, but I would like to complain about it again because this is what we do here.
Yes, exactly.
Every once in a while, and it's been on the last six releases of OS X...
I will click on the dock to go to an app that is in a different space.
So, for example, I have my quartet of windows here, the windows of Casey County, you could say.
And I click on the messages app icon in the dock, which slides me one screen to the right, which is where messages is.
Well, then I click back on, let's say, I don't know, textual.
And sometimes what will happen is the animation will happen and I will slide back to the left, which is where that screen is in relation to the one that has messages.
And then with no intervention on my part, it will shimmy back to the right and take me back to messages.
Okay, let me try that again.
I do this every time.
It's been happening for years.
I do it every time.
All right, let me try one more time.
Surely that was a fluke just that one time.
Surely.
And I'll click on the textual icon one more time, whatever I said a second ago.
I'll click the same icon one more time.
Flip, swoop.
This has been going on for years.
I have no reasonable way of recreating it.
But the next time it happens, I'm going to have to start a cross-country trip to drop my iMac off with a very large battery pack, apparently.
Drop my iMac off at – At Craig's house?
Yeah, at Craig's house.
So I almost said Q, and I was like, no, that's not going to help me at all.
No, Q is the one doing the dropping off, right?
That's exactly right.
So I'm going to have to drop my computer off at Craig's house and get him to fix this because it is driving me bananas.
So since WWDC is right around the corner, right?
Right?
Now's the time to ask.
So here, that's what I'm doing.
You should make a screen recording with your phone.
Don't try to use the OS screen recording feature because that could perturb whatever was making it.
happen the second time but it seems like if it happens the second time pretty reliably the first time it happens take out that phone do your little handheld video and say what the heck is this and then the problem i agree i agree with you full stop the problem though is that usually i have sensitive enough things on my screen that
i don't really want to broadcast it publicly and we all know radar is a waste of time so i don't want to you know i would put in radar but nobody ever looks at radar so why bother so i i i don't really know the right answer i think though i just need to either like go in final cut pro with like you'll put black or whatever yeah you can just use redact it or whatever but just having it for your records so you know like make make a recording
And then you can see if there's anything on the screen you care about.
And if there is, then you can, you know, ask Quinn how to redact things in video.
Indeed.
But that would make me use Final Cut Pro again.
And apparently we all hate Final Cut Pro now because they changed a blade to scissors.
Yeah, just change it back in ResEdit.
No big deal.
Oh, can you?
I didn't realize.
No.
Oh, I thought you were serious.
You said it with such authority.
I thought you were serious.
I mean, that's what I said when I replied to Gray when he complained about it.
But, like, I used to do that all the time when I was a kid.
Like, if you didn't like some UI element in an app, all those things were just resources, you know, resource forking classic macOS.
And ResEdit had a bitmap editor built into ResEdit.
So you just fire it up, hop in there, and, you know, just change the cursor to be what you want to be.
Of course, these days, I mean, obviously we don't use resource forks and we don't use resources.
And some people would say, oh, it's even easier in the next world.
All those things are probably just like TIFF files or PDF files that are inside the app bundle.
Right.
And so it's it's easier than resident.
It's files and directories.
Code signing.
that's where they get oh good point good point i didn't think about that are all the resources code signed or just the binary there is a way to exclude things from code signing and not everything is included in code signing but my baseline assumption is that anything i want to change in an app i just assume it's part of the signature uh and so i wouldn't even bother trying but hey if someone wants to dive into final cut and of course the other thing is you know these days the uh the
The prevalence of sort of network-based updates, you're just going to be chasing your tail forever.
Like back in the old days, you'd get a floppy from your Mac user group and you'd get the app and you'd reset it and it would stay that way essentially forever because how else would the app change, right?
Unless you got a new version of it or something.
But these days, every app sort of updates itself or gets updated by the Mac App Store or whatever.
And even if you're able to get past the code signature because it doesn't apply to the thing you want to change,
your change is just going to get overwritten by the next update so it's kind of frustrating but yeah in some ways it is better and simpler now with just files and directories but in other ways the uh the mac and resource forks uh of the past with no permissions on anything in a single user system really did let you change whatever the hell you want it
You know, there's a part of me that regrets, and it's maybe a little strong, but kind of wishes that I'd spent more time on classic Mac OS.
Because I did a little bit in computer labs here and there growing up, but I barely touched a Mac until, what was it, 2008 that Marco and I were arguing about it on Tumblr.
um i i'd use them from time to time but very rarely that and actually in in college there was a a big like walmart sized like warehouse sized room i'm sure i brought this up several times on the show called the math emporium where um they had a ton of uh what it was the cube looking thing that overheated a lot i think what was that called i don't know at the time anyway the cube the cube i thought it was like a g something g4 power mic g4 cube
There you go.
I believe that's what it was.
But anyway, so I spent some time with Max then, but other than that and computer labs when I was a young kid, I very rarely spent any time with Max.
I kind of wish that I had spent more time to better appreciate and or understand Max.
and or loathe a classic Mac OS.
That was great.
It was so much fun to play with because everything was open.
There was no kind of security pre-internet and tools like ResEdit that didn't really come with the OS, but they were available from Apple for free.
or readily available in your Mac user group.
Anyway, there's the freedom to just tinker, even without knowing any programming, which I didn't, to just be able to dive into your favorite app or game for that matter, because a lot of the Mac games use resource works as well.
I've talked to this before.
I changed all of the sprites in Crystal Quest, a game that I was obsessed with.
and essentially copy the app.
And in my copy, I just used the pixel editor and res edit over the course of days and weeks and drew my own custom versions of all the sprites.
Then I could play that game.
It was like making, quote unquote, making your own game where all I was doing was redrawing the sprites, obviously.
But it was awesome.
Lots of fun.
You missed out.
All right, let's start with some follow-up and breaking news just before we recorded.
There is a new Safari tab interface in Monterey Beta 3.
Now, I have barely had the time to look at this, and I apologize.
I'm falling down on my job as chief summarizer-in-chief.
But I guess it looks less dumb?
Question mark?
I mean, I had time to install it, but barely, because those OS updates take forever for whatever reason.
So last episode, we were talking about the question of whether Apple would continue to make small tweaks and concessions like adding a reload button and a share button to the toolbar or whatever, or whether they would
realize that none of no appeasement of that type is going to suffice and their design is fundamentally flawed their approach of sticking everything into one horizontal error and have everything everything fight it out and having your tab turn into the address bar when you click on and all those things and so apparently in beta 3 um uh they have more or less gone back on that there's still an option to change it back to the old way as if anyone actually wants that this feels kind of weird that they would include that but what they've changed it back to is
Something much more like the current Safari on Big Sur or any past version.
The top bar has your window widgets, a configurable toolbar that includes an address bar.
And then below that, a line of tabs from edge to edge in your browser.
And then below that, the bookmarks bar has returned, the place where you can put little folders full of bookmarks or JavaScript bookmarklets or whatever the hell.
Right.
And so it's basically, you know, they've gone from, oh, we want this all to be in one row to saying, okay, well, people don't like that.
So here we are back to the old solution.
A couple of things about this though.
First, the tabs that are below the address bar, they still look like the rounded rectangles that used to be up there mingling with the address bar in the previous versions.
So they still don't look like tabs.
They look like the rounded things.
And one of the side effects of that design, because that design is like a grayish rounded rectangle with your fav icon and the tab text, right?
And then there's spacing, padding between these round recs.
If you compare the height of the address bar plus tab bar
in monterey versus big sur now monterey is taller so it actually takes up more vertical space by about eight points than the previous version almost like a punishment of like fine you want it to be on two we tried to save you a whole row of space but you didn't like it so you want to have two rows fine no actually it's just a side effect of probably the design and the white space they need to have but anyway it is actually taller which is weird and the second question is
why are they rounded rectangles back when they were transforming into the address bar it kind of made sense from like a transformational perspective to change from a narrow rounded rectangle to a wider one that contains the address bar like it's less jarring if that's the design you're going with but now that they're on a line of by their of their own it doesn't make any sense for them to not look like tabs and when i say look like tabs i don't mean like oh you just think whatever they previously look like is tabs in your mind
I mean look like tabs as in like the sort of visual, you know, metaphor, the physical analog there.
They're, you know, reminding you of in the real world, which is like tabs on tabbed folders, a little piece of something that pokes out that is connected to a larger thing.
Right.
I mean, you have a bunch of them all next to each other.
There are dividing lines between them.
So you can distinguish, you know, this tab from that tab from that tab.
Right.
these don't look like that they don't connect anything they're just floating they look like little address bars because that's what they used to be um all that said apple has indicated to everyone who has spoken to them it seems that more changes are on the way so just because it looks like this now doesn't mean it's going to look like this forever more changes by the way are on their way for ipad and ios as well so i think some of them have changed a little bit in the latest betas but some of them haven't changed at all but anyway more changes on the way so this is all good that they have
at least realize the previous design wasn't working for everybody and now give you an option for a much more conventional design but again if you look at this and say okay well i'm going to compare this design to the one in big sir bigs are still better because it takes up less vertical space and the tabs look more like tabs right um the one thing this has oh and a few more things that they reverted um
The back and forward buttons no longer have to like, they no longer have to hide like the forward button when there's nothing to go forward to because they were so desperate for horizontal space, right?
So back forward is now always there.
And if you can't go forward, it's grayed out, right?
You know, so it's back forward is always back forward.
So thumbs up on that.
The reload button is still there.
It's still, you know,
You can pull it from the plain customized toolbar.
It is still small, but now it goes in the right direction.
It's clockwise.
Good job, Apple.
What do you think the likelihood is that somebody at Apple heard you complaining about this and changed it because of you?
Zero.
There's a thousand people at Apple who know it's supposed to go clockwise.
Six weeks ago, they told everybody, why is the reload button backwards?
Fix it.
And then it took six weeks for it to get to us.
There's zero chance that I had anything to do with that.
This is not a unique insight.
Everyone knows which direction a reload button goes.
it is still too small and also it's still if anyone's listening to this so we can check six weeks from now it still doesn't disable and there's nothing to reload apple come on come on the forward button disables when there's nothing to go forward to good job there reload button doesn't
um and then yeah the bookmarks bar i mean was that even was that even available in the previous version i think no i kind of wish i hadn't updated because i could check it like in in the old one when it was all in one line was the bookmarks bar oh no i'm sorry i misunderstood you i don't know actually yeah anyway that that is more or less unchanged from how it is in big sir um so
uh good job apple for hearing either hearing the cries from outside apple or potentially hearing the cries from inside apple everything keep in mind that everything we receive here in the outside world including developer betas is you know days or weeks removed from when this change was actually made inside apple so we're kind of living in apple's past perpetually um so we can't it's hard to you know like what case he was getting at it's hard to actually connect anything that we complain about on a podcast or someone blogs about with apple's actions um
But, you know, even though we may be a trailing indicator, our opinions, I'm sure, are also echoed inside Apple.
And I'm glad to see them taking some steps in this direction.
It's still a little bit concerning that they still have the old version as an option, because it's like the whole reason you're doing this change is because so many people didn't like the old one.
Are there...
you know fervent fans of the old option that makes like what other app from apple has two entirely different uis granted there's not much there's not much ui to speak of in in a web browser it's mostly the web page but anyway as far as the ui exists the toolbar on the web browser is it for a web browser and apple's going to ship an app that has two entirely different uis up there seems very on apple like and maybe they just didn't get around to falling excising that code or maybe they just don't want to make the people who design that feel bad about
I will be watching the next betas to see if the option to switch back to the one that nobody likes remains.
Yeah, I'm very glad to see that they're now changing big things.
They started out the last couple of betas changing small things, and we were all screaming and yelling, this is on fire, people, and they're changing a little tiny thing.
So this is good in the sense that...
I think the previous one was definitely massively on fire, and they changed a big thing now.
They put the tabs back to where tabs should be.
And I think you're right, John.
They don't look like tabs.
And in particular, tabs – the reason why tabs have been used in interfaces for literally decades quite successfully and across many different platforms in many different contexts –
is because they visually make sense, people get them, and they also don't look bad.
And so when you look at a browser today, not this new Safari, but if you look at a regular release browser today, the concept of what's the current tab is extremely clear.
You can tell very quickly what tab you're on.
It's very obvious.
That, I think, is the biggest area where this one falls down, in addition to, as you mentioned, just the waste of space.
It's hard to tell what the current tab is unless you look very carefully at a very, very low contrast difference between two colors.
Especially if you have two tabs.
That's always the problem with trying to indicate state with a subtle shift in like tint.
If you just have two of them, it's not always obvious if the lighter or darker one is supposed to be the active one.
It's a guessing game you don't have to do if you implement tabs in a way that, again, reflects the real world where a tab would be attached to a larger thing.
And so you just see where it's attached, see where there is no line dividing it.
That's the active one because it attaches to the toolbar, however you want to conceptualize it.
That's how you can tell what the current tab is in Safari and Big Sur because it's the tab that connects to the address bar without a dividing line, right?
Exactly.
Yes, there is also a tint to it, but you don't have to worry about the tint.
yeah i feel like reinventing tabs is kind of like reinventing buttons in the ui you know you can try it you can try to to totally you know if you want to make check boxes that don't look anything like check boxes that don't even have like you know any kind of indicating check mark they just maybe like you click it and like it slides over or something you know it's like
Some totally different visual look, but the functionality is supposed to be like a checkbox.
You can do that, but your customers are going to show you or tell you at some point that's not successful and that checkboxes were fine and they should look like checkboxes and that's how people expect them to look and that's how they will work if they look like that.
I think that you're going to have the exact same problem with tabs where trying to design an interface that is functionally tabs –
but that doesn't look anything like tabs is not going to work very well.
And, and so this is a good, this is a very good, you know, temporary step.
And I get the feeling based on the pace of these changes and the severity of these changes, I get the feeling that like, I think inside Apple, they do know that Safari's UI is kind of on fire and they are rushing to, to fix it.
So I'm, I'm heartened by that.
Uh, but yeah,
they need to go further like this this is not enough i'm glad to see this they need to go further and and i think and i hope that they will we are brought to you this week by mac weldon keep your summer style going with the brand that's reinventing men's basics mac weldon they are so much more than just underwear their full collection includes t-shirts polos button-ups shorts pants
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Now, as for the iPhone version of Safari, they went slightly far in that.
So in this latest round of betas that came out today, the iPhone version of Safari made a significant change in that normally before in this beta series, when you would tap the big, giant, annoying floating bar on the bottom to enter an address or type in a search query –
when you would focus on the text field, it would fly all the way to the top of the screen.
And then you'd be typing into the text field way at the top of the screen for some reason.
And that was very disorienting.
And it made it hard to do muscle memory and to locate it visually and everything else.
So in this new one, they have basically turned the address bar into a thing that attaches to the top of the keyboard window.
So as the keyboard window slides up,
the that giant horrible translucent bar translucent blob really not really a bar bar doesn't go all the way across um that giant translucent blob turns into a gray opaque bar with the blob in the middle of it that sticks to the top of the keyboard as it slides up so it ends up you know in the middle of the screen roughly because it's on top of the keyboard instead of floating on the top this is an improvement um
But this is still not a good design.
But I'm really, again, I'm encouraged, I'm heartened to see they're moving in the right direction here.
The right direction is basically take everything new about this and throw it away and go back to the way it was because that was better.
But they're going in the right direction.
And I'm cool with that.
Even though they still have a long way to go on the iPhone.
The Mac version is getting closer to normal.
The iPhone still has a long way to go.
And I have my own ideas on that.
I was going to say I should blog about it, but I'm like, no, I shouldn't.
I really shouldn't.
I probably won't.
By the time you got the blog post up, another beta would be out and it would be out of date.
It's hard to blog about betas because this is not a permanent thing.
Think if you had written a big blog post about it and then they just changed the Mac version, right?
And that would be the top post on my site for six months.
Exactly.
So maybe I shouldn't.
I still haven't used the iPhone version.
Oh, it's still pretty bad.
But what you're saying is like, oh, they just should go back to the other way.
I think I'm kind of with what Casey has said about his experience with it and that I like the idea of a lot of the UI being down at the bottom.
I don't know if that necessarily includes the address bar, but I feel like sticking to the top of the keyboard
The reason I would want it to be down low is, I don't know if this is still the case in iOS 15, but for pretty good reasons, autocorrect is not the same in the address bar.
Can you imagine trying to type in the name of some company that misspells its name?
It generally lets you type what you want.
And then you realize how much you rely on autocorrect because very often when you're typing something in the address bar,
uh you know you have mistakes and so that's why i want the address bar to be near where my thumbs can reach when they're typing so i can reposition the thing now i know you can just hold down on the keyboard and you get the insertion point or whatever but i just feel like having everything localized to that area makes me feel more comfortable you know placing the insertion point the old-fashioned way or if i want to actually drag it or select a piece of it or whatever you know like
I think that's a reasonable compromise.
It doesn't take away the other bad things about the floating bar and how it doesn't pin to the bottom and all that other stuff.
But I'm not, again, saying this as someone who's still not used the iPhone Safari 15, I'm still not entirely willing to give up on the idea that it is actually better to have more crap in the bottom of the Safari UI on the phone.
And I agree with you on that.
Actually, having used this for a few weeks now, I am on board with putting things on the bottom that are the things that you need most.
And I think the search slash address bar is one of those things.
So conceptually, that does make sense as an area to explore.
And I think there's a way that you could get something good and usable out of this.
I guess – I don't have to blog about it.
I'll just talk about it.
The wonders of podcasting.
What I would change about this in broad strokes – I don't want to get too specific because, frankly, I haven't put that much thought into it because it just came out today.
But what I would change in broad strokes is –
the bar that like right now it, it goes between the kind of like long pill shape, like the big, like floating oval that has this giant drop shadow that, that overlays the webpage.
And then as you scroll, it shrinks down to an opaque skinny bar that just has the, the like domain name on it.
And you can tap that to like, to then bring up the big floating giant shadow bar.
To me, that distinction needs to be reduced.
Um,
It's still too jarring.
It still changes too much.
And frankly, I think having that big floating bar when it's in blob mode on top of the text of the webpage with a giant drop shadow so it stands out and you can see it looks terrible.
It makes everything under it incredibly unreadable and cluttered looking.
And it's serving no purpose whatsoever whatsoever.
for us to see what is behind that bar at that moment.
Because, again, it's covered in a giant dropshade, you can only see a couple words of it anyway, and it's cluttered and unreadable.
So the whole concept of having the active mode of that bar float above the bottom area of the screen, I think is a design failure, which can be very easily remedied.
Make it a toolbar!
Toolbars go all the way across, and they have a 0.5 pixel border on top,
and then a tiny little drop shadow on top of that so they stand out from the content.
So it not only saves a ton of space, but is way more readable because it is permanently stood out from the page.
I know that they're all about having the background extend under and around everything for reasons.
I'm still not convinced of those reasons, but I know that's the direction they go with their design right now.
Fine, okay, we can have more background color and break everybody's webpage UIs, but...
This particular aspect of this design, if that toolbar, if the active version of that was also an opaque bar that went all the way across and went straight to the bottom, just like the inactive version of it is where it shrinks down to just the name of the domain...
That would be a substantially better looking UI.
So that would fix a lot about the clutter and the weird, that massive dropshadow that I think is a travesty of design in context of putting it over webpage text.
That would fix those major issues.
Now, there are still other issues with this.
I do think if you're going to have the address bar at the bottom, having it slide up with the keyboard and be right above the keyboard is not bad.
I think that's probably a good compromise for where to put the address bar.
Then the question becomes what do you do with all the other functionality?
Because right now one of the big problems I have with this design in active use is that everything just takes more taps.
In the common case, if you're reading a web page and want to do something, go to a different web page, close the web page, reload the web page, share it, do anything like that, search for something else, you have to do two taps now.
You have to first tap the shrunk version of the toolbar.
then you have to either tap the address bar which is there good okay or you have to tap the ellipsis button and then tap whatever you want from there so it's like everything is more and more taps away it's under more modes and junk drawers and everything else that needs to be collapsed in in its hierarchy like it like you know flatten the organization you know like that needs to be fewer taps to do common things fewer modes fewer different changes that the ui is constantly bouncing between so
I know this is radical, Apple.
However, one thing we have in great surplus on these modern phones is vertical space.
We have tons of vertical space.
You're about to introduce the ribbon, aren't you?
No.
God, no.
No.
Apple calls it the ribbon.
It comes from the bottom of the screen.
you know what i'm going to introduce toolbars holy crap toolbars they i know i know you invented them in the stone ages apple they're still the best solution in a lot of cases and i think what this needs to be is a toolbar that doesn't change to two different modes or three different modes or four different modes
Just a toolbar that is fixed in size and position that always shows the same controls.
That way, you don't have to tap it an extra time to wake it up to do something else.
You don't have to worry about how it's going to expand and contract and all the different problems that arise from that.
You don't have to worry about what content is going to be under and behind it because there is no content under and behind it.
It's so much simpler and it works better.
And yeah, when you're in like the scrolling through a long article mode, you might lose 20 points of height on the bottom.
Who cares?
These phones are so tall and skinny.
We have that space to spare.
Well, you don't.
Yeah, I do.
I have the real estate of a XS.
And what better way to use that space than the most commonly used controls being clearer, faster, and easier to access?
Yeah.
To me, that's a no-brainer.
Give it a fixed-height toolbar that always shows the relevant controls.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems logical.
Again, I actually am trying to update my whatever phone this is, this old phone of mine trying to get on the latest beta so I can fiddle with it a little bit.
But in principle, I agree with you.
I am not a particularly great designer.
In fact, I would say I'm probably a pretty poor designer.
But
I feel like it's table stakes for a user interface to be, if not predictable, then unsurprising.
And when things are jumping around on you all the time, it's infuriating.
A great example of this...
And I feel like Apple does.
Oh, you know what this is?
It's like when you go to the whatever screen it's called, the Today View or whatever on your phone where it has like widgets and things.
And I'll be looking at the Apple News widget, which honestly I should just remove from my darn screen, the Today View, but I haven't.
But I'll be looking at it and I'll be reading the headlines and I'll see, oh, you know, I actually would like to read that.
And I'll go to tap on it.
And by the time I've made the decision and moved my finger to tap on the particular headline, it has done a refresh and is now showing me all the new stuff.
Another great example of this is like if you're loading a web page.
I can't think of a particular example, but you're loading a web page and you're trying to find the thing you want.
You found the link you want.
And you go to click on it, but then like some add at the top or some other element in the DOM is shrunk or expanded or been added or subtracted.
And suddenly the link you tried to click is moved 100 pixels north or south.
And it is absolutely infuriating.
It is absolutely infuriating when things dance around like that.
And this is what you were saying, Marco.
And I think that for a user interface, it needs to be basically predictable.
And I guess I would get used to this dancing about, but it doesn't feel predictable at the moment, or at least in the little bit of time I've played with it.
I think we all agree, or it certainly sounds like we all agree, that...
Putting more emphasis on the bottom of the screen is good.
It's this dancing about, and I agree, I'm not as offended by the drop shadows and whatnot, but I agree with you that I don't think they're additive.
I think, if anything, they make things a little harder to see, which, again, is what you said.
But moving stuff to the bottom, thumbs up.
All this other junk, at best a sideways thumb and at worst a thumbs down.
Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not saying go back to the old toolbar.
I'm not even commenting on what should be in the toolbar.
I recognize this is a limited amount of horizontal space to cram a certain number of controls in there once you have a bar.
Although that being said, the current floating blob with the drop shadow toolbar
has less horizontal space than it could because it is a floating blob.
If it was a full-width fixed position toolbar, you could fit at least one more button on it, and possibly two, depending on how much you're willing to crush the address bar.
But moving the address bar to the bottom, okay.
I personally wasn't looking for that, but I could see the argument for a lot of people doing that.
That makes sense.
That, I think, can be workshopped.
But...
just have the toolbar be a toolbar because that's what it's functionally trying to be now, but it's being a terrible toolbar now.
It's being very hard to both look at and use.
And if it wants to be a toolbar, logically, let it be a toolbar.
Make it a damn good toolbar, not this crappy, floating, bouncy thing.
And what you're saying, Casey, about things bouncing around, I think that's something that we, as an industry, not just even beyond Apple, but certainly Apple is part of it,
our uis so often lack stability like this is it's such a critical quality like you you want the ui to be stable you want to not like not every surface should be live and
You feel like if you're going to pick up the phone or you're going to try to select some text on a webpage with the mouse on a desktop or something like that, you don't want every single thing that you could click on or accidentally brush against with your finger on a phone to be something that is live that does something.
You want stability.
You want things to feel solid and predictable and forgiving and not be so susceptible to things like accidental input or imprecision in input or things like that, that people are doing things unintentionally.
And you also don't want the UI to be moving around if people are trying to use it.
And I feel like there's a lot of the current...
Like the Mac design language these days of everything being hidden behind hover states and then things animate somewhere out of the way and change where they are.
This is all violations of UI stability.
It makes everything like a hot zone or a live zone and things are jumping around and it's disorienting and it's inefficient.
And it's unintuitive as well and undiscoverable and all sorts of other problems.
So like, you know, in this case, anything you can do to make a UI more stable in the sense that things don't move around too much.
There aren't too many different modes where things come in and out or slide around or pop in or pop out.
That makes it easier and better and more calm to use for more people.
And it's just it's a better design if you can do that.
And I think Apple's very close to that here.
I think they can.
They can take the best of this, which is like, look, if you like the new multi-tab view and the tab groups and everything, and if you like the idea of moving the address bar to the bottom, we can have all of that in a better design.
All of that does not depend on the design being this exact thing.
We can have all of that in a usable, visually less distracting and easier to see and use UI.
I like your use of stability and stable much more than what I was saying about being predictable.
I think that's a more accurate description because you can be predictable with this.
Like the new Safari is predictable.
It's just not stable.
So I appreciate that.
I think your word is much better.
It's a little bit more than stability to bring back my favorite hobby horse.
It's what we're talking about is, you know, it's like the spatial finder in that the stability that we're craving is the stability that we're used to from interacting with the real world.
Like if we were to arrange items somewhere in front of us and reach for one.
And as soon as you reach for it, it grows and moves to left by five inches.
If it did that every single time, it's predictable.
But that's not the way things act in the real world.
So our bodies and minds are not attuned to the idea of reach for something and be aware that when you reach for it, it will always move five inches to the left.
And you have to anticipate that motion.
Because nothing we interact with every day behaves that way in the real world.
When we talk about spatial interfaces, there are interfaces that take advantage of the skills that we have from both evolution and our genes, but also our life in the real world, where we must manipulate objects in space all the time.
And every part of our motor system and visual system is tuned to do that.
So when we say stable, what we're basically saying is,
behave more like things behave in real life it doesn't mean you make everything a physical analog or you put a 3d engine and a physics engine into your ui it simply means that like that it feels unstable to us because it behaves in a way that we don't expect when virtually or really reaching for something and we'll tolerate you know
the magic of the computer oh the the bar will minimize when we're not looking at it and then we have to maybe do something to make it get big again right that is reasonable magic of like okay the drawer is closed the drawer is open right you know i've shoved that aside and i've pulled it back into view right it's not as if we need everything to be like oh i can't use the interface unless i have to actually yank the bar up from the bottom i don't like how it comes up on its own it's like we're not asking for that but once you sort of
perturb the you know the the mind body connection the sort of hand eye coordination of going for the thing even if it's 100 predictable like the little floaty bar is it feels disconcerting it feels annoying because every time we go for it we have to do this little override of our normal oh you're reaching for a thing it's oh you're reaching for a thing and it will be you know 50 points higher than you expect it to be and it's
It's frustrating.
I put in our Slack channel Mark review a chapter art for this section if you would like.
I thought this is kind of where you were going with this, so you didn't go all the way there.
But I would say it's for those who don't look at their chapter art or have a bad...
podcast player or if marco doesn't put it in it's the classic picture of like what is it word six in windows 95 yeah with all the toolbars turned on yeah with who knows if it's really all of them but all so many toolbars turned on that there's one line of text visible in the presumably 640 by 480 window and everything else is just toolbars or status bars um these type of you know these ridiculous interfaces obviously take them to an extreme um
Like, it's not a great interface, and it's part of why Microsoft went with the ribbon, but it has the advantage that it gave the user some flexibility to choose what they had in their toolbar.
And in general, these toolbars, as ridiculous as they look, pretty much, you know, if you put in the little stripe of the toolbar that has those things in it, they pretty much stay there, and they're just there the whole time you're using the program, and they don't move around when you try to click on them.
And there wasn't much contextual like, oh, when you're in this mode, suddenly a new toolbar item appears and pushes everything out of the way.
They were pretty stable to use Marco's word.
They behaved more like things that you would arrange in front of you in your workspace, right?
And as Marco pointed out, on the phone, we do actually have a lot of vertical space.
i think on modern iphones giving people well two things one giving the iphone some iphone native analog to configurable toolbars which have been on the mac forever is not a ridiculous idea we had that actually remember the very first iphone had that where you could like change around the order of stuff like in the music app and stuff on the bottom yeah lots of lots of modern ios apps have that my twitter client has that those were tab bars not toolbars but yeah
Well, yeah, I know the names don't make any sense.
But anyway, a bar on the screen that has buttons and you can customize them and rearrange them and do all the stuff like that.
You know, but there's never been like an official OS supported, like there hasn't Mac OS 10 had an official UI for this.
It still exists in many apps, including Safari, for that matter, where the sheet comes down.
You know, obviously that won't work on the phone.
There would have to be some sort of phone version of that.
But rather than having every developer roll their own, have that.
And the second thing is,
You know, because that lets you fret less about, like, what the defaults are.
Pick good defaults.
Have a one-line toolbar with some, like, whatever buttons you think are the most important to be always visible.
But I bet a lot of people would actually appreciate the ability to, A, customize that, and, B, add a second row.
Who wants two rows of buttons?
I don't know.
Maybe someone, like, they want five favorite things, or they want to put, you know, maybe combine it with the bookmarks bar.
Apple loves combining multiple things, right?
Maybe, like...
It's not ridiculous to think that the sort of expanded version of that bottom bar couldn't survive on anything except for the iPhone mini with two rows.
Because when you pull up that larger UI, you're about to do a thing.
Share the web page, type in a new address, run a JavaScript bookmarklet to do something to the page that you're on, like whatever.
You're going to do a thing.
At the moment you're doing that thing, you're not concerned at all with the one extra row of text that is obscured by the now double height toolbar that comes up.
And the floating blob is way higher than two rows of a stuck to the bottom toolbar would be.
so this this is obviously not the direction apple is going with any of its uis it's all about minimize hide throw in a junk drawer uh but i i think that an iphone and certainly an ipad setting that aside but even just on the iphone a customizable toolbar and the ability to do more than one row not obviously the word six ridiculous thing here where you fill your safari thing or whatever but
Most people wouldn't use it.
Most people might not even know that you could ever go to two rows, but I think enough people would that it is worthwhile because it's not like, you know, when you do that, it's not like you are worried about covering up one or two more rows of text in your webpage.
But again, the iPhone mini totally has the space.
It's, it has the screen real estate of the iPhone 10 and 10 S the phones that we all used for like those years.
Like it's, it has a lot of screen real estate.
Yeah.
And the iPad, the iPad can almost get away with a Mac like UI.
I mean,
with a popover, a customizable toolbar, unless there's plenty of room.
Again, I'm not saying by default, and I'm not saying make it Word 6, but it's not unreasonable.
And if they did that, I feel like there would be much less pushback.
Not because people crave double-height toolbars, but
But just because people would think, oh, well, I'm not going to use that.
But if I ever want it, it's nice that it's there.
And the people who do want it will love it.
So it's like no harm, no foul to anybody else because it doesn't introduce a, you know, let's say they move everything to the bottom.
Like, oh, I like that they moved everything to the bottom.
And they won't even know that there's a customizable tool where there can be two rows.
But the people who do know will love it.
So it's win-win.
Anyway, call me Apple.
I would totally use that because we, you know, first of all, you know, you have to cram in the address bar now down there in that area.
And so that would leave more room for things like a dedicated reload button.
So I don't have to do the pull to refresh, which doesn't always work.
I'm not always at the very top of the page.
Or, you know, I could have, for instance, a one password button.
Because now that we have native extension support in Safari, or better extension support at least, and you have all the different share extensions you can put in there, imagine how cool it would be to be able to put any of your Safari action extensions or the new web extension things as a button in that second row of that toolbar.
We have uses for it.
And as John pointed out, the current design with the big floating bar...
is actually so tall because it's so far off the bottom of the screen that it's not you don't actually have enough space to to put two rows there but you almost do like if that became a solid toolbar you could make it only a little bit taller and have to have space for two rows maybe if you also count the shadow that bleeds out above the thing
Oh, definitely.
If you include that, you definitely already have enough space.
Because that's already like obscuring the web page and making me gross.
Yeah, it's already unreadable area because you have this giant shadow blocking it.
Hopefully, you know, I remember like, you know, when iOS 7 was first in beta, the first couple of betas, maybe even possibly even just the first one, used an incredibly thin variant of Helvetica.
It was a super thin font weight.
Oh, yeah.
And it was so ridiculously thin that it proved to be pretty difficult to use.
And very early in the beta process for iOS 7, Apple adjusted the font weights to be a little bit thicker system-wide.
And we are now able to look back on those beta 1 iOS 7 screenshots and the marketing pages that were made for it, and we can look back and laugh at how ridiculous that ultra-skinny font was.
I hope this version of Safari becomes that in the future.
I hope we're able to look back at this as a failed experiment that's slightly amusing in retrospect, as we all use a much more usable version that hopefully they will ship by this fall.
It is kind of funny that two prominent UI redesigns were both the Safari and both of them look like they might be backpedaling on the toppy tabs, now this one.
i mean it is worth considering like how did they get to this state you know typically most apple software interface like most apple uis when they come out they tend to just be final like this this is just what it is and it comes out and sometimes it lands like a little balloon but it doesn't usually get revised in public like this um and so first of all i'm not saying that's a good thing like
I think they should get revised more often, and maybe public feedback should be taken into consideration more, like maybe the notifications on the Mac since Big Sur, please, for the love of God, fix notifications.
For the love of God, please.
How did that possibly not change in Monterey?
But anyway, there's still time.
Maybe it'll get there.
Anyway, I do think it's worth considering, like, is there something...
up with the feedback loop inside the company like why why is this stuff able to get out when honestly there's stuff about it that's just really bad and then also why do they seem kind of blindsided when their public says hey that's bad like why why do they get out in the first place and and why is it so surprising to them when we don't like it
Like you would think maybe they they would have like some kind of insight into like maybe they would show to some I know I know that they don't do focus groups that often but like maybe they'd show to some people and say hey what do you think of this you know like what how does it get out in the way it is when it's so obvious to us on the outside like certain things about it aren't good.
Well, because I think of the people who make it, even if you were to show it to a focus group or get feedback from internal employees or whatever, the easy comeback for the people who are heavily in favor of the thing they designed is, well, we won't really know until the public sees it.
So let's just wait to hear from the public, which to the credit of the Safari team, like they've tried these UI experiments, you know, toppy tabs and now this and are reacting to feedback, which is good and it's what they should do.
But up until the point where it lands in the general public, you can always say, well, it's just internal Apple people and we're not representative of the general public.
Oh, that's just a focus group.
Well, let's wait until we see it.
You can always just say, that's all well and good, but we really have to wait until the people see it to let us know.
And in that way, you can make sure something lives to see the light of day and go out to the public if you are really vociferously for it and you have enough sway within the org.
And it seems like, you know...
The UI folks within individual products do and probably should have, you know, more or less final say of the UI of the thing that they're making.
Right.
Even if the whole rest of Apple tells the Safari team we don't like the new Safari UI, the Safari team can always say, well, that's great, but you're not on the Safari team.
We are.
And let's just wait to see what the people say.
And, you know.
All right.
Also, there's been some public opinion and they're making changes.
I'd say that's pretty healthy.
I'm not particularly worried about like, oh, how did this get out?
Because it is a beta.
How did this get out as in it ships final?
I would be much more worried about, but it seems like we're not going down that road.
Yeah, and as long as... If bad stuff comes out in beta, but then they do listen to feedback and make it better before release, then that would be fine.
Again, I don't think that's the common case of that, but that's why we're not able to point to a lot of examples of that in recent history.
But...
If that's how they want to do things from now on and that happens more and more, I don't see anything wrong with that.
As long as that feedback loop does function correctly once it does get out to the public opinion stage and people contest it and report back and say, hey, this part of the design doesn't work.
And then they actually listen and they actually do fix it in that beta cycle rather than five years later when they decide to look at it again.
So if that's the world we're going to be in for this kind of stuff sometimes, that's fine.
And the good thing is it does seem like
Right now, that feedback cycle is working and they are refining and they are seemingly going to make it something better than what it is now before it's released in two months.
So I'm encouraged.
One thing I'm also encouraged by is if you notice, this is something I noticed this today because you so rarely see broken animations from Apple.
But the animation, when the keyboard slides up in iPhone Safari and the floating soap bar turns into the address bar that's above the keyboard now that's fixed there, the animation's not right.
The keyboard slides up a little bit slower than the bar does.
And so as it goes up, there's a slight gap that forms and then disappears between the top of the keyboard and the bottom of that bar.
And it's something that, again, like Apple so often nails animation so well.
I can't think of the last time I saw a broken animation shipping in an Apple product.
I mean, again, shipping is in quotes because this is a beta.
But the reason I find this encouraging is that it makes it feel more like they're busting their butts to fix this quickly.
Yeah.
Like it makes it seem like, oh, they're they're on fire over there now and they are rushing and they are actually making big changes quickly because they know they have to.
That I like to see, like because that that shows that that, you know, A, they're listening, B, they're changing things and C, they're probably not done yet.
And that's that's encouraging.
I think I can safely say now that it was a mistake to put this in follow up.
I'm sorry.
I didn't know Marco had so much to say about it.
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We are 50 minutes in, and maybe we can get through follow-up item number two, which is... Golly, y'all, we are a mess.
Josh, who is an 11-year Apple retail veteran, wanted to write with regard to what I'll call elective AppleCare repairs.
So this was... Yes, I was talking last week about how I dropped my iPhone mini and scuffed up the outside rim of the aluminum.
And it was like kind of sharp and like, well, it's not really enough damage to get an AppleCare replacement.
So it's just kind of frustrating.
Yep.
So Josh wrote, Apple doesn't provide service for what they would term, quote, cosmetic damage, quote.
What this means in practice is that the genius or tech specialist at the store is looking for an actual cracked screen or back plate or some other non-functional component.
Their visuals mechanical inspection guide, which most of them know by memory for a situation like this,
instructs them not to provide service of any kind in or out of warranty paid or free for a device that's just roughed up in other words a customer can't choose to invoke apple care plus at their own discretion even if they want to pay the hundred dollars for a replacement phone this is still josh writing i assume the reason for it is a combination of apple not wanting to lose maximum amounts of money on replacement phones and a concern for the environmental impact of providing replacement phones in wide circumstances as it turns out customers generally expect a replacement phone for nearly anything wrong so this isn't unreasonable in my opinion says josh
And I, I don't know, man, I have mixed feelings about this.
Like, thankfully, I haven't been in a position where I've wanted to do this sort of thing because either my phone is freaking shattered or it's been in good shape.
But I mean, I don't know if it's obviously roughed up and damaged.
And if the person wants to pay the hundred bucks, then why not?
Well, I mean, it does make some sense, you know, for the reasons that, you know, they cite here.
Like, it does make some sense, but it also, in practice, creates this really strange incentive.
Like, if I want to replace my phone, I should just drop it and break it.
Like, that's kind of a strange... Crack the screen.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, I think Apple would be, you know, if you get a good person at retail, like, let's say, for example, you scuff the side of your phone in a way that now there is sharp metal that could cut you.
It's still cosmetic, but you've like perturbed the aluminum and made like a little sharp flange shoot out of it.
I bet they would be flexible and say, look, this thing can actually hurt me now.
And so even though nothing is broken, broken, what can you do?
And people have discretion to do the right thing.
That's part of the service we expected in Apple stores if it actually is a case like that.
And if it's not and you're super desperate for another phone, yeah, just break the glass.
yeah which is it's i mean that's terrible but and i i don't think i can make myself do it it's terrible but like really if like yeah like you shouldn't do it you should like the only way a reason i would ever do that is if i did have a phone that had like essentially a sharp piece of metal that could actually cut me and i couldn't find anyone at apple retail just to be willing to do a replacement under apple care i'd be like well because
I feel like that is a non-functional phone.
If I can't hold it without literally cutting myself, am I supposed to just get out the metal file and just start?
You know, that seems excessive.
So I feel like maybe if I was in that situation and somehow the Apple store employees were not flexible, I would just, you know, put a little neck in the glass and say, oh, now it qualifies.
Not in front of the person.
I still couldn't make myself do it, honestly.
I'm not having to make this very convoluted scenario to justify the piece of metal sticking out that cuts you.
Maybe one angle is like, what if you've scuffed up the outside such that it's now worth substantially less on resale or trade-in?
And you have AppleCare.
And so it's like, if I could pay $100 to get a new phone and then trade that in, maybe I would make more from the trade-in than this one that Gazelle or whatever just rejected because of the side scuffed up.
It does create some weird holes like that.
But ultimately, it's one of those things where I see why they have their policy the way it is now because that would result in a lot of problems.
pretty unnecessary replacements too so it's one of those things like you got to think of everything apple does in these areas as how could people really scam the crap out of this for their own benefit because apple is such a massive target for scammers to try to exploit and so this is one of those things like yeah this it makes sense that they would have some kind of reasonable limits on when they will replace a device for apple care even if you pay for it
Once again, put a case on your phone.
Yep.
Never going caseless again.
Telling you that right now.
All right.
We had a bunch of follow-up for importing photos onto your devices.
And there were two very big themes here.
One of which was just use the lightning to SD card camera reader, guys.
Why wouldn't you do that?
I have tried this in the past or with an iPad Pro that has USB-C, you know, using a SD card dongle.
this just never worked for my brain like i just did not enjoy the process i didn't enjoy doing it on the ipad despite the screen being phenomenal i just i didn't like it and maybe it would work for for you certainly a lot of people seem to do it this way i didn't like it also i wasn't confident how it would handle raws both in terms of whether or not it would ingest them and in a lot of cases i want to delete the raw but i don't want to delete the jpeg
And I don't think there's really a mechanism for doing that on the iPad.
And even if there is, it must be clunky would be my assumption.
So not for me, but a lot of people wrote in about it.
And the lightning testy card camera reader in the case of a older iPad or a phone is like 30 bucks or something like that, which is kind of a lot.
I feel like this is almost like a generational thing and that we're always thinking we we were asked about our photo ingest process and all of us talked about how we get photos from our cameras to our Macs right but for a lot of people their phone or their iPad is is the primary computing device in their life maybe they don't even have a desktop computer or a laptop right and so in that case ingest means like what they're trying to do is essentially get it into their iCloud photo library it's like well why wouldn't you connect it to your phone it's
You know, could it have to your computer?
My computer's at home.
What are you even talking about?
My phone is always with me.
And so I'll just, you know, plug in the Lightning SD card reader and import.
And then it goes into my iCloud photo library.
And, you know, they don't have the issues that you were just describing of like, I want to, I have JPlay Plus Raw and I need to sort through them and so on and so forth.
So, yeah, this was a very big feedback theme.
I think there is definitely two classes of people.
One that wants to bring their photos onto their Mac and one that doesn't.
There are 10 kinds of people that understand binary.
And then the other big recommendation we got, which I do want to try, but I haven't yet, is for an app called Photo Mechanic.
I didn't look at pricing for this.
I have no idea if it's free or if it's a bazillion dollars.
But one example of somebody wrote in about it, Peter Kaiser wrote, it has a great previewer to look through all the images on the SD card you're ingesting from.
before you ingest them and you can discard the ones you don't want to ingest then when you do ingest you can rename the images on the fly based on whatever variables you want to specify you can also have them ingested to two different locations at once for for example peter says you know i ingest into my synology nas and to a dedicated photo drive on an external hard drive so this looks like it is up my alley but again i haven't had a chance to try it
So this everyone who recommended this was like either was a professional photographer or heard about it from a professional photographer.
It's I haven't looked deeply into it, but it strikes me as a inexpensive program and be a program that is probably I'm going to say that probably awful like.
from the perspective of an outsider in the same way that if you were to throw some random person who used GarageBand, if you were to throw them into Pro Tools, they'd be like, what the hell is this app?
This app stinks, right?
But professionals, A, put up with weird UIs they just become accustomed to, and B, have great loyalty to a weird old program that does one job really, really well.
So it seems like there's a lot of loyalty to this program for people who needed to do the one thing that this thing does.
This is not a tool for, you know, getting your things into iCloud Photo Library because I don't think iCloud, I mean, it seems like it's not.
It seems like this is like your job is photos are over there and you want them on your computer.
And this is a Swiss army knife to do that, right?
And it's a fast one.
It has a fast preview or like it's sort of, you know, high performance workflow oriented for professional photographers.
Probably overkill for the average person.
But because it was recommended so much, I think it's worth at least checking out.
Maybe they have a demo or something.
They do.
This would be good for your old workflow cases.
But remember, you're going to switch over to use iCloud Photo Library, so you won't need this anymore.
Am I, though?
Anyway, Photo Mechanic 6, real-time follow-up, $140 US.
And then there's a Photo Mechanic Plus that includes things that I don't think any of us are interested in, but that's $230.
So $140 for what I think would be sufficient for me.
Chris Hancock writes,
I don't see this happening, but I like the principle of it.
I mean, it sounds like a cool, like, happy medium.
I don't think it really solves all the problems we were lamenting, but it's certainly interesting.
And it would solve a lot of problems in that Apple would force these camera companies to have some kind of reasonable, like...
fast apple native supporting import mechanism maybe even wireless instead of the just universally terrible as marco said apps that are made by the camera companies themselves who have no idea how to make software and they just they don't look like they're native for any platform like it doesn't look like a native mac program doesn't look like a native window program it doesn't work the ui is inscrutable
Even like the UI text is not localized well.
So you can't even read it and understand what they're trying to say.
That would be a good upgrade.
But I feel like every camera company either is so far outside the realm where they care about consumer electronics or is like a mortal enemy of Apple and vice versa.
So why would they even talk to each other about this?
Because as Phil Schroeder said on stage, Apple sometimes thinks of itself as having one of the best cameras in the world.
right or being the best camera company in the world why would they help out another camera company i know they don't it doesn't seem like there's any overlap between them but it's like apple's just off doing its own thing and you know they'll like they'll support importing from you know if you plug in your sony camera to your mac and launch apple photos the apple photos program it will import into it but trying to make that relationship tighter just doesn't seem like a thing that apple or the camera companies are interested in at this point
We had some feedback from Alexander who writes, the Aeron chair was updated in 2017.
And one major change is that the foam bars removed from the front.
The dot-com bubble era or Aeron classic chair, which is still sold, used, or even new, are different from what's currently manufactured and sold by Herman Miller is Aeron.
And one of you guys found a link that we will put in the show notes to discuss the differences.
Yeah, I had no idea when John was lamenting the bar that goes across your leg on an Aeron chair.
And I was saying, oh, it doesn't bother me at all.
It turns out, like, mine that I bought a few years ago is the new version.
And it doesn't have one of those bars anymore.
Like, it still has the rim at the very bottom where the fabric goes, you know, where the mesh fabric goes into that is the frame of the chair.
But apparently, but the previous version of the Aaron had kind of like an extra bar that went across kind of behind your knees.
They're like almost right before the edge of the chair.
And the new one does not have that bar.
So it turns out that if you, like John, have had that bar digging into your legs, the new ones might not do that for you because they are actually different.
Yeah, sit in it to find out.
Because the thing that you're describing, the old one has a pad there because they apparently discovered and knew...
that the stupid bar was going to dig into.
So they put a pad there to try to help and it didn't help because like in the end, the bar is still there and there's the pad and there's also where the mesh goes into the pad or whatever.
The new one, the way the new one solves the problem is it doesn't need the pad because the chair is tilted down more and the transition from the mesh into the bar is smoother.
Um,
And so both of those things – and it looks like the actual rim is a little bit skinnier too.
So both of those things combined to make the bar less prominent.
That said, the bar that was digging into me still exists.
It wasn't the pad that was digging in.
It was the actual metal frame of the chair.
So always sit down and try it out.
But it seems like even in the first version, they recognized this design problem and tried to mitigate it with the pad, and it didn't work out.
In the second version, they said if we just sort of bend the lip of the chair down more, it'll be less diggy.
I've never sat in one of the new ones, so maybe it would solve –
Maybe it would solve the problem completely for me, but it is good that they have revised this.
And, yeah, this is a good YouTube video if you want to see more than you ever wanted to know about the minute differences between the old and the new chair.
The new one, it's not all pluses.
There are some things that might be considered a downgrade, but overall it looks like a better design.
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And then I have a little bit of follow-up for everyone.
As of sometime between the last recording, I am now the member of a two-person family and I have Apple One or whatever it's called.
So everyone leave me alone.
It's finally happened.
So instead of family sharing, are you the organizer?
Yeah, so family sharing.
I am the organizer.
I've given Erin whatever blessing I can to make her, if not the organizer, then the equivalent, or as close as it can be.
But it's kind of irrelevant at the moment because there's just two adult Apple IDs on it right now.
I have started the ingest process into photos, and at the rate we're going, maybe it'll be done before I die.
Yeah.
So that's good.
I have 73,609 photos, 4,899 videos.
I started this process yesterday, maybe the day before the photos process.
And I have 54,361 items remaining.
And let me remind you, I have a gigabit connection to the internet.
Which it is not using fully, I'm sure.
Oh, no.
If you were to measure.
Well, you know, I don't know for sure, but actually, do I know for sure?
Just go to the activity monitor and look at your network IO.
It is not using.
No, I don't need to go to activity monitor because it's sitting right there on my menu bar.
It's right there, 12 megs a second.
Which you can read in 16 point tall.
You can read like the y-axis values, I'm sure.
no it's it's it's literally says 2.85 mb slash s that's what it says that's not gigabit no no it is not um so yeah it's it's i don't know man like it's going slow on my iMac pro which i don't love there was i put a screenshot i'm not gonna bother putting it in the show notes but i put a screenshot uh somewhere in the relay slack what does it read uh okay
Zero photos scanned.
Photos will continue scanning your remaining 2,516 photos when you're not using the app and when your Mac is connected to power.
It said that on my iMac Pro.
And don't worry about the scanning part either.
Like you just care about the import of this part.
Like the scanning, it's going to take you a while for it to like go through all the pictures and try to identify faces and all that other stuff.
But like.
I don't know why, honestly, I don't know why it even bothers to even try doing that before it's actually imported all your photos.
But the mysteries of, like, Apple's import is very much like its iCloud thing.
Like, if it does what you want, then fine.
But if it doesn't, you have no knobs.
You have no dials.
You have no way to say, could you A, do it now instead of waiting until later, or B, do it faster?
Someone actually asked this question.
They were like, oh, I'm an iPhone.
It never wants to upload the pictures.
This is actually in the context of using the SD card thing or whatever.
How do I get it to take the photos off of my phone and put them into iCloud?
And it does the phone does try to helpfully explain to you if you go to the photos app and scroll to the bottom it will say I stopped uploading your pictures to iCloud because your battery is low and I'll resume again when you plug in and that's that's the answer I gave them is like if you want to if you want to make it start uploading now.
go and plug it in you can also use like tap that text it doesn't look like a button to tell it to do it now but very often like in this case what if you wanted to tell it hey don't analyze faces until later what if you wanted to tell it please use my gigabit connection to upload now like use all my course do all the thing like this is literally the only thing i'm waiting for instead it's like this blanket policy of like
let's not perturb your computer too much, which is a reasonable default.
You don't want it to cripple your computer doing, you know, face analysis or whatever, or saturate your network connection when you're trying to do a podcast.
Those are all fine defaults, Apple, but we do, it would be nice to have a way like, I just think about this button and smile all the time, the sync button and the Mac version of messages.
Wow.
Whoever added that, they need to like get an award and like a plaque on the wall.
And Apple, like somehow someone got a button in that would say, hey, I know there are messages that aren't appearing on my Mac.
Instead of me just sitting here waiting, praying, hoping, wondering, will they ever sync?
When is it going to happen?
I don't know.
There's no progress indicator.
I could be waiting here for hours, days, years.
Maybe it could never happen.
Do I have to sign out of iCloud?
Oh, I just clicked the sync button and then it syncs the messages right when I click the button because that's what I'm waiting for right now.
Oh God, Apple, please, please add that to photos.
Yeah, so it's uploading excessively slowly.
And then on my MacBook Pro, and maybe this is user error, so if it is, then it's my bad.
But what I did was, on the iMac, I'm going to have an entire duplicate of my photo library because...
I'm not quite as obsessive as John with my backups, but when it comes to photos, I'm pretty close.
So what's it going to hurt to have yet another duplicate of my photo library and this time on the iMac?
So I have it, you know, not optimizing, et cetera, et cetera.
And I want all the source files on there.
On the laptop, I would prefer to not take up the entire SSD.
And so what I did was I made an APFS volume.
I think that's the right vernacular.
I'm sorry, John, I might've gotten that wrong.
But basically I made a thing that's like 10 gigs or something like that.
And I said, okay, photos, make your thing there, become the system photo library and go ahead and start plugging away.
That was yesterday.
Right now, when I click on the library tab or the library thing in the sidebar on photos, all I see is updating.
yeah i would for i would say two things one 10 gig may be a little bit small because the optimized storage just means it's not going to have your originals but i it's not i don't think it's smart enough not to try to at least bring thumbnails for everything and 10 gigs may not be enough for even all your thumbnails and i have no idea what photos will do in that case so consider larger ties and the second thing i would say i'd go like 50 on that yeah and the second thing i would say is what you're doing fine
don't do that on your macbook until you're done doing the thing on your imac because like well i could confuse it right it's a think of it a two-step process step one all photos on imac step two little miniature library on the mac all right don't try to do them simultaneously there's no there's no advantage and as you've noted it's not like it's really going to do it simultaneously anyway it's just going to make you wait and photos is so bad like no progress bars no nothing just a
Presumably I'm doing something.
You really have no way to check.
Even activity monitor will make it look like your machine is mostly idle, but that doesn't mean I'm not doing anything, as far as you know.
So I hear you.
I agree with you.
I understand what you're saying.
But can we just concede or admit to each other, if not everyone else, that this...
like this kind of sucks like why are we okay with this like well we're okay with it for two reasons one this is not the common case people don't come in like day zero i have 70 000 photos like if you take if you start with an empty library and take photos like a normal person the system works way better right and second in the grand scheme of things no this isn't great but the most important thing is does it safely contain all my photos and are they actually available everywhere and
it as far as we've all been able to tell with our own personal experiences and what we've heard from people despite the extremely frustrating slowness of all this it does eventually converge on correctness which is which is a big thing like you know correctness first speed second right they don't have the speed they don't have the features but if they have correctness that's enough to you know to build trust and loyalty over the years that it you will eventually get your photos in and they will eventually show up on your phone and you will eventually get some subset of them on your mac
I mean, I get it.
But if I heard an Android person being like, well, it's working, but super slowly and it's working maybe on my other device and all, by the way, I have to return and do the exact same processing on all 80,000, you know, videos and photos on every single device, which I know that used to be the case.
Maybe that's not the case anymore, but it used to be that all the devices had to do all this churning and analyzing whatnot themselves and
Like if I heard an Android person saying this, I would ask what the hell was wrong with them and why they're using this service.
Well, in their defense, Casey, an Android person would never say this because Android people can never get two devices to stay in sync between – what would it be?
Like their phone and Windows PCs or what?
Like what's it going to be?
I mean, I think you're being a little unfair to Google's sync prowess, but I do take your point that it's not exactly going to be iPads and maybe not Windows machines other than using Google Photos on the web.
But nevertheless, I don't know.
I was at the point that I would do this just to shut everyone up.
I mean, just to make everyone happy.
But I'm really not overwhelmed with this process.
You haven't even imported the pictures yet.
It's taking too goddamn long, John.
It's taking forever.
You have a lot of photos.
It's a large volume.
Just be patient.
Let them be imported.
Once they're imported, then you can enjoy the excitement of editing a photo and cropping it and knowing you're not destroying the original.
Then that's where the magic happens.
Well, but that doesn't bother me because this will always, in my brain, this is always going to be a secondary or tertiary library.
We'll bring you around yet.
Step one is getting them into the library.
Step two is letting you think of the library as the place where you can safely edit photos without destroying your originals, which is true.
Good luck.
That's why a library is different than folder full of files.
I am very much looking forward to when Casey tries to edit his photos in the Mac version of Photos and discovers the throw-the-fork-away flow that it has.
There's a bug in Photos for the Mac.
Oh, great.
Even more reasons to use it.
I think for two releases now, when you go into crop mode, you can just press C and you're cropping it, right?
Yeah.
it it like scroll it doesn't scroll so you can see the entire picture like it the scrolling offset is wrong and the only way to fix it is to go into a different mode and go back to crop mode i don't know how long that thing's been there but it's like it's so reproducible it's like does no one in apple ever go into crop mode and realize hey i can't see my whole picture like it's just you know how many years is that going to be like that it's not a bad bug it's just like a ui glitch of like some you know offset or some animation outrun some other thing or whatever but
it just boggles my mind that i can be there for so long every time i switch from adjust back to crop to fix that i think and there's other like speaking of animation bugs uh in photos when you're doing crop stuff and like actually dragging around the the little croppy tool it you know re it rejiggers the view to whatever you cropped you know because if you crop it real small it doesn't want to leave it small or whatever it eventually gets the right position but it does this intermediary step where i guess is really really wrong by like hundreds of pixels and then it snaps back
again years it's been there for years like it's not it's not a big deal it's just like it's like photos has like a personality it's like it's got a lot of eccentricities and quirks but it it really boggles my mind that these these bugs are able to be there year after year and no one ever bothers trying to fix them
But Casey, to answer your question about why is this thing actually good or why do we use this or why do we tolerate this, the answer is that as a library management thing, like as a library layer, a sync platform, a data store –
It works really well for most people most of the time.
I have had no major problems with iCloud Photo Library since it was introduced, which at this point was, what, 10 years ago?
I mean, it's been a while, and I've had no major problems with it.
I've had no sync problems.
I've had no lost or missing photos from it.
Everything does sync, and it works well, and it works in reasonable amounts of time.
as a system, it is very, very good.
Now, the app for editing your photos on the Mac is really terrible.
Like, that's, I'm just being honest, it's terrible.
You know, see also, throw the fork away.
Like, it is just a terrible flow and it delays you and it's, again, it's like the epitome of tons of different unnecessary modes and transitions and things moving around and animating.
Like, tons of that.
But,
But I hardly ever edit my photos.
And if I do, it often happens on the iPhone anyway, like right after I take them.
And so I rarely edit photos in non-trivial ways on the Mac.
What I do is shoot a lot of photos and videos and want them to sync everywhere and want that to be easy and automatic and not as a deal with imports and raw and stuff like that.
And that's a pretty common set of priorities.
And so if that fits your common set of priorities, then it's a great platform.
And the reality is, for most people, that's what they really need.
And yeah, I do wish the Mac app was a better photo editor for when I do want to do non-trivial edits.
It's not very good.
But
The rest of it, the most important parts of it to me are that data store and sync layer and just having it be automatic and everything appears everywhere and I don't have to think about it or do anything or import anything ever.
And it's great at that.
So that's why we tolerate the crappy Mac app.
And I think you will find a lot of value in that.
The editor, like, yeah, the UI of photos, the app is bad and the editor UI is bad.
But the actual editing features, they're not, it's not Lightroom.
Like, don't expect miracles.
But the individual features that do exist work pretty well.
Like, this is the sort of...
it will hold your hand right it's it knows that you you probably don't have the knowledge or skills to do use a fancy app like lightroom i certainly don't right so they don't give you controls that are that complicated yes the ui is bad but the individual controls for adjusting levels curves you know the exposure their little magic do what i mean their retouching tool all of those things are
like the actual modifications that makes your image are well tuned to people who might want to make edits but don't want to be like a photo editing expert i only ever use photos to edit my photos i hate the ui but i like the results that i get because the edits i'm making are fairly simple i'm rotating i'm cropping
I'm adjusting levels and exposure and, you know, maybe one or two other little tweaks there.
And that will take you so far.
You know, like obviously, again, if you want to edit RAWs, you want to do Lightroom with way more sophisticated changes.
You want to apply the same adjustments to 15 things.
You want to do custom barrel distortion.
Like, yeah, there's a reason those other programs exist.
And you can, you know, go edit your photo in them and bring back your edit and do all that stuff if you want.
but the actual like for someone like you who doesn't seem like they don't edit their photos that much no try try the the horrendously implemented in ui tools because the results they give you on your photo through it and the good thing is if you don't like them you can always hit the little button that says reset to original and it's always there
And that gives you the freedom to screw with them and not feel like, oh, I don't like this.
What have I done?
Oh, no, I did a bad crop.
The original is always there.
It's freeing.
It's liberating.
That's all well and good.
But, well, first of all, I don't ever really edit my photos, to be completely honest with you.
The most I'll ever do is white balance if I take stuff inside.
And generally, if I'm taking photos inside, I'm not using my big camera anyway.
I'm using my iPhone because it's usually going to come out better that way.
So I don't typically white balance anymore at all.
But when I was doing editing, I don't have the technical chops to do it, to be honest with you.
Like, I wish I understood in the same way that either of you guys do how to pull colors in and out and contrast up and down and so on.
You don't need to know that for photos.
That's what I'm saying.
Like for white balance, there's like a single button that says, please fix the white balance for me.
There are more sophisticated controls even in photos.
But if you just click the auto white balance button, you're done, right?
Right.
But OK, so now that I've done that, now I need to take that JPEG and pull it back out of photos.
Actually, you put it in the one true data store, which is the synology.
You really don't.
I just, I can't, I cannot, I cannot trust anyone with these files.
I just can't do it.
I can't bring myself to do it.
I mean, I mean, I understand the lack of trust, right?
But like what Marco was getting at is that like no system is perfect.
Eventually one of us is going to get screwed by Apple photos, right?
But a decade's a pretty good run, right?
In the grand scheme of things, like think of all the other photo services that have come and gone and that we haven't been able to trust.
And this Apple one, as if, you know, we're also heavily in the Apple ecosystem, it's well integrated everywhere, right?
and has been reliable for us now not for everybody it's not perfect and like i said if we just keep going long enough eventually one of us is going to get screwed in some way that's why we have a lot of backups but i don't think you can argue with like i think the reputation of apple photos in terms of reliability is pretty good there will always be people with horror stories about how it corrupted the whole library and destroyed everything but i'm not babying this thing like 140 000 photos in the thing and
it's i if if it destroys all my photo library after the time i've used it now i'd be like fair enough like what other okay what other program have i been able to use for that many years with no data loss treating it this way across iphoto and photos and all this like that like it's like like marco said the apps come and go like iphoto changed a lot when it was iphoto and then photos came and it's worse and bad but like
But it's like the program, it's not like, oh, I don't like the program, therefore I don't like that.
It's a platform and there are programs on top of it.
One of the programs on top of it is the iPhone version, which is getting better this year, right?
And iOS 15 actually showing you the metadata so I don't have to use the third-party programs to get that info.
And on the iPad, right?
It's the platform.
And the apps built on top of it aren't that great.
But the fact that the platform has been solid for us, that is the big selling point and that is integrated everywhere.
Casey, also, at the end of the day, if you have the Photos app on a Mac with it downloading your entire library on that Mac, these are all just files in the file system.
They will be part of your time machine backup.
They will be part of any other disk backups that you have that happen to include the big iCloud photo library packages because the package is just...
a folder really you know like it's a mac package format so you can just dive in there and you can find all those files now the the directory paths and file names will be garbage but the files are all there and so if you want to you can actually automate that process
You can make a shell script or you can make a Hazel thing or whatever you want to do.
You can use the new shortcuts feature.
You can automate having something go in there and pull out everything you've added to it and automatically give them the right names and paths and put them in your Synology.
That can actually be totally compatible with this new system because at the end of the day, these are just files in a weird place on your hard drive.
for the masters yes but not for his edits and that's what he's interested in um like that if he does make an edit he wants that to be baked into his canonical shoebox because he's has very bad ideas about how to archive data but yeah like well the edits are there too oh slow down
Slow down.
Okay.
If you're going to be a jerk about it, let's pull on that.
No, I think this, I think you should never, you should never save the edits is what I'm saying.
You should never save the edits.
Like, or rather you should, if you save the edits, you have to save the original to it.
It boggles my mind that you crop a photo and then have the cropped version replace the original.
Like that's not good.
I can, I can make a strong argument either way, but I hear what you're saying.
Like you should keep both is what I'm saying.
Like you do want the crop because that was work that you put into it, but also you want the original in case you flub the crop.
I mean, I guess, but I like to think I'd be pretty sure that that is the crop I want before I deleted the original.
Never.
I go back and re-edit photos from like 2005 frequently because I look at them.
I'm a better photo editor.
Not that I'm a good photo editor, but I'm better at using the stupid photos app.
And I will go back and look at them.
Like there was years when I wasn't even white balancing anything.
I have like, you know, I have Canon 5D pictures from like the 5D that was like
quote-unquote borrowed from mit for a short period of time um and they're all super yellow because they were taken indoors and i'd never white balanced them i'm like oh i can just go and fix that that's all my pictures for like a five-year span they're all yellow oh same yep same i don't know i like as much as i'm it's not you know i i apologize i really don't like to be the complainer but i that's what i've been doing today the role of complainer will be played by casey list
um i and i'm not actually really trying to complain like most of this is tongue-in-cheek but i i just want to point out that this onboarding experience has not been delightful and well this is your punishment for onboarding after you have 70 000 photos yeah right most of us onboarded 10 years ago right i mean it is bad this is a bad experience but i i if you were to bring this to apple they would say okay well do you know how many people are in this position like very few
And so I would imagine they're not going to optimize for it.
That said, they should totally have a mode that says, you know, a button that says, please do the thing now, because that's literally all I'm waiting for.
And I know you're trying to be nice to my computer, but don't.
Well, that's the thing is it depends what you mean by do the thing.
Like if if there was a way for me to tell photos slurp up all available bandwidth, just go frickin nuts, then I would absolutely hit that button.
Similarly, like overnight, I would hit the, okay, now that things are uploaded, please churn and destroy my poor CPU, figuring out for the first of 15 times who's where and what's what and so on and so forth.
Like, I am kind of dreading my devices doing that scanning because, again, I feel like maybe they said something about this being passed around server side.
So maybe this is old.
Yeah, I think that is like last in-person WWDC, there was something about sharing face data or whatever.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
But maybe not all classification is shared around, whatever the case may be.
That's right, yeah.
I believe where we left off was that anything that you manually classified and entered was synced, but anything that is automatically detected by the algorithms is not synced.
I think that's right now that you say that.
Yeah.
Although I would say that the face recognition thing, it's not, I mean, you're going to say that it's going to look like it's going to take a long time for your 70,000 photos, but like what it does is it uses your manual selections to find similars, right?
And I do this frequently of like, oh, I uploaded some new pictures and now I'm going to manually select a bunch.
And then what you'll see it do is say, okay, based on what you selected, I found...
5,000 additional photos.
I mean, you're going to see numbers like that because that's how many you have uncategorized, right?
But it says that like, not like after 10 minutes, it's like after you're done confirming, it says one, two, three, oh, 50 more photos found, right?
Like it's pretty fast at...
What I'm saying is syncing the manual stuff sounds like, oh, that's nothing because I manually confirmed 10 photos.
That 10 photos will quickly multiply into many, many more.
It's actually pretty fast at finding the faces.
And the hard part and the work is actually the manual part.
The automated part is fast.
Now, the part I don't know about is the part that knows this is a chair, this is a dog, the classification.
I think that might be super slow.
But honestly...
that i use that feature all the time hopefully and it's just like when you'll see when you use it in the stupid photos ui like there's an autocomplete and if you don't see your thing autocompleted don't bother because if you're you're trying to look for like b and it doesn't autocomplete to be like a bumblebee or whatever don't bother like you might as well just try insect because you have to pick from one of the autocompletes it only knows about a finite number of things right google is you know google search obviously you can type any nonsense in there and do image search and it will do its best
apple photos is not like that so that may take a while but like when that's going because it runs in the background or whatever like if if you ever want to search your photos like that you probably need a different tool that said i haven't seen the ios 15 thing with the text thing that might actually help a lot so we'll see
A couple other quick notes.
First of all, some very belated follow-up from a few weeks ago.
You and I, or maybe it was all three of us, were discussing why bother geotagging photos.
And I meant to bring this up during the show, and I either didn't get a word in edgewise or knowing me probably forgot.
But one of the reasons I love geotagging my photos, and I'm not snarking.
I'm really being serious.
One of the reasons I love geotagging my photos is because...
If you think about my preposterous or not, but whatever it is, it's mine.
There are many like it.
This one is mine.
My photo management setup is that if I know when a picture was taken, it takes me exceedingly little time to find the actual source file on the Synology.
Now, maybe that's not something that you, John, you Marco, or you listener care about, but it's something that happens to me relatively often.
However, if I wanted, if I know, oh yeah, there was that one time we took that picture at Cape Charles and I don't know what year it was, but I remember being really, really pretty.
If I geotag my photos and if I have something like Google photos or soon Apple photos, I can drill into Cape Charles and find that picture.
Similarly, like for you, John, oh, I remember there was that picture I took of the kids on Long Island, but I don't know if that was last year, the year before, the year before that.
Like,
That is the moment at which geotagging photos becomes extremely useful.
Leaving aside the fact that I just kind of like having that metadata there anyway, being able to just say, oh, where was that?
It was Long Island, but what year was that?
Then you can go and dig deep into exactly where that was taken and find this photo extremely quickly.
Now, the problem with this is that it requires a Google Photos or an Apple Photos or what have you, because
This is not something that I know of that you can do on the file system particularly easily.
But if you have something like Apple or Google, what have you, then it is a really convenient way to find photos.
And I have had this happen many, many, many, many times.
Maybe that's because I have a crummy memory, which I absolutely do.
Maybe you're better at knowing exactly what year whatever photo was taken, but I am not.
And that is part of the reason why I go absolutely bananas in trying to make sure that every photograph that's ingested into whatever system has been geotagged.
I'm not against geotechnics.
I would love it.
It's just that I have my limits when dealing with this crappy software for these camera makers, right?
And so I just deal with it.
But for your specific example, it will not shock you to know that all my Long Island pictures are labeled with the Long Island label, which is the thing, the keyword.
Oh, that's a fair point.
you can do in photos.
And I also have smart folders in the sidebar.
I have a Long Island folder.
And under that, I have smart folders for Long Island year and Long Island year favorites.
And they are both smart folders that say keyword is Long Island, the year is 2004.
Keyword is Long Island, the year is 2004 and is favorite.
Yeah, that's totally fair.
And so I can just turn down those folders and click on them and select them.
And yeah, like...
And not all of them are geotagged.
Some of them are.
Some of the iPhone ones.
And again, I think geotagging is working with this Byzantine Bluetooth paired flow with my new thing.
But honestly, if they're not, I am pretty good about tagging stuff.
That's the thing about photos.
Back in the day when they had star ratings, I had everything star rated.
Now they just have faves.
But I was able to import all my star ratings as keywords.
So now things that were previously two stars have a two stars keyword on them.
Attaching arbitrary tags to things is surprisingly flexible.
um and yeah and it does support the geotagging and all the other you know meta exif metadata about the lens and the camera i use the camera search all the time to you know to say i don't remember where i took this but i think it was with this camera i can just show me all the canon 5d pictures right then narrow that down by ear it's nice
Oh, one thing I've noticed, by the way, about geotagging before I move on from that is so I've been occasionally viewing those like memories videos that the Photos app algorithmically makes for you, which, by the way, are pretty good.
I was surprised.
I don't know if this is a 15 beta thing or what, but it's pretty good.
I was very impressed.
But one thing I noticed in one of them was that it was about a like a location based trip that I had taken a few years back.
and it included in the footage that used for that trip video that i shot on the drone the drone is not geotagging as far as i know no it is it is oh it is oh okay because i was thinking like was it smart enough to just infer the location because i imported it like on the same day as all these other pictures but no i guess if it's if the drone's actually geotagging which i suppose it can because it has gps
Right.
So I'm 98% sure that it is.
I'm almost certain that my Mini 2 does indeed put you, because you can put that metadata in an MP4 as well.
And so I'm almost certain that my drone does.
And I have the cheapest drone that DJI makes.
Well, cheapest of the new drones that DJI makes.
And so I'm pretty sure that yours, which was not the cheapest that they make, should geotag it as well.
So yeah, that's just an aside, a bit of follow-up that I meant to bring up.
And then finally, one other thing that I think is quite hilarious.
Goddammit, you're right, they do at it.
I just pulled up a drone shot.
Oh wait, why the hell was that?
Anyway, sorry.
In any case, one thing that I do find quite hilarious and very frustrating, but this is kind of sort of my fault.
So I'm looking at on my iPhone, I'm looking at the library tab and photos and I'm on all photos.
And so I'm scrolled all the way to the bottom, which is presumably the latest, most recent photo, right?
And at the top on the Photos app in iOS, it shows the date.
And the date I see, and this is not a joke, is December 19, the year 5828963.
Because I guess what had happened was, I'm looking at these last, what, 9, 10 videos, actually.
And they were Casey on Cars videos of the Alfa Romeo, the Quadrifoglio.
or the Julia Quadrifoglio.
And I guess like something got hosed up with the exit data.
So the year is 5828963.
But these are like the most recent 10 pictures on my phone because it's doing date descending or whatever.
And so this is the bottom of my photo library.
I'm gonna have to go in and change the metadata on these bad boys.
So it is not from the year 5828963.
But I almost wonder if Apple should maybe filter out anything that's that far in the future.
But then again, if that's what's the date in the photo, what are they really supposed to do?
That's one of, speaking of dates like that, well, first, Photos actually does have a fairly good date adjustment thing, although I kind of wish one feature Apple could add.
I shouldn't even tell them because they should just do family sharing.
But anyway, I would love it.
I would love it if their adjust date feature had a thing where you could sort of blank out fields, right?
Because I've been, my relatives are scanning like old black and white photos of like my grandparents and great grandparents and stuff, right?
And usually you only know the year.
And but you have to put in everything in the date field.
Right.
So I have to come up with this convention of like, if I only know the year, it's January 1st at zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.
But that's a valid date.
And it's not I wish I could say, look, for this camera, you know, for this photo, I know the year in the month.
This one, I know the year to sort of say the other ones are don't cares or I don't know yet or whatever.
But yeah, the adjust date feature is handy.
And I was just looking through my photos when you were saying that I have a cool picture of an M8 competition.
I don't even know if that's a thing, but that's what the badge says on the back of this thing.
I'll post it on our channel later.
Please do.
Goodness.
So yeah, all in all, I am excited about Apple One.
I'm excited to have the two terabytes, although I'm hypothetically going to be using a little over one terabyte for photos alone very, very soon.
I'm excited about the two terabytes.
I'm excited.
Well, I feel like I'm excited to have Apple Music, even though I don't know why, because I do love Spotify so much.
The right answer is probably to just divorce myself from Spotify, but gosh, I love those Discover.
No, no.
If you think the Photos app is bad, try using the Music app.
Stick with Spotify.
but it just it pains me deeply to be double dipping try to i dare you to use the music app spotify really sucks on the mac though like having to use their terrible web view i mean but i'm sure casey is used to it and has the features he wants and i'm assuming it has to be less buggy than music on the mac um less buggy maybe but just clunkier and crappier like i it is clunky and crappy it is not buggy
I mean, and yeah, granted, like, you know, the music app on Mac is not great for lots of reasons.
But it is at the end of the day.
It's still like, you know, good old reliable iTunes mostly under there.
And it mostly works.
Now, that being said, the like Apple Music as a Service parts of it are pretty rough.
But if you're mostly using it to play your existing library, as I am, it's great.
And Spotify is fairly clunky at that.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
It is pretty clunky at the library that you brought to Spotify.
It's pretty great with everything else.
But for a library that you brought to Spotify, it's not great.
And I'm excited for...
For Apple Music, I'd try it out and see what I think.
I'm excited that I don't have to worry about paying for Apple News.
Well, not worry about it, but if I see something that's paywalled on Apple News+, hypothetically, it shouldn't be paywalled anymore, which is great.
The best thing about this is that you no longer have to decide piecemeal which Apple services you want to pay for or not pay for.
You kind of get everything, and that's...
you can then you can try everything and see like what you actually like now you can finally play sayonara wild hearts without worrying about whether you want to pay for it or not i bought that for uh the switch like a month or two ago and it is i didn't finish it because i only had a few minutes to play but it is very very good finish it it doesn't make a long i think it's like 45 minutes or something
I know.
I just haven't had the chance.
And then, well, shoot, there was something else I wanted to say.
But regardless, I'm excited.
Oh, Fitness Plus.
That's what it was.
I have actually really been liking Fitness Plus a lot.
I've been using it quite regularly.
It's not the only exercise I do, but it's the majority of the exercise I do.
And I have been really, really enjoying it.
It's got its own problems for sure.
But on the whole, especially for something that's really pretty much brand new, I have been extremely impressed with Fitness Plus and have really, really been liking it.
And
Now, like it's not a big deal, but now because we're on a family and because Aaron gets all these things too, if we do workouts together, which we aren't doing these last couple of weeks, but we were doing for like a month or two straight, we were doing a lot of Fitness Plus stuff together.
And we kind of ebb and flow in and out of working out together, working out separately.
Yeah.
But now we can show her watch on the screen because it used to be the king every time because I was the only one paying for Fitness Plus.
So it'll be nice to show her watch on the screen.
I mean, I would love for Apple to consider that maybe you would want two at once, which would be amazing.
See, also, Apple, people have families, and we would love to share our photos with our families.
But anyway, I am excited about...
Having all these things, I am honestly, as much as I snark, I am excited about having photos.
And assuming I can get it all squared away and it all ingests and scans and does all that gobbledygook, I am looking forward to having it.
I am looking forward to making it easier to access my photos from 15 years ago, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm glad I'm doing this, even though the onboarding experience is rougher than I would like it to be.
You should try some some smart folders is probably like the first thing you should do, like because you don't have to do anything for them.
Like you can rely on the metadata.
Like one example of a smart folder, speaking of your wacky dates, is I have smart folders that are like that say that these are not the children that they're supposed to be.
So it basically says if person identified is my daughter, but the date is before my daughter was born.
put that into a smart folder and then I can go in there and essentially select all and say, no, that's not her.
She wasn't born yet.
Or see if the dates are wrong.
If it is her, right.
Those sort of like, you know, you're letting the automated system do its best to guess, but when it gets it wrong, there's certain, certain things you can do to sort of rule them out.
Right.
Um,
and yeah that's partially what like you know my library is filled with so much metadata i have tags for all my kids right because they didn't have face recognition for most of my life of using this app but when they added face recognition i didn't ditch the tags i just use apple's face recognition to make it easier for me to apply the tags right so like even if i lose all my face data all i'm doing it is like as a bootstrap mechanism so i can properly tag everything and so i have all sorts of things that say
The person identified was your daughter, but it's not tagged as your daughter or it's tagged, you know, and then I can just sort of reconcile those.
And those smart folders, it's just every once in a while I go into them as like a screen or two full of things.
And I, you know, correct the things or whatever.
And what I'm left with is essentially hand rolled metadata that identifies my children.
Meanwhile, it continues mightily in the background to try to identify my kids.
And it does a pretty good job, but I'm still glad I have my tags.
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Thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
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All right.
So let's do, I really wanted to hear your answer to one of the ask ATPs that we had for this week.
And so we're going to do that as kind of like a bonus after show.
I don't know.
It's a special, special treat after show.
Andrew Blomquist writes, does Adam still wear his Apple watch about a year in?
I'm considering getting one for my kid, but I'm concerned about what happens after the novelty wears off.
Insert Syracuse a disclaimer about not all kids being the same here.
My mileage may vary, et cetera, et cetera.
I love that.
I absolutely love that.
Standard disclaimer for any parental question or answer.
That's very true.
So what is, I don't know why I'm so interested in this, but I really am.
So what is Adam's story with his Apple Watch?
Is he still wearing it?
So listeners might recall that last fall when Apple released the Apple Watch SE and more importantly, Apple Watch Family Setup,
which allows somebody without their own, like a kid or maybe elderly relative, without their own iPhone to have an Apple Watch that is paired to your phone.
And then you get to have certain controls over it and everything.
When that all happened, we got one for our son.
He is, at the time, eight, and now nine, and...
the context in which we were getting it was, you know, he has a certain degree of freedom around our little neighborhood here.
And so we wanted him to be able to have some kind of cellular device so that he could both contact us if he needed to, we contact him if we needed to, and we could see where he was.
And for an eight-year-old slash nine-year-old,
a phone is a bit of a clunky choice for multiple reasons um you know i we didn't want him to have to have a phone if he didn't need one for just size and complexity reasons and just eight felt a little bit young to have his own phone um i know everyone's standards on that are different so i'm not going to judge that now but it just for us that felt a little bit young but the apple watch seemed like a reasonable choice because it
Yeah.
And so it ended up being pretty good.
He does still wear it.
It still works great.
The novelty has mostly worn off.
But in a way, that's a good thing because the novelty in the first few weeks of using it was mostly like it was a way he could play some really simple crappy games.
Because there are games for the Apple Watch.
They're not good, but they exist.
They're actually almost comically bad, but they do exist.
There are a couple that are reasonably impressive in certain things that they do, but for the most part, it's not a compelling thing to do.
So the novelty wore off fairly quickly, a few weeks maybe.
And then it just became utility for us.
You know, he has cellular on it.
And it's something like 10 or 15 bucks a month on our plan.
So it's not much extra cost, not like a phone would be.
And we're able to text him.
And he texts back from his watch, like from the playground, if we need to tell him like, hey, you know, come home for dinner or whatever.
Like, you know, we can do that.
And he's able to be communicated with or communicate, you know, taking the initiative to us.
We can do audio FaceTime calls to it just fine.
The, you know, Find My with, you know, our fine family location sharing thing works just fine.
There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, it has worked great.
And we're actually very happy we did it.
You know, he's able to...
have like a regular kid lifestyle and we don't have to worry too much about like what if he gets it wet what if he drops it what if he you know leaves it somewhere because like all those worries that you'd have with a phone that you don't have to have with the watch or at least that are greatly reduced with the watch like yeah it is possible to break an apple watch but
it's a lot harder than it is to break a phone.
You don't have to worry about, again, like water in it.
Like now it's the summertime.
Sometimes he goes swimming with his, with his day camp that he's in and it's fine.
He, we don't have to tell him like, Oh, don't, don't bring your phone.
Like don't leave your phone in your pocket when you go in the water.
No, it's a watch.
Just walk in the water.
It doesn't matter.
You can do whatever you want with it.
Just leave it on, please.
Otherwise like that's fine.
And so that all is great.
Now, because the novelty has mostly worn off and it is more utilitarian now, we do have to often remind him or ask him to wear it.
He doesn't often think about putting it – because it's still an Apple Watch.
He still has to take it off and charge it every day.
And sometimes he'll take it off before getting into the shower or something, and so it'll be left somewhere.
And if I don't go around and try to find it at night and put it on the charger, then the next morning it's not charged.
So there is that little annoyance that's just the reality of kids.
They're not going to be as attentive to this kind of stuff as we are.
And so there is that minor annoyance of the daily charging is sometimes missed by it being left somewhere in the house after it was taken off in the evening.
Uh, but for the most part, it's been good.
Now there have been a couple of instances of unreliability in the, I don't know if it's the software or the cellular or both.
I think it actually has been some of both.
Um, Apple watches with cellular are not, they don't have as good of antennas as the phones do.
Um,
And so sometimes we just won't be able to reach him and the watch will just like not report his location and it just basically won't have the connectivity that we really want.
This is not common, but it does happen every so often.
And it is kind of annoying, like, well, we have this thing just in case we need it.
And sometimes it just doesn't work.
But, you know, sometimes phones don't work either.
I mean, it's less often and sometimes the kids are faking it and BSing you when they say their phone didn't work.
But, you know, the reality is this happens on the watch sometimes.
It does seem like it's not as reliable as the phone.
There was even a case a few weeks ago where...
We were messaging him saying, hey, come home for dinner or whatever, and he wasn't responding.
He wasn't responding.
We eventually had to go look for him, and we found him.
We picked him up, brought him home.
And I was like, let me see your watch.
Because he was insisting he wasn't getting the messages.
And again, you put it through the kid BS filter a little bit.
Like, okay, really?
Was he really not getting the messages?
But I looked, and certainly, sure enough, not only were there no notifications on his watch –
But I opened up the messages app on the watch, and they weren't even getting in there.
My messages were just not there.
I rebooted the watch, and they all appeared.
So there is definitely some unreliability that is really unfortunate.
Obviously, this would be a lot better if it was as reliable as the phone in those ways, and it's very clearly not.
But for all of the advantages it has over the phone for this context, for like, you know, I was going to say a middle aged kid, if that makes sense.
He's not super young.
He's not a teenager.
So like, you know, for like a middle, middle aged kid, I think it's a really good solution when he's not old enough to to reasonably want or need or have a phone.
that would provide the same value in other ways, but he's old enough that he can have independence out in this part of the world, this crazy part of the world that we live in.
So he can be out there on his own, and we can have the need to reach him or locate him, or he can want to reach us, and he can have a way to do that without having a phone.
And so in that way, it's worked out great, and we're very happy with it, and we're going to continue with it.
Well, the good news is when he gets a phone, you won't have to remind him to take that with him every day.
Oh, yeah.
He'll be hopelessly addicted to social crap like we are.
The charging, unfortunately, may still be an issue depending on your kid.