Integrating Media Servers into Call Sheet

Uh June is Pride Month, at least here in the States, and uh we wanted to take a moment to just quickly recognize that Pride Month is important, that the three of us stand with all of the LGT LGBTQIA plus community. I did that off the top of my head. Hope I got it right. Um you matter. You are important. We love you and care for you. We try to be here for you in any way we can when we can. If you think that any of those folks are beneath you, then you are a turd and you can just tune out right now. Uh, there's there's nothing wrong with loving who you want to love, with being who you want to be, and to stand in the way of somebody realizing the best version of themselves in a in a way that doesn't affect any one else really. We I think we support that. You know, we sh we sh you should let the people love who they want to love and be who they want to be. And f you know, I I have some friends that um are going through some transitions now and I can tell you that at least as far as I can tell, they are happier than they've ever been in the many years that I've known them. And so uh gentlemen, if you have something to add, I am all all ears and all for it. But in summary, ATP stands with you and happy pride. Yeah, I think uh to to as much as as you know three cishet white guys can can try to understand any any part of this, uh you know, we try to be the best allies that we can and the best supporters that we can . It shouldn't be as controversial as it is that people should be who they are and love who they love. That is such a beautiful concept, and it's really sad that the world has made that so difficult for so many people for so long in different versions in different forms. If you really think about what that really means, like be who you are and love who you love . Who could possibly be against that? But but yet yet there are people who are and who who make the lives of queer people difficult. Um and we we all know queer people, we know gender-fluid people, we know trans people, a lot of people whose lives have been made more difficult by by forces against being who you are and loving who you love. And we just want to, as Casey said, just reiterate how much we vehemently support all rights for all people to be who they are and to love who they love. Anything that we can do to help, we we are happy to help. And until this fight is totally won and everyone is equal, which as we know is probably never see also racism. Like you know, we we never really solved that. It's a constant battle . Um anything about gender identity and sexuality, like that's gonna be a constant battle for the rest of our lives too. And we wanna make sure that we are constantly on the good side of that, helping to fight it. And so we strongly encourage the rest of you, please help defend people's rights and help encourage people to live the lives that that they want to live. Yeah. And in the US we've recently made some terrible backsliding in this area, so we all just have to fight even harder to not only continue to make forward progress, but to make up the ground that we've lost. Uh we have to kind of really dig in here and uh just try to get back to where we were a couple of years ago. So it's rough for us, but you know, you you can't give up. Yep. So happy pride, everybody. John, you have something going on. Yeah. Um dynamic DNS. Uh this was definitely a big thing. I don't know, I feel like maybe uh a a little while ago where you'd get like I got my first cable modem, oh but I don't have IP, but I want to run a server in my house in violation of my ISP's uh terms of service. Um so you'd get a host name and you'd be like, Well, but can I get like a host name that like any time anyone looks up the host name it resolves to whatever the IP address the my cable modem gave me recently that's dynamic DNS. The dynamic part is I look up the IP address for this host name and I get a different answer depending on you know whatever whatever IP address John, what year is it? Why are we talking about this right now? We're gonna party like it's nineteen ninety nine, right? Well, because in the past I signed up for our dynamic DNS thing for so I could do exactly that. So I could wherever I was in the world, I could, you know, SSH into, you know, my h my home computer running Mac OS ten. Obviously now uh, you know, former sponsor Tailscale solves all these problems and more, right? But I'm going back in time, right? Long time ago, dynamic DNS was a big thing. I did that. I got an address um and I connected it up to my network. Uh and I didn't uh you know back in the day, uh I mean I'm still a cheapskate, but I was even more of a cheapskate when I had a lot less money. Um and there was a free one. It says, oh, you can get a free dynamic DNS address at this particular service. Was this dyn dns.org? That's what I used. No. Okay . It's uh no IP, no hyphen IP.org. Uh yes, I'm familiar with this as well. I wasn't aware that anybody has ever paid for these services. Like I'm sure they had paid tiers, but like of all the different times I've seen a dyne DNS or a no IP, like everything everywhere, I've never heard of anyone paying for them. Yeah, so the no IP thing with the with the free plan, it's great, except that once a month you get an email that says the hostname you registered at noip.com is set to expire the next 14 days due to inactivity. Unused hosts are removed from our system if no updates are made within 90 days. This policy helps to ensure we have no stale DNS records. If you are still actively using this host name and do not wish to have your host removed from our DNS service and database, please click the link below. And they used have to like a link for you to click. See also Google Voice. So me being a programmer back in the day, I just programmed a thing to watch for those emails and then like make a request for the URL. Done and done. Right. Nice. Then they, you know, time passes on and then they get wise to that and they're like, Well, we can't do that. We're gonna make you go to a page and like do a capture type thing. I'm like, uh, well, I suppose I could try to defeat the capture, but again, this was many, many years ago. I'm like, um I'll just go to I'll just when they send the email once a month, I'll click on the link, I'll do the capture. Eventually the capture thing will learn my IP address is legitimate and not even prompt me. You just hit the little checkbox or whatever. So yeah, um and I had a note in my calendar to say you should probably get rid of the that dynamic DNS thing because you don't really use it anymore and there are so many better solutions. Uh maybe it's time to ditch it. Uh but I put the note on a specific date and that was I guess maybe last week or so. And that's because um i first signed up for this um no ip uh address 20 years ago oh wow this is this anniversary corner i've never been happier in my whole life this is the nerdiest anniversary I've ever heard. For for twenty years, once a month, I've been clicking on a link or going to a caption and filling it out. And I feel like this is an amazing embodiment of exactly how cheap I am and how far I will go not to have to pay any money . Because every single month they're like the come ons are like, you know, the the button that's highlighted is the one that says sign up for our paid plan. And like it tries to funnel you so hard to sign up for our paid plan. I'm like, nope. I will, I will outlast you, no IP. I will do this for free forever. I just kept waiting for the day. I'd wake up and they'd say, No more free plan. Uh you have to pay. But they never did. I was like, if you're never gonna make me pay, I'm never going to pay because I don't need any of the paid services. All I need is exactly what you're giving me . And once a month I will do this. So for 20 years, I've been clicking on links from the IP.com. And I just wanted to celebrate that probably right before I get rid of that IP address and replace it with something more sane. So happy 20th anniversary. My host dynamic hostname that I signed up for in 2006. That's amazing. I mean, first of all, like if you wanted to stop doing this, how much money would that cost? Like what I'm sure there's some kind of paid plan where you don't have to verify every month, right? I don't know. I mean I uh there's so many other solutions and I'd also have to think about like why am I doing this because these days I have all my stuff on servers, like uh you know, I have my servers that I host on Cloudflare and stuff. So like part of the reason it says there's no activity, well two reasons. One, FIOS really doesn't change my IP address. So like the dynamic DNS thing, like I don't even run it half the time. And two, like when do I ever need to connect to my home network in this way? I really don't. So I'm probably just gonna get rid of it and not replace it. I can't remember last time I used it, but I was so close to twenty years last time I considered this, I'm like, I'll put a thing in the calendar. It's 20 year anniversary, we'll figure it out. But anyway, yeah, I will click on a link once a month for 20 years to save money. By the way, just I did I looked it up. It's three bucks a month to get rid of that requirement. I'll I will never pay that. Right. If it's worth it for you to save three bucks to click a link once a month, great. Yeah, no, no, it's. a that's the thing Like, if I wanted the services, I would have paid for it long ago. I have no problem paying for services that I need, but I don't need anything beyond what I have, and the only quote unquote cost to me is clicking on that link, and it's like 20 years, man. I'll I'll click it for 20 years. If you give me a free way to do it, I'll take it. Um, if it if it was more onerous or if I needed some extended services, I would have done it. But yeah. Obviously I really want to go that route as as Casey will tell you that uh uh Tail Scale former sponsor is the way to do that because they may they have it's so much more powerful than it's done Mic DNS address. Yes. They are former and future sponsor for the record, but genuinely, I am pretty obsessed with Tail Scale. It really does just work in almost every way. And you know, one of the things that's great, you know, uh not to turn this into a tail scale ad, but there's a couple of features that makes this really great. First of all, you know, all of your devices have a sta a stable host name that's only uh visible to things within your own tailnet. So basically, within your little like mesh network, if you will. But they also have a feature called Tailscale Funnel, which is the sort of thing that I think would solve a lot of these problems that we used to solve solve with dynamic DNS. And what Tailscale Funnel does is it says, all right, I want to vend this port on this device to the public internet. So say you're working on a web page in like a Docker container or something like that, and you want to have a coworker look at it. Well, a coworker maybe or like a friend or something like that. So someone not on the same tailnet, you can actually enable tail scale funnel, which will let the w which will let the internet tunnel into your device via tail scale servers, but it's all encrypted so they can't s you know sniff it out or anything like that. Um and it's actually very powerful and very cool. I wouldn't be like running a jellyfin server through this or something like that, but for you know the sorts of things where you just want somebody to look at something on your you know host it on your own computer, it does work very well. Suppose you were maybe sending a goose concert video to a friend. Yes, exactly. I mean, I don't know who would ever do that, but that is something you could do, hypothetically. All right, uh, let's start with some follow-up. We have a big show today, so we're gonna try to power through this famous last words. Uh let's talk about the Ferrari Luce. Uh RG extracted a video clip that John you were talking about that shows I don't know how would you describe what what you were after with this video clip. I understand it and I've watched it, but I'm not sure how to verbalize it. Yeah, maybe I just could have given a time stamp link to the YouTube video, but RG did extract it into a a quick little animated GIF, which is not a GIF, it's MP4, but whatever. Um it's the two parts of the the design of the car. This is for from Ferrari's own presentation. They said basically think of it this way: there's like a inner black inner part that slopes way down in the front and the back, and then there's this red or body-colored outer shell that goes on top of it, and they have an animation showing just that. So I that's what I was referring to in the last show and I had trouble describing it. I'm still having trouble describing it, but now there's a clip. Check it out. Additionally, I don't remember if I said this privately or publicly, but I had said to you one way or another that you should make a blog post about your EV stupidity checklist. And Yeah. I mean, time wise, depending on when you saw what, you might have think the blog paste came first, but it was totally Casey saying, Hey, that thing you talked about on the show, you should make a blog post about that. So I did . Uh we'll link it in the show notes. It is a more formalized version of what I talked about on the episode about uh when car makers make an EV and forget how to do basic things in car design. Uh and it's not just for EVss because they do this acros all cars, but anyway, I covered tried to cover a bunch of bases. Check it out. Print it out, give it to your car designer friends and say, here , look at this list. Right? You forgot something on this list though, which didn't hear to me until several days later. Do you want to try to guess what it what it is you forgot? I mean, whenever you make a list like this, everyone's gonna write in to tell you what you quote unquote forgot. Uh there obviously I could have gone for on forever with uh things that are dumb about E Vs, but which particular thing are you referring to? Well you I will give you three guesses. What is my bugbear? What am I always banging the drum about? For E for EVs specifically or for your car specifically? Yes. I mean it's it's not common across every single EV, but a lot of EVs I should have I should have written down the all the suggestions everyone else had. I didn't see any suggestions that I hadn't, but just ones that didn't cut. But I'm I'm not other than like a windshield that withstands iPads, I'm not thinking of anything. Well played. Uh no, CarPlay. It's car play. It's obviously car play. You need to support car play. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Some so a lot of people s wrote in with that because they were saying, hey, not only is that uh, you know, whatever, like the the Chevy Equinox, because I used that as an example when I tooted about this. Not only is the Chevy Equinox EV stupid in these ways, also they remove car play from and I'm like, I have bad news about GM and CarPlay. It's not I mean, I'm I know they're doing it mostly on EVs now, but I think it's basically a company wide thing. So as each as each car model gets redesigned, I think their plan is for the new design not to have car play. So that's not an E V thing, but yeah, that's really dumb. But that's a that's a GM thing. Yeah, well, and also like every few months somebody from Rivian goes on a Neil Patel podcast and gives an And that just happened again, um basically saying like we are never gonna do CarPlay, why would we do CarPlay? All we need to do is add a few integrations for things like Spotify, maybe, or Apple Music, and then it'll be fine. And clearly nobody would ever want to run overcast in the car. Why would you want to do that? Well, it's just it's just like this back and forth cadence of of the same story, which is executive says we don't need car play, and then whatever the most recent survey is, 80% of customers said they won't buy a car car without play and just goes back and forth and back and forth. And it's like, all right, well, I guess you're just gonna wait it out and see if that number goes down. Yeah. And Rivian's position has always been like, we don't need ever we we don't want somebody taking over the whole experience. It's like, well, that's not really like almost no car lets car play take over the whole experience. Um and there's like my car it has like, you know, i in the most recent interview, whoever from inner from Riven was being interviewed by Neila and I think it was decoder, um, said like the CarPlay requires every pixel of the screen. No, it doesn't. Most cars don't use that. It does not. I I got so mad about this. I got so unnecessarily mad about it. Maybe they were talking about CarPlay Ultra, which by the way, the Luce doesn't have that either, which is interesting. Yeah, but even but like you know, look at what ev what CarPlay means to everyone is it's a window on the screen that shows your phone stuff. And that's all it needs to be. Like my car, it you it takes up most of the main screen, but it doesn't take up any of the gauge cluster. And and along the bottom of the main screen is my car's controls for things like climate. And that's fine. It works fine. And and then they were they were like, Whoa, our customers don't even want it anymore. Yeah, because anybody who wants it isn't your customer. Right. Yeah. Self selecting, it's the Mac Pro Yeah. Yeah. So remove it from our cars and then three years later nobody who buys their cars wants CarPlay. Yeah. Who who who can imagine that? So yeah, good luck. I I've used your software. I've owned I've owned your vehicle. I've used your software without car play, and guess what I did? I put my phone in a bracket next to the air vent because that's what I had to do. Because that's what I actually need is my phone in the car. And your software is not good. Like the Rivian map software was horrendous. The routing was bad, the traffic was bad, the directions were bad, the map data itself was bad, the street names were bad, the exit names were bad. Everything about it was bad, so I never use it, I just used Waze. That's why because theirs was worse. Guess what? Their Bluetooth implementation for audio? Bad. Limited. Their version their client apps for things like Apple Music. Bad. That's why I didn't use them for very long. And whenever they would announce some new update or some new service, I'd go try it again. And I would bail it after less than a day 'cause it was so bad. Or I would try their routing, cause they said the routing's better. I would try it on one trip and it would be so bad. Sorry, Rivian. I want Rivian to succeed. I really do because their vehicles, I think, have a lot of great aspect, a lot of promise. I like a lot about their company ethos. I like a lot about their style. Their capabilities in things like off-road situations are amazing. Like there's so much and I'm so optimistic about their future lineup. Like I think the R2 is going to bring them a whole bunch of success. I really love how the R3 might be looking. The R3X would be a serious contender for my next car if it if it actually comes out in like in the right time span. But CarPlay, man, that would solve so many problems and Rivian still continues to assert that we don't need CarPlay 'cause we can just build in like you know, people like podcasts, right? Oh, we'll just build in an Apple Podcasts. Done. We'll st haveill Spotify. That's podcasts, right? Makes me so mad. Oh, you want maps? Here's a map. It's all the same, right? Nope. It sure isn't. Nope. It makes me so mad. And the thing of it is that you can offer CarPlay and continue to do the sh you're already doing. It's not mutually exclusive. I don't understand. That's the that's and and the worst part is like they keep saying like we we have to do this ourselves so that we can give you know give people a a good experience. They're not giving people a good experience. The good experience is I gotta put my phone in a bracket because that's what I actually need. And I don't have to do that with my other car because my other car has car play. And so I don't need to put my so I don't put my phone in a bracket and use it while I'm driving. Yep. No, it's it's preposterous to me. It's it's complete hubris. I am my personal opinion, I think I've probably said this before, and I don't think it's an original thought, but I think eventually when Tesla sales continue to go through the crapper, I think eventually they will enable. We've heard rumors about this. I think we've even talked about it on the show. They will eventually enable CarPlay. And then spontaneously the clouds will disappear at Rivian HQ. And suddenly CaryP willla work on a Rivian because it works on Teslas, so I guess it should work for us too. I mean, we might literally hear about CarPlay being added to Teslas next week. Like that that they could do actually something with Apple where Apple announces you know on some slide at WWC like that could actually be part of what we hear very soon. I can totally see that being a thing that they would want to like co-announce together. There was something in the show notes about CarPlay on Tesla, but it just got pushed down down and and didn't even make it into overtime. There's a this is a long cue, so thank you for bringing that back up. You are welcome. All right. I told you we had to make this quick, and then I went on a tear with well, Marco and I both. And uh air high five to you, Marco, because I'm right there with you. All right, let's talk about another thing that makes us so happy. Bamboo. Uh with regard to last week's overtime and uh bamboo, the 3D printer manufacturer and their fights with users or with it's with their own users, Steve Riggins writes, Bamboo is not liked by the open source community well before this latest issue. They've repeatedly broken the spirit of open source software, and this was, I believe, the final straw for many. I own a Prusa P-R-U-SA, partially because of this older beef that I heard about via my friends, and I did That was posted on Mastodon . Jose uh replied to that post saying facts. I stopped firmware updates right when they announced plans to lock down the comms on my X1C. I'll never buy another bamboo. I understand why people have a beef with bamboo and it it ha it being a an increasingly proprietary system. I I get that. People have pointed out legitimate issues like bamboo is a Chinese company, and sending your models through their servers can possibly create some unusual or undesirable outcomes. I totally get that. I just don't care about those things from my point of view as a casual 3D printing hobbyist. I love how easy and good bamboo stuff is. If I wanted to go kind of the more like open source route, the Prusa stuff looks really good. I I totally get why people would do that. And maybe in the future , I will go that route. But right now I'm perfectly happy to stay in this walled garden. Walled gardens can work really well. As long as they're not the only gardens. Like that like and that's The good thing is I'm I'm glad the world of open, free, non-locked down 3D printing exists. And I think there will always be a market for that. If I was running like a big you know fleet of printers for like a product company where I was actually printing stuff in mass and shipping it to customers, like I would probably want more control over my hardware. And so I would probably do something like a bunch of Perusas or something. But as a hobbyist, I love not having to deal with the increased complexities of the open source world. I love just having it be integrated because when it was harder before I had the integrated bamboo system , I never did anything with it. I never 3D printed anything because it was too hard. Now it's made it easy. So what I said in the in the overtime for non-members uh about this, the basic gist of it is please let me not care about the dispute here between bamboo and the open source people. Please let me continue to enjoy this hobby and not be an activist this one time for this one issue. Um, because that's that's currently a big source of joy for me and I want it to stay that way. Yeah, and your request was denied, by the way. So many people wrote in and basically said to Marco, no, sorry, you can't not care. So answer. Asked and answered. Honestly, I was not persuaded by those arguments. Well, but you asked. Like you shouldn't ask permission if you didn't want to hear the answer. You don't have their permission, but you just you can do what you want because you don't need their permission. Thanks. We are sponsored this episode by factor. Now imagine, hunger strikes, but you're exhausted. You've had a really long day. There's something healthy in your fridge that you should be making, but you just don't have it in you. Factor solves this problem for you. Factor helps you hit your nutrition goals this season and just eat healthy without the planning, the grocery runs, or the cooking. So factor meals come to you fresh, never frozen. 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Or we're like, let's get him real good, healthy meals. So we went went right to factor for that because all he has to do is pick something out of the fridge in a factor box and put it in the microwave for two minutes, poke some holes in the in the top, and it's done. There's a whole meal, healthy, high protein, fresh vegetables, ready to go. It's a great situation. So head to factormeals.com slash ATP And use the code ATP fifty off to get fifty percent off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-six. See website for more details. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring our show. All right. Alarms for more than twenty four hours in advance. Ben Smith writes, you can set an alarm up to seven days in advance by using the repeat every X day of the week and selecting which day or days you want the alarm to go off. Given that alarm reminders are now way better at this, I can't think of a reason why anyone would Aaron Powell That's a clever workaround, but thankfully no longer needed. Yeah, that's a that's a that is a clever workaround. It's a terrible solution. That's you shouldn't need to do that to set an alarm, you know, more than twenty-four hours, you know, a at a time. So I understand why people do this with now the new alarm reminders that makes sense. Uh we talked a lot over the last few weeks about moving files and how to move files. I think the genesis of this was NASCATP several weeks back, but do you copy and paste files? And we talked about cut copy and paste and then the move modifiers. That's that's been the uh past three shows worth of discussion about this. Yeah. Uh Steven Optibeek writes, uh Optibeck, Optibeek, Octopta something. Uh Stephen He's given pronunciation and I also can't remember what it is, but I know we always get it wrong. I'm sorry, Stephen. Stephen Up to Something writes, You can use the move command, the MV command, to move files across volumes. It works just as you would expect. Here's a demo movie. And uh this was on Mastodon, and we'll put a link in the show notes. I can't believe I didn't like not scold you, but correct you about this. I guess you were just on a tear and I didn't interrupt, but I of course you can use the MV command to move files for cross volume. I mean yeah I didn't say definitively one or the other, but I just thought about it. I'm like, you know what? I've actually haven't tried that on on Mac OS and because the file moving the the basic tools on Mac OS like CP and MV and stuff do all sorts of Mac stuff, I'm like, I wonder, did they change that? Uh, but anyway, I didn't actually try it. Uh Steven did, and so there's a video. Uh, then Steven continues, uh, in a second uh movie and a second toot. Here I am interrupting the process by yanking the volume. Don't try this at home, kids. The move or MV only copied part of the file and kept the source intact. So there you go. So uh it is the he bravely tested the worst case scenario, which is if it dies in the middle, what happens and the good news is that the source file is still there. So thumbs up to M V All right. Uh and then someone whose identity was omitted or will be omitted here to spare them the embarrassment wrote in to say that they did not heed your advice, John, about cross-volume moves in the finder and ended up hosing a entire virtual machine that they were trying to move. Whoopsi-opsies. Yeah. Yeah, they they said they had my voice in their head while they were doing it and they said, well, anyway. And then the thing failed and they deleted the destination and realized their source was host. So remember what reminding again what this is saying is if you're doing an operation in the finder with drag and drop that would normally be a copy, in other words, moving across volumes, but you over ride the fact that it's a copy by holding down command to make it a move, that's what I'm saying don't do. Because you know for the for the reason stated here that like uh espe like I think the problem with the VM is it' actusally a folder full of files and you but it looks like one file. So like you you drag it. This is like a this is actually sort of working as designed, but not as the user expects. You know, you could you hold down command, turn it into a move, it starts going, but it fails for some reason. You're like, ah, well, I'll just do it over. But what you didn't realize is that in that file that looks like a single file, but it's actually a folder full of files, each one of those files was like, copy the destination, delete the source, copy the destination, delete the source, copy the destination, delete the source. Oh, I got interrupted. So then when it gets interrupted, you're like, oh, the copy failed. Let me just delete the destination. I'll recopy it. But what you're recopying, it is now a partially populated directory that looks like a file full of stuff. This is, again, I don't think this is actually a bug. This is like just working as designed, but again, not as you expect. There are actual bugs where you're working with a single file, and you can still end up in the scenario where the destination didn't get written correctly and the source is gone. So don't do it. Just let it be a copy and then delete the source when you're sure the destination has been entirely written. Uh we did a member special on the movie Her and we talked during the member special about how or at least I brought up how cool I thought the user interfaces were on the screens. And Peter Puglio writes a fun little tidbit about the movie Her, the artist Jeff McFetrich, designed all the computer UIs seen in the film. His art is wonderful and worth checking out. But he's also done a lot of work for Apple, including the artist Watchface, W WDC 2017 graphics, and Apple Pay Transit ads. Come to think of it, looking living so close to New York City, Marco's probably seen some of his Apple Pay Transit ads in person. I have I have fond memories of that WWEC 2017 Mm-hmm. It was really cool looking. So yeah, like, oh that guy. Yeah. I know his style. Yeah, I really like that style. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Have you ever thought I should make it a little bit less easy for anybody, you know, scammers, stalkers or whatever, to find my personal info online? Here's what you do. 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Uh, we will not be going unless there's a surprise that I was not an aware or that I was not aware of, but we will be bringing you coverage as always. And the theme for this year is all systems glow. I feel like they've lean leaned on this one a few times. I mean, it's obvious that they're referencing the sort of HDR overbright uh effects that they use when you activate Siri. Um, and like, didn't they use maybe they didn't use the exact phrase, but I feel like the art on at least a couple of recent WWCs has been like, Hey, did you know we use HDR uh colors and uh images and graphics in iOS? Like, yeah, we know. We know. But anyway, uh here we are. This is uh WWC twenty twenty four take two . Hopefully, I mean we'll see what we actually get here. I mean I think German's reporting, which we'll get to in a second, has been pretty strong in one direction and, that's's you know, there probably a lot of a lot of truth there. But what I hope to see broadly, AI is everywhere in the industry. A bunch of it is BS and is is turning out to be underwhelming, but a bunch of it is turning out to be pretty useful and pretty high value. Apple is so far pretty much nowhere in this game. They don't make the models. They have tried and they have failed to make the models. They don't host the infrastructure . And I could I think more importantly for for Apple and their products, they currently don't really use AI well in their products. And me and these things are obviously related you know to to a degree, but what I want to see from Apple is if you're not going to build the models, f ine. Hire Google to do it, that's fine. Like Google makes good models, so that seems like a totally fine choice. If you want Google to host the infrastructure too, that's that's also fine. Like these big companies have lots of infrastructure, lots of capacity. Apple has has used things like Azure and AWS for parts of their services before, so that's that's perfectly fine. What I want to see from Apple is the ability to integrate AI into making good products and features. We haven't seen that either. So far, Apple has been utterly paralyzed and seemingly unable to ship anything good that uses AI. Look at how they have tried so far in their little baby steps. Siri, of course, is not the baby steps. Siri is like the giant Apple AI-like area that they have so far just complet ely failed in so many giant ways over time with Siri, and its its reputation is terrible . Everything bad about Siri's reputation is a hundred percent deserved because it really has been massively missed opportunities, huge inflated promises that they cannot then deliver on or, that they deliver inconsistently on. And then you look at how else have they integrated AI into their OSs and products? So far, badly. We have crap like image playgrounds, which is horrendous. The writing tools, which are pretty rough and not super useful. You know, minor things like photo editing that are kind of like half-baked, half there, mostly over-promised and under-delivered. We have things like the um the image uh visual intelligence. Um that's also pretty half-baked and pretty underwhelming compared to like what Android has, which is like the same feature but better and works better. We have not yet seen Apple do anything successful with AI. I think I can't believe you forgot Genmoji. Oh yeah, right. They've done multiple versions of Genmoji. Image Playgrounds is here, but so is Genmoji. Right. So like what I want to see is like, okay, if you can't make the models, fine. You can't host the models, fine, but use them to build products that don't suck. Use them to build features that are compelling. Add APIs that developers can use to build features and products that are compelling. They did that. They did your transcription thing. That's an example of using AI to make a useful feature. They did. And and the transcription, I think, is possibly the only thing they did pretty well with AI so far at an API level. Like the foundation models are there in the 26 releases. I'm glad they're there. They're very limited and I'm hoping to see improvements there with 27. But I I ultimately what I want to see from the 27 OS is for Apple to join the AI revolution to set expectations accordingly. I don't expect them to have their own models, or at least from scratch. I'm sure that you know whatever they're whatever they're dealing with with Google, you know, that's fine. I don't expect them to become a model company. But Apple in general is a product and platform company. And so what I want to see is get on board with AI in your products and platforms for things that it can actually do well for compelling features that are well implemented, well designed, and well-integrated. So far , they have shown no willingness or ability to use AI in a well-implemented, well-designed, and well-integrated way. We just have crap like image playgrounds. And I I would love to see Apple deliver something with AI that is not a half-assed laughing stock. Uh a a useful feature that couldn't exist without AI because the the previous like repair thing that they had was really falling behind the state of the art. It's why I always ended up using uh edited in PixelMeter Pro because they had some machine learning powered uh image repair thing for years and I was like always using that because it works so much better. And then Apple added cleanup. It's like, hey, we'll do that too. Now is clean up as good as Google's things? No, it's not. Google has better image cleanup tools as you noted. Um but like transcription, it's like, well, it's better than it not being there. It should be a system level feature. It should be part of the photos app. It should be uh something that they add in the and they did add it to their credit. But now I'm gonna take it all away because uh that feature on my wife's M1 Max Max Studio in the Photos application works about ten percent of the time. And you know what happens the other ninety percent of the time in the little sidebar in photos, I see a little text message that says uh image cleanup could not be loaded, try again later. I don't know what that means. It's persisted across major versions of Mac OS, I believe. Uh just I I it's it's like, oh, it's does it never work? No, once in a while it works, but not all the time , and I can't figure out why. So way to screw up that one feature that I actually liked. Uh rumor there are we're not gonna go over like every rumor for WWDC. We'll link to some roundups where you can see there's lots of stuff that's rumored, but um we're gonna hit some highlights, but one of the things that is rumored that we're not gonna cover today is supposedly better machine learning powered, AI powered photo editing features. Hopefully they'll actually work this time, but that is one of the things that I think is uh an example of take uh AI technology and make a useful product feature out of it. I think being contrarian right now, insofar as we're not gonna shove AI down your throats any more than we already are, but we're not gonna do any more shoving of AI down your throats. Look at us. We're we're with you. We we agree. I think as much as I'm snarking right now, I think that's actually a potential like victory to just say, look, we've tried what we've tried, we've we're we're gonna make a few things better, but we're not gonna just sprinkle AI dust on every freaking thing we have. Do you think that's what Apple's saying, or are you saying you wish they would say that? I think that they have the opportunity to say that because they've done so little now and they can just lean right into it. But they will not say that. They will not say that they won't. They they absolutely won't. But it would be neat. Because I don't know, I just I feel like Marco I think opened this entire segment uh about AI with saying that, you know, in some ways, in cer tain contexts, it's very good and very impressive and very useful. And then there's the eight trillion other ways where it's being shoved right down our throats. And I'm not here for any of that. And I wish that somebody would be the adult in the room and just say, you know what? We're gonna you, we're gonna do what Apple always used to do, which is we will use this underlying technology to do things that are helpful in the real world to real people, like, you know, uh photo editing and stuff like that, rather than just making something stupid that nobody wants, like image playgrounds. So I don't know. I don't know what they're gonna do. I suspect that they're gonna try to just you know everyone seems to think, and it would not surprise me that they're just going to try to right all the wrongs from twenty twenty four or you know what what is the phrase from Godfather settle all the family debts or something like that? Um and so whatever. I've I I don't think I've ever seen it. I believe it's business. John, why don't you just correct me now so we can save all these. Let Marco correct you on movie quotes. The world gone mad. Not a good spot for me, my friends. Not a good spot for me. Uh I love you, Marco. But anyways, um the the point is that it would be very refreshing to see them treat AI as a tool to or a means to an end rather than the end itself, which is what the rest of the industry is doing. So I I think they have like they've been what Marco described, if you asked Apple they'd be like, Oh that's what we're doing. But our rebuttal would be, yeah, but the places where you added it to your products didn't make them better. Like gen I mean, I'm not saying genmoji is bad, but like that's like what do you what is your usage of that feature? Like it may have been implemented well, it may have even been integrated well, and it may have been integrated so well that it's not in your face because you know you're not being prompted for it a lot. But it's not something people want to do versus photo editing, which I think is a good use and transcription is a thing developers want to use, so that's a good use. Image playgrounds, they definitely threw it in your face. Image playgrounds is here. Uh, as Marco talk about, like yeah, when you would install the OS, it would throw it in your face. 48 times. Oh, that's right, that's right. Yeah, it would just constantly say, hey, Image Playgrounds exist. Because otherwise, how would you find it? It would just be this app in your applications folder. And it's look, if there was demand for not very good image generation in a really l limited environment, people would find the app, but they don't because it's not a thing that they wanna do. So yeah, the features they do have, I mean, I said we're not gonna cover everything that they're that is supposedly coming, but we're going to cover a couple highlights, and one of them is uh the serial overhaul on iOS twenty seven, and German's got a little info on that. But I think ultim before we get there, just ultimately what I wanna see is when Apple either is not really ready to do something well yet, or if the industry is demanding it but they don't respect it, they call it a playground. You know, we had Swift playgrounds on the iPad , and that was like, we're not gonna give you real Swift on the iPad. I mean it it has broadened since then, but like it's like we're not gonna give you the full-blown environment. We're we're gonna give you a a toy. Here's a toy version of this. Image playground is was a perfect a name for that in Apple's parlance because they're like, this whole AI thing, we don't respect this. Like that was obviously. Like Craig Federig was very clear about that. He and Jaws and the top Apple Brass did not respect AI for a long time, even after the rest of the industry is like, mm, this is getting pretty good, pretty useful. They cracked all over it in public. So you can you can imagine how bad it must have been in private. Trevor Burrus they what they came out against was chatbots. Federigy according to Inside Rumors sort of got religion about uh chat GPT or the the technology itself back with like GPT version two or something. But what they all came out publicly against is that thing where you go to chatgpt.com and have a conversation within an LM, we're against that. That's what they were coming out with. And I feel like L uh AI, quote unquote AI, is a much broader topic than that. But the manifestation that hundreds of millions of people see is I go to a website or I use an app and I type back and forth to a chatbot. And that's what they were against. Aaron Powell Yeah, but but honestly, that was obviously the wrong take in retrospect. And even then, it's like when when old dudes heard about younger people texting their friends all the time instead of calling them on the phone, and they were like, that's terrible. Why would anybody want to text their friends? And you could just call them. And you know what? Everyone wants to text their friends, as it turns out. That's a very generational thing. And I think Jaws and Federigi obviously missed that complet ely for way too long. And so as a result, Apple in general just did not see AI as something that they needed to care about when that was obviously wrong. And so that's that that's kind of what led them to be so far behind in among other problems. But what they shipped was almost like trying to placate the stock market. Like, look, we can AI, here's a half-assed app that generates some garbage that no nobody will ever use because it's terrible. When Siri was launched in 2011, it it started out as a in a pretty competitive place for the time. It just never moved forward, and then everyone else did move forward. Apple's AI stuff wasn't even competitive the day it launched. Like literally the day all this stuff came out, it was already laughed at. It was ridiculous. It was way less capable than everything that was out on day one. And of course it never got better. So they're they were coming from a place of deep disrespect for all of this. They they seemingly saw it as something they were obligated to do by market forces or the press or whatever, and they crapped out some garbage that they didn't that ev you could tell they didn't respect it at all. It was shoved down everyone's throats through promotion in the settings app everywhere. Image playgrounds are here. And you know you had to click it and dismiss it and everything to get it to turn off that stupid red badge for that stupid notification for their stupid promo and their ad for their settings app. Not that I'm upset forty-eight times. They obviously didn't respect it. And look at how much that has cost them. They are stay are still so far behind. What I want to see broadly is signs that they respect it now and have some better idea on how to actually use AI in their products in a again in a well-designed , well-integrated way, not just some like bolted on crap thing. Like you look at the writing tools uh API they did too. Writing tools are pretty rough in large part because they just punted and didn't make a UI. Like at all. There's no UI. You just like right-click a menu and do some stuff and it's like, well, what if you want to like adjust stuff or see the diffs or anything? Nope. There's no UI. Because Apple doesn't know how to make UIs anymore either, apparently. But that's a whole separate topic. But like I just again, like I want to see them take this world seriously and show us that you can make good products. That's what Apple's strengths have usually been: is take technology that's out there, that's floating around, use use their skill, their their product sense, their design sense, and their UI cho ps to make good products out of compelling tech. We have the compelling tech. We've had it for a while, longer than they think so, but it's been here for a while. Maybe they finally agree that's compelling tech. Now let's see. Can they use this compelling tech for any good product features, products, or integrations. So far, they haven't. And so if they continue not to , I'm kind of worried, honestly. If Apple can't figure out how to make good products with AI or how to integrate AI in a good way into their products for new features and stuff. What are they doing? Where are they going to go the next 10 years? Like that's those are major doubts that I have about them that hopefully in a week we will be able to say, oh, it seems like they've turned over a new page or a leaf or whatever the expression is. It seems like they they they're now in a better direction. And look at the you know there are some cool integrations here, and maybe the betas have some of them working already, hopefully, fingers crossed, and maybe we can see like signs that they are able to harness this new world and make great stuff with it. We have not yet seen those signs. It's fair for you to not mention this because they didn't ship it, but what they announced in 2024 and didn't ship is exactly what you're talking about. Like all the stuff that they said it was going to do, but it never actually did is, let's integrate this intelligence into like I th I think the Apple intelligence strategy as articulated as articulated in WWC 2024 was and is the best strategy for Apple, which is we have all this data about you. Let's let the model know it all. And let's let you talk to the model and have it manipulate all this data in a privacy-preserving way on your device. Because like we're the only one who we're going to give that kind of access to. We don't want to, you know, allow chat GPT to have essentially like the the equivalent of like the computer control thing where it just controls your Mac or whatever. We can do that because we're Apple, but these other things can't. So we're gonna roll out Apple Intelligence and you'll be able to ask it when your mom's flight is arriving and it can see your email and see your messages and see all this end-to-end encrypted stuff and do all like that. Was a thing that would take this technology and make Apple's products better. They just didn't ship it. Like that's the was the problem. And what they did ship is everything you listed, which is like, well, what the heck is this? You don't have a chatbot and you hate chatbots. You've got image playgrounds, which no one's using, you've got genmoji, which no one's using, you got writing tools, which is half-hearted at best and terrible. You've got the image clean enough, it doesn't run on my wife's computer, so I'm mad about that. Um, and everything else, like the bulk of what it was in WWC twenty-four, what I thought of as Apple the Apple intelligence strategy after that keynote just didn't arrive for two years. So this is a chance for them to get back to that. But on the topic of chatbots and again getting back to Erman, German, I have some good news, bad news. I think it's well, we'll get to it after uh Casey reads what it is, but I'm I'm have mixed feelings about the uh what is uh rumored for uh Siri in iOS 27. So from the twenty eighth of May, Mark Garman writes, Illustrations created by Bloomberg show the revamped Siri interface, a new chatbot style app, and other major iOS 27 changes that the company plans to announce to WWDC. The new Siri will include the delayed features announced in 2024 , such as the ability to understand personal data and analyze on-screen content. But those capabilities are just one part of a broader wave of updates, a rebuilt model that uses Google Gemini technology, AI-powered web search, and a completely redesign ed interface. There's also a dedicated Siri app designed to complete to compete more directly with chat GPT and other AI assistants. So in summary, uh also Siri in the camera app alongside photo and video plus customization of the camera's app camera app's toolbar icons and there are a whole bunch of screenshots in this article we'll put a link in the show notes we also have a link in the show notes to a Mac rumors article which regurgitates a couple of those screenshots. Yeah, these aren't screenshots, these are mock-ups And also , did you want a chatbot? Guess what? The thing that Craig Federic and Jaws were were coming out against two years ago saying, We don't the chatbots, we don't think that's it. Apple is going to have one built into the OS. You'll talk back and forth with Siri, which will really be a Gemini powered LLM. The interface they show is basically like if you pull down from the top, like the dynamic island expands to be a search box like always, but what the search box has in it now is like search or ask where you can ask , and presumably that goes to Apple's you know model that's powered by Gemini . Um you can also go to chat GPT in this thing, and supposedly it's third-party pluggable, so there may be some competition there, but then they have screenshots of a chat app, an LLM powered chat app where you're talking to chat to uh to Siri uh and it's all like dark mode, and you ask questions and it give responses, and it it looks the mock-up looks like chat GPT basically in dark mode, only you're not talking to chat GPT. And uh, you know, obviously tons of people want to use you know AI chatbots because they do, they use them . I'm still not entirely sure that Apple needs to or should make one because I'm I'm I feel like what they're going to make cannot possibly be as good as the the real chatbots, like using chat GPT directly, using Claude directly. Those are I I just don't see see how Apple can keep up. Those things get updated all the time and keep improving and keep getting better and better. And Apple probably can't keep up. And they're gonna give you this out to go to the third party ones anyway. So it's like this weird waypoint on your way to going to a real product that people actually like and use. You can stop off midway through and talk to Apple Siri back and forth. And yeah, it'll be smarter than Siri has ever been before because that's not hard. But really, if you want to actually have a productive, serious conversation, you should go to one of the third party chatbots because they're gonna be better. Um and when you know uh, Federic and Jobs were saying we, think chatbots is not it, that's not the way to do it. They were trying to contrast that to, hey, it's just going to be there are just going to be features of your phone that'll be powered by this stuff under the covers, but you won't know it. Your phone will just be more capable. And they felt like just puntinging and say, well, we're not going to do any of that. Instead, there's a window where you can type text back and forth. Like they already have that. It's on the iPhone. It's called Chat GPT app. It's the Cloud app. Like you just that those are third party apps. And Apple seems like they are if it's rumors to be believed, they're saying we have to have one of those two. And I just I have no confidence that the one they have will be competitive. I just even though they're even though they're using Google Gemini under the covers, like so you would think like, well, at least it'll be roughly competitive with Google. I'm I don't believe that. I think it will be worse. I think it will have fewer features. I think it will advance more slowly. And kind of like how in current iOS, when you go to chat GPT through Siri, with the integration that they've had with OpenAI since 2024 or whatever, that it's worse than going to chat GPT directly. I think that will be true of talking to Siri. So I'm not enthusiastic about this. I'm enthusiastic about them rolling out the promised features from 202 4 where just I can ask my phone something and it can look at all the data that only it can see because it's private on my device and do useful stuff. That's something that can't be matched by the third party clients because Apple won't let them because Apple doesn't give them access to your stuff. So that I'm looking for ward to. But I cannot see myself ever saying, you know what? I want to talk to an LLM chatbot, and you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to launch the Siri app and do that. I just don't see that happening. There's they're so far behind and I don't feel like they are going to be competitive in this realm. Aaron Powell Yeah. I don't think they've ever shown the ability to be competitive in things like this. You know, in many ways , what Apple's software has has seemed like in oh geez, maybe a decade . Is it just seems like it's moving at a fairly leisurely pace in almost every way, except designs, which they're happy to rush and shove through. But like what with the exception of redesigns, which they love, uh apparently, um with with that exception, the rest of it seems to just move glacially. Now, I understand this is a significant challenge at their scale. They have a lot of platforms. They update them all pretty much in lockstep. Um that's not a small job. That's also a self-created problem and optional. But hey, that's not a small job. I get that. But what it has seemed like, you know, in for a long time is that they just aren't stepping on the gas in this new this new era. It seems like they're coasting in software. They're not really pushing things people want to push. They're not really, you know, participating in this new this whole new boom much. And even among things that they even if we set aside AI for a minute, Apple software just doesn't move that quickly and they don't see you know like what you were just saying, like they they will put something out there and then it just dies. Like they it just gets ignored or you know, they'll they'll do the first eighty percent of something and show off a good demo at WBC and then you'll never hear about it again. It'll never get that last twenty percent of effort put into it. It'll just kind of sit there in mediocrity forever until it's eventually discontinued or repla ced. That happens with so much of Apple software and you know it's from from things like APIs all the way up to apps, like entire apps, like that that happens a lot. And it just seems like they're just coasting and not really stepping on the gas. It seems like they don't really maybe they don't think they need to. I I don't know, but the entire industry is exploding and booming right now with all sorts of new potenti al. So we're not only we're we're not seeing Apple take advantage of the new potential or use the time and resources to polish up all the stuff they already do. Neither one of those things is happening. And so again, like show signs of some change of direction or ability, or even just caring. Show signs that they can care and follow through with something. Show signs they're stepping on the gas. Show signs that they're like that they're actually active and trying to be competitive in some way instead of just coasting and resting on their laurels and collecting fees because they're really good at those things. But let's let's see them really push on the products a little more. Another one of the rumors is third party integration, integration of third party AI, that that it'll be pluggable, that it won't just be this one deal with open AI, but that you'll be able to pick from the leading vendors. And you know, this is the other strategy that lots of people talk about is like Apples need to do this. They just need to integrate with the third parties, just you know they don't they don't need to do everything they're already the the platform that people use uh their mobile the mobile platform people use these apps from the most so why don't they just integrate why don't they just give integration i mean one of the reasons they don't want to do that is obviously they're willing to give their own uh LLM stuff access to all your contacts and all your messages and all your mail and blah blah blah because they're Apple and they trust themselves, right? And they don't trust, you know, Facebook, uh, OpenAI, Anthropic to get access to that same data. In theory, they could do it in a privacy preserving way by having really limited APIs, but uh in the end those companies are probably just like, well, we'll just continue to get people to to download our app and onto their phone and use it that way. So there is a place for system integration. And the rumor is they're supposed to, you know, have more third-party LM integration. Does that mean every single place you could ask Siri, there will be a choice to ask some third-party thing? Do you will you only get to pick one? Will it only be surfaces in some places? That remains to be seen, but that's one of the rumors. Another one in the screens touch where you see um the camera app having a, you know, instead of like photo, video, portrait, blah, blah, that Siri will be an option because they're basically taking visual intelligence, which was previously hidden under like a whatever it was, long press on the action button or whatever the heck the default shortcut is. They're gonna put that right into the camera app, which I think is a good idea, but that brings up the third-party integration thing. Okay. I think the camera app should have a thing that says, hey, what is this? You know, that's a question you've been able to ask with like Google Lens for like a decade, I guess. And LMs are way better at it than those old things used to be. Will the only option be to use the quote unquote Siri camera to ask Siri, which then asks the Google Gemini model? Or will you be able to say uh in settings somewhere, what do you want to use for the thing where you point your camera at something and ask it what it is? And you could say, Oh, I've got a chat GPT subscription, so I'm gonna set that to ChatGPT and not Siri . It seems like that's not going to happen, but that's the type of third-party integration that it's like you have to choose Apple. Are you going to do everything and actually keep up with it? I think you're not going to keep up with it. Or are you going to provide the integration needed in this case like in the camera app I think they could do that in a privacy preserving way allow a third party model you know like do some integration maybe not in this release maybe it'll be in a future release or whatever, but when I look at this feature, I'm like, okay, but if I really wanted to know what it was, would I ever use Siri Camera or would I launch the chat GPT app and use that directly just because I know from experience that it's going to do a better job? Or would I use Google Lens because I know from experience that that's gonna do, but it's not called that anymore. Whatever the heck it's called now. I I've in practice I frequently use the Google app. I think I described when I had a halogen bulb or whatever. I didn't llm, I went to Google Image Search or whatever because it does a good job. Now it's probably powered by Gemini behind the scenes anyway. I don't care. But the point is, I went to their app and I think that will continue to be the case. So I expect WWC to be this weird mix of we're doing a bunch of stuff and we don't suck as bad as we used to. And we're like, okay, well, you know, good. Not sucking as bad as Siri is a low bar, but you need to do that. But also, will there be some push for like, and also that we have third-party integrations in select places? And that seems like it's going to be uh more half-hearted, which is kind of a shame. Because I feel like that's what they should be doing. Like if they if they are not going to be able to keep up with the big third parties in terms of this stuff, they should be really good about integrating them. And in the areas where only quote unquote only Apple can do it for privacy reasons, that's where they should put all their effort. Do those features that nobody else can do. And you know, maybe someday plug a third party thing into that. But but we'll see. I don't want to prejudge it because again, maybe they they're using Google's model, so maybe it won't suck as bad as we think it will. But um I put it this way. I look forward to being able to talk to my phone, my thousand dollar whatever iPhone, whatever pro, the same way I can talk to my twenty-five dollar uh Amazon Echo Puck that I won in a raffle 10 years ago. And because I can talk to that one. You know what? That one's backed on some some server by decent model. I talk to it. I don't care how I phrase sentences. I just say any old crap and it gives me reasonable respons es. I cannot do that with my phone. And that that hopefully will change next week. It's hard for us to have any faith in Apple's abilities in this area because Siri hasn't even done like the 10 years ago feature set reliably and well over this time. And when you look at modern LLM tech, it seems like it would be a godsend to something like Siri, because you know, where Siri fell down in so many so many ways, uh you know, some of it was just like basic reliability and responsiveness and stuff like that, server failures, response failures, and everything, that's that's a different problem that they also need to solve. But where Siri would often would often fall down is like misparsing what you meant by your command. Or you ask, or or like it asks something you wa you give a follow-up and it d it like kind of figures the wrong direction on what that follow up meant or what you were asking or what you were saying or it drops the thread or whatever. LLMs are really good at the natural language interface. They're really good at taking sloppy human input, figuring out what they meant and what a good answer to that would be, and delivering it. And so you would think that this would be exactly what Siri needs, not to become ChatGPT, but to just become a good Siri. That's uh ultimately what we need from Siri, what we want from you. Cause uh you know, John, you're right, like Apple's never going to be as aggressive about updates as aggressive about features. Like they're never because again, they don't they can't step on the gas. They they are so slow at so many of these areas. So we know they're not going to replace the desire for most people to have the ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini apps on their phones and use them all the time. Siri is not going to compete with that for most people. And Apple shouldn't try. And I don't even know if they are trying. It you know, the app the app redesign that was rumored for Siri could just be like a better way to access Siri instead of it just being in these like ephemeral floating blobs that just are gone the second that you've you know stop looking at them. Um, which is probably a good a good strategy for it. But ultimately what we want from Siri is for it to just deliver on what it has always supposed to deliver on better and reliably. And they should be able to do that with modern LLM tech. It should help them do that. That's what I want to see. I don't need them to become Gemini or Claude. I need them to become Siri, to actually do Siri well . That's what I want to see. And what and if they just put a new UI on the same old crap Siri again, uh, then that's not really gonna do it for me. Um but I I I think I mean look, we we keep giving them chances over and over again. Every year, there for the last few years there's been rumors that Siri's about to get better? It hasn't. Uh maybe this will be the year that that it gets something other than a superfici al interface tweak or a superficial tweak to its basic behavior. But I want to see something beyond superficial. I want to see the results of them having stepped on the gas ever on Siri and actually being able to deliver something better. You keep using the car analogy, but I think the Siri situation is that the last car they were going to exploded and then they had to build the new car and clean up the the wreckage from the old one so thus the delay. Although again we talked about this in the past episode that like supposedly like the 26.4 update was supposed to have a bunch of Siri advances and they kept delaying that. So if they uh announce you know all these Siri features that we just described at uh WWC at the keynote and they say uh but actually some of these features are not shipping until the fall. Then we're gonna be like, uh which features? You know, the ones that are actually good and they make Siri not suck. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see if see what they've learned because I feel like they've had they have had some hard lessons about announcing things to WWDC, but everything that we just went through with the Gorman River seemed pretty solid. Uh chatbot interface, uh Gemini powered Siri, the the Photos thing, or whatever. So I think they'll have some good features, and I think they will, you know, because again, the Gemini deal. The Gemini ideal is the thing that gives me the most faith. I know Gemini exists and works and I used it. And so if that is powering their back end, I know they'll probably make it a little bit worse, but hopefully they won't be able to make it that much worse. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I just I hope there's more to this than just AI talk. And I mean both WWDC and the rest of this episode, because we've caught on its air. Well, you should go to the Mac OS uh topic next. Oh god, because none of us have opinions about that. All right. So on AI. Not AI at least. All right, the tenth of May. It's also not intelligent. Oh, sick burn. The tenth of May, Mark Erman writes, though the Mac software introduced the same liquid glass interface seen in iOS 26, the design language hasn't translated as smoothly to the larger displays and different input methods of desktops and laptops. Part of the reason is that liquid glass was created with more modern hardware in mind. I'm sorry. What? I believe it was keep reading so we get to the end of this ridiculousness. Okay, so uh yeah, that fair enough. Uh so let me repeat what I just said. Part of the reason is that liquid glass was created with more modern hardware in mind. The crisp OLED displays that are used on iPhones, some iPads, and Apple Watches I'm sorry, what the f is he on? What is he talking about? This is like we can fix the butterfly keyboard, but you need to put a gasket under all the keys. That'll fix it, right? Well, no, so here's the thing. Because of Mark German's infuriating writing style, let's call it. It's impossible for me to tell if the BS that you just read is Mark German offering opinion or conjecture or if it's sourced. I think it's Mark German offering opinion or conjecture and that opinion or conjecture is stupid. Yes. Because can't render translucency on an LCD? Why? Like it if the contrast is higher and you get better blacks on an OLED, but rendering translucency has to do with compositing multiple layers to come up with a final pixel color, like Aqua on 10.0 on LCDs had plenty of translucency and it was rendered fine. So the OED thing just makes no sense to me. The best I can come up with is if you have a bad quality display and you have a UI that has like barely any difference between two adjoining shades of white that it looks bad, but that's not the LCD's fault. That's the fault of the person who made a UI where you have two colors of white that are almost the same right next to each other. That's the problem, and it doesn't look any better on OLED. OLED corre ctly renders the tiny difference in whites between the two things, and so do LCDs. So this this is old news, I know, but like it's infuriating because it's like of all the nonsense reasons to try to excuse liquid glass on the Mac blaming on the lack of OLED screens for Mac is just the most ridiculous thing of heart. And I don't think this has anything to do with Apple. I don't think an Apple source is saying this. I don't think anyone at Apple would agree with this. So I'm just really dumping on Mark German. But in case you heard this, that like, oh, Liquoglass looks bad because Macs don't have OLED screens and that's going to change soon. A, it's not going to change that soon, so don't worry about that. And B, that's not that's not why Liquid Glass in the Mac is bad. Yeah, because it turns out blurry text is not going to be solved by OLED screens. You know, if you look at most of Liquid Glass's failures, like because again, like I want to be clear, I don't hate everything about Liquid Glass. I just think it has some bad desig ns. Number one for me is text in a computer UI should never be blurry. Period. I will hear no other arguments on that topic. Blurry text is bad design. So, where do you see blurry text in liquid glass? Everywhere. Okay. Why? Because they made a barless design basically. You have navigation bars, toolbars, and sideb ars, and they decided all of those things should either be gone, but still have their controls float, or be very, very, very translucent to the point where they get these blur overlays and these blur effects at the edges. So liquid glass, the design, is filled with basically cluges, hacks, bad hacks. They're like, okay, we started from a place of we want everything to be transparent and floating over the content. To respect the content lol. Okay. But we're going to float everything over the content and be translucent. So then, okay, how do how do scrolling bars work? Oh well, I guess we'll we have to blur things in, you know, progressively blur them as they get closer to the edges so they scroll better or whatever. Like that was a bad solution to a precondition they created with the design that should probably be revisited. Because what's what's better than blurring text is not creating the conditions that you need to blur the text to use the controls. Okay, let's look at designs to do that. Maybe bars are the solution. I don't know. I just throwing it out there because I think we might have had those in the past and they might have been fine. Maybe some kind of bar s to separate content from control areas. Bear with me. Maybe the control s shouldn't be on top of and blended in with the content. Maybe to respect the content, having the controls be separate is not only better for the design, but also better for the controls. And better for the content. I know that's very radical today, but just consider the possibility. So anyway, what liquid glass needs and and what I am hoping to see, although I don't expect much, but what I am hoping to see is twe aks to the design that still keep some of the aesthetic of it, that like the parts that are good. Because there are parts of it that are good, um, but that remove the need for bad hacks like blurring text everywhere. Because that is always a bad hack. The other thing I would love to see removed is they have this amazing system where when you have an app with a sidebar, the sidebar is supposed to be translucent now, and content is supposed to appear under it. Now, what if there isn't content under it? Because what if like the thing that is on the on the right side, uh like the content area, what if it doesn't have additional content that is under the bar on the left, logically speaking, or that content would be inaccessible? Well they have a whole system they recommend that you do where you mir ror a fake mirror of the content on the right under the bar on the left just for the purposes of blurring under that bar. So you're blurring mirrored fake content under it so you get color blobs going through there so liquid glass looks coherent. That is the most ridiculous thing ever. That's the kind of hack that like if your design requires that to look coherent , it's a bad design system. That needs to be revisited. That needs to be iterated. So what I want to see is liquid glass being tweaked to need few er crappy hacks that make for crappy UI. And that's blurry text and fake blurred content. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you're not wrong. And uh the thing of it is that I I am actually mostly okay with liquid glass, which I know is blasphemous, and I'm probably gonna get fired for saying that, but I'm mostly okay with it, but it's certainly least well considered on macOS. Again, this is not an original thought. Um, but I would really love to see I I I think some people in our little commentariat or whatever the word is I'm looking for are like, oh they should just crap you know, put put it in the can and walk away from liquid glass and A, they're never gonna do that. But these never gonna happen. Yeah, I don't think it's necessary. Like, there are some grumbly people on Mastodon that are like, oh, I should just walk it back and never touch it again. I just I don't think that's necessary. I think it looks pretty good, even on Mac O S for the most part. But I think it would be nice to do what they did, as we all said last summer, do what they did with Iowa 7 and walk back some of the more aggressive stuff to make it a little more, I almost said well-rounded. That's probably not the phrase I want here, but make it a little more palatable. And I I think there'll be some of that. I doubt they'll call attention to it, but I think there'll be some of it. And I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it on all the platforms, even though I think as we all agree, and again not, an original thought, I think macOS needs it the most, but I would like to see it pretty much everywhere. I think everywhere could stand to be improved a little bit. Also, I would say like again, even setting aside design changes, the implementation is still very sloppy and half baked too. Like there like one of the worst things about on iOS, the like a floating glass button, like a toolbar button, if you tap the edge of that button , it it plays the animation of you tapping the button, but the button tap does not fire . So if you don't hit the middle of a button, you can think you're hitting a button and it doesn't actually trigger the action. And there is no way for the underlying app to change that a lot of the time. So i like there's little implementation bugs, or or like you know, bad animations, like there's there's little bugs like this all over the system that make it difficult for us as developers to make good UIs with liquid glass. And so if let's assume that you like liquid glass and support it and want it to stay, well then at least give us the ability to make good apps with it. Like get make it work better. Obviously there's you know I'm gonna have my opinion about changes to the components, things like bars and stuff, fine. But even if you don't change anything like that, make the current system work better. Because it right now it's still is full of paper cuts. So continuing with what Mark Erman said, I'm told the company is preparing what people internally consider to be a quote slight redesign quote for Mac OS twenty seven. With the next update, Apple aims to address the shadows and transparency quirks. Last year's operating systems didn't necessarily suffer from design problems, I'm told, but rather a not completely baked implementation from Apple's software engineering team. So this is gets to what Marco was saying. Filled with bugs. I've had to deal with them for an entire year. On macOS, they're really bad. Uh, on other platforms, they also have problems. Uh, and this is source, this is not just German. So he's saying what he's told uh and what people internally uh consider, you know, to be a slight redesign. Um whoever the internal source uh was that said the system doesn't necessarily suffer from design problems, but just a not uh complete implementation, why not both, as they say? Uh yeah, the implementation was bad and not completely baked. I 100% agree. You know what else was bad? The design. As Marco just out there explaining, like I don't know why this I mean, I guess I think this doesn't bother people just because they don't see how this design leads to all the problems they're seeing, and they think like, oh, we can fix this by just tweaking things and changing transparency, and you can improve things, but you know, I think I made a list of these three things many months ago when I was trying to boil it down to what's wrong with Luke Glass, but it's basically it's the fundamental thing of like um I don't know, picture an image editor and you open an image and the image is a a picture of somebody and the you the entire picture fills the window. It's like, okay, there's the picture. All right, but liquid glass says, okay. But in this application, you don't just look at the picture. We want you to have tools so you can like edit the picture or crop the picture or scribble on the picture or whatever. And the liquid glass solution to this is take that picture that's filling the window and take a bunch of capsule-shaped things and drop them on top of the edges of the picture so they're floating on top of the picture. And now you can't see part of the picture because the controls are floating on top of it. And then that's where we get into things that Marco was talking about. Okay, but what if I want to see the thing that's like the tool palette is blocking the picture? What if I want to see that? Can't I just scroll the picture so it's not underneath the toolbar. No, you can't, because then what would be underneath the the toolbar? So now you've got to do the mirror image thing. And it's like this is just plain a bad idea. You don't start with content edge to edge and then drop a bunch of uh capsules on top of it. That's a bad idea. That is fundamentally a bad design for a user interface for a million reasons that we are all experiencing, maybe developers more than other people, but just there's no way around it. You either can't have content underneath the thing, in which case it's not floating on top of the content anymore. Or you can, and once you do have something floating on top of the content, then you want to show it through, and that's also a bad idea. And then you dwan to be able to see the whole image. So now you gotta do the mirrored blur thing. Or it's just it's just a bad idea. And as Marco said, like this was this wasn't a problem that needed to be solved. This is a new problem that they have introduced with a bad design, which by the way also had a bad implementation. Now in macOS 27, it's still going to be the ideal is a bunch of content edge to edge with a bunch of things dropped on top of it floating. That's not going to change. All they're talking about is maybe we'll tweak some of the blurred edge things and the transparency and the blah blah blah. But the fundamental design of liquid glass we are stuck with for probably a very long time. And that fundamental design is bad. It's not the worst thing ever. It doesn't break the computer. You can still use it. It's fine. But it's a bunch of bad ideas. And it just kills me that they're going to spend brain power and years and years of effort to try to take what is a fundamentally bad idea for a user interface and try to make it as least bad as possible. When they could have gone in a million other directions that would have been like, let's identify problems that people are having with the UI and solve them versus let's identify something that has heretofore not been a problem and make it a problem and spend the next half decade fixing that problem. And that is frustrating. But I still I'm I welcome any any improvements to liquid glass, but it's you know we have to wait for the next big redesign for them to fix this because it's just so fundamental to the everything they've done. Um we gotta wait for the stupid 20th anniversary phone. They'd be like, see, this is why they did it. It's like, no, you could have bars on that phone too. It wouldn't find. But anyway, um, yeah, it it it is something to look forward to is to see how they tweak it. And also, honestly, from a developer's perspective, yeah, please do fix the bugs because setting aside the bad ideas and the design when things just don't work, that makes everybody sad. So I hope they do uh make a lot of progress there. All right. Beyond uh this is still German, beyond adjusting the look look of liquid glass, Apple will focus on bug fixes, battery life upgrades, and performance improvements. Yay. Another new iOS twenty seven and macOS twenty-seven feature is a potentially helpful addition to Safari that mimics something Google Chrome has for had for years. Oh no, I smell AI coming. Apple's testing a feature that can automatically organize tabs into groups. When enabled, the system says that tabs will group into topics you browse. The feature isn't labeled as an Apple intelligence enhancement in the system, but it's clearly using some form of AI to work. I mean, I think that is a useful feature. Like people, no one wants the manual. Most people don't want to manually organize their tabs. Most people have no organization whatsoever. And if there was a feature of a Safari that said, it looks like these are the tabs where you're trying to figure out what refrigerator you're going to buy, and these are the tabs where you're ordering takeout. And you know what I mean? Like that it could put them into groups because Safari has had tab groups and pin tabs and stuff like that for a long time, but only the most meticulous people actually use them. So some kind of machine learning powered sort of , oh, it looks like you're it looks like you're trying to write a letter, Clippy style thing where it makes uh tab groups for you. Could be cool. This is also a good test of Apple's ability not to shove this crap in your face, right? Is it gonna be like image playgrounds again? And where you're not gonna be able to launch Siri and without it shoving this you know we can smartly organize your it's like okay, okay, chill out. If it's a feature people want, like I know you gotta make it discoverable or whatever, but like don' dont't I need it to be thrown in my face a million times. Just do a good job on the feature, support it, and see how well it's adopted. But yeah, I don't, I hopefully it doesn't uh mess up the interface too much, but uh So there's been a lot of hardware that we keep hearing has been delayed by Siri. There's the alleged home pod with a screen there's the god forsaken apple tv i am desperate to get a new apple tv so i can trickle down so desperate i want to trickle down because i have like a three generation back one in the tailgate tub that is also my travel apple TV, and that's the problem. The current one you just bought a new Apple TV for your tub. I I should have. I didn't realize I was gonna be waiting 18 frigging years. Um no, the the one in the living room, which is the most modern one, I can't keep the generation straight. The one in the living room is great. Occasionally it feels a touch slow, but 99% of the time it's great. The one we have in the bedroom, which is one generation back, is 80% of the time pretty good, if not great. Occasionally it's a little meh, but generally speaking, it's more than enough. The tailgate tub one is what is that two generations back, and it's getting real rough down there. So and again, the tailgate tub one is our travel one. And yes, you can laugh at me and say it's unnecessary to bring an Apple TV with me, but you know what? Not only is it unnecessary, but it's something I enjoy. So come get off my back. But anyways, the point is I really need that one to get upgraded, which really means I want to do a trickle down. And so please, Apple, for the love of God, I don't think I'll be able to get to Mac Rumors buyer's guide quick enough, but suffice it to say, it's been like three hundred friggin' years uh since the Apple T V has been updated. It is really preposterous. Oh, I was able to make it four years? 1 3 24 days, October of 2022. So we are coming upon fo ur years . Four years. This is basically half of my youngest child's life. She has only known one Apple TV, which is a phrase I kind of wish I could have back now, but I've already said it. So here we are. Anyway, uh so maybe an Apple TV with an A17 Pro or perhaps a revised remote. I again, I've always been an Apple TV remote apologist, uh especi,ally the current one I actually really, really like. Uh, so that doesn't bother me any, but I know I'm standing mostly alone on that. And for those of you who enjoy home pods, uh particularly the home pod mini, maybe there'll be a new one of those too. You never know. Yeah, so the Apple TV and the HomePod Mini are rumored to have been done for just ages. They're just sitting there, the hardware's been done for months and months and months. But of course, they can't ship them like so many of these things, like the home pod with the screen, which is also rumored to have had the hardware been done for months and months and months because they rely on Siri not sucking and having features that they said were gonna be ready but aren't. And so the hardware has just been sitting there gone. I mean I guess they could have shipped things like the Apple TV without it and just, you know, but they've just said like we're gonna it's the flagship feature of the you know TV OS 27, it's got you know it's all of a piece. So a lot of hardware has been delayed, and if you're gonna delay some hardware, this is probably the hardware to delay, it's fine, especially like home pop with the screen, which I don't know if people are clamoring for. But the rumor is that uh now that the 27 OS are going to be announced, this hardware is free to be released. The question is: will Apple mention any of this hardware at WWE C? Some of the rumors say, Yeah, they're gonna introduce all of this hardware at W WC because why wouldn't they? It's been sitting around, it's totally ready to go. They probably already have all the promo it's like, why wouldn't they launch them? But then I look at this hardware, I'm like, when Apple announces hardware at WWC, they usually like to have some kind of like flag bearer really impressive, exciting thing like MacBook Pros or something, which are, you know, again, those are the OLED ones, they're not coming out until much later. So they're not going to be announced. But and I don't think any one of these devices, or even all three of these devices, are significant enough for them to give them a slot of WWDC. But who knows, maybe they don't have a lot of other things to talk about. So I'm not actually expecting these to come out of WWDC, but I am expecting them to come out shortly after because or at least be announced shortly after. I think they can't ship obviously until the twenty seven OS has actually come out, so maybe fall ish. Um but yeah the one I'm the one I actually am most excited about is the Apple TV. Not because of the trickle-down reason, but just because it is old and the vague rumors of a possibly revised remote, even if it's just like we made one of the buttons microscopically concave when before it was microscopically convex or whatever. The alyready do that on the but buttons, it's so slight. Anyway, any change that remote will be good for me. It is much better than the remote it replaced, but I still feel like there's tons of room for improvement, and I have frequently found cursing that remote because when the skip intro button comes up and you know it's only there for a brief period of time. I have a short window of time with which I have to grab the Apple TV remote off of whatever end table that it's on, and I have to press the one and only largest button on this remote to activate the skip intro button. And my success rate at that is terrible. And I'm I refuse to blame myself. I'm a good video game player. I can press buttons. Why is this so hard? Because I haven't fully disabled the touch interface. And why have I not fully disabled the touch interface in settings? Because it is actually the fastest, most efficient way to navigate the UI, but it also totally destroys my ability to press buttons without accidentally swiping or something. So I really don't like the remote, even though it is better than the one that replaced it. And I'm looking forward to any mild revisions. And hey, A17 Pro. And you know, I think they need that one because it's it'll run quote unquote Apple intelligence, whatever the heck that means. But maybe that will mean uh when I talk to my serial remote and ask it to do TV things, it'll be slightly better. It's already pretty good because it's its problem domain is so narrow. Normally, when I say, you know, press the remote and say watch blah blah blah, it does a pretty good job of finding that. Maybe if they make it LML powered, I can have more sophisticated conversations like show me the, you know, watch blah blah blah, but show me the version I bought on the iTunes Store and not any of the other ones, and it will understand that when I say it just like that. My Amazon puck can do it. So I'm looking forward to that. And I'm I'm not particularly excited about the home pod with the screen, but who knows? Dazzle me. But again, I don't think this stuff will be announced. What do you think? Will there be will there be any hardware WWC? And if so, will this be among the hardware? The only reason I can imagine there being hardware, and I think uh Upgrade was saying this this week, is that that would give a convenient excuse for um for Turnus to be MCing for at least a portion of it. And maybe we can look at the tea leaves about uh the way this is going to be handled. We should talk about that before we end the segment. But I could see that as like a convenient excuse. But leaving that aside, no, I don't think they're going to talk about hardware. Yeah, and again, I didn't rumors. There may be some other rumor hardware, but as far as I know, like you know, nothing, nothing big. It's just these these ones are people rumoring these ones because they're ready. And just because they're ready doesn't mean they're going to be announced or you know, uh WWC. Because again, they can't ship until the twenty seven OS is around and that's not going to happen until fall at the earliest. Or not fall, but when when does iOS usually come out? Is it fall? Yeah. It's sub usually sub you know early September. Yeah, I guess early fall as a v versus sometimes later fall, the macOS will come out later fall. But uh unless they just ship it when at the state it's in in early fall, like they did with twenty six point oh and that was terrible. I mean we know they're gonna ship it. They're gonna ship with the with the new iPhones. That's ed to delay, yeah. I'm saying for Mac OS, they used to delay Mac OS until like October sometimes, but uh this most recent year I feel like they didn't do that. Nope. They I mean th this is you know modern Apple. They they ship whatever they've got at that time, whether it's finished or not, they shove it out there. I have uh yeah, I have uh have LEDVARs in my code for macOS twenty six point zero, macOS twenty six point one, macOS twenty six point two, macOS . Th areese all I have conditions on all of these things in my code to say, okay, in 26.0 you need to do this, but then 26.1, you need to do this. And 26 because of like tweaks to metrics and controls, it didn't work. So yeah, the 26 OS release has just been a nightmare in terms of how the bugs have shifted and moved around in Mac OS using Swift UI or whatever. So I'm looking forward to 27 not repeating that, and maybe I can just have one thing that says 27 or later. Imagine that. All right. Let's talk names. Uh back rumors had noticed way back when that a bunch of shell companies had uh registered, I think trademarks, it doesn't really matter, but had done something to uh just basically pee on and claim as their own a bunch of different names. And of those that have been used already, or you know, taking away the ones that have been used already, Mac Rumors has come up with the following list as potential names. California , Condor, Diablo, Ferallon, Grizzly, Mammoth, Miramar, Pacific, Redtail, Redwood, Rincon, Shasta, or maybe Shasta, I don't even know. Skyline and Tiburon. Of these options, are there any that jump at you jump out at you as absolutely yes, absolutely no, or hmm, maybe. Well, so to begin with, uh, I want to say that I hope that they continue to give macOS names. They don't have to be California names, but it's one of the last places of like fun for the sake of fun in Apple's products. Everything else is so regimented, especially now they're all on the same number and everything . The big cat names were fun. California place names are less fun, maybe than big cat names, but still fun. And this is one of the, you know, the one of the sort of like uh inconsequential things that's going to be announced at WFC is what is the new name of Mac OS? It was more fun when Mac OS was in better shape and we could just enjoy this as a frizzy thing on top of an OS that we loved, and now we're just kind of all grumpy about the glass or whatever. But still, this is a fun part of the announcement , and again, I love the fact that it has no consequences. Now, this list, as you noted, there's been a bunch of names that were in this trademark list of these shell companies getting trademarks for Apple that they did use. Like Sequoia was on there, I think. Sonoma, I forget which ones have been, but they did use some of these. But I think also they have had macOS releases that didn't come from this list. So I'm not entirely sure that the new name will be on this list. It could be something that's not on this list at all. In particular, the first name that you read is interesting where I feel like uh if they ever use Mac OS California, that's the end of the California names. That's the last one. Like once you use that, there I feel like they would announce uh MacOS California and this will mark the end. I guess they would announce that they would just find out next year. But surely that one has to be the last one if they ever use it. Uh I don't know. I could see them. I know they don't typically look back that much, but I could see them saying, you know, this is the 50th anniversary of the company or 50th birthday, whatever you want to call it of the company. So we wanted to do something big. Let's call it macOS California. Yeah. And I have a as much as I dislike liquid glass, uh, macOS 26 should have been Skyline, right? The code name was Solarium or Solaria or whatever it was. The code name was like a sun sky based word. It should have been Skyline. I'm glad they didn't use it because I don't like Mac OS 26. And so I'm glad they didn't use Skyline for it. But it's it was like a a glass OS sky glass I I know Skyline's a place or whatever, but it's a chili chain. Um I like Skyline. I that's one of my favorite names. I don't predict that it's going to be used, but on this list, I like that one. And also the other one on this lists that uh is funny to me is uh Farallon . I'm pretty sure, like so many things from my youth, like that I didn't know. I'm pretty sure that there was a classic macOS networking company with that name, uh, that I read in like Mac magazines when I was a kid. Only when my child's brain saw that word and just scanned it, it pronounced it internally as, let's see, phalron ? Which which is not how you pronounce it. It's F-A-R-A-L-L-O-N. But I had no idea there was a place with that name. I just knew it as a networking company that I internally mispronounced, because I had never heard anyone speak that name, I think, until you just said it, Casey, right? And so my whole childhood, I'm like, it's one of those phalron networking things or whatever. Nope. It was clearly a place that was probably from that part of California and named themselves after it. And uh, you know, I don't know the names of places in California. I think we've all proven that we don't know these names. Um, although I did know Mavericks. Uh but yeah, Farallon is uh probably my bottom choice because I can't pronounce it. Uh for me, I could like I said, I could see California being a thing. I don't know where Skyline, California is. Uh I don't know anything about California geography. There was that movie with the aliens invaded that was called Skyline. I thought it was because like all the aliens are coming from the sky. No, it's a place. Well it's also Skyline Drive in Virginia and uh I think it's actually Skyline is only in Virginia. I'm sure these names are used elsewhere, but apparently there is let me see. There is this is a spyline. Skyline California. Either way, uh I view I view Skyline as a Virginia thing, so I both love and hate that as an idea because you know that all the obnoxious Californians would be like, well, it's all it's uh really about California because California is the only place that matters. Uh but I do like Pacific. I like the Mammoth and Grizzly. Um I do think Redwood is pretty good, but wasn't that used for like one of the Windows versions or something like that? What am I thinking of that that was a code name? Yeah, yeah, but not an official name. I mean they just did Sequoia. I feel like Redwood is that's fair. That is true. I don't know. I I think there's several in there. Apparently Sky line I'm looking up on Wikipedia. Skyline is a hilly urban neighborhood in San Diego, California. There you go. Today I learned. Not as good as Skyline Drive. Uh also I I think Marco had mentioned this quietly under his breath, which may or may not make the edit, but a very good chili., as it turns out Yes. Um nevertheless. Very good chili? Isn't that the one? Is n't chili on spaghetti? Uh yeah. Or maybe vice versa, but yes. I've actually never been to a skyline chili, but I grew up like I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. I think they're based in Cincinnati, so or at least they're popular in that area. So uh they were kind of all over the place, but I've never actually went into one. Yeah, I've had it uh of some very dear family friends. Uh the m wife in the family is from Ohio and occasionally we'll make skyline chili and it is delicious. Anyways, uh I don't know. I think there's a lot of decent options on here. I I do agree with you, John, that the California names are fun. They are not as fun as the big cats, but there's only but so many big c ats you can choose from. And I do like that they have some sort of thing other than just a numeric version number, even though as we've proven, I think it was like a year ago now, maybe two years ago, that Marco and I have no freaking clue what came when or anything like that. But still, I do like them. Uh let me start with some negative. I mean, I think we've maybe already covered this, but is there anything else that Marco, let's start with you that you 're not looking forward to? What are you what are you dreading about next week? So in general , Apple WBCs are a combination of exciting potential and homework. And and and the the balance of that shifts year to year. You know, what I what I didn't like last year was that the liquid glass redesigns brought a ton of homework, and I wasn't super fond of much else besides the transcript API, which admittedly, that was a really big deal for me. But like the rest of iOS 26 mostly just brought work that developers had to do because redesigns do that. This year, it's more likely to be a better balance of that. Um, because it's just it's not a redesign year. And so what I'm hoping for this year is hopefully some design calmness in the sense that like they are not gonna hopefully redesign things to such a degree that we would need to redesign our apps again. And also maturation and expansion of a lot of the on-device model stuff. I was very happy to get those APIs last year, but they but they aren't really that useful yet because of just inherent limits and the on-device models and everything. And also, we were all so busy dealing with liquid glass for the first half of the year that we couldn't really build against the on-device models that much because we were just underwater doing liquid glass stuff. So what I what I hope to see this year is again like a better balance of new capabilities and new stuff we can do versus like keeping up and treading water that we have to do to keep up with the system. Also , adopting and maintaining a liquid glass UI is especially cumbersome because things are so different from eighteen and stuff and whatever came before. It's hard to maintain the code basis for both. It's hard to make your app adopt liquid glass, especially adopt it well and not just to a surface level, but also maintain compatibility with iOS 18. What I want this year is for things to move forward enough that we can drop compatibility for iOS 18 in our apps for the most part. And that requires a lot of just stability, uh reputation improvements for the OSs, tweaking them in such a way that a lot of the haters who are holding on to 18 and Sequoia can comfortably move to them and will happily install them. Pushing that base forward, I think, is the biggest thing they can do for us. So what I am dreading, to answer your question, is if they don't do that, i if if what they ship is just another like , you know, butterfly keyboard gasket on top of liquid glass, like, oh, we fixed it and it's not really fixed. And it's just like some token tweaks and it's not anything actually meaningfully better. That that would be I think the failure mode here. I don't know how likely I'm I am to get what I want design wise, but I think I probably will get what I want technically. I do expect the foundation models frameworks to be a little bit better, a little bit tweaked, a little bit improved. And then the question is this entire world of app intents that we are that we've been promised since the 2040 or 2024, you know vaporware demo. The idea of like your your apps that that can vend things using a new app intent system to you know to the OS and have Siri tie them all together that is a giant question mark. Like, are we gonna actually see that? Is it gonna actually work? Is it gonna be good? And what will our apps be able to vent? And how will that system work? Is it gonna be like the system spotlight database, which it's built upon, which does not work very well ? Um I I hope not, or I hope they have made spotlight work better somehow, even though they never have achieved that see also Siri, like it there's a lot of these things are kind of like built on shaky foundations or or likely to be built on shaky foundations that I am a little bit worried about. But ultimately , I hope that they give us a good amount of new capabilities to use without it being full of a bunch of grunt homework on shaky crap that doesn't work. Because that's what we had last summer and it sucked. And it was really hard for us to develop good features and move our software forward. So this year what I'm hoping for is the opposite. Give us decent stuff that works well that we can use to make better apps. John . Yeah, I think uh the thing I'm dreading most is uh kind of like Marcus had a repeat of uh last year, like in in my short five or six uh year career as a Mac app developer, uh this year dealing with macOS 26 has been by far the the worst stuff that I've had to deal with. I just spent so much time uh fighting with like small display issues with basic interface elements that I didn't control. Um like I for example I use uh on macOS there's like store controls where you can just say like oh so you have a bunch of subscriptions in your app or a bunch of app purchases. We have a view for you that shows them the Apple way. And I was like, I'm definitely using that because I'll get past App Review. I'm like, look, I don't even control this view. It's Apple's view. I just say put store view here and it just reads all my metadata about my things and blah blah blah and then I have to worry about oh your button has the wrong text or you didn't put the price in the right place. I'd be like, look, I'm not even making this UI. It's the Apple UI. And I thought that was so smart when I rolled out my app with an app purchase in Mac OS 15. And then twenty six came and broke that window over and over and over again by making it clip things or show embarrassing scroll bars or make the buttons really tall or make it so you couldn't read all the text. And you know, this is another example of not my fault, but definitely my problem. I just didn't want to ship an app that looked embarrassing. Even it was like, well, it's usable, but like why is there a scroll bar with like two pixels worth of travel in this window that you can't resize? I'm like, well, I don't know why this scroll bar is there. It shouldn't be there. It's a bug in Apple's thing. And so I had to do just the most Herculean stuff to that's why I have all those things of like 26.0. This is what I need to do to make it work. 26.1, oh, they changed it, but now you need to do something else to make it work. 26.2. Now I need to do this. I even, as I mentioned on a past episode, have branches in there for OS version, but also on Intel versus ARM. Why should Swift UI view from Apple be different on Intel versus ARM? I just experimentally I have determined on macOS 26.whatever on Intel looks like this, and on macOS 26.0 on Arm looks like this. Luckily, I have bought machines to test with, but it's just that was such a waste of my time because was that adding features that helped the user at all? No. Could I ignore it? I could have ignored it. But then when people would go to the purchase screen on my app, they would see something looks like someone doesn't care about their apps. Like, why does this look janky? Why is this button detects in this button truncated? Why is there a scroll bar that scrolls two pixels? I feel like that's an impression I didn't want to make in my apps. So I spent so much time fighting with the new look of liquid glass and mac OS 26 for basic controls that really have nothing to do with the functionality of my app. I also fought with it elsewhere on my app. My settings screen, which is does have to do with the functionality of my app, had similar problems, and I basically did six months worth of bugs and bug reports on that. By the end, they pretty much got them all fixed. I think I have it, you know, the the case where you're using whatever we're on now, 26.5 , I think it has maybe one or two little hacks in it. But kind of like Marco was saying, I That's all still in the code and has to be because what if someone is using my app on 26.0? I don't want my app to look bad. I can't clean that code up until I drop support for 26, which is not gonna happen for a long time. So yeah, that's what I'm dreading. A repeat of that. And I don't honestly, I don't think that will happen. Again, it shouldn't 27 should basically be the same as 26, but with a minor tweaks that don't affect anything, and plus a bunch of bug fixes. So I'm not expecting it, but dreading in terms of like I have I have PTSD from from liquid glass on the Mac. I don't want to have to go through that again. Um, and then uh well , you should go to your thing, Casey. What are what are you dreading, if anything? Uh you know, I I don't feel like I'm dreading that much. I feel like as I'd said earlier, I am dreading that if they really get, you know uh the they get obsessed with AI stuff like you know oh it's AI this AI that AI this AI that like I do not want to see that I'm I'm over it. I I don't want Are you dreading that in the presentation or in the products or both? Yes. I think either way it could be the case. Um what I'm I'm also dreading that and uh the Apple has gotten better in the last few years, but still is a long way to go. I'm dreading looking at the documentation for all of the new stuff because you know it is likely to be missing or trash, they have gotten better, they still got a long way to go. So I'm dreading looking to that, looking looking at that. Um, what I'm looking forward to though is uh first of all, we haven't really had a chance to um to uh think about what the presentations are gonna be. But when I was listening to upgrade a few weeks back now, something that Jason or Mike said occurred to made me think that the likelihood that they do some completely corny and cheesy and cringe uh changing of the guards pre-video for this, you know , so like you know, handing off from Tim to John . I think it's gonna happen. And I'm actually kind of excited for it, if I'm honest, because I think it could be really fun. I thought you were gonna say it wasn't likely to happen and you were glad it wasn't gonna happen, but no you went the other way. You think it's going to happen and you're excited for it. I think it could be kinda cute. I really do. I might be the only one. I don't do it and I'm not looking forward to it, but I won I don't you know it's fine. I I don't I don't care about that stuff. Uh but no, I mean in I I think in terms of things we're excited for, which I think we've all kind of bounced off that as well, you know, let's let's go from not so happy to happy. I would love to see some advancements in Swift UI. There's no like particular bugbears all that come to the front of my mind as specific things I really want them to change. Uh a better search support would always be great because I've had to do custom search-related stuff in call sheet for its entire life for various and sundry reasons to have some better first-party support for doing things more flexibly would be great. I think a lot a lot of Swift UI, you could just say, I would like to do blank in a more flexible way, or allow, you know, be allowed to do whatever, but have more flexibility with it. Um I think that's true of most of Swift UI. I actually and again I know a lot of the older like the the spiritually older folks online are very anti Swift UI right now and like Mastodon, whatever. I actually really like Swift UI. I think that if call sheet were to be written in UI kit that it would look one half as good or I'd still be working on version one. And that's perhaps an indictment of my own skill, and maybe then I'm I'm okay with that. But I really, really like Swift UI, but it also really, really has problems. And so I am not calling for a whole cloth like let's go a different direction with Swift UI. And and I've seen some of some calls for that on Mastodon. Um I I I would really like to see and I'm excited for seeing what improvements come to Swift UI on basically any of the platforms, even if it's one that I don't really use pr myself. Like if I I would love to see John get some Swift UI improvements for macOS because that will eventually help me when I'm using John's apps or other apps that are m macOS apps that are based on Swift UI. So I'm excited to see what they do with Swift UI this year. That's likely to be more of a state of the state of the union thing than a keynote thing, but I'm still looking forward to it. Well, let me let me talk about what I'm excited for because it connects to what you were saying about Swift UI. This is phrases like what, are you excited for? I'm not actually excited for this because I don't think it's going to come, but if it did come, boy, would I be excited about it? And it's exactly what you got at. There's functionality that's still missing from Swift UI on the Mac. There's been a couple of uh complaining posts about it recently, but it just just re r again, PTSD, reading that person's description of all the different drag and drop systems and how none of them are fully functional. Lived it. Friggin' lived it with with switch glass from from like day one of Swift UI when I should not have been using it on the Mac , having to roll this all on my own, and here we are years later, it you still cannot implement basic drag and drop with all the features you would want on the Mac, and it's it boggles the mind. They're on like the third or fourth try at doing drag and drop. Just today I was messing with.file importer, which I don't know if there's an equivalent of that in uh in iOS, maybe not, but basically open save dialogues. How do you do an open save dialogue box in a macOS Swift UI app? They have features for it. Uh they can have modifiers and stuff for it, but they're fairly limited. There's a bunch of stuff that you can't do in them that you can do with the app kit ones, and also buggy. Because if you have like oh, I'm gonna do a file importer on this view, but there's file importer also on this other view, it's like, oh, now they fight with each other for reasons you don't understand. No, I don't understand. I don't like you end up making like an invisible, clear one-pixel background view to attach your file importer for because that's the that's what makes it work. Like stuff like that should not happen this far into Swift UI. So I would be super excited if they came out with Swift UI advances that say, hey, missing functionality, it's here now. Things that didn't work and were buggy, they're fixed. But I'm not expecting that. Yeah. But what I am excited for, which I know is coming, and I know this every year, is because uh it's developed in the open. Swift. The advances in Swift that are happening in Swift Evolution, you can look there's no surprises. It's been happening all year. It happens in the open. We know every single thing that's gonna come , or pretty much every single thing that's going to come in Swift. And I can tell you, having watched a year of advances, there's a bunch of really good stuff. In particular, uh, the in a whole like um uh could not type check this expression in uh reasonable time. Sometimes that's not what it means. But for the times when it really does mean that it couldn't type check that expression in reasonable time, that's gonna get way faster in the new version of Swift. And that is just a quality of life improvement for everybody who's using Swift. And all the other nice features they're added. Like I'm always excited about that. And it's kind of anticlimactic because if you follow Swift Evolution, you know all the features, but it's also exciting because like I've been seeing people discuss these features over the course of the year and argue about them and seeing whether they get adopted or whether they have to go back to be modified and come back in. And then WWC is like they're they're coming out. It's like here are the ones that graduated. You know, here are the ones that graduated to actually be features of Swift six point four or whatever version we're on now. Um and I can tell you the features are good. And I I'm also excited for an Xcode built on top of this version in Swift that performs better because of these improvements. And I suppose also a new version of Xcode that has better LLM integration and stuff like that. But I am excited about that. And it's easy to get excited about that because you know it's coming. Like it's it's one of the the few things that Apple does in the open where you don't have to guess uh what's going to arrive. Um the other thing I'm excited about, I think I said this when we talked about this at the beginning of the year, I am actually excited to see the features that didn't ship in 2024 actually arrive in a usable form because I think they're good ideas and I think they will be useful to me as a user of my phone if they work like like Marco said the way we know they can. We know it's possible. We see the technology working in these very limited scopes. I'm not asking for the world. I'm just like Marco said I'm, just asking for Siri to act like Apple has been advertising it acts like for the past decade. That I'm actually really excited about. I know it's boring and it's not like, well, does that mean Apple is okay and they're competitive and I'd setting all that aside , I'm a person with a phone and I want to be able to do those things with my phone more reliably. And every other device in my life that has been hooked up to any kind of LLM powered engine has gotten better for me in that regard and that it understands what the heck I 'm saying and responds in a reasonable way. I'm so excited for my phone to get there. I don't think I'm gonna run a beta of iOS because I'm not that excited about it, but I'm excited to just get over that hump and uh it seems like this is gonna be the year. Marco, anything that you are particularly excited for? I've kind of woven it through my my commentary the rest of the episode. Um but yeah, just in in general, what I wanna see is, you know, again, like what what makes for a good WBC is they show off features that A will ship, B well, or at least work and see that I can use to make a better app. That's like, you know, because there's there is the the consumer part of the WDC announcements of like here's what all of our new S's are going to do, and that's great. But it is like technically still a developer conference. And I am technically still a developer. And what I would like most of all is yeah , Apple, you did you you do good stuff, but we know your stuff is gonna like be c be a little bit half assed, let's be honest. Like you know because that's that's what they do, as we were saying earlier, like they put out some stuff that kinda works and walk away whistling and call it a day. Like but where their platforms really shine, despite them not acting this way, is with third party apps and what we do for them . And the better tools they can give us, the better we can make our apps. So that's what I'm always most hoping for every year is give us tools so that we can make better apps. That's the most empowering, that's what has the most impact, and that's what ultimately pushes their products forward.. Yeah Yeah, I agree. Uh John, you put in here what will we miss the most? I'm not sure where you were going with that. Uh, but I have a couple of theories. Well, I have a couple of theories. Uh number one, uh I will miss seeing the two of you. Uh obviously we like I said earlier, we didn't really get the nod this year, or didn't at all get the nod this year. We never really understand why we do or don't get the nod. But we didn't, uh, so we're not gonna be seeing each other, unfortunately. And that makes me sad. I will miss that the most. I'm guessing, John, you will miss being able to use your piece of crap computer with the newest operating system the most. No, what I'm gonna miss the most of WWE C is the formerly planned announcement of the new Mac Studios, the computer of supposedly going to buy. Because before the whole AI is using all the RAM and everything in the world thing, Mac Studios with presumably M5 family of chips were going to be announced at WWC, and now they totally aren't, for reasons that are understandable and technically are not really Apple's fault, but really suck for me personally. So what will I miss the most? The Mac Studio. Sad me. And obviously, you know, I you know missed the Mac Pro a little bit, but it was kind of a mercy killing. But like that was that was my prize. It's like, okay, well, the whole Mac Pro saga is over. Got my shirt with the the dates and the little tombstone. It's like it said., blah blah blah But guess what? This is the year that I'm gonna buy a new computer and they're gonna roll it out to WWDC. And no, they're not. I mean, they can surprise me. That would be super amazing if they come up with like an M6 Max Studio and they're like, somehow we got RAM chips. I'll be ecstatic, but I just don't see that happening. So yeah, that's what I'll miss the most. My Mac Studio. And also you too, but yeah. I won't I won't miss uh six hour plane flight. That is true. I will not miss that. Uh but I love that we rank, Mark when I rank below the Mac Studio, the computer that you didn't even really want in the first place. Really, really feeling great over here. I talk to you two every week, but you know, where's my Mac Studio? He really wanted better podcast co-host, but he's stuck with us. Right, exact ly. Where's the Mac Pro podcast hosts? You're gonna be riddled with holes. Oh my gosh. I I don't think we should take this any further. Marco, anything you'd like to add or are you good? I am good. All right. Well then I think uh that's pretty much it. Is there any uh stagecraft or anything you want to talk about or are we good? Stagecraft. I mean, like uh the the things you were talking about, like what kind of weird skits are they gonna have and stuff? Um I guess the uh I guess yeah, that is uh one other topic. Um the question of the balance between Tim and Turnus. I think we're gonna see a lot of both of them. I I think Tim is gonna open and I think he's gonna hand it off to Turnus all the time. Yeah I think I And you think Turnus is going to be talking about things that are not hardware related? Um That's a good question. Yeah, because like normally Federigi would take a pretty big role in this. I obviously I I think I think Federigi will still be in this to you know prominently in this, but maybe like the kind of MC role that used to be just Tim, I think maybe, maybe he will share that with Turnus, you know? Yeah, we'll see that that it'll be interesting. I mean, it's not like it's a mystery. Like we know the transitioning is happening, we know the time, we know ever ything about it. And honestly, how they divide up responsibilities is not even that important because who cares? It'll be fine either way. Um , but it will be, I mean, it may be our first opportunity to see Turnus talking about something that's not hardware. I'm not sure that will happen, but if it did, it would be our first look at like CEO Turnus. Like you're no longer confined to your world where you just talk about whatever the hardware product is. Now you could you could talk about whatever you want. You can talk about the new Apple T Yeah, I'm I'm I'm really actually surprisingly excited to see how they spin this. Well, the spin implies that it's bad, but you know what I mean. Like how they handle this transition. And I suspect it's going to be mostly business as usual, and with perhaps a bit more turnus than we had seen in the past, but not I don't I don't think it's going to be like Tim says hi and then turns the entire thing over to Turnus and then says goodbye. I mean it could be. It's been similar to that in the past, but I don't think that's what's gonna happen, but we'll see. Do you think there's gonna be a Tim goodbye? Because this is like his last uh basically Apple event before he's not a CEO I think there may be a nod to it, but I think it'll be mu it won't be much more than that. You know, uh it they'll I think at the least it'll be a kind of a wink and a nod sort of thing, not literally, but you know what I mean. Uh and at most it'll be something like, you know, thank you for the time that, you know, I've spent with you and blah blah blah. Especially actually and I could very much see him couching it as and to the Yeah. I don't know. I I I would be surprised if he confirmed that this was his last event. That doesn't that's not really his style, it's not really Apple's style. I I would be very surprised by that. Well we'll see what happens. I mean he could just say something nice and not mention anything about it being his last event. We're just like, huh, why did he say that nice thing about employees and thank you? Um the own the one way you where we could see a ton of Turnus quote unquote legitimately or normally is if all that hardware we described, the home pop of the screen, the Apple TV and, the new home pod mini. If that all comes out, yeah, have turned us do all that because he would have done all that anyway. Like he's the hardware guy, you know, he would have been the the top level MC for that handing off the individual ones. But if that stuff doesn't arrive, I'm I don't know where you would work in Turnus from a hardware perspective. So I guess we'll be looking at that. But yeah, and the other thing to look for, I guess, is is there any change whatsoever in Turnus' demeanor? I don't think there'll never be a change in Tim Cook's demeanor. He's gonna be the same forever. But will Turnus like will we see anything different from Turnus? I don't think we will because he's Tim Cook is still the CEO and he's still kind of in the mode of like I don't quite have this job yet, just keep keeping on, keeping on. But uh I'm always watching for that. I want to see him spread his wings and come out from the shadow of Tim and maybe that won't happen this June, but I hope it'll happen eventually. All right. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week. Factor and delete me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at ATP.fm/slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week and overtime, we're going to be talking about the newly announced NVIDIA RTX Spark, which could be a challenge to Apple Silicon. We'll talk about that in overtime this week. You can join and listen at B.fm slash join. Thank you everybody for listening, and we'll talk to you next week Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Accidental Oh it was accidental Accidental John didn't do any research. Marco in Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental. Accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at A T V dot F M And if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C A S E Y L I S S So that's K C Lis M-A-R-C-O A-R-M -N-T-Marco Armin S-I-R -A-C USA C USA It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to accidental accident al tech so along I've nerd sniped myself with call sheet. Um I I I feel like generally speaking, my work efforts are fairly static. You know, I work roughly the same hours every day. I feel like I get roughly the same amount of output out of me every day. But then I'll get this burr up my bottom, like, oh man, it would be really cool if I could do blank. And when that happens, I cannot stop until it's done. And I feel like Marco, you definitely have talked in the past about some of these I don't know if manic is really the word I'm looking for, but these like hyper intense moments where you're just absolutely fixated on something. And maybe John you go through that too. I don't know. But I feel like I I have a kindred spirit of Marco, if nothing else on that. Oh yeah. This is much of my life. Yeah. Um but I I think the the difference between Marco and I is the way you describe yourself anyway is that it's very fits and very you know very big fits and very big spurts. I've always forget which one's good, which one's bad. But either way, you know it's very it's very up and downwards mine is mostly level and then I'll go through these moments that it's like oh my god I cannot peel myself away from the computer and that's one of these times. Uh the most recent time that this happened was and this is that this is going to be something that we could let ourselves get sidetracked about. I'm really going to try not to. Maybe we should talk about this topic another time. But I am mostly divorcing myself from Plex , and I have started to lean into at least for my own use, I've started to lean into Jellyfin, which is a purely open source equivalent. I do think it is worth discussing this another time, but that's not terribly pertinent to the conversation, except to say that I had added support in call sheet for uh getting information from Jellyfin as to what's currently playing. And so when call sheet, not long after call sheet launched, I forget exactly when I shipped it, you could um it it would sniff out if there was a channels server running in the local network, or a really actually not even a server, excuse me, but a client running in the local network, or if a Plex client was running in the local network, and it would do its best to interrogate those clients and figure out what are they playing and do the best it can to put that information by default on the very top of the very first screen you see when you open the app. And it was okay at first. It got a little better over time. Um, with channels, it uses Bonjour, which is the uh zero config stuff that's baked into all of Apple's devices. It's an Apple technology, if I'm not mistaken. Um, and it works really well. It's it it's pretty consistent and uh I I really like the way that that John over at channels has handled that. Plex , however, what they have is kind of spiritually similar to Bonjour, but it was written about 9 50 years ago and it shows. And so uh apparently I just recently found out that the internal name for this or allegedly the internal name for this is Gadaimate or GDM, which I find hilario us. But what you do, and I haven't looked at this piece of code in a little while, so I might get the detail slightly wrong. But what you do is you have, or call sheet will broadcast uh a multicast message that says, hey, are there any Plex clients out there? And if a Plex client hears that message, it will reply and say, yes, I am a Plex client. Here I am. And here's my uh connection information. And then call sheet will then go and connect to that Plex client directly and say, Hey, what are you playing right now? When I first launched this feature, I don't want to say like two-ish years ago, it worked okay . This is very old, very rickety tech. If you're the kind of dork that has like a VLAN in your uh home network, and let me tell you the kind of people, the kind of dorks who run Plex are the kind of dorks who would have a VLAN . Uh and if you don't know what that is, congratulations, you're normal. Uh but if you have like a VLAN or something like that. How do how did that avoid you know, like we we pronounce it vlog? Why don't we say VLAN? Because it's too close to Vlad. I don't know. Uh, but anyway, um, if you have like a VLAN or something like that, it doesn't work. Like it in so many ways it doesn't work. And then as Plex is in poopified over the last year or two, again, we'll talk about this another time. Uh, as Plex is in poopified and had dramatic ally written rewritten their client apps, a lot of these features got even more rickety than they already were, which is saying something because they were pretty frickin' rickety. The problem I had though is that for whatever reason, for right or wrong, I was staunchly, devoutly against doing any sort of thing where you have to log in in order to get information from these playback clients. I didn't want to have to do like an OAuth flow. I've done it in the past and I hate it. And I'm sure there's packages for it now, but I just didn't bother with it. I didn't was fun for the user. I didn't think it was nice. Didn't feel good. And so I didn't want to do anything that even vaguely rel relied on login . So then uh a few months ago I started to really try and trial jellyfin and really try to figure out okay can I let the can I make this work in my life? And I've decided that at least as I sit here today, I am pretty much all in on Jellyfin. I still run my Plex server. Um, but uh in the family is still on Plex . But for me personally, for me, myself, and I, I'm pretty much exclusively on Jellyfin now. Um, there I will say that the Jellyfin client apps are all pretty much terrible at this point. All the infuse people are yelling at me and screaming at me. I have tried infuse . It was not for me. I don't remember why. It doesn't matter. But um there isn't there is a client that I enjoy called Send Player. I'll link it in the show notes. It is written or based out of China, so take that for what you will, but it is very affordable and it's a one-time purchase. But anyway, so I'm all in on Jellyfin and I wanted my playback information from Jellyfin to be showing up in my app in call sheet. So I can just tap and see what I'm working on or what I'm what I'm watching. And it turns out that there is no sort of peer-to-peer way to do this with Jellyfin . So now what I needed to do is I needed to do some sort of like login flow. And I asked Claude about this former and I think future sponsor. I asked Claude about this, and Claude said, Well, hey, here's what you can do. You can do like a whole all OAuth thing if you so desire. But you can do, and I forget what Jellyfin calls it, but you can basically do one of those things where you ask the server for a PIN number and then the user goes to the server and enters that pin number to complete the handshake and say, yes, this thing is blessed. And so that's what I did. And that's already shipped in call sheet. It shipped I don't know like a month or two ago. And it's pretty good. I like to think I made it as clean and easy as I possibly could. And so now when you start up call sheet, it is almost freaking instant that you can see what you're playing in Jellyfin. What's also great about this is that because you're not doing some like multicast, you know, peer-to-peer sort of scenario, uh, it will work depending on your setup, of course, it could even work remotely. So the peer-to-peer thing for both um channels and for Plex that only worked if you were on the same network because it was all multicast stuff. Well, I have my Jellyfin server exposed using Tailscale and specifically a Tailscale service. I'll put a link in the show notes. But basically what that means is in the same way I was talking about funnel at the top of the show that lets you expose something to the entire internet that's on your tailnet Serve is kind of like doing the same thing, but only within your tailnet. So you have to be attached to my tailnet in order to access my Jellyfin server. But it has a full HTTPS certificate. You know, it's it's it's got a uh easy to remember domain name, et cetera, et cetera. Well, what's great about all this is when you enter in, you know, jelly dot you know, whatever your if Talnet's name is dot TS. net, well then you can see that information even when you're watching something remotely, which is really cool because it'll reach through Tailscale and ask your Jellyfin server, hey, what are you playing right now? And this works super well. And it works so freaking fast . It's it's incredible. By the time call sheet is spun up entirely, typically what you're watching Jellyfin is right there, front and center, right at the top of the screen. I love it. I genuinely do . But all the Plex people, of which I sort of kind of, but I'm mostly not one anymore. All of them are saying, hey, you with love, your Plex um implementation is a pile of crap. Because it is. Because the the way that Plex does things is so rickety and so old. And so today, or maybe it was yesterday actually, yesterday I got thinking if co if uh Jellyfin has this sort of code thing that I can do , I could probably do something like that with Plex, right? And now I'm in a little bit of a pickle because what I figured out, it's a good pickle, but a pickle nevertheless. What I figured out, and I've mostly implemented like the the the plain Jane Easy approach, the the the no frills version is already implemented. It's not on test flight or anything yet, but it's close to test flight. And I can ask, you know, have you have you tried a log into play into Plex. And what it does is it goes and asks the Plex central servers. The central Plex servers, hey, this user would like to log in. And it gives you a very long code. It's like a 20-character long code. But the nice thing is the user never needs to see that. You just send the user to a particular URL that includes that code in it. This is very much like what John has done with uh our discount codes for HTTP merge. And so you go to a special URL and the user just needs to enter, you know, their login credentials with Plex, you know, in the spirit of OAuth. I never see any of these credentials or anything like that. And they don't even need to enter a code. They just say, you know, is this uh is this okay ? Yes, it is, and that's that. The the k the catch though is that this only works with asterisks and daggers and double daggers. This only really works for playback on your local server. It doesn't really work with remote servers. And the reason that is, is because I uh Plex , while it has a central like author authorization and authentication mechanism, it doesn't really have any sort of central what are what is this user playing anywhere sort of server or situation. And one of the great things about Plex is that you know I can share my Plex server with other people without needing to punch more than a single hole in my firewall, without needing to do the tail scale dance, without needing to do anything else, I can share my Plex server with other people so they can stream my media and vice versa. So if John, for example, has shared his Plex server with me, which at last I saw he had, and I'm streaming something from John's house to my house, this call sheet integration wouldn't work because I'm interrogating my local server to see are is Casey playing anything locally? And I'm not going and interrogating John's server because in order to do that, I would have to interrogate all of the servers I have access to. And not to humble s brag, but that' kind of a long list for me. So the the the question that I kind of have and I'm curious what you two think is this seems to work a billion times better for pretty much every use case, except when you're watching something from a remote server, which is not an entirely uncommon use case for Plex . Or you can use the old school, like the old school one, it's still functionally there, but it almost never works in my experience. You can use the old school multicast thing, and you can hypothetically get whatever you're watching across any server on the entire planet. So I'm thinking as I sit here now, I'm thinking I'm going to ship this new Plex integration and leave you the option to do either or. Although the old version is so bad I've been considering pulling it because it's really very rickety. But I'm curious if either of you have thoughts on how I should handle this. Because again, the summary is I could do this new thing where the user does have to log in, but it's very quick and very easy. In fact, it's actually even easier than Jellyfin, which I didn't think was possible. But you can only see what you're watching locally, like what you what you're watching from the local server, I should say. Or I can leave it as is and just tell Plex people, sorry, you know, Plex has a really rickety system, there's nothing I can do. Or I hope it works for you, even though it never works for anyone. So I don't know. Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Any opinions about this? You you gotta think a 2027 uh mindset, Casey, here's what you do. Uh WWC, Apple announces a new version of Shazam kit that works with TV shows you just record all And then you look that up using it using TMTB. Done and done. That would be a good thing. No API interface. No figuring out what server you're streaming from. No figuring out what are you watching it on? Is it on Apple TV? What network do I have to scan with this and log in with that and figure out? No, no, it's just it's in the air. Uh, and if you could take over the camera and have it look at the screen figure, like you gotta do it the the machine learning AI way, just sound and video is happening in the room. What is it? What show is that? What episode? What actor is that on the screen? Done and done. I mean that that would be like that would be the coolest and most modern version of that. And you you can even privacy invasive. Yep. Yeah, but and you could even do something's do something like you know, take like take a picture every three seconds for like ten seconds. With your applasses. Just for like in like one burst. Like identify this. Boom, boom, boom. Send those three pictures to and send the pictures you take to to some kind of moderation center in another country. Right, exactly. No, I was gonna say like you know, send them to like you know the the open AI AVIs or whatever and say what movie is this? Like it like that could be done, but no, I I think setting aside those kind of solutions for now, because I don't that doesn't really sound like you or necessarily a great idea. Um when you you know you have a choice between something that has a a lim a more limited feature set but works a lot better and something that is more broad. I would go for the former every time because what when you are when you're you know if people are prom ised functionality that is slow, rickety, you know, incomplete in practice, that's going to make it a more frequent negative experience for them with your product. Whereas if you say, here's this version works a lot better, it just doesn't support this one use case. Right, right. They know that up front . And the more common cases where you're watching things locally work a lot better. That is usually the right approach. Like make a product that does that covers less area, but covers it better. Yeah, I think you're right. And that's what I'm leaning towards. And like I said, I'm leaving uh for now anyway, as I sit here today. I plan to leave the old and rickety version there if you prefer it and basically have a to ggle between the two. But um I I really think that you're you're exactly right because so many people have written me over the over the last couple of years and said in very, very nice ways, did this ever work d,ude? Because it surely it surely seems like it doesn't. And again, the the people who have said this have pretty much universally been extremely nice about this. Um and and so I feel like giving a better experience to your point, Marco, even with the caveat that it's only for local stuff, I feel like that will generally be better for almost everyone. And I think that that's probably the right answer. But I like I said, I mean the reason I half jokingly get give my, you know, Shazam Kathakan Understand TV shows answer is because I watch most of my T V shows in a thing that you're not supporting at all and I want the experience of being able to open up call sheet and not have to search for the show I'm watching. I just wanted to know. I would personally be willing to give call sheet access to the mic to you know TV show Shazam Kit what I'm watching because that would save me having to do the search. I would personally be willing to point the camera at the screen, although that would probably be a lot less reliable than the audio. But like the the problem, the reason I'm suggesting this again, only half jokingly, is because it sidesteps all its other issues. Because like even if you just want to support Apple TV, Apple is not going to roll out an API where, like, hey, third parties, do you want to know what someone's watching on the Apple TV on any app? Just use this API. That will Apple will never do that. TV makers are not reasonable. TV makers do do that. TV makers watch what you're watching and report back to their service. But Apple will never, nor should they. Apple shouldn't do this. But I the the bottom line is I'm on my couch. I'm watching a thing. What is that person from? You could save me a bunch of steps if I could launch call sheet and just see the show up at the top. And that's not gonna work because I watch my shows on like the Hulu app, the Apple TV app. Like I don't watch them on Plex. I don't watch them on Jellyfin, right? I would do the login dance of whatever I had to do to make that work, but we watch in all sorts of things. Like we still have that Hallmark Plus streaming subscription. Like there's just too many apps. And so that's why I'm saying there's not going to be any app integration. Can we sidestep it? Can we get around it? Can we use the power of machine learning and advanced technology to narrow it down even to say these are my top three guesses for what show you're watching, tap on the one you're watching. And it I know integration will be better, and I I applaud you for pursuing this, but like you just really nicking away at like the corner of a giant iceberg because it's great for the five people who watch all their stuff through Jellyfin or watch all their stuff through Plex, and maybe those nerds are kind of like a core audience, but your app has much broader appeal. And so I do think most people who use your app will never know or see anything about this feature. So to in in that end, I would say maybe try to time box the what you the time you spend on this, speaking of being nerd sniped, because as cool as it is, you're never going to get anything close to enough coverage that you know the majority of users of your app are ever going to see this feature. Yeah, I know you're right. And on the long-term list, which it's been on the long-term list since before LLMs were really a thing, or before I was aware and exposed to them anyway. If you look at home assistant, and you know, it wouldn't be me if I didn't bring that up at some point, uh, if you look at home assistant, there is a mechanism by which it will show what the a what Apple TVs in your house are currently playing. Now it doesn't really show a whole lot about it. It's like a title and very little else. Whereas the nice thing about using Jellyfin or Plex or channels is that they'll often give me an exact movie database ID number for the thing that they're that the person is watching. But I'd like to at some point set an LLM at like the home assistant um code base and say hey there is a mechanism by which I think there might even be a Python library to do it with that that home assistant leverages. I have a bookmark somewhere that I could dig up but suffice it to say look through this code and write me a swift version of it so I can do this too. And what it ends up doing is the the four digit like pairing code that you would do, uh I forget when you do this, sometimes with airplay, sometimes with other things, you basically have to do that dance once or maybe twice. And then at least h ome assistant will show you the title and like a image for what the person is watching, not like literally a screen cap, but like a poster image or something like that. Um, and so I'd be curious to see if I could make heads or tails of that with the help of an LLM on my side. Um, I did try to dig through this code two, three years ago, whatever it was, and it was nigh impossible for me to figure out. I think in no small part because I am I am able to speak Python, but I am far, far from fluent in it. And I think that was a large part of the problem. Um, but over time, you know, maybe I will, especially if I start digging into the like more agent-y stuff where I say, Hey, go figure this out, let me know when you're done. Maybe I should do that at some point and set, you know, Claude off and say, Hey, build me a Swift library that does this thing. Here's an example of it that works over here. See what you can do. And maybe that'll work and maybe not. But the the downside of that though is that even if I can figure out what you're watching on like Paramount Plus, what have you, the best I could do is when you tap on it, it pre-fills out a search for Star Trek Strange New Worlds or whatever it's called you know what I mean? It's just it types those words out for you rather than jumping you directly to the the entry in call sheet for Star Trek Star Trek Strange New World. Well you can do the I'm feeling lucky and show the search first search result in line and then play it is this not it type of thing. But you get my point. But I don't know we'll see what happens. But I I I have very much enjoyed trying to figure out how to do this. And I've been working with Claude to do it. This is things, these are things that I think I am capable of doing without the help of an LM, but again, it's much quicker to ask it questions and have it give me direct answers than having to spelunk go spelunking through Plex documentation or third-party copies of Plex documentation or what have you in order to figure it out. But I mean pretty much all the code I've written for this particular feature is I think 100% me. I don't even think it's 99% me. I think it's 100% me. It's just the fig uring out what the magical incantation I need to do against the Plex API. That was largely a conversation, almost entirely a conversation with Claude. And so again, that's the sort of thing that I think is really powerful. Let me have Claude help me with the thing that I'm not uniquely skilled at. And then I will do the things that I think I am uniquely skilled at. And that's been that's been fun and rewarding as well.