00:00:00 ◼ ► Adam Angst, welcome back. I think it's been about five years since I've had you on the show, which I keep saying repeatedly to the guests on the show has been too long. When last we spoke, I believe it was the Tidbits' 30th anniversary of Tidbits.
00:00:13 ◼ ► That probably is just about right, because we're closing in on 36 in April, I think, which is utterly incomprehensible.
00:00:22 ◼ ► And so, to put it in context, and I think right now, as we record in mid to late February, there is no middle of February. It just goes right from early February to the end of February.
00:00:33 ◼ ► But as we record, I think we're going to see a march that is dominated by Apple is turning 50 coverage. And, you know, it's a big anniversary, 50 years. I think Apple itself is going to be very uncomfortable with it.
00:00:52 ◼ ► But I was supposed to, and I don't know why I didn't. And in fact, just before we recorded, I just emailed whoever his rep is about the fact that it's going on.
00:01:05 ◼ ► Yeah, I can't wait to read it. That's Adam. You listeners won't hold it, won't be able to see it. But Adam held up his copy of David Pogues, an early edition of David Pogues' upcoming Apple at 50 book, which I am greatly looking forward to.
00:01:18 ◼ ► And so glad that David Pogues wrote that book, because I'm not quite sure. I don't know if anybody would do a better job at an Apple at 50 book.
00:01:27 ◼ ► But just to put it in context, Tidbits at 36, Apple's turning 50. That means 72% of Apple's corporate lifespan, Tidbits has been around from. I can't wrap my head around that.
00:01:56 ◼ ► Yeah, but pretty close to half. And that to me is nutty. But 72% must feel really weird for you.
00:02:04 ◼ ► I will admit there are times when, you know, something happens and you're like, I've seen this so many times before.
00:02:25 ◼ ► Do you have... I feel like the fact that I can't really wrap my head around the fact that Daring Fireball has been around...
00:02:38 ◼ ► And I think that's sort of why I'm still doing what I do, is that it still feels new and fresh to me in my head.
00:02:45 ◼ ► I've come and gone a couple of times throughout, you know, in terms of how I felt about it.
00:02:50 ◼ ► It's tricky because I do remember very early on when I started Tidbits, I comment that I had a relatively short attention span.
00:03:03 ◼ ► And even now, I hate it because I am much better at something has happened right about it right away.
00:03:29 ◼ ► We're very similar in that regard because one of the reasons I have invited you onto the show is to talk about some specific issues.
00:03:39 ◼ ► Some specific issues in messages and, I guess, the phone app, really, but messages, too.
00:03:51 ◼ ► I mean, months ago, and that when you wrote about them, I read right away and I noted them and I was like, oh, I would like to link to that.
00:04:27 ◼ ► There's two ways I break a log jam when it's like this is a big thing I want to write about.
00:04:31 ◼ ► Either I formulate like a 4,000-word piece that gets a lot of it off my chest, the Something's Rotten and Cupertino piece about, I don't know how many thousand words that was.
00:04:42 ◼ ► But that was a good way of getting the, hey, what went wrong with Apple Intelligence piece about a year ago.
00:04:48 ◼ ► But with this UI stuff and with Tahoe, macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, I think doing it piecemeal is much more effective.
00:05:31 ◼ ► And with Tahoe's window resizing, where it really came down to, long story short, pretend it really is still a perfectly square, pointy cornered rectangle.
00:05:41 ◼ ► The area where the mouse pointer tip needs to be to resize the window hasn't changed at all.
00:05:53 ◼ ► But if you're drawing it with some of the windows, especially the ones that have been the most updated for the liquid glass effect, with such large corner radiuses.
00:06:15 ◼ ► But with such comically large radiuses, which subjectively, people have opinions on how it looks.
00:06:35 ◼ ► What Norbert put his finger on exactly is that a vast majority of the real estate on screen where the hot point is for resizing a window from the corner is actually off the edge of the radius of the window.
00:07:05 ◼ ► And most people, users, the common sense of a user is that you have to click on the thing that you can see.
00:07:15 ◼ ► And I know somebody corrected me on the Don Norman language of affordances versus I forget the other bit of lingo.
00:07:22 ◼ ► But I'm just going to call it an affordance, that it's just a nicety that you can click a little bit off.
00:07:32 ◼ ► And that you can sort of – it's almost a heuristic that the click tracking can use to say if they're clicking this close to the corner and we are rounding them off a bit, they probably mean to resize the window rather than click behind it at that close of a distance.
00:07:49 ◼ ► But, you know, when it's 72% or something like that, 72% of the area for resizing a window is actually visibly off the window.
00:08:09 ◼ ► And it's the collection of them that really paints the picture rather than any one in particular.
00:08:42 ◼ ► And so when we're brushing our teeth at night, we're the sorts who kind of wander around while we're brushing our teeth and look at things.
00:09:02 ◼ ► And there are some old ones there, such as the Macintosh Bible, multiple editions of, and et cetera, et cetera.
00:09:10 ◼ ► So it's been really reminding me, oh, my goodness, like there's Michael Frazee's Guide to the Macintosh Underground.
00:09:26 ◼ ► And for the people who've been listening to and reading us for a while, surely one of the books on their shelves is your Internet Starter Kit, which was a big deal for quite a few years in the mid to late 90s.
00:09:54 ◼ ► It was just so fun because it's like all of a sudden, all of this fun we were having on our Macintoshes, we were connected to each other.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And Tidbits, obviously, at almost 36 years, 35 and counting, got off the ground as I know we covered this five years ago.
00:10:10 ◼ ► But as HyperCardStack and then originally, and I think it was for a long run, and then sort of slowly but surely turned into an email newsletter.
00:10:22 ◼ ► Yeah, two years at the HyperCardStack and then my sister, bless her heart, actually converted all the text to structure enhanced text, which was something I believe you looked at when you were building Markdown.
00:10:41 ◼ ► And we still have no idea what happened to Ian Feldman, the guy who actually came up with it, you know, with me way back when.
00:11:15 ◼ ► He's retired now, but he was a professor, maybe Ankara University, I forget, a computer science professor.
00:11:22 ◼ ► But yeah, he wrote this little browser, you could basically open C-text files, which, you know, and then, you know, they pulled the headings on one side and, you know, show the text in another pane and things like that.
00:11:35 ◼ ► I do like the idea, though, of the Netflix series, the limited series, with brooding music as the darkness of the Swedish winter.
00:11:52 ◼ ► Now that you mentioned the name, I guess I did use it, but I often really just read it.
00:11:58 ◼ ► My earliest memory is mostly of tidbits, and I remember the hypercard stacks, and I remember downloading them, and I remember thinking how clever it was.
00:12:06 ◼ ► And I remember, though, that just the easiest way to get it was to get it in email and just space read, right?
00:12:15 ◼ ► And command-click on any interesting links, and that part of it, more than any specific use of asterisks or brackets or whatever punctuation marks to mark things, was sort of the biggest influence on Markdown, was, hey, I just remember it was just plain text, and it was marked up in a sort of structured way that you could tell what was meant.
00:12:53 ◼ ► You know, and I remember, I was so lazy, and there's so much stuff, and we can't get sidetracked on this, and I guess I should do an episode of the show about it.
00:13:01 ◼ ► And people keep writing to me about it, about the way that Markdown is having, like, another, without ever having declined from its original purpose of something that humans can use to write text to turn into HTML for the web, is without question the lingua franca of LLMs.
00:13:24 ◼ ► There's all these new features and a lot of these coding agents where it's like, you kind of, a lot of them, I mean, long story short, it's like, it's turned into a programming language.
00:13:41 ◼ ► Yeah, because the LLM actually sort of prefers it in some ways if it's a human readable prompt as opposed to a JSON file or something.
00:13:51 ◼ ► We sort of moved all the way into all these XML-y things, and pulling back from that, because the LLMs are like, yeah, just give me text.
00:13:59 ◼ ► It's really a very happy accident from the human legibility of Markdown that I intended from the start, that because the LLMs were designed to parse human input, a format with a little bit of extra structure that was meant to be human readable.
00:14:20 ◼ ► They just sort of picked it up because what is readable to humans, you know, the idea is you could give a normal person who's never even heard the word Markdown.
00:14:33 ◼ ► You could give them a Markdown formatted document in a monospace font, and they could read it and totally understand the stuff like, oh, I get it.
00:14:48 ◼ ► And that the asterisks or underscores around a word are, like, effectively italicizing it.
00:14:59 ◼ ► Or you could travel back in time with it and make it look like a typewriter written manuscript and hand it to somebody in 1955, and they would totally get it.
00:15:18 ◼ ► The difference between Markdown and Ctext, I think, basically, is that Ctext is so much – it is actually nicer to look at or was when people were using it.
00:15:30 ◼ ► For instance, one of the things that Ctext did, if I'm remembering correctly, was instead of headings being, you know, hash marks in front of them, you underlined them.
00:15:46 ◼ ► And it made – it looked great, but it turned out it was actually relatively hard to do and, you know, fussy to make and everything.
00:15:53 ◼ ► So Markdown was much more about, like, you know, providing that bridge between different systems, whereas Ctext was mostly about displaying to the reader while providing some structure for an app like EasyText to read.
00:16:21 ◼ ► And I know that when the original run of the Macintosh Daily Journal was a thing, which was distributed in Ctext, Matt Detheridge, I know he used Microsoft Word and had scripts that output to – I think he used Word.
00:16:43 ◼ ► So that's the difference, was that Ctext was so fussy that you wouldn't want to actually write in it, whereas Markdown is, like, both a writing and reading format, and that's the big difference.
00:16:53 ◼ ► But huge influence, and it was that reading experience that really informed it more than any specific nature.
00:17:01 ◼ ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor of the episode, our good friends at Factor.
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00:18:20 ◼ ► Like the meal kit type things, it comes with, like, dry ice in a package to your house, so it's fresh, refrigerated style, never frozen.
00:18:41 ◼ ► I love steak every time, but they always have good little steak meals, really well-portioned for lunch, so it's not like you're going to, like, a steakhouse and getting, like, something where you've got more food to come home with than you could eat in the next few days.
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00:19:51 ◼ ► Do you want to, since it was you who kicked it off with the sort of in-depth analysis of this, the new difference, the new interface for the phone app,
00:20:00 ◼ ► Yeah, so with iOS 26, Apple dove into the phone app and redesigned it, and completely, utterly and completely.
00:20:17 ◼ ► But in a move which we really haven't seen Apple do maybe ever, certainly hardly ever, they left the old interface in place as well and allows you to switch between them.
00:20:40 ◼ ► I was on vacation visiting my son in Vancouver, and we were flying home, and I sort of decided I wanted to write this article.
00:21:01 ◼ ► And I discovered that this is a, you know, I sort of went into it with the kind of get off my lawn, why did you redesign the phone app?
00:21:08 ◼ ► You know, those of us who actually use the phone because we still know what a telephone is, and remember, in fact, dialing them with rotary phones.
00:21:26 ◼ ► And I went through, you know, switched to unified view and switched back to classic view, and then just decided that I had to go through everything you do in the phone app and compare them.
00:21:45 ◼ ► And this time I had to go like, well, actually, the 20-something engineer that came up with unified view actually did a better job than the 20-something engineer who came up with the classic interface way back when.
00:22:02 ◼ ► I think it's sort of the fact that they offer both the classic and unified view and make it easy to switch in place right there in the main tab of the phone app.
00:22:14 ◼ ► It's actually a return to the era of customability by the user that is actually the flip side of the coin of pointing out what's wrong with the OS26 and liquid glass designs.
00:22:36 ◼ ► Like, the fact that even up to today that you can customize the toolbar, AppKit, Mac apps.
00:22:45 ◼ ► And the fact that it's not as customizable as it used to be, but there are some significant view options in Apple Mail for the way that you want to fundamentally look at your messages.
00:22:59 ◼ ► And that you can still get the old classic instead of left to right mailboxes in a column on the left, messages in a column in the middle, and message detail in a column on the right.
00:23:13 ◼ ► You can still get the classic three-panel view where it's messages or mailboxes on the left and then an up and down view on the right, which is a list and then the message underneath.
00:23:30 ◼ ► And remind me, I don't use Mail regularly, but they don't call it a classic view, though.
00:23:36 ◼ ► See, that's what I thought was interesting about this was like, I'm actually, to be fair, to be clear, I'm totally in favor of having this choice.
00:23:45 ◼ ► And because I, you know, particularly, you know, as I've gotten older and people like my parents have gotten older and whatnot, I see the level of confusion that these, we're going to redesign the interface and it's better causes for people.
00:24:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm looking at Mail now and on the fly as we record this, I can't even find it because I use the three column left to right view.
00:24:20 ◼ ► So in view menu, there's a view, use column layout, and then it's checked, when it's checked, right, it's so crazy.
00:24:29 ◼ ► When you use column layout, you get the classic two panel view, and when it's unchecked, you get what I would think of.
00:24:36 ◼ ► Yeah, and I'm looking at it, my podcast machine famously is the one that I'm using Tahoe on.
00:24:49 ◼ ► Like, when it's unchecked, what I would call this column layout, I don't know, but that's the command to use.
00:25:02 ◼ ► Yeah, and again, that was actually a really important thing to provide when they did that switch, because people get very, very accustomed.
00:25:15 ◼ ► And to change the interface, even if you have arguments for why the change is better, and even if you're right about those arguments, that doesn't mean that you're helping a person who has built up significant muscle memory.
00:25:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and the other big factor, and I think this phone app redesign is one of the first times we're really seeing post-iPhone as a cultural institution, Apple, grapple with it.
00:25:50 ◼ ► Right, where everything, and I would say far more, take the subjectivity of which one you liked better out of it.
00:26:04 ◼ ► And for all of the ongoing discussion that I think is all valid, iOS 26, I think there are people out there who don't really notice much new about it.
00:26:29 ◼ ► And I think that they have sort of steered their design language toward not ever needing to again.
00:26:50 ◼ ► And one of the things, it was in the early days or in the 90s when Apple was famously tinkering on the edge of bankruptcy and had obviously, just obviously terrible management that didn't know where, how to go forward and failed, majorly, totally failed next generation operating system efforts.
00:27:18 ◼ ► The advantage of their small market share, at least, especially once Jobs and the next leadership team came in and kind of righted the ship.
00:27:32 ◼ ► The advantage of the relatively small audience was that they could do something like release the Aqua interface for Mac OS X, which was just as drastic a visual change going from the classic Mac OS look.
00:27:47 ◼ ► Which, up until that point, the betas of, or developer betas, whatever they were called, of Mac OS X looked like.
00:28:01 ◼ ► In fact, it was probably the best platinum look they ever had because they actually, the betas of Mac OS X had some nice improvements, like sort of darker windows for the forefront and some better window management controls.
00:28:32 ◼ ► And one of the advantages of that is that with 5% market share, and that 5% was almost entirely comprised of enthusiasts, is that you could do that.
00:29:06 ◼ ► It wouldn't go off on Microsoft if they had, like, the find, you know, the okay and the cancel buttons in the wrong order.
00:29:15 ◼ ► Because they, their guidelines put them in the other order, and we were snobby about the fact that there's a reason that Apple's put the okay button, the default button in the lower right, and the cancel button to the left, and whatever their...
00:29:27 ◼ ► I think that their reasoning was, well, if Apple did it this way, we'll flip them so that we have a different way.
00:29:32 ◼ ► Whereas Apple's wasn't just an arbitrary decision, so many of us have been looking back at, like, old, late 80s and early 90s editions of the Human Interface Guidelines from Apple and citing all the ways that Mac OS 26 Tahoe literally epitomizes the don't do it this way examples in the old Hig.
00:30:13 ◼ ► People complained about the fact that Aqua looked, I remember people complaining that it looked too, I don't know, childish or non-pro, right?
00:30:33 ◼ ► Thus, it didn't look serious and pro like, say, the next hardware did with the black magnesium that it was constructed out of.
00:30:44 ◼ ► Or the way Apple's pro hardware has pretty much looked ever since I think the titanium PowerBook G4 kind of started the modern look.
00:30:54 ◼ ► It was before they got to aluminum because they couldn't quite, they hadn't mastered constructing with aluminum yet.
00:31:00 ◼ ► But that titanium G4 and everything since has been that sort of metallic aluminum, whether it's a MacBook Pro or a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini.
00:31:14 ◼ ► Yeah, and they used like a, right, right, more, less colorful, a little less translucent, more of a slate color.
00:31:25 ◼ ► And then there was the preference and system preferences at the time before they renamed it system settings, where you could change the red, yellow, green buttons to use graphite, they called it.
00:31:36 ◼ ► And it changed those buttons to gray and a sort of gray with a blue tint, which is near and dear to my heart.
00:31:47 ◼ ► And B, that using neutral colors was important for people doing color work in the actual content of their work in the window.
00:32:07 ◼ ► From an objective computer-human interaction perspective, it was exquisitely thoughtful.
00:32:13 ◼ ► And Jobs, as I cited this back in June, as a contrast with Alan Dye's introduction of liquid glass, and then I quoted a bunch of it, which was just word salad.
00:32:35 ◼ ► But he also said, pointed out things like, hey, look how clear and obvious it is, which is the active window and which windows are inactive in the background.
00:32:46 ◼ ► And he referred to it as the key window, I believe specifically, using the parlance of human factors experts, the way that human factors people talk about it.
00:32:58 ◼ ► And I think you pointed out that we Mac users at the time, like the audience that Apple hung on to through the lean years, whether we were actually designing interfaces as part of our work or just using it.
00:33:13 ◼ ► We were fans of UI design in the way that people are readers of like fiction are fans of good writing and know the rules and can just talk, aren't just interested in the plot of a novel, but are actually interested in the, oh, that's such a beautiful paragraph or what a sentence that is.
00:33:40 ◼ ► And with UI, some of that artisanal aspect is also mechanical in that it has to be functional, it has to be consistent, it has to be clear.
00:33:56 ◼ ► That's really what we're trying to create with an interface is something that you can use.
00:34:05 ◼ ► And that was what Apple under jobs really got and what the Alan Dye era seems to have entirely lost track of.
00:34:19 ◼ ► And I had a post at some point that somebody who had worked at Apple for quite a while as a UI designer and had left within the last two years and works somewhere else now, but has been a long time.
00:34:31 ◼ ► I'll say a friend, but a long time chirper and never like someone who told me leaked information or anything like that.
00:34:39 ◼ ► But just a reader who I knew worked at Apple and therefore their emails I took very confidentially.
00:34:44 ◼ ► But just when I wrote that had mentioned that in this person's interaction with Alan Dye and their team, like what struck this person about the jobs introduction and they were there for that.
00:34:56 ◼ ► I think it just being refreshed that jobs knew the lingo like key window and this person said like I learned when dealing with Alan Dye and his team that if I use words like that their eyes rolled back in their head like look at this guy talking computer nerd stuff.
00:35:10 ◼ ► It's not that they didn't know they weren't stupid per se, but that they really had lost the idea of human factors design as a science and it really just went totally to just art of how it looks.
00:35:26 ◼ ► And that's what made it so galling so totally galling when Dye announced that he was leaving Apple from meta and then the next day post my work here is done and posted the jobs quote of the famous jobs quote about people have this idea that design is how it looks.
00:35:43 ◼ ► It's not it's design is how it works of all people to post that Alan Dye who really it sounds good and they might have thought that's what they were doing, but everything about the work that they did and everything, especially about Matt goes 26 Tahoes to me proves that they totally didn't get it and that it is a science and that you need some in the way that you need.
00:36:06 ◼ ► If you're really going to talk about grammar, you need obscure inside lingo words like gerund, you don't need to know it to be a writer, but if you really want to analyze it, you need words like that.
00:36:24 ◼ ► I mean, maybe you hear more than I do, but Apple used to have usability testing that you heard about like it bubbled up.
00:36:32 ◼ ► There were kitchens there were people got called in there were universities that that, you know, someone would be organizing something at a university that never ever pops up in my feeds anymore or just my awareness.
00:36:47 ◼ ► I think and I can't prove it I could be wrong, but what I've heard and it's mostly from people who've left over the last especially the last five years and therefore have gotten freer to share their experience inside Apple over the last 10 to 15 years, but most of which I still treat confidentially because and they don't even have to say it.
00:37:08 ◼ ► But it's like people leave Apple for a while and then they often come back like the Jason sells six colors name is such a good name for an Apple site because there are so many people who truly bleed six colors.
00:37:20 ◼ ► And so blabbing about their experience would cut that off or would at least make it more difficult in the future.
00:37:28 ◼ ► But I think to make a very long complicated story short, I think that while Steve Jobs knew that lingo and knew it and clearly could get enthralled in discussions about details like that.
00:37:43 ◼ ► Like if there's a window in the background, which controls should be active right away before you click to activate the window and talking about it with actual human factors people using the lingo in the same way that I think for everything he cared about.
00:38:00 ◼ ► He was a what's the other word for a renaissance man, somebody who, you know, like a jack of all trades.
00:38:07 ◼ ► But he could really he could speak that lingo, but I think ultimately trusted his gut so much knowing that his gut was so informed by all of that human factors design that started at Xerox Park with the early GUIs and that so enthralled Apple's team that came and toured and was allowed to use the ideas.
00:38:38 ◼ ► And remember when he was dismissing Microsoft as just having taste and that was in UI and that was important, you know, that you can't do.
00:38:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that under Steve Jobs, he trusted himself so much that a sort of, hey, we really ought to stick to these written rules sort of went by the wayside.
00:39:11 ◼ ► It's by knowing the rules of grammar that allows a more talented writer to break the rules of grammar in a way that if you handed it in to a sixth grade English teacher would technically require the teacher to put red marks like, hey, that's a no-no right there.
00:39:34 ◼ ► And it both works and it is effective for communicating to the reader to break the rules.
00:39:46 ◼ ► We used to complain about sometimes when they didn't and there didn't seem to be a good reason.
00:39:53 ◼ ► But a lot of times they would create innovative new interfaces and, yes, technically, it would violate the written guidelines of the HIG.
00:40:05 ◼ ► But I think that once Jobs was gone, it left an Apple that was less, hey, by default, we should stick to the written human interface guidelines and only break them for reasons that we can explain.
00:40:30 ◼ ► And I wonder to what extent there was also, you know, during that, during those later years of Jobs' tenure, he had Johnny Ive as a balance.
00:41:29 ◼ ► And it's illustrated with a large icon representation of an iPhone showing you in icon view the difference between Classic and Unified.
00:41:45 ◼ ► And you can switch right there rather than doing what Apple does with almost everything else in iOS.
00:41:50 ◼ ► Where if it is an option, you have to go to the Settings app and then go down to Apps and then go into the Apps and then scroll to the app, even if it's one of Apple's apps.
00:41:59 ◼ ► And go there and then go into that app and then somehow figure out how to do it, right?
00:42:08 ◼ ► Just like in Mail that you can go up to the menu bar and go to View, Use Column Layout.
00:42:13 ◼ ► And interestingly, even though there are plenty of settings that are still buried the heck away in Settings, Apps, Phone, Apple at the bottom of this little menu where you switch between Classic and Unified, there's a Manage Filtering option, which takes you straight there.
00:42:30 ◼ ► That's actually, I mean, like it takes you to the kind of down into the filtering sections, but it takes you to that, you know, Settings, Apps, Phone screen, which is really kind of helpful.
00:42:47 ◼ ► There are a couple of little oddities here so that, for instance, this menu only appears in the Classic view, which is the default, when you're in the Recents screen.
00:42:59 ◼ ► So, you know, so if you're in Favorites or Contacts or Keypad or Voicemail, it's not there, which is a little weird.
00:43:29 ◼ ► Because those buttons at the bottom, I mean, that's the thing that the two big changes are you get those Favorites built into the Unified screen, and then there's fewer buttons at the bottom.
00:43:45 ◼ ► But this is where the lack of something that is the equivalent of the Mac menu bar in iOS.
00:43:54 ◼ ► And now we are approaching almost 20 years of iOS, and it still doesn't have anything like the Mac menu bar.
00:44:01 ◼ ► And I'm not saying it has to be a menu bar, but the menu bar on the Mac is there in every app, and it's the place you go.
00:44:08 ◼ ► So if there is a view option, you would have a view menu, and no matter what you change from or to, if you want to change back, the view change doesn't remove the thing that you used to switch the view.
00:44:30 ◼ ► I think everybody would agree that this hamburger menu, filtering menu, whatever it's called officially in Apple's parlance, but it has no name, no label.
00:44:39 ◼ ► It is a menu, but because there's no menu bar in iOS, it goes away unless you're in the Recents tab, one out of the five tabs.
00:44:53 ◼ ► The only thing I will say is that probably you're going to choose Classic or Unified and stay there, that probably you are not going to.
00:45:04 ◼ ► So in some ways, you don't want this to be too visible or too in your face because it'll just get in the way every time you do go to want to filter something, which is the actual utility of that menu is filtering.
00:45:15 ◼ ► So one of the things I found that fascinating while I was exploring all this stuff was I could actually hear the discussions.
00:45:33 ◼ ► They're just whose opinion mattered the most in the end because they had a better argument.
00:45:40 ◼ ► And the two big ones are why did the phone app need a new layout, a new view option anyway?
00:45:49 ◼ ► And you really put your finger on it, which I mean that both literally and figuratively.
00:46:00 ◼ ► And that there were ideas from 2007 about the importance of a phone and people's habits with their old phone, whether it was a smartphone or for most people, including me, I just had like a $20 Nokia candy bar phone.
00:46:18 ◼ ► I remember once you programmed like on my Nokia, I guess I went through a couple of them in the cell phone era before the iPhone, but just no folding, no flipping, just a Nokia candy bar.
00:46:46 ◼ ► The whole point was, how do you make a phone call to your favorite people very quickly?
00:46:50 ◼ ► And so it kind of makes sense why the list of recent calls, if you just tapped on any of them in most of the row.
00:47:00 ◼ ► So if Adam Angst had called me today and I had missed the call or I had taken the call and still was there in the recents list, I'd go to recents and anywhere in the row I could tap and it would one tap.
00:47:14 ◼ ► And it totally makes sense from the context of what people were familiar with the purpose of a cell phone was in 2007.
00:47:22 ◼ ► And then there was a little I button on the right side that was the touch target for getting info about Adam.
00:47:49 ◼ ► And there is an equivalently small phone icon on the right side, which is a specific touch target for call this person right now.
00:48:16 ◼ ► I cannot tell you the burning passion with which I hate this interface because I don't –
00:48:38 ◼ ► And then you're immediately doing that, you know, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel as quickly as you can.
00:49:17 ◼ ► And it's really when I first read your article that it really occurred to me just how often that happens to me.
00:49:26 ◼ ► And I think one of the reasons it happened – it still kept happening, like I said, 18, 17, 18 years into me owning an iPhone and using it every day was that nothing else in iOS works that way.
00:49:41 ◼ ► It's like when you're in the mail app, whatever your mail app is on your iPhone, when you're looking at messages and you tap a message, it doesn't immediately open a reply to that person.
00:50:10 ◼ ► It's destructive to your time, and it's destructive to the other person's time and attention.
00:50:16 ◼ ► You have interrupted someone for no reason when you didn't mean to do it in any way, shape, or form.
00:50:37 ◼ ► It is about the way that if things that could be consistent, if they are consistent, then the user can stop thinking about them.
00:50:51 ◼ ► But the more I used my iPhone over 15, 16, 17 years, the less likely I was to think about it and just tap on it.
00:51:01 ◼ ► And what is interesting is that phone button was sort of a completely new concept, you know, in the phone app, you know, where each call had its own little button.
00:51:41 ◼ ► In terms of sliding to the left to make a reminder or pressing and holding to get, you know, more information to be able to message the person or mail them directly from that contact.
00:52:01 ◼ ► So it makes total sense why this was the interface for the iPhone call app, the phone app in 2007.
00:52:10 ◼ ► And they were just sort of forging ahead very quickly to ship this thing at a rapid pace and using good principles.
00:52:28 ◼ ► It never occurred to me to complain about the fact that nothing else worked this way in 2007 because the whole thing seemed so novel.
00:52:38 ◼ ► But the longer they went, the more it stood out as this exception that works in a way that made sense in 2007 and really doesn't seem to make any sense in 2025.
00:52:51 ◼ ► And the other aspect of it is that in 2025, and frankly, probably for a fair amount of these past years, is that a lot of people don't make calls ever.
00:53:10 ◼ ► But, you know, people who are five, ten years into their iPhones, you know, now, they probably, you know, make calls purely under duress.
00:53:22 ◼ ► I'd love to hear and see somebody do a study on how many phone calls per day people get and then correlate it by their age.
00:53:38 ◼ ► And only really in the last three or four years have we been able to stop saying, you could call them.
00:54:09 ◼ ► And I think you and I, when I linked to your piece, we had a bit of an email chain going about it.
00:54:14 ◼ ► In the summer, when I first put iOS 26 on like a year-old iPhone, and that's what I often, that's my typical pattern,
00:54:30 ◼ ► And I put the beta on my year-old phone, and then I just use the eSIM switching in settings, which is really nice,
00:54:40 ◼ ► Like, the disadvantage versus the old-fashioned SIM cards and sticking a paperclip in there to pop it out
00:54:47 ◼ ► and having this little tiny thing the size of your pinky finger fingernail to not lose is it was harder to, like, test an Android phone using your real phone number.
00:54:59 ◼ ► But now even Android, the whole world is kind of getting on board with eSIMs, and it's really nice.
00:55:04 ◼ ► But in the summer, when I first tried Unified, it didn't click for me right away because I only thought of it as a layout change.
00:55:35 ◼ ► And actually, speaking of hidden, we do need to point out that Apple has done something truly strange with phone apps settings
00:55:47 ◼ ► with this tap to call, tap recents to call option, which we are praising as for being able to reduce inadvertent calls.
00:56:05 ◼ ► If you're really in a hurry, you can't tap that little button, that little phone button.
00:56:10 ◼ ► They put in a hidden setting that only appears in the settings app when you're in Unified View in the phone app.
00:56:26 ◼ ► The clock is ticking when we stop recording this show for me to finish that before this show gets published, hopefully tomorrow.
00:56:50 ◼ ► Hey, this is a bad idea for a setting to have it appear and disappear based on something else that is not right there.
00:57:08 ◼ ► So, if you're in the phone app, if you switch to the new one, Unified, and then you go to Settings, Apps, Phone, then there is a preference.
00:57:33 ◼ ► But if you go back to the phone app, which is where you need to go back to toggle and switch from Unified to Classic, that whole checkbox, I'll call it a checkbox, whatever we call these switches in the toggles in iOS, it just disappears.
00:57:50 ◼ ► So, I think it should say in the small text underneath that this option is only available in the Unified when you're using the Unified View.
00:58:07 ◼ ► Because I think inside Apple, they're like, the whole point of Classic is that no matter what else you do, it continues working the way the iPhone had from iOS 1 through iOS 18.
00:58:32 ◼ ► It should just be grayed out with descriptive text underneath explaining why it is grayed out.
00:58:40 ◼ ► It's grayed out because it's only available when you're using Unified View in the phone app.
00:58:47 ◼ ► And that whoever it is at Apple, I actually think, now, if I had my druthers, this option would be available for users in both Classic and Unified Views.
00:58:57 ◼ ► And I was going to just say that Classic View is not perfectly like Classic View, right?
00:59:04 ◼ ► Because you have these new filtering options where you can hide unknown senders and spam calls.
00:59:10 ◼ ► And so I would argue that, okay, if you're going to add these unknown callers and spam things to the Classic Views interface, then allow people to toggle this tap recents to call option as well.
00:59:35 ◼ ► If you start going back and forth trying to see how this works, you will crash the settings app.
01:00:23 ◼ ► And obviously, I guess I'm thinking, again, imagining the conversations is, I think it has something to do with the fact that when you, okay, you're most iPhone users, but overwhelming majority who are now using iOS 26 had been using the iPhone for some number of years before.
01:00:46 ◼ ► The number of users whose first iPhone is running iOS 26 is probably vanishingly small.
01:01:00 ◼ ► But what they want id is when you switch to unified for the first time to get this new behavior.
01:01:14 ◼ ► But if the setting is on, I guess the other solution to this would be separate settings in that list for tap reasons to call a separate setting underneath.
01:01:24 ◼ ► I mean, it's a long list and it's kind of buried in settings, but a separate setting for the unified view and for the classic view.
01:01:33 ◼ ► That might actually, as I'm talking through this, might be the answer that we're reaching, where what Apple wanted was when you're in classic, you get the old behavior where you tap reasons to call and you're in unified, you don't tap reasons to call.
01:02:22 ◼ ► Like you said, it's actually even described wrong because it says start the call as soon as you tap a name or number in the recents list.
01:02:56 ◼ ► But yes, they could have said in the unified views recents list and it would have solved the problem.
01:03:00 ◼ ► And as we're talking about this, I'm sitting here looking at you as we record the show, talking about this in as explicit detail as we can muster in an audio podcast.
01:03:14 ◼ ► I'm toggling both things and I just left the phone app in classic view and I went back and I'm like, God damn it, Adam just told me it was, where the hell is it?
01:03:30 ◼ ► As we're talking about it because I had forgotten that I had gone back to classic to look at the filtered list of like unknown and spam callers.
01:03:39 ◼ ► It was very much when I was writing, I had the same thing, you know, when I was writing it up, I was like, okay, where did it go?
01:03:45 ◼ ► And then, of course, the fact that the settings app was crashing, you know, every third or fourth time I went in there, it wasn't helping because then I'd get confused about where I was.
01:03:52 ◼ ► But one of the things that makes this such an interesting thing to talk about is that overall, this is one of the best things about iOS 26 is user interface changes.
01:04:02 ◼ ► Then you unified list overall and you in detail, you're the man who's written the most about it and put your finger on what is good about making this list consistent with the way list views work in all of your other messaging apps and why it's useful and why this is a law.
01:04:24 ◼ ► But even with this thing that we're praising overall, the way that they dealt with the edge cases is so frustrating and it just sort of shows it's not just that we disagree with it.
01:04:40 ◼ ► Well, it's actually even slightly worse than that because if you use the swipe back and forth on the bottom of the screen to move quickly between settings and phone, you can literally see it go away.
01:05:00 ◼ ► Which is actually pretty clever that it's programmed that way and that even in an operating system where you don't think of the apps as having windows, they effectively are windows.
01:05:13 ◼ ► And that's when in the switcher view, effectively you see each app as a window that the window is updating as you're switching.
01:05:21 ◼ ► And it animates rather than just flashes from one, you know, from one frame to the next.
01:05:37 ◼ ► The few of us who notice, but it's just a sign of even when Apple does something right, that they've lost a certain old Apple would not have done this.
01:06:02 ◼ ► And if you ever switch back to classic view because you're like, I don't know what happened, but I want my phone to work the way it used to.
01:06:09 ◼ ► And as soon as you switch to classic, then you get all of the classic behavior, including tap reasons to call.
01:06:29 ◼ ► Unified view where it's off by default and classic view where it would be on by default.
01:06:42 ◼ ► Because I really do think you made the case that there is a case to be made for preferring the classic view for layout, but wanting the don't accidentally call people once a week behavior.
01:06:55 ◼ ► So the question is, is do we think this classic unified split is going to stick around past, say, iOS 27?
01:07:18 ◼ ► You know, as opposed to, again, to go back to mail on the Mac, it's not view, use column layout, or use classic view.
01:07:28 ◼ ► Because I think that for some people, that old school list of messages in a row, a top, a message view underneath is so ingrained in their mail habits that there's no way they could ever really take it away.
01:07:55 ◼ ► I mean, it's going to be a hard one to pull because, again, the people who are going to use it, and Apple will have telemetry on this.
01:08:10 ◼ ► And I forget exactly what happens when you first upgrade to iOS 26, but I'm pretty sure this is a case where what they do is use the new tip kit, which is a very useful new framework across their operating systems, where developers can put a user, you know, like to date us severely.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And then when balloon help was on, you could hover your mouse over any element and any element that the developer had added a balloon help for.
01:09:03 ◼ ► And they called it balloon help because they looked like the balloon dialogues from a comic book or a comic strip.
01:09:10 ◼ ► And therefore, and in a way that in a comic strip, that little pointy part of the balloon points towards the mouth of the character who's speaking, it points to the element that you're hovering over so that it would be very specific.
01:09:23 ◼ ► And tip kit is a way for developers to add something like that to user interface elements.
01:09:31 ◼ ► And I think what happens when you first upgrade to iOS 26 is you get a tip kit thing pointing to the filter menu saying, hey, here's a new thing.
01:09:39 ◼ ► It's the filter menu and you can switch to the unified view and we kind of wish you would.
01:09:53 ◼ ► And as I recall, it's a very nicely written tip balloon saying, and if you switch, you could switch to unified.
01:10:00 ◼ ► And we promise you won't get lost in settings, apps, phone, view, whatever, to ever go back.
01:10:11 ◼ ► You can just come back here and tip this, tap this same filter button and to get the menu and you can instantly switch back.
01:10:31 ◼ ► They show you a tip that encourages you to try it by default, which is probably the right way to do it.
01:10:37 ◼ ► But I think the reason I don't think they're going to, even though they've named it classic, I think they've named it classic more as an encouragement to try the new thing.
01:10:46 ◼ ► Like, hey, if you want to be an old fuddy-duddy and stick with the outdated thing, keep using classic.
01:11:11 ◼ ► I realized the other day I was exercising in a hotel gym and they had, I don't know if it's serious or whatever, but one of those commercial-free satellite radios playing.
01:11:22 ◼ ► And they were playing something that they called classic rock and they were playing something that they called classic rock or I think that's what they call it.
01:11:28 ◼ ► And I realized that what's now deemed classic rock, while it's all very familiar to me, is actually much older than what they called oldies when I was a teenager.
01:11:39 ◼ ► And I don't know who picked the name oldies, but that name was not meant to last because it's so disparaging.
01:11:49 ◼ ► That would be the sign that maybe this is going to go away next year is if they rename instead of unified and classic, if it's unified and oldie.
01:12:21 ◼ ► And there's a couple of sponsors that I had to spell it out or they asked me to spell it out.
01:12:27 ◼ ► And I think Sentry in particular is a good one because I think verbally it sounds a lot like century, like a hundred years.
01:12:45 ◼ ► Look, and I want to tell you this on this show, they have a couple of different things that they've been sponsoring the show for me to tell you about.
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01:14:37 ◼ ► Do you want to talk about the way that messages in iOS 26 is sort of similar to the phone app?
01:14:51 ◼ ► We've decided to change things, and, oh, look, phone and messages are very similar kinds of apps.
01:15:01 ◼ ► And particularly when Apple added the new ability to identify unknown senders slash callers, that was needed a way to be expressed in the interface.
01:15:13 ◼ ► And so, you know, we have the, you know, in the phone app, we have that filter menu in the top, and it shows you calls, missed calls, voicemail.
01:15:52 ◼ ► So with the phone app, it's all from the carrier, and I've never seen anything there at all.
01:16:04 ◼ ► The promotions filter is the one that has what I would consider to be spam, which is primarily, for me, political spam, which is, it got better for me, and then it got worse.
01:16:33 ◼ ► Honestly, at this point, I get unsolicited text messages because my wife and I have donated to, in our case, Democratic candidates.
01:16:52 ◼ ► But we gave less money in the 2024 cycle than we did in 2020 because we were both so incredibly frustrated by the barrage of text messages from candidates.
01:17:10 ◼ ► I think it's the fault of an organization called Act Blue, which is sort of a, I don't know what exact kind of organization Act Blue is, but it's like a political action committee or some kind of nonprofit or some kind of organizing function to help Democratic candidates get elected.
01:17:26 ◼ ► But it's them who has this master mailing list that they sell or give to Democratic candidates so that, you know, like in a national election, getting a message from Kamala Harris.
01:17:50 ◼ ► But it's like, we just keep getting, I just keep getting messages from random candidates in random states and they are all Democrats, but it's like, I'm not going to give money to somebody who's running for the House of Representatives in Texas.
01:18:05 ◼ ► Well, I mean, in some ways, I sort of like reading their messages because they're all very earnest.
01:18:19 ◼ ► And sometimes I will look at it for a little because I see the preview and it comes from an unknown number.
01:18:35 ◼ ► And yes, it was a candidate whose little earnest spiel is that they were thinking about their grandfather and somehow it inspired them to run this year for the Senate or the House or whatever the hell they're running for.
01:18:55 ◼ ► And there are sometimes messages I want in promotions, codes, those two-factor codes come in and get filtered into promotions instead of the main list.
01:19:08 ◼ ► And sometimes they don't, like we have certain accounts, like I think for our Amex account or something where it always comes to me instead of Amy and I just need to read it.
01:19:27 ◼ ► And one of the great breakthrough features Apple's come up with in the last 10 or 15 years, the team behind that.
01:19:46 ◼ ► It's probably the main thing that I miss on my main Mac, which, like you, I have not yet taken to Tahoe.
01:19:57 ◼ ► I love to hear that even the good features about Tahoe are things that I don't really want or need because my primary browser is Safari.
01:20:13 ◼ ► All of my friends, I have so many friends who, I guess I have a few who I think use Chrome, and they're not the user interface nitpickiest friends.
01:20:24 ◼ ► But I have some user interface nitpicky friends, and I'll count you, I'll add you to the list, Adam, who are big Arc aficionados.
01:20:31 ◼ ► And they are becoming ever more increasingly bitter because they got a taste of this thing that they fell in love with.
01:21:26 ◼ ► But I could see how if it doesn't, Arc is way more interesting to me than Chrome or Brave or certainly Microsoft Edge.
01:21:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I used to be a big fan of the sidebar of tabs in OmniWeb was Omnigroup's browser from the early days of Mac OS X.
01:21:50 ◼ ► I don't remember it ever quite being explicitly canceled, but just sort of, eh, we can't keep up with this.
01:22:06 ◼ ► And I think that's how long I've been using Safari as my primary browser continuously is I switched from OmniWeb.
01:22:12 ◼ ► At some point, I think in Obama's first term, maybe even before that, maybe George W. Bush was still president.
01:22:36 ◼ ► And, you know, the only thing that I have a little argument with, in actually both phone and Messages, is that filter menu is a little hard to move through quickly.
01:22:53 ◼ ► It doesn't have a lot of – it feels like it would be nice to have some way of, like, swiping between these lists quickly so you don't have to kind of look at all of them and go, oh, that's the one I – or to know, you see, because the filter menu will be – indicate it'll have a blue background if there's something in there.
01:23:14 ◼ ► So, like, you're trying to figure out, like, why you didn't find the message you're looking for.
01:23:18 ◼ ► Like, you saw the notification come in from something, and that's actually the one I just found live on the show, sitting there in the spam filtering.
01:23:37 ◼ ► And it's actually, if anything, more consistent in Messages because Messages only has one main view.
01:23:45 ◼ ► So that filter menu is always visible as opposed to what we talked about a bit ago about on the phone app that you have to be in the calls list in the tab bar at the bottom.
01:24:03 ◼ ► But I kind of feel like in Messages, they get away with the fact that there's no system-wide, always-present thing at the top for menus to be in.
01:24:14 ◼ ► The other change between Messages and phone, which is sort of a strike against consistency, but I think actually makes sense in each in context, is your favorites in Messages use the contact avatars, little circles.
01:24:36 ◼ ► Which, it took me a while to figure out the contact posters, too, because I had none, or I had one, or something like that.
01:24:51 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like that's, like, don't the people at Apple notice that in their list, none of the people who don't work at Apple, none of the people in their families who aren't their colleagues have posters?
01:25:03 ◼ ► This should be something that stands out to them of, we should go back to the drawing board on posters because nobody is setting these up.
01:25:13 ◼ ► I didn't even have them for them until I went to write an article about it because I had one person who'd come in with one.
01:25:28 ◼ ► And so why are these icons the size of a phone instead of a circle like they are like when you pin chats to the top of messages?
01:26:20 ◼ ► One of my all-time features of iOS is the photo widget, which just picks photos through machine learning.
01:26:35 ◼ ► For me, the lock screen photo shuffle on both the iPhone and the Apple Watch is possibly my favorite feature ever.
01:26:56 ◼ ► It is like having a personal assistant with who you trust with access to your entire personal library who like, hey, John, it's the start of the day.
01:27:20 ◼ ► And that's something that, again, Apple Intelligence, when you connect the faces with the contacts and just pull one up, make a nice one.
01:27:37 ◼ ► But make it easy to tap and hold to get a command to pick another one and maybe have one that works like you can do with your lock screen and have it pick a bunch and rotate throughout the day.
01:27:53 ◼ ► Go through a bunch of my favorite pictures of my wife or ones that your machine learning suggests I might think are favorite photos of my wife.
01:28:02 ◼ ► And I will say that the – because the only place you see contact posters otherwise is when one of these people calls you.
01:28:12 ◼ ► I didn't know about it for the longest time because no one used it until I finally set these.
01:28:23 ◼ ► The only thing that has confused me about it is that at least in the iOS 26 era, I have – and I didn't let Apple Intelligence pick them all.
01:28:33 ◼ ► But then I got really picky and went and handpicked a bunch of photos of mostly my wife and son.
01:28:43 ◼ ► And I'm not saying I got into marital trouble over it, but it was noted that I was a person who didn't have family members on my lock screen and had other sorts of wallpapers.
01:29:00 ◼ ► But sometimes it's like one of my favorite pictures of my wife will be my current lock screen photo.
01:29:06 ◼ ► But then also, for obvious reasons, one of the people I speak to most frequently on the phone is my wife.
01:29:15 ◼ ► And I'm confused whether I'm on the poster image because I'm on a call or I'm on the lock screen.
01:29:23 ◼ ► The easiest way would be for me to switch my lock screen back to just a wallpaper that isn't my family and not have it change.
01:29:37 ◼ ► It's that we have these nice photos and we don't have to go through 30 or 40 or 50,000 photos or however many we have to find the ones we like the best.
01:29:56 ◼ ► It really bothers me that in both of them, when you go to the bottom and there's the manage filtering, which is a great thing to have right there that jumps you into the right place.
01:30:16 ◼ ► And I know that it used to mean, I think, according to Hoyle or according to our Bible, the HIG, it might have at one time meant that you were going to get a dialogue in the app you were in that you would have to deal with before you continued on to the feature.
01:30:33 ◼ ► When you have a new untitled document and you hit save, the save command has three dots at the end of it because the save dialogue box is going to come up because it needs to come up because you need to be able to name the file and choose where you want to save it.
01:30:53 ◼ ► But then after you have already named the document, the save command doesn't have dot, dot, dot because it'll just save in place and you don't see a dialogue box.
01:31:12 ◼ ► Because I feel like it's a little unexpected maybe for some people that, oh, what does that do?
01:31:21 ◼ ► Jumps you exactly to where you want to be two or three levels deep in the settings app.
01:31:41 ◼ ► So, yes, I didn't even notice that, actually, that it does actually scroll you down to the right spot.
01:31:53 ◼ ► A+, whoever is behind this at Apple, you should go out and have a nice dinner with the people who hooked up the continuity feature to get those SMS codes pre-filled in your browser.
01:32:05 ◼ ► Because these are the sort of things that made us Apple users long ago and have kept us Apple users since they're the nice touches that define and always used to define the Apple user experience.
01:32:29 ◼ ► And, of course, it's liquid glass, so, you know, good luck figuring out if it's actually a button and everything.
01:32:33 ◼ ► And it's what you use to, you know, mess with your favorites or to work with multiple items in the list.
01:32:50 ◼ ► Like, it's got a big space for something I never, ever do or I do very, very infrequently.
01:33:00 ◼ ► The other thing about it that bugs me, too, I agree that it occupies – and, again, if they had something equivalent to a menu bar where both of these things could go, they wouldn't – it does bug me a little.
01:33:15 ◼ ► The other thing is – and I almost want to praise them for one thing about it, which is that they at least spell it out, E-D-I-T.
01:33:24 ◼ ► Yeah, right, at least edit as opposed to a cryptic icon, which is what they've done with so much else.
01:33:31 ◼ ► And once you go to – if anybody – if you're listening along, I just imagine that this is almost like a video episode of the show where people listening are – they've got their podcast player in the background, and they're using the messages app and phone app as you and I have been talking about them.
01:33:54 ◼ ► And now you can select individual message threads, but the edit button turns into a blue checkmark, right?
01:34:10 ◼ ► Like, these goddamn checkmarks that have replaced the done buttons drive me crazy because there's no consistency between them.
01:34:19 ◼ ► Like, when you take a screenshot, it's like, if I hit the X, does the screenshot disappear or does it get saved to my photo roll automatically?
01:34:49 ◼ ► Like, there's – in addition to the ones you are trying to select to delete or to mark unread, you can, like, select multiple threads and mark them red or unread at the same time.
01:35:08 ◼ ► And somewhere, Larry Tesler is rolling over in his grave because this is a mode and, I mean, this is a deep discussion.
01:35:17 ◼ ► But should we, in the year 2026, still need a separate mode for selecting items in a list than just tapping items in a list?
01:35:26 ◼ ► Maybe I get it that we've – instead of a precise mouse cursor, we've got the fat-fingered interface on a touchscreen because they can change the screens and change the size of the phones and advance the software as much as they want.
01:35:43 ◼ ► But I kind of feel like if you're going to have a mode for this, it should be as explicit as possible.
01:35:56 ◼ ► I kind of feel like one of the lesser complained about, and certainly by me, aspects of liquid glass that I think deserves scorn is the elimination of words in favor of icons only.
01:36:10 ◼ ► Which is where people will always say, but you don't have to localize them, and to which I say, get over it.
01:36:21 ◼ ► I get it, and that Apple has to localize for literally – by definition, Apple has to localize for every language that they sell the product in.
01:36:33 ◼ ► Almost every language that has a sizable enough country to have a localized version for it.
01:36:44 ◼ ► A, for Apple itself, cry me a river about the cost of localizing the entire – I mean, it's like, look at their financial reports every quarter.
01:36:53 ◼ ► They just had the highest revenue and highest profits of any quarter in the company's history.
01:36:58 ◼ ► They can afford to keep paying for people to translate the word done into whatever esoteric languages iOS supports out there.
01:37:09 ◼ ► B, this is actually one of those things that AI is incredibly good for, and I have some developer friends who have localized their apps into more languages than they've ever supported before by using LLM tools to do it.
01:37:23 ◼ ► And they've gotten feedback from readers or users of their apps who speak those languages to say, hey, I notice you have a localization for whatever language, and it's really good.
01:37:43 ◼ ► So I want to complain about the blue checkmark, but I want to thank them that the edit still says edit.
01:38:08 ◼ ► Well, you check something off a to-do list, but that is a single item, not like a set of actions.
01:38:13 ◼ ► But if you take a screenshot, take a screenshot right now on your iPhone, and then there's an X button that makes it go away, but then there's also a checkmark.
01:38:22 ◼ ► But that opens a menu where you get save the photos, save the file, save the quick note, copy and delete, delete screenshot.
01:39:12 ◼ ► At least it should be a checkmark with a chevron to say it's going to open a menu because it's not going to do the thing.
01:39:17 ◼ ► That sort of – when I think back to the things that we would have arguments about in our community about consistency.
01:39:32 ◼ ► How fine-grained they were, but how seriously we took them because we're such UI nerds.
01:39:38 ◼ ► And again, it's one of those ways where being a stickler for detail is helping everybody else who doesn't – who says they don't care.
01:39:48 ◼ ► But if people who really are, like us, bothered by getting little things like this wrong, think all these things through and apply in the software that's being made these principles, all the people out there in the world, the 99% of the world who does not care, has never heard of the human interface guidelines, they benefit from them, right?
01:40:09 ◼ ► They learn that a little down-facing chevron on a button means it's going to open a menu, and they learn that if it doesn't, it means it's going to go away.
01:40:17 ◼ ► And the word done – and again, maybe it is a problem in some languages that the equivalent of done is a longer string.
01:40:28 ◼ ► I don't know what the solution is, but it didn't seem to be a problem all the way up through iOS 18 to just say done if they meant done.
01:40:36 ◼ ► I do feel as though with some of these icons – because obviously Apple, they don't have an edit icon, although if you look in the lower right corner, they have a pencil on a square icon, which is the compose icon.
01:40:51 ◼ ► But in other apps, like in Pages, like we touched on, the menus in Tahoe having icons, they tend to reuse these things because, in fact, they're very, very hard to describe all these functions with icons.
01:41:20 ◼ ► And it – because it sort of also looks like it could be a sort icon, like maybe tapping it would sort them in the opposite order of what you're seeing because it's a pyramid that's going down.
01:41:31 ◼ ► And, in fact, I believe in years past that's actually very similar to the sort icon from list views across macOS where it was a pyramid of ever-decreasing sizes or ever-increasing whether you were sorting, ascending, or descending.
01:41:48 ◼ ► And, again, it sort of fits in with the whole terrible, dumb, no-bad, make-me-furious decision to add icons by default or recommend icons by default for most menu items across macOS Tahoe in the menu bar.
01:42:19 ◼ ► But the best argument against it is if you got rid of the menu names, the words, would you be able to use the menu bar with these icons alone?
01:42:33 ◼ ► You might have a chance briefly while you remembered what the positions of the menus were.
01:42:44 ◼ ► Some of them you could, you know, you go to view and view as icons, view as list in the finder.
01:43:15 ◼ ► And most push buttons, if there's space for them, it would, it's better to have just words.
01:43:29 ◼ ► It fits in with a big safe, safety, like kindergarten scissors corner radius of the windows.
01:43:44 ◼ ► Just because Steve Jobs liked rounded racks doesn't mean you should keep going that way.
01:43:48 ◼ ► But it really does feel like they're moving towards, I really hate to say it and to go to this extreme,
01:43:55 ◼ ► but like an idiocracy future where the, even on the Mac, the whole interface is designed for people who can't read.
01:44:10 ◼ ► And one of the things that's going to be interesting is, is that we are interestingly moving back towards a much more textual future with LLMs.
01:44:29 ◼ ► It's like, that's how everybody, the hottest thing in years in tech is entirely text-based almost.
01:44:35 ◼ ► And even when you're doing visual things like generating images or now generating videos, you do it with a text prompt.
01:45:06 ◼ ► Or, which I really think is key to the success of this sponsorship deal, is that you, the people listening to me and Adam talk for two hours about these niggling user interface details and are still enthralled and waiting for us to get back to it, are the sort of people your friends and family come to when they have a need.
01:45:26 ◼ ► Like, hey, you know, maybe I should have a website for this business I run or thing that I do.
01:45:30 ◼ ► Or maybe my business needs a new website or I should replace the one that's already there.
01:45:38 ◼ ► And instead of you building a website for them or you hand-holding them, Squarespace really is the sort of WYSIWYG meant to be approachable from users of all levels of skills.
01:45:52 ◼ ► If you really do want to add your own JavaScript to your website, yeah, you can do that with a Squarespace site.
01:45:59 ◼ ► And if you don't know the difference between JavaScript and CSS and have no idea what CSS even is and you're already rolling your eyes and running away, you don't need to know any of that to use Squarespace to set up a website.
01:46:15 ◼ ► It really is really scales from don't know anything about making websites technically at all to I can actually code a website by hand if I wanted to, but I don't want to.
01:46:31 ◼ ► If there's one little thing I want to tweak, Squarespace scales all the way from one to the other.
01:46:49 ◼ ► And again, just like we were talking about on the show, using words, describe the sort of things you want or do the do it the old fashioned way that Squarespace has supported forever and choose from their library of professionally designed and award winning templates.
01:47:03 ◼ ► And then once you choose from a template, you can go back to using the Blueprint AI to tweak it.
01:47:11 ◼ ► Simplest first part of having a website is registering a domain name and keeping it registered and being able to support it.
01:47:30 ◼ ► And when you go there, Squarespace dot com slash talk show, you save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using that code talk show.
01:47:44 ◼ ► Anything that have been on your I mean, we could go forever, but I was going to say we could go forever.
01:48:21 ◼ ► I yeah, I installed it right away on my MacBook Air and which I use a fair amount, but not not as my main machine.
01:48:31 ◼ ► And I usually upgrade around Christmas, you know, got a little time, you know, it's a it's sort of a good time to do it.
01:48:40 ◼ ► And that was about when a lot of these things started coming out, you know, because I hadn't honestly noticed like the window resizing thing myself until Norbert wrote about it.
01:48:57 ◼ ► So it's not actually a usability thing for me so much as as just like it would make no difference.
01:49:49 ◼ ► But it's like you effectively put your Mac under management like it's like you have an IT department.
01:49:57 ◼ ► You set a policy and you just say and then every 90 days you can renew it with a new certificate that says, don't let this machine upgrade to Tahoe.
01:50:08 ◼ ► And then you will get rid of the red badge on the settings icon, which doesn't bother me.
01:50:14 ◼ ► But I totally I'm close enough to being obsessive compulsive about unwanted badges that I told like it doesn't really bother me.
01:50:24 ◼ ► And I kind of actually kind of embrace the red badge that I've had for a while of bugging me about Tahoe.
01:50:31 ◼ ► And I've had I even wrote about it, how it's kind of there's an aspect of the software update interface that kind of makes it easy to make a mistake.
01:50:40 ◼ ► And when you want to just update to the latest version of Sequoia 15 Sequoia, it's if you go to the I click the I for the details, it changes it.
01:50:52 ◼ ► If you click the I next to Sequoia automatically selects Tahoe, no matter which I you click, whether you click the I next to the upgrade to Tahoe or the update to the latest point release of Sequoia.
01:51:09 ◼ ► When you click any of the I buttons, you get the exact same dialog box, which has Tahoe checked by default, which is atrocious in its own way.
01:51:18 ◼ ► And I've had readers write to me and say, even though you wrote about it, it happened to me.
01:51:35 ◼ ► And it's one of those things where in the earlier years of Daring Fireball, I'd have been less hesitant to link to it because I felt like I could my audience was more technical.
01:51:44 ◼ ► Whereas this requires a bit of technical expertise where I don't want to put my you're kind of on your own if you want to do this.
01:52:06 ◼ ► And, you know, it's the same thing, you know, when they stop signing the iOS updates and, you know, we've just gotten we complain about it every year or people write about every year.
01:53:10 ◼ ► So so the illusion has always been that they just don't listen and they have no idea what we on the outside are talking about.
01:53:28 ◼ ► So last year at the WWDC keynote for just last June for announcing iOS 26 and all the other 26 OS's, I think it was, though, I think when some of these features, because they're the same across OS's, they have to decide which OS's segment they'll announce it in.
01:53:46 ◼ ► But I think because your phone is your main camera, they did this when they were talking about iOS 26, they said about the phone app and the way that that so many users did not like the layout changes in the tab bar and the way that when you scroll down, it gave you a bunch of instead of just showing you your photos, it showed you sections and smart groupings of your photos, like friends and family and stuff like that.
01:54:14 ◼ ► I didn't hate that change so much, but it's one of those things where change annoys people, right?
01:54:20 ◼ ► And they said, I think it was Federighi speaking, and he even said, or maybe they made somebody else say, I don't know.
01:54:26 ◼ ► But whoever said it said, hey, we heard you guys, and we've changed the photos app again in response to very deftly worded to avoid saying to change the things you hated.
01:54:39 ◼ ► They chose their words very carefully and they came up with a very cleverly, deftly worded way of saying, we've changed photos again because we listened to what you didn't like about it.
01:54:52 ◼ ► They didn't add a classic view in this case, but they definitely listened to the specific criticisms that people had, which was basically that people wanted an easy, obvious way to just show thumbnails of their photos in the order that they've been most recently taken, which is the way the library tab at the bottom of the photos app now works.
01:55:16 ◼ ► And then they added a second tab collections, which shows all the things that they wanted people to draw people's attention to in iOS 18.
01:55:30 ◼ ► So I can't help but think it's not just my own personal bias where I wasn't annoyed so much by the iOS 18 photos app, but I'm highly annoyed by a lot of aspects of liquid glass in across all the 26 OSs.
01:55:44 ◼ ► I can't help but think that it's just the plain objective truth that there's just it's not just me.
01:55:56 ◼ ► So hopefully, and I don't, yeah, little bits of things in the change, but it's it is the at least they are annual like clockwork this year.
01:56:16 ◼ ► So I think that what they'll do is and are doing clearly at this point in February of 2026 and probably have been doing for months now.
01:56:27 ◼ ► And I hope with a more liberated detachment from some of the specific things post Alan Dye and his inner circle going leaving Apple from meta in a surprise announcement, clearly a surprise to Apple's leadership, that it can kind of free them to make more changes than they would have even if Alan Dye had stayed.
01:56:53 ◼ ► I think even if he'd stayed, they'd have to address some of these things, but now they can make more changes and without mentioning them by name, just be like, well, good riddance to bad rubbish, right?
01:57:13 ◼ ► And there are things like just the fundamental – like the system font being San Francisco.
01:57:18 ◼ ► It's a wonderful typeface, really wonderful typeface that I think was designed in a timeless fashion in the way that Helvetica is kind of timeless.
01:57:45 ◼ ► And they certainly need to do some work on the transparency stuff still because – and they added that one option.
01:57:55 ◼ ► I forget which one where they added a system setting for liquid glass that wasn't – yes, tinted.
01:58:03 ◼ ► And the big tell about the fact that they're taking it seriously is that they didn't hide it away in accessibility.
01:58:11 ◼ ► There have always – for so many – I mean, I would say probably decades at this point, 20 years, there have been really good features tucked away in accessibility that I think a lot of users miss because they think, well, my vision and hearing and motor skills are fine.
01:58:29 ◼ ► And no, but there are features in there that you might really like just to make things look better.
01:59:04 ◼ ► There's a few places where I think Apple has – I don't know if it's intentional, but I almost feel as though they're using liquid glass to punish us.
01:59:16 ◼ ► You know, like, you try to turn off – you know, have reduced transparency on and everything like that.
01:59:31 ◼ ► They're, like, if, like, I kind of – again, and here I'm – I am connoting pejorative personality defects upon the person who – persons who foisted this upon us.
01:59:45 ◼ ► But I can't help but feel that there was some contingent within Apple pushing towards this Tahoe interface who were, like, can't we finally just get rid of the always-on scroll bars, right?
02:00:00 ◼ ► And all these people are, like, no, that's the people who I think have disagreed all along with making it the default to turn off always-on scroll bars on the Mac.
02:00:17 ◼ ► Why in the world would you want to hide them by default on a display where there's plenty of room for them?
02:00:22 ◼ ► Being able to see what views are scrollable when there is more scrollable content, where are you, what range is currently visible by the size of the scroll thumb, and where are you from the beginning to the end in the current context?
02:00:38 ◼ ► Why in the world do you have to hover your mouse over the view and start scrolling to get that –
02:00:57 ◼ ► Again, our mutual friend who we mentioned earlier, Paul Kafasas, has mentioned it, I don't know, on the Rogue Amoeba blog, but certainly on, I think, on his personal blog, One Foot Tsunami.
02:01:08 ◼ ► But they have turned them – they've made them thicker, which you think is good because they're bigger.
02:01:23 ◼ ► But where you don't – when you click on them, they don't get darker because they're already dark all the time.
02:01:29 ◼ ► So it's sort of – I'm imagining a conversation where somebody wanted to get rid of the option so they didn't have to support it.
02:01:35 ◼ ► And, in fact, they screwed it up in the Finder column view, which I've written about multiple times and Jeff Johnson, who did most of the legwork on writing it up, that you could turn on column view in the Finder.
02:01:49 ◼ ► And with always-on scroll bars, you couldn't resize columns anymore because the widget to resize the columns was underneath the scroll bar.
02:02:07 ◼ ► And then somebody – the people who wanted to get rid of them are like, well, then we're going to make them black and ugly.
02:02:20 ◼ ► So it's like they effectively took the way the scroll bars look, which haven't looked good for a while, I think, ever since they made them look like iOS scroll bars.
02:02:27 ◼ ► And, again, on the phone, especially the early iPhones, when they were only three-and-a-half-inch screens, you can understand why they got – I totally understand why they got rid of always-visible scroll bars.
02:02:43 ◼ ► And I would still like to see my current scrolling context all the time, whether I have my thumb on the screen and I'm moving it or not.
02:02:51 ◼ ► But I totally understand that space was so limited that only having the scroll bar visible while you're scrolling was a useful and clever decision.
02:03:04 ◼ ► And getting rid of the arrows to go up and down, which was – we're actually not just a useful tip for newbies, but we're like – you could just put your mouse there.
02:03:18 ◼ ► And it just feels like somebody spitefully took a big Sharpie marker and just colored the scroll bars in on Tahoe.
02:03:35 ◼ ► Yeah, so I think they could do things like, hey, what if we made scroll bars on the Mac look cool and useful and, God, it would be so awesome.
02:03:53 ◼ ► It's a very long way of answering your question, Adam, but I don't think they're going to backtrack per se.
02:03:58 ◼ ► I certainly – I mean, that would be a shock if they were like, remember that thing we announced last year and made you live with for a year?
02:04:08 ◼ ► And, again, iOS 7 kind of shows the way – iOS 7 was way as radical – more radical as it was than liquid glass is on iOS.
02:04:17 ◼ ► It had a lot of problems with just how flat they had made things and how much depth as a visual cue they had eliminated.
02:04:29 ◼ ► And I think there are things they can do to, hey, let's find a middle ground between clear and tinted so that we don't even need that option, right?
02:04:38 ◼ ► Let's try to eliminate some of these accessibility sessions like reduced transparency and stuff or make it so that fewer people will want to turn it on.
02:04:48 ◼ ► Make it an actual accessibility setting as opposed to something that 50% of the population.
02:04:54 ◼ ► Make it something for people who have a visual – whatever the visual problem is that it really is for people who like any sort of transparency is a distraction or really reduces the clarity of how well they can see what's on screen.
02:05:07 ◼ ► People keep sending me – like one of the most common ones is when you go to the Wi-Fi menu in Tahoe and you list like the network names that if you do it against a white background, it's like you can't frigging read them.
02:05:24 ◼ ► And I know there's rumors that it's going to be like a snow leopard upgrade this year where they really are just going to tackle things.
02:05:36 ◼ ► So that's what I expect is not a backtracking per se, but a, hey, let's fix these things that people are talking about because they obviously are real.
02:05:46 ◼ ► And I think that there's a visual framework within LiquidGlass that there's plenty of good territory to work with.
02:05:53 ◼ ► I do wonder if they could be using some more of this machine learning technology also because we have the power for it these days to literally be looking on the fly at all times and saying, wow, that's unreadable.
02:06:12 ◼ ► Yeah, or at least to automate the testing of it and to run through all of the possible states so you can get into and make sure that text remains legible at all times.
02:06:22 ◼ ► It seems to me like something that maybe should be visible while they're writing the software.
02:06:27 ◼ ► Like, hey, this looks cool like this, but if it's a white background on the web page, then you can't read anything.
02:06:37 ◼ ► I would love to see, too, a backtracking of the everything should look the same across all OSs.
02:06:43 ◼ ► I mean, like the biggest rant I would like to get off my chest for Daring Fireball soon would be something along the lines of one of the best things Apple did when they created the iPhone in 2007, the iOS interface in 2007, which I know wasn't called iOS at the time.
02:06:59 ◼ ► Was they really didn't make it look like the Mac or, you know, only in ways that made sense.
02:07:11 ◼ ► But now they're shoving these iOS-isms on the Mac that are just inappropriate for a desktop workstation interface.
02:07:40 ◼ ► Windows phone looked like desktop Windows shrunk to a phone and shrunk to a much smaller than iPhone-sized screen because it had, like, a keypad.
02:07:53 ◼ ► The Mac is on a roll, and people love the Aqua interface, so let's put the Aqua interface on a phone.
02:07:59 ◼ ► But now they've done the reverse and taken the phone interface and put it on the Mac, and it's disrespectful, in my opinion.
02:08:22 ◼ ► But I'm looking forward to this WWDC more than any in recent years because I think it's going to be a huge tell what they do user interface-wise.
02:08:37 ◼ ► At this point, it's like, hey, two years ago, I don't think – that's the whole point of my argument last year.
02:08:46 ◼ ► I think they panicked and rushed and announced stuff that they didn't know if they could build, and it turns out they couldn't build it.
02:08:56 ◼ ► Like at this point, it is – now is the time where they really need to announce something that they are definitely going to ship.
02:09:02 ◼ ► So I would say the combination of how do they adjust to the reaction to this, the exit of Alan Dye, the internal –
02:09:10 ◼ ► And again, I've reported on this probably better or at least more than anybody else that inside Apple, there was much rejoicing when Alan Dye left.
02:09:20 ◼ ► So I don't think management was aware of that until he left and that they could kind of get the pulse on how people inside the company.
02:09:29 ◼ ► Maybe they were worried like, oh, my God, what are all the other UI designers going to think now that he's left?
02:09:40 ◼ ► So if that's all they do, and I think if that could be the gist of the 27 updates is, hey, we're going to fix the most serious, glaring human interface crimes across all the OSs, including and especially the Mac in the 27 updates.
02:09:59 ◼ ► And we have a coherent Apple intelligence story that we're really going to be able to ship.