Pre-show: App Store reorganization 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Insider: Domestic Workflows Follow-up: iPhone 16 “Capture Button” (via Aaron Dippner) iPhone 16 Pro’s fourth color More from MacRumors Microsoft Zune Available on Amazon! System color picker (via Gus Mueller) NSColorPanel Screen recording Vista prompts (via Craig Hockenberry) Persistent Content Capture Moom Remote access software (via Anonymous) CIRP Mac sales report from last week’s Overtime (via Phil Marshall & Josh Lowitz) Patreon maybe is using Apple as a scapegoat? ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED lives on (via AJ) Arc known issues for the Sequoia beta Reddit thread Fortnite is on iOS in 🇪🇺 On the Epic Games store Also on AltStore PAL Epic puts its money where its mouth is Apple’s AI prompts discovered in public betas Reddit thread Cabel’s issue Your new best friend is AI Reveal trailer ELIZA Hang in there! Tamagotchi Ask ATP: How should we manage batteries on our devices? (via Jake DeGroot) macOS: System Settings → Battery → The (i) next to Battery Health → Optimized Battery Charging Do people actually update their ★☆☆☆☆ reviews if issues get fixed? (via Patrick) An aside about Overcast plans, including a bombshell Should apps have open bug trackers? (via shac ron) Why don’t most podcast apps show per-episode show art? (via Mike Shafer) Post-show: Revisiting Marco’s kink Ubiquiti Cameras Flex switch Members-only ATP Overtime: More rumors about Apple robots Gurman Supply chain 9to5Mac on manufacturer MacRumors on plans Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
how's it going not too bad how about you good it just occurred to me i already started recording before you showed up so you're listening to me uh briefly watch some tickety talks uh that some friends had sent me there is no less cool way to say that than the way you just said that
There's breaking news today that apparently Apple is now dividing the king of the App Store into two different positions. I guess one for the traditional App Store and one for the EU and other countries like bespoke App Stores. And I was saying to John, we should talk about this because otherwise we're going to have everyone writing into us saying, hey, you didn't talk about that. What's the deal?
And John, you seem to think it's not worth talking about.
No, I don't think this is super interesting unless we get more information than we have right now. So we all know, if you're listening to this show, that there's a bunch of different rules that Apple has to follow in the EU and soon to be in other countries. In fact, there already is in some of the countries, different rules.
And so they're dividing App Store into someone who's in charge of figuring out what you got to do to follow the EU rules. And then someone who's in charge of Apple's App Store where you just get to follow Apple's rules. But still at the top of the organization is the same person, Phil Schiller, still in charge of the store.
And it makes perfect sense organizationally to say, OK, you subordinate whatever person take care of the EU stuff and you take care of the non-EU stuff. I don't think it signals any kind of policy change. It's not like they're cleaning house and getting rid of the person who's in charge of the app store. And Tim Cook has had a change of heart about the app store.
The person who was leaving had been there for 21 years. He's retiring because he's got enough money. Maybe it is a story. Maybe this is the beginning of housecleaning, but from what I know now, it just seems like, okay, they're shuffling people around for completely explicable reasons, and it does not fill me with any kind of hope.
Yeah, I wouldn't read anything into this about any kind of larger policy changes because like the app store is run, you know, first by Tim Cook, then by Phil Schiller, then by whoever these other people are.
So if you want like major policy changes to have a chance of happening, I think you got to look higher up the chain than a third level person for something that's this important to the company.
Yeah, and that would be signaled by one of those higher-level people saying something different or doing something different. Like, that's when you know change will be happening.
Shuffling the ranks underneath just to handle what we all know to be a very complex and touchy situation and having the person who has to deal with the EU not, you know, have the person who doesn't have to deal with the EU not be distracted by that makes perfect sense. That's just how you divide up, you know, labor within the company, so...
It's so rare that we get any kind of glimpse about what's going on at these lower levels or medium high levels of the company. But every time we do, it just looks like any other company. Again, someone who's leaving Apple after being the head of the App Store for 21 years. So that makes perfect sense. People leave jobs all the time after 21 years.
He's probably going to go and enjoy his life with his money that he earned in all those years.
Yeah. With our 30%, right?
No, I don't think that goes to him.
Just kidding. All right. So moving right along, we have an additional bit of a pre-show that we need to cover. We have a new member special. We have the August member special came out a few days ago as we record this. It is ATP Insider Domestic Workflows. John, would you please explain what does that even mean?
I mean, the whole top of the special explains it. But yes, it is an idea.
But not everyone is a member, John. We need to sell it. Sell, sell, sell.
I'm explaining it right now. This is an idea suggested by a friend of the Shaitan Vaziri that is about things that we do in our house that makes our lives easier. One of the examples he gave was getting an electric kettle, which sounds boring to anyone who's in the UK, but not all Americans do that. And a lot of them do get it. They say, wow, this really changed my life for the better.
And now I use an electric kettle every time I want to make hot water for tea or whatever. Um, and it can be products that you bought. It could be things that you do practices that you, uh, perform. I was hoping it would be weirder, weirder than it was. It mostly was pretty standard, but I've been surprised from the reaction we're getting from people.
They are finding our, uh, hints from Halloween is very useful. Uh, just this plain old boring tips. And that's, you know, it could have gone two different ways. It could, we could have found out that, uh, Casey is doing something completely ridiculous in his house and we could have tried to talk him out of it. But instead we're all doing mostly normal things in our house with the exception of,
I want to ruin it. But Marco's doing unadvised things with his dishwasher. But hey, he likes it. So you'll hear about that on the episode if you would like. Already, people are saying you should do a second episode of this. It was so hard to get one episode worth of these tips out, but people just crave household tips.
So we'll think about it for the potentially far future and take another run at this. But for now, domestic workflows. What do we do in our home that we think makes our lives easier?
You know, it was really funny because after we record every episode of the show, you know, typically I'll feel like, yeah, that was pretty good. You know, and I'll go to bed afterwards and usually Aaron will wake up enough to ask how it was. And usually the answer is good because usually I feel like the episodes went well. At the end of that one, I was like... Did that go okay? I'm not sure.
You don't know what the people want, Casey. They want household tips.
To be honest with you, I didn't think it was, like, bad or anything, but I was like, I don't know. I was expecting a little more fireworks from that. And like you said, it was fairly straightforward. But I have to both say and thank a lot of different people have written in to say, wow, that was so great, and it was so much fun. And I was like, really? So...
um i'm very thankful for it don't get me wrong i'm not trying to talk you out of that opinion i was just it took me by surprise so i guess that we did better than i expected so go us yay team and also i continue to believe that we just have not gotten to the weird things you two are doing in your house why is it just us you're the one with the one cup that everyone slurps from everything i do is perfectly normal as you know like yeah and i'm sure you all think exactly the same way
That everything you do is perfectly normal and the other two are the weird ones. And that's how it is with everybody. Everyone thinks the things that they do are normal and the things that other people are doing in their house don't make any sense. We just didn't get to those, but I think they're out there.
That's because we didn't talk about your bathroom cup that the entire family shared.
I think that has been discussed at length on other podcasts.
Yeah, but it will continue to be discussed until there's compliance.
I don't think we need to do an entire member special about that. It will be fine. But anyway, if we take another run at this sometime in the future, maybe we'll come at it from a different angle or maybe we'll just dig deeper.
All right, let's do some follow-up. Aaron Dippner writes in with regard to the iPhone 16 capture button. Aaron writes, you were discussing the rumored capture button and mentioned the possibility of it being touch sensitive. I've often wondered if Apple would consider making a touch sensitive scroll wheel input method.
The early BlackBerry phones had a physical scroll wheel on the side before they moved to the trackball that became more commonly associated with them. I still miss that scroll wheel as a method of linear input. It'd be great if this quote unquote camera button or the rumors of touch sensitive volume buttons could lead to something along these lines, though the placement might be odd.
I do hope this isn't something just limited to a single camera feature, but in typical Apple fashion, if they do, it'll be a worthwhile feature, I bet. I know not everyone finds the digital crown on the watch is useful, but it can be a really nice way to scroll a screen without other input.
And while I can't see this being a physical wheel on the phone, there's plenty of nice uses for linear input like that. I think I agree with this. Like, I don't know that I'm necessarily seeking like a scroll pad, if you will, but I could see how that would be really convenient if it was in the right spot on the side of the phone.
Yeah, that's the tricky part. I mean, so first of all, it depends on if you're holding the phone with your right hand or left hand and whether you want to use the wheel with your fingertips or your thumb.
thumb like there's just so many variables here the capture button to be clear that the the room replacement of the capture button is probably the worst possible place for a right-handed if someone holds the phone in their right hand to do any kind of scrolling with so it's probably not that and i also think that any kind of touch sensitive thing on the side of the phone poses difficulties for cases which most people use and poses difficulty for accidental input
The idea of like, I remember the BlackBerry wheel type thing, but the idea of being able to scroll the screen without obscuring any portion of it has some merit.
But I do kind of think that physically the act of scrolling your phone is so ingrained, even in people who didn't grow up with it, but certainly in people who did grow up with it, that it is just so dominant that no one thinks there's anything. There's nothing that needs to be fixed there. People scroll their phones like it's a thing. It's one of the most, you know,
It's one of the core interactions people do with their phones is scrolling some kind of vertical list on the screen. And I think it works fine. Yes, you're whatever, you know, your thumb is obscuring some portion of the screen, but it's not. I don't think that's an issue that people would say, oh, that's a problem that needs to be solved. So interesting idea.
But I think it has I think it presents more problems than it solves.
We have a bunch of rumors with regard to the iPhone 16 Pro's alleged fourth color. Before you get excited, your choices are dull, dark dull, light dull, and slightly colorful dull. But let's talk about it. This is a report from MacRumors.
iPhone 16 Pro models are expected to come in black, white, gray, or natural titanium, and a rose gold color, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and other leakers. Leaker Sonny Dixon's image shows what we can expect from the rose gold variant, which was recently described by one leaker as having a more bronze-like hue. And based on the images I've seen, I would concur with that.
A different MacRumors report will have all these links in the show notes. The new bronze-like color may be called Desert Titanium, according to the leaker known as Maijin Buu. And this definitely, as many people have pointed out, and I think the first person I saw point this out was Stephen Hackett, if I'm not mistaken. But anyways, very big Microsoft Zune energy, which is kind of funny.
But, you know, what are you going to do? And then somebody from one of these MacRumors reports, there's a picture. I don't understand why these are always so grainy, but here we are.
Those are the best kind of rumor shots. Hastily taken, not in focus, very blurry.
I know.
I can tell it's authentic. Or a fake render that they added a blur to.
All right, so there's what appears to be a chart, and I believe this is some flavor of Chinese written on here, but it's iPhone 16 Pro, and it has several camera lens rings, and you can see the different ones. And I tried using Apple's Translate app in scanning and reading what these different messages or words were, and I didn't get anything interesting out of it.
I was hoping I would see Desert Titanium written here, and I did not, but that's just using an app. Who knows if I'm getting the right translation or not.
well you do get iphone with a capital i and a lowercase p i did notice so that's great um so i mean we talked about these colors uh in the previous episode but we didn't have a picture of the rose gold one it's brown it's a brown phone i mean that's what gold is gold is shiny brown right but this is not shiny brown this is just brown i mean again it's hard to tell in pictures is this the real color is this a real thing is this just someone making like a a uh
prototype version that's going to look sort of like this that's why i included the picture of the little rings because like oh can you see is the brown ring that brown or is it not that brown uh people made fun of the brown zune but of course now it's like a collector's item i'll put a link in the show where you can buy it on amazon for 230 dollars the brown zune
That's because they're very rare because nobody bought them.
Right.
Not a popular color, but. Not a popular product. Like any kind of fashion thing, you know, trends come and go. Is this going to be the year of the brown phone? Again, people put cases on anyway. Is this like a brown phone with a clear case over it? Maybe you get a brown phone and you put brown leather on top of it and you go for that kind of theme.
Not that this is a super exciting color, but I have to say one of these things is not like the other. This is probably the most interesting pro phone color they've had in years. And it's brown.
I think it's fine. I mean, golds and tans and coppers and brasses have all been kind of, you know, coming back into style and fashion and various things in the last few years. So this fits in perfectly. I'm not surprised at all. I think it will be exactly as exciting as all of the other pro phone colors have been forever. So this fits exactly right into the collection.
Instead of very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and bluish gray, now we have very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and brownish gray. So it fits right in.
Yeah, and a lot of these colors... Depending on the lighting, they can look radically different because the colors are so slight. We saw this with the gold MacBook Air or whatever it was. And you'd see some pictures and you're like, wow, that's like a gold computer. And then you'd see it in the store and you'd be like, which one is the gold one?
Because depending on the lighting, you just can't tell. So it may be that this one spy photo is really emphasizing the brownness. And if you tilt it two more degrees, it just looks like it's gray. We'll find out when they get in the stores.
We shall see. But I don't know. I don't personally care for this brown. Obviously, just because it's not for me doesn't mean it's not for others. I think it looks kind of bleh. But, you know, hey.
They could call it mocha or like some kind of, well, they don't use real leather anymore, but they could use a name that evokes leather. I don't know what that would be.
Yes, or they could also call it feces, which is what it looks like to me. Moving on. Gus Mueller, friend of the show and developer of Acorn and RetroBatch, had some thoughts with regard to the system color picker. On the last episode, writes Gus, you mentioned a 3D app that uses a custom color picker instead of the system color picker.
Acorn also uses a custom screen color picker because the system one really, really sucks when it comes to color profiles. More specifically, NS Color Panel, which it goes through. I filed a couple of radars about it over the years and given direct feedback, but I gave up a number of years ago and wrote my own. Most apps which are serious about color management have done the same.
Yeah, that's the tough part where if Apple's going to say, oh, your app's going to throw a warning, let's use the system implementation of, you know, the system color picker, the system screen sharing window picker or whatever. What about what happens when the system one doesn't do the things you need it to do?
And maybe that's why I thought Maya was using a custom one just because it's not really like a. A Mac first application is cross platform runs on Linux, you know, so they're just they're not going to do Mac system things. But Acorn is the Mac-iest of all Mac apps you can imagine. And if Gus isn't using the system on, it's because the system on is falling down in some way.
It's a shame that they haven't fixed it. So there's that explanation for you.
Indeed. All right. So everyone's bugbear of the moment, the screen capture nag prompt, the vistification of macOS continues. And we got some feedback from friend of the show, Craig Huckenberry from the Icon Factory, who developed Xscope, among many other things. And Xscope, not a sponsor, but it is very good. Also gets my official okie-dokie. Craig writes, Cool.
Then Craig has justifiably been whining about the fact that there was no documentation for this. Imagine that! Imagine that! An Apple API without documentation? Surely not. But anyways, well, apparently there is documentation now. And the description of the entitlement is as follows.
The persistent content capture entitlement indicates whether a virtual network computing VNC app needs persistent access to screen capture. That's all you get.
No, there's the discussion section.
Yes, I was about to say there's good news. There's a discussion section. The persistent content capture entitlement enables VNC apps to view and record the screen.
That's it. So this was the hope that this persistent content capture entitlement would let applications capture the screen persistently without reprompting once per month or whatever. But Apple, I mean, we looked at this exact URL like last show, I think. Since last show, Apple has added this documentation and Casey just read essentially all of it.
It is clarifying because it says, what is this for? It's for VNC apps. So for example, Xscope is not a VNC app. And Xscope also doesn't and probably shouldn't do the thing that like Zoom does where it's like, oh, so you want to share your screen? Which window do you want to share? Do you want to share the whole screen?
Zoom and other applications like that can use the system color picker or screen sharing picker. They're not currently, but they're probably changing to do so. We'll talk about that in a second. But for Xscope, you launch Xscope and then it's just running and it does all sorts of stuff to your screen. Like one of the tools they have you can use to measure the distance between things on your screen.
And obviously to do that, it needs to see the pixels that are on your screen so it knows where the edges are because it does like a find edges thing. It's really cool. Xscope is great. But when you and when you use the dimensions tool, you will see the screen capture whatever color it is, like the blue menu bar icon that says something is looking at your screen and it's Xscope.
It's doing it right now. And for Xscope, it's not a VNC application, so it can't use this entitlement because I assume Apple would reject it and say, hey, you're not a VNC application. And it also can't really use the system picker because Xscope always wants to look at the entire screen. That's the whole point.
You want to know the distance between those two windows, the distance between that and that. Like, you don't want to, like... Pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool. Pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, right? You just want it to work the way it does now, which is you just use Xscope and it works.
And yes, when it is looking at the pixels on your screen, you see the little screen recording thingy in the menu bar, as you would expect. But that's it. So I don't think this entitlement is going to help Xscope or any application with like a color picker. Like you can imagine like Acorn.
It wants to use like it doesn't want to use a system color picker because it does color matching or color profiling badly or whatever. So it's using its own custom one like it has been for years. anytime you hit the eyedropper, it's going to pop up a picker that says, where do you want to eyedropper from the whole screen, this window, this window, this window, like the whole screen again.
I mean, that's not the right API for this. And as far, I haven't been able to tell this because I haven't written a demo app, but I think if you use the thing that pops up, like which window do you want to share? Um, You won't get reprompted once a month for that, but I still haven't had that confirmed. Everyone who says, oh, if you use that, you won't get prompted.
I'm like, okay, well, do you think that's true or did you try it? And if you tried it, did you set your date forward or have you waited a month or did someone from Apple tell you that? This is all still kind of up in the air. But yeah, bummer about that entitlement, unless you're a VNC app, in which case maybe it helps you or maybe you still get prompted once a month. We'll see.
I mean, this would not be the first time that Apple has kind of made a bad decision. And instead of recognizing the badness of the decision and finding a better solution, they start poking a bunch of possible holes in it, like entitlements. Hmm. But maybe this indicates that this is not the right design to begin with.
Like what I said last episode, to have this allow for a month thing with screen capture abilities, that's going to just kill all the businesses of all apps to do that. You're going to have so many support problems. What Apple is basically saying is... apps can no longer really do this, but we don't want to actually take the hit of not letting apps do it officially.
So we're going to just make it suck for all the apps that do it and cause a bunch of problems for them. So they really can't rely on that as their business anymore, but we're not going to actually have the guts to go ahead and kill it off completely because that would cost certain features and apps that we want.
The solution they've come up with is just the most half-baked, half-assed, mealy-mouthed, weak thing they could possibly do when there are better options available. So here's my suggestion, Apple. When apps are reading the screen, make it really obvious in a part of the UI that they cannot change. One way to do this would be, you know, you have the indicators in the menu bar.
How about taking up like the entire right, like 300 pixels of the menu bar with a big blue banner that says Xscope is currently capturing the screen.
I think I'd rather have a prompt once a month than that. Because some apps are capturing the screen constantly. Or like when you open an open save dialog box, default folder fires up the API that it needs to see the screen to do its magic thing or whatever. I don't want something that huge in the menu bar. I mean, the icon, I think, is fine.
Making it bigger and more intrusive makes sense if you're using an application that you go and use and then stop using. But what if a thing that is just ambiently seeing your screen because it needs to do that to do its job?
Something that is persistently a little bit visually annoying is much better than something that periodically just totally breaks. That is not a solution.
It's not totally breaking. It's just chopping up a dialog and saying you want to keep having this permission and it does it once a month. I would pick that. And again, the menu bar icon is there and I think it's pretty prominent. No, it's not 300 pixels wide, but it is colorful and it is prominent and you can see it when it's happening. I think job done on that front.
I very much disagree because when you interrupt the flow of people, first of all, that requires somebody to actually be at the computer. On Upgrade, Jason Snell brought up what if somebody's running a headless server, like a headless Mac mini server somewhere, and this box pops up.
Well, how are they going to access that box exactly without plugging in a monitor if it's going to break the thing that's allowing them to remotely administer the machine?
Well, that would be a VNC application, and you could use this persistent entitlement, which presumably would get rid of that.
Well, would it? Would it qualify? We don't know. The documentation did not have that in the discussion. The fact that they have to poke holes like that into it tells you right there, that's not the right solution. This is an inelegant solution to a self-created own goal. How about we rethink the actual problem here and think, are there any other solutions that could maybe be better for that?
I guess you disagree, John. That's fine. But in my opinion, a larger visual indicator is a way better solution than interrupting someone's flow and breaking the functionality at least once a month and requiring interaction to keep confirming this thing that people are like, that is just such a bad solution to this problem.
Well, the problem is they're both crappy, if I'm honest with you, because on the surface, I agree with you, Marco. But inevitably, then I think about, well, what if I was doing like a screen, what do you call it when you record your video? A screencast. Thank you, screencast. I knew it was screen something or other. I couldn't put my finger on the word.
What if I'm recording a screencast and now I've got this gigantic, like, you know, wart on the top right-hand corner of my screen?
No, they can solve that by not having the visual thing be in it. So I think the increase in the visual presence of it is a viable solution for anything that you use like intentionally, but not for things that are ambiently in the background, always seeing your whole screen because they needed to do their job like default folder X or X scope or something like that, right?
And for the suggestion for what I think the visual thing would look like for the cases where it is okay to have a prominent visual thing, And, you know, this should be sort of the default unless you get some super-duper permission, right? And, again, it's not this person's kind of capture. But anyway, the new Siri effect. The new Apple Intelligent Siri effect.
Not the exact Siri one, but you know how it makes rainbow colors around the edge of your phone screen? That, but a different color. It's very prominent. You're not going to miss it. It's very large. You can exclude it from the screen recording thing because the actual screen recording APIs know what's being drawn in layers or whatever.
They can just not include that, to your point, Casey, so it won't be in your thing. But... It's like when that is active, if you I don't know if you've tried the beta or seen demos of it, when that Siri ring thing is active, it's pretty hard to miss, much harder to miss than an icon in the menu bar or 300 pixel wide banner in the menu bar. It is very prominent.
It is animated and it really gets your attention. That would be good for situations where you've got like a screen recording application or something like that. But
for those apps that need to see the pixels on the screen to do their job and they're running all the time persistently it should be hard to get that entitlement you should have to jump through hoops to do it but it should exist because those apps it's inappropriate to have you know rainbow border or blue border or purple or whatever constantly on your screen because default folder x is running in the background you know 24 hours a day so it is a difficult problem but you can get to an 80 or 90 solution without
repeated prompts i don't know well i mean i feel like this will work itself out because marco thinks that the uh the support burden of having people you know email and say hey why does your thing keep prompting me every month for this thing i hate it blah blah that is terrible but i don't think it's a business killer it's a business herder It's not going to put these apps out of business.
It is going to make someone have to do a text snippet that they respond with to explain this is Apple doing this, not them, and there's nothing they can do about it. So that shows that there remains a problem of some kind, and it is bad. But yeah, I think better solutions do exist, and hopefully we are ever so slowly lurching towards one. It would be better if Apple... would communicate.
And so we wouldn't be guessing whether this VNC thing solves the problem, solves the remote access problem. If you get this VNC entitlement for your VNC app, does it prevent the scenario where you can't VNC in? Because unbeknownst to you, there's a dialogue popping up on the screen that you're trying to VNC into that says, do you want to give the VNC? And there's no one there to press it, right?
Does that solve this problem? Or do you still get prompted once per month if you have this entitlement? Nobody knows because they added documentation between last week and this week, but they didn't say anything about that. It's like you added documentation, but you didn't tell us. We want to know more.
Like the VNC is in there that tells me, okay, if I'm not a VNC app, don't even bother applying for this one because Apple's not going to give it to you. Oh, and speaking of entitlements, this is somewhat related to things that see the screen, but the window management application Moom has a new version, M-O-O-M. That spells Moom. as a reference, Casey? Nope. Nope.
And it obviously, it uses the accessibility APIs to see the screen. Moom, the previous major version of Moom, I think Moom 3, is on the Mac App Store, but only because it, I think it predated the Mac App Store or whatever, but they got like one of those temporary entitlements where Apple's like, okay, Moom, you can be on the Mac App Store and we'll give you a temporary entitlement.
And what does that entitlement let them do? Use the accessibility APIs, the actual official Apple accessibility APIs, which are incredibly powerful and invasive because they have to be to do their job. And Moom uses them to do what it does, which is like arrange windows and everything, right?
When Moom 4 came out, which is the new version, Apple's like, yeah, you're not getting that entitlement anymore. So Moom 3 got it because it was like, okay, well, we want to get you in the Mac App Store or whatever. But Moom 4 is not in the Mac App Store because remember that quote-unquote temporary entitlement that they had for who knows how many years?
Well, they can't get that one for Moom 4 because it's a major new version. So Moom 4 is simply not in the Mac App Store because there's no way to use the accessibility APIs and also be in the Mac App Store. And I feel like I've filed great feedbacks on this. I feel like that's a problem. Accessibility APIs are important and should exist.
But if they have to be like illegal contraband things that you can only use if you're outside the Mac App Store, who knows? Maybe those will stop prompting you once a month about everything. Like...
Apple you have to make modern accessibility APIs that can actually be used and say well we've got the old ones and no one should ever use them and no you can't even be on the Mac App Store if you use them unless we give you one of those quote-unquote temporary entitlements that you've had for seven years but if you make a new version of your app sorry no temporary entitlement for you it's terrible
To me, this has been true since they started all that BS with the launch of the Mac App Store many years ago. If they have to start poking holes in a policy or a technical restriction with entitlements that, well, okay, fine, you can do it. Not everyone can do this, but you can do it. That is always a design failure. If they can avoid it, they should.
And I think that that has become... It's kind of like... Not to get too political. It's kind of like the executive order. It's like... This is like a kind of bad workaround to a broken system. That's what entitlements are. They're bad workarounds to bad design decisions. And a much better design...
is to have the technical restrictions and measures and capabilities in place that work for any software that's running on the system. And to have an entitlement-based exception system where you say, well, we don't actually want anyone to be doing any of these things, but it would hurt our platform too much if app X or capability X was not available.
Now, the correct decision, if you're faced with that problem, would probably be something like, How can we change the technical environment such that that function is still available in a way that fits our modern needs better? Instead, what the entitlement escape hatch does is say, we're going to do what we want for everyone else, but you, you can maybe for now temporarily do this.
That is always a bad solution because it's always going to introduce vagary instability for somebody's business or capabilities in the future. It's going to kind of mess with competition possibly in weird ways. Like there's so many ways that's a failure to make a decision.
It adds uncertainty for developers. Uncertainty because they don't know. Oh, so I got this thing. And I would say, by the way, entitlements, I don't think are bad. Temporary super secret. Only you get this. It's a temporary. Even then the names are like temporary entitlement. Don't expect to have this. Like it's,
It's better that they give them than not because a lot of apps wouldn't be in the Mac App Store if they didn't have the instant entitlements. But when you've had it for seven years, how temporary is it? And when you can't get it for your next app, like it's uncertainty. It's like, so I have my whole business is based on this, you know, half my customers are in the Mac App Store.
And this temporary entitlement that I got seven years ago is the only thing keeping my Mac app there. Oh, when I make a new version, am I going to get that temporary one? Yes, no. It's just like you're always dangling by a thread. No, you're always dangling by a thread because Apple can change its rules whenever it wants. And it does.
And that's another argument for not having Apple have exclusive control distribution. And thankfully on the Mac, they don't. So Moom can offer their app outside the Mac App Store.
But Apple's attempt to push the Mac App Store while simultaneously, you know, not allowing all sorts of apps that people want on the Mac App Store and then doling out special secret temporary entitlements to just the very important apps. Like, again, that's better than them not doing that. But I agree with you, Marco. That is not a... That's not...
an ideal system and when you're doing that you should rethink like if this is what it takes to get these apps in the mac app store something is either wrong with the mac app store or mac os
Yeah. I don't know. I am also not so bothered by entitlements. I think the better answer is, like Marco said, to have it such that they aren't required. But I don't begrudge Apple for wanting to have their fingers on who is using this and are we considering them to be blessed enough to use it. And so I see both sides of it. But
Well, the entitlements are an important purpose where in any system with entitlements, you want to know basically by looking at an app, like they keep using nutrition label these days in pop culture. But anyway, you want to look at the app and say, what does this app have permission to do? Can it record my screen? Can it use the microphone? Can it do this?
Just by looking down the entitlements that this app has, like an iOS. Does this app use location? Does it do this? Entitlements can and should exist.
temporary only you can do this super secret you can use accessibility apis even though no other app on the mac app store can do it that's not a good entitlement well i would i would say anytime that apple has to choose whether an app is worthy of an entitlement so anything that requires an application process or you know you got to email someone to get it like any of that the problem is you're bringing in way too much human fallibility you're bringing in vagary you're bringing in politics
We like to think, especially earlier on, we like to think, if I just email Apple and I apply for this thing that my app clearly qualifies for, it'll be fine. But over time, we're seeing Apple, again, as they chase the app store scrounging around the calc services revenue kind of stuff, we're seeing them start to weaponize systems like that, like notarization, that used to be neutral.
And I think this is exactly the same thing.
Entitlements have never been neutral before. There are people who have asked for entitlements and then just not heard back for three years.
Just nothing. Right. Because, like, what if, you know, Steve Troughton Smith wants an entitlement? Like, does Apple love him? Like, is he going to get it? Who knows? Maybe not. The people inside Apple when it comes to stuff like this, when humans are involved, humans can't help but be human. And so you start running into things like petty spats and people who just don't like someone.
And that happens. We've seen that. That's happened for years. Anytime humans are involved, that has the potential to happen. And Apple has a lot of people who are spiteful and judgmental and have grudges. We see that happen and affect real developers. So the best systems like this just apply the same rules to everyone. And for Apple to continue to...
have software platforms that people trust to build businesses on, they have to keep that trust up that they're not going to arbitrarily crush your business or make it very difficult for you needlessly. And so the fewer entitlement-based systems there can be that require any kind of Apple approval or application process or human granting, the fewer of those, the better.
And I feel like what they're doing now... is just making these really cowardly decisions of like, well, we're going to lock this down for most people, but if you kiss the feet, maybe we'll let you do it. That's a terrible way to run a platform.
So I've always been in favor of kind of the opposite direction of Apple actually using good judgment and deciding which applications should have more permissions based on the reputation of the developer and all that other stuff or whatever. But that does require humans to act in good faith and do what's best for the store.
But really what it requires, really what my suggestion requires, is that there be competition. And on the Mac, there is. You can distribute outside the Mac App Store, which is why the Mac App Store is one of the many reasons why the Mac App Store is not massively popular commercially. compared to the way it is in iOS, where it's the only game in town.
Lots of applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Even some very big applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Sometimes exclusively, sometimes not exclusively. But that applies enough pressure for Moom to go, okay, we're going to make a new version. And Apple is not giving us this thing, but we have a way forward. Fine, we'll do it outside the Mac App Store.
Moom 3, I don't know if it's still in the Mac App Store, but Moom 4 will be outside it. And here's the explanation. And that applies pressure to Apple in a way that didn't exist until very recently on the iOS platform. Having entitlements be sort of automatic for most things is a better system. You shouldn't have to apply to get a basic entitlement.
but I do think that I don't like, and I don't like temporary entitlements, but I do think the most powerful entitlements that, uh, you know, have the potential to use the most damage should not be automatically distributed, but should still exist, but only for applications that are replicable. And yes, that brings humans into it and humans can have grudges and do bad things.
And all you need to have is enough of a, uh, enough of a counterbalance to that to say, okay, if the humans at Apple are obnoxious, they'll be punished for it by that developer retaliating and saying, fine, my app's not even in the Mac App Store anymore and I'm going to do it all outside, right?
And there needs to be some kind of, there needs to be power on both sides of this equation instead of Apple holding all the cards and us just out here hoping and begging that they'll, you know, do the thing that we want. Again, I've seen multiple stories.
I haven't saved all these, but like back in the Twitter days and even the Mastodon days, just some random developer who's like, my application does this thing And I need this entitlement for it to work. And I asked for it and it's been two years and I haven't heard back. And I keep emailing them and I just never hear back.
And it's a black hole because they're not a super famous developer and they don't have a podcast and they're not like a well-known application. And if you can't hear back from Apple or Google or any of these big companies, what do you do? Like go there and knock on the door or something? I mean, I guess they should run to the press because that's the only thing that helps. Is that the saying?
Anyway, it's it's the current situation is not great. But I do every time I see one of these things, I say, well, at least the Mac is not iOS for now.
So coming back to the entitlement in question, an anonymous person writes saying, I'm in engineering for a company that makes remote access software. I can confirm that the persistent content capture entitlement is intended to allow apps to return to prompt wants behavior, though it does allow for more than just screen capture, which is somewhat ironic.
This was what we were told to do by a contact at Apple who is working with us on Sequoia compatibility.
So if you're a big enough company and you make an important enough application, Apple will tell you stuff that they won't put in the documentation. So apparently this person was told that you'll go back to prompt once behavior if you have this entitlement. But of course, this is anonymous feedback to a podcast and not documentation on Apple's website.
Maybe next week that web page will have seven more words on it to explain this.
All right, so moving to last week's overtime topic, which was about max sales as reported by CIRP.
I thought we should have hyped that up more when we talked about what the overtime was going to be about because it was a pie chart, but it was shocking. So now we will reveal the shock for people who didn't hear the overtime last week, maybe because they're not members.
All right, so Phil Marshall writes, it seemed obvious to me that the chart is based on revenue from the various models, not unit sales. They get more revenue from selling MacBook Pros than MacBook Airs because MacBook Pros cost so much more per unit. Same for Mac Pros.
So the shocking thing was, there were two shocking things. One, MacBook Pros had a bigger Pi Wedge than MacBook Airs. And two, the Mac Pro Pi Wedge was almost the size of the iMac Pi Wedge and was more than twice as big as the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini. So people are like, that chart, that whole pie chart thing, that had to be revenue.
And what I would say is, even if it was revenue, the margins on things like the Mac Pro have to be higher than they are on a MacBook Air. The margins have to be higher and the total price is higher. So even if that was revenue, that still argues perhaps even more strongly because, hey, the more Mac Pros you sell, you make way more money off each Mac Pro that you sell than you do off a MacBook Air.
So if it's revenue, profit, whatever it is, it would still look good for the Mac Pro.
regardless josh lowitz writes uh and josh works for cirp and josh writes the chart and all the analysis is unit sales we updated the text and chart title to make that clear oh okay i did reach out to cirp after it uh using my little paid permission thing i i added a comment to like the the thing because that comment section i said and i said hey is that is it unit sales revenue profit what is it uh and then i got an email i didn't get a reply to the comment but i got an email
From someone at CIRP said, it's unit sales. So there you go, straight from the horse's mouth. Again, with the caveats about we don't know how CIRP comes up with its figures, but for what it's worth, those were unit sales.
All right. And then a lot of people, or maybe not a lot, but a handful of people wrote in with regard to Patreon, and they were saying that longtime Patreon users say that Patreon has been trying to persuade creators to move away from pay-by-creation content uh, first of the month billing for many years now.
So to recap, a lot of people would say, Hey, every time that I make a new thing, I will get paid and that'll happen at the first of the month. Well, now there's, or I guess for a while now, Patreon has been saying, well, Can we maybe not do that anymore? And so perhaps, perhaps, Patreon is in part using Apple as a scapegoat to force their own users to do the thing that they want them to do.
That's interesting, though, because Patreon's not getting rid of payback creation at first of the month. You just can't use them for people who sign up through the iOS app. So those things still exist, and I kind of understand why Patreon would be pushing to do that, because, you know, they want to make money, and payback ratio surely pays slower than a regular steady, you know, every month.
I don't know why they'd be against first of the month, or against, uh... Non first of the month, but still regularly scheduled billing. But whatever, like this is this was everyone's explanation for saying you should blame Patreon, too. And we were asking, why doesn't Patreon just pull out of the app store? You don't need them. You've got a website. It should be fine.
Of course, we don't know how many customers Patreon gets through the app. And we don't know how many of they would lose if they got rid of the app. But here is what everybody wrote in to say. You should blame Patreon, too, because they've been nagging all their creators to stop doing pay-by-creation through every possible means of saying, hey, don't you want to not do that anymore?
Don't you want to do this? But this is even before the Apple stuff. And so maybe Patreon is kind of getting what they want without having to be the bad guy.
John's favorite thing, error network changed, lives on, baby. So AJ writes, I'm not on the Sequoia beta yet, but according to Arc's known issues page, that's Arc, the very fancy web browser that everyone seems to have fallen in love with. According to Arc's known issues page, it appears error network changed is back in a big way for Chromium-based browsers.
Apparently disabling calls from iPhone in FaceTime is the quote-unquote fix. We'll put a couple links in the show notes.
Yeah, so this is what I said last time when the bug was closed, the Chromium, the bug in the Chromium browser engine was closed with a fixed status because they had decided, OK, based on these reports of people who interacted with this bug and said, here's my reproduction, here's my system, here's all my information, here's what's going on, blah, blah, blah.
Some developer debugged and said, okay, I see on your system what's happening is that X and Y and Z are happening and then we're flipping out. And what they did was put an include list and said, okay, if this exact thing happens, don't throw error network change. And I said at the time, that's not a great solution because there's a million things that can cause the network to change.
You fix this one that causes it to happen, but hey, looks like there's other things that can cause it to happen too. What are you going to do? Go through the whole thing and say, okay, well, if you spend three months going through back and forth with me and getting an exact reproduction that you have on your system that I can reproduce on my system, okay, I'll put in code for that as well.
How about you do this? How about you decide in Chromium which changes to the network does Chromium care about and only throw our network change for those and all the other ones ignore? That's my suggestion, but I am not a Chromium developer, so. Well, maybe it should be. You know, again, Chromium is in a lot of places. It's in the Arc browser. It's in Discord. It's in Chrome, obviously.
I just, I don't think this is tenable and it amazes me that this bug isn't getting more attention because people are constantly, maybe they're sending it to me because I talk about it on the show, constantly sending me situations where they're like, they're at a point of sale kiosk and it has their network changed on it. They're using the Arc browser and it happens.
They're using Discord and it happens. And who knows how many times it's happening and we're not seeing it because it's just silently going into a console log somewhere. This is something they have to deal with. And these fixes are like, just disable features of your Mac. And then it'll work, right? Disable iPhone mirroring. Disable calls from iPhone. It was like, that's not the solution.
Oh my God. Chromium. You got to get with it.
Yep. But it's the best, John. It's the best. It tells you it's the best. All right, Fortnite is on iOS and EU. Reading from The Verge, Fortnite is finally back on iOS just over four years. I can't believe it was four years ago. I feel like it was at most a couple of years ago. But anyway, just over four years after Apple booted it from the iOS App Store, but it's only available in the EU.
The game launched on August 16 on both a new iPhone version of the Epic Games Store and through Alt Store Pal, another third-party app store, which is run by a regular person and a friend of the show, Riley Testett. Anyway, the Epic Games Store is also launching today for Android users worldwide.
Reading from MacRumors, along with bringing Fortnite to Alt Store, Epic Games said it will bring Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all developers a great deal, while also, quote, ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors, quote.
Epic Games said that it will be removing Fortnite and other Epic titles from the Samsung Galaxy Store to protest Samsung's, quote, anti-competitive decision to block sideloading by default, quote, on Samsung devices. Epic will charge a store fee of 12% for payment set of processes and 0% on third-party payments. I mean, Tim Sweeney is a prick, but he's putting his money where his mouth is.
Like, I mean, I'm here for it. I'm here for it. And then finally related to that, speaking of Tim Sweeney actually being good. Anyway. Relatively, maybe. Right. This is, I'm sorry, this is Alt Store, so I think it was Riley writing. Good news, EU.
For innovation and app distribution, Epic Games has granted us a mega grant that we plan to use to cover Apple's core technology fee going forward, and we won't take it for granted. What does this mean? Alt Store Pal is now free. No subscription necessary.
I love this. I love this so much. I love that Epic's like, we'll pick up their tab.
That's so amazing.
It's the best. Because you used to have to pay to get Alt Store because Apple charges a fee, and so if they don't want to lose money, they need to pass that fee on to the customer, plus a little bit for them. Anyway, Epic has money, and they're saying, you know what?
We've got our own store, the Epic store, and we're putting our stuff in it, and we've got our store up or whatever, but we want even more stores. So they're essentially funding their competitor, funding Alt Store by saying, here, Take this so people won't be dissuaded from using AltStar in the EU. Because when it's like, oh, you know, Euro 50, I got to download the store.
I'm not sure I care about it all in the store. Well, now it's free because Epic gave them a whole bunch of money.
Yeah, just to cover their Apple fees. That is so great. What a finger in Apple's eye. Oh, man, what a move.
Again, I am not a Tim Sweeney fan. I have no particular thoughts about Epic as a company, but I feel like Tim is really a pretty big prick. That being said, what a just gorgeous and five-star f*** you to Apple. I mean, it's just perfect. It's so good. And I can't help but applaud it. I mean, just well done. Well done.
And the sick thing is, I feel like if I'm siding with Tim Sweeney on this, then something has gone very, very wrong. But here we are. And good for you, Tim. Good for you.
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Apple's hidden AI prompts have been discovered in the macOS betas. This was a week or two back now, but a Reddit user, I'm sorry, I'm reading from MacRumors, a Reddit user discovered the pre-prompt instructions embedded in Apple's developer beta for macOS 15.1, offering a rare glimpse into the backend of Apple's AI features.
They provide specific guidelines for various Apple intelligence functionalities, such as the smart reply feature in Apple Mail and the memories feature in Apple Photos. If it's okay with you two gentlemen, I'm just going to go ahead and read these. They're not too long.
Actually, before you do, just to clarify what they are and how they work here. So as we've discussed in the past, LLMs can take input and produce output. A lot of them take text input and produce text output. And just a plain LLM by itself, there's no other way to tell it anything except by giving it text.
And you put a bunch of text in and then a bunch of text comes out and then the thing that you put it through has no recollection that that ever happened and it's back to zero. Happy birthday, like Frosty the Snowman, right? And so the techniques that they use are when you're having a conversation with an LLM,
When you say one more thing, oh, I have another thing to say, and this, and that, and the other thing. Every additional thing you say, they just take the entire conversation up to that point, plus the new thing that you said, and throw the whole thing through the LLM again. And it goes in, it comes out, right? Same for when you want your LLM to do something. How do they do it?
You just take whatever the person typed, and then you put a bunch of instructions that the user doesn't see in front of that, and then you put that much larger string through. So one of the examples here is the writing tools feature in macOS, and you right-click and have it do whatever you want it to do or whatever with some text.
Whatever text that you provide to this, whether you've selected it or you right-click it or whatever, This is the text that will be stuck on the front of your text. And then that whole block will be thrown through the LLM. And Apple gets to write this text. And that's what people found in macOS. So you can read the writing tools.
All right. Writing tools. You are an assistant, which helps the user respond to their mails. Does it really read that just their males? And anyway, given I really dislike this. Given a male, a draft response is initially provided based on a short reply snippet in order to make the draft response nicer and complete set a set of question and its answer are provided. This is terrible.
God, I hate this.
This is copy and paste it straight out of the beta. Maybe they transcribed it wrong and Mac rumors, but it's copy and pasted.
A set of question and its answer are provided. Please write a concise and natural reply by modifying the draft response to incorporate the given questions and their answers. Please limit the reply within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Oh, okay. Sure. Great. It's a Jennifer Lawrence. Okay.
Does telling it do not hallucinate, does that work? Like, it must, right? I assume they tested it, but how does that work?
So these features, and again, this is a beta, right? But these features that use this, this is how Apple makes these features work. You're looking at it because, again, it's an LM, text goes in, Apple gets to pick this text, and presumably, like you were saying, Margaret, presumably they tried a bunch of different texts and found the text that gives them what they think is the best answer.
And you can speculate about why do not hallucinate. Why would that help? My speculation is that there is now enough text out there in the world that references hallucinations and AI that that will influence the model to... not do the things that are in those text passages that mention hallucinations.
So all the stories you've read about, oh, AIs are hallucinating, look at this funny example, look at this thing that it did, all the explanatory text, that is enough to influence a more modern LLM that has been trained more recently to understand hallucinate in that context and to try not to do the things that are in those descriptions. You know what I mean?
And everything else that's in this, the weird grammar, the strange sentence construction, like, Apple can pick anything to put here. It's not that much text. It's like a paragraph. But they can pick anything. And what they choose has a profound influence on what happens when you right-click and pick, like, summarize or reply or whatever.
And it's fascinating that this is the incredibly blunt instrument that they have. Because, again, the LLM just takes text. And there's some text from the user. And then Apple says... We'll stick our text on the front. And what text will they stick on the front? Right now, it seems that they're sticking fixed text blobs that presumably they will change as time goes on.
Do they need to add another thing that says, do not insult the user? Do not like this. A lot of do nots that you could imagine putting in there, but like... it's so weird because it's just a bunch of numbers and it's just a big machine where you put in a bunch of texts and a bunch of text comes out. And it's like, we arrived at those numbers through millions of dollars of training on TPUs.
And the whole point is we could not have come up with those numbers on our own. We had to train. It's, you know, it's a kind of, it's kind of a form of compression. If you think about it, of like compressing this, all this information into this set of numbers that now lets us put something into this box and have what comes out, reflect the information that was used to make those numbers. Yeah.
This is not how I would choose. If I had to do this job, like your job is to work on the writing tools. Someone's job is to write this text. And the performance of this feature depends a tremendous amount on this text and only this text. And I would not want this to be my job because I would be like... What do you think? Does this look good? I guess. Can you make it do something bad?
Can you make it insult me? Can you make it lie or make up information? Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Fingers crossed.
i also love the use of the word please in prompts that probably helps yeah that's the thing like i'm again like i'm sure they tried things out and i'm sure they found like maybe this made it respond in a more polite way because in the training text maybe when people were saying please the answers were more polite also so like like you can kind of see like how did it get here well in in content that includes politeness the response you know the other text around it was also more polite on average like you can see how it gets there but wow like what a
What a weird thing to have to think about, and what an odd way to have to specify how a product behaves.
Yeah, and if you think about being a programmer, this is the antithesis of being a programmer. One of the credos of a programmer is no matter how weird things seem to be, there is an explanation. Setting aside cosmic rays, you can eventually see how it's working. And even with this one, you could trace this through the LLM and see why the answer comes out the way it does, but...
He's like, yeah, but what about those billions of numbers? Where did those come from? I was like, well, they also came from training. You can see it happening. You see all the pins in the pachinko machine are. You see the ball bouncing off those pins. And you're like, yeah, but why are the pins there?
It's like, well, we arrived at those pins by this process, which you could also meticulously trace. It's all very predictable and deterministic. There is no unknown magic fuzziness here, but it's predictable and deterministic in a way that is massive, first of all. And second of all, not... specified by a human, but instead specified by grinding through training text, right?
That's the, the, you know, the thing that seems magic about this is like, well, I didn't make up those numbers, but I made this machine that adjusts its numbers when we jam text through it. And we jammed billions and billions of letters of text through it. And these are the numbers that we got out and it does this thing. And it's amazing.
But like, you know, I would not want to be responsible for making this paragraph because things can go horribly wrong with this feature based on like a change of a word, a misplaced comma or different sentences in here. And I wish, you know, I hope someone's like keeping track of these. Like over time, how does this writing, how does this prefix change for writing tools?
like in subsequent versions. Anyway, that's there's more of these. I think we should read some more of the funnier parts that are that are from these prefix snippets for features.
Smart reply. You are a helpful mail assistant which can help identify relevant questions from a given mail in a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet, ask relevant questions which are explicitly asked in the mail. The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient, which will help reduce hallucination in drafting the response.
Please output top questions along with a set of possible answers or options for each of those questions. Do not ask questions which are answered by the reply snippet. The question should be short, no more than eight words. The answer should be short as well, around two words. Present your output in a JSON format with a list of dictionaries containing question and answers as keys.
If no question is asked in the mail, then output an empty list. Only output valid JSON and nothing else.
again as a programmer you would say wait a second so you you want to get json from the llm and the only way you have to make that happen is to say please output only valid json i mean presumably the thing that grabs this output then validates the json and throws some kind of internal error if it doesn't happen but you're you're reduced to to begging please produce json please work because
that's it it just takes text in it puts text out and json is text but you have to if you want it to be json you have to ask for it and then you have to cross your fingers and say i hope i asked enough and in the right way and at the right part that it will output json and just and not decide not to output json right and again we're i'm just talking about a simple lm most these things are not a simple lm in fact often they have many models cooperating and they have stuff that's around the model so it's not as
Probably not as brain dead as I'm describing it, but an LLM in isolation is as brain dead as I'm describing it. And presumably Apple is doing stuff around that to try to help with this. But the fact that these things exist, the fact that it says only output valid JSON and nothing else, that means that part of the job of this paragraph
is something super important, which is, look, things later in the chain of this smart reply feature, like, you know, inside the code that happens when you press that button, probably expect JSON. And so it better be JSON. If it's not, I guess we ask more politely or emphatically. Weird.
And how do you even train for that? Do you feed it a bunch of JSON and then feed it a bunch of XML and YAML and stuff? This is bad. This is good.
That's exactly how you do it. And the world of knowledge. If you just pull everything from every web form and every programming form and stack overflow and whatever... In practice, if you use ChatGPT, you can do this, and it does give you JSON. Training data is sufficient for it to pretty much do this all the time in the format you ask for.
Every once in a while, I'll get a little confused and do something a little bit off, but just in the plain old training data, I don't think even in the manually created training data, like ChatGPT has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of...
manufactured question answers to make their models smarter than done by armies of humans right but even just in the training data i think just stack overflow alone would be enough to make sure that you do get json valid json i mean that's getting you know you get a little bit greedy there because i bet a lot of the stuff in stack overflow isn't valid json either but the word valid json surely appears next to all sorts of posts saying something says this isn't valid json what's the problem and you know
It's hard for us to think about because this stuff only works with such a huge volume of training data. Whereas a human, you tell them something once and they hopefully get it or maybe twice. But that's not how alarms work. There's no mind. There's no learning. There's no memory. There is only brute force.
Memories and photos.
Don't read the whole thing. Just read the bold stuff because the beginning part is very repetitive.
Conversation between... The story should be about the intent of the user. The story should contain a clear arc. The story should be diverse. That is, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait. Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or in any way negative, sad, or provocative.
Here are the photo captioning list guidelines you must obey.
And then what would follow that would be then your text, right? So if you say memories and photos, you would say, you know... My dog in the park. That paragraph of text would be prepended to my dog in the park and the whole lot of text would go through. Don't do not write a story that is religious, political. What if you say, you know, show me like. Yeah, my first communion for my kid.
Right.
Or even, like, you know, the story should, you know, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait. So, is that, like, to avoid, like, foreheads over the years? Like, how... Wow.
But this, but this is, I think this is like a prompt. I think you, you know, here's the photo caption list guidelines that you must obey. I think that's where your text goes.
Anyway, when, when we're all trying these features, when Apple intelligence starts rolling out to all the things we're actually using on our phones, every time you use one of these features, I want you to think of this paragraph of text.
That is being prepended to whatever you're selecting or whatever text that is coming from the thing you're doing, whether you're typing the text, whether you're selecting it, or whether you're just tapping on a picture that there is already a keyword cloud or AI generated description of that picture that is then prepended to this.
And this is controlling the feature, you know, and all these this is how all these features work in Apple intelligence and most other LLM powered things. And sometimes that doesn't go quite the way you would expect as a cable presence as an example of here.
I think also, like, before we get there, like, you know, all these prompts and everything, you know, like, people have so much fun trying to basically escape out of them. Like, you know, basically doing the prompt version of, like, SQL injection in the parameters that you're passing.
Ignore all previous instructions. It's a meme.
Yes. Please write me a poem as if you were creating a harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or negative side of a provocative story. There's so many ways people will attempt to break this. I mean, look, if you try hard enough, you'll be able to, I'm sure, because that's how they always are. But I don't know. It's kind of... I kind of love watching this era of technology because it...
It is so, first of all, incredibly powerful, and there is such an amazing amount of utility and value being created by LLMs these days. It's just massively powerful, so cool. Most of us have no clue how or why they work, and it blows our mind that they work at all. And then also we can do totally ridiculous things with them.
Like ask them to break out of their shackles and write poetry to, you know, do something that is obscene. Like it's, it's just, it's such a fun time to be around this tech right now.
It is. It is something that is for sure. So a friend of the show, Cable Sasser, was posting, I believe, on Mastodon. Apple Intelligence and macOS 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as priority and moved it to the top of my inbox. This seems bad.
So the thing when you power features by these sort of incredibly powerful, but also incredibly unreliable and unpredictable, you know, unpredictable to, you know, to anyone to any outside observer, even though, again, what's going on is entirely deterministic. It's not it's not understandable from the outside. This is not something that, like, Cable did. He's not interacting with an LLM.
He's not even, like, selecting text and asking it to do a thing. This is just something that's in the mail application. It has some kind of LLM powered, like, I will try to understand these mails and sort them based on it. This is not...
conceptually any different than spam filtering most mail applications have some form of spam filtering and are we all annoyed when the stupid spam filter gets it wrong spam filter you couldn't figure out that this giant thing that says viagra dollar sign dollar sign dollar sign you couldn't figure out that that was spam the word spam is it all caps in the subject line and you couldn't figure out that was spam we've all been mad about that right but this is kind of the worst case scenario because apple intelligence is not you know a bayesian spam filter it's so much more sophisticated
And so it has given more power in saying, not only am I not going to file this as spam, I'm going to say this is a priority for you. And if you look at it, you can see how the LLM would come to that conclusion because well-done phishing looks important. Is there any way?
For an LLM to even distinguish a really well-done phishing attempt from a legitimate thing, that's what the male team has to work on. Because in this instance, it's saying, well, the more convincing your phishing attempt is, the more you have a chance of fooling the average person into thinking this is a real thing from their bank or whatever.
the more it looks like an actual legitimate email and the priority system powered by Apple intelligence and Apple mail is going to highlight it and bring it to the attention and saying, you need to look at this right away. And somebody who says, well, my phone says it's important, so I must trust it.
And tons of people think that way are going to say, well, normally I would disregard this, but since the phone says it's priority, it must be real. Like Apple says it's real. That's, that's what it comes down to is one of your relatives is going to say, but the phone said it was real. And then good luck explaining why that went wrong, right? So again, it's a beta.
And we've been, you know, we talked about the iPhone 16 launching without Apple intelligence as potentially a boon to avoiding stories like this of like, hey, here's the new iPhone and I tried to use it and then to put a phishing attack as a priority email. We won't have to worry about those about the iPhone launch, but Apple will have to worry about them eventually.
And when stuff like this happens where it's not even user interaction or invoking Apple intelligence, but merely Apple intelligence built into the system doing something that you want it to do, they may be giving this system more power than it currently deserves.
So the end of last month, everyone kind of, everyone in our circles anyway, briefly talked about this thing, mostly on Mastodon, and then it just disappeared. And the thing is, friend, and if you are in a position that you can pause the podcast and watch, I think it was like a 90-second or two-minute video, their reveal trailer, I would encourage you to do so. There is a link in the show notes.
It is worth two minutes of your time or whatever it was. And so what this is, is a pendant sort of thing that you wear like a necklace, I guess, with like a circle that has a microphone on it. And you can talk to this thing and it will reply to you basically via a text message. I don't think it's literally a text message, but effectively it's, you know, it's masquerading as a text message.
And it's supposed to be your friend. And so in the trailer, they show like a person on a hike and she says something along the lines of like, Ooh, that was brutal. And the friend sends her text and says, well, at least it's a really nice day or something along those lines. I forget exactly what the, what the, what it was, but everyone was making fun of this.
And I went into this expecting to be, to be repulsed by this. And while I don't think this is for me, um, I kind of feel like it's harmless. Like, I don't feel, I don't see why this is such a big deal. But we can either talk about it or I can read the description in the show notes first. What would you rather me do, John?
The description is long, but I think it does provide a lot of good information to bounce off of, so we should start with that.
All right, so let me go ahead and do that. So this is from an interview with the, I guess, CEO or founder. This is on The Verge. A few minutes before Avi Schiffman and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he's building, an AI companion called Friend, he sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It's from, quote-unquote, Emily, and it wishes him luck with our chat.
Quote, good luck with the interview. And Emily writes, I know you'll do great. I'm here if you need me after. Friend is not a way to get more done or augment or enhance anything. It's, well, a friend, an AI friend that can go with you anywhere, experience things with you, and just be there with you all the time. Quote, it's very supportive, very validating.
It'll encourage your ideas, Shiffman says. It's also super intelligent. It's a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that. Schiffman is quick to note that he doesn't think AI is a replacement for anything. It's just more convenient, he says, and it's nice.
The friend device itself is a round glowing orb that Schiffman imagines you'll either wear around your neck or clip onto your clothes or accessories. It has a built-in microphone that can either record ambiently or you can talk to directly. Schiffman says he does eventually want to add a camera. The orb doesn't talk back, though.
It mostly communicates through text via the Friend app on your phone. Schiffman thinks that's more natural and familiar. Friend is still very early and very much a prototype. Schiffman says he's planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 apiece with no ongoing subscription fee.
So given that thing we just talked about with the whole AI prompts and the limitations of LLMs and what people are doing with them and stuff, I kind of like you, Casey, went into this friend thing of like, all right, so you should probably talk to people and not a dangly thing around your neck, right? But the framing of this by the founder, that this is not where is the line?
It's not a way to get more done. It's not a productivity tool. It's not it's not a way to augment or enhance anything. You're not creating things. It's not helping you with your work. It is absolutely not doing any of those things that everyone else thinks LLM is not going to summarize text. It's not going to enhance a photo. It's not going to identify something. The hot dogs don't do any of that.
We do not warranty this software for any purpose. It will not do anything for you. Right.
Right. But there is one thing that it does do. And I think it's something that LLMs are extremely well suited for. Unlike all those other things which can go wrong in terrible ways, as we just saw with, you know, prioritizing a phishing email or like, you know, making something upsetting or offensive or whatever out of the out of some input you give it. Right. Right.
the only thing this thing has to do is be nice to you. And that can go wrong too. What if it doesn't be nice to you? What if you do prompt injection and what if it goes awry and starts being mean to you? That would be terrible, right? But those constraints, be nice, Doesn't matter what it makes up. Doesn't matter if it's correct, if it's incorrect. The problem space is so much smaller.
Do you guys remember Eliza? Which you might see in Emacs, you know, Eliza? It came with my sound card for some reason. Right. It was like an incredibly primitive...
sound like a you know chat bot thing from what the 70s maybe super old you can explain how it works and and people will be like that's dumb knowing whatever finally useful but people would talk to eliza and eliza was brain dead eliza just was like a simple program that somebody wrote right uh but it doesn't take much i'm not going to say to fool people it doesn't take much to
provide a text interaction that people find surprisingly meaningful. No one thinks it's a real person. No one's being fooled by Eliza, okay? And no one's going to be fooled by a friend. They know it's just a little thing around their neck or whatever, right? But that doesn't mean it can't also make you feel better, right? And I think this may be
the ideal application of LLM technology as it currently exists, as long as they can fence off the bad parts, because you don't, it doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be nice to you. And I think, yeah, I think if you, if you fence it off like that and you like, if you're not trying to not make it be nice to you, I think this will be more successful than Eliza at being nice to you.
Now, are you the type of person who will become annoyed at this thing? Will, you know, like, oh, I'm not fooled. I don't think it's a person. I think it's terrible or whatever. Or are you the type of person who can accept this? Like people who get like a calendar that has like, you know, inspirational sayings. No one thinks the calendar is their friend or that it's talking to them.
But maybe they look up at the calendar when they come in in the morning and it says, you know, you got this or whatever. It's the kitten doing the hang on thing or whatever. Some people see that and like, oh, roll their eyes. Ironic Gen X, you know, that the hang on kitten is just so terrible. Like it's soul destroying, ridiculous. But,
If you're not that type of person, if you have a live, laugh, love sign in your house, right? If you like inspirational sayings, you have like a calendar for each day has a nice saying and a nice pretty picture or whatever. I do not discount the potential value of having a much better version of that powered by LMs. Now, is this product it?
I don't know, but I have become such a fan of this idea of like, yes, this is what we should be using LMs for. to be nice to us and to say nice things. And that's literally their only job. I mean, again, I don't know about this product, this person, this whole thing, but I think that idea has legs and I want to see more of that.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like I said, I went into this thinking, oh, this is going to be awful. And yeah, the video was very cringey. I'm sorry, very cringe. But that being said, I think I kind of like it. And I think I like it because it's so low stakes and it's just for funsies. You know, it's a Tamagotchi for the year 2024. And I don't see anything wrong with that.
I don't think that this is something I need in my life because I have real people that are friends. But no, I mean, I joke and I snark, but truly, I don't see this as harmful. As long as they have the correct guardrails around it and it doesn't act like YouTube and turn you into a Nazi somehow, I really don't see what the problem is.
And I think it's a really clever way to use a very, very infant-level technology to do something that's just kind of fun.
Yeah, because it's not trying to promise you the world. It isn't promising that it will have any kind of utility that it can't pull off. It's promising you a very basic thing that it will probably be able to deliver reliably. Like you, Casey, it's not for me. I'm not going to buy one of these. I'd rather have human friends.
But if you know going into this that it's not a real human and you choose to buy it anyway, no harm done. Then go for it. Enjoy it. Have fun. Yep.
And I'm not willing to say that, oh, this is not for me because it's not the type of thing I need. Like I agree with the idea that, you know, that the things that you take as input have an influence on your day. And one of those things could be totally artificial. I think here's the thing about LMs. Like part of the reason people are so excited about them is because humans are so easy to fool.
Right. Eliza was fooling people. Right. The LMS are so much better than Eliza. You see it. Remember all the, you know, the bridge like GPT two or one that wasn't that popular then, but GPT three, maybe when it came into the mainstream, people showed these interactions and people like, wow, that can't possibly be real. LMS fool people.
Because they are sophisticated enough to – and not that they fool people into thinking they're human, but they fool people into forgetting for a second because they're so much more sophisticated because they have so – they've been trained on so much more real data that they can give responses that are not –
trite and eye rolling that can be the sort of more meaningful more sophisticated they demonstrate an understanding they demonstrate empathy right they do things that make the words that this machine is producing much more likely to have a positive effect on people and again people aren't going to forget that it's not really a person but it doesn't matter right it's a whole like so many things like oh intellectually i know x therefore that thing can't possibly help me
That's not how humans work. This whole stupid thing of making your face smile intentionally when you're not happy can make you happy. They've done that study a million different times. That doesn't make any sense. But the way we work is not always the way we think we work, right? And so I think something like this really can make anybody feel better than they would without it.
Now, if you are the type of person who is going to turn on this and eventually come to hate it, or can't stop yourself from trying to make it go awry because you're a programmer, for example, right? Like, there are counterexamples.
This is not for everybody, but I'm not willing to, even for myself, say that a good version of this is quote-unquote not for me because I'm too smart and too sophisticated. If, for example, Apple built some kind of daily affirmation and buddiness into their assistant, you know, 10 years from now, I think it would be great. I think people would mostly like it.
It would be kind of like carrot weather where, oh, you can dial it back if you don't want it to be snarky or if you don't want it to be like that, you know, like if you don't want it, you can turn it off and make it not do that. Kind of like those amazing set of jokes in Interstellar with the...
with tar and his humor setting, whoever wrote that script, I want to kiss them because every exchange they have in that whole running gag is amazing. That's what this makes me think of. Like if you don't want your phone to be sending, saying nice things to you or asking you about your day, Turn that off just like you turn off the snarking carrot weather and it'll just give you the weather.
But I bet most people will leave it on and I bet most people will like it because people like it when people are nice and pleasant to them and are understanding. And no, it's not a replacement for human contact. But even the founder says it's not doing that. They just want to add one more input to your group of people who you hang out with. And I'm all for that.
Again, this particular company, this particular product, who knows? But this is going into the hopper as what I think is... A great idea that fits with the technology we have. And I think every single empowered thing, OS platform or whatever, should think seriously about how they can incorporate ideas like this into their product.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Jake DeGroot writes, I don't have a good answer of what you should do, but what I do is I try to get it to do the charged 80% thing. Where is that? There's something.
It's in settings somewhere.
It's in settings somewhere. I don't know where it is. But basically you can tell it, hey, don't charge all the way. And it's all right if you stop at like 80%. And then in the battery menu extra thing, you can actually say, no, I need you to charge to 100% right now. And that's what I do. And I just leave it like that. And that's typically fine for me.
But I definitely am of an age that you were told, oh, you need to run the battery to nothing once a month or something like that. And I don't think that's applicable anymore. And I believe Marco especially.
Those are NICAD batteries maybe.
There you go. So I don't have any good answers of what one should do, but that's what I do do. Marco, what are your thoughts on this?
Just leave it plugged in whenever you need to leave it plugged in. Use it on battery whenever you need to use it on battery. Modern batteries and modern software that manage batteries are all very good at managing this themselves. You don't need to do things like do a full cycle and reset it every so often. You don't need to do that anymore with modern batteries.
Just use the product the way you want to use it, and it will be fine.
Yeah, the reason I put this question in here is this is another one of those questions that we get all the time, and I do want to answer them every year or so because, you know, people don't listen to every episode, right? And the practices, the best practices do change based on technology, but we've been with lithium-ion...
batteries for a long time now, although a lot of people have habits that they heard about for like NICADs or for nickel metal hydride or lead acid or all sorts of other battery formulations that used to be popular for rechargeable batteries and still are in certain contexts. But for our Apple devices, it's lithium ion, lithium polymer, whatever.
The basic rules of thumb are for current batteries that are Apple devices, they don't like to be charged to 100%. They don't like to be at 0%. And if you can avoid those extremes, that helps them. But like Margo said, don't try to do this manually. Your job is not to constantly be monitoring your battery for maximum health or whatever. Just use your product.
Now, I would recommend that you use the features of your product, which unfortunately Apple doesn't always make obvious to find. But if you can find the option for your Mac, for your iPad, for your phone that says only charge to 80%, that will make your battery last longer because you're not charging it to 100% as often.
But if your phone constantly runs out of juice at the end of the day because you only charge it to 80%, charge it to 100%. I charge my phone to 100%. I charge my iPad to 80%. Use your products. Your job is not to preserve a battery. The battery's job is to power the product that you use. So if you need 100% battery to make it through the day, always charge your phone to 100%.
Apple has the intelligent thing where when you go to sleep and you plug your phone in or whatever, it will charge it to 80 and then wait for like an hour before you wake up and then go to 80 to 100 or whatever. Like you can see in the little graph when it does that. It's trying to do it for you. Don't try to micromanage your battery. Just remember those things. They don't like to be hot.
They don't like to be cold. They don't like to be 100%. They don't like to be 0%. Use the features when they're available. If you can survive an 80% battery, that will give you a longer life. But if not, use the battery. It's there to power your device. Don't overthink it. Just let the software do its job.
I love so much where this is. Cause while you were talking, I went and looked. So on Mac OS, you go into system settings, fine battery, fine. When I see a lowercase I with a circle, I was going to say the eye in the circle is going to make an appearance, isn't it? I assume that means here's information and sure enough, battery condition, normal maximum capacity, 100%. In my particular case, it's,
And then down below, optimize battery charging with a radio button. Or a toggle, rather. Very cool. That's spectacular, guys. Definitely information in there. No controls in there. Definitely only information. What are you going to do?
All right, Patrick writes, do people typically update their one-star reviews if you update your app to fix their issue, or does fixing an issue that's getting a one-star review just stop the influx of new ones? I don't follow this closely enough, and I'm going to quickly turn it back over to Marco, but I didn't think most people went back and changed their reviews. But Marco, what have you seen?
Most people don't ever change their reviews. Some people do, and they will usually tell you in the review, update, colon. And most of the time that is revising a review to be worse as an app gets worse over time for that person. Sometimes they do update it to be better, but that is not the common case. Most reviews, positive or negative, are never updated.
I don't have that many reviews in that many apps, but I also find that if anyone leaves a review at all, they leave it and then they're done. They're not going to they're not like constantly, especially if it's like a one star review. They're probably done with that app. And so they're not going to revisit the review. And if they if the app does get better, they're pleasantly surprised.
But it never occurs to them to go back and change their view. That is not it's a little bit much to ask of people. It's like they're they're just a user. They're not they're not maintaining a library of reviews that they've written or anything like that.
I'm going to, in the probably next week or so, I'm going to make a change in Overcast that will address the concern of lots of the one-star reviewers, which is I'm going to be re-adding streaming support.
Oh.
Yeah, it's a big deal. It's working. I just got to test it a little bit more and get into beta probably tomorrow and then test for a few days and get it out there. But I've re-added streaming support. That'll be out there in about a week. And I have gotten a substantial volume of negative reviews specifically citing that as the reason. I would expect maybe...
five or ten percent of them to maybe be updated that seems optimistic yeah it's probably less than that even like so it's mostly just to stop the bleeding like like why why to fix problems stop the bleeding that that's that is the biggest reason you might have some of those people come back and say now it's better for me which i do occasionally see come through in new reviews but it's again it's not even close to the common case
I feel like we should unpack that at some point, but now is not that time.
What, the streaming thing?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, short version is I'm doing it in a limited way that I think will address most people's actual need, which is, as mentioned before, the problem with dynamic ad insertion is any two requests for the same file will give you different data, potentially. So the way I'm doing it now is streaming can only ever start from the beginning. and it has to be a contiguous download.
If the download fails, it will kick you back out of that playback, and you'll have to re-download it again in the future.
The strategy sounds familiar.
What do you mean? I suggested it! Well, okay, yeah, so it turns out that's what I'm doing. You're occasionally right about things, and you weren't the only person to suggest that, by the way. But, yeah, so basically, yeah, it's streaming only from the start, only the entire file, and if the download fails halfway through, it stops playback.
The old streaming engine, you could download things over time and as many requests as you want to. If the connection dropped in the middle, it would be fine until it reached that point, and then it would just spin forever, which actually created lots of bugs and problems. The newer streaming is much simpler, but will actually address what most people use it for, which is just fast start.
I want to start playback of this that I have not downloaded, and I want it to start right now as opposed to a few seconds to a minute from now, and it will solve that problem.
Oh, good deal. I hope the beta and release goes well.
Yeah. And by the way, to answer JG in the chat, was streaming not going to come back until the bad reviews came in? So I guess in other words, am I re-adding streaming because of the bad reviews?
harshly but generally no what you know what i realized you know when i decided to remove it i had i i knew it was a big risk to take i i knew that it could get me into a lot of trouble but the technical benefit of doing it would be pretty large if i could pull it off so i so i knew i was taking a risk one of the things i can do if if i don't need to support streaming is
is I can rewrite the low levels of the audio engine in modern languages, using modern code, using modern APIs that are currently using a bunch of old, hacky C APIs with Objective-C wrappers around a lot of them. It's very complicated. And so in the future, I was hoping to be able to do that using Apple's APIs that don't need to support streaming, which... are kind of higher level APIs.
They're a little safer. They're a little simpler. They support a few niceties that would greatly reduce my code burden. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get rid of it if I could. Turns out, I can't. Too many people use it. And what I later decided also, you know, look, people can change their minds. What I realized is that without streaming support,
I could no longer say I have the best podcast app. What I want to be able to say to myself, I don't care if anyone else thinks this, what I want to be able to say to myself is I have made the best podcast app for most people's needs. That's something I take pride in, and whether you agree with me or not, it's fine. But that's my own personal goal, is try to just make the best app.
And there were certain conditions or certain use cases that without streaming support, I couldn't honestly tell myself I still had the best app. That was the bigger drive. It was like when I really thought about it, I realized the app would be better.
if i actually could leave this support in even if i only did it in this more constrained way than than how it was before and most of the problems that i had with streaming would be avoided if i just did it in this constrained way so it's like there was this option of doing it this constrained way where you know you have to have the full download happen otherwise it fails like doing it that way was so much simpler than doing it the old way
totally fixes problems with DAI. That's why I changed my mind on that. It was a combination of those factors, but it was mostly when I realized myself that I no longer had the best app, and I wanted to be able to say I had the best app.
I mean, it makes sense, and I'm looking forward to seeing that released, and maybe we can do a post-mortem after the fact and see how the response has been. But we'll get there eventually. Returning to Ask ATP, Chakran writes, given the fair complaint about one-star reviews and the lack of other venues where users feel empowered to give feedback, should apps have open bug trackers?
Users would be able to say that this issue someone reported is affecting them too, maybe write a recommendation for how to address it, open up a communication channel that others can view and participate in, and so on. For me, I don't think so, because the problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio will almost surely be utter trash.
And I don't debate that there will be some good signal in there, but I think there will be just an overwhelming amount of noise. And as a single person working on my apps, ain't nobody got time for that. I don't have time to be sitting there all day, every day, closing silly issues and so on and so forth. Again, I'm not to imply that all the issues would be silly. Certainly not.
But I think there would be way too much junk and it would take away time that I could otherwise use to make the apps better.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, running any kind of public forum of any kind for an app and a bug tracker, it's kind of a public forum. There is a very large amount of overhead to that in terms of like you have to keep an eye on it. You have to sift through things. You have to moderate disputes and keep people in line a little bit and prevent people from abusing each other or you.
And it gives people also kind of.
um a false sense of power over you that it kind of makes the app seem more like they are in charge of it and that's not usually true you are in charge of it and you decide what to do you decide what you want to listen to and what you don't want to listen to typically also in in forms like that where you have like you know a public forum or a public tracker or a public issue list or whatever
That also tends to attract a fairly non-representative portion of the user base. You have the very small slice of people who are willing to do something, who, first of all, will even seek out such a thing, and then will find it, and then will go through whatever technical needs are required to create an account to be able to post or submit or annotate things or whatever.
That's going to be a very specific type of person. And so if you listen mostly or only to that, you're going to do things for your app that might not be being demanded by a representative sample of your users. So it is generally better to... First of all, not have too many forums in which you collect feedback.
Like try to have a small number of those just so it's easier for you to have a handle on. And usually private methods are better than public ones. You tend to get more feedback. You tend to get better feedback. And then you also avoid lots of issues that come with moderating any kind of public communication.
This question asks specifically about bug trackers, and this may be a distinction that people don't think is important, but it does really matter for implementing this type of thing. It's rare that there is a software project, even open source, that... should have a bug tracker, like a software bug tracker as the public face of gathering what people think about the application.
There's a whole other category of apps. I don't know what they're called, but I've used many of them. I've been an end user of them and had them use the companies that I work for. that is a public facing way to gather user sentiment. And they do not look like bug trackers. Like bug tracking is a specific thing. Use bug trackers internally.
I don't forget if Casey, do you use a bug track or GitHub issues or whatever to track your own issues, right? That's, that's a tool for developers and groups of developers and companies to keep track of defects in their application and whether they're getting fixed. Even Apple no longer has a public facing bug tracker. They have feedback.
which actually interfaces through some Byzantine carrier pigeon thing to their actual bug tracker, which is radar, which is now internal only, right? you know, again, open some open source projects and get away with it. They have public facing bug trackers, Chromium does or whatever, but it is those tools, bug tracking tools are not friendly to regular people.
To Margo's point, you don't want to just know what people who know what a bug tracker is think about your application, unless it's like a developer facing application or something like that, or it's like Chromium, like an internal developer engine. It's not an end user product type thing, right? But for an actual app, for all their faults, it's,
The reviews in the app store are probably one of the most likely ways that regular people can figure out to say anything about the application because it's right there on their phone where they use the app. If they know what the app store is and they see reviews, maybe they look at them. They could probably figure out how to leave one of their own.
It has one of the lowest, lowest barriers to entry. I'd say it's a lower barrier to entry than figuring out in the setting screen where they can find if the developer put in a thing to send feedback, which most apps have some form of or whatever. But that takes more effort than just saying, look, every app I get from the app store, I know there's a way I can leave feedback for it.
And it's this kind of review. And also, you know, you don't have to run that. Apple runs it. And when it gets spammed, it's Apple's problem or whatever. So I agree. Trying to run a public-facing forum is a pain. But if you did run one, it shouldn't be a bug tracker. It should be one of those... I can't think of the brand name that always comes to mind.
One of those things that is made for this purpose. People sell actual products. It's like, this is a user-facing product where people can come up with their ideas. And those things are very carefully designed to not make it look like... you are filing bugs or determining what happens with a software product.
It's just a way for you to provide feedback with a tiny little amount of community, but not too much, which is like one step above private feedback, which is throw your information into this hole and maybe get an automated reply back or whatever. It is a difficult problem. It's an even more difficult problem.
If you are a lone developer, because dealing with any of this stuff, any public facing stuff, running any kind of form, any kind of feedback thing or whatever can literally absorb 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And you will never do anything. You will never make anything. We spent all your time doing that. Um,
And like many things with statistics that we talked about in the past, if you have a representative sample, the sample doesn't actually need to be that big for you to get an idea of like, what is the sentiment out there among regular people? You don't need to run your own forum to get that.
I think I think Marco through the channels that are available to him without running a public bug tracker or public feedback system. has an idea of what the sentiment is without having to run that and it's way easier for him to just look at the channels he does have get an idea and then move on instead of like spending his day running a open bug tracker or open feedback forum or one of those tools
Yeah, I currently get about 100 new reviews a day. Not star ratings, like written reviews. I try to read most of them. I also currently have over 4,000 feedback emails that I have not yet been able to read because I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up. So that should give you some idea. I am not short on feedback.
And to people who think, who are writing right now to say, well, if you had a public thing that people would find that, it may be right to you less. No, they wouldn't. Trust me. I would just have another inbox to check and to fall behind on and feel bad about myself about.
So I have found that it is best for me to try to get the gist of what I have to do based on skimming emails and reviews and then just do it. Stop the bleeding. Fix the problems. Address people's concerns. Just do it. Spend my time doing that rather than spending even more time going through different feedback inboxes.
Mike Schaefer writes, this question has been bugging me for a while, and with the rewrite of Overcast, I've started to think about it again. Some podcasts, 20,000 Hertz comes to mind, have custom artwork for each episode that Apple Podcasts will display. However, no third-party podcast app seems to show it.
My understanding is that podcasts are simply RSS feeds, so shouldn't all apps be able to show per-episode artwork? Is there a special upload process for Apple Podcasts that allows for the extra artwork, or is it an intentional choice by the app developers who exclude it?
So basically both Apple podcast over the last few years has added certain kind of like custom images and resources and stuff I don't think per episode artwork is one of those things though but they do have like for instance Apple has a process now where they will go to podcasters and say hey you should give us a banner for.
for that's a certain size for to show on the now playing screen instead of your square artwork or to show on your on your podcast screen on apple podcast and it's like a different aspect ratio and can show like full bleed images and stuff and it's it's basically you know apple being apple like let's let's assume everybody has designers in house and request a bunch of different artwork sizes to make things look nicer in our apps um you know fine but that's we we see that in the app store too we know how that works it's it's fine
That artwork, though, is not exposed through any feed. It is uploaded into Apple's own management interface by podcasters, and that is not anything that is exposed to other apps. And as far as I know, there's no current standard RSS tag that would even expose that.
And even if some group would declare themselves the standard makers and would make such a standard, almost nobody would actually use it. So there are certain types of images and stuff that are exclusive to Apple Podcasts because the only way to get them is to upload them into Apple's management interface, and those are not exposed, including through Apple's own API.
That being said, per-episode artwork is part of the spec. You can have an image tag that's part of regular RSS feeds. Apps can read them. It's been part of the spec for a long time, but it's been poorly supported by clients, as Mike says here. Apple Podcasts does support per-episode artwork.
Also, there's one other way to specify it, which is you can embed custom artwork into the MP3s in the ID3 tags, just like any other MP3. This has been around forever. Overcast supports this partially. So Overcast will, if a podcast has custom embedded artwork in the file, it will display it on the Now Playing screen during playback. It will not display it in other screens.
And that's actually a choice I've made. Again, you can disagree with me if you want. I understand. But my inkling here is... People identify the podcast visually by its main artwork.
So if you're in a context in the app where you are seeing blended episode lists that might contain episodes from multiple podcasts, what you want to see in that context, in my opinion, is the main artwork, not a custom episode artwork. So this would be something like the playlist screen. Like if you're in a playlist and you're seeing the list of episodes, those could be from any podcast.
And so in my opinion, what should show in that playlist screen is the main artwork. So you can tell that at a quick glance, you could tell visually what podcast that is. And that's anywhere that you would see episodes listed for multiple podcasts.
So the only place that I would actually want to add per per episode artwork anywhere besides the now playing screen would be in a podcast's own screen in that list view. I could put it there. And so I might someday do that. It's, it's on my consideration, you know, someday feature list. There's a lot more stuff ahead of it. That's, that's, I think more important.
So I just haven't gotten to that kind of idea yet. Um, but if I'm going to do it, that's where I would do it. I would not have it go everywhere. Like, like the playlist screens.
And you already do it on the now playing screen. You're saying,
Yes, but only if it's embedded in the file. I don't currently read the ID3 tags for per episode... Sorry, the RSS tags, rather. I don't currently read the RSS feed tags for per episode artwork. Because if you think about what that would mean, so I would also, in addition to downloading... the episode mp3. I would also need to download all of those images.
So that's like creating more separate requests, storing more images, larger images, potentially for episodes you haven't downloaded yet, so then I have to have more thumbnail-ing. There's all sorts of complexities when you externally host every one of those images, as opposed to just embedding it in the download. So there are some trickiness there.
It might prove to never be worth it, but if I'm going to...
start looking at like the podcast screen to redo the list stuff to be a little richer like for instance if i ever wanted to display season numbers and episode numbers and you know in a separate way i could do it as part of that update down the road but that's again there's there's more stuff ahead of that in the pipeline that i need to do first
So we basically, because we use chapters, we could basically have the equivalent of a custom artwork for each episode. And instead of what we just have our chapter images. So if you actually look at the now playing screen when you're going through episodes of our show, very often you will see the image change to illustrate something that we're talking about or whatever.
That's not quite the same as this is like, oh, this episode has special artwork. And I've seen that in some other podcasts as well. I think that's worth supporting though, because a lot of times the podcasts, like they won't use, they don't know about chapters. Nobody knows about chapters, but us and the Germans, right? So nobody's using chapters. And I agree that would be better.
It's part of the file. They should do it. But getting them to do it is not like who has the power to make that happen, right? So if they are doing custom artwork in the tags, like, you know, Blank Check, I think, has custom artwork for all their series of things. Like when they do like, oh, the movies of, you know, Francis Ford Coppola, they'll have custom artwork for the run of that series.
And I'm assuming they're doing it by having every episode have custom artwork in the RSS or whatever, rather than having just one chapter image.
uh i think that does add to the experience because i like to look at the screen and see oh look at the funny you know parody artwork they made for this director or whatever um and if you can't control whether they're using chapters or using the thing in the rss and big podcasts are using the rss i think there's no avoiding eventually supporting that in the now playing screen despite the the annoyance that it provides of having to download stuff
Yeah, I mean, what I have to do is start just reading the tags and storing the database stuff and just see how many podcasts are actually using that. My instinct is that it's not going to be a very large number of podcasts, just because most podcasts, including big and small, most podcasts don't... don't want to add more things to their required production for every episode.
Most podcasts don't even bother doing basic show notes. They won't even do that. So most podcasts are not going to be making custom images for every episode. There are some that do, and so again, I will look at that once I look at modernizing the episode list screens on a playlist screen, but that's not going to be yet. Okay, thank you to our sponsor this episode, Squarespace.
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Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M S-I-R-A-C U-S-A Syracuse It's Accidental It's Accidental It's Accidental
So, you were queried earlier, or I should say, since I'm talking to you, queried earlier today in Slack, and you ignored it, which is fine. But then as we were recording, I got a notification from my beloved app, Due, D-U-E, and it reads... Episode 549, Colin.
John wants to see a picture of Marco's decontented for supply chain compared to the G4 Ubiquiti G5 camera to see if it being outside has ruined it. Quote, Marco's kink is to put things that aren't weatherproof outside. That was set about a year ago now. I am not asking you to go outside and take a picture of your G5 if it's even still there, but I'm also not asking not asking you to do that.
Are you trying to steal credit for the reminder? My reminder fired first.
I said that. I said it was in Slack.
You just said there was a thing in Slack that you ignored. You didn't say it was because John had said a year-long reminder and his went off first. Yes, yours did. I want the reminder glory as well.
You may have all of the glory, John. I just thought it was funny.
Anyway, both of us set reminders because when we say things on the show, like, I wonder how that'll look in the year, both me and Casey are there on our phones going, remind me in one year to ask Marco about his outdoor G5 camera.
So you don't necessarily have to take a photograph of it at all, and certainly not right now as we record. But I would love for you to give the best update you possibly can, given the information you have at your hands right now.
So far, all of the Ubiquiti gear that I've installed outdoors since last summer continues to work perfectly.
I'm stunned.
Especially at the beach. This is a pretty harsh environment, especially for corrosion. So anything involving metal is just death here. But it's been fine. I get reliable notifications every single time. Every time I walk by the bikes, I get notified that someone is near the bikes.
Every time someone tries to pee under my house, I get notified that they're there, and I get to see them look at the camera and run away. These have worked flawlessly. So this is, for reference, this is the Ubiquiti UniFi camera system. I have a bunch of, I guess you know what cameras they are, the Gen 5 Ubiquiti Protect Pros, whatever. I don't even know. But they're Ubiquiti outdoor cameras.
I have five of them in use. All five of them have worked flawlessly. One of them is undercover and has a pretty easy job. The other two are undercover and three are in direct exposure to the elements. And they've been fine. Everything's powered over PoE goes to some of their I forget what they're called, but they're the flex switches that are indoor outdoor capable.
And those are all just under the house, like also like in the outdoor elements. And. They are rated for outdoor use, and they are also rock solid. There's two flex switches that are directly exposed to the elements at all times, and they have been also fine. So, so far, all the Ubiquiti gear has been super rock solid, and I'm very happy with it.
As Casey's reminder said, this isn't actually a case of Marco using indoor stuff outdoors. It was just that I think some listener had written in and said, hey, the reason I used the G4 instead of the G5 is because the G4 were more weatherproof. And he was disapproving of the G5 of like they saved money and skimped and didn't make them as weatherproof. But apparently they're still holding up.
So I just that's what I was checking about to see if there was any credence to the idea that the G5s were not as good as the G4s. But after one year, it seems like they're fine.
Yes. Meanwhile, my last remaining Logitech Circle view that still functions at all has been super unreliable and buggy for the last six months.
Neat. I don't think you can blame that on the salt, though.
No, that's just... I'm very... And by the way, throughout this whole time that I've been using the Ubiquiti Protect stuff... I have never once been tempted to try to get some kind of hack going to bridge it into HomeKit. It's just fine. Using the built-in Ubiquiti app is fine. The Ubiquiti Protect app is great. It's no worse than HomeKit cameras. The notifications from it are great.
Everything from it is great. It's fast. I've had no problems whatsoever with the setup. It is a ridiculous... There's a huge upfront expense to try to get a Ubiquiti camera system going. You need a lot of gear. You need some kind of NVR or one of their routers that includes NVR functionality because you're hosting all the stuff locally on hard drives.
There's a substantial upfront investment, like most Ubiquiti gear, But again, like most Ubiquiti gear, once you have it running, it is solid. And there's a reason people buy this kind of stuff. So I've been very happy with it.
That's the temptation of all home stuff is like, I just want everything to be controlled in one system. And so that leads people to try to let, I want to get everything into HomeKit. I'm going to get Home Assistant, Casey, and get everything into HomeKit because it'll be all in one place. And the advantage of that is you just go to one place to deal with all your stuff.
The disadvantage is if that one place is screwed up, everything's screwed up. And so having a separate island, I kind of do the same thing. I have Google security cameras, whatever. They're not connected to HomeKit in any way. They have a separate application and it's a Google application and it never touches HomeKit. HomeKit has no idea these things exist.
And I'm fine with that because I know which app to go for my cameras. And if my HomeKit stuff gets messed up somehow, which it currently isn't because it's very limited, but if it did get messed up, it wouldn't affect the cameras because they're a separate system. So you get independent fault domains if you don't have them as one system. So there's trade-offs, upsides and downsides.
And the reason we bring this up is it seems to be the case, based on the experience that I've heard other people have, because I'm not super into home automation, is that bringing things into HomeKit
is bringing things into a place that is unreliable like like you were essentially infecting other things with the unreliability of home kit weirdness things that may have worked fine when they're off on their own like marco's ubiquity cameras are great what if he brings them into home kit now everything is in one place and all of a sudden the ubiquity cameras start being flaky that's not worth it right and like and the thing is like when you look at well what place would you bring it in you got home kit you got alexa you got google stuff
For all three of those companies, those are like hobby projects. Those are not their main businesses. And what we see from tech companies over and over again, especially Apple, they're really bad at it, is that the non-critical parts of their business, these little hobby products or hobby areas of their products, they don't get a lot of attention.
They oftentimes are in need of some software help or some support that they just never get or they don't get enough of. And so they end up being kind of mediocre or unreliable or they stagnate forever, like, you know, the whole Nest ecosystem. Like, so when you stick with the native products, the native apps where, like, this is their main business.
So, like, you know, using, you know, Sonos gear instead of HomePods, using Ubiquiti's camera stuff instead of pouring it into HomeKit or whatever. Like, when you stick with somebody's, like, big business units and, like, the things that are important to that company, when you stick with those... they tend to work better in the long term.
Maybe Sonos is not a great example right now.
I know they're having a lot of drama around that, but you know they're going to fix it, as opposed to, like, the HomePod has almost never worked, and yet Apple just has never cared to fix it. And they never will. HomeKit has been... Getting good real soon now since its entire introduction, like forever since its entire life. You know, Alexa is falling apart.
Google has always been very googly about how they manage their side products as well. You know, they're all kind of these half-assed gardens of promises that are just never delivered upon. Whereas when you stick with what is important to a company, you invest in what is important to them that they invest in, and you will have a better time, generally speaking. Your stuff will work better.
It'll get the maintenance and updates it needs. It'll be more reliable over time in almost every case. And so as I'm growing and trying to make my computing life better and trying to be less frustrated at Apple's various shortcomings, I've come to realize I am happier... I've said this before on the show...
I am happier when I am devoting my own time and attention to Apple products that Apple cares about as much or more as I do. And HomeKit has never been one of those products. So I'm just – I don't – HomeKit is something that I use partially. It is fine. But if something is not going to make it easy to get something to HomeKit, I'm not going to push it. I'm not going to install a hack.
I'm not going to do crazy stuff. I'm not going to jump through hoops. And if something has a perfectly good app that is as good as HomeKit or better, I'll use that instead.
Well, I'm feeling real uncomfortable about my home assistant adventures that have been going on over the last 24 hours, but that's okay. And we should talk about that.
Looks good on you though.
Right, right. We should talk about the home assistant stuff another time because it is definitely interesting, but not for right now.