Xcode 27 Delete Derived Data Command

I have monthly Facetime calls with a handful of good friends, one of whom is our good friend Underscore. and once ath we'll get on Faceetime for like an hour or two and just chitchat and catch up. And when I was talking Underscore the other day, I was mousing around for a moment and I noticed my magic trackpad, which is my mouse of choice, was sliding a little bit on my desk. And so what I do is I turn off the trackpad, I pick it up, I flip it over, and the four little like feet or whatever they're called, the little rubberized things that it rests on You know, rub on them for a second with your hand or with your finger and gets all the gook off, and then you put it back down, everything's good for another few weeks, or what have you I turned it off, I rubbed the bottom and I went to turn it back on and The little nubbin that I used to turn the thing back on isn't there anymore. Apparently it shore off. It's a little power slider because it's a slider, right? justust like on the keyboards. The little nub in for the slider fell off when it was in the off position. so is it metal like on the keyboards? Yes. So how does it fall off? Isn't it like trapped in there? isn't it? You would think, But I have it on my I have it between my fingers right now and it is ity bitty and I should send it to doctor Drang to do like a forensic analysis. Oh does it look like it broke, like is there a fracture? Yeah, I think it shore off Like you're so powerfully turning it on and off. You know, that work out, John. Your fingernail works out. Exactly. But so that was very annoying and frustrating. but I have good news. I have then used that as an excuse to upgrade my lightning Magic trackad and keyboard to not only a USBC Magic track pad and keyboard bllack USBC track and keyboards. So I am living a great grandiose black life. I've got my BlackBook Pro over here with my black keyboard and my black mouse and I am loving life. Just call me MKBHD to be clear, like I think Almost every nerd wants that excuse to replace the perfectly fine lightning version of these peripherals with the much more convenient USBC version. Exactly. And here I am with a giant supply of Microsoft precision mouses, all which have a micro USB port on the front. Oh no No that's not desirable at all I do have a couple of quick lamentations though. I got my Fancy pants magic keyboard, right? my black magic keyboard. and it looks so good. It reminds me of the iMac Pro one, which I loved and would actually probably still be using if it wasn't for the case it wasn't for the problem that it doesn't have touch ID that the iPad Pro one doesn't excuse me iMac Pro one doesn't And so what kind of animal lives without touch ID, right, gentlemen? Anyway, I got this new keyboard. However, There's a difference from my old lightning version of the keyboard. And that difference is If I look at the lightning keyboard other than being blinded by how bright it is because the keys are all white or something like that, the control key in the bottom left hand corner spans roughly two thirds of the width of the shift key above it, right So in the bottom left corner, there's as basically every Mac keyboard, control option and command. And so I don't know when this started, but I have in the last couple of years started control clicking to right click. I know that you don't have to do that. I know there are a million other ways to do that, including two fingertaps and so on and so forth. I could set the trackpad to click on the bottom right and that's how I do it I'm aware Whatever reason, I don't know why. I started doing Control cllick like I'm a damn eighties Mac user, right, John? That's how I've done it. Now the new There' no like on the Mac in the eighties. Well, fair, fair. All right. For a while, there wasn't a control key. All right, that joke fell flat in every level. But nevertheless, the new keyboard, the option key and the command ke keys were both shrunken ever so slightly. And instead of the control key being the lower left hand key on the keyboard This stupid globe and FN key. is in the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard, and then command and then option excuse me, and then conttrol then option then command. And so now every time I go to freakaking right click, instead I'm function clicking, which does nothing. Is this the mini keyboard without a keypad? Is that the problem? No, and that's the other thing that was the other lamentation I wanted to talk about. I had to get the one with the numeric keypad, because even though I don't really use the numeric keypad that often But I'm not gonna to do any stupid half height up down arrows. You have to get the numeric keypad to get the full height up down arrows. And so'm rocking this numeric keypad like my dad using Lotus one hundred, twenty three in the eighties. So I use it to type in numbers, but I didn't realize that they have the FN key down by the contr. mean. I have the keyboard the game with my Mac Pro, which as you noted, does not have a touch ID key, but it has normal control keys in the corners so I I don't know I'm gonna do. I mean I guess I could just keep using this, but we'll see. In the grand scheme of things, at least I have my beloved functional peripherals now. You sent a link to we'll put this link in the show. What the hell? It's when they curve the corners too because like it's all curvy around the things? No, the last one was is curved as well I don't know if it' identically curved, but it looks At a glance. Yeah, I think I think it was just when they integrated touch ID, they made it those couple of tweaks. I think myife my wife's keyboard. She has an extended keyboard and it has touch ID, but I don't think they did that to the cour. May we'll have to find, I should just start searching eBay for my wife's keyboard Well actually now that I'm looking at it, if you look at this image, I was not intending for this topic to go on this long, but here we are. There's if you go to this shop, if you go to the store, so here I'll paste this link in. So this is the old one without touch ID. and there is no F and key in the bottom left. Exactly. Right, but my wife has one with Touch ID with no F and key in the bottom left, I think Yeah, they put the F and key in like the home end block. Right, exactly What is the current one doing? Is that a menu? I don't know what those buttons you have a keyboard, press it Well, I did and nothing happened.'s why I am so confused. Although I'm doing this in like Freaking Chrome The one's a forward delete, but then what's the one what's the one to the left of home? the heck's I'm wondering. Menu key or something? It looks like a menu Yeah. Oh no, it is a right click. So now if I'm in mail, it's right clicking on first respoers. So you don't have to hitrol click anymore You can just hit the key next to delete But why o, if you are looking to like replace a click on the mouse, it has to be for most people on the left hand side of the keyboard. Exactly, Eactly. I think this is for if you're just navigating from the keyboard Yes. To bring up a context menu though? I think there was a time where in the default setting you couldn't pop up a context menu from the keyboard unless you had like the full keyboard access thing on or whatever. So maybe that's the role that key fills. I might just disable that key in the keyboard if I had a key like this because the key next ex to the delete key often gets hit accidentally and I don't want it poping up a context menu I mean, that's very weird. And it only so I was trying it on Visual Studio code, which is what's right front my face you tiled with Chrome because that's where both our external and internal show nototes are. But then when I went to mail If I'm looking at my list of messages, And then I have one of them selected, whichever one is currently selected. If I hit this little menu button, sure enough, the context menu comes up with open, send again, repeply, reply all, eter Today I learned. I have breaking news. My keyboard also has a menu button Look. Have you ever hit it? I've never hit it in my life. I just tried. So I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic and on between the right side Alt and control. So know, it's a windows keyboard So on the left side, Alt and control, there's the windows key between them On the right side, if you dont contontrol, there's a menu button. and I just tried like, you know, if you have something in the UI selected and you hit the menu button, it does bring up the context menu for that item which I never knew was a thing people did with the keyboard. Anyway, that is that. So let's start with some follow up. and I have possibly good news So I had lamented and then Marco joined in with me about how I wasn't receiving tap taps on my watch from Aon's notifications and Aaron's notifications specifically. And Marco and I were casting about for potential causes for this. and we were talking about maybe focus modes. we were talking about any number of other things. And a lot of the suggestions we got, I didn't actually get that many suggestions via like Masadon or anything But most of them were things I had at least considered or had looked at in the past. but A couple of them, it wasn't any one particular person, but a couple of them had me poking around, like based on the things I said, poking around in Earon's contact again which I thought I'd done recently, but seemingly not And if you look at a particular contact in IiOS in the contxt app, and maybe this works on MacOS I don't know, but I'm looking at my phone right now. I noticed that for ringtone, I had a specific sound for Earon, which is you're the best around from the Karate Kids soundtrack because of course, although my phone hasn't run verbally Charmie My phone hasn't run aloud in like ten ten plus years, but that's neither here nor there And then I have a special vibration for her, which we had talked about tight emergency bycast on That a lot of you thought about. Well done. It's early too. Anyways, below the ring tone section though, there is a text tone section. Would you like to guess what text tone I had set for Erin some wayay somehow? I bet I did it. I don't know why I would have or when I did it, but would you like to guess what the option was that I selected Silent. None, exactly. So apparently I had explicitly told the system, Do not vibrate when Aaron texts me. I don't know what on God's green earth would have possessed me to set that, but I did. Maybe did you ever not have the silent switch on your phone? Like was there a time where you didn't just get the thing out of the box, turn that switch on and never touch it Yeah, I mean, pretty much if you mean the physical switch, I always immediately set it to silent mode and never look back. Because I can imagine like if there was even just a moment when you didn't have that set and you're constantly getting textes from your wife and your phone' making noise, you're like, o, how do I fix this and you go into the contact turn silent and now it solves the problem because she's the one who is texting you the most, and then you just forgot about it for years l That would be a very casey thing to do with without question. But it's like it's weird, does it never? because I thought your thing was like, it seems like you don't get notifications, but it's not one hundred percent at the time. Right. So what it was the behavior in summary was that when it was a private conversation just staring and me, I wouldn't get a tap tap, I wouldn't get any any vibration notification I would still get like pop upps on my Mac and it would still show up in the lock screen, so on and so forth. But when we were in group txts,, so you a handful of people together, then her stuff would poke through based on my foocus mode settings, which is what I wanted. It just wasn't in our private conversations. So in summary, Marco, this may or may not help you. But if you go into Tiff's contact and go down and look at the special settings for both vibration for ring tone and text tone, pererhaps you screwed yours up too. Now, I did immediately test it and it did seem to tap my wrist when she sent that text then in just going about my day yesterday, which is when I fixed it or thought I had anyway, going about my day It seemed like I was missing them again, but I was oftentimes in the midst of using a different device and I know that Apple tries to be intelligent about Oh, he's sitting at his Mac. You don't need to tap his phone, his watch, his iPad, etcetera. You can just show the notification on his Mac. So I still assume it's fixed, but I'm not entirely sure. It at least worked briefly. I can tell you that much. But I'm not sure if I can declare absolute victory yet So it's not that's not whatever your theory was about the text tone being set to none, that could have been a problem, but it is not my problem All right because I for a while in order to try to alleviate this problem A couple of years ago, I set Tiff to have a custom text tone called vibration rapid. And it is aggressive. It's basically like you five short, strong vibrations. And like you can't it sounds like there's know like a nuclear alert going off on your phone. If it's like sitting on a desk or something, it sounds ridiculous But that's the one that's like, you can't possibly miss that Unfortunately that It seems like again, when you are wearing an Apple Watch It seems like that over like the Apple Watch Its presence on your wrist tells the phone, don't bother vibrating the user. I got this. And the Apple watchatch is then responsible for tapping. Now there are other vibration settings on the watch. There' there's a setting that's been around forever called Pominent Hptic, I believe. where It will before it does like the whatever whatever haic it was going to do if it's going to do like the tap tap. It'll first do a big like a like a one second long buzz Then tap tap And I used to do that. I don't I don't have it set currently, but I used to do that because Like I always liked wearing the stainless steel watches and the vibration motor just wasn't that strong to have it be a very strong feeling through the heavier stainless steel case And so That was kind of required to feel almost anything reliably on the Apple Watch. Also those early tabtig engines were also just, I think, less reliable and they would fail and like get weaker and die over time Anyway So that's not the problem I have with TIF is not that setting because I have it set to Textstone vibration rapid Although maybe Maybe the Apple Watch doesn't because the Apple watchatch doesn't do that same pattern. That's correct. I wonder if maybe it like doesn't it doesn't even have that entry. So maybe that's it. I can tell you, the way I have temporarily at least worked around this problem is What I speculated about last time during the show, I just did it, which is On MacOS you can this's probably true when I was too, but I change the notifications for messages on MacOS to be persistent in the corner rather than momentary. So that way like If if there is a message that comes in on the Mac you know, if if the little notification bubble in the upper right corner You know, normally it would show up for whatever it is five seconds and then disappear And with the persistent setting, it stays there until you dismiss it This is how I have calendar notifications, reminder notifications.ike this is how I can figure the most important things And so now messages works that way too. And that is at least helping work around the problem. Well, please reach out to Margo and me if you do have any other suggestions We got some feedback from Bart Reardan, who created a Mac Arst Mac app skill. Arst is such a funny wor I know it's common in the Queen's English, but it's just so funny to me. anyway. Bart writes, the HPDv MacAed Mac apppps member special is now available as a skill, so your LLM vibe coded apps can also be Mac arsted Putting my money whereere my mouth this, says Bart, is my own Mac ask or AstT sururvey says mostly. And the agent apparently came back with a score of twenty three out of thirty six where there's a whole breakdown that we can link to in the show notes of the results it found, but I thought that this was very funny that Bart turned it on himself and came up with It's all right Yeah, some of the findings were reasonable. likeike I looked at the skill a little bit like I'm assuming they just asked to like summarize the member special. Transcribe the member special, summarize it turn it into a skill, blah blah. So I'm sure stuff is lost in translation. And as I said, when we talked about this member special last week, it's not like we covered the entire topic. We just did the best we could. but anyway, some of the things that it called out is that you You can't copy and paste a contain your ID, IP or image reference. That's the idea of like if there's something in your app that can be selected and you hit copy and there's anything remotely sensible that you can do with it, you should support it Th then it found some drag and drop stuff and some other random things. So interesting. If you want to try it out, we'll put a link in the notes. Again, skills are just directories for all text files in a particular format, so they're very portable. And you can just look at them with your own eyeballs and Read them yourself, if you're not using an LLM All right, with regard to RAamageddon, Jonathan Wites, listening to ATP the last couple of months, helped me decide to upgrade my MacBook pro before RAM and disk prices went up That effectively saved me fif thousand five hundred dollars, so I'm going to be making a donation to Staint Jude in September This is the way this is the way my friends. Yeah the new innovation instead of like the Marco offset. it's like, hey, did you save some money by buying a max at the right time? Take that difference and just understand. And you know the way to September. I mean, it's fine if you want to way to September because that's when we do the, you know, campaign for whatever. You can donate it anyt timee during the year. So just FYI G great job, Jonathan Yeah, so whenever, Jonathan you make that donation, for you, since you were the first to come up with this new thought technology, please send me email. figure out a way to send me email, reach out and I'll send you a couple stickers. justust for Jonathan because they were the inventor of this new thought technology Shutter Aperture writes with the skyrocketing cost of memory, do you think Apple will revisit their unified memory strategy and offer a model with less built in memory, but with the ability to add more RAM later? No I don't think yeah, I don't see this as a thing because their whole stick when a lot of the innovation of Apple Silicon is the unified memory. I get where Shutter Aperture is coming from But I don't see this as a thing. I mean, as we said in the earlier program, we talked about this, it would still be unified if it was expandable. The unified Adjective in the description is saying that there is not a separate pool of VRAM and regular RAM. It is one unified pool of memory that is used by both the GPU and the CPU. So that is what makes it unified You could have unified memory and have it be expandable, but Apple won't do that just because The other things that you get from their current memory thing is you get very short physical distance between the CPU GPU and the RAM, like it's right on the same package with it or very close to it on some of the other models. And you can do that with expandable RM too, but it's closer still if you can get know, right next to it Um It's soldered on so in theory, it's more reliable and potentially you can get higher speeds for less money because the interfaces for doing high speed that are expandable, you know, But anyway, the main problem is, of course Apple doesn't have a lot, physically doesn't have a lot of room in any of its computers currently for expandable memory. Obviously in the laptops everything's tight and you're like, well, you know it can be done. look at the framewor ltop they do it. It's like, yeah, look how much room they dedicate to their expandable memory and then try to find that room in Apple's laptops. It's rough. And even in things like the Mch Studio Uh there's, you know, they have the removable modules and stuff. You could probably fit it in there, but anyway, I feel like Apple has just moved on from that And the idea that that would help with the RAM crisis, like, o' buy buy less RAM now and then add more later guess so, but like By the time RAM prices go down to the point where you wouldd actually save money or you know, it's like an installment plan. like you can just buy your thing on one of those buy now pay later or like take out a loan or something and have all your RAM from day one versus paying for half the RM and then a year later paying for more. Now I'm not against expandal memory. I think it's great, but I think Apple has shown that they are not willing to do that. And I don't think they would say, well, this would really help our customers because then they could buy cheaper computers from us and then expand them with possibly third party RAM later. Like as you're saying that sentence, you think, is this a thing that seems attractive to Apple? I don't think it does seem attractive for them. I agree that it is attractive to tech nerds and the general public, But so long ago now, I can barely remember when we all used to recommend buying Macs with the minimum memory and then expanding them. Those were the days. Well and even even then, like A lot of the appeal of socketed RAM,, modular hard drives and a lot of the appeal for Apple's Max supporting those was not necessarily about, well, I want to extend the life of this down the road. It was I don't want to pay Apple's prices upfront. I want to immediately go get like, you know, crucial RAM or you know some third party SSD or hard drive and pop it in like on day one. You know, I tried that once. Yeah. had that go for it. I mean, all my old Macs, before they really locked it down, pretty much all my old Macs had third party RAM in it and it was fine for the reason Marco said because Apple will always charge insane prices for RAM and so would just get third party RAM I like my first couple Apple laptops, I had my own hard drives in them too because they were it was cheaper to get, you know your own little you know two point five inch hard drive and put it in there than it was toay Apples's prices for that too. But So that's Apple's never going to care that much about that market. And to be clear, I do think it's a shame that you can't upgrade things down the road. Like that does hurt customers in a bunch of ways. But it hurts customers in ways that As Jony just saying, like, it doesn't really hurt Apple. So they're not going to care. But also just kind of broadly, Apple is a very patient company They're not going to change their plans based on what they perceive as short term pain you know, we don't really know yet. It's too early to say How long is this, you know skyrocketing cost of memory and storage? How long is this going to last? Is it going to be one year? Is it going to be three years? Is it going to be ten years? We don't really know App probably has better insight into it than we do because they're con to the supply chain a lot a lot more. But if it's only going to be like a few years where this is going to be really skyrocketing and then supply will catch up to demand Apple is going to be patient enough to wait that out. They're not going to change their entire architecture plans based on pain for a few years. They take a longer time horizon than them J. Peters at the Vverge writes In an interview with YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in twenty twenty six. We'll put a link to the video in this article in the show notes Gamers Nexus asks, wereere you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops Valves Pierre Lu Grfis responded, Look, there's no contracts. There's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every month or something and they say, you can't buy that many. And it's yes or no or excuse me, you can buy that many, and it's yes or no. And if we say no, they never talk to us again. because they have all the power. L right now, if you are the manufacturer of a resource that is scarce everywhere in very high demand and it's very difficult to, you know, for new competitors to come online, You can dictate terms. This is, again, like we were talking last episode. how Apple used to be able to dictate terms to suppliers because they were like such a powerful buyer with so much volume and they could basically do they could get the suppliers to do whatever they wanted. Now it's a reverse situation. Now the suppliers are know what's in short supply, they have all the power and they can dictate whatever they want to their customers and their customers have to either accept their terms or not have memory It's really not it's not great, Bob All right, and then with regard to the three big companies that make RAM, Luke James at Tom's Hardware writes, Samsung, SK Heinx and Micron were sued on june twenty fifth in the US district courourt for the Northern District of California, where seventeen plaintiffs accuse the three memory makers of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly seven hundred percent over four years The complaint argues that the three companies used a coordinated shift toward high bandwidth memory, or HBM, the stacked D RAM that feeds AI accelerators, as a cover to curtail production of older DDR three and DDR four modules That contraction in commodity DRAM, the plaintiffs argue, pushed prices to record highs while no rival could step in. Building a new DRAM fab costs tens of billions and takes years, leaving the incumbents free to cut output without fear of being undercut Samsung and SK Heinex have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing months before, with the latter paying one hundred eighty five doll million dollars fine in April of two thousand five. So twenty one years ago now. Crime pays because I can imagine paying that one hundred eighty five million dollars fine was dwarfed by the profits they reaped from this. So I don't know the merits of this case. Obviously, we do know that There is a non nefarious explanation. if there's a suddenly a new custer with like essentially unlimited money buying a ballt of supply, that of course would cause prices to go up. But the fact that two of these companies have pled guilty to price fixing before makes you think Maybe not entirely without merit. So we'll see how this case goes Either way, I don't feel like the case will make RAM prices go down and even if they lose, apparently they'll pay a fine that is just, you know a piddling fee compared to the profits they reap, but it's worth keeping an eye on this Yeah, I mean, the reality is like, what has probably happened here probablyrobably not like people getting together in a smoke filled room and saying, let's cut everything. It's probably not that. It's probably You have a very small number of companies that all were faced with exactly the same incentive. Which is, hey, all this HBM that is being demanded by like the AI players that like this is we can make a bunch of money on HBM. So let's make as much of that as we can to sell these people. And oh, those old fabs over there doing the, you, the cheap commodity RAM, maybe we can decommission those so that way we can have more resources towards HBM. Like that's probably what happened here. It probably was not collusion to, you know to do this ridiculous, nefarious. They like No, they were just moving their capacity to what was making them the most money. Of course they were. anybody would That's why theyll argue in court, I'm sure. But the fact that they pleed guilty before means probably someone had a recording of the Smokefield room where they said let's fall fix prices together because you don't like you settle maybe or you plead out or something like pleading guilty is like You got aead to write. so we'll see how this goes. Hopefully they didn't record the meeting stringer Bell style where they colluded. Yeah Also that was twenty two years ago. You know, there's probably how many of the people who were in that smoke filled room back then are even still in their positions or even still alive? You don't even know, you know It's probably a different group of leaders right now John, can you set the context for this next line item, please This is Marco musing last episode. We were talking about hey the feedback that someone sent us, Hey, you can get a Mac minini with eight terabytes of SSD. And I was thinking about a Mac minini It's like, can I get some kind of like cheap, small Mac to tide me over until I can buy the Mac that I really want I was like, well I can't do because I need a terabbte acidD and the MMinoney doesn't come with them but apparently it does. So so I priced it and it was like five thousand four hundred bucks. And Marco was musing like If they made the entire Mac mini out of gold, would it be the same price? Yeah, I say like would the stock like you know two hundred fifty six, sixteen gigmile be cheaper with a gold case Ch with an ARBed SS. Yeah. So AWAax wrote in to say with an open bottom and an estimated thickness of one and a half millimeters, a solid gold case for the Mac Mi Mac Mini would be one point one seven kilograms. That's one full kilogram more than the aluminum case, which would be only one hundred sixty four grams. Yep, Gold is heavy. this would cost one hundred fifteen thousand dollars at current market prices and raw material alone. Also, gold is less rigid than aluminum, so this would be a rather bendy case. Yeah, I's say there are multiple reasons why you don't tend to make gold cased electronics. Yeah. one. Ecept that one time. Right. Yeah, isn' it G is quite heavy and yes, it is not a structurally strong material either. But yes, the cost of one hundred fifteen. ye Yeah, gold is a little expensive right now. I don't know if if you've been following you know that market since the current president's term U But yeah, is gold is always expensive and it's even more expensive now. So maybe a couple of years ago that would have been merely fifty thousand dollars. bananas, but still a little more money than the eight terabyte SSD We are sponsored this episode by Zockdoc Have you ever put off making a doctor's appointment because it's just kind of a pain to do it. You either got to go through their big phone system and all the menus and everything, talk to somebody and read your name over the phone and everything, or you can go fill in their new web portal thing that they have just converted to again and figure out your login again. It's such a pain. ZockDoc is here to fix that ZoDoc lets you search and compare local in network doctors and book them quickly and easily at your convenience. They have more than one hundred fifty thousand providers within over two hundred specialties across all fifty US states. You can go on ZockDooc's website to see tons of reviews from real patients and detailed doctor profiles to help you choose the right doctor for you. You can see their actual appointment openings and click to instantly book a visit. This is usually available very quickly, usually within twenty four to seventy two hours. Sometimes even you can score same day appointments if you want And ZockDooc is free to use. So you can go through and figure out exactly what doctors are right for you and book them right on ZockDoc way faster and easier than pretty much all the alternatives out there Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zoockdoc. Head to zZockdoc dot com slash ATp to get started and check that appointment off your to do list. That's Zoc dc dot com slash ap Zockdoc dot com slash ATp Thank you so much to Zkdoc for sponsoring our show John your long national nightmare is over. Fable is back, baby. Haydenfield of the Verge writes after weeks of negotiating with the Trump administration, Anthropic is finally going to be able to bring Claude Fable five back online. And this was future tense when it was written. It is now a thing Ananthropic wrote We have received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls in Claudd Fable five and Mythos five will be restoring access on july one, which as we record, this was yesterday. Anthropic also said it would re enable access on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry soon but with no set timeline Ashley Bellinger at RS Technical writes, after weeks of testing, Fable five is no longer vulnerable to a bypassing method discovered by Amazon researchers that identified several software vulnerabilities and triggered the export curbs. That bypass method is currently blocked in over ninety nine percent of the cases, Anthropics said, However, tightening safeguards came with a trade off that may cause some benign prompts to be blocked, quote, during routine coding and debugging tasks, quote, the company acknowledged. The company also said, working closely with the government, we trained an improved safety classifier that targets and blocks the behavior described in the report. Users will be notified if a request to Fable five is blocked and the request will instead be sent to Opus four point eight. Yeah, this highlights something that someone sent us feedback when I was saying, you know, the guard rails is, you know, essentially writing senten to an LMM asking you not to do stuff. And they're saying, no, they use they use whole separate models. Like this classifier model that's trying to determine like the other some other model will look at the input or output and determine if it's dangerous or whatever. But of course, those other separate models are also by feeding them words and So it's all it's, you know, it's turtles all the way down. Um, Yeah, that's a change they made Fabable. used to just like silently fall back to be to using a weaker model, but now it will tell you, hey, the thing you sent me looks like it might be bad. so we're using our weaker model opope is four point eight instead. And so at least you'll know when that's happening to you. but U yeah, whatever whatever happened behind the scenes allowed this to go forward. Although I will say like I got an email about this too and like that what they're doing with Fable, if you have like a monthly subscription to anthropic or whatever, again, current and former sponsor of the show U The seell fables included in your subscription. until july seventh And then after that, I guess it's like pay per token for Fable. like it's not part of your subscription. So I don't know what they'll do with this model after the july seventh thing When I was using it it was like, because you have the twenty dollars a month plan, you get to use Fable. and you know, it burns through your tokens real fast, but at least you have access to it. So I wonder if after july seventh, I just won't even have access to it at all I don't have anything to do with Fable, but I'm glad that it's back. Oh and I cut out all the parts of the story where Athrop is like, you know, while we were banned, the other models could do all the same things that had all the same problems. But whatever, we're not complaining. we're back now Yeah, I think know first of all, on the plans and pricing exxpect this to change every two weeks. Like's that's what's going to happen it's not faster. I mean, I was saying, I believe two episodes ago, I said like, oh, don't worry. I'm sure Fabe will be back within the next three months. It took a week Like whatever it was, it took almost no time. know this stuff is going to be changing and shifting constantly as with all frontier AI development. So Yeah, maybe maybe by july seventh, which as we record is five days away. you know, maybe they'll they'll bring it behind you know a higher paywall or you know, make it pay per token only or whatever But then literally five days later might be different. they might change the plan again, certainly in the long run This will be one of the models in the picker for you for the next couple years. and you know, I'm sure in the long run, every plan will have access to it. They just need more capacity or whatever or more guardrails. And on the guardrail front, I do think it's kind of kindind of a farce that like, okay, well This model This is too good at doing dangerous things. So if you ask to do something dangerous We're going to direct you to a dumber model. So it's like, Imagine like, you know, you you go to like, you know, some expert like an expert bomb maker and it's like, helpelp me make a bomb They got to list I can't help you make a bomb. I am too good at making bombs Go to Bob down the hall, he kind of sucks at it. You have him do it for you. L it's a ridiculous concept that this is What kind of safety are we are we giving here and how How safe is that really It's not I think they are they are doing what the government asked them to do because that was the only way to get this back, not because it is the right solution to this problem. I mean, they already had these guardrails in it. It's just that the bypass was like, oh, we found a way around your guardrails so make your guardrails better. Likecause the whole point of fable it is the guardrailed version of Mythos. So they were already doing this. And like I said, they were doing it silently. They would just drop you down silently, but at least they'll tell you now Obviously the main problem with these coding agents and these quote unquote dangerous things is It's a very symmetrical double edged sort because If you're writing a program, you want these things to find security problems in your own program so you can fix them And that is indistinguishable from find a security problem in this program that I didn't write so I can break into it. It It's literally the same exact thing. And so it's like, look, do you want us to make our software better or would you want like us to be ignorant of the flaws? Like theseese models won't find an exploit in someone else's system, but they also won't find the flaws in your own code. We just try mightily to maintain the status quo, which is just never going to work. So this is all very silly and we'll see how it develops. Like I understand why people are trying to do it. I'm not advocating for like, let's do a free for all and allow the, you know, people script kitties to find flaws in anything by typing a two sentence prompt. Like I understand the potential danger, but like 's I don't see how this is tndable long term. L we want to use these things to find security problems in our own programs. That's the only way they're ever going to fix Well, and also like this is such a short term you know, delay here, because suppose Anthropic had really great model research and training to develop this one really special, I guess maybe these two really special models that are really good at finding software vulnerabilities. And suppose that no one else in frontier Air development was doing this at all or as well as they were. Those are pretty big assumptions. But suppose that is the case. That is maybe some of their narrative O they have developed this amazing technology that gets really good at finding security vulnerabilities.'s another their narrative. they constly keep saying that GPT five point five and five point six can do exactly the same thing and it's not for. They're banned the one isn't. Right exactly. But Obviously the reality is other models either already are this good or are about to be this good. And some of those models are going to be run by say, Elon Musk or China, And they're not going to give a crap about what the government export regulations or whatever are, and they're not going to put any guardrails on it So The idea that we are somehow avoiding this like security apocalypse of bugs being found and exploited you know en masse by controlling this one or maybe these two models, it's a fantasy in a very short time Everyone who wants this kind of power is going to have it if they don't already. So in a very short amount of time, all of the fears of all the bugs being exploited en masse That's going to happen whether this one particular dust up settles one way or the other. We're all going to have to face this probably this year or next year at the latest we are going to see a wave of exploits and we are going to have to be very aggressive at patching them and updating things. This is what I was saying a few months back of like This is a really bad time to be holding ono an old OS. you know, if if you if you're like, you know, if you have like an old device that you are, you know, trying to extend the life of that can't get the newest OSs or if you are like, you know, you never wanted to use Tahoe so you're sticking with the old, you know, like This is a very bad time generally for security to be refusing to run software updates Basically as quickly as they come out And that's going to just be the case for a few years And no amount of guardrails and no amount of government intervention is going to prevent that because the reality is the government and the guardrails don't control every company, they don't control every model and they don't control every user And just to be clear, like the whole point of the Mythos thing is that they want to give that access to Mythos to, you know, designated security people so that they can fix like the flaws and the important things. So like here's the unconstrained one for the people we trust. Please use our unconstrained model to fix all the bugs before we released the constrained one to the world. Like that was the strategy, but as Marco points out, like that's that makes some kind of sense as a way to move forward. Like we don't want to stop the good guys from fixing the problems, but we don't want the bad guys to have the tools But like it's a fantasy world that they're the only player that does this. So you know they're doing what they can. likeike I give them some credit for trying, but the system around this is like chaotic and haphazard and very silly. Proably not motivated by anything except for just power and bribery and personal grudges All right, moving on, let's talk Siri AI, where Marcus Mendees at ninety five Mac writes a change in IOS twenty seven beta two makes it more clear how Siri AI should handle requests involving accessing content behind a URL A new section in Siri AIs system prompt now says, quote, you cannot access let this let me back up a half step. So what this means is there's this big long prompt that you don't get to see and you don't get to modify that the system provides to the AI thing model. there's what I was looking for to kind of give it the lay of the land what it's supposed to do, right? And this I've seen this and it's like probablyroably five or ten pages of typewritten text long, if you will. Well anyways, this is a new clause in that instruction that you don't get to modify as a user. So it says You cannot access content behind URL. When a user provides a URL and asks you to summarize read or extract information from it, inform them you cannot access web pages. Do not offer follow up suggestions or workarounds. This feels like it's the Dan Morin clause. Remember he was looking for like a Wikipedia page with himself on it and I found a page and says there's no Wikipedia page for you. He said The totally is it this URL? And seriously I was like I can't access that URL. Can you read it to me? Tell me what it says. And so now this is like, do not offer follow up suggestions. or do not ask you know, you can say, I guess it can say like hey, I'm not allowed to access URLs, but you can't say, why don't you read it to me? because that is bad. But I mean, this really shows what Apple is trying to do with Siri AI an LLM that can't access URL's is significantly constrained in both good and bad ways. presumably this prevents all sorts of exploits and attacks or whatever, but also makes it vastly less powerful than the other normal, unconstrained LLMs that will gladly fetch the contents of a URL. I get most of my in my coding things all the time, I'm telling it, here's the documentation on the web, look at this documentation, don't trust your guesses about what things do, so on and so forth. And CREI is like I won't even look at the URL. I have my world knowledge thing, which hopefully is somewhat up to date. and I've got all my other stuff, but I will not go to an arbitrary URL, read it and do anything with it. So Now that's rough Then additionally, the workaround that people were using to get through the Siri AI waitlist, apparently that's not to work anymore, or isn't working anymore. Tim Hardwick and Mac Rumors writes Apple appears to have closed loophole that let Mac users skip the Siri AI waitlist in the latest MacOS twenty seven Golden Gate beta Many users who are running the second developer beta of Macwest twenty seven are finding that the line skipping command does not work for them. Users who enabled Siri AI this way in the original beta are also reporting that they've been kicked back to the waitlist after updating MooC. Some users are suggesting alternative methods involving submitting Apple intntelligence feedback to accelerate approval, but the claims remain anecdotal. For what it's worth, I signed up on my iPad and it only took, I don't know like two or three days get through the waitlist likeike this wasn't particularly egregious. And I don't think that's, you know, because anyone at Apple's paying attention to who I am or what I'm doing or anything like that. Like I think I'm just another number in the bucket to them. and it only took me like forty eighty to seventy two hours or something like that. So it's not that bad. Yeah, I also got in within, I think about five or six days of joining the wait list It it wasn't that bad Finally, Gee Rambo fr of the show writes John was wondering if there is any way to tell which model Siri was using for each answer that he was asking to determine why one answer was less accurate or detailed than another. I'm pretty sure that if you export the Apple intntelligence report that's available in system settings, it will include the model that served each request as part of the metadata I didn't know that. by the way, I had my first Hey Siri is good now a moment The other day, I was I was like, you know in the midle hold on, Sir, just woke up my phone. Wow, good time should notched out those frequencies in your voice. Yeah, right. I was looking for information in an email that I you know, I didn't know what the heck it was. And I forget the exact prompt I used, but it was something like, hey, what was that, you know, what was the thing I was looking for? And you know, one of those forms And it, you know took about four or five seconds and then found it Okay, great That's awesome. Okay, maybe Maybe we're on the right track now. So it's promising I actually had a similar experience Friend of the show, Lex Friedman has turned himself, I think at one point in his life, he was a software developer and then didn wasn't and now is becoming a software developer again. And he's made an app called Gnome, which I enjoy, which is very similar to Friend of the Sh Jelly's Gift wrapped app It lets you, you curate a list of gifts and know copy and paste them in places very easily. Lex was kind enough to send me a code for it. so I didn't have to pay him the five or eight bucks, whatever it was, which is not egreious by any means, but he was nice enough to offer before I even asked. and so I took him up on it. Well anyways, this happened, I don't know a while ago that he had sent this code and I was trying to look for it. and I thought, o wait a second I wonder if I could ask Siri. And sure enough I said, you know, Lex Friedman with kn gave me a code for an app, you know, a month or two back. Can you find that code? I'll be darned, but it came up with exactly the message I was looking for. And I was doing this in like the you know clicky clacky typey interface to Siri. and it had a little link I could click to go in messages to that message, which not only did that work, but it worked quickly because I know going back in time and messages is often fraught with peril, but it actually worked Lickety split. and I was very, very impressed. So I had a very similar moment. That's awesome I was really into it All right,, we're going do something a little different today. We were offered by our friends at Parakeet, and we'll talk about who they are in just a moment. We were offered to do a little trade sort of scenario where our friends at Parakeet would make some app icons for us in trade for talking about and critiquing those icons on the show. And so let me tell you about Parakeet And then we're going to go through each of the three of us have had one or more icons rejiggered, reimagined, redone by Parakeet. And we're going to discuss them. So let me tell you the stuff that I really need to tell you up front First of all, if you are interested in doing icons or that sort of thing, you should absolutely check out our friends at Parakeet. The reason we took this as a kind of spwn con sort of thing is because they are friends of ours and we know these folks. Like Marco, you have had them do icons for you in the past, right? Yeah, in fact, Parakeet is a partnership between Louis Mantea and Luca Grafera And Louis Mantia was actually one of the original duo who made the original oververcast icons And I've worked with Louis before through all of that. and And in fact, the other part of the duo was Brad Ellis, who I believe, made the Switchclass icon right Jon? That's true. Yeah. so this is you, old friends here. And so I've worked with Louis a lot over the years He's he's just a pro. And what I especially love is that Louis is opinionated So when you go to Louis with an app icon idea, like You know, I don't usually have like the most complete ideas. I'm always like, well, maybe it involved some of this and maybe I was thinking a little bit of that. And you know, here's kind of what the app is. And you know, I go to Louis with a cloudy mess of vague directions And he comes back with, okay, You should pick one of these things. Let's focus on this part of this and this is the right color for this. Like and he and he's right Like every whenever he, you know, gives those kind of opinions and directions, like he's right. And it makes the product better, it makes the artwork better, it makes the icon, the logo, the focus, it makes it all better And it can go beyond the icon. Like obviously, you know, these are just designers. They're really good at lots of part of software design Not only do you get an icon but you get direction that you can use throughout the app. So if you need to help with like, he, you know what kind of color scheme should I be using throughout the app? or maybe what kind of themes like That's all part of their skill setet I like working with them for lots of reasons It isn't just draw me a pretty icon But that being said, their icons are very pretty and they're really good at drawing you a pretty icon. They are. So I can strongly recommend working with them. is This is a sponsorship in the sense that, you know, they have traded work for this read. you know, there's no money going back and forth. pay us and icons Yeah There's a for of payment we don't normally take. and like emphasize like this is not a thing that we do often, but it's specifically because it is these specific people in this specific company why we took this deal and because we think it'll be fun to actually because and because we also haven't shown each other the icons yet that they made. So we figured it would be fun fun for the show to reveal our icons to each other and comment on them live. And as part of the read, We can actually critique them. like we're not you know we didn't promise to only be positive about them. Now it just so happens I'm pretty positive about mine to be honest, But you know, we' we didn't promise that we would only say good things. So that part of the show is just going to be like actual show content about these icons. But this part is, yeah, we like parakeed a lot and we think you should go visit them to get your icons done because you This summer, everyone's doing new icons for their apps for the new OSs because you kind of have to. and they are incredibly talented at notot only any, you know, whatever the that icon design is of the time, they're very good at it. Like they adapt they adapt their skills over time, they're very good at it. But I can say they are really exceptional at handling liquid glass icons, especially with the new twenty seven capabilities, but they help you also backport to the twenty six capabilities. So they cover all those bases from the technical side. They give you the icon composer file and everything. like it's all native stuff like that And and they're really good for this moment in developers' lives where We just need to keep adding new icons to our apps because Apple keeps changing what it means to be an app icon And it's really good to have somebody like parakeet on your side to help you do that and they do a really good job All right, so anyway, if you want to hire parakeute for your app icons and I strongly recommend that you do. They can't pay me to say that in icons or money, but I strongly recommend that you hire them because they are professionals and they're really good at their job and they're better than you think. As evidenced by the fact that you did hire them. Iicon, which you're very happy with before they ever did the sponsorship. Oh, yeah, I mean look look, you know that if I can do something myself, I probably will to a fault I know that I do not make good app icons. You seen you've seen my work when I make app icons myself. It's not good. And you know, I hire very few people to help me with my apps. This is one of them, if not often the only one because they're again, they're really good. and I strongly recommend this. anyway. it's parakeet This is Louis Manta and Luca Garfera. Their website is parakeet. co h So P A R A K E E T d. CO parakeet. co goo there They are very good at what they do We were talking with them about doing this. It wass like, do you want just like a normal Ed read or do you just wanted us to talk about your icons? And they said, Oh, you should just talk about the icons. And like, we're going to critique them, you know. Like we're not like as Markco pointed out, I'm like, arere you sure you want that? like, oh yeah, no, sure, go for it. Like they were very like very open to this. There There was no, you know, they they chose to take this route and so they're going to get what they paid for with icons. they're going to get it all right. All right, so let's talk about our actual icons. and we're doing this, we're trying to like reveal them to each other in real time. so there will be various pauses when we upload our icons to the ATP websitees so we'll have URLs that we can put in the show notes. so you can see them too Oh But I'm going start with some images that I already uploaded becausecause when I I've engaged with other companies to do icons for my apps before And I always try to preface my engagement with these various designers by saying I apologize in advance. what is about to happen? Be Marco was saying like he just has like vague ideas or whatever and it's like, I may have vague ideas, but I have very definite opinions about everything. Surprising no one listening to the show. Yeah. I mean It's just Its like it's, it's the curse It's like my old hypritical blog posts. It's like, I may not be able to do it But I know what's wrong with the thing you did Like I know what I don't like about it, right? And that it's like, well, then what should I do? It's like, I don't know but I know it's not that. And it's terrible. So I started, I wrote a big document for all the icons I was getting proposed. And yes, I got two icons instead of one, C consider it a findinder's fee since I kind of initiated this whole thing U And this is the in the document I put this thing which is this lots of pictures of this on the internet. and signs in windows and images of it or whatever, but And maybe it was a real thing that somebody did, like some design the story behind it or the you know, anecdote is, some design bureau put this in their window as a price list for design services And it said For one hundred dollars, I design everything. I being like the designer for two hundred dollars I design a new watch. For three hundred dollars, I design and you advise. five hundred, I design and you help. eight hundred, you design and I help, thirteen hundred, you design, I advise. twenty one hundred do, you design Watch. and then for three thousand four hundred dollars, you design everything. And the idea here is like, look, you're hiring a designer. But it seems like you just want to do all this yourself. So like, why am I even here? Am I just here to like be your like Photoshop monkey and just whatever you say. And I sent this and I said I'm going to try to avoid this, but be aware, this might be what this feels like Because like every single thing you send I don't have a problem formulating an opinion about very specific aspects of it. and that can be very frustrating. And as I always say, it's like, look U This has to be a, as we would say in the business case a time boxed thing. It's not going to go on forever. We can't like, let's iterate until you're happy with your icon. likeike that's ridiculous. It doesn't make sense. There's a certain reasonable amount of time, whether you're paying in ATP sponsorship slots or you're paying in actual money Uh It's not like this is not a ten year long commitment to make an icon for you, right? So I said, it's perfectly fine if we go through a reasonable amount of time and we end up with an icon that I we don't end up with an icon that I like. That still that is still services rendered And that's how you have to think about design services. Don't think like, well, I pay for this. I should have the icon of my dreams. It's like they're not going to spend a year on your thing. And if you can't find something that you like in a year Uh like, you know, you don't own them forever because you paid for one icon That said they're really good to what they're doing. and I did not have any problem finding icons that I like. But I just wanted to throw that out there. So let's start with Switch Glass. It's my application switcher icon Yeah, here is the old icon that Brad Ellis made for me which I love. I Brad exactly what I wanted and he made he tore the image out of my head and made that. I yes there was an iteration. There was an iteration process going back and forth, you know, many iterations or whatever, but like I'm just so extremely happy with the ion he made. I'm like, this is what I was picturing him So why am I bothering getting a new icon? Well If you look at this icon and you know what happened to Tahoe this icon does not fly in Tahoe. Tahoe requires all icons to fit within a rounded rectangle, rounded edge square that we call a squirl. And if your icon does not conform exactly to that outline Tahoe takes your icon, shrinks it by like seventy percent, and shoves it in the middle of a grrey sorrel. And it looks awful. And you may be thinking, looks like your icon already has a squirrel in it Yeah, but it's not the, you know, the correct squirkel. is is the bounds of it are broken. It's supposed to look like a clear it's on an angle first of all, which the real squirrel isn't And then the bounds of the squirrekler are broken by the various shapes. It basically looks like a How like go I don't know half a centimeter thick piece of lickable glass with a circle diamond and square floating over it, and my idea is the circle diamond and square kind of represent the icons you're switching among. It doesn't really make sense. It's just the icon that I wanted. I got it. I love it. and To comes and says screw your icon. And so as I recently said when I was commenting on Rogamiba's post about squirrel jail, which is the gray the grreay squirrel they stick your icon in and if it breaks the bounds I think this is the worst thing Apple has ever done design wise to developers and definitely the worst thing they have ever done to iccons, forcing icons into this I think if if Apple wants all icons to be in squirrel shape as they tried to promote in Big Sir, MacOS bigig Sir then they should lead by example and people should you know adopt it because they think it's the best thing to do. When they transition from bitmapped icons, like, you know very pixelated style in classic MacOS to more photore realalistic larger icons in MacOS ten They didn't mandate it. They just led by example, and everyone said, yeah, we want to do that because it's awesome and everybody transitioned Everyone didn't transition to squirrelles after Big Sir because some people were like It's fine. and I guess, you know, we'll update if it works with our design. But if it doesn't work for our design, we'll just stick with their old design. Like takeake Rogamea, they had a squirrel, but they had like a microphone over it and the microphone just like poked out of the edge a little bit and that that goes into squirrel jail now a big serve, they just kept their old icon because it still look good. it' still look to fit in anyway I hate this decision that Apple did, but it puts me in a difficult situation, which is First of all, as've discussed in past episodes I wanted Bread Ellis's icon to live as long as possible because I love it And so I found a way painfully to make it so that when my app is on MagOS fifteen and earlier you see Bread Eis's icon. And when it's on MacOS twenty six, I had made my own awful, terrible liquid glass icon that I hate U With the advent of twenty seven and you know fifteen getting farther in the rearview mirror I knew I was going to need new icons because if I'm going to eventually upgr to twenty seven, which in theory will happen if I ever get a new damn Mac I don't want to look at my awful t icon that I made. I want a nice icon Um And so that was the challenge. And it's a difficult challenge for a designer, which is like, I love my current icon. The only reason I'm leaving it is because Apple is forcing me And I hate the new icon style, like I hate Taho icon style. So now go make an icon that I love in a style that I hate while like abandoning an icon that I love behind it. So incredible challenge. And this is what you your hire designer for. because I I honest had to say like my proposal for this was like Love the old icon. Hate Taho I don't know have to demand What do we got? I I I always say just something I'm open to almost any idea. like throw it out there. And what I said most of my design engagements for Icon was like Let's just start with like napping sketches, just like scribbles with a pencil and a napkin because I need to see a thousand of them to know even what direction to go And here's the problem when you work with really talented designers. They' So good. Luc and Louis who both worked on this. they are so good and so fast that their're like throwaway pencil sketch would take me like seven days Yeah And like I'm in an iMessage conversation with them And then I'm like, what about X, Y and Z? And then they reply like two seconds later with the thing I just typed. And then I'm typing my response and I'm like, well, what if you did X Y and Z and while I'm typing that, they have sent another revision of it I don't know I honestly don't know physically speaking what they're doing on their computers to make this happen and know they're not using it out this world hand These are all handmade icons They were so fast. And like high quality very fast work coming out with like iterations. And we went through so many iterations. and I asked them as I always do, like, can I have all the raw materials in the iterations? And they said, yes, as long as I don't like use them or show them to the world. I just love seeing the process. So I didn't know where we were going to go with this If you look at the my icon, my crappy Tahoe version of this was Just make it a white squirrelle and put a circle in a diamond in a square And that's the current Tahoe icon if you have my I have switched class in Tahoe and I hate it and it's ugly And they come up with a bunch of different variations. First of all, they did a head on one. they're like,y dummy, you do a head on one, there's here's how a professional would do it. And it's like, oh that's that's a million times better. They're like And that was within the first five minutes like, okay, we're going to start on your icon. What do you think of this? And I was like You just like Great S just spend like because I spent way longer doing my terrible icon than they did making Like here's how you would have done this if you had any clue what you're doing. But I was like, but is that the best thing? I was like, right away, I'm like, Oh, thank God, because like No matter how the rest of this goes, at the very least, that icon is already better than my existing icon and good enough for me to use And then of course I had them tweak that a thousand wayses to Sunday to try different variations. Most of my ideas were bad as usual, but like they're so fast U And we're like what else can we do? like come up with anything. They came up with all sorts of wild ideas. I drew the menu bar icon for my app because my app doesn't even show in the dock by default. So you only see the menu baricon and the menu bar icon is a squirrel. with the diamond from the middle of the app icon. in there alternate menu bar icons as well. most people just use the default. I'm like, maybe we could just concentrate on the diamonds so we could just do a diamond in a squirrel because the diamond doesn't break the bounds and we did a bunch of experiments with that And eventually, Louis came up with the winner O maybe it was look, I don't know who did it again, there's a collaboration. they're both doing this, but in the messages thread I was mostly talking with Louis U And the innovation here was Can we get the whole like a diamond in a squirrel? thing, which again, is the menu bar icon while also getting the old icon. So now I have to upload something and mark a light to this app. here is after many, many, many, many revisions and iterations, here is the icon that I'm using. Now, you might look at this and say It's one of the things like, oh, that's not such a great idea. That's obvious. I could have thought of that. But hey, you didn't and neither did I B, it is brilliant in ways that are not entirely obvious. Now, first of all It's a beautifulyrated icon. just looks really good. I could never have made this in a million years, right Um What it is is it looks like you took my old icon Rotated it so it's a diamond and put it on a squirrel background. It's like, haven't you just put yourself into squirrel J? I was like, no, this is essentially my diamond icon ' we had lots of icons that just had diond in the middle, but now the squirrel is the diamond. 'causeuse if you take the squirrel and you rotate it forty five degrees, it's like a diamond shape, But it also has the floaty things on it, breaking the bounds of the thing suchuch a good idea, such like an amazing like You know, cut the Gordy and not like, oh, so you want a diamond, but you also want your old icon?. How about your old icon is a diamond And it's not metal anymore. They're translucent. And so there were some constraints I put on my design, which was, and I think this one helped and maybe my users will not appreciate this, but I was pretty adamant about this I do not care. How my icon looks on top Tahao is dead to me. I I don't care how it looks on Taho. And the reason this is relevant is because as we've saidated before, these d. icon files, this format that Apple came up with It's a bunch of resources and a recipe. So it's like Bitmaps, vector images, layers and recipes and effects. That's what it is. And these icons are assembled on the fly by the operating system. It doesn't burn out bitmaps of them. It's like, I take your ingredients. I assemble them, I composite them, I apply your layer effects And then I you know eventually rendnderers a bitmap that keeps a memory somewhere or whatever, right The twenty six Taho's effects are different than twenty seven's effects they'res just different, even for the same things. And also twenty seven has effects that twenty six doesnz't support. And twenty six won't even read the d. icon files from twenty seven, which makes everything complicated. So I said I don't care how it looks in twenty six. Don't worry about making an icon that looks okay in twenty six and looks okay in twenty seven. Just concentrate on making one that looks really good in twenty seven because I'm hoping, I maybe I'm wrong with this but I'm hoping. They're not going to change the rendering of these icons every single year. It's just a Tahoe was a terrible mistake and they're fixing it. And the twenty seven rendering will stay and maybe they'll only add to it But they changed how these things render. So the icon you're seeing, this is a bitmap made with the twenty seven rendering system And it doesn't look as good in twenty six, but I don't care. That was hopefully that freed them up And of course, we made a million variants of this, and by the way, one of the reasons they use these recipes for them is so they can have the different icon themes, which is separate from the system theme. Y system theme is lighter or dark on macquest and other operating systems. But there's a separate on MacOS icon theme and on IiOS and everything as well And the icon theme can be default, which is what you're looking at here And there's dark, which is a dark icon theme, which you can have regardless of what the system theme is. And then there's clear sucks all the color and life out of your icon and makes it clear. And then there's clear tinted, which is like clear but with a color tint to it And the reason I can do that is because it just takes the ingredients, the layers and the effects. and then it composites them and then you know, for clear, it sucks all the color out of it and for dark, it makes them darker and stuff. And you can tweak the. on of file lets you tweak, oh, this change. in dark mode, use this specular value, but in default mode, use this. like you can change it like that. But I'm pretty sure you can't have totally different icons in dark and light. Maybe there's a hack to do that with like visibility or something, but Either way That's icon themes We had made so many variations of this that I wanted to also have I didn't want to also have, but like by the time we were done, I'm like, you know We spent all that time figuring out how to do this icon And I think you ended up making a really good dark version of it Did I just upload the same one again twice? notot there is. Okay. U And so there was lurking in the various iterations This icon which is basically the same as that icon but with a dark background. and I thought it was a little bit too dark for the default mode And you can't have two entirely separate icons, I think, for light and dark mode. No you can Can you? Yeah, you can make the entire like groups like in icon compomposer. You can have an entire group toggle on or off. you know you can have totally separate layers and assets for different color ges. Anyway, the dark mode that Parakekey did actually looks fits in better with Dark mode because they did like an inverted thing where like the shapes are light and the thing is dark or whatever. So I do like their dark icon theme mode But I also like this icon. so what I'd end up doing was in the about box for swwitch Glass. If you're in dark mode, you see this icon. Oh nice. but you see the other icon in light mode. And I think I also made it I don't think I finished the up but I'll probably also make it so that if you click the icon, it will switch to the old Brad Ellis one as well because I just still just love that icon So anyway, that' switch gl solved an incredibly difficult problem in an icon that just looks amazing and I'm very happy with And you're be glad you don't get to see the, you know ten or twenty versions of the same icon that we went through before we arrived at this, but So I just say I am very picky and they were very nice to work with. and they solve they solve this design problem very neatly. The next st app, which hopefully this won't as long, sorry'm going on about this Next one is front and center. Front center, I made the icon for because it did not require me to actually draw anything My idea for the front center icon by the you, to remind everyone front center is the app that I have that restores the window layering behavior from Classic MacOS where when you click on a window that belongs to a different app It will not just bring that window to the front. It will bring all the windows that belong to the app to the front. That's how classic MacOS worked. I'm very used to it. I wanted Mac OS ten to work like that. And for years I ran Drag Thing, which did that for me. There were other Mac utilities that did that, but Drag thinging got discontinued. And I said, you know, this is my very first Mac app soe trivial. Once a friend showed me how to do it and worked together to make this map. Anyway, that's all Font Center does. It makes it so that when you click a window in another app, all the windows will come to the front. And you can toggle the modes. you go back to what I call the modern mode, which is the default mode for MacOS But I keep it in classic mode most of the time. And so the icon for front and center I decided it was going to be Three square platinum windows, like classic MacaS style, MacOS eight style Copeland style, if you will, windows That say front and center. The back window says front, the middle window says, and in the title bar, and the front window says center in the title bar. And these are pixel for pixel exact incarnations taken from screenshots from Mac emulators. so I didn't have to draw any of this. This is what Mac OSA windows look like. I'm kind of surprised Apple let me have this icon because technically every pixel this was drawn by Apple Not me. didn dont care. It was too long ago, it's in the past And having a pixel exact icon And Magawest ten doesn't really fit because it scales and everything gets blurry. So I made basically like all the different sizes of this icon So that all the edges are sharp square pixels, like none of them are scaled in the pre Taho days in the days before the. icon format, you had like. ICNS resources which said, give me your sixteen byx sixteen, You' thirty two byx thirty two, byx sixty four by sixty four. It was a bunch ofpar sizes and you would put separate bitmaps for all of them And as someone was pointing out on Macedon recently I actually have custom versions for sixteen byx sixteen and thirty two by thirty two that don't look like the big icon because that was the idea with icons was like, If your're icon They used to be thirty two by thirty two max, but like If you your icon at's sixteen by sixteen or eight by eight is unreadable when you try to scale it, draw a different icon at that size. And so my My tiny icon just has one window and my really tiny icon just has like the title bar stripes. All that dies with d. icon because that. icon does not let you do that. You can't have separate totally different icons for different sizes. It's like ingredients and a recipe, and that's it Uh And so I'm sad that that's dying with front and center. I desperately need a new icon because these cascaded overlapping windows do not fit in a squirkele. And if you just stick them in the squirkle, they look blurry and awful. And once again, I made my own Tahoe icon, which was three overlapping windows and it looked terrible And so I threw up my hands and said, Save me Parakekey, do something here And my guidance on this was less exacting than Switch glass. I was like, I don't know, layered it'say about layering windows. Like the themes here is like classic MacOS. I wanted to invoke classic MacOS in some way and I want to invoke Window layering in some way because that's what the app does go with that And so again within thirty seconds was like, here's your app icon, but done by professionals. Like yeep, that's already better. three layered windows And we went back and forth on this for a while U I don't know if we tried we tri maybe thought of a couple of other things but didn't really implement them Yeah it was so clear that layered Windows was the right approach And how many iterations are there on layered windows? and yeah there's a surpring amount. And we ended up coming up with this icon, which I'll paste in a second Uh yeah, layered windows This icon is an interesting case study because well the other thing that I threw in here is like, you know In Cassic MacOS, my favorite desktop picture Thatop background wallpaper, as I say, and current problems because Windows won that war Um was a particular shade of like purplish blue Just a solid color. It was one of the default choices in various versions of MacOS. and I and also like In classic MacOS, the progress bars were this color and the folders were not exactly this color, but the progress bars and the folders are also kind of like a bluish purplish type of thing. And so that always reminds me of Classic MacOS. And so The idea was Let's do like a liquid glass style classic MacOS window. So the frontmost window has the clothes box and the Zoom box and the window shade box. Oh, this is so good. And the stripes from a liquid glass window from a classic MacOS window, but it's rendered in liquid glass. Now here's the thing about this icon Unlike the switch cllass icon You can make that switch glass icon the size of a billboard and just looks gorgeous and you want to lick it This one, as you make it bigger and bigger, you say, Those window controls are pretty rudimentary, like not particularly detailed. And believe me, at various points I said, can we make those window controls more detailed and more like they look like in classic MacOS. And we went through several iterations of that and it was all a bad idea because The thing about icons is you're not looking at them at ten twenty four by ten twenty four. You're always looking at them in icon sizes. And this is true of the Switch Glass icon too, E though it looks gorgeous at big sizes, much of the design of the Switch Glass icon was because I would scale it down to like thirty two by thirty two and say can I can't see it. It doesn't read right. likeike I don't see the shapes, it's not working, blah blah, blah You have to look at icons at normal icon sizes. How is it going to look in an actual finder window? How is it going to look in list re view? How's it look on a dock with the samee dock size? No one wants to look at your gorgeous icon. They're not going to make it huge. So Their first instinct was correct, which is we really have to simplify these window controls because it'll be hard to even see them at all. So they need to be like the stage makeup version of window controls. Like it needs to be kind of like cartoonish and simplified and fisher pric. And even though it doesn't look amazing when it's ten twenty four by ten twenty four You have to do that. other way it it looks like a muddy mess when it gets at icon sizes And so I'm really happy with this icon because like the other one, this went through so many iterations of me shrinking it down and shrinking it down and like At various points, I had findinder windows open with ten app icons, just ten apps all. I would just build them all in Ecode. ten apps all lined up and I'd just be scaling them and the icon view a slider and thing. and then had them I had them all on the dock. And I would scale the dock and I would look at them and it was like, It was like the thirty one shades of bllue thing from Google only human powered and not metrics driven. It's just me staring at them with like, which of these ten versions that look exactly the same to the casual observer is the best one? U And yes, that was probably tedious for them, but and it was difficult for me too, but like eventually I circled on this one. So Now I have icons and the same deal. I don't care how it looks in Taho, its bad in Tau. I don't how it looks in Tahoe. I told them that. donon't blame them because my icons look weird and tao. That's on me. I said I do not care how it looks in Tahoe. It looks fine at Tahu. It looks like an icon. But like As you can make bigger and t some of the effects aren't quite as good So the final thing I'll say about this is I I'm not going to use these icons until I can build with ExO twenty seven. I could in theory build Exo twenty six, like Parakeet gave me twenty six version of these icons because again the EcO twenty six refuses to read. icon files from twenty seven if they use any of the new features So I can't ship these exact ones in twenty six. Uh And I could just, you know, again, they gave me ones that work in twenty six by removing the twenty seven only features and stuff But I don't want to do So I'm not actually going to deploy these icons until I can do my first build with Exo twenty seven, which usually happens like The week they go GM or whatever. So my apps will continue to have hideous icons in twenty six because they're my own drone ones. And I will also get the maximum amount of time where the people on MacOS fifteen earlier see the old icons that I liked Be I did like, you know, even though I didn't really draw my icon with the layered windows, I did like it. So I'm maximizing that time. So even though I love these icons They will not be on my apps until I can build with Excode twenty seven. But when that does happen, I'll be very happy. I will update My website, and like I said, I will probably add Easter eggs so that you can like click on the icons in the app somewhere to see my old versions because I really do love my old versions. It's not Parakeet' fault that I love my old versions I got taken away. It's Apple's fault and I'm mad at Apple for doing this to me, but I am glad to have Beautiful icons made by professional designers that I am really happy Yeah, these are really good It's very' doing what they're good at. It turns out it works well All right, so for me, obviously I had asked them to look at call sheet. And if you recall, the original call sheet icon is what I asked them to take a look at. And basically what that was was a clapper board like you would see at a film set with a magnifying glass over it. And I willll put a link in the show notes to Jelly's write up that he did a couple of years ago now about the the evolution of the icon and you can see the truly piss poor version that I was using that I had drawn. Oh my God, that it's drawing. that I had drawn as like my first internal cut at it, and then Jelly took it and made it look tremendous. This is a special skill, Kasey. being this bad at it. You mentioned like the things that A I couldn't make with whatever French band that I can't pronounce Because it's so weird. Yeah. I don't think N AI could have come up with something that this bad. It was trulyerrible. I don't don't I don't know how you did it. How did you come up with the red? The color Yeah, the color selection why I don't know. I don't And red on and blue. It's like, you know, when you first on' like the three D effect, like it makes your eyes really. I think my favorite thing about this is that the magnifying glass circle is not centered on the icon. L no,. Why would it be? But it's that it's not it doesn't look intentionally off centered. No, it's just far enough off to annoy you. It's far enough off to look like a mistake, not a choice. He tried to get as many tangents as he could into one icon. exs got the little corners of a touch like that It's. This is unfair critique C case's on. No no, but it gets worse. It gets better wor. This shows how important an icon designer is. Yes. So if you zoom in by whatever means you choose on the icon on Jelly's right. Oh my God, there's outlines. There's an outline of the original magnifying glass. I don't know how I accomplished this. you couldn't be bothered to clean it up I didn't even realize Jelly and I were having a Facetime call attention to the detail that Casey brings to thexel art like ye,' leftover stuff there, whatever. I think my favorite thing about this also is even in the blog post, the rectangle graphic that you put behind it is also like random colors that do not go with the colors That was Jelly's deliberate choice. We were on maximum ugliness. Yes, exactly. We were at a faceime call like a week or two ago, as I was talking about earlier in the show And they pointed out to me, did you ever notice there's a second magnifying glass? I was like, what are you talking about? Look in the upper left corner, there's the Oh my God. It's like you designed by like, you know, the magic Wand tool in Photoshop to just select this layer and trick it down, but you missed on the little anti alias edges. No, but that's unfair to the magic Wand tool Iagic why to will not do this So my maring orders for Louis and Luca were Hey, I really like the way that Jelly ended up with the icon. And I love the way it looks, but I feel like at this point, it's looking a little bit dated. That's not Jelly's fault, It's just you know, tastes and whatnot have moved on So I'd love, you know, a refreshed spick and span version, if you will of that icon. And didid your instructions include anything having to do with like make it liquid glassy, like make it fit in with liquid glass? Like what was your stance on that I could look up, I'd have to find the conversation, but I could look up what I told them. But it was I believe in summary, it was, yeah, you know, modernize it. I think it makes sense to do something liquid glassy, particularly around the magnifying glass and the icon are one of the things I said to them unlike some other people they may have spoken with recently is you are the professionals. I'm gonna give you some thoughts Do what you think is best because I remember being on the other side of the table as a consultant, which I don't know John if you ever did consulting during your career, but I did plenty of it. Okay. It is absolute affolutely infuriating when a company hires you Bring your expert advice and expertise to them And then all they do is bicker with you about the things you tell them to do. And obviously some bickering is normal and go back and forth, that's a good relationship, et cetera. But oftentimes I would come into some other company and be like, hey, I'm here to do X Y and Z. and they would say to me, great, you need to do it in exactly this way in exactly this order or else we're going to be very upset and tell your boss. And That's not a relationship, That's not constructive. So what I said to them was, hey, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking about For example, I really like that Jelly had text on the icon. I genuinely do. I think It's really fun to have these little like nods to different movies and different things. and like the joke that he made, which we talked about just a week or two ago about the search for Blue December with K S Lis as the director. I think that was hilarious. It's a very busy icon by my instruction, but it's a very busy icon. And so maybe we can simplify it. And so Louis and Luca took a look at it and here's what they came up with. And I absolutely love it. I think it looks great This is basically a modernized, simplified a liquid classified version of the call sheet icon I don't know when I'm going to deploy it, but it is my intention to make this the default icon. I intend to leave the existing icons because there's a zillion icons in there that you can choose between. Jelly had had done various versions of the Capperboard, then my friend Stee. I'll put a link to his write up about the icons that he had done. All of those are going to stay, but this will become the default back and forth a fair bit about what do we do with regard to the like jokey versions of the icon? And one of the things I said to them was, like I said a moment ago, I like the text, but that's not a hill I'm looking to die on. But one hill I am looking to die on is I don't want to lose sight of having at the very least, a pride icon and a trans like a trans icon. And so they said, we absolutely agree. And they came up with cuts for both Pride and the trans version of it as well, which I'll put links to that in the show notes also. And I think that these also look absolutely great. and they keep with the spirit of what I'm trying to accomplish, but in a more subtle way Now I would like to hear what you guys have to think, but before or have to say about it, but before I do, I will tell you that I opened these an icon compomposer, which is the mechanism by which you mash together all the different things that John described and There are one to two, four, six Different portions of different like, I don't know what these are called, like objects That g there are more than six groups. There's like seven or eight groups. layers.. I guess layers. yeah, that's probably a good word for it. But the highlights in the magnifying glass, there are six individual highlights to make it look just so. And this is the sort of thing you get from a professional designer. And you, Louie and Luca really took the time to make this look good. And about the only thing that we Bickkeered is too strong a word, but bickkeered about was their original cut had the two like rivets that are that make up the pivot points for the cl the clappy part of the clapper board. Originally they had them The top one in particular was kind of hanging off the corner a little bit or that's the way it looked. I mean, it can't be hanging off the corner outline because then knew you get in squrel jail. Yeah, so it wasn't literally off the corner, but it was like positioned in a slightly funky way. And I think it was probably because I don't have a copy of that icon in front of me right now, but I think it was because it was perhaps I'm doing a poor job describing it, but physically that's where it would have been if this was a real clapper board And we worked a little bit on like bringing it in and we decided, you know what? It makes more sense to have the rivets where they are now such that it fits the icon better, even if physically it isn't perfect. But working with them as a pleasure, I like to think I was pretty easy on them. And I was the thing I to say like if anything, they deferred to me more than they should have because I was like, what do you think of this? I'm open to your ideas. throw stop out there. Don't take what I say as gospel, just because I I give you a suggestion. L they would just implement it in two seconds and then I would see it was a bad idea But But like that's the process. I needed to see it. but like I was totally open to anything that I mean, the entire design of my arot I did not think of at all. it was entirely from them. So so yeah, I definitely am open to their ideas. The only difference is like when they show me something, I immediately know what I don't like about it. Yeah And that is difficult to hear if you're not, you know, if you're not if you're not a professional and you just take it personally or whatever, but they don't at all they're just you know, you don't like that final' change it this way. You don't like that final change it this way. that can go on for a while if no one has any good ideas, which is why I'm always saying, please, please throw anything you got throw it at me because I have no problem I have no problem judging it. just, you know, put it out there. but yeah, it does you know, it can be tiring to hear that every single thing you do, you found something else wrong with this. It makes you think you're never going to be happy. And I try to emphasize like Already like with their first iteration like already I would take this icon. It's done. Like, you know, it's better than what I have. Like already we've succeeded. Everything else is gravy But yeah, I will iterate for a while to try to try to get it polished up the way I want it Yeah, so I think my executive summary of the call sheet icon is what if you took Jelly's icon, which again, I love And what if you made that But what what if like or in this case former Apple designers came through and made that look more applely in a good way. And I think that's where it landed. So I'm all ears on what you two have to say about it. or if you don't have much to say, we can move on to Marco. Honestly, I think this is a great icon. I mean, I like the previous one as well. But the previous one, I think if you had to criticize the previous one The biggest critique would be it's just had a lot going on. It's know very busy. And we did, by the way, we did a member special where we critiqued our home screen icons, which included Margco and Casey's apps their IOS apps. So if you want to hear us critique Margco and Casey's old icons, there's a member special for it. Yeah. But I think this is a great evolution. L I think, you know, it is a common tragedy when icons are redesigned to like throw away all the old personality and just have some kind of simple, you know blob or swoosh or whatever This is not what happened here at all. you know, this this keeps prettyretty much all of the personality minus the text, which and again, I think I think the text It was a cool reference. It was also very busy and know you couldn'tad no one's reading that, you know at icon size anyway. And so This is this is a really great direction for it to go in. I even have the maybe slightly hot take that I think you can use the Rainbow Pride icon as the main icon becausecauseuse it isn't that different. That is true, actually. I had had similar thoughts. I mean, it depends on how you want to brand it because was One of the concerns for all of our icons, I imagine is that we have mentally, at least in our own minds, like an idea of our branding as expressed by our icon and your default icon, despite having variations does express your branding. So I look at the prride version's icon. I'm like, oh that's the prride version of Case'sicon. But when I look at the default version, I'm like oh, that's call sheet. So. Yeah fair. Yeah. And I also kind of like I like the idea of someone going in and making the choice to use the Pride icon in a prride way, not in like I'm not trying to punish them know because because I don't use your default icon either by the way. Like that's part of what makes it fun is that because your icon lends itself so well to variations, allows personalization. And I agree, I think the Pride one looks great just just color scheme wise, right? It looks amazing. And so if you like that color scheme, you just pick it. I personally use the Apple sixix Colors one And they did make I'm not going to put in the show notes, but they did make a version of that as. so that will be an Please put that in because it's what I choose but it allows you that's a whole point of custom icons. They allow you to express yourself. But your default ones does say call shoot to me. Yeah, I guess I guess you're right, th like, you know, making like having the pbe would be like a special thing It makes it more special than if it was just what the kind of always was. That's a better way to put it. Yeah, that's exactly. And You know, there's lots more I don't know if there's an official website but like here's the Pride flag, here's the trans pride flag, here's the lesbian Pide flag. there's like more color combinations than you might expect. so you could check that out to add more variations if you want That's true. And also something that I believe Marco said a moment ago was that when I came to them and I said, you know, look What I'm asking for, I guess, is just a modernized version of the current Capperboard icon. But really, you know, go to town, do whatever you think is best. If you have some wild ass idea that you want to try, go for it. Let's see what happens. And it was interesting because Louine Luas said to me, you know Well, that would be fun and all And you don't want to give up on the I feel gross saying this, but the brand recognition of the clapper booard. And you don't want to throw that away, which is what Marco, I think was saying a moment ago. Like let's not throw that and put that aside. Let's embrace it and just modernize it and make it simpler. And they did look at keeping some text on there. and we the three of us quickly concluded Nah, we just got to take it off entirely. and the colors on the clapper board can be one of those sort of, if you know, you know, sort of situations. And I think that's for the best So here's a micriqu of the icon First, I'm jealous of you because you have what I wish any of my icons had, which is if you want to use the new refraction effect in the twenty seven OSs you need to have something behind the thing to refract. Yeah. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. And so like look at the Apple maps icon in IOS twenty seven, they put a little clear refractty thing around it because the background is like whatever like a you know, whatever Apple's map tiles are with like the green grass and the roads or whatever, and that gives you something to refract them M, we tried with my icons but like because of the again, because of the branding coherence and everything, like trying to maintain the branding difficult to get something. I don't I just don't have a bunch of like sharp lines with colors contrasting against each other. Gess what you have, Casey. You've got a of your icon. It's a bunch of stripes or lines so you can go to town on the ref And you have a magnifying glass. like it was already in your icon. So I'm jealous that your actual icon branding fits so well with twenty seven. But I will say that like this icon is another example of like stage makeup I think the, um, Like the specular highlight effect and the like the chromatic effect and everything around the magnifying glass are way overdone at giant sizes, but then shrink it down to normal icon size and you're like, o, it looks great That's what you have to do with icons. just is my advice to anyone out there because if if you engage a professional designer, they'll do what you tell them to do tell them to do like, you know, my instinct looking at this big icon was like,, it has to look amazing at ten twenty four Do't it doesn't matter what it looks like No one's ever to look at it that size. You're never even going to look at it that size. Your icon has to look good at icon sizes. And yes, a designer will do what you pay them to do and they'll you know, they'll do what you ask but you can ask for things that are wrong and bad. Hopefully, they'll try to dissuade you from that and say I suggest you not do this, but in the end you know, the client the client gets what they want, you want the client to be happy. So whatever they're happy with. My advice to you is you should do what Kasey is done here. Oh, I don't know, maybe how it didn't bother him. but like I think this looks just so like stage makeup, like so overdone at massive sizes but it looks perfect at icon sizes. And especially for an iOS app, there's not even a way really in like the home screen to zoom your icons to ten twenty four, right? It's always going to be icon sized. And at icon size, this looks great. I think they did a great job All right, Marco, what' you got All right, so I also took kind of a double dip approach here. I was like, Hey, listen, if you're going if you want to do the oververcast icon refresh, that'd be great. but I really want you to do my new Reminder app. Well Case is really making your self made icon for the Rinder app look good. Yeah Oh yeah. Anyway, but first they did do overcast. Uh here, this is the link here So What I ask for with oververcast is basically like just like a little tweak for IOS twenty seven Again, I've had Louis look at the icon over time a lot. You know, Louis's done all the tweaks or most of the tweaks over time in the the twelve, eleven years, twelve years that overcast has been a thing And he's been dying to have me change the outline color, I think. And he's like, try this Not only does this new icon for overcast, which I think I'm going to use, I'm like ninety percent sure I'm going to go with it Not only does it have like Perfect updates for the twenty seven glass refraction looks and everything like that. impeccably done but he has Change the outline color of the tower circle from Black to a dark blue and blue goes really well with orange and I think think I love it. It's the very first day he showed me, I hated it And I'm like, this is going to need some time. becausecause it was just, you know, I've been looking at the same color scheme of white orange black for twelve years or whatever Th now I'm like, hm this is awesome. I think this this little tweak of shifting that circle from black to dark blue I think it really gives a level of freshness to the icon that I really appreciate. And this is like, again, like when you work with a good designer, They will come up with suggestions and ideas that you would not have And you again, you don't have to say yes. And I don't say y to all of them I thought this was a really cool new direction so This I think is great. I'm going to live with it for a little while on my devices and see like how I like it over the next few weeks. but I think this is awesome. and I think I'm probably going to go with this And so this original design, like the whole shape of this, this was a Brad Allllis and Louis? Yeah, Louis and Brad at their previous Pacific helelm compomany, like years years and years and years ago. And then over time, I've had both Brad and Louis at different times tweak it for different needs. like, you know, like when the Apple Watch became a thing you know, a couple years into oververcast, you know, I had Brad help me with that. later on, I had Louis help me with with an update for you know little tweaks here and there. Last year's twenty six icon, the first lastass icon, that was Louis. He literally just unsolicited sent me one he's just like here Here I tried this. I made this. I remember this. And I was like, Ohh, this is Perfect canan I use this? He's like, yeah, I like great. Okay. So yeah, so it's been it's been, you know, Louis, Louis and Brad, you know, over the years and now, you know, Louis and Luca, I've I haveve You know, work with them through this text message, you know, through this iMessage chat that we've had, which by the way, working through iMessage is such a delight when you're doing it like going back and forth with, oh, here's an image here and you put paste links here and there and it's so much faster than like going through emails or zoom meetings like you know, months apart or weeks a. I made Google Docs, of course. I mean, I did their Ii message as, but I also Google Well, of course she didn't. But anyway, yeah, working working with Louis and Lua for this has been a pleasure But yeah, the overcast icon, that was the kind of the easier one. let crite let me critque the Overcast icon before I move So first, you are in the same situation as me and that you don't have refracting things over changing colors, like all of your content is not over anything else that intersects it in a way that refraction would take effect. So you get the like especially this is an example of like at ten twenty four, this looks gorgeous with the specular highlights on the bottom of the little rings and then like the chromatic shadows. Th are all effects that I know from Iicon compposer, but Unlike call sheet and unlike my friend Center icon, the bigger you make this one, the more the details look amazing and definitely look more liquid glassy. But the plain fact is you don't have a casey situation. you don't have a shape that goes over the top of another shape that intersectses that you can refract. So if refraction is actually turned on in any of these shapes, you would never be able to tell, even at ten twenty four, which is It's not a shame because I think I was going to say like this the bones of this icon, like the original design of circle Radio Tower, Signals orange, like it's so strong and it's so, you know, so well branded that like you know, who cares about stupid, you know a refraction effect in the twenty seven OSes who knows it'll even be there in twenty eight? So you' wised to keep things the way they are for the blue and the circle I don't mind it when you know, when I saw it, I noted that it was blue, but I'm like, yeah, that works because as you noted, it's like The whole cliche of like teal and orange or whatever complimentary colors is attractive together It does change the branding a little bit, but it also changes it for more of like a u Halloween tiger thing with black and orange to be more like complelimentary colors, more artistic My one criticism of this icon is that I would have gone through eighty seven iterations trying to make the bottoms of the radio waves read better at small sizes And I mean, maybe, you know, maybe that can be done. I honestly I don't When I when you actually see it on device, you don't, you don't have any problems. Well, I'm looking at it shrunk and down and big sizes looks amazing, right? Srunk and down compomaring it to the current icon the circle part of it is not the part that stands out like the blue versus black. That's not the thing I noticeed the thing I noted is that the bottom of the little things fade a little bit, but That's me, you know, I have my opinions and honestly, like I said, with a vast majority of my opinions, oh, I don't like this about this, change it to be that way. And they would do it. and then I would look at it and say nope I was wrong So that could could be the case. I actually did a few of those back and forth with with the next icon where I was like, can you try like this? and oh no, you're right. Yeah, buts that's the process. Like need to like you need to see it. I mean, maybe they already know because they've either already seen it or have more experience. they know it's going to suck But as the client, you have to say, I need show me it with this thing like that. And then you have to be honest with yourself and say just because I asked for it, like, oh, you gave me the thing that I wanted. I'm happy with it, right? I I did it with all my icons. It's like ask for ask to see the variation, see the variation and then judge it Honestly Did that make it better or not? or do you like it worse? And most of my changes made things worse. But you have if you're hest about that, hopefully you'll up with an icon the end of And with overcast, I wanted to be really careful because Not only does, you know You know, Overcast has been around for such a long time The icon like I think they pretty much got it right the first time. you know, there have been tweaks, you know, little tweaks over time, but they've been really minor tweaks And so I didn't want to change the overcast branding because Everyone loves it. I love it No, it's great. It doesn't need to change. Yeah, the users love it. L so it doesn't need to be like a whole new, you know, like the way Instagram changs the icon radically, you know, a years ago and everyone hated it. Like it doesn't need that level of refresh. It just needs like littleittle tweaks to move forward over time with system conventions and minor fashion changes All right, so Next, I'm like, right, now I need I need an icon for my new remind to wrap I have finally A name for the app I don't think I want to reveal it yet. But I went into this, I gave them a very broad rief I'm like, all U It's, you know, it's an app that's very it has a very basic UI. It' it's a reminders database front end that's simplified, focused on people who snooze a lot. I'm just waiting for you to accidentally blurt out the name of the app. Keep going. Yeah. People who snooze a lot and if it's not reminding them constantly, like every day, like if you dismiss the alert for reminder and it never reminds you again, like that thing will never get done you know, it's an app for forgetful people and for ADHD and, you know, people, people whose brains work like mine Which is we need a lot of gentle reminding all the time about about tasks and we procrastinate and put them off a lot. You know, Most days I am snoozing at least five different things that are alerting me every single day I'm like, I'll do tomorr, do it tomorr, do it tomorrow. O kick the can down the road. That would have been a good name Anyway kick the can. That'll be my backup name inase in case I've runns any trademark problems. Um anyyway, gave them the brief, and I'm like, All right, I develop this app On the flight on the way to my Hawaii Big Island family vacation And I loved visiting like the big island. I loved like the lava flows coming off of the, you know, all the volcanoes that kind of form the island in the middle. There's all these like dark brown and black like lava flows of different you know, all these like rocky, beautiful landscapes. I loved visiting Kona coffee farms. You know, I looked up like you know what What is the volcano that the Kona farms are on? and you know, what's the shape of it? Maybe I can involve that shape And I went back and forth like before before we even had this thing, I was going back and forth with AI brainstorming of like what kind of concepts can I work in here One of my favorite ones was like a sunrise because every day is a fresh start. That sounds great. I love that. And so I'm like, right, what about a sunrise over the volcano that Kona coffee grows on? And I even briefly, I'm like, Ohh, what about my old peace icon, which is a sunrise And which I forget whether Louis or Brad made it, but it was one of their icons back in the day and I was like, all right, maybe I can involve the peace sunrise with this volcano, maybe with coffee. and'm like okay, so I gave I gave this all to Louis and Luca. And Louis, you know, very opinionated, but also very diplomatic. and he was like, listen This is a lot of concepts. This is like too many things to work in. Let's pair it down. You can keep the name, you can keep the volcano, but you probably don't want that name with a volcano. It doesn't really work. and it's like, okay, okay, okay, I at the sunrise. I had a million million different you ideas. The problem with all of those ideas First I was like, all right, what about a coffee? Laf, like a coffee because I visit a coffee plantation. What about like a coffee leaf cluster with the coffee cherry Well, that just it looks like a holly. It doesn't look toistne. Itll is a Christmas app, yeah. Right. All right. What about the Kona volcano? I forget it's mount I forget which mountain it is. but It doesn't really have a distinct shape Be volcanoes don' look like cartoon volcanoes. they look like mountains And so it doesn't really have like a very visually iconic shape Sunrises, sureure, they're fine, but you know, there's not that much distinct about that. All the different other metaphors, like one of the things that I considered was a forget Me Not flower. I thought, Oh, that's great. Forget me Nots have a beautiful shape well That's used for like Alzheimer's and dementia organizations. It's not really a happy association. So I'm like, okay, I probably shouldn't use that And so like there was There were all these different metaphors and ideas that I was trying and just that I just was hitting walls with. I couldn't get anywhere with any of them. Finally You know, within within, you know, a day Louis and Luca came up with, Hey, what about A lighthouse Okay, let's talk So I also I also told him, by the way, I'm like, I'm using this color, this dark red as my tint color in the UI. And I want to keep it I don't want to be talked out as dark red. and they're like, all right, we can work with that, you know So this is the icon that they came up with. and this is through some iteration The reason a lighthouse, I think is a fun metaphor is that The wholele, the I was saying, like it just constantly reminds you of things that you don't forget. It's like basically like a beacon. It's Constantly hey, hey, don' forget this. Don't forget this. Don't forget this and that's That's kind of what a lighthouse does. like, you know, the way the light swivel around, you get like the periodic. And this was like, you know, when I was going back and forth with AI, it was giving me all these different metaphors of like waves and things like that and it's just It was so hard to come up with anything that wasn't already taken in the productivity space. And the lighthouse better than all the AI generated ideas. And that was that was all Louia and Luca Um, and I was like, oh, actually I love that also because I love Fire Island. and I would love a way to represent Fire Island and Fire Island has an iconic lighthouse on it. So I showed the picture and actually I didn't realize Luca grew up aong Island and they've been to the lighthouse So this actually is styled somewhat evocative of the Fire on Lighthouse with the stripe. that's kind of how it looks. It's interesting that you couldn't get talked out of your dark red, but it's like, what if we just go to the Fire on Lighthouse kind of rusty Maroon? be bere like, nope. Well The dark red, I like the dark red a lot. First of all, I think it looks great in the UI. And second of all I like the idea of Raking red because red in reminders means overdue And if you work the way I work, you always have just a wall of red statuses in reminders. And I like the idea of like, you know, I'm going to take that back. I'm going to make the whole app red black and white and just make it like this new dark, cool red and you know, F your overdue red. So anyway. So we went back and forth a few times. and know at one point I was like, o, can you make the lighthouse bigger and I'm like I recognize I just told designers make the logo bigger, but it actually was the right move in that case and But they also had the idea of what if we tie in the visual identity to overcast icon also. And that's why it has the circle with a tower in the middle with something coming out of the tower, you know, horizontally. It just works so well and This shape, it goes in all the different color modes, like the monochrome icon modes, the dark mode, They just nailed this and I wouldn't have had any part of this concept without working with them Again, a huge part of their value N not only are they really great artists, but they're really good at coming up with branding and concepts too. likeike and and they drew like John was saying earlier, like The speed of iteration. L I was on my couch one night with my laptop and they were just caking out. How about this? How about this? like I couldn't believe how quickly they were generating really good icons and then at the Once we decided the direction to go, they're like, okay, we're going to draw this up for you What were you just doing? Like they're they're like, In their minds probably their rough draft.. Those are their napkin sketches. Yeahah. Right. And they were like amazing. L I was like, I thought that was the final Ion Because even even their rough drafts, like whatever they were like, you know, crapping out with no time were amazing. But then you know, of course, you know, then the final one has all the nice specular highlights and you know, it is more refined, but I couldn't have been more happy with this. and I showed it to a few people and everyone I showed it to it was like, oh yeah, that's it, nailed it loveove it I gave them a very difficult problem in the sense that I really didn't know what I was looking for, and I gave them way too many things to pick from. And they guided me correctly into something that was simpler and nicer and a better logo, and I think will help it stand out more in a sea of check marks Yeah, I'm just so glad this's not list items and check marks on the side because that's just, that's an impossibility. I mean you could have asked for that and they would have done it for you if that's what you wanted but it's like, man You think it's a crowded it's a crowded icon field if you're going to do check marks or line items. No matter how you abstract them, no matter how you think you're stylizing them or being clever, it's like, wow, there's a lot of icons with that. Well, and to be clear on that point though, like like one thing that Louis pointed out during the process because I was saying, like please don't make it look like a check mark because everything else is a check markark. And he was like, well, Most people are only going to have like one of these types of apps installed. L you're not really the users don't really care if it looks like a check markark or not because they aren't seeing a wall of checkm apps on their devices. Like in the app store, you might see a whole bunch of those. I mean, look, let's be honest, like apppp store search is not something that was ever great, but in its current form where it's just filled with ad slots and you know they're only going to turn that up. Organic discovery on the app store is effectively dead. Competition and just a flood of apps made it pretty bad for a while But with search ads and then increasing the search ad load and increasing the search ad size. Apple has destroyed organic discovery in the apppp Store. So no one is going to find this app by just searching for apps like ADHD rememinders or whatever. No one is going to find it that way. It's going to all have to be paid marketing or you social or referral marketing. I know better than to think than to presume that the app stores are going to do anything for me for this because they won't all they'll do is take more of my money. and look, hey, Turnus prove me wrong. I would love for this direction to change because I think it's horrendous. but I also know the reality of the world. Apple makes a bunch of money from App Store search ads, and I don't think they're going to want to turn that off. They're not even going to do anything that will turn it down. They're going to only crank it up over time because every sing this is the problem of service revenue, every single time that there's a bit of a soft corarner on the horizon, They're going to want to crank whatever knobs they can crank push those numbers up. And when you already have an ad system in place, you can say, what if we just add more ads? What if we just crank up the ad load a little bit? That's always a knob that is sitting right there, so tempting to press when when you need a little bit of a boost. So we know they're going to do it over time. So anyway But Louis was good to point out, like The sea of check markarks is not as bad of a thing to avoid as I was assuming it is because I was thinking of it as a big grid of apps on the apppp store. It's all check markarks, but no one ever sees that. And no one's going to see my app in that anyway people see this is on their home screens. so that matters a lot more than whatever everyone else is doing. that being I'm gl it's a checkark I mean, you'll see the Apple Reminders app though, like the line items. So at the very least, if you differentiate your icon from the Reminders app icon, it helps it stand up. I mean, I guess people can hide or delete that one, but like I'm not sure everybody does. And my draft icon looked a lot like the rememinders icon. So anyway, yeah, very, very pleased with how this icon turned out. and working with Louis and Luca was just delightful All right, so here's my critique I think the circle branding is a really good idea and I would have thought of that for the reminders Cicon. I think the White House is a great idea. kind of amazed that The lighthouse icon doesn't have any twenty seven refraction effects. you're like, oh, it's light and it's like a reflecting lens and surely we could do something with that, but I can see why in this design there's not really a place for that to be here and it would just kind of muddy things up a little bit and it would like mess with your branding because the only thing things the light intersects with is a circular ring and you don't wantan to like refract that because that messes with the circle. and then the inside part, which I think would just look muddy or whatever. I would have one hundred percent gone with the rusty brownish or more maroonish colors of the actual fire and lighthouse, which I know has been repainted several times I honestly don't even know exactly what color it is now, but it's black and white. put a link to the Wikipedia page where you can see a picture of it from some timee in the past. The roof of the building has always been kind of maroon. and then the lighthouse itself has kind of been brownish, but there's a little bit of a reddish tint, especially at sunset. I totally would have done that with the color of this because I'm so nostalgic for the firear on the lighthouse. Branding wise, it makes more sense to use the color from the ring and since you love this dark red color, this is the icon you wanted and that's what you got. Um Blue I would have definitely iterated thirty times in that blue ' God, how many backgrounds did we have for like shades of gray for my stupid icon? I just would have gone around forever in that blue. It's kind of a sky blue, but maybe more of like a baby blue or like there's some flower that's this colored blue that I don't know the name of like And so that I probably would have chosen a different color, but it does go well with the red I oververall like the idea of this and how much better it stands out from the other icons and the thing I like the most about it is the The expansion of the light, like your you know, cartoon representation of a lighthouse, like let's make the light rays look like there are a cone going outwards, right Be that's kind of like when you were talking about the idea behind the app and everything, The idea of a conical shaped light illuminating things and alerting and saying you got stuff to do. That is expressed by the by the like I'm holding my arms out now as I talk about That is expressed by like the spreading cone of light. And I also particularly like the white square coming right at you. say, yes, you t you things to do. lightight coming right into your face U So yeah, good job I went back and forth a few times with them, you know like tweaking the shapes a little bit here and there. and you know, there was never There was never any friction going back and forth with them on stuff like they're, you know, they're professionals. And so it wasn't there was none of that kind of like that like, you know difficult artist dynamic, you know, like there's none of that like attitude. It was just like, okay, yeah, let's try that. And then we' try, Ohh yeah, that's actually better. you know, it was great. There was even, you know, at one point, I said, hey, let's try it without the circle, just being the lighthouse, you know, full, full size of the icon. And they whipped it together and like, oh yeah actually now that you show us that, you're right, That is worse. Go back to the circle. Like it was lots of iteration like that and it was all very pleasant and very nice to do I think this looks great. I think my favorite part of it, as silly as it sounds, might be the circle branding that to tie it in with oververcast. I really think that's a clever idea that I don't think I would have come up with, but I love now that I see it. And like when you see these icons you know, near each other. it just they just look right together. Like they just they look really good together. Yeah Yeah one of the to wrap us up one of the things that I said in my proposals for icons that I always say in all my proposals for the icons which is going to sound wrong or possibly rude, but is how I think about the process is that The icon should be better than the app Oh it is. L like you know, whatever your think your app does and how great you think it is or whatever, you always want an icon that looks like, wow, that looks like it's an icon for even better app than yours. That is the sign of a good icon where the icon is better than the app where you're like, the app is good and I like it at all. but man, that icon makes it seem like this is going to be the best app in the universe and it's like Well don't you you don't want to do that, because they' going gonna be disappointed because your app is not as the I. I'm like No, that's what I want out of. I want the icon to elevate the app. Like's that's why I tell people like, oh, I don't want to spend all this money. because if you actually pay and don't have a podcast where you give sponsorship slots for your icons like we do, if you actually pay for your icons like I did for, you know, Hyperspace, for example, you're like, oh, that seems like so much money. It's not. It is the best money you will spend on your app. Like everyone, you know, you have to have your obviously the app has to serve a need and be useful and blah blah blah. You're like, o, should I hire a designer to Change all the screens on my app by all means if you can do that. But if you only have a very limited amount of money, spend it on the icon Icon is so important and so many apps I know of, I'm like, That app's okay, but the icon makes it seem so much better than it actually is. So that's what I tell everybody with my things. I want your icon to be better than my app, which is not hard because my apps aren't that complicated and amazing, but that is the goal of the icons. And the second thing I'll say is and this is the sign of a successful engagement with a designer of any kind is you know, I guess, you know, it has to fulfill the the needs of the thing you're designing or whatever But in the end also the client has to be happy And I think looking at all of our icons, I think my icons are the best. And you know why? Because they're my icons and they're what I wanted. I better think that. That's the whole point of it this. doesn't mean my icons actually are better. It's like, oh yeah, I should be happier with my icon than I am with yours because those are your icons and you ask them. and I hope you feel the same way that your icons are better than mine. And that is the sign of a successful engagement with the designer. You should come away happy. You should be like, I cannot believe how great this is and I look at my icons and your icons, I'm like oh, I got the best icons clearly No, they are really great. And I apologies for this lasting as long as it did, but the conversation is really about the icons,s not about the two of them. But if you're interested, Louis and Luca over at parakeet. co nototot com. co check them out. They're really great Yeah All right, let's move on. and Apple has done something kind of interesting. and Tim Hardwick over at Mac Rumors reports, in MacOS Tahoe twenty six point four, Apple introduced a new security popu that warns Mac users when they paste a command into the terminal app that could be harmful. Apple has now published a support document explaining why the pop up warning appears. That support document and this Macrooms article will both be linked in the show notes The support document is called if your Mac blocks a terminal command, paste or script This alert appears if you don't regularly use terminal, and you copied the command from somewhere like a website, chat agent or messaging or email app Sammers use these channels to instruct people to paste malicious commands into terminal to harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. This alert helps make sure that you aren't tricked into running a command that you didn't expect I think this is interesting that they say specifically if you don't regularly use terminal. I think that's doing a lot of work in a good way there. Yeah. When I first saw this feature come up, I'm like, oh no 'use I copy and pasteuff into terminal all the time. Is this is going be another annoyance where it's like constantly in my face warning me about things And I have never seen this dialogue box. And I've pasted a lot of things into the terminal on Taho, because even th I'm not running on my main Mac, I do devwork on it or whatever. So however they calibrated that to like decide, should we annoy you with this or not I think they did a pretty good job because it has basically never bothered me of them. It also makes me think, okay, well then how how is this actually saving me from any of this Is this Is this security feature actually useful if it's like Oh I don't I don't want to bother people who use a terminal a lot. I think One of the other things they use to determine whether they should bother you with these dialogues is whether or not you have the dev tools installed, likeike whether you have X code installed, There's another signal in their formula for should I warn you about this or not? But I guess the thought is like the people who I don't know if this is true but the thing is the people who are the most vulnerable, are the people who don't regularly use the terminal, who don't have dev tools installed The reality is we are all equally vulnerable to getting screwed by this. How many times have all of us pasted in curl pipe, you know, a curl URL pipe basash because some website told us to, which is just incredibly ill advised. but I think the reason we all do it is like We make a microsecond judgment of the trustworthiness of some website and the potential consequences of deleting our entire home directory, and we just roll the dice and figure, look If this website really was malicious and someone had replaced this install script with a script that exfiltrates all of my data. I probably would have heard about it by now, so I'm just going to roll the dice and do it. That's a terrible way to live. We shouldn't do that. anytime I can avoid rununning a curl pipe bash, I avoid it like the plague, but I have to admit sometimes I just do it And so this is what it's trying to save you from So the actual dialogue reads as follows, possible malware paste blocked. Your Mac has not been harmed. Scammers often encourage pasting text into terminals to try and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. These instructions are commonly offered via websites, chat agents, apps, files or a phone call Then you get two options, paste anyway or don't paste. Yeah, I like that they try to tell you like maybe you're talking to someone on the phone right now. Maybe you're having a chat with them. Are they telling you to paste a bunch of stuff in your turn? Well, beware. They try to phrase it in a nice way. I would probably be more hyperbolic to be like, danger. Be careful. you know, what just did someone tell you to do this? because you can't say make sure you know what the command is doing because nobody like if you don't use the term, you don't know what the command is doing. It's just it's just giving you a hopefully a microsecond of pause to say Maybe think about this again. And maybe people will just click the default button and say paste anyway yada yada. And obviously the scammers willon'tplicitly direct you, Oh, your computer may say this, but don't worry social engineering in the end wins no matter what. Because the social engineers know what they're facing and they will instruct you that this is a normal thing and it's just your computer trying to be safe, but rest assured that what I'm telling you to do is safe because I'm your friend. so please do it. That's how social engineering works. Nothing can save everybody. But I think this is a useful feature to add This is very smart. If your mac shows a malware detected paste blocked or malicious script bl blocked alert These alerts appear from MacQest dets a commommander script that contains known malware and blocks it. And so the difference here is the dialogue says, your copy and paste was blocked because it contains malware. This action did not harm mare. Yeah, and that's that's the real key to this is like, they're obviously keeping a database of something,, whatever regular expressions that match commands. know, it's a cat and mouse game. but once they find out, hey, this website has been compromised and their curl URL pipe basash thing Now contains malware. Hopefully they can quickly add that to the database. and then if you go and paste it, let's say, you know, eight hours or twenty four hours after the malware is detected, your Mac will say, I'm not even going to give you the option. I know for a fact this thing has been compromised. L whether it is a compromised, legitimate website or like an obvious malware website with a UR that looks like a legitimate one, but isn't because they have a domain name with like a typo in it or something like that This is where the real protection comes in, which is every single thing you paste into terminal they're looking at and comparing about their list of known malware that I hope they're keeping up to date. So I think this is a great feature. There's actually It was a story that came out just today about the Opera web browser adding this feature. likeike specifically just in the web browser itself. And this is this is like the multiple layers of protection. like adding it to terminal, shouldhn't this be OS wide? Should it be per app U Every little bit of this helps. any place where there is an app u or an operating system or some sort of subsystem where it's in a position to potentially keep track of a list of known bad things and check them for them. You know, this is a great use of our comparatively infinite resources.'re like, Oh, I don't want something looking at my pace board. Every time I paste them, it's like it's two microseconds. The amount of grief it will save you by catching you from installing malware is great. I heartily endorse this feature both for the reason I said earlier that I've never had to be bothered by it and the other reason which is if I ever do do something stupid, I have some chance that the MacOest is going to save me from All right, let's talk about Xcode twenty seven and John, you've made a discovery with regard to it. tellell me about it When I was watching WWC sessions, I think where I saw it first, a couple people mentioned maybe it like the group labs or this Q and A that Xcode twenty seven adds a menu command to do something that We Apple platform developers have been doing manually for many years, which is deleting the derived data folder U When EXcode does stuff and builds your app and everything. It has a folder, that I don't know where it is. It's like a library application support EXcode or library deX code. somewhere in your library directory, there is a directory called derivive data that Xcode fills with, I would assume intermediary products of building or anyway, it's like it says, data derived from the stuff that you're doing Um And sometimes when you're using X code, like Your build starts failing or your app won't launch and you can't figure out why. And the folk wisdom is, oh, just delete the contents of your derived data folder and then just rebuild for years since, you know, for years and years Xcode has had a command, you know, command shift K. I don't know what the actual command is, which is like, Or is it delete build products or something? There's like a menu command and a keyboard shortcut that says Can, build, clean clean build products or something like that. You're like, why would if it has that command, why don't you just use that command? Well, experience has shown that sometimes you hit Cand shift K And you hit commommand B your command R to build or run And it still fails. And that's why everybody says, oh, commommand shift K isn't enough. You have to go to the terminal, type RM minus RF it's to path to your derive data folder. donon't make it any typosed on like very carefully. And there's apps that do it. There's like the deev Cleaner app that will delete your derive data folder. And so in Exo twenty seven Apple essentially relented and said, We know everyone is deleting their ded data folders So we're going to put a menu command. In addition to the existing command shift K command, a new command that I forget what it's called like delete Derrive data or something like that becausecause we know you're doing it anyway. And rather than you manually typing an RM command or dragging a thing to the folder or whatever Why don't you just let us do it safely? And this was a topic of Conversation and commentary sort of like off script commentary, many of the group labs and stuff U where Apple folks talked about the feature and This kind of reminds me of the sync now button or whatever in messages on MacOS where like if you have message syncing to the cloud Messages, I believe was the first apppple has made in ages where They added a button that when you click it, it does the syncing like sync now U And that was the whole idea behind syncing and the lack of those buttons is, oh, you should never have to manually control this or monitor it or deal with it. We will just sync what needs to be synced when its to synced and you shouldn't have to worry about it at all In reality, there are situations where you're like Come on. What is it going to sink And it's trying to do what it thinks the right thing to do is saving your battery or waiting until later or it doesn't know there's data to dinking. you're like I just wish I had a button that would say just sync stuff now And so that one app addeded one. And in some ways, it's an admission of defeat We tried to make a completely transparent system where you would never have to worry about when things sync and things would just always be in sync everywhere But obviously, we failed becausecause no system can be that perfect and we're not our systems aren't even good enough that nobody ever wants it to sink now People do want it to sink now sometimes And so we'll add a button Now what does that button do? Is it like the elevator or door close button where it just makes us feel better by disabling itself after we click it for a while and then re enabling? It's like, ye Yeah, we did the sync totally. when in reality it's just a timer and it's faking us out Like the door close elevator button, if it makes people feel better, it's still kind of doing its job, even if it doesn't actually cl close the doors on the elevator. So I do still have suspicions about the syn button, but I'm pretty sure it does something because I use it occasionally and when I click it it does sync and maybe I'm being fooled. But anyway Dlete derived data. Is it the elevator door closeed button? Is it U giving up on the notion that like look we know There's something wrong with Xcode sometimes and the only solution is to derived data. and we wish that wasn't the case But sometimes it is the case Yeah The theory presented by Apple People, which I think is actually the actual truth When you have some problem in EXcode that's causing your thing not to build or whatever And deleting derived data fix it fixes it It's very often a sign that something is screwed up about your project. Usually you have some dependency wrong. You haven't expressed a dependency that exists between some submodules, such that when you run a parallel build, if you get lucky and thing that depends on the other thing happens to go, you know, the thing that you depend on goes first and then the thing that depends on it goes second Everything's great and it works fine. But because builds happen in parallel and you can't guarantee timing, sometimes when you build it The thing it depends on gets built after the thing that depends on it ands it's never going to work, right? And that's because you haven't correctly expressed a dependency in your project And you've just been coasting on luck. So yeah Deleting derived data does, quote unquote Fix it. problem is in your project And so I think this is an even more powerful sign where Apple saying Even though this probably isn't our fault most of the time It's probably your fault We still know There are lots of people who are going to delete the contents of their derived data folder as a regular course of doing stuff. And even though it's kind of like wrong, like I'm sure that's why this feature hasn't been added for years Hey, every once in a while it might be the right thing to do And even if it is wrong, shouldn we just make our app helpful to our users Even though we know most of the time it's because their project is screwed up And that, I think, is one of the most hopeful signs. from Apple software design department that I've seen in years right up there with the sync button in messages where they are willillingly giving us a feature E when, you know The problem is not their fault just to try to make their app more useful and feel better to customers. I think the next iteration of this is, hey, please find all the dependency problems in our program that are causing this to happen, but you know, one step at a time. So I give Delete derived data thumbs up even though It's probably still highlighting a problem in our projects I agree with everything you said. I think this is great. I do this dance constantly. That's my question to you too. Do you tune delete derive data constantly? I shouldn't say constantly. It's frequent enough that it annoys me every time I do it because then I have to you know I typically I can get by with what I need by doing what is it a command shhift K or whatever we talked about earlier that is, you know a clean build folder, but occasionally, I shouldn't said constantly, occasionally I don't know, maybe once or twice a month, I'll have to go in there and just tos everything dered data and start aew. U Marco, do you delete d drive data Almost never U this is not even like this is a thing like I've used the the app Dev Cleaner, which is a fun app. It's it's like a little app for the Mac that Basically like helps you clear out and find like huge storage usage from Excode, especially for IOS developers U There's been a number of needs of this over the years and Def Cleaner always keeps up. Yeah, this is very good. And by the way, Xcode added features that they haven't shherlocked Dv Cleaner, but Xcode itself now has like you can look at the installed components and delete stuff from there. So they've taken some lessons from Dev Caner by incorporating some of those but Dv Cleaner still goes a little bit farther. Yeah, Df cleaner is great. I can recommend it. But yeah, this basically integrates, you know some some of that functionality into X code. But yeah, I almost never do this. It' It is very rare for me to have a problem that is not solved by either cleaning the build folder or quitting and restarting Xcode Yeah my main use of delete derived data is with Betas becausecause my luck with betas building my apps is terrible. As I said last the first beta of Golden Gauge could not even debug maps. Baba two of Xcode can. I don't know what the problem was, I don't care. But When things are buggy and broken in betas of X code on beta OSs, Delete derive data is my friend. but I'm pretty sure I've literally never done delete derive data on a non beta. X code on a beta OS. like in the release versions of stuff, I've pretty much never had to do it. I do use Dev Cleaner, so maybe I'm you know cleaning it out as a matter of course because Dev Cleaner actually will remind you, hey, you haven't run Dv Cleaner a while, maybe you should run it. It's nice up But but I don't have all the weird IOSSDKs and simulators installed. Like that's where it builds up. like, oh, you have you have a simulator for IowS twelve in here. Do you still need that?robably not That'll save you some disk space But yeah, I don't expect to use this command But I really like what it says about the pragmatic nature of Apple's software decisions, and I hope we see more things like that Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Parakeet and ZockDoc. And thanks to our members who supportter us directly, you can join us at AP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP oververtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in overtime we're going to beking about Should Apple create a handheld gaming platform Good question. You'll hear us talk about it overtime if you join ATP.fM slash join. Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you next week Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ' it was accidental. It was accidental And you can find the show not atp dot f And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CAS E Y L ISS so that's Kasey Lis M A R C O A R M Anti Marco Amen S I R AC USS Syacuse It's accidental They didn't mean to accident last to our cast so long All right, Casey, I'm going to see Goose in a few hours. What should What should I know? You've seen them more recently than I have I don'ts I know you're snarking. I don't think there's anything to know. I will say that if you haven't listened to the new album, you should do so. Of course I have. In fact, What what what I've been told in my household is that the music of my bands that I like is more tolerable when it's their studio recordings than when it's their live recordings. And so The day I was told that, I immediately started playing in the car the new album, which it's big modern right? That's the new alum Yes, yes. I'm trying to It's very yellow. Yes. Yeah. so and I believe that was immediately regretted by the other members of the family. but yes, I do like the new album a lot Yeah, so I would check that out again, like listen to it on the way down or something. My personal favorites, if you're listening, you know for those of you who are perhaps not as familiar with Goose I really enjoy Svener. I think I'm pronoucing that right. It's the third track on the album It's very inspired by eighties, but not straight eighties, if that makes any sense. Like it's got some of that vibe from the eighties, but it's not like, oh, this could have been recorded you know forty years ago or whatever. Good to be, they often do a very extended and very good jam on there. In fact, one of my favorite jams of the year so far is a good to be Florida, mayaybe I'd have to look it up. And Terrero, which I did hear in Virginia Beach and is also excellent. So those are my three favorites off the new album. No, it's exactly what you expect. Like when we went, it was great when we went in October. Now there's obviously a little bit new newer and different material. When I went a few weeks ago I think we talked about it on the show, but we were in the genereneral admission section, which very glad I tried. veryy glad to never do that again because I'm old.'m old for that now,. I'm way too old for that. Oh yeah, I always buy seats. Yep, yeep. And suffice to say that Marco is returning to Virginia to go with me to see fish to see fish, jeezy, pezy. he would have loved that. Next year, we'll see fish together. Yeah, we'll say. you need one more year of goose before you're ready for that Right, right. But Anyway, but we worked together we actually were on the phone with each other trying to figure out which one of us had the better seats. And it turned out that I almost got the Marco seats from when we saw them in Richmond, which is to say the very front row of the seated section, but behind all the lunatics in general admissions. So no, I'm very much looking forward to you going. Depending on what I'm doing this evening might be able to actually sit down and watch it because again, as we've talked about numerous times, I won't be belabor this, but if you go to nugs. net, you can pay for a subscription and you can actually watch live broadcasts of many bands, including but not limited to Goose U And so I will hopefully be able to see some of that show tonight. and certainly within forty eight hours of it being done, you and I can go and either grab it from nugs or you know, grab it from bandcamp or whatever. So I'm very much looking forward to it. To the degree you can chare, what is the transit scenario to get you there? Are you training the whole way No, I'm I'm literally taking I'm taking a ferry in like an hour. to ferry to the mainland, John and then just driving from Yeah, driving two hours to New Jersey. That's the mainline, New Jersey. sureure. Okaykay. Is this an outdoor? like a I don't know if the vvent is it an outdoor thing U I don't actually I wanted to lift that up before I left. It's PNC Arts Center. I forgot. I think it's indoor. Oh no, it's outdoor. Yeah Welling bring your fancy sunscreen Oh yeah. Oh that's. Well, I mean, it does start at seven. so it's I'm not going to need that much sunscreen, but sun's still out of seven. maybe don't need it but like yeah, Ionder it' going to be because it's hot ot today at least up here it's hot. Yeah. that's why theason I was gonna look up the venue before I left was like, do I wear do I bring pants? If it's be like a big indoor air conditioned thing, maybe I'd bring pants but no, I'm bringing shorts. It's a shorts of venue. And this time I'm not gonna to have my pocket in my front shorts wall you mean Yeah ye, sorry. Did you get your replacement wall yet or is it still coming? I sure did. I got my new. I should link to it in the show notes Dream of the nineties is still alive, Mer, you could have a wallet chain. I don't think that was ever your style, but you know, maybe it could be. Slimfold, That's it. It's the Slim Fold wallet I will link to it. is This is the one I got the Micro TIVk, but otherwise the Microsoft shell is what I've been using all these years. TiVk Your wall is made of house wrap Yeah, the TieVk just is even lighter weight but here the soft shell is like the more normal looking one. I like this because It still allows me to carry like some cash, which I don't use a lot of cash during the rest of the year, but on fire aroundround, a lot of things here use cash. And when you go to Europe, you like to give hundreds of dollars to the pickpockets. Yeah, well, you have to support the local economy. Anyway, these wallets are great because they U they weigh nothing. And I think this is originally from Dan Provost of Studio Neat. I think I heard about it from him first. This is a fantastic, kind of minimal, very lightweight wallet I very much enjoy it. What color is yours? Orange Well, so I actually did I got myself the orange one of the of the Microsoft shell also because I figure like I think it's a limited edition so I wanted to get that, But the Tiepeic one I'm using currently is the reddish one, the u the red pattern To go back a brief step to Goose because that's all I ever talk about these days, I noticed because I followed them on Instagram and they had I either posted or reposted that, I believe was the PNC Center had said, because of the heat, you can bring, I think it was up to two water bottles for a sum total of a gallon of water. It's gonna be big lines of the bathroom. right? I don't know what it is in sensible units. It's probably a few liters, but like a lot of water can come with you or in order to survive. Yeah, especially because like, I mean, look, not only is it a concert, it's a jam band concert. So there's a good deal of drug use going on and many of those drugs make you very thirsty, so I think that's Pro probablyably very good advice Also, it's going to go on for a long time Yeah, Oh yes. Yeah. I mean, honestly, if I were you, I really would bring at least one large water you mean, double check my math on this, but I would bring a large water bottle because it is going to be toasty for sure Have you ever seen the I saw somebody the other day here at the beach with one of those Around the neck personal, I guess air conditioners or fans? Yes. It's like a fan or something. Yep Y. Well neckir conditioner. Yeahah. Does that do anything? Oh they do, but they're like the ones that cool you also tend to be heavy because they have to be powerful and they need batteries. And so it's like it's a trade offff. Like do you want a heavy thing on your shoulders and around your neck in exchange for the cooling? I don't know. It looked like something that was really not worth the size in bulk, but I I mean, maybe they maybe it's one of those like secret gadget hacks that you that work really well and no one really talks about it, but it did not look that way I mean, you just need someone else. you just need your assistant to hold it U you know it's pointing at your neck and then you just sprit some water on it, you know, whatever Texas stay cool, but yeah, they What is worth Earin got me for Christmas. I think it was Kind of as a gag gift, but kind of not It's a fan that has two belts it J just hear me out, hear me out. It has two belt clips on it. One of which is facing like the u of the belt clip is facing upward and the u of the belt clip. The other one is facing downward. So you can fan your feet. No, hold on. So on either side of the fan, there's, you know, there's a clip And the idea is one side to your shorts or whatever and the other side gets clipped to your shirt So what this does is it blasts air up your back probably look like a complete freaking moron on the one or two times I've ever used this But it is Delightful because you're getting cold air blown right up your back or perhaps your front if you wanted to put it there or whatever. But it is incredible the difference it makes. Even if it's just blowing warm air, the fact that the air is moving really, really helps. Can you mount it upside down and blow air into your pants? You probably could. Yeah, I don't see any reason why not. We'll see if I can dig up a link for the show notes, no promises, but that actually works far better than you would think it would.. Okay.'s And I feel like too, like yes, you probably do look ridiculous, but when it's that hot fashion is out the window. like right? shhorts are already a pretty significant fashion compromise. do You do what you got to do when it's when it gets that hot, it's like you know, And also like, especially in this context like At a jam band concert You're not going to be the least fashionable person in any row. Don't worry Yep. I think I did find, I don't have it next to me, but I'm pretty sure I found it for the show notes. I just linked it in the chat room as well. So you can check that out.gain, I' probably not doing the world's greatest job describing it, but you can sort of kind of get the gist as you look at all these different pictures. Actually, one of them is shown as having it around the neck, which I don't recommend, but you can see that there's if you look at like the fourth image, they show three different wearing styles and the one I'm talking about Basically having your shirt tuck into it so that you're blowing air up your shirt. It's actually really nice. I love the picture of the guy holding the delivery box Unimaginable cooling effect. Look how happy he is. Y. so much. L like how happy he is to have this phhotoshopped done to him. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah y. I like the fake phhotoshop sweat on the left hand side of this image as well. Yeah also, he's dripping sweat, but his shirt looks pretty dry. Y A, goodood stuff Anyway, have fun tonight. I'm very, very jealous. Hopefully you get a really good set list and have at least a couple of really good jams. Thank you