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ATP

699: Not the Correct Squircle

 

00:00:00   I have monthly FaceTime calls with a handful of good friends, one of whom is our good friend Underscore.

00:00:06   And once a month, we'll get on FaceTime for like an hour or two and just chit-chat and catch up.

00:00:09   And when I was talking to Underscore the other day, I was mousing around for a moment,

00:00:13   and I noticed my magic trackpad, which is my mouse of choice, was sliding a little bit on my desk.

00:00:18   And so what I do is I turn off the trackpad, I pick it up, I flip it over,

00:00:21   and the four little feet or whatever they're called, the little rubberized things that it rests on,

00:00:25   you just, you know, rub on them for a second with your hand or with your finger and gets all the gook off,

00:00:30   and then you put it back down, everything's good for another like few weeks, what have you.

00:00:33   I turned it off, I rubbed the bottom, and I went to turn it back on,

00:00:36   and the little nubbin that I used to turn the thing back on isn't there anymore.

00:00:40   Apparently, it's shore off.

00:00:42   It's a little power slider, because it's a slider, right, just like on the keyboards.

00:00:46   The little nubbin for the slider fell off when it was in the off position.

00:00:51   Is it metal like on the keyboards?

00:00:54   Yes.

00:00:55   How does it fall off?

00:00:56   Isn't it like trapped in there?

00:00:57   You would think, but I have it on my, I have it between my fingers right now,

00:01:02   and it is itty-bitty, and I should send it to Dr. Drang to do like a forensic analysis.

00:01:06   Oh, does it look like it broke?

00:01:08   Like is there a fracture?

00:01:09   Yeah, I think it like shore off.

00:01:10   You're so powerfully turning it on and off.

00:01:13   You know, I work out, John.

00:01:14   Your fingernail works out.

00:01:16   Right, exactly.

00:01:18   But so that was very annoying and frustrating, but I have good news.

00:01:22   I have then used that as an excuse to upgrade my lightning magic trackpad and keyboard to not only a USB-C magic trackpad and keyboard, but the black USB-C trackpad and keyboard.

00:01:36   So I am living a great, grandiose black life.

00:01:40   I've got my BlackBook Pro over here with my black keyboard and my black mouse, and I am loving life.

00:01:45   Just call me MKBHD.

00:01:46   To be clear, like I think almost every nerd wants that excuse to replace the perfectly fine lightning version of these peripherals with the much more convenient USB-C version.

00:01:58   Exactly.

00:01:59   And here I am with a giant supply of Microsoft Precision mouses, all which have a micro USB port on the front.

00:02:08   Oh, no.

00:02:09   Oh, that's not desirable at all.

00:02:12   I do have a couple of quick lamentations, though.

00:02:15   I got my Fancy Pants Magic Keyboard, right, my black Magic Keyboard, and it looks so good.

00:02:22   It reminds me of the iMac Pro one, which I loved and would actually probably still be using if it wasn't for the case.

00:02:29   It wasn't for the problem that it doesn't have Touch ID, that the iPad Pro one doesn't.

00:02:32   Or excuse me, iMac Pro one doesn't.

00:02:34   And so what kind of animal lives without Touch ID, right, gentlemen?

00:02:37   Anyway, I got this new keyboard.

00:02:39   However, there's a difference from my old lightning version of the keyboard.

00:02:44   And that difference is, if I look at the lightning keyboard, other than being blinded by how bright it is because the keys are all white or something like that,

00:02:52   the control key in the bottom left-hand corner spans roughly two-thirds of the width of the shift key above it, right?

00:03:00   So in the bottom left corner, there's basically every Mac keyboard, control, option, and command.

00:03:05   And so I don't know when this started, but I have, in the last couple of years, started control clicking to right-click.

00:03:12   I know that you don't have to do that.

00:03:13   I know there are a million other ways to do that, including two-finger taps and so on and so forth.

00:03:16   I could set the trackpad to click in the bottom right, and that's how I could do it.

00:03:19   I'm aware.

00:03:20   Whatever reason, I don't know why, I started doing control click like I'm a damn 80s Mac user, right, John?

00:03:25   And that's how I've done it.

00:03:27   Now, the new keyboard—

00:03:28   There was no right-click on the Mac in the 80s.

00:03:29   Well, fair, fair.

00:03:31   All right, fair enough.

00:03:31   And for a while, there wasn't a control key.

00:03:33   All right, that joke fell flat in every level.

00:03:36   But nevertheless, the new keyboard, the option key and the command keys were both shrunken ever so slightly.

00:03:42   And instead of the control key being the lower left-hand key on the keyboard, the stupid globe and effing key is in the bottom left-hand corner of the keyboard, and then command, and then option, excuse me, and then control, then option, then command.

00:03:55   And so now, every time I go to freaking right-click, instead I'm function clicking, which does nothing.

00:04:00   Is this the mini keyboard without a keypad?

00:04:02   Is that the problem?

00:04:02   No.

00:04:03   And that's the other thing.

00:04:04   That was the other lamentation I wanted to talk about.

00:04:06   I had to get the one with the numeric keypad, even though I don't really use the numeric keypad that often,

00:04:10   but I'm not going to do any stupid half-height up-down arrows.

00:04:13   You have to get the numeric keypad to get the full-height up-down arrows.

00:04:16   And so I'm rocking this numeric keypad like my dad used in Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80s.

00:04:22   I use it to type in numbers, but I didn't realize that they had the FN keyed down by the control.

00:04:27   Neither did I!

00:04:28   I have the keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, which, as you noted, does not have a Touch ID key, but it has normal control keys in the corner.

00:04:34   So I don't know what I'm going to do.

00:04:36   I mean, I guess I could just keep using this, but we'll see.

00:04:37   In the grand scheme of things, at least I have my beloved functional peripherals now.

00:04:42   You sent a link to it.

00:04:43   We'll put this link in the show.

00:04:44   What the hell?

00:04:45   Oh, it's when they curve the corners, too?

00:04:47   Because it's all curvy around the things?

00:04:49   No, the last one was curved as well.

00:04:50   I don't know if it's identically curved, but it looks at a glance.

00:04:53   Yeah, I think it was just when they integrated Touch ID, they made those couple of tweaks.

00:04:57   I think my wife's keyboard, she has an extended keyboard, and it has Touch ID, but I don't think they did that to the core.

00:05:02   Maybe I'll have to find, I should start searching eBay for my wife's keyboard.

00:05:05   Well, actually, now that I'm looking at it, if you look at this image, I was not intending for this topic to go on this long, but here we are.

00:05:11   There's, if you go to the shot, if you go to the store, so here, I'll paste this link in.

00:05:14   So this is the old one without Touch ID, and there is no FN key in the bottom left.

00:05:20   Exactly.

00:05:21   Right, but my wife has one with Touch ID with no FN key in the bottom left, I think.

00:05:25   Yeah, they put the FN key in, like, the home end block.

00:05:28   Right, exactly.

00:05:29   What is the current one doing?

00:05:31   Is that a menu?

00:05:32   I don't know what those buttons...

00:05:34   Well, you have the keyboard.

00:05:35   Press it.

00:05:35   Well, I did, and nothing happened.

00:05:37   That's why I'm so confused.

00:05:39   Although I'm doing this in, like, freaking Chrome.

00:05:42   Well, one's a forward delete, but then what's the one...

00:05:44   What's the one to the left of home?

00:05:45   What the heck is that?

00:05:46   That's what I'm wondering.

00:05:47   Is it like a menu key or something?

00:05:48   It looks like a menu, yeah.

00:05:50   Oh, no, it is a right click.

00:05:51   So now, if I'm in mail, it's right clicking on first responder.

00:05:56   So you don't have to hit control click anymore.

00:05:58   You can just hit the key next to delete.

00:05:59   But why...

00:06:00   Okay, if you are looking to, like, replace a click on the mouse, it has to be, for most people,

00:06:05   on the left-hand side of the keyboard.

00:06:07   Exactly.

00:06:08   Exactly.

00:06:09   I think this is for if you're just navigating from the keyboard.

00:06:12   I guess.

00:06:14   To bring up a context menu, though?

00:06:16   I think there was a time where, in the default setting, you couldn't pop up a context menu

00:06:20   from the keyboard unless you had, like, the full keyboard access thing on or whatever.

00:06:23   So maybe that's the role that key fills.

00:06:24   But I might just disable that key in the keyboard if I had a key like this, because the key next

00:06:28   to the delete key often gets hit accidentally, and I don't want it popping up a context menu.

00:06:32   Yeah, I mean, that's very weird.

00:06:34   And it only...

00:06:34   So I was trying it on Visual Studio Code, which is what's right in front of my face, you know,

00:06:39   tiled with Chrome, because that's where both our external and internal show notes are.

00:06:42   But then when I went to Mail, if I'm looking at my list of messages, and I have one of them

00:06:47   selected, whichever one is currently selected, if I hit this little menu button, sure enough,

00:06:51   the context menu comes up with open, send again, reply, reply all, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:56   Today I learned.

00:06:57   I have breaking news.

00:06:59   My keyboard also has a menu button.

00:07:01   Have you ever hit it?

00:07:03   I've never hit it in my life.

00:07:04   I just tried it.

00:07:05   So this, I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic, and on between the right side, alt and control.

00:07:11   So on the, you know, it's a Windows keyboard.

00:07:12   So on the left side, alt and control, there's the Windows key between them.

00:07:15   On the right side, between alt and control, there's a menu button.

00:07:18   And I just tried, like, you know, if you have something in the UI selected, and you hit the

00:07:24   menu button, it does bring up the context menu for that item.

00:07:28   Which I never knew was a thing people did with the keyboard.

00:07:32   Anyway, that is that.

00:07:36   So let's start with some follow-up.

00:07:38   And I have possibly good news.

00:07:41   So I lamented, and then Marco joined in with me, about how I wasn't receiving tap-taps on

00:07:47   my watch from Aaron's notifications, and Aaron's notifications specifically.

00:07:50   And Marco and I were casting about for potential causes for this, and we were talking about maybe

00:07:55   focus modes.

00:07:55   We were talking about any number of other things.

00:07:58   And a lot of the suggestions we got, I didn't actually get that many suggestions via, like,

00:08:03   Mastodon or anything.

00:08:03   But most of them were things I had at least considered or had looked at in the past.

00:08:08   But a couple of them, it wasn't any one particular person, but a couple of them had me poking

00:08:13   around, like, based on the things I said, poking around in Aaron's contact again.

00:08:18   Which I thought I'd done recently, but seemingly not.

00:08:20   And if you look at a particular contact in iOS, in the contacts app, and maybe this works

00:08:25   on macOS, I don't know.

00:08:25   But I'm looking at my phone right now.

00:08:26   I noticed that for ringtone, I had a specific sound for Aaron, which is, you're the best around

00:08:33   from the Karate Kid soundtrack, because of course.

00:08:35   Although my phone hasn't run verbally.

00:08:37   That's so charming.

00:08:38   My phone hasn't run aloud in, like, 10 plus years.

00:08:41   But that's neither here nor there.

00:08:42   And then I have a special vibration for her, which we had talked about, and I had emergency

00:08:46   bypass on, which a lot of people have thought about.

00:08:49   Well done.

00:08:49   It's early, too.

00:08:50   Anyways, below the ringtone section, though, there is a text tone section.

00:08:56   Would you like to guess what text tone I had set for Aaron some way, somehow?

00:09:00   I bet I did it.

00:09:01   I don't know why I would have or when I did it, but would you like to guess what the option

00:09:05   was that I selected?

00:09:06   Silent.

00:09:07   None.

00:09:08   Exactly.

00:09:08   So, apparently, I had explicitly told the system, do not vibrate when Aaron texts me.

00:09:16   I don't know what on God's green earth would have possessed me to set that, but I did.

00:09:21   Maybe you, did you ever not have the silent switch on your phone?

00:09:24   Like, was there a time where you didn't just get the thing out of the box, turn that switch

00:09:28   on and never touch it?

00:09:29   Yeah, I mean, pretty much, if you mean the physical switch, I always immediately set it

00:09:33   to silent mode and never look back.

00:09:36   Because I can imagine, like, if there was even just a moment when you didn't have that

00:09:40   set and you're constantly getting texted from your wife and your phone's making noise,

00:09:43   you're like, oh, how do I fix this?

00:09:44   And you go into the contact and turn it silent.

00:09:45   And now it solves the problem because she's the one who's texting you the most.

00:09:48   And then you just forgot about it for years later.

00:09:49   I mean, that would be a very Casey thing to do, without question.

00:09:54   But it's like, it's weird.

00:09:55   Like, does it never?

00:09:56   Because I thought your thing was like, it seems like you don't get notifications, but it's

00:09:59   not 100% of the time.

00:10:01   Right.

00:10:01   So, what it was, the behavior in summary was that, and it was a private conversation just

00:10:06   Aaron and me.

00:10:07   I wouldn't get a tap tap.

00:10:09   I wouldn't get any vibration notification.

00:10:11   I would still get, like, pop-ups on my Mac and it would still show up on the lock

00:10:14   screen and so on and so forth.

00:10:15   Uh, but when we were in group text, you know, so, you know, a handful of people together,

00:10:19   then, um, her stuff would poke through based on my focus mode settings, which is what I

00:10:26   wanted.

00:10:26   It just wasn't in our private conversations.

00:10:28   So, in summary, Marco, this may or may not help you, uh, but if you go into TIFF's contact

00:10:33   and go down and look at the special settings for both, uh, vibration for, for ringtone and

00:10:39   text tone, perhaps you screwed yours up too.

00:10:41   Now, I did immediately test it and it did seem to tap my wrist when she sent that text.

00:10:47   Then, in just going about my day yesterday, which is when I fixed it, or thought I had

00:10:52   anyway, going about my day, it seemed like I was missing them again, but I was oftentimes

00:10:57   in the midst of using a different device.

00:10:59   And I know that Apple tries to be intelligent about, oh, he's sitting at his Mac.

00:11:03   You don't need to tap his phone, his watch, his iPad, et cetera.

00:11:06   You can just show the notification on his Mac.

00:11:08   So, I still assume it's fixed, but I'm not entirely sure.

00:11:13   It at least worked briefly.

00:11:15   I can tell you that much.

00:11:16   Um, but I'm not sure if I can declare absolute victory yet.

00:11:20   So, it's not, that's not, whatever your, your theory was about the text tone being set to

00:11:25   none, that, that could have been a problem, but it is not my problem.

00:11:28   All right.

00:11:29   Because I, for a while, in order to try to alleviate this problem, a couple of years ago,

00:11:35   I set tip to have a custom text tone called vibration rapid, and it is aggressive.

00:11:42   It's, it's basically like, you know, five short, strong vibrations.

00:11:48   And, like, you can't, it sounds like there's, you know, like a nuclear alert going off on

00:11:52   your phone.

00:11:53   Like, it's, if it's, like, sitting on a desk or something, it sounds ridiculous.

00:11:55   Um, but that, that's the one that's like, you can't possibly miss that.

00:12:00   Unfortunately, that, it seems like, again, when you are wearing an Apple Watch, it seems

00:12:06   like that over, like, the Apple Watch, its presence on your wrist tells the phone, don't

00:12:12   bother vibrating the user.

00:12:14   I got this.

00:12:14   And the Apple Watch is then responsible for tapping.

00:12:17   Now, there are other vibration settings on the watch.

00:12:20   Like, there's, um, there's a setting that's been around forever called Prominent Haptic,

00:12:23   I believe.

00:12:24   Yes.

00:12:24   Where it will, before it does, like, the, the, whatever, whatever haptic it was going

00:12:31   to do, if it's going to do, like, the tap-tap, it'll first do a big, like a, like a one-second

00:12:35   long buzz, then tap-tap.

00:12:38   And I, I used to do that.

00:12:40   I don't, I don't have it set currently, but I used to do that because, like, I always liked

00:12:43   wearing the stainless steel watches and the vibration motor just wasn't that strong to

00:12:48   have it be a very strong feeling through the heavier stainless steel case.

00:12:52   And so, that was kind of required to feel almost anything reliably on the Apple Watch.

00:12:57   Also, those early, those early taptic engines were also just, I think, less reliable and

00:13:01   they would, they would fail and, like, get weaker and die over time.

00:13:04   Anyway, so that's not, the problem I have with TIFF is not that setting because I have it set

00:13:09   to Textone Vibration Rapid.

00:13:11   Although, maybe, maybe the Apple Watch doesn't, because the Apple Watch doesn't do that same

00:13:17   pattern.

00:13:17   That's correct.

00:13:18   I wonder if maybe it, like, doesn't, it doesn't even have that entry.

00:13:22   So, maybe that's it.

00:13:23   I can tell you, the way I have temporarily, at least, worked around this problem is what I

00:13:27   speculated about last time during the show, I just did it, which is on macOS, you can,

00:13:34   this is probably true on iOS too, but I changed the notifications for messages on macOS to

00:13:39   be persistent in the corner rather than momentary.

00:13:42   So, that way, like, if, if there's a message that comes in on the Mac, you know, if, if the

00:13:48   little notification bubble in the upper right corner, you know, normally it would show up

00:13:52   for whatever it is, five seconds and then disappear, and with it, with the persistent

00:13:56   setting, it stays there until you dismiss it.

00:13:58   This is how I have calendar notifications, reminder notifications, like, I, this is how I

00:14:03   configure the most important things.

00:14:05   And so, now Messages works that way too.

00:14:07   And that is at least helping work around the problem.

00:14:10   Well, please reach out to Marco and me if you do have any other suggestions.

00:14:15   We got some feedback from Bart Reardon, who created a Mac arsed Mac app skill.

00:14:22   Arse is such a funny word.

00:14:24   I know it's common in the Queen's English, but it's just so funny to me.

00:14:27   Anyway, Bart writes, the HP dev Mac asked Mac apps member special is now available as a

00:14:31   skill so your LLM vibe-coded apps can also be Mac arsed.

00:14:35   Putting my money where my mouth is, says Bart, is my own app Mac asked or arsed?

00:14:41   Survey says, mostly.

00:14:43   And the agent apparently came back with a score of 23 out of 36 where, and there's a whole breakdown

00:14:51   that we can link to in the show notes of the results it found.

00:14:54   But I thought that this was very funny that Bart turned it on himself and came up with,

00:14:59   yeah, it's all right.

00:14:59   Yeah, some of the findings were reasonable.

00:15:01   I looked at the skill a little bit.

00:15:03   I'm assuming they just asked it to summarize the member special, transcribe the member special,

00:15:07   summarize it, turn it into a skill, blah, blah, blah.

00:15:08   So I'm sure stuff is lost in translation.

00:15:10   And as I said, when we talked about this member special last week, it's not like we covered

00:15:14   the entire topic.

00:15:15   We just did the best we could.

00:15:16   But anyway, some of the things that it called out is that you can't copy and paste to contain

00:15:20   your ID, IP, or image reference.

00:15:22   That's the idea of like, if there's something in your app that can be selected and you hit copy

00:15:25   and there's anything remotely sensible that you can do with it, you should support it.

00:15:28   And then it found some drag and drop stuff and some other random things.

00:15:32   So interesting.

00:15:33   If you want to try it out, we'll put a link in the notes.

00:15:37   Again, skills are just directories full of text files in a particular format.

00:15:41   So they're very portable.

00:15:42   And you can just look at them with your own eyeballs and read them yourself, even if

00:15:45   you're not using an LLM.

00:15:46   All right.

00:15:47   With regard to Ramageddon, Jonathan writes, listening to ATP the last couple of months helped me decide

00:15:52   to upgrade my MacBook Pro before RAM and disk prices went up.

00:15:55   That effectively saved me $1,500.

00:15:57   So I'm going to be making a donation to St. Jude in September.

00:16:00   This is the way.

00:16:01   This is the way, my friends.

00:16:03   Yeah, this is a new innovation.

00:16:04   Instead of like the Marco offset, it's like, hey, did you save some money by buying Macs at

00:16:09   the right time?

00:16:10   Take that difference and you don't have to wait to September.

00:16:13   I mean, it's fine if you want to wait to September because that's when we do the, you know, campaign

00:16:16   for whatever.

00:16:16   You can donate any time during the year.

00:16:18   So just FYI.

00:16:19   But great job, Jonathan.

00:16:20   Yeah.

00:16:21   So whenever, Jonathan, you make that donation for you, since you were the first to come up

00:16:25   with this new thought technology, please send me an email, figure out a way to send me

00:16:28   an email, reach out and I'll send you a couple of stickers just for Jonathan because they

00:16:31   were the inventor of this new thought technology.

00:16:33   Shutter Aperture writes, with the skyrocketing cost of memory, do you think Apple will revisit

00:16:39   their unified memory strategy and offer a model with less built-in memory, but with

00:16:43   the ability to add more RAM later?

00:16:45   No.

00:16:45   I don't think, yeah, I don't see this as a thing because their whole shtick, when a lot

00:16:50   of the innovation of Apple Silicon is the unified memory.

00:16:53   I get where Shutter Aperture is coming from, but I don't see this as a thing.

00:16:56   I mean, as we said on the earlier program, we talked about this, it would still be unified

00:16:59   if it was expandable.

00:17:00   The unified adjective in the description is saying that there is not a separate pool of

00:17:06   VRAM and regular RAM.

00:17:07   It is one unified pool of memory that is used by both the GPU and the CPU.

00:17:11   So that is what makes it unified.

00:17:13   You could have unified memory and have it be expandable, but Apple won't do that just because

00:17:17   the other things that you get from their current memory thing is you get very short physical

00:17:22   distance between the CPU, GPU, and the RAM, like it's right on the same package with it

00:17:27   or very close to it on some of the other models.

00:17:29   And you can do that with expandable RAM too, but it's closer still if you can get, you know,

00:17:33   right next to it.

00:17:35   It's soldered on, so in theory, it's more reliable and potentially you can get higher

00:17:40   speeds for less money because the interfaces for doing high speed that are expandable, you

00:17:45   know, but anyway, the main problem is, of course, Apple doesn't have a lot, physically doesn't

00:17:50   have a lot of room in any of its computers currently for expandable memory.

00:17:54   Obviously in the laptops, everything's tight and you're like, well, you know, it can be done.

00:17:57   Look at the framework laptop.

00:17:57   They do it.

00:17:58   It's like, yeah, but look how much room they dedicate to their expandable memory and then

00:18:01   try to find that room in Apple's laptops.

00:18:02   It's rough.

00:18:04   And even in things like the Mac Studio, there's, you know, they have the removable

00:18:08   modules and stuff.

00:18:08   You could probably fit it in there.

00:18:10   But anyway, I feel like Apple has just moved on from that.

00:18:13   And the idea that that would help with the RAM crisis, like, oh, buy less, buy less RAM now

00:18:19   and then add more later.

00:18:19   I guess so.

00:18:21   But like by the time RAM prices go down to the point where you would actually save money

00:18:26   or, you know, it's like an installment plan.

00:18:28   Like you can just buy your thing on one of those buy now, pay later, or like take out a

00:18:32   loan or something and have all your RAM from day one versus paying for half the RAM and

00:18:36   then a year later paying for more.

00:18:38   Now, I'm not against expandable memory.

00:18:39   I think it's great.

00:18:40   But I think Apple has shown that they are not willing to do that.

00:18:44   And I don't think they would say, well, this will really help our customers because then

00:18:47   they could buy cheaper computers from us and then expand them with possibly third party

00:18:51   RAM later.

00:18:52   Like as you're saying that sentence, you think, is this a thing that seems attractive

00:18:54   to Apple?

00:18:55   I don't think it does seem attractive to them.

00:18:57   I agree that it is attractive to tech nerds and the general public.

00:19:01   But so long ago now, I can barely remember when we all used to recommend buying Macs with

00:19:06   the minimum memory and then expanding them.

00:19:08   Those were the days.

00:19:09   And even then, a lot of the appeal of socketed RAM, modular hard drives, a lot of the appeal

00:19:19   for Apple's Macs supporting those was not necessarily about, well, I want to extend the life of this

00:19:26   down the road.

00:19:26   It was, I don't want to pay Apple's prices up front.

00:19:30   I want to immediately go get like, you know, crucial RAM or, you know, some third party

00:19:34   SSD or hard drive and pop it in like on day one.

00:19:37   You know, I tried that once.

00:19:38   Yeah, I had that go for it.

00:19:40   I mean, all my old Macs, before they really locked it down, pretty much all my old Macs

00:19:44   had third party RAM in it and it was fine for the reason Marco said, because Apple will always

00:19:48   charge insane prices for RAM and so I would just get third party RAM.

00:19:51   Yeah, like my first couple Apple laptops, I had my own hard drives in them too because they

00:19:56   were, it was cheaper to get, you know, your own little, you know, 2.5 inch hard drive

00:20:00   and put it in there than it was to pay Apple's prices for that too.

00:20:03   But so that's, Apple's never going to care that much about that market.

00:20:06   And to be clear, I do think it's a shame that you can't upgrade things down the road.

00:20:10   Like that, that does hurt customers in a bunch of ways, but it hurts customers in ways that

00:20:15   as John was just saying, like it doesn't really hurt Apple, so they're not going to care.

00:20:19   But also just kind of broadly, Apple is a very patient company.

00:20:24   They're not going to change their plans based on what they perceive as short-term pain.

00:20:30   You know, we don't really know yet.

00:20:32   It's too early to say, how long is this, you know, skyrocketing cost of memory and storage?

00:20:37   How long is this going to last?

00:20:38   Is it going to be one year?

00:20:40   Is it going to be three years?

00:20:41   Is it going to be 10 years?

00:20:42   We don't really know.

00:20:44   Apple probably has better insight into it than we do because they're connected to the supply

00:20:48   chain a lot more.

00:20:49   But if it's only going to be like a few years where this is going to be really skyrocketing

00:20:55   and then supply will catch up to demand, Apple is going to be patient enough to wait that

00:20:59   out.

00:20:59   They're not going to change their entire architecture plans based on pain for a few years.

00:21:06   They take a longer time horizon than that.

00:21:09   Jay Peters at The Verge writes, in an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve

00:21:14   engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026.

00:21:18   We'll put a link to the video in this article in the show notes.

00:21:20   Gamers Nexus asks, were you able to lock in contracts from memory with the suppliers directly

00:21:25   or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops?

00:21:27   Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffice responded, look, there's no contracts.

00:21:33   There's nothing.

00:21:34   Those guys, they give us a price every month or something and they say, you can't buy that

00:21:38   many and it's yes or no.

00:21:40   Or excuse me, you can buy that many and it's yes or no.

00:21:43   And if we say no, they never talk to us again.

00:21:44   Cool.

00:21:46   Super cool.

00:21:47   Because they have all the power.

00:21:48   Like right now, if you are the manufacturer of a resource that is scarce and very high demand

00:21:54   and it's very difficult for new competitors to come online, yeah, you can dictate terms.

00:22:01   Again, like we were talking last episode, how Apple used to be able to dictate terms to

00:22:05   suppliers because they were like such a powerful buyer with so much volume and they could basically

00:22:10   do, they could get the suppliers to do whatever they wanted.

00:22:12   Now it's a reverse situation.

00:22:15   Now the suppliers are, you know, what's in short supply.

00:22:18   They have all the power and they can dictate whatever they want to their customers and their

00:22:23   customers have to either accept their terms or not have memory.

00:22:28   Yeah, it's really not.

00:22:30   It's not great, Bob.

00:22:31   All right.

00:22:32   And then with regard to the three big companies that make RAM, Luke James at Tom's Hardware

00:22:38   writes, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron were sued on June 25th in the U.S. District Court for

00:22:43   the Northern District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accused the three memory makers of

00:22:48   illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have

00:22:54   risen roughly 700% over four years.

00:22:58   The complaint argues that the three companies used a coordinated shift toward high bandwidth

00:23:03   memory or HBM, the stacked DRAM that feeds AI accelerators as a cover to curtail production

00:23:09   of older DDR3 and DDR4 modules.

00:23:11   That contraction in commodity DRAM, the plaintiffs argue, pushed prices to record highs while no

00:23:16   rival could step in.

00:23:17   Building a new DRAM fab costs tens of billions and takes years, leaving the incumbents free to

00:23:23   cut output without fear of being undercut.

00:23:25   Samsung and SK Hynix have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing once before, with

00:23:30   the latter paying $185 million fine in April of 2005, so 21 years ago now.

00:23:38   Crime pays, because I can imagine paying that $185 million fine was dwarfed by the profits

00:23:44   they reaped from this.

00:23:45   So I don't know the merits of this case.

00:23:47   Obviously, we do know that, like, there is a non-nefarious explanation if there's suddenly

00:23:52   a new customer with, like, essentially unlimited money buying up all the supply that, of course,

00:23:56   would cause prices to go up.

00:23:57   But the fact that two of these companies have pled guilty to price fixing before makes you

00:24:03   think maybe not entirely without merit.

00:24:06   So we'll see how this case goes.

00:24:07   Either way, I don't feel like the case will make RAM prices go down.

00:24:11   And even if they lose, apparently they'll pay a fine that is just, you know, a piddling fee

00:24:16   compared to the profits they reap.

00:24:17   But it's worth keeping an eye on this.

00:24:19   Yeah.

00:24:19   I mean, the reality is, like, what has probably happened here is probably not like, you know,

00:24:26   people getting together in a smoke-filled room and saying, let's cut everything.

00:24:30   You know, it's probably not that.

00:24:31   It's probably you have a very small number of companies that all were faced with exactly

00:24:36   the same incentive, which is, hey, all this HBM that is being demanded by, like, the AI

00:24:42   players that, like, this is, we can make a bunch of money on HBM.

00:24:45   So let's make as much of that as we can to sell these people.

00:24:49   And, oh, those old fabs over there doing the, you know, the cheap commodity RAM, maybe

00:24:54   we can decommission those so that way we can have more resources towards HBM.

00:24:57   Like, that's probably what happened here.

00:24:59   It probably was not collusion to, you know, to do this ridiculous, nefarious thing.

00:25:03   Like, no, they were just moving their capacity to what was making them the most money.

00:25:07   Of course they were.

00:25:08   Anybody would.

00:25:08   That's what they'll argue in court, I'm sure.

00:25:10   But the fact that they pled guilty before means probably someone had a recording of the

00:25:14   smoke-filled room where they said, let's fill pre-fix prices together because you don't

00:25:17   like you settle maybe or you plead out or something like pleading guilty is like, you got

00:25:22   us dead to right.

00:25:23   So we'll see how this goes.

00:25:25   Hopefully they didn't record the meeting.

00:25:28   Stringer Bell style where they colluded.

00:25:30   Also, that was 22 years ago.

00:25:33   You know, there's probably like how many of the people who were in that smoke-filled room

00:25:37   back then are even still in their positions or even still alive.

00:25:40   You don't even know.

00:25:41   It's probably a different group of leaders right now.

00:25:44   All right.

00:25:45   John, can you set the context for this next line item, please?

00:25:48   This is Marco musing last episode.

00:25:50   We were talking about, hey, the feedback that someone sent and say, you can get a Mac mini

00:25:54   with eight terabytes of SSD.

00:25:56   And I was thinking about a Mac mini.

00:25:58   It's like, can I get some kind of like cheap, small Mac to tide me over until I can buy the

00:26:01   Mac that I really want?

00:26:02   And I was like, well, I can't do that because I need an eight terabyte SSD and the Mac mini

00:26:05   doesn't come with them.

00:26:06   But apparently it does.

00:26:07   And so I priced it out and it was like 5,400 bucks.

00:26:09   And Marco was musing, like, if they made the entire Mac mini out of gold, would it be the

00:26:15   same price?

00:26:16   Yeah.

00:26:16   I say, like, would the stock, like, you know, 256, 16 gig model be cheaper with a gold case

00:26:22   than John's?

00:26:23   Or with an eight terabyte SSD.

00:26:24   Yeah.

00:26:25   So AWACS wrote in to say, with an open bottom and an estimated thickness of one and a half

00:26:31   millimeters, a solid gold case for the Mac mini would be 1.17 kilograms.

00:26:37   That's one full kilogram more than the aluminum case, which would be only 164 grams.

00:26:43   Yep.

00:26:43   Gold is heavy.

00:26:44   This would cost $115,000 at current market prices in raw material alone.

00:26:49   Also, gold is less rigid than aluminum.

00:26:52   So this would be a rather bendy case.

00:26:54   Yeah.

00:26:54   Let's say there are multiple reasons why you don't tend to make gold-cased electronics.

00:27:00   Yeah.

00:27:00   Except that one time.

00:27:01   Right.

00:27:02   Yeah.

00:27:03   Gold is quite heavy.

00:27:04   And yes, it is not a structurally strong material either.

00:27:10   But yes, the cost of $115,000, yeah, gold is a little expensive right now.

00:27:14   I don't know if you've been following that market since the current president's term.

00:27:19   But yeah, gold is always expensive, and it's even more expensive now.

00:27:24   So maybe a couple years ago, that would have been merely $50,000.

00:27:30   It's bananas.

00:27:31   But still, a little more money than the 8 terabyte SSD.

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00:29:11   John, your long national nightmare is over.

00:29:18   Fable is back, baby.

00:29:20   Hayden Field at The Verge writes,

00:29:21   After weeks of negotiating with the Trump administration,

00:29:23   Anthropic is finally going to be able to bring Claude Fable 5 back online.

00:29:28   And this was future tense when it was written.

00:29:30   It is now a thing.

00:29:31   Anthropic wrote,

00:29:33   We have received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls in Claude Fable 5

00:29:38   and Mythos 5 will be restoring access on July 1, which, as we record this, was yesterday.

00:29:43   Anthropic also said it would re-enable access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry soon, but with no set timeline.

00:29:50   Ashley Bellinger at Ars Technica writes,

00:29:53   After weeks of testing, Fable 5 is no longer vulnerable to a bypassing method discovered by Amazon researchers

00:29:58   that identified several software vulnerabilities and triggered the export curbs.

00:30:02   That bypass method is currently blocked in over 99% of the cases, Anthropic said.

00:30:07   However, tightening safeguards came with a trade-off that may cause some benign prompts to be blocked,

00:30:12   quote,

00:30:12   During routine coding and debugging tasks, quote.

00:30:14   The company acknowledged.

00:30:16   The company also said,

00:30:17   Working closely with the government, we trained an improved safety classifier that targets and blocks the behavior described in the report.

00:30:23   Users will be notified if a request to Fable 5 is blocked, and the request will instead be sent to Opus 4.8.

00:30:29   Yeah, this highlights something that someone sent us feedback when I was saying, you know,

00:30:34   the guardrails is, you know, essentially writing sentences to an LLM asking if not to do stuff.

00:30:39   And they're saying, well, no, they use whole separate models, like this classifier model that's trying to determine,

00:30:43   like the other, some other model will look at the input or output and determine if it's dangerous or whatever.

00:30:48   But of course, those other separate models are also trained by feeding them words.

00:30:52   And so it's all, it's, you know, it's turtles all the way down.

00:30:56   Yeah, that's a change they made.

00:30:58   Fable used to just like silently fall back to be, to using a weaker model.

00:31:02   But now it will tell you, hey, the thing you sent me looks like it might be bad.

00:31:06   So we're using our, our weaker model Opus 4.8 instead.

00:31:09   And so at least you'll know when that's happening to you.

00:31:12   But yeah, whatever, whatever happened behind the scenes allowed this to go forward.

00:31:16   Although I will say like, I got an email about this too.

00:31:19   And like what they're doing with Fable, if you have like a monthly subscription to Anthropic or whatever,

00:31:26   again, current and former sponsor of the show.

00:31:29   They say, oh, Fable's included in your subscription until July 7th.

00:31:33   And then after that, I guess it's like pay per token for Fable.

00:31:37   Like it's not part of your subscription.

00:31:38   So I don't know what they'll do with this model after the July 7th thing.

00:31:41   When I was using it, I was, it was like, because you have the $20 a month plan, you get to use Fable.

00:31:46   And, you know, it burns through your tokens real fast, but at least you have access to it.

00:31:49   So I wonder if after July 7th, I just won't even have access to it at all.

00:31:52   So I don't have anything to do with Fable, but I'm glad that it's back.

00:31:55   Oh, and I cut out all the parts of the story where Anthrop is like, you know, while we were banned,

00:31:59   the other models could do all the same things that had all the same problems.

00:32:02   But whatever, we're not complaining.

00:32:03   We're back now.

00:32:04   Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, on the, you know, plans and pricing, expect this to change every two weeks.

00:32:11   Like it's, that's what's going to happen, if not faster.

00:32:13   I mean, I was saying, I believe two episodes ago, I said like, oh, don't worry, I'm sure Fable will be back within the next three months.

00:32:20   It took a week, like, or whatever it was, like it took almost no time.

00:32:24   You know, this stuff is going to be changing and shifting constantly, as with all Frontier AI development.

00:32:31   So, yeah, maybe, maybe by July 7th, which as we record is five days away, you know, maybe they'll, they'll bring it behind, you know, a higher paywall or, you know, make it paper token only or whatever.

00:32:42   But then literally five days later, it might be different.

00:32:46   Like they might, they might change the plan again.

00:32:48   Certainly in the long run, this will just be one of the models in the picker for, you know, for the next couple of years.

00:32:55   And, you know, I'm sure in the long run, every plan will have access to it.

00:32:57   They just need more capacity or whatever, or more guardrails.

00:33:01   And on the guardrail front, I do think it's kind of, kind of a farce that like, okay, well, this model, this is too good at doing dangerous things.

00:33:12   So if you ask to do something dangerous, we're going to direct you to a dumber model.

00:33:16   So it's like, imagine like, you know, you're, you go to like, you know, some expert, like an expert bomb maker.

00:33:23   And it's like, help me make a bomb.

00:33:24   And the guy's like, listen, I can't help you make a bomb.

00:33:27   I am too good at making bombs.

00:33:29   Go to Bob down the hall.

00:33:30   He kind of sucks at it.

00:33:31   You have him do it for you.

00:33:32   Like, it's a ridiculous concept that this is, what kind of safety are we giving here?

00:33:39   And how, how safe is that really?

00:33:42   It's not, I think they are, they are doing what the government asked them to do, because that was the only way to get this back.

00:33:49   Not because it is the right solution to this problem.

00:33:52   I mean, they already had these guardrails in it.

00:33:54   It's just that the bypass was like, oh, we found a way around your guardrail.

00:33:57   So make your guardrails better.

00:33:58   Like, it's the whole point of Fable.

00:33:59   It is the guardrailed version of Mythos.

00:34:01   So they were already doing this.

00:34:02   And like I said, they were doing it silently.

00:34:03   They would just drop you down silently.

00:34:04   But at least they'll tell you now.

00:34:06   Obviously, the main problem with these coding agents and these quote unquote dangerous things is it's a very symmetrical double-edged sword.

00:34:14   Because if you're writing a program, you want these things to find security problems in your own program so you can fix them.

00:34:22   And that is indistinguishable from find a security problem in this program that I didn't write so I can break into it.

00:34:27   It's literally the same exact thing.

00:34:30   And so it's like, look, do you want us to make our software better or do you want us to be ignorant of the flaws?

00:34:35   Like, these models won't find an exploit in someone else's system, but they also won't find the flaws in your own code.

00:34:40   So we're just trying to mightily to maintain the status quo, which is just never going to work.

00:34:45   So this is all very silly and we'll see how it develops.

00:34:48   Like, I understand why people are trying to do it.

00:34:49   I'm not advocating for like, let's just do a free-for-all.

00:34:51   Well, and allow the, you know, people, script kiddies to find flaws in anything by typing a two-sentence prompt.

00:34:56   Like, I understand the potential danger, but like, it's, I don't see how this is tenable long-term.

00:35:01   Like, we want to use these things to find security problems in our own programs.

00:35:05   It's the only way they're ever going to get fixed.

00:35:06   Well, and also, like, this is such a short-term, you know, delay here because suppose Anthropic had really great model research and training to develop this one really special, I guess maybe these two really special models that are really good at finding software vulnerabilities.

00:35:24   And suppose that no one else in frontier AI development was doing this at all or as well as they were.

00:35:31   Those are pretty big assumptions.

00:35:32   But suppose that is the case.

00:35:34   That is maybe some of their narrative.

00:35:36   That only they have developed this amazing technology that gets really good at finding security vulnerabilities.

00:35:41   That's not their narrative.

00:35:42   They constantly keep saying the GPT 5.5 and 5.6 can do exactly the same thing.

00:35:46   That's not fair that they're banned and the other one isn't.

00:35:48   Right, exactly.

00:35:48   But like, so, so, obviously the reality is other models either already are this good or are about to be this good.

00:35:56   And some of those models are going to be run by, say, Elon Musk or China.

00:36:02   And they're not going to give a crap about what the government export regulations or whatever are.

00:36:07   And they're not going to put any guardrails on it.

00:36:10   So the idea that we are somehow avoiding this, like, security apocalypse of bugs being found and exploited, you know, in mass by controlling this one or maybe these two models, it's a fantasy.

00:36:22   In a very short time, everyone who wants this kind of power is going to have it if they don't already.

00:36:30   So in a very short amount of time, all of the fears of all the bugs being exploited in mass, that's going to happen.

00:36:38   After this one particular dustup settles one way or the other, we're all going to have to face this probably this year or next year at the latest.

00:36:48   This we are going to see a wave of exploits and we are going to have to be very aggressive at patching them and updating things.

00:36:57   This is what I was saying a few months back of, like, this is a really bad time to be holding on to an old OS.

00:37:02   You know, if if you if you're like, you know, if you have like an old device that you are trying to extend the life of that can't get the newest OS's or if you are like, you know, you never wanted to use Tahoe.

00:37:13   So you're sticking with the old, you know, like this is a very bad time generally for security to be refusing to run software updates basically as quickly as they come out.

00:37:23   And that's going to just be the case for a few years and no amount of guardrails and no amount of government intervention is going to prevent that because the reality is the government and the guardrails don't control every company.

00:37:37   They don't control every model and they don't control every user.

00:37:39   Yeah. And just to be clear, like the whole point of the mythos thing is that they want to give that access to mythos to, you know, designated security people so that they can fix like the flaws and the important things.

00:37:49   So like here's the unconstrained one to the people we trust.

00:37:51   Please use our unconstrained model to fix all the bugs before we release the constrained one to the world.

00:37:57   Like that was the strategy.

00:37:58   But as Marco points out, like that's that makes some kind of sense as a way to move forward.

00:38:02   Like we don't want to stop the good guys from fixing the problems, but we don't want the bad guys to have the tools.

00:38:09   But like it's a fantasy world that they're the only player that does this.

00:38:13   So, you know, they're doing what they can.

00:38:15   Like I give them some credit for trying, but the the system around this is like chaotic and haphazard and very silly and probably not motivated by anything except for just power and bribery and personal grudges.

00:38:29   All right, moving on.

00:38:30   Let's talk Siri AI where Marcus Mendez at 9to5Mac writes, the change in iOS 27 beta 2 makes it more clear how Siri AI should handle requests involving accessing content behind a URL.

00:38:40   A new section in Siri AI system prompt now says, quote, you cannot access.

00:38:45   Let me this.

00:38:46   Let me back up as half step.

00:38:47   So what this means is there's this big, long prompt that you don't get to see and you don't get to modify that the system provides to the AI thing model.

00:38:57   There's what I was looking for to kind of give it the lay of the land of what it's supposed to do.

00:39:01   Right.

00:39:01   And this I've seen this and it's like probably five or 10 pages of typewritten text long, if you will.

00:39:08   Well, anyways, this is a new clause in that instruction that you don't get to modify as a user.

00:39:13   So it says, you cannot access content behind a URL.

00:39:16   When a user provides a URL and asks you to summarize, read, or extract information from it, inform them you cannot access web pages.

00:39:22   Do not offer follow-up suggestions or workarounds.

00:39:24   This feels like it's a Dan Morin clause.

00:39:26   Remember, he was looking for like a Wikipedia page with himself on it and found a page and says there's no Wikipedia page for you.

00:39:32   He said that totally is it this URL.

00:39:34   And Siri AI was like, I can't access that URL.

00:39:37   Can you read it to me?

00:39:38   Tell me what it says.

00:39:40   And so now this is like, do not offer follow-up suggestions or do not ask the, you know, you can say, I guess it can say like, hey, I'm not allowed to access URLs, but you can't say, why don't you read it to me?

00:39:49   Because that is bad.

00:39:52   But I mean, this really shows what Apple is trying to do with Siri AI.

00:39:56   An LLM that can't access URLs is significantly constrained in both good and bad ways.

00:40:02   Presumably, this prevents all sorts of exploits and attacks or whatever, but also makes it vastly less powerful than the other, you know, normal, unconstrained LLMs that will gladly fetch the contents of a URL.

00:40:13   I get most of my, in my coding things, all the time I'm telling it, here's the documentation on the web.

00:40:18   Look at this documentation.

00:40:20   Don't trust your guesses about what things do, so on and so forth.

00:40:22   And Siri AI is like, I won't, I won't even look at the URL.

00:40:27   I have my world knowledge thing, which hopefully is somewhat up to date and I've got all my other stuff, but I will not go to an arbitrary URL, read it and do anything with it.

00:40:35   So yeah, that's rough.

00:40:37   Then, additionally, the workaround that people were using to get through the Siri AI waitlist, apparently that's not going to work anymore, isn't working anymore.

00:40:45   Tim Hardwick in MacRumors writes, Apple appears to have closed the loophole that let Mac users skip the Siri AI waitlist in the latest Mac OS 27 Golden Gate beta.

00:40:53   Many users who are running the second developer beta of Mac OS 27 are finding that the line skipping command does not work for them.

00:40:58   Users who enabled Siri AI this way in the original beta are also reporting that they've been kicked back to the waitlist after updating.

00:41:04   Some users are suggesting alternative methods involving submitting Apple intelligence feedback to accelerate approval, but the claims remain anecdotal.

00:41:12   For what it's worth, I signed up on my iPad and it only took, I don't know, like two or three days to get through the waitlist.

00:41:19   Like, this wasn't particularly egregious and I don't think that's, you know, because anyone at Apple is paying attention to who I am or what I'm doing or anything like that.

00:41:26   Like, I think I'm just another number in the bucket to them and it only took me like 48 to 72 hours or something like that, so it's not that bad.

00:41:34   Yeah, I also got in within, I think about five or six days of joining the waitlist and it's, it doesn't, it wasn't that bad.

00:41:40   Finally, uh, Guy Rambeau, friend of the show, writes, uh, John was wondering if there's any way to tell which model Siri was using for each answer that he was asking to determine why one answer was less accurate or detailed than another.

00:41:52   I'm pretty sure that if you export the Apple intelligence report that's available in system settings, it will include the model that served each request as part of the metadata.

00:41:59   So that's cool.

00:42:01   Yeah.

00:42:01   Didn't know that.

00:42:01   By the way, I had my first, um, Hey Siri is good now moment.

00:42:05   Uh, the other day I was, I was like, you know, in the middle, hold on, Siri just woke up on my phone.

00:42:09   Wow.

00:42:10   Good timing.

00:42:10   Should have notched out those frequencies in your voice.

00:42:14   Yeah.

00:42:14   Right.

00:42:14   I was looking for, um, information in an email that I, you know, I didn't know what the heck it was.

00:42:19   And I, I, I forget, I forget the exact prompt I used, but it was something like, Hey, what was that?

00:42:23   You know, what, what was the thing I was looking for?

00:42:24   And, you know, one of those forms and it, you know, took about four or five seconds and then found it.

00:42:30   I was like, okay, great.

00:42:32   That, that's awesome.

00:42:34   Okay.

00:42:34   Maybe, maybe we're on the right track now.

00:42:37   So that's, it's promising.

00:42:38   I actually had a similar experience.

00:42:40   Um, friend of the show, uh, Lex Friedman has turned himself, I think at one point in his life, he was a software developer and then didn't, wasn't, and now is becoming a software developer.

00:42:49   Again, and, uh, he's made an app called gnome, which I, uh, enjoy, which is a very similar to friend of the show, jelly's a gift wrapped app.

00:42:58   Um, it lets you, you know, curate a list of, um, gifts and, and, you know, copy and paste them in places very easily.

00:43:04   And Lex was kind enough to send me a code for it.

00:43:07   So I, you know, didn't have to pay him the five or eight bucks, whatever it was, which is not egregious by any means, but he was not nice enough to offer before I even asked.

00:43:14   And so I took him up on it.

00:43:15   Uh, well, anyways, uh, this happened, I don't know, a while ago that he had sent this code.

00:43:19   And I was trying to look for it and I thought, Oh, wait a second.

00:43:22   I wonder if I could ask Siri.

00:43:25   And sure enough, I said, you know, Lex Friedman with an E, uh, gave me a code for a, for an app, you know, a month or two back.

00:43:32   Can you find that code?

00:43:33   And I'll be darned, but it came up with exactly the message I was looking for.

00:43:39   And I was doing this in like the, the, you know, clickety clacky typey interface to Siri.

00:43:43   And it had a little link I could click to go in messages to that message, which not only did that work, but it worked quickly because I know going back in time and messages is often fraught with peril, but it actually worked lickety split.

00:43:55   And I was very, very impressed.

00:43:57   So I had a very similar moment.

00:43:58   That's awesome.

00:43:58   I was really into it.

00:44:00   All right.

00:44:01   Uh, we're going to do something a little different today.

00:44:03   Uh, we were offered, uh, by our friends at Parakeet, uh, and we'll talk about who they are in just a moment.

00:44:10   We were offered to do a little trade sort of scenario where, uh, our friends at Parakeet would make some app icons for us in trade for talking about and critiquing those icons on the show.

00:44:22   And so let me tell you about Parakeet and then we're going to go through each of the three of us have had one or more icons, uh, rejiggered, re reimagined, redone by Parakeet and we're going to discuss them.

00:44:33   So let me tell you the stuff that, uh, I really need to tell you up front.

00:44:36   Uh, first of all, if you are interested in doing icons or that sort of thing, you should absolutely check out our friends at Parakeet.

00:44:43   Uh, the reason we took this as a kind of spawn con sort of thing is because they, they are friends of ours and we know these folks like Marco, you have had them do icons for you in the past, right?

00:44:52   Yeah.

00:44:52   In fact, Parakeet is a partnership between Louie Mantia and Luca Grafera and Louie Mantia was actually one of the original duo who made the original overcast icon.

00:45:02   And I've worked with Louie before, uh, you know, through all of that.

00:45:06   And, and in fact, the other part of the duo was Brad Ellis, who I believe made the switch class icon.

00:45:11   Right, right, John?

00:45:12   That's true.

00:45:12   Yeah.

00:45:12   So this is, you know, this is, you know, old friends here.

00:45:15   And so I've, I've, I've worked with Louie, uh, a lot over the years.

00:45:19   He's, he's just a pro.

00:45:21   And, and what I, what I especially love is that Louie is opinionated.

00:45:25   So when you go to Louie with an app icon idea, like, you know, I don't, I don't usually have like the most complete ideas.

00:45:32   I'm always like, well, maybe involve some of this.

00:45:35   And maybe I was thinking a little bit of that.

00:45:37   And, you know, here's kind of what the app is.

00:45:39   And, you know, I go to Louie with a cloudy mess of vague directions and he comes back with, okay, you should pick one of these things.

00:45:47   Let's focus on this part of this and this is the right color for this.

00:45:51   Like, and he, and he's right.

00:45:52   Like every day, whenever he, you know, gives those kind of opinions and directions, like he's right.

00:45:58   And it makes the product better.

00:46:00   It makes the artwork better.

00:46:01   It makes the icon, the logo, the focus.

00:46:03   It makes it all better.

00:46:04   And it can go beyond the icon.

00:46:06   Like, obviously, you know, these are just designers.

00:46:07   They're really good at lots of parts of software design.

00:46:09   Not only do you get an icon, but you get direction that you can use throughout the app.

00:46:14   So if you need help with like, hey, you know, what kind of color scheme should I be using throughout the app?

00:46:18   Or maybe what kind of themes?

00:46:20   Like, that's all part of their skill set.

00:46:22   I like working with them for lots of reasons.

00:46:25   It isn't just draw me a pretty icon.

00:46:28   But that being said, their icons are very pretty.

00:46:30   And they're really good at drawing you a pretty icon.

00:46:33   They are.

00:46:34   So I can strongly recommend working with them.

00:46:36   This is a sponsorship in the sense that, you know, they have traded work for this read.

00:46:40   You know, there's no money going back and forth.

00:46:42   They paid us in icons.

00:46:43   Yeah, right.

00:46:44   There's a form of payment we don't normally take.

00:46:45   And like Mark emphasized, like, this is not a thing that we do often.

00:46:49   But it's specifically because it is these specific people in this specific company why we took this deal.

00:46:54   And because we think it'll be fun to actually – because we also haven't shown each other the icons yet that they made.

00:47:01   So we figured it would be fun for the show to reveal our icons to each other and comment on them live.

00:47:08   And as part of the read, we can actually critique them.

00:47:12   Like, we're not – you know, we didn't promise to only be positive about them.

00:47:15   Now, it just so happens I'm pretty positive about mine, to be honest.

00:47:18   But, you know, we didn't promise that we would only say good things.

00:47:23   So that part of the show is just going to be, like, actual show content about these icons.

00:47:28   But this part is, yeah, we like Parakeet a lot.

00:47:30   And we think you should go visit them to get your icons done.

00:47:33   Because, you know, this summer, everyone's doing new icons for their apps, for the new OSs, because you kind of have to.

00:47:40   And they are incredibly talented at not only any – you know, whatever the icon design is of the time, they're very good at it.

00:47:48   Like, they adapt their skills over time, they're very good at it.

00:47:51   But I can say they are really exceptional at handling liquid glass icons, especially with the new 27 capabilities.

00:47:58   But they help you also backport it to the 26 capabilities.

00:48:01   So they cover all those bases from the technical side.

00:48:04   They give you the icon composer file and everything.

00:48:06   Like, you know, it's all, you know, native stuff like that.

00:48:09   And they're really good for this moment in developers' lives where we just need to keep adding new icons to our apps because Apple keeps changing what it means to be an app icon.

00:48:19   And it's really good to have somebody like Parakeet on your side to help you do that.

00:48:23   And they do a really good job.

00:48:23   All right.

00:48:26   So anyway, if you want to hire Parakeet for your app icons, and I strongly recommend that you do.

00:48:31   They can't pay me to say that in icons or money.

00:48:35   But I strongly recommend that you hire them because they are professionals, and they're really good at their job.

00:48:39   And they're better than you think.

00:48:41   As evidenced by the fact that you did hire them to your icon, which you're very happy with, before they ever did the sponsorship.

00:48:46   Oh, yeah.

00:48:47   I mean, look, you know that if I can do something myself, I probably will to a fault.

00:48:52   I know that I do not make good app icons.

00:48:55   You've seen my work when I make app icons myself.

00:48:58   It's not good.

00:48:59   And, you know, I hire very few people to help me with my apps.

00:49:04   But this is one of them, if not often the only one.

00:49:07   Because, again, they're really good.

00:49:09   And I strongly recommend this.

00:49:10   Anyway, it's Parakeet.

00:49:12   This is Louis Mantia and Luca Grafera.

00:49:14   Their website is parakeet.co.

00:49:17   So P-A-R-A-K-E-E-T dot C-O.

00:49:21   Parakeet dot C-O.

00:49:23   Go there.

00:49:24   They are very good at what they do.

00:49:26   We were talking with them about doing this.

00:49:28   It's like, do you want just like a normal ad read?

00:49:30   Or do you just want to just talk about your icons?

00:49:32   And I said, no, you should just talk about the icons.

00:49:34   I'm like, we're going to critique them, you know.

00:49:36   Like, as Marco pointed out, I'm like, are you sure you want that?

00:49:39   They're like, oh, yeah, no, sure, go for it.

00:49:40   Like, they were very, like, very open to this.

00:49:43   There was no, you know, they chose to take this route.

00:49:46   And so they're going to get what they paid for with icons.

00:49:50   They're going to get it all right.

00:49:52   All right, so let's talk about our actual icons.

00:49:54   And we're doing this.

00:49:55   We're trying to, like, reveal them to each other in real time.

00:49:58   So there will be various pauses when we upload our icons to the ATP website.

00:50:02   So we'll have URLs that we can put in the show notes so you can see them, too.

00:50:06   But I'm going to start with some images that I already uploaded because when I, I've engaged

00:50:11   with other companies to do icons for my apps before, and I always try to preface my engagement

00:50:18   with these various designers by saying, I apologize in advance for what is about to happen.

00:50:23   Because Marco was saying, like, he just has, like, vague ideas or whatever.

00:50:26   And it's like, I may have vague ideas, but I have very definite opinions about everything.

00:50:32   Surprising no one listening to this show.

00:50:34   Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's like, it's the curse.

00:50:38   It's like my old hypercritical blog post.

00:50:39   It's like, look, I may not be able to do it, but I know what's wrong with the thing you did.

00:50:44   Like, I know what I don't like about it.

00:50:46   Right?

00:50:46   And that is, it's like, well, then what should I do?

00:50:48   It's like, I don't know.

00:50:49   But I know it's not that.

00:50:50   And it's terrible.

00:50:51   So I started, I wrote a big document for all the icons I was getting proposed.

00:50:56   And yes, I got two icons instead of one, considered a finder's fee, since I kind of initiated this

00:51:00   whole thing.

00:51:00   And this is the, in the document, I put this thing, which is this, lots of pictures of this

00:51:07   on the internet, and signs and windows and images of it or whatever.

00:51:11   And maybe it was a real thing that somebody did, but like some design, the story behind

00:51:16   it, or the, you know, anecdote is some design bureau put this in their window as a price

00:51:20   list for design services.

00:51:22   And it said, for $100, I design everything.

00:51:25   I being like the designer, right?

00:51:27   For $200, I design and you watch.

00:51:29   For $300, I design and you advise.

00:51:32   $500, I design and you help.

00:51:33   $800, you design and I help.

00:51:35   $1,300, you design, I advise.

00:51:37   $2,100, you design, I watch.

00:51:40   And then for $3,400, you design everything.

00:51:42   And the idea here is like, look, you're hiring a designer, but it seems like you just want

00:51:47   to do all this yourself.

00:51:48   So like, why am I even here?

00:51:49   Am I just here to like, be your like, Photoshop monkey and just whatever you say.

00:51:54   And I sent this and I said, I'm going to try to avoid this, but be aware, this might be

00:51:59   what this feels like.

00:52:00   Because I like every single thing you send, I don't have a problem formulating an opinion

00:52:06   about very specific aspects of it.

00:52:08   And that can be very frustrating.

00:52:09   And as I always say, it's like, look, this has to be a, as we would say in the biz, Casey,

00:52:15   time boxed thing.

00:52:17   It's not going to go on forever.

00:52:18   We can't like, let's iterate until you're happy with your icon.

00:52:21   Like, that's ridiculous.

00:52:22   That doesn't make sense.

00:52:22   There's a certain reasonable amount of time, whether you're paying in ATP sponsorship slots

00:52:27   or you're paying in actual money.

00:52:30   It's not like this is not a 10 year long commitment to make an icon for you.

00:52:33   Right.

00:52:34   So I said, it's perfectly fine if we go through a reasonable amount of time and we end up with

00:52:38   an icon that I, we don't end up with an icon that I like.

00:52:41   That's still, that is still services rendered.

00:52:43   And that's how you have to think about design services.

00:52:45   Don't think like, well, I pay for this.

00:52:47   I should have the icon of my dreams.

00:52:48   It's like, they're not going to spend a year on your thing.

00:52:50   And if you can't find something that you like in a year, like, you know, you don't own them

00:52:55   forever because you paid for one icon.

00:52:58   That said, they're really good at what they do.

00:53:00   And I did not have any problem finding icons that I like, but I just wanted to throw that

00:53:03   out there.

00:53:04   So let's start with switch glass.

00:53:05   Uh, it's my application switcher icon.

00:53:07   Yeah.

00:53:08   Here is the old icon that, uh, Brad Ellis made for me, which I love.

00:53:13   I told Brad exactly what I wanted and he made the, he tore the image out of my head and made

00:53:19   that.

00:53:19   And yes, there was an iteration.

00:53:21   There was an iteration process going back and forth, uh, you know, many iterations or whatever,

00:53:25   but like, I'm just so extremely happy with the icon he made.

00:53:29   I'm like, this is what I was picturing in my head.

00:53:31   So why am I bothering getting a new icon?

00:53:33   Well, if you look at this icon and you know what happened in Tahoe, this icon does not fly

00:53:39   in Tahoe.

00:53:39   Tahoe requires all icons to fit within a rounded rectangle, rounded edge square that we call

00:53:46   a squircle.

00:53:46   And if your icon does not conform exactly to that outline, Tahoe takes your icon, shrinks

00:53:53   it by like 70% and shoves it in the middle of a gray squircle.

00:53:56   And it looks awful.

00:53:57   And you may be thinking, it looks like your icon already has a squircle in it.

00:54:01   Yeah, but it's not the, you know, the correct squircle.

00:54:05   It is, it is the bounds of it are broken.

00:54:07   Uh, it's supposed to look like a clear, it's on an angle, first of all, which the real squircle

00:54:11   isn't.

00:54:12   And then the bounds of the squircle are broken by the various shapes.

00:54:14   It basically looks like a, uh, like a, I don't know, half a centimeter thick, a piece of lickable

00:54:20   glass with a circle diamond and square floating over it.

00:54:24   And my idea is the circle diamond and square kind of represent the icons you're switching

00:54:27   among.

00:54:27   It doesn't really make sense.

00:54:28   It's just the icon that I wanted.

00:54:29   I got it.

00:54:30   I love it.

00:54:30   And Tao comes and says, screw your icon.

00:54:32   And so as, as I recently said, when I was commenting on the rogue Amoeba's post about, uh, squircle

00:54:38   jail, which is the, the gray, the gray squircle, they stick your icon in.

00:54:41   And if it breaks the bounds, I think, uh, this is the worst thing Apple has ever done design

00:54:46   wise to developers.

00:54:47   And definitely the worst thing they have ever done to icons, forcing icons into this.

00:54:51   I think if, if Apple wants all icons to be in the squircle shape, as they tried to promote

00:54:55   in Big Sur, Mac OS, Big Sur, then they should lead by example.

00:54:59   And people should, uh, you know, adopt it because they think it's the best thing to

00:55:03   do when they transitioned from bit mapped icons, like, you know, very pixelated style in classic

00:55:09   Mac OS to more photorealistic, larger icons in Mac OS 10.

00:55:11   They didn't mandate it.

00:55:12   They just led by example.

00:55:14   And everyone said, yeah, we want to do that because it's awesome.

00:55:15   And everybody transitioned.

00:55:17   Everyone didn't transition to squircles after Big Sur because some people were like, it's

00:55:22   fine.

00:55:22   And I guess, you know, we'll update if it works with our design, but if it doesn't work for

00:55:26   our design, we'll just stick with our old design.

00:55:27   Like take rogue Amoeba.

00:55:28   They had a squircle, but they had like a microphone over it and the microphone just

00:55:31   like poked out of the edge a little bit.

00:55:32   And that would, that goes into squircle jail now.

00:55:34   Uh, but at Big Sur, they just kept their old icon because it still looked good.

00:55:37   It's still looking to fit in.

00:55:38   Anyway, I hate this decision that Apple did, but it puts me in a difficult situation, which

00:55:42   is, um, first of all, as we've discussed in past episodes, I wanted Brad Ellis's icon

00:55:48   to live as long as possible because I love it.

00:55:50   And so I found a way painfully to make it so that when my app, uh, is on Mac OS 15 and

00:55:57   earlier, you see Brad Ellis's icon.

00:56:00   And when it's on Mac OS 26, I had made my own awful, terrible liquid glass icon that I

00:56:07   hate.

00:56:07   Um, but with the advent of 27 and, you know, 15 getting farther in, uh, the rear view mirror,

00:56:13   I knew I was going to need new icons because if I'm going to eventually upgrade to 27, which

00:56:18   in theory will happen if I ever get a new damn Mac, I don't want to look at my awful

00:56:21   Tahoe icon that I made.

00:56:23   I want a nice icon.

00:56:24   Um, and so that was the challenge.

00:56:27   And it's a difficult challenge for a designer, which is like, I love my current icon.

00:56:31   The only reason I'm leaving it is because Apple is forcing me and I hate the new icon style.

00:56:36   Like I hate Tahoe icon style.

00:56:38   So now go make an icon that I love in a style that I hate while like, like abandoning an

00:56:45   icon that I love behind it.

00:56:46   So incredible challenge.

00:56:47   And this is, this is what you hire a designer for.

00:56:50   Cause I, I, I honestly had to say like my proposal for this was like, I love the old

00:56:55   icon.

00:56:56   Hey, Tahoe.

00:56:57   I don't know what to do, man.

00:56:58   What do we got?

00:57:00   I'm like, I said, I'm, I always say, I just, I'm open to almost any idea, like throw it out

00:57:04   there.

00:57:05   And what I said in most of my design engagements for icons, I'm like, let's just start with

00:57:10   like napping sketches, just like scribbles with a pencil on a napkin.

00:57:13   Cause I need to see a thousand of them to know even what direction to go.

00:57:18   Uh, and here's the problem when you work with really talented designers, they're so good.

00:57:23   Luca and Louie, who both worked on this, they are so good.

00:57:26   And so fast that they're like throw away pencil sketch would take me like seven days.

00:57:31   And they like, I'm in an iMessage conversation with them.

00:57:35   I'm like, and then I'm like, what about X, Y, and Z?

00:57:37   And then they reply like two seconds later with the thing I just typed.

00:57:40   And then I'm typing my response.

00:57:42   I'm like, well, what if you did X, Y, and Z?

00:57:44   And while I'm typing that they have sent another revision of it.

00:57:47   Like, I don't know how, I honestly don't know physically speaking what they're doing on their

00:57:51   computers to make this happen.

00:57:53   And no, they're not using it.

00:57:54   These are all hand, these are all handmade icons.

00:57:57   They were so fast and like high quality, very fast work coming out with like iterations.

00:58:03   And we went through so many iterations and I, and I asked them as I always do, like, can

00:58:07   I have all like the raw materials in the iterations?

00:58:08   And they said, yes, like, as long as I don't like use them or show them to the world, I just

00:58:12   love seeing the process.

00:58:13   So anyway, I didn't know where we were going to go with this.

00:58:15   If you look at my icon, my crappy Tahoe version of this was just make it a white squircle

00:58:21   and put a circle and a diamond and a square and they're gray.

00:58:23   And that's the current Tahoe icon.

00:58:25   If you have my, I have switch class in Tahoe and I hate it and it's ugly.

00:58:28   And they come up with a bunch of different variations.

00:58:31   First of all, they did a head on one.

00:58:32   They're like, hey, dummy, if you do a head on one, they're like, here's how a professional

00:58:35   would do it.

00:58:35   And it's like, oh, that's, that's a million times better.

00:58:37   And like, and that was within the first five minutes.

00:58:40   Like, okay, we're going to start on your icon.

00:58:41   What do you think of this?

00:58:42   I'm like, I was like, you just like, great.

00:58:44   Sure.

00:58:44   Just spend like, cause I spent way longer doing my terrible icon than they did making.

00:58:48   Like, here's how you would have done this if you had any clue what you're doing.

00:58:51   But I was like, but is that the best thing?

00:58:53   I was like right away.

00:58:54   I'm like, oh, thank God.

00:58:55   Because like, no matter how the rest of this goes, at the very least, that icon is already better

00:59:01   than my existing icon and good enough for me to use.

00:59:03   And then of course I had them tweak that a thousand ways to Sunday to try different variations.

00:59:06   Most of my ideas were bad as usual, but like, they're so fast.

00:59:10   And they were like, what else can we do?

00:59:12   Like, come up with anything.

00:59:13   They came up with all sorts of wild ideas.

00:59:15   I drew the menu bar icon for my app because my app doesn't even show in the doc by default.

00:59:21   So you only see the menu bar icon.

00:59:23   And the menu bar icon is a squircle with the diamond from the middle of the app icon in there.

00:59:30   There's the alternate menu bar icons as well.

00:59:32   Most people just use the default.

00:59:33   I'm like, maybe we could just concentrate on the diamond.

00:59:35   So we could just do a diamond and a squircle because the diamond doesn't break the bounds.

00:59:38   And we did a bunch of experiments with that.

00:59:40   And eventually, Louie came up with the winner.

00:59:43   Or maybe it was Luca.

00:59:44   I don't know who did it.

00:59:45   Again, it's a collaboration.

00:59:48   They're both doing this.

00:59:49   But in the messages thread, I was mostly talking with Louie.

00:59:53   And the innovation here was, can we get the whole, like, a diamond and a squircle thing,

01:00:00   which, again, is the menu bar icon, while also getting the old icon?

01:00:04   So now I have to upload something.

01:00:05   And Marco will edit this out.

01:00:06   All right.

01:00:10   And here is, after many, many, many, many revisions and iterations, here is the icon that I'm using.

01:00:18   Now, you might look at this and say, it's one of those things like, oh, that's not such a great idea.

01:00:22   That's obvious.

01:00:22   I could have thought of that.

01:00:23   But A, you didn't, and neither did I.

01:00:25   And B, it is brilliant in ways that are not entirely obvious.

01:00:29   Now, first of all, it's a beautifully rated icon.

01:00:31   It just looks really good.

01:00:32   I could never have made this in a million years, right?

01:00:35   What it is, is it looks like you took my old icon, rotated it so it's a diamond, and put it on a squircle background.

01:00:45   It's like, haven't you just put yourself into squircle jail?

01:00:47   I was like, no.

01:00:48   This is essentially my diamond icon, because we had lots of icons.

01:00:51   It just had a diamond in the middle.

01:00:52   But now the squircle is the diamond, because if you take the squircle and you rotate it 45 degrees, it's like a diamond shape.

01:00:57   But it also has the floaty things on it, breaking the bounds of the thing.

01:01:00   Such a good idea.

01:01:02   Such, like, an amazing, like, you know, cut the Gordian knot.

01:01:05   Like, oh, so you want a diamond, but you also want your old icon?

01:01:07   How about your old icon as a diamond?

01:01:10   And it's not metal anymore.

01:01:11   They're translucent.

01:01:12   And so there are some constraints I put on my design, which was, and I think this one helped, and maybe my users will not appreciate this, but I was pretty adamant about this.

01:01:20   I do not care how my icon looks on Tahoe.

01:01:23   Tahoe's dead to me.

01:01:25   I don't care how it looks on Tahoe.

01:01:26   And the reason this is relevant is because, as we've stated before, these .icon files, this format that Apple came up with, it's a bunch of resources and a recipe.

01:01:34   So it's like bitmaps, vector images, layers, and recipes, and effects.

01:01:40   That's what it is.

01:01:41   And these icons are assembled on the fly by the operating system.

01:01:44   It doesn't burn out bitmaps of them.

01:01:46   It's like, I take your ingredients, I assemble them, I composite them, I apply your layer effects, and then I, you know, eventually render as a bitmap that keeps the memory somewhere or whatever, right?

01:01:54   The 26, Tahoe's effects are different than 27's effects.

01:02:00   They're just different, even for the same things.

01:02:03   And also, 27 has effects that 26 doesn't support.

01:02:05   And 26 won't even read the .icon files from 27, which makes everything complicated.

01:02:11   So I said, I don't care how it looks in 26.

01:02:13   Don't worry about making an icon that looks okay in 26 and looks okay in 27.

01:02:17   Just concentrate on making one that looks really good in 27.

01:02:20   Because I'm hoping, and maybe I'm wrong with this, but I'm hoping that they're not going to change the rendering of these icons every single year.

01:02:26   It's just that Tahoe was a terrible mistake, and they're fixing it.

01:02:29   And the 27 rendering will stay, and maybe they'll only add to it.

01:02:33   But they changed how these things render.

01:02:35   So the icon you're seeing, this is a bitmap made with the 27 rendering system.

01:02:41   And it doesn't look as good in 26, but I don't care.

01:02:43   That was, hopefully that freed them up.

01:02:46   And of course, we made a million variants of this.

01:02:49   And by the way, one of the reasons they use these recipes for them is so they can have the different icon themes, which is separate from the system theme.

01:02:56   Your system theme is light or dark on macOS and other operating systems.

01:02:59   But there's a separate, on macOS, icon theme, and on iOS and everything as well.

01:03:03   And the icon theme can be default, which is what you're looking at here.

01:03:06   And there's dark, which is a dark icon theme, which you can have regardless of what the system theme is.

01:03:11   And then there's clear, which sucks all the color and life out of your icon and makes it clear.

01:03:16   And then there's clear tinted, which is like clear, but with a color tint to it.

01:03:20   And the reason it can do that is because it just takes the ingredients, the layers and the effects, and then it composites them.

01:03:26   And then, you know, for clear, it just sucks all the color out of it.

01:03:28   And for dark, it makes them darker and stuff.

01:03:30   And you can tweak the dot icon file lets you tweak, oh, this change in dark mode, use this specular value.

01:03:35   But in default mode, use this.

01:03:36   Like, you can change it like that.

01:03:37   But I'm pretty sure you can't have totally different icons in dark and light.

01:03:41   Maybe there's a hack to do that with, like, visibility or something.

01:03:44   But either way, so that's icon themes.

01:03:47   But we'd made so many variations of this that I wanted to also have.

01:03:52   Well, I didn't want to also have, but, like, by the time we were done, I'm like, you know, we spent all that time figuring out how to do this icon.

01:03:57   And I think you ended up making a really good dark version of it.

01:04:02   Did I just upload the same one again twice?

01:04:04   No, there it is.

01:04:05   Okay.

01:04:05   And so there was lurking in the various iterations this icon, which is basically the same as that icon, but with a dark background.

01:04:14   And I thought it was a little bit too dark for the default mode.

01:04:16   And you can't have two entirely separate icons, I think, for light and dark mode.

01:04:21   No, you can.

01:04:22   Can you?

01:04:22   Yeah.

01:04:23   Like, you can make the entire, like, groups, like, in Icon Composer, you can have an entire group toggle on or off.

01:04:30   You know, you can have totally separate layers and assets for different color cubes.

01:04:33   Anyway, the dark mode that Parakeet did actually fits in better with dark mode because they did, like, an inverted thing where, like, the shapes are light and the thing is dark or whatever.

01:04:41   So I do like their dark icon theme mode, but I also like this icon.

01:04:45   So what I'd end up doing was in the About box for Switch Glass, if you're in dark mode, you see this icon.

01:04:51   Oh, nice.

01:04:52   But you see the other icon in light mode.

01:04:54   And I think I also made it.

01:04:55   I don't think I've finished yet, but I'll probably also make it so that if you click the icon, it will switch to the old Brad Ellis one as well because I just still just love that icon.

01:05:02   So, anyway, that's Switch Glass, solved an incredibly difficult problem in an icon that just looks amazing and I'm very happy with.

01:05:09   And you'll be glad you don't get to see the, you know, 10 or 20 versions of the same icon that we went through before we arrived at this.

01:05:18   But it's fine to say I'm very picky and they were very nice to work with.

01:05:22   And they solved this design problem very neatly.

01:05:24   The next app, which hopefully this won't take as long.

01:05:27   Sorry, I'm going on about this.

01:05:28   Next one is front and center.

01:05:29   Front and center, I made the icon for because it did not require me to actually draw anything.

01:05:34   My idea for the front and center icon, you know, to remind everyone, front and center is the app that I have that restores the window layering behavior from classic macOS where when you click on a window that belongs to a different app, it will not just bring that window to the front.

01:05:46   It will bring all the windows that belong to the app to the front.

01:05:48   That's how classic macOS worked.

01:05:49   I'm very used to it.

01:05:50   I wanted macOS 10 to work like that.

01:05:53   And for years I ran DragThing, which did that for me.

01:05:56   There were other Mac utilities that did that, but DragThing got discontinued.

01:05:58   And I said, you know, this is my very first Mac app.

01:06:01   So trivial.

01:06:01   Once a friend showed me how to do it and work together to make this app.

01:06:05   Anyway, that's all front and center does.

01:06:07   It makes it so that when you click a window in another app, all the windows will come to the front and you can toggle the mode.

01:06:11   So you go back to the what I call the modern mode, which is the default mode for macOS.

01:06:16   But I keep it in classic mode most of the time.

01:06:18   And so the icon for front and center I decided was going to be three square platinum windows, like classic macOS style, macOS 8 style, Copeland style, if you will, windows that say front and center.

01:06:32   The back window says front, the middle window says and in the title bar and the front window says center in the title bar.

01:06:36   And these are pixel for pixel exact incarnations taken from screenshots from Mac emulators.

01:06:42   So I didn't have to draw any of this.

01:06:43   This is what macOS 8 windows look like.

01:06:46   I'm kind of surprised Apple let me have this icon because technically every pixel of this was drawn by Apple.

01:06:50   Not me.

01:06:51   But they don't care.

01:06:52   It was too long ago.

01:06:53   It's in the past and having a pixel exact icon in macOS 10 doesn't really fit because it scales and everything gets blurry.

01:07:00   So I made basically like all the different sizes of this icon so that all the edges are sharp square pixels.

01:07:07   Like none of them are scaled in the pre Tahoe days, the days before the dot icon format.

01:07:12   You had like dot ICNS resources, which said, give me your 16 by 16, your 32 by 32 by 64 by 64.

01:07:18   There's a bunch of separate sizes and you would put separate bitmaps for all of them.

01:07:22   And as someone was pointing out on Mastodon recently, I actually have custom versions for 16 by 16 and 32 by 32 that don't look like the big icon because that was the idea with icons was like if your icon, they used to be 32 by 32 max.

01:07:37   But like if your icon at 16 by 16 or 8 by 8 is unreadable when you try to scale it, draw a different icon at that size.

01:07:44   And so my tiny icon just has one window and my really tiny icon just has like the title bar stripes.

01:07:50   All that dies with dot icon because dot icon does not let you do that.

01:07:55   You can't have separate, totally different icons for different sizes.

01:07:58   It's like ingredients and a recipe and that's it.

01:08:00   And so I'm sad that that's dying with front and center.

01:08:04   But I desperately need a new icon because these cascaded overlapping windows do not fit in a squircle.

01:08:09   And if you just stick them in the squircle, they look blurry and awful.

01:08:12   And once again, I made my own Tahoe icon, which was three overlapping windows and it looked terrible.

01:08:17   And so I threw up my hands and said, save me, Parakeet, do something here.

01:08:21   And my guidance on this was less exacting than switch class.

01:08:25   I was like, I don't know, layered.

01:08:27   It's about layering windows.

01:08:29   Like the themes here is like classic Mac OS.

01:08:31   I want to evoke classic Mac OS in some way.

01:08:33   And I want to evoke window layering in some way because that's what the app does.

01:08:37   Go with that.

01:08:38   And so again, within 30 seconds was like, here's your app icon, but done by professionals.

01:08:43   Like, yep, no, that's already better.

01:08:45   Three layered windows.

01:08:46   And we went back and forth on this for a while.

01:08:49   I don't know if we tried it.

01:08:52   We tried, maybe thought of a couple of things, but didn't really implement them.

01:08:54   But yeah, it was so clear that layered windows was the right approach.

01:08:58   And how many iterations are there on layered windows?

01:09:01   And yeah, there's a surprising amount.

01:09:03   And we ended up coming up with this icon, which I'll paste in a second.

01:09:08   Yeah, layered windows.

01:09:09   This icon is an interesting case study because, well, the other thing that I threw in here

01:09:14   was like, you know, in classic Mac OS, my favorite desktop picture, the desktop background

01:09:21   wallpaper, as I say, in current parlance, because Windows won that war, was a particular shade

01:09:27   of like purplish blue, just a solid color.

01:09:30   It was one of the default choices in various versions of Mac OS.

01:09:33   And also like in classic Mac OS, the progress bars were this color and the folders were not

01:09:40   exactly this color.

01:09:40   But the progress bars and the folders are also kind of like a bluish purplish type of thing.

01:09:44   And so that always reminds me of classic Mac OS.

01:09:47   And so their idea was, let's do like a like a liquid glass style classic Mac OS window.

01:09:55   So the front most window has the close box and the zoom box and the window shade box.

01:10:01   Oh, this is so good.

01:10:02   And the stripes from from a liquid glass when from a classic Mac OS window, but it's rendered

01:10:06   in liquid glass.

01:10:07   Now, here's the thing about this icon.

01:10:08   Unlike the switch glass icon, where you can make that switch glass icon the size of a billboard

01:10:13   and just looks gorgeous and you want to lick it.

01:10:15   This one, as you make it bigger and bigger, you say, those window controls are pretty rudimentary,

01:10:20   like not particularly detailed.

01:10:21   And believe me, at various points, I said, can we make those window controls more detailed

01:10:26   and more like they look like in classic Mac OS?

01:10:28   And we went through several iterations of that and it was all a bad idea because the thing about

01:10:34   icons is you're not looking at them at 1024 by 1024.

01:10:37   You're always looking at them at icon sizes.

01:10:39   And this is true of the switch glass icon too.

01:10:41   Even though it looks gorgeous at big sizes, much of the design of the switch glass icon

01:10:45   was because I would scale it down to like 32 by 32 and say, I can't, I can't see it.

01:10:50   It doesn't read right.

01:10:51   Like I don't see the shapes.

01:10:52   It's not working, blah, blah, blah.

01:10:53   You have to look at icons at normal icon sizes.

01:10:56   How is it going to look in an actual finder window?

01:10:58   How is it going to look in a list view window?

01:10:59   How is it going to look on a dock with a sane dock size?

01:11:01   No one wants to look at your gorgeous icon.

01:11:03   They're not going to make it huge.

01:11:04   So their first instinct was correct, which is we really have to simplify these window controls

01:11:10   because it'll be hard to even see them at all.

01:11:11   So they need to be like the stage makeup version of window controls.

01:11:15   Like it needs to be kind of like cartoonish and simplified and Fisher price.

01:11:19   And even though it doesn't look amazing when it's 1024 by 1024, you have to do that.

01:11:23   Other than what it looks like, it looks like a muddy mess when it gets at icon sizes.

01:11:27   And so I'm really happy with this icon because like the other one, this went through so many iterations of me shrinking it down and shrinking it down.

01:11:34   And like at various points, I had finder windows open with 10 app icons, just 10 apps.

01:11:41   I would just build them all in Xcode, 10, 10 apps all lined up and I'd just be scaling them and the icon view slider and thing.

01:11:47   And then I had them, I had them all on the dock and I would scale the dock and I would look at them.

01:11:51   And it was like, it was like the 31 shades of blue thing from Google, only a human powered and not, uh, not metrics driven.

01:11:56   It's just me staring at them of like, which of these 10 versions that look exactly the same to the casual observer is the best one.

01:12:03   Uh, and yes, that was probably tedious for them, but, uh, and it was difficult for me too, but like eventually I, uh, circled on this one.

01:12:09   So now I have icons and the same deal.

01:12:12   I don't care how those looks in Tahoe.

01:12:13   It looks bad in Tahoe.

01:12:14   I don't care how it looks in Tahoe.

01:12:15   I told them that don't blame them because my icons look weird in Tahoe.

01:12:18   That's on me.

01:12:19   I said, I do not care how it looks in Tahoe.

01:12:20   It looks fine in Tahoe.

01:12:21   It looks like an icon, but like, as you make bigger in Tahoe, some of the effects aren't quite as good or whatever.

01:12:26   Anyway, so the final thing I'll say about this is, uh, I can't, I'm not going to use it.

01:12:33   I can't really use these icons until I can build with Xcode 27.

01:12:36   I could, in theory, build, uh, an Xcode 26.

01:12:40   Like Parakeet gave me 26 versions of these icons because again, the 20 Xcode 26 refuses to read dot icon files from 27 if they use any of the new features.

01:12:50   So I can't ship these exact ones in 26.

01:12:53   Uh, and I could just, you know, again, they gave me ones that work in 26 by removing the 27 only features and stuff, but I don't want to do that.

01:13:01   So I'm not actually going to deploy these icons until I can do my first build with Xcode 27, which usually happens like the week they go GM or whatever.

01:13:10   So my apps will continue to have hideous icons in 26 because they're my own drone ones.

01:13:15   And I will also get the maximum amount of time where the people on a Mac OS 15 earlier see the, uh, old icons that I liked.

01:13:21   Um, cause I did like, you know, the, even though I didn't really draw my icon with the layered windows, I did like it.

01:13:26   So I'm maximizing that time.

01:13:27   So even though I love these icons, they will not be on my apps until I can build with Xcode 27.

01:13:33   But when that does happen, I'll be very happy.

01:13:35   I will update my website.

01:13:36   And like I said, I will probably add Easter eggs so that you can like click on the icons in the app somewhere to see my old versions.

01:13:42   Cause I really do love my old versions.

01:13:44   It's not Parakeet's fault that I love my old versions got taken away.

01:13:47   It's Apple's fault and I'm mad at Apple for doing this to me, but I am glad to have beautiful icons made by professional designers that I'm really happy with.

01:13:54   Yeah.

01:13:55   These are really good.

01:13:57   It's very, it's doing what they're good at.

01:14:00   It turns out that it works well.

01:14:02   All right.

01:14:04   So, uh, for me, uh, obviously I had asked them to look at call sheet.

01:14:08   And if you recall, uh, the original call sheet icon is, uh, what, what I asked them to take a look at.

01:14:15   And basically what that was, it was a clapper board.

01:14:18   Like you would see at a film set with a magnifying glass over it.

01:14:21   And there, I will put a link in the show notes to jelly's, um, write up that he did a couple of years ago now about the, uh, the, the evolution of the icon.

01:14:31   And you can see the truly piss poor version that I was using that I had drawn.

01:14:39   Oh my God.

01:14:40   That it's drawing, um, that I had drawn as like my first internal cut at it.

01:14:44   And then jelly took it and made it look tremendous.

01:14:46   Um, this is a special skill Casey.

01:14:48   Yeah.

01:14:49   Being this bad at it.

01:14:50   You mentioned like the things that I couldn't make with that, whatever French band that I can't pronounce because it's so weird.

01:14:55   Yeah.

01:14:56   I don't think any, I could have come up with something this bad.

01:14:58   It's truly terrible.

01:14:59   I don't, I don't know.

01:15:00   I don't know how you did it.

01:15:01   What, what, how did you come up with red?

01:15:03   The color?

01:15:03   Yeah.

01:15:03   The color selection.

01:15:05   Like why?

01:15:05   I don't know.

01:15:06   I don't know.

01:15:07   And red on blue.

01:15:08   It's like, you know, when you put red on blue, just like the 3d effect, like it makes your eyes

01:15:11   really, I think my favorite thing about this is that the magnifying glass circle is not centered on the icon.

01:15:16   Like, no, no, why would it, why would it be?

01:15:18   But it's not that it's not, it doesn't look intentionally off center.

01:15:21   No, it's just, just far enough off to annoy you.

01:15:23   It's far enough off to look like a mistake.

01:15:25   Not, not a choice.

01:15:26   He tried to get as many tangents as he could into one icon.

01:15:29   He's got the little corners of it touching.

01:15:30   Oh my God.

01:15:31   It's amazing.

01:15:31   This is unfair.

01:15:33   We're critiquing Casey's icon.

01:15:34   No, no, but it gets worse.

01:15:35   It gets better.

01:15:35   But this, this shows how important an icon designer is.

01:15:39   Yes.

01:15:39   So if you zoom in by whatever means you choose on the icon on jelly's right.

01:15:46   Oh my God.

01:15:46   There's outlines.

01:15:47   There's an outline of the original magnifying glass.

01:15:51   I don't know how I accomplished that.

01:15:53   You couldn't be bothered to clean it up.

01:15:54   I get, I didn't even realize jelly and I were having a FaceTime call, uh, like a week ago.

01:15:58   The attention to detail that Casey brings to the pixel art icon is like, yeah, there's

01:16:04   some leftover stuff there, whatever.

01:16:05   I think my favorite thing about this also is like, even in the blog post, the rectangle

01:16:09   graphic that you put behind it is also like random colors that do not go with the colors.

01:16:15   That was jelly's deliberate choice.

01:16:17   So we were on a maximum ugliness.

01:16:19   Yes, exactly.

01:16:20   We were on a FaceTime call like a week or two ago, as I was talking about earlier in the

01:16:23   show.

01:16:24   And, uh, they pointed out to me, did you ever notice there's a second magnifying glass?

01:16:28   I was like, what are you talking about?

01:16:29   Look in the upper left corner.

01:16:30   There's the out.

01:16:31   Oh my God.

01:16:32   It's like you designed by like, you know, the magic wand tool in Photoshop to just select

01:16:38   this layer and shrink it down.

01:16:39   But you missed all the little anti-aliased edges.

01:16:41   No, but that's unfair to the magic wand tool.

01:16:42   Magic wand tool would not do this.

01:16:45   So my marking orders for, for Louie and Luca were, Hey, I really like the, the, the way

01:16:53   that jelly ended up with the icon.

01:16:55   And I love the way it looks, but I feel like at this point it's looking a little bit dated.

01:17:00   That's not jelly's fault.

01:17:01   It's just, you know, tastes and whatnot have moved on.

01:17:03   So I'd love, you know, a, a refreshed, a spick and span version, if you will, of, of that

01:17:09   icon.

01:17:10   And your, did your instructions include anything having to do with like make it liquid glassy,

01:17:15   like make it fit in with liquid glass.

01:17:17   Like what was your stance on that?

01:17:18   I could look up, I'd have to find the conversation, but I can look up what I told them, but it was,

01:17:22   I believe in, in summary, it was, yeah, you know, modernize it.

01:17:26   I think it makes sense to do something liquid glassy, particularly around the magnifying glass

01:17:30   and the icon.

01:17:31   But you are, one of the things I said to them, unlike some other people they may have

01:17:36   spoken with recently is you are the professionals.

01:17:38   I'm going to give you some thoughts, but do what you think is best.

01:17:42   Because I remember being on the other side of the table as a consultant, which I don't

01:17:46   know if John, if you ever did consulting during your career, but I did plenty of it.

01:17:49   Okay.

01:17:49   It is absolutely infuriating when a company hires you to bring your expert advice and expertise

01:17:59   expertise to them.

01:18:00   And then all they do is bicker with you about the things you tell them to do.

01:18:03   And obviously some bickering is normal and you go back and forth.

01:18:06   That's a good relationship, et cetera.

01:18:07   But oftentimes I would come into some other company and be like, Hey, I'm here to do X,

01:18:12   Y, and Z.

01:18:12   And they say, and they would say to me, great, but you need to do it in exactly this way,

01:18:16   in exactly this order, or else we're going to be very upset and tell your boss.

01:18:19   And like, that's not a relationship.

01:18:21   That's not constructive.

01:18:22   So what I said to them was, Hey, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking about.

01:18:26   For example, I really like that Jelly had text on the icon.

01:18:31   I genuinely do.

01:18:32   I think it's, it's really fun to have these little like nods to different movies and different

01:18:36   things.

01:18:37   And like the joke that he made, which we were talking about just a week or two ago about,

01:18:40   um, the search for blue December with Kay Celis as the director.

01:18:44   Uh, I, I think that was hilarious, but, but it's a very busy icon by my instruction, but

01:18:51   it's a very busy icon.

01:18:52   And so maybe we can simplify it.

01:18:54   And so Louie and Luca took a look at it and here's what they came up with.

01:18:58   And I absolutely love it.

01:19:01   I think it looks great.

01:19:02   Um, this is basically a modernized, simplified, uh, liquid glassified version of the call sheet

01:19:09   icon.

01:19:10   Uh, I don't know when I'm going to deploy it, but this, it is my intention to make this the

01:19:14   default icon.

01:19:14   I intend to leave the existing icons because, you know, there's a zillion icons in there

01:19:18   that you can choose between.

01:19:19   Um, Jelly had done a bunch, had done various versions of the clapperboard.

01:19:23   Then my friend Stee, uh, I'll put a link to his writeup about the icons that he had done.

01:19:27   Um, all of those are going to stay, but this will become the default.

01:19:30   And we went back and forth a fair bit about, you know, what do we do with regard to the like

01:19:36   jokey versions of the icon?

01:19:38   And one of the things I said to them was, you know, like, like I said a moment ago, I like

01:19:42   the text, but that's not a hill I'm looking to die on.

01:19:44   But one hill I am looking to die on is I don't want to lose sight of having at the very least

01:19:51   a pride icon and a trans, like a trans icon.

01:19:56   And so, uh, they said, we absolutely agree.

01:19:59   And they came up with, um, cuts for both pride and the trans version of it as well, which I'll

01:20:06   put links to that in the show notes also.

01:20:07   Um, and I think that these also look absolutely great and they keep with the spirit of what

01:20:14   I'm trying to accomplish, but in a more subtle way.

01:20:16   Now I would like to hear what you guys have to think, but before, or have to say about

01:20:20   it, but before I do, I will tell you that I opened these in icon composer, which is the

01:20:24   mechanism by which you mash together all the different things that John described.

01:20:28   And there are one, two, three, four, six different portions of different, like, I don't know what

01:20:35   these are called, like objects that grew or not.

01:20:38   There are more than six groups.

01:20:39   There's like seven or eight groups, but I guess layers.

01:20:42   Yeah.

01:20:42   That's probably a good word for it.

01:20:43   But the highlights in the magnifying glass, there are six individual highlights to make

01:20:50   it look just so.

01:20:51   And this is the sort of thing you get from a professional designer and, you know, Louie and

01:20:55   Luca really took the time to make this look good.

01:20:57   And about the only thing that we bickered is too strong a word, but bickered about was their

01:21:03   original cut had the two, like rivets that are, that make up the pivot points for the

01:21:08   clap, the clappy part of the clapper board.

01:21:10   Originally they had them kind of, the top one in particular was kind of hanging off the

01:21:15   corner a little bit, or that's the way it looked.

01:21:17   I mean, it can't be hanging off the corner, uh, outline because then you get in squirrel

01:21:21   jail.

01:21:21   Yeah.

01:21:22   So it wasn't literally off the corner, but it was like positioned in a slightly funky

01:21:25   way.

01:21:26   And I think it was probably because I don't have a copy of that icon in front of me right

01:21:30   now, but I think it was because it was perhaps I'm doing this.

01:21:33   I'm doing a poor job describing it, but physically that's where it would have been if this was

01:21:36   a real clapper board.

01:21:37   And we worked a little bit on like bringing it in and we decided, you know what, it makes

01:21:41   more sense to have the rivets where they are now, such that it fits the icon better, even

01:21:45   if physically it isn't perfect.

01:21:46   But working with them was a pleasure.

01:21:48   Uh, I like to think I was pretty easy on them.

01:21:51   And I was like, if anything, they deferred to me more than they should have, because I was

01:21:58   like, what do you think of this?

01:21:59   I'm open to your ideas, throw stuff out there.

01:22:01   Don't take what I say as gospel, just because I give you, I give you a suggestion.

01:22:04   Like they would just implement it in two seconds and then I would see it was a bad idea.

01:22:08   But, but like, that's the process I needed to see it.

01:22:10   But like, I was totally open to anything that, I mean, the entire design of my archive, I did

01:22:15   not think of it all.

01:22:16   It was entirely from them.

01:22:17   So, uh, so yeah, I definitely am open to their ideas.

01:22:20   The only difference is like when they show me something, I immediately know what I don't

01:22:23   like about it.

01:22:24   And that is difficult to hear if you're not, you know, if you're not, if you're not a professional

01:22:28   and you just take it personally or whatever, but they don't at all.

01:22:30   Like, so they're just, you know, you don't like that.

01:22:31   Fine.

01:22:32   I'll change it this way.

01:22:32   You don't like that.

01:22:33   Fine.

01:22:33   I'll change it this way.

01:22:34   And that can go on for a while if no one has any good ideas, which is why I'm always

01:22:37   saying, please, please throw anything you got, throw it at me.

01:22:40   Cause I have no problem.

01:22:41   I have no problem judging it.

01:22:42   Just, uh, you know, put it out there.

01:22:44   But yeah, it does, you know, it, it can be a tiring to hear that every single thing you

01:22:48   do, oh, you found something else wrong with this.

01:22:49   It makes you think you're never going to be happy.

01:22:51   And I try to emphasize like already, like with their first iteration, like already, I would

01:22:55   take this icon.

01:22:56   It's done.

01:22:56   Like, you know, it's better than what I have, like already we've succeeded.

01:22:59   Everything else is gravy, but yeah, I will iterate for a while to try to try to get

01:23:03   to polish it up the way I want it.

01:23:04   Yeah.

01:23:05   So I think my executive summary of the call sheet icon is what if you took jelly's icon,

01:23:09   which again, I love.

01:23:10   And what if you made that, but what, what if like Apple, or in this case, former Apple designers

01:23:16   came through and made that look more appley in a good way.

01:23:20   And, and I think that's where it landed.

01:23:21   So, uh, I'm all ears on what you two have to say about it, or if you don't have much to

01:23:25   say, we can move on to Marco.

01:23:26   Honestly, I think this is a great icon.

01:23:29   I mean, I liked the previous one as well.

01:23:31   But the previous one, I think the, the, if you had to criticize the previous one, the

01:23:35   biggest critique would be, it's just, it had a lot going on.

01:23:38   It's very, you know, very busy.

01:23:39   And we did, by the way, we did a member special where we critiqued our home screen icons, which

01:23:43   included Marco and Casey's apps because they're iOS apps.

01:23:45   So if you want to hear us critique Marco and Casey's old icons, there is a member special

01:23:49   for it.

01:23:49   But I think this is, this is a great evolution.

01:23:53   Like I think, you know, it's, it is a common tragedy when icons are redesigned to like throw

01:23:59   away all the old personality and just have some kind of simple, you know, blob or swoosh or

01:24:03   whatever.

01:24:04   This is not what happened here at all.

01:24:06   You know, this, this keeps pretty much all of the personality minus the text, which, and

01:24:11   again, I think, I think the text, it was a cool reference.

01:24:14   It was also very busy and you couldn't, you know, no one's reading that, you know, at

01:24:18   icon size anyway.

01:24:18   And so this is, this is a really great direction for it to go in.

01:24:23   I, I even have the, the maybe slightly hot take that I think you can use the rainbow pride

01:24:29   icon as the main icon because it isn't that different.

01:24:33   That is true.

01:24:33   Actually, I had a similar thought.

01:24:35   I mean, it depends on how you want to brand it because that was, that was one of the concerns

01:24:39   for all of our icons.

01:24:40   I imagine is that we have mentally, at least in our own minds, like a, an idea of

01:24:44   our branding as expressed by our icon and the, your default icon, despite having variations

01:24:49   does express your branding.

01:24:51   So I, I, I look at the pride version of this icon.

01:24:53   I'm like, Oh, that's the pride version of Casey's icon.

01:24:55   But when I look at the default version, I'm like, Oh, that's call sheet.

01:24:57   So yeah, fair.

01:24:58   Yeah.

01:24:59   And I also kind of like, I like the idea of someone going in and making the choice to use

01:25:06   the pride icon in a, in a pride way, not in a, like, I'm not trying to punish them.

01:25:10   Yeah.

01:25:10   No.

01:25:10   Cause, cause I don't use your default icon either, by the way, like that's part of what

01:25:14   makes it fun is that because your icon lends itself so well to variations, it allows personalization.

01:25:18   And I agree.

01:25:19   I think the pride one looks great.

01:25:20   Just, just color scheme wise, right?

01:25:21   It looks amazing.

01:25:22   And so if you like that color scheme, you just pick it.

01:25:25   Um, I personally use the Apple six colors one, uh, and they did make a, I did, I'm not going

01:25:30   to put it in the show notes, but they did make a version of that as well.

01:25:32   And so that will be, please put that in cause it's what I choose, but it allows you, that's

01:25:35   the whole point of custom icons.

01:25:36   They allow you to express yourself, but your default ones does say call sheet to me.

01:25:39   Yeah.

01:25:40   I guess, I guess you're right though.

01:25:41   Like, you know, making, like having the pride one be like a special thing, it makes it more

01:25:46   special than if it, if it was just what was what the icon always was.

01:25:50   That's a better way to put it.

01:25:51   Yeah.

01:25:52   That, that, that's exactly.

01:25:52   And you know, there's lots more like there's a, I don't know if there's an official website,

01:25:55   but like, here's the pride flag.

01:25:57   Here's the trans pride flag.

01:25:58   Here's the lesbian pride flag.

01:26:00   There is, there's like more color combinations than you might expect.

01:26:04   So you could check that out and to add more variations if you want.

01:26:07   That's true.

01:26:07   And also something that I believe Marco said a moment ago was that when I came to them

01:26:11   and I said, you know, look, what I'm asking for, I guess is just a modernized version of

01:26:16   the current clapperboard icon, but really, you know, go to town, do whatever you think is

01:26:21   best.

01:26:21   If you have some wild ass idea that you want to try, go for it.

01:26:24   Let's, let's see what happens.

01:26:26   And it was interesting because Louie Lucas said to me, you know, while that would be fun

01:26:30   and all, you don't want to give up on the, I feel gross saying this, but the brand recognition

01:26:36   of the clapperboard.

01:26:37   And you don't want to throw that away, which is what Marco, I think was saying a moment ago.

01:26:40   Like, let's not throw that and put that aside.

01:26:43   Let's embrace it and just modernize it and make it simpler.

01:26:46   And we, they did look at keeping some text on there and we, the three of us quickly concluded,

01:26:52   nah, we just got to take it off entirely.

01:26:54   And in the, the colors on the clapperboard can be one of those sort of, if you know, you

01:26:58   know, sort of situations.

01:26:59   And I think that's for the best.

01:27:00   So here's a micro take of the icon.

01:27:03   First, I'm jealous of you because you have what I wish any of my icons had, which is if

01:27:08   you want to use the new refraction effect in the 27 OSs, you need to have something behind

01:27:14   the thing to refract.

01:27:16   Yeah.

01:27:16   Yeah.

01:27:17   Otherwise it doesn't do anything.

01:27:18   And so like, look at the Apple maps icon in iOS 27, they put a little clear refracty thing

01:27:23   around it because the background is like whatever, like a, you know, whatever Apple's map tiles

01:27:28   are with like the green grass and the roads or whatever.

01:27:30   And that gives you something to refract them, man.

01:27:32   We tried with my icons, but like, because of the, again, because of the branding coherence and

01:27:36   everything, like trying to maintain the branding, it's difficult to get something.

01:27:40   I don't, I just don't have a bunch of like, uh, sharp lines with colors.

01:27:44   There's a contrasting against each other.

01:27:45   Guess what you have, Casey?

01:27:46   You've got to lift the whole top of your icon.

01:27:48   It's a bunch of stripes or lines.

01:27:50   So you can go to town on the, and you have a magnifying glass.

01:27:53   Like it was already in your icon.

01:27:54   So I'm jealous that your, your actual icon branding fits so well with 27, but I will say

01:28:00   that like this icon is another example of like stage makeup.

01:28:03   I think the, um, like the specular highlight effect and the, like the, the chromatic effect

01:28:09   and everything around the magnifying glass are way overdone at giant sizes, but then shrink

01:28:15   it down to normal icon size.

01:28:17   And you're like, Oh, it looks great.

01:28:18   That's what you have to do with icons.

01:28:20   This is my advice to anyone out there.

01:28:21   Because if you, if you engage a professional designer, they'll do what you tell them to

01:28:25   do.

01:28:25   Don't tell them to do like, you know, my instinct looking at this big icon was like, Oh, it has

01:28:30   to look amazing at 10 24.

01:28:32   Doesn't, doesn't matter what it looks like.

01:28:33   No one's ever going to look at it that size.

01:28:35   You're never even going to look at it that size.

01:28:36   Your icon has to look good at icon sizes.

01:28:39   And yes, a designer will do what you pay them to do.

01:28:42   And they'll, you know, they'll do what you ask, but you can ask for things that are wrong

01:28:45   and bad.

01:28:46   Hopefully they'll try to dissuade you from that and say, I suggest you not do this.

01:28:49   But in the end, you know, the client, the client gets what they want.

01:28:53   You want the client to be happy.

01:28:55   So whatever they're happy with, but my advice to you is you should do what Casey has done

01:28:58   here.

01:28:58   Or I don't know, maybe that's how it's didn't bother him, but like, I think this looks,

01:29:02   just so like stage makeup, like so overdone at massive sizes, but it looks perfect at

01:29:08   icon sizes.

01:29:08   And especially for an iOS app, there's not even a way really in like the home screen to

01:29:13   zoom your icon to 10 24, right?

01:29:15   It's always going to be icon size and that icon size.

01:29:19   This looks great.

01:29:19   I think they did a great job.

01:29:20   Yeah.

01:29:21   Thank you.

01:29:21   All right, Marco, what you got?

01:29:23   All right.

01:29:24   So, uh, I also took kind of a double dip approach here.

01:29:27   I was like, Hey, listen, uh, if you're going to, if you want to do the overcast icon

01:29:32   and refresh, that'd be great.

01:29:33   But I really want you to do my new reminder app.

01:29:35   Well done.

01:29:37   Casey's really making your, uh, self-made icon for the reminder.

01:29:40   I've looked good.

01:29:40   Yeah.

01:29:41   Oh yeah.

01:29:41   Uh, anyway, but, but first they did do overcast.

01:29:46   Um, and so, uh, here, this is the link here.

01:29:48   So what I asked for with overcast is basically like, just like a little tweak for iOS 27.

01:29:55   Again, I've had Louie look at the icon over time a lot.

01:29:58   You know, Louie's done all the tweaks or most of the tweaks over time in, in the, the 12,

01:30:03   11 years, 12 years that overcast has been a thing.

01:30:06   And he's been dying to have me change the outline color.

01:30:10   Um, and he's like, try this.

01:30:14   Not only does this new icon for overcast, which I think I'm going to use, I'm like 90% sure

01:30:21   I'm going to go with it.

01:30:22   Not only does it have like perfect updates for the 27 glass refraction looks and everything

01:30:28   like impeccably done, but he has changed the outline color of the tower circle from black

01:30:36   to a dark blue and blue goes really well with orange.

01:30:39   Uh, and I think, I think I love it.

01:30:43   It's the very, the very first day he showed me, I hated it and I'm like, this is, this is

01:30:49   going to need some time because it was just, you know, I've been looking at the same color

01:30:54   scheme of white, orange, black for 12 years or whatever.

01:30:59   Um, then now I'm like, Hmm, I think this is awesome.

01:31:03   I think this, this little tweak of shifting that circle from black to dark blue, I think

01:31:09   it really gives a level of freshness to the icon that I really appreciate.

01:31:14   And every, and this is like, again, like when you work with a good designer, they will come

01:31:18   up with suggestions and ideas that you would not have.

01:31:21   Uh, and you, again, you don't have to say yes.

01:31:23   And, and I don't say yes to all of them, but I thought this was a really cool new direction.

01:31:27   Um, so this I think is great.

01:31:31   I'm, I'm going to live with it for a little while on my devices and see like how I like

01:31:35   it, uh, over the next few weeks.

01:31:36   But I think this is awesome.

01:31:38   And I think I'm probably going to go with this.

01:31:40   And so this, this original design, like the whole shape of this, this was, uh, a Brad,

01:31:44   Alice and Louie.

01:31:45   Yeah.

01:31:45   Louie and Brad at their previous, um, Pacific helm company, like years, years and years and years

01:31:49   ago.

01:31:50   Um, and then over time I've had both Brad and Louie at different times, tweak it for different

01:31:56   needs.

01:31:56   Like, you know, like when the Apple watch, uh, became a thing, you know, a couple of years

01:32:00   into overcast, um, you know, I, I had Brad help me with that later on.

01:32:03   I had Louie help me with, uh, with, with an update for the, you know, little tweaks here

01:32:08   and there.

01:32:08   Um, last year's 26 icon, the first, last icon, that was Louie.

01:32:13   He literally just unsolicited, sent me when he was just like, here, here, I tried this.

01:32:17   I made this.

01:32:17   Oh, I remember this.

01:32:18   And I was like, oh, this is perfect.

01:32:21   Can I use this?

01:32:22   He's like, yeah, go ahead.

01:32:23   I'm like, great.

01:32:24   Okay.

01:32:24   Um, so yeah, so it's been, it's been, you know, Louie, Louie and Brad, you know, over the years.

01:32:31   Um, and now, you know, Louie and Luca, I've, I, I've, you know, work with them through this

01:32:37   text message, you know, through this iMessage chat that we've had, which by the way, working

01:32:41   through iMessage is such a delight when you're doing it, like going back and forth with, oh, here's

01:32:46   an image here and you put, you paste links here and there.

01:32:48   And it's so much faster than like going through emails or zoom meetings, like, you know, months

01:32:54   apart or weeks apart.

01:32:55   I made Google docs, of course.

01:32:56   I mean, I did through iMessage as well, but I also made Google docs.

01:32:58   Well, of course you did.

01:32:59   But anyway, yeah.

01:33:00   Working, working with Louie and Luca for this has been a pleasure.

01:33:03   Um, but yeah, so the overcast icon, that was the kind of the easier one.

01:33:09   Let me, let me critique, let me critique the overcast icon before I move on.

01:33:11   Um, so first you're in the same situation as me and that you don't have, um, refracting

01:33:18   things over changing colors.

01:33:20   Like all of your, all of your content is not over anything else that intersects it in

01:33:24   a way that refraction would take effect.

01:33:25   So you get the, like, especially this is an example of like at 1024, this looks gorgeous

01:33:30   with like the, the specular highlights on the bottom of the little rings and they're like

01:33:34   the chromatic shadows.

01:33:35   These are all effects that I know from icon composer, but like, uh, unlike a call sheet

01:33:39   and unlike, uh, my front and center icon, the bigger you make this one, the more the details

01:33:43   look amazing and definitely look more liquid glassy.

01:33:45   But the plain fact is you don't have a casey situation.

01:33:48   You don't have a shape that goes over the top of another shape that intersects it that you

01:33:52   can refract.

01:33:53   So if, if refraction is actually turned on any of these shapes, you would never be able to

01:33:56   tell even at 1024, which is, it's not a shame.

01:33:59   Cause I think the, I was going to say like this, this, the, the bones of this icon, like

01:34:03   the, the original design of circle radio tower signals orange, like it's so strong and it's

01:34:08   so, you know, so well branded that like, uh, you know, who cares about stupid, you

01:34:13   know, a refraction effect in the 27 OS is who knows it will even be there in 28.

01:34:17   So you were wise to keep things the way they are for the blue and the circle.

01:34:20   I don't mind it when, you know, when I saw it, I noted that it was blue, but like, yeah,

01:34:25   that works.

01:34:26   Cause as you noted, it's like, you know, the whole cliche of like teal and orange or whatever

01:34:30   complimentary colors that is attractive together.

01:34:32   It does change the branding a little bit, but it also changes it from more of like a, uh,

01:34:37   Halloween tiger thing with black and orange to be more like complimentary colors, more

01:34:42   artistic.

01:34:42   Um, my one criticism of this icon is that I want to have gone on through 87 iterations

01:34:47   trying to make the bottoms of the radio waves read better at small sizes.

01:34:50   Yeah.

01:34:51   And I mean, maybe, you know, maybe that can be done.

01:34:53   Honestly, I don't, when I, when you actually see it on device, you don't, you don't have

01:34:58   any problem.

01:34:58   I have, I'm looking at it shrunken down and big sizes looks amazing, right?

01:35:02   Shrunken down, comparing it to the current icon, the, the circle part of it is not the part

01:35:07   that stands out like the blue versus black.

01:35:09   That's not the thing I noticed.

01:35:10   The thing I noticed is at the bottom of the little, uh, things fade a little bit, but that's

01:35:13   me.

01:35:14   Uh, you know, I have my opinions and, and honestly, like I said, with a vast majority of my opinions,

01:35:19   Oh, I don't like this about this.

01:35:20   Change it to be that way.

01:35:21   And they would do it.

01:35:22   And then I would look at it and say, Nope, I was wrong.

01:35:25   So that could be, I actually did a few of those back and forth with, with the next icon where

01:35:29   I was like, can you try like this?

01:35:30   And Oh no, you're right.

01:35:31   Yeah.

01:35:32   But that's, that's the process.

01:35:33   Like you need to see, like you need to see it.

01:35:34   I mean, maybe they already know cause they've either already seen it or have more experience.

01:35:37   They know it's going to suck.

01:35:38   But as the client, you have to say, I need, show me it with this thing like that.

01:35:42   And then you have to be honest with yourself and say, just because I asked for it, like,

01:35:45   Oh, you gave me the thing that I wanted.

01:35:46   I'm happy with it.

01:35:47   Right.

01:35:47   I mean, I did it with all my icons.

01:35:49   It's like, ask for, ask to see the variation, see the variation and then judge it.

01:35:53   Honestly, did that make it better or not?

01:35:56   Or do you like it worse?

01:35:57   And most of my changes made things worse, but you have to, if you're honest about that,

01:36:00   hopefully you'll end up with an icon at the end that you like.

01:36:01   Yeah.

01:36:02   And, and with overcast, I want it to be really careful because not only does, you know, you know,

01:36:08   overcast has been around for such a long time.

01:36:09   The icon, like, I think they pretty much got it right the first time.

01:36:13   I mean, you know, there have been tweaked, you know, little tweaks over time, but they've

01:36:16   been really minor tweaks.

01:36:18   And so I didn't want to change the overcast branding because everyone loves it.

01:36:23   I love it.

01:36:23   Yeah, no, it's great.

01:36:24   It doesn't need to change.

01:36:25   Yeah.

01:36:25   The users love it.

01:36:26   Like, so it doesn't need to be like a whole new, you know, like the way Instagram changed

01:36:30   their icon radically, you know, a few years in and everyone hated it.

01:36:32   Like, it doesn't need that level of refresh.

01:36:35   It just needs like little tweaks to move forward over time with system conventions and minor

01:36:40   fashion changes.

01:36:41   But anyway.

01:36:42   All right.

01:36:43   So next, I'm like, all right, now I need, I need an icon for my new reminder app.

01:36:48   I have finally a name for the app.

01:36:52   I don't think I want to reveal it yet, but I went into this.

01:36:56   I gave them a very broad brief.

01:36:59   I'm like, all right, it's, you know, it's an app that's very, it has a very basic UI.

01:37:04   It's a, it's a reminders database front end that's simplified, focused on people who snooze

01:37:11   a lot.

01:37:11   I've been waiting for you to accidentally blur out the name of the app.

01:37:13   Keep going.

01:37:14   People who snooze a lot and if it's not reminding them constantly, like every day, like if you

01:37:19   dismiss the, the alert for reminder and it never reminds you again, like that thing will

01:37:22   never get done.

01:37:23   You know, it's, it's an app for, for forgetful people and for ADHD and, you know, people, people

01:37:29   whose brains work like mine, which is we need a lot of gentle reminding all the time about,

01:37:36   about tasks and we procrastinate and put them off a lot.

01:37:40   You know, most days I am snoozing at least five different things that are alerting me

01:37:46   every single day.

01:37:47   I'm like, I'll do it tomorrow, do it tomorrow, do it tomorrow.

01:37:49   Or yeah, kick, kick the can down the road.

01:37:52   That would have been a good name.

01:37:53   Anyway, kick the can.

01:37:55   That's, that'll be my backup name in case, because I've run into any trademark problems.

01:37:59   Anyway, I gave them the brief and I'm like, all right, I developed this app on the flight

01:38:04   on the way to my Hawaii big island family vacation and I loved visiting like the big

01:38:11   island.

01:38:11   I love like the lava flows coming off of the, the, you know, all the volcanoes and then that

01:38:15   kind of form the island in the middle.

01:38:17   There's all these like dark brown and black, like lava flows of different, you know, all

01:38:21   these like rocky, beautiful landscapes.

01:38:24   I loved visiting Kona coffee farms.

01:38:26   You know, I looked up like, well, you know, what, what is the, the volcano that the Kona

01:38:31   farms are on and, uh, you know, what's the shape of it?

01:38:34   Maybe I can involve that shape.

01:38:35   And I went back and forth, like before I, before we even had this thing, I was, I was going back

01:38:39   and forth with AI brainstorming of like, what kind of concepts can I work in here?

01:38:42   One of my favorite ones was like a sunrise because every day is a fresh start.

01:38:47   Like, that sounds great.

01:38:48   I love that.

01:38:49   And so I'm like, all right, what about a sunrise over the volcano that Kona coffee grows on?

01:38:56   And I even briefly, I'm like, oh, what about my old peace icon, which is a sunrise, which

01:39:02   I, I forget whether Louis or Brad made it, but it was one of their icons back in the day.

01:39:09   And I was like, all right, maybe I can involve the peace sunrise with this volcano, maybe with

01:39:15   coffee.

01:39:15   And I'm like, okay, so I gave, I gave this all to, to Louis and Luca.

01:39:20   And Louis, you know, very opinionated, but also very diplomatic.

01:39:23   And he was like, listen, this is a lot of concepts.

01:39:25   This is like too many things to work in.

01:39:28   Let's pare it down.

01:39:29   You can keep the name, you can keep the volcano, but you probably don't want that name with a

01:39:34   volcano.

01:39:34   It doesn't really work.

01:39:36   And it's like, okay, okay, okay.

01:39:37   And with the sunrise, I had a million, a million different, you know, ideas.

01:39:42   The problem with all of those ideas.

01:39:44   First, I was like, all right, what about a coffee leaf, like a coffee, because I visited

01:39:48   a coffee plantation.

01:39:49   What about like a, like a coffee leaf cluster with the coffee cherry?

01:39:52   Well, that just, it looks like a holly.

01:39:54   It doesn't look distinct.

01:39:55   It's a Christmas app, yeah.

01:39:57   Right.

01:39:57   All right.

01:39:57   What about the Kona volcano?

01:39:59   I forget, it's Mount, I forget which mountain it is, but it doesn't really have a distinct

01:40:04   shape because volcanoes don't look like cartoon volcanoes.

01:40:07   They look, they look mountains.

01:40:08   And so it doesn't really have like a very visually iconic shape.

01:40:12   You know, sunrises, sure, they're fine.

01:40:15   But you know, there's not that much distinct about that.

01:40:18   All the different other metaphors, like one of the things that I considered was a forget

01:40:23   me not flower.

01:40:24   Oh, that's great.

01:40:25   Forget me not to have a beautiful shape.

01:40:26   Well, that's used for like Alzheimer's and dementia organizations.

01:40:30   It's not really a happy association.

01:40:32   So I'm like, okay, I probably shouldn't use that.

01:40:35   And so like there was, there were all these different metaphors and ideas that I was trying

01:40:40   and that just, that I just was hitting walls with.

01:40:43   I couldn't get anywhere with any of them.

01:40:45   And finally, you know, within, within, you know, a day, uh, Louie and Luca came up with,

01:40:52   hey, what about a lighthouse?

01:40:54   Okay, let's talk.

01:40:57   So I also, I also told them, by the way, I'm like, I'm using this color, this dark red as

01:41:03   my tint color in the UI and I want to keep it.

01:41:07   I don't want to be talked out of the dark red.

01:41:09   And they're like, all right, we can work with that.

01:41:10   So this is the icon that they came up with.

01:41:12   And this was through some iteration.

01:41:14   The reason a lighthouse, I think is a, is a fun metaphor is that the whole role of the

01:41:20   app, I was saying like, it just constantly reminds you of things that you don't forget.

01:41:23   It's like a, basically like a beacon.

01:41:25   It's constantly, hey, hey, don't forget this.

01:41:28   Don't forget this.

01:41:29   Don't forget this.

01:41:29   And that's, that's kind of what a lighthouse does.

01:41:32   Like, you know, the way the lights swivel around, you get like the periodic.

01:41:35   And this was like, you know, when I was going back and forth with AI, it was giving me

01:41:38   all these different metaphors of like waves and things.

01:41:41   And it's just, it was so hard to come up with anything that wasn't already taken in the

01:41:45   productivity space.

01:41:46   And the lighthouse is better than all the AI generated ideas.

01:41:50   And that was, that was all Louie and Luca.

01:41:53   And I was like, oh, actually, I love that also because I love Fire Island and I would love

01:41:58   a way to represent Fire Island and Fire Island has an iconic lighthouse on it.

01:42:02   So I showed the picture and actually I didn't realize Luca grew up on Long Island and they've

01:42:07   been to the lighthouse.

01:42:07   So this actually is styled somewhat evocative of the Fire Island lighthouse with the stripe.

01:42:12   Like that's kind of how it looks.

01:42:14   It's interesting that you couldn't get talked out of your dark red, but it's like, what if

01:42:17   we just go with the Fire Island lighthouse kind of rusty maroon?

01:42:19   Well, the dark red, I like the dark red a lot.

01:42:24   First of all, I think it looks great in the UI.

01:42:26   And second of all, I like the idea of retaking red because red and reminders means overdue.

01:42:34   And if you work the way I work, you always have just a wall of red statuses in reminders.

01:42:39   And I like the idea of like, you know, I'm going to take that back.

01:42:42   I'm going to make the whole app red, black and white and just make it like this new,

01:42:46   dark, cool red.

01:42:48   And, you know, F your overdue red.

01:42:50   So anyway, so we went back and forth a few times.

01:42:55   And, you know, at one point I was like, oh, can you make the lighthouse bigger?

01:42:58   And I'm like, I do.

01:42:59   I recognize I just told designers make the logo bigger.

01:43:01   But it actually was the right move in that case.

01:43:04   And they also had the idea of what if we tie in the visual identity to Overcast's icon also.

01:43:11   And that's why it has the circle with a tower in the middle with something coming out of the tower,

01:43:17   you know, horizontally.

01:43:18   It just works so well.

01:43:22   And this shape, it goes, you know, all the different color modes, like the monochrome icon modes, the dark mode, like they just nailed this.

01:43:30   And I wouldn't have had any part of this concept without working with them.

01:43:34   Again, a huge part of their value.

01:43:36   Not only are they really great artists, but they're really good at coming up with branding and concepts, too.

01:43:41   Like and and they drew and like John was saying earlier, like the speed of iteration.

01:43:45   Like I was on my couch one night with my laptop and they were just cranking out.

01:43:49   How about this?

01:43:50   How about this?

01:43:50   And like I couldn't believe how quickly they were generating really good icons.

01:43:55   And then at the once we decided the direction to go, they're like, OK, we're going to draw this up for you.

01:44:00   Like, what were you just doing?

01:44:02   Like they're they're like in their minds, probably their rough drafts.

01:44:06   Those are their napkin sketches.

01:44:07   Yeah, right.

01:44:08   And they were like amazing.

01:44:10   I was like, I thought that was the fun.

01:44:12   Because even even their rough drafts, like whatever they were like, you know, crapping out with no time were amazing.

01:44:20   But then, you know, of course, you know, then the final one has all the nice specular highlights.

01:44:25   And, you know, it is more refined.

01:44:27   But I couldn't have been more happy with this.

01:44:30   And I and I showed it to a few people and everyone I showed it to was like, oh, yeah, that's it.

01:44:33   Nailed it.

01:44:34   Like, love it.

01:44:35   I gave them a very difficult problem in the sense that I really didn't know what I was looking for.

01:44:39   And I gave them way too many things to pick and they guided me correctly into something that was simpler and nicer and a better logo.

01:44:49   And I think we'll we'll help it stand out more in in a sea of checkmarks.

01:44:54   Yeah, I'm just so glad that it's not list items and checkmarks.

01:44:57   Because that's just that's an impossibility.

01:45:01   I mean, you could have asked for that and they would have done it for you if that's what you wanted.

01:45:03   But it's like, man, you think it's a crowded it's a crowded icon field if you're going to do checkmarks or line items.

01:45:08   No matter how you abstract them, no matter how you think you're stylizing them or being clever.

01:45:12   It's like, wow, there's a lot of icons with that.

01:45:13   Well, but and to be clear on that point, though, like like one one thing that Louie pointed out during the process, because I was saying, like, please don't make it look like a checkmark is everything else is a checkmark.

01:45:22   And he was like, well, most people are only going to have like one of these types of apps installed.

01:45:28   Like you're not really the users don't really care if it was like a checkmark or not, because they aren't seeing a wall of checkmark apps on their devices.

01:45:36   Like in the app store, you might see a whole bunch of those.

01:45:39   But I mean, look, let's be honest, like app store search is not something that was ever great.

01:45:44   But in its current form where it's just filled with ad slots and, you know, they're only going to turn that up.

01:45:49   Organic discovery on the app store is effectively dead.

01:45:54   Competition and just a flood of apps made it pretty bad for a while.

01:45:58   But with search ads and then increasing the search ad load and increasing the search ad size, Apple has destroyed organic discovery in the app store.

01:46:06   So no one is going to find this app by just searching for apps like ADHD reminders or whatever.

01:46:12   No one is going to find it that way.

01:46:14   It's it's going to all have to be paid marketing or, you know, social or referral marketing.

01:46:18   So I know better than to think than than to presume that the app store is going to do anything for me for this because they won't.

01:46:25   All they'll do is take more of my money.

01:46:27   And look, hey, Ternus proved me wrong.

01:46:29   I would love for this direction to change because I think it's horrendous.

01:46:33   But I also know the reality of the world.

01:46:36   Apple makes a bunch of money from app store search ads, and I don't think they're going to want to turn that off.

01:46:41   They're not even going to do anything that will turn it down.

01:46:43   They're going to only crank it up over time because every single this is the problem of services revenue every single time that there is a bit of a soft corner on the horizon.

01:46:53   They're going to want to crank whatever knobs they can crank to push those numbers up.

01:46:58   And when you already have an ad system in place, you can say, what if we just add an add more ads?

01:47:03   What if we just crank up the ad load a little bit like that's always a knob that is sitting right there.

01:47:09   So tempting to press when you when you when you need a little bit of a boost.

01:47:13   So we know they're going to do that over time.

01:47:15   So anyway, but Louie was good to point out like the sea of checkmarks is not as bad of a thing to avoid as I was assuming it is, because I was thinking of it as a big grid of apps on the app store.

01:47:27   It's all checkmarks, but no one ever sees that and no one's going to see my app in that anyway.

01:47:31   What people see this is on their home screens like that's so that matters a lot more than whatever everyone else is doing.

01:47:39   But that being said, I'm really glad it's not a checkmark.

01:47:41   I mean, you'll see the Apple reminders app, though, like the line item.

01:47:44   So at the very least, if you differentiate your icon from the reminders app icon helps it stand out.

01:47:48   I mean, I guess people can hide or delete that one, but like I'm not sure everybody does.

01:47:52   Yeah.

01:47:53   And my my my like draft icon looked a lot like the reminders icon.

01:47:57   So anyway, yeah, very, very pleased with with how this icon turned out.

01:48:02   And and working with Louie and Luca was just delightful.

01:48:06   All right.

01:48:07   So here's my critique.

01:48:08   I think the circle branding is a really good idea and I would have thought of that for the reminders icon.

01:48:14   I think the lighthouse is a great idea.

01:48:16   I'm kind of amazed that the lighthouse icon doesn't have any 27 refraction effects.

01:48:23   You're like, oh, it's light and it's like a reflecting and lens and surely we can do something with that.

01:48:27   But I can see why in this design there's not really a place for that to be here.

01:48:31   And it would just kind of muddy things up a little bit and it would like mess with your branding because the only things the light intersects with is a circular ring.

01:48:36   And you don't want to like refract that because that messes with the circle and then the inside part, which I think would just look muddy or whatever.

01:48:42   I would have 100 percent gone with the rusty brownish or more maroonish colors of the actual fire and lighthouse, which I know has been repainted several times.

01:48:52   And I don't I honestly don't even know exactly what color it is now, but it's black and white.

01:48:57   Put a link to the Wikipedia page where you can see a picture of it from some time in the past.

01:49:00   The roof of the building has always been kind of maroon and then the lighthouse itself has kind of been brownish, but there's a little bit of a reddish tint, especially at sunset.

01:49:07   I totally would have done that with the color of this because I'm so nostalgic for the fire on lighthouse.

01:49:11   But branding wise, it makes more sense to use the color from the ring.

01:49:15   And since you love this dark red color, this is the icon you wanted and that's what you got.

01:49:19   The blue, I would have definitely iterated 30 times in that blue because I got how many how many backgrounds that we have for like shades of gray for my stupid icon.

01:49:28   I just would have gone around forever in that blue.

01:49:31   It's kind of a sky blue, but maybe more of like a baby blue or like a there's some flower that's this color blue that I don't know the name of like and so that I probably would have chosen a different color, but it does go well with the red.

01:49:48   Yeah, overall, like the idea of this and how much better it stands out from the other icons and the thing I like the most about it is the the expansion of the light like you're, you know, cartoon representation of a lighthouse like the let's make the light rays look like they're a cone going outwards.

01:50:04   Right, because that's kind of like what when you were talking about the idea behind the app and everything, the idea of a conical shaped light illuminating things and alerting and saying you've got stuff to do that is expressed by the by the like I'm holding my arms out.

01:50:19   Now as I talk about that is expressed by like the the spreading cone of light, and I also particularly like the white square coming right at you say yes, you yes, you have things to do like coming right into your face.

01:50:33   So yeah, good job.

01:50:34   I went back and forth a few times with them, you know, like tweaking the shapes a little bit here and there.

01:50:38   And you know, there was never there was never any friction going back and forth with them on stuff like they're, you know, they're professionals.

01:50:44   And and so it wasn't there was none of that kind of like that, like, you know, difficult artist dynamic, you know, like there's none of that like attitude.

01:50:54   It was just like, okay, yeah, let's try that.

01:50:55   And then we try.

01:50:56   Oh, yeah, that's actually better.

01:50:57   You know, it was great.

01:50:58   There was even, you know, at one point I said, hey, let's try it without the circle just being the lighthouse, you know, full.

01:51:03   Full size of the icon and they whipped it together like, oh, yeah, actually, now that you show us that you're right, that is worse.

01:51:10   Go back to the circle like it was lots of iteration like that.

01:51:13   And it was all very pleasant and very nice to do.

01:51:16   I think this looks great.

01:51:18   I think my favorite part of it, as silly as it sounds, might be the circle branding that to tie it in with Overcast.

01:51:24   I really think that's a clever idea that I don't think I would have come up with, but I love now that I see it.

01:51:29   Yeah.

01:51:30   And like when you see these icons, you know, near each other, it just they just look right together.

01:51:35   Like they just they look really good together.

01:51:36   Yeah.

01:51:37   Yeah.

01:51:37   One of the to wrap this up, one of the things that I said in my like proposals for icons that I always say in all my proposals, the icons are just going to sound wrong or possibly rude.

01:51:47   But it is how I think about the process is that the icon should be better than the app.

01:51:51   Oh, it is like like, you know, whatever you think your app does and how great you think it is or whatever.

01:51:58   You always want an icon that looks like, well, that looks like it's an icon for an even better app than yours.

01:52:02   That is the sign of a good icon where the icon is better than the app where you're like the app is good and I like it and all.

01:52:08   But man, that icon makes it seem like this is going to be the best app in the universe.

01:52:11   And it's like, well, don't you want you don't want them to do that because they're going to be disappointed because your app is not as good as the icon.

01:52:15   I'm like, no, that's what I want out of an icon.

01:52:17   I want the icon to elevate the app.

01:52:19   Like that's that's why I tell people like, oh, I don't want to spend all this money because if you if you actually pay and don't have a podcast where you give sponsorship slots for your icons like we do,

01:52:26   If you actually pay for your icons like I did for, you know, hyperspace, for example, you're like, oh, that seems like so much money.

01:52:31   It's not.

01:52:31   It is the best money you will spend on your app.

01:52:34   Like everyone, you know, you have to have your obviously app has to serve a need and be useful and blah, blah, blah.

01:52:38   You're like, oh, should I hire a designer to to change all the screens on my app?

01:52:42   By all means, if you can do that.

01:52:43   But if you only have a very limited amount of money, spend it on the icon icon is so important.

01:52:49   And so many apps I know of.

01:52:51   I'm like, that's that that app's OK, but the icon makes it seem so much better than it actually is.

01:52:56   So that's what I tell everybody of my things.

01:52:58   I want your icon to be better than my app, which is not hard because my apps aren't that complicated and amazing.

01:53:02   But that is the goal of the icons.

01:53:04   And the second thing I'll say is and this is the sign of a successful engagement with a designer of any kind is, you know, I guess, you know, it has to fulfill the needs of the thing you're designing or whatever.

01:53:16   But in the end, also, the client has to be happy.

01:53:19   And I think looking at all of our icons, I think my icons are the best.

01:53:23   And you know why?

01:53:23   Because they're my icons and they're what I wanted.

01:53:26   And I better think that that's the whole point of it.

01:53:27   It doesn't mean my icons actually are better.

01:53:29   It's like, oh, yeah, I should be happier with my icon than I am with yours because those are your icons.

01:53:33   And you ask them.

01:53:34   And I hope you feel the same way that your icons are better than mine.

01:53:36   And that is the sign of a successful engagement with a designer.

01:53:39   You should come away happy.

01:53:40   You should be like, I cannot believe how great this is.

01:53:42   And I look at my icons and your icons.

01:53:44   I'm like, oh, I got the best icons, clearly.

01:53:45   Yep, yep.

01:53:47   No, they are really great.

01:53:50   And I apologize for this lasting as long as it did.

01:53:52   But the conversation is really about the icons, not about the two of them.

01:53:55   But if you're interested, Louie and Luca over at parakeet.co, not .com, .co.

01:54:00   Check them out.

01:54:01   They're really great.

01:54:02   Yeah.

01:54:03   All right, let's move on.

01:54:04   And Apple has done something kind of interesting.

01:54:07   And Tim Hardwick over at MacRumors reports, in macOS Tahoe 26.4, Apple introduced a new security

01:54:14   pop-up that warns Mac users when they paste a command into the Terminal app that could be

01:54:17   harmful.

01:54:18   Apple has now published a support document explaining why the pop-up warning appears.

01:54:22   That support document and this MacRumors article will both be linked in the show notes.

01:54:26   The support document is called, if your Mac blocks a Terminal command, paste or script.

01:54:30   This alert appears if you don't regularly use Terminal and you copied the command from

01:54:34   somewhere like a website, chat agent, or messaging or email app.

01:54:37   Scammers use these channels to instruct people to paste malicious commands into Terminal to

01:54:41   harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

01:54:43   This alert helps make sure that you aren't tricked into running a command that you didn't

01:54:47   expect.

01:54:47   I think this is interesting that they say specifically, if you don't regularly use Terminal.

01:54:54   I think that's doing a lot of work in a good way there.

01:54:56   Yeah.

01:54:56   When I first saw this feature come up, I'm like, oh no.

01:54:59   Because I copy and paste stuff into Terminal all the time.

01:55:01   This is going to be another annoyance where it's like constantly in my face, warning me

01:55:05   about things.

01:55:05   And I have never seen this dialog box.

01:55:08   And I've pasted a lot of things into the Terminal on Tahoe.

01:55:11   Because even though I'm not running on my main Mac, I do dev work on it or whatever.

01:55:14   So however they calibrated that to like decide, should we annoy you with this or not?

01:55:19   I think they did a pretty good job because it has basically never bothered me.

01:55:22   And it also makes me think, okay, well then how is this actually saving me from anything?

01:55:26   Is this security feature actually useful if it's like, oh, I don't want to bother people

01:55:31   who use the Terminal a lot?

01:55:32   I think one of the other things they use to determine whether they should bother you with

01:55:36   these dialogues is whether or not you have the dev tools installed.

01:55:39   Like whether you have Xcode installed as another signal in their formula for should I warn

01:55:43   you about this or not?

01:55:45   But I guess the thought is like the people who, I don't know if this is true, but the

01:55:49   thinking is the people who are the most vulnerable, the people who don't regularly use a terminal,

01:55:51   who don't have dev tools installed.

01:55:53   The reality is we are all equally vulnerable to getting screwed by this.

01:55:57   How many times have all of us pasted in curl, pipe, you know, curl URL, pipe bash because

01:56:04   some website told us to, which is just incredibly ill-advised.

01:56:10   But I think the reason we all do it is like we make a microsecond judgment.

01:56:15   of the trustworthiness of some website and the potential consequences of deleting our entire

01:56:20   home directory.

01:56:20   And we just roll the dice and figure, look, if this website really was malicious and someone

01:56:25   had replaced this install script with a script that exfiltrates all of my data, I probably

01:56:31   would have heard about it by now.

01:56:32   So I'm just going to roll the dice and do it.

01:56:34   That's a terrible way to live.

01:56:35   We shouldn't do that.

01:56:36   And anytime I can avoid running a curl, pipe, bash, I avoid it like the plague.

01:56:42   But I have to admit, sometimes I just do it.

01:56:44   And so this is what it's trying to save you from.

01:56:46   Yep.

01:56:47   So the actual dialogue reads as follows.

01:56:51   Possible malware paste blocked.

01:56:53   Your Mac has not been harmed.

01:56:54   Scammers often encourage pasting texts into terminal to try and harm your Mac or compromise

01:56:59   your privacy.

01:56:59   These instructions are commonly offered via websites, chat agents, apps, files, or a phone

01:57:03   call.

01:57:03   Then you get two options, paste anyway or don't paste.

01:57:06   Yeah, I like that they try to tell you, like, maybe you're talking to someone on the phone

01:57:09   right now.

01:57:09   Maybe you're having a chat with them.

01:57:10   Are they telling you to paste a bunch of stuff in your terminal?

01:57:12   Beware.

01:57:13   They try to phrase it in a nice way.

01:57:15   I would probably be more hyperbolic to be like, danger, be careful.

01:57:20   You know, did someone tell you to do this?

01:57:24   Because you can't say, make sure you know what the command is doing.

01:57:27   Because nobody, like, if you don't use a terminal, you don't know what the command is doing.

01:57:30   It's just giving you, hopefully, a microsecond of pause to say, maybe think about this again.

01:57:35   And maybe people will just click the default button and say, paste anyway, yada, yada.

01:57:39   And obviously, the scammers will explicitly direct you, oh, your computer may say this,

01:57:42   but don't worry.

01:57:43   Like, social engineering, in the end, wins no matter what.

01:57:46   Because the social engineers know what they're facing, and they will instruct you that this

01:57:51   is a normal thing, and it's just your computer trying to be safe.

01:57:53   But rest assured that what I'm telling you to do is safe, because I'm your friend.

01:57:56   So please do it.

01:57:57   That's how social engineering works.

01:57:58   Nothing can save everybody, but I think this is a useful feature to add.

01:58:03   Yeah, this is very smart.

01:58:05   If your Mac shows a malware-detected paste-blocked or malicious script-blocked alert, these alerts

01:58:12   appear if macOS detects a command or script that contains known malware and blocks it.

01:58:16   And so the difference here is the dialogue says, your copy and paste was blocked because it

01:58:22   contains malware.

01:58:22   This action did not harm your Mac.

01:58:24   Yeah, and that's the real key to this is, like, they're obviously keeping a database

01:58:28   of something, you know, whatever, regular expressions that match commands.

01:58:31   You know, it's a cat-and-mouse game.

01:58:32   But once they find out, hey, this website has been, you know, compromised, and their, you know,

01:58:40   curl URL pipe bash thing now contains malware, hopefully they can quickly add that to the database.

01:58:47   And then if you go and paste it, let's say, you know, eight hours or 24 hours after the

01:58:52   malware is detected, your Mac will say, I'm not even going to give you the option.

01:58:55   I know for a fact this thing has been compromised.

01:58:57   Like, whether it is a compromised, legitimate website or like an obvious malware website with

01:59:01   a URL that looks like a legitimate one but isn't because they have a domain name with like

01:59:05   a typo in it or something like that.

01:59:06   This is where the real protection comes in, which is every single thing you paste into

01:59:09   Terminal they're looking at and comparing about their list of known malware that I hope they're

01:59:13   keeping up to date.

01:59:14   So I think this is a great feature.

01:59:16   There's actually, um, there's a story that came out, uh, just today about the Opera web

01:59:21   browser adding this feature, like specifically just in the web browser itself.

01:59:27   And this is, this is like the multiple layers of protection, like adding it to terminal.

01:59:30   Shouldn't this be OS wide?

01:59:32   Should it be per app?

01:59:33   Um, every little bit of this helps any place where there is an app, uh, or an operating system

01:59:40   or some sort of subsystem where it's in a position to potentially keep track of a list of known

01:59:46   bad things and check them for them.

01:59:48   You know, this is a great use of our comparatively infinite resources.

01:59:51   Like, Oh, I don't want something looking at my paste board.

01:59:53   Every time I paste them, it's like this, it's two microseconds, the, the amount of grief

01:59:58   it will save you by catching you from installing malware is great.

02:00:01   So I heartily endorse this feature, both for the reason I said earlier that I've never had

02:00:05   to be bothered by it.

02:00:06   And the other reason, which is if I ever do do something stupid, I have some chance that

02:00:10   the Mac OS is going to save me from it.

02:00:12   All right.

02:00:13   Let's talk about Xcode 27 and, uh, John, you've made a discovery with regard to it.

02:00:18   Tell me about it.

02:00:18   When I was watching WWDC sessions, I think where I saw it first, a couple of people mentioned

02:00:23   maybe with like the group labs or this Q and a that Xcode 27 adds a menu command to do

02:00:29   something that we, Apple platform developers have been doing manually for many years, which

02:00:34   is deleting the derived data folder.

02:00:37   Um, uh, when Xcode does stuff and builds your app and everything, it has a folder that I don't

02:00:44   know where it is.

02:00:44   It's like a library application support Xcode or library developer Xcode somewhere in your

02:00:48   library directory.

02:00:49   There is a directory called derived data that Xcode fills with, I would assume intermediary

02:00:54   products of building or anyway, it's like it says data derived from the stuff that you're

02:00:58   doing.

02:00:59   Um, and sometimes when you're using Xcode, like your build starts failing or your app won't

02:01:05   launch and you can't figure out why.

02:01:06   And the folk wisdom is, Oh, just delete the contents of your derived data folder and then just rebuild.

02:01:13   And for you, for since, you know, for years and years, uh, uh, Xcode has had a command,

02:01:17   you know, command shift K.

02:01:18   I don't know what the actual command is, which is like, what is it?

02:01:21   Delete build products or something.

02:01:22   There's like a menu command and a keyboard shortcut that says clean build clean.

02:01:26   Yeah.

02:01:27   Clean, clean build products or something like that.

02:01:29   You're like, why would it has that command?

02:01:31   Why don't you just use that command?

02:01:32   Well, experience has shown that sometimes you hit command shift K and you hit, you hit command

02:01:38   B or command R to build or run and it still fails.

02:01:41   And that's why everybody says, Oh, command shift K isn't enough.

02:01:44   You have to go to the terminal type R minus RF to path to your derived data folder.

02:01:49   Don't make it any typos.

02:01:50   Don't like very carefully.

02:01:52   And there's apps that do it.

02:01:54   It's like the dev cleaner app that will delete your derived data folder.

02:01:56   And so in Xcode 27, Apple essentially relented and said, we know everyone is deleting their

02:02:04   derived data folders.

02:02:05   So we're going to put a menu command in addition to the existing command shift K command, a new

02:02:10   command that I forget what it's called, like delete derived data or something like that,

02:02:13   because we know you're doing it anyway.

02:02:15   And rather than you manually typing an RM command or dragging a thing to the folder or whatever,

02:02:20   why don't you just let us do it safely?

02:02:22   And this was a topic of conversation and commentary, sort of like off script commentary, many of

02:02:30   the group labs and stuff where Apple folks talked about the feature.

02:02:36   And this kind of reminds me of the sync now button or whatever in messages on Mac OS, where

02:02:43   like if you have iMessage syncing to the cloud messages, I believe is the first app Apple has

02:02:47   made in ages where they added a button that when you click it, it does the syncing like

02:02:53   sync now.

02:02:53   Right.

02:02:54   And that was the whole idea behind syncing and the lack of those buttons is, oh, you should

02:03:00   never have to manually control this or monitor it or deal with it.

02:03:03   We will just sync what needs to be synced when it needs to be synced.

02:03:06   And you shouldn't have to worry about it at all.

02:03:07   But in reality, there are situations where you're like, come on, when is it going to

02:03:13   sync?

02:03:14   And it's trying to do what it thinks the right thing to do is saving your battery or waiting

02:03:17   until later or doesn't know there's data to dink.

02:03:19   And you're like, I just wish I had a button that would say just sync stuff now.

02:03:23   And so that one app added one.

02:03:25   And in some ways, it's an admission of defeat.

02:03:28   We tried to make a completely transparent system where you would never have to worry about when

02:03:32   things sync and things would just always be in sync everywhere.

02:03:34   But obviously, we failed because no system can be that perfect.

02:03:38   And we're not.

02:03:39   Our systems aren't even good enough that nobody ever wants it to sync.

02:03:43   Now, people do want it to sync now sometimes.

02:03:45   And so we'll add a button.

02:03:47   Now, what does that button do?

02:03:49   Is it like the elevator door close button where it just makes us feel better by disabling

02:03:52   itself after we click it for a while and then reenabling?

02:03:55   It's like, yeah, we did the sync totally.

02:03:56   When in reality, it's just a timer and it's faking us out.

02:03:59   Like the door close elevator button, if it makes people feel better, it's still kind of

02:04:02   doing its job, even if it doesn't actually close the doors on the elevator.

02:04:06   So I do still have suspicions about the sync button, but I'm pretty sure it does something

02:04:10   because I use it occasionally.

02:04:11   And when I click it, it does sync.

02:04:13   And maybe I'm being fooled.

02:04:14   But anyway, delete derived data.

02:04:17   Is it the elevator door close button?

02:04:19   Is it giving up on the notion that like we know there's something wrong with Xcode sometimes

02:04:26   and the only solution is delete derived data?

02:04:27   And we wish that wasn't the case, but sometimes it is the case.

02:04:31   Or the theory presented by Apple people, which I think is the actual truth.

02:04:36   When you have some problem in Xcode that's causing your thing not to build or whatever

02:04:41   and deleting derived data fixes it, it's very often a sign that something is screwed up about

02:04:49   your project.

02:04:50   Usually you have some dependency wrong.

02:04:52   You haven't expressed a dependency that exists between some submodules such that when you run

02:04:57   a parallel build, if you get lucky and thing that depends on the other thing happens to go

02:05:02   for, you know, the thing that you depend on goes first and then the thing that depends on it

02:05:05   goes second.

02:05:06   Everything's great and it works fine.

02:05:08   But because builds happen in parallel and you can't guarantee timing, sometimes when you

02:05:12   build it, the thing that depends on it gets built after the thing that depends on it.

02:05:16   And it's so you're it's never going to work.

02:05:18   Right.

02:05:19   And that's because you haven't correctly expressed the dependency in your project and you've just

02:05:24   been coasting on luck.

02:05:25   So, yeah, deleting derived data does, quote unquote, fix it.

02:05:29   But the problem is in your project.

02:05:31   And so I think this is an even more powerful sign where Apple saying, even though this probably

02:05:37   isn't our fault most of the time, it's probably your fault.

02:05:41   We still know that there are lots of people who are going to delete the contents of their

02:05:46   derived data folder as a regular course of doing stuff.

02:05:48   And even though it's kind of like wrong, like I'm sure that's why this feature hasn't been

02:05:52   added for years.

02:05:52   Hey, every once in a while, it might be the right thing to do.

02:05:57   And even if it is wrong, shouldn't we just make our app helpful to our users, even though

02:06:01   we know most of the time it's because their project is screwed up?

02:06:05   And that, I think, is one of the most hopeful signs from Apple software design department that

02:06:11   I've seen in years right up there with the sync button and messages where they are willingly

02:06:16   giving us a feature, even when, you know, the problem is not their fault, just to try to

02:06:25   make their app more useful and feel better to customers.

02:06:28   I think the next iteration of this is, hey, please find all the dependency problems in our

02:06:31   program that are causing this to happen.

02:06:32   But, you know, one step at a time.

02:06:34   So I give delete derived data a thumbs up, even though it's it's probably still highlighting

02:06:40   a problem in our projects.

02:06:41   Yeah, I agree with everything you said.

02:06:42   I think this is great.

02:06:43   I do this dance constantly.

02:06:45   Do you do you?

02:06:46   That was my question to you, too.

02:06:47   Do you to delete derived data constantly?

02:06:49   I shouldn't have said constantly.

02:06:50   It's frequent enough that it annoys me every time I do it, because then I have to, you know,

02:06:54   I typically can get by with what I need by doing what is a command shift K or whatever we talked

02:06:59   about earlier that is, you know, a clean build folder.

02:07:02   But occasionally I shouldn't have said constantly.

02:07:04   Occasionally, I don't know, maybe once or twice a month, I'll have to go in there and

02:07:08   just toss everything in derived data and start anew.

02:07:11   You, Marco, do you delete derived data?

02:07:13   Almost never.

02:07:14   This is not even like this is a thing like I've used the the app DevCleaner, which is a fun

02:07:20   app.

02:07:20   It's like a little app for the Mac that basically like helps you clear out and find like huge

02:07:27   storage usage from Xcode, especially for iOS developers.

02:07:30   There's been a number of needs of this over the years and DevCleaner always keeps up.

02:07:34   Yeah, this is very good.

02:07:35   And by the way, Xcode added features that they haven't Sherlock DevCleaner, but Xcode

02:07:39   itself now has like that.

02:07:41   You can look at the installed components and delete stuff from there.

02:07:43   So they've taken some lessons from DevCleaner by incorporating some of those.

02:07:46   But DevCleaner still goes a little bit farther.

02:07:48   Yeah.

02:07:48   Yeah.

02:07:49   DevCleaner is great.

02:07:51   I can recommend it.

02:07:51   But yeah, this basically integrates, you know, some some of that functionality is Xcode.

02:07:55   But yeah, I almost never do this.

02:07:58   It's it is very rare for me to have a problem that is not solved by either cleaning the build

02:08:03   folder or quitting and restarting Xcode.

02:08:06   Yeah, my main use of delete derived data is with betas because my luck with betas building

02:08:12   my apps is terrible.

02:08:13   As I said, the last the first beta of Golden Gate could not even debug maps.

02:08:17   Beta two of Xcode can.

02:08:18   I don't know what the problem was.

02:08:19   I don't care.

02:08:20   But when things are buggy and broken and betas of Xcode on beta OSes, delete derived data is

02:08:25   my friend.

02:08:26   But I'm pretty sure I've literally never done delete derived data on a non beta Xcode

02:08:32   on a beta OS.

02:08:33   Like I mean, release versions of stuff.

02:08:35   I've pretty much never had to do it.

02:08:37   I do use DevCleaner.

02:08:38   So maybe I'm, you know, cleaning it out as a matter of course, because DevCleaner actually

02:08:41   will remind you, hey, you haven't run DevCleaner in a while.

02:08:43   Maybe you should run it.

02:08:44   It's a nice app.

02:08:45   But I don't have all the weird iOS SDKs and simulators installed.

02:08:48   Like that's where it builds up.

02:08:49   Like, oh, you have you have a simulator for iOS 12 in here.

02:08:52   Do you still need that?

02:08:53   Probably not.

02:08:54   That'll save you some disk space.

02:08:56   But yeah, I don't expect to use this command, but I really like what it says about the

02:09:00   the pragmatic nature of Apple's software decisions.

02:09:05   And I hope we see more things like that.

02:09:06   Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Parakeet and ZocDoc.

02:09:10   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

02:09:12   You can join us at ATP.fm slash join.

02:09:15   One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.

02:09:19   This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about should Apple create a handheld

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02:09:29   Thanks, everybody.

02:09:29   We'll talk to you next week.

02:09:32   Now the show is over.

02:09:37   They didn't even mean to begin.

02:09:39   Because it was accidental.

02:09:41   Oh, it was accidental.

02:09:44   John didn't do any research.

02:09:47   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

02:09:50   Because it was accidental.

02:09:51   Because it was accidental.

02:09:52   Because it was accidental.

02:09:52   Accidental.

02:09:53   It was accidental.

02:09:54   Accidental.

02:09:54   Accidental.

02:09:55   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

02:10:00   And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

02:10:10   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-

02:10:40   than i have i don't think there's i know you're snarking i don't think there's anything to know

02:10:45   i will say that if you haven't listened to the new album um you should do so of course i have

02:10:50   in fact so i what what uh what i've been told in my household is that uh the the music of my

02:10:58   bands that i like is more tolerable when it's their studio recordings than when it's their

02:11:02   live recordings um and so the the day i was told that i immediately started playing in the car

02:11:09   the new album which i it's big modern right that's the new album yes yes i'm trying to it's very yellow

02:11:14   um yes yeah so that and i believe that was immediately regretted by uh the other members

02:11:21   of the family but uh but yes i i do like the new album a lot yeah so um i would i would check that

02:11:27   out again like listen to it on the way down or something uh my personal favorites if you're

02:11:31   listening uh you know for those of you who are perhaps not as familiar with goose i i really enjoy

02:11:36   uh savenger i think i'm pronouncing that right it's the third track on the album

02:11:39   it's very inspired by 80s but not straight 80s if that makes any sense like it's got some of that

02:11:46   vibe from the 80s but it's not like oh this could have been recorded you know 40 years ago or whatever

02:11:51   uh good to be they often do a very extended and very good jam on there in fact one of my favorite

02:11:57   jams of the year so far is a good to be um from i think uh florida maybe i'd have to look it up

02:12:03   uh and torero which i did hear in virginia beach and is also uh excellent so those are my three

02:12:09   favorites off the new album um no it's exactly what you what you expect like when we went um it was

02:12:15   great when we went in october now there's obviously a little bit newer newer and different material when i

02:12:21   went a few weeks ago um i think we talked about on the show but we were in the general admission section

02:12:26   which very glad i tried very glad to never do that again because i'm old for that now i am way too old

02:12:33   for that oh yeah i always buy seats yep yep and uh suffice to say that marco is returning to virginia

02:12:38   to go uh with me to see fish i see fish jeezy peasy he would he would have loved that next year we'll see

02:12:44   fish together yeah we'll see you need one more year of goose before you're ready for that right

02:12:50   right uh but anyway but uh we we worked together uh we actually were on the phone with each other

02:12:55   trying to figure out which one of us had the better seats and it turned out that i almost got the marco

02:12:59   seats from from uh when we saw them in richmond which is to say the very front row of the seated

02:13:04   section but behind all the lunatics in general admission so uh no i'm i'm very much looking forward

02:13:10   to you going uh depending on what i'm doing this evening um i might be able to actually sit down

02:13:15   and watch it because again as we've talked about numerous times i won't belabor this but uh if you

02:13:20   go to nugs.net you can pay for a subscription and you can uh actually watch live broadcasts of many bands

02:13:27   including but not limited to goose um and so uh i will hopefully be able to see some of that show

02:13:33   tonight and certainly within 48 hours of it being done uh you and i can go and either grab it from nugs

02:13:40   or you know grab it from band camp or whatever so i'm very much looking forward to it to the degree

02:13:44   you can share what is the transit scenario to get you there are you training the whole way

02:13:49   no i'm i'm literally taking i'm taking a ferry in like an hour to ferry to the to the mainland john

02:13:56   um and then uh just driving for you know yeah driving two hours to new jersey that's the mainland

02:14:03   new jersey sure okay is this is an outdoor it's like a i don't know the venue is it an outdoor thing

02:14:10   uh i don't actually i wanted to look that up before i left it's a pnc arts center i forgot i think it's

02:14:16   indoor oh no it's outdoor yeah well that bring bring your fancy sunscreen oh yeah oh that's true well i

02:14:22   mean it does start at seven so it's i'm not going to need that much sunscreen but i'm still out of

02:14:27   so maybe you don't need it but like yeah i wonder if it's going to be because it's it's hot

02:14:30   hot today at least up here it's hot yeah that's what that's why the reason i was going to look up the

02:14:33   venue before i left is like do i wear do i bring pants if it's maybe like a big indoor air conditioned

02:14:38   thing maybe i'd bring pants but no i'm bringing shorts it's it's a shorts kind of venue and this

02:14:42   time i'm not going to have my pocket in my front shorts your wallet you mean yeah oh yeah right

02:14:45   sorry did you get your replacement wallet yet or is it still coming i sure did i i got my new

02:14:50   i should link to it in the show notes um dream of the 90s is still alive marco you have a wallet

02:14:54   chain i don't think that was ever your style but you know maybe it could be slim fold that's it it's

02:15:01   the slim fold wallet um yeah i will link to it this is this is the one i got the um the micro tyvek but

02:15:08   otherwise the microsoft shell is what i've been using all these years tyvek your wallet is made of house

02:15:13   wrap yeah the tyvek just is even lighter weight but here the the soft shell is like the the more

02:15:18   normal looking one i like this because it still allows me to carry like some cash which i don't

02:15:26   use a lot of cash during the rest of the year but on fire island a lot of things here use cash and when

02:15:30   you go to europe you like to give hundreds of dollars to the pickpockets yeah well you know you have to

02:15:34   support the local economy anyway these wallets are great because they um they weigh nothing and i think

02:15:42   this is originally from dan provost of studio neat i think i heard about it from him first this is a

02:15:47   fantastic kind of minimal very lightweight wallet um i very much enjoy it what color is yours orange

02:15:54   well so i actually did i got myself the orange one of the of the microsoft shell also because i figure

02:16:00   like i think it's a limited edition so i wanted to get that but the tyvek one i'm using currently is the

02:16:04   reddish one the um the red pattern uh to go back a brief step to goose uh because that's all i ever talk

02:16:10   about these days um i noticed because i follow them on instagram and they had i either posted or

02:16:16   reposted that i believe was pnc uh the pnc center had said because of the heat you can bring i think it

02:16:24   was up to two water bottles for a sum total of a gallon of water it's gonna be big lines in the bathroom

02:16:31   right i don't know what it is in sensible units it's probably a few liters but like a lot of water can come

02:16:38   with you in order in order to survive yeah especially because like i mean look not only

02:16:42   is it a concert it's a jam band concert so there's a good deal of drug use going on and many of those

02:16:47   drugs make you very thirsty so i i think that's probably very good advice also it's gonna go on

02:16:52   for a long time yeah oh yes yeah i mean honestly if i were you i really would bring at least one

02:16:57   large water or you may double check my math on this but i would bring a large water bottle because

02:17:01   it is going to be toasty for sure have you ever seen the i saw somebody the other day here at the

02:17:06   beach with one of those like around the neck personal i guess air conditioners or fans yes it's like a fan

02:17:14   or something yep yep a little neck air conditioner yeah does that do anything oh they they do but they're

02:17:19   like the ones that cool you also tend to be heavy because they have to be powerful and they need

02:17:24   batteries and so it's like it's a trade-off like do you want a heavy thing on your shoulders and

02:17:27   around your neck in exchange for the cooling uh i don't know it it looked like something that was

02:17:32   really not worth the the size and bulk but i i mean maybe they maybe it's one of those like

02:17:37   secret gadget hacks that you just that work really well and no one really talks about it but it did not

02:17:43   look that way i mean you just need someone else you just need your your uh assistant to hold it uh

02:17:49   you know so it's pointing at your neck and then you just spritz some water on it you know whatever

02:17:52   it takes to stay cool but yeah for what it's worth aaron got me uh for christmas i think it was

02:17:57   kind of as a gag gift but kind of not it's a fan that has two belt clips on it just hear me out

02:18:05   hear me out has two belt clips on it one of which is facing like the u of the belt clip is facing

02:18:10   upward and the u of the belt clip the other one is facing downward so you can fan your feet no hold on

02:18:15   so on either side of the fan there's you know there's a clip and the idea is you clip one side

02:18:21   to your shorts or whatever and the other side gets clipped to your shirt so what this does is it

02:18:27   blasts air up your back huh i probably look like a complete freaking moron on the one or two times

02:18:34   i've ever used this but it is delightful because you're getting cold air blown right up your back

02:18:40   or perhaps your front if you wanted to put it there or whatever uh but it is incredible the difference it

02:18:46   makes even if it's just blowing warm air the fact that the air is moving really really helps can you

02:18:51   mount it upside down and blow air into your pants you probably could yeah i don't see any reason why

02:18:54   not um you i will see if i can dig up a link for the show notes no promises but uh that actually

02:19:00   works far better than you would think it would okay that's and and i feel like too like yes you

02:19:05   probably do look ridiculous but when it's that hot fashion is out the window like right shorts are

02:19:11   already a pretty significant fashion compromise you do what you got to do when it's when it gets

02:19:17   that hot it's like all right you know and and also like especially in this context like at a jam band

02:19:21   concert you're not going to be the least fashionable person in any row don't worry yep i think i did find

02:19:27   i don't have it next to me but i'm pretty sure i found it for the show notes uh i just linked it in

02:19:31   the chat room as well uh so you can check that out it again i probably not not doing the world's

02:19:35   greatest job describing it but you can sort of kind of get the gist as you look at all these

02:19:38   different pictures um actually one of them is shown as like having it around the neck which i

02:19:43   don't recommend but you can see that there's um if you look at like the fourth image they show three

02:19:48   different wearing styles and the one i'm talking about is basically having your shirt tucked into it

02:19:53   so that you're blowing air up your shirt it's actually really nice i love the the picture of the

02:19:57   guy holding the delivery box unimaginable cooling effect look how happy he is yep so much like how happy

02:20:06   is to have this photoshopped onto him yeah yeah right oh yeah yeah i like the fake photoshop uh sweat on

02:20:13   the left hand side of this image as well yeah also he's dripping sweat but his shirt looks pretty dry

02:20:18   yep ah good stuff anyway have fun tonight i'm very very jealous uh hopefully you get a really good

02:20:23   set list and and have at least a couple of really good jams thank you