The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► First guest ever. We're up on episode. This is episode 272.

00:00:03 ◼   ► First time I've ever had a guest who I've worked for

00:00:05 ◼   ► and it'll never happen again. Well, maybe you'll come back, but I've,

00:00:12 ◼   ► I've run out. I was going to say that sounded a little ominous.

00:00:16 ◼   ► I've run out of former employers. I believe who, who I can, there are,

00:00:20 ◼   ► there's not a long list anyway. Uh, but anyway,

00:00:24 ◼   ► I thought what better time BB edit 13 came out recently.

00:00:29 ◼   ► I actually don't have the date in front of me, but I've always liked the idea of having

00:00:34 ◼   ► -- I need to do it more often, is have some of my developers come out and, you know, movie

00:00:39 ◼   ► stars come out with a movie, what do they do?

00:00:40 ◼   ► They go on shows, talk about it.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Why don't developers do it when there's a major release?

00:00:47 ◼   ► And you know, that's sort of an old school big co thing to do from back in the days whenever

00:00:53 ◼   ► there was a major release, the company would go out on tour, they'd do a press tour, they'd

00:00:59 ◼   ► Go around everywhere and meet with everybody and and that's how it used to work

00:01:04 ◼   ► Your BB at its career

00:01:07 ◼   ► Well BB that doesn't have a career but your career leading co-founding bare-bones with your longtime partner Patrick

00:01:14 ◼   ► How's Patrick doing by the way? He's he's great. He's the same as he ever was unchanged

00:01:19 ◼   ► 13 is a big number. You've always been relatively conservative

00:01:26 ◼   ► I would say in the grand scheme of version numbers that if it's a dotto it's pretty significant

00:01:32 ◼   ► 13 but how long how old is BB edit now? So

00:01:36 ◼   ► the first commercial version of BB had it was 2.5 and that shipped back in

00:01:42 ◼   ► May of 1993

00:01:45 ◼   ► You and I used to always talk about it

00:01:47 ◼   ► You've always said that one of the it's it's sort of like people who say that they were at the Don Larson's perfect game

00:01:53 ◼   ► Yankee Stadium, you know, there's Yankee Stadium seated 56,000 people. There's

00:01:58 ◼   ► 500,000 people in the New York area who were there at the game a

00:02:02 ◼   ► Lot of people miss remember that they had BB at at 1.0

00:02:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a funny thing how how memory works of course over enough time you you sort of fuzz out the details

00:02:15 ◼   ► And and that's how it goes happens to all of us there

00:02:19 ◼   ► There was a BBEAT at 1.0 at one point, but it never left the building in general release.

00:02:27 ◼   ► But 1.0 is a shorthand for "since the very beginning."

00:02:31 ◼   ► That's something we hear a lot of.

00:02:33 ◼   ► And so when somebody says 1.0, we're like, "Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:36 ◼   ► Awesome.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Great to hear from you."

00:02:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:39 ◼   ► And yeah, there might be a kernel of truth to it where they might distinctly remember

00:02:42 ◼   ► reading a review in Macworld or MacUser or one of the magazines at the time that would

00:02:46 ◼   ► would say something to the effect of BBA at 2.0 is 2.5 is the first commercial release

00:02:52 ◼   ► of barebone software's award winning text editor, blah, blah, blah. And then they just

00:02:56 ◼   ► file that away in their head as first release. Yep. Still going strong. I I looked back my

00:03:05 ◼   ► friend Daniel Bogan runs a site called uses this and I remember Daniel well and he's still

00:03:11 ◼   ► going strong. You know, he I didn't realize how how diligent he is with uses this. There's

00:03:17 ◼   ► 1040 interviews on Daniels uses this site. And basically, he just talks to creative people

00:03:24 ◼   ► of all slants, maybe someone like me, like a blogger type person, a developer, individual,

00:03:31 ◼   ► creative artists of various sorts, and talks to them about what tools they use to do their

00:03:35 ◼   ► I was on I was a interviewee

00:03:38 ◼   ► Over ten years ago

00:03:42 ◼   ► and I looked back on it this last week because my friend Andy Bayo of

00:03:47 ◼   ► waxy.org fame was asked to be on back then too and like 2009 and had put it off until like last week so it was like

00:03:56 ◼   ► so I read his I thought well I should go back and reread mine and

00:04:01 ◼   ► Boy either I'm either I'm the luckiest SOB on the planet or I've got really good taste in software because

00:04:07 ◼   ► the the list of my

00:04:10 ◼   ► Most used and the ones I had most affection for software

00:04:14 ◼   ► Are still going strong and and at the top of the list was BB edit your Jimbo still on the list

00:04:19 ◼   ► p calc

00:04:22 ◼   ► On the outliner

00:04:24 ◼   ► There's an awful lot. There's an awful lot of apps from 2009 that are not around anymore

00:04:29 ◼   ► But the funny thing is if I went back to 1999 BB edit still would have been at the top of the list

00:04:33 ◼   ► yeah, and I'm gonna go with good taste on that one because

00:04:38 ◼   ► What we found is that you you don't stick around for very long without having

00:04:47 ◼   ► some amount of perseverance some

00:04:51 ◼   ► degree of

00:04:55 ◼   ► willingness to just sort of dig in and do what needs to be done and for us to it's

00:05:00 ◼   ► You know, we're committed

00:05:03 ◼   ► well, we should be but

00:05:05 ◼   ► Also, I'd be I'd be

00:05:10 ◼   ► I'd be neglect if I don't mention another one from the top of my list is acorn

00:05:14 ◼   ► From flying meat software and our good friend Gus Mueller and and his wife at soda. Why?

00:05:21 ◼   ► But it's funny because I look at that list and I think well

00:05:25 ◼   ► you know ten years ago, and I think BB edit and peak alc and

00:05:29 ◼   ► Omni outliner those are apps have been along around a long time. I still think of acorn is like a newish app I

00:05:37 ◼   ► Think it was at the time. I think it was relatively a very low version number in 2009

00:05:44 ◼   ► But it's you know been a solid ten years and it's sort of that same formula of

00:05:50 ◼   ► for lack of a better word, craftsmanship.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I absolutely agree.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And I think you've really nailed it with that one.

00:06:02 ◼   ► There is a craft to this, right?

00:06:06 ◼   ► And you don't, to go back

00:06:10 ◼   ► on what I said a minute ago and build on it, you don't

00:06:14 ◼   ► endure without a dedication to that.

00:06:18 ◼   ► And again, I don't want to spend the whole show reminiscent about the good old days quote-unquote except

00:06:24 ◼   ► I kind of do want to talk about the good old day

00:06:26 ◼   ► But one of the things that I found most I find most inspiring about the BB edit story is

00:06:33 ◼   ► It not that there haven't been ups and downs along with the

00:06:39 ◼   ► Faring of Apple itself for sure. I mean talking about an app that first came out in 1993. There was some rough years

00:06:47 ◼   ► Oh, yes, there were as a Mac developer

00:06:50 ◼   ► But in hindsight there's never really been a time in that period when

00:06:59 ◼   ► BB edit wasn't completely relevant to the needs of

00:07:04 ◼   ► Somebody who needs a professional strength text editor for the Mac platform

00:07:09 ◼   ► That did things the Mac way that supported the Mac technologies in the OS that

00:07:16 ◼   ► That would be applicable to a text editor

00:07:20 ◼   ► With professionals there was net there's never been a period where BB ed

00:07:24 ◼   ► It really hasn't been relevant to that like it's for lack of a better word

00:07:27 ◼   ► I would say you've never taken your eye off the ball on where that should be

00:07:31 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think a central reason for that is that

00:07:38 ◼   ► Underneath it all there has always been text

00:07:44 ◼   ► Right, it's true. It doesn't matter

00:07:47 ◼   ► It almost doesn't matter what you do for a living

00:07:51 ◼   ► Underneath it there is text

00:07:54 ◼   ► At the very beginning when we when we started doing this I was writing Mac software and of course

00:08:01 ◼   ► text right source code

00:08:03 ◼   ► and then

00:08:06 ◼   ► the World Wide Web started to grow and it was HTML and it was text and

00:08:12 ◼   ► Web 2.0 remember that yeah came along and it was

00:08:16 ◼   ► JavaScript and CSS and and even as we move forward into into newer stuff

00:08:24 ◼   ► It's still all text underneath and and that's kind of what the plumbing of the world is built on this as far as our industry is

00:08:33 ◼   ► Concerned as far as the web is concerned it is

00:08:37 ◼   ► In some ways and Brent Simmons and I have talked about this a bit and I feel I feel like I have a long daring

00:08:42 ◼   ► Fireball rant and on this that I've been sitting on

00:08:44 ◼   ► literally could be ten years but

00:08:47 ◼   ► Basically how plain text won the war and

00:08:52 ◼   ► It it's hard to remember like when BB at it first appeared in

00:08:58 ◼   ► 1993 94 95 I I think you had to do an awful lot of explaining on a regular basis to customers that no you

00:09:06 ◼   ► You you can't just hit command I to make the text italic

00:09:10 ◼   ► Indeed. No there is you can change the font

00:09:14 ◼   ► But you'd be changing the font for everything because it's plain text and and I think that that was very hard

00:09:20 ◼   ► It seems ridiculous

00:09:23 ◼   ► Today's world where plain text is so prevalent in so many ways

00:09:28 ◼   ► but on the Macintosh

00:09:32 ◼   ► Really from the get-go with the software that really took off in the 80s

00:09:35 ◼   ► You know your Mac writes the original the early versions of Microsoft Word

00:09:39 ◼   ► I was gonna call it

00:09:42 ◼   ► TextEdit, but of course at the time it was teach text which

00:09:47 ◼   ► In hindsight, what a strange name. I'm I know that I used to know the backstory on how it became teach text, but

00:09:54 ◼   ► What a weird, you know, but what we now know is well the equivalent role of text edit the default text editor

00:10:01 ◼   ► for the platform was an app called TeachText,

00:10:04 ◼   ► but it defaulted to styled text.

00:10:06 ◼   ► And so you could change the font,

00:10:08 ◼   ► you could make it bold, you could make it italic.

00:10:11 ◼   ► And that sort of was sort of the baseline

00:10:13 ◼   ► that Mac users form for how text should work.

00:10:16 ◼   ► And not having it, I think was, it was hard to explain.

00:10:20 ◼   ► - It was for a less technical user.

00:10:24 ◼   ► And so the story that we always used to tell,

00:10:27 ◼   ► and it's an interesting point you make

00:10:29 ◼   ► because we have to answer the question

00:10:32 ◼   ► very seldom these days.

00:10:35 ◼   ► But the story we always used to tell is,

00:10:37 ◼   ► there are two ways to look at text.

00:10:39 ◼   ► There's text as the content of a finished document,

00:10:43 ◼   ► something you'd produce with Word or PageMaker,

00:10:47 ◼   ► remember that, or InDesign, or any modern--

00:10:52 ◼   ► Yeah, right, so the document is itself the finished work.

00:10:58 ◼   ► work. And then there's text, which is data, and it's fed into another program. And that might be

00:11:06 ◼   ► a compiler, it might be a web browser or a web server or an interpreter, or God help us,

00:11:15 ◼   ► a markdown to HTML renderer. And so what we built BBE to do as part of this story,

00:11:23 ◼   ► what we built BBN to do was to function to handle the second class of text.

00:11:29 ◼   ► There was a niche to be filled there. I know that there were other plain text editors of that era,

00:11:42 ◼   ► but there was none that really seemed like it was the king of the hill to supplant. For the most

00:11:49 ◼   ► part I think in the early days BB Edit was competing against the built-in text editors

00:11:54 ◼   ► in ThinkSee and Think Pascal. With the term competing being used loosely in those specific

00:12:02 ◼   ► cases ThinkSee and Think Pascal had their own built-in editors but they were also

00:12:09 ◼   ► purpose-built for working within those IDEs. Right. And that was sort of BB Edit's earliest

00:12:17 ◼   ► market opportunity was, okay, so we need a text, I kept hearing we need a text editor that isn't

00:12:25 ◼   ► tied to an IDE. The original Consul Air Mac editor was sort of come and gone. MPW was from Apple,

00:12:36 ◼   ► and it was part of a tool chain that cost around $1,000 or more. And was not really, it was a weird

00:12:45 ◼   ► Beasts, I mean we keep we we can't go into it a long thing on MPW

00:12:50 ◼   ► But MPW didn't act like I mean that was part of the commercial appeal

00:12:54 ◼   ► Well, they were MPW was a commercial product too

00:12:57 ◼   ► Which is crazy when you think about it that it was a thousand dollars

00:12:59 ◼   ► But part of what the the think product stepped in and did is we could do this in a very Macintosh way

00:13:04 ◼   ► Whereas MPW was this weird sort of moon man mismatch of Unix command line isms

00:13:10 ◼   ► But not really Unix Unix just sort of Unix inspired

00:13:15 ◼   ► in a Mac app.

00:13:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, and at the same time,

00:13:19 ◼   ► there were some freeware third-party editors,

00:13:22 ◼   ► there were a couple of commercial products,

00:13:24 ◼   ► or a couple of shareware things.

00:13:27 ◼   ► And I think one of the first things

00:13:30 ◼   ► that I remember from that era was looking at those

00:13:34 ◼   ► and thinking, yeah, I kind of see what they're doing,

00:13:38 ◼   ► but in sort of true programmer-ish fashion,

00:13:42 ◼   ► I looked at it and said,

00:13:43 ◼   ► well, that's not the way I want to do it,

00:13:44 ◼   ► I have the ability to do it the way I want to do it. So I'm gonna do it. I

00:13:48 ◼   ► Think any older I get the more I believe it the more

00:13:54 ◼   ► You know if you want me to come in and give a pep talk pep talk to you to some youngins

00:13:58 ◼   ► I think some of the best advice you can have in life is

00:14:02 ◼   ► That if you ever look at an opportunity like that whether you want to get into

00:14:07 ◼   ► programming whether you want to get into

00:14:10 ◼   ► writing whether you want to

00:14:13 ◼   ► Be an actor or stand-up comedian whatever it is

00:14:16 ◼   ► If you look at what people are doing and you think I could do that

00:14:19 ◼   ► You probably can like that's that's really I know it's sounds trite

00:14:25 ◼   ► But really that's half a half of life and half of success in life is just deciding

00:14:30 ◼   ► Looking at something and saying I could do that that nobody knows who I am

00:14:34 ◼   ► I've never done it before but I think if I stepped in here I could do this

00:14:37 ◼   ► Yeah

00:14:38 ◼   ► And it's funny you mentioned that because my wife and I have been watching this

00:14:41 ◼   ► delightful little short run reality show called making it hmm and

00:14:45 ◼   ► It's it's it was on I think it was NBC

00:14:50 ◼   ► Amy Poehler and what I can't remember his name right now. Oh, I you know what I was on that was Nick Offerman that yeah

00:14:59 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I just saw that on the airplane the other day. It was I was

00:15:03 ◼   ► Went on a trip with my dad over the weekend for his birthday

00:15:06 ◼   ► And I didn't put the headphones on but I know the show I didn't watch the show because I didn't want to use their

00:15:11 ◼   ► goofy headphones, but it was on the airplane. Yeah, and it's a lot of fun. The vibe in it

00:15:16 ◼   ► is really positive. It's not sort of that cutthroat reality show. But one of the things

00:15:21 ◼   ► they sort of keep landing on as they're talking is we want people to feel like to look at

00:15:28 ◼   ► this and say, "Well, yeah, I can do that." Yeah, exactly.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And so that's sort of the flip side of it, right? I completely agree with you. If you

00:15:37 ◼   ► look at something and you think yeah I could do that go and do it just a touch

00:15:46 ◼   ► again I don't want to get too far away from it to go back and talk about the

00:15:50 ◼   ► role that styled text played and we could talk more about Apple script in a

00:15:54 ◼   ► bit and the weird bizarre unkill ability of Apple script and what a weird vestige

00:16:00 ◼   ► of the 90s it really is but one of the things that in hindsight when you look

00:16:05 ◼   ► at it now compared to every other scripting language in use that I'm aware

00:16:11 ◼   ► of is that its underlying backing store is not plain text I mean you do type

00:16:16 ◼   ► text and so if you could start from beginning to end and write an entire

00:16:23 ◼   ► Apple script right there in the script editor you could do it but then the

00:16:26 ◼   ► second you hit enter it compiles and gets stored in this weird styled text

00:16:33 ◼   ► format that isn't really text underneath anyway because it gets translated to

00:16:38 ◼   ► Apple events behind the scenes and it nobody would ever make a scripting

00:16:43 ◼   ► language that worked like that today but in the 90s I think that seemed like a

00:16:46 ◼   ► normal idea because it was it somehow it felt like that's where the world had

00:16:51 ◼   ► gone is is we shouldn't be writing plain text we should be we should be doing

00:16:55 ◼   ► something fancier for lack of a better word yeah and it's and it's funny some

00:16:59 ◼   ► of the parallels there because my first job as a professional software engineer in the

00:17:07 ◼   ► Mac industry was working on Think Pascal.

00:17:12 ◼   ► One of the intrinsic characteristics of it was that you could enter text into its editor,

00:17:21 ◼   ► Audacity just bound up on me.

00:17:28 ◼   ► I hope there's no gap there.

00:17:32 ◼   ► We'll edit it now.

00:17:35 ◼   ► You could enter.

00:17:36 ◼   ► You were typing into the editor, but every once in a while, or if you press the enter

00:17:41 ◼   ► key, it would take your text, it would tokenize it, and so the internal representation of

00:17:48 ◼   ► your text was this sort of bizarre tokenized format.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And Apple's script editor and all of the Apple script editors,

00:17:56 ◼   ► including the excellent script debugger, do that.

00:18:00 ◼   ► And it's just intrinsic to the way Apple script is.

00:18:04 ◼   ► And sure, there are some advantages.

00:18:06 ◼   ► It's very compact.

00:18:07 ◼   ► And once upon a time that mattered.

00:18:09 ◼   ► But it is very strange.

00:18:15 ◼   ► There's a great quote by Brian Kernighan.

00:18:19 ◼   ► I'm trying to get it here so I don't screw it up.

00:18:20 ◼   ► Here we go.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Everyone knows-- this is co-inventor of the C programming

00:18:25 ◼   ► language, one of the great programmers in computer science history.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing

00:18:32 ◼   ► a program in the first place.

00:18:34 ◼   ► So if you're ever as clever as you can be when you write it,

00:18:36 ◼   ► how will you ever debug it?

00:18:39 ◼   ► And anybody who's ever written any kind of program of any complexity

00:18:43 ◼   ► Whatsoever knows exactly what he's talking about, but I feel like that lesson didn't get learned

00:18:50 ◼   ► And maybe it'll never get fully learned everybody's there's always

00:18:53 ◼   ► Always young and ready to make not not learn from the mistakes of their elders, but I kind of feel like the whole industry

00:19:00 ◼   ► went too far in that direction with

00:19:03 ◼   ► Like just things like file formats and not were and and network protocols that weren't human readable

00:19:12 ◼   ► Either like if it's a network protocol just right over the wire

00:19:16 ◼   ► Or if it's a file format if you could just open it in a text editor and actually see the file format

00:19:22 ◼   ► It and I feel like those formats got

00:19:26 ◼   ► Were sort of fell into that trap that he's talking about where if you make the file format as clever as you possibly can how?

00:19:33 ◼   ► Are you ever gonna debug it when there's a problem when there's a bug?

00:19:36 ◼   ► Involving writing to the file format if you can't just eyeball it

00:19:39 ◼   ► Well, why would you ever need to debug it if you got it right the first time?

00:19:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and I I think there's a few factors at work there, right?

00:19:50 ◼   ► One of them is is definitely what a friend of mine used to call excessive cleverness

00:19:55 ◼   ► Another factor is

00:20:00 ◼   ► That sometimes the technology is a product of the time in which it's invented

00:20:08 ◼   ► back when Brian Kernighan was inventing C

00:20:12 ◼   ► and programming on Unix, there were a lot of constraints.

00:20:16 ◼   ► And these days, there are many fewer.

00:20:21 ◼   ► So it's easy to think about making things

00:20:24 ◼   ► more computationally complicated

00:20:26 ◼   ► or making them take up more space,

00:20:28 ◼   ► which is a weird thing to think about

00:20:31 ◼   ► because text is not all that large.

00:20:34 ◼   ► - Right, in the grand scheme of things.

00:20:36 ◼   ► in the grand scheme of things.

00:20:40 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:20:42 ◼   ► I kind of feel-- speaking of text being large,

00:20:44 ◼   ► that leads me to XML.

00:20:48 ◼   ► I kind of feel like that's one of those products of its time.

00:20:52 ◼   ► So Mac OS X, and to some extension, I think iOS too,

00:20:57 ◼   ► just in a way that it inherited from Mac OS,

00:21:02 ◼   ► was really a product in a lot of ways.

00:21:05 ◼   ► some of the decisions they made at a very low level

00:21:07 ◼   ► were a product of the very late '90s.

00:21:09 ◼   ► And one of those was the ascendance of Java.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And so they wasted, in hindsight,

00:21:15 ◼   ► wasted an awful lot of time creating Java versions

00:21:19 ◼   ► of the Cocoa frameworks, because it seemed like

00:21:22 ◼   ► this is what you had to do to be relevant.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Java was so, it was just like madness.

00:21:28 ◼   ► You know, the whole industry had been consumed by it.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And then XML was the other one,

00:21:32 ◼   ► where all the config files in Mac OS X,

00:21:38 ◼   ► for some definition of all that is like 99%,

00:21:41 ◼   ► are XML files under the hood or like GZipped XML files

00:21:47 ◼   ► to understand what these property lists are.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Whenever you had to hack into your preferences or something

00:21:51 ◼   ► like that, it's an XML file.

00:21:55 ◼   ► And XML has really fallen out of favor in the real world.

00:22:00 ◼   ► I mean, nobody that I know of does

00:22:02 ◼   ► new stuff with XML it's all if it's if it's there and its legacy it's there but

00:22:06 ◼   ► everybody is switched to primarily JSON the JavaScript object notation and the

00:22:10 ◼   ► one of the big differences between JSON and XML even if you use it to represent

00:22:15 ◼   ► the same thing is there's an awful lot less visual noise in JSON it's it's back

00:22:22 ◼   ► to hey you could just like read this and understand oh I see what's going on here

00:22:27 ◼   ► I see the format.

00:22:28 ◼   ► Oh, that's an array.

00:22:30 ◼   ► There you go.

00:22:31 ◼   ► Here's all the key values.

00:22:33 ◼   ► Here's the values.

00:22:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, Jason is super, super well suited

00:22:40 ◼   ► for key value transmission.

00:22:43 ◼   ► And I think there's still a place in the world for XML,

00:22:48 ◼   ► but for that sort of key value storage these days,

00:22:53 ◼   ► there are definitely better things.

00:22:54 ◼   ► And I think JSON is pretty much the way

00:22:57 ◼   ► to go for that these days.

00:22:58 ◼   ► All right.

00:22:59 ◼   ► But when the app-- to bring it back to BB Edit,

00:23:01 ◼   ► when the app's underlying thing is

00:23:03 ◼   ► this app is meant for reading plain text

00:23:05 ◼   ► files of any format, when new things pop up,

00:23:09 ◼   ► there's BB Edit ready to go.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Yep.

00:23:12 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break here.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Thank our first sponsor of the show.

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00:25:48 ◼   ► So let's talk fast forward. Let's talk bb at at 13.

00:25:58 ◼   ► Let's do it. Dark mode. And now you've had dark mode support, I

00:26:03 ◼   ► think since

00:26:07 ◼   ► Mac OS when it went what the last version of Mac OS had at first that's one of those weird things that came to the

00:26:12 ◼   ► Mac before it came to

00:26:14 ◼   ► to iOS

00:26:16 ◼   ► And BB edit sort of backed its way into dark mode support where even before the OS

00:26:24 ◼   ► Officially had this feature called dark mode where you just toggle a switch in system preferences

00:26:29 ◼   ► BB edit as a text editor has had

00:26:35 ◼   ► Complete control over the coloring of of your text

00:26:38 ◼   ► So if you wanted to as a lot of programmers seem to want to do and I've long done if you want to program with a

00:26:44 ◼   ► Dark background and light text BB edit has supported that for a very long time

00:26:50 ◼   ► And I think was sort of that's sort of where BB edits dark mode support kind of backed in

00:26:57 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. And and so what what sort of happened there and I kind of say sort of because well

00:27:04 ◼   ► that's how it was, it just sort of happened,

00:27:06 ◼   ► was that Mac OS, I think it was 1013,

00:27:12 ◼   ► had sort of a very, very embryonic version

00:27:17 ◼   ► of the appearance support that first appeared in 1014.

00:27:22 ◼   ► - Right.

00:27:23 ◼   ► - Because 1014 was the first OS

00:27:24 ◼   ► that had a user-visible dark mode.

00:27:27 ◼   ► But it turned out that in 1013,

00:27:30 ◼   ► it was possible to set a dark appearance

00:27:33 ◼   ► for your Windows and UI Chrome.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And so once I figured that out,

00:27:40 ◼   ► I started tinkering and realized

00:27:43 ◼   ► that if you were using a dark background color scheme,

00:27:47 ◼   ► then what I could do was set the surrounding window

00:27:50 ◼   ► to be dark as well,

00:27:51 ◼   ► and sort of make it a little bit less jarring to use.

00:27:55 ◼   ► - Right.

00:27:56 ◼   ► - And that persisted for a while.

00:28:00 ◼   ► And I sort of kept that hack in place

00:28:02 ◼   ► for longer than I wanted to

00:28:04 ◼   ► because we had to keep supporting 10, 13

00:28:08 ◼   ► and older OSs for a while.

00:28:10 ◼   ► When BB out of 13 shipped, I looked and I said,

00:28:13 ◼   ► "Okay, let's impose some sanity here.

00:28:18 ◼   ► We've got Catalina coming up,

00:28:20 ◼   ► which has automatic switching."

00:28:22 ◼   ► And so what I did was I kind of turned the model on its head.

00:28:27 ◼   ► So instead of yanking the application appearance

00:28:30 ◼   ► around to match the color scheme,

00:28:35 ◼   ► I split it apart and he said,

00:28:36 ◼   ► "Okay, you can have one appearance for light mode

00:28:39 ◼   ► and one appearance for dark mode,

00:28:40 ◼   ► one color scheme for light mode

00:28:42 ◼   ► and one color scheme for dark mode."

00:28:44 ◼   ► So then whenever you switch, it just follows.

00:28:48 ◼   ► - I will tell you, and this is something,

00:28:52 ◼   ► I mean, I've used,

00:28:54 ◼   ► I don't wanna go too far of a tangent with this,

00:28:56 ◼   ► But I've used BB Edit in a roughly dark mode fashion

00:29:02 ◼   ► for a long time.

00:29:04 ◼   ► And primarily for me, I've always

00:29:06 ◼   ► thought as an app that it's always open,

00:29:07 ◼   ► and I'm often using all day every day to some degree.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Usually if I have a longer article on Daring Fireball,

00:29:12 ◼   ► I'm doing it in BB Edit.

00:29:14 ◼   ► I've always found that with most of the Chrome in the OS

00:29:19 ◼   ► being the traditional white backgrounds,

00:29:21 ◼   ► light gray backgrounds, having that one dark window

00:29:24 ◼   ► or a couple of dark windows that pop out behind other windows,

00:29:29 ◼   ► it's just helpful in that sort of a Fitts' Law sort of way,

00:29:35 ◼   ► where there's this nice big visual rectangle.

00:29:37 ◼   ► And I know that if I click the mouse anywhere on it,

00:29:39 ◼   ► BB edits back in the forefront.

00:29:42 ◼   ► If I happen to have my fingers on the track pad or the mouse

00:29:46 ◼   ► at the moment, right?

00:29:48 ◼   ► You get in the flow, and if your hands are on the keyboard,

00:29:51 ◼   ► you want to switch to the other app with the keyboard,

00:29:53 ◼   ► usually command tab or something like that. And if your hands are on the mouse, you want

00:29:56 ◼   ► to you want to keep it on the mouse, you just don't want to switch contexts like that. And

00:30:00 ◼   ► dark mode always always been. I've always enjoyed bb edit like that. But the other thing

00:30:08 ◼   ► that sounds like a terrible pun that's been eye opening to me recently is I've been going

00:30:13 ◼   ► through some visual issues and including cataracts in both eyes. And it it's truly an accessibility

00:30:24 ◼   ► issue. And there were moments months ago or not too far ago, where with different types

00:30:30 ◼   ► of cataracts in both my left and right eye, I literally found myself unable to read black

00:30:35 ◼   ► text on a white background. It just looked like gray text that was just washed out. And

00:30:43 ◼   ► dark mode was a revelation. And because I'd switch and I'm not really like on iOS, I'm

00:30:48 ◼   ► not really a fan of it aesthetically, but I'd switch my phone to dark mode. And I could

00:30:52 ◼   ► just I could read I didn't have to bump the text size up to I like run it like one click

00:30:57 ◼   ► over the default. But that was fine. As long as it was dark mode, it was something to do

00:31:02 ◼   ► with the way that the cataract reflects reflects light, that having a bright white background

00:31:07 ◼   ► just blurred the text out hopelessly. And so now all of a sudden light bulb goes off

00:31:12 ◼   ► in my head and I realized well that's why

00:31:15 ◼   ► that Mac OS and iOS have had that feature

00:31:19 ◼   ► for years and years in the accessibility preferences

00:31:23 ◼   ► to completely reverse the colors of the screen,

00:31:26 ◼   ► which was sort of like a poor man's dark mode.

00:31:30 ◼   ► But it was aesthetically displeasing

00:31:34 ◼   ► because some colors, you know, white goes to black,

00:31:37 ◼   ► well that's fine.

00:31:38 ◼   ► But you know, blue going to orange

00:31:40 ◼   ► and different colors would reverse.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And then they've added, and they've kept at it.

00:31:45 ◼   ► And it's one of those ways where I've always

00:31:47 ◼   ► been an advocate for accessibility.

00:31:48 ◼   ► And I think Apple has done such a commendable job.

00:31:51 ◼   ► And they've added some nice features in recent years

00:31:53 ◼   ► where they try to be smart about what they reverse

00:31:57 ◼   ► and what they don't.

00:31:58 ◼   ► So if you're reading a news article in The New York Times,

00:32:02 ◼   ► they'll reverse the color.

00:32:03 ◼   ► If you have that mode on, go from black to white,

00:32:06 ◼   ► white to black.

00:32:07 ◼   ► But they won't do the photographs,

00:32:09 ◼   ► because a photograph that's completely reversed

00:32:12 ◼   ► looks like an image negative.

00:32:15 ◼   ► But having proper dark mode that is aesthetically pleasing

00:32:19 ◼   ► and that the designer and developers of the app

00:32:22 ◼   ► have looked at and chosen colors and button colors and text

00:32:25 ◼   ► colors to have everything look right,

00:32:27 ◼   ► when I needed it for accessibility,

00:32:31 ◼   ► it honestly was like I just felt like the luckiest

00:32:34 ◼   ► SOB on the planet.

00:32:35 ◼   ► Because if it had happened 10 years ago,

00:32:37 ◼   ► maybe I would have been out of luck.

00:32:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's all true.

00:32:41 ◼   ► I agree with all of it.

00:32:42 ◼   ► And in that, in a practical sense,

00:32:46 ◼   ► dark mode really is an accessibility boost.

00:32:50 ◼   ► It, for most people, you look at it

00:32:54 ◼   ► and either you need it because you work

00:32:57 ◼   ► in an open plan office with horrible fluorescent lights

00:33:00 ◼   ► so everybody turns the lights off and it's dark.

00:33:03 ◼   ► and then a conventional light mode appearance

00:33:07 ◼   ► just burns your eyes out.

00:33:08 ◼   ► - Right.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - But yeah, it's a very real issue.

00:33:12 ◼   ► And so for us, yeah, it was just nice to be able

00:33:18 ◼   ► to kind of make it all blend together smoothly.

00:33:21 ◼   ► And the designer who did the updated color schemes for Biby

00:33:26 ◼   ► and I think it was, I think it was Biby at 11

00:33:28 ◼   ► where we introduced the new color scheme model.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Just did a terrific job.

00:33:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, a lot of, you know,

00:33:36 ◼   ► and you can go everything from, you know,

00:33:39 ◼   ► like a daring fireball scheme where it's sorta dark

00:33:41 ◼   ► with light text or very dark, like black with white text

00:33:45 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:33:46 ◼   ► Here's a BB edit story.

00:33:50 ◼   ► I have this in my show notes, I gotta tell.

00:33:52 ◼   ► Just recently, right when I decided to have you on,

00:34:00 ◼   ► I was writing my MacBook Pro, the 16-inch MacBook Pro review.

00:34:06 ◼   ► So that's recently.

00:34:07 ◼   ► I think it was about, what, three weeks ago, somewhere

00:34:09 ◼   ► around there.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Tight turnaround.

00:34:13 ◼   ► We got those of us who got the review units.

00:34:15 ◼   ► I think we had like 14 hours before the embargo dropped.

00:34:22 ◼   ► So it's not really quote unquote review.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Nobody's pretending that that's a full-fledged review,

00:34:29 ◼   ► but you can give first impressions and I'm not in a race for clicks or hits. And so I'm

00:34:35 ◼   ► not hell bent on hitting the embargo. But I do know that people wanted to preorder them.

00:34:40 ◼   ► And you know, and that was so that was my goal writing the thing is okay for the readers

00:34:45 ◼   ► who are thinking about jumping on this right away, because they've been waiting for an

00:34:49 ◼   ► updated keyboard design. And maybe they, you know, they've heard about this bigger 16 inch

00:34:54 ◼   ► screen. And so they've been waiting for what do they want to know, that's my attitude.

00:34:58 ◼   ► I'm writing it. And the first thing I did was maybe we had two days but the first time

00:35:08 ◼   ► I tried to set it up, I wanted to use not time machine. What's the thing called migration

00:35:14 ◼   ► assistant to get Oh boy to get set up? Well, I'll tell you what now. So I'm I've been negative

00:35:20 ◼   ► on I've skipped migration assistant for years and years and years and a couple of years

00:35:24 ◼   ► ago on my show, I tried it on a lark, not with a machine that I bought for myself, but

00:35:29 ◼   ► with a review unit from Apple. And I thought, Well, what the hell, it's not even my machine,

00:35:33 ◼   ► I use migration assistant, it was amazing. And it moved over stuff that I couldn't believe

00:35:37 ◼   ► it moved over like CPN modules for Pearl that I installed at the command line, you know,

00:35:43 ◼   ► using pseudo stuff that was far outside my my users home directory. And it all just moved

00:35:51 ◼   ► over. It really has been and I got a couple of I got some feedback from some people that there's

00:35:56 ◼   ► there's been a very small but dedicated team within Apple that really has put an awful lot

00:36:01 ◼   ► of work into migration assistant without much recognition outside and I think there's a lot

00:36:07 ◼   ► of old timers like me who back in the day tried either when it was called migration assistant or

00:36:13 ◼   ► whatever the old name was tried it look at the results wipe the hard drive start over from

00:36:19 ◼   ► scratch and start, you know, I used to maintain this big, long checklist of everything to

00:36:23 ◼   ► install what to do when I get a new machine, I use migration assistant now. But it was

00:36:29 ◼   ► slow and and that the reason it was slow and it's, you know, again, I should have known

00:36:34 ◼   ► better. But basically, if you're using USB three, it's pretty slow, even if it's like

00:36:40 ◼   ► from an SSD. And so instead of going machine to machine, I went from an SSD super duper

00:36:46 ◼   ► clone to this machine, and it was taking forever. And the progress bar was I know that it's

00:36:55 ◼   ► like a long running gag that progress bars are some of the hardest to write code and

00:36:59 ◼   ► don't get a lot of love. But it was like, it only updated like twice. It was like a

00:37:03 ◼   ► seven hour migration. And it like there were like three times where it updated. So it was

00:37:07 ◼   ► like stuck at seven hours for like two hours. And I thought maybe it was stuck.

00:37:11 ◼   ► lies, damned lies and progress bars. Exactly. Well, anyway, long story short, I let it go

00:37:19 ◼   ► overnight. It's it's the seven hours thing must have been right. It just wasn't updating.

00:37:26 ◼   ► There's all my stuff. I've got a working home directory. I've got all of the apps that I

00:37:31 ◼   ► want to use. I type command space and launch bar opens and I type BB and BB edit launches.

00:37:37 ◼   ► And it's got all my stuff. It looks like my BB edit. You know, the preferences, I guess

00:37:41 ◼   ► made it across. And there I go, I'm off to the races and I'm writing my review. And it

00:37:49 ◼   ► got late in the night. You know, I think it was like an 8am Eastern Time deadline. It's

00:37:54 ◼   ► like four in the morning. I'm proofreading. I'm too old to be proofreading at four in

00:37:58 ◼   ► the morning. It's I'm tired. And I don't know what I was thinking. I thought, Well, I should

00:38:04 ◼   ► at least unplug this SSD and unplug the SSD and BB edit disappeared because it was running

00:38:11 ◼   ► off the SSD, I hadn't installed BB Edit on the internal drive. When I typed command space

00:38:16 ◼   ► launch bar, I'd found it in the applications folder on the SSD that was a super duper clump

00:38:20 ◼   ► of the other article. And I hear the whole article was just about done. I'm in a proofreading

00:38:26 ◼   ► stage and it's four in the morning and the whole goddamn thing disappeared. And you're

00:38:31 ◼   ► screaming internally, either internally or outwardly. I would call it more of a flop sweat.

00:38:39 ◼   ► I would say it was a flop sweat. But I think to myself now I haven't I haven't fought that

00:38:45 ◼   ► I might have lost data in BB edit in years. I haven't even I guess I've had some crashes

00:38:51 ◼   ► but I can't remember how you know like running beta versions of course. But I haven't had

00:38:56 ◼   ► a moment like that in BB edit in a very long time. And I thought well I have faith in BB

00:39:02 ◼   ► edit. And but I honestly couldn't remember I couldn't remember if I hit command s and

00:39:06 ◼   ► I probably had

00:39:08 ◼   ► Because you know if you're of a certain age you just hit command s while you're idly thinking right?

00:39:14 ◼   ► I

00:39:16 ◼   ► Launched BB edit again. Actually. I copied it over from the SSD. I was like, oh I better put it in app local applications

00:39:22 ◼   ► I launched BB edit and boom. There's my article back up and I it

00:39:27 ◼   ► Insertion point blinking on the sentence that I was struggling over how to fix didn't lose a word. Oh

00:39:34 ◼   ► Beautiful thing.

00:39:36 ◼   ► That auto-save, auto-recovery stuff, really, you know,

00:39:41 ◼   ► it goes back to the days when laptops in particular

00:39:46 ◼   ► tended to unexpectedly go to sleep and not wake up,

00:39:52 ◼   ► especially if you were running Mac OS X, early versions.

00:39:56 ◼   ► It was a thing, remember?

00:39:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And it goes back to the days before the OS itself had any

00:40:05 ◼   ► sort of restoration mechanics built in. And we just said, you

00:40:12 ◼   ► know, we want people to not have to worry if something crashes,

00:40:18 ◼   ► we have we want people to, to just start up and pick up where

00:40:23 ◼   ► they let wherever they left off.

00:40:25 ◼   ► Well, I didn't have time machine set up on this machine, because

00:40:27 ◼   ► it was something I just set up. And the only external drive I

00:40:30 ◼   ► had set up was the super duper clone from the other machine,

00:40:33 ◼   ► which I don't even know why why I was running. I don't even know

00:40:36 ◼   ► it. That doesn't seem like me. You know, it doesn't. When I'm

00:40:40 ◼   ► on a laptop, it doesn't seem right to just keep keep an SSD

00:40:44 ◼   ► connected if you're not actively using it like to do the super

00:40:46 ◼   ► duper backup or to do the restore or if you happen to be

00:40:51 ◼   ► using it just because you've run out of internal storage and you

00:40:53 ◼   ► have a lot large, you know, Lightroom project or video

00:40:57 ◼   ► project or something like that that you need an external drive for but I was

00:41:01 ◼   ► under the impression I didn't need it I was I thought I don't know why I didn't

00:41:05 ◼   ► eject it I don't know what I was thinking but for some reason impulsively

00:41:08 ◼   ► at 4 in the morning I unplugged the drive didn't lose didn't lose place

00:41:11 ◼   ► check the volume backup before unplugging it did not lose a word and

00:41:17 ◼   ► boy I wish it made me wish not for the first time in my life that BB and it was

00:41:21 ◼   ► a physical object that I could just give a pat on the head to.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I'd say thank you.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Well, you know, maybe there's a product idea in there because we've got a merchandise store

00:41:34 ◼   ► now and when you said physical object, I instantly flashed to the weighted companion cube from

00:41:42 ◼   ► Portal.

00:41:45 ◼   ► Maybe there needs to be a weighted BB Edit cube or BB Edit plush.

00:41:51 ◼   ► It's such a great feature. It really is. And it's been there for a while. And I just had

00:41:56 ◼   ► this thought, I think PB edit will have my back. And it did. Yeah, that was something

00:42:05 ◼   ► back in the day. I know my friend Michael Lop has said this to me too, that it's like

00:42:09 ◼   ► he he he have rans and repose rans.com fame, but he likes to, he likes to identify people

00:42:18 ◼   ► his generation are older by whether they have the idle habit of command s when they like without

00:42:26 ◼   ► even thinking while they're while they're like pausing between sentences or lines of code or

00:42:31 ◼   ► something like that yeah it's it's what jim korea used to call the safe twitch yes the save twitch

00:42:37 ◼   ► right it's just something to do sometimes i'll just sit there and hit command s a couple times

00:42:40 ◼   ► You know just save save save early save often. Yeah

00:42:44 ◼   ► When you think about it and I think I said like, you know

00:42:50 ◼   ► There's a lot of nostalgia in this episode talking about the old days of BB edit

00:42:54 ◼   ► But and BB it was always good at that BB

00:42:56 ◼   ► It was always a stable application and but you know, like you said something, you know

00:43:00 ◼   ► It's certainly beyond the purview of an app

00:43:03 ◼   ► To be able to say whether or not the power book is going to successfully wake wake from sleep

00:43:09 ◼   ► It was and and we used to we we'd console ourselves as Mac users with well

00:43:15 ◼   ► At least we're not on Windows where it you know, really does seem like you're at, you know

00:43:19 ◼   ► Russian let type odds as to whether the laptops gonna wake up when you when you open the lid

00:43:25 ◼   ► Yeah, but you know, I like to think that if if in a different timeline we were doing Windows software we do it the same way

00:43:37 ◼   ► All right, I was talking about

00:43:39 ◼   ► Apple script before and I want to get back to that because I feel like

00:43:47 ◼   ► BB edit has always

00:43:51 ◼   ► Has had good support for Apple script from about as early on as you could have expected it to you know

00:43:57 ◼   ► I think I'm dating myself here, but I'm pretty sure Apple script was system 7.1 or maybe it was 7.5

00:44:03 ◼   ► But I think it was 7.1

00:44:05 ◼   ► It's always been the most supported automation tool at the system level.

00:44:16 ◼   ► And things that you could argue are maybe equivalent to AppleScript in their support.

00:44:21 ◼   ► And I would say Automator would be the more modern equivalent.

00:44:24 ◼   ► But again, you've got to put quotes around modern for Automator at this point.

00:44:29 ◼   ► But that was largely, in a lot of ways, was largely built on top of AppleScript.

00:44:33 ◼   ► a lot of the stuff that you can do in Automator is based,

00:44:37 ◼   ► you know, for apps to support it,

00:44:38 ◼   ► it's still based on the same underlying Apple event stuff.

00:44:42 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:44:43 ◼   ► And Apple events on Mac OS X

00:44:46 ◼   ► are implemented using mock IPC.

00:44:50 ◼   ► So go figure, which dates back to 1988, I think, or '89.

00:44:57 ◼   ► So go figure that one out.

00:45:02 ◼   ► It does seem to be and I always I fear for it. I think everybody who cares about it fears

00:45:12 ◼   ► for the future of Apple script. It doesn't seem like the type of technology that Apple

00:45:18 ◼   ► really cares about. There's been a vague Sammy now we're 17 to 20 years depending on where you want to

00:45:26 ◼   ► count the origins of Mac OS X, you know, as a shipping product, it's I guess, around 17 years,

00:45:31 ◼   ► certainly as something that's been in development, it's more like 22-23 years, that's a long time.

00:45:37 ◼   ► It never felt like the next side really had all that much

00:45:43 ◼   ► interest in AppleScript. You know, and basically the story, you know, to oversimplify it was that

00:45:54 ◼   ► there are so there were so many professional Mac users in production environments who had

00:45:58 ◼   ► workflows that depended on it. That if Apple had any thought at the beginning of axing it in that

00:46:06 ◼   ► great, you know, and it was the right thing to do to go through project by project and do hard

00:46:11 ◼   ► things like kill the new, for example, that it the company needed to focus and certain things. I mean,

00:46:19 ◼   ► it in a sense, it's tragic, because the Newton was kind of beautiful in certain ways.

00:46:22 ◼   ► There are other technologies that I don't know that anybody really had much affection for and I don't it wasn't

00:46:30 ◼   ► Wasn't weren't many tears shed

00:46:33 ◼   ► For getting rid of open doc. I don't think

00:46:36 ◼   ► Sorry, I can't help but laugh right

00:46:42 ◼   ► I know there was that famous video of a guy who was an open doc developer given jobs the business at

00:46:47 ◼   ► WWDC in like 97 and jobs had this wonderful answer to the gentleman

00:46:52 ◼   ► Think that might have been the one guy

00:46:54 ◼   ► Really really was upset then Apple killed open doc

00:46:57 ◼   ► Apple script is sort of this thing that that won't die because people need it but doesn't really move forward because

00:47:05 ◼   ► Apple doesn't care about it enough. It occupies a very strange place in the Mac power users

00:47:12 ◼   ► tool belt in my opinion I

00:47:15 ◼   ► agree with that and

00:47:17 ◼   ► To throw another wrinkle into it

00:47:20 ◼   ► I think the security folks at Apple hate it.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Because to them, I believe,

00:47:29 ◼   ► 'cause nobody has ever said as much to me,

00:47:32 ◼   ► but it seems very clear,

00:47:35 ◼   ► they consider AppleScript a gigantic security hole.

00:47:38 ◼   ► - Right.

00:47:39 ◼   ► - Underneath it, they consider Apple events

00:47:41 ◼   ► a gigantic security hole.

00:47:42 ◼   ► They consider cross application IPC

00:47:46 ◼   ► to be a gigantic security hole.

00:47:48 ◼   ► and they, I think, would be delighted

00:47:53 ◼   ► if the whole thing just went away.

00:47:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I get that impression too.

00:47:58 ◼   ► And they're good people, and if that's their job

00:48:00 ◼   ► is to be the security people, it is, you know,

00:48:04 ◼   ► like I say this with no animosity towards them,

00:48:09 ◼   ► even though I hope that they continue to get overruled,

00:48:12 ◼   ► because I get it that that's their job, right?

00:48:14 ◼   ► Your job as the security person

00:48:16 ◼   ► is to is to raise those things right like that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the Secret

00:48:21 ◼   ► Services job isn't to make sure that you know, the sightlines for the cameras from CNN are

00:48:28 ◼   ► at an optimal angle, right? The security and I mean, that's not their job, you know, and

00:48:32 ◼   ► if, if their answer to CNN is no, your your cameras are going down here in this pit, and

00:48:37 ◼   ► that's it, you know, it's, it's for security reasons, you know, it's but I do I do get

00:48:43 ◼   ► that impression that IPC as a whole that you can go down the

00:48:46 ◼   ► stack and that the whole thing is sort of viewed very

00:48:51 ◼   ► skeptically.

00:48:52 ◼   ► That yeah, it's it's the job of the security folks to envision

00:48:57 ◼   ► the worst case scenario. But as as long as I can remember, and I

00:49:02 ◼   ► I can I can remember a long time at this point. Here's another

00:49:08 ◼   ► flashback for you working on Mailsmith and PGP support in the

00:49:13 ◼   ► late 90s. And there has always been an intrinsic, I believe, an

00:49:22 ◼   ► intrinsic conflict between security and usability, user

00:49:27 ◼   ► experience. And there has to be a balance there. And so it's a

00:49:36 ◼   ► very, very difficult line to walk. I do not envy the people

00:49:41 ◼   ► who have to make decisions in either the security group or the user experience group because

00:49:46 ◼   ► you just know that if you tighten one screw, you're going to hurt a lot of people.

00:49:54 ◼   ► I feel like it's a recurring theme in my writing.

00:49:58 ◼   ► I've always felt like I have a good sense of fairness towards viewing trade-offs and

00:50:05 ◼   ► appreciating the other side of an argument, whereas I feel like an awful lot of people

00:50:08 ◼   ► who care passionately about something really latch onto their side of the trade-off argument.

00:50:15 ◼   ► And I just wrote about this today. I linked to iFixit's teardown of the new Mac Pro, and

00:50:21 ◼   ► they gave it a 9 out of 10 for repairability by all accounts. It is every bit as modular

00:50:27 ◼   ► as Apple promised. And, you know, there's a bit of tongue-in-cheek from the iFixit guys,

00:50:33 ◼   ► and I get it, and it's funny, but like they really, you know, they were making hay over

00:50:36 ◼   ► the fact that you can literally put in your own RAM using nothing but a pair of opposable

00:50:41 ◼   ► thumbs. You don't even know you don't even get a screwdriver to get to where the RAM

00:50:44 ◼   ► is. Isn't that great? And it really is great. And there one they gave it a nine out of 10.

00:50:49 ◼   ► And they didn't say why they didn't give it 10 out of 10. But the only real knock they

00:50:52 ◼   ► had against the whole system is that the system's SSD drive isn't user swappable because it's

00:51:01 ◼   ► on the same chipset as the whole T2 system, which is the little iOS running on a system

00:51:09 ◼   ► on a chip that for the Mac Pro there is no touch bar and there is no touch ID, but it's

00:51:15 ◼   ► the same system that handles that. There is a secure enclave and they have a wonderfully

00:51:21 ◼   ► human readable white paper on it that I think I linked to today. And you can read about

00:51:25 ◼   ► And it really is an interesting system. And it really is a very interesting approach to security

00:51:32 ◼   ► and being able to validate the boot, the system booting up and evolved in the various ways that

00:51:39 ◼   ► a bad actor could screw with your computer to get something if they can get something in there early

00:51:45 ◼   ► on in the boot process, then all things over. And so being able to verify that is a great,

00:51:51 ◼   ► great thing. But it really is a huge trade off in the usability of the system as a modular thing,

00:51:56 ◼   ► where let's say you you spend $12,000 on this configuration now and two years from now,

00:52:03 ◼   ► the price of eight gigabyte or eight terabyte SSDs drops significantly that you can't just say,

00:52:10 ◼   ► well, I'll get one of those eight terabytes system SSDs and swapping it that you can't do that it is

00:52:16 ◼   ► is a huge debt. That's usability for the type of people who buy Mac pros. It's a direct

00:52:20 ◼   ► trade off. Yep. And I think that's what costs them the one point with iFixit. Yeah. Was

00:52:26 ◼   ► that that one issue alone? There's also in to me, we've never really gotten clarity on

00:52:31 ◼   ► this on the scripting, you know, the other scripting story on Mac OS 10 Mac OS 10 has

00:52:38 ◼   ► always been this Unix layer. And when Mac OS 10 Mac OS 10 was new, when it was even

00:52:45 ◼   ► before it came out, there was like a whole page on apple.com/macos10 that had this big,

00:52:52 ◼   ► you know, in the style of the day, a very skeuomorphic three-dimensional, fakes three-dimensional

00:52:58 ◼   ► steel plate with pristine screws that said Unix. This is secure. It's secure. It is robust.

00:53:07 ◼   ► And at the time in 2002, secure meant things like a protected memory system so that when

00:53:13 ◼   ► an app, you know, if one app went down, it had no chance of bringing down, you know,

00:53:18 ◼   ► the whole Windows Server or whatever the equivalent was on the old Mac OS, you know, where an

00:53:22 ◼   ► app could scribble over the wrong part of memory and boom, your whole machine's wedged.

00:53:28 ◼   ► That was what we considered security or the fact that you could have, you know, two users

00:53:35 ◼   ► on a system at home and the operating system really did keep one user from writing over

00:53:41 ◼   ► files of the other whereas on the classic Mac OS that was always a bit of a bit of a handshake deal

00:53:47 ◼   ► I won't look at your stuff if you don't look at mine. Yeah.

00:53:53 ◼   ► But the other that we I don't think we've really gotten an answer on this but I feel like

00:53:59 ◼   ► it's up in the air and I know that there's a lot of pessimists out there on Apple's

00:54:04 ◼   ► commitment to the pro market but and software wise I worry but you look at the hardware they

00:54:11 ◼   ► they've come out with in the last year or two years,

00:54:14 ◼   ► really starting with the iMac Pro, which is genuinely

00:54:17 ◼   ► professional hardware.

00:54:18 ◼   ► Now they're selling workstations that can be configured up

00:54:20 ◼   ► to $52,000.

00:54:22 ◼   ► That's a serious commitment to professional computing

00:54:27 ◼   ► on the hardware side.

00:54:28 ◼   ► But there was this announcement--

00:54:30 ◼   ► I forget if it happened at WWDC this year,

00:54:34 ◼   ► like in a small footnote afterwards.

00:54:36 ◼   ► I know it wasn't in the keynote, but they

00:54:38 ◼   ► said something, something to the effect

00:54:40 ◼   ► of that the Unix scripting layers may not be long for the world, or at least in terms

00:54:46 ◼   ► of being built into the system, and that you might have to download them yourself.

00:54:52 ◼   ► That's right. That lines up with my own recollection of them specifically saying, I think it was

00:54:58 ◼   ► in the Catalina change notes that the Unix scripting languages were deprecated, which

00:55:06 ◼   ► which is a word they like to throw around.

00:55:08 ◼   ► And I read maybe a little bit more into that

00:55:13 ◼   ► than I should have, but my sense of that is that they simply

00:55:21 ◼   ► on the one hand recognized that they were never really

00:55:26 ◼   ► very good about keeping those tools up to date.

00:55:29 ◼   ► The versions that macOS shipped with were always out of date

00:55:34 ◼   ► they rarely got updated when they were maintenance patches to the OS and they were very difficult to

00:55:42 ◼   ► keep up to date on your own unless you started using something like homebrew which a lot of

00:55:50 ◼   ► people started doing yeah well so i use it i like it but i know a lot of people have strong feelings

00:55:56 ◼   ► against it they don't trust it they've been bitten in the past by it and there's a certain

00:56:03 ◼   ► however much behind Apple's versions of things like this we're talking about languages like Perl and Python and and

00:56:09 ◼   ► and Ruby Ruby, of course, and you know Ruby is a great story of that because

00:56:14 ◼   ► Perl and Python were already

00:56:17 ◼   ► Not old old but you know, they were in established established in 2002

00:56:23 ◼   ► The whole rise of Ruby happened during the Mac OS 10 era

00:56:28 ◼   ► mm-hmm and and really felt

00:56:32 ◼   ► You know part of it was that an apple, you know got a version of Ruby

00:56:35 ◼   ► And I know there's you know every one of these scripting languages

00:56:38 ◼   ► But Ruby I think sort of maybe maybe more so than others had some weird issues where you know

00:56:44 ◼   ► The newest version was not quite fully compatible with the one that Apple had included

00:56:50 ◼   ► But you could you could get it there

00:56:51 ◼   ► But but you could count on Ruby being there even when Ruby was a relatively new language that had taken off and the fact that

00:56:57 ◼   ► it was just there and you didn't really have to

00:57:02 ◼   ► Do anything complicated at the at the command line really?

00:57:05 ◼   ► It's just a feather and Mac OS X hat I think and agreed. Yep, and it was also at a time

00:57:12 ◼   ► You know again, not me and you

00:57:14 ◼   ► for sure, but an awful lot of our of

00:57:18 ◼   ► Our friends who were new new new to the platform in the mid-2000s

00:57:23 ◼   ► Came because of Ruby it was Ruby that drove them to come to the because that was what they were writing for their work like

00:57:29 ◼   ► Ruby on Rails server side stuff. And what what do you want on your desk? If that's what

00:57:34 ◼   ► you're doing? You wanted a Mac, you wanted Mac OS 10? Yep. The thing that's unclear to

00:57:40 ◼   ► me, and I've asked around, and as far as I can tell, I think that it's one of those things

00:57:46 ◼   ► with Apple, where they won't even say that we don't know, they'll just they just have

00:57:51 ◼   ► a non answer. But basically, I think what do they mean by an external download? And

00:57:58 ◼   ► Because there's two ways that can go.

00:58:00 ◼   ► The first would be what you were talking about, where

00:58:02 ◼   ► you're completely on your own.

00:58:04 ◼   ► There is a terminal app, and you have access

00:58:06 ◼   ► to the Unix command line.

00:58:08 ◼   ► But you've got to start from scratch with--

00:58:10 ◼   ► and Homebrewed certainly makes it a lot easier

00:58:12 ◼   ► than downloading a tarball and compiling the whole thing

00:58:16 ◼   ► yourself.

00:58:18 ◼   ► Because then it raises the question of how do you

00:58:20 ◼   ► get the developer tools?

00:58:22 ◼   ► Now you've got an 8 gigabyte Xcode download just

00:58:25 ◼   ► to get a compiler.

00:58:28 ◼   ► The other one, though, would be if Apple makes these tools part

00:58:32 ◼   ► of the developer tool package, which they've always done.

00:58:36 ◼   ► So you install Xcode, and then there's

00:58:39 ◼   ► a menu command you can do that will install the command line

00:58:42 ◼   ► version of all the various compilers.

00:58:45 ◼   ► And there's other tools that are in there.

00:58:47 ◼   ► But you don't have to do the whole make, test, install,

00:58:53 ◼   ► command line dance to get them.

00:58:55 ◼   ► They're officially supported.

00:58:56 ◼   ► They come from Apple in a real package installer, and basically all you have to do is authorize,

00:59:01 ◼   ► you know, say, "Okay, I'm an admin on this Mac.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Go ahead and install them."

00:59:05 ◼   ► If that's what they do with Perl and Python and Ruby and its various friends, I guess

00:59:10 ◼   ► I'm okay with that, but I would really hate to see it.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I'd really hate to see those languages drop out as being supported at all by Apple.

00:59:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree, and it's really difficult to predict how that's going to go.

00:59:25 ◼   ► I have been getting, and I don't have a basis for this necessarily, but I've sort of been

00:59:32 ◼   ► getting the sense that there is less, how do I phrase this?

00:59:44 ◼   ► It feels like the Mac is becoming less and less of a developer platform for people who

00:59:50 ◼   ► aren't actually targeting Apple OSs.

00:59:54 ◼   ► Right. That's a good way. That is a very good way to put it and I

00:59:58 ◼   ► Did I

01:00:01 ◼   ► You know, I hesitate to tell them their business and where max sales are coming from and what's significant

01:00:08 ◼   ► You know what significance the number of developers who are just doing purely server side stuff in

01:00:13 ◼   ► rails or PHP

01:00:16 ◼   ► Or you know all of the other various JavaScript based server side stuff

01:00:21 ◼   ► that has become really, really popular in the last few years.

01:00:27 ◼   ► But I get it that maybe if you tally up all of that market, it isn't that huge compared

01:00:35 ◼   ► to the four to five million Macs Apple sells quarter after quarter at this point where

01:00:41 ◼   ► an awful lot of them are just typical consumers who want to get a MacBook Air to do email

01:00:46 ◼   ► and browse the web and whatever else, you know, a typical quote unquote Mac user would

01:00:51 ◼   ► do. But I kind of I kind of feel like they might be overlooking just how important that

01:00:58 ◼   ► that developer market even though they're not writing iOS apps or Mac apps or tvOS apps,

01:01:04 ◼   ► that being the go to platform for those developers, I still think was a it was good for the Mac

01:01:10 ◼   ► above and beyond multiply the number of those developers times the price of the max that

01:01:16 ◼   ► that they pay for.

01:01:17 ◼   ► Somehow it--

01:01:18 ◼   ► - Yep, you beat me to it.

01:01:21 ◼   ► I really think that developers of anything,

01:01:28 ◼   ► software developers, web developers,

01:01:33 ◼   ► people who are producing things on,

01:01:37 ◼   ► the technical things on Macs,

01:01:40 ◼   ► whether it's PHP and WordPress themes

01:01:44 ◼   ► and CSS and HTML or C for scientific computing

01:01:49 ◼   ► and also Mac, iOS, watchOS and all the rest.

01:01:57 ◼   ► I think that people who do software development

01:02:01 ◼   ► are the leading edge enthusiast audience for any platform.

01:02:06 ◼   ► They push the hardware to its limits,

01:02:12 ◼   ► They push the OS to its limits.

01:02:14 ◼   ► And I think it's a real mistake to marginalize them,

01:02:20 ◼   ► even on the valid fiscal basis

01:02:27 ◼   ► that they don't sell all that many machines

01:02:29 ◼   ► because it's in any market, not just computing,

01:02:33 ◼   ► it's the enthusiasts who tell other people what to buy.

01:02:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I know you can,

01:02:39 ◼   ► I bet you know where I'm going is the car market.

01:02:41 ◼   ► uh-huh

01:02:43 ◼   ► And I really do think that's true and I'm not

01:02:47 ◼   ► You're more much more of a car guy than I am our friends at the ATP show even had a car show before I did

01:02:54 ◼   ► But I think I get it and I kind of my abs

01:02:58 ◼   ► Observations and I haven't bought a car in 13 years

01:03:02 ◼   ► We're overdue, but I'm waiting because I feel like at this point, you know, I'm sort of like

01:03:09 ◼   ► Where John, Syracuse, oh was waiting for the new Mac Pro

01:03:12 ◼   ► We're overdue for a new car, but it at this point. I really feel like I want to get something electric

01:03:18 ◼   ► I feel like buying another gas car is the wrong wrong move for us

01:03:21 ◼   ► but in the meantime here I am and I have to look at my wife and son and explain why we have a

01:03:26 ◼   ► 2006 Acura that doesn't even

01:03:28 ◼   ► Does not only doesn't have carplay. It doesn't even have a USB

01:03:32 ◼   ► It's 2006 the the latest and greatest in 2006 was the iPod with the 30 pin connector

01:03:38 ◼   ► And we don't even have that.

01:03:41 ◼   ► - Well, listen, I'm not gonna judge you

01:03:43 ◼   ► because my daily driver, my grocery getter is a 2004

01:03:48 ◼   ► with 143,000 miles on it.

01:03:51 ◼   ► My fun car is a 2005 with 127,000 miles on it.

01:03:57 ◼   ► And yeah, every once in a while

01:04:04 ◼   ► I think about buying a new car.

01:04:06 ◼   ► And for a daily driver, of course,

01:04:07 ◼   ► it's easier to look around and say,

01:04:09 ◼   ► okay, well, this is the price I want

01:04:11 ◼   ► and this is the electric car that does what I want.

01:04:14 ◼   ► 'Cause yeah, I agree buying a gasoline car for everyday use

01:04:17 ◼   ► is seems like a losing bet.

01:04:20 ◼   ► But as an enthusiast,

01:04:23 ◼   ► I look at BMW's current offerings and I think, wow,

01:04:28 ◼   ► they really don't make a car I wanna buy

01:04:31 ◼   ► and that's really disappointing.

01:04:33 ◼   ► - And I've heard that from so many friends

01:04:36 ◼   ► who are in that semi-enthusiast market.

01:04:39 ◼   ► And then, and just weird decisions

01:04:41 ◼   ► and the way that cruft,

01:04:43 ◼   ► mental cruft can just kind of build up

01:04:47 ◼   ► in the design process where there's things that they can,

01:04:52 ◼   ► just adding weight to cars and putting stuff in the doors

01:04:57 ◼   ► and adding the stuff when it's,

01:04:58 ◼   ► if it's meant for enthusiasts,

01:05:01 ◼   ► it's just not what they want,

01:05:02 ◼   ► that they're making decisions that are,

01:05:04 ◼   ► That's not what we want.

01:05:07 ◼   ► And circle back to the trash can Mac Pro and similar type decisions where I get where some

01:05:15 ◼   ► people might appeal to them.

01:05:17 ◼   ► They might want a fancier electric window that moves in a much more smooth manner.

01:05:23 ◼   ► But I don't want 50 extra pounds in my door.

01:05:27 ◼   ► But I'm with you and I look at Apple's computers and I have a 2018 MacBook Pro with a touch

01:05:37 ◼   ► bar, the last gasp of the old keyboard.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And I hope there's an iteration of it that has the new keyboard.

01:05:45 ◼   ► I've heard that the new keyboard isn't quite as bad as the previous generation and that's

01:05:49 ◼   ► good.

01:05:51 ◼   ► But I'm looking at enthusiast hardware and seeing nothing.

01:05:56 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, and sorry, go ahead. And I look at the OS and I feel that I have a sense of the direction

01:06:06 ◼   ► it's going in and I see a lot of the same thing happening. I see the enthusiasts, the ones who say,

01:06:13 ◼   ► "Yeah, this is what I got. This is what I like. This is what I would recommend."

01:06:18 ◼   ► If you're making recommendations for family, what are you going to support?

01:06:25 ◼   ► and thinking, and thinking, Yeah, I, I can't recommend this.

01:06:30 ◼   ► There's a sense I almost wrote it today. But there's a sense that we're we as Mac users

01:06:38 ◼   ► are never satisfied. But that's our job as Mac enthusiasts to never be satisfied.

01:06:44 ◼   ► So any domain enthusiasts are never satisfied, right? And so here, Apple has finally shipped

01:06:50 ◼   ► this major new update to the MacBook Mac Pro and it truly is in and of itself just impressive

01:06:58 ◼   ► engineering across the board. But I can't help but look at both A just go to store.apple.com

01:07:09 ◼   ► and try to configure a nice pro desktop for $4,000 which seems like something you ought to be able to

01:07:17 ◼   ► to buy, but which they don't sell because the new Mac Pro

01:07:21 ◼   ► starts at $6,000.

01:07:23 ◼   ► And in my opinion, again, I don't

01:07:25 ◼   ► think it's a problem for the market that machine

01:07:29 ◼   ► is meant for, this workstation class market.

01:07:33 ◼   ► I don't even think it's necessary.

01:07:34 ◼   ► I don't think it's great, but I don't

01:07:36 ◼   ► think it's necessarily a problem that that base config $6,000

01:07:40 ◼   ► Mac Pro isn't that great for anybody,

01:07:43 ◼   ► that the people who really, really need

01:07:45 ◼   ► excessive computing ability are configuring something a lot more expensive than that.

01:07:50 ◼   ► And the people who really just want a nice modular desktop, it's the $6,000 is going

01:07:57 ◼   ► into things that aren't necessarily the best dollar for dollar. I mean, there's tons of

01:08:01 ◼   ► people on Twitter who've configured, you know, Intel based hardware from the PC market. And,

01:08:08 ◼   ► know, you can get something pretty performant for and you know, are truly in my opinion,

01:08:16 ◼   ► you know, professional, you know, with with good quality RAM and a good SSD and stuff

01:08:20 ◼   ► like that, for, you know, less than $6,000. Much less right. There's still a hole in the

01:08:27 ◼   ► lineup there. And, you know, I, is it just as simple as an iMac Pro without the built

01:08:34 ◼   ► display and that's that's not the most unreal you know it's not unreasonable to

01:08:39 ◼   ► want in in terms of the modularity of your professional machine it is it

01:08:44 ◼   ► strikes me as actually very reasonable to want to separate the computer from

01:08:49 ◼   ► the display because a display can certainly last for a lot of people

01:08:52 ◼   ► especially now that they've gone retina right now that you know we've gone over

01:08:55 ◼   ► this you know we had the great divide from the CRT era to the flat screen era

01:09:01 ◼   ► And then with the flat screens we've gone to this these retina level resolutions

01:09:06 ◼   ► It's not unreasonable to think that like if Apple were to sell a regular 5k

01:09:12 ◼   ► Pro display without the XDR that it could last 10 years or more

01:09:17 ◼   ► a lot longer than your computer might and so I really don't think it's

01:09:22 ◼   ► Again I realized we're complaining just after Apple

01:09:28 ◼   ► But I look at it and I see the complaints of my developer friends on Twitter

01:09:33 ◼   ► You know or in private, you know slack groups and stuff like that that boy a lot of them a lot of them feel

01:09:40 ◼   ► Well way over served by the new Mac Pro and

01:09:45 ◼   ► They sort of feel like they're missing an enthusiast level device, you know computing device

01:09:51 ◼   ► That's somewhere in between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro what we now call the Mac Pro

01:09:58 ◼   ► Couldn't agree more. I think it's kind of funny through throughout my entire

01:10:04 ◼   ► Personal and professional history of buying computers my

01:10:09 ◼   ► Mystical magical sweet spot price point has always been forty four hundred dollars every compute every every computer I've ever bought

01:10:18 ◼   ► What once equipped from the

01:10:22 ◼   ► 512 K Mac to the to the

01:10:27 ◼   ► Quadra 700 to the Power Mac 9500 and through to the my

01:10:34 ◼   ► Most recent computer purchase which was desktop purchase, which was a 2013 Mac Pro

01:10:39 ◼   ► $4,400

01:10:42 ◼   ► and

01:10:44 ◼   ► It seems like a reasonable price to me as a very nice professional just computer

01:10:50 ◼   ► Yeah for for for somebody who uses a computer to make their living

01:10:55 ◼   ► thing. There is always a sweet spot price point. And for me, it

01:11:01 ◼   ► has just worked out to be $4,400. And so to these trash

01:11:07 ◼   ► cans, I have two of them. I have I have the one I bought when it

01:11:12 ◼   ► came out. And I have a refurb that OWC was selling. It's a

01:11:17 ◼   ► four core machine, and I use it for testing new OS versions. And

01:11:21 ◼   ► they're just sitting here quietly on my shelf side by

01:11:23 ◼   ► side, next to my desk, taking up no floor space, outputting almost no heat, and they're

01:11:30 ◼   ► exactly what I want in a computer.

01:11:33 ◼   ► I can take the top off and put in more memory if I need to.

01:11:39 ◼   ► I've figured out that I can swap in a new SSD.

01:11:45 ◼   ► Those are the things that I've found historically that I always need to upgrade.

01:11:49 ◼   ► Computer like an iMac Pro with no attached display and a hatch over the memory slots. Perfect. Yeah, I

01:11:55 ◼   ► Was I was looking at the new Mac mini which from all accounts is a solid little machine

01:12:02 ◼   ► and

01:12:05 ◼   ► There's

01:12:06 ◼   ► No access to the ramp. You've got to take the machine apart. Yeah, and for what it is, I think that's fine

01:12:12 ◼   ► I just feel like it shouldn't be the only standalone desktop Mac other than the new Mac Pro

01:12:18 ◼   ► I mean that not for twenty five hundred dollars. It shouldn't be it's there's a serious gap and I love I again

01:12:24 ◼   ► I know we're complaining about we're complaining about a Mac mini that has never been better as a Mac me agreed

01:12:30 ◼   ► Yep

01:12:30 ◼   ► right and that they really did listen to pros and who use Mac minis for their work and

01:12:37 ◼   ► Put as many ports on a little tiny

01:12:39 ◼   ► It's hard to imagine how they could have gotten more ports into the back of that thing, which is great. That's great. Yep

01:12:46 ◼   ► But we're enthusiasts. It's our job to complain about things that don't matter to 90% of the population

01:12:51 ◼   ► Exactly, and we do a very good job of it. All right, let me take a break here. Thank our friends at Casper

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01:13:16 ◼   ► The original Casper mattress combines multiple, multiple supportive memory foams for a quality

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01:13:36 ◼   ► The wave features a patent pending premium support system to mirror the natural shape

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01:13:44 ◼   ► The Essential has a streamlined design at a price that won't keep you up at night.

01:13:49 ◼   ► It's a little bit lower in price.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Still a great mattress.

01:13:52 ◼   ► And then the Hybrid, that's the new one, where it combines the pressure relief of their award-winning

01:13:56 ◼   ► foam with durable yet gentle springs.

01:14:01 ◼   ► They also offer a wide array of other products.

01:14:04 ◼   ► If it's related to sleeping and being comfortable, things like pillows and sheets, Casper has

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01:14:27 ◼   ► Satisfied their mattresses are delivered right to your door in there small. How could that possibly fit a mattress box?

01:14:34 ◼   ► It's really kind of amazing you open it up you follow their instructions number one put it in your room first

01:14:40 ◼   ► Take the box upstairs put it in your bedroom

01:14:42 ◼   ► Open it up. It'll suck all the oxygen right out of the air

01:14:45 ◼   ► And next thing, you know, you got a mattress. It's really amazing

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01:14:57 ◼   ► You don't like it. They take it back with no questions asked

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01:15:17 ◼   ► casp er

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01:15:22 ◼   ► talk-show and

01:15:23 ◼   ► Using that code talk show at checkout. That's casper.com slash talk show and special code talk show

01:15:30 ◼   ► terms and conditions

01:15:32 ◼   ► Apply not just terms not just conditions but terms and conditions

01:15:38 ◼   ► apply. Before we move on, I just wanted to mention, I'll kick myself if I don't. I have

01:15:46 ◼   ► this theory on the removal of the scripting languages, the Unix ones, and that if if I'm

01:15:52 ◼   ► right, I'll be I guess I'll be happy. But my theory is if Apple continues to support

01:15:57 ◼   ► them, like again, I wouldn't be surprised if they just get installed with the developer

01:16:02 ◼   ► tools, you know, like the Swift compiler and the GCC and whatever else they got the C Lang

01:16:07 ◼   ► I guess they don't ship GCC anymore. Do they?

01:16:10 ◼   ► I

01:16:13 ◼   ► Hope that if they continue to support it that one of the reasons for getting

01:16:19 ◼   ► Rid of it in the default install it would be that the security team

01:16:25 ◼   ► Doesn't want

01:16:27 ◼   ► Individual apps to be able to count on the presence of those scripting languages because I think that's part of why they're deprecating

01:16:34 ◼   ► them to warn people that if your app which is either mostly or ostensibly a

01:16:41 ◼   ► Mac app using the you know cocoa API's and stuff like that but you've got some

01:16:47 ◼   ► subsystem of the app that calls out to the Unix shell scripting languages

01:16:54 ◼   ► heads up you're not going to be able to count on that anymore not that it won't

01:16:59 ◼   ► be possible to do it but you can't just assume and for me personally this you

01:17:05 ◼   ► know it certainly is in use by a fair number of the apps that I use there's a

01:17:09 ◼   ► fair number of apps that include my markdown pearl script as the as a

01:17:14 ◼   ► markdown you know translator you wouldn't be an app that uses that

01:17:18 ◼   ► wouldn't be able to use that anymore it would have to switch to some sort of

01:17:21 ◼   ► native Swift or objective C markdown parser which is possible and there's

01:17:26 ◼   ► There's plenty of them that are very good, but I suspect that if they do pull if 1016

01:17:33 ◼   ► ships and these scripting languages are not in the default installation, there's going

01:17:37 ◼   ► to be an awful lot of stuff that's going to break in weird ways from developers who either

01:17:42 ◼   ► didn't heed the instructions or just, you know, old versions of apps that users have

01:17:48 ◼   ► just kept using.

01:17:49 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good notion.

01:17:51 ◼   ► And it's a real interesting idea that there's a security component to their thinking on

01:17:57 ◼   ► this.

01:17:58 ◼   ► That wouldn't surprise me either.

01:18:01 ◼   ► Unix scripting as another form of that automation security hole.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:09 ◼   ► All right.

01:18:11 ◼   ► BB Edit 13.

01:18:13 ◼   ► A couple of the flagship features seem like they were pulled right out of my...

01:18:19 ◼   ► I didn't even know I wanted them.

01:18:21 ◼   ► You know people who read during fireball know that I'm a regular expression super nerd

01:18:25 ◼   ► Possibly some sort of weird savant where it's the one just this esoteric

01:18:30 ◼   ► level of programming or programming ish

01:18:33 ◼   ► stuff that for whatever reason my brain takes to

01:18:38 ◼   ► There so there's a new feature in BBS, which I love which is called the pattern playground and

01:18:45 ◼   ► This there's actually been there have been apps entire apps that this is what they do now. It's just a feature in bbedit

01:18:52 ◼   ► Can you tell people what a pattern playground is?

01:18:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so a pattern playground is a safe space

01:18:59 ◼   ► for

01:19:02 ◼   ► beginning users to experiment with grep patterns and

01:19:06 ◼   ► See how the individual elements of a pattern work get a sense of what a pattern does

01:19:14 ◼   ► while working with their actual text,

01:19:16 ◼   ► because of course there's a strongly practical aspect

01:19:19 ◼   ► to this, but without risking actual data.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Since they're looking at a read-only copy,

01:19:28 ◼   ► they'll try a pattern out, they'll say,

01:19:31 ◼   ► "Oh, this matches this,

01:19:32 ◼   ► and these are what the sub-patterns match,

01:19:35 ◼   ► and here's how they break down."

01:19:36 ◼   ► So it gives you that level of introspection into a pattern

01:19:40 ◼   ► so that you can really see how it works.

01:19:43 ◼   ► And so it's an enormously helpful learning tool

01:19:48 ◼   ► for anybody who's just starting out.

01:19:51 ◼   ► But at the same time,

01:19:52 ◼   ► it's an enormously helpful development tool

01:19:56 ◼   ► for anybody who's experienced at writing GREP patterns

01:19:59 ◼   ► to create, to iterate, to debug a GREP pattern.

01:20:04 ◼   ► Because yeah, as you say,

01:20:07 ◼   ► there really is an element of programming

01:20:10 ◼   ► to writing a GREP pattern.

01:20:12 ◼   ► There's logic involved in the expression of that logic.

01:20:15 ◼   ► And so there's this visual introspection.

01:20:21 ◼   ► You can try stuff out, you can test it.

01:20:23 ◼   ► And when you're ready, you just hit a button.

01:20:26 ◼   ► It goes over to the find window

01:20:27 ◼   ► and you're ready to put it into service.

01:20:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it fills in all the things

01:20:31 ◼   ► like the sub-expressions.

01:20:32 ◼   ► So if you want to, you know, sub-expression one,

01:20:35 ◼   ► sub-expression two, you know, here,

01:20:37 ◼   ► sub-expression one is rich, sub-expression two is seagull.

01:20:41 ◼   ► and you're like, oh, but wait, sub-expression two

01:20:43 ◼   ► with Seagull has the space before his name.

01:20:46 ◼   ► I have to adjust this pattern to make sure the space

01:20:48 ◼   ► isn't in first name, last name, that sort of thing.

01:20:51 ◼   ► - Exactly, and at the same time,

01:20:53 ◼   ► there's also a spot in the playground

01:20:55 ◼   ► for experimenting with replacement patterns.

01:20:57 ◼   ► So for any given match, again, yeah,

01:21:00 ◼   ► it helps you learn that on the novice side

01:21:05 ◼   ► and on the experience side, it helps you iterate and debug.

01:21:10 ◼   ► It's not the best analogy I've ever come up with,

01:21:12 ◼   ► but it reminds me a little bit of apps like Photoshop,

01:21:17 ◼   ► Photoshop in particular, but going back in the day,

01:21:20 ◼   ► where you'd bring up a filter for Photoshop back in the day

01:21:24 ◼   ► and you'd twiddle with all the settings

01:21:26 ◼   ► and then you had to hit a button and wait for the filter

01:21:30 ◼   ► or whatever it was to apply to the image

01:21:33 ◼   ► and then you could see if you liked it.

01:21:35 ◼   ► And if you didn't, then you had to Command + Z,

01:21:37 ◼   ► go back to it, try it again.

01:21:39 ◼   ► And at some point, Photoshop switched to when these windows

01:21:44 ◼   ► are open and you change the settings for the Gaussian blur

01:21:47 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:21:48 ◼   ► They preview live in the window behind the dialogue

01:21:51 ◼   ► where you're setting it.

01:21:53 ◼   ► And apps like Acorn and Pixelmator do that too.

01:21:56 ◼   ► But this is sort of like live preview for grep,

01:21:59 ◼   ► where instead of typing a pattern, hoping it's right,

01:22:03 ◼   ► doing a change all, and then eyeballing the results,

01:22:06 ◼   ► and undo, go back to the fine dialogue, try it again.

01:22:10 ◼   ► You can just sit there and play with it,

01:22:12 ◼   ► and then you could see it in the window,

01:22:14 ◼   ► right there in the playground window.

01:22:15 ◼   ► Okay, this is gonna do exactly

01:22:17 ◼   ► what I thought it was going to do.

01:22:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, it really removes the sense of error

01:22:23 ◼   ► from the trial and error process.

01:22:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:25 ◼   ► Right? - Right.

01:22:26 ◼   ► - Because all of a sudden,

01:22:28 ◼   ► instead of dealing with that element of frustration

01:22:30 ◼   ► of it didn't do what I wanted,

01:22:33 ◼   ► you're now, you're twisting a knob

01:22:37 ◼   ► and watching the effects in real time.

01:22:40 ◼   ► And so, is there still trial and error?

01:22:45 ◼   ► Well, sure, in a literal sense, you're trying something out.

01:22:49 ◼   ► It works like you want it to or it doesn't.

01:22:51 ◼   ► And if it doesn't, you adjust.

01:22:53 ◼   ► But the loop is so tight now that it feels much more

01:22:58 ◼   ► like a live fine tuning sort of a process

01:23:02 ◼   ► then instead of trying and failing.

01:23:07 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:23:08 ◼   ► One of my other new features, and I love it,

01:23:09 ◼   ► I'm looking at the BBE

01:23:09 ◼   ► I'm looking at the BBE

01:23:11 ◼   ► at 13 release notes here,

01:23:12 ◼   ► and you even call it out that it was,

01:23:13 ◼   ► this is the commands command, which I love.

01:23:16 ◼   ► And it was added in BBE at 12.5,

01:23:18 ◼   ► but as it says here in the release notes,

01:23:20 ◼   ► it's too cool not to mention again here.

01:23:21 ◼   ► Now this, I have to take a little bit of credit for it.

01:23:23 ◼   ► This was an idea that I threw over

01:23:25 ◼   ► the support transom years ago.

01:23:29 ◼   ► - You did.

01:23:30 ◼   ► And we always used to refer to it internally

01:23:34 ◼   ► as Gruber's Universal Runner.

01:23:36 ◼   ► - But the idea of this command,

01:23:37 ◼   ► which I just love and I use it all the time.

01:23:40 ◼   ► The commands command and I believe it's the default

01:23:43 ◼   ► keyboard, that's what I use.

01:23:44 ◼   ► I think it was free for me, it's shift command U.

01:23:47 ◼   ► And it brings up a window where you can type any command

01:23:52 ◼   ► in BB edit, anything in any of the menus,

01:23:54 ◼   ► and whatever you type will start matching.

01:23:57 ◼   ► And it'll show you a list of everything.

01:23:59 ◼   ► So if you know you wanna run the process lines containing,

01:24:02 ◼   ► you could start typing the word process,

01:24:04 ◼   ► you could start typing the words containing,

01:24:07 ◼   ► You could start typing lines.

01:24:08 ◼   ► It'll match them.

01:24:09 ◼   ► If you have a whole bunch of scripts,

01:24:11 ◼   ► you know, your own Apple scripts or text filters,

01:24:13 ◼   ► which of course I have a lot of,

01:24:14 ◼   ► all of those are included.

01:24:16 ◼   ► And then you could just arrow key down to the one you want.

01:24:19 ◼   ► If it's not the top selection, hit return.

01:24:21 ◼   ► And then that menu key runs.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And I love it because I, long ago, I'm too old.

01:24:27 ◼   ► I've run out of space for new, new shortcut keys.

01:24:30 ◼   ► I don't, so I don't, I don't need to,

01:24:33 ◼   ► if you have, you know, a script that you're running,

01:24:36 ◼   ► I just got done selling t-shirts at daring fireball and the weird process I used to run them. I

01:24:41 ◼   ► Run a couple of it's not even worth putting a script together to do it because it's about a two or three step process

01:24:47 ◼   ► To export the final count of you know, each SKU, you know, all right

01:24:53 ◼   ► We got you know 37 of this shirt and 47 XL's blah blah blah

01:24:57 ◼   ► But instead of running like two or three commands with their own shortcuts. It's all shift command you type the name hit return

01:25:05 ◼   ► There it is. I love it. And I wish I

01:25:07 ◼   ► Don't mean you know, maybe you'll take it the wrong way, but I wish that it became like a standard feature system wide

01:25:13 ◼   ► Yeah, well we we were inspired and I suspect you were as well by the awesome work of of

01:25:21 ◼   ► Really indispensable tools like launch bar. Yep. Yeah and

01:25:26 ◼   ► And and one of the things that I did early on

01:25:32 ◼   ► during the development of this feature was to think,

01:25:35 ◼   ► well, gee, the thing that BBEdit can do that LaunchBar can't

01:25:40 ◼   ► is show you everything inside of BBEdit.

01:25:43 ◼   ► As you said, scripts, filters, recently opened files,

01:25:48 ◼   ► not just menu commands.

01:25:50 ◼   ► Of course, the OS will show you menu commands

01:25:52 ◼   ► in the help menu, but that's not really complete.

01:25:59 ◼   ► And one of the things that I wanted to do when I wrote to Launch Bar's developer about this was to say,

01:26:06 ◼   ► "Okay, well, could I somehow expose this knowledge to Launch Bar?"

01:26:13 ◼   ► And he said, "That's a really good idea. Unfortunately, it can't support that right now, but I'll think about it."

01:26:20 ◼   ► So he may be looking into a model or an API for doing that, which I think would be just awesome,

01:26:28 ◼   ► because like I said, LaunchBar is a terrific product.

01:26:30 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:26:31 ◼   ► - But it became clear too that

01:26:36 ◼   ► as popular as LaunchBar is,

01:26:40 ◼   ► not everybody who has BB Edit has LaunchBar.

01:26:44 ◼   ► - Right.

01:26:45 ◼   ► - Not everybody who has BB Edit knows about LaunchBar.

01:26:47 ◼   ► And this need is still here.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So I said, okay, well, I'm gonna go ahead and build this in.

01:26:53 ◼   ► It's time for Gruber's wish to become reality.

01:26:58 ◼   ► And because it happened mid-cycle,

01:27:00 ◼   ► and this is something that we've been doing

01:27:03 ◼   ► for a long time, and I think in some ways it's awesome,

01:27:07 ◼   ► in most ways it's awesome,

01:27:09 ◼   ► and in some ways it's really difficult,

01:27:11 ◼   ► that we will do significant feature additions

01:27:15 ◼   ► in between point O's.

01:27:17 ◼   ► - Right.

01:27:18 ◼   ► - And it's awesome because you get new features for free

01:27:24 ◼   ► without having to buy an upgrade.

01:27:26 ◼   ► And on the other hand, what we've found is that sometimes it's necessary to call out

01:27:33 ◼   ► with a point O features that we added in a previous point five because we've noticed

01:27:40 ◼   ► that a lot of folks really only look closely at a point O.

01:27:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:27:44 ◼   ► Right.

01:27:45 ◼   ► That's where you can really catch their eye with the new feature.

01:27:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Or as it turns out, an old one.

01:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:51 ◼   ► of upgrades it is and without turning this into an app store bitch fest but did the bb edit saga in

01:28:02 ◼   ► the app store has been interesting to say the least where it was in and that's an adjective

01:28:09 ◼   ► all right we'll go with it then you left then there you know were some policy changes that

01:28:14 ◼   ► allowed serious, you know, tools like bb edit to come back. And that's just talking it can

01:28:22 ◼   ► you have an app with the power of bb edit and have it be in the App Store with the sandboxing

01:28:28 ◼   ► rules and to get exceptions, blah, blah, blah, that, you know, is a long, dirty path, we

01:28:35 ◼   ► don't have to, we don't have to go too far down. But at a high level at a very high,

01:28:42 ◼   ► obvious level at this point, you know, in the app stores life, it's very clear that

01:28:48 ◼   ► Apple is not going to do well, I shouldn't say never say never, but it's clear that upgrade

01:28:54 ◼   ► pricing isn't something they want to do. And that that applies on iOS as well as Mac OS.

01:29:03 ◼   ► For whatever their reasons, but you bare bones is a company that largely was built on the

01:29:09 ◼   ► old model of if you're a new customer, you'll pay x maybe at the you know, it's $129 or

01:29:17 ◼   ► whatever the price was at the time. But then when new major versions come out, you can

01:29:22 ◼   ► upgrade for a significant discount compared to the regular price for a new customer. And

01:29:28 ◼   ► that once you're in, you could upgrade you could buy BB at five back in the day and then

01:29:32 ◼   ► upgrade to six and seven and eight. And you're only paying at an incremental step along the

01:29:39 ◼   ► way and you get all these new features. That App Store doesn't support that. And I think

01:29:46 ◼   ► it's pretty clear that in large, large parts, like just look at Adobe, who used to follow

01:29:51 ◼   ► that method with their apps have gone to subscription pricing. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts

01:29:56 ◼   ► on on where that's going.

01:30:00 ◼   ► Well, that's a that's a fairly deep and tricky one because there's there's definitely a large

01:30:08 ◼   ► segment of the audience that prefers the classical upgrade model, where you know what you're paying

01:30:17 ◼   ► for. You're paying for bb edit 13. And as long as bb at 13 can run on your hardware, you you've got

01:30:24 ◼   ► got the right to use it.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Exactly. And we are fully in favor of that. We support it, we

01:30:29 ◼   ► built our business on it. We believe in it ourselves. I

01:30:34 ◼   ► always prefer software with a paid upgrade model. I support

01:30:39 ◼   ► developers with paid upgrades. And that is an option which for

01:30:46 ◼   ► as long as I'm in charge, we will always provide.

01:30:49 ◼   ► And the subscription model is how the App Store provides

01:30:56 ◼   ► for ongoing revenue for an application.

01:31:04 ◼   ► And their subscription model was, and frankly is,

01:31:13 ◼   ► oriented around a model of subscription to content.

01:31:16 ◼   ► There was a bit of cognitive dissonance.

01:31:22 ◼   ► They clearly heard it before,

01:31:24 ◼   ► but there was still a little bit of cognitive dissonance

01:31:27 ◼   ► where I said, okay, well,

01:31:29 ◼   ► but that's not what we wanna do.

01:31:32 ◼   ► I mean, we don't have content.

01:31:33 ◼   ► We have features.

01:31:37 ◼   ► And so what we wanna do is translate our free mode model,

01:31:42 ◼   ► which we've had since BB Edit 11.6,

01:31:47 ◼   ► where you get to use everything for the first 30 days,

01:31:51 ◼   ► and after that, there are advanced features

01:31:55 ◼   ► which are only available if you have a paid license.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Well, how do you do that in the App Store

01:32:03 ◼   ► and support ongoing revenue?

01:32:05 ◼   ► And the short answer is you have to do it with subscriptions.

01:32:09 ◼   ► There is no alternative.

01:32:10 ◼   ► - Right.

01:32:12 ◼   ► So that's how it works in the App Store,

01:32:16 ◼   ► is the same way, 30 days after that,

01:32:21 ◼   ► it's free without the advanced features,

01:32:24 ◼   ► or if you have an active subscription,

01:32:26 ◼   ► you get all the advanced features.

01:32:28 ◼   ► And so the conventional upgrade model

01:32:33 ◼   ► goes away in the App Store.

01:32:35 ◼   ► As you said, it's not supported.

01:32:38 ◼   ► We don't have any way to know who our customers are

01:32:41 ◼   ► or determine their eligibility.

01:32:43 ◼   ► And so what we do is from now on,

01:32:48 ◼   ► if you have a live subscription in the App Store,

01:32:51 ◼   ► whenever we do BBEdit 14, you'll get it.

01:32:55 ◼   ► And as long as you have a live subscription,

01:32:59 ◼   ► you'll get all of its advanced features.

01:33:01 ◼   ► That's how it worked with the 13 upgrade.

01:33:03 ◼   ► BBEdit 12.6 was the first version

01:33:07 ◼   ► to come back to the App Store earlier this year.

01:33:09 ◼   ► So it sounds to me like your approach to the App Store is fundamentally, and this is your

01:33:17 ◼   ► personality, but it's fundamentally practical.

01:33:20 ◼   ► And if you had your druthers, I would assume like a lot of other independent developers,

01:33:28 ◼   ► you would rather be able to sell upgrade pricing in the App Store.

01:33:33 ◼   ► There's you know it as Steve Jobs like to say and as my dad loves to say people in hell want ice water

01:33:40 ◼   ► Yep, I use I use that one myself. My dad loves that saying and it does it makes an awful lot of sense

01:33:46 ◼   ► There's really no use complaining complaining about it. It is what it is. I

01:33:49 ◼   ► Just to before we move on to maybe just idle chitchat but

01:34:03 ◼   ► There I still see it

01:34:05 ◼   ► There's a fundamental disconnect in my mind between

01:34:09 ◼   ► Apple's clear commitment to pro hardware and this ridiculous supercomputer Mac Pro and

01:34:15 ◼   ► The sort of

01:34:20 ◼   ► Apple hasn't said this Apple has not really even hinted that hey the App Store is going to be the only way to distribute Mac software

01:34:30 ◼   ► but there's certainly a lot of people who suspect that's what they'd like to do and

01:34:33 ◼   ► Again, whether it's and I think you made a good point earlier where where there's certainly some cynical people who and then rightly so maybe

01:34:41 ◼   ► Who might see it as well? They just you know, they want their 30% cut of everything

01:34:45 ◼   ► And Apple, you know, they they enjoy their 30%

01:34:49 ◼   ► 15% cut of recurring software revenue. I'm sure you know, they cash every single check

01:34:57 ◼   ► But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that's driven as much or more by the security people

01:35:02 ◼   ► looking at it not as a business decision, but simply a

01:35:06 ◼   ► Very very conservative take to what you're allowed to do at your own machine and my idea and maybe this is a terrible idea

01:35:13 ◼   ► Maybe it really is but my idea has been

01:35:17 ◼   ► that I wish that there was a

01:35:20 ◼   ► developer switch in Mac OS 10 and that you could set it so we've long had

01:35:26 ◼   ► admin accounts and regular user accounts where a regular user account has

01:35:32 ◼   ► significantly restricted permissions. This has been the case possibly even

01:35:36 ◼   ► before Mac OS X. This might go back to the next era, but you know if you set up,

01:35:42 ◼   ► if you have a shared family iMac and you create a regular user account for your

01:35:47 ◼   ► children or something like that, they don't have the right to solve to install

01:35:50 ◼   ► software they needed, you know, they'll get prompted for an admin password and

01:35:54 ◼   ► and username to go ahead and do stuff.

01:35:57 ◼   ► We've always had this.

01:35:58 ◼   ► I wish that there was a third, this is my vey,

01:36:00 ◼   ► I haven't planned it out, I have no white paper,

01:36:03 ◼   ► but I kinda wish there was a third account type

01:36:06 ◼   ► called developer, and it would be a way

01:36:10 ◼   ► of confirming to the system

01:36:15 ◼   ► that you'd like an awful lot of these restrictions

01:36:18 ◼   ► to go back the way they are, and I trust myself.

01:36:21 ◼   ► It

01:36:23 ◼   ► Tished for lack of a better word to shoot myself in the foot

01:36:27 ◼   ► I mean I do you know another way of putting it is that for it in the real world power tools?

01:36:32 ◼   ► To be useful you need to be able they need to be built in a way that you you might hurt yourself with them

01:36:38 ◼   ► You know a knife a sharp knife is a good tool, but a sharp knife you could cut yourself with

01:36:43 ◼   ► and if you don't take do care you can do a lot of damage including to yourself and

01:36:51 ◼   ► I think I see where you're going with this.

01:36:55 ◼   ► And my sense of it is that,

01:37:00 ◼   ► as you've said, the security aspect of it is a very,

01:37:05 ◼   ► I think it's a very big component.

01:37:06 ◼   ► Apple cares a great deal about security.

01:37:09 ◼   ► They don't keep tightening screws

01:37:12 ◼   ► because they don't think it's important.

01:37:15 ◼   ► They think it is important.

01:37:16 ◼   ► And I can see the trend line continuing to a place where

01:37:21 ◼   ► even if you're a developer,

01:37:27 ◼   ► you can't run anything on your Mac

01:37:29 ◼   ► that didn't come from the App Store or Apple.

01:37:34 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:37:35 ◼   ► - And so I don't know what that's gonna do to the ecosystem.

01:37:46 ◼   ► there's going to be some real trouble there.

01:37:49 ◼   ► But I also think that your notion of a developer user

01:37:53 ◼   ► account is one solution to that.

01:37:58 ◼   ► One thing I'd be intrigued by is I

01:38:01 ◼   ► wonder what percentage of Macs in use

01:38:05 ◼   ► are primarily used from an admin account.

01:38:08 ◼   ► Because every Mac has to have an admin account.

01:38:12 ◼   ► And so how many people when they get it's just go with the most

01:38:17 ◼   ► popular Mac of all the MacBook Air, how many people get their

01:38:21 ◼   ► new MacBook Air, go through the turn it on, go through the first

01:38:25 ◼   ► run, set it up, create your account, type your name and let

01:38:29 ◼   ► them pick your, you know, your home directory name, or maybe

01:38:32 ◼   ► adjust that if you want to. And then never set up another

01:38:37 ◼   ► account, I can only I would assume that is the overwhelming

01:38:41 ◼   ► majority of Maxon use that the over would agree that most of

01:38:44 ◼   ► them run as the admin user and therefore are running under a

01:38:49 ◼   ► user whose permissions are traditionally speaking rather

01:38:53 ◼   ► dangerous, you know that you can, you can launch an app that

01:38:57 ◼   ► could just start overwriting files in your documents folder

01:39:00 ◼   ► or something like that. There's all sorts of things that you

01:39:03 ◼   ► know, that for a year, you know, 20 years, an app that you simply

01:39:08 ◼   ► double clicked in your applications folder could do, you know, all sorts of quote unquote

01:39:13 ◼   ► dangerous things. My thinking is that a developer account wouldn't, it wouldn't be subject in

01:39:24 ◼   ► my, I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think that you're suddenly going to find hundreds

01:39:31 ◼   ► of thousands or millions of Mac users turning their toggling the button in the users and

01:39:36 ◼   ► account systems preferences to become developer accounts, just

01:39:40 ◼   ► because they want to do x, y, and z. I don't think most of

01:39:45 ◼   ► those users really run into many problems with Mac OS Catalina,

01:39:49 ◼   ► I really think you have to be either a developer or a

01:39:52 ◼   ► developer type user,

01:39:54 ◼   ► a so called power user. Yeah. But here's a, here's a thought

01:40:00 ◼   ► to go with your, your your own idea here. And that, and that is,

01:40:05 ◼   ► What if in order to turn on a developer user account,

01:40:09 ◼   ► you also had to have a developer account with Apple?

01:40:13 ◼   ► - And then all of a sudden you lose a bunch of power users

01:40:15 ◼   ► who have no reason to sign up for a developer account.

01:40:19 ◼   ► Or is that what you're thinking?

01:40:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:21 ◼   ► Like somebody who's just, you know,

01:40:23 ◼   ► just to go with the podcast, you know,

01:40:25 ◼   ► like David Sparks at the Mac Power Users podcast

01:40:30 ◼   ► or people who's just sail through

01:40:34 ◼   ► like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and know everything inside and out, but really, you know,

01:40:39 ◼   ► have that long standing, you know, and they know all sorts of things like, you know, they know

01:40:43 ◼   ► about installing Safari extensions and the ways that you can, you know, the powerful things that

01:40:48 ◼   ► you can do with extensions and stuff like that. In all the apps that they use, does it really make

01:40:53 ◼   ► sense to require them to have a developer account to unlock those abilities? I don't know. But I

01:40:58 ◼   ► kind of feel like once you say, even if this if this idea got any traction within Apple,

01:41:04 ◼   ► I don't think it would take very long for them to say, "Well, the first thing you have to do is have

01:41:07 ◼   ► an Apple developer connection account." Exactly. And it's like, if you have a developer account,

01:41:14 ◼   ► maybe you don't ever see BB Edit wants to communicate with Xcode cancel or allow.

01:41:21 ◼   ► And I don't want to turn this into a Catalina bitchfest. I've been running this 16-inch MacBook

01:41:30 ◼   ► Pro for weeks now and it has to run Catalina because it's new hardware. I have to say Catalina

01:41:35 ◼   ► has been much better than I was led to believe. You know, going into this it's it's it's been

01:41:41 ◼   ► pretty good. And not buggy, better than I think its reputation seems to be. But when I've run

01:41:48 ◼   ► into weird things, boy, are they frustrating. Like, yeah, there was one I tweeted just like

01:41:53 ◼   ► last week where I was writing in Mars at it mid sentence, I'm kind of in the flow. And all of a

01:41:59 ◼   ► of a sudden a system-wide modal dialog popped up and stole keyboard focus to ask about some

01:42:05 ◼   ► app in the background. I forget what it was. I wanted permission to read my documents folder.

01:42:08 ◼   ► It was an app I hadn't been actively using in hours. It just was sitting idly in the

01:42:13 ◼   ► background and for some reason something prompted to do it. I cannot remember, honestly. It

01:42:20 ◼   ► might be decades or more that I can remember a system-wide modal dialog popping up mid-sentence

01:42:26 ◼   ► while I'm typing and stealing keyboard focus. It just seemed

01:42:29 ◼   ► at all. Right. And all of a sudden, there's a bunch of

01:42:32 ◼   ► beeps, and you lost a bunch of words. And, and you lost your

01:42:35 ◼   ► train of thought. And, and it just looks like a cheap dialogue.

01:42:40 ◼   ► It just there's something cheap to the way that it looked where

01:42:42 ◼   ► it just not that I thought it was a scam. I knew exactly what

01:42:46 ◼   ► it was. I knew you know that these this is this new perm, you

01:42:48 ◼   ► know that they they they used to they keep tightening some of

01:42:51 ◼   ► these screws like now the documents folders is protected.

01:42:54 ◼   ► You know, first they first they came for mail and contacts and

01:42:58 ◼   ► and I didn't say anything because I'm not writing an email client anymore.

01:43:03 ◼   ► All right. Let me take a third break here and thank our third

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01:45:14 ◼   ► this podcast

01:45:16 ◼   ► So I really did mean that in the middle of that read our Squarespace has great track support but

01:45:23 ◼   ► So does bare-bones it's always been a huge source of pride for you

01:45:29 ◼   ► It's true for a lot of the independent developers. I know and I do think that

01:45:35 ◼   ► There's also some correlation to the developers who have

01:45:40 ◼   ► Longevity and I've kept apps going for a long time that they also deeply concern themselves with customer support

01:45:47 ◼   ► Tell me you know, tell me about your approach to customer support at bare-bones and where that started from

01:45:55 ◼   ► Well where it started from was

01:45:58 ◼   ► my very first

01:46:01 ◼   ► Professional job which was at think technologies the folks who did light speed C and light speed Pascal

01:46:06 ◼   ► as

01:46:08 ◼   ► a

01:46:09 ◼   ► customer, I got to talk with a human being who knew something about the product, how it worked,

01:46:16 ◼   ► how to help me use it, how to fix problems when it wasn't working correctly.

01:46:22 ◼   ► And this person hired me as his replacement. One day he called me up. We were talking and

01:46:33 ◼   ► He mentioned, he said, "By the way, I'm leaving, but I have to hire my replacement.

01:46:42 ◼   ► Would you be interested?"

01:46:43 ◼   ► I said, "Sure." I had to think about it because I was living in Virginia at the time,

01:46:53 ◼   ► and I was just out of college. This was up in Boston, and it was a big deal.

01:47:03 ◼   ► to make a long story short, I ended up taking that job and firsthand had this experience of

01:47:09 ◼   ► being on the receiving end of a phone call from a programmer, trying to use the product,

01:47:18 ◼   ► and having trouble. I very quickly realized that even though that was a perfectly conventional

01:47:28 ◼   ► way to do tech support at the time, it was hugely important that we were responsive to what the

01:47:36 ◼   ► customer needed. That when the customer thought they had a problem, you listen to them describe

01:47:42 ◼   ► what's going on and you frame that against your own experience and you say, "Okay,

01:47:46 ◼   ► well here's what's happening. You're holding it wrong." Maybe not in so many words.

01:47:55 ◼   ► or "That's a really neat idea. Let me make sure the engineers hear about that."

01:48:01 ◼   ► "No, this is definitely not working correctly. We'll get a bug fix for that."

01:48:06 ◼   ► It really drove into me at a very impressionable age how important customers are to the product,

01:48:19 ◼   ► not just in the conventional ways of yes, they buy a license and your company gets to keep the

01:48:25 ◼   ► lights on, but as part of a cycle that makes the product better. It's a weird form of art

01:48:36 ◼   ► developing applications over time. And I do feel like that framing that Steve Jobs had

01:48:45 ◼   ► in the last few events that he held as CEO of Apple, that Apple exists at this intersection

01:48:51 ◼   ► of the liberal arts and technology. It's true at Apple's enormous scope, and it's true at the scope

01:49:01 ◼   ► of a true small independent developer, where there's obviously technology involved. We were

01:49:07 ◼   ► just talking about playgrounds, obviously very technical. But there's this liberal arts process

01:49:13 ◼   ► to the ongoing development of a program and how you keep it relevant.

01:49:17 ◼   ► And I do think that the closeness of of bare bones relationship to its customers from the

01:49:25 ◼   ► get go, I mean, literally since before it was a commercial product.

01:49:30 ◼   ► You know, I remember the release notes to the earlier version, like BB edit 2.2.

01:49:35 ◼   ► And they were largely, you know, I guess I read about them on tidbits, probably, or probably

01:49:39 ◼   ► using that probably comps this Mac announce actually to really go to really bring it back

01:49:45 ◼   ► to the old days. But they were based on, you know, we heard from we heard from some of you who are

01:49:50 ◼   ► using BB edit. Okay, here's, here's some answers to your problems. Enjoy. Yeah.

01:49:55 ◼   ► Yeah. And, and, and that really informed the way we do it today. And yes, the mechanics might be

01:50:01 ◼   ► a little bit different. And it's true, we don't do telephone tech support anymore. We just can't.

01:50:09 ◼   ► But if you write in to support@barebones.com and you have a question or a problem or a request

01:50:18 ◼   ► or even just want to tell us how much you love it,

01:50:22 ◼   ► your email is read by a human being who appreciates it, even if it's a complaint,

01:50:34 ◼   ► and still forms part of that hugely important cycle

01:50:39 ◼   ► that helps us make the product better.

01:50:43 ◼   ► - To me, the flip side of customer support,

01:50:47 ◼   ► 'cause I think it's two parts of the same coin,

01:50:50 ◼   ► is good documentation.

01:50:52 ◼   ► And to me, both of these things have largely been lost.

01:50:57 ◼   ► You can get tech support from Apple.

01:50:58 ◼   ► I don't wanna say you can't get tech support.

01:51:00 ◼   ► You call 1-800-APPLE and you can go to Apple stores

01:51:02 ◼   ► and get tech support, but it's mostly,

01:51:05 ◼   ► you can't get tech support from Apple

01:51:07 ◼   ► in the way that you get tech support from bare bones

01:51:09 ◼   ► or from the Omni group or from flying meat.

01:51:12 ◼   ► And you don't get technical documentation like you do.

01:51:18 ◼   ► I mean, BB Edit is fully documented, the manual.

01:51:22 ◼   ► And again, it's near and dear to my heart.

01:51:24 ◼   ► There's parts of the manual that I've, you know,

01:51:25 ◼   ► still there with my words in them

01:51:27 ◼   ► from when I was working on it.

01:51:30 ◼   ► But again, it's the recurring theme in the apps

01:51:34 ◼   ► that I've been using for a decade or longer,

01:51:37 ◼   ► or two decades in some cases.

01:51:39 ◼   ► And there's a very strong correlation

01:51:43 ◼   ► between the independent developers

01:51:45 ◼   ► who are committed to customer support

01:51:47 ◼   ► and who are committed to really good documentation

01:51:50 ◼   ► and not just letting that go.

01:51:55 ◼   ► And I-- - Yeah, and that, well,

01:51:58 ◼   ► And that was another thing I learned from the Think days.

01:52:00 ◼   ► It's like manuals are important.

01:52:02 ◼   ► The documentation is important.

01:52:05 ◼   ► Release notes are important.

01:52:06 ◼   ► The guy who hired me into his job at Sec Support

01:52:11 ◼   ► actually eventually came back to the company

01:52:14 ◼   ► and wrote documentation for Lightspeed C

01:52:20 ◼   ► and Lightspeed Pascal.

01:52:22 ◼   ► He actually wrote documentation for us as well.

01:52:26 ◼   ► And yeah, I cannot overstate the importance of that.

01:52:31 ◼   ► Our change notes are perhaps the best expression of that.

01:52:41 ◼   ► I'm trying to figure out how to frame this

01:52:52 ◼   ► because there's so much history there.

01:52:56 ◼   ► But whenever a change got committed,

01:52:59 ◼   ► it's very important to write up the nature of the change

01:53:04 ◼   ► in the way the customer can understand it

01:53:07 ◼   ► because that change is going to go directly

01:53:10 ◼   ► into the change notes.

01:53:11 ◼   ► - Well, and there it is as a first class item

01:53:15 ◼   ► right there in the help menu, change notes.

01:53:18 ◼   ► - That was new for 13, actually.

01:53:19 ◼   ► I don't know why I didn't do it before.

01:53:21 ◼   ► - But they are, they're both the,

01:53:24 ◼   ► They're both-- I don't know if BB Edit's documentation

01:53:27 ◼   ► is the goal.

01:53:28 ◼   ► It's certainly excellent.

01:53:29 ◼   ► And again, you could even take out

01:53:31 ◼   ► the chapters that are still there that I've worked on.

01:53:33 ◼   ► So take out any self-serving aspect of my praise

01:53:37 ◼   ► for the BB Edit user manual.

01:53:39 ◼   ► It still is.

01:53:40 ◼   ► And it's still good.

01:53:42 ◼   ► It's very good.

01:53:44 ◼   ► But the change notes, in addition

01:53:45 ◼   ► to their comprehension, they're always worth reading.

01:53:52 ◼   ► Here's one.

01:53:53 ◼   ► It's very recent.

01:53:54 ◼   ► this might even be the beta it's 13.04. I just have to read this I love it this is but this is

01:54:00 ◼   ► why it's worth poring over the BB edit change notes it's bug 380460 for performance reasons

01:54:07 ◼   ► BB edit will skip to drawing the invisibles upside down question mark glyph for characters

01:54:12 ◼   ► in the bmp quote private use area and then you got the Unicode numbers there there's there's

01:54:19 ◼   ► these unique series of Unicode byte sequences that are private use area in the Unicode standard.

01:54:26 ◼   ► And now BBS just going to draw them as invisibles for performance reasons. But then it says

01:54:30 ◼   ► the Apple symbol and it gives its exact byte code is now excluded from that test because

01:54:37 ◼   ► it is sacred. Right? Because that's what happened. What happened was in the old days, it was

01:54:44 ◼   ► option g right is how you type an apple logo right um am i misremembering nope that's option

01:54:51 ◼   ► shift k option shift k option g is the copyright symbol i knew that was one of them yeah option

01:54:55 ◼   ► shift k you've been able to use option shift k to type an apple logo as far back as you've uh

01:55:01 ◼   ► probably all the way back to the get-go but in the old days that was just uh you know there were

01:55:08 ◼   ► only 255 characters and they just reserved one of them for this then they did eventually did the

01:55:13 ◼   ► the right thing and moved it into the private use area of Unicode.

01:55:18 ◼   ► And BBEdit is not going to exclude it from the list because it is sacred.

01:55:21 ◼   ► That's the sort of detail that's worth reading in release notes.

01:55:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and funny you mention that too because I just pulled up a document I hear.

01:55:32 ◼   ► Some years ago, one of my earliest Twitter friends, Patrick Burleson, who I think works

01:55:41 ◼   ► at Apple now asked me about change notes. He's like, "How do you do it?" And I said,

01:55:51 ◼   ► "You know, I've never really put it all down in one place." So I have a markdown document

01:55:58 ◼   ► here which I wrote because he asked me that question and I've never done anything with

01:56:02 ◼   ► it and I have mixed feelings about whether I should. I probably should. I won't be giving

01:56:09 ◼   ► away any secrets, you can tell how we do change notes. But towards the end, there's a note here

01:56:20 ◼   ► that says, "It is hugely important that when, as an engineer, you're writing commit notes,

01:56:24 ◼   ► you must write them for the customer to read. That means that you should know your audience

01:56:30 ◼   ► and take care with your spelling, grammar, and writing style." And it goes on. There's a few

01:56:37 ◼   ► more paragraphs and I'm not going to bore you with them. But that's really the point here is that

01:56:44 ◼   ► these change notes, a lot of folks write commit notes for other engineers to read. And it's not

01:56:55 ◼   ► that that's unimportant, but engineers with access to the source code can figure out what you did by

01:57:02 ◼   ► by looking at the changes in the source code.

01:57:04 ◼   ► The user-facing rationale for the change,

01:57:08 ◼   ► which is every bit as important,

01:57:12 ◼   ► is something that you have to be able to communicate clearly

01:57:15 ◼   ► to the customer when they read it.

01:57:17 ◼   ► So trying to be cute or twee about your change notes

01:57:24 ◼   ► doesn't benefit the customer.

01:57:26 ◼   ► It's like they wanna know what you did.

01:57:29 ◼   ► And by setting it down clearly at the time

01:57:33 ◼   ► you make the change, which is in the commit notes,

01:57:36 ◼   ► there is no better time to do that.

01:57:39 ◼   ► And so that's how we do it.

01:57:41 ◼   ► When there's a code change--

01:57:43 ◼   ► - You write it up.

01:57:44 ◼   ► - It's written in English.

01:57:45 ◼   ► - Well, I can think of no better note to end on.

01:57:50 ◼   ► Rich, I thank you for your time.

01:57:52 ◼   ► Everybody can, of course, find out more

01:57:54 ◼   ► about BBEdit at barebones.com.

01:57:57 ◼   ► And then Rich, you personally are @Siegel, S-I-E-G-E-L.

01:58:02 ◼   ► You and I are fellow surname only,

01:58:05 ◼   ► preferred username people.

01:58:07 ◼   ► You're excellent Twitter follow.

01:58:09 ◼   ► Anything else that you wanna mention before we sign off?

01:58:14 ◼   ► - Oh goodness, there's so much.

01:58:17 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:58:18 ◼   ► Go get BB Edit.

01:58:19 ◼   ► All right, well great product.

01:58:22 ◼   ► I'm very proud of it.

01:58:24 ◼   ► I'm very happy about the new version.

01:58:26 ◼   ► We have that 30 day full evaluation period and then the free mode afterwards.

01:58:34 ◼   ► So you can pay for it and get all the features.

01:58:37 ◼   ► You cannot pay for it and still have an awesome editor.

01:58:40 ◼   ► And you're happy to have them as users until they need…

01:58:42 ◼   ► I'm happy to have you as a user whether you pay me money or not.

01:58:46 ◼   ► That I love.

01:58:47 ◼   ► Better if you do.

01:58:48 ◼   ► Better if you do.

01:58:49 ◼   ► But you don't have to.

01:58:52 ◼   ► And also, yeah, John, I want to thank you in particular for having me as a guest.

01:58:57 ◼   ► I hope this isn't the last time.

01:58:58 ◼   ► No.

01:58:59 ◼   ► But I also want to thank all your listeners for listening.

01:59:02 ◼   ► Yeah.